The Best American Poetry

Quote of the Week: The 99-cent Slice

On Monday morning, April 15, with taxes on people's minds -- before the bombs went off in Boston -- commuters reading the Wall Street Journal got to ponder the implications of the ninety-nine cent slice of pizza, a new development in Manhattan. You see stands advertising dollar slices on Eighth Street and Second Avenue, for instance, and the competition and inferior product are leaving some proud pizza makers feeling pretty vulnerable. So let's hear from an expert, and obligingly one steps forth, and these deathless sentences emerge:

<<<
"The 99-cent slice is a giant step towards killing the classic New York pizza experience," said John Arena, who teaches a class on pizza history and culture at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What's next, $1 lox and 10-cent bagels?"
>>>

Say, dear reader, what is the most remarkable element in this little graf? Though there's more than one candidate, my vote goes to "a class on pizza history and culture." -- DL

With a Poem by Cate Marvin (and a few words about Boston) I start a new phase of The Lion and the Honeycomb [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

I’ve been away so long! Been tending a few other fireplaces, to wit, I’ve got two books coming out in the fall; also changes in husband’s work has given me more time alone with my kids, now seven and eight, which, of course, leaves less time alone with words. To be scathingly honest it might be truer to say I simply couldn’t get my blogging fire lit of late, but look now, I’ve got a spark and some tinder, and hope for smoke.

My idea is to return to the blog but with a new focus: poems I love by contemporary poets. In the past I wrote mostly about the greats of our common canon, especially Bishop, Plath, O’Hara, Dickinson, Milton, Yates, Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, Auden, Wordsworth, Keats, Stevens, Blake, well, you get the type. Now I’ll be offering poems by the living and wonderful. We start with this intense little fascination by Cate Marvin, author of the terrific books World’s Tallest Disaster and Fragment of the Head of a Queen, both with Sarabande.

Why I Am Afraid of Turning the Page

Spokes, spooks: your tinsel hair weaves the wheel

that streams through my dreams of battle. Another

apocalypse, and your weird blondeness cycling in

and out of the march: down in a bunker, we hunker,

can hear the boots from miles off clop. We tend to

our flowers in the meantime. And in the meantime,

a daughter is born. She begins as a mere inch, lost

in the folds of a sheet; it's horror to lose her before

she's yet born. Night nurses embody the darkness.

Only your brain remains, floating in a jar that sits

in a lab far off, some place away, and terribly far.

Your skull no longer exists, its ash has been lifted

to wind from a mountain's top by brothers, friends.

I am no friend. According to them. Accordion, the

child pulls its witching wind between its opposite

handles: the lungs of the thing grieve, and that is

its noise. She writhes the floor in tantrum. When

you climbed the sides of the house spider-wise to

let yourself in, unlocked the front door, let me in

to climb up into your attic the last time I saw you

that infected cat rubbed its face against my hand.

Wanting to keep it. No, you said. We are friends.

I wear my green jacket with the furred hood. You

pushed me against chain-length. Today is the day

that the planet circles the night we began. A child

is born. Night nurses coagulate her glassed-in crib.

Your organs, distant, still float the darkness of jars.

- Cate Marvin

There’s a deep drumbeat, heartbeat, that jogs us down the midnight hallways of this poem. Or is it only the gloaming, night not yet come fully down? There are secrets here, but also confidences rendered, something terrifying yet also the glory of birth, possibilities of life and the awful proximity of death.

"I am no friend. According to them. Accordion,…"

The poem pushes and pulls, accordions, it runs and is rocked to a stop by a chain length, it is intimate but lonely, feels full of regret. If I read it twice I feel less abandoned, less the lark rising of a heart at horror and harmed, alone.

This has been a hard week for the country, the Boston Marathon bombing breaking our collective lungs and leaving us stunning with weary strength. Some people on facebonk, as I like to call it, have said it’s wrong to reel from a crime so common in the world, but I say, then you’ve never been near one, because when you’re near one it hurts like hell. You trauma. You burst. When 9/11 happened I was writing Doubt: A History and I was writing on doubt in the world of the Ancient Jews, and just up to crafting the section on the destruction of the Temple. When I started writing I didn’t know a thing about why that event scarred the people of the Temple so badly, broke their belonging, turned them into the people of the book. After our local disaster (I was writing in the East Village, only neighborhoods away), I knew way too much. It howls you. It hollows your head.

I offer this poem now because I’d been thinking of leading with it for a few days, and given the circumstances felt it was best to keep with what poetry does for readers of poetry, not always to stir us to filmic emotions, but instead to take us into the self and into the self of others, looking around with a flickering flame and finding our way through the strange, strained dream that is living.

Gracious it’s nice being back. I've missed you. Don’t kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

Love,

Jennifer

The Punk Singer and The Florist: A conversation between Frankie Rollins and Selah Saterstrom. By Sarah Suzor

From Scene II of Barbara Guest’s play, The Lady’s Choice

Christian: You like only myth,

            And so you would go riding,

            Greensleeves and all

            To where love’s hiding.

Antoinette: I like you.

Christian: Lady in the heavy manner

            Of kings, you do not please.

Antoinette: Am I not pretty?

Christian: Pretty a dash, but not

            To my tasting.

Antoinette: And do I not please?

Christian: You please yourself.

Antoinette: You rock me.

Christian: You rock all foundations.

            You are almost an earthquake.

Antoinette: Your name?

Christian: Christian.

Antoinette: Than you’ve some charity.

Christian: Enough to lend.

Antoinette: Spend it on me.

***

I am obsessed with well-written dialog; I find it to be one of the most intriguing aspects of a story. Here Guest serves us her characters’ attributes with little explanation needed. Antoinette is some version of a privileged debutant, and Christian is some version of a shining nobility who Antoinette thinks she has fallen for without even knowing his name (so it’s also clear Antoinette is severely desperate). Remarkably, these are assumptions Guest leads us to without having to write much at all.

Today I am going to be featuring an interview with two fabulous fiction writers, Selah Saterstom and Elizabeth Frankie Rollins (who I will refer to as Frankie). They both speak about each other’s writing as operating not from what is explicitly written, but instead from what is implied within the writing. For example, from Selah’s 2007 book, The Meat and Spirit Plan (Coffee House Press):   

For my response essay I begin with the sentence: There are worse things than enduring sadness. The teacher reads it out loud. I shoot this girl Bitch Lisa a look like: fuck you, I’m deep (pg. 67).

Implication: Narrator- 1, Bitch Lisa- 0.

And this is an excerpt from the beginning of Frankie’s Origin, a novel in installments, where a husband and his pregnant wife are venturing off to settle an island:

Paramon spoke saying, “You look pained. Are you alright?” He rested the oars against his chest, mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, which was soiled with two days’ rowing. His eyes, despite lack of sleep, surprised her with their shine.

“Darling,” she said smiling, pulling herself up a little in the boat, straightening her damp skirts at her feet. “I was only thinking of tea in china cups.”

He blinked and winced.

“No! No reproach, Paramon. I was only making fun of myself. Not complaining. Just trying to make light of my homesickness." (From Chapter One.)

Implication: the woman’s miserable.

We, as readers, are often drawn into characters and scenes by what we can assume about the person, or the situation. It's really psychological; this way other people's stories can become our own. Selah and Frankie know that. They also win the award for Most Creative Dialog this week. (See Frankie’s answer to: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?) As you will read, these two clearly display a real, and rare bond, a bond that originated not only from encouragement and inspiration, but also from friendship.

Be careful, like Guest’s Christian, they’re easy to fall for.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Frankie Rollins: We met in a barn. At grad school. Goddard College’s Haybarn. Selah walked in and I saw her across a room of full of people and folding chairs. She had this great big bright aura all around her. Our eyes met and I smiled and waved to her like I knew her, automatically, instinctively. She waved right back. After the readings, we found each other and introduced ourselves. The only thing strange about any of it was the moment when I realized that I did not, in fact, even know her name.

Saterstrom: I’ve known Frankie for 13 years. 13 has always been a lucky number for me.

We met in Vermont at Goddard College where we were both pursuing MFAs in fiction. Frankie was ahead of me in the program, but I had seen her around: she glowed. I mean that she changed the energy of any room she was in and in a visceral way – such a presence – this was a fact, and in my book she was 100% glorious in every way that ever has mattered.

A limited, limiting clarity: A conversation between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer. By Sarah Suzor

From George Oppen’s poem, “Route” (1968):

Your elbow on a car-edge

Incognito as summer,

I wrote. Not you but a girl

At least

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful

            thing in the world,

A limited, limiting clarity

I have not and never did have any motive of poetry

But to achieve clarity

***

Oppen is often included in the Objectivist poetry movement, a movement (reluctantly) defined by Louis Zukofski as poetry exhibiting “sincerity and objectivity.” I bring up Oppen in conjunction with today’s interview because “clarity” is often a notion that’s counter to the popular assumption of poetry. As a poet, I frequently find myself in conversations with people who are insistent that poetry is riddled with hidden metaphors and secret allusions, or that it’s a category of private, encoded language, intended to be truly comprehended by only a select group of individuals.

The collected bodies of work between Paul Vangelisti and Standard Schaefer defy the “encoded” assumption of poetry. This doesn’t necessarily make their books easy or accessible, it makes them clear. Standard’s 2005 book, Water and Power (Agincourt Press) is still one of my favorite books, and Paul’s recent release Wholly Falsetto with People Dancing (Seismicity Editions) is my latest greatest affinity. Wholly Falsetto speaks with certain straight-forwardness that, I’m assuming, most readers can find some sense of application within. For example:

5^th November

Because a tall man is a fool, says Aristotle, and traffic is unbearable, the days much shorter, your eyes often kind to me as the music too is lost at sea. Along the coast lights are going on and off, even if it’s too early to fall asleep and catch the leggy young blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on her finger (pg. 22).

And from Standard’s The Notebook of False Purgatories (Chax Press), I borrow my favorite line of all time:

“Progress is progress / and never the other way around.”

In their collaborative fiction effort, which follows this interview, Paul and Standard alternate chapters. They offer two different viewpoints on a small fishing community feuding over water rights. An avid reader of both Paul’s and Standard’s work, I can’t tell who wrote what chapter. I say that to instill this: the way these two approach creating— their intention— seems mighty similar. I think Paul says it best when he mentions that the best part of working with Standard is that they never have to explain much to each other. To me, this is a gift that is almost as difficult to come by as sincerity, objectivity and clarity. Anyway, read the goods. Then go catch that leggy blond walking off down the street spinning your fedora on their finger. In dreams, or otherwise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Paul Vangelisti: We met through my good friend and colleague Martha Ronk, who was one of Standard’s teachers at Occidental College. That would have been about 1994-95, almost twenty years now.

Standard Schaefer: I met Paul through my professor Martha Ronk. I was aware that she wrote poems and that she knew people in LA who wrote poems. She hadn’t really won any awards or published much poetry yet. I think maybe I one of those kids who drive their professors crazy because even though they might really appreciate a literary education, they really want to create. And I think Martha might have had it in mind that if I met Paul and saw how hard he worked, I’d either drop the subject or at least stop hounding her because Paul obviously loved to discuss poetry. That was probably 18 or 19 years ago.

SS: What about your writing career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

PV: I’d probably have to say that I wouldn’t have tried my hand at a novel, that is, committed myself to spending the time and determination it takes to work through chapter after chapter or a significant length of time. Also, I don’t think that in the last 10-15 years I would have paid as much attention to, or at least framed questions about my own practice and poetics necessarily in the same historical manner had I not talked about and read through certain problems with Standard. Maybe you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you can certainly make him think more critically about the ones he relies on.

Schaefer: Well, I’d be a fiction writer with a drawer full of poems that I never finished. I was always more attracted to the formal and aesthetic freedom possible in poetry, but I just thought to do it well you really had to work hard. Paul assured me that you did. It’s just that I noticed that setting the constraints for myself was way more fun than following the constraints of fiction because whether or not it’s mainstream it is full of conventions that I began to realize kept from doing the thinking-through-language that I always understood to be the point of writing. Paul I think showed me that you just think through writing and use poetic constraints of various types forces you to think differently than you did previously.

SS: Standard, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Paul’s work?

Schaefer: There’s a line of Paul’s in a poem called “Rime”: “who can deny the sincerity of hot dog stands envisioned as hot dogs.” I was partial to it for a long time because it seemed to capture the vapidity of LA at time when it was trying to cast itself as the creative center of the universe and where I could see a lot of good ideas were being milled and refined into hopelessly literal, one-note affairs.

SS: Paul, what’s your favorite line or stanza of Standard’s work?

PV: There are many but how about this one for starters, from Desert Notebook, 2004-2008: “Perhaps there was never a desert and we made it the first time we looked up to Mars.”

SS: What’s the most exciting project you two have collaborated on together?

Omnipotent: A conversation between Omnidawn Publishing's Rusty Morrison and Gillian Hamel. By Sarah Suzor

Umberto Eco, from his collection of essays, On Literature (English translation published in 2004):

I have often asked myself: would I still write today if they told me that tomorrow a cosmic catastrophe would destroy the universe, so that no one could read tomorrow what I wrote today?

My first instinct is to reply no. Why write if no one will read me? My second instinct is to say yes, but only because I cherish the desperate hope that, amid the galactic catastrophe, some star might survive, and in the future someone might decipher my signs. In that case writing, even on the eve of the Apocalypse, would still make sense. 

One writes only for a reader. Whoever says he writes only for himself is not necessarily lying. It is just that he is frighteningly atheistic. Even from a rigorously secular point of view.

Unhappy and desperate the writer who cannot address a future reader (334).

*** 

I didn’t use Eco's quote to debate or analyze its contents; I used it because I think it speaks to the tremendous importance of those who bring books to life: publishers. 

Presses are one of the most essential part of the writing community. And because “small presses” typically strive to publish work “beyond mainstream literature,” small press publishing houses are vital to poets, translators and writers of experimental fiction. Today I am featuring an interview between Rusty Morrison, co-founder of Omnidawn Publishing, and Gillian Hamel, senior poetry editor for Omnidawn and managing editor for the press’ online imprint, OmniVerse. In 2001, Rusty founded Omnidawn Publishing with her husband, Ken Keegan. Today Omnidawn is one of the most well respected, highly regarded small presses in North America. Omnidawn, with tremendous help from Gillian Hamel, has also renovated the press’ old blog into the zine OmniVerse, which has become one of the best contemporary online resources for interviews, new creative work and essays. Omnidawn Publishing’s website lists approximately 50 full-length poetry titles (many of which have won prestigious awards and prizes), and OmniVerse now credits over 100 contributors; a stunning achievement, especially when one considers Omnidawn’s short 12 years of existence and its small masthead of staff members. Interestingly, both Rusty and Gillian combined two of my questions: 1.) What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry, and 2.) What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry? Says something, doesn’t it?

Eco: “One writes only for a reader.”

Me: “One writes (or reads [or lives]) only to experience the thrill of fascination.”

In any case, these are two women who deserve a lot of praise.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Rusty Morrison: Gillian is a friend of Sara Mumolo, who works for Omnidawn. Sara told us that she knew a poet who would be a perfect addition to our staff. Gillian has exceeded every expectation that I had; she’s become such an integral part of our team, I can’t imagine Omnidawn without her.

 Gillian Hamel: I came to Rusty and Omnidawn through the wonderful, nebulous network of the MFA program at St. Mary’s College in the fall of 2009. My friend Sara Mumolo, who went through the MFA a year ahead of me, had been in Rusty’s workshop at SMC and was interning at Omnidawn. She got me some review copies of Omnidawn’s books for our MFA’s literary journal, MARY: A Journal of New Writing, and I was so impressed by their exquisite design, literary sophistication, and all-around excellence that I asked her about interning there as well. She was happy to set me up with Rusty, and I couldn’t be more grateful to her for being another pillar of influence in my involvement with poetry.  

SS: What about your career would be most drastically different if you two hadn’t met?

GH: In a way, everything – Omnidawn opened up so many different avenues to me of exploration and innovation in understanding poetry, making books, and talking to other poets. I doubt I would have taken such initiative to design and manage an online journal, or to start my own chapbook imprint. There are so many other important people I would never have met. Most importantly, however, to the question of ‘career’ within this question, I might not have ever learned to take myself seriously as a poet and a functional participant in the project of poetry – which is to say, I would not have learned not only to trust my abilities in those areas, but also to understand when my limitations aren’t as serious as they seem.

RM: I did a second-take when I saw the word “career” in your question. I understand why you’ve used it, since you are asking about my work as Omnidawn’s co-publisher and poetry senior editor. And, certainly, in that context, I want to talk about the ways that Gillian Hamel’s presence continually renews and enlivens my approach to what Omnidawn can do and can become. I also sense that your question is broad enough to allow me to share the ways that my relationship to Gillian has enlivened my own writing, since I do see myself as being a poet as much as I see myself as a publisher. These two kinds of work fill the space that should mean “career” to me. The dictionary defines “career” as “an occupation undertaken for a significant period of a person’s life and with opportunities for progress.” Poetry and presswork certainly have taken over all “significant” time in my life, but I wonder if one can speak of “progress” when discussing a creative project—be it a press or the poems I write. How does an artist gauge “progress”?

One of the most valuable aspects of my relationship with Gillian is that her vitality—her continually fresh approach to aesthetics—opens me to my own beginner’s mind. I can trust that she shares my way of seeing “progress” as including regress and digress, and even a salting of anti-gress, which can lead to new ingress. These aren’t typical words for articulating “career” path success, but they are essential words for constantly re-envisioning what a press can do, and what a poem can do.

SS: Rusty, why did you start the online magazine, OmniVerse?

RM: There wouldn’t be an online magazine called OmniVerse, if it weren’t for Gillian. Ken and I had wanted to create a magazine that would be a place to foster conversations about literature and the arts (a place where we could publish work that had nothing to do with Omnidawn), but it wasn’t until Gillian envisioned the form that we actually ventured into this.

SS: Gillian, how did you get the position of Managing Editor for OmniVerse?

GH: We’d had a slowly dilapidating blog, in its heyday a lively hub of news and discussion of all things Omnidawn and the broad poetic community, curated expertly by the inimitable Craig Santos Perez. As he began to limit his involvement in this project and focus more on his teaching career, Rusty generously offered me the position of the blog’s senior editor. However, my inability to navigate the format so capably combined with our rising presence on other social media outlets eventually rendered the blog much less relevant than it had been. The space in social media to focus on Omnidawn was well-established, and so we wanted to cultivate something for the work beyond Omnidawn’s immediate reach of publication. With Rusty’s support, I decided the best thing to do was serve another facet of Omnidawn’s involvement in the poetic community and, somewhat selfishly, fulfill a longtime dream of mine of founding and editing a literary journal. In my opinion, there will never be enough places to showcase the diversity of new work, criticism, and engagement in our art form, and I’m glad that Rusty and Ken agreed there was a place at Omnidawn for me to indulge this passion with one more outlet. 

SS: What’s the most difficult part of working in this industry? What’s the most rewarding part of working in this industry?

RM: My husband Ken Keegan and I began Omnidawn in 2001 because we believe that small, independent presses are essential: they disseminate fresh, lively, culturally pertinent and provocative literature. A society needs many small presses so that widely diverse ideas and points-of-view are easily accessible to everyone. As Italo Calvino tells us, “… the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language." 

Ken had wanted to begin a press for years, but we never felt we were secure enough financially to do this, and we never felt that we had enough time. But, in 2001, we realized that there is never enough time or money to begin a project like this—we realized that if we waited any longer, then we’d never do it. So, we plunged in, aware of the precarious nature of publishing. We have no regrets; we are excited about every new book, every new project. But it is an excitement tinged by our awareness of the precariousness and challenges of small press life. I suppose that our awareness of the risk helps us to savor every moment, every pleasure.

I share this history because I think it’s the best answer for both parts of your question. I am constantly rewarded by the opportunity to be in conversation with writers whose voices are resonant and relevant to the changing moment in which I live. What’s most difficult is that the work of running a press doesn’t end at 5pm, and the week doesn’t end on Friday afternoon. We remain thrilled by the challenges, and always a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities.

GH: I decided to conflate these two questions because – and perhaps this is going to sound a little cheesy – the ways in which the work of poetry challenges, frustrates, and exhilarates me are pretty much inextricable. The limitations of things like money and physical space and time are obviously stifling and need no further examination, but the fact of their inevitability makes the result of your work a victory that is both indulgently contrarian and deeply valuable. It seems facile to make these kinds of statements, but I think it’s sort of pointless to argue against them, especially where poetry is concerned. We all know we’re working in such a fraught, marginalized space, and we carry on in spite of that and because of that and with the sort of forbidden knowledge that it’s actually what makes us thrive. In a way, I kind of love that things like e-readers are becoming so ubiquitous because it’s begun to validate the craft of what I do – as the imperative for the cheap and utilitarian in printed books disappears, we have more room to explore the medium, to discover the interplay between printed and digital materials, to return the art to the form and let the poetry breathe in the space that’s been created.

It's National Haiku Day!

Celebrate by entering the Library Hotel's haiku challenge for a chance to win a two-night stay in the hotel's Poetry Room (299 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10017).

All you have to do
to win two nights in New York
is write a haiku

Details here.

-- sdh

Reading for the Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo: Wednesday April 17, 8:00 @ The Poetry Project

St. Mark’s Church  | 131 E. 10th Street, New York, NY 10003 | 212-674-0910 |

We're celebrating Wesleyan University Press’s long-anticipated landmark edition of Ceravolo’s poems with an all-star reading:  David Lehman, Charles North, Ron Padgett, Anselm Berrigan, Peter Gizzi, David Shapiro, John Perreault, Eileen Myles, Susie Timmons, Timothy Donnelly, Jordan Davis, Ariana Reines, Corina Copp, Corrine Fitzpatrick, John Coletti, Thurston Moore, Anita Ceravolo and Parker Smathers.

Poetry on the Red Carpet - Tune In @bestampo

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 at 6:30pm, the Academy of American Poets will present the 11th annual Poetry & the Creative Mind at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall  (1941 Broadway, New York, NY).

Special guest readers for 2013 are Jad Abumrad, Glen Hansard, Mario Batali, Student Poet Claire Lee, Dick Cavett, Stew, Patricia Clarkson, Rose Styron, Tyne Daly, Amber Tamblyn, and Kathleen Turner. This year’s master of ceremonies is Calvin Trillin. Each will read a favorite poem.

If you can't attend you can follow along with poet Leah Umansky who will live tweet for us throughout the evening (@bestampo). Umansky also tweets as @lady_bronte.

Tickets are: $45-$75 and can be purchased at (www.lincolncenter.org).For more information, visit the Academy's website here.

“PEACE AND WAR IN AMERICAN POETRY” by David Lehman

 

"daybreak gray and dim . . . "

The US Library of Congress invited David Lehman to contribute to a series of essays by leaders in the literary field, including former Poets Laureate and Consultants in Poetry, that illustrate how poems by Americans helped define the country. This presentation aims to complement conventional historical texts and showcase poetry’s place as an essential tool for recording our nation’s past. The authors are expressing their own opinions in these essays, which may not necessarily reflect the position of the Library of Congress. Here is David Lehman's contribution:

 

Peace and War in American Poetry

War and Peace: the title of Tolstoy’s massive novel of Napoleonic Europe trips off the tongue. Not so “peace and war”: the inversion of the customary word order represents a victory of hope over experience — or of the poetry of aspiration over the prose of sad actuality. As a subject for poetry, war has an immediate advantage over peace, because war entails action, whereas the experience of peace is an absence, not noticed until not there, like the absence of pain.

War was the first subject to quicken the pen of an epic poet. But the author of The Iliadknew that the scenes of the Trojan hero Hector in battle with Patroclus and later with Achilles would not be so remarkable if there were not also a tender scene of Hector bidding farewell to Andromache, his wife, and their baby boy, who is scared of daddy’s helmet. Epic poets have followed Homer’s lead, widening the scope of war inevitably to include peace – whether peace be construed as the absence of hostilities or as something positive in its own right.

In book XVIII of The Iliad, Homer describes the shield of Achilles that the lame god Hephaistos has fashioned for him. The shield depicts two cities – one embattled, besieged; the other functional, with a wedding and a court of civil law where disputants can settle their differences without violence. In layers of concentric circles the shield also shows some of the things conspicuously lacking in fields of battle: a vineyard, a herd of cattle, a circle of young men and women dancing, the bounty of the harvest – the fruits of peace.

continue reading

Confidence = Generosity: A conversation between Elizabeth Robinson and Travis Cebula. By Sarah Suzor

Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet (“Letter 8,” 1904):

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. …How are we to forget all those myths at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about the dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps every terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants to help us (pg. 52).

***

Whoa.

I love these letters. They are such an incredible inside look at the indestructible positivity Rilke carried with him throughout his career. Here he’s basically telling his young correspondent, Mr. Franz Kappus, that there’s no need to panic; we are all, at times, stricken with torment and doubt (about our lives, about our crafts), and, although we can never alter the past, we can always alter our perception of the past as we move forward into the future. Rilke is instilling the next generation with realistic optimisim. 

“But only someone who is ready for everything… will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence.”

Exhaustively. The word itself seems to tempt one into it;

I dare you

to draw yourself,

exhaustively,

from (into)

your own existence.

As I consider today’s interview between Elizabeth Robinson and Travis Cebula, I find Rilke’s haunting notion to be the perfect introduction. These two poets are some of the most inquisitive and prolific writers I know. The two descriptions – 1.) Inquisitive and 2.) Prolific – both require a certain curiosity that “excludes nothing.” Elizabeth is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Counterpart (Ahsahta Press). She has taught all over the country: the University of Colorado Boulder, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Montana, and she founded (with Colleen Lookingbill) EtherDome Chapbooks and (with Laura Sims) Instance Press. Travis’ second full-length collection of poetry, Ithaca was recently released from BlazeVox Books. He has founded Shadow Mountain Press and in 2011 he received the Pavel Srut Fellowship from Western Michigan University. Travis also teaches at the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris (avec moi). I love how both Travis and Elizabeth make a point to comment on each other’s generosity throughout this interview. As Elizabeth says about Travis (and, in my opinion, about people in general): Confidence = generosity.

With that, I gratefully share the stage.

Sarah Suzor: How did you meet? And how long have you known each other?

Elizabeth Robinson: Travis was a student in a remarkable graduate workshop I taught at Naropa University in the Spring of 2008. I looked forward to going to that class all week long and when I arrived, I’d just feel such gladness and affection for the students. As writers, they were so dissimilar, but they read and responded to each others’ work with real insight and respect. Travis threw himself into the experience. He gulped down contemporary poetry and poetics, he became an expert reader of his peers’ works, he experimented voraciously as a poet. Later I got to work with Travis on his M.F.A. thesis. I think the poetry part got written pretty fluidly, but he also had to write a 30 page essay, and I continually challenged him on aspects of what he wrote. He had conceived of a really interesting approach to poetics, but I just kept returning and suggesting changes here, pressing back on ideas there. I thought he’d eventually want to throw me in front of a train. But no: each iteration was cheerfully revised within a week or so. If he was ever frustrated, he didn’t show it.

Since then, though we both seem to be in transit quite a lot, Travis has been an endlessly prolific writer, an attender of readings, a respondent in a writing group, a recommender of books, an occasional shoulder to sob on: in short, a friend.

(He’s also a terrific cook, and my kids are wild for his peanut butter brownies, though I think his blueberry coffee cake is to die for.)

Travis Cebula: I’m pretty sure our paths first crossed in January of 2008. It was definitely my second semester of graduate school, which means I met Elizabeth on the first day of a poetry workshop she was teaching in the MFA program at Naropa University that semester. We may have strolled past each other on campus before that, but that was the first time we spoke.

She walked in the door of our classroom in the historic (and historically clanking and smelling) Lincoln building. I remember initially being a little frightened of her, which seems a bit silly in retrospect, but it’s true. In addition to her obvious competence and intelligence, which are evident at first glance, she had a strong no-nonsense air about her on the first day, probably to make sure we were focused. Understandably. Students at Naropa have a tendency to lose focus for a number of reasons. Her demeanor was a little intimidating, because none of the other professors I’d encountered at the school up to that point had taken anything quite so seriously. The pedagogical tone was normally much more laissez faire, which makes perfect sense if you know anything about the philosophy or history of the institution. But Elizabeth made it clear right off the bat that she had higher expectations for our class. I remember thinking, “I really don’t want to be around when she gets angry. I really don’t want to be the one who makes her angry.” It might have been her mother bear side showing on the first day, just so we knew it was there. That can be scary.

I’m glad she did, though. Everything turned out perfectly, and it didn’t take long at all for her to warm up to the class after she determined we were serious. I’m grateful to my program advisor at that time, Todd McCarty, for suggesting her class to me. Suggestion is a bit of an understatement. What he actually said was, “You NEED to work with Elizabeth.” He was absolutely right, and not just for me. The few people who were fortunate enough to be in that workshop together are still friends, in close contact, and every one of us is still writing on a regular basis. We go to each other’s weddings. We read together. We collaborate. We publish each other’s work. Seriously, how often does that happen? An entire workshop? Elizabeth started all of that.

But, don’t get me wrong, I still don’t want to be around when she gets angry. That would suck.

SS: What about your writing career would be most noticeably different had you two not met?

ER: My life in Colorado has often been difficult and estranging. Travis is a generous, dynamic, and enthusiastic colleague. I think I would find myself more isolated at this point if I had not met Travis. He is a staple participant in my life as a writer in Colorado. Because of his travels, his writing, and his general inquisitiveness, he often brings news of books, presses, and communities that I’m glad to learn about.

TC: I know a few people, including myself, who unabashedly refer to Elizabeth as our “Poetry Mom.” I hope she’s comfortable with that. Does that answer the question?

I think that if I hadn’t met Elizabeth I wouldn’t have a “writing career” in any kind of recognizable sense. I don’t mean I wouldn’t be writing right now, which I’m pretty sure I would be, but rather that my development in the other aspects of a writing life would be stinted at best. A career is something more than just work (or a job); it entails building relationships, a broad engagement with community, and responsibilities that extend into the world, into time. I think I’d still be trying to teach myself what to do in that regard, how to get to that next level, and asking myself questions like, “How do I submit work to a journal?” “What should I be reading?” “How do you write a book review?” “Are these poems a book yet?” “How do I know if there’s a reading to go to this weekend?” “Who can I talk to about what I’m writing?” “Who do I want to talk to about what they’re writing?” And many, many more.

Now I think of a writing career as a collage: the community, the conversation, the teaching, the publishing, the reviews, the support, the readings, the late nights spent talking, the love, the friendship, the editing, the sequence, the ups, the downs, the offers of and reception of support, all in turn. No, I wouldn’t have a gestalt of all of that yet if I hadn’t met Elizabeth. That’s an easy conclusion to arrive at. My life would be very different without her. I am a little curious if, conversely, the more recent part of her own career might have been any different had we not met. I wonder, have I offered her anything in return? I suspect the answer is, “Perhaps, but not nearly enough.”

SS: Travis, if you had to pick, which of Elizabeth’s books is your favorite?

TC: I hate questions like this, if for no other reason than it’s always impossible for me to give a straight answer. I love all of Elizabeth’s books, and for different reasons. Not equally, mind you, but to narrow my list of favorites down to one is challenging. They all offer different perspectives on life and the human experience, and they all carry what I believe to be astute and beautifully written perspectives on different aspects of life. Which is to say, she has successfully avoided the trap of writing iterations of what amounts to the same book over and over again. Asking me to pick a favorite book of hers is like asking me to pick a favorite part of life….

Actually, that might be easier. In that case, at least I could throw out junior high school. I’ll offer Harrow as my favorite, for the simple reason that it’s the first one I read, and thus the first one I fell for. The trauma she weaves into that book while avoiding even a hint of melodrama is breathtaking. Barring that, I would choose “whichever one I’ve read most recently.” So, Counterpart is making a strong case for itself at the moment, which may disprove one of my earlier statements. Her descriptions of devils and hell are strongly redolent of my experiences in junior high….

SS: Elizabeth, what has been most rewarding about watching the evolution of Travis’ writing career?

ER: I think Travis proceeds pretty fearlessly. It’s always really exciting to see someone who has been your student get published, whether discrete poems in a periodical or in book form, but Travis approaches writing much more expansively than that. He is traveling, meeting new people, finding out about contemporary presses. I guess what I find rewarding about observing Travis is that he understands so many ways of writing (that is, he can be very stylistically diverse) and participating in a writing life through friendships, projects, reading. When I work with people, I understand that they might not write poetry forever because other commitments and projects will come into their lives, but I always hope that they will really stick with it and find out what writing will yield in their lives as an ongoing adventure. Travis is one who has made that commitment and I am grateful that I can continue to be in conversation with him as a poet.

SS: Travis, if you had to guess Elizabeth’s favorite color you’d pick?

April 15, 2013

Discussing discussions: A conversation with James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. By Sarah Suzor

Jack Spicer, from his 1957 collection, After Lorca:

Dear Lorca,

…Things do not connect; they correspond…. Even these letters. They correspond with something (I don’t know what) that you have written (perhaps as unapparently as that lemon corresponds to this piece of seaweed) and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men write each other.

Love, Jack

***

The irony here is this: in 1957 Spicer wasn’t dead and Lorca was.  Now Spicer’s dead, and I’m not. So, either Spicer was psychic or this is the way things really do work: a ladder of correspondence.   

A creative profession, perhaps more than any other profession, is one built, culled and cultivated from groundwork that has already been set, hence innovation via (some kind of) inspiration. I know no writer who isn’t a living, breathing representation of the influences they have encountered. The future gains new ideas and models of creativity this way; we’re constantly marching up a long ladder of either intrigue with, or rejection of something outside ourselves. These things which one chooses to correspond to, or move away from, construct the notion of a “history,” a history that inevitably makes a creative career larger than simply one’s personal contributions. Sounds important, right?

In many ways the story of Ezra Pound editing T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land makes the poem itself much more intriguing. In the annotated edition of The Waste Land we see the working relationship Pound and Eliot had refined. Indeed they were pals, but the friendship formalities go by the wayside when Pound stepped in as “editor,” leaving brash, “Bad- but [I] can’t attack until I get typescript” commentary all over Eliot’s written script, and cutting major sections and lines of the poem with the justification, “Too personal.” Some of Pound’s comments are extremely funny, especially when one imagines what Eliot­­– “The Old Possum,” as Pound called him– must have been thinking while looking them over. However, Eliot took many of Pound’s edits into consideration because he trusted his advice. And later in the annotated edition we see Pound return as Eliot’s ally by championing The Waste Land to other colleagues. This is a 1922 letter from Pound to John Quinn:

 

“Eliot came back from his Lausanne specialist looking OK; and with a damn good poem (19 pages) in his suitcase…. About enough, Eliot’s poem, to make the rest of us shut up shop.”

The rest is history. And that’s my point.

So, I’ve decided to infiltrate the Best American Poetry blog with contemporary examples of “working relationships.” Each day I will feature two writers in a conversation that highlights the aspects of their lives and careers that have been enhanced by writing together, learning from one another, or publishing with each other.

The most beautiful findings in each of the interviews are the descriptions of the lifelong friendships that have been created between these artists.

James Belflower mentions he wishes he could bridge the gap between New York and Arizona just to sit down for coffee with mentor, Cynthia Hogue.

Elizabeth Robinson looks forward to hearing about the new communities Travis Cebula encounters during his travels.

Rusty Morrison says she fully trusted Gillian Hamel to see Omnidawn’s online magazine OmniVerse come to fruition.

Standard Schaefer and Paul Vangelisti constantly alert each other to work that might pique each other’s interests.

And when asked about the best advice Frankie Rollins has imparted, Selah Saterstrom answers: “To risk everything for my biggest life and best work.”

To risk everything.

You picking up what I’m putting down?

Enjoy these conversations as they come down the pipeline. I have also asked the featured writers to collaborate on a new creative piece between the two of them. This is intended to honor each other’s talents and abilities, but most importantly, to put a new spin on their “relationship,” one that we, as audience (as the future), can correspond to and with.

 

I’m kicking off the week with an interview between James Belflower and Cynthia Hogue. James’ second full-length collection of poetry, A Posture of Contour, was just released from Spring Gun Press, and it is a beauty. He’s pursuing his PhD at Suny Albany, and he curates the Yes! reading series. Cynthia is the Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry in the English Department at ASU. She has published seven collections of poetry, most recently, Or Consequence and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, interview-poems and photographs (with Rebecca Ross).

I’ll let them tell the rest of their story.

Tonight at KGB: Yona Harvey + Lynn Melnick

 

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Yona Harvey + Lynn Melnick

 

Monday, April 15th, 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

Yona Harvey is a literary artist living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of the poetry collection, Hemming the Water (Four Way Books: New York, 2013), and the recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation. Her poems can be found in jubilat, Gulf Coast, Callaloo, West Branch, and various journals and anthologies, including A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry (Ed. Annie Finch). She lives with her husband and two children in Pittsburgh, PA, and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Lynn Melnick’s first book of poetry is If I Should Say I Have Hope, published by YesYes books. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB,  Denver Quarterly, Guernica, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and elsewhere. Her fiction has appeared in Opium and Forklift, Ohio, and she has written essays and book reviews for Boston Review, Coldfront, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry Daily, and VIDAweb, among others. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

 

Upcoming, Spring 2013

 

Apr 22   Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman   

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

 Click on thumbnail to see gallery:

• 
• 

Sarah Suzor, Guest Blogger April 15-19

This week we welcome Sarah Suzor as our guest blogger. Sarah's full-length collection of poetry, The Principle Agent, won the 2010 Hudson Prize and was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011. Her collaboration with Travis Cebula After the Fox is forthcoming in 2014 from Black Lawrence Press. Her reviews and interviews can be found in Tarpaulin Sky and Rain Taxi. Suzor’s poetry has been published widely. anthologized, and translated. She lives in Venice, California, where she is a founding editor of Highway 101 Press, a correspondent for Omnidawn’s online magazine OmniVerse, and a guest lecturer for the Left Bank Writers Retreat in Paris. 

Welcome, Sarah.

-- sdh

"A Milestone Reached" [by Philip Brunst]

Thursday the 19th of April was a special night for The Best American Poetry and series editor David Lehman. At the New School’s Tishman Auditorium an all-star cast of poets celebrated the anthology’s 25th anniversary with the launch of The Best of the Best American Poetry, guest edited by distinguished poet and man of letters, Robert Pinsky.

As Mr. Pinsky noted in his introductory remarks,The Best American Poetry series, which Mr. Lehman started in 1988, has filled an important cultural place in society. It acts out what Mr. Pinsky described as a “significant cultural process,” whereby artists confer recognition upon other artists — a process of discovery and advocacy responsible for the reputations of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, to name but two poets who were once overlooked.

The Best of the Best American Poetry is a collection of 100 poems selected from the nearly 2000 already published in the anthology’s twenty-five-year existence. The LA times called it an embarrassment of riches, and the lineup of poets who read on Thursday night was certainly that. From Richard Howard to Marie Howe to Yusef Komunyakaa, the range and quality of voices was nothing short of exceptional.

Mark Doty began the evening with his hypnotic poem “Difference,” which opens with a description of jellyfish floating in a Massachusetts harbor.

“The jellyfish

float in the bay shallows

like schools of clouds,

 

a dozen identical — is it right

to call them creatures

these elaborate sacks

 

of nothing?”

                                                           

   — Mark Doty, “Difference”

 

One of the distinctive qualities of all The Best American Poetry volumes, readily apparent at book launches, is how different one poem is from the next. The poets read in alphabetical order and there is an unexpected quality to the event. There are, in rapid order, sonnets and sestinas, rhymed- and free verse, on subjects ranging from Vietnam to New Mexico.

 

Major Jackson read “Urban Renewal XVI,” his poem selected for the volume, which is in part a poem of how he came to be named Major.

 

“What of my fourth grade teacher at Reynolds Elementary,

who weary after failed attempts to set to memory

names strange and meaningless as grains of dirt around

the mouthless, mountain caves at Bahrain Karai:

Tarik, Shanequa, Amari, Aisha, nicknamed the entire class

after French painters whether boy or girl.”

                                                           

— Major Jackson, “Urban Renewal XVI”

 

This was followed shortly afterwards by Sarah Manguso’s prose poem “Hell.”

 

“The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave. Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

 

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.”

                                                           

— Sarah Manguso, “Hell”

 

And then two poets later there was Paul Muldoon with his alliterative and rhymed poem “The Loaf,” where the poet experiences sensations through a hole in the wall of his house, built in 1750. 

 

“When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch

in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair

it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch

 

with a pink and a pink and a pinkie-pick.

 

When I put my ear to the hole I'm suddenly aware

of spades and shovels turning up the gain

all the way from Raritan to the Delaware

 

with a clink and a clink and a clinkie-click.”

                                                           

— Paul Muldoon, “The Loaf”

 

In the end the evening highlighted the seminal, twenty-five-year mark that David Lehman has reached with the now invaluable Best American Poetry series as well as the strength of American poetry today.

-- Philip Brunst

Turnover [by John Beer]

In the spirit of PiL's American Bandstand appearance, I thought it'd be a good idea to share my guest spot with some guest guest contributors.

***

I asked a passel of illustrious commentators to respond to this question: Can you recommend a "neglected classic," i.e. a work (not necessarily literary) that has real significance to you that you think is generally un- or underappreciated? (The "classic" language is by no means meant to limit things, temporally or otherwise.) And the results are in!

Tisa Bryant: Eyeball

A groundbreaking African diasporic literary publication from 1992-2002 edited by Jabari Asim and Ira B. Jones in Philadelphia, Eyeball featured poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, visual art and interviews displaying a range of artists and aesthetic practice, including Paul Beatty, Esther Iverem, John R. Keene, Clarence Major, Lisa Teasley, Askia M. Toure, Jerry Ward, the collective vision and individual visions of both DrumVoices and the Eugene B. Redmond writers, and Gwendolyn Brooks on Audre Lorde.  At present, an archival set of Eyeball is unavailable to writers and researchers. Yale graduate student Claire Schwartz leads a project to remedy that, via donations of back issues, at [email protected].

Timothy Donnelly: What’s Up, Doc? (Peter Bogdanovich)

I have pretty specific tastes in movies. My favorites are Mulholland Drive, The Shining, and Vertigo. Sometimes the order I rank them in changes but right now it happens to be alphabetical. Darkness, obsession, existential weightiness, tragic fatalism, the supernatural, and impossible formal beauty are what I want in a movie, and all three of these give me as much as I could ever hope for and then some. It’s odd, then, that my fourth favorite movie, or maybe it’s my fifth, isn’t anything like these others at all. In fact, it’s a G-rated comedy—1972’s What’s Up, Doc? You probably haven’t seen it.

Paying homage to old Bugs Bunny cartoons and the screwball comedies of the 30s (weird to think the 30s were as far back in 1972 as 1972 is to us now), What’s Up Doc? stars a young Ryan O’Neal and an even younger Barbara Streisand, skin all tanned and eyes wild blue, and it costars an amazing lineup of character actors, including the scene-stealing Madeline Kahn, here in her first feature role. It was directed by the great Peter Bogdanovich, better known for the movies he made just before and after What’s Up, Doc?, namely The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973). Those you’ve probably seen.

What makes What’s Up, Doc? a favorite of mine, aside from its performances and my nostalgia for it, is its relentlessly witty, intricate, and just plain madcap script. Written by Bogdanovich, the whip-smart Buck Henry, David Newman, and Robert Benton, What’s Up, Doc? is full of fast-talk, banter, wordplay, puns, allusions, pastiche, and inspired nonsense. The speed with which it barrels forward from one absurdity to the next stimulates me in a way analogous to how my other favorite movies’ terror and beauty do. And come to think of it, it’s completely obsessive—just in another key. But even as it concludes with couples paired up and order restored, it still keeps cracking wise and twisting in its happiness. That’s my kind of movie. The other kind.

Bhanu Kapil: City M (Melissa Buzzeo)

A chapbook that I held close for a long time: a vision of the experimental feminine -- how the writer approaches a plaza in the off-season and there, in Montreal, comes to writing as to place itself: elemental forces, intense desire for what the book could be in a truly communal life.  

Aaron Kunin: “The Lie” (Walter Ralegh)

Last year, reading Percy's anthology Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, I encountered Walter Ralegh's poem, "The Lie," and was struck by its freshness. It is a masterpiece of the drab style in sixteenth-century poetry.

The premise is Ralegh's dying wish for his soul to visit all of the world's most profound concepts and institutions, and tell them the plain truth about what they are. If there is any further conversation, Ralegh's soul is to "give them all the lie." Anything they say in response, even a simple "Yes," would be a lie.

For example, Ralegh's soul is to tell the arts "that they want soundness," and to remind time, "Thou art but motion." Now both of these statements are regrettably true. No physicist, philosopher, or mystic has, to my knowledge, come up with a better definition of the profound concept of time. The only figures of speech in these lines are abstraction and apostrophe — Ralegh's address to his soul, and his soul's address to the abstraction. There is also an intriguing implication that time has pretensions to being something more than mere motion.

The tone is cool and dry, with suggestions of anger successfully controlled. For a while, this was my favorite poem. Reciting it comforts me, as I believe Ralegh intended.

One last anecdote about the neglect of this amazing poem. In his "Brief Life" of Ralegh, the seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey notes that someone told him Ralegh "died with a lie in his mouth, but I have now forgot what it was." Presumably Aubrey is garbling this poem, which Ralegh wrote some time before he died, but imagining the moment of his own death.

Dorothea Lasky: The Fast (Hannah Weiner)

I wrote about this before on The Millions blog for their 2010 Year in Reading, but my favorite neglected classic is Hannah Weiner’s The Fast (United Artists Books, 1992). It is one of her early journals, written in 1970, which explores how limiting one’s environment can be a kind of holy poetic constraint. I’ve used the book a lot in my classes on color and poetry, because the auras that Weiner describes are so vivid and real and they can be a great jumping off point for students to think about the colors of things, not concrete always but hallucinated. I believe the book gets to the matter of things: the matter of language and why language matters. It is also a mystical text and about the spirit. What poetry can and should and will be all about—the indefatigable spirit. Hannah Weiner is one of our American classics.

Anthony Madrid: The Seasons (James Thomson)

If I rubbed a wishing lamp, and the genie came out and said, "You can revive one reputation and one reputation only—choose!," I would instantly reply: "I choose the reputation of James Thomson, 1700–1748, author of The Seasons."


I was turned on to Thomson by Samuel Johnson's twenty-page biography of him in the Lives of the Poets. I have always thought that piece the best of the medium-sized lives. Johnson makes you lust to read Thomson. And Johnson does not always make you lust to read people.


If anybody wants to Facebook message me, I'll be HAPPY to type out some choice bits from The Seasons, and I defy anyone who likes poetry at all to resist the shit. In my opinion? Thomson is right up there with Virgil and Milton.

Joe Milutis: The Scribleriad (Richard Owen Cambridge)

I don’t know if The Scribleriad (1751) can be said to be neglected, because it was never properly “lected.”  I found it while using “scribble” as a search term in the vast trove of the Literature Online database, only to find the ultimate scribble—an epic of all things desultorily authored, an heroic tale about bad writing.  In-and-of itself, The Scribleriad performed its problematic quite well, and forthwith disappeared into history.  This self-published epic follows the journeys of Martin Scriblerus, “alchymist and pedant,” to exotic locales like the “Island of Poetry,” where he meets with proto-Oulipeans and gets unnecessarily angry with them.  Ah yes, we’ve heard this tale before, not just because I’m sure we all know, say, a visionary nature poet who is routinely annoyed by the neighborhood lipogrammatist, but because Martin Scriblerus was a character created fifty years prior, by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot, et al. subsequently to be abandoned.  Richard Owen Cambridge’s recycling, then, is a type of plagiarism-by-anticipation (of Oulipo) and plagiarism proper (of the Scriblerus Club).  It is a remix-epic of cosmic proportions, positing the poetic line as the hero’s comic dilemma.  

Jared Stanley: Adventure (Television)

Adventure never gets the love that Marquee Moon gets, and that’s never made sense to me. The ringing excitement of the interlaced guitars on “Days” explore (and perhaps delimit) the possibilities of grace in popular music. It’s dirty and stately and pastoral and confusing. This record pops up in conversation with poets – I have made friends talking about this record. Did I mention the lyrics? Tom Verlaine knew how to make poetry work in pop – couplets like “I love disaster / and I love what comes after” or “I feel the shells hit – moonlight web / Goodbye arms, so long, head!”

Dana Ward: Opening the Eyelid (David Rattray)

I was fortunate enough to be in NYC last weekend during a celebration of David Rattray's life & work at the Poetry Project. It was a revelatory & beautiful two hours, every performance moving & informative, each lending some resolution or arc to the life of this legendary writer. I'd been a fan of his Semi(o)text book, but had never gotten my hands on his volume of verse diwan published in 1990. Having had it now for less than a week it's already changed me consequentially, reading it in spring, being with this person's extremely fine & rich sense of being living in & out of light. It's become one of my favorite books in 5 days time, & I can only hope that others are as lucky as me as things go along, to have a chance to encounter this writing. Thanks to David Abel, Eileen Myles & everyone else for making Rattray's art & life ever more visible (again) in the world.  

A Long Poem [by Lera Auerbach]

 

I’ve grown too impatient to read long poems.
After a while my eyes start shifting like dancers
who’ve missed their entrance cues. I find  –
I am reading a different poem all together
than the one on the page. I close my eyes.
The letters are dancing and chewing my eyelids,
like tiny caged rodents, sharp teeth protruding,
their round eyes almost blind,
their whiskers trembling, trying to smell through.

This new poem I am reading in my mind is related
to the one in the book, but as a distant cousin,
the family ties are vaguely remembered,
some childhood memories, a gray photograph,
taken at some forgotten occasion,
but not much else ties them together.

The long poem is starting to look like a shopping list.
Each item is a new line, the stanzas form departments,
where all the words are labeled and neatly
packed in rows on parallel shelves.
I’m forever lost in its aisles, in the endless labyrinth,
where each detail is screaming
to be noticed and appreciated.
I am taken hostage by the advertisements,
the cleverness of its commercials,
coupons, attractive packaging,
already forgetting what was on my list.
What was that I was looking for
when I started reading, and feeling –
oh, so, so inadequate.

The long poem turns into a dark ancient forest
and I am a child lost in its meanings,
the unfamiliar verbs are howling like owls,
announcing the arrival of the twilight time.
It is not yet the night, but it’s chilly already
and the long arms of the shadows are touching my feet.
Alarmed and still hoping for a last minute happy-ending miracle
or at least for some understanding or a familiar sight -
I rashly turn pages, feeling slightly embarrassed
of my impatient flight, and vaguely suspecting
that some part of me is still lost in the maze
in the complex associations and hidden meaning
of that long poem, in its hostile branches and roots
of incomprehensible words, and that small part of me
may never be rescued from its crowded pages,
and I will never know what happens at the end.

 

The L. A. Times on The Best of the Best American Poetry: An embarrasment of riches

"Either way, the strength of the book (which [Robert] Pinsky compiled with the aid of series editor David Lehman) is its sense of subjectivity, the way these poems illustrate their editor’s aesthetic, and in so doing, tell us something of how poetry operates in the world."  by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Critic, April 9, 2013.

Read the full review here.

Read excerpts from The Best of the Best American Poetry here.

Join Guest Editor Robert Pinsky and Series Editor David Lehman and leading poets as they launch this historic volume:  Thursday, April 11, 2013. 7:00 PM. The New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York City.  Details here.

Thumbs [by John Beer]

 

The work of criticism is always, let’s say, ephemeral; Saint-Beuve’s name survives only because Proust was against him. Even more fleeting are the reactions of the mere reviewer. “No serious critic can devote himself, frequently, exclusively, and indefinitely, to reviewing works most of which inevitably cannot bear, would even be misrepresented by, review in depth,” sniffs Renata Adler in her screed against Pauline Kael.

So the outpouring of emotion in the wake of Roger Ebert’s death might seem a transitory thing; already, the passing of the Iron Lady (of whom more later) has moved him off the screens. The rise of Siskel and Ebert neatly paralleled in time the switch from the decade-long Prague Spring of New Hollywood to the blockbuster-driven economy still churning its way through the Marvel and DC lineups. Even if Ebert’s courage and openness in the face of his disfiguring illness and his resolute identity as a newspaper journalist in the twilight of that industry render him heroic, he and his partner might still seem like emblems in a narrative of cultural decline, banally and profitably celebrating the culture industry’s assembly line, whatever caveats they might have about individual products.

But I want to offer a different view. Sneak Previews and its successors enjoyed an astounding success, given how unpromising the show’s basic structure might have seemed: two untelegenic, middle-aged white guys bickering about movie clips. The show operated on the premise that arguing about culture could draw a mass audience. And it did. “Thumbs up or down” may have been the takeaway message, but both critics made clear that those decisions were made for reasons, and reasons that each would emphatically try to make the other acknowledge.

Maybe those arguments weren’t always the most sophisticated. And maybe the very act of treating Weekend at Bernie’s 2 as worthy of detailed consideration was as much a con as it was a tribute to critical open-mindedness. But in their humble way, Siskel and Ebert offered a model of rationality, one on which thinking wasn’t a matter of following an algorithm or asserting a purely subjective preference. In other words, it was a humanistic kind of education.

And it strikes me that poetry criticism, that much-lamented field, could do with more of a dose of At the Movies-style debate. We have our dramatic flareups, as with the fascinating byplay between Marjorie Perloff and Matvei Yankelevich last year. But too often, even when critical disagreements break out, they either proceed at an austere level of abstraction or wind up with people talking past one another. I’d love to see a pair of writers devote themselves to detailed and contentious consideration of recent books or poems of note. There are some excellent examples approximating this: Al Filreis’s Poem Talk, for instance, or the byplay between Christian Wiman and Don Share on the Poetry podcast, but I think there’s room for a similar effort that's neither tied to a particular publication nor emphasizing a scholarly conversation.

***

The use of thumbs in the poetic context, though, might have its risks:

What a thrill—

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

 

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

(Sylvia Plath, "Cut")