The Best American Poetry

Cory's Choral Story [by David Yezzi]

I like E. A. Robinson. I really do. No, I mean it. I really like his stuff much of the time. Especially the lyrics. The long poems, not so much (except maybe as sleep aids).  Well, anyway, I want to like him a lot, but sometimes I get put off by a certain tone of . . .  what? Fustiness? Creakiness?

More and more, I’m realizing, though, that it is not always Robinson’s voice I am hearing in the poems, or not just his voice. The more I think about his poems—such as “Reuben Bright” and “Richard Cory”—the more I begin to understand the dramatic nature of his work. (The dramatic element in lyric poetry is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, and you can read more about that here. I hope that this post might serve as an extension of some of the ideas put forward in that earlier essay.)

For my money, “Eros Turannos” is Robinson’s greatest poem. (This is just me talkin’ here.) I love that poem deeply and unequivocally, and I’ve always admired Yvor Winters’s take on it, as adopting the music of W. M. Praed’s vers de société for tragic ends. (In fact, more successfully than Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the poem uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to elevate its subject to devastating dramatic effect.)

The poem is a love story as Gothic horror tale. A woman’s fear of growing old alone is greater than her fear of a man she knows deep down she should refuse. The result is a loveless union, isolation, confusion, and despair. The poem ends with these two stanzas:

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a house

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been

   Or what they are, or would be.

 

Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

The “we” is a choral voice (a dramatic voice!) that Robinson uses often and which lends his poetry its particular social cast. Here is how the poet and critic D. H. Tracy describes the effect, from an essay in Contemporary Poetry Review:

Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian “we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation, or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it. . . .”

Really brilliant, this. And a real key to Robinson’s poems. In fact, it was when I began thinking about the choral voice in Robinson that I came to better understand one of Robinson’s most burnished chestnuts, “Richard Cory,” a poem that I respected but never truly warmed to.

BAPsters will, of course, know the poem, but here it is for reference:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

What has always bothered me about this poem was how seemingly pat its theme was, i.e., Ah, life! How sad that even the man who has everything in the eyes of the world cannot be happy with his lot. It seemed not so much tragic as moralizing somehow, and this pat theme seemed to me to dampen its humanity. 

The poem has always been popular (Robinson, remember, was awarded three Pulitzers, only one fewer than Frost!), adapted as a folk song by Simon and Garfunkel:

 

 

 

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be

Richard Cory.

The S&G version actually gets at something vital about the poem (though it in no way rivals the beauty of Robinson’s verse-making—song lyrics are a different sort of thing). The chorus is sung from the point of view of a townsperson of Tillbury, the imagined village (based on Gardiner, Maine), where many of his poems are set. (The "I" takes on a choral quality, sung in harmony by S and G.)

 

 

 

 

(I am told that Robinson once lived in this bell tower overlooking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.)

In fact, I see now the poem is far more tragic and horrible than I first imagined, and the way in to this new, darker understanding is through the choral voice in the poem. Look at the nasty stuff the townspeople say:

We people on the pavement looked at him

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

Then consider the tone of: “And he was rich – yes, richer than a king.” Hear the bitter dig behind the repetition and that word king? Dang! If I was Richard Cory and everyone’s envious eyes (the eyes of the world!) were on me all the time, I might not make a good end either. Tracy’s observation about Robinson's poems implicating the reader is exactly right: we are the “We.” We drove Richard Cory to this. Just as we (the town, society) helped drive the blinded woman down the steps at the end of "Eros Turannos" (or so, I believe, it is suggested). 

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

Driven down by themselves? Perhaps. But we are the abettors. Robinson's poems are about us every bit as much as they are about these sorry denizens of the Vacation State. Robinson, it turns out, was a freaking genius of poetry's dramatic context, if only we tune our ears to hear it. I knew I liked him. But, now, like one of the Tillburyites who envied Richard Cory, I hate him, too.

"How to Write a Love Poem"- Part 1 [by Stephanie Paterik]

Arguably the biggest occupational hazard of the poet is that sooner or later, your lover will request a love poem.

If you are either very cocky or very skilled, you might whip out a fountain pen and write a fitting ode upon a cocktail napkin.

But if you possess the slightest doubt about your abilities, or about the notion of "love poems" in general, you might quiver in your oxfords.  

Most writers I know agree the love poem is the hardest to write. Breakup poems? Child's work. Meditations on death? No problem. Pastoral portraits and comic scenarios? They can be rendered with fair effort. But the love poem risks sentimentality, vulnerability, cliché -- and worst of all, the probability of falling short in its attempt to capture the enormity of the emotion.

For all of these reasons, love poems impress and intimidate the heck out of me. So on the eve of March, an hour before kissing February good-bye, I find myself researching the history of love poems, revisiting modern favorites and distilling some lessons from them all.

Lesson No. 1: Follow Clichés to their Roots

When I think of love poems, the verse that pops into my head is "roses are red / violets are blue." It's inevitable, and it makes me equate all love-y verse with shallow greeting cards. Who wants any part of that? 

But as is the case with so many clichés, this flower stems from an interesting seed. 

Edmund Spenser (pictured at the top) immortalized the image of red roses and blue violets in 1590 with his epic poem, The Faerie Queene:

 

It was upon a Sommers shynie day,

When Titan faire his beames did display,

In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew,

She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowers, that in the forrest grew.

In the following stanzas, Chrysogone falls asleep in the grass and is impregnated by sunbeams, leading to the birth of faerie twins. The goddesses Venus and Diana steal the newborns. Not exactly the stuff of greeting cards!

Spenser was more concerned with supporting Queen Elizabeth I and the Reformation than writing a transcendent love poem. But the sensuality in his verse is far more inspiring than the versions that arrived centuries later.

He's also known for "Amoretti," a sonnet cycle exploring his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. She's rendered as his practical if not unromantic counterpoint, which gives the poems a tantalizing tension. In the sonnet "One Day I Wrote her Name," Spenser writes: 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

 But came the waves and washed it away:

 Again I wrote it with a second hand,

 But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

 "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

 A mortal thing so to immortalize;

 For I myself shall like to this decay,

 And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

(If you're interested in Spenser, you'll enjoy this thorough biography over at the Poetry Foundation.)

So how did Spenser's roses and violets make their way to us? Two hundred years after he penned the lines, they appeared in a collection of English nursery rhymes called Gammer Gurton's Garland:

 

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet, and so are you.

Thou are my love and I am thine;

I drew thee to my Valentine:

The lot was cast and then I drew,

And Fortune said it shou'd be you. 

 

And a hundred years after that, in 1862, the image swam the English channel to appear in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, in which Fantine sings "violets are blue, roses are red / violets are blue, I love my loves." It sounds lovely in French, which gives us the pleasurable slant rhyme: 

 

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,

Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.

So our Valentine cliché has an alluring literary tradition, and simply knowing that helps me embrace the love poem a little more. Next Thursday, I'll share some favorite love poems and lessons from current writers. 

Until then, xo February.

***

Prompt: Find a love poem you admire, be it classic or modern, and determine what makes it successful. Next week - some prompts to help write one.

Images: "Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen" by Henry Fuseli (middle) and 1901 edition of Mother Goose (bottom).

Cool Titles: is 5 (by Jenny Factor)

I've been thinking lately about Cool. About cool before the concept of cool. Or before the cool people of today knew about the concept of Cool because we weren't born yet. Take E.E. Cummings in 1926, for instance, entitling his third book of poetry, in titling his fifth book as book

is 5

which must surely have been among the coolest titles of poetry books published in 1926, or in any other year for that matter. 

Which is why I want to take a moment to say that I really like E.E. Cummings. 

He makes verbs out of typography. He metaphors the hell out of grammar. He lets a lot of air into his sentences. (Or philosophy. Or science. Or thought. Or ego. Iconoclasm. Or humility. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm just not seeing him clearly. Readers: your thoughts?)

What he does do is karate chop the line breaks and even whole/holey/un-whole words--a trait for which he has been both praised and lambasted. (Edmund Wilson called his punctuation "hideous".)

It's true! Sure, we probably knew his poems sounded good. But did you ever wonder why? One story I can tell you about E.E. Cummings is that he was apparently hiding a pocketful of meters and a burial plot of sonnets inside his outwardly-apparent "free verse". Marilyn Hacker broke the news to me in a conventional sonnet class. I was 25 years old and floored. Instead of "Where's Waldo?", poets with a hankering to do so, could read swaths of Cummings and ask, "Where's the buried sonnet?" She showed me some secret examples. 

The Poetry Foundation web site's bio of Cummings seems to point toward confirming this. From the age of 8 to 22, Cummings practiced writing in traditional verseform. So it's no wonder, no puzzle, and no surprise that a deep canon hovered under the cannon he carried back inside his heart and mind and experience from the first world war (where, incidentally, he hung out with Pablo P. and other avant garde artists).

E.E. Cummings: a stealth formalist. 

And yet, also, paradoxically, a rebel. Adam Kirsch's terrific exploration of Cummings in The Harvard Review shows a man who contained (and complained) these complexities. 

Who else deserves the Too Cool for School award for titles of poetry books? 

Full Stage and a Full House at the BAP Launch Reading

Mark Doty at the Lecturn (Photo (c) Gabriel Don)

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)

 

Marie Ponsot Named NYC Literary Legend [by Catherine Woodard]

In the New York Botanical Garden in November, Marie Ponsot paused in front of a towering tree. She recalled as a little girl she delighted her mother with the observation that trees are just like big bunches of flowers.

That power of pause, of reflection transformed with language, often with a jolt of joy (or pain), makes Marie Ponsot, 91, an inaugural NYC Literary Legend. She is a poet who sees and seizes the lyric moment in her work and in her life.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the 2012 Literary Honors Thursday. Joining Ponsot, were Walter Dean Myers for children’s literature, Paul Auster for fiction, Roz Chast for humor, Robert Silvers for literary life and Robert Caro for nonfiction.

“The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,” asserts the poem Ponsot read at the Gracie Mansion ceremony. That poem, "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo," ends with these four lines: “Late at night when my outdoors is/indoors, I picture clouds again:/Come to mind, cloud./Come to cloud, mind.”

Mother to seven, mentor to many, Ponsot writes and teaches with a child’s delight in exploration. But this child reads Latin, translates French and has published numerous poetry collections. The most recent are Easy (2009), Springing (2002) and The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Among many honors, Ponsot holds the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for lifetime achievement and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. 

Professor emerita of English at Queens College, CUNY, Ponsot also has taught in national and international graduate programs. With colleague Rosemary Deen, Ponsot wrote Beat Not the Poor Desk. This revolutionary text for effective writing teaching won the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. Ponsot still teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of 92^nd Street Y and at The New School.

The city ceremony capped a week of Ponsot appreciation that began Monday at the KGB Bar in the East Village. She first read “TV, Evening News,” a poem that begins with a “screenful of chaos” from the war in Afghanistan.

“I don’t know the languages,” the speaker claims, “I safe screen-watch.” But nevertheless Ponsot connects all of history and humanity in the third, six-line stanza: “Achilles is not there, or Joshua either…/My children are thank God not there/any more or less than you and I are not there.”

As a tank takes out a wall, Ponsot subverts a word of worship: “the house genuflects,” and a woman howls in the dust before the camera cuts to the next shot.

Ponsot is seriously Still Against War, her trademark yellow button and the title of two books of poetry by former students from several decades. Jamie Stern, poet, publisher and lawyer, gathered three dozen students at her Tribeca loft Tuesday to read from Still Against War II. And to take a challenge to describe beyond clichés Ponsot’s bright smile and blue eyes, eyes simultaneously piercing and generous.

 “She smiles like she has a secret but one she is happy to let you in,” Michael Bennett said.

“The generosity of the Dalai Lama’s eyes,” offered Elizabeth Coleman.

“Blue laser beams that can zap x-rays or cut glass,” said Jackson Taylor.

In a Ponsot workshop, students do not offer subjective improvements to the poems of others. Instead she draws out rigorous, detailed observations, which inevitably give the poet a notion about what to fix. (I keep on my desk two pithy paragraphs Ponsot wrote about her grandmother’s three-word expression “Mind Yourself Child.” Change the intonation and stress on each word and you too will be thinking about identity in complex ways.)

Still Against War I in 2011 celebrated Ponsot’s 90^th birthday and her recovery from a heart attack, stroke and aphasia the year before. Ponsot got critical rapid care because she had a son call poet Scott Hightower, whose partner is an emergency room doctor.

Imagine a life in which her emergency call is to a fellow poet. “She lives poetry on a scale that is just so elemental,” Hightower said. “Not only as a writing mentor but a teaching mentor.”

In the days before she could speak again, Ponsot was taking inventory in her head of language lost, instinctually poking around for passages she knew in more than one language and for a long time. When she couldn’t recall “The Lord’s Prayer” in English, she tried it in French. When that didn’t work, she remembered a Latin manuscript and from visual memory began to translate it back into English.

While Ponsot lay in intensive care, Sapphire, novelist and poet, snuck in to deliver six small notebooks and pen. Once home, a poet posse of students and friends came by to read and talk about poems regularly to help Ponsot regain lexicon and syntax. Her fluency with language restored, Ponsot read new poems as well as published work at Monday’s reading.

As she told a group of high school poetry students in the Bronx in November, even in the hospital she followed the only rule she’s ever made for herself about writing – do it at least 10 minutes every day. “If I could do that with seven children, so can you,” Ponsot said.

Then to their surprise, 15 minutes into the class they’d expected to be a lecture and reading from a master, Ponsot leaned forward and announced “My dears, let’s hear your poems.”

One by one, they read while Ponsot listened as intently as she watches trees and clouds and children and wars and words.

Catherine Woodard wrote “Secret of Tomato” as a tribute to Ponsot and appears in both Still Against War volumes. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. She worked to restore Poetry in Motion to the NYC subways and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia. In 2011, she was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a featured poet at UnshodQuills.com. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from The New School and MS in journalism from Columbia University. 

 

Stephen Crane: American Poet (by Jenny Factor)

Today is the opening day for millions of baseball fans--including me. (This poet cheers for the Dodgers.)

Another fan of baseball, Stephen Crane (b. 1891 in New York, and shown above as a Syracuse University undergraduate), made a name as a journalist, and wrote novels, short-stories, and poetry at the turn of a prior century. Here is a brief biography of the artist--and his influential friends--thinkers such as H.G. Wells and Henry James. And here is some information on his baseball-loving Syracuse days. And here is a wonderful Best American blog post on his birthday in November. 

A highschool sophomore I know sent me the following poem; in fact, it is his favorite early American poem. Stephen Crane’s “’Truth,’ Said a Traveller” he wrote, "presents two conflicting themes, first that truth is an achievable phenomenon, and second that it is mysterious and unreachable, a shifting, relative, and utterly mysterious entity." 

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.

In his fascinating 1975 essay, "The Hole in the Bucket", (Coming into the Country, University of Michigan Press) John Haines claims that  "American poetry lacks ideas." He continues, "Like all large statements, this one covers a lot of ground and leaves plenty of room for error". Was Haines responding to a lack he felt in 1975 that previous generations of American poetry had not shared? Yes, he seems to be!

However, it is precisely a poetry of ideas that I think we are beginning to see, more and more, in some of recent contemporary poetry...sinuous, philosophical long poems. Quirky philosophical sonnets. Experimental leaps and fancies that hold ideas central and foremost. Ben Lerner. Fanny Howe. Olena Kalytiak Davis. Claudia Rankine. Dan Beachy-Quick. Ben Doller. Douglas Kearney. Paisley Rekdal. And on and on.

Thanks, Stephen Crane. Thanks, John Haines. 

Introducing . . . . Kevin Young at the 92nd Street Y March 26, 2012

Ed note:  Kevin Young gave wonderful reading on Monday at the 92nd Street Y here in NYC. He read new poems plus selections from his books, which you can buy here.  Here's David Lehman's introduction:

Good evening. It gives me enormous pleasure to introduce this reading by Kevin Young, for in addition to admiring his work as an editor, a curator, a writer, and above all a poet, I have been lucky enough to collaborate with him on two very different projects, about which I will leave you in momentary suspense while I list a few of his accomplishments, as is customary on such an occasion.

By his titles you shall know him. Kevin Young  is the  author of books of poetry entitled Dear Darkness, For the Confederate Dead, Jelly Roll: A Blues, and Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels – and as the list suggests the history and culture of black Americans figures very significantly in his creative and professional work. He has a natural flair for the noir in more than one sense. I first encountered Kevin Young when he was writing film noir poems and editing his  turn-of-the-century anthology Giant Steps named in honor of a jazz composition by John Coltrane and introducing us to “a cross-section of cutting-edge black writers,” including, among the poets, Elizabeth Alexander, Terrance Hayes, Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey. Nothing if nor prolific, Kevin has edited anthologies of jazz poems, blues poems, and a selected edition of John Berryman, the white poet who dared to adopt a persona in blackface for his most original work, The Dream Songs.

Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, Young’s 2011 collection, is characteristically greater than the sum of its parts; it is unified in tone, style, subject matter, and ambition. Young comes at you in the form of a minstrel show in one poem, a hymn in another, proverbs and prayers, diary entries and letters, to look at the 1839 slave-ship mutiny with the multiple perspectives the truth calls for. And at the same time he was writing Ardency he was editing The Art of Losing, an anthology of poems of grief and healing. The elegiac impulse is strong in his own recent poems, such as the brilliant selection chosen by Langdon Hammer for the current issue of The American Scholar. These are poems that deal with that gravest of one-time events in the life of a man, the death of his father. In such a one as “Wintering,” the palpable chill of death makes the poet wish “to be warm -- & worn -- // like the quilt my grandmother / must have made, one side / a patchwork of color -- // blues, green like the underside / of a leaf – the other / an old pattern of the dolls // of the world, never cut out / but sewn whole – if the world / were Scotsmen & sailors // in traditional uniforms.” The quilt as a metonymy for art is what turns metaphor into truth. Mourning “is just / a moment, many, // grief the long betrothal / beyond. Grief what / we wed, ringing us.”

            The first time Kevin Young and I collaborated was on January 4, 2007, when we agreed to take part in what Ken Gordon, of Quickmuse.com, called a “special serial agon.” Kevin and I were given four prompts and asked to write poems in response, with a limit of fifteen minutes per prompt, and with each keystroke preserved in real-time. Among the prompts was a quote from the then-recently deceased James Brown: “The one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing.” We wrote poems based on the line, which both of us endorsed, with qualification and elaboration, and I was delighted to hear the quotation once again at a reading Kevin gave from his new award-winning prose book, The Grey Album. On that same day we also wrote poems prompted by quotes from or about three other notables who had just died, Saddam Hussein, Gerald Ford, and Robert Altman. You’ll find it on the net: go to Quickmuse. Our poems also appeared in New American Writing.

            In contrast to that improvisatory collaboration of simultaneous verse-making, the second time Kevin and I worked on a project together was the year he made the selections as the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2011, of which we are both I think justly proud.  During that period we met, either by plan or serendipitously, at a Boston hotel, a New York art gallery, a London airport, and a café off an Atlanta road named after the fellow who pursued the Fountain of Youth and discovered Florida instead. It was a pleasure to work with him – and to celebrate life and art with this man of extraordinary intelligence, energy, ambition, and a contagious joie de vivre, a particular joy in living that stands behind even the darkest of his elegies.

                                         -- David Lehman

If it's February, it must be Gertrude and Alice [by Stacey Harwood]

 

 

For the past several years, I've been buying the Studio Hinrichs 365 Typography Calendar from Ken Night Design. The supersize version is worth the price because when it's mounted on the inside of the front door I can read it from just about anywhere in the living and dining room.  Plus, it's attractive.  Each edition features 12 unique typefaces - one for each month; many are not commercially available - with a brief explanation of why the font is distinctive and a biography of each type's designer.  

I just removed January to expose February (above) and am disappointed that February is a short month because I'm wild about designer/artist Ward Schumaker's contribution to 2012.  He came up with "Gertrude-and-Alice"  while working on illustrations for “Paris France,” his book on Gertrude Stein.  In keeping with his artistic style, he combined brushed letters and hand-cut paper characters. Schumaker says that he imagined that the heavy brush strokes represented the large and ebullient Gertrude Stein, while the delicate hand-cut paper pieces represented the thin and prickly Alice B. Toklas.

A quick Google search took me to Schumaker's own blog and website, where one can see more of his fine work. Some of it may look familiar; Schumaker's illustrations have appeared in many popular magazines and newspapers.  

Here's an image of Gertrude Stein from "Paris France":

 

And here on his blog you'll find another series inspired by Stein.  I want to get my hands on a copy of his Two Kitchens in Provence by M.F.K Fisher.  Beautiful!

In a recent post, Schumaker reports that he's just landed in New York City, where he'll live for a year. Welcome! 

-- sdh

Paddy Kavanagh’s “A Christmas Childhood” (Terence Winch)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) continues to inspire conflicting feelings and opinions. John Nemo, writing in The Dictionary of Irish Literature, puts it this way: “His followers, a varied but vocal group, speak of him admiringly as an important force in Irish letters, second only to Yeats. His detractors, fewer in number but every bit as vocal, dismiss him as a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant who disrupted rather than advanced the development of modern literature.”  As a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant myself, I will take my place among Kavanagh’s followers.

One of his most ardent admirers was my old friend James Liddy, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee until his death in 2008. Many years ago (in the ‘70s sometime), James sent me a copy of an Irish journal called The Lace Curtain, which included his “Open Letter to the Young about Patrick Kavanagh.” Describing Kavanagh’s work (and, really, his own as well), Liddy writes, “Or there is a poetry in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”

Kavanagh brings that emotional intelligence, I think, to “A Christmas Childhood,”  a poem one encounters regularly this time of year in Irish circles on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an Irish accordion player, I relish the mention of his father’s melodeon (pronounced melojin), which is a single-row button accordion.  

The poem introduces us to the thrumming imagination of a six-year-old Irish farmboy, ca. 1910, who is perfectly in tune with the magical world around him.

 

A Christmas Childhood

by Patrick Kavanagh

                           I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

 

                           II

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon. The Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade.
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At his wedding in April 1967; Kavanagh died in November of that year.

One final note: Kavanagh’s best-known poem is probably “On Raglan Road,” which was written to the tune of an old march called “The Dawning of the Day.”  Many singers have recorded the song since the ‘60s, including Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor.