Craig van Rooyen: “My teacher, Marvin Bell, once assured me that poetry can be absorbing for an entire lifetime. The longer I keep at it, the more I cherish the feeling of being absorbed — of being soaked up by the process of laying down words.”
Craig van Rooyen: “The fact is, we lose stuff all the time. If you’re lucky, it’s just your wallet. Tomorrow it could be your dog. At some point, it will be your mother. One of the jobs of a poet is to make music out of loss. That last sentence sounds pretty and is kind of philosophical, which is why it would never work in a poem. It’s also probably offensive to someone who has just experienced a big loss. A good poem, on the other hand, makes a sound that readers recognize as their own. I write to come closer to making that sound.”
Craig van Rooyen: “Since Aretha Franklin’s death on Wednesday, I’ve been watching the news cycle’s struggle to express what this woman meant to the country. Then a line from an old hymn came back to me. The title is adapted from a line in ‘O Holy Night,’ composed by Adolphe Adam and translated into English by John Sullivan Dwight, and the line ‘by the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept …’ is from Psalm 137:1.”
“How to Swim an Elegy” by Craig van RooyenPosted by Rattle
Craig van Rooyen
HOW TO SWIM AN ELEGY
Lo, let that night be desolate;
let no joyful voice come therein.
Let them curse it that curse the day,
who are ready to rouse up leviathan.
—Job 3:7-8
Craig van Rooyen: “I wrote this poem in response to the story of the mother orca who has been swimming for more than five days in the Puget Sound with the body of her dead calf balanced on her forehead and nose.”
Craig van Rooyen: “When Ollie, the bobcat, returned to the National Zoo in DC earlier this week after being on the lam for a few days, the zoo’s curator of great cats had this to say: ‘I think she wanted to go out, have a little bit of fun, see what it was like on the outside, then I think I’m ready to come back inside now.’”
Craig van Rooyen: “The fact is, we lose stuff all the time. If you’re lucky, it’s just your wallet. Tomorrow it could be your dog. At some point, it will be your mother. One of the jobs of a poet is to make music out of loss. That last sentence sounds pretty and is kind of philosophical, which is why it would never work in a poem. It’s also probably offensive to someone who has just experienced a big loss. A good poem, on the other hand, makes a sound that readers recognize as their own. I write to come closer to making that sound.”
Craig van Rooyen: “I was fascinated to read in an article by Amanda Petrusich in the New Yorker this week, that a privately-funded group with seed-money from Google will launch a moon rover named ‘MoonArk’ later this year. One of the cultural relics included on the MoonArk is a song: a three-minute-and-twenty-second recording of a nightingale, made in Bremen, Germany, in 1913, by Karl Reich. Engineers describe the MoonArk and its 6-ounce payload as ‘a deep human gift and gesture for the Moon.’ Sometimes human beings can still surprise and move me with their extravagance.”