hey folks—my interview for the new collection, Be Radiant, was posted today.
thanks to aaron lelito for the fun conversation! we talk kerouac and ginsberg, burning adolescent poems, old english as mother tongue, scholarship and art, earth and epistemology, and the artistic process.
after my second collection went to the publisher i’ve turned my eye toward finishing a couple other book projects, so not as much poetry writing of late, but the dry spell is broken momentarily as the new verse review just put out my translation of a fragmentary versification of the ‘christ and the samaritan woman’ scene from the gospels worked up in old high german verse likely in the 9th century. the general dialect (alemanic) is the same as where one of my maternal ancestral lines is from.
the meter has internal rhyme, which felt very clunky to me at first, but it’s grown on me somewhat. it was weirder when i found out about b/c my years of learning about dead germanic languages tended to assert that any rhyme in this literature was an import or quirky experiment. but plenty of old high german is written in this way, and before latin started rhyming regularly. huh.
anyway, maybe you’ll enjoy it. 🙂
hey folks: it’s been a busy day, but i wanted to get this out before i retire for the evening. because today my second poetry collection, be radiant: a sonata pome, has been published by fernwood press!
this collection is everything from right before the pandemic to about a year ago, including some prints i’ve made for illustrations (was very pleased fernwood allowed me to get some visual work in the collection too). my copies are still en route, so i haven’t yet seen and held it, but today is the official release.
readers of this blog will see familiar material in a whole section of the collection devoted to the state natural area poems. 🙂
the blurbs (from very gracious fellow poets) are below, and you can order a copy here if you like and want to support my work. wishing everyone a peaceful night!
Faced by the specter of eco-catastrophe, what can we do to ward off anxiety and paralysis? We can contemplate and celebrate, as Jacob Riyeff does in this volume, that patch of the Earth which is our patrimony. Microscopically observed and lovingly curated, these lyrics articulate, layer by layer, a Midwestern landscape and time-scape radiant with the often-hidden beauty of life. Archaeology, geology, and botany fuse in a poetry that invites readers to unearth and reverence their own inheritance in our anything but common, Common Home.
–Laurentia Johns OSB, Stanbrook Abbey, England
Jacob Riyeff’s Be Radiant does precisely what it proclaims. Riyeff’s poetry comes in a variety of styles and forms, but each poem radiates with a sense of time and place. Riyeff, like the fungi he loves so much, is a poet rooted in place. His poems reflect this rootedness. Riyeff, as a scholar, is also rooted in the English language. He weds these two in poems like “The Ruin,” which is a translation of an Old English poem, and yet Riyeff places it before a burial mound in his home of Milwaukee. Consume these poems, and you will find yourself radiant as well.
–David Russell Mosely, poet and theologian
“Adaming creation beyond the Fall,” Jacob Riyeff-a Blakean hybrid of poet, mystic, and illuminator-brings us a new collection that visits “Paul the hermit in the desert”-but still has time to paddle his daughter out past the breakers under an afternoon sun. We see touches of earthy Kerouac, of nature-loving Wordsworth, all against a soaring, ancient spirituality. In “Spring Ephemerals,” he records, with telegraphic, haiku-like focus, intricate images of the damaged Wisconsin wilderness-dovetailing, later, with his translation of the Old English poem “The Ruin.” The sequence “Leads and Diggings” excavates his own family history through voice and narrative-and extends its core sample through the strata of geologic time. This poet is a hybrid of many pasts and worlds-in other words, an American original.
–Amit Majmudar, author of Twin A and What He Did in Solitary
hook lake bog is a soft bog in a glacial pocket in dane cty. as the wdnr website explains, the lake is almost completely filled in at this point, with bog, meadow, and tamarack wood along with floating sedge mats slowly making the spot land again. other habitats surrounding.
my brother and i parked alongside the road and walked into the site b/t two houses. a little encouragement from a 6yo playing in his backyard and a turn into a small wood and we came upon hook lake. the description was right; there was open water around but lots of sedge mats, some big enough to look like the mainland, some small floating islands. we choose a couple islands close to shore and hopped along some tussocks. when we got on—after a misstep that landed my brother’s leg into the bogmud above the knee (no waders here…)—we found to our delight that it was a serious quaking bog. the ground rippled beneath our feet, and when the other person jumped the whole mat undulated with land-waves. i’d been on quaking mats before, but not such dramatically obvious ones. a real treat. a whole little world of moss, sedge, and cranberry, getting on toward dusk.
first id of wild cranberry!
a.
making on the mat
a quaking
sea of moss towers
b.
lovely burgundy
spiralled leaves
quiet on the lake
a philosophical poem on the stance toward the beautiful from bernard durward’s 1882 poems:
today’s poem from bernard durward’s 1882 volume, poems, on topics most keenly appealing to me: time, death, and love.
“a tear” from 19th-century milwaukee poet bernard durward. read from his 1882 collection, poems.
today’s poem is set presumably at durward’s glen in caledonia township, columbia cty, wisconsin. from his 1882 self-printed book, poems: vol 1.
a macabre ending, and i assume “cicala” is supposed to be “cicada.” summer in the glen.
dappled things has just released their new issue, in which i have one original poem and three translations of old english galdru. while i do encourage any and all to buy a copy, thankfully, they’ve made mine accessible on the issue’s webpage as well. you can read the original here and the translations here.
this is a particularly satisfying publication for me because 1) the poem is about my extended family and our time together in different areas i have great fondness for, 2) the translations are of galdru (“charms”) which i think are some of the most interesting material remnants of early medieval culture, and 3) dappled things was where my first ever poem, a triolet about st. levan’s in cornwall, appeared almost a decade ago now. thanks, dappled things!
here’s that triolet, in case you have an interest:
st. levan’s well
we walked along a forest path
and drank from selevan’s well.
for a moment, we lived the past;
we walked along a forest path.
and tho’ we knew it wouldn’t last
as the spring flowed to the wind-swept swell,
we walked along a forest path
and drank from selevan’s well.
Jacob Riyeff 