The Best American Poetry

Monday @ KGB: Nin Andrews & Sally Ashton

The KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series

Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone

Presents . . .

Nin Andrews & Sally Ashton

Monday, March 30 @ 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE

Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art (www.dmqreview.com). She is the author of These Metallic Days, published by Mainstreet Rag. Her prose poem collection, Her Name Is Juanita, is forthcoming from Kore Press later this year. Poetry and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Poet Lore, Parthenon West Review, failbetter.com, and Linebreak. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area where she teaches poetry; she also teaches freshman composition at San José State University.

 

Nin Andrews is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum.  She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux.  Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.

KGB Bar: 85 East 4th Street (btwn. Bowery & 2nd Ave) NYC 10003

Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone

Presents . . .

Nin Andrews & Sally Ashton

Monday, March 30 @ 7:30 PM

Admission is FREE

Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art (www.dmqreview.com). She is the author of These Metallic Days, published by Mainstreet Rag. Her prose poem collection, Her Name Is Juanita, is forthcoming from Kore Press later this year. Poetry and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Poet Lore, Parthenon West Review, failbetter.com, and Linebreak. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area where she teaches poetry; she also teaches freshman composition at San José State University.

 

Nin Andrews is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum.  She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux.  Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.

KGB Bar: 85 East 4th Street (btwn. Bowery & 2nd Ave) NYC 10003

Sally Ashton is Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, an online journal featuring poetry and art (www.dmqreview.com). She is the author of These Metallic Days, published by Mainstreet Rag. Her prose poem collection, Her Name Is Juanita, is forthcoming from Kore Press later this year. Poetry and reviews have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Sentence: a journal of prose poetics, Poet Lore, Parthenon West Review, failbetter.com, and Linebreak. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area where she teaches poetry; she also teaches freshman composition at San José State University.

 

Nin Andrews is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum.  She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux.  Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

For the complete KGB spring lineup, click here.

KGB Bar: 85 East 4th Street (btwn. Bowery & 2nd Ave) NYC 10003

Ed Ochester Presents Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

LYRAE VAN CLIEF-STEFANON “Lyrae was a winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (the Pitt Poetry Series is one of three publishers of the Cave Canem prizewinners). Her first book, Black Swan, was well-reviewed and sold well. Her new book, ]Open Interval[ is amazing. I heard Lyrae present some of those longer, new poems in a summer garden reading, and it was one of those events where you could hear the crowd's intake of breath, and then silence, and then huge applause.” —Ed Ochester

Transit of Venus

The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb

because other words do not sound like conversation.

In the kitchen, always, one who’s just discovered

beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.

He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;

in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb

in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

“Transit of Venus” from ]Open Interval[$14.95 • 96 pp. © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press
 Also by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon from the Pitt Poetry Series: Black Swan $12.95
American Poetry Now features poems by many poets from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Freud Quiz # 21

Freud Quiz # 21
This is the first sentence of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents:
(a) “It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement – that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”
(b) “Two scenes from Shakespeare, one from a comedy and the other from a tragedy, have lately given me occasion for setting and solving a little problem.”
(c) “In my Traumdeutung I made a statement concerning one of the findings of my analytic work which I did not then understand.”
(d) “The word ‘No’ does not seem to exist for a dream.”
(e) “Anyone who has at any time had occasion to enquire from the literature of aesthetics and psychology what light can be thrown on the nature of jokes  and on the position they occupy will probably have to admit that jokes have not received nearly as much philosophical consideration as they deserve in view of the part they play in our mental life.”

Note: The opening lines of three other essays by Freud are also given here.

-- DL

Mark Eleveld, Guest Blogger March 29-April 4

This week we welcome Mark Eleveld as our guest blogger.   Eleveld is the editor of the best-selling poetry anthologies, 'The Spoken Word Revolution' & 'Redux' (Sourcebooks Publishing). He is a high school English teacher, co-owner of EM Press (em-press.com) and, most recently, producer of 'Slam the Radio', a poetry radio show on Sirius/XM Satellite Radio, channel 117/163.  Welcome, Mark.

In other news:

 In honor of National Poetry Month:  One month of poets' tattoos over at Tattoosday! 

Coming Up at The New School (66 West 12th Street, Room 510):

Monday, April 6, 6:30 PM David Lehman will lecture on W. H. Auden's poetry  at 6:30 PM. To prepare, read the Auden selections in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Among the poems Lehman will address are "Musee des Beaux Arts," "September 1, 1939," "In Memory of W. B. Yeats," and "Under Which Lyre."

Tuesday, April 7, 6:30 PM  Paul Violi will read his poems and converse with David Lehman.

Hard Times, part eleven (by Mitch Sisskind)

When Annika got back into town, she and I had a serious talk about my backyard cemetery project.

ed note: If you want to catch up on Mitch Sisskind's Hard Times project, you can view all previous reports here.

which anglican theologian are you? a facebook quiz [by Amy Lemmon]

Amy took Which Anglican Theologian are You? quiz and the result is R. S. Thomas
Scripture, tradition, and reason are best articulated poetically. Poetry, which you write in your free time, is bound up with the ecstasies and the toils, the hopes and the pains of existence. Yet, the sacrament has an existential simplicity that makes it preferable in some ways to the complexities of the word. Nonetheless, liturgy is our finest language, and shapes how you see yourself and the outside world. You find nature to be especially beautiful, and believe that the environment should be given greater theological recognition than it is. The Church is headed by bishops, who you believe should see to it that local identities and languages are preserved.
---

I recently joined a church for the first time since childhood. Searching for a community to help focus my spiritual path in the wake of some major life changes, I was drawn to the Episcopal Church for a number of reasons--its social and political liberalism, its policies regarding gender and sexual orientation (i.e., they don't matter), the Apostolic tradition, the emphasis on reason ("you don't check your brain at the door"), the music. A couple of years ago I met Dahn Gandell, a vivacious redhead with a who calls herself a "radical Episcopal priest." I figured any organization that would ordain a woman like Dahn had to have it going on. And of course, being an incurable Anglophile, how could I help but be drawn to the church of John  Donne and George Herbert, of Auden, C.S. Lewis, and Dorothy L. Sayers?

Today through the frenzied digitized forum of Facebook I noticed that Dahn (who is a FB friend) had taken this quiz. Although I usually decline all manner of extra "applications" in the hopes that social networking will not be as much of a time-suck as it really is, I couldn't resist this one. I was very pleased with my results, not least of which that it reminded me of Welsh poet and clergyman R. S. Thomas, whom I had discovered during a trip to London in 1994. If the little precis above is any indication, he and I have a lot in common--theologically speaking, at least.

Taxi trivia (by David Yezzi)

Two mid-twentieth-century American poets died of heart attacks in New York City taxi cabs. The more recent was Robert Lowell in 1977, who expired en route from JFK. Having left his third wife, Caroline Blackwood, he was returning to his second, Elizabeth Hardwick, with a Lucian Freud portrait of the young Blackwood in his arms. The other, lesser-known, was James Agee (1909–1955), who at the age of forty-five died on his way to the doctor, leaving his only novel, A Death in the Family, unfinished. The book appeared posthumously, after a substantial editing job, winning a Pulitzer in 1958 (a year before Lowell's National Book Award-winning Life Studies appeared).

My review of Agee's Selected Poems, edited by Andrew Hudgins, will appear in the special April poetry issue of The New Criterion. Other highlights of the issue, which can be viewed online beginning April 1, are three new poems by Christian Wiman, a review of Daniel Mendelsohn's new translations of Cavafy by Eric Ormsby, and an essay by Denis Donoghue on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

William Logan tackles the recent volume of interviews with Seamus Heaney by Denis O'Driscoll: "A reader jaded by memoir might still find it interesting to know that the Heaney stove would have been stewing up feed for the animals, with scones rising on the griddle, an ever-boiling kettle, and pots choked full of washing."

"A Woman of Worth" [by Joy Katz]

A Woman of Worth
                                                  Proverbs 31

A woman of worth who can find?
For her province is far above rubric.

A woman of wood, hooks, and rind.
The forks have gone suddenly ruthless.

The hearth of her husband,
husk of her --

She does him good, she evolves.
Dislodges God the last days of her life.

A woman of words: who could mind?
So what if her rupees surprise us.

She is fond of her housefly,
her housefly is cloned with garnet.

She consoles a friend yet bests him.
The fruit of her hands is vincible.

A woman of wound who can find?
She gilds her lawn in streaks, makes song her law.

Her hands hoist the splendor, the spilt.
She strews her hands toward the pool.

“A woman at war with her mind.”
“Her parlance is totally useless.”

She counts singers in fields, and bison.
Steak and doubloons in her cloud chamber.

She opens her mouth: hysteria.
Its likeness on her tongue.

A woman reorders, combines.
Chills rise up into her breast, blessing the husk also, singing:

Favor is false and beauty is vain,
flavor is pulse and bedding is vale.

This woman yet fears the Lord, praise her.
Praise the wood, praise the intimate grain.

-- Joy Katz

On Dickens and Listening [Heather Christle]

Don't you love it when science echoes in confirmation of literature's observations?  This week I've been reading A Tale of Two Cities, a copy my grandmother gave me when I was ten, and which I've been thrilled to finally experience.  I grew especially happy the the other day, when I came across this description of Lucie Manette's testimony at the Old Bailey:

Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be unconsciously imitated by the spectators.  Her forehead was painfully anxious and intent as she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when she stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its effect upon the counsel for and against.  Among the lookers-on there was the same expression in all quarters of the court, insomuch, that a great majority of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors reflecting the witness, when the Judge looked up from his notes to glare at that tremendous heresy about George Washington.

I was reminded of this piece from Science Daily, which states, "The movement of facial skin and muscles around the mouth plays an important role not only in the way the sounds of speech are made, but also in the way they are heard according to a study by scientists at Haskins Laboratories."  Okay, so it's the mouth and not the forehead, but still!  All those foreheads creasing along with Lucie's seem to shape the jury's interpretation of what they hear, and Charles Darnay gets his reprieve. 

Plus, how amazing is that study?  Imagine if you could hook someone up to that machine and then have them listen to poetry!

another spring sonnet [by Amy Lemmon]

Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life.
    --Proverbs 4:23

As March unveils its well-worn wonders, blunted
by frost-heave cynicism, sleeping senses
prick to life. The nerves of lust are plucked
and sing good-natured sleaze of robins' nests,
worms, spring's own coy dalliance with chill
(the threat of April snow), affairs of cloud.
Dry winter yearnings shed disguise, melt
and trickle in to muddy up the blood.

Now spring's inside me, something I can't wear,
though every year I dream this perfect dress:
roll-in-the-yard skirt, long but barely there,
light cotton, filmy sleeves, a wash of blossoms
from skinny crabapples. Love shows its sprigs,
pulls the truth of breeze across bare legs.