your new Sunday editor.
I co-edit
a biannual poetry journal, and I’m also a poet (as are most editors of poetry
journals).
publishes work from poets writing on all points of the current poetry spectrum
and at all stages of their careers — from first poems in print to household
names (if there were such a thing in poetry).
“To particularize is the alone distinction of merit,” said William
Blake. The best way I can suggest what Barrow Street is up to is through the
poems I’ll post over the next three months.
The poem I’m choosing for this
first post is “Yinglish Strophes IX” by Thomas Fink.
YINGLISH STROPHES IX
So ancient the way
they fight, the way
they kill themselves.
She
wouldn’t let you anybody
should help her. Home
she didn’t. Sometimes
friends
grow out you or
you grow out them.
I really don’t know
her money. I’m not
raving like she does.
She likes to rave.
It’s later mostly than
trees blooming. By
you
is more cheap a
little. To gold let’s
get. I am still
in a daisy. Who
am I gonna aggress?
It interferes with talking,
to be togetherness.
— Thomas Fink
I find this poem intensely pleasurable. In reading I’m pushed back and forth between
pure delight in the linguistically and syntactically fractured
Yiddish-inflected English, and the insistent sound of a very funny speaking voice. The poem never finally comes to rest in
either of these directions. Each phrase
is pleasingly suggestive: “Who /am I gonna aggress? / It interferes with
talking, / to be togetherness.” The poem
hints at poetry’s power to resist any closed universe of meaning.
“Yinglish Strophes IX” was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2007, edited by Heather McHugh. The poem made its next appearance in Thomas
Fink’s No Appointment Necessary
(Moria Poetry, 2006), and recently, in the chapbook Yinglish Strophes 1- 19 (Truck Books, 2009).
— Patricia Carlin