Element from the quilt artwork of challenge no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper.
There’s a thrill of eros to many summer time poems. Like in these late-eighties teen films—Soiled Dancing, Say Something, One Loopy Summer season—you by no means know once you’ll see some pores and skin. And so it goes in our new Summer season challenge. In Jessica Laser’s dreamy, autobiographical remembrance “Kings,” the poet recollects a consuming sport she used to play in highschool on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer time holidays:
… You by no means knew
whether or not it will be strip or not, so that you at all times
thought-about carrying layers. It was summer time.
Generally you’d get fairly bare
but it surely wasn’t pushy. You can take off
one sock at a time.
Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer time fling? Perhaps that’s simply how objects seem within the rearview mirror; even probably the most operatic affairs can appear a bit comical looking back. In his poem “Armed Cavalier,” Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse type of summer time romance, when two lovers lock themselves away “for an entire weekend / and never eat or drink.” I really like the wry look he casts over his shoulder on the finish of those traces:
Stars, sluggish site visitors,
the summer time I needed you really liked me
sufficient to kill me,
however not likely.
In the event you’re curious to study extra in regards to the story behind “Armed Cavalier,” try our on-line Making of a Poem collection characteristic on his poem this month. Leopoldine Core, whose poem “Ex-Stewardess” seems on this challenge, lately contributed to the collection, too—and to my summer time playlist. “I used to be listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, ‘Dance II’ by Discovery Zone, and this mournful track ‘Consider Me, If All These Endearing Younger Charms,’ carried out by Mia Farrow in The Muppets Valentine Present in 1974,” Core recollects. I’m listening to Farrow’s Muppets Present rendition as I write this, and Core’s proper, she does sound “a bit like Nico.”
They are saying that on sizzling summer time days within the nation’s capital, Richard Nixon would mild a roaring blaze within the fire of his White Home research, crank the air con as much as full blast, placed on a bit Mantovani, and gaze out the window on the Washington Monument. This could be one of many few issues Nixon and I’ve in widespread; whereas my fellow Individuals are out in droves worshipping the solar, I like nothing greater than to retreat to my house workplace and, thermostat set to eco mode, leaf via poems about summer time. On this challenge’s pages, fellow seasonal voyeurs will discover that Lewis Meyers’s “Summer season Letters” delivers “the black raspberry’s ardour for a drop of daylight” with none want for sunscreen. “Summer season Letters” marks the late Meyers’s return to our pages after greater than a half century; his final poem within the journal, “Going to Chicago,” was printed in a 1965 challenge, underneath the Johnson administration. We’re grateful to Meyers’s widow, Diana, and to the poet Ellen Doré Watson, for sharing the poem with us.
Elsewhere, Sharon Olds muses on her quest to discover a higher language for intercourse in her Artwork of Poetry interview, and John Keene, in his Artwork of Fiction interview, observes that Portuguese is best suited to that process than English. It must also be stated that, though we tried our greatest, not each poem on this challenge is about summer time, intercourse, or summer time intercourse. You’ll additionally discover a philosophical poem about cats by the good Argentinian author Mirta Rosenberg, translated from the Spanish by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman; an excerpt from Imani Elizabeth Jackson’s expansive minimalist sequence “Flag”; and a poetic noir set within the Antwerp of Jonathan Thirkield’s singular creativeness. Bon voyage, and joyful studying.
Srikanth Reddy is the Evaluation‘s poetry editor.
