The Best American Poetry

Secrets of the Editing Trade, Part 1: The Rejection Slip

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If the subscription list of this magazine approximated the yearly inflow of manuscripts – the editors would hire a long string of assistants, have cut flowers replenished daily on their desks, and be less harassed generally.  Even then, however, the impossibility of answering personally each letter that reaches the office would be equally manifest.  What is one to do about such a condition?

Those sentences were not written by any living editor of a literary magazine, nor ever blogged (except by me), but were written by Alice Corbin Henderson and published in Poetry – way back in July 1916.  You can read the whole piece here.  I’ve been noticing the theme of rejection that runs through some of the comments on my posts here this week, and thought I'd address them briefly before I melt away.  (I call this "Secrets of the Editing Trade, Part 1," but will probably only have time for a part 2.  There aren't really any secrets, despite what people seem to imagine.)

I guess the first thing to mention is that both Chris Wiman and I are writers who get rejections all the time just like everyone else.  This is true of most of the folks who read submissions at magazines and websites that publish poetry.  In fact, the only time I'd ever been in contact with Chris before I came to work at Poetry was via a rejection letter from him sent not long before I came!  And I speak to you as one of those recent Paris Review de-acceptancees.  No need to feel sorry for me, but I'm just sayin'...

Is this a tired subject?  Probably not.  Lots has been written about it already, though there's little need to state the obvious.   But it remains an important subject for most of us – it's not going to go away; heck, there’s even a whole Rejection Wiki these days.   Well, of all that's been written on the subject, I recommend Ada Limón’s  “Response Burger: A Story of Rejection.”   It’s heartening to see Ada’s strong and salutary response to her having received those mortifying rejection slips we all get: “I really believe that all those rejections made me better.” 

Understandably, not everyone feels that way.

For those who haven’t “made friends” with their rejections as Ada has done, it’s worth noting that Henderson’s piece is not a complaint.  Like all of Poetry‘s editors from Harriet Monroe on, Alice was grateful to those who take the time and trouble to send their work, without which the magazine would simply not exist.  Instead – and as are the present editors and Harriet herself – Alice was a poet too, and well understood the experience of rejection as “brutal and dispiriting.”  But, she asked, what sort of rejection would not be those things?

What she offered in solace to those whose work was turned away was the assurance that “All the verse that has come into this office up-to date has been read by the editors.” Despite the large number of submissions we get (about which I remarked earlier in the week) and the small number of staff here at the magazine, every submission is read with care and respect by the people on the masthead.  Our Consulting Editor, the poet Christina Pugh, and I, between us, read everything that comes in (as it happens we have no interns or students), and compose written comments on submissions that I then discuss back and forth for many days at a time with Chris.

I don't know how things will be under the next editor, but these past few years Chris Wiman and I have gone back and forth about submissions in what has become a continuous, illuminating, and humbling conversation.  I have never ever heard the world "slush" used here.  Our names go on the thing, so we take it very seriously.  And we all know we can be as wrong as Col. Higginson was in our judgments.  When we find work to accept, we feel real pleasure, knowing what publication means for a poet; when we turn things away, we both know how it feels, and we sincerely hope everyone will keep trying us, entrusting us, with their work.

Henderson put it memorably all those years ago:

“The poet knows that he is a genius; and the editor still hopes to discover that he is in each manuscript examined.  The editor has a hundred sorrows for the poet’s one.  The poet may swear at the editor, and rather adds to his dignity in doing so; but the editor, in addressing the poet, has to assume the polite demeanor of the dancing master.”

So, let’s dance, shall we?  It’s our share of what Ada nicely calls “the necessary work.”

Coda: A word about the photo above.  To celebrate his 15th poem in Poetry magazine, appearing earlier this year, it was taken by Todd Boss and posted on Facebook with the caption:

“12 rejections before they ever took one. Don’t give up, friends. Never give up.”

 

-- Don Share

The Beautiful American Word, Sure

 

 

 

 

 

 

An alien crowd of nurses, residents, attending physicians, and machines and carts careened and hummed everywhere around his wife. If she had needed her husband during her labor, if she had hopes of counting on him, well, as usual, he was completely useless. Oh, he’d taken the birthing classes, worried himself crazy, and had tried to be attentive for months. It was no use. In the end, apart from a few ice chips he fed her on cue, she was on her own again, struggling with absolute physical and spiritual courage, getting things done because nobody else was going to do them.

     Watching helplessly and unhelpfully as she went through her labor, he kept thinking of those urban legends in which a mother finds, miraculously, the strength to lift an automobile to get her child out of danger. And so, thanks to this kind of courageousness, their only child was born, from strength and sheer resolve. Somehow in all the uncomfortable maze, glare, and welter, a nurse found him cowering in the corner by a cart. Everything was moving fast; he found it hard to keep up with what was going on, with what he was even thinking.  Above all, he was crying, crying a lot, something he had really never done before. It surprised him almost as much as the unfathomable process of childbirth.  A nurse took him by the crook of the arm. She stuck the odd, unbalanced eyes of a sleek, gleaming surgical pair of scissors into his shaking, damp hand without even looking to see where his fingers were and said, no doubt having said it many, many times before, “Dad? You want to cut the umbilical cord?” And this is what he answered:

     “Sure.”

     If the word “sure” has anything to do with certainty, it’s a funny business that a man can say it when he’s least certain.

 

*

     One of my favorite poets is Delmore Schwartz, and one of my favorite poems by him is a sonnet, “The Beautiful American Word, Sure.”

 

The beautiful American word, Sure,

As I have come into a room, and touch

The lamp’s button, and the light blooms with such

Certainty where the darkness loomed before,

 

As I care for what I do not know, and care

Knowing for little she might not have been,

And for how little she would be unseen,

The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear.

 

Where the light is, and each thing clear,

Separate from all others, standing in its place,

I drink the time and touch whatever’s near,

 

And hope for day when the whole world has that grace:

For what assures her present every year?

In dark accidents the mind’s sufficient grace.

 

 

     There can be no doubt but that at the instant of the cutting, the brand-new dad in my vignette had a feeling exactly like what Delmore describes in the first stanza of his poem: something would have switched on in him, after which light bloomed. After all the months of uncertainty during our couple's pregnancy—the worry and stress—there was now, and maybe just for now, certainty.

     The second stanza is too complex to manhandle, and too delicately built for the crudities of armchair lit-crit. Yet that gorgeous line, “The intercourse of lives miraculous and dear,” occurs just past the poem’s midpoint. And it leads to a place where life gets shorter, to a place in the poem in which the quatrains rush into tercets because time is going to run out, something all parents feel keenly. Nevertheless, it’s a place “where the light is, and each thing clear,/separate from all others, standing in its place. . . .” One of the many chaotic things that happen during a birth is an alternation of the sense of time. On the one hand, waiting, and plenty of it; on the other, things go by so fast, you scarcely feel present in any moment. You take in what you can take in: “I drink the time and touch whatever’s near . . . ”—your wife, your new baby, your in-laws arriving just late enough to have missed the crowning—“And hope for the day when the whole world has that face,” the innocent, wanting face of a baby.

     It is often, if not usually the case, that a man has never had “sufficient grace” until he sees a woman give birth, and meets his son or daughter for the first time, under the certain and steadying guidance of a stronger presence. Readers of poetry are very blessed this way.  Even at the other end of our lives, we can fortify ourselves by recalling Dante's guide, Virgil, and then his beloved Beatrice, ferrying him into a new life, a new world.  Each langauge, each poetry has its own beauty and wisdom.  But I don’t know what word exists in other languages for the assent and faith, right in the heart of doubt, that is spelled out in the beautiful American word, sure.

     Ours is a word rhymed, in Delmore Schwartz’s poem, with these kindred words: care, dear, clear, near, year. No dictionary of any language in the world will tell me (and believe me, I’ve searched) all the things that “sure” can possibly mean. But a poem, with its family of rhymes and little nervous miracles, gives a reader just about everything he needs to be more sure of himself, and of those around him.

 

-- Don Share

Pictured: Delmore Schwartz and Mr. and Mrs. James Agee, on their way!

Death of a Literary Magazine

It wasn't pretty.  The decision was made by people who probably didn't read or look at it.  It had been around for decades, surviving literary, cultural, cold, and military wars.  It was killed by university administrators.  The deciders aren't even there anymore.  And I never hear its name mentioned nowadays.

Yet for almost seventy years, Partisan Review was one of the nation's most important literary magazines, and the fresh-faced fellow pictured above had, somewhat improbably, become its poetry editor, following in the footsteps of such folks as Delmore Schwartz and Rosanna Warren.  That fellow was me. 

When the magazine was killed off, the New York Times headline read: "Journal's Closing Spells End Of an Era," and the article remarked that

... the magazine is unlikely to be forgotten. From its inaugural issue as an independent journal, in 1937, which included Delmore Schwartz's short story ''In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,'' a poem by Wallace Stevens and contributions by Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and Edmund Wilson, to its heyday in the 1940's and 50's, the journal published an astonishing range of landmark work. For many Americans, Partisan Review was their introduction to Abstract Expressionism, existentialism, New Criticism and the voices of talented young writers like Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag.

The list of contributors is so impressive - PR ran everything from "Avant Garde and Kitsch" to "Notes on Culture" to "Skunk Hour" - that I could fill this blogpost with nothing but names, so I'll just add that, lest we forget, Anglo-American literary culture was truly shaped by the mag.  To give just one example, between 1941 and 1946 Orwell wrote fifteen "London Letters" for PR, after which, iIn 1949, the journal awarded him £357 for the year's most significant contribution to literature, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

At its peak, PR had about 15,000 subscribers.  When I met Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, he told me he was a reader.  So was my podiatrist.  Nobody talked much about "audience" in those days, probably because litmags did have an audience back then.  And though chronologically, PR was shut down less than ten years ago, it's ancient history, in literary terms.  Back then turns out to be way, way back. 

I was at PR for eighteen years, starting as a go-fer.  Naively, I went to the office one day and asked if I could work there for free.  After an initial scolding, an editorial assistant took pity on me, and gave me a few things to do, providing that I made myself invisible to the editors, didn't use the bathroom in the office, and pledged not to steal, or even touch, review copies of books.  Everything felt sacred.  The offices were extremely quiet, except when the Editor was in town, during which visits a fair amount of yelling could be heard.  (Once, the Editor chased somebody out onto the street, calling whoever it was "stoopid - with two o's!")  I was reasonably intimidated.  But I wanted to learn how literary magazines were made and produced.  And gradually, I was given more honorable tasks until at some point, I was allowed to read incoming manuscripts, and even answer the phone.  Philip Roth called one time, and hearing my voice asked, "Are you somebody?"  (I had to say: no.)  James Dickey used to call, and I ended up spending many lovely hours chatting with him: he was quite happy to talk to a nobody. (I should add that when I attended PR's cranky sixtieth anniversary party in New York, I happily laid eyes on such fascinating folks as Diana Trilling and... BAP's own David Lehman, for the first time!)

There was a tiered system of manuscript readers.  First, second, third...  I was at the very bottom of the ladder for a long time, needless to say.  The idea was to pass along work that looked promising, along with a typed, well-composed note explaining why a manuscript was being imposed upon the reader above me, who could send it farther up the ladder.  In some rare cases, the real editors would get things, and make big decisions; you did not want to send along too much, because that would incur the wrath of everyone up the line - but if you sent nothing along, it would be suspected that you weren't doing anything.  It was a bit trickky to negotiate all this, but there could be no prouder moment than when a ms. a reader sent forward appeared in the magazine - and better yet, won some kind of award later.  But mostly, I was writing up appraisals of submissions that were going to be rejected, and trying to do so with dignity and intelligence. 

After a few years of this, I started saying what I really thought about manuscripts.  At this point, I was reading almost all poetry.  Partly, I wrote up my mini-essays to please myself: in a way, to avoid boredom or going stale.  And then, too, I had the idea that nobody was really reading my comments.  About the latter I was wrong, for one day the Editor called me into his office.  We had never spoken before, and I was positive I'd be hurtling down the stairs before long: stoopid with two o's.  But no! 

"We've been reading your reports for years, you know."  Uh oh.  "You seem to know something about poetry..."

They kept me on, and so I stayed for the better part of two decades, learning every aspect of editorial and production work.  I had one particularly wonderful mentor, who later became my teacher, and then a friend: Rosanna Warren, who was Poetry Editor there for many good years.  I typed RW's letters, day after day, week after week, and in the process, learned a great deal about tactfulness, kindness, generosity, empathy, and other qualities the very best editors cultivate.  It was a large and crystal-clear window on the everyday world of working writers. 

I've had lots of jobs, as I've written elsewhere: busboy, van driver for a junior college, librarian...  Though I earned no money at PR, my apprenticeship at a literary magazine was the best job someone like me could possibly imagine.  And working my ass off on behalf of other writers, setting my own work aside along the way, I became Contributing Editor and the magazine's last-ever Poetry Editor.  I know it sounds pious and pompous, but I've felt that work as a calling. 

Though it was hard to believe that such an important magazine could be shut down, the truth is that it had lost its way for a very long time.  And it's natural enough, really: literary magazines die for all sorts of reasons: lack of money, lack of vision, lack of readership...  When they go, they are not much lamented, though some have left their mark.  (Take a look, for instance, at this amazing list on Wikipedia of "Defunct American Literary Magazines."  Wow.)

I blogged yesterday about my own unflagging enthusiasm for reading submissions.  I've been reading them now for almost half my life.  It has been a privilege to do so, and I've tried to give writers the kind of encouragement I suppose I wanted to receive myself.  More importantly, what I've learned from being at one of those dead magazines and then at one that has lasted over a century is amazingly simple: there is work that lasts and lasts, and survives the fraught and lonely manner of its birth. 

 

-- Don Share

Gluttons for Poetry (by Don Share)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've been amused - bemused, more accurately - by the continuing discussion, among American poets, of an apparent "glut" of poetry.  Poetry must be one of the very few things Americans feel there is too much of, but there are days when I sympathize with the argument, however nebulous, that there are too many poets, too many poems.  That's only because for the past few years I've been blessed with a job in which I am entrusted to read many thousands of newly-written poems.  At Poetry magazine, we now get about 120,000 individual poems to read in a year's time.  No matter how you feel about quantity, that's a big number.  As things stand these days, we are able to publish about 300 of those submissions each year. 

Is 300 a lot, too much, not enough? Can anyone really know?  No less than W. B. Yeats raised a version of the numbers question:

I remember saying one night at the Cheshire Cheese, when more poets than usual had come, "None of us can say who will succeed, or even who has or has not talent. The only thing certain about us is that we are too many."

That was easy for him to say, I suppose!

Poets and editors alike have to wonder how much of what they publish will stand the test of time; on both ends, the record can be a bit shaky.  For all that, the numbers aren't a problem, as far as I'm concerned, but rather an opportunity.  And if I ever tired of reading poems, it would then become clear that I'm in the wrong line of work.  Fact is, I can't wait to read more poems, and it's something I do day and night.

Here's another number: 100.

As many readers here will know, Poetry magazine just turned one hundred years old.  Finding ourselves on the magazine's editorial staff upon the occasion of its centennial has meant many things, almost all celebratory.  It also meant that we needed to take stock of what came before.  Christian Wiman, Poetry's Editor, and I were given the task of reading every poem published in our pages in order to assemble an anthology to put it all in perspective.   And so, for a period of several months Chris and I read more poems than anybody would have cause to do under normal conditions.  All in all, between us we read about 40,000 poems.  As pictured above, we worked quietly and alone in a rented conference room, winding our way through piles of poems until we were down to one hundred poems - not one for each year, and nothing in chronological or any other kind of logical order.  Instead, we assembled a kind of grand sequence, punctuated occasionally by pithy prose quotations we also discovered in our sojourn.

The result is The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of POETRY, published by the University of Chicago Press.  The idea is that you can read it straight through, or dip into it; that the book would be a pleasure to read whether you were a poetry expert or someone just finding the way.  Chris has articulated a great deal of what we learned, and what can be learned, from reading so many poems in an essay so quotable that I'd end up quoting the whole thing if I tried to quote from it here.  You can read it online, however, and it's called - ready for one more number? - "Mastery and Mystery: Twenty-One Ways to Read a Century."

That twenty-one one-ups Wallace Stevens's famous thirteen, you could say...

*

It only occurred to me well after all our work on the book was through that we might have earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for reading all the poems we did.  As it happens, there are guidelines for such things, and they're posted on an official "Is It a Record?" website.

All it says about poetry is that they cannot "consider claims for longest or shortest poem," and all it says about reading is: "We do not accept claims for silent reading."

Oh, well!

*

Before I came to Poetry five or six years ago, I was working at something I loved very much.  And I did not expect, though I did dream of it, that I would ever be offered the chance to work at the magazine.  I had never met Christian Wiman, or any of the other staff, but during my interviews I realized what incredibly devoted and singularly talented folks they are: I knew that I wanted to work with them more than anything in the world.  Yet at some point along the way, I must have looked surprised, or shown some fleeting hesitation about uprooting my life to come to Chicago.  Chris gently took me by the crook of the arm and quietly said: "It's good to shake things up once in a while."  From that moment on, the man has been an inspiration to me.

In a post to come, I'll talk about what it was like to be present for the death of a literary magazine: I was the last man standing at the old Partisan Review, which was about 70 years old when it was killed off; among other things, its editor had stayed on way too long.  True to his vision of shaking things up, by contrast, Chris is, as readers now know, leaving his post as editor of Poetry.  So here's one last number: 10.

Chris has been at the magazine for ten years.  It's hard to believe that his tenure comprises a tenth of the magazine's history.  Change is good, as we all say, and change there will be.  Well, not everything is, or should be, about numbers.  But I'm certain that when it's all accounted for, these past ten years of poetry - upper and lower-case P, as we often say around the office - will be seen as wonderful ones.

Off I go to read more poems.

Pictured above: Chris reading piles poems for the anthology.

 

-- Don Share

Poetry makes nothing happen? Think again!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'm going to begin the week by reprising a piece a version of which I once ran on my own blog; it's the best opening salvo I can think of for a few days of rumination.  In the days to come, I'll muse on such subjects as secrets of the editing trade, favorite words, what the heck is going on at Poetry magazine (or maybe not!).  But I find myself repeating the substance of what follows in many conversations, so I hope you'll forgive me for kicking off with it now.

*

You see the phrase, “poetry makes nothing happen” trotted out over and over again, attributed to W.H. Auden as some sort of evidence for the reductiveness and hermetic inutility of poetry. There's no Fifth Amendment that prevents an art from testifying against itself, of course... And yet…

The fact is that the phrase occurs in a POEM – one, moreover, that eulogizes a poet who made things happen (being a politician and activist, as well as a writer), W.B. Yeats. And in context – only part of that context, since I can’t legally quote the entire poem, and that context is absolutely enormous – the poem actually says:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

I’m not practicing literary criticism here, by the way; I’m reading exactly what it says on the page: poetry survives: it is a way of happening, a mouth.

Even if, as some argue, by the time of the poem’s publication Auden had lost his belief in poetry as an agent of political change, he would not, as Jon Stallworthy points out, have dared say the words “poetry makes nothing happen” to the living Yeats, no sir.

As it happens, the origin of the phrase is Auden’s Partisan Review essay of about the same time (1939), “The Public v. the Late Mr. William Butler Yeats,” in which he imagines putting Yeats on trial for his belief in fairies and other “mumbo-jumbo.” As the British poet Angela Leighton remarks, “in the imaginary court case to which he brings the poet, the defence lights on a phrase which will yield its own poetic riches.” In Auden’s courtroom “the case for the prosecution [of Yeats] rests on the fallacious belief that art ever makes anything happen, whereas the honest truth, gentlemen, is that, if not a poem had been written, not a picture painted nor a bar of music composed, the history of man would be materially unchanged.” When this gets reworked into the famous “makes nothing happen” bit, Leighton observes, the phrase “turns, by a tiny inflection, a redistribution of its stresses, into its opposite: ‘poetry makes nothing HAPPEN.’ By this accentual difference, ‘nothing’ shades into a subject, and happens. This is an event, and its ‘happening’ sums up the ways of poetry. Intransitive and tautological, nothing is neither a thing, nor no thing, but a continuous event.” So for Auden, the job of the poet is not to be what he called, at about this time, a “crusader” – but to make poems happen.

Poetry, that is, "survives / in the valley of its making…”

Is it romantic to imagine poetry accomplishing anything in a world of happenings? Maybe so, with a big R; as A.F. Moritz says in an essay, “What Man Has Made of Man,” in Poetry magazine:

“Poetry is not at all what it’s often said to be, the indulgence, development, and expression of private inward life. This is one of those half-truths that is the worst error, even a lie. Poetry is inward self-development plus the insistence that this must have a principal place in the public forum plus a third thing, a conclusion that flows from the first two. Everyone must be allowed full personal development, and everyone must be allowed full participation, since only full participation leads to full personal development, and in turn a proper society can only be produced by full development of each member. Poetry is, above every other human endeavor, the place where person and society are not merely joined but revealed in their original unity. Poetry is the place where the strange, painful division we have created between person and society is suffered, despaired over, denounced, subjected to comparison with memories and dreams and myths of better times, and given the gift of a prophecy: that the proper unity still and always persists, and that it can become the world we actually live in, not just in verse, but on both sides of our front door.”

And Moritz traces this view back to Wordsworth, who came up with

“the famous phrase ‘what man has made of man’ … in a time of war: the French Revolutionary Wars of 1792 to 1802, which after 1800 merged into the Napoleonic Wars that lasted to 1815: twenty-three years of almost unbroken international violence. Let’s recall the history of this phrase in such a way as to underline its meaning and continuing relevance. It occurs in the poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring,’ which Wordsworth composed and published in 1798, in the aftermath of great disappointment. Wordsworth had been in France at the time of the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. At first he was an eager partisan of the Revolution. It seemed to promise that the world would suddenly be made new in the shape of justice, that people everywhere would shake off chains. ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,’ he wrote, ‘But to be young was very heaven!’ Soon, though, the Revolution descended into ruthless violence, partisan exterminations, then war by France against neighbors, and Wordsworth renounced it. But he was in despair because his hope had been destroyed, and he felt he did not know who he was or what he should try to make of himself. His beloved England had opposed the new freedom, and then the new freedom had turned into cruelty and tyranny. Was there hope of freedom anywhere in the world? Was there any way of living that did not mean joining in a worldwide status quo of injustice: being given influence if you serve oppressive regimes, being let alone if you acquiesce in them, receiving poverty if you happen to occupy a lower rung, and oppression, even death, if you resist? Could any of this be called communion? Wasn’t the whole landscape nothing but isolation, because even if you agreed and participated, you really were denying yourself, falsifying yourself? In this desolate situation, which was equal parts political and personal, Wordsworth set out to rebuild hope and a vision of possibility for a transformed society.”

In the end, Wordsworth drew inward; society transformed itself in ways he hadn’t dreamed of, and he lived out his life writing lots of dull late-period poems few enjoy much now. But the hope and vision persist, and Moritz traces them up through our own recent history by way of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Czeslaw Milosz.

The question of hope and vision remains timely. There’s explosive political and economic turmoil around the world every single day of our lives. Can poetry matter... for us?  Claude Lévi-Strauss, who lived to be 100 years old, and saw lots of the world, wrote in his classic Tristes Tropiques:

“Man is not alone in the universe, any more than the individual is alone in the group, or any one society among other societies. Even if the rainbow of human cultures should go down for ever into the abyss which we are so insanely creating, there will still remain open to us — provided we are alive and the world is in existence — a precarious arch that points toward the inaccessible. The road which it indicates to us is the one that leads directly away from our present serfdom: and even if we cannot set off along it, merely to contemplate it will procure us the only grace that we know how to deserve. The grace to call a halt, that is to say: to check the impulse which prompts Man always to block up, one after another, such fissures as may open up in the blank wall of necessity and to round off his achievement by slamming shut the doors of his own prison. This is the grace for which every society longs, irrespective of its beliefs, its political regime, its level of civilization. It stands, in every case, for leisure, and recreation, and freedom, and peace of body and mind. On this opportunity, the chance of for once detaching oneself from the implacable process, life itself depends.

Farewell to savages, then, farewell to journeying! And instead, during the brief intervals in which humanity can bear to interrupt its hive-like labours, let us grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is, beyond thought and beneath society: an essence that may be vouchsafed to us in a mineral more beautiful than any work of Man: in the scent, more subtly evolved than our books, that lingers in the heart of a lily; or in the wink of an eye, heavy with patience, serenity, and mutual forgiveness, that sometimes, through an involuntary understanding, one can exchange with a cat.”

To grasp the essence of what our species has been and still is: this is at once political, personal… and poetical.

Michael Wood writes, in his book, Yeats & Violence: "Of course many provisos and restrictions leap to mind. If a poem isn't any good, nothing will happen. Even if a poem is a masterpiece, nothing will happen if we don't allow it to. And most important of all, it is characteristic of this sort of happening that we find it very hard to say what has happened - that is why it sometimes seems as if nothing has happened."

Actually, much of our lives pass by during which nothing happens.  Auden's poem, though he was a great poet of the quotidian as well as of history, flies a bit higher than might suit most of us.  He's writing, after all, about another great poet, Yeats.  W.B. was "silly like the rest of us," Auden says - though it seems to me that Yeats was silly in his own peculiar way; at any rate, "his gift survived it all," and that's not promised to mere mortals.  The fact is that most of us who are poets risk having our work consigned to oblivion, or at least to the recycle bin.  This leaves a fair number of us saddened.

And so I'll end with Jack Spicer's "Golem," which can be read as a direct - and also witty, and down-to-earth - response to the elegy for Yeats; here's the concluding section:

He died from killing himself.
His public mask was broken
because
He no longer had a public mask.
People retrieved his poems
from wastebaskets. They had
Long hearts.
Oh, what a pain and shame was
his passing.
People returned to their
business somewhat saddened.

 

Pictured: a valley, perhaps of our saying

-- Don Share 

Don Share, Guest Blogger January 7-11

This week we welcome Don Share as our first guest blogger of 2013.  Don is Senior Editor of Poetry.  His books include Squandermania (Salt Publishing), Union (Zoo Press), Seneca in English (Penguin Classics), and most recently a new book of poems, Wishbone (Black Sparrow) and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions), a 2012 Guardian Book of the Year and Paris Review Editors’ Choice selection. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books) were awarded the Times Literary Supplement / Society of Authors Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán, and will appear this year in a revised edition from New York Review Books.  He  co-edited The Open Door: One Hundred Poems, One Hundred Years of Poetry Magazine (University of Chicago Press) with Christian Wiman. Find out more about Don Share here. Follow Don on Twitter @Don_Share

Welcome, Don.

In other news . . .

Daniel Nester reads at New York City's McNally Jackson book store as part of the Real Characters humor series:  January 9, 7:00 PM.  Details here.

Delirious Hem continues its Chick Flick series, edited by Jennifer L. Knox and with a new post every day.  What is chick flick anyway?

From Bowie to Bessie:  Catch up with Coldfront's "Song of the Week" series, with contributions from some of our great contibutors!

-- sdh

Don Share, the Antidote to SCRIPTORCONVENTUSPHOBIA by John Hennessy

There ought to be a name for it, the apprehension we feel before meeting for the first time a poet or writer whose work we’ve long known and loved—what if the wit who’s soothed our deepest anxieties or kept us up laughing all night turns out to be a joyless curmudgeon, a strident piss-ant, in person? Or what if they’re great to everyone else, but they just don’t like you? There should be a term derived from Greek or Latin for this fear: poetametus, maybe, or scriptorconventusphobia. There’s even a kind of event-planner’s shit-list of authors—an informal collection kept up by word of mouth, from reading to reading, of writers who are notorious for their shocking rudeness, bad behavior—people that you only invite to your campus, conference, library, or book store if you’re feeling brave. (You know who/what I mean.)

Earlier this week I wrote about how I learned this anxiety the hard way, by dating the daughter of my then-favorite poet. Today, though, I’d like to turn to Don Share, a poet whose work I’d known and long admired before we met, and who, in person, turned out to be true to his words: funny, generous, witty, well read, well spoken, able to engage virtually anyone in a sincere exchange.  Don Share may be the nicest guy in poetry—just ask anyone who’s met him or worked with him as an editor. He’s been around in that capacity for years, logging time as poetry editor at Partisan Review, Literary Imagination, and Harvard Review before becoming senior editor at Poetry in 2008.

Don taught me long ago that editors who write poetry can have it rough: just think of all the people—many of them first-rate poets—you’ve said no to. How excited to read your book are they going to be, and if they do, in what spirit will they read it? I suggest you read Share’s new book, Wishbone, just out from Black Sparrow, with an open mind, sense of humor near to hand. The mixed presence of the elegiac and the comic, in evidence in his new poems, may well be Share’s trademark and unifies the poems of his fine breakout book, Squandermania (2007, Salt Books).

Squandermania has three epigraphs by Isaac Singer, references to Samuel Beckett, Paul Tillich, William James, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, even Gary Becker’s Rotten Kid Theorem, and it’s eponymous poem is subtitled “Falling Asleep Over Delmore Schwarz”; as these allusions suggest, the mood here is equal parts terror and redemptive—or at least extenuating—comedy. “Meaning,” the second poem in the book, begins, “It don’t mean a thing/ if it don’t mean a thing,” and this warning note to self launches Share’s attempt to make meaning or sense—and, alternately, to challenge meaning, risk non-sense—of language, family life, and the politics of a dishonest government perpetually bringing the world to war.

Share is equally adept at the long free-verse poem, the jeremiad, the sonnet, mock-heroic couplets, puns, and epigrams. His lyric hero hasn’t followed Philip Larkin’s commandment in “This Be the Verse” (“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”): he has become a father, and now he faces the consequences. “On Court St. I am innocent/ on Highland I take the high road/ on Ames I am aimless again”—all life and all landmarks have become “alike as eternity!” The book progresses backward in time, with Share implicitly comparing his experience as a father and husband to the experience of his parents, the mode of family life in his childhood to his present family life. “Honi soit…” offers a surprising response to his father’s use of corporal punishment and complicates one of the book’s central questions: can we escape the routines and mistakes of our parents, and, better, do we even want to?

David Lehman's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

Good morning!

Very pleased to bring you today the favorite poetry covers of David Lehman, poet, occasional painter, and founding editor of the BAP series.  The image above is a picture of Larry Rivers, next to Grace Hartigan's hat, both of whom (Rivers and the owner of the hat) are also, as we have seen, primary interests of Don Share.  (For more poets on covers, see Nick Flynn & Jesse Ball's picks.)

In a more intensive way than for Don, however, David's interest in collaboration is at the heart of his interest on covers.

It's a great subject, the cover art of poetry books, especially considering the overlap in sensibility between practitioners of the literary and visual arts, and how often it happens that a painter writes poetry (and really good poetry) and a poet makes watercolors or collages.

In descending order, beginning with one out of many of Rivers's covers for Koch, here are David's choices and the larger questions they seem to raise.

3. Kenneth Koch's New Addresses (2000).

Question: Shall a cover be the canvas that sponsors a literal collaboration between image and lyric text?

"The complementary nature of Rivers's art and Koch's poetry is remarkable and worth examining in detail..... The cover of New Addresses splices reproductions of poems, adds a cameo photo of Koch, and uses splashes of color not so much to highlight a text as to show that beyond their meaning, the words function as visual signs and markers. It's exceptional, and I find it inspiring.

As one who paints when he gets the chance, I can testify to the purely visual pleasure of alphabets -- including those of foreign languages little known. Some of Franz Kline's black-on-white drawings look like Chinese calligraphy smuggled behind the occidental curtain."

2. Houseboat Days (1977) by John Ashbery. Cover R. B. Kitaj

Question:  Shall a cover serve as a second title to the work, a visual title that elaborates the linguistic title?  If so, should the poet not choose the second title just as he chose the first?

Ashbery got to pick the covers for a number of his books: "Houseboat Days," "As We Know," "Your Name Here," "Flow Chart," as well as for  his art criticism, "Reported Sightings." He has marvelous taste and many friends who are painters, and a look at such covers as I've mentioned gives you an idea of the extraordinary range of his affinities[...]

My favorite Ashbery cover is the one featuring the black-and-white painting R. B. Kitaj did for "Houseboat Days (Viking, 1977). A young woman in an old-fashioned dress holds a paddle on a boat. But the chiaroscuro effects (the sky is an uproar of clouds), the look on her face, and the strong diagonals in the picture combine to create an eerie or uncanny feeling as if someone from another decade were serenely paddling into our pond.

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1.  Hymn to Life (1974) by James Schuyler. Cover, Fairfield Porter.  Image not available

1. A Few Days (1985) by James Schuyler.  Cover, Darragh Park.

Question:  Shall a cover reveal what the poems themselves reach out towards and seek but cannot obtain?

"The covers of James Schuyler's books spring to mind... I'm torn between Darragh Park's cover for "A Few Days" (Random House, 1985) -- lush purple loosestrife on light green grass amid dark green trees -- and Fairfield Porter's almost abstract rendering of a tree for the cover of "Hymn to Life" (Random House, 1974). Both pictures are so right for this poet who turns to landscapes not simply as an aesthetic choice but as a way of dealing with the anxieties and actualities that make such pastoral tranquility so attractive and so hard to come by."

Thanks much for these haunting, impossible dreamscapes, DL.

Do the questions that David's covers suggest resonate for you?  Mary Jo Bang has different questions, as we'll see soon.  What are yours?

Round 2: Nick Flynn's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

For today, I asked poet and memoirist Nick Flynn to share his favorite covers with us.  Oh so different from Don Share's choices.  Whereas Don has chosen classic covers, strong, graphic, architectural, typographical covers that tilt their way towards the intertextual and the satiric, Nick has chosen covers that have no such sense of jovial calm.  His three seethe with color and torqued forms.  They are vexed, lush, unruly.

1. Rebecca Wolff's The King

2. D. A. Powell's Chronic.

3.  Marie Howe's Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

Nick's choices may at first appear diverse, ranging from the dark, unsettling, biological (Powell), to the neo-punk, as if Vivienne Westwood inflected (Wolff) or to the vibrant, scrawly, and childlike (Howe).  But they share a strong, baroque sense of pattern, and reveal themselves as a group to be what I would call late-Hellenic in style: ornate, ordered images about to burst into disorder.

 

Fantastic.  Thanks, Nick!

And thanks to all of you for your comments...

Don Share's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

We begin with Don Share, poet and Senior Editor of Poetry, who will start us off this week on cover design.

Having been asked for his top three ("Only three? how difficult!") Don considered a few options...

"Among my favorites are Larry Rivers's covers for Kenneth Koch's books, and particularly the one he designed for Frank O'Hara's collected poems (later used on the selected),"

He settled on "the cover of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems as my no. 1."

 

"This book never ever fails to get my heart pumping, and scholars will soon observe that the color scheme is indebted to the old Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain!"

Other options vying for first place--

"I’m also fond of the famous Grace Hartigan cover of O’Hara’s Oranges: Twelve Pastorals;... and of course Jasper Johns’ cover  for the MOMA edition of In Memory of My Feelings is incredible...!"

Pick 2:

"Next... Geof Huth’s superb cover for Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet."

"Huth is one of our very best visual poets, and his cover design not only makes you want to hold and read the book... it’s a poem by itself."

And finally.....

Finally, the cover of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me – a Nathaniel Dorsky image – is arresting and haunting.  In some ways the austere Black Sparrow cover of Robin Blaser’s edition of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer is a lot more appropriate, and I adore it as well.  Then, too, Jess’s cover for Spicer’s After Lorca cover is terrific & iconic...  and yet...

I’ll pick Graham Mackintosh and Stan Persky’s design for The Book of Magazine Verse – a delicious parody of the Rago-era Poetry magazine cover design: how could I not?

There we have it!  Top Three, complete with many spiraling alternative possibilities.  Visually diverse (save for a love of typographical play) and all the more compelling for it.

Thoughts?  Personally, I can't quit Grace Hartigan and her oranges.

Many thanks, Don:  so, so rich!