by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

“Unacknowledged Legislators” 2015

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        For some people, it’s the favor of free books in perpetuity; for others, it’s the half-sentence of acknowledgment in somebody else’s back pages; but for me, the best fringe benefit of a couple of decades’ work in literary publishing is that I have friends who are poets – real live called-to-the-role poets.

Three such are in full poetic flower this week.  There’s Cecily Parks in The New Yorker, MFA’d, Ph.D’d, prize-published, fitting herself into the morning suit of the doctor’s wife:

                                Inside

the coughing man’s lung the surgeons

found a fir tree. The dark interior

of a lung or a leaf bud, imagined

long enough, becomes a wilderness.

Your mind can do this

in the morning when you don’t have

a body. Wilderness isn’t paradise.  

There’s Rowan Ricardo Phillips, down at McNally Jackson with Tracy K. Smith, doubtless reading new poems about heaven, such as one this comes from:

   Even Heaven has its dream of being

Paris. A flawed Paris in a flawed light.

A proper Paris. You arive there by

Accident: like Narcissus to his pond.

Cecily and Rowan have new books – O'Night and Heaven – and I hope to post a fresh piece about each of them.    

Lawrence Joseph, meanwhile, is between books, as the saying goes, but each of his new poems has a greater density and singularity of expression than most poets’ whole books.  Here are a few lines from “Visions of Labour,” behind the paywall in the London Review of Books:

                                                  Static model,

dynamic model, alternate contract environments,

enterprise size and labour market functions,

equilibrium characterisation, elasticity of response

to productivity shocks: the question in this Third

Industrial Revolution is who owns and controls

the data.  That’s what we’re looking at …

Larry invokes Blake at the beginning of the poem, and against heavy odds the poem makes good on the invocation: “Visions of Labour” is a radical poem, an an apt pendant to the street-shout of vexation over things-as-they-are that is Pope Francis’s first encyclical.    

The photograph is of an anti-austerity rally held in London last weekend.