Author’s Note:

“Charmed” picks up on [the] theme of self-focus, wanting to “push off / the earth’s face” in the form of watching TV; it’s tuned to Frost’s “Birches.”

Author’s Statement:

I’m from Richmond, Virginia where reminders of the Civil War are…plentiful, so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that I should write about it. However, this is the only poem I can remember writing that so directly takes a scene from the war as its subject. All too often we think of major conflicts in major terms, with the Civil War, for instance, slavery or states’ rights. But history isn’t made simply by marble men tossing grandiose speeches back and forth or charging bravely up a hill. Enemies do not always hate and demonize each other. I mean, Breckinridge doesn’t show his dislike of Sherman here because he laid waste to the South during his march to the sea. No, he’s frustrated that he didn’t get enough bourbon. From my comfortable life nearly 150 years later, I can relate to that.

Author’s Note:

Three of the poems are based on strange new fears that I’ve experienced since I started along the disappearing path of conception by technological means. Its failure presented and continues to present a different kind of future for my wife and me, and we are not quite out of wanting that other thing. It’s an absurd form of loss because it’s about losing what was never ours. Those poems simply explore what it means to persevere even when we know we will not persist. They are not about the fear of death but the fear of obliteration.

Author’s Note:

How much does place affect the people we become?  And not just the place as it is now, but the history of the place?  Do buildings and walls remember, and if so, do they speak?  And if so, are we listening?  These poems are taken from a collection called The Belle Mar. The Belle Mar is a fictional plantation in South Louisiana (loosely based on a real one called The Belle Rive). Each poem in the work takes place in a different room in the house in a different year.  All my life I have felt stretched between a deep love of my home and something very near disgust for it. Am I who I am because of Louisiana’s grim history, or in spite of it? These poems try to “squeeze the universe into a ball” (or a house), with the house itself bearing witness to the ugliness, beauty, the hatred of others, the hatred of self, and the ghosts that haunt its own walls. How have we changed? How have we failed to? If we think of our own hearts as having many chambers, many rooms, which are the ones we keep locked? Which are the ones we, ourselves, are locked inside?

Author’s Note:

The poem is exactly what the title states: a report. I sometimes think that all poems are simply ‘reports’ from the writer’s unconscious. Something happens, it collides deep inside you with other events that have placed markers in the psyche, and the resulting explosion causes a verbal welling-up on the page. It is then up to the poet to shape it and give it a form. I have chosen a very loose form for this poem because it is about physical things that are by their nature fairly loose and chaotic: the ambling forms of the cattle, the scattered crab apples, the uncertain date of return of migratory birds, the tentative responses that we offer each other. The poem is unified and informed by love of place, something which is easy to identify with on an unconscious level as most of us have some attachment to somewhere and we recognise the emotion when it presents itself.

Author’s Note:

Looking at this group of poems, I can see how obsessed I am with fixity and flux. Why else would I choose, when writing an ekphrastic poem, one of Rembrandt’s paintings concerned with an obelisk and then use metaphors from music to describe it?

Why else title a poem “Monuments” when I am writing autobiographically about a book my father left me when he died?

I have in the last few years written scores of ekphratic poems for a three-part book I am assembling on Rembrandt, Rodin and Michelangelo. But I have never so blatantly admitted my desire to be a visual artist as I have in “Jouissance.” : “ I always wanted to be a painter./The painter can just render, the poet/ must, admit, try hard to say something.”

And then there are my “eschatological poems,” about death and paradise—both of them imagined constructions. The speaker in “From this Side” has “crossed over” into that alterity which is  beyond literature and music and art but some synthesis of all three. There is no language for what he wants to say. Oh, why not admit it: he’s not a speaker; he’s just Peter Cooley with his face up against the impossible.

But it’s not a bad place to be.

Harper has been a major voice in American poetry, and a widely influential teacher at Brown University, since the early 70s, when his first book Dear John, Dear Coltrane (1970) broke new ground. The first Poet Laureate of Rhode Island (1988-1993), he has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. In 2008 he won the prestigious Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. In 2009 he published a new collection, Use Trouble.

This poem first appeared in the Winter 2009/2010, Vol. 39 Issue 3 of The Iowa Review.

Author’s Note:

“Négritude,” a world-wide movement of the African diaspora usually attributed to Aimee Césaire & Léopold Sédar Senghor, on and off the continent of Africa, and answerable, by metaphor, to the violation of the African Slave Trade, better known as the “Triangular Trade.” Robert Hayden, the translator of “Two Flutes,” is also author of the modem epic, “Middle Passage,” a poem written in eight dramatic voices assembled to place rhetorical blame on the complicity of the many agents of profit, large & small.

@Michael S. Harper, 2008

(Read about Jake’s AWP tribute panel)

Jake was a scholar and master of the lyric. His electric renderings of civil rights atrocities put him on the map. In a recent email to me, he expressed excitement about his new work, some of which he wrote at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop over the summer. A testimony to his singular energy and dedication, he said about the workshop, “I worked like a dray but wrote more than I might have imagined possible,” signing off, “your Alabama brother.”

Author’s Note:

Reading Jean H. Baker’s Mary Todd Lincoln, I discovered scores of fascinating things about Mary Todd Lincoln, but the ones that struck the most resonant chord involved her obsessive shopping, her immersion in spiritualism and her arrest on charges of insanity.  For a spell I had no idea I would write about her, as I imagined myself finished with Civil War era poems, but when my wife and I traveled to Gettysburg to see the new museum, I found that first lady’s image and personality stamped on displays everywhere I turned.  The bookshop there offered Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln, and in another month my sofa was covered with books on the same subject.  I couldn’t shake the image of her buying gloves for all occasions, dozens of pairs.  Although I understood some of the Victorian woman’s fashion concerns, the gloves struck me as metaphorical, a much more complicated, and more sympathetic, obsession than Lady Macbeth’s hand-scrubbing. Beyond the numerous personal losses she experienced, I imagine Mrs. Lincoln kept a kind of national casualty count in her heart, but she tried to insulate herself from all that grief with the gloves and other purchases, while she also mourned dramatically and attempted to summon the dead, which was very much the fashion of the day.  She was also far more sophisticated, erudite and sympathetic than I had guessed, and by the time I was a few pages into note taking, I was captivated and wanted to find a voice that would do her justice.

Author’s Note:

I remember the first time I saw my wife host a party. Her graciousness and pleasure at serving our guests made me want to learn how to mix interesting cocktails and to tell better jokes.

Something similar happened when we entered parenthood. It wasn’t that she changed, but certain latent aspects of my wife’s personality seemed suddenly drawn to the surface: a gentleness in her voice, an abiding patience. Watching her soothe our son those first few sleepless months, I was introduced to a new species of peace even as I came to know the labor that earned it. This poem began as an attempt to formalize both the shrill aggressiveness of an infant’s need and the tenderness with which a mother struggles to meet it.

Author’s Note:

“It was hard to be a great writer,” Ernest Hemingway once wrote, “if you loved the world and living in it and special people. It was hard when you loved so many places.”  And I think that tension is there, underlying most everything he wrote: how, despite his dedication to art, he was also always being pulled toward the unmitigated joys of just living his life.  While hard to pinpoint as a governing aesthetic, I hope a similar tension shows through in my first manuscript, Naming the Lifeboat.  Only a handful of the poems therein are set down in Antarctica, but they are a culmination of sorts, of many of the other poems of travel and nature, and I am happy to have several of them appearing together in this issue.

Author’s Note:

“I Knew You Before You Were” is one of the cornucopia of poems I’ve written in the months leading up to, and following, the birth of my son—poems that will appear in my fourth collection of poems: The Wish Book (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions). The poem does a better job of articulating what it’s about than I can possible replicate here—but its focus is on an exploding-moment. A bit of time in which thought expands and worm-holes, where grace and fear weave, where worry and beauty live in the same cardboard moment, where anticipation and dread and gratitude can completely unmoor a person from the mundaneness of the day, and in that breaking-loose, that drifting normalness, become something extraordinary, something utterly heart-swelling.

Author’s Note:

Over the last ten years, the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border has pushed those who are crossing into increasingly remote corridors, in particular the most remote areas of the Sonoran desert.  Hundreds of people die each year attempting the passage: in 2009-2010 alone, 253 bodies were recovered on the Arizona-Sonora border, a number generally understood to be only a fraction of those who have actually died, most of whom have not been found.

 From 2009 to 2011 I worked with one of the humanitarian aid organizations that have formed in response to the situation here.  Volunteers walk desert trails, leaving water and searching for people in need of emergency medical care.  In 2010, while mapping a trail in the desert south of Tucson, my friends and I found the remains of an unidentified man who the medical examiner estimated had died at least six months before.  The poems that appear here emerged out of that experience, and are part of a book-length sequence.

Hear Stop Time.
Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

Author’s Note:

African-based syncopations in music tend to seduce us and enliven us with the illusion and reality of how rhythm can be manipulated. Stop Time, like the seeming off-kilter of reggae’s rhythm, for instance, or the irresistible “pockets” in dancehall rhythms and the clave patterns of the rumba, is often the basis of the swoop and sway of the dances that it creates. I have been fascinated by the way in which stop time is a beautiful and persistent piece of luggage Africans have carried with us even without knowing it is there, and in the poem the church becomes the place where it finds sacred power—a metaphysical moment of helplessness that relies on faith—the gap, the absence, the separation—before the bridge of faith that spans the gap and brings us safely home.