The Best American Poetry

Headfirst Into The Air (by Laura Orem)

The Olympics are here again, and I can’t rally up much interest. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I keep finding out who won and who lost each event before it’s broadcast (thanks a lot, New York Times). Maybe it’s because, as I’ve written before, there are no characters anymore; everyone is slick, smooth, and tediously decorous. No real drama, not even in the athletic performances, which are uniformly excellent and hinge on the tiniest millisecond.

I used to love to watch the swimming and diving events. I love to swim, even though I’m neither fast nor elegant in form. As for diving, it’s always been a mystery to me how you get good at it without breaking your neck. In fact, I will agree that, even now, of all the summer Olympic sports, diving provides the most suspense, because even a gold-medal diver can misstep or over-rotate, so you catch your breath until she safely slices into the water.

I learned to swim at age five in the Officers Club Pool at Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland. EA is notorious for two things: LSD experiments on soldiers in the 1960s, and a stockpile of deadly chemical weapons dating back to World War I that they finally disposed of only about ten years ago. My father was a civilian employee who worked on post. We lived in a development a few miles outside the gate, but as a little girl I spent a large chunk of my time on the post grounds themselves.

When I was a kid, no one talked about the tripped-out soldiers or the weapons stockpile; I’m not sure how much of it was publically known in the late sixties. There were “deadly force” areas tucked into remote corners, but they were largely invisible and you had actively go find them. For me, the post was a wonderful place, with shady, tree-lined streets, and deer so tame they’d walk right up to your parked car. There was a riding stable with horses you could pet, and a small airfield where, each 4^th of July, the Rec. folks put on a carnival complete with pony rides, a tiny ferris wheel with four cars, and about twenty-five ramshackle booths. You bought a bunch of tickets for five cents apiece, then you made your rounds. There was Pitch-Til-U-Win, where, if your aim was good and you were lucky, you could win yourself a small pink plastic poodle with sparkling blue eyes, and even if you weren’t, you’d at least end up with a Hawaiian lei made of paper flowers. There was the Wheel-of-Fortune, where if you were very very lucky, you could walk off with a stuffed dog with vinyl ears, and the Pick-a-Duck game, where you could win a straw hat. There was the Spin-Art booth, where you poured primary-colored tempera paint out of Tupperware ketchup bottles onto a piece of spinning cardboard and got your own work of art to hang up on your wall. The air was redolent with sizzling hot dogs (for the kids) and pit-beef sandwiches (for the grownups), and for dessert you had your choice of snowballs or cotton candy. Then, as darkness fell, your dad got the blanket from the car, and the whole family, smelling now of OFF bug spray, headed down to the grass field by the runway to swat mosquitoes and watch the fireworks.

Olympics 2012: Liam and Meghan O'Rourke (author and former gymnast) exchange thoughts on Olympics highlights and heartbreak

from Meghan O'Rourke:

I confess that my Irish heart got quite sentimental and soggy when I saw Kieran Behan step on to the floor on Saturday in his leprechaun-green athletic gear. (That part was unfortunate.) Not only is he Irish—Kieran!—but he has overcome enormous adversity to be at the Olympics. And like a true Irishman, he has demonstrated Olympian stubbornness. When he was 10, he found a tumor the size of a golf ball on his leg; the doctors botched the surgery and left him with “permanent” nerve damage. But he learned to walk again — and began training, only to suffer a freak accident: brain damage after hitting his head in a routine fall. Hours and hours of rehab. It only went on from there: first the torn ACL in one knee, then the other; a broken arm; financial straits (he ended up sweeping the gym he trained in); and now a rotator cuff injury. Yet there he was, walking out on the floor mat along with all the other Olympians.

Continue reading . . .

Olympics 2012: Lynn Melnick n Synchronized Swimming and Paisley Rekdal on Archery

(Ed note:  For the next couple of weeks we'll be bringing you the Los Angeles Review of Books coverage of the 2012 Olympics)

On Archery by Paisley Rekdal

FIRST, WE MUST CONSIDER the draw.

This is the amount of weight an archer pulls when drawing a bow: 50 pounds is the average draw for the male Olympian; 20 pounds the average for the female. With a recurve (the Olympic bow of choice), weight increases as the bow is drawn, stopping at its peak weight: imagine, if you will, the strength required to draw, steady, then focus your arrow with 50 pounds of tension weighing on a single arm, all in the hopes of hitting a target at 70 meters in less than 40 seconds. Like many of the Olympics’ less visually spectacular sports (curling comes to mind, though the Norwegian team’s harlequin pants certainly made an impression), archery’s drama is internal; but for those who have ever practiced it, as I have, watching archery reminds us that, while a feat of both instinct and psychology, it is most importantly a sport of stamina. The draw never changes, but your ability to pull efficiently does, and the tendency of your arrow to wobble — a weakness inherent to every shot due to the arrow’s torque — will only increase as you fatigue, even with the aid of a stabilizer. Without training, the draw weight will exhaust you after a few shots. Your target focus will slide, your bowstring fingers callous like a guitar player’s. Most painfully, the tender inner forearm of the hand that grips your bow belly will burn with welts that the bowstring, having released the arrow at 150 miles per hour, raises at it snaps against your exposed flesh like a wet whipcord of Kevlar. Instinctively, you’ll flinch at each release, ruining your shot. You will have to learn to wear an arm and chest guard.

Continue reading . . .

Sharon Dolin, Guest Blogger

We're pleased that Sharon Dolin will continue posting from southwest France where she is artist in residence at Le Moulin a Nef.  Sharon is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Whirlwind (due out this fall from the University of Pittsburgh Press) and Burn and Dodge  (Pittsburgh, 2008). As well as poetry, Sharon is at work on a book of aphoristic sequences, several of which have appeared or are forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Denver Quarterly, The American Poet, Salamander, and The Kenyon Review Online.  She has poems forthcoming in Poetry along with a Q&A in December. Currently, she teaches at Poets House and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, and directs The Center for Book Arts Annual Letterpress Poetry Competition.  Sharon blogs over at Whirlwind.

 Bienvenue, Sharon.

In other news . . .

We're in full Olympic swing here and are thrilled to be collaborating with Gabrielle Calvocoressi and her Olympic team of poet/sports reporters over at the Los Angeles Review of Books.  You'll find our Olympic coverage here, and daily posts at the LARB here. 

Sports Desk (Olympic Edition): In Praise of The Things I Don't Know [Gabrielle Calvocoressi]

Today, after a few hours of watching Olympic archery and beach volleyball I made my way to Abbott Kinney Blvd. in Venice, got a really perfect iced green tea at Intelligensia Coffee and felt genuinely happy to be alive. That’s surprising in some ways since over the course of the last few weeks I’ve lost my apartment, watched my laptop die not once but twice and moved more deeply into my research for a book of prose I’m writing that focuses on my mother’s suicide and the general and uncomfortable question (for me, anyway) of why she killed herself and why I, seemingly, will not. Suffice to say it’s been a pretty brutal few weeks.

 

I think I feel so great because of the Olympics. I’ve got to say I love all of it, starting with the trials and continuing right onto the opening ceremonies last night. I gather a lot of folks didn’t like the Opening Ceremonies but I thought the James Bond bit was funny and the fireworks were great. And how can you not love all those athletes smiling and taking photos and marching alongside their teams of 200 or 20 or 2? I love that there’s an Independent Olympic Athlete’s delegation for athletes like South Sudanese runner Guor Marial, who can’t run for South Sudan because the newly formed country doesn’t have an Olympic body and will not run under the flag of Sudan because as says, "My family lost 28 members in the war with Sudan. Millions of my people were killed by Sudan forces. I can only forgive, but I cannot honor and glorify a country that killed my people." I love that every single Olympic team has at least one woman athlete (a first) and that, for the first time, the American team has more women than men. And I love Caster Semenya’s raised fist as she walked into the stadium holding her flag.

Which is to say, I love that tremendous joy and unspeakable tragedy can live in the same body and in the same moment of time. When it’s packaged by the media this balance can be destroyed and come off as melodrama. But one can simply go back to the athletes themselves as they do what they do best and find all of these seemingly opposing forces working themselves into something extraordinary. Take gymnast John Orozco, who I really don’t know much about. I learned about him during the months leading up to the games. One Saturday I was having some trouble getting out of my pajamas to go to the coffee shop and write. I may have been having some trouble doing a number of things related to going outdoors. I turned on the television in hopes of finding some baseball or bull riding. I wanted to watch someone do something super hard and make it look effortless. And I wanted to watch closely enough that I could begin to see the decisions they were making that made it look so much easier than it was. It calms me to do that. I thought it might get me up and out the door. Neither sport was on and didn’t want to see some comedy or light movie so I looked at the guide and saw the men’s gymnastic trials were on. Though it may have been a competition leading up to the trials. As I’ve said, I was and am new to gymnastics and the world of the trials. I didn’t really care. I pulled the blanket over myself and started watching.

And there was John Orozco.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the course of the afternoon I found out John Orozco is from the Bronx.  His father suffered a major stroke, which forced him to retire from his job at the sanitation department. His mother suffers from lupus and rheumatoid arthritis and, according to her son, is in pain all the time, which did not keep her from driving the hour round trip most days of the week to get him to gymnastics practice. Terrible things. Things you don’t recover from. I listened to the commentators at the same time that I watched John Orozco do the most remarkable things with his body. I watched him get very still and then burst into motion. What struck me was that the beauty of what he was doing didn’t undo any of the darkness of the story. The things that were broken would stay broken and the beauty and achievement would live alongside it. And together they would make a young man’s life. I decided I’d make sure to watch him during the Olympics because he had a lot to teach me about what it is to be an adult. And I did get up and go to the coffee shop, which oddly enough I almost omitted from this piece because it sounds sort of clichéd but like most clichés it’s actually true.

Over the next two weeks I’ll be wearing various hats here at Sports Desk. I’ll be writing short bits about the Olympics at the end of each day and I’ll be thinking about the sorts of things I want to talk about as I return to this space on a monthly basis after a long time away. I’ll also be featuring a great project I’m working on as the Poetry Editor for The Los Angeles Review of Books. Because I’ve been looking forward to the Olympics and thinking about all the things I don’t know, I thought I’d ask some amazing poets and poet-critics to help me make sense of the balance of formal rigor and unabashed optimism that it takes to be an Olympian and a poet. The Best American Poetry is our partner in this project and will be featuring all the essays published at LARB. And we'll be having Olympic adventures at Sports Desk as well. And the team can keep growing, so lend me your voice.

 

When the team from Great Britain entered the stadium David Bowie’s, “Heroes” started to play. I’ve had that song in my head for weeks, though I’m not sure I really know what the term means. I look forward to trying to find out. I think it’s going to take a whole team.

We Can Be Heroes: LARB Poetry at the 2012 Summer Games by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

(Ed. note:  Los Angeles Review of Books poetry editor Gabrielle Calvocoressi has invited a team of poets to cover the 2012 London Summer Olympics.  If you land here first, you'll get a taste of what's to come with an opportunity to head over to LARB for the rest.  It's going to be an exciting way to experience the games. Who better to write about sports, athleticism, competition, than poets?)

Image: "Alternate Olympics 2012 Logo"

TO SAY I AM LOUSY at sports is an understatement. Given the chance, I would pick myself last for my own baseball, handball or volleyball team. And yet, I love to watch athletics more than almost anything, and I find this to be true with many poets I know. Contrary to popular belief, poets are some of the most avid sports fans around. I’ve wondered about it for a long time and I’ve decided that there’s no better time or place to consider the question of what draws poets to sports than the 2012 Summer Games. Starting with the opening ceremonies on July 27^th some of the most interesting poets and poet-critics in the country (and a few from the UK) will talk about sports and poetry — what it is to do something really well and what it is to risk failure on the world’s largest stage. We’ll hear about archery and synchronized swimming, boxing and basketball. We’ll have coverage of what we’ll be calling “The Ghost Sports,” the sports that used to be in the Olympics and aren’t any more, because I suppose I can understand why we don’t play baseball at the Games but I am bamboozled by the fact that we don’t play cricket.

Continue reading here.

KELWYN SOLE AND THE SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY ANTHOLOGY by John Hennessy

This fall, issue #4 of The Common (see yesterday’s post) will include a ninety-page anthology of contemporary Anglophone poetry from South Africa guest-edited by Kelwyn Sole, the first such collection to be printed in the U. S. since Denis Hirson’s The Lava of This Land appeared nearly twenty years ago. (A couple of years ago the excellent online magazine Big Bridge did its own feature of fiction and poetry from South Africa, I should note.) Sole has gathered 24 poets ranging in age from the first generation born after the National Party came to power (1948) to those born near the end of Apartheid (1994), from the internationally established to the absolutely emerging—at least one of whom has yet to publish a full length collection.  (For a complete list leaked early, please see the end of this post.)

Kelwyn Sole’s own new collection of poems, Absent Tongues, his sixth, has just been published in South Africa by Hands-On Books.  What I admire most about this excellent book is Sole’s ability to balance political content with love poetry, urban immediacy with the nearly pastoral.  As Rustum Kozain cogently puts it: Sole’s “political poems refute any notion that political art can never be art. His insights draw us into the heartlessness of our new political masters, the confused brutality behind the murder of poor immigrants, and of a hovering ‘sadness at what might have been/ had we more courage/ had we searched/ further than our skins our pockets.’” Sole’s poetry, Kozain affirms, functions as South Africa’s “national conscience.”

Here are two poems from ABSENT TONGUES by Kelwyn Sole:

Not a poem on behalf of the poor

1

The poor are lighter
than a fish-head bone:
and their words, seeming
at times guttural and heavy
in their throats as stones,
blow away on a first breeze
untroubling as dandelions.

The protocols of the rich
fatten, and promise one day
to absolve them also.
It never happens. So
they endure, dazzled
by the hope of a beauty
they think others have,
their feet at the point
of an abyss with no step,
no mirror, just knowledge
of their falling.
Snagged between horizons
and billboards
                       spoken to
by those enormous beings
painted in two dimensions
with arms that terminate
in soap or handshakes
who point the way

in lieu of the tame human
parings of the State who
keep their gatherings
inside closed rooms
                                - those
who perorate, or legislate,
or write on others’ behalf -
in all the places where the poor
never themselves set down
their bums or thumbprints.

2

In a world of money
no one needs to recognise
the palm
not held out
because it keeps
its dignity and purpose:

and, bereft of the function
of pity they provide
for those with wealth,
the final task of the poor
is an expectation
to stay unnoticed:
to remain grateful,
to cause no trouble.

The poor, in fact,
are allowed to provide
no answers of their own:
because, if they do,
their answers finally
are to those questions
those who possess,
or squander life
on power, do not
want to hear.