The Best American Poetry

Matthew Yeager, Guest Blogger May 31-June 6

This week we welcome Matthew Yeager as our guest blogger.  Matthew is making the film-festival rounds with A Big Ball of Foil in a Small New York Apartment, a short film based on his poem of the same title. Matthew Yeager's poems have appeared most recently in Bat City Review, Agriculture Reader, and Sixthfinch. "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," originally in NY Quarterly, was selected by Pulitzer Prize Winner Paul Muldoon for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2005.Welcome, Matthew. 

In other news:

We love Bill Hayward and so does Dennis Cooper.  Check out Bill Hayward Day over at Cooper's blog. 

Congratulations to us.  We're among the top 100 poetry blogs, according to the Online University Reviews.

--sdh

Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Sarah Gridley)

As the publisher of jubilat, I rarely edit the poems we accept. Ninety per cent of the time we take what we get, as is. In the case of the other 10%, we might ask to change a word or two, or possibly end the poem a line earlier; but no dramatic alterations. While I believe the best poems create their own terms -- terms that push our thinking in new and exciting ways -- I sometimes envy editors of fiction and nonfiction, who are expected, even encouraged, to edit the pieces that end up in the pages of their magazine.

However, once in a great while I have the opportunity to work with the author on a poem we have accepted. This was the case for Sarah Gridley's "Acousmatic," which we published in the last issue. We had published Sarah previously -- her poem "Cuckoo's Report" was featured in jubilat 3. I greatly admired that poem as well as her first collection, Weather Eye Open, which was published in the  University of  California Press New Poetry Series in 2005. After Sarah read for the Poetry Society of America's third New American Poets Festival in 2007 (in addition to publishing jubilat, I also work as Programs Director for the PSA), I asked her to send along some new work to the magazine.

Included in Sarah's batch of submissions was "Acousmatic." Before we had gotten a chance to respond, she sent along a much revised second version. It was this that sparked my interest -- it seemed like it was moving in the right direction formally and rhetorically. And I also found it as powerful as it was mysterious, like acousmatic sound itself: the notion of hearing something without knowing its cause. Sarah sent in a third version while we were looking at the second, and I didn't like it as much. After discussions with my editors, I wrote her back asking her to consider returning to the earlier version. She sent along another draft in response and told me the poem had been difficult for her to edit because it dealt with the experience of witnessing friends bury their child. The questions that preoccupied her in the poem were "how parents can survive such losses, how friends can help only so far, how no 'higher power' feels accountable or responsive to me, how beauty, turned a fraction on its axis, feels vicious."

This note made me realize anew how poems help us contend with the most confusing experiences, and how privileged I was to be able to publish such essentially human work. I was also grateful to Sarah for being so collaborative in the revision process. "Acousmatic" went through one more revision, and the result still makes me marvel at how a poem can be so philosophically, psychically, and imaginatively engaging.

-- Rob Casper

ACOUSMATIC

not a concept, much less a faith—
not quiet

but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field

and was the sound of snow dissolving, glass being blown
from lips of beginners

where by love I mean a failing,
copious and opaque, heart without a practical power

most feeling the gives of undone
fountain and basin, the water

penned in, the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads are cracking

our sun’s white code
in the courtyard foreign beyond the window

plurally into something else
when I live on the look of muteness, where I lived on the look

of happiness
rose that was quanta—

I ask after cost—after gouge of grass
and sky, after cause

that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain

in tempos habituating grass
redbud trees in arriving and splitting

accost, accost, come closer to my ribs
not only the understanding

has a language
be it wind in rings of meanest direction

or deepest remove when bluest in surface
by memory I mean

a skin: a cover for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe

or hear in wind a single
soothing thing

or hear of wind a kindred displacement
in our skins to the added

subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open

for eating
yes now I am listening to your fallible sounds

pity for the you
that is stranded, pity for the you

who dazed or faceless
where now I am hearing a mechanical click

to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise

pit before beginning
to take up

listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer

attach me, walking, attach me

--  Sarah Gridley

Date Night with the Obamas

Stacey and I walked down Sixth Avenue in the sunlight feeling good. At Housing Works, one of the great thrift stores de nos jours, I paid $25 for a beautiful Paul Stuart jacket that must have cost its owner thirty times more. Of course it needs revisions, I mean alterations, but some days are like that -- full of chance rhymes and serendipitous encounters, like a poem. Like finding the right silk tie to link the jacket to the red tennis shirt I was wearing, and I had just the right costume for date night, our date night, which also turns out to be the Obamas' date night, and the reason there are so many cops along Sixth Avenue is that the Obamas are here -- they're eating at Blue Hill on Washington Place, a "Greenmarket haven" featuring food that star chef Dan Barber grows on his upstate farm. We ate dinner there ourselves once.

The cops were cracking wise but keeping a straight face. The crowds were gathering on the avenue -- though it was now six o'clock and the Obama motorcade would not be moving up Sixth for another hour and a half. Turning left on West Third Street we stepped into the Blue Note, where Frank Sinatra Junior was going to sing some of his papa's tunes with an excellent band at around the same time that the curtain would go up at the Belasco, where the Obamas were going to see "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," August Wilson's play about black sharecroppers migrating to the industrial north.

Stacey managed to get us the two best seats at the Blue Note bar, and the next person to sit down wore a white jacket and a black shirt. If I ever write a spy novel, I can promise him a part. Stacey and I can recommend the concoction prepared by the bartender -- Vladimir by name, Serbia by origin -- consisting of tequila, agave, fresh lime and Grand Marnier, shaken vigorously with ice, then strained into a cold martini glass. Almost as much fun to make as to sip.

Sinatra Jr. called his father "Sinatra" and sang "Here's to the Losers" unexpectedly, and a song I hadn't heard before, said to be Johnny Mercer's last lyric, circa 1976. The music was undoubtedly Jimmy Van Heusen's, but what was the song called? "Empty Tables," maybe. Among the more predictable choices, Porter's "I've Got you Under My Skin," Arlen's "One for My Baby," and Gershwin's "A Foggy Day in London Town" showed that Nelson Riddle's peerless arrangements remain impreccable. From the Count Basie sessions, "Summer Wind" has weathered well; less so the bigger hit that was on the flip side of "Summer Wind" back in the summer of 1966: "Strangers in the Night." Each instrumentalist had his moment in the sun: the piano in "One for My Baby," the trombone in "Skin," the whole horn section in "Luck Be a Lady." Sinatra quoted his "uncle, Milton Berle" about how audiences used to be full of middle-aged men and their daughters. Tony Bennett was in the audience and took a bow. It was a lovely way to spend an evening.

-- DL

We Bitches [by Anna Guzon]

We Bitches

Even a charming little girl will
print a few well-chosen words
neatly fold it into a star and
disseminate her harm. We know
how to ruin a reputation. We learn
to play it in the schoolyard.
Her name sounds like stink.
His eye-ware is hilarious.
We grow-up
to make-up assumptions
that are sounder than children’s.
His middle name is unfaithful.
Her marriage is laughable.
We die
without ever knowing
what is said in one’s obit.
She often kept to herself. The bitch
knew how to choose her words.

-- Anna Guzon

I Beat the Sunrise for You [by Sharon Dolin]

Mojácar la Vieja, my constant view  

As a final post, I had thought to share a draft of one of the Goya poems I wrote about in my previous post, but they are so unfledged, I can’t bring myself to do so. Instead, I’ll offer one of the other poems I wrote while here, this one drafted at dawn because the birds are so loud here they woke me up. I leave it to the reader to determine if I am overly indebted to Lorca. Seguirillas is one of the rhythms used by palmeros (hand clappers) in Flamenco.

I Beat the Sunrise for You

 

beat the first dawn birds

their syncopated seguirillas

for hoisting the gold-grey

Cyclops eye

beat the moon’s retreat, the star’s

                        decline, beat the Earth’s hum and its breathing

gecko heat, the espaliered tree

            the hooting doves, beat my own

                        awakeness, my desperate ear for you

but I know I didn’t beat you.

            You’re already up, you’ve been up

                        for hours—all day—on the other side

of this churning Atlantic

            before the locust moon, the scorpion

                        afternoon, before your first

sweat and your last shiver

            I’ve beat them all with this white

                        tea on this plank of wood

before this veined view of twin mounts

            I’ve beat my death, even yours

                        no blood in the mouth

no stone under tongue

            no lock on my thigh

                        no, no why to your sigh. 

Your Esquire Shoot [by Todd Boss]

Your Esquire Shoot

                     -- for Alex Lemon

required a tailor-
made Armani suit,
a blue tab collar, a
pocket square to match
the azure face of a six
thousand dollar
watch, and a woolen
peacoat, over-the-
shoulder. You
stand there, dripping
sex appeal while
techs fix your hair,
find the light that
gets at that gletz
in your eye, and snap
and re-snap the shutters
on your million
dollar smile. Look
at you. Don’t you
make a marvel of a
mannequin? You, in
the swaddle of your
moment—Aren’t you
the goods, the hood’s
winged ornament,
the pipe smoke’s
spice! You’re looking
fine, my friend. It
must be nice.

-- Todd Boss

Friday, London Calling, Ms. Stallings, and Some Etruscans Warriors [by Ernest Hilbert]

Well, tonight I board a flight for London. I traditionally spend the Saturday before the book first book fairs settling into my hotel and then heading out to visit London pubs with my old Oxford friends, which usually means I walk into the fairs without having really slept for two days. And that is how I like it. Takes the edge off. Anyway, it's been a lot of fun guest-editing here at Best American Poetry. I hope you found something to enjoy in my posts. Please head over to my own blog, E-Verse Radio, where these sorts of diversions go on daily.

And, finally, here’s one I think is a real stunner, a heart-breaker, from Alicia Stallings, from the forthcoming Swallow Anthology of New American Poets:

“Persephone Writes a Letter to Her Mother” by A.E. Stallings

First—hell is not so far underground—
My hair gets tangled in the roots of trees
& I can just make out the crunch of footsteps,
The pop of acorns falling, or the chime
Of a shovel squaring a fresh grave or turning
Up the tulip bulbs for separation.
Day & night, creatures with no legs
Or too many, journey to hell and back.
Alas, the burrowing animals have dim eyesight.
They are useless for news of the upper world.
They say the light is “loud” (their figures of speech
All come from sound; their hearing is acute).

The dead are just as dull as you would imagine.
They evolve like the burrowing animals—losing their sight.
They may roam abroad sometimes—but just at night—
They can only tell me if there was a moon.
Again and again, moth-like, they are duped
By any beckoning flame—lamps and candles.
They come back startled & singed, sucking their fingers,
Happy the dirt is cool and dense and blind.
They are silly & grateful and don’t remember anything.
I have tried to tell them stories, but they cannot attend.
They pester you like children for the wrong details—
How long were his fingernails? Did she wear shoes?
How much did they eat for breakfast? What is snow?
And then they pay no attention to the answers.

My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.
But here there is no fodder for small talk.
The weather is always the same. Nothing happens.
(Though at times I feel the trees, rocking in place
Like grief, clenching the dirt with tortuous toes.)
There is nothing to eat here but raw beets & turnips.
There is nothing to drink but mud-filtered rain.
Of course, no one goes hungry or toils, however many—
(The dead breed like the bulbs of daffodils—
Without sex or seed—all underground—
Yet no race has such increase. Worse than insects!)

I miss you and think about you often.
Please send flowers. I am forgetting them.
If I yank them down by the roots, they lose their petals
And smell of compost. Though I try to describe
Their color and fragrance, no one here believes me.
They think they are the same thing as mushrooms.
Yet no dog is so loyal as the dead,
Who have no wives or children and no lives,
No motives, secret or bare, to disobey.
Plus, my husband is a kind, kind master;
He asks nothing of us, nothing, nothing at all—
Thus fall changes to winter, winter to fall,
While we learn idleness, a difficult lesson.

He does not understand why I write letters.
He says that you will never get them. True—
Mulched-leaf paper sticks together, then rots;
No ink but blood, and it turns brown like the leaves.
He found my stash of letters, for I had hid it,
Thinking he’d be angry. But he never angers.
He took my hands in his hands, my shredded fingers
Which I have sliced for ink, thin paper cuts.
My effort is futile, he says, and doesn’t forbid it.

My wife is a classical archaeologist. This takes her annually to a dig at an Etruscan acropolis in Tuscany. Together, we wind up in all sorts of remote places in several continents, far from roads (at least modern ones) or any hint of civilizing influence. These are, of course, magical times, when we scale a ruin in a field of olive trees above a glistening Aegean or poke up slippery stone stairs a mile above a ravine in Peru to find a place where ancient rites were enacted, or descend into airless tombs painted with fantastic figures far below the earth. I’ve often thought I’d like to assemble a book of poems relating to archaeology and archaeologists. I have learned from visiting the homes of Lynn's colleagues that they are fiercely dedicated to their field, and they will consequently purchase anything that relates to it, refrigerator magnets, posters, figurines, and, of course, books. There may only be a few thousand of them, but by the Lilliputian publishing standards of poetry, that’s a serious audience. . . If any editor out there would like me to work up a prospectus for such a book, just say the word.

The Integrity of Poets [by Jim Cummins]

In the Times a few weeks back (April 25) an article by Edward Rothstein, "The Sorrow, the Pity, the Celebration: France Under the Nazis," reviewed an exhibition at the New York Public Library (the exhibition runs through July 25), "Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation," organized by Robert Paxton.  It was originally shown in Caen, France, in 1980 "as a display of a growing archive of war material," presented by Olivier Corpet and Claire Paulhan, and has been "reshaped" by Paxton, "whose 1972 book, Vichy France, outlined how avidly collaborationist that regime really was."

The show sounds terrific, brimming with material, much or most of it unfamiliar.  Rothstein says, "A sense of disorder is partly the welcome price of seeing so much." He tries to give some sense of the enormous amount of information in the exhibit, such as the fact that the avant-garde writer Jacques Audiberti, because of paper rationing that benefited collaborationist French writers, "wrote his novel, Monorail, on wallpaper supplied by his father, a builder." He also shows how muddled and/or self-serving the majority of French writers were in the face of German oppression. Some, like Sartre and Cocteau, "went along with the dominant power for the ride," whereas others, like Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise), remained ignorant until it was too late. (Nemirovsky, a Jew, converted to Catholicism, or tried to, but was sold out by the French police.) All in all, a pretty sad tale of authorial cowardice -- no wonder we teach our students that the author does not exist anymore -- with few exceptions. Rothstein says, "... very few [writers]... like Andre Malraux joined the underground armed forces to fight the Germans."

Here is the last paragraph of Rothstein's article. "This is not ... a tale of heroism or far-ranging insight.  Though Mr. Paxton shows that poets were, as a group, particularly resistant to the collaborationist lure [italics mine], for the most part, the touted visionary powers of writers left all too much in the darkness."

So my question is, how come the poets were so much less willing to go down the road that led, eventually, to Derrida and Paul de Man, and beyond?

-- Jim Cummins

Bill Hayward's American Memory Project: Jason Shinder on Howl

For more on this extraordinary project, go here.

--sdh

More About Writing in Mojácar [by Sharon Dolin]

In Madrid, at the beginning of my month’s sojourn in Spain, I was quite struck by the room in The Prado of Goya’s “Black Paintings,” those he painted at the end of his life to hang in the house he retreated to called Quinta del Sordo (Deaf Man’s Country House), located outside Madrid, the most famous of which is Saturn eating one of his many children. When traveling, I find it’s always useful to set myself a project among other things, such as translations, writing aphorisms, and just writing poems as they come. The project that naturally arose was to write a sequence of poems in response to each of the 14 paintings in Goya’s series. Is it by sheer happenstance that I have been staying in the bedroom/studio named Goya? (Each artist bedroom is called by the name of a Spanish artist, the others on my floor being Lorca and Cervantes, both given to painters!)

So while I sit here in my studio, surrounded by visual artists, I spend part of each day studying reproductions of paintings and writing about them. Something about their dark subject matter and technique (Goya often painted over a previous image with a layer of black carbon) attracts me as I sit here surrounded by so much desert light. Of course my chief concern is that I haven’t quite figured out a fresh approach to these paintings, to ekphrasis in general, and to my own increasing body of ekphrastic poems.

Goya’s technique in this series seems very fast—even gestural—and he obviously painted over sections of each canvas. I decided that I, too, would not labor over the initial drafts of these poems, but would try to write each one very quickly. That does not mean, of course, that I won’t then go back and revise—write over the original words, as it were. But the initial approach is to be as quick as a Chinese calligrapher’s stroke down a page. Have I succeeded? That remains to be seen. In the end, it will depend on what I am able to do in the revision process which, because I had no printer here, will have to happen after I return home.

Thursday, Craig Arnold, One of Possum's Cats, and, of Course, More Auden [by Ernest Hilbert]

Craig Arnold, who went missing on the small volcanic island of Kuchinoerabujima, Japan, on April 30th, is also scheduled to appear in the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. He was considered one of the finest poets of his generation, and he was certainly an electrifying performer of his poems. Here is a video of him reading “Asunder,” which appeared in Smartish Pace in April 2008.

Here is another poem from the forthcoming Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, by Dr. C. Dale Young:

“Torn” by C. Dale Young

There was the knife and the broken syringe
then the needle in my hand, the Tru-Cut
followed by the night-blue suture.

The wall behind registration listed a man
with his face open. Through the glass doors,
I saw the sky going blue to black as it had

24 hours earlier when I last stood there gazing off
into space, into the nothingness of that town.
Bat to the head. Knife to the face. They tore

down the boy in an alleyway, the broken syringe
skittering across the sidewalk. No concussion.
But the face torn open, the blood congealed

and crusted along his cheek. Stitch up the faggot
in bed 6 is all the ER doctor had said.
Queasy from the lack of sleep, I steadied

my hands as best as I could after cleaning up
the dried blood. There was the needle
and the night-blue suture trailing behind it.

There was the flesh torn and the skin open.
I sat there and threw stitch after stitch
trying to put him back together again.

When the tears ran down his face,
I prayed it was a result of my work
and not the work of the men in the alley.

Even though I knew there were others to be seen,
I sat there and slowly threw each stitch.
There were always others to be seen. There was

always the bat and the knife. I said nothing,
and the tears kept welling in his eyes.
And even though I was told to be “quick and dirty,”

told to spend less than 20 minutes, I sat there
for over an hour closing the wound so that each edge
met its opposing match. I wanted him

to be beautiful again. Stitch up the faggot in bed 6.
Each suture thrown reminded me I would never be safe
in that town. There would always be the bat

and the knife, always a fool willing to tear me open
to see the dirty faggot inside. And when they
came in drunk or high with their own wounds,

when they bragged about their scuffles with the knife
and that other world of men, I sat there and sutured.
I sat there like an old woman and sewed them up.

Stitch after stitch, the slender exactness of my fingers
attempted perfection. I sat there and sewed them up.

Chapter X: In which I publish a poem in The New Yorker. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

The Best American Poetry Blog seems to have an affection for the poetry of lyrics and with that in mind I offer the lyric to this keen ecstatic classic, which I think one rarely sees but only hears.  Bowie wrote the music. 

Iggy Pop LUST FOR LIFE lyrics

(hear the song)

Here comes Johnny Yen again

With the liquor and drugs

And a flesh machine

He's gonna do another strip tease

 

Hey man, where'd you get that lotion?

I've been hurting since I bought the gimmick

About something called love

Yeah, something called love

Well, that's like hypnotising chickens

 

Well, I'm just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in the ear before

'Cause of a lust for life

'Cause of a lust for life

 

I'm worth a million in prizes

With my torture film

Drive a G.T.O.

Wear a uniform

All on government loan

 

I'm worth a million in prizes

Yeah, I'm through with sleeping on the sidewalk

No more beating my brains

No more beating my brains

With the liquor and drugs

With the liquor and drugs

 

Well, I'm just a modern guy

Of course, I've had it in my ear before ...

I bring this to your attention because I have a poem in the current New Yorker.  Page 84, all the way at the back.  It is very beautiful to me, as is the Contributor’s page, which speaks of me as if we were old friends.  It is a sweet week, seeing my issue in strangers’ hot strange hands on the subway.  Anyway, here is My Hero.

 See that?  Thus Quoth Iggy. 

 Like billions of others, I have a long and storied relationship to this song not least because of the hypnotized chickens.  Also because of getting to say I’m worth a million in prizes.  Which must have meant something to me, hmm?  But also the utter buttered uddery-ness of the milky “Well, I’m just a modern guy/Of course, I’ve had it in my ear before.”  That has always made me happy.  The first time I heard it I thought, can a person say that?  A person can. 

But there’s also “Here comes Johnny Yen again,” which comes to mind at times as I know what it is like to run like a demon to the sugar bowl.  I suspect cookie monster hears that line growl its way into his mind and out his mouth.   

Still, like trillions of other emotional wretches I’m weak for the line “Lust for Life.”  Just saying it is a kind of paradise.  Now that I think about it as a slogan it sounds like anti-abortion prostitutes.  It could happen. 

Seeing the Stooges live a bunch of times helped muscle me through a BA and a PhD. Including times I barely clocked in at taking it one heartbeat at a time.  At times, I wasn't taking it.   Somewhere there is a video of Iggy leaning down to where I stood in the pit against the stage and allowing us to scream some lyrics together, “Now I want to be your dog,” if you must know.  It doesn’t sound quite right in this context but I assure you it was a romantic triumph. Also somewhere there is video of me crowdsurfing in the pit.  

So here we are.  Now I only surf remotely.  I do not remotely surf.  I do not have a million in prizes, but I am, at last, a modern guy.  I have to get back to Bertrand Russell but I want to see if I can get Iggy to read this post, and so please indulge me this allowance. 

Hi Iggy.  I hope you like my poem.  I love you.  

Okay, I guess that wraps it.

kisses of the appropriate nature to all of you,

Jennifer

Art Ain't No Excuse (by Laura Orem)

In a key scene in the movie "Frost/Nixon," the David Frost character,played by Michael Sheen, challenges Frank Langella's Nixon on his actions leading up to his impeachment. Frost can't understand how Nixon, as an attorney and as President of the United States, could possibly have justified his criminal behavior: "Are you really saying, the President can do something illegal?" Frost asks in disbelief. Nixon barks back, "I'm saying, if the President does it, that means it's not illegal!!" It is a moment that elucidates both Nixon's overweening arrogance and his breathtaking sense of entitlement, and it solidifies in the audience's mind his completely warped moral character. We think: who does he think he is? No one - no one - is above the law.

For the past couple of weeks, the literary world has been abuzz with the tawdy and depressing melodrama of choosing the Oxford Professor of Poetry. What has bothered me most about the whole business is not the sordid politics of academia (anyone who has taught at the college level is familiar with it; if you're not, I suggest Richard Russo's Straight Man as an eye-opener), or even the accusations back and forth involving Walcott and Padel, the validity of which I'm not going to debate here. What is disturbing to me is something I think is much bigger. It is the attitude, articulated by some at Oxford and many in cyber commentary, that artists, poets in particular, are excused from responsibility for their actions because of their art.  To this I say, Bullshit.

Hermione Lee, one of Walcott's champions, commented at the beginning of the controversy, "Should great poets who behave badly be locked away from social interaction? We are acting as purveyors of poetry not of chastity...You might ask yourself...whether you wanted Byron or Shelley as a professor of poetry, neither of whom had personal lives free from criticism." No one is suggesting that sexual chastity is an altar to be worshipped at. That was never the argument, and I think Lee's answer is disingenous. Neither am I suggesting setting up poets as paragons of virtue; poets are, first off, people - flawed, struggling, imperfect. But poets, like everyone else, should try to behave ethically and with integrity. Their art does not excuse them from this.

Part of the artist's job is to challenge accepted wisdom and mores, and to help us see the world in a new way, to tell us when the Emperor has no clothes. Certainly, poets like Allen Ginsberg and Frank O'Hara shook up and challenged sexual mores and attitudes; they pushed the world toward a new vision and new ways of defining love, and sometimes, especially with Ginsberg, their work was messy and uncomfortable and profane. They were also both good folks, known for their generosity and kindness toward younger poets and for their lack of pretension and ego, and they contradict the belief that there is something inherent in the arts that says the artist, by definition, must behave like an asshole. This is true as well of almost all the poets I know - they are good people, not perfect, but doing their best to live their lives with integrity and decency.

The classic examples of using art to excuse unethical behavior are those who say the great poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot negates their unethical actions - it doesn't matter what they did because their contributions to poetry are so immense (this argument helped to save Pound from execution). Those who disagree with this are often characterized as moralizers and Philistines. But while the poets' actions do not erase their contributions to poetry, neither does "The Waste Land" cancel out the fact that Eliot was an anti-Semite who locked up his troublesome wife in a madhouse and then abandoned her, nor The Pisan Cantos that Pound acted as a shill for the Italian Fascists and stood up to be counted with the mass-murderers. Both the poets' poems and their behavior are part of the picture.

On a less dramatic level, there is also the case of Robert Lowell's book, The Dolphin, in which he lifted (without permission) large chunks of his wife's private letters and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Lowell was a brilliant poet, and he made beautiful poems out of these letters. But it was still a lousy thing to do, and I don't believe the poems, however beautiful and stirring, excuse or change that.

 

So call me a Philistine, but I believe it is no more right for a poet to claim entitlement because of his/her art than it is for a rock star to claim it because he has a hit record; a professional athlete because he can throw a ball farther than anyone else; a minister because he is the "conduit of God's word"; a politician because he is in a position of power and can get away with it.  I'm not talking about challenging outdated sexual social codes or attempting to see the world in a new way. What I mean is this: hurting people is wrong. Abuse of power is wrong. Malicious cruelty is wrong. It doesn't matter if you are Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Richard Nixon, the guy who runs the service station on the corner, or you or me. It's wrong.

Poets aren't paragons; they are human beings with all the same challenges and struggles as everyone else. But like everyone else, they have an obligation to behave with integrity, to stand, finally, for something more than the sounds of their own voices.

Wednesday: Swallows, Monarchs, and More Wisdom from Wystan [by Ernest Hilbert]

This September, the excellent Swallow imprint at Ohio University Press will issue the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, with a foreword by J. D. McClatchy. I would like to present a few poems from the anthology as a little appetizer for the book (which may be preordered on Amazon). I’ll post two poems today, and one each of the remaining days this week.

“Monarch” by Priscilla Becker

Your rule has made an August
of October and I am lazy
in my domicile as maple leaves
turn half yellow and forget
the ailing spectrum.

This season there are many
kings; I’ve made a shrine
to orange things, a coterie
of me and three domestic-
leaning cats whose naps fulfill
a mossy genuflection brought on
by molding walls, delays
in evolution.

I thought I saw you drinking from
a branch between the pickets
of a fence, and in two gestures
you define first aviation,
then verticality. And as I wait

for long-diverted patterns, triumphal
browns, the cat’s serene totem
of itself says there’s a lineage
denied me. Still I would like to rule
a small bud too, but I have neither
your erect and glassy wings nor
did I come from emerald shroud:
I drink the milk of thistle, preferring
it to natural motherings.

Hot Off The Presses!

InCreduLit.com, a scholarly service I use frequently when teaching literature, has expanded its focus to include cable television (more on that later) and a 24/7 news bureau, through which it monitors other news-invention services such as itself.  This item is just in--hot off the press, as it were; I send it along in the interests of full disclosure.

"The New York Fabricator, an imaginary tabloid that invents news it thinks people want to hear, has reported today that the State Department is about to deploy a new weapon in the war on terror: Mary Qaeda Counterterrorist Ensemble and Cosmetics, Inc.  Soon a fleet of pink Cadillacs will descend on the Middle East as "Mary Qay" representatives target Muslim women with a unique product line that includes eyeliners, mascara, forehead exfoliators, and lively new burqa styles.  Under its new Secretary, former senator Hillary Clinton, the Department seeks to implement its controversial "Lysistrata" policy, which encourages Muslim women to withhold sex from their terrorist husbands in an attempt to shorten jihad.  By making the top halves of Muslim women's faces 'irresistible,' Mary Qay reps hope to entice Muslim men to 'lay their guns and their women down at the same time'--winning  the coveted pink Cadillacs for the reps in the process.  Republicans were quick to attack the new policy.  Former Representative Tom DeLay, in an interview on Fox News, expressed contempt for the plan.  'Give me a break,' he sneered.  'A Cadillac's a powerful lot of car for a woman ...'  And former Vice President Dick Cheney bitterly called the program a 'pathetic half-measure,' compared to the one he tried to implement in 2004, which involved turning the Mary Qay Cadillacs into powerful car bombs; this initiative was narrowly defeated after Democrats and others pointed out that the main victims of the blasts would be women and children.  In a related pilot program, 'Mary Qay Without Borders,' Mary Qay doctors will offer prosthetic limbs to replace those lost after amputations due to adultery, while Mary Qay plastic surgeons will treat survivors of 'honor killing' attacks whose faces have been  disfigured by acid."

The Cherry Blossom Proof [by David Shapiro]

The Cherry Blossom Proof

The Milky Way is shrinking
so the cherry-blossoms are
growing larger. You write me longer letters.
Therefore, God exists.

-- David Shapiro

See The New York Quarterly,

for this and other poems by David Shapiro, Malachi Black's interview with him, a terrific long poem by Mark Bibbins, and works by Terence Winch, Dorianne Laux, Bob Hicok, others. Click here.

Couch-potato Kittens, Bad Rap Lyrics, and the Ever-cheerful Mr. Larkin [by Ernest Hilbert]

My wife and I have taken in a family of young kittens and their momma. I stepped onto the back porch of our home in Philadelphia one morning and saw a little head, with the two little wedge ears, poking up from the woodpile in the neighboring yard. Then another. Then another. Two little black kittens and a runty tabby. The mom seemed personable enough, a tough black bruiser cat. We have “rescued” and found homes for quite a few cats before, and spring is always the time. As Lynn and I sat out drinking Lord Chesterfield Ale on the porch yesterday, we were treated to the sight of two cats doing it right in the middle of the sidewalk. I thought of John Lennon’s “Let’s Do It in the Road.” Shameless! The kittens are all healthy so far: negative for FIV and Leukemia, no fleas, no infections, but lots of ear mites. Our vet thrills to show us the mites under the microscope, where one sees clumps of them breeding in the ear dirt. We now take the kittens up one or two at a time from basement to our living room (we have two cats we don’t want mingling with them), and socialize them by petting them and letting them watch whatever is on TV, such as Lethal Weapon, interpolated by commercials for fiber products and life insurance. Since they’re Philly cats, they’re used to the sirens and gunshots. I’d like to take this opportunity to draw readers’ attention to some worthy new online haunts I’ve taken to recently.

My Creative Process (Thoughts Written on the Long Bus Ride Back from Córdoba to Mojácar) [by Sharon Dolin]

One of the prize-winning Patios in Córdoba

This is my final week in Spain, so this week I will offer reflections on my experience here.

What has my creative process been like here in Spain? Stalled in Mojácar, more enthused by translation than the production of new poems. Until I arrived in Granada and I found my way back to poetry through the landscape of mountains that seem almost sacred in their distance snow-capped grandeur. And flamenco, of course. And the enduring presence of Lorca. Now I’m in touch with my duende—perhaps a kind of animus. I've written several poems in the style of Lorca and tried a few Oulipean experiments using his poems as a base. My writing of aphorisms has returned (a project I began several years ago and work on intermittently). All are tied to a particular place: Thus, I am writing Andalusian aphorisms now. In the course of my readings I have yet to encounter a woman’s aphorisms, yet women can be as pithy as men.This group of aphorisms, tentatively entitled “Andalusian Wind,” contains some found aphorisms. Here is one I encountered in the ladies’ WC in Córdoba bus station:

            What hurts most

            in life is that

            which you have never ventured to live.

And another on the walls in Sacromonte in Granada: BEAUTY IS YOUR HEAD, which sounds better in Spanish: LA BELLEZA ES TU CABEZA.

In Granada, I felt myself as a poet; in Córdoba, a Jew. In the ancient synagogue (only one of three left in all of Spain!), I stood inside this small square shrine with Sophie, a young woman from Canada, and I deciphered the fragmentary inscriptions for her. The most spiritual moment of my journey: I sang for her the section of the psalm we sing during the Days of Awe (and the month leading up to it): “Achat sha’alti” (One thing I ask, that I may dwell in the House of the Lord all the days of my life . . . .” ) It was my way to bond with all the Jewish ghosts who had and had not been able to pray there. And then the groups of tourists and school children descended upon us and drowned out the echoing hush. Twice I went to the Salon de té, run by a gentle Moroccan man, who suggested I drink a tea of lotus, jasmine, and rose—the closest I have ever come to drinking the essence of flowers. And finally, I had my first Turkish bath and massage. (There were days like this that felt like I was living poetry and didn't need to write any.)

In Córdoba, also, I managed to see the last evening of the annual Festival of the Patios. Imagine houses with inner courtyard and patios, the owners giving themselves over to creating a space of colorful spring flowers (a lot of geraniums, from what I could tell) and then opening up these patios to the public for several weeks each May. (There are prizes given to the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd Place Winners.) A culture given over to beauty and repose in tea salons and flamenco. Yes, there is a Plaza de Toros (bullring, and I keep managing to arrive too early or too late to a city to see any bullfight) and yes, most people do have to work. I know this is an extremely romantic view of things, but in these two cities—Granada and Córdoba—I have seen an appetite for  joy, for drinking and eating with friends rivaled only by my visits to Italy. I no longer felt the loneliness of cactus but a solidarity with everyone and in this moist ground, of fountains and rivers, I could find poetry once more.

Coda: Now here’s a strange truth I must confess. In the first 10 days I spent in Mojácar, I discovered, when just checking back in my notebook, that I had written 19 poems—not the first time my feeling about writing did not jibe with reality. They may all be una mierda (such pleasure in cursing in a foreign tongue!), but they belie my belief that I had written nothing out of the desert to which I am returning. In the desert, too, there are also songs. Exile. The desert. Wandering. Isn’t that the history and fate of my people after all?

Poetry War, Oxbridge Battlefront

From our British correspondent:
<<<
Ruth Padel, first female Oxford Professor of Poetry, resigns over smear claims

The first female Oxford Professor of Poetry resigned today following her involvement in an alleged smear campaign against a former rival.

>>>

The candidate (left), a cute brunette with hazel eyes, denies any wrongdoing, says she acted in "good faith" towards rival Derek Walcott, who withdrew from the contest amid recriminatory reminders that he has twice been charged with sexual harassment. Now a new election will be held. Read the London Telegraph account here.

Padel is quoted saying "I wish he had not pulled out." Many other women have felt the same way, quipped Felicia Burns.

The poet will make a fuller statement at the Hay Festival tomorrow.

Back on February 26, the Guardian reported that Ladbroke's of London had laid 8-1 odds on Padel's becoming Britain’s poet laureate. Only Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage, and three other bardies had shorter odds for the post that eventually went to the winner.

Padel was Lady Antonia Fraser's choice for the laureateship. "The candidate I back for [sic] is someone who was not mentioned in any of the newspaper reports yesterday [29 March] -- Ruth Padel. Her poems on Darwin are simply wonderful." Lady Antonia's late husband won the Nobel Prize in literature under the pseudonym Harold Pinter. See the story in the London Evening Standard here.

Patricia Hose charged that it is because of her preoccupation with Darwin and his association with evolutionary theory that Padel's poems have not been taught in the United States or Canada.

Initial reports of Duffy's laureateship mis-identified her as Carl Duffee, sparking outrage in Oxbridge circuses. But cooler heads prevailed. And a Manchester audience laughed appreciatively when Duffy -- Britain's first female, openly lesbian laureate -- improvised a couplet apropros the scandal of MP's runaway expense accounts:

"What did we do with the trust of your vote? Hired a flunky to flush out the moat," quipped Andrew Motion's successor, the Independent reported.

Speaking of moats, an article in the Telegraph notes and gloats over the members' use of public funds to clean their moats and do other greedy expensive ruling-class sorts of things, but concludes that the scandal is strictly small time.

Viktor Shenderovich, a media commentator on Russian radio, whose puppet show based on Spitting Image was banned some years ago, said the Russians are laughing at us. "The scope of corruption in Russia cannot compare with the shameful pettiness of British MPs. The small-mindedness arouses only disgust."

In the Guardian David McKie's take on the growing controversy was that we have always been going "From bad to verse." McKie's article on the mediocrity of past poets laureate was the 514th entitled "From Bad to Verse" since 1890.

Michael Deacon in The Telegraph saw the Padel flap in the context of the moral stance taken by revered figures of the past who would be outlaws today. Shelley was an atheist, Byron a womanizer, Coleridge a junkie, Keats a lily-livered Londoner, Blake a madman, and Wordsworth a bore.  And that's just the Romantics. “Not one of them, were they alive today, could hope to land the Oxford post," Deacon wrote. "They just don’t meet the exacting moral standards set by people who conduct smear campaigns.”

MP's in Britain are members of parliament. In the United States, the initials stand for military police.  Yours truly, favoring challenges or duels as a way of adjudicating disputes, proposes that all the entrants write a poem that capitalizes on the potential for transatlantic misunderstanding in this conjunction of letters. If you go here or there you'll see what I mean. You Americans are clever but we got there first.

-- Raymond Chandler Russell

Memorial Day, 2009

To World War Two (by Kenneth Koch)

Early on you introduced me to young women in bars
You were large, and with a large hand
You presented them in different cities,
Made me in San Luis Obispo, drunk
On French seventy-fives, in Los Angeles, on pousse-cafes.
It was a time of general confusion
Of being a body hurled at a wall.
I didn't do much fighting.  I sat, rather I stood, in a foxhole.
I stood while the typhoon splashed us into morning.
It felt unusual
Even if for a good cause
To be part of a destructive force
With my rifle in my hands
And in my head
My serial number
The entire object of my existence
To eliminate Japanese soldiers
By killing them
With a rifle or with a grenade
And then, many years after that,
I could write poetry
Fall in love
And have a daughter
And think
About these things
From a great distance
If I survived
I was "paying my debt
To society" a paid
Killer.  It wasn't
Like anything I'd done
Before, on the paved
Streets of Cincinnati
Or on the ballroom floor
At Mr. Vathe's dancing class
What would Anne Marie Goldsmith
Have thought of me
If instead of asking her to dance
I had put my BAR to my shoulder
And shot her in the face
I thought about her in my foxhole--
One, in a foxhole near me, has his throat cut during the night
We take more precautions but it is night and it is you.