Next Line, Please: Questions and Echoes [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Have you ever written or read a poem that started and ended with a question, and found yourself so totally enthralled, so mystified, and included? Well, for this week's installment of Next Line, Please, our contributors were tasked with that very idea, with works by Keats, Shelley, and Yeats that end with a question, and works by Goethe, Rilke, Auden, and Shakespeare that begin with one, as inspiration. Shall we dive in?

Angela Ball refers to “Ode to a Nightingale” in the title and first line of her poem, “Viewless Wings”:

Are there still “wings of poesy”? Yes. They’ve been shelved,
like a beaver top hat collapsed when not in use, whose hatter
survives in a madhouse, where he deplores the lake
for its surly, copulating swans. Stylish poets reject
metaphorical levitation, as evoked by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.,
in his sonnet, “High Flight,” where he “slips the surly bonds of earth”
in a Spitfire MK1, aided by wings from Cuthbert Hicks,
author of “The Blind Man Flies” and source of the line,
“And touched the face of God.” What are these straw-man
“bonds of earth”? Why “surly”? Can plagiarism
fly?

I'm a sucker for things like poesy and mad hatters, and copulating swans, for sure! What a powerhouse.

Michael C. Rush dazzled many of us with the questions raised by “Eleutheromania” and with the magnificence of sound in the poem’s sixth stanza:

Who holier than the disbeliever?
Even the thirstiest visits the cistern of drool.

Choose your delusion? Choosing your delusion
is just one of the delusions that chooses you.

I smell burning books, millions of them, unseen, unread,
hijinks of accusing kachinas and kinkshamers drinking the soul-ution,

instantiating confusion, a quasi-tsunami of ludonarrative dissonance,
a knucklefruit parley between the chronic ironic and the cure of the curve

as was kisses will be with the lips of is.
What we take for granted is taking things for granted.

The shock of a duck
jerked up in the jaws of a dog.

Which is more powerful, narrative or verisimilitude?
Is power determined by the ability to deceive?

David Lehman is with Stephanie Cohen, who said her favorite lines of the week were “The shock of a duck / jerked up in the jaws of a dog.” For my part, I'm pretty enthused by "drinking the solution."

In “Requiem,” Pamela Joyce S. beautifully weaves echoes of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”: “full of sorrow,” “half in love,” “full-throated ease,” “tender” night.

What are you thinking?
To think is to be
full of sorrow and
I am full of thought.

Only half in love,
you said half joking,
the quiet breath escaping
like a death rattle.

I called you soft names
with full-throated ease
In the forlorn landscape
of tomorrow’s separate dreams.

What thoughts will please you,
Love, on this last tender night?

So much yes! 

Diana Ferraro’s “Clockwork” begins and ends with timeless questions:

What time is it?

The sorry round face, two bones as hands
The mock banner of a forbidden ship
Poison, pirate, prowess, no lighthouse warns.

The past, a sacking bag laid on the bare land
Jewels and coals shifting and clanking
A peaceful cow with a bell hails the future.

Bright stamps on lost letters, used gloves, missed calls,
Stocked sunrays heaped within a tall fire
Written papers burn on the trail of autumn leaves.

Weightless witnesses stolen by the wind
Zephyr, sirocco or gale, so many skies!
Present melts in the sigh of a lived life.

Is it time?

As always, there are many more poems and interesting conversations on poesy to read up, so head on over to the American Scholar's page for the whole post!