David Caplan

No tide pools, no couples on the beach
where my parents met,

only whitecaps bowing and lifting,
until each blurs into itself.

[...]

This week’s poem, “God Knows English” by David Caplan, is complemented by a photograph by Noah Rabinowitz. The poem and photo are part of a series by Caplan called “Observances,” which appeared in our Spring 2012 issue on the state of American Poetry.

Crucifixes crowbarred from the apses
left their shadows, faint or imagined:
a false translation, like the Bibles

missionaries stacked along the driveway.

[...]

The need to be heard does not change,
the need to get close. Again we tear
our request, scatter it across the grave.

[...]

On the train home, a Bluetooth in his ear,
he listens to a lecture on fear and love,
the four kinds, lower and higher.

[...]

Across Eastern Parkway the camera
recognized his walk,
neither absent-minded nor harried.

[...]

Each morning I skim the books they study,
a few minutes to remember that anger

[...]

The American poetry scene has not gone back to the days of the midcentury generation—nor should it. It also largely avoids the least attractive development that claimed the intervening years, when the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry returned as farce.

In insult verse, the accuracy of the charge matters less than its confident presentation. To be assertive is to be right; to be memorable is to win.

As if new Jersey were Babylon, an Argentine
and an Israeli argue in Aramaic, Styrofoam cups
of instant coffee warm in their hands,

[...]

You know how certain singers turn words
into sounds, keeping only the tune?

[...]

The sudden quiet of a room emptied of noise.
Only the Hebrew, a stone on his tongue.

[...]

No mirrors, not even above the sink,
only the study hall’s glass doors
repeating their mistake,

[...]

Like scribes, they lean closer, watching
the old men he blessed for long life stand and listen.

[...]

Late Saturday afternoon, late winter,
they sway and clap, not wanting

to let the chorus go, and when their teacher asks,
What are you, dead?

[...]

Unlike the men there, I wore a yarmulke. I explained my situation to the waiter behind the counter, asking if I could take a bottle of water and pay him back the next day. He firmly said no.

Garlands of trinitarias shade an artist’s studio,
plainer than their synagogue halfway down the hill,
its ceiling painted with stars, a glass chandelier.

[...]

The image of a nineteenth-century military man, Sherman, bearded and with a haunted stare, evokes patriotism’s fearful complexities.

While different notions of the relation of art and life inspire contemporary memoirs and poetry, Shapiro’s poetry uneasily investigates this division.

While the American military conducted a war promoted in metaphysical terms—“a war against terror”—two occasions invited self-reflection. An election approached, followed by a date of more specialized interest: the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass.

Contemporary metrical verse surprises many learned readers simply by existing. For all the reasons that Paul Fussell summarizes and for a great number more, much of the liveliest recent scholarship concludes that literary and cultural history dooms this poetry to failure, irrelevance, or political and aesthetic conservatism.