The Best American Poetry

Getting to Know: Sharon Mesmer (by Daniel Nester)

In which we ask a contemporary American poet the same questions Teen magazine asked now-pregnant teen idol Jamie Lynn Spears; see original interview here.

Sharon Mesmer is the author of Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (Belladonna Books, 2006), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998) and Crossing Second Avenue (ABJ Books, Japan, 1997). Her prose collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, France, in French translation, 2005) and In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005 and 2000). Lonely Tylenol, an art book in collaboration with the painter David Humphrey, was published in 2003 by Flying Horse Editions/University of Central Florida. She is a two-time New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in poetry. We caught up with Sharon while she was doing time in the wilds of rural Pennsylvania--and when shes says wilds, she means "like a bear came right up on our deck last night and stuck its nose against the glass door"--with an iffy internet connection.  And we're glad we did!

BAPB: You’re in Jr. High, right?
SM: Yes, and like Kentucky I am 56.3% illiterate. 

What are you most looking forward to?
Experimenting with rideable unicorns — flaring nostrils, slaying the evil beast.  I am evil and narcissistic!  But tonight I am just contemplating the magic of dolphin elbows.

What kind of car do you want?
One with sensitive teeth.  You’ve probably heard of a narwal, who may still play a role in mating rituals or determining male hierarchies.  Narwals hate dolphins, tho.

What's your favorite subject?
The atavistic mating rituals of unicorns. We believe in One Unicorn, The Pink, The Invisible. Every day we discover new plant life, insects, and animals in humanoid form. The Giant Unicorn (Elasmotherium sibiricus) was once a massive powerful female dark elf.

Do you play any sports?
Wringing every possible dollar, pound, yen, drachma and Euro singing “Kashmir” and “Stairway” to the back rows of interchangeable enormodomes the world over.

Are kids in school treating you differently because of Nickelodeon exposure?
They wake up knowing I am putting in the work to pursue my dream, and it makes them feel alive and free.  Right now, their sensations are unfolding like the petals of a flower, and the stimulus is so overwhelming they can't be anywhere BUT in the moment.  It's like a perfect storm of "a-ha" moments. They learn more and more from my thighs.  My glutes are two vacuum hoses they LOVE, LOVE, LOVE to process. They love learning. They love to learn, and I love to facilitate their long-term goals, the path to the summit.

You have a new puppy named Ali, right? How is she?
Ali's stratagems originally emerged as mercantile vigilantism incarnate via her asymmetrical silhouette which blurred the boundaries of day/night.  Just as Nature equipped the porcupine with a means of defense, Ali wore her embattled position external to the world: ethnic communities turned into war zones once normative gendered binarisms were undone by the shock of pleated chiffon in a wearable skirt length.  Drawing on Nietzsche, Ali announced with aggressively concocted assurances the primacy of her surfaces as a navigation between the elegant Scylla of Balenciaga/Dior historicity (purposefully reserved non-flounciness) and the cheap Charybdis of Wal-Mart blackguardism (fabrics that "degrade," i.e., stretch denim).

How old is she now?
Old enough to open the floodgates to even more delish seitan dishes.

She's a mix, right?
A rock and roll behemoth.  The horsey-chested Zep frontman.

From Daniel Nester in Albany.

Hello there. This is Daniel Nester writing to you from Albany, NY, in my office at The College of Saint Rose, a medium-sized college right in the Pine Hills neighborhood of the city. Just a few things about me, dear reader, before I start with my guest blogging hijinks.

I live with my wife, Maisie, and my our daughter, Miriam "Mitzi" Lee, in the Center Square neighborhood of the city. We are three blocks away from one of the best used books stores I’ve ever been to, Dove & Hudson. We came here around three years ago from that nest of lovable yuppiedom, the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. I have one book of poems, The History of My World Tonight (BlazeVox, 2006), and before that two prose books on my obsession with the greatest rock and roll band of all time, Queen--God Save My Queen: A Tribute and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (Soft Skull Press, 2003 and 2004). I used to edit La Petite Zine, then Unpleasant Event Schedule, then the Sestinas section of the McSweeney's website.

So why am I here guest blogging, dear reader? To plug my own books shamelessly and talk about myself too much? Well, most bloggers do that, I suppose.  Maybe it's to "overshare," that buzzword Emily Gould, formerly of Gawker, invokes to describe her personal posts in yesterday's Sunday New York Times magazine? I'm not sure there.  Let's hope not.  Gould seems to conflate her accounts of her own blogging and editing Gawker, the media- and star-making-machinery-obsessed website. It's an interesting term, however: poetry debate often about whether or not to overshare in their work, whether it is better to strike an "impersonal" pose (Eliot) or engage in "candor" (Ginsberg) . Maybe that's why poets and their blogs seem to have a symbiotic relationship: it's either an escape valve for sharing/oversharing personal information for the poets of impersonality, or another outlet for candor for the Too Much Information poet-types.

I think it's fair to say I am a TMI poet. 

Anyhoo, on with the show.

That photo of me above is taken from most recent installment of Karaoke + Poetry = Fun, also known as KPF.  What is Karaoke + Poetry = Fun?  It's a very occasional reading/singing performance in which poets read a poem or two then sing a song. Yes, it's that simple, and it's that fun. I invented KPF in 2000 when it seems readings needed to be jazzed up a bit. Some others have tried the format.  Alcohol is usually involved with KPF. Scratch that: It is always involved. More photos from KPF to come.

New and Old in China

We were in Dalian for our first two days here, cosseted in the Five Star Furama hotel.  All of the advertising cliches apply:  thick terry towels and bathrobes, fluffy eiderdown pillows, luxurious appointments and these.

These commodes have begun to gain acceptance in U.S. markets.  Will Smith hawked his on Oprah a few months ago, saying that he didn't miss toilet paper because the "Washlet" gets it right.  When I visited a bath showroom in April, a few customers scrutinized one the way my colleagues and I looked at the first computer to appear in our offices in the early-80s.  Can these be the wave of the future?

How strange, then, in China, to go from luxury hotel to home-style restaurant, where the Jakes is across the hallway from the dining room, doesn't have a door, and is just a simple hole in the floor.  We've been camping and know the drill when it comes to going in the wild.  Yet these primitive facilities still call for an attitude shift.  As Eleanor Goodman, a translator of Chinese poetry explained, "you just pull your clothes out of the way and go." 

--sdh

Genghis Khan

Mongolia!

Film Still Series #67

From the forthcoming film by Bill Hayward, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Produced by Bill Hayward and Anna Elman.

From Dalian (China) with Love

At Dalian University of Foreign Languages on Monday, I read my "Oxford Cento of American Poetry," and invited the students to pick a favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. A line from Whitman inspired Wang Xingying (王兴颖)，whose English name is Eileen. The earthquake was very much on her mind when she wrote these lines.

-- DL

Yours and Mine

What is yours is mine,my father,
though you are not here any longer.
When the sky grew darker,
your love came into my heart deeper,
and then my eyes turned brighter,
and my wings stronger.

Facing disaster, I won't be weaker.
You and I are together,
no matter what I will suffer.
God made us daughter and father,
disaster has taught me to stand straighter.

What is mine is yours, dear father,
forever and forever.

*

Wang Xinying also wrote three one-line poems.

Hand
Hand handing hand hangs hope high

Love
Love lets life last forever

Where is God
When God turns his back to us, everyone's face is God's.

IncreduLit #2

A friend of mine, inquiring as to the source of the line "So I sign off, wishing I could sing on," received the following reply from the IncreduLit scholarly service:

"So I sign off, wishing I could sing on" is the first line of the notorious "Black Bart" soliloquy from the second of Robert Service's "sestina operas," Klondyke Fannie, as adapted by Helen Trueblood for her famous "Frontier Opera" series, which opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall in, we believe, May of 1934.  An interesting note on that production: Trueblood herself trained as a Rockette for six weeks before the show opened, and was in the opening night kick line for the phantasmagorical, pyrotechnical final act in which Black Bart is kicked to death by the entire Rockette troupe, with each dancer costumed as Annie Oakley.  Intrigue surrounded the production from that first night on.  When Daily Mirror columnist, Walter Winchell, who'd had a brief affair with Trueblood and was furious at having been jilted, raced up the aisle to phone in a vicious pan of the production, he was tripped and sent sprawling by a mysterious "Lady in Black," sustaining a broken ankle and a particularly nasty cut to his upper lip.  The "Lady" was never apprehended; insiders at the time claimed "she" was local radio host, Barry Gray, in a black dress and wig.  Winchell had carried on a long feud with Gray, excoriating him in his columns, calling him "Borey Pink" and a "disk jerk."  In any case, Winchell's bad review never appeared, and Klondyke Fannie was a smash hit for a few months, until the man playing Black Bart--Paul Soldati, an actor with reputed Mob ties--was literally kicked to death during a Sunday matinee performance.  The subsequent murder investigation closed the show down; it was never revived.  Trueblood, however, didn't give up, and the following spring opened her second opera, Juneau What I Mean, to mixed reviews; it closed after a moderate run.  Subsequent entries in the "Frontier" series--What's Your Point, Barrow? and Don't Know Her Name, But Alaska--had similar success before the outbreak of World War II.  During the war Trueblood served as a WAC officer until her death in 1943, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where she worked as a consultant for the drama troupe stationed at the USO training camp there.  Trueblood never recovered consciousness after a mike boom accidentally knocked her off the stage during a dress rehearsal for Juneau What I Mean.  The troupe was scheduled to fly out of Fayetteville two days later to perform the opera at a series of American bases in the South Pacific, beginning with Guam.  One notable personality connected with this production was Bob Hope, who played the lead character, "Dirk, the Handler."  After Trueblood's death, the tour was canceled, and the entire drama troupe was transferred to Chicago to train in sketch comedy.

In Praise of the Middlebrow

Years and years ago, I read an essay by Richard Eberhart, "Will and Psyche in Poetry," and it became something of a touchstone for me in reading poems.  As a thumbnail code, it was a sort of default guide.  But as it turns out, the definitions of "Will" and "Psyche" I've followed all these years have been my own, not Eberhart's.  Now I've read the essay again, and realize either my twenty-something brain read only what it wanted to then, or that my fifty-something brain (along with my thirty- and forty-something brains) conveniently forgot the part of the essay I wasn't interested in.  Eberhart was much more judicious toward Will than I have been in my life, and ultimately saw both Will and Psyche (possibly) residing in the other.

Oh, fine.  Go yin-yang and golden mean on me; I'm still not interested in fairness after all these years.  My young self wanted to know what Keats meant about "negative capability," what Graves meant about the presence of the Goddess, what Eliot meant about coming back to where we started out from, and knowing that place for the first time.  My personality is withdrawn, reclusive; I'm better at hearing than seeing.  I'm more interested in the unseen than the seen, not because I'm subtle, but because I'm cowardly, and have felt from early years on there's more danger there.  Will seems too obvious to me, with its chest-thumping, its demands to be lauded.  Here's Eberhart: "The Psyche state in poetry pertains to, exemplifies, or takes off from peace, quiet, calm, security, harmony, proportion, concord, tranquillity, freedom as from something (war, for instance), serenity, stillness, and silence ... Will is wish, desire, inclination, pleasure, appetite, passion, purpose, determination, choice, intention, entreaty, command, decree, power, arbitrary disposal, self-control as in a man of strong will, zeal, volition." 

Others have made a similar dichotomy, though phrased differently and with different emphases.  My own has always been an attempt to understand the difference between the poetry that wills itself into being, via the brain, logic, the determination on the part of its maker to be a poet, and the Psyche poem, more prized, of "inspiration"--of the "lights," the soul, the heart, the Muse, the god.  The latter seems the truer poem, the poem that directly accesses the ground of being.  The poem of will ultimately deceives: not only is it susceptible to cleverness, but the force of the cleverness itself can turn out to be the real, if unconscious, subject of the poem; the poem's agon can be played out several levels above the ground of being, fooling the poet, and possibly the reader.  The poet of will is the poet of the middlebrow: the will is the organ working furiously behind that furrowed middle brow.

The middlebrow isn't the standard of the age, of course; but it's the commonplace everyday knowledge of the age, and serves its purpose, as I now finally realize.  At its highest, the middlebrow orders things, makes lists, codifies, and marshals rhetorical strategies, clevernesses, even deep learning, into homilies.  When we think of homiletic types of literature, we immediately become condescending: Sunday school sermons and the like.  It's age-old experience mushed up into spoon-sized servings.  And that's probably a reasonable reading of the immediate past, with the added value that it lets us off the hook in the present.  But in fact the middlebrow in any age is precisely the shrewd packaging of homily in contemporary terms that is just a step or two in advance of us.  That's probably why we turn on it so fiercely when we catch up with it and pass it.

More Questions [by Nin Andrews]

More Questions

Tell me, Love, who is your critic?

And when?  Do you know?

Do you believe what he says? Or she?

Me?

Yes, until his back is turned,

I do.  I do.

I don't mean to.  It's just what happens.

But I never read a poem from top to bottom.

Is that a comment about sex or poetry?

Or the shadow?

Do you agree with the number three?

Do you count your days? Lucky stars? Loves?

Who taught you to add?

Do you know?

Me, I'm in love with Ann and Tim and Nicanor too.

Nicanor is dead.

Did you ever ask your love, are you an elegy?

Do you know what you are doing? Asking? Of whom?

You who were always such a quick study.

A flash in the pan. The sky, too.

Does that mean you were never happy after the fact?

Did you cry the night we had sex?

What % of sadness do you carry in your soul?

That's mine, you know.  Right there.

In the skin beneath the skin.

Is that where love and poetry begin?

Do you have a handkerchief? A tissue?

Something to tell me now?

Is this how what begins

Begins?

-- NA

When the Banjo Stops (by Elizabeth Samet)

That's when the trouble starts in Bonnie and Clyde. My students noted this when we watched the film a few weeks ago. When the banjo stops, bad things happen: “I killed a man back there,” Clyde seethes in the back of a movie theater after the getaway from their first fatal job. Like moviegoers everywhere, my students are deluged by onscreen violence. However, because they are preparing to become military officers, their response to it has a clear-eyed sense of the stakes. It is the antithesis of Clyde’s childlike, dangerous naiveté. The film’s final scene, in which Bonnie and Clyde are riddled with bullets, had an especially powerful impact on us. It doesn’t look like the violence typical of most action movies today. Its horror unfolds in slow motion, and it tells us something about ourselves that the supercharged gore of contemporary cinema does not. It isn’t only the slow motion, of course, but also the preceding series of quick cuts between Bonnie and Clyde, who, having realized what is in store for them by the side of that country road, search out each other’s eyes. Watching it this time, what I found most powerful was Clyde's broken sunglasses (one lens has popped out) and untucked shirttail—the hapless disarray of his life crystallized in an instant.

Pantheismus, Pluralitas, Poetria [by Alexandra Zelman-Doring]

Brown University senior Alexandra Zelman-Doring, who won the annual Glascock Mount Holyoke last month, was inspired to write the following poem by the sight of the three judges crossing a foot bridge on the Holyoke campus in South Hadley, Massachusetts:

Pantheismus, Pluralitas, Poetria

                   --     for J. Koethe, D. Lehman, L. Szporluk

Wait, companionable green

Of the scent made spring

Of the ear fashioned bird,

Your golden patch of age,

Spreading over under

Streaming through the god-sent.

Every way of talking

Is to nature.  In and for and to.

Three poets on a bridge.

The bench man made, awaiting

But they pass it. 

Wait, that the over-heard

By god, a silence, each

Her green gives part. Ear

Of the one-too-many eyed.

There is no silence to this bridge.

It has no maker, when they pass it

Who imagine a plurality of green,

All spring, all tame, all lifted.   

                                                

-A.S. Zelman-Döring

Una mujer, Over There [in Madrid, to be exact] (by Kathleen Ignatius)

Una mujer, over there

(In Madrid, to be exact)

I don't really understand blogs.  I am a very old young person.

My only other foray into blogging was a false start--

http://allaboutmymadrid.blogspot.com/

Here in Madrid, in the kitchen of my of my Ecuadorian friend of Lebanese parentage, there is a product with a label written in English-esque Spanish:– Bio-Vegetal.  I keep reading and discover it is an Italian product.  The slogan: La soluzione perfetta per lavare le verdure.  I get a glass of water and think about my question from yesterday.  I was in a café and they were playing a version of Monk's “Well, You Needn't.”  Well, I needed to know who was playing.  It wasn't Thelonius.  So I asked the Spanish barman.  Our exchange went like this:

--Bood Pool.  --¿Quién?  --Bood Poul.  --¿Qué?  ¡Bood Pow!  --Oh, ¡Bud Powell!

We were both embarrassed.  Small revenge, I guess, for having had to repeat the phrase --Un tinto a thousand times since I moved here.  Lost letters between us.

Or that time in Florence when I asked for the cocktail with American name and the waiter didn't understand me until I said it six times and he repeated back to me, relieved,

--Oh, un geen feez!

¿Quien tenía razón?  Chi c'aveva ragione?

In Spanish and Italian I have (not) reason.

In English I can only be right or wrong.

--Kathleen Ignatius

Let's call a duck a duck (by Mitch Sisskind)

It's funny ain't it how bigots can be pretty good writers? Dostoyevsky, Celene, and hey -- let's call a duck a duck -- Hitler came up with some stuff too. So in my endless endless search for something, anything, that ain't corporate or NPR i found this here guy I think from Missouri, a self-proclaimed Identity Christian who writes (or wrote, as this dates from about five yrs ago) a sort of blog where he rates candidates for local elections. Mark Twain would have recognized this guy and in fact damned if the boy ain't right there in the pages Huckleberry Finn!

This here is the last gasp of what used to be called 'Southwestern Humor.' Category that in the 19th cent. reached fullest expression in the work of a man named George Washington Harris who created a character name of Sut Lovingood. And if you think anything here is offensive, then find you some Sut and read it. Makes Petroleum V. Nasby look like a Sunday school picnic. Here's a description of this character Sut from a contemporary academic study:

"Sut is one of the cruelest characters encountered in Southwest humor. He grossly exaggerates the qualities of conniving, cruelty, brutish behavior and coarse speech--the qualities that enable men to survive the harsh life of the frontier. In turn, respectability, kindness, and brotherhood are characteristics for derision as they constitute the personalities of the weak."

Sut was hugely popular. Kind of makes you stink, or think, don't it? So here's the modern heir in the form of Missouri local election picks from 2002. Only for those who like it raw or maybe medium rare as I have toned this down a little as there are ladies present but use the imaginations God gave you and you will get the idea:

Collector of Revenue

After fighting with Nikki Meyer's Republican mob, John T. Jones complimented me on my courage. I told him that Nikki's mob was stupid to let me irritate them so easily. Jones then asked me if I was saved. I told him that I was a babtised Dual-Seedline Identity Christian. Jones said that he was a 'New Testament' Christian and that God loves everyone. I pointed out that Christ called an Canaanite woman a dog and said that He had come only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. Jones complimented me on my knowledge of the Bible. I said that if I were to pick and choose what part of the Bible I was gonna obey that it would be be much easier for me to simply worship myself and cut out the religious middle-men. Jones at least had a sense of humor about that conversation.

Jim Otey can go back to reading the sports on the television. Terry Lankford needs to turn states' evidence against Sheriff Ron Doerge. Don't make me have to press 'hindering prosecution' charges before a Revolutionary drumhead tribunal.

I feel sorry for Lee House. She is proud for being married to Roy D. House. Roy D. House is the stupidest asshole in Newton County. Roy's brother was supposedly killed 30 years ago by his fellow drug runners -- it is one of the most popular gossip subjects for the old-timers. Roy ran as a Repub back in 1994 and House interrupted me at a debate posed by a home schooler for tax breaks for home schoolers. Roy House wants nothing but pubic skrewels forced on all children. I told House to shut up on my time. In addition, House whined like a pussy after the Republican primary that the Lawrence County clerk, Robert Bartlesmeyer, stuffed the ballot boxes so that his wife Linda could win the Republican primary, and then when I asked him if that was true, House screetched like a psychotic banshee that he had never said what was common knowledge. Roy D. House is vermin, and definitely at the shallow end of the gene pool even if the pool is nothing more than a bedpan. The thought of the House family being tax collectors is noxious to myself. If you knew of them like I do, they'd be noxious to you too.

Caution! Watch this video before you take a hallucinogenic enema (by Mitch Sisskind)

Do not take the hallucinogenic drug DMT anally until you've seen this clip! It goes on for quite a while but you'll appreciate its content when you enter the psychedelic realm of ten billion munchkins and weirdly pulsating geometric shapes that somehow seem alive!!!

Jess at Tibor de Nagy

"Goddess. . .because. . .because. . ." (c. 1954, Paste-Up)

Jess (1923-2004)

Paintings and Paste-Ups

May 22 to July 31, 2008

Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York

212 262 5050

If you think you're doing everything right, you're probably doing this wrong (by Mitch Sisskind)

As this young man says, if you are dissatisfied with your life but you can't determine exactly what you're doing wrong, the trouble is probably that you're not studying enough Torah. But can we study the whole Torah in one lifetime? It's very difficult -- so I for one have decided to specialize. I am only studying the incident in which Moses strikes a rock, Numbers 20:2-13. Actually this is the second time Moses struck a rock, but it's the first time he got in trouble for it; in fact, God says that Moses will not be allowed to enter the Promised Land because he struck the rock. It's true that God had told Moses to speak to the rock, not to strike it, but for this the great leader is denied entrance to the Promised Land? A very puzzling episode!

If anyone has any insights on this Torah passage, please share!

A Broad, Abroad: The Bitch Still Be Abroadin'

So. I'll bet you thought you was done with the Slattern from Switzerland, the Teutonic Tart, the Helvetic Harlot, the... yeah. Aber nein! I've simply been-- let's call it-- recovering from my escapades. And recover I have, and re-cover the same ground, I am fixin' to (there's the Texas slipping in) do. As in: I'm sitting in Zurich Flughafen waiting to board a flight to Berlin where tonight I get to see Mr. Cave. I am going with a girl I first met at a NC&TBS show in San Francisco (my second NC show). Her name is Eva and she is a seminarian. I was once a seminarian. Did you know that seminary and semen are etymological siblings? Sometimes I get the words etymology and entomology confused. Speaking of insects, myrmecology is the study of ants. Not the study of Ethyl Merman. Also, she was not a mer-person, though Ester Williams might have been, what with all the swimming. And ethyls and esters are both organic chemical compounds.

Then again, so is reefer.

If I blather it is only because I'm giddy with my pretend rock and roll life. I'm even sporting my just-bought from Camden Town beet-colored with snakes on 'em Doc Martens with a floral print dress that I am afraid is making me look hippy and also hippie-like. I may need to change.

The night before last, I was fortunate enough to be in Paris where with the luscious Lea Graham, the effervescent Evie Shockley, and the terrific Timothy Bradford where, as a group, we feted The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, Second Floor European-style. Which is to say, in the basement of a dimly lit bar and by reading the hell outta them poems.

I call this shot, Trouble Brewing.

Tomorrow, I leave for Chicago, where I will be attending and hopefully reporting on the Pilcrow Lit Fest, a gathering of small-press types. Of course, it's not how small it is, it's what you do with it. Or, so I hear.

However. I cannot leave off my duties as European Correspondent. So to that end, I leave you with a photo I took of a billboard in a neighboring town. Seems like I ain't the only white trash in the zip code (of, if you prefer Postleitzahl)!

A tractor show!

Gotta board my plane.

Bis bald,
Jill

Hipsters or kittens? You make the call! (by Mitch Sisskind)

Which would you rather watch? One of the most intense exercises in self-absorbtion ever digitalized? Or kittens playing in a kleenex box? Five and a half million people have already voted for the kittens, but it's not over yet!

John Cusak and Diablo Cody                                                                                    

the kittens (better without the horrible soundtrack!)

If it's Tuesday it Must be Jinan

The earthquake disaster is on everybody's mind here and every time our hosts lapse into Chinese sidebar conversation, our translator tells me they're discussing the recovery operation.  The numbers are staggering and continue to be revised upward; last night it was 34K plus dead. Over 360,000 have been evacuated.  To where?  And it's only in the last day or so that rescuers have been able to get to some of the more remote areas where roads were completely destroyed.  Entire ethnic groups have been wiped out.
     One of our hosts, a well-known poet, is also the editor of The Jinan Daily and we are honored that he has taken time from his schedule to be with us to discuss poetry.  I wonder if the news coverage of the earthquake has fallen off the front pages at home; here, it is non-stop on every television station.  In general, people seem satisfied with the government's rescue operation and are grateful for the assistance from neighboring countries. Questions about building quality will be raised later.
    Last night, after dinner, David met with about 15 Shandong province poets to discuss American and Chinese poetry.  To say there was a significant language barrier would be an understatement.  Still, the poets managed serious conversations and our Chinese hosts and their guests were quite familiar with such poets as Robert Bly, Mark Strand, Ted Berrigan, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Elizabeth Bishop.  (I was somewhat dismayed to see that some of their information came from Wikipedia, which I know to be rife with inaccuracies.) One poet in our presence is referred to as the Elizabeth Bishop of China.  She gave some of her poems to us and we're hoping we can share them with you after consulting with her later today. 
    When the group discussion turned to the practice of writing poetry, and David remarked that writing poetry for him is an adventure, that he doesn't know where a poem will end up when he starts, that he often writes poetry to work out an idea, there was nodding all around.  "Poets are the same everywhere,"  someone said.
    Later today we meet with three university presidents over lunch that I'm told will comprise food "not available in Beijing, not elsewhere in Shandong, and especially NOT in New York."  I'm already hungry.

-- sdh

My Father's Rope

My father died yesterday in the early morning.  I sat with him for about five hours the previous day while he slept, sedated, and my mother, 84, slept in a chair, her head on a folded-up towel.  I took her home in the evening, and my sister sat with him for a while.  Then he slipped away, probably still unconscious, in the middle of the night, with no one there.  I brought my mother back, and we sat for another few hours with him, and then we said good-bye.  I wrote some things in my notebook while we sat there, including this small poem.  I offer it as a little valedictory, in an emotional time.

My Father's Rope

My father packed a rope into every suitcase

when he went out to all the wooden towns

after the war, offering his wares.

Each suitcase was cardboard,

like all the other suitcases

of the men offering America's wares

after the war, the necessary war.

"All those hotels were made of wood,"

he told me once, cunning and fear

I'd come to know in him at war

in his face.  "The Allegheny, the old Fairfax

in Wheeling, the Dexter, pride of Fremont, Ohio.

I'd call ahead; sometimes I had to call

more than a month ahead, to book a room

that wasn't higher than the second floor.

Fire took 'em all--yeah, each single one

burned down.  I'd been to war, I wasn't going to fry

on a fourth-floor ledge.  I packed my rope."

Standard-issue clothesline, doubled back,

and tied at three-foot intervals with a knot

they taught him in the Navy, in the war.