The Best American Poetry

Shelley's "Ozymandias" on "Mad Men"

The surprising thing about the line from Shelley's sonnet quoted on tonight's episode ("Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!") is not that Mr. Ginsberg knows the poem but that art director Stan, the unremitting  philistine, should also know it -- and know it well enough to point out, to Ginsberg and bystander Peggy, that the "rest of the poem" rebukes that hubristic utterance. The line joyously mouthed by the young copy-writer is from the monument Ozymandias, "king of kings," built to his vanity. But the great Oz was not an ominipotent ruler for long. Time has ravaged the statue: "Round the decay, / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away." -- DL

"The Rape of Persephone" [by Justine Bienkowski]

Before I even cut you open, I
Imagine stripping you, revealing chaste
Persephone: a gleam of white, a sigh
Of scarlet beads, of blood. Beware! Make haste,
For Hades rides to watch her suckle seeds.
It must be virgin skin that draws his sight,
So supple, full of life. What kind of deeds
Does he conceive? Such calculated plight!
I, too, will crack you open, lift your legs
And suck your juice from plumping lips. We kiss,
A secret, sweet and so silent, begging
For ecstasy. I dig my nails in bliss,
My mouth is stained by this red murder, by
Your red blood. Now, I have consumed you dry.

-- Justine Bienkowski

NOTEBOOK: INNUENDI (by Anthony Madrid)

1.

I have this idea for a new kind of review. Call it a “gallery” review. Just a long list of quotations, individual lines mostly. Maybe a few two-fers and three-fers. At any rate: the best lines from the book, cherry-picked and re-typed by the reviewer. No commentary at all.

I’m prompted to this idea by the fact I’ve been doing it for years with my friends. It’s the first thing I do when anybody sends me their manuscript, if I’m giving it a good read. I read the thing, and underline all the good stuff (using a ruler and a light green pen), and then I assemble a long email, retyping all the best bits. Sometimes those little galleries are so exhilarating, they’re well worth sending to other people besides the poet. I’ve sent my “58 Bits from Robert Fernandez’s We Are Pharaoh” to at least four people besides Robert.

This kind of review wouldn’t be for everybody. Some citizens just got to have that analysis. Got to have that graduate-student, name-checking prose.

Me, I just go by good lines anyway. Actually, now I think of it, Auden says almost the exact same thing somewhere. That the quotes in a review are usually the only part worth reading, if you’re trying to actually get anywhere. Must be in The Dyer’s Hand. At any rate, now that everything’s online, isn’t the thing I’m calling for rather tenable? There are no spatial limitations on the internet.

 

2.

Another good idea. A kind of hybrid poetry manual that would be partly poetics and partly Kama Sutra. A hodgepodge of tips for writing good poetry, mixed up with tips for appreciating each other’s good looks and getting each other off. The two themes should be treated as if they are absolutely equivalent, same exact status—almost as if they are the same topic throughout.

This is a good idea. And, you know, they actually did have books like that in medieval India. I’m thinking of those collections of erotic epigrams, where it’s thing after thing after thing about bodies, and then there’ll be one like this:

 

The gold of poetry

gets smelted and refined

from the speech of

unreflective men.

Let us go

cheerfully among them

with poised minds.*

 

(*Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India, trans. Andrew Schelling. Seattle: Broken Moon Press, 1991. Page 45. The poem is credited to Varahamihira.)

 

3.

I have an emendation suggestion. Marvell’s “The Garden.” Look at this stanza:

 

When we have run our passion’s heat

Love hither makes his best retreat:

The gods, who mortal beauty chase,

Still in a tree did end their race;

Apollo hunted Daphne so

Only that she might laurel grow;

And Pan did after Syrinx speed

Not as a nymph, but for a reed.

 

Do you get that? Marvell’s being witty. Apollo ran after Daphne, not so he could have her, but so she would turn into a laurel. He wanted the laurel. And Pan didn’t want the girl; he wanted the reeds (so he could make his little Peruvian flute thing). Get it? Marvell’s playfully driving home the idea that plants are better than people.

Good. But look at that last line. Shouldn’t it be “not FOR a nymph, but for a reed”—? Every time a new edition of Marvell comes out, I check to see if the editor has anything to say about this. Nothing ever happens. I’ve never seen it printed any other way besides the way I have it, above.

Am I looking at it wrong? I can’t see how “as” works there at all. Surely Marvell wrote “for.” (Comment stream’s open, nerds. I wanna hear somebody defend that “as.”)

 

4.

Speaking of emendation suggestions. My student Margaret Kuchler had a lot to say about how to fix up “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” She had to memorize it for school (she’s sixteen), and was quite insistent that the alterations supplied by her struggling memory pretty much carried the authority of Poetic Truth. And they did. Look at these lines:

 

The moon was shining sulkily,

  Because she thought the sun

Had got no business to be there

  After the day was done . . .

 

Maggie was all, “Had got no business being there—not ‘to be there’. ‘To be there’ is sickening and wrong….”

She had a lot of these. Four out of five of ’em were spot-on. Sometimes she didn’t know what to do to fix the lines; she just knew she disapproved. Anyway, of course I did not withhold from the child my theory that what she was doing is the Right Way to correct verses….

APHORISM: Memory is the better poet.

 

Anthony Madrid, Guest Blogger May 13-19

This week we welcome Anthony Madrid as our guest blogger.  Anthony lives in Chicago.  His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI Online, Boston Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Lana Turner, LIT, Poetry, Washington Square, and WEB CONJUNCTIONS.  His first book, called I AM YOUR SLAVE NOW DO WHAT I SAY, was published in March by Canarium Books. Listen to Anthony talk about and read his poem "Once upon a Time" from the April, 2012 issue of Poetry magazine here.  And read Michael Robbins' interview with Anthony here.

If you're visiting Chicago, hear Anthony read:

Wednesday, May 23, 7:30 pm
Danny's Tavern Reading Series
1951 W. Dickens Ave (in Bucktown, near Damen and Dickens)
Chicago, IL

 

Welcome, Anthony.

-- sdh

Homage to Joe Brainard [by Jacques Bernard]

Nancy Diptych

At the New School's Tishman Auditorium on Tuesday, May 8, writers who knew and loved Joe Brainard (1941-1994) read from the Library of America's new edition of the artist's collected literary works. Joe, a modest man, whose "modesty" (John Ashbery once wrote) "is the modesty of the gods," would have been astonished to find that his poems and prose have been published so handsomely under an imprint so prestigious as that of the Library of America. On hand was Ron Padgett, Brainard's closest friend, who edited The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, Padgett was among those who read their favorite Brainard pieces, as was Paul Auster, who contributed the volume's introduction. Other presenters included Frank Bidart, David Lehman, Edmund White, and Library of America editor-in-chief Geoffrey O'Brien.

A beautiful Brainard anecdote told that evening has Joe on holiday with three friends touring Sicily. Whenever the group reached a new destination, an affectionate postcard from Joe awaited each of them. Edmund White said that on their first date the notoriously shy Brainard brought along a pad so the duo could pass notes back and forth in lieu of talking. 

Portions of I Remember were read aloud as were prose poems, diary entries, aphorisms, sui generis writings, and a play. Some Joe lines: "Writing, for me, is a way of 'talking' the way I wish I could talk." "Actually, I am practical. It's just that, sometimes, being impractical seems practical to me." Or, in a different register, "I remember my parents’ bridge teacher. She was very fat and very butch (cropped hair) and she was a chain smoker. She prided herself on the fact that she didn’t have to carry matches around. She lit each new cigarette from the old one. She lived in a little house behind a restaurant and lived to be very old."

In a letter to Padgett in 1965, Brainard wrote, “I find myself with a certain talent that Frank O’Hara has, and that is to say something quite simple so absolutely that one, without even thinking, assumes you are of course right.” Simplicity and honesty combine in Brainard's "I Remember." The recurrent use of these words at the start of each new entry in a list has become a poetic form and a standard poetry workshop prompt. From an interview with Anne Waldman on the subject of "I Remember": "I feel very much like God writing the bible.  I mean, I feel like I am not really writing it but that it is because of me that it is being written ..."

The Collected Writings does us the service of printing the whole of "I Remember" (including "I Remember More" and "More I Remember More") while simultaneously showing us how rich a trove Brainard left us beyond this signal masterpiece. And all this writing was done in the twenty-year period when Joe, on speed, created his paintings and drawings and collages -- hundreds and hundreds of them until the day he quit taking speed. For the last fourteen years of his life Joe Brainard produced no new work. What did he do? He stayed in his SoHo loft smoking Tareytons and reading great Victorian novels.

Joe was a sweet man. As an assistant professr at Hamilton College I arranged for a retrospective exhibiton of his work to be shown at the Root Art Center in the winter of 1978. The exhibiton coincided with a course I was giving on the New York School. The show featured such collages as "Yellow Madonna," "Butterfly Madonna," "Flower and Butterfly," "Smoke," "Morning Glory," "The End," "Let Me Entertain You," "Shower," and "Eight of Diamonds," as well as a pencil sketch of Jasper Johns," a self-portrait, paper cut-outs, oil-painted canvases, watercolors, gouaches, and numerous mixed media pieces. In all, seventy-eight of Joe's pieces were on display. We invited Joe to spend a January week at the college, during which he gave a reading and a gallery talk. I remember most vividly the afternoon that we had a very large art studio at our disposal and everyone in the class was encouraged to collaborate with a partner on a painting or drawing, a piece of writing, or some admixture of the two. Joe and I filled two dozen pages of a sketch book with our collaborative efforts that afternoon.

If you're wondering, Jacques Bernard is a nonexistent personage. In "I Remember" Joe recalls when he signed his paintings "by Joe." There were also times he thought of adopting a pseudonym -- Bo Jainard or Jacques Bernard. Such an impulse might last a week. But Joe was always Joe in his art, whether painting an Ernie Bushmiller icon (as in the "Nancy Diptych" above) or the whippet on the cover of The Best American Poetry 1998 -- or remembering that, as a boy, when he read "after five days return to" in the upper left corner of an envelope, he thought that after five days the recipient of any letter should return it to its sender.

-- DL

Your Financial IQ [or, Finance for Poets, Part VI]

We asked our broker friend Eric Rice to devise a shortcut list of sample questions that would determine your financial intelligence quotient. It is Eric's belief -- and one we share -- that any smart, educated person, even one who is mathematically challenged, should be able to direct and control his or her investments. Think about it. No one has a greater interest in preserving and enlarging your capital than you do. Poetry is, to invert Wallace Stevens's aphorism, a kind of money, and yet American poets with academic appointments are said to spend an average of twelve minutes a year, maximum, on their retirement plans.

See how you score on the quickie exam Eric drew up to evaluate your potential as a self-actuated Wall Street amateur in the best sense of that old-fashioned word.

(1) Investors drawn to the precious metals market, and to the yellow metal in particular, are known on the Street as "gold bugs." Explain the derivation of this term.

(2) Is "dollar-cost averaging" a really better method than "lump sum" investing?

(3) Should the basis of the Dow Jones Industrial Average be re-calculated to make stock prices a less significant factor than market capitalization?

(4) What is the hidden risk in "index funds"?

(5) True or false: when interest rates go up, the value of bonds goes down.

(6) Is AMEX a buy at 60? Is DIS a buy at 45?

(7) If you hold 150 shares of Coca Cola and the firm announces a two-for-one stock split effective in August, should you sell or hold the new shares (presuming that they are long-term holdings and therefore taxed more favorably than stocks held for less than one year)?

(8) When, as now, money market funds yield zero, and saving accounts return less than one percent, what should you do with money you can't afford to lose? 

(9) What is a DRIP?

(10) If you have $50,000 invested equally in ExxonMobil, IBM, Johnson and Johnson, Intel, and Pepsi, are you properly diversified in today's market?

Eric's answers :

(1) Poe's story.
(2) Yes, except when a "lump sum" (inheritance, lottery) lands in your lap and must be handled all at once
(3) Yes and no. The issue is under debate.
(4) Index funds promise you "average" returns. Is that what you want? Are you American?
(5) True
(6) AMEX probably, DIS definitely
(7) If you agree wth Warren Buffet's buy-and-hold strategy you keep all the shares.
(8) You put emergency money in a savings account, and your core investment cash account in a short-term bond fund. Also, you load up on dividend-growing stocks.
(9) Dividend Re-Investment Plans (where you receive your dividends not in cash but in additonal shares of stock)
(10) Eric would say yes, though a purist might question the doubling-down in tech (Intel, IBM), a sector Eric favors for superior short-term performance, If you had an additional fifty thousand and wanted to continue a blue chip strategy, you might add equal amounts of Caterpillar, Wells Fargo, Chevron, Proctor and Gamble, and Microsoft.

Beautiful werewolf... by Peter Jay Shippy

Thanks so much to Stacey & David for allowing to me visit.  And much thanks to you, for stopping by!

For my final poem-as-text for a children’s book, I’ll go back, just a bit.  Richard Brautigan’s  “A Boat” (The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, Houghton-Mifflin):

            O beautiful

            was the werewolf   

            in his evil forest.   

            We took him

            to the carnival   

            and he started   

            crying

            when he saw

            the Ferris wheel.   

            Electric

            green and red tears   

            flowed down

            his furry cheeks.   

            He looked

            like a boat

            out on the dark   

            water.

 

This poem always breaks my heart—and then I smile—the perfect math.

 No illustrations—leave the pages blank so our children (or you) can provide their own.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PSA Hosts Annual Award Ceremony: Marilyn Nelson Delivers Frost Medal Lecture (by Madge McKeithen)

Wanda Coleman, above left, and Marilyn Nelson, above right

“The hunger to be heard can be crippling,” Wanda Coleman said.  “Tonight, their work has been elevated to its proper place, validated, the burden a bit diminished.”

I had asked Wanda Coleman, the 2012 Shelley Memorial Award winner, what the evening had meant to her – all the words we had heard from the poets honored in the Grand Ballroom of the National Arts Club at the 102^nd Annual Awards Ceremony of the Poetry Society of America, on Tuesday, May 8.

From PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn’s opening remarks and welcome through each award recipient’s reading to Frost Medalist Marilyn Nelson’s lecture, the evening was charged with intelligence, warmth, and appreciation, with readings by Wanda Coleman along with this year's  Annual Award winners Lily Brown , Jehanne Dubrow, Emily Kendal Frey, Suji Kwock Kim, Lise Goett,  Jennifer Maier, Bruce Smith, and Susan Terris. For a complete description of the awards and a list of winners, visit the PSA website here. 

Following the Annual Award winners' readings, Marilyn Nelson rose to warm applause to deliver the evening’s Frost Medal lecture.  The Frost award was established by the PSA to honor distinguished lifetime achievement in American poetry.

Nelson spoke of individuals who had mentored her, inspired and supported her. She expressed her thanks and recalled the admonition, “Beware lest your reputation exceed your gifts.” She noted that the official language accompanying the Frost award had shifted from service to to achievement in poetry and staked a claim for serving, speaking affectionately of the hundred or so who have spent time writing at her Soul Mountain Retreat.

Where does our poetry point us? Nelson asked.  Where do we rediscover our best hope? Where can poetry put a finger in the dike to hold back chaos? She spoke with concern about poetry workshops that tend to ridicule earnestness and value empty cleverness, about the tendency to proceed as if poem and truth are separable. She spoke directly and movingly about the simple pleasure and deep importance of reading, enjoying, and being elevated by poetry. People continue to hunger for poetry, she said, I try to write poems that satisfy that hunger.

She recounted her experience of first hearing James Dickey’s “Sheep Child,” and read from her “13 Year Old American Negro Girl,” and from “Faster Than Light” in which The Poet and The Muse converse:

We’re dying faster than the speed of light,
our fame forgettable. Will our good deeds
vanish like molecules of exhaled breath,
to be recycled by the universe?
Girl, get on back to the raft. When you try to think,
the breeze between your ears nearly blows me away.
The Muse again. So much for my magazine.
As if you ain’t been drifting all this time.
you’d know that what lasts is the hush of space:
the hiss of orbit, and the hum of stars.

If we could launch a space probe, I wondered,
would it take my last name engraved in gold?
My puny thoughts? My hopes for the future?
If I had to remain anonymous,
would I publish? Would I write poems at all?
. . .
Leave immortality to cancer cells:
They don’t know when to stop. Just when they reach
the point of no return, the body dies,
and the cancer is returned to genesis.
Genes are programmed to reproduce and die.
Poetry, to be stuck on a synapse,
lucky to be a line remembered wrong.
Your work, projected into the future,
is pulled back to earth by dark energy,
that glue which binds the cosmos together . . .
From Stamford on, I no longer traveled alone;
my seat mates, a businessman and his cell-phone.

Find the complete text of Marilyn Nelson's Frost lecture here.

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 and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com.

"Wild Nights!" [by Alex Bennett]

Wild Nights
            after Emily Dickinson

Wild wild wild wild wild wild nights.
           Were I with thee with thee wild nights.
           Were I with thee with I nights.
Wild nights wild nights these should be hour nights.  

Futile winds to the heart in port. Futile winds
           to the heart in more. Futile winds to the heart in shore.
           To the heart to the heart to the heart’s door.
Done with the compass and done with the chore.
Done with the compass and now the floor.

Tonight, why night, in Eden we row. Tonight, by night, in Eden we sow!

-- Alex Bennett

The moment one learns English by Peter Jay Shippy

“The moment one learns English, complications set in.” Felipe Alfau (Chromos)

Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary (Univ. of California Press) is one of my favorite books to read, teach, and recommend to children, big and small.  The book is genius. Where’s her MacArthur!?

Mullen mashes Stein’s huzzah! and Oulipo’s triggering restraints with the deep language of an African-American woman.  Also, the poems are deadly funny.

That isn’t always apparent to first time readers. Some students mistake her verbal peregrinations for poststructuralist blague or academic obfuscating.  One solution? We go to YouTube so they see her read.  Once they put her words to a voice, a face in front of fully engaged, joyful audience, they get it.  Mullen is singing for them.

“Undead, undead, undead” by Peter Jay Shippy

“Undead, undead, undead” (Bauhaus)

Recently I’ve been teaching a class that explores fairy takes, new and old. One of our texts is My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales (Penguin) edited by Kate Bernheimer. At the risk of sounding like a homer—the poets rule this book! The aforementioned Shelley Jackson has a wonderful tale. And a few weeks ago our class had a viscously delightful time performing Joyelle McSweeney’s dramatic, gooey take on “The Town Musicians of Bremen.”

But my favorite piece in the collection is Sabrina Orah Mark’s “My Brother Gary Made a Movie and This Is What Happened.” Like her poems, her tale is almost impossible to paraphrase, it’s the beautiful lovechild of Maya Deren & Bruno Schulz. 

Mother Died Today [by David Lehman]

Mother died today. That's how it began. Or maybe yesterday, I can't be sure. I gave the book to my mother in the hospital. She read the first sentence. Mother died today. She laughed and said you sure know how to cheer me up. The telegram came. It said, Mother dead Stop Funeral tomorrow Stop. Mother read it in the hospital and laughed at her college boy son. Or maybe yesterday, I don't remember. Mama died yesterday. The telegram arrived a day too late. I had already left. Europe is going down, the Euro is finished, and what does it matter? My mother served plum cake and I read the page aloud. Mother died today or yesterday and I can't be sure and it doesn't matter. Germany can lose two world wars and still rule all of Europe, and does it matter whether you die at thirty or seventy? Mother died today. It was Mother's Day, the day she died, the year she died. In 1940 it was the day the Germans invaded Belgium and France and Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister. The telegram came from the asylum, the home, the hospital, the "assisted living" facility, the hospice, the clinic. Your mother passed away. Heartfelt condolences. The price of rice is going up, and what does it matter? I'Il tell you what I told the nurse and anyone that asks. Mother died today. -- DL

Long pause. (Beckett, “Catastrophe”)

A few weeks ago I finished Geoff Dyer’s Zona—a book about a movie (Tarkovsky’s Stalker) about a room. It’s a book of divine deviations.  Toward the middle of the book, Dyer notes that he first saw Stalker as an undergraduate at Oxford, when he was “at that point of maximum aliveness, when my ability to respond to the medium was still so vulnerable and susceptible to being changed by what I was seeing.” Later he writes, “…even if you manage to keep up with the latest things, you realize that these latest things can never be more than that, that they stand almost no chance of being the last word, because you actually heard—or saw or read—your personal last word years earlier.”

"Big Tool" (by Allison Contey)

Big Tool

Oh the frustration of the big tool.
To have, or to have not a big tool,
to be equipped to deal with the big
tool, to become a big tool when dealing
with it in a big toolish way,
like having a big St. Bernard
in a tiny apartment, or luxurious
hair at the supermarket, either way
how problematic the big tool can be
if one does not know how to position
the big tool so that it does not become
a big inconvenience, a crowbar
when a drill is necessary, a wall anchor
when a claw would do. To exploit
the big tool is to give thanks to big G
and it is probably what he had in mind
when he gave the Apostles (and Pentecostals)
the power to speak in tongues, or made Jesus
an uncanny bartender at Cana. So I cross myself
and point heavenward, K-Rod-like,
when I remember to take out the garbage
or avoid a late fee, because clearly I’ve been missing the big tool
for far too long, or, perhaps missed it altogether
and fear that life is just a series of regretful sighs
in one long lonesome moment of years
in which your big tool becomes circumscribed
by distractions, or lost, like opening
the take-out bag and seeing that the special sauce
has been omitted, which renders the entire order
tasteless, useless, an extravagant waste.

-- Allison Contey (2008)

"Letter to Violi from Prospect Heights" [by Amanda Smeltz]

Letter to Violi from Prospect Heights

This week the wind picked up something crazy,
ripped inside my coat on Sixth Ave. I got so ticked
I growled, fuck you wind! Some old women
whirled around, looked at me with prim mouths.
As ever, Paul, I offend. Now it’s night on Vanderbilt
and the café plays Ella Fitzgerald. She brings some relief,
as does this steaming pile of polenta, chevre,
ratatouille. No drink at the moment, though.
When I woke up this afternoon it was lousy.
Lips cracked and a memory of yowling at the bar
about quitting. I struggle a bit of late.
Last winter, smoking out of Ali’s wide windows
on the Bronx, you made that angry eagle face,
said what really pisses you off is when the good
ones see how hard it is and quit. I think
about the Marines again, but I confess
that has a dark origin. The get-fried-in-a-tank place.
That is not the poetry place. Besides, that we’re still
at war is idiotic. Hughes writes a massive piece
about his brother over there – he’s got this line about a .50 cal
taking off an eleven year-old’s leg. I can’t stop seeing
my littlest brother: bright blonde hair, bleeding
stump like raw hamburger, me carrying him in
howling. I can’t take it. Can’t sign up for that
even if sometimes I want to be hurled
like a grenade. What a crock, to pretend to blow up
solitary, like shrapnel won’t perforate nearby flesh.
Anyway the point is I won’t quit. Though I might take
flying lessons: Graves said my poems are like Pancho Barnes.
That’s one hell of a woman. After just six hours in the cockpit,
she had the trick down. I don’t know what G meant by it,
but I love a female ace and anything that keeps me
from an office job. You told me to avoid desks
and hucksters, both being bad for the constitution.
I think about your health. Whatever it is, kick its ass.
Shea misses you a lot and so do Jamie and the rest. Poetry
is boring without you. Come back and we’ll have a whole carton
of Winstons and that Irouleguy you liked
when you came by the restaurant. Send my regard to Ann –
ask if she’d mind the company of some rambunctious poets.
We’ll rent a car and drive upstate.
Get better. Come home. Love, Smeltz.

-- Amanda Smeltz (March 2011)

Life during wartime by Peter Shippy

Ladies and Gentlemen, in this corner, wearing the emerald trunks, the woman who made David the 2^nd most famous Byrne from RISD, I give you Mairéad, the Dublin Goblin (Pangolin? Javelin? Mescaline?)!

Byrne’s no-holds ars (rim-shot) is:

            If it looks like a poem, it is a poem

            If it associates with poems, it is a poem

            If it has even one drop of poetry, it is a poem.

            If it joins with another genre to form a new genre that genre will be poetry

            & all its products will be poems.

That’s “One Drop” from her most recent book, The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven (Publishing Genius Press).  When he was a Head that other Byrne sang, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” His heaven is not her heaven.  MB’s heaven is a busy place—over 200-pages of prose poems, verse poems, playlets, list poems, found poems, poems about war, Providence, family, and everyday lunacy.  I adore the book’s title, but everyday lunacy, the title of her first section, is an apt definition of its enterprise.

Many of the pieces are small—a few lines:

            PARKING IN FRONT OF SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE

            After a while it feels like home.

            girl

            on a side-street

            late for school

            stepping up

            on a short wall

            to sway

            a few steps

            alone.

The great children’s book writer Ruth Krauss (I’ll Be You and You Be Me, illustrated by some cat named Sendak) would have adored those two poems.

One of my favorites of Byrne's a prose poem that begins, “If a cow eats a fridge a bulky object is lodged in its neck which is also broad and oblong like a fridge.” Like William James moshing with Russell Edson.

But my choice is:

            SPRING

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            March

            April

 

There you go.  The Waste Land in 32 words.

For our kids’ version, one word per page, right?  What kind of art? Collage, I think, wind-blown detritus, newspapers and leaves and blossoms and raindrops and bowler hats. 

Illustrator?

The great Sarah Sze.  She’s representing America at the 2013 Venice Biennale.  Sze is best known for her site-specific sculptures and installations, but this book needs her hand with space and light and the everyday objects that percolate her art.

 

 

An Affair to Remember: Three Writers, Two poets, and a Chef in Harlem by Madge McKeithen

The readers – two poets, three prose writers, and one chef-cookbook author -- at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on Saturday night had been asked to consider these questions:

What is memory? Is it more than just the residue of time passed? Can memory also nourish the mind, uplift the spirit?

Part of the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, the ninety-minute event was co-sponsored by the Office of Cultural Affairs of the Consulate General of Israel, the Poetry Society of America, A Public Space, and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

(l to r: Etgar Keret, Adam Mansbach, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts)

Etgar Keret’s opening story, “Pipes,” set a tone of disarming clarity and directness while his introduction – recounting leaving his army barracks to deliver the story to his brother – was quintessential Keret: wry, compassionate, and -- always and never just -- joking. He reached back to the first story he ever wrote, one that ended with a poignant possible future for those who had never quite belonged.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts brought intense observation and detailed interpretation with a passage from Harlem is Nowhere in which she examines a photograph titled  “Within 30 Seconds Walk of the 135^th Street Branch”.  Her words were telling about what the picture does not tell, while the Schomburg Center came alive as a character in her life in the neighborhood and in the broader, longer story of Harlem.

Adam Mansbach read from Rage is Back (forthcoming, Viking, January 2013) in pages that gave life to Dondi, living in Fort Greene in 2005 and yearning for the glory days of graffiti pre-1989. Dondi’s rhythmic cultural critique of a viewpoint is at once mesmerizing and disturbing, and in the section Mansbach read, the protagonist’s actions were both time-bound and time-defying.

(l to r: Marcus Samuelsson, Tracy K. Smith, Sonia Sanchez)

Tracy K. Smith read from her Pulitzer-winning Life on Mars -- poems of a future and a universe informed by nostalgia. Her father’s work on the Hubble Telescope project, the mid-twentieth century’s fascination with Mars as a potentially hospitable environment, and the subsequent transmissions from Hubble led in her poem series, “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” to a universe so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

When Sonia Sanchez stood to read, she paused and requested “as the senior one”, another round of applause for the younger generation, another gesture to past and future, heritage and legacy. Sanchez read to the memory of Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Catlett. From Does Your House Have Lions? she read  in sister’s voice, brother’s voice, and father’s voice of alienation among kin, and then, movingly, of an imagined repentance and acceptance -- one loss conceivably redeemed, another not. 

Marcus Samuelsson, chef and owner of the celebrated Red Rooster Harlem, stepped up and, foregoing the podium and microphone, paced back and forth across the stage, speaking extemporaneously, while slides of his homes in Sweden, Ethiopia, and New York cycled across the screen behind him.  He embodied the energy that had been building in the room all evening, as palpable as the salted sweet nuts that he had distributed were tasty. He spoke of growing up in Sweden, searching for his birth mother in Ethiopia, and deciding to come to America because “it was the only place that had professionals who looked like me.”

The crowd lingered in the Langston Hughes auditorium and with the writers in the foyer just outside, reluctant to let go of the evening’s experience.

Literature -- vibrant with integrity, witness, ferocity, and connection -- had delivered the emotional meanings at every moment

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 and writes online at www.madgemckeithen.com.

Lera Auerbach's new requiem (an "ode to peace" in Dresden)

Excerpt from ‚Die Welt’ – 12.02.2012 -- by Joachim Lange

The Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach, endowed with many talents and currently enjoying the success of her opera "Gogol" in Vienna, has expanded her large-scale Requiem into an Ode to Peace. Auerbach composed the work for the renowned Saxon orchestra as composer in residence.

Cosmopolitan as the prolific composer is, she does not only fill out the Frauenkirche up to the dome with the large choral and orchestral forces, but also has the world in its entirety pictured before her mind's eye. In the Kyrie, for example, the text is set with an almost papal eloquence in 40 languages at once with tympani and trumpets, without any fear of being influenced by the great models of the genre. The settings of central prayers of Christians and Jews are also self-assured in their utopian approach, as are those of Hindus, Buddhists and Moslems as well. The fact that one must read along in order to find one's bearings in the polyphonic, indeed mellifluous text in the space of the Frauenkirche is most likely part of the concept of a human utopia of harmony in the longing for peace.

Auerbach seeks to bridge the gap between the wound of Dresden and the present day. The so-called Dresden Amen, already used by Wagner in Parsifal, repeatedly appears. One also hears the text "Peace, Where God Dwells" by Dresden's own Christian Lehnert, engraved in the peace bell of the Frauenkirche. But there is also a reminiscence of 11 September 2001 with Father Judge's prayer.

Auerbach has composed symbolically charged music that perfectly fits the special performance space. The audience (who did not applaud in the church but observed a minute of silence) hardly resented the fact that she did not offer unsettling novelty but instead sought to make a direct effect with the entire impact of the orchestra and choir. There are, at any rate, only a few islands of calm reflection - such as "In “Silentium", which beguiles with simple melodies - in the layering of surging songs and of skilfully varied melodies pervaded by orchestral vehemence. Otherwise, high-pressure emotion dominates, always gaining new impetus through the orchestra and choir spurring each other on, leading again and again to a sweeping stream of sound.
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Mad Men Last Night: Dreams Deferred, Dashed, or Done [by Connie Aitcheson]

         I could almost see the words of Langston Hughes scrolling across the bottom of the television screen: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore, And then run?. . . . Maybe it just sags like a heavy load or does it explode?”

               In last night’s episode Megan decides that she isn’t going to dry up or fester. Rather she will cut her losses and pursue her childhood dream of being an actress. Although she’s doing well at work, the ad business is not for her. After a failed audition, she reveals her desires and distress to Don: “I can’t explain it, but I felt better failing at that audition than I did when I was succeeding at Heinz.” But Megan is still young enough to have "chaos, fun, and adolescent joy," the qualities a client feels are needed in a piece of music to accompany an ad. Megan’s not thinking of financial security. She’s grateful she has that in Don so she can afford to dream of being an actress. Whereas Don’s days of leaping before looking are over -- as we see when an elevator door opens but there is no elevator, just a long vacant chute to nowhere. If he had walked into the elevator shaft he’d have fallen to his death. Don wants familial security and routine. He may not want Megan barefoot and cooking in the kitchen all the time, but he wants to know she’s close by, either at work or home. 

               But Peter is a heavy load that’s about to explode. Or about to go from the minor explosions he has each episode into a volcanic eruption. He has a fling with Beth, the wife of a train buddy, Harold, who sells insurance. Within twenty minutes of meeting each other they’re on the floor of her home. While Peter knows Beth is trying to soothe her pain of knowing her husband is unfaithful, he gives into the reckless moment. But he doesn’t fantasize about the affair or treasure the memory as Beth suggests. Instead, he pursues Beth -- on the phone and, when that doesn't lead anywhere, in person, at her home with her husband in another room. Eventually we see him as the jilted lover waiting for Beth in a hotel room forlorn, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. He throws a glass at the wall, defeated.

               Of all the scenes in the episode I audibly laughed when Peggy gave it back to Don at the botched pitch for whip cream, “You’re not mad at me, so shut up.” They’re so perfect for each other, yet I would never want to see them together.  Only Peggy can sass Don and leave him unoffended. When he calls her searching for Megan, she switches the roles and asks him if he knew where her boyfriend was, as in ‘Man, I am not your wife’s keeper.’ Anyway Joan tells us earlier of the type of women Don marries, and that type is not Peggy.  That type is a long willowy model -- like Betty Draper.

               Dreams for Don are not ethereal and visionary, but concrete steps taken to achieve a goal. He and Roger share a generational moment when they say their career choices weren’t lofty ideals but what they were told to do or what were the avaiable jobs. By the time Megan puts on The Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” (from Revolver), Don can’t really appreciate it for its motivational lore but its literal suggestion.  He’s too busy thinking of Megan and this new deveopment in their marriage.  So the best way he knows to “lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void,” is to go to bed. He may well find some answers tomorrow. -- Connie Aitcheson

Poetrynauts… to the launch bay! by Peter J. Shippy

Here’s a poem by Jennifer L. Knox (A Gringo Like Me, Bloof Books & Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present edited by Mr. Lehman, Scribner):

 Hot Ass Poem

Hey check out the ass on that guy he’s got a really hot ass I’d like to see his ass naked with his hot naked ass Hey check out her hot ass that chick’s got a hot ass she’s a red hot ass chick I want to touch it Hey check out the ass on that old man that’s one hot old man ass look at his ass his ass his old man ass Hey check out that dog’s ass wow that dog’s ass is hot that dog’s got a hot dog ass I want to squeeze that dog’s hot dog ass like a ball but a hot ball a hot ass ball Hey check out the ass on that bird how’s a bird get a hot ass like that that’s one hot ass bird ass I want to put that bird’s hot ass in my mouth and swish it around and around and around Hey check out the ass on that bike damn that bike’s ass is h-o-t you ever see a bike with an ass that hot I want to put my hot ass on that bike’s hot ass and make a double hot ass bike Hey check out that building it’s got a really really really hot ass and the doorman and the ladies in the information booth and the guy in the elevator got themselves a butt load of hot ass I want to wrap my arms around the whole hot ass building and squeeze myself right through its hot ass and out the other side I want to get me a hot ass piece of all 86 floors of hot hot hot hot ass!

* * * 

I know, it’s an obvious choice for a contemporary poem that I’d like to see made into a children’s book!

I can just see that enumerator (Hey) lighting up each page in scarlet 48-point Courier. Without punctuation or line breaks Knox needs that interjection to steer the poem.

What about that voice? Who is the poem’s emcee? A creepy predator or benign hedonist?  When I teach this poem I always play Knox reading it, which often changes my students’ opinion. Instead of hearing Frank from Blue Velvet they hear Jennifer L. Knox and they smile and curl up into little balls… and  then she gas them! Gulp.

I’ve always heard a Tom Clark/Bolinas vibe.  About Clark’s “Whatever Happened to Don Ho” Billy Collins wrote, “… this one dares to be deceptively loose, so druggy, and so American…” (Dark Horses, UIllinois Press). 

If Beckett employed the “syntax of weakness” in his prose, I’d call Knox’s the syntax of weak knees, weak knees caused by Baudelairean ecstasies caused by wine, poetry, or (lack of) virtue, as you wish.

 But, a children’s book can’t really use that word!  Can it?  Won’t her publishers gripe?

Her Publishers: Jen, we can’t expose the urchins to 3-letter words. Help us out,

don’t you know, the book biz is in crisis! How about Hot Bottom? Hot tush? Hot Fanny?

Knox: No.  It’s Ass or nothin’.

Us (singing): If the kids are united then we’ll never be divided (Sham 69).

Her Publishers: We are moved by your united front and we will allow your

beloved Asses to stay! 

Us: Hooray!

Should the narrator be an animal?  Yes, it should.  Are you thinking sloth?  It’s obviously a 3-toed sloth.

Illustrator?

Shelley Jackson author/illustrator of another of our family faves, Mimi’s DADA Catifesto (Clarion Books). Every 2 or 3 years I feel the need to inflict, er, delight, yes, delight my students with DADA. Next time I get that itch, I’m including Jackson’s book on my list—it’s that good.  Arp! Arp!