The Best American Poetry

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schult

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

"That’s What I Thought" [by Mitch Sisskind]

Everybody has a tragic story
And I have one of those too. 
Would you like to hear it 
For a couple of hours on an 
Economy class flight to LA?
Haha that’s what I thought!

So let’s talk about money.
Just by looking at people
It’s hard to tell how much
Money they have. Do you 
Think I have a lot of money? 
Haha that’s what I thought!

So let’s talk about sex.
Just by looking at people
It’s hard to tell how much
Sex they’re getting. Do you
Think I’m getting a lot of sex?
Haha that’s what I thought!

So let’s talk about death.
Just looking at people
It’s hard to tell whether
They’re dead or alive but
If you wait long enough 
You’ll be right eventually

The way a stopped clock
Is right twice a day. Do you
Think I’m alive, or am I dead?
Haha that’s what I thought!
But what about now? 
And what about now?

"Poem in the Manner of the 1960s" [by David Lehman, with poster from Va Q R]

Virginia Quarterly Review's poetry poster from 2012

Pride or Prejudice: You be the judge [by David Lehman]

In the current issue of New England Review, a highly respected journal, the editor prefaces the issue with a note in which she admits to being captivated by Les Miserables by Victor Hugo [left]. But to get into the book she says she had to overcome obstacles. The musical, for one thing. "Also it's from old white Europe -- what news could there be?"

This sentence stopped me in my tracks. And I wanted to ask you, dear reader, how you would sum up your reaction:

(1) Forget it. She was trying to be clever.
(2) The three least appealing words in the language used to be "dead," "poets," and "society." Now they are "old," "white," and "Europe."
(3) Forget it. Who, even among readers of lit journals, reads the editor's note?
(4) Forget it. She is trying to prove that she's virtuous.
(5) Forget it. It's the end of Western Civilization as we know it. (So what else is new?)

No Time Like Now: New Poems by Andrei Codrescu

You are invited to public self-flagellation at Strand Bookstore in New York City on March 26th at 7pm.

 

I will be reading from new poetry book, "No Time Like Now" (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press). More details are to be found in the calendar at codrescu.com. Other details are going to be revealed strictly for you if you do me the honor of showing up.

 

In preparation for the event I read several thousand incendiary words by H.P. Blavatsky, who put me in a spiritist and spiritual state of mind. Hopefully, the benefits of this lecture will be of use to all of us. In any case, whatever ails you will stop hurting for the duration of the performance. And maybe a week after.

 

Needless to say, reading at Strand Bookstore was always one of my Three Wishes. The others were: being published by City Lights Books, which came to pass (thank and happy 100th birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti!), and being translated and published by Gallimard, which hasn't yet happened, though it will, even if Gallimard wasn't what it used to be when I first wished it at age 19.

 

The Strand is the last standing Pillar of the Book in the City that sleeps most of the time these days. Show up and we will keep it from landmark-attack. Thank you.

 

In other news, I was in London and watched a half hour of incomprehensible live TV from Parliament. The Brits want out of Europe at all costs, and in jubilant self-mutilation they started stocking eggs, butter, oranges, and wine. They are nostalgic for the Great War. They have suffered enough Prosperity. Stupidity rules on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Come stock up on my poems: they will keep you well-disposed while the morons shoot off their toes. Order book/tickets here

From the Archives: Lydia Davis on TV [by David Lehman]

From the Archives: January 29, 2013

           On July 15, 2012, we reported in this space that Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under fame would play the part of Dr. Susan Wheeler in a two-night miniseries based on Robin Cook's 1977 novel, Coma. (Genevieve Bujold starred in the 1978 movie.) That show aired last fall. Now we learn that a character named Lydia Davis [pictured left in Paris 1973]  plays a vital role in the pilot episode of Revenge, a successful series now in its second season, about a girl who grows up to avenge her wrongfully disgraced father. The Hamptons are the locale and pretty much everyone is evil, vain, treacherous, and bitchy except for the men who are evil, vain, clueless, and unfaithful as the day is long. There is a hierarchy in this evil queendom, and the queen bee here is Victoria Grayson (played by Madeleine Stowe). The avenger was once named Amanda Clarke; now she is Emily Thorne (played by Emily VanCamp). Stacey said, "imagine what Barbara Stanwyck would do with either of these parts." Joe pointed out that the show is basically "The Count of Monte Cristo" meets summer in the Hamptons.

Lydia Davis is Victoria Grayson's best friend, as rich as she is blonde. It was Lydia Davis who gave a Van Gogh to her friend as a token of her esteem, But Lydia Davis [pictured right] is about to be excommunicated from the golden realm for having been caught fucking Victoria Grayson's husband! Who had a fake heart attack! Which was arranged by Emily Thorne! And you the viewer are left wondering about the exact relation between the character of Lydia Davis and the texts created by the author Lydia Davis even as you applaud this new fashion of naming the characters in TV series after contemporary poets. -- DL

Pacific Northwest Poets: Plentiful & Powerful [by Heidi Seaborn]

Next week, writers from all over will trek to Portland for the Associated Writers & Writer’s Programs (AWP) Annual Conference and Book Fair. Those of us in the Northwest are delighted to invite the writerly world to our rivers, mountains, ocean shores and urban landscapes. Attendees will find themselves surrounded by the natural beauty and a zillion poets who call the Pacific Northwest home.

There may be more poets writing and publishing in the Pacific Northwest than anywhere besides New York City. Working together with Lewis & Clark College, Oregon Poetic Voices  has archived digital recordings of over 450 poets reading their poetry. In Washington State, Kathleen Flenniken’s The Far Field blog, captured the work over 350 poets a few years ago. These are poets that are widely published, often professional poets. In Seattle, which carries the UNESCO City of Literature designation, there’s a joke that there are so many poets in the area that you need to swerve to avoid hitting one.
   
“There is such a tremendous range of poetic voices and styles in the Pacific Northwest, “says Billie Swift, owner of the poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, Open Books. “At Open Books, we don’t have a Pacific Northwest Poets section because where would one begin? We have people come into the store seeking PNW poets. Their eyes widen as we pull book after book after book off the shelf. And then there are hundreds of literary journals and presses thriving in the region.”   

One of which is the renowned Poetry Northwest that is celebrating its 60^thyear at AWP. Editor Erin Malone agrees with Swift: “Poetry is ubiquitous in Seattle and the whole Northwest— from the UW to organizations like Hugo House, to our indie bookstores, to reading series like Margin Shift, to our Writers in the Schools teaching our K-12 kids how to write poems. And because it’s such a large community, I feel like our writing scene goes against that dreaded Seattle Freeze. Writers here are very supportive and welcoming.”

Claudia Castro Luna, Washington State’s Poet Laureate credits a rich ecosystem that surrounds and supports writers in the Northwest: "I have been pleasantly surprised at finding writerly/poetry communities in every corner of the state.  This is heartening. I have also seen nascent communities in High Schools, but much more work remains to be done. There is vibrancy and yet there remain many untapped possibilities to involve immigrant communities as well as Native communities to share their songs and their stories."

Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna and Oregon State Poet Laureate Kim Stafford at the Hugo House 

The poets working today have several legendary tall trees of Pacific Northwest poetry to thank, including Theodore Roethke, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, David Waggoner, Carolyn Kizer and Tess Gallagher.  As Billie Swift says, “The Pacific Northwest poetry community has an exceptionally strong adherence to the poetic word."

That word is both heritage and expectation. Oregon State Poet Laureate, Kim Stafford reminds: “How many stories, songs, chants, spells, and other native utterances disappeared with the wave of settlers to the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century? Along with still-vibrant tribal presence here, I see writers in this region at work to restore words that fit the place--the land, rivers, weathers, and quirky customs we carry forward. We have a vibrant book and poetry scene in Seattle, Portland, and Boise, and as Oregon Poet Laureate I've encountered writing communities scattered all over. The land speaks through us to one another.”

 

Next Line, Please: Red Eyes and Blue Moons [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week's post shows off poems that made clever use of phrases with multiple meanings, phrases such as "red eye" or "blue moon" or "working stiff" or "grass widow." As always, there were droves of impressive responses to the prompt, and much else to be admired. Shall we jump in?

Steve Bellin-Oka’s “Red Eye” won deserved praise from discerning readers:

Bright crimson smear in the sclera. Over-
flow of a miniature river’s cataracts into the ovoid pool
of black pupil, blue iris, and lens. I almost never look
at my face in a mirror: so someone asks, what
happened to your eye? What hasn’t. Violent sneeze,
burst vessels. Once I abraded the cornea when by mistake
I rubbed sand into it. Maybe I was trying to make
glass. On the all-night flight from Vancouver to Baltimore
where you lay dying, I took a window seat so I
could both see and not see, hologram of the reading light
fixed above the jet wing. In Polaroids of us at the beach
as kids, our eyes burn red as coal embers, as unchecked fever

Diana Ferraro said it best when she wrote, “I like very much the almost medical, precise descriptions that create a cold distance, then slowly build into all the meanings of red eyes until we fall into the painful abyss of the unexpected.”

Christine Rhein shares first place with “Working Stiff,” the soliloquy of a man wearing a “man bun” (gross) and “Armani suits” (very nice if you can get it):

I’m serious. Fourteen hours a day. My neck, shoulders hurting.
My laptop heating up. Like business. I own a mall, a dance club,
three coffee shops. And on paydays, we all chat—my employees
happy,
able to buy the hippest clothes, great bodies, expensive hair—the
kind
that bounces when they walk. For myself—it’s a man bun, six-pack
abs,
Armani suits—in Second Life, Kona Karl raking in the lindens, and
me
designing logos for the coffee cups, bikinis for the dancers. To top all
that—
I’m getting married soon. But hey—don’t tell my wife. She thinks I’m
just playing “some stupid game.” She’d never understand Kona Karl
needing a tuxedo, a honeymoon. Or the 55,000 lindens—260 bucks
I’ve spent on special animation, making sure that, yeah, I’ll be
working
magic on my wedding night. And on any night when my bride,
Cloudberry,
shows up, logged-in, to shake cocktails, fill the hot tub in the beach
house
she picked out for us—the mortgage, like in real life, costing me
plenty.

"Blue Moon" proved to be a very popular jumping off point for NLP contenders.

Patricia Wallace earns high marks with her poem of that title:

I like the moon, the way she hangs around
when everyone else has split, sick of my caterwauling,
my complaints, my sorry love life. Sometimes she’ll slip in
an extra appearance at the bar and shine her full attention
on our conversation. We talk about dark sides and tattoos,
joke about the gossip: the black-out nights, how secretly
she’s a man, the dog-eared rumors people spin out drunk
with daylight, wanting to be hip and clever by claiming
we’re looney. She says she gets the blues from wildfires
and volcanos. Been there. I know the feeling,
Once in a blue moon, if she’s had a few too many,
I’ll walk her to the corner, lift her to a lamppost and watch her drift
into a dawn sky. There’s that little tidal tug as she disappears.

Taking advantage of the unusual terms used to keep score in tennis (where “love” equals zero) Allen King contributes the clever and economical poem, “Love-Love”:

Watching tennis
on t.v.
she turned
and asked,
“What’s love?”
Boy did
that make
me think.

There's plenty more to see, so visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post!

Brendan Behan Remembered [Terence Winch]

There’s a picture of Brendan Behan standing outside the Dublin Zoo with a bemused look on his face and a large snake curled around his neck.  The photo reveals much about Brendan, who died 55 years ago today, on March 20, 1964, at the age of forty-one. He was a comedian who liked to shock people and who wasn’t afraid to take chances.  He was an unstoppable ham who would do nearly anything to entertain his audience.  His life, or legend, nearly overshadowed his work in its claim on public attention.  His fans were sometimes more interested in the snake around his neck than in his writing.

He was a man of many talents, with the charm and magnetism of a movie star.  An accomplished singer who knew hundreds, maybe thousands, of songs, Brendan came from a musical background—his father played the fiddle, his uncle wrote the Irish National Anthem, his brother Dominic wrote “The Patriot Game,” one of the best-loved Irish songs to come out of Ireland’s struggles.  Brendan himself composed many songs, some of which are part of his plays and one which he claimed was written with a threatening pistol at his head.  He was fluent in the Irish language and wrote the first version of The Hostage (an Giall) as Gaeilge.  He had lived in France, spoke good French, and claimed to have written pornography in Paris. He was precocious writer, turning out reasonably good verse as early as age nine.  He first started drinking when he was a boy, so his two major activities in later life—drinking and writing—were off to an early start.

As he grew older and more famous, his taste for “the gargle” took greater hold of him.  In his late twenties and early thirties, when he was turning out the work on which his reputation would ultimately rest, he was capable of long periods of hard work without any intake of alcohol.  But as he conquered the public with his brilliant memoir Borstal Boy and his two best plays, The Quare Fellow and The Hostage, he lost the stamina to keep on producing work of the same stature.   His public demanded the famous tough-talking funny Irish writer, and Brendan hated to disappoint a ready audience. It wasn’t, of course, all the public’s fault.  Brendan loved pub life, good times, music, talk.  He was certainly aware of how he was ruining himself and his future as a writer, but that awareness was no match for his thirst.  

As a boy and young man he was a political extremist, having taken part in a 1939-40 IRA bombing campaign (one with numerous parallels to the later IRA bombings that were part of the Troubles in Northern Ireland) in Britain, where he was arrested in Liverpool at the age of sixteen and sentenced to three years in borstal (something like reform school). Although he had abandoned active participation in the IRA by the time he was an established writer, the same wild and rebellious spirit that landed him in borstal—and in an Irish prison for his part in a shoot-out between the Irish police and the IRA less than a year after his release from borstal—also landed him in numerous bars on both sides of the Atlantic, wherein he challenged his health rather than the established order.  It was in the pubs that he played Brendan Behan, the famous ex-con with a big mouth and great talent. 

Ultimately, the booze got the best of him.  Friends, family, doctors, editors—many of the people in his life—tried to help him control his need for drink.  But he wasn’t up to the task.  There was a public hungry for the character Brendan Behan had created, and he wanted to come through for his fans.  His drinking, though it was bringing him closer to an early death with every passing day, was also a central element of his public act.  Towards the end he was in and out of hospitals frequently. His wife Beatrice, or some friend perhaps, would discover him unconscious in his hotel room in a diabetic coma and rush him to a hospital.  He amazed medical people with his powers of recovery and disheartened those who loved him with his many drunken escapades and self-destructive compulsions.  Much of his talent was destroyed along with his liver, so that at the end he was almost a parody of himself, trying desperately to live up to his reputation as legendary raconteur and tireless literary comedian.

His life was full of contradictions.  He hated and feared death and didn’t even like the subject brought up in his presence.  Yet he destroyed himself at an age when he should have been just reaching the peak of his powers as an artist.  He was known throughout the world as a brawling macho Irishman, yet he was also bisexual and wrote at least one early story, unearthed by Ulick O’Connor in his fine biography of Brendan, which can clearly be categorized as gay.  Even Borstal Boy includes many touching scenes (no pun intended) among the imprisoned boys that are obviously sexual in nature.  Brendan apparently worried about what a public revelation of his sexual complexities would do to his image, but such an expose never occurred in his lifetime.

Brendan’s last books were all spoken into a tape recorder and later put together with the help of his devoted editor, Rae Jeffs.  He had lost the ability to sit down at a typewriter and work at his craft.  In the end, Brendan was in the hospital, dying of alcoholism, when he got hold of some drink through a misguided visitor.  That apparently finished him off.  There were to be no more miraculous recoveries. 

Borstal Boy was Brendan’s masterpiece, the book in which, as they say, he found his voice. In the making over a period of many years, it displays all Brendan’s talents as a story-teller and humorist.  A moving account of his life from his arrest in Liverpool to his release from borstal and return to Ireland, the book is put together with exacting skill and literary vitality. Borstal Boy is in the tradition of portraits of the artist as a young man and rivals Joyce’s more highly regarded Portrait.  If Brendan had gone on to write something approaching the brilliance of Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, Borstal Boy would perhaps have a higher rank in literary history than it now enjoys. 

The best-known of his plays, which are both performed from time to time, are The Quare Fellow and the Hostage. They are first-rate works that clearly demonstrate Brendan’s gift for dialogue and his ability to create authentic human drama.  The rest of his output—more plays, two “travel” books, a novel, and a follow-up to Borstal Boy are second-rate only in comparison to Borstal Boy and the two major plays. 

When I was a high school kid in the 1960s, my two favorite writers were James Baldwin and Brendan Behan. I couldn’t get enough of their work. I was thrilled when Brendan released two LPs back in those days. In fact, I pretty much memorized Brendan Behan Sings Irish Folksongs and Ballads, so much so that I can  still instantly summon up his voice in my mind any time night or day.      (Photo below: Visiting Brendan at his permanent residence in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, Oct. 2016; photo by Dominick Murray.)

Frank Yerby, Protest, and the Picturesque [by Hollis Robbins]

Every few years a scholar rediscovers Frank Yerby (1916-1991), the black bestselling author whose most famous novels, including The Foxes of Harrow (1946), The Golden Hawk (1948), The Saracen Blade (1952), and Judas, My Brother (1968) have little or nothing to do with race protest. Yerby won’t fit the standard narrative for African American writers. His work is too melodramatic, too Gothic, too picturesque. Most attention to him is a matter of making him fit or theorizing why he doesn’t.[1]  Then he slips into obscurity for another ten years.

Yerby also tried his hand at poetry. As an undergraduate at Fisk University he published one of his first pieces, “The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands,” in The Fisk Herald in 1938. This curious poem might be read as a lament that a fascination with the Romantic and picturesque would be at odds with penning protest literature.    

The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands

I

They say that when they burned young Shelley's corpse
(For he was drowned, you know, and washed ashore
With hands and face quite gone—the fishes had,
It seems, but small respect for Genius which
Came clothed in common flesh) the noise his brains
Made as they boiled and seethed within his skull
Could well be heard five yards away. At least
No one can hear mine as they boil; but then
He could not feel his burn; and so I think
He had the best of it at that. Don't you?

II

Now all the hungry broken men stand here
Beside my bed like ghosts and cry: “Why don't
You shout our wrong aloud? Why are you not
Our voice, our sword? For you are of our blood:
You’ve seen us beaten, lynched, degraded, starved;
Men must be taught that other men are not
Mere pawns in some gigantic game in which
The winner takes the gold, the land, the work,
The breath, the heart, and soul of him who loses!”
I watch them standing there until my brain
Begins to burn within my head again—
(As Shelley's burned—poor, young dead Shelley whom
The fishes ate) then I get up and write
A very pretty sonnet, nicely rhymed
About my latest love affair, how sad
I am because some dear has thrown me for
A total loss. (But Shelley had me there,
All his affairs turned out quite well indeed;
Harriet in the river drowned for love
Of him; and Mary leaving Godwin’s house
To follow where he led—quite well—indeed!)

 III

You see this is ironical and light
Because I am so sick, so hurt inside,
I’m tired of pretty rhyming words when all
The land where I was born is soaked in tears
And blood, and black and utter hopelessness.
Now I would make a new, strong, bitter song,
And hurl it in the teeth of those I hate—
I would stand tall and proud against their blows,
Knowing I could not win, I would go down
Grandly as an oak goes down, and leave
An echo of the crash, at least, behind.
(So Shelley lived — and so at last, he died.
The fishes ate his glorious hands; and all
That mighty bulk of brain boiled when they burned him!)

Yerby’s first-person speaker assumes general familiarity with the Romantic myths surrounding Percy Bysshe Shelley’s death and cremation in 1822. Dozens of ghoulish versions circulated in the decades following.[2] “They say,” the poem opens, but who does the speaker mean by ‘they’ exactly? Shelley’s friends? Books about Romantic poetry? Yerby’s college professors? The public generally? The poem assumes that Shelley needs no introduction, though Yerby’s speaker adds details about drowning and fish in a helpful parenthesis, demonstrating his detailed knowledge of Romantic poetry gossip.

The speaker then compares himself to Shelley: “At least/No one can hear mine as they boil,” he remarks. The poem demands the reader weigh in on the comparison: “He could not feel his burn; and so I think/He had the best of it at that. Don’t you?” It’s a startling moment. To whom is the poet speaking?

The second stanza offers a clue. It begins in the present. “Now,” he says “hungry, broken men” demand that he raise his voice in protest. Race is not mentioned but is clear: “you are of our blood:/You've seen us beaten, lynched, degraded, starved.” The poem is speaking back to those who want him to write about race. But the poet’s brain begins to burn and he turns to write “A very pretty sonnet, nicely rhymed/About my latest love affair.” The comparison with Shelley returns: one poet is unsuccessful at love, the other too successful. Yerby refers casually to Harriet and Mary and Godwin, assuming again that his readers know the cast of Romantic-era characters well enough.

The third stanza returns to the reader. “You see this is ironical and light,” he begins. He is sick of “pretty rhyming words.” But what can he do? At fourteen lines, the last stanza of “The Fishes and the Poet’s Hands” evokes a sonnet. Several lines “Now I would make a new, strong, bitter song,/And hurl it in the teeth of those I hate—/I would stand tall and proud against their blows, Knowing I could not win,” echo lines from Claude McKay’s sonnets “If We Must Die” (“Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,/And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!”) and “America” (“Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,/And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth”).

To whom is Yerby’s speaker comparing himself? McKay or Shelley? While Yerby ends his poem with one more comparison to Shelley, McKay seems like the real competitor. “Knowing I could not win, I would go down/Grandly as an oak goes down, and leave/An echo of the crash, at least, behind.” Yerby’s talent was not in sonnets, though he published a handful,[3] but rather in sprawling costume novels with picturesque grand oaks and decaying civilizations, leaving more than an echo behind. The protest verse he left for others.

The Poetry of Bonnie & Clyde [by Heidi Seaborn]

On May 4^th, the poems of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow will be auctioned off by Heritage Auctions in Dallas. The notorious gangster couple wrote poems during their two-year crime spree from 1932-1934 that included robbing banks, gas stations and shops and killing people along the way. They were eventually ambushed by the police in Louisiana and died in the shootout. The poems were written in a 1933 daily planner notebook that has been in the possession of Clyde Barrows’ family all these decades. Bonnie Parker was particularly prolific. Her poems are long sequences of rhyming stanzas that pull from the Wild West ballad tradition.

You've read the story of Jesse James
Of how he lived and died;
If you're still in need
Of something to read,
Here's the story of Bonnie and Clyde.

She likens their fugitive life to that of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Long before Michael Ondaatje wrote The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Bonnie Parker imagined him in poetry, in a chance encounter with Clyde in her poem, “Outlaws—Billy the Kid and Clyde Barrow”:

Billy rode on a pinto horse
Billy the Kid I mean
And he met Clyde Barrow riding
In a little gray machine

Billy drew his bridle rein
And Barrow stopped his car
And the dead man talked to the living man
Under the morning star

Billy said to the Barrow boy
Is this the way you ride
In a car that does its ninety per
Machine guns at each side?

I only had my pinto horse
And my six-gun tried and true
I could shoot but they got me
And someday they will get you!

Bonnie also used her poems at times to set the record straight when they were falsely accused:

If a policeman is killed in Dallas,
And they have no clue or guide;
If they can't find a fiend,
They just wipe their slate clean
And hand it on Bonnie and Clyde.

There's two crimes committed in America
Not accredited to the Barrow mob;
They had no hand
In the kidnap demand,
Nor the Kansas City depot job.

While Bonnie and Clyde were glamorized in life and since through film and literature, their poetry reveals that life on the run was far from easy. Clyde (with misspellings) describes:

As we travel down the highway
never knowing where it will end.
Never very much money 
and not even a friend

We donte want to hurt annyone
but we have to steal to eat
and if its a shootout to live
then thats the way it will have to bee.

The outlaw couple knows that they are doomed and use their poems to express their fatalism. Their impending death is presented in their poems without bravado or fear, but an understanding that this will ultimately be their end:

Some day they'll go down together;
And they'll bury them side by side;
To few it'll be grief
To the law a relief
But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde. 

~From “Outlaws: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde” by Bonnie Parker.

For Bonnie, poetry was a hobby. She had written poetry previously and even had a couple poems published. However, one wonders if the poems written in the 1933 notebook were written for posterity. If so, Bonnie and Clyde would be pleased and surprised that 84 years later, their verse would be auctioned off and read around the world on something called the Internet!  

Jérôme Cassou's Une Joie Secrète: Paris harlequin, Paris people [by Tracy Danison]

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

She claimed she was quitting but Nadia Vadori-Gauthier continues her one-minute dances – at this writing, she’s done a bit more than 1500, a full day plus an hour – since she began her ritual in the bewildered grief and defiance that followed the Charlie Hebdo mass murder of satirists by religious fanatics in January 2015.

There was always more than just marking the feelings of the moment in Vadori-Gauthier choreography – an effort to look again at Paris. Apart from being lively and lovely, Jérôme Cassou’s film Une Joie Secrète: Danser, un acte quotidien de résistance poétique,  (“Hidden Joy: dancing, a daily act of poetic resistance”).

Joie Secrète succeeds in discerning some new patches in the Paris patchwork and a new way of fitting Paris people into the urban esthetic. I say “Paris people” instead of “Parisian” because Vadori- Gauthier’s people are more witness than actor. In color, then, Joie secrete shows a Paris “harlequin” and, in among the stone, steel and glass of street and building, people.

undefined

In color.  Joie Secrète shows that Paris’ urban fabric has been, is being, significantly nicked, slapped and splashed with bursts and dashes of primary color. Asked straight up after the screening, Vadori-Gauthier denied scenarizing them. As she says, she was responding to a cache of primary colors in the landscape, a lot of which, if not all, are from the decades-long accumulation of hard-plastic urban furnishings – think metro seats or trash bins but also all manner of coverings, frames, signs and electronic info boards as well as flowers and more adventurous taste in house paint. If you care to look, the primary-color harlequin Vadori-Gauthier is pointing to is there in the places and spaces, waiting, maybe, for its Caillebote.

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

In people. Set in ordinary places in the central city, Vadori-Gauthier’s short choreographies – those in Cassou’s film and those that are not – show a strong, not to say, unusual, complicity of performance with place. If most places are recognizable to someone who knows the city fairly well, Vadori-Gauthier isn’t dancing them, highlighting them, using the recognition value, like say Woody Allen does. Rather, her performances show her fitting into those places, inhabiting them rather than using them. The 2015 Charlie Hebdo and November 13 mass murders were seen as trying to drive people out of the city, take over. It makes sense that on one level Vadori-Gauthier’s Une minute de danse par jour is about owning and keeping the city, in the same way as the march for the Republic – “We belong here and we are not afraid”. But the Joie Secrète take on Vadori-Gauthier’s one-minute of dance suggests that the idea of “being part of the city” goes beyond ownership or citizenship.

As those sad mass-murderers reminded the world, ownership and citizenship can be disputed and even taken away, they are subjective and political, not objective and real.

Photo: ©unedanseparjour/unejoiesecrète:courtesyagenceelektonlibre

If we make people part of the décor, as much a part of the city as the stacked stones, worked metal and glass, the rain gutters and doors, the trash bins and benches and the swatches of primary color, if we take them as objects as well as subjects, they become real too. Ironically, this realness is a belonging far more profound than ownership. As objects of the play we animate, Joie Secrète (and one minute of dance a day, too,) suggests, who can dispute our place in it?

"Une Joie Secrète: Danser, un acte quotidien de résistance poétique", by Jérôme Cassou is a selection of FIFA 2019 films about art and had its première at the Palais de Chaillot, Théâtre national de danse, Paris, in February 2019. “Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s one-minute dance numbers: “towards a sweeter way of living” featured in The Best American Poetry, September 2017.

A Delicious Deciduous Debut [by Heidi Seaborn]

Crowns off to Matty Layne Glasgow for his debut poetry collection, Deciduous Qween being chosen by Richard Blanco for Red Hen Press’ Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award in 2018.  This debut collection is a forest of wonders, bejeweled with language that stings, flings, hisses and kisses all at once. This is a writer who pulls the teeth of childhood and holds them up to the light for the reader to see “like words that only shine/when they are free”, a writer who unearths the Texan landscape and sexuality in poems that burn hot and vivid.

Glasgow revises the floral blooming coming of age story into “a bed of wildflowers” with the “lust & rust of a Texas spring.” There is lust and rust and love and shame, and loss threaded throughout this collection, as a mother dies and a boy claims his sexuality and life goes on like a drag queen on stage.

The poem “how you go” includes erasures from Peter Wohlleben (author, The Secret Life of Trees) as it grapples with a mother erased from a son's life. In Deciduous Qween, people and trees are entwined as Glasgow reimagines human nature from our soiled roots to our lofty leafy limbs.  Deciduous Qween will be available in June. In the meantime, here’s a taste:

 

Ash Mama

I never called you Mother Tree.                             
May I now        that  your body     
felled you—bark      sallow  &
unfurling     from your   hollow
bones?   I saw      an emerald
ash borer   in   your pancreas,
watched   it loosen  your skin,
swallow you   whole     in one
month.     They   said it would
take years.      I never  called
you         Great Ash,       until
that’s what   you were— dust
through     my fingers,    filling
your own     mother’s     grave.
You never called me seedling,
your       weak-limbed    boy—
frail-leaved        &  thin-veined
in shadow.  Every  tree needs
light,       every  crown   wants
to rise.     We each wore  ours
differently.     You died  before
your     mother.           No sun
for you   no     head in    star-
soaked canopy.  You kept me
alive      all   the same,   until
they took you    away,     left
your roots      in the ground,
bound to mine,   as if to say
Grow,baby.   Reach, qween            
 boy. Let your crown   shine.

A Modern Take on “Marriage” [by Heidi Seaborn]

Are you or have you been in an MFA Poetry program?  Are you over 50? Ok, then you’ve read Marianne Moore's “Marriage” and know it is considered one of the most important works not just from Moore, but of Modernism. [Ed: Marianne Moore's "Marriage" may be found in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.]

Published in 1923, “Marriage” is a long, complicated collage of statements and quotations on marriage, gender and male/female relations that evolve into a dialogue between Adam and Eve and it still holds up today. The institution of marriage has fundamentally not evolved drastically, despite women’s rights, legalization of gay and interracial marriage. And Moore’s use of collage to create the overlapping conversation of husband and wife, Adam and Eve is perhaps more relevant today than ever.

We can envision Eve and Adam, sitting by the glow of the television, iPhones in hand, scrolling.Without looking up from his iPhone or to see if he is disturbing Eve, Adam blurts out: “Treading chasms/on the uncertain foot of the spear” and continues on “Past states, present state,” his voice rising.

Eve shifts a bit as Adam has interrupted her own social media scroll. But he doesn’t notice, busy blabbing on about nightingales, apples, before admitting he “stumbles over marriage,/a trivial object indeed.” Does Eve bother to look up at this admission from Adam? She does for a moment, wondering if someone had posted wedding photos on Instagram that she’d missed, glances over at iPhone. Seeing nothing, she returns to study her own iPhone. They continue on for a while like this, maybe a “hmmm” or a grunt of acknowledgement that the other has spoken.

Then Eve lights up, reads a snippet from her Facebook feed “for love that will gaze an eagle blind” quoting her friend Tony Trollope, and then a jibe from Shakespeare’s Twitter feed. Now Adam is paying attention. He hates that she follows Shakespeare, some girl crush he thinks.

Two can play at this. They both start going back and forth, throwing out insults gleaned from social media pals and (possibly fake) news sites. Adam cites John Cournos’ retweeting Ezra Pound—“a wife is a coffin” is met with “well, maybe she ‘leaves her peaceful husband’ that Eve snagged from a Simon A Puget’s fashion blog.

Side by side on the sofa in the dim light of the television, they continue on, heads bent over their weapons. When the television volume turns up to air an ad from Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union”, Adam and Eve briefly look up before returning their gaze to the little screens in their hands. Marianne Moore would not be surprised.

New Dominion Bookshop, A Poet's Bookshop (by Nin Andrews)

 

A little over a year ago, I moved from Poland, Ohio, to Charlottesville, Virginia, and I barely recognize the sleepy university town where I grew up. At times I even feel a little homesick for Ohio. But one of the great joys of moving back is visiting New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookshop in the state and a bookshop with an extensive poetry section (located at the front of store—not in the basement or the some dark corner where poetry books are usually found). As a teen, I worked at New Dominion but the shop, like the city, has been transformed. It is now owned by Julia Kudravetz, a poet.  Her marketing director, Sarah Crossland, is also a poet. Maybe it’s no surprise then that the shop has become a happening place for poets and writers, particularly during the one week in March when the city hosts the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is this week!

I am so excited about New Dominion Bookshop and the upcoming events at the Festival, I thought I’d interview Julia Kudravetz and Sarah Crossland.

NA: First, Julia, I want to thank you, not only for running the bookshop, but also for opening it up to so many events. What inspired you to buy New Dominion? How does a poet go from teaching and running workshops and readings to becoming the owner of a bookshop?

JK: Thanks so much for interviewing us! I think it has been a long and winding road, so to speak, to being owner of an historic independent bookshop. Everything we do prepares us in some ways for the next task, but in my case, I first got involved in the bookshop through a poetry and fiction reading series that I hosted called the Charlottesville Reading Series. We held it monthly at a nearby artspace, and when a poet or a writer was on booktour, I wanted to be able to sell the book, so I asked Carol Troxell (the former owner) if I could start selling books from New Dominion at the event. From there I began working occasional shifts at the shop and doing their social media. When Carol Troxell passed away suddenly two years ago, I wrote to her husband and asked if he would consider hiring me as the manager, and if that went well I would buy the shop. At the time I was teaching college composition courses during the week, but I finished out the school year and began my job as the manager the day after classes ended. It’s been nonstop since! It’s true that it’s a big switch to go from teaching to managing a business, but in some ways teaching skills translate really well into dealing with the public—you have to be able to talk to people, to understand their needs and what they are looking for, and of course you must be patient and confident even when you’re feeling overwhelmed by it all. I also think that teaching and managing have a lot in common—you have to have a good relationship with a student or employee before you can really ask them to learn new and sometimes difficult skills to keep the shop going.

I am really grateful that I can lead this beautiful bookshop into the next century, that there is a loyal and growing clientele, and that I have such a cool and committed staff, pictured below. I’m also just incredibly lucky to have bought the shop during a time when indies are seeing a resurgence.

NA: Sarah, could you tell me how you came to work in the bookshop? What brought you here? How do you keep the magic of this bookshop alive?

SC: Of course, it's magical when your job perfectly aligns with your writing career. After my MFA in poetry, I managed the classes and programs at WriterHouse, the local creative writing nonprofit in town, and then went on to work for Indie Film Minute, a radio program and website dedicated to promoting independent film. Along the way, I learned about the ways in which storytelling informs how we engage with brands. Also, I watched a lot of Mad Men. When Julia purchased the shop in 2017, one of the things she wanted to focus on was building community outreach through events and marketing. We had met at a creative writing conference in 2011 and reconnected. 

The bookshop is a hallowed place. But the best way to "keep the magic alive" is to keep on loving books ourselves. There's so much joy in recommending books, especially when it's someone's first encounter with a great book. My favorite was a time last fall when a quiet teenager came in and said he'd just finished On the Road, and he didn't know what to read next. I handed him Howl, which he had never heard of before. This is what we do at independent bookstores.

NA:  New Dominion also hosts a teen reading series? I heard something about PBS doing a spot on the shop?

JK: Yes! Last September the local PBS program “Charlottesville Inside Out” did a profile on our shop highlighting our new teen reading series, Friday Night Writes. It’s an opportunity for young unpublished writers to share their work in an accepting group of other young artists. As the series has evolved, it’s turned into more and more young musicians singing their original songs, and that’s cool—I imagine it will grow and change over time, and I’m not sure what the end result will be, but as long as we have young people discovering the shop and being creative in this space I think the series will go on. The more age groups we can reach, the better for the health of our bookstore going into the future.

NA: What is it like to run a bookshop in this day and age? Do you live, eat, breathe, dream books?

JK: I think it’s one of the most difficult and rewarding things I have ever done. Running a bookshop means you wear so many hats because the shop is a cultural gathering place as well as a place of business.  It’s wonderful to see the lists of books coming out and make decisions about how many to buy for the store (and think which customers might want them!).  Other days all I think about is how to pay the cleaners and if I’ve paid the sales tax yet for the month. In a larger business, I suppose these tasks—the book buying and the business side—are a little more differentiated—but I like having a little of everything to do. Things certainly never get boring, and sometimes it feels like being in a play—as soon as one character goes out the door, another one comes in with their incredible story. I have lots of material for a memoir already!

NA: Could you list the poets who will be reading here at the festival?

JK: Sure! New Dominion tries to host a lot of the poetry and literary fiction during the festival. Poets reading at the shop or at offsite events we are co-hosting include: Steve Cushman, Molly Minturn, Kirstin Rembold, Joelle Bielle, Kyle Dargan, DaMarris Hill, Alyson Hagy, Maggie Anderson, Kevin Prufer, Melissa Stein, Sherman Bitsui, Diana Nguyen, Francesca Bell, Lindsay Bernal, and Remica Bingham Risher.

What an amazing group to be reading over a period of only four days here!

NA: I'd love to close with a recommendation for a new poetry book—a recent discovery perhaps?

JK: I really enjoyed Lindsay Bernal’s new collection What It Doesn’t Have to Do With. The poems are funny and smart and sad and beautiful. It’s just a great book. And the poet is reading during the festival!

SC: I'm currently reading William Brewer's startlingly gorgeous and heartbreaking poetry collection I Know Your Kind, which is about the opioid crisis in West Virginia. This isn't really poetry (okay, not at all), but I had to slip in a recommendation for the other book I'm currently reading, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen L. Brusatte--it will definitely find its way into a poem soon enough.

Julia Kudravetz is the owner and general manager of New Dominion Bookshop and a writer.  A Charlottesville native, she has taught college and high school English  is the founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

Sarah Crossland is the recipient of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Prize, a 2013 AWP Intro Journals Award, and the 2013 Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been published in The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and other journals. She is currently working on finishing a collection of poetry about the Romanov daughters, called The Winter Palace. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as the marketing and communications director at New Dominion Bookshop. You can find more of her poetry at sarahcrossland.com.

A little over a year ago, I moved from Poland, Ohio, to Charlottesville, Virginia, and I barely recognize the sleepy university town where I grew up. At times I even feel a little homesick for Ohio. But one of the great joys of moving back is visiting New Dominion Bookshop, the oldest independent bookshop in the state and a bookshop with an extensive poetry section (located at the front of store—not in the basement or the some dark corner where poetry books are usually found). As a teen, I worked at New Dominion but the shop, like the city, has been transformed. It is now owned by Julia Kudravetz, a poet.  Her marketing director, Sarah Crossland, is also a poet. Maybe it’s no surprise then that the shop has become a happening place for poets and writers, particularly during the one week in March when the city hosts the Virginia Festival of the Book, which is this week!

I am so excited about New Dominion Bookshop and the upcoming events at the Festival, I thought I’d interview Julia Kudravetz and Sarah Crossland.

NA: First, Julia, I want to thank you, not only for running the bookshop, but also for opening it up to so many events. What inspired you to buy New Dominion? How does a poet go from teaching and running workshops and readings to becoming the owner of a bookshop?

JK: Thanks so much for interviewing us! I think it has been a long and winding road, so to speak, to being owner of an historic independent bookshop. Everything we do prepares us in some ways for the next task, but in my case, I first got involved in the bookshop through a poetry and fiction reading series that I hosted called the Charlottesville Reading Series. We held it monthly at a nearby artspace, and when a poet or a writer was on booktour, I wanted to be able to sell the book, so I asked Carol Troxell (the former owner) if I could start selling books from New Dominion at the event. From there I began working occasional shifts at the shop and doing their social media. When Carol Troxell passed away suddenly two years ago, I wrote to her husband and asked if he would consider hiring me as the manager, and if that went well I would buy the shop. At the time I was teaching college composition courses during the week, but I finished out the school year and began my job as the manager the day after classes ended. It’s been nonstop since! It’s true that it’s a big switch to go from teaching to managing a business, but in some ways teaching skills translate really well into dealing with the public—you have to be able to talk to people, to understand their needs and what they are looking for, and of course you must be patient and confident even when you’re feeling overwhelmed by it all. I also think that teaching and managing have a lot in common—you have to have a good relationship with a student or employee before you can really ask them to learn new and sometimes difficult skills to keep the shop going.

I am really grateful that I can lead this beautiful bookshop into the next century, that there is a loyal and growing clientele, and that I have such a cool and committed staff, pictured below. I’m also just incredibly lucky to have bought the shop during a time when indies are seeing a resurgence.

NA: Sarah, could you tell me how you came to work in the bookshop? What brought you here? How do you keep the magic of this bookshop alive?

SC: Of course, it's magical when your job perfectly aligns with your writing career. After my MFA in poetry, I managed the classes and programs at WriterHouse, the local creative writing nonprofit in town, and then went on to work for Indie Film Minute, a radio program and website dedicated to promoting independent film. Along the way, I learned about the ways in which storytelling informs how we engage with brands. Also, I watched a lot of Mad Men. When Julia purchased the shop in 2017, one of the things she wanted to focus on was building community outreach through events and marketing. We had met at a creative writing conference in 2011 and reconnected. 

The bookshop is a hallowed place. But the best way to "keep the magic alive" is to keep on loving books ourselves. There's so much joy in recommending books, especially when it's someone's first encounter with a great book. My favorite was a time last fall when a quiet teenager came in and said he'd just finished On the Road, and he didn't know what to read next. I handed him Howl, which he had never heard of before. This is what we do at independent bookstores.

NA:  New Dominion also hosts a teen reading series? I heard something about PBS doing a spot on the shop?

JK: Yes! Last September the local PBS program “Charlottesville Inside Out” did a profile on our shop highlighting our new teen reading series, Friday Night Writes. It’s an opportunity for young unpublished writers to share their work in an accepting group of other young artists. As the series has evolved, it’s turned into more and more young musicians singing their original songs, and that’s cool—I imagine it will grow and change over time, and I’m not sure what the end result will be, but as long as we have young people discovering the shop and being creative in this space I think the series will go on. The more age groups we can reach, the better for the health of our bookstore going into the future.

NA: What is it like to run a bookshop in this day and age? Do you live, eat, breathe, dream books?

JK: I think it’s one of the most difficult and rewarding things I have ever done. Running a bookshop means you wear so many hats because the shop is a cultural gathering place as well as a place of business.  It’s wonderful to see the lists of books coming out and make decisions about how many to buy for the store (and think which customers might want them!).  Other days all I think about is how to pay the cleaners and if I’ve paid the sales tax yet for the month. In a larger business, I suppose these tasks—the book buying and the business side—are a little more differentiated—but I like having a little of everything to do. Things certainly never get boring, and sometimes it feels like being in a play—as soon as one character goes out the door, another one comes in with their incredible story. I have lots of material for a memoir already!

NA: Could you list the poets who will be reading here at the festival?

JK: Sure! New Dominion tries to host a lot of the poetry and literary fiction during the festival. Poets reading at the shop or at offsite events we are co-hosting include: Steve Cushman, Molly Minturn, Kirstin Rembold, Joelle Bielle, Kyle Dargan, DaMarris Hill, Alyson Hagy, Maggie Anderson, Kevin Prufer, Melissa Stein, Sherman Bitsui, Diana Nguyen, Francesca Bell, Lindsay Bernal, and Remica Bingham Risher.

What an amazing group to be reading over a period of only four days here!

NA: I'd love to close with a recommendation for a new poetry book—a recent discovery perhaps?

JK: I really enjoyed Lindsay Bernal’s new collection What It Doesn’t Have to Do With. The poems are funny and smart and sad and beautiful. It’s just a great book. And the poet is reading during the festival!

SC: I'm currently reading William Brewer's startlingly gorgeous and heartbreaking poetry collection I Know Your Kind, which is about the opioid crisis in West Virginia. This isn't really poetry (okay, not at all), but I had to slip in a recommendation for the other book I'm currently reading, The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Stephen L. Brusatte--it will definitely find its way into a poem soon enough.

Julia Kudravetz is the owner and general manager of New Dominion Bookshop and a writer.  A Charlottesville native, she has taught college and high school English  is the founder of the Charlottesville Reading Series. She holds an MFA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars.

Sarah Crossland is the recipient of the 2012 Boston Review Poetry Prize, a 2013 AWP Intro Journals Award, and the 2013 Pablo Neruda Prize. Her poems have been published in The Missouri Review, Crazyhorse, Boston Review, TriQuarterly, The Iowa Review, A Public Space, Denver Quarterly, Guernica, and other journals. She is currently working on finishing a collection of poetry about the Romanov daughters, called The Winter Palace. She lives in Charlottesville, VA, where she works as the marketing and communications director at New Dominion Bookshop. You can find more of her poetry at sarahcrossland.com.

Over the Moon and Back Again [by Heidi Seaborn]

In an MFA workshop last summer, an acclaimed poet declared that the moon was over, that it had been over used and needed to be relegated to the poetry graveyard with ravens and heart. Just like that. Done. The MFAs took note. No more moons.

But I’m not yet ready to yield the moon. Instead I find myself now obsessed with it, guarding it from extinction. Like Diana, I hunt for moon references. Pounce on moon sightings. I keep an eye on the moon when it rises at night, as it lingers in the sky by day. I wane as it wanes, I am filled by its fullness. When a Super Moon blasts a hole in the night sky, I can’t look away, letting its spotlight hold me, entranced. I’m not alone. Google the recent Super Blood Wolf Moon and you’ll find over 55 million results. For one moon, on one night.

When the moon eclipsed the sun a couple of years ago, the world looked up in wonder. The poets wrote. It’s cultural. Remember moon pies and Michael Jackson performing The Moonwalk? It’s historical. Remember Neil Armstrong’s real walk on the moon? Or just watch First Man and pretend you were alive then.

In fact, the moon stars in nearly 1,000 movies according to IMDb. We croon to the moon, whether we are music fans of Oscar Peterson, Neil Young or Pink Floyd. Amazon lists over 20,000 albums and 60,000 books with moon in their titles. On poets.org, there are 107 pages of moon references. The poet Lillo Way has a prize-winning chapbook Dubious Moon [Slapering Hol Press] that is nothing but moon poems. Here’s one from Way’s book that captures the sensuality of the moon, its powerful draw:

Frame the Moon

Furred out, cased, paned and trimmed,
the opening of a window.

From my position here on the floor
in supine half-spinal twist,

my quarter-revolving eye catches
a perfectly sliced-in-half moon centered

in the upper right corner of the upper
left pane of a window blued by a sky

somewhere between baby-boy daytime
and electric-transvestite midnight –

the perfect globe cleavered by
a celestial butcher-boy –

the first half of hope, not the last,
depending, I suppose, on your viewing point,

mine being spine suppliant to floor,
floor kissing earth and holding the kiss,

earth sucking me hard, the half-moon
mullioned and muntined,

one four-millionth of a light-year away,
beaming me up and off from here –

half an inkling that, when the bones wave
their white phalanges of surrender

to whatever pulls us down – some unthing,
some weightless, scentless, tasteless,

wan thing, draws me up into a moon’s
glowy, showy, half-assed bliss.

 

The moon rules the tides of our oceans, of women’s bodies. It may orbit our earth, but we are in its powerful cosmic sway. Even Brenda Shaughnessy’s poem “I’m Over the Moon” [Human Dark with Sugar, Copper Canyon Press] where the moon is dismissed as: “A kind of ancient/date-rape drug” and “It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band./Better off alone” acknowledges it is the lover we can’t ever truly leave. Maybe we are destined to howl at the moon in our poems, to shoot past cliché to discover the ancient and constant inspiration of our one and only moon.

Heidi Seaborn, Guest Author March 18-22

This week we welcome Heidi Seaborn as our guest author. Heidi is the author the award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, March 2019), Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal and a New York University MFA candidate. Since Heidi started writing in 2016, she’s won or been shortlisted for nearly two dozen awards including the International Rita Dove Award in Poetry and published in numerous journals and anthologies including The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Penn Review and Nimrod, a chapbook and a political pamphlet. She graduated from Stanford University and is on the board of Tupelo Press. Find out more about Heidi at  heidiseabornpoet.com. You can follow her on Twitter @heidiseaborn1 , Facebook and Instagram. Read her poem "What It's Like to Fall in Love" here. 

Welcome, Heidi. 

-- sdl

Is this is the most beautiful paragraph in the English language? Yes. [by Stacey Lehman]

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

---from The Dead by James Joyce

And here's an adaptation, for John Huston's beautiful film of the same name: 

A note on craft, also from The Dead. Consider how seamlessly he conveys information about family history and relations in this one paragraph: 

Gabriel's eyes, irritated by the floor, which glittered with beeswax under the heavy chandelier, wandered to the wall above the piano. A picture of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet hung there and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower which Aunt Julia had worked in red, blue and brown wools when she was a girl. Probably in the school they had gone to as girls that kind of work had been taught for one year. His mother had worked for him as a birthday present a waistcoat of purple tabinet, with little foxes' heads upon it, lined with brown satin and having round mulberry buttons. It was strange that his mother had had no musical talent though Aunt Kate used to call her the brains carrier of the Morkan family. Both she and Julia had always seemed a little proud of their serious and matronly sister. Her photograph stood before the pierglass. She held an open book on her knees and was pointing out something in it to Constantine who, dressed in a man-o-war suit, lay at her feet. It was she who had chosen the name of her sons for she was very sensible of the dignity of family life. Thanks to her, Constantine was now senior curate in Balbrigan and, thanks to her, Gabriel himself had taken his degree in the Royal University. A shadow passed over his face as he remembered her sullen opposition to his marriage. Some slighting phrases she had used still rankled in his memory; she had once spoken of Gretta as being country cute and that was not true of Gretta at all. It was Gretta who had nursed her during all her last long illness in their house at Monkstown.

-- sdl

Next Line, Please: Two-Word Titles [by Virginia Valenzuela]

John Ashbery once said that he liked to begin with a title, rather than end with one, when he sat down to write a poem.

Here on Next Line, Please, we are partial to two-word titles that can yield multiple meanings. For example, “Spring Break” might refer not only to college kids painting the town red in Fort Lauderdale but also to the damage that a winter storm may cause to a pristine spring of water.

Here are some potential two-word titles:

Working Stiff
House Arrest (or House Organ)
Twin Killing
Strip Steak
Food Court
Hot Corner
Blue Moon
Red Eye
Hung Jury
Grass Widow
Spring Break

Each of these phrases has a primary meaning, and in some cases a slang meaning—for example, “twin killing” is baseball shorthand for a double play. Your job is to choose a title from this list—or come up with a two-word title of your own—and write a poem that features two meanings of the chosen phrase. Extra credit if you start with one meaning and end with the other. Fourteen lines or less.

It’s not the same thing, but many years ago David wrote a poem that secretly capitalized on two possible meanings of “ERA” (“earned run average” in baseball and the proposed constitutional amendment). You can do the same with other acronyms, and maybe we’ll do that one fine week.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

A poem from The Awl by Meghan O'Rourke [posted by Mark Bibbins]

I am moved by the deep physicality of this poem, its small but significant moments of transformation, in which the mundane is made resonant and weird. How do we love someone we’ve never met, yet is already a part of us? O’Rourke’s poem does not offer an easy answer to this question. —MB

Poem for My Son

You were of the earth, like a lentil.
The taste of quince, a revulsion at meat.
The others were like a dream that scores
the body long after waking—
But you were sour spit, a pinched pain in the right hip.
There was nothing luminous about you,
oh you made the smells of the city repellant.
On the doctor’s screen,
a black dot with a line through it, a blot,
you grew slowly grey and white,
then boned and legged and oblong and minded.
I made you out of grapefruit and Rice Chex.
—The others were made of longing.—
Each time I saw you in the soundwaves
was preparatory, not romantic; not like the wind
but more like a river pushing against my legs,
insisting on its presence. In thick socks
I ate potato chips and congee, built
you without trying, splaying my ribcage.
Lugging my freight down the street,
I thought about what I wanted for you—
(love love and more love)
but you were already you, not
an outgrowth of my mind,
just your own strange, remote, hardening body,
moving toward arrival under surgical lights
in sudden, open parenthesis—

Meghan O'Rourke is the author of the poetry collections Sun in Days, Once, and Halflife. She is at work on a book about chronic illness.