The Best American Poetry

"At the Gate" [by Indran Amirthanayagam]

At the Gate

My mother lies down in her bed to wait,
in a white robe, hair spread on the pillow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.

My mother said she couldn’t rise, even late.
She says take her to a nursing home tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.

She speaks to her aunt, to mater and pater.
She wants to fly to Ceylon to a bungalow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gat.

Try to move your fingers, feet, shift your gait.
Try to straighten your legs, temple unfurrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.

Try, try, fall, try again. This is not fate.
This is obstinacy and wisdom not sorrow.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate.

I will wait by the gate, Mummy, and tell fate,
that angel, to give us ‘til tomorrow.
My mother lies down in her bed to wait.
Tomorrow an angel will arrive at her gate

Of Ithe author of this villanelle,  Terence Winch has noted, 'Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School.  In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having  become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s. >>> For more, click here. The poet was also the "pick of the week" in September 2021.

A Scary Prediction from June 2012 [by David Lehman]

On January 6, 2012, we ran this piece under the heading “A Scary Prediction -- China: Better Dead Than Red”:

<<<  Back in January 2008, when the media was fixated in Iowa, I predicted that Barack Obama would win the presidency and be re-elected. Stacey can confirm this prediction. Scarcely infallible, I picked Kerry to win in 2004. Nevertheless -- I think it's fun to go on the record with a prediction, and here is mine of the season:

I believe that in my lifetime the Unted States will go to war with China. And by war I mean military conflict -- to be fought primarily on the sea. It will require the shifting of our navy to the Pacific, which is under way, and our disengagement from the fruitless and basically irrational forays into Iraq and Afghanistan, which are winding down, as the Obama Administration replaces boots on the ground with drone strikes in Pakistan and computer hacking in Iran.

Since this is an interactive blog, I invite you to choose the Sarajevo or pretext for the naval battles to come in the ironically named Pacific Ocean:

(1) China's ancient cultural conflict with Japan rears its head. The Chinese interfere with a Japanese ship, and the loss of face in Japan is such that they ask the US to intervene.
(2) Chinese efforts to control North Vietnam spills over into South Korea
(3) China presses spurious claims to mineral-rich islands off Japan and the Philippines
(4) On the corporate level, China eats America's lunch because Chinese regulations put US firms at a decisive disadvantage
(5) A recession in China exposes the fundamental contradiction between the capitalism the Chinese practice and the government's repressive policies. Google makes its inroads. Riots break out among people whose consciousness has been raised. Among the rioters are parents dying to have more children than the government permits, laborers who feel exploited, and an intellectual class that learns there is a discrepancy between the government's official line and the truth -- as in: what were the real reasons the earthquake of May 2008 was so devastating?
Your pick, dear reader?  -- DL >>>

The collage is by David Lehman Copyright (c) 2012

"Fear of the Freight Elevator" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Well-founded fear of the freight elevator 
That once had inexplicably gone rogue

Boomeranging up and down between
The ground floor and the twelfth floor 
Without any cause that the agonized
Janitor could hope to understand until

Again inexplicably it suddenly stopped. 
But for how long would it be stopped?.

Thanked be fortune, the front elevator
Was ever predictable in the hands 
Of four septuagenarian elevator men:
Pete, Egnar, Joe, and a night shift man
   Whose proper name I didn't know;
   I just thought of him as Also Joe.

 

 

Rupert Wondolowski: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Tears Are Time Travel

 

I didn’t feel well.

Granny let me stay

home from school.

45 years passed.

Father died.

Like a champ.

Didn’t even dip into

the painkillers the

hospice left in plenty.

The night before he went

I asked him how he was doing.

He said “Okay, I just have to beat this.”

The day he died

bulldozers started tearing

at the woods behind our house.

A long feared and protested event

happening now like a staged

scene in a John Sayles movie.

Mother died.

Not so good.

Howls of the soul so

twisted and agonized that

a lifetime of horror movies,

Catholic school

and Flannery O’Connor

could not prepare me for.

I hunted mushrooms

in my backyard woods

wearing soggy Batman slippers

with my granny.

I’m still there.

I’m pretty much here.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Rupert Wondolowski is the author of Dreams Are My Social Life (Publishing Genius), Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon the Sea (Fell Swoop), The Origin of Paranoia as a Heated Mole Suit (Publishing Genius), and The Whispering of Ice Cubes (Shattered Wig Press). From 1988 to 2007 he edited the Shattered Wig Review literary arts zine and Shattered Wig Press, publishing 27 issues of the Review and close to 20 chapbooks by national authors, including many by cult author and artist Blaster Al Ackerman, on the Press.  During that time he also hosted monthly Shattered Wig Nights at the legendary Baltimore club, 14 Karat Cabaret, run by artist Laure Drogoul.

Since 2013 he has performed in spectral folk adjacent The Mole Suit Choir with Liz Downing and, since 2020, Greg Hatem. They have recorded and released three albums, Campfire Spacesuit, Phantom Paddle Boat, and Doomsday Lamp. They set the poetry of Rupert and other Baltimore poets to music with guitar, bowed banjo, and electronics.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                          Flannery O'Connor. Self-Portrait, 1953

An Interview with Diane Raptosh [by Nin Andrews]

Ever since I saw the review copy of I Eric America, I've wanted to interview you about this stunning collection. There is so much to love about this book. I especially admire the mythic quality of your writing. I  love origin stories. I thought we’d open this interview with your first poem.

 In this origin story, the moon crowns three people:
the mother, her children. In the original glory
a girl might birth her own brother. In this roiling
storehouse: relics from Delos, Sicily. Safe vests
for travel to Mars. In origin-storage: bloodroot.
Wet bulb. Torsi. Here and there worry seeps in
to rewrite the corm of the fathers. In its oaring
through woe, the tale will take in some deer. A dog.
This story’s original flora count locusts. Dogwood.
Fir trees. This tale refers to the genus of shrub
artemisia, holy mother of absinthe. Don’t you just
love how absinthe abs its way right smack into the
in the—exactly how epics start out: In the beginning,
maybe a girl ago, an original glory brined everyone kin—

DR: Not sure if I am supposed to say anything in response to this poem. It’s fair to say it represents a tendency of mine in poetry: I sometimes feel that I have to reinvent everything in each new book of poems—start the whole world over, create a new myth, reinvent language, reimagine new and better ways of being in community with fellow sentient beings. It is sometimes a debilitating expectation.

The cover is so beautiful as well. And it goes perfectly with the book. Who is it by?

DR: The cover is by a French artist Julien Tromeur; the title of the piece is "A Person Standing in the Air with a Star in Their Hand." I love the title of the photo as much as I love the photo.

What was the first book of poetry you read and then thought, I love this. I want to write like
this . . .  Can you say what it was about that poet/poem that inspired you? Maybe quote it here?

DR: I am very much influenced by the poetry, prose, and critical writings of Adrienne Rich. I return to her books often, inspired by the growth of her work and with it, the expansion of her soul and poetic vision. I love rereading her early poems in Diving into the Wreck. I am equally enraptured by her prose, in which she reminds us that poetry is a vastly underused national resource; she offers up the following wisdom for its possible utilities: I want a kind of poetry that doesn’t bother either to praise or curse at parties or leaders, even systems, but that reveals how we are — inwardly as well as outwardly — under conditions of great imbalance and abuse of material power. How are our private negotiations and sensibilities swayed and bruised, how do we make love — in the most intimate and in the largest sense — how (in every sense) do we feel? How do we try to make sense?

She goes on to say that [w]here every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions — not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

I remain in awe of how, with every new poetry collection, Rich reinvented self, investigated society, and “unsettled” language itself into as yet unconceived modes of imagining. I think of her as my lifelong teacher and envision her as an ideal reader.

You have such a musical ear. Did you ever play a musical instrument? Do you read and reread your work out loud?

DR: I did play the violin, the Suzuki method, by ear when I was a child. Sadly, I gave it up in my teen years, but it turns out that all that ear training was useful. I read and reread my work out loud and many times as well as silently. My brother Eric was the real musician in the family, a pianist.

This is a serious and seriously powerful book, but it contains so much light—so much wit and tenderness and brilliance. Sometimes, when reading, I just want to ask, how do you do it? How does a poem like this poem come about?

For my summer body, I would like
two pairs of buttocks: that populous
softness. An owl face peeping from my navel—
my gown-surround, a flock of orange
feathers. I’d want to have gold-red hair
and grebes’ lobed feet. I’d like even
the cleft of my knees to wreak bosom.
I want to pay egrets rent as I rise 
from a basket of corn ears. I’d like to
serve up a torso of locust and fir tree,                            
ankle and star husk—six hundred eaves’                                
daydreams of tones sieved from the tissues
of language. I want every aged ripeness
to die in my care. I want everyone born here.

DR: I would say this poem was an attempt to work into sonnet form the idea that I am a bit codependent. Ha! The experts have it that “codependents confuse caretaking and sacrifice with loyalty and love." Turns out this is not a great lifelong pattern on my part; as one of the sonnets puts it, “I egg on and over-care.” I was my brother’s primary caregiver for the first year and a half after his plane crash. I am a mother, a grandmother, a girlfriend, a daughter, a sister, a niece, an auntie. I have done an awful lot of caregiving over the decades, beginning in childhood. Still, it seems that our communities and societies, their fir trees and fauna, would benefit from more of an overall ethos of care. Who couldn’t use a little more—and better, more consistent—nurturing? Wondering about such things, I decided to concoct a new kind of I: part animal, part plant, part “ankle and star husk,” part grebes’ feet, part beauty, as a means to begin to care properly for everyone.

Why sonnets?  At what point did the sonnet become your form?

DR: I’ve been writing almost exclusively in the sonnet form for about the past five years. Not sure it’s “my” form, but I realized that the poems I was trying to write would benefit from the limitations of form, and the sonnet is so resilient, so elastic, that I just can’t turn away from it. In an earlier book I had written that “the sonnet’s a prison I lock myself in / so I can find new ways to break free,” and this continues to be true. I love the challenge of compression which the sonnet demands. It is the most amazing little rectangle of possibility in which almost anything can be done if you’re patient and keep returning to it. A bit like a yoga mat.

I hate the question, What is this book about? I think it reduces a book. No matter what the answer, a book worth reading is so much more than that. But this beautiful collection was written during a pretty dark time in your life?

DR: As much as anything, I would say the book is “about” the harmful, lasting and often unforeseen effects of unprocessed pain at the level of self, family, and nation. We all can trot out names of politicians and presidents who did not get the love they needed from their fathers in particular. Such unprocessed trauma ends up getting played out on the world stage in ways we know all too well. As selves within families and communities we project our unprocessed grief onto others: “All that rage—at last / —is what pain feels like when I air it in public.” The book hums all around the idea that we each must seek to heal our pain to keep from harming others with it. Put differently, who will not heal his own pain can only inflict it. The collection unfolds from the basic premise that “America is the nation-expression of / a severely traumatized person.” A related motif of the book, to which I’ve already alluded, is what feels to me like an overall lovelessness in America, a resounding lack of care for.

The book was written during a dark time, yes, personally. Collectively, I believe we have been experiencing a dark time for decades.

 And yet, out of darkness or suffering, you were able to write such beautiful poems?

 DR: Yes, well, I don’t know how to play the violin any more, so I had to do something!

 Writing teachers always tell students to find their voices, as if their voices are lost. How, when did you “find your voice.”  Don’t answer this if you think, as I do, it’s a stupid question.

DR: I don’t believe I have ever found my voice, honestly. If I have, it keeps changing, like a pubescent boy’s. I guess I make a voice, or perhaps a series of voices, in each collection by internalizing the subject of each piece. By listening to that great ineffable force behind the writing and letting it carry the day.

What issues do you struggle with most when you are writing a sonnet?   Do you edit obsessively? Does the editing process drive you nuts? Or do the poems flow out of you like water from a faucet?

DR: I edit obsessively, yes. The process sometimes relaxes me and sometimes drives me nuts. But I am made more crazy by simply living in the world without the aid, care, and possibilities afforded by poetry. It is very rare that a poem flows out of me like water! That is funny. Is it even a thing?

Funny, yes. But there are poets who claim not to edit. Or not to edit much. Frank O'Hara, Ashbery in his later years,  Ammons, at least with some of his poems.  I should make a list. But I digress. Back to you . . . 

What nonliterary subjects or hobbies or obsessions find their way into your poems? Or serve as sources of solace or inspiration?

DR: Not surprisingly, given many of the books I’ve written, including American Amnesiac, I’m very interested in American history and current affairs. Maybe because I was a single mother, always scanning the horizons for dangers, I have always kept a finger on the pulse of what is going on in America. I’ve made it a point never to be blindsided or duped by parties, leaders, or systems—to ferret out the truth, no matter how harsh: “Turns out my single-mom angst worked great as seeing-eye dog,” as one of the sonnets, a “fourteener,” puts it. Simply put, I wanted to make sure my children would be o.k. I would carve out a Plan A, Plan B, Plan F, G and Z to make sure we would all survive regardless of what the cruel systems of power had in mind for our present, for our futures.

On a lighter note, I love the word America. I can’t get over it. Just thinking about the sounds of the word thrills me. The word troubles me. I’m interested in troubles, in writing something more than the confessional poem. As the poet Shane McRae says “It is necessary for any artist who wishes to make work of more-than-personal lasting significance to have a non-standard relationship with the materials of their art. Words ought to trouble the poet, and the poet ought to trouble them back. If it’s useful to note, in I Eric America, I do try to trouble the language, since it is in fact in peril. I use the technique of anthimeria quite a bit: using verbs as nouns, nouns as verbs, adjectives as nouns, and so on. In other words, I destabilize nouns and verbs in order to mirror and enact family- and nation-level destabilizations upon which the poems meditate. 

Another sidebar: My poetry teacher in grad school, Alice Fulton (another huge influence on me, by the way), used to say that poets are athletes of the imagination. This is a terrific and apt metaphor. I’m involved in a lot of mostly solo sports: skiing, hiking, running, yoga. Athleticism is good training for poets. It lends a poet the never-give-up attitude we sometimes need.

How did you find Etruscan Press? I think of you as a perfect fit for Etruscan. Your a poet's poet, smart, quirky, brilliant, mythic . . .  I could go on . . . 

I somehow ended up on Etruscan’s website and read and admired its mission statement. I checked out all the authors and ordered a couple of books, somewhat at random, by a couple of Etruscan writers: Myrna Stone’s Luz Bones, and H.L. Hix’s Legible Heavens. I was really wowed by these books and thought, well I will send them American Amnesiac. And boy was that one of the smartest things I ever did in my life. Etruscan Press is outstanding in so many ways, and everyone associated with the press, deeply kind.

If you were giving a reading, what poem would you always want to read? Maybe we can close with that.

I want to name America my brother,
since we all see that eric stashed in
the navel of nation-state. I want the union
to man an inner change of location, to shift
from the seed of Eric meaning one, alone,
unique, to its roots in long-time journey;
everlasting, eternity. I would like the place
to navel-gaze just enough to note that
dogwood’s frail stateliness. To annotate
decency. To nightly simulcast grace. I’d like
the state to glide on its rims, scuffed and
abraded, forging new rubrics of spine. I’d like
the nation to state out loud: All that rage—at last
—is what pain feels like when I air it in public. 

Diane Raptosh’s collection American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. She teaches literature and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. 

I Eric America is her ninth book. www.dianeraptosh.com 

RJG BD [on Dick Gallup; by Ron Padgett]

RJG BD

Richard John Gallup, wake up,
it’s your birthday, or maybe you’re
already awake and the spotlight
of the day is following you around
the stage and you can’t get away,
you are shining and special all
this very day you came sliding out
and your mother said Oy vey
though she was not Jewish
and in fact had never even heard
that expression before you taught it to her,
but let me explain that she said it
because having a child can hurt
and plenty, and being a child can hurt too,
which is why we never grow up or if we do
we’re awful, so it’s great that you never did
and I never did and probably won’t,
for even though we might totter and drool
we can always say Oy vey!

—Ron Padgett
2003 (previously unpublished)

Here's the cover of Ron Padgett's forthcoming book, a memoir of Dick Gallup, which Cuneiform Books will publish.

James Earl Jones (1931-2024) reads "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

For Friday the 13th:

Byron's "Don Juan " and "So, We'll Go No More a-Roving" -- Great Poems of the World, Episode 10, with David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

   


           George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1788–1824

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, we'll go no more a roving

So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

from "Don Juan, Canto I"

I want a hero: an uncommon want,
    When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
    The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
    I’ll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan—
We all have seen him, in the pantomime,
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time.

Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke,
    Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe,
Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk,
    And fill’d their sign posts then, like Wellesley now;
Each in their turn like Banquo’s monarchs stalk,
    Followers of fame, ‘nine farrow’ of that sow:
France, too, had Buonaparte and Dumourier
Recorded in the Moniteur and Courier.

Barnave, Brissot, Condorcet, Mirabeau,
    Petion, Clootz, Danton, Marat, La Fayette,
Were French, and famous people, as we know:
    And there were others, scarce forgotten yet,
Joubert, Hoche, Marceau, Lannes, Desaix, Moreau,
    With many of the military set,
Exceedingly remarkable at times,
But not at all adapted to my rhymes.

Nelson was once Britannia’s god of war,
    And still should be so, but the tide is turn’d;
There’s no more to be said of Trafalgar,
    ’Tis with our hero quietly inurn’d;
Because the army ’s grown more popular,
    At which the naval people are concern’d;
Besides, the prince is all for the land-service,
Forgetting Duncan, Nelson, Howe, and Jervis.

Brave men were living before Agamemnon
    And since, exceeding valorous and sage,
A good deal like him too, though quite the same none;
    But then they shone not on the poet’s page,
And so have been forgotten:—I condemn none,
    But can’t find any in the present age
Fit for my poem (that is, for my new one);
So, as I said, I’ll take my friend Don Juan.

Most epic poets plunge ‘in medias res’
    (Horace makes this the heroic turnpike road),
And then your hero tells, whene’er you please,
    What went before—by way of episode,
While seated after dinner at his ease,
    Beside his mistress in some soft abode,
Palace, or garden, paradise, or cavern,
Which serves the happy couple for a tavern.

That is the usual method, but not mine—
    My way is to begin with the beginning;
The regularity of my design
    Forbids all wandering as the worst of sinning,
And therefore I shall open with a line
    (Although it cost me half an hour in spinning)
Narrating somewhat of Don Juan’s father,
And also of his mother, if you’d rather.

In Seville was he born, a pleasant city,
    Famous for oranges and women—he
Who has not seen it will be much to pity,
    So says the proverb—and I quite agree;
Of all the Spanish towns is none more pretty,
    Cadiz perhaps—but that you soon may see;
Don Juan’s parents lived beside the river,
A noble stream, and call’d the Guadalquivir.

His father’s name was Jose—Don, of course,—
    A true Hidalgo, free from every stain
Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source
    Through the most Gothic gentlemen of Spain;
A better cavalier ne’er mounted horse,
    Or, being mounted, e’er got down again,
Than Jose, who begot our hero, who
Begot—but that ’s to come—Well, to renew:

His mother was a learned lady, famed
    For every branch of every science known
In every Christian language ever named,
    With virtues equall’d by her wit alone,
She made the cleverest people quite ashamed,
    And even the good with inward envy groan,
Finding themselves so very much exceeded
In their own way by all the things that she did.

Her memory was a mine: she knew by heart
    All Calderon and greater part of Lope,
So that if any actor miss’d his part
    She could have served him for the prompter’s copy;
For her Feinagle’s were an useless art,
    And he himself obliged to shut up shop—he
Could never make a memory so fine as
That which adorn’d the brain of Donna Inez.

Her favourite science was the mathematical,
    Her noblest virtue was her magnanimity,
Her wit (she sometimes tried at wit) was Attic all,
    Her serious sayings darken’d to sublimity;
In short, in all things she was fairly what I call
    A prodigy—her morning dress was dimity,
Her evening silk, or, in the summer, muslin,
And other stuffs, with which I won’t stay puzzling.

abve: Byron in Albanian attire

"Unforgettable" [by David J. Rothman]

Unforgettable

            --in memoriam Emily Desire Gaynor Rothman, 1964-2020

Let me forget all that reminds me of

You: the shoes, heels worn down the way your gait

Would wear them, the photos, rings pledged with love,

The documents from your dissolved estate,

Our wedding china, sons, notes to yourself,

The boxes, stones and shells that you collected,

The old ski gear, the stylish belts, the shelf

Of jewelry that you carefully selected

With instructions to give it to friends.

And let me soon forget the sound of your

Low voice when you said After my life ends,

I hope you wait a while, but then live your

Life. Find another woman. Live your life.

If I forget all that, will you return, my wife?

-- When young, David J. Rothman had the good fortune to study with Czeslaw Milosz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand and Robert Fitzgerald. His most recent books are a textbook, Learning the Secrets of English Verse (Springer 2022), co-authored with Susan Spear, and My Brother’s Keeper (Lithic 2019). "Unforgettable" is one of two poems by David J. Rohman in the current issue of The Hudson Review.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 11, 2024

Ayokunle Falomo’s Autobiomythography of was published yesterday by Alice James Books. This powerhouse of a book—with a powerhouse of a title—centers on the stories we tell ourselves and each other, the mythologies of our families, our struggles, our heritage. Falomo begins the first poem in his book “I was a boy once &/ I did not show the world my teeth…”  In the leaps that follow, he is ready to show us now—his grit, his humor, his vulnerabilities, his Nigerian sensibility—in poems that explore colonization and decolonization, the identities thrust upon him and those he chooses. The book is a wild inner-globetrotting which ends with the tender “Thank You Ancestors Who Loved Me.” Interspersed are a series of spectacular “self-portrait” poems like this one:

https://www.usi.edu/sir/ruth-awad-poetry-picks/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird

Congratulations, Ayokunle!

https://www.usi.edu/sir/ruth-awad-poetry-picks/self-portrait-with-thorn-necklace-and-hummingbird

Congratulations, Ayokunle!

"The blue light in the guest bathroom" [by Mitch Sisskind]

In the guest bathroom a faux-marble counter 
Surrounds the sink and a plastic toilet seat
Also has the appearance of black marble.

Each closet in the apartment has a switch 
To ignite a bulb as the closet door opens but
In the guest bathroom the opposite is true.

When the door of the guest bathroom closes
A beguiling blue light above the door reflects
Off glass-covered leopard skin-print wallpaper.

Bathrooms exist as well in the guest bedroom,
The child's bedroom, and adjacent the walk-in
Closet of the so-called master bedroom where

A small safe in the walk-in closet might attract
Someone's brief notice on the way to the
master bedroom’s bathroom while away in the

Long hall a cedar closet becomes shrouded 
In darkness as the door closes to create
An unexpected seclusion space but neither 

The small safe by the master bedroom
Nor the halcyon confine of the cedar closet 
Beguile like the blue light in the guest bathroom.

Advice to Young Poets and a Poem by Kelli Russell Agodon [by Nin Andrews]

Recently I’ve had the honor of being asked to Zoom with several graduate poetry classes. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a classroom by Zoom or otherwise, and I’m less practiced at answering the predictable questions such as—how/when/why do you write and where do you find inspiration, and what is your writing process, and what advice do you have for young writers, and . . . 

In one class, a fellow guest-teacher and poet offered the advice: write from the heart. And don’t wait around. Life is short. Such good advice! I thought.

But I began to wonder, Do I do that? Or do I just write out of habit? Wasn’t it Flaubert who said inspiration comes from sitting at the same desk at the same time of day every day?

Or do I  write from anxiety? Or existential discomfort? Like Anne Sexton, I’m always trying to get rid of the rat inside me. But what about those days when inspiration never happens? And the rat keeps running and running on its little wheel? 

I was reminded of the Amor Towles story, The Ballad of Timothy Touchett, in which Timothy Touchett dreamt of literary fame but discovered he had nothing to write about. He blamed his lack of suffering. “How could one expect to craft a novel of grace and significance when one’s greatest inconveniences had included the mowing of lawns in spring, the raking of leaves in fall, and the shoveling of snow in winter?” “Timothy’s parents hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.” So instead of writing, Timothy studied the habits of famous writers.   

Like Timothy Touchett, I enjoy studying other writers' habits. I want to know what kinds of sorcery they employ. As a result, I can tell you that John Updike ate so much when he wrote, he didn’t like to go out to lunch and worried about his figure. He was partial to oatmeal cookies. Joan Didion edited at the end of the day with a drink in hand (Liquor, of course, played an important role for a lot writers—no need to list them all here.) John Ashbery enjoyed a nice cup of tea and classical music when he wrote, which was usually in the late afternoon. Charles Simic enjoyed writing when his wife was cooking. Eudora Welty could write anywhere—even in the car— and at any time, except at night when she was socializing. Flannery O’Connor could only write two hours a day and her drink was Coca Cola mixed with coffee. Simone de Beauvoir wrote from 10AM-1PM and from 5-9PM. Louise Glück found writing on a schedule "an annihilating experience." A. R. Ammons wrote only when inspiration hit—he compared trying to write to trying to force yourself to go the bathroom when you have no urge. Anne Sexton took up writing after therapy sessions. Jack Kerouac had various rituals at different times—one was writing by candlelight, and another was doing “touch downs” which involved standing on his head and touching his toes to the ground. Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf wrote standing up. Wallace Stevens composed poems while walking to work. Gabriel García Márquez listened to the news before writing.  Amy Gerstler sometimes listens to recordings of rain while writing. I tried that once, and the rain put me into a deep and dreamless sleep.

I have only one rule. Never write after dark. If I do, especially if I try to edit, I destroy whatever I’ve written, line by line, word by word, until there is nothing left. It happens quickly. 

I also have a ritual. If I am stuck, I ask the muse for help. Then I read a personal forecast of some kind. Shake an 8-ball. Check out my astrology. Flip open a book of poetry at random and find one line to use as if it were an instruction or a secret message. It’s surprising how much help is available, should one ask for help.

My most recent source of advice/instruction came from this poem:

Surrealist Angel 


        by Kelli Russell Agodon

Be lost.

Be the howling stars of the quiet
coyote. Arrive at the roadway
without a plan, without knowing
where you will go.

Turn left.

Be the firefly. Be the moth.

Be the couple in the car who has fallen
in love for the hundredth time.

Be the clock, their hands.

Be the bell chiming from the church
and the patrons leaving
the bar. Be the drink they keep
in their hands, the holy water
they bathed in.

Turn back. Turn forward.

Be the headlights of the taxi,
the sidewalk, the dark stairs
leading to the bright apartment.

See the glow in the window
and want to be that glow.
See another person reaching for another.

Be the silhouette behind the shade.

 

 

Part 2: Advice on Revision and the Pleasure of Burning Manuscripts with Gaylord Brewer [by Nin Andrews]

In my last post, I talked about Zoom classes, about advice (or lack thereof) that I have offered to MFA students. I decided to add a part 2  because I avoided the topic of revision. It’s my least favorite subject. Of course, students always ask if I revise and how and  . . .

I wish I didn’t have to revise. I am unspeakably envious of poets like Frank O’Hara, who was famous for not revising. Of A. R. Ammons [pictured, left] who could write a poem like “City Limits” in one sitting. Of Max Jacob who composed  in a notebook while walking through Paris and wrote:  “The ideas I found in this way seemed sacred to me and I didn't change a comma. I believe that prose which comes directly from meditation is a prose which has the form of the brain and which it is forbidden to touch.” (From an interview with John Ashbery in the Paris Review)

Alas.  I revise and revise up to the last minute before a poem or book is published, and then I keep on revising. As to advice?

I like George Saunders’ advice: Also found here

And Jane Hirshfield’s list.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar, a brilliant teacher and poet, teaches a systematic approach to revision in which one examines every part of speech in a poem. 

One of my favorite teachers, Sydney Lea,  said “that if he writes 13 drafts of a poem, he often ends up going back to the 11th.”

If only I had just 13 drafts to deal with. I might write 60 drafts and need to go back to the 20^th. Sometimes an entire poem is lost when I can’t find my way back to the moment before I killed it.

Gregory Orr once told me my poems were like flowers that had lost their stems and leaves and sometimes their petals. They were, he remarked, kind of bald.

An early draft is like an overdressed woman. I slowly remove layer after layer of her clothes. By draft 15, she is naked. Then I open her further—it’s sort of like opening a Russian doll. I want the inner woman. The one the others (who are just shells after all) are huddled on top of, protecting her secrets. But there’s always a risk of taking off too many layers and ending up with that little wooden bowling pin at the center—a faceless, colorless, genderless alien.  The bald thing Gregory Orr beheld.

In the end, I agree with Paul Vaery who said, “a poem is never finished, it is only abandoned.”

There comes a time when abandonment of one’s work is a relief.  Even a cause for celebration. A time when Gaylord Brewer’s advice comes in handy.

Advice on Burning Manuscripts
by Gaylord Brewer

A simple charcoal grill for a simple task works best, rickety and self-assembled. Bear in mind a manuscript of even moderate ambition makes a dense sheaf, so an igniting fluid will be necessary. Set beloved pages gently onto the grate, douse liberally, and touch each corner with a struck match. Take your time. No urgency is required, no violence beyond the awaking flame itself. A ritual of release, not revenge. The intimate, irremediable act. Sip your beverage of choice and squint through coruscating fumes as the autumn night descends. (It is of course October, month of regret, reflection, and sorcery.)

As top pages, transmogrified, curl into the twilight like black moths, and a simmering, steady heat caresses the body of work, cover with the lid. Your part is done. Trust fire now to bring the words to their inarguable conclusion.

In my twenties I burned a novel and witnessed its conflagration. The Death of Auguste Rodin. Indeed. Days later, I followed with my entire folder of short stories. Fourteen. No carbons, no files, no discs, no jump drives. Students tend to stare incredulously when I sometimes conjure those sweet moments. No exhilaration, no fervor, certainly no regret. Just a settling calm, the confidence of a right thing, as ragged tissues of ghosts silently rose in the chill of evening. Embers, aglow on their grave, sputtering a few last, spent words.

Leopardi's "The Infinite" [translated by Henry Weinfield]

THE INFINITE
Giacomo Leopardi

Dear to me always was this lonely hill,
This hedgerow also, which to such extent
Keeps the horizon hidden from the view.
But sitting here and gazing brings to mind
Interminable spaces, superhuman
Silences, and the very deepest calm
Beyond what sight perceives, till what I feel
Is on the verge of fear. And when the wind
Is rustling through these branches, I compare
The infinite silence to this voice I hear.
And then eternity returns to me,
And the dead seasons and the present one
Alive with all the sounds it bears. And so,
My thought is shipwrecked in immensity,
And sweet it is to drown in such a sea.

(1819)

The New York School Diaspora (Part 77): David Hernandez [by Angela Ball]

Hello I Must Be Going

Really nice meeting you sorry
I have to hurry off there’s this thing
happening this thing I must do
you too yes dying is the thing
everyone is not talking about it
why ruin karaoke night why discolor
the air between you and the bartender
hello what can I get for you
it’s miraculous we’re here and then
the world is yanked from us and then
time dismantles our bodies to dust
okay um can I help the next customer
see it would be awkward
let’s not bring it up mum’s the word
come on now we’ve still got
some living to do pick up that trumpet
I’ve got mine already never mind
we can’t play any instruments
the point is to make a sound
any sound in this endless parade
shimmering toward silence

                                             - David Hernandez

David Hernandez's most recent collection of poems, Hello I Must Be Going (Pitt Poetry Series, 2022), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include Dear, Sincerely (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016); Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry; Always Danger (SIU Press, 2006), winner of the Crab Orchard Series; and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). David has been awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares and Southern Review. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.

The New York School Diaspora (Part 77): David Hernandez

David Hernandez’s “I Really Must be Going” is in a terrific hurry but never blurs.  Its title (and that of the book it lives in) originally belongs, of course to Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers, performing what is possibly the funniest comic production number in movie history. Groucho twits the assembly of adoring guests (including the hostess, the redoubtable actress Margaret Dumont) by singing his true desire while performing the role of pith-helmeted “African Explorer” perfectly in every other way, proving that once a gestalt is established, it can withstand almost any amount of silliness, so long as the pretentions of onlookers keep it afloat.

In Hernandez’s poem, a tacit understanding avoids morbidity while it invokes “I,” “you,” and “we” in a way that surrounds us with a universal problem: death, when it comes, breaks off every interaction--even having a drink in a bar (some victims at Pompeii were surely lavaed in a bôite).  It’s a delicate subject, one that must be stumbled into:

     . . .there’s this thing

     happening this thing I must do

     you too yes dying is the thing

     everyone is not talking about it

     why ruin karaoke night why discolor

     the air between you and the bartender

     hello what can I get for you

Just as Groucho’s song accelerates, so does the poem, without sleeping policemen of punctuation. It’s clear that what Philip Larkin calls “unresting death” is everywhere precisely because “everyone is not talking about it”—why “discolor / the air”?  We agree, for the most part, to keep things light, preserve appearances—it’s why we say of someone dead that they’ve “passed.” Kenneth Koch’s brilliant late poem, “Proverb,” literalizes that speedy passing: “Les morts vont vite” while “We living stand at the gate / and life goes on.” Hernandez’ poem, more comic but just as scarifying, x-rays the social. It resembles a jazz funeral’s second line, that aims to replace sadness with celebration—at the same time poking fun at itself, knowing it must fail.

We are reminded of Frank O’Hara’s posthumously discovered (by Kenneth Koch) “Talking to the Sun at Fire Island,” when at the end of the poem the sun says, “. . .go I must, they’re calling / me.” Frank wants to know who “they” are. “Some / day you’ll know,” says the sun. Somehow, the exuberance of O’Hara’s poem survives the darkening at its close—but also depends on it. The exuberance in Hernandez’s, forced by custom, must obey strict rules:

     let’s not bring it up mum’s the word 

     come on now we’ve still got

     some living to do pick up that trumpet

     I’ve got mine already never mind

     we can’t play any instruments

     the point is to make a sound

The sound that “Hello I Must be Going” makes is urgently, supremely dramatic. Simply put, it surrounds us with what matters. Hollis Summers, a fine poet who taught at Ohio University, used to say that any good poem should be worthy of being “carved in stone.” Hernandez’s poem—as colloquial and broken-off as it is—somehow achieves this state. We participate in its monologue, resort to trumped-up gaiety replaced in the end by eloquent despair: “make a sound /any sound in this endless parade/shimmering toward silence”  - Angela Ball

Roger Eagle [by John Harbourne]

from the artist John Harbourne, this missive from Liverpool:

<<<
The drawing was done in 2017. It’s a portrait of Roger Eagle, who was manager of the world famous Eric’s club in Mathew Street, Liverpool in the 1970s. In the 60s, Roger had been DJ at the Twisted Wheel in Manchester, where he played his vast collection of R&B records and eventually promoted his favourite artists, who came over to Britain to play. Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, John Lee Hooker and Howling Wolf were just a few of the famous names he promoted over here. 

The jukebox in Eric's club was famously eclectic, full of Roger's favourite music and was an education to many of us back in the day. My drawing shows three of his favourite artists: Bo Diddley, Charlie Parker and King Tubby (on the lapel badge).

>>>

johnharbourneartist.com

Lola Haskins: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

________________________________________________________________

The Discovery

 

On walking, in my seventies, down a leafy street

behind two women in their early forties who

are chatting to each other as companionably

as birds on a limb, and having thought, with

happy anticipation, ah, I'll be their age soon!

it occurs to me that I've lost my mind—but

just then the clouds evanesce and light pours

through the oaks and ash, to form lace on

the pavement lovely enough to be sewn

into dresses, and I see that time is as

random as the patterns the sun makes on

any given day as it filters through leaves,

and as illusory as a baby being born, and

as strange as the years of our lives that

go by without returning, and as equal as

the one friend's auburn hair and the red leaf

she steps over, which the wind has abandoned

for love of her.  And now, having finally

seen that the world is every minute new,

I realize that I'm only a little younger than

those women after all, and I step between

them, and we speak as we walk, and by

the time we part, each of us in her own way

has told the others how lucky she is,

to have been alive in such a beautiful place.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Lola Haskins has published 14 books of poetry and three of nonfiction. Her work has appeared widely in magazines and been broadcast on the BBC and NPR. Her latest collection, Homelight (Charlotte Lit Press 2023), was named Poetry Book of the Year by Southern Literary Review, and was a Hoffer Grand Prize finalist. The one before that, Asylum (University of Pittsburgh, 2019), was featured in the New York Times Magazine and will shortly be featured in The John Clare Journal. Past honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, two NEAs, two Florida Book Awards, narrative poetry prizes from Southern Poetry Review and New England Poetry Review, a Florida's Eden prize for environmental writing, and the Emily Dickinson prize from Poetry Society of America.  

_______________________________________________________________________________________

                                          Vincent van Gogh, Olive Trees (1889), Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Jack Kerouac, Columbia's football star [by Mitch Sisskind]

I have enjoyed reading on this site about Jack's outstanding work in Mark Van Doren's class at Columbia. However, while it may be true that Jack quit the football team after receiving an 'A' in the class, this is not actually why he quit the team. In 'Vanity of Dulouz,' one of his last books -- it may even have been posthumous -- Jack makes it very clear that he left the team out of frustration at the Columbia Coach. The Coach's real name was Lou Little, and I believe in the book Jack refers to him as Lou Libble. Here he is...

As the book describes it, Little (or Libble) had a tremendous fixation on a reverse play called KF-79. He had won a game with it thousands of years ago, when he was so happy he fell off his dinosaur. Now he kept insisting that Kerouac practice this play over and over, which pissed Jack off. Plus, Jack had broken his leg sometime earlier and Lou had moved him down in the depth chart, very unfairly in Jack's opinion. So Jack left the team. In fact, not long afterward he left Columbia altogether.

Jack was a good player in high school in Massachusetts, and I believe he did a postgraduate year at Horace Mann School where he also played. He was probably the best football playing writer ever, certainly the best since U. of Penn All-American T. Truxton Hare in the early years of the 20th century. 'Vanity of Dulouz' is one of the best books ever about football, although only the opening section actually deals with the game. Jack had the ability (like Homer) to magnify a small incident like a football game into something on the scale of the Normandy invasion. 'Dulouz' is really good, and you feel like you're right next to Jack on the field, or on your barstool.

However, the all time best book on football -- in fact, it's in a completely different league than any other football book -- is Don Delillo's End Zone. Which is wonderful, because unless I am mistaken Delilo did not play the game past the high school level and I'm not sure he even played high school ball. In this sense he's a kind of Stephen Crane, who wrote convincingly about combat without having taken part in it. Well, Tolstoy said if you've seen a street fight you can write about a war. If you've seen Mr. Smee, you can write about Captain Hook. If you've seen a dachshund, you can write about a Shar Pei. Trust me!

from the archive; July 27, 2008

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes [by Thomas Gray]

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

'Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.

Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause.

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide
Two angel forms were seen to glide
The genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue
Through richest purple to the view
Betrayed a golden gleam.

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretched in vain to reach the prize.
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat’s averse to fish?

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent
Again she stretch’d, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between.
(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled,
She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood
She mewed to every watery god,
Some speedy aid to send.
No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;
Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;
A Favourite has no friend!

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;
Nor all that glisters, gold.

-- Thomas Gray

with thanks to Henri Matisse for the great painting. A critic recently wrote that "One poem like Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' will drag you into anthologies forever, no matter how dull your other poems."  Thomas Gray is anything but dull in such poems as this one, or "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College," about which I wrote this..Here is an excerpt from the piece.  DL

 <<<
I have read Gray’s “Ode” many times and it has never failed to astonish me. It begins conventionally enough with a description of Eton seen from afar. “Happy” are the hills, “pleasing” is the shade. We anticipate an idealized evocation of the life of boys on the playing fields of Eton (where, 70 years later, the Duke of Wellington would say that the battle of Waterloo was won). But even as Gray summons up the image of the boys at their games, we get hints that Eton remembered is what Frost called a “momentary stay against confusion.” The boys “snatch a fearful joy,” we learn in the fourth stanza. The fifth stanza states the enviable condition of youth: “the tear forgot as soon as shed.” But nothing prepares us for the change in intensity signaled by the opening of stanza six: “Alas, regardless of their doom,/ The little victims play.” At the sound of the words doom and victim, the reader is in the position of a batter who had expected a fast ball and looks in amazement and dismay as an off-speed pitch curves over the heart of the plate.
>>>   

https://www.slate.com/articles/arts/classic_poems/2013/01/david_lehman_on_why_thomas_gray_s_ode_on_a_distant_prospect_of_eton_college.html

https://panoply.fm/podcasts/slatepoetry/episodes/yfUbNxo70OwA8us0iCy0K

Tom Hall interviews Mary Jo Salter about BAP 2024

https://www.wypr.org/show/midday/2024-09-03/the-best-american-poetry-of-2024

Midday

The Best American Poetry of 2024

By Tom Hall, 

Teria Rogers

Published September 3, 2024 at 12:40 PM EDT

Courtesy of Simon and Schuster

The Best American Poetry 2024, edited by Mary Jo Salter

Tom's guest is Mary Jo Salter, a Professor Emerita in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has written essays, lyrics, and children’s books. This year, she’s been chosen as the guest editor of an anthology of verse called The Best American Poetry 2024. 

Salter will discuss this new anthology this evening[(Setpember 3, 2024: our official pub date]at The Ivy Bookshop.

Courtesy Photo

Mary Jo Salter, poet and former professor at Johns Hopkins University

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