The Best American Poetry

On Robert Frost, "Bereft" (by Jenny Factor)

Forgive me, those of you in "weather". Under weather. Riding out weather.

Here is a poem much on my mind. It has traveled beside me for over a week...leashed (or perhaps, unleashed and dislodged from memory) by the Sandy of my west coast imagination, and now, today, stirred up again with the east coast storm warnings all over the news, in this funny well-publicized country of news cycles and imaginings.

There is probably a small image of this poem inside every cell in my body. I memorized it at 12 years old. Sixteen lines. Fewer end-rhyme sounds than one's average sonnet. (There are four in here...though some would say six, since two are debate-worthy, are slant.) All the lines are in falling meters: trochees, dactyls.

As for the sounds: so many W's. A beautiful haunting wind-like mouthful of lament.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

                            Robert Frost

I love how the "or" rhyme (door, floor, before) goes on for the first five lines...the tension the reader feels as one's ears anticipatorily try to abandon the sound at the normal stanza intervals for a couplet or a quatrain, but no, our author keeps going...three times, four times, five! Incredible. 

I love "past", "massed", "hissed", "missed", with yet a sixth "or" rhyme thrown in between the pair of couplets, the jangly couplets that don't quite belong to one another, but nevertheless sound and feel fresh, as they try to create a little stir of exterior argument to the poem's primal rhetorical blow. 

And then "tone", "known", "alone", "alone" comes...chiming hollow-voiced like a church bell, the "alone" repeated, so primal, so lost. 

"Word"..."Word" the final two lines begin, as if the wind itself were infused with broken messages, as if language itself speaks of its own inability to redeem the sorrow of the poet, or me. This anaphora glues together a couplet whose ends don't even rhyme: "alone" and "God". Instead, "God" is part of an off-rhyme with "abroad". Our closure (on "God") is no closure...no click of end-sound against end-sound, but we know we've landed as close to closure as we are going to get. 

A helpful anonymous person on Yahoo! Answers points me toward Jay Parini's really excellent Frost biography, Robert Frost: A Life (a book I read about two years ago, and would recommend) and tells me that this poem was written in 1893, which would put it concurrent with Frost's early work, three years after his first published poem and while he was still dancing into and out of college. This surprises me, enjoying it as I do in the volume in which it was published, West-Running Brook, in 1928. Itched by the fact, I take my early edition of West-Running Brook down from the shelf to look, and in fact, the poem bears a note on the Title page ("Bereft. As of about 1893"), a note I never noticed before. 

Where have I heard this wind before? 

I can't tell you that. But I think it was born inside me. And storms--not my own--but yours, you of the East Coast--have called it up!

Sometimes I have an odd kind of guilt for experiencing my own feelings of so-called empathy. My son's foray into philosophy opened our household up to ideas such as "speaking for others"--an unmitigatedly bad thing once one has thought about it. One must try to keep track of what one doesn't know (mustn't one?).

So forgive me for reciting "Bereft" for you. It is myself that I indict, isn't it? after all.

Four Halloween Poems from "Why Am I Grown So Cold" by Myra Cohn Livingston (posted by Jenny Factor)

            HOUSE FEAR

Always--I tell you this they learned--

Always at night when they returned

To the lonely house from far away

To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,

They learned to rattle the lock and key

To give whatever might chance to be

Warning and time to be off in flight:

And preferring the out- to the in-door night,

They learned to leave the house-door wide

Until they had lit the lamp inside. 

                        --Robert Frost (1874-1963)

 

   I called to the wind,

"Who's there?"........Whoever it was

    still knocks at my gate.

                --Kyorai, trans by Harry Behn  (1651-1704)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a grey thing that lives in the tree-tops

None know the horror of its sight

Save those who meet death in the wilderness

But one is enabled to see

To see branches move at its passing

To hear at times the wail of black laughter

And to come often upon mystic places

Places where the thing has just been.

                                                          --Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

 

THE WARNING

Just now,

Out of the strange

Still dusk...as strange, as still...

A white moth flew: why am I grown

So cold?

            --Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) (her form is the 'cinquain')

In my childhood in Beverly Hills California, where our storms tended toward fire and quake, Los Angeles poet Myra Cohn Livingston served as Artist in our schools. Her first lesson was to use our real eyes, rather than to "buy in" to other people's metaphors and similes. She liked to remind us that "snow" wasn't "winter" in Southern California.  I knew that if I "saw" the leaves turning something other than crinkly-and-brown, I should get my eyes checked. 

On the other hand, she would bring in brilliant objects and ask us to come up with lists...what are they? what are they to us metaphorically? We would take metaphor-hunting walks. We would find the telephone in the seashell, the moon "as the north wind's cookie." (That last is Vachel Lindsay, in case you were wondering.)

And she would read us poems, across time, across space, from a stream she knew where poetry was always happening inside itself. A famous children's poet, she didn't believe in talking down to children. Her anthologies still sit on my shelves, and are of interest to my 43 year old self. 

Her anthologies for children (among her more than 90 books), always included international work, spanning six centuries or more. Here for Halloween are some selections from Why Am I Grown So Cold: Poems of the Unknowable (A Margaret K. McElderry Book, Athenaeum, 1982).

 

"Be Ashamed to Die Until You..."* (by Jenny Factor)

Stanley Kunitz once implored all of us to become the person who writes the poem. 

Every day, I am humbled and delighted by the community of writers, students and faculty, with whom I work at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program.  My colleagues and students take risks on the page, write hard, read seriously, live lives of meaning, and are wickedly talented. But what wows me again and again is this community's vulnerability, expansiveness, and humility. This puts very big, wide margins around the possibilities for words. Margins so big that everyone has room to risk and learn. And dream.

When I was a young poet returning to Los Angeles, recently divorced, newly "out", child in tow, with a satisfying dot-com editorial job, low-wage but creative, and without many local literary connections, Eloise Klein Healy came into my life as a gentle can-do dynamo. I'd meet her at readings, and through mutual friends; and eventually, we began a conversation about poetry. I became aware that she had created and was directing the Low-Residency MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, the first low-residency program on the West Coast. 

Fast forward seven-tenths of a decade to 2006. Around the time I began teaching at Antioch University Los Angeles, I asked Eloise about our program's special focus on literature and the pursuit of social justice.

On Not Knowing with Ron and Sandra (by Jenny Factor)

I know you're probably not local to Los Angeles, but I wish you could come out to hear two of my literary heroes, Sandra M. Gilbert and Ron Carlson read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena this weekend. 

Founded in 1894, Vroman's is Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookseller (two of Vroman's early employees are restacking books in the photo, above). 

Here are a few words from Ron Carlson on bewilderment and humility and listening in the act of writing:

"Beginning a story without knowing all the terrain is not a comfortable feeling. It is uncomfortable enough in fact to keep most people away from the keyboard...But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that feeling: you stay alert to everthing that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there. 

"The single largest advantage a veteran writer has over the beginner is this tolerance for not knowing. It's not style, skill, or any other dexterity. An experienced writer has been in those woods before and is willing to be lost; she knows that being lost is necessary for the discoveries to come."

from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press), page 15

Sandra Gilbert is one of my favorite living writers. She speaks of life as a woman, a daughter, a mother, a thinking person. "You write because you dream a different self into being when you write," Sandra M. Gilbert says in her essay, "Why Do We Write", On Burning Ground: 30 Years of Thinking about Poetry (University of Michigan Press). "You write because you meet a new you in writing, a you you didn't know you had."

Ron Carlson and Sandra Gilbert will be reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California on Sunday, April 15, 4p.m. 

 

God's Optimism in April (by Jenny Factor)

At the AWP conference in Chicago, I attended a panel--the first panel of the first morning--on contemporary Jewish poetry. There was a lot of genius at that table, and an adorable baby in the audience about whom the moderator said, "Don't be angry at that baby. We like that baby." A very happy little panel. Of all the things in that room I found to like, I left there utterly taken with the work of young Hasidic poet, Yehoshua November. 

Here is the poem he read that morning, from his first book, God's Optimism (Main Street Rag, 2010). 

Baal Teshuvas at the Mikvah

Sometimes you see them

in the dressing area

of the ritual bath,

young bearded men unbuttoning

their white shirts,

slipping out of their black trousers,

until, standing entirely naked,

they are betrayed by the tattoos

of their past life:

a ring of fire climbing up a leg,

an eagle whose feathery wing span

spreads the width of the chest,

or worse, the scripted name of a woman

other than one's wife.

 

On Reading Part II: Reader's Block (by Jenny Factor)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my writing friends asked me a week ago whether I'd ever heard of a problem where writing is going fine, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it completely hurts to read. Hurts to read? I asked him. You mean like back pain?

"Sort of! My eyes just won't go there. I open books. I can't focus on them."

We were catching up over chicken sandwiches, followed by a tart with sliced pears and caramel sauce. Yum. But honestly, this is a hard time for my friend. His parents are unwell. In a short 8 months, he’s changed jobs and ended a marriage, and just lately, he’s moved onto some of his own medical tests. 

He was surprised. But I wasn’t. At least, not very. I’ve known a number of colleagues, students, and members of my very own book-addicted family who have gone through a period of time where reading, once an outlet and a pleasure, felt almost palpably painful. The introspection. The quiet in one’s own head. Quiet that has to stay quiet enough to open to a writer’s voice, to another human’s point of view. Sustained focus. And all of this striking a self who no longer feels like the same, stable self.

I call it "reader's block" and it can feel just as insidious as the writer's version.

I do have a few strategies for dealing with it, though....

1. Try to read a single poem like a meditation every day.

Maybe twice per day. Give up on whole books and turn to the kinesthesia of repetition. Find and notice every piece of punctuation. Basically, run your mind mouth over the words multiple times and try to emblazon them into you.

I found this exercise during a time when I was going to shul regularly. During the month of Elul (usually sometime in September), there is a tradition of reading the same psalm every day. I have now done this three times--three whole months, exploring the words of this single poem. I'm amazed by how the poem begins to open--familiar, calming, and yet somehow also always fresh.

On Reading, Part I: Reading for Writers (by Jenny Factor)

I have this Magellan-esq idea about reading that I want to explore today...

In my experience, reading (for a writer) is something like an opera singer's scales, a kind of preparation of the whole body for the writing work that comes after (months after, years after, moments after). It's the best place I know to get my conscious-editor mind and my writer-mind to meet on some common ground. It's like going on a journey with a boat full of Me.

The Me's in the boat are--sensory me, who reads; writing me, who loves to swing words around but can't look through the side or rear view mirrors, and editor me, who likes to figure out how all the contraptions are built. Really, it's the book itself that is our territory. The moments the book does something inside me--hits me in the solar plexus, makes the top of my head tingle, gives me a new kind of vibration in my hands or feet, makes my inner eye create pictures, gives me a heavy, settled-in feeling, jingles in my ear--that are the scenic lookouts, the encounters with wildlife, the hairpin turn, the trees. 

I love how the cartographer's or bird watcher's spirit animates that idea-- the idea of reading for completeness, for discovery, to give the body and mind a full-immersion experience with language, and its co-vessel, craft. We settle into the text with our unified selves, like fly-fishers, or Columbuses, or canoers up the Amazon......

What I’m saying is this: every book is a territory, a geography, unmapped by our own mind until we’ve read it, until we’ve been there. A full penetration into the jungle of otherness, over the leafy floor on the swinging vines of words. Liking the book isn't important. The aim is completeness. The aim is a cartography. The aim is nothing more or less than the complete exploration of the effect on ourselves of everything that can possibly be said.  

Reading hits the mind in any number of places:

the literal,

the visual,

the visceral.

And more. It hits the mind, and it often hits it so well, and so subtly, that it's hard to figure out where the book struck.

The goal for the writer is not just the reader’s joy, the reader’s transport, but also the doctor’s clinical observation and analysis of this joy and transport. To take books apart and figure out how they work on the reader. 

Writing is a stunning business. We put down a charged line of letters, a form of communication, richer and more textured than actual depicting speech. If we're lucky (especially in the tiny enacting contraption that is a poem), every word vibrates like an excited electron and has the ability to send off sparks. We will never really know how our words are detonating in the mind of the Big Other (see Lacan) when we put them on a page and pass them across a table to someone we have never met. How their impact is being created and recreated in the brand new, not-our-own body. 

The writer who reads must test this kinetic-body-mind-recreation process in the only reader she knows personally—the only reader to whom she has direct bodily access: herself.

-jf

Stephen Crane: American Poet (by Jenny Factor)

Today is the opening day for millions of baseball fans--including me. (This poet cheers for the Dodgers.)

Another fan of baseball, Stephen Crane (b. 1891 in New York, and shown above as a Syracuse University undergraduate), made a name as a journalist, and wrote novels, short-stories, and poetry at the turn of a prior century. Here is a brief biography of the artist--and his influential friends--thinkers such as H.G. Wells and Henry James. And here is some information on his baseball-loving Syracuse days. And here is a wonderful Best American blog post on his birthday in November. 

A highschool sophomore I know sent me the following poem; in fact, it is his favorite early American poem. Stephen Crane’s “’Truth,’ Said a Traveller” he wrote, "presents two conflicting themes, first that truth is an achievable phenomenon, and second that it is mysterious and unreachable, a shifting, relative, and utterly mysterious entity." 

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.

In his fascinating 1975 essay, "The Hole in the Bucket", (Coming into the Country, University of Michigan Press) John Haines claims that  "American poetry lacks ideas." He continues, "Like all large statements, this one covers a lot of ground and leaves plenty of room for error". Was Haines responding to a lack he felt in 1975 that previous generations of American poetry had not shared? Yes, he seems to be!

However, it is precisely a poetry of ideas that I think we are beginning to see, more and more, in some of recent contemporary poetry...sinuous, philosophical long poems. Quirky philosophical sonnets. Experimental leaps and fancies that hold ideas central and foremost. Ben Lerner. Fanny Howe. Olena Kalytiak Davis. Claudia Rankine. Dan Beachy-Quick. Ben Doller. Douglas Kearney. Paisley Rekdal. And on and on.

Thanks, Stephen Crane. Thanks, John Haines. 

Beach Weather & Beware (by Jenny Factor)

On April 16, we mark the 53rd anniversary of the publication of William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White's The Elements of Style--truly the classiest of forays into the nays and naughts, and ayes and oughts of grammar. 

I have a long affinity with these funny savvy men, and I have to throw James Thurber in with the lot, because his own collaboration with White, Is Sex Necessary (written in 1929, but feels more midcentury) surely deserves to be quoted one day on a show oft-cited in these pages, namely AMC's Mad Men. (Check out Is Sex Necessary, if you haven't already read it...it will forever affect how you think of bluebirds, lampshades, and feminism).

My favorite moment in The Elements of Style, however, does not take place in a lampshade, but rather on some sort of sunny April day, I like to imagine, much like today, on a sidewalk or on a beach. 

Here they are, Messieurs Strunk and White, on the difference between "will" and "shall":

"A swimmer in distress cries, 'I shall drown; no one will save me!' " But a suicide says, "I will drown; no one shall save me!" 

The item is naughty, or was to sixteen-year-old me, who first read it over lunch hour on the floor of the Beverly Hills High School library. To be so glib, so smug, so wry about something important and dark--how perfect for an adolescent. And this was Strunk and White--clearly high-school English-teacher-sanctioned naughtiness too!

These lines always remind me of Stevie Smith's chilling 1957 foray into similar water:

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It's the best weather of the season here in Pasadena, California today. The warm, breezy bathwater kind of day that makes a person think of the beaches and bellyaches of youth--when the breeze cut the cheek with a kind of salt, and the tide dashed in and out, and the tiny body was too small still for sweat, the water temperature perfect, or cold in that all-alive way, and some home base of towels and shade and popsicles to return to, to be wrapped up and plopped flat in, and....well, that's the kind of day it is. And it's spring break--the very last day of spring break--too!

Call it a writer's temperament, but in spite of the weather, or because of it, I'm peckish and morose. And so I found myself this morning hunting down old judgmental and funny Strunk and White for my favorite beach-themed quote.

Jacques Lacan: Imaginary Philosopher (by Jenny Factor)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my son's favorite people is Jacques Lacan. "He's dead," you say? Well, you have a right to your opinion.

I can tell you that Lacan has been riding in the backseat of my Toyota Prius, keeping my teen and me company as we cross town between school and our small house, whose front yard is set in a great school district and whose backyard answers to a not-so-fine one. My son does not always agree with Lacan, but he knows him like a brother. As the wheels turn, we rattle on about current events, the unknowable Big Other, the Register of the Real, the Lack, and other Lacanisms made popular by a man we refer to as Jacques or just "Jack". 

My son never had an imaginary friend, but I now live with my son and his Imaginary Philosopher.

And truly, if you ask him, my kid can tell you what Jacques thinks about everything...

The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and the Real: Three types of experience, all bound up in signfication (and signifiers)