The Best American Poetry

NaPoWriMo Poems Day #30: Finish Line

Ahoy, scribblers! You've reached the finish line! How do you feel? Awesome, I hope, because you are. Along with smart and pretty. If you didn't write a poem everyday, who cares? If you did, you rule. Read some non-fiction as you rest up for next year. We'll see you then.

The last prompt is, "Write a poem incorporating at least three 'I remember' statements. This invocation of memory seems a fitting way to end our month together."

Onto the poems.

On Nostalgia by Timothy O'Keefe

The sun is never more or less bright. It is more or less obstructed. A parable.

The urge to feed nostalgia. Is this different from nostalgia itself? Impulse versus aftermath. A temptation, but devoid of ecstasy. The impulse tells us we might live again—an uncanny resemblance—and if we live again, will it really be us there, or will we skulk along the periphery with half-clenched fists? Like a voyeur in the mirror. A narcissist, but no one looks back. They look continually past—past doubt, past what-if, past the day you left, left them bereft, on the brink, slightly bemused. We can see us there—we know what we’d like to think. But from where to think it? The arc of nostalgia never begins in an emotional present. We catch it en route, already worn down to the metal and glistening. Therein lies a brute navigation.

Lean and mean, our fathers said, without a referent.

"On Letting Go" [by Lera Auerbach]

Yes, it must be a good thing.

Yes, I think so.
I recommend it.

First, let go of your dream – 
The one that keeps you awake at night,
That restless yearning, 
needing want.

Now you can sleep soundly.

Then – let go of your ambition – 
You are fine as is, 
You’ve certainly accomplished a lot.
Striving for more will lead you to trouble.
Besides, it’s never enough anyway.

These are large concepts – so

let go of smaller things:
talks with your neighbors, 
exotic vacation, invitations and 
that fat novel you never quite finished.

Empty your pockets: 
let go of receipts, spare change, 
old letters, photographs of places
you will never go back to.

Throw away old furniture, 
clothes two sizes too small or too large,
Paperback books, 
telephone numbers,

Let go of your memories;
dull stings of the past.

Don’t you feel tired 
of this aging body, 
of that same face, 
the daily betrayals of reflections?

Let go of life itself –  
what’s left?
Can you still  

imagine 
a perfect moment?

Let go. 
You are tired. 
You are so very tired.
And the empty skies are waiting.

-- Lera Auerbach

 

La diferencia entre Pepsi y Coca Cola

Edited by Julio Mas, La Diferencia entre Pepsi y Coca Cola, published in Madrid, is an excellent introduction, for Spanish-speaking readers, to contemporary Anglo poetry in the US. What is the singular difference between Pepsi and Coke? The answer is inside. Get it here. 

Mad Men: the Limits of Liberation [by Connie Aitcheson]

It seemed to be a night of liberation for the women of Mad Men: Peggy defying expectations and moving in with Abe, Megan bursting with new ideas and even little Sally coming out as a beautiful adolescent, trying to leave the age of innocence, while the big girls also supported and encouraged each other. But then the generations spoke; wisdom, doubt, envy, and truth all echoed to each other -- crashing and crushing the hopes and dreams built up in the women’s fantasies.  

Peggy’s uncertainly about her relationship with Abe made her think his request for an urgent dinner must mean he wanted break up with her.  With Joan’s encouragement she changes her thinking and believes the dinner might be for a marriage proposal.  But Abe doesn’t propose marriage, instead he wants them to live together and Peggy has to readjusts her thinking. When all the talk of cohabitation is finished, Abe asks Peggy if she still wants to eat dinner and she says, “I do.” The sadness on her face implies that this might be the only time she gets to say those words. It Is as though her heart caught up with her mind and she calculated all the pros and cons of living together or not being with Abe: is she settling, how does she maneuver sex-and-the-single-girl territory, does she demand marriage or go with what’s right for the moment? As strong and independent as she is, as determined to move in with him, it was painful to watch her have to struggle with the choice, then to have to listen to her mother’s words, “you are selling yourself short. This boy he will use you for practice till he decides to get married and have a family.”

The Mad world is a constant struggle between reality and illusion. Megan and Don recovered remarkably well from last week. Still blissfully in love but wanting to prove herself, Megan comes up with the winning idea to seal the Heinz deal.  Although everyone at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce knows the idea is Megan’s, she downplays her role in coming up with it so that Raymond from Heinz gives Don the contract.  Peggy congratulates Megan and she is seemingly on her way to realizing herself as a successful career woman.  But Megan’s parents are staying with her and Don, and their unhappiness filters into her life.

Her father, Emile, a leftist intellectual, is struggling with his own professional failure as his latest idea for a book didn’t go too well with the publishers, and his wife, Marie, is unhappy and unloved. Let me digress for a second. It is a little jarring watching sweet, innocent Ormond from Sabrina get typecast as the mother of adult women.  She was fantastic in Temple Grandin, but I’m not sure if I want to see her as a mother much more. Maybe just wife or mistress, business woman, politician or Navy pilot, anything else.  It takes deliberately awful makeup, with the eyeliner on her top lid so unfashionably out of skew and shadows under her eyes, to make Ormand look old enough to play Megan’s mother.  With her hair down she could be playing Megan.

Anyway, leave it to the fathers to see in their daughters what they don’t see in their wives; Don telling Sally to take off her boots and makeup, protecting her virtues -- this after he deserted Megan last week.  And Megan’s father giving her a backhanded compliment and beat down, “I’ve always thought you were single-minded about your dreams….but now I see that you skipped the struggle and went right to the end….I hate that you gave up.  Don’t let your love for this man stop you from doing what you wanted to do.” Yet at the same time he’s telling his daughter this, his wife's head is positioned between Roger’s legs in a dark room. What dreams did she have or skip; how did her marriage make her stop living her life?

In the end all are sadder and maybe a little wiser, but none as honest as Sally.  When she sees the exchange between Marie and Roger she is forever changed. Asked by her telephone buddy how the city is, she has the last word of the night. “Dirty.”  

-- Connie Aitcheson

A Gesture of Beginnings By Timothy O'Keefe

It takes just one awful second, I often think, and an entire epoch passes. —Sebald 

 

In the smallest of intervals, one discovers the indefinite change. I love the dizzying blur of time in Sebald’s quote, but more than that, I love to imagine that second. To populate its momentary world. See: the second after a hand stops waving. See: the seconds between rain leaving the clouds and, “Hey, it’s raining.” See: not the seconds that measure lightning from its thunder, but the precise waving of those treetops.

 

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, Dionysus places the young king Pentheus at the top of an enormous tree overlooking the field in which he will die. It is a story of divine wrath. Dionysus destroys the family of Cadmus for denying his worship, and the details of suffering are explicit in the extreme. No one has a more shocking fate than Pentheus: Dionysus clouds his mind, dresses him as a woman, and leads him to a group of female worshippers (the Bacchae, led by Pentheus’ own mother) who dismember and decapitate him with their bare hands. And yet, somehow, Dionysus remains unblemished—in purity, in consequence—by this act. It is an atrocity transcended in the simplest of gestures: after Pentheus is put out of mind and sense, before Dionysus leads him to the hillside of his death, there, in the waiting—just before—Dionysus watches Pentheus primping his hair. When one of the curls falls loose, Pentheus says Arrange it. I am in your hands. [This, too, is an awful second.] Dionysus reaches for Pentheus’ face, tucks the curl back under its ribbon. 

 

Gesture: an action that surpasses its acknowledgments.

In Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat,” there’s a moment that astonishes me every time: Just after an anecdotal backstory of the song’s “you” (And you treated my woman to a flake of your life…), just before the lyricism reaches its crescendo of address (And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer…), and, when it’s all over, when we’ve realized that the song is also a letter, we find a window on the letter’s creation, the moment of its reality: Well I see Jane’s awake—she sends her regards. I can almost see Jane’s lithe coming-to, her awareness of the letter-writer’s presence, that first talk of nothing much at all, and the final “Tell him I said hi,” or perhaps, a casual wave of the hand.

 

Poets are often asked what kind of poems they write, and it seems so natural, so humble in its curiosity, so clear in its hope for a window on the poet’s imaginative landscape. I’ve been asked this question many times, and it’s always an unexpected strain. The truest answer I can give is also, I’ve been told, the least helpful: “Short. I write short poems.” Or, even worse: “Well, I write my experience of experience.” The reason, I think, that these answers can come off as lazy or evasive or smug is because what is really being asked for is a view from outside—the way one would describe a distant skyscraper without getting into the nuances of interior design or architecture. In this spatial analogy, the outside and inside descriptions of the skyscraper are unique views, equally legitimate and exacting on their own terms. And there’s the crux, which also serves, I hope, as an overture to my blogging week: I cannot see the outside of a poem—I see only an expanding interiority that goes as far as the action it performs. As readers, we ackowledge that action, and in the moment of our acknowledgment, it surpasses us. 

You win if. . .

You win if you can name the bandleader with the clarinet and the singer
and what is it that you win? How about this:

 
Have you ever tried a Ramos Gin Fizz with Creme de Violette instead of orange blossom water?
(Originally posted April 29, 2011)

The Businessman, the Statesman, and the Poet

Ed note:  On Thursday,  April 26, 2012, at The Corner Bookstore in Manhattan (93^rd Street and Madison Avenue), Dana Gioia read from Pity the Beautiful, his most recent volume of poetry.  Here is the text of David Lehman's  introduction. (sdh):

Most poets lead lives of quiet desperation or perhaps subdued contentment. The example of Dylan Thomas to the contrary notwithstanding, the life of a modern poet is not supposed to be dramatic, exciting, full of unexpected detours and flamboyant adventures. Take a look at the contributors' notes of a poetry anthology and you’ll see the typical profile: the poet has an MFA degree, teaches writing workshops at a university or college, has several publications, has gained some recognition, and lives with spouse plus a pet with a cute name in Tuscaloosa or Kalamazoo, or maybe Iowa City or Ann Arbor.

How different from this paradigm is the life and career of Dana Gioia.

After college at Stanford, Dana studied comparative literature at Harvard, picking up a master’s degree but deciding that the academic life was not for him.  In 1975, he returned to Stanford to study business. With his MBA in hand he began working for General Foods in Rye Brook, NY, becoming a vice president of marketing, with responsibilities for such accounts as Jell-O and Kool-Aid. Still later he specialized in mergers-and-acquisitions. This is demanding work, but Dana, whose unflagging energy and stringent work ethic remain an inspiration to his friends, did not put his literary life on hold.

Mindful of the great American poets who toiled not in ivory towers but in insurance companies, medical practices, libraries, journalism, as well as commerce, Gioia was a businessman by day but managed to publish poems and ambitious essays in prestigious magazines such as The Hudson Review and elsewhere. He became a leader of the New Formalism, a movement determined to restore to poetry the importance formerly placed on rhyme and meter. He also translated Montale, wrote touching personal memoirs about Elizabeth Bishop (whom he had come to know while at Harvard) and John Cheever, and in 1991 penned an influential and much-quoted essay for The Atlantic that won him many ardent admirers and a fair share of enemies: “Can Poetry Matter?” Nearly twenty years later, the poetry website called Scarriet posted its “hot 100” list, and there in second place, between Billy Collins (“a poet of wit and popularity”) and David Lehman ("BAP takes the pulse better than prizes/contests do”) you will find Dana Gioia, whose “famous essay still resonates.”

After leaving the business world, Dana gave more time to the literary life – writing poems and essays and opera libretti, editing textbooks, translating Seneca, collaborating with all sorts of folks on all sorts of worthy projects. But he had another surprise in store for us. He became, in 2003, the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, in which capacity he served for six years, piloting ambitious programs and managing to sell the arts to congressmen not necessarily disposed to be supportive. It is safe to say that not since Archibald MacLeish headed the Library of Congress has a poet worked so hard, and accomplished so much of value, in so prominent a position in the federal government.

On a purely personal note, I like to remember the day in 2003when Dana came to New York and we had coffee at the Cornelia Street Café. Dana told me about the National Book Festival he was organizing for the fall and he asked me to help him make a presentation of American poetry. There would be a brunch at the White House that my wife, Stacey, and I could attend. I said: My mother – It would mean a lot to her, a holocaust refugee, then 88, to come. Dana took the cell phone out of his pocket and made a call and five minutes later my mother was on the guest list. The day we visited the White House was one of the happiest days in her life, and for that I will always have Dana to thank.

Now Dana is publishing his fourth book of poems, Pity the Beautiful. It is his first collection in more than a decade, and I have no hesitation in declaring it to be his finest to date – and surely – in such poems as “Special Treatments Ward” and “Majority” and “Being Happy” and “The Road” -- his most poignant. There’s a poem that appeared in the Hudson Review that’s out of this world: “The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet.” These are poems in which sentiment is refined by technical prowess, and simple words combine to make music and meaning merge marvelously and memorably.

It’s a privilege to present to you this man of letters and of action, the author of Pity the Beautiful, my friend, the poet Dana Gioia.

-- David Lehman

"fist machine" [by Katie Thompson]

Blue, I’ve got you grounded.
One clap for anarchy & your power grid,
three more times if the first succeeded.

My knuckles are pink from nickels you slid
across the table; my mouth is tired of trying
to figure out why. Blue, I’ve got you.

Shut the door, peel off the label. Scream a little:
bitches, all of em. Stop now. Stop
three more times if the first succeeded.

Let’s spend all day looking for that museumed squid.
Leave me at the bottom
of the moving staircase. Blue, you walked away

with your smallest spine.
Tonight I stole a can of Pepsi. I’m sorry. I’m sorry
three more times if the first succeeded.

Let’s not confuse contact with theory.
Let’s not pretend we’re human.
Blue, I’ve got you grounded.
I’ve got you three more times if the first succeeded.

-- Katie Thompson

Timothy O'Keefe, Guest Blogger April 29-May 5

This week we welcome Timothy O’Keefe as our guest blogger.  Timothy is the author of The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Seneca Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded an Academy of American Poets prize and scholarships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Tin House Writer’s Workshop. He teaches at Westminster College and curates the University of Utah Guest Writers Series.

Welcome, Timothy.

-- sdh

Multiple Choice (by David Lehman)

The multiple-choice exam as an ad hoc poetic form attracted me even before I saw the clever and funny things John Ashbery did with it. My Freud Quiz is as much an homage to the mulitple choice form as to the bearded inventor of psychoanalysis in his little Berggasse flat in Vienna. I think I like the structure not only because of its familiarity but because of my love of alternative possibilities.

Last night I was reading the May 2012 issue of Harper's and I came across an essay entitled "Ignorance of Things Past" by editor emeritus Lewis Lapham. The essay is full of recollected pith, some of which is surprisingly bland: "a morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable" (Thomas Jefferson). But it was when I reached a new graf headed "History is work in progreess" that the imp of the perverse reared its head and I created "History, a Multiple-Choice Exam," draft one, which follows:

History is
(1) A 'work in progress" (Lewis Lapham, Harper's, May 2012)
(2) "A waste of time" (Hilda Cortez, who sat next to me in Art History 76 sophomore year)
(3) A sphinx that "to the defeated may say 'Alas!' but cannot help or pardon" (W. H. Auden, "Spain 1937")
(4) What happens when thesis meets antithesis or when Newton's second law of mechanics meets "Hegel's Vacation"
(5) The compulsion to repeat (Freud)
(6) "Now and England" (T. S. Eliot)
(7) "Long Ago and Far Away" (Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein)
(8) "Everything only connected by 'and' and 'and'' (Elizabeth Bishop)
(9) A "hail Mary" pass (Doug Flutie)
(10) Something that occurred prior to
    a) Auschwitz
    b) Hiroshima
    c) Watergate
    d) the fall of the Berlin Wall
    e) your birth, dear reader. Nine months prior, give or take a few days.
    f) all of the above conjoined by ampersands

-- DL

Nothing Beats the Martini [by DL]

 A "dark and stormy"
(ginger beer and rum)
does excellent things for some.
Try it
the next time you go off your diet.
You'll see.

But nothing beats a Martini.
No, nothing beats a Martini.

Informed imbibers agree
that a chilled Negroni
(gin, sweet vermouth, Campari)
is better than Long Island Iced Tea.
But does it beat a Martini?

Tell me what in
a Manhattan
is not to like?
Rye, sweet vermouth cut with Cynar
(an artichoke-based liqueur
you'll find at any good bar)
makes for a great cocktail
that will not fail
to please on land or sea
and improve any party.

Still, this is the singular truth:
Nothing beats gin and vermouth,
the latter French, the former English.
Served cold as the Arctic Ocean,
it inspires devotion.
It's as water to a fish,
It's delightful and delish,
It's precisely what I wish.

Nothing goes down as cleanly
as a well-mixed Martini.

No, nothing beats the Martini. 

-- DL

Edvard Munch's Scream: On Sale Today!

Not today actually but next Wednesday, "The Scream" is expected to fetch $80 million at Sotheby's. Private viewings in London and New York will have preceded the big auction. It's a painting that spoke to me as a young man; it is the daddy of all shrieks from Wes Craven's to Howard Dean's; and it (and Rilke) triggered a poem I wrote back in 1972 or '73 when I had just returned to New York after two years of intelligence work in the UK and France. Daryl Hine accepted it for Poetry magazine and here it is from the December 1973 issue. Looking at the painting, caught up in all the curves and swirls,don't overlook the fact that the screamer is standing on a bridge and that there are two "normal" fellows within earshot. A lot of Norway went into this 1893 painting. A lot of manuscripts were huirled into the flames. -- DL

Marie Ponsot Named NYC Literary Legend [by Catherine Woodard]

In the New York Botanical Garden in November, Marie Ponsot paused in front of a towering tree. She recalled as a little girl she delighted her mother with the observation that trees are just like big bunches of flowers.

That power of pause, of reflection transformed with language, often with a jolt of joy (or pain), makes Marie Ponsot, 91, an inaugural NYC Literary Legend. She is a poet who sees and seizes the lyric moment in her work and in her life.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the 2012 Literary Honors Thursday. Joining Ponsot, were Walter Dean Myers for children’s literature, Paul Auster for fiction, Roz Chast for humor, Robert Silvers for literary life and Robert Caro for nonfiction.

“The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,” asserts the poem Ponsot read at the Gracie Mansion ceremony. That poem, "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo," ends with these four lines: “Late at night when my outdoors is/indoors, I picture clouds again:/Come to mind, cloud./Come to cloud, mind.”

Mother to seven, mentor to many, Ponsot writes and teaches with a child’s delight in exploration. But this child reads Latin, translates French and has published numerous poetry collections. The most recent are Easy (2009), Springing (2002) and The Bird Catcher (1998), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Among many honors, Ponsot holds the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for lifetime achievement and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. 

Professor emerita of English at Queens College, CUNY, Ponsot also has taught in national and international graduate programs. With colleague Rosemary Deen, Ponsot wrote Beat Not the Poor Desk. This revolutionary text for effective writing teaching won the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. Ponsot still teaches at the Unterberg Poetry Center of 92^nd Street Y and at The New School.

The city ceremony capped a week of Ponsot appreciation that began Monday at the KGB Bar in the East Village. She first read “TV, Evening News,” a poem that begins with a “screenful of chaos” from the war in Afghanistan.

“I don’t know the languages,” the speaker claims, “I safe screen-watch.” But nevertheless Ponsot connects all of history and humanity in the third, six-line stanza: “Achilles is not there, or Joshua either…/My children are thank God not there/any more or less than you and I are not there.”

As a tank takes out a wall, Ponsot subverts a word of worship: “the house genuflects,” and a woman howls in the dust before the camera cuts to the next shot.

Ponsot is seriously Still Against War, her trademark yellow button and the title of two books of poetry by former students from several decades. Jamie Stern, poet, publisher and lawyer, gathered three dozen students at her Tribeca loft Tuesday to read from Still Against War II. And to take a challenge to describe beyond clichés Ponsot’s bright smile and blue eyes, eyes simultaneously piercing and generous.

 “She smiles like she has a secret but one she is happy to let you in,” Michael Bennett said.

“The generosity of the Dalai Lama’s eyes,” offered Elizabeth Coleman.

“Blue laser beams that can zap x-rays or cut glass,” said Jackson Taylor.

In a Ponsot workshop, students do not offer subjective improvements to the poems of others. Instead she draws out rigorous, detailed observations, which inevitably give the poet a notion about what to fix. (I keep on my desk two pithy paragraphs Ponsot wrote about her grandmother’s three-word expression “Mind Yourself Child.” Change the intonation and stress on each word and you too will be thinking about identity in complex ways.)

Still Against War I in 2011 celebrated Ponsot’s 90^th birthday and her recovery from a heart attack, stroke and aphasia the year before. Ponsot got critical rapid care because she had a son call poet Scott Hightower, whose partner is an emergency room doctor.

Imagine a life in which her emergency call is to a fellow poet. “She lives poetry on a scale that is just so elemental,” Hightower said. “Not only as a writing mentor but a teaching mentor.”

In the days before she could speak again, Ponsot was taking inventory in her head of language lost, instinctually poking around for passages she knew in more than one language and for a long time. When she couldn’t recall “The Lord’s Prayer” in English, she tried it in French. When that didn’t work, she remembered a Latin manuscript and from visual memory began to translate it back into English.

While Ponsot lay in intensive care, Sapphire, novelist and poet, snuck in to deliver six small notebooks and pen. Once home, a poet posse of students and friends came by to read and talk about poems regularly to help Ponsot regain lexicon and syntax. Her fluency with language restored, Ponsot read new poems as well as published work at Monday’s reading.

As she told a group of high school poetry students in the Bronx in November, even in the hospital she followed the only rule she’s ever made for herself about writing – do it at least 10 minutes every day. “If I could do that with seven children, so can you,” Ponsot said.

Then to their surprise, 15 minutes into the class they’d expected to be a lecture and reading from a master, Ponsot leaned forward and announced “My dears, let’s hear your poems.”

One by one, they read while Ponsot listened as intently as she watches trees and clouds and children and wars and words.

Catherine Woodard wrote “Secret of Tomato” as a tribute to Ponsot and appears in both Still Against War volumes. Her poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, RHINO and other journals. She worked to restore Poetry in Motion to the NYC subways and is a board member of the Poetry Society of America. Woodard is a 2012 fellow at the Hambidge Center in Georgia. In 2011, she was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a featured poet at UnshodQuills.com. Woodard has a MFA in poetry from The New School and MS in journalism from Columbia University. 

 

NaPoWriMo Poems Day #26: Home Stretch!

Now you’re really in the home stretch of NaPoWriMo, scribblers! If this was a marathon, you’d be peeing blood by now. Today’s prompt, an elegy, which reminds me:

 
I especially love, “Blue looked at the possum, then he looked at me.” Our own gaze pales next to our gaze returned. Devotees paint eyes on white-washed stupas, eyes on statues in Hindu temples because we visit the Gods to be seen by them. An animal that sees us—that cuts through its instinct and collar and cage bars—is a most worthy subject for a banjo elegy.

Now, onto the poems!

This Just In: Call for Submissions - The Poet's Quest for God: 21st Century Poems of Sprirtuality

Poet, editor and publisher Todd Swift writes to us from London with this call for submissions:

Eyewear Publishing is looking for new, mostly previously-unpublished poems, written in English, concerned with spiritual issues in this secular age, by persons of any faith, or none.

Deadline for submission: August 1, 2012

One of the characteristics of our contemporary culture which is generally described as post-modern is the human search for the spiritual. The advent of post-modernity has been accompanied by the dawn of a new spiritual awakening. Many spiritual writers say that desire is our fundamental dis-ease and is always stronger than satisfaction. This desire lies at the centre of our lives, in the deep recesses of the soul. This unquenchable fire residing in all of us manifests itself at key points in the human life cycle. Spirituality is ultimately what we do about that desire. When Plato said that we are on fire because our souls come from beyond and that beyond is trying to draw it back to itself, he is laying out the broad outlines for a spirituality. Augustine made this explicitly Christian in his universally known phrase: ‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You’. This new emphasis on and openness to the spiritual dimension of human existence which is characteristic of contemporary lived culture is accompanied by a new emergence of atheism - ‘The Rage against God’ – as well as a sometimes-aggressive secularism. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are the two best-known exemplars of this in Western Europe.

Perhaps the best response to this rage against belief in a Divine Power at work in the universe is a poetic one. In reply to people such as his brother Christopher and Dawkins, Peter Hitchens believes that passions as strong as theirs are more likely to be countered by ‘the unexpected force of poetry, which can ambush the human heart at any time’.

Hence we invite poets from around the world who can empathise with the new search for the spiritual to write about their belief, search or struggle with their quest for God (or a God), whether their image of God is what one young person described as ‘a creative energy that exists all around us, a life force’, the female image of God of the Old Testament, or the Abba (Father) image which lay at the core of the spirituality of Jesus of Nazareth, or indeed, some heretofore unimagined apprehension of the divine. The purpose of this collection is to awaken debate, create an imaginative discourse and generally open a space for religious poetic practices in the contemporary world, while at the same time refusing to delimit the horizon of the possible. As poetry, and poets, have a long, rich, and no doubt complicated tradition of writing to, and about God (one needs only to think of Dante, Milton, Donne and Dickinson) and other issues surrounding faith, belief, and transcendence, the editors believe there should be no shortage of inspiring, inquiring, intriguing and imaginative poems available for readers at this challenging time in human history.

Submissions will be welcomed via email as word documents, containing no more than three poems, and including contact details and a brief 100 word biographical note about the author.  For more information, or to submit, contact Dr Swift at [email protected], at Facebook or here.

-- sdh

This Be The Poet: PSA Celebrates the Poetry of Philip Larkin by Madge McKeithen

             “The poem kept pushing back at me, challenging me.” Thomas Sayers Ellis was speaking about “Money,” the poem that he had just read at Tuesday night’s celebration of the work of Philip Larkin at Cooper Union. And a celebration it was, the challenge of Larkin’s work giving rise to an interesting and memorable evening sponsored by the Poetry Society of America and The Cooper Union.

        Larkin’s poems, read by PSA's Executive Director Alice Quinn and twenty invited poets, shared the stage with live musical performances by the Queens College Louis Armstrong Ensemble of Larkin’s favorite jazz. From the PSA director’s opening remarks about having shared “This Be The Verse” on a recent Sunday’s visit with her elderly father to the closing recording of Larkin reading “Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album,” the evening was an intensely auditory experience. Familiar poems, read aloud, took on new and different traits for the audience and the readers.

            Words grabbed the listeners’ attention in a manner different than Larkin read on the page, alone, or in classes past, perhaps because of the reader’s intonation or the poem’s context in the night’s line-up. There is an evening coming in/…That lights no lamps, Meena Alexander read near the outset, while Paul Simon’s reading of we should be careful/Of each other, we should be kind/While there is still time near the end seemed even more benedictory. At other times, as with Nick Laird’s reading of “Aubade” to a hall full of attentive listeners – Not to be here,/Not to be anywhere,/And soon: nothing more terrible, nothing more true. – the poem was experienced as much as it was heard.

At times, the cadence of the poem and the accents and intonations of the reader moved together in an engaging, syncopated fashion. Throughout the evening, the poets served and served up Larkin’s memorable poems, delivering, celebrating and standing alongside; the work itself was alive and shining.  Especially was this the case with “Talking in Bed,” “High Windows,” and “Home is so Sad.”

Sometimes there was just plain fun, as with lines Archie Burnett (editor of the volume being celebrated, The Complete Poems. Philip Larkin. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012) read, After drinking Glenfiddich/I say good rubbance to bad riddich.  Sometimes, clarity and immediacy, as Saskia Hamilton read …there lies/Hidden round them, waiting too,/Earth’s immeasurable surprise.

Tuesday’s event made a strong case for reading poetry aloud with others and for continuing to seek broader audiences, wider configurations of others. Staged, as PSA Program Director Darrel Holnes put it, in a multi-arts format, the evening of music and words provided an experience of Larkin’s work beyond and different from reading silently alone. The public venue for considering some of this poet’s private yet universal, dark content was particularly apt, and for the growing community of poetry readers and lovers, an evening such as this provided a new way in to talking about a poet and the work of a poet we cannot stop talking about.

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL and at the Darien Library. Her work has appeared in literary journals, anthologies and newspapers, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School University.

David Grubin's "Downtown Express" [by David Lehman]

Sasha, a brilliant young Russian violinist, needs a visa to stay in New York. He gets a fellowship to study at Juilliard and he's good, but his domineering father, a cellist from the old country, keeps interrupting Sasha's lessons with his teacher, Marie, an exceedingly attractive American pianist (Carolyn McCormick) who knows her Tchaikovsky and can down her vodka with the best of them. The young man (the extraordinarily talented Phillipe Quint) meets Ramona, a bohemian blonde keyboard player and singer (Nellie McKay), who lives hand to mouth, raiding garbage dumpsters for her next meal. Meanwhile, Papa (Michael Cumpsty) gets it on with Marie, and will Sasha bone up for his recital or will he throw caution to the winds and join Ramona's band? The movie is tender-hearted and sweet but not sentimental with great shots of street musicians on and off the subway. New York City (Brighton Beach, Lincoln Center, the Russian Samovar) is happily on display. The superb soundtrack veers from Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and ambitious cavatinas to "classic rock" songs featuring violin and keyboard and written by Mr. Quint. It's an homage to dualities: two cultures, two love affairs, two kinds of music. Brilliant. See it. -- DL

Happy birthday, Ella

 

The Other Latin@: A Q&A with Blas Falconer [by Emma Trelles]

The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity is an anthology of 20 essays that, according to its co-editor Blas Falconer, aims to counter a narrow perspective of Latino/a writers and honor their diversity. In his own essay, Falconer writes, "When Spanish enters the poem, it is often done because it is part of the memory, not because it is the language of the reader or of the audience."

This idea of how Spanish is mysteriously fused to the neurons of Latino writers resonated with me, and I wanted to hear more from Blas.  He and co-editor Lorraine Lopez will present the book this Thursday, April 26, at noon, as part of the Books and Beyond series at the Library of Congress in partnership with Letras Latinas and the University of Arizona Press. At 6:30 p.m., both Falconer and Lopez will read selections from their own work. For details, visit here.

ET: What was the source of inspiration for this anthology, for the idea that Latino writers are more than a globbed together demographic or a brightly colored (I'm guessing red) wedge in a pie graph?

BF: The book began, in part, as a presentation on an AWP panel I wrote in 2008. The acquisitions editor from University of Arizona Press was in the audience and came up to me afterwards and suggested we do a whole book. I told her I was thinking the exact same thing. We wanted to open it up beyond the Latino identity that's been seen through a small lens.

The book also originated from the fact that I didn't really understand my own relationship to the Latino community or to Puerto Rico. I had traveled there a lot when I was younger, but after my grandmother passed away I stopped going. I also knew that there was this rich Puerto Rican community in New York that I didn't feel quite in sync with because I grew up in Northern Virginia, and there just weren't a lot of Puerto Ricans there. As a writer, I kept asking myself, ‘Am I Latino?’ ‘What does it mean to be Latino?’ I have a white father and a Latina mother, but I have an estranged relationship to Puerto Rico. What does this mean? Then I realized that I saw two of my dearest friends as Latinas - Lisa Chavez, a Chicana from Alaska, and Helena Mesa, who is Cuban and grew up in Pittsburgh - even though they too felt disconnected. I thought, ‘Let's explore this.’ I realized that many writers were challenging the term of Latino in various ways, and I thought reading about their experiences might be interesting.

Another source of inspiration is that sometimes I just don't want to write. I'm on empty. But I'm still fueled by great poetry or writing, so I want to be involved somehow. Editing kind of satisfies that need. Seeing how different people write, how their work or books come together. It's inspiring.            

ET: How did you seek out writers? What was the criteria for submissions?                                                             

BF: The press asked me to widen the scope to include fiction writers, and I asked Lorraine Lopez to be my co-editor. We started thinking about the Latino experience and the Latino identity, and we wanted writers that subverted stereotypical topics -- food, grandmothers, estrangement and exile, urban life. We wanted to push beyond this and see what was next.                 (at right, Blas Falconer)        

ET: What's funny is that all those topics are in the book!

BF: It's totally true. But Lisa Chavez, who's from Alaska, isn't writing about the expected Chicana experience. In his essay, Steven Cordova  basically says, ‘I'm Latino, but I'm HIV positive and gay, and it doesn't mean I'm not Latino or addressing issues of otherness, but I'm doing that through this other aspect of my identity, through this other narrative.' 

In terms of aesthetics, Carmen Gimenez Smith and Gabe Gomez call on Latino poets to explore what might be considered experimental methods of articulating the Latino experience, which often relies heavily on narrative. So those topics are there, but they’re approached in many different ways.

ET: As an editor, do you find it challenging to reject work?

BF: I do. To be honest, we did have to pass on a few essays because there were a couple of times where they were redundant in subject matter. Another one was more for an academic journal in terms of what the press wanted for our imagined reader. No one submitted a bad essay, but some of them just didn't fit. It was hard because we didn't invite anyone to submit that we didn't really admire as writers.

ET: The tone of the essays in this book varies widely: "Latina Enough," by Stephanie Elizondo Griest is witty as well as reflective. In "When We Were Spanish," your co-editor Lorraine Lopez offers a kind of personalized scholarship. Did you both deliberately attempt to include a gamut of styles or did it just turn out that way?

BF: It kind of did just turn out that way. We were interested in not only the ideas in the essays but also in their craft. And we weren't just asking anyone to contribute; we were asking writers. So we encouraged them to write in the manner they felt best addressed their subjects. Gina Franco's essay is much more lyric, for example. It's a stunning essay and very complex in the way she addresses issues of identity.. Some were more academic, such as Peter Ramos’ essay, which had more of a rooting in the American cannon, more of an academic slant. And that was good too.

ET: In "Coyotes," Alex Espinoza writes about speaking at community colleges and remembering how he also sat at a workshop, at University of California, Irvine, and at the same table as Gary Soto and Helena Viramontes. What is the role mentorship plays in understanding identity?

BF: In my own essay, I kind of address this. When I started reading Rane Arroyo and Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought, ‘Oh these writers are like me in some way.’ But they were able to find their own voices and incorporate their cultural influences. They were doing what I wanted to do, and I saw them as legitimate Latino writers. It was a way in for me. I realized I am also a part of this community. In that sense I saw them as models.

When my first book came out, I felt an incredibly nurturing response from the Latino community that I had never expected. Even today, five years after my first book was published, I still feel welcome and there's no question I'm part of this community. It made me feel as if my own experience was legitimate, and it's resolved this kind of conflict of estrangement I've had. I’m grateful to the Latino community for embracing diversity within itself.

ET: How do you as a Puerto Rican and Latino poet feel or do not feel marginalized?

BF: You know, I don't feel marginalized. I feel like everyone has had that experience of being "the other." I don't care if you're a straight white man; you've felt that sense of otherness. I don't feel any more marginalized than other people do at different times in their lives. I don't think I'm going to be denied a job or not be published or be dismissed because I'm a Latino writer. I don't think I'm going to be ignored. Maybe it's a testament to the strides the Latino writing community has made in publishing. Of course, I've experienced bigotry in my life as a gay man and as a Latino, but I'm not looking over my shoulder or waiting for the next person to shut a door in my face. But other people have had, and still do have, that experience, and I know that it happens.