The Best American Poetry

Poetic Perfection: David Lehman's Three Favorite Poems of 2011

NPR's senior editors asked me to name three of my favorite poems of 2011 and to record some thoughts about them. I chose three poems that share a sense of mystery and the uncanny – a spooky but also exhilarating glimpse of a spiritual world beyond our own. All favor plain speech, an unadorned directness, eschewing the glamour of rhyme or traditional form. -- DL

Read the full article here. 

Hail to thee, Herr Hershon and "Hanging Loose"

The new issue of Hanging Loose in hand reminds me to protest an injustice done to the poet Jeni Olin, a hardy Hanging Loose perennial, in the December Vanity Fair.  There was much to dislike in the article on Larry Rivers, but the sentence devoted to Ms. Olin takes the cake for calculated insolence: "A young poetess, Jeni Olin, was in residence during the last five years of his life." The knowing use of poetess, which sounds like a put down even if you're not PC, combines with the weirdly impersonal "was in residence" to give the impression that Jeni Olin -- more properly described as Rivers's companion or partner -- held the amatory equivalent of an academic fellowship at the Rivers abode. It's a cheap shot, a gratuitous insult founded on ignorance and schadenfreude. .

But to happier things. Hanging Loose Press has new books by Jeni Olin (Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems), Michael Cirelli (Vacaitons on the Black Star Line), and Erika Miriam Fabri's Dialect of a Skirt, In the new issue of the magazine, editor Robert Hershon recollects his days in San Francisco's North Beach in the late 1950s. He arrived on the opening day of the Howl obsecnity trial. "The Chronicle seemed full of Beat this and Beat that. I didn't hear this as literary, just the popular press's tag for the current mode of bohemianism. Soon Herb Caen, the columnist everyone read every morning though everyone denied it, invented the much-hated word Beatnik -- 'Beat' plus Sputnik."

So many notewothy poems here. I like Philip Dacey's fluid rhyme-driven quatrains, Marc Cohen's enigmas (that "baffle me / And the miserable creatures / Who happily live inside me"), Bruce Kawn's narrative "menu," Diane Seuss's long lines full of Whitmanic self-celebration ("I wore a lip gloss // that made my mouth look like glass and rode the frisky horse of time, mane braided / with stars, down the serpentine humps of the slide"). Seuss's "It Wasn't a Dream, I Knew William Burroughs" is a knockout.

Marie Bahlke, approaching her ninetieth birthday, weighs in with a poem entitled "Nineteen Forty-Six" while the section devoted to "Writers of High School Age" includes Nikki Rhodes, of Vancouver, Washington, who "has had work in the Seneca Review and The Battered Suitcase. She has two poems here, but the one that won my heart is "Dear Mississippi." Here's how it ends: "River, it would be the most / wonderful flood; even the moon would come play / with us in the boat. Everyone / important would be there, Mississippi River. / Everyone would be there but you." -- DL

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Paul Violi

This poem by Paul Violi appears is his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

Bob Hershon (pictured here, with Elizabeth Swados, prior to their reading at KGB Bar last Monday evening, has been selecting our Sunday poems from Hanging Loose. Photo credit: Star Black

This poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel appeared first in Hanging Loose 47 in 1985 and later in her book, A Primer for Buford.

WRITING POETRY ON NEW PAPER

Rich
alluring
this sudden change seems
     sinful
too free and easy
for a Dustbowl Woman

I must walk carefully
     on good paper
     one word at a time
     feeling my way down a
                 new path
     not yet realizing

there are no inky crossouts
     no roadblocks
     of junk mail flyers
     to slow my pen

-- Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

I wish I had the time and space to tell you the whole remarkable story of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.  Luckily, there’s an excellent website that will supply her biography and let you read some of her poems.  In fact, you can hear Wilma reading some of her work in her clear, no-nonsense fashion:
digital.library.okstate.edu/mcdaniel/index.htm

In brief, Wilma was born in Oklahoma in 1918 to a poor farming family that became still poorer in the Dustbowl of the Thirties. In 1936, the McDaniels joined the army of 0Okies who headed to California, desperately seeking work. Wilma remained a farm laborer all her working life. She died at age 88, in 2007.

Her story is not very different from thousands of others except that some time in her early teens, Wilma began writing poems. She wrote about family and friends and – that rare subject in American poetry – work. All kinds of work, from picking fruit to repairing old machinery to running a tiny store, all the occupations that keep small rural towns going. At some point, her poems began appearing in church newsletters and local papers. And then, years later, somehow she connected to the poetry community and began publishing in literary magazines.

We first heard of her from a California poet named John Oliver Simon, who encouraged her to send work to us. We loved her writing right from the start and she appeared in the magazine with great regularity. We went on to publish four full collections of her work, but we weren’t alone; she published many books with small local presses. In her last years, her reputation grew steadily. Universities took note of her great talent and special history and began teaching her work. National Geographic called her a national treasure. She was named poet laureate of Tulare County.

Poetry didn’t make her rich, of course, and the frugal habits of a lifetime remained with her always. When an envelope arrived from Wilma, I’d shake out the contents. There would be, say, ten poems, all written in black ink, on the backs of religious flyers, on the insides of flattened cereal boxes, on the unused spaces of junk mail, all carefully trimmed to the size of the poem, so she could save the unused portions.

At one point, I sent her a ream of 24# white bond paper and I waited to see what she’d do with 500 sheets of virgin stock. Months went by and the poems continued to arrive on scraps of cardboard and newsprint.  Then, just when I was about to ask her whether she’d ever received the package, she sent Writing Poetry on New Paper.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Hettie Jones

This poem by Hettie Jones appears in her most recent poetry collection Doing Seventy.

Praise
                        for Marie Ponsot

All praise the midweek market,
the first-of-the-season sexy zucchinis
gazing up from their crowded
boxes

All praise the cherries, their tight
red bellies, the sweet, slender stems
and the pit, ah the pit, to be nursed
in the mouth, cajoled to give up
its last sweet hold, praise

them.  Praise all.  All praise.

Years ago, I was talking with John Gill, editor of a good small press with the maddeningly generic name of New/Books, about another small publisher and John frowned.  “Tell me how many first collections they’ve published,” he said.  Few or none was the answer.  New/Books had published my own first collection Swans Loving Bears Burning The Melting Deer a couple of years before, one of many firsts they took a chance on.

That conversation has stayed with me over the years as the first time someone had said to me in so many words that having the courage to publish new authors was a responsibility for a literary press.  Over the years, Hanging Loose has tried to have at least one first book on every list, including those by Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Sherman Alexie, Joanna Fuhrman, Michael Cirelli, Maggie Nelson, Mark Statman, Jeni Olin, and many others.

Along the way, we developed an odd little specialty: First books of poetry by older writers who had published lots of other stuff but never poetry. Jack Agűeros had written for Sesame Street and off-Broadway, done translations, and headed El Barrio Museum. Elizabeth Swados had written novels, textbooks, children’s books, operas and Broadway musicals. Hettie Jones had been a busy editor and had written many children’s books and the celebrated Beat Generation memoir How I Became Hettie Jones.  Curious coincidence: Each of these authors was 58 years old when that first collection appeared.

had known Hettie for years and was fond of her, so when she’d say to me “Some day I’ve got to send poems to Hanging Loose,” my smile may have been a bit forced, since I didn’t know Hettie wrote poems, much less poems we’d want to publish, and it’s a situation that can strain friendships. Every editor will recognize this nervous state. Luckily, we had a happy ending, which isn’t always the case. We liked Hettie’s poems -- her humor, her economy of language, her fury at injustice. Her first collection, Drive, followed soon after. It got fine reviews and won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Two other volumes have followed. Praise shows Hettie at her straightforward best, full of love for the bounty of nature, her East Village neighborhood and the very lovable Marie Ponsot.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents Poems by Charles North

These poems by Charles North – they’re short, have two – appear in his Complete Lineups (Hanging Loose Press, 2009).

CITIES

San Francisco   ss
Munich   cf
Paris   lf
Rome c
Madrid   3b
London   rf
Athens   1b
Istanbul   2b
New York   p

MOVIES

A Day at the Races   rf
The Maltese Falcon   lf
Rules of the Game   3b
Children of Paradise   cf
On the Waterfront   1b
The Lady Vanishes   ss
The Baker’s Wife   2b
Odd Man Out   c
Masculine Feminine   p

As the season (don’t ask what season: the season) is about to open, at last, as Johan Santana gets ready to win 25 games, as Jose Reyes prepares to play all 162 games (plus the post-season), as David Wright gets set for 35 homers, as Jenrry Mejia and Ike Davis step into our dreams of rookie glory – ah, let it all roll out! – as the whole team lines up for kisses on the forehead, what better time to turn our attention to Charles North’s Complete Lineups?  Answer: No better time, right now, before Oliver Perez goes on the DL again.

The lineup poems were introduced in Charles’ first book, in 1972, and new ones have appeared in magazines and books over the years.  Last year, we brought them all together in one beautiful little book, with art by Paula North, a key member of the coaching staff from the beginning.  The book has received some very nice reviews in poetry publications – and on MLB.com.

“I don’t know what the non-fan will make of Complete Lineups,” wrote William Corbett, in his introduction to the book, “but for those love baseball North’s book is bliss.  The first lineup, “Cities,” has Rome catching and batting cleanup. Yes! Catcher is the position to which all roads lead. San Francisco, the Baghdad by the Bay, leads off, surely a thief on the bases, and plays shortstop. Istanbul, batting eighth and playing second, is just right for the “exotic” position played by Hall of Famers as worlds apart as light hitting Nellie Fox and the power-hitters Joe Morgan and Ryne Sandberg.”  Bill brings the same insights as he moves along to Vegetables, British Poets, Diseases, Philosophers, Wildflowers, Herbs & Spices, and the other lineups. (To my knowledge, Charles has not addressed the subject of competition between these teams, so we don’t have any tabloid headlines like Diseases Kill Composers or Colors Fade in Extra Innings.)

Wait – what’s that?  Daniel Murphy out for maybe six weeks?  It’s starting, already?  We may need an immediate lineup of Anxieties.

Note: For an excellent discussion of Charles North’s work, see the piece by Michael Schiavo that appeared on this blog in February.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jack Anderson

This poem by Jack Anderson appeared in Hanging Loose 88 and was the title poem of his 2009 collection from HL.

GETTING LOST IN A CITY LIKE THIS

Getting lost is the first thing you find yourself doing here
You stand getting lost right in front of your front door
You wander another way and wonder of wonder
You bump into yourself getting lost there once more

You discover no street parallels anything else here
restaurants sink lost into stews of addresses
Facades circle squares and disappear lost
While strollers walk lost through rainstorms of architecture

Tram cars get lost but slither past carefree
You ask “Is this Prague?  Or Paris?  I’m lost.”
If you found your way yesterday you didn’t you’re still lost
For though you stare at the map the map stares back lost

From now on you can never abandon being lost
So wherever you find yourself you must love yourself lost

-- Jack Anderson

The hangingloosepress.com website includes a complete index to the 95 issues of the magazine we’ve published so far (#96 will be out in April, grab your checkbook!) and I frequently find myself wandering around in it, usually to check the spelling of a name or the accuracy of a title, but often just roaming aimlessly.

Hmmm, did we really publish her? Did we publish him that early? I’m always intrigued by people we published in one issue who we never heard from again. (When I find editors who like my poems, I build a hut on their front step and stay there until they burn me out.)

In contrast to those who come our way but once, there are the HL lifers, the people whose work we have printed year after year, sometimes decade after decade, whose writings are inextricably bound up with our history and the perception of who we are.  Of these, no one has had a longer HL life than Jack Anderson.

Jack had three poems in the first issue, which came rolling out of the mimeograph machine in 1966, and four poems in #93, with frequent visits along the way. He is very civilized company, a witty and sharp-eyed New Yorker and a knowledgeable world-traveler. At the same time, his work often touches on his memories of church suppers and the like in the Milwaukee of his boyhood. (Oddly, his poems almost never reflect his other long career, as a dance critic, for The New York Times and other publications.) I love this poem, Getting Lost, because it combines bad-dream menace with playful language and an ultimate sweetness. It evokes my favorite travel moment: Arrive in a new city, stick a map in your pocket and start walking, getting lost, getting found, getting lost again, until the city begins to yield its essential shape. What’s better than that!

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Sherman Alexie

This poem by Sherman Alexie appeared in Hanging Loose 56 and was reprinted in The Business of Fancydancing, his first book.

DISTANCES

I’ve watched the Children of The Third World starving on television.  I’ve heard the stand-up comic ask, “why didn’t the cameraman give that kid a fucking sandwich?” I know all the mothers of America have told their kids: “Clean up your plate.  There are people starving in India.”  When I was young, living on the reservation, eating potatoes every day of my life, my mother would tell me to “clean up your plate or your sister will get it.”

*

A woman writes to a man who used to live here.  I write back, pretending I’m the man she’s been searching her whole life for.  “Do you still love me,” she writes to ask him, and me.

*

I do not speak my native tongue.  Except that is, for the dirty words.  I can tell you what I think of you in two languages.

                                (excerpt)

“Distances” was the first poem of Sherman’s to appear in Hanging Loose, twenty years ago this spring, when he was still a student. We had the good sense to ask for more immediately and that quickly led to a request for a manuscript. The Business of Fancydancing, his first book, was published in 1992, leading The New York Times Book Review to say “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”  Not bad for a first book from a small press, eh?

We’ve published six books of Sherman’s altogether. The newest, Face, is Small Press Distribution’s best seller of the past ten years.  Of course, he’s also published an amazing number of story collections, novels and journalism, made movies, entertained countless audiences, and won many awards.  I suppose that’s the reason for a question I began hearing a while back: “I guess Sherman has changed a lot over the years, huh?” They don’t mean “I guess Sherman doesn’t live on commodity cheese anymore.” They’re longing for me to say, “Yeah, he’s become a monster of ego, impossible to please.” When I say that’s absolutely not true, the disappointment is palpable.

The other question I hear a lot, from smirking interviewers, is “Say, how did an Indian from out West ever come to publish with a press in Brooklyn?”  I’m often tempted to say he was tied to a pony and led into the fort by John Wayne, but I usually just point out that he was a college graduate and so he knew how to put stamps on an envelope.

My favorite recent question came when Sherman made his second appearance on The Colbert Report some weeks ago. Donna Brook and I accompanied him both times. We were waiting for him to show up at the studio when one of the producers walked by. “I remember you,” she said. You’re Sherman’s parents, aren’t you?” Either we’re looking more Indian or Sherman’s looking more Brooklyn or her eyes were closed.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Penelope Jane Reid

This poem by Penelope Jane Reid appeared in Hanging Loose 41 and later provided the title for Smart Like Me: High School-Age Writing from the Sixties to Now.

SMART LIKE ME

They put me right near
the maternity ward.
I know;
they want me to see
what I’ve missed in my life but
I know.

The women in there all think they’re
so lucky;
they’re not sixteen.

The women in there
have been praying for years
for what I
just threw away.

What would he have been?
Or she?
Crazy like him.
Smart like me.

-- Penelope Jane Reid

In 1968, Dick Lourie proposed to the other Hanging Loose editors (Emmett Jarrett, Ron Schreiber, me) that we start a regular section in the magazine devoted to writing by high school students.

I thought it was a terrible idea.  I don’t want to read a lot of third-rate imitations of rock lyrics and adolescent moaning about lost love, I said.  Let them publish in their school magazines.

Luckily, I lost the argument and, right from the beginning, we began to receive amazing work from young poets all over the country (along with the expected romantic laments.)  I don’t know how they found us in those pre-Internet days when the few hundred copies we printed rarely traveled west of the Hudson, but find us they did and the poems and stories have kept coming now for forty-two years.  At a rough guess, I’d say we’ve published work by over 600 high school writers.

In the late eighties, we decided to collect a lot of the pieces in an anthology.  The news didn’t thrill everybody. A major funder sniffed: “I can’t imagine why you think we’d have any interest in supporting work by high school students.”  Hmmm: We went ahead without anybody’s support and, happily, that first collection got rave reviews.  Two others have followed and a fourth, When We Were Countries, (with Mark Pawlak as lead editor), will be published this spring.

Penelope Jane Reid’s “Smart Like Me” appeared in  HL #41, in 1981, one of three we ran.  Looking back at it now, it still seems to me a marvel of concision, all the more powerful for its tight lines and lack of embellishment.  We never saw any other poems from her.  She was a student at J.M. Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky when #41 came out.  The last we heard, for the anthology’s contributor notes in 1988, she’d gotten a degree in journalism from Indiana University.

The high school section has produced a few poetry lifers – Joanna Fuhrman and Rebecca Wolff come to mind – but most of the young writers wander off to other pursuits.  Penelope Reid would be in her late forties now.  I hope she’s had a sparkling journalistic career and maybe, just maybe, the occasional itch to scribble down a terrific poem.

-- Robert Hershon

Editor's note:

Poems by high school students appearing in Hanging Loose have been selected for The Best American Poetry on several occasions. Jorie Graham chose a poem by Jendi Reiter for BAP 1990; Adrienne Rich chose two poems by Natasha Le Bel and one by Deborah Stein for the 1996 volume; Marc Jaffee's "King of Repetition" was picked by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 edition. I'm trusting my memory here, and there's a chance I'm leaving out somebody. But you get the idea: Hershon and his coeditors have a great eye for young talent. -- DL

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jeni Olin

This poem by Jeni Olin will appear in her new collection, Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems, which will be out from Hanging Loose Press this spring.

DEPAKOTE

I felt most at home on this pill in a bucolic shire
of the Hamptons amid the piss-colored braids
of wheat on a Metamucil can, milkweed & sneeze drops,
a track The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner
never checked out in the Orangeade foam of dawn.
Glistening like a brow in an aspirin ad on the telly,
I’ve got a brain like soaked coral.
I’ve got a tongue like a baby’s penis.
I’m Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense --
I’m dead but I don’t know it.
My pen, my Eskimo blood spilled cheekily
over good & dear people.  I managed to write this
by myself With a Little Help from My Friends.
When I said, “Oh get me away I’m dying,”
I meant I wanted a cigarette & a problem child
on a peony-filled evening.  In the dry heat
of photocopy fans, making Easter cards with the, uh,
terminally ill, you hold the retinal scanner to my heart.
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
as flames rose to her Roman nose &
her hearing aid began to melt. . . ”
And in the darkened underpass I gave
blood & now my French is shaky.

-- Jeni Olin

If I tell you that the titles of a sequence of poems in Jeni’s new book are Depakote, Abilify, Klonopin, Xanax, Paxil, Lamactil, Meridia, and Lithium, you will conclude that she has not always had an easy time of it.  And you would undoubtedly figure just what to expect: poems so lugubrious, so dismal, so unrelievedly saturated with gloom, that, upon turning the last page, you’d be feeling a need for some strong medication of your own.

But that’s not the case: Jeni Olin writes the most energetic poems about depression ever put to paper.  Every poem is a thrill-ride. When you turn a corner, you have no idea where you’ll end up and the images come speeding by you, from a can of Metamucil to Joan of Arc’s nose. Yet the poem never feels like a random collection of unconnected lines. It adds up. The sheer exuberance of the language and the surprising connections are the very opposite of what the title tells you to expect. You can feel a little guilty: How can this writer’s problems make me feel so good?

-- Robert Hershon