The Best American Poetry

Lauren Hilger, Guest Author May 8-12

This week we welcome Lauren Hilger as our guest author. Lauren is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, Summer 2022). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. For more about Lauren Hilger, visit her website here.  Follow her on social media: Twitter: @lauren_hilger  Insta: @lauren.hilger    

Read poems by Lauren Hilger here: 

Jersey Shore, Sixth Finch

Greenery, Chicago Review

 

Welcome, Lauren.  Sdl

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 4 (by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex)

AR: How did you become a poet? What is your process?

DD: First, of course, I was named after a poet. The Commedia played an important role in my family history. My great grandfather brought a copy of it with him when he came to America from Sicily. Poetry was a constant, if muted, presence throughout my childhood. My grandmother loved Frost and Sandberg and Millay. I she would occasionally recite the poems she’d memorized in grade school (“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fog,” “First Fig”). My father, who was a postal worker, loved Emily Dickinson, so her books were always around, and I read her at an early age. We also had The Iliad, The Odyssey, Don Quixote (I remember reading the poems in the preface to the novel at an early age), The Aeneid, El Cid. My mother, who was a stay-at-home mom and then a secretary when I was growing up, was a great reader too. Both of my parents were extremely religious Roman Catholics (my mother converted from Southern Baptist to Catholic), so there was the poetry of the Bible as well, especially The Book of Job, The Psalms, The Book of Proverbs, The Song of Songs. 

I’ve always loved reading, and from grade school on I kept a journal. When I was eighteen, I read Allen Ginsberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Gerard Manley Hopkins for the first time. That trio of poets made me want to write poetry. I continued to write because I fell so in love with poetry in all its varied forms, and writing it helped me (continues to help me) to be a better reader of it. My writing life will always be subordinate to my reading life.

My process varies from poem to poem, but for the most part now, I come up with an idea, a phrase, a title for
a poem and when I have time, I sit down and write a draft. For most poems, a draft will take about two hours to write and I’m reading aloud and revising as I write. Sometimes, I might begin a poem during my lunch break (I work as a high school English teacher) and then finish it after the last bell rings and before I pick up my daughter from daycare. Then, I might go back to it after the children are asleep or in the morning before work. Usually, I take a poem as far as I can within a few days, reading it aloud and revising it as necessary. Then, I set it aside, and either send it out to magazines or just let it breathe in a word document (I mostly write on the computer). Sometimes, there might be minor revisions from that point until it is published in a book. And even after that, there are lingering questions. For example, in the poem that starts this interview, I’m not happy with the rhythm of the line: “my dear little one. Teach me what the fire.” I think it might be better to change the sentence structure of the poem so that the line reads: “Teach me, my dear little one, what the fire…” If I’m ever lucky enough to have a Selected or Collected poems, I might make that change, but I’m also aware of many poets (Auden comes to mind) who tinkered too much with old poems. I’m no Auden, of course, but I understand the impulse toward endless refinement, and how corrosive that impulse can be.

AR: Your poems take on various forms. Which forms are you most comfortable working with? Do you choose form before writing the poem, or does the poem dictate the form?

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

DD: Like many contemporary American poets, I write countless sonnets. I’ve written much of my poetry in ten-syllable lines, sometimes in a kind of Miltonic blank verse, but often just letting the rhythms ride (and writhe) against the syllabic constraints. I’ve written prose poetry consistently throughout the years, inspired by David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present, which has been one of the most important, and most often revisited, anthologies in my reading life. Nin, I’d argue, is the greatest living practitioner of the American prose poem. It’s a form I love to read and think about. For about a year, I’ve been writing in a stanzaic nonce pattern I’m calling “stepped septasyllabic cinquains.”

NA: Thanks for your kind words! I am blushing! Can you give an example of your stanzaic nonce pattern poems?

DD: It’s a fancy way of describing seven syllable per line, five line stanzas, written in a recurring zigzag pattern. Here’s a few stanza from MIDWHISTLE, where I’m invoking William Heyen and ruminating on his Whitmanian and Dickinsonian pedigree:

Sing for us, the dragonfly
            in the arc of an anthem,
the bumblebee zigzagging
                         the sidelines of an empire.
            I praise your Lord Dragonfly,

Bill, & praise the ambition
            it must take to un-Amherst
a clover & a bee from
                       the funerals in a brain,
            from the prairie and its yawp.

NA: I am so impressed. You are a master of many forms!

DD: I don’t think I’ve mastered many forms, but I have certainly tried to (with varying degrees of success). I’ve written hundreds of failed villanelles, thousands of botched haiku, fifty or so unremarkable sestinas, and a rusty old red wheelbarrow  full of ballads, triolets, rondeaus, bops, kwansabas, pantoums, haibun, ghazals, abecedarians, and so on. I have one sestina in Lullaby, and one kwansaba suite and one abecedarian in my second book, but I haven’t mastered any of those forms. Nevertheless, I enjoy working in those forms, especially when I’m thinking about a poem that I love written in that form. It’s so impressive to me when a contemporary poet writes in one of these inherited forms in a way that expands the structure and strengthens the tradition. I think with wonder and admiration of how a poem like Tim Seibles’s “All the Time Blues Villanelle” can go toe to toe with “The Waking” and “One Art” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”

Sometimes, I choose the form before writing the poem. That approach doesn’t often result in a poem I’m willing to send out into the world. I’ll write a sestina, but it will feel forced or academic or less immediately resonant than I want it to be or it’s just not making sense in the way I’d like it to make sense, so I’ll set it aside and never think of it again. Most often though, the form will suggest itself organically as I’m writing. At some point, maybe even within the first few words, I’ll see that this poem wants to effloresce into a sonnet, or this is a prose poem, or this demands quatrains. Then, I will work toward the form by accretion and improvisation and revision-in-the-moment.

My three books of poetry also use form as an organizing principle. Sonnets thread through the books as do prose poems and other poetic structures in much the same way that themes and tropes thread the collections, providing order amid a species of repetition.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Amanda Rabaduex is a poet, writer, educator and Air Force veteran. She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Wilkes University. She is a graduate assistant for Etruscan Press, and the current editor of River and South Review. Originally from Ohio, she now lives in the Smoky Mountains.

Nin Andrews’ lucky numbers are nine and seven. Nine, she says, is navy blue. Seven is red, Victory Red, like her mother’s lipstick when she was a child.

Greg Masters: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Masters. Photo by Kate Previte

________________________________________

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

 

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

into track one of a box-set

reissue of the Miles Davis Quintet

recording “Freedom Jazz Dance,”

a previously unissued rehearsal take,

the raspy-voiced bandleader instructs

drummer Tony Williams to play triplets.

Up to this point in the ensemble’s

working out of the tune, he’d,

uncharacteristically, 

been lagging, playing as if he were

still with Jackie McLean,

accompanying with a ring-a-ding-ding

on the ride cymbal.

But after first working out a bass part for

Ron Carter and a few run-throughs—

Wayne Shorter certainly had the head down

and Herbie Hancock seemed assured

with splashes of chords—

Miles instructs his teenaged drummer

to lay down a triplet pattern and, after a

few attempts, he hits on the pulsating

underlying momentum that, still,

50-plus years after recording,

transforms the seven-minute

master track into a miracle.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Greg Masters co-edited the poetry magazine Mag City from 1977–85. In 1977–78, along with a crew of poet comrades, he produced a cable TV show, Public Access Poetry. From 1980–83, he edited The Poetry Project Newsletter. Over the past decade, he has issued 10 books of his writing from his imprint Crony Books. “At 20 minutes, 37 seconds” is from It Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This (Crony Books, 2020).

[To hear the track referred to in the poem, go here.]

[For more on Tony Williams, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Sudeep Sen introduces Sarah Arvio, Rachel Eliza Griffiths,Vidyan Ravinthiran. . .

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

Yes, we have no bananas today,
but Cheetos and nacho chips—                                                                                                         
seven different brands—and instant
mashed potatoes complete with sodium                                                                                                  
acid pyrophosphate, and sodium bisulfite.
We have gummi bears and red cinnamon                                                                                         
candy hearts.  Ranch dressing, a whole row
of plastic-wrapped, sliced meat. Line up
for your diacetyl, your free glutamic acid,
your butylated hydroxyanisole.
We have everything but bananas,
those bright phallic bunches, those wrapped
wands of fruit-meat, potassium
hunger bombs, soft, sweet monkey crack.

Gylys writes:
"The poem emerged after my friend Jennifer sent the quotation that is the title as a writing prompt. It’s a bit of a playful rant against processed food.  I wrote it with that old Louis Prima song, “Yes, We Have No Bananas” running through my head.  so the playful energy probably emerged from that tune as much as from the quote."

The poem first appeared in the Crab Orchard Review in March 2019, and then in Gylys's most recent book, Body Braille (Iris Press, 2000). The poem will also asppear in the forthcoming book The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouthed Jars.

The Fly in the Ointment [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People think the Golden Calf looked 
Like a calf but that is very wrong.
(Literal readings of the Bible are a sin.)
It looked like whatever you wanted
And it looked different to everyone
And since you could change it just
By thinking about it the Golden Calf
Was more like the guy's holographic
Girlfriend in 'Bladerunner 2049'
Than the Golden Calf as shown in
The 1956 'Ten Commandments' movie.
Don't forget: God can give you anything
You want but the fly in the ointment is
So can the devil! So can the devil!

On No Tokens, with Hannah Beresford [by Lauren Hilger]

A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford

 

Lauren Hilger: What is your earliest memory of working with NT poems? 

 

Hannah Beresford: My first submission period with NT, I printed all of the submissions. It was so extra. T Kira literally said, “This is so extra.” What experience I had of an editorial nature was in workshops, and I’d only been in workshops where we distributed hard copies and marked them up by hand. I didn’t know how to get in that mode, to really sink into a poem, through a computer screen. I still feel that way, but am learning restraint. 

 

I am often surprised by how much being an editor–getting behind the scenes of submittable–does not buffer me from the anxiety of submitting, even despite my better judgment. There is so much work we love and have to pass on. Every journal says that, but it really is true! And yet, when those rejects come in my inbox, I lose that context–I feel small again. Does being an editor help you field the trials of being a poet? And if so, help, tell me how!

 

LH: Hah! I have a perverse love for the admin of submitting. I try to maintain the same amount of submissions out at any time. I'm always shocked to receive a personal note or nice rejection, though. It's the moment that breaks (with a human chord) the robotic process I want it to be.

LH: How do you feel about the old adage that one has to read the lit mag before submitting?

 

HB: Sure! In a yes or no sense. Is it a venue for my work, or maybe not so much? If you’re unsure, what have you to lose (unless they charge submission fees)? But, I wouldn’t advise writing toward an aesthetic with a particular venue in mind.

 

LH: I’m wondering, how do you recognize in your own reading that you are gravitating toward a poem? 

 

HB: This is usually a sensory response. My reading or mind’s eye is saturated by a color. That leaves the most lasting impression on me. Then, I experience the poem and its color in a tactile or corporeal way. The metronomic organs have a lot to do with how I experience creative work. Breath, heart rate. And secondarily, the reactive organs. A poem that stays in my mind hasn’t transcended for me. I had a student who would yell “goosies!” when she loved a poem in workshop. We talk about that a lot—whatever you call it. Goosebumps, most often. I don’t know what it is from a scientific standpoint, but when I feel that, I think it’s a response without an outlet. Maybe because it’s a response to something imaginary, or maybe because it’s a response that feels indeterminable, unresolvable. Empathy is unresolvable. Anxiety, fear, desire. Poetry is corporeal, at its genesis, poetry is an art form of and through the body. We experience it mostly on the page now. Maybe I like a poem that knows its roots are in bodies. For a moment it activates and occupies me from some ancient lineage. I’m a grounding rod, and then it’s gone again. Then, right there, is a particular weightlessness. Maybe the relief of feeling hyper-embodied registers like an instant disembodiment. The poem is super-humanizing, then exalting. Yeah, goosies!

 

LH: How soon do you know a piece is asking for you to take it seriously? 

 

HB: In short, it’s a matter of subversion. When a piece continually defies my expectation, I feel most provided for. I hardly ever want to know where I’m going. I want to surrender to the lead, but predictabilities will keep me engaging with the work in a mechanical way. I don’t think a reader can help that; when you see tracks, you follow them. When I feel sure that I can’t get where the piece is going any faster than it will take me there, I’ll resign to the line, or the word, or the page. I want to be humbled, to feel overthrown. 

[No Tokens Issue 9 Cover: Erika Diehl, 2018, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan, shot with a Fuji x100]

 

HB: What is a first poem that moved you, and how has your reception changed over the years? 

 

LH:  Bruce Weigl’s "What Saves Us" felt like it had slipped some message under the door for me. As a Catholic kid reading this poem, I kind of fell asleep midway through and thought "yea yea yea okay I know where we're going with this." The end then knocked me out. It still does, in fact, I never remember the end when I bring this poem to mind. I remember the girl, her skirt, the religiosity, but I forget what made me love it: that spooky, unanswerable end!

 

Tell me, how does working as an editor across genre and collections aid in your curating of individual poems as units?

 

HB: I know it isn’t fashionable to prescribe to genre, and I get that. I’m on board. I don’t think there are genre specific limitations. But it would be untrue to say that there are not strengths specific to the differences between how I experience most poems and most prose. (Here, I am permitting an assumption that, more often than not, a prose work exceeds a poetical work in length or volume or time attended to it, per unit.) For example: I love a poem that knows where its ground is but levitates above it. I love that tension, I love that defiance. There is definition, a contour, in the refusal to anchor. To what extent is that kind of suspension above, or resistance to, a grounding plane sustainable in book-length prose? I won’t answer that question. I don’t know! Anything can be done. So, to your question, the more I read and edit and learn across genres, the more I look at a poem and think: here’s an opportunity! I can be pressed to spend more time in this, I can be asked more easily to re-read, I can have more questions in the end. I’m here for it—give me stratums, and coding, and metaphor, give me words to learn and research to be done. A treasure hunt, a Russian doll, the onion—all the clichés. Someone has committed, there’s time to be spent!

 

As an addendum here, it would be negligent to disregard sonics. To me, the sonic quality of a piece overlays or underpins any and every other decision the writer makes. It is a constant accompaniment. It informs everything, but it precludes nothing. Should prose by its nature, regardless of volume or length, be held to any lesser standard of intentionality of sonics than poetry is? Intentionality is key. Should all prose be harmonious, undulating, lyrical, sonorous, or hypotactic? Should all poetry? I want to feel assured that the sonics of a work were a choice; purposeful. Discordance can inform or reinforce meaning or character. Redundancy, imbalance—too. And sometimes, yes, musicality is affecting.

HB: You and I have talked a lot over the years about poetry’s reception in the popular-ish culture. This AWP we talked more specifically about poetry’s reception in the literary culture. If you could speak to any one misconception or have any one thing known about poetry–whether to the greater public, or even amongst writers–what would it be?

 

LH: Poetry threatens everything I think I know sometimes too! And that's okay! Something I say at the beginning of every new class I teach is "you don't have to apologize for not knowing anything about poetry, not being a poet, or hating poetry. You don't have to apologize for being a poet. There is no difference! We're all encountering it together!"

 

How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed? 

 

HB: Maybe it is not so much that we have changed, but our opportunities have broadened. In the beginning, I felt a strong sense of joining the collective of a brilliant masthead. Of course, that is still true—the honor of my life. But more and more, I see NT becoming something of its own as well. More folks have heard of NT and so our slush is more and more dynamic and, honestly, stacked. It’s hit after hit. Our reach as a journal exceeds our individual orbits more and more. There are so many talented people out there. I feel lucky that NT is on the radar of all of our submitters, and more of them every year.

 

What did you expect when you came on board with NT at its very inception? What did NT mean to you then, and what does it mean to you now?

 

LH: I met our founding EIC T Kira at MacDowell and first heard about the magazine over breakfast one morning. After I was offered the position, I remember hoping she'd trust me and that I could do a good job. Almost a decade in, I still want to just do as much as I can. Learning from and connecting with contributors means everything to me. 

 

What is your hope for NT's future?

 

HB: I love the young writers and poets prizes so much. I feel like that’s where my heart is. The young poets blew us away! I’d love to see NT grow more on a community level; programming and initiatives that extend beyond the literary world. An inclusive point of accessibility for reading and writing.

[No Tokens cakes along with Poetry Co-Editors Lauren Hilger & Hannah Beresford]

 

Ils ont entendu le vent dans les arbres . . .

Thanks to Jim Cummins for sending this along. Believed to be the only time Johnny Carson sang in public:

Thanks, Jim!   -- sdh

For "Plume," Another Feather in the Cap

The new issue of Plume is out. Edited by the admirably imaginative Danny Lawless, issue #129 (May 2022) contains work by D. Nurkse,  Tomasz Różyck, Susan Aizenberg, Bill Stratton, Jeffrey Skinner, Cartol Muske-Dukes, Lauren Camp, and, well, why don't we just copy the TOC below the picture? I recommend the section "Poets and Translators Speak," in which the writers comment on their work. 

 Ephrem Solomon
Folk Memory 3, Woodcut and mixed media, 2015

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022

Poems

 D. Nurkse Poetry: A Mirror, a Pencil and an Envelope. Seven Minutes with D. Nurkse and Nancy Mitchell

Lauren Camp Small Scenes without Apology

Danielle Blau (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

David Lehman Three Poems from a Work in Progress

 Antonio Gamoneda Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022) translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Jeffrey Skinner Four From Delos

Mark DeCarteret Lives of the Postmodern Poets

Susan Aizenberg Forced March

 Tomasz Różycki Two poems by Tomasz Różycki translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Zoë Ryder White Close to now

Christopher Howell Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

Carol Muske-Dukes Spam Risk

Bill Stratton What Almost Killed You

Alejandro Escudé My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

The Poets and Translators Speak
Rosenthal, Stratton, Aizenberg, et. al.

Book Review
distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

Featured Selection
 A Travel Guide for the Exiled; An Interview with Zein El-Amine, by Leeya Mehta

Essays and Comment
A Kind of Sorcery: On Shame, Defiance and Moral Imagination by Richard Hoffman

On Games [by Lauren Hilger]

In writing poetry, I’ve found that occupying three different positions is important: cold editor, kind tutor, and just a writer. In looking at my poems as a cold editor, I’m impartial, ruthless, determined. Cold editor is necessary at the end but not before. That role can’t be assumed too soon. Before then, if I’m writing but stuck, holding back, or can’t get where I want by my current methods, I require the kind tutor, and have to act as one to myself and my writing. The kind tutor role offers opportunity through games; yes it's still me looking at the same drafts but changing perspective points out different routes, and doesn’t take it so seriously. 

When I think about doing the crossword, for instance, it never feels like my brain’s time-off so much as part of my brain resting, perhaps, while another tests itself. Trying games with your drafts or to generate writing is a way to see if something unexpected can open up. Braiding what you know with what you don’t. In play, a lot will be addressed. As such, today, I offer five votes for games:

1. Lower the stakes: If you’ve taken a class with me you’ve heard this. Beyond being my thesis as a teacher, I take this stance toward poems. I don’t think pressure allows me to write my best work. If I intend to write something meaningful or “good” the stakes can feel immobilizing. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if I've played this game before, it works. If I say to myself “this is an experiment; none of this will be seen; it doesn't matter; anything you do here is a win” I feel I can write more bravely. If I get there in the end, I don’t mind that I have to trick myself. Here, give this one a try: set a timer for two minutes and give yourself this constraint – try to write monosyllabically. It may be bad but that’s fine. Only up from here. You may find new ways to say what you mean. And I love low, brute words. We have the rest of our life for high Latinate multisyllabic choices. I like that this game forces us to regress verbally. Try it and get back to me. 

[Keats on light and shade]

2. Adding light to shade. A game: set a timer. For five minutes you have to address an individual, could be anyone, but write to them as if you are in the best mood possible. As if you’re feeling incredibly positive. What if you gave yourself this constraint every day for a week? Sometimes I feel like only what’s broken my heart is worthy of my words, so this exercise reminds me I can still write in a way that fights that. Even if you try to write only the good, the shade (what hurts) is still present, so see how much light you can get in.

3. Throw it away. Nothing’s that precious. No one has to see the pages you write from these games. It’s important to be reminded of that. Sometimes a piece can look too done too soon. These practices remind us that it’s beneficial to toss a lot and keep what matters. 

4. Just set a timer. Listen, it’s amazing what you can do in three minutes. This may not sound novel but I’m ALWAYS surprised by how long this amount of time can feel. I can never tell it’s that short. What this teaches me is I still have time to write even if I’m exhausted at the end of the day. Only thing is you can’t stop typing or moving your pen. Try to keep going. It’s brief! 

5. Reconsider Productivity: My earliest memories are of playing house, Jersey Shore arcade games, frog bog, carnival games, video games, and art was a game then too. We know play is important for developing brains – we are searching for limits as children. We learn to trust things if we see it isn’t so bad first, and games can teach us losing isn’t the end of the world. We could use that same attitude toward our work. A game: set a timer for two minutes and free write. Once it goes off, spend equal time writing without using any adjectives or adverbs. Timer goes off: now try to include a color in every line. The same color. Lastly, free write again with no constraints. How did it feel to go back to writing without any rules? How did the free writes vary? Did they feel different from one another? Which felt more free, the first or the last? All right, let’s say you got a few lines you can work with here, you won. If you hate what you wrote, guess what? You had to write through what’s obvious and boring first to get anywhere else. You’re a step closer. 

The Fork in the Road: On Frost's Misunderstood Masterwork [by David Lehman]

Not the least of Robert Frost’s accomplishments is that he managed to balance popularity with artistic excellence. Take “The Road Not Taken” (1920), arguably his most famous poem. You probably read it in high school. You will find it any good poetry anthology. And indeed, in its wizardry, the poem deserves the highest accolades. The irony is it has often been loved and quoted – for the wrong reasons. The further irony is that this misunderstanding itself testifies to the subtlety and genius of its creator. The critic David Orr has written an entire book, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (2015), newly in paperback, on this misunderstanding and the nuances of Frost’s design. 

Here is the poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

            The last stanza sounds heroic. The tone – a blend of nostalgia, wistfulness, assertiveness, and pride – is as irresistible as the rhetoric. Look at the last three lines. A master of repetition, Frost repeats a portion of the poem’s opening line and then creates all the drama in the world simply by repeating the first person pronoun, suspending it across two lines, and clinching it with a rhyme: “and I -- / I took the one less traveled by.”

           The poignant repetition, accompanied by a gently insistent rhyme, is a Frost signature. Think of the end of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which John F. Kennedy carried in his wallet:  “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” The effect is magical. In “Stopping By Woods,” it is the specter of death that is evoked. In “The Road Not Taken,” it is the choice facing anyone about to commence upon a career.

            And here’s where the misunderstanding comes in. Generations of commencement speakers have quoted “The Road Not Taken,” because of its perceived message. Avoid the common route. Go your own way. Be a maverick, a non-conformist in the great American tradition of Emerson and Thoreau.

            But now go back to the second stanza. Note lines nine and ten. As far as the traffic on them, the two roads are “really,” Frost acknowledges, “about the same.”  Two questions immediately occur. If there is little to distinguish the two roads, what do we make of the last stanza? And if the poem is not a straightforward assertion of non-conformism, what is it about?

            One thing it is about is the inevitability of regret. You cannot “be one traveler” and take both paths. At any crossroads you must choose, and though you may keep alive the hope that you’ll return someday, you know deep down you will never get a second chance. “I doubted if I should ever come back.”

            What about the proud boast made in the last stanza? The key line, easy to overlook, is “I shall be telling this with a sigh.” The sigh communicates regret even as it paves the way for a stirring declaration of independence. But this declaration may just be a case of a proud man praising his own past.

            So subtle is this seemingly plain-spoken poet that he can have it both ways. He can appeal to readers who look for adages, nuggets of wisdom, and he can reward those who value subtlety and complexity. Frost’s economy is exemplary: the “yellow” wood in line one suffices to place us in autumn. And the vagueness of “Somewhere ages and ages hence” establishes that the speaker is an older gentleman given to recollecting the past with a distant look in his eyes. For those captivated by the poem, David Orr’s book is highly recommended.

.           When I teach “The Road Not Taken,” I ask students: What is the sneakiest word in the poem? Hint: it is in the title. The word is “not,” a powerful word because it gives presence to absence, summoning up what is not there. The poem is about the road the speaker takes, not about the one disdained. The road not taken is the road we will never know except perhaps in alternative versions of history, novels that center, for example, on the assassination of President Kennedy, at whose inauguration in 1961 Frost recited another of his great poems “The Gift Outright.”  --DL

Ed. Note: First published as a "masterpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2016, under the heading of "Clearing a Path to Truth: Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is a poem that’s loved for the wrong reasons."

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html   
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

On Reverence [by Lauren Hilger]

[a conversation with short story writer and playwright, Abuchi Modilim]

LH: I’ve been thinking about reverence and how to define it for myself. What makes you reverent of some writers (beyond just admiring their work?)

AM: I think reverence should be a personal thing. I revere writers who support emerging writers. I revere writers with great personalities too but the former is what I find most interesting. 

LH: The writers I revere most, I feel like are excavating me from something very dull that keeps me from really seeing. Sometimes that dullness is just getting wrapped up in the day – a lot ushers past me unobserved. If I give myself ten minutes to read a hero, I notice how much I’m ignoring! 

[Esiaba Irobi]

AM: "How much I'm ignoring." It is the phrase. No writer is completely free of this. When I’m not writing, I go back to E. C. Osondu and Wole Soyinka. I like how E.C. Osondu writes. Effortlessly. His writing screams freedom. I read Chigozie Obioma, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Okey Ndibe, Chika Unigwe, Esiaba Irobi, I can't exhaust the names. But undoubtedly, I have read E. C. Osondu more. Wole Soyinka's play 'The Lion And The Jewel' taught me the craft of playwriting. His characters are real. The originality of his poetic dialogue is incomparable. Who are the writers you go back to?

[Lauren, with her copy]

LH: Right now we’re back with Pizarnik, Tranströmer, and Zbigniew Herbert. Do you think you write for the kind of reader you are? 

[Pizarnik's books are treasures]

AM: I write what I would love to read. And I don't have specific readers in mind when I am writing. Writing a good story or play is my foremost obligation when I sit to write. I focus on the form, and not intention. You write for your kind of readers? 

LH: I think I’m writing with the idea of telling a secret, whoever is receiving that is beyond me. What do you find mysterious or unknowable about your own work? Does that change per genre you’re working in?

AM: This question reminded me about the writing workshop facilitated by J.K Anowe at the University of Nigeria. He had asked us to study our writing to find out the spectacular thing about it that we don't know. It was that day that I discovered that I often have a weird character in my writing. I was surprised. I was never aware until after that workshop. And this does not change per genre. You would see this character in my short stories and plays. 

LH: Do you tend to consider your audience as your contemporaries, or do you think about the future? 

AM: First, I consider my contemporaries. I also think about how my work would carry on into the future but I don't let it bother me. Great works would live after the writer is gone. It is not the writer who decides that. The works of William Shakespeare who died in 1616 are still being taught in universities around the world. I use him for this example because of the era in which he wrote. I am sure he was not writing for us then but we are reading him today. 

[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]

 

LH: How did your genres come to you?

AM: The genres I now write short stories and plays came naturally to me. I didn't force them. I wrote poems in my early days of writing. I stopped writing poems to focus on short stories and plays. I don't chew my fingers when I sit and face the screen of my laptop to write a short story or play. And I am currently working on a full-length play that will be published in 2023. Although now, I write poems once in a while and luckily for me good journals accept them. I had entered for Jack Grapes Poetry Prize in 2021 and made the semi-finalist list. 

I think the literary writer is first a poet. It doesn't matter if they are writing poetry or not. Whichever language the writer chooses to write with, reflects poetry. Have you written other genres before? 

LH: I started as a fiction writer and took a long time to admit I was a poet. I was most afraid and most affected by poetry. There’s no turning around now though, I want to stay here.

Abuchi Modilim is an Igbo-born storyteller and playwright. He is the winner of the 2021 Arojah Students Playwriting Prize. And the curator of Enyo: An Anthology of Contemporary African Plays. His writing has appeared in No Tokens Journal, Jellyfish Review, Kalahari Review, Abandon Journal, Samjoko Magazine, and is forthcoming in Native Skin, the State University of New York Praxis: Journal of Gender and Cultural Critiques, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for Best Small Fictions. Currently, he is studying English and literary studies with a minor in Theatre and film studies, at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

On the Juicy Tube [by Lauren Hilger]

Today I offer a meditation on the 2000s cultural power icon: Lancôme’s Juicy Tube. A generation's foray to makeup. Let’s consider together an object that stands as a symbol, an antique, a kind of doorway.

[From every conceivable angle, it was just lip gloss.]

In high school, a friend bestowed upon me two gifts, a Juicy Tube in the color “clear sheer” alongside the MAC single pan eyeshadow “pink haze.” I took this as a gift that said, “here you'll need these.” A license of another kind. Upon acquiring I wondered, actually, what was the Juicy Tube’s reason to be? It seemed just what it was, a juicy tube. But it required a new category; it wasn’t chapstick or lipstick, those were two things I could wrap my head around. 

[The precursor]

It was a lacquer I found mysterious. For one, it lost all pigment once applied. For two, when would you need it? Surely not when you’d pull for chapstick. In addition, the Juicy Tube cost 16 US dollars, expensive then and now especially compared to the Lip Smackers that preceded them in our collective consciousness. Lip Smackers offered scents (flavors?) like vanilla frosting, blue raspberry, and a shocking pink cotton candy, appealing to children. 

 

[Another loved object]

In fact, my prized possession had hitherto been a gumball machine made to dispense jelly beans. Like Lip Smackers, jelly beans were a collection you consumed, kind of plastic, colorful, also sold at the mall. Juicy Tube marketed with no such no food flavoring. It had the aesthetic of an ice cube. 

[I wasn’t kidding.]

“The glistening hi-shine of Juicy Tubes,” my friend offers, when I ask what topic she’d like for me to write about as a guest author on the Best American Poetry blog. “Loved Juicy Tubes. Nothing like ‘em.” 

All to say, the Juicy Tube linked being a kid to something I didn’t yet recognize. “Thelyphthoric” is a term I try to think through in my second book Morality Play (out soon from Poetry Northwest!) I certainly do not believe it’s as simple as “fashion magazines and pop stars were corrupting young girls!” but there was something sinister in the open-mouthed ads. Something cold, intimidating. I remember applying my Juicy Tube meticulously in algebra until my teacher slammed his palm on the table and shouted “HILGER” to make me stop. Is this the only memory I have of math that year? Of course I was mortified but, truly, I didn’t think of it as putting on makeup during class. I didn’t think of it as anything yet.  

It was the novelty of something new and strange. High school can usher in an era of heightened insecurity, a lot of tears, a lot of struggling. For your author it certainly did. Maybe the Juicy Tube represented something so vapid and icy and untouchably beautiful that I could access that too. Adult in my mind, I carried around a real beauty brand in the pocket of my long, long jeans. I wore it to declare my connection with Britney checking her lip gloss in Crossroads. I wore it along with the brows of Edith Piaf, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo.

In other words, it marked a moment – it spoke to something larger than I was. It offered assurance. It now lives eternal in the flash of printed photos from disposable cameras. 

[shades of sheer]

I loved the Juicy Tube for being a signifier, ultimately, of innocence. Equally, I loved it for its minimalist claims – it did just what it said on the tin. Should you be selling a lip product in 2022’s beauty space and want to succeed amidst a saturation of high-quality indie lines from all over the world, celebrity brands, luxury makeup, your lip gloss better tout benefits. We’re talking plumping lip oils infused with vitamins and collagen. To really make a mark they need to be hydrating, vegan, cruelty free, sustainably created, ethically sourced, etc. Application should be effortless, should feel like nothing, be lightweight, easy to wear. Juicy Tubes, hate to say it, were the least comfortable option we had. Sticky, viscous, obvious. If a breeze blew a strand of hair toward your mouth you’d never recover. Were the early 2000s Juicy Tube a brand new product, would it find relevance today? It has since been brought back, pitched as an object of nostalgia. But what’s replaced it? To your author, nothing.

"B-Flat Elegy" [by Stanley Moss]

Stanley tells us he wrote this poem as an elegy for Richard Howard. "The poem is not a home run, it's a bunt, and I'm running as fast as I can to first base."

B-Flat Elegy

Three cheers and chairs for Richard who died,
the cause was complications of dementia,
Finders keepers, losers weepers,
along the Seine, the Thames, the Sligo and Hudson.
God knows why it makes a poet friend recall
a kind, contrary Irish lady, Bridget Boland, 
film writer, novelist, and gardener,
my close, close, close friend
I never slept with,
my devout Roman Catholic friend
lost her faith, couldn’t bear to hear music
for some reason hidden from her.

Incidentally I cheer
for a graduate student librarian,
Willa, whose mother is a horticulturist.
Her daughter can’t stand or abide flowers, 
ugly roses, tulips, or violets.
I bet God loves Mr. Auden
who received a letter from his mother
after she died, he could not read,
it would have broken his heart forever.

Listening to Mozart and Bach, I think about
a lady who lost her father, husband, and children
at Dachau. She made out okay, but fell down,
got torn apart when she heard music.
I refuse to defend myself.
Bridget, my Irish lady born in London,
and the death camp lady
were somehow sisters. It’s strange.
Cheer if it pleases you, cheer
for the joy of not remembering your name.
Notre-Dame is on fire, in Madrid the Gran Via
snakes to the Palace Hotel.

Unkempt hair
almost rhymes with dementia.
In the Ukraine a loudspeaker tells the static news:
a boy, six years old, watched his mother raped
for two days by Russian troops.
The six year old son’s hair turned gray.
I hide feelings from myself
my inappropriate, demented preoccupations,
I mourn for a dozen eggs,  Richard, and Bridget.

-- Stanley Moss. Photo credit: Bill Hayward.

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 3 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

NA: You said in the first part of this interview series that you collaborate with your wife on community poetry projects through the Tioga Arts Council in upstate New York, which she runs. And that you two have curated ekphrastic and reverse ekphrastic exhibits. I’d love to see a sample of what that exhibit looks like?

DD: In our most recent exhibit, which was funded by a grant from the Poetry Foundation, we gave poems to
local artists and had the artists paint, sculpt, or collage a response to the poetry. The poets featured were you, David Lehman, Richard Blanco, Eloisa Amezcua, Christine Kitano, Nicole Santalucia, H.L. Hix, William Heyen, María Isabel Álvarez, Faisal Mohyuddin, Christian Teresi, Leah Umansky, Nicole Santalucia, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Joe Weil, and a few others. My wife also made broadsides of the poem and artwork. We had local elementary school children respond to lines from the poems, as well, and we hung their crayoned responses in the children’s gallery, which is attached to the main gallery at Tioga Arts Council. Posted on the right is Richard Blanco’s “Cloud Anthem” from his most recent collection. The collage/painting was done by the artist, Andrea Kelleher. 

 

NA: You collaborate with other poets, recently with Nicole Santalucia on a collection of Ashbery poems. And I heard that this book, Generations, inspired you to write a long poem in response to William Heyen. I wondered if you could talk a little about those projects and/or poems?

DD: Nicole and I have been collaborating on our Ashbery book for over two years now; the book is a series of epistolary prose poems addressed to John Ashbery. The poems began as letters to each other mediated by the figure of John Ashbery. I’m not sure what the final shape of this project will be, but I’ve enjoyed working on it with Nicole, who is such a dear friend and such a wonderful poet. I feel that I’m always learning from her, and she’s so funny, in her work and in real life. I’m so lucky to have her as a friend (and her wife Deanna Dorangrichia, who is an amazing artist). These friendships were given to me by poetry.

I also wrote a long poem titled MIDWHISTLE, written in stepped septasyllabic cinquains and addressed to Bill Heyen and to my son, Dante Jr., who was unborn when I wrote it. I think it’s safe to say this is the first long poem written simultaneously to an octogenarian and to a fetus.

I’ve always wanted to write a long poem. As an undergraduate I read and admired A.R. Ammons’s Garbage and Tape for the Turn of the Year, Williams’s Paterson, and Galway Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. I’ve tried on many occasions to write my way into a book-length poem, but I could never find a way. Then, I read David Lehman’s Playlist (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019) and reading that book started me thinking of the long poem again. Reading Bill Heyen’s long poem, To William Merwin (Mammoth Books, 2007), along with the impending birth of my son and my deep engagement with Heyen’s oeuvre, precipitated the initial outpouring, which became MIDWHISTLE.  

Thanks to Sean Bishop and Ron Wallace, the University of Wisconsin Press picked up MIDWHISTLE and it will come out in spring 2023 as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. I’m excited to see this book come into the world along with the other collections that will be published in the series during 2022-2023: American Sex Tape by Jameka Williams, Shopping or The End of Time by Emily Bludworth de Barrios, Betsy Sholl’s As if a Song Could Save You, Joshua Burton’s Grace Engine, and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl.

 

NA: A lot of poets have a favorite poem to read from their books. Maybe I should call it—their favorite read-aloud poem. Do you have one from this book? Or maybe just a poem to close with here? With a short opening commentary on how it came to be?

DD: I like this one. The title is a gentle half-parody of those long expository James Wright titles that I love (and that he modelled on Li Bai’s titles). The title does describe the genesis of the poem. I had been reading the Merwin translations and watching a television show about the arctic expedition and this poem came from there. The diastole and systole of this poem expresses everything I want to say, and keep trying to say, and haven’t quite figured out how to say, in all my poems.

Poem for My Two-Year-Old Daughter After Reading W.S. Merwin’s Translations of Musō Soseki and Spending a Few Hours Meditating on the Ill-Fated 1845 British Arctic Expedition of the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror

I’ve also made friends with wisteria
and the cattail light of morning. Come sleep
inside a bottled ship’s rigging. Be glad
you’re loved without longitude, forever.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of three poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016), Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019), and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one volume titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. His book-length poem, MIDWHISTLE, is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Spring 2023.

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

Five years on: On Reading with Jerome Sala and David Shapiro at the Zinc Bar Last evening [by David Lehman]

 

What a pleasure
to read with
Jerome Sala and
my old Columbia
and Clare colleges’
chum, David Shapiro,
at the Zinc
Bar last evening.

Jerome read first.
His corporate sonnets
reflect years of
labor that Marx
would characterize as
alienated in the
tall tower of
Time and Life
on Sixth Avenue.

There is beauty
in a cliche 
just as there
is humor and
then just to
clinch the deal
comes the rhyme.
Well played, Jerome.

The host beckoned.
I read second:
I read poems
in the manner
of Catullus,Herrick,
Goethe, Keats, Mayakovsky,
Millay, Stevens, Dorothy
Parker, Charles Bukowski,
and Kenneth Koch.
I also told
an old joke.

David Shapiro read
poems from his
new book including
"Why Rimabud?" and
conversed with the
darkness wondering whether
you could see
the darkness or
whether total darkness
was a poem.
"As Kafka wrote,
there is hope,
but not for
us," he concluded.

The mermaids sang
to him. The
crowd cheered. I
promised I'd write
about the event
using only three
words per line.
Thanks were made.

All were glad.
Drinks were had. 

-- David Lehman

from the archive; first posted May 8, 2017 (je pense)

On Memorization [by Lauren Hilger]

As I write to you, in the year 2022, we don’t have to memorize much: GPS leads the way, phone numbers are saved, and devices alert us of birthdays. Say what you will about attention spans, how we are faster and less focused than any other era in history, how we value what’s brief and easy, ever and anon. You still have choices! You can try to memorize a poem today. 

Reading your poems aloud is a powerful editing tool – trying to memorize, I’ve found, is even stronger. You get to ask yourself, what lines are not worth learning by heart? What’s gotta go? I’m no actor used to memorizing scripts, and I know there are as many ways to read a poem as there are infinite individual learning styles, but I’ll share what’s worked for me! 

1. Record yourself. Having a recording playing through headphones is my favorite way to learn a set for a reading. I also want to pay attention to my speech patterns and accent. Sure, in listening to yourself, you can realize the way you say “egg” or “coffee” is insufferable but trying to work through that, to actually hear what you sound like can be useful. And examining your voice paired with the poem helps certain lines stick.
2. Writing it out by hand and in your handwriting. I think of this act as bringing the poem to another place and hopefully deepening the poem-shaped rut in the brain. Seeing the lines in your hand takes them out of a font used for daily communication, a font you might subconsciously associate with details meant only to be taken in short term. 
3. Moods. As I’m writing this, a friend texts me his poem, line after line, as he is practicing retrieving it without peeking. Relaxed, at ease, talking to friends – that’s where your brain exists at times, and you’ll want to bring the poem to that mental space too. Having experienced knowing that poem there in that mindset, not just a stressed study mode, can help you access it later on.
4. Print! If I can offer any practical advice, just have a printed back up with you. None’s the wiser if you glance down. Truly no one will care or notice. Or bring your book, should you have one![waiting for a train with poems]
   
5. Listen. I spent my youth taking out poetry recordings housed by NJ’s Park Ridge library and the greater Bergen County system of libraries. These were (ahem) CDs, and I always was working on one commuting by train. That connection felt profound from go: hearing poets make bad jokes between poems, mess up their lines, take their time drawing out words, listening to where they stay quiet, their silence, felt like the most precious time spent. And today, as then, I’m grateful for others who offer their work to me as a performance. I always feel humbled and moved by it. [this was a giant case for three CDs]
6. Learn other poets’ poems. What can this practice offer you? Learning other poets’ poems alleviates some pressure I feel to create, and practicing someone else’s work still feels like I’m training my ear. Memorizing poems I love has helped me answer questions like: Where did this poet go that might have been edited out? What risks did they actually take? Does the first line really matter? In fact, learning poems in some ways feels, to me, like memorizing just the first line. That first line brings everything else forth. You learn one line that reminds you of the next. Then the next feeds the next and all the rest.
7. Have no end goal. What is it that’s so hard about memorizing a poem without meter or rhyme? Is it too close to language we don’t normally interrogate, the language we don’t look at directly but know as a tool? And what if you’re almost there but keep losing the thread at the same line? Or what about when it’s just not working and you never get a line to stick? To this poet, it doesn’t matter. It’s the trying that teaches and in trying, you get to dwell.

Mary Ruefle: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Ruefle, photo by Hannah Ensor, 2017

_____________________________________________________________________

Little Stream

 

My heart was bright and shining

like a lobster boiling in water.

And then I was just a child

eating the leftover snow.

I’d lost my mittens and my belly button

was as good as gone, meaning

I couldn’t be born again, ever,

so I sat by a little stream

with my eyes closed.

I saw a woman carrying a child’s coffin

on her head. I saw a rat so friendly

he shined my shoes with his tongue.

I saw my mother leave the room, saying

“Now I am going to go drink some vinegar.”

I saw a surfer drink a wuthering wave

and go down gently into that good night.

I saw the daffodils praying together.

I saw a hummingbird cry out

for a comma between decades.

I saw the quick trimming the hair on their necks

and the wicks of their packaged feet.

I saw something small and in constant danger

of being blown away, like pepper.

I saw a monk set an umbrella on fire, for fun.

I saw an old man dwelling in a tiny fishing village

with a tangible vibrancy that was truly inspiring.

I saw a Venus flytrap eat a cheeseburger.

I saw my struggles were coming to a close.

I saw I would grow so old I would stop wondering

what life on Napa Rui was like, and forget

the first apple tree was in Turkey.

I had the constant feeling something of vital importance

had been lost sight of, was perhaps even gone.

It’s hard to say hello to every atom.

I got to know protozoans, though.

It took three days for my umbilical cord

to swim past. At the end,

the tattered carnation of my navel

seemed most like me, so I threw it in

and at once my eyelids opened,

never to close again.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, as well as a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. She is also the author of My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, where she serves as the state’s poet laureate. [“Little Stream” from Dunce. ©2019. Printed with permission of the author and Wave Books.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                        Hieronymus Bosch, The Concert in the Egg, ca. 1475

Adrian Matejka Named POETRY Magazine's New Editor

Adrian Matejka has been named editor of POETRY magazine. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was named Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018–19

 Here's the official announcement: 

Back in 2014, we posted Erin Belieu's conversation with Adrian:

Interviews with Poets--Day 3--Adrian Matejka (by Erin Belieu)

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

from the archive; first posted September 10, 2014

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

"Gift Means Poison in German" [by David Lehman]

And poisson means fish in French.
Therefore, on my first trip to Paris,
reading a menu I recalled
my cousin, now a fashionable designer,
then a survivor of Dachau, twelve years old,
a week after arrival in New York City
when Truman was President. I thought
of what she must have thought when,
for the first time, she rode on the Broadway bus
and passed one gift shop after another.

Poison itself is a funny word, a gift horse
given by deceitful Greeks: look in its mouth
and see: it sounds what it says, it seems.
For example, five years ago I walked
into the Jolly Corner grocery store
which no longer stands on 75th Street
and Columbus Avenue. A man and his wife,
ahead of me in line, were buying Camels
for him and Winstons for her when
a display case of brightly packaged junk food
next to the cash register caught his eye.
His wife said, in a tone it would take a gifted actress
years to perfect, “That stuff is poison!”
and then she stalked out of the store as though,
perhaps, the ongoing argument that defined their marriage
had taken a new, subtle turn. Tilting his head
toward the door, the man behind the counter
faced the abandoned husband and said,
“She’s poison.” He said it as if he knew
and by god I thought he did: very possibly both of them
were right, I decided: and wondered what the husband
was thinking, who had suffered in silence
this perfect stranger to insult his wife.

David Lehman

David Lehman is the author of numerous collections of poetry including New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), and The Daily Mirror (Scribner, 2000). His latest book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World (HarperCollins, 2015). He is the series editor of Best American Poetry and edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. He received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Schocken, 2009). He teaches in the New School graduate writing program. 

from Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 1983. Posted by VQR,  December 12, 2003. Poem appears in Lehman's first book, An Alternative to Speech (1986).

"Poems of Robert Frost" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

I went to the doctor for my

Annual checkup and he said,

'You've got cancer of the nose.'

Of course I was very surprised

But he added, 'You don't have to

'Do anything right today except

'With enough time you won't

'Have a nose.' I then inquired,

'What is the alternative, doc?'

And he replied Mohs surgery

About which I was clueless

But did not like the sound of it

One bit so I took the road

Less traveled you might say.

 

                *

Okay, stopping by woods on

A snowy evening. I don't know

About woods but growing up

In Chicago I was familiar with

Snowy evenings. One night

It snowed so hard that they

Called off school and we kids

Went sledding at Devil's Hill

All the next day and then

As the dusk began to fall

About four o'clock the snow

Resumed so even if it was

Not strictly speaking woods

It was a snowy evening.

 

                *

What about the poem 'Sand Dunes'

By Robert Frost? He describes how

A town doesn't get inundated by

Ocean waves but it does succumb

To sand dunes which he says are

Brown and dry. I believe this refers

To how you can get muddle-headed

In your old age even if you survive

The earlier years of your life because

It's like your brain gets clogged up

With sand. Also you will be buried

In the earth (sand) unless you want

To be cremated which reminds me

Of 'Fire and Ice' by Robert Frost.