The Best American Poetry

Kill Your Darlings, Trade Melo [by Catherine Woodard]

“Kill your darlings” is a common command in creative writing classes. William Faulkner (1897-1962) usually gets the credit; sometimes Mark Twain (1835-1919) is mentioned. Regardless who said it first, it’s a savvy way to fine tune writing, particularly poetry.

Darlings are those lines that tingle all the way from the brain to the fingers translating that brain. Reread a darling, and you smile again, and again. The basketball equivalent is a stunning scorer, someone whose sheer athleticism is an addictive thrill. But it’s an altogether different decision to decide if the phrase or the scorer helps or harms the poem or the team.

Which brings me to Carmelo Anthony, who joined the New York Knicks in February 2011. The Knicks aren’t the only franchise held back by a darling but it’s the team where I live. Melo is a gifted pure shooter; he averages almost 28 points as a Knick. But Melo is a clunker as a team player, a ball stopper who disrupts the flow of the offense, just as wording that calls too much attention to itself harms a poem.

Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad poem. It may still be better than most, but it won’t ever go to another level. I’ll bet that Anthony never plays on a championship team. Superstars may win games. Teams win championships.

Anthony has the worst playoff percentage of the last two decades and is the only marquee player listed in the worst ten. So I hope Melo was listening to the post-game analysis after the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Miami Heat in the first game of the best-of-seven-series Tuesday. Kevin Durant, the league’s scoring champ for the last three years, led the Thunder with 36 points. LeBron James, Most Valuable Player three of the last four years, scored 30 for the Heat. The analysis credited the patient team play around Durant for the Thunder’s come-from-behind victory.

While Anthony was out with a groin pull, point guard Jeremy Lin emerged from the bench to orchestrate a taste of team play for the Knicks. My favorite moment of this season is Landry Fields spontaneously kissing the side of Lin’s head, in the sheer joy of a team victory.

 

Offensive flow not only disappeared when Melo returned; the diva squeezed out Coach Mike D’Antoni. Mike Woodson, the new coach, did a great job stepping in, but his system is based on more Melo.

A basketball insider I adore quotes all kind of correct statistics on why Anthony is the most impressive Knick. Even so, she and I agree on our favorite Knick, center Tyson Chandler. Tyson anchors the team on defense and leads the NBA in shooting percentage. Chandler will never be a darling.

I admit I’m regularly accused of reducing all of life to a basketball analogy. But there is a parallel in the collaboration of a small team of words in a poem and only five players at a time on a basketball court. Sure, component parts also have to meld for a successful novel and or soccer team. But precisely because basketball and poetry have fewer moving parts, there is a particular pressure for each word, each player to work well with the others.

I’m going to start calling my darlings “Melos” and think in terms of trades not executions. No millions of dollars will be at stake. The excised phrase may or may not find a place in another poem. I’ll just imagine the other words thanking me for putting the team first. 

An Ode to Magic [by Catherine Woodard]

Basketball poems bugged Quincy Troupe for a long time, particularly his own. No poem he’d ever read­ – or written – captured the speed of basketball, until he wrote an ode to Earvin "Magic" Johnson Jr. in 1985.

“They were all just too damn slow,” said Troupe, a former pro basketball player and the first Poet Laureate of California. “Basketball is quick, quick, quick.”

After 20 drafts – the rewriting continued even after A Poem for Magic was published – Troupe finally (maybe) is finished with the poem. Troupe compared versions at a craft talk this spring at Poets House in New York City and read the final version from his 1996 book Avalanche. 

A Poem for Magic

My eyes are full of basketball, open and closed, during the March to June stretch of NCAA and NBA finals. (Thanks goodness the WNBA then takes over for the summer.) But Troupe’s reading is the first time my ears have ever been full of basketball. Not just sounds that conjure associations, squeaky sneakers or a bouncing ball. But an earful of the players (or poets) who master the mechanics and then elevate an art to a level where the rest of us mere mortals can only just admire, slack-jawed and inspired.

Troupe’s free verse frenzy of “herk & jerk” captures the rhythm and images of how Johnson “wiled your way to glory” as the point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers. Tall, agile and a consummate team player, Johnson was one of the game’s greatest passers as well a potent scorer: “head bobbing everwhichaway/ up & down, you see everything on the court.”

All game long, fans expected surprise from Magic. Highlights of Johnson’s greatest passes capture for me the rare thrill as a poet of suddenly connecting two words in a transcendent way. Those moments are even more impressive to me than Johnson’s five NBA championships and three MVP awards.

 

Troupe, the author of nine volumes of poetry, literally opens up the spacing of the poem in the last version and adds more enjambments to mirror Magic’s mastery of change of pace. A long indent sets off “a new-style fusion of shake-&-bake/ energy”, with energy enjambed to the next line.

Forty-three lines into “A Poem for Magic,” a “we” suddenly appears for just three lines: "in victory, we suddenly sense your glorious uplift/ your urgent need to be champion/ & so we cheer with you, rejoice with you."

And disappears, just as fast, in the next line, indented so far it almost slides off the page “for this quicksilver, quicksilver, / quicksilver moment of fame.” But that quicksilver moment is just enough connection to keep us coming back, to play or appreciate the arts that elevate.

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Return to BAP tomorrow to learn why Troupe decided Chicago Bulls superstar Michael Jordan was a villanelle and what Jean Paul Sartre and a busted left knee has to do with it. Also email me at cathywoodard@gmail.com if you’re interested in channeling your inner Phil Jackson and pairing a poem or book of poetry with players in the NBA playoffs (winners and losers) or WNBA players just ramping up their season.

Jackson thoughtfully chose books for his players for long road trips. Whatever they did with the books was their business, but it’s hard to argue the tactics of a coach who won 11 championships, six with the Chicago Bulls and five after with the Los Angeles Lakers. That doesn’t include two with the Knicks as a player in the 1970s. I’ll include the best pairings in a blog this week, and of course credit assists. Explain why and how you’d like to be identified. At present, BAP cannot also offer a sneaker contract.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, faces uncertainty

In last night’s anxiety dream, I was suddenly tending bar at an unfamiliar restaurant, a wine bar with a sprawling, open floor plan of tables and a sleek, steel and glass bar. It wasn’t busy, but nonetheless I fumbled around trying to locate even the most basic items, like ice, an order pad and lime wedges. My apron lacked pockets—it was, in fact, an Amish-looking calico thing out of keeping with the clean aesthetic of the joint. As the dream wore on, the place got steadily busier, so that the 15 minutes it was taking me to find a gin called Target Red (never heard of it, took a while to figure out it was a gin) multiplied exponentially into a hopeless, 2 hour wait for even the simplest glass of house wine. I woke  up, as one does, upon point of death: a waiter had just put in an order for a Bubblegum Glider.

What on earth goes into a Bubblegum Glider? Only your butt, it turns out. There is no such drink, but in an anxiety dream, no-win situations are the point. As a veteran of these recurring things—in addition to tending bar at a surprising variety of unfamiliar restaurants, I have also been pushed onto a Met-sized stage in an 18^th-century ballgown to find myself in an unfamiliar opera, and I have chased down lost wallets, tickets or luggage in the world’s most bewildering airport or train station minutes before final boarding—I can claim intimacy with and proud obsessiveness about uncertainty.

At least, that’s what I call it, to be performing a task in a climate of unpredictability, without the tools and knowledge to do it properly, or at all. The word “uncertainty” has gotten a lot of circulation lately, not always in sentences I understand. I am especially suspicious when the sentences come out of the mouths of right-wing political operatives, like Karl Rove and his buddies at the superpac, American Crossroads:  “Former President Bill Clinton and now even Warren Buffett don’t agree with Obama’s policies, which are adding uncertainty and instability to the economy and making it worse.”  Really? Last time I looked, it was big banks and a real estate bubble, both private sector activities, that caused our economic uncertainty.

I also marvel when overpaid CEOs conjure its specter. Why has “uncertainty” become the lament of the 1%, who would seem better equipped to handle it than your average bartender? What do they mean by this word?

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us this first definition: “The quality of being uncertain in respect of duration, continuance, occurrence, etc.; liability to chance or accident.”

The idea here is that uncertainty is an absence where measurable or knowable data should be. My anxiety dreams have this quality: in a bar where I’d worked before or an opera in which I’d been cast and rehearsed, I’d be fine. Instead, I know I’m in trouble the moment the dream starts, and the evidence only mounts as it goes on. Uncertainty is itself a kind of data, in that you can tell what’s not there. The OED offers up a wonderful early usage (1382) in this sense from Wycliff’s translation of the Bible, in which Timothy urges us not “to hope in vncerteynte of richessis, but in quyk God.”  He’s arguing that blind faith is a surer bet than making money.

But CEOs and Karl Rove don’t mean to suggest that they ought to turn away from riches if they want to avoid uncertainty. Here’s one contemporary usage, from a guy whose business you’d think would profit from it:

“There are so many uncertainties,” said Jeffrey Joerres, CEO of Manpower, the Milwaukee-based provider of temporary workers. “If these uncertainties keep stacking up and none get resolved, we’ll see a hiring pause rather than the current slowdown.”

Stacks of uncertainty (instead of dollar bills?) prompted Joerres to give himself a raise, from $6,950,000.00 (not enough!) for working all of last year to $10,450,000.00, for working this. That a $3.5 million pay raise only moved him from #199 to #163 in Forbes’ ranking of CEO compensation gives you some idea of his fellow CEOs’ compensations. His free-floating “uncertainties,” devoid of any clarifying prepositional phrase, fits with a 1691 use of the word in the Andros Tracts, “a collection of pamphlets and official papers issued between the overthrow of the Andros Government and the establishment of the second Charter of Massachusetts (1688–1701),” foreshadowing Mitt Romney’s case for his candidacy: “Most of the Persons in our Government understand little or nothing of Trade, and so they leave it always at uncertainties.”

Now we’re getting somewhere, though not without resistance from skeptics, as in the 1653 citation right before the anti-Government one: “We love to toyl for uncertainties, and in this are worse then [sic] children.” That suggests Trade might not be as Almighty as it Thinks Itself.

Economists use the word “uncertainty” in a particular sense, to mean “a business risk which cannot be measured and whose outcome cannot be predicted or insured against.” This usage arose in the 20^th century, with F. H. Knight, in his 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. He argued that “A measurable uncertainty, or ‘risk’ proper, as we shall use the term, is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all. We shall accordingly restrict the term ‘uncertainty’ to cases of the non-quantitative type. It is this ‘true’ uncertainty‥which forms the basis of a valid theory of profit.” Until Knight rode in, I thought risk, whether proper or not, involved facing the unpredictable, but in Knight’s thinking, risk is “not in effect an uncertainty at all.” No, risk is safe, because you can insure against it. It’s uncertainty that’s risky.

Thus CEOs, who frequently argue that they should be handsomely compensated for taking risks, try to stick to the sure bets for making money, like giving themselves pay raises. They want nothing to do with unpredictable outcomes, the stuff that supposedly creates jobs, the stuff that capitalism supposedly rewards, as in the next citation in the OED, from another economist in 1929: “The assumption of uncertainty is therefore a disutility and must be rewarded.” If taking risks means doing nothing that isn’t insured against failure, and the “assumption of uncertainty” is anathema to our corporate executives, why their ten million dollar price tag? Why reward caution, hardly what “job creators” tout as their own virtue? Caution is supposed to be what Ordinary Joes have when they put up with Ordinary Salaries.

CEOs these days “toyl for uncertainties,” but what makes them make them “worse then children” is their complaining, amid stacks of executive pay, about how tough it is out there. Since children can’t drink in wine bars, let’s leave dealing with uncertainty to the grown ups, like President Obama. His salary is $400,000. Where’s his reward for “the assumption of uncertainty”?

Natasha Trethewey to Succeed Phil Levine as Poet Laureate

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The Library of Congress is to announce Thursday that the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.
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For the rest of Charles McGrath's New York Times article reporting the appointment, click here.

By chance on this day I read a piece by Philip Levine, our current poet laureate, whom Trethewey will succeed officially in September. In a recent issue of  The Normal School, a literary magazine based in Fresno, which is Levine's home turf, Phil writes that the first project he suggested to the Library of Congress on becoming PL was "a collection of the ugliest poems I could find" somewhat on the model of Robert Pinsky's "Favorite Poem Project." The LOC would have none of it, and Phil says he went on to the cause of "lost poems," such as "Abel" by Demetrios Capetanakis and "Opus 118" by the spurious Ann Knish of the Spectra hoax (1918). These are worthy works, and The Normal School does us a service by reprinting them, even if, from Levine's silence, one infers that the idea left the LOC cold.  -- DL

A Scary Prediction -- China: Better Dead than Red? [by DL]

Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:

I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.

Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:

(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Phillipines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader?  -- DL

The News and the Weather [by DL]

When you read a newspaper after two weeks of shunning any,you may get excited at first (Bristol Myers develops anti-cancer medication without debilitating side-effects of chemo; professional hackers in Idaho are sabotaging Iran's nuclear program) before reality returns with a vengeance: twenty per-cent unemployment in Spain and Greece; Putin visits Merkel in Berlin to explain why Russia conintinues to support the murderous Syrian tyrant. (At the UN, only three countries voted against the resolution to condemn: Russia, China, and Cuba.) There is a chill in the air as the Dow Jones loses 250 points and the market is down for the year. Everone is afraid that a panic is just around the corner. This is the time for stoicism and a poker face. But then the news turns absurd, though in a macabre way, and the impulse to convert the ephemeral into an aesthetic product takes hold in the spirit of Paul Fussell, who died last week at age 88. According to Fussell, the decisively ironic tone of the modern temperament "originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War," World War I, the war to end all war. To the memory of Mr Fussell I dedicate this multiple choice of the week:

1) "Like the crusade to make all Americans homeowners, [the idea of college for all is] now doing more harm than good." Vocational training is better than "dumbed down college." Who said it?
a) An economist in the Wasington Post
b) "Square-jawed" Mitt Romney, who clinched his party's nomination
c) An  old guy griping that things ain't what they used to be
d) Paul Fussell
e) Bernadette Peters upon being toild that she will receive a Tony Award on June 10 for her work in animal adoption.

2) When Ernest Hemingway defined critics as "men who watch a battle from a high place, then come down and shoot the survivors," he was thinking of
a) Brooks Atkinson and Howard Taubman of the New York Times
b) "The whole New York tradition, from Edmund Wilson to Susan Sontag"
c) Carlos Baker of Princeton University
d) Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson (see The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas )
e) Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn, and Mary Welsh

3) Which of the following didn't happen last week:
a) The impresarios of Indonesia canceled Lady Gaga's sold-out concert in Jakarta because her "needleslly provocative" advocacy of homosexuality makes her the "devil's messenger"
b) A Muslim woman argued in the Guardian that wearing the hijab is the ultimate feminist act
c) A New Yorker writer blogged that he was quitting Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is a despot and you enter his pseudo-democratic realm at grave risk to your privacy
d) Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin's baby, twittered his indgination to his 400,000 followers when John Edwards was acquitted
e) A poll of New Yorkers determined that 97% did not know why John Edwards was on trial  but were sure that he is guilty, thus demonstrating that

1) The campaign finance laws are impossible to understand
2) Screwing your media adviser is one thing, impregnating her is another
3) Screwing her is one thing, doing it while your wife is accompanying you is another
4) Screwing is one thing, but doing her while your wife is dying of cancer is another
5) Nobody is afraid of looking ignorant

Extra credit if you can identify the fellow in the piocture and explaiun his relevance to this post.
-- DL

Whither Greece? [by DL]

I asked the man in the street, I mean my friend on the Street, about the fate of Greece and the Eurozone, and this is what I heard:
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I don't know about Greece. None of the other countries really cares about Greece, many because their own problems are overwhelming, and in the long run I think Greece would be better off out of the Eurozone and, in fact, the whole EU (haven't The Iliad and The Odyssey been proof a long time that Greece is both the single force most responsible for Europe and not itself European?). But you also have to consider the run on banks that Greece's exit would probably — some would say surely — trigger and which the other Euro countries obviously don't want and are incapable of dealing with, financially or otherwise. So it looks like Greece either gets out on its own, defaulting on its debt, and begins the long road to recovery, or, through no fault of its own, really, but because no one wants the fantasy to evaporate, it takes out the whole Eurozone and possibly, eventually, the EU as well. Good riddance to bad rubbish: The United States of Europe has always seemed ridiculous to me. But, meanwhile, chaos either way.
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What can I say / but oy vay? Meanwhile, if anyone knows anything about a Spanish language Monopoly-like board game about the IMF called" Eternal Debt," please let me know. -- DL

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: You Get What You Order

Bars are not democracies, but in both cases, you get what you order with regularity. Voters pick the guy who’s going to deregulate, reform education and cut taxes, and lo! that’s what he does. Voters pick the guy who’s going to reform health care, cut taxes and get us out of Iraq, and lo! Ditto! There are few surprises. Scott Walker’s bait and switch aside, elected officials are actually kind of predictable.

So what do voters mean when they complain about slippery politicians? It means they ordered up something they don’t want after all, and instead of admitting their own mistake, they find a crack in the glass, a fly in the soup, a crook behind the bar. Obama the candidate was pretty clear about seeking to reform healthcare should he be elected. Guess what? He did just that.

But voters want to send back the Obamacare cocktail, and now he’s ignoring his own biggest legislative achievement. He could say, “Hey, you got what you ordered.” But he won’t. As every bartender knows, you dump the perfectly good drink and make another, to the customer’s specifications, even though it’s the customer who’s at fault.

Having been maneuvered into this defensive posture more than once, here’s what one former bartender used to do: suppress customer turnout. In other words, I took preventative measures, steps to avoid filling the orders of customers likely to return them, by discouraging the customer from staying at my bar. I profiled. Here’s the kind of customer who’s going to send a drink back:

• Asks for, then spends a very long time parsing, a Drinks Menu
• Chooses based on the garnish, hence ordering that which comes with an umbrella, cucumber, or
  specialty ice cubes in the shape of florets
• Giggles
• Consults friends and neighbors before ordering, but does not consult the bartender
• Zeroes in on the flaming drinks

Someone who fit this profile would learn from me, much to my disappointment, that the key ingredient (crème de boullion, a sparkler) was out of stock. If I had to, I’d invent a key ingredient.

This method is highly inexact and therefore thoroughly unfair. No doubt many lovely customers got caught in my dragnet. Tough. Since I’d earn better tips from taking care of fewer, less problematic drinkers, prevention was too winning a strategy to ignore.

Which is why Republicans are very busy suppressing wide swatches of the electorate with “anti-fraud” laws, lest some few of them vote for Obama, and why I here suggest that Democrats try the same, anti-democratic, elitist, un-American, immoral strategy. Here’s how:

• Card the usual suspects: every white person over the age of 50. Make sure each has a valid passport or similar to prove U.S. citizenship.
• Inspect the ID photo—does it really look like its bearer? Or like a younger, more attractive cousin? Since passports are good for 10 years, a number of photos will be out of date. Challenge these.
• Check the address—is it within the polling place’s district? Some of the elderly move into assisted living but don’t change their addresses on their passports or driver’s licenses, since they can no longer travel or drive. Flag these tricksters as potentially fraudulent voters, no doubt pulling a fast one on America from their socialist, Obamacare-subsidized wheelchairs.
• Also target younger white men with cigars, white women who show up during business hours pushing expensive strollers, and anyone wearing a cross.
• Canvass the parking lot, then demand valid proof from white voters with fish or other Christian iconography on the bumpers or rear-view mirrors of their cars.
• Have all of the above cast provisional ballets, so they are in the same boat as the young, black and brown Americans who’ve been harassed by the other side.

There is an easier way. Voters could educate themselves. They want to slash aid for hungry people, schools, NPR and Planned Parenthood, while pouring tax dollars into wasteful defense spending at a rate higher than the next 10 countries’ combined military budgets? They can vote for Romney. They want tax breaks for the rich and squat for the middle-to-poor? They can vote Romney. If people calculated their interests like the rational creatures economists believe them to be, Democrats would win with 99% of the vote. But voters are no more rational than giggling arsonists perusing the drinks menu at Painkiller. Oops, gotta go. Just got a request for Zombie Punch.

PSA Hosts Annual Award Ceremony: Marilyn Nelson Delivers Frost Medal Lecture (by Madge McKeithen)

Wanda Coleman, above left, and Marilyn Nelson, above right

“The hunger to be heard can be crippling,” Wanda Coleman said.  “Tonight, their work has been elevated to its proper place, validated, the burden a bit diminished.”

I had asked Wanda Coleman, the 2012 Shelley Memorial Award winner, what the evening had meant to her – all the words we had heard from the poets honored in the Grand Ballroom of the National Arts Club at the 102^nd Annual Awards Ceremony of the Poetry Society of America, on Tuesday, May 8.

From PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn’s opening remarks and welcome through each award recipient’s reading to Frost Medalist Marilyn Nelson’s lecture, the evening was charged with intelligence, warmth, and appreciation, with readings by Wanda Coleman along with this year's  Annual Award winners Lily Brown , Jehanne Dubrow, Emily Kendal Frey, Suji Kwock Kim, Lise Goett,  Jennifer Maier, Bruce Smith, and Susan Terris. For a complete description of the awards and a list of winners, visit the PSA website here. 

Following the Annual Award winners' readings, Marilyn Nelson rose to warm applause to deliver the evening’s Frost Medal lecture.  The Frost award was established by the PSA to honor distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry.

Nelson spoke of individuals who had mentored her, inspired and supported her. She expressed her thanks and recalled the admonition, “Beware lest your reputation exceed your gifts.” She noted that the official language accompanying the Frost award had shifted from service to to achievement in poetry and staked a claim for serving, speaking affectionately of the hundred or so who have spent time writing at her Soul Mountain Retreat.

Where does our poetry point us? Nelson asked.  Where do we rediscover our best hope? Where can poetry put a finger in the dike to hold back chaos? She spoke with concern about poetry workshops that tend to ridicule earnestness and value empty cleverness, about the tendency to proceed as if poem and truth are separable. She spoke directly and movingly about the simple pleasure and deep importance of reading, enjoying, and being elevated by poetry. People continue to hunger for poetry, she said, I try to write poems that satisfy that hunger.

She recounted her experience of first hearing James Dickey’s “Sheep Child,” and read from her “13 Year Old American Negro Girl,” and from “Faster Than Light” in which The Poet and The Muse converse:

We’re dying faster than the speed of light,
our fame forgettable. Will our good deeds
vanish like molecules of exhaled breath,
to be recycled by the universe?
Girl, get on back to the raft. When you try to think,
the breeze between your ears nearly blows me away.
The Muse again. So much for my magazine.
As if you ain’t been drifting all this time.
you’d know that what lasts is the hush of space:
the hiss of orbit, and the hum of stars.

If we could launch a space probe, I wondered,
would it take my last name engraved in gold?
My puny thoughts? My hopes for the future?
If I had to remain anonymous,
would I publish? Would I write poems at all?
. . .
Leave immortality to cancer cells:
They don’t know when to stop. Just when they reach
the point of no return, the body dies,
and the cancer is returned to genesis.
Genes are programmed to reproduce and die.
Poetry, to be stuck on a synapse,
lucky to be a line remembered wrong.
Your work, projected into the future,
is pulled back to earth by dark energy,
that glue which binds the cosmos together . . .
From Stamford on, I no longer traveled alone;
my seat mates, a businessman and his cell-phone.

Find the complete text of Marilyn Nelson's Frost lecture here.

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL and at the Darien Library. Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School University and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com.

An Affair to Remember: Three Writers, Two poets, and a Chef in Harlem by Madge McKeithen

The readers – two poets, three prose writers, and one chef-cookbook author -- at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Saturday night had been asked to consider these questions:

What is memory? Is it more than just the residue of time passed? Can memory also nourish the mind, uplift the spirit?

Part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, the ninety-minute event was co-sponsored by the Office of Cultural Affairs of the Consulate General of Israel, the Poetry Society of America, A Public Space, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

(l to r: Etgar Keret, Adam Mansbach, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts)

Etgar Keret’s opening story, “Pipes,” set a tone of disarming clarity and directness while his introduction – recounting leaving his army barracks to deliver the story to his brother – was quintessential Keret: wry, compassionate, and -- always and never just -- joking. He reached back to the first story he ever wrote, one that ended with a poignant possible future for those who had never quite belonged.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts brought intense observation and detailed interpretation with a passage from Harlem is Nowhere in which she examines a photograph titled  “Within 30 Seconds Walk of the 135^th Street Branch”.  Her words were telling about what the picture does not tell, while the Schomburg Center came alive as a character in her life in the neighborhood and in the broader, longer story of Harlem.

Adam Mansbach read from Rage is Back (forthcoming, Viking, January 2013) in pages that gave life to Dondi, living in Fort Greene in 2005 and yearning for the glory days of graffiti pre-1989. Dondi’s rhythmic cultural critique of a viewpoint is at once mesmerizing and disturbing, and in the section Mansbach read, the protagonist’s actions were both time-bound and time-defying.

(l to r: Marcus Samuelsson, Tracy K. Smith, Sonia Sanchez)

Tracy K. Smith read from her Pulitzer-winning Life on Mars -- poems of a future and a universe informed by nostalgia. Her father’s work on the Hubble Telescope project, the mid-twentieth century’s fascination with Mars as a potentially hospitable environment, and the subsequent transmissions from Hubble led in her poem series, “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” to a universe so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

When Sonia Sanchez stood to read, she paused and requested “as the senior one”, another round of applause for the younger generation, another gesture to past and future, heritage and legacy. Sanchez read to the memory of Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Catlett. From Does Your House Have Lions? she read  in sister’s voice, brother’s voice, and father’s voice of alienation among kin, and then, movingly, of an imagined repentance and acceptance -- one loss conceivably redeemed, another not. 

Marcus Samuelsson, chef and owner of the celebrated Red Rooster Harlem, stepped up and, foregoing the podium and microphone, paced back and forth across the stage, speaking extemporaneously, while slides of his homes in Sweden, Ethiopia, and New York cycled across the screen behind him.  He embodied the energy that had been building in the room all evening, as palpable as the salted sweet nuts that he had distributed were tasty. He spoke of growing up in Sweden, searching for his birth mother in Ethiopia, and deciding to come to America because “it was the only place that had professionals who looked like me.”

The crowd lingered in the Langston Hughes auditorium and with the writers in the foyer just outside, reluctant to let go of the evening’s experience.

Literature -- vibrant with integrity, witness, ferocity, and connection -- had delivered the emotional meanings at every moment

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL and at the Darien Library. Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School University and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com.