At the center of the screen is an acute triangle with a rounded bottom. Its shape resembles the pattern left by wipers on a dirty windshield, inverted. Before the device is activated it’s a gray blank and reminded me of the opening sentence of a novel I read more than forty years ago: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” -- the only thing I remember from William Gibson’s Neuromancer. 

This was my second echocardiogram in less than two weeks. The first detected “reduced systolic function,” though I remain asymptomatic. The second was performed using contrast. The technician puts transparent jelly on the left side of my chest and moves the transducer probe around until she gets a clean image. That picture replaces the “dead channel”: my pulsing heart. Seeing it is miraculous, a gift denied us for most of human history. I remembered the first time I saw an ultrasound performed, which was also the first time I saw my oldest son, in utero.

 

The word that came to mind is sostenuto, which I learned from the fifth stanza of Richard Wilbur’s poem “For C.” (Mayflies: New Poems and Translations (2000):

 

“Still, there’s a certain scope in that long love

Which constant spirits are the keepers of,

 

And which, though taken to be tame and staid,

Is a wild sostenuto of the heart,

A passion joined to courtesy and art

Which has the quality of something made,

Like a good fiddle, like the rose’s scent,

Like a rose window or the firmament.”

 

Wilbur wrote the poem for his wife, known as Charlee. Sotenuto is a musical term, an adjective meaning, according to the OED, “to be sung or played in a sustained manner.” It’s from the Italian verb for sustain, which is precisely what I want my heart to continue doing for me.

 

 

'Conserved in Treasure, Finally'

Rare is the poet who can simultaneously think and sing. C.H. Sisson once quoted the French critic Charles Maurras saying, “Reason may convince, but it is rhythm that persuades.” Prose writers don’t talk much about the rhythms of their words, which is probably a good thing. Prose is the draft horse of style, getting the heavy job done. Too much filigree and the language turns precious. The reader rightly suspects the writer is compensating for sparsity of content (e.g., John Updike). 

Words are never in isolation and are more like notation in a musical score than stones in a mosaic. One word follows another according to the logic of sound and sense. We spend a lot of time matching words to the rhythm that already exists in our heads, a rhythm we can’t begin to perceive until we start arranging the words. Sometimes for emphasis we purposely break the rhythm, always with resolution or absence of resolution in mind.

 

Much of the poetry written in the last century and a quarter is indistinguishable from prose – often tone-deaf prose. No need to name names. A writer who wrote superior prose and poetry, a rare feat of juggling, is Janet Lewis. Consider “Carmel Highlands” (Selected Poems of Janet Lewis, ed. R.L. Barth, 2000):

 

“Below the gardens and the darkening pines

The living water sinks among the stones,

Sinking yet foaming till the snowy tones

Merge with the fog drawn landward in dim lines.

The cloud dissolves among the flowering vines,

And now the definite mountain-side disowns

The fluid world, the immeasurable zones.

Then white oblivion swallows all designs.

 

“But still the rich confusion of the sea,

Unceasing voice, sombre and solacing,

Rises through veils of silence past the trees;

In restless repetition bound, yet free,

Wave after wave in deluge fresh releasing

An ancient speech, hushed in tremendous ease.”

 

The words float like leaves in the currents of a river. There’s no hurry, no rush to the finish, but the lines are suffused with a steady, uninsistent sense of momentum. Throughout the seventy years of Lewis’ writing life, she wrote poems in both form and free verse. She is a writer seriously in need of rediscovery. One of her novels, The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), is among the four or five finest ever written by an American. Here is a 1945 poem, “Lines with a Gift of Herbs”:

 

“The summer's residue

In aromatic leaf,

Shrunken and dry, yet true

In fragrance, their belief,

  

“These from the hard earth drew

Essence of rosemary,

Of lavender, faintly blue,

While unconfused nearby

 

“From the same earth distilled

Grey sage and savory,

Each one distinctly willed,

Stoic morality.

 

“The Emperor said: ‘Though all

Conspire to break thy will,

Clear stone, thou emerald, shall

Be ever emerald still.’

 

“And these, small, unobserved,

Through summer chemistry,

Have all their might conserved

In treasure, finally.”

 

“The Emperor” is Marcus Aurelius in Meditations (trans. Maxwell Staniforth): “Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to keep myself good; just as a gold piece, or an emerald, or a purple robe insists perpetually, ‘Whatever the world may say or do, my part is to remain an emerald and keep my color true.’” The passage suggests Lewis’ courage and steadfastness, her “Stoic morality.” Here is a 1941 poem she wrote after the death of a friend and fellow novelist, “For Elizabeth Madox Roberts”:

 

“From the confusion of estranging years,

The imperfections of the changing heart,

This hour leaves only tears;

Tears, and my earliest love, Elizabeth, and changeless art.”

 

Lewis, in her fiction and verse, is one of the few essential American writers of the last century, along with Cather, Nabokov and her husband, Yvor Winters. Lewis was born on this date, August 17, in 1899 and died in 1998 at ninety-nine.

'A Very Deadly Sort of Slave Feeling'

Regardless of her putative subject, Stevie Smith always seems to get around to death. That sounds like a prescription for adolescent morbidity, like a low-budget horror movie. There’s a theory going around, probably rooted in Freudian quackery, that all artistic creation is about death or its denial. Yet, somehow – often formally, with her nursery rhymes and rhythms – Smith charms and amuses us. Death is impertinent. “Up and Down” appeared in her first collection, A Good Time Was Had By All, published in 1937: 

“Up and down the street they go

Tapping tapping to and fro

What they see I do not know

 

“Up and down the streets they hurry

Push and rush and jerk and worry

Full of ineffectual flurry

 

Up and down the street they run

From morning to the set of sun

I shall be glad when they have done

 

I shall be glad when there’s an end

Of all the noise that doth offend

My soul. Still Night, don cloak, descend.”

 

The pair of spondees in the middle of the final line fall like clods of earth on a coffin lid. Smith’s work is subversive, not of politics or morals but of literary expectations. A diminutive woman, she knowingly donned a girlish costume (in life, in work) that was eccentric in an acceptably British manner. How liberating that must have been, setting her free to be a seriously silly poet. Pompey, the heroine of the first and best of her three novels, Novel on Yellow Paper (1936), recalls her understanding of suicide as a little girl. She urges parents to discuss the subject with their children:

 

“So I think every sensitive young child should early learn this. It is a great source of strength and comfort. It is so possible that things may become more than we can bear, is it not? That is not my thought at all. But rather, it is so possible that we may be afraid that things will become more than we can bear. There is a very deadly sort of slave feeling in this thought. For if we think this and become undone by our fear, we may too anxiously placate our fellow-beings, who appear to us to be in more authoritative positions and to have more of power than we over the things that oppress us. But with death as our immediate ally, such thoughts vanish.”

 

I’m not advocating suicide and neither is Smith. I’m not sure it’s even possible to posthumously diagnose Smith (dead at age sixty-eight in 1971) as a depressive. Rather, I think she is forthright and brave and reminds me of the seventeenth-century English prose writers – Sir Thomas Browne, in particular. To put it simply, she understands death as a part of life, as least as important a part as having children. I remember the deaths by suicide of two classmates when I was in grade school. That early exposure to self-destruction has been useful. It never frightened or depressed me.

'Thine Unsuspecting Gratitude and Love'

We’ve had a damp spring and summer in Houston – thirty-nine inches of rain since the start of the year. No major storms but frequent brief showers, often in late afternoon. At this time nine years ago, Hurricane Harvey was about to hit, flooding my car and leaving us without power for four days. Lawns now are lush. Mosquitoes swarm in clouds. Step outside and get sucker-punched by the humidity. Our front garden is a jungle, almost taking over the sidewalk. 

Walter de la Mare published “Dry August Burned” in Memory and Other Poems in 1938, though it suggests the Great War years. August was the time when farmers traditionally burned stubble on their land, causing hares to flee the fire. World War I started in August 1914. The poem begins indoors:

“Dry August burned. A harvest hare

Limp on the kitchen table lay,

Its fur blood-blubbered, eye astare,

While a small child that stood near by

Wept out her heart to see it there.”

 

De la Mare had two daughters and two sons. He was sensitive to the lives of young children, their volatile emotional natures. Sounds attract the girl outside:

 

“. . . like a leveret she ran,

To feast her glistening bird-clear eyes

On a team of field artillery

Gay, to manoeuvres, thudding by.

Spur and gun and limber plate

Flashed in the sun.”

 

A leveret is a young hare. De la Mare describes the girl as “nibbling a green leaf,” like a leveret. She is dazzled by the “sun-tanned soldiery,” the field artillery, the spectacle:

 

“She turned, and ran,

Elf-like, into the house again.

The hare had vanished. . . . ‘Mother,’ she said,

Her tear-stained cheek now flushed with red,

‘Please, may I go and see it skinned?’”

 

Like many of de la Mare’s poems, “Dry August Burned” is a compressed short story, a revelation of character. He suggests even the youngest among us, the most seemingly innocent, knows bloodlust. We are the most savage species.

 

And yet, kindness persists. William Cowper (1731-1800) kept as pets three hares, Puss, Bess and Tiney. A neighboring child who had become bored with them gave them to the poet, who wrote a poem when Tiney died at age nine. When Cowper fed bread to his dog Marquis, he also fed Puss, who lived to the age of twelve. In The Task he writes of Puss:

 

“One sheltered hare

Has never heard the sanguinary yell

Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.

Innocent partner of my peaceful home,

Whom ten long years’ experience of my care

Has made at last familiar, she has lost

Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,

Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine.”

 

We suspect some animal lovers of virtue-signaling, wishing to advertise their compassion and sensitivity. One never detects this in Cowper. He could never have lived in London among the crowds and social demands. In Olney he found respite. When Cowper writes of hares and other animals, one senses his identification with these creatures, as in The Task:

   

“Yes—thou mayst eat thy bread, and lick the hand

That feeds thee; thou mayst frolic on the floor

At evening, and at night retire secure

To thy straw-couch, and slumber unalarmed;

For I have gained thy confidence, have pledged

All that is human in me to protect

Thine unsuspecting gratitude and love.

If I survive thee I will dig thy grave,

And when I place thee in it, sighing say,

I knew at least one hare that had a friend.”

'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.”