The Best American Poetry

Lingering Loss [by Catherine Woodard]

Loss must linger on the minds of the 28 NBA teams not on the court last night when the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Miami Heat in the first game of the championship series. LeBron James of the Heat and Kevin Durant of the Thunder are in their 20s, certain to dazzle for years to come on their way to the Basketball Hall of Fame. But neither superstar is likely to usurp Michael Jordan as the greatest NBA player ever.

So why did Quincy Troupe, poet and former professional basketball player, write a villanelle for the winning shot Jordan sank with six seconds left for his sixth NBA championship as a Chicago Bull in 1998? Doesn’t a form often associated with loss seem a strange fit for the reigning champ of champs?

Troupe offered two excellent explanations at a craft talk this spring at Poet’s House where he compared the Jordan villanelle “Forty-One Seconds on a Sunday in June, in Salt Lake City, Utah” to a free verse poem for Magic Johnson, the improv king of NBA point guards.   

To Troupe, the villanelle’s echoing lines matched Jordan, so often returning to the championship to terrorize his opponents. No one who guarded Jordan would need evidence of the link to loss found in these four villanelles by Dylan Thomas, Edward Arlington Robinson, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Troupe also described Jordan as a mechanics player who over and over again literally soared above opponents with a 48-inch vertical leap. Players knew exactly what Jordan was going to do; they just couldn’t stop him. The repetition of a villanelle is precisely that predictable. The resonant image of a Jordan dunk or jump shot is the hang time. The first line of the Troupe villanelle, by form repeated three more times: “rising up in time, michael jordan hangs like an icon, suspended in space.”

In contrast, Troupe’s first basketball poem in 1985 heralded an improv player, Magic Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers, an agile and innovative point guard, the epitome of surprise.

Was Troupe an improv or mechanics basketball player? At 72, he still answers with his body as well as his words, as if he is trying to twist around an opponent. He wasn’t a tall point guard so “you’re going to learn improv or you are going to get stuffed.”

Troupe’s segue from basketball to poetry? Jean Paul Sartre and a busted left knee. Seriously.

Troupe joined the Army in the early 1960s and went from boot camp to basketball for Army and All-Army teams in France (nice work if you can get it) and a French pro team. Then he blew out his left knee. So Troupe tried writing “an awesomely bad novel” -- the sexual conquests of a pro athlete touring Europe. A French girlfriend said a family friend might have some advice.

That writer, “a little French guy with glasses,” turned out to be Sartre, who suggested Troupe learn control over language by reading poets.

Practiced control, passionate practice – Troupe already knew from basketball. His competitive juices kicked in too. Just as kids in playgrounds and backyards still want to imitate a Magic Johnson no-look pass, Troupe wanted to make poems like Pablo Neruda or Dylan Thomas. So he taught himself to write in various poetic forms, including the villanelle.

“I found I loved writing just as much as I loved to play basketball,” Troupe said at Poets House. “I could do it all day long, and want more.”

Troupe also already knew much about music, having absorbed lots of jazz, gospel and Latin music during his childhood in St. Louis, Missouri. By the time he wrote a break-though poem on John Coltrane, Troupe appreciated that those who soar in improv are building on solid, honed fundamentals, whether in basketball or jazz or poetry.

Flash forward to lots of writing success but still not a poem that satisfied Troupe about basketball. Then he moved from LA to NYC and the sounds of his new city started to alter his line from a long 12-syllable hexameter to something shorter and quicker and more unpredictable. Which led to a start and many revisions to the ode to Magic.

“I wanted a line close to a jazz riff,” said Troupe, who coauthored with jazz musician Miles Davis, “Miles: The Autobiography” in 1989, which won the American Book Award.

Jazz and basketball, like poetry, all offer Troupe a way to express American affinities. “I was hell-bent on establishing an American form, rooted in my own experiences,” he said.

With thanks to Poets House, see both poems and hear Troupe read the villanelle.

A Conversation with Anthony Madrid [by Michael Robbins]

I first heard of Anthony Madrid when we were on the same "local poets" bill at the University of Chicago in May of 2009. I read before he did. When I got to a line that riffs on Roethke, I noticed a tall goofy-looking guy in his late thirties or early forties nodding with recognition and pleasure. A few poets later, that goofy-looking guy stood up and read some poems that shook my confidence but good. I emailed him the next day, he wrote back immediately, and thus began one of the most important friendships of my life.

After a few disastrous title misfires, Anthony's book I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say will be published by Canarium Books this summer. It's the book of your dreams, if you know how to dream.

Here's "Rhymes," the poem that made me want to go back in time and publish it under my own name before he could write it. Our interview begins after the jump.

 

THE door is rusted; the wall is clean. Red, yellow, orange, green.
Many a maiden has come between | a gentleman and his luck.

Red, yellow, orange, red. Never you mind what the minister said.
You live, you die, and then you’re dead—so go ahead and be evil.

The smallest cage in the human zoo. Red, yellow, orange, blue.
Ready or not, it’s time we do | away with all this uplift.

So, purple-orange, black and white. Oh say can you see by the traffic light?
Your kid can try with all his might, he’ll never do long division.

The 400 Blows was about a kid. Red, yellow, orange, red.
It could have been me and yet instead | they set the controls for tragic.

Oh orange, orange, yellow, black. A passionate fuck to patch the crack.

A narrative designed to attract | children and other retards.

 

Regarding yours of March 18: yellow, yellow, orange, green.
Most of these citizens aren’t really mean, just reckless with people’s feelings.

Oh green, green, que te quiere green. God got giddy on Halloween.
Jebus, the Jolly Ghost, and He | put a razor blade in the apple. Now,

You’re on your own and off your meds. Greens and yellows, blues and reds.
It’s only with certain groups of friends | you dare undermine the uplift.

So, purple-orange, yellow-blue. Polly, gimme your answer true.
I order demand and require that you | tear it, little parrot.

So, let’s hear it all for the cash machine. Purple-orange, yellow, green.
Dirty Bomb and Laser Beam | are here to collect the rent.

An Interview with Oren Izenberg [by Robert P. Baird]

Let’s not waste words: Oren Izenberg is one of the smartest people I know, and if I were compiling a list of the most interesting thinkers about contemporary poetry today, he’d be a sure bet even in a group small enough to fit around my dinner table. A Visiting Scholar in the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the poetry editor at nonsite.org, a peer-reviewed journal of poetry, art, and scholarship in the humanities, Oren is currently at work on a new book tentatively titled Lyric Poetry and the Philosophy of Mind.

Our interview, however, concerns Being Numerous, the study of W. B. Yeats, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, and Language poetry that Oren published with Princeton University Press in 2010. A brilliant synthesis of literary criticism and philosophy, Being Numerous is one of the most convincing demonstrations I’ve read of how literature might be said to accomplish the kind of first-order thinking that Michael mentioned on Tuesday. (For further discussion of the book, see the symposium at nonsite held last September.)

+++

RPB: Being Numerous makes an argument about two kinds of poetry—or perhaps more accurately, two attitudes toward poetry. These are not, however, the two kinds or attitudes we might expect to find, meaning you're not much interested in the divisions that get mapped as mainstream vs. avant-garde or traditional vs. experimental. Describe for us the distinction that does interest you.

OI: Yes; two traditions, or two attitudes. I should begin by suggesting that It isn't quite right to say that I'm not interested in the split between the "traditional" and the "experimental" that so deeply marks so many writers' conception of poetry's history and its present. I came to write Being Numerous precisely because I was intensely interested in it—at once attracted to the way that that distinction seemed to get something right about certain poets' work (and also to license tremendous poetic ambition and energy), and repelled by the way that the distinction produced embarrassing dismissals of poets and poetry every bit as remarkable. (I strongly believe that self-empowering dismissal is what this distinction is for; I am thus not persuaded that the new spirit of detente that has taken hold of the contemporary scene under the auspices of "hybridity" or lyric postmodernism or what-have-you is anything other than the latest form that the division takes. Such terms are simply a way for poets to reorder the terms of praise and abuse in order to claim Stevens as well as Stein, or Traherne (Traherne!) as well as Trakl.)

One of the things that thinking about what I have come to regard as an unproductive distinction caused me to notice more acutely was the powerful disjunction between the kinds of claims that some poets make for poetry—that it might remake consciousness, purify the soul, foment revolution, found an alternative social order—and any reasonable practical account of what can and does happen in an encounter between a reader and a poem. Let's call this disjunction between the boundlessness of desire and the act's enslavement to limit a formal wish; because it represents the attribution of powers and energies to poetic form that are real in the domain of wishing and willing—a domain that cries out for interpretation and explanation every bit as much as any poem. So: the division I became interested in is the division between poets for whom the poetic ambition was directed at the making of a poem, and for whom the sense of what poetry can do must be tied to what can be expected of human-made objects and human perceptions, and poets for whom all the labor of poetic making was undertaken in the interest of something else; something to which the poem as an object was, it often turned out, not simply incidental, but inimical. That something else I have called "personhood."

On Peter O'Leary's Luminous Epinoia [by Robert P. Baird]

 
“Martin Buber tells this tale: ‘Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. ‘Yes,’ said Rabbi Elimelekh, ‘in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see those things anymore.’” (Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

I first read these words a little over a decade ago, toward the end of a road trip I took just before my final year of college. Ostensibly on a mission to visit the archive of Thomas Merton, the writer and Trappist monk, two friends and I had taken the trip mostly because we could. Guessing, correctly, that the time when our freedoms would so distantly outpace our responsibilities was not long for the lasting, and helped by my college’s liberal attitude to undergraduate grantmaking, we dragged an egg-shaped fiberglass trailer out of our northern California hometown and didn’t return until two months were through.

Can I say we took advantage? We certainly tried. Besides Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library on 114th Street in Manhattan, we had no definite destinations, there was nowhere we had to be. Our route traced a long and lopsided figure 8 on the map that carried us to Chicago to New York to Philadelphia to DC to New Orleans to Texas to Seattle to Humboldt County. Along the way we drank in the houses of friends and slept in the driveways of strangers. We crashed weddings in borrowed clothes. We wrung the last drops of our combined liquidity from an ATM in New Orleans and decided that Merton himself would probably spit down on us from heaven if we missed the midnight show at the Maple Leaf Bar. (A sprint in the small hours of the morning got us to San Antonio, where an acquaintance offered us pot and cash to mow his lawns and the mother of a friend graciously overpaid us to organize her files.)

Take My Mother-in-Law Sandwich . . . Please: Putting on the Feedbag in Chicago [by Jamie Katz]

        photo by Peter Pawinski

 The people of Chicago, that stormy, husky, brawling kind of town, sure know how to tie on the feed bag. Has any other American city patented so many signature foods? There's deep-dish pizza, smoky Polish sausages, Italian beef sandwiches au jus, and, of course, the classic Chicago-style hot dog: pure Vienna Beef on a warm poppy-seed bun with mustard, relish, pickled peppers, onions, tomato slices, a quartered dill pickle and a dash of celery salt. Alter the formula (or ask for ketchup) and you can head right back to Coney Island, pal. For       better or worse, it was Chicago that transformed the Midwest's vast bounty of grains, livestock and dairy foods into Kraft cheese, Cracker Jack and Oscar Mayer wieners. And in recent years, emerging from its role as chuck wagon to the masses, Chicago finally bulled its way into the hallowed precincts of haute cuisine, led by renowned chefs Charlie Trotter, Rick Bayless and Grant Achatz, who's one of the forerunners of a movement known as molecular gastronomy. "They hate the term, but that's how people refer to it," says Mike Sula, a food columnist for the weekly Chicago Reader. "They like to call it 'techno-emotional cuisine.'" But does it taste good? "Oh yeah," he says.

Read more . . .

Oh! Canada - Best Canadian Poetry in English NYC Launch Weekend

Pictured, above:  Back row (L-R): Yvonne Blomer, James Arthur, David Seymour, Joy Russell, E. Alex Pierce, Peter Norman.  Middle Row(L-R): Stephanie Bolster, Leanne Averbach, Anna Swanson, Shirarose Wilensky, Front(L-R): Molly Peacock, Heather Wood, Halli Villegas,  David Lehman.

Poets from all over Canada touched down in NYC yesterday for a weekend of readings to celebrate the inaugural volume of The Best Canadian Poetry in English.  Lets give our neighbors a warm welcome!  We met last night at the Canadian Consulate in mid-town, where there was much cheer and excitement.  Molly Peacock initiated the series, which is modeled on The Best American Poetry. Celebrated poet Stephanie Bolster selected the poems in this volume.   These fine poets will read this evening at the NYU Friday Happy Hour Series (5:00 PM, Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues) and at The Bowery Poetry Club (308 Bowery, at Bleecker St) on Saturday at 2:00 PM.  Both events are free.

-- sdh

Lions of Chicago [by Emma Trelles]

  This is me, not seen, sitting on the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago in June and listening to Lisel Mueller's poem.

Here's a beautiful bit of it.                                                                

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

                                                                        

   The Art Institute is the third stop of The Poetry Foundation's  Chicago Poetry tour, a walk (and a free podcast) through the city's architecture, history, and of course, the poems it has inspired. Since I was staying at the Palmer House, I was able to hit six stops of the downtown leg, with the voices of Gwendolyn Brooks and Albert Goldbarth in my head. Also Wilco and Coltrane, but they were already in my ipod. Take the tour online or download it here. It's pretty stellar, especially when you're wandering along South Michigan Ave.

 

    I love Chicago. Regal and humble, it's such a grand American city, and I mean that in all the right ways. I zipped in for a Wednesday to Thursday stay, thanks to the Guild Literary Complex and the Palabra Pura reading series, which pairs Latino poets from the area with those of us who live elsewhere.

   I read with Jacob Saenz (left), among other writers, and it was fortifying to meet and dine with artists and publishers who were spreading the good word from the enclave of Pilsen. With its murals of heroes and saints, and its tiny bodegas, the area reminded me of my own nearby nabes of Little Havana and Hialeah. Somos hermanos, todos.

  

   Tonight is Palabra Pura's July installment, featuring Maria Melendez (Momotombo Press) and Luis Humberto Valadez. Drop in early at Decima Musa and order the cheese enchiladas. They go quite well with poems. Reading details are here.  

The Cross-eyed Double-jointed Freak: A Memory (by Mitch Sisskind)

 A stranger appeared from across

The alley and though he wore

A plastic army helmet he assured

Us that he came in peace. Others

Had thrown rocks at him, he confided,

More puzzled than hurt, gesturing

Vaguely toward the neighborhood

Around Grand and Western Avenues.

But he had not put a curse on them,

He said, though he did possess that

Power. He mentioned that the power

Of flight was also his: that night he
Would fly across Lake Michigan.

The boy called King Fat then stepped
Forward. He said, 'Stranger, you

Have done well. What is your name?

But really 'tis no matter, for now you

Are one of us, and you will be called

The Cross-eyed Double-jointed Freak!

Look here: we have buried a dead turtle

And each day at this hour we dig it up,

To show what is usually kept hidden.'

But the Freak, sighing and glancing
This way and that, demurred. He said,
'The macabre fascinations of childhood

Exert no hold on me. Death especially

I shun! You see, friends, I came down

With rheumatic fever a few years ago

Which irreversibly damaged my heart,

And it is my fate to die soon.

But perhaps my death is not

Wholly a bad thing, for I am
One of those beings who in the

State of nature -- in primeval forest

Or primordial soup -- would have

Perished after a month or so,

Leaving everyone better off.'

And with mirthless laugh he

Added, 'Everyone, including myself!'

Taking this in and mulling it over,
King Fat said, 'Then let the dead turtle

Be forgotten, nor have we further need

Of anything along morbid lines beyond

The Cross-eyed Double-jointed Freak

Himself! His androgynous quality, his

Peculiar turns of phrase, the dark mystery

Of his origin, and his self-proclaimed

Tragic destiny will satisfy our interests
For a very long time. Whatever he wants

Therefore -- ice cream, comic books,
Soft drinks -- he shall have, and though
We are of a peaceful kind we shall wage

War against anyone who annoys him!'

Now King Fat addressed the Freak:
'How can we serve you, brother?

What can we give you today, or

Tomorrow, or in some future time?

Pez dispensers, bean blowers,

Jawbreakers, candy bars, ball gloves,

Slingshots, ladyfingers, atom pearls,

Jujubes, sparklers, punks, even

A Daisy brand Red Ryder bb gun --

What does your heart desire? Speak.'

The Freak considered this proffered

Bounty, booty, abundance, overflowing

Cornucopia of whatever he did not want.

And here I aver that at no time during

These proceedings had I spoken

One word, nor had I in any way

Drawn to myself the stranger's

Awareness much less his sharp

Attention. Slouching, I stood off

To one side, hands in pockets,

Shifting from foot to foot uneasily,

A minor player, neither first nor last

In the brutal pecking order, yeoman,

Burgher, middle class citizen, small

Shopkeeper, non-com, union plumber,

Rabbi of reform congregation Shmelke

Pinchas in Elmhurst or Lombard,
Chipping ice from the temple's front

Steps on the first night of Chanukah

Lest an old Jew fall and sue. Think then

How my blood froze when the Freak

Seized my T-shirted arm with fierce

But fragile grip, crossed eyes

Milky through thick lenses, voice

Shockingly like that of Jerry Lewis:

'You would give me popsicles, which

I care nothing for! Remember me!'

"The Man With The Chicken" (by Mitch Sisskind)

They called him the man with the chicken

And he rode the Halsted Street bus, this

Man they called the man with the chicken

Did.

On a chain round his neck hung an

Alarm clock, on his head a hat made

Of cigarette boxes, from his thin

Waist

A cap pistol dangled, on his feet he

Wore scuba diving flippers. This was

The man they called the man with the

Chicken.

Few funds had he but the chicken

Brought in some coins by plunging

Its head into a cracked shot glass of

Whiskey

For the amusement of onlookers and

Over time he acquired quite a little

Following, this man they called the man

With

The chicken! Wordsworth had his

Old leach gatherer but here was

A real meshuganah too, boys! Aye,

'Twas!

"To Phillip M. Klutznick" (by Mitch Sisskind)

Your name lives on

As one of the pioneer

Developers. In Chicago,

Water Tower Place unveiled

An entirely new kind of mall:

Sophisticated yet warmly

Welcoming of Wisconsin

And Iowa tourists for whom

North Michigan Avenue seemed

An enchanted wonderland.

For me, however, your echt

Achievement remains Old Orchard.

*

Old Orchard! Truly one of the

First postwar shopping malls!

Those all-day bike rides we kids

Took out to Skokie ... Jesus,

What a schlep, yet we pedaled

On and on, insouciant, unreflecting,

And once in an alley we found

A big pornography collection

Some middle-aged masturbator

In a fit of self-loathing had

Tossed into a garbage can.

*

The masturbator? I imagine

Him now in an undershirt

and boxer shorts, his features

Obscured by a three-day stubble,

Thick eyeglasses jerry-rigged

With tape and paper clips, sad,

Lonely. Yet he could have been

Anyone -- Bernie Berlowitz,

Albert Ehrenberg, Ben Crane.

*

Only this much is sure: he was

Not you, Klutznick. Nay,

Scant use you had for the

Girlie magazines of the fifties,

Your interests not fixed

On breasts nor thighs of

Desperate farm girls trapped

In the city, wearily posing

With dirty feet in harshly lit

Black-and-white photo shoots.

*

Your thoughts were toward

Retail square footage as yet

Unmanifested in the physical

World but already real enough

On the North Michigan Avenue

Of your prescient cognitions!

Nineteen-fifty into the seventies

You held suzerainty in Chicago --

Yourself and A.N. Pritzker.