The Best American Poetry

Patricia Carlin presents a poem by Thomas Fink

Hello, dear readers.  I’m Patricia Carlin, and I’m very happy to be your new Sunday editor.

I co-edit Barrow Street, a biannual poetry journal, and I’m also a poet (as are most editors of poetry journals).  Barrow Street publishes work from poets writing on all points of the current poetry spectrum and at all stages of their careers -- from first poems in print to household names (if there were such a thing in poetry).  “To particularize is the alone distinction of merit,” said William Blake.  The best way I can suggest what Barrow Street is up to is through the poems I’ll post over the next three months.

The poem I’m choosing for this first post is “Yinglish Strophes IX” by Thomas Fink.

YINGLISH STROPHES IX

So ancient the way

they fight, the way
they kill themselves.  She

wouldn’t let you anybody
should help her.  Home
she didn’t.  Sometimes friends

grow out you or
you grow out them.
I really don’t know
her money.  I’m not

raving like she does.
She likes to rave.
It’s later mostly than
trees blooming.  By you
is more cheap a

little.  To gold let’s
get.  I am still
in a daisy.  Who
am I gonna aggress?
It interferes with talking,
to be togetherness.

-- Thomas Fink

I find this poem intensely pleasurable.  In reading I’m pushed back and forth between pure delight in the linguistically and syntactically fractured Yiddish-inflected English, and the insistent sound of a very funny speaking voice.  The poem never finally comes to rest in either of these directions.  Each phrase is pleasingly suggestive: “Who /am I gonna aggress? / It interferes with talking, / to be togetherness.”  The poem hints at poetry’s power to resist any closed universe of meaning.

“Yinglish Strophes IX” was reprinted in Best American Poetry 2007, edited by Heather McHugh.  The poem made its next appearance in Thomas Fink’s No Appointment Necessary (Moria Poetry, 2006), and recently, in the chapbook Yinglish Strophes 1- 19 (Truck Books, 2009).

-- Patricia Carlin

"Slippage" (by Patricia Carlin)

Patricia Carlin of Barrow Street will be our new Sunday poetry editor succeeding William Waltz of Conduit in that position. We invite readers to review the choices made by our previous Sunday editors -- Bruce Covey, Judith Hall, Ed Ochester, Rob Casper, and William Waltz, archived under "Coconut," "Antioch Review," "Pitt Poetry," "jubilat," and "Conduit." And we welcome Pat warmly; she is a first-rate poet and an astute editor, and we're lucky to have her on board. here is one of Pat's poems that I admire. -- DL

Slippage

A woman writing a tree,
night drifting in.
For that instant the future moved
to where roots, rivers, cities surrender their channels.
There were no more stations.
No more futures invading the instant.
All night the room drifted
turning death into trees
and the woman of the room into blue poems.

Patricia Carlin
from Quantum Jitters (Marsh Hawk Press 2009