This week we welcome back Jennifer L. Knox as our guest blogger. Jennifer’s latest book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and four times in The Best American Poetry series. She is working on her first novel. Find out more about Jennifer here and follow her on twitter @jenniferlknox.
Welcome, Jennifer.
In other news . . .
April 3, 2012 6:30 p.m.: Poetry Forum with Jill Alexander Essbaum The New School 66 West 12th Street, room 510, New York, NY
Jill Alexander Essbaum is author of numerous books of poetry, including The Devastation, Necropolis, Oh Forbidden, Harlot, and Heaven, which won the 1999 Bakeless Prize. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has served as an editor for the online journal ANTI- and for the Nanopress Project.
Moderated by David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the School of Writing. More information here.
In twenty-five years of working on The Best American Poetry, I had lost only two of the guest editors with whom I worked closely for "their" year -- A. R. Ammons (ed. BAP 1994) and Robert Creeley (BAP 2002) -- until three days ago, the day of the death of Adrienne Rich, who edited The Best American Poetry 1996.
Adrienne's poems had been picked by Jorie Graham and Charles Simic respectively for the 1990 and 1992 books in the series, and when Adrienne and I corresponded on the latter occasion it turned out that she admired the anthology and its aims and had very definite opinions on how to make it even better and more inclusive. I decided to ask her to serve as the guest-editor of a volume and courted her to this end for more than a year before she accepted. I met with her in New York in September 1993 and we sealed the deal with a handshake.
In The Best American Poetry 1996, Adrienne broke with precedent in more ways than one. She was the first editor to include more than one poem by a given poet. Her edition incudes four poems by high school students and four poems by men and women incarcerated in prison. Reading for the anthology she said, "I always felt I was panning for gold."
Among the poems she wanted to include were several by authors that, in spite of our assiduousness, we (Maggie Nelson and I) failed to track down in that winter of 1995-96 when e-mail was still a novelty. Adrienne named the authors in her introduction to the volume, and eventually we heard from them. "A poem often becomes a kind of commodty in the competitive world of curriculum vitae, though I deplore the fact," she wrote to a disappointed poet. "I would be very sorry if either this mischance, or your numerous recognitions, were to get between you and the life of poetry, which is an art, not a competititon, an art demanding self-discipline and apprenticeship, often through very unencouraging circumstances, for stakes which have nothing to do with the market. I hope you will consider this, unfashionable idea though it is."
It was wonderful to work with Adrienne. She committed herself with fierce passion and uncompromising integrity to the editing of The Best American Poetry 1996. Her own poems appeared nine times in The Best American Poetry, in each case to the enhancement of the volume. In lamenting her death I join all the many others whose lives were touched by this important and beloved figure. -- DL
See the tribute to Adrienne in The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/167113/five-poems-adrienne-rich
Vincent Van Gogh was born 159 years ago today. But that's not a picture of him. It's a picture of his younger brother Theo, who virtually single-handedly provided the financial and emotional support that allowed his brother to paint.
When we were teenagers, my younger brother, Richard, and I considered our destinations in life. He planned to become a lawyer. I thought I might be an alienated novelist like some in the peripatetic pack of Beats I admired. During those rare moments when I considered the financial implications of any such decision, I took to calling my brother "Theo." This was said half in jest, but only half. And it was said almost wholly in ignorance. I did not then know that Theo died at age 33 from dementia praralytica, a syphlitic brain infection. Luckily, neither did my brother know this.
It's easy to exaggerate Theo's patience and transform him into a saint of patrons. But Vincent was not easy to be with. For many of us, our image of Vincent is forever tied to Kirk Douglas' portrayal in Lust for Life. The real Vincent, sadly, was not anything like Kirk Douglas. The real Vincent was like a dirty street wanderer with rags for clothes who mutters to himself and, seemingly for no reason at all, suddenly begins to yell at or lecture passers-by. As an alternative to Kirk Douglas, it's worthwhile to track down Tim Roth in Robert Altman's Vincent & Theo.
As Vincent's incredibly articulate letters make clear (letters we only have because Theo saved them; Vincent's mother destroyed his letters to her), Theo could get frustrated. The brothers fought about money, about what kind of art Vincent should be painting, about Viincent's interminable search for understandably reluctant women models. And yet, through it all, Theo stayed loyal. He sold the single painting of Vincent's that was bought during the artist's lifetime.
As an art dealer, Theo also pushed others then not so well known including Monet and Degas. It was Theo who introduced Vincent to Gauguin, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Seurat, and others, and it was Theo who convinced Gauguin to stay with Vincent at Arles.
I found it interesting that Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith chose to open their fascinating recent biography Van Gogh: The Life with Theo traveling to get Vincent's body for burial. The authors assert that Vincent did not shoot himself but that he was talking to two boys, and one of them, who had frequently verbally tormented him, accidentally shot him. The authors believe Vincent took responsibility so the boys wouldn't get into trouble. This claim is made at the end of the 976 page book through a series of closely-reasoned arguments that I nevertheless did not find conclusive. What surprised me is that the claim is never considered that Vincent took his own life for a good reason--Theo was dying and when that happened Vincent would no longer be able to paint. Indeed, Theo died six months after Vincent.
Theo's great-grandson, also named Theo, was a Dutch filmmaker who produced the film Submission. The film was critical of how Islam treated women. Some Muslims were outraged by the film, and in 2004 a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim named Mohammed bouyeri assassinated Van Gogh.
On Vincent's birthday, it's worthwhile recalling both his great art and his great brother and all great brothers.
John Wooden, who coached UCLA to a surely unsurpassable record of 10 NCAA basketball championships, considered poetry one of his most effective coaching tools.
Poetry was not for game days, but for the locker room, bus rides, hotel lobbies and especially during practice, where Wooden believed “the real work is done, the real improvement made.” He wrote about how poetry shaped his legendary career in a prose piece for Poetry magazine and in his many books.
This 2012 Final Four weekend, it’s hard to imagine Wooden reciting poetry in the tattooed turnstile men’s college basketball has become, where the best players move onto the pros in a year or so. But there is not a player or coach in March Madness who is not in awe of Wooden’s 38-game tournament winning streak.
“I constantly incorporated bits of poetry, rhymes, and maxims to help focus attention, give direction, and create inspiration,” said Wooden who died in 2010, just shy of his 100th birthday.
Wooden also liked to recite poems, out loud or in his head, to fall asleep, including a couple of his own. Don’t Look Back was one of them.
Poetry was as valued as physical strength on the small farm in Indiana where Wooden grew up. Each night his father, Joshua Wooden, read to his four sons by coal lamp – Tennyson, Whitman, Shakespeare, Longfellow, and the “The Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley.
“While he could lift heavy things men half his age couldn’t lift, he would also read poetry to us each night after a day working in the fields raising corn, hay, wheat, tomatoes, and watermelons,” Wooden wrote in 1997 in Wooden A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court.
“My own love of poetry came directly from my dad’s willingness to read to all his boys each night back on the farm,” Wooden said. “I developed a love for it before I even realized it. It has stayed with me – to my great benefit – all of my life.”
Basketball also started on the farm with a ball his mother made by stuffing a black sock with rags and a rim his father forged from the rings of a barrel. His high school basketball team played in the state championship three times and won once. Wooden was All-American for three years and won the NCAA championship at Purdue, where he graduated with a degree in English in 1932. He’s one of only three people inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Wooden received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor in 2003.
Wooden, who retired from UCLA in 1975 after 27 seasons, was proudest to be known as a good teacher. In a 2009 Gatorade commercial directed by Spike Lee, Wooden recites a poem about setting a good example by Rev. Claude Wisdom White, Sr.
Wooden broke my heart in 1968 when UCLA annihilated Dean Smith and my beloved North Carolina Tar Heels in the NCAA finals. (Dean Smith is right up there for me with Wooden in my basketball and integrity pantheon.) I watched the game on a snowy television about the size of an iPad, and remember the adults around speaking respectfully about Wooden’s words, even as we were rooting against his team.
"Failing to prepare is preparing to fail."
"Flexibility is the key to stability."
"Be quick, but don't hurry."
What Wooden wrote well and recited often was aphorism; the kind of maxims that produce eye rolls in the young. Bill Walton, UCLA's center for two national championships and two undefeated seasons, had a similar reaction during the 1970s. Walton, who unsuccessfully lobbied his coach to ease up on dress codes and other rules, quoted Bob Dylan that “The times they are a-changin.” But as a father, Walton scrawled Wooden’s aphorisms on his children’s lunch bags with hope that the words would stick.
In Wooden’s system, attitude as crucial as the mechanics of a jump shot. “Poetry, in all its forms, was an efficient tool for this,” he said. “Poetry works its magic in many different ways.”
Though he acknowledged in the Poetry article that aphorism is not universally considered poetic: “Is this poetry? Certainly, in my opinion,” he said, noting that he also read contemporary poetry. “I have a book of poems on my bookshelf by Billy Collins. The rules of poetry are and should be flexible; good words in good order is good enough for me.”
Convince me that Wooden’s wrong and I’ll buy you eggs (airfare not included) at Vip’s on Ventura Boulevard, the Los Angeles coffee shop where he had breakfast for decades. I’ve seen the John Wooden shrine behind the cash register, with pictures of the coach and NBA superstars. Wooden clutches a walker in some of the most recent pictures.
In 2006, Wooden took Sports Illustrated columnist Seth Davis back after breakfast to his apartment to recite poetry. Wooden, who wrote nearly a dozen prose books, showed Davis a poetry project. He was working on a book of 100 poems, 70 already written, not to publish, but to leave for his family – 20 poems each on family, faith, patriotism, nature and fun.
Many of his former players quote their coach in this ESPN tribute at Wooden’s death. “He could say so much in so few words,” one said.
Catherine Woodard has played coed, pickup basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. In 2011, Woodard was the featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University.
I found this photo from one of the dealers that I source my movie-stars-on-bikes photos from. (See Hollywood Rides a Bike, the international bestseller!) It's stamped "Sep 19 1954," and someone (a newspaper photo editor?) has written, in rich script, in pencil, "Dolores with fellow group member in Switzerland."
I love this shot. I think it's Conde Nast Traveler that has that "Where are you?" feature where the magazine posts a photo and readers have to guess the locale.... If anyone recognizes this particular spot in the Swiss Alps, I'd love to know. Dolores and her fellow group member -- let's call him Harry -- are hardy cyclists, certainly. Their panniers are full, and their bikes aren't exactly lightweight, granny-geared touring machines. Harry's bike, in fact, looks like a Raleigh rod-brake model (you can see the trademark heron on the chain wheel) - a heavy-duty two-wheeler typically used for city streets and rough country routes. Mighty steep grades in this neck of the woods, to be sure, but I think he and Dolores are up to it.
If Dolores and Harry are still around, they'd be in their 80s now, I'd guess. I hope they don't mind that I've shared this photo -- they may still have old albums tucked away, and perhaps journals that they've kept, with other snapshots and daily entries to remember the miles they logged, the beer halls and cafes they stopped in, the inns they slept in.... Or maybe they camped out by a river, ringed by trees, at the bottom of one of these snowy peaks?
Dolores and Harry may have been strangers when they embarked on this tour, and perhaps they became fast friends (especially fast going down one of those alpine roads!), or they became lovers, or they had a huge fight about politics, or literature, and didn't talk together, or ride together, for the rest of the tour.
And what are they looking at? A long valley dotted with evergreens? Another jagged mass of mountain? Or two men in the town's plaza, just down the road, passing government secrets encripted on a folded note tucked inside a matchbook? That's it -- Dolores and Harry, cycling spies!
Ed note: Kevin Young gave wonderful reading on Monday at the 92nd Street Y here in NYC. He read new poems plus selections from his books, which you can buy here. Here's David Lehman's introduction:
Good evening. It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce this reading by Kevin Young, for in addition to admiring his work as an editor, a curator, a writer, and above all a poet, I have been lucky enough to collaborate with him on two very different projects, about which I will leave you in momentary suspense while I list a few of his accomplishments, as is customary on such an occasion.
By his titles you shall know him. Kevin Young is the author of books of poetry entitled Dear Darkness, For the Confederate Dead, Jelly Roll: A Blues, and Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels – and as the list suggests the history and culture of black Americans figures very significantly in his creative and professional work. He has a natural flair for the noir in more than one sense. I first encountered Kevin Young when he was writing film noir poems and editing his turn-of-the-century anthology Giant Steps named in honor of a jazz composition by John Coltrane and introducing us to “a cross-section of cutting-edge black writers,” including, among the poets, Elizabeth Alexander, Terrance Hayes, Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey. Nothing if nor prolific, Kevin has edited anthologies of jazz poems, blues poems, and a selected edition of John Berryman, the white poet who dared to adopt a persona in blackface for his most original work, The Dream Songs.
Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, Young’s 2011 collection, is characteristically greater than the sum of its parts; it is unified in tone, style, subject matter, and ambition. Young comes at you in the form of a minstrel show in one poem, a hymn in another, proverbs and prayers, diary entries and letters, to look at the 1839 slave-ship mutiny with the multiple perspectives the truth calls for. And at the same time he was writing Ardency he was editing The Art of Losing, an anthology of poems of grief and healing. The elegiac impulse is strong in his own recent poems, such as the brilliant selection chosen by Langdon Hammer for the current issue of The American Scholar. These are poems that deal with that gravest of one-time events in the life of a man, the death of his father. In such a one as “Wintering,” the palpable chill of death makes the poet wish “to be warm -- & worn -- // like the quilt my grandmother / must have made, one side / a patchwork of color -- // blues, green like the underside / of a leaf – the other / an old pattern of the dolls // of the world, never cut out / but sewn whole – if the world / were Scotsmen & sailors // in traditional uniforms.” The quilt as a metonymy for art is what turns metaphor into truth. Mourning “is just / a moment, many, // grief the long betrothal / beyond. Grief what / we wed, ringing us.”
The first time Kevin Young and I collaborated was on January 4, 2007, when we agreed to take part in what Ken Gordon, of Quickmuse.com, called a “special serial agon.” Kevin and I were given four prompts and asked to write poems in response, with a limit of fifteen minutes per prompt, and with each keystroke preserved in real-time. Among the prompts was a quote from the then-recently deceased James Brown: “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” We wrote poems based on the line, which both of us endorsed, with qualification and elaboration, and I was delighted to hear the quotation once again at a reading Kevin gave from his new award-winning prose book, The Grey Album. On that same day we also wrote poems prompted by quotes from or about three other notables who had just died, Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford, and Robert Altman. You’ll find it on the net: go to Quickmuse. Our poems also appeared in New American Writing.
In contrast to that improvisatory collaboration of simultaneous verse-making, the second time Kevin and I worked on a project together was the year he made the selections as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011, of which we are both I think justly proud. During that period we met, either by plan or serendipitously, at a Boston hotel, a New York art gallery, a London airport, and a café off an Atlanta road named after the fellow who pursued the Fountain of Youth and discovered Florida instead. It was a pleasure to work with him – and to celebrate life and art with this man of extraordinary intelligence, energy, ambition, and a contagious joie de vivre, a particular joy in living that stands behind even the darkest of his elegies.
After a four-year hiatus, Poetry in Motion is back in NYC subways, reinstated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in collaboration with the Poetry Society of America (PSA).
Re-imagined in NYC under the aegis of the MTA Arts for Transit, the poems are now partnered with art in the subway posters and also printed on the backs of three million MetroCards each season. That means 12 million poems in pockets annually. Which makes Arts for Transit by far the largest publisher of poems in the world. Graduation, a poem by Dorothea Tanning, paired with art by Joan Linder, is the restart.
The MetroCard distribution, random and refillable, is one in 10, at windows and machines. Two poems a season will ride in 1,500 cars, about a quarter of the fleet
One of the most popular public literary programs in American history, PSA’s Poetry in Motion launched poems in transit in more than 20 U.S. cities.
(My disclosure: My activism for Poetry in Motion began the moment I knew it disappeared in NYC and led me to the PSA board. As to my recent March Madness NCAA Basketball posts for this blog, I confess my favorite women’s and men’s teams are departed in the one-and-done tournament NCAA format. I needed rebirth.)
Gene Russianoff, staff attorney of the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy organization, read a Robert Frost poem at the relaunch celebration in Grand Central Station.
“It brings a bit of the unexpected to the riders’ days,” Russianoff said. “I mean the good kind of unexpected.”
I’ll continue to count on the Straphangers to watch my back on how the MTA spends my money; Poetry in Motion to inspire, again.
Catherine Woodard has played coed, pickup basketball in New York City for three decades. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. In 2011, Woodard was the featured poet at UnshodQuills.com, co-published Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She will be a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a former president of Artists Space, one of the nation’s oldest spaces for emerging visual artists. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from the New School University and MS in journalism from Columbia University.
Just started reading The Astaires: Fred & Adele, Kathleen Riley’s biographical portrait of the sibling song-and-dance duo whose stage performances -- in the years between the wars, before Fred took his top hat and spats and tap-danced his way to Hollywood – were the stuff of legend, of dazzling delight.
And then I happened on Ed Ochester’s poem, “Fred Astaire,” which begins with the line “The secret of his popularity was that he looked like a bus driver…” and goes on to compare Astaire to William Carlos Williams, “who also talks plain without ornament just like Astaire when he's singing.”
Here's a YouTube homage to the dancing sibs -- singing "Hang On to Me" -- with a montage of stills. As Riley points out in her book, there's only one short and not terribly well-shot film of the sister and brother hoofing together.
