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

Angell of the Basepaths Fondly Remembered [by David Lehman]

From an encyclopedia article on Roger Angell: << In a Newsweek article titled "Angell of the Base Paths," David Lehman made note of what he called Angell's "poetic resonance" and quoted Angell: "If I was influenced by anyone, I guess it was by my stepfather, E. B. White…. He suffered writing but made it look easy. >>

What prompted the question that provoked the quote? It was January 1988 and Roger had a new book coming . The Newsweek editors much preferred a fetaure article to a regular book review, and I pitched the idea of  going to Arizona and spending time with Roger (and some friends of his) during Spring Training. We watched a couple of games and dined with Roger and former Giants manager Bill Rigney who remembered every pitch of the ninth inning of the third game of the 1951 playoffs between the Giants of New York and the Dodgers of Brooklyn. "It was my life," he explained.

I asked Roger whether he thought anyone would surpass another Roger's record of 61 home runs. "If anyone can do it," he said in Scottsdale, "it's Mark McGwire with that short sweet swing of his." Roger introduced me to Bart Giamatti, then president of the National League. Of the barrel-chested former president of Yale, Roger told me "Bart will be our next commissioner. . .if he doesn't drop dead of a heart attack." Bart became commissioner and, alas, his fate was as Roger forecasted. The piece in Newsweek ran under the heading "Angell of the Basepaths."

In a  2017 piece on Red Smith, I asked readers to "consider these sentences from his piece about the 1947 World Series game in which the Dodgers' Cookie Lavagetto ruined the Yankees' Floyd Bevens's no-hit bid with a bottom-of-the-ninth game-winning two-out double. 'In the third [inning] Johnny Lindell caught Jackie Robinson's foul fly like Doc Blanchard hitting the Notre Dame line and came to his feet unbruised. In the fourth Joe DiMaggio caught Gene Hermanski's monstrous drive like a well-fed banquet guest picking his teeth.' In the same game, Tommy Henrich of the Yankees took a hit away from Hermanski: 'Henrich backed against the board and leaped either four or fourteen feet into the air. He stayed aloft so long he looked like an empty uniform hanging in its locker. When he came down he had the ball.'"

Roger wrote me a letter -- always a big event -- saying that Red Smith "was a hero of mine, long ago, because he always made it clear that it was OK for sports fans be smart and educated enough to own an extended vocabulary. and also to appreciate and, above all, enjoy sports. To be like him, that is.  He was serious about this but never took himself seriously.  He was also (by the way) a heavy drinker and often filed copy with seriously shaking hands.

"My only beef about your review is that you omitted Red's weird ending in that column about that Bevans-Lavagetto near no-hitter: a line saying  that the unhappiest man in North America when the tilt ended was a sportswriter there with a broken "v" on his typewriter, which made it it impossible for him to write either of those names.  This was Red himself---he told me later that the "v" snapped off along about the fifth inning and flew like an escaping sparrow out of his Smith-Corona and out of sight over the lip of the pressbox.

"Thanks for bringing this all back.  I've got the Okrent collection and now I'll actually read it."

Matisse!

Dante, Near and Far [by Robert P. Baird]

There is much strange in La Vita Nuova, the libello or “little book” that Dante composed fifteen or so years before starting in on the Divine Comedy. Take, for starters, the form of the book, an alternation of prose and poetry that produces effects as dizzying as any in Williams's Spring and All. Or take the central narrative, which describes a love—young Dante’s, for the slightly younger Beatrice—so intense that it causes the poet to faint in public and forces him, poor lad, to write lying love poems to the donne dello schermo, the “screen ladies” he uses to hide the real object of his affection. Take even Beatrice herself, who begins the book as a girl in a girdled dress only to reveal herself not long after as a miracle made flesh.

All of this is strange for us to read, or should be, even if, grinning behind our commentaries, we spot in the donna dello schermo an unacknowledged ancestor of the celebrity beard. After all, when Dante says that Beatrice is a miracle, he isn’t indulging mere hyperbole, the way Roxette did in that song I remember too well from seventh grade. Nor does he mean it less merely in the manner of an established trope, as John Donne did at the end of “The Relic.” Uniquely for the time and all but blasphemously, Dante meant that his beloved’s appearance on earth was a miracle that repeated (and maybe even competed with) Christ’s Incarnation itself. In the young poet’s eyes, Beatrice was the agent of his religious salvation and the summit of all Creation, the radiant filament that binds together heaven and earth. 

Dante’s strangeness, his distance from us in time and cultural space, is the reason Eugenio Montale took T.S. Eliot gently to task for suggesting that the Commedia was “extremely easy to read…for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well.” It’s not that Montale felt any need to defend the reluctant intricacies of his native tongue. His point was to insist that “Dante is not a modern poet…and that the instruments of modern culture are not ideally suited to understanding him.”

And yet even if we accept Montale’s reminder as well warranted, and I do, I don’t think it’s careless or unfair to say that there are times when Dante can feel close to us, “strangely close,” as Montale admitted. Graduate school is far enough behind me that I won’t bother you with theories of transhistorical subjective affiliation. My effort here is only to point out, a little like a finger before the moon, a single small moment that I love in the Vita Nuova.

The moment I mean happens early in the libello. At the start of the third chapter, Dante is describing his second encounter with Beatrice. (The first occurred nine years earlier.) The meeting is brief and profound: eighteen-year-old Dante sees Beatrice in the street, she waves hello, and her greeting causes the young poet so much giddy distress that he decides he can only go home and put himself to bed. 

That night Dante has a dream, and—perhaps predictably, dreams being dreams—this is where things get weird. In his sleep the poet sees uno segnore di pauroso aspetto emerge from a fiery cloud. Despite his fearful aspect the lord is happy, very possibly because he is carrying in his arms a naked woman asleep beneath a crimson drape. After Dante realizes that the woman is Beatrice, the lord holds up a burning object and tells the dreaming poet, in Latin, Behold your heart. At that moment the lord wakes Beatrice and starts to force-feed her Dante’s flaming heart. With understandable reluctance, Beatrice eats the thing until the lord’s happiness mysteriously turns to grief and he carries her away, presumably to heaven. 

As I said: weird. 

It was weird for Dante, too. So weird, he tells us, that he woke immediately afterward and decided to write a sonnet about what he saw. Not only did he write a sonnet but he told his readers, in the poem's second and third lines, that “these words I have composed are sent for your elucidation in reply.” And not only did Dante include this request (which I like to think of as the thirteenth-century equivalent of a self-addressed stamped envelope) he also decided to send the sonnet to molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo, “many of the famous poets of that time.”

And here, finally, we get to the moment I love, the slender moon my finger’s been wagging after all this time. Here we see Dante—newly a poet, desperately in love—appealing to the judgment of his literary betters. Ostensibly, of course, the point was to ask about the dream, but who could doubt that what Dante really wanted was a judgment on his poem? What writer, what person of any ambition whatsoever, can’t remember that feeling of wanting to know—wanting to test—the quality of her nascent talent? 

It’s in this way that Dante comes to occupy, in my mind, anyway, the head of a secret history of such events, the benedictions or baptisms that link one poetic generation to the next. This is the history in which a young Walter Whitman sends Ralph Waldo Emerson an unsigned and unattributed copy of Leaves of Grass. This is Emily Dickinson asking T. W. Higginson, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?” This is Paul Muldoon sending Seamus Heaney a sheaf of poems topped with the question “What's wrong with these?” (“Nothing,” the older poet responded, or so the story goes.) 

Among those who responded to Dante, the Vita Nuova acknowledges only Guido Cavalcanti, whose response “Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore” marked the start of the poets’ friendship. On the reading of his future primo amico, Dante’s dream was a vision of “all value, every joy and goodness that one can feel.” Cavalcanti suggests that the lord “who rules the world of honor” wanted to bring Beatrice back from near-death with the flaming food of Dante’s love.

It’s no surprise that Dante would choose this response to quote in his Vita Nuova, even while he would insist, as well, that “the true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then.” As scholars have argued, Cavalcanti’s interpretation of the dream, while not strictly coincident with Dante’s own, was nevertheless close enough to buttress the latter’s dramatic sense of his love’s significance. 

Not all of Dante’s respondents, however, were so encouraging. Of the three reply-sonnets that survive, one, by the Tuscan poet Dante da Maiano, is about as far from Cavalcanti in spirit and tone as we can imagine. In so many words da Maiano tells Dante that it’s simple love-sickness that’s got him bothered, and probably bad hygiene besides. If Dante really wants to heal himself he needs to get rid of the noxious vapors infecting his brain. And the only way to do that, da Maiano says, smirking down the centuries, is for the young poet to go and give his testicles a good washing.

Here, too, we get the chance to meet Dante at his most queasily familiar: not as a prodigy reveling in the warm validation of his peers, but as a callow poetaster hearing harsh words from a poet he respects. It’s probably too easy to admire da Maiano’s sonnet for its precocious snark, but I appreciate his poem even more for the rare gift it affords: the chance for once to meet Dante outside the glare of his own genius.

Posted by Robert P. Baird on January 09, 2012 at 06:00 AM in Guest Bloggers, History | Permalink

Squib 378 [by Alan Ziegler]

For Roger Angell (1921-2022)

Long ago, on the off-chance I might run into the Devil at the Crossroads,

                                                        Robert Johnson's Crossroads

                                                                    Mine


I prepared a modest negotiation list (not worth trading my soul for, but perhaps Mephisto would settle my soles:

                                                1) Appear on WBAI
                                                2) teach at Columbia University
                                                3) publish in The Village Voice
                                                4) publish in the Paris Review
                                                5) publish in The New Yorker.

By 1986 I had yet to crack the toughest nut, The New Yorker (of course, The New Yorker). I sent off an un-agented story, like buying a lottery ticket for the cost of roundtrip stamps. One afternoon, I slowly opened the mailbox, ever-hoping to find my SASE feather-light, sans story. Once again, not again. Upstairs, I clicked my blinking answering machine.

Download Answering machine 1986

The Big Three. . .as Roland Garos Begins

Sally Wen Mao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

Inviolacy

 

Tonight, we shrink for no one.

           Tonight, we are afraid of nothing.

                       Not torpedoes, not the long

 

bodies of submarines or tiger sharks

             that circle beneath us. Not wilt, not tornados,

                         not the dark camps moored to erasure.

 

We will reel them in, shear their teeth.

               Their husks stew the sea. Tonight, awaken me

                            from this dream of apple blossoms, we’ll follow

 

the kingfisher downstream, forget what we’re

            confronting. It’s better this way. To mythologize:

                        city of endless crayon, endless sod;

 

boy riding wild horse in Mongolia.

            Chimeras cannot hurt us

                        even if they were once matter, pestle

 

grinding mortar. Even the abattoir

            feels unreal— it’s unlikely that we’ll ever

                        witness: creature turning

 

into meat. The duck hangs whole

            in the restaurant window. We believe

                        it is whole. When we order it plump,

 

it is cut to pieces in the back room.

            Even invincible, we envy the luxury:

                        a room to bleed in, break apart accordingly.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sally Wen Mao is the author of Oculus (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014). The recipient of an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, she currently lives in New York. 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                     Zhang Xiaogang, The Dark Trilogy Fear: Meditation, Sorrow, 1989-1990. Oil and collage on canvas, in three panels.

University cancels SONNETS as "products of white Western culture"

Hello, sucker. Thought you were smart to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet? Think again!

<<<
from the London Daily Mirror 15 May 2022

University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'

• University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
• Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment 
• Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’ 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022

University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment. 

Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.

Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

>>>

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10819139/University-cancels-sonnets-concerns-products-white-Western-culture.html

Sonnet 29

 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the proiductf of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic.  Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. --  DL

Poet Spotlight: Kelly Weber [by Emma Bolden]

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

Big Tech [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Internet
In those days I was doing trade shows
Mostly in Vegas, Dallas, or Phoenix
And since it was before the internet
I used to leave voice mail messages
For my wife where I would call myself
On The Road Mouse and if she left one
For me she was Stay At Home Mouse
Or vice versa where she would be
On The Road Mouse and I would be
Stay At Home Mouse depending
On who was on the road or at home
Which in those days was Boulder
And then we moved to Indianapolis
Where we got the Internet in 1993.

Text
When cell phones came in we lived
In Phoenix texting back and forth
Many dozens of times every day.
Phoenix Table Mat was a bad place
To work and when I proffered
In my texts that I wanted to look
Elsewhere but was leery to quit she
Wrote back in answer a text signed
Optimistic Mouse which was sweet
So I wrote one signed Love You Mouse.
The problem was how in those days
Texting was not automatically free
So I got a $2000 one-month bill but
Kept my mouth shut and paid it.

Zoom
Phrases like old home week or
A trip down memory lane refer to
When you wallow in the past by
Talking about the Model T Ford
When we now have the Tesla or
About texting when we now have
Snapchat, Instagram, and Zoom.
I will download my personality
Onto a computer so she can
Zoom with me after I’m dead
Or if she’s dead first she will
Have downloaded herself also
But what if we’re both dead?
Well, it will be up to the kids. 

"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."

"Rasa" by Joanne Dominique Dwyer hits the stands!

From Rasa by Joanne Dominique Dwyer, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. It's terrific!

Chaperone

To keep watch. Not my indigo eye on the ball
nor in the blacklight peephole.
Not on the blisters dappling my feet.
Nor on the beauty or the ugly in the mirror.
But on the children in the playground and on the fur-matted squirrels.
From a wooden tower, the running herds.
From the leaning alabaster lighthouse, a one-armed mermaid
out-swimming the divers, with tanks on their backs –
chasing her, like erasers of magic.
Eye on the bird, that its head does not hit glass.
On the sky, for the sun’s second coming, though she
might have been inebriated when she swore to return.
My small room smelling like canned tuna fish in oil.
My dry cough keeping both of us awake.
Chaperone: The supervision of vulnerable women in public spaces.
A shepherd is a chaperone.
Neruda asking What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?
Derived from the French word for a hood or a cape.
Covering the eyes of a prisoner.
And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue.
I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue.
And someone did come and grab my wrists.

Ars Poetica of “Chaperone” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer

       The conception of the poem Chaperone was hatched from the word itself. I am enamored with the geneses and meanings of words. In the act of making poems, I often find myself going down the yellow brick roads and the snow-covered paths of etymology. A treasure hunt that feeds my propensity for leaping imagistic associations in my poems.

       The existence of oral and written language is proof enough for me that life, in all its marvels and mysteries, is worthy of digging one’s heart and heels into. And so goes the poet, heave-ho, not deterred by the glob of purple Jell-O or virescent leek aioli on her chin, into the fecund snake pit, into the scalding sea of lava, into the sunbaked salt flats of the imagination with only a canteen of water and a quill. And what gets pulled out of the hat of the poet’s mind is sometimes preordained through careful plodding and other times is an unexpected dinner guest. And on rare occasions a bedfellow or a take-to-the-grave beacon of light.

       What excites me about Chaperone is that sans a premeditated intention or conceit, other than exploring its etymology, the poem, without forced entry, unveils a communiqué. It’s as if the poet gets out of the way and the poem writes itself. The poem is no longer mine. I do not possess it; it possesses me.

       And what uncoils is a suggested hierarchy of what to keep our eyes on, what to care for and be custodial towards, and what not to. The poem advises us not be concerned with the mundane, the lurid, or the beauty and the ugly of our individual bodies. Instead, to focus on beings with less agency, like children and animals. A one-armed mermaid and an anthropomorphized sun extends the girth of the poem into the mythic – an area of great psychic and cultural importance. Asking for custodial attention there as well, less there be an extinction of the mythological as well as the natural world.

       The poem drops in register with two confessional lines about the ordinary and faulted life of the speaker – her cough and her room smelling like tuna. From there, several imagistic pit stops or fueling stations caravan in a powerful line from Neruda’s “Book of Questions.” Pablo becomes a guest star.

       The poem culminates in narrative – at first global or collective: And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue. Then ends with the autobiographical singular: I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue. /And someone did come and grab my wrists.

       The unexpected surfacing of the mud memory, in the act of writing Chaperone, was a raptured surprise.

Listening to "The Man from Laramie" [by Elizabeth Samet]

The first thing you have to know is that the opinions I express as a guest blogger on the Best American Poetry site are my own and do not reflect those of the United States Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. The second thing you have to know is that I've been teaching a film course this semester. One of my favorite things about this class is that it allows me to see old films in new ways. One of the several films my students and I screened together was Anthony Mann’s The Man from Laramie (1955), with James Stewart, Arthur Kennedy, and Donald Crisp. David Thomson is exactly right when he suggests in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film that what fuels The Man from Laramie as well as the other Westerns Stewart did with Mann are “the suppressed neuroses” of “the adventurer hero.” Some of my students were a bit surprised at Stewart's anguished character and at the film’s open-endedness. They expected less ambiguity in a movie from the 1950s. Perhaps part of what helped to create that expectation was the obligatory title song, “The Man from Laramie,” which, like the songs that begin High Noon and so many other Westerns of the period, digests the whole messy business into a straightforward ballad. The experience of seeing Laramie again got me thinking about music in Westerns in general and about the music from a very different kind of Western: Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Jonny Greenwood’s score for that recent film is a world away from “The Man from Laramie.” Blood, however, like certain older films, is as remarkable for its silences as for its sounds. I admire Anderson’s willingness to let the picture speak for itself. He clearly trusted the image (and the acting of Daniel Day Lewis). Today going to the movies can be a deafening experience--especially the previews. Quiet movies are increasingly rare, as are filmmakers who permit long periods of silence. Remember the prairie bus stop scene in North by Northwest? Silence on the screen; I’d like to hear a little more of that.

from the archive; first posted May 19, 2008

"Brilliant & bright": A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

Ron Horning on W. H. Auden in "The Brooklyn Rail"

The first question anyone interested in W. H. Auden’s poetry is likely to ask about the sumptuous new edition of the poems is, “What will I learn from these 2,000 pages that I don’t know from the Collected Poems, also edited by Edward Mendelson, that came out in 1976, has been in print ever since, and is 670 pages long?” Or, if you believe none of the poems Auden wrote after emigrating to the US bears comparison with those written in the late 1920s and throughout the thirties, “What will I find out about Auden’s best poetry that I don’t know from 1977’s The English Auden, also edited by Mendelson and still in print, where the poetry takes up a mere 300 pages?”

The answer to both is a lot, and the value added starts with the presentation. While the Collected Poems is retrospective, printing the poems Auden wanted as he wanted them by the time of his death, the Princeton Poems, exhilaratingly prospective, prints the poems as they first appeared in individual books, recreating Auden’s poetic development as it actually happened from 1928 to 1972, including many poems later eliminated, plus the poems from the posthumous Thank You, Fog. Also here are poems Auden published in magazines but chose not to reprint, as well as poems he didn’t publish anywhere, such as the first thirty-six lines of an unfinished 1940 sestina, “We get the Dialectic fairly well,” that sprang to life in The New York Review of Books last December.

Material changes are accounted for in textual notes that make up more than half the page count. Since the notes do not identify or explain names and other references, this may seem like a lot of unnecessary information unless you’re working on a PhD, but Auden treated his published books as notebooks and could make several different sets of revisions before deciding a poem was finished. This was certainly true up to his Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 and Collected Longer Poems, published in 1966 and 1968 respectively, and he might have made further changes to earlier poems and revised later poems if he’d had the chances he did in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Not only do the textual notes list Auden’s second, third, and fourth thoughts, they point out mistakes and euphemisms introduced by typists and publishers on each side of the Atlantic. So the notes are key to this edition of the poetry, which is both the climax of Princeton’s edition of Auden’s complete works and the foundation on which it was built.

And yet … you’d be hard pressed to find contemporary poems in English that exhibit an affinity with the poems gathered here, the kind of affinity that, without being anything like them, the early poems have with poems by Hardy and Frost, Yeats and Moore. Scads of poems in the 1930s and ’40s were influenced by Auden, some written by his friends, but the most recent readable and widely-available proof of his influence I know of is John Ashbery’s Some Trees, published in 1956, and a poem Philip Larkin added to his 1946 The North Ship when it was reprinted 20 years later, “Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair.” This apparent remoteness is partly a result of the inevitable historicizing of a recognized poet and partly due to changes inside and outside poetry during the last half century.

Some markers are obvious. One example: for Auden, “man” and “mankind” are nouns that include women as well as men, and he’s not concerned about the long range effects of a shared name that privileges one sex over another. Unless a poem is a love poem or character study, “he” is the generic pronoun for anyone alive: you take it in stride to get somewhere with the poems, and if you don’t, goodbye. But what really sets Auden’s poetry apart from poems now is his perpetual technical engagement with the poetry in English that came before him, starting with Beowulf—a body of work he expands in all directions, contributing elegies, clerihews, sonnet sequences, ballads, prose poems, villanelles, and englyns. For starters.

The sheer surprising novelty and quality of the alliterative, politically inflected, and electrifying early poems—“The Watershed,” “This Lunar Beauty,” “A Bride in the 30’s”—owe as much to the times and Auden’s life while England was homebase, as they do to the country itself. He lived in Weimar Berlin a year following graduation from Oxford in 1927, taught in prep schools back in England, wrote plays with Christopher Isherwood, traveled to Iceland with Louis MacNeice, provided texts for Benjamin Britten to set, wrote scripts and did odd jobs for a government-sponsored documentary film unit, visited the Spanish Republican front in 1937, and was in China with Isherwood when the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Once he traded national frontiers for state lines, though, Auden settled into what was rapidly becoming a norm for US poets, supporting himself by writing criticism, anthologizing, and traipsing around the country from college to college, teaching, lecturing, and giving readings. After 1945 he spent summers abroad.

It was on their return trip from China in 1938 that Auden and Isherwood saw the United States for the first time, liked what they saw, and decided to move there: Isherwood to Los Angeles, Auden to New York. They came back early in 1939, preceded by formidable reputations, and some Britons never forgave them for what they considered outright desertion during the worst threat to their native country since Napoleon. But the two men were professional writers, not soldiers or diplomats, and expecting them to put their lives on hold for the national emergency makes as much sense as believing that Neville Chamberlain wouldn’t have signed the Munich Agreement if he’d read The Orators or Isherwood’s Sally Bowles. Worth remembering, too, is that homosexuality was a criminal offense in England until 1967.

Taken together, the poems fall into three main groups, with the English Auden succeeded not so much by a US Auden but, in the four long poems written during and right after World War II, by a consciousness cutting loose from England and Europe and finding its bearings in the States and a renewed commitment to Christianity. “New Year Letter,” “For the Time Being,” “The Sea and the Mirror,” and “The Age of Anxiety” were the last long poems Auden wrote, but he hadn’t stopped writing shorter poems, often in thematic suites, and he continued to write them, along with opera libretti with his partner Chester Kallman and a steady stream of translations and critical prose, until he died in a Viennese hotel room in 1973.

While his poetry does relax after 1947’s Age of Anxiety, it never loses its brilliance or technical ability, and the later lyrics are as remarkable in their more circuitous ways as the earlier pointed work. Here are the endings of “First Things First,” “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno,” and “Partition”:

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

                                    *

…though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

                                    *

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Besides assembling some of the most vivid poems ever committed to English, their pertinence no more confined to poetry than to the century in which they were written, these two books are also a monument to the acumen, scholarship, and perseverance of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and the editor of the complete works, who brings to his task here, as he did to the eight volumes of plays, libretti, and prose, a single minded devotion usually associated with editors of Victorian poets’ letters, Cecil Y. Lang for instance, and, further back, establishers of texts like Herbert J. C. Grierson, whose 1912 edition of John Donne’s poems is still the only one that counts. You’d say Auden lucked out if you didn’t believe his work deserves this kind of meticulous and exemplary care.  -- Ron Horning

from The Brooklyn Rail, May 2022

Ron Horning is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanitas, and Blazing Stadium. He’s written about photography and rock-and-roll for the Rail.

"In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton" (Nightboat Books) [by David Lehman]

We welcome the publication of In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, a posthumous collection by a wonderful poet who died in 1994, entirely too young. The publisher is Nightboat Books, and the work of editing it was shared by Philip Clark and the late Reginald Shepherd. I knew Donald well; he is represented in an anthology I edited, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, for which he wrote a statement about the occasion and objectives of one of his poems. It may be the only critical statement that he ever published. Three of Donald's poems appeared in a low-circulation magazine I edited, Poetry in Motion, in the late 1970s.

In the picture above, Donald is the fourth poet from the left. To his right is Tim Dlugos, with Dennis Cooper standing on the other side of Tim. Amy Gerstler is second from the right. Also in the picture are Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, and Ed Smith.  The venue is the Ear Inn and I'd have to guess the date as early 1980s.

Donald, a great fan of Mexican food (chimichangas), loved the music of Khachaturian, was born in Texas but you'd never know ity from his speech, wrote a sensually abstract poetry. Donald was a most hodpitabler man; in the 1980s when I lived in Ithaca, I sometimes stayed at Donald's place on my visits to the city. In one of them, the poem "Blue Skies" was in his typewriter. In a letter to me dated December 13, 1982, he wrote, “For the longest time I’ve wanted to write things [ie. poems] that are both funny and serious, obvious and mysterious. And in [‘Empire of the Air’], perhaps, I have succeeded. Less so in ‘Winter Garden.’ And ‘Masters of Self-Abuse’. . .well, it has its moments. Someday, you’ll have to tell me what you think.”

Here is the first paragraph of Douglas Crase's afterword to the new collection.

<<  The appearance in print of the selected poems of Donald Britton is an affront to cynicism and a triumph over fate. When Donald died, in 1994, it was sadly reasonable to assume that the influence of his poetry would be confined to the few who had preserved a copy of his single book, the slender, deceptively titled Italy, published thirteen years earlier. As the few became fewer it seemed all but certain the audience for his poems would disappear. Donald never taught, so there were no students to mature into positions of critical authority. There was no keeper of the flame to incite publication, no posthumous foundation to subsidize it, not even a martyrology in place to demand it out of sentiment. The survival of his work would have to come about, instead, as a pure instance of “go little booke”—an instance that must now warm the heart of anyone who has ever believed in poetry. It was the poems in Italy themselves, free of professional standing or obligation, that inspired the successive affections of two remarkable editors and the confident publisher of the present selection. Donald, who despite his brilliance was a modest and self-effacing person, would be surprised.
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Crase's afterword concludes with this thought about the "longevity" of poetry as opposed to a "career" in the field.

<<<       Donald’s posthumous success in inspiring the publication of his selected poems, coupled with the undeniable failure in worldly terms of his career, is occasion to wonder if the career is ever the same as poetry itself. From time to time a critic will observe that Hart Crane’s suicide, for example, or Joe Brainard’s decision to stop making art, may be regarded as proof the artist realized what his admirers don’t, that the work was a failure and the career could not be sustained. The critic doesn’t quite dare to draw the same conclusion from the abjuration of Rimbaud or the suicide of Sylvia Plath, which reveals of course that the logic in the first case was as opportunistic as it is preposterous. Someday a critic will do us the service of disentangling poetry from the standard map of a professional career. The map is a convenience to committees but meaningless to the future reader—the twelve-year-old boy or girl in San Angelo—the very reader poets must hope to have. What is useful to that boy or girl is sometimes no more than a phrase, perhaps a book or poem, amounting to a style of mind in which to escape or dwell. I recognized such a style of mind in Donald Britton and it made us friends. The first time I heard him read his work in public was at the Ear Inn in New York, the afternoon of March 7, 1981. Blond as ever, he was in that environment an apparition of nervous grace. I can’t say he connected with the audience; he certainly didn’t flatter it. He conveyed, perhaps too clearly for the occasion, his sense of an audience beyond the room. One got the feeling he expected to reach across time and elicit a response composed of the same respect for intellect and desire that we had there, in the Ear Inn, that Saturday afternoon. Donald's poems were not lessons or anecdotes. They are invitations to the unending contemplation of ourselves, and things beyond us, that makes the human species a window on creation.
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Here is a poem by Donald Britton from the new volume:

Notes on the Articulation of Time

It becomes a critical account
of all that’s spoken, done:
the drawing in of breaths, even,
these nights whose atmosphere
reminds us of mountains,
white volumes of air. We need

these narratives, we want them:
the city lies before us
and some one person in the sleeve
of a streetlamp awaits
our enraptured attention
as we await the concept of the city

which tells us how we move
in the particolored geographies
about us. We can’t be certain
we are moving toward this person
nor do we require certitude.
It is enough to acknowledge

the movement itself, shavings
of light inscribing a circle.
Our childlike sense of the other
bears these forces toward
completion and renewal,
a lexis of infatuated sounds.

-- Donald Britton

From the archive; first posted May 18, 2016

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?   

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?