Nachoem M. Wijnberg

By Nachoem M. Wijnberg Translated By David Colmer In poems selected from 20 collections and translated by David Colmer, the Dutch poet Nachoem M.

I once heard the poet Terrance Hayes respond to some variation of the familiar question about his relationship to formal poetry by saying, “If it has no form, it casts no shadow.” I took that to mean that every poem, regardless of whether it’s written in a received form like a sonnet or a villanelle, has some form; it’s how the text receives the world’s heat and casts a shape inside which one can find another weather.