The Best American Poetry

Hard core blues+ kitten

Filmed in 1971 --

Ths has to be one of the most popular kitten videos ever! More than five million views --

Happy Hallowe'en (from Rome) [by Moira Egan]

[No! it's not a Hallowe'en party! It's teachers from L'Aquila wearing ass ears to protest proposed changes in education here in Italy (guess what: less money, fewer hours: "useless people" those teachers!]

Every day this week, we've had thunderstorms and protests. Students are occupying the schools. Thousands (hundreds of thousands, from the looks of things) are marching in the streets, in spite of thunder, lightning, and heavy heavy rains. "If nothing else, Berlusconi has really energized the populace," everyone is saying. Indeed. Though why they weren't so energized on election day here is another question ----

"Where Abstract Starts" [by Joseph Ceravolo]

Where Abstract Starts

I sit here it is 4:00
Should I say it?
Death occurred to me
And the fit over bounded
My physical thought
As I lie here
It must be my underlying thought

Know now where it comes from
Know now where abstract starts
I sit here, I lie here
It is 4:15

And I should say it
Out in the open, under the stars
Rebounding in my physical body
My non-existing into
The snows of abstract flesh

-- Joseph Ceravolo

The poem appeared in the February 18, 2008, issue of The Nation.

See The Oxford Book of American Poetry for other poems by this extraordinary talent.

Overheard Outside a Bookstore [by Jim Cummins]

I don't want you to think I'm the kind of person who sneaks around and listens to other people's conversations and writes them down; but I do.  I've arrived at that age--60--where, man or woman, you're invisible.  You're wearing Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak whenever you go out.  You no longer matter to anyone "out there" because of course Americans only have time for pattern-recognition, and your surface no longer has anything to offer.  You can feel resentful about this, but that's self-defeating: the truth is, you're going to die sooner than the people who don't see you are.  They know that.  You're a vague reminder of what's in store for them, too, and they don't like it.  They want to go get some coffee.  I think we invisible ones appear on the eyescreens of younger people as a set of pixels that immediately flash an alarm to the brain.  The brain then takes over, directing further action.  For some, this means whisking themselves out of our presence, posthaste.  But others just don't see us; we're allowed to hang out in their comfort zones for a while, blessedly invisible again, listening.      

I think I'm better than most at this invisibility thing, because I've been invisible most of my life.  This isn't self-pity talking; it's true.  I'm sure at some point in life I was pissed: I wanted to tell my story, not listen to some buffoon tell his.  But the problem is, when I did tell my stories they were pretty boring.  I'm not a good storyteller; I'm a listener.  Perhaps not even a good listener, but a listener.  Even when my friends would generously wait for me to tell my stories, I came to realize they were being polite until the conversation could come around again to their stories.  However miffed I might have felt, I had to admit I enjoyed their stories much more than my own.  I know this goes back to identity issues I probably should have fixed a long time ago.  But I'm sixty; give me a break.  You know that Hollywood saying, You've got to own the room?  I've never owned a room.  Ever.  If I were a camera I could photograph an atom, because I wouldn't displace anything.  I'm like a light rain.

So I'm standing in a light rain, outside a bookstore, near closing time, looking at possible remaindered mysteries.  But they're the guys I don't like: Dean Koontz, a detective whose cat solves crimes.  I'm leafing through a paperback of Walter Isaacson's Kissinger when I hear the following.  The man's voice moves me with its own outsiderness, I guess; he has his own issues with books.  I can understand that: books mock us.  But a sweet feeling for Doris overcomes his fear, and he ventures into perhaps alien territory.  I copied the conversation down verbatim and put it in my notebook later that night. 

   "Darletha!"

   "Hey!  What you doin' here, lookin' at the books?"

   "I thought maybe I'd get Doris a book.  She always sayin' how she love books.  I thought maybe I get her a book."

   "You still got that book I gave you?"

   "Yeah, I still got it."

-- JC

Monday Night at KGB [by Julia Cohen]

Usually poetry readings are only interrupted by enthusiastic but inexperienced fans who do not yet know that the etiquette is to wait until the end of the reading to clap (not between poems). Or by friendly hecklers that that compare the reader to John McCain. I was going to present you with the witty banter of Rick Barot and CAConrad. Pretty straight forward. But after CAConrad's reading was interrupted by a madman who threatened the readers and the audience, I'll also include the mad man's dangerous 'banter.' I think it's the sign of an excellent reading when it ends with a brawl where the poets keep their cool.

Tiger Poem for the Tiger Picture I Just Posted [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Well. I'm tired but I wanted to post a poem and have decided to follow the wit of the last photo I posted.  This is from my first book The Next Ancient World.

Villanelle: If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass

You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.
You will, of course, be taunted if you ever try to change.
When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

Consistency is worse, it brings the wrong kind of fame.
The orbit of right action has a freakin’ woolly range.
You will not be rewarded for remaining long the same.

It, inertia, is a pity.  It, stagnation, is a shame. Yet you
yourself preach caution as you pace your unlocked cage:
“When trainers wander off, tigers, please do not.  Stay tame.”

Be a mountain if you want to, be the whole mountain range.
Will you, in turn, be hostage to your hostage on the page?
You will not.  Be rewarded for remaining long the same?

You can say what you want when the angel makes you lame.
You can wrestle against water, you can rape your own rage
(when trainers wander off).  Tigers, please do not stay tame.

As hard as bleeding a tree to death by cut and squeezing, change
from out of the gut of the rut’s range will be insanely hard.
But you will not be rewarded for remaining long the same,
when trainers wander off, tigers, please do not stay tame.

-- JMH

Halloween and the Other Fright Nights [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

As the season ensues, my friends, I too am ill.  I cough, I suffer, I cancel.  I otc, I herbal, I chicken soup.  I intend to be well by Halloween, my favorite holiday.  Here is a jack-o-lantern I scalpeled into being.

And by election day, my least favorite holiday, at least in this last decade.  Here I depict the concern of my friends and myself.

I feel at the moment like the sweat on the brow of the squire’s squire’s squire, should ever there be empire sufficiently Byzantine as to have one, which of course, there is, and has been, and grace of nature, shall be. 

The whales, I see, in my ailing drear, are smarter than we, and will smite us. 
Whales get their due in fiction but in poetry it’s all tigers and birds.  It is easy to see why.  Here is a tiger with whom I recently sympathized.

Does the beast yet burn bright?  Despite?

James Tate and Dara Wier at the New School [by Angela Patrinos]

The Strange Worlds of Dara and James

Guest poets James Tate and Dara Wier arrived early Monday for the forum at The New School and so David Lehman and I sat in an office with them before the event began.  We talked about poems that feature apes, and Dara told us how to remove a rooster from a fence.  About lemurs, James said, "I still love them, though I no longer dwell on them day and night."  James and Dara told us that when they were visiting family in DC last year, they paid for a $300-dollar-a-night room at a posh hotel near the White House but were mysteriously (and no doubt mistakenly) upgraded to the $5000-a-night Vice Presidential Suite.  Describing the suite, James sounded like the narrator in one of his poems: 

"The paintings were real paintings.  The table sat eighteen.  You climbed three steps to get in the bed."

The poets, who are married to one another, have published between them twenty-seven books of poetry, and ten minutes before the event began, the room was packed.  (David Lehman knows how to pick 'em!)

"Las Meninas" (Velazquez) [by Mark Minton]

Las Meninas
(for Rob Shore)

In Diego Velazquez's great painting "Las Meninas,"
or "Maids of Honor," life and art fight to a draw:

Chaotic activity overwhelms the canvas,
and the purposeful artist pauses to impose order.

The little maidens are so "off message,"
as one adjusts her skirt and another approaches
the sleepy royal dog, a killer at rest.

Somewhere near the back of the room
a courtier parts a curtain and steps into the stair,
surveying the disordered scene
before departing again.

In the receding background two older women
chat about the weather or perhaps the scullery maid's
scandalous behavior.

Only the tiny blonde Infanta seems prepared for portraiture:
striking a pose, aware of her looks and her pedigree,
as a kneeling attendant
prepares to adjust her charge's hair, just so.

And the royal dwarf, in a dress as pretty
as she is ugly,
keeps her attention focused on her masters,
just beyond the frame.

Meanwhile, the mirror at the back of the room
dimly reflects this royal couple
who are sitting for their picture
but are not, it seems, the real subjects.

Off-center, beyond the back of his canvas frame,
occupying the left quarter of the painting, stands the primary focus.
Diego Velazquez, painter to King Philip of Spain,
intently surveys the far distance,
relaxed fingers holding the charged brush.

Diego Velazquez prepares a brushstroke....
Or is he the subject? Perhaps not.
For the painter seems intent on something else
that we cannot see, and neglects
the jumble of figures at his feet.

He seems to look past even the royals themselves
and pays no attention to the overly busy maids,
or the preening Infanta, the drowsy cur,
or the dwarf in the purple crepe dress.

But Diego Velazquez nevertheless prepares a brushstroke...

In fact, he starts to draw Life itself,
beyond this canvas, the mirrored reflections, these flecks of paint:
beyond Time itself.

He looks out at the viewer, surprised by nothing,
only preparing his brushstroke: his triumph of art over life.

Perhaps, in this intent, he looks even into the present, into this room,
sees Luke once again coolly adjusting his hair, just so;
Jeff dreaming of distant armadas and battles at sea;
Brian thinking chess is definitely more exciting than this;
and Patrick deciding that novels are better than poems,
while Dylan wonders what Yoomie is doing tonight.

And why not? It is just as possible a subject
as all the others that have passed before this rectangular frame
in four centuries,
as Diego Velazquez prepares his brushstroke.

And imagination may stretch further than our immediate view
and also perceive Rob and his girlfriend
under the billion stars of Arhanghai,
where the immense weight of the backlit sky
crushes all human purpose to Gobi dust.

At the same time, there is this one small interesting detail
where the young colt,
in its corral on the darkening steppe,
whinnies in the receding light
cuddling next to the indulgent mare
while Diego Velazquez prepares another brushstroke.

– Mark Minton

Musings from McCain Country [by Jim Cummins]

Ohio is a battleground state--I love the way we overdramatize ourselves; such warriors we are--and it may very well go for Obama; the huge population upstate usually goes Democratic.  But here in southwestern Ohio, you might as well be in Alabama or Montana: you see red wherever you look.  Not that the actual city of Cincinnati (about three hundred and fifty thousand) won't shout "Yes, we can!" but that the surrounding 1.6 mil will drown it out.  A straw poll on the television Channel 12 News a couple of weeks ago drew something like 13,000 votes.  They do a poll like this every night, usually about things like whether we want red-light traffic cameras or not, or whether the local NFL franchise is the worst ever in the sport.  But 13,000 is an inordinately high number, indicating an urgency to express.  The result was 57% for McCain, 43% for Obama.

Cincinnati is a hard nut to crack.  I've been here thirty-odd years, but since I didn't grow up here I remain, truly, an outsider.  Which is fine with me; I've been observing the native population all that time.  Cincinnati divides itself down the middle into the east and west sides; the east side considers itself to be more sophisticated.  It has the exclusive neighborhoods, the country clubs, the shopping and the cosmopolitan lifestyles--the condos in Vail, the European and Asian vacations.  The east side is where the new executives for Procter & Gamble, or Carl Lindner's American Financial Group, find homes.  There's money and movement on the east side: social mobility, educational diversity, anxiety.  I don't mean to portray it as progressive; the east side votes Republican to make money.

Then there's the west side.  I have two symbols here of the west side; the first is Elder High School and the Elder football stadium, known as "The Pit."  The other is Buddy LaRosa's restaurant, LaRosa's Pizzeria, on Boudinot Avenue.  First, "The Pit."

To understand The Pit, you have to understand that the west side culture is built on a fanaticism for sports--especially baseball, basketball, and football; soccer is a bit too effete, more of an east side sport--and an even greater fanaticism for never moving--or even traveling--more than three blocks from where you were born, throughout your whole lifetime.  Also, you have to go to Elder.  There are other decent high schools in the area, but Elder is the heart and soul of the west side.  Elder athletes are perennial contenders for state championships, in a multitude of sports, and Elder graduates provide a remarkable percentage of the city police force and fire department, and historically, a long line of judges and prosecutors.  This Elder law & order cabal is so legendary it has inspired a novel, Pure Murder, by a local mystery writer, A. M. Pyle. 

Enter The Pit.  The Pit seats 9100 fans, and for most events you can't get a ticket.  The seats are taken up by old people: Elder graduates from their 20's and 30's to their 70's or even 80's.  People who have never ever left the neighborhood.  People for whom high school football games or high school basketball games remain, not only the ultimate entertainment value, but a secret sign for a secret society, a band of brothers that will not change.  The Elder nickname is "Panthers"; their fans call themselves "Panther Nation."  Remember, this is a German city; the pun that pops into mind is "Panzer Nation."

I go out to eat alone almost every night, so I've developed a range of 8-10 restaurants where I can get an decent inexpensive dinner.  Sometimes I head over to the LaRosa Pizzeria in Western Hills.  I only go there when I'm in the mood to see the epicenter of the west side: large Catholic families, of German, Italian, and Irish descent, for whom this mediocre pizza chain (LaRosa's pizza, I bitterly tell anyone who'll listen on my deeply disappointed and yearning nights, is like a methadone program; I've had good pizza in my life, but Cincinnati isn't the place to find it) is a social hub.  There's a large restaurant proper, and an extended bar area with eight or ten televisions, all broadcasting sports.  The 80-odd-year-old patriarch of all this, Buddy LaRosa, started a high school/local athlete hall of fame years and years ago; throughout the restaurant are hand-drawn portraits, year by year, of the inductees, in huge frames, maybe eight pictures to a frame.  Most of them are west-siders.  The west side, after all, has produced a serious roster of baseball talent over the years: Don Zimmer, Jim Frey, Ron Oester, and of course the greatest and most infamous, Pete Rose.  The current Boston Red Sox first baseman, Kevin Youkilis, is a west side product.

When I walked in late on Saturday night last week, I found they'd added a toy: over in the corner of the bar three men--three grown men, as my grandma would say--were sitting on a dais with a huge TV screen behind them, and microphones and recording equipment in front.  They were doing analysis of local performances in the day's high school football games!  It was hard to believe, but kind of amazing to see--three grown men, as I've said.  The USA was changing; not just their neighborhood, but the entire country, around them; to step up into that would require reiterating their usual platitudes or a questioning that would take on generations of received opinion: better to be obsessed with sports.  I sat for a while and watched families come and go, people laughing and talking unaffectedly, as if this place were their living room.  The bodies of the young men, in their 20's and 30's, were already thick and soft; every one of them that I saw wore a ball cap; they often shaved their heads and wore a bristly kind of facial hair reminiscent of current British gangster movies.  The women displayed themselves, not more or less attractively than the men, but with the tone of an exploited group.  I was reminded of that old existentialist mantra, "existence precedes essence."  Unlike the Protestant cities around here--Dayton, Columbus, Indianapolis, where I grew up--Cincinnati is decidedly Catholic, Old World Catholic.  Its mantra is "essence precedes existence"--the Catholic mantra.  One only has to exist here, to be taken care of by God; it's not exactly complacency, but satisfaction.  The real trick is to hold onto this Elder world, not elect someone who wants to replace it, who would require "growing up" by the standards of a hypocritical PC world, a world like the east side, for instance. 

I looked down at what I was doing as I waited for my food.  I was reading a "popularizing" book on religion--Joseph Campbell's Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor--to find language I could use to describe to my students--language that they could understand--what Emerson was saying in "The Divinity School Address" about the difference between the inner spiritual being and the outer institution of religion.  A goodly number of my students were the sons and daughters of the people here, or people like them; they commute to classes, live at home until they graduate, get a job, and move a few blocks away.  My spaghetti was fine that night.  I truly believe we are all more alike than we are different.  But I do plan to vote for Obama; and I'm certainly not interested in football.  Or high school. 

 

Of Hexers and Hauntings - a Halloween Post (by Laura Orem)

York County is part of what is known as "Pennsylvania Dutch Country." In contrast to common belief, the term "Pennsylvania Dutch" is not synonymous with "Amish."  Pennsylvania Dutch is an ethnic term, referring to a large group of immigrants from the Palantine region of the German Rhine Valley, who are comprised of many different religious denominations: Amish, Mennonite, Anabaptist, and so on. Many of these immigrants came to the New World in the late 1600-early 1700s, fleeing religious persecution, and set up communities in what are now Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, and Indiana. In contemporary usage, the term Pennsylvania Dutch is often used to describe those descendants of these groups who still wear traditional dress and/or live their lives apart from their 21st century, technology-bound neighbors. In reality, the term encompasses a much larger, more diverse group of people of German descent. (Amish and Mennonite folks, although occasionally related to each other, are distinct groups. The easiest way to distinguish them is the fact that the Amish wear traditional clothing and do not use any modern conveniences, like electricity or automobiles; Mennonites, while often dressing in traditional clothing, drive cars and use telephones and otherwise embrace technology. There's more to it than that, of course, but that's the simplest way to tell them apart.)

One of the more ubiquitous cultural images of Pennsylvania Dutch country is the hex sign - those garishly-colored circular plaques found on the sides of barns and over door lintels. There is some dispute as to their origins and meaning -- some believe them to be simply good-luck symbols, like a horseshoe over a doorway or a four-leaf clover, hung up "chust for nice," as the saying goes; others believe them to be protection against something more sinister: amulets and talismans against hexes and the evil eye. The debate extends to the name "hex sign" as well. Does it simply refer to their original hexagonal or six-sided shape, or is it a derivative of the German or Dutch words "hexe" or "heks," meaning "witch"? No one knows for sure.

Some modern-day hex signs, available for sale at your nearest PA farmer's market. A note: the Amish do not paint or display hex signs.

However, while the meaning of hex signs remains unclear, in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, the tradition of hexing, or folk magic, is a strong one. Nowadays, it's gone underground, but from the mid-19th century through the 1970s, hexenmeisters or pow-wowers were influential and important members of the rural communities of the area. The belief in this folk-magic was so strong that, in 1928, fear of being hexed led one local pow-wower to murder another in cold blood, leaving the murdered man's ghost to haunt the hollow down the road for the past eighty years.

The Excitable Kenneth Koch [by Luke Meinzen]

Luke Meizen, one of our Mongolia-based correspondents, sends this poem, inspired by his readings of Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch:

To Excitable Kenneth Koch

You wouldn't know me, uh, sir. I was introduced
by Frank O'Hara. He didn't mean
for it to happen (you knew before I did
that he's dead). I think he liked you.
I was introduced again by Mark.
His name is less famous, but he
had a lot more to say. He was saying it,
one time, when I went downstairs to fetch more whiskey
and to look in the bathroom mirror.
There are several panes of glass.
In that bathroom, I can see the back of my head so
I like to evaluate my haircut and posture
before I climb back up to the bookshelf.
Had we not met, I would not have thought
this a poetic detail. Now I do.
There it was.

You are gloriously unfamiliar, a friend of a friend
of a generation. I have known writers before -
there was Jack, first, my mad burning mentor.
That relationship made me more important
to myself when I realized I hadn't done anything yet.
That relationship was subject to revision
I also had Bruce. We met by accident, a friend
again. He came along on other accidents
that I have since re-named adventures.
They both died young. My literary friendships
tend to.
Mr. Koch, how did you live so long.
I am only beginning to consider the proposition
of growing so old.

What I have learned, in passing,
in glimpses, as if from many headlines
on a blocks' worth of newsstands,
I learned while building the somber foundation
of a monument to myself. When I heard
what I heard, and I heard it from you,
I chortled, no, I giggled, and went about
constructing a wink. So, you,
Excitable Kenneth Koch, the missionaries you made,
and the list of names in which I found you
are the reasons I have hung my melancholy
with little pieces of colorful string.

Tony Towle's Memoir 1960-1963 [by Jim Cummins]

I'm excited to begin another week of blogging.  I thought it might be fun to post a few descriptions of life in the provinces before the election.  Life in exile, as it were; I'm sort of like Ovid without the genius.  Or more accurately, maybe a friend of Ovid's in Tomis, a pal he can play checkers with at the general store.  This general store overlooks the Black Sea, at least.  I've never really been anywhere, so the Black Sea looks great to me, the girls running naked on the beach.  My friend Ovid is often glum, gazing across the Black Sea ... to Rome, he thinks.  I tell him Rome is in the opposite direction, but he tells me his Rome is in the mind.  "So king me," I reply.  Really.  He goes on and on about the "Eternal City"; it gets ... eternal, especially with all the girls running naked along the beach.

I came across a book that's been around for a while, I gather, but which fell in my lap like new.  It's Tony Towle's Memoir 1960-1963 (Faux Press, 2001), and it's a fun read.  I have such nostalgia for the late 50's-early 60's that it's like a real ache in my heart.  Or maybe my stomach.  Perhaps because I ate Towle's book up.  It starts with several stories detailing Frank O'Hara's generosity toward Towle, including turning over his old apartment at 441 E. 9th St to Towle and Frank Lima, when O'Hara and Joe LeSueur moved to a loft at 791 Broadway.  The apartment rented for 53 dollars a month, but went up to an astronomical 56 dollars when Towle and Lima moved in.  Sigh.  Other kind gestures by O'Hara included getting the young Towle a scholarship to the New York City Writer's Conference ($200, a fortune in those days) and introducing him to Kenneth Koch.  Here's Towle's description of meeting Koch at the Cedar Tavern:

"I mentioned that I understood Kenneth Koch was conducting a poetry workshop at the New School and I was going to attend.  'Oh, really?  Kenneth is right over there.'  To my astonishment and before I could ask him please not to, O'Hara walked the few feet to the bar and came back with Kenneth Koch.  ' This young man is going to take your class at the New School.'  My astonishment turned to chagrin.  Koch looked at me expectantly.  I didn't know what to say.  I wanted to compliment him; I had spent so many hours getting to know Thank You, and it had been a pleasure and a revelation to do so.  'Oh, Mr. Koch, I love your work.  It's so ... so ...'  I was floundering for a synonym for 'sophisticated,' which wasn't quite right, but I knew the perfect word was in there somewhere.  He stood there waiting for me to finish my sentence.  Superficial is what I heard myself saying.  Koch stared at me in disbelief for a second or two, then turned away and walked back to the bar.  What had I done!  I was mortified beyond belief.  Unfortunately, sometimes my reflexive reaction to my own verbal blunders is to show no reaction at all.  This of course is interpreted by others that I intended to say exactly what I said.  O'Hara was as amused as I was embarrassed.  He went over to the bar and said something to Kenneth.  I hoped he was assuring him that I didn't mean it, which was certainly true.  At any rate, Koch stayed at the bar.  I then had some more conversation with O'Hara and Lima, inwardly excoriating myself, during which O'Hara casually mentioned that he too was going to be teaching a poetry workshop at the New School.  It instantly occurred to me that I had to take them both.  At least I would have one teacher I hadn't insulted."

Towle has a lot of great stories, including who "closed" the Cedar Tavern on its last night by throwing an empty beer mug into the old clock on the wall.  I enjoy living in the past.  Nice book.

 

Meditations in an Emergency - Mad Men Season Finale

At the close of this season's Episode One, Don Draper reads lines from Frank O'Hara's "Mayakovsky" as he mails O'Hara's book "Meditations in an Emergency" to an unknown recipient. 

Last night's season finale was appropriately titled after the O'Hara book, given the personal and national emergencies being played out on the screen.  But what of the title poem?  Read it here.   Seems that the poem hovers over the entire season.  And that the line "I am the least difficult of men.  All I want is boundless love" is true of each character.   Do you agree?

Read other Mad Men posts here.

-- sdh

"The List of Famous Hats" [by James Tate]

The List of Famous Hats

Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon- esty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up--well, he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pin- head at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that be- neath his public head there was another head and it was a pyra- mid or something.

-- James Tate

from Great American Prose Poems

 

James Tate and Dara Wier will read at the New School this evening (Monday, October 27, 2008) at 6:30 pm in room 510 of 66 West 12 Street.

Happy Birthday, Sylvia Plath

Born on October 27, 1932, Sylvia Plath made this self-portrait in 1951.

Monday @ KGB: Rick Barot & CAConrad

KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk & Michael Quattrone
With original hosts Star Black & David Lehman

Monday, October 27, 2008: Rick Barot & CAConrad
7:30 PM
FREE

RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. His first book, The Darker Fall, was the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry and was published by Sarabande Books in 2002. Sarabande published his second book, Want, in 2008. His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including New England Review, The New Republic, Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His work has also appeared in many anthologies, including The New Young American Poets, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University. He lives in Tacoma, Washington and teaches both in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and Pacific Lutheran University.

CACONRAD is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008). The Book of Frank (Chax Press) will be published in fall 2008, advanced ELVIS course (Soft Skull Press) will be published in spring of 2009, and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled THE CITY REAL & IMAGINED: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press) will be published in 2009. He invites you to visit him online at

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street (between Bowery & 2nd Ave.) ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360

Film Still Series -#42

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.

Bruce Covey presents Natalie Lyalin

A lovely baker’s dozen weeks later, I’m sad to bring this little series of Coconut Sundays to a close! But since I must end, what better way to do so then with the parting words, “Alibubo. Bubsigtree. Grivstalbikt!” So also ends Natalie Lyalin’s spectacular poem “Jeffrey Bloodhound Sans,” which originally appeared in Coconut 6. Natalie is such a startling young poet, all of us, Readers, should turn off our tvs and rev up our search engines , looking for more of her! & more there is—in Octopus, La Petite Zine, Verse, and other cool journals! Natalie is a sweet person, co-editor of the bitchin’ mag Glitter Pony  and a graduate of UMass Amherst now living in Philadelphia. Her first book, Pink and Hot Pink Habitat, is due out from Coconut Books this spring, another appropriate place to end this little BAP feature. Please look for Coconut 14 (due out in about a month at http://www.coconutpoetry.org) and for two brand new titles from Coconut Books: That Gorgeous Feeling by Sueyeun Juliette Lee and Heron/Girlfriend by Jen Tynes (both due out in about three weeks, available here. & for my own next book, Glass Is Really a Liquid, which will be out next year from No Tell Books.

Thanks, Readers, for listening these three months, and thanks, David, for the opportunity to showcase the work of several magnificent poets!!!

-- Bruce Covey

Jeffrey Bloodhound Sans

I know him. To know is dimension,
a black bot with star spangles. Have
a sexy birthday. Have an amalgamation.
The language was just delivered and it
is good.
                       I’m holding secret.
                       This situation. Countdown. Speeches for
                       if I don’t come back. I’m not coming back.

In profile with gold necklace. The quiet ears. Study the
nose. Today I become naked Ingrid.  Would Ingrid
mind a morsel of finger fat.

Girl words. A tomato. A plum. An apricot.
                       Time is holding in a clear tube.
                       Time is lightning on a spare key.

Words that do not yet exist. Alibubo. Bubsigtree. Grivstalbikt.

-- Natalie Lyalin

Significant Mother (by Joy Katz)

A regular column on poetry and motherhood

Part Two: The Secret Reason Why New Parents Don't Write

Shortly after I finished a Stegner Fellowship, some years ago, a former workshop poet and I were trading news about our colleagues. One of them had just had twins. "Well," he said, "that's the end of HER life." A mean-spirited comment for sure, but I forgive him because he had no idea what he was talking about (it's not his fault; maybe no one without a baby could imagine it), and because I've become more philosophical since becoming a parent.

What he was talking about, besides writing, was: applying for grants, taking big literary administrative jobs across the country on short notice, going to residencies and conferences, et cetera. He meant that she was off the landscape, like a cactus at Los Alamos after the Trinity blast.

It's true that people raising young kids don't have a lot of time. But that's not why they don't write. The reason they don't write much, at least at first, is that they are in stupid, staggering, consuming love.

It's late, you're up holding the baby, your wrists are sore from holding the baby so his head won't fall backward and snap off, but you don't notice. You don't notice because you're studying the curve of his lips. Your free hour (there are free hours, and fifteen-minute periods) is all infused with joy, a narcotic bliss tinged with a fresh and alarming sense of danger and mortality. A good thing to write about, maybe. (Sometimes someone gives you the break you've been dying for and takes the baby for ten minutes — then you might not write because your wrists are throbbingly sore.)

Pretty soon the baby is older and crawling and you can't stop watching the way his knees propel him forward, and everything in the room takes on a different scale owing to this new proportion, and the sounds he makes are like moths batting themselves into the furniture and into the deadly hot light and you spend your time mostly keeping him alive, and in your free hour you stare out the window and think of the sounds he makes.

As for the jobs and conferences, the new parent is not a cooked cactus in the poetry landscape. She is like trinitite, the radioactive green glass the sand at Los Alamos turned into. In other words, still there, and with a long half life.

But being in love, and that disruption of one's writing life, is something any writer can empathize with, even my erstwhile poet-colleague.