There Is No One Else In Charge

2013 is going to be an excellent year for Matthew Nienow, and it starts with his poems everywhere: "O Anchor" on Verse Daily and four new pieces in the latest issue of POETRY. Read these and be glad that there's much more to come from Brother Matt.

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I write against things, I suppose, and the thing that doesn’t interest me is gathering a cabal of people exactly like yourself to read what you write. The thing which I like about my writing—I don’t know if it’s a symptom of its generalness or whatever—but I have old ladies e-mail me, or write to me, more likely, who are age eighty-five and then I have very young people: sixteen, seventeen. I like the idea that the writing has no precise identity. It doesn’t block people, it doesn’t force them to think, “Oh, this is me in a very precise way.”

-An Interview with Zadie Smith at The Rumpus

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Hope is not an easy word to use well, in poetry or out of it. Evoking hope too easily can feel kind of glib or damp; saying there is none, though the opposite, can feel sentimental in a similar way. The right shade of belief and doubt can seem impossible to express.

In his great poem for a new year, “The Darkling Thrush,” Thomas Hardy gets that kind of meaning right, I think. Hardy says he “could think” of a “blessed hope” of which he is “unaware.”

-Robert Pinsky on Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" at Slate

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