The Best American Poetry

Re-Visiting "The Reaper" [by Daniel Westover]

When I applied to the MFA program at McNeese State, the application process was straightforward: you sent some poetry or some fiction, and you either got a phone call or you didn’t. Test scores, previous publications, and GPA didn’t factor in. I sent the only six poems I had written. They were dreadful imitations of what little I had read, something like a mash-up of Robert Frost and William Stafford, but any grain of potential within them can be attributed to a gifted teacher, Peter Makuck, who taught my undergraduate poetry workshop with remarkable dignity and discernment. When I speak to poets about how they came to be writers, there are as many different stories as there are poets, but it is worth noting, especially in a climate where educators are increasingly devalued, that most of their stories feature an inspired teacher.

I arrived in Louisiana hungry for direction. I spent every spare minute in the Frazar Memorial Library consuming collections, quarterlies, and criticism. I read every poem in A. Poulin Jr.’s Contemporary American Poetry anthology and then started it again. On my third time through, the binding broke, and I was afraid to tell the librarian (I had no money to buy it, and there was no way I was letting them pull it), so I bound it together with rubber bands and, when I wasn’t reading it, hid it on the Government Documents floor. (There was never anyone on the Government Documents floor).

One night while looking through old magazines, I discovered one called The Reaper, which Mark Jarman and Robert McDowell had edited in the 1980s. I liked it immediately. The eponymous Reaper was an imaginary personality who wrote criticism, conducted interviews, and issued manifestos. He (She? It?) condemned the obfuscating nature of contemporary poetry and argued for a return to narrative. Narrative was the genre I found easiest to understand, so I was seduced by excerpts like these:

Navel gazers and mannerists, their time is running out. Their poems, too long even when they are short, full of embarrassing lines that “context” is supposed to justify, confirm the suspicion that our poets just aren’t listening to their language anymore. Editors and critics aren’t listening much, either. Despite their best, red-faced efforts, their favorite gods—inaccuracy, bathos, sentimentality, posturing, evasion—wither at the sound of The Reaper’s whetstone singing.

The Reaper maintains that both the accurate image and the narrative line, two determining factors of the poem’s shapeliness, have been keenly honed and kept sharp by the poets included here, whereas many of their counterparts, forgetting these necessities, have wandered into a formless swamp where only the skunk cabbage of solipsistic meditation breeds, with its cloying flowers.

Reading this again, I see why it appealed to me so much. The unabashed confidence was attractive to a writer who had no confidence, and the sardonic tone made me feel better about the fact that I didn’t understand a great deal of what I was reading. It gave me permission to dismiss the difficult stuff. If I couldn’t understand a poem, it must be the poet’s fault. There were millions of poems in the world; I shouldn’t waste my time with the inaccessible.

I also liked that The Reaper gave me rules to follow. I needed rules. Poetry was this big thing that I really wanted to write, and I needed someone to tell me how. I wanted an instruction manual. I found one, of sorts, in the third issue of the magazine, which included “The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands.” Technically this was as much a list of what not to do as it was an instruction manual, but I took it as gospel, and like any convert to the true faith I also became an evangelist. I remember making photocopies for my peers in the writing program and spreading the good word of The Reaper, The New Narrative School, and Story Line Press. (I’m poking fun at myself here, not The Reaper.) 

This past week I pulled out my copy of The Reaper: Essays (selections from the magazine collected in a single volume) because I was curious to see how I would react to what I had once admired so much. I am going to share some of those reactions here, hoping that others might find them worthwhile, or at least interesting, even if they may disagree. Specifically, I want to revisit “The Reaper’s Non-negotiable Demands,” which are:

1. Take prosody off the hit list.

2. Stop calling formless writing poetry.

3. Accuracy, at all costs.

4. No emotion without narrative.

5. No more meditating on the meditation.

6. No more poems about poetry.

7. No more irresponsibility of expression.

8. Raze the House of Fashion.

9. Dismantle the Office of Translation.

10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.

I will briefly summarize the arguments associated with each of these demands. Each item from the list is in bold, followed by an italicized summary of what The Reaper says about it. Beneath each summary is my present reaction.

 1.    Take prosody off the hit list.

 The major defect of contemporary poetry is that it consists of artless, chopped sentences, with no sense of form. Attention to the line is lost. A knowledge of prosody should be used to exclude that which is not poetry rather than describe everything that purports to be.

 It was Pound, in his own list of demands, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste,” who warned, “Don’t think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.” That’s still good advice. But I don’t think there has ever really been an anti-prosody faction among serious poets. On the contrary, most poets care a great deal about their craft. Yes, I’ve taught plenty of students who think that feeling the poem is all that matters, but they outgrow this. And even though I was not writing poetry in the 1980s, I’ve read plenty of poetry and criticism from that time, and I’ve never encountered anything resembling a hit list, real or figurative. The Reaper also contends that the poetic line has been compromised. I agree with that contention. But is that such a terrible thing? Over time, the poetic line has gradually become less determinate. We no longer require a specific number of feet, syllables or stresses in a given line. We do not ask poets to capitalize the first word of every line, or to mark line endings sonically with rhyme, as Dr. Johnson required when he called for “every verse unmingled with another as a distant system of sounds.” This is one area in which I’ve changed my thinking significantly since first encountering The Reaper. At the time I believed in “line integrity,” a term often used by formalist critics. In general, it suggests a preference for line autonomy. That is, lines should regularly be broken at natural pauses in syntax or points of punctuation, with non-syntactical breaks being employed only for occasional rhetorical effects—surprise, emphasis, etc. The idea is that when pauses bookend a line, they establish boundaries which, especially in the absence of meter, syllable count or any other strictly measurable unit, give the line an integrity it would otherwise lack. However, I have come to believe that arguments such as these disregard basic fact: the end of a printed line is a boundary. Indeed, it is the only boundary that allows enjambment to function at all. I have seen lineated texts that I would describe as chopped prose, but I have also seen many poems that use systematic enjambment—degrees of enjambment, or what John Hollander calls “Sense Variously Drawn Out”—in artful ways. The final claim in this section is that prosody should be used to exclude non-poems. That sounds like a hit list.

 2.    Stop calling formless writing poetry.

 Not every grouping of four lines is a quatrain. Fourteen lines do not a sonnet make. A poetic form is more than how the words are placed on a page. If anything is allowed, then nothing is selective. 

 I like it when poets play with inherited forms—Hopkins’s curtal sonnets, to name one magnificent example. Why shouldn’t a poet blend rhyme and meter with heavily enjambed free verse, like Patrick Kavanagh does in The Great Hunger? Why shouldn’t she “roughen” the villanelle by slightly altering the repeating lines, as Elizabeth Bishop does in “One Art”? To me, this is a way of reinvigorating a form and making it appropriate to the Modern world, where things to not fall nicely into neat formations. As a graduate student I wanted to be told what was and was not poetry, so the idea of selectiveness appealed to me. I now carry a much larger umbrella. Exclusive notions of poetry can cause us to miss the value in what is extraordinary simply because we do not understand it. To be clear, I am not against evaluating poetry. As readers and as critics, that is part of the job. If we think a poem is bad, or that it fails according to the rules it sets out for itself, we should say so. But I’m wary of carrying around ready-made containers and disregarding poems because they don’t seem to fit into them.

 3.    Accuracy, at all costs.

 Avoid generality that masquerades as insight. Avoid poetic shorthand. A poem should not require guesswork. Don’t force readers to look outside the poem for what should be in it.

 I don’t care for guesswork in poetry. As my friend Morri Creech used to say in workshop, “If ten careful readers of poetry don’t get what you are doing, then you are not actually doing it.” I still think “Don’t kick the reader out of the poem” is a good maxim for a poet. But I have also come to value ambiguity. Some of my favorite poems are not “accurate” in the way The Reaper demands. What exactly does Ted Hughes mean, for example, in his magnificent poem “Wind,” when he writes that “wind wielded / Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, / Flexing like the lens of a mad eye”? What does it mean that the speaker of Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” “must enter again the round / Zion of the water bead, / And the synagogue of the ear of corn” before he will consent to mourn the child’s death? I feel the meaning of these lines in my gut. If pressed, I could probably explain their symbolism. But they cannot be called “accurate”; indeed, replacing them with more “accurate” lines would be a travesty. In fairness to The Reaper, there is such a thing as metaphorical laziness. I once saw a Mad Lib-type exercise called “How to Write a Bad Poem,” and it began with “In the [insert noun] of my mind, / the [insert noun/verb/direct object].” So you might wind up with something like, “In the refrigerator of my mind, / ghosts follow an albatross.” That’s deep stuff, man! Complete with Coleridge allusion! I suspect some people write like this. (All the editors of literary journals are nodding.) But I tend to think most poets are better than this, and as a reader I will always accept inaccuracy if you give me a reason to.

 4.    No emotion without narrative.

 Emotion is irrelevant unless it is the result of a story. Poems should be communicative, transferring the emotion to the reader, and this requires narrative.

 I can get on board with the idea that a poem should communicate something, especially if you are going to ask someone else to read it. If it doesn’t offer something, why bother to publish it? Just keep it in your journal. But I find the argument that every poem needs to tell a story in order to present genuine emotion to be the least convincing of all The Reaper’s assertions. Certainly poems should move. There should be some kind of engine that both engages and propels the reader. This is what Charles Olson, in “Projective Verse,” calls “the push of the line.” But this doesn’t need to be a story. Does “Ode to a Nightingale” tell a story? Does Plath’s “Blackberrying”? Does Richard Wilbur’s “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra”? These poems progress, and we follow, but it would be difficult to convince me that any of them tells a story. In the chapter “The Death of the Lyric,” The Reaper concedes that lyric poetry used to work but argues that it has now become corrupt and meaningless, too self-absorbed, and that there is a kind of sameness to all of it. I can absolutely think of poems that warrant this assessment. I can also think of dozens, probably hundreds, of contemporary lyric poems that do not. Some poems engage the intellect. Others captivate us with their music. Some bewitch us with their imagery. And yes, some draw us in with great narrative. But let’s not require all poems to tell a story. If sameness is a problem, that surely won’t help.     

 5.    No more meditating on the meditation.

 Poems need a subject. If a poem only makes sense to the poet, it is unsuccessful. The act of writing, as a metaphor for thinking, is not an adequate subject for a poem.

 I find I still agree with most of this. Tony Hoagland’s piece, “The Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment,” offers a good overview of the improvisational, wobbly poem and some of its problems. But I also find that narrative can take the poet too far from an experience. Sometimes we need the distance and perspective that narrative offers, but sometimes that would kill a poem. I think Ellen Bryant Voigt is a wonderful example of a contemporary poet who uses narrative when it is needed and avoids it when it is not. Her poem “At the Movie: Virginia, 1956” is a narrative poem that requires an adult speaker, one who is now fully aware of the racial tensions that the girl in the poem was trying to understand when she was “wanting to look, not knowing how to see.” On the other hand, her poem “The Cusp” eschews narrative:

So few birds—the ones that winter through
and the geese migrating through the empty fields,
fording the cropped, knuckled stalks of corn:
all around us, all that’s green’s suppressed,
and in the brooding wood, the bare trees,
shorn of leaves or else just shy of leaves,
make a dark estate between low clouds
that have the look of stubborn snow.

In a purely scientific exercise --
say you came from the moon, or returned
like Lazarus, blinking from the cave—
you wouldn’t know if winter’s passed or now beginning.
The bank slopes up, the bank slopes down to the ditch.
Would it help if I said grieving has an end?
Would it matter if I told you this is spring?

I suggest that if we knew who was grieving in this poem, or why, or even the identity of the “you,” the poem would lose some of its power. There is, clearly, a story here, but it took place "off-stage." As Voigt writes in this interview with The Atlantic, the narrative always hovers behind a lyric poem, but it isn’t always necessary or even desirable to offer the story itself. We need lyric poems because poetry often is an act of thinking or of feeling or of praying, and because immediacy sometimes trumps rationality and, yes, even clarity.

6.    No more poems about poetry.

 No more poems about poetry.

 This subject has been debated almost to death, but to me it's a non-issue. There are a lot of really bad poems about poetry. There are a lot more really bad poems about love. Shall we ban love poetry? Wallace Stevens is supposed to have said, “All poems are about poetry.” I don’t know if he ever really said it, but I like it.

7.    No more irresponsibility of expression.

 If you choose a form, you must adhere to the limitations of that form and follow its rules. If you choose a subject, you must be faithful to its expression. There should be a perfect marriage of content and form.

 This is the item on the list that I most agree with. While I don’t like the idea that there is a formal buffet from which to choose the form you want—a Spenserian sandwich today, a terza rima trifle tomorrow—a perfect marriage of content and form is the goal, though I say that with the belief that the “perfect” form is often messy (see my earlier comments about “roughing up” form). Perfection is a lot to ask, but poets should all strive for it, and prosody gives them the tools to try.

8.    Raze the House of Fashion.

 Poets should always be looking to go in a new direction. Whatever is in fashion should be avoided.

 Of course this appealed to me when I was beginning to write poems. Who doesn’t want to be new and original? But what a walking paradox I was! I wanted someone to tell me, to give me rules for, how to write original poetry. The Reaper painted itself as a counter-cultural magazine, comparing itself to BLAST and Kayak, and maybe it was like those magazines in the sense of presenting an alternative to what it saw as a dominant, dangerous trend. But Jarman and McDowell also, by their own admission, sought to begin a new trend, and I have come to believe that artistic movements, even well meaning ones, are almost always antithetical to art because they promote a limited agenda. To be clear, I’m not saying art can never be political, or that artists and critics should never fight for what they believe in. What I’m saying is that art answers the demands of the artistic moment rather than the demands of trends. A manifesto is an instruction manual for avoiding old trends and following a new one.

I now realize that what I really hungered for as a graduate student was not an instruction manual or a list of demands, but craft, and that these are very far from being the same thing. My father-in-law has a garage full of tools, and every time I walk in I am amazed that he not only knows what all of them do, but that he can actually create things with them. My Grandpa Darrell is the same way. If it can be made out of wood, he can make it. But the tools don’t tell either of these men what they can and cannot make with them. They had teachers who taught them what each of the tools does, and certain tools were used whenever needs arose. Eventually, after a lifetime of work, the tools became part of them so that they didn’t seem like tools at all but extensions of their vision. This analogy may seem simple to some, but it works for me.

9.    Dismantle the Office of Translation.

 Poems in translation become indistinct from one another. They sound like their translators and not the poets who wrote them. Too much bad poetry gets translated into English.

 Dafydd ap Gwilym. Rilke. Neruda. Catullus. Botev. Akhmatova. I can only read one of these poets in the original language. Should I forget about the others? Having attempted to translate poetry myself, I can readily believe that no translation is perfect. I’ll settle for the imperfect ones.

10. Spring open the Jail of the Self.

 Poets exist as part of a world, and the poems should reflect that world. The distinct self is only important when we see the world in which it exists.

 In my first poetry workshop as a graduate student, someone said of one of my poems, “This is a poem set in the city that could have been written before the invention of the automobile or electricity.” Point taken. One thing I’ve learned from my study of Welsh poetry is that poets exist as part of a community, and that they have an important function to perform beyond introspection. But I also believe that highly personal poems are often the most communal. This is one of the strange paradoxes of writing: in order to approach the universal, art requires those authenticating details of individual experience. The truth is, we will never know enough about the world. And too many of us prefer not to know. Ideally every poet would be familiar not just with literary history, but also with art history, music theory, political history, and science. The irony of my early reading of The Reaper is that even though it was encouraging me to be aware of the world, it caused me to close off part of the literary world. I initially dismissed some of my now-favorite poets—Wallace Stevens, Geoffrey Hill, even T. S. Eliot—because their poems were difficult. (Incidentally, The Reaper argues, in one of its essays, that Wallace Stevens ruined contemporary poetry. My response to that essay would require a separate post.)

But what is closed off can be reopened. Looking back, I don’t regret the period I spent as a member of The Reaper’s congregation, and my purpose in revisiting The Reaper’s "non-negotiable" demands has not been to show how wrongheaded they are, or to cast myself as having evolved beyond them, but to, in fact, negotiate with them. Even though I no longer fully agree with many of them, I value their existence, and on reflection, I still believe that the principles helped me. They gave me the confidence to write, and even though I now see it as a false confidence, writing is what I most needed to be doing. And for all I know, The Reaper is still doing that for some young writer hiding out in Government Documents.

Wild Medicine: A Poetry Walk at The New York Botanical Garden (through September 8, 2013) by Stephanie Paterik

"I am tired."

The first line of Walahfrid Strabo's poem “Rose” is perched among the perennials in The New York Botanical Garden as if it grew from soil. And it’s how you feel when you take the bus from Manhattan to the Bronx, seeking refuge in the vast and peaceful acreage here.

This moment of resonance is what the Poetry Society of America had in mind when it partnered with the garden to create annual poetry installations, bringing verse to the masses in an unexpected place. It began in 2010 with Emily Dickinson’s Garden, an exhibit that showcased Emily’s poems alongside replicas of her beloved flowerbeds.

Next, they brought together Spanish gardens of the Alhambra with poems of Federico García Lorca, and Monet's garden with Mallarmé's verse. This year, they’ve reached farther back in time, recreating the first medicinal herb garden of the Italian Renaissance—lush with opium poppies, milk thistle, cypress and poems inspired by nature.

The PSA hosted its spring benefit here on May 23 to celebrate two successful public poetry projects -- Wild Medicine and Poetry in Motion, the latter of which features poems inside New York City subway cars. It honored Sandra Bloodworth, executive director of MTA Arts for Transit and Urban Design, who revived Poetry in Motion after a four-year hiatus. 

"It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you do not need to get credit for it," she said as she accepted the award.

PSA Executive Director Alice Quinn and her team curate the short, memorable poems you see on subways. For Wild Medicine, they dug up verse from Renaissance poets Thomas Campion, An Collins, Edward Herbert, John Milton and Edmund Spenser. And in a stroke of brilliance, they included Strabo "the Squinter," a ninth century Frankish monk who tended a cloister garden and penned the book Hortulus about the experience.

Translated from Latin, Strabo’s poems are the oldest in the garden yet they feel the most modern. Much like Whitman, he has the uncanny ability to reach beyond the cloister walls and through the ages to speak to us today.

He’s not afraid to begin with the blunt (“I am tired”) or the quirky (“let us not forget to honor fennel”). He paints a poignant picture of the changing seasons, then confides that nettles are so annoying. We see him rush to his flowers with sloshing buckets and fret about which ones are bathed in sun and which are doomed to shade. He knows instinctively that a garden is ripe with metaphor for the poet willing to dig. 

If you go between now and September 8, 2013, stroll along the Renaissance Poetry Walk to enjoy poems on giant placards, and duck into The Italian Renaissance Garden to learn about the wonder drugs of old. (Did you know fine hairs on a stinging nettle irritate healthy skin but relieve pain in an injured body part? Or that ethanol extracted from the cones of Italian Cypress trees boast antimicrobial and antimalarial properties?) Visit on June 22, July 27 or September 7, and you'll be treated to music and dramatic readings by Rafael Campo, Elizabeth Alexander and Linda Gregerson.

While you're there, look for Strabo's poem "On the Cultivation of Gardens," an artist's mantra and gardening metaphor that has not wilted in a millennia. The subtle observation that “a quiet life has many rewards" -- like the joy that comes from devoting oneself to a garden -- bursts open in the second stanza: 

For whatever the land you possess, whether it be where sand
And gravel lie barren and dead, or where fruits grow heavy
In rich, moist ground; whether high on a steep hillside,
Easy ground in the plain or rough among sloping valleys --
Wherever it is, your land cannot fail to produce
Its native plants. If you do not let laziness clog
Your labor, if you do not insult with misguided efforts
The gardener's multifarious wealth, and if you do not
Refuse to harden or dirty your hands in the open air
Or to spread whole baskets of dung on the sun-parched soil –
Then, you may rest assured, the soil will not fail you.

This, the poet says, he has learned from common opinion, searching around in old books, and experience. 

At last, a good trip to the garden begins with exhaustion and ends in rejuvenation. If you’re looking for fresh inspiration after a long winter, get your soles dirty at Wild Medicine. This soil will not fail you. 

Stephanie Paterik is a journalist and poet in Brooklyn. She earned an MFA in poetry from The New School and, as David Lehman’s research assistant, worked on The Best American Poetry 2010, 2011, 2012 and Best of the Best. She has contributed to Anderbo, PARADE, Glamour, Adweek, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. The Sonoran Desert is her native soil.

“Happy 48, Eleni Sikelianos!” [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

ELENI SIKELIANOS  (5/31)

You have to come essplainy
’cuz dey nebber unnerston os.
With a very happy birthday to
Eleni Sikelianos.

The Lower Forty-eight complain
They canno grow bananos.
With a very happy birthday to
Eleni Sikelianos.

Zoologist, he plainly love
De khippos and de rhanos.
With a very happy birthday to
Eleni Sikelianos.

Restrainy rider take de rein
Con dientes y las manos.
With a very happy birthday to
Eleni Sikelianos.

•

Mark Doty and David Lehman talk about Frank O'Hara. . .

 

Hail to thee, O Vesper, Martini thou never wert

James Bond's invention, named after beautiful Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (1953):

"A dry martini," [Bond] said. "One. In a deep champagne goblet."

"Oui, monsieur."

"Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's. one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?"

"Certainly, monsieur." The barman seemed pleased with the idea.

"Gosh, that's certainly a drink," said Leiter.

Bond laughed. "When I'm...er...concentrating," he explained, "I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink's my own invention. I'm going to patent it when I can think of a good name."

—Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, Chapter 7, "Rouge et Noir"

Happy Birthday, May Swenson! [by Sharon Preiss]

Tuesday, May 28, would have been May Swenson’s 100^th birthday. In her lifetime Swenson was a playwright, a professor, a lesbian, a Mormon, a translator, a lover of nature, a feminist, a critic, and a poet. On the evening of her birthday this week, Poets House, Poetry Society of America and The Library of America got together in Poets House Kray Hall to celebrate the quiet beauty and integrity of Swenson’s life and work with a reading of selections from the recently published Collected Poems, a handsome edition designed for posterity by The Library of America.

To be honored with publication by The Library of America is no small thing. The mission of this organization, founded 34 years ago and funded in part by seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to help “preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing…America’s best and most significant writing.” And yet, as several of this evening’s participants mentioned, Swenson’s sometimes deceptively simple poems are now often taught more in middle school than in graduate school. This definitive collection of her wider body of work, including some of her writings about poetry, will reintroduce readers to “the linguistic density, sonic intensity, and erotic charge” of the greater portion of Swenson’s work, as poet Sharon Dolon pointed out during her portion of the evening’s talk. 

It’s true, Swenson’s poems can be a little “sweet:” several of the poems read by the eleven poets, critics, and editors who participated in the evening elicited from the audience happy laughs and surprised exclamations of joy in their closing lines, as opposed to the solemn hums and grunts that “important” poems often receive. But what’s wrong with a little levity and delight in poetry from time to time? As the editor of the new book, Langdon Hammer, pointed out, “Swenson was popular and accessible in a century known for poetic difficulty.” For poetry to stay alive in the hearts and minds of the general public, every era must have a poet or two whose work, on the surface anyway, is simple and straightforward. Think Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Billy Collins. Every beginning reader of poetry will, if she’s so inclined, find her way to greater levels of difficulty and sophistication in poems only by starting with work that is more simple and straightforward. Very few of us started a love of poetry by reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, or Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily” (“Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.”)

And yet, there is an underlying complexity to Swenson’s poems that presents itself variously as metaphor and double-entendre, economic exactitude of language, pinpoint line and word placement, and formal choices that are as pertinent to the poem as the words themselves. There is nothing wasted in Swenson’s poems, but the layers of even her simplest work reveal themselves to careful readers like the petals of an opening blossom. Here is “Four-Word Lines” in its entirety:

            Your eyes are just

            like bees, and I

            feel like a flower.

            Their brown power makes

            a breeze go over

            my skin. When your

            lashes ride down and

            rise like brown bees’

            legs, your pronged gaze

            makes my eyes gauze.

            I wish we were

            in some shade and

            no swarm of other

            eyes to know that

            I’m a flower breathing

            bare, laid open to

            your bees’ warm stare.

            I’d let you wade

            in me and seize

            with your eager brown

            bees’ power a sweet

            glistening at my core.

The poem is breathtaking. The precise and compact “four-word lines” move the poem “forward,” yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in “feel like a flower.” Bees are flower’s pollinators, so while the lover’s eyes do have “brown power,” the flower, in this sense, is the bee’s lover. The intense longing and the potential sting of the bee are assuaged in the poet’s receptiveness and openness under the gaze of the beloved.

The evening ended with a live recording of Swenson reading her elegy to her father, “Feel Me.” “’Feel me to do right,’ our father said / on his death bed. We did not quite / know – in fact, not at all – what he meant.” How fitting that the dying words of the poet’s father should also involve the mystery and magic of language, as Swenson’s own poems do. The poem continues on to explore the possible meanings of these words, posing question after question and possibility after possibility. The elegy, a tender paean to the beloved father, is also a meta-poem that plumbs the depth of the poet’s own work.

This poem, too, is an example of Swenson’s signature “Iconographs,” a type of concrete poem wherein the placement of words on the page acts to enhance the meaning of the poem. “Feel Me” was originally composed on the page with two streaks of white space moving diagonally through the first four then final three stanzas of the poem. The streaks create a disjointedness that echoes the challenge of understanding: there can be a stark break between word and meaning, between what is said and what is understood. 

In her essay “The Poet as Antispecialist,” Swenson writes that the experience of poetry is “based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear to things as they are and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming.” Reading and re-reading Swenson’s poetry opens up this “becoming.” As the poet Samantha Thornhill remarked in her portion of the evening’s celebration, beyond the precision and exactitude of Swenson’s poems, “the page is a playground and poetry is lawless.”

The Greatest “English” Poet you (Really) Haven’t Heard of [by Daniel Westover]

Last month while scrolling through my Twitter feed I came across a link to an article by Adam Kirsch in The New Republic titled “The Greatest English Poet you Haven’t Heard of.” This kind of title never fails to bring me running (or clicking) in the hope of discovering a writer I’ve been missing out on, someone I will fall in love with. It reminds me of the time I discovered a dusty copy of Patrick Kavanagh’s Selected Poems in Dauphine Street Books or, to go back a little further, the time my cool Aunt Jill, seeing my twelve year-old self tapping his foot to the latest twee pop album, slipped me a copy of Peter Gabriel’s Security and said, “You need to listen to this.” Every bibliophile has an inbox of books that keeps growing, and I’m no different. Just knowing that there are words out there to hunt down, unearth, or stumble upon randomly, and that at any moment someone can add genuine value to my life, maybe even completely change its course, by offering the unexpected—well, that’s one of the things that gets me out of bed.

So I was a little disappointed when Kirsch’s piece turned out to be an introduction to the poetry of Edward Thomas and, in part, a review of Matthew Hollis’s (partial) biography of Thomas. To be clear, the piece itself is not disappointing. Kirsch is a fine writer. I enjoy his thoughtful essays on Modern poetry, and this one is absolutely worth your time, especially if Thomas is a poet you haven’t heard of. But I found Kirsch’s title puzzling. Thomas is represented in every major anthology of twentieth-century British literature that I own. He was one of Robert Frost’s dearest friends. Anne Stevenson, Andrew Motion, Seamus Heaney, and Geoffrey Hill all admire him as an important predecessor. R. S. Thomas cut his poetic teeth on Edward Thomas. Ted Hughes called him “the father of us all.” In short, his was, and remains, a known voice. Kirsch says as much in the article, pointing out that Thomas, once he had found that voice, “became one of the most beloved poets of the twentieth century.” So I was scratching my head a little. I also have quibbles with calling Thomas an “English Poet” since he was Welsh by blood and much of his work is motivated not chiefly by a love for the English countryside, as is commonly assumed, but by hiraeth, as Andrew Webb demonstrates in his brilliant new book on Thomas.

But never mind. For the sake of this post, let’s say that an English poet is any poet who writes poetry in English. I don’t happen to believe this, but I will pretend to for a moment because even though I was disappointed by Kirsch’s teasing title, it did lead me to consider just who is, in my view, the greatest English poet (of the twentieth century, at least—I didn’t stray into earlier territory) that most people have never heard of, and unless I broaden that category to include all English-language poets, I can’t use the brilliant poet that keeps asserting herself in my mind.

Of course, “greatest” is a loaded, subjective term. I think there is as much “greatness” in Caddel and Quartermain’s Other anthology as there is in the Oxford staples. Maybe “important” is a better adjective because it’s at least kind of demonstrable. But Kirsch uses “greatest,” so that’s what I’m going with. In my estimation, the most neglected “great” poet of the twentieth century is Lynette Roberts (1909-1995), a wonderful, difficult poet who was born in Argentina to parents of Welsh extraction, moved to London as a Spanish-speaking child, and lived in Wales as an adult. Her work was championed by Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas, who was best man at her wedding. T. S. Eliot thought she was a tremendous writer, and he published both of her volumes at Faber. Wyndham Lewis (of BLAST fame) championed her work and sketched this image of her. Like the work of most Modernist poets with experimental inclinations, Roberts’s work is uneven, but in the words of Robert Graves, who called her “one of the few true poets now writing,” “her best is the best.” I view her magnum opus, the heroic Gods with Stainless Ears, as a forgotten Modernist masterpiece. And yet, outside of Wales, I’ve never met another person who is familiar with her work. The closest I’ve come is this excellent 2006 piece by John Wilkinson in Boston Review.

Roberts is a war poet of the home front, and her work blends the inertia of domestic life in a small Welsh village with an awareness of devastating global conflict. Much of the relatively little writing that does exist on Roberts focuses a bit too much on her failed marriage to the Welsh poet and editor Keidrych Rhys, her mental breakdown, her becoming a Jehovah's Witness, and the fact that she abandoned poetry late in her life. All of this has its place, of course, and it provides a context for her work. But there is certainly not enough focus on her linguistic innovation, the stark originality of much of her work, and the fact that it offers what Katie Gramich calls “an impressionistic evocation of a west Wales enclave becoming a wasteland.” What matters most to me, as a lover of words, is that Lynette Roberts could write poems like this one:

 

                        Poem

 

                        We must uprise O my people. Though

                        Secretly trenched in sorrel, we must

                        Upshine outshine the day’s sun: and day

                        Intensified by the falling prism

                        Of rain shall curve our smile with straw.

 

                        Bring plimsole plover to the tensile sand

                        And with cuprite crest and petulant feet

                        Distil our notes into febrile reeds

                        Crisply starched at the water-rail of tides.

                        On gault and greensand a gramophone stands:

 

                        In zebrine stripes strike out the pilotless

                        Age: from saxophone towns brass out the dead:

                        Disinter futility, that we entombing men

                        Might bridle our runaway hearts.

                        On tamarisk, on seafield pools shivering

 

                        With water-cats, ring out the square slate notes.

                        Shape the birdbox tress with neumes. Wind sound

                        Singular into cool and simple corners,

                        Round pale bittern grass, and all unseen

                        Unknown places of sheltered rubble

 

                        Where whimbrels, redshanks, sandpipers ripple

                        For the wing of the living. Under tin of earth

                        And wooden boles where owls break music:

                        From this killing world against humanity,

                        Uprise against, outshine the day’s sun.   

 

Read that again, out-loud, and even before you look up all the words and allusions, tell me the sound alone didn’t just make your life better.

Keith Tuma included two sections of Gods with Stainless Ears in his controversial (and I think admirable) 2001 Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford), and Patrick McGuiness has now edited both Roberts’s Collected Poems (Carcanet, 2005) and her Diaries, Letters, and Recollections (Carcanet, 2008). Hopefully this will lead to increased awareness of her work among readers and critics, and not just in Wales, where, to be fair, it has received attention. In the meantime, imagine that I’ve just approached you in the aisle of your favorite used bookstore with a copy of Lynette Roberts’s Collected Poems in my hand, and that I am handing it to you and saying, “You need to read this.”

 

 

 

Early Summer Due In, and a Poem from Major Jackson's Holding Company [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dearest Bleaders,

Weather service says we’re in for a mini-heat-wave in my neck of the brick – temps in the 90s.

Right now a warm cloud has settled on the ground and wets us down. I’ve got the proofs of my two new books to correct at the same time, tricky balance, so I thought I’d set it all down and say hi to you. Also, there are tiny black flies on my heirloom tomato plants, but none on the cherries nor the beefsteak.  I am spritzing them with soap and water – the interweb says it will help.

Today I offer you a poem I love by Major Jackson, from his book Holding Company. He also wrote the wonderful Hoops.

Designer Kisses

I'm glum about your sportive flesh in the empire of blab, and the latest guy running his trendy tongue like a tantalizing surge over your molars, how droll. Love by a graveyard is redundant, but the skin is an obstacle course like Miami where we are inescapably consigned: tourists keeping the views new. What as yet we desire, our own fonts of adoration. By morning, we're laid out like liquid timepieces, each other's exercise in perpetual enchantment, for there is that beach in us that is untranslatable; footprints abound. I understand: you're at a clothes rack at Saks lifting a white linen blouse at tear's edge wondering.

By Major Jackson

Nice, right? I’m sure there are many ways to read the poem, but here is one: Your earnest partaking in the games of social media and at parties depresses me, as does the pictures you posted of yourself kissing that hipster (aren’t you the funny one). Love among the online rubble of your past relationships, and mine, feels less meaningful, but we better carry on while we are young, before we have an obstacle course of wrinkles on our faces and have to move to Florida. It’s dull there, but springbreakers and visits by families coming in to go to Disney keep things interesting. Today we don’t feel anything, we don’t know what we want, but we do still want people to click “like” when we post. Some nights we do too much to get this and then, by morning, a whole time cycle of our mood is recorded and before our eyes: time melted out into a spill. We are also perpetually enchanted with each other, and we have inner lives that are such a crowd of memories and interactions that we can’t actually translate that inner world into words; my mind is full of people, though right now I can’t think of anyone at all. Of course it is silly and unfair of me to imagine you always online or at parties, perhaps right now you are doing the most traditional thing a woman can do: textiles.

I can relate. Aren’t emotions exhausting?

Anyway, great poem. Enjoy the beastly hot week with a cold beverage.

Love,

Jennifer

"The Escape Artist" by David Lehman (on Slate)

Courtesy of Finn Mac Ginty/Flickr

A dark green room: the experiment fails,
And the leaves change color before their time.
He felt, though he had not committed a crime,
Like a gangster disguised in a top hat and tails,

Continue reading here.

"The Adlai Stevenson of the Art World" [Jane Freilicher]

<<<
A 1956 letter written by Ms. Freilicher to Frank O’Hara, who celebrated her in his acclaimed “Jane” poems, initiated various plans to get together, beginning: “Dear Frankie, I was utterly delighted to get your cuddlesome letter. Perhaps you don’t know how much I’m missing you but it is quite a tel’ble lot. It is a terrible thing being the Adlai Stevenson of the art world without a Young Democrat like you by my side.”
>>>

<<<
This relationship [with John Ashbery], and the others that grew from it, are the subject of “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown, a show that places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of the New York School — Mr. Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler — to whom she was muse, confidante, beloved brain. “One doesn’t stay friends with somebody for 40 years unless they have a lot of nice qualities, such as brilliance,” Mr. Ashbery wrote two decades ago. “Jane Freilicher is also the wittiest person I have ever known.”
By implication, the show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.
>>>

From Gina Bellafante in "Jane Freilicher: A Painter amid Friends," a review of Freilicher's latest show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, The New York Times, May 25, 2013. 

Why (Not) Wales? [by Daniel Westover]

I am one of the (relatively) few American academics specializing in the English-language literature of Wales, sometimes referred to as Anglo-Welsh literature. The term that most of us working in the field use is Welsh writing in English, to distinguish the writing from the much older yet still thriving tradition of Welsh-language literature and to avoid being limited by the colonial connotations of anything following “Anglo” and a hyphen. As I travel to conduct and present research, the most frequent questions I am asked are not about the research itself, but about how I came to be interested in Wales at all. These questions move beyond the kind of friendly interest one takes in other people’s careers and often approach something closer to bewilderment. Both in the US and UK—and especially, as it turns out, within Wales itself—I am asked questions like “How on earth did you wind up in Wales?” and “What is an American doing studying Welsh literature?” These are put to me by academics and non-academics alike, and they are often immediately followed by, “What’s the connection?” The implication, of course, is that there must be some family association or unusual circumstance that led me to Welsh studies. But as much as I’d like to claim that I’ve traced my genealogy to the small Welsh village of a distant ancestor or that my great-grandfather left the Welsh valleys and came to America to find work, there is no such romantic connection. Westover is a very English name, and the only family connection I have to Wales is my second cousin Brian, also an American of English descent, who owns and operates a hostel in the Snowdonia National Park.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The easy rejoinder to these questions, and the one I’m sometimes tempted to offer, is Why not Wales? Really, why should it seem weird? No one would blink if I went to London to study the Bloomsbury Group. It’s okay to like Virginia Woolf just because, you know, she’s awesome and stuff. But not Welsh literature, it seems. Having answered the question so many times, I admit to having tried out a few tall tales to see how reactions would differ. I once told an archivist at the National Library in Aberystwyth that my ancestors were from Merthyr and were converted to Mormonism by Captain Dan Jones—a famous missionary who translated the Book of Mormon into Welsh—and that they immigrated to Utah and founded the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. She was completely satisfied and even pulled a first edition of the Welsh Book of Mormon from the archives, for which I still feel guilty (but not too guilty since it was a beautiful book). The real answer to the question of Why Wales? (and the one I usually give, I promise) is much simpler than people expect it to be: I was exposed to the writing of several writers from Wales, and I felt a pull. I didn’t know what Welsh writing in English was or how it did and didn’t fit into my puerile, monolithic idea of British literature. But I knew that this work was at least as good and often better than the work I was reading in my official “British literature” courses and that the more I read, the greater the pull became. That story is not as exotic, but it has the benefit of being true.

Here is a slightly more detailed version: I was an undergraduate at BYU, where the Welsh poet Leslie Norris was poet-in-residence. Although I was never able to take a class from him (they were always full; my brother, now an English professor at the same school, was luckier), I went to his readings and studied his poems and stories. I didn’t understand them, but I wanted to. They upset me. They seemed to be about boys running around Welsh villages, but there was an anxiety running beneath the lines, something disquieting. It was around this same time that I discovered a novel called A Toy Epic by a writer named Emyr Humphreys. I could swear I found it in the university library, but I have just checked online, and it isn’t there, so unless they’ve since pulled it from the stacks, I don’t know how I got hold of it. In fact, it really does seem amazing to me now since of all Humphreys’s works, A Toy Epic is the novel that was thought to be too Welsh for American tastes and, as a result, never found an American publisher. It isn’t an easy book for an American to find, as the students who take my Welsh literature seminar will tell you. (Wait, this will be even better than the Tabernacle Choir story! The miraculous journey of A Toy Epic onto American soil and into my hands!) A Toy Epic was very strange. There were multiple boy narrators with strange names like Iorwerth and Albie, and there was nothing to mark where one stopped speaking and another began. And there were words and whole sentences of dialogue written in a language that I could only assume was Welsh. Despite this (maybe because of this) I couldn’t put the book down. Here was a boy, like me, who grew up in an intensely religious environment and was struggling to define himself against those inherited ideologies, and here was another boy who, like me, had always done well in school but had not yet managed to find a subject he cared about. Here were boys skipping class and discovering God and sex and politics and hurting each other and growing to love each other despite their differences. I now understand that the boys in A Toy Epic are representative of different Welsh social, economic, and cultural positions between the two World Wars, and that the novel is also a border novel that traces complex interpersonal and linguistic relationships along Offa’s Dyke. (Note to the editors of The Longman Anthology of British Literature: there is a border between England and Wales despite your claim, in your entry on Dylan Thomas, that Wales “is wholly contained within the borders of England.”) At the time, however, I only knew that the book was wonderful. 

In 2000 I began a studio-academic MA/MFA program at McNeese State in Louisiana. It was that year, in a course with the brilliant John Wood, that I was introduced to the poetry of R. S. Thomas (who died that same year and whose centenary is this year).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thomas’s work was nothing like that of Leslie Norris. It began with drooling hill farmers slogging through mud and ended with experimental poems about God. He seemed to hate the very English language that he used in his own poems, and I couldn’t decide whether he loved or loathed the Welsh people. I was confused by someone who could seem so misanthropic on one page and then, on another, turn out one of the most beautiful love poems I had ever read. As someone who had been raised to believe in an anthropomorphic, loving deity, I was also captivated by depictions of a God who was distant, who demanded blood and sacrifice, and who refused to be pinned down by human concepts. And as a poet myself, concerned with learning the craft, I was intrigued because Thomas was doing things with form and metaphor that I had never encountered. In his late work especially, he was breaking lines at unexpected places in a way that always kept me engaged. Thomas’s work became the subject of my MA thesis, and when that didn’t satisfy me, I set about looking for someone who could supervise a Ph.D. It quickly became clear that the scholars who could direct my research were all in Wales. This would probably still be the case, but that is changing.

I don’t mean to paint myself as the lone wolf (dragon?) of North American Welsh studies. There were others there before me, and we are growing in number. We meet every two years with scholars from the UK at the conference of the North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History (NAASWCH). Those living in the UK meet annually at the Annual Conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (AWWE). There is also a journal devoted to scholarly work in the field. First called “Welsh Writing in English” and then “Almanac,” it is now called the International Journal of Welsh writing in English. For those interested in a history of the literature and critical approaches to some of its prominent authors, I recommend as a starting point the book Welsh Writing in English, edited by M. Wynn Thomas. But most important of all is, of course, the literature itself. A good place to begin is the wonderful Library of Wales series, published by Parthian. 

Greta Gynt, "The Shady Lady Spiv"

From the black-and-white postwar British movie Easy Money (1948), here is the Norwegian actress Greta Gynt singing "The Shady Lady Spiv" to fellow spiv (or cheap crook) Dennis Price at the London nightclub where she works. She and Price are conspiring to rip off the football lottery outfit that employs him. The plot is a sort of milquetoast toast to Barbara Stanwyck's partnership with insurance agent Fred MacMurrary to defraud his company and eliminate ehr husband in one swell foop in Double Indemnity..But listen to the song, and delight in "spiv," a piece of English slang that has not lost its strangeness, especially when coupled with "shady lady." The movie is available streaming from Netflix. -- DL 

Marty's Lesson: Thoughts About War Poetry and Teaching on Memorial Day, 2013 [by Daniel Westover]

Although I didn’t know it as a kid, my grandfather, Eugene (Eugenio) James Martinis—“Jimmy” to his siblings, “Marty” to me—was a Screaming Eagle, a paratrooper in the 101^st Airborne. Technically Marty was my step-grandfather, but I didn’t know that, either, and it wouldn’t have mattered to me. When I was six, I visited a petrol station in the Mojave Desert, and the owner, a man that I later learned was my biological grandfather, gave me a mesh baseball cap with “Esso” stitched across the front. It was a cool hat with really loud plastic snaps, and I liked that it smelled like gasoline, but I lost it soon after. There was no relationship behind the gift to make it valuable. Marty, for his part, was aloof and even cold at times, but he was there, and, as it turned out, he gave me one of the most enduring lessons of my childhood.

It would be a stretch to say that I loved Marty. He was too quiet, and he preferred the company of his dogs to my own. But I did like him. He smelled like menthols and coffee beans, and sometimes he would wake up—that’s how I thought of it—and tell a really great joke, like the one about what the Dalmatian said after dinner (“That hit the spots!”). He could do a perfect Foghorn Leghorn impersonation, his Italian spare ribs didn’t fall apart as you were picking them up (but they fell apart perfectly in your mouth), and he always kept the candy jars stocked. He bought us our first VCR, and when “Old Blue,” my dad’s Datsun 510, finally got to the point where he couldn’t resurrect it (Dad had been hotwiring it with paperclips during its final years), Marty gave him his Ford Pinto, a bright orange car we named “Julius,” which Dad kept until 2002, long after Marty was gone—he died of lung cancer in 1991. I never knew Marty well, even as a teenager. By the time I was old enough to value what he gave me and want to know him better, he was sick, and then he was dead.

One day in the summer of 1985, my cousins and I were “playing war”—an awful phrase, but it’s the one we used—in Marty’s front yard, trying to avoid the dandelion flares and dog poop land mines. I had just stormed the beach of the flowerbed when I realized Marty was on the front porch. There was a lit cigarette in his hand, but he wasn’t smoking it. He wasn’t moving at all. To say he was watching me doesn’t quite get it right. He was looking in my direction, but he wasn’t seeing me. I didn’t understand the look on his face. How could I? I was a ten-year-old Mormon kid who’d been raised in a bubble. I hadn’t even seen an R-rated movie. I had no reference for genuine horror. I stepped backwards into the yard, but I was unable to turn my back to him. I stopped about ten feet from the porch and just stood there. I’m sure I couldn’t have articulated this at the time, but I was afraid—not of Marty, like you might expect, but of leaving Marty. That is, I was afraid that if I left, I would hurt him. Something in him would break. I don’t know how long we were there after my cousins had left the yard, but I would have stayed all night if he hadn’t stepped down from the porch and started unbuttoning his flannel shirt.

I don’t claim to be an expert on many subjects, but one thing I know for certain is that you can never be prepared for your grandfather to undress in front of you, especially in his front yard. But that’s what Marty did, without speaking or giving me any clue as to the reason for it. He unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off, and when he did, I saw what looked like a plait of fine lines pasted to his right side, rising from his hip to his nipple, all the more striking because even though Marty was a dark-haired Italian with a lot of body hair everywhere else, there was no hair on that side of his body. By the time I was beginning to process what I was seeing, Marty had already slipped off his shoes and unbuttoned his pants. He pulled them down and stepped out of them, then stood there in the grass with nothing on but his boxer shorts and his socks. His right leg had similar scarring. In my kid brain, the marks looked like strands of stretched Silly Putty. Years later my mom would tell my about the Battle of the Bulge, how Marty had jumped over Belgium and how only twenty percent of those who jumped with him made it to the ground alive. She would tell me about the phosphorous that ripped his side open and seared the skin, how he had somehow kept fighting and made it out alive. She would tell me about the trip she took with him, first to the Ardennes Forest and then to the military cemetery where Marty’s best friend is buried, and she would show me the campaign medals and the photographs as she told me about how much that trip had helped him—and also how deeply it had hurt him. But on that summer afternoon in 1985, Marty didn’t tell me about those things. In fact, we never spoke of them, though I wish now that we had. On that day, Marty just wanted me to look. He wanted me to see.

It’s not just on Memorial Day that I remember Marty. Because of what he gave me, I think of him most often in my teaching. I remember him, for example, when sophomores wrestle with Wilfred Owen and argue with each other—as they should—about whether it is sweet and glorious to die for the fatherland. Marty, horrified at seeing me pull imaginary pins from pinecones and lob them over the retaining wall, was teaching me the very thing that Wilfred Owen was trying to get across to Jessie Pope—namely that war is not a game, that there is a dreadful cost, and that it is, therefore, obscene to rhyme the words “gun” and “fun” in a poem, to wave a poetic white feather at a child or to promise him glory in the bouncing rhythm of a playground song. I think of him when my students read Siegfried Sassoon’s “They” and discuss how soldiers are changed by war, or when I play Kenneth Branagh’s recording of Owen’s “The Send-off” and students sit in silence, unable to speak at the thought of those “too few” returning soldiers, who “creep back, silent…along half-known roads.” And in those moments I also think, as they do, of those who have not returned, from either World War or the many wars that have followed—those eighty percent of Marty’s division who jumped into the darkness above Belgium and never took another breath on solid ground, or the eleven men of Travis Williams’s squad who died in Iraq.

When they do speak, I listen as my students debate important questions, like whether or not these are “anti-war poems,” and what that even means, or whether it is possible to speak out against war but still support the troops. Students find the answers to these questions in the writing itself. They discover, for example, that Sassoon, in his famous letter of 1917, is writing on behalf of the troops, and that his love for them was such that he eventually rejoined them at the front to fight in what he believed to be a mismanaged war. These poets were not cowards or political commentators or armchair critics who didn’t know what they were talking about. Both Sassoon and Owen were awarded the Military Cross. Both left Craiglockhart War Hospital and returned to the front. Sometimes students are moved to tears when they read Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” a poem where the speaker goes down into a trench and, as it becomes the underworld, comes face to face with a soldier he has killed. They are moved not just because the dead soldier speaks of the deeds he might have accomplished and the poems he might have written had he survived, but because they know what Owen did not: that the poem is a prophecy. Owen would be killed in action a week before the Armistice.

To my knowledge Marty never spoke out against WWII or any other war. In fact, my mother tells me he encouraged her to join the Air Force, believing that it would be a good life for her. By showing me his scars, I don’t think he intended for me to question the justness of his cause, or at least I don’t think that was his primary motivation. I think, instead, he wanted me to feel a gravity I had never felt before. And sometimes I share this story with my students because I want them to feel it, too. The dead are not something to trifle with or to use as political leverage. They were here, and now they are dead, and their absence should weigh on us. It should make us ask hard questions about the way they died and the reasons they died. It should make us question the ideology that sent them there. I watch, for example, as students find themselves confronted (and seduced) by the romantic (and familiar) nationalism of Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier," a poem that leads them to a discussion about the ideology of American exceptionalism. I don't tell them what to think. That's not what teaching is about. Teaching is about starting a conversation, the way Marty did that afternoon even without using words. I don’t think I’ll ever know what he saw as he looked at me “playing war” that afternoon, but I imagine he saw ghosts, maybe the ghost of his best friend. I'm speculating, and I wish I knew for sure, but I know enough to let the experience weigh on me and work in me. There is gravity to sacrifice, and there is also aftermath. As difficult as that aftermath can be for me to face, it was more difficult for Marty, so I try to carry the experience in all its visceral reality and complexity, and I try to approach my reading and teaching of poetry with the same commitment. In the words of the Welsh poet Alun Lewis, in my mind the greatest poet of the Second World War, “Across scorched hills and trampled crops / The soldiers straggle by. / History staggers in their wake.” 

 

Memorial Day: We remember the poets who served. . .

. . . These are a conquered people,
said the British sergeant,
putting his hand on my shoulder
at the bar in Foggia, Italy—
this is 1944. He was instructing
me on why I should not tip
the Italian barmaid, as I was doing.
A conquered people. I liked the phrase
because it had the ring of history, . . .

-- Harvey Shapiro

Harvey, who died on January 7th of this year at the age of 88,  flew 35 missions as a B-17 radio gunner for the United States Army Air Force in Italy and Central Europe in World War II. For the Library of America he edited Poets of World War II -- an excellent anthology. You can read about it here and a little more about Harvey's wartime exploits in this essay: "Peace and War in American Poetry," dedicated to the  vliant who served. -- DL

"Happy 74, Frank Bidart!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

FRANK BIDART   (5/27)

Ass b-b-b-backwards 
And horse b’fore b’cart.
With a very happy birthday to
The poet Frank Bidart.

B’Jesus! Seventy-four.
B’doing my b’part
To wish a happy birthday to
The poet Frank Bidart.

B’cup, b’cup, b’gallon.
B’liter and b’quart.
B’cause I took a challenge on
B’half of Frank Bidart.

Apart from the b’doddity,
D’strangeness and b’zarrt,
This poem speaks its golden love 
To the poet Frank Bidart.

☆

Daniel Westover, Guest Blogger May 27-31

Daniel Westover has an MFA from McNeese State University and a PhD from the University of Wales. His scholarly works include R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (University of Wales Press, 2011) and the forthcoming Leslie Norris: A Ghost Story (Parthian, 2015). His own poems have appeared in North American Review, Crab Orchard Review, Southeast Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Asheville Poetry Review, Measure, and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Tennessee. He is currently co-editing the anthology The World is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. This fall will see the publication of Daniel’s novel, Michael Fargo’s Epistle (Publerati), as well as an article in conjunction with the R. S. Thomas centenary, a study of the artistic relationship between Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. Daniel lives in Johnson City, Tennessee where he is Assistant Professor of Modern British Literature at East Tennessee State University.

Welcome, Daniel.

-- sdh

Quote of the Day: Mark Lasswell on Kate Chopin, WSJ May 25-26, 2013

Readers will have to forgive Mr. Cambell his obsessions. He brings race into the book with a dull frequency, sometimes to unintentionally comic effect. We're told that black St. Louisans including Chuck Berry, Miles Davis and Tina Turner "struggled for recognition behind such noted white St. Louisans as Williwam S. Burroughs, Kate Chopin, and T.S.Eliot." This is a double-bankshot of academic claptrap. Burroughs and Eliot barely count as sons of St. Louis, and Kate Chopin--who was she again? Oh, yes: a late-19th-century fiction writer retroactively declared interesting by feminist reputation fabricators. Only a captive of the faculty lounge could be under the impression that Kate Chopin was ever so celebrated that her fame overshadowed the genius behind "Johnny B. Goode."

                 -- Mark Lasswell, Wall Street Journal review of "The Gateway Arch" by Tracy Campbell (May 25-26, 2013)

-- sdh

Augury Books: Reading Poetry & Fiction Mss. Now through June 30

<<<
The editors at Augury Books have opened this year's reading period for:

— Poetry manuscripts, keeping up the fine tradition that has served us well the past few years with The Book of Lost Things by Patrick Moran, Soldier Quick with Rain by David Joel Friedman and Mantic by Maureen Alsop, and 

— For the first time, short story collections.

Please send us your previously unpublished poetry manuscripts (b/w 45-80 pages, not including front and back matter) and short story collections (b/w 80-180 pages) that contain at least three short stories.

We like work that is expertly written and keeps us intrigued. We have fallen in love with writing from many different traditions and on many different subjects -- but we also respond to writing that defies tradition and convention. We just insist on work that demands -- and justifies -- our blind devotion.

For further guidelines and instructions on exactly how to submit, please visit: http://augurybooks.com/submissions/ 

-- Kate Angus, Kimberley Steele, Matt Cunha
[email protected]
http://augurybooks.com/
>>>

"Hick and Willie Get a Catalog from the 'Atheist Collective' Gallery" [by Jim Cummins]

Hick:

"Got the mail.  Here's a list of 'Easter Fun Facts,' straight from Jesus.
Did you know He suffered from 'Dysfunction, Resurrectile,'
until His Father threw a thunderbolt projectile?
It broke the stone to pieces--"

Willie:

"--'and scared all the feces
out of Magdalen, Peter, and John the Reptile'?
No, I didn't know that.  Let me open their 'Dreck File'--
maybe there's a paparazzi shot where Mary 'V's us."

Hick:

"You're disgusting.  Did you know if you have a Resurrection
lasting longer than 'Eternity'
by Calvin Klein, you should consult an attorney?
Or that John Calvin was saved in a run-off election?"

Willie:

"Well, he had a lot of followers.  He was a Twitterer,
after all.  Is that from the 'Atheist Collective'?  Do they want money?
Okay, I'll lighten up and try to be funny--
although the guy who wrote 'Snowbound' was Whittier."

-- Jim Cummins

Natasha Trethewey: A Poet of Our Time [by Sharon Preiss]

Natasha Trethewey is the perfect poet for the 21^st Century Obama-era United States. Her work embodies much that is current and important in today’s America as the country is being forced in so many ways to move out of its selfish childhood and into a more mature adult place in the world. To claim she is the most contemporary of poets may be a bit odd to say of someone whose poetry is so much steeped in the historical past. But as she examines history via her precise poetic dissections of paintings, photos and texts, and works to untangle her own story of her American heritage, she lays bare our country’s complex and often troublesome saga of race relations, white superiority, and hubris with all its lingering prejudices and bias.

In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her Native Guard, a series of poems that swings between the Civil War-, Ante-bellum-, and 20^th Century-era South. Tretheway’s own parents (he white, she black) met in the early 1960s at Frankfort State College in Kentucky, and, as Trethewey writes in “Miscegention,” 

            In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

            they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

 

            They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

            begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

 

Two poems later, in “Southern History,” she weaves herself into the story:

 

            Before the war, they were happy, he said,

            quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

 

            history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,

            and better off under a master’s care.

 

            I watched the words blur on the page. No one

            raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

 

This would have been about 1984. It’s shocking that even then, the real story’s not being told.

Trethewey’s most recent book of poems, Thrall, published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, traces the origins of the story back even further. At a recent reading at New York City’s Cosmopolitan Club, co-hosted by the University of Georgia, of which Trethewey is an alumna, she read exclusively from this book and talked a bit about her work. 

Thrall is an amazing book, the language leading the reader so gently into the brutal world of colonial dominion that we are smack in the middle of it, forced to look into the mirror of history before we can pull the cloak of denial over our eyes. Even the word “Thrall,” so close to “thrill” or “trill” and moving from the whispering “th” through its cascading “all,” does not imply the imprisonment of slave or captive that it actually denotes. 

In the four-part poem “Taxonomy,” the poet describes a series of 18^th Century portraits that could, at quick glance, look like simple familial paintings or ones of a master and his slaves. But these are casta paintings, and they were created to codify the equations of mixed race families. Trethewey deftly incorporates lilting phrases like “crown of lace,” “soft curl of her hair,” and “An infant, she is borne” to show how the delicacy of the painting can obscure its more sinister implications. But by the closing lines of the first poem in the series we are shown a closeup of the servant who carries the mestizo child:

            … He is dark

                        as history, origin of the word

            native: the weight of blood,

                        a pale mistress on his back.

 

            heavier every year.

 

Trethewey’s way of unveiling injustices and illuminating wrong-thinking echoes Percy Bysshe Selley’s, “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” And yet the distorted must still be righted. In the poem with which she closed her reading, “Enlightenment,” the poet and her father revisit Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello after it’s been scientifically determined that Sally Hemings’s ancestors are part of Jefferson’s own lineage. Trethewey recounts how, on their first visit, her father defended Jefferson’s actions:

            how Jefferson hated slavery, though – out

                        of necessity, my father said – had to own

            slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

 

            he could not have fathered those children:

                        would have been impossible, my father said.

In the present visit, they both now know the real story, and their love for each other has endured despite her having to find her own way past the “knowledge” he’d previously passed on.  This “knowledge,” the poet implies, is what we must always be questioning and fighting against, these seemingly fixed barriers that keep us “other to each other,” as Trethewey phrases it in the last line of the poem. And as the book’s epigraphs so aptly put it: 

            What is love?

            One name for it is knowledge.

                                                -- Robert Penn Warren

 

            After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

                                                -- T.S. Eliot