Devon Balwit: “The first simile comes from Kyle Okoke’s poem ‘Matthew 6:28’ in this month’s Poetry magazine. It is for all those called to be first responders.” (web)
Devon Balwit: “A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of rereading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which the news article quotes and from which this poem grows. In it, he writes that kitsch is ‘the absolute denial of shit, in both the literal and the figurative senses of the word; kitsch excludes everything from its purview which is essentially unacceptable in human existence.’ (web)
“The World Beneath” by Devon BalwitPosted by Rattle
Image: “All of Us” by Lou Storey. “The World Beneath” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, April 2023, and selected as the Editor’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the editor, Megan O’Reilly: “As the title indicates, the poet imagines Lou Storey’s colorful and complex piece as depicting a ‘precursor’ to our current world (‘the disappointed world’), a more pure and essential civilization, and after viewing it through that lens, I can’t see it any other way. I found the language here to be irresistibly interesting, effortless lines that so aptly describe a place that doesn’t quite exist but is simultaneously more real than reality. I was particularly struck by ‘the houses all speak / a language before language, / that tuneful hum above / the shapes in a board-book,’ which I interpret as an incredible expression of the primitive way we experience the world as pre-verbal children, and a passage that will stick in my mind for a long time.”
Devon Balwit: “Many days, I’ll have prepared the greatest lesson I can—bells and whistles, profundity and music—and my students won’t look up from their phones. Writing poetry helps me overcome that soul-crushing frustration. Through poetry, I look past the clock, the institutional drywall, and my thwarted ego. It lets me put my stamp on my experience and stand awhile outside of time.” (web)
Devon Balwit: “Both this week’s New York Review of Books and today’s New York Times contained scary stories of how workers are being surveilled at work—not just Amazon or UBER workers, but office workers and so-called professionals. This goes way beyond what websites they are visiting or how quickly they are keyboarding—eye motion, taking photos of their faces and posting them to the team, paying them based on some opaque productivity algorithm rather than a set salary. I read the NYRB article through, but abandoned the Times article when it told me that as I was reading, this type of software would be running, and I would receive my own productivity score at the end. This made me think of what it would be like to read poetry under such conditions.” (web)
Devon Balwit: “Amidst the continuing war, the threat to reproductive rights, ugly elections, and racially motivated shootings, perhaps a poem like this seems trivial—still—this story spoke to me and made me think of my own walk-on part on life’s great stage.” (web)
Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2021: Artist’s Choice
Image: “Easy Like Sunday Morning” by Shannon Jackson. “This Room” was written by Devon Balwit for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, November 2021, and selected as the Artist’s Choice. (PDF / JPG)
Comment from the artist, Shannon Jackson: “It was both thrilling and fascinating, and felt a great privilege indeed, to read through the poems inspired by my photograph. Each one impacted me for different reasons, but I chose ‘This Room’ for its personal resonance. Photography is most often a strictly felt experience for me—and usually what moves me to click the shutter is seeing, or feeling, something extraordinary in a seemingly ordinary moment. I felt this poem did much the same for me. Using the simple imagery and moments of a life, as well as the narrator’s personal confessions and musings, the poet speaks to the kind of love that is perhaps only possible at a certain age and stage of life, but which, given such duration, contains a multitude of layers and complexities. It left me pondering the extraordinariness in what might seem an otherwise ordinary love and life together.”
