The Best American Poetry

Praxilla is Back! (by Laura Orem)

After a long hiatus, Praxilla is back! Issue #3 features:

Poetry by Alison Doernberg, Alan Britt, Ann Bracken, Barbara Lefcowitz, Calder Lowe, Charles Bane, Chris Taylor, David Lehman, David McAleavey, Elizabeth Johnson-Miller, Ernest Hilbert, Ernie Wormwood, Eugene Ritchie, Fork Burke, Gregory Luce, J.P. Dancing Bear, James Valvis, Jessie Carty, John Lane, John McKernan, Kathy Douglas, Naomi Thiers, Nin Andrews, Richard Harteis, Rosanne Wasserman, Stacy Grimes, and Wendy Chin-Tanner.

Fiction by Lane Jennings.

Non-Fiction by Vivian Faith Prescott

Check out this exciting new issue at our new website at www.praxilla.net.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We'll be reading again April 15-May 15. Details and submissions guidelines can be found here.

Something Understood - Rebecca Lindenberg

For today, some poems by just a tiny few of the contemporary lady poets whose work I really enjoy and by whom I feel both influenced and bettered. 

Interview

by Kathryn Cowles, from Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name

Interviewer: I'm going to ask you a question. There is a right answer, and I'm very serious, and I want you to answer seriously. Seriously, but also honestly. Here is my question: What do you do if you find a dead cat?

Eleanor: Name it.

Interviewer: Wrong. What do you do if you find a dead cat?

Eleanor: Mouth to mouth, depending on the newness of its deceasedness, the likelihood of revivification, and whether or not it's an ugly cat.

Interviewer: Wrong again.

Eleanor: Was the cat on my property or my neighbor's?

Eleanor: Is it summer or another season?

Eleanor: Put it in the freezer to buy time.

Interviewer: No, no, no.

Eleanor: Light its cigarette.

Eleanor: Ask it to light my cigarette.

Eleanor: Brush its black, or grey, or tawny hair out of its eyes and shed a single tear.

Interviewer: Stop it. Lies, all lies.

Eleanor: Kill another cat so it has a friend.

Eleanor: Show it photographs of my children.

Eleanor: Actually, I have no children to show.

Interviewer: This is not at all what I had in mind.

Eleanor: Chalk a line around its silhouette for future reference.

Eleanor: Of course, I'm assuming the dead cat is on the ground. Really, it could be anywhere.

Eleanor: Up a tree, or nailed to the side of a building.

Eleanor: Utilize catnip in creative ways until it stops playing dead, that old trick.

Eleanor: Wait for Jesus to come.

Interviewer: You never say what I want you to say.

Eleanor: Taxidermy.

Eleanor: Halo its head, lend it my wings.

Eleanor: Are you listening?

Eleanor: Do you really want to know?

Eleanor: You can learn a lot about a person by asking.

 

“I am in love, hence free to live”

by Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something To Desire, There Is Something To Regret

(trans. Steven Seymour)

I am in love, hence free to live

by heart, to ad lib as I caress.

A soul is light when full,

heavy when vacuous.

My soul is light. She is not afraid

to dance the agony alone,

for I was born wearing your shirt,

will come from the dead with that shirt on.

 

Camera Lucida

by Claudia Keelan

Though the photograph deceives

The viewer is drawn to its light,

Vision itself a device

Where the world becomes

An animated drawing.

The lover, for example, is hollow in the middle,

Standing beside the skeleton bones

Of a 19^th century hoopskirt.

And though you can’t believe it,

She’s you.

 

The Door Opens

by Martha Ronk, from Vertigo

 

One painter put a thick white line

where the door opens into the dark room

and women make beads and light stripes the floor.

Each time paint becomes light, we are asked to believe.

The requests come thicker of late.

They say one painter asked them to stand there,

hands out, the light coming in, for a long time

that is never long enough.

 

Key Episodes From An Earthly Life

by C.D. Wright, from Tremble

 

As surely as there are crumbs on the lips

of the blind                I came for a reason

 

I remember when the fields were no taller

than a pencil            do you remember that

 

I told him            I’ve got socks older than her

but he would not listen

 

You will starve out girl               they told her

but she did not listen

 

As surely as there is rice in the cuffs

of the priest          sex is a factor            not a fact

 

Everything I do is leaning            toward

what we came for               is that perfectly clear

 

I like your shoes your uncut hair

I like your use of space too

 

I wanted to knock her lights out

the air cut in and did us some good

 

One thing about my television set it has

a knob on it enabling me to switch channels

 

Now it is your turn            to shake or

provoke             or heal me             I won’t say it again

 

Do you like your beets well-cooked and chilled

even if they make your gums itch

 

Those dark Arkansas roads            that is the sound

I am after            the choiring of crickets

 

Around this time of year               especially evening

I love everything          I sold enough eggs

 

To buy a new dress            I watched him drink the juice

of our beets           And render the light liquid

 

I came to talk you into physical splendor

I do not wish to speak to your machine

 

On Walking Backwards

by Anne Carson, from “Short Talks”

My mother  forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

There are so many more people whose work I wish I had the time and patience to type in and represent here – I have a stack of books in front of me right now, Eleni Sikelianos, Danielle Deulen, Brenda Shaugnessy, Elizabeth Willis, Jenny Boully, Olena Kalytiak Davis, there are just so many amazing women writing terrific stuff it would be, I am happy to report, quite impossible to even make a semi-partially-sort-of reasonable list of them, let alone share poems from each and all.  But please, please, tell me who you love!

Difficult Things - Rebecca Lindenberg

Languages are difficult.  When we first moved to Rome I couldn’t speak a word of Italian, but I took classes and learned to talk for both of us.  Once weekend we were wandering around this art installation at a villa outside of town.  Someone introduced us to an Italian publisher from a press called Maledizione, I laughed at the name.  He smiled.  So you speak some Italian, he said.  Not really, I said, but I’m learning.  Me too, he grinned.  I hear it’s a beautiful language.  Wild onions grew in the yard, and wherever people stepped, the smell of crushed scallions rose into the sun-stung air.

I think it was Rilke who said “everything worth doing is difficult.”  Which is bollocks, by the way.  There is nothing at all difficult about enjoying a good bacon sandwich, and it is absolutely worth doing.

People sometimes say that Love is difficult.  This, I think, is true.  But I also think Love simplifies many other things – whether or not to get up in the morning, for example, who to call. 

Bernadette Mayer says, “Obfuscation bewilders old meaning.”  When do we pass from difficulty to opacity; from opacity to meaninglessness?  And what are the productions of meaninglessness?

Say language is an organ of perception.  Now, say “lemon”.  Can’t you taste it?

Remember the ancient Greek problem of the “heap”?  Are two grains of sand a heap?  Are six?  Six hundred?  Six-hundred and one?  Which grain of sand transforms the accumulation into “a heap”?  Surely, this matters more to the heap than to the sand. 

The Cantos are difficult.  They’re difficult in a way that teaches me nothing except how to feel very, very small.  Which, I suppose, is not really nothing.

But Gertrude Stein is difficult in a way that teaches me to wonder why, after all, sugar is not a vegetable.  It grows.

Is flower feminine?  It’s not a very manly word.  But is asphodel?

After we’d lived in Italy for a few months, I gave a reading at the house where Keats died.  Afterwards, you and your son and I went out to dinner.  On the way home from dinner, giddy with poems and wine and Sardinian food, we saw people rushing out of the internet shop where I always bought our bus tickets and phone cards.  Then smoke, then a noise like the canon they fired each afternoon in the park down the street.  Then all the glass cascading from the windows.  I was afraid, I wanted to go home.  No, you said, I think I saw who did it.  We have to go see if we can help.  I was mad at you, not because I didn’t want to help, but because it meant me speaking for us both again, since I alone was learning this new language.  The caribinieri arrived.  I talked, embarrassedly just listing words from the pages of a chapter on description:  brown hair, black shirt, yellow how do you say? stripe.  I said in Italian to the Bangladeshi man who our internet shop, It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.  He said, Don’t leave, please.  If you go, the police will leave.  And I understood that languages are not as difficult as some things that I didn’t know the words for.  Maybe still don’t.

About that which we cannot speak, we must make new language.

Poetry is difficult.  It’s about difficult things such as harrowing loss and exquisite calm and other things that remain only feelings while we try to configure the words to turn them into ideas.  This does not make the feelings less powerful or less difficult, it just makes them more sentient.  It vectors them.

Poetry is difficult because it’s made of languages, which are difficult.  And none of these things – ideas or feelings or languages – can be handily wielded like a light epee with any hope of precision or control.  It’s more like trying to aim a trebuchet at a Coke bottle set on the castle wall at 500 paces. 

Poetry is difficult, and worth doing.  But it’s not worth doing because it is difficult.  Or anyway, that’s not why I do it.  I think I do it for the bacon sandwiches.

Man Writes Poem by Jay Leeming

Edwardian Man Writing At Desk by PereLachaise

Reading Rebecca Lindenberg's account of America's Next Top Poet reminded me of this terrific poem by Jay Leeming:  

Man Writes Poem 

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now 
to our man Harry on the scene, what's

the story down there Harry? "Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems . . .

Read the rest of Man Writes Poem here.

-- sdh

America's Next Top Poet - Rebecca Lindenberg

America’s Next Top Poet

So, I’ve been watching America’s Next Top Poet.  If you haven’t seen it yet, there are things I don’t want to spoil for you, so I’ll just give you the basic premise.  You can catch up on Hulu if you want – there are only two rounds left this season but each one’s gonna be a doozy.

Basically, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, this is a spin-off of Tyra Banks’ wildly successful show, America’s Next Top Model.  Alas, our version is a little less picturesque.  First of all, a model is lucky if her career lasts until she’s 30 or 35, which is (by contrast) more or less when a poet can expect her career to begin.  There are a couple of just-starting-their-MFA youngsters on the show.  There are also a couple of contestants who came later to poetry.  But for the most part, the baker’s dozen original contestants are emerging or recently-emergent poets in their later twenties to mid-thirties.  The host and judge, aka the Tyra Banks of the poetry world, is a well-known writer whose career is by no means over, but who has begun to enter what can best be described as the retrospective phase of that career – a Collected under contract, maybe on faculty still but not really teaching much, starting to talk to an editor about what to do with all that correspondence.  Somewhere, a grad student is writing a paper that features their work.  I’m not telling who it is – you can guess, but I think you should just watch.  I’m also not telling you who on the panel of judges is poetry’s counterpart to ANTM’s eccentric but likeable drag queen runway coach, Miss J.  But I will tell you that apparently Paul Muldoon is the Nigel Barker of the poetry world, so you’re not totally in the dark.

The show was originally going to film in New York City, but after the “NYC vs. MFA” debate, the producers didn’t want to be seen as weighing in too heavily one way or the other, lest they should alienate viewers.  Instead, they decided that America’s Next Top Poet should be set in a small city on the Gulf Coast, ravaged by hurricanes and oil spills, in hopes that the presence of poets in that community would raise visibility and support economic prosperity.  As you’ll see when you watch the show, as noble as this sentiment may be, this has mostly resulted in a series of ill-advised encounters with beleaguered locals that’s created an insurmountable town-and-gown antagonism between those attached to the show, and those attached to the town in which it currently takes place.  There was one incident in a downtown dive bar involving a concealed weapon, a live chicken, a thermos of gin and tonic and a bad karaoke rendition of Erasure that has since become the stuff of reality TV legend, as well as an SNL sketch and a John Stewart punchline.  Perhaps you saw the “Poets Gone Wild” parody that posted to YouTube?  Well, then you know what I’m talking about.

Monday @ KGB: Matthew Yeager + David Lehman

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...
 
Matthew Yeager + David Lehman
Monday, March 28
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com <http://www.kgbbar.com/>

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 10003 * Phone: 212-505-3360 <tel:212-505-3360>  

*****

Matthew Yeager's  poems have appeared recently in the journals Bat City Review, Supermachine, New York Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and the anthologies Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," was an official selection at twelve film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up two awards.  Recent accolades include the Barthelme Prize in short prose for 2009.  He is the co-founder of Chicken Truck Productions and lives in Brooklyn.     

Read some of his work in pax americana <http://paxjournal.com/?q=node/143> .
 
*****

David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He founded, with Star Black, the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar .
 
Read some of his work at the Academy of American Poets <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/40> .  
 
*****

Upcoming, Spring 2011...

April 4       Brian Teare + Jean Valentine
April 11     Matthew Zapruder + Eileen Myles
April 18     Saskia Hamilton + Karl Kirchwey
April 25     Gabrielle Calvocoressi + Andrei Codrescu
May 2        Dorothea Lasky, Star Black + David Yezzi 
May 9        Angie Estes + Mitch Sisskind
May 16      Dan Chiasson + Deborah Landau

Poetry Matters - Rebecca Lindenberg

Poetry Matters

Thank you, Best American Poetry and Stacey Harwood, for inviting me to blog and muse here for the week.  I’m really excited, and since this first post turned out rather long I want to promise that my intention is to post wildly various things all week.  Tomorrow, thanks to a suggestion from Nicky Beer, I’ll be musing about what kind of reality TV show “America’s Next Top Poet” would look like.  For now, since this is a conversation that came up this weekend (and I’ve been thinking on it ever since), below are some thoughts on why poets worry about poetry’s relevance.  To all who take the time, thanks so much for reading.

 

So I was just visiting some pals in L.A.  And my friend has this book on her shelf.  It’s called Can Poetry Matter?  I have never read this book, but it seems like a strange title to me, in no small part because its author is, ostensibly, a poet.  I imagine most poets would say, Well, yeah.  But people seem to want to talk about this – can poetry matter, does poetry matter, how much, and to whom?  In fact, the very friend who had this book on her bookshelf wanted to talk about it, so we sat down at her dining room table one afternoon and just talked about it.  She is passionate, articulate, and anxious about this question. 

She and I didn’t answer the question, and I do not propose to answer it here.  I don’t even really propose to examine it here.  Rather, I want to examine – briefly – another question:  Why is it that poets feel this question has such urgency?  Might we even be doing poetry itself a disservice by insisting on revisiting this question over and over again?  Might we be convincing ourselves and others that our art, plagued by fears of its own irrelevance, is ultimately doomed?  I mean, nobody ever asks, can math matter?  Nobody asks, can physics matter?  Nobody argues that the current state of cell biology is very worrisome and we should talk about it.  We don’t usually ponder the relevance of astrophysics or theoretical math.  Or catechism or pizza or mountain biking, for that matter.  Well, you might say, we don’t ask that because obviously cell biology and math and physics are useful, because mountain bikes are useful, pizza is delicious, and even religion is useful in devising communities or ethical codes (arguably, pizza is also good for this).  What use is poetry?

I perceive this as a very Puritanical anxiety, though the question about the role of the poet in society is as old as Republic X, and perhaps something about Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal state finds its way into our current anxieties.  Perhaps all poets secretly feel like interlopers in an otherwise-virtuous world of even-keeled and industrious citizens.  Perhaps Plato’s repudiation, based though it is on poetry’s emotional efficacy, rhymes with some deep-seated Puritanical anxiety about poetry’s “use”.  Writing well after Plato, even Cicero wanted writing to do three things, after all:  docere, movere, delectare.  To instruct, to move, and to delight.  Perhaps we, today, aren’t convinced that poetry can do these things.  Or perhaps we believe it should, but that the poetry being written right now simply doesn’t.  Surely some of us believe it shouldn’t have to. 

Sunday Quiz: Who Didn't Win?

Looking over the history of the Academy Awards for best original song in a movie, you notice how many great songs won between "The Continental" and "The Shadow of Your Smile," before the great falling off that followed.

Which of these great musical geniuses of the time did not win an Academy Award?

Harold Arlen
Irving Berlin
Dorothy Fields
George Gershwin
Ira Gershwin
Oscar Hammerstein
Yip Harburg
Jerome Kern
Johnny Mercer
Cole Porter
Richard Rodgers
Jule Styne
Jimmy Van Heusen
Harry Warren

For extra credit. name the nominated song(s) by the listed greats that failed to win though they were eligible. Also name some of the winners. And sing them.

I'm watching State Fair on TCM right now. Hence the thought. -- DL

Rebecca Lindenberg, Guest Blogger March 27-April 2

This week we welcome Rebecca Lindenberg as our guest blogger.  Rebecca's first poetry collection, GLOSS, is forthcoming in 2012 from the new McSweeney's poetry series.  She is the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2009-2010 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship.  Her poems appear or will soon appear in POETRY, The Believer, 32 Poems, DIAGRAM, Conjunctions, No Tell Motel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, BlazeVox, Barrow Street, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere.  She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, where she also lectures.  She grew up in Palo Alto, California, where she was the laziest member of the Greenmeadow Swim Team, and she makes a mean lasagna.

Welcome, Rebecca.

"Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books?" [by Kathryn Maris]

How many times do I have to say
get rid of the books off the goddamn floor
do you have any idea how it feels
to step over books you wrote about her
bloody hell you sadist what kind of man
are you all day long those fucking books

in my way for 3 years your acclaimed book
tell me now what do you have to say
for yourself you think you’re such a man
silent brooding pondering at the floor
pretending you’re bored when I mention her
fine change the subject ask ‘Do I feel

like I need more medication’ NO I don’t feel\
like I need more medication it’s the books
don’t you see don’t you see it’s her
why don’t you listen to anything I say
and for god’s sake books on the floor
are a safety hazard remember that man

from Cork who nearly died fine that man
fell over a hurley not a book but I don’t feel
you’re getting the point the point is that a floor
is not an intelligent place for books
books I have to see and books that say
exactly where and how you shagged her

what shirt she wore before you shagged her
I can write a book too about some man
better still about you I can say
something to demonize you how would you feel
about that ha ha why don’t I write a book
about how I hoover your sodding floor

and how you’ve never once hoovered your floor
why can’t I be a muse why can’t I be a ‘her’
what does one have to do to be in a book
around here do I have to be dead for a man
to write me a poem how do you think it feels
to be non muse material can’t you say

you feel for me what you felt for her
can’t you say I’m better than that woman
can’t you get those books off the floor?

--  Kathryn Maris

"Darling, Will You Please Pick Up Those Books" was "Poem of The Week" in the Guardian's Books Blog.
Here is the Amazon listing for Maris's book, The Book of Jobs.