Field – Fall 2010

Bruce Weigl, Annie Finch, Steve and Stuart Friebert, David Young, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carole Simmons Oles, and Stephen Tapscott contribute to “A Symposium” on poet Richard Wilbur, in anticipation of his 90^th birthday, with essays responding to particular Wilbur poems, reprinted here. These thoughtful essays of close reading, and Wilbur’s “consistently brilliant” poetry (as aptly categorized in the editors’ introduction), are well accompanied by new work from David Dodd Lee, David Wagoner, Elton Glaser, Jon Loomis, Kimiko Hahn, and Sandra McPherson, among others.

Bruce Weigl, Annie Finch, Steve and Stuart Friebert, David Young, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carole Simmons Oles, and Stephen Tapscott contribute to “A Symposium” on poet Richard Wilbur, in anticipation of his 90^th birthday, with essays responding to particular Wilbur poems, reprinted here. These thoughtful essays of close reading, and Wilbur’s “consistently brilliant” poetry (as aptly categorized in the editors’ introduction), are well accompanied by new work from David Dodd Lee, David Wagoner, Elton Glaser, Jon Loomis, Kimiko Hahn, and Sandra McPherson, among others.

Translator Eric Torgersen introduces a long poem, “A Few Notes from the Elbholz,” by German poet Nicholas Born, who died of cancer at age 41 in 1979. Torgersen’s introduction is especially useful, as I assume most American readers, like me, will not know either the region of which Born writes in northern Germany on the border of East and West, or Born’s work. I liked Born’s poem immensely and admire Torgersen’s adept and fluid translation:

Walking through small-large HOMELINESS
(I can only call it)
broad meadows, the grass, frozen and sparkling
with frost, squeaks, the old forest
groans, and mist, rose-colored, rises
as if from camped herds

All if not made of ideas,
wet black branches of these scorned oaks
rummage the sky

Poems by Rick Bursky (“Cardiology”: “Seven years ago I bought a pair of crutches, / just in case”); Megan Snyder-Camp (“Confession”: “I used to pretend the ceiling was the floor.”); and John Gallaher (“The Bridge at Rest”: “The bridge is dreaming again.”) with their merging of the thing-ness of the world around us and abstract metaphysical concerns are successful and definitely in keeping with the Wilbur-ish focus of the issue.
[www.oberlin.edu/ocpress]