The Best American Poetry

Writing Without a Center - Kenji C. Liu [Asian Pacific American Heritage Month]

I have the pleasure and honor to once again guest curate a week of blog posts here for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM). Thank you very much to Best American Poetry for offering this space for thinking and writing.

I consider myself active in Asian Pacific American (APA) arts and culture, but my allegiance isn’t to the identity–it’s to issues, histories, and lineages. The truth is, a lot of contemporary APA poetry is less an inspiration for me than is poetry and writing from other communities, past and present.

Those who help me find new ways to think and write about our world, like Michel Foucault, Cherríe Moraga, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabes, and others, are those I consider my lineage and poetic community.

Kenji Liu, guest blogger May 20-26

 This week we welcome back Kenji Liu as our guest blogger.  Kenji is a 1.5-generation immigrant from New Jersey. His writing arises from his work as an activist, educator, artist, and cultural worker. His poetry chapbook You Left Without Your Shoes (Finishing Line Press, 2009) was nominated for a 2009 California Book Award. His writing has appeared in RHINO Poetry, Generations, Kweli Journal, Doveglion Press and elsewhere. He has received a Pushcart nomination and is working on a full-length collection of poetry, prose and visual art. Kenji is the poetry editor at Kartika Review. Find out more about Kenji here.  Follow him on Twitter @kenjicliu.

Welcome, Kenji.

-- sdh

 

The Greatest Poetry Hoax of the Twentieth Century [by DL]

THE greatest poetry hoax of the twentieth century was concocted by a couple of Australian soldiers at their desks in the offices of the Victoria Barracks in Melbourne, land headquarters of the Australian army, on a quiet Saturday in October 1943. The uniformed noncombatants, Lieutenant James McAuley and Corporal Harold Stewart, were a pair of Sydney poets with a shared animus toward modern poetry in general and a particular hatred of the surrealist stuff championed by Adelaide wunderkind Max Harris, the twenty-two-year-old editor of Angry Penguins, a well-heeled journal devoted to the spread of modernism down under.
In a single rollicking afternoon McAuley and Stewart cooked up the collected works of Ernest Lalor Malley. Imitating the modern poets they most despised (‘not Max Harris in particular, but the whole literary fashion as we knew it from the works of Dylan Thomas, Henry Treece, and others’), they rapidly wrote the sixteen poems that constitute Ern Malley’s ‘tragic lifework.’ They lifted lines at random from the books and papers on their desks (Shakespeare, a dictionary of quotations, an American report on the breeding grounds of mosquitoes, etc.). They mixed in false allusions and misquotations, dropped ‘confused and inconsistent hints at a meaning’ in place of a coherent theme, and deliberately produced what they thought was bad verse. They called their creation Malley because mal in French means bad. He was Ernest because they were not.
    Later, the hoaxers added a high-sounding ‘preface and statement,’ outfitted Malley with a tearjerking biography, and created his suburban sister Ethel. The invention of Ethel was a masterstroke. It was she who sent Malley’s posthumous opus, ‘The Darkening Ecliptic’, to Max Harris along with a cover letter tinged with her disapproval of her brother’s bohemian ways and proclaiming her own ignorance of poetry.

    For more about Ern Malley, go to Jacket, issue # 17.

INNUENDI :: 4 :: [by Anthony Madrid]

1.

The planet Jupiter. Really big, right? Lotta moons. They don’t even know how many. How big does a thing have to be to be a moon. I don’t know. Not that big. You ever seen the photos of Mars’s moons. One of ’em looks like a moon, the other’s not even round. It’s shaped like a jelly bean, and it’s only, like, whatever, five miles long. It’s got craters, it’s a moon, but it’s not that big. I forget what it’s called. Now, Jupiter, obviously, has plenty of these little ones, nobody knows how many. That doesn’t even matter. The four big ones matter. Callisto, Ganymede, Io, Europa. I’m doing this from memory. And I’m building to a question. Are any of the four big ones as big as the Earth. It’s a reasonable question. And the answer is no. I looked it up. One of ’em, I forget which, is as big as Mercury, though. So you can think of Jupiter as having planet-sized moons, if you like. I love this kind of thing.

 

2.

All through my childhood, I was like, OK, the dinosaurs “died out.” But isn’t an alligator a dinosaur. It’s a big menacing reptile, isn’t it. And that’s basically the head of a T. Rex on there. But then it turns out no. That’s not what a dinosaur is. Dinosaurs had their legs directly underneath them, like a dog or a kangaroo or whatever. Alligators don’t have that. They slither around on their bellies. This is why snakes and gila monsters and all that stuff are not dinosaurs. You wanna know what’s a dinosaur? You probably already heard about this. Birds. They got the egg thing going on + the pea brain + the legs right underneath them. They walk. Or hop. Actually, I’m not sure the pea brain is important here. It’s the eggs and the legs. If people laid eggs they’d be dinosaurs. Wait, no, that’s wrong.

 

3.

Hokay. I tried to download the whatever that would allow me to whatever. I did download it. And it does nothing. Nothing has changed. I must have done something wrong. There must be some elementary procedure. Probably I am like a Martian who takes the lawnmower out of the box, lays it on its side in the driveway, and then stands back, waiting for the grass to become shorter. I don’t know. David, I cannot open those .docx things. I will never be able to open them using this apparatus. And by apparatus I mean mind. I recommend you open them + copy and paste them into the bodies of a series of emails.

 

4.

Once upon a time there was a magical prince who was a dinosaur and a leopard and who spoke Italian and Russian and this kind of thing, and he was in love with a glass of water who was a whirlwind of unpredictable forked lightning and who went ice skating and wrote short stories and things like that. And the glass of water had a sister who was a stethoscope and a vile betrayer and who liked to give bad advice and then blow up the world using a bomb that had this little pig’s-tail wick that, when lit, looked like a Fourth-of-July sparkler. But it all worked out in the end, because there was another world inside the first one, and the inside one was better in some ways than the first, and the evil sister got married to a gold-plated baloney spoon who was sensitive and adored by children who are little jars full of pen caps.

 

5.

If somebody wants to explain to me how flutes work, I’m all set to hear it. You blow across that one little hole, and then by covering other holes further down the tube you make the thing make different notes. OK, how. I just…I never would have invented that thing in a million years. I wouldn’t have thought blowing across a hole in a tube would do anything. Pretty much it’s like you’re telling me you can make trills of notes by blowing on your hand. That ain’t gone do nuthin’. Why would it. Yet there it is.

 

6.

All right. Here’s my question, smart guy. How come everything always has something off to the right and a little down of it? Look at India. You see there: you got that little doohickey off to the right and a little down of it. “Sri Lanka.” OK. Now look over here. Africa? Got this one, off to the right and a little down: “Madagascar.” And China got Taiwan.... And even over here: we got Cuba. Yes we do. And Russia got Japan…. You can pick anything you want! Australia? Got New Zealand. Look at it. The only, only one that don’t is South America. Uh-oh! Yes, they do…!

 

FRIDAY EDITION (b) :: INNUENDI :: 3 [by Anthony Madrid]

1.

Did you know that Emily Dickinson once wrote a poem about being frightened out of a toilet by a spider? And that, in that same poem, she figures the spider as having stolen from her “the marrow of the day”? I transcribe:

 

                                       1167

                    Alone and in a Circumstance

                    Reluctant to be told

                    A spider on my reticence

                    Assiduously crawled

 

                    And so much more at Home than I

                    Immediately grew

                    I felt myself a visitor

                    And hurriedly withdrew

 

                    Revisiting my late abode

                    With articles of claim

                    I found it quietly assumed

                    As a Gymnasium

 

                    Where Tax asleep and Title off

                    The inmates of the Air

                    Perpetual presumption took

                    As each were special Heir—

 

                    If any strike me on the street

                    I can return the Blow—

                    If any take my property

                    According to the Law

 

                    The Statute is my Learned friend

                    But what redress can be

                    For an offense nor here nor there

                    So not in Equity—

 

                    That Larceny of time and mind

                    The marrow of the Day

                    By spider, or forbid it Lord

                    That I should specify.*

 

(*For clarity, I have installed four stanza breaks: the last four, above. Otherwise, the text is reproduced exactly from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, volume 2, page 815. I should like to draw the reader’s attention to Dickinson’s use of the word assiduously at line 4. The word appears nowhere else in her poetry.)

 

2.

Nerd, and dork. These terms are not interchangeable. Nerds are worse. They are. In movies they are cowering things, but in real life they have nerdy self-confidence. Intelligence, anger, self-confidence—and no savvy. This guy right here knows what I’m talking about. Nerds are sinister.

Whereas, for dorks there is hope. Dorks aim to please, and sometimes they figure out how to do it. They “try too hard” for years on end, but eventually they learn. And more, at the end of the process they have soul. They have suffered for their art. It is painful to forgive them, but they must be forgiven….

All this is about poetry, of course—an ecosystem top-full of these two types. Wicked little martinets and frooty goofballs. But the goofballs are going somewhere. Some of them are. They must be smacked in the mouth sometimes, heaven knows. But you must never forget they are the future.

 

3.

Every single poet should compile his or her own Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I mean a totally personal anthology of one’s Gold Standards. Poems one returns to over and over, like one returns to a favorite CD. I don’t know how many pages, but there has to be absolutely no pretense to fairness. If three quarters of the book is one poet, so be it. If one of the poems is seventy pages long, and none of the others are anything like that, so be it. If it’s all men, or all women, or all gay, or all straight—so be it. There has to be ONE operating principle behind the book: THE poems that you treasure. Nothing more, nothing less.

Robbins told me Bill Knott has been doing something like this for years. He’ll make, like, his own Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy, based strictly on his own taste. Compile it, self-publish it, give it to friends. That is excellent. I would love to do a John Ashbery selection like that. The ones I love, irrespective of chronology, importance, Ashbery-ness….

But mainly I want to have a look at my friends’ Golden Treasury compilations. As long as the supreme editorial principle is adhered to—requiring that every included poem pass the Love Test, and that all other criteria be absolutely banned—then imagine how much I would learn about the compilers! Actually, now that I think of it, this little project would be a cinch to engineer. Just do it all online. Be like Pinterest, or whatever that shit is.

PREDICTION: This idea will be a reality within the next hundred and twenty seconds.

 

4.

Hafez says somewhere “Snatch up a book of poems and head to the wilderness.” Yes. And you either aspire to write books that would live up to that, or you don’t.

Sandra Simonds told me: “Poems are either really good, or almost, or they have no right to exist.”

Hannah Gamble told me: “I can't take any more of these Victorian kitchen utensils and Google words. Corvid, silique, whipstitched, runnel—I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to read Miss Havisham’s poetry.”

And Chris Crawford says: “All poems should… no, all metaphors should, I mean all poetry should always…wait, what the hell am I talking about, what’s poetry?”

 

The New School Announces the Winner of the Second Annual Paul Violi Prize

 

Justin Sherwood, Winner of the 2012 Paul Violi Prize

Justin Sherwood has won the second annual Paul Violi Prize in Poetry for a selection of original poems entitled “Abeyance.” Honorable mention goes to Lenea Grace (“National Canvas”) and Alissa Fleck (“Meditations on Salt”). Formal announcement will be made at graduation.

The prize is named after Paul Violi, who taught in the New School Writing Program from 2003 until his sudden death in April 2011. Paul excelled as a mentor and inspired our students as much by his example as by his presence. The students loved him and it was reciprocal. "Simply walking in the door made me a happy man," he said more than once.

Awash in the love of Paul that was matched only by the shock and dismay at his untimely passing (he was sixty-six), Paul’s friends decided to raise funds for an annual poetry prize to be given in his honor. The response of donors was immediate and generous, and funding for the Paul Violi Prize in Poetry, consisting of a cash award of $500, is secure for many years to come.

Alex Crowley, 2011 Violi Prize Winner

All second-year students in our program are eligible to apply with a group of five of their best poems. To assure fairness, the contest is judged by distinguished poets not affiliated with the New School. Alex Crowley won the 2011 award, announced in September of 2011 and celebrated at the memorial tribute to Paul Violi that took place at the New School on December 2, 2011, to an overflow crowd. On that occasion, each of thirty-one writers – including major literary stars (such as Paul Auster, Billy Collins, Ron Padgett) as well as New School Writing Program students and alums – read one of Paul’s poems. Professor David Lehman, poetry coordinator of the New School Writing Program, organized and moderated the event, along with Robert Polito, director of The New School Writing Program, who delivered remarks in Paul’s memory. Before the intermission Lehman surveyed the audience and quoted Yeats:  “Think where a man’s glory most begins and ends / And say my glory was I had such friends.”

“Paul's inventiveness was astounding,” Lehman said. “He liked not only writing poems but creating forms, or claiming for poetry forms and structures in use in civilian life. So he has poems in the form of TV Guide listings, the index to a nonexistent book, potted biographies for a midterm examination or quiz show, a radio pitchman's patter, the dialogue between a delicatessen counterman and a customer, and the acknowledgments page of a poetry collection. One such effort would spawn another. He writes an ‘Acknowledgments’ indicating the name of the journals in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge's actual poems might appear – ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in ‘Modern Bride,’ for example, and ‘Work without Hope’  in ‘Popular Mechanics.’ And this splendid conceit gives rise to a second poem entitled ‘Acknowledgments,’ only this one is populated with purely notional poems written by a mad grammarian: ‘Elegy for the Split Infinitive,’ ‘Poem Contaminated by Prepositions.’”

In his remarks at the Violi memorial tribute, Robert Polito said: “Paul’s poems possessed a dynamic internal architecture, and casually carried a lot of history inside them – one element of his energetic design looping back to the conceptual wit of British metaphysical poets like Marvell, Herbert and Donne; another element summoning and reinventing the vivid American, even hardboiled vernaculars of Damon Runyon,  Dashiell Hammett, and Mark Twain; another element recasting the fluency, volatility, and forthrightness of the Coleridge conversation poems he loved and taught; and still another element, maybe more elusive but no less crucial, that absorbed into poetry the deadpan strategies of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Johns.”

“Paul had a genuine and deep reserve of intellectual curiosity,” Lehman said. “He seemed immune from the kinds of resentment and bitterness that afflict so many poets who have not received as much recognition as they deserve. We are proud to honor his name and his legacy.”

Happy birthday, Robert Morse (alias Finch, alias Bert Cooper)

 

59 BITS FROM TANYA LARKIN’S *MY SCARLET WAYS* [selected by Anthony Madrid]

(Larkin, Tanya. My Scarlet Ways. Saturnalia Books, 2012. ISBN: 978-0-9833686-3-2. $14.) 

❖

 

a proletariat anthem that sweetens wells

cranks swings and lands kids on their feet.

 

❖

 

                   I will faint and resurrect

like a circus tent at dawn

first in one town, then another.

 

❖

 

I was this pink, sun-cradled snake.

I grew anarchic red.

 

❖

 

So gone into things, resigned

to winds, charmed by use—

they strapped me to a prow for luck.

 

❖

 

like the bell in the broken doll’s head

we loved to kick around.

 

❖

 

It’s not so bad,

the sound of losing at love.

When we broke off the arms of the statue

she softly came alive.

 

❖

 

                                     playing us

like flutes and finding all the stops

 

❖

 

           There is precisely this much me

in the room. And I know precisely

 

because I am not that girl off to powder-

puff in the leaves thinking, love

 

come smother me faster.

 

❖

 

How good it must feel to play through the girls

 

❖

 

                                  Goodbye, girls, I’ll see you

later in the place where your wings are trussed

 

❖

 

                     I saw you there soaking in grass until grass

felt its sex and shouted, smite me like a nation

It is you, who washes death’s posable head

with soft licks. One day you will lick it entirely away

 

❖

 

you suckhole of sincerity

 

❖

 

I make a face at my neighbor and she makes a face back.

 

❖

 

sniffing out sex-past or sex-future

 

❖

 

there goes love’s hierarchy a pleasure only felt

by pleasure seekers

 

❖

 

I cannot do it alone signing all your names to my letters

saying aren’t I brave dear so and so having feelings at all

 

❖

 

These days I cannot get high enough

to vandalize the moon. I cannot get low

enough to eat earth and like it.

 

❖

 

I care about style but it’s not everything.

It’s only anything insofar as I need it

to survive the sad pulp of late afternoon,

the sublime languors of a loved one as he or she

decides to have me or not.

 

❖

 

                        o where is the cordless

the lost disc of postpunk seraphim rending the skies.

 

❖

 

As if one foot in the door of the doom room.

 

❖

 

As if Satan didn’t look so cute when defeated

his oversized wings curving over his head.

 

❖

 

As if seasons didn’t matter but it’s your blankety blank life

Southern California or lack thereof.

As if Nebraska said give me a hill so I can jump.

As if for sooth we went pretending in feathered masks.

 

❖

 

                                                       there was no

choice but to accept the foot into my chest, let it

kick in my ribs with its all-seeing heel

 

❖

 

Happiness is unanimous the sun

bites down with its one blunt tooth

 

❖

 

                           But I was quickest

to my quiver. My arrow was out.

I learn more from missing—when I miss.

 

❖

 

Three whole seconds of true leaf affection
you missed because you were off with your blankey

your nose in the moss a finger in the lining.

 

❖

 

                      The book I was reading bit me,

and I tried to bite it back, but left the dream

 

for another, jawing at the air.

 

❖

 

HEAVEN AND HELL ARE REAL PLACES

 

Goody for them but I’ll keep walking

 

❖

 

Inside it, horses will foam at the mouth. A row of archers

shall go down on one knee.

 

❖

 

put the wreck back in recreation

 

❖

 

a bloom itself that releases a fragrant steam, Pah Pah, into the sky

 

❖

 

I throw out a shoulder thinking up music

 

❖

 

just my God’s much farther than yours—

not a quick scramble up the light.

 

❖

 

What are you, style? Besides something to fool

around with until the real thing comes along

a way to say, here I interject a little weather.

 

❖

 

When I write fiction, I call you the distance

between me and my characters. In a poem, are you

the distance between me and myself? Is the goal

not to have you at all but to burn in my own flame

not just sit there by the fire singing songs and

warming my hands? That seems a little extreme

 

❖

 

More likely, style, you’re an instinct for self-

preservation, so I don’t blame those who hide

in you.

 

❖

 

                                                 without distance

there’s no love—no room to cast oneself out.

 

❖

 

Here kissings lasts a country mile.

 

❖

 

I run my silver down your parts.

You run your silver down mine.

 

❖

 

The sun has a body to go with its head.

 

❖

 

My little dark one, my little death,

she said, nothing exists until you lick it.

I said I wanted to be licked.

 

❖

 

Look at the cypress, I said, it really

knows how to use its drama. Lick it,

she said. But it already exists, I said.

 

❖

 

The sense of being haunted is bunk, divine bunk.

 

❖

 

Today I strive but tomorrow I will go

at the pace of an heir. No need to hurry

through anything, even sadness or cold,

since time is money and tomorrow I shall have

plenty of that.

 

❖

 

                                                   now I reject

anything I can have easily, which is quite a lot

now that I am rich. Just think of all the stuff!

 

❖

 

                                           every marked and

unmarked tree in this double silent old growth

forest belongs to me.

 

❖

 

I leave the little beasts alone in their zoo of light

and turn to accept the admiration of the poor,

who nod and wonder at my enormous discipline,

which keeps them from killing and mounting me

on the walls of their otherwise tasteless, suburban homes.

 

❖

 

We were spinning ourselves into a rare dessert,

a delicate sugar helmet, deliriously scribbled, snow

that would melt on contact with that other, intractable world.

French King Henry took to wearing a basket of little dogs

on a ribbon around his neck.

 

❖

 

The English called it sprezzatura, the ability to think

an impossible lightness into the body and leap over

a mess of tombs thereby escaping your godbound

enemies or by the flourishes of a sword

cut the gown into a hundred bits the leaving the woman

that had been so tightly bandaged in tulle more or less

naked not even nicked by the sword.

 

❖

 

                                                            She is

the lucky beneficiary of another’s studied

effortlessness. You will carry her across death

because you have matched yourself

to nothingness and she has not.

 

❖

 

The suitors are doing donuts in the parking lot.

 

❖

 

Pig or god, I am learning how it’s done.

 

❖

 

One sure way of getting behind

God’s back is by making a trumpet

of some devil’s minion’s ass in a poem

 

❖

 

       ground him down to a pilgrim

with her stare;

 

❖

 

Wise she was from letting us drink ourselves

to death.

 

❖

 

I never went home those days. I was home-free.

 

❖

 

How far exactly is Cho-fu-Sa? Will I ever know

the distance one can travel away from the self to another

 

without breaking apart, until I have arrived, white-hot

and thirsty, looking to tie one on in a three-syllable town:

 

❖

 

ripened by the miles I’ve walked

 

❖

 

the mirror where I practiced how to kill

and spare a life all in one look

 

❖

 

From the Archive: When Bad Lines Happen to Good Poems (by Laurence Goldstein)

(Ed note: Anthony Madrid posts thus far are pretty terrific, yes?  I kow you agree so to show your appreciation you should buy his book. 

His post about translation got me free associating until I arrived at this post by Laurence Goldstein from a few years ago.  Not exactly on point but timely nonetheless. sdh)

If you were empowered by the gods to travel back into the canon of poetry in English and change or delete one line, which would it be?  On occasions, sometimes years apart, I’ve put this query to literary acquaintances, and the winner of this unscientific survey is. . . Percy Shelley’s plaintive cry, “I fall upon the thorns of life.  I bleed.”  The reason often given, and it’s clear by the swiftness with which this line is proffered that many of my contacts have not heard the question for the first time, is that this line is a blemish on a great poem that has no other bad line, not even a so-so line, but is poetry at its purest and most consummate perfection.  The poem, of course, is “Ode to the West Wind.”  Actually, I have come to like “I fall upon the thorns of life,” which is thoroughly in tone with the fine succeeding lines, “A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed / One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”  One has to hear and feel the desperate abandon of the whole passage to appreciate the upsweep of canto 5 when the poet becomes a seer of divine power who, “by the incantation of this verse,” trumpets a prophecy to mankind.

    But “I bleed” is, admittedly, beyond the pale, over the top.  Within the decorum of the poem it reaches too far and the strain of the gasped two words causes an audible snap.  How might we improve the line.  Substitute “, and need” or “, a seed”?  Those are bland enough to not claw at the reader’s taste.  I recall the story of Paul Valéry pausing at a bookstore window and reading two pages of verse from an open book. France’s reigning poetic genius, he tries to improve even one word of the text before him, and fails.  He goes into the bookstore and finds that the book is Racine’s Ph èdre.  No, I am not Paul Valéry, and will not presume to tamper with Shelley any longer.

    Another favorite response is (you saw this coming) the last line of the first stanza of Stanley Kunitz’s great poem “Father and Son.”  The speaker pursues the phantom figure of his dead father, who never shared the boy’s childhood (and who, we know, took his life while Stanley was in the womb).  The boy is lost in “the silence unrolling before me as I came, / The night nailed like an orange to my brow.”  The principle is the same as with Shelley:  the high quality of the entire poem casts a brighter light on the offending lapse.  As it happens, a younger and brasher version of myself asked Kunitz about this line on the occasion of his visit to the University of Michigan .  He smiled wanly and gave what I took to be his standard response.  Many people had asked him about the line over the years, but now the poem is so well-known, so often anthologized, even (I reminded him) praised as a precursor to the movement of Confessional Poetry, that it was now too late to change it.  He looked down and said again in a whisper, “Too late.”  Never too late I wanted to reply, but I felt intensely his desire to change the subject.

    There is the problem of failed locutions – Matthew Arnold’s “Who prop, thou ask’st, in these bad

Forty Swimsuits [by Molly Arden]

Tonight’s entry begins in the small closet in the upstairs hall.  There, a bag of shameful confirmation is knotted evidence of a ritual I’ve practiced since my teens.  It’s difficult to discuss without the risk of sounding horribly shallow, it might be only a poet who would recognize the significance of the ceremony involved in selecting an annual summer wrapper.  This ritualized spring rebirth of the self is made by way of spandex, nude lining, underwire, a few pieces of hardware.

ONE LITTLE IDEA ABOUT TRANSLATION [by Anthony Madrid]

YEARS AGO, I was tutoring a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl named Ryann. Ideal kid. Wide-awake, responsive, ready for anything. She had an assignment to write a poem for school, so I was gonna show her how to write poetry. I suggested we do one together.

I had this insight. Find something she likes, make her imitate that. Good. I told her: “Now, you’re gonna have to be honest with me. I’m gonna read you a poem out of this book, and I need to know if you genuinely like it. Don’t say you like it if it’s just OK.” She agreed.

I redd her Smart’s “To His Cat Jeoffry,” thinking it was a medical certainty she would love it. Not so. It was just OK. I tried something else. Just OK. Something else. OK. Something else…. I was starting to sweat. It was starting to look like maybe this wasn’t gonna work after all. See, I thought every one of these poems was going to knock her dead. It was all stuff I’m in love with. But anyhow, we did finally hit it….

Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.” That one, who knows why, she leapt at. Literally. She was across the table: “That—that.” Glowing.

Good. So we talked about the Auden for a while, comparing notes. And I told her: “We could do something like that—only not that long. Lemme explain to you what an epigram is….” So, I explained. I showed her how the rhyme at the end of an English epigram makes the poem seem to snap shut like a metal box. I told her we were going to go for eight lines, XAXA XBXB, in the same rhythm as the Auden. I drew a diagram. I asked her if she had anybody in her life she would like to make fun of. She goes: “That’s easy. My sister Lily. We all make fun of her at my house, ’cause she’s missing her front baby teeth.” Perfect.

(Just a reminder that all this is building to a point I want to make about literary translation, a theme I know I have not touched upon yet. We’ll get there.)

And so I set about showing her the Way of the Patient Rhymer. How the rhyme thing, which looks at first glance like a mere pain in the ass, can be turned to the poet’s advantage. How it can prompt new thoughts, surprising associations. I also showed her how to do the rhythm. We started talking, trancily, in it (“As I walked out one evening / Walking down Bristol Street, / You see it’s not that difficult. / The thing just needs three beats…”). And I wrote the first line of what was to be our poem:

                    Tell you about my sister Lily.

Ryann instantly chimes in:

                    Her mouth has a gaping hole.

I’m all, “Good! Good! That’s especially good, ’cuz there are lots of words that rhyme with hole….” And I made her write ’em all out….

Long story short, here’s the poem. Easily reproduced from my memory:

 

                    Tell you about my sister Lily.

                    Her mouth has a gaping hole.

                    Her teeth may never come in.

                    She may have to play the role

 

                    Of the girl with the tragic lisp.

                    But tragical though she may be,

                    She is safe from the Macintosh apple

                    That sabotaged Adam and Eve.

 

That took around ninety minutes for the two of us to produce, and I know for a fact the last words installed were Macintosh and sabotaged. We had hit upon the Adam and Eve joke relatively early, but we were seriously stumped by what to put before apple. She kept coming up with stuff like “crisp, juicy” which is fine for the rhythm, but sounds like filler. I was showing her how the solution to this kind of problem often comes from rooting around in the sound structure of whatever you already got. Hence, tragic and tragical eventually prompted Macintosh. Took a long time, but we got it. However, once we had Macintosh, the gods basically handed us sabotaged on a tasseled pillow.

Those last two pieces falling into place was an exhilarating thing. And there’s more to this story, and I’ll email it to you if you want, but for right now let me get to the point about translation.

It’s this. The word sabotaged. That’s not really the right word, if you think about it. Sabotaged makes it sound like the apple had agency, and that’s kind of awkward and wrong. Except it’s not. Because sabotaged fits so neatly into the sound fabric of the stanza, everything that’s wrong with the word simply disappears from view. The word takes on a status for which we have no name in our poetics. I want to call it “the right wrong word.” The word is wrong—but it’s better than whatever would have been right.

But now suppose some Russian translator were to try to turn the poem into Russian. Everyone knows the first thing to go is the sound structure. And so look what happens. Stripped of its sonic context, sabotaged merely becomes the wrong word. The Russian will produce something like:

                    She is secure from the Macintosh apple

                    That {undermined by subterfuge} Adam and Eve.

And what I’m trying to say is: I’ll bet you anything it is this phenomenon, or anyhow some version thereof, that partly explains why, in reading (say) Mandelshtam poems in English, we constantly meet with words that simply seem offbeat or wrong. I bet in Russian, they are right wrong words. In English they are merely oddball.

 

"Men Marry What They Need" [by John Ciardi] & a Brainteaser

John Ciardi, a poet and editor whose verse translation of Dante many of us read in college, and who is sometimes patronized as "middle-brow," wrote an amazing poem, which you should read: "Men Marry What They Need":

Men marry what they need. I marry you,
morning by morning, day by day, night by night,
and every marriage makes this marriage new.

In the broken name of heaven, in the light
that shatters granite, by the spitting shore,
in air that leaps and wobbles like a kite,

I marry you from time and a great door
is shut and stays shut against wind, sea, stone,
sunburst, and heavenfall. And home once more

inside our walls of skin and struts of bone,
man-woman, woman-man, and each the other,
I marry you by all dark and all dawn

and have my laugh at death. Why should I bother
the flies about me? Let them buzz and do.
Men marry their queen, their daughter, or their mother

by hidden names, but that thin buzz whines through:
where reasons are no reason, cause is true.
Men marry what they need. I marry you.

-- John Ciardi

I wonder what a woman would say in reply. -- DL

"Santa Muerte" [by Allison Contey]

Between opening and closing
                your lips—stones
as gathered from the plain
                as commanded by the angel
as found in the river, smooth
               as ancient warning, carved
as black lava hardens
               as in the mausoleum
as a hexagonal crypt, floretum
               as you, transformed, circle
as an arc forms in the sky
               as the stand bows its head
                      as the snow falls and time unwinds
                                 one more hour one more day. 

-- Allison Contey

QUESTIONNAIRE [by Anthony Madrid]

1. Name some poets everybody in your milieu likes, except for you.

2. The opposite. Poets you like, but none of your friends do. Poets you are always having to defend.

COMMENTARY ON 1 AND 2. These two questions are supposed to get at opinions and tastes for which the person receives no applause. Things like that occupy a special category, for sure, but it’s not like the contents of that category reveal the person’s Authentic Taste.

Authentic Taste is whatever you like or dislike irrespective of all applause, including your own. A fundamentally unknowable category. And here it is further obscured by the fact that a certain kind of citizen gets off on holding perverse opinions. This is how they “know they’re in the right.”

More on this hereafter.

•

3. Never mind other people for a second. Off by yourself, name some poets whom you really should like—’cuz they’re just exactly your kind of thing—but you just don’t.

4. The opposite. Poets with whom you have virtually nothing in common, but whom you truly love.

COMMENTARY ON 3 AND 4. Baby poets never have answers for these questions. They are all invested in defining their tastes in a way that coheres, makes a statement, is portable, can be summarized. Consequently, whenever they see something is written in a style that they supposedly approve, they treat the thing like family. That poem or poet always has a place to stay. At the same time, baby poets exclude all kinds of stuff on principle, and so even when they like it, they don’t like it. They explain away their liking in the same way I used to explain away my liking the Monkees. I don’t really like them; I just like listening to them and singing along.

•

4 (b). Poets you’re embarrassed to like, exactly because your liking them reveals what a shallow, tasteless, sentimental, unintelligent person you really are.

4 (c). Poets who proved to you that {your stupidasshole ideas about what makes for good writing} were wrong.

COMMENTARY. Again, I’m just trying to get past the baby poet in all of us. I have asked people question 4 (b) and had ’em come back with a rigmarole of great names. “Shelley, Keats…” It’s quite frustrating. You wanna say: “Look, answer the question in such a way that you’re not implicitly bragging.” But with a lot of these customers that’s like saying, “OK, grow a new head. Good. Now lemme ask you all these questions over again.”

•

5. You know how T.S. Eliot allegedly put the Metaphysicals back on the map? Suppose you were an arbiter of taste like that. Whom would you like to put back on the map.

COMMENTARY. This is actually a really loving and affectionate question—provided you’re not dickishly asking it of someone who, you know damn well, doesn’t know anything about old poetry. But when the person does know things, you often get a response that is a joy to listen to.

Some of the most valuable ten-minute conversations of my life have taken the form of somebody telling me about an old poet whose reputation deserves reviving. Edmund Waller. James Thomson.

•

6. Poets you regard as your personal property. I.e. it literally annoys you, or at least makes you uneasy, when others like this poet, because you cannot believe they like him/her for the right reasons.

(I call this the Emily Dickinson question. Anyhow, for me, Dickinson is exactly this poet. When I first saw Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson on a shelf in 1997 or whatever it was, I thought: “Totally get that. Totally.”)

•

7. If a photo were suddenly gonna be all over the internet, a photo of some famous person or celebrity reading your book, who would you want it to be. Name a few people.

(Corina Copp knows what I’m talking about with this!)

•

8. Poems you’ve wept over more than once.

9. Poems you have thundered against.

COMMENTARY ON 8 AND 9. Question 8, of course, will have rather more authority than 9 with persons like myself, who go by the Kama Sutra theory of pleasure. The less voluntary the response, the sexier. (Goose bumps, too, have a lot of authority on this model.)

Meanwhile, the thunder question might be the most intimate one on this list, insofar as it’s basically a given that if you were thundering against some poem you were denouncing a lot more than the poem without realizing it. Or maybe you’re too savvy for that. Maybe you always draw excellent distinctions between the poem and the poem’s influence and the kind of person who would be excited by it, and so on and so forth. Perhaps in discussing the poem itself you always maintain a steady tone of amused superiority.

In which case: Get lost. Can’t you see we’re trying to get something done around here?

•

10. If, twenty-five years from now, we were to find you on a bench in the New York City subway, drooling on yourself and rocking back and forth and reciting something from memory, what would it be?

COMMENTARY. I think Edward Lear must have regarded the above question as the Supreme Index of Poetic Goodness. Likewise, the author of Peacock Pie. I asked Nadya, the other morning, what her answer would be. She thought about it a while and said, smiling, “Adze-head.” Here’s the piece she meant, a much-repeated item in this household:

 

            Across the sea will come Adze-head,

            crazed in the head,

            his cloak with hole for the head,

            his stick bent in the head.

 

            He will chant impiety

            from a table in front of his house;

            all his people will answer:

            “Be it thus. Be it thus.”*

 

(*Copy-text: The School Bag, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, eds. London: Faber and Faber, 1997, page 4. The poem is listed as “Anonymous, Irish, sixth century.” Translation by James Carney.)

 

Forget John Cusack: YOU could be the voice of POE

The Voice of Poe Contest

 

YOU could be a featured voice in the new

Edgar Allan Poe Cottage (The Bronx, New York) bi-lingual audio tour! 

 

Create a video of your best interpretation of Poe's

Annabel Lee, The Bells, or The Cask of Amontillado

English and Spanish Submissions are Encouraged - Be Creative!

Share your video by Monday, June 4: Watch the video above for how to submit.

English and Spanish finalists will compete to be included in the audio tour

 

The Voice of Poe Contest

 Presented by The HIstoric House Trust of New York City

 and

The Bronx County Historical Society / The Bronx Latino History Project

 

 *Contest Video by Dan Boujoulian

--sdh

Frankie died today -- in 1998 (by DL)

Sinatra, snapping out of  a haze,
noticed me sitting across from him
“Who the fuck are you?”
Just another fan, I said, on the day he died
I made anagrams out of his name
satin, sin, stain, stair, train, rain, star
and figured out my last message
I mean what I would say to him now
“your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”
on the other hand you left me the history
of your voice the record of the American century
from Roosevelt to Reagan you will live on
whenever I need to hear you (it has to be you)
sing “I Get Along Without You Very Well”
(Strand’s favorite) or “I’m a Fool to Want You”
(my choice) when your lover has gone

-- 5 / 15 / 98

"Winnie the Pooh," [by Ian Brown]

it was really a strange choice
you made this morning to go
with just a t-shirt and no pants.
There are not many of us who
can pull that kind of thing off.
There are not many of us who
are bold enough to just let it all hang
out in the breeze, like you, and still
maintain such a calm and easy
demeanor.

You  are a dirty dog, Pooh Bear,
look at you all sexual in that honey pot.
Is it true that everything tastes better
without pants?           Of course it is.

What could be any sweeter
than that oozing of almost
sticky honey across
your fingertips to
your tongue painting
your throat down to
the palace of your teddy
belly – which is surely golden
by now, you silly old bear!
Your insides must be like porn
for a king, the likes of Midas!

You have lived fancy
in your decisions,
and I understand only now,
seeing you, all alone,
in the middle of this gray
afternoon sitting on top of a branch
that is just strong enough to hold
your tiny weight, that you have
figured out what life is.  And
what life is is no pants and
a red t - shirt

The clouds are bunching in the beyond, and
Oh!  It has begun to Rain!

-- Ian Brown

INNUENDI :: 2 :: [by Anthony Madrid]

1.

Take a look at these familiar lines from Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan”:

 

            A shudder in the loins engenders there

            The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

            And Agamemnon dead.

                                                    Being so caught up,

            So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

            Did she put on his knowledge with his power

            Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

 

I have thought millions of times about the line “Did she put on his knowledge with his power.” That question is strictly out of Yeats’s head. There is no warrant for it in the original myth, or anywhere. When you are being raped by a god, you do not “put on his knowledge.” Anyway it never happens in Ovid. So what was it that prompted Yeats to take that line of thought?

My hypothesis has always been that, after Yeats became a celebrity, he had a lot of experience with women wanting to starfuck him, and that he had pondered the way in which a starfucker is partly driven by a desire to share—however obliquely—in the famous person’s glamour. Such is the magic of celebrity. People feel they’re special just by sharing an elevator with you. I passed Johnny Depp on the street in New York once. Joan Jett went to my high school.

Of course, if all this is right, then Yeats’s poem is more about guilty sex with a groupie than about the dreadful consequences foreseeable in violence. But hasn’t it always felt like it kinda needs to mean something other than just the surface stuff? Yeats’s amendment to the myth has a vulnerable and gratuitous quality, I think. Yes: if the poem is highly satisfactory—and it is—I want to propose it’s because we’re all intuiting that Yeats is confessing something here. He’s that swan.

 

2.

“Give money me, take friendship whoso list.” On the one hand, that line is attractive because of its perversity and impiety. Good. But there’s also the matter of the delectably screwed-up syntax. Not “Give me money.” Give money me.

I showed this line to Margaret Kuchler (vide the post from Sunday) to persuade her she was overplaying her hand to say all twisted syntax is bad. She saw it right away. “Give money me” is obviously good. Hard to say why.

“Something wicked this way comes,” not “Something wicked comes this way.” Good. Why. Why does the Martian-ness work here but not everywhere? We need a science of this.

 

3.

Another thing we need to bring back. Epigrams. You ever read the one by Martial…. I don't know how it goes in Latin but in English it’s something like: “You say all the girls are on fire for you, Quintus. You: who have the face of a man swimming underwater.”

Write twenty poems like that. Poems that would actually do somebody some good.

Dolly Lemke’s even better. She has this new series of poems, most of ’em less than ten lines, and they give you an X and a Y coordinate, both. They’re all called “I’m So Into You.” Lemme ask her if she will let me throw two or three in here. 

 

•

 

I’M SO INTO YOU        

Nick Sturm

 

By now you’ve figured out

what I wrote in your book

that I almost love you

but in a we can never be vegan together

sort of way and honestly

I would rather feel ill

for the rest of my days

than give up fresh goat cheese

and steak

 

•

 

I’M SO INTO YOU        

Aris Bordo

 

Remember that time

you took two lorazepam

thinking it was aspirin

and you awoke from tepid sleep

more confused than ever

You are so cute

and you have a great body

 

•

 

I’M SO INTO YOU

Amanda Smeltz

 

But I’m way more into

you kneeling in front of me

to tell me how amazing I am

How dreadfully courageous

I am to say those things

and me just nodding my head

at your radiant and rugged beauty

 

•

 

4.

Here’s a pleasant game. I call it “Weapons-Grade Literary Trivia Puzzler.” The idea isn’t to ask the other players questions they can’t answer. No. What would be the point of that. The idea is to ask them questions they can answer—just not right now for some reason.

Get the idea? You don’t score any points for stumping people. If you ask a question and nobody knows and nobody cares, you lose. You only win by making the other people squirm with delicious agony because they do know the answer—or anyhow they certainly used to know it—they just can’t think of it right now.

Hard to come up with an example that will work here. OK, how ’bout: Name three novels by Melville besides Moby-Dick. Now, of course, some assholes will answer that question instantly. Others could not possibly care less. But English Departments are ramjam with people whose self-definition depends on being able to answer questions like that promptly—and yet who are unable to do so. It’s those people who make WGLTP fun. I have no problem confessing I am one of these.

Also it’s fun because the game kinda requires the players to know each other pretty well. You have to know what topics Sarah thinks she’s an expert on, so you can aim your questions “right where she lives”….

 

5.

Mostly it’s not that poets are bad. It’s that they’re nothing. Most readings too. They’re not bad; they’re nothing.

This is something they should have taught us in MFA-land. Bad is not the devil. Bad can be good. The devil is what you see all around you: large piles of neither-good-nor-bad, towering stacks of nothingness. Nothingness and nobody’s ever gonna reread it. Miles and miles of poetry that completely passes for art—but nobody loves it.

Actually, sitting here right now, I can think of at least two poets who aren’t any good, they’re bad, they're wrong about everything, they're dumb and icky—but they are something. I rush to read whatever they print, and I would walk through five miles of flaming snot to see them do their thing. I don’t even care that they’re bad! They’re something!

 

"My Parents Fled the Country" [by Asa Drake]

But only for two years.
She was in jail for only two years.
It was her childhood dream.
They called her on 9 /11.
It was in the Amazon
But only for two years.
Some of my friends disappeared.
They fled more successfully than she did.
And the guy who fixed my ear infection
And strep throat
Went up for twenty-five years.
But I could never write about my childhood.
I was such an unreliable narrator in those days.

-- Asa Drake

58 BITS FROM ROBERT FERNANDEZ’S *WE ARE PHARAOH* [selected by Anthony Madrid]

(Fernandez, Robert. We Are Pharaoh. Canarium Books, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-9822376-5-6. $14.)

✷

the flesh calls back its bulls

✷

This is also the context in which childhood attempts to recur.

✷

Avoid the participle and the bread-winning verb.

✷

An ocean plucks one, two, three, five, seven feathers from its flank

✷

Marietta: 

your name in strawberry leaves.

✷

Not just the river but the shadow of the river travels.

✷

the vowels are infirm.

✷

& the soul goes up on the mountain

& the poem’s sex cruise

 

everyone on the beach should

take their bottoms off it’s

Dionysian it’s

relaxing

✷

the sun in tiers

✷

with your lovingly razor-thin feelers,

mr. mosquito

cleaning the trapdoor lashes of the eye

✷

no fun no longer

now the redheads

now I know

✷

I watched the sun

walk in its black wave

wash dirt from its hooves

exit the river

✷

if I were a husband

I would be a touch-sensitive lamp

✷

if I were a guitar placed in sunlight

I would close my hole

✷

the day undoes its belts

✷

Capable, like a boxer’s gloves, of mouth-watering speed

✷

The face, a portable blackboard (a child’s blackboard).

✷

How can we accommodate these reforms?

✷

I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids.

✷

split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat.

✷

Gets to the party.

Arrives at the party.

Arrives dead at the party.

✷

Cold blooded, we’ve come to get a look at you.

✷

THE ROOT

Being active, on the tips of its toes, forking, conversational

✷

being disaster and re-architect

✷

sleeving unity

✷

What moves along the course of the line must learn the single line

✷

Whither goest, Ruth in strange corn: the concise fft of levitation.

✷

Because we endeavor to end in a fuck-all of resolution:

✷

uninhibitedly pounded not yet sun

✷

from alpha-hydrangea to omega-white

✷

I was, I became, I preferred the sweep

✷

they feed you black radiance

from the run-off of the in-

curled, the sentient light.

✷

Cuts a water-wheel

 

from its body,

a jenny wheel,

 

Catherine wheels.

✷

                    The center

unravels no more easily

 

than a stone:

✷

                    you cannot uncut

The stomach: it is a die.

✷

A nurse raises

Her beak from my chest:

✷

It is midnight and I am speed cut

Into thirds of day;

✷

               Woman with a rag for a heart,

child with rags for hands.

✷

                                                The charge

leveled against us is that we are bodiless.

✷

tear the water up in veins

✷

The sun thins and that is its sound,

              that is its speaking:

✷

            become the tall,

the grey one in

            perfumed black suit,

a host of death’s heads, cameras,

            rubies surrounding me.

✷

Ever I believe,

ever I am loved

✷

small pyramids

mark the perimeter

✷

Or if I say damage, but you show that you are April; if I say damage and you are April in the midst of institutions,

✷

                                    Gifted firecoral breezeway,

jackpots of rushing water.

✷

                there, the sea in its crinkled introspection

of wilds, its maze and bladders.

✷

that we will die offends the dead

✷

am alive one last time today

✷

The lion that is the light and the meat stacked on the table.

✷

if a heap of rags is bread

✷

The one who is the key to these transactions enters the room. The one who is the key to these transactions enters

✷

We who eat at the table,

Speak at the table, see

 

At the table,

Are painful

 

Dilations and constrictions

✷

in its uprushing and poised sails, the moray

a little loaf of bread falling into slices

of its own volition . . .

✷

The smell of the spirit,

like wet clothes left

in the sun at the public pool,

is also the color of the confused,

the busy flag.

✷

Who is so human as to

know the thousand limbs, who is less

than human in this forum

✷

                                    I wanted to

show you that here were all sorts of things

that might have been of use to you.

✷

incompossibility

✷