Four New Poems

and how I wrote each one

Dear Friends,

I rarely share my own poems in this newsletter, but given that my new book is out in less than two months (you can pre-order it here), I hope you’ll forgive the brief departure from our usual programming.

I have four poems in this issue of The Kenyon Review, a journal I’ve been reading since college. I first submitted work there at 19, and it was, rightfully, rejected. But I received a kind letter from their then editor-at-large G.C. Waldrep encouraging me to apply to the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets, a free summer intensive for college students. I recommend this program to any young poets in your life.

I’ll tell you a little bit about each poem here, in case that sort of thing is of interest to you. It is to me—I love hearing how a poem came into being even if, at the end of the day, a poem needs to be able to stand on its own without an advocate when it’s read in private. As we know, a charming backstory can’t be everything.

I wrote this poem in 2022 in Vamvakou, Greece, where I was introduced to the hawk moth (also called sphinx moth) after running from planter to planter thinking I was watching a rather drab hummingbird at work. Its caterpillar form is called a “hornworm.” None of these delightful facts fit comfortably into the poem, but I wanted you to know. I also—up until six months ago—had a grammatical error in the poem (dangling modifier) that no one had brought to my attention. Thank goodness for the copy editor that caught it.

I’ve written a lot about my mentor Saskia Hamilton, including a remembrance of her for Poetry Magazine you can read on Substack here. This poem is based on a story she told me about the penguins in London Zoo, which used to complete a “penguin march” each afternoon, to the delight of zoo attendees. That is, until staff realized that the concrete was causing the penguins arthritis. Really, I was trying to write about what it feels like to know you don’t have much time ahead with someone…how you escape into stories about the past to avoid thinking about the future. Saskia was in my life for 15 years, and our last two years were extraordinarily precious to me.

Charm City is a nickname for Baltimore. I happened to be there in 2023 when two neo-Nazis conspired to blow up Baltimore’s electric grid. It got me thinking (again) about the shapeshifting nature of violence in America, and the many ways we look away from it. The song referenced in the poem is Simon and Garfunkel’s jewel “America,” which features a man “gone to look for America” alongside his lover, Kathy.

I also began this poem in Greece in 2022, in a place called Mani that is surrounded by mountains. It took me three years of working on this poem to get it right, and most of that time was spent trimming away at couplets—I had so many images that I wanted to include, and at one point, it read more like a catalogue of things I’d seen there. Leaving it that way, however, completely diluted the focus of the poem—I knew the feeling I wanted to capture, which meant being (or becoming over many years of drafting) okay with saying less to say more.

Thank you all so much for reading this selection. If you’d like to pre-order If You Love That Lady, you can do so here.

Remember that next Friday’s installment of Poems for Your Weekend will be dedicated to spotlighting poems from within our community. You can still submit your poem—and chat with other poets!—in our May poetry thread.

Gratefully,
xM