This week we welcome Thomas Moody as chief of our bureau in Australia. Thomas's poetry and prose have appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, The Los Angeles Review, Hanging Loose, Lindsay Magazine and elsewhere. He is rarely caught with his pants down.
Welcome, Thomas.
-- sdl
“People United”, Joanne Leighton. Photo: Patrick Berger 2021
Children, behave!/That’s what they say when we’re together!/ And watch how you play!/They don’t understand/ And so we’re runnin’ just as fast as we can/ holdin’ on to one another’s hand,/ tryin’ to get away into the night,/and then you put your arms around me and we tumble to the gound/and then you say, ‘I think we’re alone now!”/The beating of our hearts is the only sound…
Tommy James and the Shondells, 1967
Paris’ performance spaces are set to open on 19 May. After three lovely days of six performances at the Atelier de Paris’s audience limited and socially-distanced “platforme professionnel”, I want that. I really want it. I long for it.
I am not the only one longing, either. Since late March, like Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Maine Auntie tying to wish up the telephone to call a quack on the mainland, my pal Huang has been willing the Avignon festival into renewed existence. However, the general tone is on-verra-bien, of battle-weary poilus. Everybody’s sick of everything, whether of the know-nothing yahoos on the right, woe-is-my-purse business types or the jumpy government, afraid things will bugger all at the last minute.
Tempted by tastes of pleasure like Atelier de Paris’ lovely plateforme professionel and longing just to get on with it, I still just don’t know if an opening really should happen this coming Wednesday.
My doubt is part partial observation, part gloomy signs and portents, part finicky rationality, part home truth. Some years back, it seems I inherited that little bird who used to shamelessly tittle-tattle my lies and evasions to my mom. This damnable volatile witters on in a voice pitched between feu-mon doux frère gasping his last prophecy and Cardi-B cheerfully praising her own twat.
“Trace,” croons the bird, “Six weeks on and this so-called world’s-second-greatest-market and super-power-in-its-own-right has vaccinated you once… Not the best of vaccine choices, neither. … And, this R -.75 notwithstanding, the overall data’s no thrill – look at those clusters on the cloud graph … Trace,” sneers my little bird, “Tracy. Is it any wonder that Avignon – then, as now, a dense honeycomb of tiny, airless rooms sweltering inside a stone labyrinth of narrow, humid passages – is most famous for a truly legendary losing bout with the Black Death? … And. Tracy,” the bird pauses for effect, “Listen… When all is said and done, doesn’t contemporary France, private and public, plexiglass, steel and concrete France, conserve, preserve and just still stink with a cheek-by-buttocks social architecture and social organization worthy of medieval Avignon? ”….
I’ve got my doubts indeed. But, finally, the Atelier de Paris’ excellence has shown me a better way. In fact, I’ve already said yes to the opening of the Printemps Arab festival on the day. Damn the torpedoes! And all that.
What made the Atelier so persuasive?
Programmers usually try to capture what’s in the air, what’s good, what’s hip. But, at least this time, the Atelier tried to do only sensibilities. The program was a dance that moves movement, a dance that carries the force of feeling, a dance that just dances, a performance that performs irony, a dance that calls up worlds, a performance that shows philosophy: Liz Santoro’s Mutual Information; Joanne Leighton’s People United; Françoise Tartinville’s Collage, Jeanne Brouaye’s Ce qu’il reste à faire et la où nous en sommes (“What we still need to do and where we’re at”?), Aina Alegre’s R-A-U-X-A , Madeleine Fournier’s La Chaleur (“Rut”?). Exploding math, meta-politics, dancing to dance, irony as truth, world creation, parody is as philosophy. All that beats my cobweb hands down.
These performances were not just sparklers, either. One of them, at least, Joanne Leighton’s People United, came off as a dance performance, a nearly a perfect ballet, a nearly a perfect happening. Remmember, Mary Poppins, my spiritual auntie, says “nearly” does for “perfect” as we know it in the Vale of tears, here below.
Like Valentine Nagata-Ramos’, BE.GIRLS – also premiered for professionals, at Micadances earlier in the year – People United, in its near perfection, seemed to me to mark a last milestone on the road to the paradigm shift, O! Devoutly wished. Both groundbreaking. Both gorgeous. Both, absorbing.
So. Not only was not a single one of the Atelier’s chosen plateforme professionnel premiers in any sense a disappointment. Each performance absolutely sparkled with conceptual refinement carried by writerly discipline, materialized by sober scenarists and done by well-practiced performers. I emphasize well-practiced now, in the light of Covidzeitefahrungen, because the besetting sin of France’s (live) performing arts is sloppy execution, which I too often forget to notice. So maybe the Covid emergency has done some good all around.
Keep the Atelier de Paris in mind when you’re next in Paris – the time is not far off.
At least, let’s hope it isn’t.
“Without paranoia, there’s nothing. My knowledge of
homeland trivia is nothing if not
chaotic, historically inaccurate..."
Toby Fitch works in the great tradition of Australian (post-/modernist) poetry that takes play seriously and regards irreverence as a sincere expression of esteem, and stretches from Christopher Brennan’s 1897 pastiche of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés to John Tranter’s innovations in “proceduralist” compositions, and unwittingly passes through the oeuvre of the fictional Ern Malley. Over the course of his six collections to date, Fitch has paid tribute to this lineage by borrowing from both its source material and apparatus to construct a poetry that offers something entirely new: an unnerving ability to make the reader an accomplice to the poetic experiment, a kind of involuntary collaboration that is most pronounced when Fitch’s ambition seems to be to dismantle the poem itself. What I find most interesting about Fitch’s poetry is not so much the novelty of his techniques as the peculiarity of their effects, which frequently remind me that in our alchemic relationship to language, we are the more combustible element.
If a feature of modernism has been to remove the all knowing, all seeing poet from the center of the poem and invite the reader in to participate in the imaginative act, then Fitch plunges us ever deeper, to make us complicit not only in the poem’s achievements, but also its messes, its wrecks, its verging collapse. “i am a permanent & frustrated civilian/bloke of the global village” the speaker of “Village” tells us “thought to be post-everything as all new taste is voided across the furnishings/interior becomes exterior my private abode exploding”. It's a nuanced way of representing our modern compulsion to "explode" the distinctions between private and public, to externalize our inner life, to blur the line between actor and spectator. In the process, Fitch makes us co-conspirators in his strange, mischievous world. In this aspect, his work might find a precursor in the art of Bruce Naumen.
Fitch’s early experiments in poetic form and aesthetics often pit the volatility of language (the randomness of mistranslation, say) against the exactness of design. These sculptured poems, which at first glance appear entirely confident of their jurisdiction, begin to grow less certain of their structures the moment we enter them. The two arrowhead-shaped stanzas of “Narrows”, from his debut collection Rawshock (2012), seem to hurl down the page in a propulsion of words which is both mimetic of the poem’s shape and seemingly hell-bent on destroying it, like termites that, in the words of Manny Farber, “eat away at their immediate boundaries.” Fitch achieves this through his finely tuned ear for the traditional instruments of poetry (condensing, slant-rhymes; line breaks positioned in the mid-points of action) and how language works outside of poetry, that is: misunderstood, mangled, and patched together. Rawshock, for instance, is a paronomasia of “Rorschach”, and references a poetic sequence in the book which reshapes the Orpheus and Eurydice myth using the ten original Rorschach inkblots as templates.
Or take “Mauvement”, with its liquefaction of language into a kind of precipitation of data, in which certain words come in drops of syllables, so that we are able to locate the vice in our “de vices”; we find the error in the "conq/erors of the world"; and our weather systems arrive regendered (for so long exclusively given female names) as a "male storm".
"Mauvement" from The Bloomin' Notion and Other Stories of Beau
What we get here is Fitch's fixation with the way language can be broken open by mistake/pun/(mis)translation to reveal a more genuine meaning lurking within, which is to say: there is much truth to be found in the unintentional, the error. The poem also exhibits Fitch’s talent in playing with our physical expectations of reading a poem: tilting one's head to align ourselves with "Mauvement", the words, rather than secure themselves in place, begin to cascade away from us, so that we become increasingly unbalanced and begin to experience a form of slippage ourselves.
There is a latent energy in Fitch's poetry that our attention—never wholly innocent—explodes to life. In many of his poems, the reader can be made to feel like a wolf who has sidled its way into the stockade and stirred up the horses—a few lines in and one half expects the fences to come crashing down and the words to bolt off the page.
In his second collection, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, Fitch turns his attention to Rimbaud’s Illuminations, flipping each poem upside-down to “write backwards through them, hijacking and re-versing their content”. Fitch tell us he relies upon “the French of Rimbaud, the translations by John Ashbery, the filter and slippage of every language on Google Translate, a sense of reckless abandon, and an ear/eye/err for the pun” to construct an extraordinary book that reverses the cultural loop of the colonial circuit, and opens up the possibilities of what it might mean to be “Australian” (he interchanges the moniker "Aussie" with the French aussi: also, as well, too), while puncturing some long held national delusions.
But before I go any further into the political concerns of The Bloomin’ Notions, I want to share some lines that give an overall sense of the delight the collection takes in language, and the revelations that arrive in the form of fluke, error, blooper:
“& the relevant delusion is a man w/ money/& ici an aussi trysting the rules/that like a tonne of organic eclairs/drape a new noir across the Bois-like lure” (from “After the Orgy”)
“To the lovemobile! Because I’m the original/inventor of desertion” (from “Vices”)
“i don’t have a pacifier for the vile despot i cling to” (from “Aphasia”)
"there will be no headlines/tomorrow what a relief! but i will have to pay/some serious rent to re-carpet this womb!" (from "In Fancy")
Within these slippages and puns lies a more profound interrogation of one of Australian poetry’s preoccupations: how to shape a poetics from our genocidal colonial past, when, as Jonathon Dunk observes “any simple assumption of formal cadence implies and reifies colonial possession.” Australia is at once both a replica of Europe and its opposite, it’s antipode—an extension of the European imagination, first as mythic paradise, then as island jail, all the while being in reality home to the oldest continuous culture on Earth. It has given us a national character that is built upon both malformed ideals of “Australianness” and a long-held inferiority as Europe’s subaltern.
One way to approach the problem is to intentionally mishandle, mistranslate and botch our European cultural inheritance, to master the canon forced upon us and then rearrange it. In Fitch’s essay Aussi/Or, which explores Australian poetry’s tradition of such mistranslations, he writes of the political principle of a poetry “generated by paronomasia—by the difference and sameness in words; a poetry of multiplicity that questions truth, mastery, authority, and symbolic structures by trespassing upon and through them, undermining them; poetry that “offers you up” a serious parody, serio ludere, a paradox in terms; a poetry of unreason, that transgresses boundaries.” The Bloomin' Notions certainly fits this bill.
Speaking on his poem “In Fancy” (a mistranslation of Rimbaud's "Enfance", and also a clever play on "infancy"), with its magnificent first line “why on earth would I blow open the safe/of childhood?” Fitch describes his “inversions” as “partly procedural, partly just play, part larrikin, part love, it’s a ‘down under’ conceit, this method of writing backwards.” One would struggle to think of a better set of ingredients with which to advance an Australian poetics.
|The Bloomin' Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press, 2016)
N.B. I have used screenshots of "Mauvement" to best illustrate the physical nature of Fitch's poetry, and whose design and typography are far beyond my ability to reproduce. You can click the image to get a larger, clearer, and isolated view of the poem. -- T.M.
David Trinidad and his mother Joyce, graduation from junior high school, 1968.
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Sonnet
The day she died, my mother divided
up her jewelry, placed each piece in Dixie
cups (on which my father had written, with
magic marker, the names of her children
and grandchildren): her aunt’s pearls, her mother-
in-law’s topaz and amethysts, her own
mother’s plain gold cross. Earlier, I’d held
a mirror while she put on her lipstick
(Summer Punch) and ran a comb through what was
left of her hair. She stared at the gray strands
in her hand—not with sadness, but as fact.
When she placed the last ring in the last cup,
she looked up at me and said, “We never
have enough time to enjoy our treasures.”
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David Trinidad is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry. These include Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017), Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013), and Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point, 2011). Digging to Wonderland is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2022. He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011) and Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith (Turtle Point, 2019). Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College. [See this link for more poems by David Trinidad.]
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David Trinidad by Billy Sullivan
On This Very Street in Belgrade
Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.
-- Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938). Photo of Simic, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, holding a copy of the book, with David Lehman at a reading organized by Bill Wadsworth of the Academy of American Poets in October 1992.
I walked
around the house
in search
of chocolate.
(There must be
some chocolate
somewhere, right?)
No, I don’t think
it’s a sweet tooth
craving,
I just have
an excess
of dissonances
today.
Chocolate makes
dissonances
resolve.
(Or it doesn’t.)
Regardless,
somehow,
you feel
better.
(Or you don’t.)
Oh well,
At least,
you’ve tried.
Die Verwandlung
Or, one student’s adventures in higher yearning
May 6, 2018
To: Colleagues in the Writing Module
From: Jack Hexter
Many of you who have worked with Richard Treacy will be impressed by the progress he has made, as shown by his essay (below) on the take-home final (open-book, three hours).
Sigmund Freud asked, in evident exasperation, “What do women want?” Based on your understanding of at least three of the works we read this semester, how would you answer Freud’s question? Be sure to give a title to your essay.
What Women Want
by Richard H. Tracey
Some would say they want to get married and raise a family. Others want to “have it all.” I am not sure whether that is even possible, but it is the ideal pursued by some. I think the answer is more complicated than that.
It is hard to generalize about women, but I will try, because half of us are them, slightly more than a majority, and maybe even more than that according to demographic studies indicating that women live longer than men, and it is something like 50.2% versus 49.8% of the population. So technically it is possible that they could vote a woman president into office if they all stuck together.
When I think of Antigone, Major Barbara, The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Bible, and even Lucky Jim, looking for what they have in common, each woman is a unique individual, with an identity that sets them apart at the same time that they belong to a larger group, just like each of us who come from different backgrounds, and yet, as was mentioned in class, there is “unity in diversity” for despite our variegated pasts we share a “stake in humanity” by endeavoring to do the same little everyday things like brush our teeth, put on our clothes, and eat breakfast before we come to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 A.M. in Hartwick Hall.
Let me give an example. Of these various female characters. And what they want. Since that is the question. They all want to help. Antigone helps her brother, Barbara tries to help those whose souls need saving, Lady Britomart tries to help her family and herself, and Praskovya helps society by conforming with it. Also, Eve helps to fulfill human destiny by eating the apple, and Kurtz’s fiancée in Heart of Darkness wants to help the war effort in the Congo by honoring Kurtz and the sacrifices he made.
Thus, each of these four women leads an individual life, with individual desires that sets them apart. One desires the ordinary, one the extraordinary; one desires to save souls, and one wants to be the center of attention.
Yet they have one thing in common. Whatever they desire, each wants to succeed in that desire. And furthermore each goes to extremes to fulfill that desire. Praskovya ignores her husband’s death, Antigone hangs herself, Barbara accepts the entirely different philosophy of Undershaft, Eve bites into the apple and then brings it to Adam, not knowing what the consequences will be, and Margaret throws fits. Women, then, desire what she will, but always desires success.
Sadly there may come a time for each of them when enough has gone too far. But for whom could it be different?
Speaking personally, it is very hard to say what a woman wants. Freud would not have asked it if the answer was obvious. He would probably answer in terms of “sexual desire,” which I find hard to believe considering that sex is not necessarily overrated but is merely one facet of a life in which there are other aspects including quality of life issues (food, beer, having a pet, etc.), sports (football being the obvious example, but again this transcends gender, e.g. the U.S. women’s soccer team), politics (Hillary Clinton), and yes, even our studies, which may be the key to future success if affluence is the goal or if you want to get into law school, the Peace Corpse, or the foreign service, which has a test which I hear is a bitch.>>
For more of "Freud's Immortal Question," this link should direct you to The American Scholar (September 4, 2012).
In the Hollywood film of Carousel, Jacques d’Amboise—hemmed in on both sides by lines of dancers—suddenly takes off into a sequence of four precisely placed double air turns and then, reorganizing his focus, streams aloft into a leap, his legs beating before him as he sails. This is virtuoso ballet dancing, by any measure. However, it is a different kind of virtuosity than d’Amboise’s colleague, Edward Villella, displays as, say, Oberon in the film of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both men are performing classical steps with the same exactitude, but they aren’t performing them to the same effect. In his memoir, I Was A Dancer, d’Amboise makes it clear how much he admired his colleague’s dancing; Villella was at once his brother-in-arms and a nonpareil standard. And, in the twenty-four roles that Balanchine created for d’Amboise, not to speak of his casting and coaching of the latter in the title role of Apollo (for some devoted members of the NYCB audience, he was the definitive Balanchine Apollo), Balanchine made it clear how important d’Amboise was to him.
D’Amboise was a head taller than Villella, longer boned and less visibly muscled: The comparison might be a quarterback against a boxer. (Villella was an actual welterweight boxing champion at the New York Maritime Academy; he also lettered in baseball.) They both jumped high and landed with buoyancy, but Villella, with a more compact physique, put more torque into his preparations for jumping and turning. And although both men achieved brilliant batterie (the beating legs), it took the dancer with longer limbs a nanosecond more time to perform the opening and closing of his legs than it did his colleague. Villella’s beats, now legendary even on film where (as Villella’s greatest chronicler, the critic Arlene Croce, could have put it) they read as a blur, were slightly faster in fact, and the power of his movement made them register as much faster in effect. Villella’s feet also pointed more sharply than d’Amboise’s, making Villella’s beats seem extra-clear. There was something else. Villella performed classical allégro combinations with a phrasing that arrested their momentum at the height or most complex part of the step, giving a flashing photographic moment of stillness in the midst of motion that seemed almost unreal. (Among Balanchine’s ballerinas, Merrill Ashley achieved that effect, too.) Yet d’Amboise did not “stop” mid-stream that way; he showed the poses beautifully, but he displayed them in the course of the dance current. He didn’t enunciate them. And he didn’t show the sculptural power involved in initiating classical steps. He performed steps as conversational gestures, as elements in a larger song—and the song, with its unpredictable counts and uninflected climaxes, was written by George Gershwin for his good pal Fred Astaire, even when Gershwin was channeling the fantastical imagination of Fauré, the clinical intelligence of Stravinsky, the melodic raptures of Tchaikovsky, and even when his onstage figure was trying to learn to walk on the way to Parnassus or to catch a Sylph on the fly or to wrangle a Gypsy momentarily transforming herself from a lion to a lamb. I have always thought that Balanchine himself, who loved theatrical surprise and magic, either once danced or wanted to dance that way, perpetrating the illusion nightly, on union time, that the physical work of dancing could be shielded from the audience, as the entrances of his ballerinas are so often shielded from sight until, Presto!, there they be at center stage.
With respect to d’Amboise’s skills and sensitivity as a partner, I’d like to quote the dance historian and critic Janet Light, a member of NYCB’s audience going back to the 1950s (and, as a child, a student at SAB). Since I only began to look at the company in the mid-1960s, I asked her for her longer-lived impression of d’Amboise’s stage relationship to his ballerinas. She wrote as follows:
“Remembering the irresistible Jacques d’Amboise, it’s the person onstage that lingers with me, rather than Jacques in any one ballet or role. I think it’s connected to how he partnered many of Balanchine’s important ballerinas. He could shift the focus of his own performance to his partner, and the dedication of his attentiveness let the audience know there was no place else he would rather be. He could hold his own with them all while remaining generous and true: Squiring the witty Tanaquil LeClerq in Western Symphony’s rousing Fourth Movement; tracing wondrously a luminous Allegra Kent’s loosened hair in the haunting Afternoon of a Faun; punctuating with his wide stance and arms thrown back Melissa Hayden’s steely arabesque balances in Stars and Stripes’ hold-your-breath Fifth Campaign. Jacques d’Amboise became a star but seemed onstage a real person, meeting the challenges of a great repertory that shaped him into an artist, and in turn, helped dance in America take flight.”
In his memoir, d’Amboise—frequently admired as a partner yet always extending praise—wrote: “I loved viewing Conrad Ludlow. . .and the poetry he brought to a pas de deux.”
Jacques d’Amboise was beloved by audiences and much-honored for his art as a dancer and choreographer. He was also central to his family, and he enjoyed the knowledge that his own children—two of the four became successful dancers—esteemed him for his art as well as for his affection. Even so, he wasn’t awarded a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) Fellowship in 1984, the year he retired from performing, for his stage achievements. He received it as a Dance Educator, the founder of the National Dance Institute. The laurel was given to d’Amboise, a high-school drop-out (at age fifteen, he left both SAB and academic studies to join NYCB) who had analyzed what dancing is beyond the lines and extreme poses and the superstructure of the steps with names. D’Amboise taught dance as full-bodied gesture, action, energy the dancer learns to regulate instantaneously (“Precision and exactness are steps toward truth.”), all in service of two principles: to teach individuals how to relate to one another through rules of engagement, also known as decorum and respect, and to transfer the civilization one’s generation inherited to the generation poised to receive it. He taught himself how to offer these core principles to children as small as infants and adults of all ages, traditions, and walks of life so that they understand them and, most wonderfully of all, want to inhabit them.
Poetry has been important to NDI’s teaching and the performances of its school children because d’Amboise cherished it; he also practiced writing it. D’Amboise’s memoir is peppered with references to poets—Yeats, Auden, Yevtushenko, Hafiz (the fourteenth-century Persian master of the ghazal). You can also see him in his poet’s mode while he’s teaching dance to small children affiliated with NDI in a 4’06” film, on Vimeo: Jacques d’Amboise—Whispering Poetry, one of eight film portraits that director Nick Davis made in 2016 as part of larger project, called “Eight over Eighty,” about productivity while aging. I actually saw d’Amboise teaching in person that way around that period in an elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, as part of another project that I was up to. Even in 2016, his spine was curled forward as he walked, and I winced to see him hobble only a short distance.
Nevertheless, once he was demonstrating to the students what he wanted them to learn about arts and civilization, he was in the zone—alive, highly energized, sparking with ideas and imagery in an electrifying example of basic cultural pedagogy for elementary school beginners.
The Nick Davis film captures that transformation in four minutes through editing. Suddenly, d’Amboise is quoting, almost perfectly, Robert Burns: “See how Maria leads the dance! She’s life itself. / I never saw a foot so nimble and so eloquent. And the sweet, whispering Poetry it makes / Shames the musicians.” Or, suddenly, he’s showing a boy how gesture evolves from language. Pointing one of his little fingers to his own temple, he says, “In here, there’s a dream.” He lets the finger drift away from his body. Then, we’re watching him with the boy. Taking one of the boy’s hands, he points its little finger gently toward the child’s temple, saying, “In here, there’s a dream. Take it out (he guides the child’s hand around to where the boy can see it), “look at it” (the boy focuses on the tip of the finger, all at once a girl in the center of a circle focuses on her finger), and then d’Amboise whispers “and sending it up,” and we see an entire class, each student raising both arms carefully, hands with palms up, while she lifts her gaze toward them: Presto! Port de bras with a difference. D’Amboise begins a small peroration on why New York dancers are the best. The diverse class is entirely spellbound.
“I’ve always been happy,” d’Amboise ended his memoir. I’m not sure I believe him, but if that was the story that he told himself to function as the magician who enraptured those children with dancing and poetry, then who cares?
Barbara Henning, Selfie Photo on 11-1-20 at 4.44 PM
_________________________________________________________
Here We Are
Off to the stationery store on Avenue A
to buy paper and metal bookends.
At least 58 people died in Europe
this week in a brutal cold wave,
plunging temperatures to 17 degrees
below zero. When I step inside,
I'm suddenly phlegmy and coughing.
Blood starts pouring out of my
left nostril. A funny old woman
hidden inside a blue hooded coat
darts out the door. Republicans
point at the millions of immigrant
workers pouring into the country.
Then I look in the mirror and see
a funny looking old woman
with her head wrapped
like a mummy and a tissue stuck
in her nose. King Tut's mummy
was recently removed from
the sarcophagus, and placed
in a climate-controlled box
to be displayed at a museum in Luxor.
My husband often had a bloody nose.
Maybe we'll find each other
in another life. When I think of
losing my children, I feel my body
crack into pieces. China's cracking
down on subversive meditating
disciples of the Dalai Lama.
Be thankful for now, Barbara.
Today. This minute. Here we are.
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Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and eight collections of poetry, most recently a collection of poems, Digigram (United Artists Books 2020) and a novel, Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). She is also the editor of Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil 2021), as well as The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (BV) and Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna). She is Professor Emeritus at Long Island University in Brooklyn. [“Here We Are” from A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press, 2015) is used by permission; © 2021 by Barbara Henning.]
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In this Nov. 4, 2007 file photo, Egypt's antiquities chief Dr. Zahi Hawass, center, supervises the removal of the mummy of King Tutankhamun from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. © REUTERS / Ben Curtis
I am looking at the world globe with my father.
He points and says: “This is where you are.”
“What do you mean? I am here with you,”
I respond, not understanding.
Father laughs: “You are here, but you are also there.”
“You mean there is a tiny copy of me who lives there?”
“No, I mean here is there.”
That did not make any sense, so I never learned geography.
Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. A contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he now directs the graduate writing program at Cornell University.
I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hutchinson via email about how great poems, by their nature, console us while they also judge us severely. We also discussed the relationship between poetry and melody, the intersection of sound and meaning, and the necessity of becoming a “kindler” ― a fierce agitator against injustice, burning like kindle, always firmly fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.
Why do you write poems?
I write poems because it is my calling.
What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?
In all those cases you’ve named, it’s the work of language to assert justice which is most pressing. Poetry is certainly central to that assertion, but whether in a gubernatorial way, to use a clumsy phrase, is at best questionable. What isn’t questionable is that the best poems give us consolation while, at the same time, they judge us severely. The way poems judge us is to demand that our capacity to imagine, which is to say our conscience, be more alive to the world and to never settle on a single view of it.
Still, I don't believe poetry tells “our present society” how to enact the things you’ve outlined.
What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?
If a poem is happening, then it is its own most radical thing, whether that poem might be the beautiful indignation of Robert Hayden’s miniature epic “The Middle Passage,” or the seemingly chaste lyric of Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Dress” (you can imagine the poetic inventiveness that goes into just the word “liquefaction” to capture the movement of silk!). It takes courage to do such making.
But I believe it takes an even greater courage to come to such making. Consider, for instance, that right now in Belarus and Myanmar poets are being killed and jailed for doing their work, poets who might be just writing about the movement of silk or bearing witness to governmental tyranny: in both cases, they continue to find the courage to write poems of integrity. Poets the world over, in less extreme circumstances, struggle to do their work with as much integrity. Sometimes they fail. And yet they find the courage to write poems. So every resonate poem is a radical thing, and an act of courage.
Your work is often praised for its musicality, intensity, and nerve. Of your collection House of Lords and Commons, literary critic John Freeman writes, “What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search.” The poet Ilya Kaminsky writes that “Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.” He goes on to remark on the “choral presence” of multiple tonalities within your poems. Poet Henri Cole writes that your “hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” It seems no reviewer can speak of your poetry without invoking music. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between poetry and melody? And what exists at the intersection of sound and meaning? Of language and art?
I’m always seeking in the melody of my poem what Pound calls melopoeia: which he defines, rather obliquely, as when “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” That the words are charged is what gives a poem its essential tension, and that charge is a definite resistance of the typical “sweet music” sense of melody which might not bear into account the fraught, ethical nature of words. I say “definite” then because the poem is a conscious act of interweaving unheard melodies embedded in words, so a hearer might hear what is not there in “their plain meaning.”
Actually, what’s not there but heard in those words are, I think, the “intersections” you referred to. In fact, these overlapping intersections make every poem an occasion of meaning. It’s in these intersections the reader of goodwill will find meaning on multiple registers. She will find herself there, too, magnified at a slightly elevated pitch.
In a lecture at the Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019, you explored Frederick Douglass’s legacy, and what the idea of legacy means, through a close reading of poems by W.E.B. Dubois and Robert Hayden—and ultimately, you invited us all to become “kindlers.” What does it mean to be a kindler, and why is such an endeavor meaningful and important?
The kindler idea I draw from a magnificent long poem by Frederick Douglass called, “The Tyrants’ Jubilee!,” from the line, “the fire thus kindled, may be kindled again” which became the title of my lecture. To be a kindler is to be someone involved deeply in the unfinished business of emancipation, to be the fierce-minded liberty lover Douglass was, to agitate in our moment against injustice, however construed. The agitation must be fierce, burning like kindle, but it must be fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.
Your most recent book of poems, House of Lords and Commons, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016. Poet Susan Stewart describes the collection as “the pure line of poetry, shaped by [Hutchinson’s] sun-lit vision and music,” adding that, “House of Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?
The collection was published five years ago, so it’s no longer so new. I like that you asked about ambitions, and what I recall, to give a very drastic summary, is my attempt to explore the different breaches of the relationship between civil polity and poetry. What that crack-up sounds like? As I was doing most of the listening from this country, many of the poems became about arranging the psychic pressures between home and abroad.
What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?
Really too many to name. The anthologies of those centuries, and not only in English, are my favorite to read. I return a lot to this stunning compilation of work from the pamphlet wars of the 17th—a favorite is Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated, a title I wish to steal one day. Milton is a constant, of course, especially his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. But of late I’ve been reading a lot of Milton’s younger contemporary, Lucy Hutchinson.
No way, again, a stable and short answer can be given to the question of what their work has awakened in me. I feel the raw alchemy of the intelligence and imagination of their fractious time working on my mind in the very syntax of their writing. Something gets transmuted, and usually whatever that it is, it has strong “relevance” to our contemporary moment. You need only to read, for instance, the first sentence of Milton’s Areopagitica to see what I mean.
What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?
I’m working on a collection of essays, due out next year. My Douglass lecture will be included, so I’m excited about that, the chance to get it right or as close to right as possible.
Alison C. Rollins' debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is one of the most spectacular first books I have ever read. The first poem I read from her, "Why Is We Americans," was published in Poetry magazine several years ago. The poem can be found in full here.
The following is an entry from a reading notebook that I keep, in which I respond to poems and passages of prose. Here is what I wrote about "Why Is We Americans" several years ago. If this interests you, pick up a copy of her amazing first book and prepare to be amazed.
Alison C. Rollins’ “Why Is We Americans” begins as a riff on a line (and title) from the late work of Amiri Baraka; Rollins extrapolates the Baraka line into an anaphora-patterned meditation on notions of national belonging particular to the African American experience. The poet interweaves images from canonical western literature (“Walden pond,” “Jesus,” “Whitman,” “Orpheus,” “Darwin”) with images from the African American church (“the Pastor’s chattering chicklets,” “Psalm 23,” “mouths / washed out with the blood of the lamb”), and allusions to jazz music (“Roach and Mingus at Birdland,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamned,” and the concluding couplet, which references Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and raises the specter of lynching in a powerful way). The poem is as triumphant as it is incantatory, elevating sometimes mundane and sometimes extraordinary tropes into a profound celebration of Blackness. The vibrant surprising diction and the regular deployment of AAVE syntax imbue the poem with an astonishing energy at every turn: “We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths/ upside the head, jammin’ fingers in / Darwin’s white beard”; lines like these drive the poem forward with their sonic textures while continuing a critique of the exploitative and oppressive practices that vertebrae American life and American history. I love this poem. I feel like I could live in it forever—the explosive musicality of it, the joy of it, the strangeness of it. It is everything I look for in a poem: it is canny and subversive in its metapoetic view of American literature and culture, and it is infused with a hard earned duende that renders it unforgettable.
Your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
-- by Charles Bukowski
Read more about Charles Bukowski here.
What you gonna do when you get out of jail?
I'm gonna have some fun
And what do you consider fun?
Fun, natural fun
The Genius of Love, Tom Tom Club
I got a thrill when the Atelier de Paris’ newsletter appeared in my inbox the other day.
“Thrill”?
Aren’t thrills reserved for moments of life, like the moment when I first touched the cool, dry hand of the – these days – pale, vaguely adipose, woman just behind me, limbs lopping deadlike off our blood-red Récamier?
The livelong day now, this woman hogs the whole of our empty ceiling with her disgruntled stare. The stare, I must say, in its hint of godlike irony, is a work of esthetic genius.
I get up, bend my face over hers so I can kiss her and she me.
We do. Tamed it may be, but a thrill is there, here and now. This is a moment: here and now. Of course, by the time I sit back down and she’s reverted to her esthetic state, we’ve both forgotten the thrill and the moment – it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense if we spent every blessed moment savoring the thrill of it.
God’s bones, we get little enough done as it is.
True science observes, anyhow, that moments are the twisted skeins of a life, the bosons of a thing of talking flesh. Smollett demonstrates that thrill is the invisible but sensible ether that jolts a life this way and also that and thus visibles the otherwise fleeting moment.
Four years ago now, the Circassian (artist-acrobat) Cécile Mont-Reynaud, whose high-wire performance as Fate thrice-personified in her performance La Fileuse (“Yarning”), proved all this beyond a doubt in front of the public library Romain Rolland in the eastern suburb of Romainville, now served by the number 11 line. Karine was there and, if you can get her attention, she’ll vouch for it from our blood-red Récamier, reading from the stippled whitewash of the naked ceiling.
“A medusa, a mop,” I wrote as Mont-Reynaud’s skeins visibled in the senible ether, “A fleeting moment, lampshade merry-go-round, a cocoon, a caterpillar turned weeping willow, a shower of rain, a pinata, a bird’s gilded golden cage, a trunk, an obstacle course of visibled bosons, a raging sea, a maypole, a ladder of knots or a knot of ladders, a spherical stair of golden hair... an uneasy plinth-cum-diving board to address the gods and reason men, slip knots, electric wires, cords and dis-chords, strands of muscle. Swing through string: What a thrill.”
There you have it.
Memory only makes it seem thrills make moments or vice versa. But thrill is a moment here and there and everywhere. And memory? Another subject.
So, I felt a thrill the moment I saw the Atelier’s newsletter in my in-box.
Not because choreographers’ Liz Santoro and Joanne Leighton figured there, although they do. But because I suddenly realized that the Atelier’s message – “No live performance”– has, after more than a year of crise sanitaire – has suddenly become the general one.
The simple negative thrills because until now, under the guise of a performer’s traditional declaration of loyalty to performance - “The show must go on!”, there’s been a lot of confusion and delusion about just what “live” performance is or can be.
Suddenly, whether because audiences came to understand why they go to the trouble of going to live in-personperformance or because producers realize that the live-and-in-person they mean can’t actually translate to pixels, the confusion seems to be over.
It has become pretty clear to everyone that “live performance” means “in-person performance” - the thrill of live performance is the moment of being there with creation and creators.
We should all keep the thrill of being there with in mind in the coming weeks and months. We may find ourselves arguing hard to keep on being there with – when there are so many “cheaper” alternatives.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Do’s and Don’t’s
Tony Bennett said it was Frank Sinatra who told him, "Steal from one person and it's plagiarism. Steal from everybody and it's research."
“Keep a strict eye
on eulogistic &
dyslogistic adjectives,”
Lewis (C.S.) advised
Tynan (Kenneth).
“They shd diagnose
(not merely blame)
& distinguish
(not merely praise).”
“Almost any noun is better
alone than chaperoned
if it is the right noun,
and very few can stand
two adjectives” --Pound
to Parker Tyler, ‘35--
“‘Unsettled dream’
is stronger than
‘unsettled white dream’.”
Precision and economy of language
are virtues this author recommends
when writing poems,
but finds difficult
to put into practice.
“It’s more important,”
Ornette Coleman once said,
“to play the correct
feeling
than the correct note.”
“Some of the time,"
to quote Chuck Close,
“you know you’re cooking;
the rest of the time,
you just do it.”
Or as the handbook
on improvisation
for church organ advises:
"Do not be afraid
of being wrong;
just be afraid of being
uninteresting."
________________________________________________________________________________________
Mark Pawlak is the author of nine poetry collections and the editor of six anthologies. His latest book is Reconnaissance: New and Selected Poems and Poetic Journals (Hanging Loose). His work has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Polish. My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov, a memoir, is forthcoming in 2021 from MadHat Press.
______________________________________________________________________________________
(1)
At times like this, I feel sorry for postal workers.
It must be very stressful to be one.
To always have to sort things out while thinking of viruses.
One can easily distinguish a postal worker who thinks of viruses from the one who doesn't.
Those who think wear gloves and masks. But most of them do not; most of them are young and careless.
At the beginning of the pandemic, an entire hotel in China that was converted into a hospital for coronavirus patients had collapsed suddenly, killing everyone inside.
How does a building suddenly collapse?
How does a human being?
What is the breaking point?
What is that something, usually insignificant in itself, that makes all the difference between life and death?
I think of Sylvia Plath.
How she returned to her dirty home (her housekeeper left), overwhelmed by unhappiness, with her two small children always in need of her care.
If she had returned to a spotlessly clean and welcoming house instead of a messy one full of dirty dishes and laundry, would she still have killed herself?
Perhaps, but maybe not then.
Maybe the breaking point would still hold a while longer.
(2)
Last year there was a postal worker who was overwhelmed by his responsibilities of daily deliveries of packages.
He just had too many parcels to deliver to too many houses and not enough time allotted to do so.
Even if he worked past his hours, he still could not manage all deliveries and be often scolded by his superiors for the delays.
At first, he kept undelivered packages in the trunk of his car in hopes of delivering them the next day, but the next day he would have a new bunch of boxes, and soon the trunk of his car was too full.
After a while, he gave up on the idea of being able to deliver everything, so he left all packages he could not deliver in a shed next to his house.
He hoped to deliver them one day when his daily load would be lighter, but such a day never came.
After a while, the shed was full of packages, and he had to keep the new ones in the garage.
He never opened the boxes.
In his mind, he never stole them, he just kept them for better delivery times.
It was not his fault that better times were slow in coming.
Nobody appreciated any of his past accomplishments (for he did make numerous safe and timely deliveries) when police discovered his shed and his garage full of packages belonging to other people.
He tried to argue that the packages didn't belong to anyone – they were still in transit on the way to their final destination, but some of them were in transit for over a year and, after all that time, were considered missing in action like lost soldiers.
(3)
Sometimes my poor head makes me feel like the trunk of this poor man's car with too many deliveries scheduled in too short a time, and I feel like giving up.
At night, I stare into all these packages in my head.
I try to imagine what lies within each.
I look at the names of people and imagine them as characters in my book.
Then the clock chimes and reminds me that it is too late for everything.
Too late even to try.
(4)
A dog doesn't know if something is too late.
Unless it's related to food.
Because, as far as a dog is concerned, food always comes too late and never too early.
(5)
Life is mostly unbearable. And full of wonders.
Partially, it is unbearable because it is full of wonders.
Just think of all the undelivered wonders the postal worker kept in his garage.
But many wonders would not fit into any packaging and can't be delivered because they are just too great.
Like the night when Venus and the moon were so close together, and we sat on the bench next to the ocean and felt so happy about the present moment that it also felt sad.
Great happiness is always sad because it overflows and spills into sadness; happy sadness because it is just too vast to stay happy.
The chorus of frogs after the storm is like that.
Also Gesualdo's music and the Montserrat cathedral – you almost hate it, it's so beautiful.
A good book feels like that: overflowing without beginning or ending, even without a middle, happening all at once and about everything and nothing in particular.
The only thing that separates a good book from nonexistence is its two covers: that's not much of protection from nothingness, not much at all.
I have been the poetry editor at DIALOGIST since 2016. Working with Michael Loruss, the founder and managing editor, over the past several years has been one of the great lights in my life in poetry. Together, we have published and promoted many challenging, beautiful, wild, and necessary poems.
I love every poem we publish, and I am always amazed by the quality of the submissions we receive. We’ve been publishing a poem a week since 2019. Here are links to 10 poems I can’t live without (listed in no particular order). Below each poem, I’ve provided a short note on what I love about it. An audio recording by the poet accompanies most of the poems.
Check these poems out and look at our archives here.
To all the poets we’ve published over the last five years, thank you for sending us such brilliant work.
1) “Brazo” by Darren Donate
Note: The poem includes some disturbing photographic images of an injury (the poem is about the poet’s father, whose arm was injured doing factory work). It's such an amazing poem, reminiscent of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, in some aspects of its concrete/visual grammar. It’s an incredible poem about immigration, labor, family, and notions of national belonging.
2) “[Circumcise my heart, o genderqueer God.]” by Elana Lev Friedland
This heady sonnet, in direct dialogue with poems by John Donne and Meg Day, completely rends me every time I read it. This poem maps all types of kinships and identifications with a fluidity and grace that is unforgettable. I can’t wait until Friedland has a full-length collection.
3) “Your Quaint Conceit” by Alina Stefanescu
Roethke woke to sleep and took his waking slow. Stefanescu begins this poem: “I wake to cheap ontology.” What follows exhilarates and challenges. I’ve read Stefanescu’s poetry in other journals and when I see her name, I always know I’m going to love the poem I’m about to read. Consider the fifth stanza: “To appease is not apostrophe / but a rich bisque of climax, the cauldron / of yearn kept stirred.” See what I mean.
4) “Grief box” by Katie Richards
This long ambitious poem about motherhood, suburbia, and suicidal ideation, is imbued with the spirit of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. “Grief box” is a tour de force, a virtuoso performance that will haunt you.
5) “sermon” by Shaina Phenix
In this poem, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye collides with The Gospel According to Matthew to spectacular effect. Phenix explores the intersections between race, misogyny, and religion with great intelligence and with profound lyricism.
6) “POEM WRITTEN ON FATHER’S DAY” by Grace Q. Song
Song’s poem, equal parts thorn and salt, is a father-daughter poem I would put side by side with “Poem For My Father” by Toi Derricotte, “How Many Times” by Marie Howe, and “In Honor Of David Anderson Brooks, My Father” by Gwendolyn Brooks. When I think of father-daughter poems, I often think of Jason Shinder’s great anthology More Light: Father & Daughter Poems: A Twentieth-Century American Selection (Harvest Books, 1993). A twenty-first century anthology of the same kind would do well to include Song’s masterful poem.
7) “He Asked What Made My Brain Do That Thing Where I End Up On the Floor With The World Ending” by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
I love a long expository title, and Hardwick’s title is one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever encountered. This poem is a tornado, a night-blooming cereus in a greenhouse—ample, frenetic, interior as any a journeywork of stars.
8) “sunflowers: a myth, a painting” by Michelle Donahue
This textbox prose poem elides the phenomenological approaches of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It is achingly lovely, an ear to the earth. That other poet of sunflowers, William Blake, would approve.
9) “unpeeled” by Alli Cruz
This complicated, brilliantly written poem about sex, violence, misogyny, rape culture, and young adulthood should be required reading for every college freshman across the country. I look forward to reading great poems from Cruz for many years to come.
10) “COMPLETE” by Troy Varvel
Varvel’s powerhouse exploration of stuttering would make Robert Graves’ Claudius applaud. From its first line, “COMPLETE” explodes into alterior fluencies that affirm the beauty of the speaker at the poem’s center. The poem disavows normative speech patterns and offers up a searing and original music that always undoes me.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
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