The Best American Poetry

Putting Down the Hammer [by Stephanie Paterik]

I’ve been a happy renter all of my adult life, relishing the freedom of a short-term lease. But in the fall, without warning, the unfamiliar desire for a place of my own crept into my bones.

It might have started at last year’s AWP conference in Chicago, where a group of poets lectured on the craft of assembling a manuscript. They said you need a room of your own, a space where you can hang poems on walls – live with them, listen to them, rearrange them. New Yorkers in the audience (myself included) laughed out loud as we pictured our studio and one-bedroom apartments with wall-to-wall furniture.

But, wouldn’t it be nice?

Pretty soon, I couldn’t stomach the cranky landlady, hang artwork on other people’s nails, or live with Rental Apartment White on the walls. Quickly and miraculously, my husband and I found a good deal, closed on a home and hired contractors to begin renovations last week. 

Every other night, we take three trains to Brooklyn to visit our home. I bring a book and enjoy the anticipation. When we arrive, we swing open the door, turn on the lights and find our space transformed.

On Day 1, the floors were meticulously covered with paper. Day 2, a living room wall disappeared and old brick, wood and piping were exposed. Day 3, brick and wood gave way to gleaming white columns. We order pizza and sit on the floor of our empty apartment, appreciating all of it.

Tomorrow, a light fixture might show up. A countertop might come down. We never see the workers – we never see the work – so it feels as if our home is inventing itself day-by-day, eager to surprise and please. I know it’s the product of sweat and craft, but I like to pretend there’s some magic involved.

I felt the same way watching my parents’ first house rise out of the desert. We would visit the dirt lot to take pictures and appreciate every plank. The stakes with little red flags marking the construction perimeter seemed to grow straight out of the ground.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I’m rediscovering the joys of being a reader as I wait for my home to manifest. Usually, periods of reading but little writing fill me with guilt. I should be making something! I should be knocking down walls and writing lines! Who am I to enjoy another’s hard work without doing my own?

But this week, I’m content to admire other people’s creations – an indulgence we writers sometimes strip from ourselves.

I wonder, when you became a serious writer, did you also become a serious reader? Did you start studying the workmanship of novels and poems, breaking them apart to understand how to put yours together? And did that enhance your appreciation but diminish your ability to get lost in it a little bit? Did you start measuring how your own writing stacked up against everything you read, endlessly calculating the balance?

The beauty of the reader is her ability to open a book, be surprised and imagine that it made itself in an instant, or that it always existed. She almost can forget the creator, the toil – a literary Big Bang.

It’s fun to forget the work and rediscover the art of appreciation. Sometimes, there’s pleasure in putting down the hammer.

Prompt: Read something, anything for fun. If you’re looking for a recommendation, might I suggest The Paris Wife, a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley? The author, Paula McLain, earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and published two poetry collections. It's so enjoyable, I'm actually losing sleep to read it.

Much Depends on Dinner: Baking Hamentaschen with Robin Neidorf and Talia

     All human history attests
That happiness for man,—the hungry sinner!—
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
     --  Lord Byron, Don Juan. Canto xiii. Stanza 99

(Ed note:  Robin Neidorf and I were classmates in graduate school and whenever I think of her or we exchange e-mails I have to remind myself that she's not still one year out of Williams College. In grad school, even though she was studying non-fiction, she would try anything!  Like the sestina she wrote a few hours after learning the form - it was hilarious, a narrative, from the point of view of an actress who didn't want to kiss her leading man. -- sdh) 

It has been many years since I’ve had proper hamentaschen, which to me means my grandmother Lillian’s hamentaschen. This is only in part my own fault: The last time I tried to make her recipe, my aging gas oven gasped its last just as I heated it up to bake the goods. That event precipitated three months of eating sandwiches and microwave foods from a makeshift setup in the dining room and $60,000 in renovations.  Not unexpectedly (if somewhat illogically), I was a leery of trying that recipe again.

Over the next few years, I tried other recipes. I’d purchased a book of Jewish holiday crafts, stories and recipes, and naturally my daughter Talia wanted to make those recipes, rather than the one scribbled on an index card. Since part of the purpose of the book had been to engage us both with the traditions and the (now fabulous) kitchen, I could hardly say no.

But these weren’t my recipes, or my tastes. We tried the butter version – too like a shortbread. We tried the oil version – I couldn’t get the dough to stick properly. We filled with pie filling – the lazy-mom’s version… feh! We filled with chocolate chips – Talia was delighted, but the texture was all wrong. The ideal, to my mouth, was cakey rather than crispy, and filled with a savory mixture of golden raisins, prunes, apricots and… something.

Hamentaschen, for those who are not familiar with this gift to the world, are filled cookies baked for Purim, an early spring holiday celebrating Queen Esther’s courage in speaking up for her people. Bad guy Hamen (for whose triangular hat the cookies are shaped) takes the death sentence he planned to mete out to the Jews. And in commemoration of this noble victory, Jews forevermore stave off constipation with the prune-filled sweets.

There are as many versions of the cookie as there are Jewish kitchens. The matrix of options is almost mind-boggling: The cookie can be milchig (made with dairy) or parve (suitable for either meat or milk). The filling can be tangy, sweet or super-sweet. An endless array of options for tasting and testing. (As long as the oven doesn’t let you down.)

The last butter version was a disappointment. For the cookies to be shaped around the filling, the dough needs to be chilled to stiff-but-workable. I couldn’t get the ratios right, and the dough either melted in my fingers or crumbled into sweet dust.

My cousin Malcom’s wife Kara came to my rescue when I announced in a Facebook status update that only an extra stick of butter seemed to save the day. ‘They can’t be Lillian’s, then, because hers were parve and they were perfection.’

She was right. Lillian’s were perfection. Why was I looking somewhere else when I already had what I craved?

So. Grandma Lillian’s hamentaschen. Know that Grandma Lillian was a wretched cook – her baked steak was legendary for its jaw-strengthening properties. Her percolated coffee, re-perked throughout the day, could hold a teaspoon upright. Her salads featured a bright arrangement of fruit (both fresh and tinned), boiled eggs, radishes and greens of uncertain provenance. But the hamentaschen were, as Kara reminded me, perfection.

A Friday evening I prepared the dough and chilled it. On Saturday morning Kara and Malcom’s daughter Tsaudik (only a few days younger than Talia) came over to play. At  mid-day I convinced both girls (pictured above) to help me assemble, squeezing little triangles together.

The oven worked. The aroma was just as I recalled. The great-granddaughters paid little attention to the whole process, more interested in creating outfits for the cats (and trying to catch one) than creating with me. That was fine. More than fine. It was perfection.

Grandma Lillian’s Hamentaschen:
Keep in mind this makes approximately 300 cookies. I usually make half the recipe, but this is the unaltered version:

Cookie:
6 eggs (5 makes crisper)
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups oil, (Lillian used Wessen)
2 oranges--juice and zest
1/4 tsp salt
5 tsp baking powder
6-7 cups flour

-mix all until barely dry, (adding flour as you go)
-chill overnight to make it stiff and workable
-roll out on a floured surface, (not too thick, thin is better)
-add about 1/2 tsp filling and form into triangles.

Filling: Grind up packages of prunes, white raisins, dark raisins, apricots. Lillian added a small jar of apricot jam, juice and zest of one lemon.

Bake at 375 for 10-16 min.

Robin Neidorf lives, writes and cooks in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, where she wrote a memoir about her grandmother Lillian for her thesis. Current projects include essays on being a community volunteer and notes towards a book about preparing for an interfaith-friendly Bat Mitzvah.

(this post originally appeared on April 2, 2010)

Indian English Poetry [by Catherine Woodard]

The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry is a testament to the power of think global, write local.

All 85 contemporary poets selected by the editor, Sudeep Sen, are Indians who write in English. They live in India and across the world, and write about everything under the sun in a variety of traditional forms and free verse.

Sen, a poet with serious anthology credentials, took the bold step of selecting mostly new work; more than 90 percent of the poems are unpublished. So it’s a terrific snapshot of the vibrancy of English poets in India and the diaspora.

Other features also break the expected in refreshing ways. The poets are listed alphabetically by first name “so that there is a further sense of intimacy and a community-feel among fellow poets,” Sen states in the well-written, six-page introduction.

Many of the poets are new to me, so I can’t lament greatest hits that might be missing. However, readers can get a good feel for each poet because generally there are at least four pages of poems and a few considerably more. (I can’t argue that Sen should include himself; however, 15 pages seems excessive.)

Many of the poets have had long careers: Amit Chaudhuri, Arundhathi Subramaniam, David Dabydeen, Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Vijay Seshadri, Vikram Seth. Some only have one book or chapbook, such as Sridala Swami and Siddhartha Bose, whose playwright and performer credentials are far longer.  

What all the poets share is a confidence with English as one of India's 26 official languages. All included are born after 1950 when India became a republic and the world’s largest democracy.

At 541 pages, the anthology has heft and heart and lots of experimentation with formal forms as well as free verse. “You’re likely to encounter a pantoum next to an acrostic poem, a triolet juxtaposed against a ghazal, lyric narratives, Sapphic fragments, Bhartrhari-style shataka, sonnet, rubai, prayer chants, rap, reggae, creole, haiku, tanka,” the introduction promises and delivers.

Sen also backs up his observation that “The subject matter is staggeringly large. There is introspection and gregariousness, politics and pedagogy, history, science, illness, fantasy, love, erotica, sex and death.”

He isn’t shy about promoting Indian English poetry, that’s for sure. “I would provocatively assert that the best English poetry written by Indians in the contemporary national and international literary arena is perhaps as good — or superior — to Indian fiction in English as a whole.”

A pointless, if provocative claim, I would argue. But I would second Sen’s conclusion that “Indian poets are in full flight” and thank him for making it so easy to read so many.

Tomorrow: a Q&A with Sudeep Sen. 

*******

I couldn’t find an online source to purchase the anthology with shipping outside of India, including www.harpercollins.co.in. (Readers, please comment below if you know a source.)

I also recommend Sen's selections at Prairie Schooner Feast Anthology of Poetry by Indian Women, available online.

And a call for submissions. Editors Charles Fishman and Smita Sahay are seeking published and unpublished poems or translations in English on rape and other forms of violence and oppression directed at women in our time for Veils, Halos and Shackles, an anthology of Indo-American poetry. Learn more here.

Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre by J. Chester Johnson now live at the Green Mountains Review

From the Editors of Green Mountains Review -- Over the next ten days, Green Mountains Review Online will present in four installments J. Chester Johnson’s groundbreaking essay “Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre,” which probes deeply into one of America’s deadliest and least discussed race massacres – an event that also directly led to a more progressive U. S. Supreme Court judgment toward equal protection and thus helped usher in the civil rights movement. Driving Johnson’s exhaustive research is a personal connection to the massacre and its mysterious circumstances that brings to the fore those powerful emotional questions that lie always beyond the larger historical ones.

Olive Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice who opened the door to freedom for wrongfully convicted sharecroppers

Scipio Africanus Jones, American Lawyer who became a "20th Century Moses."

Preface

Across the sweeping canvas of American history, two markers–inherited and ineluctable–from the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas of the Mississippi River Delta invite a degree of attention to the episode yet to be received from public consciousness. First, the sheer number of persons who died in the massacre–-more particularly, the countless African-Americans who perished-–would certainly cause this massacre to be judged one of the most deadly racial conflicts–-perhaps, the most deadly racial conflagration-–in the history of the nation. Second, the wellspring of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s drew constantly from the 1923 U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Dempsey that emerged out of the legal proceedings in Phillips County against African-American defendants, charged with the murders of whites allegedly committed during the massacre. The ruling in Moore v. Dempsey broke a long chain of Supreme Court decisions brutally adverse to the safety and rights of African-Americans.

Two heroes whose individual backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar share in this American saga. Most apparent, Scipio Africanus Jones, African-American lawyer, who started as a laborer in the Arkansas fields to become a 20th century Moses, climbed, through brilliance and tenacity, to forensic heights to free the black sharecroppers, unjustly found guilty of crimes in the aftermath of the massacre, and, at the same time, developed the legal strategy that, ultimately, through the intervention of the U. S. Supreme Court, altered the application of the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution to protect the individual rights of and due process for American citizens. The other hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston patrician and distinguished jurist, who wrote the majority opinion for Moore v. Dempsey, not only opened the door to freedom for wrongfully convicted Arkansas sharecroppers, but also articulated a new judicial precedent and principle under which the federal government would more forcefully thereafter engage in the constitutional protection of its citizens.

Continue reading at Green Mountains Review Online.

Delhi Promenade of Pop Poets [by Catherine Woodard]

Walking Delhi with Himanshu Verma, an emerging arts curator, follows a trail where poets share top billing with rulers and religious leaders. Poets get prominent positions in India’s history – literally – with their shrines and tombs near those of emperors and saints across Delhi. 

The place to be buried in Delhi from the 14th to 19th C was Nizamuddin, a village named after the exalted Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Not far away is a vast World Heritage site, the tomb of Humayun, the second of six powerful Muslim Mughals who controlled Northern India from 1527-1707. Eternity in the vicinity was a mark of status for nobles and warriors too. But who is buried closest to the white marble mausoleum of Nizamuddin who died in 1325, none other than his disciple and eminent Muslim poet Amir Khusrau, who died just six months later.

If all you know about Hindu-Muslim relations in India is the wrenching partition in 1947 and subsequent political assassinations, the relationship between this saint and poet and the broader culture is a good place to get perspective on why India is simultaneously the Hindu capital of the world and the second largest Muslim nation.

Most, not all, of the Islamic Mughals were tolerant of people of other faiths, including the indigenous Hindus. Khusrau was a cultural cross-pollinator, writing poetry primarily in Persian but also in Hindi. He drew on both languages for the first known printed dictionary. His poems take several forms, but Khusrau may be best known for expanding the development of ghazal. Khusrau mined ghazal for lyrics with his fusion of Persian and Indian musical traditions to create the Sufi devotional music, qawwali. Hindu and Muslim pilgrims, not to mention music lovers, still crowd the courtyard between the tombs of saint and poet for Friday afternoon qawwali.

The path to the tombs twists through narrow alleys and bazaars, a bustling Muslim marketplace since the Middle Ages. One route goes past a still-preserved sandstone step well built by Nizamuddin to provide water and a scenic meeting place in the neighborhood. 

Then picture eight or nine singers and musicians, called a party, performing powerful poetic lyrics of love and longing. The intoxication with the beloved is understood to be the divine, but oh how well the metaphors work for the mere human as in a Khusrau excerpt below:

O sweetheart, why do you not take me to your bosom?
Long like curls in the night of separation,
Short like life on the day of our union.

Flash forward to Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), a master of ghazal, who was alive during the unsuccessful Indian rebellion against the British in 1857. Traditionally ghazal is a short poem of divine anguished love, in couplets all using the same rhyme, with the poet’s name in the last stanza. Ghalib expanded the focus to philosophy and the troubles and mysteries of life. For example, he compared his unhappy arranged marriage to a second imprisonment following the confinement of life itself.

Reading samples of Ghalib’s poetry at his tomb in Nizamuddin and his house in another old Delhi neighborhood invited comparisons to American contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His subject matter is as broad as Whitman, but his spot-on death metaphors more powerfully conjure up Dickinson.

In between chronologically is Rahim, Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khana (1556 – 1627). A Muslim who wrote Hindi couplets, Rahim was a powerful minister in the Mughal court of Akbar. The Hindu god Lord Krishna is often featured in his poetry. The marble and sandstone on his tomb in Nizamuddin were stripped off and recycled for an 18^th C tomb elsewhere. The base remains intact as does respect for the wisdom of his couplets:

The tree does not eat its own fruit, the lake does not drink its water.
For the welfare of others, the good one accumulates wealth, so says Rahim.

Here’s my video of Verma reading Rahim. Verma runs several multidisciplinary arts initiatives, including Red Earth and 1100 Walks. (Don’t miss his food-centric street tour of Old Delhi if you’re in town.) Verma is himself a devotee of Krishna.

 

The thread of poet prominence continues in India’s modern political history. Nobel Laureate Tagore Rabindranath died in 1941 before independence but was an influential intellectual friend of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. Tagore first called Gandhi a Mahatma, or great soul, and the name stuck. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel prize, for a collection of poems Gitanjali in Bengali and English.

Words of the poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, songwriter, artist and educator pop up all over India. He even gets the last word at the Taj Mahal where a Tagore quote fills a huge wall near the exit and describes the marble marvel as a “tear drop… on the cheek of time for ever and ever… a garland that would blend formless death with deathless form.”

The experimental school Tagore founded educated Indian leaders in a variety of disciplines including Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate economist, and Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and the prime minister for 15 years. (She was lucky enough to get the surname Gandhi from her Parsi husband.) Gandhi kept a framed picture of Tagore with an English excerpt from Gitanjaliin her home study; words in a prominent vitrine in her museum that lead a mind without fear to “where the clear stream of reason/ has not lost its way.”

Ultra Violet Postcards [by Catherine Woodard]

BRINK

The meaning of quiet – those corridors
Knew it well. Softly girls. This building is old,

Mother C lisped up stairs, her wimple
Flaring like a halo. At table, tennis, we twirled spins

like neat habits. A single smash could dismantle
our world. Outside school, a man with a cleft lip

spiced slices of raw mango. Red chilli
burst into our mouth like explosions of sea water.

The heat moved us to shower. We limp-toed
into womanhood in spotless socks,

a generation afraid of bringing things down.
A backyard of bramble and weed was where

we found noise. It wandered knock-kneed
and had a tongue full of pins.

Through this poem, I discovered Anindita Sengupta in a new anthology I will review here tomorrow. “Brink” caught my eye on a flight from Mumbai to New Delhi on New Year’s Eve. I already intended to visit protests there on violence against women. So yes, I was ripe to land on this hinge line of “Brink:” “a generation afraid of bringing things down/ A backyard of bramble and weed was where/we found noise.”

I also admired the poem’s focus on the “meaning of quiet” and the deft insertion of the meaning of unquiet through a table tennis scene: “A single smash could dismantle/ our world.” Just outside the school in that poem, explosions are found, alliteratively and literally, in “spiced slices of raw mango.”

City of Water, Sengupta’s first collection of poems, was published in 2010 and won the Muse India Young Writer award in 2012. She lives in Mumbai and is pictured with her nine-month-old daughter, Amaya.

I love how quickly you can travel the world and the world of ideas on the Internet. I offer a few postcards from my travels after meeting “Brink” on paper.

My first stop was Ultra Violet, a site for contemporary feminism in India that Sengupta founded and edits. I’ve been reading it regularly since my return to New York for its sophisticated coverage of civics and culture and have had a few email exchanges with Sengupta. Ultra Violet reflects her ear and eye as a journalist and poet. She is one of six international journalists recently awarded new media fellowships to report on topics of global health by the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Sengupta will focus on maternal and reproductive health as this link explains.

A delightful discovery of my trip to India was the large number of journalists who write poetry or poets who support themselves as journalists. Print journalism, at least for now, remains a robust business in India. As a newspaper reporter for more than two decades before I made poems, I fantasize about more cross-fertilization between poetry and journalism in the United States. Both poets and journalists aspire to compressed truth. I’d love to see more experiments like NewsPoet where a poet spends the day in the newsroom at National Public Radio reflecting on the day’s stories and composes a poem for the night’s broadcast. And I urge journalists to look beyond the usual suspects of government officials, academics and advocates and call poets for quotes. Who would not want to hear what W.S. Merwin or Jorie Graham, or even better their poems, have to say on climate change? A good poem is by technical definition a good sound bite.

Ultra Violet considers issues from political, cultural and practical angles. The poem “Not a Cactus” by Minal Sarosh shared recent billing with astute analysis about needed reforms from a pioneering woman’s rights lawyer. “Our Cities, Ourselves: An Open Letter to Mumbai City Administrators” examines how urban design affects women’s issues. Shilpa Phadke, an Ultra Violet editor, sociologist and Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, posted her letter and  “Mumbai Rising,” a powerful video below produced at the centre. Phadke is a co-author of the book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. The book argues that women should have the right to choose to take risks in public space without being harassed. Phadke appeals to Mumbai government officials for better public transit, expanded parks and restaurants and bars open late at night which she argues is not only good for women but for Mumbai’s reputation as a “world class city. Surely you care about international financial investment.”

Like in travel, when you discover an interesting neighborhood, the best way to explore is to just wander around. Ultra Violet is a great place to roam.

 

Tonight at KGB: Todd Boss & Joseph Voth

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Todd Boss + Joseph Voth

 

Monday, Feb. 18, 2013

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

*****

Todd Boss's poetry collections are Pitch (W. W. Norton, 2012) and Yellowrocket (2008), both Midwest Bookseller’s Choice award selections. His 35-part “Fragments for the 35W Bridge” was part of a collaboration with Swedish artist Maja Spasova called “Project 35W,” an August 2012 art installation on the Mississippi River. Panic, Todd’s verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novella Pan, will premiere as a one-man opera in late 2013, arranged by Boston Conservatory’s Andy Vores. Todd is a founding co-director of Motionpoems, a leading producer of poetry films now collaborating with Copper Canyon, Milkweed, Graywolf and other fine publishers. 

 

Joseph Voth's first volume of poetry, Living with Noise, was published by NorthShore Press in 2011.  His work has been published in Epoch, South Carolina Review, Connecticut Review, and numerous other journals.  After teaching at San Diego State for ten years, he embarked on a classic and melodramatic sojourn in New York City, where he suffered and completed a second manuscript before returning to teach in CA at College of the Canyons in LA.

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*****

Upcoming, Spring 2013

Feb 25   Pink Thunder Poetry Music Night: Michael Zapruder + Friends   

Mar 4     David Lehman + James Kimbrell 

Mar 11   KGB POST AWP HALF-OPEN MIC     

Mar 18   Monica Ferrell + Arisa White   

Mar 25   Daisy Fried + Idra Novey 

Apr 1     Nate Pritts + Jennifer Fortin + Jackie Clark   

Apr 8     Major Jackson + Heather Christle       

Apr 15   Lynn Melnick + Yona Harvey  

Apr 22   Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman   

Apr 29   Michael Klein + Will Schutt       

May 6    Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins         

May 13  TBA + TBA  

May 20  Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party  

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews: Ode to Winifred

Archie Ammons (1926-2001) was born today

INTERVIEWER

I’ve always been curious about why you’ve traveled so little. I think you spent a year in Italy.

AMMONS

Three months. We had the traveling fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which was for a year, but we came back after three months. I lost twenty pounds and I couldn’t wait to get home.

INTERVIEWER

You didn’t care for the experience of being an expatriate?

AMMONS

I hated it. I’m not interested in all that cultural crap. It was just a waste of time for me.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe this is part of what you were talking about before when you spoke of your rejection of Western culture, by which I take it you mean more specifically a rejection of Europe or of European cultural domination.

AMMONS

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

But it occurred to me that one reason you have traveled very little is . . .

AMMONS

There’s no place to go.

INTERVIEWER

There’s no place to go?

AMMONS

Yeah, that’s a good reason not to travel. Well, I’m interested in the Orient, but I’m really not interested in going there. I’m not interested in Europe. I have no interest whatsoever in going there. Every now and then I go to Owego and sometimes I go to Syracuse, sometimes to Geneva, Binghamton—all over the place.

INTERVIEWER

Geneva, New York, rather than Geneva, Switzerland.

AMMONS

Geneva, New York, right.

INTERVIEWER

It occurred to me that another reason might be that you’d already done a considerable journey in going from your origins on the coastal plain of North Carolina to the hills and lakes of central New York state. A critic could spin a parable about the northward progression of your life—from a state that was part of the Confederacy to a university town in . . .

AMMONS

In the Emersonian tradition. In fact there is an essay about how I came to the north and took over the Emersonian tradition.

INTERVIEWER

I thought you had decided to become influenced by Emerson only after Bloom told you that you’d been.

AMMONS

That’s basically correct, except that I did have a course on Emerson and Thoreau at Wake Forest. The professor was basically a preacher, however, who treated the hour as an occasion for sermonizing. But yes—it’s a marriage of the South to the North.

INTERVIEWER

What is?

AMMONS

The movement of my life.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve spent more time in the North.

AMMONS

Much more. I lived my first twenty-four years in the South. I’ve been in Ithaca more than thirty years.

INTERVIEWER

Are you conscious of being a southerner here?

AMMONS

I don’t hear my own voice, but of course everyone else does and I’m sure they’re all conscious of the fact that I’m southern, but I am mostly not conscious of it. In the first years, I was tremendously nostalgic, constantly longing for the South—for one’s life, for one’s origin, for one’s kindred. Now I feel more at home here than I would in the South. But I don’t feel at home—I’ll never feel at home—anywhere.

from The Paris Review: "The Art of Poetry," No, 73. For more about this major American poet, click here.

Language Compass [by Catherine Woodard]

If the recent protests in India prove to be a tipping point for a safer place in society for women, language may need as much reform as police or judicial procedures.

As the mother of two daughters in college, I chose to start 2013 at the New Delhi protests over the brutal gang rape and subsequent death of a female paramedical student. I was in India to meet my eldest daughter who’d been traveling with a classmate born in Nepal. As a poet and former journalist, I also dove into the language of the event, spending my nights surfing the extensive coverage in English on 24-hour news channels and reading the robust print media. Many of the words were worrisome.

"Eve teasing" is a common media moniker in India for a broad spectrum of sexual harassment, essentially everything that falls short of rape. Verbal street harassment, flashing and molestation are all a lot more serious than the archaic euphemism suggests. In a 2012 poll, 78 percent of New Delhi women reported verbal or physical sexual harassment and 98 percent of young men admitted it's commonplace among their friends.

I sensed a hunger for leadership in framing the debate. The presence at protests of so many young men as well as parents with their children was encouraging and mirrored hopes for change reported by media. I discounted fringe theories such as the regional minister who concluded, “stars are not in position.” (One expects noise from the most conservative corners as I recalled the barbaric theories about rape from several U.S. Congressional candidates this fall.) Most discouraging, however, was the range of government and religious officials across the nation who blamed women for the violence, whether because of immodest dress or a decline of Hindu values. The son of the President of India, a member of Parliament, called female protesters "highly dented and painted" women who “have no connection with ground reality.” A popular Delhi spiritual leader said the gang rape victim could have saved herself by praying at her attackers’ feet. And far too many of the screaming heads on television were yelling for chemical castration even though experts pointed out that violent crimes against women are more often about power than sex.

Even the propensity to label the 23-year-old a girl in headlines indicated how language contributes to the lack of respect and response from the streets, the police and the courts. Only one of more than 600 rapes reported in New Delhi in 2012 has produced a conviction. And few people dispute that rape is vastly underreported because of the widespread conviction that only people with political connections will get any semblance of justice from corrupt, underpaid, poorly trained and mostly male police departments and the overwhelmed and understaffed courts.

Even so, there is no shortage of reporting about violent attacks each day. In two national newspapers, daily roundups of recent rapes across the nation are headlined “Criminals Everywhere” and “Meanwhile…” In early January those briefs included a dead 16-year-old found hanging from a tree, a 15-year-old allegedly kidnapped by a neighbor dead in a school toilet and a 15-year-old held captive and raped for 15 days by three men from her village.

It’s dangerous to be female in India from the womb to old age. The list of causes is long and complicated: aborted girls, female infanticide and neglect, domestic violence, sexual violence, dowry and family disputes. From cradle to grave, males get a larger share of family resources whether for nutrition or health care or mosquito netting for malaria.

“If there’s one glass of milk left, it’s still going to the boy in the family,” said a mustached, middle-aged office manager at the New Delhi protests on New Year’s Day. “It’s just disgusting how we treat women of all ages.”

He’d approached me with a very nervous mother and her teenaged daughter he’d just met, in case my camera meant I was a reporter. Their faces were already partly covered by bright scarves, which they instinctually pulled even tighter as he relayed their dilemma. The 17-year-old went to the police at her mother’s behest after being raped by a neighbor in South Delhi. Not only did the police do nothing, the man and his friends are now regularly threatening mother and daughter. “Can you tell me who they can talk to who will take them seriously?” the man asked.

The stakes inherent in that question are quite high. About 25 million women could be alive if the suspiciously low ratio of women to men in India was more in line with areas of the world with more equal gender care, according to research published in December in the Economic & Political WEEKLY.

The analysis of government mortality data concluded that 100,000 women are burned to death each year and another 125,000 die from violent injuries rarely reported as murder or suicide.

“The plight of adult women in India is as serious a problem as that of young girls who were never born or die prematurely in childhood,” wrote the authors Siwian Anderson of the University of British Columbia and Debrai Ray of New York University. They called for further study of their hypothesis that the excess adult deaths are “associated with the custom of dowry which has been linked to bride-burning and dowry-death if promised dowry payments are not forthcoming.”

Women have made enormous strides in India in recent decades in education and workplace opportunities but still live in a patriarchal society that has traditionally defined them by their relationships as daughters and wives and mothers. The visible successes of Indian women among the uncertainties and opportunities of the global economy makes them a target of the vast numbers of young men, many unemployed or underemployed, who outnumber young women of marriageable age.

“The modern woman is seen to be on a collision course with our age-old traditions, part sex goddess part super achiever, loathed and desired in equal measure,” Sagarika Ghose wrote in a column in The Hindustan Times. “A profound fear and a deep, almost pathological, hatred of the woman who aspires to be anything more than mother and wife is justified on the grounds of tradition.”

Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1998 and pioneered the concept of missing women, notes that the acceptance of elite women in top positions of political power since India became an independent nation in 1947 does not have a trickle down effect. In his book of essays The Argumentative Indian, Sen places improved gender equality high on his list of what India needs to maximize opportunities in the global economy. If the nation needs a model on how to do better, he and other respected voices say look no further than the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi.

I started 2013 in the footsteps of Gandhi, literally; his last steps are marked on the path where he was assassinated in 1948 for his advocacy for equality for all of humanity. Beside those steps, beside the Gandhi museum, the Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia hosted an interfaith prayer meeting for “Peace Dignity Equality Justice & Respect for Women and Girls” on New Year’s Day. A picture of Gandhi towered over the open-air auditorium as I sat down with a book of his writings I’d just purchased in the museum shop. 

“Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity to me, the female sex, not the weaker sex,” Gandhi wrote.

I flipped the book over and printed on the back binding was praise of Gandhi’s vision of greatness by Rabindranath Tagore, the Nobel Laureate poet whose words I happily bumped into all across India.

No poet has to be convinced that language can be a compass.

*****

Upcoming this week: Indian writers on respect and reform, a poets walk with a Delhi arts curator and a review of an extensive new anthology of Indian English poetry and interview with the editor.