“More and more, I’m asking myself what kind of world I want to create through my art. . . . More and more, I’m writing against my first impulses.”
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest
I wrote the four poems in NER 47.3 called “Our Revels Now” between December 2025 and March 2026, during the ramp-up to, and eventual enactment of the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Metro Surge, which sent ICE agents into US cities. The poems are a direct response to that event, but they’re also responding to the broader onslaught of fascism. One of my favorite things about Prospero’s speech in The Tempest, quoted in the epigraph above, is its expansiveness—the way micro and macro levels coexist in a misty way: the speech is about the island the play is set upon, and also about the Globe Theater, and also about life on Earth. Similarly, the fascism I was writing about is not just confined to the Twin Cities or to the United States. It is surging internationally.
Prospero is a magician (aka artist/poet/maker) of reality. As I see it, the artist’s charge is to respond to reality, though the line between response and creation is often slight. More and more, I’m asking myself what kind of world I want to create through my art (we might also ask what kind of world we all end up creating through our lowered expectations and failure of imagination). More and more, I’m writing against my first impulses (which are often toward sweeping, doom-riddled statements; or if not quite so sweeping, at least soaked in grimness, disgust, or cynicism). I wrote “Our Revels Now (are ended)” first, and it carries some of that tone. But I didn’t want to live there for too long. So I wrote “Our Revels Now (are mended),” which helped me see the better ending. Then once I knew where we were headed, I wrote “blended” and “suspended” to serve as a progression between those two points.
So much of The Tempest is about a parent’s ability to create worlds for their children and then having to give that up in favor of children creating their own. This is where my sequence ultimately ends as well: with the child becoming the enchanter instead of the enchanted.
I may not know when things will get better, and it’s certainly not happening fast enough, but I’ve made the choice to not be the kind of magician that actively conjures endings rather than beginnings.
In terms of echoing Prospero’s speech on a formal level, my first impulse was to do an “erasure” (or what, in my practice, is more akin to a close reading) of those eleven lines. I remember highlighting a handful of words (maybe ended, solemn temples, cloud-capp’d towers, gorgeous, dissolved), but I couldn’t make anything interesting work. Then I thought about doing a terminal poem, maintaining the final words of each of those eleven lines and writing new lines into them, but that wasn’t enough to maintain the poignancy and beauty of the original. So finally I decided to maintain the length of the speech (eleven lines) and the approximate line lengths (ten lines of ten-eleven syllables followed by a final line of six), and to try to carry through my favorite words from the monologue whenever possible, ideally splitting them up across the four poems. But I found that most of the borrowed words stayed in “Our Revels Now (are ended)” and very little of the original language made it into the subsequent three poems. Once I knew what the sequence was going to do, it was able to carry itself without that scaffolding.
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions, 2018), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions, 2019), and Meltwater (Milkweed Editions, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Minnesota Book Award and the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and was a 2025 National Book Foundation Science + Literature selection. She was a 2020–2021 McKnight Writing Fellow and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize for her poem “Glacier.” Her fourth book, Cosmorama, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2028.