Detail from the cover art of issue no. 244: Emilie Louise Gossiaux, London with Ribbon, 2022, ballpoint pen on paper.
Thereโs a thrill of eros to many summer poems. Like in those late-eighties teen moviesโDirty Dancing,ย Say Anything,ย One Crazy Summerโyou never know when youโll see some skin. And so it goes in our newย Summer issue. In Jessica Laserโs dreamy, autobiographical remembrance โKings,โ the poet recalls a drinking game she used to play in high school on the shore of Lake Michigan over summer vacations:
ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย ย โฆ You never knew
whether it would be strip or not, so you always
considered wearing layers. It was summer.
Sometimes youโd get pretty naked
but it wasnโt pushy. You could take off
one sock at a time.
Is that easygoing, one-sock-at-a-time feeling what defines the summer fling? Maybe thatโs just how objects appear in the rearview mirror; even the most operatic affairs can seem a little comical in retrospect. In his poem โArmed Cavalier,โ Richie Hofmann captures the hothouse kind of summer romance, when two lovers lock themselves away โfor a whole weekend / and not eat or drink.โ I love the wry look he casts over his shoulder at the end of these lines:
Stars, slow traffic,
the summer I wished you loved me
enough to kill me,
but not really.
If youโre curious to learn more about the story behind โArmed Cavalier,โ check out our online Making of a Poem seriesย featureย on his poem this month. Leopoldine Core, whose poem โEx-Stewardessโ appears in this issue,ย recently contributedย to the series, tooโand to my summer playlist. โI was listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, โDance IIโ by Discovery Zone, and this mournful song โBelieve Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,โ performed by Mia Farrow inย The Muppets Valentine Showย in 1974,โ Core recalls. Iโm listening to Farrowโsย Muppets Show rendition as I write this, and Coreโs right, sheย doesย sound โa little like Nico.โ
They say that on hot summer days in the nationโs capital, Richard Nixon would light a roaring blaze in the fireplace of his White House study, crank the air conditioning up to full blast, put on a little Mantovani, and gaze out the window at the Washington Monument. This might be one of the few things Nixon and I have in common; while my fellow Americans are out in droves worshipping the sun, I like nothing more than to retreat to my home office and, thermostat set to eco mode, leaf through poems about summer. In this issueโs pages, fellow seasonal voyeurs will find that Lewis Meyersโs โSummer Lettersโ delivers โthe black raspberryโs passion for a drop of sunlightโ without any need for sunscreen. โSummer Lettersโ marks the late Meyersโs return to our pages after more than a half century; his last poem in the magazine, โGoing to Chicago,โ was published in a 1965 issue, under the Johnson administration. Weโre grateful to Meyersโs widow, Diana, and to the poet Ellen Dorรฉ Watson, for sharing the poem with us.
Elsewhere, Sharon Olds muses on her quest to find a better language for sex in herย Art of Poetryย interview, and John Keene, in hisย Art of Fictionย interview, observes that Portuguese is better suited to that task than English. It should also be said that, although we tried our best, not every poem in this issue is about summer, sex, or summer sex. Youโll also find aย philosophical poem about catsย by the great Argentinian writer Mirta Rosenberg, translated from the Spanish by Yaki Setton and Sergio Waisman; anย excerptย from Imani Elizabeth Jacksonโs expansive minimalist sequence โFlagโ; and aย poetic noirย set in the Antwerp of Jonathan Thirkieldโs singular imagination. Bon voyage, and happy reading.
ย
Srikanth Reddy is theย Reviewโs poetry editor.