The Best American Poetry

Talking Pictures: On "The Asphalt Jungle'"

Ed note: Since December 2019 I have written a regular column on classic movies for The American Scholar. Here are the opening paragraphs of my latest, which was posted yesterday (April 17) under the heading "Blind Accidents: How John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle brilliantly epitomizes the caper film." -- DL

<<< “If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town,” Louis the “box man” Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso) tells Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe),the mastermind of a million-dollar jewel heist, in John Huston’s 1950 noir, The Asphalt Jungle. Surprise: the robbery doesn’t go off as brilliantly planned. Doc, also known as “the professor” and “Herr Doktor,” will end up in prison along with Gus (James Whitmore), the hunchbacked counterman who is a top-notch getaway driver; Cobby (Marc Lawrence), a bookie; and Lieutenant Ditrich (Barry Kelley), a crooked cop . Louis will leave a widow and a small, sickly child after a watchman is punched and falls to the ground,  misfiring his gun, and a slug finds its home in Louis’s belly. Oh, yes—“box man” means safecracker.

Based on the novel by W. R. Burnett, The Asphalt Jungle is the ur-example for the whole caper subgenre. The booty could be the gems in a shop on Paris’s ritzy rue de Rivoli (Rififi), the proceeds at the track on the day of a big race (The Killing) or, in a comic register, the take of five Las Vegas casinos at midnight on New Year’s Eve (Ocean’s Eleven). Whatever the setting, the result is failure, not because of the ratiocinative powers of the police but because of the inevitability of betrayal, miscalculation, and violent death. Nearly all of noir is founded on this assumption made somehow romantic and even glamorous.
>>>

For the rest of this piece, please link to The American Scholar website here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/blind-accidents/
For other "Talking Pictures" posts, click here:
https://theamericanscholar.org/dept/sections/departments/talking-pictures/

Photo: Sterling Hayden, Jean Hagen, and Sam Jaffe in The Asphalt Jungle, 1950

Free City FilmTrip – 1 “Corrupt Purposes” [film by Bill Hayward]

Bill Hayward is a creative paradox: a master image-maker who lives surrounded by poets and writers. You should see what he does to his books, which lie in great stalagmites all over his floor – he marks and annotates them like a Talmudic scholar. And then he alchemically transforms what he’s read into something filmic that can’t be categorized in any conventional way. To my knowledge, no one has synergized visual, aural and textual material in quite this radical a form. I am not exaggerating when I say that his recent, multi-award winning "Free City FilmTrips", incorporating excerpts taken directly from the novel, may represent the foothills of a movie genre. - Eric Darton

Elinor Nauen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________

The History of Western Philosophy

 

Bertrand Russell had just about convinced me

there’s more to life than sex

I’d like to go to bed

with him but he’s dead      even windowless

monads are sexy     they remind me of gonads

careening around & bumping

each other     hitting on each other

 

I know more philosophy than that

 

you’re not supposed to mix

your muse with your mistress or they’ll both

fuck you     over     the real question

is

is there anything we can think of

which

by the mere fact that we can think of it

is shown to exist outside

our thought   

 

the answer is sex

therefore god exists

 

sex is a revelation

a reason

empirical

possible     credible     self-consistent

the best of all possible worlds

sex precedes existence

precedes essence

I fuck      therefore

I attract every body with a force

directly proportional to the product

of their masses

 

Buridan’s ass

unable to choose between 2 equidistant bundles of hay

died of hunger

call me up sometime     I’ll make you lunch

_________________________________________________________________________________

Elinor Nauen is a poet and prose writer who writes frequently about baseball, cars and driving, and place, and maintains a six-day-a-week blog (at ElinorNauen.com). Her books include Now That I Know Where I’m Going, American Guys, So Late into the Night (a book-length poem in ottava rima), My Marriage A to Z: A big- city romance, Cars and Other Poems, and, as editor, Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women writers on Cars & the Road and Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend: Women Writers on Baseball. She hails from South Dakota, lives in Manhattan’s East Village with her husband (Johnny Stanton) and a cat (Lefty), and studies Norwegian and strict traditional Japanese karate. She hosted (with Martha King) the Prose Pros series from 2007-2019.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

In Memoriam: Daneen Wardrop & Laura Boss

When a poet dies there is a vast caesura, a field of lilacs interrupted by wing beats and heartbeats and aches and aches and: snugly in the ampersand at the end of a life, they shine there, an em dash, a last ellipsis, a lovely lock of gray hair on the wrist of a daughter—…&

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Last week, two wonderful poets died within a day of each other: Daneen Wardrop and Laura Boss.

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I didn’t know Daneen (except through her poetry), but I was reading an advance copy of her latest book when I heard from the publisher we share about her passing. Wardrop’s newest collection, Endless Body, is part of a three-book-in-one collection called Trio, which also features books by Diane Raptosh and Karen Donovan, due out this summer. I had read her book, Silk Road, last year and was impressed by its virtuosic technique, it’s intense interiority, and the imaginative heft of the collection’s central persona (Donata Polo, Marco’s wife). Wardrop, a noted Dickinson scholar, imbibed and alchemized the inebriate air at the epicenter of Emily’s poems. Wardrop’s poems, especially those in her forthcoming collection, were transformative, transcendent, elegant, precise. Reading them I could not help but be amazed and reassured by the poet’s immensely intelligent, deeply loving, and wildly original presence. She is one of many many poets whose work deserves a wider readership and whose life in poetry has enriched us all.

Here are links to some of Daneen Wardrop’s books:

Trio: Planet Parable, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body (Etruscan Books, 2021)

Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018)

Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015)

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University of New Hampshire Press, 2009)

Here is a link to Wardrop’s poem, “name,” on the Academy of American Poets website.

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I first met Laura Boss sometime around 2012 at a reading at the PCCC Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura came up to me after the reading, said some kind words about a poem I had read, and quoted back a few lines that she admired. The handful of times I read in Paterson after that first occasion, I would always look for her in the crowd, usually sitting next to her longtime friend and Poetry Center director, Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Maria and Laura were alike in their enthusiasm for poets and for poetry, in their deep listening to the music around them, and in their fierce support of fellow poets.

Laura Boss founded Lips poetry magazine in 1981. She published Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Stone, David Ignatow, Marge Piercy, Michael Benedikt, Anne Waldman, Ishmael Reed, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Toi Derricotte, Alice Notley, Hal Sirowitz, Alicia Ostriker, Molly Peacock, and many more. She wrote an accessible autobiographical poetry, straightforward, rich, searching, and wild. She lived an amazing life in poetry. The next time I read in Paterson I’ll still look for her in the crowd.

Here are links to some of Laura Boss’s books:

The Best Lover (NYQ Books, 2017)

Flashlight (Guernica Editions, 2010)

Arms: New and Selected Poems (Guernica Editions, 1999)

Here is one of Laura’s poems:

LIVING TOGETHER
for Gregory Corso

I lived with Gregory for a year
or rather he lived with me
And though it was only a year,
it seemed like twenty
At night on my brown velvet sofa
he would write in his Chinese red silk
embroidered covered journal
with his brown ink Mont Blanc pen
that he had asked me to buy for him
and to get one for myself (though I never did)
The TV would be on and in memory always
tuned to a baseball game–
In the mornings we would make the run to Christie Street
for him to pick up what he needed to survive the day–
At this point, I was on a hopeless mission to get him to stop
to get rid of his years of bad habits
I was wearing my invisible Wonder Woman cape
but I was never successful like Wonder Woman
Sometimes we would go out to Maxwell Plum’s but
he could never sit for more than half the lunch
He took me to see the movie Napoleon but we only
stayed for half(it was incredibly long)
He stayed in my apartment and painted a self-portrait of himself
He kept changing the face–even once made himself black–
He had the skyline of San Francisco behind him
He painted a portrait of his friend Kerouac–
He painted a portrait of me and my eyes turquoise though
they are green and even made the sky turquoise
He made me look like a bitch—but the colors were beautiful
We went to San Francisco to find an apartment
but came back to New York when we were called that Ted Berrigan had died–
There was never I realize a chance that we would make it
We were like a fragile, fragrant homemade candle—
Its slight flickering wick
just waiting for the oncoming tsunami wave to blow it out.

(Originally published in the Connecticut River Review)

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David Lehman’s “Peace and War in American Poetry” [by Anne Holmes]

from the Library of Congress:

November 22, 2019 by Anne Holmes

The following essay was written in 2012 by David Lehman as part of the Poetry and Literature Center’s online “Poetry of American History” series that ran from 2012-2014. The series included essays and interviews by leaders in the literary field, including former Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry, that illustrated how poems by Americans helped define or expand the country. The aim was to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. Though the series is no longer active, From the Catbird Seat is reprinting essays from “Poetry of American History” to bring them new light.

Peace and War in American Poetry

1.

David Lehman. Photo credit: W. T. Pfefferle

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience—or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliad knew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace—whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities—one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest—the fruits of peace.

W. H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles” (1952), one of the strongest poems of his later period, invokes the Homeric precedent to throw into relief the bleakness he sees around him. World War II may have ended in 1945, but Auden’s shield reflects a world dominated by implacable hostility between erstwhile allies. We were at peace, but the supreme metaphor of the era joined winter freeze with military might: the Cold War. On the shield of Achilles, as Auden pictures it in 1952, are “an unintelligible multitude,” a disembodied voice proving “by statistics that some cause was just,” a martyrdom enclosed in barbed wire, a thug wielding a weapon:

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept
Or one could weep because another wept.

It is a deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

In his elegy for William Butler Yeats (1939), Auden declared that “poetry makes nothing happen.” The assertion is debatable; exceptions come to mind. But the larger point seems incontestable. Art and even love are powerless against the ruthless use of superior force. Indifference “is the least / We have to fear from man or beast.” [1] A spirited rendition of Beethoven’s fourth Piano Concerto will not stop the wars, make the old young again, or lower the price of bread. [2] “We must love one another or die”: a noble sentiment, but it will not help you win the war against the Third Reich or the Empire of Japan. [3]

The early Auden might have branded as defeatist some of the things he writes in his later work. During the Spanish Civil War, Auden had written about “the necessary murder,” a phrase he would come to rue, to disown, to revise unsatisfactorily, and to disown again. “Spain, 1937,” the poem containing this offensive phrase, ends with an exhortation to action, for “the time is short and / History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.” In retrospect, this line struck the mature Auden as fundamentally wrong, even wicked, for justice (he came to see) has nothing to do with history or inevitability.

In the years between the “age of anxiety” (Auden, 1946) and the “age of Aquarius” (Hair, 1968), there were few poems of unalloyed joy upon the conclusion of wars that left the populace weary and wounded. The self-consciously public utterance of the time was either a howl or a chant from Allen Ginsberg or perhaps a nervous meditation punctuated with creepy imagery, as in Robert Lowell’s “Fall 1961,” in which a grandfather clock ticks away the seconds and “We are like a lot of wild / spiders crying together, / but without tears.”

Click here for subsequent parts of the essay, including a discussion of World War II poets.

Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

An Interview with Elizabeth A. I. Powell [by Nin Andrews]

I met Elizabeth A. I. Powell years ago when we were both students in the MFA program at Vermont College. A young mother with three small children and another one in her future, she was studying fiction back then. I lost touch with her until years later when I saw she had won the 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga prize for her fabulous collection, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter or Living Truthfully under Imaginary Circumstances. I thought, Wait. Is that the same Liz?  I was reminded of Nickole Brown, another Vermont college graduate, who studied fiction and who also became a prize-winning poet. 

NA: How/why did you transition from fiction to poetry? Can you say a few words about your evolution as a writer? 

EP: My evolution as a writer follows the trajectory of my evolution as a woman. I had to learn to listen to my own voice, not the voice and criticisms of others, and it took a long time deciphering what was valid criticism and what was someone holding forth opinions in the moment. I had to learn to trust myself.  I gave up on my first love, poetry, in my senior year when told it wasn’t very good at all by my classic nemesis---my stepmonster-- when I returned from the Bennington College July program. 

So, I changed to fiction. When we were in grad school I had a prof there say,” Oh no, not another damn women’s story!” It was a lyric essay, really, about childbirth. From then on I tried to turn every story into some other kind of form. Writing fiction in third person was too much like moving heavy furniture around a room.  There was no discussion of hybridity, especially at VC. Here’s the deal, I had to make it matter only for myself.  I was buying whatever anyone wanted to sell me. Then one day I realized the truth in the Dylan song, “Everything passes, everything changes, just do what you think you should do.”

NA: You are a master of the lyric essay as well. I love the poem (or is it an essay?), “Summer Undid Me: Guerlain Imperiale (Bedroom), 1853.” 

EP: Oh, Nin, thank you! It is a kind of detoxification from too much summer sun, reading books about Napoleon and Baudelaire, spritzing too much Guerlain, and a narcissist lover gaslighting me into another dimension! It is an argument about how we use our senses and how easily we can be fooled by history, marketing, artifice. Ultimately, it’s how can we tell the dancer from the dance. It’s creative inquiry, which belongs to essay and poetry and becoming. It is a kind of poetic journalism, which is to say, a sister to documentary poetics. 

NA: I am a fan of all your books, but I especially love Atomizer. I admire its humor, intensity, and lush sensuality. I'd love to hear you talk about the experience of writing this collection. Maybe say a few words about the difference between writing the personal and the persona poem? 

EP: I don’t think we can write something until we have really lived it and leaned into the question of it. When I’m stuck on a poem it is usually because I haven’t lived the needed experience to finish the poem. With a persona poem the same is true for the writer. One can try on masks, but ultimately one must have the empathy of understanding the narrative arc of the poetic problem. I love what method acting’s Sanford Meisner has to say (about taking on personas), that we must behave truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

I started “Atomizer”  with my concerns about the intersections of technology and biology, and capitalism’s influence on how we find love and attachment. I was heavily influenced by French philosopher Alain Badiou’s work, In Praise of Love, which depicts contemporary love as a mutual truth refinement, one that can’t be calculated through marketing and technology, but by saying YES at every turn. I, in turn, turned to my own five senses as a way to interpret romantic love (as well as agape love) and how it all plays out.  

NA: Who are your influences? And what are your guilty pleasures?  

EP: Always, Paul Celan. Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Gwendolyn Brooks and Lucille Clifton. Sam Shepard, Don DeLillio, and Raymond Carver. Reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets  gave me a freedom back I didn’t know I’d lost. For the sounds of sense and the sounds of a rural life, Frost has meant a lot. Comedy and comedic timing, voice and satire has kept me good company, especially through Jewish humor. I learned so much from my mentor at UNH, Charlie Simic. But it all started sitting in my room as a seven year old listening to JFK’s famous speeches album on my little record player. Listening to Joni Mitchell has been important, speaking of records. My guilty pleasure is to engage with pleasure without guilt, and when that is not possible, to eat as much high quality chocolate as possible in my most comfortable pajamas. 

NA: What are you working on now?

EP:  I’m working on a manuscript of poems and lyric essays called, Into the Mistake, about reproductive trauma as an epigenetic and environmental conversation through time and texts; how our lives live in us and grow like rings in a tree. It also features growing up in NYC in the 80s and the idea that maybe mistakes are more mystical than we sometimes think. The book pretty much believes in process theology.

NA: Could we have a poem from the book? Maybe "The Ordinary Odor of Reality"? And some commentary along the lines of how the poem came about? 

This poem came about when I visited OVR (Olfactory Virtual Reality) in Burlington, VT where they are doing critical work on using olfactory technology to treat veterans and trauma survivors with PTSD. When I was there they had bottles and bottles of scents like: gas fire, baby powder, coolant, match strike, hot sand.

THE ORDINARY ODOR OF REALITY 

Is as strong as our bones
steeped in our bodies
like Red Rose Tea.
Outer space smells like rum,
so says spectral analysis, 
but all my trauma reeks of
baby powder and chlorine.
We breathe 86,400 times a day.
We ingest each other through 
our nostrils straight into 
our amygdala like 80s cocaine or salt
water over our heads. I have inhaled 
my worldview from the sterility 
of Brutalist architecture, schoolrooms 
I have sat in. I am having a smell dialogue 
with mold and wet earth and sand 
that resides in the woods and playground 
inside my memory. What are 
your odor threat cues? Coolant? Match 
strike? Summer day? All arranged
in form, a story? I put on 
the Olfactory Virtual Reality
Headset that looks like space goggles
with a scent-o-graph that changes 
with each virtual image, in order
to confront the Aqua Velva, polyester 
bedspread, peppermint schnapps, 
urine and semen and tobacco,
the capture and pillage 
of my seventh year. Now 
in warrior headdress I combat
the reality of the moment
that launched my career
in PTSD. Cyber psychological
treatment, imaginal exposure
therapy to locate the past
so, I can crash back through,
on a treadmill with my space goggles 
and therapist, and relive it
to master it, and take a shovel 
to rebury it in that wet earth, 
but without me. 

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, most recently “Atomizer” (LSU Press). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a Small Press Bestseller and named a “Books We Love 2016” byThe New Yorker.  Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K.  Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, Stand (UK), and American Poetry Review. Find her at www.elizabethaipowell.com

Book Recommendation: Philip Brady's The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics

Philip Brady's The Elsewhere:  Poems & Poetics is a collection aimed at eternity.  Brady's new and selected provides an unabashedly bardic synthesis of the smoking girders and brickwork that make a life in poetry. Ranging from Queens to West Cork, from Youngstown to Lagos, The Elsewhere negotiates the landscape between recollection and release, between art and life, between impulse and sudden song: "I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. / But memory's a muscle letting go." The essays on poetry, and the poetry itself, are Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday.  The Elsewhere is everywhere ambitious, but more importantly, its poems and prose dwell in a kind of singing that begins in the forever that is right here.    

This is the perfect book to pick up during national poetry month; it makes me wish there were more New and Selected collections that featured essays on poetics alongside the poetry. I'd like to see the same kind of book from contemporary poets who write incisive prose (like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Zucker, Tracy K. Smith, Nin Andrews, Martín Espada, David Lehman, Terrance Hayes, William Heyen, H.L. Hix, and on and on and on...).

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend whole-heartedly Brady's ambitious poetry and erudite prose. ~DD

The Four Noble Truths [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Number One, in a nutshell: life is pain

And (Number Two) life's pain is caused

By desire; so if Old Smengie desires

A coffee date date with Paige Spiranac

(Google her) because It might possibly 

Lead to "something," then Old Smengie

Will feel pain and not just because he

Desired the "wrong thing" but because

He desired "anything" at all. Fortunately

(Number Three) there's a way out of

This predicament which is to follow

(Number Four) the Eightfold Path

Which says (once again, in a nutshell)

Do the "right thing." Problem solved!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"The Last Orgasm" [by Nin Andrews]

Preface     

If anyone reads this book, they will think they know what kind of person I am. They will, I am certain, imagine me as someone else, someone I can never be—simply because I have written this book of orgasms, and this book will do that to them, and to me. It will make me appear to be the kind of person who is in the position to write about orgasms, who knows all about orgasms: their songs and dances and secret languages. They might go so far as to compare me to Noah Webster, claiming that just as he compiled an entire opus of words, carefully defining and distinguishing each one’s particular origin, pronunciation, spelling, and proper usage, so I have collected an opus of orgasms. And I will have to admit, with surprise, that even if I don’t imagine myself to be that sort of person, even if I don’t consider myself an author anymore, much less an author of an opus of orgasms, even if I no longer converse with orgasms in my daily life, the orgasms continue to seek me out, as orgasms will, as if they need my blessing, as if I and only I can hear their pleas, their wishes, their last breaths.

>>>>

When asked to describe her writing life, Nin Andrews once wrote: "I have always felt a little apologetic about my poetry. Because I am not sure that I am the person who writes it. Rather, some other mystery woman sits in front of my computer, typing happily away. This other is bold and loud, and my father, who met her on occasion, described her as unbecoming, uncouth, and socially unacceptable. When she was a girl, he threatened to wash her mouth out with soap and water, as was done in those days. Ivory soap—it made her vomit. But all the soap in the world could not clean or shut her up. It is she who gives voice to orgasms (or is it vice versa?), and who has not a worry in the world about what others think. Me, an inhibited wisp of woman, I can only watch her and sigh."

Ed. note: Nin Andrews's book "The Last Orgasm" (2020) is available from Etruscan Press. The "orgasms" collected here are in the manner of such writers as James Tate, Lydia Davis, Vallejo, Lorca, Henri Michaux, Frank O'Hara, Kafka, and Rilke.

Dispatch from a Distance - Animal Tracking [by Cara Benson]

Rare glimpse

It’s easy to feel like a Magoo in the woods, walking my developing foot paths to repeatedly visited spots among the veritable highways and busy intersections of animal tracks crisscrossing all around me. Of course I notice them, the tracks, but the creatures themselves have typically skidaddled. I imagine far off sets of eyes up in branches, peeking out from burrows, shining in dark dens, all trained on me as I whistle away, largely oblivious to their precise locations. I am learning, though, that their movements are legible and that I can become better versed in deciphering them. There’s a wildlife tracker I’ve been able to walk with a few times who talks about it that way, that it’s a matter of reading the story in the landscape. These stories are more prominent in winter as their trails show in the snow like pictographs on a blank page, so the season just past fell perfectly open for me to put in the “time on the ground.”

In my previous post, I’d written that I was going to explore snowshoeing next. My loose idea was to ruminate on how the snow reveals desire lines. That’s the term planners use to describe foot paths that form regardless of design (think of those bare brown walkways in the green of parks that show the cut-throughs and ways that people actually travel). In the woods hikers often call them herd paths. I was thinking about my own desire as revealed by the path I tread through the landscape out my door. More than a few writers have taken this topic on of late. Robert Moor in his On Trails and Torbjørn Ekelund’s In Praise of Paths both consider how desire lines are a result of how the individual and the collective meet on the road. This idea was appealing to me, but whose trails I was meeting and overlapping with were not of human origin. My snowshoes packed and connected with paths that, from what I could tell, were deer, coyote, and would that have been mink? Or were they fisher? Are pine martens in the area? And then porcupines! That’s a yes (I think) to all of them. So my writing, like my walking, has followed this line.

I quickly became obsessed with reading prints. First I was drawn in to looking at each individual mark. Counting toe pads. Seeing the imprints of nails. The gentle drag of a paw across the powder. All such intimate evidence of the actual creature left behind. I wanted to touch everything. To get as close as possible to the impressions that demonstrated an incredibly diverse taxonomy of fauna in this corner of the world. Deer, sure. Okay, voles, even turkeys. But bobcat? Out my back door? How cool is that! (Very.) (Until one attacks you.) (I’ve never been attacked.) (It could happen.) (Probably won’t.) (Right?)*

Trying to identify the animal by looking only at an individual print, though, is like naming that song in one note and that note might be muffled. Or played off-key and through a paper cup and you’ve got wax in your eyes. What I mean is that prints are not always clean impressions. Even when they are, some of them are similar enough to each other that more information is needed. That’s why trackers look at the gait of the animal as revealed in the series of prints. Are they body scissoring or leg scissoring? Bounders, leapers, waddlers, walkers, or trotters? Do they step back foot into front print? Land with hind feet first?

I try to picture the animal moving and get too mechanical about it. After a while, I can’t even remember how my cats walk. My mind loaded with data struggled to incorporate it into my sensing self. For a while, everything I saw was either deer or coyote (even if it wasn’t coyote). One of the pieces of information that stayed with me is that canine prints typically show the nails. As do weasels and mink and otter and fisher and probably others, but I didn’t know any of that yet. So I’d see prints with prominent front points and feel fairly satisfied with myself that I’d nailed it. But over the course of time and walking with those who’d been at it longer, I found that some of tracks I thought were coyote were actually fox. Of course then I went through a period of thinking everything I saw was fox, but I’m past that now (porcupine). For the record, I’m not always wrong. In fact, I’m getting less wrong.

If you can’t peg it from a small swath of the trail, the scope of the investigation must expand to follow the tracks for more information. That often means looking to see if there’s scat. Most animals in the wild, with the possible exception of porcupines who will sleep in their poop, don’t shit any old place. They do it to communicate. Fox, for example, will leave scat on little branches. Or up on logs. They want to elevate its presence. The message: “I’m here.” As I started looking, I saw them everywhere. It wasn't long before I began to wonder if they were also talking to me. Something else to consider: what was I saying to them with my repeated trips through their range? What is it I might have wanted to say? I’m here, too.

I did notice over the course of winter more and more scat was being left right in the middle of my snowshoe paths. There was a particular corridor that seemed to be an information hotspot. At the bottom of one of the first hills I descend from the back of my home I enter a rich swath of hemlock forest that holds multiple rocky beds collecting runoff and rain in spring and summer that are blissfully easier to cross in snow. Just past the first of these temporal streams, in one afternoon I came across two fresh calling cards. Coyote (hair filled, rope-like) and fox (somewhat similar, but smaller).

I know scatology is serious business, but it is a particular type of feeling one gets when leaning in to another creature’s excrement, then zooming in for close-ups. I can’t tell you how many angles of pellets, tubes, segments, and other shapes of feces I have on my phone now. Due to pandemic distancing, it’s not that often that I’m in face to face conversation with someone and scroll my pictures to show them something, but even going through them for my own self, it does give one pause. Not kidding, I have passed more than a few Saturday nights this season comparing my pictures with what’s on the internet (I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise, there’s a lot of shit online).

Though they were leaving evidence right under my feet, trailing animal tracks also leads the walking off my usual paths. To follow where the animal treads rather than what I might have intended put me into a more deeply attentive state. “As the crow flies” became as the woodchuck waddles. My walking evolved into stalking. Slow. Methodical. I want to run into the creatures, and, also, I very much don’t. Everyone wants to see a bear until they actually do. I have run into black bears a few times. It’s exciting! And scary. And I want to be their friends and feel badly yelling at them, as you’re supposed to do. But jeezum, they’re big.

Walking with the expert tracker we did follow right to the source – twice. Both times, benignly, porcupine. One down in a smelly den. The other up way up in a hemlock tree. Porcupines apparently are less skittish as they’re their bodies are supremely well defended. They get down in a den and curl up with their quilled backs to the opening. You can get your face in the hole for a peek and deep whiff (I did); they don’t actually shoot quills as one myth would have it. It might be safer doing that than standing under one up in the trees as they are known to fall out of the limbs, sometimes fatally.

Initially, though, I didn’t want to follow tracks too far as to not disturb whoever I might be on the tail of. Someone had said on one of my other walks that you can follow the trail in reverse to read some of the story. But it’s all moot, really, as it is ridiculous to think that a coyote is anywhere in the vicinity of me tromping along in my snowshoes. Over time I became more comfortable letting the trail take me wherever it went. Over downed trees, up rock ledges, frozen wetlands and bogs, some terrain I’d never tread without the protection of a hefty snow pack covering what’s frozen or asleep under it.

Now the snow is gone and mud season upon us. My tracker friend does walks year round, also in urban areas. The clues might be harder to discern, but I’m sure that they’re there to be read if I am looking. I was thinking about that while doing spring clean up last weekend, raking out the flower beds and cutting away last year’s dead growth. I saved the most unruly bushes for last, the catnip. I started snipping and pulling the stalks from the bottom, working my way up to the apex of the bush, when on top there was, elevated for sure detection, a small pile of dried fox shit, not far from my front walkway. Well played, red. Well played.

*I wrote this before that video went viral. I'm just being goofy here. Healthy bobcats don't typically attack humans, especially unprovoked. Don't believe the internet hype.

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, Whose Woods, Roads And Seeds, A Trace, and Hunting Season.

Squibs 457-463 [by Alan Ziegler]

457:

458: Louvre Pyramid aglow, flat on my belly angling the camera with my wallet, my cheek to the ground to peek through the viewfinder. A tug on my feet—must be security I’m always doing something wrong in Paris, fingers wagging at me. But it’s just a young guy laughing with his friends. “Vous rude!” I blurt, and he says Frenchly, “It is a joke.” I reply, “Do you want to hear a joke? ‘A Frenchman pulled my leg.’ That’s a joke.”

459: Live it up now. Live it down later.

460: The elevator door opened. I didn't get in because it was occupied by a baby in a stroller and her mother. I waved and smiled behind my mask. The baby—about a year—stared back expressionless. As the door was closing she grinned and waved. It occurred to me that no child born in the last year has likely experienced a complete stranger smiling at them. I stood alone in the hallway, as if on a deserted platform having just missed a train.

461: I never think about you sexually. Except when I masturbate.

 

462:

463: Party at Gary Giddens’ apartment. I ask a young critic with an academic appointment how he would define bebop. The critic starts to answer then realizes that the jazz musicians surrounding us have gone silent. "I'm not going to answer that in this room."

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

David Lehman, Denise Duhamel & Nin Andrews: Reading at the KGB Tonight 4/12/21

 

<<
I am so excited to be reading with David Lehman and Denise Duhamel tonight for the KGB series, I can barely breathe. I am thinking of this as my ten minutes in the presence of fame—as well as in the presence of two of my all-time favorite poets.  I can’t wait to hear Denise read from her new collection, Second Story, which includes a long poem in the form of Terza rima about her terrifying experience with hurricane Irma, as well as her equally terrifying poems about the last few years, under the influence of Donald Trump. And I am so excited to hear from David Lehman whom I expect to surprise us by reading from his forthcoming collection, The Morning Line, due out in the fall of 2021 from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  I owe so much to both of these poets. David was my first real poetry professor. I would never have pursued poetry if it were not for him. And it was Denise who taught me how to read an orgasm poem aloud.  -- Nin Andrews >>

 

The reading starts at 7 pm.

 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86561522512?pwd=UW1BRXU0dVZHZ2ZWM0xHWUtjWWNkQT09

 

Meeting ID: 865 6152 2512 Passcode: 799004

<<
I'm grateful to David Lehman for giving me the chance to say a few words about his April 12 KGB Bar reading with Nin Andrews and Denise Duhamel, because it was David who introduced me to their work. Back when the reading series was new, in the late 1990s, with Star Black and David in charge, he gave me a copy of "The Book of Orgasms" by Nin Andrews, and I was blown away by the sheer happy lusty sexiness of the concept and the individual poems illustrating the poet's orgasmic "quest," which is a never-ending one inasmuch as the "last" in any series is the first in a new series. I also recall a night at the bar when, drinking Tanqueray martinis, Lehman insisted that feminism and fun were not incompatible, and won the bet with Duhamel's Barbie poems in her book "Kinky." As for Lehman himself, will he read daily poems, poems "in the manner of" his favorite dead poets, or a Baudelaire translation? What this virtuoso trio has in common is authenticity, humor, wit, daring, and sensibility, which is just about everything. >>  -- Fred Chervil 

 

Daniel Tobin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Banshee

            The long, drawn-out howling of a dog

            shut up all night inside the auction ring

            out back of our B&B scares awake

            the owner's child so that she cries

            in the room below our bed, a duet

            that in my half-sleep seems to carry

            beyond Mount Eagle and Slea Head

            to my grandmother's Brooklyn apartment

            thirty years ago where, back-lit in her chair,

            she told me her story of the banshee,

            how as a child she heard it wail

            through the townland of Kilvendoney the day

            the neighboring farmer died; and again

            years later she listened to what sounded

            like the keening of an old woman

            under Sixth Avenue streetlights,

            and knew then that no prayer could save

            her oldest son lying in a coma,

            meningitis working into his brain,

            the pain like a small voice rising to a pitch

            beyond all hearing -- a noise so unlike

            the steady hum and beep of machines

            that monitored your induced sleep

            in the outpatient wing where they carved

            the lump from you, as it turned out,

            benign, the word soothing as the whisper

            this child's mother must use to calm

            the fractured music in her daughter's throat,

            Shush, shush, it's only an old watch dog,

            as moonlight softens the tin roof

            outside both our windows, and I draw you

            closer to me in our rented bed

            and rest my hand on your scarred breast.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Daniel Tobin is the author of nine books of poems, including From Nothing, winner of the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Stone in the Air, his suite of versions from the German of Paul Celan, and most recently Blood Labors, named one of the Best Poetry Books of the Year for 2018 by the New York Times and The Washington Independent Review of Books. His poetry has won many awards, among them the Massachusetts Book Award and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His critical and editorial works include Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Awake in America, The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and To the Many: The Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge. His most recent work is On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence. A trilogy of book-length poems, The Mansions, will appear in 2023. He teaches at Emerson College in Boston. [See also this link for more poems and information.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

                    Kiki Smith, American (born Germany), born 1954; Banshee Pearls (detail), 1991;  Smithsonian American Art Museum.          

From My Diary No. 3 – February 2020

 

Inner Voices – Oil on Canvas by Lera Auerbach

(1.)

I think of the mountain from Rafael's childhood.
Once upon a time, there lived a woman.
Her name was Soledad.
Nobody lives on that mountain now.
Nobody is left who remembers Soledad,
only Stella (Rafael's mother) and Rafael.
She's also in my memory.
And if you are reading this, she's now in your memory, too.

You may forget about Soledad as soon as you finish reading this.
Or, perhaps, I may make her a bit more memorable
or bring her name again later, so if you forget her now,
you will remember when you see her name later on.

Soledad was 82 years old when she died.
The house, high in the mountains, had no electricity,
and each morning, she would milk cows and look around for snakes.

Snakes loved the sun and would come out to lie on the stones.
Some of the snakes were poisonous, but they only bite if frightened.

Nobody knows how Soledad appeared and from where she came.
She was always living with Rafael's family, although she was not related to any of them.

Soledad never married.
Every night she would make bread in the oven,
enough for the whole family.
She would drink coffee all day long,
and her hands smelled of coffee, bread, and milk.

When we moved to our house in Florida, Rafael bought a machete to protect against the snakes.
He never used it, and the machete was lost,
just as so many things tend to get lost and never found again.

(Where do all these lost things go?)

 

(2)

Before coming to the Mayo Clinic, I was preparing to perform my 'Arctica' with the Oslo Philharmonic.
In my hotel room in Rochester, I had a piano, and after long days of tests and doctor's consultations,
I would return and practice for the upcoming concert.

Very few people knew I was at the Mayo Clinic. One of them was Enric Sala.
Enric is an explorer with National Geographic and my partner in the "Arctica" project.
Enric encouraged me to put my health first and not to postpone the surgery.
I don't know if I would have the strength to cancel my performance in Oslo without Enric's support and perspective.

Fortunately, the presenters found another pianist who was able to learn the solo part in time.
The performance in Oslo went on as scheduled.
I felt like the captain who abandoned the ship, yet the ship miraculously sailed on,
while the captain was left alone on the reefs, bruised and confused.

Each day in the hospital, some part of me was in Oslo, rehearsing with the choir,
rehearsing with the orchestra, practicing alone.
Another part of me was back in the Arctic, listening to its silence (which is never silent)
and trying to grasp the enormity of its solitude.

Arctica – the fragile giant, the North of the North.

Only a small part of me, the least real one, was in the hospital,
trying to walk around my room (ten steps in each direction)
while holding onto the IV stand.

I also used the IV stand in my symphony as a musical instrument –
it is how "Arctica" starts – with the sound of drops falling from an IV stand.
Sound of time passing, ice melting, seconds and droplets melting away.

(Sound of a hospital, of a medical emergency, of life passing or life renewing itself.)

 

(3.)

Generally speaking, quarantines need to be continuous –
since at any time in any given place, there are plenty of contagious illnesses.
One quarantine should melt into another.

Quarantines shouldn't be limited to viruses.
For example, when there is a spike in fatal crashes while driving,
there should be a few days per week when driving is forbidden.
Or at least limited to certain hours.
Let's say one would be allowed to drive between 2:00 and 5:00 AM at night
when nobody drives, but not during rush hours.
It would certainly balance things and improve statistics.

The researchers at the Mayo Clinic explained to me that Cushing disease
has only a 30% success rate of treatment by operation in Germany,
while in the USA, the rate of success is 100%.

"How could it be?" I asked.

"We operate on healthy people," the researcher explained. "In Germany, they wait
until you are damaged by the illness. Healthy people have a 100% recovery rate."

Statistics are a powerful thing.

For example, if there is a spike in divorces, let's freeze all marriages for a while.
Fewer marriages result in fewer divorces.

It's not a bad idea to quarantine all children; they seem to get ill much more often.
Healthy children equal healthy nations.

And definitely forbid people from gathering.

(Let's approach life in a way to improve statistics.)

 

(4.)

Why would anyone want to gather anyway? I never understood that.
Much better to stay at home and read good books.

Or you can listen to orchestral music using noise-cancelling earphones.
Noise cancellation is vital because this is how audible viruses (for example, news) get in.
The earphones don't fully protect you from noise, so when you are not listening to symphonic music,
you should wear earplugs with noise-cancelling earphones on top of the earplugs.

If someone asks you a question, just nod in response.
Nobody expects you to listen anyway.
Nodding is similar to clicking likes under social media posts –
you just add your support to the ego-boosting activities of your friends.
Nobody expects you to actually read their posts or click on their links (unless they contain cute animals, of course.)
After all, if you start reading and clicking on all posts of all your friends, most of whom you have never met,
you will never live to be 82 like Soledad, who lived alone in the mountain and never owned a computer.

The other positive side of a continuous quarantine
is that the Apocalypse loses its edge after a while.
One can scream, "We are all doomed!" only until one loses one's voice.
After a while, it's no longer believable.

But I'm worried about my parents. They are 82 like Soledad.
They don't fully understand the weight of the impending disaster, even though they have a computer and television and other viral spreading news outlets. They still venture outside and are reckless enough to visit various doctors wherein the waiting rooms they wait for sick people to spread more germs around.

Their refusal to quarantine themselves saddens me.

I have quarantined myself from everyone long ago, for that's what a writer must do anyway.

(It comes with the territory.)

 

(5.)

Can poetry and music, serious music, still be written?
In times when people have forgotten how to listen,
how to keep silent, how to remain still?

Perhaps I am starting to sound depressive.
As my doctors have warned me, cortisol deficiency can take its toll.

Every week, I receive a questionnaire from the Mayo Clinic.
The questionnaire is always the same.
It compares my attitude and feelings before and after the surgery.

I don't think my answers have changed so far, but I do not know for sure
since I did not keep my previous answers.
Probably, researchers may find my data disappointing.
They would like to see a graph. A graph is when lines go up and down.
Flat graphs are boring. Flat graphs are unremarkable.
Like rubber ducklings in a bathtub of a polar bear hunter.

Keep it together, I say to myself.
But I am worried that I may not be able to keep it all together
and may turn into a soundwave or break into tiny particles
that no longer make any sense and can't be reconstructed.

(I wish I could go to that mountain and meet Soledad,
who never, I am sure, worried about becoming a soundwave.)

 

 

Force Majeure (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

Professor Koch said, 'We know the story

'Where the guy wakes up and he's turned

'Into a bug, right? Now write a story where

'The guy turns into a beautiful woman.'

 

He was always talking about beautiful women.

Very well. Anomaly Englehardt spoke up,

A kid recognized as a universal genius who

In class always kept one hand over his mouth.

 

Anomaly Englehardt said, 'Concepts of ratio

'First appeared in ancient India as attempts

'To numerically express the ideal proportions of

'A beautiful woman's physiognomy, i.e. her face.'

 

Then Mar Knee spoke. Mar Knee always kept 

One eye closed and most often the left eye.

Mar Knee said, 'In The Book of the Courtier

'Castiglione imagines a conversation between 

 

'A man and two beautiful women but one more

'Beautiful than the other and Castiglione relates

'How the man flatters the more beautiful woman

'Without at all offending the less beautiful one.'

 

Then I spoke. 'Somewhere Byron remarks 

'That a boy should see only beautiful women

'Until he's twelve years old,' I blurted out. 

In those days I ordinarily stood on one foot.

 

'But what about when the boy turns thirteen?'

Inquired Anomaly Englehardt with his droll

Intonation to which Mar Knee responded,

'Then we must simply do the best we can.'

 

'Haha, mes élèves,' Professor Koch laughed,

'Class dismissed. Go out into the world and

'Good luck to you.' He had a slight stammer

Mostly on the letter G or on the letter M.

 

Later on College Walk I ran into a grad student

I knew slightly, an ardent Italian communist.  

A beautiful woman walked by and he sneered,

'Look at her. All she wants is a prick.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The How-To Poem with Rebecca Morgan Frank [by Nin Andrews]

I had all these great ideas for a blog post last night as I was drifting off to sleep, feeling thrilled to have just received my second vaccine, and dreaming of life after Covid—dinners out, coffee shops, friends. But this morning, when I woke, I felt done in. Overnight, my brain seems to have turned into Jello. I’m not sure if there’s a coherent thought in there, thanks to Moderna. Usually when I lack inspiration or brain power of my own, I pick up a poetry book at random, and it helps get the juices flowing. Or at least, I have an enjoyable moment with someone else’s poetry. But today, those poetry books are staying on the shelf.  No way can I focus on poetry.

Instead, I’m reaching for my guilty pleasure—self-help books.  Because there isn’t a subject I don’t need a how-to book for. Or a book for dummies. Whenever I walk into a bookstore, I am amazed to find a whole shelf of books, written just for me. So far, I have read Walking for Dummies--I mean how does anyone put one foot in front of the other? Daily Sex for Dummies. Daily, seriously? Tying Shoes for Dummies—it’s true, I don’t even tie my shoes correctly. And The Dummies’ Guide to Love and Happiness.  

What can I say? I love instruction manuals, precisely because I can never follow directions. I remember, many years ago, in a college poetry class, one student said, “Nin never does the assignment. She just goes off into her our own world.” “Yep,” the teacher said. “But at least she has another world to go to.” I am not sure if that’s a good thing. But I try to do what I am told. Well, more or less.

I also love instruction manual-poems like Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual,” and Rebecca Morgan Frank’s “How to Make Your Own Automaton,” which she reads in this video below. And then offers advice on how to write your own how-to poem. Frank is brilliant. And she gives great advice.  Now, if only I can follow it. 

 

An Interview with James Longenbach [by Aspen Matis]

Renowned poet and literary critic James Longenbach is the author of six poetry collections ― including Earthling, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award ― and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Nation, and he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim +Fellowship, among other honors. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Longenbach via email about his forthcoming book of poems, Forever. We also discussed wisdom as a way of trying to stop time, how immediacy is constructed through language, the reality that "everyone writes what they’re given to write," and how perhaps poets ― and all people ― need a lot of road blocks in order to find a road. 

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I like how writing poems makes me feel. We all listen to pop songs we love many times, and we don’t generally listen again because we can’t remember how the song goes; we like how it feels to move from the beginning to the end. I think our experience of poems, especially as we write them, is like that, like living acutely in time.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I’m not sure there is one! — though it’s important to believe there is one. Over the last 20,000 years most poems have been lost, and five or six have changed society; these days, how many people read Theocritus or Tennyson? It’s important to do the work, important not to formulate rules from anything; it takes a lot of forgotten poets to make a Theocritus.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Make a poem, which is also the most mundane thing.

If you were to teach a course in modern poetry, where would you begin?

Since the 80s, I’ve done just that lots of ways. These days I organize such a course not by authors (who in this format recur several times) but by verse forms — prose, several different kinds of free verse, sonnets, other rhyme and metrical schemes, songs, and so on. This arrangement changes, but the advantage is that I can better emphasize the great diversity of modernism.

How, in your view, is immediacy constructed through language? 

As I say in The Lyric Now, a great poem creates a sense of the now; the language is happening now; this is why we might keep reading Theocritus. There are lots of ways to do that, but I end up talking a lot about syntax, about how the order of the words creates in each poem a repeatable event in time; this is why, looking back, great poems have been written about (say) both the Holocaust and about sunflowers.

What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of Earthling? 

The poems of Earthling are all overshadowed, as I look back, by my mother’s death. She was old, it was both expected and shocking; but it took me years to figure out how to write about it, and really it wasn’t until, in “The Crocodile,” I haphazardly hit upon the idea of seeming to speak in a very contrived voice that I began to tell what felt like the truth. As that poem points out, maybe we need a lot of road blocks to find a road...

Writers who do more than one thing often face the problem of expectation: people tend to like to pigeonhole them. As a celebrated poet and critic, have you had to navigate the limiting assumptions of your readers and reviewers?

Yup. And my own limiting assumptions, too. But all poets are brilliant critics; they may not write their criticism down, that’s all. You need to have read (so to speak) a hundred great poems in order to write one good one.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Tons of them. Frost said famously that poetry is what is lost in translation, and Pound said poetry is what is made in translation — with that interesting word in English that corresponds to Theocritus’s Greek. To me, the latter definition has the advantage of seeming less mystical, more material, and poetry is of course a material art, a making of objects out of the medium, in our case the English language. Every human being has had the most complex emotions, but very few human beings have written poems.

Is your forthcoming book of poems, Forever, your most personal collection? What would you like to share about its conception and your vision for its life? 

In one sense, anything we write is deeply personal — what else could it be? But certainly the poems of Forever happened because of my ongoing coping with kidney cancer, and without question I have dealt with questions about mortality (which, looking back, I thought I already had!). Especially inasmuch as these poems are bound up with grappling with such questions, questions that often feel uncomfortably primal, questions of love, the poems feel to me deeply present.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Conrad Aiken won the National Book Award, and Aiken is a good poet, though he’s not often read. Prizes are of the moment, made of the moment and the moment’s judges, and sometimes history is eventually there, too.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

The philosopher Emil Cioran once said we become wise when we should have been depressed! That’s a little sly, but there’s something to it, too; wisdom is a way of trying to stop time, and time can’t be stopped, as our constantly and surprisingly changing poetry reminds us. There are no rules, and what works really well for one poem or one poet has nothing to do with the next poem or poet. All artists know a lot about sliding back to the bottom of the mountain...

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve been working on some new poems and some new essays, too. An essay on punctuation (especially its absence) in poetry from the 8th-century “The Seafarer” to the current Jos Charles just appeared in Poetry magazine, and a new poem called “Now and Then” has just come out in The Threepenny Review. I’m grateful. Everybody writes what they’re given to write, and doing so sounds as if it should be easy; but it’s very hard, and in my experience it gets beautifully harder. Often I wish I got to decide anything.

Who said it? [A Challenge]

Remember when the Sunday Times Book Review, frankly middlebrow and proud of it, used to run author's queries ("for a biography of Maxwell Anderson I would be grateful . . .") and legitimate questions from college grads who wanted to track down a favorite quotation (was it Scott Fitzgerald who said "live fast, die young, and have a handsome corpse?") In that spirit I offer you this cocktail party line that would have beguiled Flo Bear.

"If the Kennedy White House was decadent; the Clinton White House was sordid." Who said it? I have asked a lot of smart people, to no avail, and would be grateful for any leads. Meanwhile, my friend Burt Hooton proposes this multiple choice list of possible candidates:

1) Jane Fonda
2) Arthur Schlesinger
3) Diana Trilling
4) Senator Susan Collins
5) Jacques Barzun
6) Lawrence P. Berra

I'm not convinced by any of Burt's suggestions, though the terms of the distinction do sound as though they could have come from #3 or #5, and I appreciate the convention observed in #6.

You get extra points if you can say what Ava Gardner is doing in this post or if you can make a convincing case in favor of Oliver Stone's theory of JFK's assassination. -- DL