The Best American Poetry

Nick Ashford, dead at 70, a songwriter as 'solid as a rock'

Following the death of Jerry Leiber (see David Lehman’s fine tribute below) comes the news that another half of another fine songwriting team – Nick Ashford of Ashford and Simpson – has died, at age 70. While I would never claim that Ashford and Simpson’s body of work is nearly as important as Leiber and Stoller's (the latter remained unequalled until Lennon-McCartney for the range and ambition of their pop songs), Ashford and Simpson made some very beautiful music together.

 

Early on in its career, the husband-and-wife team wrote hits for other duos, most notably Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was one early summit; “Ain’t Nothin’ Like The Real Thing” was even better). As performers and producers as well as songwriters in the 1970s, Ashford and Simpson recorded a series of albums that presented something distinctive: a portrait of a classy, upwardly-mobile couple in love – with each other, and with success. Never smug, never taking love or material gain for granted, they were politely adventurous (no other classy duo coming out of the 1960s would have recorded an unironic instrumental called “Bourgie, Bourgie”) and extravagantly soulful on hits such as “Send It,” “Is It Still Good To Ya,” "By Way of Love's Express," and “Solid.”

Nick Ashford – tall, debonair, dashingly handsome – was a songwriter born to be a front-man. His skill and gracefulness were rare.

Tattoos and the (interdisciplinary) Art of Persian Poetry by Roger Sedarat

Tattoos, unlike smoking, remain pretty cool. They’re also here to stay (and in keeping with the loose Persian connections, please allow the pun). I thought of introducing a brief collage of poetry tattooed on strangers and friends. Of course I suspected something like this had been done before, but I had no idea of the quality nor the extent of such projects.

Before briefly exploring some Persian connections and implications of this topic, I want to thank writer Facebook friends for introducing me to a couple of great publications: Editors Kim Addonizio and Cheryl Dumesnil have created an anthology of fantastic writers that capture the art of tattooing in various ways in Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Also of interest is Eva Talmadge and Justin Taylor’s The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos for Bookworms Worldwide, a great coffee table book featuring great photographs of literary excerpts tattooed on various body parts.

I also want to mention too that my Queens College Early Americanist colleague Sian Roberts advises researching into “moko,” which,” she says, “is deeply integrated into Maori and Polynesian culture (fun fact: ‘tattoo’ originated as a Polynesian word.)”

In thinking about this topic in relation to things Persian (my commitment for my week of blogging), I also got to know those already in my life by various poetry on their skin. I didn’t know, prior to this entry, that my friend Jason Tougaw, a Comp. Rhetoric specialist (also at Queens College) has a Cocteau drawing of Orpheus, which explains in part why he seems to embody a kind of poetry. Stefanie Simons, who I got to know at Pen America, has tattooed part of an Aracelis Girmay poem on her body (yet another significant reason Stefanie is such a cool young writer). Getting more serious with things—and hopefully I can put a few pics up of what I’m seeing—Claire Van Winkle, poet and translator (and new MFA student at Queens) has this on her arm from Jorie Graham “The longing is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ~JG” Always, or usually, the arms of these writers carry the words of writers, as if literally connecting to some key influence.

 

By way of transition to the Persian, Tara Mokhtari, an Iranian-Australian poet and critic who I recently met during her visit to NYC, has the following lines in Perisan on her arm from the modern Iranian poet Sohrab Sepehri (about whom I hope to blog soon). She offers the following loose translation: "Live large, and alone, and modest, and unyielding.” Most people, she notes, get a little disappointed when she explains the “alone” part. Writers, however, would surely understand.

 

            I offer these tattooed lines as a greater transition to the well-known early trendsetting images of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat, who radically politicized the female body with words from poetry as well as other sources. Like Neshat’s work, Mokhtari’s words both attract and subvert attention, as the latter explained how men during her trip to NYC hit on her by using the foreign lines as an entry into the conversation (making the message of valuing aloneness all the more significant).

Those unfamiliar with Neshat's postmodern treatment of the feminine post-Islamic Revolution—especially following her visit to her country of origin in the 1990’s—might find it worthwhile to check out her Women of Allah series. She co-opts a kind of communal or group definition of the Persian woman in the context of the Islamic Republic of Iran, reproducing a seeming empowerment with guns, for example, though also rendering the women with little individuality (re-imposing the mystique of the veil, so to speak). 

 

There are far too many things to say and theorize upon as one considers the implications of these seminal images. In a pithy blog entry, it’s perhaps best to let the art speak for and against itself, so I’ll refrain from what will only become a reductive analysis. One overriding question that Neshat’s work continues to brilliantly bring to the surface relates to appropriation and issues of Orientalism.

 

Obviously the Persian script on female bodies (the artist used her own body in much of this work), like Tara’s tattoo, means something different to Iranians than to those, say, in the English speaking world. The latter can’t help but find another layer in their resistance to understanding, and I read that some have mistakenly assumed they must be lines of the Qu’ran. What does it mean to know, or to not know, that often this amazing calligraphy are the words of the first modern feminist poet Forugh Farrokhzad?

A prodigious amount of tension derives from the dichotomous reception of eastern vs. western audience. Insofar as Robert Frost famously claimed “Poetry is what gets lost in translation,” he was pulling a fast one, and his elusive irony gets aptly demonstrated here. The meta-statement itself is poetry, an epigram of sorts, meaning in locating the dislocation Frost paradoxically finds poetry. In her own way, through the resistance of translation and the resulting loss of meaning, Neshat too makes poetry in the English speaking world by allowing the loss.   

Of course there is a lot more going on in Neshat’s earlier work here (not to mention her more current projects with video and film). To a certain extent interjecting the images in the framework of poetry tattoos might seem like forcing a comparison. However, when considering these indelible impressions as well as a kind of permanence through the use of impermanent artistic media, they remain another kind of tattoo pictured on the artist. 

 

In Memoriam Jerry Leiber, lyricist

 

Mike Stoller wrote the music and Jerry Leiber, who died today, wrote the words for songs Elvis Presley, the Coasters, and the Drifters made famous when popular music went from the Big Band sound to rock and roll via the intermediary of rhythm and blues. The duo wrote "Hound Dog" and "Jailhouse Rock" and "Yakety Yak" and "Love Potion No. 9." I touched the wrong plant one day this summer and a couplet from "Poison Ivy" sprang to mind a day later: "Gonna need an ocean / Of calamine lotion." But the best Leiber and Stoller collaboration may well be "Is That All There Is?" as done by Peggy Lee. Leiber, the son of Jewish refugees from Poland, was 78. -- DL

Sinatra and Brando on the set of "Guys and Dolls"

When you watch the film version of Guys and Dolls, you sometimes get the feeling that Nathan Detroit and Adelaide (Frank Sinatra and Vivian Blaine) are in one movie, a hoot, while Sky Masterson and Sister Sarah of the Salvation Army (Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons) occupy an alternative universe, much more serious and deep and dramatic.

Sinatra and Brando were rivals. Brando, who did not have the better voice, got the best songs. Frank Loesser did write a serenade for Frankie boy to sing to Adelaide, but the lad must have eaten his heart out to hear Brando's thin nasal rendition of "Luck Be a Lady Tonight."

Brando on Sinatra in heaven: "That guy is going to give God an earful for making him go bald."

Sinatra on Brando, whom he called "Mumbles": "I hear they're making a movie of the Bible. They wanted Mumbles to play God but he held out for a better part."  

Audience participation portion: do you like the way Brando dances in the Cuba scene? Do you miss the songs dropped from the stage version -- such as "A Bushel and a Peck," "I've Never Been in Love Before," and "Marry the Man Today"? What do you think of "Your eyes are the eyes of a woman in love"? What's the best song in the show? Why do I think "G & D" is the consummate Broadway musical? Do you agree? -- DL

"Revolutionary Road": A masterpiece you must read [by DL]

If you're hooked on Mad Men, as I am, you owe it to yourself to read Richard Yates's great novel of exisential suburban angst,  Revolutionary Road (published in 1961). The book is a fucking masterpiece, and I wonder whether "fucking" in that clause does what I want it to do, which is to raise the stakes and assert that here we are on the same level of greatness as achieved by the creators of Jake Barnes, Jay Gatsby, and the people who trek west to Los Angeles in order to die.

Imagine that Pete Campbell and Betty Draper are married and you begin to have an idea of what Frank and April Wheeler are like. They have two kids, a girl six and a boy four, in a New York suburb that resembles Stamford, CT. Most of the action takes place in the six month period between spring and fall 1955, though flashbacks amplify the tale as needed. Frank works for Knox Busness Machines, an outfit rather like IBM, and Yates has a very sharp idea of the technological changes to come in the computer era that was still, in 1961, the stuff of visionaries and science fiction writers.  Frank likes to think that he will retain the values he had when he lived alone in Greenwich Village. This is but one of his illusions.

You can read the novel as a critique of the era or of the generation that fought the war and lost the bliss. There is a character here, a real estate agent, who perfectly (to use a word she favors, as in "what a perfectly lovely afternoon"), represents the reality principle circa 1955. But the heart of the novel lies in the marriage of Frank and April, in their quarrels, their prolonged fights and temporary truces, their negotiations about "maturity," their differing reactions to an unexpected pregnancy, and their joint daydream of quitting job, residence, and the life of practicality in favor of Europe and the life of jeopardy and the unknown.

It is a beautifully structured novel that gets you inside the heads of the characters and moves you -- to the point, in my case, where I wondered, abashed, if I had ever been as craven and self-serving as the male protagonist, who, when wooing April, hears about her childhood and realizes that her tribulations and deprivations dwarfed his: "'Jesus,' Frank said on first hearing these facts, one irritably hot summer night in the Bethune Street place (though he wasn't quite sure at the time, as he hung and shook his head, whether what he felt was sorrow for the unhappiness of the story or envy because it was so much more dramatic a story than his own)." The cad -- though I hasten to add that Frank does have his virtues, and April is far from blameless, and we sympathize with them both as we suffer with them and their children in the woe that is their marriage. 

This is Arnold's "criticism of life" done superbly and with a gift for sentences that are poetically beautiful. Let me give an example, from a seduction scene, a male executive collaborating with a female secretary in the time-approved manner that Mad Men has exemplified. A few things to notice in the following: the figurative work done by "bondage" in the first sentence, the active verbs in the second; the sexual rhythm of the language ("knots and buttons and buckles and hooks"), and the upward flow of the second sentence to an orgasmic conclusion, his first, hers equally intense though syntactically an afterthought just as it is in his mind:

<<< Then they were on the couch and the only problem in the world was the bondage of their clothing. Twisting and gasping together, they worked urgenty at knots and buttons and buckles and hooks until the last impediment slipped away; and then in the warmth and rhythm of her flesh he found an overheling sense of this is what I needed; this is what I needed; his self-absorption was so complete that he was only dimly aware of her whispering, 'Oh, yes; yes; yes. . .' >>>    --- DL

This Just in from Molly Peacock

The marvelous Molly Peacock writes to encourage us to spread the word about the Troubador poetry competition, now accepting entries. Of the contest, Molly says: This is a marvelous contest, full of prestige, and they love poets from the US and Canada to consider.  Even if a person doesn't win, there's a memory there of the good poems they have read, and that's always nice for things to come.

This year's contest will be judged by Susan Wicks & David Harsent (with both judges reading all poems)

Prizes: 1st £2,500, 2nd £500, 3rd £250 & 20 prizes of £20 each

Plus a Spring 2012 Coffee-House-Poetry season-ticket

and a prizewinners' Coffee-House Poetry reading

with Susan Wicks & David Harsent on Mon 28th Nov 2011

for all prize-winning poets

 

Submissions: by Mon 17th Oct 2011

 

Find complete contest details here.

-- sdh

Contemporary Manifestations of the Beloved by Roger Sedarat

My experience with the ghazal, as both a translator from the classical Persian as well as an Iranian-American poet writing in the form in English), gets me thinking comparatively, both in terms of time and space. New translations of any great writing will always appear, in part because literary styles change along with a reading audience. Thinking about how this form reaches from the 13^th and 14^th centuries to today, even as it spans regions (from Iran to America), continues to offer a kind of intercultural space for some postmodern funkiness.

I didn’t think, out of all the things in the world to blog about, that I’d find myself here, but to make it worthwhile, I want to focus on form in relation to theme. If I remember correctly, T.S. Eliot has that great metaphor about theme or meaning in a poem as analogous to the meat the burglar throws the guard dog as he sneaks into the home for the jewels (the style). To a great extent, the “beloved” in the ghazal has served as the desired object, especially for Persians, who adapted the longing for the divine into such a sensual and tangible form, wherein the beloved becomes the material manifestation of divine presence. As a result, writers like Hafez began juxtaposing the high and the low, esoteric theological matters with full red lips, long before rock n’ roll was invented, let alone rap or hip hop.

Of course, some of these depictions do not safely fall under the rubric of political correctness. This makes the current writing of the form that much interesting, when considering a Persian writer like Simin Behbahani who, while honoring the form of the ghazal , inverts the gender of the beloved, a politicized/feminist statement on the centuries old tradition. 

For all their erudition, readers then and now are still dogs, regardless of the desired object, so I thought if only to satisfy my own hunger, I’d throw out contemporary manifestations of the beloved—objects of transcending desire—as they surface in different kinds of writing. Again, it’s not like these have direct relevance to the form, but they do capture something of the spirit of longing for the beloved, albeit within the context of the culture in which they are written. Here’s a little list arising from a survey of some favorites. They are off the top of my head—lines to and for various beloveds—and admittedly they tend to get too male/chauvinistic. I really would like to see collective posts here, various lists from men and women:

 

Wendy let me in I wanna be your friend

I want to guard your dreams and visions

Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims

And strap your hands across my engines

                                                            --Bruce Springsteen

“Pray and play, play and pray.”

                                                Miles Davis

 

“I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too.”

                                                            --Wicked Witch of the West, Wizard of Oz

 

“In this country first you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman.”        

                                                                                                       --Tony Montana

 “Oh, wait’ll I get dat wabbit!”

                                                 --Elmer Fudd

 

“Oh no, Mrs. Robinson. I think, I think you're the most attractive of all my parents' friends. I mean that.”

                                                                                                --Benjamin (from The Graduate)

 “What am I living for, if not for you?”

                                                    --Fred Jay and Art Harris (Song)

 

“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.”

                                                                                                --Vince Lombardi

“I put her on my plate, then I do the dishes.”

                                                           --Lil’ Wayne

“Hello cowgirl in the sand…”

                                                --Neil Young

 

“Ah beer, the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems.”

                                                                          --Homer Simpson

 

“God it’s so painful when something is so close, but still so far out of reach.”

                                                                                          --Tom Petty

 

“Hey Mr. DJ, I just wanna’ hear, some rhythm and blues music…on the radio”

                                                                                                            --Van Morrison

“I eat men like air.”

                                    --Sylvia Plath

 

“See that look in their eyes, Rock? You gotta get that

look back, Rock. Eye of the tiger, man.”

                                                --Apollo Creed, Rocky III

 

“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place.”

                                                                                                --Bob Dylan

“COOKIES!!! UMM-NUM-NUM-NUM-NUM”

                                                                        --Cookie Monster

 

“What they want, I don’t know, they’re all revved up and ready to go.”

                                                                                    --Ramones

 

Abandoned Quarry Seen from Below by John Lane

(c)Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews interviews John Lane here. 

Harold Bloom: Born to Teach [by David Lehman]

Word of Harold Bloom's forthcoming book -- on the King James Version, 500 years old in 2011 and still the best of Bibles  -- excites this reader as a volume from no other contemporary critic can do. Bloom's passion for literature, his love of it, is infectious and informs every page he writes. One feels, reading Bloom on great books, that if he couldn't write, he wouldn't live; that writing for Bloom is an extension of reading, and reading comes as close to living itself as any purely intellectual activity can do. Edmund Wilson wrote that Lenin identified himself with history but also identified history with himself, a very different thing. Substitute Bloom for Lenin and Literature for History in that formulation and it works as well. Bloom resembes the characters he likes the most: he has a Falstaffian appetite, a gargantuan grasp of literature, a prodigious memory worthy of "Funes the Memorious" in the story by Jorge Lus Borges; and he enjoys tilting quixotically at windmills, which he does with the requisite zeal and the gift for a memorable phrase. 

I'll have more to say on The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible, which Yale Universty Press will bring out in September. For the moment just a few thoughts about the title, both halves. The principal title is unusual because it echoes T. S. Eliot as much as Eliot's scriptual sources, an association one doesn't expect Bloom to pursue. But it's the subtitle that I especially like, for "appreciations" in the sense intended by Bloom as by Walter Pater before him is precisely what we need and do not get from the literary critics of our time. More power to him: the very word is anathema in academic circles.

I thought I'd take one of Harold's books off the shelf in the sun this afternoon, and it's How to Read and Why (1999), which contains commentary on stories, poems, novels, and plays -- enough to fuel the reading list for at least two seminars, though the book is meant to reflect, Bloom says, "reading as a solitary praxis, rather than as an educational ernterprise." The aim is the "restoration of reading," taking it back from the academics. The book begins with a credo in five principles, three derived from Emerson, one from Samuel Johnson, and one representing Bloom's own contribution. They are:

-- Clear your mind of cant (Samuel Johnson)
-- Do not attemt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. (Emerson)
-- A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. (Emerson and Wallace Stevens)
-- One must be an inventor to read well (Emerson)
-- The "recovery of the ironic" -- and here Bloom is at his most expansive. One senses that he hasn't said this before. Consider this short but rhetorically powerful clarifying passage and its unusually personal coloration:

<< Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says. But with this principle I am close to despair, since you can no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to become solitary. And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what has been civilized in our natures. >>

The introduction of Hamlet as the supreme exemplar of a man of irony gives us a working definition of irony and implicitly conveys the professor's abilty to understand Hamlet as a version of himself. There follows the unabashed note of the personal: "despair" -- and the surprise of a simile that obliges us to consider the "ironic" and the "solitary" as related states of mind and being. And then comes the twist ("and yet") that precedes the final blunt universal assertion, which manages to sound plausible and slightly outrageous at the same time. "The loss of irony is the death of reading." The syntax is that of Wallace Stevens, an old Bloom favorite, and the thought is an adaptation of a Stevens aphorism. But Bloom makes it his own. Here he is, two pages later, summing up:

<< Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas, even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that can be used for weighing and considering,and it very likely will be irony, even if many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you blaze forth as the scholar of one candle. >>

Bravo. -- DL

Roger Sedarat, Guest Blogger August 21 - 27

This week we welcome Roger Sedarat as our guest blogger.  Roger is the author of two poetry collections, Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP’s 2007 Hollis Summers’ Prize (David Lehman, judge), and Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011) as well as the academic study, New England Landscape History in American Poetry: A Lacanian View (Cambria, 2011). His translations of classical and modern Persian poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as World Literature Today, Drunken Boat, roger: an art and literary magazine, and Dirty Goat. He has received a St. Botolph Poetry Grant and scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Under the name of Haji, he performs poetry as well as translation, relating his hybrid Iranian-American identity to the politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program, as well as Poetics and Middle Eastern-American literature in the English department, at Queens College, City University of New York. Find out more about Roger here. 

-- sdh

"Lil' Wayne Writes Ghazals"--A 21st Century Introduction to a Classical Persian Form

“Lil’ Wayne writes ghazals.” This from Program Coordinator and poet Reynold Martin to the amazing group of teens doing spoken word (and so much more) at Urban Word as he introduced the workshop I gave on the ghazal a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to poets doing well with the form in English—especially the likes of Marilyn Hacker, Suzanne Gardinier, and the late Agha Shahid Ali—more often than not the form needs little introduction. Thankfully, it also lends itself to so much clever invention in our trans-cultural age that it spontaneously receives an introduction like the one from Reynold.  

One of the many classical masters from Iran aptly defined Persian verse by saying, “Poetry is in the rhyme.” That may sound a bit antiquated, even among contemporary  Iranian writers, who tend to break away from the established Persian form of the ghazal. Yet rhyme of course endures, insisting on making itself heard, whether in the original poems of Rumi and Hafez or the lyrics of Lil’ Wayne. In asking the teens at the workshop why rhyme keeps coming, and also what is it about rhyme for Rumi and others that inherently makes for us  a kind of spiritual connection, versions of the same response answered both questions. Basically, as they observed, it links what might not belong together, cleverly connecting as it helps us to remember.

I get the gist of Reyold’s comparison, but following the workshop I needed to explore it for myself. First, a very brief recap on the form of the ghazal. Sticklers will rightly get upset and say I’ve glossed too much here, but it’s a blog entry, for goodness sake. Rest assured, there are ample resources out there to better and further introduce the form. I’d say a good place to start is Shahid Ali’s introduction in his anthology: Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English. Anyway, here is a short overview, followed by a comparative analysis to Lil’ Wayne and others:

The ghazal is a poem comprised of autonomously closed couplets, wherein each stanza stands independently from others. A recurring rhyme followed by a repeated phrase concludes both lines of the first couplet as well as the second line of the remaining couplets. Typically, the convention calls for the poet or persona to include his or name in the concluding couplet. Emerging in 7^th Century Arabia, the form became especially well known through the 13th and 14th century verse of Persian poets such as Rumi and Hafez, making its way to later poets writing in Urdu such as Ghalib. It has been adopted by other poets writing in Hebrew, Turkish, German, Spanish, and English.

 To give an excellent example, here are a few lines from Shahid Ali’s poem, “Even the Rain,”

 Even the Rain

 by Agha Shahid Ali

 What will suffice for a true-love knot? Even the rain?

But he has bought grief's lottery, bought even the rain.

 

"our glosses / wanting in this world" "Can you remember?"

Anyone! "when we thought / the poets taught" even the rain?

 

After we died--That was it!--God left us in the dark.

And as we forgot the dark, we forgot even the rain.

 

Drought was over. Where was I? Drinks were on the house.

For mixers, my love, you'd poured--what?--even the rain.

 

The first couplet reproduces in both lines what the following couplets will copy only in the second line: the recurring rhyme followed by the word or phrase. In the last couplet, typically the poet mentions his or her name or a pseudonym as a kind of signature.

It’s worth noting that after Rumi met his esteemed teacher, Shams-y-Tabriz, who reoriented him in time and space (whirling him into a true poet as opposed to a mere learned academic), roughly ¾ of what he wrote was in this form. It’s also worth speculating why. Each couplet, unlike an entire western sonnet, coheres unto itself, remaining closed. You could scramble a given ghazal and get an interesting poem in flux, even as each couplet maintains its autonomy (which is why in the Urban Word workshop we could each write our own couplet and then make an entirely unified ghazal in a very random way that seemed to fit together as if by author intentionality).

 This obviously puts productive pressure on the form and specifically the rhyme + the recurring word, in a great way. One would, and should, have to read tomes like Annemarie Schimmel’s The Mystical Dimensions of Islam to fully appreciate how the philosophy of Sufi mysticism underpins this form and vice versa, creating a seemingly disjointed world that unexpectedly unifies through musicality of the form. And here is where English does fall short compared to Persian, Urdu, (and other languages I’m sure). In Iran, the form itself literally sings. I write now listening to Sufi music streaming on RadioDarvish.com, an internet site that serves as my kind of go to station for any kind of writing or translating. The great Mohammad Reza Shahjarian sings a ghazal by the 13th century classical Persian poet, Saadi. 

At the tomb of Hafez , the 14^th century master’s poetry is sung on loudspeakers.

 Translations by Marilyn Hacker and original English ghazals from Shahid Ali are about as good as examples one can get of the form in English. Add to this the introduction of supplementary music (which becomes integral thanks to the form, and the poetry itself) by Coleman Barks. Even so, the form, if only as analogy, can be compared to some masterful lyrical songwriting that uses the crux of such repetition.

 Before getting to Lil’ Wayne, consider another great songwriter (and no stranger to appropriation of middle-eastern mysticism) invested in similar repetitions, Bob Dylan. Here are a few couplets/lyrics from “Shelter from the Storm”:

I was burned out from exhaustion buried in the hail

Poisoned in the bushes and blown out on the trail

Hunted like a crocodile ravaged in the corn

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".

 

Suddenly I turned around and she was standing there

With silver bracelets on her wrists and flowers in her hair

She walked up to me so gracefully and took my crown of thorns

"Come in" she said

"I'll give you shelter from the storm".  

 Of course this is not a ghazal; it’s an American song, a very good one at that. But as a song, it embodies the spirit and, to a certain extent, the letter of the form . The last two lines work as an extended repeated phrase, while each third line varies the “orn” rhyme. In part, constructions like these enable Dylan to go the distance and branch out in so many interesting ways while returning to an inherently satisfying (and darkly spiritual) repetition.

To conclude with where we started (very much like a ghazal), Lil’ Wayne in his own way does indeed approximate the form as well. It’s too much to get into how deftly he puns to reinvent cliché, politically charge his own self-reinvention with humor, etc. Even so, at some point it’s really worth going into the kind of correspondence between his rhyme in this respect and the likes of Hafez. Like the latter, for Lil’ Wayne much of the poetry is indeed in the rhyme. Going back to Tha Carter II Album, consider these lines from “I’m a Dboy:”

 

Thinkin' of a masta plan

I get money but I'm thinkin of a fasta plan

I'm tryin' to cash it in

I got 5 in thet garbage can and the Wrap Saran

I need cash advance

See I know three sold

The other two a jam

I'm a sit on one and whip the other one much as I can

Hot ass fuckin sadan

Windows rolled down no sound

Them bricks got the speakers drowned

I ain't listenin for shit but sirens

I ain't tryin to get to my ships sunk fuck you pirates

I'll touch you cowards

It ain't nuthin to a boss

The niggaz in the hood tryina floss and ya head gotta cost nigga

Take a loss nigga

SS five five all black with the top chopped off dat

Catch me in the spots where the shots pop off at

I ain't tryin to prove nuttin I'm jus tryin to move somthin

 

[Chorus]

 I'm a d-boy

Bitch I'm a d-boy

Ho I'm a dough boy

I got the scope in the rope for them jackboys

I got money in my pocket

I got money in my block

I got the money in the power

 

Now, I know this is a stretch, and I’m getting myself in trouble (and Reynold along with me). All, or most any kind of pop song has a refrain, so how can one just say willy nilly chorus= repeated phrase? One can’t, unless the series of rhymes can be said to equal one long rhyme, and the rhyme functions at this level of musicality and inventiveness. We are at best still dealing with an analogy as opposed to an equation, but I’d maintain we are closer to the ghazal than may at first be realized.  

 

Legacy: The Marvelous Arithmetics of the Beautiful Needful Thing: by R. Erica Doyle

On this, the last day of my blogging here, I close at the open (hats off for recognizing my paraphrase):

 

You have enabled yourself to prove of incalculable aid to many, many women—not just today’s women, but women down the ages. You have always been a most important, most significant person, Audre. I am, have been, and always will be proud of you.

 

– Gwendolyn Brooks to Audre Lorde (Audre Lorde Papers, Spelman College Archives)

 

Eating my hybrid breakfast of mangu with Finney, I open Lorde’s The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance and throw the pages like the Ifa, the I Ching. What is she saying to this morning’s news?

 

 

 

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews interviews John Lane of the Hub City Writers Project

(photo (c) Les Butchart)

Ed note:  John Lane is a naturalist, author, professor of Environmental Literature and Creative Writing at Wofford College, and co-founder of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina

 

NA:  I first met you at a poetry reading back when you were a Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia.  Already an accomplished poet, I remember listening to you read the poem, “Quarries,” which beautifully articulates the poet’s need to look at the losses in the world, a poem I am happy to find in your new and wonderful collection, Abandoned Quarry.  The poem ends with the line: I longed to grow into a man and work/to quarry the emptiness outward/until all was level again.  I know it’s an odd question, but I’d love to know how you see your evolution as a poet?  How has your quarrying been?

 JL. Thank you Nin. That was I believe 1980. A long time ago. (It’s getting close to the time when “half a lifetime ago” isn’t just a figure of speech!) I’ve always loved that poem “Quarries,” which I wrote during my Hoyns Fellowship year in Charlottesville. It’s one I return to often when I want some sort of hard fix on what I want from my poetry. I’ve got a great story that goes with its republication in  Abandoned Quarry.  I was back in Charlottesville last fall as a visiting environmental writer at UVA’s Brown College and I had breakfast with Greg Orr, my mentor in whose workshop I wrote “Quarries” over 30 years ago. It was a very emotional visit for me—walking the Lawn and seeing old friends. It was one of the few times I’ve been back there since I left in 1981. As you know, lots of my changes were there, both good ones and bad. When I told Greg the name of the new & selected poems I had due out from Mercer University Press he picked up the reference to the old poem right away. “I can’t wait to read the poem called “Abandoned Quarry,” he said. I had to admit to him that I had not written a poem called “Abandoned Quarry,” and he said, “Well, get to it. You can’t call that collection ‘Abandoned Quarry’ unless there’s a poem to show why.” So that next day I wrote a first draft of the poem “Abandoned Quarry” in the Charlottesville airport on the notes app of my iphone! In a few days I sent it to Greg right and we “work shopped” the poem back and forth, and now I have that new echo poem to that one written over 30 years ago. Strangely enough, it was written in Charlottesville. So after 30 years of, as “Quarries,” says, “thick dust stirring, then slowly settling around me,” I’m still at it!

NA: I often think of you as a nature poet, recalling many of your poems that move gracefully from the natural to the personal, from the intimate to the infinite.  But you write other kinds of poems including your quirky and insightful dead father poems. I am not usually a fan of dead father poems, but yours I love.  They remind me of how the dead actually do continue to talk to us—in the most ordinary ways. I love how the dead father in the poems is cooking hash browns, gambling, telling you to change the oil in your car, etc. Can you talk a little about these poems?  Which poem was your first dead father poem?

JL:  Those are real ghost poems. I wrote the first one—“My Dead Father Dressing”-- at Interlochen Arts Academy in the winter of 1987 or ’88. I was there teaching as a poet in residence for a semester. I’d been out cross country skiing and I’d piled my wet clothes in the corner of my little room when I returned and then sat down to type at my computer. Out of the corner of my eye I had this funny little vision of my long dead father putting on my clothes. The spooky visitation only lasted for a few microseconds but in the midst of it I began typing this poem, “I see my dead father in the room…” A little background: a few weeks before at Christmas my mother had given me my father’s driver’s license. He’d died, a suicide, in 1959 when I was five years old. Well, when I looked at the license I noticed that my father was only 5’6”. I never knew that. I’m over 6’! Well, that I believe was the beginning of it in my unconscious. Fathers are supposed to be bigger than sons, and yet my father was a half a foot shorter. There also was the whole thing Donald Hall made famous among poets with his long poem “The Day I Was Older.” Will we live more years than our fathers were given? (Or our mothers?) Well, in 1987 I was 33 years old, and I knew my father took his own life when he was 44. Over the next ten years I wrote the rest of the poems that appeared in The Dead Father Poems, the beautiful letter pressed Horse & Buggy collection in ‘99. The last one in the collection (or section in the new & selected) is “My Dead Father Rebuilds My Engine,” where he rebuilds an old car in my yard and then “hands me the keys.” Very metaphoric! And I wrote that when I was approaching the age my father was when he died. It’s all about ambition (“a dream with a V-8 engine,” as Elvis said) and about my dead father giving me permission to go on without him. The last poem written though was the one called “My Dead Father Visits my Mother.” This poem was a request written for my friend, the poet Deno Trakas. He read the collection in draft and said, “You know what’s missing? He’s got to go over and visit your mother.” He was right and so I added that one in before it was published.

NA: I have been enjoying your two new books, Abandoned Quarry, and The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph, bending the pages of the poems and essays I like the best.  As I do this, I think of how authors often read the same pieces from their collections over and over again—when they give readings. I am wondering if you could name one or two of your favorite poems and essays to read aloud?

JL: It’s hard to decide. There are 107 poems in there written over a period of 33 years in the collection, so I could dip in almost anywhere. I have little colored markers on the ones I read a bunch. There’s “Quarries” and “Tony Dorsett and his Band,” from the early years, and I have to read “Sweet Tea” if I’m in the South (it’s become my “Sweet Baby James” here in South Carolina) and I like to read the “Certainty” section from the long poem “Against Information,” and I always read a “Dead Father Poem” or two, and the Mark O’Conner improvisation “Delta Morning Blues,” and of the new poems I’ve read “My Sister Cleans Out My Ears” several times, and “Cliffs of Moher” once or twice. With  The Best of the Kudzu Telegraph I like to always read “The Battle for Suger Tit,” and “The Not So Constant Gardner” and “Ode to a Truck” and “Whose Planet is it Anyway?”  I think those transcend the local and people seem to enjoy them all over, even above “the kudzu line.”

At Play in the Syllabic Fields of Alterity: Tamiko Beyer and Susana Baca: R. Erica Doyle

Tamiko Beyer is one of those poets I like to stalk.  And she is highly stalkable, appearing here and there, now in an anthology I’m judging, now at a conference, now participating in, organizing, or attending a reading, now in a link from a link of a link.  The plethora of journals in which she has appeared defy easy categorization.  Prolific and spread hydra-like about the poetasphere she floats, and I like to surf about, casting my net for her latest adventures, preferably while listening to Susana Baca.

Is it terribly vain to say that I first began to google her most regularly after once googling myself?  She’d done an analysis of a poem of mine at her Kenyon Review blog and was much smarter about it than I’d been in the actual making of it.  Before then, I knew who she was, didn’t everybody? She was everywhere, listening, making work, running workshops, and now I began her track her more closely. She left Brooklyn for St Louis, but came back soon, thank goodness, not that her work let up while she was away. Not that location much matters for someone who clearly lives in multiple dimensions. How else to explain how she writes so much and pops up in so many places? And works with so many different people, teaching workshops, students of different ages, collaborating with other artists, and writing about other writers.  I think there is more than one Tamiko, like right now I am looking for my favorite poem from bough breaks, her chapbook published earlier this year, and I can’t find it.  I think it might have been written in another dimension and left there.  It is a poem in multiple choice, smart and vulnerable and touching and I am really mad I can’t find it (but then again, my progressive lenses haven't come in yet).  Her poems are prose-y, and in case you haven’t noticed I have a prose-y preference. 

In her statement about her poems for Poets for Living Waters, she writes: “I want to know if/how my poetry can blur the boundaries between inside and outside (waters), enact the fluidity across the earth and between bodies. And always, I want to dissolve the separation of poet/citizen/activist. Can ((sub)alter(n)ed) language spur a rush, a flow to action? Claudia Rankine, paraphrasing Myung Mi Kim, says “what alerts, alters.” Alert alert alert.”

A: quoting Claudia Rankine paraphrasing Myung Mi Kim. Swoon.

Her new book, bough breaks, interrogates gender, motherhood, conception and circumscription (yes, I do mean the limits of a taxonomic group of organisms) across terrains and cities (New York, Honolulu, Tokyo), creating a diaspora of maternity, the inside-out of an always present code:

dear malarial mosquito-bitten arm dear burned dear earthquake rubble-crushed, I have no steady answers I wake up every single morning       dear corner drug deal, I have been around dear hunger after ten days dear shredded dear child soldier dear drive-by stray, you are the stuff of voices and I keep waking and you keep showing up and I keep showing up    dear repeated  gesture of  hand to open mouth again  and  again  I pretended not to see until the last day I gave a piece of fruit      dear abducted dear bloated belly dear cancerous marrow, some of us are brave and the question is which ones      dear taunted, the question is how would I protect you      dear institutional bed dear praying for his hand to stop dear rat-chewed ear, I keep waking you keep showing up how brave will we be   dear drunk before menstruation dear beaten nightly,

Creepily conscious and surprising, the voice in the poem implicates itself in the traffic of misery and hope. This poem both freaks me out and touches me. Alert.

Beyers' Kenyon Review blog is a rich compendium of thoughtful musings on everything from nature to the prison industrial complex to the Transgender Day of Remembrance, embodying both passion and compassion.  She just has a way of saying things about huge issues that we should be screaming about that don't make you feel yelled at, but like doing something.  On the Doveglion Press blog, Beyer writes compellingly of a "queer eco-poetics":

"A queer::eco::poetics rides the transformative power of the erotic while resisting and interrupting tired gendered portrayals of earth-mother-goddess nature. In a queer::eco::poetics gender and eros shift and transform continually. Sex and the erotic are integral to, but do not solely define, a queer::eco::poetics."

When she puts it that way, who can refuse to join the party?

B: Speaking of alterity, poetry, citizenry, motherhood and activism, just two weeks ago, Susana Baca, the other hero of our story, was made Minister of Culture of Peru, the first person of African descent to hold such a high post in the country.  About her latest album Afrodiaspora also released in 2011, Baca writes, “I have traveled to many places where Afro Descendants live in Latin America, many of them poor and forgotten places, neglected and excluded by governments where there is a social exclusion but at the same time I feel that they have a spiritual strength to express the African presence. So I try to sing songs from these places, even though I left out a lot. I celebrate the shared blood and the way that the African presence has influenced Latin America.” I always associate Baca with motherhood, perhaps because she looks like she could be my mother, or because my mother sang to me, or because the night I was at her concert in Lincoln Center was the night of the crisis that brought my adopted daughter to live with me.

Baca has recently begun collaborations with other Afrolatino artists, including poets and reggaeton's Calle 13. Here is one of her more traditional songs, "Valentin."

 

 

Here's to the poet/activist/citizen/mothers/trangressors/interdimensional travelers of the world. Pa'lante!

Be Transformed By the Renewing of Your Mind: Monica Hand, Nina Simone, Kalup Lindzy and Imaginary Social Worlds: R. Erica Doyle

I spent much of my early years in a neo-colonial, proto-feminist interior world, managing my various traumas by pretending I was a plucky, white British girl in a secret garden or boarding school lorded over by an evil school mistress or mean housekeeper, or, alternatively, an Elf, because who, really, wanted to be a Hobbit?

This is all, apparently, quite normal. John Caughey is an ethnographer whose seminal work, Imaginary Social Worlds, explains how the imaginary, internal experiences in which we spend most of our lives, both asleep and awake, enable us to negotiate culture and construct identities either in opposition to or in concert with external experiences. This was all explained to me in my almost 20 years ago by history professor Eva George, who not only taught me about her mentor’s work, but about viewership, and um, how to drive (I’m a New Yorker, people). 

Caughey is “particularly interested in how contemporary individuals handle multiple cultural traditions including how they simultaneously or alternatively construct senses of self out of diverse cultural models of race, gender, ethnicity, and personality.” In Monica Hand’s book forthcoming from Alice James Press,  me and Nina, we find this de/construction:

Eunice Waymon

my name an omen

my name sin

 

my name

my name a moan

 

Nina

Nina Simone

 

Disidentification, disembodiment and subsequent embodiment; the slipping into and out of the self that became the cultural icon;  reconstitution in the poetic form itself as each word of the poem is an anagram of “Eunice Waymon” (substituting “s” for the soft “c”), a nod to the anagrams in Terrance Hayes’ Hip Logic. (cover art above by the talented Krista Franklin)

Roadside Stand by Charles Simic

In the watermelon and corn season,
The earth is a paradise, the morning
Is a ripe plum or a plump tomato
We bite into as if it were the mouth of a lover.

Despite the puzzled face of the young fellow
In scarecrow overalls reading a comic book,
It’s all there, the bell peppers, the radishes,
Local blueberries and blackberries
That will stain our lips and tongue
As if we were freezing to death in the snow.

The kid is bored, or pretends to be,
While watching the woman pick up a melon
And press its rough skin against her cheek.
What makes people happy is a mystery,
He concludes as he busies himself
Straightening crumpled bills in a cigar box.

-- Charles Simic

But where are the postcards of summer?

In June, the Academy of American Poets mailed out blank postcards to poets asking them to fill out the space -- in any manner they wished -- at some time during the summer.

The results of this enjoyable experiment are in -- some of them at any rate -- and can be viewed here. The postcard is no longer a fact of daily life, no longer a routine means of communication, but it is gaining respect as a creative space, an invitation to blend language with image. To the right you see the high-spirited and very summery card sent by Sharon Olds on July 6. -- DL

Will Sinatra sue Frank McCourt the Bum?

According to the Los Angeles Times's Dodgers Blog, the Frank Sinatra estate, holders of five season tickets to Dodger games, may be among the ardent Dodger fans joining the legal dispute between putative owner Frank McCourt and the rest of humankind. McCourt's misdeeds need no rehearsing here. Suffice it to say that he has had a ruinous effect on a proud franchise and that it seems he would rather run it into the ground than surrender to the forces arrayed against him. These include destiny, major league baseball, angry creditors, embarrassed bankers, his soon-to-be-ex-wife and facsimile co-owner, the population of Los Angeles and environs, Dodger aficionadoes and and even bitter rivals. The well-named McCourt has made only the bankruptcy and divorce lawyers happy.

The LA Times article --"Dodgers bankruptcy: Frank McCourt vs. Frank Sinatra?" -- shows how a very little tidbit of news can go far thanks to the magic of names and an old-fashioned play on words, the journalistic equivalent of a rhyme: Ol' Blue Eyes bleeds Dodger Blue just as his old pal Tommy Lasorda does.

Frankly, my dear, I sort of give a damn.  -- DL

Sin Fronteras, I Share With You the Sky: R. Erica Doyle

Today I will share with you the sky, because I can.  In case you haven't noticed, I've got what someone in one of the many random books I've read called "lighthouse" focus.  I am constantly scanning back and forth. Some people have a laser focus.  That is not me. I do have a laser focused appetite, however. Once I ate only tortellini and ham for a month.

The sky has been doing some amazing things lately. I can't think about these rain clouds without thinking about the drought that Kimberly Alidio has been talking about in Texas, as well as their rolling blackouts.I can't think about the drought without thinking about the water crisis in the Southwest.  The Southwest makes me think of the Rio Grande Valley where some of my friends are teaching, and the Rio Grande Valley makes me think most of all of Gloria Anzaldua, editor with Cherrie Moraga of This Bridge Called My Back, a book that changed my life. Anzaldua died in 2004:

Dwelling in possibility with Bill Hayward at Apple/SoHo by Justin Taylor

bill hayward © saman giraud

  Did you know that there’s a theater on the second floor of the Apple Store in Soho? I confess that I did not. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever been on the second floor of said store until this past Monday (August 8) when I walked up the pale lucite steps (or whatever kind of steps they are) to take my place with the sixty or seventy other people who had come out for “Looking for Dragons,” the latest installment of the store’s Meet the Artist series. This night, the artist was my friend Bill Hayward, a passionate and relentlessly innovative photographer, painter, filmmaker, and choreographer.            

bill hayward and robert duvall © saman giraud

     Hayward began by showing his  portraits of musicians, politicians, artists, and actors—images first published in magazines such as Rolling Stone, Interview, and GQ.  Ronald Reagan, Bob Dylan, and Robert Duvall all made appearances. “He was a lot like the characters he played,” Hayward said of Duvall. Sonny Rollins popped onscreen, grinning and looking toward the ceiling, his sax cradled in one arm at his side. Later, a close-up of a cruel-eyed man who did not smile. “Anyone know who that is?” Hayward asked. “Anyone?” It was Roy Cohn, whose baleful legacy was cemented during the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s. 

bill haywawrd and sonny rollins© saman giraud

     Despite his success, Hayward told us he’d grown restive as a portrait photographer. “I can tell you how to sit and I can light you and dress you and make an image….but in the end it's not so much about you as what I did to you, and in the end I found the process hollow and unfulfilling.” He described  how his focus expanded from the face to include the whole body, in motion or at rest. He showed  photographs he’d manipulated in the dark room, or developed into prints and painted on, waxed, or changed by some other means. One particularly powerful piece (top) had begun life as a black and white close-up of a woman’s face that Hayward had shellacked directly onto a specially designed raw wood frame then driven through with screws and covered with in beeswax.

           Hayward shared several clips and stills from his current film project, Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, as well as a generous selection of images from his ongoing series “Portraits of the Collaborative Self,” for which Hayward reverses the usual relationship between the photographer and subject. Hayward’s subjects