The Best American Poetry

Andrew McCarron, Guest Author July 26-30

This week we welcome Andrew McCarron as our guest author. Andrew is a teacher and writer born and raised in the Hudson River Valley. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology, chairs the Religion, Philosophy & Ethics Department at Trinity School in Manhattan, and teaches in the English Department. His books include: Mysterium, a poetry collection (Edgewise Press, 2011); Three New York Poets: Charles North, Tony Towle & Paul Violi, a collection of critical biographies (Station Hill, 2016); Light Come Shining: The Transformations of Bob Dylan, a study of the Nobel Laureate’s religious identities (Oxford University Press, 2017); and The Ballad of Sara and Thor: A Novella (Station Hill, 2017). He is currently completing a creative biography on the late classicist William C. Mullen.

Welcome, Andrew. 

-- sdl

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair
and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,
his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,
“that since you’ll never wake, that you’re not inscribing memories?”
Describing a hallucination means you’re describing it
to someone, so who’s to say this isn’t part of the hallucination?
My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration
and took a picture. They say as much about the idea of time
as they do the idea of reality, most recently in the mechanism
through which birds see the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a kind
of blue. I like that. Everyone you know is suddenly an art student.
Or how families have a recurring theme, generation to generation.
Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.
As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The Enquists want the baby,
the child, as he’s three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out
through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans
want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal
over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,
and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail
to Kansas. (The painting keeps folding that we’re working on,
fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,
the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was
a kidnapping, and one, the mother, goes off somewhere,
and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her
with some friends. One, driving, July 8, falls asleep,
and they cross the median, down the hillside, into the trees.
You fall asleep over this life, and you wake
in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll
forest. You’re planning some sort of festival.
The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,
as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,
they’ve all gone but for the mother and the child,
and he finds her one day in late fall, and she asks him
if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

--John Gallaher                                       first published in LIPS, as "Golden (23)"

Though I’ve always known he died in a car wreck, I didn’t know until recently that my birth-father died in his sleep. Likewise, I’ve always known I was adopted (at age three), but the circumstances, as well as my birth-mother’s name, were a mystery, until I found her recently. I’ve been trying, since my book, In a Landscape (BOA 2014), to find a way to write as I’m thinking, to try to write the thinking itself, the imagination, but in a non-fiction landscape. From Lyn Hejinian, I think of it as thought transference, or articulating the inarticulate. Ashbery talks about this as well, describing it as a project reflecting how the mind works, the play of thought. I like these ideas, keeping in mind O’Hara’s directness (“I did this I did that”) and Miles Davis playing what the day presents. I’m not sure if any of this makes much sense to anyone but me, which is why I hesitate to put too fine a point on it.
--John Gallaher

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

John Gallaher’s tribute to origins, “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” shares the breathless energy of Frank O’Hara’s elegy, “The Day Lady Died,” and its trajectory from the circumstantial to the transcendent. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” . . . “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted. . ,” while the poet-speaker of “Garden of Mirrors” looks “up from lunch. . .” and imagines his dead father, “perpetual passenger, his head full of roads.” O’Hara records his lunch-hour movements; Gallaher celebrates his car’s 123456th mile. O’Hara’s bank teller’s name, “Miss Stillwagon,” is part of his day’s momentousness, along with “NEW WORLD WRITING,” “Verlaine,” “Bonnard,” “Strega,” and “Gauloises.” (Lady, not pinned to her daylight name, enters the poem via photograph.) Gallaher describes the navigation of birds, their precise jazz of vision, “a kind of blue”; linking it to a family’s serial mirroring: a set of shoulders, “a taste for parsley.” Then we hear, in third person, the story of his divided parentage, related as Enquists vs. Gormans—recalling Faulkner’s Snopes and Compsons, discordant tribes. Suddenly, the poem mirrors itself, registers the strain exacted by the telling, the difficulty of keeping the story within bounds: “(The painting keeps folding that we’re working on, / fretting along the edges of the frame.)” The father goes looking for the mother “with some friends.” He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear “down the hillside, into the trees,” dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title. At poem’s end the son has found the mother, “in late fall,” is with her in the way that Frank is with Lady Day at the 5-Spot: “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”(no end-stop). Art pre-empts time. John Gallaher’s “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” collapses fifty years as the mother asks her son “if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.”
--Angela Ball

(The New York School Diaspora will be on sabbatical till Tuesday, 31 August, when it will return as a biweekly feature.)

"How to Write a Villanelle" [by Martin Stannard]

Click here for "How to Write a Villanelle" -- and below that "How toi Write a Sonnet" -- by Martin Stannard, who writes:

<<<
Good morning, and welcome to August.

 

This is to announce that "How to Write Poetry" is now available at its very own website: https://how2writepoetry.blogspot.com/

 

and today sees the release of Issue #2 of the series: "How to Write a Villanelle", which you will find there as a blog post , and also free to download as a PDF if you are looking for that special gift for someone who is difficult to please.

 

I know I said that #2 would be about how to write an epic, but several people responded to Issue #1 ("How to Write a Sonnet") by asking for help to write a villanelle, and so here we are.

 

Best wishes etc.

Martin
>>>

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Figgissimo

The sauna of a Southern summer seems made for figs. When David Kirby and I bought our house, I discovered an old fig tree near the driveway and the vegetable garden. The woman who sold us our house told us her father had had a victory garden there during World War II. Does the fig tree date back to the forties? I wish I'd asked her. 

A fig tree is a glorious creature with large leaves that look like the palms of a giant. I've planted two more trees since we moved in. We had to have a pine tree in the front yard removed, and I'm going to plant another one where the pine was. Early in the fall fig trees begin to loose their leaves, but when they start to leaf out in the spring, their bare brown stems erupt with little rosettes of green, and I know that the figs are on their way.

This summer has been miraculous. I usually make two flats (12-jars per flat) of fig jam. This year I made 36 jars, and two fig tarts.

I'm wondering about the figginess of this summer. Could the drought during May followed by torrential downpours be the reason? Probably not, because this is a pretty typical late spring into early summer. I have to compete with the birds and squirrels for the figs. This year I got all St. Francis of Assisi and addressed the critters. "Brother and sister birds, you take the high figs and I'll take the low ones. Then we'll all live as one. Brother and sister squirrels, I know you're hungry, too. Please take all you want, but please don't take a bite and then go on to the next fig. Let's share the lusciousness."

It seemed to work. Fig jam is one of mother nature's true gifts. Bread, butter, and fig jam with a cup of coffee or tea makes an ambrosial breakfast. With a strong stinky cheese it goes well with an aperitivo. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a crostata marmalata, the Italian breakfast tart, with fig jam. 

I inherited David's mother's copper jam-making pot, and I cook up two or three batches of jam every summer. Our trees have small brown figs called Brown Turkey, that seem to me more concentrated in flavor than their larger cousins. In my mother-in-law's recipe for fig jam the only ingredients are figs, sugar, and lemons. The most complicated part of making fig jam is fig curation. The season is only a couple of weeks in July. It starts slowly and then builds up speed. On good days I pick a pound in the morning and another pound in the early evening. Every two days I have enough for a batch of jam. But figs are tender little orbs. You have to watch them or they'll turn into mush. 

Since I had so many figs this year, I had plenty for tarts. My first tart was beautiful, but the crust was a disappointment. That's because I tried a crust that wasn't Patricia Wells' crust. The second one was beautiful and balanced. The recipe is from her great book At Home in Provence, which won a James Beard award when it came out in 1996. I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw her demonstrate some of the recipes. The copy I bought is falling apart because I've tried so many of the recipes. The fig tart is a variation on the apricot almond tart. The only change I made was that I substituted orange flower water for the almond extract. This photo is of the halved figs without the cream filling.

I'm hoping to find some purple figs at the market later in the summer, and try the recipe with them. Here's the recipe again: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

Next week: It's a Peach-luscious world

Yolanda Wisher: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

______________________________________________________

5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2

Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood.
Walk up the sidewalk towards Chestnut Street.
Speak to the Rev holding the light-skinned baby,
ask his son to come put a new inner tube on my bike.
Cross Ludlow, past the mailbox on the corner,
Risqué Video, Dino's Pizza, and the Emerald Laundromat.
The fruit trucks tucked into 44th Street on the left,
house eyes shut with boards, fringes of children.
Once we went into a store sunk into the street,
owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,
from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,
where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,
draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman
behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic.
We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips,
eye the bean and sweet potato pies.

Back into the hot breath of West Philly, sun is setting.
The sky is smeared squash, tangerines in a glaze.
Three girls and one boy jump doubledutch. A white man
hustles from the video store with a black plastic bag.
We look for money in the street, steal flowers
from the church lawn. The shit stain from the wino
is still on our step. Mr. Jim is washing a car for cash.
John is cleaning his rims to Buju Banton.
Noel is talking sweetly to the big blue-eyed woman.
Linda, on her way to the restaurant. The sister
in the wheelchair buzzes by with her headphones on.

One night, a man was shot and killed on this block,
right outside our thick wood door. But not today.
Today is one of those days to come home from walking
in the world, leave the windows open, start a pot of
black beans. Smoke some Alice Coltrane. Cut up
some fruit, toenails. Hold on to the moment
as if time is taking your blood pressure.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Philadelphia-based poet, singer, educator and curator Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013). Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016–17. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher was awarded the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She has collaborated with artists and organizations to create community-driven programs rooted in the practice of poetry as a public art, including a neighborhood poetry festival, literary takeovers of local museums, a series of poetry church services, and a poetic address to the nation. Wisher performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary. [pronouns: she/her/y'all]

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Reflections on Sam Truitt’s Tokyoatoto [by Andrew McCarron]

 

I am concluding my week of blog entries on the poet’s notebook with some reflections on the poet Sam Truitt’s marvelous recent book, Tokyoatoto (Station Hill Press, 2020). This book-length poem was composed in a small pocket-sized notebook during a ten-day trip to Tokyo in late Fall 2019, five months before the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down international travel. The poem begins in New York City as the poet travels to JFK Airport and concludes with his return. Impressions, thoughts, sights & sounds, and memories were jotted down in real time. Having lived in Tokyo from the age of three to seven, and having not set foot in the city or elsewhere in Japan since that time, the book enacts T.S. Eliot’s poetic dictum “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Truitt expresses something similar early in the poem when his plane begins its descent into Tokyo’s Narita Airport: “Gliding downward through clouds & then under & cotton & black mountains in gold light I found myself inexplicably sobbing now gliding downwards tears in & spilling from my eyes toward the most beautiful place on Earth 52 years coming home.”    

Returning to Japan at the end of his fifth decade of life, Truitt records the shifting parameters of his consciousness through words. He reveals the nature of this poetic project while waiting for a Tokyo subway sometime over the days following his arrival: “one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.”  

The book offers a sketch of those reflective moments in life when we try making sense of things, when we seek to express the accumulation of where and who we’ve been as we slide perpetually into the future. What it’s like, how one things moves into another, what we remember, the lacunas of what we forgot, what we’ve read, the mystery, and all the saw-toothed fragments of memory that weave continually through what we see: coalesce. The ever-expanding geometry of our consciousness reveals itself, momentarily, before the pattern changes.

It’s no coincidence then that the majority of Truitt’s odyssey occurs in transit: via foot, taxis, buses, subways, trains, and airplanes. Here’s some text from the flight over: “as we scoot over Siberian ice & crags & rock & out the grey & purple river-looped land in the orange light band I guess must now be south as north becomes it.” Or a moment toward the end of the book recorded on a subway: “& then I am in the subway wondering where exactly I am though knowing inordinately & knowing I need to do a quick search of my body to locate the ticket…” The movements that propel the poem frequently open up to flowerings of philosophical insight and questioning, such as the following moment in the middle of the poem: “you could say sex alone makes it worth it yet even sex wears thin & then you’re stuck with a habit of working within a structure…” No conclusion, though, is given much time to marinate before the focus leads elsewhere: “& so it goes back & forth until it is gone.”  

The structure and physical layout of Tokyoatoto is significant. Each page of typed text (one section per page) is presented opposite a facsimile of the handwritten page from the original notebook he kept from November 23 – December 3 2019, with almost no alterations or additions. Why is this? As Robert Creeley famously put it, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” The inclusion of the original handwritten notebook in the published book captures what it’s like to make sense of the intersections of past and present, place and moment, self and others, matter and spirit, and the familiar and the foreign as they’re consciously experienced in the flux of time. What unfolds across the work is an experience of the unified field without a deliberate fielding of the experience.

 

Note on author: Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer, and a host of the podcast Baffling Combustions. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts, he lives in Woodstock, NY.

"There's No Place Like Home" [by James Thurber]

Idling through a London bookstore in the summer of 1937, I came upon a little book called `Collins' Pocket Interpreters: France.' Written especially to instruct the English how to speak French in the train, the hotel, the quandary, the dilemma, etc., it is, of course, equally useful - I might also say equally depressing - to Americans. I have come across a number of these helps-for-travellers, but none that has the heavy impact, the dark, cumulative power of Collins'. A writer in a London magazine mentions a phrase book got out in the era of Imperial Russia which contained this one magnificent line: `Oh, dear, our postillion has been struck by lightning!' but that fantastic piece of disaster, while charming and provocative - though, I daresay, quite rare even in the days of the Czars - is to Mr Collins' modern, workaday disasters as Fragonard is to George Bellows, or Sarah Orne Jewett to William Faulkner. Let us turn the pages of this appalling little volume. 

Each page has a list of English expressions one under the other, which gives them the form of verse. The French translations are run alongside. Thus, on the first page, under `The Port of Arrival,' we begin (quietly enough) with `Porter, here is my baggage!' - `Porteur, voici mes bagages!' From then on disaster follows fast and follows faster until in the end, as you shall see, all hell breaks loose. The volume contains three times as many expressions to use when one is in trouble as when everything is going all right. This, my own experience has shown, is about the right ratio, but God spare me from some of the difficulties for which the traveller is prepared in Mr Collins' melancholy narrative poem. I am going to leave out the French translations because, for one thing, people who get involved in the messes and tangles we are coming to invariably forget their French and scream in English anyway. Furthermore, the French would interrupt the fine, free flow of the English and spoil what amounts to a dramatic tragedy of an overwhelming and original kind. The phrases, as I have said, run one under the other, but herein I shall have to run them one after the other (you can copy them down the other way, if you want to). 

Trouble really starts in the canto called `In the Customs Shed.' Here we have: `I cannot open my case.' `I have lost my keys.' `Help me to close this case." I did not know that I had to pay." I don't want to pay so much." I cannot find my porter.' `Have you seen porter 153 ?' That last query is a little master stroke of writing, I think, for in those few words we have a graphic picture of a tourist lost in a jumble of thousands of bags and scores of customs men, looking frantically for one of at least a hundred and fifty-three porters. We feel that the tourist will not find porter 153, and the note of frustration has been struck.

Our tourist (accompanied by his wife, I like to think) finally gets on the train for Paris - having lost his keys and not having found his porter - and it comes time presently to go to the dining car, although he probably has no appetite, for the customs men, of course, have had to break open that one suitcase. Now, I think, it is the wife who begins to crumble: `Someone has taken my seat.' `Excuse me, sir, that seat is mine.' `I cannot find my ticket!' `I have left my ticket in the compartment.' `I will go and look for it.' `I have left my gloves (my purse) in the dining car.' Here the note of frenzied disintegration, so familiar to all travellers abroad, is sounded. 

Next comes `The Sleeper,' which begins, ominously, with `What is the matter ?' and ends with `May I open the window?' `Can you open this window, please?' We realize, of course, that nobody is going to be able to open the window and that the tourist and his wife will suffocate. In this condition they arrive in Paris, and the scene there, on the crowded station platform, is done with superb economy of line: `I have left something in the train.' `A parcel, an overcoat.' `A macintosh, a stick.' `An umbrella, a camera." A fur, a suitcase.' The travellers have now begun to go completely to pieces, in the grand manner. 

Next comes an effective little interlude about an airplane trip, which is one of my favourite passages in this swift and sorrowful tragedy: `I want to reserve a place in the plane leaving tomorrow morning.' `When do we start?' `Can we get anything to eat on board?' `When do we arrive," `I feel sick.' `Have you any paper bags for air-sickness?' `The noise is terrible.' `Have you any cotton wool?' `When are we going to land ?' This brief masterpiece caused me to cancel an air trip from London to Paris and go the easy way, across the Channel.

We now come to a section called `At the Hotel,' in which things go from worse to awful : `Did you not get my letter ?' `I wrote to you three weeks ago.' `I asked for a first-floor room." If you can't give me something better, I shall go away.' `The chambermaid never comes when I ring.' `I cannot sleep at night, there is so much noise." I have just had a wire. I must leave at once.' Panic has begun to set in, and it is not appeased any by the advent of `The Chambermaid': `Are you the chambermaid ?"There are no towels here." The sheets on this bed are damp." This room is not clean." I have seen a mouse in the room.' `You will have to set a mouse trap here.' The bells of hell at this point begin to ring in earnest: `These shoes are not mine.' `I put my shoes here, where are they now?" The light is not good.' `The bulb is broken.' `The radiator is too warm.' `The radiator doesn't work." It is cold in this room." This is not clean, bring me another." I don't like this." I can't eat this. Take it away!'

I somehow now see the tourist's wife stalking angrily out of the hotel, to get away from it all (without any shoes on), and, properly enough, the booklet seems to follow her course - first under `Guides and Interpreters' : `You are asking too much." I will not give you any more." I shall call a policeman." He can settle this affair.' Then under `Inquiring the Way' : `I am lost." I was looking for-"Someone robbed me." That man robbed me." That man is following me everywhere.' She rushes to `The Hairdresser,' where, for a change, everything goes quite smoothly until: `The water is too hot, you are scalding me!' Then she goes shopping, but there is no surcease: `You have not given me the right change.' `I bought this two days ago.' `It doesn't work.' `It is broken.' `It is torn.' `It doesn't fit me.' Then to a restaurant for a snack and a reviving cup of tea: `This is not fresh.' `This piece is too fat.' `This doesn't smell very nice.' `There is a mistake in the bill." While I was dining someone has taken my purse." I have left my glasses (my watch) (a ring) in the lavatory.'

Madness has now come upon her and she rushes wildly out into the street. Her husband, I think, has at the same time plunged blindly out of the hotel to find her. We come then, quite naturally, to `Accident', which is calculated to keep the faint of heart - nay, the heart of oak - safely at home by his own fireside: `There has been an accident!' `Go and fetch a policeman quickly.' `Is there a doctor near here?' Send for the ambulance." He is seriously injured." She has been run over." He has been knocked down." Someone has fallen in the water.' `The ankle, the arm.' `The back, a bone." The face, the finger.' `The foot, the head." The knee, the leg." The neck, the nose." The wrist, the shoulder." He has broken his arm."He has broken his leg.' `He has a sprained ankle.' `He has a sprained wrist.' `He is losing blood.' `He has fainted.' `He has lost consciousness."He has burnt his face."It is swollen."It is bleeding." Bring some cold water.' `Help me to carry him.' (Apparently, you just let her lie there, while you attend to him - but, of course, she was merely run over, whereas he has taken a terrific tossing around.)

We next see the husband and wife back in their room at the dreary hotel, both in bed, and both obviously hysterical. This scene is entitled 'Illness': `I am feeling very ill, send for the doctor.' `I have pains in-' `I have pains all over.' `The back, the chest.' `The ear, the head.' `The eyes, the heart.' `The joints, the kidneys.' `The lungs, the stomach.' `The throat, the tongue.' `Put out your tongue." The heart is affected." I feel a pain here." He is not sleeping well.' `He cannot eat.' `My stomach is out of order.' `She is feverish.' `I have caught a cold." I have caught a chill." He has a temperature." I have a cough.' `Will you give me a prescription ?"What must I do?' `Must I stay in bed ?' `I feel better.' `When will you come and see me again?' `Biliousness, rheumatism.' `Insomnia, sunstroke.' `Fainting, a fit.' `Hoarseness, sore throat.' `The medicine, the remedy.' `A poultice, a draught.' `A tablespoonful, a teaspoon-ful.' `A sticking plaster, senna.' `Iodine.' That last suicidal bleat for iodine is, to me, a masterful touch.

Our couple finally get on their feet again, for travellers are tough - they've got to be - but we see under the next heading, `Common Words and Phrases,' that they are left forever punch-drunk and shattered: `Can I help you? 'Excuse me.' `Carry on!! 'Look here!' `Look down there!' `Look up there!' `Why, how?' `When, where?' `Because.' `That's it!' `It is too much, it is too dear." It is very cheap." Who, what, which ?"Look out !!' Those are Valkyries, one feels, riding around, and above, and under our unhappy husband and wife.

The book sweeps on to a mad operatic ending of the tragedy, with all the / rings and brasses and wood winds going full blast: `Where are we going?' `Where are you going?' `Come quickly and see!!! 'I shall call a policeman.) 'Bring a policeman!' `I shall stay here.' `Will you help me?' `Help! Fire!' `Who are you?' I don't know you." I don't want to speak to you." Leave me alone. "That will do." You are mistaken." It was not I. "I didn't do it. "I will give you nothing.' `Go away now!' `It has nothing to do with me.' `Where should one apply?' `What must I do?' `What have I done?' `I have done nothing.' `I have already paid you.' `I have paid you enough.' `Let me pass!' `Where is the British consulate?' The oboes take that last, despairing wail, and the curtain comes down.

Olympic Musings [by Walter Carey]

"You know what expression I hate the most?"
"What?"
"When they say she, quote, settled for silver."
"That's why I say fuck 'em."

-- in support of which I refer you to today's New York Post reporting that Lilly King won silver, and Annie Lazor bronze, in the 200-meter breastroke in Tokyo and noting that King "pushed back against the media and American public, who, in her view, often downplay a silver or bronze finish."

"Pardon my French but the fact that we're not able to celebrate silver and bronze is bullshit," King observed.  

Block-flute [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Marianna and I are at a summer retreat.
I am five years old. I have a wooden recorder
with me, a block-flute. I blow out melodies.

My parents left – they have some urgent matters.
What urgent matters could there be during the summer?
I play my flute. Igor is here with us. 

He is a genius, a chess prodigy who has won
chess games against the former world champions.
He is my brother, and he has very long legs. 

When Igor walks, I must run after him like a dog.
I quickly get tired. Igor puts me on his shoulders.

I imagine myself as an eagle, a stormy petrel, a seagull.
Igor runs; I fly after him – I am the wind.

The wind plays the flute. Grownups lie.
I know – my grandma, Musenka, is dead.
That’s why my parents left.
I will never see her again. Ne-ver.

“Iga, do you know?” I ask, landing my flight.
 “No,” he answers seriously.
Igor is almost an adult. Grownups lie.
(He Knows)

Bukowski Sonnet [by Mitch Sisskind]

When I ran into Charles Bukowski in 
A men's room at Santa Anita in 1980
He joked that you should never bet on
A horse that the guy at the next urinal 
Touts you on. We laughed about it 
And then I mentioned how when 
I was going around Mexico in 1965
I didn't have a bowel movement 
For two weeks on account of 
How scary the bathrooms were.
'No shit!' he said. We laughed 
About it and he asked if when 
At long last I did defecate was it
Anything special and I said 'Nah.'

The Poet's Notebook: Interview with Carley Moore [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: Of all the contemporary poets and writers I know, few are as bracingly honest, funny, and heartfully transgressive as Carley Moore. In addition to being an NYU professor, and proud mother, Carley is author of the novel The Not Wives (Feminist Press, September 2019), the essay collection, 16 Pills (Tinderbox Editions, 2018), the poetry chapbook, Portal Poem (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), and the young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012). I am so appreciative that Carley agreed to be interviewed for this blog. Thanks Carley!]

 

AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process?  

CM: I started keeping a diary when I was in the third grade. After a hospital stay, my parents bought me a small plaid diary with a matching pencil from the hospital gift shop. That diary was probably the beginning of my journal writing, which after high school and college morphed into more of a space for my creative process and lesson planning. 

AM: What roles have your notebooks played in your creative process over the years?

CM: They are essential to everything I write, whether it’s poetry, fiction, or essays. I do some freewriting at the beginning and end of every writing session and it helps me hold onto what I’ve been working on that day and also figure out what might come next. A few years ago, I did The Artist’s Way, and that really helped me get messier in my journal, and introduced me to the concept of “Morning Pages,” which are just three pages of mess, never to be looked at again. I didn’t stick with the idea of never returning to the writing, but I’m grateful for the encouragement to be a messy writer, to write almost as if painting. I’ve since moved into bigger notebooks and paintbrush like pens and I really love that.

AM: Can you reflect on an instance in which you wrote something into your notebook that ended up being the final version with minimal editing when you got around to typing it out?

CM: Some parts of my dissertation were free-written and stayed much the same when I moved from notes to the final document.  Poems often undergo minimal transformation too. I lately write poems as Instagram posts and those are completely as is/whatever tumbles out of me. Typed into the Insta platform and not my notebook, but really the same idea.

AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?

CM: I try very hard to bring the freedom of the notebook into the computer, like I want the typing to be as messy as the stuff in the notebook, but invariably, I tend to get a little fussier with sentences and sentence structure when I type. In the notebook, everything is a lot more fragmented and list-like and I don’t really worry very much about sentence structure or grammar.

AM: Would you like your notebooks to be read by others, or are they private?

CM: They are private. I don’t want anyone else to read them. Not necessarily because they are full of secrets although they do contain some of the worst—grouchiest, whiniest, crabbiest—parts of me, but mostly because they’re my space to play and do whatever and they are not anything finished or for the public. I give my students the same space in their private freewriting. We all need something that is completely our own and is just never bothered or scrutinized by anyone. 

AM: What do you do with your notebooks once they are full or finished?

CM: There are different places on my bookshelves where I have them. Many older ones are in a big plastic bin in my hallway closet. I don’t tend to reread them or take them out. I’m not interested in them in that way. I do look at the previous notebook for a couple of weeks because there’s cross over and especially with novels, I may have taken notes that I need to remember or hold onto to keep going. 

AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?

CM: My great grandmother kept a diary that I’m hoping to inherit at some point. It’s very mundane, but I love it. She wrote things like, “And then we walked up over the hill.” I also love the look and feel of journals and notebooks and the kinds of pens people have used. I may have seen some of Emily Dickson’s fascicles which I became obsessed with for a while—these are the hand-stitched chapbooks she made of her own work. I think I also say Emerson or Thoreau’s journals a long time ago, which were fascinating too. 

AM: Do you incorporate non-linguistic elements into your notebooks (e.g., line drawings, doodles, collage, painting, etc.)? Is there something that makes your notebooks or your “notebook practice” distinctive?

CM: I doodle a bit and make a lot of squiggly marks, but mostly it’s just messy cursive. I went to Catholic School until 3^rd grade even though my family isn’t Catholic and handwriting was very serious, a whole subject unto itself. I was crowned (with a Burger King crown!) handwriting queen in second grade and was very proud of that. My writing up until a couple of years ago, has always been very neat. I’m glad to have freed myself from that tidy work. 

Announcing the Gunpowder Press Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest [by Emma Trelles]

Gunpowder Press invites Latinx poets who are current residents of California  (age 18+)  to submit to the first Gunpowder Latinx Poetry Chapbook contest. The deadline to submit is September 30, 2021.

Poems may be submitted in English or Spanish. Selected manuscripts will be published in both English and Spanish.

We especially encourage poets living on the Central Coast in Santa Barbara, Ventura, or San Luis Obispo counties to submit. Special attention will be given to poets who have not yet published a full-length collection.

Two manuscripts will be selected for publication in bilingual editions. The winning poets will each receive $250.00, 10 copies of the published chapbook, and an invitation to read at the Mission Poetry Series in Santa Barbara in 2022. 

For all of the guidelines, in English and in Spanish, visit https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

Gunpowder Press invita a los poetas Latinx que residen en California (mayores de 18 años de edad) a participar en el primer concurso del Gunpowder Latinx Plaquette de Poesía.

Los poemas pueden estar escritos en inglés o español. Los manuscritos seleccionados se publicarán en formato bilingüe: en inglés y en español.

Invitamos especialmente a los poetas que viven en la costa central y en los condados de Santa Bárbara, Ventura, o San Luis Obispo. Se prestará atención especial a los poetas que aún no hayan publicado una colección completa.

Se seleccionarán dos manuscritos para publicación en ediciones bilingües. Los poetas ganadores recibirán $ 250.00 cada uno, 10 copias del poemario publicado, y una invitación para leer en la Mission Poetry Series en Santa Bárbara en 2022. Para más detalles, visita https://gunpowderpress.submittable.com/submit

Mahler's Second Symphony -- with commentary [by Aaron Cohen]

Check out this podcast of Mahler's 2nd symphony with commentary. This link also leads to Aaron Cohen's similar treatment of Mahler's 1st.

Available July 7, 2021

The podcast series Embrace Everything – The World of Gustav Mahler^TM, a multi-season exploration of the composer’s complete symphonies, continues with Symphony No. 2.

The Embrace Everything^TM podcast series was created and is hosted by award-winning radio producer Aaron Cohen. It explores and celebrates the music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) by taking a journey through his symphonies. Using interviews with leading Mahler interpreters and scholars, readings from the letters of Mahler and his contemporaries, commentary from Mr. Cohen, and the sounds of the symphonies themselves, each season of the series guides listeners through one of these landmark works in the orchestral repertoire.

https://www.theworldofgustavmahler.org/

The Poet's Notebook: Interview with erica kaufman [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: In addition to being an accomplished and innovative poet, erica kaufman is the Director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking. The institute, which has been offering professional development workshops for teachers and students since its inception in 1982, is built around the primacy of the notebook and pen as instruments of investigation. Even after the institute was forced to go remote by the pandemic, the notebook and pen remained the pillar and ground of the texts and questions that its various workshops pursued. Not surprisingly, erica’s two books of poems INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books) emerged out of the forge of her notebooks. I am delighted that erica agreed to be interviewed for this blog!]

AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process? 

ejk:  I’ve kept a notebook as part of my creative process for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved notebooks as an object--there’s something that is just innately appealing about opening a fresh notebook and completing the last line of the last page of a notebook. Not too long ago I was visiting my parents and found a stack of notebooks from elementary school (3rd grade). It was fascinating because I don’t actually remember writing and keeping any sort of journal at that time, but I did. The notebooks were labeled with my name and the year, and filled with poems with the occasional dated prose entry. My elementary school notebooks are hardcover, often from the Looney Tunes store (if there was such a thing in the 1980’s on Staten Island).

AM: What roles have your notebooks/journals played in your creative process over the years?

ejk: I prefer to write by hand. I use notebooks to keep notes, often lists of things I hear or see, strings of words or phrases that I find interesting. I am always writing--it is how I focus my attention, how I digest information I’m taking in, how I learn. I always try to keep separate notebooks for different purposes--one for notes, one for poem drafting, one for job work...But inevitably these categories bleed into each other so I also spend a lot of time recopying materials from one notebook to another. When I draft a poem I almost always do it in a notebook first, and I revise by recopying drafts and seeing how different small changes feel as I try them out. Writing poetry is a very physical process--I need to experience multiple drafts and I need to have all of my notes and versions of a single piece in one place so I can move back and forth between renditions of a poem before settling on what might be the closest to a final one. The notebook is also where I might test out something I’m thinking about through prose that might later become a poem.

 AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?

ejk:  This is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years--I’ve read articles with titles like “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades” (NY Times), “Handwriting shown to be better for memory than typing” (Big Think), and “Attention, Students, put your laptops away!” (NPR). In short, it seems as though we have scientific proof that typing and writing by hand are actually different cognitive processes that lead to different things happening in the brain. I know that for me, anything I write by hand sticks in my head in a very different way than if I’m typing. I retain or remember anything that I write in a notebook, the same is just not true when I’m typing. Increasingly I’m also aware that I bring a certain anxiety with me to the keyboard--when I’m typing it is as if whatever I’m working on has different stakes attached to it. When I’m ready to type I’m usually on my way to finishing and submitting something (for my job or for my personal work). So, that’s a totally different experience as well. I’m just not a person who really writes on a screen for pleasure. I’ve even tried the ipad with stylus approach where I could write by hand and have that translated to type, but it didn’t or doesn’t feel the same. The notebook is my version of a sandbox or a laboratory. The keyboard is more like the stage or lecture hall.
AM: Would you like your notebook  to be read by others, or are they private?

ejk:  My notebooks aren’t private, but at the same time, I’m not sure that they would make sense to anyone but me. I have a tendency to create catalogs and lists of phrases and words more than anything else. So the notebooks are full of these dispersed between poem drafts. I suppose there’s a way in which the notebook then becomes a puzzle?

 AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?

ejk:  When I was in college I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Anselm Berrigan. At that time he was writing “Zero Star Hotel,” and I remember walking with him after class and he showed me what the poem looked like in his notebook. I remember thinking that the stanzas looked like windows, the poem a large building. I also remember that this was a moment that marked a shift in how I thought about my writing practice. I suddenly realized that the “journaling” I’d always done was writing in its own right. I continue to relish (and remember) moments where I notice a poet writing in a notebook because of how it makes their writing process tangible (to me) in a different way. 

AM: Why would you encourage someone interested in writing poetry to keep a notebook?

ejk: I think it is essential! I would encourage someone interested in writing anything to keep a notebook and to think of that notebook as a space with no predetermined goals. When I’ve worked with younger writers, there still seems to be a certain idealization of the notebook as a diary, a place to put one’s secrets and gossip. But, really, the notebook, for me at least, is a place to put anything that is done in writing. What is most useful is the discoveries that happen when I look back through all the writing I’ve done along the way. I’m able to find pieces of poems that can then find new homes in other projects. I can also see how my own writing is changing and how I want it to change. Because I do so much of my revision by hand, seeing the earliest drafts of pieces can often remind me of where I began in a project, and can also then guide me back to certain important questions that the work I’ve made might not have answered as of yet. I’ve been working on an epic trilogy for the past decade or so—thus far it includes INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books). I knew the project was a trilogy because of what I found in my notebooks.

Street Musicians [by birthday boy John Ashbery]

One died, and the soul was wrenched out   
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets   
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on   
The same corners, volumetrics, shadows   
Under trees. Farther than anyone was ever   
Called, through increasingly suburban airs   
And ways, with autumn falling over everything:   
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels   
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is. The other beached   
Glimpses of what the other was up to:
Revelations at last. So they grew to hate and forget each other.

So I cradle this average violin that knows   
Only forgotten showtunes, but argues
The possibility of free declamation anchored
To a dull refrain, the year turning over on itself   
In November, with the spaces among the days   
More literal, the meat more visible on the bone.   
Our question of a place of origin hangs
Like smoke: how we picnicked in pine forests,
In coves with the water always seeping up, and left   
Our trash, sperm and excrement everywhere, smeared   
On the landscape, to make of us what we could.

John Ashbery, “Street Musicians” from Houseboat Days. 
Copyright © 1987, 1979 by John Ashbery.

Astrological fact: Ashbery, a  July Leo with Virgo rising, and a lot of Virgo in his chart, outraged the astrological community by ending his poem “The Skaters” with these lines:

The constellations are rising
In perfect order:
Taurus, Leo, Gemini

From John Ashbery as Icon by Jonathan Walker:  <<< “By placing Leo ahead of Gemini, as if the world went from May to August and then back to June, Ashbery either (a) deliberately  subverted the natural “order,” (b) questioned the concept of “perfection” when related to the heavens (or any force outside of human agency),  or (c) exhibited an aloof indifference to fact, thus showing that (a) ignorance of esoteric matters is not a liability, or (2) one was entitled to disregard the Vietnam War as a subject even if good citizenship requires that one “brush the teeth” and all that. >>

Asked to comment, Ashbery recommended the Kirby cocktail at Trestle on Tenth, on 10th Ave and 24th St. The recipe consisted of “gin (Plymouth, I think), sweet vermouth (I think), cucumber juice (I think) made from kirby cucumbers, which are now in season--they're the small, pickle-like ones, Cynar aperitif (it's an Italian brand, made from artichokes), and orange bitters, which proved very difficult to find.  Maybe you could have one at the bar there to (a) see if you like it, and (b) coax the recipe out of the bartender (though they didn't seem very secretive about it).”

"Jackie Kennedy" [by Mary Maxwell]

Jackie Kennedy

Fabulous beast rumored to have roamed the dunes, a sighted unicorn
of sorts, gone to the Moors for a slumming late-night drink, or so
some claim. Somewhere behind her oft-photographed dark glasses,

possibly a private self.  Carrier of culture waving from the back of
the awful convertible.  Forty-four thousand acres of land protected
with her husband’s flourishing signature, just ahead of developers

eyeing the Provincelands and contemplating the construction of
a bridge from Long Point back to Plymouth.  At Land’s End, at
the Pilgrim’s landing site, did she order the very, very dry martini

preferred by Arthur Schlesinger? The Cold War’s narrow ties, its
playboy spies, gadgets and international girlfriends on the side. That
Atomic Age as one of optimism rather than doom, galactic horizons

as something other than a dump site for Earth’s waste. Outer space
versus inner resources.  Her favorite poem by Millay recalling all
our country’s youthful, windblown promise.  Iconic shared visage,

not only historic but component of us, a multitude’s satellite decade
with her as breathless bungling mother to a network generation. In
front of Town Hall, she’s resurrected in pillbox and tottering heels. 

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012).
Ed. note: Jackie Kennedy shares her birthday of July 28 with Marcel Duchamp and John Ashbery.

The Poet's Notebook: Jean Holabird’s Travel Notebooks [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: In 2019, I attended an eightieth birthday party for the New York City poet Tony Towle. The gathering was hosted by Tony’s good friend, the artist Jean Holabird, and Tony’s partner, the actress Diane Taylor. Having arrived at Jean’s Tribeca loft early, I had an opportunity to see some recent work. In particular, she shared a series of impressionistic Moleskine notebooks that she kept while traveling around the country on Amtrak over a period of two years during which her loft was being renovated by the owner. The drawings and poetic jottings in these notebooks blew me away, conjuring comparisons in my mind with the Fourteenth Century Travels of Sir John Mandeville or the travel poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Jean’s notebooks contain visual and textual snapshots, stills, and scenes from the places and moments she encountered on her wanderings, capturing poetic fragments of New York and America before and during the pandemic. Perhaps the larger story of place and time that her notebooks convey won’t be clear until many years hence. I asked Jean Holabird to contribute to this blog with a short reflection on her travel notebooks along with some images. Thank you so much, Jean!]   

Life, Illustrated

    Since my teens, I have chronicled life and travels in various media: writing, sketching in pencil, watercolors, oil paintings. The Moleskine notebooks did not coalesce into their present incarnation until 5 or 6 years ago. They have become, in effect, “visual” or “graphic” diaries.

   I was led to this gradually: remember watching my father draw on family trips (and trying to emulate) – a show of Roy Lichtenstein sketchbooks at MoMA several years ago (enchanting jottings of designs and ideas in colored pencil) – and, more recently, seeing the tiny notebooks kept by my friend, the wonderful artist John Willenbecher (filled with magical bits and pieces that had caught his fancy).

   Although depiction of the amazing places I have been lucky enough to visit has always been the driving force, there is also, as a friend opined, an attempt to “own” the objects of interest. Thus, the notebooks are, in a sense, the means to “own” my daily life. This was very important during the 2 years I spent as a nomad while my building was being re-furnished – the books were like anchors, mooring me to the present.

   In the year of the pandemic, they were companions as I roamed the emptiness of Lower Manhattan, marveling at, and recording the glorious blossoming of restaurants in the streets. 

Most of all, the notebooks are a fun way to keep track, seeing, and working. They are also quite useful at rendering the past retrievable, and providing material to be used in other formats.

  

   Jean Holabird, July, 2021  

“Sure, I Was Loved. . .” [by Anne Carson]

for Dimitris Papaioannou

I tame you.
(No you don’t).
You were nude.
You were intangible.
You were unconvincing.
You were vague.
You claimed you were born from angels.
You stank of the horrors of war.
You blazed with ruthless pride.
Your full, loose mouth blazed.
You had a fruit bloom.
You bloomed like a cannibal.
Ready to devour or be devoured.
Or both.
You had your portrait painted as a butcher’s block.
Yet you were not a still life.
You were meat but recently living.
You had come with your own legs.
I replaced your legs.
I replaced your crotch.
Crotches.
All of them.
You were ghosting around as if a mystery of Hymen.
I undressed you.
That is the only difference.
Beyond that there was little development between us.
I used crutches, stilts, evisceration, plaster casts.
I rooted your shoes.
I tilted the stage, I knocked it apart, I combined you with other genders.
I rolled up my sleeves.
I showed you no tenderness, we might as well have been sexual!
Or medical!
Or archaeologists!
I required you to clean up whatever mess we made.
I used the mess again next day.
I slowed your steps, inhibited your breathing, assaulted you with film score
music (waltz).
I littered the stage with open graves and you fell into them – hilarious!
I laughed at you!
I made you walk on your hands without oxygen or effective friends.
I made you build the floor you walked on.
I blew your clothes off.
I mangled your Orpheus scene.
I threw someone else’s thighs at you.
I doused you with the waters of Lethe.
I flattened you into a lozenge and stuffed you in my pocket.
I shot all the arrows of King Darius’ Persian army at you (fast!)
then made you pick them all up (slow).
I tossed your skeleton off its slab (it smashed).
I played with your skull.
I got you chasing a nostalgic scrap of paper then turned out the lights
and told the audience to go home.
Beyond that nothing was resolved between us.
The legs were of various heights.
You invited me into your golden age, I made you a stranger,
a loser, an arriviste, an undocumented alien, an unclaimed hostage,
a bad birthday gift.
I had you eaten into by the human.
I broke your energy,
I invented your gravity,
I pulled you out through your own peep-hole.
(No you didn’t).
I tame you.
(No you don’t).

Anne Carson will publish, with Rosie Bruno, a comic book version of Euripides’ Trojan Women in 2021

from the Times Literary Supplement (January 22, 2021)

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

Written (after Szymborska)

The written stone rests
in the unwritten river;
unwritten rain is falling
over the written town.

Nothing written today,
but tomorrow you’ll be written
as you sit in your room not writing.

Lo, it is written.
Pollen writes on the stamen.
The man writes a child
in the body of the woman.
Your eyes write the view
into the window,
but it doesn’t stay forever.
It returns with you into the unwritten.

All that means is written.
Lo, a tiger of a word
has escaped its cage.

Our quiet words
wait beneath the stair
for a reason to speak,
an edge or fold or cause
to remark. Oh, we say,
no way and no how.

This is how the world begins,
dark branches written
against a white sky.

The written stone rests
in the written river;
written rain falls
over the written town.

--Paul Hoover

Written (after Szymborska)

In teaching the work of Wisława Szymborska, the Nobel Prize winning Polish poet, I came across her lines about “a written deer running through a written forest.”  The phrase is magical and generative, reminding us of the central issue of writing, the encounter of the real and the imaginary.  Speaking the word “deer” brings them to mind, as we have individually experienced deer.  This form of magic was known by ancient Greeks as ekphrasis.  I’m drawn to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, because, in bringing us closer to the real, we discover the Real.  

--Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover's book, O, and Green:  New and Selected Poems will be published in August by MadHat Press / Plume Editions.  It includes selections from all his books since 2001.  With Maria Baranda he edited and translated The Complete Poems of San Juan de la Cruz, published by Milkweed Editions earlier this year.  He also edited, and in part translated, The New World Written:  Selected Poems of Maria Baranda (Yale University Press, 2021).  He is editor of the annual literary magazine, New American Writing, and two editions of Postmodern American Poetry:  A Norton Anthology (1994 / 2013).  His collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation, is available from University of Michigan Press.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eleven): Paul Hoover [by Angela Ball]

For me, an important question is whether a poem’s language seems to originate from outside the poet or from within. The first case allows for selection and collage, for serious play. Paul Hoover’s “Written” (after Szymborska) belongs in this camp, finding voice from a line of Wislawa Szymborska’s poem, “The Joy of Writing.” What results is a poem with these striking lines: “The man writes a child / in the body of the woman.” The article used for both participants, “the,” is impersonal. The preposition, “in,” with its stern accuracy, has the same coolness. These choices tell us we are in the realm of the primordial:

     This is how the world begins,
     dark branches written
     against a white sky.

The poem’s repetition of “written” hones the word, sharpens its force and the force of all words: “Lo [look!], a tiger of a word / has escaped its cage.”

The poem’s “written stone” is cousin to the stone in W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, “Easter, 1916,” where it lies unchanged “in the midst of all,” holding the “terrible beauty” of those martyred for Ireland in the Easter rising. Amid violent change, an abiding coolness. This is the temperature of Paul Hoover’s “Written,” in which words are marks, and primal remarks express surprise or disbelief: “Oh, we say, / no way and no how.” Why is the poem’s river “unwritten” at the beginning and “written” at the end? The answer is this poem, tiger of language and the permanence of meaning.

--Angela Ball

What is "The Longest Pleasure"? Lord Byron Knows

And is there not religion, and reform,

            Peace, war, the taxes, and what's call'd the "Nation"?

The struggle to be pilots in a storm?

            The landed and the monied speculation?

The joys of mutual hate to keep them warm,

            Instead of love, that mere hallucination?

Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure;

Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.

      
                                                by Lord Byron from Don Juan, Canto the Thirteenth

--sdh

The Poet's Notebook [by Andrew McCarron]

In one of his notebooks, Pablo Picasso wrote “je suis le cahier” (I am the notebook), which conveys the important role that keeping notebooks/sketchbooks played in his creative process. Picasso is hardly alone. From Leonard da Vinci’s fifty notebooks to the those of Allen Ginsberg, the keeping of notebooks has been an integral part of the creative act for many writers and artists. The fact that notebooks are handwritten, that they capture process, and that they are closest temporally to the moment of inspiration grants them a privileged place in the practices and legacies of writers. No wonder scholars pore over the notebooks of poets for insights into the mystery of their works. What’s also interesting is how some poets, such as Philip Larkin, attempt to destroy their notebooks, whereas others, like Ginsberg, sell them for considerable sums of money.  

As an undergraduate at Bard College in the mid-to-late 1990s, I had the great fortunate of taking a poetry workshop with John Ashbery during my sophomore year. We became friendly afterward and I was invited over to his home in Hudson, New York for lunch. Sitting in his upstairs study, I saw a spiral notebook of continuous prose propped up on a stand next to an antiquated computer. I asked about the notebook and he shared a bit about his process. The notebook in question would become his book-length poem Girls on the Run (1999), inspired by the paintings and 15,000-page fantasy novel of the eccentric Chicago-based artist, loner, and custodian Henry Darger (1892-1973). Ashbery explained that for this poem he had written everything in penciled prose first. There were no line or stanza breaks and minimal punctuation. Stream-of-conscious. Line and stanza breaks were determined later on as he typed the language into a word file.

That visit to Ashbery’s home precipitated my interest in seeking out (and possibly handling) the journals and notebooks of many of my favorite poets, including Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, James Schuyler, and Walt Whitman, the title of whose magnum opus, Leaves of Grass, literally means “pages of jottings,” precisely the sort of impressionistic writing that poets scribble into their notebooks. Whitman, as a poet of human forms and capacities, saw his work as a living organic body that was midwifed into existence through notebooks in which he discovered the possibilities of the long line and the multitudinous voice of the American self.  

If the philosopher John Dewey was correct by suggesting that all language is social, the poet’s notebook captures the conversations we have with ourselves before we turn and share our thoughts and feelings with others. Notebooks enable an inner life, and one that’s less governed by the demands of the publication market or laws of genre. In the notebook, one’s creative self can incubate. For young writers in particular, the proliferation of technology and social media has turned the notebook into an endangered species.

The blog entries posted over the coming days will contain a series of interviews and reflections that celebrate the poet’s notebook shared by Erica Kaufman, Carley Moore, Sam Truitt, and the artist Jean Holabird. I hope you enjoy!