Poets often talk about poetry in their poems, and what they say can hold a mirror up to reality in a way that blissfully convolutes the folds of a reader’s brain. With a lifetime of honorable service to poetry, Robert Pinsky is a formidable contemplator of poetic paradoxes and influence, writing in his new book, “I want to publish a book with on every page / The one same poem, all not by me but mine.” With a kind of double-mirror infinitude, the debut poet Saba Keramati employs the cento form, which repeats lines by other poets, and quotes a line by the poet Sarah Gambito: “I’m a poem someone else wrote for me”—in other words, a poet writing a poem that quotes a poem in which another poet declares that she’s a poem written by someone else for her, perhaps the future poet who is quoting her back.
Justin Rovillos Monson, writing from prison, advises using the fragments of one’s experience to remind you how it feels to be alive: “Hell, / light ’em up in a poem to remember / where your body vibrates.” Chris Nealon focuses on that uncertain moment, akin to writing down a dream before you forget it forever, when all that stands between the creation of a poem and its vanishing from your mind is a simple utensil: “Composing a poem in your head and hoping that the organizing thought is sturdy enough to keep the words in order till you lock your bike and grab a pen—” Once it is on the page, what matters is whether the poem enacts something important in a p.
