The Best American Poetry

Writing Without a Center - Kenji C. Liu [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

I have the pleasure and honor to once again guest curate a week of blog posts here for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM). Thank you very much to Best American Poetry for offering this space for thinking and writing.

I consider myself active in Asian Pacific American (APA) arts and culture, but my allegiance isn’t to the identity–it’s to issues, histories, and lineages. The truth is, a lot of contemporary APA poetry is less an inspiration for me than is poetry and writing from other communities, past and present.

Those who help me find new ways to think and write about our world, like Michel Foucault, Cherríe Moraga, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabes, and others, are those I consider my lineage and poetic community.

Kenji Liu, guest blogger May 20-26

 This week we welcome back Kenji Liu as our guest blogger.  Kenji is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His writing arises from his work as an activist, educator, artist, and cultural worker. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. His writing has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Generations, Kweli Journal, Doveglion Press and elsewhere. He has received a Pushcart nomination and is working on a full-length collection of poetry, prose and visual art. Kenji is the poetry editor at Kartika Review. Find out more about Kenji here.  Follow him on Twitter @kenjicliu.

Welcome, Kenji.

-- sdh

 

The Greatest Poetry Hoax of the Twentieth Century [by DL]

THE greatest poetry hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.
In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.
    Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry.

    For more about Ern Malley, go to Jacket, issue # 17.

INNUENDI :: 4 :: [by Anthony Madrid]

1.

The planet Jupiter. Really big, right? Lotta moons. They don’t even know how many. How big does a thing have to be to be a moon. I don’t know. Not that big. You ever seen the photos of Mars’s moons. One of ’em looks like a moon, the other’s not even round. It’s shaped like a jelly bean, and it’s only, like, whatever, five miles long. It’s got craters, it’s a moon, but it’s not that big. I forget what it’s called. Now, Jupiter, obviously, has plenty of these little ones, nobody knows how many. That doesn’t even matter. The four big ones matter. Callisto, Ganymede, Io, Europa. I’m doing this from memory. And I’m building to a question. Are any of the four big ones as big as the Earth. It’s a reasonable question. And the answer is no. I looked it up. One of ’em, I forget which, is as big as Mercury, though. So you can think of Jupiter as having planet-sized moons, if you like. I love this kind of thing.

 

2.

All through my childhood, I was like, OK, the dinosaurs “died out.” But isn’t an alligator a dinosaur. It’s a big menacing reptile, isn’t it. And that’s basically the head of a T. Rex on there. But then it turns out no. That’s not what a dinosaur is. Dinosaurs had their legs directly underneath them, like a dog or a kangaroo or whatever. Alligators don’t have that. They slither around on their bellies. This is why snakes and gila monsters and all that stuff are not dinosaurs. You wanna know what’s a dinosaur? You probably already heard about this. Birds. They got the egg thing going on + the pea brain + the legs right underneath them. They walk. Or hop. Actually, I’m not sure the pea brain is important here. It’s the eggs and the legs. If people laid eggs they’d be dinosaurs. Wait, no, that’s wrong.

 

3.

Hokay. I tried to download the whatever that would allow me to whatever. I did download it. And it does nothing. Nothing has changed. I must have done something wrong. There must be some elementary procedure. Probably I am like a Martian who takes the lawnmower out of the box, lays it on its side in the driveway, and then stands back, waiting for the grass to become shorter. I don’t know. David, I cannot open those .docx things. I will never be able to open them using this apparatus. And by apparatus I mean mind. I recommend you open them + copy and paste them into the bodies of a series of emails.

 

4.

Once upon a time there was a magical prince who was a dinosaur and a leopard and who spoke Italian and Russian and this kind of thing, and he was in love with a glass of water who was a whirlwind of unpredictable forked lightning and who went ice skating and wrote short stories and things like that. And the glass of water had a sister who was a stethoscope and a vile betrayer and who liked to give bad advice and then blow up the world using a bomb that had this little pig’s-tail wick that, when lit, looked like a Fourth-of-July sparkler. But it all worked out in the end, because there was another world inside the first one, and the inside one was better in some ways than the first, and the evil sister got married to a gold-plated baloney spoon who was sensitive and adored by children who are little jars full of pen caps.

 

5.

If somebody wants to explain to me how flutes work, I’m all set to hear it. You blow across that one little hole, and then by covering other holes further down the tube you make the thing make different notes. OK, how. I just…I never would have invented that thing in a million years. I wouldn’t have thought blowing across a hole in a tube would do anything. Pretty much it’s like you’re telling me you can make trills of notes by blowing on your hand. That ain’t gone do nuthin’. Why would it. Yet there it is.

 

6.

All right. Here’s my question, smart guy. How come everything always has something off to the right and a little down of it? Look at India. You see there: you got that little doohickey off to the right and a little down of it. “Sri Lanka.” OK. Now look over here. Africa? Got this one, off to the right and a little down: “Madagascar.” And China got Taiwan.... And even over here: we got Cuba. Yes we do. And Russia got Japan…. You can pick anything you want! Australia? Got New Zealand. Look at it. The only, only one that don’t is South America. Uh-oh! Yes, they do…!

 

FRIDAY EDITION (b) :: INNUENDI :: 3 [by Anthony Madrid]

1.

Did you know that Emily Dickinson once wrote a poem about being frightened out of a toilet by a spider? And that, in that same poem, she figures the spider as having stolen from her “the marrow of the day”? I transcribe:

 

                                       1167

                    Alone and in a Circumstance

                    Reluctant to be told

                    A spider on my reticence

                    Assiduously crawled

 

                    And so much more at Home than I

                    Immediately grew

                    I felt myself a visitor

                    And hurriedly withdrew

 

                    Revisiting my late abode

                    With articles of claim

                    I found it quietly assumed

                    As a Gymnasium

 

                    Where Tax asleep and Title off

                    The inmates of the Air

                    Perpetual presumption took

                    As each were special Heir—

 

                    If any strike me on the street

                    I can return the Blow—

                    If any take my property

                    According to the Law

 

                    The Statute is my Learned friend

                    But what redress can be

                    For an offense nor here nor there

                    So not in Equity—

 

                    That Larceny of time and mind

                    The marrow of the Day

                    By spider, or forbid it Lord

                    That I should specify.*

 

(*For clarity, I have installed four stanza breaks: the last four, above. Otherwise, the text is reproduced exactly from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, volume 2, page 815. I should like to draw the reader’s attention to Dickinson’s use of the word assiduously at line 4. The word appears nowhere else in her poetry.)

 

2.

Nerd, and dork. These terms are not interchangeable. Nerds are worse. They are. In movies they are cowering things, but in real life they have nerdy self-confidence. Intelligence, anger, self-confidence—and no savvy. This guy right here knows what I’m talking about. Nerds are sinister.

Whereas, for dorks there is hope. Dorks aim to please, and sometimes they figure out how to do it. They “try too hard” for years on end, but eventually they learn. And more, at the end of the process they have soul. They have suffered for their art. It is painful to forgive them, but they must be forgiven….

All this is about poetry, of course—an ecosystem top-full of these two types. Wicked little martinets and frooty goofballs. But the goofballs are going somewhere. Some of them are. They must be smacked in the mouth sometimes, heaven knows. But you must never forget they are the future.

 

3.

Every single poet should compile his or her own Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I mean a totally personal anthology of one’s Gold Standards. Poems one returns to over and over, like one returns to a favorite CD. I don’t know how many pages, but there has to be absolutely no pretense to fairness. If three quarters of the book is one poet, so be it. If one of the poems is seventy pages long, and none of the others are anything like that, so be it. If it’s all men, or all women, or all gay, or all straight—so be it. There has to be ONE operating principle behind the book: THE poems that you treasure. Nothing more, nothing less.

Robbins told me Bill Knott has been doing something like this for years. He’ll make, like, his own Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy, based strictly on his own taste. Compile it, self-publish it, give it to friends. That is excellent. I would love to do a John Ashbery selection like that. The ones I love, irrespective of chronology, importance, Ashbery-ness….

But mainly I want to have a look at my friends’ Golden Treasury compilations. As long as the supreme editorial principle is adhered to—requiring that every included poem pass the Love Test, and that all other criteria be absolutely banned—then imagine how much I would learn about the compilers! Actually, now that I think of it, this little project would be a cinch to engineer. Just do it all online. Be like Pinterest, or whatever that shit is.

PREDICTION: This idea will be a reality within the next hundred and twenty seconds.

 

4.

Hafez says somewhere “Snatch up a book of poems and head to the wilderness.” Yes. And you either aspire to write books that would live up to that, or you don’t.

Sandra Simonds told me: “Poems are either really good, or almost, or they have no right to exist.”

Hannah Gamble told me: “I can't take any more of these Victorian kitchen utensils and Google words. Corvid, silique, whipstitched, runnel—I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to read Miss Havisham’s poetry.”

And Chris Crawford says: “All poems should… no, all metaphors should, I mean all poetry should always…wait, what the hell am I talking about, what’s poetry?”

 

The New School Announces the Winner of the Second Annual Paul Violi Prize

 

Justin Sherwood, Winner of the 2012 Paul Violi Prize

Justin Sherwood has won the second annual Paul Violi Prize in Poetry for a selection of original poems entitled “Abeyance.” Honorable mention goes to Lenea Grace (“National Canvas”) and Alissa Fleck (“Meditations on Salt”). Formal announcement will be made at graduation.

The prize is named after Paul Violi, who taught in the New School Writing Program from 2003 until his sudden death in April 2011. Paul excelled as a mentor and inspired our students as much by his example as by his presence. The students loved him and it was reciprocal. "Simply walking in the door made me a happy man," he said more than once.

Awash in the love of Paul that was matched only by the shock and dismay at his untimely passing (he was sixty-six), Paul’s friends decided to raise funds for an annual poetry prize to be given in his honor. The response of donors was immediate and generous, and funding for the Paul Violi Prize in Poetry, consisting of a cash award of $500, is secure for many years to come.

Alex Crowley, 2011 Violi Prize Winner

All second-year students in our program are eligible to apply with a group of five of their best poems. To assure fairness, the contest is judged by distinguished poets not affiliated with the New School. Alex Crowley won the 2011 award, announced in September of 2011 and celebrated at the memorial tribute to Paul Violi that took place at the New School on December 2, 2011, to an overflow crowd. On that occasion, each of thirty-one writers – including major literary stars (such as Paul Auster, Billy Collins, Ron Padgett) as well as New School Writing Program students and alums – read one of Paul’s poems. Professor David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the New School Writing Program, organized and moderated the event, along with Robert Polito, director of The New School Writing Program, who delivered remarks in Paul’s memory. Before the intermission Lehman surveyed the audience and quoted Yeats:  “Think where a man’s glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was I had such friends.”

“Paul's inventiveness was astounding,” Lehman said. “He liked not only writing poems but creating forms, or claiming for poetry forms and structures in use in civilian life. So he has poems in the form of TV Guide listings, the index to a nonexistent book, potted biographies for a midterm examination or quiz show, a radio pitchman's patter, the dialogue between a delicatessen counterman and a customer, and the acknowledgments page of a poetry collection. One such effort would spawn another. He writes an ‘Acknowledgments’ indicating the name of the journals in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge's actual poems might appear – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in ‘Modern Bride,’ for example, and ‘Work without Hope’  in ‘Popular Mechanics.’ And this splendid conceit gives rise to a second poem entitled ‘Acknowledgments,’ only this one is populated with purely notional poems written by a mad grammarian: ‘Elegy for the Split Infinitive,’ ‘Poem Contaminated by Prepositions.’”

In his remarks at the Violi memorial tribute, Robert Polito said: “Paul’s poems possessed a dynamic internal architecture, and casually carried a lot of history inside them – one element of his energetic design looping back to the conceptual wit of British metaphysical poets like Marvell, Herbert and Donne; another element summoning and reinventing the vivid American, even hardboiled vernaculars of Damon Runyon,  Dashiell Hammett, and Mark Twain; another element recasting the fluency, volatility, and forthrightness of the Coleridge conversation poems he loved and taught; and still another element, maybe more elusive but no less crucial, that absorbed into poetry the deadpan strategies of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Johns.”

“Paul had a genuine and deep reserve of intellectual curiosity,” Lehman said. “He seemed immune from the kinds of resentment and bitterness that afflict so many poets who have not received as much recognition as they deserve. We are proud to honor his name and his legacy.”

Happy birthday, Robert Morse (alias Finch, alias Bert Cooper)

 

59 BITS FROM TANYA LARKIN’S *MY SCARLET WAYS* [selected by Anthony Madrid]

(Larkin, Tanya. My Scarlet Ways. Saturnalia Books, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-9833686-3-2. $14.) 

❖

 

a proletariat anthem that sweetens wells

cranks swings and lands kids on their feet.

 

❖

 

                   I will faint and resurrect

like a circus tent at dawn

first in one town, then another.

 

❖

 

I was this pink, sun-cradled snake.

I grew anarchic red.

 

❖

 

So gone into things, resigned

to winds, charmed by use—

they strapped me to a prow for luck.

 

❖

 

like the bell in the broken doll’s head

we loved to kick around.

 

❖

 

It’s not so bad,

the sound of losing at love.

When we broke off the arms of the statue

she softly came alive.

 

❖

 

                                     playing us

like flutes and finding all the stops

 

❖

 

           There is precisely this much me

in the room. And I know precisely

 

because I am not that girl off to powder-

puff in the leaves thinking, love

 

come smother me faster.

 

❖

 

How good it must feel to play through the girls

 

❖

 

                                  Goodbye, girls, I’ll see you

later in the place where your wings are trussed

 

❖

 

                     I saw you there soaking in grass until grass

felt its sex and shouted, smite me like a nation

It is you, who washes death’s posable head

with soft licks. One day you will lick it entirely away

 

❖

 

you suckhole of sincerity

 

❖

 

I make a face at my neighbor and she makes a face back.

 

❖

 

sniffing out sex-past or sex-future

 

❖

 

there goes love’s hierarchy a pleasure only felt

by pleasure seekers

 

❖

 

I cannot do it alone signing all your names to my letters

saying aren’t I brave dear so and so having feelings at all

 

❖

 

These days I cannot get high enough

to vandalize the moon. I cannot get low

enough to eat earth and like it.

 

❖

 

I care about style but it’s not everything.

It’s only anything insofar as I need it

to survive the sad pulp of late afternoon,

the sublime languors of a loved one as he or she

decides to have me or not.

 

❖

 

                        o where is the cordless

the lost disc of postpunk seraphim rending the skies.

 

❖

 

As if one foot in the door of the doom room.

 

❖

 

As if Satan didn’t look so cute when defeated

his oversized wings curving over his head.

 

❖

 

As if seasons didn’t matter but it’s your blankety blank life

Southern California or lack thereof.

As if Nebraska said give me a hill so I can jump.

As if for sooth we went pretending in feathered masks.

 

❖

 

                                                       there was no

choice but to accept the foot into my chest, let it

kick in my ribs with its all-seeing heel

 

❖

 

Happiness is unanimous the sun

bites down with its one blunt tooth

 

❖

 

                           But I was quickest

to my quiver. My arrow was out.

I learn more from missing—when I miss.

 

❖

 

Three whole seconds of true leaf affection
you missed because you were off with your blankey

your nose in the moss a finger in the lining.

 

❖

 

                      The book I was reading bit me,

and I tried to bite it back, but left the dream

 

for another, jawing at the air.

 

❖

 

HEAVEN AND HELL ARE REAL PLACES

 

Goody for them but I’ll keep walking

 

❖

 

Inside it, horses will foam at the mouth. A row of archers

shall go down on one knee.

 

❖

 

put the wreck back in recreation

 

❖

 

a bloom itself that releases a fragrant steam, Pah Pah, into the sky

 

❖

 

I throw out a shoulder thinking up music

 

❖

 

just my God’s much farther than yours—

not a quick scramble up the light.

 

❖

 

What are you, style? Besides something to fool

around with until the real thing comes along

a way to say, here I interject a little weather.

 

❖

 

When I write fiction, I call you the distance

between me and my characters. In a poem, are you

the distance between me and myself? Is the goal

not to have you at all but to burn in my own flame

not just sit there by the fire singing songs and

warming my hands? That seems a little extreme

 

❖

 

More likely, style, you’re an instinct for self-

preservation, so I don’t blame those who hide

in you.

 

❖

 

                                                 without distance

there’s no love—no room to cast oneself out.

 

❖

 

Here kissings lasts a country mile.

 

❖

 

I run my silver down your parts.

You run your silver down mine.

 

❖

 

The sun has a body to go with its head.

 

❖

 

My little dark one, my little death,

she said, nothing exists until you lick it.

I said I wanted to be licked.

 

❖

 

Look at the cypress, I said, it really

knows how to use its drama. Lick it,

she said. But it already exists, I said.

 

❖

 

The sense of being haunted is bunk, divine bunk.

 

❖

 

Today I strive but tomorrow I will go

at the pace of an heir. No need to hurry

through anything, even sadness or cold,

since time is money and tomorrow I shall have

plenty of that.

 

❖

 

                                                   now I reject

anything I can have easily, which is quite a lot

now that I am rich. Just think of all the stuff!

 

❖

 

                                           every marked and

unmarked tree in this double silent old growth

forest belongs to me.

 

❖

 

I leave the little beasts alone in their zoo of light

and turn to accept the admiration of the poor,

who nod and wonder at my enormous discipline,

which keeps them from killing and mounting me

on the walls of their otherwise tasteless, suburban homes.

 

❖

 

We were spinning ourselves into a rare dessert,

a delicate sugar helmet, deliriously scribbled, snow

that would melt on contact with that other, intractable world.

French King Henry took to wearing a basket of little dogs

on a ribbon around his neck.

 

❖

 

The English called it sprezzatura, the ability to think

an impossible lightness into the body and leap over

a mess of tombs thereby escaping your godbound

enemies or by the flourishes of a sword

cut the gown into a hundred bits the leaving the woman

that had been so tightly bandaged in tulle more or less

naked not even nicked by the sword.

 

❖

 

                                                            She is

the lucky beneficiary of another’s studied

effortlessness. You will carry her across death

because you have matched yourself

to nothingness and she has not.

 

❖

 

The suitors are doing donuts in the parking lot.

 

❖

 

Pig or god, I am learning how it’s done.

 

❖

 

One sure way of getting behind

God’s back is by making a trumpet

of some devil’s minion’s ass in a poem

 

❖

 

       ground him down to a pilgrim

with her stare;

 

❖

 

Wise she was from letting us drink ourselves

to death.

 

❖

 

I never went home those days. I was home-free.

 

❖

 

How far exactly is Cho-fu-Sa? Will I ever know

the distance one can travel away from the self to another

 

without breaking apart, until I have arrived, white-hot

and thirsty, looking to tie one on in a three-syllable town:

 

❖

 

ripened by the miles I’ve walked

 

❖

 

the mirror where I practiced how to kill

and spare a life all in one look

 

❖

 

From the Archive: When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems (by Laurence Goldstein)

(Ed note: Anthony Madrid posts thus far are pretty terrific, yes?  I kow you agree so to show your appreciation you should buy his book. 

His post about translation got me free associating until I arrived at this post by Laurence Goldstein from a few years ago.  Not exactly on point but timely nonetheless. sdh)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Ph èdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

Forty Swimsuits [by Molly Arden]

Tonight’s entry begins in the small closet in the upstairs hall.  There, a bag of shameful confirmation is knotted evidence of a ritual I’ve practiced since my teens.  It’s difficult to discuss without the risk of sounding horribly shallow, it might be only a poet who would recognize the significance of the ceremony involved in selecting an annual summer wrapper.  This ritualized spring rebirth of the self is made by way of spandex, nude lining, underwire, a few pieces of hardware.