The Best American Poetry

Last Monday at KGB Bar [by Megin Jimenez]

Last Monday at KGB Bar, our own series founder Star (“I can’t be a celebrity because I punctuate”) Black, took to the podium with friend and city poet Geoffrey O’Brien. Star read from her new book, Velleity’s Shade, out later ths year from Saturnalia Books (www.saturnaliabooks.com). The essential tension in this work lies in the balance between the rapidly collecting images and registers, and an ever-present attention to form. The poems bump along with questions (“Do you think I need surgery?”) and iron-clad declarations (“The road is too possible. It’s in the way”) that transform into startling images (“a lake dematerializing  into snap turtles”) — surrealism in its original sense, the yoking together of the unexpected. In the flesh, it was the various personae in the work that resonated. Star’s powerful presence brought out the wry moments in her varied “I”s, the teeth in the lines.

Early on she offered a poem to the ambitious weaver Arachne, a useful talisman as other poems touched on (“but not really”) Man Ray, the abruptness of monsoons, the military, asexuality, aging. (Read a few of the poems here: http://www.theawl.com/2010/01/the-poetry-section-four-poems-by-star-black.)

Geoffrey O’Brien (“My first friend in New York!” says Star) shared some brand new work as well as a taste of his book Early Autumn, out next month from Salt (www.saltpublishing.com). The poet’s omnivorous appetite for the arts was evident in an elegy expressed via music references, a collage of pulp prose, an operatic, lovelorn declaration by a Moorish princess (inspired by the 17th century dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca) and his own eye-opening first encounter with George Oppen’s work. Writing itself as an image (letters as insects) was recurrent, as was memory as a place — a garden, an attic.

O’Brien closed with excerpts from a long poem that inhabits a great part of Early Autumn. Inspired by Hubert Robert’s paintings of ruins (http://traumwerk.stanford.edu:3455/71/50) — ruins of the ancient world, but also ruins of buildings currently in existence — the poem resembles an extended musical improvisation. That elusive, oh-so-gratifying moment when the act of writing opens up, no longer an effort, but an experience, was palpable, and made a solid case for the long poem. The image of ruins seemed to press the poet to recreate New York City entire, leaping from scene to scene, with September 11 a latent presence (“nothing is permanent”).

Star Black read a poem she dedicated to a poet (unnamed) she had met in her early days in New York: “When he asked, ‘Do you write?’ I realized he meant ‘Do you write poetry?’ and it’s a question I’ve been trying to answer ever since.” I tend to approach poems as questions, but it seems like a useful new way to hear them, as answers, and we lucky listeners had a few to take home.

-- Megin Jimenez

Dianne Blakely tours the South (by David Yezzi)

Dianne Blakely is a phenomenal poet, and just now she's publishing a series of articles on Swampland.com about lesser-known but wonderful Southern poets that is well worth a look. First up are Lisa Russ Spaar, Molly Bendall, and Brian Teare, complete with extensive interviews of each. 

As she writes: "Charlottesville seems the right place to begin this National Poetry Month. As teachers there, Charles Wright and Rita Dove have received the most acclaimed national recognition, and I’ve written about both in the recent years [here and here], as well as a reminiscence of Eleanor Ross Taylor, whose husband Peter was a mainstay of the fiction department for many years."

Dianne wrote her wonderful piece about Taylor months before Taylor received the Ruth Lily Prize from the Poetry Foundation. (I wonder if her article had anything to do with it? Looks like Christian Wiman was already on the case!)

Dianne now turns her attention to a handful of vital younger talents, and the result is a real treasure trove.

Paul TILLICH: PART 4

Wow what a beautiful day, blog readers!   I’m at the window here, watching cats watching whishing leaves, armed with my NJOY electric cigarette, an ingenious contraption that allows you to inhale nicotine-infused water vapor.  I’m going to go for two posts today, half-timed by a trip to Trader Joes.  Perhaps even more.  Work is going to swallow both days of my weekend whole, and then I think I’m done for my week, which is a shame, as it’s gone by all too quickly, the coins too quickly spent and on what, ultimately, I’m not sure.      

---

Continuing from yesterday, I must admit I’m a bit dumbfounded by all the possible conversational directions we might go in.   Doubt is really not some haze, but the acute awareness of an equally viable option – in poem-making, it’s a word or line or whole draft that could equally well be a different word or line or whole draft.  In life, it’s a torn heart.  In a matter like this, the doubt pertains to the fact that there is so much that deserves to be brought immediately to the fore.  I don’t know if anyone would disagree if someone were to say that every crisis is a crisis of limits.             

First, my impulse in bringing up Tillich and Einstein was apologetic….One thing Tillich asks is that theology be shown the same respect as one shows physics, medicine, or any other discipline.  When criticizing it, one should criticize the most advanced and not some obsolete forms of the practice….In one sense, he’s absolutely right.  We don’t debunk medicine as a field because Benjamin Rush, the Doctor Os of the late 18^th century, once prescribed his diarrhea-inducing  “Thunderbolts” for everything from malaria to nosebleeds.  Nor do we say astronomy is doomed to  truthlessness because it once assumed the sun to be just the bolder and brighter of our two orbiters.  However, we have no problem attacking obsolete forms of religious thought, and feeling justified in our attacks.   Of course, it is a different situation in religion.  If certain doctors were trying to bleed sinus infections out of us in the present time, we would have grounds for attacking medicine as a viable field.  Such a parallel situation can no doubt be found in contemporary religious practice.    

Ultimately, in Tilich’s religious thought, contemporary Athiesm is put into the surprising position of serving what it believes itself to be attacking.  This is what I was hoping to show.  Attacks on a distorted concept of God, a conflation of the symbol for the “unknowable ground and abyss of Being itself” cannot be strong enough, and are ultimately in service of religion.  This is because they’re in the service of Truth. As Augustine puts it, “where I have found the Truth, there I have found my God, the Truth itself.”  Truth, as we all know, can only replace itself with itself.  You cannot remove a truth without establishing truth.  Thus, it can only become itself more fully as if moves through time.  If God is “veritas,” what can be said then?                

Says Tillich: “Ultimate Concern is manifest in the realm of knowledge as the passionate longing for ultimate reality.  Therefore, if anyone rejects religion in the name of the cognitive function of the human spirit, he rejects religion in the name of religion.”  These are some of the most challenging words Tillich speaks to the contemporary religious.            

On a side note, Tillich’s imploration that theology be treated the same as other fields presupposes that the field of religion is dynamic.  This is troubling to many inside of religion for all kinds of reasons.   Unfortunately, as it has related to scientific inquiry, religion’s movement has had the tendency of resembling a continuous retreat, from one untenable position to the next untenable position.  (One can trace this to the Thomistic Dissolution.)  Tillich warns against theologians and religious leaders building their doctrines in the dark spots of scientific research, and how such is ultimately at odds with religion.  At the time he wrote his History of Christian Thought, and to this day, science has not been able to conclude how organic matter arises from inorganic manner.  The danger is that religion places a “being among beings” in the universe at this point, where he reaches down with His fingertip aflame and puts life into the world, only to eventually withdraw, as one does from a grill gone blazing out of control.   While such a concept of God is exciting to the mind, and pleasing to our poetic faculties, where can it go next once science is able to get its thumb on how life came to be?  Perhaps religion places this transcendent being at the instant before the Big Bang.  Anywhere it places it, however, is ultimately a misplacement, a misunderstanding of God, and a misunderstanding of religion.      

ON PAUL TILLICH: PART 3 [by Matthew Yeager]

HELLO BEST AMERICAN BLOG READER(S).  Good to be back for my third installment; today begins the draft, some of the most exciting few days of the year for NFL fans.  Even during the Bengals’ despairing 1990s, in which the Bungles dug out lows nearly unimaginable in a league with such an even financial playing field, draft day was a day of wild optimism.  As a young fan you hope for stars; as an adult, you feel yourself hoping for fixtures.  You like the idea of your squad using a top pick on some blunt mauler of a guard with the staying power of a canned good.  Someone re-signable, who’ll be in the lineup for a decade.  I’m hoping that a fellow named Mike Iupati, from Idaho, falls to us this year.  He’s just such a blunt mauler.  Well worth a 21^st overall pick.  In the cold-weather divisions particularly, few things are more invaluable than depth on the line.  Ah, football….In the name of these blog-posts maintaining at least a modicum of topical unity, I won’t dwell.

I would like to begin by picking up discussion of a document briefly touched on yesterday.  This was at some point before I began un-systematically meandering through the Ontological argument for the existence of God.   Thinking about those sentences, I can only smack myself on the forehead.  I was like someone running all the way the around the base-paths without actually getting his foot on a single bag.  If you would like to take in a piece de resistance (sp?) on the subject, read Tillich’s “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” which appears in Theology of Culture.  Read especially the sections on the Augustinian Solution and the Thomistic Dissolution.  All the ideas are laid out there and shine, simply.    

The document that I mean to talk about is Tillich’s 1940 rejoinder (reprinted in the same book) to some religious statements made by Albert Einstein.  Einstein’s comments, in which he rejects the idea and existence of a Personal God, roused a considerable amount of excitement at the time.  One can discern that Tilllich was a bit miffed by it.  His first point in the paper, after all, is that Einstein’s arguments would have failed to matter out of a different mouth, as they were “neither powerful nor new.”  One can also discern that he was disheartened.  The outbreaks of fear and anger, the schizophrenic God-affirming and God-denying that afterwards ran rampant, could only indicate a spiritual sickness in the religious communities.   It could only indicate superstition, recidivism, suppression.  If you read Tillich’s A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism, you’ll find in the chapters on religion and science that he was much more optimistic than he should have been about the relationship between the two realms moving forward.   And really, there should by now have been a healing together, or at least a movement in that direction.

As for the Personal God, Tillich explains that “it is the common opinion of classical theology, practically in all periods of Church history, that the predicate "personal" can be said of the Divine only symbolically or by analogy or if affirmed and negated at the same time.” 

What does this mean?  That if you are a member of any Judeo-Christian religion you have no point of disagreement (or shouldn’t) with Einstein or anyone else as to whether a perfected and all-powerful being exists or does not exist.   The answer is that such a being does not exist.  There is no such being that has power as you have power, only to an infinite degree.  There is no such being that has knowledge in his head as you have knowledge in your head, save to an infinite degree; such a being does not make choices as you make choices; he does not have, in each massive transcendent cell of his being, a Y-chromosome like a gigantic glowing tuning fork rendering his every cell transcendently male.  Nor does he literally “send his son” in the way you might send someone to go do something you aren’t capable of doing yourself.   Such a being could not do this because such a being doesn’t exist; the Personal God symbolizes; it inflects; it allows access to the dimension of depth in all that is, but it does not exist.   

Says PT: “The concept of a "Personal God," interfering with natural events, or being "an independent cause of natural events" makes God a natural object beside others, an object amongst objects, a being amongst beings, maybe the highest, but anyhow a being.  This, indeed, is the destruction, not only of the physical system, but even more the destruction of any meaningful idea of God. It is the impure mixture of mythological elements (which are justified in their place, namely in the concrete religious life) and of rational elements (which are justified in their place, namely, in the theological interpretation of religious experience). No criticism of this distorted idea of God can be sharp enough.”

He says more: “It is obvious that in the daily life of religion that the symbolic character of the idea of the Personal God is not always realized.  This is dangerous only if distorting theoretical or practical consequences are derived from the failure to realize it.  Then attacks from outside and criticism from inside follow and must follow.  They are demanded by religion itself.  Without an element of ”atheism” no “theism” can be maintained.”   

(To Be Continued.)

Split, a poem for an April night [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I like the idea that if I post this now I will have posted on Wednesday. I've got nine minutes.  So here's a poem, first published at The New Republic last year.

Also, I've been going on about the Pantoum over at Dear Fonzie.  Pantoum! and  More Pantoum!

More soon, keep breathing,

Love,

Jennifer

Split

We speak of rebellion when the kid

is a hellion and the folks are as mild

as a spoon. 

Likewise Republicans

born of freethinking lesbians

 seem like reactors, turncoats

on how they were raised. 

Let me offer another

concatenation

of this explanation.  Think of your mother

as one discreet corner

of a person with a multiple

mental disorder. 

You’re one of the others.  One that split off.

 

Not a turncoat then, but the expression

of what was suppressed.  The same woman,

your mother, who wants to help others,

also likes life as a racket

where the best finagler wins. 

 

For reasons we do not fully assemble

she can not voice this redder side

of her nature and the voicing of it,

that is you.

You are not teaching the former

generation.

Their frenzied distaste in certain directions

was the cue you used

to decipher the code

of just how you were not

to do as you were being told. 

--Jennifer Michael Hecht

Young Badboy Brown (by Mitch Sisskind)

Nathaniel Hawthorne's story "Young Goodman Brown" powerfully depicts the experience of what could be called disillusionment -- but that's putting it too mildly. What the title character experiences is existential shock at the realization that things, and people, are not what they seem. He just can't get over it, and descends into lifelong depression. (This was before the introduction of anti-depressants like Prozac and Paxil, which can cause weight gain and diminished sex drive.)

 

Set in Puritan times, "Young Goodman Brown" opens with Mr. Brown about to depart on a little business trip. He bids an affectionate goodbye to his wife, named Faith, and then heads off into the forest. There, as if by prior arrangement, he meets up with a diabolical individual who leads him deep into the foliage. And what does your Goodman Brown see in the foliage? Why, it's a full-bore Dionysian orgy -- kind of like the Burning Man festival, I guess, with people dancing around and some of them maybe having sex right out in the open, although that part is left to the reader's imagination. Also, no drugs. But here's the really wild part: the "queen" of the Dionysian orgy is none other than Goodman Brown's own wife! Oy! Oy vey!

Well, when Goodman Brown gets home from his business trip Faith is right there waiting for him. But things just don't seem the same to GB -- so he becomes melancholy for the rest of his life.

It's a sad story, but I can relate. Many years ago my friend Wally in high school showed me a couple of his "eight page bibles" -- little pocket sized porno comics, some of which featured well-known comic book characters. I was deeply shocked to see Sluggo, from the "Nancy" comic strip, masturbating at his window as he watched Nancy jumping rope outside. A thought bubble had Sluggo thinking, "This os okay, but..." You can imagine what happened in the subsequent pages. I was actually afraid to look at them. But at the same time a whole world was opening up. Were there images, somewhere, of squeaky clean Archie and peevish Veronica? Or Superman and Lois Lane? As Arthur Graham Bell said, "What hath God wrought?"

Those memories came back to me this week when I began to research "eight page Bibles" on the interent. (Why would I do such a thing? "Nothing human is foreign to me." -- Shecky Greene.) Anyway, it turns out that in true Puritan tradition some of the best eight pagers were drawn by the same artist who did the cute little comics in Bazooka Joe bubble gum! His name was Wesley Morse (1897-1963) and I'm proud to say he was born in Chicago, where Kim Novak was also born!

Here's a Bazooka Joe comic:

 

And here's an image from one of Morse's eight pagers. This one doesn't feature any famous characters..

Both these comics are really quite delightful, don't you think? The porno one especially has such a light touch. As a child this stuff scared me but now, as Martin L. King said, "I'm not worried about anything! I'm not afraid of any man!" That's progress!

The images come from http://lambiek.net/artists/m/morse_wesley.htm. To see more, visit that excellent site.

PAUL TILLICH: PART 2 [by Matthew Yeager]

HELLO BLOG-READERS!

I was all set to begin today with the statement, “Paul Tillich is not a great prose stylist,” and then go on to talk about what exactly it is that makes his English prose so lucid, so convincing, so compelling.  Perhaps I will in brief.  The short of it – the root of it – is that Tillich learns English according to what he already knows, namely Latin and Greek, and so is wary of the meanings of words that we as native speakers take for granted.  There is a simplicity in sentence structure that almost can feel juvenile for certain whole books, as in Dynamics of Faith.  It seems incongruous, at times, but wonderfully so.  As many of his essays are adapted lectures, there is an orality to way the sentences unfold.  Orality is about rate, as the ear is slower than the eye.  He taught, and has that teacher’s ability to sense what is known and isn’t known, stop where he is, and break a concept down.  There is a calmness and measuredness.  Although certain practices irk him, he is never polemical, which is rare when one is writing about religion.               

The plan was then to examine Tillich’s response to Einstein’s theological statements in 1959, which is a nice introduction to his viewpoint.  Specifically, it a fine example of how the pond of Tillich’s onto-theological system receives the boulder of Athiesm without a ripple of disturbance…He likewise receives Freud, Nietszche, and has enlivening and enriching things to say at various points about their brilliant contributions to human thought.  I should do this, at a certain point, as it might lead to good discussion of contemporary Athiesm.  Anyhow, as I sat there thinking, outlining a course, my mind ran ahead….

To talk about Tillich is soon enough to talk about Ontology and the Ontological approach to the question of God.  Paul Tillich is, perhaps first and foremost, an Ontologist.  What exactly is Ontology?  It’s definable as the branch of metaphysics that deals specifically with questions of Being.  The roots are the Greek on, which means “being,” and the word logos, which means “word.”  The logos, as Tillich traces it through history, is shown to refer not only to a word but what the word signifies.  He also describes the logos as “the creative structure of the world.”   All this is complicated.  Ontology, at its basis, is simple.  It can be called the beginning and basis of philosophy.  It is the philosophical practice that someone with no philosophical training has the best chance of happening into while lying in his bathtub.  It is an investigation of the fact that there is not Nothing, and wondering, just as Parmenides once did, why this Nothing is not.  It is to simultaneously to wonder why Being is, and what Being is.

Of course that is only one way of describing it, and I am not one to say that I am fit to be offering any description at all.  As I sat down several hours ago, out of curiosity, I flipped open the Wikipedia breakdown of the history of the ontological argument for the existence of God, which traces the major points made by the major players from Avicenna, to Anselm, to Descartes, to Leibniz, to Kant, to Bertrand Russell, et al.  At the present moment, though not quite so devastatingly as an hour and a half ago, I feel profoundly humbled.  Embarrassed, almost.  The arguments that brilliant thinkers all through history have lain their minds, like tiny jellyfish, at the altars of….Whatever arrogance creeps up in you that you might actually get a good pile of understanding on any given subject, goes up in smoke in about one second when the enormity of your unknown is encountered….

I can remember wandering the 7^th floor stacks one summer afternoon at the NYU library; I was 24, only a few months removed from the completion of an MFA; out of the blue, I found myself completely overwhelmed by the awareness that even if I lived to be 110, even if I blew no hours twiddling thumbs, unambitiously thumbing guitars, doing things for others, or watching sporting events, even if I ate only sandwiches and meal-replacement bars (foods that can be consumed while actively engaging a book) I wouldn’t have a chance against those stacks….Of course this sort of knowledge is available to you at any time you wish.  You can always know that you will never set foot in every nation of the world.  You always know that you can never memorize every word in your entire library, or read every book in any good library.  You can be sure of it as you are sure you didn’t start the sun a-burning with a well-fired arrow.  Yet when such awareness comes as, when it breaks in of its own accord, it is, well, let us just say it is different.  Ultimately, I think we would all agree that it is a good thing….    

In any event, to return to this Wikipedia breakdown: what is the ontological argument for the existence of God?  You’d perhaps be better served typing the subject heading and reading for yourself.  Or maybe you wouldn’t, as it doesn’t really lay the argument out, or describe how it feels, or describe what causes it to feel the way it does….Bertrand Russell, in the two-paragraph booth Wikipedia gives , speaks of the ontological argument as fallacious-seeming to a modern mind.  Yet he speaks also of the difficulty of finding exactly where the fallacy lies.  One might compare the Ontological argument then to a patient who is greenish and queasy, but resists an exact diagnosis.  “I see a man that clearly is sick,” speaks herr doctor, “but I know not with what.”  Wikipedia points out that he quote from Russell, “Great God in his boots!  The ontological proof is sound!” was uttered early in his philosophical career.   There is something about those exclamation points that is characteristic of the ontological realization.  There is a tremendous bang that it gives off in the mind; what sadness then, when, as the mind moves, this magnificent and multi-colored firework, this beautiful boom, is re-imagined as a paper sack “filled with air and given a good smack.”  We want that feeling of truth to be exploding in us each moment, and if we feel that it doesn’t, we feel we aren’t in the truth.   

So, again, what is the ontological argument for the existence of God?  If we are Paul Tillich, we must first sigh a great continental European sigh, because we know “the existence of God” is not a possible verbal construction, and the ontological argument is not an argument….Nevertheless, in the ontological “argument,” it is conventional to say that the existence of God precedes knowledge.  This is what Wikipedia means.  To say that it precedes knowledge means that it precedes the cleavage of “Oneness” into subject and object.  For there to be knowledge, there has to be something to know and someone to know it.  God pre-cedes knowledge and super-cedes knowledge, because in God alone subject and object are one.  There is no knower and no known, only that one substance which cannot even be said to be both knower and known equally.  Those distinctions into subject and object do not yet exist.  Likewise, in the ontological conception of God (which is, once again, utterly and absolutely paradoxical, as God cannot be conceived) essence and existence are one. 

What does it mean, the statement that in God alone essence and existence are one?  What is essence, first of all?  Essence, answers the question as to what a thing is.  What is it, this piece of the universe I am beholding?  It’s an apple core; a desk; a wheel.  Whatever it is that makes it what it is that thing’s essence.  To ask then, “What is something essentially?” seems like a redundancy, but of course it is necessary when one is talking about a complex entity.  A corporation like McDonalds, that says it is essentially a real-estate holding company, and not a conglomerate of red-and-yellow buildings that serves chip greasy thin burgers, separates its “whatness” into surface and depth.  On the surface, what it is is a chain of burger joints.  On a deeper level, what it is a real estate holding company.  Essence, you could say then, is the answer to the question as to what a thing is in the “deepest” sense possible.  

“Existence” answers the question that a thing is.  If you walk around your living room, and keep walking, and say to yourself, “A chair would look nice over here,” the chair that you speak of, the object of your want, has essence but not existence.  The chair that you are sitting in, if you’re sitting in a chair, has both essence and existence.  What is it, that four legged or swiveling structure currently supporting your weight?  It is a chair.  Does it exist?  Yes, one would be inclined to say.  Despite our awareness that quarks and string theories are dancing through each pebble and leaf of the particulate world as we sit, and that on a sub-atomic level nothing actually ever touches anything else, we must park our idea of a ground somewhere.  Rather, this idea parks itself somewhere.  The chair you sit in possesses existence; otherwise you would collapse to the floor.  (See: Stephen Daedalus kicking the stone along Sandymount Strand (in homage to Samuel Johnson), in Book I of Joyce’s Ulysses.)  

To return:  “In God alone essence and existence are one.”  What does this mean?  A different, and better way to state it would be that God is a word for that state in which essence and existence are one.  If we say they are one, essence and existence, we mean that they are the same.  Essence is existence.  This is different from metaphor, at least metaphor in practice.  It’s a stronger is than the is in metaphor, or implied in most statements of metaphor.  Take some metaphorical lines of poetry like Robert Bly’s, “The bear between my legs / has one eye only / which it offers to God to see with.”  This contains, by implication, the statement, “my penis is a one-eyed bear.”  This is not a genuine statement of shared identity.  It is not a statement of truth, and we all know this.  It’s a statement of poetry. The lines are an expression of boldness.  In the context of the poem – a fine symbolist love poem – love has excited the poet to a great boldness of speech.  That we are necessary to existence is perhaps the boldest thing that can be said.                            

Again, though, God’s essence is existence.  Not God’s existence, but existence itself.  What God is is that Being is.  You are ended up in Meister Eckart’s notion of God as Being itself.  This is a simplification, but it is what provides the ontological bang.  There is no leap of faith involved, because one has not arrived at the conclusion that some gigantic whim-ridden Father with two metric tons of white facial hair MUST and NECESSARILY exist, and that He has breathed existence into everything out of His puffed-up, Dizzy Gillespie cheeks.  No such absurdity.  One looks out the window, and, by encountering Being, which is in the tree bark and the grass blades and air and the puddles, in all things that are, feels suddenly and without embarrassment or guilt or foolishness or superstition that he can use this word: God.  That’s what you might call the ontological bang.  To quote Goethe: “So, waiting, I have won from you the end: God’s presence in each element.”        

Of course all this can be philosophically disassembled, but I do not have the faculties or time to do it as of this moment.  It is also theologically incomplete; I need to eat; I need to get myself out the door; tomorrow, or later on tonight, I’ll talk about Tillich and Einstein.  This will give me an opportunity to speak in praise of Athiesm, at some point here, while offering some critiques.  I’m going to see Seamus Heaney read tonight, and am quite excited.   Be well till then!  This is Matthew Yeager, signing off…. 

Shine a Light on It, Laura . . .

Say your friend becomes obsessed with bears and because you like this about her you want to encourage the obsession by providing her with a little bear decor.  Wouldn't she like these lamps  to illuminate her work space and inspire her research?  She found them on CSN stores  a company that has everything from toddler beds to cookware to home decor and they've offered to send a couple of these lamps to our bear besotted friend so she can let us know what she thinks of them. As it turns out, I ordered my own heavy-duty desk lamp from CSN.  It arrived quickly, set up easily, and works beautifully.

-- sdh

Oh, to be in England now that April's there . . . [by Catharine Stimpson]

On April 14, getting on a crowded flight for London, I was obsessively if sweetly chanting to myself, "I will be in England now that April's there."

We landed at Heathrow on the morning of April 15, little knowing that we were on one of the last flights permitted to arrive.  When I phoned a friend to say hello, he was surprised to hear from me. "Katie," he said, "you shouldn't be here. All of the air space in Britain is shut down."

I am now among the stranded and the stalled. Like most travelers, I do not know when I will get out.  I am sharing fantasies with others in my affinity group.  Can we get to France, even though the ferries and the
Eurostar beneath the English Channel are completely sold out?  Then, can we drive or get a train to Madrid or Lisbon, and fly  out from there?  What about the ferry from England to Bilboa?

These are fantasies.  What are the realities? Being in London in April, as the Plume of Ash drifts across the waters of the Atlantic and the land mass of Europe, is inexorably strange.  London is beautiful right now. The sun dapples the people relaxing in Leicester Square. The tulips and daffodils brighten the gardens around the exalting cathedral of St. Paul's. To read TIME OUT about cultural events is thrilling. Look up at the sky. No-one can see the Plume. Instead, you gaze at a delicate shade of blue with white, pink, and golden clouds. Feathery clouds. Everyday life is  more plume than ash.

Yet, escaping the invisible Plume is impossible.  People say the best maps on which to watch its motions, going East and South, is on the NEW YORK TIMES website.  Ah, said a man in the office on which I have a borrowed computer, the plume is nearing Madrid.  So much for the fantasy of Madrid as our new launching pad.  Waiting for the Tube, the London subway, one hears a stiff-upper-lip recorded announcement about all British airports being shut down because of the Plume. Do not take the Tube to Heathrow. The BBC features incisive, responsible, non-perky analyses of both the forthcoming elections here and the nature of volcanos and their expulsions. We now read about the airlines putting pressure on aviation authorities to relax the ban on air travel in Britain, to be more lenient.

This combination of April happiness and the Plume of Ash tests all our modern technologies. Planes cannot fly, despite being in good condition.  A volcano on a small island in the Northern Atlantic has beaten them.We trade stories about which websites of which airlines have crashed. My indispensable Blackberry flaunts its limitations, how hard it is to read applications, how tired one's thumbs gets trying to send messages and memos.

The combination also, yet again, tests our globalism. I came to London to chair a meeting of an advisory group for an international organization. Of course, several of our members could not get in.  If they had had to obtain a visa, their efforts were wasted. But we could Skype them in if we could manage the various time zones in which we were operating. The organization has its offices in Hammersmith in the West of London. I am being housed in Novotel West London, a hotel of 650 rooms and conference facilities, a decent enough chain with a global clientele, often families.  The staff is from nearly every country and seems to include a native language speaker for all of its diverse customers.  Despite our variations, our breakfast buffet is resolutely English: eggs, beans, bacon, toast, porridge, with some yoghurt from Normandy and some cold cuts and cheeses and croissants for the picky.

My personal conditions and circumstances, despite being stranded and stalled, are enviable.  I am not sleeping on a make-shift cot in the Munich airport. I have more than enough access to ATM machines, food, a historic and vibrant culture, the Technologies of Communication, and friends. I can wash out my clothes. No-one here expects the Novotel to have to dole out masks to protect our respiratory systems against the shards of Icelandic pumice and volcanic rock.  My colleagues at work are helping me with cancellations of appointments and re-arrangements. Everyone is understanding that I am in my beloved England and April's here, but I am not on a feckless, giddy holiday.

But that Plume, that Plume, is no spray of feathers in a dowager's tiara in a comedy of manners; no decoration on the helmet of a British guardsman. That Plume, the smoke from the fire within the earth,  is burning the global economy. The Plume, and the global winds, do their thing, and refuse to Skype us and reveal their intentions. And, if we were really stupid enough to believe that we were more or less immune from the ravages of nature, our stupidity has crashed along with our ever so global travel schedules.

Cathy Colman at the Cornelia Street Cafe - April 21 - Be there!

At a party uptown last night, we had a chance to hear LA poet Cathy Colman read a few poems from her dazzling new book Beauty's Tattoo (Tebot Bach, 2009).  Now we're looking forward to hearing more when she reads tomorrow night at the Cornelia Street Cafe. Why don't you join us?  6:00 PM Cornelia Street Cafe / 29 Cornelia Street / Greenwich Village, NY / 212-989-9319 

ON PAUL TILLICH: PART 1 [by Matthew Yeager]

Hello BAP blog readers,  

It is 11:17 PM as I begin, and my plan is to complete a brief introduction to the thinking of Paul Tillich, the Lutheran theologian thought by many, myself among them, to be the prior century’s great philosopher of religion, by 4 AM.  I am also not extinguishing  hope that I might pay a few bills, respond to several emails, get my white cotton jacket into a bucket of hot bleach water, and also check the box-scores, all while appeasing a small gray tabby named Charlie who’s addicted, at present, to a stuffed fish on a wand and string and will reenact the yowling pain of his birth unless I periodically make it jitter and dance around the apartment….We will see how all this goes, and hopefully by sun-up I’ll have felt some satisfaction.   

I was raised as Catholic (“in the Roman Church” as Tillich would say) and received my formative education – my high school education – from the Jesuits.  It was in courses in theology there  that I first saw and heard Tillich’s name.   He became lumped in my head with, oddly enough, James Joyce, whom I first learned of off a black-and-white poster tacked on a wall in my freshman English classroom.  It was communicated, at different points, more in tone and less in details, that both Joyce and Tillich were beyond our powers of comprehension.  Above our thinking level, above our reading level.  As the bias you carry upwards as a student – even if you are student of video games or electric guitar – is for whatever it is that’s beyond you, I suppose I imagined Tillich with a bit of an aura around him.  Especially at that age, you are striving to get into more inches of height, more knowledge of the world, more experience, and the thing is, you perhaps one of the horrors of adulthood is that you no longer are in a position where this shedding and this growing occurs with such seeming inevitability.  Hence our mid-life piano lessons, karate classes, etc….Regardless, my first impression of Tillich was that he was a part of all I couldn’t yet then get at.   He began, for me, in an elevated state.  As much as a first impression can be said “to go over the falls in a barrel,” it can also be said to be the barrel into which all that follows is deposited.  I suppose I am and should be aware of that.   

If, in thinking of growth, in thinking of Tillich, I find myself thinking of Rilke, who wrote the processes of growth better than any poet (both in the Letters to a Young Poet and especially in those fantastic symbolist poems in Book for the Hours of Prayer), its worth pointing out that the two shared a common time, a common language, and common corner of the world.  Tillich was born in 1886, a decade after Rilke.  There are certain affinities between them owing to the fact they’re both coming out of that German Romantic symbolist tradition.  Both, for instance, are into “depth,” the idea of depth, of this quality “depth,” which can be said to exist in all things as only Being exists in all things.  In Tillich, it’s an indispensable concept in his whole systematic theology.  As for Rilke, you need extra fingers to count the places where “depth” appears as a symbol for God, the true self, the true poem, a conflation of everything of all that is grown into, and more.  Think of all those directional metaphors: in, out, up, down, rising, falling.  Whether one is moving inward or outward, all this movement was perceived, symbolically, as one direction; you could say that direction was toward whatever reality it was this word “depth” was capable of implying (or, to use Li Young Lee’s word, “inflecting.”)…. One way the two of them, Rilke and Tillich, differ is in attitude to their tradition.  Rilke, in his formative years, of course felt estranged from every tradition.  Black coat wearing, roses in his buttonholes, swaying through the gloom, not holding down a job, estrangement was part of his conception of himself as a poet.  By this belief in his total estrangement, he was able to court originality, and by that originality reel in those big revelatory poems.   Very well done, Rilke.  There isn’t quite the emphasis on aloneness, on singularity, in a field like theology as there is in a field like poetry.  Perhaps that accounts for some of Tillich’s love for his native soil.  He felt strongly for the Weimar Republic of his youth and its culture.  Great painting, great music, great theology.  Incredible philosophy, probably the best since the Greeks, was happening in Germany the last fifty or sixty years of the 19^th century, and Tillich, in an essay in Theology of Culture written later in his life, in America, makes no bones about how those in that cultural milieu were aware and proud of it.      

I don’t want to get into a biographical outline of Tillich’s career; I was hoping to lay him down in a few broad brushstrokes, and be onto ideas, particularly his ideas on symbols and revelation, and what they might especially mean to all those engaged with poetry.   It must be mentioned, though, because it deserves mentioning, that Tillich was one of first and most outspoken opponents of Nazism.  In even the shortest biographical sketches, in two sentence taglines, this tends to be mentioned. He was very much a public intellectual, a chaired professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Frankfurt, and he began speaking out against the party in 1929.  The rhetoric, the concept of a nationalist soul, had begun showing up in his classrooms, and he was prescient in regard to its implications.  When Hitler came to power several years later, Tillich was ousted from his professorship and forced to leave the country.  This was in 1933.  Though he didn’t yet know English, he was given refuge at Union Seminary, in uptown Manhattan.  He was in America for the duration of the second World War, and was among those prominent voices radioed into central Europe throughout.       

Regardless one’s attitude toward religion, one cannot help but admire this. There was no schism in him whereby he could blithely ignore the political realm while continuing to engage in philosophical and theological querying.  There are people capable of chairing philanthropic boards, reading philosophy, etc., and then going out to dinner and insulting an entire wait-staff over a drip of wine, or looking at a homeless person and saying out loud, “Ugh.  Can’t we bag this trash and bury it in Staten Island?” while pinching their nostrils histrionically.  These are the most horrifying kinds of people, because they should be better than that.  Emerson references these sorts of folks at the beginning of “The Poet,” in that fantastic analogy of a stick rubbed with another stick, which becomes warm only in one spot while the rest remains cold.  He uses this to describe those who have headfuls of literary history or those who can vibrate to great music and visual art, but whose whole beings have not been enlivened by their pursuits.  If an education in the humanities fails to instruct the entire being, it is ultimately a botched education.  We all, on some level, believe this.

I am not a European historian.  I mean, I’m a bleeping bartender; that’s the best solution I’ve found for how to make enough money to stake off enough time to engage regularly with poetry….I suppose I should learn more about the upheaval that was taking place in Germany after WWI and before WWII.  I’ve seen the staggering inflation numbers.  It is difficult for me, and for all of us as Americans to wrap our heads around those sorts of percentage.  While we’ve seen our gas prices climb in recent years, and been plunged into fear as to our economic future, we’ve never on American soil seen a loaf of bread suddenly going for $100, a pair of basic shoes going for $3000 dollars.  A perspective that would allow us, every now and again, to imagine walking into a bodega and finding that a roll of paper towels is beyond our purchasing power would be an improvement in us.  This is very different than imagining being utterly destitute in a stable economy.

In any event, it is his ontological religious perspective that enables Tillich to understand Nazism, at its inception, as “daemonic.”  That is the term “daemonic” that he, the most intellectually and verbally careful of religious thinkers, trots out.   His concept of daemonic structure is one in which an aspect of an entity, be it a self or a society, that should not be the object of ultimate concern is elevated into the role of ultimate concern.  “If a national group makes the life and growth of its nation its ultimate concern, it demands that all other concerns – economic well-being, health and life, family, aesthetic and cognitive truth, justice and humanity, be sacrificed to this ultimate concern.”  It is in that word, daemonic, where he is more a theologian than ontologist; it is a viewpoint of classical theology that good and evil reside within things, whereas truth and falsity reside only in the mind.  This is Aquinian; if you read Tillich, you find it’s one of the few points where he could be said to agree with Aquinas.  

It is as of now 3:35 in the morning; I have not arrived anywhere near where I’d hoped to arrive.  More from me on Tillich later on tonight.  I swear this will get very interesting at some point soon.  Be well, blog readers; I will too, and thanks so much for your time.   

Confessions of a "Top Gear" Addict (by Laura Orem)

First off, let me say right now that I know next to nothing about cars. I do know how to drive (both automatic and manual, I'm proud to say); I know where to put the gas in; and I know not to leave the headlights on when I turn the car off. Other than that, I'm pretty much clueless. I can stay clueless, too, because both my husband and my son Micah are total gearheads, and I refer all things automotive to them. Despite this -- or maybe because of this -- I am completely addicted to the BBC car program (or programme, as they spell it), Top Gear.

 

(left to right, Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond)

For those unfamiliar with the show, it is a combination talk show/automobile review/stunt extravaganza/three-ring-circus.  It is co-hosted by three presenters: Jeremy Clarkson, a very large (six foot six inches, I believe) car expert, journalist, and hater of all things green; James May, a shaggy, highly intelligent and exceptionally well-read journalist, whose nickname is "Captain Slow" and whose rumply, absent-minded professor mien I confess I find quite appealing; and Richard Hammond, a Davy Jones (of the Monkees, not the ocean) lookalike who nearly lost his life five years ago when an Indy-style racecar he was testing for the show flipped and speared him headfirst into the ground.

 
There is also the Stig, Top Gear''s "tame racing driver," who tests the featured cars and whose identity is ever-secret, although we do know he is a professional driver and that he is fond of listening to self-improvement tapes in foreign languages while hurtling around the test track at very high speeds.

The talk-show element of Top Gear consists of short interviews with celebrities, usually from British television and most of whom Americans have never heard of, then the celebrities do their own laps around the test-track in cars which most Americans have also never heard of (the steering wheels are all on the wrong side, too). The celebrities' lap times are then posted with much ceremony - for a long time, the fastest celebrity driver was Simon Cowell, whom, though British, I have heard of.

Top Gear also does serious reviews of cars, and, according to Micah, the reviews are thorough and honest; I wouldn't know, and as I said, I am completely unfamiliar with most of the cars, anyway (what the hell is a Panda?).

For me, the best part of the show are the challenges. Every other week or so, the three hosts are given a task by the producers, usually something that is well nigh impossible, like driving from Germany to northern England on one tank of gas. Each man chooses his own vehicle, and the winner gets bragging rights. Did I mention that they are each given a (very) limited budget with which to purchase a vehicle? So the cars in question tend to be very vintage and very decrepit (no brakes, for example), and sometimes the challenges are really insane, such as driving across the Kalahari Desert or over a 17,000ft Bolivian volcano (this last challenge almost killed both the presenters and the vehicles from lack of oxygen - they had to turn back and go around the volcano before they all died of altitude sickness). In most of the challenges, Clarkson provides the most bluster and bravado; Hammond is the pluckiest; and like the tortoise, May is slow but steady, as his nickname implies. They spend a lot of time arguing and getting lost and so on; they also accidentally set things on fire a lot, and it really is very funny.

The best and funniest challenges are when they have to modify their clunkers, as in the following clip. In this episode, they are tasked with creating cars that will also function as boats; the finish line is on the far side of reservoir. 

In this second clip, we find out what a trio of gearheads would do with an Olympic ski jump, a team of rocket scientists, and a Mini Cooper.  What indeed?

So that's my confession. Ridiculous as it is, I love Top Gear.

Mostly Merely a Hello [by Matthew Yeager]

Hello, first and foremost, to my fellow poets.  Regrets that I’m not getting started on my first post here until nearly noon of day #2.  Further regrets that it will constitute little more than a salvo.  After a series of long days of catering, I feel a bit of what the boxer must feel lying in his hospital bed after a victorious bout.  There is, in the short term, a positive feeling (or at least a more positive-than-usual feeling) about having been utterly pummeled….I suppose what follows any feeling of victory, commensurate with the size of that victory, is a feeling of being entitled to whatever state one is in afterwards.   I am not capable of the slightest nick of guilt for having folding closed my laptop, slid it a few feet on my desk, and rested my head in my arms for the bulk of the three or so hours I’ve had this morning to give myself to words.  

Boxing, sports, catering, metaphor-mixing, forgiveness….  ”Kill the body and the head dies,” is a boxing truism that I’ve routinely found myself applying to my species of paid labor.   The ability to think good, coherent thoughts, and write them, is certainly compromised by laboring on one’s feet.  Lately, however, as I’ve climbed the catering ladder (it is really a step ladder, and with only two steps) into more responsibility, I’ve been subject to more direct attacks on the head.  The head also dies, naturally, if it’s the target and repeatedly struck.  Large events = large spaces = walkie-talkies and earpieces among those in management positions.  The feeling of an earpiece in an ear, capable of causing one of ten or twelve different personalities to explode in your head, is about as pleasant as having your ear plugged with a living bumblebee.  Like those zero-gravity chambers that simulate the environment of space, a headset could be said to simulate the conditions of schizophrenia.  Pulling the contraption off at the end of a night invariably leaves me with a feeling that I have done some damage.  There’s a nastiness to the bud that lives in the ear too; like the moisture on a fingertip in a wet-willie.             

In any event, as I have to be back on the clock in exactly one hour, perhaps I should rephrase my analogy to a boxer slumped on a stool between the rounds of a fight in which he is being pummeled, but ahead on the scorecard.  One spits strings of water into a bucket with perhaps a little more gusto if he knows he’s ahead on the scorecard.   I have four days off following today; I have taken them so that I might make some good posts over the course of my allotted week.  In keeping with what I’ve taken to assume is the spirit of blogging, I haven’t done much in terms of pre-writing.  This, retrospectively, was foolish.  Blogging for a week is like a clock-sport in that the time will elapse no matter how or what one does.   (A baseball game, theoretically, could endure for eternity if the pitcher could stand actionless on a mound for eternity, never once winding and delivering.)  There is a reason every NFL offensive coordinator scripts his first ten to fifteen plays.    

Though I have given you essentially no reason to read me thus far, I will return tonight, late, with my first topical post.  I will be talking, of all things, theology.  Please do drop by.  If, this April day, you’d like to carry around in your head a good line of poetry, carry around this one.  “So much has happened that we didn’t do.”  It’s the last line of Fran Quinn’s “The Mystic in Spring.”  To my sense, it’s about as good a line as can be written to conclude a poem about the season.  Amidst the two-week old leaves, its heaviness is like the heaviness in a picnic basket.  Be well! 

Matthew Yeager, Guest Blogger April 18-24

This week we welcome Matthew Yeager as our guest blogger.  Matthew's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2005, Best American Poetry 2010, Bat City Review, NY Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.   His short film "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," was an official selection at ten film festivals in 2009, picking up two awards.  Other distinctions include the 2009 Barthelme Prize in Short Prose.  The son of a coal-miner’s daughter, he graduated St. Xavier High School in 1998.  His hobbies include bicycling, mixology, going to the chiropractor, and consuming as much content as possible as pertains the Cincinnati Bengals.  With Sean Logan, he is the co-founder of Chicken Truck Production.  Matthew lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

Bob Hershon (pictured here, with Elizabeth Swados, prior to their reading at KGB Bar last Monday evening, has been selecting our Sunday poems from Hanging Loose. Photo credit: Star Black

This poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel appeared first in Hanging Loose 47 in 1985 and later in her book, A Primer for Buford.

WRITING POETRY ON NEW PAPER

Rich
alluring
this sudden change seems
     sinful
too free and easy
for a Dustbowl Woman

I must walk carefully
     on good paper
     one word at a time
     feeling my way down a
                 new path
     not yet realizing

there are no inky crossouts
     no roadblocks
     of junk mail flyers
     to slow my pen

-- Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

I wish I had the time and space to tell you the whole remarkable story of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.  Luckily, there’s an excellent website that will supply her biography and let you read some of her poems.  In fact, you can hear Wilma reading some of her work in her clear, no-nonsense fashion:
digital.library.okstate.edu/mcdaniel/index.htm

In brief, Wilma was born in Oklahoma in 1918 to a poor farming family that became still poorer in the Dustbowl of the Thirties. In 1936, the McDaniels joined the army of 0Okies who headed to California, desperately seeking work. Wilma remained a farm laborer all her working life. She died at age 88, in 2007.

Her story is not very different from thousands of others except that some time in her early teens, Wilma began writing poems. She wrote about family and friends and – that rare subject in American poetry – work. All kinds of work, from picking fruit to repairing old machinery to running a tiny store, all the occupations that keep small rural towns going. At some point, her poems began appearing in church newsletters and local papers. And then, years later, somehow she connected to the poetry community and began publishing in literary magazines.

We first heard of her from a California poet named John Oliver Simon, who encouraged her to send work to us. We loved her writing right from the start and she appeared in the magazine with great regularity. We went on to publish four full collections of her work, but we weren’t alone; she published many books with small local presses. In her last years, her reputation grew steadily. Universities took note of her great talent and special history and began teaching her work. National Geographic called her a national treasure. She was named poet laureate of Tulare County.

Poetry didn’t make her rich, of course, and the frugal habits of a lifetime remained with her always. When an envelope arrived from Wilma, I’d shake out the contents. There would be, say, ten poems, all written in black ink, on the backs of religious flyers, on the insides of flattened cereal boxes, on the unused spaces of junk mail, all carefully trimmed to the size of the poem, so she could save the unused portions.

At one point, I sent her a ream of 24# white bond paper and I waited to see what she’d do with 500 sheets of virgin stock. Months went by and the poems continued to arrive on scraps of cardboard and newsprint.  Then, just when I was about to ask her whether she’d ever received the package, she sent Writing Poetry on New Paper.

-- Robert Hershon

Congratulations Emma! Did you think we wouldn't notice?

I love Emma's recap of AWP (and Sally Ashton's too).  But did you happen to notice that Emma slipped a piece of BIG NEWs in her diary of days in Denver?  She just happens to be the winner of this year's  Andrés Montoya Poetry Poetry Prize.  That's news worth its own post. Read more here.

Congratulations Emma!

-- sdh

"Dottie insisted I sample the peach cobbler, which later caused me to slide the driver’s seat back an inch or two . . ." Jamie Katz finds the soul of Memphis.

In search of Memphis blues, our friend Jamie Katz explores the Mississippi Delta.  Read the full story here.

Thanks, Jamie.

-- sdh

AWP: That's a Coda! [by Emma Trelles]

At the AWP 2010 Conference: view of downtown Denver and the Rockies 
  
Wrap-up, reflections, notes, epilogue, snark, comments, cuttings, insights, diary, dispatch, report, briefs, digest, ditties, snips, quips, chicks with inky whips, bullets, index, missives, postcards, texts, tweets, deep thoughts and bleeps - there appears to be a fathomless amount of AWP rehash in the vaporsphere, and since DL asked me for highlights, I'm chucking my pennies in with the rest. 

*Right off the plane, check in, and hoof it to the convention center, where I'm introduced to Maria Melendez, poet and editor/publisher of Pilgrimage magazine. I immediately sign up for a subscription because the current issue looks great and Maria is too buoyant to deny. So great to kick off my first experience at my first AWP with someone who's not talking about budget cuts but about how much she digs the mag's photo cover because it's "a return to creatures." Yeah.

*Meet poet Suzanne Frischkorn in person after a couple of years of playing online friendsies. She is the one who clues me in that the vertigo, nausea, and overall stoned-ness I've been feeling is not exhaustion, jet lag or bad airport food - it's altitude sickness. On her advice, I'm chugging criminally priced Gatorade and Smart Water. It works. Thanks, Suzannita.

* Michael Chabon is the keynote speaker for Thursday night. He reads an essay where he plays both the parts of curious reader/student and semi-sagacious author. He asks himself something along the lines of Where do you get your ideas? He responds with Ideas are perhaps the least interesting part of the job...like the pound of insects we each consume unknowingly per year. 

MC: Can one really teach writing? MC: No, one can't...Life is not a story, or not a very good story. It has a beginning and end and those are the same for everyone. You need to edit your life, you need to shape it. But most of all, you need to lie.

MC: How do we write? MC: One clattering letter at a time.

A pachanga gathers at the One Poem Festival.

 * One Poem Festival: About 30 Latino poets reading one poem each at the Dikeou Collection. Oscar Bermeo leads off with "When the City Ends," which might not be the poem's title but is certainly an imagining that squeezes in cityscapes, double dutch girls, and the Soul Sonic Force.  Xanath Caraza sings the beginning of her poem in a bronzed alto; Tim Z. Hernandez hypnotizes us with his meditation of dusk in the campos and how "Venus shows her bashful face in the blue of night."  Kristin Naca tells of her father's failed quest to catch cardinals and Dan Vera  recalls his elementary school's "cafetorium," where he and other 7 year old boys watched films about hygiene and the  unexpected fate of Old Yeller. Listen, you know how sometimes you go to readings and you're nodding and hmm-hmmming but really you're thinking about dinner or how you should stop for gas on the way home? There was none of that wandering for me at this reading. Everyone had something good to offer here, not just in verse but also in news. Poet Silvia Curbelo announced the winner of the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, which supports the publication of a first full length collection by a Latino poet. Past winners include Gabriel Gomez, Sheryl Luna, and Paul Martinez Pompa. This year's winner - me. And I am thrilled and grateful. Thank you to all.

*Banana wheat pancakes, homefries, cafe au lait and a carafe of iced lemon water at The Delectable Egg(see right). I ate at this place twice and would have hit it a third time if I had any sense. But I was too busy running between the hotel, its ripoff gift shop ($8 for a bottle of Visine), the book fair, and sundry events, the latter which included a reading by contributors to The Sun that I had  intended to listen to for about 15 minutes before tearing off to one of the 100 things I wanted to attend but didn't. It was too good to leave. Hat off to Steve Almond, Ellen Bass,  Akhim Yuseff Cabey, Frances Lefkowitz, Alison Luterman, and  Sy Safransky. I actually forgot about eating while hearing your poems and stories. Sorcery!

 

*Lots more to note, but too beat to do so. Writing about AWP is almost as exhausting as entering its glorious and buzzing maw. I will add that, wretched altitude aside, springtime in Denver is a pretty thing, and if anyone knows the name of this tree I would be glad to learn it.

  

 

This Week: April 11-17 (And a preview of April 20)

APRIL 18, 2010 - 7:30 pm NYQ's 40th Anniversary Party:- at Westbeth Community Room in NYC. What a line up!  A full night of readings by Grace Zabriskie, FD Reeve, Fred Yannantuono, Jackie Sheeler, David Lehman, Jayne Lyn Stahl, Ray Collins, Matthew Yeager, Ted Jonathan, Joanna Crispi, and Sommer Browning. There will also be a wine tasting,a cheese tasting, a raffle and more. Come early as the space is limited. $20. Click here for directions.

Filmmaker Bill Hayward writes with news of Asphalt, Muscle & Bone:  as we move forward with production on the film Asphalt, Muscle & Bone, and with more forthcoming live performances of the intimacies project, we are posting an ongoing series of short/sudden improvs entitled cloud to ground.  Follow along here. 

-- sdh

"They're Playing Our Song": Back in print!

It's back in print!

Max Wilk's They're Playing our Song, his book of interviews and encounters with such great songwriters as Irving Berlin, Jule Styne, Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer, Dorothy Fields, Leo Robin, Richard Rodgers, Betty Comden, Ira Gershwin, and other fabulous personages.

Originally published in 1973, the book won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award and has become an evergreen. It is probably the best oral history we have of the classic American popular song. The new edition -- published by Easton Studio Press -- includes a preface by Jule Styne and a foreword by Margaret Whiting,

You can order it here from Amazon.