Abram: Hello, I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: And today, I am so pleased that we are going to closely read and discuss a poem by Alex Dimitrov, titled “Winter Solstice”. Abram: Before we read that poem, though, we have one exciting announcement for you, which is that on January 31st, We'll be doing a live performance of Poetry for All, which anyone can watch. You can live stream and see it. So if you want to see what we actually look like, as we talk about poems, we're going to be on a stage talking with the incredible poet, Marilyn Nelson, about her poetry on January 31st at noon Eastern. And you can tune in and see us do it. Joanne: Yeah. And we'll be sharing things on social media as well in the days leading up to that event. Abram: But before that. It is the winter. It is December, and we're going to turn to a winter poem by Alex Dimitrov. Alex Dimitrov is the author of four books of poetry. He's taught all over the place. Princeton, Columbia, and elsewhere. And he's currently writer-in-residence at New York University. Among the many amazing things that he has done, Alex Dimitrov is also writing the endless poem, “Love” in real time on Twitter, adding one tweet a day. We've talked before on this podcast about how social media is changing the whole landscape of poetry. And this is just one sort of radical example of that. An endless poem that gets new lines added every day on Twitter. But today we're not talking about that poem. That poem is called “Love”. Today, we're talking about darkness. We're talking about the longest night of the year. Joanne, could you read for us Alex Dimitrov’s poem, “Winter Solstice”? Joanne: Yes, with pleasure. [to read this poem, click here] Abram: It's such a good poem. Joanne: I love everything by Alex Dimitrov. What a wonderful poet. This is from a collection titled Love and Other Poems. Every single poem is so good that it's difficult to choose which one to read, but I'm glad we chose this one. Abram: Let's talk a little bit about how we chose this one. Joanne: Yeah, it took a while. It took a while. Uh, you know, Abram and I go back and forth. It's like a tennis game, uh, on how we. select poems for this podcast. Sometimes you pick one, Abram, sometimes I pick one. And over the past several days, we've had a little bit of a cage fight, uh, you know, that almost led to an episode on Tennyson. So basically I was feeling a lot of despair and a lot of hopelessness about the state of things in the world. I was not even able to comprehend. Doing a podcast. I was just not there emotionally and Abram was threatening that if I didn't choose an alternative, we would do an episode on Alfred Lord Tennyson. Abram: I, in fact, I sent Joanne a countdown clock, uh, to Tennyson. And it really inspired you. It really got you moving, uh, looking through a lot of poems. Joanne: Yeah. If anyone wants to motivate me, threaten me with Tennyson, that'll do the trick. So I was really, really struggling to imagine what kind of poem we could read. In a time when things seem very, very bleak and, you know, I was just grappling with my own feelings and how to stave off that hopelessness. And then I remembered this idea that a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, Jonathan Lear, He has this concept of radical hope. That's his concept. The word radical of course comes from the Latin word radix or root. And so to be radical is to transform at the level of the root, right? Like a fundamental transformation, uh, of the self or of an institution or a cause. And so Jonathan Lear, he said, he has this quote and I think about it a lot. especially when I'm feeling some despair. He says that what makes radical hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends our current ability to understand what it is. So that means a radical hope demands flexibility. openness, and what Jonathan Lear describes as imaginative excellence. So that idea of radical hope led me back to this wonderful book by Alex Dimitrov. I read this book last year. I've thought about it a lot of times since. I admire that he's The way it reaches out to the reader, the way it situates the speaker of the poems in a particular place and time, the way that every poem feels like an attempt to stave off death and despair, even while acknowledging death and despair. That it's always there, that everything is transient and impermanent, and that there's a possibility that all of us might be forgotten and even so the poems exist and thrive. Anyway, I'm rambling, but boy, that's, that's what I bring to this poem and all of his poems and why I love his work so much. Abram: Well, let's dive right into it, because this is a poem that almost asks you to dwell with each line as it unfolds. And we could begin with the title with Winter Solstice. So it's a poem about the longest night of the year, which is, of course, a time to think about all of those things, the hardness, the darkness, the misery. I mean, the word misery comes up in this poem, right? Yeah. And so it is that time and yet it is also the time. of turning. It's time. This is the longest night of the year and the next night is going to be shorter. Uh, it's a time of transition. And so I think it is perfectly poised at what you call this, this moment of radical hope towards something. It doesn't even know what it is, but also remembering something that it longs to hold onto. So in many ways, I find this poem really remarkable for having all of that balance held at the point of the longest night of the year. Joanne: You know exactly what date this is, December 21st, right? If there's something predictable and known from the title, and that's something Alex Dimitrov does all the time, you know, just look at the table of contents and you'll see he has poems titled 1969. Summer solstice, full moon, poem written in a cab, you know, they, they feel very simple and casual, but then in each instance, Dimitrov really expands and creates surprises from the situation he puts the reader in, you know? Abram: The simplicity of the title lends itself to the first line. Again, it's the longest night of the year. I think as we'll see, as we kind of walk through this poem, so much of this poem is actually about. And the word again at the very beginning shows that time comes and goes, wanes, waxes. Here we are again, there's cycles to this time. And this is a particular moment of it. And so we, again, it's, it's, it's gesturing towards that sense of turn. Again, we're here, but it's not there. The only place we're going to be. Joanne: That's nice. Yeah. And then from there, a very simple first line, first sentence, the city closer to a replica of movie sets. Another simple poetic line as a sentence. What do you notice there? How does he narrow our focus? Abram: Well, this. Brings to mind for me this whole long tradition of already in the second line of the poem, the flaneur or the city walker, the person who is out at night noticing things and to have the city kind of look like a replica of movie sets means that there's a kind of artificiality, uh, make believe to it all a kind of, is this really the real world is all these lights are hung all these places. It's almost as though everyone is putting on a performance and he is walking through it and everything. Is staged. I mean, later you get this sense of the stage lights on these three pigeons huddled together later, another stage light casts out and you see this couple together in a diner. And so it's sort of like he's walking through and everything is a kind of performance or a stage. Uh, and he's in the midst of it. Joanne: I love that because, you know, of course, the speaker of this poem is alone in this walking that you describe. Uh, he's making these observations. And, you know, again, it's December 21st. So anyone who's lived in a big city like New York City, you know that a lot of people leave town, right? So this is a time of anticipation for the holidays, but it can also be a very lonely time for the people who maybe stay in the city or are alone themselves, or it's a height, you get a sort of a heightened sensitivity when you're walking alone in the city. And that's the wonderful tradition of the Flaneur. I mean, it's a very old tradition. It originates in the 1800s in Paris. And it's, it's a very modern concept, this notion that you would be able as a modern person to have modern streets to walk on in a planned city, right, that you would be able to walk in a straight line in a safe way. on modern city streets and have the leisure time to do it and have the leisure time to notice things and then bundle those disparate things together in a poem and see how they hang together, you know? So I feel like this is very much a Flinner poem in that way. And, you know, earlier, before we started recording, you were talking about that very ancient idea, Horace's great quote, ut pictura poesis, you know, as in painting, so too with poetry, uh, that, that poetry is like painting. And so in this case, it's like the city is providing you with that. The poem, you know, all of the visual stimuli of the city, as sad as it might be, as strange or problematic as it might be, is providing the poem and the poet is sort of gathering and arranging these very rich materials, you know? Abram: And the next few lines Give us not just a set of observations, but also a kind of philosophical reflection on the nature of time and measurement and what can and cannot be measured. And so, uh, as he's wandering through this movie set-like scene, he says, it's garish streets announcing what cannot be measured. Silence, who we were in mirrors, neon in the gray. What do you notice about those lines? Joanne: Oh, I love those so much. I've been thinking about them for days. Okay, uh, the streets are garish. It goes back to that idea of the, uh, the city as a kind of a replica of a movie set. Something garish about those lights. Announcing what cannot be measured. What a strange thing to say. And then look at the list. Silence? That's the first one. Who we were in mirrors, that's really interesting. And then the third thing is neon and gray. So silence, what a big thing for me to just rest on for a minute and try to understand what that is. But then that second one is very specific and individual. To the poetic speaker and another person who we were in mirrors. Now that suggests that whoever the we is perhaps isn't a we anymore. It also suggests that that passing past a mirror, it's come and gone. Right? So again, there's that transience. There's that passage of time. There's that sense of aloneness, uh, in a, in a big crowded city. Right? And then neon in the gray. I love that because when I think of neon lights, I think of so bright, so sharp and so clear, but maybe this is. Kind of a foggy or misty night, an overcast night. And maybe the brilliance of that neon against the gray isn't quite as spectacular as it could be if the night sky were deep blue or jet black. You know? Abram: Well, it's another way to think about painting. In poetry. I don't always love that trope because I think poetry is a different art form for a reason. It's not trying to be painting, but it is in a certain sense, often giving us these pictures in our mind that we can hold on to very carefully and see very particularly. And neon in the gray is a certain way of saying selection, right? Like this, this appears out of murkiness. This appears out of murkiness. And what follows the phrase neon in the gray are a series of sort of brilliant, short pictures. So the immediate next line is three pigeons huddling under bar light. And I love the way that the garishness announces what it is. And in a certain sense, trying to overcome. Joanne: And then, and then it's almost like you can follow the eye of the poetic speaker. A couple argues in a diner while a server brings their check. It's unclear what history has done to them or even the last five minutes. And I can. Easily imagine the poetic speaker looking at that couple while the speaker is on the outside of the diner, the couples on the inside. And, you know, the speaker can't know what, what they're arguing about, but you can tell we aren't right from people's facial expressions, their body language, that something's wrong. And there's that imagining and I love, it's unclear what history has done to them or even the last five minutes. And that's the moment. Where the poem treats time like an elastic band, right? He stretches time from the grandiosity of history to the tininess of the last five minutes. Abram: And that leads to his overall sort of big buried question, which is both a kind of toss off and a kind of deep sort of philosophical wondering. Besides, who knows what to do with love? Joanne: Yeah. Abram: I love that. Sort of tossed in the middle. You just had, you just had pigeons, you just had this couple, and then this enormous question sort of just tucked into the middle of this poem. Joanne: It feels like in the middle of the poem, he's just about given up. There's a sense of futility there. Right. And then he says, it may not make it through one cigarette. Meaning love may not make it through one cigarette. And just a few, something to say, and I think you and I were agreeing on this. That couple in the window of the diner reminded both of us so much of the paintings of Edward Hopper. We mentioned painting earlier, and I just want to mention it again. Because I don't know whether Alex Dimitrov had Hopper on his mind or not, but I certainly did, as I thought about, uh, that couple and, you know, thinking about those paintings and the, the luncheonettes of the 1930s in New York City, that's, again, that sense of, uh, extreme loneliness and quietude. But again, he kind of gets retro again in this line, it may not make it through one cigarette. I can't remember the last time I watched somebody smoke a cigarette, an actual cigarette. It feels like such a retro thing to do now. Right. But I feel like again, to think about that slow burn, right. And it takes a few minutes and then it's gone. Abram: And also, you know, it's all these night scenes. And so a cigarette glowing at night is different than a cigarette in the day. And so it comes to mind as a unit of measure, much more readily at this longest night of the year. And then he goes on and it's enough to kill you. How dark it is, how cold we seem, even in our own misery. And then there's the last two lines, but let me just pause right there. What do you see happening as he turns towards the end of this poem? Joanne: It's enough, this awareness, this realization he just had about love, that it's transient, we don't know what to do with it, it's full of pain, it's full of suffering, when it ends, it makes us feel lonely. It's enough to kill you, how dark it is, how cold we seem, even in our own misery, seems like he's talking about love there, but it could also be that darkness of the winter solstice. Abram: Yeah. And we've talked many times in this podcast about how and why poems continue, where, where, what a poem would do if it ended earlier. And you can imagine a version of this poem that ended there on that word, and it's enough to kill you how dark it is, how cold we seem, even in our own misery. Boom. And done. And that's one kind of poem. I don't think it's as good a poem as the poem that we've got, but it would be a, it would be a kind of complete poem unto itself, but it doesn't end there. And this is the turn. And this is the sense of winter solstice as a kind of turning moment. This is an incredible ending to me. So we just end with that word misery, how cold we seem, even in our own misery, all while knowing we will miss this. We will miss this when it ends. Suddenly the long night is not just a set of miseries. It's a set of possibilities. It's, it's like these, these scenes that the night only makes possible. The longest night of the year. There's something that the day can't do that the night does do. And actually it actually reminds me of, you know, there's all these happiness studies and, you know, it's like the Norwegians are always the happiest people in the world or whatever. But I once saw a kind of follow up to that, and they said, Well, how are the Norwegians so happy that they have these endless long nights and they're super cold? And how could they possibly be happy? And what was interesting was the sort of survey results or whatever the results of this study were that the Norwegians Look forward to and highlight what the winter and the night makes possible. That's not possible in the day. And in the summer, if you're able to look into what's possible, even in the darkest and coldest nights, it's not possible in the daytime, then what we think of as a kind of misery. I think of Norwegian's nights as possibly a form of misery they think of as a form of possibility. Joanne: You know, we talk about turns in poems and, you know, quite often it might sound like just a literary device, but what you're describing is a way that the cosmos is reminding us to turn, whether it's turning inward or turning toward hope or preparing for a different kind of reality for a few months. Right. Cool. Abram: Yeah, I think that's right. And the other thing I find remarkable about this ending, so much of this poem reminds me of those winter Sundays by Robert Hayden. And I don't know if he was thinking about that poem at all or not, but that poem, those winter Sundays begins with the same sense of againness that poem begins Sundays to my father woke up. Right? So the, this sense of again and again and again, but that poem ends with, what did I know? What did I know of love's austere and lonely offices? And here we get that same sense of repetition, even almost the same rhythm. We will miss this. We will miss this when it ends. Joanne: Uh, of course it refers literally to the winter solstice, that there's something beautiful about it. It's about mortality. When it ends, when our lives end, at the end of all of this, we will miss even this. Even this difficulty, even this isolation, even, the, the, the frustration of love that might be, uh, lost. Right and I think for me, that's why I wanted to. discuss this poem because where it lands, it's so authoritative. We will miss this when it ends. Do you hear that trochaic, you know, that beat, we will miss this when it ends. And it's a way for me to remember. you know, before we started recording, I was talking about, you know, how sober and emotional poets can be, and we can be a rather sober lot. But, uh, but I think that there is some solace and even occasionally, Productivity and joy that can come from confronting the most difficult things. That's sort of a, a through line to so many of his poems and perhaps why, I mean, I don't know, Alex Dimitrov, I can't presume, but perhaps that's why that poem titled Love is a is a poem that he refuses to finish because he's insisting on, uh, on, on anchoring onto that, that concept and that feeling, despite all the difficulty and darkness. So with all that we've said, uh, Abram, will you read this poem again? Abram: Absolutely. [poem] Joanne: What a great reading. Thank you, and thank you to Copper Canyon Press for granting us permission to read this poem today. To learn more about Alex Dimitrov, you can visit our website at https://poetryforall.fireside.fm/ And as if you didn't get it from the whole podcast, uh, once again, I will strongly encourage you to get Alex Dimitrov's book titled Love and Other Poems published by Copper Canyon Press and follow him on Twitter so that you can read that long poem titled Love. Abram: And please remember to subscribe to Poetry For All wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Joanne: Thank you for listening. Abram: Thank you.