The Best American Poetry

Praxilla is Back! (by Laura Orem)

After a long hiatus, Praxilla is back! Issue #3 features:

Poetry by Alison Doernberg, Alan Britt, Ann Bracken, Barbara Lefcowitz, Calder Lowe, Charles Bane, Chris Taylor, David Lehman, David McAleavey, Elizabeth Johnson-Miller, Ernest Hilbert, Ernie Wormwood, Eugene Ritchie, Fork Burke, Gregory Luce, J.P. Dancing Bear, James Valvis, Jessie Carty, John Lane, John McKernan, Kathy Douglas, Naomi Thiers, Nin Andrews, Richard Harteis, Rosanne Wasserman, Stacy Grimes, and Wendy Chin-Tanner.

Fiction by Lane Jennings.

Non-Fiction by Vivian Faith Prescott

Check out this exciting new issue at our new website at www.praxilla.net.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We'll be reading again April 15-May 15. Details and submissions guidelines can be found here.

Something Understood - Rebecca Lindenberg

For today, some poems by just a tiny few of the contemporary lady poets whose work I really enjoy and by whom I feel both influenced and bettered. 

Interview

by Kathryn Cowles, from Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name

Interviewer: I'm going to ask you a question. There is a right answer, and I'm very serious, and I want you to answer seriously. Seriously, but also honestly. Here is my question: What do you do if you find a dead cat?

Eleanor: Name it.

Interviewer: Wrong. What do you do if you find a dead cat?

Eleanor: Mouth to mouth, depending on the newness of its deceasedness, the likelihood of revivification, and whether or not it's an ugly cat.

Interviewer: Wrong again.

Eleanor: Was the cat on my property or my neighbor's?

Eleanor: Is it summer or another season?

Eleanor: Put it in the freezer to buy time.

Interviewer: No, no, no.

Eleanor: Light its cigarette.

Eleanor: Ask it to light my cigarette.

Eleanor: Brush its black, or grey, or tawny hair out of its eyes and shed a single tear.

Interviewer: Stop it. Lies, all lies.

Eleanor: Kill another cat so it has a friend.

Eleanor: Show it photographs of my children.

Eleanor: Actually, I have no children to show.

Interviewer: This is not at all what I had in mind.

Eleanor: Chalk a line around its silhouette for future reference.

Eleanor: Of course, I'm assuming the dead cat is on the ground. Really, it could be anywhere.

Eleanor: Up a tree, or nailed to the side of a building.

Eleanor: Utilize catnip in creative ways until it stops playing dead, that old trick.

Eleanor: Wait for Jesus to come.

Interviewer: You never say what I want you to say.

Eleanor: Taxidermy.

Eleanor: Halo its head, lend it my wings.

Eleanor: Are you listening?

Eleanor: Do you really want to know?

Eleanor: You can learn a lot about a person by asking.

 

“I am in love, hence free to live”

by Vera Pavlova, from If There Is Something To Desire, There Is Something To Regret

(trans. Steven Seymour)

I am in love, hence free to live

by heart, to ad lib as I caress.

A soul is light when full,

heavy when vacuous.

My soul is light. She is not afraid

to dance the agony alone,

for I was born wearing your shirt,

will come from the dead with that shirt on.

 

Camera Lucida

by Claudia Keelan

Though the photograph deceives

The viewer is drawn to its light,

Vision itself a device

Where the world becomes

An animated drawing.

The lover, for example, is hollow in the middle,

Standing beside the skeleton bones

Of a 19^th century hoopskirt.

And though you can’t believe it,

She’s you.

 

The Door Opens

by Martha Ronk, from Vertigo

 

One painter put a thick white line

where the door opens into the dark room

and women make beads and light stripes the floor.

Each time paint becomes light, we are asked to believe.

The requests come thicker of late.

They say one painter asked them to stand there,

hands out, the light coming in, for a long time

that is never long enough.

 

Key Episodes From An Earthly Life

by C.D. Wright, from Tremble

 

As surely as there are crumbs on the lips

of the blind                I came for a reason

 

I remember when the fields were no taller

than a pencil            do you remember that

 

I told him            I’ve got socks older than her

but he would not listen

 

You will starve out girl               they told her

but she did not listen

 

As surely as there is rice in the cuffs

of the priest          sex is a factor            not a fact

 

Everything I do is leaning            toward

what we came for               is that perfectly clear

 

I like your shoes your uncut hair

I like your use of space too

 

I wanted to knock her lights out

the air cut in and did us some good

 

One thing about my television set it has

a knob on it enabling me to switch channels

 

Now it is your turn            to shake or

provoke             or heal me             I won’t say it again

 

Do you like your beets well-cooked and chilled

even if they make your gums itch

 

Those dark Arkansas roads            that is the sound

I am after            the choiring of crickets

 

Around this time of year               especially evening

I love everything          I sold enough eggs

 

To buy a new dress            I watched him drink the juice

of our beets           And render the light liquid

 

I came to talk you into physical splendor

I do not wish to speak to your machine

 

On Walking Backwards

by Anne Carson, from “Short Talks”

My mother  forbade us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

There are so many more people whose work I wish I had the time and patience to type in and represent here – I have a stack of books in front of me right now, Eleni Sikelianos, Danielle Deulen, Brenda Shaugnessy, Elizabeth Willis, Jenny Boully, Olena Kalytiak Davis, there are just so many amazing women writing terrific stuff it would be, I am happy to report, quite impossible to even make a semi-partially-sort-of reasonable list of them, let alone share poems from each and all.  But please, please, tell me who you love!

Difficult Things - Rebecca Lindenberg

Languages are difficult.  When we first moved to Rome I couldn’t speak a word of Italian, but I took classes and learned to talk for both of us.  Once weekend we were wandering around this art installation at a villa outside of town.  Someone introduced us to an Italian publisher from a press called Maledizione, I laughed at the name.  He smiled.  So you speak some Italian, he said.  Not really, I said, but I’m learning.  Me too, he grinned.  I hear it’s a beautiful language.  Wild onions grew in the yard, and wherever people stepped, the smell of crushed scallions rose into the sun-stung air.

I think it was Rilke who said “everything worth doing is difficult.”  Which is bollocks, by the way.  There is nothing at all difficult about enjoying a good bacon sandwich, and it is absolutely worth doing.

People sometimes say that Love is difficult.  This, I think, is true.  But I also think Love simplifies many other things – whether or not to get up in the morning, for example, who to call. 

Bernadette Mayer says, “Obfuscation bewilders old meaning.”  When do we pass from difficulty to opacity; from opacity to meaninglessness?  And what are the productions of meaninglessness?

Say language is an organ of perception.  Now, say “lemon”.  Can’t you taste it?

Remember the ancient Greek problem of the “heap”?  Are two grains of sand a heap?  Are six?  Six hundred?  Six-hundred and one?  Which grain of sand transforms the accumulation into “a heap”?  Surely, this matters more to the heap than to the sand. 

The Cantos are difficult.  They’re difficult in a way that teaches me nothing except how to feel very, very small.  Which, I suppose, is not really nothing.

But Gertrude Stein is difficult in a way that teaches me to wonder why, after all, sugar is not a vegetable.  It grows.

Is flower feminine?  It’s not a very manly word.  But is asphodel?

After we’d lived in Italy for a few months, I gave a reading at the house where Keats died.  Afterwards, you and your son and I went out to dinner.  On the way home from dinner, giddy with poems and wine and Sardinian food, we saw people rushing out of the internet shop where I always bought our bus tickets and phone cards.  Then smoke, then a noise like the canon they fired each afternoon in the park down the street.  Then all the glass cascading from the windows.  I was afraid, I wanted to go home.  No, you said, I think I saw who did it.  We have to go see if we can help.  I was mad at you, not because I didn’t want to help, but because it meant me speaking for us both again, since I alone was learning this new language.  The caribinieri arrived.  I talked, embarrassedly just listing words from the pages of a chapter on description:  brown hair, black shirt, yellow how do you say? stripe.  I said in Italian to the Bangladeshi man who our internet shop, It’ll be okay, it’ll be okay.  He said, Don’t leave, please.  If you go, the police will leave.  And I understood that languages are not as difficult as some things that I didn’t know the words for.  Maybe still don’t.

About that which we cannot speak, we must make new language.

Poetry is difficult.  It’s about difficult things such as harrowing loss and exquisite calm and other things that remain only feelings while we try to configure the words to turn them into ideas.  This does not make the feelings less powerful or less difficult, it just makes them more sentient.  It vectors them.

Poetry is difficult because it’s made of languages, which are difficult.  And none of these things – ideas or feelings or languages – can be handily wielded like a light epee with any hope of precision or control.  It’s more like trying to aim a trebuchet at a Coke bottle set on the castle wall at 500 paces. 

Poetry is difficult, and worth doing.  But it’s not worth doing because it is difficult.  Or anyway, that’s not why I do it.  I think I do it for the bacon sandwiches.

Man Writes Poem by Jay Leeming

Edwardian Man Writing At Desk by PereLachaise

Reading Rebecca Lindenberg's account of America's Next Top Poet reminded me of this terrific poem by Jay Leeming:  

Man Writes Poem 

This just in a man has begun writing a poem
in a small room in Brooklyn. His curtains
are apparently blowing in the breeze. We go now 
to our man Harry on the scene, what's

the story down there Harry? "Well Chuck
he has begun the second stanza and seems . . .

Read the rest of Man Writes Poem here.

-- sdh

America's Next Top Poet - Rebecca Lindenberg

America’s Next Top Poet

So, I’ve been watching America’s Next Top Poet.  If you haven’t seen it yet, there are things I don’t want to spoil for you, so I’ll just give you the basic premise.  You can catch up on Hulu if you want – there are only two rounds left this season but each one’s gonna be a doozy.

Basically, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, this is a spin-off of Tyra Banks’ wildly successful show, America’s Next Top Model.  Alas, our version is a little less picturesque.  First of all, a model is lucky if her career lasts until she’s 30 or 35, which is (by contrast) more or less when a poet can expect her career to begin.  There are a couple of just-starting-their-MFA youngsters on the show.  There are also a couple of contestants who came later to poetry.  But for the most part, the baker’s dozen original contestants are emerging or recently-emergent poets in their later twenties to mid-thirties.  The host and judge, aka the Tyra Banks of the poetry world, is a well-known writer whose career is by no means over, but who has begun to enter what can best be described as the retrospective phase of that career – a Collected under contract, maybe on faculty still but not really teaching much, starting to talk to an editor about what to do with all that correspondence.  Somewhere, a grad student is writing a paper that features their work.  I’m not telling who it is – you can guess, but I think you should just watch.  I’m also not telling you who on the panel of judges is poetry’s counterpart to ANTM’s eccentric but likeable drag queen runway coach, Miss J.  But I will tell you that apparently Paul Muldoon is the Nigel Barker of the poetry world, so you’re not totally in the dark.

The show was originally going to film in New York City, but after the “NYC vs. MFA” debate, the producers didn’t want to be seen as weighing in too heavily one way or the other, lest they should alienate viewers.  Instead, they decided that America’s Next Top Poet should be set in a small city on the Gulf Coast, ravaged by hurricanes and oil spills, in hopes that the presence of poets in that community would raise visibility and support economic prosperity.  As you’ll see when you watch the show, as noble as this sentiment may be, this has mostly resulted in a series of ill-advised encounters with beleaguered locals that’s created an insurmountable town-and-gown antagonism between those attached to the show, and those attached to the town in which it currently takes place.  There was one incident in a downtown dive bar involving a concealed weapon, a live chicken, a thermos of gin and tonic and a bad karaoke rendition of Erasure that has since become the stuff of reality TV legend, as well as an SNL sketch and a John Stewart punchline.  Perhaps you saw the “Poets Gone Wild” parody that posted to YouTube?  Well, then you know what I’m talking about.

Monday @ KGB: Matthew Yeager + David Lehman

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...
 
Matthew Yeager + David Lehman
Monday, March 28
Reading starts at 7:30pm
Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com <http://www.kgbbar.com/>

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 10003 * Phone: 212-505-3360 <tel:212-505-3360>  

*****

Matthew Yeager's  poems have appeared recently in the journals Bat City Review, Supermachine, New York Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and the anthologies Best American Poetry 2005 and Best American Poetry 2010. His short film "A Big Ball of Foil in a Small NY Apartment," was an official selection at twelve film festivals in 2009-2010, picking up two awards.  Recent accolades include the Barthelme Prize in short prose for 2009.  He is the co-founder of Chicken Truck Productions and lives in Brooklyn.     

Read some of his work in pax americana <http://paxjournal.com/?q=node/143> .
 
*****

David Lehman was born in New York City. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009) and When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook / Schocken, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999), The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000), and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006), a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. Lehman teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He initiated The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology's general editor. He founded, with Star Black, the Monday Night Poetry Series at KGB Bar .
 
Read some of his work at the Academy of American Poets <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/40> .  
 
*****

Upcoming, Spring 2011...

April 4       Brian Teare + Jean Valentine
April 11     Matthew Zapruder + Eileen Myles
April 18     Saskia Hamilton + Karl Kirchwey
April 25     Gabrielle Calvocoressi + Andrei Codrescu
May 2        Dorothea Lasky, Star Black + David Yezzi 
May 9        Angie Estes + Mitch Sisskind
May 16      Dan Chiasson + Deborah Landau

Poetry Matters - Rebecca Lindenberg

Poetry Matters

Thank you, Best American Poetry and Stacey Harwood, for inviting me to blog and muse here for the week.  I’m really excited, and since this first post turned out rather long I want to promise that my intention is to post wildly various things all week.  Tomorrow, thanks to a suggestion from Nicky Beer, I’ll be musing about what kind of reality TV show “America’s Next Top Poet” would look like.  For now, since this is a conversation that came up this weekend (and I’ve been thinking on it ever since), below are some thoughts on why poets worry about poetry’s relevance.  To all who take the time, thanks so much for reading.

 

So I was just visiting some pals in L.A.  And my friend has this book on her shelf.  It’s called Can Poetry Matter?  I have never read this book, but it seems like a strange title to me, in no small part because its author is, ostensibly, a poet.  I imagine most poets would say, Well, yeah.  But people seem to want to talk about this – can poetry matter, does poetry matter, how much, and to whom?  In fact, the very friend who had this book on her bookshelf wanted to talk about it, so we sat down at her dining room table one afternoon and just talked about it.  She is passionate, articulate, and anxious about this question. 

She and I didn’t answer the question, and I do not propose to answer it here.  I don’t even really propose to examine it here.  Rather, I want to examine – briefly – another question:  Why is it that poets feel this question has such urgency?  Might we even be doing poetry itself a disservice by insisting on revisiting this question over and over again?  Might we be convincing ourselves and others that our art, plagued by fears of its own irrelevance, is ultimately doomed?  I mean, nobody ever asks, can math matter?  Nobody asks, can physics matter?  Nobody argues that the current state of cell biology is very worrisome and we should talk about it.  We don’t usually ponder the relevance of astrophysics or theoretical math.  Or catechism or pizza or mountain biking, for that matter.  Well, you might say, we don’t ask that because obviously cell biology and math and physics are useful, because mountain bikes are useful, pizza is delicious, and even religion is useful in devising communities or ethical codes (arguably, pizza is also good for this).  What use is poetry?

I perceive this as a very Puritanical anxiety, though the question about the role of the poet in society is as old as Republic X, and perhaps something about Plato’s banishment of the poets from his ideal state finds its way into our current anxieties.  Perhaps all poets secretly feel like interlopers in an otherwise-virtuous world of even-keeled and industrious citizens.  Perhaps Plato’s repudiation, based though it is on poetry’s emotional efficacy, rhymes with some deep-seated Puritanical anxiety about poetry’s “use”.  Writing well after Plato, even Cicero wanted writing to do three things, after all:  docere, movere, delectare.  To instruct, to move, and to delight.  Perhaps we, today, aren’t convinced that poetry can do these things.  Or perhaps we believe it should, but that the poetry being written right now simply doesn’t.  Surely some of us believe it shouldn’t have to. 

Sunday Quiz: Who Didn't Win?

Looking over the history of the Academy Awards for best original song in a movie, you notice how many great songs won between "The Continental" and "The Shadow of Your Smile," before the great falling off that followed.

Which of these great musical geniuses of the time did not win an Academy Award?

Harold Arlen
Irving Berlin
Dorothy Fields
George Gershwin
Ira Gershwin
Oscar Hammerstein
Yip Harburg
Jerome Kern
Johnny Mercer
Cole Porter
Richard Rodgers
Jule Styne
Jimmy Van Heusen
Harry Warren

For extra credit. name the nominated song(s) by the listed greats that failed to win though they were eligible. Also name some of the winners. And sing them.

I'm watching State Fair on TCM right now. Hence the thought. -- DL

Rebecca Lindenberg, Guest Blogger March 27-April 2

This week we welcome Rebecca Lindenberg as our guest blogger.  Rebecca's first poetry collection, GLOSS, is forthcoming in 2012 from the new McSweeney's poetry series.  She is the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship and a 2009-2010 Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship.  Her poems appear or will soon appear in POETRY, The Believer, 32 Poems, DIAGRAM, Conjunctions, No Tell Motel, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, BlazeVox, Barrow Street, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere.  She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, where she also lectures.  She grew up in Palo Alto, California, where she was the laziest member of the Greenmeadow Swim Team, and she makes a mean lasagna.

Welcome, Rebecca.

"Darling, Would You Please Pick Up Those Books?" [by Kathryn Maris]

How many times do I have to say
get rid of the books off the goddamn floor
do you have any idea how it feels
to step over books you wrote about her
bloody hell you sadist what kind of man
are you all day long those fucking books

in my way for 3 years your acclaimed book
tell me now what do you have to say
for yourself you think you’re such a man
silent brooding pondering at the floor
pretending you’re bored when I mention her
fine change the subject ask ‘Do I feel

like I need more medication’ NO I don’t feel\
like I need more medication it’s the books
don’t you see don’t you see it’s her
why don’t you listen to anything I say
and for god’s sake books on the floor
are a safety hazard remember that man

from Cork who nearly died fine that man
fell over a hurley not a book but I don’t feel
you’re getting the point the point is that a floor
is not an intelligent place for books
books I have to see and books that say
exactly where and how you shagged her

what shirt she wore before you shagged her
I can write a book too about some man
better still about you I can say
something to demonize you how would you feel
about that ha ha why don’t I write a book
about how I hoover your sodding floor

and how you’ve never once hoovered your floor
why can’t I be a muse why can’t I be a ‘her’
what does one have to do to be in a book
around here do I have to be dead for a man
to write me a poem how do you think it feels
to be non muse material can’t you say

you feel for me what you felt for her
can’t you say I’m better than that woman
can’t you get those books off the floor?

--  Kathryn Maris

"Darling, Will You Please Pick Up Those Books" was "Poem of The Week" in the Guardian's Books Blog.
Here is the Amazon listing for Maris's book, The Book of Jobs. 

Heartfelt Felicitations, David Wagoner

on the occasion of his receiving the American Academy of Arts and Letters Arthur Rense Prize given every three years to a "poet of consistent excellence over a long career." David edited the superb 2009 volume in the BAP series. And here is a photograph of Mark Doty -- also an American Academy honoree in 2011 -- reading at the launch event for BAP 2009 in September of that year. 

She Heaps Up, by Amy Holman

Today, I set my torch aglow on my hillfort, but not in warning to the next guest blogger, rather to signal welcome to this fine community before I go off to forage. I have not been "heaping up," lately, and this task of composing prose posts on what informs my poetry has informed me of some poems to write. (Aside from the Greek and Latin origins to "poet" that sound similar and define as "make," poet also derives from the Sanskrit word "cinoti," meaning "he heaps up.") 

It is mating season in the northern hemisphere, and that means the gentleman humpback whales will be singing to communicate their fitness to the lady whales. At least that's the updated answer on why they sing. The fact that they never sing their particular songs again and invent new ones proposes that they are more advanced than our species, at least enough to not give a girl a line. Biologists refer to the humpbacks as "inveterate composers" and yet that they might be singing for the pure pleasure of it and their own satisfaction is "an untestable question in scientific terms." I wonder what the humpback anthropologists and musicologists make of human punk rock? Or, recordings of Dean Martin?

Anyway, I hope I have stayed within the bounds of usufruct here at Best American Poetry, using this space for my enjoyment without ruining the substance of it. It's been a pleasure. I'm off to a five year old's birthday party on this 40 degree Spring day. The sun is shining, the sky is pale blue, and I see a small cloud in the shape of a dove. Well, until that airplane drove through it.

Notes on Being A Trapped Animal, by Amy Holman

In the twelfth grade when I felt trapped by other girls, school, shyness, New Jersey, and being seventeen, there was at least some poetry. I could write it, sort of, and I could read and memorize it, recite it to my few friends, and write about it. I was not quite able to see myself in it, only see that I liked making it. Not until years later did I note that when given an assignment in English class to write a paper comparing two poems we hadn't covered in class by two of the poets we had, I wrote a paper on trapped animals. I loved the language of the poems, ("matted hyacinthine curls"; "A pip of life amid a mort of tails") and I loved that they were about lone animals--an easier subject for me to deal with in an all girls school than love. One poem was "The Bull" by William Carlos Williams and the other was "The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws", by Wallace Stevens. Lone volatile bull stretching in the grass and chained to a fence, and lonely, bored parakeet with sharp claws and useless wings. Luckily, I broke out to college the following fall. 

It still bothers me that earlier this week Knut, a four-year-old polar bear died of brain damage because his ferocious wild nature was trapped alone in a Berlin zoo; apparently, the psychological equivalent of being bashed over the head. Rejected by his 30-year-old mother, he imprinted onto a zookeeper, a man mother who inadvertently rejected him by dying a year later from a heart attack. No other polar bears, no arctic tundra, no seals, no man mother. Crowds and crowds of spectators he grew to need and be panicked without, much like the starlets of popular culture.

I do not like going to zoos, even ones as advanced in the way they accommodate animals as The Bronx Zoo is, and even though I know that a certain species of deer, extinct in China, has a population there. I understand the benefits of keeping a few animals to inform the public that these species are worthy of a place on earth, and that place is not in the zoo that is demonstrating this. I get that the sale of fake fur toy animals contributes to conservation. There are more tigers in captivity in the world than free in the wild, and not all of that captivity is run by animal behaviorists and zoologists. Some of the tigers in captivity are lucky to be in zoos, it is true. The alternative to raising Knut, the bear cub, without its mother was to euthanize it. 

Studies show that zoos work better than documentaries to turn citizens into activists against extinction, encroachment, and cruelty. But I like words. I like reasoning. Tigers in the Snow, by Peter Matthiessen, for instance, accompanied by photographs by Maurice Hornocker, follows the disappearing Siberian tigers and argues for their rights. We the Creatures, edited by C.J. Sage and published by J. P. Dancing Bear at Dream Horse Press, includes "Bears in China" by Ellen Bass--featured poet in the new APR--about the horrific harvesting of bear bile for shampoo while the animal is still alive. Difficult to accept, but more urgently expressed.

Perhaps adolescence was the well intentioned zoo, and adulthood my poetic tundra. 

 

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire - 100 Years Ago Today by Stacey Harwood

קרבנות פֿונעם טרײַענגל־פֿײַער ליגן צוגעדעקט אויף דער גאַס (Credit: Forward Association)

Both my maternal and fraternal grandmothers were among the scores of eastern European immigrants who worked in sweatshops during the early part of the last century.  My maternal grandmother, who in an afternoon could stitch up a fashionable dress out of remnants she bought in S. Klein's basement, told stories of the boss who turned back clocks to lengthen the work day and other cruelties she endured for mere pennies until conditions improved with the growth of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. But before the ILGWU,  there was . . . nothing.  And because there was nothing, 146 mostly Jewish women aged 16-23 lost their lives when on March 25, 1911 they were trapped by a fire that swept through the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory at 29 Washington Place in New York City.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the fire, the Forward, the venerable nationally focused Jewish newspaper, has published a special section for its March 25 issue.  The section features the first-ever translations of the Jewish Daily Forward’s original Yiddish coverage of the event, including the front page of March 25, 1911, the day of the fire, stories about the heroes of the fire, and Editor Abe Cahan’s editorials about the tragedy. Find the Forward's special section here.

The Forward also sponsored a poetry contest, and the English and Yiddish winning poems are published in the special issue. The winner of the English poem is Zackary Sholem Berger of Baltimore, Md, and the winner of the Yiddish section is  Alec (“Leyzer”) Burko of New York City. Read the English winner here and the Yiddish winner here. 

--sdh

Could You?

This just in . . . Calling All Poets: Write a poem for a good cause!!

My friend Susan Pattenaude, a senior domestic violence attorney with The Legal Project in Albany, NY writes to tell me about a poetry contest for a good cause.  This is near to my heart because I lived in the Capital District for many years and I know about the good works of The Legal Project. It's just the kind of important organizations that faces financial difficulties in these hard times. 

Now, you can help the Legal Project win a 2011 Heart and Soul Grant by writing an original 4 to 8 line poem that reflects the Project's mission to provide free and low cost legal services to the working poor, victims of domestic violence, and other under-served individuals in the Capital District of New York State. The deadline is short (March 28!).  To fuel your imagination, find out more about The Legal Project here.  Find out more about the Heart and Soul grants here. 

Send your poems to Lorraine Wynne, associate director of The Legal Project ([email protected]).

-- sdh

Photographs Can't Rhyme, by Amy Holman

This picture I took today, a few days into spring, is part of what passes for pastoral in my Brooklyn neighborhood--a barn-shaped birdhouse visible through a vine-wrapped chicken wire fence at the Recreation Center on 1st Street. I like to take photographs of juxtaposed environments, especially where nature reclaims the urban landscape, or when individuals living here impose their notion of the country life on the city. 

I read a beautiful essay by Barry Lopez once, perhaps in DoubleTake magazine, that addressed his interests in photography and writing, and which he wrote to accompany artwork by an unfamiliar, deceased artist who had admired him. In the essay, Lopez illustrates the scene that determined his choice of writing over photojournalism. He was in Alaska, I think, and out on a raft away from the larger boat to take photographs of bears. Kodiak bears? Polar bears? One was in the frame of the shot, one was not. When he got back to the boat, and was unloading the roll of film (a lovely tactile task of the past, now), he unrolled in his mind what he recalled seeing in between the frames of the camera shots. What was the other bear doing? Where was it swimming, what was it eating? How close was it? The energy of this excitement in getting his observations right, along with his need to know more than the limits of the frame, was the factor that led him to switch his focus, as it were, to the broader view a writer has. 

I think of this often in relation to my love of writing and taking photographs, especially when I feel upset at not capturing a photograph I wanted. I can write about what I saw to make up for the picture I missed, but that always seems too difficult and inconsistent with my vision. Clearly, writing is more important, but I could not give up the framing of a photographic shot--my favorite part--to focus my attentions only on the words that describe and frame. I also do enjoy not letting the viewer see more than what I frame. This can be achieved with an unreliable narrator, too, a political poem, and a column, to name just a few writing controls.

The photograph can be its own message, untethered to any specific explanation, like a series of tiny Polaroids I took in Paris in November 2002 that cause me to feel the writing of Paris to be almost unnecessary. But, a photograph can also be a prompt for writing, as can the record of mistake and perception the old film-based photograph dictates. I'd love to write a story or poem based on an accidental photograph, the kind we are all less likely to take with digital cameras. A photographer, Jim Hair, whom I met last weekend at the "Kayak at the Confluence" event in St. Louis, described just the sort of eerie example from his trove that could work on my imagination. Jim is running for mayor of Richmond, Indiana, in hopes to coax it into the arts community he believes it could be, and we talked about how his becoming Mayor would not only put the photography business on hiatus but also, change the ways in which he can move through his town, camera in hand. 

One of the benefits to being a writer is that there is no contraption to give away my eye. I am just as let down by my inability to capture in writing what I miss capturing in the camera. It is always possible to heal the writing anguish with another take on the page. I do love that difficult task of getting the words and meaning right far more than the capture of the physical in light. And photographs can't rhyme.

 

Taylor Worship, by Catherine R. Stimpson

 My sister  Mary called. "Elizabeth Taylor," she said.
         "Yes," I said.  
        "I'm sorry," she said.
        "I am, too," I said.
        "You must be mourning."
        "I am." 
        "You were obsessed with her," she said. 
        "I was," I said.

        I was? I  am---although my obsession is now reined in and harnessed.
After I saw Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet in 1944, I learned how grand  it felt to worship someone from afar. 

        I never wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor.  Worship is not about identification.  Her middle name, Rosemond, may have been close to mine, Rosalind, but even a besotted child knows that sharing four letters out of eight in a middle name leaves four letters unshared. 

        I may have had fantasies that she would appear in my little town and pop me into her car and take me to Hollywood to be her friend, but I never really wanted to be that close either. Worship is not about sharing a toothbrush.

        I wanted what I had: the wonder and curiosity and exhilaration and freedom to range widely that a giddy reverence provides. Elizabeth Taylor's life was larger than mine. It was distant from mine, but  it was close enough for it to warm  and open my imagination and my heart.  As a child, I could recite the names of her parents (Francis, Sara), of her brother (Howard), and of her chipmunk (Nibbles).  Later, I could rattle off the names  and characteristics of her first fiance and then of all her husbands.  Oh, yes, John Warner, he was a bit of a rest stop. Even without seeing them all, I can chatter on about the movies. 

        Like prayers, such recitations were a sign of my devotion. But a far greater sign is   the quality of my attention to her activities, rapt when I was young, dearly engaged when I was older. She was a goddess worthy of my solicitude. She had both beauty and talent. She used her talent well. She seemed to do what she pleased, but she never seemed snotty or mean. She had a good time on several continents, but she did good things as well. She had courage.  In National Velvet , she cut her hair and rode her horse to a championship.   She was loyal, generous, and brave. She never fudged things---or not that I could tell.   
        
        And, she had all those illnesses and injuries and addictions, but she was reborn again and again, rising up from rehab and hospital beds.  As divinities must be, she was capable of resurrection.  Unlike some divinities, she was bawdy and earthy. She could camp out unpretentiously. In 2002, she published a book, Elizabeth Taylor: My Love Affair With Jewelry. Such stones, such pearls. Hers was hardly a sand lot collection. The first picture shows her in profile---all gussied up.  In the second she is also in profile, starting to kiss a great-grandchild. And her hair?  It is in pink and blue rollers. 

        My realistic self is aware that she died on March 23, 2011, at the age of 79, in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.  Her publicist said the cause was complications of congestive heart failure. These are facts. However, I also know that she is off to fresh woods and pastures new, though they may be yachts and 4-star hotel rather than fields and sheep folds.  She dedicates the jewelry book to "my beloved Mike and Richard, the two greatest loves of my life. And to my children, without whom there would have been no life." So Mike and Richard will be there, and her friend Roddy McDowell, and favorite dogs, and her family when they are ready to roam to be with her. 

        I elided the truth in my conversation with my sister. I am gratefully remembering  "my" Elizabeth, whose presence enabled me to enter into the realms of worship, rather than mourning. Late yesterday afternoon, in such a spirit, I asked a young man in my office if worshipping Elizabeth Taylor were a generational matter. Were his circles as involved in her doings and being as mine?  "The chatter on Facebook is less than I might have expected," he said diplomatically.  I took this in, but I would never, never make book against the enduring face of Elizabeth Taylor. 

Congratulations to Newest Hall of Famer John Ashbery by Stacey Harwood

We're pleased to announce that on the evening of Friday, April 1, in Albany, NY, the Empire State Center for the Book will induct John Ashbery into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.  David Lehman will present the award. The induction ceremony will be the focus of the Empire State Book Festival Gala that will kickoff the state’s second annual Empire State Book Festival, a two-day celebratation of New York State writers, literature, and literacy. 

We'll be featured during the morning of April 2 when  Daniel Nester, Mark Bibbins, Kathleen Ossip, Cara Benson, and I will join David Lehman to read poems and talk about the Best American Poetry series. In the afternoon, David Lehman will appear on a panel devoted to the American songbook. If you're in the vicinity of Albany, NY during the weekend of April 1-2, stop by the festival.  It's free!

Read Daniel Nester's post on the festival here.  Find out about the latest festival developments here.

The Body of Poetry, by Amy Holman

Here is an odd little Elizabeth Taylor mixed media piece left over from an Etsy page that no longer exists. I suppose that poems will be wanted now that she has died. Maybe a 140-character Twitter poem by a big poetry star will be the appropriate pop cultural memorial. I like the witty 53 characters she said once in response to what should be written on her gravestone: "Here lies Elizabeth. She hated being called Liz. But she lived." Elizabeth had a personally difficult life as backdrop to her professionally fortunate, glamorous life. I am surprised that she broke her back at least five times, and not surprised that she died exactly 53 years after her true love, Michael Todd, was killed in a plane crash. Both seem like the symbolism that writes its code in the tissues and bones of our bodies, and tries to influence our thinking to play along in our demise. She was not influenced much, for a long time. 

At the risk of seeming flaky, let me tell you that the metaphysical source to body pain and injuries details symbolic meanings that we can learn to avoid. If Elizabeth broke her upper back it meant that she felt unloved and unsupported emotionally, (eight marriages) or that she was holding back love (eight marriages). If she broke her middle back, it was because she had guilt and was stuck in all the stuff back there in the past (eight marriages). With an estate worth 600 million, it is unlikely she broke her lower back with a fear of money and lack of financial support. I would not get hung up on toe stubbing and the sniffles, but I know that when I have felt silenced, creatively, or otherwise, I have gotten sore throats. The inability to speak up for oneself was not a problem for Elizabeth Taylor, highest paid actress the year I was born. 

I think like a poet, speak in metaphors and similes, stop people when they say what sounds like a line of poetry--"write that down"--and it's a problem as much as a joy. When a praying mantis came in the window and sat on my desk, I looked him up in the languages. The Africans consider it a visitation from God, but the French believe the Praying Mantis arrives to help the lost find their way. That's one of the themes of my novel. The mantis was on my desk! Alas, while the characters may be ready to find their way home, I have not yet liberated them with the final chapters. I'm too busy looking for new metaphors and more secret codes than to actually apply them. 

Rest in Peace, Elizabeth Taylor.