The Best American Poetry

Poets and Artists Play "Telephone"

7 Rings: An Artist’s Game of Telephone

7 Days, 7 Artists, 7 Rings, is a living, responsive work of art created by Rebecca Campbell and Nicole Walker. Each week the painter and poet, respectively, alternate kicking off the current week’s collaborative artist project. Painters and poets, photographers and essayists, musicians and story writers link their works. For example, a poet may be presented with a video and asked to write a poem in response; the poem in turn is shown to an artist, and the chain continues. The responses came daily, with artists having only twenty-four hours of rtesponse time. Begun in 2010 and reprised in 2011, the project is archived here (or at htttp://bekandnik.wordpress.com.) Ms Campbell and Ms Walker plan a new round of Telephone to start soon. -- DL.

Four Halloween Poems from "Why Am I Grown So Cold" by Myra Cohn Livingston (posted by Jenny Factor)

            HOUSE FEAR

Always--I tell you this they learned--

Always at night when they returned

To the lonely house from far away

To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,

They learned to rattle the lock and key

To give whatever might chance to be

Warning and time to be off in flight:

And preferring the out- to the in-door night,

They learned to leave the house-door wide

Until they had lit the lamp inside. 

                        --Robert Frost (1874-1963)

 

   I called to the wind,

"Who's there?"........Whoever it was

    still knocks at my gate.

                --Kyorai, trans by Harry Behn  (1651-1704)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a grey thing that lives in the tree-tops

None know the horror of its sight

Save those who meet death in the wilderness

But one is enabled to see

To see branches move at its passing

To hear at times the wail of black laughter

And to come often upon mystic places

Places where the thing has just been.

                                                          --Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

 

THE WARNING

Just now,

Out of the strange

Still dusk...as strange, as still...

A white moth flew: why am I grown

So cold?

            --Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1914) (her form is the 'cinquain')

In my childhood in Beverly Hills California, where our storms tended toward fire and quake, Los Angeles poet Myra Cohn Livingston served as Artist in our schools. Her first lesson was to use our real eyes, rather than to "buy in" to other people's metaphors and similes. She liked to remind us that "snow" wasn't "winter" in Southern California.  I knew that if I "saw" the leaves turning something other than crinkly-and-brown, I should get my eyes checked. 

On the other hand, she would bring in brilliant objects and ask us to come up with lists...what are they? what are they to us metaphorically? We would take metaphor-hunting walks. We would find the telephone in the seashell, the moon "as the north wind's cookie." (That last is Vachel Lindsay, in case you were wondering.)

And she would read us poems, across time, across space, from a stream she knew where poetry was always happening inside itself. A famous children's poet, she didn't believe in talking down to children. Her anthologies still sit on my shelves, and are of interest to my 43 year old self. 

Her anthologies for children (among her more than 90 books), always included international work, spanning six centuries or more. Here for Halloween are some selections from Why Am I Grown So Cold: Poems of the Unknowable (A Margaret K. McElderry Book, Athenaeum, 1982).

 

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, read by Vincent Price

Patrice de la Tour du Pin and Amit Majmudar, by Luke Hankins

Yesterday, I posted here about the devotional mode in poetry and my forthcoming anthology, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and featured two poems from the anthology. Today, I'd like to highlight the work of two additional poets from the anthology about whose work I am very enthusiastic.

As far as I can tell, Patrice de la Tour du Pin has been little known in the U.S., but thanks to the efforts of poet and translator Jennifer Grotz, he has begun to reach an English-language audience in literary journals, and will continue to do so in Grotz's translation of his collection Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days], forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2013. 

 

Patrice de la Tour du Pin (1911–1975) was a French, Catholic poet who achieved fame for individual collections of poems as well as Une Somme de poésie, a three-volume multi-genred work he wrote and continually revised throughout his life. Late in his career, de la Tour du Pin distilled and collected his most powerful lyrical poems, written in the form of psalms, into Psaumes de tous mes temps [Psalms of All My Days]. As Jennifer Grotz says, "These psalms articulate his struggle to find poetic authority and spiritual meaning in the midst of world war and modern tumult." I'm thrilled to be able to include four of de la Tour du Pin's psalms in Poems of Devotion, and I'd like to share one of them with you here. More of Grotz's translations of de la Tour du Pin's work can be found online at Blackbird.

PATRICE DE LA TOUR DU PIN

Psalm 41*

My God, I know only my debt,
all my life carried in debt--
and you who repay it in a word!

Forgive me my shamelessness:
you who have hedged me in from all directions at once,
deliver me in time for your day of rest.

Set the night sky back in motion,
reweave the constellations
into a scaffold for your praise.

On that day when you judge
the taste of my joy with your lips,
my sorrow at your Passion,

will you be able to say: “Here is a man 
who valued me 
over thirty radiant ideas”?

            -translated from the French by Jennifer Grotz

*"Psalm 41" by Patrice de la Tour du Pin, translated by Jennifer Grotz, appears here by permission of Jennifer Grotz.

Another marvelous poet featured in the anthology is Amit Majmudar (b. 1979), a diagnostic nuclear

Happy Birthday Ezra Pound (10/30) by Anthony Madrid

EZRA POUND (10/30)

Ailanthus, amphetamines, power lines downed
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound

Bell, book, and candle, and half the set drowned
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound

Inflatable raft at the Lost and Found
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound

The Pez dispenser says See ya around
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound

Happy birthday, Ezra Pound!!!
The bubbling subway is apt to astound

The spool’s undone, the thread’s unwound
Happy birthday, Ezra Pound

  

   -- Anthony Madrid

KGB reading canceled due to storm

KGB Monday Night Poetry is sad to say...

 

Dorianne Laux + Cornelius Eady + Joseph Millar

...is canceled 10/29/2012 due to Hurricane Sandy. 

Be safe everyone!

*****

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after 

so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes

that a storm is coming,

and I hear the far-off fields say things

I can't bear without a friend,

I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on

across the woods and across time

and the world looks as if it had no age:

the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,

is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny.

What fights with us is so great!

If only we were to let ourselves be dominated,

as things do, by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to be bent by us.

I mean the Angel who appeared

to the wrestlers of the Old Testament;

when the wrestlers' sinews

grew long like metal strings

the Angel felt them under his fingers

like chords of deep music.

Whomever was beaten by this Angel

(who often simply declined the fight)

went away proud and strengthened

and great from that harsh hand

that kneaded him as if to change his shape.

Winning does not tempt that man.

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively

by constantly greater beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Bly)

*****

Upcoming, Fall 2012

November 5     Wayne Miller + Jerry Williams       
November 12   NBA Judges! Laura Kasischke + Maurice Manning + Dana Levin + Patrick Rosal      
November 19   Henri Cole + John Koethe                 
November 26   Ana Bozicevic + Fanny Howe
December 3     David Lehman + Mark Doty       
December 10   Mark Strand + Malachi Black + Season Finale Party!!!!    

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews: Dickinson

The Don Draper Advertising Awards for 2012

The best TV commercial of the year is Direct TV's "Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The cause-and-effect sequence -- "when you wait forever for the cable guy you get bored, when you get bored you stare out the window, when you stare out the window you see things you shouldn't see, when you see things you shouldn't see you need to vanish" -- creates a rapid absurdist narrative Don Draper would have liked. The clauses escalate: "when you need to vanish, you fake your own death" (with a picture of a man surfacing in the ocean, a burning ship in the distance), then "you dye your eyebrows," and finally the coup de grace: "you attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Shifley." The specificity of this name is a nifty touch. I wonder whether it's the name of a guy at the ad agency.

The worst TV commercial of the year -- take it from one who has watched too many baseball and football games this fall -- is a forty-way tie among car commercials that use the fake word "introducing." Even a commercial for Mercedes, with Jon Hamm's voice over it, is guilty of this triteness next to which the cliches of car ads from the print magazines of yore ("runs good," "loaded") seem amost OK.

The weirdest commercial of the year is, hands down, the one from Direct TV featuring a blonde wife emerging from the shower, wrapped in a towel, looking distraught. The huge TV screen on the wall reports a "recording conflict." (Apparently the household cable TV system can record one show at any given time.) She says she is "sick of this thing," adding, "I just feel like it's watching me walk around naked." Snarls hubby, in front of the bathroom mirror, "Well, at least somebody gets to." Then he continues brushing his teeth, noisily, the noise communicating his contempt. The idea of a "recording conflict" -- and of warring TV tastes -- as emblematic of a marriage on the rocks is smart, but the use of a bitterly quarreling couple to sell a product is negativity of a kind usually seen only in political ads. Still, it does a lot in fifteen seconds, and it does not involve a talking animal. -- DL

Luke Hankins, Guest Blogger October 29 - November 2

This week we welcome Luke Hankins as our guest blogger.  Luke is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions (Wipf & Stock, 2011), and the translator of I Was Afraid of Vowels...Their Paleness (Q Ave. Press, 2011), poems from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. He is the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, forthcoming Nov. 30, 2012) and serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review. He received his M.F.A. from Indiana University, where he held The Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including American Literary Review, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media national radio program On Being.

Welcome, Luke.

-- sdh

"Misgivings" by William Matthews

"Perhaps you'll tire of me," muses
my love, although she's like a great city 
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn't tire of rain, I think,

but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away 
by floods.  And worse than what we can't 
control is what we could; those drab
scuttled marriages we shed so
gratefully may auger we're on our owns

for good reason. "Hi, honey," chirps Dread
when I come through the door; "you're home."
Experience is a great teacher 
of the value of experience, 
its claustrophobic prudence,
its gloomy name-the-disasters-

in-advance charisma.  Listen, 
my wary one, it's far too late
to unlove each other.  Instead let's cook
something elaborate and not
invite anyone to share it but eat it
all up very very slowly.

(This poem first appeared in Poetry. Robert Bly selected it for The Best American Poetry 1999. -- sdh)

Go Away, Sandy!

Stay safe, everyone!

 

 

 

More on Jacques Barzun by Jamie Katz

We've received a few comments in response to David's post about Jacques Barzun, who died on October 25th at the age of 104.  Here's an excerpt from a piece by our friend Jamie Katz, who had the honor of toasting Barzun on the occasion of his 100th birthday.  Follow the link to read more about this extraordinary scholar.

In his work I am struck, not just by his erudition and elegant prose, but by his acknowledgement of fluidity, chance and human agency in culture and history. It is a liberating conception, giving weight to both daring leaps of individual genius and the smaller gestures and habits that form the tissue of society. He gives respect to our innermost selves, too. Speaking of Descartes and the split between rationalism on one side and impulse and intuition on the other, Barzun refuses to take sides: “The more science proves its worth, the harder it is for ‘nature’ or ‘the heart’ to feel free. Reason should guide — all moralists agree — but, as others point out, mind is not separate from heart. The astute Chinese have a character for heart-and-mind. They perceived that the urge to reason is itself a drive from the heart, which explains why rationalists are often fanatics.”

Continue reading here.

--sdh

Why you should go to AWP [by Kate Gale]

October 26^th, 2012
AWP

I’m in Seattle for AWP 2014 planning.  The next AWP is in Boston, March 6-9, 2013.  I am always telling young poets that they should go to AWP.  Here’s why.

You meet lots of writers there and there’s nothing like being in a bar and looking across at Yusef Komunyakaa or C.D. Wright to know you are in the center of greatness. 

 The panels range from great poets and writers reading to how literature is made to the network on which literature is built.  As a young writer, you want to understand the world in which you live.  You want to understand what literary magazines publish the work you publish, you want to understand what presses publish the kind of work you write and you want to understand what is going on in your own community.

But what is much more important is knowing what you can do to be part of keeping that afloat.  The world of poetry and literature requires many players, and there is no reason you can’t be one of them.  Maybe you can help a literary magazine or a reading series, maybe you can start your own press, but find out a way to become part of the solution, not part of the problem.  And the problem is very simple and has three parts.

1. There are way more good manuscripts that want to be published than there are writers to publish them.
2. There are far more people writing and sending their words out into the world than there are reading good work and buying books.
3. In general, we need more intellectuals and readers. That might require writing more poetry that people can actually understand.  Poetry that isn’t just written for other academics.  Or not.   Just know your audience.

These are the problems.  If you come to AWP with your poems, your stories, your stuff that you want someone to help you out with, good luck.  Here is the story the gatekeepers want to hear.  I like what you’re doing in the literary world.  I would love to be part of  it.  What can I do to help?  Once you figure out where you fit in, what you can do to be part of the solution, then you can start asking for something.

If what you want is a champion, then champion somebody yourself.  And when you do get a book accepted, create a marketing/publicity plan that includes going to AWP and selling books and making sure you get the word out there. 

Remember that it is not about you.  Or at least not just you. Writers needs to have a community to sustain them.  Writers should work on being givers instead of takers, should work at being less needy.   Editors are not waiting around to find writers that we can do stuff for.  We are trying to live. 

So when I see you at AWP in Boston, tell me what you are doing for the literary community.  Tell me what you’re doing to make magic happen.  

Jacques Barzun, 1907-2012 [by David Lehman]

Jacques Barzun, intellectual historian, legendary Columbia professor, mentor, essayist, man of letters, has passed away at the age of 104. Perhaps in an effort to point to his great versatility, the NY Times obit calls him a "cultural gadfly," which seems to me tonally wrong. No gadfly, he did not sting and fly away, in the manner of a satirist; his knowledge was as deep as his range was wide, and he brought the resources of an encyclopedic mind to the least of his endeavors.

No one else could have written -- and published at the age of 93 -- a magisterial cultural history of Europe, with a driving thesis embedded in the very title of the book: "From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present." As a professor he crossed disciplinary boundaries with enviable ease -- if he taught you Romanticisim you were exposed to history, music, philosophy, art, and literature; you put in time with Berlioz, Rousseau, Delacroix, Shelley, Coleridge, Goethe, Carlyle, Stendhal, and the world historical individual personified in the emperor of France -- and you understood the ways the 19th century deviated from the classical and swerved into the modern.

For many years Barzun and Lionel Trilling team-taught Columbia's senior "great books" seminar, which met one night a week and was arguably the crowning glory of a Columbia education. Trilling and Barzun were different in temperament and taste. As writers and scholars they used totally different strategies, rhetorical and methodological, to attack a subject. Yet they were able to air their intellectual disagreements with civility founded on fondness as well as respect. They complemented each other beautifully in dialogue and had a shared penchant for off-the-cuff wordplay. One evening Malthus's dire predictions of runaway population growth were under discussion. Trilling ventured, "honi soit qui Malthus pense." To which Barzun replied without missing a beat, "honi soit qui mal thus puns." Students lucky enough to have taken the Colloqium on Important Books, as it was called, still spoke about it, with ardor and awe, thirty or forty years later.

When, working as Trilling's research assistant, I decided to make the prose poem the center of my doctoral thesis, Trilling suggested I meet with Barzun and he arranged the interview. Not only was Barzun encouraging; he pointed me in so many fruitful directions -- from Macpherson's "Ossian" to Leigh Hunt to the prosopopoeia as a rhetorical device -- that I walked away in that state of intellectual agitation that bodes well for a critical undertaking even as it vastly complicates it.

I turned again to Professor Barzun when, a decade later, I set out to write a book on murder mysteries. At Cambrdge University, I had written my master's essay on detective novels. Now, in 1985, I wrote a Newsweek cover story on the subject and landed a book contract. Long a fan of Jacques' great "Catalogue of Crime," done collaboratively with Wendell Taylor, and containing thousands of annotated entries on detective novels and stories, I wrote to him, and met with him for a luxuriant hour of conversation in his midtown office. The single-space, two-page letter he sent me touched on Voltaire's "Zadig," the relation of detection to science, the development of the Surete in France, the reason for the genre's highbrow appeal, among other things. Barzun said that criminal anguish was something that could be done well by Dostoyevsky but was usually fatal in lesser hands. The first-person murder mysery, he smiled, "must be a foresight saga." It was quite a session. "The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection" owes much to Professor Barzun.

Though Barzun in "Meditations on the Literature of Spying" (1965) reveals that he has little affection for Cold War developments in the espionage genre, he makes a number of observations that I  find suggestive, impressive, and useful. For example, he connects the success of the genre at the time of his writing -- the time of James Bond on one hand and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold on the other -- to "the multiform attack on privacy" that causes vast amounts of anxiety in the populace. Barzun goes further:

<<
Psychoanalysis has taught even the common man that he is in some ways an impostor; he has spied on himself and discovered reasons for distrust and disgust: in all honesty he cannot turn in a good report. Nor do his surroundings help to restore his confidence. The world is more and more an artifact, everywhere facsimiles supplant the real thing -- the raucous radio voice, the weird TV screen. Just to find his bearing he must fashion a computer simulation of his case. So mimicry, pretending, hiding, which are part of the child's first nature and used to be sloughed off as true individuality developed, now stay with us as second nature, and indeed as the only escape from the bad self and the bad world.
>>

This is brilliantly put and one has to rub one's eyes a little recalling that the essay, so predictive of intellectual conversation to come, appeared back in the Spring 1965 issue of The American Scholar. While Barzun broadcasts his irritation with the espionage genre, at least he pays it the compliment of calling it, in his title, "the literature of spying," which is no mean thing in his book. -- DL

Brendan Constantine, the many poets of Los Angeles

October 25^th, 2012

 

Los Angeles will soon have its first city laureate.  It’s a great honor for a city to have a poet laureate, and in the process of choosing someone, what we on the committee found out was that L.A. is crowded with poets.  There are poets on the streets, poets in the classrooms, poets who don’t leave their houses much, poets who like to write on beaches.  There are poets who try for quantity, who seem to have simply reams of work stacked about them taking up the house and shelf space and even sitting in the kitchen where the little pots and pans ought to be and poets who limit themselves to one or two good poems a year.  There are different kinds of poets and there are different kinds of poems.  Just like you listen to certain music when you’re sad and some when you’re happy.

 

There are poems which like to stand up and sing out loud.  (Like I do in the shower! I’m amazing!  You should hear me.) Or poems that sit quietly in a corner and weep.  The kind of poetry I am drawn to the most is the smart poetry, the poetry you can’t stop thinking about, the poems that come back to you in the middle of the night.

 

When I go to readings of my favorite poets, I hope they will read certain poems.  When Jim Tilley reads there is this poem he has about the big questions.  I like it very much because I always end up spinning off thinking about what the big questions are and how when you’re in love, it’s tedious when you only have time for bills and dinner and the kids and not time for the big questions.

 

When Eloise Klein Healy reads, I want to hear the one about softball and the one about the bears and the one about the swales of rain.  And when Doug reads I want that peppy poem about the Middle Passage.  Charles Harper Webb has a poem on duct tape that I wait for, and this coming Monday, Brendan Constantine reads at the Gerding Theatre, I hope he will read the poem below which is one of my favorites.

 

Last Night I Went to the Map of the World and I Have Messages For You

Brendan Constantine

America says it has misplaced your number.
I wasn’t comfortable giving it out. I said
I’d let you know.

Africa’s birthday is this weekend.
There’s a party. No gifts.
                                        Just come.

If you’re planning to go, Greece wants 
to know if it can get a lift. Awkwardly
                                                 so does Turkey.

Russia wanted me to say The worm knows
the cabbage but the worm dies first.
I have no idea what that means. Do you?

Japan looked really uncomfortable all night
but never spoke. Is something going on?

Ireland asked to be remembered.
I sang to it for you.

I didn’t get to connect with Europe
but, as the French say, Isn’t that just
                                                            too bad.

Is that everyone? Oh yes, the oceans.
They asked what they always ask
and I promised I’d repeat it,
                              Why do you never call?
                                     When are you coming home?

 

Here is why I love this poem:

 

1. It makes me think.
2. It makes me enter this big head space about us and them.
3. I love thinking about nation vs. human
4. Brendan’s Greek and I know that Greek/Turkey line is a kick for him.
5. It’s about the big ideas of life.
6. Singing to Ireland.
7. Mostly because I like very much to think about home.  In its largest sense and smallest sense, its wildest and its safest.  Everything about what it means to be home, to feel at home, to build a home, to make a home, to nest.

 

Come to the Gerding Theatre at 8 pm on October 29^th, 2012—this coming Monday! And hear Brendan read with Tanya Chernov, Tess Gallagher and Caleb Barber.  It’s at 128 NW Eleventh Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97209

More Self-Pity: Viggo Mortensen vs. Demi Moore

We posted D.H.Lawrence vs. Kenneth Koch. Here's Viggo vs. Demi (Viggo's dimpled chin gets my vote):

-- sdh

Falling Through Air by Kate Gale

 Writing good poetry is like falling through air.  Not water.  Because water stops you.  Water slows you down.  Water makes you think about whether you really want to keep going down.  Water is all free fall; water lets you go down deeply.  Deeply into words, language and ideas.

 

Tess Gallagher eloquently wrote,

            “I Stop Writing the Poem”

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I'm still a woman.
I'll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I'll get back
to the poem. I'll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there's a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it's done.

 

Why do we stop writing the poem?  We stop to work.  We stop to arrange the clothing.  To arrange the sandwiches on a plate, laying out the cilantro and parsley.  Sliced red onions, peppers, olives.  Then back to poem and if we’re not lucky, the poem may be lost, may have scurried away and hidden among the dirty linens.

Women start with being women.  We start with our children.  All else is small, and insignificant compared to this:  How are my children?  Is my relationship with my children sustained?  We bring together the arms of the shirt, of the pants, of the giant life we have with our children and feel it hinging and unhinging.  You cannot be a successful poet, writer or even person and lose your relationship with your children.  That’s key, and yet, we want our poetry to achieve a level of mastery.  Not craft.  Not clean loving well laid lines.  Not something that runs out of an MFA program perfect and sweet.  No, poetry that has plenty to do.  Poetry that can stop tenderness and get to the other side.  Poetry that’s the small girl wanting to grow up and the woman wishing for a dress so that she can seduce the waiters. 

It’s different being a woman writer.  But should it be?  Women, if they are not careful are ghost writers.  They can write standing up straight and beautiful against the sky, and their words can remain invisible.  We need to write so we’re not left out in the cold.  We need to write the big stories.  Not the domestic stories, the enormous stories that flatten myths.

Poetry that’s outside the lines.  That’s wild.  That has a job to do.  No matter who lives or who dies.

Tess Gallager will be reading at the Red Hen Press reading at the Gerding Theatre at 8 pm with Caleb Barber, Brendan Constantine and Tanya Chernov.

http://www.pcs.org/blog/item/red-hen-press/

The poetry Olympics by Kate Gale

Writing poetry well should be like training yourself for the Olympics.  The poetry Olympics.  Even there are no gold medals, no silver or bronze, even though there are no endorsements, (I keep writing to Nike, “I run, I write poetry, give me shoes! But no luck.) even though the rewards of poetry are being able to go around saying, “I’m a poet,” which, if you throw in a couple dollars will get you coffee, in spite of that, you should take it seriously. 

For me, that means doing what they do in the Olympics, going through training.  When I meet with MFA students, they want to know how long it will take before they get their first book published.  Here’s what I think about:  When my kids were in karate, their teacher Ken Nagayama would say, “When an American enters the dojo, he likes to ask one question.  ‘How long will it take for me to get a black belt?’ That is not the right question.  That is not right thinking.  Right thinking is, ‘Is this a place where I can enter the lifelong study of martial arts and learn about what it means to be human using this art form?’ That is the right question.”

Can I enter the study of poetry here?  Is the right place for me at this time?  Are there poets I can learn from?  Red Hen Press has a list of about twenty core poets who know we have a slot for them every several years so they can focus on writing knowing their work has a home.  This list includes Percival Everett, Peggy Shumaker, Camille Dungy, Doug Kearney, David Mason, Cynthia Hogue, Jim Tilley, Kim Dower and Lisa C. Krueger.

We have three poets who have undertaken to enter the dojo of poetry and let the martial arts instructor take some serious swings at their work.  Lisa C. Krueger, who read last month at Poets House with David St. John and Phil Levine had two books out but wanted to see how daring and risk taking she could be with her third book.  She enrolled in the Bennington MFA program.  As an adult with a thriving Psychotherapy practice, it isn’t easy to become a student again, to submit to having your poetry—which feels like your children!—be whacked around by the throngs, to say nothing of the poets who lead the workshops, but that’s what she’s done.  The poems that have emerged are ferocious, they have bite and wild as if they were surrounded by wolves and learned to speak anyway. 

Jim Tilley retired from Morgan Stanley and dedicated himself to a life of language and ideas, but first to poetry.  He’s been to Breadloaf, to Squaw, to Palm Beach, and he keeps going.  Every summer.  He works on his craft as hard as he ever worked in the world of finance, and the result is amazing. Poems that walk between math, light and energy.  Poems that are precise and balanced, poems where the poet is paying attention to every word.

Kim Dower, a renowned publicist went back to poetry after an absence of twenty-five years and dedicated herself to attending the conferences where she could submit her poems to criticism.  She takes classes with Terry Wolverton, one of Los Angeles’ treasures both as poet and writing teacher.  Her second book, Slice of Moon will be out from Red Hen Press next year, and she is reading this weekend on Saturday at the Ruskin Art Club at 4 pm with Oliver de la Paz and Cynthia Hogue. 

Red Hen’s core poets have this in common.  They are not hoping for a black belt.  They have entered the life of poetry and are in there, in the muck and grime, the wet evenings, the long winters, the pages on the floor.  They’re not hoping for game, they are the game.  I salute all poets who are in it for the long haul, for entering language cracked and brittle and ending up with poems whole and humming.

 http://redhen.org/events/rhp-at-the-ruskin-art-club/

On Self-Pity: D. H. Lawrence and Kenneth Koch duke it out

D. H. Lawrence
Self Pity

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

Kenneth Koch
I Like Rats

I never saw a rat
Sorry for itself.
I never saw two rats
Consoling one aniother for being rats.

Rats live good full rat-lives with other rats.
Rat mind and rat heart plunge them into rat sex with
       other impassioned rats.
People say they are poison and ugly and cause disease.
I say people cause disease.
I never caught a cold or syphillis or gonorrhea or
       manic depression from a rat. 

BAP 2012 West Coast Launch Reading November 8

ALSO TAKING PART THOUGH HER NAME HAS BEEN UNACCOUNTABLY OMITTED FROM THIS NOTICE IS AMY GLYNN GREACEN FRESH FROM A STINT AS THE JAMES MERRILL PRIZE FELLOW IN STONINGTON CT

For more information: Mill Valley Library