'My Poems Sing of Life'

The new century -- no longer new -- has been insatiably consuming good writers. In the early years of the twenty-first we endured a rough patch. In a five-year span we lost Anthony Powell, Edgar Bowers, William Maxwell, W.G. Sebald, R.S. Thomas, Penelope Fitzgerald, C.H. Sisson, Eudora Welty, D.J. Enright, Herbert Morris, Anthony Hecht, Thom Gunn, Donald Justice, Czesław Miłosz, Saul Bellow, Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.

More recently we saw the deaths of Hilton Kramer, Thomas Berger, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, John Simon, Geoffrey Hill, Evan S. Connell, Richard Wilbur, Whitney Balliett, Les Murray, Turner Cassity, Helen Pinkerton, Terry Teachout, Robert Conquest, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Podhoretz and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Life and culture are depleted. Now we’re expected to say, “But at least we have their books for consolation.”

 

Add to this sad roll call the name of Clive James, dead in 2019 at age eighty. I had been reading his books for roughly the last twenty years of his life. Most enduring is Cultural Amnesia (2007); perhaps most entertaining, Latest Readings (2015), for what he writes about Joseph Conrad, Dr. Johnson and Olivia Manning. In 2010, James was diagnosed with emphysema, kidney failure and leukemia, and lived to publish another dozen books (including a translation of Dante) before his death. Much of the poetry he wrote in that final reprieve was devoted to his illness and its reckoning. Published in the Yale Review in April 2017 and collected in that year’s Injury Time was “Declaration of Intent.” In the fourth of its five stanzas he writes:

 

“My poems sing of life. Though death is also there

In how they crystallise an emphasis

Like a tango maestro pausing, they do not despair:

They just acknowledge the abyss

Awaiting us. It brings finality

To what we were. It will do that for me

Soon now. My poems prove that I accepted this.”

'My Unreliable Retrieval System'

Welcome news is so rare in our withered literary culture, we are obligated to celebrate good new work when we encounter it. The summer 2026 issue of New Verse Review has been published, and it includes work by several of our finest established poets, as well as poems by newcomers worth reading. You’ll find three epigrams by R.L. Barth, including “McNamara’s 100,000”: 

“Moronic? Bumbling? Drooling? Poor? Sign here.

There are 100,000 openings

In McNamara’s scheme. You’ll learn some things

You might convert to skills; and never fear,

If under fire you don’t know zig from zag,

Be sure he’ll give you your own body-bag.”

 

Mike Juster’s “Nothing in Hell Is Up to Snuff” is dedicated to his late friend the poet X.J. Kennedy:

 

“It rankles us that Satan doesn’t care

for process. Brimstone shipments are too slow

for summer fun, so flesh is roasted rare,

and He has banished Barry Manilow

without an explanation. Long ago,

He welcomed new arrivals with a show

of evil…not now! He seems unaware

that he is failing as a CEO.

Unshaven, dazed in tattered underwear,

He leaves His pitchfork on His patio,

then curses God without the same old flair.

Though revolution simmers in the air

and demons hatch new schemes for overthrow,

most souls prefer The Devil who they know.”

 

Here is Aaron Poochigian’s “Heliolatry,” a poem that revels in the miracle of photosynthesis:

 

“There are the trees forever doing

a slow, expansive dance

called ‘Reaching Toward the Light.’

 

“Then there’s how shadows keep imbuing

the patterns with askance

and horizontal height.

 

“The whole show, with its matching ways

of moving, points to one

bright source of bud and sprawl.

 

“I close my eyes and tilt my gaze

into the sun, the sun,

the pivot of it all.”

 

And here are two poems by a poet new to me, Adrienne Su. “Solitude” is a meditation on memory, which she describes as “my unreliable / retrieval system.”

'What Are You Selling There – Despair?'

The Night of the Murdered Poets took place on August 12, 1952. Thirteen literary and intellectual figures were murdered on Stalin’s orders in the basement of Lubyanka Prison in Moscow. Four were poets who wrote in Yiddish – Perets Markish, Leyb Kvitko, Dovid Hofshteyn, and Itsik Feffer -- and a fifth, David Bergelson, was a Yiddish novelist. All were Jews – “rootless cosmopolitans,” to use Stalin’s phrase. The others were intellectuals and scientists who had been active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, organized during World War II by the Soviet government to mobilize world Jewish support for the Soviet war effort against Nazi Germany. All were arrested in 1948-49 and endured beatings and torture before their executions. Dovid Margolin writes in “The Exiled Rabbi and the Executed Poet: A Soviet Jewish Story,” published at Chabad.org: 

“After their arrests, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee activists were cruelly interrogated and tortured, with Markish’s treatment among the worst. He was interrogated two or three times a day, questioned all day, and then again from 11:30 p.m. until 5 the next morning, 96 times in all. Under torture at the hands of one of the MGB’s most sadistic officers, Markish signed a confession of guilt (he was accused of treason), effectively signing his own death sentence. On Aug. 12, 1952, after a sham secret trial at which they were all found guilty, 13 of the 15 defendants were executed with a bullet to the back of the head—a crime that has since become known as the Night of the Murdered Poets.”

 

Markish was born in 1895 in Polonnoye, then in the Russian Empire, now Ukraine. He served in the Russian army during World War I and published his first collection of avant-garde poems, in Yiddish, in 1919. After a series of pogroms in Ukraine in the early 1920s he moved to Warsaw, where he coedited with novelist I.J. Singer (brother of Isaac Bashevis Singer) an expressionist literary anthology. He returned to the Soviet Union in 1926 as a celebrator of the Soviet regime. He co-founded the Soviet School of Writers, in 1939 was awarded the Order of Lenin and in 1946 the Stalin Prize.

 

Markish published “Chatyr-Dag” (literally, “Tent Mountain”), named for a massif in Crimea, in 1920, revised and expanded in 1931. This is the opening quatrain from Jordan Finkin’s translation:

 

“Chatyr-Dag. With footsteps marking your wandering paths

I approach the hem of your cloud-patched cloak.

You recluse of stone with almond trees overgrown,

What lapidary tidings do you await from world’s end?”

 

And this from an untitled 1919 poem translated by Amelia Glaser:

 

“Hey, what do you deal in – sorrow?

What are you selling there – despair?”

Nadezhda Mandelstam in Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), in a chapter titled “The Wandering Jew,” writes: “A remarkable thing about the Jews is that, apart from suffering the lot of their own people, they also have to share the misfortunes of those in whose country they have put up their tents. Even a Jew who publicly renounces his Jewishness still goes to the gas chambers with the others, or is sent to Kolyma, like any member of the alien tribe whose language he speaks.”

 

On November 22, 1955, the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR ruled there had been “no substance to the charges” against Markish and the other defendants and closed the case.

'Never Perfectly Free from Giddiness'

Yet another unfamiliar word I would like to see revived: gasconade. Dr. Johnson gives a typically terse definition: “a boast; a bravado.” He cites the letter Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in which I encountered the word this week: “Was it a gasconade to please me, that you said your fortune was increased to one hundred a year since I left you?”

 As a noun, the word entered English from the French in the seventeenth century. Later it became a verb and an adjective. The OED’s definition is “extravagant boasting or exaggeration; boastful or bombastic language.” In other words, bluster, bloviation, braggadocio, magniloquence, bullshit, the way politicians talk. Richard Steele used the word in The Tatler No. 115 in 1709: “[H]is great volubility and inimitable manner of speaking, as well as the great courage he showed on those occasions, did sometimes betray him into that figure of speech which is commonly distinguished by the name of ‘gasconade.’” Other sources cited are Tobias Smollett and John Quincey Adams. 

 

Swift’s letter to Pope is dated August 11, 1729. In it, he describes symptoms of a chronic inner-ear disorder – likely, scholars have deduced, Ménière's disease – that plagued him from the age of twenty. Swift suffered from vertigo, nausea, tinnitus and progressive deafness:

 

“[M]y head is never perfectly free from giddiness, and especially toward night. Yet my disorder is very moderate, and I have been without a fit of deafness this half year; so I am like a horse, which, though off his mettle, can trot on tolerably; and this comparison puts me in mind to add that I am returned to be a rider, wherein I wish you would imitate me.”

'Objects of Value or Virtue'

The only summer mornings we woke up and got dressed early was garbage collection day. We had to beat the trash men. This was long before recycling came into fashion. Everything went into the fluted metal trash cans. Larger objects were piled beside them. Once we found an oversized television set which we carried away in a wagon, hauled deep into the woods, lugged across the creek and up the hill and threw off a cliff for the pure delight of hearing a cathode ray tube explode. I marvel that some of that glass, metal and plastic are probably still in that creek bed after sixty years.

We claimed old magazines and assorted bric-à-brac. At the time – early-to-mid-sixties – I was reading my way through the collected oeuvre of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Once I found a machete-length butcher knife with a wooden handle. I painted the blade red and proudly carried my John Carter of Mars sword. I suspect kids today would be admonished not to do any of the things I’ve just described, though we were practicing our own version of recycling. Howard Nemerov precedes his poem “The Town Dump” with lines from Act III, Scene 2 of King Lear. Lear is on the heath during the storm. Kent leads him to a hovel for shelter and Lear says “The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious.” That’s a nice gloss on our hobby as kids. Nemerov goes on to describe our weekly summer pastime:

 

“Objects of value or virtue,

However, are also to be picked up here,

Though rarely, lying with bones and rotten meat,

Eggshells and mouldy bread, banana peels

No one will skid on, apple cores that caused

Neither the fall of man nor a theory

Of gravitation. People do throw out

The family pearls by accident, sometimes,

Not often; I’ve known dealers in antiques

To prowl this place by night, with flashlights . . .”

'Capricious and Leaking'

“[T]here is, perhaps, a special pleasure in re-learning the names of many of the flowers every spring. It is like re-reading a book that one has almost forgotten. Montaigne tells us that he had so bad a memory that he could always read an old book as though he had never read it before.”

The Irish critic Robert Lynd (1879-1949) is writing in the title essay of his 1921 collection The Pleasures of Ignorance. Naturally, I couldn’t remember which essay by Montaigne he cited but logically enough I found the passage in “Of Books”:

 

“To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book (I mean of those that I intend to use only once) the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole . . .”

I had a similar experience recently when looking up something I had written on Anecdotal Evidence eighteen years ago. I quickly found it but in the same post I referred to another book I have no recollection of having read. The title and even the author’s name are blanks in memory. Lynd would understand:

“I have myself a capricious and leaking memory. I can read Hamlet itself and The Pickwick Papers as though they were the work of new authors and had come wet from the press, so much of them fades between one reading and another.”

 Even serious readers and rereaders, at least those not cursed with photographic memories, must concede that we’re left with general impressions of books in memory, not transcripts. I’ve read Conrad’s Nostromo twice but just the other day I had to search a digital version to confirm the precise wording of a passage I incompletely remembered.

 

“With a bad memory,” Lynd writes, “one can go on reading Plutarch and The Arabian Nights all one's life. Little shreds and tags, it is probable, will stick even in the worst memory, just as a succession of sheep cannot leap through a gap in a hedge without leaving a few wisps of wool on the thorns. But the sheep themselves escape, and the great authors leap in the same way out of an idle memory and leave little enough behind.”

 

In On the Ivory Stages (Mirabeau Press, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple calls Lynd “a distinguished essayist” and says his work is “very un-strident in tone” for a man so heavily involved in Irish politics. Rather, his essays are “those of an amused, sceptical observer of the follies of mankind, as well as a recorder of the small pleasures of existence.”

 

[The Montaigne passage is from the translation of The Complete Essays of Montaigne by Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1957).]

'It Is to Live'

Literature is a hobby, and not. It is an academic discipline, and not. It is a diversion, a distraction, an escape. But some of us can’t imagine a well-lived life without it. There’s a lot of talk about books being good for us, making us better, more empathetic people, all of which may be true but that’s not why I read. If I were asked for a definitive explanation, I would be lost. In part it’s habit, the pure momentum of a lifetime spent reading, and I see no reason to stop. I know good books make me happy, even their proximity in the same room, which sounds vaguely fetishistic. They’re companionable, friend-like – but so is a cat. There’s consolation in books – but more in loved ones. Such metaphors seem to suggest we read to be in the company of other humans, even when we’re alone. 

Theodore Dalrymple has been publishing a series of books with a simple premise – the books he has been reading and the thoughts they trigger. They are not collections of reviews and some of the books he reads are admittedly lousy. He’s fond of saying that every book has something of interest in it, something that can be thought about and cherished or dismissed. In the latest installment, Not for the Proud Man Apart (Mirabeau Press, 2026), Dalrymple writes:

 

“[O]ne of the pleasures of growing old – perhaps the pleasure of growing old – is that the association of ideas with what one reads, which is never quite logical, and certainly not voluntary, becomes richer.”

 

I stretch to imagine a life without reading. My understanding of the world would be threadbare. It’s perfectly possible to be virtuous, even saint-like, having never read a book, and it's likely that most of the world’s problems are caused by literate people.

 

For several months early in the century I read nothing but books by or about Henry James. I had returned to college to complete my B.A., having dropped out thirty years before. I was writing a senior thesis on James and his “poor sensitive gentlemen,” life’s spectators, too timid or passive to do other than live an unlived life. I began to notice the peculiar regularity with which benches appear in his novels and stories, often as a refuge for such characters.

 

Madame de Mauves in her eponymous story occupies a bench on the terrace at Saint-Germaine-en-Laye when she is introduced to Longmore. Frederick Winterbourne is seated on a bench outside the hotel at Vevey when he first meets Daisy Miller. Isabel Archer takes her place on a bench at Gardencourt during her final scene with Caspar Goodwood in The Portrait of a Lady. For their only meeting outside her workplace, the unnamed heroine of “In the Cage” sits with Captain Everard on a park bench in London and announces her secret, unacknowledged devotion. Dencombe, the doomed, doubt-wracked novelist in “The Middle Years,” faints and comes under the care of Dr. Hugh while on a bench at the seaside. Stransom suffers his apparently fatal attack on a chapel bench in front of his altar at the conclusion of “The Altar of the Dead.” John Marcher twice takes his seat on a bench in “The Beast in the Jungle,” James’ greatest story.

 

It’s thesis fodder, I know, of no interest to anyone. But by reading James I became aware of the ways people use park benches – for lovers’ trysts, as a place for tired parents to watch their kids, as a public sanctuary for old people. I consulted Jane Jacobs on the importance of urban parks. I experienced no colossal epiphany. I just made life a little more interesting.

 

Henry Oliver writes about books with love and without grandiosity. In “Literature as Part of Life,” a recent essay at The Common Reader, he writes: “To read, then, is not to receive commentary; it is not to see art as a mirror of the world or the lamp of a soul. It is to live. It is another way of living, just as walking and eating and loving and talking are.”