The Best American Poetry

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.

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (II)

Summer Afternoon For DCLehman [by David Shapiro]

Summer Afternoon
For DCLehman just feeling happy James’s words you love

Today was unbear-
ably beautiful like a
bear walking thru school!

Today was amaz-
ingly cool and calm like fish
rushing to the knife!

today the sun hit
the bricks as if a painter
added more yellow!

today supremely
lucid and blue like bluejays
imitating sky!

today was better
than many days but don't say
that just love today!

today today like
a kitsch garden on TV
or sudden color

at five forty in
the afternoon no one
was dead bullfighting

Today exactly
at 5:42 the myth
I live by shattered!

today close to 5
43 the pop of depth
and Rabbi Nachman

I heard the grass sing
Walt was not disappointing
the bear ate the kid

the palm leaf had moved
what is more a monument
smiled like pigeons

Scholem said Whitman
was his religion--did that
disappoint you now?

the rose in Scholem's
yard we plucked it was so big
it wagged its stem soul

I can't use that word
beautiful and not normal
making green ones red

Throw a diamond
on the rusty steel table
just three randomly

That was my today
yell yellow yellow yellow
stain of a blue day!

sing yellow yellow
yellow shall be my garden
Desdemona day

Kawabata saw
the beautiful in glasses
on Hawaiian glass

He loved the repeats
Oh dim moon oh dim dim dim
no he said Bright Moon!

Beautiful poem
As ugly as beautiful
as pornography

All is horrible
said my friend all wonderful
circumcized cirque size

Like an artifice
like an artificial lake
oh bright bright bright day!

seeing through difference
he called it but I might say
loving difference!

oh penumbra oh
and Van Gogh thinking he had
painted stars too large!

well maybe he had
when I take my glasses off
tear-shaped breasts appear

Futurists, beware
my eyes are stained with stars you
might find archaic!

as a sculptor said
nice to practice archaic
crafts! not that he did!

beautiful spacious
the end of sullen empire(s)
one day beats them all!

beautiful summer
on a bed all afternoon
don’t say beautiful

summer in autumn
beautiful as bugs to friends
sunlight on your hands 

-- David Shapiro

Sportin' a Hoodie [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Dear Jill,

Every time I go out tarted up, and by all accounts looking lovely, I come home very lonely. However, I seem to get a lot more attention from men when I am in line at the market in my jeans with my hair pulled back. I feel much more coquettish and happy with myself when I am dolled up, but, considering the results, it seems that I should lay off the blue shadow and the whorish lips. Should I sacrifice my aesthetics to get results? Or should I follow my instincts and wait for the proper man to follow my scent?

Little Red Riding Alone Hood

Bloody Hell

Dear Jill,

Five weeks ago I met a wonderful guy. We fell for each other, hard (ouchie!). When we were together we snogged, sang, laughed, drank primitivo, looked at medieval tapestries, listened to Leonard Cohen. When we were apart we talked, emailed, text messaged, posted to each other's Facebook Walls, commented on each other's blogs, sent notes by carrier pigeon, practiced telepathy. It was bliss, but it took up all our time. Now both of us have a lot of work to catch up on, and we haven't exchanged more than a few lines in days. He seems fine, but I am starting to resemble Sylvia Plath's less stable sister.

1. Do you think I need to adjust my medication?

2. Can anything be done with these lines from my poem draft, working title "Wrestling the Angel"?

O creature of light, creature of darkness,
your grasp slips. I fall,
down, down, down,
down, headfirst, bumfirst,
legs asplay, arms tucked.
Bloody, bloody, bloody hell,
bloody hell.

Blessings,

Dame Dopamine

"A Llullian Circle" [by Felix Singer]

A Llullian Circle

In Spain, they say, there is a river
that flows against the tendencies.
No one knows how it is done,
though speculation runs the gamut
from black magic to magnetic.
Up and over the Pyrenees,
it spills itself so that the shepherds
must hitch up their pantalones
or suffer tickling by gardas.

Somewhere, then, a counter-river
flows along with expectations,
pools about the lowest places:
formicating vortices.
The terminus where it runs dry --
in bygone times a temple shrine --
is nowadays a workmen's pub
that smells of beer and yellow cheese
and sundry corporal temptations.

Out the back they've dug a trough,
immaculated to St. Michael,
as the hand-writ signage says:
para su relevacion, muchachos,
renew the precipitation cycle!
Pesetas spinning on the bar
and wide palms raised to slap them down.
The drunken gamblers all have gathered
to see the auguries of Car:

 wings and bloody feathers scattered
by a hint of evening wind.
The old man thumbs a wrinkled dewclaw,
the divinator's only gew-gaw:
the rosary parsing the sage's time.
Now his lone nystagmic eye
(a brown egg boiling in a vat of lime),
unmoored from the world of things,
indicates an empty bird-cage:

"Gentlemen, that cockatiel will nibble its string
ere the coins are beaten flat."

-- Felix Singer

Autumn in Abruzzo [by Moira Egan]

One of the advantages of being married to the Italian translator of many Best American Poets is that I get to along for the weekend when the Poets win their Italian poetry prizes.

As I was taking this picture, a woman in the piazza suddenly understood what was going on, and, as they say, much laughter ensued. But it wasn't all fun and games for this weekend of the Premio Laudomia Bonanni (sponsored by La CARISPAQ, the major savings bank of L'Aquila): whew, Mark worked hard for his Bonanni Prize!

The Lion and the Honeycomb, and why they mean so much to this 21st century Doubter [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Friedrich von Hugel was a late 19th early 20th century Baron and Catholic lay theologian.  At a time when “Modernists” within the Church were proposing an almost purely intellectual version of the religion, and a backlash against this Modernism was strong and extreme, Von Hugel tried to offer a middle way, which hoped to use rationalism to prove that something was true about God and religion. I love a lot of strange things about the strange Yeats poem, “Vacillation.” I wrote about it in The Happiness Myth because even though we all know that depression or to put it mildly “a bad mood” sometimes just settles on a person, without reason, we almost only find the idea that it happens for happiness too, in poetry.  Jane Kenyon’s “Happiness” is a great example and so is this stanza from the Yeats poem:

My fiftieth year had come and gone, I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop, An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top. While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Yet, my friends (if I may folksy you), that’s not what I came here to talk about.  It is, rather, the last stanza of this poem.  As you will see, it is from this bit of writ that I take the name of my Wednesdays blog here.  I should mention that Yeats got it from the Bible, wherein Samson ripped a lion to pieces and later felt like visiting the carcass and he did and a hive bees had built a honeycomb in there, and Samson stole the honey and feasted on it.  It’s a portrait of the artist as a young Fury, with a sweet tooth.  The tooth is pointy, and the point is that I hope I have now prepared you to love this stanza as much as I.  Yeats comes down with his feet of clay firmly on the ground, a guy you could bring to a skeptics meeting and not have to work too hard to make it make sense.  Vacillating from the delights of the sea of faith to the delights of meaning what you say and saying what you mean, Yeats has sympathy for the sea of leaping, but it isn't the way he sees it.  I love him for it.

Must we part, Von Hugel, though much alike, for we
Accept the miracles of the saints and honour sanctity?
The body of Saint Teresa lies undecayed in tomb,
Bathed in miraculous oil, sweet odours from it come,
Healing from its lettered slab. Those self-same hands perchance
Eternalised the body of a modern saint that once
Had scooped out pharaoh's mummy. I -- though heart might find relief
Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief
What seems most welcome in the tomb -- play a pre- destined part.
Homer is my example and his unchristened heart.
The lion and the honeycomb, what has Scripture said?
So get you gone, Von Hugel, though with blessings on your head.

So tell me what you think if you have any thoughts regarding anything.  See you next Wednesday.
Jennifer

"Etudes" [by Elaine Equi]

Etudes

Autumn is a solitude.
Winter is a fortitude.
Spring is an altitude.
Summer is an attitude.

Summer is a multitude.
Autumn is an aptitude.
Winter is a quaalude.
Spring is a prelude.

Spring is a lassitude.
Summer is a longitude.
Autumn is a gratitude.
Winter is an interlude.

Winter is a beatitude.
Spring is a platitude.
Summer is a verisimilitude.
Autumn is a semi-nude.

-- Elaine Equi

from The Best American Poetry 2007 ed. Heather McHugh

He Loves Hardly [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Dear Jill:

Every time I show someone my sequence of six hundred spelunking sonnets, the response is to say they're songs of sex.  But how could they be, when I haven't gotten any for months?  (Years, really.  I'm very good in bed, or would be, but women seem not to respond to my pick-up lines, or anyway not to respond in quite the way I'd like.  I've got my trailer all decked-out to make it cozy for cuddling, if you know what I mean, so I'm ready if I could just get a babe to come home with me, but it may not help that I'm overdue for a little dental work.)

Maybe you could help me with this concluding couplet from one of the sonnets?

No mere nick in the earth is that warm grave
In the wooded hill, but a very cave.

Lonely in Laramie

Last Night at KGB [by Julia Cohen]

Sometimes you have to let the poems and the witty banter, the in-between-poem-talk, stand for themselves. Katy Lederer is the author of Winter Sex (poetry), Poker Face (memoir), and her new poetry collection, The Heaven-Sent Leaf, recently released from BOA Editions:

“I’m just going to read from the new book. It’s a series of forty-five poems based on my experience working at a hedge fund, where I discovered that money can be a very creative thing.”

“I didn’t bring on the economic crisis.”

"My roommate is here, I think. We were on the Upper West Side bemoaning how everyone there has black couches and not enough art. This poem ('In the Flower Store Next Door') is based on a large apartment complex and a flower store that thrives on sending flowers solely to the people who live there.”

"A number of these poems play with the term brainworker, which was coined by Galbraith in The Affluent Society, and relates to the well-educated white-collar worker.  Galbraith had the idea that economics pre-WWII were based on ideas of scarcity and after WWII, economics were based on abundance and what to do with this abundance. Check out his book."

Auden in NY: Why does it seem so inviting?

David Lehman in conversation with Michael Braziller
"Auden in New York"
Thursday, October 23, 2008 at 7:00pm
at
The Philoctetes Center
247 East 82nd Street
(Phone: 646-422-0544; email: [email protected])

For extra credit, who was Philoctetes? (1) Important Greek. (2) Character in Sophocles. (3) Archery champion. (4) Character in Edmund Wilson. (5) Tefillin.

The Lordly Hudson -Monday, 5:30 pm, 10/20/2008

-- sdh

"Economics 101" [by Nin Andrews]

Economics 101

When I was a girl, maybe in second or third grade,

my dad taught me econ. 101 by handing me 2 cookies

and telling me to divide them among the 8 people

at the dinner table.  You can't break them in half,

and besides, no one wants to eat your crumbs.

I wanted to be fair, so I couldn't decide what to do.

Hard, he said, yes?  So now let's imagine that's all

the food you have. Or a metaphor for all you own.

Are you going to share?  Are you going to be an idiot

like those Christian saints, and do as the Gospel of Matthew

suggests: not worry about food or drink or clothing

and assume God will provide . . . That he will clothe you

like the lilies of the field?  That Jesus will come

with his loaves and fishes?  He will turn water into wine?

Of course not, he smirked.  If you have any smarts

at all, my girl, you will hide those cookies, and just pretend

you are as hungry as everyone else.  So that no one will

steal them from you.  No one will envy you or worse.

There's a Hassidic saying I love: put your head before your heart,

you'll be a king. Put your heart before your head, you're a fool.

The Jews were smart.  And rich too.  The mistake they made

was not to hide these facts. And you see what happened to them.

-- Nin Andrews

Massive Sad Creation [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Dear Jill,

I am in love with a thoughtless, self-centered poet who regularly drives me into constant despair.  On the upside this anguish has fueled 149 books and still writing.  Should I continue this suffering and write another 149 books or shall I entertain a new line of work?  One that doesn't involve thoughtless, self-centered poets and massive sad creation?

Signed,

Edna Goldbloom

Expression

Apeish sunflower, holy thorn
snapdragoning up my canvas
my blue agates, my orchid moss all nigh long.
Nothing grieved, horn toned
spiking lotus, this decree varnished.

See also: Eloquence

See also: A hummingbird, she suckled my man

"In the Four Seasons, Laguna" (by Mitch Sisskind)

In the Four Seasons, Laguna

 

Like all bubbles, the dot com bubble

Represented a vast wealth transfer from

The pathetic checking accounts and piggy banks

Of ten million schmucks to the exotic investment

Vehicles of men like Cabot DeWoskin. 

With his whore he sat watching “The O’Reilly Factor”

In the Four Seasons, Laguna. After a time
He nodded off, dreamed he was young again,
Preparing for the big game or watching professional
Wrestling with Ron Feiger. The year was 1967.

Waking, he saw his whore had gone
Along with his wallet. What remained was the note

She scrawled: “Fuck you!” He laughed

Out loud! His billion was in the Cayman Islands,
Invisible but also by some miracle everywhere,
Intimate, close as the nearest Web connection or ATM.

-- Mitch Sisskind

Mad Men Ties it Up

Well, last night we discovered to whom Don Draper mailed Frank O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency in Episode 1 of this season's run of Mad Men.  When Don asked the recipient if she'd read it, she said that she had, that it had reminded her of New York and that (I think) it made her sad (or did she say that it made her worried? Help me out).  In any event, I wonder if she had a particular O'Hara poem in mind. I love it that they tied up this loose end. 

--sdh

p.s. The title of next Sunday's season finale is "Meditations in an Emergency."  Maybe FOH will make an appearance.

Frank O'Hara

Love and Dicks and Dying and Stuff [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

The absolutely anonymous “DL” writes:

Bienvenue aux etats-unis ou liberation rules, mein liebchen. So generous of you to offer line edits. Here's one that's been bugging me. It comes at the end of the eighth stanza of a nine-stanza poem, and it arrives as a rhetorical climax: "We must love one another or die." It sounds good, I know, but it's untrue -- we're going to die no matter what -- and I have this old-fashioned notion that poetry and truth should go together like wahrheit und dichtung or conjugal love and Alberto Moravia. What should I do? Junk the stanza? Junk the poem? Can you think of a way to save the line? Like maybe changing "or" to "and"? For your muse-inspired vice and advice I thank you in advance of the guard. Ton ami PS How about "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"? That's another line I'm not quite satisfied with. I rejected the idea of modulating from verse to prose dialogue at this point with a hunky gang boss saying, "I don't want my brother coming out of that bathroom with only his dick in his hand."

Dear “DL”  (if them's your REAL initials, Bub).  I might handle this in a couple of ways.  Now, I am assuming you aren’t concerned with meter here, yes?  If that's the case then you could extend the line by not even very much and that would take care of your issues of truthiness:

We must love one another else die of it.
We must love one another or die from it.
(Or some variation of the above)

Because: it doesn't negate other ways of dying, nor does it technically suggest that dying is an avoidable event.

Now, if you ARE watching your meter here, you could sneak a wee ‘we’ in there, oui?, and then- VOILA!- you got yourself an alexandrine line:

We must love one another else we die of it. 
(Hmmm, though if I were the owner of this line, I might change ‘else’ to ‘lest’ because that further clouds the mystery-- will we die of the loving or of the not loving?)

Also, your own suggestion of ‘and’ ain’t half bad.

The perfectly suited man... [by Jill Alexander Essbaum]

Dear Jill,

How do you get over someone who left you when you really, really think he was the most perfectly suited person to you that you'll find?

Also, here is a line of poetry I’d like you to edit.

"Another wonder of the world, smaller than you imagined. Larger, too – like women can be large and small in anger."

Thank you,

Vivica Caliente De L’Amour
(not the poet’s real name)

Dear Vivica,

There is no such thing as getting “over.” There’s getting along. There’s getting down on it (Kool & the Gang are still together, did you know that?). And there is, of course, getting off. But over? No, my sister. If this break up were, say, a hedge maze, then your fear that this boy might have been the most and only perfect match for you would be the axe-wielding Jack Nicholson bearing down, down, down on the Shelley Duval of your self-confidence. What you need to do is get THROUGH the maze, Miss Mousie. You must be a chin-up trooper and, like Valerie Bertinelli, take it one day at a time. Go out. With friends and on dates, both. And do your work. Write your poems. A stereotype it may be, but it’s this kind of shit that poetry’s all about. And trust me: He wasn’t the man for you.

Besides, the only perfectly-suited man I know is Mr. Cave, and here is a picture of him in one of those dapper suits.

As for your lines:

“Wonder of the world” I worry is too cliché, even with the way you undercut that cliché by extending the metaphor. Also, I’m concerned about the large women. Unless you want your reader to think of the ladies as fat and then have that assumption repealed at the end of the line, “in anger” comes too late in the clause. Is there something else that this wonder can be besides large or small? Can the women be wonderful and terrible in anger and the initial “wonder” be revised to something else? In any case, I like very much this metaphor, however you decide to play it out.

Feeling your pain and digging your words,
Jill

Monday @ KGB: Jordan Davis & Katy Lederer

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

Monday, October 20, 2008: Jordan Davis & Katy Lederer
7:30 PM
FREE