Thanks, Jeff, for this thread, which I have only had time to read through thoroughly now and have enjoyed immensely. Some great poems posted and a very high level of commentary. In particular, thanks for the wonderful portrait you have given us of Josh and also for your comments on his extraordinary villanelle.
I will return to this thread with fuller comments later, I hope, but in the meantime here's one by Anthony Hecht with the almost too apt title, "Despair", which I was surprised to see hadn't yet been quoted:
Quote:
Sadness. The moist gray shawls of drifting sea-fog,
Salting scrub pine, drenching the cranberry bogs,
Erasing all but foreground, making a ghost
Of anyone who walks softly away;
And the faint, penitent psalmody of the ocean.
Gloom. It appears among the winter mountains
On rainy days. Or the tiled walls of the subway
In caged and aging light, in the steel scream
And echoing vault of the departing train,
The vacant platform, the yellow destitute silence.
But despair is another matter. Midafternoon
Washes the worn bank of a dry arroyo,
Its ocher crevices, unrelieved rusts,
Where a startled lizard pauses, nervous, exposed
To the full glare of relentless marigold sunshine.
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This is one by someone who has clearly been there. And the depiction of "despair" as a geographical place is a very telling one. It's also interesting that in a volume entitled
The Darkness and the Light, he shows the light as being as potentially terrible as the darkness here.