The Best American Poetry

Reading "Reading" at the LA Public Library ALOUD Series (by Jenny Factor)

Just home from a very smart conversation between two thinkers and critics--Marjorie Garber (The Use and Abuse of Literature), and David L. Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading)--whose latest books speak to that intimate act, reading. (If reading is in a "crisis", Garber suggests, that means merely a "turning point" and "bring it on!")

I have to admit (abashed), I went to hear Garber twice during her Los Angeles visit. Professor Garber had been something of an icon to me when I was an adolescent at Harvard University, lodged in the third row of Sanders Theater, in a favorite seat, stage left, listening to her enact the act of reading and questioning Shakespeare. If as Ezra Pound suggests in The ABCs of Reading that we must read a book three times to have truly read it: once when we are younger than the protagonist whose consciousness carries the plot, once when we are their age, and once when we have outlived them (or at least outlived their story), I was giving my second read to Marjorie Garber, herself, now that I am nearly the exact age she must have been when (unless my memory fails me) in matching fuscia miniskirt and heels, she unlocked a lady's jeweled trunk, critical interpretation upon interpretation, with such innuendo and aplomb that I think I once audibly gasped. 

I am also a fan of David Ulin's--and particularly of his brave recent little polemic. 

And so I'm home with a number of thoughts about reading, and would like to write more on this.

For now, let me simply leave you with two links:

Seth Lerner's review of The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber (Pantheon; 320 pages)

David Ulin's very fine essay from the Los Angeles Times on the topic that became his new book, The Lost Art of Reading (Sasquatch Books; 160 page).

Of Witness (by Jenny Factor)

I'd like to say a little something about "Been There/Done That" as a creative urge. Or for that matter, about remembrance of any sort that requires for its continued potency the visit of someone who lived through and lived beyond the tragedies described.

Frankly, I'm worried. What is the trajectory of humanity's memory after the singular embodying human voice fades out? What if the art isn't made? The symbol or symbolic act not enacted? The bridge not extended...?

Sunday was Yom Hashoah for my son's Hebrew School class--the day in which the Shoah is remembered throughout the diaspora world.

Our shul is blessed to have among our members a poet survivor--a very fine poet--Zahava Sweet whose book, The Return of Sound was published by Bombshelter Press in 2005.

But the Shoah is still taught largely voice to voice, witness to non-witness. 

What will be required for the Non-Witness one day to be able to say, "this is because what happened to me when I was brought out" Of Poland. Or Austria.

A certain vibrant subsection of contemporary poetry is written from the tradition of "I was born there" "I lived that" "I was watching". But what is the trajectory of that poetry after the voice in which it is sounded fades out, dies of old age or perceived triviality or the inability to create something lasting of lasting horror. Of course outside of art and self there is no lasting horror. And isn't that, then, the problem? What if the art itself cannot or does not manage to thrive beyond the human connections and day-to-day political potencies that sustain and nourish it in its own era?

When (and how) is Poetry of Witness poetry-enough and witness-enough? And what if events of genuine importance have no living poet-witness left at all?

Dear Life: Still Here! (by Jenny Factor)

Stacey Harwood's important post earlier this week put me in mind of James Wright. A poet and exemplar of endurance. A sturdy fragile voice. Perhaps I'm looking for an antidote. Perhaps I'm just looking. In any event, I was reminded this morning of his "Northern Pike". 

This is one to read slowly to oneself, twice-in-a-row. (It's an argument with the self, I think...). It works best on a kind of rhythmic repetition...

Northern Pike

All right. Try this,
Then. Every body
I know and care for,
And every body
Else is going
To die in a loneliness
I can't imagine and a pain
I don't know. We had
To go on living. We
Untangled the net, we slit
The body of this fish
Open from the hinge of the tail
To a place beneath the chin
I wish I could sing of.
I would just as soon we let
The living go on living.
An old poet whom we believe in
Said the same thing, and so
We paused among the dark cattails and prayed
For the muskrats,
For the ripples below their tails,
For the little movements that we knew the crawdads were making
under water,
For the right-hand wrist of my cousin who is a policeman.
We prayed for the game warden's blindness.
We prayed for the road home.
We ate the fish.
There must be something very beautiful in my body,
I am so happy.

       --  James Wright

Mary Oliver once wrote of those poets and other artists who commit suicide, "I forgive them/their unhappiness.../...for walking out of the world./But I don't forgive them.../for taking off their veils/and dancing for death. for hurtling/toward oblivion/on the sharp blades/of their exquisite poems, saying:/this is the way/// I was, of course, all that time/coming along/behind them, and listening/for advice. She concludes "Members of the Tribe" from her 1986 Dream Work with these lines that remind me of my own high school darkness, and how, on the day after, I'd feel so light my head and shoulders just floating up without any of the ego or striving left in me:

And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo's brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,

lived to be a hundred years old.

So here's a toast...To the muskrats. To the game warden's blindness. And to life. Inventive. Fragile. Liveable.

L'chayim!

A Special Post for Jenny Factor (by Laura Orem)

Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too
(by Jim Hall)

All my pwoblems who knows,
maybe evwybody's pwoblems is due to da fact,
due to da awful twuth dat I am
SPIDERMAN.

I know, I know.
All da dumb jokes:
No flies on you, ha ha,
and da ones about what do I do wit all doze extwa legs in bed.

Well, dat's funny yeah. But you twy being
SPIDERMAN for a month or two.
Go ahead.

You get doze cwazy calls fwom da Gubbener
askin you to twap some booglar
who's only twying to wip off color TV sets.

Now, what do I cawre about TV sets?
But I pull on da suit, da stinkin suit,
wit da sucker cups on da fingers,
and get my wopes and wittle bundle of equipment
and den I go flying like cwazy
acwoss da town fwom woof top to woof top.

Till der he is.
Some poor dumb color TV slob
and I fall on him and we westle a widdle
until I get him all woped.

So big deal. You tink when you
SPIDERMAN
der's sometin big going to happen to you.

Well, I tell you what.
It don't happen dat way.
Nuttin happens.
Gubbener calls, I go.
Bwing him to powice,
Gubbener calls again,
like dat over and over.

I tink I twy sometin diffunt.
I tink I twy sometin excitin like wacing cawrs.
Sometin to make my heart beat at a difwent wate.

But den you just can't quit being sometin like
SPIDERMAN.
You SPIDERMAN for life.
Fowever.
I can't even buin my suit.
It won't buin.
It's fwame wesistent.

So maybe dat's youwr pwoblem too, who knows.

Maybe dat's da whole pwoblem wif evwytin.
Nobody can buin der suits, dey all fwame wesistent.
Who knows?

Poets on Obama's First 100 Days (by Jenny Factor)

A Dispatch from Day 23...President's Day is right around the corner. But one President shows up every single day.

 

Check out "Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days", an evolving online collection of poems inspired by Barack Obama's first 100 days in office. Launched the day of the inauguration, the First 100 Days is the idea of writers Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker, who asked ninety-eight other writers to each take on a single day of these first one hundred, and write a timely poem to reflect on each day of grace. The writers involved in the project are asked not to write their poems in advance, but rather, to allow their poems to reflect the date they've been assigned. Read the poems by Major Jackson, Rachel Zucker, Leslea Newman, and Cate Marvin right now.

Which poet is up next? It's always a surprise....

John Updike at 40 (by Jenny Factor)

Four weeks from tonight, if I catapult over some few tiny remaining hurdles (two short reports, an interview, and a scary party—in fact, even if I don’t jump the hurdles), one way or the other, I will turn 40. Forty years old—neither wise nor ready—but at least, I’ve learned to laugh more of the time.

The year my father turned 40, I was 16 years old. I wrote John Updike a fan letter—not on my own behalf, but on his. 

“My father reads your books,” I told him. “My father—who incidentally is, like you, a Harvard man—reads your books and thinks about them and takes them apart and shares them with me. And what I think he’d like best of all for his fortieth birthday would be for you to send him—well, even just your signature.”

I was a high-school sophomore or junior—and my father knew his Updike: The Centaur, The Rabbits, several volumes of short-stories. At the time, I could rattle the books off in order. It was only 1985—there were still a manageable number.

I’d take them down from the locked bookshelf one-by-one with his blessing, and read them for insight…into people, into grown men, into the funny, sentimental, brilliant and complex man my father was (and is). I read them to learn the enemy, boys, and the chess board—people, adults, interactions, the tension of wanting freedom, of wanting connection, of never holding onto one’s own wants quite long enough. I read them to learn the Road.

The punchline of this story is that John Updike wrote back! 

Dorothy Parker (by Jenny Factor)

Got a New Years' Resolution? Here's what poet Dorothy Parker* might have to say...

Observation

If I don't drive around the park,
I'm pretty sure to make my mark.
If I'm in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I'll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.

--Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)

Wishing you all the best in 2009 and beyond!

-J.F.

*Little-Known Note: Once upon a time, famous New Yorker Parker was a west-coast poet. You can read about the Los-Angeles-based events of the Dorothy Parker Society here. Thanks to Adrienne Crew for putting Parker on the L.A. map!

Looking Back at 2008: Mahmoud Darwish (by Jenny Factor)

Before we say goodbye to 2008, I'd like to take a moment to remember poet, Mahmoud Darwish. A fellow Piscean (born March 13, 1941), Darwish died in August 2008 in the United States. He was 67 years old. As a Palestinian poet, Darwish wrote with complexity and honesty from an intersection of lived experience and politics.

Here is an original translation of one of his poems by one of my favorite American poets, Marilyn Hacker:

Now in Exile

Now, in exile – yes, at home
in the seventh decade of a brief life
they light candles for you.

Be joyful, yes, as calm as you can be
a stupid death went astray on the cluttered road
and left you a respite.

Above the ruins, an inquisitive moon
laughs like a fool.
Don't think he's coming closer to welcome you.

Like the new month of March,
as part of her endless task,
she has given the trees back their names of nostalgia
and neglected you.

Toast the breaking of the glass, then, with your friends.
In your sixties, you won't find
a leftover tomorrow
to carry on the shoulder of a song
… and let it carry you.

Say to life, as behooves an experienced poet:
Walk lightly, like those women aware
of their enchantments
and their guile.  Each one makes her secret plea:
Now I am yours ! How handsome you are !

O life, walk lightly, so that I can see
your imperfection.  I had so forgotten you
in the torment of my quest for you, for me.
And each time that I unravelled one of your secrets
you said to me, harshly : Oh, ignorant !

Say to absence : you let me diminish
and I have come --- to perfect you !

  -Mahmoud Darwish
                                tr. Marilyn Hacker

A Poetic Geometry of the Holidays (by Jenny Factor)

What is it about the circle that suggests itself as a poem form for a sacred season? 

I'm thinking here of a beautiful Christmas "garland" by Marilyn Hacker, called "A Christmas Crown." It begins, "Son of the dark solstice descends the tree/into the winter city" and ends six sonnets later with "The children sing/below our gossip. Roast and fruit and wine/and smoke mix in the air near dinnertime./The guests file foodward while the darkening/sun of the dark solstice descends the tree."

Long ago last spring, when the season was all shoots and ladders, poetry correspondent Mitch Sisskind posted a Poetic Term of the Day. He instructed us that Serpentine Verses are poems comprised of lines that begin and end with the same word. BAP leader extraordinaire, David Lehman, then demonstrated with a serpentine verse of his own in the Comments section. Such poetry circles make little loops out of each line; links in a chain disconnected from each subsequent link. Mirror poems, by contrast, are one bigger Circle: their end words repeat in reverse order, iterating themselves on the way in and the way out. 

So here in the Spirit of the Circle is a modified depiction of both these poetic shapes by long-dead genius, George Herbert. His "A Wreath" turns the serpentine line progressive, connecting each chunk of chain to the one that follows, and finally clasping it around with a complete mirror. Here it goes:

A Wreath
A wreathed garland of deserved praise,
Of praise deserved, unto thee I give,
I give to thee, who knowest all my ways,
My crooked winding ways, wherein I live,
Wherein I die, not live: for life is straight,
Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee,
To thee, who art more far above deceit
Then deceit seems above simplicity.
Give me simplicity, that I may live,
So live and like, that I may know they ways,
Know them and practice them: then shall I give
For this poor wreath, give thee a crown of praise.

So, Writers, as we shoot and ladder forward into 2009, here's my wish for you all: a season that circles as it climbs, that mirrors only the best. As the short days fade, Writers write: write and bloom.

-J.F.

Scandal and Scenery: Make your Poetry Video! (by Jenny Factor)

Last Wednesday. Overcast. A day so drippy, so bit-dreary that I didn't intend to go far from home...until the sagey smell of a sunny Mulholland Drive morning came winging right into my living-room. California poet, Kim Dower, sent me a link to Guerrilla Reads, a great new poetry e-Zine, in which writers read their work in the environment where it was created.

The submission guidelines include:

1. The video must show the author reading his or her own fiction or poetry.
2. The reading should take place in a real-world setting and should not be formally staged.
3. Videos should be no more than eight minutes long.

The creators of Guerrilla Reads are Bronwyn Mauldin (a writer, blogger, podcaster and radio host) and Cheryl Klein (director of the California office of Poets & Writers). There's a smudged, street-theater genius to this project. Check it out!

-J.F.