The Best American Poetry

Improvisation, Creativity and the Lock on the Garden Shed (by Leslie McGrath)

I bought a few ears of butter & sugar corn at a farm stand yesterday morning. All afternoon-- through grading assignments, doing laundry, revising a poem, walking the dog—I let thoughts of sweet corn move through me. Rather, I let the textures and possibilities of taste rise and fall through the permeable membrane of my consciousness. I have a fine taste memory, as I think many cooks have. I can taste ingredients, combinations of ingredients. It’s been very hot and humid, so I’d made a mild chicken salad with red grapes, tarragon, and toasted pecans for supper. Corn with a spritz of lime juice? I had a bright fruit note in the chicken salad. A jazzed-up caprese salad? No, two dishes with the same texture. Creamed corn? Not on such a hot day. I remembered my new corn zipper early in the afternoon, and while stripping the kernels from their cobs, a few thoughts came. Not just about the corn dish.

The corn zipper strips three rows of kernels at a time in long pieces. I picked one up and looked closely at the cut side, where three white rows were weeping a very sweet juice. Tercets, I thought, long-lined tercets. I sat at the desk and tried a revision of an elegy I’ve been wrestling with for months. Did the weeping kernels point me in the direction of the elegy? Did the long three-row piece nudge me to try a different tack? As I shifted the lines around, I thought, chipotle, the sweet bite of corn needs a masculine pairing and an aggressive cooking technique. There it was: a quick corn fry with bits of smoky chipotle. There it was: another window into a poem that had felt sealed, ungenerous.

Eating as a Part of a Writing Practice (by Leslie McGrath)

Most of us know that Hippocrates wrote “First, do no harm.” This edict is used by Western medicine in the oath that physicians use as part of a covenant to their patients. Hippocrates also wrote, “Let food be thy medicine” and most of the world (China and India) relies this connection between food and health. I learned to as well.

Five years ago, realizing that poetry was not going to pay my bills, I took a seven month long course at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in Manhattan. They train “Holistic Health Counselors” (HHCs) who then go and open practices in which they use a broad range of theories and research about nutrition to help clients improve their health. I found the education, which ranged from Ayurvedic medicine to the latest scientific research in nutrition being done at Harvard, deeply helpful. I opened a private practice as an HHC in 2007, just as the economy imploded. I lasted only a year, but my training led me to a writing gig as a feature writer for the “Conscious Kitchen” column at Natural Home & Garden magazine  I developed healthy vegetarian recipes and wrote short pieces about the nutrition and history of each recipe. It was great fun to write these articles, the pay was good, and it was a thrill to see professional photographs of the recipes I’d developed. They looked far less appealing in my kitchen as I tested them!

More on Cooking and Writing

Leslie McGrath's recent post about the similarities between writing and cooking reminded me of this passage, by Charles Simic:

If not in bed, my next writing-place of choice is the kitchen, with its smells of cooking. Some hearty soup or a stew simmering on the stove is all I need to get inspired. At such moments, I‘m reminded how much writing poetry resembles the art of cooking. Out of the simplest and often the most seemingly incompatible ingredients and spices, using either tried-and-true recipes, or concocting something at the spur of the moment, one turns out forgettable or memorable dishes. All that’s left for the poet to do is garnish his poems with a little parsley and serve them to poetry gourmets.

-- Charles Simic, New York Review of Books, February 10, 2012

-- sdh

Tart Pie Filling: The Pushcart Prize and Online Literary Magazines (by Leslie McGrath)

 

I’ve promised pie filling today. Here it is in the form of a literary controversy which, like the pie plates, doesn’t appear to have gotten much light. The 2012 edition of Pushcart Prize anthology contains within its introduction by publisher Bill Henderson the following statements:

“I have long railed against the e-book and instant Internet publication as damaging to writers. Instant anything is dangerous — great writing takes time. You should long to be as good as John Milton and Reynolds Price, not just barf into the electronic void.”

I think very highly of the Pushcart Prizes. I believe that annual poetry anthologies are a vital means of getting poetry more widely read (beyond the walls of other poets’ bedrooms and academe.) They also serve as a kind of enormous flip book. A look through a decade’s worth of this kind of anthology gives the reader a sense the prevailing preoccupations and styles of American poetry during that period.

What I did not know, and what concerns me, is that the publisher of the Pushcart Prize anthology seems to be saying that literature published in electronic form is of lower quality, thus not considered for their prize and their publication. This has caused a great deal of concern among certain online literary magazines, some of whom have decided to no longer nominate for the Pushcart Prize.

Endless Genghis Khan adventure movie....

This goes on for about thirty more episodes -- in Chinese or Mongolian, your guess is as good as mine. Genghis Khan (real name: Temujin) was a pretty bad guy but what the hell. The Mongols under GK and his successors did great until defeated by the Mamluks in 1260, partly because the Mamluks had stronger horses. The Mamluks were also horrible. Interesting that a couple of Mongol expeditions sent against Vietnam by Kublai Khan were defeated by the Vietnamese guerilla fighters. I guess "Charlie" had some tricks up his sleeve even then. As longtime visitors to this site know, Mongols today are very interested in poetry. The film entitlted "The Weeping Camel" is a wonderful resource about contemporary Mongolia.

Sherman's Still Yellen After Sixty Glorious Years

Librettist ("The Rothschilds"), playwright, and Emmy-award winning screenwriter Sherman Yellen celebrates the jubilee of his marriage in this post via Huffington:

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When we married on a sweltering June day in 1953, the chance of our marriage lasting was remote -- even when divorce was something of a rarity in our world. Born in the early Depression years we came of age in post WWII America. I'd just turned 21, a recent college graduate with a determination to make my living as a writer, and Joan was 19, and an amazingly beautiful girl at a time when Elizabeth Taylor and Ingrid Bergman set the standard. We met at college, as many people did who married early. We were far too young to have settled feelings, and we had no jobs or money: a recipe for a marital disaster.

Neither of our parents had been divorced. Mine had soldiered through some difficult years, while hers had enjoyed a good marriage, so divorce was not in our DNA.

We were outspoken, opinionated, stubborn -- oh, so stubborn -- and not afraid of snapping a judgment or having a good fight. No smart bookmaker would have given odds on our marriage enduring for six years, let alone 60. Young people in love in those Eisenhower/Kennedy years didn't live together first as 80 percent of the couples do today; they got married amidst a family celebration and a lot of ugly wedding presents: silver-plated table top cigarette lighters, crystal ashtrays, and enough wooden salad bowls to launch a life devoted to nothing more than smoking and eating iceberg lettuce and pale pink hot-house tomatoes.

We were Depression era babies who married in "The Age of Anxiety" when fear of the bomb, the Russians, juvenile delinquents, and flying saucers lived side by side with Father Knows Best, comedian Milton Berle, the poems of W.H. Auden, and the dreaded, indefinable "existentialism." Although TV had made its steady incursions into movie-going, it was still a time of superb filmmaking. Storytelling was an art that then depended on good writing and performances, not special effects. Brilliant film stars acted in literate movies such as Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve and On The Waterfront and superbly crafted comedies such as Some Like it Hot filled the big theater screen with laughter and glory. And so we have lived from that Age of Anxiety to the Age of Kardashian where a glut of celebrities whose work nobody has ever heard of go in and out of rehab as the cameras roll and turn their sad, soft disorders into hard cash. Life may be far more expensive than it was in the '50s and '60s, but fame and fortune are so much cheaper.

Okay, enough from the grouchy old man -- on with the story.
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For more click here.

 

Binghamton Loves Me (to the tune of "Somebody Loves Me")

Here (with thanks to Nicole Santalucia and Deanna Dorangrichia) is the latest sign that Binghamton wants to attain Hampton status:

Three Pie Plates and a Civil War Era Mystery

 

I’ve been dying to show you all these beautiful old pie plates we found recently. They were resting on a beam above the ceiling of a bedroom in our house. The house was built in 1749 and is thought to be one of the first farmhouses in my town of Stonington, CT. Like many very old houses, it’s been added onto over the years. Still, it’s a little old Cape Cod style home which once was a sheep farm, then a Christmas tree farm, now home to a boat builder and his poet wife. My husband Bill is one of a dwindling breed. He and the ten other men who work at his shop restore old wooden boats. It takes decades to learn to do what they do. Imagine building furniture which must fit a hull’s swoop and curves so perfectly that it can function well in years of rough seas.

We have a saying at our house: if it’s food, Leslie can cook it; if it’s wood, Bill can fix it.

The News of the Week in Review [by DL]

Once upon a New York Times, there was a Sunday section called  "The News of the Week in Review," which was a non-parody version of "That Was the Week That Was" -- TW3 for short -- the British TV hit of 1962 or '63 that crossed the great pond and introduced David Frost to the countrymen and -women of Robert Frost.

Such a magazoon today would tell you, in elliptical Winchell style, that Mexico, Latin America's second biggest economy, is hosting a presidential election this year and the candidates include "a Hitler admirer, a self-confessed adulterer, and a strictly informal entry, an ex-Playboy model turned production assistant, Julia Orayen," who is evidently running on a cleavage campaign (source: Barron's, June 25, 2012, "Magical Games" by that irascible master of Wall Street skepticism, Alan Abelson). . .  Texas Monthly tells us that Larry Hagman, Dallas's main man, was about to have a nervous breakdown in 1965  or '66 when his Hollywood buddy Peter Fonda came to the resuce and took the beleaguered actor to a Crosby, Stills and Nash concert. David Crosby generously handed Hagman a few tabs of acid and it had the desired effect. "I realized we don't disappear when we die. We're always a part of a curtain of energy." After his epiphanic Whitman moment, Larry gradually gave up acid in favor of leaves of grass. When he dies, he says, he wants "marijuana and wheat planted" in the field where he is buried. People "would harvest it in a couple of years and [bake] a big marijuana cake. People will eat a little Larry." . . . You wonder what the pictue of Helen Forrest, nee Fogel, in the upper left signifies? Keep wondering. . . Meanwhile, in Thailand they have their own version of Thai-dye T shirts. According to Andrew Biggs of the Bangkok Post (as quoted in The Week, June 22, 2012), Thai people of all ages and both sexes sport shirts with crude legends printed on them -- like "Heil Hitler!" or "I'm a cunt" or "Fuck Maggie Thatcher." The Interviews with T shirt wearers revealed that none knew what the words they wore meant. They bought the garments simply because they looked Western. . . Check out the current issue of Harper's. which has an excerpt from Paul Auster's forthcoming memoir, expertly done in second-person POV, a previously unpublished Albert Camus column from 1939 praising the power of irony, a smart, well-researched piece on Walmart by Dan Halpern (not that Dan Halpern), and a terrific prose poem by Mary Ruefle ("Little Gold Pencil"). . . Give up? I was listening to Helen Forrest swinging with the Harry James band when I began writng this column and ended with Bll Evans brooding at the Vanguard.. . . DL

Scent and Memory: how cooking parallels writing (by Leslie McGrath)

The limbic system, one of older parts of our brains (the cerebrum, where conscious thought coalesces, is the newest part) is the seat of emotion and memory formation. It’s also the part of the brain that governs our sense of smell. There’s a direct route between the sense of smell and memory. Think of the thousands of scenes in literature in which a character’s memory of a long-ago event surfaces because of an association with a particular scent: a grandmother’s perfume, a father’s cigarette, a warm dessert lifted from the oven. These examples have always struck me as unsubtle, even trite. This may be because scent operates more on the level of the unconscious. Its memory-finding ways are working constantly in the background. And writers develop practices which help us orient ourselves in our work by using scent as a marker.

A couple of months ago, a friend --I’m waving at you, Laura Orem-- sent me a bag of chocolate mint (yes, there is such a thing) which she’d grown and dried. I keep it on my desk and breathe deeply of its sweet herbaceous scent, which calms me and takes me to the sense of joyful risk from which I write.

My office here at home is off the kitchen and I go back and forth from desk to stove during the course of the day. I realized that I wander into the kitchen when I’m stuck in my writing/grading/editing. Cooking is an essential act of creation. For an adept cook, it has all the elements needed for the creation of a poem, followed by much better odds that it will taste the way it should.