In this month’s essay for Plume, Joy Manesiotis and Maxine Scates, two former close friends of Brigit Pegeen Kelly, share a memorable appreciation for Kelly as both a beloved friend and, as the Poetry Foundation refers to her, “one of the most strikingly contemporary American poets.” Scates and Manesiotis make a strong argument indeed for Kelly’s enduring legacy. After reading their inspired tribute to their dear friend, one is reminded of the lag time American readers and critics perpetuate in their tardy appreciation for authentic poetry that’s fated for greatness. Scates and Manesiotis divi ..read more

Writing Internationally: Ian Haight in conversation with Tzveta Sofronieva   Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of over twenty books, including Multiverse (2020), a collection of new and selected poems written originally in German, Bulgarian, and English. Ian Haight, author of the collection of poetry Celadon (2017), is also the co-translator, with T’ae-yong Hŏ, of Spring Mountain: Complete Poems of Nansŏrhŏn and Homage to Green Tea by the Korean monk Ch’oŭi, both forthcoming from White Pine Press. Excerpts from Homage to Green Tea are included in this feature, along with new work ..read more

In her essay “The End,” Heather McHugh considers the phenomena of letters, specifically their iconography, their runic etymology, their aesthetic shapes, their archetypal strangeness, their psychic catalysts, and their poetic inspiration that concatenate as the verbal masonry for linguistic construction. “With all their many kinds of beelines, S-curves, U-turns, zigzags! That’s my stuff,” she confesses in this love letter to letters that reads like a brilliantly learned rap song to the aural, visual, and semiotic phenomena of letters. Not words, but letters, which McHugh exegetes as the DNA of ..read more

One of the most useful things I did during my psychiatry training was attend an open AA meeting. I sat in the back row of a church basement and listened as people used phrases we were taught emphatically never to employ with patients: addict, junkie, drunk, dirty urine. In the hospital I thought we were learning the vocabulary of addiction, but we had been studying some other dictionary entirely. Without personal experience with substance use, I will never speak this language fluently. But after working with people in recovery and active use for six years, I have developed a comfortable humili ..read more

Grandpa David Told Me Once of Carpathia, a Place He had Never Been   His hospital topped a mountain, so we ran the rest.   The radiation of the cold triggered his pulse monitor. He popped out of the covers beaming   as a toddler. Safta too appeared, wearing death for him   in the new wrinkles and grayed hair. He covered her   in the blanket, rose on bent feet. We went to the ice   cliff in red blankets—he fell looking at sky.   I wondered if this would be death or the next moment   or the next. I helped him and his new hunchback up   and David gaped ..read more

Wind, Blue Sky   I am practicing being in the moment,   to think wind, blue sky, grandson singing   in his stroller—feygele, for little bird,   as my mother would say. I am trying   to feel the ropy muscles of my legs tighten   and release, rhythmic as a metronome,   with every step, to feel on my skin, tangible   as some human touch, the soft morning air.   I am trying to attend to the distant crow,   if he is a crow. I am practicing at practicing—   but here comes memory, insistent as the bird’s   cry, sparked this time by an old ph ..read more

HOW TO BE   I don’t like it when you’re faux-butch   or when you’re faux-femme, but really since   I won’t know real until I see it   and maybe not even then, it’s true that you can’t win.   Let me think.   Perhaps the real is merely the consistent—   though there’s nothing more consistent than plastic.   Perhaps the “faux” is a self-conscious   tic.   *   “Don’t be a child!” I want to say,   though I am very fond of children.     PRETEND   “Honest to God throwback”   Top Gun   Legacy of Monsters   * &nbs ..read more

On Dreamboat: Two Questions, and the Ground Between     “What is truth?” Pilate asked.  Before Jesus could answer Pilate was on his way out the door.  It was a rhetorical question.  He was eager to speak again to the people outside who kept complaining about this weirdo, this rabblerouser, and get them to solve the problem in their own damn courts.  Or, just go away.  He didn’t care which.  Pilate was a busy man, with no time for metaphysical disputes, which in any case seemed to him trivial and beside the point.  The point was power, and his place ..read more

Pierantonio on Being Married to Artemisia Gentileschi the Night She Dances the Ballet: War of Beauty War of Love, 1612 You broke through a bouquet of arteries, barked alla luna, plucked it from the sky, then swallowed whole. Your toes could break Florence. You writhe nauseous against the silhouette of Santa Croce, become your arms fettered into atriums, swell with all the images you can hold: the Sunday walls behind you, fading slack; your regurgitated moon popped upon the canvas, rolling chestnut spotlight. Your city dissolves. The country inside you dissolves. Drawing is the battering of you ..read more

Eating the Madeleine   1 I remember the scut of it: my mouth shut inside a smooth lawn part emerald, part autumn novitiate I envied the parochial-school kids across the street for their bloody knuckles, the welts on their backs from the strap those tangible markers of punitive love   They were effervescent, Peter, Robert, Sally We played Mean Mother in their rose arbor, and every April they donned their ribboned outfits for the Easter Parade down the shore If I do anything well, I said to myself years later, picturing the rose arbor let me be the queen of blow jobs That will surely l ..read more