The Best American Poetry

Speak the Speech, Part I [by David Yezzi]

Of poetry, Marianne Moore famously wrote: “I, too, dislike it.” I wonder what she might have said about poetry readings? Moore herself was, I think, a charming reader, but, like her poems, also idiosyncratic. Sometimes the recording is at fault (I have a copy of a reading she gave at the 92^nd Street Y with W. H. Auden that is grainy and hard to hear), but sometimes it’s just the way she reads—too quickly in spots, without careful articulation.

 

Still, it is breathtaking to hear her voice. Hearing poets read can tell you so much about their work that you might not ever catch on the page. I remember understanding (I mean really getting, on a musical level) for the first time the polyvocal nature of so many of James Merrill's poems when I actually heard him do all of the voices. (I also learned that he liked to wear violet socks and Birkenstocks with his blue blazer.)

Some poets are extremely fine readers of their own work—Auden (though I know some folks disagree), Larkin and Bishop (both marvellous, sounding exactly as you’d expect), Geoffrey Hill (simultaneously plummy and fierce), Brooks (delightfully musical), and Berryman (growly and antic).

Some poets are bizarre readers of there own work, but great fun to hear nonetheless—Eliot (so Anglican), Cummings (so Unitarian), and Ginsberg, so wacked out and hip, as in this clip of a poem he wrote while on LSD read to William F. Buckley on Firing Line:

 

But many poets fail to do justice to their own work—far too many to mention in fact. You will know immediately the kind of thing I mean—when, for example, instead of using the natural music of speech they trot out their “poetry voice.”

It’s what G. Burns Cooper, in his book Mysterious Music: Rhythm and Free Verse, calls the Generic American Poetry Contour: “a slight but sustained rise at the end of each line or intonation phrase.” (Hat tip to Natalie Gerber!) It's aternately painfuland hilarious to listen to. Image if Frost read that way:

                                 gold

 Nature’s first green is

                             hold.

Her hardest hue to

                           flower;

Her early leaf’s a

                       hour.

But only so an

The up-rising lilt is often accompanied by a breathiness that signals the numinosity of "poetry." The problem is not just that this way of reading creates an irritating repetition in the vocal music; it’s that this arbitrary vocal pattern actually obscures the meaning for the listener by disregarding what Frost called “the sound of sense” (though Frost had something even more profound in mind). As Frost famously explained in an interview with the critic William Stanley Braithwaite, originally published in the Boston Evening Transcript for May 8, 1915:

Words in themselves do not convey meaning, and to [ . . prove] this, which may seem entirely unreasonable to any one who does not understand the psychology of sound, let us take the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation. This is because every meaning has a particular sound-posture; or, to put it in another way, the sense of every meaning has a particular sound which each individual is instinctively familiar with and without at all being conscious of the exact words that are being used is able to under stand the thought, idea, or emotion that is being conveyed. 

Frost worked to get the sounds of sense and of sentence sounds into his writing. What I’m suggesting is that poets should work to preserve the sound of sense in thier performance of the poem (as a generosity to the listener, if nothing else).

The first thing to consider is how sound and sense are linked inextricably--like love and marrage, you can't have one without the other. Listen to this speech from Richard II performed by Richard Burton:

  

No matter where; of comfort no man speak:
Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

What Burton, like all of the greatest Shakespearean actors, does so brilliantly is guide us though the complicated syntax of Shakespeare’s verse with his voice. Where he means to continue the thought, he raises the pitch of his voice to signal there is more to come. When he wants to let us know that a thought is coming to an end, he drops his voice down to a full stop. (Then there is the brilliant calrity of "How some have been deposed; some slain in war,/ Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;/ Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd," each phrase lightly stair-stepping down in tone to indicate a list, then ending on the lowest tone with "murder'd"--full stop.) 

All of us do this quite naturally when we speak. We all know how to convey the sounds of grammar and syntax with our voices. Conversation would be virtually impossible otherwise. When, however, we fall into the Generic American Poetry Contour, the sense is lost to our listeners. (And, remember, at a reading we only have one fleeting chance to get the sense across!)

Hamlet’s advice still rings true: o'erstep not the modesty of nature. Simply speak the speech. Do less. Just talk. To someone. As if your life depended on it. That's all.

 

(Tune in tomorrow for “Speak the Speech, Part II”)

 

Note: I currently teach classes in performing poetry at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, the West Chester Poetry Conference (scroll down), and the MFA program at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison, CO, in July. (The latter two are currently accepting students!)

Related articles

Poetry and the Age

Cory's Choral Story [by David Yezzi]

I like E. A. Robinson. I really do. No, I mean it. I really like his stuff much of the time. Especially the lyrics. The long poems, not so much (except maybe as sleep aids).  Well, anyway, I want to like him a lot, but sometimes I get put off by a certain tone of . . .  what? Fustiness? Creakiness?

More and more, I’m realizing, though, that it is not always Robinson’s voice I am hearing in the poems, or not just his voice. The more I think about his poems—such as “Reuben Bright” and “Richard Cory”—the more I begin to understand the dramatic nature of his work. (The dramatic element in lyric poetry is something I’ve been interested in for a while now, and you can read more about that here. I hope that this post might serve as an extension of some of the ideas put forward in that earlier essay.)

For my money, “Eros Turannos” is Robinson’s greatest poem. (This is just me talkin’ here.) I love that poem deeply and unequivocally, and I’ve always admired Yvor Winters’s take on it, as adopting the music of W. M. Praed’s vers de société for tragic ends. (In fact, more successfully than Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the poem uses the conventions of Greek tragedy to elevate its subject to devastating dramatic effect.)

The poem is a love story as Gothic horror tale. A woman’s fear of growing old alone is greater than her fear of a man she knows deep down she should refuse. The result is a loveless union, isolation, confusion, and despair. The poem ends with these two stanzas:

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

   The story as it should be,—

As if the story of a house

   Were told, or ever could be;

We’ll have no kindly veil between

Her visions and those we have seen,—

As if we guessed what hers have been

   Or what they are, or would be.

 

Meanwhile, we do no harm; for they

   That with a god have striven,

Not hearing much of what we say,

   Take what the god has given;

Though like waves breaking it may be,

Or like a changed familiar tree,

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

The “we” is a choral voice (a dramatic voice!) that Robinson uses often and which lends his poetry its particular social cast. Here is how the poet and critic D. H. Tracy describes the effect, from an essay in Contemporary Poetry Review:

Robinson’s use of the choral presence is innovative and, in its particular form, remains strikingly rare. It came to him early but not always easily: the drafts of “Eros Turannos” show that the fifth stanza, where the “we” is introduced, went through the most revisions. The Robinsonian “we” is not simply a means of lending generality to discourse or speculation, or a casual way of implicating the reader. It is not the French on. It has an understanding of its point of view, as a point of view, and is capable of distinguishing itself from omniscience. It does not exist to characterize itself, as in certain dramatic monologues, but to characterize another. It would seem intuitive to a playwright, I think, but in poetry in English there is little of it or anything like it—perhaps in Stevie Smith, or James Weldon Johnson’s “Brothers—American Drama.” Robinson’s insight into the possibilities of choral pronouncement arises from a serious consideration of what our collective being is and how individual lives acquire and lose meaning in it. . . .”

Really brilliant, this. And a real key to Robinson’s poems. In fact, it was when I began thinking about the choral voice in Robinson that I came to better understand one of Robinson’s most burnished chestnuts, “Richard Cory,” a poem that I respected but never truly warmed to.

BAPsters will, of course, know the poem, but here it is for reference:

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

What has always bothered me about this poem was how seemingly pat its theme was, i.e., Ah, life! How sad that even the man who has everything in the eyes of the world cannot be happy with his lot. It seemed not so much tragic as moralizing somehow, and this pat theme seemed to me to dampen its humanity. 

The poem has always been popular (Robinson, remember, was awarded three Pulitzers, only one fewer than Frost!), adapted as a folk song by Simon and Garfunkel:

 

 

 

But I, I work in his factory

And I curse the life I'm living

And I curse my poverty

And I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be,

Oh, I wish that I could be

Richard Cory.

The S&G version actually gets at something vital about the poem (though it in no way rivals the beauty of Robinson’s verse-making—song lyrics are a different sort of thing). The chorus is sung from the point of view of a townsperson of Tillbury, the imagined village (based on Gardiner, Maine), where many of his poems are set. (The "I" takes on a choral quality, sung in harmony by S and G.)

 

 

 

 

(I am told that Robinson once lived in this bell tower overlooking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village.)

In fact, I see now the poem is far more tragic and horrible than I first imagined, and the way in to this new, darker understanding is through the choral voice in the poem. Look at the nasty stuff the townspeople say:

We people on the pavement looked at him

In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

Then consider the tone of: “And he was rich – yes, richer than a king.” Hear the bitter dig behind the repetition and that word king? Dang! If I was Richard Cory and everyone’s envious eyes (the eyes of the world!) were on me all the time, I might not make a good end either. Tracy’s observation about Robinson's poems implicating the reader is exactly right: we are the “We.” We drove Richard Cory to this. Just as we (the town, society) helped drive the blinded woman down the steps at the end of "Eros Turannos" (or so, I believe, it is suggested). 

Or like a stairway to the sea,

   Where down the blind are driven.

Driven down by themselves? Perhaps. But we are the abettors. Robinson's poems are about us every bit as much as they are about these sorry denizens of the Vacation State. Robinson, it turns out, was a freaking genius of poetry's dramatic context, if only we tune our ears to hear it. I knew I liked him. But, now, like one of the Tillburyites who envied Richard Cory, I hate him, too.

Spring Notes and a Poem by Mark Bibbins [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

 

How’re things? By me they’re pretty good. The sun, of late, has brightened my cold dark heart a bit, let a little light into the eternal dungeon of the winter's mind. I’ve got some seeds and seedlings into our patch of dirt: broccoli, tomatoes, scallions, basil, eggplant, corn, and I’m looking forward to the tending as much as the eventual harvest. Today is chilly and dim with laden clouds, but for the gardener, rain takes on a sweeter threat.

 

I’m offering today a poem by Mark Bibbins whose fabulous books are Sky Lounge and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. I love this one because it looks at a city with the smart eyes of someone who has seen it change, and changed with it.

 

Apology to This Neighborhood, the Two Before, the Next

 

Hipsters get to say

at least I’m not trendy

and the trendy turn

 

it around and they’re

right too.  People go

to nightclubs.  They

 

stand outside, freezing,

wearing more perfume than

clothing, and shriek until

 

the cops come on

horseback and close

down the street.  Insert

 

terrible things here about

we all get what someone

else pays for.  Too bad

 

I never cared enough

about Chelsea

but nobody could

 

have made it better

than Schuyler anyway

so why bother.  Yes

 

we’re part of the problem

wherever we go

and it’s the only way

 

we manage to be punctual,

showing up just in time

for the real decline.

- Mark Bibbins

 

One reason it is good to be older is that the history of places runs through your mind when you walk around, especially if you live in a city like New York that changes all the time. Of course it’s hard to see Chelsea no longer what Chelsea used to mean, and the East Village no longer what the East Village used to be, but it is good to know the morphing pulse of the city you live in. As they often do, Bibbins’s poem here has a comical voice and weary eyes, and a wise awareness of what his own presence brings to the place he is discussing, even to the point of our showing up bringing on the final real decline -- but we know it’s not all decline since it’s a good thing the poet showed up.

 

My camera broke last year and I didn’t replace it until recently. I put the old memory card into the new body and there were pictures from a year ago and the kids were smaller and all the objects in the house were shifted. Time is a crazy arrow. Nothing to do but cultivate the garden and try to not let the world whittle you down as you go.

 

Courage my friends! Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

 

Love,

 

Jennifer

Tonight at KGB: Will Schutt + Michael Klein

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Will Schutt + Michael Klein

 

Monday, April 29, 2013

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

 

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

 

Will Schutt's first manuscript, Westerly, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2012 Yale Younger Prize.  The book is forthcoming in April, 2013 from Yale University Press.  Schutt's poems and translations have appeared in Agni, FIELD, Harvard Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.  A graduate of Oberlin College and Hollins University, he lives with his wife in Wainscott, New York.

 

Michael Klein's books of poetry include then, we were still living, Track Conditions, The End of Being Known, and 1990, which tied with James Schuyler for the 1993 Lambda Literary Award.  He has also edited Poets for Life: 76 Poets Respond to AIDS, winner of the Lambda Book Award), Things Shaped in Passing, and In the Company of My Solitude. His new book of poems, The Talking Day, is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2013. He teaches in the MFA Program at Goddard College in Port Townsend, Washington and is on the faculty of the summer program at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown 

Monday Comic with Nin Andrews

George Jones, a fool no more

George Jones, who died this past Friday at age 81, had long been lauded as one of the greatest voices in country music history. He was also, along with Hank Williams, one of country music's most cautionary tales, with a history of alcoholism, substance abuse, marital woes, and career mismanagement that would have forced a lesser man into early retirement or (as in the case of Hank) an early death. Unlike Williams, Jones was never a great songwriter; he was a great interpreter of others' songs. He was very much a contradictory artist: A loner who did some of his best work in collaboration with another singer -- Tammy Wynette (his ex-wife) and Melba Montgomery most notably. And all of the problems that dogged him whenever he didn't appear onstage (which was frequent enough to earn him the nickname "No-Show Jones"), vanished when he was in thrall to his own gift, in performance, at one with the baleful sentiments he sang. He was hard on himself in every sense, and always carried with his toughness and stubbornness an air of hangdog shame, as though he felt destined to be the fool, not the master, of his life. 

 

Jones was one of the most self-conscious, for good and ill, of great American artists. He knew his gift, he knew it wasn't so much his voice as his phrasing that was the genius part ('s why he could redeem so many lesser lyrics). But the clenched-jaw delivery can also serve as synecdoche for a man frozen, trapped: trapped by his feelings of inferiority, the unwarranted shame he felt about his class, the paralyzing sting of those in mainstream music industry who never recognized him fully, for the cruelty of country radio for abandoning him when he still had something to give. People of privilege sometimes don't understand why an artist can start to self-destruct when he feels resentment, abandonment, false praise instead of the kind of praise and appreciation of his gifts he knew he was owed. (And I'm talking about the whole arc of his career, not just the final years.) "No-Show" was a fond joke barely concealing a different diagnosis: an addictive, isolating personality that could not achieve enough comfort in his own skin. All of which makes the best music that he leaves behind more precious.

--Ken Tucker

David Yezzi, Guest Blogger April 29-May 3

This week we welcome back David Yezzi as our guest blogger. David’s books of poems include Azores (2008), a Slate magazine best book of the year, and Birds of the Air (2013). His work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry (2006 & 2012), The Paris Review Book, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Poetry Speaks Who I Am, and Bright Wings. He is editor of The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets (foreword by J. D. McClatchy) and executive editor of The New Criterion. He is currently writing a biography of the poet Anthony Hecht for St. Martin’s Press. Read the New York Times review of Birds of the Air here. Read the Publishers Weekly review here.
Welcome, David.

-- sdh

Happy Birthday, Patricia Lockwood [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

TRICIA LOCKWOOD   (4/27)

PATRICIA LOCKWOOD
KNOCK ON WOOD
A PIÑA COLADA
IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD

A PENIS COLOSTOMY
PRETTY IN PINK
AND JUDAS ISCARIOT
RINSING THE SINK

JUDAS ISCARIOT
SCARED OF THE MOON
PETITION PATRICIA
TO LOWER THE BOOM

PATRICIAN POSITION
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU SHOULD
A PIÑA COLADA
IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD

IS NOT ALWAYS BROUGHT ON
DELIVERY TRUCK:
SUCKITUDE TEACHER’S
DOWN ON HER LUCK

IS DOWN ON HER LUCK
IS DOWN ON HER HAUNCHES
PONTIUS PILATE’S 
KNOCKED UNCONSCIOUS

BLOCKWOOD LOCKWOOD
THIRTY YEARS OLD
I WALK UP THE WALL WHEN I 
DO WHAT I’M TOLD

O LOCKWOOD LOCKWOOD
COULDN’T AND COULD
A NIÑA COLADA
IS NOT ALWAYS GOOD

GARDENIA COLADA
AND GIDDY IN PINK
AND A NUDIST ISCARIOT
RINSING THE SINK

•

 

Never Getting Published [by Bruce Kawin]

I asked Julie Carr, who is thoroughly launched as a poet, how she would feel about being a poet if her work had never been published.  Because that does happen to some of us.  Julie wrote this:

* * *

How would my writing have been different if I’d never been published?

This is a very difficult question to consider, since of course I have been published. I can’t honestly imagine an alternate history for myself, so instead I will say what being published has meant to me.

First, it has meant that some older poets whose work I admired and in some cases loved recognized something in my writing that they felt they wanted to support. This recognition has been invaluable, for I don’t, in writing poetry, seek a large audience of strangers. I seek, instead, to be part of a conversation that matters a great deal to me. Publishing is like being welcomed into the room, into the conversation, and that feeling of belonging has been important to me, as it is to anyone in any sphere of life.

Publishing a book also means I feel free to begin a new book. If the books remain unfinished, unread, unbound, they continue hanging around. I continue wondering if they are complete, if they’ve done whatever it was I hoped they would do. Once out in the world in that certifiable “finished” form, I can more or less forget about them – I can shift my attention, feel my interests sway, take on new concerns and new forms. This, of course, is exciting for me. It keeps my relationship to the art alive.

But there is another way in which publishing allows the books to have a new life – a life off the page. Reading from them, performing them in a sense, allows me to transform them into another kind of communication. The relationship with an audience is one of shared listening (I’m listening too as I read), and one of immediate exchange. Every reading is, to some degree, an improvisation. And the factors that go into this improvisation belong to everyone in the room. We are having some kind of experience together, and I learn from it, feel it change me. This is also a way that poetry stays vital, relevant, and present.

Of course not publishing could permit a kind of privacy, important, perhaps, to some writers. I’ve never been, however, the kind of writer that values being alone all that much. I’m interested in writing as a social phenomenon. I never write alone, for there are always books around me as I write. I’m listening to the words of others, to their rhythms, their thoughts, their vocabularies. In some ways I feel that writing is the most socially connected thing I do. Publishing is an extension of the interaction that begins the moment I sit down at my table with a pile of books on either side of me and a few on the floor. Sometimes I never open these books – but they are always there, keeping me company as I speak with them.

I think if no one ever found my poetry worthy of publishing, I would have done one of two things: I would have published it myself or, more likely, I would have found a form that suited me better. I used to be a dancer. I still consider myself some kind of performer. If the writing of books had simply not worked out, I think I would have heard that as an opportunity to discover other forms of art making that would. I don’t really believe in failure for artists. I think we fail only when we set our sights too narrowly. We fail ourselves by getting stuck on some vision of the future that we’ve invented or inherited from the culture. There are many ways to be an artist in the world. This is the one that makes sense for me right now. I am sure, had I not found writing books to be functional, I would have found another way. Making art of one kind or another is simply, for me, a way of living. It is not a “skill” I “master” in order to “succeed.” It is a, or the, process of living in a body with a mind.

* * *

I agree with Julie that publication is essential for a writer and that self-publication is a viable option.  I'm not so sure that I myself could find another art.  (I did try screenwriting, but that's another story; anyway it didn't work out.)  Creative moments come to me in words and lines.  But I can think of a poet who became a dancer and another who became a filmmaker.

Never finding a publisher is unbelievably frustrating.  And a waste of good poetry. 

It's also painful to read published work and to know one could do better than that, than what somebody did for some reason decide to print.

Of course many unpublished poems are just no good.  They get rejected and it hurts the poets but that's the end of it, or it will be the end again.  One pities publishers' readers of unsolicited manuscripts—until they make a dumb mistake and reject something fine.  They are the guards at the gateway to an audience in the present and maybe to the future, and they might just not let you in.  They really do control literature, which generally consists of the "best" of what gets published.

The editors of magazines and the judges of contests have a terrible responsibility.  (Scholars do too, when they uncover and edit a lost poet like Emily Dickinson—or translators when they decide to work on a barely known novelist like Sadegh Hedayat or the once unknown Alain Robbe-Grillet.)  They give a manuscript the chance to find many readers, to be in print, perhaps to be remembered and reprinted.  Or they reject the manuscript and leave the writer wondering whether there is something wrong with his or her work, commitment to poetry, hope to resonate with an audience, and ambition. 

I was able to publish very few poems before my book Love If We Can Stand It, and they've already been forgotten.  If my book had not been published, there would have been something essential missing from my life.  The poems would not have been finished, as Julie says.  But the way things nearly came out, my only audience would have been the people at poetry readings, since reading a poem to a group doesn't depend on the OK of an editor—though of course even readings are administered, and one usually has to get on a list to read. 

But some poets don't feel the need to share their work with a community or to see their poems in print.  They may get beaten down by rejection slips or they may, as Julie notes, seek privacy.  They may come to conceive their work as a private concern. 

Many great singers never make records; they may not even try.  They may prefer not to be bothered with all the recording studios and crowds.

Emily Dickinson called publication "the Auction / Of the Mind of Man" (poem #709) and preferred to keep her poems in a drawer.  We found out about her work only after she was dead, but while she was alive she was just as much a poet as she is now, in our imaginations and on our bookshelves, when we know what she was writing.  She had a very limited audience if any, but she wrote the poems.  It may not have bothered her (after a few tries) that her poems had no publisher, and she probably felt glad that she didn't have to answer to an editor or to the conventions of her time about dashes and capitalization.  It helped her work that she wrote it for herself.

If you're never published, my advice is to remain a poet.  Give readings.  Self-publish if you can afford it.  Publish online if you make sure your work is copyrighted.  Look into other media, like audiobooks.  Talk to other poets, make connections.  Enter contests—though personally I never had any luck with them.  Query publishers.  But keep doing the writing.  Someday somebody may want the work you're doing now.  If nobody ever does, you'll still have had the satisfaction of making the poems and getting them right.  Remember that even published poets leave unpublished poems when they die.

 

On Amazon and in Your Local Poetry Store [by Bruce Kawin]

One way to survive as a poet is to print your own work.  Cal Kinnear once had a Hoe Washington press, an old newspaper flatbed.  He set the type and chose the paper for the poem, sometimes issuing a poem at a time and sometimes a collection.  Les Gottesman founded his own imprint, Omerta Press, and published 14 chapbooks (2006-12) before Finishing Line Press took his first official book, Misuses of Poetry and other poems (2013), which ends:

 

        Deal

 

        The cosmos promises to

        load my book

        on the real hard drive.

 

Let's hope so.  I think it's what we all hope for, and getting our poems printed and reviewed and read and remembered is one way to get there.  If Cal had his printing press, Les had his inkjet printer and produced all the Omerta books himself.

 

Les's poems are funny and personal, sharp and obscure.  His tightly arranged sounds and vivid words take you somewhere but don't tell you where it is.  He's a grave jester with a speeding mind and a montage artist's control of tone.  Example:

 

        Poems

 

        A white hamburger led children to a wall.

        You had to be there in order to be there.

 

        Poems have changed

        from schematic arbitrariness

 

        to slutty impatience

        like laws or cancer.

 

There's some influence here from Koch and O'Hara, but it's Les's voice, his pronouncement.  Some of his poems are readings of the world, some like the work of a prophet with no god:

 

        Misuses of Poetry

 

        Jesus was right.  The grammar I

        undressed with my eyes had

        already devised the emphatic predicate

        of he-acts in space and she-acts at

        the outer rings of time's

        onion of conscious syrup that

        the sentence wouldn't stop.

 

He gets the immediate moment and can pile words like a Beat.  He has published many individual poems in magazines and online, but it takes a book of his poems to get the idea, to feel who this Gottesman character is.  The Omerta chapbooks and the new book let one spend enough time with him, get a sense of the worlds he builds—as in the ending of the prose poem "Day One Two" from the Immortal Nails chapbook:

 

        Decisions are rented.  Land is brought, and taken away.  A man goes into a buried store.

 

The Omerta books were distributed by the author.  In a while they'll be all kinds of collectible. But the new book, Misuses of Poetry, is available on Amazon.  And the next one will be too:  Les just won Tebot Bach's 2012 Clockwise Chapbook Competition for The Cases (due in 2013).

 

Poetry books that appeared in a few hundred copies used to have to find special distributors.  It was hard to get a book into a store, and in fact it still is.  It helped that some bookstores focused on poetry (Cal ran one in Olympia called Word of Mouth Books, one of the first bookstores where people could sit down and read) or were known for their poetry sections.  Amazon and its network of affiliated sellers have made it much easier for a small edition to find readers, as long as it has a publisher and an ISBN number.  Cal's new book, Shale Eyes (2012), is on Amazon too, and so is mine, Love If We Can Stand It (2012).  Personally I'm extremely glad that my book can be found in poetry bookstores as well as bought online, and I'm glad that Amazon's "look inside" feature allows people to read a lot of the book for free, almost as if they were browsing in a bookstore. 

 

Thanks to Amazon and other retailers, it poses absolutely no impediment to U.S. distribution that my book was published in England.  For the record, there's 45 years of work in that book, and it had to be a book because the key poem in it, "Two Greek Women," was too long for any of the magazines I sent it to to consider publishing—even The New Yorker, which liked it and does publish fiction longer than that poem.  For ten years I entered "Two Greek Women" in chapbook contests and the whole book in book contests, rewriting and rearranging the book all the time, but had no luck.  I queried publishers directly, but no one would read it.  I put enough money in my will to have the book self-published if I died without finding a publisher.  Finally, in 2011, I had good luck in England:  Anthem Press, which had just accepted my book Horror and the Horror Film, was part of a publishing group that had a new imprint, Thames River Press, that planned to publish new fiction.  I asked the editor at Anthem, Tej Sood, whether Thames River might consider a book of poems, and he said it was possible and put me in touch with the head of Thames River, Kamaljit Sood, who had my book and another poetry manuscript that had coincidentally been submitted sent out for anonymous evaluation, and my book was selected.  A later anonymous reader suggested putting "A New Song" first, and I agreed and rearranged the book for the last time.  The finished product looks good, was printed and bound well, and has no typos.  I'm glad I didn't have to die for the book to see print.

 

Post Wherein I Propose the Annexation of Canada by the United States by Means of Daoism [by Anthony Madrid]

All right, let’s all try and remain calm. I’m not going to go up the front steps and walk through the front door, here. I’ma go around back and come in through the kitchen window. So I need you all to be patient.

FIRST CONCEPT. What I call “social” reading. What do I mean by that. I mean reading contemporary poetry in a spirit of (a) wanting to know what’s going on in Poetryland, and (b) shopping for friendships. This is rather different from reading like a normal person, who simply wants a good time. People who read socially (in the sense I’m advancing here) don’t mind as much if they’re not having a good time. They are playing a different game, with different stakes. They want to know “the lay of the land”—and that means they have to map the swamps and the abandoned parking lots just as much as the places where they might want to be. For a certain kind of reader, that knowledge by itself is enough to make the suffering worthwhile, and if you add to that the potential for discovery with all its attendant thrills—the possibility of finding uncharted isles where dinosaurs still live or whatever—you get some idea of the stakes involved for the “social” reader. The deal is you get a map going, and then you can give directions.

I also mentioned “friendship shopping.” Here’s where Facebook comes in. Today, the supreme ease with which you can have a written conversation (boing!, right there, instantly) with somebody whose poetry does it for you—and how quickly thát can turn into friendship, sex, children, a new civilization—well! this is another good reason to put up with the inevitable boredom involved in the mapping project….

SECOND CONCEPT. Virtually every one of you reading these words answers the description I am giving here. You piss and moan about it, but you want to know what’s going on and you want to “get into it” with people. It’s just like with music when you were in high school. You were studious—you just didn’t call it that. You wanted to know all there was to know about glam rock or rap or whatever the fuck was your deal. We were all like this. Metal. Psychedelic shit. Beck. The difference is: With poetry, you can “friend” Beck, and Beck has nothing better to do than chat with you, ’cuz he’s lonely and starved for praise….

THIRD CONCEPT (hold tight for this one). Americans ignore Canada a lot. Apropos of poetry, there is a certain amount of reasoning involved, and that reasoning is elegant and convincing: “Why would I fuss with Canada, when I haven’t even read _______ [some American poet]? I’ll come ’round to Canada later.” Also, many American poets have a certain amount of resentment towards Canadians, on account of the way the ones who come down here almost always parade their scorn of US backwardness and obnoxiousness (which would be fine, except they act like they don’t expect you to agree).

But here is precisely where I take my first step through the back window and into the kitchen sink. Listen: There is no actual reason to think of Canada as a separate country. Thinking of Canada as a separate country is like thinking of the states of New York and Pennsylvania as separate. You can, if you insist, but the warrant for doing it is slender. Who in the world is gonna stop her ears and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna know what’s going on in Philadelphia; I’ll get to Philly after I’m done with the rest of the US….” (I deploy {PA + NY} as my example here because those two states’ combined populations = the total population of Canada. Plus most of Canada’s people live right there in that zone anyhow.)

—But here’s the clincher.—Go back to Concepts 1 and 2. Admit it: you are a social reader. You can’t get enough of charting the cliques: the Cool Kids, the Freak Shows, the People Who Can’t Write for Shit but Are Total Babes—OK, then! there’s this whole other neighborhood you haven’t been to yet…. It’s right there across the street, and you’re putting off checking it out ’cuz you’re silly!

I’m not saying Canada is this golden Shangri-la where exciting things are happening, 24/7. No, the whole beauty of what I’m driving at is precisely that Canada represents more of the same of what we already got, down here—more Cool Kids, more Freaks, more friends, more everything! You can’t get enough, right? You wanna know all there is to know, right? Well….

FOURTH AND FINAL CONCEPT. Daoism. I have in mind, in particular, the emphasis in the Daodejing on “actionless activity”—and stealth. You probably see where I’m going with this.

The Canadians don’t need to know about any of this plan. We will simply annex them, mentally. We’ll quietly start reading them, and caring about them, and reviewing them. We should submit to their online journals. We need to know what those journals are.

Again: There is no need to announce. Indeed, we want it to go down such that “when our work is done, our task accomplished, throughout the country, people will say it happened of its own accord” (Daodejing 17).

My brothers and sisters, join me in this. Go, reread the Daodejing and let us march upon the Canadians with our minds. They cannot resist us if we have the Dao on our side.

• • • • • • • •

The Widows' Handbook [by Bruce Kawin]

For the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival:  what it means to keep writing even if it looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or left in a drawer.  It seems appropriate to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published for the first time.  The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be published in a few months by Kent State University Press.  You heard it here first.  Putting this book together and getting it published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how many publishers declined to read the manuscript.  The book was edited by two bereaved women, Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn.  I wrote some questions for them.  Lise answered first, then Jacqueline. 

Bruce:  Are you both widows?  Do either of you have experience as editors or creative writers?

Lise:  I am a widow; my second husband and I had been happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her burden.  As for my editing experience, I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry.  I’ve published a few poems in collections of poetry by linguists.

Jacqueline:  Not only that, but there was a wife—the Lawful Awful, from whom  he had been estranged for years.  I have been a professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.

Bruce:  How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?

Lise:  Fifteen queries to likely-looking places, resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent.  But after we were in negotiations with KSUP, one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.

Bruce:  Did you consider self-publishing?  Did you reject the idea, and why?

Lise:  I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because KSUP will make it available as an e-book.

Jacqueline:  In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it at all—not even as a last resort!  Promoting the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a project.

Bruce:   How did you attract manuscripts?  Where did you place ads or notices and what did they say?

Lise: Jacqueline is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:

WIDOWS: Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding (including but not limited to finding new love or focus).  We are a published poet/editor and a scientist/professor, both widowed.     Manuscript will be submitted to trade publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30,     2011. Send with SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].

Jacqueline also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word.  Some of those friends helped put her in touch with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert).  She also selected a few widows’ poems from the anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman & McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from their own books.

Bruce:  Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?

Lise:  Most women who are widowed – especially older women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories.  For many women, the social isolation (because some married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship compound the devastation of losing their partners.  My late husband had been widowed twice before we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses.  So I would never consider a man’s grief to be less deep than a woman’s.  But…he found new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife.  That said, I wish we had included some older gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to their grief.  (The "beauty trap" catches them as much as it catches women.)

Jacqueline:  As Lise says, in our gendered society the social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants to admit.  I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.

Learning to Love Lorca [by Sharon Preiss]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lorca extravaganza continues! Don’t worry if you’ve missed some of the early events that have already happened New-York-City-wide in celebration of this poet of mystery and intrigue. There is plenty more to come. Happenings including film screenings, readings, talks, concerts, and exhibits of Lorca’s art, manuscripts, and personal possessions span through July 21. Plus, there is a beautifully re-packaged, newly released, updated version of Poet in New York available in stores now (FSG, $17) with reproductions and inclusions of some of the material that’s currently on view in the “Back Tomorrow” exhibit at the Wachenhiem Gallery in the Schwarzman Building of the NYPublic Library. If you are a Lorca fan, the new book and the exhibit are musts, and if you’re curious or ambivalent about his work, as I have been, this is a superb opportunity to explore why Poet in New York issuch a revered collection and why eighty-three years after Lorca’s fated visit to our fair city, his darkly conflicted vision of Gotham is as relevant as ever.

My problem when I first tried reading Poet in New York in 2008, when the Grove edition of the poems came out, was a twofold mix of confusion: I wasn’t able to let my logical mind wander through the surreal images of the poems, compounded by the fact that I couldn’t grasp that someone would write a book about how much he hated New York. The first stanza of the book, from the poem “Back from a Walk,” is:

        Murdered by the sky.

        Among the forms that move toward the snake

        and the forms searching for crystal

        I will let my hair grow.

The poem continues with four couplets of similarly quixotic and frankly negative images – limbless trees, broken-headed animals, a butterfly drowned in an inkwell – culminating with the repetition of the first line, “Murdered by the sky.” What was I, a lover of reason, beauty, and logic, not to mention a lover of New York City, to make of this opening poem?

Since then, I’ve not only read the introduction to the poems – a practice I usually eschew until after I’ve read the entire book (I don’t want my experience to be tainted by someone else’s, but in this case it was immensely helpful) – but I’ve come to appreciate, if not entirely agree with, Lorca’s point of view. 

Lorca came to New York from Granada in 1929, when he was 31 years old, and was already known as a playwright and poet in his home country. His purpose in coming to the U.S. was not to seek fame and fortune, but to nurse a broken heart and have a new experience. He suspected he would dislike the city, but he needed a rearrangement of his senses, at least so said Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, former friends who panned his latest book, the popularly acclaimed Gypsy Ballads, as being dull and predictable. It’s fair to say that New York duly rearranged his senses and that his work would never be dull and predictable again.

He hated the crowds: “These are the dead who claw with earthen hands / the doors of flint where clouds and sweets are rotting.” He hated the dirt: “Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of black doves / splashing in putrid waters.” He hated the Hudson: “That gray sponge!” But most of all, he hated the lust for money and the striving for more and more. “From the sphinx to the vault there is a tense thread / that pierces the heart of all poor children.” Lorca witnessed, first hand, the spectacle of Wall Street when the stock market crashed in October 1929, and the death and despair over the loss of mere money made him sick.

He found respite in the streets of Harlem in the company and culture of Black Americans, who he identified with the Gypsies of his country. And he was saved from the long brutal days of August in the city by a friend who invited him to Vermont for the month. He also traveled to Cuba, which he loved. All these adventures are chronicled in the poems, and there are moments of sublime happiness alongside the pieces that document his less-than-enthusiastic take on the City.

The downbeat poems of the collection give a new spin on the notion of negative capability, where rather than being a passive conduit of the beautiful mysteries of the world, the poet becomes the lightning rod for brutal reality, where it’s equally viable to write magnificent and moving poems about the world’s exposed underbelly as it is to write odes to Grecian urns.

It’s hard not to wonder what Lorca would make of today’s New York. It is probably cleaner, but certainly more crowded. The hollow howls of the City’s weekend and holiday carousing would horrify him, though he might have been able to appreciate what a center of world culture we’ve become. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the materialism and money grabbing. Though they don’t read tickertape anymore, there’s still a mass of people here that worships the stock market and aches for profit, whatever the human cost. That, above all else, is what turned Lorca off to New York. Ah, but these months are a celebration of his life and his work. Let’s leave “the others, those drunk on silver, cold men,” to their own devices. Let’s just follow Lorca through the streets for now and appreciate the city in all its dingy, horrible beauty, and honor the poet who sang it. 

For more on the program and to find a schedule of events, go to http://lorcanyc.com/program.

Writing "Old Frankenstein" [by Bruce Kawin]

When I wrote "Old Frankenstein," the newest poem in Love If We Can Stand It, I got the first line out of nowhere.  I was watching TV in the living room and thinking about nothing.  The line was "The old man never calls" and the title came right after it.  I laughed.  I got paper and a pen and started writing.  By the time I got to the smoking jacket I knew what I was doing.  The whole thing took about two hours.  The poem reads:

 

    The old man never calls.

    He quit making us

    settled down with his bride

    in a stone cottage

    went back to his smoking jacket

    wrote a book and tore it up

    they say, I never saw it.

 

    I learned to talk again

    in spite of them all

    every crowd and Burgomaster

    —read by fires, by lakes

    ate what I ran across

    but killed no people

    not for a long time now.

 

    The flesh has not decayed, probably can't.

    I carry a cane and that explains the walk.

    I dress like a cheap old man

    a man with peculiarities

    a man you'd leave alone

    to live in a shed in the woods.

    He'll die, I won't.

 

    He can't live forever

    and he doesn't like it when I show up.

    I haven't tried that in twenty years.

    I accumulate birthdays like everyone else.

    He could call.  His wife

    could call.  My only family.

    I wonder how it will be without him.

 

By line 2 of the poem I found that I had to decide between the Hammer series (which began with The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957) and the Universal series (which began with Frankenstein, 1931).  In the Hammer series Dr. Frankenstein, played by Peter Cushing, reappears in each sequel and builds a new monster.  In the Universal series the Monster reappears, but after Bride of Frankenstein the doctors change; in the first two films he is played by Colin Clive.  I have a special affection for Bride of Frankenstein and wanted to work it in, as I had worked it into "One, or Words for Poetry," a poem about one-syllable words:

 

    smoke good

    the fiend said

    friend good

    fire no good

    good, bad

    bride of

 

    but we can not say the long name

    not his in the first place

    of the man who made him

 

    son of

    bride of,

    the kids

    I did not have

 

So I chose Colin Clive as my doctor.  Peter Cushing was not ruled out, though.  There could have come a time when he "quit making us," us being all his consecutive monsters, and settled down.  Clive makes the Monster and the female whom Dr. Pretorius calls "the bride of Frankenstein," hence the "us" in the Universal series sense.  At first I meant the "us" to apply to the Monster (Boris Karloff) and the bride (Elsa Lanchester) from Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein as well as the series of monsters made by Cushing, but by the time I saw the doctor in his smoking jacket, he was Colin Clive and the "stone cottage" was in black and white.  Then I saw the title had made the same choice.

 

There was a rule in the first three Universal sequels' titles that Frankenstein had to refer both to the doctor and to the Monster.  In the first film, as in Mary Shelley's novel, it was meant to refer only to the doctor, but the public was soon calling the monster Frankenstein.  In Bride, the doctor gets married and the Monster has a bride, even if she rejects him.  In Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein, there is always a relative of the original doctor.  But in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, the name refers only to the Monster.  So my title, Old Frankenstein, needed to refer both to the aged Dr. Frankenstein and to the aged Monster, and that was no problem; it dictated the story of the two old Frankensteins.  I also thought of Young Frankenstein, which I love, and saw this poem as a sequel to it as well as the final entry in an imaginary Universal series. 

 

Another advantage of being able to use Bride of Frankenstein was that in that film, the Monster can talk.  "I learned to talk again" is my defiant response to the decision made in all the sequels after Bride, in which he can't speak. (The exception is that in Ghost, when the Monster has Ygor's brain, he does briefly speak, but they are Ygor's words.)  My Monster would learn, and as in the novel, he would read. 

 

The doctor's torn-up book got me back to the Monster and to the end of what worked as the first stanza, and it was seven lines.  I decided to make the poem in seven-line stanzas, not sure how many there would be.  I have written my share of sestinas with their six-line stanzas, and I enjoy working in tight forms, as I had done in "Slides" where each ten-line section of the poem is a rectangle of type set halfway down the page to resemble a projected 35mm slide.  A contemporary take on the Renaissance sonnet sequence (like Samuel Daniel's Delia), it was presented as a slide show of episodes from and meditations on an unrealized romance.  I wrote it first in 1969 and rewrote it from 2010 to 2011, changing the plot, cutting out half the "slides," and revising many lines and images, so that it's now tighter and makes more sense.  It's also more honest although it remains deliberately obscure.

 

But back to stanza 2.  The crowd and the Burgomaster (as the credits spelled it) came from the Universal series.  I always enjoyed the torchlight parades when the crowds get torches and search for the Monster.  The Burgomasters are fools that my Monster would look down on.  The "fires" and "lakes" are in the novel.  By the end of the stanza, I had him stop killing people.  He's an old monster conceived in the era of the slasher movie, a Jason who's given up his machete or just uses it on trees.  He's also an old monster in approximately 1955, because he says he hasn't shown up to see the doctor for 20 years, and I figure he did that in 1935, the date of Bride.  Of course he could have done it later in some film we didn't see.

 

Jason also shows up in stanza 3, as the model for the monster living in a shed in the woods.  I was thinking of Friday the 13th Part 2.  By the time I wrote about his walk and his clothes, I was clearly seeing the Universal Monster and the way he walked when he was played by Karloff, which wasn't as stiff as he later got, and the thrift-shop clothes he would wear.  I thought the lines were funny and I was really enjoying writing them.  With "He'll die, I won't" I tightened up the rhythm to prepare the ending, the thing that's bothering the Monster and making him take stock of himself and his current life. 

 

Stanza 4 starts with a repetition of thoughts about death because I needed seven lines in the stanza.  That happens sometimes.  By line 4, I was feeling outraged about the birthdays the monster was accumulating in solitude, I was feeling his isolation, I was feeling that his more-or-less father (implied in the double meaning of "old man" in line 1) and Mrs. Frankenstein should call him and certainly could.  I felt he was a real character and I felt his emotions inside me.  That is a wonderful feeling.  It's like what writers mean when they say their characters created their own dialogue.  It happened to me a lot when I was writing "Two Greek Women," which is a short epic about two contemporary lesbians whom I made up out of two women I slightly knew who were not lovers; mainly I made them up, and I certainly didn't know what my models (whom my characters looked like and from whom they took their names) thought about anything, but the characters I made up spoke words and lines and did things the way they—the characters—would; they became real to me while I was writing, and in that way every invention in the poem became both true and something I couldn't miss.  So that's the kind of feeling and creating that came out as "He could call.  His wife / could call." 

 

Then came "My only family," and the poem had stopped being funny a while ago.  The last line came to me as suddenly as the first, and I knew it was the last line when I wrote it:  "I wonder how it will be without him."  Everything came together with that line, which for me was the most creative and insightful moment in the writing.  Then I went back to the top of the stanza and wrote the redundant but not that bad "He can't live forever" to make seven lines, and the first draft was done.  I went over it until I had things like the shed image the way I wanted them and the correct rhythm for the line about his walk, and the poem was done.

 

Tonight at KGB: Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman

 

Monday, April 22, 2013

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY 

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Sharon Olds is the author of ten volumes of poetry, including Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (Knopf) The Father (Knopf), and The Dead and the Living (Knopf), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Her most recent volume, Stag's Leap (Knopf), was awarded the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize and just last week, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize.   In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  Olds declined.  Her open letter, published in the October 10th, 2005 issue of The Nation, closed as follows: "So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it."

Michael Dickman is the author of The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009) and Flies (2011), which won the James Laughlin Award for the most outstanding second book by an American poet.  Together with his brother, the poet Matthew Dickman, he is the co-author of 50 American Plays.  Dickman has received fellowships from the Michener Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Princeton University.  His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Field, Tin House, Narrative Magazine and others. He has been profiled in Poets & Writers and, alongside his brother, in The New Yorker.

 

Upcoming, Spring 2013

 

Apr 29   Michael Klein + Will Schutt       

May 6    Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins         

May 13  Sarah Arvio + David Kinloch 

May 20  Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews

Borges and the Camels [by Bruce Kawin]

                                                                          for John Ashbery

Two stories from the mid-1960s.

When I was an English major at Columbia, I took a creative writing course from Kenneth Koch, who changed my life.  Actually it was a class in modern literature with some creative assignments.  I have never met anyone who knew so much about modern literature.  He assigned books we had never heard of, like Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Pasternak's Safe Conduct, and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (which became my favorite novel and which I've taught for years; a student told me recently that Woody Allen likes it too, which makes perfect sense).  He sent us out to review The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  He had us read Borges's Ficciones and the latest issue of Art and Literature.  And he told us stories.  One of them dragged me into a labyrinth, made me part of it.

 

As a way of explaining "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," Koch told us that he had been sitting on a New York park bench with Borges when Borges said that the way one could tell that the Koran was an authentic document was that there were no camels in it.  If someone had wanted to create such a book and then plant false, artificially aged documents that appeared to establish its existence in the 7th century C.E., that person would certainly have included some Arabic local color, such as camels.  Koch wanted to show us how Borges could read even the Koran as a potentially false text and how the fact that there were no camels in it could prove the Koran was authentic if one was in a Borgesian mood.

 

At the time I was also taking a class in what was then called Oriental Humanities, and the assignment for that week was the Koran (trans. A. J. Arberry).  I read it with Koch's Borges story in mind.  There are two camels in the Koran. 

 

The question is, did Borges know that?  Koch apparently did not.  If Borges did know about the camels, then he was doing an advanced Borgesian number on Koch and anyone to whom Koch might tell the story, expecting that someone who heard the story and knew there were camels in the Koran would have reason to doubt its authenticity.  That was the trap that he set, and the story ends with my hearing the story, finding the camels, and wondering what I had been led to wonder.  Or it ends today, with my writing this.

 

Because Borges may not have known about the camels.  He could simply have been raising the issue that the Koran could be a faked and planted and falsely substantiated book.  I don't know whether Koch was in on the joke (I never discussed this with him; I was mostly too intimidated to go to professors' office hours), and I don't know whether Borges knew he was setting a trap.  I met Borges a decade later when he visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I got a chance to ask him about the paradoxical final sentence of "Borges and I" ("I do not know which of us has written this page"). He said there was no paradox and that "Borges and I" was a simple record of how he felt when he got mail addressed to Borges.  So readers may have made up the ultimate Borges, the one who lays out labyrinths for careful readers, the one who knew Koch would someday have a student who would hear the story, read the Koran, and be convinced that its existence was a literary conspiracy, a student who never would guess that Borges might just have been careless and missed the camels.

Happy Birthday, Cathy Wagner! [by Anthony Madrid, via Facebook]

CATHY WAGNER  (4/21)

Wagner! Wagner!
RAH RAH RAH
We got it in the bagner
And HA HA HA

With a vagabond, vagabond,
Evacuate the vowel, they
Validate, debilitate
And fascinate the owl

With a FIRE DRILL, FIRE DRILL
Freakin’ out the Fred, I’m
Coming from la Mancha, can’tcha
See my Sudafed

With a nolecule, molecule
Nalachi and Ruth, they
Modify the Golden Rule,
The mandible and tooth

With a nickel down, trickle down
Trippin’ up the kid, they
Gotta soap ’em, try to go from
Paris to Madrid

And we waggin’ on the Wagner!!
HA HA HA
Gotta desecrate the flagner 
And RAH RAH RAH

•

 

 

Bruce F. Kawin Guest Blogger April 22-26 (and contest!)

This week we welcome Bruce F. Kawin as our guest blogger. Although he published chapbooks in 1964 (Breakwater) and 1970 (Slides), Bruce did not publish a book of poems until 2012, when Thames River Press (London) brought out Love If We Can Stand It.  He has also published nine more or less scholarly books on literature and film, of which the most recent is Selected Film Essays and Interviews (Anthem Press, 2013), as well as the last seven editions of Gerald Mast's A Short History of the Movies.

In other news . . .

Book Giveaway:  The Collected Poems of Ai (Norton, February 2013).  Tell us about your earliest memory of poetry for a chance to win one of five copies of Ai's recent collection. You can write your story in the comment field.  Read Sharon Preiss's review of The Collected Poems of Ai here.

-- sdh

Is There Poetry in Soccer? By Alissa Fleck

Musing on how to make sense of myself as a soccer player with the heart and mind of a poet

The diehard poet sees a poem in everything. The most seemingly unpoetic experience still offers a story through her lens. Who can say exactly why the poet’s brain works this way?

In some cases, it is an organizing factor. In others, it is a mechanism of defense or cathartic process. At times we construct narratives to protect ourselves from what is raw, painful or inexplicable. We put language onto what we cannot understand, we grapple for a semblance of sense or beauty. Words protect us. That’s how we can write poems about trauma, for example, how the most unimaginable pain can become poetic.

What about distinctly “unpoetic” experiences of the everyday? Poems exist on the most mundane of subjects. Nothing is mundane in the hands of the skilled poet or, rather, the mundane becomes extraordinary in that it is mundane.

But how much of life does the poet approach, not with the images or pieces of a poem, but with the actual poetic process itself?

Everything I do seems to fall into the same general interest areas, requiring use of similar parts of the brain—I write and research and write some more; I curate a reading series for poets; I make music—with the notable exception of playing soccer. I like to think language is a realm in which I have some degree of mastery and playing music seems to exercise the brain in many of the same ways. Where does soccer fit in, besides making me—ideally—a more well-rounded person? 

While I enjoy the game immensely, I am all but incompetent on the soccer field. At the risk of constructing a false dichotomy, I’ve always considered myself more intellectually-inclined than athletically. Of course the two need not be mutually exclusive; indeed perhaps I can fuse the disparate pieces of my life and say it is possible to see the sport of soccer—or any sport for that matter—as a poetic experience. 

For skilled players, there is a great deal of, well, skill to playing soccer. There is foresight and strategy. You make predictions, take gambles and develop systems of spoken and unspoken communication with teammates. You get better by practicing and watching the masters (rarely in life, however, is that not the case). 

There’s a certain art to the balance of the game. You must learn to read your opponent, to think ahead and visualize. So much of the game is lived abstractly, in one’s head, before any play is made. A play takes a moment, while visualization and strategy last all match—even all season. Soccer involves immense amounts of running and passing and work, punctuated by small, intense bursts and climaxes as when a player takes a shot.

How similar all this sounds to the poetic process. A great deal of work goes into crafting a poem. There are hours upon unseen hours of toiling for the little bit that's ultimately displayed. To begin to understand that work, you must read between the lines, unfold and dismantle the finished product.

All poetry is also a conversation, just like soccer, though neither is a conversation in the most traditional sense. Poets converse with their contemporaries and their predecessors, while soccer players converse with their teammates and their opponents. They get to know each other intimately. As my sports fanatic uncle has always preached: “Everything you need to know in life, you learn on the soccer field.”

There’s certainly rhythm and repetition to soccer, as with poetry, but there is also a lot that is unpredictable and beyond our control. Despite certain limiting repetition of a soccer game, there are infinite possible outcomes. 

In poetry as in play, we can control what we do but we cannot necessarily control the consequence. We cannot control how a game will unfold just as we cannot control how a poem will unfold—what will it become once it’s left to others’ interpretations?

Alissa Fleck is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on Bitch, Truthout and Narrative.ly and in the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and more. She writes a weekly literary column for NY Press.