The Best American Poetry

A Few Notes from the Antioch MFA Residency (by Jenny Factor)

Part One: Twice each year, I help to organize and participate in Antioch University Los Angeles' MFA residency—a 10-day festival of literature and language held on the campus in Culver City. On Saturday morning, the poet Richard Garcia taught Jumping Into the Flow, a class about how to design and lead an in-class writing exercise. Richard says that to write a good exercise, you'll need (a) a model poem, (b) a procedure, and (c) an atmosphere. He described the good classroom exercise as "a combination of structure and chaos". He gave us this recipe before we took out our own pens: (1) be aware of your atmosphere, (2) be especially aware when memory kicks in and opens a door. If it does, follow it. This is one of the poems I wrote that morning. All the similes are by members of the Antioch Poetry Program:

Solstice Morning Similes
for the people of A1011

As soon as my eyes opened, I found myself
Again. Yup, there I is—on the mattress like
Pubic hair on a bar of soap. That’s the way
It goes some days I guess: thought simmering
Like a pancake in its own grease, oil splatter
On the poor chef, on the poor chef’s clothes.
Why even bother? I rolled around and stretched
My legs and found—what?—well, it was like
Crumbs under the sheets, like the boiled egg
I left in the trash yesterday that stank when I
Got home at 11. Damned summer heat—like
Hot waves off the barbeque grill. Some days, I’ll
Stand and stand outside in the dusk, feeling
The one heat beat into the other, cooking
For the family. And it’s just like that sometimes:
One child bored…what do I do, Mom? And
You-know-who needing—a hand, some
Attention. For me to give a damn. And like
Picket signs outside the grocery store, I protest. I
Flip the burgers. I take another sip of iced gin.

-J.F.

You can read poems by Richard Garcia here.

"Lookout" for David Berman and The Silver Jews (by Ken Tucker)

The Silver Jews is a band led by singer-songwriter-poet David Berman. In existence with varying personnel since 1990, formed in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Silver Jews has its sole constant in Berman. He is a singer in the same sense that Kris Kristofferson, Leonard Cohen, or Allen Ginsberg is a singer. Vocalizing in a flat, nasal monotone, speaking his lyrics as much as singing them, Berman isn't American Idol's idea of a star, and all the more reason to like him for that. But a flat voice and poetic imagery can get you either neglected or as overrated as Nick Cave or Kristofferson. Berman navigates a cozy middle ground on his new album with his band the Silver Jews, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, recorded in Nashville. It's is sort of country-rock, sort of art-rock. It's sure as hell not (feh) spoken-word; neither are his performances of the tunelessness-as-a-sign-of-integrity sort in the manner of James McMurtry.
Before I go any further, let me remind/recommend Berman’s 1999 poetry collection Actual Air. His publisher was probably glad to get the money-quote (ha!) from Billy Collins for the back cover, but close readers will note that Berman's conversational grandness is closer to a contemporary with an equal passion for music, the mighty Mark Halliday, than Collins. As a print poet, Berman deploys his wordplay with poignant sincerity. As sung poetry, the lyrics on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are more than poignant and/or sincere. They’re also willfully obscure and philosophical (typical song title: "What Is Not But Could Be If"), and occasionally simple and direct to the point of abstraction. (No, the song called "Open Field," is not, as I first assumed, some sort of Bermanesque homage to Charles Olsen's gang—it's an adaptation of some lyrics by an obscure-to-me Japanese musician and artist, Tori Kudo.)
But one thing "Open Field" and Berman’s own songs on this album suggests is the magical, chimerical idea that anyone can make music as forthright and unadorned as this. Berman emphasizes this notion by including drawings of the chords he used to create this album, adding the note, "Anyone can play these songs." No, David, not anyone; only some Silver Jews.
Among whose number is Berman’s wife, Cassie, who also plays bass, and who provides the right vocal notes of plaintiveness on "Suffering Jukebox," a deceptively simple song with the brilliant notion of assigning human feelings to an old jukebox filled with sad country songs. Rarely has the use of the pathetic fallacy in pop music been more precisely pleasurable, and I like way Berman puns on the phrase about the jukebox "breaking down."
A number of compositions on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea are big, knotty story-songs, chiefly "San Francisco, B.C.," a version of the Summer of Love if it were re-told by a lower-depths novelist such as David Goodis or Charles Willeford. Another garrulous ramble, "Aloysius Bluegrass Drummer," concerns the title character’s raucous involvement with a tough customer of a woman named Brick Butterfly. David Berman carries both his poetic and country music influences lightly, quoting a phrase from Emily Dickinson in that song as casually and appropriately as he does one from Roger Miller, the songwriter of "King of the Road," among many other, lesser-know great songs.
People who’ve followed Berman's career for more than a decade may be flummoxed by the paucity of autobiographical-seeming, or advice-containing, tunes that put the "cult" in cult-following for this artist. Some early reviews has ascribed this to Berman’s real-life sobriety and what appears to the outside world as a happy marriage. But while I think one of the pleasures of pop-culture criticism is in not merely analyzing the work at hand but bringing to the subject everything one knows about a performer's life and reputation, in this case, I'm going to chalk up the disarmingly uneven, fitfully majestic music on Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea—get an earful of "My Pillow Is The Threshold" immediately, please—to a mundane yet thoroughly admirable motive: a desire to be heard by as many people and as various an audience as possible.
--Ken Tucker

Adventures in Chinese Cuisine (by Joseph Kruzich)

(This week we welcome Joseph Kruzich, Public Affairs Officer, US Consulate Shenyang Province, China.  He has been living in China for the past four years.   Joseph will post all week about Chinese food and drink.  Thanks Joe! --sdh)

Today I plan to post about the most fabled of all Chinese cuisine, the spicy food of Sichuan and a most unlikely place in China where I have discovered some of the best.  I live in Shenyang, up in China's frigid Northeast, where one wouldn't imagine being able to find really good Sichuan food, but I have searched far and wide - from New York and LA  to Beijing and Chengdu - and I have not found a better Kung Pao Chicken than the one served at one of Shenyang's most popular restaurants, Spring Summer Fall Winter (Chun Xia Qiu Dong).  The restaurant owner has assembled some of the best Chefs from Sichuan and their commitment to Nouveau Sichuan is unparalled in China.  The Kung Pao Chicken has a nice balance between spice and flavor, using the freshest peppers, onions, and chicken to be found in China's North.  Each bite of this delicacy melts in your mouth, with a spice that is not overwhelming but leaves one with the desire to gradually devour this dish as you intermittently try other dishes on the table.  I guarantee you will search long and hard to find a better Kung Pao chicken anywhere.  My other favorite Sichuan dish at Chun Xia Qiu Dong is Shui Ju Xia, which is a variation of the second most famous dish from Sichuan, spicy fish in oil or Shui Ju Yu.  Shui Ju Xia puts a generous portion of fresh, pealed shrimp in a pot of spicy oil, mixed with stringy mushrooms, peppercorns and the famous Sichuan spice, Ma, a kind of pepper that numbs your lips and leaves one addicted to this spicy flavor.   This dish is not spectacularly spicy like its Kung Pao counterpart, but it leaves one with a smooth, oily and spicy flavor on top of a delicious shrimp that keeps you coming back time and time again with your chopsticks.  I hope all of you will have the chance to come out to Shenyang to try this fabulous Sichuan cuisine, but tomorrow I will describe a few non-sichuan dishes, that I also love to introduce to my Chinese and American friends.  Of course, food needs a drinking complement and spicy Sichuan is best accompanied by a good beer or a strong Bai Jiu (a kind of Chinese vodka) and I will post later in the week about drinking in China as well.  I'm hopeful that I will be able to add pictures of the two dishes tonight, but if not, I will work out a way to get the photos posted this week.

"Symposium" (by Maxine Kumin)

Symposium

Last call for the symposium at 4 p.m.
to examine the works of W. H. Auden
whom I remember always in carpet slippers.

X from Hum. 101 will discuss the early poems,
Y from Eng. 323 will discuss the later poems
in the symposium that opens at 4 p.m.

Spender famously said, Poor Auden; soon
we’ll have to take off his face and iron it to see who he is.
Perhaps he had bunions, thus the carpet slippers.

Lord Byron, Faustus, Yeats, September 1
1939, these poems should head the list
of works discussed in the symposium at 4 p.m.

which will reaffirm the poet’s place in the pantheon:
wittier than Eliot, more readable than Pound,
both too erudite to read in carpet slippers

but knowing how all the instruments can disagree
and cleverest hopes expire, let us revere
his pleated face in the symposium at 4 p.m.
while I revisit him on stage in carpet slippers.

-- Maxine Kumin

from Prairie Schooner (Spring 2008)

Theodore Roethke [by David Lehman]

No anthology is as nearly complete as the editor wishes. In the case of The Best American Erotic Poems (2008), permission for the use of several poems was denied. Theodore Roethke's 1958 poem "The Sensualists," for example, had an honored place in the book. And his reputation could use a boost. But it was not to be. I would love to post that poem here, but that doesn't seem right. So I'll just refer you, dear reader, to Roethke's Collected and I'll write you a brief head note. Here goes:

Theodore Roethke (1908 –– 1963). Born in Saginaw, Michigan, Roethke spent many boyhood hours in the greenhouses that his father and uncle operated and owned. The poet was a big man –– six feet two and over two hundred pounds –– and for a time he coached tennis at the colleges where he taught. At the University of Washington, where he held a faculty appointment from 1947 until his death, Roethke exerted a powerful influence on student poets, among them Richard Hugo, Carolyn Kizer, and David Wagoner. "Poetry is an act of mischief," Roethke wrote. He accumulated aphorisms and observations in the manner of Wallace Stevens. In "The Poet's Business," for example, he notes that "A poet is judged, in part, by the influences he resists." I'm not certain I agree that "a `movement' is a dead fashion" -- this seems just clever -- but the idea that "almost all language is dead metaphor" succinctly states the poet's challenge. As one who spent time at Bennington College, as Roethke did, I prize this notebook entry from the 1940s: "Going to Bennington [is] a little like going into the Marines."

-- DL

"Cassetta Frame" (by Sarah Hannah)

Cassetta Frame (Italy, circa 1600)
Robert Lehman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I wonder what his hands were like – skin,
Thumbprint’s orbits, half moon of the nail --
The artisan who plied bough and alloy, chisel,
Stone, for the sake of circumscription:
Poplar, walnut, ebony, pear, niello,
Crystal, lapis. The words abscond from wood
And bloom in trees: Pioppo tremulo;
Forma di pera. I confess to find
Myself astonished by outskirts of things:
Hem and shirr, ice storm, sea coast, shadow, fringe,
To find myself forsworn to the mixture,
Poplar, walnut, ebony, pear,
Niello, crystal, lapis. Lapse! No life
But in the rim; no word but on the lips.

– Sarah Hannah

The poet Sarah Hannah – author of two fine books published by Tupelo Press, Longing Distance (2004) and Inflorescence (2007) – took her own life in May 2007. See Eva Salzman’s obituary essay in The Dartk Horse magazine, a version of which appears on-line in Contemporary Poetry Review: http://www.cprw.com/Misc/hannah.htm

Elizabeth Bishop on Ashbery's "Three Poems"

"At first I felt extremely baffled -- only a sense of `motion' and the extremely good writing led me on -- but now after many re-readings I think I am getting to understand them better -- especially `The Recital' -- and some of `The System.' Actually, when I do enjoy passages or pages most, they remind me very oddly of Kierkegaard (whose name I don't remember how to spell right, I think). Although no theologian, probably no Christian, I've always been able to read him with the greatest pleasure -- and your THREE POEMS have now begun to give me the same sort of pleasure. I hope you don't mind my saying this -- that I shd. be saying something like they remind me of Yeats! Whatever -- you have really arrived at a personal, purely logical, and deep -- as well as beautiful way of saying things. I'm not a critic and have difficulties expressing myself about poems -- but I'm sure this book is very important -- as they say all the time, of course-- but really, as well."

-- Elizabeth Bishop
(typed letter dated March 5th, 1973, from Sixty Brattle Street, Cambridge 02138)

from the archive; originally posted June 21, 2008

Ammons 5: Speaking [by Roger Gilbert]

For my last post on Ammons, I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.”  Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February of 2001.  He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America.  Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions.  Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:

Speaking

 

There will be rains I’ll need

no shelter from; cold winds

no walls need broach the chill of for me:

 

when fire splits seams

out of the ground, I won’t

need the warmth at all; lone, ever,

 

when you who have given

your days to me, when you

come close, I won’t sense

 

that last approach: not

knowing how to speak,

I’ll say nothing.

And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:

Speaking

 

There will be rains I’ll need

no shelter from; cold winds

no walls need brook the chill of for me:

 

when fire splits seams

out of the ground, I won’t

need the warmth at all; love, even,

 

when you who have given

your days to me, when you

come close, I won’t sense

 

that last approach: not

knowing how to speak,

I’ll say nothing.

The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.”  (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.)  Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations.  In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in one more like the second.  What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem.  

This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.”  After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem.  Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love. 

 

The poem’s last line also underwent significant change.  In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.”  In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice.  But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind.  The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.

"Jazz as a Way of Life" (by Jordan Davis)

Jazz as a Way of Life

The landscape riffs on what works where,
Scrub brush dirt, scrub brush dirt, bougainvillea
Pamplemousse-style on sandstone
Declining to absorb
The blues and grays.
It's radio day at Hillside Elementary
And the sea is tuning
Its seriocomic static into a new life,
A true light
That comes in a little box
In quantities of two or four. The salesman
Resists the urge to alliterate. He's picked up
The idea that it makes him sound illiterate.
He thanks his lucky day record
He has the San Diego territory,
The percentage of lounges
He hasn't embodied the spirit of error in here
Is still high. He's not high. The principal
Is singing along with the hundred and one
Strings, and the sea is staring
Disconsolately at the closed-up little clubs
That dot the roadside cliffs. That dot.
That sweet and precious dot.

– Jordan Davis

from The Nation, October 1, 2007

Swiss Workers Deep in Conversation Under a Billboard at the Hauptbahnhof in Zurich

I took this through the window of the train as it was about to leave. I wonder what they were talking about. It seemed serious.

Swiss Party Snacks

Much to love here. They're desperado nuts, whatever that means. Also, they're extra wild.

Three More Orgasms (by Nin Andrews)

The Proverb of the Burning House (or How to Save the Orgasm)

The orgasm is like a woman who has just emerged from a burning house. She folds her scorched limbs in front of her chest and shies away from anyone who tries to touch her. A doctor might suggest special ointments to be applied to her tender flesh. But only by you, Love. No one else. Otherwise she will never heal.

News from the Orgasm

Wherever you go, Love, the orgasm talks to you nonstop, as if needing to keep you up to date. The orgasm knows things. It knows what you are only beginning to realize. Life lasts a moment. And she is that moment.

The Last Orgasm

remembers you. Of course she does. How you thought you would just sit for a spell, draw sunlit plums or several peaches or something as simple as a silver spoon. As if you could just trace the outlines of love instead of touching me. That once, once upon a time, back then, on a summer day beneath the blazing sky on the saddest day of an angel's life . .

-- Nin Andrews

Poetry Agon: David Lehman and Kevin Young

<<<

QuickMuse has branched out into the serialization business with a "special serial agon": [On January 4, 2007] Kevin Young and David Lehman each wrote a quartet of poems about the recent famous dead (James Brown, Robert Altman, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein). [The poets were given prompts and were limited to fifteen minutes per poem, with their keystrokes stored in real time.] Read Young’s poems here and Lehman’s here. We’re proud to announce that these sequences [were] published in New American Writing 25 (2007).

http://quickmuse.com/

>>>

Irving Berlin, the Singing Waiter (by Jenny Factor)

Roger Gilbert's evocative recollection of Charles Trenet inspired me to include this additional excerpt from Lawrence J. Epstein's At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York's Lower East Side: 1880-1920.

"Berlin never learned to read or write music. He played the piano...using just the black keys...Born in Russia and subject to excruciating poverty, Irving Berlin...began his musical life leading a singing beggar into cafes. Blind Sol let Berlin sing with him once in a while, and the young boy found that he enjoyed the experience so much that he began singing in the cafes himself....In 1906, Berlin became a singing waiter at Pelham's Cafe, inventing risque lyrics to parody current hits. Two singing waiters at another cafe had published a song aimed at Italians and the song had been successful. Pelham's decided it had better get in the song business as well and had its piano player compose a similar song. Berlin's lyrics were used, and so his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy," was published on May 8, 1907, three days before his nineteenth birthday."

Charles Trenet, Troubador

What if Irving Berlin and Frank Sinatra had been the same person?  In France they were, and his name was Charles Trenet.

I’m taking a break from my posts on Ammons to share my newly revived passion for Trenet.  While I’ve always enjoyed his lighthearted songs and his buoyant singing, I’ve only recently begun to appreciate his range and versatility.  Trenet (1913-2001) wrote and performed hundreds of songs over the course of his more than sixty-year career; best-known in the US are “La Mer,” memorably recorded by Bobby Darin in an English version called “Beyond the Sea,” and “Que Reste-t-il de Nos Amours,” recorded by Sinatra among others as “I Wish You Love.”  But there are many other superb songs by Trenet that never crossed over to English.  And while Trenet himself spent time in Hollywood, he didn’t achieve the level of transatlantic stardom accorded to fellow performers like Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Charles Aznavour.  Yet in my opinion he was the greatest of all the French chanteurs, offering an incomparable blend of nostalgia, humor and joie de vivre, shot through with unexpected streaks of melancholy.

It may in part be a measure of how close-knit the French cultural world was in the 30s and 40s that Trenet associated with the likes of Saint-Exupery, Artaud, Cocteau, Colette, and Max Jacob.  He harbored serious literary and artistic aspirations of his own, publishing novels and verse along with his copious chansons. A gay man compelled to keep his sexuality hidden for most of his career, he often called attention to the line between the performer’s mask and the poet’s soul.  One of his most beautiful songs, “L’Ame des Poetes,” imagines a crowd of people singing the poet’s words after his death, “not knowing for whom his heart beat.”  Here’s a video of Trenet singing it sometime in the 1970s:

How to Know the Secrets of the Orgasm (by Nin Andrews)

You must take notes and observe the orgasm carefully.

Once you have learned to recognize the orgasm, you will know that the orgasm abandons you only by enveloping you. (How small you become in such an expanse, my love.)

Sometimes the orgasm mistakes a nude buttocks for a loaf of bread and takes a swift bite from the soft flesh, leaving tiny teeth marks.

The orgasm can become more desirable in absentia . .

When the orgasm leaves for its annual seaside vacation, it rarely takes more than 7-8 days to return. During its absence, you feel as if water is filling your ears. At night you dream of whale songs.

Neither your family nor your culture gave birth to the orgasm. The orgasm comes from beyond and prefers to remain invisible, though sometimes it can be seen crawling across your skin like a small, red wave.

Few have ever witnessed the sudden and inexplicable flight of the orgasm.

The metaphor for your life? Getting stuck in city elevators, riding up and down for hours. The orgasm takes no responsibility for this.

Orgasms can never be replicated. Each is as unique as a fingerprint with its many whorls

Even now the orgasm is working in your life. A shadowy stranger, an afterimage of you, it leaves wet footprints on the tile floor. You must learn to distinguish which footprints are your own, and which are those of the orgasm.

The orgasm is your only hope. Even now, the orgasm is licking the surface of your tiny black heart.

-- N. A.

Nin Andrews is the author of The Book of Orgasms.

Ammons 4: The Hermit Lark [by Roger Gilbert]

          Yesterday I wrote about Ammons’s poem “Mechanism,” an exploration of the inner workings of a goldfinch.  Ammons wrote about many other birds as well, including blue jays, swallows, terns, and grackles.  One bird seems to have captured his imagination with special force.  In a 1983 interview he responded to a question about the function of the poet by saying “I think of the hermit lark, a shy bird with an unlocatable, indescribable sound.  I identify with that in myself and in the poets I read, too.” The hermit lark appears in several Ammons poems, including one simply called “Hermit Lark”:

Shy lark! I'll bet it took a while to get you

perfect, your song quintessential, hermit lark,

just back from wherever you winter: I learn my real

 

and ideal self from you, the right to sing

alone without shame!

water over stone makes useless brook music; your

 

music unbearably clear after rain

drops water breaking through air, the dusk air

like shaded brookwater, substanced clarity!

 

I learn from you and lose the edginess I speak of

to one other only, my mate, my long beloved, and

make a shield not so much against the world,

 

though against its hardest usages, as

for tenderness's small leeways: how

hard to find the bird in the song! the music

 

breaks in from any height or depth of the spiral

and whirling up or down, jamming, where does it

leave off: shy bird, welcome home, I love your

 

song and keep my distance: hold, as I know you

won't, through the summer this early close visitation

behind the garage and in the nearby brush:

 

you will pair off and hiding find deeper

shyness yet: be what you must and will be:

I listen and look to found your like in me.

 

"Sweet William" by Ern Malley, Australia's National Poet

Sweet William

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

One moment of daylight let me have
Like a white arm thrust
Out of the dark and self-denying wave
And in the one moment I
Shall irremediably attest
How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding)
My white swan of quietness lies
Sanctified on my black swan’s breast.

-- Ern Malley

See http://jacketmagazine.com/17/ern-dl.html

Cover of the Autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins; cover art by Sidney Nolan.

Ammons 3: Mechanism [by Roger Gilbert]

          Ammons is probably best known for two stylistic innovations:  his eccentric use of the colon and his liberal incorporation of scientific language in his poems.  Both of these devices are on full display in a poem called “Mechanism.” The poem falls into two parts, a short introduction to his general concept followed by a long, thickly layered description of a goldfinch.  Here are the first four stanzas:

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,

      morality: any working order,

    animate or inanimate: it

 

 

has managed directed balance,

      the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,

    some energy left to the mechanism,

 

 

some ash, enough energy held

      to maintain the order in repair,

    assure further consumption of entropy,

 

 

expending energy to strengthen order:

      honor the persisting reactor,

    the container of change, the moderator:

What Ammons calls in the title and in line six a “mechanism” is called by the simpler name “going thing” in the first line.  Both names refer to a wide array of phenomena, as the little list in the first stanza implies: “goldfinch, corporation, tree, / morality.”  What characteristics could these four things possibly have in common?  Goldfinches and trees are both living organisms, but corporations and morality?  There’s an unlikely pairing.  Yet for Ammons all these things exemplify what he calls a “working order,” any dynamic system that takes in and puts out energy, that organizes and repairs itself, that staves off entropy and chaos.  Living creatures, businesses, and abstract value systems all possess these features.  Notice that the poem begins with an imperative; we are being instructed to “honor” all these mechanisms, not because they are all equally beautiful or good, but because they all work, they all have achieved a kind of self-sustaining balance.  (Ammons was working as a sales executive at a glass manufacturer when he wrote this poem, so he would have been especially aware of the importance of balancing what comes in and what goes out for a corporation.)

A Broad, Abroad: A (b)road diverges in a yellow wood

See what happens when you serve a horny, bored poet a plate full of summer gourds at your poetry conference? She plays with her food.

Hullo, peeps. This is your roving, raving European correspondant, your coeur déspondant, your very own pain in the arse Jill Alexander Essbaum, with an overdue update. I've been lax in posting. And by lax I don't mean an airport in southern California. (Nor do I mean lax as in -ative, because that would be déclassé.) The sore fact is that once you remove the spangles of travelling about from my sash, I fear I'm just an ordinary ole gal with not too much terribly interesting to report on. But then again-- ain't that the point of blogs?

I'm back in Switzerland until further notice. Switzerland is one of the hosts of this nonsense (I beg one thousand pardons, if you are a soccer fan, for referring to it as nonsense). Downtown Zurich is crammed to capacity with kiosks, food stands, hat vendors, face painters, booze sellers, widescreen televisions, and foreigners. Train schedules have been altered, added upon, increased. Much whooping can be heard in the Hauptbanhof after hours. Switzerland, as I understand it, is out of the tournament already. Anyone want to clue me in on who I should root for?

While in the US, I participated in two literary festivals. The first ever Pilcrow Lit Fest, as headed by the stunning Amy Guth, and The West Chester Poetry Conference, as headed by the formidable Mike Peich. Highlights of that shindig included a phenomenal reading by Richard Wilbur (did you know he used to be a hobo? I think more poets ought to hobo. Especially if it leads to the gorgeous output of verse suchlike Mr. Wilbur's), loads--scads, even-- of social hours intended to create camaraderie and build poetic bridges, ostensibly (and possibly, to get us good and sloshed before the readings), and workshops and seminars for all interested. I was a member of the Millay critical seminar (headed by Jennifer Reeser). Millay is one of my favorite poets. She is utterly underestimated by the critics, still. And we tend to read the wrong Millay, imho. Yes, "First Fig" and "Renascence" are both impressive. But fuck me running and call me a cab: If you ain't read Fatal Interview, then you ain't read the best of Millay. (...)