The Best American Poetry

Easter, and the Christians are at it again, raising the dead.

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you see me in church this weekend, I’ll be crying.

Wait.  Scratch that. 

I’ll be weeping.

Hmm.  No.  That’s not right either.

Try:  Sobbing.  Bawling.  Engaging in a back-pew sort of break-down best reserved for funerals (and only really, really, really tragic ones at that). 

I know.  It totally doesn’t make sense.  In the fairy tale of Holy Week, Easter’s the happy ending.  It’s the Resurrection!  It’s death undone!  It’s every promise rendered right!  It’s bunnies and chocolate!  Jesus, Jill. Jill—it’s Jesus!   

AND YET: The minute that stone is rolled away I lose my shit.  Crude, but there’s no other way to put it.

Easter fucks me up.*

A digression, not particularly brief. Indulge, please:

Extra! Extra! Read All About It! JAE in the Times!

Best American Poetry's own Jill Alexander Essbaum is featured today in the New York Times'  "Learning Network" Blog's post, "Poetry Pairing." Click here to read Jill's wonderful poem "Precipice" and the discussion as the poem is compared to two other pieces about time.

Way to go, Jilly!

From the Archives: A Christmas Sermon by Jill Alexander Essbaum (December 25, 2010)

(Yup.  What follows is a Christian, Christmas sermon.  You've been warned.) 

    A couple of weeks ago I was on a flight from Palm Springs, returning home from the December residency of the MFA low-res program in which I teach (UCR-Palm Desert: The Hottest MFA in the Country—no, it’s true; our posters say so).  I’m not a brilliant flier.  Airplanes make little sense to me and thus, they terrify. Sometimes I take a valium.  Sometimes I white-knuckle my way through the turbulence and the beverage service.  And sometimes, as in this instance, I strike up a conversation with the poor sap sitting next to me.  

    My seat mate was young and very handsome.  He worked as a supervisor on an herb farm in the Coachella Valley.  He was traveling to Miami with his boss. His hometown was Jerusalem.  His name was Mohammed.   

    We had a nice chat, us.  I inquired after the herbs he farmed.  What’s the best one? I asked. The chive, he replied. It's the hardest to grow. I asked about his family. Ten years ago a brain tumor killed his father.  My own father's been dead a little over a decade, and I said as much. We offered each other the condolences of paternal loss.  

 

A Christmas Sermon

(Yup.  What follows is a Christian, Christmas sermon.  You've been warned.) 

              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    A couple of weeks ago I was on a flight from Palm Springs, returning home from the December residency of the MFA low-res program in which I teach (UCR-Palm Desert: The Hottest MFA in the Country—no, it’s true; our posters say so).  I’m not a brilliant flier.  Airplanes make little sense to me and thus, they terrify. Sometimes I take a valium.  Sometimes I white-knuckle my way through the turbulence and the beverage service.  And sometimes, as in this instance, I strike up a conversation with the poor sap sitting next to me.  

    My seat mate was young and very handsome.  He worked as a supervisor on an herb farm in the Coachella Valley.  He was traveling to Miami with his boss. His hometown was Jerusalem.  His name was Mohammed.   

    We had a nice chat, us.  I inquired after the herbs he farmed.  What’s the best one? I asked. The chive, he replied. It's the hardest to grow. I asked about his family. Ten years ago a brain tumor killed his father.  My own father's been dead a little over a decade, and I said as much. We offered each other the condolences of paternal loss.  

Boxed-In, Blue Humorous and Bleary-Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza)

I spent a lot of time today thinking about my intentions for tomorrow's feast.  The way I want the table to look, who should sit where, how I should time every dish, course, segment of our evening.  In the end, some of those intentions will be realized and some will certainly not.  Every Thanksgiving has been made both better and worse by things going off-plan.  (I think here, first, of the oft dragged-up story of the year we ate at midnight because I didn't know how to cook a turkey, and also of the time a squirrel ate the pie crust I had cooling on the porch, but also of that one Thanksgiving when we played impromtu charades and laughed hysterically for an hour.)  

More appropriately, though, I it also made me think about poetry, and how I often sit down with a prompt, or a plan, but only sometimes go that path.  Writing formal poetry is one way of working according to plan.  Thematic poems, too.  But even starting with a last line, or an organizing image...that's organization of a sort.  I rarely if ever write completely free, and I'm entirely curious about people who do.  How does anything *go* anywhere?  I couldn't do it.  Some friends I know couldn't start with a plan or everything they write feels contrived. 

But--okay, and here's my own plan veering off course--you know what, kids?  I think I might beg my wonderful hosts at BAP to give me more than a week of blogging.  Because I swear I have lots of deeply-considered and potentially interesting things to say to all of you, but right now I'm about to fall face first into the huge stock pot of autumn soup. (A recipe, by the way, I stole from my wonderful friend, the amazing poet Rebecca Lindenberg.)

Yeah.  See, my family arrived today.  En masse.  From Brooklyn.  They haven't been cooking, no, but they have been talking.  Loudly.  And borrowing my car and stealing my bed.  And arranging my furniture.  (It's already arranged the way I want it, of course.)  

God, I love them.  God, they are A LOT of a lot of a lot.  And Jillybean and I will be waking up at 5:30 to prep and cook the turkey.  Woo, Lord.  Woo, we're thankful and tired.

So, here.  I'll leave you with some fun, maybe.  And an explanation of the title.

Jilly's idea of blue (butternut) humor:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How to Chop a Fuckton of Onions (more Bildungsroman Holiday, by Jessica Piazza)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, kids.  And you know what that means?  Onions.  A FUCKTON of onions.  Below you'll find one of my favorite recipes (and the impetus for said onion-chopping), an amazing poem by the lovely Suji Kwock Kim called "Monologue for an Onion," and a question that is all together too personal.  I hope you'll answer it.

And I very much hope you're having fun out there, celebrators.  

Sex Advice from Poets!

Check out Nerve.com where David Lehman, Jill Alexander-Essbaum, and Mark Bibbins answer such questions as

<<
This guy I’ve been dating is a writer and things have really been going well between us. The problem is that he showed me some of his work last week and I didn’t know how to react — it was terrible! I know it’s a huge part of his life, so I lied and said I liked it. Is this a dealbreaker? I can’t lie forever.
>>

You will also find, among many other juicy epistles, the perennial query from the "self-described feminist" who wants the guy to pay when they go out and also wants absolution for her heresy.

http://www.nerve.com/advice/sex-advice-from/sex-advice-from-poets-0

It's been awhile...

...since I've posted any puns.  "Are y'all havin' any symptims of depruvation?" Jill asked, concerning withdrawal.  

Ok.  That was bad.  Real, real bad.  As are the following, unapologetically harebrained Tom Swifties.  The Tom Swifty is my pun préféré.  Like all puns, it contains, in the brevity of its form, the twin potentials of greatness and ridiculousness.  These are at once too clever by three-fourths and as self-indulgent as a dozen showers a day during a drought.  Love them or loathe them, here they are.  

The Reading I Can't Attend, But Hope You WILL

Exactly one year ago today, I was in Switzerland on a visit.  I stayed with my dear, dear friend Susana Gardner in her home in Wallisellen.  We drank, we gossiped, we plotted world poetic domination.  I love this lady immensely.  

Susana is the curator / editrix / head beauty in charge of Dusie, a fantabulous multi-tiered organization that includes a press, a publishing collective, a journal, and (blessedly) a pillow for me to lay my head upon whenever I land in Kanton Zürich. 

On Thursday, August 12, at 8 pm, Susana Gardner, Cara Benson, Mairéad Byrne, Caroline Crumpacker, Eileen Myles, and Kate Zambreno will be reading from their new works. The reading is at Book Thug Nation in Brooklyn, New York (100 N 3rd St. between Berry Street and Wythe Avenue).  That's a rock-star line-up if ever there was one.

I want so badly to attend this reading but I can't quite swing the scratch to fly from Austin to NYC for just a night.  So what I'm hoping is that anyone who CAN attend this reading WILL attend it.  And that if you go, you'll sidle up to Susana and give her a hug and say simply "That's from Jill."

Did you hear about the consumptive hollywood starlet?

She was always being typecast as a phlegm-fatale.