The Best American Poetry

The Punk Singer and The Florist: A conversation between Frankie Rollins and Selah Saterstrom. By Sarah Suzor

From Scene II of Barbara Guest’s play, The Lady’s Choice

Christian: You like only myth,

            And so you would go riding,

            Greensleeves and all

            To where love’s hiding.

Antoinette: I like you.

Christian: Lady in the heavy manner

            Of kings, you do not please.

Antoinette: Am I not pretty?

Christian: Pretty a dash, but not

            To my tasting.

Antoinette: And do I not please?

Christian: You please yourself.

Antoinette: You rock me.

Christian: You rock all foundations.

            You are almost an earthquake.

Antoinette: Your name?

Christian: Christian.

Antoinette: Than you’ve some charity.

Christian: Enough to lend.

Antoinette: Spend it on me.

***

I am obsessed with well-written dialog; I find it to be one of the most intriguing aspects of a story. Here Guest serves us her characters’ attributes with little explanation needed. Antoinette is some version of a privileged debutant, and Christian is some version of a shining nobility who Antoinette thinks she has fallen for without even knowing his name (so it’s also clear Antoinette is severely desperate). Remarkably, these are assumptions Guest leads us to without having to write much at all.

Today I am going to be featuring an interview with two fabulous fiction writers, Selah Saterstom and Elizabeth Frankie Rollins (who I will refer to as Frankie). They both speak about each other’s writing as operating not from what is explicitly written, but instead from what is implied within the writing. For example, from Selah’s 2007 book, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press):   

For my response essay I begin with the sentence: There are worse things than enduring sadness. The teacher reads it out loud. I shoot this girl Bitch Lisa a look like: fuck you, I’m deep (pg. 67).

Implication: Narrator- 1, Bitch Lisa- 0.

And this is an excerpt from the beginning of Frankie’s Origin, a novel in installments, where a husband and his pregnant wife are venturing off to settle an island:

Paramon spoke saying, “You look pained. Are you alright?” He rested the oars against his chest, mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, which was soiled with two days’ rowing. His eyes, despite lack of sleep, surprised her with their shine.

“Darling,” she said smiling, pulling herself up a little in the boat, straightening her damp skirts at her feet. “I was only thinking of tea in china cups.”

He blinked and winced.

“No! No reproach, Paramon. I was only making fun of myself. Not complaining. Just trying to make light of my homesickness." (From Chapter One.)

Implication: the woman’s miserable.

We, as readers, are often drawn into characters and scenes by what we can assume about the person, or the situation. It's really psychological; this way other people's stories can become our own. Selah and Frankie know that. They also win the award for Most Creative Dialog this week. (See Frankie’s answer to: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?) As you will read, these two clearly display a real, and rare bond, a bond that originated not only from encouragement and inspiration, but also from friendship.

Be careful, like Guest’s Christian, they’re easy to fall for.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Frankie Rollins: We met in a barn. At grad school. Goddard College’s Haybarn. Selah walked in and I saw her across a room of full of people and folding chairs. She had this great big bright aura all around her. Our eyes met and I smiled and waved to her like I knew her, automatically, instinctively. She waved right back. After the readings, we found each other and introduced ourselves. The only thing strange about any of it was the moment when I realized that I did not, in fact, even know her name.

Saterstrom: I’ve known Frankie for 13 years. 13 has always been a lucky number for me.

We met in Vermont at Goddard College where we were both pursuing MFAs in fiction. Frankie was ahead of me in the program, but I had seen her around: she glowed. I mean that she changed the energy of any room she was in and in a visceral way – such a presence – this was a fact, and in my book she was 100% glorious in every way that ever has mattered.

A limited, limiting clarity: A conversation between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer. By Sarah Suzor

From George Oppen’s poem, “Route” (1968):

Your elbow on a car-edge

Incognito as summer,

I wrote. Not you but a girl

At least

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful

            thing in the world,

A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry

But to achieve clarity

***

Oppen is often included in the Objectivist poetry movement, a movement (reluctantly) defined by Louis Zukofski as poetry exhibiting “sincerity and objectivity.” I bring up Oppen in conjunction with today’s interview because “clarity” is often a notion that’s counter to the popular assumption of poetry. As a poet, I frequently find myself in conversations with people who are insistent that poetry is riddled with hidden metaphors and secret allusions, or that it’s a category of private, encoded language, intended to be truly comprehended by only a select group of individuals.

The collected bodies of work between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer defy the “encoded” assumption of poetry. This doesn’t necessarily make their books easy or accessible, it makes them clear. Standard’s 2005 book, Water and Power (Agincourt Press) is still one of my favorite books, and Paul’s recent release Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing (Seismicity Editions) is my latest greatest affinity. Wholly Falsetto speaks with certain straight-forwardness that, I’m assuming, most readers can find some sense of application within. For example:

5^th November

Because a tall man is a fool, says Aristotle, and traffic is unbearable, the days much shorter, your eyes often kind to me as the music too is lost at sea. Along the coast lights are going on and off, even if it’s too early to fall asleep and catch the leggy young blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on her finger (pg. 22).

And from Standard’s The Notebook of False Purgatories (Chax Press), I borrow my favorite line of all time:

“Progress is progress / and never the other way around.”

In their collaborative fiction effort, which follows this interview, Paul and Standard alternate chapters. They offer two different viewpoints on a small fishing community feuding over water rights. An avid reader of both Paul’s and Standard’s work, I can’t tell who wrote what chapter. I say that to instill this: the way these two approach creating— their intention— seems mighty similar. I think Paul says it best when he mentions that the best part of working with Standard is that they never have to explain much to each other. To me, this is a gift that is almost as difficult to come by as sincerity, objectivity and clarity. Anyway, read the goods. Then go catch that leggy blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on their finger. In dreams, or otherwise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Paul Vangelisti: We met through my good friend and colleague Martha Ronk, who was one of Standard’s teachers at Occidental College. That would have been about 1994-95, almost twenty years now.

Standard Schaefer: I met Paul through my professor Martha Ronk. I was aware that she wrote poems and that she knew people in LA who wrote poems. She hadn’t really won any awards or published much poetry yet. I think maybe I one of those kids who drive their professors crazy because even though they might really appreciate a literary education, they really want to create. And I think Martha might have had it in mind that if I met Paul and saw how hard he worked, I’d either drop the subject or at least stop hounding her because Paul obviously loved to discuss poetry. That was probably 18 or 19 years ago.

SS: What about your writing career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

PV: I’d probably have to say that I wouldn’t have tried my hand at a novel, that is, committed myself to spending the time and determination it takes to work through chapter after chapter or a significant length of time. Also, I don’t think that in the last 10-15 years I would have paid as much attention to, or at least framed questions about my own practice and poetics necessarily in the same historical manner had I not talked about and read through certain problems with Standard. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can certainly make him think more critically about the ones he relies on.

Schaefer: Well, I’d be a fiction writer with a drawer full of poems that I never finished. I was always more attracted to the formal and aesthetic freedom possible in poetry, but I just thought to do it well you really had to work hard. Paul assured me that you did. It’s just that I noticed that setting the constraints for myself was way more fun than following the constraints of fiction because whether or not it’s mainstream it is full of conventions that I began to realize kept from doing the thinking-through-language that I always understood to be the point of writing. Paul I think showed me that you just think through writing and use poetic constraints of various types forces you to think differently than you did previously.

SS: Standard, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Paul’s work?

Schaefer: There’s a line of Paul’s in a poem called “Rime”: “who can deny the sincerity of hot dog stands envisioned as hot dogs.” I was partial to it for a long time because it seemed to capture the vapidity of LA at time when it was trying to cast itself as the creative center of the universe and where I could see a lot of good ideas were being milled and refined into hopelessly literal, one-note affairs.

SS: Paul, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Standard’s work?

PV: There are many but how about this one for starters, from Desert Notebook, 2004-2008: “Perhaps there was never a desert and we made it the first time we looked up to Mars.”

SS: What’s the most exciting project you two have collaborated on together?

Omnipotent: A conversation between Omnidawn Publishing's Rusty Morrison and Gillian Hamel. By Sarah Suzor

Umberto Eco, from his collection of essays, On Literature (English translation published in 2004):

I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?

My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense. 

One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.

Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader (334).

*** 

I didn’t use Eco's quote to debate or analyze its contents; I used it because I think it speaks to the tremendous importance of those who bring books to life: publishers. 

Presses are one of the most essential part of the writing community. And because “small presses” typically strive to publish work “beyond mainstream literature,” small press publishing houses are vital to poets, translators and writers of experimental fiction. Today I am featuring an interview between Rusty Morrison, co-founder of Omnidawn Publishing, and Gillian Hamel, senior poetry editor for Omnidawn and managing editor for the press’ online imprint, OmniVerse. In 2001, Rusty founded Omnidawn Publishing with her husband, Ken Keegan. Today Omnidawn is one of the most well respected, highly regarded small presses in North America. Omnidawn, with tremendous help from Gillian Hamel, has also renovated the press’ old blog into the zine OmniVerse, which has become one of the best contemporary online resources for interviews, new creative work and essays. Omnidawn Publishing’s website lists approximately 50 full-length poetry titles (many of which have won prestigious awards and prizes), and OmniVerse now credits over 100 contributors; a stunning achievement, especially when one considers Omnidawn’s short 12 years of existence and its small masthead of staff members. Interestingly, both Rusty and Gillian combined two of my questions: 1.) What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry, and 2.) What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry? Says something, doesn’t it?

Eco: “One writes only for a reader.”

Me: “One writes (or reads [or lives]) only to experience the thrill of fascination.”

In any case, these are two women who deserve a lot of praise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Rusty Morrison: Gillian is a friend of Sara Mumolo, who works for Omnidawn. Sara told us that she knew a poet who would be a perfect addition to our staff. Gillian has exceeded every expectation that I had; she’s become such an integral part of our team, I can’t imagine Omnidawn without her.

 Gillian Hamel: I came to Rusty and Omnidawn through the wonderful, nebulous network of the MFA program at St. Mary’s College in the fall of 2009. My friend Sara Mumolo, who went through the MFA a year ahead of me, had been in Rusty’s workshop at SMC and was interning at Omnidawn. She got me some review copies of Omnidawn’s books for our MFA’s literary journal, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, and I was so impressed by their exquisite design, literary sophistication, and all-around excellence that I asked her about interning there as well. She was happy to set me up with Rusty, and I couldn’t be more grateful to her for being another pillar of influence in my involvement with poetry.  

SS: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

GH: In a way, everything – Omnidawn opened up so many different avenues to me of exploration and innovation in understanding poetry, making books, and talking to other poets. I doubt I would have taken such initiative to design and manage an online journal, or to start my own chapbook imprint. There are so many other important people I would never have met. Most importantly, however, to the question of ‘career’ within this question, I might not have ever learned to take myself seriously as a poet and a functional participant in the project of poetry – which is to say, I would not have learned not only to trust my abilities in those areas, but also to understand when my limitations aren’t as serious as they seem.

RM: I did a second-take when I saw the word “career” in your question. I understand why you’ve used it, since you are asking about my work as Omnidawn’s co-publisher and poetry senior editor. And, certainly, in that context, I want to talk about the ways that Gillian Hamel’s presence continually renews and enlivens my approach to what Omnidawn can do and can become. I also sense that your question is broad enough to allow me to share the ways that my relationship to Gillian has enlivened my own writing, since I do see myself as being a poet as much as I see myself as a publisher. These two kinds of work fill the space that should mean “career” to me. The dictionary defines “career” as “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.” Poetry and presswork certainly have taken over all “significant” time in my life, but I wonder if one can speak of “progress” when discussing a creative project—be it a press or the poems I write. How does an artist gauge “progress”?

One of the most valuable aspects of my relationship with Gillian is that her vitality—her continually fresh approach to aesthetics—opens me to my own beginner’s mind. I can trust that she shares my way of seeing “progress” as including regress and digress, and even a salting of anti-gress, which can lead to new ingress. These aren’t typical words for articulating “career” path success, but they are essential words for constantly re-envisioning what a press can do, and what a poem can do.

SS: Rusty, why did you start the online magazine, OmniVerse?

RM: There wouldn’t be an online magazine called OmniVerse, if it weren’t for Gillian. Ken and I had wanted to create a magazine that would be a place to foster conversations about literature and the arts (a place where we could publish work that had nothing to do with Omnidawn), but it wasn’t until Gillian envisioned the form that we actually ventured into this.

SS: Gillian, how did you get the position of Managing Editor for OmniVerse?

GH: We’d had a slowly dilapidating blog, in its heyday a lively hub of news and discussion of all things Omnidawn and the broad poetic community, curated expertly by the inimitable Craig Santos Perez. As he began to limit his involvement in this project and focus more on his teaching career, Rusty generously offered me the position of the blog’s senior editor. However, my inability to navigate the format so capably combined with our rising presence on other social media outlets eventually rendered the blog much less relevant than it had been. The space in social media to focus on Omnidawn was well-established, and so we wanted to cultivate something for the work beyond Omnidawn’s immediate reach of publication. With Rusty’s support, I decided the best thing to do was serve another facet of Omnidawn’s involvement in the poetic community and, somewhat selfishly, fulfill a longtime dream of mine of founding and editing a literary journal. In my opinion, there will never be enough places to showcase the diversity of new work, criticism, and engagement in our art form, and I’m glad that Rusty and Ken agreed there was a place at Omnidawn for me to indulge this passion with one more outlet. 

SS: What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry? What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry?

RM: My husband Ken Keegan and I began Omnidawn in 2001 because we believe that small, independent presses are essential: they disseminate fresh, lively, culturally pertinent and provocative literature. A society needs many small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. As Italo Calvino tells us, “… the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language." 

Ken had wanted to begin a press for years, but we never felt we were secure enough financially to do this, and we never felt that we had enough time. But, in 2001, we realized that there is never enough time or money to begin a project like this—we realized that if we waited any longer, then we’d never do it. So, we plunged in, aware of the precarious nature of publishing. We have no regrets; we are excited about every new book, every new project. But it is an excitement tinged by our awareness of the precariousness and challenges of small press life. I suppose that our awareness of the risk helps us to savor every moment, every pleasure.

I share this history because I think it’s the best answer for both parts of your question. I am constantly rewarded by the opportunity to be in conversation with writers whose voices are resonant and relevant to the changing moment in which I live. What’s most difficult is that the work of running a press doesn’t end at 5pm, and the week doesn’t end on Friday afternoon. We remain thrilled by the challenges, and always a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities.

GH: I decided to conflate these two questions because – and perhaps this is going to sound a little cheesy – the ways in which the work of poetry challenges, frustrates, and exhilarates me are pretty much inextricable. The limitations of things like money and physical space and time are obviously stifling and need no further examination, but the fact of their inevitability makes the result of your work a victory that is both indulgently contrarian and deeply valuable. It seems facile to make these kinds of statements, but I think it’s sort of pointless to argue against them, especially where poetry is concerned. We all know we’re working in such a fraught, marginalized space, and we carry on in spite of that and because of that and with the sort of forbidden knowledge that it’s actually what makes us thrive. In a way, I kind of love that things like e-readers are becoming so ubiquitous because it’s begun to validate the craft of what I do – as the imperative for the cheap and utilitarian in printed books disappears, we have more room to explore the medium, to discover the interplay between printed and digital materials, to return the art to the form and let the poetry breathe in the space that’s been created.

Discussing discussions: A conversation with James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. By Sarah Suzor

Jack Spicer, from his 1957 collection, After Lorca:

Dear Lorca,

…Things do not connect; they correspond…. Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write each other.

Love, Jack

***

The irony here is this: in 1957 Spicer wasn’t dead and Lorca was.  Now Spicer’s dead, and I’m not. So, either Spicer was psychic or this is the way things really do work: a ladder of correspondence.   

A creative profession, perhaps more than any other profession, is one built, culled and cultivated from groundwork that has already been set, hence innovation via (some kind of) inspiration. I know no writer who isn’t a living, breathing representation of the influences they have encountered. The future gains new ideas and models of creativity this way; we’re constantly marching up a long ladder of either intrigue with, or rejection of something outside ourselves. These things which one chooses to correspond to, or move away from, construct the notion of a “history,” a history that inevitably makes a creative career larger than simply one’s personal contributions. Sounds important, right?

In many ways the story of Ezra Pound editing T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land makes the poem itself much more intriguing. In the annotated edition of The Waste Land we see the working relationship Pound and Eliot had refined. Indeed they were pals, but the friendship formalities go by the wayside when Pound stepped in as “editor,” leaving brash, “Bad- but [I] can’t attack until I get typescript” commentary all over Eliot’s written script, and cutting major sections and lines of the poem with the justification, “Too personal.” Some of Pound’s comments are extremely funny, especially when one imagines what Eliot­­– “The Old Possum,” as Pound called him– must have been thinking while looking them over. However, Eliot took many of Pound’s edits into consideration because he trusted his advice. And later in the annotated edition we see Pound return as Eliot’s ally by championing The Waste Land to other colleagues. This is a 1922 letter from Pound to John Quinn:

 

“Eliot came back from his Lausanne specialist looking OK; and with a damn good poem (19 pages) in his suitcase…. About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop.”

The rest is history. And that’s my point.

So, I’ve decided to infiltrate the Best American Poetry blog with contemporary examples of “working relationships.” Each day I will feature two writers in a conversation that highlights the aspects of their lives and careers that have been enhanced by writing together, learning from one another, or publishing with each other.

The most beautiful findings in each of the interviews are the descriptions of the lifelong friendships that have been created between these artists.

James Belflower mentions he wishes he could bridge the gap between New York and Arizona just to sit down for coffee with mentor, Cynthia Hogue.

Elizabeth Robinson looks forward to hearing about the new communities Travis Cebula encounters during his travels.

Rusty Morrison says she fully trusted Gillian Hamel to see Omnidawn’s online magazine OmniVerse come to fruition.

Standard Schaefer and Paul Vangelisti constantly alert each other to work that might pique each other’s interests.

And when asked about the best advice Frankie Rollins has imparted, Selah Saterstrom answers: “To risk everything for my biggest life and best work.”

To risk everything.

You picking up what I’m putting down?

Enjoy these conversations as they come down the pipeline. I have also asked the featured writers to collaborate on a new creative piece between the two of them. This is intended to honor each other’s talents and abilities, but most importantly, to put a new spin on their “relationship,” one that we, as audience (as the future), can correspond to and with.

 

I’m kicking off the week with an interview between James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. James’ second full-length collection of poetry, A Posture of Contour, was just released from Spring Gun Press, and it is a beauty. He’s pursuing his PhD at Suny Albany, and he curates the Yes! reading series. Cynthia is the Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the English Department at ASU. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, interview-poems and photographs (with Rebecca Ross).

I’ll let them tell the rest of their story.

Games Poets Play [by Heather Christle]

This evening I was reading this post on The Hairpin, all about "low-effort toddler games" like "Do You Like My Hat?" and "Hide Things in Your Clothes," and it reminded me of a passage from the children's book Pinky Pye, wherein a cat types up a list of suggested games:

 

The very clever cat then goes on to explain more complicated games, which you might enjoy reading (beginning on page 118).

And this led me to thinking of all the games I've played with poet friends, which now I will tell you how to play, in case you find yourself with guests or selves to entertain this weekend.

1. Game of First Lines

This is just like Balderdash, only instead of inventing definitions for obscure words, you invent first lines for titles. Pull a literary journal off the shelf, open to the first poem, read the title aloud, and then have your friends write down a convincing option for a first line, while you write down the actual one. Gather them all together, read them out loud, and have everyone guess which is real. Points to anyone who guesses right, or whose line manages to fool someone. Or don't keep track of points. Then pass the journal to the next person, so you get a chance to invent.

2. Game of Following the Rules of Vasko Popa's Game Poems

I just made this up, but I think it would end in tears. Here is how you play "Seducer"

One caresses the leg of a chair
Until the chair moves
And motions him coyly with her leg

Another kisses the keyhole
Keeps kissing it and how 
Until the keyhole returns the kiss

A third one stands to the side
Watches the other two
And shakes and shakes his head

Until his head drops off

3. Game of Not Listening

When you are stuck in an audience listening to someone who is dull or going on for too long, write down words and phrases she says, in order, but very selectively, so that by the time she finishes you have a much better speech she could have made had she only known how to edit herself. Extra points if you arrange her own words into an entirely different subject.

4. Game of Constant Similes

Pretend that every time someone says "like" as filler (of the "um" variety) he is embarking on making a simile it is your job to understand.

5. Game of Stacking Books

This game I borrowed from Matthea Harvey, who borrowed it from the artist Nina Katchadourian. Go to a place full of books. Find titles you'd like to arrange into a poem. Stack them in an order that pleases you. Depending on whether or not you think the place is trying to keep the books in a different order, you might consider leaving them there for someone to discover. Or take a picture.

6. Game of "Life of Game"

Listen to Loren Goodman.

7. Game of Thinking of Something

Think of something. Tell your friends you are thinking of something. See if they can guess what it is. If you are not with friends, try just thinking of something.

Those are all of the games I know. I'm lying. Those are half of them, but I am trying to raise my level of mysteriousness, which is part of a game I'm not telling you about.

--Heather Christle

 

In Praise of Amateur Singers, Carolers, and More (by Jenny Factor)

You now behold (in the photo above) a group of Beverly Hills High School alumni (parents, bankers, singers, and friends) returning to the alma mater as they do each December to sing "Still, Still, Still" with their old high school singing group, The Beverly Hills High School Madrigals.

They are singing under the baton of a very dear teacher, Joel Pressman, who was already making room for creativity and discipline, tenderness, tough love, and a lot of humor when I was a creative soul lost in the halls of that high school. Mr. Pressman's powerful voice draws us all back. What a teacher! What a singer! And all those voices--those alums who have gone onto careers in diaper-management, advanced cookie baking, accounting and the law, we alums who still love to sing, who still remember to slow down for that huge diminuendo in the final verse, and know how and why to watch the conductor--well it leads all of us in the audience to a place very close to tears!

Here is a video of this year's event. Over a hundred singers of all ages. And Joel Pressman with the baton.

  I had been a parent for oh about a minute when I realized that I would never again stumble upon a group of carolers singing on floor 3 of the mall, children chiming off-key in a red velvet auditorium, middle school brass sections bugling themselves bug-eyed at Disneyland without instantly bursting into happy tears.

Every face, every trying-hard face is so shiny and focused. And then there are always a few faces, bored and daydreaming...the child in the navy satin poof skirt inaccurately mouthing the words. The boy with the monkey-face dramatics who couldn't quite pull the requisite colored outfit together, and would fit in better at the local Chuckie Cheese. And the social dynamics. Gee, they just slap one in the face until the stomach remembers the old flip-flops. Nodding to the parents with a "hip" Queen medley mostly from Bohemian Rhapsody, "mamma, I killed a man...my life had only just begun..now I've gone and thrown it all away" as we audience members howl with laughter, the joke on us for getting old, humming along. A high school diva in a black slinky dress, draped over a piano as if she were a lounge act, supported by four guys her own age in hats and bow ties, two of whom she'd never date, and one who would never date her (wrong gender), and the one who just maybe...and that isn't even storying up to the accompanist. The girl-on-girl duet, part love, part catfight. The sounds of the audience, the live net of high school affections and antagonisms, providing the soundtrack to the series of festive, frought events. I love them. I love every single one of them.

There we sit, we parents, grandparents, and other partisans, holding our tinier-each-year camcorders and recording our bigger-each-year children. I am purged over and over by the beautiful imperfection of the music, from the tiny beauty pageant kindersingers, to the high school minnesingers or maestros, tuning with purpose, and following the conductor with more verb and verse. Sometimes it seems as if you can feel layers under the singing or strumming--the hours of practice, all the different ears assaulted by scales, the "have you practiced enough" arguing behind every household door, and then later the "stop practicing till you have done your homework" or the "that dress is black but it's too short" "too fancy" "too casual". The parents, the children and their dreams. Like raising peacocks or grooming unicorns part of what's so touching is knowing that this is it, this is childhood, the most "adult" form this art will ever have for many of our children. 

It seems so grown-up really, to believe in this effort and practice and excellence. To work hard. And then to come together to live it all out. What's wrong with us adults--so quickly bored and scattered, our energy dissipated by not wanting to disappoint our own hopes. How big we were, small like that!

Last week on NPR, Barbra Streisand (now in a new movie) was interviewed by Terry Gross. She talks about singing "People who need people," a song whose lyrics might be exactly opposite of what she believes, but they felt right. She talks about the moment when she was thirteen, and a bridge in the music, a bridge she swore was too long, suddenly got filled by a new idea for her, and when she came back in, the sound that came out of her--it was new. It was something she didn't know she had inside her.

And so this is what art is like. What life is like. Near as I can tell it.

We stop worrying about perfection. We pause for not knowing. We let effort happen, for its own mysterious reasons in its own mysterious state. 

And sometimes, if we're very lucky, both Heaven and Nature sing!

Thanks, Joel Pressman. Happy Holidays to One and All...j.f.

Asylum Avenue: An Interview with Samuel Amadon [by Michael Schiavo]

Samuel Amadon

Sam Amadon and I have known each other for over a decade. We have much in common, particularly Connecticut. I had a few questions for Sam about his second collection, The Hartford Book, published this spring by Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Sam is also the author of Like a Sea, which won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 2010. His poems have appeared recently in American Poetry Review, Better, The New Yorker, A Public Space, and Ploughshares. He teaches in the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina. We conducted this interview via email from our respective homes in Vermont and South Carolina.

What was the process of composition for The Hartford Book? How did it relate to your first book, Like a Sea?

I wrote the bulk of the poems that now make up The Hartford Book in 2004. It was my first semester at Columbia and I was working with Richard Howard. About once a week, I’d go to his apartment in the Village and I’d bring him three or four of these poems. He really showed me how to write them, but more than that he showed me that I could write them. I had thought of poetry as something careful and cool, and my poems didn’t sound anything like me (as in the “me” sitting in the diner opposite you). Richard changed all that. He was so excited by these poems; it was a motivation to write them. We’re obviously quite different people, Richard and I, and I think this was part of his fascination—it was like I was bringing him the news.

Anyway, I found a method for the poems: long, funny circles of talk that make shifts via association, and continually find their sad way back to where they started. That line also works as a fair description of most of my friends from Hartford. That’s part of what I was after: to bring out this way of being that feels local to the place, to the people, to me. After a long process of weeding out (I cut the book in half over seven years) and changing forms, I think I got some of that. In Like a Sea, I was trying to do everything but write The Hartford Book, not because “I wanted to get away from it,” but because I wanted to see how different I could be and still sound the same. Even the procedural poems in that book, like “Foghorns” which is drawn entirely from A Long Days Journey Into Night, feel to me as if they fit in a wide circle drawn around The Hartford Book.

Like a Sea

The Hartford Book poems were composed before Like a Sea, yet published after. Was this weird in any way?

Like almost everybody, I get really frustrated with the idea that half of poetry is off-limits. Or with the idea that you don’t have to read my poem, you just have to figure out which column it falls into on your aesthetic spreadsheet. So to some extent, I was happy to be publishing The Hartford Book after Like a Sea just to confuse matters. The best thing that came out of it, I think, is what it did to Andy Axel’s brain, evidenced here. With readers like him, I don’t think we have to be quite so afraid of the future.

How has Hartford/Connecticut as a landscape/place affect your development as a poet and the language in your work?

Well, Michael, as you might recall, it can be incredibly lonely. That’s partly what I think of when I think of Hartford. Driving in circles through empty streets and listening to the radio. Sitting by myself at the coffee place. Big empty parks. I didn’t do a lot of writing there, and I didn’t do a lot of reading. But for the part of being a poet that is about being alone, Hartford taught me how to do that. It’s not surprising that I grew up four or five blocks away from Stevens.

The Hartford Book

What’s this poem, Controversy, you’ve written with Tom Hummel?

Tom and I had been searching for a way to do something collaborative together for a long time, but whatever we’d come up with seemed half as good as what we could’ve written on our own. In Controversy, we figured out the trick was coming up with a project that needed two authors, that couldn’t have been done by one person alone. Essentially what we did is a blind erasure. One of us would provide the other with sentences from a text that the other would erase, but we never told each other what they were erasing. And we added other constraints: if I took a sentence from the thirtieth page of the third book on my fifth bookshelf for Tom to erase, then Tom would take a sentence from the thirtieth page of the third book on his fifth bookshelf for me to erase. We picked the sentences ourselves, but chance had a role in choosing the pages. I really like how it turned out. It’s like a box of broadsides. Which is something I don’t think either one of us would’ve made on our own.

Does that process fall anywhere in what’s been dubbed the Conceptual poetry spectrum?

I don’t know if I would call it conceptual exactly. I tend to think of conceptual writing as work that plays out a meaning that’s made off the page. Like Jackson Mac Low’s “Ridiculous in Piccadilly.” When you run through that poem, you “be poor always and unkempt”; you “be ridiculous in Piccadilly.” I don’t think that’s the case with what we did. I’d file Controversy under Procedural Epistolary. Because we were really erasing as a way to write to each other.

Do you consider the Hartford Whalers to be the 2006 Stanley Cup winner even though they won it as the “Carolina Hurricanes”?

No. But I did watch some footage of the end of the last Whalers game the other week, and wept a bit while looking for my dad and me in the crowd. Look I know that teams get moved, and the Whalers going to Durham is nothing like the Dodgers and Giants going to California or anything, but it has to be one of the stupidest and most wasteful thing’s that’s ever happened to a franchise. Rowland thought he’d move the Patriots to Hartford, so he let the Whalers go, and years later I drove by him walking his dogs on the street (when he was getting impeached) and shouted, “Governor, you’re an asshole.” If I saw Bob Kraft, I’d do the same thing.

Hartford Whalers, 1972-1997

We can both reconcile poets like John Berryman and Gertrude Stein in our own work, even though some consider them to represent disparate branches of poetry. Do you see these distinctions becoming more and more unnecessary for others?

Well it’s easy for me to do that with Berryman and Stein because we have so much in common—the three of us can’t shut up. Really, I think the idea of “disparate branches” is more to blame than the differences between any two poets. That’s the deception: all the long-drawn lineages. There’s no master plan that we’ll finally figure out, thank god. I don’t to mean to say that conflicts and influence, schools and rivalries don’t offer us anything, but that can’t keep us from reading these individual poems by these individual poets. We have to try to keep remembering that. Anyway I don’t think you reconcile Stein and Berryman—I think you put them in the same room and let the sparks fly.

What was it like to be published in The New Yorker for the first time?

Not to say that poetry hasn’t given me a lot, but it did feel pretty good to pay the last part of that month’s credit card bill with “the money from my poem.” It was unexpected. I sent into the slush for years. Turns out they actually read it.

Tell me a little bit about your current manuscript, Tourism.

With Tourism, I tried to play against myself section to section. Most immediately, this is visible in formal changes. There are poems in rigid syllabic patterns without punctuation. There are poems in received forms: Petrarchan sonnets and heroic couplets. But I also created difference by taking on subject matter that doesn’t quite fit with who I am. I never knew about the original Penn Station, the one they blew up to build MSG. And when I read about, I thought there’s a certain kind of poet who does research on something like this and then writes about it. Then I tried to do that myself, and by the end, I dropped the “there’s a certain kind of poet” part. The manuscript’s a departure from the first two—the word “Hartford” never appears—but inside, it’s full of these departures from itself.

You recently received your PhD from the University of Houston and are now teaching at the University of South Carolina. How have you found the experience?

I think if the MFA students I’m teaching weren’t generous and kind people who write interesting and daring poems that it would be a lot harder. For that I feel really lucky (beyond how lucky you have to feel just to have gotten a job.) I felt ready to make the move. I’m writing new poems now, after a bit of a drought, and I think teaching has a lot to do with that. Doing the PhD really gives you a chance to figure out what you think about workshop. You see how you think it should run, how you don’t think it should run. To my mind, it’s about being the best audience for the work. The idea that having someone waiting to read it—to really read it—has a lot to do with it getting written.

The Bookstore [by Michael Schiavo]

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

Poets and Artists Play "Telephone"

7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers link their works. For example, a poet may be presented with a video and asked to write a poem in response; the poem in turn is shown to an artist, and the chain continues. The responses came daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours of rtesponse time. Begun in 2010 and reprised in 2011, the project is archived here (or at htttp://bekandnik.wordpress.com.) Ms Campbell and Ms Walker plan a new round of Telephone to start soon. -- DL.

Philip Larkin and Tom Clark Play Cards [by DL]

Tom Clark's skill at juxtaposing image to work makes his "Beyond the Pale" blog a constant source of pleasure -- perhaps especially when Mr. Clark, a poetry editor of great distinction in his time at The Paris Review, takes us thoroughly by surprise, as happens here, when a Philip Larkin poem of note ("The Card Players" from High Windows) is conjoined with Adriaen Brouwer's Flemish 17th-century card players, who smoke and drink and carouse and lose their tempers and break things when they lose or suspect someone of cheating and if you stare at them they'll blow smoke right into your face and their companions will laugh and one of them, said to be the artist himself, will blow smoke rings in the air for your enjoyment while his friend puts his finger to his lips, begging you to keep the secret, or to his nose, signifying that the criminal activity taking place is sanctioned by the syndicate. -- DL