The Best American Poetry

The Year in Review: Tech Electric: Poetry and the Synchronicity of Sensory by Julie E. Bloemeke (October 19, 2012)

Monday’s blog began with my connection to the confluence of synchronicity as a means to the muse and poetry.  Throughout the week I have tried to open further conversation in regards to how technology is creating its own kismet through form and reach.  Today, I am hoping to both bring the conversation back to the visceral roots of Monday and send our dialogue into a new trajectory, to offer another place of intersection among technology, the sensory, the social and the "random" coincidence.

On Tuesday I explored poems that incorporate technology as an arc.  Today, I offer this question:  do you remember your first encounter with digital terminology or reference in a poem?  This may not be something that immediately comes to mind, but perhaps my experience here will further illuminate why I raise the question.  The first time I remembered seeing technology used as an integral force in creative writing was not in poetry.  It was in a Johnathan Ames short fiction piece called “A Young Girl,” published in the premiere issue of Swink (2004). In the story, the protagonist/writer, Leon David, receives an e-mail from Hallie a fan/grad student.  E-mail quickly progresses to instant message which escalates to a face-to-face meeting and sexual encounter. From anonymity to physical and sexual presence (and still a type of anonymity) in the space of three pages.  I remember being struck by the story mainly for its use of creating an intersection through technology.  Had Ames written the story before the advent of digital immediacy, its way of resonating on a variety of levels simply would not have been the same, or arguably, possible.  The unexpected e-mail—David even says “these correspondences keep me alive,”---the exchange of words over the screen before the voice, before in person, before sex, all contribute to the pace and tension of the story.  Something about it felt utterly irrevocable and fresh.

Fast forward to the present where digital reference and creative writing are not just components but are encouraging a very specific, and perhaps totally new, conversation. Earlier this week I referred to OCHO’s issue #24, an issue dedicated to poets who Twitter.*  And, while I cited one piece from the journal, I think it is important to note that a majority of the poems also offer a conversation around tech language, poetry, form and the digital world:  Two examples:  In “Village, Batanta Island,” Scott Edward Anderson creates a world where children interact because they can see themselves in a digital camera. Samuel Peralta, in “Sonnets B4 the Blaze,” plays in the language of technology, using end rhymes like “dot-com,” and “eBay.”   Both are works that could not exist without knowledge of and experience in a digital world.

But what happens when we go one step further?  When we center entire journal issues, chapbooks or anthologies around technology or a component of it?  Iron Horse Literary Review is a notable instance:  Issue 12:4 is a compelling array of poems and prose that orbit around planet Facebook.  It is a hotbed of social media inspiration, including poems that deconstruct, lament, explore and champion FB’s swerve and spectacle.  Jennifer A. Luebbers (“Ms. Barnhill is Back: A Poem in Found Facebook Status Updates”) and Tamiko Beyer (“September Update: Friend X”) create found poems from status updates culled from the FB newsfeed; Robert Fanning and Laura McCullough navigate the boundaries of F2F (face-to-face) interaction with family members versus FB lurking, poking, unfriending, etc. (And in the process, they also cause us to ponder the layers of language and technojargon in FB).  Fanning and Juliana Gray also play with form and rhyme in their poems as well—Fanning with rhyming couplets, Gray with the ghazal (end word: Facebook).  Dinty W. Moore offers his piece—“Why I Trained My Dog to Post: One Writer’s Facebook Journey,”-- with this introductory question:  “Can a chronological string of Facebook wall postings create a narrative?” and later shares an edited stream of his FB wall posts with this codicil:  “Though I’ve edited away much of the repetition and detritus, what you read below represents an accurate, purely chronological and possibly embarrassing chronicle of the time I’ve wasted.  Let it be a cautionary tale.” In essence, Moore causes us to wonder how to define, or if we can define, this particular genre.  And Steve Langan in “Ugly Kids,” goes back to the idea of kismet, of what it means when technology enables us to find the unfound, when we can “friend” a person from our past, a person often characterized more by our memory of the person than the flesh-and-blood person:

“Twenty-five years later, many of these people

start to come back into your life.

Blame technology.  Consider yourself warned.

All but the one who truly fascinated us,

over whose whereabouts, opinion and future

we speculated endlessly, back when

there was nothing else to do but think.”

On Valentine’s Day, 2012—definitely not a random day, considering-- Jasper Magazine and Muddy Ford Press took social media/social networking poetry a step further:  the chapbook.  Jasper Reads, Download is an entire collaboration that revolves around poetry and prose of the digital world.  The bent is decidedly erotic; almost every poem in the chapbook plays with the nuances and multiple entendres of technospeak.  In Nicola Waldron’s “Face Time” we experience contradictory intimacy of the sexual over video chat: “I slide down on my back/and press my fingers to the screen,/the thermal image app,/its thick curtain, then stroke it open,/touch the place that takes you,/the camera’s feral eye.” In “Smart Phone,” Lauren Wiggins makes a heady list of jargon, causing the reader to stop and consider the language on multiple levels:  “I’m not talking about/vibrate setting, call waiting,/nor voice-activated dialing,/not even 4G networking or hot spot detection.”  Often the results have a sense of humor, turning the language back on itself:  Barbara G.S. Hagerty’s “The Kids Don’t Know Everything:  “To our kids, we are so yesterday, so over it,/so you know, analogue...” 

But Jasper Reads, Download also offers a new window (dare I point out the word choice here) into the realm of connection and confluence.  The poems and prose therein are a glimpse into the tech electric—perhaps the tech erotic?-- as an exploration of the suggestiveness of communication when we are both connected and disconnected in the realm of computers and iPhones. There is a definite sense of play, tease and flirt, as in Dustin Brookshire’s found poem on Grindr: “For Midtown on Grindr,” “Message me…/if your passport has been/worked as much as your body” or in Ed Madden’s** “Sometimes its all I think about, too:”  “The dog-day cicadas are dialing up--/horny little modems buzzing in the oaks.” 

Which brings us back to this idea of how poems are becoming more of a direct sensory experience.  I think of Dickey writing about how books “call” us (again the word choice) from the shelves.  But what happens when the lines or the poems choose us more directly, flash to us—here we have to ask, randomly?—as a text message?  For instance, if you enable your cellphone to receive messages from Cellpoems, a link to a poem can buzz to you at any time.  Unlike PoemFlow, which requires its users to open the app to see the poem for the day, Cellpoems arrive directly to you on their time. Suddenly the poem becomes not just about the experience on the page, but a multi-sensory and very personal, well, encounter?  Perhaps the poem (and the body?) electric?  As the poem buzzes into your hand, it is not only visual and auditory but also tactile.  The poem, as text message, not only lends that first vibration (again, the language rife with possibilities), but also presents a text that can be immediately manipulated:  the poem can be touched on the screen, enlarged, photographed, shared.  Endless possibilities for confluence. 

As a young mom, I remembered, especially on days where poetry seemed a distant universe, waiting for the morning hour to strike 10:55 so that I might shush the baby for just a few minutes to catch Garrison Keillor on the Writer’s Almanac.  In the throes of no sleep and making a slow progression out of postpartum depression, it was these few daily moments that were often my grace.  It was here that I learned about the poetry of Barbara Crooker, Brad Sachs, Matt Cook, Wendy Cope, Michael Chitwood and was reminded of my love for other poets I may have been neglecting:  Blake. Kumin. May Sarton. 

The experience offered poetry on so many levels that resonated with me.  There was the sense of randomness, of not knowing which poem I would experience that day.  There was intrigue of hearing a poem though Keillor’s voice, the feeling of being taken outside of my life for the moment.  The poem was not on paper, not visual or tactile, but it was more in my body, reminding me often of that heady cocktail of mental and physical that I mentioned on Monday.  And the poem was always a surprise, an enticement, a journey.  And sometimes even, just for a moment, an impetus to return to my own writing.

But could there be more?  Something further sensory?  Even more direct?  I think there just may be.  I offer this as a point of muse.  Recently a fellow poet e-mailed to ask if I had a few uninterrupted minutes.  Sure.  He asked if I had my phone.  I did.  He began to text me a poem he was working on, breaking each line by hitting “send.”  So, my first experience of the poem went like this: flash of phone light up/buzz, read line. Pause. Light up/buzz, read next line.  The entire poem arrived this way:  Visual.  Auditory.  Tactile.  It demanded my attention, leaving the lingering sense of vibration in my hand.  This was not reading on the page.  It was intimate.  Direct.  Curious with possibility.  The poem touching me.  Visceral.  Rife with kismet. 

Dickey said the poem called to us from the shelves.  Maybe the reverse is true.  Maybe the poem calls us from the shelves, into the body, back into words.  The connection, or reconnection of the two.

In my case it was a calling.  I was called by name, like a song I could finally hear, like a something I—and maybe the rest of us—are only beginning to know the beginning of.

                                                                                                              ----Julie E. Bloemeke 

It is with great thanks that I sign off this week.  Much gratitude to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for this fantastic forum.

Thank you, dear reader, for sharing your stories and intersections, for raising questions and continuing the conversation.  Let’s keep talking.

And thank you to the following kind souls—and kismet energies!-- who were incredibly helpful in offering insight, support, discussion, enthusiasm and a keen editing eye.  Thank you for bearing with the poet of me who does not usually call prose “home”:

Beth Gylys

Bella Pollen

Howie Axelrod

Jan Clausen

Peggy Ingraham

Reb Livingston

Collin Kelley

Deborah Bernhardt

And one last note of gratitude to the haven that is VCCA. The gift of a residency granted me the time and creative space needed to compose, edit and muse properly on the words.  Oh, yes, and a lake to swim in for when the words confounded me.

Please keep, as we say, in touch: 

On Twitter:  @jebloemeke

*I regret to share this news.  After publishing Tuesday’s blog I learned that JS VanBuskirk died a few years ago.  My apologies for the oversight.

** Ed Madden has also compiled an arrangement of found poems on Craigslist, all gleaned from ads placed in January and February 2012. “Missed Connections: Craigslist Found Poems” was inspired by Alan Feuer’s “Inebriated Love” (New York Times, 22 January 2012)

The Year in Review: Auden on Prayer Book Revision: No More Mr. Nice Guy? by J. Chester Johnson (October 8, 2012)

When the article, “On Working with W. H. Auden on The Psalms,” appeared here, I received a number of questions and requests for more information.  So, I’m taking this opportunity to respond – at least, in part.

I’ve noticed it came as a complete surprise to many persons that W. H. Auden was so fully engaged, intellectually and emotionally, in the Episcopal Church’s revision of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, begun in earnest in the late 1960s. While a portion of his views on the subject was included in the article, associated material by and about Auden on the revision project is also contained in the final pages of Later Auden, the most recent biography by Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and principal biographer.  To receive a little more flavor of the intensity of Auden’s perspective toward the subject, add the following excerpt from one of his letters:

“What has happened over the last few years has made me realize that those who rioted when Cranmer introduced a vernacular liturgy were right.  When this reform nonsense started, what we should have done is the exact opposite of the Roman Catholics: we should have said ‘Henceforth, we will have the Book of Common Prayer in Latin.’ (There happens to be an excellent translation.)”

These views were further clarified and emphasized in the considerable communication that exists on various aspects of the revision process between Auden and Canon Charles Guilbert, who was, at the time, the Custodian of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER of the Episcopal Church.  The basis for Auden’s fundamental aversion to the revision can be summed up, I believe, in this thoughtful and quite eloquent excerpt from a letter, dated March 19^th, 1968, to Guilbert:

“We had the Providential good-fortune, a blessing denied to the Roman Catholics, that our Prayer Book was compiled at the ideal historical moment, that is to say, when the English Language was already in all essentials the language we use now – nobody has any difficulty understanding Shakespeare’s or Cranmer’s English, as they have difficulty with Beowulf or Chaucer – at the same time, men in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries still possessed what our own has almost totally lost, a sense for the ceremonial and ritual both in life and in language.”

Although Auden’s ideas were decidedly contrary to much of the revision project, they were not as vehement regarding the psalm retranslation for which he served on the drafting committee before returning to Europe to live. In this respect, since the two of us held the position of poets on the committee, I’ve been asked from time to time if I could identify specific Auden contributions to the retranslated psalms, now contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER. As a consequence of my joining the committee sometime after Auden had become a member, combined with his heavy schedule – mainly, Auden’s frequent trips to Europe and his eventual move from New York City – we never attended the same meetings of the drafting committee.Therefore, I cannot be an original source for Auden’s textual offerings to the finally adopted psalm retranslations. Nonetheless, I was, of course, very interested in the specific recommendations Auden would have made to the committee, and I inquired during my participation on the committee about those contributions. It should be obvious and noted that a true rendering of the translated meaning of the considered text, as a matter of principle, preceded, for obvious reasons, any contribution by either poet.  Before the poets’ assistance was invoked, the scholars on the drafting committee traced, to determine if mistranslations surfaced at points along the trail, received text from the original Hebrew through the Greek (Septuagint), through Old Latin, and through St. Jerome’s Latin revision to Miles Coverdale’s 16^thcentury translation, which also relied, in part, on Luther’s German Bible and which constituted, with little adjustment, the psalms contained in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER for virtually the book’s entire life. One final step for the committee also involved a review of the 1928 version of THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER, which had accomplished a few modest adjustments to Coverdale.

According to comments of the chairman of the drafting committee, with whom I worked closely on the retranslation for more than five years to completion of the project, Auden provided three memorable contributions to the adopted retranslation:  In psalm 27, he replaced “secret place” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “secrecy”; for psalm 42, he replaced “water pipes” in Coverdale and “water floods” in the 1928 version with “cataracts”; and for psalm 95, he replaced “prepared” in both Coverdale and the 1928 version with “molded.”  I also believe Auden made an additional and fourth contribution: He presented forceful pleas for the committee to retain a variety of inherited language; for example, I know he argued for the preservation of this line from psalm 122: “Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity with itself,” and that is what one finds today in THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.  I’d not be surprised at all if a few more traditional lines were also saved through his erudition and zeal.

Notwithstanding the deep reservations he held about the general revision, Auden still felt compelled to offer help, reflecting, among other things, his ties to both the institution and the qualities of the traditional liturgy. At one point in the correspondence, Auden writes to Guilbert, “I should be honored and delighted to serve in any capacity on the Standing Liturgical Commission.”  I also believe the offer to assist illustrated a genuine generosity and good will, which unfortunately do not comport with the judgment, among many people, that Auden regularly exhibited a honed curmudgeon attitude.  My interchange with W. H. Auden can not confirm this latter view; a person of strong ideas he was – with polymathic knowledge and precise proportion at his fingertips to enhance and justify those views, but he was mostly accessible and transparent and not rude, arrogant, or routinely short – not from my experience.

 I distinctly remember my first encounter with him. In my early 20s, I decided to try out New York City as a place to live – during the late 1960s. Early on in the settling process, I found myself thumbing through the mammoth Manhattan phone book, and either accidentally or by intense curiosity, I unearthed the name, W. H. Auden. Now, surely, the poet would not be so open as to list himself in the phone book for everyone to know the number – I assumed it was just a duplicate name in the gargantuan city.  Yet, to confirm my conclusion, I decided to call – the hubris of the young at play.  Someone picked up the phone, and I began to inquire: “Is this W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  “Is this the poet, W. H. Auden?” “Yes.”  It couldn’t be, could it? So, I started to stumble and stutter into some comment about how much I admired and enjoyed his verse.  He immediately made me feel at ease, and we talked for awhile – I didn’t feel rushed to jump off the phone.  Little did I know that, in four years, I’d be communicating with him over the retranslation of the psalms for THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

There is also a story involving Edward Mendelson that corresponds with my own, both of which could possibly help shed some of Auden’s adhering reputation among some people for brief tolerance and quick severity.  Mendelson, an assistant professor at Yale at the time, had been given the job of serving as Auden’s chaperon and guide on a visit the poet made to the campus to talk with students and to record his poems.  During the stay, Auden mentioned to Mendelson that he wanted to put together a new collection of his essays, to be titled FOREWORDS AND AFTERWORDS; however, Auden didn’t remember what he had written, to which Mendelson replied that he had copied all of Auden’s essays, which were then in Mendelson’s apartment.  Auden, obviously pleased, spent a few hours with the copies but then said he would need to return at a later date in order to read all of the essays. Following the trip to Yale, after Auden had announced his departure for England, he wrote to Mendelson asking that he, Mendelson, make the selections for him, and sent a check for $150 to cover the costs of copying.  In turn, Mendelson put together a preliminary list of contents, which Auden reviewed and amended; Mendelson, a few days later, sent a sheaf of copies to Auden.  Sometime after these exchanges, Auden asked Mendelson to be his literary executor. And still later, Mendelson remitted a check to Auden for $40, the sum remaining after the costs of copying and mailing were paid.  When Auden received the check, it apparently became a celebratory moment for him and Chester Kallman, with much waving of the check, for, as then exclaimed, they had, at last, found an honest man.      

Mendelson chose to end his biography, LATER AUDEN, with attention to the poet’s fervid concentration on liturgy and the conduct of worship. Considering the remarkable focus and energy Auden placed on these issues during the last years of his life, there could be no more fitting way to close the final chapter on the poet’s life. 

J. Chester Johnson has written verse for over forty years.  His work received praise from writers and poets spanning several decades  –  from, among others, Allen Tate and Nobel Laureate I. B. Singer to current, well-known poets, such as Molly Peacock and Major Jackson, who commented, regarding Johnson’s most recent volume, St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems: “Undoubtedly, this is a work headed for literary permanence in our collective ear.”  In his 20s, Johnson served with W. H. Auden as the two poets for the retranslation of the Psalms, as now contained in The Book of Common Prayer. For the last ten years, “St. Paul’s Chapel,” the signature poem for his recent book of verse, has been the memento card for the approximately 30,000 weekly visitors to the Chapel at Ground Zero.

The Year in Review: Lasagna and Marge by Nancy Davidoff Kelton (October 4, 2012)

 In her 70s, my mother began to call some women “Marge.”

The real Marge, a kind, caring neighbor, visited my parents with homemade cookies and condominium gossip. She enjoyed my mother’s company. She and my mother had great rapport.  Mostly, Marge appreciated my quirky, unconventional mother. Mom felt safe with Marge.

The first new Marge was my parents’ regular waitress at the Florida deli where they ate breakfast. She greeted them each morning with a warm hello and a basket of rolls, and then conversed as she brought their usual egg order along with a white paper bag for the uneaten rolls. When I counted eight bags in the freezer, Mom said, “Marge at the restaurant doesn’t want us to run out.”

Other Marges included her longtime hairdresser and a doting home aide. On one of the aide’s days off, my mother fell, broke her pelvis, spent three weeks in the hospital, and then another three in the rehab unit of a nursing home. During that time, my father got pneumonia and died.

In my mother’s absence, the doting aide found a new job. I explored other homecare options. None felt right. With enormous guilt, but little choice, I moved my mother in a nursing home in Buffalo, our hometown.

In time, Mom blossomed.  Her sass and wit returned.  She looked and sounded happier and more relaxed than she had been as shut-in the condo when my father was alive. Except for a scowling night aide, she called “Lasagna” the staff showered her with attention and found her fun to be around.

“Let’s leave this dump, Marge,” she told her favorite aide one day while I was there. “My daughter’s crazy and I’m missing something important.”

“What?” the aide asked.

“A man.”

“What’ll you do with a man, Esther?”

Mom said, “Neck around.”

Another Marge polished her nails with wild colors. A kitchen Marge gave her lots of attention and bags of rolls to go.

I was grateful my mother found Marges. Then one by one, they left. Mom began to complain. About the food, her stomach, bedtime, and Lasagna.

One afternoon, when we were sitting together in the living area and Lasagna was sitting there by herself, my mother, fidgeting and glancing from her to me, said, “Lasagna doesn’t like me.”

“Lasagna doesn’t seem to like anyone, Mom.”

“She’s mean at bedtime. Why can’t I come with you?”

Ouch!  I spoke to the social worker before leaving. In the car, I thought about 8-year-old me many moons before, stuck in the children’s dining room at a Catskills resort. “Why can’t I eat with you?” I pleaded with my parents after only one uncomfortable meal. For the rest of that vacation, I sat in the main dining room between my mom and dad.

I was not as good a parent to my 85-year-old mom.

Later that month, my mother died. The doctor wrote ‘heart attack’ on the death certificate. He told me she’d been asleep. When I picked up her belongings, Lasagna was on duty. “Sorry about your mother,” she said.

I thanked her. “Was she okay at bedtime?”

“Fine.”  Lasagna walked away.

I pray my mother died without harm or fear. I pray she found bags of rolls in heaven and angels she calls Marge.

Nancy Davidoff Kelton is the author of 6 books. Her essays have appeared in several sections of The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Buffalo News, More, and Redbook among numerous other publications. She blogs over at  LOVE 'N STUFF.  Nancy teaches writing at the New School, NYU, and Hunter College.

The Year in Review: Blue and Sentimental by Ira Sadoff (September 27, 2012)

Last day of blogging and “I’m sweating a lot by now” which is a line from O’Hara’s tribute to Billie Holiday and arguably the best elegy about jazz ever written (“The Day Lady Died”). In my less than grand finale, I want to throw some tunes at you: Ballads, sad tunes that acknowledge the love affairs,  troubled or done for, seeming deprivations and losses that plague us, feelings elegiac or just those inexplicable moments where a dark spot shadows us and that feelihng needs to be expressed and shared.

I count myself among the multitudes of jazz fans who love Holiday’s late recordings (52-56 especially) where her voice and heart are broken.She has maybe an octave left in her voice, but she’s so incredibly expressive it hurts all the more. She accomplishes so much with her phrasing and the grainy quavering in her pitch that you’d swear, even when singing Ellington tunes like “Sophisticated Lady,” she was singing her autobiography. Ben Webster, maybe the greatest balladeer, plays behind her. Skip the ten second ad when you can.

Billie Holiday "Sophisticated Lady"

Though I’ve been extolling the virtues of adventurous jazz this week I don’t want to forget that I also love jazz and poetry of yore (how’s that for diction), art that speaks to the heart seemingly more directly with melancholy or longing. When someone else’s sadness speaks to mine I don’t generally feel “down” but rather I feel less alone. I frankly don’t understand people who don’t listen to music that’s sad or who avoid movies that deal with difficult (as in real) emotions. And I see no contradiction in being transported by art that grows out of another time just because I aspire to write adventurously. After all, we love to listen to Bach and Mozart, and who but the most rigid formalists would think we should still compose like them (for a less glib response, my HISTORY MATTERS confronts some questions about composition, time and flux).

  So I’m open to the “breath-taking” solos of Ben Webster, in tunes like “Where are You?” and “Ill Wind” and let them break my heart(again and again). You’ll have to put up with 10 seconds of an ad for dishwasher ads in a number of these cuts (I swear: this is such a great country) to listen to this beautiful version of “My Romance.”

 Ben Webster ":My Romance"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l7xYNbunXU And no one can play “Laura” like Don Byas (I alluded to his work in the James Carter entry yesterday).

Don Byas "Laura"

Then there’s Dexter Gordon, though I think he coasted through his later years: the tunes are still pretty. There’s Benny Carter’s “Flamingo” and “Blue Star” (he was lively right to the end), Gene Ammons’ “Goodbye”; there’s any ballad by Lockjaw Davis; late in his life Stan Getz became a beautiful ballad player, and Ike Quebec’s tear-jerker, “Blue and Sentimental” with guitarist Grant Green in the background could melt an iceberg.

Ike Quebec, "Blue and Sentimental"

But perhaps no one can play more sweet and sensitively and noir-like than Johnny Hodges. Here’s “Daydream,” but he plays an infinite number of beautiful ballads and you should hear them all.

Johnny Hodges "Day Dream"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoBhmxHgHig Slightly more contemporary ballads? I love the ballad playing of Chico Freeman in SPIRIT SENSITIVE. Here’s his “Autumn in New York,” from that album.

Chico Freeman, "Autumn in New York"

Coltrane’s an amazing ballad player (“Out of This World” and “I Want to Talk About You”) and composer (“Naima” anyone? )and his accompaniment of Johnny Hartmann (alias Billy Eckstine the second) is rightfully legendary. Off the top of my head I’m thinking of Marion Brown’s version of Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” the throaty Archie Shepp at Montreux in 1977-8, and Abraham Burton’s Punta Lullabye” from CAUSE AND EFFECT (god he should be better known). Here’s that cut.

Abraham Burton "Punta Lullabye"

On the trumpet there’s of course Miles and Chet Baker before drugs take over his life, and Bakida Carroll, and so many others. And to end where I started, there are the vocalists: Sarah Vaughan’s beautiful instrument darkens, there’s Shirley Horn (a special romantic place in my heart that involves a certain person) and early Betty Carter; there’s Sheila Jordan, and the more extreme and dramatic and over the top singers I really love like Helen Merrill and the late work on Muse by Morgana King.

There are too many other lifelong pleasures to name. Such joy in that sadness.

This blog entry momentarily makes me think I should have continued my career as a disc jockey. In college I had an all-night jazz show on WRNJ, high above the Ritz Carleton in Atlantic City New Jersey – this before Donald Trump did such wonders with the town. But then I remember I had to walk the streets knocking on merchant’s doors asking them to buy ad time on a third-rate FM station. I got one account and even that didn’t bring me real money. I just got one meal a day at a fish(y) restaurant. Maybe it was all those scallops and not my conscience that turned me into a vegetarian the very next year!

I’ll end with this acknowledgment page: Thanks to BESTAMERICAN POETRY for giving me the opportunity to share my passions. I’ve enjoyed for so long the joys of other poets’ thoughts and I’ve been remiss in not writing to some of them to thank them. It’s a great blog.

OK, jazz is an African-american art. White folks surely can play the music and listen with pleasure, but the art’s more meaningful when we understand something about the tradition and the history that informs it. Like any art, the more you know, the more you can hear and appreciate (yes you do have to read poetry endlessly if you even have a prayer to become a good poet). Jazz is almost uniquely a communal, improvisatory, art: it builds on tunes that have histories in that community, it speaks from the heart of gospel and the black church, it’s a close cousin of the blues. It acknowledges, inhabits and transcends centuries of oppression. Jazz responds to that history, in its rage and melancholy and resignation, in its happy blues, and its other-worldly aspirations. If we don’t have a more lively jazz world today it’s because so many of the clubs where musicians used to learn their trade are gone; listeners had so many more opportunities to hear the art live (which is the art at its best. There are many reasons for those closings, our culture’s current devaluation of art in general, the cost of maintaining a club in cities given the cost of living and inequities of late capitalism. You can put some of the blame on jazz as an academic activity. And I’m leaving out a thousand other reasons for how jazz has been marginalized in the culture. So here’s to places like the Village Vanguard and more to those little clubs opening up even now to give young players a chance to show their wares.

Finally, thanks to readers of the blog -- though the community I dream of consists of is sitting in a chair and listening together, putting on one CD or record album (I still have them) after the next. Better still sitting at a rickety-table and sharing personally that passion with the artists only feet away from us, with a good glass of wine and, as we aspire for our own art, taking in the pleasure of feeling. Deeply and often.

 BOA EDITIONS just published Ira Sadoff's new collection of poems, TRUE FAITH. He teaches in the Drew MFA program and is currently on sabbatical, living in a converted barn, listening to a lot of music and doing his best to write new poems.

The Year in Review: Poetry, Community, and Identity, An Essay in Installments--Part 5 by Jonathan Farmer (September 21, 2012)

Reading and writing are solitary pleasures, and yet both can offer a profound sense of connection. Writing these posts, I hear what I always do when I write, a version of my own voice, sometimes confident—as though I’m convinced by my own posture that someone wants to hear what I’m saying—sometimes trying too hard to sound confident, as though I’m fighting against the vulnerability of it all. After all these years of writing, I still haven’t learned how to write without aspiring to authority (pun intended, I guess), which is (he writes with apparent confidence) one of my biggest weaknesses.

I taught “Saint Judas” the other day, and the poem’s last line has been on my mind. “I held the man for nothing in my arms.” For nothing—for free, and for no reason, with no hope. Judas is redeemed—exchanged into meaning, into life—only when he doesn’t seek any compensation. We want our love to matter. We want to build monuments to our love*. But when we do so, even inspired by our love, we begin to misconstrue. Or, if not misconstrue, reveal. That we are human, that we want to be more than human, that in our moments of selflessness some self-interest lurks. Nothing grotesque, necessarily. Just a wish for this passion to be valuable, meaningful, true.

So it is when we love poems, and even more so when we love poetry, when we become, in some public way, people who read, write, love poems. We want to redeem our love. And so we do build monuments—National Poetry Month; “men die miserably every day.” And sometimes (I think) we misconstrue and reveal and we get territorial, and love looks less like love than a domain.

“Love should be put into action!” shouted Elizabeth Bishop’s hermit. And then the echo “tried and tried to confirm it,” the slightly funny feminine (can we come up with a better term for this?) rhyme mocking as gently as the echo itself. When I started writing poems, I was certain that what I was doing mattered. I could feel it. Now, as I grow less convinced that poetry matters in its own right and, maybe related, less convinced that my own writing has particular worth, I find I’m more drawn to usefulness—teaching, publishing, writing criticism. I think of the people who go into prisons and teach poems, who do indeed put their love into action, and powerfully so. And I think of the poets and critics who look for a political purpose in their art, sometimes plausibly, sometimes less so.

This is all a long way of saying something painfully obvious: when we write or read or teach poems, we’re still people. And if the poem serves as a cue for us to think and hear in a slightly different key, that’s only a translation. We still do the things people everywhere do—we delude ourselves, we get carried away, we answer to or resist the codes of behavior we’ve learned, we try to place ourselves in relationship to others.

I’m always amused by Larkin’s title: The Less Deceived. It’s a hilarious boast—superiority as humility, like Socrates bragging that he was the only person who knew how little he knew. But these are the kinds of calculations we make when we make or find meaning, conscious or unconscious balancings between grandeur and humility. We congratulate ourselves on having thrown off the fussy old costumes, unaware that we’re in a new costume now (I read somewhere that the wardrobe of the Hasidim began as a rejection of the outdated and overly formal religious clothing of the time.) It’s easy to get tired of it, and I do long to hold something “for nothing,” but of course that desire has already given it a purpose.

We live in the world, and sometimes we live so deeply inside it that we forget we’re there. I know plenty of people find that idea unappealing, want poetry to disenchant, and sometimes I want that, too. But it’s worth remembering that even there, we’re finding a kind of enchantment, a sense that we will, for instance, enact radical, societal change by writing poems most people won’t want to read. That’s no reason not to write them—many of them are wonderful (pun intended here, too, I guess)—but it is a good reason to be humble about it all.

I don’t mean to be bleak. The good news, too, is that we read and write as humans, even in our aspiration to be less fallibly human, even in the double calculation of trying to be the less deceived. It’s worth being a person, I think. There’s certainly plenty of company to be found there, and the odd mix of humility and aspiration it entails appeals to me. I no longer believe poems or poetry are essential. I haven’t believed that for a very long time. But I still sometimes experience them as though they are, and it’s nice to have people around who sometimes feel the same.

 

You can read the other sections of this essay here:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4 

*Yesterday, after I had finished the first few paragraphs of this, a review copy of Susan Wheeler’s meme showed up in the mail. It contains the following lines from Propertius, translated by G.P. Goold: “As for the poems you composed in my honor,/burn them, I pray: cease to win praise through me.”

Jonathan Farmer is the Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor of At Length Magazine and the poetry critic for The Slate Book Review. He teaches at The Hawbridge School in Saxapahaw, NC, and lives with his wife, Caroline Luther, (and their cat, Hopkins, also pictured here) in Durham, NC.

The Year in Review: A Poem and a Mistake (and an Error) by Amy McDaniel (September 12, 2012)

Ovid claimed that the cause of his exile to Tomis was carmen et error -- a poem and a mistake.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about mistakes and errors. In everyday usage, these can be interchangeable, but for our purposes, they do refer to two distinct ways to get something wrong. Let's let Aristotle explain:

Within the art of poetry itself there are two kinds of faults—those which touch its essence, and those which are accidental. If a poet has chosen to imitate something, [but has imitated it incorrectly] through want of capacity, the error is inherent in the poetry. But if the failure is due to a wrong choice—if he has represented a horse as throwing out both his off legs at once, or introduced technical inaccuracies in medicine, for example, or in any other art—the error is not essential to the poetry.

So: capacity versus choice. An error touches the essence, a mistake does not. "I didn't see that coming" (capacity of vision) versus "I should have seen that coming" (choice of where to cast your gaze). When I taught in Bangladesh, this distinction was particularly salient as I tried to figure out whether my students' misuses of English stemmed from not knowing the rule (an error) or from forgetting or ignoring the rule (a mistake). 

This became even more complicated with my poetry students. What is an error in English might not touch, as Aristotle puts it, the essence of the poem. In yesterday's post, I printed two poems by one of my students. The idioms are not always standard. She writes, "I want to leave here but I had lost myself in deep of darkness."

Would a native English speaker use this idiom instead of "in the depths of darkness?" Or, in the first poem, the line "steal my accompany" instead of "companion," when referring to the shadow stolen by the sun? Probably not, and so much the worse. There is something essentially right about using "accompany" as a noun for "that which accompanies me," given that "accompaniment" sounds too cold and still and "companion" too warm and human. The poem is cool; the shadow is between thing and being. 

A poem and a mistake. My students knew exile. Not only were they away from their homes, among sudden peers of many different faiths, nationalities, backgrounds, but some of them had spent part of their childhood as refugees. We read lots of poems about exile and foreignness. For them, language was already estranged from habit and custom. It would be an error to think there is no room for a mistake in a poem.  

Originally from Atlanta, Amy McDaniel  is the author of the poetry chapbook, Selected Adult Lessons (Agnes Fox Press). Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in The Agriculture Reader, h_ngm_n, RealPoetik, Tin House, Alimentum, Saveur, PANK, and elsewhere.

The Year in Review: A New Way to Listen by Lisa Vihos (August 22, 2012)

Lisa Vihos

So, I was contemplating my reading to celebrate the publication of my new chapbook, The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012). The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to hear myself go on for a half hour or more, as much as I like my poems. It occurred to me that many of them might be done better justice if read by other people, some of them not necessarily poets, just friends, coworkers, and neighbors who have good voices and strong characters. Imagine that!

And so was born the idea for my "poetic happening," a "community poetry read" in which the majority of my poems would be read by others. There are 22 poems in the chapbook, and I had fifteen readers each read one poem. I read three, one of which was the title poem. We went through the poems in the order that they appear, skipping a couple along the way. Hearing them read aloud that way, I discovered I had put them in an order for a reason. More surprises.

I had assigned the poems in the two weeks prior to the reading, so that my designated readers had a chance to familiarize themselves with the words. I did not "test" anyone before the reading. I just trusted them to do the best they could, even though some of them told me they were nervous. Some were afraid that they would not do the particular poem justice.

Let me say right here, not a single person disappointed me. In the moments when the readers were on stage, I was blown away by the care with which each person read. I could tell that each person had clearly practiced, and had thought about giving the assigned poem some personal power from his or her own inner repertoire of thought and emotion.

For me, it was as though all the voices in my head that I cannot actually speak the way I hear them came to life during that 45 minutes. There was the voice of the angry woman, the loving man, and the anguished poet. Janet, who is in her 80s, read a poem in defiance of getting old. Lynn, who is seeking to grow and evolve, read a poem about just that. Ed, who had some training in the monastery many eons ago, read a poem with scriptural references, and Al, who has the slightest southern drawl and an occasional stammer, read a poem in which God invites us to stop complaining and join him for a shot of tequila.

If I may say, the effect was quite mesmerizing.

It was something theatrical, layered, magical. Yes, they are "my" poems, but I like to think that they belong to the world, and hearing others read them made that real for a short while. Lest you would question the sanity of a poet not reading her own work, please read more about the evening from the perspective of an observer, essayist and Stoneboat associate editor, Signe Jorgenson, who witnessed the whole thing:

And, if you need to treat yourself to something really enriching one of these days, get your friends to read your poems for you at your next reading. You will be amazed at how wonderful you sound when it is not the sound of your own voice you hear.

The Year in Review: Shouldn't the Sonnet? [by Sandra Simonds, August 15, 2012]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

 

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

   Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

 

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 

You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

 

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

 

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

 

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

 

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

 

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

Sandra Simonds grew up in Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. in Psychology and Creative Writing at U.C.L.A and an M.F.A. from the University of Montana, where she received a poetry fellowship. In 2010, she earned a PhD in Literature from Florida State University. Her second book of poems, Mother was a Tragic Girl, was published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2012. She is the author of Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009), which was a finalist for numerous prizes including the National Poetry Series. Her third book of poetry, House of Ions, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2014. She is the author of several chapbooks including Used White Wife (Grey Book Press, 2009) and The Humble Travelogues of Mr. Ian Worthington, Written from Land & Sea (Cy Gist, 2006). Her poems have been published in many journals including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, The Believer, the Colorado Review, Fence, the Columbia Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Volt, the New Orleans Review and Lana Turner. Her Creative Nonfiction has been published in Post Road and other literary journals. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida with her partner, two children and two dogs and is an Assistant Professor of English at Thomas University in beautiful, rural Southern Georgia. Find out more about Sandra here.  Follow her on twitter @SandmanSimonds.

The Year in Review: "Something's Missing:" Poetry and the Unthinkable [by Ailish Hopper, August 6, 2012]

The last year or so have been eventful in American poetry, especially if you follow the conversations, in verse or prose, about race. The blogosphere, and many other spheres, have lit up on several occasions with differing opinions on Who is Right or Wrong, What the Problem of Race is Really About (or its variant, Why do People Have to Keep Bringing this Up). In other words, maybe not so eventful, maybe, The Usual and Familiar, Part Ad Infinitum.

Meanwhile, the last two years have also brought some important new poetry that deals directly with race, including books by Thomas Sayers Ellis, Martha Collins, Evie Shockley, Douglas Kearney, Jake Adam York, and many more.  This is from Thomas Sayers Ellis’s “Or,” in Skin, Inc.:

         Or Oreo, or

         worse. Or ordinary.

         Or your choice   

         of category

                               or   

                               Color

 

         or any color   

         other than Colored

         or Colored Only.

         Or “Of Color”

 

                             or   

                             Other

While many of these works have been understood for their role as “public” or “political,” I think they, like many artifacts and ideas about race, are more often seen as utopian, or even dystopian (utopia’s mirror image). Since utopia and dystopia are most often dismissed, ignored, or otherwise pigeonholed, poetry about race can be, too. Meanwhile, a whole unmapped, “unthinkable” territory within them beckons.This week in this series of posts I’ll be looking at this beckoning landscape, of the unthinkable, what Audre Lorde so famously described as poetry that “helps us name the nameless…so it can be thought.”

Many so-called utopias have been realized, whether legal utopias, like blacks and women getting to vote, or technological ones, like talking to one another on little TV screens. This has lessened, rather than heightened, the word’s appeal; as utopias become “thinkable,” we distinguish even more between what is predictable or realistic (or, thinkable), and what is pie in the sky,” “wishful thinking” (unthinkable). Of course, there is also the twentieth century’s important contribution to its current meaning. Here is some of Wislawa Szymborska’s poem titled “Utopia,” her ambivalence emblematic of the harsh possibilities of utopia, in this case totalitarianism:  

          Island where all becomes clear…

          The only roads are those that offer access…

          The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
          sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

          The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
          the Valley of Obviously.

          If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly…

          On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
          Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

          Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
          Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things...

          For all its charms, the island is uninhabited…

Reading poetry about race in a similar way, as either utopian or dystopian, we might see its attempts to show the unthinkable as mere ideas (and Usual and Familiar ones at that), never something embodied or “inhabited.”  Of course, when it comes to race, the “unthinkable,” both is different, and weighs differently, on each of us, depending on our skin color and life circumstances. And, perhaps in poetry, the harder question is, How on earth could any of us describe it?

At some point the notion of utopia changed from something that existed in a physical place, as in Thomas More’s “Utopia,” from which the word comes, to something that existed in time, either a future, in which case it would never arrive; or a past, in which case it was already sealed and done.

But the unthinkable isn’t necessarily only in the future or the past---just as the past isn’t necessarily only in the past.

Here is Lucille Clifton’s poem, “Memory:”

 

          ask me to tell how it feels
          remembering your mother's face
          turned to water under the white words
          of the man at the shoe store. ask me,
          though she tells it better than i do,
          not because of her charm
          but because it never happened
          she says,
          no bully salesman swaggering,
          no rage, no shame, none of it
          ever happened.
          i only remember buying you
          your first grown up shoes
          she smiles. ask me
          how it feels.

Reading and listening to the American poetry world’s responses to the events this past year or so, I saw another dimension of the utopian, with many of us illustrating what Adrienne Rich said, about the unthinkable, in “The Phenomenology of Anger,” that “every act of becoming conscious” may at first seem illogical, unreasonable---unthinkable---indeed, “an unnatural act.”

This is reflected in what Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch said about this artwork aimed at “something’s missing:” rather than a mere wish-fulfillment or revenge-fantasy, they saw it as a productive, if hard question or critique--an “it-should-be.”  Like, what really do emancipated bodies and language look like?

Ailish Hopper is the author of Bird in the Head, which was chosen by Jean Valentine for the 2005 Center for Book Arts prize, and recent poems have appeared in APR, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tidal Basin Review and many other places. She has received support from the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. A native of Washington DC, she teaches at Goucher College and lives in Baltimore.

The Year in Review: APOLLONIA: Greetings from Sifnos [by John Hennessy, July 22, 2012]

 SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

Greetings from Sifnos, Greece, an island in the Western Cyclades, quiet sibling to the flashier and better known Santorini and Mykonos.  Before I arrived this summer for my tenth return trip, like everyone else I was worried about the economy. How were my friends and acquaintances here handling the Draconian austerity measures Germany insists on imposing? Would Greece quit the Eurozone, default on its loans, return to the drachma? Part of me certainly hoped so: to this outside observer, the currency switch in 2002 had always seemed much better for the rich, worse for the middle and working class, another way for the wealthy to loot the country—as their American fellows do. (Don’t tell me about Greeks evading taxes until Mitt Romney, who may be our next president, releases his tax records.)  In 2002, prices of everyday goods and services soared to fit the Euro, but wages for workers stayed low, still tied to drachma rates.

The tourism industry took a hit then, too, as fewer middle class Europeans could afford the hotel rates and meal costs, the hikes in airfares and airport security fees. Athens and the islands were quieter. Even the backpackers from the Antipodes and North America stopped coming in their high-spirited droves, seeking out cheaper beach spots in Turkey and Vietnam.

While international tourism had begun to pick up again in the last ten years, Sifnos is close enough to Piraeus—three hours by high speed ferry—to be popular with Greeks, especially wealthy Athenians. Last summer you noticed their absence, despite the many French (more posey swan-dives from the rocks, less bouzouki-driven pop music, no p.d.a.) who seem to be trying to take their place. Clearly it wasn’t this clan of French who coined the phrase joie de vivre. Although I felt positive about sticking to my plan to return to Greece, no matter what happened in the election on June 17th and its aftermath, part of me worried I’d fill with self-reproach: What kind of opportunist takes a vacation in a country on the brink of fiscal collapse?

But I find instead that as you move away from Athens, particularly Syntagma Square, ground zero for the protests against the austerity measures, people are reluctant to talk to visitors about the suffering. Even my good friend Helena, who is sorting out her mother’s finances, came home from a meeting with the tax officer mostly keeping mum. She did say that she’ll try to sell some property, that the real-estate tax hikes are ridiculous, impossible to meet. But what’s really killing everyone right now is the fee schedule for electric service, which takes a page from the loan shark’s book: every six months everyone—no matter how little electricity one consumes—has to pay a “connection fee”; collecting revenues through utilities is yet another way to make the working and middle class pay, another way to avoid the graduated income tax—which puts the burden on the rich. Helena mostly hinted at this with a series of small jokes and ironic nods, and I filled in the gaps. Hardly what we’d call in New Jersey, where I grew up, complaint.

Greece will survive. Chin up. The sense I get in the Cyclades is that after more than four thousand years of negotiation, of colonizing and being colonized, withstanding attacks from within and without by Ionians, Samians, Minoans, Romans, Venetians, Ottomans, Nazis, bankers and every other form of pirate, they must be right to be if not optimistic then stoic. That hasn’t stopped me from asking questions, of course.

SIFNOS (c) IAN MacLELLAN

     From all of the news articles I’ve read lately, three documents have helped me understand the political/economic situation in Greece these days, and here they are:

 

Arianna Huffington’s New York Times editorial from May 13, 2012, “Greek Tragedy”:

(Huffington makes clear that the Greeks refuse to mortgage the future of their children, so the austerity measures will never be acceptable to most of them. Read this article and then consider our willingness, in the United States, to allow our children, our young people, our college students, to go fifty, one hundred, even two hundred thousand dollars into debt before they receive their degrees.)

John Lanchester’s New Yorker Comment from June 18, 2012, “Greece vs. the Rest”

The third document is an email I received from an old friend who, among other things, is a Hellenic Studies professor:

“The situation in Greece is unbelievable and I avoid Athens at all costs.  I just moved back to the US after living in France for four years, during which time I went to Greece often -- but for most trips I flew direct from Paris to Crete and didn't stop in Athens at all; I gave a lecture at the U of Athens a year ago and the only people on the streets after 10pm were junkies and homeless immigrants (many whole families).  Nothing really good is being written on "the crisis" in English, partly since it's breaking news and partly since the English press is just reporting from afar (and mainly just replicating the AP wire version of events).  One of the grimmest aspects for me is the rise of the Golden Dawn, the fascist right wing party that used to exist mainly in the Diaspora (it was really strong among Greek Americans in Astoria) but now is popular in Greece, too.  There is a strong xenophobic thread in all Greek society and it isn't at its best right now.   In my view (which is the minority one) they should get out of the Euro, exit the EU, and figure out how to be less dependent on tourism.  But I don't think any of that is going to happen.”

John Hennessy is the author of Bridge and Tunnel (Turning Point Books/Word Press 2007), a collection of poems, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Believer, Poetry, The New Republic, Harvard Review, LIT, Huffington Post, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily, What’s Your Exit? A Literary Detour through New Jersey and other journals and anthologies. Hennessy is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics, and he is the poetry editor of The Common, a new print magazine based at Amherst College. In 2007-2008 he held the Resident Fellowship in Poetry at the Amy Clampitt House. Hennessy went to Princeton University on a Cane scholarship and received graduate degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Arkansas; he teaches at the University of Massachusetts and lives in Amherst.