The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry: 25 Years of Cover Art

As series editor of The Best American Poetry, I get to have a say, sometimes a large say, in the cover art we use each year. As I love looking at pictures, the need to produce a new cover each year has given me an extra reason to frequent galleries and museums. It is fun to be constantly on the lookout. It can change the way you look at a painting, a photograph, or a collage, adding a new dimension to the experience. Choosing cover art is not a unilateral process: My editor at Scribner, others at Scribner, including the art director and the publisher, and my literary agent (Glen Hartley), are among those whose opinions matter. Here are the covers we have run.  We hope you will weigh in, too. View the slide show in full screen and select the "show info" option to see the names of the artists and titles of the art work.  -- DL

"Not with a Bang but a Tweet" [by Robert Schultz]

Fourteen, one-forty—what’s the difference
Besides concision? Lines, characters, syllables,
It’s all just counting (0101). Sense
Spills through little tubes its billion baubles.

Until it doesn’t. We, the fat, fail. The grid
Fails, satellites fall. We thumb dumb texts
To a sky that does not answer. Even God
Looks away. Our guns don’t save us. What’s next?

Outside, first, the traffic, actual, smelly,
And grass—the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
So nature again, and death, and people yelling
At each other, vibrating air. Then it all caves

To the artist incising with sharpened bone
Her bison—those next one hundred forty strokes.

-- Robert Schultz

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

"Far North Farm" [by John Tranter]

A, silver, E, snow, U, dead-leaf green:
Spoons with sugar and dripping water, hillocks of snow
Traversed by hopeful young men with a moneyed glow
And sleds and perspiration, silver-blue clouds again
Chilling the horizon, a thousand miles to go.
Leave these ‘adventurers’, laughing in between
Signing media deals and muttering something obscene.
Schoolboys worship them, writing out a motto

In Latin, about suffering and stiff upper lips.
I, salmon sandwiches and hot chips.
O, the empty bottle is the colour of fear.
Push on. You’ll make it home, at dawn.
Who cares that you look a right prawn,
Sipping absinthe in the Pub with No Beer.

-- John Tranter
First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2013

"The Apartment" [by Joan Biddle]

They live on the street side of the building,
we live on the back side. They hear duets of men

and smoke, we hear birds chirp
and cover a fridge with pictures.

They shave each other’s heads
and take pills, we climb into blankets

and collect fur. He plays the drums,
she charcoals, I pick at the paint

on the walls. They hang
their clothes in the alley. We hang

drapes. We’re usually tipsy
on red wine. They drink two whiskeys

neat. I see a shore
of white skin on her back when she lifts

her arms. I see her wolf eyes and blackberry
lips. I see his skateboard,

a sandpaper tongue. A bell
rings in the afternoon. We lift our heads.

-- Joan Biddle

"Apartment" originally appeared in The Country Dog Review.

"Happy 157, George Bernard Shaw!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (7/26/1856)

George Bernard Shaw!
I’m sure I don’t knaw!
That goofy-ass hat
Is against the law.
I’m standing in snowshoes,
In panties and bra:
I’m singing sea shanties
To George Bernard Shaw!

George Bernard Shaw
Detected the flaw
In elbowy lamp
And in bendy-ass straw.
“The cunningest citizen
I ever saw,”
Says Mr Insistor
To George Bernard Shaw!

☂

O Hannibal mandible
Cash-on-demandible
Misunderstandable
George Bernard Shaw!!

•

The Brilliant, Troubled Legacy of Richard Wagner (by Jamie Katz)

his bronze portrait bust of German composer Richard Wagner, by artist Arno Breker, resides in Bayreuth, Germany, home of the annual festival honoring his work. (Getty Images )

She is Richard Wagner’s great-granddaughter, and her life has been dominated by the light and shade of his genius. But as a teenager growing up in Bavaria in the 1950s and ’60s, Eva Wagner-Pasquier went googly-eyed for an altogether different musical icon: Elvis Presley. She remembers the excitement he stirred up more than half a century ago merely by passing through a neighboring town on maneuvers with the U.S. Army. So last year, joined by her American-born son Antoine, Eva finally trekked off to Graceland to pay homage to the King. “I’ve always wanted to go there,” she said, flipping open her cellphone to display the idealized image of Elvis she uses as wallpaper. “It was superb! We stayed at the Heartbreak Hotel, of course.”

The trip to Memphis was a lighthearted escape from the burdens of running a family business like no other. Since 2008, when Eva and her half-sister Katharina succeeded their father Wolfgang Wagner, they have directed the famed summer opera festival founded in 1876 by Richard Wagner and managed by his heirs ever since. In this bicentennial year of the composer’s birth, Wagner devotees are now setting forth on their annual pilgrimage to the seat of his still-powerful cultural domain: the charming city of Bayreuth (pronounced BY-royt), nestled far from Germany’s urban centers, in the rolling hills of Upper Franconia. “Wagner without Bayreuth,” observes the cultural historian Frederic Spotts, “would have been like a country without a capital, a religion without a church.”

From July 25 through August 28, the faithful will ascend the city’s famed Green Hill to the orange brick–clad Bayreuth Festival Theater—known globally as the Festspielhaus. It was built by Wagner himself to present his revolutionary works—among them his four-part Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal—in the innovative architecture and stagings he felt they required. The Bayreuth Festival became the first full-fledged music festival of modern times, the granddaddy of everything from Salzburg and Spoleto to Bonnaroo, Burning Man and the Newport Jazz Festival. At Bayreuth, however, only Wagner’s works are presented. After his death in 1883, the festival and the theater became a hallowed shrine for his followers, many of whom embraced his ideology of fierce German nationalism, racial superiority and anti-Semitism. He was idolized by Adolf Hitler, whose rise was abetted by the Wagner family’s support in the early 1920s.

Continue reading here.

Qatar Reverie Part III (by Peter Fortunato)

(Ed note: This is part III of Peter Fortunato's series about life in Qatar. Read part I here and part II here.)

Qatar and its captial city Doha are in the desert -- no matter how you pave it, or drive it, or air condition the new buildings. (photo (c) Peter Fortunato)

The prospect of the job and of Doha itself were from the beginning almost hallucinatory. After four years over there, I could comfortably refer to it as “my other life,” though all of it remained improbable -- this city-state springing whole from the desert floor, bounding forward in less than two decades to become the richest per capita nation on the planet!  I was happy to return to Ithaca when it was over, and yet, four years back, that other life begins to shimmer in my imagination.  I rode fantastic horses and I wrote well while I lived in Doha.  I moved in international circles among the prominent thinkers of many fields.  I started to paint seriously once again, and when I told people I was an artist they paid attention. It was a place for dreams, all of us felt it, the vast possibilities – at least until you felt it starting to close in on you, that tiny peninsula with its restrictive customs and new laws, its expensive air fares, choked roadways, constant construction, and the ever rising cost of daily life, unmatched by commensurate pay raises (for the expats anyway).  Place of paradox:  a desert always, despite the many amenities to comfort the  professional class and to inspire the nationals.  Not many people had ever lived on this Saharan peninsula in the past; the heat and isolation would still make it impossible today without the modern infrastructure.  And yet, paradoxically, I stayed in part because I liked the hot sun on my skin, liked the taste of salt thick on my lips after a morning of galloping horses on the beach (though that too ended when a vast housing project, an entire “city” near Doha began.)  Before they became clotted with automobile and truck traffic at all hours, I liked cruising the nameless desert highways, where, as if out of the hazy past, a pack of grazing camels might suddenly appear. 

            In 2005 when I arrived, the nation’s economy was the fastest growing in the world, increasing yearly at a rate of more than 20%.  I literally watched the Qatar Financial Center grow alongside my apartment tower, and watched on satellite TV the adverts for its investment services broadcast worldwide by the BBC.   Whether you wore a white collar or one of the ubiquitous blue jumpsuits of the construction workers, you couldn’t help but feel like you were helping to create something positive.  You couldn’t help but admire the country’s farsighted Emir, Sheikh Hamad, and his wife, the trail-blazing Sheikha Mozah.  Just yesterday, in a move unprecedented in the Gulf Arab World, His Highness peacefully abdicated his throne in favor of his son.  It had been expected, it was only a matter of time, but this too is a sign of how quickly the future is arriving for the Qataris.  What will it bring?  Nowadays they drive Porches and BMW’s, Ferraris and Lamborghinis on streets where their grandparents walked in the dust.

The geometries of change can be arresting! (photo (c) Peter Fortunato)

Qatar Reverie Part II by Peter Fortunato

(ed note:  this is part II of Peter Fortunato's posts about Qatar. To read part I go here.)

   “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,”  Delmore Schwartz famously wrote;  and like him, I brought with me the ghosts of my parents and all of their immigrant aspirations to my life in a foreign country. It was never easy being seven thousand miles and twenty two hours of air travel from home, a world away from family as well as the freedoms and cultural touchstones of the West.  Most difficult of all was the separation from my wife, who had decided after one semester to return to teaching in Ithaca.  It was a joint decision that I would commit to four years, yet on a day-to-day basis it was primarily a matter of my own determination that kept me there.  Was I a fool?  Had I been seduced by some received idea, an outdated masculine ideal about self-worth and income?  Was I guilty for having let my wife labor so long at a job she didn’t exactly love, because of the financial benefits it delivered?  Or did I just want to get away from it all, assuaging my doubts with the reassurance that since she and I are both writers, this adventure would be good for both our independent souls? 

            All of the above.  I spoke continually to her and to myself about all of the above.  And I dreamt often of home, of my childhood, of my rural youth in the Hudson Valley, of  my first girlfriend, of all my girlfriends, of Cornell as it had been in the 60’s and 70’s, the liberation it had given me and that I wanted to communicate to college kids on the other side of the planet.  In fact, I felt quite young again, a bachelor, even if that was not completely to my liking.  In that gender segregated, tolerant but Islamic society, I daydreamed about sex constantly.  I fantasized about the wife of a foreign ambassador and almost embarrassed us both one day at our riding club when she lent me her whip.  On another day, a young lady, a Qatari, began to chat me up while we brushed our horses -- until her stern protective maid stepped between us.

The surreal quality of an ice skating rink in the giant shopping mall across from my tower never ceased to amuse me. (photo (c) Peter Fortunato)

Happy Birthday Emma Lazarus (July 22,1849–November 19,1887)by David Lehman

Without Emma Lazarus' timeless poem, Lady Liberty would be just another statue.

Near the end of the 1942 movie Saboteur, one of director Alfred Hitchcock's early American efforts, the heroine, played by Priscilla Lane, catches up with an enemy agent at the top of the Statue of Liberty. Pretending to flirt, she says it's her first time visiting the statue. This must be a big moment for her, the villainous saboteur replies with thin sarcasm. It is, she acknowledges with obvious feeling, and abruptly quotes the best-known lines from Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus," engraved on the statue's pedestal:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore;
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me....

Without ever ceasing to be a "wrong man" thriller, in which a falsely accused hero must elude capture while tracking down the real culprit on his own, Saboteur is also an ode to American freedom, and it reaches its moral zenith here, with a statement of a special national purpose. For many in 1942, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the United States into World War II, Lazarus' welcome to the world's displaced marked the difference between the Allied and Axis powers.

Read more of Lehman's essay here.

-- sdh

NYC Poetry Festival July 27th & 28th, Governors Island, NYC

Once again, Governor's Island is the setting for the annual Poetry Society of New York Poetry Festival. This years event promises to be even more thrilling than the 2012 fest. The lineup includes Lara Glenum, Cornelius Eady, Catherine Wagner, CA Conrad, Paul Legault, Todd Colby, Anne Waldman, Geoffrey Nutter, Andrew Durbin, Miguel Algarin, J. Hope Stein, Bob Holman, Cathy Park Hong among others.

Governors Island

The organizers have lined up over 50 poetry organizations and 200 poets on its three stages; a Vendor’s Village where local booksellers, artists and craftmakers will sell their wares; the 3rd annual Ring of Daisies open mic;THE POETRY BROTHEL tent; a boozy area sponsored by BROOKLYN BREWERY, THE BROOKLYN SALSA COMPANY, and THE ABBEY in Brooklyn; healthy and delicious food options including THE MUD TRUCK, THE PALENQUE COLUMBIAN FOOD TRUCK, MORRIS GRILLED CHEESE, EVERYTHING ABOUT CREPES, and BIG D’S GRUB TRUCK; a spontaneous generation house where we’ll be writing collaborative poems; and, of course, the Children’s Festival at NYCPF, this year sponsored by WRITOPIA!

Governors Island, Colonel’s Row FREE (Suggested Donation $10)

For more information go here.

Qatar Reverie Part 1 by Peter Fortunato

Sailing into Doha at dusk (photo (co) Peter Fortunato)

        Sometimes it seemed as if I were living in a dream of my own device – though   sometimes, I wondered if I were also dreaming the dreams of others, hundreds of thousands of us, “forced bachelors” like me,  raising the tiny country of Qatar out of the sand and into the Twenty First Century. 

         I was living twenty stories high in a building so new that one day, three years into my occupancy, it occurred to me that I had inhabited the space longer than any other human being in recorded history.  By then, during my last term teaching in Qatar, the name of the tower had changed, its ownership mysteriously transferred to an influential sheikh, and most of my original friends – whether faculty colleagues, oil company execs, or the friendly Filipino attendants at the gym -- were gone. The resident of the penthouse, right above my head, a representative of Shell Oil, was out of country so often that I never knew if he’d absconded, like so many expats, contracts or patience expired.  Often it felt as if the whole country or any part of it I cared about could be replaced overnight; funky charm having no leverage there against bigger, better, faster.  By this time, 2009, my tower, for a few years the tallest building in the West Bay desert, was dwarfed by more colossal structures, and only one view of the Persian Gulf remained to me.  Surely some other giant would soon blot that out – or perhaps as a friend said, bag in hand bidding me farewell:  “They’ll probably knock this old thing down before too long and build something shiny in its place.”   

View from Bilal (photo (c) Peter Fortunato)

             We were all dreamers, there.   

            My own desert visions had to do with teaching future doctors at the start-up medical school Cornell University was operating in partnership with the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.  The topics of my writing seminars for pre-med students were World Literature, and Literature and Psychology.  The students were from everywhere, and I was inspired by their idealism, by their heartfelt gratitude for what I could give them.  After decades of teaching required writing courses back in Ithaca, I felt I was being truly rewarded, and my wages were by far the highest of my career. 

            “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,”  Delmore Schwartz famously wrote;  and like him, I brought with me the ghosts of my parents and all of their immigrant aspirations to my life in a foreign country. It was never easy being seven thousand miles and twenty two hours of air travel from home, a world away from family as well as the freedoms and cultural touchstones of the West.  Most difficult of all was the separation from my wife, who had decided after one semester to return to teaching in Ithaca.  It was a joint decision that I would commit to four years, yet on a day-to-day basis it was primarily a matter of my own determination that kept me there.  Was I a fool?  Had I been seduced by some received idea, an outdated masculine ideal about self-worth and income?  Was I guilty for having let my wife labor so long at a job she didn’t exactly love, because of the financial benefits it delivered?  Or did I just want to get away from it all, assuaging my doubts with the reassurance that since she and I are both writers, this adventure would be good for both our independent souls? 

to be continued.

Peter Fortunato Guest Author July 22-26

This week we welcome Peter Fortunato as our guest author.  Peter is a writer, performer, ceremony maker, visual artist, and teacher.  He is also a practitioner of complementary alternative medicine specializing in hypnosis.  He lives in Ithaca, New York with his wife, the poet Mary Gilliland.  Find him on Facebook at Peter Fortunato author.

Late Morning: New and Selected Poems, recently published by Cayuga Lake Books, surveys almost forty years of his work, beginning with selections from his earliest collections, A Bell or a Hook and Letters to Tiohero. Themes that compel Peter's work are love of nature and human love, the revelatory power of dreams, and spiritual practice rooted in Buddhism.  He is the winner of numerous awards for his writing, including the Emily Dickinson Prize of the Poetry Society of America, and a Pablo Neruda Prize from the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa, Oklahoma,

Welcome, Peter.

-- sdh

"Detour" [by John Tranter]

A, hot pink, babies angry when kissed,
Gummy smile clenching to a scowl,
E, snow blessing the street, a lisped vowel
Hiding midnight’s infidelities, the wife pissed,
Smile (angelic) changing to grimace (foul),
Faint flutter of pulse at the wrist
As the Grim Reaper calls with his damned list.
I, sallow salmon, time to throw in the towel

And get outta here. O, tropical jungle green,
U, blue, lavender, dizzy aquamarine –
Padding from the pool, dripping wet, past
Croaking frogs, pythons, hamburger joints
Covered in vines, then a sign in Chinese that points
To the busy city – lights, people – home at last.

-- John Tranter, first published in The Australian (2013)

The Orchid [by Joan Biddle]

THE ORCHID

New York was dusty in its caves of windows, its tallest towers. The girl ran across the park, always late. They had eaten at a place called Aureole, which is a nipple but which is also a halo. She returned to her 23rd floor cubicle to no fanfare. When she ran her finger across her desk it came up gray with dust. There in front of her was the tall purple orchid her mother had brought, opening its mouths.

-- Joan Biddle

"The Orchid" appeared originally in Rhino]

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Didi Menendez, Editor of PoetsArtists and iARTistas and interactive iPad books (with a few questions for Denise Duhamel)..

Didi Menendez

NA: You do so much: you’re a poet, an artist, a painter, an editor of books and online print journals and so much more. I’d like to begin by asking for a brief description of all that you do.

DM: I am a parent first. I have four children, two of which are grown up, and two still living at home. I am single parent and I guess you could say that my work outside of the home (my publications, art, etc.) is my husband. If I were still married, I don't think I would have found these creative outlets. Although I started drawing portraits as a child and into my teens, I stopped when I got married at 21 and art stayed dormant until after the divorce(s). I found myself alone with four children all under the age of ten. I had my mother to help me then. She now has Alzheimer's but that is a different story. My sister, Ivonne, also was there for me but finding a way to release my creativity in publishing and writing poems was one of my saviors. It helped me become a happier person.

NA:You are also curating an exhibition with Sergio Gomez at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago next spring. Could you describe that
 event? http://poetsandartists.com/fixation-2014/

DM: We had such a success with this year's show "From Motion to Stillness" (/) that we wanted to do it again. Sergio Gomez  invited me to participate and by doing so it allowed the publication PoetsArtists to become a living artwork. We could say that the publication became a performance piece.

I am surrounded by such great talent 24/7 that it became evident that this had to be the next step and somehow Sergio Gomez also gathered that (being such a great curator and artist himself), and so it happened. Since the show is based on figurative arts and poetry we went back and forth with ideas for next year and finally settled on Fixation.

I wanted to have some artists from this year's show and some new artists and poets which were not in this year's show such as


Cesar Santos 

Denise Duhamel  

Richard Blanco  

Nin Andrews 

Eloy Morales  

Daena Title   

and more. We had such a great time in Chicago, getting to meet each other, and we were invited to view the Tullman Art Collection at Flashpoint and the art collection at the loft by Howard Tullman who has acquired many of the artwork published in PoetsArtists.

Link to Tullman Art Collection

NA:  I love what I have seen of the film of Denise Duhamel’s poem, “Sorry, Google doesn’t know jealousy”  which will be featured at the exhibit. What made you think of filming her poem? 

DM: I wanted to showcase the poems next to the artwork and thought of posters and other ways to have the poems be as present and the art at the show, and Sergio Gomez said that we could screen them in the gallery so I knew that was going to be the best way to get the attention of the visitors.

This year we had a traditional reading and it just did not work out well because of all the excitement in the room. Denise sent me several poems, which I am publishing, but "Sorry, Google doesn't know Jealousy" automatically started getting my attention. I started visualizing the poem and it clicked that it should be read but should Denise read it? How was I going to make this work? And then it dawned on me. As I mentioned above, I am surrounded by artists and poets 24/7 so why not have a line read by each? I didn't realize how many poets I was thinking about until I started to count the lines. There are 65 lines in Denise's poem and that is how many poets will be reading in the film.

NA: Denise, what inspired this fabulous poem?

DD: Didi asked me to try to write something for the “fixation” event she is curating with Sergio Gomez. I realized one of my fixations or obsessions is jealousy. It seems sort of taboo to write about because I always thought of it as such a shameful, immature emotion. But this invitation gave me an excuse to really explore it. I wrote a few poems and then this long list poem “Sorry, Google doesn’t know jealousy,” using googlism.

NA: That is so interesting! In Buddhism one is taught to investigate her negative thoughts and feelings such as jealousy, resentment, and anger. I always want to run away from them. But yet you go right into the lion’s den. This poem and your new book, Blowout, http:// www.amazon.com/Blowout-Poetry-Series-Denise-Duhamel/dp/ 0822962365, about your divorce are cases in point. Do you do this consciously? Are you ever afraid to tackle a subject?

DD: I just saw a hokey church billboard that read, “Courage is fear plus prayers.” I scoffed, but I had to admit that I liked it and could relate. I don’t really pray in the traditional sense, but I say a prayer such as, “please, universe, help me look this monster in the eye” sometimes when I write. That is how I deal with writing about painful things.

NA: Also, Denise, what is it like to see your poem as a film and read by 65 poets?

DD: It was pretty amazing! I loved seeing other poets interpret the lines—yours, Nin, was hilarious, and one of the first ones Didi showed me. Sometimes the clips were so depressing, almost scary, and then other times the clips were goofy or lighthearted. It was very satisfying to see such sentiments about jealousy come out of others’ mouths. Even though the poets didn’t write the lines, their willingness to say them made me feel less crazy and alone in my fixation.

NA: I have this strange feeling that poetry has become like a silent film. Most of the time we are alone with the words on a page. And now Didi is turning this silent experience into talkies. Was it strange to hear your poem in so many voices?

DD: It wasn’t as strange as you might think. I had never read the poem aloud myself when I sent it to Didi. It was brand new, only a few days old, when I gave it to her. So it as though all these poets breathed the poem into life, into a talkie, as you say.

NA: Back to Didi: You have been publishing books and journals for some time now, but you have recently begun to publish interactive books and journals for the iPad. What inspired you to try this new venue?

DM: I love new software and discovering new web sites. They become an online playground for me. Whenever I run into one of these discoveries, I try to figure out how to use it to better my publishing or art. This seemed like a perfect platform for what I do. So I did it.

NA: I had the honor of having you publish The Circus of Lost Dreams, a book I wrote in collaboration with the Rhode Island artist, Emily Lisker. (https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-circus-of-lost-dreams/ id623295035?mt=11)

It’s such a unique experience to see a book come to life. It’s both auditory and visually rich. What an incredible amount of work it must be to create a book like that! Are you planning a series of iPad books.

DM: I am currently publishing PoetsArtists and iARTistas for the iPad. Your book was the first published specifically for the iPad, although I had been publishing other books in print and digital format in the last years. However I started to lose interest in publishing these in a static format so I stopped for about a year until I discovered being able to publish for the iPad. It turned me on. So I am back to publishing chapbooks and books. I have a few planned out for later this year including one by Matthew Hittinger and another by Diego Quiros. I don’t offer open calls on these, I invite because I want to make sure to publish quality work without having to find one in a heap of manuscripts and only later to find out that the author is not tech savvy.

NA: You publish two online journals, MiPOesias and PoetsArtists, in which you are mixing poetry and art. I am wondering if the poets and artists are beginning to communicate with one another, thanks to you?

DM: MiPOesias is no longer being published. iARTistas is taking her place. I don't really have a reason why MiPO is no longer being published other than it seemed like the best thing to do with her. I felt she needed to be put out of her misery (mine). As far as poets and artists communicating with each other, you bet. I have them collaborate once or twice a year. The whole reason I started publishing PoetsARtists in 2008 is because I wanted to have art mixed in with the poems. I wanted to see them collide.

NA: Many poets I know are not technically savvy. They don’t feel comfortable on the internet, and they don’t know how to access your latest projects. But you are not afraid of technology, and you are not afraid to be ahead of the curve? Is this a frustrating issue for you?

DM: It is not a frustrating issue for me. I am whistling my own tune here literally. I do understand that all this techno babble is frustrating on others but I can't wait for the world. I am almost 53 years old and I realize that maybe I have another 20 to 30 years or so tops before I will have to stop all of this so in the meantime, I will do my thing and hope that those that whistle along with me take advantage of it.

NA: When I first heard of you, you were a poet and editor living in Miami. Now you are an accomplished artist as well, living in Chicago. Tell me about your evolution. Have you been writing and painting for many years?

DM: I am not living in Miami and I do not live in Chicago either. I live in the Mid- west. Close to Chicago but not without a few hours of travel to get there. As I mentioned early on in the interview, I had been drawing and painting up to the time I got married. When I moved here the winters were so lonely that the desire to start painting started to nudge. I was already publishing and trying out new venues for publishing but drawing and painting again really did not stir until the winter of 2007. As far as evolution, what brought me here to the USA to begin with was a (r)evolution so I have had to change many times over to accommodate my life.

NA: You make wonderful biographical videos of artists, which can be viewed at http://vimeo.com/menendez. I particularly enjoyed this one of Cesar Santos

Do you have a video, which includes your own art as well as a mini-biography?

DM: I want to mention that Jack Anders wrote the review on Cesar Santos. He is such a trooper. He normally writes poetry reviews so to have him write one on Cesar Santos one of my favorite artists was a treat for me as much as I am sure it was for Cesar.

Regarding my own work, not really. I did one as an example and briefly posted it online so others can see what I was going to be doing with their videos but then took it down once I started producing the real McCoy's.

NA: I also love the videos of your paintings from start to finish. I was wondering if you would post a link to one of them and talk about your process?

Oh these are just little drawings I do on the iPad. I do these mostly when I run out of art supplies.

DM:  How many books and journal issues do you publish each year?

NA: From 10 to 20 depending on whether I have themes or not. Or whether I publish a chapbook or full book that year.

DM: What aspects of publishing and editing, painting and making videos, do you enjoy most?

I enjoy algebra the most. If I publish A what will become of B?

NA: I’d like to close with a poem or perhaps a link to a poem or an issue of that you are particularly pleased with.

DM: I want to close with this issue of MiPOesias which was published in 2008 and edited by Emma Trelles. It is the only publication of mine where you will actually find a poem written by me. Emma and I went back and forth with this call because I was adamant about not including my work because it is a major faux to the credibility and integration of my publications but since she was the editor and I had given her control of who and what to publish, she won.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Didi Menendez is a Cuban born (1960) American artist and publisher. Her publications have been recognized by The Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry and other anthologies. She lives with her children in the middle of the United States of America. She never plans on visiting Cuba. Ever. Not even if it is the last place on earth to live. Not even then.

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here. Follow Nin on Twitter here.

Yvan Goll, Facing Death [by Luke Hankins]

Yvan Goll (1891-1950) was a poet, playwright, novelist, and translator born in Alsace-Lorraine who wrote in German, French, and English. He later lived in Paris and the U.S. and was an active part of the literary circles in Paris and Greenwich Village, along with his wife, Claire Goll. In the final years of his life, suffering from leukemia, he devoted himself to writing the poems of Das Traumkraut, translated as Dreamweed by Nan Watkins and recently released in a bilingual edition by Black Lawrence Press. (See an interview with Watkins at The Brooklyn Rail.)

These poems, written in pain and in the knowledge of impending death, possess a hallucinatory urgency that ought rightly to earn them a place among the great lyric works of the 20th century in any language. So that his pain not be wasted, Goll transformed it into the kind of art that perhaps only the dying genius can create. For the true artist, nothing is wasted--not even suffering, not even death. Read Dreamweed and you will see that Goll was a true artist, to the end.

Here is a poem from Dreamweed:

Rosedom*

Moon-rose

That burns in the heads of beasts

Brain-rose

Skinned from skulls

O hot-tempered rosedom

 

As long as the wheel of the rose

Turns and turns

The noonday rosary

Raves in fevered fields

And the rose-eye bores

Into my waking sleep

 

Yet woe if the Unrose

Ascends from the metals

And my rose-hand rises

Against the sun-rose

And the sand-rose withers

 

O rose rose of roses

That alone blazes for the roseless

 

*"Rosedom" is reprinted from Dreamweed, trans. Nan Watkins (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), by permission of Black Lawrence Press.

 

 

 

 

New Books by Contributors to Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets [by Luke Hankins]

A number of the poets included in my anthology Poems of Devotion (Wipf & Stock, 2012) have superb new books out. Here’s a list of the ones I know of and have read:

• Bruce Beasley: Theophobia (BOA Editions) (Look for my review forthcoming in Contemporary Poetry Review)
• Steven Brown: To the Wheatlight of June (photographs by Ben Nixon, poems by Steven Brown) (21^st Editions)
• Morri Creech: The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser Press)
• Jennifer Grotz (translator): Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de la Tour du Pin (Carnegie Mellon Press) (See one of the psalms and my brief commentary on de la Tour du Pin here.)
• Marjorie Maddox: Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock)
• Maurice Manning: The Gone and the Going Away (Harcourt)
• Eric Pankey: Trace (Milkweed Editions) (See my commentary here.)

I highly recommend each of these.

Notes from an Editor at an Old-Fashioned Literary Magazine; or A Brief History of Asheville Poetry Review; or What Not to Send to a Literary Magazine [by Luke Hankins]

Keith Flynn founded the literary magazine Asheville Poetry Review in 1994. What began as a regional publication quickly grew to a national one. Keith was the lead singer and lyricist of the band The Crystal Zoo at the time, and he took every opportunity to place the magazine with independent book stores around the country as he toured with the band. The distribution and subscription base grew accordingly, as well as the breadth of submissions from around the country, and indeed around the world. I started as an intern in 2006, and shortly thereafter joined the staff as an Associate Editor, and then later as Senior Editor, my current position. Today, 19 years after our founding, we are distributed across the U.S. and Canada not only to independent book stores but also to many chain book stores. In addition to publishing poems, essays, reviews, and interviews, as we always have, we now hold an annual single-poem contest, The William Matthews Poetry Prize, with a guest judge each year.

 

Through all of these changes, however, Asheville Poetry Review has remained a rather old-fashioned literary magazine. We only accept unsolicited submissions by mail, and we remain an entirely print-based magazine (albeit with some archive material online). We often wonder if this makes us a relic, or whether, in our most whiskey-induced flights of fancy, we might number among the heroic proponents of a noble tradition. Well, time will soon tell whether we can survive the costs of operating as a print publication, a question that has become increasingly difficult to answer each year, largely due to shrinking and disappearing independent book stores and ever-increasing distribution costs. With no outside funding or affiliation (by choice), we rely on subscriptions, sales, and now the annual prize, for the entirety of our operating budget.

 

The process of reading the thousands of submissions that come by mail each year is an often pleasurable one—the tactile relationship with each envelope and page, the visual elements of handwriting, the sounds of tearing and creasing. It seems to me that this gives an editor a more intimate experience with each submission, in the same way that—for me—reading a book or magazine in print is more intimate and more fulfilling than reading it on a screen.

 

But opening one’s doors to mail from the wide world allows for the possibility—and likelihood—of the strange, the scary, and the hilarious. Here are some things that I’ve received in envelopes over the years:

 

-A be-sequined and be-glittered cover letter, complete with an airbrushed glamor shot of the author.

-A poem entitled “Sexy Jesus” which consisted of a graphic (GRAPHIC) depiction of the author having sex with—you guessed it—Jesus. To top it off, a cover letter enquiring as to whether we the editors had “the balls” to publish the poem.

-An envelope in which every word on every page—and on the envelope itself—was surrounded by and covered with small frenetic pen marks, somehow leaving most of it just legible. I was shocked that the USPS had been able to deliver it. The markings were so meticulous and so ubiquitous that they didn’t strike me as a joke or anything done in the knowledge that it was abnormal. It filled me with concern for the wellbeing of that person.

-A series of envelopes containing barely legible handwritten haiku, adorned with odd magazine clippings affixed to the page with all manner of adhesives, including scotch tape, blue painter’s tape, and bandaids. Each submission included a “Bonus” haiku at the end . . . Lucky us!

 

“Happy 58, Susan Wheeler!” [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

THREE BIRTHDAY LIMERICKS for SUSAN WHEELER  (7/16) 

1.
There was a young lady named Wheeler,
Whose stinger, antenna and feeler
Could never be seen—except in a dream
Of that hexapod lady named Wheeler.

2.
There was a young person named Wheeler,
Preserved in a jar of tequila.
“I’m a gnat! I’m a gnat!” was the comment of that
Hymenopterous person named Wheeler.

3.
There was a young lady named Wheeler,
Whose camouflage couldn’t conceal her.
Though she hid in the closet, her slim ovipositor
Under the door would reveal her.

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