As a poet, my instinct is to turn to words. They are harder to find in an era where I can’t hug my grandmother after her first round of cancer treatment or hold my best friend’s hand while the president toys with immigration laws whose renegotiation or extension could send her family ten time zones away after twelve years in this country.
So instead of filling my spiral notebook with first drafts of poems, I am spending quarantine handwriting letters to the people I can’t touch.
I am learning more about poetry than I have in entire workshops.
Your results may vary, but I have always found the place for the genuine in poetry to be unlocked not by just reading it but by memorizing it. And it’s a good exercise, in the midst of chaos, to give yourself over to a sound and a rhythm that is not your own. It takes time — you probably have plenty — and effort. But you feel poems differently when you get them by heart and say them out loud. You have to chew them, and their rhythms overpower yours. It frees you up, to submit to them: It’s self-abnegation by incantation, your very own ventriloquist’s act.
Many moons ago, before the pandemic—before we even had moons—our home in the universe was a ring of glowing material, with the young sun in the center, like a donut sprinkled with cosmic dust and gas. Round and round the disk went, whisking particles around, until the material began to stick together in clumps. After millions of years, the clumps curved into the planets and the moons as we know them today, a rich assortment of worlds.
This is our story, but it has happened—is happening—countless times across the cosmos, around other stars. Astronomers have long known about such swirling structures, known as protoplanetary disks, which are the leftovers from the fiery birth of new suns. Telescopes have even managed to observe them in stunning detail (well, as stunningly detailed as you can get many light-years from Earth).
If you attended a banquet at the house of an Italian lord, you’d be handed one of these, filled to the brim with red wine. You’d be expected to lift it by wrapping three fingers around the base, and raise it to your lips without spilling a drop. The whole process should look effortless.
Sound tough? The difficulty was the point. Courtiers were expected to embody the ideal of “sprezzatura,” a hard-to-translate word that combines the senses of elegance, sophistication, and nonchalance. In other words, you were supposed to be good at everything, without ever seeming to put any effort into it. What could be a better demonstration of sprezzatura than casually raising one of these sloshing, top-heavy goblets and taking a sip?
If you follow—or, really, go anywhere near—comics or animation for young people now, you’ve almost surely encountered Noelle Stevenson. First noticed for online fan art about the Avengers, she turned her scrappy dragons-and-castles story “Nimona” into a successful Web comic in 2012, then (with help from a trade press) into one of the bookstore hits of 2015. By that point, she was drawing cover art for big-name novelists and comics writers, such as Ryan North and Rainbow Rowell, and writing for Marvel and DC Comics, and also for the lighthearted feminist summer-camp comic “Lumberjanes.” That success led to an animation writing job and, despite her youth, to her position as the showrunner for “She-Ra and the Princesses of Power,” a delightful, action-packed, queer-friendly, candy-colored Netflix reboot of the nineteen-eighties cartoon.
“Nimona,” “Lumberjanes,” and “She-Ra” share a sensibility: all-ages, girl-powered, whimsical but with a streak of angst, grounded in fantasy and in campfire tales, with multiple characters designed to help troubled young readers through their personal darkness. “The Fire Never Goes Out,” Stevenson’s new book, reflects that sensibility, but it’s an altogether different sort of work: the volume gathers short autobiographical comics that Stevenson drew (and often posted on the Web) between 2010 and 2019. It’s a memoir of sorts, with slices of life from the end of Stevenson’s teens to near the present day. It’s also a coming-out story, a love story, a tale of disorientingly rapid professional triumph, and a story about mental health and illness, showing the young artist figuring out what she must do—first to make art and then to get well.
Translated by veteran Argentinian translator Frances Riddle, Ampuero’s Cockfight explores alternatives to the male-centered family unit across various social strata, depicting strong and weak women, children coming of age and being violated, and maids who critically observe the families who employ them. Her sparse prose focuses on character, narrowing the distance between the body and its experience of violence. Combining structures reminiscent of fairy tales and horror films, genres that often fall back on portraying subservient women characters, Ampuero upends these conventions by decentering the male gaze and reversing tropes.
In his trial before the citizens of Athens, Socrates famously compared himself to a gadfly — a pest, sent by god, perhaps, to “awaken and persuade and reproach” his fellow Athenians so that they did not “spend the rest of [their] lives asleep.” If he was a gadfly, then piety, justice and intellectual orthodoxy were his nectar. Into these moral and ethical issues he would bite, until he sucked dry their illogic and laid bare the uncertainty at their base.
More than 21 centuries later, Socrates — or, at least, the Socratic method of laying bare — would come alive again, this time in the form of a brooding Dane, the self-described Socrates of Christendom, Soren Kierkegaard. Clare Carlisle, in her sparkling, penetrative new biography, “Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard,” explains how Kierkegaard ran against the philosophical grain of his time.
Ekelund writes, “I walk long distances, but I always wish I could keep going. I would love to leave everything behind me and just walk, day after day, for thousands of miles, on paths I’ve never taken before.”
This lovely book taps into something primeval in us all.