The Best American Poetry

Thursday, November 15, 6:00 PM: An Evening with the Poets of Sage House

Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, & Carmen Torrado Gonzalez with David Lehman 

Thursday November 15 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Buffalo Street Books
The Dewitt Mall
215 North Cayuga Street
Ithaca, New York 14850

Spend an evening with the poets of Cornell University Press: Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, and Carmen Torrado Gonzalez! By day – they publish some of the leading academic and trade books in the country and world. By night – they emerge from Sage House to write and share their own evocative, imaginative, and inventive works. Join us for a reading with Ithaca’s poet-publishers & special guest David Lehman!

Next Line, Please: Title Precedes Text [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please, quizmaster Lehman provides a new prompt for NLP regulars to try out.

For this prompt, let's start with on of these two titles: “Occupational Hazards” and “Barroom Brawl.”

The former works because "it is part of our discourse, a phrase that can suit many purposes or occasions;" and the latter because "it, too, is a familiar phrase and may conjure up a very concrete scene."

Now on to the rules...

Write a poem 10 to 15 lines long. A second constraint might prove useful. For example, you may write a 10-line poem divided into two five-line stanzas, both of which have identical last lines.

Or—and what a stunt it is—a 12-line poem in which the numbers from one to nine appear in English or homophonic form. You are encouraged to take liberties. The word for “five” in French sounds like “sank”; “four” is “fear” in German; “nine” is “nein” in that language; the word “one” is included in “wonderful.” It’s a wonderful paradox that constraints act as liberators of the imagination.

Visit the American Scholar's page for the full post and to enter your candidate!

"32 Titles for Bad Poems" [by David Lehman]

Thirty-Two Titles for Bad Poems

1. Epistle to the Guggenheim Foundation
2. Everyone Was Chill
3. Sincere Voyeurism
4. Ode to the West Wing
5. Why Women Matter
6. At the Grave of Mel Gibson
7. Ode to My Vacuum Cleaner
8. Ferns
9. Hate Speech
10. Chugging Ersters to Chincoteague
11. Bad Hair Day
12. 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall
13. The Voice in the Coffin
14. Iconic Landmarks of Germany
15. Self-Portrait in a Side-View Mirror
16. The Rubber Band That Lost Its Elasticity
17. Of High School and Heartbreak
18. Debbie Downer Doubles Down
19. Why I Am Not an Astronaut
20. Wife Studies
21. A Harmonica for Monica
22. The Love Song of William Jefferson Clinton
23. The Crime of the Ancient Mariner
24. One Fart
25. The Wizardry of Ozymandias
26. An Elegy for the U.S. Constitution
27. Why “Nothing” Matters
28. The Revolt of the Pronouns
29. Parasite Lost
30. Vowel Movements
31. Sullen Weedy Lakes
32. Gone with the Window Washer

-- David Lehman

Runner-up:  “My First Backpack.”

Note: The magazine 32 Poems devotes its back cover to lists consisting of 32 items. My "Thirty-Two Titles for Bad Poems" appeared in the back cover of the Spring / Summer 2017 issue. -- DL

Doug Lang reading "Pandaemonium Sonnet" (Terence Winch)

Last Thursday (8 Nov 2018), while visiting my friend Doug Lang, the great Welsh/American poet, at his studio apartment in downtown Silver Spring, Maryland, the subject of movies about poets came up.  We discussed Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath in Sylvia; Bright Star, the film about John Keats; Patterson, Jim Jarmusch's excellent 2016 film about a (fictional) poet that used real poems by Ron Padgett; and other movies as well. Doug reminded me that he has a poem on this very subject in his 2012 collection dérangé.  He agree to read it for the cameras:

[click to enlarge text]

 

"Retronym time" from "Time Pieces" [by Rachel Wetzsteon]

Retronym time

Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One. 

-- from "Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon 

"Time Pieces" first appeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry 25th Anniversary Edition. 

-- sdl (11/11/18)

Ron Padgett on Apollinaire (an excerpt)

 Here is an excerpt from Ron Padgett's essay, "A Few Things about Apollinaire and Me." The occasion for this essay was the publication, by New York Review Books, of Ron's long-awaited translation of Guillaume Apollinaire's Selected Poems. It is a coincidence only in the sense Gertrude Stein gave that word, that I, too, was influenced deeply by Apollinaire in my time in Paris, a few years after Padgett's year there. Unlike Ron's, my attempts to translate Apollinaire are limited to two of his poems, "Zone" and "Hotel," and that makes me appreciate all the more the accuracy and the intelligence that Ron brings to the translator's task. He has done a noble service to literature. -- DL

<<<

I wish I could recall the first time I learned of [Apollinaire, pictured left]. I do remember hearing, in the very early 1960s, Kenneth Koch talking enthusiastically and often about his poetry. I also recall being attracted to the sound of his name, which of course was not his real one. Would I have felt as much allure in a poet named Wilhelm de Kostrowitzsky (his real name)? Probably not: less euphony and no suggestion of Apollo.

The first two poems of his that I tried translating, “The Pont Mirabeau” and “The White Snow,” have moments of complex word play, but, being enthusiastic and naïve, I didn’t let that deter me. Over the years I got deeper into his work by translating more of his poems, as well as his novella The Poet Assassinated, which I tackled as a student in Paris in 1965. Well, I wasn’t really a student, I was a Fulbright fellow who attended no classes; instead I kept on being the poet that I had become, but now one who was falling deeper and deeper into what I imagined to have been Paris before World War One, a Paris whose writers and artists I had been drawn to since my teen years. Living below the poverty level—my wife and I subsisted on a Fulbright stipend allocated for one person—gave me the impression that I had even more in common with the threadbare poets I was captivated by, such as Reverdy, Cendrars, and Jacob, and among them Gui stood at the center of things, representing the exciting and innovative cultural world of pre-war Paris. My just being there, walking his neighborhoods—there were back streets whose buildings still had turn-of-the-century signs painted on them, cafes and restaurants that had hardly changed in 70 years—visiting his grave and sensing him there in the ground, standing mesmerized in front of the Bateau Lavoir, feeling the late-night danger and poverty of the Montmartre of 1907, and, perhaps above all, holding in my hands, just as he had, his manuscripts, corrected proofs, and letters—I was hooked for life. More than that, I assumed that as a young (avant-garde!) poet I had every right to be hooked, for we had something in common. However, fueled by youthful energy and adoration, I never stopped to ask myself exactly what it might be.

Although the poems I wrote that year in Paris reflect my being there, only a few of them show an obvious influence of Apollinaire, despite the fact that the book I cherished most was the Pléiade edition of his Oeuvres poétiques (the same copy I use today). I was already well acquainted with the two major collections he published in his lifetime, Alcools and Calligrammes, but the Pléiade edition included many poems I had never seen, and among them I found some gems, some of which didn’t sound like “Apollinaire.” All the better! For I was bent on not sounding like myself all the time, either, and I didn’t mind sounding like him sometimes. Take a look at his little poem, “Hotel”:

My room looks like a cage
The sun sticks its arm through the window
But I who want to smoke and make mirages
I light my cigarette with daylight
I don’t want to work I want to smoke

“I light my cigarette with daylight” is fanciful (and delightful), but it’s the final line that determines the feeling of the whole poem. The poet is feeling dreamy and lazy. Plunk. That’s it. The epigraph of a poem of mine I wrote in Paris that year, “Tone Arm,” runs in a similar vein:

The clouds go rolling over
The rooftops of the 17th-
18th- or 19th-century buildings—
They are really rolling
You people of the future
How I hate you
You are alive and I’m not
I don’t care whether you read my poetry or not

Fifty years apart, two poets sit in their hotel rooms in Paris and thumb their noses at the conventional bourgeois world, he charmingly, I arrogantly.

Apollinaire’s influence on me consisted of more than a superficial and temporary adoption of a self-indulgent attitude. What affected me more deeply was the elasticity of his work, which ranged from traditional, euphonious forms to avant-garde calligrammatic verbal collages. He certainly wasn’t the only experimenter of his day, but I can’t name another poet of his time who showed such aesthetic range, aside from Mallarmé, and even then the latter’s Coup de dés is an aberration for him. As for myself, coming from a country whose emblematic monument was the Statue of Liberty, and from a state (Oklahoma) with a freewheeling history, and from a father who liberated himself from social conventions (and laws) when it suited him, I was primed to become an adept of a poet of freedom and adventure such as Apollinaire, who, in one of his last poems, says, “We want to give you vast and strange territories / Where flowering mystery offers itself to anyone who wishes to gather it.” While cherishing the formal music and sweet diction of the Elizabethan and Metaphysical poets, the way Apollinaire revered Villon and Racine, I saw myself as a fellow explorer of those vast and strange territories, though I would never have articulated such a thought. It was yet another unspoken assumption that carried me forward.

>>>

Roy Hargrove Dead at Forty-Nine [by David Lehman]

The most talented trumpeter
of his generation,
who played
for us in Albany,
used to hang out
at Smalls, that
low-ceilinged cellar
near us where
he proved he could sing,
a bonus,
because we came for his trumpet
“Whisper Not,”
and when Cyrille Aimée sings “Love for Sale”
and he plays, it’s as if
he’s Coltrane to her Johnny Hartman

Next Line, Please: Like People in Novels [by Virginia Valenzuela]

“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

“The Gauge of Dissonance,” by Aaron Fagan uses the line as an epigraph. The title gets us started on a high note, and "rises to eloquence," provokes thought:

We can, but there is no one there to explain us to ourselves
Or others—the tidy or perfectly untidy inner lives of strangers
Designed for us to love or not love but love then unlove
And then love again by story’s end. And no one is so perfectly
Self-aware as those imagined in all those parallel linear lines
Of prose like striped prison uniforms now set free in verse
No matter how unskillful their behavior might’ve been those
Years ago, beneath a balcony in Paris, and the decision to leave.

The third and fourth lines struck me as very Virginia Woolf-esque. Well done.

Millicent Caliban's poem, “Death Sentence” offers us another way in to Wharton's sentiment:

We can’t behave like people in novels.
We haven’t got the time, the wit, the grace.
We are bored, overworked, exhausted,
or plunged so deep in our personal swamps,
we cannot rise to the necessary
insight, irony, or self-reflection.

We slither around in the opaque mud:
reptilian, repulsive, repugnant,
lacking an author to prompt our passions,
detonate desire. We can see no plot,
no climax, no redeeming denouement.
Alas! Condemned to remain post-modern.

And finally, Patricia Wallace’s “The Window,” a sonnet, with a terrific opening, and a lovely turn:

Coming not out of nowhere, like the cold October wind
down from the mountains, the ten-year window arrives,
revising the scope of binoculars from far
to near, and we’re staring it right in the faces
of our suddenly ghostly children. We’re searching for
a story that leads to a different ending, magical
realism or a fable where polar bears regenerate
and glaciers like ice cubes refreeze, or at least
the old inhabitant trees hang on, their birdless limbs
whispering to one another. Now a blip on
the radar, we’re trying to invent new characters, better
than we are. But we can’t behave like people in novels,
can we? Jumping backward in time, heeding the warning
signs, giving the predictable conclusion the slip?

We also applaud Patricia Smith (whose poem begins with the Wharton epigraph, and then “I certainly hope not—” ), Louis Altman (whose phrase “a Dashiell Hammett evening” could launch a dozen poems), Donald LaBranche, Keith Barrett, and Elizabeth Solzburg for work of exceptional merit.

More poems on the American Scholar's page, along with the full post! And a new prompt next week~

A Visit to Winchester [by Tami Haaland]

I was in Winchester, England, this week to offer a poetry workshop at Winchester College, a boarding school founded in 1382. The students, teachers, and I met in a room of the college library. We read Sandra Alcosser’s “What Makes the Grizzlies Dance,” and I shared two of my own poems featuring deer, grizzly bears, and butterflies, all leading to a prompt about encounters with animals. The students told me they weren’t accustomed to this kind of writing, yet they had plenty to say and volunteered to share their work with each other.

This wasn’t my first visit to Winchester. I’ve been here several times to meet with colleagues or students at the University of Winchester, and nearly always, someone will mention Keats’ visit to the city two hundred years ago. He wrote “To Autumn” there in September 1819, and visitors can follow the walk thought to inspire the poem—around the cathedral, down College Street, past the house where Jane Austen died only two years before in 1817, past Winchester College and along the River Itchen, one of the chalk rivers of southern England.

An article in the Guardian, however, says the view from St. Giles Hill may have inspired Keats as he looked down on fields recently purchased by a wealthy banker. The poem, seen in this light, has an edge of social commentary during a time when landowners monopolized the harvest, and food prices were high. Scholar Nicholas Roe suggests that patterns in “To Autumn” parallel the sensibility of King Alfred the Great (849-899 CE), famous for driving the Vikings out of England but also a poet and a humanitarian who argued for translation so that more people, men presumably, could be educated. A large statue of King Alfred stands near the ancient entrance to Winchester, though it wouldn’t have been there in Keats’ day.

Regardless of where he walked, and I imagine he walked in various places over the course of two months, Keats would not have been the first poet to combine multiple sources of inspiration into one poem. Apples, fields, flowers, river, swallows and gnats appear in his lines, and like a painter, he did not simply imitate what he saw but created his own design. It may even be that the rhythm of walking influenced his poem.

Rumor has it that Keats intended to stay longer in Winchester so that he could use the library at Winchester College. I’m curious what he wanted to research, or maybe he just wanted to prowl through books. In any case, Winchester College refused access because he was not a gentleman. In his letters, Keats complained about the absence of a “tolerable library," but he admired the bookstore on College Street, then called Robbins and now P & G Wells. Around the corner is The Wykeham Arms, a pub he was said to frequent.

Hearsay surrounds Keats’ brief time in Winchester and a good deal is documented through letters and scholarship. In snooping about, other details have surfaced. He was short of money, and he hoped to do what was necessary to become a more popular writer. I assume this would have allowed him to make a living from his work. And during his stay in Winchester he wrote 1500 lines. Divided by the 58 days he stayed there, he averaged 26 lines per day. Some say he aspired to 50, a goal I’m keeping in mind.

Hip hop: the geopoetic culture of the universal citizen [by Tracy Danison]

Photo: “Gegegay’s High School” @Kota Sugawara

Hip hop history resides in the empowered shade of Mae West that hovers over Tokyo Gegegay’s Pachinko cabaret Choreography: Tokyo Gegegay/Performers: Mikey, Bow, Marie, Miku et Yuyu

Far across the distance and spaces between us/The heart does go on…

- Céline Dion, "My Heart Will Go On" (Love theme from the “Titanic”)

His metro advertising says French top de top rapper MC Solaar is on a géopoetique tour.

Makes sense to me.

“’Geopoetics’, Ma’am”, I say, gripping Karine’s hand and turning to gaze into her eyes, “They don’t pay much, surely. But, then, Ma'am, I don’t always sleep sound. Do I?”.

One of the originators of the French rap-hip-hop scene and a poet of ideas as well as of songs, Solaar is a straight-line child of chanson française, a sort of unpainterly Ramalzee.

Géopoetics has been on my mind since before running into Solaar’s advertising, since I went to see Jann Gallois’ Reverse, at the Palais de Chaillot, Théâtre National de la Danse. Though I went to see Gallois’ work without thinking much of the rest, Reverse has been created part of the national theater’s “cultural dialogue” with Japan, associated with a program called “Japonismes”. In addition to co-sponsoring (with the Festival d’Automne) contemporary expressionist dance such as Saburo Teshigawara’s The Idiot (a gripping performance of Prince Myshkin’s sacred madness) or Takao Kawaguchi’s tribute to butoh originators Tatsumi Hijikata  and Kazuo Ohno, the theater also put together Triple Bill#1, in which Gallois’ piece featured.

Photo: “The Idiot”© Kota Sugawara

As part of Palais de Chaillot's tribute to Japan - France connections, Saburo Teshigawa dances the holy madness of Prince Myshkin

The brainchild of Dominique Hervieu, currently director of the Bienniale de danse de Lyon and a tireless promoter of dance performance, Triple put Jann Gallois and Kader Attou to writing for Japanese hip hop dancers and, as a ballast, threw in mass media hit Tokyo Gegegay’s 100%-Japan hip-hop-inspired dance cabaret High School.

The idea was to see how French choreography would shape under Japanese interpretation or maybe how Japanese interpretation would shape under French choreography. Gallois, who discovered dance and learned her trade in hip hop, now writes broadly contemporary dance. Attou, who, like MC Solaar, came of age in the early 1990s, has developed a wide variety of performance and concept while keeping a strong association with the hip hop theme – “urban dance”. The five Japanese performers are hip-hop bred.

But because Triple put hip-hop at the center, this could not be a straightforward application of “other” (Japan) techniques on “other” (France) choreography, or vice versa. And that’s because hip hop is universal culture, the shape of universal citizenship.

Physically fun and intellectually deep, universally accessible and powered by values rooted in notions of human equality and individual self-reliance, hip hop is a universal ideology rather than a gadzillion dance trends. In hip hop, the cultural power of African-America has combined the radical politics of Thomas Jefferson and the radical humanism of Ralph Waldo Emerson to create the first true universal citizens living out a first truly global culture.

Photo: “Reverse”© Kota Sugawara

Hip hop bred Hayate, Jona, Katsuya, Sakyo and Takashi danced on the tips of fingers, spun on their crowns, amazing spectators not so much by their synchrony but by their synchronicity

Choreography: Jann Gallois/ Lighting: Cyril Mulon/ Music: Chrisophe Zurfluh/ Costuming: Hitomi Tsuchida

Intentionally or not, Triple Bill showed that, like any other profound human phenomenon, hip hop has a historical base. With every bell and whistle of better than a 100 years of American pop culture blaring, Gegegay’s High School closes Triple Bill shows how hip hop is the inheritor of all modern popular entertainment. Its operative words are “inclusive” and “diverse”. The empowered shade of Mae West’s erotic insolence hovers over the wildly explosive doings of a Pachinko cabaret in which a deranged sumo wrestler has breathlessly thrown a kitchen sink in somewhere: rambunctious-bottomed chorus girls dressed in open pleat slit-skirts and Manga-style soft-porn-style sailor suits dance on school desks in precisely delineated Las Vegas-style numbers that seamlessly patch in the ass-grinding, tit-thrusting entertainment-industry-style eroticism of MTV around a heart of the strenuous and punchy ground-to-air movement of battling interpretative- or expressionist- hip hop!

As an ideology hip hop empowers individuals working within strong groups. This is why a fairly straight-forward battle-style hip hop performance enables Kader Attou to use his Yoso (elements) piece to order the five traditional godai (material positions) expressed in the elements kū (空, Void); chi (地, Earth); sui (水, Water); ka (火, Fire) and fū (風, Wind). With composer Régis Baillet marrying contemporary electronic music to traditional Japanese instruments, Attou’s choreography just lets each of the five performers – shared with Jann Gallois’ Reverse  –  systematically take the measure of the others and affirm himself in his space. These individual actions build overall tension as performers stretch themselves to be so much within their individual spaces that the stretching produces a Big Bang of expansion of self and selves: mutual, mutualizing and mutualized space.

Photo: “Yoso (éléments)” © Kota Sugawara

Kader Attou’s hip hop choreography lets each performer affirm himself in “empty” space

Choreography: Kader Attou/Lighting: Cyril Mulon/Music: Régis Baillet/ Costuming: Hitomi Tsuchida/Performers: Hayate, Jona, Katsuya, Sakyo, Takashi

As a practice, hip hop values self-reliance and promotes individual accomplishment. That’s why Jann Gallois’ Reverse seemed so strongly about her development process as a choreographer and so little about technique or its announced theme of “our topsy-turvy world”. The piece leads off with performers’ heads down, limbs loose, feeling out a choreography from among classic break-dance moves. As the group of five dancers – shared with Kader Attou’s Yoso  –  at angles and somehow overlapping, brushed then bumped then touched, a bridging motif took shape and hardened into movement that enabled a cross-over into a choreography of acrobats dancing on the tips of fingers and spinning on their crowns, amazing Tokyo passersby not by their synchrony but by their synchronicity. In other words, hip hop let her do with Japanese dancers what it seems to me she wants to get to with all the performance I’ve seen from her thus far: to bring together, really together, compactly and perfectly together.

When all is said and done, then, because hip hop is what it has become, Triple Bill#1 was more a demonstration of how the locals from around 36°02'50.2"N 138°10'13.4"E and the locals from 47°4'60'' N 2°24'0'' E develop themselves within our universal culture.

 

Daryl Sznyter’s Synonyms [by Abigail Anne Frankfurt]

Daryl Sznyter’s debut collection of poem, Synonyms for (OTHER) Bodies is a raw, honest book that takes the reader beneath the poet’s flesh.

The narrator’s voice in the first poem, “The Virgin to Gabriel,” is both vulnerable and powerful. Sentences rub up against one another.  A passage that begins “My knees bruise softly” may end with the somewhat aggressive “clean up / your mess / leave / go / bother god.”

Sznyter plays with hard and soft language throughout the collection. She pays homage to poets such as Anne Sexton and Eileen Myles. In “Bad Girl” there are hints of Olga Broumas, “architect of my body.”

The title poem exposes the reader to an intimacy that is curt and painful. “I am fat and I am invisible / I go out to eat in groups / & the waitress always / seems to forget my food.” It’s as if one is reading lines out of the poet’s diary. Perhaps these poems are so discomforting because we have all felt this otherworldly disappearance of self.

Sznyter’s poems speak to family, her relationship with her hometown, and the stumbling beginnings of her romantic life. She finds strength in her body (“I Skip Work for Adult Ballet Class”) and resilience in who she is not and who she is becoming.

In this first collection, not only do readers hear the chilling clank of bone on bone, the rattle of prescription pills, and the sweat dripping down a sunburned back, but we also hear a voice that describes two worlds: one where the speaker was not permitted to speak and one that creates a world where she will no longer be silenced.

Daryl Sznyter is a brave new voice in the literary world.

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Going Back to School [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Dear Poetess Vinny,

I’m considering graduate school to earn an MFA in Creative Writing. I’m in my late forties, a mother, and my main concern is how to present myself in a university setting. Should I wear clothes I would wear to work? How far can I dress down? Any advice would be much appreciated!

Yours, 

Poetess

Dear Poetess,

Taking on a Masters in Fine Arts is a wonderful challenge filled with creative torrents, fast-paced learning, and hopefully, major literary inspiration. It’s also a place to meet talented, like-minded people who will boost your ambition and support your pursuit of writing, which is something we can’t always take for granted.

Many graduate programs are populated by recent college grads, but MFA Creative Writing programs tend to be a little bit different. MFA students are quite diverse in age, race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and previous careers, especially in programs in places like New York.

So let’s talk fashion.

A lot of people in the Masters in Fine Arts programs in New York have day jobs, which means there will always be at least one person in your class wearing a button-down and slacks and one in a blouse and dress shoes. There are also a lot of unemployed poets, daytime baristas, nighttime bartenders, and everything under the sun; meaning, you’re just as likely to find people in skinny jeans, t-shirts, and converse shoes. All this to say, no one is going to judge you based on what you wear to class. 

I interviewed two women in the Creative Writing Program at The New School to find out a few things, such as what they did before grad school, why they came to the program, and which shoes they wear when putting their best foot forward.

 

Profile 1: Where professional meets glamorous

Heather Newman is 57, a suburban wife, mother of two kids aged 20 and 22, and the owner of a playful, fluffy Coton de Tulear named Sir Lancelot, the royal dog of Madagascar. Heather has worked as a freelance writer and copyeditor for Family Circle magazine, an associate producer for TV and radio at Grey Advertising, and an on-air TV news reporter at CBS. She is a second-year student in the poetry concentration.

Poetess Vinny: What made you want to return to school after having a successful career in all of these exciting fields?

Heather Newman: While I was home raising kids, I started to write creatively, taking classes and workshops whenever possible. Most people my age opt for low-residency MFA programs. I wanted the full-time interaction with a vibrant literary scene. Jane Fonda says she has lived a life in five acts. For me, the MFA is my chapter three.

PV: Did you have any reservations about joining a program that, statistically speaking, has a high population of people under 30?

HN: No. I love young people. My challenge is technology. But I’m getting better. I use google docs, Instagram, thinking about Twitter… and I love The New School, its professors, students, commitment to social justice, and the incredible literature classes. In fact, I wish the program were longer.

PV: What kinds of clothes do you wear to class? Readings? What do you wear to feel comfortable and confident? 

HN: I’ll admit I adore clothes. (I once wrote an ode to my closet.) Leather jackets, boots, fun scarves, funky jewelry. Not that it really matters…it’s the work that counts. But still, I never met a lipstick I didn’t like!

 

Profile 2: The power of passion

Lindiwe Priscilla Krasin, 42, is a Bronx-based black power feminist. She writes poetry and creative non-fiction and has been published in the Journal of Progressive Human Services. Before coming to the New School, she operated the business Sex & Safari. Sex & Safari “is all about the sex appeal aesthetic. We design sexy wardrobes, spaces and parties. I am all about being sexy,” says Lindiwe, a now second-year student in the Creative Writing MFA.

Poetess Vinny: What made you want to return to school after having a successful business, starting a family, etc.?

Miss LPK: This is my second masters degree. My first is in modern and contemporary Middle Eastern Art History. School and writing have kept me alive, 'cause to be frank, I have had a crazy life. My love life and family life are in shambles right now. I finally went back on psychiatric medication. If not for school and writing, I'm not sure I would have anything to live for. It has been that raw for me. My life is really Mi Vida Loca nuts.

PV: Did you have any reservations about joining a program that has a high population of people under 30?

LPK: I did not consider my age. I don't care if people look at me as older or not. Whatever it is, it is.

PV: What kinds of clothes do you wear to class? Readings? What do you wear to feel comfortable and confident? 

LPK: I mean for me, honestly, I am a living brand. Lately I have gone to class looking absolutely bummy and gross, but I have had stuff going on that has driven me almost mad so that explains all that. However tonight I am wearing a perfect fall evening-at-school ensemble: shimmery gold leggings and a long sleeved scoop neck body suit from Forever 21 in Union Square, a gold and white fine wool scarf as a cummerbund (super sexy) and simple purple and silver Asics jogging sneakers. I look amazing. I have my braids up in a fiesty looking pony tail. I never wear foundation. I eat coconut oil for extended fertility (fingers crossed) and good skin. Occasionally at night, if I'm going out, to a reading or drinks with my peers, I will cover my skin with something (lotion or powder) to give me a natural body glow.

In conclusion…

I hope this helps you, and others like you, feel confident moving forward with the next steps in your literary life. An MFA is a great way to meet people, to talk about amazing books, and to heighten your skills as a writer. And if you make a few fashion statements along the way, well, that’s just icing on top of the cake.

 

You can find Heather’s newest poems on The Inquisitive Eater

For more on fashion and poetry, please visit my blog, Vinny the Snail

 

And to have your questions about fashion and beauty answered, please comment below!

"Let's Get Lost" with Cyrille Aimee

 You've heard Chet Baker's take on these lovely Frank Loesser lyrics. Now listen to Ms. AImee. -- DL

 

 

Meet the Press: Green Writers Press—Dede Cummings, James Crews, & GWP authors/poets

Dante Di Stefano: How did Green Writers Press come into being?

James Crews: Green Writers Press, an independent, Vermont-based publishing company, founded on Earth Day in 2014, is dedicated to spreading environmental awareness and social justice by publishing authors who promulgate messages of hope and renewal through place-based writing and environmental activism. Former Little, Brown book designer, Dede Cummings, founded the press out of her home office in southern Vermont with the mission to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups and social justice organizations. Our list has expanded significantly, publishing such authors as Julia Alvarez, David Budbill, Chard deNiord, John Elder, Dr. M Jackson, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, and Clarence Major.

DD: Can you talk a bit about the “localvore” approach of the press, combining environmental activism with the work of publishing?

Dede Cummings: One reason we started Green Writers Press was to print our books sustainably, and use eBooks and audiobooks to reduce our fossil fuel use. We are excited to be publishing our own authors, and we welcome your support to help us spread the word. In today’s world of social media and online transactions, here are GWP, we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object, into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and eBook publishing.

Our vision is that, collectively, our printed and eBooks will become a chorus of voices of writers and readers, artists and photographers, who care about the fate of the earth and want to do something about it. Though we believe our books will be interesting to Vermont residents, Green Writers Press has national distribution and we hope to have a broad reach and impact. Our voices need to be heard, which is why we refer to our press as a global press. We are—we all are connected on this planet we love. It is our hope that we can create a community around our press and the books we publish.

DD: Using the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry as a point of departure, could you talk a bit about the poetic significance of Vermont? How has this place influenced you as a poet and editor? What, if anything, links Vermont poets as widely disparate as Major Jackson and the late Ruth Stone, for example?

From editor and former Vermont state poet laureate, Sydney Lea: While even as I make one, I myself feel somewhat impelled to challenge any generality regarding so wide-ranging a group of poets as those in our anthology.  Indeed, the “Vermontiness” of this collection may reside particularly in its non-homogeneity. Our little state has a rightful reputation for orneriness and individualism, and I think those qualities prevail first to last here. Yes, there is often among our authors a strong sense of place, but not always. There is often, but not always, a vivid consciousness of the seasons. I could go on, but what really abides in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Second Edition is the autonomous voice. No one poet here would be mistaken for another. I find that bracing and gratifying.

From editor and Vermont state poet laureate, Chard DeNiord: While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in [this anthology] claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich legacy of the state's poetic tradition. In addition to this, I would add that Vermont's legacy of fierce independence, self-reliance, and ingenuity, from its earliest settlers to its present citizens, continues to typify not only Vermonters, but its best poetry. Like its farmers, inventors, loggers, and sugarers, Vermont poets enjoy memorializing their state's stunning landscape and rugged character. Vermont is both a liberal and conservative state, pulling two ways at once just as a good poem does. One of the qualities that endures as a bittersweet yet alluring theme in much of Vermont poetry is its ironic double nature as an archetypal paradise and formidable wilderness. This seeming contradiction provides the perfect prescription for sublime poetry where the landscape intersects with Vermont's poets' lives in memorable ways, as in Robert Frost's "Home Burial," Hayden Carruth's "Emergency Haying," Ruth Stone's "Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Laundry," Major Jackson's "Enchanters of Addison County," Louise Gluck's "Burning Leaves," Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," Mary Ruefle's "Jewelweed," Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Headwaters," "David Budbill's "Sometimes," Julia Alvarez's "Homecoming," "Sydney Lea's "Dubber's Cur," and "Leland Kinsey's "Surviving Bulls." The rugged life-style that has typified the lives of so many Vermonters over the past three centuries, as well as the mystical Green Mountains,  continue to find their way into Vermont's contemporary poetry, as evidence by the more than 100 strong poets who fill this volume.

DD: Vermont Exit Ramps II puts the poetry of Neil Shepard into conversation with the photography of Anthony Reczek in interesting ways. What is the most notable aspect of this dialogue for you?

From Vermont Exit Ramps II photographer, Tony Reczek: Tamra Higgins, one of the founders (with Mary Jane Dickerson) of Sundog Poetry, in her wonderful introductory remarks at the Vermont Exit Ramps II Book Launch, said: “How fortunate we are to have the long-lasting friendship between Tony and Neil transubstantiated into this book!” 

That’s probably the most notable aspect of the VER II “dialogue” for me, how in many ways the book is a continuation of a conversation started some five decades ago, when we first began rambling around the Vermont countryside.  VER II carries on that same conversation, but our instruments have changed, and the riffs have a greater complexity and nuance.  But the conversation – no, the song – still emerges from that shared sense of wonder first encountered those many years ago.  We just keep riffing on it.

From Vermont Exit Ramps II poet, Neil Shepard: I agree with everything Tony and Tamra say:  how VERII transmutes a remarkable friendship spent rambling around Vermont for the past forty or fifty years into this crystallized series of poems and photographs that record the changing nature of the pastoral landscape.  

Most of the poems are what we’d call post-pastoral – they examine the flashpoints and tensions between natural and the human-built landscapes – whereas the photographs offer a mix of modes, sometimes casting backward to traditional pastoral images, and sometimes capturing the what-is of contemporary post pastoral Vermont. So, in this dialogue between old friends, sometimes the photographic images reinforce the poems, and sometimes they clash with the written word, But overall, what’s most remarkable to me, in addition to our ongoing friendship, is how two artists (poet and photographer) demonstrate their love and attachment to the Vermont landscape, which they both record and interrogate through the word and the photographic image.

DD: Tell us about some of the other books in your catalog. What elements link Green Writers Press poetry collections?

DC: Green Writers Press is proud to offer some stunning poetry books in our catalog. We are looking for new and emerging poets that write about the earth and our place in nature and the built environment, poets who give voice to those who are marginalized in our society, and established poets who want to publish with us and enjoy the benefits of working collaboratively. Green Writers signed the new poetry collection by Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, and we are thrilled to work with such a notable American poet as Pack. We also recently published Dirt and Honey, by Rachel Vasquez Gilliland, an emerging Mexican-American poet and feminist. Another upcoming book is titled Time Inside, by Vermont poet Gary Margolis, about his work with maximum security prison inmates. Last, but not least, GWP just published A Bouquet of Daisies, by seventeen-year-old poet, Megan Alice, with proceeds benefitting the Planned Parenthood Federation. We strive for a diverse chorus of poetic voices and our literary magazine, The Hopper, also awards a poetry prize, now in its third year. Winners include John Saad in 2016, Ralph Black in 2017, and our 2018 winner, Charity Gingerich. Our poetry editors are James Crews, Anna Mullen, Ellie Rogers, Emma Irving, Dede Cummings, and Caroline Shea.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JC: We have a bias for poetry that is accessible to as large an audience as possible, and because we are an independent press run almost entirely by women, we also believe that more female and transgender voices are needed in American poetry to give voice to those who have been kept quiet for too long. But as an environmentally-minded publisher, we hold close to Robert Bly's idea of "shared consciousness" with the natural world — an outlook long held by Native Americans before us. This idea puts forth that elements of the natural world are just as intelligent and conscious as humans (if not more so), and perhaps the current environmental crisis would not be so dire if more people saw the world in this way. We need more American poetry that acknowledges our essential interconnectedness as a planet and as a human species. To paraphrase the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, we'd like to see more poetry that awakens us from the illusion of our separateness. 

DD: What does the future hold for poetry at Green Writers Press? 

JC: Because our publisher is an award-winning poet in her own right, we give a lot of attention to publishing and promoting our poetry catalog. To that end, you can expect to see several new collections which showcase diverse American voices, and which unflinchingly tackle the environmental crisis. You can also look for anthologies that are in and of themselves forms of resistance against the prevailing fear and outrage infecting our politics and our country as a whole. For instance, we'll be publishing an anthology edited by our poetry editor, James Crews, called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, with a lovely preface by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

DD: You recently published Landscapes with Donkey by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (translated by Ellen Skowronski-Polito). Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

DC: Winner of the 2016 ASLE Translation Grant to support the cross-cultural sharing of ecoliterature, translator Ellen Skowronski-Polito presents Marrero Henríquez’s poetry and vision to an English-speaking audience. In Landscapes with Donkey / Paisajes con burro, Spanish poet José Manuel Marrero Henríquez follows a gentle, gray donkey on his travels through the hillsides of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located off the western coast of Africa. Wise and thoughtful, the pensive quadruped, a “doctor of the earth,” studies the limits of ground and sky  with the unique perspicuity of a donkey’s gaze. On a journey far beyond the pasture’s horizon, the donkey, humblest of poets, takes flight to the Americas, Asia and Africa and unravels the mysteries of this transcendentally beautiful and profoundly life-giving planet we call home.

José Manuel Marrero Henríquez is a poet, writer, essayist, and tenured professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He has published extensively on literary landscapes and on a variety of topics of Spanish and Latin American literatures. He has served on the advisory board of EASLCE (2010-2014) and is a member of the advisory board of Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. He has recently edited Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts (Franklin Institute, 2016) and is co-editor of Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el siglo de la gran prueba (Catarata, 2018). Paisajes con burro, his latest book of poems, was awarded a 2016 ASLE translation grant, and has been published as Landscapes with Donkey under the translation of Ellen Skowronski-Polito (Green Writers Press, 2018). His most recent endeavor of a Poetics of Breathing, a general ecocritical theory, resonates within his creative writing and advocacy of environmental issues.

A sample poem, the first one in the book, in Spanish and in English:

            La pezuña raspa el suelo
            para enterrar el punto
            que a su interrogación falta
            y el sol fortalecido esfuma
            la energía encarnada en el campo.

            No queda humedad en las cosas
            y se evapora la vida
            para siempre.

            No hay voces, niños,
            águilas, culebras,
            ni siquiera buitres,
            o ruiseñores.

            Dormitan en los libros.

            Terco, seco el páramo
            y azul el cielo, el burro
            escarba su pregunta
            en el suelo.

——-

            The hoof scrapes the ground
            to bury the point
            that lacks its question
            and the strengthened sun blurs
            the energy embodied in the field.

            Things lose their moisture
            and life evaporates
            forever.

            There are no voices, children,
            eagles, snakes,
            not even vultures,
            or nightingales.

            They doze in books.

            The páramo dry
            and the sky blue, the stubborn donkey
            scratches his question
            in the ground.

---

Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English, and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her seconds poetry collection, The Meeting Place, is due out in May 2018 from Salmon Poetry in Ireland, and she is at work on a collection of stories called Spin Cycle. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede is a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in West Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, newly installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.

James Crews is an up-and-coming poetry editor and poet himself, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in creative writing / poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column and grew to love the Great Plains. He now lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles from the Robert Frost Stone House.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

The Mission Poetry Series presents Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, & Vandana Khanna

The tenth season of the Mission Poetry Series begins with a reading on Saturday, November 3, 2018, at 1 p.m. at the Santa Barbara Public Library. Sunlight, Leaves, & Shadows: Three Poets in Autumn features three award-winning authors: Chella Courington, Joseph Rios, and Vandana Khanna.  The title of the event is taken from “Words,” a poem by Dana Gioia, the current Poet Laureate of California.

The reading will be held at The Santa Barbara Public Library, in the Faulkner Gallery, at 40 E. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA,  and is free and open to the public. The event offers complimentary broadsides, refreshments, and poets’ books for sale. The Mission Poetry Series is hosted by program director Emma Trelles and production coordinator Mark Zolezzi. For more information, visit www.facebook.com/missionpoetryseries/

Simon Fujiwara’s “Revolution” installation and the ironies of image at Lafayette Anticipations [by Tracy Danison]

Photo: Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations

As in any virtual amusement park, Mr & Ms Public must take a ticket and patiently wait their turn to ride Simon Fujiwara’s empathy machine, now at Lafayette Anticipations in the Marais

Move over Woody Allen. An empathy machine, pictured above, trumps the filmmaker's celebrated Banana's orgasmatron, at least as an opening image for Simon Fujiwara’s Revolution installations at Lafayette Anticipations’ new spaces in the Marais, which run until the first week of January 2019. Fujiwara's machine, actually called Empathy1 simulator, and installed on the ground floor of the building, is complementary to three installations on two upper floors.

Each installation points and questions the volume and ubiquity of images and image technology and the representation of self. All  are esthetic and emotional successes. Such success is certainly owing to Fujiwara’s effective execution of his concepts and intentions but also I think to the very skillful configuration of the building’s modular space: there is an extra-fine touch at work in light and surface, in empty and full, in distance, dimension and position.

Revolution is a first solo show in France for Fujiwara - a multidisciplinary artist who has worked at the Tate and MOMA, as well as in Berlin & Tokyo - and follows on an earlier collaboration with the foundation and Centre Pompidou.

Empathy 1, constructed by a simulation-equipment manufacturer on the artist’s concept, is a real sit-down-strap-in experience that uses YouTube footage, amusement park ride-like movement, strobe, rushing air and splashing water to create a simulation of life that is “truer than Disney”, I heard Fujiwara say, and which he describes as a “sculptural experience”: riders find it fun.

The installations upstairs include a Happiness Museum, which breaks down happiness to data and artefacts, a still and film presentation of a certain Joanne Salley, and, on the top floor, a wax figure representing Anne Frank. Salley is a former art teacher of Fujiwara whose career was ruined when some British tabloid published pictures of her with her breasts exposed; Anne Frank is of course one of the most moving symbols of the horror of the Shoah.

Photo: Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations

Joanne Salley lost control of her image when a tabloid published photos of her with her breasts uncovered. She is determined to get it back and rebrand

Fashionista-style photo posters fixed to a sort of raised platform or plinth hide as much as they reveal the energetic, classy, athletic, lovely, lively, cool, etc., etc., etc. Joanne Salley they depict. Embedded behind this… monument(?) … is a screen showing a continuous loop documentary, featuring Salley, of Salley’s effort to regain control of Salley’s image, an image that came to control Salley; no victim, Salley’s determined to recapture the “Salley brand”. The documentary’s story line carries you through this latter irony and pushes you on to the uncomfortable realization that indiscreet breast handling in the 21^st century will get an unwary female punished, severely (and didn’t it recently happen to a competitor at a world-level tennis match?). The narrative then pulls you beyond that uncomfortable realization to a distressing one:  in trying to get control of her own image, Salley might be courageous but she believes in the same system as the yahoos who stole her image, milked and wrecked it.   

The Anne Frank wax dummy installation produces a similar if not the same distressing effect of irony to the Salley one.

 

Photo: Courtesy Lafayette Anticipations

The robot camera continuously scans the dummy for signs of life…

In itself, a wax dummy – literally, a golem –  is creepy: the lifelike image has the form, texture and allure of a corpse; unlike a golem, any life produced in it is a projection of the onlooker. Fujiwara has perched the thing up high on an all-white platform, where a spectator can’t get it but through the giant split screen images projected in the void above the motionless dummy by a robot camera programmed to continuously hover over it, to seem to lick at it.

Aside from incongruously providing the only real movement, the robot camera furnishes the banal “body emotion-study” camera work familiar from TV and film: the somehow emotive eyes, the somehow touching smile, the somehow darling fingers somehow earnestly holding the pen. All this is from a dead thing of wax, of course. Disturbing irony, surely.

Even so, there is distressing irony in this iconic installation. It is this: the Anne Frank image has been crafted to stimulate… empathy! And the more I contemplate the image, the more I find that the image kills empathy…

Back to the ground floor.

Maybe I should try the Empathy 1 simulator. Or maybe the orgasmatron?

Poet as Travel Guide [by Tami Haaland]

For the next few weeks, I’m living in a small apartment in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, Germany, and on the weekends, I’ll be teaching a brief seminar on Montana literature at Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg or Ludwigsburg University of Education. Since I arrived on Monday, I’ve been settling into time zone and location, organizing my life, and walking. I like the way travel focuses a person on basic concerns—where to sleep, what to eat, how to return after venturing out. It appeals to my inner hunter-gatherer. Rather than using GPS, I prefer to discover where the road goes, a method that does not guarantee success but is satisfying on its own. So far, I’ve come across crisp fallen apples, fresh blackberries along a walking path, and kale planted at the end of a field for anyone to pick. The Waldorf School just above the campus seems to be surrounded by small farms, complete with resident goats, and today there were perhaps fifteen small wild sheep called muffelwild in Favoritepark.

Favoritepark is a small forest situated directly beside the campus leading first to a colorful hunting lodge and then to the palace built by Duke Eberhard Ludwig who famously said, “There are already enough boring towns.”  Ludwigsburg is not old by the usual standards. It’s an 18^th century city that developed because of the Duke, and it is lovely and spacious, full of trails designed for walking and biking. One path I especially like is the Planetenweg that connects Ludwigsburg to other towns on a path where large steles with sculptures on both sides represent the planets, and the entire system is built to scale. Made by students at the University, these steles feature dismembered human/god figures in relief on the front side and engraved images on the back, where parts of the body are connected but less recognizable, more like a being made of fire. Exhibited on a tree-lined walking path, these sculptures extend out from a gold metal sphere that represents the sun.

There is something about seeing the dismembered Erde, or Earth, that feels ominous. I don’t know if this is intentional since all of the figures are similarly portrayed. Because I don’t know German well, I go through the motions of reading the explanatory plaques, and then I make things up. I recognize some words and add my own false assumptions, as if conducting that familiar writing exercise of creating a poem by pretending to translate an unfamiliar language. I imagine climate change and a troubled world as I view this portrait of the Earth, but I don’t think that’s what the students had in mind.

Apparently Ludwigsburg is also the center of Swabian poetry. The first night I was here, my hosts mentioned the Swabian dialect, which is connected to a 2000-year-old ethnic group in this area. Friedrich von Schiller, from Marbach am Neckar, and Eduard Mörike, who was born in Ludwigsburg, appear to be the two most prominent poets connected to Swabia. In the 19^th century, Longfellow anthologized Schiller’s “Count Eberhard, the Weeper of Würtemberg,” elsewhere translated as “Count Eberhard, the Groaner.” It’s a battle narrative written in quintains that specifically mentions Swabian lands.  What appeals to me more, though, is this short poem from Mörike, “September Morning,” translated by Charles L. Cingolani, which provides a sense of this place, where “colors / Stream forth in molten gold.”

Of course we’re a month past that kind of brilliance, but there are still leaves on the trees, the weather is mild, and Ludwigsburg is celebrating the season with a pumpkin festival. Some say it’s the biggest in the world.

Next Line, Please: An Epigraph in Search of a Poem [by Virginia Valenzuela]

What prompts a poem into existence? Dr. Lehman suspects that many poems are byproducts of reading, coming across an arresting line, an interesting image, a noteworthy character, and we think of it as a point of departure.

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton writes: “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

For this week's prompt, write a symmetrical, two stanza poem under 14 lines, allowing for a duet, if not a dialogue. Or perhaps an unrhymed sonnet?

It’s up to you whether to use Wharton’s line as an epigraph or as a line in your poem—possibly the terminal line of one or both stanzas.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate! Deadline: Saturday, November 3, midnight wherever you are.

Tami Haaland, Guest Author Beginning October 31

We'd like to welcome back Tami Haaland as our guest author. Tami will be posting weekly during her stint teaching at a small school near Stuttgardt, Germany. Tami is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (Lost Horse Press, 2018), When We Wake in the Night, and Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. Haaland’s poems have recently appeared in Consequence, Ascent, The Ecopoetry Anthology Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry among other publications. She received an Artist Innovation Award from Montana Arts Council and is a 2019 recipient of a Governor’s Humanities Award. Haaland has served as Montana's Poet Laureate and is a professor of creative writing at Montana State University Billings.

Welcome, Tami.

-- sdl

Interview with Tony Towle [by Jess Matuozzi]

[Guest Author Note:  Thank you to Jess and Tony for this fascinating interview and to Hanging Loose Press for permission to reproduce the poems discussed in it!]

JM: Your poetry taps out a wry tango with history; you’ve looked at it, through it, over it, beyond it, within it, and around it, describing the historical perspective of the backward-glancing present as “the cartoon with the one perennial frame.” And so we’re here to speak of poetry’s intersection with history, personal and collective.  

Let’s start with the former. How has your writing process changed with age? I’m not referring to changes in style, like your shift from pop collage to a more conversational mode, but rather, to changes in the way you experience the writing process. 

TT: My first thought is: how can aging not have changed my writing process (along with everything else!)? But when I try to figure out what those changes have actually been, I draw a blank. If the “writing process” is the manner in which the poems are made, regardless of individual content or style, I think I have to say that there hasn’t been perceptible (perceptible to me, anyway) change since I got going in the early ‘60s. Perhaps I mistake what you are getting at. Feel free to steer me onto the right track! 

 

JM: I’m afraid I only have directions to the wrong track. It’s located at the intersection of poetry and history in the broadest sense: that is, at the site where poetry catalyzes cultural shifts that can, ultimately, be historical in their import. I’ve always seen your poems as being quietly countercultural — “The City in the Throes of Despair,” for example, crashes the ethos of “accomplishment” against the sort of openness that allows for “beauty to interrupt constantly.” Do you see your poems as countercultural? 

 

TT:  The poem you refer to was written in 1967, when the “real” counterculture (politics and sociology more than poetry) was well on its way to being a force in national life; but my work had nothing to do with that, nor was I personally very much a part of it, although I knew many poets who were. I’m not so much countercultural as a classic outsider, whose work is perhaps quietly subversive. Part of the subversion can be a free-wheeling parody of conventional thinking, with an insistence on being gratuitous, stubbornly irrelevant  to “normal” society and daily reality. The poem in question is surreal and absurdist, with satiric reference to Robert Moses, real estate developer Samuel Lefrak, and the Borough of Queens (where I grew up).  I write different kinds of poems, so one could find examples that are other than what I have just described. But I would maintain that I’m a subversive outsider rather than a counterculturalist, which usually implies an agenda beyond poetry itself.

 

JM: This differentiation you’ve made between the countercultural and the subversive is very useful; it offers a clearer vocabulary for discussing poetry’s role(s) in the public sphere. Now you’ve got me thinking about the value of anchoring subversion in a rich array of historical references, as you do in recent poems like “Misprision” and “Five Days in June.” When you find yourself animated by the mischievous impulse to pen something “gratuitous” or “stubbornly irrelevant” to conventional society, what historical period do you find most compelling to engage with, and why?   

 

TT:  It’s really whatever comes across my radar and suddenly seems right for inclusion in a particular poem. I’ve read enough history — starting in earnest at the age of eight — so that the material exists in my head as a kind of repertory. But the historical aspect may not be the primary motivation for the poem. “Misprision” — an archaic word for misunderstanding (among other meanings) — is about double entendres, a couple of them rather pornographic (Sappho’s original tongue, indeed!); the whole is made ambiguous by a naïve narrator going through a series of misprisions. Ambiguity is a prime feature of the subversive, at least my version of it. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity in poetry, and with art in general, but the average person is not. (The meaning should be clear, damn it!) Irony is another feature, and irony is often ambiguous. “Five Days in June” starts out as a lampoon of the clichéd and ubiquitous “Today,” used as an introductory phrase carrying bogus authority for a point that is not in the least proven: Today,  Americans are less inclined . . . Today, women prefer . . . This has annoyed me enough over time so that a couple of years ago I found myself composing this short poem that I think ridicules the device but is entertaining beyond that. So I don’t know if this poem is really “historical” — though it does reference the Ottoman Empire — since what could be less historical than Today? 

In any event, in both these poems it is aspects of language that drive the car, with historical references, among other items, along for the ride. In general, I’m pretty eclectic. In my book Winter Journey, there are mentions and scenarios that include the storm god Teshub, medieval Baghdad, the Mongols, Plutarch, the Battle of Kursk, Catherine the Great, John Calvin, Samuel Barber, John Clare, Val Lewton, Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, Genghis Khan, Ogodei Khan, En-Hedu-Ana, Sargon of Akkad, the Sumerians, Phoenicia, Elijah, Ahab, Jezebel, Genghis Khan again, Parthia, Sappho, Charles VIII of France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Sassanians.  

 

JM: I remain curious about what drives your propensity for more distant historical allusions. So I’ll conclude by asking you this: if you were to embark upon a sustained poetic foray into the life of some figure from the more distant past, who would you choose?  

I don’t think my sensibility is suited to do a long-poem biographical treatment of one individual, à la Robert Browning, or Byron — or my late friend and colleague Paul Violi, who was wonderfully adept at creating extended studies of historical figures (or invented ones, for that matter!).  I wouldn’t be able to sustain it, and it would end up as something else. As to a propensity for distant historical allusions, that began long before I started writing poetry. I think it had to do with escape. I often found (find) the present limited and unsatisfying. History has always given me somewhere else to go.

 

*    *    *

The City in the Throes of Despair

 

The great worm of the north, in whose footsteps we tread,

eludes us with a thousand lightnings.

However the bus, the nourishment of the city, pulls in,

and nothing has been accomplished though beauty

interrupts constantly, interpolating a row of moments

like a pink balustrade basking in the sun.

 

The buses and planes go forward in clouds of yeast and salt,

lurching over the pipes and turbines of the city

as Wyoming would slide down the coast of Norway

and I look from the plane as from the vantage point of a roof

to see the Lefrak Building shielding my eyes from Manhattan.

Lefrak, whose first name has escaped me —  like Catherine

the Great's last — into the wild blue,

but who with Moses, whose first name is an anticlimax,

has left us the Queens of today and tomorrow.

 

We surprise the great worm in the frozen waste of his sleep.

Our magic ax and feather do their work

and the monster lies helpless in scattered and giggling pieces.

The five boroughs are safe and rainbows arch over the brick,

bright birds with their pinions are free to range once more,

but in whose colorful wake our hurtling plane seems spiritless,

planning to touch only Chicago and perhaps Detroit,

with a landing in the meantime however subtle meaning an emergency,

with no one congenial until reaching the ground, parachutes billowing,

and relaxing on the train back to New York, the parachute as a souvenir.

 

Tony Towle, 1967

from The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000

(Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

 

 

Misprision

 

someone said Sappho could be understood

only through her original tongue

and I said I didn’t think so

as educational as that would probably be

 

someone wrote that Charles VIII

entered France in the 1490’s

and I said to myself: I don’t think so

he was born many years before that

but he did penetrate Italy in 1494

as far as Naples, and didn’t withdraw

for an entire year, which seems extraordinary

by today’s standards

but he finally lost virility and everything else

by hitting his head on a doorway in 1498

 

someone wrote that gardening was a literature 

in which scholars nibbled at the edges 

of what appeared to be an insurmountable edifice

and I thought: that makes perfect sense,

nibbling is an authentic scholarly pursuit

and eventually the edifice will get lower

and can be surmounted

 

somebody said that cretins painted murals

and got out of labyrinths but that seems unlikely

and someone wrote to say it’s time for a poetry museum

but I don’t understand how anyone could possibly know that

and isn’t that what our books are already

glassless vitrines 

where you’re allowed to run your fingers over the art

or nibble on the implications

or loiter in the white passageways between the lines

hoping to meet the lenders to the exhibition

 

Tony Towle,  2004

from Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, 2008

 

Five Days in June

 

Today, the most overused introductory is Today,.

 

Today, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.

 

Today will be yesterday tomorrow, and it will be clear

that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

 

Today, I will put ten dollars on Pigs in Moonlight, take my winnings

and disappear into the Ottoman Empire.

 

Today, the Ottoman Empire is a furniture store on Queens Boulevard.

 

Tony Towle, 2015

from Noir: Poems 2008-2017, Hanging Loose Press, 2017

*    *    *

[Tony Towle, a quintessential poet of the New York School and the city of New York itself, is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Hanging Loose Press, 2001).  His most recent collection is Noir: Poems 2008-2017 (Hanging Loose Press, 2017).]

[Jess Matuozzi received her PhD in English and African American Studies from Yale University in 2016. She is currently a fire dancer, primate conservation activist, and English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.] 

 

John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan.  It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's high school…  Special thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin Jamail]

Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge.  Ashbery’s playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise, contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations.  Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run.  Many years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor, John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my first year at Trinity.  John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain.  He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.

Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:      

Student: How do you get inspired?

Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait.  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.

Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?

Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens.  I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses.  I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns.  I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school.  The population was something like 8,957,000.  She had the most population of any of the cities.

Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?

Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet.  I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually.  It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer.  Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter.  I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint.  I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.

Student: What poets inspired you the most when you were younger

Ashbery: Actually the first modern poet in that anthology.  It was all strange to me as it probably is for anyone who encounters modern poetry, asking “What is this?”  “It doesn’t make any sense!”  But then I began to like that.  Some of the poets I liked actually made a lot of sense but I was still too inexperienced to realize this.  My favorite one was W.H. Auden, who you wouldn’t think today would give readers that much difficulty; partly because his later poetry was much more uncomplicated and straightforward.  But he hadn’t written his later poetry yet.  His earlier poetry is rather obscure and puzzling.  I became very attracted by his way of using different tones and styles, like vernacular of various kinds, and prosy journalism, and all of these mashed together in the same poem.          

Student: What inspired your poem “Some Trees”?

Ashbery: The poem “Some Trees” was inspired by falling in love and also by reading the poetry of Marianne Moore, which I was reading a lot of at the time.  I think that there’s an influence in that poem of Marianne Moore’s, certainly the half-rhymes that she used a lot. 

Student: Do you write with the intention of getting at a deeper meaning?

Ashbery: Deeper than what?  I write with the intention of expressing a meaning that I couldn’t put into words until I’ve done so by writing it in the poem.  

Student: Do your poems just come to you or do you sit down thinking I’m going to write a poem now?

Ashbery: Yeah I guess I sit down thinking, or hoping, “I’m going to write a poem now.”*

Student: Do you disagree with the critical interpretations of your poems?

Ashbery: Yes, always, including the favorable ones.     

Student: Do you understand your own work?

Ashbery: No—but as I said, that’s why I write it, hoping that I’ll be able to understand it eventually.*

Student: Does other art inspire your poems?

Ashbery: Certainly painting and music, especially music.  I listen to music when I’m writing.  I think if I had known how to do it I probably would have written music instead of poetry.  What’s interesting is that it’s a linear experience in time as is a poem.  You have to stay with it until the end to know what it’s all about, whereas a painting you can look at and say, “O yeah, I got that.”  The time that is built into the experience for me is very much something that the poetry is about, too.  It’s the universal subject.  My poetry often reflects my past, childhood, and so forth.  The temporal quality of poetry is why I switched from painting to writing poetry.  But I look at a lot of art, too.  I worked as an art critic for a long time and had to force myself to really look at something so I’d remember when I sat down to write about it what I had seen.  That was a very valuable experience.  One thing that’s the hardest to do is give your attention to anything.  By painfully forcing myself I learned a valuable lesson.              

Student: If you could bring five items to a deserted island what would you bring?

Ashbery: Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.   

Student: If you weren’t a famous poet what other work could you imagine yourself doing?

Ashbery: I can’t imagine myself doing any work.  I don’t think poetry counts.  I would like to have been able to do other things, like writing music, as I just mentioned, or writing novels, which people would then actually read.  But it’s very difficult to write a novel, whereas it’s easy to write poetry, provided that you’re a poet.  I’m always amazed at performative art, like a violinist who plays an incredible concerto.  Of course, it’s easy for him because that’s what he does.  It wouldn’t be easy for me.

Student: Do poets have a responsibility to be political?

Ashbery: I think people have a responsibility to be political.  I don’t think that poets have a responsibility to write political poetry, because I think any poetry is political in the sense that it makes you reflect on life, and feel glad you’re alive if it’s a good poem, and it makes you want to act in various capacities from love or militant philosophy and experience different forms of your life.  I don’t like political poetry because I invariably agree with the message in it and don’t have to be reminded of it.