This is a little embarrassing. The first time I saw Annie Hall I was visiting a friend’s apartment in college. Senior year, actually. I only caught the ending, something about eggs. Years later, I finally watched the film with my girlfriend (perhaps not the best idea) and only after completing the film, dwelling upon all of my failed past relationships, did I happen to look up Woody Allen’s biography on Wikipedia. There was Mia Farrow. There were nude photos. There was Soon-Yi Previn. And here I am, all these years later, reconsidering my anxiety about eggs, about relationships, about the fundamental role of differences in any romance. And I’m grateful to Natalie Shapero for it. In these poems, Shapero slices and dices, mixes and matches. Each portion of the “Four Fights” sequence incorporates dialogue in the form of point and counterpoint. Yet what really carries this sequence is what follows from the simple banter: we get a great deal of revelation from a speaker I imagine is a Freudian condensation of Mia Farrow and Annie Hall, someone who can speak back to the dreariness of a Manhattan scene, the differences between orgasms, the ultimate unfairness of the neurotic playwright getting with an underage girl. Here, beyond the ironic humor, we get pathos.

This week we present Leora Fridman’s ekphrastic series based on the paintings of Norman Rockwell. Each poem is tied to a specific painting, and initially we were going to provide links to the images. Ultimately we decided against this because there is something even more ghostly about the brief flashes in the mind’s eye of source material–this is the barbershop, this is the boy and his dog…or is it? Fridman’s work forces us to question. She creates a space that is at once familiar and comforting yet eerie and threatening through her constant subversion of the iconic American painter. The work takes on the quality of David Lynch film, where even the most pedestrian of images becomes unsettling. Through the repetition of his full name, Norman Rockwell, throughout the movements, the figure constantly changes, becoming blank and then whole again. My ears and mind deaden to the repetition then I come back. I wonder if I’m to imagine Rockwell himself or some larger construct of what Rockwell represents in his various forms. He is a trickster, clever and devilish, a kindly old man of homespun wisdom, a threat, and perhaps even a murderer. Rockwell becomes both a complex and fully formed individual and an abstraction–an idea somewhere in the ether–capable of every and anything. Here the painter of the paintings is given a new life and new images to inhabit.

In this triptych by Liam O’Brien, one is pressed to remember Ovid’s Metamorphoses—each beautiful or tragic tale of flight, fancy, pursuit, and transformation. In “Brighton, 1923. Sea-Monster” we first see a game of “boys-will-be-boys” choking each other that unfolds a mermaid like, “ungainly woman: legs joined,/breasts like limbs, mouth thick. Crowned/ with fleshy bull kelp.” Transformation and witness are at the heart of these poems. Always, the speaker invokes another (brother and lover in each) in order to perpetuate the narrative. The backdrops are tragic and beautiful, where in “The Proposal” the speaker’s father is a recrudescent Icarus, who doesn’t fly to the sun, but “foolish into a cherry tree.” There is no moral of this parable to avoid staring into the bright light of day. There is no moral or didacticism whatsoever. Instead, the father falls from the tree and is humbled before, presumably, the mother-to-be, where he delivers a proposal of matrimony, again presumably. Presumption is a frequent stance that the reader of O’Brien’s work must take because his narratives are beautifully garbed in mystery and intrigue. They are emotionally heavy, without giving too much information that would undo their splendor and that is their gift.

To read these poems by Johnathon Williams is to allow oneself to be entirely overwhelmed by the unimpeded force of a moment of time that is both "all / too much" and also "slipping away." Each of these poems begins with a moment of crisis that expands outward until it seemingly encompasses and embodies the narrator's entire life. These thoughts and observations accumulate, weighing down on the both the narrator and the reader: "Jesus, the arch / of her back. Her fists and hair. My shame and joy." The narrator finds that recognizing the situation is not enough, that something is still missing: "I recognize the language but not the words." The struggle to move successfully through the day becomes a struggle for survival—the survival of one's purpose. The second poem references Ovid and Goethe, though these poems seem more to respond to Rilke's You must change your life, answering "But time / is the whole problem, its relentless march / away".

Not enough is said about music. Last week, as I sat down to write this introduction, I re-encountered Sara Henning’s poems. I found myself impressed by the artful elaboration of ideas from grammatically similar structures and overarching floral conceit in her prose poem “Without an Aperture.” The verse poem “Girls Like Us” engrossed me through its images extending over three lines that suddenly, wonderfully, shift into other associations. But what dazzled me more was Henning’s music. “Without an Aperture” discovers itself by stitching sounds together as fluidly as it does ideas. Immediately following the first clause, we know we’re in for a musical performance: “…your mouth covered mine like soil covers a root but relies on ruse and not the turn from soil to rock and back again”. The frequency of the “r” sound in this passage is more evocative than argumentative, wandering from mouth, to soil, to root, and then to ruse. In the next sentence, wood turns “spongy” and, one clause later, we have the beautiful compound idea ”braincomb” that takes the wood’s transformation, symbolically and phonetically, and moves the wood, the speaker’s body, and the peculiar romance of the poem into an exploration of contact with the world out there.

Jesse Delong’s poem wants it all. At once meditative, descriptive, and lyrical, the poem achieves its many accomplishments by being what its title promises: a notebook. With all the enthusiasm of an amateur, Delong’s poem suggests that the scientist who explores the floret is more interested in Swedenborg’s correspondences than a better nomenclature. Through Delong’s poetic notes, the floret becomes a vehicle for “revelation//by route of pigmentation”.

Jeff Downey’s work operates within its own unique sanctuary of call and response. In “A Chamber Apart”, the poem is dictated by short lines and tight enjambments that yield all the fun of conundrum and contradiction. “If it’s in a movie, same thing,” begins the second sentence of this longer poem and is a microcosm of what this beautiful piece offers: "and if it’s in a dream, something, / some newspaper folded in such a way / as to keep every insert." “Same thing,” becomes “something,” and such an odd but uniquely clever sentence exhibits where and how Downey’s leviathan intends to play ball: on its own terms and even a shrewd reader cannot help but to be happy to go with it.

In these four poetic vignettes by Charlotte Pence, wood is offered as man's origin story, as a fact of biological anthropology, as a personal anecdote, and as an analogue to a Greek myth. Wood becomes a generative metaphor that we watch create life, self-awareness, civilization, beauty, understanding, change, and loss: "Around wood, around fire, we began." Pence realizes as she analyzes the various changes surrounding wood that "w/ everything gained, there is loss," watching wood consumed as fire and trees cut in preparation for a winter storm. As Pence meditates on what was lost, one might consider the leveled forests documented by W.G. Sebald in Rings of Saturn, or the razing of the Amazon where the lands of uncontacted tribes is becoming continually encroached upon. One might think of Robert Frost's "Birches" and wonder if that memory, that experience, will continue to become more foreign to succeeding generations as we continue to use the earth as a raw resource for consumption, or consider it as mere decoration of a properly manicured lawn. And with these overwhelming thoughts, one might be tempted to, like the little girl, "[stop] moving, let the tree hide her" hoping that though the branches might fall, though both humanity and ecology might change, somehow the tree will still be there to comfort us, whatever we become.

In the shape of a “great old redwood naked in starlight,” the tree awes us with its power and scale; however, in the form of a “corpseflower,” the tree becomes a register of the “accumulated dead.” Tim Kahl’s poetry switches from the lyrically beautiful to the lyrically macabre in an instant, as if our impressions of the world were as diametrically opposed as the two sides of a pancake. Kahl is the hand that deftly flips these conflicted reactions. It is the dynamism of seeing one thing radically transformed from a different angle, with a different phrase, that makes makes the work so numinous. Kahl maintains an ambivalent relationship to the world he describes. On one side of this relationship, Kahl expresses wonder and excitement, rendered by a voice reminiscent of William Carlos Williams. Passages from “Anatomy of the Noumena” take such pleasure in the description of a maple, for instance, that catalogs of detail become catalogs for the various stations of reverence: “the half-light is wrapt (rapt) tight on its frame, / Ghosting oblivion / Nervous spike of growth / Positioning amid the infinite matter.”