'I Love the Universe Because It’s Made of Stories'

The third issue of New Verse Review has just been published, and I take it all back: poetry is not dead. The journal is crowded with work by good poets familiar – Jane Greer, Jared Carter, Ernest Hilbert, Amit Majmudar, Alfred Nicol – and previously unknown, like Daniel Patrick Sheehan. Good to see two Aaron Poochigian poems, including “Not Atoms”: 

“When, strolling through the Village, I discover

“one lonesome shoe, a jeweled but dogless collar,

the crushed rose of a hitman or a lover,

barf like an offering, a half-burnt dollar,

'Scream' masks holding traffic-light-top vigil,

 loose lab rats among the morning glories

 or Elmo trapped inside a witch’s sigil,

 

“I love the universe because it’s made of stories.”

I’m reminded of another "list" or catalog poem, a sonnet by Jorge Luis Borges, “Things,” (Selected Poems, 2000) translated by Stephen Kessler:

 

“My cane, my pocket change, this ring of keys,

The obedient lock, the belated notes

The few days left to me will not find time

To read, the deck of cards, the tabletop,

A book and crushed in its pages the withered

Violet, monument to an afternoon

Undoubtedly unforgettable, now forgotten,

The mirror in the west where a red sunrise

Blazes its illusion. How many things,

Files, doorsills, atlases, wine glasses, nails,

Serve us like slaves who never say a word,

Blind and so mysteriously reserved.

They will endure beyond our vanishing;

And they will never know that we have gone.”

 

Poochigian and Borges remind us of the world’s bounty, including good poems. The founding editor of New Verse Review, Steve Knepper, keeps all three issues available and free.