The Best American Poetry

December 2-8: This Will Be the Week that Was

John Ashbery and David Lehman

 

Mark Doty

Tracy K. Smith

Monday, December 3:  David Lehman and Mark Doty read at the KGB Bar. 85 E 4th 7:00 p.m.  Details here.

Tuesday, December 4:  Poetry forum with Tracy K. Smith. The New School, 66 W 12 St 6:30 p.m. .  Details here.

Saturday, December 8: John Ashbery to read at the New School. 66 W. 12 St. 7:00 p.m. Details here.

All events are free!!

Poetry Forum: Tracy K. Smith 6:30 p.m. The New School Lang Café, Eugene Lang Building, 65 West 11th Street, Ground Floor (enter at 66 West 12th Street)

On December 4^th at the New School, the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winner in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith, will join David Lehman to read her poems and discuss her work. A former student of Lehman, Smith is the author of  the Pulitzer winning  Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), and two previous volumes, Duende, and The Body’s Question.

Along with her Pulitzer Prize, Smith’s awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, a fellowship from the Breadloaf Writers' Conference, and a 2005 Whiting Award.

She has taught at the City University of New York, University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University, and is now an assistant professor of creative writing at Princeton University. She lives in Brooklyn.

What I'm Reading Now: An Excerpt (by Stacey Harwood)

When I was about eleven, my job was to grade the eggs with my step-mother when I came home from school.  We worked in the basement, grading each egg separately on a small hand scale, brushing the dirty ones by hand with a sandpaper brush.  Hilda sat on a low box in front of an upturned crate which held the scale.  We both pushed a case of graded eggs away; periodically my father would appear and stack the crates one on top of another, labeling them with his co-op number so that they could be identified and he would get paid.  From sitting thus for years, bent over the hand egg scale, my stepmother's shoulders got so round that she appeared to have a hump.  One of the last modern machines to come onto our farm was an automatic egg-grader.  It was then possible to stand and put dozens of eggs on the scale at the same time. But it was too late for Hilda's back to straighten out. 

. . .

All the farm women and girls I knew packed eggs and did other chores on the farm.  Some of the women worked right alongside their husbands, cleaning out chicken coops, preparing the outdoor ranges for the chickens, doing the same heavy manual work as the men.  These were the women who peopled my world.  I looked at them, at their work-worn hands and faces, their rough clothing, indistinguishable from the men's and I resolved never to live on a farm or have anything to do with a farm when I grew up.

-- from The Land Was Theirs:  Jewish Farmers in the Garden State by Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky (University of Alabama Press, 1992)

The Year in Review: APOLLONIA: Greetings from Sifnos [by John Hennessy, July 22, 2012]

 SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

Greetings from Sifnos, Greece, an island in the Western Cyclades, quiet sibling to the flashier and better known Santorini and Mykonos.  Before I arrived this summer for my tenth return trip, like everyone else I was worried about the economy. How were my friends and acquaintances here handling the Draconian austerity measures Germany insists on imposing? Would Greece quit the Eurozone, default on its loans, return to the drachma? Part of me certainly hoped so: to this outside observer, the currency switch in 2002 had always seemed much better for the rich, worse for the middle and working class, another way for the wealthy to loot the country—as their American fellows do. (Don’t tell me about Greeks evading taxes until Mitt Romney, who may be our next president, releases his tax records.)  In 2002, prices of everyday goods and services soared to fit the Euro, but wages for workers stayed low, still tied to drachma rates.

The tourism industry took a hit then, too, as fewer middle class Europeans could afford the hotel rates and meal costs, the hikes in airfares and airport security fees. Athens and the islands were quieter. Even the backpackers from the Antipodes and North America stopped coming in their high-spirited droves, seeking out cheaper beach spots in Turkey and Vietnam.

While international tourism had begun to pick up again in the last ten years, Sifnos is close enough to Piraeus—three hours by high speed ferry—to be popular with Greeks, especially wealthy Athenians. Last summer you noticed their absence, despite the many French (more posey swan-dives from the rocks, less bouzouki-driven pop music, no p.d.a.) who seem to be trying to take their place. Clearly it wasn’t this clan of French who coined the phrase joie de vivre. Although I felt positive about sticking to my plan to return to Greece, no matter what happened in the election on June 17th and its aftermath, part of me worried I’d fill with self-reproach: What kind of opportunist takes a vacation in a country on the brink of fiscal collapse?

But I find instead that as you move away from Athens, particularly Syntagma Square, ground zero for the protests against the austerity measures, people are reluctant to talk to visitors about the suffering. Even my good friend Helena, who is sorting out her mother’s finances, came home from a meeting with the tax officer mostly keeping mum. She did say that she’ll try to sell some property, that the real-estate tax hikes are ridiculous, impossible to meet. But what’s really killing everyone right now is the fee schedule for electric service, which takes a page from the loan shark’s book: every six months everyone—no matter how little electricity one consumes—has to pay a “connection fee”; collecting revenues through utilities is yet another way to make the working and middle class pay, another way to avoid the graduated income tax—which puts the burden on the rich. Helena mostly hinted at this with a series of small jokes and ironic nods, and I filled in the gaps. Hardly what we’d call in New Jersey, where I grew up, complaint.

Greece will survive. Chin up. The sense I get in the Cyclades is that after more than four thousand years of negotiation, of colonizing and being colonized, withstanding attacks from within and without by Ionians, Samians, Minoans, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Nazis, bankers and every other form of pirate, they must be right to be if not optimistic then stoic. That hasn’t stopped me from asking questions, of course.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

     From all of the news articles I’ve read lately, three documents have helped me understand the political/economic situation in Greece these days, and here they are:

 

Arianna Huffington’s New York Times editorial from May 13, 2012, “Greek Tragedy”:

(Huffington makes clear that the Greeks refuse to mortgage the future of their children, so the austerity measures will never be acceptable to most of them. Read this article and then consider our willingness, in the United States, to allow our children, our young people, our college students, to go fifty, one hundred, even two hundred thousand dollars into debt before they receive their degrees.)

John Lanchester’s New Yorker Comment from June 18, 2012, “Greece vs. the Rest”

The third document is an email I received from an old friend who, among other things, is a Hellenic Studies professor:

“The situation in Greece is unbelievable and I avoid Athens at all costs.  I just moved back to the US after living in France for four years, during which time I went to Greece often -- but for most trips I flew direct from Paris to Crete and didn't stop in Athens at all; I gave a lecture at the U of Athens a year ago and the only people on the streets after 10pm were junkies and homeless immigrants (many whole families).  Nothing really good is being written on "the crisis" in English, partly since it's breaking news and partly since the English press is just reporting from afar (and mainly just replicating the AP wire version of events).  One of the grimmest aspects for me is the rise of the Golden Dawn, the fascist right wing party that used to exist mainly in the Diaspora (it was really strong among Greek Americans in Astoria) but now is popular in Greece, too.  There is a strong xenophobic thread in all Greek society and it isn't at its best right now.   In my view (which is the minority one) they should get out of the Euro, exit the EU, and figure out how to be less dependent on tourism.  But I don't think any of that is going to happen.”

John Hennessy is the author of Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books/Word Press 2007), a collection of poems, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Believer, Poetry, The New Republic, Harvard Review, LIT, Huffington Post, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour through New Jersey and other journals and anthologies. Hennessy is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, and he is the poetry editor of The Common, a new print magazine based at Amherst College. In 2007-2008 he held the Resident Fellowship in Poetry at the Amy Clampitt House. Hennessy went to Princeton University on a Cane scholarship and received graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas; he teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst.

ELLISTON POET R.I.P, PART 2 [by Jim Cummins]

So last night I'm in this mellow mood--autumnal, musing. Thinking about "the old days," remembering when I asked my grandmother what it had felt like to her to have lived through horses & buggies, cars, streetcars, planes, and now [1969] a man walking on the moon. She said she didn't give a rat's ass about all that, but pulled me over to the couch where she regaled me for two hours with stories about the Church in Pittsburgh, the Mob in Pittsburgh, the priest who stood up to the Mob, the mob boss and his big funeral, presided over by the priest, which might have got mixed up with the priest's funeral that all the mob bosses attended. Whatever, she was right; autumnal musing is for wimps. Not for the first time, I'm reminded funny is the only cure for the dark.

In 1976, I was 28, and had been in the curator job for about a year. The program had fallen into a little bit of slump; we didn't really take care of our guests well. When Phil Levine showed up as Elliston Poet for ten weeks in the fall, I found I could remedy this lack on our part and have a ball in the process. Phil and I, and my wife, Maureen Bloomfield, also a poet, just hit it off; in his usual outspoken way, Phil terrified most of the department, so we had plenty of time together. The ones he didn't terrify, he alienated by beating them at tennis. "He's so fucking competitive," one of them said once. "I thought he was a poet." I nodded sagely, "Yeah, I know what you mean. Poets usually aren't competitive." But talk about pushing the dark back with funny! Phil was 48, angry, edgy, passionate, warm, sentimental, full of stories and jokes, and a great poet--just being around him made you feel all things were possible. This was his first extended residency away from home, and he missed his wife, Franny, terribly. He spoke of her and his three sons constantly at first, along with stories of his family's two years in Barcelona, the Spanish Civil War, Lorca, poetry, matadors and jockeys--and of course Detroit. Ford Rouge, Lemon, the auto parts business, his twin brother, Eddie, a painter, the escape to Iowa City, the friendships with Berryman and Gunn and Justice, et al. I'd never had such an introduction to a life and work as that; tonight I feel very grateful and affectionate.

As I said, Phil was lonely--Cincinnati is a cold place in many ways, and the university was already becoming the soulless corporate entity of the present day--and all he wanted to do was hang out and talk, eat and drink. And teach. Maureen and I lived in a tiny constricted apartment, in a building since torn down, on Jefferson Avenue. We were on the first floor; you had to knock on our living room window, so we'd know to go out into the hall and open the outer door. One of us would hear a knock, and there would be Phil in his little black raincoat, and we would be off. Or we'd put big rib-eyes on the broiler--Maureen, now a vegan, cringes at this memory--and eat and drink into the night. We loved him. We became something of a surrogate family to him; he called us his kinder, and we WERE kids, so it was okay. At 28 and 26, we were a lot younger than our years. It was not all smooth sailing. Phil felt neglected by the English Department, and painful as it is to say, repelled by the values he saw it as embracing. He said it was "ruled at the top by five or six Mandarins, while the work of the place was done by the slave labor below." The Cincinnati Reds baseball team won its second straight World Series during Phil's stay; and Phil thought the Art Museum reflected the town's values in that it collected valuable "things" instead of dedicating itself to the glories of the human spirit. These two ideas came together at one of his Elliston lectures, when he declared, infamously to many, "You get the baseball team you can afford, and the art museum you deserve." Phil's digs at the Vernon Manor were no picnic, either. This was right before that grand personage underwent a sweeping, and successful, renovation, and had become, in effect, a rather sad old-age home. Phil used to keep us in stitches about the sounds he heard on the other side of the wall each night, as yet another patron gave up the ghost. He swore people were dying every night there, and it's true I did see a hearse once waiting patiently in the circular drive. But mostly, as I've indicated, the ten weeks went back too quickly and most enjoyably. One of my sweetest memories is of the poet John Ficociello inviting us to dinner, then torturing us with the slowest making of homemade fettucine noodles in modern history. The martinis were strong, the talk was great, and the food was attacked when it finally showed up. I remember we were talking about movies, and Phil was trying to get across how his generation had been formed by them. I said I knew what he meant, and quoted Fred Astaire in TOP HAT, singing, "Putting on my top hat, polishing my nails!" I knew I was being perverse, as did Fic. And of course Phil, ever the tough guy, looked aghast. "I meant Jimmy Cagney," he said.

Before he left, Phil wanted to give us a gift, so he flew us to Detroit, to see the neighborhoods of his youth and get a better understanding of that powerhouse of a city. We stayed in Royal Oak, near Eddie's house. Eddie still ran the car parts business Phil had worked in, too, along with Lemon and the other men, whom we were able to meet. What can I say? I loved Eddie, too. Can you imagine two Phil Levines? One was already improbable to me. And meeting Lemon was, apart from meeting that dignified and wise presence himself, was a bit of history, to Maureen and me. Next day the poet and lawyer, Larry Joseph, who was then attached to the Michigan State Attorney General's office, and who'd published at least one book of poems, drove Phil, Maureen, and I around Detroit. We started at 8:00 AM and finished after 5:00, with Larry, an impassioned Detroit lover, giving us an incredible history lesson as we drove. We went to all Phil's old neighborhoods, the Ford Rouge plant, old houses, old businesses, old haunts. Phil rode shotgun and looked shell-shocked, but for us it was amazing, absolutely unforgettable. Larry, a brilliant poet and a brilliant lawyer, was also a brilliant historian and tour guide. Still, the most amazing moment was yet to come. Toward the end of the day, we stopped at a particular white house; I don't know if Phil directed Larry to stop, or if Larry knew to. Anyway, Phil told a story so startling to me that I've never forgotten it. Phil said he had had a short career as a second-story man--he'd once been a thief in the night! He said he'd got caught one night on a stair landing--or maybe he'd "caught" himself doing this, and realized how stupid it was, and stopped. And maybe, of course, he only did it that one time; or maybe even he was telling a story about how he THOUGHT about doing it, and never actually followed through. Who knows. But what a story.

The next day we went out to the race track where Eddie had a part-ownership of a horse, and spent the day watching the races and hanging out with the jockeys. Eddie, not surprisingly, is an accomplished painter, who uses a formal, elegiac approach to pop subject matter, mostly beer cans and jockeys. What a duo they were. That night we went to a club to see Kenny Burrell, the great jazz guitarist, and a childhood friend of Phil's and Eddie's. The wonderfully acerbic critic Wilfred Sheed once said, of the Midwest:
"Why hulking agglomerates like Cincinnati and Detroit never developed their own culture is beyond me." Phil Levine could never get his head around Cincinnati--and I've never been able to, either, completely--but for ten weeks in the fall of 1976, that was okay.

The Year in Review: Color, Scent, and Exile (by Sharon Dolin, July 26, 2012)

Birthday Macarons from Le Varens de Gens, neighboring town

This was my birthday present from Cheryl and John, who hosted a fabulous birthday dinner party for me in the garden here. It's a feast of colors and flavors, as is my stay here. Cheryl Fortier is the Director of Moulin a Nef, the artist colony where I'm staying.

artisanal soap shop in town

One of the four artists staying here left today, so it was a little bit sad. In the morning, I walked into town with Yona Harvey, the other American poet in residence here, and we stopped in the soap shop, where the proprietor makes all the soaps as well as eau de toilette, with every possible scent. I bought the violet one because it smelled just like the candies of my youth that my son now also likes.

Here are the four of us: Aurelien Morrisse (French painter), Michelle Acuff (sculptor, visual artist, who left today), Yona Harvey (American poet), and moi (NY poet who would rather use color than words). I am hoping, perhaps, in a later post to talk about their work.

It's also the 56th anniversary of the day Nasser took control of the Suez Canal, which began the Suez Canal Crisis, which led to the expulsion of the Jews from Egypt, not least of whom was Edmond Jabes, beloved poet/philosopher, who moved to Paris. Would he have become the writer he became had he remained in Egypt? Would the taste of exile be so palpable in his work?

Color, eau de toilette, and exile. These are the three moods of the day.

I suppose I came here because even these brief sojourns elsewhere are the way I, like many artists, can, in a self-imposed exile, receive the word in the desert. For Jabes, the Jew was the quintessential outsider, the "foreigner of foreigners."

at the base of the clock tower in Auvillar, in homage to Marcabrun

Auvillar is the birthplace of Marcabrun, a troubadour poet born around 1100, who is famous for writing a song that was used as inspiration during the Crusades, in which Jews as well as Moslems were massacred.

So my stay here continues to be rife with contradiction. As it turns out, the Garonne may be off-limits for swimming because of all the pesticide run-off. To be continued . . .

Sharon is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Whirlwind ( University of Pittsburgh Press) and Burn and Dodge  (Pittsburgh, 2008). As well as poetry, Sharon is at work on a book of aphoristic sequences, several of which have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Denver Quarterly, The American Poet, Salamander, and The Kenyon Review Online.  She has poems forthcoming in Poetry along with a Q&A in December. Currently, she teaches at Poets House and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and directs The Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Competition.  Sharon blogs over at Whirlwind.

Happy Birthday, Marilyn Hacker (by Jenny Factor)

Tuesday marked the birthday of poet, Marilyn Hacker. In her honor, I've been thinking about a writing an odd multi-part fairy tale poem, based around a particular Grimm story, and featuring a transgendered bear. I may never finish it (well, actually, yesterday I finished a draft) but if I do, it is meant to be a kind of tribute to something wonderful she did when she was just about precisely my age. I am a long-time fan of all her work, but I am a fan, in that way we love what we love that feels particularly personal, almost like a secret, of her very brilliant series of poems based around the legend of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and featured in her fourth book, Assumptions (Knopf, 1985). 

I love The Snow Queen poems for the figure of the Little Robber Girl, whom Hacker depicts as a saucy, savvy, tough-skinned and tender tomboy-girl. The friendship between the Little Robber Girl and Gerda saves Gerda's life, allows her brother's rescue. The Little Robber Girl knows how to handle her knife, how to maneuver around her mother, how to get dirty and stay clean. I'm simplifying.

"every day millions of people die for our sins" [by Dina Gatina]

every day millions of people die for our sins
so what

I won't say it twice

let in a little
intime

every day millions of people die for our sins
so what
you're repeating yourself
so what, so what

they die
- you're repeating yourself
- every day
repeat after me
and whatever

you are repeating yourself every day and whatever

die after me
every day
summer sales
repeat after me:

summer sales

shout it louder 

-- Dina Gatina (translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich]

On Monday, October 15,at the midtown branch of the New York Public Library three young Russian poets read with three American counterparts at an event moderated by David Lehman. This is one of the poems read by Dina Gatina on that occasion. Gatina has won the prestigious Debut Prize for poetry in Russia.  For more information, here's a link to Causa Artium, one of the sponsors of the event.

WILLIAM BLAKE (11/28/1757) by Anthony Madrid (via facebook)

*I* have had just about all I can take
Happy birthday, William Blake

Planing and sawing before I’m awake
Happy birthday, William Blake

The God of our Fathers is still on the make
Happy birthday, William Blake

Nudist and nudist and apple and snake
Happy birthday, William Blake

☎

Oh, happy birthday, William Blake!!
Here are your presents and here is your cake

A ring on the Devil for innocence’ sake!
Happy birthday, William Blake

-- Anthony Madrid

Year in Review: POEMS BY AMELIA ROSSELLI AND A CONVERSATION WITH ROSSELLI TRANSLATOR DIANA THOW [ROBERT FERNANDEZ, July 8, 2012]]

Please welcome the scholar and translator Diana Thow, who for today’s entry has generously provided poems from her translation of Amelia Rosselli's Serie Ospedaliera (Hospital Series) in addition to some illuminating and insightful Rosselli context and commentary.

—RF

                        From Serie Ospedaliera (1963-1965) 
                        Amelia Rosselli/translation Diana Thow 

                        Lifting of weights and particularities of fate 
                        little doves eyed my strength 
                        taken from your take-off like 
                        candy, the vocation melted into 
                        a semantic revision of our quarrels 
                        and birds. None of the soldiers who really 
                        wanted to remarry was able to tell me 
                        who is it that really marches. 

                        ….solitary in the didactic regions 
                        I held the brigantella disappointed by 
                        such a miserable fate, oh 
                        see I’m exploding, don’t run away, the 
                        piano’s machinegun subtracts 
                        sensations, metro, camphor, the curved 
                        red lips bricks of the safe.

                         * 

                        A thin little voice: enough to open the shutter 
                        of the little window, that changes the world 
                        and its surfaces are a part of your 
                        migraines. Enough to barely open, open, your 
                        sleep measures itself against the sky, where 
                        a tragic image stays. 

                        You open a wall: another appears, to take 
                        your pulse. You can’t razor the wall, you don’t want 
                        to save yourself those few spirit hours, forcing 
                        its mysterious cells. And still, you feel like 
                        a fallen pine between the new pine groves, 
                        straight end to rotten pity. 

                        *

                        You scare yourself with all your heart 
                        with the air that shakes and sheds you; 
                        dreams radiate down through the 
                        illiterate facades, you count 
                        blood in fat drops 
                        falling full into your hands 
                        withdrawals from the anguish of knowing 
                        where the air is what does it move why 
                        it speaks, of ills so watered down 
                        to seem, so many things together 
                        but not one you forget, your 
                        dragging night and blood 
                        through immense days.

[Note: “You scare yourself with all your heart” first appeared in the estimable THERMOS]

RF: Who was Amelia Rosselli? 

DT: In her words: 

            Born in Paris afflicted in the epoch of our fallacious 
            generation. Laid out in America among the rich fields of landowners 
            and the statal State. Lived in Italy, barbarous land. 
            Fled from England land of the sophisticated. Hopeful 
            in the West where nothing now grows. 

            —from “Contiamo infiniti morti…” in Variazioni Belliche, translation Cinzia Blum and Lara Trubowitz) 

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) was a dynamic, idiosyncratic and intensely lyrical presence in postwar Italian poetry. She was in a category of her own: not only multilingual (she grew up speaking English, French and Italian), she was often the token female in the largely male dominated field of Italian literature at that time. Rosselli was born in Paris in exile. Her father was the famous antifascist leader Carlo Rosselli, and her mother was British. Her very name bore the scars of Italy’s struggles to liberate itself from the fascist regime in an era that was trying to forget its fascist past. After her father’s assassination, she spent formative years in upstate New York with her extended family. During this time her grandmother read the children Dante in Italian so that they wouldn’t forget their Italian language and heritage. Amelia finished high school in London, and moved with her grandmother to the family home in Florence in the 1950s, eventually relocating to Rome, where she would live for the rest of her life. Her voice was as distinctive as her poetry: she spoke Italian with a hint of a French accent (most noticeable in her French pronunciation of the letter R). In addition to her work as a poet, she also worked as a journalist, editor, and mentor to younger poets.