The Best American Poetry

Vincent Katz, Guest Author September 13-17

photo © Vivien Bittencourt

This week we welcome back Vincent Katz as our guest author. Vincent is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), which received a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010 to 2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, he collaborated with Sarah Sarhandi on the opera While There's Light, based on his translations of Propertius. He lives in New York City.

Find out more about Vincent Katz here. 

Welcome back, Vincent.

-- sdl

Kora Lives! [by Vincent Katz]

WKCR is on, as it often is at this time of day, and they are playing selections from Miles Davis’s fusion period — “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Splashdown,” to name two. It is providing the right vibe, as the radio often does, to composing thoughts about two books that are on my mind. When I was a teenager, a little after those Miles tunes were released, I had some favorite books of poetry. They were talismans, I carried them with me, they could ward off depression and evil by their mere presence, without even needing to be opened, or read. Part of that had to do with their physical presence. I remember the series of books Gary Snyder published with New Directions, especially, one summer, Earth House Hold. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, published by Grove Press (the edition with the red and purple cover overlaying a photo of O’Hara seated on a Gothic stool). The same poet’s Lunch Poems, from City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, back when the covers were not glossy. They were printed on soft card stock, each title in identifying format and design, differentiated by the color combinations. Lunch Poems will always recall the orange and blue in its layout. Another book I carried with me everywhere that summer I was 15 was another title from the Pocket Poets Series, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

I loved Kora in Hell. Just gazing at its cover was of inestimable benefit to me, and I enjoyed reading it. It felt very adult, its jokes easily understood, its thought-connections sublime and not necessarily accessible to all. It represented a kind of secret knowledge. This was unlike some of Williams’s better known poetry, which prided itself on using everyday language and meeting the reader halfway. It was modern, in that it didn’t always feel like what poetry was supposed to feel like, but it was anti-modernist, or maybe non-modernist, in its ratcheting down of degree of difficulty. Anybody could read those poems (though not anybody can write them!). Kora was different. I liked the classical reference in the title, the Greek word kora itself, coupled with that word “Improvisations.” I think that was the one that got me the most. I was listening to a lot of jazz; the idea of improvising a book, or sections that made up a book, was thrilling to me.

Looking around last year, I realized I no longer had that copy of Kora, so I ordered another one. I made sure to order one from one of the earlier printings, a first edition it looks like. I just wanted to make sure I got one that looked and felt like the originals, as though it was made of cotton, dyed red. “March had always been my favorite month…” the prologue tells us. And, “What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination be called verse.” I agree with Williams that these are not like French prose poems, but to my mind they are poems in verse:

“Fools have big wombs. For the rest? — here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further : if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.”

That is the first section of the first “chapter”. Each chapter is composed of three numbered sections, some have which have corresponding texts in italics. I was going to say that my reading this time, some forty-odd years later, showed that these early experiments of Williams’s were not as successful as I remembered. But the reading, the looking at the text, does not allow me such an easy assessment. A poem can be made of anything we are told in Chapter XX. In the final chapter, we learn, “The particular thing… dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry.” A little more on imagination’s transformative power (“How ridiculous!”), how leaves blowing on the ground have forgotten the branch on which they grew, yet somehow “invoke a burst of warm days not of the past nothing decayed : crisp summer!” And the final paragraph informs us:

“Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises : this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness.”

Maybe it’s the way I read it that needs to change. Instead of starting at the beginning and attempting to forge straight through, I should glimpse things here and there, creating my own patterns within those suggested by the poet in his improvisations. Kora was first published in 1920 by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. At that time, Williams was half the age he would be (74) when the next edition, published by City Lights, came out.

Anne Waldman has a granddaughter named Kora. Anne the adept of so many traditions, including the Greek. I’ve been reading her many books, trying to keep up with her, delighted. Lately, I got focused on her 2004 book, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, published by Penguin in the Penguin Poets series. The books Waldman has published with Penguin form a remarkable series in that they are not so much collections of separate poems as book-length meditations on specific areas of consciousness: Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Trickster Feminism.

Structure may be the most particular of all, as it is devoted to a specific subject, a specific location, a specific object, a specific man-made holy sanctuary devoted to the veneration of the divine: the Borobudur stupa, built in the 9^th century CE in Java, Indonesia. An introductory note explains: “Designed as both mandala or psychological map for the Buddhist pilgrim, as well as a spiritual challenge to the curious layperson or secular aesthete, Borobudur was built on a hill that sits on Java’s lush Kedu plain. It has a long and complex history and was almost lost until its ‘discovery’ in the nineteenth century… Most powerful at this site perhaps is the narrative sequence of reliefs carved into the million stones, narratives which teach a spiritual, gentle, and harmonious way of life. The reliefs are arranged so that as one ascends the stupa the stories turn complicated and abstract… Borobudur is essentially an image of the world according to the Buddhism of the Mahayana.”

Waldman’s book is not so much about the stupa as it is a guide to Mahayana in the form of experimental poetry for which the poet has become known. Waldman has taken cues from Williams’ In the American Grain, his epic poem Paterson, and Charles Olson’s call for “a saturation job,” applying study to a wide range of topics. In Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, the reader is treated to Waldman’s takes on the “Four Noble Truths,” “Walking Out of Six Styles of Imprisonment” (hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, warring god realm, god realm), 4^th century stories of the Buddha, “Mantra” (with paraphrase of Milton), “Steps of a Bodhisattva,” “Mudra,” “An Aside on Karma,” “Peregrinations of the Dakini” a Glossary and Bibliography. A Magnificent, Beneficent Tome! All should carry it with them! Come to the River, Put Down your Book, and Dive!

 

“Nations are narrations

Spiritual sites are narrations

Ineluctable witnesses to other narrations

Are the panoptic meditators in their own bell jars…

A connotative splendor resides here…”

Now published: "The Morning Line" by David Lehman

September 15, 2021. Pittsburgh, PA. -- The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the publication of David Lehman's new book of poems:

<<<
The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity in poems that proffer candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age.

"The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range," writes Major Jackson. "Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified."

A poetic ventriloquist, Lehman expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky's “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.  

The Morning Line includes such tours de force as “Tales Told To Tevye,” which The New Yorker published in its flash fiction series, and “The Complete History of the Boy,” a loving look at the growth of a son’s mind. The title poem is a prose meditation on gambles, wagers, risk, and the high stakes of the Corona virus pandemic.  >>> 

You may order the book from online vendors or directly from the University of Pittsburgh Press:
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966616/
$18 paperback.

Praise for The Morning Line:

“’Everyone was supposed / to be miserable:’ but here are these poems—poems that, like Emerson before them, are most serious when they’re most playful, most profound when they sound childlike.  David Lehman is a writer of many kinds of poetry, many kinds of prose, but whatever he writes is unmistakably his—and ours. Lehman lets us become who we are, which sounds as if it should be easy: we need him, and, until he writes even more, The Morning Line is his best book.

--James Longenbach

In The Morning Line, David Lehman engages us at his most companionable. His voice is inclusive and intimate, his intelligence inexhaustible, embracing subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith. These poems bring us into conversation with Baudelaire, Catullus, Mayakovsky, Voltaire, and Elaine Equi, are often humorous and always joyful. Reading David Lehman is an antidote for loneliness.

--John Hennessy

Ever the bon vivant and sophisticate, David Lehman is too savvy to write boorish poetry, purely sentimental lyrics furiously sodden with all the lumps life hands us. Instead, he hears the melodies and plays the keys. The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range. Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified.

-- Major Jackson

Chris Mansell [introduced by Thomas Moody]

I'm on vacation this week, but I thought I'd leave you with this classic by Chris Mansell. Just a few notes: Penrith is a city to the west of Sydney (technically it is a part of Sydney) and heats up in the summer as only inland Australia can; while the Blue Mountains are a nearby mountain range, which get their name from their greyish-blue tinge. As for the rest, as my friend Bob Hershon used to say, you can thank me later.

 

 

Darwin discusses Tierra del Fuego

you pace out an Australian hot summer
devoid of air at Penrith
with some lime light artificial member
of the new aristocracy
the dry skin of grass cracking under boots
grass grey stalks like thin glass vials
hold some therapeutic acid break like needles
in a nightmare before the operation

you, you garrulous old metronome
peeling off the layers of our secret wishes
like the skin of the face of an aging actress
to insist on evolution
we liked the geology of our mountains
we wanted only to pat the earth with our flat hans
and feel its body shifting        mumbling dialogue
from dreams under its old clotted-cream breath

we resent your careful notebooks
on stratification of our blue mountains
the knife between the layers
the prising out collectable pimples
want you to go back to the discussions of the geology 
of Tierra del Fuego        surely exotic enough
to satisfy an Englishman

Get your imaginations out: the case for a performance cure in Paris [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

"Les Merveilles", Clédat&Petitpierre. Photo© Y.Clédat

Belmondo is dead!

I’ve put up mosquito netting around the bed to protect Karine and, though mosquitoes have heretofore been thought to turn their proboscises from a knave’s corruption, to protect myself. At 06.30 hours in the second week of September, at 48.8566° N, the sky already lours hot and grey. At 08.00 hours, as I set out Karine’s tisane, the celestial scowl disperses before a pitiless sun. Heretofore, the sun trope has been stock for bright Timbuktu, not gray Paris.

As the day smolders towards evening, showers of hot, fat raindrops eruct; the drops are heavy enough to slap, all too apt to turn to hail.

About 40 years ago now, an article in the NYRB observed that the only known example of a planet-scale runaway greenhouse effect is Venus. It is 800°Celsius inside the planet’s perpetual methane-cum-co2 self-generating storm system. “Self-generating storm system” suggests to me that the milder effects coming up here on Earth are more likely to have driven our species to extinction well before things get as warmed up and wild as on our sister planet.

If the pandemic has proved anything at all, it’s that pure motives and reasonable plans notwithstanding, changing circumstances and a full third of people will oppose you and your damnable, liberty-killing plans.

"Panique", Clédat&Petitpierre. Pan cannot play his pipes yet. He can get on his legs and hump. Some say Pan is the son of Hermès. Photo©Y.Clédat

No matter that denying climate change has clearly failed to prevent obvious and dangerous climate change. The third is now spreading the depressing lie that it’s too late to act against the inevitable catastrophe: Be free! Consume, for tomorrow you die! When the depression tactic fails, the third will turn to applauding sabotage. Out of a spite that the third will dress up as an understandable “human need for revenge”.

As Pogo said: “We have met the enemy and He is Us”.

Given the complexity of the phenomenon and the human challenge, the junk exercise of “thinking outside the box” won’t do.  Positivism backed by little hops in good, solid science by good people just will not compass hot spells that cripple the young and kill the old or cold snaps that can freeze-dry woolly mammoths. Nor can solid science by good people inspire the Trotsky-like determination to execute and defend a social action plan that might let the species survive in the face of immanent catastrophe.

In Isaac Asimov’s Foundation story, the shower-obsessed space buccaneer hero Trevor is given a choice between melding with Earth and or remaining a “free” individual, “remaining human”. Trevor chooses to remain a space buccaneer hero, rejecting sexual freedom and powerful women, and flying off to conquer the universe and become as gods, presumably. 

"Les Mariés", Clédat&Petitpierre. Parc de Bercy. Photo©Y.Clédat

Asimov was presenting the choice and the outcome as most of the species still frames it (for more on this type of stuff, see my essay on ordinary-folks’ philosopher Michel Onfray’s otherwise inexplicable hatred of Greta Thunberg).

Of course, the real choice the species is confronted with is not “remaining ‘human’”. And it doesn’t imply becoming as gods and flying off to terraform Mars or capture comets. It’s about saving our species from its self-definition of itself thus far. The choice to be made is more like taking an engineering post or not at General Electric’s silicon plant in Waterford, New York, to feed and house and educate a large, varied and troublesome family than being or not a space buccaneer out to conquer the universe. Do we take up, or not, the responsibility for the complex system we call “Earth”?  The bottom line is: Is the species a variable, like Trevor, along for the ride, or do it strive to become a constant, co-responsible with system Earth? I’ve voted for co-responsibility.

And now the only way forward is Imagination.

Imagination is the seed of the leaps in outlook and science that our species needs to decide what to do. Imagination is the wit to, or the unbearable lightness of heart to, rip up the box just outside of which we’ve been orbiting too long, click together those ruby slippers and choose.

From scratch.

Not by chance, the function of dance is to enable Imagination.

"Les Baigneurs”, Clédat&Petitpierre. Taking some sun in the Jardin de Reuilly, Paris.

Hegel (or is it Kant?) was right: our species does have a mechanics of the whole that spontaneously responds to our collective becoming. Since the art of dance is the seed of Imagination, dance – and, so, as I’ve argued, dance-performance–  has been growing ever more present in our lives. It is no accident, either, that the most popular and practiced form of dance – hip-hop – is a values set and global movement that touches on every aspect of a free and responsible life among equals.

This idea came to me this past weekend.

I had decided to watch the six well-crafted performances by the veteran troupe Clédat & Petitpierre. The troupe opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season, which, like many other venues, is full of lots of post-pandemic treats.

Fun, clever and beautifully made, Clédat & Petitpierre performance systematically achieves art as well as entertainment. In conception, the river is always flowing, Schrödinger’s Cat is shamming and not. Each performance is on the real event horizon. Sensibilities are engaged. Feeling is studied and distinct. Territory engaged transforms spectator into participant.

As I watched and ruminated on this, I realized that as each of the troupe’s performances was able to achieve the quality of art, it enabled access to Imagination in its participants.

As the mechanics of the whole and becoming would have it, quality performance such as Clédat & Petitpierre’s, along with increasingly strong performance programming  have made Paris, and France, a showcase for performance and dance performance.

Allons'y! By tingling in the monkeys' thumbs, Imagination this way comes”. "La Parade Moderne", Clédat&Petitpierre, opened the Atelier de Paris’ 2021-22 season. Photo©Y.Clédat

Performance and dance performance from small, developer-feeder venues such as Atelier de Paris, Regard du Cygne or Le Générateur, local theaters in and outside central Paris and in the regions and even the national dance theater are making city and country a must-do destination for the Imagination cure the species will be needing through the years to come.

"No Day Without Revision" [by David Shapiro]

Date: Sep 15, 2007 9:44 PM

No Day Without Revision

 for DCLehman

How fast do you write
as if that means anything
haiku, slowly crawl

if Zeno's correct
we will never reach Fuji
high views of New York

Braudel said: There's holes
in the heart of this New York
will it heal – Never!

I told Phillip, friend
they have murdered New York now
to make it Lausanne

Phillip said, David
New York is not an old cow
to be tipped over!

He left Manhattan.
My friends moved away--
nostalgic for land--

New York's not Lausanne
thank god but rents leapt, artists
disappeared like smoke

But why speak estates
Well, for a few years artists
spoke of real estate--

***

Meyer Schapiro said:
Art and money are systems
utterly at odds

He hated Berenson
because wealth was secret
plumbing in his life

****

I took a tea hour
if you permit the bubbling
syllable – bitter!

yuck! froth! green gloop! tea!
But the ceremony charmed
me relaxed me Divine

I like one flower
one ritual one sweet note
Internal God – Tea!

the way of flowers
they say the great movie man
went back to flowers

Woman in the Dunes!
but he went back to father's
flowers arranging!

Think of the double!
A man makes a great movie
then.....chrysanthemums!

***

Everything speaks
to me; it bursts my brain when
blossoms speak to me

Her thigh speaks to me
Christ's thigh spoke to Angelo
Cressid's foot has speech

What are we doing
writing haiku in dark age
belated lateness

The critics tone-deaf
the art critics color-blind
all we have's madness

Negative Keats goes
emptied out of moral self
he becomes a....gnat!

and gathering haiku
cluster in the sky pink clouds
Clouds my master loved

Clouds that Kenneth loved
he told me: don't be afraid
of planes – look! torn clouds!

Kenneth said: afraid
of planes! but you'll never see
anything this good!

On earth as it is
I say thanks for not killing
the first-born – myself!

My father's warmest
tones – Judaism attracts
We don't kill first-born

And of my son, said:
There's only one problem – he's
only one – make more!

***

So it turned out you
haiku-lovers that father
did not kill me, died

I say if friends die
I can do it too who's scared
well, apprehensive

If my dear friends die
I can even take coffins
"I die and smile"

****

This chain of haiku
which could be three syllables
is a bit unclear

Am I just mumbling
abstract phobias or does
insight burst wild geese!

In school my son knew
Hamlet’s soliloquies and
school was mad at me!

Inappropriate
my little boy 3 loved Latin
"Good for Jewish pope"

said Kenneth or priest
or cardinal I thought But
Ovid's your favorite!

squooshing syllables
I remember Catullus
hating to love love

I hated loving
I'm so glad to love less, less
then not at all, all

let haiku echo
KO or a season on earth
earthwards where Frost fell

and Crane dived down deep
and raised his hand up to scream
Help, hello. goodbye

He swam strongly then
just as Ray Johnson swam out
Some never think that

Padgett said Never
have I thought of suicide
funny his friends did

Ted killed himself fast
Allen killed himself slowly
fire, ice, speed, coke

I have twenty books
like twenty snowy mountains
still to write Oh snail!

write slowly always
then throw the paint like blossoms
then dry. now, revise

Oh deliberate
sex inside a haiku – yes
fucking is OK

it’s called wild wisdom
Americans so regressed
we can learn bodies

Internal bodies --
are the way to understand
Cezanne, Picasso!

the body felt from
inside not like driving cars
We don't know bodies

Too abstractly haiku
lie down like sodden hosts, guests
all drunk on ideas

I like old haiku
the bee emerging all drunk
from inside the rose

I throw bread, old pond
don't be scared of many sins
Blame it on bodiers

Blame it on clouds, late
in the afternoon of life
almost evening, friend

– David Shapiro

Stephanie Paterik: Finding Success in Business & Creativity with the Editor-in-Chief of Adweek

Stephanie Paterik, editor in chief and senior vice president of Adweek (as well as a contributor to the BAP blog), on the role the study of poetry has played in her career:

Why Not Now? with Amy Jo Martin

Stephanie Paterik is editor in chief and SVP of Adweek. In this episode, Stephanie shares a Why Not Now? story with Amy Jo that shaped the journey of her life and career. She had been working as a journalist in Phoenix for several years when she made the decision to quit her job, move to New York City, become a poet, and start an editorial consulting business on the side. This part of Stephanie’s journey felt like a detour, but it ultimately led to the role of editor in chief of Adweek.

Click here for the interview. And she was a mixed doubles champion in tennis (2013).

Amiri Baraka Catching Up With Himself [by Vincent Katz]

One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.

To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.

I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.

I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.

Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.

I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.

He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.

Here’s one:

“Note to AB”

I became a poet

Because every thing

Beautiful seemed

“poetic” to me.

I thought there were things

I didn’t understand

that wd make the world

poetry. I felt I knew

who I was but had to

Struggle, to catch up

w/ my self.

Now I do see me

sometimes, a few worlds

ahead, & I speed up, then,

put my head down,

Stretch my stride out

& dig

There me go, I scat &

sing, there me go.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fourteen): Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

ODE AT THE HOSPITAL

My father’s moustache aced geometry.
My father’s moustache makes cowboys blush
with its hard line. My father’s moustache
has two spots, one light in one dark,
like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v.
shutting off. My father’s moustache talks
like Ricky Ricardo, tells fortunes, chants
Our Fathers in its sleep—it dreams blue seas.
My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy.
My father’s moustache goes by Antonio
if you’re family. If not, try a cup of water
under your bed—it cures everything.

--Jessica Guzman

I had been writing poems about my father’s illness when I read an essay in which Stanley Plumly describes odes as rendering their subjects into art objects. Something similar to but not quite ekphrasis. My father had a commanding moustache, and I imagined it on display in a museum next to a little plaque. ‘Ode at the Hospital’ began with that image before anaphora morphed it into something more intimate and dynamic.

--Jessica Guzman

Jessica Guzman is the author of Adelante (Switchback Books, 2020), selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2019 Gatewood Prize. Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, jubilat, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, and elsewhere. She teaches at Widener University and lives in Philadelphia.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Fourteen: Jessica Guzman [by Angela Ball]

“My Father’s Moustache” is an expression of disdain from 1930’s Brooklyn, a raucous song by Woody Herman & His Herd (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8X0wXZOhY) , and a likely name for 60’s/70’s soda shops and used-clothing emporiums. It had, by then, an aura of gentle nostalgia—the “my father” referenced a sprightly older gentleman likely a member of a barbershop quartet. In Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital,” these associations ground active description, as the moustache “aced geometry” and “makes cowboys blush.” When the ‘stache shows its spots, “one light in one dark, / like a black-eyed pea, or a tube t.v. / shutting off,” it takes on quasi-religious powers, chanting “Our Fathers in its sleep.” With “My father’s moustache survived chemotherapy” it draws us up short with the reality of illness and invokes the protective exclusivity of family, a magic circle. This is, after all “My father’s mustache,” not yours. Like its subject, Guzman’s poem refuses despair, ending with mock advice tinged with mysterious truth: “try a cup of water / under your bed—it cures everything.” In its terse twelve lines, the poem plays life’s essences against one another—virility and age, cultural and personal memory, humor and sadness, exile and belonging, personality and the loss thereof, the body and the loss thereof.  Set in God’s hostel, Jessica Guzman’s “Ode At The Hospital” makes permanent not just its potent moustache, but the particularity of praise.

--Angela Ball

Is Shakespeare Still Readable? [by Vincent Katz]

I am excited to be back at the B.A.P. post desk! This week I plan to riff on things I’m reading and see where that takes me. I usually read a mix of favorites and new work, often going back to things that have affected me powerfully in the past. I like the way books come to litter a place, diving into obscurity for extended periods before resurfacing bold-faced and re-determined to command respect. Alternatively, there are those books that lie there perennially, always available yet untouched for months or years at a time. This summer I picked up such a book and threw it into my overnight bag — the updated Folger Library edition of Hamlet, published in 2012 and edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. I think it belongs to my son Oliver. I say “think” as I found it in the vicinity of his room; there is no handwriting in it I can identify as his, and no evidence he ever looked at it.

 

We used these same editions when I was in high school, probably read the same syllabus. There may be a tendency to look down on these editions as “school” editions, or to think that one should be able to read Shakespeare without notes at this point, that one should be able to get what one gets out of the words alone. I am here to tell you that, unless you are really schooled in sixteenth-century poetry (and I know some of you are), then this is not the case. I understand a lot more of Shakespeare than I did when I was in high school, but there are still usages I want to fine-tune in my reading. And this brings me to the beauty of these editions. They are not at all precious, you can take them anywhere, they are clearly and elegantly designed, they have the benefit of having the notes on pages facing the text, and, for this reader at least, the choices of which usages to include notes for were judicious.

 

For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, when Hamlet is prepping Horatio to observe the King’s reaction during the play Hamlet has prepared for him, here are some of the notes given:

84: comment: observation

85: occulted: deliberately hidden

86: unkennel: a term describing the driving of a fox from its lair

89: Vulcan’s stithy: forge of the Roman god of fire and metalworking

92: censure of: i.e. forming an opinion about; seeming: appearance, behavior

 

Here’s the passage:

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,

Even with the very comment of thy soul

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt                      85

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,

And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,                          90

And, after, we will both our judgements join

In censure of his seeming.

[Maurice Jones as Hamlet in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2019 production]

The reading is enhanced, made easier, by this helpful edition. I now want to read all of the plays in these editions. I picked up Hamlet in Oliver’s room, thinking, there is a reason I needs must read this text again (Shakespearean English is quite addictive!). And there was. The embodiment of madness, was it not of love fomented? Was it purely of his father’s motive? And what did that entail? I’ve been reading it to my mother, and we love to repeat to each other, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” It’s an oral art, a text made to be used onstage. It is simultaneously some of the best poetry in our language. I wonder if it is really passing out of use now. I mean, do kids love this language as much I did at their age, and still do?

[Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, on Shakespeare at Play's iOS app]

Martin Stannard on John Ashbery's Unfinished Works

review by Martin Stannard

PARALLEL MOVEMENT OF THE HANDS – Five Unfinished Longer Works, John Ashbery (Emily Skillings, Editor) 265pp. pub. Carcanet (UK) Ecco (USA)

These days the John Ashbery phenomenon, somewhat thanks to the internet, is even more of a phenomenon than it might otherwise have been. As if an Ashbery academic/critical industry keeping lots of sometimes probably quite dull people in university positions were not enough, thanks to today’s technology one is able, among other things, to take a virtual tour of his house in Hudson, which is kind of fun, and might give you some ideas for interior décor. I often think back to the mid-1980s when I wrote my Masters dissertation on the New York School poets and their relationship to English poetry, and there was just one book of critical essays about Ashbery to which I could refer, which was one more than there was on either Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch or James Schuyler. These days, with Google and all the rest, I don’t know where one would even begin with the background research.

But enough of that, except that this posthumous publication of five “unfinished” long-form works adds to what is already a huge body of work, and as such probably needs to justify its existence beyond simply giving us some Ashbery we haven’t seen before. We already have a lot of Ashbery poems. One might be excused for raising an eyebrow at the publication of something unfinished that dates back to the early 1990s (30 years!) even if the editor (Emily Skillings, Ashbery’s assistant from 2010 until his death in 2017) goes to great pains to point out that all the pieces presented here were “stored and kept just several yards from where Ashbery wrote poetry and correspondence” and “Though these projects hadn’t been prepared for publication . . . they also hadn’t been sent to the archives or put into storage. They may have been suspended – paused on their way to inclusion in a book – but they hadn’t been abandoned.” The cynic may ask, How come this stuff, which is so old, was never finished? Perhaps deep down the poet felt it wasn’t quite up to scratch but for some reason was unwilling or unable to let it go? But the editor has that one covered too, by stressing how important the notion of art as “unfinished” is in Ashbery’s life and career. That’s fair enough, but there’s “unfinished” and then there’s “30 years unfinished”. It has to be said that Skillings deals further with the cynic’s concerns, saying that “In the absence of any explicit instructions from Ashbery regarding these poems, and after consulting with many friends of the estate, I arrived at the conclusion that these projects . . . deserved to be seen”. Given that those “many friends” included David Kermani, Ashbery’s husband, and others who were very close to the poet, we should probably usher the cynic from the room, even if we can still hear some mumbling.

Click here for the rest of Martin Stannard's piece.
https://www.littermagazine.com/2021/09/review-parallel-movement-of-hands-by.html

Erika Meitner: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_______________________________________________________________

Austerity

 

Go off the fiscal cliff with me, baby. I’m ready.

We can hold hands while we blow through

 

West Virginia quickly, since we’re halfway down

77 past Charleston already and I’m cranked on

 

Cherry Coke from Burger King, feet on the dash,

wondering aloud if they’ll cart sad Dick Clark out

 

again for TV New Year’s Eve while the car radio

plays Blue Öyster Cult (I’m burnin’ for you), then

 

world news: Putin says no Russian adoptions

to the US and you say Dick Clark’s a year gone

 

(heart attack) and the radio says a victim of

gang rape died in India, and that frenzied buyers,

 

fearful of a ban, are swarming gun stores after

Newtown to stock up on rounds of .223 bullets.

 

Home in the darkness. Home on the highway. Assault rifles

are sold out across the country. Across the country

 

we pass trailer parks along the river, empty parking lots

of long-shuttered store fronts, trees hobbled with ice,

 

and signs left over from Christmas: Happy Birthday

Jesus, and Mary Wrapped the Greatest Gift of All.

 

Congressional leaders are hopeful about a deal, but

I am not confident that anything will change this stretch

 

of desolate road, this altitudinous mountain we climb

in our four-wheeldrive vehicle. Most days it seems

 

we all might steer directly, without detours, into the white

and constant border. If you ask me if I’m anticipative,

 

I might say yes. West Virginia, you were Wild and

Wonderful, then Open for Business, but now you’re

 

Wild and Wonderful again because everything comes back,

even Dick Clark, with impaired speech, Beech-Nut gum

 

sponsorship long gone, to wish us a Happy New Year,

though now it’s followed by “Seacrest—out!”

 

With his perfect teeth and hair, Ryan ushers in

the year of austerity, the year when there was only

 

evening and morning, the bare trees,

their dark bodies, their bent limbs.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, The Believer, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022.  (For more on Erika Meitner, click here.)      ["Austerity" is from Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

"From Minor Errors, Mighty Words May Flow": A "Next Line, Please" Prompt

NEXT LINE, PLEASE

From Minor Errors, Mighty Words May Flow

By David Lehman | September 12, 2017

September 12, 2017

For our next prompt, I shall adopt Emily Winakur’s proposal, seconded by Paul Michelsen. In August Emily suggested that we write on “the topic of misunderstanding and all it may lead to (good, bad, surprising, etc).” The poem we write should have “as its basis a fundamental mishearing or misreading of language.” She proffers these “examples of mishearing/misreading that might take center stage in a poem: seeing ‘rabbi’ as ‘rabbit’; hearing ‘drive-through nativity’ (curious enough in its own right) as ‘dried fruit nativity’; a spellcheck wanting to substitute ‘banquet’ for Banquo and ‘madcap’ for Macduff in a paper about Macbeth.”

Paul Michelsen quotes my book about the New York School, The Last Avant-Garde: “Misunderstandings, though sometimes lamentable in our daily lives, have a value like that of dreams or jokes for the artist bent on making a virtue out of a necessity. The theme of misunderstanding—sometimes deliberate, sometimes inadvertent, but always implicit in the acts of creation and communication—is one to which [the late John] Ashbery has long been drawn.”

New York School mainstay Kenneth Koch has a poem, “Taking a Walk with You,” which is a catalogue of his misunderstandings. The poet Andrei Codrescu, mindful of Robert Frost’s statement that “poetry is what gets lost in translation,” contends that “poetry is mistranslation”—an assertion that makes complete sense once you consider that every metaphor is on some level a misrepresentation.

The Summer 2017 issue of The American Scholar has a splendid portfolio of poems by Mary Jo Salter, nearly every one of which illustrates the poetic value of mis-hearings. A beautiful poem of hers, in a recent issue of The Hopkins Review, alludes to a famous romantic line in Casablanca. The title of Mary Jo’s poem is “We’ll Always Have Parents.” The substitution of “parents” for “Paris” is all it takes to set the poem in motion.

So … our prompt is to write a poem based on a mistake, a typo, a misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue (about which Freud has so much to say), or an error that results in something better than what was originally intended. To honor compression as a virtue, let’s have a 12-line limit. The lines can be a solid block, or you can divide them into stanzas, rhymed or unrhymed.

Let me improvise an example:

I said “I planned to use his firm,”
but, when I type too fast, use
becomes sue, and so it happened.
As minor discords from foolish errors grow,
the threat of war loomed. Sensibly he wrote
“The time to make peace is now,”
but when he types too fast, now
becomes not, and that sealed our fate.
We agreed to disagree, but it was now no use.

But of course the tone of your poem, its orientation and its objective, may differ wildly from what I’ve written here, which, by the way, needs a title. Any suggestions?

Thanks, everyone. Deadline: Saturday night, September 16, midnight wherever you happen to be.

Permission required for reprinting, reproducing, or other uses.

David Lehman, a contributing editor of the Scholar, is a poet, critic, and the general editor of The Best American Poetry annual anthology. His book One Hundred Autobiographies has just been published. He currently writes our Talking Pictures column.

https://theamericanscholar.org/from-minor-errors-mighty-words-may-flow

Meet the Press: Etruscan Press's Tribus Imprint

Dante Di Stefano: In the introduction to Trio and to the book that preceded it, Triptych, you discuss the concept behind Etruscan Press’s new Tribus imprint. Could you talk about how Etruscan’s new model came into being and some of the benefits of publishing a three-in-one volume?

Philip Brady: The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. It’s heartbreaking because it’s one thing to be turned down by a stranger and quite another thing to be rejected by someone who has already shown commitment to your work. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along by a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. I had always admired Robert Miltner’s work. That’s when the idea of Tribus came to me. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. I contacted the three authors. Fortunately, they enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, exploring connections and working together.

DD: What was it about the work of Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop that threaded together for you when you began to think of the project that would become Trio?

PB: Each book is replete and fully empowered. Still, presented in one codex, webs of continuity appear. Trio highlights the way that women, in the penumbra of the patriarchy, fashion conduits for life, power, and loss. Trio augurs identity within and beyond selfhood. Trio reconfigures utterance by stretching, almost to breaking, line and syntax (as Daneen Wardorp says in an interview, “I love enjambment.”).

Composing their books separately, together three poets orchestrated what Diane Raptosh calls a “triunity.” In a “Trialogue” included in this volume, they converse, riffing off each other, weaving “centos” of one another’s lines, a poetics which, as Raptosh writes, let her “feel the  tendrils themselves turning into a new kind of work.”

DD: There are two more Tribus selections in the offing, one including a collection I wrote. Could you talk about these two forthcoming books?

PB: So, the next step was to actually solicit a Tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific. and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, Dante, your new manuscript showed up. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought: Etruscan Generations. You agreed first, and then I sent Hix and Heyen your manuscript and asked for something to go with it. They both replied right away, and we have a new Tribus.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems powerfully connected. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

DD: Sadly, Daneen Wardrop, whose collection Endless Body, closes out Trio, passed away before the book’s publication. What do you find most memorable about her work, in this volume and elsewhere?

PB: Dante, I sit before this question and come back to it over and again. So many images: first seeing Silk Road—the delight of entering into that magical, historical journey of Donata Badoer; watching as the work emerged, working with Daneen through a succession of cover images—she was an astute art lover with a trove of references and connections—talking about the poetics of evoking  the past in poems which employ and resist narration…And then on to Endless Body—an unframed sequence crafted out of one of poetry’s prime elements—the art of enjambment—as if in breaking, lineaments reveal the oracular—the space where story yearns forward onto the empty page, the exhaled breath. All too soon to speak of. All too soon to be.

DD: Karen, I was first introduced to your work through Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of what you call tiny stories and essays. From 1985 to 2005 you co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose. I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about your long engagement with short prose. There’s only one prose poem in Planet Parable, “I Saw Egrets Flying.” What has short prose taught you about lineated poetry (and vice versa)? How did your understanding of short prose inform the multiplicity of stanzaic patterns and formal choices on display in Planet Parable? When you are composing, how do your poems begin to assert themselves in formal terms?

Karen Donovan: Thanks for all these questions, Dante. Yes, Walker Rumble and I founded ¶ way back in 1985 and published 25 issues over 20 years, working with hundreds of writers doing ingenious things with short prose. The work spanned categories – prose poem, flash fiction, microfiction, creative nonfiction, essays, letters, lists, rants. We described the contents of ¶ as “short bursts of ordered sensibility of 250 words or less” and let folks decide what to submit under that wide sky. Forging literary ground in the universe of shortness was a fantastic editorial experience. All during that time, I was making my living as an editor and professional writer, but in my creative life I was writing lineated poetry and never thought of myself as a writer of prose. When I started doing the prose pieces that wound up as Aard-vark to Axolotl, it was mainly just to play with the cool vintage illustrations in an old Webster’s dictionary we owned. Before too long, I realized I was writing paragraphs and had to laugh. The form had evidently percolated into my body and all it needed for a spigot was that dictionary.

What short prose taught me is that it must be as well written as poetry, to set Ezra Pound’s dictum on its head. You can’t have a wasted syllable. “That first line is pretty close to that last line,” as Walker once said.

Whether I’m writing poetry or prose, I try to craft strong sentences and put them in the right order. It's usually very clear when I need end-stopped lines and when I don’t. The egrets piece in Planet Parable that you mentioned is a good example. It tries to make transparent the long, loose discursive process of thinking while taking in continuous, seemingly random data from the world. It’s a slightly distracted internal disquisition that unfolds in time, so I wanted a stream of prose. Versus poetry, which is really a method of obliterating time. Everything in a poem happens at once, even in a narrative. The idea crystallizes and pops into existence and hits the reader like a photon.

Making a formal choice is a matter of knowing where the energy is in my idea. What form will allow me to capture it? Sometimes I think about form before I start writing, and sometimes I let the content pile up and dictate its form to me as I go (trusting in Levertov’s great description of form as “a revelation of content”). Form sticks to content quite mysteriously. Form is also a good editing tool. I often like to write in syllabics, which has its own handy, built-in Exacto knife. One of the most formally experimental pieces in Planet Parable, “This Is Why Advanced Ontics Is Taken Pass/Fail,” is constructed of decasyllabic lines that break apart as the poem moves forward and then reheal as the poem concludes. I needed to handle an onslaught of ideas from biology, chemistry, quantum physics, metaphysics, and more, and I wanted the poem to be both show and tell. Syllabics gave me the structure to hang on to this trapeze act. But still – it’s made with sentences.

DD: There’s a prose piece from Aard-vark to Axolotl that I kept thinking of when I was reading Trio, “The memory fruit,” which begins: “You are not singular. You are not really yourself. Something else makes you: deep snow, grief offered names, love as portable as a small stone.” Could you riff on the experience of publishing your work in a three-in-one volume, and the work of Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop in light of “The memory fruit”?

KD: Dante, you are clairvoyant. Calling up “The memory fruit” from Aard-vark to Axolotl is more relevant to the making of Trio than you could know. The illustration that goes with this piece is titled “Achene of Buttercup in vertical section, showing solitary seed.” I was writing about loneliness, the experience of losing a friend to whom I had a lifelong soul connection, the shock of realizing how much of my identity had been formed in her presence and now felt as if it had disappeared with her. And now… Diane and I lost Daneen to very sudden death, right when we were getting ready to celebrate the publishing of Trio, after months of intimate poetry conversation, immersed in one another’s language, resewing our lines together as centos, and birthing this volume together. The sense of loss is very similar. Our work and our minds are in explicit relationship, literally bound together. Trio itself is now the memory fruit. My hope is that it will go on generating attachments among our books every time a reader looks into it.

DD: I love one of the last lines in Planet Parable, “the vast thirsty ashes of the world” over which the rain speaks. There’s something so lovely and sad about the intense music of this moment, a moment that emblematizes Planet Parable’s thematic and formal concerns. What points of connection do you see in Planet Parable’s telescoping ecopoetics, the historical excavations of Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body’s exploration of corporeality and consciousness?

KD: Why the hell isn’t this beautiful project we are living going better? Is it possible to do it another way? All our books cohabitate with this question from different sides. Diane’s book sings with the mind and spirit of a woman who saw an alternative: “My advice was cultivate that love / which craves the happiness / of partner most, his or her / person next. Yourself last. / Be kind to the new. // In freedom / is safety. When people / learn this, they’ll know equality.” Daneen says, “Don’t worry about the awe. / There is no history except slate, / no biography except occasional winter wheat, / deer treading sun.” In the last poem in Endless Body, she asks, “At what rip in the gravity do we enter?” In its vast, thirsty ashes, the world yearns always to re-create itself after it is destroyed.

DD: Would you share a memory of Daneen Wardrop while working on this project and talk about the significance of Endless Body for you as a reader?

KD: Endless Body is endlessly generative – in subject matter, language, image, tone. Reading it is an experience of motion, tendency, current, experiment. Many of the poems are titled using word variants from Dickenson’s drafts. The book’s openness flows from Daneen’s receptive, absolutely original sensibility. Every conversation and email thread we shared brought that same light.

Here’s an example. One of her ideas for doing a reading together was to invite the whole audience in. I quote her: “If we end up doing readings virtually, we might ask people to use the chat function to suggest an image or idea they’re interested in/obsessed by that day at that minute. We might then, among the three of us, be able to find one of our poems that speaks to or complements that idea and choose to read that. It would probably be chaotic to do that for the whole reading, but we could have a couple of those interludes? This may be totally out there, but given the claustrophobia I sometimes feel with zoom, it might be cool to think of ways to air things out, widen things out.” Exactly. Air. Wideness. Out. That’s Daneen!

DD: Diane, In Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, you write through multiple personae inhabiting a variety of formal approaches. You’ve written many persona poems throughout your career, most notably in your collection, American Amnesiac, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve heard you speak eloquently about writing persona poems here. How was writing through and about the historical figures in Run different from persona poems you’ve written in the past? What other thoughts can you share about writing persona poems? What are some of your favorite persona poems written by other poets?

Diane Raptosh: I believe every poem is a persona poem, including—and perhaps especially—poems crafted from the I. American Amnesiac is in some respects a weirdly autobiographical poem, despite the fact that its speaker, Calvin Rinehart/John Doe (from Amnesiac) is a formerly affluent white man whose life specifics do not much resemble my own. But his status as participant-observer, his sense of being simultaneously subject and object, his many neuroses and certainly his anxious obsessing over the state of America are characteristics I consider my own. As for why write anyone writes persona poems, this portion of John Keats’s Negative Capability seems helpful: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, The Moon, The Sea . . . —the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” These sentences make good sense to me.

John Doe felt like someone I needed to fill in for; he felt more or less like a real person think-feeling in my mind. Writing about and through Victoria Woodhull—with her array of secondary characters—felt similar. I identified with her in many ways: she was all raw energy, unschooled, eccentric. I am “educated,” yes, but I come from humble beginnings. It felt easy to “become” Woodhull, as I have bucked many of the same restrictive scripts put in place for women, including traditional marriage, lifelong monogamy, and more. I love to take on voices and topics that allow me to learn as I compose. Why write what I know?

In terms of other persona poems, I studied carefully Tyehimba Jess’s incredible verse collection Leadbelly as a primary model for writing persona poems about a historical figure with a cast of other, necessary characters included. His was my go-to text for how to bring to life a historical character. So too, I would like to give a shout-out to my Trio mate, Daneen Wardrop’s Silk Road, which, as Phil mentioned, is written in the persona of Donata Badoer, Marco Polo’s wife. What an incredible book! Beyond these, Patricia Smith writes some of the most powerful persona poems I have ever encountered. Her “Skinhead” is stunning. Of course, Robert Browning’s duchess is in the background, looking as if she were alive. James Tate has great persona poems, as do Robert Hayden (“Night, Death, Mississippi”) and the poet Ai. I love her work. For the past decade or two, I have found it easier to arrive at emotional truths through writing persona poems; doing so allows me to enter a sense of boundlessness. That said, right now, I am at work on a manuscript written from the I. The time feels right to risk some things from that pronoun.

DD: What did you learn about nineteenth century American culture and literature through the creative process that you hadn’t learned through scholarly research?

DR: I’ve always been an American history buff and did a lot of scholarly research for Run. Understandably, I encountered differing narratives about who Woodhull was. But I wasn’t looking for that exactly. I wanted to uncover and offer a possible version of her—from birth through her presidential campaign—based in “fact” and informed, imaginative conjecture. I wrote the book from a conviction that all history is what Plutarch called historia: both fact (chronicle history) and fiction (feigned history). Mostly I wanted to get Woodhull’s story out there in the best way I knew how: through poetry. I was bugged that it took me until I was almost 55 years old even to have heard of her! Doing the research, I was reminded of how much the 1870s mirror our times in terms of, well, the usual categories: oligarchical economic structures, slavery-centered political frameworks, misogynistic scripts, caste systems, racism…. I was researching and drafting the book during the Trump/Clinton campaign. It comes as no surprise that long before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain sources, nineteenth-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. To answer your thoughtful question (at last!), I feel that to understand someone, you have to become them. I’d like to try being everyone! This is what literature helps us do. Rather than aiming to arrive at an “objective” understanding or at some definitive rendition of Woodhull, the creative process enabled me to enter—through acts of imaginative, empathic transport—the essence of Woodhull, as well as to channel the energies and voices of other figures important in her inner circle.  

DD: Could you share some thoughts on the Emily Dickinson who appears in Endless Body? What is the Dickinsonian influence or imprint on Trio as a whole?   How does Dickinson inform what Daneen Wardrop called the “spiritual conversation” unfolding in this three-in-one book?

DR: What a wonderful question. I would say there is a Dickinsonian tonal complexity, or perhaps better: a tonal mischievousness at work in Trio as a whole. Equally present: an overall Dickinsonian wit. More on Emily Dickinson’s overall imprint in the final paragraph.

Dickinson appears in Wardrop’s Endless Body implicitly and overtly. I would go so far as to say that Dickinson is “the blade in the melody” of Endless Body, which Wardrop herself points to in her poem “+ Glowed + Absent—through.” Dickinson inheres in every endless dash—that pointer, that magisterial gesture, that “vast barrette” mentioned in Wardrop’s “+ Catch my + slips so easy.”

More specifically, I would say that her poem “Emily Dickinson undressing” (which begins with this epigraph by Roland Barthes: Imagine [if possible] a woman dressed in an endless garment...”) is a map by which we might effectively navigate Wardrop’s whole book. In this piece the poet suggests that “If I knew how to pray, words would cross wefts / of endless garment / bobbins still spinning in the world—” This is precisely what Endless Body does: with every taut line, with each knowing turn, it stitches a limitless fabric: “Some veils are red. // Some tulle is ripped. // In this deep tippet the world starts”—the full while the poet rips through to eternity. As Wardrop’s I types out her words, seams redden and glow—. These seams form the spiritual conversation that all of us in Trio are having. I hope readers too will experience this numinous quality. This immanence. These bladed melodies.

The + Glow + Absent—through. Similarly, Karen Donovan invites us all in her poem “So Many Swans Could Mean Something” to stand “on the great divide where the mind / is always leaving the body behind.”

DD: Would you also share a memory of Daneen Wardrop and talk about her legacy as a poet, scholar, teacher, and person?

DR: There is so much to know about Daneen; every day I uncover some new mystery about her. Her roles in rock, folk, and bluegrass bands—as lead singer and guitarist throughout her college years—transformed into a tenured English professorship at Western Michigan University, 1990-2020. During that career, she earned many awards, including the Distinguished Faculty Award at WMU and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was a nationally renowned Emily Dickinson scholar (Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (1996), Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009), as well as Dickinson’s poetic heir apparent. She inspired her colleagues, students, and friends—from those associated with WMU to poetry lovers and climate advocacy communities.

In 1997 Daneen adopted her daughter Lian from China: Lian is featured in many of the poems in Endless Body (“LiLi and I speak to each other raining hands—” says the poet in “Afternoon”). I also have a daughter from China right around Lian’s age. Daneen and I had a number of conversations about our adoption experiences. We traded stories over Zoom about airport experiences with our “backpack babies”: how we literally had to sprint—daughters buckled onto our bodies—from one mysterious office to another, for meetings with adoption officials in China. Daneen’s multi-layered poems about adoption continue to move me—through. I’ve no doubt that she was a first-rate mother, daughter, sister (“My family speaks to each other with thunder on their sleeves, / whiskers in their bellies,” according to “Afternoon.”)

Honestly, I feel as if I was just beginning to know her as a friend. She was very funny, deeply authentic, and modest to a fault. She was incredibly large hearted. A kinder person we might never know.

As for Daneen’s poetic legacy, I would point to her ability to take on almost any subject, any persona, any tone, with mastery. I would easily place her among the most brilliant American poets I have encountered. Her work is a high-wire act of heart and erudition, pause and profusion, compression and munificence.  Endless Body is her tenth book.

---

Poem from Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body:

Gift

A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.
White box painted with red and yellow flowers
bright as patois. No perches like on a bird house?
. . . a butterfly house. Each slot hardly wider than a match—
the wings must have to shut together to enter.
Do the butterflies tilt and fly in without stopping— 
clapped-closed and no stopping?
She was dry, thin lips
cut as the line around a country.
The box came without instructions.
This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.
Why would they want to be in there,
darker than an inside.
I will not retract a single tilt of her face.    

---

Poem from Karen Donovan’s Planet Parable

So Many Swans Could Mean Something

I don’t want to talk about what we have lost, I am not sure
there is a difference between prayer and conversation

anymore, why anything happens, why thinking
is like this breathless occupied midnight.

Out back where the clouds skim the black surface
of the pond, it’s as if we called them, and now

you are saying, Look, the whole flock is here.
They drift, nickering, white boats on a moonless tide,

making and breaking engagements on a night when everything
gets decided. It is time to sleep, but who can sleep?

The water could not be blacker. We watch them,
lights off in the house, window slid wide,

standing on the great divide where the mind
is always leaving the body behind.

---

Poem from Diane Raptosh’s Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love

This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.
This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.
This is my lover. But when I seize love, summer trees sing off-key.
This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.

This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, it is despotism.
This is my law: it is ruddy—leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.
This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I will have it.
These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.

This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.
This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.
This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall.
This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.

This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.
This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life.

---

Philip Brady is the author of five collections of poetry: The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics (Broadstone Books, 2021); To Banquet with the Ethiopians (Broadstone Books, 2015); Fathom (Word Press, 2007); Weal (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999) winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize; and Forged Correspondences (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. Brady’s poetry has received the Ohioana Poetry Award, The Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artists Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, a Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

Karen Donovan’s new collection of poems, Planet Parable, was published in 2021 by Etruscan Press in an innovative multi-author volume called Trio, which also includes complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her two other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays inspired by the illustrations in a vintage Webster’s dictionary owned by her grandfather. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose.

Diane Raptosh’s verse collection, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award as well as for the Housatonic 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. An active ambassador for poetry, she has given workshops and readings everywhere from riverbanks to prisons. The holder of the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, she teaches literature and writing at the College of Idaho, where she also co-chairs the program in criminal justice/prison studies. Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, published in a collection of three poets’ works, is her seventh and most recent book (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

 

Daneen Wardrop was the author of five poetry collections: Endless Body (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021); Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018); Life as It (Ashland Poetry Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award; Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015); and The Odds of Being (Silverfish Review Press, 2008). She was also the author of several works of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England, 2009). Wardrop’s honors include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert H. Winner Award, judged by Jean Valentine. She was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and died on April 8, 2021.

Fall Haiku [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

 

Saturday market
In Union Square: Cantaloupes
Alongside apples.

Confused by weather
The woman on the subway
Wears socks and sandals.

Turning a corner,
Into Sixth Avenue wind,
The man holds his hat.

At Gonzo cafe
On Thirteenth, outdoor tables
Are empty by eight.

Looking up, nothing.
On the horizon, two lights
Grow brighter, then dim.

Stacey Harwood (NYT, October 4, 2004)

"Quite Possibly the Sexiest Dance Ever Put On Film" [by Mindy Aloff]

David Lehman's Labor Day post about the movie "Picnic" prompted several comments, here and elsewhere, but this one, by dance aficionado Mindy Aloff, stands out: 

"Oh, I agree with the writer Laura Leivick: It's quite possibly the sexiest dance ever put on film.

"The choreographer (uncredited) was Miriam Nelson.

Her IMDb bio: 'Debuted on Broadway in 1938. Married fellow dancer Gene Nelson. When Gene joined the Signal Corps, Miriam went to Hollywood and signed an acting-dancing contract with Paramount. She eventually became a choreographer in film, choreographing many musical numbers for Gene once he had a contract with Warner Bros. After her divorce from Gene, she eventually married producer Jack Meyers. Miriam was an extra in the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys, playing the girl arguing with the man wearing an eye patch. Taught Ingrid Bergman her dance scene in Cactus Flower. In 1969 she choreographed Disney on Parade. She married producer Jack Meyers and was eventually widowed. She returned to the stage in 1992 when her friend Marge Champion produced Ballroom at the Long Beach CLO. Her autobiography, with a forward written by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, was published in 2010.'

Aloff: "It also didn't hurt that the cinematographer of "Picnic" was James Wong Howe (with uncredited Haskell Wexler as the Second Unit Camera Operator), that Jean Louis had designed Kim Novak's dress, or that the little outdoor spot they were dancing in had been designed by Jo Mielziner, who, with colleagues art director William Flannery and set decorator Robert Priestley, won an Oscar for Art Direction-Color for their work on this film. Of course, crucial to the effect of the dance scene was George Duning's Oscar-nominated score. His 'Theme from "Picnic"' (which reached Number One on the 1956 Billboard charts) was, as the resisting stars gradually inched together, suavely introduced to and then--Oh, Mama!--melded with the music of the 1930 song 'Moonglow' by Columbia's musical director Morris Stoloff. The fact that Holden, allergic to dancing, had to get practically falling-down drunk to do the scene, while Novak couldn't wait to tear herself away to go to church, located this superficially cool summer-evening intimacy on top of an underground volcano of banked fires; the individuals can barely relate while the sliding musics mate them. Someone reviewing it brilliantly compared it to a baked Alaska; as Laura quipped to me about Holden, 'He can bake my Alaska any time.'"

The sexiest dance ever put on film? Here it is. You decide: 

Ron Padgett on Joe Brainard: from Tulsa to NYC on $5 a month

[Ed note: "I know how valuable my time is and I plan to never ever get a job again.” Joe Brainard. In summer 2017, Ron Padgett alerted us to his wonderful essay about his great friend the poet and artist Joe Brainard. I'm posting an excerpt below with a link to the full piece. Thank you Ron. sdh]

Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to New York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.

The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.

The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.

At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.

Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
From the archive; first posted January 5, 2018.

Untitled (Pat), June or July 1961, oil on pressboard, 15 ¾ X 15 inches (c) Joe Brainard

Joe Brainard in 1961-63 by Ron Padgett

Because documentation has been lacking, relatively little has been written about two crucial years in Joe Brainard’s life, 1961 and 1962— just after he moved at age 18 to New York City (December of 1960) and just before he moved to Boston (January of 1963). Joe did not keep a diary, nor did he write letters to his closest friends, who had come to New York about the same time as he. His letters—the few that survive—to his parents and aunt back in Tulsa consisted of perfunctory reassurances that he was all right. Recently, however, a group of his letters has surfaced, providing new and important details on this period.

The letters and postcards were addressed to Sue Schempf (1918–2009), a woman he met in Tulsa when he was still a high school student or a very recent graduate. Schempf, a decent Sunday painter, had signed on as a patron; that is, in the early 1960s she was sending him five dollars per month. The financial arrangement appears to have been vague: at several points Joe mentions owing her money and at others he gives the impression that she is due work in exchange or that he is going to repay her. Regardless, the monthly arrival of five dollars was important to Joe.

The first piece of correspondence (postmarked December 15, 1960), addressed to Schempf and her husband, is a postcard announcement of Joe’s modest solo exhibition at a place called The Gallery, in a small shopping center in Tulsa, to take place on December 17 and 18. The announcement is addressed in the hand of someone other than Joe, who was either in Dayton or New York City at the time. Over the course of the next year, Sue Schempf herself would open a frame shop, which would also be available for small shows.

At some point she bought one of his collages, a 1960 work that not only reflected the structure of the cover design he did for The White Dove Review a year or so before but also proved to be a harbinger of his collages to come 15 years later.

Fig 01 Mixed media collage, 1960, coll. E. G. Schempf 25 × 22 inches

Find Ron Padgett's essay along with a beautiful gallery of Brainard's work here.
From the archive; first posted January 5, 2018.

The Shadows of Memories [by Lera Auerbach]

Untitled [Oil on Canvas] by Lera Auerbach

 

1. Forgetting Ignorance

The world is created anew. I often fail to see it and think as if it was still the old world that I knew. I forget my ignorance.

My mother doesn’t own a computer and doesn’t understand how the Internet works. It’s all mundanely miraculous and miraculously mundane to her. I try to explain but realize that I don’t understand it either. I can navigate it, but I do not know who or what is staring at me from the other side of the screen.

 

2. Reflection

I spit out blood from my bleeding gums and, looking at the sink, see my death.

 

3. The Shadows of Memories

One can think about so many things and nothing at all.
How can nothing be something?
How can nothing be?

Can a shadow cast a shadow?
Perhaps within each shadow lies a deeper shadow, just like within the first death, lies the second death. 
If a person can be born more than once, it’s possible that after he is dead, he dies again – a death within death from which it is impossible to return. In this second death, he loses not only his memories but the shadows of memories.

When did Eurydice die?

An Interview with Justin Jamail [by Aspen Matis]

Poet and attorney Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. His poems and commentary have appeared in many journals and online publications, and he is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. Raised in Houston, Texas, he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

I corresponded with Mr. Jamail via email about the radical nature of uncommon wit, the arena of poetry criticism as a realm “where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed,” and the pleasure of rereading great works many times over. We also discussed the intimate relationship between clarity and metaphor thought Mr. Jamail’s original definition of “exchangeable bonds” in the context of a poem: “Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.”

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I write poems for fun, as an intellectual challenge or game, and because I think poems can be beautiful. Also to impress my wife and other friends.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

Very generally speaking, it seems to me that art is necessary for the good life. I just mean that as an empirical observation — I don’t have any explanation for why it is necessary or what it “does,” and I am not interested in those questions at all. That man does not live on bread alone can also be taken as an empirical observation rather than as a moral or theological principle. That is what I mean here. Poetry is a kind of art, so it fills that role in “our present society” as it has in every other society. Its comparative advantage, I guess, is that it fits in the pocket or average memory and, among literary arts, seems to me to place the least burden on the audience. Its apparent necessity notwithstanding, our present society rather overvalues art and poetry than undervalues it — or so it seems to me.

In your view, in what way does our present society overvalue art and poetry? I imagine that’s an uncommon perspective, among poets.

Oh, I mainly mean expressions that seem to reveal an expectation that promises more from art than it can give. Expectations that poetry will make the audience better, wiser, or more successful people or citizens, for example. Or, as a very different example, any expectation that any aesthetic experience can approach the value placed on oil paintings. It’s modern cant (there’s an 18th century influence!). I would gladly have all awareness of the existence of Picasso erased from my mind in exchange for the current market value of one of his paintings. Probably.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Demonstrate uncommon skill and wit without the appearance of effort or diligence or pride.

Your book of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Poet and editor David Lehman praised the collection as a “book worthy of its legacy,” in which one “can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this debut collection? Is there a particular inquiry or exploration that unifies the book? And what do you hope readers will be left with, after the final page?

These were what seemed to be most of the best poems I had written over a pretty long period. Tony Towle, one of my favorite poets, was nice enough to give me advice on the ordering in addition to some splendid editorial comments. I hope the audience likes the poems. For someone as authoritative as David to have sensed the influence of poets as great as Koch and Violi is pretty humbling. There is no doubt that those poets exert a huge influence on my sense of what makes a poem successful.

What do you do (beyond listening) when “The room pulls away” and you are standing, as in your fine poem Early April Subway?

Write poetry! — or anyway a line or two.

What are exchangeable bonds, metaphorically speaking?

Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.

You dedicated your book to “My fathers” — who are these men? 

Jeffrey Jamail and David Lifson

You are an accomplished attorney, currently the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden; is there a place in your creative practice where your legal and poetic fascinations unify? Or are these lines of work necessarily distinct — two independent threads of your life’s tapestry? 

I don’t see much connection. The scenes and clichés of office work life enter poems fairly often, I notice. Hmmm… I may write a Georgics of the office…

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Robert Herrick. Andrew Marvell. Shakespeare of course if we are talking early 17th century (is he part of the “long 16th”? Probably.). I read a lot of 17th and 18th century sermons; I think it is a neglected area of excellent English literature. If I had the time for an academical career I would concentrate on this. I read some poems by Sarah Egerton and Anne Finch last year and liked them quite a bit. I like Oliver Goldsmith’s writing. It’s hard to be inspired by 18th century poetry because there is a lot of “inside baseball” — references to each other and contemporary events and so forth. But I admire it a great deal. Those poets were masters of skills I don’t seem to have developed to any meaningful degree.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Poetry criticism is an area where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed. I have been told that one should not argue about taste, but that is not a reason for extending one’s exposure to bad taste. When poetry is critiqued well, what happens is that a critic has told convincingly in what way a poem or poet is successful or unsuccessful. This is valuable because it can form what is really only an impression of taste (or something) into clear ideas. Sometimes criticism can be the occasion for general remarks on mankind, of course. Such writing is often also a pleasurable or beautiful thing in its own right.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

I haven’t noticed much correlation, but I don’t read enough to take an intelligent view. The results of the system seem consistent with the construction of the system?  

The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language! For every such book that I have neglected, there must be dozens of less famous works. Also, I think I could defend an observation that there has been a steady increase in the quantity of literature of all kinds and all qualities. What keeps me, in particular, among those responsible for great works falling into obscurity is that I reread favorite works many times over. I guess I have a terrible memory for literature!

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Read more.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

A Georgics of the office and more short lyric poems that I hope my wife will like.

Haiku Exchange, Sept. 9, 2007 [by David Shapiro and David Lehman]

Sunday September 9, 2007

David Shapiro to David Lehman

Subject: I had vertigo? Lins says hello to you Why we gone from JA (events kana)

Now I even read
the poor translations
of the wonderful haiku

I even like lines  / like this all stretched out condensed / oh ugly haiku

when I was fifteen
my friend now dead said David
too much in your head

He enjoyed Moby
Dick and said first he read parts
then fell into space

the real space between
the letters – he slapped his sister
with a Tagore book

in jail for stopping
at a green light– He said in
jail he thought up deaths

Varieties of
suicide – he had talent
now dead in a cave

Krishna consciousness
you may find it funny, but
it’s real as his hair

I had lots of friends
become priests – they wrote
lots of poor haiku

Jack Kerouac wrote
his American car strophes
now I'm the old man

they say common joy
is only in rock, sports, sex
But friends say: Haiku!

Oh it’s national
but more like the family
Haiku won't hurt you

My friend's father was
in a group where the copy
was always better

Better than what? Think
better than the original
little objects

I'm against rhyming
haiku because it’s too ruled
I like split insights!

I never could write
the perfect haiku sestina
even a pantoum!

I failed everything
like Du Fu in his exams
or even his tears

What's a haiku? sonnet
condensed to even smaller
nuns than Wordsworth

I don't know if you
don't know what makes a haiku
Spurt up like moon sex

Love Buson, Issa
one has good eyes for music
one loves bugs so much

Kenneth saddened me once
by saying flowers and fish
in haiku are false!

all those cherry trees
were often just poetic
Horrifying, yes?

I find Basho real
So maybe his trees, roads, fields
are true in real ways

Just because Borges
had dream tigers don't think that
those tigers don't bite!

You were a dream once
and you were a dream tiger
Imitate and die

That sounds too extreme
but the death haiku are that
haiku for doctors

– David Shapiro

September 9, 2007

Extending the exchange plus an excursus

From dclehman 
To dajoshap

An exchange with you
of haiku by haiku in
honor of life, death.

Friendship is two old
talkative monks sitting
on top of a mountain.

Two old monks atop
a mountain discuss the gold
standard in Koch’s play.

Is there no room for
cherry blossoms and the white
eye of a brown owl?

Your definition
of haiku (sonnet condensed)
is sweet though untrue.

I, too, love moon sex,
dream tigers, split insights, and
spiritual puns.

Spiritual puns
are coincidences, said
G. K. Chesterton.

Can haiku do the work
of a spiritual pun?
Strangers meet on train.

One kills the other’s
wife and wants his own father
killed by the other.

Or the survivor
sleeps with the victim’s widow
after killing him.

Both Alfred Hitchcock
and Sophocles believe in
spiritual puns.

Rhyme in haiku seems
contrary to the spirit
of the Eastern mind.

That must be why I
do it though of course you’re right
I shouldn’t. And so night

falls as it must on
us all, and to bed must I
go, to sleep, to dream,

and not to die. O
friend it pleases me to write
these haiku with you.

-- David Lehman

 

"Ain't That a Kick in the Head?" [with Dean Martin and friends, on an evening in Roma]