The Best American Poetry

Monday @ KGB: Monica Youn & Rosmarie Waldrop

November 22
Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez and Michael Quattrone
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE
KGB Bar * 85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 10003 * Phone: 212-505-3360 * www.KgbBar.com <http://www.kgbbar.com/>

Monica Youn, the author of Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010) and Barter (Graywolf, 2003), lives in New York. For her work on Ignatz, she has been nominated for the National Book Award, awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton, a masters degree in English from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and her law degree from Yale. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and has taught creative writing at Columbia University and Pratt Institute. She currently works as an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, focusing on election law issues.

Rosmarie Waldrop’s Driven to Abstraction is just out from New Directions. Other recent books of poetry are Curves to the Apple, Blindsight (both New Directions), Splitting Images (Zasterle), and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her Collected Essays, Dissonance, was published by University of Alabama Press in 2005. Her two novels, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter and A Form/of Taking/It All are available in one volume (Northwestern UP, 2001). She has translated Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Hocquard, Jacques Roubaud from the French, and, from the German, Elke Erb, Oskar Pastior and Gerhard Rühm, among others. She lives in Providence, where she co-edits Burning Deck books with Keith Waldrop.

Upcoming Fall 2010...


November 29  Ben Mirov & Reb Livingston
December 6    Season Finale! With James Tate, Alex Phillips and Star Black

More about Steve Orlen

These pictures of poet Steve Orlen, who died one week ago today, come to us from Jerry Williams and Max McConkey   They were taken by Max.  This first picture is of a memorial service.  In sending it along, Max writes: There was a lovely, private, informal event for Steve in [his] backyard yesterday afternoon. Only "close friends" invited: but that turned out to be about 50 people. We ate samples of Steve's favorite foods (lots of bacon), drank wine, told Steve stories (many R or X rated), listened to Steve poems read by fellow poets, laughed, and cried. In the photo, below, which I took with my iPhone, the group was gathered to hear a reading of an Orlen poem by his close friend, Gibb Windahl.  

The two pictures below were taken on November 12, under the ramada in the backyard of Steve's house. In the first, Steve is surrounded by friends, from left, Buzz Poverman, Michael Collier, Fred Kiefer [English Prof @ UA, also a local FOS], and David Rivard.
Here's a picture of Steve alone. The picture came labelled "softy.jpg."  I didn't know Steve but the label seems to be packed with love and to say something about him that is most endearing.  I wish we had met. 

Max tells me that those who are Steve Orlen's facebook friends can find more pictures, tributes, and reminiscences on his page.  You can read Jerry Williams' post about Steve here.  Again, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment field below. 

-- sdh

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by J. E. Wei

In the Field

The bungalow is empty now.  The clock swings in silence.  (I see Grandpa taking me to the urine bucket on a mossy floor, where bamboo curtains moldered.)  The bigger room of the first uncle is filled with webs; over there, the second uncle’s smells dusty; the third room (used to be a pig sty) was built for the third uncle, now a monk in the mountains.

Outside the door, dogs hear the squeak.  You ride me on the bike, like those mornings when we had shadows—don’t be sad the rice paddies are full of weeds.  In the field, fireflies shine with your favorite stars; they are friends saying good-bye. They call out your name: Peace Pine.  Peace Pine.  It isn’t far and let me walk with you—cross the bridge of orchids, So Long, my pine, So Long, my pine.

-----

J. E. Wei's prose poem appeared in Sentence 6 and in Best American Poetry 2010. He teaches at St. John's University in Taiwan.

Reader's Choice: More Personals from the London Review of Books

Vote for your favorite!

1.
<<<
Allow me to buy you dinner! It's chicekn or fish and one of the conditions is that I get to harp on for three hours about my ex-fiance who dumped me in a week -- a fucking week! -- before our wedding. But, yes, after that I'll ket youhavs sex on me. F, 29.
>>>

2.
<<<
If you're looking for a relationship with very little collateral damage, you should probably pass this ad by. but if you don't mind alienating most of your friends and never talking to your sister again, I promise I'll make it worth your while. "That cheap slut," 44.
>>>

3.
<<<
I'm making a reference to classical literature in thius advert just to earn our respect. But in doing so, I'm losing respect for myself. F, 41.
>>>

4.
<<<
Let me change the ribbon in your typewriter. Robert Mitchum seeks Lauren Bacall. American man, 46, desires thoughtful overseas correspondence fr an affair of the mind. Political oundiots and email aificonados discouraged.
>>>

Lawrence Joseph at the New School [by Stephanie Paterik]

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law.”

Few poets understand this sentiment as poet and longtime lawyer Lawrence Joseph does. Joseph, who teaches at St. John's School of Law, has published five books of poems, and the Rilke quote serves as an epigraph for his book of prose, Lawyerland, which humanizes lawyers – for better or worse – by recreating their intimate conversations.

Joseph spoke at a New School forum last week about his decision to follow the path of poets who earned their living outside the literary world. And he read several poems from his books Into It and Codes, Precepts, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993.

Imagine Perry Mason reciting verse in lieu of a closing argument and you have an idea of what it’s like to hear Joseph read. He offered an intense and authoritative reading of Some Sort of Chronicler I Am, which describes a panhandler on the 3 train with scant sympathy for the man’s spiel about contracting AIDS. 

“Specified ‘underclass’ by the Department of Labor/ —he’s underclass, all right: no class/ if you’re perpetually diseased and poor. … —blessed , indeed; he’s definitely blessed. His wounds open here, on the surface:/ you might say he’s shrieking his stigmata.”

 Tidy couplets counterbalance the tough tone of this poem. As in so much of his work, Joseph captures the beauty and brutality of life through an unflinching lens and applies order to it. Everything becomes law.

Chronicler also alludes to famous writers who witnessed life through other professions, including Wallace Stevens, a lawyer, and William Carlos Williams, a physician.

Brass Tacks [by Janice Erlbaum]

That's what we're getting down to, folks. Not tin tacks, not copper tacks; not a tie tack or the wrong tack to take. Shiny, pointy, brassy tacks with slightly convex heads, such as you might find in a tack factory, or hammered into the arms of your leather sofa. Because it is Friday afternoon, here in the EST, and there is no longer anything preventing us or prohibiting us from beholding and begrabbing these brass tacks in front of us, no more alluvial layers to dig through in our quest to get down to them. (Also to get down to a margarita, should we so choose.) (YES I know it's early but it's FRIDAY.)

What is the Best American Goddamn Poetry, already?

I have several suggestions for arriving at the answer.

1. Just choose the poetry of Frank O'Hara. He's my personal favorite, plus his Meditations on an Emergency was featured on Mad Men, which is a television show. On television = the best, right?

2. Let the people decide! Oh, wait, I just got a call from the people. They decided on Kanye West. I told them that he was a musical artist, but they directed me to his Twitter page to explore the breadth of his oeuvre. I explained that Twitter wasn't poetry, but they told me that I was defining "poetry" by an alienating and hegemonic metric, and that the constriction to 140 characters to express meaning is not unlike the parameters of other poetic forms like haiku, sonnets, etc. I told them I'd suggest it on this blog, but I'm pretty sure nobody here is going to go for Kanye. Lesson learned: Never ask the people anything.

3. Give it to whichever poet the largest number of Americans have heard of. This means that the Best American Poet is Shakespeare. Congratulations, Shakespeare! I personally haven't read any of your work, but I hear it's really top notch.

4. Check Poets.org's list of most popular poems by page views. Right now, Langston Hughes is hogging six of the top twenty spots. So the answer is Langston Hughes. Phew!

5. Let's get a really smart guy who's read a ton of poetry to consult with other smart people in the poetry field to make what he considers to be the choices that represent the highest expression of craft, the most accurate depiction of unspeakable emotion, and stuff that sounds good.

6. Nah.

7. Two words: POETRY SLAM!

So there you have it -- brassy, tacky, and hacky -- the Best American Blog Post About What Constitutes the Best American Poetry, as determined by a totally unbiased panel of myself. Thanks for reading along this week. See you in the wordy pages.

In Memory of Steve Orlen (1942-2010) by Jerry Williams

A few years ago, my friend, former teacher, and mentor, Steve Orlen, came to read his poetry at the school where I teach creative writing, and I had the great pleasure of introducing him to a New York audience.  About seventy-five people attended, and before Steve got up to do his thing I read the following introduction:

Steve Orlen has authored five previous collections of poetry, including This Particular Eternity, Kisses, and The Bridge of Sighs.  He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  He teaches at the University of Arizona and in the low-residency M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College.  He lives in Tucson with his wife, the painter Gail Marcus-Orlen, who designs all of his book covers, and they have a talented young son named Cozi, who attends the University of Massachusetts.  Of Cozi, I have heard Steve say, "I wish he would just become a poet and get it over with," which leads us into the more anecdotal aspects concerning Steve Orlen, the man.  First of all, he is the best teacher I have ever had the privilege to study with, and I would not be standing here right now if I hadn't taken his courses at the U of A.  Also, Steve Orlen, like most poets, has been the subject of a few juicy rumors.  Now, rumors in general are a dirty business, and we should always take them with a couple dump trucks full of salt.  Most people would consider themselves lucky to have lived the lives that their rumors attest to.  But there is one rumor, and it's probably true, though where poets are concerned, nothing can be confirmed unless you've witnessed it with your own eyes—and sometimes not even then.  But this specific rumor, whether scuttlebutt or legend, says more about the heart of this poet than anything I could possibly concoct with a lot of fancy language.  As the story goes, Steve Orlen got into a shoving match in a bar with a drunken Kurt Vonnegut because the distinguished novelist exclaimed that "free verse is shit."  This was 1966, and I imagine the scene would not have played out any differently if Steve had been toe-to-toe with Norman Mailer, Lyndon Baines Johnson, or Yahweh Himself.  Anyone who would broadcast such ridiculousness was going down.  You'll be glad to know that Steve has mellowed over the years, as any good man would, but that fire still rages in support of the craft of poetry—on the page and in the classroom.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but he's poetry's promoter, manager, trainer, corner man, cut man, and seasoned pugilist all rolled into one.  The blurbs he writes for his contemporaries' books sound better than most poets' poems.  And, tonight, we get to celebrate Steve Orlen's reaching yet another significant milestone: the publication of Elephant's Child, New & Selected Poems from 1978-2005.  Seriously, this is the real deal.  Please welcome Steve Orlen.

As the booming applause began Steve jumped up from his chair and hugged me as hard as I've ever been hugged and then he took the podium, thanked me and the college, and proceeded to bring the house down with his beautifully constructed, longish narrative-lyric hybrids.  I swear there were people crying in the crowd.  This was one of the greatest nights of my professional life.

On November 14th, Steve Orlen passed away as a result of a sudden terminal illness.  During the prior week he had been surrounded by family, friends, and colleagues.  Alison Hawthorne Deming shared with me that he spent that time, utterly present and Buddha-like, working on his final manuscript with his former students (accomplished poets in their own right).  Awareness of such facts tempers my grief somewhat, but makes my heart even heavier, so heavy I'm going to cover-couplet W.H. Auden:  Earth, please receive your honored guest.  Steve Orlen is laid to rest.

Variation on the theme of Time [by Lera Auerbach]

 VARIATIONS ON THE THEME OF TIME

 I. 

Time
with time
shrinks
in size,
worsens
in quality.

I search
memories,
trying 
to remember
one
perfect
moment
from childhood
when past
was still
my future.

II.

 

Time exits,
tip-toeing.
I stand
alone
in this empty
room,
erasing
my past,
harvesting
the words,
burning them
in the silence
of music.

All that I own
has turned 
into ashes.

I open the door
and breathe in
cold air.

III.

Time 
in places
becomes 
so thin,
you can see 
through its 
fading material.
You see 
the dim valleys,
You see 
strange shapes
shifting, 
changing,
blending. 

Time 
with time
loses 
its colors –
the ancient 
pyramids
are now 
all-gray.
Time likes 
gray-ness,
it can rest 
for a while,
it can cuddle 
in a cradle
of forever 
beyond.

Time 
also 
gets 
tired
sometimes.

In its sleep 
Time hears
the gray 
clouds 
sing.

[by Lera Auerbach]

Flarf vs. Slam [by Janice Erlbaum]

In the ongoing battle to see which school of poetry can greater damage the reputation of the truly BEST American Poets -- the ones who, you know, actually read and write poems instead of watching poems, thinking them up and then performing them -- I ask you to consider these two contenders: Flarf and Slam.

Flarf, a poetic form born in the digital age, originally relied heavily on Google searches of random phrases to provide the raw materials for poems. The tension between the computer generated text and the poet's human point of view results in a mishmash of half-formed ideas that resemble to an alarming degree what's going on in the scrambled brains of those of us who live at least part time in a virtual world, while also inviting the reader or audience member to impose their own meaning on the poem. I like flarf for its playfulness, its dadaist tendencies, its resemblance to found poetry, which is something I've always loved. The only downside? I can hear my friend Katie Vagnino yelling in my head: "IT'S BULLSHIT!"

One of my favorite flarf poets, Sharon Mesmer:

Then there's slam, either the best thing or the worst thing ever to happen to poetry. Wonderful, in that it continues the oral tradition of poetry, and inspires a lot of young people to consider poetry in a new light. Terrible, in that a lot of it is speechifying, acting, and comedy; also, oh my god, that CADENCE. Here are some slammers who come highly recommended by my friends in that community.

I like this line by Buddy Wakefield, "Forgiveness is the release of all hope for a better past."

So which do you think is "better for poetry?" Which do you think is "worse?" And most importantly, what do you think is next?

Congratulations Terrance Hayes

for winning this year's National Book Award for the poetry collection "Lighthead." 

Find the complete list of winners here.

-- sdh

Mamihlapinatapai [by Janice Erlbaum]

In 1993, the Guinness Book of World Records declared the word "mamihlapinatapai" to be the world's most succinct word. I heard this and thought, "Seven syllables isn't exactly succinct," but then I learned its meaning: "A look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start." Like a kiss, or a game of rock-paper-scissors. What a beautiful way to say it, as opposed to how it sounds in English: "And then we were both, like, uhhhh..."*

The word mamihlapinatapai is Yaghan, an indigenous language from Tierra del Fuego; it's the language of the Yagan peoples, who populated the archipelago for over 10,000 years before Magellan "found" it in 1520 and basically set them up to be slaughtered by Europeans. Now the language that described life for the people who lived at the very southernmost tip of the habitable world for a thousand centuries may be coming to an end in ours -- there's only one living speaker of Yaghan left in Chile, and she's in her seventies.

Truth? I cribbed most of this off the Endangered Languages Alliance site. I was poking around on it because I've recently joined the Board at Bowery Arts & Science, and Bowery founder Bob Holman is involved with the ELA, and BAS also sponsors some endangered language projects, which I'm trying to learn more about, because it overlaps with the mission to keep the oral tradition alive and vital, and also because it's sort of my homework.

But, like, I mean, I dunno. Languages change, you know; whatevs. They're dying out all the time, another language every two weeks. I think about my recent travels to Amsterdam and France, where everybody was speaking English, a language born of a world view of foreign origin, imposed upon most of Europe like an ill-fitting costume. I think about all the things I can only say in Yiddish -- "ungapatchka," or "kvelling" -- which have no English analog.

And then I read this on the ELA site:

"As languages die, thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge, experience, creativity and evolution goes with them."

As we say in Internet-ese these days, THIS. 

The Bridge of Sighs by Steve Orlen (1942-2010)

If you'll believe me when I tell you I have tried
To understand pleasure, the beginning of pleasure,
You'll know exactly how I watched my mother

That morning lounging in the red plush chair
In the gray, submerging shadows of the parlor
As she talked on the phone:that I stared

With each of my five years at the tender
Curve of her ankle as it moved downt the high instep
Of her dry, clean, pale, and perfect foot and over

The toes, underneath to the arch. Oh, it just leapt!
It was the highest, most splendid arch,
More magnificent than the Arc de Triomphe in the newsreels

As the German soldiers marched beneath,
More delicate than the arches of the bridges
Of Venice, build by those gentlemen the Doges,

Paved by the feet of centuries of lovers
And saved from destruction by the American soldiers
On probably the same morning

I watched my mother's foot tense and relax,
And when she smiled down her long body at me,
And stroked my hair, and offered me the smooth beauty

Of her foot, and asked me, yes, to rub it just a little,
She said, right into the phone to whomever,
"Ahhh," the ah of the beginning of pleasure

That demands, even as it gives itself up,
That leaves you always ready to begin,
Always on the lip of things

Like a young harlot standing on the Bridge of Sighs
Waving goodbye to the soldiers of the losing side,
Waving hello to the soldiers of the winning side.

 

Ed note:  This poem first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Donald Hall chose it for The Best American Poetry 1989.  Paul Muldoon picked Orlen's poem "Song: I Love You. Who are You?" for the Best American Poetry 2005

Steve Orlen has died.  We will post a remembrance of him here later today.  Meanwhile, please share in the comment field your thoughts about this wonderful poet. 

BAP Goes to Seattle: A Toast

Martha Silano left her camera at home but that seems to be the only thing that went wroing when she and Carolyne Wright organized a BAP reading in Seattle. Participants from various editions of the anthology were on hand, as was David Wagoner, guest editor of BAP 2007. Martha promises to write more about the event when her turn as guest blogger comes around. But she filed this report on the Blue Positive blog. Click on the link and you'll see -- absence of camera notwithstanding -- what a photogenic lot of poets took part.

Cheers! -- DL

Recipe for a 15-minute poem [by Janice Erlbaum]

I wanted to share a poetry exercise I like to do with students who are intimidated by the idea of writing poetry, in case it might be useful to you, reader dear. Because it consists of writing fragments and then tumbling them together, and because it's like looking at your life through a bunch of tiny mirrors, I call is the Kaleidoscope. The instructions are as follows:

1. Get your notebook, or open a new document. (You'd think this would be evident, but I've seen people try to do this in their head.)

2. Write down the top five things on your mind in no more than a few phrases

E.g.:

The thing with Melanie
Money money money
Cheryl's tumor
Writing writing writing
Gut hanging over waist of pants

2. Write down five lines of dialogue you've either heard or said this week

E.g.:

"These tickets are no good for tonight, you were supposed to be here last night."
"Janice, can you take care of that?"
"Based on what happened yesterday I think we need to talk." 
"I think the material is mostly there."
"Pardonnez moi?"

3. Write down five things you have in your bag, using two words per item.

E.g.:

Broken lipstick
Extra tissues
Great Expectations
Sugar-free gum
Various change 

4. Write down five "freeze frame" moments, little moments from the movie of your life, from the past month.

E.g.:

Hugging a woman I didn't want to hug
Biting my lower lip while watching reality TV
Nearly crying with hunger and frustration outside the store
Standing in tree pose while my oatmeal cools
Glaring at the empty page, which glares back at me

5. Write down five quotes, phrases, lines from songs, whatever jumps into your head as describing your life right now.

E.g.:

Fake it 'til you make it
"La vie en rose"
"Shut up, just shut up, shut up"
"I work this relationship 9 to 5, and I deserve overtime"
"I can't help it, that's the way that I am."

Okay!

You now have eight minutes to reorganize these lists into stanzas. You can use a formula -- one from list A, one from list B, then from C, D, and E, then repeat -- or you can shuffle them according to any scheme you want. You can leave items out or rephrase them, or you can copy them exactly. If one of the above phrases seems like a good title or starting point, start there. As long as you write a poem, you can write anything you want -- obviously -- you don't need my permission to write a poem, and in case you do need it, you most certainly have it. 

These tickets are no good for tonight, you were
supposed to be here last night. Pardonnez moi?
Nearly crying with hunger and frustration,
Faking it until I fake it some more; shut up
Just shut up, shut up. Based on what happened
Yesterday, I think we need to talk –
The thing with Melanie
Money, money, money
Cheryl’s tumor
Broken lipstick, extra tissues
Janice, can you take care of that?
I work this relationship 9 to 5
Glaring at the empty page
Writing, writing, writing
Biting my own sugar-free lips
Great Expectations, various change
Hugging a woman I don’t want hugging me
Gut hanging over the waist of my pants
Standing in tree pose, la vie en rose…
I can’t help it!
                That’s the way that I am.

So there it is! I didn't say it would be a great poem, I just said it would be a poem. For a great poem, you need at least fifteen more minutes.

NAACPoets [by Janice Erlbaum]

I judged a poetry slam on Friday night.

It's been about eighteen years since I was a little baby slammer, all of 23 years old, waving my righteous little fist around on the stage of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, hoping that MTV would put me on the air (they did) and make me into a famous poet (they didn't). And in that eighteen years, I've seen my share of slams, and often enjoyed them, though the formula's getting a little stale. But it's been a while since I put on my judging shoes (sneakers, in case I have to run from an angry poet), whipped out the fat black marker that makes me dizzy when I smell it (I know -- don't smell it! But I have to, just to check and see if it still makes me dizzy!), and tried to assign a quantitative value to another poet's expression of their art.

Then I was invited by a teenaged writer I know to judge the NAACP -- that's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People -- Jamaica Youth Poetry Slam. Which was very cool, especially for a comparatively colorless Pink Person, as I am definitely in favor of the advancement of all peoples, especially youthful peoples, and I was eager to see what the ever-rotating cast of Kids Today was up to when it came to the spoken word.

Friends! I have journeyed far and wide! (St. Albans, Queens, which is pretty goddamn far/wide from my place in Manhattan, and is also the birthplace of LL Cool J, and therefore a significant site in the history of hip hop.) I have listened to derivative drivel, and I have had my ears filled with gold! (Metaphorical gold, not the molten metal kind, because that would be painful.) And I have come to tell you that there is hope for slam poetry!

Teenagers, man. They're really good. They're really inspired -- they are passionate about social justice, they are passionate about their loves and their hates, and they are passionate about their art. And they're fresh; they haven't had the hope stomped out of them yet. They haven't been told that their work suffers from a lack of tangible imagery, or the meter here is inconsistent, or that the last word of every line in your poem needs to be the same in every stanza according to this formula: ABCDEF, FAEBDC, CFDABE, OMFG. They just talk about what's on their mind: Paying the bills, getting harassed by law enforcement, worrying about the long term effects of this summer's oil catastrophe (I refuse to call it a "spill," a word that implies a small, easily solvable mess). One young man, in the course of an otherwise beautifully composed and intricately rhymed poem, dropped a couple of lines that suggested he felt antithetical to homosexuality. And he lost to a lovely young woman with a short 'fro and a girlfriend.

Not only were the young poets on fire; the crowd was heated up, too. The younger brothers and sisters were rapt, even the toddler-sized ones -- the next generation of poets being hatched. An eleven-year-old named Malachai was too young to slam with the teens, but he was invited to recite something he'd prepared: an excerpt from Jesse Jackson's 1984 speech at the Democratic National Convention. Need I tell you that the crowd went nuts? The lyricism, intricacy, and raw power of the slammers' work was undeniable; the level of talent was unbelievable (I mean, believable, but barely, because they're freaking kids). It was tough, at the end of the competitive round, not to give everyone a 10, or an eleven even, because that's how uplifting the evening was. 

Of course we told them they were all winners, just for writing poetry, just for showing up and putting themselves and their words on the line. But the real winners were us, the audience. Me. I won a sense that poetry is in the hands of a capable new generation, that texting hasn't killed writing, and that the kids, as they say, are okay.

The Saturday Post - A Celan Poem In Remembrance of Kristalnacht [by Dean Rader]

Earlier this week, I was invited to participate in a reading with Anne Barrows and Chana Bloch that acknowledged Kristalnacht. So, I dug out some translations I did back in the early 1990s of some lesser-known Paul Celan poems. Here is one of them:

 

There was earth inside them, and

they dug.

 

They dug and dug, and their day

passed, their night. And they did not praise God,

who, so they heard, wanted all this,

who, so they heard, knew all this.

 

They dug and heard nothing more;

They did not grow wise, invented no song,

created no language.

They dug.

 

There came a stillness, there came a storm,

there came oceans, one and all.

I dig, you dig, the worms dig, too,

and the singing out there says: They dig.

 

O one, O none, O no one, O you:

Where did it lead when it lead nowhere?

O you dig and I dig and I dig through to you,

and on our finger, the ring wakes up.

Janice Erlbaum, Guest Blogger November 14-20

This week we welcome back Janice Erlbaum as our guest blogger.  Janice is the author of GIRLBOMB: A Halfway Homeless Memoir (Villard, March '06), and HAVE YOU FOUND HER: A Memoir (Villard, Feb. '08). Her poetry and prose has been featured in anthologies including ALOUD: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, THE BUST GUIDE TO THE NEW GIRL ORDER, THE BEST AMERICAN EROTIC POEMS FROM 1800 TO THE PRESENT, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER’S HANDBOOK: The 826 National Guide to Writing Your Memoir, and VERSES THAT HURT: Pleasure and Pain from the POEMFONE Poets. Fine out more about Janice Erlbaum here. 

Welcome, Janice. 

-- sdh

Monday @ KGB:Rae Armantrout, Cornelius Eady & Linda Gregerson

November 15
Hosted by Laura Cronk, Megin Jimenez and Michael Quattrone
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE
KGB Bar * 85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 10003 * Phone: 212-505-3360 * www.KgbBar.com <http://www.kgbbar.com/>

Rae Armantrout won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book, Versed, which also won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. She is a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego, and the author of ten books of poetry.


Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, 2008), Brutal Imagination, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award, and Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets. His work in theater includes the play Brutal Imagination and the libretto for the opera, Running Man, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. In 1996, with writer Toi Derricotte, Eady co-founded Cave Canem <http://www.cavecanem.org> , a literary home for African American poets, which offers workshops, retreats, readings, and a first book prize.


Linda Gregerson is the author of the poetry collections Magnetic North (2007), which was a National Book Award finalist, Waterborne (2002), The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (1996), and Fire in the Conservatory (1982). She is a recent Guggenheim Fellow and has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and several Pushcart Prizes. She  teaches creative writing and Renaissance literature at the University of Michigan.

Upcoming Fall 2010...

November 22    Monica Youn & Rosmarie Waldrop
November 29    Ben Mirov & Reb Livingston
December 6      Tribute to James Tate, with Alex Phillips, Star Black... and James Tate!

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Peter Johnson

Hawk

 

Sometimes I awake with a headline stuck in my head: Doctor in Bangor Treating Elvis for Migraines; Pharmacist Completes History of Drive-InMovie Theater—and I write it all down in my little red notebook. But there are other nights when blood rocks my heart, and people I’ve injured or thedead appear, hovering above the ceiling fan. The city is asleep, the city is awake, the city is napping. Does it matter? I think, climbing insomnia’s creaky stairs to an attic that doesn’t exist, trying to remember what is good, what is right.Yesterday, my student fell from a tree and died. That morning I knelt before the dog’s crate and kissed her goodbye. I stopped to buy cough drops and a backscratcher. I was cut off twice and beeped at once. My student wrote a story about the Civil War, about heroism. He wrote about an uprising of Christmas reindeer, about a boy and his imaginary camel. He drew a cartoon called the “Devolution of Man,” and he once wrote: “Artists have to try, no matter how hard to love their enemy because it is up to artists to save humanity.” Because he believed in what he wrote, he wasn’t my best writer. He wasn’t a liar, he wasn’t waiting for applause. The clap of crows emptying a tree was enough for him, the simple architecture of an egg. He had climbed, I think, to gain a different perspective, like the hawk that mysteriously appeared today. I was walking to class and sensed his dracular presence, then heard a squirrel’s lament no more than ten feet away—a bone-crushing sorrow for life, for death.

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This prose poem by Peter Johnson appeared in the first issue of Sentence. Peter's Rants and Raves: Selected and New Prose Poems is out from White Pine Press, and it caps off a sequence of four books of prose poems by one of the subgenre's most significant practitioners in recent years. Peter was also the editor of The Prose Poem: an International Journal.

This Just In . . . Tonight in Seattle: The Best American Poetry Group Reading

7:00 PM

Elliot Bay Book Company

1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle, Washington 98122

Telephone: (206) 624-6600
Toll-free: 800-962-5311

FREE 

Come hear these fine Northwest poets whose works were included in recent editions of The Best American Poetry :  Sonia Greenfield, Jerry Harp, Pat Hurshell, Julie Larios, Peter Pereira, Martha Silano, Mary Szybist, Molly Tenenbaum, David Wagoner, Cody Walker, Kary Wayson, and Carolyne Wright.

 Best American Poetry contributor and event organizer Martha Silano writes:  It's going to be an inspiring, effervescent, and joyous evening of poetry and conversation; I just know it. If you are ambulatory and well enough to be out and about, please join us in sharing with you what guest editors Mark Strand, Heather McHugh, Charles Wright, and David Wagoner consider to be some of the best poetry being written in America.

 Thanks, Martha!  Please send pictures so we can post them here. 

-- sdh