The Best American Poetry

Bloof Books Tour: Let us not speak of Nashville. Georgia's on our mind. (Shanna Compton)

Columbus, Muncie, Nashville, Atlanta, Tallahassee...so it's Day Six of the book tour. (Each morning I have to count.) Each morning we wake up in a hotel, remember where we are (FL), calculate the number of hours we have to drive (9+), and hunt up the nearest Starbucks (.5 miles). Where are the driving directions? GPS has become the most important item in our poetic toolbox—without it no poetry readings will happen.

When we're punchy with highway miles, phrases from billboards (or dangling Truck Nutz) send us all into riots of laughter: WOW WOW WOW CAR WASH. SPICY CRUNCHY JUICY GENIUS. HARDEN’S TAXIDERMY SNAKESKIN KOOZIE $65. What, we wonder, is a "primitive" baptist church vs. the usual kind? (Whatever their theological differences, physically primitives must be smaller; in sparsely populated areas there may be three or four within just a few miles. Congregations of 10, 20 maybe? Or maybe disguised meth labs?) In the afternoons, we check into new rooms, change our clothes, choose from among our poems, gather fresh copies of our books, and warm up our voices. Where are my shoes? No, my other shoes? That first night in Muncie's faded like a dream. We're tired but happy, always ready to do it again. 

(I will speak of Nashville, actually. Because it was fun to hang out with Nancy McGuire Roche and to meet Andrea Hewitt-Gibson and Elvin [the filmmaker whose last name I neglected to get]. Checking into our hotel, we got caught up in the somewhat confusing wake of the Tennesee Titans’ departure from the same location. Beyond that, I will just wonder aloud the following two things: 1) Why are bookstores often the least comfortable venues in which to read literature aloud? And 2) Why didn’t I have the sense to cancel that event when the staff neglected to return my emails? Peter is at least as high a security risk as Meghan McCain (who appeared there the night before.))

On to Atlanta, where Sandra Simonds joined the tour. She, Peter, Jennifer & I read at Emory University for the What's New in Poetry Series hosted by Bruce Covey. (You guys know him; he's blogged here before, and is the editor of Coconut, as well as the author Glass Is Really a Liquid, very shortly forthcoming from No Tell Books.) The campus at Emory is leafy and lovely. We heartily consumed vegan eggplant curry and tofu lettuce bundles at Doc Chey’s with grad student Caroline Crews (a visiting scholar in Emory’s exchange program). In the audience at Few Hall we found a few dozen of Bruce's creative writing students, along with poets Heather Christle (a current fellow at Emory and author of The Difficult Farm from Octopus), Howard Miller, and Julie Bloemeke (see interview below for links). Sandra, Peter and Jennifer performed with their usual liveliness and connected successfully with the crowd, by all signs. (A room in which actual enjoyment of poetry is evident is one of my favorite places, I mean come on. It was awesome.) After the book sales and signing, we went back to the hotel bar (so we didn’t have to DUI—that’s how we roll) and talked for a few hours, and quizzed Julie about poetry, social media, and vultures: 

Sandra Simonds & Julie Bloemeke, Atlanta 9/16/2010

Saturday Aphorism

First comes the sweat. Then comes the beauty if you're very lucky and have said your prayers.

- - George Balanchine

This Just in: From "Marie Claire"

The Best (Modern) Poems for Any Stage of a Love Affair by Maura Kelly:

"Almost nothing turns me on more than a man sharing his favorite poems with me. I'd take a man who knows his cunning linguists well over one who is an expert at that other thing any day of the week."

Read the full article here.

-- sdh

Garner's Usage Tip of the Day

I subscribe to Bryan Garner's daily "Usage Tips."  This came in today's e-mail:

poetize; poeticize.

Although Eric Partridge claimed that "'poetize' is gradually displacing 'poeticize'" (Usage & Abusage at 235[Garner's Modern American Usage, Oxford University Press]), in fact "poeticize" is six times as common in print as "poetize." E.g.:

o "Surrealistic touches pile on top of surrealistic poeticizing, and the production collapses." "Mini Reviews," Wash. Post, 3 May 1996, at N42.

o "He poeticizes sculpture's historic frustration in works that leap into the viewer's heart with lapdog charm." Peter Schjeldahl, "The Credible Hulk," Village Voice, 20 May 1997, at 89.

In any event, it appears that the two have undergone differentiation. Although both originally meant "to compose poetry," only "poetize" (dating from the late 16th century) properly bears that sense today. "Poeticize" (dating from the early 19th century) means "to imbue with poetic qualities; to impart an aesthetic or emotional impact suggestive of poetry."

* * *

Which word are you more likely to use?

Subscribe to Bryan Garner's Usage Tips here.

-- sdh

I Love Lawrence Schimel: In Praise of A Midsummer Night’s Press—Jason Schneiderman

In yesterday’s blog, I was talking about Poetry Citizenship—an idea I should probably do more to articulate—and one of the things that kept lurking at the edges of both the post and the conversation about the post was the question of how much is too much? If a journal can’t get a readership or funding or sponsorship, does that mean that it should just quietly die—wave to us on the shore as it drowns? I’m sure that the success rate for journals is roughly that of small businesses—which is to say, extremely low—and that’s why a journal that makes it big is such a big deal. I was at the release party for the first Issue of Tin House; I discovered McSweeny’s early on; I remember the rumors about Fence when it was just staring, and I met my husband at the release party for the second issue of Lit. It was wonderful to see Bloom start and flourish, then painful to watch it fold (although I think it’s actually frozen in carbonite like Hans Solo, and I expect it to return any moment). As I pointed out, poets, unlike novelists, (and I’m speaking in broad strokes) have chosen a publication system that exceeds paying demand, with the benefit that work valued by a small group can find publication. I’ve often advised my students that when you start trying publish your work, you should approach all editors from the positon of gratitude. Appreciate what they are doing for poetry—don’t just think of them in terms of what they can do for you. And under no circumstances should you feel entitled to publication. That’s just a recipe for bitterness. Editors and publishers of poetry are people who deserve to be celebrated—they embody the ideals of Poetry Citizenship. And I wanted to call your attention to one editor in particular: Lawrence Schimel.

            Lawrence Schimel is the founding editor of A Midsummer Night’s Press, and since 2007, it has published full length collections in beautifully designed, but very small books. Each book is 5.75 inches tall and 4.25 inches wide. And they’re very thin. They have a wonderfully small footprint—I could fit three of them on my bookshelf in the space that Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats takes up; nine in the space that Thom Gunn’s Collected Poems takes up. In some ways, I feel like I have a bit of a double standard—I wouldn’t want my own book to be so small, since I worry it wouldn’t be taken seriously—but on the other hand, I wish every book were so manageable and portable and light. Looking at the overflowing bookshelves around me, it’s a huge relief to look at a small book. And as e-readers become a increasingly common and viable way of reading (I have no e-reader myself), I suspect that books will become bigger and smaller—that a book like this will still fit in a bag without adding heft or weight, offering the tactile joys of a book without breaking your back, or even showing in your back pocket.

            I wanted to take a quick look at two of the books on the Press—Julie Enszer’s Handmade Love. The title poem is about the ways we circulate between the personal and the public; the ways we move in and out of our homes, while making our homes. The poem starts with a bag her mother sewed for her as a child, and how it was a source of strength until she got teased for it. As an adult, she cherishes the bag, and returns to it as a source of joy, but remembering the shame. She concludes the poem

 

                        I value handmade things.

I believe there are two kinds of love in this world:

 

inherited and handmade. Yes, we inherit love

but my people, my people make love by hand.

 

And here all the strands or her identity come together—as a woman, as a Jew, as a lesbian, as a femme, as a feminist. That “my people” is wonderfully open, finding chosen and received families informing her ideas of love, and how to move in the world. She often plays with the language of sex and love—a poem about a gay friend’s stroke furiously wishing that “stroke” could refer to sex, not a burst blood vessel. Enszer has a light touch, which stems from trusting her reader. She’s playful and serious at once, letting the multiplicity of her emotions calibrate into well formed surfaces. Nothing exists in isolation, as here when a sexual image opens up delightfully onto religion:

 

I have placed my hands, my lips

on their breasts and spread their legs

 

as Moses parted the red sea.

 

Her tongue gets to play the part of the Israelites (is that old advice to write the alphabet with your tongue replaceable with singing Mi Chamocha?). The poem is a tender look at a young butch just coming out—the speaker looking on with nostalgia, concern, and admiration. Much has been made of queer time—particularly by Kathryn Bond Stockton—about how those of us who aren’t having children live our lives along timelines that aren’t straightforward.  Enzser does a wonderful job of playing with what Stockton calls “growing sideways”—with finding her place in a heritage but also letting that lineage loop back on itself.

            Schimel has a particular fondness for irreverent and the charming. One of the books on his press is called The Good-Neighbor Policy: A Double Cross in Double Dactyls, and it really is a mystery told in dactylic dimeter. Here’s a quick sample:

 

Never one word about

why she decided to

shoot her own husband when

            he saved her life.

Adrian tells it as

vengeance for violence

in his next nove, The

            Victimized Wife.

 

Check out the press. It’s beautiful.

(note: in Midrash, Mi Chamocha is the song that the Israelites sang as they entered the Sea of Reeds, and the waters did not part until the water was already in their mouths, changing the sound of the words from Mi Kamoka to Mi Chamocha-- the "ch" is like "Bach". Mi Chamocha is usually translated as "Who is like unto thee?").

Sing-A-Long Thursday

Let it rip!

Moon River

-- sdh

Fortune and Other Tellers [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

How are you? Are the muses of autumn whispering in your ears? Or have they entered your blameless mind and turned to furies? The world is full of worry. Why not us? There's a New York Times article today where Woody Allen says he has never -- never -- seen one of his movies after it was done. Said if he was clicking through the channels and saw Annie Hall or Manhattan or any of them he speeds his clicker forward so as not to endure the pain of the film's imperfections.

So many people's heads are so peopled with critics that where seems to stand a man stands a multitude and not one of them enjoying himself. No wonder joy is so often tied to pain. Even Socrates on his death slab, prior to imbibing the dram of poison, rubbed his ankles where the guard had just removed his chains, and noted how often sweet pleasure is unbreachably in league with pain.

Will the pain you are in today some day, like the shackle removed, give fruit in pleasure, in relief? I don't know. I guess the truth is I'm still a little traumatized by 9/11, still wondering what's going to blow up next, and so where once I made promises now I can only offer a roasted plate of hope, plucked of its feathers, basted in its song. Delish, but making hope the thing without feathers, that does not perch on the soul, that does not sing a song with words or otherwise, and to our horror and our numb, sometimes stops at all.

Then again, you may spurn the wave, sailor, but what have you got if not your boat and whatever dream of seamless hulls makes that ship float.

Back in 2003 the MPR radio program Speaking of Faith devoted a show to my book Doubt: A History which is about religious doubt, all over the world, throughout history. They have replayed it over the years too, and over the years this show has brought my work to a lot of people, and often brought them to me -- in emails or other communications -- which is one reason I'm so glad to live in the future. I love hearing from people on these themes, and I do.

Anyway, the program, "Speaking of Faith," with the brilliant Krista Tippett, has decided to change its name to "Being." This week's very interesting show explains why. What moved them was the contributions of guests on the show (especially scientists) and audience members who have made it clear that they do not believe in God or are not religious, but who still find the show's questions to be their questions too -- questions about how to live with the mystery of life. I am moved to say that at about the 35 minute mark of this week's episode, Tippett introduces my book's episode and says it was pivotal in reframing the way she saw the conversation on faith, mystery, and reason.

It's funny to note, too, that the Woody Allen article to which I refer above is called On Faith, Fortune Tellers, and New York, because among the interesting things strewn around the piece, what seemed most headliney to someone was Allen saying that he has no belief in religion or fortune tellers, and that he thinks that if you can get yourself to believe either one, either one can do about as much to help.

So you see, it all comes around. Socrates thinks about his ankle, the rest of us nurse our separate wounds and wonder how so much happiness can well up in moments between so much anxiety and struggle. The man at the feast turns out to be frightened of the entre. Oh well. Perhaps he shall dare some antipasto. 

That's all for today. Tonight I'll lead a discussion on Paradise Lost with a bunch of lively grad students and we will pity Satan even as he over and over explodes his own existence and wonders at the carnage life keeps raining on his reign.

Please be careful, bloved bleaders. Youth is difficult, aging a trial, and all our envy misplaced on other weary wanderers who when they meet their blessings in the street barely hale them, but rather click by at tricky, frightened speeds. Take up no arms against yourself, lay down your arms! Both the lion and the lamb are popping several pills to get through the day and several more to fall asleep again. You, by comparison and contrastion, are doing fine. I know you are suffering, or have been, but don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you yet again. 

Love,

Jennifer

ps The picture above is art from the Crossing the Line Festival in Brooklyn this past weekend at the Invisible Dog. Here's another.

A Call for Poetry Citizenship And a Dust Up Over Reading Fees—Jason Schneiderman

   A minor blogosphere dust-up over reading fees has made me think a lot about the economy of money and attention—particularly as it relates to poetry. The blog battle went something like this—The New England Review had announced that it would be charging $2 to read submissions that were sent via the internet. The NER has been struggling financially, and I daresay institutionally. I responded to a call to write letters in the summer of 2009 asking the administration of Middlebury College not to withdraw their funding, and Middlebury College did not close the doors… but it did demand that The New England Review find a way to become solvent.

    My initial response to the reading fee was chagrin. I’ve told students in no uncertain terms that they should never pay someone to look at work for publication. You should pay teachers who offer the service of helping them with their craft—but it should not be someone holding the promise of publication over their heads. And the proof should be your own experience. You know if a teacher is helping you or not. And if you’re in a program—well, the school works out who they think deserves to be teaching, and you work out if you want to stay. You should also get paid either in cash or contributor copies. So now, my advice has been wrong. NER is a legit magazine. They still read paper mail submissions for free, and frankly, if you submit by mail, between the stamps and the printer and the envelopes, you’ll be spending close to $2, depending on the number of pages in your submission.

    I actually only read a little of the venom being spewed against the NER—I’m consistently amazed at the kind of invective that passes for reason in the blogosphere—although it’s hardly limited to that realm. I certainly understand the desire to see the most extreme versions of opposing ideas battle it out, but I can’t understand the desire to have poetry conversations turn to mud wrestling. In fact, I thought that this interchange between Sarah Manguso and Rachel Zucker is an excellent model for what it looks like when people articulate their opposing perspectives without dishonesty or invective.

    The Paris Review recently revoked its decision to publish a number of poems they had accepted in order to give the new poetry editor more control over the magazine’s poetry more quickly. Considering that many journals have backlogs of a year or more (I’ve waited three years in some cases for poems to be published… it’s not that unusual), the backlog only becomes a problem if you have a book coming out and the question of copyright starts to loom. Usually it can be sorted out. But then, would you feel differently if you had paid to be read? If the Paris Review had charged, would there be a possible legal claim? Might one demand a kill fee-- as non-fiction writers get when their more lucrative writings are accepted but then go unpublished?

    The money/time economy is supposed to distinguish between professional and amateurs based on whether you pay for your time or whether your time is paid for. Remember back in the days when Soviet Bloc athletes were “amateurs” only in the sense that apparently, no one in the Soviet Economy was a professional? The prestige of the Olympics was such that western athletes would often put off earning money from tournaments and advertisements so that they were still on the amateur side of the money/time economy. A friend of mine—one trying to keep a journal afloat—told me with horror that his teachers while he was getting his MFA boasted about how they subscribed to no journals. They only read journals that were sent to them (either as contributor copies or just cause they were famous). I think, and not having been there I can’t be sure, but I think that they were boasting about their having made it to the professional side of the money/time economy of poetry. They ALWAYS got paid for poetry time—whether reading or writing. They NEVER paid for anything poetry related. It’s an ugly refusal of collegiality with their students—one might as well say, “Who gets paid to be in this classroom, and who is paying?” In a certain way, it enforces the consumerist model of education (which ultimately leads to passive students asking teachers to get learning on them). It makes it clear that money is the unit is the value—a problematic notion for a poet. All over the place, one finds angry accusations that poet today have a profession and not a calling. But haven’t there always been professional poets? Wasn’t Homer a professional? Certainly, the terms of apprenticeship, training, publishing and distribution have changed, but lets not pretend that poetry can be divorced from money in our current circumstances. Let’s not pretend than that’s there’s an outside to capitalism. I’m not being paid for this blog entry—but I paid for the computer, I pay for the internet service by which I’ll access the server to post it, and I paid for the copy of Microsoft Word in which I’m typing. With all of our interactions (and this is the complaint that concludes Lady Chatterly’s Lover), money circulates. Even if not in the ways we might like it to. This morning as I type this is generating a huge amount of capital transfer-- just none of it to a poet.

IT'S HERE!! IT'S THE OFFICIAL PUB DATE OF STRIKING SURFACE! -Jason Schneiderman

It's official! Striking Surface is out!!

Thank you to Ashland Poetry Press for publishing it! Thank you to Sarah Wells & Stephen Haven for being amazing editors and managers. Thank you to Elton Glaser for picking it! Thank you to Linda Gregerson & David Trinidad for blurbing it! Thank you to Claudia Carlson for the gorgeous cover design! Thank you to Dannielle Tegeder for the gorgeous image!  Thank you Ada Limon & Jennifer Knox for sustaining me through this! Thank you Michael Broder for believing in me! Thank you Richard Siken & Tom Sleigh & Wayne Koestenbaum for reading it! Thank you EVERYONE!!

Buy the book!

http://static.ashland.edu//aupoetry/

or

Amazon

or

Small Press Distribution (none in stock...)

This morning we peed in a Bob Evans; this evening we read serious literature in a university library. (Shanna Compton)

Ed note:  This is the first installment of the bloof books' road trip blog. Check back often for updates. Details here. Last night Muncie, Indiana; tonight, Nashville, TN.-- sdh 

We've come a long way, baby.

Seriously, that drive from Newark to Columbus yesterday was a really, really long way. (Tallahassee to Raleigh will be worse.) We got in so late, that our trip to Tip Top Kitchen & Cocktails for local wine and vegan muffalettas is all kind of a blur. The guy "pleasuring himself" in the street downtown, unfortunately, less blurry than we would like. It's like we packed a week into yesterday. We also stopped at a discount chain and bought shoes. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, I think.

Jennifer L. Knox, Peter Davis & I kicked off our book tour tonight with the first reading in Muncie, IN, at Ball State University. We've been to David Letterman's alma mater three times now, and it's always a lot of fun. Since one of the things I enjoy most about these trips are all the new-to-us poets we meet, I thought I'd introduce a few along the way.

 

_{Tyler Gobble & Cody Sean Davis: Mad for Plaid}

 

Eliot's Message in a Bottle (by David Yezzi)

My squib today is about the epigraph to The Waste Land, which I had forgotten refers to the Sybil of Cumae, about whom more below. I’ve read the epigraph (and its translation) many times in the Norton Anthology and more recently in The Oxford Book of American Poetry and elsewhere, but only this week was I reminded by the composer Thierry Lancino--who had included a few lines of Eliot in a recent composition—of the wider resonances of the reference. (Again, apologies, if this is old hat.)

First, there’s the epigraph to Eliot’s poem, taken from Petronius’s Satyricon: 

Here is the translation: “For once I saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked the Sibyl, ‘what do you want?’ she answered 'I want to die.’”

The story the Sybil of Cumae (quoted off the Web) goes something like this: “During the seven years when the Theban prophet Teiresias had been a woman . . . he was said to have had a daughter, Daphne, radiant as the day. It is no surprise that she caught the attention of a god, Apollo no less, who granted her the gift of prophecy and anything else she asked for. She grabbed up a handful of sand and demanded to live as many years as there were grains of sand in her grasp, but neglected to ask for eternal youth. When she spurned Apollo’s love, he refused to grant the omitted boon, and she was fated to grow old. She became the Sybil of Cumae, in Italy, and continued to age, withering away until she was hung upside down in a bottle, saying only that she wished to die.”

The allusion gives particular poignancy to Eliot’s poem, not least of all when Teiresias speaks in the third section, The Fire Sermon:

I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest--
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent's clerk, with a bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired
Endeavors to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defense;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronizing kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .

The Sybil was a transitional figure between the religion of the ancients and Christianity. She is said to have foretold the coming of Christ and is alluded to in the Dies irea:

Dies irae, dies illa

solvet saeclum in favilla:

teste David cum Sibylla.

(That day of wrath, that dreadful day, / shall heaven and earth in ashes lay, / as David and the Sybil say.)

Another interesting resonance, I suspect, to Eliot’s masterpiece! The sly Possum.

Death & the Economy of Attention: Tribute to Barbara Brackney- Jason Schneiderman

  The morning that August Wilson died, I was teaching Joe Turner’s Come and Gone to undergraduates. None of my students had heard about Wilson’s death, and when I mentioned it to them, I did sadly. But my sadness was the not the sadness that comes when someone you loved dies. Had I seen August Wilson at a party, I doubt I would even have recognized him. My sadness was that his death meant there would be no more work by August Wilson. With his death, his corpus had closed. As I said to my students, he will never again get to surprise us. We can be sure that everything he wrote is everything he wrote. Certainly, there is occasionally an author who seems to manage a posthumous publication— I adored Ellison’s Juneteenth, and it does make me rethink Invisible Man—but that is the very notable exception. Wilson died an artist with an assured legacy. My students found it odd that I thought that anything, however subtle, had changed between our discussion of Act II when Wilson was alive and our discussion of Act III when he was dead. Most of them were surprised to find out he’d been alive as recently as our last class. And I wasn’t sure I could prove that anything was different. But I was sure that it was. Wilson had worked—in part—precisely for what we were doing in that classroom. He had built a legacy, and a significant one. The fact that my students were reading his play was a part of that legacy. But now that he had passed from the world. his hand would be forever stilled as to the playing out of that legacy. Suzan-Lori Parks, on the other hand (we also read Topdog/Underdog), is a different matter

    I bring this up because I’ve been trying to promote the work of a woman who died, and who died in the process of building a legacy. I met Barbara Brackney in 2004. She was taking an online poetry class that I was teaching for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, and she had an intensity that was arresting. She wanted to discuss prosody all the time. I suspect that poetry workshops often reverse that natural order of the world. In most places, you meet people through a shared interest or a shared task (a job, a class, a club) and the personal comes out on the side as people warm up to each other. In poetry workshops, the personal often ends up on the table as an unavoidable part of the work at hand, and you get to know people through their aesthetics, which come out on the side.  It soon became clear that Barbara’s intensity grew out of her knowledge of her own looming death. She had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and after a life as a clinical psychologist (and professor of psychology), she wanted to leave a part of herself in the world through poetry. She wanted what August Wilson had—to be known after her death as the producer of works still read.

    But Wilson had a lifetime, and Brackney did not. I was as direct with her as she was with me, and I expressed doubt that she would have the time to develop the skill to write the poems she wanted to write. She wanted, like so many of us, to reach that sophisticated stranger—to move someone with no other connection to us than that they love what we wrote. And in this way, death is overcome in the sense that my connection to August Wilson (or David Foster Wallace or Reginald Shepherd or Deborah Digges) is the same before and after their death. I am grateful for the work they did, not necessarily for the people they were. And in fact, I’ve learned many times that one should never confuse the work with the author. (Politics, on the other hand, reminds us not to confuse the work with the actors.) Still, I told Brackney some version of “you can’t love the destination without loving the journey”—ie, even if you don’t produce a book, it’s good to start the process of writing it.  She took more classes with me, and she grew as a writer. She developed an amazing level of skill in a very short time. If she had been less talented, I doubt we would have continued to work together. But her work demanded my attention through its accomplishment.

    In 2007, as her condition was worsening, we worked intensively on a manuscript of her poems. It  ultimately turned out to be chapbook sized—seventeen poems in all. I tried to rush it into publication before her death, but couldn’t find a publisher to take it on—and I urged Barbara not to self publish. We talked about what she wanted from an audience, and basically, since her friends already knew her poems, publication was a way to find a larger audience. To find those people, she needed a publisher—someone who would support and disseminate the work; someone who would know how to get her work displayed. Barbara died in 2007, and I continued to look for a publisher for her chapbook. In 2008, Jack Estes took Late August for his press Pleasure Boat Studio, and in 2009, the chapbook was published.

    I had thought that my work would be more or less finished once I had found her a publisher. I’m not in the habit of making death-bed promises. I certainly hope that it was out of character for me to promise to find someone a publisher after she died. But as moving as the story is, it hasn’t really accomplished what she wanted—she still hasn’t found an audience. The chapbook has sold very few copies, and every time I tell the story of how Barbara’s chapbook came into print, the story seems to take center stage. Everyone finds it a moving story—but they stop there.

On the Road with Bloof Books' Shanna Compton, Peter Davis, and Jennifer Knox

Follow along here as bloof books Shanna Compton, Peter Davis, and Jennifer Knox burn up the blacktop on their historic book tour.  First stop, tonight, in Muncie, Indiana.  Be there!  But if you can't, read about it here as Shanna and co. live blog along the way.  -- sdh

Why We Read Mysteries (by Larry Epstein)

What's interesting about a killer orangutan and a purloined letter? Or about the endlessly fascinating literature that grew from Edgar Allan Poe's valiant effort to push back against the madness trying to create an empire in his mind? This is a mystery with no solution. We know the facts, but we never fathom the explanation. It's not that we haven't tried.

Maybe, some arguments go, we read mysteries for psychological reasons. Perhaps figuring out the puzzle or enjoying the vicarious thrill of the search provides emotional satisfaction. Or maybe mysteries provide us with the childlike delight of a sequence of surprises, comparable, say, to a Charlie Chaplin routine followed by a topper and then a topper to the topper. In one psychoanalytic explanation by Dr. Charles Rycroft, the victims are parents, the criminals the readers' anger at parents, and the detectives, well the detectives discover they are looking at that anger in themselves. Maybe the authors and readers are all the characters in a story, with their detective side punishing their criminal side for crimes--impulses they have or actions they've taken. Such a detection and punishment symbolically cleanses their sins. This symbolic cleansing is so pleasurable and so chronically needed that we seek it over and over. Maybe Freud was right. We are discontented with our civilization, always struggling with our primitive instincts. On this interpretation, we are the criminals, and being caught provides the symbolic punishment we need to exorcise our guilt for the instincts.

Perhaps readers of mysteries fear uncontrollable social change and see in mysteries the gallant defense of the status quo. This social defense theory has become complicated by many characters like Edward G. Robinson's Rico or Tony Soprano who make audiences question their identification solely with the forces of law.  Or consider Dexter, the serial killer who kills killers, and Vic Mackey of The Shield, who kept crossing the border between cop and criminal. These characters make audiences ponder the acceptable limits to controlling criminality.

Reading or watching mysteries provides a rehearsal for what might happen in our own social lives. Young girls watched Beverly Hills 90210 and its offspring to find models for their growing selves (a cringe-inducing fact for many parents) and experience situations that might occur in their lives before the incidents happened. So, too, mysteries prepare us for the crime we fear we might experience. Having read and seen enough examples, we have mentally rehearsed our various potential roles in any crime we might encounter.

"Rotten Luck" [by John Tranter]

(After Baudelaire)

To put up with a career as pointless as this,
it takes the courage of a gambler.
Okay, someone has to do it, but
like they say: vita brevis, ars longa.
The grave I look for is covered with brambles,
on a lonely hill in the bush. Jazz began
by livening up a funeral march. So
mix more drinks, and mix them stronger.

More than one winning lottery ticket lies
forgotten in a drawer. Dentists ply
their skilled and painful trade, ignored..
Many an opium poppy flaunts its
spangled petals in a silent jungle glade,
far from addicts, that babbling horde.

-- John Tranter

Sound Poems for Monday -- Jason Schneiderman-- (Ciccone-scapes I-IV)

Welcome back from the weekend!

In honor of John Giorno, I'm starting the week with my sound poetry experiments. His signature recording style was his work being read by a male voice, followed by the same poems being read by a high pitched female voice at about a two second delay.  I'd never really been interested in sound poetry until I heard his "Give it to Me Baby" on the album "10+2:12 American Text Sound Pieces". And after reading it, I kind of wanted to do it.  I had a hard time opening these in the preview, but if you open the link in a new tab, they play just fine.

The rules I set up for myself were as follows:

1)    I could only use lyrics from Madonna songs

2)    I could only use my own voice (though I could filter it, layer it, repeat it)

3)    I could only use a single piece of my voice. 

4)  Each piece had to be very very short.

Ciccone-scape I

01 Madonnascape I_ Borderline

Ciccone-scape II

Madonnascape ii Like a Virgin

Ciccone-scape III

Cicconescape iii dress you up

Ciccone-scape IV

Madonnascape iv ray of light

So, tomorrow thoughts on death and the economy of attention. And two chances to see me in New York this week:

White Swallow hosted by Angelo Nikolopolous / Tues, Sept 14th, 6pm

Cornelia Street Café / 29 Cornelia St / with Ada Limon & Nick Flynn

&

Inspired Word hosted by Mike Geffner / Thursday, September 16, 7pm

Le Poisson Rouge / 158 Bleecker Street / with Luis Bernard & "A Night of Three GoD/Desses" (w/ open mic sign up)

Monday @ KGB: Rita Ann Higgins & Philip Fried

The KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series kicks off its new fall season this Monday, September 13, with a trip across the pond. "Untameable and anarchic" Irish poet Rita Ann Higgins will be joined by New York ambassador, Philip Fried. Please join us at 7:30 PM!

Rita Ann Higgins was born in Galway, Ireland. One of 13 children, she left school at 14 and was in her late 20's when she starting writing. She has published eight collections of poetry, five with Salmon publishing and three with Bloodaxe including Throw in the Vowels: New and Selected Poems 2005, reissued in 2010 with audio CD. She has written several plays. Later this year sees the publication of a book of her essays and poems with Salmon called Hurting God. Forthcoming from Bloodaxe in 2011 is a new collection of poetry called Ireland is Changing Mother. She is working on a play about Hanna Greally's incarceration for twenty years in a mental institution. Her many awards include The Peadar O'Donnell award. Rita Ann is a member of Aosdana.

Philip Fried is a New York-based poet and editor of The Manhattan Review. His poems have been widely published in journals and have appeared in many anthologies, including Salmon: A Journey in Poetry Poetry, Poems 1981–2007 and Poetry After 9-11: An Anthology of New York Poets. In addition to being a poet, Fried is the founding editor of The Manhattan Review, an international poetry journal that critics have called “excellent” and “lively.” He collaborated with his wife, the fine-art photographer Lynn Saville, on a volume combining her nocturnal photographs with poetry from around the world: Acquainted with the Night (Rizzoli, 1997).

Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez & Michael Quattrone
Founded by David Lehman and Star Black

KGB Bar ● 85 East 4th Street ● New York, NY 10003 ● Phone: 212-505-3360 ● KgbBar.com ● FREE

For the complete season line-up, click here.

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Alice B. Fogel

Variation 1:  Yhwh

Explode from the cauldron dark,

that’s what I’d do for them:  That in mind into self

and other I divided.  In and in I overlapped in density

and where I was gravid I breathed their breaths. 

With my body like a brine spiraling I stirred

the silence till it echoed apart from me, and where I

was deafened I hummed their frequencies. 

From a floating ground I fired rounds of clouds

flaming and where they burned I brewed the rutilated

light till it refracted in the wells between comets rocketing.

In and in through the ancient rooms I fell and where

there were thresholds I left them canyons gorgeous

and aggrieved.  Flung wide, electrified, I striated skies

with ellipsis, color, collapse, shot suns past

eclipse, blew the air for sound to sound

from touch, touched them till they cried in ecstacy:


Out and out and through the skin my sweat

ran and poured into hollows so where I emptied

they filled and though I encompassed

they merely contained.  Into the molten cavity I

dropped a stone, I lit the furnace, stretched a hide. 

I wielded the ragged white-veined ice and birthed

spinning galaxies in atoms, vital alluvium, the eternal

quest for me.   I remembered and made them

forget.  I raged and sweetened them.  Formless then

I dimensioned space, delineated them.  I swallowed

my own throat to feed them hungers delicious.

Where I could not pass I corridored their heavens.

Where I felt nothing I caused them passion and urge.

I watch them and they are blind to me.

I sleep, and they dream. 

I cry out to them, and they die.

* * *

Alice B. Fogel is the author of  Be That Empty: Apologia for Air (Harbor Mountain Press), Elemental and I Love This Dark World (Zoland Books).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in May 2005.  Alice wrote, “Var. 1: Yhwh” is based on the Kabbalah’s notion of the Zim-Zum, which is pretty much like the big bang theory in physics. I also thought of Francis Ponge’s “Kings do not touch doors,” or how lonely the powerful are. The way the universe is spinning in and out replicates the way Bach’s variations often climb up and down scales, sometimes involving the crossing over of hands."

Jason Schneiderman, Guest Blogger September 12-18

This week we welcome Jason Schneiderman our guest blogger.  Jason is the author of Sublimation Point, a Stahlecker Selection from Four Way Books, and Striking Surface, winner of the 2009 Richard Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press.  His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Poetry London, Grand Street, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Story Quarterly, and Tin House.  He has received fellowships from Yaddo, The Fine Arts Work Center, and The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.  He was the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America in 2004.  A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, he is  completing his doctorate at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Read more about Jason here.  Find a schedule of upcoming readings here.

In other news . . .

Bloof books live blogs its road trip.  First up, Muncie, Indiana.  Details here and here.

Save the date:  September 23, 2010, 7:00 PM. The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading at the New School (66 W 12th Street, NYC)  Guest Editor Amy Gerstler joins Series Editor David Lehman to introduce a line-up of readers that will include Mark Bibbins, Lynn Emanuel, Elaine Equi, Jill Alexander Essbaum, Kimiko Hahn, Sharon Olds, Gerald Stern, Dara Wier, Terence Winch, and more!  7:00 PM.  Free.  Details here.

Ted Genoways and VQR (continued)

from today's New York Times: Click here for the whole story.

<<<
A Suicide Leaves a Literary Journal and Its Editor in Limbo

By JULIE BOSMAN
Published: September 10, 2010
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Ted Genoways was just 31 when he took over as editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review in 2003, determined to propel the storied but old-fashioned literary magazine at the University of Virginia into the 21st century. Three years later he made good on his promise. The tiny journal won two National Magazine Awards and six nominations — up against perennial glamour titles like The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine and Vanity Fair — and Mr. Genoways was hailed in national literary circles for his spunk and vision.

But by this summer, things had gone dangerously south. Mr. Genoways had become alienated from his small staff, some of whose members repeatedly complained to the university president’s office about his absences and his attitude. His initially warm relationship with the university’s English department — whose renowned creative writing division includes novelists and poets like Ann Beattie, John Casey, Rita Dove and Deborah Eisenberg — had cooled after he sought a position there and was summarily rejected.

Then on July 30, the review’s managing editor, Kevin Morrissey, took a gun to a coal tower on the outskirts of town and killed himself, an act that some of Mr. Morrissey’s friends and family attributed partly to stress in the workplace — even going so far as to lay that stress publicly at Mr. Genoways’s door.

Now the 85-year-old review is in limbo. University officials have canceled the winter issue and closed the offices until an investigation into the staff’s complaints is complete. Mr. Genoways is fighting for his job, his reputation, his $134,000-a-year salary and his legacy as the editor who helped put the review on the literary map far beyond the “academical village” founded by Thomas Jefferson, where William Faulkner, a pipe between his teeth and a Tyrolean hat on his head, once strolled as writer-in-residence. >>>