The Best American Poetry

"There was a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses": Who has "The Formula"?

Congratulations to David Lehman for having his poem "The Formula" featured on today's Poetry Daily site. 

Read the poem here.

"The formula" originally appeared in The New Criterion (December 2011).

-- sdh

If you love parodies. . .

The lover of parodies, convinced that an expert aping of someone else's distinctive style conveys not only a chortle or belly laugh at that poet's expense but a deep respect for that writer as well, may cite J. K. Stephen's sonnet on Wordsworth as exhibit A. -- DL

A Sonnet

Two voices are there: one is of the deep;
It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody,
Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea,
Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep:
And one is of an old half-witted sheep
Which bleats articulate monotony,
And indicates that two and one are three,
That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep:
And, Wordsworth, both are thine: at certain times                                       
Forth from the heart of thy melodious rhymes,
The form and pressure of high thoughts will burst:
At other times--good Lord! I'd rather be
Quite unacquainted with the ABC
Than write such hopeless rubbish as thy worst.

-- J. K. Stephen (1859-1892)

It's Lovely Weather for a Sleigh Ride Together with You (by Laura Orem)

Thanks to Margaret J. for this one. Proof that there are no small parts, only small performers.

And now, for your holiday listening pleasure, the Marimba Ponies:

 

Paddy Kavanagh’s “A Christmas Childhood” (Terence Winch)

Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) continues to inspire conflicting feelings and opinions. John Nemo, writing in The Dictionary of Irish Literature, puts it this way: “His followers, a varied but vocal group, speak of him admiringly as an important force in Irish letters, second only to Yeats. His detractors, fewer in number but every bit as vocal, dismiss him as a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant who disrupted rather than advanced the development of modern literature.”  As a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered peasant myself, I will take my place among Kavanagh’s followers.

One of his most ardent admirers was my old friend James Liddy, an Irish poet who spent most of his adult life as a professor at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee until his death in 2008. Many years ago (in the ‘70s sometime), James sent me a copy of an Irish journal called The Lace Curtain, which included his “Open Letter to the Young about Patrick Kavanagh.” Describing Kavanagh’s work (and, really, his own as well), Liddy writes, “Or there is a poetry in which real ideas from living come at us. This kind can be direct statement with a reference behind to the story of what happened to the poet. It relies on the mind staying alive, on the man making the statement keeping his emotional intelligence alive.”

Kavanagh brings that emotional intelligence, I think, to “A Christmas Childhood,”  a poem one encounters regularly this time of year in Irish circles on both sides of the Atlantic.  As an Irish accordion player, I relish the mention of his father’s melodeon (pronounced melojin), which is a single-row button accordion.  

The poem introduces us to the thrumming imagination of a six-year-old Irish farmboy, ca. 1910, who is perfectly in tune with the magical world around him.

 

A Christmas Childhood

by Patrick Kavanagh

                           I

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost—
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.

The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw—
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again

The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch
Or any common sight the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

 

                           II

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.

Across the wild bogs his melodeon called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.

Outside the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon. The Three Wise Kings.

An old man passing said:
‘Can’t he make it talk’—
The melodeon. I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife’s big blade.
There was a little one for cutting tobacco,
And I was six Christmases of age.

My father played the melodeon,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At his wedding in April 1967; Kavanagh died in November of that year.

One final note: Kavanagh’s best-known poem is probably “On Raglan Road,” which was written to the tune of an old march called “The Dawning of the Day.”  Many singers have recorded the song since the ‘60s, including Van Morrison and Sinead O’Connor. 

"I Cry" [by Herb Engelhardt]

She has opened
My lover's fly

Her tongue is
In his ear

He's not here
I cry

-- Herbert Engelhardt

From the Archives: December 23, 2009 - On Christmas, Barbara Stanwyck, and the Singular Life [by Michael O'Keefe]

 For some A Christmas Carol, (Alistair Sim’s version please) is the definitive Christmas film.  For others It’s A Wonderful Life holds the honor of best film to watch during the holidays.  “Marry Christmas Bedford Falls!  Marry Christmas, Mr. Potter!” James Stewart bellows returning from a parallel, yet horrible, reality to face charges for bank fraud in “the real world,” whatever the hell that is.  Both have the Christmas spirit for sure.  But for me the films to watch at Christmas all star Barbara Stanwyck.  

First there is the not very well known Remember the Night (left). Fred MacMurray and Stanwyck star in Preston Sturges’ screenplay.  (No, they don’t plot the murder of her husband, though Stanwyck does play a shoplifter.) In the interest of transparency I should mention it’s a romance, the protagonists meet cute, overcome obstacles, fall in love, observe traditional male and female roles (and I mean traditional for 1940) and live in an America that may have only existed in the mind of Preston Sturges and his contemporaries in Black and White Hollywood, USA.  Oh yeah, transparency.  I should reveal that in the singular nature of my love life, I'm not extraordinary nor remarkable.  I’m single and stand alone.  And my proclivity to indulge in sentimental notions around Christmas makes my opinion not only biased but most likely hooey, as they used to say in 1940.

As hokey as some of the sentiment is, and as obvious as the plot line of a shoplifter bailed out and brought home to Wabash, Indiana by a prosecutor for a heartwarming Christmas is, the film knocks me for a loop every time. The key and the heart of the film is Stanwyck.  MacMurray’s family is seen through her eyes, and their homespun values melt her cynicism in moments that pierce what passes for my veneer of sophistication. Perhaps the fact that I’m approaching the age of fifty-five and have little to show from my love life but a collection of snapshots, cards and memories that linger but do not nourish should disqualify me in the holiday movie round up.   Or could it be that that same status should make me Chairman of the Christmas movie board?  For the purposes of this blog let’s hope it’s the latter. The two other films to look for are Christmas in Connecticut and Meet John Doe. Though the latter is not set at Christmas its climax takes place on Christmas Eve and that’s close enough for me. In Christmas in Connecticut (right) Stanwyck plays a columnist that has created a fantasy world of a farm in the country, a loving husband and a handle on domestic details that surpasses anything Martha Stewart ever cooked up.  When asked to take in a wounded Vet for Christmas by her publisher she attempts to con them both but ends up falling for the Vet, played by Dennis Morgan.  The look in her eyes as she gives herself over to her longing is spectacular. But her speech at the end of Meet John Doe, a wonderful Frank Capra film, where she begs Gary Cooper not to jump from roof of the City Hall, is the topper of them all.  She’s suckered Gary Cooper into playing ‘John Doe’ so that her ruse of writing a John Doe column for a powerful paper won’t be uncovered. Cooper plays along at first but when he realizes he’s been a stooge for a power hungry Nazi-like bad guy, Edward Arnold, he tries to reveal the scam but is thwarted in his attempt to do so.  Abandoned by all those he’s touched across the country he decides to keep John Doe’s promise to throw himself from the roof of City Hall on Christmas Eve to protest man’s inhumanity to man.  What he doesn’t know is that Stanwyck, Arnold and his cronies, and some loyal supporters are there waiting for him.  Sick with the flu, and desperate to stop the suicide Stanwyck throws herself into his arms and begs him not do to it.  The depth of her plea is staggering and when she calls him “Darling” I fall to pieces every time. In short: If Barbara Stanwyck’s character from any of these films walked into my life I’d sweep her off her Black and White feet and never give the bright and shiny world a second glance. I’ll be home and alone for Christmas this year but Barbara Stanwyck, with a little help from her friends, will give me hope.  And that’s gift enough for me. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.

The Tropical Roundup Gift Guide [by Emma Trelles]

Above:  store-bought bow and discount wrapping paper, pieced together with magic tape and love.

Yes, I know there's only five days left till Christmas, that by the time this post is completed Hanukkah is already twinkling its arrival, that some holiday shoppers are sitting smugly alongside their craftily wrapped presents, the kind with hand painted angel paper and chiffon bows and berries artfully attached.

But the Tropical Roundup is not one of these shoppers. She is on Cuban time, which technically means that while everything will get done, it will all happen in a great flurry, at the last minute, with some presents and cards assembled in the driveway outside the recipient's home. Wine will assist in these endeavors, as will cortaditos and pasteles de guayaba (both of which I'd consume twice a day if I didn't care about looking like a gourd).  One does not have to be Cuban to exist in this perpetually behind (but well fortified) state. But it helps, as does living in South Florida, where "Cuban time" is as common an expression as Turn down the a.c. and Coño!

Here are a few quick gift ideas for  those of us who consider Cronus a nemesis:

1. Behold the beauty to the left, a Great Gatsby tee from Out of Print Clothing, displayed prettily alongside my high school copy of the novel. My birthday, wedding anniversary, and Christmas are all within a couple of weeks of each other, so my husband is doomed to hunt for gifts for me throughout December. I assist (read: prod) him  with tips, such as this shirt I'd been eyeballing for about a year now.

On its website, Out of Print states that it "celebrates the world’s great stories through fashion. Our products feature iconic and often out of print book covers. Some are classics, some are just curious enough to make great t-shirts, but all are striking works of art."

Indeedy. Other choice picks include Thoreau's Walden, Darwin's The Origin of Species, the mysteries of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys (The Sign of the Twisted Candles and The Mark on the Door, respectively), and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in a festive red and white.

 

To browse women's, men's, and kid's shirts,  visit here. If you select overnight or second-day air delivery, your prezzies will arrive before Santa does.

2. Last month I was lucky enough to read at the Miami Book Fair International and hear many fine poets, whose fine books I bought as well. I think you should buy them too, particularly from independent bookstores like Books and Books, Powell's, Politics & Prose, or whatever book shop is in your town and is battling Amazon, the real world version of the Dark Lord of the Sith. 

 Here's some of what I scored: Susan Briante's Utopia Minus (Ahsahta Press); Sandra Beasley's I Was the Jukebox and Gerald Stern's Everything is Burning (both from W.W. Norton); Radha Says: Last Poems by Reetika Vazirani (editors Leslie McGrath and Ravi Shankar / Drunken Boat); Seamless Matter: Thirty Stills (Rain Taxi / OHM Editions), by Ravi Shankar; and Shapes the Clouds Assume (Kattywompus Press), by Jesse Millner, offering one of the best poems I've ever read about my home state.

Why I Love Florida, by Jesse Millner

 It's mostly because I'm a pantheist: like the Moguls I worship the sky, blue heaven that floats above me, like Whitman I worship each leaf of the St. Augustine grass, each blade a bright flag of this tropical world's dispostion, like Dickinson I worship the black racers along the dirt road I run most afternoons, those "narrow fellows" pouring their oily bodies into weeds that line my journey west, which is the orientation Thoreau argued for, the direction he walked each day from his shack at Walden Pond as he looked for that particular oak tree, the one whose branches filled with the music of God, which is a chorus of the natural world, a kinship with tree, flower, root, and earth, the hymn shriek of the osprey alighting from the slash pine outside my window last Saturday, yes, God in every thing, manifest in cypress dome or pine barren, in saw grass or slough, in the summer cumuli that blacken to nimbus and bring the hard rain that is itself the only true baptism, that holy hard rain, which cleanses this despoiled paradise, which roars into ditches and lakes that disperse and collect, but does not wash away our many and collective sins. 

3. Poster Art from Ironforge Press!  Give the music slaves in your life a chance to re-experience their rock-age, or gaze longingly at the show they missed, by purchasing concert posters from this Fort Lauderdale print shop specializing in flatstock and silk screen. Older stoners will enjoy AC/DC, Alice Cooper, Steely Dan, and Black Crowes; skillful tributes to Of Montreal, Arctic Monkeys, and Minus the Bear might appeal to the young and moustachioed set, but, really, there's no accounting for who's going to listen to what. Right now I'm listening to an Uncle Tupelo album recorded around the same time I was in elementary school (that last bit is a fatass lie).

Shop for posters here on Ironforge's main page and visit the press' blog for recent adds.

4. Finally, Radio-Active Records is taking orders all week. This independent record store sells a sea of vinyl, along with cds, turntables, and more. Here's an interview I did a couple of years ago with owner Sean Kayes and store manager Mikey Ramirez, who offers this little known bit of vinyl lore: "If you slow down the 12-inch copy of Madonna's Into the Groove, it sounds just like David Gahan from Depeche Mode."

Because plenty of its business is conducted online, Radio-Active knows how to coddle out-of-state customers. But they've got bricks and mortar too. If you live in South Florida, stop by for a vist, as did this groovy lady, who got Jesus (and Mary Chain) while holiday shopping.

.

A Tribute to Paul Violi

On December 9, Paul Violi's friends, family, and colleagues gathered together at the New School to pay tribute to this marvelous poet by reading his poems to a grateful audience. If you missed the event, you can watch it here. If you don't know Paul's work, you are in for a couple of hours of enormous pleasure.  

--sdh

Bobby Darin: Beyond the Sea

 

The Ink Spots: "I don't want to set the world on fire"

 

To err is human. . .

From the Archives: Cooking Latkes with Gabriella Gershenson by Stacey Harwood

Since the Jewish Festival of Lights and its attendant bacchanal of fried foods begins this week, we thought it a good time to bring back from last year this popular post: 

"Fried things are highly popular at any celebration:  they add a piquant variety to the menu; they are nice to look at, possess all of their original flavor, and can be eaten with the fingers, which is always pleasing to the ladies." Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste.

This is really a public service announcement disguised as a cooking post. In case you hadn't noticed, we're deep into latke season here.  If you read through this post, study the photos, and follow the instructions, you will never have to eat the leaden, oily, flabby discs that so often pass as latkes in restaurants and delis, and, yes, your relatives' homes.  My friend, the superb writer and editor and Food Network judge Gabriella Gershenson  (photo, above) has generously agreed to share the outstanding recipe passed down from her Latvian babulenka and perfected for the modern kitchen by her mother, the superb chef and caterer Anna Gershenson. Your search for latke heaven ends now.  By heaven I mean that your latkes will be thincrispflavorful and so light that you will dispense with all social niceties such as dishes, knives, and forks and eat them with your hands as soon as you can after they emerge from their brief bath in bubbling oil.  

We begin:  As Anna instructs in the recipe at the bottom of this post, assemble your ingredients and cooking accouterments.  You will need several bowls, sheet pans, lots of paper towels, some aluminum foil; the kinds of things that may not immediately come to mind.  If you have to stop mid-cooking to find them, latke perfection could be out of reach this time around.  (Below, the ingredients: eggs, flour, onions, potatoes, oil. You will also need salt and pepper.) 

Before we took this photo, Gabi and I had already peeled and cubed a boatload of russet potatoes.  The type of potatoes is key: you want a starchy variety.  I'll leave it to the food scientists to explain why. You also want to have a lot of oil on hand (Ed. note: Gabi uses Canola.)  
Once you're at the point shown in this photo, you grind the onions and potatoes.  "WTF? Grind? Every latke I've ever made has used shredded potatoes." I know, I know, me too.  At first Gabi and I couldn't believe it either but you do grind the potatoes. You fit your food processor with this blade and blast away. How do you know when your potatoes have been ground to the proper texture?  You listen to Anna: When you see that the potatoes are beginning to slide in the bowl and don't just sit attached to the walls, and moisture starts appearing, it's time to stop.

(Here is where we pause for a brief departure from Commandment #2 to say thank you to the god of small kitchen appliances for creating the food processor, without which we would be doing  this.)

Next, you dump your first batch of ground onions and potatoes into a strainer set over a large bowl.  Grind and strain the remaining potatoes and onions and when you're done, a goodly amount of milky water will have accumulated in the bowl. Peer through the water and you will see that the bottom of the bowl is coated with a thick white paste.  This is the potato starch. Pour off the water, being careful to preserve the starch (see photo, right).  

Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists

Call for applications:

 

The NYFA Immigrant Artist Project is pleased to announce the call for applications for the 6^th Cycle of our flagship Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists.

The 2012 Mentoring Program will pair emerging immigrant artists with artists from the NYFA Fellowship Program. Our NYFA Fellows will act as one-on-one Mentors to their Mentees for a period of six months. They will help them in gaining broader access to the New York cultural community by sharing ideas, advice, and resources. Mentors will also guide Mentees in achieving one or more specific goals and objectives. This year’s cycle will take place from April to September of 2012.

Along with the services and resources of the overall Mentoring Program, we are pleased to offer five Van Lier Fellowships this year! This award will provide eligible Mentees with a modest stipend and added professional development support.

This is a competitive program that is free of charge to accepted participants. The first five cycles of the Mentoring Program were highly successful with participants advancing in their careers and forming lasting bonds with their Mentors and other participants.

This program is accepting applications for the following areas: Architecture/Environmental Structures/Design**, Printmaking/Drawing/Book Arts, Crafts/Sculpture, Digital/Electronic Arts, Nonfiction Literature, and Poetry.

 

If you're eligible, apply!  Here's a link to the application.

 

Great Bullshit Sentences of 2011

From J. C. Hallman's essay "Books Make Me Masturbate" in Zone #3:

<<<
The first to use the phrase "creative writing" was Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his speech "The American Scholar," delivered at Harvard in 1837. . . .For Emerson, "creative writing" wasn't an allusion to the act of creation, to the grand scheme of two people coupling so as to make something beautiful and alive out of nothing, it was a citation of it. That's what he meant. The "-ive" part of the word means that."-ive" is the suffix of similization. In the end, "creative writing" means "writing that is like fucking." It's from the Greek. Or the Latin.
>>>

Got that, everyone? Thanks for the helpful italics, JC. -- DL

The Best American Poetry 2011: "The core of what it is to be human"

Still buying holiday gifts for family, friends, colleagues?  Give the gift of poetry! Read Michael Parker's review of The Best American Poetry 2011 to find out why this year's volume, with selections made by Kevin Young, will make the perfect gift. Find the review in the most recent issue of Poets & Artists (#30):

Read the review live here .

You may view/read it online here. 

The print and digital download is available here. 

Click on the cover image above or here to buy The Best American Poetry 2011.

 

-- sdh

Jericho Brown Farewell, Featuring The Phantastique 5

Thank you for following these posts all week, for your re-posts and your tweets and re-tweets and comments and discussions and phone calls telling friends to take a look at the love we've been making one day after another.  Thanks for your many messages of encouragement, your patience with my typos and misprints, and most of all, for looking forward to a new day of gratitude.  Thankfulness does not have to end here!

Thank you Chard DeNiord and Rita Dove and Fanny Howe and Michael Dumanis and Christine Garren and Dawn Lundy Martin for being brave enough to tell the truth just because this starstruck admirer asked for it.

Thanks always and forever to David Lehman for The Best American Poetry Series and Stacey Harwood for putting up with the OCD and technological incompetence that help to make me Jericho Brown.  Thanks for asking me to do this and for letting me do this my way.

Thank you, Derrick Franklin (the other fine man pictured above), for being the love of my life, for dealing with me and without me in the midst of my end of the semester grading and recommendation writing and refusal to sleep or eat because I think I've figured the right word in the last line of some old poem, for being my long distance love who makes both coasts my coast, for letting me flirt with the anonymous and the ridiculous knowing that, in truth, I'm coming home to put my whole check and whatever else you require in the palm of your perfect hand.  Thanks for letting me chase whatever it is I think I'll catch when I'm foolish enough to agree to blog for a week at the busiest time of year.

This final post is written in gratitude for the lives and legacies of Rudolph Byrd, the man I credit with teaching me how to read, and to Essex Hemphill, whose poems Dr. Byrd used as the primer for my lessons.  I live with their spirits in my ear:  no wonder I get where to go!

And finally, thank you Darrel Alejandro Holnes, Saeed Jones, Rickey Laurentiis, Phillip B. Williams, and L. Lamar Wilson for sending me poems and pictures with which to end this week and to share with lovers of poetry who are about to read what the critics call brilliance.  Nobody teaches me to be free like the five of you do, THE PHANTASTIQUE 5.

Since I've been asking questions all week, one last interview before all of you enjoy these short lyric poems:

Q:  Why spell fantastic like that?  Why five instead of four?

A:  Hmm...queer, isn't it?

Beethoven and My Father

My father Joseph Lehman was born today in Furth, Germany, ninety-nine years ago. Ludwig Van Beethoven was born in Bonn on the same date in 1770. When my father had his fatal heart attack in December 1971, I flew home from Paris, where I was studying, arriving too late to see him alive one last time. The fourth movement of Beethoven's Ninth, not only the major theme but the entire movement, from instrumentals through vocals, from development to coda, went through my mind in the following days. I could hear the singing at the funeral, at the cemetery, at home, and in the sickbed that awaited me in Paris upon my return there weeks later. I didn't know then that my father and Ludwig Van shared a birthday. In Paris, Ludwig Van Saul and I spent hours listening to to a recording of the symphony, he doing his best to educate me. Two friends form that time remember my saying, of my father, that he was "a holy man." I believe it. That was also the year I read Dostoyevski, and my head was full of Raskolnikov, the gambler, the Karamazovs, and certain saintly fools. -- DL 

 

Christopher Hitchens RIP [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,
I've told you guys before about how Christopher Hitchens borrowed a mite too liberally from my book Doubt: A History, though he cited a lot he definitely did not give credit when it was most painfully due. (I made all that plain in an otherwise extremely positive review of the book and we had some electronic chat about it and suffice to say the man liked my work and just hadn't quite realized how much was indeed mine, i.e. original research and ideas). I'd mostly forgiven him by then and I'd forgiven him entirely upon hearing his diagnoses. I had disagreed with much of his politics too -- I'm not much of a nun hunter and I think taking time out to bash the Clintons exhaustively in a world as corrupt as our is a little jambon-fisted (clumsey in a european way) -- but as he got sicker I thought more of the Hitchens of Letter to a Young Contrarian. And of course his God is Not Great is a hilarious and eye-prying romp through religion's manifold attempts to sway the genuinely curious Hitch, and how they all fail spectacularly. If you haven't read it you really should. 
An editor over at the Ottowa Citizen asked me to write up an atheist's take on CH's godless predicament now that the end was likely soon. Thought I'd share it with you.
Hope you're enjoying the warmish cold. Big hugs. Don't give up. Shout "courage" to strangers. Or give up and shout nothing. But don't kill yourself. I shall return to encourage you again. 
Love,
Jennifer

Charles Trenet sings "La Mer"

 

From the Beautiful to the Perverse: A Talk with Jericho Brown and Dawn Lundy Martin

I hear tell that listening to some folks talk about going to Cave Canem can get as boring as listening to angels talk about heaven. 

I know.  Everybody gets it:  “You finally found a community where, simultaneously, it’s okay not to be obviously black in your writing (whatever the hell that means) and it’s okay to be obviously black in your writing (whatever the hell that means). For a few days out of a lifetime, you’re treated like an entire human being by extraordinarily talented people, sharing meals and workshops and tears with poets you’ve loved for most of your life.  Yipee.”

Well, those of us sick of the love-fest are going to have to find another blog to read today.  (Some of us already changed the channel as soon as we saw the word, “black.”  Scary asses.)

I first attended the Cave Canem workshop when I was 24 years old.  (I know; to look at me you’d think that was just last year.)  And while there, I became convinced that there is no shame in loving all the poetry I love.  

I also met a woman whose writing continues to floor me, to make me rethink my every revision, to question all my ways of being.

Dawn Lundy Martin earned an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  Her full-length collection, A Gathering of Matter / A Matter of Gathering (University of Georgia Press, 2007), was selected by Carl Phillips for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Discipline, won the 2009 Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, chosen by Fanny Howe. She is also the author of three chapbooks, including The Morning Hour (2003), which was selected by C.D. Wright for the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship.

In 2004, she co-edited The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism (Anchor Books, 2004), a collection of essays on activism in America.  She is co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation, a national grant making organization led by young women and transgender youth.  She is also a founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets.  She is currently an assistant professor in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

I met Dawn one Cave Canem summer in a workshop where she, through her comments and poems and hardedged honesty, changed the way I read and see.  I still think of her as one of the smartest people I’ve encountered in my life, so I thought I’d share with you some of the questions I’ve wanted to ask her for some time.  In memory of my CC sister Phebus Etienne, with gratitude for every Friday ever that anybody got dressed up just to go somewhere sweaty and shake her or his booty, here’s a talk I had with Dawn Lundy Martin: