An American children’s book published in 1908 reminded me of a metaphysical figment conjured by Jean-Paul Sartre. The book is The Hole Book, written and illustrated by Peter Newell. A friend who collects vintage children’s books told me about it. The verse is serviceable doggerel, rhythmically regular enough to be memorized and recited by kids. The premise is simple and clever and the book would never be published today. Here are the opening verses:  “Tom Potts was fooling with a gun (Such follies should not be), When—bang! the pesky thing went off Most unexpectedly!   “Tom didn’t know ’twas loaded, and It scared him ’most to death— He tumbled flat upon the floor And fairly gasped for breath.   “The bullet smashed a fine French clock (The clock had just struck three), Then made a hole clean through the wall, As you can plainly see.”   We follow the path of the bullet through the remainder of the book as it passes through a boiler, a rope holding a swing, an aquarium, a Dutchman’s pipe, a sack of grain and a watermelon, among other things. Not a soul is wounded by the stray bullet. Newell is no poet but he’s a marvelous illustrator. My sons would have loved this book.   The professor who taught the eighteenth-century English novel and introduced me to Smollett and Sterne had a sense of humor that once would have been described as “bawdy.” She was enormously funny and insisted that literature is written to be enjoyed. It’s a lesson that has stuck with me for more than half a century. Something that came up in class reminded Donna of Sartre’s concept of “the hole.” She giggled through her brief explanation drawn from To Freedom Condemned: A Guide to His Philosophy (trans. Justus Streller, 1960):   “The hole is something which longs to be filled. The small child is drawn as if by magic to holes. He can not restrain himself from putting in his finger or his whole arm. He makes a symbolic sacrifice of his body to cause the void to disappear and a plenitude of being to exist. The fundamental tendency of human beings to stop up holes persists throughout life, symbolically and in reality,” and so forth in unapologetically Gallic silliness.

There is no greater remedy for helplessness than helping someone else, no greater salve for sorrow than according gladness to another. What makes life livable despite the cruelties of chance — the accident, the wildfire, the random intracellular mutation — are these little acts of mercy, of tenderness, the small clear voice rising over the cacophony of the quarrelsome, over the complaint choir of the cynics, to insist again and again that the world is beautiful and full of kindness. It makes all the difference in a day, in a life, to hear that voice, all the more to be… read article

It’s not fair to think of our dead as “The Dead,” a demographic category that erases all distinctions but absence. My brother (d. 2024) and Jane Greer, the North Dakota poet who died this week, would have had little in common in life. Ken had no use for poetry and he framed paintings and photographs for a living. He was an artist manqué and I knew him all his life. Jane I knew only recently from her poems and the emails we exchanged. Each was a notable individual, distinct, not a statistic, worthy of memory. Memory salvages both from oblivion. In some of us, the elegiac impulse is powerful. By my count, the Summer issue of New Verse Review 2.3 contains at least ten poems memorializing or addressed to those who have died. Here is Victoria Moul’s “I.m. Andrew, October 2024”:  “Cozen me then, my restive Lord: The candles in the church blow out After only an hour or more. I have forgotten now which saint Was in which niche and in what stand I set my candle, when I paid A few coins, not quite the allotted price, Or even whom I named Sidelong while wondering too Whether the man who knelt Across from me was married; how We might afford that flat; or if I should buy leeks or aubergine. Attention is So short and slight a thing, a flame Snuffed as soon as lit, but all the same Someone, I think, heard the name I named.”   Moul adds a footnote: “This poem is in memory of Andrew Hurley, who died in Paris on 11th October 2024. Andrew’s encyclopaedic knowledge of, and unrelenting enthusiasm for French poetry are much missed by all who knew him.” She speaks for me: “the name I named.” John Talbot contributes “Epitaph of Menophilos” to New Verse Review:   “Such days as were my lot I passed in joy Buoyed in the quickening flux of poetry. Bacchus was never very far away, Or Aphrodite either. As to friends: Not one of them can tell of an offense I ever did them. I am Menophilos, A son of Asia, till I left to settle Far from home in the sundown hills of Italy. Here I held my ground, and now am held Among the dead. I never did grow old.”   Together, Moul and Talbot edited C. H. Sisson Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). Here is Sisson’s “The Absence” (God Bless Karl Marx!, Carcanet, 1987):   “How can it be that you are gone from me, Everyone in the world? Yet it is so, The distance grows and yet I do not move. Is it I streaming away and, if so, where? And how do I travel from all equally Yet not recede from where I stand pat In the daily house or in the daily garden Or where I travel on the motor-way? Good-bye, good-bye all, I call out. The answer that comes back is always fainter; In the end those to whom one cannot speak Cannot be heard, and that is my condition. Soon there will be only wind and waves, Trees talking among themselves, a chuchotement, I there as dust, and if I do not reach The outer shell of the world, still I may Enter into the substance of a leaf.”   Chuchotement: French for “whisper.”

Ceramics came into my life the way the bird divinations had a year earlier — suddenly, mysteriously, as a coping mechanism for the confusions and cataclysms of living. I was reeling from a shattering collision with one of life’s most banal and brutal truths — that broken people break people — and I needed to make, to do the work of unbreaking, in order to feel whole again; I needed something to anchor me to the ongoingness of being alive, to the plasticity of being necessary for turning trauma into self-transcendence. A daily creative practice is a consecration of the… read article

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