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Editor's Choice brings you a poem from a new publication selected as a must-read. Our feature editor today is Heather Green.
Nancy Naomi Carlson
If you mess with the Good Book,
you might mistake the Hebrew “ray” for “horn”—
karan and keren easy to confuse—and like Michelangelo,
envision Moses at Sinai with horns on his head
instead of suffused with a heavenly glow—

another gift from the God of Stone Tablets.
So much depends on a single vowel issuing forth
from the rattling depths of a throat, as in last words,
when meaning shapes lips gasping for breath—
perhaps one small clue about the afterlife—

or your son’s ex-girlfriend who conversed
with God despite the haze of Haldol dispensed each day
in pulp-free orange juice—new translations
thanks to missed doses—squeezing
that divine voice from the pulpit of her dreaming.

In another time you might have paid a price
for putting the Word in other words,
like William Tyndale, strangled then set on fire
or John Wycliffe, ashes strewn along the River Swift
for wrestling with the sacred in your native tongue.
from the book PIANO IN THE DARK / Seagull Books
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When I’m translating, I feel guilty about not writing poetry. I’ve found the best way to assuage my guilt is to write poetry about translation, as I did with “In Other Words.” Indeed, translation is one of the themes in "Piano in the Dark," forthcoming from Seagull Books, from which this poem comes. Written just after my mother’s death, ostensibly from Covid, the poem reflects my obsession over my inability to translate her unintelligible last words.
 
Color headshot of a smiling Yona Harvey
"Reenvisioning the Writers Group"

Yona Harvey highlights three versions of the writers' group that sustain creative work: "(1) a long-term, generative writers group that focuses on accountability and what’s working in your writing, (2) a short-term writers group of three readers who can rely on one another for targeted, critical feedback, or (3) one or two trusted readers to whom you can quickly turn in a pinch—most likely you’ve built a relationship with them already, possibly from writers  groups past.'

via POETS & WRITERS
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Cover image of David Perry's book of translations, The Odes of Horace
What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on David Ferry's The Odes of Horace


"The genius for a simple clarity is what makes all of Ferry’s Horace and Virgil so commendable, and his verse is proof as well that 'simple clarity' is not 'economy,' nor less and stranger language. That he adds a word or removes a god is hardly worth attacking when the former makes for grace and the latter is a name we neither cared about nor said correctly. Instead, like the King James translators, he understands that another language is another material, and one cannot build a wooden house from marble. The attempt will last forever."
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