The Best American Poetry

Greg Santos presents Todd Swift (I)

Todd Swift is a 43-year-old Canadian expatriate writer, currently living in London, with an Irish wife.  He is a poet, anthologist, teacher, blogger, emcee, enthusiast, activist, essayist, and sometime TV writer.  He feels he has given way too much of his own time to his main obsession, poetry.

Todd Swift’s poems seem often to blend effortlessly a conversational tone with formal verse. “Ballad of the Solitary Diner,” like numerous other Swift poems, is written from the point of view of a speaker who sees the gift of poetry as both a blessing and a curse.  We who write poetry in 2009 know that there’s a solitude that comes with the territory. I am not the only one who can relate to the speaker’s desire to subsist on poetry books.

-- Greg Santos

Ballad of the Solitary Diner

When I eat alone, I am alone.
Thank God I have my books.
Friends? Not many.
My wife, in her tower, earning money.
A few who live in other countries.

Too far to go to share a meal.
When I sit down at noon I often feel
As sad as a man having married
The moon. You cannot love well
Someone you can’t share a spoon

With, be it soup or salad.
The waiter or waitress assumes
The identity of a temporary friend,
But they are busy with their errands
And soon go to other people.

Then, as my tea cools, and the day
Gets weak in the head and fails
To keep appearances up,
I put on my winter coat to pay.
Leave a pound for their trouble.

And go out the way I came in.
Thank God I have my books.
I can tell by the limited smiles
As I turn, I no longer have my looks.
It is a shame we have to eat at all,

It hurts us to have to be so open
And quiet, even as we appear social.
If I could get by on my poetry
I’d eat a page a day in my flat.
I’d stay thin, and not become fat

As all this dining out in the world
Has made me: yes, and with nothing
To show for the tedious work
Of getting it down, but one more check
And a dark walk home, through a town.

-- Todd Swift, from Rue du Regard, 2004

Molly P's Coda to This Week's CanAm Blog: Stephanie Bolster on The Best

To find the last words for the Canadian-American exchange we've been having this week,  I quote Stephanie Bolster, the intrepid first editor of The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008.

Though a reader of the Best American annuals, I’ve always balked at “best.” I don’t have the same “best” from year to year, perhaps not even from morning to night within a single day. As I read 2008’s possible contenders – each on several occasions, to increase a poem’s chances of striking me in a receptive moment – what was I looking for? 

First: good writing. Awkward or rote syntax; familiar expressions, images, and locutions; or random lineation, ruled a poem out. A meaningfully rebellious and distinctive syntax or a deliberately dissonant music often ruled it in.

Second: depth and challenge, be that emotional or intellectual. If additional readings failed to yield new insights and appreciations, but, rather, dulled the flash I’d sensed the first time around, the poem lost its post-it note.

Finally, and inseparably from the first two criteria: an interesting, even strange sensibility or imagination.  . . . I sought poems that excited and surprised me, that felt (boldly or quietly) necessary, often urgent. I sought poems serious and poems frivolous (though seriously frivolous). . . . I was without doubt a tougher critic than if I’d been reading fewer poems, but asking myself whether I could confidently put my name behind a particular choice forced me to be discerning.

In the end, the best is what you feel you can put your own name to -- that's what Stephanie Bolster did, and I am grateful.

It's been a joy to write this blog, to talk to all of you--and, importantly for me, to listen.  Many thanks to Stacey Harwood who added the photos to these posts, especially David Hockney's swimming pool and Mrs. Delany.  Now I'm going to take a nice dive back into the 18th century.

Warmest wishes,
Molly

Molly Peacock Adds Caribbean to Canadian & American, plus a PS

After an unexpected day off from this blog because of my secret life as a biographer of Mrs. Mary Delany (1700-1788, left) the remarkable flower collage artist, I return for the Poetry Weekend Blog with this post and an orchardful of thanks for all those who have hurled themselves with such passion into the Canadian-American-British poetry discussion, particularly Zach Wells, the editor of Jailbreaks: 99 Canadian Sonnets.  Now it's time to bring in the Caribbean, and today's poem does just that.  On my blog break I attended one of the programs at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City where I am a Fellow this year, not thinking that that the prose writers Maryse Condé and Elizabeth Nunez, both born in the Caribbean, would lead me back to our discussions.  But Maryse Condé refused, à la Zach Wells and a bit like the grandfather in Joy Russell's poem below,  to generalize about what a Caribbean, particularly a French Caribbean writer is. 

While Condé was thoroughly uninterested in linking writers with nations,  Elizabeth Nunez found it irresistible to relate place and customs to a writer. I'm with Nunez, obviously;  I find it irresistible, but I also find it ineffable.  Characteristics I feel are solid start evaporating in my very hands.  Joy Russell also seems driven to make these cultural connections, and she makes them solid by inserting history, and family history, into her poem that was chosen for Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008.  Russell  depends on metaphor to carry this poem, especially "the city soot, a new glove for the body."  Thinking of verbal comparisons such as that "new glove" prompts me to remind Americans that Canadians rarely use the "melting pot" metaphor, where all cultures merge, then cool into a monolith.  Instead, Canadians use the "mosaic" metaphor:  the cultural mosaic, each piece grouted into the landscape so to speak, shining side by side.

Russell says of  her poem "On King George's Crowning" that "it is part of a poetry manuscript whose eyes and ears fall on Vancouver, London and Belize, their bodies of water and connection to Empire."  The Georges, particularly King George III, have their impact on our Canadian-American discussion, because George III was one of the supervising figures in the late 18th century revolution that created our two countries, and the reaper / raper of the treasure of the Caribbean.  He was also, I have to admit, a big admirer of the flower collages of Mrs. Delany, to whom I am devoting myself this year. What goes around comes around, in this blog, anyway. 

After Joy Russell's tercets is a PS I hope you'll read.

On King George's Crowning

On King George's crowning, the interviewee
said they all got sweets and little goodies, and when
they come by boat, some come as stowaways.  Once

they collect money for this woman's fare.  Others
come, a fiver tight in their pockets, like my grandfather
when he escaped from the belly of the crown and never

spoke of it again.  Others not bring overcoat--
no one told them how air moves vampires through
bone, erases memory matter.  Some dress in suits

tropical style, as the ship moved its shaky
hand over the old surface of the sea  They arrive,
say 'I born Jamaican, I die Jamaican,' take a bite

of the sweet, hand to mouth, take the test
of motherland's history--bitter--replied, when asked if
they spoke the Queen's English;  Enoch Powell's rivers

of blood forming a new oxygen, scarlet-marked
as they sliced through London fog;  iris recording
life, how it is:  Houses of Parliament, Big Ben

in the grey dank; a room, a galvanized tub to wash, emerge
baptized;  the city soot, a new glove for the body; the signs
reading no Irish or blacks or dogs, not wanted but

take your money, just the same.  Some, some,
carry hope like luggage, others not so sure-footed, others
not so childlike in believing all what this mother have to say.

Some bring formal names, leave pet ones behind,
whisper night bougainvillea.  How this country
cold, cold, cold through and through and no hot tea

enough to warm you, or hand friendly enough to pry
open the dark days, bring morning brightness.  Some come,
stay, patience worn thin like paper, hearts

tough as old bread, and letters back home with every
copper earned from the Double Decker, brow wipe
of the sick, hammer of nail into two by four--if they

lets you, if you not too dark for their liking.
Some, some, come long way, did bite
of the sweet.  Motherless mother's milk.

Ol' Englan'
cryin' crocodile tear
for her lost chil'ren.

Joy Russell

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Stephanie Bolster, Editor;  published by Tightrope Books

PS
I just want to  thank fellow poet and Best American blogger James Cummins, for bringing humor to these posts.  Do Canadian's have a funny bone?  You bet, but not when we're duking it out about poetry, so thank you Jimmy C!                                                                    

Molly Peacock Introduces the Mighty Website RPO

Rather than throwing more names of Canadian poets at American readers, I'm going to let you in on the mighty website that is a fabulous cache of poetry and commentary on poetry, Representative Poetry on Line.  RPO, the brainchild of Ian Lancashire, began as a teaching tool at the University of Toronto and has expanded, expounding on and exemplifying poetry, exonerating some poets, and exhilarating most of its visitors. It is a site that researchers visit as well as poets, professors, students, and casual readers  looking for a great Valentine.   Experts, students, old fans and newbies to poetry can all find something to dig into at RPO.   It is not a superficial site, or a even a particularly glamourous one, but it runs very deep as well as broad. I'm going to refer you to the Canadian Poets page.

And I'm also going to refer you to the threads from earlier posts, since I'll be spending intermittent moments for the rest of today replying to the likes of Zach Wells, Craig Poile, James Arthur et. al.  This blog has sparked a fray!  And I better get back into it. 

Incidentally, here's what Ken Babstock says about Hunter Deary, from yesterday's post:  ". .  . but was Hunter Deary herself who appeared, in the way fiction writers are heard to talk of their characters; like they'd stepped out of the shadows whole, historicized, and speaking like no one but themselves." 

All the best to all the readers of this blog,

Molly

The Homekid and the Prodigal: Molly Peacock on CanBrit and AmCan Poems

    It strikes me that there can be an unabashedly strong link between Canadian poetry and the muscular vigor of certain British poets.  Think Simon Armitage.  I see this in a number of the poems in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008, particularly in the work of Ken Babstock, with its consonants and metrical quick-step. I see it as well in Carmine Starnino's poem "Squash Rackets" with his homage to Christopher Smart's "For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry."  (Starnino's poem begins with these echoing lines, pumped up for the squash court:  "For they know us by their grip and the swordmanship/ of our swing.  For they are chrome lariats/ always bellowing, "here I come to save the day!"/ For they love, whenever possible, the crosscourt smash/and channel our inner thug for that grunting drive."

    If you compare a Canadian to a Brit, they aren't so squeamish as an American might become.  Is it because the Queen is on a Canadian five dollar bill?  There are no one dollar bills;  they're coins (and they have her Majesty's image on them, too).  Or it is because the essential historical difference between English-speaking Canada and English-speaking America is that the American descends culturally from people who broke away from England while the Canadian descends culturally from the people who didn't want to rupture that tie?  It's the difference between the sibling who strikes off for parts unknown and the sibling who stays home with mom and pop.  They both grown up, of course.  They both grow into their wisdom.  But from what different directions . . .

    Check out Ken Babstock's poem, which Stephanie Bolster, the Editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008 called "quirky, wacky, noisy, dense and disjunctive," which Bolster, incidentally, attributes "perhaps  . . . [to] an influence of work from south of the border."  Well you never know about influences, do you?  Here's the Canadian poem, caught in our own editorial crossfire  of reasons why something is Canadian and something is the best.  (Not to mention that the homekid never compares well to the prodigal.)

PS

Here is A.F. Moritz's clue to what's going in his ekphrastic poem, "Odds and Ends," posted yesterday.  And to further edify American readers, the painter Emily Carr is an icon in Canada, our Georgia O'Keefe.

"Odds and Ends" describes a painting by Emily Carr in the city art gallery of Victoria, and, more particularly, the experience in which my viewing of the painting was set.  Leaving the gallery, I walked through the surrounding neighborhoods, thinking to come out soon on the ocean, but it turned out to be a long walk on a hot humid day:  I'd misunderstood my map.  And in a front yard I saw a rhododendron petal . . . "

HUNTER DEARY AND HOSPITAL WING

Hunter Deary emits noises like peach pits;
    dry scrotal humming that punctuates fits.
When a hip comes loose it comes loose
    before breakfast and she pops it back

in with a winch, a rock, a clean tube and a sock.
    Ask Hunter Deary what the microbes
are for.  Ask Hunter Deary what the library's
    for.  Ask Hunter Deary what agent con-

tested her birthright, her being out late, her
    transmission on broadband at night.
The men in the neon X.  The hole in the
    plastic.  The ppb.  The stitches.  The snug.

The snug.  The stitches.  The parts per billion.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Children of blood lung.
Children of static.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
The snug.  The stitches.  The parts per billion.

Hunter Deary has clicked on the task pane
    reads there what they cut from the thought:
a topographical map of the region, a vein
    darkening wetlands, strung north through

some temperate zone.  Hunter Deary left gas
    in a bird's nest, bags under bypasses,
phenobarbital in the mud of the Don.  Hunter
    Deary in traction.  Hunter Deary in Huntsville.

She's counting down days to a hearing;  fed
    on black pumpkin, on cheese string, on
marrow sucked through wing of an auk. Ages
    in ice bubble.  Calving.  The fake vermilion.

Calving.  The ages in bubbles.  The fake vermilion.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Children born sexless and cleansed.
Leaded gametes in frog ponds.
    Hospital Wing sings to his children.
Calving.  The ages in bubbles.  The fake vermilion.

Ken Babstock

from  The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
published by Tightrope Books

American Pool or Canadian Lake: Molly Peacock on Poets' Approaches

Can I put my finger on the difference between the Canadian and the American approach to writing a poem?   Let's try a water analogy.  Think of poetry as a swimming pool.  The Canadian poet has no trouble getting in at the shallow end and taking a reader with her, has no trouble assuming the reader will wade into this unknown pool with him.  Poet and reader go in together.  They take their time.  Finally they hit the place where their feet leave the bottom, and then they will swim, experiencing something they both know is over their heads.  (That is what poetry feels like to me, trying to stay afloat in an element in which you might sink, and which is surely over your head.)

   As a result the Canadian poem tends to be longer than the American poem (there are two poems over ten pages each in The Best Canadian Poems in English 2008);  it tends to wind along to more places, to be more interested in the side track, be more familiar with its reader, to assume its reader might be a cousin, or even a friend, swimming along together.  It is possible these qualities are a result of the Canadian poet feeling supported, both by grants and by the government as well as by a populace who actually looks to its poets to define what it is to be Canadian. Or simply the result of a generalized feeling on the part of poets who sense that their culture is responsive to them, or that they are necessary to how the country defines itself.  Small-audience art that it is, poetry is necessary to Canada.

        But the American poet, who generally feels much more extraneous to American culture (except for last Inauguration week) is strictly a deep end diver.  She mounts the diving board.  He walks to the end.  She flips upwards into the air.  He soars, curving, and splashes down into the depths.  All of this happens in the first five lines.  Forget the shallow end.  Forget the journey.  Forget the feeling of writer and reader in an exploration together. Sign up for being an audience, because the American poet requires being watched.  The poet has practiced that amazing dive, and it is thrilling.  You know from the first line that the poem is about to explode with experience, perception, language.  But the companionship of the adventure together can be missing.

        The American poem is compact and immediately surprising.  The Canadian poem is lankier and discovers its surprise.  Perhaps that swimming pool analogy needs adjustment.  Let the American stay with the swimming pool, because there's a sense with an American poem that the poet is leaping off a high board.  But let the Canadian get in at the shallow end of a lake, and take the reader along, feet cut by a few stones, goose-bumped, sea-weedy, out to the middle that requires some strong side-by-side swimming.

        Here's a poem by A.F. Moritz from the anthology that requires this tandem writer-reader companionship.  A reader simply must have the faith and time to follow the writer through his associative journal and its consequent emotional connections.  (I'll post Moritz's clarifying note tomorrow. Meanwhile, enjoy the swim.)

Odds and Ends

An evil swamp meadow, burnt and sawed.
Invisibly small lives hum and rummage in fearful humidity.  Among the stumps
lean six pine saplings, the bare slender trunks
tipped with cone-shaped tufts of needled twigs:
greenery arrowheads.  What made these arrow-trees
fall here notch first and sink their feathers
under the lava flow of golden weed --
what, beyond some whim and power of nature
and ideal of the painter, inexpressible in words?

I was glad as always to leave the museum
and regain the town and again be living
in a picture, restored to our nature as pilgrims
for the ideal law.  But when the walk did not turn
and open on the sea, as map misreading had told me,
my eyes settled on a fallen rhododendron flower.
Its petals, intact and perfect, were in fact
not petals but five rays of a single disc,
shadowy rose, with a circular hole at center.
It was a skirt for a dead Romantic waist:
the upturned, golden, hammer-headed pistil
had fit there, with its garden of ten stamens waving
ovular flecks, and these remained above
on their bush withering, while the shed pink dirndl
was put away in the grass.

                                            O clothes she wore
and we put them away for her to wear again
someday, and today they lie there still.

A. F. Moritz

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2008
published by Tightrope Books

(Illustration:  David Hockney, Day Pool with Three Blues)

Best American Meets the Best Canadian - Picks by Molly Peacock

 As a dual citizen of both the United States and Canada, and as a poet who publishes in both, I play a constant compare and contrast game as I navigate between the two literary cultures.  Americans often think of Canada as just another state north of the border, though Canada has its own entirely  complicated culture.  Canadians look down to their southern neighbors with mystification marbled with hauteur and jealousy, the way someone who lives happily in a small house on beautiful acres looks at a neighbor who's built a McMansion right up against the property line.  Yet occasionally there's an American literary idea that intrigues Canadians, if uneasily.

     The idea of collecting the best poetry of the past year is one of those distinctly American ideas that has been adopted, but adapted in the great North, where people are nervous about ideas of THE BEST.  Yet Tightrope Books, a small press (yes, in Canada a small press can have a very large reach) under the valiant leadership of Halli Villegas, has undertaken to launch a Best Canadian series.  2008 was our first year.  As an admiring copycat of David Lehman, I am the General Series Editor.  Our first judge was the young, super well respected Stephanie Bolster, a poet all Canadian literature followers know, but who is not known in the US, where the few Canadian poets known are two better recognized as prose writers (Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood), one better recognized as a lyricist (Leonard Cohen), and of course, the inimitable Anne Carson.

    Our first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English is as different from its US counterpart as Canadian poetry itself is different from what is written to the south.  Same language.  Contrasting ways with it.  The poets of both my countries look inward for their communities;  very few poets trespass across either border.  Canadian poets, accustomed to looking to the south, know the names of American poets;  but American poets don’t know about their Canadian counterparts. They wonder, Who are these people?

    All this week I'll be trying to tell you by introducing Canadian poets from The Best Canadian Poetry in English, with heaps of thanks to Stacey Harwood.  Here's the first, by Margaret Avison, one of my faves.  It has a Marianne Moore-ish prickliness, and it unfolds as a metaphysical conceit.  It doesn't completely hit you at first, and I'll have more to say about this unwillingness to hit a reader on the head tomorrow.  I've kept the Canadian spelling -- yes, we keep the "u" in armour (and in glamour, too). 

Molly Peacock

Hag-Ridden

A plague of locusts is
a reminder that the
focus on knees and thighs
in stringy and gangling
insects can inspire in-
vidious
comparisons.
Nimble in
chain-armour (below) with an
upside-down carapace (shellacked),
these tiny
obstreperousnesses model
adoptable fashion trends.

The elderly, too,
are scant in under-
pinnings, and
angular.  But,
unlike locusts, these
swarm very seldom.  Each may
go with a stick; a plague, perhaps first to
themselves, Yet, their
undemanding pleasure in the
world out under such a
mysterious (some days dazzling) sky
may be a to-be-
desired infection.

by Margaret Avison

from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008
Tightrope Books

Molly Peacock, Guest Blogger January 25-31

 This week we welcome Molly Peacock as our guest blogger.  She is the author of several volumes of poetry, including  The Second Blush (Norton, 2008) and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems (Norton, 2004).  She recently introduced the first volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2008). You can read more about Molly Peacock here. Welcome, Molly.

In Other News :

Cool Poets, Hot Poems, and English Tea:  David Lehman, Laura Cronk, and our own Moira Egan touching down from Rome, celebrate erotic poetry.  Saturday, February 7, 3:00 PM.  Duane Park Cafe, 157 Duane Street, New York City.  $25 includes a full English tea-service accompanied by sexy poems in a romantic setting. Reservations required: 212-732-5555. More information here.