Burn and Dodge

Notes

 noteS The epigraph from Dante is my translation. “Envy Speaks”: The image in the first stanza is inspired by a Leonardo da Vinci drawing. “The Truth of Poetry”: The epigraph is from Marianne Moore’s poem “Poetry,” as it appears in Collected Poems of Marianne Moore (Faber, 1951). “Current Events”: Written in the aftermath of 9/11, this sequence of poems refers to some events reported in the New York Times during June 2002. The quote in “What-Knots” is taken from an article by Jane Perlez, September 17, 2002. “Barbarous Thing”: The opening sentence is from Amelia Roselli’s poem “Irony an Even Harder Kneecap,” translated from the Italian by Giuseppe Leporace and Deborah Woodard, published in Chelsea 72 (2002). The partial lines from Milton are from his “Sonnet XII. On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Certain Treatises,” the treatises being divorce tracts. “At the Reception”: Based on a photograph taken at a reception at the Library of Congress (1963). “Ode to Fernando Pessoa”: A homophonic poem based on Pessoa’s “Triumphal Ode.” “Your Only Music”: The opening line is from Keats’s letter to his brothers, George and Thomas Keats, January 13, 1818. “Clare-Hewn”: This series of homophonic sonnets translates the English Romantic poet John Clare’s sonnets, with their agrarian-based nineteenth-century vision and language, as though they had been written in a foreign tongue. The epigraph is taken from his sonnet “Summer Moods,” where Clare himself “translates” birdcalls into human sounds. “A Pact with Ezra Pound”: Pound wrote, “What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross” in Canto LXXXI of The Pisan Cantos. “Envy Ghazaled”: The epigraph is from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (2003). “I Have”: The epigraph is the opening stanza of Paul Celan’s “Ich Habe Bambus Geschnitten,” as translated by John Felstiner in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan (2001). “Hot Springs Cinquains”: This poem is for Jody Rosenblatt Feld. ...