The Best American Poetry

Introducing "Wednesdays with Denise"

Watch this space on Wednesdays for dispatches from Denise Duhamel. Denise’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Find out more about these books and others here. A proponent of collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). Denise was guest editor of the Best American Poetry 2013. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. Find more BAP blog posts by and about Denise here. 

Welcome, Denise. 

-- sdl

 

BAP 2009: The Gala Launch [by Liz Howort]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 [2009] featured  prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

 David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

            “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

 John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprising movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each line beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard does. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2009

Two Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

Explosion

An explosion is always right because 
Gramps can't argue with an explosion.
If he starts up at Thanksgiving dinner 
You and him might argue but he can't
Argue with an explosion you set off.

Same thing as when Gramps buys 
A cell phone and you have to set off 
An explosion or when Gramps goes
On a trip down memory lane again 
You have to set off an explosion. 

What if Gramps keeps continuously 
Bungling old time expressions like
It is two sides of the same horse?
You must set off another explosion,
You got to so stop your blubbering.

Sleepless

Gramps is scared that he might 
Forget his Social Security Number
So tossing and turning like a ship 
Heavy laden he keeps reciting 
His Social Security Number to
Himself until the casement glows
A glimmering square (Tennyson.)

 

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For this ‘Wednesdays with Denise,” I point you in the direction of Gulf Stream, Florida International University’s national literary magazine for which I am a faculty advisor.  Here’s a throwback to Ashley M. Jones (an alum of FIU’s MFA program and now Alabama’s Poet Laureate) interviewing David Lehman about the prose poem:

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/archives/online-archives/online-8/features-8/gulf-stream-interviews-david-lehman/

Our latest issue is Spring 2022.  The editors will be reading submissions through November 3 for the next issue.

https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/issue-30/

The picture on top, from the issue, is "Marco Island" by Kevin Norwood.
Marco Island, Florida, November 2021
-- September 28, 2022

"Torrents of Spring" by Philip Mead [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

If T.S. Eliot had been writing in Australia, "The Waste Land" might have opened "September is the cruelest month". Spring has just arrived in the Southern Hemisphere, and on the east coast of Australia it looks likely the season will only compound what has been the wettest year ever recorded.

 

The great Philip Mead's "Torrents of Spring" seems superbly situated for the occasion, a spring poem more doleful than celebratory. Through the speaker's conversation with the dead Scottish poet Sorley Maclean, who is on his way to Calvary (evoking both one of Maclean's most well known poems and the Crucifixion and resurrection of Christ), we are reminded that loss is just as an essential element of spring's process of renewal as the blooming of acacias and bottlebrush. But how do we find renewal in the loss of a loved one? According to Maclean "there are no solutions" but to be in the world and know that it carries on:

What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.

The last line suggests that art exists outside of this carrying on; one step removed from life, it can be deferred. I like the idea that art is free of the future, that its temptation to exist lies not in time but in the eternal. It allows for us to meet dead poets in city laneways and have them assure us we continue to dream in death, as in life, "lonely as exoplanets".

 

Torrents of Spring

 

I thought I recognised Sorley Maclean
walking towards me down Niagara Lane.
As he came alongside he said look up,
you can see our friend the sky where the tall buildings
lean in towards each other. I can see some glyphs
floating across up there. The in-between goes all
the way back to the well of darkness.
Sorry but I’m an analogist, and out of area.
Back on the corner the tree shadows had seemed
to scatter around his ankles. He said he was on his way
through, from Antofogasta to Calvary, reminded me
that the lamps are a super important part of the
hanging universe. We keep dreaming he said,
lonely as exoplanets. The hard thing, I know,
is losing one of your own. That always takes up a lot.
Then after a very long pause he said, there are no solutions.
What I always did was walk to the edge of the sea
and watch the fishermen where they haul their boats
in and the surge of the ebbless ocean.
Everything passes between islands, and take it from me
anything in art can be deferred, it’s free of the future.
I know you’ve read about my afflictions. And I was different then.
I wanted to ask him about sudden gusts of wind,
and the cries of memory, the unexpected turns
in full lives, like his, and the enigma of where people end up,
but he was gone. Round the corner and down the street.
The last thing I remember was his scarf, the blue of flax lilies.

 

                                                                            first published in Australian Book Review

 

 

György Ligeti (1923-2006)

How many of you listen to "modern music" (i.e. Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Kurtág, Xenakis, etc.) for sheer pleasure? I've been into this stuff since very early childhood so it's just as pleasurable for me to listen to a Mahler symphony as a Stockhausen opera.

But I completely understand the fact that our 21st century ears are still plugged into the 19th century ... our "pop" music is diatonic, the TV jingle is diatonic, the scores for Star Wars are definitely diatonic (or sometimes chromatic ... chromaticism can be used in both a diatonic and dodecaphonic context).

Most people react to non-diatonic music with a feeling of having listened to noise, incoherent musical sounds, or -- often -- just an annoying waste of time.

So I propose this experiment. Listen to all or some of the following four compositions by György Ligeti and observe your reactions:

1. Atmosphères (1961)
2. Requiem (Kyrie) (1963-65)
3. Lux Aeterna (1966)
4. Aventures (1962)

The first work is for orchestra; the other three all involve singers.

2001: A Space Odyssey
directed by Stanley Kubrick

Yes, I'm certain most of you recognized the above music as part of the score of this cinematic masterpiece from 1968. Were you able to enjoy the music on its own merits, or did you immediately begin to associate the sounds with images from the film?

It's not an academic question, because audio and visual cues comingle in our brains, and sometimes fuse together!

• Atmosphères plays over the first three minutes of the film, before the MGM logo even appears. You could say that the music "sets the mood," or in its urgency, is subtly telling the audience to quit jabbering and prepare for the experience. But if you soak up this non-visual prelude, you will find a gigantic pay-off later in the film.
• The next Ligeti we hear is when the apes meet the monolith -- the music is the Kyrie from the Requiem. This music will accompany every appearance of the monolith, except the final one. We see the syzygy as the music reaches a peak and Kubrick cuts it off abruptly. The camera looks out on the African plains and the Moonwatcher episode begins, culminating in the bone/satellite Also Sprach section.
• Lux Aeterna makes its first appearance when Floyd's shuttle is approaching the monolith site. The music takes a break while the crew has sandwiches and coffee, and then resumes until it turns back into the Kyrie -- the leitmotif of the monolith -- and is overwhelmed by the high-pitched shriek of the radio signal.
• If your home-video version leaves out the Intermission, you've missed Atmosphères again. Shorter than the opening cut, but still an important cue to what will come next.
• A supertitle: "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite." Kyrie returns as we observe another syzygy -- this time from Jupiter. We hear almost the entire movement (Kyrie eleison = Lord, have mercy) -- nature's cosmic terror; mercy seems irrelevant!
• Now the payoff from having heard Atmosphères so often. As Bowman passes through the Star Gate, and we observe his face in a frozen scream, we hear ten minutes of music, accompanying one of the best-known scenes in cinematic history.
• In the alien apartment, we now hear Aventures for the first time. Strange vocal noises pierce what seems like silence.

The actual techniques Ligeti used to compose these works is fascinating, maybe a subject for a future post.

Oh yes -- Kubrick and all his lawyers somehow neglected to pay (or even correctly credit) Ligeti for his brilliant music. Ligeti sued; it was settled, and all must have been forgiven, for Christiane Kubrick accompanied Ligeti to the premiere of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), after Stanley's death.

The Proud Beggar [by Tom Disch]

Am I happy to have lived
When and where I did
America The 20th century
I've often said so
Grateful anyhow for my good luck
But I'll be happier soon
To have shed both when and where
My landlord has had me evicted
Katrina struck
As Charlie lay on the mattress
Of a New York hospice
And he had as little care
For the deaths of those other paupers
As for his own
May I achieve the same
Dark wisdom
Yet still I scrawl
These codicils and think
It matters who gets
Dibs on the dust
From my shitpile
Didn't I write
Just after he died
"Nothing we had
Was worth the having"
And isn't that still true?
These few disintegrating molecules
And then the mattress
Will be rotated
To receive the next deposit
Our chiefs may rejoice
For when they die
Their ships go down
In the same flames
They aren't evicted
They laugh at the poor in their rags
Pushing crook-wheeled grocery carts
Filled with moldy books
Please buy one, Sir
Just a dollar
Less for you

June 1, 2008

"Made Bed" [by Beth Gylys]

Made Bed

He could have been my lover again that night—
a whisper of dress lifting over ears,
the tie unknotting, the sheets predictably white,

the fumbling urgency leaving us breathless, light
from lust tinged by guilt, the vanished years.
He could have been my lover again that night,

confusing past with present, desire with flight,
image with image: elbow, breastbone, sheers—
the tie unknotted, the sheets ironically white.

Entangled, our voices pitching like a kite
in a storm with vowels, bleats, stifled swears...
he could have been my lover again that night

if the night were only and alone, if right
and right had not had different names. Affairs:
the ties unknotting, the sheets iconically white

and damp, and something's broken, lost, bright
as shattered glass, as side-lit, backstage mirrors.
He could have been my lover again that night,
the ties unknit, the sheets shamelessly white.

-- Beth Gylys

from Verse Daily, September 26, 2019

http://www.versedaily.org/2019/madebed.shtml

L'Shana Tova: "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" [poem by David Lehman]

Molly with Stick, Cayuga Lake, 1981 (c) Glen Hartley

For I will Consider Your Dog Molly 

 

For it was the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah, New Year's Day, day of remembrance, of ancient sacrifices and averted calamities.

For I started the day by eating an apple dipped in honey, as ritual required.

For I went to the local synagogue to listen to the ram's horn blown.

For I asked Our Father, Our King, to save us for his sake if not for ours, for the sake of his abundant mercies, for the sake of his right hand, for the sake of those who went through fire and water for the sanctification of his name.

For despite the use of a microphone and other gross violations of ceremony, I gave myself up gladly to the synagogue's sensual insatiable vast womb.

For what right have I to feel offended?

For I communed with my dead father, and a conspicuous tear rolled down my right cheek, and there was loud crying inside me.

For I understood how that tear could become an orb.

For the Hebrew melodies comforted me.

For I lost my voice.

For I met a friend who asked "is this a day of high seriousness" and when I said yes he said "it has taken your voice away."

For he was right, for I felt the strong lashes of the wind lashing me by the throat.

For I thought there shall come a day that the watchmen upon the hills of Ephraim shall cry, Arise and let us go up to Zion unto the Lord our God.

For the virgin shall rejoice in the dance, and the young and old in each other's arms, and their soul shall be as a watered garden, and neither shall they learn war any more.

For God shall lower the price of bread and corn and wine and oil, he shall let our cry come up to him.

For it is customary on the first day of Rosh Ha'shanah to cast a stone into the depths of the sea, to weep and pray to weep no more.

For the stone represents all the sins of the people.

For I asked you and Molly to accompany me to Cascadilla Creek, there being no ocean nearby.

For we talked about the Psalms of David along the way, and the story of Hannah, mother of Samuel, who sought the most robust bard to remedy her barrenness.

For Isaac said "I see the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the offering?"

For as soon as I saw the stone, white flat oblong and heavy, I knew that it had summoned me.

For I heard the voice locked inside that stone, for I pictured a dry wilderness in which, with a wave of my staff, I could command sweet waters to flow forth from that stone.

For I cast the stone into the stream and watched it sink to the bottom where dozens of smaller stones, all of them black, gathered around it.

For the waterfall performed the function of the chorus.

For after the moment of solemnity dissolved, you playfully tossed Molly into the stream.

For you tossed her three times, and three times she swam back for her life.

For she shook the water off her body, refreshed.

For you removed the leash from her neck and let her roam freely.

For she darted off into the brush and speared a small gray moving thing in the neck.

For this was the work of an instant.

For we looked and behold! the small gray thing was a rat.

For Molly had killed the rat with a single efficient bite, in conformance with Jewish law.

For I took the rat and cast him into the stream, and both of us congratulated Molly.

For now she resumed her noble gait.

For she does not lie awake in the dark and weep for her sins, and whine about her condition, and discuss her duty to God.

For I'd as lief pray with your dog Molly as with any man.

For she knows that God is her savior.

David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)

-- sdl

Laura Orem: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________________

Bald

 

Remember, remember that boy

who could not love you

because you were not pretty,

whose terrible honesty you’ve carried

for thirty years, the truth you mined from him

like some strange gemstone made of your

own desperation that you still wear

around your neck.

 

And now this boy, your boy, who carefully wields

the electric razor until, stroke by stroke,

your head is shaven, austere as a nun’s,

beauty or lack of it as irrelevant as it is to God. This is

about power. This is about mess. This is what you do

to claim some purchase on this absurd slide

down a hill of talus looking for meaning

or Jesus or some way to make sense.

The boy reminds you as he shifts

to a disposable razor and, surgically careful,

scrapes away the tiniest stubble, black and gray

as a prophet’s beard. Your choice, he says. My choice,

like forcing truth from another boy thirty years ago.

See, says my son. Look. It’s not so bad.

You can stand it. You already have.

Stand it some more.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Laura Orem is a writer, artist, and educator. Currently a board member of the Baltimore Wisdom Project, a multi-faceted education program for inner city youth, she taught writing for many years at Goucher College. She is the author of two books of poetry, Castrata and Resurrection Biology.  She lives in Palm Coast, Florida.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This transformed image of the iconic Mona Lisa from a 2013 poster is the “perfect emblem of the upheaval that cancer brings with it, the enormity of its impact on the life of a person and of the inestimable stakes,” says the National Cancer Association Foundation of Italy, a nonprofit organization that provides free palliative care and pain management services to cancer patients throughout Italy.  

 

 

What are the Scariest Poems in the English Language? [by David Lehman]

            What is the scariest poem in the language? I wager that many would select Poe’s “The Raven,” and it is unquestionable that Poe has the ability, in his verse as in his stories, to scare the dickens out of you. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" will get votes, as it should. There are poems by Emily Dickinson that, like a Magnum .44 wielded by Dirty Harry, could "blow your head clean off." Byron's "Darkness" makes you shudder, and many poems from the Elizabethans and the Metaphysicals make you see a skull and bones on the other side of your pillow. You can, however, make the case that Robert Frost -- Frost, who was once habitually misread as a genial Yankee sage -- has written as dark and frightening a poem as we have.  The French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal confessed himself terrified by the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” It is Frost who captures that silence.

            The brilliant sonnet “Design” – in which a spider makes a meal of a moth -- exemplifies the view of nature that informs Frost’s poetry. Nature at work is aesthetically satisfying; it has order, pattern, design; but there is nothing moral or ethical about it. Nature, as opposed to human nature, is indifferent to individual life. Put another way, nature feeds on itself, and life requires death, as the life of the spider requires the death of the moth.

            Humanity is stupid or destructive in Robinson Jeffers’s poems, which take the side of nature against human life. Frost doesn’t go that far, but in his poems the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Man is frail, and the loss of a man may be mourned, but the mourning lasts a mere moment. In Frost’s “Out, Out – “ a boy working with a buzz saw loses his hand in an accident. The results are surprisingly fatal: “No one believed. They listened at his heart. / Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.” But what truly shocks the reader is not only the death in quick stages -- brilliantly captured in that line with two dashes -- -- but also the moment when the boy, a “big boy / Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart,” pleads, “Don’t let him cut my hand off -- / The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!” We infer that brother and big sister lack parents, and this knowledge deepens the pathos. 

             The ending of “Out, Out –“ seems at first to indict humanity for its essential callousness. They – the same “they” that had listened at the boy’s heart – go right on living: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” Callousness or realism? The ending is similar to the ending of Auden’s great “Musée des Beaux Arts,” in which Icarus, in Brueghel’s painting, falls from the sky to his death in the sea, “and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” Both poems are superb, but Frost’s will give you the chills while Auden’s more analytical approach will make you ponder the thesis that humanity is necessarily indifferent to human suffering.

             Among the scariest of Frost’s poems is “Desert Places.” Compare it to Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” Both poems are about “nothing.” It may be that Stevens’s poem is the stronger of the two; it certainly requires enormous attention and rewards numerous re-readings. But “Desert Places” has something that “The Snow Man” with its “distant glitter of the January sun” lacks. “Desert Places” has terror.

              In his "Pensées" (i.e., thoughts), Blaise Pascal wrote: “When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Here is the final stanza of Frost's "Desert Places":

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

 Take that, Pascal.-- DL

from the archive; first posted October 31, 2015

End [by Susan Brind Morrow]

I like having a fierce dog

Who barks and bites

And leaps at your head

The beauty boy who sleeps at my thigh

Red fox red

My beautiful Ted. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What carnivore 

brought down the deer

Whose rib-cage stands red

In the brown spring fields below

 

Venus rising in the dawn

Frost on the lawn

This April morning.

                                                                 *

We sat and watched the sun go down across the lake below through the broken black outlines of the trees. The faint flicker of a rainbow formed for an instant in the low sky to the north as though it were the rim of something suddenly visible, the shining fragment of the rim of a halo. The last light fell in a wave of gold that swept quickly around the room settling for a moment on each of us in turn. We sat talking in the dark, in what seemed like a box of deep blue light as we had in summers past, so that the evening had about it a sense of timelessness.

I reminded Terry of how once he said that everything operates on the level of four basic elements, their combining and breaking down, and that we are all “just some spectacular sideshow,” as though all the desperate suffering of life were simply an elaboration of this basic principle.

“What is it that makes a human being?” He had said, “What defines being human? Falling in love. And what is that? Seeing something ordinary- as numinous. Seeing. The intensity of that focus, that concentration of energy, would be the heating up in which some significant transformation could take place.”

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Translation: Egyptian Poetry [by Susan Brind Morrow]

1970s

Songs of Baramhat

Salah Jahin

Baramhat is the first month of spring in the Coptic calendar, the calendar of ancient Egypt still in use today, along with the Islamic and the Gregorian. The most notorious months are Amshir (February/March) which is characterized by inescapable sandstorms, and Tuba (January) which is bitterly cold. The poem follows the progression of the year from midsummer (Abib, Melaoon) during which time it is often too hot to go around in the day time. Tut (toot) is September.

Sucked through the ribs 
Like milk from the breast
Unceasing, but not by a child-
Tears give way to blood
Give way to fire
Give way to words-
Red, resounding, terrible…
So the strength of the sun in summer burns out sweat.
And I-
My breast
Is a bronze fortress
That scorches the eyes
The heat increases
And melts its lock
And passes.

                  *

Malaun in all the books is silence,
Malaun in all the books is dumb.
The silence of branches webbed tight by spiders
Though horses trip through them.
Bright delicate birds sing,
They chirrup out their lives.
And I…
My heart is another bird
And if it doesn’t sing it dies.

                     *

Oh sweet wind, the month of Tut,
The lock of summer is melted and gone.
Fly away over the roofs, my heart,
To the house without ivy or jasmine,
To the mother of the eyes 
The eyes with hard words and sad smiles
And say to her,
“Oh friend to those who wander
Your friend who has loved you 
year after year has returned.
And by life- a night of longing,
By dawn and those who cannot sleep
By morning and those who hope
By noon and those who sweat
By evening and those who are tired
By Maghreb- and what is it
But a punishment for madmen?
Do not abandon a friend
Who was never false
And never- though love was lost
Cried out-
And never said, “But I…”
May the earth and sky be my witness.”

And around the shanties and the hovels,
Heart,when you go
Don’t go as a nightingale or as a bat-
Go as what you are,
A heart
With a thousand eyes 
and a thousand ears
And a thousand thousand tongues.
Crawl on your belly on the pavement in the dust
And if it is the cowardly month of Tuba, the brutal,
Listen and see what rises in the wind,
Oh heart, oh million,
Say to those in the house of tin,
“Wake up!
Your lost friend returns.
Your friend who wandered too far, forgive him.
Oh you who live in a house of tin,
Come out, rejoice!
I am not Christ,
But I’ll tell you something,
And I swear it to you,
I swear to you-
The world is lie upon lie
And you alone are true.”

                             *

Sucked through the ribs
The heat of noon unbuttons my breast,
My breast, still full of sighs,
Sighs and clanging iron and songs.
Oh come Baramhat- Spring, perfume,
Greenness, sparrows, silkworm.
Come here and see me without a mask.
For after Amshir, the father of wind,
And Tuba, the father of frost,
You come Baramhat, you gem,
You father of sun,
And my heart
Doesn’t know how to whisper.

The Falcon

Amal Donqal
Go round, winged falcon, go round
The year passes and the end will come
And when my death comes
It comes around, like the ravenous falcon.

The Pyramid Texts

2500 B.C.

The sword of Orion opens the doors of the sky.
Before the doors close the gate to the path 
through the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark,
As the falcon flies as the falcon flies
May Unis rise into the fire
Beneath the holy ones as they grow dark.
They make a path for Unis.
Unis takes the path.
Unis becomes the falcon.

 

1200 B.C. (?)

The Song of the Harper

Death is before me today
Like the smell of myrrh
Like sitting under sails in the wind
Death is before me today
Like the smell of lilies 
Like sitting on the shore of a drunken land
Death is before me today

Invocation to a Scribe

If you learn this profession 
You will become a writer
Think of the writers of the past
Their names have become immortal
Even though they are dead
And their descendants are gone.
They didn’t make themselves tombs out of copper
With tombstones of iron from heaven
They didn’t think about leaving heirs
In order to perpetuate their names.
They made heirs out of books
They had written themselves.
People they will never know are their children
For a writer is a teacher to all.
Their houses are buried, 
their servants are gone,
Their graves are forgotten, 
But their names live on 
In the books they made
While they were alive.
Be a writer. Take this to heart.
And your name will be like theirs.
Writing is better than something made of stone
Than a solid tomb
For it lives in the heart.
A man decays,
His corpse is dust
His family dies,
But his books live on.

Wednesdays with Denise [by Denise Duhamel]

For my first post, I’d like to highlight Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast which began in December of 2021.  The hosts, James Allen Hall and Aaron Smith, offer insightful, hilarious, dishy (or “Bysshy” in the case of Percy Bysshe Shelley) commentary on all things poetry. These endlessly inventive hosts play literary games like “When Rita Dove Cries” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Rita Dove or Prince) and “More Moore and Moore” (where listeners guess if a statement is by Marianne Moore or Julianne Moore). So far, Hall and Smith have interviewed Maureen Seaton, David Trinidad, Carl Phillips, Miguel Murphy, Jacques J. Rancourt, Diane Seuss, and moi, with more interviews on the way. Breaking Form starts with a warning that the two hosts will gossip, interview, and throw shade, acknowledging “we are not for everyone.” If you have Victorian sensibilities or a low tolerance for raunch, maybe stick with NPR.  But if you are up for filth, poignancy, and belly laughs, you will be hooked. The hosts have an easy banter which makes you feel like you are at a party trying to keep up with really smart people …except you don’t even have to put on your lipstick (I’m looking at you Diane Seuss)! -- Denise Duhamel

https://breakingformpod.buzzsprout.com

The Eastern Forest [Susan Brind Morrow]

 

The horns of a deer are still soft in September
An owls face is mostly ear

 

Fire in the trees at the end of winter
When red tongues of color run under their skin

 

The season of death begins with strokes of red
Its cold breath pours over the hill that swallowed the sun

 

Beeswax and fruit
And honey that tastes like raspberries thick with crystal in the comb
The full to bursting days of leaves on East Lake Road
A map of color in the fall between the fields and lake,
Sharp prickling smell of winter-
Pale blues, crushed powder snow,
The early green of winter wheat
In upturned earth; and summer’s riches
Seaweed and fish slime and stones baked on the shore,
And wreathes of rainbowed gasoline that flow
Under the dock where the carp spawn at night
In the shallow water-
The good things about Geneva
Almost make me forget its gloom,
And how my heart was broken there-
Torn into a blossoming wound,
The rose grows out of the wound

                                *

Unsheathed deer gut by the stream
A black living rust licks it down to the soft stones
Soaked in green light.
A leopard frog froze in the water last night

 

Dozens of snails in rose translucent shells
And yellow
Plastered like closing flowers on the dead stems of reeds

Now in cinders
Cedar has leaves 
Like the skin of a salamander

 

Her hair was like the fur of a winter animal
And her hands were webbed like stars

 

Scraps of color in the forest
the head of the red-bellied woodpecker
satin against the dead wood

 

She made a pillow out of the dress
Dragonflies settled around it with a light papery scratch
Throbbing salamander bodies- and glossy prismed eyes
Funny how insects prefer certain colors

 

And beyond them the mirrory river
Full of forming stars

 

Soft as a newborn, milk fed fawn
Left in the woods by its horned mother and afraid

 

Black vultures shadowing each other around the white rock

 

Pale blue bone white days of winter
When the sun is warm and the wind is bitter

 

David found a luna moth- or had my mother found it for him
Pressed against the screen door of the kitchen, a left-over from the night.
It’s huge delicate wings were the most deliciously cool shade of green I had ever seen,
Such a fine unusual shade of green I could taste it in my mouth,
Feel it’s delicate tissue on the tips of my fingers.
How could I draw such a rare color into myself?
I could only do this, taste and feel the color, as I looked at the moth

 

Clouds closed the sky like a fist

 

The silver light has retreated onto the branch tips, silvering now only the shells of the trees.
It is November. The air is cold, and there is still a burning color to things
The red squirrels are whistling in the maples by the road.

 

On the dry stoney side of the creekbed in spring were efts the color of cinnabar flecked with gold, their eyed skin as soft as wet sand. The solitary stalk of a cardinal flower, its rare deep red the true scarlet of nature, would stand in the fresh green light of the wet wood like a hidden flag.

 

Would oh would I were a kingfisher
That flies among the halcyons
Along the breaking waves, 
With a fearless heart, that holy bird
The deep blue of the sea

Kingfisher detail, Nelson Shanks

-- Alcman; Susan Brind Morrow trans.

The Mets are in the post season [by Greg Pattenaude]

On Monday evening in Milwaukee, the Mets defeated the Brewers 7-2 and with the victory, guaranteed their first post season appearance in six years.  Max Scherzer, returning from the Injured List, was brilliant, retiring all 18 batters he faced with apparent little effort.  If not for wanting to limit the number of pitches, he may have been on his way to a perfect game.  He had to settle for two-thirds of one and his 200th  Major League victory.

The Mets broke the ice in a scoreless game in the 4th inning.  Pete Alonso connected with a 3-run homer, his 36th of the season. In the 6th, back-to-back triples by Brandon Nimmo and Francisco Lindor followed by a double from “cult hero” Daniel Vogelbach made it 5-0.  After Scherzer left the game in the 6^th, the Brewers plated two on a two-run homer by Rowdy Tellez.  But any thought of a Brewers’ comeback was put to rest in the 8th, when the Mets tacked on two more, thanks to RBI singles by Tyler Naquin and Tomas Nido.

After the game, the Mets celebrated in subdued fashion.  Rather than the usual oft-repeated champaign spray madhouse in the locker room, players were seen holding flutes of bubbly, more like receiving Prosecco while heading into the cocktail hour of a wedding reception.  Clearly, they knew that more and bigger celebrations lay ahead, but nevertheless acknowledged a significant achievement.

What has been the difference this year’s success story, as opposed to other recent years?  The answer is manager Buck Showalter.  His old-school, no-nonsense approach is exactly what this young team needed.  Combined with adding veterans like Scherzer and infielder Eduardo Escobar, professionalism has returned while still allowing the team to shine with individuality and personality within those bounds.  An example of that is Edwin Diaz's 9th inning anthem of Narco by Timmy Trumpet which heralds in victories.  Gone are players giving thumbs-down gestures to fans or stuffed ponies in the dugout for riding after non-consequential home runs.  Having an owner Steve Cohen that actually cares about the team’s success other than the financial bottom line also helps.  

The Mets still hope to win the National League’s Eastern Division. May that be the next celebration with several more to follow.  Stay tuned!

"Affirmation" [by Donald Hall]

The late Donald Hall pictured here with his wife, Jane Kenyon

Donald Hall was born on this day in 1928. As guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1989 -- the second volume in the series -- he taught me much about the making of an anthology. As a man of letters, who felt as comfortable writing a profile of Henry Moore or a sports story about the Boston Celtics as a romantic poem for Jane or an essay in literary appreciation, he proved that the life of a poet and the career of a professional writer could coincide. He worked in a variety of genres and wrote for periodicals as different from one another as The Paris Review and Sports Illustrated, The Boston Globe and Yankee, and showed by his example that all the writing you do helps all the other writing you do, and all the styles and forms of writing are valid: the interview, the children's story or poem, the textbook, the diatribe, the anecdote, the blessedly unself-centered memoir in which the emphasis is on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Join me in saluting this masterly poet, teacher, editor, writer. -- DL

Affirmation

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

-- Donald Hall

Light in the desert articulates things very strongly . . . [by Susan Brind Morrow]

Light

There is a clarity of light in the desert that articulates things very strongly. It changes from moment to moment, and with it the colors change, the colors and tones of the shadows and the rocks- from violet to blue to gray. One might say that this light enables one to see in a way that is not possible elsewhere. The light itself has a kind of purity, and for some this is why the desert is a holy place. The desert eats everything, desert nomads say. And one might say, if this is death, this stark beauty, I’ll take it. For the desert is not a static thing, a place, but a process that is ongoing across the face of the earth. The Western Desert was once an ocean floor, peopled with fish and crinoids and oyster shells, whose remains are thickly embedded in the vividly colored layers of sea clay sculpted into isolated outcrops by the desert wind. Once it was a forested plain, and the shells of trees, turned to red and brown shards of stone, lie heaped in places among the fragments of bone scattered over the ground like a fine covering of soft white snow. If everything- oceans and forests and all living things, ultimately become this pure land of rock and light, one might think, if this is death I’ll take it, I am willing to be part of the inevitable transformation of all things into this stark absolute beauty. 

The Translation of Nature                                                          

Tongues in trees

Books in the running brooks

Sermons in stones

And good in everything

The great sea that surrounds us all is not death but life. We cannot see the radiant flow of animate minutiae that pervade the water, earth, and air around us. What we can see are the detailed symmetries of individual living things, and in these symmetries the underlying pattern that is the key to the mystery of eternal life. This hidden structure of life manifests in the Fibonacci lattices of growth that underlie the forms of plants and animals, and the dendritic mechanism of memory itself. The mind is a mirror, illuminating minute particularities even as it reflects in its very nature the universal flow.

The flow of radiolarians in the sea, shells and fragments left by drifting waves on the shore, masses of people drifting through airport corridors, rushing in waves toward departing planes. To capture these things is indeed to capture both beauty and insight as a bird in flight, to bring a sense of joy and motion to the intricate plethora of forms in nature, and to pass this vision on as a radiant gift to the world. 

Plants and animals are spun on the same pattern.

To see the human form as a fibrous mass of roots touches on this profound truth: A lace-like pattern of nerves underlies the skin of both, raising the question- when did these parallel life forms diverge?

The seed is what is left of the plant,

But the same cannot be said of us: you cannot plant the bones of an animal

This human dilemma, how to bring back to life what remains, 

has been universally solved by the book. 

 

What is involved is a conjuring trick. The electricity of the mind runs along vivid lines of association through its thread-like channels of memory. Hieroglyphs are not cryptic, but synecdoche: the sketch of an animal suggests some aspect of its nature. This animal particular conjures in the mind not merely itself, but its suggestion of a quality observed in other things. The flamingo is the hieroglyph for red, and blood; the crocodile for rage, and lightning- terrifying hidden things that strike. Forever hidden in the sign is the potential. The letter is the seed of the word. The word is the seed of thought.

Thus the very bones of language have the power to bring back what is gone.

The eye is the hieroglyph not to see, but to create. The presence of the artist is implicit in this insight. Perception is the essence of creation. What eye first saw the world in translation? Who created the alphabet? The composite phrase itself supplies the answer: alpha, the head of a bull, and beta, house, a word that even today can simply mean a movable divided tent. These are the paraphernalia of herders in semi-arid lands, people to whom water is in motion: a wave. Is it a wave made by wind on the sea? or is it the wave-like line left on desert rock as the water left by passing rain evaporates? There is always something wistful in catching the fleeting thing and writing it down.

The fossil stands for the form. Language works in much the same way. That letters on a page are the remnant rags of things: fossils and bones whose fine symmetries yet contain the spark of life; that the page is on and of the earth itself, are truths that capture the magical essence of memory, of how it works, of what writing and representation are, and are for.

one can imagine standing on the shore of an ancient sea, picking up fragments of coral or stone and arranging these shapes with aesthetic delight on the beach- clearing the ground with the flat of a hand to make a smooth page out of dirt or sand, and letting aesthetic intuition create a thought, a storyline, with a fluid mix of suggestive objects. A fragment suggests a human hand (the hieroglyphic verb to give); another a face (the preposition upon), or the hoof of an animal (the sign to repeat, to do it again).

 Thus random objects become signs in the magical glow of the mind, in the endless flow of luminous living things, including ourselves. The skull, the simple remnant of a human form- no more complex than a seed pod that has lost its meaning once the seed is gone- comes to mean death itself. Not death but the fear of death, for death is an idea that belongs to the illusion of the solidity of the world. 

Shakespeare told the truth: 

nothing of him that doth fade, 

but doth suffer a sea change 

into something rich and strange.

 

Above are prose poems I wrote as essays on the work of portrait photographer E.C.Warner, and the artist Michele Oka Doner

The Eye

The Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison wrote in 1912, (to paraphrase from memory), “Always pay attention to the untranslatable word, for there you may rediscover the source of sanctity.”

To pursue a question about an untranslatable word:

What is the origin, hence original meaning, of the word Jehovah/Yahweh?  

I offer an answer to this age-old question from my own observations: it is the hieroglyphic word yahw, the life-giving light that shines through all things.

This principle, the relationship between light and life, is deified in Egypt. Images in relief can be giant hieroglyphs. In this relief of Akhenaten the yahw hieroglyph, the sun streaming light, gives life to plants and people on earth alike. The rays of light are hands holding out the sign of life to everything that lives. It is the image of Avalokteshvara, he who looks down, touching every living thing with a thousand life-giving hands, open hands with eyes on them that see all the suffering of the world, that the see the reality of the world. In the Pyramid Texts these two concepts occur together where the hieroglyph is doubled in the cryptic phrase the brilliant light is in the heart of his eye. The hieroglyphic eye is the verb to create, associating the Yahweh concept with creation, with yahweh, light, as the creator, the eye that sees and shines at once.There is much Astronomy in Egyptian religious poetry. Here the soul as an infant (the word for which in hieroglyphs is moses) is washed in the field of rushes, the eastern stars at dawn.

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is the light in the field of rushes

Pure is he who is washed in the field of rushes

Pure is Unis in the field of rushes

You are born of dusk with Orion

You rise with Orion in the Eastern Sky

And descend with Orion again in the West

The third with you is Sirius, purest of places,

Who leads along the fair paths of the sky

Through fields of celestial rushes

 

The soul rises as Orion.

The stars are fields.

The stars are blossoming

The stars are green

Sew green stones

The turquoise, malachite stars

And grow green, that Tety grow green

Green as a living reed

The stars are the souls of the dead, blossoming like plants in the sky.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce [by Angela Ball]

 

The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes
       

And then we woke up. And our uncles
were still missing, our azaleas yanked

and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.
But before we woke, we heard you say

in a voice that hummed without words
that you'd gone too far and would hold

that rushing hole at your center for the rest
of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

like church. We are people who forgive, but
who can forgive something with no eyes,

no ribs, no head to bow in shame?
In the dream, though, we sat and spoke

somber. In the dream, we reached out
and took what must have been your hand,

vanishing and damp. You let us.
And when your whir-voice said, full

of torn-off roof shingles and children's
coin collections, that you were sorry,

we wanted, with all our blood and breath,
to believe you. So, for the span of a sleep, we did.

--Catherine Pierce

When a devastating natural disaster occurs, it’s so hard to reckon with the seeming arbitrariness of the destruction—why this town and not that one? Why this house, this car, this family? In this poem, I wanted to give the townspeople a chance to imagine, at least briefly, intention, remorse, and grace.—Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi and the author of four books of poems: Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words, all from Saturnalia Books. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Nation, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and elsewhere. An NEA Fellow and two-time Pushcart Prize winner, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Thirty-Five): Catherine Pierce

Catherine Pierce’s revelatory poem begins with its title, “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes.” “And then we woke up” dashes this fantasy, yet the poem obsessively continues it: working to anthropomorphize, even negotiate with, an impossibly brutal natural force that slams all it encounters, killing cowering people and animals and carrying photographs thousands of miles to where they are sometimes posted on social media and recovered. Catherine Pierce lives in Tornado Alley, as do I. Coined as part of a geographical research project in 1952, the term, with its Noir quality, suggests permanent destitution—and indeed, many towns must rebuild from zero, knowing that more tornados will spin towards them.

How to deal psychologically with this situation, let alone poetically? Though this is a more rural than urban problem, urbanity is needed—an approach with play in it—play that, far from trivializing the tornado’s impact, lets us, in part, get our minds around it. One model informing this poem may be Kenneth Koch’s brilliant addresses to large, abstract entities, such as World War II. Another may be Frank O’Hara channeling Mayakovsky in the famous sun-initiated conversation poem, “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island.” 

A true literalist of the imagination, Pierce begins by dramatizing the phenomenon’s absurd violence: “And our uncles / were still missing, our azaleas yanked / / and gone, our dogs dashed against oaks.” Like O'Hara's sun, Pierce's tornado speaks first:

 

     But before we woke, we heard you say

 

     in a voice that hummed without words

     that you'd gone too far and would hold

 

     that rushing hole at your center for the rest

     of your life. Hearing that made us feel a little

 

     like a church . . . .

 

“We heard you say” reminds us that this is fantasy—but it is also reality: a tornado cannot live without its “rushing hole.” Feeling “a little / like a church” is a wonderful literalization of faith, akin to William Blake’s expose of hypocrisy in “London,” where “the Chimney-sweepers cry / Every blackning Church appalls.” Then there is the wonderfully funny and spot-on

     We are people who forgive, but

     who can forgive something with no eyes,

     no ribs, no head to bow in shame?

In what context can this happen? In dream, of course. There, the tornado has a “whir-voice” that Pierce, in an inspired move, fills with “roof shingles and children’s / coin collections”; a voice that says “sorry,” a bare-bones apology that the town wants desperately “with all our breath and blood” to believe. Catherine Pierce’s riveting “The Town Dreams the Tornado Apologizes,” a poem that reminds us of the radically communal nature of weather, ends with a modest Shakespearean sentence—one that encompasses much of human nature: “So, for the span of a sleep, we did.”

--Angela Ball

Diane Burns's "Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question" [ chosen by Terence Winch]

 

I can't remember when I first encountered this poem.  I know I stumbled on it accidently, I think while doing some on-line research during my days as an employee of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.  We had launched a poetry feature called "Pulling Down the Clouds"  for our membership magazine, and I was always on the lookout for interesting Native work to run as the focus of the feature.  

I knew immediately I wanted this poem in the magazine.  I loved its directness, its snarly, unapologetic, in-your-face attitude. Its completely sophisticated, contemporary use of language.  This was not work that catered to white assumptions and stereotypes: just the opposite, in fact.  Hers is a complex voice in which humor, bitterness, and hipness all coexist in service to the poem. This was a voice like that of many of my Indian friends and colleagues, but one rarely heard by the non-Native world (at least beyond the pages of a Sherman Alexie book).     

Further investigation revealed that the poem was written in 1989 and that Diane Burns, a Lac Courte Oreilles/Chemeheuvi, was born in 1957 and had passed away in 2006. She "first emerged," we told our readers, "as a powerful literary voice in the 1970s working as a poet and model in New York City. Burns’s first and only book of poetry, Riding the One-Eyed Ford (Contact II Publications, 1981), further established her reputation as a unique talent by challenging Native American stereotypes through sharp wit and honesty. In the 1980s, Burns joined a circle of poets and writers in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, reading her work at the renowned Bowery Poetry Club and Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery." 

________________________

Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question

How do you do?
No, I am not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I am American Indian, Native American.

No, not from India.
No, not Apache
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
No, we are not extinct.
Yes, Indian.

Oh?
So that's where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?

Oh, so you've had an Indian friend?
That close?

Oh, so you've had an Indian lover?
That tight?

Oh, so you've had an Indian servant?
That much?

Yeah, it was awful what you guys did to us.
It's real decent of you to apologize.
No, I don't know where you can get peyote.
No, I don't know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I didn't make this. I bought it at Bloomingdales.

Thank you. I like your hair too.
I don't know if anyone knows whether or not Cher
is really Indian.
No, I didn't make it rain tonight.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Spirituality.
Uh-huh. Yeah. Spirituality. Uh-huh. Mother
Earth. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Spirituality.

No, I didn't major in archery.
Yeah, a lot of us drink too much.
Some of us can't drink enough.

This ain't no stoic look.
This is my face.
__________________

For more information on Burns, check out this obituary. I don't know if this is Burns herself reading the poem in this clip, but perhaps someone else out there would know.