The Best American Poetry

Mitch Sisskind presents a poem by Nevin Schreiner

A poem by my writer friend of many years -->>

 

The Big Bang
 
This took place when they were half asleep
The way you look when you roll over and say Huh?
Dead brained, dream soaked
Lava eyed.
 
While engaged in making a baby
Neither spoke much
Or cared much what the other might say
With the exception of what you wouldn’t exactly call
                                         language
Like:  Oh fuck, Oh Jesus, and the like.
 
They were eighteen.
Collectively, thirty six
Heaving away
Breath, sweat, skin, whatnot
Mingled like Japanese cars after a collision
Limp airbags littering
The  floor
The tv howling away
Someone banging on the ceiling or wall.
 
Nine months later
Sandor Fox arrived
His name a presumptive chariot
Air for a helium zeppelin
A city map
(Instead of a City)
Sprawled on a kitchen table
Or was it a restaurant booth
Amidst red formica dots
Atop laminated
Photographs of eggs.
 
He cried his little lungs out
To be born an American
At the end of
The age of glory
The age America made up
Looking in its mirror that said
Made in Japan,
Crying like a little sewing machine
A cloister, a swift
Soughing wind,
A piece of damp angel food cake
An overcarobonated 7 up.
 
Sandor Fox
 
Born under a pile of bills
Believing in food
Warmth, tits,
Believing in doctors, clergymen
Taxidermy, Congress,
Thinking about five to four
Supreme Court decisions,
Consumed by a need to assert himself
On the next available nipple.
 
The road not taken
Running through his new house,
Animist furniture
Sprouting strange life between velour couch cushions
And he,  Sandor, a cyclone
Whirling inside the mirror of his parents eyes
He’s wet
They’re fat
The family has cloistered itself in re-sold ideas
Shoveling its past into plastic bags
Confronting its future with Glade.
 
Sandor. Sandor. What should we do with you?
Hope of our hope.
Destroyer of nakedness.
Curer of dreams.
What should we do when you wake crying at 2 am
With your parents silently growing in their beds?
When you scream at four am,
The hour dreams are packed up for the night.
When your own tiny brain revolves in your skull
Like the dawn sky, emptying itself of stars?
What should we think about you?
What should we do?
 
I know.
We’ll meet on the street
And I’ll say, Sandor,
Do you realize what we have in common?
We both come from the Big Bang.
No, Silly, not that one,
Not that wet tumbling and rumbling
And fighting and slithering
And skidding, evulsing and sliming:
 
The other one.
  
                          -- Nevin Schreiner
 

 

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Rodney Jones

Okay, face it: the academic year is about to begin.  This ain’t no party.  This ain’t no disco.  This ain’t no fooling around.  Put away the sunscreen, dump all those plans you had for the Summer of Continuous Industry and Focus out back with the compost.  For many of us reading this blog, the creative writing workshop is heading straight at us, whether we’ll be teaching or taking one.  So I can think of no more appropriate poem to post today than this beauty by Rodney Jones, the tongue-in-cheek raconteur I am always eager to read, because just as you start to think you’re having way too much fun to be reading a serious poem, he plunges into the depths of something.   “The Ante” first appeared in New Ohio Review 10, Fall 2011.

 

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THE ANTE

First Workshop

 

A few sonnets about nature and the Greek gods.

Many free-verse poems in all lowercase letters.

Huey wrote of madness, Maddox of possums.

John played the sadness of empty stadiums.

Two berets, one silver-tipped cane, tweedy blazers.

In most Natalie poems, she took off her clothes.

The year of the Tet offensive.  Wallace in Montgomery.

We read James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton.

One Friday an ex-guidance counselor from Jasper

leapt through the window of a cafeteria, shouting

“I am the son of Jesus Christ!  Behold the rapture!”

But nothing much happened in Poetry Writing 301

until Walter C. Avery wrote that a black swan,

born in the infralapsarian brain of a garbage dump,

would crack the codes of the Southern Baptists.

And for this jack-surreal, mildly apocalyptic truffle

was taken for near genius material, practically

a second Edgar Allan Poe, until Sam Maisel

submitted his “Poem for The Worksheet Typist,”

which made everyone consider how scandalous

it must have seemed for her, a local woman,

a seamstress, and mother of Christian athletes,

to run across “I know you think you’ve seen it all before,

but this is duck rape, feathered love.”   And some

in the critique afterward, praised the line-endings;

one person even mentioned “The Second Coming,”

which, admittedly, made me blanch with envy,

so I had wanted to say something about how

sometimes the subject is not what you think

or the ones you imagine you are talking about

stand abruptly and begin to talk back to you,

but spring was bearing down on the workshop,

ripping out pages, grinding the opinions to nubs.

So much energy in the streets—demonstrations,

happenings, awakenings—so many instances

of sudden and involuntary enlightenment,

though mostly my friends and I spent our nights

on Sixth Street drinking beer at The Chukkar

or crouched in a huddle around a record player.

By the time I thought of Sam’s duck again,

May had slipped into June and June into July,

and what is poetry in a copper tubing factory?

A cloud would fan out around the tubes

as the crane lifted them from the soaping vats

after they had softened in the furnace.

My job was to crimp a point on each of them.

Then the next man would carefully run them

through a die.  Down the line I could see

the process repeating:  the furnace, the point,

the die—the tubes and men diminishing.

All night the saws screeched and whined.

The pointers clattered.  The press roared.

That was the beauty of it.  You could sing.

No one would hear.  You could say anything.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Some forty-five years later, the workshop Jones describes sounds very familiar, though I don’t see many berets these days.  The idea of poetry, “the beauty of it,” and I think Whitman would agree, is supposed to be our liberation from the phrase “supposed to be.”  You’re supposed to be freed of all those rules – social, idiomatic, topical – enough to say what you need to say.  Yet if we’re not careful the creative writing workshop becomes like any organized group of people, fraught with sidelong looks, with political and aesthetic pressures.  Is he allowed to say that?  Can she get away with that metaphor? Self-consciousness naturally interferes with pure expression, and writers can be pigeonholed even if only one or two of their poems memorably mentioned possums or nakedness.  Well, what is poetry in a copper tubing factory?  For the speaker in this poem, at this moment, perhaps it’s a relief to be away from people grouped about a table civilizing, judging, taming each other and imposing their views on what’s important to him.   We write in order to be read, sure.  But also, and maybe foremost, to sound our barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Rodney Jones has published nine books of poetry, the most recent being Imaginary Logic, which appeared last fall from Houghton Mifflin.  He has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Harper Lee Award, and the Kingsley-Tufts Award.  He is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.

 I’ve thoroughly enjoyed -- thanks for the opportunity, David! -- presenting these poems from New Ohio Review all summer long, and I hope you’ll seek out the other good poems we publish. Meet you up on the roof.

--JAR

Some Other Time: sung by Eileen Farrell (with Leonard Bernstein at the piano)

Happy birthday, Lenny (1918-1990), genius and amazing musician (with a surprisingly weak singing voice). My favorite of your songs. WIth words by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. -- DL

 

Speak, Recipe: Reading Cookbooks as Life Stories by Ian Mosby

(Ed note:  I came across this essay by following a twitter link posted by @pete_wells and since I know so many readers of this blog share my passion for cooking and for writing about food, want to recommend it here. Please do let me know what you think.  Do you have an annotated cookbook of your own or of a loved one? -- sdh)

As a historian of food and nutrition, I’ve amassed a substantial collection of cookbooks, old and new, over the years. But one cookbook I often find myself coming back to amidst the hundred plus dusty volumes cluttering my office is a 1930 edition of the Good Housekeeping Institute’s Meals Tested, Tasted and Approved: Favorite Recipes and Menus From Our Kitchens to Yours. I purchased it for $12 from a Toronto vintage shop and consider it one of my favourite purchases to date.

On the surface, at least, the cookbook seems unremarkable. Good Housekeeping cookbooks from the period are common enough, and like many others in my collection it’s well worn and smells vaguely of mildew and decades-old flour. Its spine is broken and held together with clear tape. Its pages are stuffed with dozens of handwritten recipes on cards as well as a number of others cut from newspapers and magazines. These include a fading recipe for Dandelion Wine written in pencil on a piece of scrap paper and a Campbell’s Soup can label with a recipe for Oven Glazed Chicken. In other words, it’s a cookbook like hundreds of others that could be found in kitchen cupboards in households across the country, and my personal collection includes its own fair share of similarly well-worn, well-loved volumes.

But what makes this particular cookbook remarkable – to me at least – is the inscription in the front cover left by its original owner, Jean Stephenson.[1]

Continue reading here.

I Remember: A Film About Joe Brainard

We're big fans of Joe Brainard and have written about him several times, most recently here. We were delighted to get an e-mail telling us of a new film about this singular artist and writer whom, we're happy to say, seems to be gaining in popularity. The film was directed by Matt Wolf and is built around archival recordings of Brainard reading from his famous memoir-poem "I Remember."

Here's what Matt Wolf has to say about his film:

I've always been a huge fan of Joe Brainard's art and writing, especially "I Remember," which is probably my favorite poem ever. When I found archival audio recordings of Joe reading the text on the online archive PennSound, I knew that I wanted to make something— to bring to life the poem, but also to tell Joe's story.  I approached his best friend, the poet Ron Padgett, after reading his very moving book Joe: A Memoir, and he connected me to great photos, films, and materials to tell the story.  I also interviewed Ron about his lifelong friendship with Joe from elementary school in Tulsa, Oklahoma up until Joe's death. When I was editing the film, I wanted to create a kind of conversation between Ron's recollections of Joe, and Joe's memories from the poem. I started to realize that the film wasn't just a tribute to Joe, but a film about deep friendship, and the unique bonds artists form with each other.

The film just became available online.   The trailer below should whet your appetite for more information about Joe Brainard.  Find out how to view or purchase the film here.

 

-- sdh

Spontaneous Aphorism: Hope

Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent.

-- Mignon McLaughlin
The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960

via The American Scholar (Summer, 2008)

-- sdh

A New Way to Listen by Lisa Vihos

Lisa Vihos

So, I was contemplating my reading to celebrate the publication of my new chapbook, The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012). The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to hear myself go on for a half hour or more, as much as I like my poems. It occurred to me that many of them might be done better justice if read by other people, some of them not necessarily poets, just friends, coworkers, and neighbors who have good voices and strong characters. Imagine that!

And so was born the idea for my "poetic happening," a "community poetry read" in which the majority of my poems would be read by others. There are 22 poems in the chapbook, and I had fifteen readers each read one poem. I read three, one of which was the title poem. We went through the poems in the order that they appear, skipping a couple along the way. Hearing them read aloud that way, I discovered I had put them in an order for a reason. More surprises.

I had assigned the poems in the two weeks prior to the reading, so that my designated readers had a chance to familiarize themselves with the words. I did not "test" anyone before the reading. I just trusted them to do the best they could, even though some of them told me they were nervous. Some were afraid that they would not do the particular poem justice.

Let me say right here, not a single person disappointed me. In the moments when the readers were on stage, I was blown away by the care with which each person read. I could tell that each person had clearly practiced, and had thought about giving the assigned poem some personal power from his or her own inner repertoire of thought and emotion.

For me, it was as though all the voices in my head that I cannot actually speak the way I hear them came to life during that 45 minutes. There was the voice of the angry woman, the loving man, and the anguished poet. Janet, who is in her 80s, read a poem in defiance of getting old. Lynn, who is seeking to grow and evolve, read a poem about just that. Ed, who had some training in the monastery many eons ago, read a poem with scriptural references, and Al, who has the slightest southern drawl and an occasional stammer, read a poem in which God invites us to stop complaining and join him for a shot of tequila.

If I may say, the effect was quite mesmerizing.

It was something theatrical, layered, magical. Yes, they are "my" poems, but I like to think that they belong to the world, and hearing others read them made that real for a short while. Lest you would question the sanity of a poet not reading her own work, please read more about the evening from the perspective of an observer, essayist and Stoneboat associate editor, Signe Jorgenson, who witnessed the whole thing:

And, if you need to treat yourself to something really enriching one of these days, get your friends to read your poems for you at your next reading. You will be amazed at how wonderful you sound when it is not the sound of your own voice you hear.

Spontaneous Aphorisms

A good cook can make much out of nothing, while a bad cook can make nothing out of much.

 - -  Anonymous

-- sdh

Breakfast at the Border by Mónica de la Torre (via Saveur)

 

El Yogurt Place, Tijuana

Over breakfast in Tijuana in 2010, the two sides of me came face to face. I was there, a Mexican-American poet visiting from Brooklyn, with the novelist Cristina Rivera Garza, who teaches at the University of California, San Diego. It was my first trip to the area, so we were sightseeing across the border. Cristina, a double agent of sorts, keeps two cell phones, two wallets, and homes in both cities. We were overnighting at her house on the Tijuana coast.

 

Continue reading here.

Out Loud and on Paper: Nurses struggling to tell their stories

 

Photo by Amy Dixon

Back in June we posted about the July weekend writing retreat for nurses, sponsored by the Center for  Health Media & Policy at Hunter College in New York City.  The retreat was part of the CHMP’s program in Narrative Writing for Health Care Professionals, and was cosponsored with the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. 

 

I asked Jim Stubenrauch, who along with Joy Jacobson leads the retreat, to keep us posted and I'm pleased to report that it was an enormous success, so much so that its likely that they'll be run once a quarter. Follow this link to read Jim's take on the weekend and this one to read about it from the perspective of Patricia Wagner Dodson, one of the participants. 

Please spread the word about this valuable program. You can stay up-to-date on the Center's activities by following it on facebook or by visiting HealthCetera, CHMP's blog.

-- sdh