The Best American Poetry

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

BAP 2011 Launch at the New School September 22, 2011

This brief report on last night's successful launch reading of The Best American Poetry 2011 will be followed in days ahead with some photographic magic from Start Black. It was the eighth straight year the New School Writing Program hosted the event in the spacious confines of Tishman Auditorium on 12th Street. Kevin Young, the guest editor of the 2011 volume, came up from Atlanta. And these contributors to the book joined Kevin and me on stage: Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Alan Feldman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer L. Knox, Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, Lee Upton. I concluded my opening remarks by reading "Time Pieces," the late Rachel Wetzsteon's haiku sequence, a tour de force. At my urging Kevin Young read one of his own poems -- the greatly admired "Expecting," which ran in The New Yorker last winter -- as well as two of the poems he chose for BAP 2011: John Ashbery's "Postlude and Prequel" and Erin Belieu's "When at a Certain Party in NYC."  The poets then took the lectern in alphabetical order. The poetry on display was wonderfully varied in form (haiku, aphorisms, a crown of sonnets, a pantoum, prose poem, free verse), tone, and subject matter. More than one observer noted that the poets prepared the audience, with admirable pith, for what they were about to hear. They read their poems with verve and conviction.  The effect, in Leah Iannone's words, was a "subdued awesomeness." You could hear the audience listening.

Dominique Nabokov was there with her camera, and other cameras were in evidence. We will post Star Black's photos of post-reading revelers anon. -- DL

And Speaking of Haiti [by Katha Pollitt]

  I'm a little late on this, but if you've been wondering how and where to donate to Haiti relief work, have meant to give but haven't yet done so, have given already but can give more ($10?), you can’t do better than give to Partners in Health. Founded by Paul Farmer with the conviction that health care is a human right, PIH has been working in Haiti for nearly 25 years, building a grassroots organization  that has become a model for health care for the poor in the developing world. PIH  knows the people and the culture and how to get things done.  It's in Haiti for the long term as well as the immediate crisis.  It will be there long after the media spotlight has moved on.  That’s particularly important because, unlike the 2004 tsunami in Asia, the earthquake has left tens of thousands of survivors with terrible injuries that will require long-term help.

    I've set up a donation page that makes giving incredibly easy. All amounts are welcome. My goal is to raise $1000, but if by some miracle you visit my page and that goal has been met, don't worry. You can still donate! No amount is too small.

Just click on this link.

It only takes a minute to set up your own personal fundraising page, by the way. Just go to my page and click on "Create your own page now!" in small print under the box with the thermometer. Set your own fundraising goal, post to your facebook page, e mail your friends.

 Bonus:  I was blown away by Mary J. Blige’s rendition of  Stephen C. Foster’s  1854 heartbreaker, “Hard Times Come Again No More” at the  Hope for Haiti Now telethon in New York.

I admit that  to my mind Mavis Staples’ quiet intensity is even more moving:

Berlin Postcard: The Giants Find Each Other [by Katha Pollitt]

Saturday, October 3, was Reunification Day, the anniversary of the formal reuniting of East and West Germany in l990. Here in Berlin, where I am currently living, the big event was a weekend-long outdoor spectacle involving Die Riesen, giant marionettes created by the French street theatre company Royale de Luxe. Some two million people turned out to watch a huge little-girl giant and an even more enormous grown-up-man giant dressed as a deep-sea diver wandering in search of each other in various neighborhoods. It was meant as a 'Maerchen" or fairy-tale, although no one seemed to know the story of the little girl and the deep-sea diver (who sometimes wore a yellow fisherman's slicker and rain hat). Something about separation and reunion, anyway. Since it was a beautiful warm blue-sky day (one of the few! it rains a lot here) my husband and I set out to find them. We walked and walked through the Tiergarten and stood in a huge crowd on Unter den Linden next to two rather cranky dads who pooh-poohed the whole extravaganza as overly expensive (a running theme here -- Berlin is a poor city, by German standards) but were clearly enjoying themselves. The promised giants didn't appear and eventually we had to leave. (Two bits of local anthropology you'd never see in New York: at the street fair stretching along Unter den Linden you could buy many kinds of alcoholic beverages, including schnapps, and just stand about pleasantly drinking; the great lawn in the Tiergarten, along which the crowds walked, was littered with the bicycles people had used to get there. Unlocked bicycles.)

My German teacher, Ursula, whom we ran into later, said the problem was that the little girl giant was kaputt. Sehr traurig! But late that night we saw the two giants at the Brandenburg Gate, sleeping. The little-girl giant was sleeping on the big-man giant's lap. You could hear them breathing very quietly. It was strangely moving.
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Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

    Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

   I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s  the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 

Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --

it's time to start this cultural affair.

Half came inside because it started raining, 

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 

but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 

Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.

Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 

one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 

for lack of muscles forced to show the world 

the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 

with luck. O Muse,

O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 

he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 

she's making him that tart she used to bake. 

Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!

we start to read. O Muse.

 

        -- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

Readers Real and Ideal [by Katha Pollitt]

 I love the Gertrude Stein quip David Comiskey posted in response to my last blog: “I write for myself and strangers.”  that just about covers it, doesn’t it?  Another reader sent in a  different version: “I write for myself and strange people.” That’s probably  just as true.   For some more portraits of the reader in one’s head, I queried members of  WOM-PO, a listserv of mostly poets (both sexes) devoted to discussion of poetry by women.   Here are some answers: Emily Dickinson,  YOU, “the me which is that feathered thing alive and barnacled on/as my soul,”  “people who need my words,”   a friend in Colorado with whom the poet has exchanged a weekly poem for the past 33 (!) years, “my former next-door neighbor, Joan, who didn't go to college, but who is a terrific reader,” a  longstanding poetry critique group,  a local poetry listserv in Sebastopol, CA. Linda Rodriguez  says she writes for “a literate, reading person somewhere out there in the world, someone curious who wants to see beneath the surface of life” -- a version of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader --  but others longed to reach people, including their relatives,  who didn’t read poetry and who might be electrified by something they wrote. “When I find a fifteen year old girl in a small town somewhere that has read a poem and gone on to the library filled with questions,” writes Sina Queyras,  “Well, that’s what it’s about for me.” If that doesn’t happen, don’t lose heart.  As Kate Bernadette Benedict points out “My internalized reader may not even be born yet!”  

  Mary Oliver  agrees with Benedict.   “I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now,”  she wrote in “A Poetry Handbook.” Of course, Oliver is  one of the most popular poets  in America right this minute -- it’s not like she’s waiting for posterity to catch up with her.   Billy Collins,  the other most popular  poet,   has a  riff on Oliver.  It’s a funny poem, but I can’t decide if he’s making fun of her.  Is he mocking her somewhat vatic claim on posterity, debunking the idea of posterity as anything special, ruefully deflating the concept of universality, or even comparing  Oliver’s poetry to a wet dog?  What do you think?

To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now

           

       I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. - Mary Oliver

Nobody here likes a wet dog.

No one wants anything to do with a dog

that is wet from being out in the rain

or retrieving a stick from a lake.

Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

going from one person to another

hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

something that could be given with one hand

without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,

some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet

until they go to pet her,

push her away

then wipe their hands on their clothes.

And whenever she heads toward me,

I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!

O inconceivable being!

whatever the shape of your house,

however you scoot from place to place,

no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

I bet everyone in your pub,

even the children, pushes her away.

 -- Billy Collins

The Expulsion

Adam was happy -- now he had someone to blame
for everything: shipwrecks, Troy,
the gray face in the mirror.

Eve was happy -- now he would always need her.
She walked on boldly, swaying her beautiful hips.

The serpent admired his emerald coat, 
the Angel burst into flamea
(he'd never approved of them, and he was right).

Even God was secretly pleased: Let
History begin!

The dog had no regrets, trotting by Adam's side
self-importantly, glad to be rid

of the lion, the toad, the basilisk, the white-footed mouse,
who were also happy and forgot their names immediately.

Only the Tree of Knowledge stood forlorn,
its small hard bitter crab apples

glinting high up, in a twilight of black leaves.
How pleasant it had been, how unexpected

to have been, however briefly,
the center of attention.

                        -- by Katha Pollitt
                            from The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 2009)

Whom do you write your poems for? By Katha Pollitt

It’s easy to describe the readers I  have in mind when I write my column in The Nation:  the 185,000 Nation subscribers, who are mostly liberals, progressives and leftists  of various sorts,  college-educated, over thirty, up on the news.  I know quite a few of these readers, and hear from them all the time.  Beyond the magic subscription circle, there’s the larger community of feminists, other journalists, and writers I admire including a few dead ones in my head. 

   But whom do I write my poems for?  “Anyone who wants them” is one easy answer. “Myself” is another. Both are true in a way, but incomplete.  Who is that “anyone” who pockets the breadcrumbs I cast upon the water?  And if I write for myself, why do I  try to publish my poems and care what anyone thinks about them? At least for me, communication is intrinsic to writing, so I must have some blurry idea in mind about who I’m communicating with -- or, perhaps more accurately, given the state of poetry these days,  wish I was communicating with.

  There’s a sociological answer to the readership question. According to  The Poetry Foundation’s  survey, “Poetry in America,”  the most frequent readers of poetry (or, as the study oddly calls them, “users” of poetry)  are middle-aged women with post-secondary degrees, who began reading, or using, poetry when they were young.  That’s me all over!   Sociologically,  “I write for myself” and “I write for anyone who wants it” are not such different statements after all.

   But what about the ideal reader?  The one who really sees what you are trying to do in a poem, and if you can please that demanding but simpatico person, you  feel you’ve gotten it right? If you’re lucky, you might have a teacher like that when you’re young, or a  friend, or a fellow poet or two.  Failing that, or in addition to that,  you might have to imagine your ideal reader, as Dante for all intents and purposes imagined Beatrice, whom he’d had such a crush on when they were kids.

   One popular type of imaginary ideal reader is, curiously, the non-reader.  In “In My Craft or Sullen Art,”  Dylan Thomas claimed he wrote not for literary people or for the ages but for “the lovers,/their arms round the griefs of the ages,/who pay no praise nor wages/nor heed my craft or art.”  And indeed, if  those lovers disentwined themselves long enough to read a poem, it was probably one by Thomas,  one of the last poet-celebrities of the English-speaking world. 

   Yeats (right) was another one who envisioned an ideal non-reader. In l914, fed up with  the  ideologically overheated  Dublin literary-political scene, he imagined his ideal reader as a Connemara fisherman,  a “wise and simple man”  whom Yeats believed belonged to an older, better, truer, more organic (in the old sense) Irish people.  What saves “The Fisherman”  from nationalistic  sentimentality is Yeats’ admission that this ideal  fisherman-reader does not  exist. He is  a necessary fiction, a dream:

 

Although I can see him still.

The freckled man who goes

To a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies,

It's long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality;

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved,

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer,

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch-cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down-turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream;

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, 'Before I am old

I shall have written him one

poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.'

Turning Thirty

This spring, you’d swear it actually gets dark earlier.
At the elegant new restaurants downtown
your married friends lock glances over the walnut torte:
it’s ten o’clock. The have important jobs
and go to bed before midnight. Only you
walking alone up the dazzling avenue
still feel a girl’s excitement, for the thousandth time
you enter your life as though for the first time,
as an immigrant enters a huge, mysterious capital:
Paris, New York. So many wide plazas, so many marble addresses!
Home, you write feverishly
in all five notebooks at once, then faint into bed
dazed with ambition and too many cigarettes.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except
really you don’t believe wrinkles mean character
and know it’s an ominous note
that the Indian skirts flapping on the sidewalk racks
last summer looked so gay you wanted them all
but now are marked clearer than price tags: not for you.
Oh, what were you doing, why weren’t you paying attention
that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
and became instead “deciding what to do without”?
No wonder you’re happiest now
riding on trains from one lover to the next.
In those black, night-mirrored windows
a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
a romantic heroine,
suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

                                          -- Katha Pollitt
                                          (from Antarctic Traveller, Knopf, 1983)

Poems about Poems: Why not? by Katha Pollitt

    Is there something wrong with writing poems about writing poems? And if so, what? My friend Richard Howard was the first person who told me he didn’t approve of  that subject, but since he said it while saying nice things about a poem I had written on that very theme, I didn’t take it as a blanket prohibition, just a personal preference.    It turns out a lot of people share it.  Jackie Sheeler, commenting on yesterday’s post, compares it to ‘talking to your analyst about being in therapy.”  Actually, I think that’s what psychoanalysis is supposed to be all about (see Daniel Menaker’s hilarious novel, The Treatment, for the cleverest portrayal ever of  a shrink, the impossibly vain, hostile, and infuriatingly accurate super-Freudian Dr. Morales, who thinks everything is about himself, sex, or both). But maybe that’s why I didn’t stay in it very long: talking about the shrink to the shrink just seems so rude.   Expensive, too. 
  

   The self-referential nature of art is old news.  We don’t mind songs about singing and singers, or paintings about painting and painters, as any self-portrait is bound to be: here am I the painter, painting myself painting myself. There are dozens of movies about movie-making: Sunset Boulevard, Day for Night, Contempt, Adaptation, to name just a few. Why should poetry be different? Why shouldn’t poets, from time to time, reflect in verse on what is, after all, their occupation and preoccupation?

  Perhaps there’s a moral aspect: poetry is not “the real world,” where real people , ie people who don’t read poetry, live. So if you want to reach real people, you have to write about something they care about-- baseball or the Byzantine Empire or having a baby, whatever, just not about poetry, because you can be sure that’s the one thing they don’t care about.  Writing a poem about poetry  only going to puzzle and bore non-poets.  Worse, it’s going to sound “elitist,” which is a grave sin in our faux-egalitarian country, where it’s okay to rejoice openly in having lots more money, houses, boats, cars, gadgets,  and power than others, but not in having a big working vocabulary, a good education or a consuming interest in anything unprofitable. Perhaps writing poems about poetry comes across as a way of  saying, I’m so special. Prompting the inevitable response: Who do you think you are, anyway?

  Given all this, it’s not surprising that when poets write about writing poetry, they often sound a little depressed.  My psychiatrist-writer friend Anna Fels , whose book  Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives  you should read right away if you haven’t already,  takes a clinical view:  “As a shrink,” she wrote in an e mail after reading yesterday’s post, “ I've wondered sometimes if such poems  represent depressive periods in bipolars or cyclothymics since so many modern poets have been bipolar.” Maybe, but maybe those poets are just responding naturally to the situation of the poet in our time, the sense of being always at the margins, of having to justify one’s existence, of offering the world something the world doesn’t really want.

   Here’s a wonderful poem by Grace Paley (right) about exactly that: 

          

          The Poet's Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem 

I made a pie instead     it took

about the same amount of time 

of course the pie was a final

draft     a poem would have had some

distance to go     days and weeks and

much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking

tumbling audience among small

trucks and a fire engine on 

the kitchen floor 

everybody will like this pie

it will have apples and cranberries

dried apricots in it     many friends

will say     why in the world did you 

make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable

sadness I decided to

settle this morning for a re-

sponsive eatership     I do not

want to wait a week     a year     a

generation for the right

consumer to come along