The Best American Poetry

Jorie Graham at the New School [by Philip Brunst]

On Wednesday, October 3^rd, fresh off her reception of the prestigious, 2012 Forward Prize, and in front of an eager, restless, crowded room at the New School, Jorie Graham read, with fervor and fluidity, from her new book Place.

The Poetry Foundation is not alone is regarding the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard professor as "perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation,” and on Wednesday night one saw (and heard) why. Graham read three fairly long poems from Place, “On the Virtue of the Dead Tree,” “Treadmill,” and “Lapse, Summer Solstice 1983, Iowa City,” the last, a poem about—though “about” is a term she distrusts —the experience and memory of pushing her then-infant daughter on a swing for the first time.

One of the most striking features of Graham’s poems is her use of rhythm. Each poem is harnessed or allowed to run free, gathering at times a seemingly unstoppable momentum. In “On the Virtue of the Dead Tree” hard and soft accents mix the tempo in almost every line. In “Treadmill” the coming, arriving, and waiting of death moves the poem forward with unshakeable urgency, while in “Lapse” the ups and downs are not only in the motion of the swing and the exertion of pushing it, but in the feelings of the young (and then older) mother’s hopes and fears.

After her captivating reading, the poet sat down with moderator and New School faculty member Honor Moore for a Q&A. Graham answered questions from the audience that ranged from the use of memory in writing poetry, the poet’s struggle to get her Harvard students to hear a bird sing on the way to an early-morning class, the difference between  the “subject” of a poem and its content, and the challenge writers face to find a thread between the present and the distant future, apart from Hollywood films.

And if you missed the event, or just didn’t get enough, you can always hear some more poems -- Philip Brunst

Jorie Graham Wins Forward Prize in the UK!

Jorie Graham -- the guest editor of the 1990 edition of The Best American Poetry -- has been named the winner of the 2012 Forward prize in Great Britain, which is a really big deal over there, so the timing is perfect:

Come to the New School (room 510 of 66 West 12 Street) at 6:30 tomorrow, 3 October 2012, for the poetry forum with Jorie Graham (moderated by Honor Moore, spomsored by the New School Writing Program.

You can read about the Forward Prize and Graham's triumph here.  From the Guardian account here are the first grafs:

<<<
Jorie Graham has become the first American woman ever to win one of the UK's most prestigious poetry accolades, the Forward prize for best collection, beating Oxford's professor of poetry Geoffrey Hill to take the £10,000 award.

Graham has won the Pulitzer Prize for her poetry in the US, where the Poetry Foundation has called her "perhaps the most celebrated poet of the American post-war generation", but she is perhaps less well-known than some of her American contemporaries in the UK. The Forward judges expressed their hope that her win this evening for her 12th collection, Place, would find her "startling, powerful" poetry a wider readership in the UK.
>>>

Poetry Forum: David St. John and Anna Journey Tuesday, October 9, 6:30 p.m. 66 West 12th Street, room 510

Poets David St. John and Anna Journey will join moderator David Lehman, for what promises to be a great event on Tuesday, October 9^th at the New School. David St. John’s new book The Auroras (Harper) is the first collection of new poems in eight years from the National Book Award finalist, while Anna Journey’s collection, Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press) will be released next year.

David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the George Drury Smith Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition to The Auroras, David St. John is the author of ten collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), as well as a volume of essays, interviews, and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is the co-editor, with Cole Swensen, of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. He teaches in The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing at The University of Southern California and lives in Venice Beach.

 

(c) Stephanie Diani

Anna Journey is the author of two collections of poetry: Vulgar Remedies (Louisiana State University Press, 2013) and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She received a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California.

 

 

Poetry Forum: Jorie Graham Wednesday, October 3, 6:30 p.m. The New School, 66 West 12th Street, room 510

Jorie Graham's most recent book of poems, Place, was published last spring. She is the author of numerous other collections including Sea Change, Overlord, Swarm, and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language and The Best American Poetry (1990). Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. She taught for many years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she also received her MFA in poetry. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. Find out more about Jorie Graham here.

Moderated by Honor Moore, faculty, the School of Writing, The New School for Public Engagement

Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Claire Bateman

 

     Somehow, Sunday seems an appropriate day to present this poem by Claire Bateman, a fine and under-recognized poet from Greenville, South Carolina, with six books to her name: Coronology (2009); Leap (2005);  Clumsy (2003); Friction (1998); At the Funeral of the Ether (1998);  and The Bicycle Slow Race (1991).  We often hear the word quirky applied to contemporary poets (just glance at five random blurbs, you’re sure to find quirky), but perhaps no one writing today inhabits the word quite as fully as Bateman.  The premises of her poems are apparently beamed into the atmosphere at a slant from another, logically slippery dimension -- yet once you step inside, life there seems more cogent, more comprehensible, more carefully thought out than the one you’re turning her pages in.   “Unearthing the Sky” first appeared in New Ohio Review’s third issue, Spring 2008.   I love the way Bateman will seize on an idea and pursue it all the way in the most natural, credible terms.  The excavation draws all kinds from the woodwork – not just the genetically engineered ants that chew up the undissolved stitches, but the vandals (“long-distance pissers”), artists, evangelists, the full spectrum of fanatics and romantics, and yes, even corporate representatives.  She has so thoroughly (I want to say accurately) imagined the literal dilapidation of the sky, the media attention, the complicated restorative procedures and precautions and pitfalls, the responses of onlookers and the aftermath, that we readers almost forget that the broken body of the sky is figuring forth a whole cornucopia of ideals that our civilization has chosen by turns to pillage, smudge, neglect, batter.  Almost, I say.   What follows is a deft and intelligent poem that may well be our century’s companion poem to Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur.” 

 - - - - - - -

Unearthing the Sky

 

It was filthy, of course,

with red clay streaks & embedded chips of loam,

as well as boulder-scored, chipped,

and even fractured in places,

a great big glorious suffering thing

further damaged

by the very means of its rescue,

the violence of pulleys & clamps.

Areas that had been dredged from under water

were warped & bowed

where detonation had been necessary

to dislodge them.

 

But there it was for everyone to behold.

Toddlers wearing tiny government-issued hard hats

were told, Look, honey, it’s the sky!

Older children were bussed on field trips to the dig site

where yellow tape kept them from the rim

so that the sign could continue to announce,

DROWNINGS AT THIS SITE: 0.

Round-the-clock floodlights discouraged those

who might have attempted to make their mark

on the sky’s broken body --

graffiti artists & would-be inscribers of the Ten Commandments,

corporate representatives & long-distance pissers,

as well as those who longed to plunge into it --

scuba divers, suicides, mystics, & lovers.

 

Everything was so lit-up, in fact,

that the sky would have been glad

of some darkness,

but it was not yet well enough

to generate nighttime & other weathers.

There had to be years of repair work

with everything from lasers to sandpaper,

tiny camel’s-hair brushes to welding torches.

Millions of stitches, hand-sewn

with microsuturing needles,

zigzagged across the surface

to eventually either dissolve

or be severed by army ants

genetically engineered to find them tasty.

The surgeons injected implants

of liquid mercury, black diamond plasma,

& other substances whose identities

they were not at liberty to disclose.

 

But at last, the sky was ready.

After all it had been through,

was it still the sky it had once been?

Not exactly, but were not the people

historically damaged as well --

and wasn’t there the matter

of loyalty?

So the various bolts, pegs, & screws

were removed,

releasing the sky at last

into its own silence.

Everyone watched as it rose,

a little shaky at first, but soon,

nearly as translucent, dizzying,

dimensionless, disturbing, etc.

as they’d anticipated.

 

When asked why she wept,

one woman could say only,

For something so heavy, it seemed

almost painfully light.

Abandoned, the work site still yawns

like the morning after Christmas.

 

- - - - - - -

Claire Bateman – remember the name!  See you next week.  (JAR)

 

Now and Then: Things to do in NYC April 16-21

Saturday April 21, 2012, 3:30-5:30 PM:  Poetry & Cocktails  To celebrate National you-know-what (hint: April), the acclaimed East Village restaurant Back 40 is once again hosting a poetry/cocktail slam, for which it has enlisted some of New York's most inventive chemists to create cocktails inspired by their favorite poetry.  The great slam impresario, poet Bob Holman will raise each glass and conjure the poem that inspired its contents. We were there last year, we'll be there this year.  For God's sake--hock and soda water!

For more information and to purchase tickets go here.

-- sdh

Jennifer L. Knox Guest Blogger April 1-7

This week we welcome back Jennifer L. Knox as our guest blogger.  Jennifer’s latest book of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, is available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and four times in The Best American Poetry series. She is working on her first novel. Find out more about Jennifer here and follow her on twitter @jenniferlknox.

Welcome, Jennifer.

 

In other news . . .

April 3, 2012 6:30 p.m.:  Poetry Forum with Jill Alexander Essbaum
The New School
66 West 12th Street, room 510, New York, NY

Jill Alexander Essbaum is author of numerous books of poetry, including The Devastation, Necropolis, Oh Forbidden, Harlot, and Heaven, which won the 1999 Bakeless Prize. She is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has served as an editor for the online journal ANTI- and for the Nanopress Project.

Moderated by David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the School of Writing.
More information here.

Will the Real Poet Please Stand Up? by Caroline Malone

My first impression of a poet came from listening to my mother and her friends talk about their attempts at being hipsters in high school. Apparently, my mother was not aware that the dark sunglasses, black turtleneck sweaters, berets and bongoes came straight from Madison Avenue and Hollywood. In fact, the 1958 B-movie High School Confidential seemed to be a major reference point for the youth of Oak Ridge High School. In the movie, Phillipa Fallon plays a beat poetess who performs at The Drag, a teen hangout. As Poetess recites her verse, a band interjects snatches of ragtime.

"My old man was a bread stasher all his life.
He never got fat. He wound up with a used car,
a 17 inch screen and arthritis.
Tomorrow is a drag, man.
Tomorrow is a king sized bust.
They cried ‘put down pot,’ ‘don’t think a lot,’ for what?
Time, how much? And what to do with it.
Sleep, man, and you might wake up digging the whole
human race giving itself three days to get out.
Tomorrow is a drag, pops, the future is a flake.
I had a canary who couldn’t sing.
I had a cat who let me share my pad with her.
I bought a dog that killed the cat who ate the canary.
What is truth?"

Since I was not able to see High School Confidential until my early thirties, the image of the poet influenced me via my mother's interpretation: What she found pertinent became my experience. But now I giggle when I read the poem from the film and wonder how many teenagers took it to heart.

The stereotype of the beat poet was not confined to the big screen. As an adolescent, I constantly watched reruns of the 1960s television show The Munsters. In one episode, Herman Munster improvises a poem for the guests of his beatnik party. With earnest innocence and a nervous smile, Herman speaks:

"Ibbitty bibbitty, sibbity sab,
Ibbitty bibbitty, canal boat.
Dictionary. Down the ferry."

The poem continues with nursery rhyme and novelty song references, and the young, hip guests, dressed in black jumpers and trousers, are delighted. Albeit The Munsters was a comedy, I somehow interpreted the beatnik episode as a truthful portrayal of a poet. Of course, Herman's poem makes no sense in and of itself; the audience of hipsters is responsible for attributing meaning to the words. For them, the poem is a deep commentary on the establishment. For a ten year old, the poem sounded like nonsense but the reception of it by the audience infused the words with a mysterious meaning.

More recently, in Billy Bob Thornton's film Sling Blade (1996), the character Morris writes lyrics for a song that seem to be descended from beatnik genes. In the scene, redneck Morris and his band are drinking when they begin to discuss their future as musicians:

Doyle: Morris here is a modern-day poet, kinda like in olden times.
Morris: Yeah, I got a new tune in composition entitled "The Thrill." And it goes somethin' like this: "I stand on the hill, not for a thrill, but for the breath of a fresh kill. Never mind the man who contemplates doin' away with license plates. He stands alone, anyhow, bakin' the cookies of discontent by the heat of the laundromat vent. Leavin' his soul!" Then like in poetry I go dot-dot-dot, you know, kinda off center, then I drop down and then I go: "Leavin' his soul! And partin' the waters of the medulla oblongata of - -brrrrrr! - -mankind!" That was a damn good song, wasn't it Doyle?

Of course, Thornton intends the men in the band to be laughable, but I wonder how many viewers might find that the image is an accurate portrayal of a poet.

I imagine my preoccupation here is a concern about what other people think about poets, but it could also be that I think posturing is ugly. I'm not sure what a poet is supposed to look or sound like, but I do know that a stylized version of a bard is not what I trust.

The Crazy Cat Lady [by Caroline Malone]

For Christmas, a good friend gave me a Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure. On the cover of the box in neon orange letters is stamped the question “How many cats do you have?” Five, I answered to myself and smiled knowing that instead of an impersonal gift card, my friend had put some thought into the gift: I'm special, I thought. Initially, I couldn’t wait to tear open the package and arrange my new little family on my desk at work. There are six varieties of felines, ranging from the menacing solid-black to the primarily white Siamese. And of course, there is their mistress, the Crazy Cat Lady, donned in her military green bathrobe with matching headband, blue plaid pajama bottoms, and forest green house slippers. Did she just get out of bed? Yes and no. She never leaves the house. But wait! What is that poking out of her robe pocket? Out both sides of her shoulder length hair? Cats. So, she has eight, not six. I adore cats. I always have loved them. And once in awhile, I joke with friends that one day I will indeed become Crazy Cat Lady. I think it’s safe to assume she needs no introductions, but in case there is the one soul reading this who is clueless to the Crazy Cat Lady’s existence, I will briefly summarize a typical day in the life of this unique woman. She wakes, feeds cats, brushes cats, strokes cats, talks to cats, watches cats, plays with cats, sings to cats, and oh, cleans litter boxes. In return, this mighty species provides her with companionship and occasional entertainment, on its terms, naturally.

But let’s move on to my fascination with the Crazy Cat Lady. Earlier, I wrote that I jokingly predict I will assume the identity of the Crazy Cat Lady. Yes, I love cats. I have five cats. Presently, my elderly mother lives me, a Crazy Cat Lady living condition I previously failed to mention. But I really don’t spend all of my time with my cats or any felines. When I am home, all of my cats are home, so needless to say, sharing the same space does make us rather intimate. There is a dog on the premises, which I think goes against the Crazy Cat Lady creed: nothing before or after cats shall I know. And I love my dog. I do leave my house, every damn day. And by god I do change out of my military green bathrobe every day as well. So, what’s the problem? I should be happy with my gift. I am. I cherish my gift. Find it funny. Endearing. And I'll admit, while holiday shopping, I saw the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure in my local independent bookstore and almost bought one for myself. But it’s different when someone else buys you this gift. At least it was a friend and not the neighbor who recently moved in next door and knows nothing of you except that you own a military green bathrobe and five cats. But I am most decidedly not the Crazy Cat Lady, now or ever. To quote Edie Beale, "Raccoons and cats become a little bit boring. I mean for too long a time."

Then why all the thought about her?

A few nights ago I watched for the first time the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens by cinéma vérité artists Albert and David Maysles. I had some idea of what I was getting into, but after the viewing, I had to be alone, to process the images and to tease out all I was feeling. Grey Gardens of East Hampton was home to Edith Bouvier Beale, a.k.a. Big Edie, and her daughter, Little Edie. If the name Bouvier sounds familiar, it should; the two women were aunt and cousin to Jackie O. In a desperate state of disrepair, the 28-room mansion was close to being condemned in 1973 due to Suffolk County Health Department codes violations when Jackie O hired industrial cleaners to tidy up the place. The Edies lived in seclusion for over 20 years until the elder Edie died in 1977. Little Edie passed in 2002. While they were alive, mother and daughter spent almost every waking moment together, cooking corn on the cob in Big Eddie’s bedroom and subsisting mainly on ice cream and pate. Until reporters began stalking her, Little Edie spent time on the beach, sunning and swimming. Otherwise, the ladies lived together in the past, Little Edie rehearsing her dance moves, and both ladies singing tunes from their days as socialites in New York of the 1930s, reminiscing over old photographs of themselves. Both women had dreams of starring on stage. And of course, there were the cats. Cats coming and going when they pleased, using the home as they pleased, being served luncheon by Little Edie at the behest of her mother. Wall to wall cats, reproducing at their pleasure.

Both women were drop dead gorgeous; Little Edie’s beauty far surpassed that of Jackie O’s. And they were freaks. That’s why I like them. Their men betrayed them early on. Although, the legend is that Little Edie in her twenties set her hair on fire to ensure no man would ever want to marry her. They were talented, intelligent, creative women who could act every part except that which their aristocratic family wanted them to master. As Little Edie once said, "They can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday.” Their inheritance was denied. In later years, when both women were appreciated by artists such as Andy Warhol, many regarded Little Edie as a fashion icon and philosopher, a court jester of sorts.

After allowing these women to live in me for a week, I feel protective of them. I imagine many familiar with the Beale's story judge the women and work hard to pinpoint their pathology. Dysfunctional, co-dependent, and all of those other psycho-diagnostic terms often used to “understand” people. But even in their fragmented world, I see Big and Little Edie not only as survivors but as creators; who in this world is perfectly adjusted? Perhaps to be complete is to be inhuman.

Why my fascination? To me, the story sounds perhaps a little familiar, which accounts for my attraction and repulsion, but overwhelmingly attraction. My great aunt Dorothy was often compared to Faulkner’s Miss Emily, although the body in my great aunt’s house was never found. Actually, she ran him off in 1930 when her prayers could not dry him out. For a few years, Dorothy had her own radio show in Chattanooga, Tennessee. She played a beautiful Chopin as well as “acceptable” selections from popular music. When her mother became ill, she told her brothers she would continue to live at home as she always had and nurse their mother. In the late 1950s, Dorothy was an air traffic controller until the stress of the job led to a final meltdown, and she never left the Duane Avenue family mansion again. The past was always alive for her through her music, her photographs, her memories. A past that remained beautiful in her mind.

My family history is rich with the mother-daughter dynamic, but it hasn’t ruined any of us. In 1964, after my father belted her across the face for the last time, my 19 year old mother came home and stayed home. My grandmother threatened to shoot my father if he even came near the block where they lived. She loved as she wanted, lived as she wanted, and although I have always resented her for the ways her lifestyle impacted me, I also admire her and accept that at the time, she had to find some way to breathe. Even with memories of a very often painful and frustrating life, my mother's conversation of late consists of one part present and nine parts past.

As Grey Gardens opens, we see Little Edie on what barely passes as the front lawn of the mansion. She glances into the lens, then away, and back again. Half smiling she reflects, “There is a fine line between the past and the present.” Who decided there are rules for what sustains us? Eccentric, schizophrenic, bi-polar, creative. It might not be so bad to flirt with being the Crazy Cat Lady, at least now and then.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF ENTHUSIASM PART 1 by Brian Bouldrey

1. Humility, Concentration, and Gusto. Okay, Mostly Gusto.

Poetry is a serious subject.  But I am not a serious poet.  I am not a poet at all.  I am a reader of poetry.  Don’t get me wrong: I studied poetry and wrote poetry.  Alan Shapiro was once my mentor, and he wrote on a poem, “Brian, this is a foolish piece of work; you have the attention span of a hyperkinetic three year old.”  I have cobbled this assessment into a career.

But what I lack in seriousness, I make up for with enthusiasm, and this is what my blog intends to address.  We must, all of us, as writers, attend to the form we’ve learned and also try to surpass it, break it.  We must try to surprise and delight.  I talk with other writers about all the rules, grammatical, structural, and legal.  The rule of 3’s, Robert’s Rules of Order, the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.  About the gun on the stage and how it has to go off, about splitting infinitives, about how too much enjambment will only look like free verse.  Avoid—or embrace—the subjunctive mood. A sem icolon is as ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.  Eat your  beets.  Don't feed wild animals marshmallows the way birds feed their young.

 

Santayana once said, “A great work of art must strive toward perfection.” And then he wrote, “And it must fail.”  Perhaps you’ll be appalled to know that I want to speak about poetry in this way.  Victorian writer John Ruskin, in his six tenets of good architecture, interpreted this striving as “Savageness”—a love of rudeness and imperfection.

“The demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”  Ruskin believed very much in the exploratory and playful aspects of art. He believed in something we cannot quantify or map, really, in writing: Enthusiasm.  Which is weird, because every time I see a picture of him, he looks like he just said, “You kids get off my lawn.”

“Enthusiasm” derives from the Greek “enthousiasmos”, that state of inspiration, of being filled or possessed by the god, for which artists might be praised or chastised.  In a more secular application we can still speak of enthusiasm as the condition which combines an artist’s concentration, preoccupation, attentiveness, and excitability.  In social life it is usually called “intensity”, as in, “Damn, he’s so intense.”  It’s a vaguely accusatory description of an artist’s extreme and discomforting alertness.  Ruskin was intense.

Enthusiasm does not excuse lack of talent and craft.  But it has to be present in great writing.  E.M. Forster had something to say about enthusiasm, or rather, his characters had something to say, the one who waltz happily, then sadly, through Italy in Where Angels Fear to Tread.  One evening, the British tourists of that novel decide to go to an amateur opera in the fictional town of Monteriano.  “There was a drop scene, wherein sported many a lady lightly clad, and two more ladies lay along the top of the proscenium to steady a large and pallid clock.  So rich and so appalling was the effect… There is something majestic in the bad taste of Italy; it is not the bad taste of a country which knows no better; it has not the nervous vulgarity of England, or the blinded vulgarity of Germany.  It observes beauty, and chooses to pass it by.  But it attains to beauty’s confidence.  This tiny theater spraddled and swaggered with the best of them, and these ladies with their clock would have nodded to the young men on the ceiling of the Sistine."

This is just the sort of enthusiasm and confidence that seem out of favor in this day and age.  "Enthusiasm", like "amateur" and "fail", is a four-letter word.  But maybe that's because I am shackled in the ivory tower, where amateur is hard to assess or quantify.  So follow me to Ruskin's and Forster's Sistine Chapel with me, which, if not beautiful, attains to beauty's cofidence.  Also, we can look at wild animal attacks and boobies and suchwhat.  In church. I'll explain later  (but look over there.  BOOBIES. In church.  And I think that's the chick from Starbuck's.)