Featuring: John Gould Fletcher, Christian Bök, Jacob Riyeff, and Lisa Cooper
“When I was walking here, I looked at the gulls circling in the sky—they know each other, they band together. That's really the way it is with us. I am taking you into a spiral, but it's not going to be an elevation: we're going down—down into the depths of the heart. I want to find a cranny in you that I can crawl through. That is the function of the poet: to create an aperture. The poet must be violent; he must crack the ego and reach through, or he is nothing. When something does crack the ego, for one appalling moment—we apprehend."
—Brother Antoninus (remarks made before a poetry reading at Harvard in February of 1963)
John Gould Fletcher The Silence There is a silence I carry about with me always; A silence perpetual, for it is self-created; A silence of heat, of water, of unchecked fruitfulness Through which each year the heavy harvests bloom, and burst and fall. Deep, matted green silence of my South, Often within the push and scorn of great cities, I have seen that mile-wide waste of water swaying out to you, And on its current glimmering, I am going to the sea. There is a silence I have achieved: I have walked beyond its threshold; I know it is without horizons, boundless, fathomless, perfect. And some day maybe, far away, I will curl up in it at last and sleep an endless sleep. Aug. 20-27, 1915
Christian Bök The Great Silence Prithee, phantom — lend me pity, while I, blind and weary, tend my lamplight. Tell me truly, do you sit before me, like some pilgrim, waiting mutely in these shadows for the warrant of my welcome? Must I quell my heart to harken for a whisper at my hearthside? Must I shelter here at midnight, like a boy who waves his lantern from the shipmast on the ocean, hoping that a star might flicker in reply? Or have I summoned my assassin, come to see me die? * Prithee, phantom — am I foolish to be pleading for your pardons while abiding by this gravesite? Am I ghoulish from my hunger, longing for a throng of chorists, when, instead of forests, I scry only barrens, where no song can flourish? Am I meant to take my lesson only from your muteness? Do you tutor me while songless in these tundras, where a brutal hunter seeks, unseen, to slay me for my flints and tinder? Do you eye me from an eyrie, like a spy? * Prithee, phantom — reassure me that my grieving has its witness. Tell me, must I be the first slave waking in a vacant death camp? Must I be this frail thing aching in a broken mousetrap? Dare I fathom what has yet to smite me, like some plague or famine, be it falling moons or blasted atoms — speak! I sigh, to break this silence, all these beacons lit to make me worthy to have earned a greeting. Do not let me burn, unknowing if no others hear me say: goodbye. Author's note: "The Great Silence" is a triptych of blank-verse sonnets, all written in trochaic octameter. The work responds to the Fermi Paradox — a fretful mystery (which notes that, given the age of the galaxy and the likelihood of ubiquitous, biological evolution, an interstellar civilization must have already preceded us, with enough time to visit every star — and yet we see no sign of such a civilization anywhere).
Jacob Riyeff On the Transformation of a Novel under the Hand and Eye of the Reader the heart-change time-wrought from pages crisp square-cut, finger-smooth to oil-embraced edge-fringe and bent: a fragment of life a having-read —Lake Michigan, Bailey’s Harbor Wisconsin Lunes a. east village in cool autumn rains buses sigh down nocturnal streets b. simili modo: +ecclesia st. hedwigis+ blood that is poured out, that is wine: the running river c. baxter’s hollow lune marsh marigold fresh into bloom along the spring run d. lima bog lune asters in the sedge looking out petals to water On Seeing the Glacial Outwash Fan Exposed at Janesville’s Rotary Gardens in Late July Wonder-filled we, contemplating your works this sweat-skinned afternoon. Mosses and forbs soiled this hillside now cut bare, sands exposed. Root hairs splayed in lowering sun only now since glacial ice pulled back. Maples and walnuts shade with green, but now erstwhile sea-bottoms will blow and chip and fall beneath cherries and elms. But face to face: a gift for Sunday as I pass thru the town of my birth. winter morning fresh snow new grooves
Lisa Cooper After the Flood (An anagram-by-letter of Psalm 130, NKJV) —Oh! A quilt of pied tufts, a richly lilied hill— A voice sounded to subdue the humid deluge; the Lord split the water, appointed mirrored moor, anointed the floral and verdant domain. Howls He, “Out you dry habitat! Hound, chimp, moth, heifer, riotous roaming ivy!” There is wood to hew, cyan shoreline to shield. You have dominion of a cosmic freshness, a holy bouquet. The world—an inheritance— mightily moves, whirrs with mirth, too. Hallow, write, the Orderer the History Orator to whom we offer our fire, yes, flame! Its praise as hymn-waft orbits stone, ascends to sky.
Contributor Notes
John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) was the author of Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915), Goblins and Pagodas (1916), Japanese Prints (1918), Selected Poems (1939), which won the Pulitzer Prize, among other books of poetry and prose. He died in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia, a globally renowned bestseller, which has won the Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence (in 2002). After 25 years of effort, Bök has, at last, completed The Xenotext — a project that has required him to engineer a deathless bacterium so that its DNA might become a durable archive that can store a poem about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice for eternity, enduring on Earth forever, until the death of the Sun itself. Bök is one of the earliest founders of the literary movement called ‘Conceptualism’ (a poetic school of global renown, responsible for the creation of the website UbuWeb). Bök has exhibited his ‘objets de poesie’ at dozens of galleries around the world, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York. Bök is a Fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada and the Royal Canadian Geographic Society (in both cases for his contributions to the Arts). Bök has also received a nomination for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry (in 2023) and for the Prix Littéraire Bernard Heidsieck – Centre Pompidou (in 2025). Bök currently teaches Fine Art in the School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University in Leeds (UK).
Jacob Riyeff is a teacher, poet, and translator. His work focuses on the western contemplative tradition and the natural world, and his latest collection of poems is Be Radiant (Fernwood Press). Jacob lives in Milwaukee, WI with his wife and three growing children.
Lisa Cooper works as a senior copywriter and marketing specialist at Paravel Insights. She is also a freelance writer and editor for various publications. Hasty Corporeal Ink, her first full-length book of poetry, is now available.
Love. I love this. Thank you, Joseph.
Another lovely little issue, wonderfully curated. One small oversight: Bök’s poem is in trochaic tetrameter (a drastically underused meter). I love the contributions from Riyeff and Cooper.