By LAWRENCE RAAB
“Isn’t that just another way to feel compromised?”
Professor Heninger asked. Being freshmen
and mostly women as well, I was sure
we weren’t being invited to disagree.
Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kul.
A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. What day am I promised?
By DANIEL TOBIN
For Bella Bond
Slowly as soundlessly in its unknowing,
what the driven thing must hunger for
is love’s white noise—a latent faring
There is a sister whose voice is gentle as a lullaby. A lulling. Even when angered she won’t yell. A particular upbringing that eschews the loud, though such a woman can be found embracing those whose voices swell in the streets. Perhaps less saintliness than a vicarious expression of her own rage? Frustrations? Drawing the brawler, the harsh and violent close. The softness
This October, we’re celebrating fall with new work from four of our contributors.
Becoming A Rice Pot
She held the rice pot too
close to her bosom each time
she had to take a cup of it.
Once she would take as
much, she would keep back
a fistful. She never wanted
the rice pot to be empty.
The Common brings you a special two-part series to celebrate the Pioneer Valley Poetry Productions Festival of Major American Poets, which was held at Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall on October 13 and 14.
Part Two – featuring poems by Michael Heller and Cole Swensen.
The Common brings you a special two-part series to celebrate the Pioneer Valley Poetry Productions Festival of Major American Poets, which was held at Amherst College’s Fayerweather Hall on October 13 and 14.
This month The Common brings you a selection from the anthology WORDS FOR WAR, NEW POEMS FROM UKRAINE, edited by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, forthcoming next month from Academic Studies Press.
The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber and ironic, tragic and playful, filled with extraordinary terror and ordinary human delights, the voices recreate the human sounds of war in its tragic complexity.
ANASTASIA AFANASIEVA | “Can there be poetry after:”
BORYS HUMENYUK | “Our platoon commander is a strange fellow”
ALEKSANDR KABANOV | “He came first wearing a t-shirt inscribed ‘Je suis Christ,’”
KATERYNA KALYTKO | “April 6”
LYUDMYLA KHERSONSKA | “When a country of — overall — nice people”
SERHIY ZHADAN | “Third Year into the War”
This month we welcome back long-time contributor to The Common, John Matthias. His poems previously published by the magazine can be found here.
John Matthias has published some thirty-five books of poetry, translation, scholarship, criticism, and collaboration. He taught for many years at the University of Notre Dame and is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Until 2012 he was poetry editor of Notre Dame Review, and is now Editor at Large. Shearsman published his Collected Poems in three volumes in 2011, 2012, and 2013. More recently, they have published a new volume of poems, Complayntes for Doctor Neuro, and a collection of memoirs and literary essays, At Large (both 2016). His most recent book is a collaboration with printmaker Jean Dibble and critic Robert Archambeau, Revolutions (Dos Madres, 2017). Two collections of critical essays have been published on Matthias’s work, Word Play Place, edited by Robert Archambeau, and The Salt Companion to John Matthias, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. “Prynne and a Petoskey Stone” is part of a new book now taking shape, which will be called Acoustic Shadows.
This month we welcome back one of the most crucial and distinctive Anglophone poets, Lawrence Joseph, whose sixth collection, So Where Are We?, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in August. “In One Day’s Annals” appears in this book, as does “In That City, in Those Circles,” first published in issue #10 of The Common. Joseph is also the author of two books of prose, the genre-defying Lawyerland (FSG), as well as The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose, from the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry Series, which presents Joseph’s estimable talents as an essayist and critic.
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