The Best American Poetry

British Poets, Day Two: Three Unexpected (?) Figures [by Todd Swift]

On my second day here, I want to extend the range of poets I wish to share with you, by offering three poems by three poets, who, each, in different ways, broaden the mainstream of British poetry, and, challenge its norms, without becoming iconoclasts.

The first, Giles Goodland, makes nonsense of the old us-and-them tussle between experimental and mainstream that so occupied the poetry battles of the last decades, with his poems that are variously lyric, or avant-garde, and sometimes both; often inflected with surrealist play, and an interest in formal constraints.  Primarily, as a lexicographer, he is fascinated by words, and lists.  He is becoming a very significant mid-career poet in Britain.

The second, Carrie Etter, is also admirable, for her hybrid ability to move between the differing parts of the poetry playing field - as academic, anthologist, and poet; Etter's own work is popular (and, performed beautifully) but also willing to explore language and form.  Her recent anthology of experimental women poets is a highly-useful and timely intervention; further, Etter, as an American expatriated to London, occupies that vital continuum that began with Pound and Eliot (and Frost) of Americans in England who actively shape the poetic discourse of the country, and very much belong to two nations.

Finally, the most cosmopolitan of the three is the Oulipo-inspired Paris-based poet-editor Rufo Quintavalle, half-Italian, half-English, whose Francophile interests have intersected with a long project to ingeniously incorporate text from Whitman into his own poems.  Again, commonplace ideas of identity and labels are complicated here - it is almost silly to attempt to place his poetry, though another link with Britain is surely the Oystercatcher pamphlet, recently become a hallmark of innovation and surprise.

Wise Words from VW (by Laura Orem)

from "On Being Ill" by Virginia Woolf:

 

We need the poets to imagine for us...Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts.We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason and our judgement and our memory at attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until the whole structure - arches, towers, and battlements, stands firm on its foundations...On the other hand, with responsibility shelved and reason in the abeyance - for who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or sound sense from the bed-ridden? - other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind...

...In illness, words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gathering instinctively this, that, and the other - a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause - which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind that neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poems of Mallarme or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavor, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.

Monday @ KGB: Mahogany Browne and Thomas Sayers Ellis

Monday Night Poetry at KGB Bar co-sponsors a reading with Cave Canem. Featuring . . . 

Mahogany L. Browne is the author of several books, including her latest collection of poems Swag, and the editor of the women's anthology His Rib: Stories, Poems & Essays by HER. She has released five LPs including the live album Sheroshima. As co-founder of the Off Broadway poetry production Jam On It, and co-producer of New York City's first performance poetry festival, SoundBites, Mahogany bridges the gap between lyrical poetry and literary emcee. She facilitates performance poetry and writing workshops throughout the country, focusing on women's empowerment and youth mentoring. She is the publisher of Penmanship Books, a small press for performance artists and owns PoetCD.Com, an on-line marketing and distribution company for poets. Mahogany is currently host and curator at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe.

Thomas Sayers Ellis is a poet, photographer, and Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, and a core faculty member of the Lesley University Low Residency MFA Program in Cambridge, MA. He is a contributing editor to Callaloo and a consulting editor to A Public Space. He compiled and edited Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (University of Michigan Press, Poets on Poetry Series).  He will be reading from his new book of poems Skin, Inc. just out from Graywolf Press.info@tsellis.com

The Monday night Poetry reading series at KGB is hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone, and was founded by David Lehman and Star Black. 

Readings begin at 7:30 pm. Admission is FREE

For the complete season line-up, click here.

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360 ● KgbBar.com 

 

Todd Swift, Guest Blogger October 10-16

This week we welcome back Todd Swift as our guest blogger.  Todd was born in Montreal in 1966 and has lived in England since 2003, with his Irish wife Sara. He has edited several anthologies, including 100 Poets Against The War (Salt, UK, 2003) and special sections on new Canadian poetry for New American Writing, The London Magazine, and Jacket, and on young British and Scottish poets, for The Manhattan Review. Swift has seven volumes of poetry, most recently Seaway: New and Selected Poems (2008), Mainstream Love Hotel (2009), and a free-to-download ebook from Argotist, Experimental Sex Hospital (2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry London, Poetry Review, and Best Canadian Poetry 2008. The Chronicle of Higher Education has compared his work to "that of Ezra Pound's in the 10s and 20s of the last century, in Paris and London". He has been Oxfam Great Britain's Poet-in-residence since 2004, and has edited three poetry CDs and a DVD for them. His recent publications include Modern Poets of Canada; An Anthology (co-edited with Evan Jones, Carcanet) the first British anthology of Canadian poetry in over 50 years. Todd is a tutor with the Poetry School (London) and Lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University, in Kingston-upon-Thames. He blogs over at Eyewear. He is a judge for this year's Gerald Lampert Prize, for best first book by a Canadian poet.

Welcome, Todd

-- sdh

Other British Poets: October Notes From A Small Island [by Todd Swift]

I am glad to be back blogging at Best American Poetry, today, this auspicious ten-ten-ten.  London has been experiencing – at last – an Indian summer this weekend – today was 20 Celsius and sunny, which has briefly elevated spirits – otherwise, the UK is in the midst of a slow-moving train wreck, as the Coalition government plans to announce its major (40%) cuts to the State later this month, which has most leading Arts organisers predicting disaster.  Some pundits claim this is a sharper knife than ever Thatcher wielded, so it is a fraught moment, to be sure.  But, as if dancing on the Titanic or Nero-fiddling in Rome, the poets are playing on, business as usual.  This Thursday was “National Poetry Day”, and there were hundred, likely thousands, of readings across Britain, in schools, libraries, festival halls and so on.  Announcements play a big part at this time.

 The Forward Prize for Best Collection went to Seamus Heaney, for Human Chain. Notably, Walcott’s brilliant White Egrets was nowhere to be seen on the shortlist. Which is a pity, because, in terms of late style, it is arguably the better book by an older Nobel laureate.  Human Chain has touched the British poetry world for two reasons: a) they cannot resist Heaney’s charms (he is truly afforded Wotan-like status here); and b) the sentimental human interest behind the work (illness, ambulance rides) has, in anti-Eliot fashion personalised the poetry and made it come alive for the mainstream.

Heaney’s towering status over in Britain (and of course Ireland) is all the more notable for the fact it finds no balance from an equivalent “foreign” presiding spirit, from, say, the Americas.  There is no current British consensus as to who the great American poets are, as when Lowell, Berryman and Plath, in the Sixties, achieved eminence in these isles with the support of Alvarez; or, for that matter, Olson, or Ginsberg, did, from different sources.  If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that the main American poets admired or read by the British are Billy Collins, WS Merwin, CK Williams and Louise Gluck.  Jorie Graham, John Ashbery, Stephen Burt, CD Wright, and Charles Bernstein would be lesser-known but admired experimental figures.  I am speaking of reception from a mainstream perspective, here.  Obviously, some poets and poetry readers would be more savvy, but there is no Heaney-sized figure to counterbalance his claim on greatness.  Even Yeats had Eliot and Pound to pull against.  Heaney, in this British orbit, only has the influence of Muldoon.  Muldoon’s new book is out here recently too, but has yet to really make an impact.  I expect it to be short-listed for the TS Eliot Prize in due course.

The other big news on National Poetry Day was from BBC broadcasting stalwart Melvyn Bragg, who had conveniently discovered a “new poem” by Ted Hughes from his archives at the British Library, which was promptly published.  This has led to dubious Facebooking grumblings from the poetariat, one younger poet, Jack Underwood noting that it was more a draft than a poem, and the big X across it was more a warning than a welcome.  Hughes is very loved in Britain, and when the last lines of this maudlin poem about the death of Plath were read out on BBC radio, the nation sobbed, one felt.  However, Al Alvarez, writing in yesterday’s Saturday Guardian Review (a less-influential but equivalent English version of the New York Times book section) pointed out the relative unimportance of the poem, and how Hughes had been bedding another woman the weekend of her suicide (she died Monday) in the Hughes-Plath honeymoon suite – rather tacky.

I hope to follow-up from the posts I wrote when last I blogged here, and continue to share the names and works of some of the most innovative and intriguing poets writing from Britain at the moment.  Over the summer, some controversy erupted over some of the aspects of Bloodaxe’s seminal new anthology, Identity Parade, which seeks to represent, broad-church style, the latest trends in all schools of newer British poetry.  I found it less inclusive than it might have been, but still recommend the book, nonetheless, as a good way in to the rather bewildering world of British poetry as it is now unfolding.

Brian Clements Presents One More Poem by Morton Marcus

Navel

1.

                Button sewn to our skin, the thread bitten off by the eternal seamstress, the darner of celestial socks.

                Sewn to our chests that way, you would think it holds body and soul together, the only button on the flesh coat.

                But it’s more like the flower that never bloomed nine months after it was planted—the tight, waxy petals a scar from a wound we had nothing to do with and know nothing about.

2.

                Every now and then I imagine the dead lined up for as far as I can see outside a telephone booth in a railroad terminal. Everything is silent. Nothing moves. As if the dead waited endlessly for the phone to ring, part of a museum exhibit where the locomotives bulk cold and still in the background.

3.

                When young we stare at ourselves in the mirror, poking and prodding it, giving it our full attention.

                Later, admiring the beauty of our bodies reflected in the glass, we forget that it’s there, don’t even notice its mark between heart and groin.

                Old, we stand with arms at our sides, staring at what we’ve become, the sagging belly, the flaccid breasts, and with a longing we can’t understand, our eyes return to its puckered circle, the plugged connection, the scar we never understood, the waxen bud that never bloomed.

 

Mort Marcus paid good attention to the world, and, like Francis Ponge, he paid good attention to the language we use to talk about the things of the world. Time after time Mort created object poems like “Navel” that serve as evidence not only of his attention to the world and to objects and to language, but to the relationships of people to objects and language, which is probably why so many of his fellow poets loved and admired him. Peter Johnson says of Mort:

What I remember most about Mort was his generosity and absence of ego. Certainly, Mort was a fine verse and prose poet, moving effortlessly between the two forms, but it was his interest in others and in life’s particulars that informed his life and work. When I invited Mort to my college, the gig was to visit one class and do a reading. Mort did three classes, and would have probably taught three more if they were available. He didn’t do the extra work to be nice or so he could hear himself talk endlessly (though Mort could certainly talk).  He was always in the state of perpetual intellectual agitation. Sometimes he could seem belligerent about it, but you knew no one-upmanship was involved.  He realized life was short, so why screw around being nicey-nice about ideas. Let’s go at it and try to discover why the hell we’re here and how poetry fits into it all. Probably what I’ll miss most about Mort is his optimism, especially at a time when so much contemporary poetry is laden with fashionable irony and cynicism, so that it often sounds like dialogue from a second-rate sit-com. Mort was an authentic voice. Fortunately, he left a great deal of terrific poems behind.

Get the Hell Into Dodge [by Jerry Williams]

I am writing to you from deep in the bowels of the Robert Treat Motel in Newark, New Jersey, where I am participating in this year’s Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival (http://www.dodgepoetry.org/).  I’m glad that Martin Farawell got the festival up and running after a year hiatus because it’s a wonderful creation, the largest poetry gathering since the dawn of time (according to Billy Collins).  The poets I like most this year include Amiri Baraka, Teresa Carson, Rita Dove, Bob Hicok, Dorianne Laux, Dunya Mikhail, Sharon Olds, and Marie Ponsot.

Earlier this morning I sat in the poets’ cafeteria under the massive Border’s tent, and I marveled at how I seemed to be slowly approaching the inner sanctum of American poetry.  After all these years, they might let in another half-smart scribbler from Ohio.  On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling like a fraud.  I sort of wanted to go back up to my incredibly fragrant room and watch TV.  But I soldiered on to my first event, a conversation on the “Riches of Daily Life” with Sharon Olds, Marie Ponsot, and Rachel Hadas (whose work I am not at all familiar with).  A delightful Dodge staffer introduced us around and Sharon gave me a little nod, remembering me perhaps from the first Academy of American Poets Forum, which was held at my College.  Sharon really is such a sweet person.  I can see that she has a good heart in all this chaos. Marie shook my hand and said, “Good to see you again,” perhaps remembering me from a dinner after a Barrow Street reading.  What a gutsy delight she is, truly, still protesting all our daffy foreign adventures with her buttons and everything else.  Then Rachel shook my hand, said hello, and turned to the Dodge staffer and delightfully said, “So is Jerry going to be serving as moderator or something?”  The tenderness of the inner sanctum washed over me like amniotic fluid.  

We each read a couple of our own poems and talked about how they relate to the Riches of Daily Life. When Martin had asked me to take part in this discussion—he put me on the schedule and everything—I thought he’d made a mistake.  What do I know about the riches of daily life?  Now, if the discussion had been called the Helplessness of Daily Life or the Small Humiliations of Daily Life or the Practical Joke of Daily Life or even Chicken Soup for the Spleen, I would have felt right at home.  But when Rachel read a poem about jury duty and Sharon read an ode to her menstrual blood and Marie read a poem that basically said there can’t be any riches of daily life when people are dying in war, I sat up in my seat and read a poem about someone else’s riches and someone else’s period blood—and I’m not joking.  I fit in, somewhat.  The conversation went great.  The crowd in the Robert Treat/Tri-State Ballroom had some great aesthetic manifestos slash questions to ask at the end.

After the panel, I signed some books in the Border's tent, drank some coffee, and shuffled off to another event.  Now I'm lying in bed, my wife sleeping soundly beside me.  Traffic and sirens on the streets below. Some bad movie starring What's-Her-Name on HBO.  Ativan coming on.  Another reading in the morning and then back to my life as a purveyor refurbished silver linings.   

"Among My Souvenirs" [by David Lehman]

<<
The use of "Among My Souvenirs" in The Best Years of Our Lives is exemplary. Edgar Leslie’s 1927 lyric communicates regret at the passing of time. Trinkets and tokens diligently collected and treasured offer some consolation but do nothing to stop the flow of tears. In the movie, when the U. S. army sergeant played by March comes home, he brings souvenirs of the Pacific war as gifts for his teenage son. But like the knife in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England,” when it has become a souvenir on the shelf after Crusoe returns home from his island, the mementos of the global conflict have lost their meaning. They seem vaguely unreal, lifeless. In contrast, the photograph of his wife (Myrna Loy) that a hung-over March looks at the next morning – another sort of souvenir – has all the meaning in the world for him. And "Among My Souvenirs" – played on the piano by Hoagy Carmichael at the bar, hummed in the shower by a drunken March, and heard as background music -- unifies the whole sequence and endows it with the rich pathos that makes the song so durable a jazz standard. I recommend that you listen to Art Tatum play it on the piano or, if you can get your mitts on it, a recording of Sinatra and Crosby doing it as a duet on television in the 1950s.
>>
-- DL
from Boulevard (Spring 2010)

 

The Detective Hero (by Larry Epstein)

Did Robert B. Parker ever write a bad sentence? The question arose as I read Parker's latest Spenser novel, Painted Ladies. The book has a bittersweet aura. I always enjoy Parker's spare prose and crackling dialogue seasoned with wisecracks and literary allusions. Parker writes in the new novel that actors use the word "indicating" to mean the moment when audiences can tell an actor is acting. Parker never indicates that he is writing. But this is a posthumous book. Parker died this past January. There will be one more Spenser novel published next May and supposedly a holiday novel or even others at some point. Every page of this book is haunted by the fact of the author's death.

I used my reading to ponder why Parker was so good. I first ruled out plotting. The books generally have no intricate plots. There aren't red herrings and mysterious clues. Final pages don't offer shocking revelations. Mostly Spenser puts himself in harm's way to lure the evildoers. Some fans don't like Susan Silverman, Spenser's idealized lover, or Pearl, his dog. But they were a crucial part of his world. They propelled his character. Spenser was a gourmet cook, a weight lifter, an ex-cop and ex-boxer, a man who loved to be wanted by women he could then tell that he was taken. Spenser's Boston world was interesting but not interesting enough to explain the character's success.

Many of Spenser's fans believe that Spenser's relationship with Hawk is the key ingredient. The idea of two males of different races joining in friendship is deeply embedded in American literature. And, indeed, much of the banter between the two men takes note of Hawk's blackness and therefore his differences with Spenser. But Hawk's appeal is not really because of racial complementarity. The appeal stems from Hawk's toughness. Spenser is hard; Hawk is steel. Spenser is a descendent of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe who, unlike, say, Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, discovered that reason was enough to solve crimes. They had to mix a quick intelligence with brute force. Spenser and Hawk both had that mix, but Hawk was more willing to rely on the force. His understanding of the human condition didn't have Spenser's romantic dimension. The two men were two sides of a single total hero. Hawk was the rougher side, the godfather of many characters who would emerge as the more violent sidekicks of detective heroes. Think of Joe Pike who teams with Elvis Cole in Robert Crais' books or Win Lockwood who teams with Myron Bolitar in Harlan Coben's books.

What separates Spenser from relying solely on his physical prowess is his code of ethics. Susan reminds him of that code. His work tempts him to cross the line. It is this internal struggle between thug and hero that is the moral center of every book. Spenser is both civilized and discontented with civilization. He knows what the real world is like but struggles to create his own honorable world within the real one.

Parker's books about Spenser are dramatic morality plays, often about women or adolescents in trouble. Spenser makes readers see the gradations of morality, the interstices of relationships where insights often hide. If we readers can't go around punching people the way Spenser does, we nevertheless can learn from him how to see the moral dimensions in our own lives in new and deeper ways. We can learn from Robert B. Parker how to be detectives of the human soul.

Fun with Line and Stanza Breaks (by Jerry Williams)

 

 

Found Poem a.k.a. Double Rainbow by Hungrybear9562

a.k.a. Copyright Infringement

 

Whoa!  That's a full rainbow––

double rainbow.

Oh my god.

It's a double rainbow

all the way.

Whoa!  It's so intense.

Whoa!  Man!

Oh!  Whoa.  Whoa. 

Whohohoah.

Oh my god.  Oh my god.

Oh.  My.  God.

 

Whooooooo!

Ohhhh-hoh-hoh!

Wow!

Whooooh!

Yeahhh.

Ohhh.

Oh my god,

look at that:

It's starting to even look like a

triple rainbow.

Oh my god,

it's full on

double rainbow

all the way across the sky.

 

Oh my god.  I'm weeping.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

What does this mean?

Oh!

Oh my god.

Oh!

Oh god.

 

It's so bright.

Oh my god,

it's so bright and vivid.

Ohh!

Ohh!

Ohh!

Ohh!

It's so beautiful!

I am weeping/laughing.

I am weeping/laughing.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Oh my god, it's a double complete rainbow

right in my front yard.

Ohhhh!

 

Oh my god!

I am weeping.

Oh, my god.

What does it mean?

Tell me!

Ohhhhhhh!

Too much.

Now tell me what it means.

Oh my god.

It's so intense.

Oh, oh.

Oh my god.