The Best American Poetry

Bukowski [by David Lehman]

Many artists and writers gather their strength by opposing the established order, but sooner or later the successful ones are assimilated into the culture (Allen Ginsberg, the Beats, Black Mountain, San Francisco). Usually it happens belatedly but with hyperbolic claims as if to compensate for years of indifference or inattention. There are even times when the lag between rejection and celebration vanishes to nothing, as Gertrude Stein wrote in her brilliant lecture "Composition as Explanation." When the culture swallows the fashionable anti-establishment poetry of the moment, the result may be a mild case of indigestion. A good example is anti-war poetry of the 1960s, which was immediately accepted and glorified and is of absolutely no interest today.

The poet who has resisted assimilation longest and most strenuously is Charles Bukowski. Bukowski is the real thing, like Mexican Coke, a simile he would not have embraced, being a man who sets store by bourbon, whores with good legs, and the twenty-dollar window at the track. His poetry resists the mainstream as, say, even the radical Ginsberg of the 1950s doesn't.  Bukowski is as enamored of himself as anyone else but he takes himself less seriously as a literatus. He keeps his brain in the post office where he labors as one of the proles. This humility is one reason he appeals to readers, and he has genuine and ardent readers. Bukowski has long led the league in one important category: more of his books are stolen than those of any other author, an enviable distinction.

Read "The Continual Condiiton," the most recent of Bukowski's posthumour collections, and you will see how he manages to make the reader feel that what he is saying really happened and in just the way described. He uses his artistry to conceal his artistry. He depicts himself, in such poems as "Rejected" and "The Theory," as emphatically ugly -- and at the same time he insists upon his virility. In the former, an editor rejects a story on the grounds that "to infer that an ugly man your age / had sex with four women in one day / is simply infantile day-dreaming." So what does Buk do? He spends the rest of the poem fleshing out this very situation.

About poetry Marianne Moore wrote, "I, too, dislike it." Bukowski would revise that to read "I, too, shit on it." He had an outstanding bullshit detector, and his poems in scorn of the Beats and other celebrated authors (""Ginsberg was / brought in / petted and / dismissed. / Burroughs was / still o.k. / but hardly / interesting / anymore. / Mailer, well hell, / that's big publishing, and / Olson, you know, well, / those breath pauses were / out of date / but meeting him / was nice") are funny and, well, nice.

Bukowski's power lies in the fact that he acknoweldges he is no better than anyone else and yet he remains the hero of his own life. His poems seem raw but are tighty controlled and secretly much more in the know than you might think. (Li Po and Catullus make sneak appearances in "as Buddha smiles"). I intend to write more about this fascinating personage but for now will leave you with these lines, the opening lines of a poem, which will arrest your attention and won't let it go: "the god-damned ants have come marching here / and are climbing into my wine, / I drink them down." --  DL

Runnin' Down a Dream (by Damon McLaughlin)

The Chicago Marathon is just around the corner on October 9. My brother and his wife will be running it. I think they’re crazy. But, because my plans to hear Charles Alexander of Chax Press talk about Emily Dickinson last night fell through, I find myself thinking about running and not about Dickinson. I was thinking of writing about Carl Philips, Kay Ryan as inheritors of her poetics, of maybe linking that to last night’s aforementioned The Big Read kickoff, but alas. I’m thinking instead of marathons.

The closest I’ve come to running a marathon was this summer when I ran a half-marathon on the Douglas Springs Trail in Saguaro National Park. To the springs and back is just over 13.1 miles with a net elevation gain of over 2,000 feet. I was pretty impressed with myself. I got a Jamba Juice afterward.

But what I wish to say about it is that my brain did a strange thing during that run: it shut off. Usually when I’m jogging (a normal distance), my mind wanders all kinds of places, writes all sorts of incredibly, wonderful poems later to be forgotten, composes music, etc.—it’s a meditation (you can read a related article about exercise and creativity from the Creative Research Journal titled “Aerobic Exercise and Creative Potential: Immediate and Residual Effects” by going here http://www.ric.edu/faculty/dblanchette/exercisearticle.htm). But on that long run up to the springs and back, my brain more or less went silent. I remember thinking how weird it was. I was cognizant of the quiet…but couldn’t instigate thought much beyond the empirical observation of it—of its absence. And when I say thought—I truly mean thought. Other than thinking about placing my feet solidly on the trail, watching for rattlesnakes, and telling myself how much my legs didn’t burn or how thirsty I wasn’t feeling, I don’t remember thinking about much of anything. Certainly no incredibly, wonderful poems were being written. All my energy must have gone to my legs, leaving only that reptilian machinery of my brain fully functional.

Initially I was worried. Was my lack of mental music a sign of age? Was I out of practice? Had the physical demands of the run simply taxed more of the mind than usual, reappropriating available resources? That must be the case, I’m sure. Regardless, this experience has me wondering about the mind-body connection, about—specifically as a writer—how what I do on the corporeal end of things affects how I am on the cerebral end of things. It seems obvious that true physical demands can and will overtake those needs of the conscious, wandering mind, but I’m curious about more subtle activities, the small demands like eating and drinking that many of us—in a fit of writing—can take for granted and, thus, forget. At some point we meet them with a trip to the fridge or the grocery store or what-have-you (if you are a “starving” artist, I implore you to reassess your priorities), but is it possible such habits—such things as routine exercise, diet, routine sleep patterns, and so on—can affect not only our ability to imagine but also our ability to write? They must, but—I mean—what if there’s a recipe for good poetry, and it includes things like—50 sit-ups and push-ups daily, preferably before breakfast, which should be comprised of 1 mango and a cup of Greek yogurt, preferably with a drop of honey, and one 8 oz. cup of medium roast coffee, preferably a single-origin bean from Latin America, all of which should be consumed within 12-15 minutes for optimal imaginative prowess, and so on, and so on throughout the day, each ingredient and the ingredients in tandem resulting in a specific mental effect. What if—worse—that recipe is like a baking recipe, which can’t really be fiddled with or you’ll the ruin the cheesecake, the custard, what-have-you. I know there’s a growing science on creativity and on how genes and the environment interact and on how such interaction affects the brain. What if these researchers discover a formula for the muse? The diet-exercise plan for sonnets? The Shakespeare diet? The Billy Collins Diet? The Ashbery Plan? What if the success of your craft was as dependent on the other mental processes as it was on those related to poetry?

I guess the bottom line is that I know what my writing routine is—up before 4AM, write until the kids are awake or it’s time for work, squeeze in poetry (and other writing/reading) later when I can—and I know how exercise typically affects my brain in the immediate sense, which is positively, but I don’t know how the rest of my day impacts my creativity. And I’m not talking about the anomalies we can’t predict. I’m talking about the routines, the habits, the procedures we engage in daily, that we take for granted. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a daily-living coach out there who could align our habits with our ability to create—and not just create but create well? A coach who knew the equation to highly effective poetry writing with regard to physical activity, eating habits, driving habits, cell-phone etiquette, and so on? Then we could advocate good MFA programs—or at least quality MFA profs—for teaching their students how to live rather than how to write.

Or maybe the good ones already do that. I don’t know (I do know, actually). Currently it’s 5:09 AM, and my 16 month old boy with an ear infection is waking between his fits of cough. I sense a disturbance in the morning force. Time for that mango and cup of yogurt. And so on. And so on. Keep on trucking.

 

A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 3

photo (c) Robert Hatch Photography

(Ed. note:  This is the final installment of Brian Bouldrey's three-part interview with Jane Hirshfield occasioned by her just-released collection Come,Thief. Kevin Young selected Hirshfield's poem "The Cloudy Vase" for the Best American Poetry 2011. Go here for a schedule of Jane's upcoming readings. Go here for Part 1 of this interview and here for part 2.) 

Brian: I know you’ve been developing over the past couple of volumes something you call “pebbles," very short poems that seem influenced by both eastern and western traditions.  Can you describe the growth or emergence of the pebbles?

Jane: The first book I ever purchased, at age eight, was a Peter Pauper Press book of Japanese haiku. I co-translated (with the indispensable help of Mariko Aratani) both Japanese tanka poems (the 31-syllable form that preceded haiku), for The Ink Dark Moon (Vintage Classics, 1990), and more recently haiku, for The Heart of Haiku, an extended essay on Basho and haiku that was brought out earlier this summer as a Kindle Single. But for my own writing, as I said, I felt I needed to find my own form, rather than practice the traditional ones, and after a while I began to name them “pebbles” in my mind, taking the title from Zbigniew Herbert’s famous “Pebble.” They are not haiku, but they are short, slightly intransigent poems that require some response in the mind of the reader before they are finished—as Herbert describes his pebble as inescapably warmed by the hand that holds it. I became much more conscious of these very short poems’ nature and means after writing an essay about them, “Skipping Stones,” for Stephen Berg’s anthology, My Business is Circumference: Poets on Influence and Mastery (Paul Dry Books, 2001). In the book that followed, After (HarperCollins, 2006), I grouped a series under a kind of basket title “Seventeen Pebbles.” Each is meant to be read as an individual, free-standing poem, but putting them in a series seemed more polite to the trees, rather than have 17 pages of a book with only a few lines on each. There’s a similar series, “Fifteen Pebbles,” in Come, Thief. A pebble isn’t just a “short” poem, and while it resembles other brief poems, it’s not quite the same thing as an aphorism, a haiku, an epigram. They have their own flavor, for me. Here are two—

    Mountain and Mouse

Both move.

One only more slowly.

     Opening the Hand Between Here and Here

On the dark road, only the weight of the rope.

Yet the horse is there.

After I’d published After, someone told me that Herman Melville had written short poems he also referred to as “pebbles.” They were hard to find, and didn’t resemble mine much, but I was pleased to discover I shared something with the author of Moby Dick.

Brian: Poetry, for so much of human history, has covered all the modes—love letter, persuasive thinking, discourse, argument, storytelling—and in many ways, much of that variety has died off.  Not so for you: I feel as if there are all these things and more in your poems.  I’m especially enamored of the way you place story or tale or anecdote or fable into your poems, because, while these seem the realm of prose, they are decidedly poetry in your hands, even back to Of Gravity & Angels. I’ve memorized the encounter on the road between the messenger and Giotto, from “A Plenitude,” in  The October Palace.  Can you speak to your claims over storytelling within poems?

"A poem wants to tell something telling, wants the telling detail, wants the slip of incident that holds a world. It wants the 'tell' in poker: the gesture that reveals more than the player would choose to show, yet can’t quite conceal."

Jane: Well, that’s what I love about you as a reader, Brian—you see what’s actually there. No one has ever categorized me as a story-telling poet before now, I don’t think; they usually save that for the confessional, Southern, or narrative poets. But one reason for poetry’s existence is that it expands what’s possible to be said, what’s possible to be comprehended, and also expands the ways a person has of doing those things. Stories are part of that, and also the adjective “telling”—that holds some of the intention I think you’re seeing here. A poem wants to tell something telling, wants the telling detail, wants the slip of incident that holds a world. It wants the “tell” in poker: the gesture that reveals more than the player would choose to show, yet can’t quite conceal. You hear a story that feels “telling” in that way, or learn some fact that stays with you, and it waits for its poem the way certain seeds wait for a fire before they can germinate. “Heat and Desperation,” in Come, Thief, for instance, tells the story of the invention of the wildfire-fighting technique of backfiring by a smoke jumper caught in the 1923 Mann Gulch Fire. I read that poem up in the Yosemite Meadows Poetry Festival, and a Forest Service firefighter who was there asked for a copy to bring back to his crew—that was confirming. “Left-Handed Sugar,” right next to that one in the book, came straight from a scientific article. I just looked through Come, Thief, and you’re right, there’s a leaf litter of story running right through those poems. They often also point toward a narrative able to be intuited from behind what the poem explicitly offers—a technique that runs through the Japanese tanka poems but is rarer in the briefer haiku. I think, though, you were probably talking about “borrowed” stories in your question, stories that come from something I’ve heard or learned? The clearest example of that I can think of is one of the pebbles from After. Something I read reminded of a story from the history of Australia: when Captain Cook first arrived off the coast, the native people did not react at all to his ship. It was outside the conceivable, and so they simply did not see it. As soon as smaller ships were launched to bring sailors to shore, the aboriginal people responded with great alarm. I wrote down that story in four lines, I could feel the poem in it. But it wasn’t a poem yet—it was just an anecdote, or as you say, was prose, until I could find another pole of meaning to attach it to. A string hung from a post is just a string. Tie it to another pole, tighten it, and you have the beginning of something, depending on what it’s made of—a stand up bass, a tie-line for a horse, a telegraph wire. It becomes useful. So I wondered, what was the second post, what was the new use I was feeling in this story? I carried the question for days, and then, I thought—global warming. I have never understood how anyone could deny climate change and its disastrous consequences—don’t they have children, grandchildren? When I put this story next to it, I understood. And so the story turned into this:

      Global Warming

When his ship first came to Australia,

Cook wrote, the natives

continued fishing, without looking up.

Unable, it seems, to fear the too large to be comprehended.

The point of telling this at such length has something to do with my own relationship to stories in poems. A poem can be, as a whole, a single story—and I love many poems that are like that—but mostly mine use a story as one post for the string. And the string goes from post to post, a phone wire able to carry many stories, all of which lead toward something of ultimately untellable proportions.

Dine Out Irene: Sunday, September 25, 2011. Help our farms recover from Hurricane Irene

David and I rarely dine out, in part because in New York City even a casual meal in a neighborhood restaurant can be quite expensive but mostly because I like to cook. It helps that the availability of great ingredients, especially from farmers' markets, makes cooking at home a real pleasure. 

It's precisely because I love to cook that I'll be dining out this Sunday, September 25. Many of the farmers whose produce I love experienced devastating losses when Hurricane Irene tore through New York State. My good friend, the writer, editor, and Food Network program judge Gabriella Gershenson has spearheaded Dine Out Irene, an all-day fundraiser for which she and her colleagues have enlisted dozens of restaurants to donate up to 10% of their day's proceeds to organizations dedicated to helping farms get back on their feet. The list of participating establishments is long and growing and includes many of our finest restaurants. I'm having a hard time deciding where to go. Maybe it will be a three-meals-out day. Care to join me? 

Learn more about Dine Out Irene here. And make your reservations! 

-- sdh

A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 2

photo (c) Robert Hatch Photography

(Ed. note:  This is part two of Brian Bouldrey's three-part interview with Jane Hirshfield, occasioned by her just-released  collection  Come,Thief. Kevin Young selected Hirshfield's poem "The Cloudy Vase" for the Best American Poetry 2011.  Go here for a schedule of Jane's upcoming readings. Go here for Part 1 of this interview.) 

Brian: So much of the music, the poetry of your poems rises from the subject. I don’t know how often you are quizzed about prosody, but because the audience for Best American Poetry is made up of fellow poets, I wonder if we can talk a bit about form and meter and working in and around tradition. Perhaps we could start with an extreme—the prose poem “Left-Handed Sugar”, which does NOT have line endings.  What made you decide to make this a prose piece (I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s rainforest pieces)?

Jane: It’s a choice driven wholly by music, by tone. Prose poems for me arrive inside the music of “sentences” and “thinking,” rather than in the more lyrical music of “poetry.” Yet they’re still poems—so what’s there as a vessel to catch them is “prose poem.” I always know when I’m writing a prose poem from the first phrase—it comes in that set of sounds. “Left-Handed Sugar,” with its account of a failed experiment in engineering a new diet sugar, is funny; it’s also talky, prosaic. Any form, in poetry, is woven from a set of poetic conventions and expectations. Mostly they’re learned by experiencing other poems in the same form. You get a feel for prose poems the way you get a feel for how the hips move in salsa, by seeing and by doing.

I think of a poem’s physical unfolding on the page as a kind of musical notation system, a way to conduct tone, pace, and mood. Line breaks in free verse are sometimes difficult for people, because sometimes they are an eye-pause rather than an ear-pause, but they also fundamentally signal “Read this as a poem, that’s the kind of attention that’s here.” That’s why it matters that a prose poem is a prose poem—you read it differently than you would if it were simply another prose paragraph in the middle of a magazine article. It is, first, a poem. 

"A prose poem arrives inside the music of thinking."

Brian: What other elements of form—meter (or rhythm, meter’s prosaic cousin), rhyme, stanzas, figures of repetition—have you been playing with here in “Come, Thief?”
 
Jane: In any poem, there’s always some formal, musical mandate—sound awareness conveys feeling and intelligence, and also evokes them. Awareness of music catalyzes increased reach—you feel more, you think things you wouldn’t otherwise find. Poetry, someone once said, is “thinking with the whole body.” There are some poems in this new book in which prosody is more heightened. They’re in what I think of as “wandering rhyme”— rhymed poems, but not regularly rhymed. Though no one has yet invited me into a New Formalist anthology, I’ve done this kind of poem in each of my books, from the beginning. Just as a prose poem arrives inside the music of thinking, the wandering-rhyme poems arrive in a carriage pulled by the horses of sound—the music is their First Cause, so to speak. This is true of “A Thought,” “Suitcase,” “It Must Be Leaves,” “Three-Legged Blues,” “Pompeii,” “One Loss Folds Itself Inside Another,” “I Ran Out Naked in the Sun”—a whole run of the poems that come late in the book are rhyme-made… I put them together partly to give the reader more of a chance to notice. Formal, rhymed, “traditional” poems are closer to “experimental” poetry than they are to free verse, you know—closer, that is, to poems with Dada-ist roots, or poems that have been run through a specific instrument of accident or distortion. In both traditional form and, say, poems whose cut up lines have been pulled from a hat, what’s said is the result of some accidental, outer introduction. What could be more arbitrary, really, than looking for a word that sounds like “beach” or “frustrate,” and then saying something that’s been magnetized by the coincidence of consonants and vowels? 

Brian: One poem in the book stands out here, because it’s written in a traditional form—“A Hand Is Shaped for What It Holds or Makes.” Can you talk about that one?

Jane: Every poem I write bows toward prosody, one way or another, even if it’s the faintest slap of water against the hull of a boat. If the ear and breathing aren’t awake and engaged, for me, it’s not a poem, it’s just jottings. I don’t know quite why certain poems take that on more strongly, but it does seem to me that certain forms are engines for certain kinds of thought and feeling. There are three villanelles I’ve long loved—Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.” Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.” It seems to me a form not to enter into lightly or arbitrarily; you have to wait for something that requires this particular pattern of return and discovery to work itself through. This poem did that—it arrived inside villanelle’s music, and the music then shaped what it went on to become. It is, you probably noticed, a loosened and skewed villanelle—only the last words of the line repeat exactly, not the full lines, and one stanza has an extra 2/3rds of a line tucked in. But every departure from strictness in the poem is there for a reason, and I was aware of those reasons even while writing the first draft. The over-running line is about a former love’s face: “the lines have ranged, but not the cheek’s strong bone.” It does what it speaks of, ranging, while under it, the form keeps its structure.

      A Hand Is Shaped For What It Holds Or Makes

A hand is shaped for what it holds or makes.
Time takes what’s handed to it then—warm bread, a stone,
a child whose fingers touch the page to keep her place.

Beloved, grown old separately, your face
shows me the changes on my own.
I see the histories it holds, the argument it makes

against the thresh of trees, the racing clouds, the race
 of birds and sky birds always lose:
            the lines have ranged, but not the cheek’s strong bone.
My fingers touching there recall that place.

Once we were one. Then what time did, and hands, erased
us from the future we had owned.
For some, the future holds what hands release, not make.

We made a bridge. We walked it. Laced
night’s sounds with passion.
Owls’ pennywhistles, after, took our place.

Wasps leave their nest. Wind takes the papery case.
Our wooden house, less easily undone,
now houses others. A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.
I make these words for what they can’t replace.

Brian: I am mindful, with every conversation you and I have, of the poets you admire and call into the conversation—your recommendations have always sent me running to the shelves (Richard Wilbur, Kay Ryan, long before she became widely known, etc.) Are there poets that have influenced your writing—and perhaps more dangerous a question, are there poets that you feel you had to write yourself out from under the influence?

Jane: I am utterly promiscuous in my loves, a sponge for so many influences it’s almost impossible to name them. Not just the usual American and English and Irish influences, though all the obvious ones are in me, not only the Western and Eastern classics, from Horace and Li Po to the more modern “classic” international writers like Pessoa, Cavafy, Milosz, Neruda, Borges, and Szymborska. But I might fall in love with one poem by a Dutch poet I’ve not otherwise heard of, and three years later write a poem that carries that poet’s fingerprint. I might fall in love with a medieval Sanskrit poem of erotic courtship. The one influence I have actively skirted is at the same time one of the strongest in my development—the strength is why I had to be wary not to fall entirely under the spell: traditional Japanese poetic forms. These poems shaped my sense of poetry from the start, but I’ve felt a kind of taboo about writing in their exact modes. I also avoided writing in the style of San Francisco poetry that was prevalent when I first moved West, in 1974—I didn’t want to imitate the Beat poets, or take on the coloration of the local scene, though I love and learned from what they did to break open the possibilities of how Americans write. Years later, I learned this was Basho’s advice to his students: “Don’t imitate me, don’t be the second half of a cut melon.” He also quoted a much earlier Japanese poet, Kukai: “Don’t settle for what the old masters found, seek what they sought.” 

Part 3

This Just In . . . Distressed Nation Turns to Poet Laureate for Solace

FRESNO, CA—Struggling through difficult times marked by war, economic despair, and political turmoil, the nation turned en masse this week to its newly appointed poet laureate, seeking solace in his words as so many generations of Americans have before in the words of laureates past.

Despondent citizens from across the country began gathering this weekend outside the Fresno home of 83-year-old Philip Levine, the California State University professor and poet who in less than two weeks will assume the widely celebrated title, beginning a yearlong term in which all Americans will turn their gaze upon him in search of hope and guidance.

continue reading here.  

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender, goes to Kenya

What am I doing in January, you ask? Why, I'm teaching a poetry workshop in Kenya. As Robert Frost, who clearly did not have my good fortune, would say, you come, too! The dates are January 2-11, 2012, and the trip is offered though the MFA in Creative Writing program at Stony Brook Southampton. That means you can take this trip for credit. You can also apply as a curious outsider. The idea here is to gather an ecclectic bunch, including creative minds in fields other than poetry, to write some poems, learn a little Swahili, take a few field trips and hang out with very interesting people (more on the full cast of characters to come).

Most of your ten days will be spent at the Turkana Basin, a mecca for fossil-seeking types in the northern part of Kenya. Situated on the banks of the Turkwel River, on the west side of the Lake Turkana, the Turkana Basin Institute was founded by world renowned paleoanthropologists Richard and Meave Leakey as the preeminent facility to study the origins of modern man. The institute is affiliated with Stony Brook. With 7 million years of fossil record under your feet, channeling the human experience has never been so visceral. The terrain is extraordinary. The energy of neighboring villages is a far cry from the tourist traps of southern Kenya. Turkana is an isolated oasis where culture, creativity and life converge.

Plus Richard Leakey will be there and has promised a talk on the evolution of language. Other faculty from my program--in creative writing, theater, film and visual arts--will be there too, mostly so that they can brag about swimming in the Turkwel River. While in Nairobi, our point of departure, we'll take a day safari to Nairobi National Park.

The poetry workshop will focus on strategies that came to us through the oral tradition. We'll attend to the sounds a poem makes, and explore the connections between sound and memory, aiming for an unforgettable experience.

Eating, sleeping and cocktails are included in the package. Warning: while the food's excellent and the accommodations perfectly adequate, there's no air conditioning and it is HOT there. This is not for the delicate of constitution, nor is it for strict vegetarians. But if the adorable Richard Leakey can do it, so can you.

And how much does this cost? The Curious Outsider rate is $2,930.00 and includes 2 nights in Nairobi, the safari, the round trip flight from Nairobi to Turkana Basin, 8 nights at the Institute, excursions to an archeological site (i.e., time travel to 5 million years ago) and to Elive Springs, and cultural exchanges with neighboring Turkana villages. To get graduate-level credit for the Turkana Basin Writing Workshops, you will need $3,422.00 if you are studying in the fine state of New York or $4,208 if you're not. Again, the dates for this extravaganza are January 2-11, 2012.

 

A Conversation between Brian Bouldrey & Jane Hirshfield, Pt. 1

(Ed. note:  This is the first installment of Brian Bouldrey's three-part interview with Jane Hirshfield, occasioned by her just-released collection Come,Thief. The remaining installments will appear over the next few days. Kevin Young selected Hirshfield's poem "The Cloudy Vase" for the Best American Poetry 2011.  Go here for a schedule of Jane's upcoming readings. I wish to thank Nick Shapland, our editorial intern, for his help with editing and formatting this post.sdh)

There is something selfish I experience in reading a Jane Hirshfield poem, because the thoughts, the music, and the emotions seem familiar, even specific. My God, I’ll gasp, she’s writing about me! And while I feel selfish, Hirshfield is nothing but generous. In her new collection, Come, Thief, out this month from Knopf, there are over a hundred poems with at least a dozen gifts to find in each; you do the math.  For Hirshfield readers, this collection is both more of what you love (who among us doesn’t have a favorite, yellowed and curling, stuck behind a magnet to the refrigerator?) and a new exploration of what it means to live a whole life. These are songs of innocence and experience, and time, time, time is of the essence. I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jane, public treasure and private friend, to talk about her work, both new and old. 

Brian: It only seems like yesterday that I met you, Jane, in the woods at Yaddo, in 1987.  Of Gravity & Angels hadn’t yet even been published!  I’ve read every book since.  There are books of yours I love so much that I’ve dog-eared the pages and underlined things and…well, you get the picture.  Your poems are the sort that become part of living, because they are about living. I think it was The Hungry Mind Review that commented: “These are poems for people who have lived a little, that is to say, a lot.”

Jane: I’m amazed that you remember, Brian. Kathleen Norris wrote that, about my third book, The October Palace. Yaddo is a big presence in that book, you know. The cover is a snapshot of the old stone ice-house tower, reflected in a lake with floating autumn leaves. One allusion behind the title is the Russian “Winter Palace,” but another’s the trope of the house with many rooms and what that means: many ways of being, many attitudes, all possible, all acknowledged. The kind of generous breathing space we mean when we say “roomy.” I’d never lived in a house as many-roomed as at Yaddo, and that was just West House, a mere eighteen rooms, not the Mansion. Still, it felt palatial—which to my particular psyche has less to do with power or hierarchy than with ideas of the infinite and various, and of saturation with interesting detail. A palace’s broom closet’s doorknob is interesting. What should we do with these human lives of ours except go into as many rooms as we can? I’ve always wanted to escape truncation and tameness. Even during the times when my life has looked rather astringent and simplified from the outside, it’s been simplified within the intentions of unshackling.

  "I do think it’s central, that all good poems are out of hand and ungraspable, in some way or other."

Brian: Well, Come, Thief, is no exception—there are so many experiences written about and written to in here: weddings, deaths, lost loves, beginnings and endings.  In certain ways your life is an open book of poems here.  I would never call you a “confessional” poet, but it’s clear that you, like the perfect reader of your poems, have lived a little, that you have a real zest for living. And the metaphors, the music, the experience all seem to rise up out of the evidence, the things.

Jane: I’ve always loved George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s book, Metaphors We Live By, because it makes so clear that we think with and inside the body. The most abstract language has in its taproot the pull of the tongue, etymologically—the word “abstract” holds the idea of traction, the word “language” holds the Latin for tongue. “Idea” has its roots in the Greek idein, physical seeing; “comprehension” carries the felt grasp of the hand. We are animals, and our understanding occurs in the body, in a physical world where objects, thought, feeling, experience coexist as a multicolored, spinning, molecular tangle.We understand that spinning yarn by picking it up, sometimes batting it around like a cat, for sheer pleasure, sometimes taking a crochet hook and making a hat or scarf, sometimes bundling it into a pillow or blanket. You can take a pair of scissors to the tangle for an instant—but it’s still yarn, dyed from the wool of living sheep or spun from man-made fibers that began as petroleum, that is, from something taken from the earth that once lived, hungered, listened. And isn’t it kind of strange and wonderful that the word “yarn” came to mean “story”? That in itself says a lot. How did that happen? As for the open-book of my work, a poem is always personal, for me. Any poem comes from some question, pressure, fracture, tear in my life. I do, though, write more at the level of x-ray than of nude. You can see the circumstance but not the facts. In this book, there’s that one poem where I’m running around outside naked... But never mind. That’s an exception.

Brian: I am sure you have been questioned to death about the Eastern traditions that have influenced your poetry over the years, because of your long connection to Buddhism but also because of the translations you’ve done (The Ink Dark Moon, etc.). I thought I might ask instead how the Western traditions have influenced your work. The Catholic convert, G.K. Chesterton, observes in “Orthodoxy”, that the symbols of Western religion (the Star of David, the crucifix) are made of paradox and contradiction, as lines cross each other in opposition, while the symbols of Hinduism and Buddhism are symbols of harmony.  In your poetry there is definitely that paradox and contradiction that pleases my Western mind, I must admit—how beauty can rise from sadness and loss, how there is a darkness to summer light, how “Everything Has Two Endings”— the title of one of the new poems. Care to say something to this?

Jane: Well, I was born on East 20^th St. in New York. I’m a product of the West. A great-great grandfather served as a rabbi in the Civil War. But I tend to think of these things as far more mixed than not. Judeo-Christianity comes after all from a place of many crossroads, the Middle East.

Form for Thought (by Damon McLaughlin)

In his initial discussion of tone languages in Music, Language, and the Brain, Aniriddh D. Patel writes briefly of the Chinantec, an indigenous people of southern Mexico, who utilize a whistled speech in addition to their tonal, spoken word. They use whistle combinations “of tone and stress distinctions to communicate messages with minimal ambiguity.” And he’s not talking about a hey! or an over here! or some ridiculous catcall. He’s suggesting they actually have a whistle language. Patel quotes D.P. Foris, a linguist who has studied the Chinantec:

Virtually anything that can be expressed by speech can be communicated by whistling [by the Chinantec]. The most complex example that I had interpreted for me was on the occasion that the supply plane was due to come in. Because of heavy rains, I checked the dirt airstrip for erosion and saw that it needed extensive repairs. I went to the town president and explained the need for immediate repairs, a job that was the responsibility of the town police in those days. The town is set in a horseshoe-shaped hillside; his house is at one end of the “arm,” with the town hall at the centre, about 1/2 a kilometer away. He put his fingers in his mouth and whistled to get their attention. They responded that they were listening, and he whistled a long message. I asked for the interpretation, which he gave as the following: “The plane will be here soon. The airstrip needs to be repaired. Get the picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows and fix it right away."

If what Foris claims is true, then this Chinantec whistling business is insane. It makes me believe there’s a whole other realm—other realms—of word out there. Speaking in whistle? Please. A talking drum is crazy enough—but whistling? What else am I missing out on?

This just in from Lisa Vihos. . .

100 Thousand Poets for Change Organizes Largest Poetry Event in History

600 events in 450 cities and 95 countries will take place on September 24 to promote environmental, social, and political change. Poets, writers, and artists will create, perform and demonstrate in their communities, and decide their own specific area of focus for change within the framework of peace and sustainability. Go here to read what next week's guest blogger, poet Lisa Vihos, has to say about how the event is shaping up in Wisconsin.

Cameron Scott asks, What's with the Self? (by Damon McLaughlin)

A few days ago, poet Cameron Scott sent out an email that asked “What role should ‘the self’ play in a poem? In other words should a poem be about the self as little as possible, or what the heck, it’s all about me?” He’s a contributing editor for CheekTeeth, the blog for Trachodon Magazine, and is looking to incorporates responses into a future post. With his permission, I asked that I respond here at Best American Poetry.

And this is what I have to say. In some ways, I feel like the issue is moot, yet it must be essential to the human (thinking) condition because it’s been a recurring issue in Western thought at least since Plato. His viewpoint was based in his theory of essential forms, the human soul (as opposed to self) a complex form comprised of a rational, spirited, and bodily element. Plato’s version of the soul as an essential form, and therefore separate from the body, is in part the root of what later becomes the ghost in the machine, as coined by Ryle in the last century, as conceived by Descartes in the 1600s. Aristotle, in contrast, argued the human soul was not separate from the body but rather more like an oak is to its acorn, that essential (Platonic) form is the purpose that the matter serves, a being-thing the result of a unity of its form and matter (in poetry, its form and content?). I see this viewpoint evolving into more of the blank slate theory of self, traced to Locke in the 1600s.

In more recent times, we have social constructionism and essentialism—constructionism, I think, currently winning the battle. In modern and contemporary poetry, we see this battle being waged across the field of the last century with the relative fall of received forms and the greater reception (that’s not the best way to put any of this…) of avant-garde forms. Tony Hoagland sort of follows this trajectory in his recent article on the New York School in The Writer’s Chronicle. To bring it back to Cameron Scott’s opening inquiry, we see the “role of self,” at one extreme with the Confessionalists and at another with language poets and those whose fragmented, distracted poems leave the construction of the self, speaker, etc. up to the best guesses of their readers. I like Hoagland’s ending comment in the Chronicle about it: “If the Confessionals shrank the compass of our poetry to a narcissistic focus on the personal…. The hapless, wonky, distracted poems of the moment evade the whole issue.”

To more directly respond to Scott’s question, then, and with all of the above in mind, I tend to think of my “self” as an innate effect of the physiology that produces it (me), of the experience that helps shape and build the genetic blueprint for said physiology. I certainly don’t believe in the blank slate, a theory that can deny human nature, but I don’t buy theories of essentialism either. I like how Stephen Pinker puts it in The Blank Slate: “If thought and action are products of the physical activity of the brain, and if thought and action can be affected by experience, then experience has to leave a trace in the physical structure of the brain.” Seems to be common sense, really.

As far as poetry is concerned, the presence of a “self” is undeniable. Do our best to fragment it, to distract it, to break it apart at the fundamentals of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, every poem is a fundamental, inherent production and promotion of self. It may be many other things, of course—including the negation of self and the inclusion of multiple selves—but there it is, nevertheless. I think it’s an element better aligned to voice, perhaps, than to subject matter. Maybe we can even begin saying of writers early in their careers—she has found her self rather than she has found her voice.

Accordingly, the self’s role is more an issue of process and craft than of subject matter—or should be. It seems to me that many nascent poets begin with self as subject matter but move farther from it and closer to poetry as their careers evolve, as craft elements and the nature of art take precedence over the me-me-oh-suffering-me mentality of many teenaged beginners. Even Plath, the most confessional of Confessionals speaks to this end when she says (thanks to Cate Marvin for the quote), “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.”

I like to apply what Jerry Garcia said about soloing to the role of self. In a Garcia interview I read, he said that he built his solos by knowing the melody of the tune, then either by playing toward it or by playing against it. That seems to me a relevant analogy since I think not knowing how the self figures into the poem can be detrimental, resulting in lapses of sentimentality and sloppiness, a poor ear for the timbre of the poem, much like not knowing a tune’s melody can result in a solo with poor phrasing and timing.

I don’t know that any of this addresses Scott’s email in a way he finds useful, but I’m out of time. Your input is welcome.

 

Oysters, Pure and Simple (by Damon McLaughlin)

When my mother and I were recently, briefly in Boston, she wouldn’t try oysters. We’d been in New Hampshire at Toad Hall (see previous post), and that day Legal Harborside was our final destination before we headed out. We had just enough time for lunch before returning our rental car and catching our planes.

Like my mother, I too had never tried oysters before Legal, but with rare exception I am a seafood lover and always have been. When I was a kid, I once ate some 30 individual pieces of fish at a fish fry: bluegill, crappie, walleye, bullhead—whatever the catch had been from local ponds and the Mississippi, which was just down the road. Oh, my love for fish! Such gorging made me sick, to tell the truth, but after a year or so I was back on track as a fish loving fool.

Then there was the night I kicked this lopped-off, gray-brown catfish head the size of a softball. One of the dogs must have it hauled out of the neighbor’s garbage, and I—a good-natured, pre-adolescent boy—gave that sucker a swiftly running thwack! Only instead of a thwack! it was more of a spluuuugh . . . as my foot swept through that mushy head like it was rice pudding—all those fly babies staring up with disgust, that decomposing fish smell swimming into my nose even now, many years later as I recount the event.

Thank You, Brenda Hillman (Damon McLaughlin)

I was listening to a lecture at the Poetry Foundation the other day when I jotted down this little Brenda Hillman tidbit: “For the lover of poetry, there is a disequilibrium between himself and the world that nothing satisfies but poetry.” For one of my posts here, I was going to write about the manic state, itself an imbalance, into which poetry can thrust me, the effects of such a state, and to discuss that state in terms of writer’s process. Then I heard Hillman and was like—that’s it, that’s what I was hoping to say. My wife, who is not a lover of poetry, agrees with Hillman’s declaration—at least for the strange case of her husband. At her gentlest, she says I’m in my head; at her most honest, she says I’m not living in reality. But I doubt that’s the case, right?

Disequilibrium…hmmm, yes. The problem is—poetry, more often the writing than the reading of it, leaves me deranged. I get writer’s high, float around in a cloud of chemical happiness for hours to days, and do my best to interact with others, namely my wife and children, who will say I do not always succeed, and to remember routine things like eating and showering—well, using soap while showering. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve taken a shower in the wrong mental place and forgotten to use soap, etc. It’s embarrassing.

Damon McLaughlin, guest blogger September 18-24

Damon McLaughlin lives in Tucson, Arizona where he helps adults earn a GED by day and fronts the rock band Red Star Rebellion by night. His poems appear widely in print and in online journals as well as in several anthologies including Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America and the Best New Poets series. His chapbook Olduvai Theory won the 2011 Toad Hall Press Chapbook Prize; other honors include The Davis Demitasse Poetry Prize, the Briar Cliff Review Poetry Prize, a Pushcart nomination, and other such finalist-type honors. He maintains a blog here.  His full length collection is Exchanging Lives (The Backwaters Press, 2008).

Welcome, Damon. 

In other news . . .

Thursday, September 22, 2011- The Best American Poetry 2011 Launch Reading. 7 PM, Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street, NYC) Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Kevin Young will be joined by John Ashbery, Cara Benson, Michael Cirelli, Michael Dickman, Farrah Field, Major Jackson, Jennifer L. Knox,Katha Pollitt, James Richardson, Patricia Smith, Gerald Stern, Bianca Stone, Mark Strand, and Lee Upton. 

Aggressive Swans and 'Squirtier Turkey Basters': Reports from Two Readings in Atlanta by Daniel Nester

 

Greetings from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where I am waiting for my flight to the Motor City, where I will connect to my flight home to Albany International Airport, where I will be picked up by my lovely wife and little daughters.

I’ve been on a mini-tour of Atlanta and Morrow, GA. Wednesday night, I was at Clayton State University, at a series hosted by Brigitte Byrd, who was a lovely host.

I got a hold of Byrd's latest book, Song of a Living Room, published by the mighty Ahsata Press. The collection of superb prose poems leaps from folk tales to bedtime stories to semi-autobiographical meditations on language and writing (originally from France, she peppers some pieces with full sentences in her native tongue), and general alchemic ratatouille of what she calls “lyric occupation.”

I read some new memoir stuff I’ve been working on in my sabbatical year, including, as an audible at the line of scrimmage, the tale of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s visit to my hometown of Maple Shade, NJ. Before I read, I was told the lake in Clayton hosts two "aggressive swans" (one is pictured above), which made me giggle. I suggested that if Clayton decides to have a football team, that should be their name, shortened to "Agswanns" or something. 

Brigitte and her companion Scott treated me to supper last night. We sat outside, where it was a “chilly” 64 degrees. I could get used to such chilliness, certainly in the months to come in Upstate New York.

The evening before that, I read in Bruce Covey’s What’s New in Poetry series with two better craftspeople than I: Matt Henriksen and Lee Ann Roripaugh.  I’d met both poets in the past, mostly at AWP-type clustereffs, but had not heard either read their work.

Roripaugh read from published and newer poems, including one in Spam form that had this listener in stitches. Her mention of a “squirtier turkey baster” alone made it worth the price of admission. She also read a list of “squalid things,” an imitation-homage of/to Sei Shōnagon’s pillowbook.

Henriksen read from his most recent book, Ordinary Sun, a mix of prophetic and twangy poems. It was great to hear the poems in his own voice. He also read and talked about a special section he edited for Fulcum: An Annual Poetry and Aesthetics dedicated to the late poet Frank Stanford. Henriksen provides notes towards a biography, twenty unpublished or uncollected poems, fiction and correspondence. It's fascinating stuff. He was kind enough to give me a copy and I’ll continue to read it on the flight today.

Bruce Covey was a great host, and accompanying him was Gina Myers, new to Atlanta from Saginaw, Michigan, as well as a couple Emory University creative writing fellows. As readers of the BAP Blog know, Covey a super poet—a unique meld of experimental methods with and humor and precise feeling. He’s put together a nice series at Emory, which you should go to for sure.

OK. Well, that’s the news from the airport. Hope to see you soon.

 

 

One poor corr. plus two, two, hard two find, equals seven [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I've been 1 poor correspondant and I been 2, 2 hard 2 find, but that don't mean that you ain't been on my mind. Everyblogger flaggs in her faithful log flogging eventually or now and again, but in this case it was deeply work specific. There was something I needed to get done and in order to do it I had to stop chatting at the secret societies. You are one of my least and therefore most secret society, I've hidden you in plain sight. So this is what I wrote to you around this time in 2009 (slightly tweeked).

My dearest Bleaders,

Today is the kind of day the word susurration was born to serve.  The trees out my window are full of dry leaves and seed pods and the wind is blowing around the bower.  A visiting longhaired cat is glowering at big leaves bumping around with the breeze, and a lone last pepper dipping on its branch like a grounded fledgling flitting around. Riveting programing.

It is reasonable to be seasonably sensible to Keats, at least so much as to respond to the need for an inner struggle to take place in a physical space and that space to be a stubbled field after harvest.

But are we bird, or leaf, or cat?  Real or imaginary?  I'm the pepper, you're the cat.  Sadly, there is no bird. There is a mansion in Asia Minor in which each room is a poem. In the parlor, women come and go talking of Michelangelo, in the kitchen there are cold plums, in one bedroom a girl slumbers in the curve of a colossal marble ear, in another a beauty marries the bed. Out front there is a beak in a heart and a form on a door. Out back is the newly shorn staffs of wheat and corn.  And there we are, on a picnic blanket, not forlorn but arguing with our actual demons who are plump and angry and we are grotesque but they are getting tired, even of us.  Let's just try to hold on and see what happens after dark.

love,

Jennifer

 

Spin; or Investigation of a Curious Cherry Tree [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Learning the Alphabet by Amy McDaniel

First, an explanation: My name is Amy McDaniel, and it has been a month since Stacey graciously introduced me (scroll down to "In other news") as a new guest blogger. As she mentions, I will be writing from time to time from Bangladesh, where I have just begun teaching a poetry workshop and a food & fiction class at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong. I've spent the intervening month recovering from some kind of tropical stomach virus and filling out maintenance request forms to secure a working kitchen drain and reliable electricity.

But during my first week here, in the first blush of novelty, before the culture (and digestive) shock set in and when every small errand was still an adventure, I began learning the alphabet. The Bengali one. 

The last time I learned to write an alphabet -- the Latin one -- was also the first. I don't remember it, but I do remember learning to write numbers. I was four; my family had just moved from Charlotte to Atlanta and we were living in an apartment while my parents house-hunted. One morning, my mother and I sat at the kitchen table and I pushed a fat crayon over the dotted lines she marked. I had little faith that I'd ever form these strange shapes with a free hand. This wasn't like drawing pictures, which translates the visual to the visual. Nothing about the symbols for numbers or letters evokes their sound or meaning. 2 and 5 vexed me particularly, with the way their curves hastily became angles.

2 and 5. 25. 25 years have passed since I learned new symbols for sounds. Many of the sounds, too, are brand new for me. Unaspirated t's. Extra-aspirated d's. Chchh's. Ksm's and Ntb's.

A Poetics Prosody Commonplace Post by Daniel Nester

-- Eleanor Berry, "The Free Verse Spectrum"

 

"I know some will say it is a mingled language. And why not so much the better, taking the best of both the other? Another will say it wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wanteth not grammar. For grammar it might have, but it needs it not; being so easy in itself, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which, I think, was a piece of the Tower of Babylon’s curse, that a man should be put to school to learn his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the mind, which is the end of speech, that hath it equally with any other tongue in the world; and is particularly happy in compositions of two or three words together, near the Greek, far beyond the Latin,—which is one of the greatest beauties that can be in a language."—Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy

 

"When Ezra Pound called for the "direct, objective treatment of the thing itself," he was in some sense echoing the historicism of late nineteenth-century thought. Historicism implicitly rejects systems, whether an ideological or a theological sort; and, in attempting to understand historical events without the benefit of any transcendent framework, it tacitly accepts the end of absolute value and absolutist authority as signaled by the French Revolution, Though Pound’s polemic addressed itself to eradicating the "emotional slither" he identified with late Victorian poetry, it inadvertently limited the poet almost exclusively to the ironic mode. Since mythical elements, and expressions of direct sentiment, would be curtailed by any rigorous adoption of "direct, objective treatment," the lyric poem might well lose the chief sources of its resonance. One way for the poet to render some justice to the complexity of experience is by turning to his own divided consciousness as his chief subject and presenting the consciousness directly while ironically qualifying the mind that discovers it. Or the poet might take different, fragmentary, but conflicting views inherent in an experiential situation, relate them to one another, dampening his own intentions and judgments, and energize the poem through an ironic interplay of multiple but partial "truths." Poets, especially ironic poets, became in some sense historicists of the imagination."—Charles Molesworth, The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary American Poetry

Greg McBride Wins Liam Rector Prize (Terence Winch)

In a confluence that was personally gratifying for me, I recently learned that one friend of mine won a prize named for another friend of mine. Greg McBride, who arrived in the poetry world a few years back at around age 60, and who proceeded to make up rapidly for lost time, has been named the winner of the Liam Rector First Book Prize for Poetry.  Greg’s career as a government attorney was preceded by his experience as an army photographer during the Vietnam War.  That wartime service has engendered many excellent poems, such as this one from his chapbook, Back of the Envelope:

IN-COUNTRY: DAY ONE

            Vietnam, 1969

Duffel bag stuffed in the back, he bounced down

Cong Ly on the suicide seat. The sergeant crowed

they’d stolen the mud-scarred jeep the night

before on a whorehouse street in Cholon.

 

His starched jungle fatigues and boots, a joke

in a city of millions, .45 hard

on his hip. Dressed in yellow, Saigon hummed

like a factory. Fuel-stench hung like a scrim.

 

The sun seared down on angels in ao dais,

silk panels in a red soft as wet blood,

in the green of his mother’s eyes.

They skimmed the simmering sidewalks,

 

at ease in their beauty under the palm-leaf

shade of conical nons, the calm rise

of dry heat, skirts wafting in spiraled mists

of nuoc mam, the smog of fried steam rolls.

 

That night, he sauntered down Tu Do Street.

The bar girls called and the cyclos spat

their two-cycled rasp. Distant iron bombs dropped

from B-52s burst out of the dark,

 

laying a blanket of moans over him

and the street and the girls too young in the night.

He glanced at the stars and felt himself

holding onto his gun with both hands.

The new book, called Porthole, will be out next year from the Briery Creek Press.  Meanwhile, McBride is also the editor of a first-rate on-line magazine called the Innisfree Poetry Journal.

It’s hard to believe that Liam Rector, whom I met in the early ‘70s, has been gone for more than four years.  I think he would have been pleased at McBride’s selection for this first-book prize.  Liam, himself a notable poet, was a persuasive advocate for poetry and a forceful defender of free speech, once even attempting to explain Amiri Baraka to Bill O’Reilly: