New England Review

Behind the Byline

Marianne Boruch

Marianne Boruch, photo by David Dunlap

Sarah Wolfson talks with Marianne Boruch about the platypus, Pliny, and the discovery lurking in “the spill of words.” Read “The Lyrebird Hidden…” and “Every Available Blue…” in NER 42.1.

Sarah Wolfson: These poems are part of your forthcoming book, Bestiary Dark, a project you launched as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute. The purpose of your research was to observe Australian wildlife in order to write a bestiary. How did you first become interested in the bestiary genre?

Marianne Boruch: Is it an honest-to-Zeus genre? I just knew the platypus has always been my favorite animal. So when I saw Australia was offering Fulbrights, the University of Canberra and its wonderful International Poetry Studies Institute among them, I thought I might have a distant chance to look that confusing, species-rich creature straight in the eye. I very much wanted to observe that continent’s astonishing wildlife—not only the platypus—and write a sequence of poems about it. About climate change too, and our stained human hand at fault behind it. All this morphed into what I like to call a neo-ancient/medieval bestiary because I drew inspiration from those beautiful often outrageous woodcuts made in the Middle Ages, and from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, one of our earliest (and weirdest, cross my heart) natural histories, his final effort before dying at Pompeii where he’d gone in a boat to save a friend caught in Vesuvius’s eruption. (Clearly a bad idea.)

The fact was I was suddenly free as well. I’d recently gone rogue and emeritus from Purdue University where I’d established the MFA program in creative writing and taught for thirty-two years. That good timing also worried me. Maybe I’d seem too old, my retirement possibly rendering moot the Fulbright aim to foster lasting, ongoing links between universities around the world. Plus I’d been awarded a first Fulbright in 2012 for a coveted English-speaking spot in the UK, one of its most beautiful cities, Edinburgh. So perhaps I had used up my chips.

In short, I figured my application was more than dubious. And probably doomed. But my mantra always is: what the hell what the hell what the hell…

SW: What did your journal or field notes for this project look like? Waterproof? Bowerbird-theft proof? How much actual writing occurred on your forays to look for wildlife?

MB: I do wander around with a wee notebook, what I call my “image journal” for jotting things down. I’m basically an old-school imagist, I guess. So I did use that. Since I also carried an un-smart phone that nonetheless had a camera buried in it, I could take pictures to pry open my memory later. My husband and I were there mainly in the drought months—so no, not much concern about rain.

I did write a bit of the collection’s “Book 1” in Canberra. (Bestiary Dark is made of five of those “books”; I was mining Pliny’s organization.) But mainly I wasn’t writing poems “on site,” as such. It was overwhelming enough just to absorb the strange stunning details of that country, as many as I could. From start to finish, we loved it there. I mean, who wouldn’t love a place where your house was in a grove of eucalyptus trees, a mere ten-minute walk to see hundreds of kangaroos just lounging about of a morning? We called that our “kangaroo fix” for the day. Canberra turned out to be a fantastic city for me because, though the nation’s capital and quite urban, 60 percent of it is green space, by design. Which is so smart.

But to answer the rest of that question: I wrote the bulk of the poems after we returned, and mainly in two residencies, one at Yaddo in the fall, the other at MacDowell the following winter, before both places shuttered because of Covid. Such luck! I think about this a lot, how I made it just in time. Which seems a miraculous accident, and doubly so that we were there for that Fulbright when we were, and not the next year when the virus hit and sent all the American scholars packing only a couple of weeks after the new round started in February 2020.

SW: Yes, your research took place in 2019, right before the Australian wildfires and not long before the pandemic. How did these events shape the poems or change the course of your manuscript as a whole?

MB: Well, absolutely the fires shaped the poems and, finally, the curve of the book itself. But it was curious. As I mentioned above, the real writing began after July 31, 2019, when our visas expired and we had to leave the country. And after we spent our fifth and final month circling the Outback in a little yellow rental car that seemed to our Australian friends exactly the wrong vehicle in which to do such a crazy, grueling trip.

Preparing for that was disconcerting. We were constantly warned about the western half of the country, about getting gas and bad roads and the terrain’s desolation, the UFOs that might snatch us up, about the lack of places to stay the night and buy food, etc. But we ventured out anyway. Our back seat was a little grocery store on wheels! And we filled up huge containers of water in cities like Perth and Darwin and Alice Springs where the pipes were reliable. I would have given up the ghost on the idea from the start though—I’m a wimp at heart—except for my husband’s passionate insistence that we’d be fine, and his expert planning. He was right. And I am so grateful. It was a spectacular trip. Such a privilege.

But your question… The fires, even from a distance, across an ocean and half a continent, haunted everything I wrote. I lived for news from the good friends we made there, both poets and wildlife people. We were so concerned about them. Utterly terrible, the pictures on the news and the internet, and the photos people attached to their e-mails.

I had to be careful: I was seeing it all from away, as they say in Maine; I understand I am a highly questionable outsider. Australian poets are the ones with the right to hold forth about it directly. I didn’t want to appropriate. But I did feel the awful pressure of those fires, especially what it was doing to the koalas, also the wallabies and kangaroos. This was true even for the platypus. In Tidbinbilla, the vast reserve where we had been volunteers, they had to be moved elsewhere since one or two of their ponds were feared to be in the (literal) direct line of fire.

SW: Both of these poems move inductively: they focus first on the immediate details of the birds’ behavior and then whorl outward toward human questions. Only late in the poems do we encounter an “I.” When you were writing, how did you balance the observational mode with the impulse to point toward broader concerns like art, knowledge, catastrophe, hope?

MB: Wow. What an insightful and primal question for any poet to consider, this eternal balance between self and world, past and present, disaster and hope, the mundane opening to larger realizations. Poems are destined to connect all that, being perhaps the most revered and ancient way to think about things.

Then there was the fact that we cracked up completely when our bird-whisperer friend, John Bundock, showed us the bowerbird’s truly off-the-wall collection of all-things-blue to impress a future mate. It was hidden way back in the bush. Then the lyrebird’s endless rattling off sounds natural and human-made (bring on that backfiring truck!) to woo a true love though we only heard of that. Which is to say, the comic element in both pieces—and throughout the book really—is crucial. In the case of NER‘s two poems, I hope that brings out the meticulous otherness of those birds, their passionate gravity, however quirky. Of course humor breaks down distance, and is a kind of linking of worlds. I mean, we can get as ridiculous as those birds in our various aches and passions, yes?

The bower-bird’s bower, photo by John Bundock

But the “speaker”—as we are in the habit of saying now—never sees the actual bird. That loss, that emptiness at the heart of most mysteries, seems important to note as well. And eerie. The sense of that, the shared situation of that, seemed to offer itself at closure.

Honestly, I never know how a poem will move. It rarely arrives anywhere predictable at the end—I hope for an unknowing throughout—though it mostly starts with an image that stops me. My theory, if I do have one, is the “begging bowl.” You go blank and wait for something to drop in, then try to hold back the agenda, let it go where it wants. Of course in revision—I call that my “hospital rounds”—you find out what the poem really is about; its initial reserve breaks down to reveal more of itself to you. It perhaps sounds crazy, but the poet’s patient attention day after day builds trust that there might be a discovery lurking in whatever spill of words after all.

SW: You mentioned that these poems unnerve you. Why is that? Do they unnerve you more than other poems of yours, or is being unnerved by one’s work part of a poet’s condition, in your opinion?

MB: It is the best and fully necessary condition for a poet, I think. To be knocked off one’s pins in the actual writing. I suppose that unnerved state is a version of Frost’s old saw “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” The poems of mine I think the strongest do have a way of scaring me, freaking me out a little, or a lot.

That seemed pretty much always to happen in this new book, so much that I still can’t imagine who wrote most of these, though I recognize them. So many of the poems still strike me as deeply odd. This might be because that wildlife constantly astounded, those unthinkable animals that Australians, so used to them, consider largely ho-um. The beloved purpose of art is to make the strange familiar (and the reverse, of course), but I  have to say, that didn’t happen to me in those five months, certainly not in these poems. The strange remained strange. In fact, got stranger. In many parts of the book a snarky archangel wanders in and out, sometimes spoiling for a fight. And a roadkill emu returns from the dead to speak. So there is that; a mythic thread entered the weave.

What can one say? Or do when an archangel turns up, a cheeky one, at that? You get rather unnerved. But it’s too late! He’s right there on the page…

SW: Speaking of strangeness, there’s a delightful strangeness to the language in these poems. Standard syntactical orderings are disrupted. Words are assigned new parts of speech. Chatty asides abound. How much do you think the distinctiveness of Australian wildlife invited this the linguistic elasticity? How much does it simply represent your poetic voice more generally?

MB: Sorry. These questions assume more self-scrutiny than I can manage. (I think about something I read once, that you can’t picture yourself laid out and lifeless. Can’t happen. Try it. Imagine you are looking down at yourself, from the ceiling. It’s true!)

But yes, perhaps the distinctiveness of Australia wildlife, as you rightly frame it, influenced these poems down to the word by word sentence level. More generally, I tend to hear poems this way because the mind works similarly, doesn’t it?—i.e., all over the place. I do value playfulness, and a grounded, image-rich invention. I love poets who do that.

And I fear I have to plead the begging bowl again.

SW: One of my favorite lines here refers to the speaker’s not having seen the lyrebird, which, true to the poem’s title, has remained hidden. The line goes: “But me, a life member, / the World Congress of the Disappointed, I understand hope.” This line extends metaphorical weight beyond birding, and it seems like a good emblem for the times. I mean this only slightly humorously: Do you have any suggestions of how other lifetime members of this particular world congress can nonetheless understand hope?

MB: Other suggestions beyond trusting art to help keep us going?

Well, I’ve become a better cook during this terrible pandemic. More ginger! More garlic! More vinegar! More coconut milk! That will help us hopeless sorts, I promise you.

SW: Thanks so much for your responses! It was a delight to spend time with these poems. I look forward to reading the book.

MB: No, I need to thank you, Sarah!

I appreciate the questions. And am so glad the poems make some sense to you. It was a disquieting thought to me, that they wouldn’t translate to this country somehow, coming from that wondrous other side of the world with all those seemingly impossible, most ancient and loved creatures in tow.

Marianne Boruch recently published her tenth book of poems, The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon, 2019). Her forthcoming collection, Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon, 2021), is based on her experience two years ago as a Fulbright Scholar in Australia where she closely observed the continent’s astonishing wildlife. She teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Sarah Wolfson, a staff reader in poetry for NER, is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, and Michigan Quarterly Review. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches writing at McGill University. 

Books by NER authors

October 2019

The Professor of Immortality is a tragicomedy about the paradoxes of trying to be a decent human, and—maybe even trickier—of trying to be a decent mom. It’s also page by page a joy to read. Eileen Pollack is one of the smartest, funniest and most companionable novelists out there. —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

From the publisher: Professor Maxine Sayers once found her personal and professional life so fulfilling that she founded the Institute of Future Studies, a program dedicated to studying the effects of technology on our culture and finding ways to prolong human life. In the aftermath of her beloved husband’s death, Maxine is jolted from her grief by her sudden suspicion that a favorite former student might be a terrorist called the Technobomber and that her son might either be involved in or become a victim of this extremist’s bombing. Deserting her teaching responsibilities, her ailing mother, and an appealing suitor, Maxine feels compelled to set out and search for her son in order to warn and protect him.

Eileen Pollack is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York; the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic; and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. Pollack has published many times in NER, and her most recent contribution, “Ranch House,” can be found in NER 32.4.

The Professor of Immortality can be purchased through HarperCollins Publishers or from your local bookstore.

A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys “the visceral effect that prison has on identity —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

From the publisher: Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems—canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace—and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.

Reginald Dwayne Betts is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. Betts has been published in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.

Felon can be purchased directly from the publisher or from your local, independent bookstore.

Impressive in its precise articulation and range of insights, [Timothy] Donnelly’s dazzling third collection extends the thematic reach of his 2010 Kingsley Tufts Award–winning The Cloud Corporation. Charting the underbelly of Western capitalism, the speakers in Donnelly’s poems locate the imperialist impulse in humanity’s distant origins. From gut flora to galaxies, these poems offer glimpses “that waver like air above lit candles,” restoring meaning to the world in the process. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: In astonishingly textured poems powerful and adroit in their negotiation of a seeming totality of human experience, Donnelly confronts—from a contemporary vantage point—the clutter (and devastation) that civilization has left us with, enlisting agents as far flung as Prometheus, Flaming Hot Cheetos, Jonah, NyQuil, and, especially, Alexander the Great. 

Timothy Donnelly is the author of Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove, 2003) and The Cloud Corporation (Wave, 2010), winner of the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize. A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches in the Writing Program of Columbia University’s School of the Arts and lives in Brooklyn with his family. His work appears in NER 40.1.

The Problem of the Many can be bought from Wave Books or from your local bookstore.

From the publisher: Through vivid imagery that celebrates the world, Boruch meditates on memory and time, and the process of living with, and working through, grief. Boruch’s poems challenge typical associations with the subject, exposing new facets of a universal feeling.

Marianne Boruch has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University and often in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Boruch has published frequently in NER, most recently with the essay “In the Archives of the Humanly Possible: Two Rooms” in NER 37.1.

The Anti-Grief can be purchased through Copper Canyon Press or from an independent bookstore.

In the annals of publishing there is surely no comparable record of hospitality to poets, young or old. —The New York Times

From the publisher: In celebration of the prize’s centennial, this collection presents three selections from each Younger Poets volume. It serves as both a testament to the enduring power and significance of poetic expression and an exploration of the ways poetry has evolved over the past century. In addition to judiciously assembling this wide-ranging anthology, Carl Phillips provides an introduction to the history and impact of the Yale Younger Poets prize and its winners in the wider context of American poetry, including the evolving roles of race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Carl Phillips is professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and has served as judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets since 2010. His own books of poetry include Wild Is the Wind and Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He is a frequent contributor to NER, and his work appears most recently in NER 37.1.

Firsts: 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets includes works by NER authors such as Maura Stanton, Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Nicholas Samaras, Richard Siken, Valerie Wohlfeld, Ellen Hinsey, Fady Joudah, Eduardo C. Corral, Noah Warren, and others. This anthology can be purchased from the publisher.

New Books by NER Authors

The essays collected in The Little Death of Self are meditations toward poetry by a poet who finds this mysterious genre the weirdest, most compelling of all human ways to imagine—or fathom—the great world. —University of Michigan Press

From the publisher: The line between poetry (the delicate, surprising not-quite) and the essay (the emphatic what-about and so-there!) is thin, easily crossed. Both the poem and the essay work beyond a human sense of time. Both welcome a deep mulling-over, endlessly mixing image and idea and running with scissors; certainly each distrusts the notion of premise or formulaic progression. The essays in The Little Death of Self emerged by way of an odd detail or bothersome question that would not quit—Why does the self grow smaller as the poem grows enormous, or as quiet as a half-second of genuine discovery? Why does closure in a poem so often mean keep going, so what if the world is ending! Must we stalk the poem or does the poem stalk us until the world clicks open?

Marianne Boruch is Professor of English, Purdue University, and a faculty member in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her ninth poetry collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing (Copper Canyon Press), was cited as a “Most Loved Book of 2016” by the New Yorker. Two of her poems appear in NER 38.2; prior to that NER 33.2 featured “The End Inside It,” an essay republished in The Little Death of Self.

University of Michigan Press released The Little Death of Self as part of its series, “Poets on Poetry.”

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book coverThe freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down . . . —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: In 2007, Todd Boss crossed the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis just twenty minutes before its disastrous collapse into the Mississippi. Thirteen people died in the accident, and 145 were injured. Tough Luck, a collection of poems, is anchored in this event and the questions it raised for him, his family, and his community. The poems’ down-to-earth quality and strong sense of place will appeal to readers of Robert Frost, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney.

Todd Boss, director of external affairs at the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. His book Yellowrocket won the 2009 Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Poetry. Boss’ work appeared in NER 28.4.

Tough Luck is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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Dimitrov instills palpable emotional yearning in his readers, as if you’re a tourist inside your own life: “A little of our misplaced lives, / we saw them waving on the roof in the dark / and thought they were birds.” —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, Together and By Ourselves, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal or professional lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

In addition to Together and By Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov is the author of Begging for It and the online chapbook American Boys. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. He has taught creative writing and literature at Bennington College, Columbia University, and Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He currently resides in New York City. His poem “Champagne” was included in NER 36.3.

Together and By Ourselves can be purchased directly from the publisher, Copper Canyon Press, as well as from independent booksellers.

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With exceptional candor, Dungy explores our inner and outer worlds—the multitudinous experiences of mothering, illness, and the ever-present embodiment of race—finding fear and trauma but also mercy, kindness, and community. —W. W. Norton

From the publisher: Camille Dungy journeyed across America working as a poet-lecturer, all the while tending to her daughter, then only a toddler. In her prose debut, Guidebook to Relative Strangers, she recounts the experience, paying particular attention to the way in which she and her child were perceived as two black females. Dungy grapples with the painful legacy of the slave trade, but she also celebrates motherhood and those bright moments that characterize her daughter’s entrance into the world.

Camille Dungy is a professor of creative writing at Colorado State University. Her collections of poetry have won numerous honors, including the American Book Award and the Crab Orchard Open Book Prize. Her essay “A Shade North of Ordinary,” an excerpt from her travels, appeared in NER 36.2.

Guidebook to Relative Strangers is available from publisher W. W. Norton & Co. and independent booksellers.

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A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau’s time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now . . . This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day. —Victor LaValle

From the publisher: In Norman Lock’s fourth book of The American Novels series, Samuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.

Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey. His work has appeared in New England Review numerous times, most recently in NER 34.2.

A Fugitive in Walden Woods can be purchased directly from its publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, or from independent booksellers.

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The first collection from the multi-award-winning American poet and playwright Dan O’Brien, including The Body of an American.

Plays One includes the following five pieces: The Body of an American, The House in Hydesville, The Cherry Sisters Revisited, The Voyage of the Carcass, and The Dear Boy.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright and poet and recent Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. In addition to his work as a playwright he has published multiple volumes of poetry, most recently in 2015 in a collection entitled New Life. An alumnus of Middlebury College, he currently resides in Los Angeles. An excerpt from his play The House in Scarsdale will appear in NER 38.3.

Plays One can be purchased directly from the publisher, Oberon Books, or from independent booksellers.

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A comprehensive yet eminently readable—even exhilarating—romp through Berlin’s history, coupled with a native’s view of its colorful present. Eveything you need to know about the German capital, and more. —Kimberly Bradley, Monocle Magazine

In Berlin, Joseph Pearson retraces the history of Germany’s capital city, from its beginnings as a small settlement to its present role as one of the world’s economic and political centers. Berlin’s nine-hundred-year history has been colored by vicious regimes, pivotal artistic movements, scandalous night life, and industrial innovation. Pearson walks the streets of modern-day Berlin to find echoes of this tumultuous past, and to turn up the city’s little-known secrets.

Joseph Pearson is a cultural historian and writer at New York University, Berlin. His essay “Three German Cities” appears in NER 37.3. You can read more about Pearson in his “Behind the Byline” interview, in which he speaks with nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree regarding the link among self, history, and politics.

Berlin is available from the University of Chicago Press (North and South America only) and from their Reaction Books (UK/Europe), as well as from independent booksellers.

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Less a practical guide than an anthology of think pieces, How We Speak to One Another will nonetheless send nonfiction writers eagerly back to their desks. And it’s a fun read, even for nonwriters. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be. What’s compiled in these pages testifies to the endless flexibility, generosity, curiosity, and audacity of essays. Even more than that, it provides the kind of pleasure any great essay collection does—upsetting our ideas and challenging the way we organize our sense of the world.

Craig Reinbold, one of the editors of this collection, has seen his writing appear in many journals and magazines including the Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, and Brevity. He was the managing editor of Essay Daily from 2013-2016. One of his essays, “All Things Equal on the West Side,” can be found in NER 33.3.

How We Speak to One Another is available directly from Coffee House Press and from independent booksellers.

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Simic has always had a knack for channeling the morbid—and managing to blend it with the joyous. It is in navigating those kinds of opposing emotions that he is at his most clever and profound . . . Image by image, Simic composes miniature masterpieces, offering what appears as a seemingly effortless study in language’s cinematic possibilities. —Publishers Weekly

From the publisher: The latest volume of poetry from Charles Simic hums with the liveliness of the writer’s pen—Scribbled in the Dark brings the poet’s signature sardonic sense of humor, piercing social insight, and haunting lyricism to diverse and richly imagined landscapes.

Charles Simic, poet, essayist, and translator, was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and immigrated to the United States in 1954. Since 1967, he has published twenty books of his own poetry, in addition to a memoir; the essay collection The Life of Images; and numerous books of translations for which he has received many literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Griffin Prize, the MacArthur Fellowship, and the Wallace Stevens Award. Simic is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and in 2007 was chosen as poet laureate of the United States. He is emeritus professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973, and is distinguished visiting writer at New York University. He is a longtime contributor to New England Review, most recently with his translation work in NER 29.1.

Scribbled in the Dark is for sale directly from its publisher Harper Collins and from independent booksellers.

 

 

Marianne Boruch

NER Classics | From Bishop’s Blue Pharmacy

Marianne Boruch‘s Essay, “From Bishop’s Blue Pharmacy,” was published in NER 13.2 (1990).

Wasp_Nest_03-1In 1978, a year before her death, Elizabeth Bishop finished a poem, “Santarém,” which placed her in the crux of the marvelous, at the conflux of two of the world’s great rivers, the Amazon and the Tapajos. The poem rings with exotic, chaotic life – carts hooked up to zebus, those curly-horned oxen; young nuns waving, still in their blinding white habits, off to a downriver mission by steamer; a whole lovely racket of departure and arrival. But this is mere overture; the revelation lies in wait, and the poem gradually narrows to its delivery. Entering a “blue pharmacy,” as she calls it, the poet discovers the real fortune – a wasps’ nest, empty, and placed lovingly on a shelf: “Small, exquisite,” she tells us, “clean matte white and hard as stucco.” Even-tually, the pharmacist gives it to her, and she carries off her prize to the waiting ship. There, a Mr. Swan, fellow-passenger and retiring head of Philips Electric – “really a very nice old man” Bishop assures us – blurts out, simply, “What’s that ugly thing?” And so, on such a question, the poem ends (Complete Poems 185).

I can play this movie in my head a hundred times, and I still return to that moment amid the dusty bottles and boxes, the peculiar shade of that “blue pharmacy.” It is the surprise of that gleaming, tidy relic – the wasps’ nest high in its honored place – that triggers my wonder at how a simple image presses itself into memory as fuse and heart to make a poem, to demand that it unfold as it keeps unfolding.

Surprise. How that is linked to finding, to finding out. I think of once finding a similar unexpected treasure, a map, but a wholly different kind of map, a quick, aerial re-take on the earth, calling itself ‘The Top of the World,” its living center not Asia or America or Europe, but the north pole and its arctic air, frozen islands by the hundreds, strips of cold blue – a map, in short, governed by nothing but surprise, that love of the odd angle. There it was at a garage sale a couple of summers ago, leaning against the paint-dripped bookcase, next to the sprung wing-back chair. I stood and stared; I still stand and stare in my own upstairs hall, transfixed. This may be one of those indulgent, dream-lit moments, but I am thinking Elizabeth Bishop would have loved such a map, not as much as the wasps’ nest, perhaps, but probably enough to have outbid me for it at the edge of that slow backyard, overgrown with anthémis and delphinium and poppy.

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