The Best American Poetry

Tonight at Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Arts Council

A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, Monday, October 24, 7:00 p.m.

Rimon opens its 2011-12 Artist Salon Series at The Baroque Room (275 East 4th Street, St. Paul) with author, David Lehman, who will discuss his widely praised book, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. Lehman has meditated profoundly on the provacative intersection of ethnicity, music and the formation of American culture. Moderator Joe Vass joins David Lehman in converation.

Tickets cost $10 and may be reserved by contacting the Rimon office at 952-381-3449,rimon@sabesjcc.org, or click here to reserve and pay online. For more information on the Salonclick here or for nearby parking, click on www.thebaroqueroom.com.

The Salon is co-sponsored by The Friends of the St. Paul Public Library and Motionpoems. The Rimon Artist Salon Series is funded in part by the Tychman Shapiro Gallery of the Sabes JCC.

-- sdh

Earle Hitchner, Guest Blogger October 23-29

This week we welcome Earle Hitchner as our guest blogger. Earle is the “Ceol” (music) columnist for the Irish Echo newspaper, a freelance music writer for The Wall Street Journal, and a member of the advisory board of the City University of New York’s Institute for Irish American Studies. His writing has also appeared in Billboard, The Oxford American, Details, Publishers Weekly, Attenzione, Rhythm Music, Journal of the Society for American Music, The Companion to Irish Traditional Music, and 67 recordings, including the Boston Pops Orchestra’s 1998 Grammy-nominated The Celtic Album. Born in Philadelphia, Earle has lived in New York’s Hudson Valley since 1992. He has a B.A. from La Salle University and an M.A. from CUNY Lehman College, and is currently working on his doctoral dissertation at Drew University. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Marist College, Drew University, and CUNY Lehman College, and lectured at Boston College, New York University, University of Missouri-St. Louis, CUNY Graduate Center, and University of Limerick. Among the authors he has interviewed and written about are poet Billy Collins, novelist Bernard MacLaverty, and biographer Gary Giddins.

 

Welcome, Earle.

-- sdh

Truth and Beauty, in bits and pieces -- Amy Glynn Greacen.

The thing about Rome that gets to me the most (and I’m sure this is “the thing about Rome” for a lot of folks) is the way the ancient, archaeological city and the living, modern one sit so seamlessly cheek-by-jowl with one another. The first time I saw the city, I burst into tears. This second time was no different. I’ve never seen anything like Rome for the utterly overwhelming feeling of accretion, of layers, of mosaic, that it has. It’s humbling, and it’s awesome, and it’s heartbreaking.

And the thing about having your heart broken is that parts of it can wander off in different directions.

The first real poem I ever wrote – at least, the first one I’d call “mature” whatever that means (David, you’d have heard me read it in the Glascock competition back in ’92!) was about a kaleidoscope. It was an actual kaleidoscope – and an exorbitantly fine one, I must note, polished brass and a double wheel of beautiful stained glass shards – that I’d gotten as a birthday gift for The Boy Who Died. He was a physics-minded creature and seemed to get a kick out of optical tricks, but the gift was also symbolic (in a ham-handed, adolescent way, perhaps), a way of saying that I knew all the broken stuff inside him coalesced into something exceptional and gorgeous if you knew how to look at it. At his family’s house after the memorial service I don’t mind admitting I ransacked his old bedroom looking for that kaleidoscope, but it wasn’t there. I have no idea what he did with it. He had ascetic tendencies, kept few possessions – a sentimental knickknack from me, I realized, was probably not on his list of essentials. But I always did wonder where it ended up, and that was partially what prompted the poem. But writing it made me realize that breakage and accretion and mosaic were going to be lifelong companions of mine in poetry writing.

My favorite church in Rome – not counting the Pantheon, which is inarguably in a class by itself – is the Church of Santa Maria in Trastevere. It’s very, very old; the original structure dates back to the 300’s, and the current one, built on the old foundations, mostly dates to the 12^th century. Santa Maria has a markedly different feel than the Renaissance and Baroque period Catholic churches. It’s Medieval. It has more Byzantine features, and the detail and sheer multitude of intricate, fascinating mosaic elements is staggering. Its interior columns are repurposed from the Baths of Caracalla, and its portico is plastered with fragments of ancient carved marbles. Everything in that church is made up of tiny fragments of other things, meticulously put together to form a seamless whole, one that tells a story, one that directs you to feel a certain way when you step inside. It is, in short, a poem. I don’t know how many times I went back to it, and each time it was the same and yet totally different; I saw things I hadn’t seen before, the place was refracted again and again through my own shifting kaleidoscope of experiences and feelings. I felt lifted up; I felt history as a crushing weight; I felt loss, liberation, a longing for home and a longing to never have to leave. I wasn’t raised in a Catholic family and so had no childhood experience with which to freight my reading of this place. And yet there was an overwhelming sense of a program, a story. I doubt I will ever understand how an accumulation of stone pieces stuck together in the 1100’s can feel as alive as that place.

I don’t know how many miles I walked through Rome in the two weeks I spent there. It was a lot. Probably three or four on a relatively sedentary day. And I never stopped thinking about breakage and rebuilding, and breakage and rebuilding. Everything about that place is mosaic, broken pieces forming a more meaningful whole. Basalt. Travertine. Porphyry. Onyx. Empty lots casually strewn with things that popped up when someone tried to level land for a new building: fractured columns, pieces of an older, buried city, marble sculpture fragments, Corinthian capitals, severed stone heads, plaques with partial inscriptions in Latin. The Boy’s suicide note, such as it was, fragmentary, oblique – had been in Latin. I don’t exactly know why – a dead language, ha ha; or a code meant for someone else. No matter, an unanswerable question. A piece. Like the ancient walls, like the ruins being overtaken slowly by nature, nightshade growing up through cracks in the travertine; glittering dust – hematite, mica – that might have been part of some elegant ancient display of dominion and wealth. (“When old age shall this generation waste, / Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe/ than ours…”.) Even Rome’s streets are piecemeal, literally cobbled together. By the end, I could look at anything and see a mosaic tile – plane tree leaves floating in a fountain; the high waxing moon, martins skimming the Tiber for insects, bark scales on an umbrella pine on the edge of the Palatine, a piece of a broken beer bottle in an alleyway, pigeons trawling the Campo for bits of meat. All of it distinct, all discrete, and all part of the same picture.

I write poems, largely, by this method, I’ve come to realize. I often find a line I think belongs in ne poem shows itself to be part of something else. I collect materials, break them apart, put them back together. Spin the kaleidoscope: something forms, morphs, you glimpse symmetry, then collapse. Leverage accident. Harness breakage. Build something new on the foundations of something ancient. Sculpt. Shatter. Use the pieces. Re-use is a form of double-entendre. Enjambment. Build by breaking. Take the tiny pieces and use them to show the big picture. Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. Everything connects, nothing disappears. But it breaks. And I guess that’s What I Learned On My Summer Vacation, my brethren. That everything breaks and something big is riding on whether you can be at peace with the pieces.

You can't fool 99% of the people all the time

According to a board of experts from the business community, which of these sentences applies to "Occupy Wall Street"?

-- "It is not a tea party."
-- "Tax the Rich," OK, but it depends on what the definition of "rich" is
--  "Tattoos, body piercings, a pungent aroma, and in her other hand the gender studies major held an iPhone"
-- The question is, "Will Marie Antoinette subsidize Madame Defarge's knitting business?"
--  The way to circumvent "obstructive nihilism" is to eliminate loopholes and lower marginal rates and then move to Basel 3 and higher capital requirements

According to a blue-ribbon panel of economists, money managers, investment bankers, and security analysts, which of these sentences applies to recent acitivity on Wall Street defined in the customary fashion?

-- "We're kicking the can down the road."
-- "China may crash. It's a bubble waiting to happen."
-- "Of course, if theres's a double-dip recession, all bets are off."
-- "Multiple levels of organizational hierarchy lead to managerial dysfunction."
--  Big pharma is singing the Neil Sedaka hit "'Breaking Up is Hard to Do'

True or false: The controversial new Calvin Klein's billboard campaign was released in select American cities during the week of October 17 but was immediately suspended in thirteen states by court injunction.

Thanks to Ed Rush for contributing this week's quiz.

Oct. 25 in Minneapolis: You've read the book, now see the movie! Motionpoems Premier

Join Best American Poetry Series Editor David Lehman and an exciting group of poets and filmmakers as they introduce and discuss short films inspired by poems in this year's BAP!  At this one-time event you will be able to:

Buy BAP 2011 and have it signed by David Lehman and contributing poets.

Print your own Motionpoems keepsake broadside on a Minnesota Center for the Book Arts letterpress.

See films inspired by BAP 2011 contributors:

Mark Strand
Jane Hirshfield
Matthew Dickman
Michael Dickman
Erin Belieu
K.A. Hays
James Longenbach
Bridget Lowe
L.S. Klatt
Richard Wilbur
David Wagoner

Two Screenings:  Tuesday, Oct. 25th at 6pm & 8 pm
Open Book
Target Performance Hall
1011 Washington ave S.
Minneapolis, Minn

Reception to follow each screening.

This event is free, and sure to be a scrumptious evening of synesthesia! Or should that be Cinesthesia?

*
Go here for further details.

Unrequited Love as Ars Poetica -- Amy Glynn Greacen

I copped that title from one of the Rome students (hey Chloe!), who gave a rather sophisticated talk on the notion that the poetic impulse inherently springs from the desire for something unattainable. (Oh, yeah: I’m still in Rome. Like Shelley, I drowned in Italy and what bits of me washed up are buried there for now.)

In its original, Aristotelian meaning, ars poetica means the art of, or the nature of, poetry. Anyway, I got to thinking about how unrequited, unrequitable, or forbidden love, and their attendant depths of loss and longing, have always been the subjects that interest me most as a poet. I think I stand with a significant majority of poets in that impulse. We write as an act of exorcism, or as a way of having our beloved, on the page, particularly if we cannot in real life; we write to bring our dead back, we write to redirect grief. We write our letter to the world that never wrote to us. The tropes and devices of poetry offer us ways to express our deepest longings without the consequences that might attend acting on them in real life. James Merrill spoke of using the second person in love poems in order to obviate discussion of his sexuality – he referred to the pronoun “you as “a fig leaf.” This impulse is probably what prompted Merrill to develop the dazzlingly ornate linguistic puzzles and flourishes that characterize so much of his work. If he had had nothing to obfuscate, we’d probably be without some of his best work.

“All the new thinking is about loss,” as Robert Hass famously put it. “In this, it resembles all the old thinking.” In Persian poetry there is a constantly recurring motif of the nightingale and its love for the rose. The nightingale endlessly trilling for the beautiful but thorned rose san symbolize the poet’s love for God, for an earthly love, for any praiseworthy object, but it also bespeaks a longing for unattainable perfection, for the exact right expression of something, sublime or terrible or… inexpressible. It’s the unslakable desire for the creative act itself.

Dig this. My introduction to Keats, Shelley, and the Persians came at the age of thirteen, when I was in a school production of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness! (The title comes from Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam.) The young protagonist, a teenager on his way to college and besotted with Romantic poetry – in love with love, drunk on it the way Sufi poets are drunk on the wine of divine love  – was played by Jon, the boy whose parents I ran into outside that hotel in the middle of wherever I was. Years after our own chaste little ninth-grade romance, Jon went on to date the grandchild of Czeslaw Milosz, who says in his poem “Ars Poetica?”

 

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

By the time Jon was seeing her, I was seeing Wallace Stevens and James Merrill more than Khyyam or Keats, and embarking on a passionate romance with a boy whose violent early death would inform my writing forever – though, in all honesty, it was less his death, in some ways, than the sense I always had when we were together, that I loved him far more than he would ever be capable of loving me. “Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.” Robert Hass again (who worked closely with Milosz), from the same poem, one that was recited in the workshop room in Rome too, and half of us could sing along because we all know, as poets, that part of our work is trying to find the metal (the mettle?) to build the bridge that can span those distances. It’s impossible. But like Sisyphus, or Tantalus, you’re consigned to having to try again and again.

The other day, out of the blue, a friend sent me a hyperlink, saying “Do you know this poem?” It was Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “The Windhover.” I’m telling you, man – there is no accident! There was a moment back there, in Rome, when one of the students (Hi, Zac!) gave a recitation of that poem that knocked the wind out of me – not only because the poem is so beautiful to hear spoken, but because the reciter himself almost to lift off the ground as he did it. It was that moment that got me thinking about why recitation is such a powerful act; why poems go into us so deeply that to speak them from memory can bring on a state of transcendence.

Hopkins was a Jesuit priest, and by all accounts I know of, a celibate homosexual. He suffered from anguished depression for much of his life. In spite of which – or because of which, I can’t tell you – his poems are characterized by some of the most inventive, ecstatic, joyous and complicated sounds and rhythms in any 19^th century verse in English. “The Windhover” perhaps in particular, speaks as well as anything I know for the potential that exists in sublimating the pain of unfulfillable longing. Do yourself a favor and read this aloud. 

I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, 
dapple-drawn Falcon, in his riding
    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! Then off, off forth on swing,
    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! And the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

    No wonder of it; sheer plod makes plow down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

 

Star Black at the New School last night

Photo credit: Bill Hayward

Dan Nester on Jim Morrison

<<<
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think the Doors are a hokey caricature of male rock stardom and those who think they’re, you know, shamans. The Doors, who took their name from a line in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”), combined jazz chord changes and Latin rhythms with flamenco, surf, raga, blues, and psychedelia, all in one ’60s rock band, often in one song: “Light My Fire,” “The End,” “Roadhouse Blues,” and “People Are Strange,” just to name a few. The power of the Doors’ music is that it is so unabashedly arty that it begs to be made fun of, especially by older people or those who went through Doors periods themselves and are now into Steely Dan or Animal Collective or some other less embarrassing musical endeavor.
>>>

For more, click here.

No Accident - Amy Glynn Greacen

I was lost. On purpose. I’m a bad map-reader, so when I’m alone in a city I don’t know, I like to set out on foot, get thoroughly lost, and then try to find my way home. In most cities, the method works. Rome wasn’t totally unfamiliar – I’d been there once, briefly, with my husband, who is a human compass – but it is a spiraling labyrinth of cobbled alleyways and strange diagonals. I could find my way easily to a place on one day and get hopelessly lost the next, taking what I knew for a fact to be the same route. I could go to Piazza Navona, set out in any direction away from it – and find myself ten minutes later in Piazza Navona. It made no sense.

 

I was wandering in aimless circles, fretting about the lecture I was about to give. The talk was something of a confusing spiral in its own right; there were connections I wanted to illuminate but I felt like they didn’t work: like central Rome itself, there was almost too much going on to make sense of. 

 

MAKE SENSE OF IT is one of the recurring refrains of James Merrill’s Ouija Board epic The Changing Light at Sandover. The other is THERE IS NO ACCIDENT. Part of my freakout was that the lecture led inexorably to that poem, which is terribly ambitious and complex, and and I was scared to death of having to talk about it, especially in front of a professor who had known Merrill and touched that stupid board. I thought of Merrill’s own lines, his own insecurity as, in the trope of the poem, he’s been charged by spirits with the writing of “poems of science.”

Dread of substances, forms and behavior

So old, original, so radically

Open yet impervious to change

That no art, however fantastic or concrete,

More than dreams of imitating them.

Make sense of it, I was muttering to myself. But in the labrynthine swirl of references and citations, Ovid and Pliny and Keats and Frost and Merrill and naming and mythmaking and mastery, each a tessera of its own, supposed to fit together in a mosaic like the ancient basaltic cobbles on which I circled, but like those stones too, catching my heels at every step. I wanted someone to tell me it was going to work, and there was no one there to tell me anything.

 

I stopped in a sleepy, unprepossessing side street to get my bearings. There was a small hotel across the way. A car caught my eye as it pulled into a parking space. I watched a woman get out, noting with amusement how so many Italian women bore a resemblance to the mother of my ninth-grade boyfriend: the austere peeled-onion bun of dark hair, the deep tan, the slender figure artfully draped in effortlessly stylish clothes.

 

Then the driver’s side door opened and her husband got out, and I realized that I was in fact seeing Jon’s parents.

 

I called out to them. My God! What a coincidence! We’ve been in Florence for a month. We just got into town, literally this minute. We’re flying out in the morning. How is it we find you on this exact piece of sidewalk? Unbelievable!

 

Thousands of miles from home, utter accidents of time and place, and here were people who live five miles from me, whom I’ve known two and a half decades. It was unbelievable, and yet somehow strangely inevitable. There is no accident, I thought, and yet what were the odds that as I stood there feeling unusually desperate for reassurance, there appeared, ex nihilo, two of the most enthusiastic, supportive people I’ve ever known. I explained about the lecture and the last minute misgivings I had about what I’d chosen to do.

 

“Forget about it!” Jon’s dad boomed. “You’ll bring the house down! How could you not? You’re you!”

 

I think a lot of the time when we speak of things like “no accident,” it has the pat, infuriating undertone of the stupid well-meaning friend who croons “everything happens for a reason” when you get robbed or diagnosed with something awful or your spouse runs off with their secretary. That’s not what I’m talking about. Jon’s parents did not appear, armed with jolly reassurances, because it was part of a divine plan. They appeared because I was looking.

 

The lecture went great. In fact, people marveled at how seamlessly it dovetailed with the things they’d been talking about in the days before I arrived, and I loved how it reverberated against the ideas that came up in the days following. Accident? I had no idea what anyone else was going to be talking about. But the mosaic made perfect sense.

 

Pattern recognition is the human method for validating knowledge. Harnessing it is how we make art. In a way there really is no accident. And yet, you know that feeling – the one we writers live for where something entirely random happens that jars a series of seemingly disconnected ideas into place and suddenly it’s almost as if something is writing through you? Accident? Design? Are they even different? Merrill’s occult exhortation, the one repeated again and again, is to “make sense of it,” and he means “sense” in both – well – senses of the word. Both logical, rhetorical meaning, and sensuous meaning, the eye- and ear-touching correlations that separate what we call art from what we call a shopping list. Good poetry can tickle the intellect, but so can a work of philosophy, an abstract in a science journal, or a raw idea. What it must also do in order to be poetry is to dazzle our senses in some way, to make us feel. To make us see pattern, see design, see inevitability arising from the chaotic jumble of undifferentiated information by which we’re surrounded.

I’ll leave you with two short poems that touch on this: Frost’s “Design,” and Amit Majmudar’s ghazal “By Accident.”

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/design/

 

http://counterbalance.typepad.com/counterbalance/2007/04/april_10_by_acc.html

 

Book Review Post - Deborah Landau's The Last Usable Hour [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I've been a sporatic spartan latterly, postwise, as I've elsewhere noted, I've got a lot of burners going at the moment and have been working hard to get something done for months and months now, interspersed with my usual state-hopping for secularism, and the raising of dem cute children of mine and now also, a puppy. I just try to keep the kitchen sort of clean and let the rest of it go to hades most of the time. Still, that doesn't leave time for hogging the blogosphere. But now I've handed something in, and am hoping will feel more free to return to our small electronic chats. 

Right now I'd like to offer you this book review which I wrote for no reason but the inclination to meet today's inclement weather with a storm of human artistry.

So what I want to tell you about is the terrificly smart, witty, and slightly terrifying new book of poetry by Deborah Landau, The Last Usable Hour. On the cover the silhouette of a chair swings in the open air on a rope looking as if it has hung itself, but also clearly a reference to the Platonic forms. It is a trick she pulls on us to great effect a few times in the book: she seems to say she is giving up but it turns out to be a metaphysical swerve. No, I’m not hanging myself, but I am also not in that chair. 

The chair was always empty. Plato imagined the ideal form could exist without its purpose, the human weight. Imagine perfection assless. Hilarious. Precarious.

I speculate that Landau’s poems frighten me so delightfully because she tells secrets, real ones, like being in a hanker for someone not synonymous with the husband, for romance, for instance. The book all happens at night, in a sleepless trance dropping in and out of depths of field. The poems apologize, for their insomnia and their intuitional intrusion like a sleepwalking blond beauty knocking on your door and apologizing for coming right in as she pushes past you and through your house to the yard and dissertates about the stars out there, some of which you have to admit you had not noticed before.

I have always been riveted by expressions of giving up and since I rarely give up I suppose I am most engrossed by people saying they are giving up, but then not actually giving up. Landau gives up beautifully a number of times, like an evening of dance made up entirely of interpretations of the end of Swan Lake. One hypnotic poem, or series part (each page stands alone but is not titled, though four titled sections comprise the whole), starts “In the middle of my wood, I found myself in a dark life.” and after flipping around Dante’s famous line of despair, it tells us of a mood that happens in a comfortable space, made hazy with gin and wine and night, coddled but a bit blank, candle lit, “are you sick” she asks herself without a question mark, “are you all done flirting,/ have you lost your appetites” and then the kind of open speech that makes me love a poet, the final line, “no longer a girl but slinking around nonetheless.” Don’t I know it.

I’m going to give you the next poem (or page-long stanza) in the collection in its entirety.

He keeps me waiting

and I start hysteria a little bit.

I start hysteria against everyone’s advice.

I go into the street to drink air.

I’ve never been so thirsty in my life.

Another mouth, some fresh-minted lips.

See, I can feel blue on half a bottle of jewels.

Sleep then wake then this then that day

and another night back on the bed

lying in an eros dumb and slackjawed.

The sound of hustling advances and retreats

as if someone were shuffling money

or unbuttoning a blouse.

Can you put that taffeta away now, please?

Please put it away.

I love the funny inner language of “I start hysteria,” love how she pulls us out into the street with her and her tentative madness, love “on half a bottle of jewels.” After all, we are all taking something, but what? I like how Frank O’Hara’s “I do this than that” gets so literal here it rubs out the details.

But then my favorite part is the end, where she converts all this potential energy into something kinetic, the whole of life’s rhythms, breathing in and out, day and night, even the back and forth of sex, and of love (the “hustling advances and retreats”), and condenses them all down to sound, to a susurration, a rustling, “as if someone shuffling money/ or unbuttoning a blouse” which is one seriously sexy version of the candy-wrapper theater problem, to which image Landau gracefully switches and then says to life and its crinkle of repetition, “Please, put it away.” Pretty brilliant. It’s a terribly sad little stunner, but it is funny, too, and keeps our misery company.

Well, I haven’t said nearly what there is to say, but I’ll say one last thing which is to note the pleasure of a poet who can tell me that in the city, some days in the summer, “even the little girls reek.”

Here's a link to The Last Usable Hour on amazon. 

Read your poetry and don't kill yourself, and I shall return to encourage you again. You may also feel free to encourage me as my doing so does not always presuppose that I am myself sufficienty courageous to meet the day. Coffee helps, and rum too, but only so much.

Love, 

Jennifer

 ps Portrait of a Windy Day

 

 

 

BAP 2011 Comics continued (Olena Kalytiak Davis) by Nin Andrews

Read the complete poem here.

The Third Area Reading, Oct. 20th, Santa Monica CA

The Third Area is pleased to announce its first poetry reading of fall 2011 at the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Bergamot Station, featuring Keith Ekiss, Maureen Alsop, Robin Ekiss, and Jim Natal.

Come to the gallery at 7:30 to drink, nibble, say hello, and view new works by the Armenian-born Los Angeles painter Gegam Kacherian.

When:   Thursday, October 20, 8 p.m

Where:  Rosamund Felsen Gallery 
            2525 Michigan Avenue, B4
            Santa Monica, CA 90404

Don't miss it!

 

BAP Comics continued (Terrance Hayes) by Nin Andrews

Read the complete poem here.

Geni(us loci) in a Bottle -- Amy Glynn Greacen

Rome. July. Swelter. Godfather of the Bad Hair Day, ruination of all clothing, even linen. The Italians are the undisputed masters of linen, and you know why: it’s the only fabric with a snowball’s chance in hell of breathing in this weather. Pliny the Elder claims in his Naturae Historia that the ability of flax to be spun into linen cloth was discovered by the mythological character Arachne. Pliny, as I have learned, does not care for fact-checking, though, being Italian, he does seem to get his T’s crossed and I’s dotted on the subject of winemaking.

In my craft lecture for the UW poetry group, I’ve been asked to touch on Pliny, in the spirit of the presiding genuis of Keats who haunts the program: notions of Truth and Beauty and how they play out in an “encyclopedia” full of “facts,” some of which are documentably facts and some of which are… well… not – but may possess a strange poetic beauty of their own. I find myself with a dissertation on the history of natural history that pits Pliny against Ovid’s Orpheus, the Golden Voice, Ultrapoet, Uberbard, the Greco-Roman rock star. In the tacky webs of taxonomy and the growing divergence of myth from science over the centuries, I’ve concluded that Ovid’s Metamorphoses (fable! Myth! Poetry!) outstrip Pliny’s encyclopedia – in terms of their ability to articulate scientific truth, mind you – like a Ferrari with the pedal to the floor against a pea-green Plymouth Duster.

Anyway, we’re on this Baroque church deathmarch, and I’m walking next to Richard Kenney, and talking about wine. My husband’s visiting. The night before, for our anniversary, we’d treated ourselves, despite cost and season, to a bottle of Brunello de Montalcino, a luxury we never afford ourselves at home. Kenney’s eyes pop in a way that makes me assume he doesn’t either. I’m going on about how it had tasted, like saddle leather and tobacco, dried cherry, vanilla, roses. “I don’t understand,” I say, “how it is that wine has the ability to transform itself into anything. It can taste like anything on earth, except maybe grapes. There is something mystical to me about that.”

“Well, you really are Ovid’s girl, aren’t you?” Rick laughs.

I’d never thought about it like that, but yes, this is why I love wine. It is its metamorphic ability, its transformative power, a natural magic its ventriloquism, its essential poetry. The way it can mimic, hit at, suggest, almost any flavor you can think of. It’s bottled metaphor.

Italian wines hold a special fascination for me, because they seem more local, more specific, more tied to place and personal experience than wines from just about anywhere else I know of. Italy is the largest (in volume), and one of the oldest, winemaking regions on earth. They grow something like 800 grape cultivars, and you will never see most of them unless you stumble into the random village where they happen to be cultivated. In California we import a decent number of Chiantis, and it’s not uncommon to see a varietal Sangiovese, a Rosso di Montalcino, a Valpolicella, Barbera or Pinot Grigio even in a supermarket. But there are wines so obscure and so specific to their locality – sour-cherry Umbrian Ciliegiolos, pepper and rosepetal Ruchés from Piedmont, Neapolitan Lacryma Christi, beeswax and sea-breeze whites grown only in the Cinque Terre – that they give the French notion of terroir an entirely new layer. Wines that make you come to them. Wines that lash themselves so tightly to the circumstances of their creation and your experience of them that they become metaphoric in the literal sense of transporting.

After the Brunello conversation I wanted to bring something special to the next cocktail hour, and asked a knowledgeable enoteca man for his most smashing, miraculous Brunello. He chided me in English that you don’t drink Brunello in heat like this. “I know, I know,” I said. “It’s winter wine. I know that. It’s a gift. Tell you what – send me off with a nice white too, something for drinking tonight.”

He smiled. “Well if you want something as heavy as Brunello but something like you’ve never tasted before – you want this.” He handed me a bottle of something deep and dark and purple, something light wouldn’t get through. A Lagrein, a small-production varietal in the part-German Alto Adige region, hard to find, he said, even in Rome. The label bore a single word: Porphyr. It was perfect: we’d been marveling at the porphyry in the church mosaics, their intense color, somewhere between jasper and oxidized blood.

My memory of that wine is of an instant of sheer happiness. I recall dust and violet and dried blueberry and fig, and that – especially, perhaps, for a bunch of writers – there was something about it that was like consuming ink. People tasted it and broke into smiles. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted. It was gorgeous. The wine is indeed a hard one to come by, with two places in the US that sell it. I sometimes think of splurging and ordering from a place in New York City, but I’ve always been afraid that, separated from its little moment, it would disappoint, that the magic would be gone.

Then a few nights ago I was in a local restaurant that keeps a surprisingly eclectic and thoughtful selection of Italian wines. Most are expensive and only available by the bottle, but on this night the server mentioned that their by-the-glass special was a Ribolla Gialla, an acidic golden Friulian wine I’d come to know as a common offering in cafes and pizzerias around central Rome.

I took a sip, and I swear to you I tasted it – I mean I tasted the afternoon heat draining upward from the basalt cobblestones of the Campo De’ Fiori, I tasted the sound of gulls crying, I tasted bronze and exhaust and travertine and still air and the glowering gaze of Giordano Bruno precisely as I had experienced them drinking a glass of this same wine at an outdoor café on a hot afternoon when I felt spent and sad and unable to articulate any of it and stared at the point of my pen on my notebook until I couldn’t any more. The wine said it for me anyway, so I ordered another glass and watched the swifts circle. Drinking a metaphor as a metaphor for drinking in an experience. Who says what goes around doesn’t come around?

"Rivet Spacing": a Star Black collage

Are You Smarter than an Eighth Grader? by Stacey Harwood

Reading Amy Glynn Greacen's post yesterday about memorization reminded me of the pamphlet I picked up at a book sale a few years ago.  If you went to public school in New York City during the first half of the last century, you were required to memorize poems if you wanted to advance to the next grade:

Here's the table of contents from 1925:

I bet that if you approach a public school educated Octogenarian, he or she wouldn't hesitate to recite Invictus or Sea Fever or some other verse. One of my cherished memories is of sitting in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with David's mom Anne Lehman, when she was inspired to recite, in her native German, a Schiller poem that she had learned as a girl, before her world was turned upside down by certain unfortunate events that forced her out of her childhood home in Vienna, 1939.  David and I and the diners at the nearby tables were rapt and when she finished: applause. 

 When I was in the third grade, my friend Adina Bloch and I memorized Poe's "Annabel Lee" for show-and- tell.  Years later (many years), after hearing Robert Pinsky lecture about the value of memorization, I made a sustained effort to memorize Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey and I got pretty far into it though I abandoned the project when the same lines kept tripping me up. Was there a psychological reason I wonder, for this resistance to certain words or lines? 

One must make a commitment to memorize a beloved poem but to succeed means you will have it always, whenever you want or need, wherever you may be.  If you were updating those public school memorization requirements, which poems would you include?  Would you keep any of the poems from 1925?

-- sdh

BAP Comics continued (The Editors) . . . by Nin Andrews

Here they are in a casual mood . . .

And here they're more formal:

Which do you prefer?

Read Guest Editor Kevin Young's introduction and Series Editor David Lehman's foreword here.

-- sdh

Emerson on the poor and "the wicked dollar"

A powerful and perhaps surprising moment in Emerson's great "Self-Reliance":
<<<
Then again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.
>>>

Committed to Memory -- by Amy Glynn Greacen

Writers: how many poems do you have memorized? Did you set out to memorize them? Was it demanded of you by a teacher? Did you just read them so many times they became imprinted on your amygdala? When you recite those poems – if you ever do; muttering verses to yourself while you run the vacuum or pulling out a stageworthy rendering of “Ozymandias” to astound tipsy computer programmers at your spouse’s company holiday party – what do you feel? This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know.

This summer I had the good fortune to be invited as a guest scholar to the University of Washington’s summer creative writing session, a month-long poetry intensive run out of the University’s outpost in central Rome. The students were primarily undergrads, many of them science majors or otherwise new to creative writing, taking advantage of an opportunity to nail down a humanities requirement under felicitous circumstances. The program was both rigorous and flexible, with students responsible for attending various lectures, workshops and outings, critiquing one another’s drafts, and generally living the life of the literary expatriate with as much appetite and verve as possible.

One of the program’s requirements was that each student had to memorize, and correctly recite, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” If they messed it up they had to do it again. Recitations were heard before workshops, at villas and museums, at the end of lecture periods or whatever time presented itself, but we all heard those lines recited, confidently, hesitantly, shyly or with an oratory aplomb Ian McKellen would envy, more times than I can count.

At first I thought: wow, what a quaint, funny, old-school thing to do. It almost seemed like a kind of fraternity hazing ritual. You wanna be a poet, eh? Prove it. URN it. (Sorry, that just slipped out.) But as I listened, time after time, in the ruined groves of Hadrian’s Villa and the echo-riddled entryway of a palazzo with a gravity-defying Boromini spiral staircase, in classrooms and gardens, to those 19th century rhymes, to Keats’s unfaltering, surefooted metricality, something started to happen to me. I knew this poem, had never memorized it, but it’s hard to get through even a rudimentary education in literature without “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” The poem, which I doubt I’d given much thought to since my early teens, was so familiar that it was strange to realize that if I were called upon to recite it, I’d fall on my face.

Anyway, hearing the endless iterations of “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss / Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve; / She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,/ For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” – well, the first thing that hit me was something like: easy for him to say, he died at twenty-six. But following on the heels of that was something about why it is inherently important -- cognitively? Emotionally? -- to memorize.

Of course, the earliest tradition of poetry was oral, Bardic – intended for public recitation and passed down by memorization. But it does something for us even in an age where it’s the page, not the lyre, that rules, and where rhyme and meter, tools that no doubt contributed to your ability to retain childhood nursery rhymes, have been subject to derision for decades. The very word “rote” connotes ideas that are largely anathema to us. Something servile, something mindless.

Memorize a poem and you’ll quickly learn that the act is anything but mindless, and anything but servile. There is some kind of primal magic that occurs when a matrix of beautiful or meaningful or harrowing words becomes fused with your consciousness. I saw it. I saw it again and again, on the faces of the Keats reciters, for some of whom this was almost certainly the first time they had ever been made to memorize a poem. Even on the faces of the workshop leaders, who do this every flipping year and who murmured along, time after time, eyes half-closed, larynxes silently keeping pace as they mouthed those words to themselves. It was mastery. And it was elation. Memorized poems are something extraordinary, I suspect, part prayer, part talisman, part party trick and part acknowledgment of something fundamentally human, a shared history, a common origin.

I “know” many poems, pieces of them, stray lodged lines or stanzas, fragments that haunt, uneradicatable bits. But memorized to the point where I could recite them on demand? Not that many. Thom Gunn’s “Tamer and Hawk.” James Merrill’s “About the Phoenix” and “The Victor Dog.” Large sections, but certainly not the sequential entirety, of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam. Cavafy’s “Ithaka.” Frost’s “The Most of It” and “Directive.” Yeats’s “When You Are Old” and “The Two Trees.” Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Ballad of William Sycamore” because it’s the one poem my father memorized and he recited it so often, and with such a mystical air about him, that I couldn’t help but absorb it.

And after this summer, if I ever slip a single syllable of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” someone will need to promptly involve a neurologist.

Poet Frank Giampietro has collected a wonderful group of memorized and recited poems, which you can hear at www.poemsbyheart.org . Each poet gives a brief explanation of why they memorized the poem, and then recites. There are recordings by Alan Shapiro, Claudia Emerson, Robert Pinsky and a host of other wonderful voices (Greg Brownderville’s recitation of Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse” is particularly chill-provoking). Check it out.

And consider this: what does it mean when a piece of writing gets so far under your skin that it becomes part of you? What does it mean to master the words of a master? What do you know, after memorizing a poem, that you didn’t know before?

Not a rhetorical question. I’ve been pondering this since July and I don’t have answers. Why memorize? I’m certain that, cognitively, psychically, it changes you. Why, and how, are probably up for debate, and are likely personal.

Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty. That is all….

Arthur Mitchell by Marianne Moore

Arthur Mitchell, right, with George Balanchine

 

Arthur Mitchell

Slim dragon-fly
        too rapid for the eye
               to cage,

contagious gem of virtuosity
make visible, mentality.
Your jewels of mobility

reveal
      and veil
             a peacock-tail.

                              -- by Marianne Moore

-- sdh