Kudos to editor Neil Shepard and poetry editor Elizabeth Powell on the splendid new issue of GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW with its special 100-page section on poetic influence in addition to another 130 pages of poety and fiction. Among those represented are Olena Kalytiak Davis, Stephen Dunn, Martin Espada, Dorianne Laux, Adrienne Su, and Natasha Trethewey, and there are tributes to influential masters -- an interview with Dunn, an essay on Maxine Kumin, poems in honor of Ruth Stone. Most wonderful of all, to this reader, are the discoveries, works by persons previously unknown to me. Anna Maria Hong, for example, has two compelling sonnets. And Stephen Dunn quotes a poem by the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst, whose writing (Dunn explains) "suggests that it takes everything you have to get simplicity right." Here's the Bringhurst poem Dunn cites. -- DL
These Poems, She Said
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
who would leave his wife and child because
they made noise in his study. These are the poems
of a man who would murder his mother to claim
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant
as elm leaves, which if they love love only
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.
These poems, she said....
You are, he said,
beautiful.
That is not love, she said rightly.
-- Robert Bringhurst (Green Mountains Review, vol. 33, no. 2)
