The Best American Poetry

"He's got flow!" Do you? Donate a Book to the Parachute Library

(Ed note:  On March 13, we posted about an ambitious project to build a poetry library for teens.  Here's what happened. sdh)

Maya and Amanda open a box of books

Dear poets, 

My students and I want to thank all of you who have contributed to our growing poetry library for at-risk teens in Coney Island. Thanks to your generosity, our shelves are filling with a wonderful variety of poetry books. I hope our story will inspire others to contribute as well. We now have over fifty books! 

I lead a poetry workshop for teenagers in Coney Island’s YWCA teen empowerment program through Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival, a literary nonprofit I founded. We meet at the Coney Island YWCA after-school program housed in the Rachel Carson High School in Brooklyn, NY. Parachute and the YWCA have been collaborating for over a year in order to offer the poetry workshop.  

A few weeks ago, I initiated a grass-roots project to  create a poetry section for the high school’s library, which, at the time had one poetry book. (One book!) My plan was to contact other poets, local presses, and those who had performed at Parachute’s annual festival and invite them to contribute books for a shelf at the YWCA and the school’s library.

I posted an announcement on my facebook page, sent  an email to all the wonderful poets who had read at Parachute in recent years, including poet, Matthea Harvey, who reposted my message which got picked up by the Best American Poetry blog, tweeted by them, retweeted by the Poetry Foundation. Within a few weeks books started pouring in from all over the nation and even from as far away as Canada and Spain! They are still arriving. Each day my mailbox is overflowing with books.

A sampling of donated volumes of poetry (photo (c) Amanda Deutch)

 

One of my goals in the writing workshop at the YWCA is to expose teenagers to poets whose voices the teenagers can identify with and perhaps shake up teenage notions of what poetry is and can be. They think all poetry has to rhyme and we are working on letting go of that idea.  We have read Frank O’Hara, Tracie Morris, Muriel Rukeyser, Diane DiPrima, Jennifer L. Knox and Matthea Harvey. “How did he do that? He’s got flow!” said student Maya upon reading Frank O’Hara’s “Steps.” On their own, the girls are reading Tupac Shakur and Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café.  In class, we have been writing “celebrity poems” based on chosen pop stars, such as Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj or Lil Wayne. You can read some of these on our virtual magazine, Teenage Fever Magazine  (www.teenagefevermag.tumblr.com)

The Poetry Lending Library project serves at least two distinct purposes: The teenagers get to read books by authors they would not otherwise encounter, and the poets get their books into the hands of new readers they might not otherwise reach. It’s really quite simple: symbiotic activism. The teenagers love the books; real actual “hold-in-your-hand” books. This couldn’t delight me more in an age of kindle, ipad, and nook. The students find the covers of each book we receive to be different and intriguing, and love that all the poems reveal a unique personality and life. While I may or may not be encouraging teenagers to become poets, I’m hopeful that I am fostering a love of poetry, language, and books that will empower them and serve them their entire lives. 

Won’t you take a few minutes to send a copy of your book to us? Would you like to have your books read by at-risk teens in NYC? If so, please send one (or two if you want them to go to the school's permanent collection as well as the after-school's) copy of any or all books you have authored. Feel free to sign it or leave a note for a teen. These books will really be appreciated by the teenagers. And if, through the magic of social media, this reaches you in a far-off place where your books are in a language other than English, send them along anyway. Thank you!

Please send your poetry books to:

Rachel Carson High School
YWCA Room 346
521 West Ave
Brooklyn NY 11224

Truly,

Amanda Deutch
Artistic Director
Parachute: The Coney Island Performance Festival

http://parachutepoetry.tumblr.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ParachuteFestival
http://parachuteconeyislandfestival.blogspot.com/

Parachute: the Coney Island Performance Festival is a non-profit, volunteer run organization. We invite you to make financial contributions, which help us keep doing what we are doing.  Every dollar helps us continue to offer free writing workshops for at-risk populations, an annual free literary festival, and projects such as this lending library. You can contribute here.

Happy Birthday Daneille Pafunda [by Anthony Madrid via facebook]

DANIELLE PAFUNDA (4/9)

I dunno what I should do. TURN LOOSE
The lightning and bring the thunda.
With a very happy birthday to
My friend Danielle Pafunda.

What God, what man, what hero, what you
HAVE JOINED let no man sunda.
With a very happy birthday to
My friend Danielle Pafunda.

Tίν' άνδρα, τίν' ήρωα, τίνα θεον,
RESONANTE Eoa tunditur unda,
An’ a very happy birthday to
My friend Danielle Pafunda.

This knock-off was written by somebody who
ADORES YOU and it’s no wunda.
With a very happy birthday to
My friend Danielle Pafunda.

tl;dr [by John Beer]

This is perhaps my favorite piece of conceptual writing.

 

***

Over the weekend I found myself in the judges' room for a high school Speech & Debate final (true story!). I asked one of the English teachers there whether poetry was a hard sell to her students, thinking I suppose of the oft-stated consensus that of all the genres poetry's the most resistant, the least popular, the swath of the textbook one rushes past to get to the plotty parts. "Not at all," she said, whether because they thrive on its intensity or simply through their tech- & hip-hop-enabled comfort with compression and linguistic multifariousness. “The problem is novels. It’s very hard to convince them that reading anything lengthy is worthwhile.”

 

***

What the villagers call that empty space of weeds, that grove or knoll where my mother was baptized. Not __________, but ___________.

 

Not церква but коcтьол, kościół, the word in the banished tongue.

 

Shibboleth?                [can’t hear you.]

Ear of corn?               [can’t make out the word.]

 

She coughs. The body’s own water pools in the crevice of her clavicle. The wind ripples the lake so shallow now that no fish can winter there.

 

(I are my ownenemymemory)

 

 

[river]

[flick]

[flicker]

 

(The Unmemntioable, Erin Moure, House of Anansi, 2012)

 

In addition to writing some of the most singular books of poetry of the last decade (2002’s O Cidadán, 2009’s Expeditions of a Chimaera with Oana Avasilichioaei, 2010’s O Resplandor, among others), Moure has published translations of the equally uncategorizable Galician poet Chus Pato, as well as a brilliant translation/reimagination of O Guardador de Rebanhos by Fernando Pessoa, or by his heteronym Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa famously recalibrated the task of the poet as the creation of personae rather than poems, conjuring the myriad personalities who then undertook the labor of drafting the writings associated with his name.

Moure gives the adventure of Pessoan heteronymity a political and sociolinguistic spin; as the above passage suggests, her work crosses and recrosses geographic and linguistic boundaries as it details its author’s encounters with real and imagined figures and events. Pato figures tangentially as a correspondent, while more central is the elusive Elisa Sampedrin, an authorial alter ego who appeared previously in O Resplandor. Sampedrin reflects upon Moure as Moure reflects upon the dark history that sent her own mother from the Ukraine to Canada in the first half of the last century.

Naturally enough, both Moure’s champions and her detractors tend to frame her work in relation to the post-structuralist theory that has informed avant-garde writing for almost two generations now. One will encounter citations of Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Agamben in her writing, and the passage above with its fragmentation and erasures invites assimilation to the familiar gestures of language and post-language writing.

But the heteronym is both an anticipation of and a deviation from the vertiginous deconstructions of later theory. Pessoa’s writings offer us a vision of identity plural and dispersed, circulating through the linguistic productions of a system of personae. But through imaginative investment the counterfeit becomes real, accruing an undeniable particularity. In Moure’s work, as well, the destabilization of identities and unsettling of comfortable reading habits goes hand-in-hand with the production of new and exhilarating reading possibilities, generated out of the incessant layering of linguistic strata, and thereby new existential possibilities. As Johanna Skibsrud puts it in an unusually perceptive reading of Moure, “hers is not an interest in language as a fact in itself..equally her intention is not to arrive at a sense of greater senselessness. Moure’s poetry is instead interested precisely in the ‘explosivity across membranes’ that E.S. represents in The Unmemntioable.”

What Moure’s work seems to call out for (and what Skibsrud’s reading to some degree attains) is a criticism that can trace out its processes of destabilization and reconfiguration. In particular, her writing manifests a kind of self-consciousness often associated with the “metafictional,” but which is intensified and qualitatively altered through the medium of lyric, as well as via her text’s multilingual slippages. So much of contemporary writing is sick with knowingness; Moure’s signal achievement is to parry the inescapable reflexivity of her poetry with a countervailing urge to unknowing.

 

***

 

This fall, Wave Books will publish the collection Poems (1962-1997) by Robert Lax, which I edited. Among other pieces, the book contains the entirety of Lax’s 1962 collection New Poems, which I consider one of the underread gems of 20^th-century American poetry. Here’s one poem from that collection:

 

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

never

 

How do you read a poem like this? How do you know when you’re finished with it?

One’s inner cynic might answer that it’s pretty easy to read, and even easier to be finished with. (Criticism often seems to launch from the premise that the poem is guilty until proven innocent, as though never being taken in is the highest virtue.)

“My kid could do that,” is the old and shamelessly philistine way of attacking art that dispenses with traditional conventions; variations on it persist in museums and journals to this day. To which Lax’s longtime friend Ad Reinhardt would respond, “Your kid must be a genius!” & he or she probably is.

 

***

 

“Imagine taking a college exam…clicking the ‘send’ button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly, your essay scored by a software program.”

Really, imagine it.

The loveliest bit of this story is the line that when everything in academia is automated, it’ll free faculty up “for other tasks.”

Light construction projects? Armed security? Fracking the campus subsurface?

Tonight at KGB: Major Jackson + Heather Christle

 

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Heather Christle + Major Jackson

 

Monday, April 8th, 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

 

Major Jackson's books of poems are Holding Company (2010, Norton) and Hoops (2006, Norton), both finalists for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press), which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.  Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

 

 

Heather Christle is the author of What Is Amazing (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Difficult Farm (Octopus Books, 2009), and The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books, 2011), which won the 2012 Believer Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in publications including Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and has also taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Emory University, where she was the 2009-2011 Poetry Writing Fellow. She is the Web Editor for jubilat, the coordinator of the Royal Society of Hadley for Improving Natural Knowledge at Flying Object, and frequently a writer in residence at the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. A native of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, she lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

 

 

 

Remaining Spring 2013 Schedule:

 

Apr 15   Lynn Melnick + Yona Harvey  

Apr 22   Sharon Olds + Michael Dickman   

Apr 29   Michael Klein + Will Schutt       

May 6    Glyn Maxwell + Louis Jenkins         

May 13  Sarah Arvio + David Kinloch 

May 20  Eileen Myles + Rebecca Wolff + Season Finale Party  

Acrobatics and Sumptuous Heavens [by Madge McKeithen]

 

photo: copyright Lawrence Schwartzwald

Everywhere people are longing for a deeper life.

Let’s hope some acrobat will come by

And give us a hint how to get into heaven.

Jan Karetnick, Marilyn Nelson, Lizza Rodriguez

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                   

 

 

 

Robert Bly, awarded the 2013 Frost Medal, read from his work to an enthusiastic overflow crowd at the Poetry Society of America’s 103^rd Annual Awards Ceremony hosted by Alice Quinn on April 5th. These closing lines, read toward the end of the evening, from Bly’s “Longing for the Acrobat” echoed Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s citation honoring the first reader, Lizza Rodriguez, the high school student winner of the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Award. Rodriguez and her teacher Jen Karetnick (pictured above with the 2012 Frost Medalist Marilyn Nelson) made the trip from Miami Shores, Fl, for the awards ceremony. Calvocoressi citing lines from Rodriguez’s award-winning poem,

I was dilly dialing

when the phone rang

then I ran out

like red roses 

wrote of her “perfect balance of formal rigor and imaginative acrobatics.” From Lizza Rodriguez’s reading to the last lines of “Wanting Sumptuous Heavens,” as Robert Bly, poet, teacher, preacher, reformer, editor, translator, theorist and champion of the work of many of his contemporaries took us through the sounds – grumbles, summer, thumbs, come, grumbling, comfortable, sumptuous  -- the evening was lively with words and talent and noisy with enthusiastic applause. Hardly a moment’s dip or lull. 

Ted Mathys

Ted Mathys’s poem “Vikings Did Not Have Horns on their Helmets” was the winner of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for a lyric poem that expresses a philosophical or epistemological concern.

Today the exception to the rule

  

that every rule has an exception

violated itself into a bright

metastasis of unfastening

while I rested my head against

aftermath…

In her citation honoring Ted Mathys, Alice Notely wrote, in part, “A said thing is only a said thing – though it may be true –but you can just as easily say the opposite.” Negations and reverses of the most pleasing sort, playful but not only, a poem to share with others, it ends (or perhaps doesn’t), with

 Lightning can strike the same place twice.

Lightning can strike the same place twice.

Elyse Fenton took the red-eye from her home in Portland, Oregon, to read from her manuscript Sweet Insurgent Friday night.

 …but after impact he opened

the door & walked away. Hello

tenacious earth. Sometimes

you have to practice crying uncle

for years to make it stick

Elyse Fenton

 

Of Elyse Fenton’s poems, which won the Alice Fay di Castagnola award for a manuscript-in-progress, Kevin Prufer wrote “they are alive to our historical moment, inspiring us to re-think our place in a constantly shifting political and ethical world.” Her manuscript-in-progress is now a manuscript out for consideration for publication.

Carol Light may have come farther than any of the other winners to attend the awards ceremony, flying in from Rome where she is teaching spring semester to receive the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award for original work, mid-career, without prior substantial recognition.

The sky is a bouquet of old news.

Its gap-toothed vendor was Italian;

his roses unfurl galaxies.

 

If history is a map of courage,

then the heart is made of helium.

 

Carol Light

Her poem “Hertzsprung-Russell” is part of her book Heaven From Steam – twenty-two skies and eighteen yets, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. David Wagoner, citing Carol Light’s work, wrote that she “writes out of the belief that…sound, rhythm, and meaning are of nearly equal importance in a poem…[and that she] is always using formal cadence instead of allowing it to over-control the rhythms of common speech.”

 

The life of the party slits its wrists. Its wrists

  slit their wrists. The wrist of the world

  wears a Patek Philippe Henry Graves

 

Supercomplication. Which is not a wristwatch but a pocket

  watch.

Nick Twemlow

Nick Twemlow’s “The Twenty-Four Complications” is from Palm Trees, the winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Timothy Liu, wrote in the award’s citation of this poet’s “verbal savvy, consequential wordplay, and cultural élan…a poetics that does not eschew the personal over the political or vice versa.”

 

 

 

 

Gray hairs

crowd out the black.

Not one of them

brings me wisdom.

 

Wrinkles

provide no armor.

I still quiver

to anyone's dart.

Naomi Replansky

Naomi Replansky, whose Collected Poems received the William Carlos Williams Award, spoke her poems to us, directly, looking at us, in a manner that generated a warm, vibrant intimacy. 

 

In the award citation, B. H. Fairchild said, “Ezra Pound noted that poetry severed from music atrophies, and since the earliest poems of her first book, Ring Song, in 1952, Replansky has become the master of a Blakean music radically unfashionable in its devotion to song-like meters…” Before the reading, the crowd included many Naomi Replansky admirers, long familiar with her work and delighted to join in the award’s expression of deep gratitude; after the reading, her fans numbered even more. Her “About Not Writing” is posted on the Poetry Society of America Website along with more complete poems of all of those honored, including those who could not attend the evening’s celebration: Micah Bateman, Greg Wrenn, Paula Bohince, Gary Young, and Lucia Perillo.

Martin Espada

 

Martin Espada, who shares the 2013 Shelley Memorial Award with Lucia Perillo, certainly did not sever the music. He read poems from The Trouble Ball, including “The Playboy Calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám” and “Isabel’s Corrido,” with these ending lines.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once

on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.

I kept a snapshot of the wedding; yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

 There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I’d do it again.

 

Strains from this last line resurfaced as Robert Bly read from “Ravens Hiding in a Shoe.”

Robert, you’ve wasted so much of your life

Sitting indoors to write poems. Would you

Do that again? I would, a thousand times.

With this poem, he settled into a conversational, call-and-response reading, the poet of solitude opening out to the community. “Is that true?” he would stop to ask the audience, read another line and then again, “Is that true?” Ted Mathys’s negations and reversals draw close to these lines, also from "Ravens Hiding in a Shoe."

Each sentence we speak to friends means the opposite

As well. Each time, we say, “I trust in God,” it means

God has already abandoned us a thousand times.

The audience’s response was enthusiastic – Yes. Yes. Yes.  to his “Is that true?” and then a prolonged No…in response to his amused query “Am – I – emphasizing – each -- word – too -- much?”

“Like Ezra Pound half a century earlier, Bly has centered himself in poetry and proceeded to radiate his energies out to nearly all corners of the world of letters,” wrote Askold Melnyczuk in his 1988 Partisan Review critique of Bly’s Selected Poems. His work, his many roles defy summation, making Billy Collins' Citation all the more impressive. As he sat to read from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey side-by-side with his daughter Mary holding the microphone, Robert Bly seemed at the heart of all that had gone on in the preceding hours, in the words, the tributes, the audience participation and enthusiasm. More than one person in the audience told me how Robert Bly’s work in poetry and prose had opened the door to poetry for them and led them on to other poets – Rilke, Rumi, Machado, Neruda. Several had attended events at which Robert Bly had read over the years around the country.

With a large number from his family in attendance and a packed room full of admiring poetry readers, Robert Bly read most lines more than once, sometimes repeating parts of lines. We went down into the words with him, into the poem at the word level.  Word by word.

And image by image. 

 

I do love Yeats’s fierceness

As he jumped into a poem,

And that lovely calm in my father’s

Hands, as he buttoned his coat.

                                            “I Have Daughters and I Have Sons" -- Robert Bly

 

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL in 2006 and at the Darien Library in 2009. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Utne Reader, The New York Times Book Review, and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School and blogs at madgemckeithen.com

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews

Review: The Collected Poems of Ai [by Sharon Preiss]

Ai’s single poetic form was the dramatic monologue. Her seven books published between 1973 and 2010, collected in a hefty Norton edition released in February of this year, comprise almost two hundred pieces – monologues all – written in voices as various, profound, and quixotic as JFK, James Dean, General Custer’s wife, and her own family ancestors. Rarely does she repeat a character, and her rich imaginings of their individual lives, thoughts, and speech sustained her entire poetic career.

Her earliest book, Cruelty, was published in 1973 when she was 26 and still fresh out of U Cal Irvine’s MFA program. The poems of this book are short, tight stanzas of concentrated hardscrabble, where labor, marriage, blood, dirt, loneliness and frustration, whirl themselves into evocative episodes of hard-luck and hard-living. These flint-like chips of poems, mostly hovering around 15-20 lines or so, have none of the well-known narrators or scenes that the future poems were to so famously develop over multiple pages, but their sharp scenes of spite, brutality, and despair sparked the fires of Ai’s following six volumes.

Here is the title poem in its entirety:

             The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat

            gleam in the dark.

            You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch.

            That won’t work either.

            Drinking ice water hasn’t,

            nor having the bedsprings snap fingers

            to help us keep rhythm.

            I’ve never once felt anything

            that might get close. Can’t you see?

            The thing I want most is hard,

            running toward my own teeth

            and it bites back.

 

Killing Floor, published in 1979, opens with the title poem, a three-part narrative that follows Leon Trotsky through Ai’s imaginings of his exile and nightmares of betrayal and assassination, from the Soviet Union into Mexico. The book establishes Ai’s movement toward appropriating the voices of known characters and the longer monologues that became her trademark. Not all her characters are known figures, in this or any of her subsequent volumes, but Killing Floor opens the door.

From the Japanese writers Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata discoursing on their work, their loves, their inner lives, to Lope de Aquirre, a 16^th century conquistador who dreams of El Dorado in the Amazon Basin but whose life ends in a familial murder/suicide in Venezuela, the stories are inspired and vivid. Ai’s gift is not so much as ventriloquist. While her vocabulary and diction do change some from poem to poem, the depth and strength of the poems derive from her ability to enter the heads and lives of her characters and articulate their thoughts and actions in intense and richly colored ways. Her two-part poem for Ira Hayes, the Native American Marine immortalized with six others in the iconic photo of the Iwo Jima flag-raising but who died an alcoholic death ten years later, finds him lying in a ditch, drunk on a Friday night, looking up to a moon, “the night hen’s yellow egg,” just before “a huge combat boot/punches a hole in the sky/and falls toward me.” Saturday, part two, finds Hayes pouring pepper into a cup of coffee “to put the fire out.” “I pass gin and excuses from hand to mouth,/but it’s me. It’s me./I’m the one dirty habit/I just can’t break.”

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book titles alone read like a list of Seven Deadlies – Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, Greed, Vice, Dread, No Surrender – and in each of the poems either the world is malevolent and the characters react accordingly, or the characters are so and the world is mirrored back in their baleful images. Ai’s only editorial note in all the books is at the start of 1991’s Fate, which, she states, “is about eroticism, politics, religion, and show business as tragicomedy, performed by women and men banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.” Even the Virgin Mary finds the world brutal and hostile as, in Fate’s title poem, she looks onto a scene of protestors at an abortion clinic, thinks of her own fated pregnancy, and sees an antiabortionist throw a rock that “descends like Christ/into the body of a woman,/who cannot defend herself/against the judgment of man and God,/for we have always been the receivers/of what is given without love or permission.” 

In 1999, Vice – a selection of poems from her previous books plus eighteen new poems – won the National Book Award. It’s after this, in her last two books, that Ai begins to more fully develop characters from her family history. As she was writing the poems for Dread, published in 2003, she had no way of knowing that she had only a short nine years left to her life, but it’s oddly fitting that, among the monologues written in the voices of, for example, World Trade Center first responders, JFK, Jr., and a disgraced high school teacher from Rapid City who falls in love with a beautiful prostitute who turns out to be a man, she reaches toward her own ancestors to put some definition on the story of her own life. Throughout her books, there have always been poems exploring the lives of freed slaves, Native Americans, and the deeply American conjugal joining of white, black, red, and other ethnicities, but now she begins to name names in her own mosaic lineage. She identifies herself as being “1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, ¼ Black, and 1/16 Irish.” What of the 1/16 that she doesn’t identify? Perhaps it’s this she’s working to reclaim in so many of these final poems.

While writing her final book, No Surrender, Ai knew she was dying of cancer, and she describes the
progression of one woman’s untreated breast cancer in the ultimate poem of the collection, the horrific Cancer Chronicles. Whether or not the poem describes any part of her own experience, one cannot say for sure. It’s always a dangerous thing to read too much autobiography into poems, and her imaginings of the late stages of the disease and the subject’s life imply that this is not her exact story. Nonetheless, after reading the entire collection of Ai’s work, there is a keen sense of the poet’s fearless stance in facing life’s ugly underbelly. This is the only book (aside from the new and selected Vice) that does not have a title poem. “No Surrender” was Ai’s battle cry, and the open-ended conviction of these words as the title of her last book is a fitting epitaph for this singular poet’s life and work.

John Beer, Guest Blogger April 8-12

This week we welcome John Beer as our guest blogger. John is the author of The Waste Land and Other Poems (Canarium, 2010), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. His chapbook Lucinda is just out from Spork Press, and he has edited Poems (1962-1997), forthcoming from Wave Books in the fall. He teaches creative writing at Portland State University.

Welcome, John.

-- sdh

Meet the Press: Karen Schubert in Conversation with David Hassler of Wick Poetry Center.

David Hassler

KS: The Wick Poetry Center isn’t exactly a press. Tell us what goes on in the Kingdom of Wick. 

DH: As one of the leading poetry centers in the United States, Wick has many roles in the university and community. You’re right—we’re not a press. We’ve been very fortunate to have a fantastic relationship with the Kent State University Press who each year publishes the winners of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the Chapbook Competition for Ohio Poets. We take great pride in working toward our mission of encouraging new voices and promoting opportunities for individuals and communities locally, regionally, and nationally. We also aim to engage emerging and established poets and poetry audiences through readings, publications, workshops, and scholarship opportunities.

 Another project of ours is Traveling Stanzas, a collaboration between the Wick Poetry Center and Glyphix design studio at Kent State. The award-winning series, now in its fourth year, combines the creative talents of KSU Visual Communication Design students with established poets, student writers (grades 3-12), health care providers, patients and veterans to encourage dialogue about the connection between art, writing and healing. 

 KS: How do you stay involved once the book is in hand?

DH: As I mentioned, the Kent State University Press publishes the winning manuscripts of our first book and chapbook series; I serve as the series editor for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize along with the judge. And Catherine Wing serves as the series editor for the Chapbook Competition for Ohio Poets. We also really value our Wick authors and judges, and try to follow their careers after Wick. One of the unique things about the first book contest is that not only does KSU Press publish the winning manuscript, but we also bring the winning poet and judge to give a reading on campus the fall that their book is released. The winner stays in Kent for a week and leads a poetry workshop for undergraduate students at Kent State. We similarly showcase our wonderful chapbook winners, by bringing both the student winner and open winner to give a reading on campus and meet with classes.

 KS: Is there a Wick aesthetic?

 DH: No. Our First Book contest is judged each year by a different nationally prominent poet. These final judges have a wide range of aesthetics which is reflected in our series. Similarly, the Wick Chapbook series also has a terrific range of styles in its authors.

 KS: The story of your conception is heartbreaking and also wonderful.

 DH: Yes, the Wick Poetry Center is a memorial program that was established out of a deep family loss. Robert and Walter Wick each lost their oldest teenage sons, Stan and Tom, in car accidents seven years apart. In 1984, Robert and Walter established a Wick poetry scholarship at Kent State in memory of their sons. When Maggie Anderson was hired to teach poetry at Kent State in 1989, she took notice of this endowment and began to grow the program, creating a reading series first, and then an Ohio chapbook contest and a national First Book contest. It has continued to evolve and grow and expand over the years with the enthusiastic support and active participation of the Wick family. Robert and Walter often say that the work of the Wick Center transforms their unspeakable loss into a meaningful gain for so many other emerging writers who are given opportunities that Stan and Tom could not have.

 KS: You have an anniversary coming up!

 DH: It’s hard to believe, but we have our 30th anniversary coming up next year. Our planning committee is beginning to meet and brainstorm ideas for making it a truly poetic weekend! We will be inviting back to Kent as many former judges, Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize-winners, and chapbook winners that can make the trip to Ohio in the fall of 2014. Among them are former U.S. Poet Laureates, acclaimed teachers and arts administrators, professors and students of subjects far and wide. We are planning readings, lectures, and other celebratory events, so stay tuned! And to make the celebrations even more spectacular, we will be able to host many of the events in our new location and park on the University esplanade in the newly revitalized downtown Kent.

KS: Who are the people making Wick work? What kinds of thing have Wick students and interns gone on to do?

DH: As it has been for years, Wick’s success is bolstered by an array of talented staff, graduate fellows, interns, and collaborators at the university and surrounding community. I was fortunate to follow in the footsteps of our renowned first captain, Maggie Anderson. And since then have built a robust team with strengths in business, communications, creative writing, outreach and digital initiatives, etc., who all work tirelessly toward our center’s mission of bringing poetry from acclaimed writers and everyday people to the masses.

Wick students and interns have gone on to a range of careers in not-for-profit arts administration, and teaching and administration in primary and higher education. Many are published authors. I couldn’t be more proud of my teams past and present.

KS: How did you get involved with the Poetry Center?

DH: I was first given encouragement and support from Wick, just as so many other emerging writers. I was lucky to win the Ohio chapbook contest while I was an MFA student at Bowling Green State University. The publication of my chapbook, Sabisihi: poems from Japan was hugely important in my career because it got me a job working for the Ohio Arts Council as a poet-in-the-schools the following year. I spent ten years driving around Ohio teaching poetry residencies for all ages in all different kinds of schools and communities. That experience was invaluable to me, and in the late 90s Maggie Anderson contracted me part-time to develop an outreach program for Wick. In 2004, I was hired full-time as the Program and Outreach Director.

KS: A friend recently noted that there is a strong creative writing force in Ohio, and I’d noticed that about other places that might seem unlikely – Iowa, Kentucky, Alabama – but had taken my own state for granted. Do you have any theories about why there is so much good writing coming out of Ohio?

DH: I think Kent and northeast Ohio in general is a place of deep listening and creative force that perhaps has been fed and charged by the wounds we have sustained as a community: the May 4^th shootings in 1970, the Cuyahoga River catching fire in 1969 in Cleveland, and other struggles within our communities. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like art, not just writing, but all forms of art, is so often an attempt to make sense out of what troubles us. There seems to be a deep conscience in this area. It’s fertile ground for poetry and all art. That, and, of course, our cloudy skies. We have to rely on our inner resources, our “inner weather.”

 KS: Any dreams or future projects in the pipeline?

 DH: As a matter of fact, yes—the Wick Poetry Center is embarking on perhaps its most exciting era yet! We are in the process of relocating onto the University Esplanade close to an exciting, revived downtown Kent and adjacent to a new park that will showcase community voices and serve as an outdoor gathering space. The proposed new location for the Wick Poetry Center is a historic home and former residence of Kent State’s first female faculty member, informally called the “May Prentice House.” The University is relocating the house onto the new esplanade, which weaves through the university and connects to downtown Kent.

 Another exciting feature of our relocation is an interactive "poetry park" that will sit adjacent to our new home. This inviting green space will be centrally located on the esplanade and will feature an outdoor gallery which will showcase the award-winning Traveling Stanzas posters; and also serve as a gathering space for quiet reflection or public events, performances, and classroom visits. As a community landmark, the poetry park will be a source of great pride for town and gown and become a destination point for community members, local schools’ writing classes, and participants in poetry writing outreach programs.

Karen Schubert's work appears or is forthcoming in MiPOesias, quickly, Ohio Poetry Anthology, Conte and others. She is the recipient of a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and a 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts. Her third chapbook I Left My Wings on a Chair  won the Wick Poetry Center chapbook contest and is forthcoming from Kent State Press in 2014. She teaches English at Youngstown State.

Thanks for the Memory (It's lyricist Leo Robin's birthday!)

 

Celebrate 25 Years of The Best American Poetry: Launch Reading on April 11 in NYC

Available for pre-order:

 Launch readings hosted by David Lehman and Robert Pinsky and featuring poets included in this volume:

April 11, 7:00 PM:  Tishman Auditorium, Alvin Johnson/J. M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY. With Robert Pinsky, David Lehman,  Mark Doty, Edward Hirsch, Richard Howard, Marie Howe, Major Jackson, Lawrence Joseph, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sarah Manguso, J.D. McClatchy, Paul Muldoon, Meghan O'Rourke, Tom Sleigh, Susan Wheeler, and C. K. Williams. Details here.

<<<

from Donna Seaman's review in Booklist:

Each year a new volume in the Best American Poetry series, founded by poet Lehman, appears, each edited by a distinguished American poet, the likes of A. R. Ammons and Amy Gerstler. To celebrate the series' twenty-fifth anniversary, Lehman asked former poet laureate Pinsky to select 100 "best of the best." The result is a concentrated, high-caliber, and exhilarating overview of the intensity and artistry that have made American poetry so splendidly varied and vital since 1988. . . . Pinsky, an inspired poetry advocate, explains that his criteria were "ear, imagination, and urgency". . .Given the depth of Lehman's and Pinsky's opening essays and the concise poet biographies and the poet's original statements about the writing of the poems, this is an anthology of broad scope, serious pleasure, and invaluable illumination.
>>>

-- sdh

Life in Full: A Tribute to Ruth Stone by Sydney Lea

It has been a pleasure to be guest blogger on the BestAmPo site, and interesting to gather responses to my comments. (There were a couple of instances in which I was criticized for saying things I never said, but in my experience that’s the norm.)

For this final post, perhaps because I just saw Dustin Hoffman’s debut film as a director, Quartet, which achingly portrays the trials of senescence; for this last commentary, I want to pay a brief and inadequate tribute to Ruth Stone, my predecessor as Vermont Poet Laureate.

Ms. Stone was remarkable in every way: until the last of her 96 years, and despite being all but completely blind, the woman still generated some of America’s most compelling poetry.

Compared to her, I’m a mere youngster, just past 70. And yet, like anyone blessed to live past middle life, I feel a profounder sense of loss with every year: dear friends and family die; faculties and physical resources fade; I anticipate more funerals than weddings. I scarcely expect to know a life-span like Ruth’s, but if I did, such losses as I have known up to now would surely have lodged themselves among the multitude that followed.

It is entirely understandable, then, that at her great age Ruth Stone should have been a chronicler of sorrow; but in fact she suffered gut-wrenching loss even before she reached 50. Her husband committed suicide in 1959, and to one extent or another, we sense the man’s presence (or rather his absence) in all his companion’s work. She once described her production as “love poems, all written to a dead man.” Consider the following:

 

Poems

 

When you come back to me
it will be crow time
and flycatcher time,
with rising spirals of gnats
between the apple trees.
Every weed will be quadrupled,
coarse, welcoming
and spine-tipped.
The crows, their black flapping
bodies, their long calling
toward the mountain;
relatives, like mine,
ambivalent, eye-hooded;
hooting and tearing.
And you will take me in
to your fractal meaningless
babble; the quick of my mouth,
the madness of my tongue.

 

By my reading, the speaker here finds herself looking forward from winter to the warmer seasons so brilliantly evoked by her meticulous attention to natural detail.  That will be a fecund time, a time when poems returns to her; and yet “when you come back to me” seems poignantly to suggest the return as well of an absent lover. The tragic subtext here is that the human “you” will not come back after all, that the speaker must settle for what she calls “fractal meaningless/babble.”

Lyric poetry, however, more than any other mode of discourse, can contain opposite impulses without lapsing into mere self-contradiction. While this is, yes, another Stone poem about grief and loss, and about the resulting erasure of meaning, it’s also about “the quick of my mouth,” the life-force that this valiant woman enacted by means of her own eloquent speech.  The “madness of my tongue” was the madness of desolation –but also of exhilaration. The reader can all but hear the sound of spring freshets in her diction.

For me, “Poems” captures in very short span what it is to be human. Our lives do not consist of a simple good day/bad day dialectic; for as long as we draw breath, we will experience pain and fulfillment simultaneously.

Ms. Stone invited my admiration and gratitude: the very music of a phrase like  “fractal meaningless/babble” makes me feel more alive, no matter the losses that I, like anyone else, have known, and that I, like anyone else, am bound to know further.

 

 

 

 

The Hidden Allegory by Sydney Lea

I’ve been writing  newspaper column for five regional papers ever since January of 2012, when my stint as Vermont Poet Laureate began. A number of people have asked if I’ll ever present the thoughts I’ve offered there in book form. That seems unlikely. I doubt any publisher would sponsor a volume consisting of one- and two-page essays.

 

I am nonetheless honored by these expressions of interest –and a bit surprised: a late-comer to poetry as a mode of inquiry, which seems a reasonable way to describe it, I still find it remarkable that readers should be at all concerned with my opinions about it.

Still, I will self-advertise to the extent of saying that a book of literary criticism by my hand, A Hundred Himalayas: Essays on Life and Literature, was published last autumn by the University of Michigan Press. Its essays are more expansive than these have been, and they cover a span not of one and a half but of almost forty years.

 

In those four decades, I’ve been both teacher and poet, each function a blessing to me, and furthermore, I hope, honorable pursuits. In selecting essays for the book, however, I confess I had a qualm or two. That, I concluded, accounted for my having so long deferred their presentation between covers.

 

Why the qualms? I’ve already hinted at one reason: my depressive’s sense that no one would be much interested in my opinions and speculations. But that was less compelling a reason than another, namely the ambivalence I feel even about old-fashioned practical criticism (not to mention the supersonic literary-theoretical sort), whether my own or others’. Not that I don’t enjoy it  –I do, a lot– but that I sense the critic’s grasp must always fall short. Or rather, it often becomes so inventive that it’s less a response to any given text than it is its own hybrid art form. The critic’s response, that is, turns primarily into something on his or her mind, which is likely altogether different from what the author had on his or her mind.

 

But what does any author have in mind?

 

A common question I’ve heard over the years, from aspirant commentator, person-in-the-street, and academic specialist alike, is “What is the poet trying to say?” It’s as if that author had some terrible throat disease. There’s a way in which a good poem is itself what it is trying to say, in which the poem is its own “meaning.”

 

And yet, when all is said and done, that meaning does in some respects remain obscure. When the obscurity is part of its design I grow impatient with it, but even if the poem seeks precision and lucidity, if it has anything going for it, it is surely at least other than one-dimensional. No translation of its “ideas” will account for its power.

 

Truth is, I believe that an ambitious poem will possess its own hidden allegory, an allegory hidden not only from the critic but also from the author. Oh, that author may tell you what gave rise to this or that piece of writing, and he or she may do so in entirely good faith. But I insist that his or her prose explication of the poem’s origins must always be far less than complete. In my own case, for example, I may claim that a recent and as yet unpublished poem was tripped off by my observing a particularly outsized oak leaf, and the claim is at once “true” and scandalously insufficient. The poem does somehow illuminate aspects of my own spirit that I didn’t know were there, but it is powerless to render them in full. Yes, I noticed that oak leaf. But what in me turned it into such a big deal (at least in my own heart)? I confess I don’t know. Why, say, should that leaf have arrested my attention more than further recent news of drought’s effects on a part of Kansas that I have come to love? Why more than my oldest grand child’s recent fifth birthday? I don’t know, and I don’t know.

 

Let me illustrate where I’m going by reference to another example from my work, which it took me a long time to comprehend even in part. In the early eighties, my younger brother died suddenly of an aneurysm. He was barely into his thirties, so needless to say, this catastrophe was just that, coming, so it seemed, out of nowhere. One unsurprising effect on me was a rather protracted abandonment of poetry. What, I wondered, was the point of “art” in face of something against which it would forever be ineffective?

 

Six months passed. I was out hiking with my dogs. One of them came upon some piece of rotten nastiness on the woods-floor and, doglike, began to roll in it. This put me in mind of a situation which by then was well behind me. Five years before, a certain local clan had gutted a deer right across from where my family lived, leaving the guts there to putrefy. I was and am a hunter, so it was not the kill that bothered me; it was that they would leave that mess for my dogs to gobble up and, to put it genteelly, to redeposit inside our house.

 

The clan in question was a hard-luck, hard-living kind. One of the sons would shortly die in a hideous car crash; another had beaten a neighbor to death during a drunken party, and had only lately been sprung from behind bars. In a word, these were not men to whom, if you had any sense, you whined. I let the whole matter pass, having scooped up the deer’s paunch and hauled it deep into the woods several miles away. In that moment, however, I imagined what might have happened if I had complained, imagined how an escalating controversy between their family and my own would have turned out.

 

When I got home, I sat at my desk, the itch to write having seemed to return. I then wrote a poem called “The Feud,” in which I played out that fantasy of violent vengeance. When I typed the last word, I sat back, my body literally shaking.  The poem had ended up at fifteen typescript pages– which I wrote in an hour, and, uncharacteristically, revised almost not at all before publication. Once I found the almost laughably simple narrative scheme –they do something, I retaliate; I do something, they retaliate– the poem appeared to write itself.

 

 

Being a good Puritan, of course, I was certain that anything that came so quickly could not be any good. As the cliché has it, I hadn’t “earned” it. And yet various confidants pronounced “The Feud” one of the best things I’d accomplished.

 

Now here was the sort of hidden allegory I’ve referred to, though it took me about eight more years to see it, though I’m sure I still see it incompletely.

 

The relationship between the I of the poem and its hardscrabble antagonists was very much like my actual relationship to my late brother. We were the closest of five siblings in age, and were the closest otherwise too. And the most adversarial. I was something of a scholar and an athlete, which caused him to construe both those endowments as bogus and even odious. As I understood upon his tragic death, my smug sense of myself as his superior was much akin to the self-styled decent-honest-God-fearing narrator’s sense of himself vis-à-vis the unfortunate neighbors with whom he feuded. At the resolution of the poem, he has an epiphany: namely that all the virtues he has ascribed to himself are in fact paltry as measured against the grand moral stakes of his community, never mind of the universe.

 

The poem came so quickly, I now believe, because without even knowing it, I had for six months, so to speak, been doing research for it; indeed, I had been doing that research all through the course of the life I’d shared with my poor brother.

 

How would a pile of guts have led to such an insight? I still don’t know. And even as I present this plausible account of what my own hidden allegory was, I am conscious that even after thirty years I have at best decoded a mere fraction of it. So don’t tax yourself if you feel that you often don’t “get” this or that poem. You have a lot of company, even among poetry’s practitioners.

Introducing the Orchestra and its Creatures [by Lera Auerbach]

 

 

•  Orchestra: democratic dictatorship.

•  Piccolo flute: ears’ toothpick.

•  Piccolo’s passages: scraping of the nervous system.

•  Flute: skeleton of an exotic bird.

•  Flute in the low register: unheard of.

•  Alto flute: melted flute.

•  Bass flute: imaginary friend that makes an occasional imaginary appearance.

•  Block flute: a child’s toy, requiring a highly specialized professional to perform.

•  Oboe: permanently out-of-tune instrument, so much so that the rest of the orchestra has to tune to it.

•  Oboist: a man who always tastes his instrument before playing it.

•  First clarinet: exhibitionist of circular breathing.

•  Bass clarinet: unfunny bassoon.

•  Bassoon: royal jester.

•  Contrabassoon: grandfather of the royal jester.

•  Contrabassoon’s staccato: old king’s farts.

•  French horns: cellos of the brass section with violinists’ ambitions.

•  Trombones: throw a glissando at them and see what happens.

•  Bass trombone: Mr. Macho Machissimo, married to Mrs. Tuba.

•  Tuba: the golden halo of the orchestra.

•  Mute for the tuba: Wouldn’t you wish to have one for your spouse?

•  Tuba’s frullato: time for dinner.

•  Orchestral pianist: percussionist who cannot count.

•  Percussion section: the brains of the orchestra.

•  Timpanist: arrogant percussionist.

•  Harp: amplifier of silence.

•  Harpist: harpy in disguise.

•  Harp: undressed piano.

•  Piano: a coffin for a harp.

•  Piano: 88 keys for an unlocked door.

•  Violin: prima donna.

•  Cello: soul of the orchestra.

•  Contrabass section: a mythological tortoise on which the world is built.

On Awful Poetry by Sydney Lea

-->

            I was at a gathering not long ago –the venue isn’t important– when I heard a soldier recite a poem. He’d been struggling after getting home, and small wonder: twice deployed to Afghanistan, he’d also been twice wounded, one of those times pretty critically. He told us that the poem he gave us had kept him going through several horrific ordeals.

             I think the poem was called “Hope.” It was awful.

             For all its clichés and bromides, however, that poem had been a literal life-saver for the man, so by what right do I sneer at it?

            Driving home after that get-together where I heard the GI, I got to thinking back some twenty years, when my wife and I were sitting one evening in a backcountry restaurant. Apart from us, there were only three patrons: a mother, her adult daughter, and her son-in-law. The daughter had composed a poem for her mom’s birthday, and we couldn’t help overhearing it. That poem too was awful.

            But again, how do we claim the superiority of “high art”?  

            Such a matter provides much food for thought, no? I mean to avoid strong opinionation, to make clear that my judgments are that, period: my judgments, hence not ones with any special authority. So if I ask you to consider quality vs. awfulness here, I mean primarily to raise an issue, not to offer some pat and prescriptive solution to it myself; I’m far from convinced that one is available.

            The soldier and the daughter poet moved their listeners, certainly, more than many of the recent (and to me inscrutable) I have seen in print. 

            What do we make of that?

 

Robert Pinsky on Radio Boston: The "weird majesty" of American poetry

Former US Poet Laureate and Guest Editor of The Best of the Best American Poetry Robert Pinsky in the WBUR studios. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Listen to the program and read excerpts from The Best of the Best American Poetry here.  

Join Robert Pinsky at the first launch reading to celebrate 25 years of The Best American Poetry:  April 4, 6:00 PM, Boston, MA:  Metcalf Building, George Sherman Union, 775 Commonwealth Avenue, Second Floor, Boston, MA. With David Lehman, Frank Bidart, Carl Phillips, Lloyd Schwartz, Charles Simic, Rosanna Warren, and Franz Wright.   Details here.

-- sdh

In Memoriam Robert Siegel by Sydney Lea

 

Pool by the Sheep Gate

 

He’d been lying there most of his life.

When the angel troubled the water, he couldn’t move

fast enough to be first.  He had no wife

or brother to carry him: no one that love,

 

a sense of justice, or pity moved to the task.

So when the wonderworker came, he was resigned

again to seeing someone else cured. He didn’t ask,

even when the healer looked him in the eye

 

and inquired if he wished to be healed–

not a strange question, considering his vocation

of living in hope denied: he was a professional

at it, with status and a certain reputation.

 

Take up your bed.... He obeyed before he thought,

luckily, of all he’d have to learn to live without.

 

 

This poem is based on a passage from the gospel of John, in which Jesus heals a lame man who has never been able to reach the healing pool by the sheep gate, precisely because he is crippled. It offers an interesting perspective: it suggests, yes, the power of Christ as seen by a committed Christian; but it also makes a reader ponder the fact that human beings can get attached to their own misfortunes, that a depressed state of mind can, for some, become a luxury– which the man healed here will have to do without.

The poem seems excellent to me. It was written by my friend of over forty years, Robert Siegel. Cancer claimed Bob’s life a few months back, and I will miss him, as poetry will. Bob had faced his disease with valor and with faith.

Thinking on his passing led me also to think, scarcely for the first time, about poetic reputation, about which I have never much been concerned. But renown was even less crucial to Bob Siegel, in part because of the faith I just mentioned. Worldly fame had to be relatively inconsequential to him.

Bob had a distinguished career: I knew him first at Dartmouth, from which, as poets, we were both axed, creative work not passing for real publication back in those days. (It’s a very different matter there now, thanks in no small part to the efforts of my friend, the wonderful poet Cleopatra Mathis.) He went on to teach at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, where he established its MFA program. He published nine books of poems, gathered numerous awards and fellowships, and enjoyed real esteem as a teacher.

But Bob was under-recognized as a poet (though the phrase, of course, sounds redundant: after all, an immensely successful book of poems will sell fewer copies than, say, a mediocre pro baseball team will sell tickets to a given game). I suspect that his relatively small reputation had to do with his lifelong, deeply committed Christianity.

The consensual view of Ivy League liberals (among which –full disclosure– I must be numbered): the consensual view of such folk, whose influence on too much of our public dialogue strikes me as disproportionate, dismisses the religious perspective, often  rancorously, sometimes insultingly. My own Christianity is far more heterodox than Bob’s ever was, yet I have frequently had to bite my lip among northeastern “progressives” while they lampoon my beliefs.

It turns out that for the self-styled enlightened ones, religionists are the only remaining group in western culture toward whom it seems not merely okay but also commendable to practice intolerance. Men and women who wouldn’t dream of slurring an ethnic community or those with an alternate sexual identity– indeed, people who, like me, would lambaste anyone who did so as a bigot– feel free to see all people of faith as one and the same... and as fair game for mockery or debasement.

In short, it appears that we needn’t reject blanket judgment on any given group of people; rather, we must be sure that we make that judgment on the right group of people. If we honor that principle, you see, we are not narrow-minded. We can say whatever we want about these undesirables.

We must despise orthodoxies...unless they are our own.

But don’t our own orthodoxies, as much as anyone else’s, close us off, say, from a poem as deft and challenging as “Pool by the Sheep Gate”?

Monday Comics with Nin Andrews

Tonight at KGB: Jackie Clark + Adam Fitzgerald

 

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

 

Jackie Clark + Adam Fitzgerald

 

Monday, April 1st, 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

Jackie Clark's first book of poems is Aphoria, from Brooklyn Arts Press.  She is also the author of three chapbooks, I Live Here Now (Lame House Press), Red Fortress (H_NGM_N) and Office Work (Greying Ghost).  The series editor of Poets off Poetry on Coldfront, a monthly series where poets write about music, she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the New Jersey State Council of the Arts. She lives in Jersey City and can be found online at http://nohelpforthat.com

 

 

Adam Fitzgerald is a New York City based poet, editor and teacher. He is founding editor of the poetry journal Maggy, and the small artisan press Monk Books that has published Mark Strand (prose poems and artworks) and Bernadette Mayer (translations of Catullus introduced by Dorothea Lasky). In 2007, he completed a Masters while editing two unpublished essays of John Ashbery on W.H. Auden and Henry Green at Boston University’s Editorial Institute. In 2010, he received his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in Poetry. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in A Public Space, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. Currently, he adjunct professes in literature and creative writing at Rutgers University and The New School. He lives in a pea-sized studio in the East Village. His debut collection of poetry, The Late Parade, will be published by W.W. Norton’s Liveright imprint in June 2013.

Free Verse Vs. Formalism: A Recipe for Tedium by Sydney Lea

Traveling around my little home state as its poet laureate, I’ve especially enjoyed that audience members outside academia tend to ask truly basic questions, which after all represent concerns that everyone feels on contemplating a poem for the first time: who’s talking? why? where? Too much current poetry can’t answer those questions on the page, and even as a lifelong lover of poetry, I turn away from them, conscious of my biological clock’s ticking.

But in fact the most frequent questions I hear involve form and meter. There are those who wonder if something can be called poetry if it does not have a regular meter, regular stanzaic shape, and often as not, a rhyme scheme. A quick reference, say, to Paradise Lost or the Hebrew Bible’s Psalms usually makes the point that needs making in this regard.

Now for the most part I happen to be something of  a formalist myself (though I suspect and even hope this is unobvious when I read, because I pause in my recitation when the grammar does, not when a line does). I even use a goodly amount of rhyme and half-rhyme. And yet I employ these tools merely because they enable me, not because they represent capital-P Poetry. Indeed, I steadfastly refuse to grind any ax in the free verse/formal verse debate, since it seems to make advocates on either side suddenly go brain-dead. Of course poetry can exist in an unrhymed and unmetered format: consider our great Walt Whitman. Of course poetry can be formally constrained without being “academic”: never mind my own small example; consider Robert Frost, a die-hard formalist...who managed to capture the sound of actual speech far more effectively than a free-verser like Ezra Pound ever did.

The passionate free-verse partisans may still believe that their mode is anti-establishment, which would of course be the truth– if today were 1920; since about then, free verse has reigned supreme in virtually every academic MFA program and among most noted poets. It is the establishment practice. But then that other sect of blind debaters, formal fundamentalists, will allege that free verse shows sloppy thinking, shoddy technique – as if that applied, say, to Robert Lowell or, more contemporarily, to Louise Gluck. Taking an equal and opposite stab, the free-verse crusaders will impute coldness, sexual frigidity, political reaction, and – again – “academicism” to formalist delivery -- as if any of these charges were relevant to the giants of the twelve-bar Delta blues, a mode that is surely America’s greatest formal contribution to world culture, and, I would argue, one that pervades our poetry even when practitioners are unaware of that effect. And how does such a judgment fit, say, Marilyn Hacker?

And so back and forth the ranters will go for hours, wading through idiocy all the while.

As I hear the free vs. formal debate rehearsed, I am too depressingly reminded of political dialogue in our day. I am never shocked by the slogans on either side of the liberal/conservative divide. It’s as though there were no real need for any of us to look at a given issue from more angles than just one: we liberals are sure we already know what the conservatives are going to promote; but we fail to see how perfectly predictable our own thinking is. And the conservatives have us pegged as well, without needing to hear us out.

When I was appointed Vermont’s state poet, I claimed in my address that a little humility never hurt anyone. The humble but crucial questions I encounter at the state’s libraries assure me that there remain at least a few open minds in the nation.