Have you ever been challenged by a movie’s pacing? It seems as if every year the world (and the art and technology that attends that world) speeds up. At times, taking in the art of the past becomes a basic test of our capacity of attention. All the more so, when that art actively defies the conventions of its genre during its own era.

I had the good fortune of talking with Dave Maher about Stalker for his special podcast series on Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, legendary for challenging audiences by eschewing the modern technique of montage. If today, the average shot length of a movie is about three seconds, Stalker “contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.” This is slowcore at its most intense.

The irony is that even fast-paced movies seem too slow and long for Generation Z, addicted as so many of them (and so many of us) are to ten second dopamine shots of brain rot reels. So Stalker becomes something like the Everest of cinema. Or, at least one of the Himalayas. Treat it accordingly. Challenge yourself!

I watched Stalker for the second time this summer in preparation for our conversation. For some reason, I’d forgotten its slowness. But once I overcame my own discomfort with the pacing, in the first ten minutes or so, I found something most unexpected. I didn’t want to stop watching it. And when I got to the end, the movie haunted me for days. Usually, films keep their hold on me for an hour, or maybe a day. Life tends to reassert its own aesthetics onto me, and the film disappears. But this time, I kept casting back to the film, as if I were still inside it, and it in me.

Stalker, to my mind, is a form of anti-cinema, since movies were, in some sense, the artistic form of modernity, with its mechanical speed and wild juxtapositions. Tarkovsky’s aesthetic is not just anti-cinema, but also anti-modernist. One might argue that it’s also anti-capitalist, at least in the sense that it goes against the prevailing conventions of speed in storytelling.

I had a great text exchange with my friend Mark, a Hollywood screenwriter, about Tarkovsky and film, and he expressed frustration with it, saying, “I think the #1 duty of film is to entertain. And all art, really.” When I asked him to define “entertain,” he said, “keep me engaged and wanting to know what happens next.” It reminded me of George Saunders’ wonderful description of the short story in his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. Mark thought this concept was pretty universal for narrative art, and then made an exception for poetry.

To me, Tarkovsky’s work challenges some of the basic ideas we have about film as narrative. On one podcast I listened to, someone complained that “I didn’t see a tremendous amount of visual storytelling…. [and] he’s supposed to be the poet of cinema.” But to me, that’s exactly poetic–-to explore the image, to try to slow down time, to see in the ordinary of life something beautiful. Perhaps Stalker isn’t a film as much as it is a narrative tone poem, sculpted of time.

What if the poetics of boredom, however, leads to a strengthening of attention itself? You don’t catch up to the speed or plot of the movie–you settle into it, sometimes bristlingly, annoyed, and then having to check yourself because of your annoyance.

Apparently, when Tarkovsky brought the early cut to the studio, they too thought it was too slow, and so he threatened to slow it down even more! In Tarkovsky’s words, “If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.”

Poetry—that other art that demands a sort of absolute attention—plays a role in the movie. There are no fewer than three poems recited in the movie.

Here’s one that the Stalker character recites (it’s an original poem by the director’s father, Arseny Tarkovsky, in my translation with Dmitri Psurtsev, from I Burned at the Feast):

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And now summer has left

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And now summer has left

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as if it never came at all.

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It’s warm still where the sun falls.

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But it’s not enough.

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Whatever I wanted to happen

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fell right into my hands

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like a five-fingered leaf.

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But it’s not enough.

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The just and unjust

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played their necessary part

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and burned into light.

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But it’s not enough.

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Life tucked me behind its back

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and shielded me from cuffs.

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I’ve had such good luck.

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But it’s not enough.

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My leaves have yet to blaze;

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my branches have not yet broken.

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The day is clear as glass—

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but it’s not enough.

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Like this poem, a lyric incantation of unfulfilled desire, Stalker’s main characters are seeking to have their deepest wish granted, as is promised, in a place called The Room inside the forbidden Zone.

What will happen when they arrive? Here’s a link to watch the film.

And when you’re done, listen to the podcast!

What will you find, in that forbidden Zone in yourself?

I wasn’t much of a podcast listener before 2020, when the world stopped and time began to stretch out. In addition to going on long walks around the neighborhood with family, I also started to listen to podcasts, seeking connection off Zoom screens. Here’s what’s keeping me company on those walks and jogs when seeking poetry-related podcasts. (If you have your own favorites, add them to the list!)

1. Poetry Unbound: Poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama’s podcast episodes are both relatively short (around 12 minutes) and utterly immersive explorations of a single poem, which Ó Tuama reads once at the beginning, and again at the end. This is the ideal podcast for those who are intimidated by or uncertain about poetry. Even if you don’t love every single poem he chooses, it’s hard not to love his richly considered readings.

2. Poetry Off the Shelf: Helena de Groot’s longform interviews of poets are the poetic equivalent of “Inside the Actor’s Studio,” or “Behind the Music”--deftly drawing out the human being behind the poetry. They talk “about language, dreams, love and loss, identity, connection, anger, discomfort, the creative process, the state of the world and the world of the soul. Hard conversations are welcomed—laughter is, too.”

3. Sleerickets: Poet Matthew Buckley Smith has Opinions, on all manner of what he calls “intractable problems,” including and especially about poetry. His show (whose name was inspired by his daughter’s pronunciation of “secrets”) often features one of a rotating band of guests (Alice, Cameron, Brian, and others). He’s a formalist poet by practice, and uplifts fellow formalists, but he’s not pedantic or tribal about it. In a world where social media encourages everyone to fawn over everyone else, MBS’s candor is often refreshing and feels almost dangerous. There’s also a Secret Show, which continues the work.

4. Commonplace: since 2016, poet Rachel Zucker’s podcast features extensive, frank, and sometimes confessional interviews with poets and artists. Zucker’s own poetry derives such power from fearless candor, and she will always ask the questions you want but were afraid to ask.

5. The Slowdown is a biweekly brief podcast featuring a single poem with a welcoming introduction by the show host, poet Maggie Smith (past hosts include Tracy K. Smith, Ada Limon, and Major Jackson). The ads may be irksome, but stay for the poem.

6. Poetry Centered Podcast “features curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of more than 1,000 recordings of poets reading their work during visits to the Center between 1963 and today. In each episode, a guest poet introduces three poems from Voca, sharing their insights about the remarkable performances recorded in our archive. Each episode concludes with the guest poet reading a poem of their own.” What’s cool to me about this podcast is that it’s as varied as the guests who curate it, and becomes a rhizomatic exploration of the breadth of contemporary poetry.

7. Poetry Magazine Podcast is the podcast for the flagship journal of American poetry, Poetry Magazine, and often features poems and poets who have recently been published in the magazine.

8. The Poetry Space is the podcast arm of the other flagship journal of American poetry, Rattle, co-hosted by its editor-poets Katie Dozier and Timothy Green. Rattle is one of the most widely-read poetry journals around, whose poems are often freshly accessible in ways that defy the stereotype of the genre.

9. Breaking Form, hosted by poets James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith, who seem to have an absolute blast dishing about the poetry world. But don’t sleep on them: they chop it up finely in interviews with fellow poets.

10. New Yorker Poetry Podcast. Hosted by New Yorker poetry editor, the poet Kevin Young, the podcast features guest poets to discuss famous poets who’ve appeared in the magazine’s pages.

11. Versecraft: hosted by poet Elijah Perseus Blumov, holds the banner for formalist verse in a way that would make even MBS blush. Blumov brings his considerable intelligence to discussing (and, really, teaching) his audience about metrical verse. (Full disclosure: I worked with Elijah when he was a graduate student at VCFA, and enjoyed learning from him as much as teaching him.)

12. Poem Talk, hosted by UPenn Kelly Writers house maven Al Filreis and a roundtable of guests, focuses on a single poem, often from the experimental traditions of American poetry. It appears to be on hiatus, but the archive is worth exploring.

13. Vs felt like being invited to a real tea party with some of the most interesting poets around. Hosted by Danez Smith and Frannie Choi, and then by Ajanae Dawkins and Brittany Rogers, the podcast may be in the past tense, but again, find a poet you want to learn more about and listen.

Honorable Mention: Between the Covers. An interview podcast with prominent (and progressive) writers by David Naimon. Is there a podcaster more devoted to researching than David Naimon? No. Naimon is on the Parnassus of literary podcasting for his rigor, his extensive knowledge, and his attempt, through his podcast, at making the world better through reading literature. While his focus is on literature broadly, when Naimon turns his attention to poets, he’s just as good.

What are you listening to, that brings poetry closer?

What struck me most were two things: first, the joy of this discovery, which is hidden and then hidden again; and second, that instead of just focusing on the treasure, the person decides on investing everything he has to buy the whole field.1 Jesus is inviting us to imagine something that it is hidden that brings us great joy, that we will exchange for all we own, and that when we do, we’re buying not just the treasure, but the whole field of it. Which means, I think, that we accept stewardship of that place. This place. That we will work in it and it will work in us.

I’ve been thinking about this because the world (the world of politics, in particular our own government) seems so hellbent on destruction and despair-sowing that I’m looking for spaces where hope is alive. Where heaven is ours and somehow all around us, hidden gems of joy in the wider field that is our existence.2

I just had a poem-translation, “Three Excerpts About Avalon,” by Dimitri Psurtsev published in California Quarterly, which, oddly enough, is also thinking about this question of paradise, another reason to share it and think about it with you. That’s one of the odd things about translation, even more than my own poetry—I don’t think about its themes or meanings as much as I try to catch its music. Here’s the poem:3

Three Excerpts about Avalon

I.

It’s descending from the sky, this train

Replete with golden shutters,

Behind which windows are blue.

The shutters open all at once—

Unearthly faces gaze with pleasure

On children, on forests and streams,

And on a dog with burrs in its sides.

Everything’s imbued with humid light—

Like bark, the scales of a pine tree,

Its tail like a feathered crown.

II.

You caught me in your nets,

So drag my heart into the air,

Where your love spreads open

Like a shell of every name.

But the green envelope of summer

Won’t let me go, won’t let me go,

Crawls into my ear at night

As into a window, and wanders the rooms.

And there are almost no clothes left

To hide my nakedness.

III.

While in a distant and warm home

That slowly hurries through the air,

Glasses sang in the cupboard’s body

And the nostrils of curtains, harnessed

In windows, twitched without sound.

And that warm cozy home echoed

With fairy tales sung and yarns

Spun from the dense wool of desires,

On an indulgent, unhurried distaff

Made of darkness and distance.

——

The poem’s three stanzas offer us a different “excerpt” of Avalon. (Avalon, I’ve learned, comes from the Celtic, meaning Isle of Apples.) In the first stanza, we behold an otherworldly train descending from the sky whose inhabitants “gaze with pleasure / On children, on forests and streams, / And on a dog with burrs in its sides.” This is the transcendental view. In the second, the poet offers us a view of erotic love, whose images of the “green envelope of summer / Won’t let me go…” In the final stanza, the poet offers us an image of domestic bliss, which contains the first two images (of the moving train, and of desire and its claims). I love its ambiguous final line—that this weaving of Avalon happens on a distaff that is made “of darkness and distance.”

That is, I think suddenly, Avalon is not just made of coziness and love—it’s happiness and sadness, it’s light and dark, it’s proximity and isolation.

It’s made of the whole field.

So, dear reader, what does your heaven on earth look like? What are the pockets of Avalon that you find around you, that you’re cultivating? Communities? Places? Activities? What’s sustaining you in these times?

Три отрывка об Аваллоне

i.

Этот с неба спускается поезд,

У него золотистые ставни,

За которыми синие стёкла.

Ставни разом открылись, и лица

Неземные глядят с наслажденьем

На детей, на леса и ручьи,

На собаку с репьём на боках.

(Всё пронизано здесь мокрым светом.

Как кора, чешуя у сосны,

Её хвост как пернатая крона.)

ii.

Вы поймали меня в свои сети,

Так тащите моё сердце в воздух,

Где любовь ваша растворена,

Словно раковина всех названий.

Но зелёная обволочь лета

Не пускает меня, не пускает,

В ухо влазит моё по ночам,

Как в окно, и по комнатам бродит.

И почти не осталось одежды,

Чтобы спрятать мою наготу.

iii.

А в далёком и ласковом доме,

Что по воздуху медленно мчится,

Пели в теле буфета стаканы

И беззвучно дрожали ноздрями

Занавески в оглоблях оконных.

И, в едином и ласковом доме,

Сказки пелись и прялася пряжа

Из дремучей кудели желаний

На потачливой, медленной прялке

Расстояний и темноты.

I’ve always loved what’s possible when you bring together people who are passionate about writing, about what words can do. With just a little encouragement, creating a space for exploration and play, something magical happens. For one thing, they discover that they’re not alone. And that their words are a bridge between themselves and themselves, themselves and each other.

Those young writers are now in their early thirties!

A few years later, as the JCU YWW continued to grow, we kept reimagining what the workshop could do. I kept adding staff—John Carroll students now play a key role in leading small group workshops, of no more than six students, to keep that small community feeling. Students in the YWW came to JCU, and became part of our staff. Then, nearly ten years ago, we added an overnight option, which created new challenges and opportunities.

For much of the last decade, we’ve had about 40-50 students with a staff of about 8-10. Thanks to John Carroll’s investment in other summer pre-college programs, the Summer in the Heights initiative in 2025 offered a menu of different courses modeled on the Young Writers experience.

This last week was our 16th! After some years of directing only, I got back into the classroom to teach poetry again. I’m so glad that I did.

Sometimes we hear stories that we’re becoming a post-literate society, a post-writing society. These writers give me hope that the future has yet to be written.

Here’s what I said to the gathering of young writers and their parents for our closing reception and reading, in the wake of more smoke from the fires in Canada:

Writers, these days, sometimes it feels like the whole world is on fire. Yesterday and today, we were visited by its literal smoke, blown on the winds on this shared and ever smaller planet. Yet even yesterday–and all week–I was breathing in another kind of vital air. The oxygen of your joyful presence, your delightful community, and your vivid imaginative writing. It was a refuge from all else that was happening all around us. We made little refuges, little homes, in our stories and poems, in this big sanctuary of the Young Writers Workshop here at John Carroll University.

Parents, thank you for giving your children the gift of ranging their inner worlds, cultivating their imagination, finding their voice and their stories. We need stories and poems more than ever right now, stories and poems that help us understand and bear this world, and imagine another one.

Back when I was a teen–in the Middle Ages–I often felt I was alone. Alone with turbulent thoughts and feelings. But one day I read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and wondered how the poet could read my mind. I felt SEEN. Literature can make us both feel at home and also open the world to us in ways that our lives sometimes can’t. Reading and writing, we come to know that we are not alone. Writers, I hope you have felt hope here. I hope you felt home here. I hope you found something that social media will never be able to represent and AI will never understand, and that is: what it means to be YOU. Beautiful, strong, incredible, mysterious YOU.

Creative Writing is part of what universities call the “liberal arts.” The origin of the term liberal arts comes from ancient Rome. There, some “slaves were entitled to the study of any subject so long as it was dubbed ‘practical.’ Slaves could take math, some science and engineering, but subjects like history, philosophy and rhetoric were forbidden. These arts of persuasion were reserved only for the liber, the ‘free.’ Why? Because the ancient Romans didn’t want to arm slaves with the tools of education that would allow them to say, ‘We should be free.’”

Writers, when you write, build in words just one room to be free in. Maybe a few rooms. A house even. Maybe you can build another country, the country of the imagination. May we find refuge in it.

Thanks to John Carroll University, especially Sage Verdi, Mike Andelbradt, Abby Breen, Toby Jones (Enrollment, Summer in the Heights), and Rory Hill (Auxiliary Services). Special thanks to Emily Dahnert, our coordinators, and Michael Garriga for his fiction wisdom. Thanks to our workshop leaders: Cole Harvey, Sam Lamparyk, Kae’La Merritt, Hannah Sobko, Raven Spano, Hannah Sutton. You have created space for new voices and new creations. This program would not exist without your work!

Reading the brilliantly-poignant Trouble Boys (2016), the story of the Replacements, I came across the account of what was, for years, the final Replacements show—July 4^th, 1991, in Grant Park, on my 21^st birthday. It was 35 years ago.

That show ended in true shambolic Replacements fashion, with the band handing over their instruments, one by one, to their roadies, mid-song, and leaving the stage. Seemingly, for ever. They were the epitome of a self-sabotaging punk band, refusing the very fame and fortune that a part of them still craved like a drug.

I emailed my buddy Jim, my high school punk rock dealer, who originally turned me onto them back in 1988, mentioning how cool it must have been to have been there for the decidedly ungrand finale.

“But we were there,” he wrote back. “Don’t you remember?”

I wanted to believe him, but it seemed impossible—like a dream that couldn’t have been true. I pulled up the YouTube audio recording of the show, and listened to the opening, a blistering rendition of “I Will Dare.” The jauntiness of the original recording is replaced with a desperate force, the force of someone reckoning with what they were becoming:

How young are you

How old am I

Let’s count the rings

Way around my eyes…

Meet me anyplace

Or anywhere or anytime

And I don’t care maybe tonight

If you will dare

I will dare

I’m older now, and I think I can actually count rings around my eyes. I always heard that song as an ecstatic echo of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in which the speaker neurotically wrestles with himself and his inability to act: “do I dare descend the stair. Do I dare eat a peach?” That poem, probably as much as any other, set me to writing. I’d read it in high school, when the isolationism of self-consciousness was starting to feel like a diving bell, and that I would not be able to rise out of it.

It’s the class where I bonded with Jim, A.P. English with Mr. Lalley, all of us careening toward college and adulthood, excited and terrified by the unknown. Mr. Lalley began to ask me, “Mr. Metres, is everything alright?”

No, not only was everything not alright, nothing was right. I must have been twitching or grimacing in my seat, but I didn’t know why. I was so wound up in fear and frustration, even my teachers were noticing. One night, at my childhood desk, I turned the page to “The Love Song,” and the whole page became a mirror and a window; a mirror in which I could see myself, and a window out of which I could imagine a world.

Scurrying downstairs into the basement, I cracked open the box of old journals and rifled back to 1991. Inside a musty notebook, July 1991, there it was. Just a brief mention, but a mention nonetheless. Westerberg was known to improvise on stage, mussing up the words to fit his mood or the moment, and I’d written down what we thought we heard of one of those phrases: “smart things come in stupid packages.” It sounded like a Rosetta Stone key to the Replacements, who had always pretended to be stupider than they were. (Apparently, he’d said, “small things come in stupid packages,” but Westerberg would be happier with our mishearing.)

So I had been there. It was no dream. I suddenly remembered that the show seemed too short, as if they’d cut out too soon, mid-song, before we were ready to leave. It was the prologue and prophecy of what was to come in a month, when we would move into the Purn, when our fucked-up inner blazing and aching bodies were so full that it made a lot of what happened afterward feel like the wrong kind of hunger.

It was my twenty-first birthday. I was now a man—whatever that meant. What I wanted most was to dance and sing back the lyrics to a fucked-up guy who made it okay to be afraid and confused and unsatisfied, to roll some words into row that made it possible to not want to disappear from the earth.

Old-school fans like to say that the Replacements at the end lacked fire, but I dare you to listen to their version of “Happy Town” and test that theory.

The lyrics, per usual with Westerberg, archly diagnose the problem with their slight modicum of success. It begins:

The plan was to sweep the world off its feet

So you sweep the garage for the neighbors to see

The plan was to set the world on its ear

And I bet you don’t know why you’re here

Who knew

That avenue was bound for happy town

What began, perhaps, as a youthful attempt at musical revolution, turns increasingly self-aware and causes nagging self-doubt. Does the road to fame simply lead to a place called “Happy town,” the literal opposite of their own world—with its unslaked desire, drunk stumbling, and rejection of the terms of selling out? Happy town is not what the point of all this noise had been.

The song goes on to describe not only clean garages, but also “afternoon parties where nobody heaves…. [where] we all fell in line and got lost.” Normie life awaits. Was this what it was all about? You can almost hear it as bitter obituary for a band who planned to “set the world on fire” and wound up playing to mildly-bigger crowds soused on summer beer.

But it rains every day on the liar.

Cue the blistering ending to “Happy Town”--the chorus of “happy town” with Stinson screaming more and more loudly, and Westerberg yelling something that will not yield to translation, the drummer pounding away. I play and replay it, the chemical electricity surging in me more each time. It brings back the explosive emotions I felt when I was in college, particularly senior year at the Purn. Just a bunch of guys screaming at the top of their lungs in a way that felt like catharsis, that roil where grief and angst and rage meet release and liberation.

About an hour in, they began to play “Within Your Reach,” another classic in the catalogue of songs of unslaked desire–not just Replacements songs, but all songs. Even now, listening again, it sounds like an elegy to what never quite happened, but somehow did.

I found a video of that performance on YouTube. The band comes on so quietly, it almost doesn’t seem like it’s a song at all, but what comes before a song. Some artful videographer toggles between footage of shows in Paris and London (shown in color) and the one in Chicago (shown in black and white), as if the band is already fading into the past. Westerberg closes his eyes almost the whole time, and sings as if he’s a medium, and the words are coming out through him, not from him:

I could live without so much
I can die without a clue
Sun keeps risin’ in the west

But instead of the original ending line, “I keep on wakin’ fully confused,” Westerberg wryly sings, “I keep on wakin’ you know the rest.” He is already letting the whole ratty-beautiful project fade into the sunset.

Westerberg originally recorded the song by himself, too shy to bring it to the band. Their bruising brotherhood would have crushed the song’s raw vulnerability and laughed it back into silence. Backed by a primitive drum machine fluttering, Westerberg plays the guitar with a flange. It sounds like a quiet plane flying overhead, rough and unpretty. But the lyrics soar as he sings to himself an unrequited love song for the ages.

Cold without so much

I can die without a dream

Live without your touch

I’ll die within your reach

Who hasn’t known such desperate longing, as if your very existence depends on this sudden other, who is both so close and yet impossibly far? And the resignation that comes, knowing that nothing will diminish that distance, and that perhaps that’s the way it’s meant to be.

But I had been there. It was no dream.

Or it was exactly a dream, and I had been there.

Whether it was Mozart or Frank Sinatra or Billie Holliday or the Temptations or the Clash or REM or Beyonce doesn’t seem to matter as much as it was you and them, making that magic third thing, the listener impossible to tell from the song (Yeats: “How can we tell the dancer from the dance?”. The songs become these portkeys back to who we were, and somehow still are. The songs of our youth are our youth, in three minute casts of sonic amber.

As Guided by Voices once sang, “most of us are quite pleased / with the same old song,” because that same old song isn’t just familiar, it’s family. It’s a vessel of our very self that we navigate the unknown.

At the 2026 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, David Baker brought together a group of us under the title: “Slow Down: Patience, Poetry, & Poets,” and Kimiko Hahn, Linda Gregerson, David, and I all offered an array of talks gyring on that theme, which (thanks to David) the folks at OnlyPoems have now published; Linda and David range around the lyric and the line and the mysteries of time around art, while Kimiko and I go back in time, counseling patience and offering mercy to our impetuous and impatient younger selves.

A year ago, I spent a good two months with my college self, writing 60,000 words of what may well become a memoir, a sort of Portrait of the Artist as Punk and Poet under the working title, “If You Will Dare,” after the Replacements song. When David asked me to talk about patience and poetry, I immediately thought about the time when I first faced my failures as a writer, when I’d only just begun, as a senior in college working on an honors thesis.

Here’s a bit from the essay about the blistering song “Whatever” by the band Hüsker Dü, referencing this album cover:

I leaned on the back two legs of my chair and turned my gaze to the massive poster of the album Zen Arcade on my wall above my bed. I pretended for a moment that I was in Hüsker Dü, wandering that rainbow-colored junkyard with my fellow bandmates in our long coats, searching for something, not knowing what. Searching a painted junkyard saturated with pastels seemed exactly like the band’s aesthetic—turning castoff trash into something both battered and beautiful. Their postpunk music gave melody to the pain that would sometimes overcome me—the pain of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear that, despite everything, would overwhelm me when I was alone.

I pressed open the CD player, placed the disc onto the cradle, and fed it back into the boombox. My scalp prickled with heat and blood, as I sang alongside by Bob Mould:

He lives in his imagination with those friends of his very own
He doesn’t get along with the outside world, he’d rather be alone
Sometimes when it’s late at night, he starts to wonder why
The plans he made can never happen so all he does is cry.

Between the verses, Mould slashed up and down the guitar with his left hand, as if trying to break it open. It was a song about a boy like me, a sensitive, obedient boy who found life impossible, caught between his dutiful and dreaming natures.

Whatever you want. Whatever you do. Wherever you go. Whatever you say, Mould sings in the chorus, a numbed monotone, and in the outro, his voice caterwauling around me.

I wanted to please Cording like I’d pleased my parents growing up. But in trying to please him, I and my writing seemed farther than ever from who I thought I was, or was trying to be.

To read the whole piece: https://onlypoems.com/blog/whatever-you-want

Thanks to our little VCFA CNF writing group (Hasanthika Sirisena and Patrick Madden) and everyone else who read this before you’re now reading this.

I’d read a bit of Muriel Rukeyser many years ago, in a course on the Nonviolent Tradition in American Literature, thanks to Professor Mike True, in 1991. True’s canon of wild poets, passionate dreamers, and nonviolent activists opened up the concept of literature in ways that I continue to learn from. “Poem,” in particular, still hits hard:

Later, I’d read The Book of the Dead for my Ph.D. exams, suddenly obsessed by poetic epics and political poetry—what suddenly appeared as documentary poetry—and that became a touchstone.

So when Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim invited me to contribute to Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser (West Virginia University Press, 2026), it would have been natural for me to focus on her documentary poetry. But what was on my mind was the fact that, after the publication of The Book of the Dead (the long poem at the heart of her collection, US-1, published in 1938), at the age of twenty-five, she set aside the documentary mode for the rest of her life.

How remarkable and unusual, in our age of literary self-branding, that she would not repeat her attempt in the documentary form! I have yet to learn precisely why—except that, to me, it shows how much of a roving and liberated artist she was, simply incapable of repeating herself.

Beyond Ourselves: Contemporary Poets on Muriel Rukeyser features probingly personal and bracingly thought-provoking essays by some of my favorite poet-writers: in addition to contributions from Gander and Heim, we have Daniel Borzutsky, Susan Briante, Khadijah Queen, Jena Osman, Erika Meitner, Nomi Stone, Deborah Paradez, and Solmaz Sharif. It’s eminently readable and you should get yourself a copy!

Instead of writing about documentary poetry, I wanted to explore perhaps why Rukeyser kept exploring in other modes, and what was at the heart of that corpus—the body itself.

Here’s the middle of the essay, which appeared in slightly different form in American Poetry Review.

V.

I wanted to see her body. No, I wanted to see her read her poetry, and her body reading it. Something about Rukeyser’s writing made me feel that she was at home in her flesh, and I wanted to see her loving her body as she read her poems. Because I have felt so exiled in my body, so at war with it, I have hungered for models of being at home and at peace in one’s skin.

Years ago, I met a musicologist who was an expert in analyzing how classical music compositions moved the body—as if the composition were not just a script for music but also for the dance of the body. I wondered about the dance her poems would make.

I searched and searched online, but I couldn’t find a single video clip of her reading. On some audio recordings, we can hear her voice, but it’s her voice alone.

I open The Life of Poetry and find:

“For Whitman grew to be able to say, out of his own fears, Be not afraid of my body.”

And “he remembered his body as other poets remembered English verse. Out of his own body, and its relation to itself and the sea, he drew his basic rhythm.”

VI.

The feeling of bodies, of a generosity of flesh, is everywhere in Rukeyser. She does the opposite of despising.

From the Latin, despise—de (down) + specere (to look)—literally means “look down upon.” Rukeyser doesn’t look down on the ocean from the lighthouse. She meets it at the chaotic flow, and the point of congress.

In “The Speed of Darkness”:

Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis

Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt

Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child.

Resurrection music, silence, and surf. (465)

And:

No longer speaking

Listening with the whole body

And with every drop of blood

Overtaken by silence

But this same silence is become speech

With the speed of darkness. (465)

In “What I See,” Rukeyser reaches across, and toward, not from above or on high:

Lie there, in sweat and dream, I do, and “there”

Is here, my bed, on which I dream

You, lying there, on yours, locked, pouring love,

While I tormented here see in my reins

you, perfectly at climax. And the lion strikes.

I want you with whatever obsessions come—

I wanted your obsession to be mine

But if it is that unknown half-suggested strange

Other figure locked in your climax, then

I here, I want you and the other, want your obsession, want

Whatever is locked into you now while I sweat and dream. (421)

Even in the great pain of this poem, the speaker reaches across—not even necessarily on a shared bed, but on two separate beds united in the longing of the speaker. Instead of happily entrancing herself in the fantasy, she stakes a claim for wanting the you and the other’s you—“I want you and the other” and what the other wants. This is the great trial of love—to want not only the imagined other, but the real other as they are.

Twenty-five years into married love, that’s what I’ve come to. To love is to let go of the idea of a person, to behold a person in their bones, in their flesh, in their wanting, in their joy, in their sweat and dream.

To accept the real as it is. And they are. And not just as they are, but as we are. There is no love of the other without a homing in on self, a radical acceptance of ourselves, body and all. Not to spite that which does not conform to our desire.

From “Despisals”:

Never to despise in myself what I have been taught

to despise. Nor to despise the other.

Not to despise the it. To make this relation

With the it: to know I am it. (472)

To be “it” doesn’t mean to accept the voicelessness of objectification, but to meet our bodies in their otherness. That is the beauty of her refusal of despising.

That hilarious throwaway poem of hers:

I lie in the bath and I contemplate the toilet-paper:

Scottissue, 1000 sheets –

What a lot of pissin and shittin,

What a lot of pissin and shittin,

Enough for the poems of Shelley and Keats –

All of the poems of Shelley and Keats. (503)

In her essay, “The Education of a Poet” (1976), Rukeyser proposes that there are two kinds of poetry: the (documentary) poems of “material evidence” and those “poems of unverifiable facts, based in dreams, in sex, in everything that can be given to other people only through the skill and strength by which it is given.”

Are we not the meeting of these poetries—the meaty materiality and the unverifiable fact, first-hand witnesses to a dream?

The first time I went, I was “leading” a peacebuilding program trip in Northern Ireland for John Carroll University, which was amusing, because I had never been to either Ireland (Northern or the Republic), nor was I an expert in any aspect of its culture of literature. But I had the great good fortune of inheriting a wonderful coordinator, the witty and organized Raymond Lennon, who seemed to know everyone and everything about his country.

Here was a place, it seemed, where Peace won. After thirty years of conflict, violence, and war, Northern Ireland had chosen peace with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and seven years later, decommissioning (aka total disarmament) by the Irish Republican Army. Everyone had bought into a power-sharing Executive, and to pursuit of their ends through constitutional and political means. A longtime peace activist, I felt like I was in heaven. Here, nearly everyone we met—from politicians to former paramilitaries to peacebuilders—talked of peace and reconciliation, as if it were the law of the land.

So for years, I happily led by being led, more or less every year, in this story of Peace in Northern Ireland. Things kept changing, but enough of the story stayed alive. Even Brexit didn’t kill it…. That arrangement held for 13 years, when, suddenly, Raymond’s health suddenly caused his early retirement. The last two years, I’ve been guided by two simple principles: 1) What Would Raymond Do?, and 2) What Do I Want to Learn and Want My Students to Learn this time?

Once I let my grief run its long course into the sea of deeper griefs, I realized that none of the students knew Raymond, so the only way that they would feel his presence would be in how I structured and ran the program. His motto “friendship super omnia,” as he said once, meant that relationships mattered, no matter where that person came from, or what “side” they were on. Without being an expert in “peacebuilding,” Raymond lived peacebuilding in everything he did.

The second principle was natural and simple, and came as an outgrowth of what I’d slowly come to understand about this place—and by “this place,” I mostly mean “Northern Ireland,” or “The North of Ireland,” as someone of an Irish nationalist persuasion might refer to it. While I’d fallen in love with how Northern Ireland had adopted as its dominant narrative Peace, the peace of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, I saw how Brexit and other factors meant that the peace narrative would not be the end of history here.

I started thinking about Raymond Williams’ concept of culture having dominant, residual, and emergent elements. In some sense, the peace narrative had been the dominant one since 1998, widely accepted by the state and by many of its citizens, a “New Beginning” as the Good Friday Agreement called it. Even so, every year, we could see how the old, residual narrative of the Troubles and its sectarianism (or its colonial vestiges, and likely both) was still every much alive. In fact, that narrative kept returning, a sort of ghostly return of the repressed beneath that peace story. The victims who hadn’t received either truth or justice also seemed like ghosts, ghosts reminding us of ghosts, and they needed to be heard.

When the UK voted to “Brexit”—i.e., leave the European Union—it brought back both the residual narrative of the sectarian divide AND dovetailed with one of the emergent narratives—that of the New Irish, the Third Community of immigrants who troubled the old binary with new stories and no stake in “Catholic versus Protestant.” And the rise of the Far Right, resisting that change. The old joke, about a Muslim who’s stopped in the streets by a hooded gang, is asked whether he’s a Catholic Muslim or a Protestant Muslim, reminds us that all three narratives sometimes collide against each other—how many stories simply do not find into easy grand narratives.

The other issue was that the primary actors in the story of the Troubles were slowly dying, or ready to move on with their lives. Father Alec Reid, Martin McGuinness, Ian Paisley, John Hume, May Blood—all people with whom we’d met over the years—were now gone, part of the literal past.

My answer to the recession of the Troubles and its living memory was in two directions. First, to return to my love, of literature and the arts, and incorporate more poetry and literary events. Over the years, we’ve gone to see Translations at the Lyric, and Good Vibrations at the Opera House, and organized poetry readings with local and international poets at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, and visited the Heaney Homeplace, and Yeats’ grave, and Thoor Ballylee and Coole Park, etc.

Second, to empower students to become their own oral historians, story-gatherers, by initiating an Oral History project modeled after Humans of New York, called Humans of Belfast, which would enable our program to get a broader, even kaleidoscopic view of this changing place, through the stories of chance encounters on the streets. Because the Belfast that I knew in 2011 is, really, a memory. It hasn’t gone away completely, but the culture keeps changing. A city is an unfolding.

****

Over the years, I’ve tried to post each day about our activities, but this year, the neat summaries didn’t come easily to me, and I was busy being in the moment. But here are some little snapshots of our time together.

Scenes from our walking tour of the Falls Road, an Irish republican neighborhood in Belfast. Our guide, Gerard, shared his long journey from getting involved in the armed struggle, to his time in prison, to losing his brother, to his lifelong work with youth. Again and again, he spoke about the need for freedom, equality, and human rights for all. He preferred, he said, like Jefferson, “dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

Our meeting with the Reverend Harold Good reminded me, yet again, how the ordinary work of peacemaking is lifelong. A Methodist minister inspired by the American civil rights movement, Good was assigned to the Shankill right before the Troubles broke out. When families were burned out of their homes, Good opened his church even to Catholic families. “The politics of fear,” he said, “creates a bad situation. And religion, too often, makes it more respectable.” Years later, during the period of negotiations that led to Good Friday, someone from the Irish Republican movement told him, “the day you invited us to your home—that changed something.”

“Me in place and the place in me.” Seamus Heaney’s words remind me how much we are shaped by the places we come from and attend to. We are inside them and then are inside us. The Heaney Homeplace is worth a visit for its tender exploration of the people and places of the poet’s youth. I do wish it had a floor dedicated to his broader contribution to politics and conscience.

On the same day, we also visited WAVE Trauma Centre and heard the poignant stories of Paul Gallagher and Henry Cochrane. For me, the stories of victims remain the emotional center of peacebuilding work, as the victims are often the ones whose lives testify to the lie of war and the betrayal of the powerful, as well as the possibilities of ordinary people to transform their lives through story and witness.

Finally, on the same day, we held a poetry reading about borders and migration, featuring Fiona Bolger, Nithy Kasa, Rafael Mendes—all of whom traveled up from Dublin as part of the Dubeloving program—and me. The event was a testimony to a new Ireland, one that looks different and sounds different from the Aul Sod.

We had a great visit at Stormont Assembly. I’ve always found the building a bit overmuch, a compensation for this statelet carved out in 1921, but I also get it.

Our visit featured a fascinating debate between David Brooks of the DUP and Philip McGuigan of Sinn Fein. It began with cordial friendliness and then became a chess match of position taking, and ended with friendliness again. Another way to do politics?

Then, later on the same day, we paid a visit to the PSNI and Roisin Brown, providing insights into the challenges of delivering police service and respecting rights in a community where difference and sectarianism exposed into the Troubles. Think of the difference between a police “force” and a police “service.” (Check out “Blue Lights” for a televisual depiction of some of the challenges of policing.)

I could go on. We had further visits to East Belfast, thanks to the wonderful Gareth Wright, and back in West Belfast, thanks to Jim Gibney, and a day to do the Humans of Belfast interviews. Later, we went onward to Derry/Londonderry, before heading west to Donegal, and then through Sligo (saying hello to Yeats!)

and Galway and then Dublin again, before flying home.

At the peace wall between the Protestant loyalist community of East Belfast and the Short Strand, a Catholic nationalist enclave, Protestant-born Gareth Wright stood and said, “if I were born just ten feet away, on the other side of this wall, I would be a different person, with different culture and politics.”

We are all marked by geography in ways that feel random. But geography is also not our final destiny. One local community worker, of the Protestant background, exhorted her fellow community workers, “we need more PLU!”

What do you mean, someone said, thinking she was being sectarian. “More Protestant Loyalist Unionists?”

“No,” she said. “People Like Us!”

It was just the third time coming back to read in the thirty-plus years since I graduated, and every time is a grace—to be able to trace my old steps, to catch up with my ghosts. Three of them came to the reading (thanks to Professor Beth Sweeney, Professor Steve Vineberg, and my buddy Brian Cook).

College, I told the students, is such a precious time, full of confusion and exhilaration and panic and delight and intrigue and wonder and difficulty. Just know that the highs and lows will be peak here, just like the walks up and down the hill of Mt. Saint James. But they are shaping you and forming you, and maybe someday you will come back here and chase your own ghosts…. If you feel lost and confused, don’t worry. I still wake up, more night than you know, at 3am, thinking that I don’t know anything. Then I think, that means that I’m still alive, and I’m still wondering about the mystery of what it means to being human. Don’t worry about that. That’s just part of being human, and that means you’re awake to the fact that life is incredibly vexing and not really understandable. And also incredibly beautiful….

A part of me is always chasing ghosts. I feel like an archivist of past feeling, and going back is like exploring the archives for some spot of time that I’ve forgotten. I love that ticklish feeling of returning to a place that I’ve spent a part of my existence, walking those same paths, standing in buildings that held and still oddly hold me. Do you know what I’m talking about? All those old neurons lighting up again, happily rhyming with time, the Christmas tree of the mind.

The next day, I came back to campus just to plug back into that mystery of how memory and place. All alone, unbothered by anyone, I walked the paths I used to walk a thousand times, in those pivotal years where I was becoming. Where anything and anyone—again and again—would catch and seize my breath, in the vast astonishments of youth.

Right over there was where Phil Fournier and I climbed a hundred-foot fir tree—so high that I felt dizzy when we looked out over Worcester. And a few steps away, in Lehy, was where he jumped out the second story window during our reading group, to punctuate his reading of the Last Supper.

And the old peace sign that we painted on the roof was still there (albeit in a new iteration—like Theseus’s ship, it’s remade and still the same).

And there on the Beavan lawn was where the Bedspins played.

And there in Carlin was where Cook and I danced on Scalia’s couch to the Clash, one fateful Thursday night that began a lifelong friendship.

So many ghosts. I felt so—what?—so lucky, as my friend Seltz would say, despite all the difficulties, lucky to have lived this life. As in Yeats’s “Vacillations”:

My fiftieth year had come and gone,

I sat, a solitary man,

In a crowded London shop,

An open book and empty cup

On the marble table-top.

While on the shop and street I gazed

My body of a sudden blazed;

And twenty minutes more or less

It seemed, so great my happiness,

That I was blessed and could bless.

Then, having walked off campus, down from the college on the hill, to the streets below, I ended up standing outside our old apartment building, looking up at what were our windows. Senior year, four of us, “the Purn,” lived in this three-story building, the bottom floor of which was a vegetarian Indian restaurant called the Annapurna, where once I bumped into the punk band Fugazi. We were on the third floor, and smelled like curry for the whole year. It was glorious, and difficult, and I’ll never forget it.

I’ve written a memoir about it. Maybe some day it will find the light. A decade ago, before the last visit to the Cross, I’d cracked open my old journals from college to do a little mind-melding. What I found astonished me.

I often wrote about my struggles, which had been blunted or even erased with the years. Yes, I wrote about some of the joys, but not all of them. Writing about that time, and looking back again, made me realize how tricky, how partial, memory can be. I wanted to tell that young man that it would be okay—but he couldn’t hear me back then, or if he did, he only did in fugitive moments, when he was slamdancing or hooping it up with Death or Glory, or laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe.

That’s, incidentally, one of the reasons I love the idea of the multiverse. That idea that there are parallel worlds, all existing simultaneously. That time, perhaps, is not linear, and every instance, every moment, is happening at the same time, all at once.

When I walked up the staircase to our apartment, I could hear someone doing dishes. Suddenly I was struck with wonder: if I knocked, would my housemates Brian or Dan or Mark—or the younger me—answer?

I decided to let them—us—do the dishes in peace. No sense in haunting them.

We Try to Ignore the Elephant Somehow

On the wooded embankment in Lewiston, New York, in late July, 2023, I paused to gaze at the Niagara river pulsing by, muscular and silvered, its liquid music quieting the apocalyptic noise in my head. It had been an unsettling summer. Canadian wildfires on the other side of this river had burned so long and hard that the smoke made the air in Cleveland, where we live, smell like drying paint, day after day. In our backyard, we’d set up some furniture, hoping to enjoy hosting friends outside, since we’ve continued to mask inside after our eldest daughter began to struggle with Long Covid. A college athlete, she was exhausted, suffering from brain fog and tachycardia. With the toxic air, we began masking outside as well. A whole country of fire, burning. It felt like something big and unnamable was dying.

But that afternoon in Lewiston, the sky had cleared and the air was soft. Two couples and I, one from the U.S. and one from Canada, were hiking by the river, waiting for the Jason Isbell concert at Artpark to begin, talking over what songs we wanted to hear.

“I work in mental health,” Michelle said. “So, ‘Anxiety.’” “[His songs] live what we live. Day in and day out.” The other nodded.

It’s hard for me not to hear Isbell’s words, written in 2017, as a prophecy of our pandemic and wildfire terrors:

A crowded room is a burning battlefield
If I don’t move, I’ll come undone
My heart beats harder, a hammer striking steel
Will I walk now or be like “Wait and Run”

The song comes on hot and hard, almost too gloomy-grand for its intimate theme. But I get it. I’ve always had trouble breathing, and when I’m scared I breathe shallow, which makes me more anxious. Asthmatic since I was a child, I have spent too many nights struggling for air. Covid and wildfire smoke reared up before me this summer, day and night, like two horsemen of the Apocalypse, riding for the tender trees of my lungs, knocking back into bed. For the lungs of my girls, one already on her knees from Covid. I found myself crying every other day, inexplicably, as if some dam was disintegrating in me.

I’m not alone in this grief, this depression. According to a KFF/CNN poll in February 2023, 32.3% of adults were experiencing symptoms of anxiety and/or depression. For young adults like my daughters, the number is 50%. All of this grief, needing something to spill into.

“For me,” Howard, from Toronto, said, “it’s ‘Middle of the Morning.’” Isbell wrote this song as he felt his own depression, stuck at home in 2020 and unable to tour. The lyrics capture, at once, both the fear of being near others in public and the curdling of relationships at home from too much depression and proximity:

I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your face
I can feel it in the way you move around this place
I know you’re scared of me, I can see it in your smile
Like an unattended child you can’t quite trust

Yet here, the song’s acoustic warmth and breezy electric guitar, provides a honeyed counterpoint to Isbell’s plaintive vocals reaching out in protect. As if the music had made it to the place the words could not.

“I can’t read poetry,” Howard said, trying to explain what drew him to Isbell. “But I’m very into lyrics.”

That’s what Isbell does, again and again. Like a true poet, he finds a music to enfold the predicament of being human right now. The suffering finds a respite in the arms of a melody. No matter how much we’re enduring, battling to keep our heads above the current, a good song can buoy us, keep us afloat.

“His lyrics are actually understandable,” Michelle’s partner said. He couldn’t name a favorite, but when pressed, he said, “King of Oklahoma.”

We got to talking, about life, about the shows they’d seen — Isbell, Drive-By Truckers, Neil Young. He worked in construction. On the side of that steep hill, looking out over the cliff, he talked about working on Toronto’s CN Tower, he said he wasn’t afraid of heights. When he has to climb a crane, though, sixty-seventy feet up, he holds on tight and focuses hard.

I couldn’t help but think back to the lyrics of “King of Oklahoma,” a song about a guy whose life is coming apart after he fell off a ladder and injured his back, getting addicted to pain meds.

The song is not so much a song as it is a classic short story, beginning in medias res, with our protagonist trying to steal copper from a worksite to pain for his addiction, then shifting to the cause of his thievery and dope-need—an ignominious piss on a tall ladder that led to a fall and back injury. He keeps thinking, if only I’d just gotten off the ladder to take a leak.

“King of Oklahoma” has the sort of soaring, full-blazing-light chorus of a country song, replete with its clichés of hard-working men and serving women:

She used to wake me up with coffee every morning
And I’d hear her homemade house shoes slide across the floor
She used to make me feel like the king of Oklahoma
But nothing makes me feel like much of nothing anymore

He may have once felt like a king, and now he’s just numb and a nobody whose wife has taken the kids and moved out. It’s a song about two falls — from a ladder, and from grace — but it’s hard not to read it as song about the plight of the American working man in general. This song’s the cagey son of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” which many took to be a patriotic anthem rather than the outcry of a man who was grieving the end of the dream.

*

Just outside Artpark, a middle-aged woman was standing by the side of the road, lifting a red donation bucket as cars passed into the park, asking concert-goers for donations to a local homeless organization.

Few cars seemed to be stopping. I was hoofing my way in town for some food, still waiting for the show.

She lifted the bucket and I put in a few bucks.

“Thanks,” she said. “It really makes a difference.”

There were two hundred and forty unhoused kids, she said, who were attending school in the area. Some were trying to cross the border, some down on their luck.

“We’re all just an accident away,” she said.

Just down the street, the restaurant patios were full. On one balcony, people were dressed up as if for an engagement party, their hand cozied up around bottles and glasses. Looking up, I was struck again by the invisible border between the haves and the have-nots.

Early in the pandemic, the first public messaging emphasized taking care of each other. But as the weeks ground on, and corporations and billionaires saw profits dwindle, the collectivity tune changed. The new lyrics said people needed to get back to work. The new lyrics said isolation was hurting people. Masking was hurting people. That our immunity needed to be built back, and that the virus was not that harmful now. Maybe it was even a hoax.

Despite the fact that more people are becoming disabled by COVID, the pandemic was declared over, and active public research and messaging evaporated. Meanwhile, a hidden country of people, a country among us, are living with the consequences. That country is growing.

[the rest of the essay can be read here. Thanks to Hasanthika Sirisena and Patrick Madden and Amy Breau for reading this and giving me great feedback, and to Ron Slate for publishing it!]

Over the years, I’ve found my ways to enter the meaning of the season. To reframe “fasting” as simplifying, as finding ways to lean more on God. In that spirit, a year ago, winter-weary and sun-hungry, weighed down by family illness at home and an inexorable genocide abroad, I decided to attend the outdoor Stations of the Cross at our local parish on Good Friday. For the first time, I was drawn to the Stations not as a meditation on Jesus’ suffering but as a place to lay my own burden down.

So I was completely surprised to arrive in front of St. Dominic Church to find a crowd of people of all ages, wearing spring pastels, hugging and chatting, with kids swooping around among their parents and grandparents. Despite the solemn occasion, joyfulness was in the air, a din of happy helloing that shook me out of my stupor.

Then someone brought out a huge, life-size wooden cross, and a mass of kids surrounded it, jockeying to hoist it to the first station. All the kids wanted to carry that cross—and a group of four did, with the littlest one tripping along, trying to take on just a portion of that weight on his small shoulder.

I marveled at the sight. Since I was young, I’ve wanted to avoid suffering, even at the cost of greater suffering. Every physical pain would cause me to spiral into anxious worry that it would last forever. Age and experience have taught me patience, but even now pain still invites my mental catastrophizing.

And here these young ones were holding the very symbol of Jesus’s terrible torture and death, a suffering that is almost impossible to imagine. In April 2020, I saw a documentary clip of Lilianna Lungina, a legendary Russian translator, who said that when we are born, our souls are asleep. But when we suffer, our souls awaken. Knowing that our 17-year-old daughter Adele was struggling with the Covid-19 shutdown, I shared the video with her, hoping it might help her navigate this troubled water. I hoped she might see this moment the way Keats had seen his own life—that the world was not a “vale of tears” but a “Vale of Soul-Making.” But Adele had just seen her senior year of high school (her track season, prom, a long-planned camping trip and even graduation) suddenly detonated by this virus. She was unimpressed: “This seems to be one of those, ‘suffering is good for you’ ideas.”

Painsplaining is the worst. But I didn’t mean it that way. Suffering can blind, numb and even tear us apart. Yet something about this phrase about our soul awakening seemed right to me. When we suffer, we feel our supreme incompleteness, our brokenness, our need. Something in us opens its eyes. And we hope and pray that in that, something else can be born as the pain is borne. That, in the words of Russian poet Ivan Zhdanov, “what outside is a cross, inside is a window.”

At the sixth station, where Veronica wipes the face of Jesus with her veil, a bevy of girls from the parish took their turn with the cross, and got their photos taken by their moms, proud to carry those beams. I thought of Veronica’s courage to help this suffering stranger, and that she exposed her head (something that she would have been judged for by the crowd) to provide Jesus a little relief.

All those kids and the cross. I thought again of William Blake’s poignant lines, “And we are put on earth a little space,/ That we may learn to bear the beams of love.” The beams of love aren’t merely the gracious beams of sunlight on an April spring day in Cleveland, but also the terrible weight of the cross that we come to know in our own lives. I suddenly wondered what sorrows my fellow parishioners were carrying, each of them carrying it in the silence of our walking together.

One of the reasons that I came to the Stations was that our bright-eyed energetic Adele, a longtime cross-country runner, had been suffering with a series of conditions from long Covid and found herself derailed by chronic fatigue and brain fog. Unable to run, or even walk more than a few thousand steps a day, she found her world had narrowed in ways none of us could have imagined.

At the seventh station, Jesus falls for a second time. The Stations of the Cross moves between moments where Jesus faces his pain alone and moments where someone comes to provide him succor or balm. Isn’t that the way suffering can be—between moments of agonizing isolating loneliness and moments where someone arrives to sit with us, drawing some of the pain away?

As we age, we see that suffering comes whether we like it or not, whether we deserve it or not. And further: that joy and grief often thread together like the warp and weft in the same weave of life. But it seemed so radically unfair that Adele had to bear this suffering at her age, or that people in Gaza were waking without houses or limbs or parents, while I, a 50-something dad, could still blithely go about my day, with health and limbs and home intact.

At the 12th station, I listened to a teenager read the reflection, and the words from the Gospels of Matthew and Mark came back to me, where, in his last moments, Jesus laments to God: “Why hast thou forsaken me?” It filled me with a strange comfort to know that Jesus felt not only human suffering, but also that terrible fear that God had abandoned him.

In my suffering, God’s silence widens. I wonder if God is nearby, or if I’ve been abandoned. Or even that God does not exist. Sometimes the suffering is a noise that consumes my hearing, gobbling up my attention. Sometimes, suffering makes me aware of the silence, just outside the noise. What is there, in that silence? Can I sit with it? What might open in me, if I do?

At the final outdoor station, which commemorates when Jesus was laid into the tomb, we were called to quiet, bowing our heads. In the silence, I could hear the sounds of cardinals and blue jays and sparrows, calling to each other from the branches of mostly bare trees, calling me back to the strange beauty of life. An existence that sometimes makes no sense, in a world bigger than all our understanding. A life whose warp and weft threads both seemingly unbearable grief and, in moments like this, something like grace.

—Thanks to America Magazine for soliciting and publishing this essay.

Don’t get me wrong: As a general rule, I hate fences. Not only do they violate the view, they aggressively create insides and outsides, us and them. But standing in my front yard, I was stamping-mad, swinging at the air — one-third of my prized boomerang lilac had been scissored off by deer teeth, their relentless hunger decimating the small bush. The deer, proliferating in our Cleveland suburb, have no natural predators other than distracted drivers. These beautiful creatures — mesmerizing us with their endless legs and huge eyes, their white tails and glorious leaping over fences — had already destroyed my common lilac in the nearby bed, razing it to the ground.

I’d tried deer spray, its foul concoction of rotten eggs, garlic and mint — but each new rain would wash away the spray, and the deer would again emerge, day or night, foraging and ravaging the bushes to the bone. I’d tried hanging Irish Spring soap, as recommended, like acrid ornaments on a Christmas tree, but they just ate around them, as if they were a child’s unwanted peas on a full holiday plate.

I planted my first lilac nearly a decade ago because they remind me of my year living in Moscow. After the dreadful winter, in which nothing grew but gray and white and smoke and diesel fumes and the thorns of my depression, spring came, bringing a wet cold and endless stretches of mud, soiling my shoes and pantlegs. (Stravinsky had wanted his “The Rite of Spring,” its wild violence, to sound like ice breaking on a Russian river. That’s a Russian spring.) But by May, at last, the lilacs began to appear, fugitive clusters of them, anywhere they could find earth — next to train station trash cans, along iron fences, along the sidewalks. Those purple blooms felt like a kind of resurrection.

I think of the poem by Sergey Gandlevsky: “O, how the lilac blooms this May! Bulging bunches fell / Fences in the villages, and on the Boulevard Ring / They touch your face in the darkness — a smell to stir the soul.” That’s it, exactly — a subtle scent that requires you to bury your nose in its purple petals. A time machine to when I was still young and hungry for hope.

Which is why, years later, after seeing the destruction of the deer, I launched myself into our vehicle to the local Home Depot, wandering the aisles, buying a huge coil of four-foot high white chicken wire. Home again, in the dark yard, I stuck the metal posts into the soft ground and unrolled the wire, its prickly end catching on my coat. A few zip ties later, the deed was done.

I felt a strange pleasure mixed with a sudden compunction. What right did I have to rob the deer of necessary sustenance? Had I changed political sides? Yet behind that ugly chicken wire, the lilac flourished, living up to its boomerang name, blooming, dying and blooming again over the course of three seasons, crowding the perimeter fence with its burgeoning life.

Good fences don’t always make good neighbors, as Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” suggests, but this chicken wire did create a space for the vulnerable beauty of these lilacs to thrive. The word “paradise,” after all, comes from the Persian word, firdaus, meaning a walled enclosure.

As the lilac continues to grow, I wonder: When will I be happy that it’s big enough? What if it outgrows its fence? Will I need more and more chicken wire, until my whole yard disappears behind its white mesh? When do the walls that we erect to protect us and our things end up becoming their own kind of prison, with us as the prisoner?

--published by Jesuit Media Lab, as part of their Lenten series, “In Praise Of...” with thanks to Erin Buckley for her art and Mike Jordan Laskey and Steve Givens for their editorial feedback. Link to follow the rest of the series.

(image of the Peace Bridge in Derry/Londonderry by David Hollis)

After twenty-plus years of teaching poetry writing, I slowly started writing craft essays for my students, incorporating all that I’d read and learned through writing. Now, I’m starting to think it may be a poetry craft book!

Here’s the start to a piece I recently published at Sewanee Writers Workshop, about the line.

FOR MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY, ACROSS THE GLOBE, POETRY WAS SYNONYMOUS WITH RHYTHMIC LANGUAGE.

By the twentieth century, however, the adherence to rhythm or meter gave way, and the poetic line rushed into the vacuum, becoming the fundamental formal unit distinguishing poetry from prose. (The rather capacious exception is prose poetry—there’s always an exception when it comes to poetry!). Most of us who see lines on a page that don’t reach the right margin, even if it doesn’t have a meter or rhyme, will immediately think that we’re in the terrain of a poem. A line of poetry is not merely a sentence or a sentence fragment.

The dominant thinking around the line is that it’s a unit of breath. There’s a loveliness to the metaphor, that each line works on our lungs and mouths the way that a melody requires us to press strings to a fretboard and pluck or strum the strings of a guitar. It can be that physical. If the line is a unit of breath, then each line’s length involves our body’s engagement with it. In English poetry, the iambic pentameter line has often been cast as the norm of poetry, in which the metrical iamb is compared to the heartbeat (rub-DUB), and the pentameter the length of a normal human breath. Even if it is not quite so—knowing how human beings are various—it’s entirely on point to consider how lines are measures of exhalations. Read aloud and consider these lines, from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” section 2:

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is
odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d
sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-
sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.

Whitman’s lines are generous, packed, comma-laden catalogues of praise. If we read each line as a single breath, the commas as slight pauses, the poem stretches our exhalations, particularly when we reach that third stanza, in which he begins to describe breathing itself, each of the four lines lengthening a bit farther than the previous, until we get to the “belch’d words,” which seems funny and self-mocking. It’s an erotic section, as he inhabits and investigates not only his own body, but—it appears—that of a lover, with the mention of his (ahem!) “love-root” and kisses and embraces. A long line feels powerful, muscular, and oracular, as if a prophet were declaiming from a mountaintop. Allen Grossman, in Summa Lyrica, argues that with the longer line, “the speaker in the poem bleeds outward as in a trance or sleep toward other states of himself” (280), and thus moves into the ecstatic (from the Greek, meaning “out of the body”) mode.

….

Here’s the last poem I look at:

Long Soldier’s elegant diamond-patterned poem was cut into diamond star quilts, emulates Lakota star quilts, inviting our eyes in multiple directions at once. In Long Soldier’s words, “a star quilt… is a recognizable object/form in the Northern plains. Lakota people often gift friends and relatives star quilts for special occasions; they represent care, love, and appreciation of one another” (Instagram post dated May 19, 2024). The poem’s form is multiversal in both senses of the term—a poem of multiple verses held in simultaneity, and a vision of the possibility of multiple universes. To read this poem is to build it as we tumble down or across it. I read someone likened it to “choose your own adventure” stories, in which a reader must make choices and be part of the unfolding story. As reader, if I am reading downward, I (or “we”!) must decide whether I want to “embrace” or “resist”—and what precisely I wish to embrace or resist. One version, hewing to the left side, is, for example, “as we /embrace / the future / we work / to understand / the grief / we shift / into light / across our faces.” Another, hewing to the right, “As we / resist / the past / we fail / to question / the grief / we bury / as ash / across our faces.” Every way down, though, requires us to encounter grief: “the grief the grief the grief the grief.”

Perhaps the most radical thing that I need to say here is that any good poem will teach you how to read it—including how it approaches the line. For example, Charles Wright’s “every line should be a station of the cross” provides a key for how to read his lines—as way stations to stop before and contemplate, to encounter and imagine each in its fullness, as the devout proceed through the images of Jesus’s suffering and death. Or, as Tomas Q. Morín shared, Yehuda Amichai’s notion that words on a line are like pots on a shelf—a more prosaic way of talking about the weight that each line must bear. There will be poetic inventions and innovation that I cannot imagine that will require new ways of reading and engaging them.

Still, I can’t quite let go of the romance of the idea of the line as measure of breath. It’s a persistent idea that does not seem to go away completely. In the essay “Projective Verse” (1950), Charles Olson proposed that poetry must return to the breath: “Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” In his theorizing of projective verse, he conceived of the page as an open field, in contrast to the tradition and its “closed verse.” What the poem must do is to transfer the kinetic energy from poet to reader, from speaker to listener.

….

For the full essay, click here!

Special thanks to Rattle for publishing this poem. This happened about fifteen years ago, and I thought I was dying. Amazing how dying clarifies things.

Incident on Valentine’s Day Beginning with Treadmill and Ending with Us

And the world and its contraptions begin

to tighten, tear, and collapse into black,

my sight and breath contracting on all sides

as if I inhale through a coffee straw

underwater, trying to keep my head

above frothing waves, between the swells

winding, rising, and slamming their invisible

shovels over me, burying me, my limbs

a spasm of directions, lost language

flailing for air, where, just moments before,

I’d been sprinting on tread, facing myself

in the wall-length mirror heading nowhere,

running to spite myself and stay upright

on the black tongue, first invented to tame

defiant inmates and now for the dread

machinery of ego, which is the carapace

of death, surrounded by similar inmates

with the alibi of health, in fitness

and fluorescence, the cold light fracturing

between my eyes and brain, my lungs

heaving, straining for the final molecules

of oxygen, and where was I heading,

north of forty, chopping my legs and arms,

chopping air to air, as if I could run

time backward, flinging myself straight, as if

I could murder this dying I’m sinking

into, drawing its jaws over the day—

but a red-headed angel now guides us

through the noon eclipse, the squeezing vice

of hallways, the narrowing black canal,

while anvil-chested, unbreathing, sightless,

distrusting the sudden trust of being

led, and now I’m lying in a box,

covered in white, facing up, looking out

a square window at the world receding

behind me, red light, red light and siren

and the faces of concern, the faces

of confidence saying not I, watching

this departure into unknowable

future, flinching from the fact that this is

how everything ends, and so quickly, all

the contracts with life dissolving, paper

in waves, all the contractions of the heart,

and I saying now to the beloved

(she’s beside the bed within white curtains)

I love you so much, I love you, meaning,

I’m dying, don’t let me, meaning, my heart,

meaning, the contractions are closer, now

closer, the insides dilate, I’m nearly inside

out, nothing will be everything and all

nothing, my petty furies and pleasures,

my dreams that rise and disappear in light,

distill into poison, and have I wasted

my life, unable to see it till now,

the glass flask of the total inkblack smashed,

the cloud alighting now before my eyes,

all the ways I hurt you by holding you

from the inmost rooms, rib-guarded,

my heart now arching hard against itself,

now drowning in the deepwater rising,

the black bends, rising in the quickening,

toward the hovering desirable light,

our daughters somewhere close, I’m sorry,

my beloveds now, you squeezing my hand

squeezing your hand, almost there, you’re saying,

or am I saying, almost there, into

the hovering, you’re saying, yes it’s you

it’s you yes you (listening now I see

you there) we’re almost there

This one is close to my heart. Special thanks to Consequence Magazine for publishing “The Fight,” a memoir about a fistfight during my youth that taught me more than a few things about myself, about fighting, about the crowd, and about my dad. The first half is below, with a link to read it for free at Consequence….

“If he does that again,” my father growled, his voice full of gravel and ash, “let him have it.” Four years old, I’d been playing with Caleb, my neighbor. Every time I picked up a plastic dinosaur, he would snatch it from my grasp. At dinner, my mother pulled the story from me. My dad, bear-chested and scary-moody, winced and leaned back, then rendered his verdict. I had no idea what he meant, and the next day, my mom overheard me asking Caleb kindly if he wanted to have it.

My mom would tell this story more than a few times over the years as an indication of my natural pacifism, a family thesis with enough basis in fact to show that I did prize peaceful relationships with other people—at times, to the point of sacrificing my own peace.

Which is why it was surprising even to me that I found myself, at age eleven, after school at Spring Lake Park, surrounded by classmates, to fight my bully, Kurt S—. A fight that I called.

Kurt had cast his hook into me from the start of the year. In the hugger-mugger of middle school, a vicious sorting system begins as children suddenly awaken as social creatures. Kurt had attached himself to the cool kids, a kind of court jester to the royalty, the beautiful children of conspicuous consumers at Half Day Middle School. He could make anyone laugh, waving his stringy, sandy-blond hair and launching his face toward those he saw as patsies or threats.

This wasn’t the first time that I’d felt out of place. When I was seven, we’d moved from a cramped duplex to this sleepy Chicagoland suburb of English street names: Lincolnshire, Oxford, Darby, Kensington, Buckingham Place. Brooklyn-born, a Lebanese-American Vietnam War veteran, my dad suddenly thirsted for trees and quiet. So, my parents stretched to buy a dream: a California ranch house on Cambridge Lane. My first bike ride in town, on my no-speed bike with the banana seat, I thrilled down a hill, then slowed up as I saw a group of kids in a yard about my age. Kids my age! Hanging on the low branches of a tree.

They turned and saw me, and their faces changed. They jabbed their hands to the ground, picking up something and hurling it my way. I felt a pain in my side, then another, pelted by something hard. One of them said, “Spic! Hey spic!” Terror seized me, and my heart flooded with adrenaline as I pumped my pedals into high gear and out of there. Crabapples. Those gnarly hand-sized stone-hard fruits expelled me from their grassy yard. I came home and asked my parents what a spic was.

A few years later, in middle school, when I began to morph into the sweaty awkwardness of preteenism, I hid in fantasy books and video games, playing Dungeons & Dragons with a small group of friends. I played Bernardo, a paladin, a holy warrior who sought to do good. At school, when classmates wore Izod shirts with popped collars and Lee jeans, I was exposed as a nerd in Toughskins. On a strict budget, with an infinite regress of bills, my parents didn’t care about designer brands. If I’d asked for a specific shirt, they’d buy me the knockoff. Instead of an alligator logo, I would have the Braggin’ Dragon from Sears. Nutshell: I wore my unhipness on my chest.

Was that why Kurt turned against me? Or was it something else? That I was different—a brown kid in an ocean of whiteness? That I was a bit of a nerd who loved school? I could not understand. I didn’t think of asking, nor was Kurt apt in self-reflection. His verbal barbs were constant, steady as those crabapples, coming from all angles.

Maybe it was my father’s advice long ago with Caleb, or maybe it was my dad in me, but one day, I had had enough. “That’s it, Kurt,” I said, in the hallway after lunch. “After school, Spring Lake Park, you and me. Fight.”

Word traveled in school faster than the speedy Burnicks brothers. Even without cell phones or computers, the school was abuzz. When school ended, I got on the bus, already full of students who weren’t usually on our line. When the bus stopped at Spring Lake Park, everybody got off. To my right, the misnamed Spring Lake was placid as a mirror. To my left, the bus headed down Lincolnshire Drive and curved into tree-lined oblivion.

I’d never been in a fight before. It was the first time for Kurt as well, so we circled each other as we’d seen brawlers do in the movies, our fists up and our faces mean. Kurt waggled back and forth, taunting. Around us, the crowd of kids closed in, egging us on.

We neared. Kurt’s first move was not a punch, but a kick. Right in the nuts. A total cheap shot.

“Hit him,” someone said. Were they talking to me?

A fury boiled and frothed inside me, scalding me. I straightened up and threw a couple of haymakers to his shoulders, and then to the side of his face, and felt the sickening smack of fist against cheek. As I tackled him, everybody crowded in, their voices clanging in my head.

Someone said, clearly to me, “Kick his ass!”

“Kill him,” someone else said.

I could feel their breath hot on my back, closing in.

A strange feeling replaced the fury. Unease moiled my stomach. I’d thought he was the cool kid. Everyone seemed to be turning against him. Why?

On the ground underneath me, Kurt flinched and covered his face, straining to get free. I threw a couple of distracted punches. I didn’t want to hurt him. I pulled the punches, so they glanced off. I felt tears stinging my face. I didn’t want to be in the fight anymore.

Just like that, it was over. I got up, dusted myself off. He rolled over, the back of his shirt grass-stained and smeared with dirt. I don’t remember speaking to anyone. I don’t remember walking home or going in the house. I just remember, as I explained to my mom why I was late, I began to cry. She hugged me hard.

“No one was cheering for him, Mom,” I said between heaves. “No one.” The rest of the night passed in a wash of forgetting.

To this day, I wonder why everyone turned against Kurt, the kid I thought was popular but who others secretly wanted to see get hurt. I had been suddenly caught in a story that wasn’t my own.

Every punch I landed on Kurt felt like a punch to my own body. Why was it that this group of ordinary kids suddenly became cruel? I thought about that for a long time. What causes otherwise normal people to go feral?

It was the first and last fistfight of my life.

Years later, I would refuse to follow my father’s footsteps during college—there would be no ROTC, much to my father’s disappointment. It had meant so much to him—a full scholarship, a purpose, a future. But also, Vietnam. For me, no scholarship. No uniform. No war machine. Maybe it was my way to make a small rebellion, the only kind possible for a dutiful son.

I did not like my dad’s anger, his dark moods that would invade our house every evening. Over the years, learning about his time in Vietnam, I had wondered if the war had made him some species of crazy. An unsafeness that I never wanted to be.

When the prospect of a draft began to be raised in 1990, I organized a protest against the imminent war in Iraq, wrote a statement of conscientious objection, and shared it with my parents. Begrudgingly, my father signed off on it. A new path opened, which began at the end of a fistfight. At the end of a fist. I would dedicate my life to peacemaking.

And that would be the end of the story.

Except, forty years later—last year, in fact—my parents were doing their usual amble around the block, when they noticed a new family had moved in, just a couple of doors down on Lincolnshire Drive. When a woman and a girl got out of their car in the driveway, my parents introduced themselves and were surprised to hear their last name.

“Are you related to Kurt?” my mom asked.

“That’s my husband,” she said.

My parents glanced at each other. My dad recounted to her that their son had had a fight with her husband, a lifetime ago.

“That doesn’t surprise me at all,” she said, laughing.

A few weeks later, my parents called again, with more neighborhood news. They bumped into Kurt. And he told them that he never forgot the time my dad came over to his house after the fight.

It changed his life, he said. He still remembered how my dad explained where he came from. His experience of war and the value of peace. How my dad had said that it was much easier to hate than to love.

“You went over to his house?” I said. “That night?” I was shocked. This was not the story of the father that I remember. The father who preached toughness. Who’d dislocated my elbow while wrestling. Twice. Who seemed afraid of my softness.

“You were so upset,” he said. “I wanted to see what I could do.”

I’d come of age in 1980s America, where the codes of manhood seemed unwavering. From pop music to movies, the rules were rigid as a flexed bicep: Be hard. Head up and chest out. Wear navy blue. Actions, not words. Tears are for the weak. Don’t be a sissy. Demand what you want. Provide. Now, some call it the Man Box, but back then, it felt more like the Man Path One Must Follow or Else Get Lost in the Forest of Losers. Your manhood would be questioned. Maybe you were gay. (To be called gay in the 1980s seemed a kind of symbolic death. Thankfully, times change.)

But the truth is, even though he served in the military, my dad violated the rules. He was strong and tough—I’d nicknamed him “The Tank”—but he didn’t hide his emotions. He loved opera and wept openly. He loved a bit of color. More than a bit—no one has dressed in so many colors all at once. He hugged me daily, even in front of my friends, much to my embarrassment. He had a tenderness about him, an Arab dad who calls even his son “honey.” Without saying so, he showed me the prison of the man code.

As he’s aged, he’s softened. A couple of years ago, I called him, asking him about a dim memory that I’d had of him grabbing a knife angrily near my sister. He had grown enraged for reasons that are lost to me. He’d put the knife down long ago, but in my mind, it still hovered, a threat I didn’t know how to vanquish.

He didn’t remember it, but he said that didn’t mean it didn’t happen. And he apologized for how he acted when were young, saying that he was often out of control. Over the phone, I could hear the trembling of his voice through tears, and suddenly I felt a fog lifting in me.

I didn’t have to be that frozen young boy terrified of his dad anymore.

Now, I’m grateful for every time that my dad, smaller with age, wraps his arms around me. I can see how he was trapped in his own Man Box, fueled by a traumatic history. Where his father ruled by fear and would beat him if he disobeyed. Where his father’s father had been murdered, and his son watched him die. Where that father had had to flee Lebanon, only to be killed in Mexico. Compared to his dad’s macho fathering, my dad was practically a hippie from the Age of Aquarius.

Maybe that night at Kurt’s house was the fruit of all my father’s work—going on retreats with other men, trying to find ways of talking through the thicket of emotions, where no language has ever been. In a world where powerful men act out the most perverse versions of the man code, demanding everything and taking responsibility for nothing, I see now that my dad has never fit in either. That though he wanted me to defend myself, he also knew the scars of violence deep in his bones. He didn’t want me—or Kurt—to think that physical violence was good or even preferable. Maybe there was something about me that reminded him of that.

So let me tell it differently. Once upon a gloom, in a fog of dark voices, a peaceable child became a paladin, vanquished a dragon, only to see his own body grow scales. The vanquished dragon turned back into a boy, astonished by what was inside him. And later that night, an old warrior unburied his scaly fist from his pocket and found, at the end of his arm, his soft palm shaking, gently, a little boy’s hand.

(Special thanks to Consequence Magazine. Support their work!)

When Editor Marlo Starr1 reached out to me about trying to do something for The Dodge related to Palestine, I encouraged her to invite Sara Abou-Rashed, a poet whom Starr heard read in Columbus not too long before, whose first book, Theories of Return, is coming out in 2026 from Diode Editions. She enthusiastically agreed.

Sara came on board as Guest Editor, brimming with good ideas: to expand the issue focus to all indigenous struggles, and to include teacher’s resources for each work. “Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land” is the fruit of that work. In her foreword, Sara admits that while she was turned off by the term “nature poetry,” she also wanted to see writing that would bring together The Dodge’s longtime concern for the environment and connect it to indigenous struggles for liberation and return:

Palestine is undoubtedly a nature issue—an urgent environmental issue of our times—an occupation of air, water, and land; a forced removal and genocide of its Indigenous population; an irreversible damage to its natural landscape and resources; a violent erasure of its ancestral villages; a persistent violation, exploitation, and continued harm to its wellbeing and ecology at large. We, after all, are an element unextractable from our surroundings, extract as they may try….

But this is not my people’s story alone. As a Palestinian writer and guest editor for The Dodge, it was not only natural but necessary to expand this issue to speak to Global Indigenous struggles and to welcome writing by non-Palestinians. I live in Ohio, the Indigenous home of the Erie, Shawnee, and Kickapoo nations, all of whom have been forcibly removed. Everywhere we look, we are confronted by the history of the land we’re trying to call home.

The issue is rich with good work: poems (check out this one by Ruth Awad), some essays (including one by Mandy Shunnarah about what Palestinian writers need from lit mags), visual art (queer tatreez from Micaela Kaibni Raen!), fiction from Sahar Mustafa!), an interview, and translations.2

My contribution, sections from “Ode to the Wallrunners of Gaza,” emerged from the awe I felt seeing images of Palestinians doing Parkour in Gaza about a decade ago. How they make of their land, including the blasted landscape of buildings bombed by Israel, a place from which to fly—that walls would be seen not as limits, but as obstacles to navigate.

Here are two snippets:

“Welcome to the Occupation”

By 1987, I had finally discovered R.E.M., a band that had crested into popular consciousness with their sardonic, anti-love love song, “The One I Love,” but it was the second track on their recently-released fifth album Document (1987) that really drew me in: “Welcome to the Occupation.” It’s amazing to recall how isolated we could be, in those analogue days, with mass information flows limited to newspapers, magazines, television, and radio. I learned about music from listening to the radio, reading Rolling Stone, and sharing cassettes with friends. R.E.M would become my favorite band for the next few years.

By this time, my world had been enlarged significantly by music. I’d learned about the South African anti-Apartheid struggle from Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” (1980), a protest song for the murder of activist Stephen Biko in jail; about the Irish Troubles and the Bloody Sunday massacre through U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1982); the ongoing psychic and physical wounds of veterans from the Vietnam War from Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A” (1984); Amnesty International and the many prisoners of conscience throughout the world from Amnesty’s Conspiracy of Hope tour (1986); the Mothers of the Disappeared in Chile, thanks to songs by U2 and Sting (both from 1987). That same year, 1987, the documentary series Eyes on the Prize was shown on PBS, and suddenly I wondered whether apartheid and state-sanctioned security force brutality were not simply things we supported abroad, but intimately wound within our own system. (It would be a year before I’d first hear Public Enemy, which changed everything again, and a few years more, in the early 1990s before I associated “occupation” almost exclusively with Palestine).

Those songs were windows into a world far different from the one outside our quiet suburban home in leafy Lincolnshire, Illinois. In the analogue world, lacking the neural networks of the internet, these songs shaped my own neural and psychic understanding of politics. They helped me see that American politics wasn’t just some horse race between competing abstract ideas, but a set of ideological practices that impacted people all around the globe, often to devastating effect. Although these songs–and the work of Amnesty–often did not make explicit those connections, they implicitly did. The U.S., after all, supported the Apartheid regime in South Africa in 1986, thanks to the tireless work of activists to shame the U.S into action; it had meddled in the Middle East, propping up Israel and the oil states against popular uprisings and resistance from Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon; it had overthrown Latin American regimes for decades, installing U.S. corporate-friendly dictators and/or funneled money to rebel groups to overthrow the communist-friendly governments (the Contras in Nicaragua).

“Welcome to the Occupation,” in its spare, minor-chord arpeggiations, was like the political brother of “The One I Love” (even sharing a similar chord pattern), inviting me to think about the ways in which American empire was not simply an occupation abroad, but one at home as well. Though lead singer Michael Stipe was said to have thrown off his usual mumble-murmur-mumble approach to vocals, enunciating more clearly and trying to be more explicit about the song, without a lyric sheet, I still puzzled through the words and their meanings.

Here’s the lyrics as I found them online, with stanzas where the music shifts:

Hang your collar up inside

Hang your dollar on me

Listen to the water still

Listen to the causeway

I’ve read a lot of online assertions that the first line alludes to the murder of priests. Indeed, in 1980 alone, the high profile assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador and the rape and murder of four Maryknoll missionaries–Sisters Maura Clarke and Ita Ford, Ursuline Sister Dorothy Kazel, and lay missionary Jean Donovan–brought international attention to the viciousness of the El Salvador government. But the line, and those that follow, are not what I would call straightforward. “Hanging,” of course, could refer to methods of torture and killing. The American dollar, perhaps, could be seen as a kind of albatross around the necks of Latin Americans. But who is speaking, actually? Is it Michael Stipe to us? Then who is the “you”? It’s quite unclear.

The last line, “listen to the causeway,” I always heard as “listen to the cause where you are,” which would make a bit more sense with what comes next: “Listen to the cause where you are / mad and educated…”. At that time in American political history, the great cause still was defeating Soviet communism. Everything was seen through the prism of that Cold War. Everything could be justified.

The next lines, I believe, are often entirely misread:

You are mad and educated

Primitive and wild

Welcome to the occupation

Many sources suggest that these lines are an ironic allusion to the imperial binary between the civilized empire and the wild colonized peoples. I think the lines are far more biting–that “we” (the people and politicians of the U.S) are mad and educated, AND primitive and wild. Our education is, too often, an education in the self-justification of U.S. violence. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn shares a 1970 study that showed that the more educated people were, the more likely they were to justify American imperialism and favor the ongoing involvement of the U.S. in Vietnam. The occupation is always both abroad and at home. The fact that Stipe replaces “wild” with “loyal” in a further iteration of the line cements that reading for me.

Here we stand and here we fight

All your fallen heroes

Held and dyed and skinned alive

Listen to the Congress fire

Again, I wish I had an easy reading of the “we” in this song–is Stipe trying to become the voice of those who fight against the brutal regimes propped up by the U.S.? Maybe. Clearly, he’s voicing their struggle through his own song, standing and fighting through his art. The “us” and “them” are confused in the song, but maybe not in a clear way. I love this phrase, though: “listen to the Congress fire.” The very language of Congress is fire. Conflagration. Bullets.

Offering the educated

Primitive and loyal

Welcome to the occupation

I also heard these lines as “properly educated,” and “offering the educated,” an iteration of the earlier move. But maybe it is in fact “offering,” and that what Congress offers us, if we are primitive and loyal, some recompense. Cheap bananas, maybe (see the origin of the term, banana republic, and the history of United Fruit in Latin America and the Dole Company in Hawai’i).

Hang your collar up inside

Hang your freedom higher

Listen to the buyer still

Listen to the Congress

Famously, drummer Bill Berry suggested that the earlier version of the line, “Hang your freedom fighters,” was probably too explicit. I love that fact, because it gives us insight into Stipe’s anger, and also the power of “hang your freedom higher.” Is it saying that freedom is out of reach for us, and the Latin American people? Or that we should imagine a freedom that can’t be touched by empire and its greed?

Where we propagate confusion

Primitive and wild

Fire on the hemisphere below

How many rock songs have words like “propagate”? Not many. But it’s the confusion that’s primitive and wild, and leads to the fires…

Sugar cane and coffee cup

Copper, steel and cattle

An annotated history

The forest for the fire

This is such good writing. Here, Stipe employs elegant litotes to suggest Central and South America in successive lines, based on their cash crops, an “annotated history” that translates forest into fire (see the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest for cattle grazing). And the beauty of the sounds in those alliterations (c and p sounds, then the f’s in the final line). Truly astonishing lyrics.

The water images, which contrast the fire ones, return at the end of the song, to suggest, via idiom, that the water of capital and power flows and destroys.

Where we open up the floodgates

Freedom reigns supreme

Fire on the hemisphere below

It’s hardly freedom if it manifests as flooded markets and forest fires and massacres, but that’s the point.

Stipe ends this sub-three minute song with a litany of lamentation, crying out for his listeners to listen, to pay attention:

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

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Listen to me

I probably caught about half of the intricacies of the song while listening to “Welcome to the Occupation” the first dozen times, but I felt it in my gut the stinging grief of it. The sense that the country that Stipe once believed in, a country of freedom and a beacon of hope and opportunity, turned out to be primitive and wild, a propagator of fire—not only in the countries to our south (and, in some respects, in every direction), but in our own country as well. Welcome to the occupation.

___

Has music played a role in your political education? What songs stand out for you?

Dear B——,

Man, your letter made me so happy! You wrote to me: “My most favorite work you’ve done is “Zooming Mom,” it hit all in the right places from acknowledging my own moms work, to even having a long conversation we’ve been needing for years…. But all of this was possible by your work. It not only deepened our me and my mom’s bond, but helped me gain a deeper respect for you as a human and a writer.”

I am so glad that my poem invited you to see your mom with new eyes and maybe even a new heart. That it helped you see her as a human being who has loved and sacrificed for you! Amazing. I want to sit with that for a minute and marvel at what a poem can do, or how people can live differently because of a poem. You have given me a gift by sharing that experience.

Your question relates to that as well. You ask: “how do you become so open? Because as a male, it’s difficult for me to be so open to people that I can trust to talk to. I don’t know if it’s the possible reaction I’ll receive or the embarrassment from having to be so open in the first place.”

For too long, men have been told the message that being strong means hiding one’s feelings. This idea is particularly true in some cultures more than others. Unfortunately, nearly all cultures are patriarchal (male-dominant), and any culture that believes that some people are more valuable than other people harms not only the non-dominant groups (say, women or non-male people), but also the dominant group as well. None of us are free unless all of us are free.

Thankfully, my dad came from a culture where men could show their feelings and not be judged as weak. But also, he is a remarkable person who has spent his whole life trying to grow and become more human and more holy. That is not easy. When I was a young boy, I was afraid of him because of his moodiness and occasional bursts of anger. But he could also be tender and sweet. Now, in his old age, his anger is almost nothing and his sweetness is almost everything. I am grateful for his transformation.

But growing up, I realized that I wanted to be a person who was different from the younger version of my father, who was strong but also scary. I saw my mom as someone who was incredibly strong because she always kept going, no matter the challenges in our lives. Over the years, she actually found another kind of strength, and became unafraid of conflict, confronting my dad about this or that. And something amazing happened. My dad liked it! He laughed. He became more human.

I think you can be strong in many different ways. Being open, being curious, wondering about the world, means that your soul is alive to the wonder of being alive to the mysteries of the world. Having an open heart, risking vulnerability, can open you to yourself and to others.

Openness is what’s necessary for love. Not anyone or everyone deserves your open heart, of course. Opening your mind, opening your heart, when the time is right, takes courage. Maybe, for me, poetry is my own sort of warrior art—and my power comes from a combination of curiosity and openheartedness. Perhaps the most repeated message of the Bible is: Do not be afraid. Love is bigger than fear.

With respect,

Philip Metres

Recently, tired of repeating the same prayers that usually give me comfort in the dark hours of the night, when my brain would suddenly turn on its disco ball, I cast the distant recesses of my consciousness to dig out poems that I’ve memorized over the years. God’s Grandeur. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Tyger. To think of them as prayers, alongside the Hail Marys and Our Fathers.

Years ago, when Catherine Bowman assigned us the task of memorizing poems, I found that poems without rhyme or meter careened across the floors of my mind and out of sight. I came to appreciate again precisely why rhyme and meter were made in the first place. Poetry is, after all, an oral art, language meant to be heard or even sung. As I wrote in a piece called “By Heart":

It is a weird, annoying, old-fashioned assignment that is secretly ancient, crazy and beautiful: to hold and share words by heart. To use your mouth, your whole body, as an instrument for the unfettered music of words.

It’s a nearly forgotten art, having things by heart. Once a staple of education, memorization now feels something like an embarrassing cramming exercise for pre-med students learning anatomy or history students repeating dates of wars that they’ll quickly offload once they’ve finished the exam. Memory itself is now so supplemented by digitization, it seems nearly impossible to have actual memories that aren’t computer-generated.

But as long as our species has been speaking, we've held some language by heart. A prayer that consoles: Make me a instrument of your peace. A commercial jingle. A dirty joke. Something about a girl from Nantucket. The Pledge of Allegiance. Something a parent or a friend or a teacher said that we've never forgotten, that bore a hole into us, hurting or healing. A whole song that wells up when its melody opens and lights something inside us. All of us carrying these words that carry us.

Now, I’d given the assignment back to myself, and at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA residency, I did something that I’ve never done before: my reading was entirely a recitation. (Well, almost entirely. I added a new unpublished, unmemorized piece.) Of course, I recited poems that were not just my own, including this rare, little-known poem by Langston Hughes that my friend E.J. McAdams sent me a while back:

“Island” by Langston Hughes

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island 
And its sands are fair.

Wave of sorrow, 
Take me there. 

I love the poem’s simplicity, which should not be mistaken for silliness. Hughes’s metaphor, of grief as a wave, invites us to imagine how grief both threatens to drown us and also draws us forward, in its wake, into some heretofore unreached future. There’s so much to be grieving for these days: the peoples of Ukraine, Gaza/Palestine, and Sudan; the increasingly bizarre acts of the Chief Executive of our now-brazen empire; the rise of fascism; and Renee Good, the poet killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Just last year, wildfires in Los Angeles tore through whole communities, including my friend Mark’s in Altadena.

But to drown in our grief, to submit to despair, seems like a capitulation, a self-capsizing of our own floating hope.

What if grief itself is the path?

Trying to remember it one night, I couldn’t recall whether the line was “an island” or “the island.” That “the” is consequential. The fact that Hughes uses “the” means that, even though it’s far off, he’s glimpsed it. He has a direction—toward those fair sands.

Like my friend, who got caught in a riptide, came to understand—you can’t fight the current, you have to swim with it. Swim with it until it releases you.

What is beautiful is that Hughes sees that though sorrow can drown, it can also be the wake that nudges us to that island.

Dispatches from the Land of Erasure: Essays and Conversations, discounted until January 4th with the code HOLIDAY25

Dispatches began as a response to a terrible episode—when Randa Jarrar was attacked for a Tweet in 2018 about a recently-deceased Barbara Bush. Jarrar, a hilarious, poignant, and award-winning writer of multiple books (both of fiction and nonfiction), was fed up with the glowing encomia about the death of Bush, a person whose family were principal authors of U.S. imperial violence against Arabs (both the first and second Iraq Wars of 1991 and 2003-, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis), and whose words about Black people who’d been relocated to Houston from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina were deeply disturbing. (She had said, “so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.") The response to Jarrar’s Tweet led to Fox News coverage, calls for her firing from her university professorship, and even death threats.

A group chat of Arab American writers—Hayan Charara, Marwa Helal, Randa Jarrar, Fady Joudah, Deema Shehabi, and I—had begun just before this, and the conversations made me feel a sense of community as folks explored their work and the mundane events of their lives. It felt like, suddenly, a digital continuation of what RAWI, the Radius of Arab American Writers, had begun for me in 2008, where we’d gathered at the Arab American National Museum for the publication of Charara’s poetry anthology, Inclined to Speak. I had this sudden sense of gaining all these literary cousins, a real kinship that I had not quite felt before in literary spaces.

So when Jarrar was attacked, I gathered essays in defense of Jarrar from Marwa Helal and other Arab American poets. In the process, Marwa had proposed a working title, “dispatches from erasure”—since what was happening, with the rewriting of the Bush legacy, was a massive forgetting, a terrible erasure, of racialized violence. Those essays were published together by Boston Review in 2018. A subsequent conversation took place, with a different lineup, and found its way into publication in 2019 at Iowa Review.

Then COVID happened. I gathered another group of poets in 2020, this time Arab and Jewish, first on Zoom to talk about what this time meant for us, and then later via long emails in 2020 and 2021. Because Mosab Abu Toha was part of the group, Gaza became a touchpoint. I don’t recall precisely why I gathered these poets, but I knew that I wanted to expand and extend the conversation, to erase some erasures. It wasn’t published until now. Everyone in the group agreed that (given the genocide in Gaza) this conversation still needed to be shared.

Dispatches is shaped by the belief that the verse in conversation (from vertere, to turn, a conversation is a turning with) can reverse erasure, can seize back the truth from the abstractions and denials of imperial narratives—whether about Arabs in particular, or Black and Brown people more generally. Much of the book explores Arab American literature more broadly, and Palestinian literature and writing in particular, an area of interest in my teaching and research since the early 2000s. Other sections explore the intersection of justice and poetry, including a roundtable of documentary poets—with Susan Briante, M. NourbeSe Philip, Craig Santos Perez; and the intersection of peace and poetry, which ends with this online piece, “Never Enough,” reprinted by Adroit Journal, which originally appeared in Paideuma.

I’m grateful to Derek Pollard, editor of the Poets on Poetry Series, who has been so enthusiastic about this project, even when it became challenging to get the final version over the line. He and the team at University of Michigan Press have been absolute stalwarts.

I’m still puzzling over what community is, and how difficult conversations are part of community, but I want to explore more in the future. It’s one of the reasons that I started this Substack newsletter.

Finally, a couple recent essays of mine that are related but not in the book came out this year, with thanks to Jonny Diamond and the brave folks at Literary Hub: “The Paddystinians of Belfast,” and “If God Were Like Chekhov.”

Wishing everyone a better 2026.