The Best American Poetry

Happy Halloween!

Some Reasons for Reviewing [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Well, it's been a fun week.  I thought I'd use my last post to respond to some of the comments and thoughts raised by my post of a couple of days ago, in which I asked whether and why folks write book reviews.  Rather than be particularly organized, I'm just going to list some of my thoughts and opinions on the subject.  And then, I'll be signing off.

-It seems to me poetry reviews have a relatively small impact on poetry sales, because most poetry books are bought by libraries (for whom pre-pub reviews in PW and LJ matter most) or by an extremely educated audience.  Therefore, I think the purpose of poetry reviews is mainly to keep the art form in line, meaning to generate a conversation around books.  So, though I rarely write them, I don't think negative reviews are a bad idea.

-That said, negative reviews written for the purpose of making the reviewer look smarter than the book under consideration are always a bad idea.  People trying to look smart rarely do look smart.

-A primary concern for a reviewer should be writing an interesting piece of prose, a piece worth reading.  This may be more important--I tread lightly here--than being right, or even accurate.  It's certainly more interesting.  See the reviews of Randall Jarrell and, more recently, William Logan.

-To Mr. Hummer, who seemed so inflamed by the notion of a poetry publicist, understand I'm not referring to some weird world where poets themselves have publicists coordinating their appearances.  If you've published 11 books, someone has done the publicity work on them--sending out review copies, pitching them to the distributor, maybe trying to line up a review or two--whether it was a publicist at the press or the editor or you.  It's an essential part of the publication process.  But poetry hasn't sold out.

-I review books to help myself read them better, to get inside some of their thoughts.

-I review books to make a small part of my living.

-I review books because I think it's important to practice writing prose.  There is no excuse for poets who can't string a standard sentence together, but can wield fragments like knives.

-I review a lot of prose so that I am made to read books I wouldn't otherwise read.

-I don't necessarily believe that poetry needs to strive to reach a wider audience.  It's one of those things that needs to be sought.  Those who need it find it.  If more people need it, more people will find it.  Poetry is its own gatekeeper.

The Spires of the Gleaming Kiln [by Emma Trelles]

Because it is Halloween, and because I love all that is dark sparkle and lore, I settled in last night and read one of the Grimm Brothers' bleaker fairy tales - Hansel and Gretel. It's the last chapter of a collection I've kept since I was a child and I don't think I've opened the book since then either. I recalled a sketch of the story - a brother and sister lost in the woods, trying to find their way home, and a witch who traps them because they are hungry and her house is made of gingerbread and cake.

Well. There's that, but there's also the whole other part I forgot about, such as that the reason they are lost to begin with is because their father and stepmother have deliberately left them to die in the forest. Twice.

The first time, the resourceful Hansel finds the path back because he marks the way with pebbles that shine in the moonlight. The second time he uses bread crumbs to track his trail, but they disappear into the mouths of grackles and rabbits and the like. The witch cages Hansel and fattens him to eat; Gretel is made into her kitchen slave. Eventually the clever girl shoves their captor into an oven, and the two return to their father without grudge. As if it was that easy to forgive betrayal.

I once loved the macabre theatre of these tales. It seemed to me, in my little girlness, that while the world was dangerous, at least it was interesting, a place where spells might explode at any moment or where children could rescue themselves. Last night I thought of H&G, now grown, perhaps choosing to forget the crone with the red eyes and the keen animal nose, the father who abandoned them. Perhaps not.

Here is their future, as seen by Louise Gluck, who authored the line I pinched for the title of this post.

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...

             Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of the gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

John Keats: Half in Death with Easeful Love

Poor Keats. A Scorpio with Virgo rising and, just to clinch the deal, his moon in Gemini. This is the equivalent of being dealt the Fool, the Lovers (inverted), and the Tower as the three culminating cards in an eleven-card Tarot reading. There is sadness in his life, illness, a consumptive cough. But he has a generous soul, he meets afflictions with renewed resolve, he is capable of great feats of self-discipline. Willing to work hours on meters and rhymes he is a born dreamer, who can shut his eyes and transport himself in a second to fairy lands forlorn, an enchantment of mist, an early Autumn of heirloom tomatoes and three varieties of peaches. Life is a struggle, but he prevails, and then dies young.

The fact that Keats's moon is in Gemini, that the nocturnal northeastern quadrant is predominant in his natal chart, and above all that Mercury is his ruling planet, supports the view of this poet as a divinely-ordained messenger of the gods trapped in the frail body of an undernourished London lad with his face pressed against the sweet shop window, as Yeats wrote. [Note: If you mix up the names Keats and Yeats, or pronounce one as if it were the other, the chances of your appreciating either are diminished by a seventh but not eliminated. The two names are separated by nearly five decades but linked by lyrical genius, with the prophetic mode ascendant in Yeats, while Keats -- brainy, anxious, and quick as befits a son of Mercury -- wins the laurels for sensuality and freshness: the palpable bubbles in the wine glass, the burst of a grape in the satyr's mouth, the humming of flies on the porch screen in August, keen fitful gusts of wind.]

Keats's Venus is, like his sun, in Scorpio. This is crucial. It means he is as passionate as he is sensitive and a gambler not by instinct or by social association but by his intransigent attachment to his ideals. Among Sinatra songs "All or Nothing At All" comes closest to expressing Keats's point of view. He is one who can be loved by many but who reserves his own love for one. Auden's poem "The More Loving One" depicts a conflict that Keats resolved each time he picked up his pen to write. He knew he was destined to be the more loving one in any partnership, and he would not have had it any other way.

Keats loved the four elements and presented their interaction with the cool exactness that Vermeer brought to the study of light.  Not surprisingly, the two share a birthday: the 31st of October. Neither of them enjoyed trick or treating, though Keats did have an impish nature as a youth, and he loved his junkets.

The position of Mercury in the third house has caused the greatest amount of comment among professional astrologists. The consensus view is that Keats resembled certain musical geniuses in his extraordinary talent, his humble origins, and his early death. Though he was less dashing than the noble Byron and less angelic of aspect than Shelley, all the women polled said they would welcome a relationship with Keats, especially if she is in England while he is in Italy writing long gorgeous letters to her about Shakespeare plays, the nature of inspiration, the smell of mortality, and what Adam felt like waking up in Eden. Emily Dickinson, tipsy on lovemaking with Byron, said she nevertheless preferred to spend the night with Keats, despite his well-known proclivity for premature ejaculation. In his poems (ED wrote) Keats proved that greatness descends on the novice only after he has opened himself up to the risk of failure or embarrassment.

If Shelley is the poet of the autumn wind, the wind that destroys and preserves, animating the leaves and the waves and the clouds in a fury of activity, Keats is the poet of autumnal ripeness. Consider his great ode to the "season of mist and mellow fruitfulness." The final stanza of "To Autumn" is as sensual in its handling of language and rhyme as in its vision of the fullness of the harvest-time:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft 
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

The closing music shows that Keats took his own advice to Shelley ("load every rift with ore") to heart. A comparison of the two poets -- the one prospective, anticipatory, the other all righteous fire and visionary fury but also retrospective and melancholy -- is a fascinating study in comparative astrology. It has been said that the single most revealing piece of information you may have about a potential dating partner is whether he identifies himself more with Keats or with Shelley. 

The muse visited Keats often in the spring of 1819. First came "The Eve of St. Agnes," the lovers rushing away into the night; then "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," the lover seduced and abandoned. And then came the odes, the greatest odes that English has to offer: to Psyche, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Melancholy, to Indolence. No poet ever packed as much magnificence in a line or wrote stanzas of such melodious charm that a simple, naive statement of Platonic optimism, which in lesser hands would be anticlimactic or worse, should seem to penetrate the heart of the mystery: "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty."

-- DL

My Birthday [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

As promised, today is my birthday.  I'm 30 years old, pretty much twice as old as I was 15 years ago.  Birthdays are very strange: it's as if one can really mark the passage of time, can stop and take a look.  As I write this, I'm already making my way to 31.

So, in a celebratory spirit, I thought today I would share a series of random facts I have in my head which aren't particularly useful, a kind of momentary constellation of me...

1) I once heard, maybe in a movie, Bob Neuwirth referred to as Bob Dylan's "amanuensis."
2) The Diaper Genie requires special bags.  The Diaper Champ requires no special bags.  That's why The Champ always wins.
3) I was a collector from a young age, storing my GI Joe figures posed in a cabinet, not ever playing with them.
4) I do not play piano, though I wish I did
5) As a kid, I once asked me dog if she was excited that it was my birthday.
6) I have smoked many thousands of cigars.
7) Roy Haynes subs for Elvin Jones, who was apparently in rehab, on one of Coltrane's "Live at Newport" albums.
8) Harlem--125th St.; Fordham...Mount Vernon West...Bronxville; Tuckahoe; Crestwood; Scarsdale; Heartsdale; White Plains; North White Plains.
9) When I used to be able to write a poem in one sitting, I used to write a poem every year on my birthday.
10) I'm not sure if my Friendster account is still active.
11) States I've visited: Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Washington, Hawaii, Oregon, Illinois; New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Missouri, California, New York, Georgia, Colorado. 
12) At least two magicians have pulled a coin out of my ear.
13) Morning People.  Why?
14) There is no rule number 6.
15) I didn't drink soda till well into my teens.  Now look at me.

This Just In . . . AWP's Reasoned Response to Bogus MFA Ranking

Ed note:  Here's the letter Matt Burriesci, Acting Executive Director of The Association of Wrtiers & Writing Programs sent to Poets and Writers objecting to the recent MFA rankings.  If you agree with Matt, why not send a letter highlighting the same points ([email protected]):

Mary Gannon
Editorial Director
Poets & Writers
90 Broad St, Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004

cc:  Elliot Figman, Executive Director

October 26, 2009

 Dear Ms. Gannon:

I have the greatest respect for Poets & Writers, which is why I was so disappointed to see Seth Abramson’s opinion survey of MFA programs in your November/December issue.  The tutelage of an artist is a complex and serious business, and it cannot be reduced to a single spreadsheet column sorted in descending order.  Abramson himself seems to concede this point before proceeding.  But even if one could squeeze this universe into one question, from a statistical standpoint, Abramson’s methodology would still be flawed.

The cover headline referring to the article proclaims, “The Top 50 MFA Programs,” which itself is incorrect.  Abramson’s piece is not a ranking or comparison of all MFA programs, but of residential programs, and only those residential programs in the United States.  Missing in this analysis altogether are the dozens of low-residency and international programs.

The sample audience Abramson used in his survey consists of 500 self-identified applicants to MFA programs. Applicants to MFA programs are only one of the key stakeholders in the success of MFA programs.  Other stakeholders include faculty, administrators, current students, the professional association that represents them (AWP), and alumni.  Abramson is correct to point out the problems with previous ranking efforts, but he falls victim to the same sins of omission and reduction committed in those attempts.  This particular sampled audience, while interesting, does have its own set of biases in assessing MFA programs.  Some may prefer to be admitted to a high-profile program, while others may be unaware of their full range of options. 

It’s also an unrepresentative sample. There are more than 13,000 applicants to MFA programs each year.  If we ask less than 4% of them to tell us their opinions about MFA programs, we will arrive at what Abramson produces:  the opinion of this 4% of applicants of 75% of MFA programs.  If you drill down, more questions are raised about the data. No demographic information appears to have been collected.  We don’t know, for example, if there’s an appropriate geographical, gender, ethnic, and age variety in the sample.  These factors do make a significant difference in the preference of applicants.

read the complete letter here.

Walt Whitman selling Levis with "O Pioneers!"

I just saw this commercial at the movie theater, during the previews. Has anyone else seen it? What do you think? What would Whitman think? -- sdh

Why Review Poetry? [by Craig Morgan Teicher

I taught a little class last night to a group of undergrads about freelance writing and book reviewing.  Which makes me think about the AWP panel I'm leading for the NBCC at next year's conference called "The Practice and Purpose of Poetry Reviewing."  What I always say to creative writing students when I talk about book reviewing is that they're entering a landscape vastly different from the one I entered, and I only entered a few years ago.  Obviously, the Internet has rapidly and irrevocably changed the way  books--and anything--are talked about.  We now live in an age where some large segment of "professional" book criticism takes place in a medium somewhere between the customer comment and the fancy print book review.  Literally, everyone's a critic, if they want to be and can type. 

But then the AWP panel will be specifically about poetry reviewing--why and how it's done.  I'm often asking poetry publicists what a review means to them--does it help sell books in a meaningful way?  Then I wonder what other reviewers think.  To what extent are poetry reviews there to keep the art form in line?  What's the point of a negative review?

I'm curious whether readers of this blog read many reviews, especially of poetry, and whether they write them, either on blogs or for print or online lit mags or newspapers or wherever.  Why do you do it--reading or writing?

I'm groggy today--it's just too early, no matter what time it is.  So no album today.  I'm too grumpy to listen to music.  ugh.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  Talk to you then.

This Just In - mtvU Names New Poet Laureate Simin Behbahani

The Wall Street Journal reports that  Iranian poet Simin Behbahani will succeed John Ashbery as mtvU's second poet laureate.

Beginning Monday, mtvU will broadcast 19 short films featuring Behbahani's poems, translated by Farzaneh Milani and Kaveh Safa, and produced by Sophia Cranshaw.

Read more about the appointment over at Ross Martin's Something Burning and here.

-- sdh

Kandinsky at the Guggenheim [by David Lehman]

I went to Kandinsky
at the Guggenheim
in the rain today
the choice was immediate
Gelb Rot oder Blau
I chose Gelb
an aggressive triangle
a peaceful square a cosmic circle
and thou

On August 1, 1914 hostilities broke out
time for one last painting
before clearing out of Munich
and heading back to Moscow
That's my Kandinsky
riding blue on a blue horse
on a blue mountain the shapes shift
but the motion is constant
and the people are split
between destruction (red)
and sunrise (yellow)

If the mountain is blue
it's a triangle on graph paper
the signature on music paper
a wrecked composition
The archer is there shooting
the arrows of symbolic logic
the sky a white trapezoid
with ribbons rods billiard balls
rubber balls eyeballs keyboard
checkerboard planets snakes and canoes
they do mean something but you can't tell

what where each of thirty squares
has its sign Im schwarzen Viereck
so he leaves Germany a second time
in 1933 a dominant curve
in the soft Paris light he signs his name
with a slightly tilted K
in a right angle in the lower left corner
and the moon is in F sharp minor
can you hear it?
and that's what yellow means
and why it's my favorite color.

-- DL

Willard Spiegelman on Winspear and the Dallas Arts District

<<
On May 14, 1959, at the groundbreaking for what would become Lincoln Center, President Dwight D. Eisenhower hailed the event as "a great cultural adventure." A half-century later, it's easy to forget that Lincoln Center was considered a radical idea. The marble grandeur, the imposing edifices, the central plaza that has become a great populist agora are now so deeply embedded in the consciousness of New Yorkers and tourists alike that the buildings seem to have been there forever.

Times have changed. A massive arts complex would strike us as unthinkable as well as authoritarian. Variety, not uniformity, speaks to our national commitment to diversity and spice of all sorts. And everything takes longer and costs more to construct. In the face of a national recession it is amazing that any building can go up.

Except in Dallas, that is, where the skyline made famous by the J.R. Ewing clan on television 30 years ago has undergone multiple transformations. None is more exciting than what opened here earlier this month, the new AT&T Performing Arts Center, a $354 million, 10-acre assemblage aligned on one central axis beside a bustling freeway at the edge of downtown. It constitutes the latest addition to what Dallas refers to as its Arts District (68 acres in toto), which began with the Edward Larrabee Barnes Dallas Museum of Art (1984) and includes buildings by four winners of the Pritzker Prize for architecture, none of which remotely resembles the others. These are the Meyerson Symphony Center (1989, I.M. Pei), the Nasher Sculpture Center (2003, Renzo Piano), and the two new kids on the block: the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House (Norman Foster) and the Dee and Charles Wyly Theater (Rem Koolhaas). Not only Foster and Koolhaas, but also their associates—Spencer de Grey in Foster's office, and Joshua Prince-Ramus (who later split from Koolhaas to open his own office)—share responsibility for the two projects. Still, Dallas likes to claim bragging rights for the Pritzker Prize-winners themselves, even though both buildings represent collaborative efforts.

-- Willard Spiegelman (in the Wall Street Journal online, 10/28/09)
>>>

For more of Mr Spiegelman's take on the new Dallas art complex, click here

We Shall Think And Listen [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

"Well, shall we/ think or listen?  Is there a sound addressed/ not wholly to the ear?"
--Williams Carlos Williams, "The Orchestra"

The above is my favorite bit of poetry about music.  Williams was thinking about classical music in "The Orchestra," but the same thinking applies to "America's classical music," jazz.  The answer, of course, to Williams' question, is we should think and listen.  I say this by way of explanation for why all my  yammering about jazz this week on this blog.  Obviously, I'm writing about it because I like it a lot and my directive as BAP guest blogger was to post "about anything you like."  But then, of course, jazz seems to me to have several intimate connections and overlaps with poetry, some of which I thought I might elucidate today. 

Listening to jazz, as anyone who does it a lot knows, is an active process, an act of will.  You must actually listen, concentrate, think.  Jazz is music not address wholly to the ear, but also to the mind (the imagination, the short and long-term memory) and to the body.  At its root, jazz is based on the idea of variations on a theme the listener knows, either because it's a popular song that everyone knows (or knew, in the case of many standards), or simply because the theme was just played for the listener at the beginning of the tune. 

But then, it gets weirder and more interesting than that, and this is where it seems to me we get into a realm that jazz and poetry share.  Not only is a jazz listener meant to suspend the basic melody and rhythm of the song being heard in memory, but also all the solos that unfold in that song, the unfolding of the solo from one moment to the next, and, further, every other rendition of that song, every song like it, and, in a way, every other song, period, from the past, present, and future.  While a jazz listener is experiencing the music he or she is hearing, he or she is also comparing it to other music, hearing how decision these jazz musicians have made in terms of melody, rhythm and a number of other factors comment on other musicians' decisions about other music, how other musicians make meaning and feeling with their instruments.

Poetry, I would argue, works the same way.  When reading a poem, we're not meant to simply interpret the words the way we would a sentence spoken aloud in a conversation.  We're meant to compare the words in the poem--taken together and apart--to all other uses of those words, to the echos those words carry from other speakers.  The poem is a collection of associations pinned together, disguised as a kind of coherent piece of writing.  It's actually much more dynamic than that, in motion like a jazz tune, changing its meaning and feeling not only as it unfolds in the poem, but as its words are used in the world outside the poem.  It's big stuff.  It's what makes poetry, and music, come off the page or out of the speaker, as it were.

-

As for an album, may I recommend Paul Motian Trio 2000 + One by the band of the same name, led by the extraordinary septuagenarian drummer (and Bill Evans trio alum) Paul Motian, who is one of the strangest and most original drummers every, thinking of the drums more as textural, rather than rhythmic, instruments.  This is music that's alternately melodic and lovely and strange and abrasive.  I'd say more but I can't so I won't.  Talk to you tomorrow.

Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

Nature and the logic of fate have brought us to this rain-soaked afternoon and while we may not grin, speaking generally, we will bear it.

Given the bright drear outside I thought I'd splash some color inside and present to you this sketch of the mind.

Did I ever mention to you that everything is difficult?  I like coffee and not having to go anyplace for hours, but I can't think of much else that passes the mustard at the great picnic table of existence.  Yes, yes, love, but I don't want to talk about that right now.  Of course soon I have to go to the pediatrician and arm young arms with shots in the dim, but still, there is coffee.  

Tonight in class we'll talk about Yeats, especially "Vacillation" (to which this weekly blog owes its name) and "The Desertion of the Circus Animals."  In the latter, Yeats talks about wanting to write but finding no story within him to tell.  Rather, finding a nothing that asks something: What was I ever saying?  The next stanzas talk about a play he wrote back in the day (On Baile's Strand), and a poem, on this mythical beautiful brute king named Cuchulain who ended up killing his son, unawares (Oedipus reverse) though his son knew just who he was and was swording towards him on orders from the queen.  And Yeats also mentions Countess Colleen about whom he also wrote poem and play.  Her people starving, she sells her soul to satisfy them, just like the present always sells the past, for the sake of the future.  Anyway, despite all these densities of meaning, the poet says it was all just words and pageantry to him, he never felt the deep mind behind.

So what's left when life no longer announces itself to you?  The same thing from when you had it all, just with a lot less theater.  Where did he get all those angry wasted straining failures in the first place?  Someplace grubby where he doesn't know anything but the archives of his scars.  Is it disgusting, yes, it is disgusting, and no, it is no Coney Island of the Mind, but it is actual, and matter of factual, and when there is nothing left but uncertainty and struggle, hey, at least you have those.  Here's the last stanza:

Those masterful images because complete


Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?


A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,


Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,


Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut


Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,


I must lie down where all the ladders start


In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

----

Nice huh?  I love it with all I've got.

I had a good trip in East Kentucky, met interesting people, saw bluegrass (green) and horses (galore) and drank beer aged in barrels that late had cradled Kentucky bourbon (tasty, with a kick), and hawked my dove, dovey message of unbelieving love.  This week there is an article in Newsweek that mentions my work in a lovely way.   

It is very tricky getting things just right, impossible actually, but the muses in their army books insist on urging further trials, though hope is plucked and baking, slathered in rosemary and olive oil.

See you next week, perhaps under bluer skies.

love,

Jennifer

Nin Andrews in New York [by Liz Howort]

            In her retrospective reading at the New School last week, the poet Nin Andrews singled out the professor who most profoundly affected her creative work: “I took a class with David Lehman and it was as if my head was blown off.”  Andrews explained that when she studied poetry at Hamilton College, most of the poets on the faculty wrote in the confessional manner. Their dark work alienated her.  In studying with David Lehman, Andrews learned that “everything has the potential to be a poem.  Recipes, advertisements, presidential speeches—all poems.” 

The writer Frank McCourt wrote of his favorite graduate professor, Morton Irving Seiden, “He insisted we should know the literature the way a doctor knows the body.”  Andrews seems expert on the combination of literature and the body. She explained the origin of her collection The Book of Orgasms by recalling another professor who told her not to write about sex.  As if spurred by the prohibition, Andrews began writing poems such as “Defining the Orgasm” and “The Quest,” which exemplify the repressive society in which her curiosity blossomed: “We must live godly lives.  God never had orgasms.  Neither should I.  I did my best to remain orgasmless, but curiosity got the better of me.”  In her poem after Henri Michaux, entitled “The Portable Pussy,” Andrews brazenly asks, “If I have to pick between a pussy and a brain, which will it be? After all, who can choose between the player and his flute?”  Andrews weaves humor into the questions she raises whether about sex or politics, the atter of which she examines in Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane. 

          Her recently published chapbook, Dear Professor Do You Live in a Vacuum? contains humorous questions and answers composed by college students: “Dear Professor,/ You gave us that problem/ about driving down the freeway at 60 MPH/ in a VW bug and hitting a truck/ that was driving at 75 MPH,/ and you wanted to know what happened next…/ I figured the answer was simple./ Drive a truck from now on.”  When asked whether people can develop or acquire a comic gift, Andrews suggested that humor can be learned and that reading absurd work may be a good first step. Humor can coexist with suffering. Part of you, Andrews said, may watch yourself suffer, and that part can see the humor in suffering. 

A Quickie [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Today has

 

been a different kind of day, with a good deal less time in it, so I'm posting later, and I'll be brief.  More on the issues tomorrow, but today I think I'll just yammer about an album and be done.

Greg Osby is one of the leading contemporary jazz composers and soloists.  As far as I can tell, each of his albums is well thought out and unique, a project in its own right rather than simply a collection of compositions and sols.  In light of my recent Louis Armstrong tear, I've been finding myself drawn to one Osby album in particular, his St. Louis Shoes, a collection of originals and others' compositions inspired by the musical history of Osby's home time.  It also recalls the music of Armstrong and his early collaborators.  At the same times, Osby's tunes, especially the first track, are often dark and haunting.  And the soloing from this excellent band, which includes trumpeter Nicholas Payton, is first rate.

 

I wish I had more in me today, but I don't.  Be back tomorrow.

A Birthday (by Laura Orem)

Today would have been Sylvia Plath's 77th birthday. She left an astonishing number of good-to-excellent poems for someone who died at 30, a testament not only to her talent but to her dedication to her craft and iron Yankee work-ethic. Easily, so easily, she could have been writing still - imagine that raw voice honed by five more decades of experience and maturity.

Arguably, she is the single most influential poet of the mid-20th century. Not just her poems, written at the very edge of daring (how many of us are that psychically brave or foolhardy?), but her endlessly re-hashed and microscopically-examined life. Part of this the result of her own myth-making - at its best, her writing is so powerful, so compelling, that it creates its own epic biography. Part of this comes from the mythologizing by her own mother (her sanitized Letters Home, edited by Aurelia Plath, was a best-seller and obligatory reading by young female poets when it came out in 1978), and by the endless books and articles written about her. Anyone who knows anything about Plath knows all the details of her life: her suicide attempts, her marriage, her children, her death - and everyone has an opinion. The story continues into the present - it was just this year that her son, Nick Hughes, a biologist and expert on fishes, the baby of whom she wrote, "Love set you going like a fat gold watch," hanged himself in Alaska. Tragic, yes - but how oddly personally tragic this death felt to so many! We feel proprietary over her, as if somehow her story is part of our own.

But how can we really know someone we didn't know? The answer is, we can't . We can know the facts of Sylvia Plath's life, and we can know her work. The rest is filling in our own blanks, making Plath into something we each want her to be, something that fits our own mythology. We didn't (most of us, anyway) know her personally, and we don't, we can't, know her now, 46 years after her death. The details of a life aren't a life. And this detritus of detail and what we project onto Plath can obscure the poetry. When she writes, in the first line of "The Jailer," My night sweats grease his breakfast plate, we are pleased because we get exactly to whom she is referring and why; like teenagers whispering at a lunch table, we are in on the secret.  But maybe we are so invested in the backstory, the poem itself is compromised - Yeah, you tell him, Sylvia. Kick his poetic ass.

Sylvia Plath wasn't a symbol, and she wasn't ours. She was a gifted, difficult, dedicated, passionate, troubled, and brilliant woman.  Other than that, we cannot presume to say what went on in her heart. (After all, are we just what we write?) But what we can know is the work, because what we have is the work. Look, I like gossip as much as the next person. I've read the biographies and I've read her journals and letters and I know all the juicy bits. But today, on her birthday, I'd like to try to honor her poetry by untethering it from all this - to read it the way poems should be read, on their own merit, good or bad. And when Plath is good, she is transcendent. Today, I grieve in the only way I have any right to - for the poems that did not get written, for the work we will never have.

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Written October 27, 1962

Monday @ KGB: Charles North & John Koethe

The KGB Monday Night Poetry Reading Series
Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone Presents . . .
Charles North & John Koethe
Monday, October 26 @ 7:30 PM
Admission is FREE

Music Reference Books and Reading on the Internet [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Today, if I may, and simply because I may, I'd like to point your attention to my favorite book, which is also my favorite kind of book, if by favorite I mean the book I most often pull off my shelf, though I haven't read it cover to cover and hope never to do so.  (My favorite book of another kind is Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, which the book in question is not, nor does it try to be.) This book is, of course, The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings by Richard Cook and Brian Morton.  If you don't know it, you probably don't listen to jazz, in which case you've probably already clicked away from this paragraph, which is now talking rather rudely behind your back.  The Penguin Guide is a mighty reference book, containing capsule reviews of thousands of in-print jazz recordings made since the genre's first flowerings. 

When I say it's my favorite kind of book, I don't mean to say I'm in love with reference books of all kinds--you won't find me pouring over a pile of concordances and dictionaries in my free time--but with books packed with what I call "little bits," tiny discreet prose pieces that that give a colorful take on a particular topic and then close up shop.  A short attention span like mine--and what begets poetry and poets if not a short attention span in love with literature--feats on these little reviews, gobbling two or three at a sitting, then saving the book for later, like the last few cookies on the plate.  But what a bountiful plate--as soon as I've had what seems to be my fill (looked up all the albums by Sam Rivers, as I did this morning, for instance), leaving the plate seemingly empty, lo and behold, it is full again as my craving shifts to Ornette Coleman! 

Poetry E-Books and Louis Armstrong [by Craig Morgan Teicher]

Hello all.  First let me say it's an honor to be here before you, doing my part to add to the text-horde, helping to create a diversion so someone else can commit the real crime.  Or perhaps to fight the real crime.  Anyway, I'm pleased to be here, blogging for the next week.

I promised David Lehman I'd write about jazz, and I will, a bit later.  But I thought I'd begin with some thoughts on a bit of po-biz news that intersects with another part of my professional life.  I make a part of my living as a technology reporter for Publishers Weekly, for whom I've written many stories about the burgeoning E-book business over the past couple of years.  It's recently come to my attention that the poetry and short fiction publisher BOA Editions, Ltd., has just made three of its book available for the Amazon Kindle e-reader device, which seems to be to be a good opportunity to think about the potential for e-books and the poetry scene. 

(First, however, I should disclose that BOA is indeed publishing my next book in May, though no one at BOA told me that they had been working on producing Kindle editions of BOA books, and I found out when I happened to scan the BOAfacebook page (and we'll leave the intersection of poetry and social networking for another day).  BOA is the first mostly-poetry press I know of to do Kindle books (though I know, too, thatGraywolf has begun to publish at least its fiction in electronic form), so BOA seems like a good place to start).

As you'll see here at the top of BOA's website, three books--collections of prose poems by Russell Edson and Nin Andrews, as well as a book of stories by Martha Ronk--are now available for the Kindle.  And for only $7.  Now I know that many a book person probably cringes at the thought of their precious books being reduced to ones and zeros, especially precious poetry books, which are more like talismans to ward off ignorance and existential loneliness than bound stacks of papers.  I'm the same way, believe me.  I LOVE my books.  One of my favorite things is to fall asleep with a book on my chest--sometimes, I'm not even reading the damn thing: I just put the closed book on my chest and close my eyes.  Books are warm and friendly; electronic files are abstract and confusing (though I would think a Kindle or Sony reader is at least slightly warm, electronic as it is). 

But then, the Internet has made this, I'd think, the most literate moment in history.  We spend more of our time than ever reading various kinds of texts, researching our interests, commenting.  I can't help but think that's a very good thing.  Sure, we're less tempted to actually speak to other people, but unless you're very weird, you still do (if you are weird, you probably found a way of not speaking to people well before the Internet came along to help).  One the whole, I think Google and others' efforts to put books online is absolutely necessary--we need to have the sum-total as it were of our knowledge archived and made accessible to anyone who wants it. 

Costco & Cocktails {Loren Goodman}

SEOUL, Korea -- October 22 & 23

As breath of Autumn's being bathes Seoul in hectic red, young men's fancies turn to... Costco!

Colleague Kelly Walsh and I discuss the possibility of a Costco run several days in advance. After a lunch meeting on entrance admissions and interview procedures Thursday afternoon, we tentatively agree to embark on a shopping adventure the following day. Upon answering his call Friday morning, we again discuss the benefits and detriments of a Coscto shopping spree. After a brief silence, my ear meets with a statement of indubitable gravity: "I'm running low on cheese." All doubt eliminated, I set out to Jongo to meet Kelly in his taxi bound for Sangbong, the location of the nearest Costco (there are at least three in Seoul).  

The rendezvous point: Jongno 4-ga

This is where I wait for Kelly's taxi. As I wait, I see the following sign:

 

Pondering the moment of my chance encounter with this quaint shop, its window display seems a portent: is not every moment of our lives consumed with time?

I try to discern Kelly's form in the many taxis that pass. Little do I know, at this time he is approaching the Han River, far in the opposite direction. With little knowledge of the city and even less command of the language, after two years I still find it difficult to get around; Kelly has been here less than two months. 

 

 

 

Once there, it is as if the entire staff recognizes the ardors of our journey, and welcomes us accordingly. While Kelly gets his papers in order, I take the opportunity to sanitize my cart handle.

Costco: Plaisir et jouissance