The Best American Poetry

"How to Write a Love Poem"- Part 1 [by Stephanie Paterik]

Arguably the biggest occupational hazard of the poet is that sooner or later, your lover will request a love poem.

If you are either very cocky or very skilled, you might whip out a fountain pen and write a fitting ode upon a cocktail napkin.

But if you possess the slightest doubt about your abilities, or about the notion of "love poems" in general, you might quiver in your oxfords.  

Most writers I know agree the love poem is the hardest to write. Breakup poems? Child's work. Meditations on death? No problem. Pastoral portraits and comic scenarios? They can be rendered with fair effort. But the love poem risks sentimentality, vulnerability, cliché -- and worst of all, the probability of falling short in its attempt to capture the enormity of the emotion.

For all of these reasons, love poems impress and intimidate the heck out of me. So on the eve of March, an hour before kissing February good-bye, I find myself researching the history of love poems, revisiting modern favorites and distilling some lessons from them all.

Lesson No. 1: Follow Clichés to their Roots

When I think of love poems, the verse that pops into my head is "roses are red / violets are blue." It's inevitable, and it makes me equate all love-y verse with shallow greeting cards. Who wants any part of that? 

But as is the case with so many clichés, this flower stems from an interesting seed. 

Edmund Spenser (pictured at the top) immortalized the image of red roses and blue violets in 1590 with his epic poem, The Faerie Queene:

 

It was upon a Sommers shynie day,

When Titan faire his beames did display,

In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew,

She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowers, that in the forrest grew.

In the following stanzas, Chrysogone falls asleep in the grass and is impregnated by sunbeams, leading to the birth of faerie twins. The goddesses Venus and Diana steal the newborns. Not exactly the stuff of greeting cards!

Spenser was more concerned with supporting Queen Elizabeth I and the Reformation than writing a transcendent love poem. But the sensuality in his verse is far more inspiring than the versions that arrived centuries later.

He's also known for "Amoretti," a sonnet cycle exploring his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. She's rendered as his practical if not unromantic counterpoint, which gives the poems a tantalizing tension. In the sonnet "One Day I Wrote her Name," Spenser writes: 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

 But came the waves and washed it away:

 Again I wrote it with a second hand,

 But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

 "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

 A mortal thing so to immortalize;

 For I myself shall like to this decay,

 And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

(If you're interested in Spenser, you'll enjoy this thorough biography over at the Poetry Foundation.)

So how did Spenser's roses and violets make their way to us? Two hundred years after he penned the lines, they appeared in a collection of English nursery rhymes called Gammer Gurton's Garland:

 

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet, and so are you.

Thou are my love and I am thine;

I drew thee to my Valentine:

The lot was cast and then I drew,

And Fortune said it shou'd be you. 

 

And a hundred years after that, in 1862, the image swam the English channel to appear in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, in which Fantine sings "violets are blue, roses are red / violets are blue, I love my loves." It sounds lovely in French, which gives us the pleasurable slant rhyme: 

 

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,

Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.

So our Valentine cliché has an alluring literary tradition, and simply knowing that helps me embrace the love poem a little more. Next Thursday, I'll share some favorite love poems and lessons from current writers. 

Until then, xo February.

***

Prompt: Find a love poem you admire, be it classic or modern, and determine what makes it successful. Next week - some prompts to help write one.

Images: "Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen" by Henry Fuseli (middle) and 1901 edition of Mother Goose (bottom).

The View from Fresh Kill: Voices from Staten Island [by R. Erica Doyle]

I guest-taught a creative writing workshop at the College of Staten Island last night. I was early and went to the cafeteria for a bottle of water and got to see what looked like lots of really big high schoolers hanging out in there and let my eyes get used to their slower movements, deeper voices and more adult clothes. I love to imagine my high school students in college. I am sad when I see the evidence of the lack of committment to our public education system, though.

I was in the bookstore, and I distinctly heard a young man ask for Scantrons, and be really bummed when the clerk told him they were out. Huh? I thought. Scantrons are those bubble sheets you fill in for multiple choice tests. Why would a student ask for that? Maybe he was a really really young professor?  I asked the clerk about it as I was purchasing goodies for the class, and she said, "Oh yeah, here we're required to provide our own Scantrons for tests." 

This reminded me, sadly, of a Department of Education business meeting I had been in just that morning, where the facilitator informed us if we went to the bathroom that there would be no paper towels because "we just don't have enough money." 

Drones much? Sigh.

Then I went in to class.

We had a really great time. We set norms first, and talked about what they hoped to get out of the night, and what they really hoped didn't happen, and why. They shared their thoughts about reading crappy, just-written work out loud, the pros and cons of writing in class and out of class, and the pressure and shame they sometimes feel about their work.  They said a lot about wondering whether things were good or bad, how to keep being inspired, how to stay committed to a plot, and discussed what might be good about peers eyes on your work and why you might want an expert. I was charmed by their energy and their diverse New York accents.

They also said they wanted to do a Q and A with me at the end about whatever, and asked me questions about careers for English majors, getting published, being a woman in my field and lots of other fun stuff. I told them hey, this is what I do: make shit up, go crazy with everything and not follow instructions that feel asphyxiating. We talked a LOT a LOT A LOT about being published and I told them I had an amaze-balls idea:  I would publish whoever wanted to be published, today, on my blog! I told them to text or email me their favorite line from the the night, and I would put it up right here, right now, for more Off Off Site Awesomeness. 

So here they are, in no particular order, collected from their freewrites, interview stories, and writing prompts from "Texts from Last Night" and "1000 Places to See Before you Die" --  thank you dear CSI students! ACT UP! FIGHT BACK AGAINST THE DISMANTLING OF PUBLIC EDUCATION! WRITE ON! 

Ti Penso Sempre -- Anissa

The flames blazed, reflecting in the eyes of all who stood at the funeral. Odd to have so many candles to commemorate a death by fire, but I was in no place to argue. --Brittany Sinodinos

Let our bones jive, skin melt together, be mine - destroy but don't damage. --Angelina Taddeo

When my solace snaps, my cynicism seems to pick my outlook up off of the floor. --Terri Caputo

take each hour by each moment of that hour and remember to breathe -- Christina Pilato

Honestly Mom! All I remember is waking up under a palm tree with a get well card that I obviously wrote to myself last night while drunk off my ass and now I'm talking to you through a coconut! --Jessica Provenzano

Guy 1:  I had a dream that I blew the bartender in the resort, who, in turn, blew me. -- Gabriella Shlyakh

And I jumped
Head first into the storm
And I'm soaring.
Flying high above 
Commonality, soft wings 
Careen in my stomach
And I've never been
So alive. -- Jena Caputo

I feel him shift; I turn around to see why and he kisses me.  I pull away, shocked.  Not so much that he kissed me, but because of the surge of energy that ran through my body.  From my lips started this intense jolt of fire and ice that moved rapidly to my heart sending it into a fatale pace.  It moved through every inch of my body, stopping at my fingertips, which turned numb almost immediately after his lips touched mine.  He instinctually apologizes, his face red with embarrassment for the first time I’ve ever seen.  Without a word, I grab his face and kiss him again to see if I could feel the same intensity as before.  I did and it got more incessant the longer our lips locked.  It no longer stopped at my fingers; it went full circle back to my tongue where I swear you could see it transfer to his.  This bright, hot light that was so viable to me ... -- Teresa Pulcrano

Alive and Furious: The Magic, Meaning and Music of Lucille Clifton [by Alissa Fleck]

Celebrating Lucille Clifton. Sherman Alexie, Tina Chang, Toi Derricotte, Michael Dickman, Timothy Donnelly, Cornelius Eady, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Nick Flynn, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Alicia Hall Moran, Sydney Clifton, Tonya M. Foster, Alexis Clifton, Charif Shanahan, Hafizah Geter, Michael S. Glaser, Alison Meyers, and Alice Quinn (photo 2013 (c) Star Black)

After the tribute reading to Lucille Clifton at the CUNY Graduate Center, I have but one thought on my mind as I levitate out of the auditorium and make my way home. 

I have to hear them—those wholly engulfing, full-body-wrenching poems—again. I have to hear them again now.

(What was that Wordsworth said about the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”?)

I don’t have time for my Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton to arrive in the mail. I must sit and be with these poems, digest them, take comfort in the fact that “tragedy while vast /is bearable.”

How does she do it? How does Clifton make us feel everything will be okay by telling us nothing is okay?

When I get home I look up her poem “dialysis.” It sticks with me this night, perhaps the most, for its ending: “after the cancer i was so grateful / to be alive. i am alive and furious. / Blessed be even this?”

“Right?” the poem begs—it’s worth it just to be alive...right ?

The words creep hauntingly from Sherman Alexie’s mouth as he recites the poem to the packed auditorium.

I come across “dialysis” on a blog that aggregates poems—it calls itself ”Punch-in-the-Face Poetry.”

“Poems that leave you reeling...Poems that leave you sore, grasping...and bring you out swinging.”

Well, yes. But when it comes to Clifton, that’s only a start. 

* * *

Last week, 12 renowned writers and one operatic singer came together to celebrate Clifton’s life and legacy on the occasion of the publication of her collected poems.

“Clifton most astutely imagines the self and others in her poetry,” explains poet Tonya Foster.

“She contained multitudes,” adds Michael S. Glaser, who co-edited Clifton’s Collected Poems, echoing Whitman. “Her poems should be spoken by many voices.”

Throughout the night, Clifton’s poems are spoken, whispered, spat and literally sung. Excerpts are repeated, voices echo one another, infusing the evening with added dimensionality. With Clifton’s two daughters in the front row, and Marie Howe waving Clifton’s image in front of us, telling us “this is what God looks like,” it is truly as though Clifton herself moves among us.

It is as though she is directing the occasion, as poems humorous and jaunty brush up against the more chilling and devastating. We are not to get too comfortable, too complacent. We are to feel the entire possible range of what can be felt and more.

A lighthearted note to Superman is followed by a reflection on the black father’s struggle to be the best “In the whole white world.”

“Another child has killed a child,” Clifton writes in “the times,” a poem which feels as heartbreakingly relevant as ever when read aloud by Toi Derricote.

Clifton notes: “these too are your children this too is your child.”

When we’re asked to picture a cockroach holocaust, the room erupts with easy—if slightly uncomfortable—laughter. Why do we laugh? Clifton anticipates this and stops us in our tracks. No sooner have we laughed than she makes us regret it. We’re still collecting ourselves when the punch hits us square in the face.

“i didn’t ask their names. / they had no names worth knowing.”

Eyes recur in many of the poems and it’s hard to escape the feeling this night that we’re being watched ourselves by a master who orchestrated it all.

If you think you know the work of Clifton, chances are you still have so much to learn. As Glaser points out, “Lucille...continues to live in and among us. There are seeds in the poems she wrote still waiting to be discovered.”

In Memoriam: A Reverse Garland for Trayvon Martin [by R. Erica Doyle]

Trayvon Martin died this day a year ago.  Thousands across the nation expressed their horror and grief, many through poetry. It is remarkable, in fact, just how many poems surface if you search "Trayvon Martin poems" on the internet.

Below is one, by poet JP Howard. She is also an attorney, a co-founder of the Women Writers in Bloom Poetry Series, a Cave Cavem Fellow, and a mother to a black, teenaged boy.

Once, I heard Molly Peacock talk about why she wrote in form. She said while writing about terrible things that there was safety at the end of the line.  I am reminded of that here, where Howard combines two usually separate cinquain variations: the reverse and the garland.

The cinquain is usually a stanza of five lines with 2,4,6,8, and 2 syllables respectively.  The reverse cinquain is 2,8,6,4, and 2.  The garland cinquain is a series of 6 cinquains in which the last stanza is formed by a line from each of the stanzas that came before. Garlands are worn in celebration, yes, but also, sometimes, for the dead. 

 

Reverse Garland Cinquain for Trayvon

 

Trayvon

I wish I didn’t have to write

about you in past tense

once again, so

unfair

 

Trayvon

your story is too familiar

we keep returning here

this pain should not

recur

 

Trayvon

Today you should be in your school

Your parents’ next visit

should not be your

gravestone

 

Trayvon

Until there is justice I will

wrap you in my stanzas

cradle your name

Trayvon

 

Trayvon

we will not forget your trip home

beautiful son man-child

let us repeat

your name

 

Trayvon

Your story is so familiar

When your parents’ visit

let them cradle

your name.

 

-- JP Howard, 2013

 

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Grief Still Very Real For Trayvon's Mom

The Next Big Thing by Susan Wheeler

A million thanks to the generous and addictive Best American Poetry Blog for accommodating this entry in the web-project The Next Big Thing, and many thanks to Sharon Dolin for inviting my participation.  You can find her entry at:  http://www.sharondolin.com/the-next-big-thing/ .  I made the grueling decision to make this the stub of one of the Thing’s tentacles, once I learned what you, the reader, were in for.  Apologies to those whose wont it is still to play.

Q:  What is your working title of your book?

A:  Monte Green’s Place.

Q:  Where did the idea come from for the book?

A:  Monte Green’s words are so familiar – and haunting – to any hearing-enabled person (and so little has been done with his odd vernacular, which cobbles together many strains, the dominant ones being Anglo-Saxon and Latin), that it seemed a rich diction to plunder.

Q:  What genre does your book fall under?

A:  It’s a hybrid translation.

Q:  Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

A:  Monte?  Jackie Gleason, if he was still with us.  Since not, Paul Dano.  He would also play the misunderstood love interest, Paulette Noh.

Q:  What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A:  Language as object fails us; there is no greater illustration than Green’s life story.

Q:  Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 

A:  Neither – it’s under contract, sans agent.

Q:  How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

A:  Given that this is the Next Big Thing and not the Last, I am still in first draft so no telling.

Q:  What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

A:  Peter Reading’s Marred Fan.  David Ives’ Haul in the Tithing.

Q:  Who or what inspired you to write this book?

A:  Wasn’t this your first question?

Q:  What else about your book might pique the reader's interest?

A:  It exposes the underbelly and the tragedy of the flim-flam known as the “telephone game.”

 (Ed note: Susan Wheeler's most recent book of poetry is Meme (University of Iowa Press, October 2012). You can find out more about Susan here. -- sdh)

Back to the Future: Jayne Cortez and Yari Yari Ntoaso [by R. Erica Doyle]

This May 16-19, 2013, the Yari Yari conference will take place in Accra, Ghana.  Yari Yari is a conference that gathers women writers from all corners of the African diaspora, and was created by the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, founded by Jayne Cortez and Ama Ata Aidoo.

"Yari" means the future and each year the conference chooses a different word to modify this word; in the past it was "Pamberi," meaning "Forward" in Shona.  This year it is "Ntoaso" which means "understanding and agreement" in Akan.

 

This year's conference is bittersweet, due the passing this January of the fire at its heart, OWWA President Jayne Cortez. Here is Jayne Cortez and her son, Denardo Coleman, performing my favorite piece of hers, "Find Your Own Voice":

 

The torch has passed to the rest of the committee, and the wonderful writers who will be making their way to West Africa this spring to cross-pollinate, demonstrate and celebrate. Poets, scholars, playwrights, novelists, storytellers, and journalists will be coming from Europe, the Americas, and Africa for this amazing event.

Featured writers include:

Angela Davis, US                Kadija (George) Sesay,         Veronique Tadjo,

author and scholar               UK publisher and writer         Cote d'Ivorien writer and scholar

                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interested in going to Yari Yari this year?  It's FREE!  How awesome is that? You do need a visa to enter Ghana from the US, so make sure you get started on the process now. For more info, go to the conference site, here, on the Africana Studies website at NYU.

And if you can't go, but would like to support and share the word, the organizers have a great site set up here, which features videos of the 2004 conference and updates about participants.

In memory of Jayne, a true firespitter, Find your own voice -- and use it!

Square Poems in Round Holes (by Jenny Factor)

When I was a child, I’d often read poems I didn’t understand. I’d throw my thoughts against the poem like a locked box, trying to parse the words together, so that the lock would slip open.

There were poets whom I knew were mostly beyond me, but my mind rubbed against them systematically, like my cat rubs her face against a hairbrush, and there were others whose work was made mostly of sound rather than idea, and those I could drink up like a glass of water. Emily Dickinson was in the first category, and Theodore Roethke in the latter. 

I wasn’t a fan of Dickinson. Why should I be? A West Coast child who had no use for a version of nature that focused on the fly, the snake, and a bunch of east coast birds. Dickinson’s world was lacy, with holes. Her snakes all seemed to be wearing little Preacher’s suits. Not enough sex in it, I might have said, had I been anything but a child. 

But then I stumbled on two short Dickinson poems of nonconformity. 

441

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me—

The simple News that Nature told—

With tender Majesty

 

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see—

For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—

Judge tenderly—of Me

 

I was an oddball kind of child. Not fitting in was kind of my philosophy. 

260

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!   How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog –   To tell one's name – the livelong June –   To an admiring Bog!

At last, a code I could use, a message I needed!

Later, I returned to Dickinson, and we sat together in the window where she whispered to me. I was grown by then. She’s not in my body as a form of sound. She’s in my mind, deep down there, like a series of locks. I open one, and she opens another. And in this infinitely regressive chain, she and I travel through a lonely place together. 

Tonight at KGB: Music Night feat. Michael Zapruder & Friends

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Pink Thunder Poetry Music Night!!! 

Michael Zapruder & Friends

Monday, Feb. 25, 2013

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

Click the Link to Listen to "Florida" by Travis Nichols, 

adapted and performed by Michael Zapruder

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVSl1eMFwnU

 

Michael Zapruder is an award-winning songwriter and recording artist, and a co-founder of San Francisco's Howells Transmitter arts collective and record label.  His albums include 52 Songs, This is a Beautiful Town, New Ways of Letting Go, and Dragon Chinese Cocktail Horoscope, which won a 2009 Independent Music Award for Best Folk / Singer Song-Writer Album.  His most recent work is Pink Thunder, a collection of free verse pop art-songs made from the poems of more than twenty contemporary American poets. Contributors include Noelle Kocot, Matthew Zapruder,  James Tate, David Berman, D. A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, and Joshua Beckman.

*****

Upcoming, Spring 2013

Mar 4     David Lehman + James Kimbrell 

Mar 11   KGB POST AWP HALF-OPEN MIC     

Mar 18   Monica Ferrell + Arisa White   

Mar 25   Daisy Fried + Idra Novey 

Apr 1     Adam Fitzgerald + Jackie Clark   

Apr 8     Major Jackson + Heather Christle       

Apr 15   Lynn Melnick + Yona Harvey  

Apr 22   Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman   

Apr 29   Michael Klein + Will Schutt       

May 6    Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins         

May 13  TBA + TBA  

May 20  Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party  

          

asdfs

"Girls" review: Lena Dunham's problems for, and with, parents

This week’s Girls was a high point in a second season that’s been a bit of a disappointment. After making a well-deserved media splash as a novel TV approach to the depiction of Young Women In Our Time, Girls is showing some of the wear and tear that occurs when an ambitious creator also becomes The New Voice of Her Generation. (Promise: no more capitalized theme phrases from hereon.) At least, that’s the sense I get, given the timing, shooting schedule, and result of Lena Dunham’s intensely scrutinized, It’s Not Just TV (oh, damn – sorry) creation.

The second season feels more like a conventional sitcom, with snappy punchlines and increasingly lovable characters, or at least characters we’re meant to understand as earnest, wounded birds. Except for the male characters, who tend to be angry wounded pitbulls. Dunham’s Hannah and her sisters-in-the-sisterhood are never more engaging when they’re not engaging each other, but rather, interacting with people older than themselves: Parents, employers, would-be mentors, patrons, and sleazebags.

So it was this week’s installment, which found Hannah accompanying Jemima Kirke’s Jessa to spend the weekend with the latter’s father and most recent stepmother – played respectively by Ben Mendelsohn and Rosanna Arquette. The half-hour contained the usual amount of Girls hijinks, Seinfeldian phrase appropriations (the repetition of “sexcapade”; “You are ‘the cushion’” – i.e., the absorber of too much emotion), and sight gags (Hannah, her bladder too full at a remote outdoor train station, squatting to pee in semi-full view of an older couple).

But this episode, titled “Video Games” after a nutty belief of Arquette’s character – that the world is “literally” a video game – was filled with nice touches and filled in a bit more of the Girls universe. Jessa is, you’ll recall, coming off the dissolution of her brief marriage to a wealthy heel. If it was typical of Dunham’s writing strategy that this haughty, assiduously devil-may-care yet totally-together Brit would prove to have a thoroughly dissolute, emotionally unstable and needy father, it is to the show’s credit that the relationship felt right – that Jessa is the daughter such a man would produce, in that we-react-against-what-we-dislike-the-most about our parents.

Significantly, I think, this episode was written by producer Bruce Eric Kaplan, better known in some circles as “BEK,” the cartoonist whose work has appeared frequently in The New Yorker. I say significant not merely because Kaplan also wrote a few episodes of Seinfeld, but because the series this season has featured more fully delineated male characters whenever Dunham and/or another female collaborator aren’t writing them. Sorry, not sexist, but it’s just true: The early half-hours of this second season featured the show’s least believable new characters, most notably the happily brief appearance of Donald Glover as Sandy, the dreary, surprise!-he’s-a-black-Republican creation.

Where the second season of Girls has frequently carried a distracted air, as though the cast members were rushing through their jokes and problems because Dunham had a scheduled Rolling Stone or I-D cover photo-shoot, “Video Games” had a wonderfully languid pace – Kaplan created a warped idyll that allowed the series to pause, take a deep breath of non-Brooklyn air, and gather its senses.

The beautiful capper to the episode was that, having seen how dreadfully Jessa had been parented, Hannah felt moved to call her own parents to express in a sweetly sincere, fulsome manner, how much she loved and appreciated her own parents, played with the usual terrific verve and comic-stressfulness by Peter Scolari and Becky Ann Baker. The phone call was a failure for Hannah, of course – her neurotic, suspicious, yet always-Hannah-obsessed parents chose to interpret her call as another occasion for worry, suspicion, and alarm. But the final scene provided a lovely conclusion to a 30-minute meditation about how they fuck you up, your mum and dad.

--Ken Tucker

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews

This week's comic is brought to you by MiPOesias.  To read Nin Andrew's poem After Denise visit MiPOesias here.

 

 

Sandy Koufax back in Dodger Blue

At the Dodgers training camp this week in Glendale, Arizona, Mr. Koufax conferred with Dodger coaches and players, Now if the baseball Dodgers were the basketball Knicks (who are adding Kenyon Martin to an already impressive lineup of over-the-hill greats), they'd probably be offering a contract to the southpaw, 77, who, to help justify the analogy, played basketball in college. As a Dodger pitcher he won the Cy Young Award three times and was NL MVP in 1963. And he pitched the team to two world championships. And he refused to pitch game one of the 1965 World Series against the Twins because the date fell on Yom Kippur. Here he is, giving the fans something to smile about. -- DL

R. Erica Doyle, Guest Blogger February 25-March 1

This week we welcome back R. Erica Doyle as a guest blogger.  R. Erica was born in Brooklyn to Trinidadian immigrant parents, and has lived in Washington, DC, Farmington, Connecticut and La Marsa, Tunisia. Her first book, proxy, was published by Belladonna* in 2013 and her poetry and fiction have appeared in Best American Poetry, Our Caribbean, Callaloo, Ploughshares, Best Black Women's Erotica, Bloom, and From the Fishouse, and elsewhere. Doyle has been the recipient of grants and awards from the Hurston/Wright Foundation and the Astraea Lesbian Writers Fund, she was a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow and a fellow of Cave Canem: A Workshop and Retreat for Black Writers. She received her MFA in Poetry from the New School, and lives in New York City, where she works in NYC public schools and facilitates Tongues Afire: A Creative Writing Workshop for queer women and trans and gender non-conforming people of color.

Welcome, R. Erica

-- sdh

Harvard expels cheats [by DL]

Some news stories speak for themselves, no editorial comment needed.
Last spring Harvard suspended nearly half of the 279 students who took a government course called "Introduction to Congress" and were caught cheating on the take-home final.
The tip off was a spate of identical answers, down to the same typographical errors, on the test.
Around seventy of the accused were expelled in a decision announced on Friday, February 1.
It took six agonizing months for the top brass to figure out what to do.
A smart lawyer tried to get the kids off the hook by saying that the course deliberately encouraged cheating as an approprate "introduction to Congress" and the workings of government.
Two late-night TV talk show hosts referred to the case, making puns on "sexual congress" and the alleged promiscuity.of college kids.
Sports fans were particulaly displeased with the expulsions, because a number of jocks, under the impression that it was a gut course, were among those who got the ax. The Harvard basketball team is a shell of its former self.
Veritas, on the Harvard shield, is Latin for "truth." There is one deliberately false statement in the above account. Can you tell what it is? -- DL

"Zero Dark Thirty" [by DL]

I'm not an Academy member and I don't have a vote, but if I did I would cast it unhesitatingly for "Zero Dark Thirty" for the best picture award. And I lament that Kathryn Bigelow, who directed the film, did not get nominated.

While I enjoyed "Argo," the other best-picture nominee depicting covert ops), it is, in the end, a formula movie, spiced up by Hollywood's valentine to itself in the form of a move within a movie, a farceur's look at Farsi life, with the jovial irreverence of Alan Arkin and John Goodman. It has a poitically correct framing device concluding with a Jimmy Carter voiceover that reminded me of the mock-editorial that may have cost an enterprising Times or Globe man his job: "More Mush from the Wimp." The movie also has a conventional narrative arc, ending in a crescendo of suspense. The joke signaled by the title ("Argo fuck yourself") goes a long way toward neutralizing one's reservations.

"Zero Dark Thirty" is a more complicated, darker, less conventional movie. The arc is there but is ambiguous: the main character, a CIA agent  played by Jessica Chastain (left), achieves her aims but is last seen crying in an airplane in which she is the only passenger. The killing of Bin Laden does not override all the losses she (and the nation) have endured along the way.

The movie meticulously shows how intelligence works. It is highly dangerous and anything but glamorous. There are false scents, blind alleys, red herrings, b;atant lies, and the intelligence agent has no choice but to follow these even if, as may happen, a calamity may result. The hoodwinking of a sympathetic CIA agent, a friend of our heroine, leads to her murder and that of several of her colleagues.

The movie has been the victim of a smear campaign. Early on it shows scenes of waterboarding. The movie does not endorse this method of interrogation; it simply depicts it. Objections to the film's violence are also overblown. The violence pales next to the torture tactics used by the French in Algeria and shown graphically in more than one affecting movie. The conclusion of the movie, with Bin Laden finally located and killed, is managed without sensationalism. There are no celebrations and parades. The movie is as somber as the subject and it is dedicated quite eloquently to the victims of 9/11 in NY, of 7/11 in London, of other terrroist attacks across the globe (Pakistan, Afghanistan) and to the heroic sacrifices made by first responders.

Do not let the organized campaign against this extraordinarily intelligent and well-made movie deter you from seeing it. -- DL

Now hear this: Jimmy Van Heusen was born 100 years ago [by David Lehman]

and has been dead for twenty-three years but his songs are as timeless as "Darn That Dream," "Swinging on a Star," "But Beautiful," "Here's That Rainy Day," "Love and Marriage," "Come Fly with Me," "My Kind of Town," and "The Tender Trap." This is Van Heusen's centennial year, and d.j. Sid Gribetz presents a five hour tribute to the composer in a special edition of “Jazz Profiles” on WKCR radio today, Sunday February 24, from 2-7 PM. That's 89.9 FM in NYC. Van Heusen paired with Johnny Burke and later with Sammy Cahn. With Sammy he wrote a lot of material especially for Sinatra and took home Oscars for "All the Way," "High Hopes," and "Call Me Irresponsible."

Van Heusen [shown here, right, with Sammy Cahn] was born in Syracuse, NY on January 26, 1913 as Edward Chester Babcock. He named himself after a shirt, thinking it a classy moniker. When he moved to New York City in the 1930s, Harold Arlen -- another escapee from snow country -- befriended him and got his first major break with a gig at the Cotton Club. “Darn That Dream,” first first big hit, was written for Benny Goodman. Van Heusen teamed with lyricist Johnny Burke to produce  “Polka Dots And Moonbeams,” “Imagination,” "But Beautiful," “It Could Happen To You," “Here’s That Rainy Day,” and “Like Someone In Love.”

 

Van Heusen, who died in 1990 at 77, was a high-living, fun-loving Sinatra buddy whose greatness was recognized by vocalists ranging from Billie Holiday and Dinah Washington to Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, not to mention Joe Williams with the Count Basie sound and Chet Baker in West Coast cool. Five of today's precious hours will be devoted to Van Heusen songs on the Columbia University radio station, WKCR, 89.9 on the FM radio dial in New York City, and available around the world over the internet at www.wkcr.org and on itunes radio.

Dating Will Be Difficult When Everyone Is Dead [ by Chelsea Reilly]

Imagine your surprise when she tells you the rats got into the baby carriage again. There is a reason for everything, which I will explain much later. You have an important decision to make. It is not my business, but she has the sex appeal of an owl. I will make you so happy your face will be unrecognizable. I will make sure you never feel hunted again. We have things in common. For example, we are always waiting for lunch to happen. You have never startled anyone.  I know the difference between an emergency and a blinding pain in the chest. There are many people I regret marrying. I never planned on sleeping alone. 

-- Chelsea Reilly

Meet the Press: Catherine Woodard in Conversation with Betsy Teter of Hub City Press

When I am lucky enough to travel, I always think about communities, about how each of us is defined by layers of communities. I grew up in Kenly, N.C., a town of 1,400 people in rural North Carolina, and have now lived more than half of my life in NYC where I’ve always known a writing community, first in journalism, now in poetry. The most innovative model I know for non-profits who want to make a difference in their community, literary and otherwise, is in Spartanburg, S.C. Meet Betsy Teter, executive director and editor of the Hub City Writers Project, the only independent press I know that also runs a non-profit book store.

CW: How did Hub City Press get its start?

BT: Basically three writers met each other when a new coffee shop opened in Spartanburg. We certainly had no idea that we ultimately would have seven employees, a press that has sold 100,000 books all over the country, and a non-profit independent bookshop on the town square. Our bookselling operations now help fund a successful summer writers conference, a poetry book prize, residencies, a mentor/critique program, a story-into-film film festival, college scholarships for local teens, donations of thousands of books to local schools, regular creative writing workshops and dozens of readings annually.

All of this started with the idea for one book, an anthology of authors writing personal essays about the experience of living in Spartanburg. In the beginning, back in 1995, we focused on telling the story of Spartanburg, through personal essay, natural history, art, poetry, etc. Readers in town loved that writers cared about what happened here and also that we were interested in preserving through words what was special about our community.

We reflect our community, and that’s what makes us successful. We use the assets that are here, we give back, and we are helping to define what it means to live in Spartanburg, S.C.

CW: Where does the name come from?

BT: We modeled ourselves after the Depression-era Federal Writers Project, because we were writers working to build community. The name Hub City is a throwback to when Spartanburg was a railroad hub in the late 1800s. We are working to create a literary hub now.

CW: How does Hub City work?

BT: We like to say we are a "vertically integrated" literary arts organization—developing new writers from the ground up through workshops and conferences, sometimes publishing them, and then selling their books. Last year, a local writer who we first met at one of our summer writers’ conferences brought us $50,000 from sales of her novel, which we published at Hub City Press and sell in the bookstore. That success is creating opportunities for a lot of other writers.

We are a 501c3 non-profit and we have tremendous financial support from our home community, even now that our publishing focus is more regional and national. A healthy bank account feeds creativity and energy, so we just kept growing and expanding, pulling more writers and readers in.

We also have a great team here and a whole slew of loyal volunteers. They are proofreading, lugging books around, running the cash register, serving wine at events, Christmas wrapping—we couldn’t do it without them.

CW: Aren't you the only independent press in the nation with a bookstore? Since Spartanburg was struggling economically, why did you open the bookshop in 2010? 

BT: First of all, we needed a place to sell the books we were publishing. The long-time independent store in the suburbs had closed a few years earlier, and we weren’t going to last long selling books at hardware stores and art galleries. And finally, Spartanburg needed a gathering place like this right downtown. As a non-profit, we were able to raise $300,000 to renovate the street level of the old Masonic Temple for our store and offices, as well for two tenants—Little River Coffee Bar and Cakehead Bakery. We’ve created a remarkably successful gathering place now with literary, art and music events at least 10 times a month.

CW: Not so many people would think piedmont South Carolina as a literary incubator.

BT: Well, this little Southern town has many of the essential ingredients. For instance, we have three colleges with creative writing departments, including an MFA program, so there are a lot of writers here, and a lot passing through. We have a board full of great writers and editors, including C. Michael Curtis, who has been editing fiction for The Atlantic for fifty years.

CW: Surely you are suffering from the wholesale slaughter of the physical book culture by tablets and downloads?

We’ve only been in the bookstore business for two years, so we never knew what it was like in its heyday. All we know is we have a great gathering space for touring authors to come read, for writers to hang out together, and, yes, to be a showroom for great literature. We’re a non-profit organization! If all we do is lead people to wonderful books and build community, we have done our job. I’ve been publishing books for 17 years now, and it doesn’t get any better than coming to work every morning surrounded by 5,000 new and classic works of literature.

On the publishing side, just about everything we release comes out as an e-book now. And seeing those statements from Kindle and BN.com at the end of the month is like looking at magic money to me.

CW: Is poetry as popular as the pimento cheese biscuits in the bakery?

BT: Depends on whom you ask. Our traditional niche has been publishing poetry with a strong sense of place, and most of those poets have been from the Carolinas. But we are finally broadening our scope and have just introduced the New Southern Voices Poetry Book Prize, which is open to poets of all kinds in 13 Southern states and will be judged by D.A. Powell, who is a native of Georgia. It’s a first- or second-book contest, and the deadline is coming up April 1. www.hubcity.org/prize.

CW: What’s next? 

BT: A residency program, starting this summer, in a wonderful little bungalow on the edge of downtown called the Writers House. This is a new life for a residency program that had once been run by a sister arts program, HUB-BUB, and which brought us some terrific poets over the years. Two of them are still here in Spartanburg, working for Hub City and teaching adjunct at local colleges. If you’re a poet (or fiction/nonfiction writer) who has had a graduate degree in creative writing in the past five years, apply at www.hubcity.org/residencies.

 

Cool Titles: is 5 (by Jenny Factor)

I've been thinking lately about Cool. About cool before the concept of cool. Or before the cool people of today knew about the concept of Cool because we weren't born yet. Take E.E. Cummings in 1926, for instance, entitling his third book of poetry, in titling his fifth book as book

is 5

which must surely have been among the coolest titles of poetry books published in 1926, or in any other year for that matter. 

Which is why I want to take a moment to say that I really like E.E. Cummings. 

He makes verbs out of typography. He metaphors the hell out of grammar. He lets a lot of air into his sentences. (Or philosophy. Or science. Or thought. Or ego. Iconoclasm. Or humility. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm just not seeing him clearly. Readers: your thoughts?)

What he does do is karate chop the line breaks and even whole/holey/un-whole words--a trait for which he has been both praised and lambasted. (Edmund Wilson called his punctuation "hideous".)

It's true! Sure, we probably knew his poems sounded good. But did you ever wonder why? One story I can tell you about E.E. Cummings is that he was apparently hiding a pocketful of meters and a burial plot of sonnets inside his outwardly-apparent "free verse". Marilyn Hacker broke the news to me in a conventional sonnet class. I was 25 years old and floored. Instead of "Where's Waldo?", poets with a hankering to do so, could read swaths of Cummings and ask, "Where's the buried sonnet?" She showed me some secret examples. 

The Poetry Foundation web site's bio of Cummings seems to point toward confirming this. From the age of 8 to 22, Cummings practiced writing in traditional verseform. So it's no wonder, no puzzle, and no surprise that a deep canon hovered under the cannon he carried back inside his heart and mind and experience from the first world war (where, incidentally, he hung out with Pablo P. and other avant garde artists).

E.E. Cummings: a stealth formalist. 

And yet, also, paradoxically, a rebel. Adam Kirsch's terrific exploration of Cummings in The Harvard Review shows a man who contained (and complained) these complexities. 

Who else deserves the Too Cool for School award for titles of poetry books? 

Interview with Sudeep Sen [by Catherine Woodard]

The birth of a book is a blessed day. The day I interviewed Sudeep Sen in January at his apartment in New Delhi about editing The Harper Collins Book of English Poetry, his latest poetry book Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1978-2013 arrived in boxes from Gallerie Publishers. Shelves and shelves of poetry books share top billing with an eclectic collection of visual art, including Sen’s photographs. He took the photo on the cover of the anthology. Behind his desk is a framed draft of a poem by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, the prolific Indian writer and later-in-life visual artist.

 

Birthday cruise for Derek Walcott, 83

Sen, 48, introduced me to his extremely charming mother in the ground floor apartment so I saw Fractals join the shrine on a dining room side table of her son’s more than two dozen poetry books, translations and anthologies. Later in January, Sen was the contemporary poet honored to read at a Nobel Laureate conference in St. Lucia. Coincidentally, Tagore was awarded a literature Nobel exactly 100 years earlier. Derek Walcott, the 1992 literature winner, lead the Q&A after Sen’s reading. “The biggest gig in my life thus far – certainly the most precious, moving and meaningful,” Sen emailed me after. 

 

CW: All 85 poets in the anthology were born after India became a republic in 1950. How does that influence their relationship to English as a language?

SS: There’s a confidence in the language, an unabashedness. One or two generations ago English was a post-colonial language. It’s no longer the case. For me, English is an Indian language. It is one of our 26 official languages.

CW: So it’s about owning the language not in reaction to a colonial history of oppression?

SS: No, it’s more than that. English just happens to be one of the tongues they are using very freely as an everyday thing. Take me for instance, I have three mother tongues: English, Bengali and Hindi, that’s how I grew up. It’s very unself-conscious. English is a language I learned from my parents and grandparents who are Indians.

When I travel abroad, people say “oh you speak English very well” and I say “and so do you.” The English language is interesting because there are so many different Englishes. There is Caribbean English, Australian English, American English, English English, Asian English, Indian English.

CW: What did selecting the poets teach you about those Englishes? 

SS: That it is complex. Take David Dabydeen in the book, whose work is known as part of Caribbean literature. He’s from Guyana and grew up in the UK, an Indian diaspora poet who writes just fabulous English poetry of the highest order. His ancestors were Indian laborers. He writes about cooking dhal and roti and curry.  Some of his poems are very steeped in Western painting, including this fabulous love poem called “Turner” I excerpt in the book.

The Indian diaspora is very complex too. The older diaspora is five or six generations as opposed to Indians in America and the U.K. of just a few generations. Africa, South Africa, Fiji and the Caribbean all have large Indian populations. Those migrations happened as slave ships. They would take an entire village, the priest, the barber, the teacher. Their descendants still sing the songs my great-grandmother sung.

CW: What impact would you like the anthology to have?

SS: I’d like more of these poets to be read in India and abroad. Literally very few are known beyond small poetry circles. There are so many young poets writing and it’s so difficult for them to break into the scene.

CW: That said, does it surprise you then the anthology is getting reviews from mainstream print, radio and television. And that a few months out, it is slated for a reprint.

SS: It has just baffled me the impact, fabulous reviews in places that don’t even touch poetry usually.

CW: Why?

SS: I think primarily because 90 percent of the work is unpublished work, which is rare in anthologies. It’s new work that is difficult to access all in one place.

CW: I couldn’t find an online source to purchase with shipping outside of India for either book, including www.harpercollins.co.in. (Readers, please comment below if you know where online.)

SS: U.S. and U.K. rights are still being negotiated for the anthology. It is however available via online portals.

CW: There is a lot of embrace of traditional form among the poets. Why?

SS: I think this is more a generational thing. The younger generation is excited about the language and so comfortable with it that they are actually trying out hard forms like villanelles and sestinas. Many of them are also bringing in classical Indian verse forms. Ghazel in English is a good example. Contemporary writers embracing older forms but still making it contemporary is bound to lead to good things.

If you are going to write free verse, you need to know what classical verse is. You need to know what you’re breaking. You don’t have to stick to any of the old rules as long as you know the rules. So much of the bad name to modern poetry is because you can write a sentence chop it up into five parts and arrange it in a column and call it a poem. That happens all around us.

CW: Do you see any trends of the poets who are not living in India and writing from other places or is it simply a reflection of where they happen to be?

SS: They bring in a certain injection of the local culture. Indian poetry is being written by so many different kinds of Indians and that’s certainly making it richer. Take the Americans. They are writing about very American things that may or may not be understood here. However, many of them are rediscovering Indian roots.

CW: Are readers in India more open to poetry because of the many languages here with different rich poetic traditions?

SS: Yes, because poetry in other languages outside of English has a long, long history. It is very much imbedded in our larger cultural sphere and very much part of our upbringing. For example poetry is integral to the music traditions in Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, extremely advanced.

CW: And where is English poetry in the scheme of things?

SS: English poetry is in a smallish circle relative to the bigness of India, a niche audience.

CW: But in a global context, isn’t India the second largest publisher of English in the world?

SS: And will be the second largest in not very long.

 

"A Blank Letter" read above by Sen. Learn more about him at www.sudeepsen.net. Read The Prairie Schooner Feast Anthology of Poetry by Indian Women edited by Sen.

How to Succeed in Hollywood in Eleven Easy Lessons [by Preston Sturges]

A pretty girl is better than an ugly one.
A leg is better than an arm.
A bedroom is better than a living room.
An arrival is better than a departure.
A birth is better than a death.
A chase is better than a chat.
A dog is better than a landscape.
A kitten is better than a dog.
A baby is better than a kitten.
A kiss is better than a baby.
A pratfall is better than anything.

-- Preston Sturges