National Poetry Month: Daniel Bosch

"Sonnet Nabokov"

(Daniel Bosch)

Pathetic, how the stiff wings' final reflex

Mimics

A death struggle; how the brittle thorax

Clicks

As the pin penetrates; how as the pin exits

Cracks

Riddle the chitin; how the aftershocks

Climax

In a foreleg's or an antenna's palsied metrics;

Facts

Carousel on a dark scrim of wax;

No music;

No music but a pulse make-believe makes

Relax.

"Sonnet Nabokov" by Daniel Bosch appeared in Poetry, November 2005. Bosch published translations of poems by Eugenio Montale and César Vallejo, and his set of four poems riffing on the films of Tom Hanks was awarded the first Boston Review Poetry Prize. In his 2013 essay "Liberate Poetry!" Bosch has also written on the difference between poetry as an art to be experienced rather than merely understood: "... a poem stood the test of time because one person after another stood up and spoke that poem aloud, and their speaking gave him or her pleasure, or terror, or grief, or wonder. Nowadays people stand for timed tests on a poem and are compelled to establish that they have 'understood' it, but they are rarely asked to account for what and how that poem made them feel physically, while and just after it was coordinating their breath and the movements of their lips and tongues."  His 2002 collection of poems is Crucible. (2002)