The Best American Poetry

The Year in Review: Easter, and the Christians are at it again, raising the dead. By Jill Alexander Essbaum (April 6, 2012)

  

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

Wait.  Scratch that. 

I’ll be weeping.

Hmm.  No.  That’s not right either.

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

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

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

Easter fucks me up.*

A digression, not particularly brief. Indulge, please:

Indomitable faith isn’t my strong suit.  I’m pretty good at misgiving; doubt’s my specialty.  Trust? A habit I’ve unlearned.  My conviction is never convinced and what assurance I do have is never, but never blessèd.  Therefore my belief in God comes and goes in the manner of a city train: it chugs from Skepticism as if it were a northern suburb and it runs all the way down to Denial, an outlying town at the end of the line.  And while I do indeed disembark at Spirituality Central Station often enough to know which tram will get me to the cathedral without having to look it up in a Frommer’s, at some point I get back on the train.  It’s inevitable.  To do otherwise would to not be Jill.  This is part of the problem. 

But even in doubt, I have always prayed.  I pray, in fact, in the manner that Sugar advises us to write which is like a motherfucker.  I pray like Shaft prays.  Eat your heart out, Roundtree.  Can you dig it?  I pray aloud.  I pray loudly.  I pray all day long, though my self-appointed hour is five am.  I take a pre-dawn walk and speak to the sky.  God’s come to expect me at that time.

(Lest you find me too virtuous for my vestments, I ought to confess it took months for me to train myself to pray for other people beyond ‘andgodpleaseblesssoandsoamen.’  Mostly when I pray I’m thrice a singer’s third syllable solfège: Mi, mi, mi.  Not so proud, not so pious.)

But I pray.  Boldly.  Like how Luther says to sin.  I’m not very nice about it.  I’m adamant.  My most-prayed prayer? What Jacob told the angel. I will not let you go until you bless me.  To which I add: And then, I still won’t let you go.  To which I also add: Dammit.

And so I doubt.  And so I pray.  I’m ok with that.  I don’t think it’s so unusual.  I’m not the only one of us who walks and chews gum at the same time.  This is a tension I’ve held for years.  Tension, you know, is sometimes called for.  A guy-wire must be taut to be of any stabilizing use.  And what this tensity has taught me is that slackening isn’t always safe.  I’m tempted to retell the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, but I won’t.  Except to say: Bridegroom awaits.  Better watch out, not cry, not pout.  Here come da judge.  Here come da judge.

It’s not the doubt, then, that ramrods me at Easter exactly.

It’s Easter’s premise.

You wanna get to Heaven?  Baby, you gots to die.

I don't believe in death. In the manner of a home owner association president who doesn’t support retail zoning.  “I don’t believe in having a Stop-n-Go so close to our school!  The children will buy Red Bull and Slim Jims and ruin their suppers!” she might say.  Likewise, me.  I don’t believe in death anywhere at all.  I don’t sustain it, I didn’t vote for it, I didn’t second the motion, canvas the neighborhood, or circulate a petition.  No one should ever have to die is I what I think.  I reserve the right to think.  I feel this deeply, more profoundly than I will ever be able to articulate.  Slim Jims, Red Bulls, Slurpees and scratch-off lotto tickets my ass.  Take your caskets and your headstones and your lilies and that weird green Astroturf stuff they roll out over by the gravesite so the folding chairs won’t wobble so much and shove those into the subdivision’s clubhouse.  I’m going swimming.

But on the third day, according to the scriptures, He rose again. 

Hmm.

Let’s think about that. 

Nevermind the water, the wine, the walking on the sea, the stilling of the tempest, the healings, the feeding of the thousands from what amounted to a few grocery bags of Lunchables—THIS is the miracle.  THIS is the big show.  THIS is the magic a-happenin’.  We’re in David Blaine territory now.  It’s only been Doug Henning to this point.   

Several months ago (and I will keep this brief) I was seized with a particular terror that was manifesting (sorry, is manifesting) as atheism.  The panic is physical—physics, actually and entirely—and not existential, and it constellates around infinity and the tangible something that nothing is (like, when you take everything away—what’s that?).  I’m not the only poet who has wondered where time goes when it’s over or if God is God, then who made Him?   This isn’t unique to me.  But it’s the center point in a very menacing wheel of ache in perpetual spin.  And so I think often (too often) about these horrors.  If I ever go truly mad, it will be from pondering this.  I promise you.

Because I don’t get it. 

Therefore when Jesus jumps out of his Hobbit hole and yells ‘Surprise!’ all I can do is make like a wail and blubber.

Because I don’t get that, either.

And you kind of need to be on board (at least a little bit) with the whole resurrection scenario in order to be a Christian. 

I want an answer.  I always want an answer.  Not a figurative answer.  A literal one.  A flesh and bone answer.  A wrap my arms around it answer.  I want my parents back.  My dead friends.  Other family I’ve lost.  The people I’ve yet to lose. 

Where did you go, Jesus, I'm dying (ha!) to ask.  How did you return?  Did it hurt getting stuffed back into your body?  Do you remember what happened in between those two events?  Where is everyone else?  Do they want to come back?  Where you gonna put everyone?  What happens if someone’s body got burned?  Whose do they get?  Why do you have to die to live forever? 

Yup, I will cry in church.  I will weep for fear and the fact of all my failures.  What I have done and what, as the order of confession reads, I have left undone (which is much and much). I will cry because when someone says The Lord is risen I will reply He is risen…perhaps?, and that’s not the answer you’re supposed to give.  I cry over orphans and widows.  How it’s indulgent to be so vexed when there are those in the world with traumas more dire than this.  I’ll cry because I wasn’t there when Jesus came back but Thomas was and even he doubted. That ain’t right.  Because I’m 40, and everything I should know better than, I don’t.  Because the only thing that comforts me is God.  But we’ve reached an impasse, us.  Because I feel safer in the dark than I do in the light and there’s something very wrong with that.  I’ll cry because when Mary gets to the tomb she mistakes the risen Christ for the gardener, a detail that’s always bothered me—is Jesus pulling a fast one?  That's not nice.  I’ll cry because I’m noisy and slobbish and hypersexed and a hypochondriac.  Because grey areas are lost on me.  I’ll cry because I’m worried that my Easter dress makes my ass look fat and then I’ll cry because I am a vain, vain woman. Because I’m tired.  And I always bite off more than I can chew.  Because I want you to like me.  I want God to like me.  Because I want God to be.  That’s my new most often supplication: Be there.  As if the absence of God has ears.  Because fuck this shit about Christ giving us our bodies back—don’t take them from us in the first place.  I’ll weep because Easter Vigil is a beautiful service and I carry my emotions just under the skin. Because I hide nothing.  Because I can’t.  I’ll cry for the impossible mechanics of a resurrection and the terrible physics of infinity.

And the dead.  I'll cry for the dead.  The dead.  The dead.  The goddamned dead.  Or is it the godblessed dead?  Which is it, Lord? Tell me.  You tell me now which it is.  I will not let you go until you tell me which it is.

And even then…

Dammit. 

* I actually gave up the f-word (saying it) for Lent.  Or, tried to.  I've found, however, that as Easter nears and I get more tweaked about this stuff... well, I get more tweaked.  There's no other way to put it.  Easter fucks me up.  

The Year in Review: "Famous Blue Raincoat" by Lawrence Epstein (May 24, 2012)

Were the haunting, breathtaking, painful lyrics of “Famous Blue Raincoat” written by almost any other songwriter besides Leonard Cohen, there would be no question about the song’s meaning.  It appears to a straightforward confessional letter about a love triangle between “L. Cohen” his woman “Jane” and their mutual friend, a man with a blue raincoat who has gone to the desert and at one time had a brief affair with Jane.

As such, the song is deeply, almost embarrassingly, personal, an epistolary song about a wounded man who cannot help forgiving the friend.

The overpowering emotion of the song inhibits another look at the lyrics, but Cohen’s autobiography immediately suggests problems with this common interpretation.  Specifically, it is Cohen’s life that is being described both as the narrator and the other man.

It is the friend in the song not “L. Cohen,” the narrator, who has a “famous blue raincoat.” But as the real Cohen noted in liner notes to the 1975 collection The Best of Leonard Cohen, the blue raincoat was his. “I had a good raincoat then, a Burberry I got in London in 1959….It hung more heroically when I took out the lining, and achieved glory when the frayed sleeves were repaired with a little leather.”

In the song, the narrator asks the friend, “Did you ever go clear?” This is a reference to Scientology and its state of “Clear.” Cohen himself for a brief time at least was a Church of Scientology member.

In the song, “L. Cohen” sings to the friend:

“You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene “

But in his concert introduction to Chelsea Hotel #2, Cohen said, “Once upon a time, there was a hotel in New York City. There was an elevator in that hotel. One evening, about three in the morning, I met a young woman in that hotel… I wasn’t looking for her., I was looking for Lili Marlene.” The song “Lili Marlene” (there are variants in the spelling of her name) was a popular love song from World War II although it had been written in Germany in 1915 during the First World War. The song is about a soldier who stands waiting by a lamppost for his love, Lili Marlene. That is, Lili is a symbol of perfect love that has gone away.

But if it is Leonard Cohen who has experienced all that is attributed to the friend, then to whom is “L. Cohen” singing? To ask the question is to answer it. “L. Cohen” is one part of Leonard Cohen singing to another part of Leonard Cohen. Call that other part, the friend in the song, “Leonard Cohen.” “L. Cohen” is faithful to women. “Leonard Cohen” is not. Leonard Cohen, the real songwriter, is writing about a romantic triangle, but he is both men in that triangle. “Jane” is any woman Leonard Cohen has been involved with.

Using this premise, it is possible to work through the song.

It opens with this line: “It's four in the morning, the end of December.” Clearly, given the time of day and year, the setting is cold and dark. It is a line reminiscent of Robert Frost’s famous line in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” an evening the speaker calls

“the darkest evening of the year.” In both cases, the setting represents the speaker’s profound sense of loneliness, of sorrow, of a depression like no other. In this despair “L. Cohen” writes to himself, seeking understanding perhaps even a reconciliation.

And so, in a step toward that reconciliation, “L. Cohen” sings: “I'm writing you now just to see if you're better.” “L. Cohen” wants the two sides to be friends.

“New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening.”

Clinton Street is on the Lower East Side in New York. Leonard Cohen really lived there. Clinton Street is named after the Revolutionary War hero General George Clinton who went on to become the first Governor of New York after independence and, in 1804, the Vice-President of the United States. The area, that is, is drenched in both Jewish and American history and has its own ongoing soundtrack. Unlike “Leonard Cohen,” “L. Cohen seems content, pleased about where he is in life.”

“I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert.”

“Leonard Cohen” is not like “L. Cohen.” He is emotionally apart from other people, far away from them in his mind. A desert is so dry that it can support only very sparse vegetation if any at all. The desert is a perfect metaphor for “Leonard Cohen’s” mind: it is so dry no fertile ideas can grow there. The desert also has multiple religious meanings. In Judaism the Israelites escaping slavery in Egypt stayed in the desert wandering for forty years, but they also received the Torah at Mount Sinai and did eventually get to the land of Israel. In Christianity, Jesus was tempted by the Devil in the Judean desert. The desert is a place of testing and “Leonard Cohen” was just in such a place in his mind.

”You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record.”

This line, of course, has a double meaning. “Living for nothing” can mean living without cost, but it more likely especially means living without a purpose, desperately searching. “L. Cohen,” ever the optimist wants “Leonard Cohen” to mine the despair for material, to keep a record.  

“Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?”

“Jane” is the woman in both their lives. The romantic “Leonard” has given her a memento to remember him by as he left to go on a spiritual exploration.

 “Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder.”

“Leonard’s” depression is aging him. The blue raincoat is a central symbol in the poem. A raincoat is a protection against wet weather, against the storms of life. “Leonard’s” raincoat was famous, because it had always protected him. He was lucky, blessed by life. All had gone well for him as he walked through life. Others got drenched, but he had his coat, his ability to conjure up the right language in the right order and put that language to music. Now, though, the raincoat is torn. It is no longer working as it once did. “Leonard” is getting a bit wet because the raincoat has torn.

 “You'd been to the station to meet every train
And you came home without Lili Marlene.”

Poor “Leonard” has been looking for the perfect woman, but he cannot meet her.  

”And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife.”

 “Leonard,” the great romantic has bothered to give a discarded piece of himself, a flake, to Jane, but, given that it was “Leonard,” they broke up and she returned to the faithful “L. Cohen” but she had been permanently changed. She had discovered that she wasn’t anyone’s attachment. She wasn’t defined just by her relationship to a man.

“Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief.”

“L. Cohen is angry in these lines, mocking “Leonard’s” romantic pose, his Gypsy-like nomadic attitude, but in his case being a nomad meant traveling not from place to place but from woman to woman. “L. Cohen” believes in devotion to one woman for life. “Leonard” does not seem capable of that.

The end of the song is the attempt at reconciliation. “L. Cohen” misses his “brother” despite the fact that this double has killed part of him. “L. Cohen” will not put up a fight if “Leonard” returns.

And so the two sides of Leonard Cohen, the responsible side who gives voice to the song, and the depressed romantic side that is scolded and reprimanded, reach a truce. The songwriter has come, for the moment, to accept a self he’s not entirely comfortable with but recognizes as irreversible.  

As if Cohen’s lyrical achievement weren’t enough in this song, there is a technical poetic point that should be mentioned. A good deal of the song is written in amphibrachs. An amphibrach consists of a stressed syllable which has an unstressed syllable on either side of it. Consider, for example, these two lines. I have underlined the stressed syllables:

It’s four in the morning, the end of December.

I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better.

What better way to write a poem about a love triangle than to have a syllabic triangle with a stressed syllable surrounded by two unstressed syllables.

I’m aware of the 1994 BBC interview in which Cohen expressed ambiguity about the nature of the song, and it’s certainly open to a wide variety of interpretations. That’s what makes Leonard Cohen so mysterious and worthwhile.

The Year in Review: Goodbye WS; Hello to you in this dark evening season by Jennifer Michael Hecht (February 18, 2012)

Dear Bleaders,

I’m sure lots of people reading this blog know we lost a staggeringly great poet, Wisława Szymborska, a few weeks ago. It was Feb 1; she was 88. I can’t help giving us this one of her poems right now.

Museum

Here are plates with no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here’s a fan–where is the maiden’s blush?
Here are swords–where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number…

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper’s silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I’m gone!

Well at 88 she outlasted a lot of dresses. Still, it sucks. No more of those poems.  I had always hoped to meet her. One thing I always Iove about her, evident here, is how much it pissed her off that the world didn't hold meaning in a visible way: how battlegrounds for instance went back to parks, a shudder shared by many but also more subtle situations too, like how you might have been at a railway station one day, even though you weren't, and how odd that it happened anyway, the meetings, the thefts, even without you. "A suitcase disappeared, not mine."

As for me friends, life continues to present itself as a war, a hot war against bleak feelings. Is this feeling thing that is me a biological thing or a thing amid the world with a usage quite askew? I may now know a thing or two about the answers to my offset typesetting, but I also have to dine on a good deal of doubt. What I can see is that life requires a dire pressing forward without leaving a sufficiently convincing trail of flower petals to find one's way back to the beginning.

Instead it's all beginning and all middle, all the time, and you just have to keep rowing even when the scenery changes on one side and stays precisely the same on the other, and other magic tricks of reality. Maybe that's a kind of growing, you're on a riverboat and after some point the inner coast of the river is always the same few houses and yards, while the outer coast starts blurring by peopled with odd beings carrying small electronics. You don't age like leaves falling onto a pile of snow, you age like snow melting off a pile of leaves, you arrive rising up from underneath. 

It's the dark side of the year my bleaders, mid february and dark and rainy with a little spritz of spring here and there. As is my habit, I'm speaking now to those of you fighting the darkness like a war, at all costs, this is the season to fight this thing, the darkness of life, life's rotten disjointment. I'm a believer in stories and stories get into your fiber about what you should be doing and how much it takes to feel alright, and I'm a believer in changing your fiber to fit a better story. It just takes a lot longer than your average hot war. It takes gallons of therapy, of one sort or another. And these gallons are gallions and this war is a land air and water war, and we have to fight for a story that makes it alright. We have to fight our own fiber.

Get some Szymborska, let her rock you from the beyond. Plus, you know, keep up the fight with your dress! Seriously. We need you. I need you, on my side. Don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

Jennifer Michael Hecht is the author of two books of poetry Funny (University of Wisconsin, 2005) and The Next Ancient World (Tupeloe Press, 2001). Her non-fiction books are Doubt: A History (HarperOne, 2004) and The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007).She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University. Her poems have been included in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1999 and 2006.  She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at The New School and is a fellow of The New York Institute for the Humanities. Read more about Jennifer Michael Hecht here. Follow her blog, Dear Fonzie, here. Read her BAP blog posts here.

The Year in Review: The Dogs are Howling, Allen by Laura Orem (February 14, 2012)

An Italian greyhound being "stacked" prior to a going-over by the judge.

The 136rd Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show is going on right now at Madison Square Garden. Purebred dogs of all shapes and sizes compete to be judged "Best in Show" and have their names engraved on the big trophy. It may seem confusing - how do you compare a chihuahua and a Great Dane? - but the dogs aren't really judged against each other. They are measured by their breed standard, compiled by the breed's parent club, which describes the ideal specimen of that dog.   The closer a particular dog gets to perfection, the higher the chance of being chosen "Best in Show."  But there are also those indefinable characteristics of personality and sparkle, that make the judging so exciting. It isn't always about the numbers.

 

2011 Best in Show Winner: Scottish Deerhound Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind. (Hickory to you and me.)

The annual WKC show also introduces new breeds to the American audience. Of course, most of these breeds aren't "new" at all; in fact, many have been around for thousands of years, but they may be unfamiliar here. To be a recognized breed in the US, the parent breed club must make an application to the American Kennel Club, proving a sustainable US population with responsible breeding practices. There are six new breeds this year: the American English Coonhound, the Cesky Terrier, the Entelbucher Mountain Dog, the Finnish Lapphund, the Norwegian Lundehund, and - take a deep breath before attempting to pronounce this one - the Xoloitzcuintli (left). The "Show-Lo," as its called for short, can be traced back to the ancient Aztecs and is the national dog of Mexico. You may know it as the "Mexican hairless." 

All dogs begin in their breed competition. The winners of each breed go on to their group competition. Groups are made up of breeds with similar purposes or jobs. The AKC recognizes seven: the Terriers (self-explanatory), the Herding Group (German shepherds, border collies, corgis, etc.), the Working Group (mastiffs, Rottweilers, etc.), the Hounds (everything from dachshunds to Irish wolfhounds); the Sporting Group (setters, spaniels, and retrievers); the Toy Group (little guys bred solely for companionship); and the Non-Sporting Group (everyone else who doesn't fit into any of the other groups). The winners of each group go on to the Best in Show competition; the winner here is literally the top dog.

 

Toy poodles being judged in their breed competition.

 

One of the fun parts of watching the WKC show is hearing the dogs' registry names. Like the names of racehorses, these names reflect the ancestry of a particular dog. At Westminster, they are proceeded by the word "Champion;" to be a Champion, a dog must have earned at least 15 points (depending on placement) at AKC sanctioned dog shows. Only dogs with this distinction can be entered at the WKC show.  But all of these dogs are also family pets. It's kind of impossible to holler, "Come back here, Champion Oreo Cookie of Royal Nabisco," so of course, all the dogs have "call names." Sometimes they are diminuitives of their registry names (like Cookie or Biscuit for above); sometimes not (like Sport or Butch). For example, growing up I had a registered German shepherd. His registry name was "Conrad Von Dornberg." We called him Atlas.

The registry names can be pretty pretentious. With this in mind, Slate has posted a little quiz. Can you identify which of these is the real name of a WKC group winner and which is a real line from Allen Ginsberg's Howl? I got 15 out of 15 (I teach Howl regularly, so I had an advantage). No cheating - and let me know how you did. Make your puppy proud.

Ginsberg or Canine?

Tune into the USA channel tonight at 8pm to watch the last three group competitions and root for Best in Show.

TheThe Year in Review: The Other Latin@: A Q & A with Blas Falconer by Emma Trelles (April 12, 2012)

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.

The Year in Review: The Bookstore by Michael Schiavo (November 12, 2012)

11 Housatonic Street, Lenox, MA

I’ve worked at The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts since at least last Wednesday.

If you get that joke, then you’ve probably been to The Bookstore where you’ve probably met owner Matthew Tannenbaum. Matt’s been in the book business for a little while now. He recounts the beginning of his career as a bookman in the chapbook-sized My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor (on sale during business hours; come on in). He’s working on a longer memoir, so I won’t, nor for reasons of plausible deniability do I particularly want to, divulge the details—which are wild, heartbreaking, historic—suffice it to say that The Bookstore came into his care during the nation’s bicentennial year and, despite claims to the contrary, he’s been serving the people of Lenox and the greater community ever since.

The Bookstore is a New England City Lights: a thriving counterculture symbol not simply because of Matt’s connection to banned-book champion Steloff nor solely because of his own place in that continuum (e.g. the poster trumpeting Matt’s reading of Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with Michael Gizzi and Clark Coolidge, the photo of him shaking hands with Vaclav Havel) but precisely because it’s a shop stocked by a man who knows that reading a book, whether the pulpiest mass market, the most surreal love poetry, or the humblest picture book, can reveal in any person of any age limitless reservoirs of imagination, of wonder, of hope. In the E-Age, selling print books is about as countercultural an activity as you can engage in in these United States.

That’s one of the reasons, but not the only, that puts me in my car 2 ½ hours ’round-trip three days a week. On one of those three days, I usually get a compliment on the store’s selection, which has been cultivated by Matt through nearly four decades of his own literary love affairs—but is also the result of a bookman having a deep and ongoing conversation with his community. Because he loves to hear what people love to read, whether they’re old friends or new acquaintances, they in turn allow Matt to suggest books they might not otherwise consider, enlarging their own point of view. It’s buoying to observe and it happens all the time.

If you’ve read Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, you might have seen Matt’s name before. This contemporary epic of motherhood and community was written on December 22, 1978 at 100 Main Street in Lenox, down the street and around the corner from The Bookstore. Almost everything in Lenox is down the street and around the corner. Matt appears a couple of times, but the most notable occurs near the end of Part III, on page 53 of the latest New Directions paperback (NDP876). On the preceding page, standing in the health food store, the question comes: “You think something like a book will change the world, don’t you?” The answer, in the next line: “I do, I take pleasure in taking the milk with the most cream”. A few lines later brings us to this wonderful decision:

 

Let’s go in to the bookstore to see Matthew Tannenbaum

The dream figure of the boy-father-mother who turns into

The recalcitrant bookseller as we do

                                                     I look over the shoulder

Of a girl flipping through the pages of a book of women’s faces

All beauties, bigger than life, black and white

                                                                  Scavullo on Beauty

You study poetry and read magazines upstairs

                                                                     Let me tell you

The titles of all the current books:

                                                 The Suicide Cult, The Ends of Power,

The Origin of the Brunists, Invasion of the Body Snatchers,

War and Remembrance, The Winds of War, The Dogs of War, Dog Soldiers,

Mommie Dearest, My Moby Dick, My Mother Myself, By Myself, Uncle,

Mortal Friends, Nappy Edges, Tender Miracles,

Song of Solomon, Delta of Venus, The Women’s Room,

Ladies Man, Six Men, The Water-Method Man, Watership Down,

The Night People, Shepherds of the Night, A Dream Journey,

Daniel Martin, Delmore Schwartz, Edith Wharton,

Time and Again, Better Times Than These, Centennial,

The Professor of Desire, The Honorable Schoolboy,

Heart Beat, The Third Mind, Jack’s Book,

Beasts, The Magus, The Flounder, The Fabricator,

Words of Advice, Secrets and Surprises, Dispatches,

Prelude to Terror, Full Disclosure, Final Payments,

The World of Damon Runyon, The Stories of John Cheever,

Someone Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe, Praxis,

The Annotated Shakespeare, The Last Best Hope

And Chesapeake

 

There are lots of beautiful things about this passage. There is no more “upstairs”—it’s now a slightly elevated section of the store with our children’s books. We don’t sell magazines; you can find a selection at Loeb’s Food Town next door, as well as newspapers. You can, however, still come and study poetry, as we’ve got an entire wall of it in the adjacent Get Lit Wine Bar, where I bartend on Friday nights, sometimes Thursday mornings.

Owner Matthew Tannenbaum behind the bar at Get Lit

It’s also a delightful snapshot of the publishing world in the late 1970s. One title in particular stands out: My Moby Dick by William Humphrey, a romp about a colossal trout and the fanatical angler out to hook him. It’s out of print, and we recently tracked down a used copy for someone. The Lenox connection is significant: Melville wrote Moby-Dick not but a few miles from The Bookstore at Arrowhead, on the Lenox-Pittsfield line. I pass by it every day on the way to work.

In my own decade-long career as a bookman, I’ve worked at various Borders and Barnes & Noble locations. I was the textbook manager at the Yale Bookstore. For a number of years, I was a manager at another great independent, the Northshire Bookstore, in Manchester Center, Vermont. I’ve worked for and with great people who have enriched my literary vocabulary, often in ways I never would’ve predicted. I’ve also worked for and with people who, in the end of the day, could’ve been selling hemorrhoid cream for all they cared, so long as you bought something from them.

The Bookstore is different.

Every once in a while, I’ll get a customer who, rather wistfully, goes on about how great it would be to own a bookstore. I try not to disabuse them. Those reveries of lounging around, talking literature the live-long are quickly erased when you have to deal with the day-to-day operations of unpacking, stocking, ordering, organizing the store. It never ends. But since we’re working with books, it’s a joy, and occasionally, moreso than any other bookstore I’ve worked at, we do get a chance to kick back and talk. About books, yes, but also about life. That is, after all, where the books comes from. It helps when Bookstore friends like Alice Brock, Bill Corbett, Harry Mathews, or Geoff Young stop in to say hello.

Anyone drawn to this blog is probably aware that the publishing industry is in—O clichéd phrase—a state of flux. We talk about this from time to time at The Bookstore. The conclusion we always come to is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is: to stock the best books, new and old, by the best writers from a variety of eras and styles and let great readers come find us. And they do. Every day.

Anyway, it’s too late to stop now. We don’t have every book ever printed available in the store for you to purchase. No one does, not even Amazon. But we do have a lot of great books, and there’s a good chance a few of those great books you’ve never heard of. So, like I said, come on in. I think of The Bookstore as like Ruthie in her honky-tonk lagoon.

We may not always have what you need, but we definitely have what you want.

* We always have lots of readings at The Bookstore, but one that Best American Poetry readers might be interested in is Peter Gizzi and Bernadette Mayer, Thursday, December 20, 2012 at 7:00 p.m.

  Michael Schiavo is the author of The Mad Song and the chapbooks 275 Ocean Avenue, Beautiful School, Dandelion (from his Gondola imprint), Ranges I (H_NGM_N) and Ranges II (Forklift). He founded the Long River Review at the University of Connecticut in 1997 and would later create the Ordinary Evening Reading Series in New Haven. His poetry has appeared in such diverse publications as The Yale Review, The Normal School, Fourteen Hills, No Tell Motel, La Petite Zine, The Awl, Sawmill, Country Music, Jerry, Drunken Boat, jubilat, Verse Daily, the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology and is forthcoming from Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock) edited by Luke Hankins. He's the founding editor of The Equalizer, an occasional poetry anthology, as well as Gondola, a print 'zine that features early poems from Paul Violi in Issue 1 and new work from Ray DeJesús, Buck Downs, Matt Hart, Curtis Jensen, Catherine Meng, and Sandra Simonds in Issue 2. He has recently completed translations of Virgil's Eclogues and the Dao De Jing, in addition to dub versions of Shakespeare's Sonnets. He lives in Vermont where he sometimes updates his blog, The Unruly Servant, and tweets at @Michael_Schiavo.

The Year in Review: Word To World by Sholeh Wolpé (November 5, 2012)

My mother and her sisters were born in Ishqabad, “the city of love,” in Turkmenistan. She was educated in Cypress as a nurse, speaking both Turkish and Greek. She then went to Tehran, met my father and married him. This is how I came to be born in Iran. And what a country! A place where in every home you almost always find a copy of poems of the revered Iranian poet, Hafez; a country where even the illiterate can recite a line or two from the poems of Rumi, Hafez, Saʿdī or any other classic poet to make his or her point in a conversation. It’s a country where an amusing children’s game—and I played this as a twelve-year-old with much gusto—is moshaereh, a game of poetry and memory where using poems learned by heart, one child recites a line of a poem, and the other child using the last letter of the poem must recite another poem that begins with that letter. For example:

 Child one:  A seasoned traveler on the road to love’s door

                    Your blood leaves its mark on every step  [i] 

                                                                            (H..E. Sayeh)

 Child two:  Prophets of words! You pen-wielding idols.

                    If your message was the Truth, why did it crash

                    like waves at the shores of degradation?  [ii]

                                                                              (Nader Naderpour)

    Child one:  Not for the sake of forests or for the sea

                     but for a leaf, for a drop brighter than your eyes.  [iii]

                                                                               (Ahmad Shamlou)

  … and so on.  There was so much poetry stored in our little heads that we sometimes kept the game going for as long as a half hour. 

 For Iranians, as for people living in many parts of the world, poets occupy a lofty position and to them poetry is like bread, air, and colors. It is in this way that poets wield power, and at the same time set trembling the hearts of politicians, dictators, and even religious leaders. Indeed from Damascus, to Beijing to Tehran in every revolution or uprising, poets are among the first to be jailed. But the voice of the poet cannot be arrested, and that makes them dangerous to oppressive regimes such as Iran and China.

 As an Iranian-American poet, I have always been a great advocate of literature in translation. As a poet who writes in English and saddles two languages and cultures, I have made it my duty to spend a portion of my time translating the poetry of Iranian poets. Not having access to the literature of a culture, movies like Argo and Not Without My Daughter, and news reports from sources such as Fox network bring to focus a whole nation through a single, and sometimes distorted, lens. I consider this kind of one-sided distorted presentation of any story dangerous, unfair, and in opposition to the peaceful direction towards which most human beings in this world wish to move.

 In a country like Iran, a great number of laws are passed just so that injustice can be carried out legally. In many cases poets bearing witness to injustices and atrocities are guardians against lies and half-truths perpetrated by the lawmakers and fanatic religious leaders. These poets are harassed, jailed, or forced to flee. It is imperative that their poems are translated into other languages, and that it is done so in a caring manner:  as living poems translated by poets who are fluent in both languages and cultures.  Carolyn Forché in her groundbreaking anthology Against Forgetting writes, “One of the things that I believe happens when poets bear witness to historical events is that everyone they tell also becomes responsible for what they have heard and what they now know.”[iv]  In my opinion, taking on this responsibility is crucial to our progress towards a harmonious and tolerant world society because to know the poetry of a nation means a closer look at its soul. Kenyan novelist and essayist, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, who has always urged dialogue between nations through culture writes:

 Culture is a product of a people’s history. But it also reflects that history and embodies a whole set of values by which a people view themselves and their place in time and space. Cultural contact can therefore play a great part in bringing about mutual understanding between peoples of different nations. Instead of armaments and nuclear weapons, instead of imposing one’s own version of democracy on tiny islands and continents through Rapid or Low Deployment Forces, let people of the world dialogue together through culture.[v]

 Presently, only 3 to 5 percent of books published in the U.S. are translations. Yet, literature in translation is a tool necessary in building bridges that connect people of different cultures and religious persuasions.  When there is a bridge, there will be foot traffic; and when we cross and engage with other cultures, through poetry, novels, and plays, we are that much closer to understanding them. That, I believe as a poet and a woman, is a good solid stride towards peace.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[i] Art of Stepping Through Time, by H.E. Sayeh, translated by Mojdeh Marashi and Chad Sweeney. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[ii] A Homily on Leaving by Nader Naderpour, translated by Sholeh Wolpé and Sahba Shayani. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[iii] In This Dead-End Road by Ahmad Shamlou, translated by Sholeh Wolpé. From The Forbidden: Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé, Michigan State University Press, 2012.

[iv] Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, W.W. Norton & Company 1993.

[v]  Moving the Center: The Struggle For Cultural Freedoms, by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o; Heinmann Portsmouth, NH; EAEP, Nairobi; and James Curry Oxford, 1993.

Sholeh Wolpé was born in Tehran, Iran, and has lived in Trinidad, the UK, and the United States.  Her publications include Keeping Time With Blue Hyacinths (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen, 2008), The Scar Saloon (2004), and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007) which awarded the 2010 Lois Roth Translation Prize. Find a complete list of titles here. Wolpé is the editor of The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its exiles (Michigan State University Press, 2012), Breaking the Jaws of Silence--Sixty American Poets Speak to the World (University of Arkansas Press, 2013), and a regional editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East (Norton 2010).

Her Persian translation and reading of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (co-translated with Mohsen Emadi) was launched by the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in October 2012, in celebration of Whitman’s work. Find out more about Sholeh Wolpé here.

The Year in Review: Some Poems of Devotion by Luke Hankins (November 4, 2012)

In my first post here at the Best American Poetry blog, I outlined my perspective on the devotional mode in poetry; in my second post, I offered some samples of work from my forthcoming anthology, Poems of Devotion (Wipf & Stock, Nov. 30, 2012); in my third post, I discussed virtuosity and simplicity in art. For my final post, I'd like to offer a few more samples from Poems of Devotion. I offer them without comment, except for a few notes:

1. Robert Seigel, "A.M.": Pentecost is the biblical event when the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus’ disciples, appearing as tongues of flame. (See Acts 2.)

2. Malachi Black, "from Quarantine": According to the author, "Cast as a crown of sonnets, the ten movements of Quarantine derive their logic and arrangement from the Christian monastic prayer cycle known generally as the canonical hours (horae canonicae). Quarantine traces the passage of one day, from predawn prayer ('Lauds') through sunrise ('Prime'), morning ('Terce'), midday ('Sext'), afternoon ('None'), sundown ('Vespers'), night ('Nocturne'), midnight ('Vigils'), and concludes at early morning ('Matins')."

3. Anna Connors is the youngest poet included in the anthology. She was a student in two of the undergraduate writing classes I taught as a graduate student at Indiana University. She is remarkably precocious. She is an immensely talented poet and is accomplished in a host of academic areas. I, for one, eagerly await the work she will produce over her lifetime.

ROBERT SEIGEL (b. 1939)

A.M.*

 

Yellow flames flutter

about the feeder:

a Pentecost of finches.

 *"A.M." is reprinted from A Pentecost of Finches: New & Selected Poems (Paraclete Press, 2006), copyright 2006 by Robert Seigel, by permission of the author.

MALACHI BLACK (b. 1982)

from Quarantine*

Sext

I have known you as an opening
of curtains as a light blurts through
the sky. But this is afternoon
and afternoon is not the time

to hunt you with the hot globe
of a human eye. So I fluster
like a crooked broom in rounds
within the living room, and try
to lift an ear to you. I try.

I cut myself into a cave for you.
To be a trilling blindness
in the infinite vibration
of your murmuring July,
I cut myself into a cave for you.

 

Vespers

My Lord, you are the one:
your breath has blown away
                the visionary sun
and now suffocates the skyline
                with a dusk. If only once,
I wish that you could shudder
with my pulse,             double over
and convulse               on the stitches
in the skin that I slash wishes in.
                But, Lord, you are the gulf
between the hoped-for
                        and the happening:
You’ve won.   So what is left for me
when what is left for me has come?

 *"Sext" and "Vespers" are reprinted from Quarantine (Argos Books, 2012), copyright 2012 by Malachi Black, by permission of the author.

 

PHILIP METRES (b. 1970)

from “A Book of Hours”*

1.

You threw me down, Lord, on the bed
I did not know I was making, unmade,
Your arms held me down, Lord, and I could feel
The panic of stasis, could taste the bitter

Of ends, the tunnel of unbreathing,
Lord, you pressed your terrible weight
Against the whole length of my indivisible
Body, your invisible inexorable weight,

Your hands around my neck until I could see
Nothing but the black in front of me,
Your hurting whole behind me, in me now

Shivering, praying for this prison of skin
To release this voice to air, that these needle nerves
Unshackle the this I am, the this you are. 

2.

Lord, I am not worthy, I am unweal-
Thy without you, but I am not unwilled,
Am not still in you.  Yes, my soul is rest-
Less and does not rest in you, my Lord,

And I’m not ready to be seized by you
In receiving you.  Unsteady in swells
Of you, I’m unmasted in the squall of you
In the sea of you, cannot outlast you.

But only say the word and I shall be
Hurled from all hurt, thrown beyond shoals, unswal-
Lowed in shallows.  Say the word and I shall

Be held, will the world and I shall be born,
Say it and I shall be beheld and hold
You, my Lord, say it with my mouth, I’m yours.

*The excerpt from "A Book of Hours" appears here for the first time by permission of the author. 

ANNA CONNORS (b. 1991)

Hanging

Hanging, feet hooked over the monkey-bars,
I used to listen for the Lord.
I waited until my ears hummed with blood
and blue reached my lips and under my eyes.
I was closer to the ground than I expected
when I did fall—relieved.

I tried it time after time
and I still believe, or pretend, those red moments
were somehow holy—
my corn-yellow hair strewn like hayseed,
the latent Messiah come, as wind, to hum
and blow across my gravel-pocked feet.

I learned to chase, to reach for others with my fingertips.
I have followed them through their homes
and I say I too am chained to this world,
trammeled like an animal to this town.
The mobbing clouds look like sheep
in this slant of day and wildly run.

Don’t ask me to reach within myself and search
for something sounding like an answer.
I don’t want to distinguish what I touch.
Let me ask someone else, “What is this?”
(What piece of obsidian has been pulled
from my body’s fallow land?)

I am the self-mutilating parakeet
a child kept and loved.
When I hear my owner’s voice,
I can suddenly feel my wings.
I slap them against the bars.
I dismantle my persimmon-brown feathers.

My body claps against metal,
A tongue in an accidental bell.
Push me, Lord, I swing.
I still sing. But maybe one night I will forget
the slow, low, humming sound

I once heard as a child hanging.
Or maybe everything
will begin to sound like it.

*"Hanging" appears here for the first time by permission of the author.

Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions (Wipf & Stock, 2011), and the translator of I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness (Q Ave. Press, 2011), poems from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. He is the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, forthcoming Nov. 30, 2012) and serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review. He received his M.F.A. from Indiana University, where he held The Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including American Literary Review, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media national radio program On Being.

Bits and Bobs: The Year in Review, Sweet Hookup, Readings, Postings

On Monday, November 5 we began our Year in Review series.  We're posting selections from each of our guest bloggers.  We're sure you will be inspired to look for more work by our contributors and to buy their books as holiday gifts.  You can catch up by following the link above. And you can read posts by all of our guest bloggers, from the blog's beginning to the present, here. You will find remarkable work.

Jim Cummins continues to post from Cincinnati.

We solve your holiday shopping with this sweet-salty hookup. 

KGB Monday Night (12.10) Season Finale:  Mark Strand + Malachi Black

A Tribute to Louise Glück: December 14, 2012, 7:00 PM, The New School

-- sdh

The Year in Review: The Poetry Olympics by Kate Gale (October 23, 2012)

Writing poetry well should be like training yourself for the Olympics.  The poetry Olympics.  Even there are no gold medals, no silver or bronze, even though there are no endorsements, (I keep writing to Nike, “I run, I write poetry, give me shoes! But no luck.) even though the rewards of poetry are being able to go around saying, “I’m a poet,” which, if you throw in a couple dollars will get you coffee, in spite of that, you should take it seriously. 

For me, that means doing what they do in the Olympics, going through training.  When I meet with MFA students, they want to know how long it will take before they get their first book published.  Here’s what I think about:  When my kids were in karate, their teacher Ken Nagayama would say, “When an American enters the dojo, he likes to ask one question.  ‘How long will it take for me to get a black belt?’ That is not the right question.  That is not right thinking.  Right thinking is, ‘Is this a place where I can enter the lifelong study of martial arts and learn about what it means to be human using this art form?’ That is the right question.”

Can I enter the study of poetry here?  Is the right place for me at this time?  Are there poets I can learn from?  Red Hen Press has a list of about twenty core poets who know we have a slot for them every several years so they can focus on writing knowing their work has a home.  This list includes Percival Everett, Peggy Shumaker, Camille Dungy, Doug Kearney, David Mason, Cynthia Hogue, Jim Tilley, Kim Dower and Lisa C. Krueger.

We have three poets who have undertaken to enter the dojo of poetry and let the martial arts instructor take some serious swings at their work.  Lisa C. Krueger, who read last month at Poets House with David St. John and Phil Levine had two books out but wanted to see how daring and risk taking she could be with her third book.  She enrolled in the Bennington MFA program.  As an adult with a thriving Psychotherapy practice, it isn’t easy to become a student again, to submit to having your poetry—which feels like your children!—be whacked around by the throngs, to say nothing of the poets who lead the workshops, but that’s what she’s done.  The poems that have emerged are ferocious, they have bite and wild as if they were surrounded by wolves and learned to speak anyway. 

Jim Tilley retired from Morgan Stanley and dedicated himself to a life of language and ideas, but first to poetry.  He’s been to Breadloaf, to Squaw, to Palm Beach, and he keeps going.  Every summer.  He works on his craft as hard as he ever worked in the world of finance, and the result is amazing. Poems that walk between math, light and energy.  Poems that are precise and balanced, poems where the poet is paying attention to every word.

Kim Dower, a renowned publicist went back to poetry after an absence of twenty-five years and dedicated herself to attending the conferences where she could submit her poems to criticism.  She takes classes with Terry Wolverton, one of Los Angeles’ treasures both as poet and writing teacher.  Her second book, Slice of Moon will be out from Red Hen Press next year, and she is reading this weekend on Saturday at the Ruskin Art Club at 4 pm with Oliver de la Paz and Cynthia Hogue. 

Red Hen’s core poets have this in common.  They are not hoping for a black belt.  They have entered the life of poetry and are in there, in the muck and grime, the wet evenings, the long winters, the pages on the floor.  They’re not hoping for game, they are the game.  I salute all poets who are in it for the long haul, for entering language cracked and brittle and ending up with poems whole and humming.

 http://redhen.org/events/rhp-at-the-ruskin-art-club/

KATE GALE is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA.  She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation and Poetry Society of America.  She is author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee.  Her current projects include a creative non-fiction book Flight of the Ugly Duckling, a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto based on The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle, based on Dr. Kinsey’s life with composer Daniel Felsenfeld.