Poem of the Week

Death Said

Emily Hoffman

I have many children; they

are all named loss.

That is also the name of my father

and my mother,

and all of my sisters and brothers.

But I am named death.

If you drew a map of my relations,

they would appear like the constellations

in the night sky.

And I am the brightest star, the North

Star,

and always at their center.

My favorite tree is the conifer,

or evergreen,

because of the smell of the resin

in the summer.

The cypress is beautiful as well.

Of the arts, I prefer the dance:

saraband, chaconne, bransle simple, bransle gay,

the pinwheel, the ring,

the horse and rider, the loom and shuttle,

lightning and the steeple—

The orchestra plays on a distant planet.

The others are always dancing;

the earth is ground

for their repeated form.

The Yale Review · “Death Said” by Emily Hoffman

describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of the poem.

I learned something about voice while writing this poem. Its “I” is not the lyric “I” but the “I” of a character voice. But the character is allegorical, if anthropomorphized, so the voice is also not an imitation of a set of speech patterns. Discerning with my inner ear what this “Death” would or wouldn’t say was a curious procedure. I can characterize the voice, retrospectively, as chilly, inclined to analytic judgment, baroque in its tastes but not in its diction; there is also something going on with pace, and explication. I found some stance in myself, and I tried to stay with that stance, and I called that stance Death.

Emily Hoffman is a writer and anthropologist. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.