The Best American Poetry

Kristina Marie Darling Guest Author May 16-20

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina is the author of thirty-six books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come:  Selected Poems 2014 - 2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, newly available from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which was just launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada has also published a Canadian edition.  

An expert consultant with the U.S. Fulbright Commission, Dr. Darling’s work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; seven residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she has also served as an ambassador for recruitment; grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; an artist-in-residence position at the Florence School of Fine Arts; an appointment at Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors. Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly.  Beginning in the fall of 2022, she will also serve as Publisher-in-Residence at the American University in Rome. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she currently divides her time between the United States and Europe.  Find out more about Kristina here. 

Welcome back, Kristina. 

--sdl

Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise [by Tracy Danison]

Raimund Hoghe’s creative search for “otherwise” is emblematic of Marie-Thérèse Allier’s contribution to the art of movement. Raimund Hoghe, “La Valse”. Photo © Rosa-Frank.com/ Courtesy Ménagerie de Verre

La Ménagerie de Verre performance studio, Laboratoire de création contemporaine – in the 11th arrondissement, just off the avenue Parmentier, about mid-way between rue de la Roquette and avenue de la République– is a legendary neighborhood institution. Until very recently it had a very human personality in Marie-Thérèse Allier, its founder and guiding spirit. That ended at the tippy end of March when Allier unexpectedly died, aged 91.

I say “unexpectedly died”, because, as with the invasion of Ukraine, despite the flagrant provocation, people of sense and sensibility just had trouble getting their heads around the very idea of her death. I was surprised myself when I heard of it – at the penultimate performance of the annual Spring program, Etrange Cargo 2022. Indeed, Le Monde newspaper reported that Allier was, quite literally, creatively engaged from her hospital room at the hour of her death – doing some last-minute consulting with staff at the opening of the day’s performance.

A dancer, not a choreographer, Marie-Thérèse Allier set up La Ménagerie as an artist’s residence and public stage for experimental creations and then kept it that way for almost forty years. Vincent Bouquet, writing in scèneweb.fr, a contemporary performance arts webzine, lists former residents whose work got a first staging at the studio and who have been both influential and popular into the present. They include, just as a sample of those you’re likely to have known earlier or heard about today, Régine Chopinot, Philippe Decouflé, Daniel Larrieu and Angelin Preljocaj, Jérôme Bel, Boris Charmatz, Xavier Leroy, Mathilde Monnier, Christian Rizzo, Olivia Grandville, François Chaignaud, Rodrigo Garcia, Yves-Noël Genod, Vincent Macaigne and Théo Mercier.

But identifying Allier with her successful institution or her commitment to supporting successful creative contemporary dance-performance doesn’t represent her full story. More than commitment and practical ability, Allier had an instinct for dance performance that meant that she brought spectators toward what is intriguing in dance and performance. Not new, not experimental, intriguing.

From my experience as a spectator over the years, writing about dance or not, Allier seems always to have encouraged her creators to get at spectator imaginations, encouraged them to try for a sense of something that isn’t tied either to convention or radicality or originality. I look over those in the scèneweb.fr list and, among those I have experienced personally, it seems to me that that effort at something intriguing in dance is what characterizes them. Throughout Allier’s career getting at something intriguing often meant cherishing “queerness”, the only operative way, especially into the 2000s, to get a bit beyond the notions of convention, radicality and originality and all that guff.

So, at Marie-Thérèse Allier’s La Ménagerie, whether or not I liked or appreciated a piece, whether it connected with me or not, I mostly felt it managed to redeem itself in pointing me toward what I cannot or could not see or say. Emblematic of my feeling, I’m thinking now of Raimund Hoghe, who died in May 2021. Hoghe was a long-time Allier familiar, a Pina Bausch Tanztheater alumni and a wonderful dance-performance creator that I might not have even begun to understand were it not for the patience of a more perspicacious friend.

La Ménagerie’s An evening with Raimund Hoghe, Hommage à Raimund Hoghe par ses danseurs et proches collaborateurs says it all about Allier’s real contribution. Sitting there grumpily and trying to find fault, I managed not only to recognize Hoghe’s work style and manner as each of the dancers and collaborators involved honored a remarkable fellow in their movement. They brought me to feel, as a spectator, that I’d shared in the man’s essential sensibility and feeling. I first slipped into Hoghe’s perspective and then, tripped into a place where I could imagine myself not just as beyond words but as otherwise. Choosing and supporting creators willing and trying to do that, why that’s a real contribution.

So, thanks, Marie-Thérèse Allier, for enabling Raimund Hoghe and all those others, who, as Hoghe did, seek dance otherwise.

Alexey Tsvetkov: In Memoriam [by Andrey Gritsman]

“I am here together with myself and alone”

The great Russian poet Alexey Tsvetkov just passed away (February 1947- May 12, 2022).

He is a world-class poet, a world poet who happened to write in Russian.

Tsvetkov created his own poetic language, unrepeatable, addictive. Once started, a poem or a book could not be put down. One read to the end possessed by its magic. His incredible play, not of words, but of thoughts and images, bewitched the reader, as did his humor.

Alexey told us: whenever I write, I always write about death. The poet puts what’s created along with what is unsayable into metaphorical form. That is the power of poetry by Tsvetkov: he always writes about what is most important, what is deepest and darkest, presented metaphorically with an amazing mastery of words and meanings. His style of recital  I would characterize as toreutic, precise, cadential, and, on the other hand, paradoxically close to a natural speech, personal verbal communication.

Born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, formerly the Austro-Hungarian empire, Tsvetkov was educated in Odessa and Moscow. In Moscow together with other famous poets (Soprovsky, Gandlevsky, Kenzheev) he founded legendary underground poetry group Moscow Time. He emigrated to USA in 1975 after his arrest in Moscow and forced move to the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya. He was awarded PhD degree in Slavic Studies from University of Michigan. 

Tsvetkov spent many years in Europe working as a journalist for the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe (Munich and Prague, 1989-2004). He anchored the RFE/RL Russian Service programs The Seventh Continent and The Atlantic Diary.  He lived his last years in New York City among his poet friends. Supporting himself as a freelance journalist and essayist, he produced a large body of original, unique and very popular poetry. He read his poems at the Cornelia Street Café, Russian Samovar, Columbia University and other venues. In 2018 he moved to Israel, where he died.

Tsvetkov was an individual of very broad erudition, rough on the surface, very kind, with stunning sharp sense of humor. His poems in English are most unusual:  cadential, almost syllabo-tonic, very tight. But it looked very natural - the same poet, writing in a different language.

He was the author of ten books of poetry and translated Shakespeare’s Hamlet. His heritage will be studied and it will take a long time to look into layers of Tsvetkov’s art and thought.

Alexey Tsvetkov

the quiet ones

in a recurring dream i find myself
stuck in a tiny town a green and neat
affair the locals scarce and studiously silent
for the most part avoid me and stay indoors
although i dwell among them i assume
myself to be a thing apart the town
is strangely shorn of outskirts there's a river
flowing from north to south and the main street
cutting across with a bridge in the middle
yet both are terminated in oblivion

beset by this conundrum i've come up
with a hypothesis perhaps the locals
are candidates to be born on earth that never
made up their minds about the matter shaped
in human form already but afraid
to take the plunge hedging their bets and this
is what the actual limbo is like the river
forever runs on the road likewise but both
resolve themselves into the void the locals
would find it pointless to wake up their green
and tidy town remains the same no matter
whichever side of the retina it's on
the quiet ones within their silent walls
what do they want of us they share no subject
with us to serve them as a starting point
for striking up a palaver

it looks
like a half-way house perhaps a railway station
but with the waiting crowd resigned to the tracks
having been dismantled so that no train will ever
stop here they look alive but never having
been actually exiled to our vale of grief
there is no way for them to share our joy
the only thing they envy us in earnest
is death denied to the unborn it is
a mystery for them and a temptation
and i remaining stubbornly asleep
fall into a confusion like a rabbit
teasing a python on the eve of being
consumed by the above and peeking under
death's skirts then part of me awakens i
recall the other's name but hush it up

 

Andrey Gritsman

In Memory of Alexey Tsvetkov

What can be said about unsayable?
Poet departs with all his belongings.
To say nothing: it is unbearable.
On tree of life - invisible markings.

His airborne light verbs, evasive,
Escapable, straight and relentless.
Who knows what one is capable
Of, while alive and restless.

What is left now: only new language
Speaking in tongues, and no sound.
He rests in peace, his last message
Only by those can be found

Only by those, who departed
Crossing the line into darkness
Keeping belongings in heart and
Calling him: the answer is silence.

"The Ambition" by Robert Harris [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Robert Harris died too young at the age of forty-two. During his lifetime he was never a major figure in Australian poetry, however, a recent publication of his selected poems, The Gang of One, has shone much deserved light on his oeuvre. In his review of the book in The Australian Poetry Review (found here), Martin Duwell writes that one of the rewards of reading through Harris's various collections, is that one sees "how hard he had to work to make himself into a good poet."

 

I like the idea of the poet not arriving fully formed, but, like so many other things in life, being the result of experience, effort, patience. "The Ambition", anthologised by John Tranter and Philip Mead in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry, seems to me a poem of great skill presented to us with a deceptive nonchalance. And I think its first line might be one of my favourites. Enjoy.

 

The Ambition

Mum, I'll be a fireman!
Did you know they gross around nineteen thousand,
work four days in nine,
quit, if they ever quit, in good faith

& moonlight driving meat trucks?
Aged people sometimes wander in 
to look at the fire station, 
saying they used to live here,

at this number. They look a long time 
at the appliances, till the head shaking
Chief rings the nursing home.

When you're old I'll be a fireman, Mum.
At green upper storey sills, waiting for fires,
I'll lean on my blue arm and look at the sulphurous city

 

Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Kristina Marie Darling:  You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art.  How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?   

Hasanthika Sirisena:  I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. 

KMD:  Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.   

HS:  Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic.  I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. 

But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is.  How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.  

Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.  

KMD:  I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you.  What made it memorable?   

HS:  Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel. 

Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)  

KMD:  What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?   

HS:  Anyone can draw. Really. But, more than an ability to draw, or an adeptness with Adobe Animator, I suggest developing your visual vocabulary. There are so many different ways to do this and methods. For me personally, I visit art museums as much as I can and watch films—lots of films. I used to turn off the sound and watch films silently while eating dinner just to practice seeing compositions. It’s also fun to do some research and see if you can find the original storyboards for movies. You can learn a lot about visual sequencing and composition that way. 

Also, if you still are hesitant, collaborate with an artist. I’ve been long seeking someone who’d like to work with me on an illustrated book.  

KMD:  What do you look for in a submission of cross-disciplinary or hybrid work?   

I don’t start out looking for anything. I hope to find something that uses visual sequences in clever and novel ways—that goes beyond what I expect from a comic or a work combining text and image. I would also love to see more work from queer and BIPOC cartoonists and artists. 

KMD:  What’s next?  What can your readers, as well as TQ’s growing audience, look forward to? 

HS:  More comics! I hope! 

Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly 

Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl 

Kristina Marie Darling:  The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing.  What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?  

Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.  

There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist.  What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? 

JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. 

Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.  

KMD:  Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.  

JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the 

wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.

In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language. 

KMD:  What can poets learn from visual artists?  

JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.   

Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.

KMD:  In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves.  Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry? 

JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.

Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void. 

KMD:  What else are you working on?  What can readers look forward to?

JG: Thank you for asking. I am deep-in with ideas of magic in everyday life, and how its suppression and absence can create alternate realities. I am writing about the bipolar condition, which although debilitating, can offer a symbolic world for the afflicted to work through for healing. This can be most effective as something approximating  "emotion recollected in tranquility." Yet there is power in rawness.  

I consider also the madness of the sane world. This is perhaps more entertaining. I am interested in these double facets of health and disease. I have a poem about John of Patmos, the author of Revelations, who offered his hallucinations for literature and religion, strangely relevant to our symbolic understanding of apocalypse. The behavior of Benjamin Lay, who engaged in guerilla tactics to oppose slavery, was considered deranged. I take a look at his story. For balance, I consider a version of The Bachelor season finale. Magic and madness will merge with oncoming streams.

 

A Portfolio of Poetry by Jenny Grassl 

 

"Crimson is the Color of Shame": a Poetry Challenge [by Clark Thomas]

Crimson is the Color of Shame
-- for David Lehman

The demand on young Jews
to be less visibly and confidently Jews
is the price of social toleration
which found its most recent iteration
in the Harvard Crimson
editorial endorsing the Philistines vs Samson,
that is, the boycott movement against Israel
which is a big and ugly deal
according to Einat Wilf, in a sound-
ly argued essay. She calls it (BDS) the “pound
of flesh,” echoing The Merchant of Venice,
reminding us of a perpetual menace,
the attempt to intimidate the Jews
into being less Jewy, a typical political ruse.

-- Clark Thomas

"I wrote this poem at David Lehman's invitation in an attempt to refute his statement that 'political poems are usually successful neither as poems nor as political maneuvers.'"  -- C.T.

David Lehman replies: "Clark Thomas wrote to me that he would take up the 'poetry challenge' implicit in my arguing that political poetry is a doomed and often self-defeating proposition. While I applaud his use of rhyme, and the way he condenses an intelligent and ambitious essay into the box of a sonnet, I am far from confident that the result is more than a superior letter to the editor.  What do readers think?"

"Where's that map of the Middle East?" -- God

from Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet
<<<
When I attended college in the United States in the mid-1990s, liberal, left-wing Jews could comfortably be pro-Israel and even active in AIPAC without any fear of repercussions or social pressure to hand over a pound of flesh. That changed with the emergence of J Street, IfNotNow, and Jewish Voice for Peace, until we arrived at the present condition, in which a Jewish student who does not show herself to be an ally of Students for Justice in Palestine, or does not agree that “Zionism equals racism,” or that Zionism is a form of apartheid, and Nazism, and white supremacy, and whatever other supreme evil will be identified next, cannot be considered a good Jew. This escalation in anti-Israel activism among some young Jews no longer seemed like a natural and excusable choice shaped by different generational circumstances, but the result of a relentless campaign of bullying.

Over the last several months, as a visiting professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I taught a course called “Zionism and Anti-Zionism.” In the many hours I spent discussing student life with students and faculty alike, it became apparent that the anti-Zionist activism on campus—the college version of the pound of flesh dynamic—was not primarily a form of social protest or political expression, but a form of bullying. The anti-Zionist activists, like classic bullies, deliberately targeted the real and perceived frailties of their Jewish peers—fear or shame in the expression of one’s Jewish identity, with its calls to Jewish solidarity and deep connection to a faraway foreign country.

The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has been one of the most effective expressions of the pound of flesh bullying tactic, inviting young Jews to participate in the cause of “social justice” only to ultimately demand the mutilation of their Jewish identity. BDS has demanded that diaspora Jews not only criticize Israeli government actions, but sever their connections with Israel completely. >>> -- Einat Wilf, "The BDS Pound of Flesh" in Tablet, May 10, 2022

See also https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-anti-zionism-anti-semitism in which Isaac tries to out-argue the head of the antri-defamation league on the subject. The best line is  "Give me a -- Isaac" -- where the speaker's frustration is conveyed beautifully. The reader supplies the missing word, "break."

Poet Spotlight: Cynthia Dewi Oka [by Wendy Chen]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen".--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly  

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.

 

 

Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?

 

Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period. 

 

WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer? 

 

CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns. 

 

WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’? 

 

CDO: I revise until I cannot revise anymore either because of I’ve hit a deadline, or because another poem or project is calling me to move forward. I don’t know when a poem is done, I just know when I have given everything I can give it! 

 

WC: Who are you finding yourself reading now? What are they bringing to your life and/or work? 

 

CDO: I just finished Reflections on Exile and Other Essays by Edward Said. It’s a tome! I had read Orientalism and a handful of the individual essays in this collection as an undergraduate, but wow, what a gift to return to his work in my mid-thirties and be able to re-engage his mind from a place of greater maturity and experience. In my early twenties, I was just trying to keep up with him on a conceptual level, but now, I can appreciate his style, his humor and shadiness (omg he was a master of shade), the immense range and rigor of his attention, and how nuanced his thinking was about identity, history, power, and ethics. His essay, “Jungle Calling,” about Tarzan as depicted by Johnny Weissmuller being an immigrant is one of the most hilarious, complex, and moving portraits I’ve ever encountered. I also loved to find Said constantly quoting Aimé Césaire, like a mantra or prayer that anchored him through all his life, specifically, these lines: “And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, / of intelligence, of force, and there / is a place for all at the rendez-vous of victory.” I have a similar relationship with a few lines from June Jordan’s poem, “Argument with the Buddha.” What Said brings into my lifework (they are inseparable!) is the sense that there is a long way to go after the end of the world. 

 

WC: What projects are you currently working on?

 

CDO: I’m working on a new collection of love poems! 

____________________________________

A Portfolio of Poetry by Cynthia Dewi Oka

THE NEW ORDER 

 

With your noses vigilant

to the ground, 

 

forgive 

 

an infection’s harsh 

slander. I said I felt you 

 

like teeth above, 

 

teeth below, therefore, 

I resolved to master 

 

you like my own  

 

memory. Yes, I rose 

like a flower from the scrotum 

 

of the devil. Yes, I 

 

moved like a flood against 

the igneous mother. 

 

She was strong

 

as American radio, but you 

are the ministry of bones. 

 

Dig, and you will find – 

 

like those nights I stood, 

hand fisted not knocking on 

 

my beloved’s door – 

 

no body 

on the other side. 

 

________________________________________

 

FAUNA IS FLORA 

 

A man I hold cries without bottom. 

 

Thousands not born rakshasa decisive or dead already. 

 

The soldiers cut into the shallow sacks of muscles gone slack. 

 

Their shoulders shredded by feathers. 

 

I admire the helicopter, said the sky while trucks of men in uniform dragged a flamingo across the mountains. 

 

Ibu lifting the coal over his eyes making a dirt house. 

 

What IS for if not conviction, ambition, ideology, onions. 

 

A dog drank their blinding sound. 

 

Our admirable lips could fit around a dying crocodile. 

 

Whose sins wouldn’t stick inside a bucket. 

 

Anyone more than the seven must have fire pointed at their crying the eagle from the well was everywhere. 

 

My grown god, When. 

 

Blood in my leeks while boots of my black hair. 

 

In a burnt man’s stomach, there was my whole life I did not enter. 

 

Hunger is believing anything had with a bucket of gun. 

 

Ink my feathers she with waist like a vocal cord. 

 

She someone’s baby in a crowd

 

_______________________________

 

MAO’S “COMBAT LIBERALISM” ADAPTED FOR THE NEW ORDER 

WE stand for active ideological weapon 

But this weapon stands for itself 

 

To let things slide for the sake of a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague, or old subordinate, to touch lightly

 

To indulge in private faces 

 

To let drift things if they do not affect one personally, knowing perfectly well what to avoid 

 

To give pride of place to one’s own type 

To not seek revenge 

 

To hear as if nothing 

 

To be among the masses and to conduct propaganda indifferent to them for their forgetting 

 

as if ordinary 

 

To see someone harming and feel, but to allow him to continue 

 

To muddle along – “tolling the bell”

 

To regard oneself as major, unequal 

 

while being

 

quite aware of oneself 

a corrosive which eats away dissension

 

an extremely bad stem

 

To replace by kinds of goods in stock minds in conflict, our midst

To overcome staunch life, subordinating always and everywhere to collective ties

 

any person 

 

All honest tendencies 

 

____________________________

 

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

 

Everything, even the Von Trapps, comes late to this polluted land.  I mean all night the stray dogs bay, the air explodes with worthless applause. Last night I pulled teeth rotted black out of a seven-year-old girl. Her belly was worm-taut, it made me think of the child wriggling inside my wife. How her feet crack like rivers six months of the year, how thin the membranes are inside her. I know how to keep my head in the New Order, but watching her watch Maria spin on a living hill, I want to offer her neck a scrubbed blue sky. Lace it with lake-feathered geese. Some nights, I wake to brine pouring out of my pores. It's the same every time – four blades spinning, a fence of people tall in black coats (where are the mosquitoes?). What does the nun say? A dream that will need all the love you can give. We buried our first child under the frangipani in the yard whose petals are a version of snow. I am trying to decide what I can and cannot say to myself. For instance, the web holds the blue-backed fly like an unsung note. Today is not always to die. 

 

"The Mysterious Romance of Murder": "Noir is the paradise of the damned. . ."

On Saturday May 14th The American Scholar posted my essay "The Last Cigarette," adapted from a chapter in my new book, THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER. Here's an excerpt -- and a link. --DL

<<<<
In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.

Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.

“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.^[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”

There is the cigarette of loneliness, the  cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.

In her discussion of smoking, Suzanne Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”^[3]

The cigarette as a prize: In The Snake Pit (1948), a so-called “problem picture” dramatizing the plight of the mentally ill, Dr. Kik (Leo Genn) wants to reward Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) for the progress she has made. On the wall, a framed photograph of a severe Sigmund Freud looks on as the doctor kindly says, “What about a cigarette now?”

The romantic cigarette, in defeat: On television in the late ’50s, Sinatra in fedora and raincoat, with a cigarette in his hand, takes his seat at the bar. It’s nearly three in the morning, and he begins to sing “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” with only Bill Miller’s piano accompaniment. There’s a glass, an ashtray, and an open pack of smokes on the bar. Joe the bartender pours whiskey into the glass when the singer tells him to “set ‘em up,” and Sinatra strikes a match, keeps it lit, stares at the flame, while telling his new pal Joe that tonight he is drinking “to the end of a brief episode.” Only then does he bring the flame to the cigarette and take a puff. He keeps the cigarette between fingers, or taps the ashes into the tray, and holds the glass of whiskey while singing. The song as written ends with “the long, long road,” but Sinatra never reaches the period at the end of the line. After “the long,” he pauses, takes a drag of his cigarette, repeats “the long,” and lets the music drift off like smoke.

The cigarette of melancholia: A triptych of Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd—World War II army buddies who reunite 10 years later and realize that they loathe themselves and one another—shows the guys smoking and singing “Once I had a dream, what a joke / Gone is that dream, up in smoke” in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the Kelly and Stanley Donen movie musicals, with wonderful lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The macho cigarette, cool under pressure: In The Godfather (1972), Michael Corleone is standing in front of the hospital where his wounded father lies unprotected. Enzo, the baker, has chosen this moment to visit with flowers, and Michael enlists him to help stand guard. The two men are to stand there, impersonating gun men, in an effort to deter the hit men driving by. Enzo, understandably nervous, needs a cigarette. Hand goes to pocket, pulls out cigarette. But his hands shake, he can’t work his lighter. Michael calmly takes the Zippo and lights him up. The ruse works. Michael has displayed initiative and imagination, and the signature of that moment is his icy demeanor when firing up Enzo’s lighter. By contrast, the unfiltered Camel that Michael smokes at the end of The Godfather II (1974) is a mark of his aloneness. The cigarette is his only friend as he sits and broods on the end of an ethic, a family, a film.

The royalty of cigarette smokers are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep (1946) ends with the two of them in a car. She “guesses” that she’s in love with him, and he “guesses” that he’s in love with her. Says he: “What’s wrong with you?” She: “Nothing you can’t fix.” And next to the words THE END, there is an ashtray with two smoldering cigarettes in it.

Ah, cigarettes. What a wonderful prop. So sexy! Too bad they cause cancer.
>>>>
https://theamericanscholar.org/the-last-cigarette/

Today is the official publication date of THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER: CRIME, DETECTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF NOIR. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes:

<<<
David Lehman’s “The Mysterious Romance of Murder” surveys “crime, detection and the Spirit of the Noir” in fiction, film, poetry and music. As one might expect from this distinguished poet and versatile man of letters, his sprightly new book isn’t just deeply knowledgeable, it’s also a lot of fun. >>>

-- Washington Post, May 5, 2022

It's not in my book, but I just remembered that James Merrill once told me that he thought smoking was "a form of suicidal yoga."

A Conversation with Dante Di Stefano, Part 4 [by Nin Andrews and Amanda Rabaduex]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greg Masters. Photo by Kate Previte

________________________________________

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

 

At 20 minutes, 37 seconds

into track one of a box-set

reissue of the Miles Davis Quintet

recording “Freedom Jazz Dance,”

a previously unissued rehearsal take,

the raspy-voiced bandleader instructs

drummer Tony Williams to play triplets.

Up to this point in the ensemble’s

working out of the tune, he’d,

uncharacteristically, 

been lagging, playing as if he were

still with Jackie McLean,

accompanying with a ring-a-ding-ding

on the ride cymbal.

But after first working out a bass part for

Ron Carter and a few run-throughs—

Wayne Shorter certainly had the head down

and Herbie Hancock seemed assured

with splashes of chords—

Miles instructs his teenaged drummer

to lay down a triplet pattern and, after a

few attempts, he hits on the pulsating

underlying momentum that, still,

50-plus years after recording,

transforms the seven-minute

master track into a miracle.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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

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

[For more on Tony Williams, click here.]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

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

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

"Mount Washington Kroger is Out of Bananas”

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

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

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

The Fly in the Ointment [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

A Conversation with Poetry Co-Editor Hannah Beresford

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

How have you sensed NT has evolved or changed? 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

What is your hope for NT's future?

 

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

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

 

Ils ont entendu le vent dans les arbres . . .

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

Thanks, Jim!   -- sdh

For "Plume," Another Feather in the Cap

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

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

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022

Poems

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

Lauren Camp Small Scenes without Apology

Danielle Blau (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

David Lehman Three Poems from a Work in Progress

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

Jeffrey Skinner Four From Delos

Mark DeCarteret Lives of the Postmodern Poets

Susan Aizenberg Forced March

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

Zoë Ryder White Close to now

Christopher Howell Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

Carol Muske-Dukes Spam Risk

Bill Stratton What Almost Killed You

Alejandro Escudé My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

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

Book Review
distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

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

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

On Games [by Lauren Hilger]

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

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

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

[Keats on light and shade]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the poem:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

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

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

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

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

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

On Reverence [by Lauren Hilger]

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

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

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

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

[Esiaba Irobi]

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

[Lauren, with her copy]

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

[Pizarnik's books are treasures]

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

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

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

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

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

[The Tragedy of Macbeth, 2021]

 

LH: How did your genres come to you?

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

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

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

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

On the Juicy Tube [by Lauren Hilger]

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

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

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

[The precursor]

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

 

[Another loved object]

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

[I wasn’t kidding.]

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

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

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

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

[shades of sheer]

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