John Poch

John Poch is the author of four poetry collections, the newest of which, Fix Quiet (2015, St. Augustine’s Press), won the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

My first connection with his poetry was through the CD collection Poetry on Record which brings together recordings of 98 different poets reading their own work — including such early voices as Tennyson, Whitman, Yeats and Frost — and contemporary poets such as Li-Young Lee and Carolyn Forché. Poch’s recording, from 2004, has him reading his poem “Simon Peter” which originally appeared in the magazine, America.

He is the founding editor of the journal 32 Poems, and teaches at Texas Tech University. The following poem first appeared in Blackbird.

John's Christ

The auctioneer commits his little gaffe
when his helpers lift the latch-hook tapestry
of Leonardo’s Christian masterpiece:
The Large Supper. The waiting bidders laugh.

And though the latest spiritual fad has raptured
a populace of novel novel-lovers,
DaVinci’s purpose is better left to others.
But here at our local auction I am captured,

wanting to lean, like John, away from the master,
get some perspective on His hands, the gist
of one opening, one closing, not a fist,
His arms apart, beholding, Jesus’ gesture—

over his empty plate and the rag-tag cast—
preparing for the word, large, or last.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection, Conspiracy of Light: Poems Inspired by the Legacy of C.S. Lewis, is available from Wipf & Stock as is his earlier award-winning collection, Poiema.

Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia to Chinese parents; as political refugees they eventually made it to the United States in 1964, where they settled. His debut poetry collection, Rose (1986), won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from New York University. In 2006 Breaking the Alabaster Jar, a collection of interviews, was published.

Many of Li-Young's poems are flavoured with memories of being:
-----"a child at mid-century
-----following your parents from burning
-----village to cities on fire to a country at war
-----with itself and anyone
-----who looks like you..."
----------("After the Pyre")
and those of his father, a Presbyterian minister,
-----"In the room with the shut curtains, of course.
-----He's talking to God again, who plays
-----hide and seek among His names..."
----------("God Seeks a Destiny")

In 2012, I attended an interview with Li-Young Lee at the Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College. He said, that his real desire is not to be a poet, but to make contact with the divine. His poems "need a word from God [but] sometimes they are just me talking." Lee also described speech as the "out-going breath", and said, "life is in the in-going breath". "A poem," he said, "is a musical score for the dying breath." The following poem is from his fourth poetry book, Behind My Eyes (Norton, 2008), as are the poems referenced above.

Descended from Dreamers

And what did I learn, a child, on the Sabbath?
A father is bound to kill his favorite son,
and to his father's cherishing
the beloved answers Yes.

The rest of the week, I hid from my father,
grateful I was not prized. But how deserted
he looked, with no son who pleased him.

And what else did I learn?
That light is born of dark to usurp its ancient rank.
And when a pharaoh dreams of ears of wheat
or grazing cows, it means
he's seen the shapes of the oncoming years.

The rest of my life I wondered: Are there dreams
that help us to understand the past? Or

is any looking back a waste of time,
the whole of it a too finely woven
net of innumerable conditions,
causes, effects, countereffects, impossible
to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

Where's Joseph when you need him?
Did Jacob, his father, understand
the dream of the ladder? Or did his enduring
its mystery make him richer?

**

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in a which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Poiema (Wipf & Stock) and So The Moon Would Not Be Swallowed (Rubicon Press). They are both available at: www.dsmartin.ca