The Best American Poetry

The Greening of Bohemia [by David Yezzi]

I want to tell you about one of my favorite poems at the moment. It’s from Lord Byron’s Foot, by George Green, which was selected last year by David Mason for The New Criterion Poetry Prize and recently published by St. Augustine’s Press. As an editor at The New Criterion, I was thoroughly delighted by Mason’s choice, since I had championed George’s work on a number of occasions, both in the magazine and in The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets.

I remember showing up several years ago to a marathon reading organized by Roddy Lumsden at a bar up by Columbia University. We were asked to write a poem based, I think, on some theme—the theme, like the poem I produced, was eminently forgettable.

After a couple hours of poems sliding by like fried eggs off of memory's Teflon, George got up (he may have been the last reader, in fact) and read “Bangladesh.” So surprising and so weird was this poem, we were rapt. You could have heard the reshelving in Butler Library. And funny! So funny. The abrupt, associative segues and the logic-defying half-slapdash, haphazardness of the narrative resolves, quite mysteriously, into a unified, warmly satiric portrait of an age that we lived though in Downtown New York and loved for its Bohemian craziness and, and, now, in hindsight, for the wince-making tartness of its bittersweet excesses. He wrote the poem the night before, he told me, when I said how much I liked it.

Riotous and sweetly sad: such a killer combo. Bravo, George Green!

 

Bangladesh

 

We have to start in 1965,

when all the gay meth heads couldn’t decide

which one they most adored, Callas or Dylan,

both of them skinny as thermometers,

posing like sylphs in tight black turtlenecks.

Then, gradually, a multitude of Dylans

                                  

began to fill the park, croaking like frogs,

strumming guitars, blowing harmonicas,

hundreds and hundreds, several to a bench.

But there was only one Maria Callas,

sequestered in her gloomy Paris pad

and listening to Maria Callas records

 

(and nothing but), her bulky curtains closed,

which works for me because it worked for her.

What doesn’t work is three David Lee Roths,

one checking bags at Trash and Vaudeville, one

strutting with ratted hair up St. Mark’s Place,

and one zonked out in tights and on the nod,

 

surrounded by the Dylans in the park.

David Lee Roth times three would mean the times

would have to change, and so a roving band

of punk rockers began to beat the Dylans,

chasing them through the park and pounding them

senseless, then busting up their folk guitars

 

or stealing them. They even torture one

unlucky Dylan by the children’s pool,

holding him down to burn him with Bic lighters,

then cackling when he begs to keep his Martin.

Later on at the precinct, deeply troubled,

a sensitive policeman contemplates

 

the crimes. Why were marauding gangs of punks

beating the Dylans in the park? He asks

himself, repeatedly, not realizing

that they, the punks, were cultural police

determined to eradicate the Dylans

and purify the park of Dylanesque

 

pollutions and corruptions, rank and abject

folk rock recrudescences, and worse—

that odious and putrid piety,

the sanctimoniousness of all the Dylans,

the phony holiness that peaks for Bob

(his faddish Christianity aside)

 

during the benefit for Bangladesh,

where George insists that Yoko not perform

and John agrees ’till Yoko blows her stack,

and they start primal-screaming at each other,

John flying out of JFK and nodding,

and Eric flying into JFK

 

and nodding. Well, Ravi would go on first,

the one and only Ravi Shankar, folks.

I saw him five times, three times high on acid,

the first time straight with Richard and his mom,

Debbie, who drove us down from Podunk High

to see him at the Syria Mosque (long gone,

 

bulldozed in ’75). Debbie’s not well.

Last August she was totally Alzheimered

and, my sweet lord, she made a pass at me,

which was embarrassing. Rebuffed but proud

she sat down on the porch swing with a thump,

and, chirping like a parakeet, she swung.

 

(And in the Department of Self-Promotion Department: my book Birds of the Air is featured on Poetry Daily today! Thanks, PD!)

 

Tomorrow: I attend the dress rehearsal of my daughter’s grade-school production of Romeo & Juliet and come away impressed not only by the performances, which were super, but also by the playwright who clearly has what it takes!

"How to Write a Love Poem"- Part 1 [by Stephanie Paterik]

Arguably the biggest occupational hazard of the poet is that sooner or later, your lover will request a love poem.

If you are either very cocky or very skilled, you might whip out a fountain pen and write a fitting ode upon a cocktail napkin.

But if you possess the slightest doubt about your abilities, or about the notion of "love poems" in general, you might quiver in your oxfords.  

Most writers I know agree the love poem is the hardest to write. Breakup poems? Child's work. Meditations on death? No problem. Pastoral portraits and comic scenarios? They can be rendered with fair effort. But the love poem risks sentimentality, vulnerability, cliché -- and worst of all, the probability of falling short in its attempt to capture the enormity of the emotion.

For all of these reasons, love poems impress and intimidate the heck out of me. So on the eve of March, an hour before kissing February good-bye, I find myself researching the history of love poems, revisiting modern favorites and distilling some lessons from them all.

Lesson No. 1: Follow Clichés to their Roots

When I think of love poems, the verse that pops into my head is "roses are red / violets are blue." It's inevitable, and it makes me equate all love-y verse with shallow greeting cards. Who wants any part of that? 

But as is the case with so many clichés, this flower stems from an interesting seed. 

Edmund Spenser (pictured at the top) immortalized the image of red roses and blue violets in 1590 with his epic poem, The Faerie Queene:

 

It was upon a Sommers shynie day,

When Titan faire his beames did display,

In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew,

She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowers, that in the forrest grew.

In the following stanzas, Chrysogone falls asleep in the grass and is impregnated by sunbeams, leading to the birth of faerie twins. The goddesses Venus and Diana steal the newborns. Not exactly the stuff of greeting cards!

Spenser was more concerned with supporting Queen Elizabeth I and the Reformation than writing a transcendent love poem. But the sensuality in his verse is far more inspiring than the versions that arrived centuries later.

He's also known for "Amoretti," a sonnet cycle exploring his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. She's rendered as his practical if not unromantic counterpoint, which gives the poems a tantalizing tension. In the sonnet "One Day I Wrote her Name," Spenser writes: 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

 But came the waves and washed it away:

 Again I wrote it with a second hand,

 But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

 "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

 A mortal thing so to immortalize;

 For I myself shall like to this decay,

 And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

(If you're interested in Spenser, you'll enjoy this thorough biography over at the Poetry Foundation.)

So how did Spenser's roses and violets make their way to us? Two hundred years after he penned the lines, they appeared in a collection of English nursery rhymes called Gammer Gurton's Garland:

 

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet, and so are you.

Thou are my love and I am thine;

I drew thee to my Valentine:

The lot was cast and then I drew,

And Fortune said it shou'd be you. 

 

And a hundred years after that, in 1862, the image swam the English channel to appear in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, in which Fantine sings "violets are blue, roses are red / violets are blue, I love my loves." It sounds lovely in French, which gives us the pleasurable slant rhyme: 

 

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,

Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.

So our Valentine cliché has an alluring literary tradition, and simply knowing that helps me embrace the love poem a little more. Next Thursday, I'll share some favorite love poems and lessons from current writers. 

Until then, xo February.

***

Prompt: Find a love poem you admire, be it classic or modern, and determine what makes it successful. Next week - some prompts to help write one.

Images: "Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen" by Henry Fuseli (middle) and 1901 edition of Mother Goose (bottom).

Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre by J. Chester Johnson now live at the Green Mountains Review

From the Editors of Green Mountains Review -- Over the next ten days, Green Mountains Review Online will present in four installments J. Chester Johnson’s groundbreaking essay “Evanescence: The Elaine Race Massacre,” which probes deeply into one of America’s deadliest and least discussed race massacres – an event that also directly led to a more progressive U. S. Supreme Court judgment toward equal protection and thus helped usher in the civil rights movement. Driving Johnson’s exhaustive research is a personal connection to the massacre and its mysterious circumstances that brings to the fore those powerful emotional questions that lie always beyond the larger historical ones.

Olive Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice who opened the door to freedom for wrongfully convicted sharecroppers

Scipio Africanus Jones, American Lawyer who became a "20th Century Moses."

Preface

Across the sweeping canvas of American history, two markers–inherited and ineluctable–from the Elaine Race Massacre of 1919 in Phillips County, Arkansas of the Mississippi River Delta invite a degree of attention to the episode yet to be received from public consciousness. First, the sheer number of persons who died in the massacre–-more particularly, the countless African-Americans who perished-–would certainly cause this massacre to be judged one of the most deadly racial conflicts–-perhaps, the most deadly racial conflagration-–in the history of the nation. Second, the wellspring of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s drew constantly from the 1923 U. S. Supreme Court’s decision in Moore v. Dempsey that emerged out of the legal proceedings in Phillips County against African-American defendants, charged with the murders of whites allegedly committed during the massacre. The ruling in Moore v. Dempsey broke a long chain of Supreme Court decisions brutally adverse to the safety and rights of African-Americans.

Two heroes whose individual backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar share in this American saga. Most apparent, Scipio Africanus Jones, African-American lawyer, who started as a laborer in the Arkansas fields to become a 20th century Moses, climbed, through brilliance and tenacity, to forensic heights to free the black sharecroppers, unjustly found guilty of crimes in the aftermath of the massacre, and, at the same time, developed the legal strategy that, ultimately, through the intervention of the U. S. Supreme Court, altered the application of the 14th Amendment to the U. S. Constitution to protect the individual rights of and due process for American citizens. The other hero, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Boston patrician and distinguished jurist, who wrote the majority opinion for Moore v. Dempsey, not only opened the door to freedom for wrongfully convicted Arkansas sharecroppers, but also articulated a new judicial precedent and principle under which the federal government would more forcefully thereafter engage in the constitutional protection of its citizens.

Continue reading at Green Mountains Review Online.

Delhi Promenade of Pop Poets [by Catherine Woodard]

Walking Delhi with Himanshu Verma, an emerging arts curator, follows a trail where poets share top billing with rulers and religious leaders. Poets get prominent positions in India’s history – literally – with their shrines and tombs near those of emperors and saints across Delhi. 

The place to be buried in Delhi from the 14th to 19th C was Nizamuddin, a village named after the exalted Sufi saint Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya. Not far away is a vast World Heritage site, the tomb of Humayun, the second of six powerful Muslim Mughals who controlled Northern India from 1527-1707. Eternity in the vicinity was a mark of status for nobles and warriors too. But who is buried closest to the white marble mausoleum of Nizamuddin who died in 1325, none other than his disciple and eminent Muslim poet Amir Khusrau, who died just six months later.

If all you know about Hindu-Muslim relations in India is the wrenching partition in 1947 and subsequent political assassinations, the relationship between this saint and poet and the broader culture is a good place to get perspective on why India is simultaneously the Hindu capital of the world and the second largest Muslim nation.

Most, not all, of the Islamic Mughals were tolerant of people of other faiths, including the indigenous Hindus. Khusrau was a cultural cross-pollinator, writing poetry primarily in Persian but also in Hindi. He drew on both languages for the first known printed dictionary. His poems take several forms, but Khusrau may be best known for expanding the development of ghazal. Khusrau mined ghazal for lyrics with his fusion of Persian and Indian musical traditions to create the Sufi devotional music, qawwali. Hindu and Muslim pilgrims, not to mention music lovers, still crowd the courtyard between the tombs of saint and poet for Friday afternoon qawwali.

The path to the tombs twists through narrow alleys and bazaars, a bustling Muslim marketplace since the Middle Ages. One route goes past a still-preserved sandstone step well built by Nizamuddin to provide water and a scenic meeting place in the neighborhood. 

Then picture eight or nine singers and musicians, called a party, performing powerful poetic lyrics of love and longing. The intoxication with the beloved is understood to be the divine, but oh how well the metaphors work for the mere human as in a Khusrau excerpt below:

O sweetheart, why do you not take me to your bosom?
Long like curls in the night of separation,
Short like life on the day of our union.

Flash forward to Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), a master of ghazal, who was alive during the unsuccessful Indian rebellion against the British in 1857. Traditionally ghazal is a short poem of divine anguished love, in couplets all using the same rhyme, with the poet’s name in the last stanza. Ghalib expanded the focus to philosophy and the troubles and mysteries of life. For example, he compared his unhappy arranged marriage to a second imprisonment following the confinement of life itself.

Reading samples of Ghalib’s poetry at his tomb in Nizamuddin and his house in another old Delhi neighborhood invited comparisons to American contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His subject matter is as broad as Whitman, but his spot-on death metaphors more powerfully conjure up Dickinson.

In between chronologically is Rahim, Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khana (1556 – 1627). A Muslim who wrote Hindi couplets, Rahim was a powerful minister in the Mughal court of Akbar. The Hindu god Lord Krishna is often featured in his poetry. The marble and sandstone on his tomb in Nizamuddin were stripped off and recycled for an 18^th C tomb elsewhere. The base remains intact as does respect for the wisdom of his couplets:

The tree does not eat its own fruit, the lake does not drink its water.
For the welfare of others, the good one accumulates wealth, so says Rahim.

Here’s my video of Verma reading Rahim. Verma runs several multidisciplinary arts initiatives, including Red Earth and 1100 Walks. (Don’t miss his food-centric street tour of Old Delhi if you’re in town.) Verma is himself a devotee of Krishna.

 

The thread of poet prominence continues in India’s modern political history. Nobel Laureate Tagore Rabindranath died in 1941 before independence but was an influential intellectual friend of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India. Tagore first called Gandhi a Mahatma, or great soul, and the name stuck. In 1913, Tagore became the first non-European to win a Nobel prize, for a collection of poems Gitanjali in Bengali and English.

Words of the poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, songwriter, artist and educator pop up all over India. He even gets the last word at the Taj Mahal where a Tagore quote fills a huge wall near the exit and describes the marble marvel as a “tear drop… on the cheek of time for ever and ever… a garland that would blend formless death with deathless form.”

The experimental school Tagore founded educated Indian leaders in a variety of disciplines including Amartya Sen, a Nobel Laureate economist, and Indira Gandhi, Nehru’s daughter and the prime minister for 15 years. (She was lucky enough to get the surname Gandhi from her Parsi husband.) Gandhi kept a framed picture of Tagore with an English excerpt from Gitanjaliin her home study; words in a prominent vitrine in her museum that lead a mind without fear to “where the clear stream of reason/ has not lost its way.”

The Stamp of Impulse: Ashbery and Koch in Worcester, MA, 2001

L to R: Kenneth Koch, David Lehman, John Ashbery.  Photo by Stacey Harwood

On May 6, 2001, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery and David Lehman appeared at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass to celebrate The Stamp of Impulse: Abstract Expressionist Prints, the first exhibit to show the influence of Abstract Expressionism on printmaking. The exhibit was spectacular, with works on display by 100 pioneering Abstract Expressionist printmakers including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Nell Blaine, Louise Nevelson, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, Cy Twombly, and Joan Mitchell. Ashbery, Koch, and Lehman read their work and reminisced about a time in America when artists, writers and musicians were experimenting with creative forms.

Find out more about the exhibit here.

-- sdh

How to Read [by Heather Christle]

One morning early in my life I decided it was high time I read a book. My parents had been pointing out letters to me for a while, and I loved noticing “H”s when we drove past billboards, or stood in line at the supermarket near the magazines. They had helped me begin making the link between letters and their sounds, and I was tired of being surrounded by words I could not decipher on my own. From a shelf in the living room I selected Owl and Sleepy Dragon, carried it to the kitchen table, and went to work.

Reading the word “owl” wasn’t too hard, but I thought “dragon” might kill me. Holy crap. How, I thought, did everyone manage to suffer like this, through the constant, slow, agonizing accumulation of sound into meaning? I kept slogging on, but I was not looking forward to the rest of my life. Then I hit the word “dragon” for a second time. I began my time-consuming decoding until it hit me, somewhere around the third letter, that I knew this word. This word was already mine; I recognized it as I would recognize any recently acquired toy, with relish.

Until that moment it had not occurred to me that words could reappear with the same letters in the same order. What an excellent idea! And my long journey into literacy worked for years by repeating that same trick, acquiring and then maintaining recognition of an entire word.

To borrow from the neurolinguist Stanslas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, I was moving from the phonological route (sounding out letters) into the lexical (apprehending entire words). For a long time it became difficult for me to not read a word, to actually see its constituent parts. It was poetry, of course, that returned my letters to me. 

There are many, many poetry books that resist easy access to simply lexical reading (think of what music Harryette Mullen makes of meaning in Sleeping with the Dictionary’s “Kirstenography”), but I want to focus here on what happens when you try to read Franck Andre Jamme’s New Exercises, translated from the French by Charles Borkhuis.

Before I send you over the the Wave Books site to see a poem for yourself, I should tell you a couple of things from the book's introduction, first that "Tablets like these used to be found on small gold leaves in ancient Roman graves. These leaves were typically folded inside the closed hands or mouths of the dead. They could be read as maxims, wishes, recommendations, or favorite sentences." And secondly, that Jamme says he wanted "to distract myself for once with letters and words, and to abandon, for a time, the customary, linear way of reading. To obscure it in order to suddenly render attention necessary; not only attention, but even a kind of effort." Got that? Okay, click here to read the first poem.

How was that? How do you feel? Did the words elude you? Did you need to move through them slowly? How did you know when a new word began? Did you predict that a word would continue one way when in fact it went another? Did the "DI" of "DISOBEY" momentarily suggest the ability might be to "DIE"? (I am really asking you, I think, whether you feel at all as I do.)

Here is a more important question: Did you begin to read aloud? It took me ages to realize that might help me understand these poems. Try it with this one. (I'm very bossy, I know.)

What happened? Did you find "THEE" bridging the imaginary space between "THE" and "ENIGMA"? Did you see the COMET? Did you speak the sounds of these letters and sound yourself as though you were only now learning to read?

Both the necessity of reading out loud and the leaving out of spaces between words feel novel to me, reading this book, but they are, of course, very old. Reading silently and making spaces are more recent inventions, as St. Augustine and W. S. Graham well know: 

[...] The inadequacy

Of the living, animal language drives

Us all to metaphor and an attempt

To organize the spaces we think

We have made occur between the words.

In a way, then, the spaces between Jamme's words have not been left out. They have just not been made to occur. I wouldn't have it any other way, not when after all of these years of having always to be a citizen of the nation of readers, these poems give me a glimpse at a tunnel into another country.

 

PS Hello, it's nice to meet you. My name is Heather Christle and I will be typing here this week.

 

Chuck Hagel and the Hegelian Dialectic [by David Lehman]

The controversy surrounding Chuck Hagel's proposed appointment as US Secretary of Defense has not been well understood. The Vietnam veteran and former Nebraska senator is a Republican, and yet the Republican establishment has raised doubts about his fitness to serve as chief of the nation's military industrial monopoly. Why? Is it because, initially in favor of the Iraq war in 2003, he realized belatedly that he had been duped and he turned dovish? It is true that his judgment has been questioned; he opposed the "surge" that seems to have been the most successful US military maneuver in the sourly disappointing years following "shock and awe," a phrase that you don't hear much anymore. In other quarters Hagel has caused concern because of his alleged softness on Iran and on violent Islamist outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah. All this has been duly reported in the newspapers (or the crude electronic successors of that twentieth-century instrument of information control). But what the pundits and the pols have omitted, perhaps disingenuously, is the secret reason for the opposition to the senate's ratification of Obama's choice to head the defense department.

What has been completely overlooked is the relation between Chuck Hagel's philosophy and that of his distinguished ancestor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists in nineteenth-century Germany. In brief, Senator Hagel may be said to subscribe with such zeal to the Hegelian dialectic that the usual Washington big mouths have had to take crash courses in the work of that famously forbidding philosopher of history. Hagel's link to Hegel is such that the Magritte painting "Hegel's Vacation," in which a glass of water stand precariously atop an open umbrella, would apply to either of them. Sources close to the candidate are leaking the rumor that he plans to be sworn in with his hand on The Phenomonology of Spirit rather than the traditional Bible.

A leader of the opposition spoke to me on condition of anonymity. "The simple truth is that a vote for Chuck Hagel is an endorsement of Hegelianism, and that particular ism -- though less scary than the isms of Marx, Lenin, and the Commune -- arouses suspicion if only by association. Everyone knows that Hegel said history repeats itself and Marx revised Hegel to say that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. This line is quoted so frequently, and almost always as an admonition, that suspicion attaches to Hegel for being hoodwinked by either Marx or by History."  More particularly, Hegel's belief that “Truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two” arouses worry among hard-liners because it acknowledges compromise as inevitable. Hegel also has the habit of speaking in different languages, which may simply be one way of disguising his penchant for repeating himself. "Nada de grandioso se faz no mundo sem paixão." "Rien de grand dans le monde ne s'est accomplis sans passion."

Hegel has been attacked for his oracular pronouncements on history. For example, "We learn from history that we do not learn from history,” or the same sentiment re-stated,  “What experience and history teaches us is that people and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.” On the other hand, Hagel could acquit himself by stating unequivocally that the study of history and civics should be mandatory in a democracy.

It could be argued that Hagel's nomination is itself an illustration of the Hegelian dialectic. It is the thesis to which the senate's opposition is the antithesis. And if Hegel taught us anything, it is that mind or spirit realizes itself in the temporary truces in the perpetual conflicts between, say, nature and freedom. Partisans of Hegel point to his ringing endorsement of freedom on the one hand and the sublime on the other at a commencement speech given a few years ago at the US Military Academy. “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained," he told the cadets at West Point. "The individual who has not staked his or her life may, no doubt, be recognized as a Person; but he or she has not attained the truth of this recognition as an independent self-consciousness.”

My own sense of Hegel is complicated by the fact that every time I think I understand him, I realize that I don't understand him. This, too, the great philosopher anticipated. “Only one man ever understood me, and he didn't understand me,” he liked to say, and somehow it didn't sound like a German smart-ass showing off in an Oxford pub. He was a great bullshit artist in an age that prized that activity. Although the era of the World Historical Individual is gone, Hegel's analysis was subtler than people realize. He liked pointing out that world-conquerors were seldom happy. When they succeeded there was nothing left for them to do -- they were "like empty hulls from the kernel." Hegel shrugged. "Alexander died young, Caesar was murdered, and Napoleon was exiled to St. Helena." It was always amusing to see Hegel shrug.

I suggest that the question be put directly to Senator Hagel, who has never been a shilly-shallying sort. Do you believe that "history in general is the development of Spirit in Time, as Nature is the development of the Idea in Space”? And what, sir, did you mean when you said that “America is the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself”? -- DL

What do they have in common? Jews!

Watch Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy Preview on PBS. See more from Great Performances.

Curtain Up on Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy Tuesday, January 1, 2013 at 9:30 p.m. on PBS from THIRTEEN’s Great Performances.

Check your local listing and catch David Lehman's star turn in this amazing documentary. 

“In any great adventure, if you don’t want to lose…you won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews.” Eric Idle

-- sdh

I Be Monsters [by Tomás Q. Morin]

When I was an undergraduate with limitless energy and cranking out poems left and right for my workshop classes, all I wrote about was my family. There were poems about everything from my grandfather’s hands to the years he spent working in a field. Even the paisley print of one of my grandmother’s shirts made it into a poem. As did my brother, mother and father, even a certain rude classmate whose name or face I can no longer remember made an appearance as a giant rat.

Some of these poems, in spite of how poorly made they were, brought my mother to tears when she read them because there we were, our family, our struggles, on a piece of paper. It was a record, albeit a weak one, that we had lived and suffered and were still here.

Take all the records the government could use to prove someone’s existence (deeds, bills, social security card, pay stubs, etc.) and they would say little more than my family had lived on a certain street and used X number of watts of electricity to power our washer and microwave and the TV that once the day’s robberies and Reagan’s pearls of ignorance had been reported by news anchors and Johnny Carson had bid us goodnight, began broadcasting pure static snow all through the night until the morning brought the national anthem and our beautiful, waving flag. None of this ever made it into my poems back then because I was, in my ignorance, mining what I knew and being a third-rate Confessional.

Later, when I was a graduate student and I had run out of things to write about in my life, I tried slipping into the lives of others and liked it, so much so in fact, I never tried to put myself in a poem again, aside from the minor personal detail I might secretly slip in like my tendency to mumble or my awful memory, details no one would ever know unless I pointed them out. What’s more, I tried to hide these details in scenes that might be filled with Johnny Carson and images of patriotism sitting snugly beside a microwave dinner.

I was, to put it simply, trying to obliterate myself in my poetry so that I could make up stories about people and places and things that were far more interesting than I was, stories that might help a reader meet someone new or travel somewhere different. In Lord Jim, Conrad writes, “My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Conrad had it easy, as do most writers of fiction, in that if a reader could be made “to see” something, she would most likely not think the character who spoke about writing and seeing was Conrad himself, just as no one I know has ever mistaken Huckleberry Finn for Twain or Gatsby for Fitzgerald.

And yet, it is our burden as poets is it not, to be confused for our speakers, even if they be of a different age or gender or species, all of which was the subject of conversation while my family and I passed turkey and dressing and peach wine during Thanksgiving. Try as I might, I could not convince them that the book I had written and whose poems they had carefully read—a thousand blessings on their heads for that—was not written by a 200 year old half man/half bear who had moonlighted as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Soviet scientist, a preacher, and countless other things.

Having to choose between thinking that I could spin a really good yarn or that I was a centuries-old hybrid creature living among them, they happily picked the latter, a choice which delights me to no end because it is just one more of a thousand masks I am happy to accept and wear and for which I will always gladly give thanks. 

What I'm Reading Now: An Excerpt (by Stacey Harwood)

When I was about eleven, my job was to grade the eggs with my step-mother when I came home from school.  We worked in the basement, grading each egg separately on a small hand scale, brushing the dirty ones by hand with a sandpaper brush.  Hilda sat on a low box in front of an upturned crate which held the scale.  We both pushed a case of graded eggs away; periodically my father would appear and stack the crates one on top of another, labeling them with his co-op number so that they could be identified and he would get paid.  From sitting thus for years, bent over the hand egg scale, my stepmother's shoulders got so round that she appeared to have a hump.  One of the last modern machines to come onto our farm was an automatic egg-grader.  It was then possible to stand and put dozens of eggs on the scale at the same time. But it was too late for Hilda's back to straighten out. 

. . .

All the farm women and girls I knew packed eggs and did other chores on the farm.  Some of the women worked right alongside their husbands, cleaning out chicken coops, preparing the outdoor ranges for the chickens, doing the same heavy manual work as the men.  These were the women who peopled my world.  I looked at them, at their work-worn hands and faces, their rough clothing, indistinguishable from the men's and I resolved never to live on a farm or have anything to do with a farm when I grew up.

-- from The Land Was Theirs:  Jewish Farmers in the Garden State by Gertrude Wishnick Dubrovsky (University of Alabama Press, 1992)