Don Share

Poetry Magazine April 2018

Poetry Magazine May 2018

Poetry Magazine January 2018

Christian Wiman

When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912, she began with an image: the Open Door. “May the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius!” For a century, the most important and enduring poets have walked through that door—William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens in its first years, Rae Armantrout and Kay Ryan in 2011. And at the same time, Poetry continues to discover the new voices who will be read a century from now. Poetry’s archives are incomparable, and to celebrate the magazine’s centennial, editors Don Share and Christian Wiman combed them to create a new kind of anthology, energized by the self-imposed limitation to one hundred poems. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive or definitive—or even to offer the most familiar works—they have assembled a collection of poems that, in their juxtaposition, echo across a century of poetry. Adrienne Rich appears alongside Charles Bukowski; poems by Isaac Rosenberg and Randall Jarrell on the two world wars flank a devastating Vietnam War poem by the lesser-known George Starbuck; August Kleinzahler’s “The Hereafter” precedes “Prufrock,” casting Eliot’s masterpiece in a new light. Short extracts from Poetry’s letters and criticism punctuate the verse selections, hinting at themes and threads and serving as guides, interlocutors, or dissenting voices. The resulting volume is an anthology like no other, a celebration of idiosyncrasy and invention, a vital monument to an institution that refuses to be static, and, most of all, a book that lovers of poetry will devour, debate, and keep close at hand.

One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of "Poetry" Magazine

The Open Door

What strikes a reader first encountering Don Share's work is the electric energy of his lines, their contemporary music and movement. Reading Wishbone, Share's third book, is akin to picking up the one clear station still transmitting, the frenetic static of the world replaced by a strong signal broadcast. Share's poems are contrapuntal ripostes to the Babel of the present, a voice not above the noise, but speaking from its midst in a self-possessed language that muscles a new way into meaning. The poems take place in America's backyards and byways, intensive care rooms and airports, haunted by fathers and Fathers, informed by philosophy, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and pop culture. One finds the poet there too, less his portrait than a self-deprecating likeness in the crowd (the Renaissance master in the corner of the canvas) decrying and defending, his "umbrella out and Cubs cap on . . . curiously Odyssean in the Loop," and always at the ready.

Wishbone

Don Shareâe(tm)s latest collection, Squandermania, is a book of poems that are slightly death-haunted and studded with references to marriage and fatherhood, geology and biology. It also revives a luminous, if complex, domesticity âe" not something most men take as their subject. Its focus is the frenzied energy and unreal depression of living in a world at war with terror, and ultimately with itself. Here the paralysis of long-standing grief and fear combine with strange energy of trying to get by from day to day: âeoeIf these are the woods, / I'm not out of them yet.âe There are poems about the intimate household terrors of marital relations and questions raised by children about what happens in the world, and others woven from a tapestry of literary interactions with sources that range from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy and Bacon's essay On Building to the âeoerotten kid theorem.âe Proverbs cease to reassure as the poet monitors news about global warning, war, and other self-inflicted disasters. What William James called the "trail of the human serpent" that runs over everything has at least (and perhaps finally) brought us to a world in which, as Share describes it, "anti-depressants make certain people violently depressed; / testing a safer system causes reactors to explode; / more freeways create more traffic; / the power grid dims, powerless; / [and] antibiotics make stronger germs."These poems of conscience and imagination record the struggle to continue living in a "glitterbound microcosm" amidst the impulses of maniacal squandering and ceaseless destruction.

Squandermania

A celebratory anthology of works from Poetry magazine includes pieces by Adrienne Rich, Charles Bukowski, Isaac Rosenberg and many more.

Fred Sasaki

Who reads poetry? We know that poets do, but what about the rest of us? When and why do we turn to verse? Seeking the answer, Poetry magazine since 2005 has published a column called “The View From Here,” which has invited readers “from outside the world of poetry” to describe what has drawn them to poetry. Over the years, the incredibly diverse set of contributors have included philosophers, journalists, musicians, and artists, as well as doctors and soldiers, an iron-worker, an anthropologist, and an economist. This collection brings together fifty compelling pieces, which are in turns surprising, provocative, touching, and funny. In one essay, musician Neko Case calls poetry “a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress.” In another, anthropologist Helen Fisher turns to poetry while researching the effects of love on the brain, “As other anthropologists have studied fossils, arrowheads, or pot shards to understand human thought, I studied poetry. . . . I wasn’t disappointed: everywhere poets have described the emotional fallout produced by the brain’s eruptions.” Even film critic Roger Ebert memorized the poetry of e. e. cummings, and the rapper Rhymefest attests here to the self-actualizing power of poems: “Words can create worlds, and I’ve discovered that poetry can not only be read but also lived out. My life is a poem.” Music critic Alex Ross tells us that he keeps a paperback of The Palm at the End of the Mind by Wallace Stevens on his desk next to other, more utilitarian books like a German dictionary, a King James Bible, and a Macintosh troubleshooting manual. Who Reads Poetry offers a truly unique and broad selection of perspectives and reflections, proving that poetry can be read by everyone. No matter what you’re seeking, you can find it within the lines of a poem.

Don Share

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