The Best American Poetry

Conjuro: A Q&A with Xánath Caraza [by Emma Trelles]

I first heard Xánath Caraza read her work last year in Milwaukee at "Cantos Latinos! A Mosaic of Latino Poetry," a poetry and panel of quite diverse Latino poets assembled at the city's library. Xánath sort of blew me away with her reading. I recall her dark hair and a red shawl that, on her, resembled a queenly sort of cape, but what I remember most was the forceful passion she put into the poems she read, the wake-up punch of each word, how, the longer she read, the less her Spanish sounded like language and more like raw sound.  I kept thinking of Shangó, the Yoruba deity (or orisha) of lightning and thunder and one whose presence is often associated with music, specifically the percussive power of drums. Her voice had that kind of command to it. I could not imagine a better title for her collection Conjuro, which is the Spanish word for a spell or incantation. She recently spoke to me from her home in Kansas City, and I learned as much about her consideration of culture and history in her work as I did about the sway color holds over it. "Poetry is a feeling of orange," she writes in "Linguistic Filigree." I wanted to know more.

 

ET: I saw you hold a crowd rapt when you read in Milwaukee last year, particular with "Yanga," which felt like one of the central poems of this book, both in its homage to how Africa has helped shape Latin American history *and* because oral tradition has a powerful claim in your work. Let's talk about Yanga first. Tell us who he was.

  

XC: I fell in love with Yanga early in my childhood; we studied him in grammar school. It captured me that he was a real person. He was, while a slave, a community organizer and was able to create the first free zone in the Americas in 1630. In a way, these slaves were unconquerable. The original name of the zone was San Lorenzo de los Negros, but now this town is known as Yanga.  I was always fascinated with language, and I pay attention to idioms. We have all these words we know come from Africa, and there are towns in Veracruz,, Mexico, that are named after African voices. So Yanga speaks to the history of Veracruz, and I wanted to put together Yanga's language and the Spanish versions of these words into a poem.

Louis Reyes Rivera, an African Puerto Rican scholar and performance poet, had a deep impact on me when I saw him in Kansas City.  He was such a nice person when I met him, very calm, down to earth, and then when he stood up to read, he turned into a drum, like a conga, pounding right in front of you. I put all of that together to create "Yanga."

Yanga

        (para Louis Reyes Rivera)

Yanga, Yanga, Yanga

Yanga, Yanga, Yanga,

Hoy, tu espiritu invoco

Aqui, en este lugar.

Este, este es mi poema para Yanga,

Mandinga, malanga, bamba.

Rumba, mambo, samba,

Palabras llegadas de África.

Esta, esta es mi respuesta para Yanga,

Candomble, mocambo, mambo,

Candomble, mocambo, mambo,

Hombre libre veracruzano...

ET: Let's talk about the presence of oral tradition in these poems. As I read  Conjuro , I kept feeling I was reading a songbook, a gathering of melodies that relies heavily on image and does so through a prose-like style, which might attribute to why your book was a finalist for multicultural fiction in the International Book Awards as well as for poetry in the International Latino Book Awards. Above all, I felt as if sound is king in these pages, with consonants percussively clinking up against one another and a skillful repetition demanding attention. I'd love for you to discuss the role of sound in this book and in your creative life.

XC: I'm always thinking about rhythm; that is true. I don't want to fall into stererotype, but I love music. I am Latina and whenever I hear a song I like, I start humming and dancing. I grew up like that. I don't feel like I should be sitting down when I hear music, and I think that is reflective in my writing. I know that the way we remember a poem is through its rhythm. A a certain kind of beat can captivate us. "Yanga" is like that.

  

 When I read it to children, they also respond to that rhythm without even knowing what I might be saying. It's very deliberate. The trick for poets is to make it as simple as possible but with technique behind it. We have to work our poems.

ET: I also thought the syntax and phrasing of these poems felt as if they originated first in Spanish and then were translated from head to hand through the act of writing. Did you experience this process, or something like it, while drafting the poems for this book?

  

XC: That's exactly how it happens. Creatively, I always write in Spanish. And once I think it's ready, I begin translating into English. If I have to write an academic paper or column, I can do it first in English. But creatively, I prefer Spanish. I reached that conclusion a few years ago. I kept editing myself while trying to write poems; I was hyperaware and I realized that this was not going to work. Especially for the short stories; I was so concerned to say it correctly in English. And then I thought, 'Let it go; write in Spanish, and later worry about the translation.'

ET: During a recent interview over at La Bloga, you mentioned that why you don't speak Nahuatl, you  grew up listening to it and recall its sounds, mostly rhythms that you describe as "green sounds, from the open spaces of my grandmother’s indigenous community."  This presence of green, and of color in general, is a vital part of this collection. Can you comment on your use of color and why it appears so forcefully in these poems?

  

XC: I do not do it consciously, but I'm a very visual person, and it is reflected in my language. Colors come to me, in one way or another. Green is what I remember from my grandmother's house because she used to live in an indigenous community in the northern part of Veracruz. Back then, we had to travel nine hours from Xalapa, the capital of the state of Veracruz, and all the way down to her house. The fields along the way were green. Where we lived in Xalapa, it's a cloud forest, but by her it's very hot, very humid and jungle like. Green, green, green. Una cupola de verde. And very thick air. I remember thinking, 'I'm inhaling all that green.'

  

ET: We've talked about how Conjuro includes indigenous, African, and Mexican influences. But I've also heard you say that the Midwest has its imprint on these pages as well, an unexpected ingredient when considering an Indo-Afro-Latino blend of cultures.  Can you tell us how the Midwest has permeated these poems and why?

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

Damiano Abeni (r) translates for Seamus Heaney at the Casa delle Letterature, May 2013.  Heaney was the William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Photo courtesy of Moira Egan

Slán abhaile, Seamus.

Dylan Thomas: Wild Child [by Larry Sawyer]

I was recently marveling over this poem by Dylan Thomas, “Who are you who is born in the next room...” (published in 1945) from a series of pattern poems called Vision and Prayer because of what it does or enacts so successfully, and in doing so, how it transcends its arbitrary form. I don’t have the entire series in front of me, so it may be that this particular shape has some relevance that isn’t obvious when it’s viewed out of context because apparently these shapes form a series. What seems most interesting to me is how this writing works so well to set a scene and create a poetic equation with an ending that comes as somewhat of a surprise in a visceral way with such depth of metaphor, while it almost completely resists its own rhyme scheme. It provides an almost perfect balance between meaning and form that still manages to raise interesting questions because of certain effects.

I’m drawn at the outset to the two somewhat cavernous caesuras. The first comes after “In the birth.” It seems appropriate that the poet creates this gap in the line after the word birth (where the reader nearly falls in), and the second occurs after the word “alone.” Both caesuras offer a perfect physical illustration of what is being described (the pregnant pause) because the reader is forced to involuntarily pause after these words, which not only gives them emphasis but reemphasizes in a very graphic way the visual provided a few lines earlier with “I can hear the womb opening.”

From the poem’s opening there is a double meaning established because of the dramatic tension inherent in the first three words. The intentional ambiguity almost has the reader questioning himself or this might also be Thomas asking the question of himself.

Dualities cascade throughout. In the idea that Jesus was God’s word made flesh. The two physically separated rooms exist showing the reader as separate from what goes on in the other room. Also, the mention of a “wall thin as a wren’s bone” seems to underscore a difference between what the speaker perceives as the natural and unnatural world.

It’s quite marvelous that “Wren bone” is an anagram of “new borne.” Other imagery underscores an idea that this event on some level is holy but, again, a duality within the structures finds the reader noticing a shift of perspective in the mirror image of the poem that begins as the lines reach a midpoint and then recede in the second half. The poem’s structure mimics what is described, i.e., the poem itself is turning or shifting. These lines could be read in multiple ways “In the birth/bloody room/unknown to the …” or “In the birth bloody/room unknown to the…”

The poem, although only 71 words, does start with a vision and end with a sort of prayer but is Thomas describing his own thoughts on his own life that started with a similar birth but resulted in the many physical, mental, and domestic problems which plagued him for years? Or is this a meditation on our relation to the natural world and the unnatural, as represented in the poem, is the overlay of religiosity that is placed upon us that begins at birth? Thomas paints a prime moment, birth, which serves as a hinge between these two “worlds” i.e., the natural world and the world of civilization (and all the socialization that civilization demands).

As the wall is a part of the civilized world, the infant is not, yet anyway, and the point is emphasized internally as the rhyme scheme pairs “wild” and “child” together as a final example of the mysterious duality that ripples throughout what might have been a poem that Thomas wrote in one sitting in a very short amount of time.

The visual pattern creates interesting parallels that otherwise might not have existed had the poem been left aligned. The final interesting afterthought is that the form provides the reader with an object to be stared at, which it gives it an element of spectacle. Because of its symmetry the object simultaneously resembles a box, a shape of some sort like a pyramid reflected in water, a crucifix, the human form with arms outspread, and finally and obviously a diamond. Sixteenth Century alchemist Agrippa also included this shape and its opposite, which would look like a jagged hourglass, in his “Of the Proportion, Measure, and Harmony of Man’s Body,” which included diagrams of geometric shapes aligned with the human form. These two shapes comprise the ebb and flow of the alternating patterns in the book.

By starting with such an unanswerable question, by including such vivid imagery (e.g., heart print), and ending with such a violent twist, the poem registers like a minor earthquake and we stare down into its dark abyss and wonder what it meant to the author, as well as what it might mean to everyone facing the riddle of human existence.

Nota bene: See if you can guess which other literary wild child may have served as partial inspiration for this particular song by The Doors.

  

Chicago Artists Resource Interview with Larry Sawyer on The Chicago School of Poetics

photo (c)Lawrence Schwartzwald

How does not having a physical school benefit your students and classes?

The online classes simply allow us to invite students into our community no matter where they’re living. With a laptop, students could take a class at home, in a café, or sitting in a car. Anywhere with Wi-Fi really. We’ve had students from Canada, Morocco, and the Philippines in addition to students right here in Chicago.

What have you noticed that has changed in Chicago’s poetry scene over the years?

There are more reading series, more journals. It’s a destination for poetry now. There has been a genuine influx of poets. I recently covered the Chicago literary scene for Ploughshares and mentioned the wide variety of events and institutions.

What event(s) would you recommend to a poet just starting out in Chicago?

Go to the readings. There are sometimes multiple events in one night but really try to get out and experience poetry. From Hyde Park to Wicker Park to Rogers Park, there is poetry to be heard somewhere nearly every night of the week.

 

How does Chicago’s poetry community differentiate itself from others like NY and LA?

I’m sure there are similarities but the Chicago poetry community is probably more varied. At some point there was some discussion as to whether the poets here constituted a "new Chicago school" but I think stylistically every type of poetry can be found here.

There is a long history of poetry in Chicago of course. Going back to Carl Sandburg or Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1920, H.L. Menken famously commented that Chicago was the literary capital of the United States. Other than Sandburg and Brooks, the city has been almost more well-known as a home to novelists but that seems to be changing. In the past 7 or 8 years, more and more poets seem to have moved to Chicago.

What’s going on in American poetry now that excites you?

Read the work of Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, Dana Ward, Tom Clark or Tracey K. Smith. I always like to see what Johannes Göransson and Bob Archambeau are writing about. The recent bickering about conceptualism has been sometimes interesting. Goldsmith is probably having a good laugh at the ire he’s produced in poets.

Lately we were happy to add Sharon Mesmer to the faculty at The Chicago School of Poetics. (Welcome, Sharon!)

Also, the events here in Chicago are great. I’m still excited by the readings at Myopic Books. I’ve been curating the reading series there for over 8 years now. I recently hosted my 200^th poetry reading there. 

Also, a few months ago I participated in and helped plan a wake for the famous Irish poet Fallon McPhael. OK, so he never existed.

I’m excited to see the late poet Joe Ceravolo being recognized now for his work with a big collected poems. Also, it’s been exciting to see Chicago in the past 10 years become a destination for poetry. I was just talking about this with the poet and Columbia College professor Tony Trigilio for his podcast, Radio Free Albion.

Next month, I plan to lead a situationist-style dérive around Rogers Park for the Absinthe and Zygote reading series. There’s just always so much going on. Chicago is amazing.

What inspired the creation of The Chicago School of Poetics?

The founding of the school really resulted from a conversation with fellow poets Francesco Levato and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, and also Francesco’s fiancé Laura Skokan one night during dinner. What began to emerge was a sense that there was a need for a different kind of school. One that offered poetics instruction but outside the strictures of the MFA culture. Many of the poets I’d come into contact with since moving to Chicago had described to me an MFA experience that sounded hyper-competitive and left students saddled with enormous debt with little promise of securing a viable teaching job upon graduation.

Looking back 15 years ago the MFA system didn’t seem to be quite the stronghold that it is now. Rather than try to poke holes in that system our discussion involved founding a school as a community beyond and alternative to that system, which we felt had become very cost prohibitive. A two-year MFA program can put a student from $28,000 to $74,000 in debt. Our 8-week courses are $399 but we also now have a new tiered pricing structure as well as a student discount. Our work study program lowers tuition even further by $100. We also used Indie Go Go recently to raise funds to provide scholarships to students in need. 

In addition to cost, it had also begun to seem that MFA programs were the cause of a rather homogenous environment in American poetry. We wanted to found a school with a focus on collaboration, rather than competition—One with less of a focus on creativity and more on craft because we agreed that creativity can’t really be taught.

We offer instruction that has the rigorous nature of MFA studies at a more flexible and affordable price. And by creating an online community for those outside of urban centers, the School provides the kind of community you might find in an MFA program but one that goes "beyond" geographical limitations.

We critique work based on its own merits. Literary theory isn’t avoided, but the craft of writing poetry is always the primary focus and intense focus on selected readings and the poems the students have written.

How alliteration, assonance, caesura, extended metaphor, hyperbole, inverted syntax, onomatopoeia, synecdoche, varying levels of tone or diction, and use of irony produces meaning and doesn’t merely convey meaning. The word produce in that last sentence should be emphasized heavily. That’s the key. Teaching methods involve critique of poems written in the class with a goal of actually publishing the work. Instructors bring all of their publishing experience to the class and freely share advice with the students. The focus is always intently on the poems that are being discussed by the class and the craft elements that could make them resonate more fully.  Students can really get inside the writing process of the instructor.

We wanted to be able to discuss writing strategies with students that went beyond the confessional, narrative, or merely descriptive. So our goal was to transcend borders in the writing itself but also to actually transcend physical boundaries. We wanted to provide a resource for poets to find community outside of urban centers, so we wanted to provide visual face-to-face conferencing online. We aren’t merely trading files via email or engaging in group reading assignments. The face-to-face, real-time, interaction allows a remarkable interactive experience and group discussion. Our fall class schedules are now online.

How do the online classes work?

Students simply need a computer with a Macintosh, Windows, or Linux operating system; a microphone (most have one built in) for voice conferencing; a webcam for video conferencing (most newer computers already have one built in); and a high-speed internet connection. The software is really easy to use. During online sessions instructors and students can share links to videos online, sound files, documents such as PDFs of specific poems, and everyone involved can communicate visually in real time. There is also a chat feature so side discussions can occur while the instructor lectures without any disruption. It leads to some really interesting discussion. Students can gather to learn about writing poetry across time zones and even across continents. Our instruction method is truly different. We aren’t merely offering online poetics instruction.

Eileen Myles taught one of our master classes and recently commented: “Time to pull down the time space limitations of what and where poetry exchange is occurring in our broken and beautiful 21st Century. Chicago School of Poetics is the only institution I know that’s experimenting so widely and freely with making the occasion of writing and community and pedagogy be at all our fingertips and in our eyes. I myself was both elated and terrified to teach a master class through CSoP because I’d previously counted on the presence of bodies as my teaching familiar. Yet I’m turned around now after conducting my master class because my students were funny and dazzling and awkward and engaged and we were also like cats seeing each other in our very own lairs and now I only want to go further and totally relish the feel of this new working and playing field. The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way.”

 

The Basic Beliefs of Bob Dylan (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

My book The Basic Beliefs of Judaism: A Twenty-first-Century Guide to a Timeless Tradition has just been published. Writing it compelled me to think of how idea systems are structured and about the nature of their constituent elements. Of course, my mind inevitably wandered from trying to provide an organized and systematic explanation of the Jewish articles of faith to other belief systems.

Since I’ve written so much about Bob Dylan, I began to wonder what it would look like to examine Dylan’s basic beliefs. I quickly concluded that, very much like the Judaism I had just written about, it wasn’t possible or even desirable to pretend that there was an easily defined set of such beliefs. Still, surely Dylan had strongly-held beliefs. So I wondered how to locate them.

I finally decided to consider a representative song. My choice is completely arbitrary. I chose it because it was written at a creative and pivotal moment in Dylan’s career.

“Maggie’s Farm,” recorded on January 15, 1965, is most frequently is understood as Dylan’s refusal to go along with the folk movement’s expectations of him, especially that he stick to acoustic rather than electric music and continue to write social and political protests against injustice exclusively rather than write about his personal feelings. The song became a living symbol at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan went electric as he sang it.

Proponents of the view that this song is a rebellion against the folk community point out the similarity of Maggie’s name to that of Silas McGee. It was on McGee’s farm that Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game” for a 1963 civil rights gathering. This song can be seen performed in Dont Look Back. However, it is also plausible that Dylan took the idea of complaining about working on a farm from the 1929 song “Down on Penny’s Farm,” which Dylan had heard on Harry Smith’s iconic collection Anthology of American Folk Music and had used as the basis of an earlier song, “Hard Times in New York Town.” “Maggie’s Farm” also bears some similarities to Gid Tanner and Riley Puckett’s “Tanner’s Farm,” recorded in 1934.

There are two beliefs inherent in these observations. Dylan’s foundational belief in the song is that he will not be chained to any movement, any group that wants to claim and own him as their own. As he asserts in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” another song on the same Bringing It All Back Home album: “It is not he or she or them or it that you belong to.” He laments that “everybody wants you to be just like them.” Dylan’s crucial belief is in artistic and intellectual independence.

As a rebellion against the folk music movement, it is possible to read the song’s characters as either general types or specific people Dylan knew. For example, when you ask what female ran the “folk music farm,” the answer is obvious: Joan Baez. On this level, the song is a protest against Baez. Pete Seeger was her “brother” in folk legend and power. And who’s the father figure for Dylan in this plot to get him to sing while he slaved? Albert Grossman, his manager. This making the work a song with a key only goes so far, of course, and it’s all conjecture anyway. The bigger point is that the folk community wanted to control Dylan, and he didn’t want to be controlled. To see the characters in more general terms consider Maggie’s ma who is the sort of person who attempts to manipulate others by invoking the support of and hiding behind the authority of “Man and God and Law.”

Dylan’s second basic belief evident in the song is his faith is in traditional music. He may not like movements, but he is grounded in the roots music of American life. If the Bible later came to either replace or supplement the American musical canon, at this stage of his life, Dylan’s truest guide was what he heard in the great music of the country, especially early 20^th century blues and country music. If there is any group in which he feels comfortable, it is the community of musicians, so long as he’s not limited to any one musical influence or heritage or any one type of song that he must sing.

There’s a third belief almost hidden away. It’s in the third and fourth lines of the song when he wakes in the morning folds his hands and prays for rain. It’s an odd statement in this angry song because the song mocks belief in others but not in the power of prayer to produce rain. It may be he wants the rain so he won’t have to go outside and pray. The point, though, is he prays at all and believes in the power of prayer. This belief became central as he got older. And just as Dylan didn’t want to be chained to a musical movement, so, too, it would turn out that he didn’t want to be chained to a particular religion. He mistrusted religious groups as much as he mistrusted any other kind of group, and his religion would, stemming from his foundational belief in complete personal freedom, focus on his own relationship to God rather than on his attachment to a religious group.

“Maggie’s Farm” also contains a seemingly ironic belief. The fourth belief in the song is in the importance of protest. That is, Dylan believes it is an individual’s moral duty to protest, but not to do so as part of a movement. In this song, Dylan complains about the National Guard standing around the door. Because the farm is run by so many oppressive people, the farm itself might be seen as the symbol of an oppressive state. It should be noted, though, that it’s no accident that it was Dylan who suggested what became Farm Aid in a comment made at the 1985 Live Aid concert. For Dylan, farms weren’t oppressive, but a symbol of family and home. Hollis Brown and his family, for example, lived on a South Dakota farm in Dylan’s song about the family’s tragedy. On that reading, Maggie and her family are ruining Eden, turning what should be a family refuge into a horrific place. Dylan in this sense longs for simplicity, for a return. Instead of the song being a cry for fighting against an oppressive state it becomes a cry for returning to lost traditions.

So, the fourth belief is indeed a call to protest, but it is not a call to protest from a particular political viewpoint. Dylan doesn’t want to be owned by any one political ideology.

Great Movie Moment: Splendor in the Grass "Miss Metcalf, may I be excused?"

The first time I watched this movie, this scene -- not the scene in which Warren Beatty pushes Natalie Wood to her knees, or frolics naked under the waterfall with the town tramp(the girl in the orange sweater here) -- made me prick up my ears.  When Miss Metcalf (Martine Bartlett) made Natalie Wood read the Wordsworth lines aloud, I scribbled them on a scrap of paper and found the poem in one of my mother's college textbooks. I was about twelve or thirteen years old and for the next few days managed to slip a few lines of WW into all of my conversations as I tried to memorize Wordsworth's Immortality Ode. It's still one of my all-time favorite poems.

 

-- sdh

(ed. note: this post originally appeared on May 3, 2008)

Six Love, Six One, Six Love (We Won)

Stephanie Paterik and David Lehman before their first-round mixed doubles match at the US Open, Monday, August 26.

On the American Grotesque [by Larry Sawyer]

In writing about themes including the sleaziness of the film industry, war in Afghanistan, the gutter nature of politics, and the absurdity of American life, my book Unable to Fully California seats itself squarely in a tradition of the American grotesque. Of course, Flannery O’Connor once famously stated that the problem for a serious writer of the grotesque is “one of finding something that is not grotesque.”

But to point at the existence of the grotesque as observer, i.e. include it as subject matter, creates a critical distancing from it and implies that the observer is not a part of the tableaux that inspired such art. But the waking up from this American dream often includes a tense realization that we are all a part of this intertwined society like it or not.

The grotesque exists at the local mall, definitely all over television, in the imminent political primaries, sitting at home by the fire, everywhere except in the wilds. People create a scenario that can be called grotesque, although the wilderness was the first common metaphor that implied a backdrop in front of which the early inhabitants of the newly formed United States enacted their grotesque scenarios.

Kenneth Burke in the 1930s called the idea of the grotesque an “attitude toward history” that is evident in contemporary life and a “cult of incongruity without the laughter.” What I sought to accomplish by sticking some pins in the film industry in my own first book.

E. H. Gombrich has written of the long tradition of grotesque motifs within the world history of visual art and names some of the work of Albrecht Dürer as being early examples of the grotesque in social settings.

The American author most typically identified as writing in a grotesque tradition is Edgar Allen Poe, but to that list could be added Sherwood Anderson, Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, and possibly also William Carlos Williams.

Grotesque

The city has tits in rows.
The country is in the main—male,
It butts me with blunt stub-horns,
Forces me to oppose it
Or be trampled.

The city is full of milk
And lies still for the most part.
These crack skulls
And spill brains
Against her stomach.

(1914)

The poem still has a slight shock value. But mere shock is never the goal of the grotesque. The poem begins with what could be a description of milk bottles lined up in rows along a city street. A sight probably not seen in the country but we’re left to wonder how the action in the poem will be resolved. It ends with a fairly graphic depiction of violence that might describe the outdated practice of consuming lambs brains during pregnancy. What makes this grotesque is that we don’t quite know. Williams offers this partial portrait to heighten the effect of the grotesque.

Taken to its logical conclusion the tradition of the grotesque in America also includes some of the best rock ‘n roll. Musical poets such as the Lou Reed of the albums Berlin and Sally Can’t Dance offer grotesque portraits of decadence and trash. The style originated by Richard Hell points to the grotesque.

And although the wilderness constituted the setting for many an early American depiction of the grotesque, Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, as early as 1643, had removed the idea of the grotesque from any natural setting, and placed it in the domain of art and “human intentionality” according to James Goodwin by writing “There are no Grotesques in nature; nor any thing framed to fill up empty cantons, and unnecessary spaces.” The idea of the grotesque, which started as a visual design element including depictions of “rude” people that set off a subject that comparatively speaking might look placid and serene includes the urban and also the urbane.

It’s always in the everyday that the grotesque is most readily apparent.

According to Goodwin it was Henry James who faulted the French poet Charles Baudelaire for being responsible for single-handedly dragging art down into the dumps and “besmirching” and “bespattering” art with common interests that degraded its integrity and reduced its stature.

The line in visual art that started as the connection that can be drawn between Honoré Daumier’s famous painting, “Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834”, which shows a man dead on the floor apparently knifed, and the still-life journalism of the photographer WeeGee whose photos often depicted grisly scenes of street crimes continues now with the photography of Diane Arbus. Rather than shock modern audiences, however, often the grotesque now may produce a wry smile.

It seems certain that there is no shortage of the grotesque in American life and it’s natural to, as a condition of being, be fascinated by it. Especially in America we like a spectacle, and as observers of media it’s that distancing that makes us feel separate from it—as we sit surrounded by it in our living rooms.

"Happy Thirty-One, Sara Peters!" (+ "Happy 264, Wolfgang Goethe!") [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

SARA PETERS  (8/28)

Sara Peters, thirty-one:
Stop the winds and block the sun.
Golf-cart Goethe, somewhat more:
He’s two hundred sixty-four.

German poet, sing a burst:
Sara Peters’ thirty-first.
Schwester von dem ersten Licht:
Werther’s song in meter strict.

Noon on August twenty-eight
Prompts Madrid to cogitate.
Sara Peters, priest and nun!
Stop the winds and block the sun.

•

 

Quote of the Day: "When I left Iowa [the Iowa Writers' Workshop] . . .

I definitely never wanted to stand in front of a group of academics again and see if they approved of me. I made up my mind to take my work to the actual reading public."

-- Daniel Woodrell, Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2013

 

"Happy Forty-Four, John Beer!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

JOHN BEER  (8/28)

My little horse must think it queer
To try to put the car in gear.
A birthday poem for my dear
Exalted malted friend, John Beer.

Oh, don’t you worry, never fear:
Thomas Hood will soon be here.
Mink and monogram cashmere?
“Average/casual” for John Beer.

“O Antonía! pioneer!”—
He said and shed a bitter tear.
He’s holding hands with Edward Lear
The better to console John Beer.

My little horse must think it gay
To teach the buccaneer to pray.
I draft these beery rhymes to say
Let flow the Beer on tap today.

•

Cinematic Qualities in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Edwin Denby [by Larry Sawyer]

Given the difficulty Americans seem to have finding any common ground on the question of gun control, unsurprisingly, as a poet, I hear a particular poem rise up in my memory to provide a quiet but definitive answer. In fact, this particular poem is known for its haunting quality and its orchestral force that contradicts its seeming simplicity. I’m writing about Emily Dickinson’s “My Life It Stood – A Loaded Gun (764).”

No one would turn to the poetry of Emily Dickinson to find solutions to the current American gun control issue, which is why the possibility intrigues me. (If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is Florida.)

Rather than point to what the poem might mean, I’m more interested in Dickinson’s description, which provides such indelible force. Buoyed by an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility that required extreme daring and skill to execute, the first two stanzas provide some of the best lines of poetry ever written by an American. With a deadpan subtlety, Dickinson’s implication that the mountains’ echo to the report of the gun completes a tableau where the reader is able to visualize the action so seamlessly it actually feels as though we are also a part of that picture caught within the frame of the poem. In fact, the entire poem has a filmic quality. The action that drives this poem could easily serve as the plot for a short experimental film.

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master’s Head -
’Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -

With the line “The Mountains straight reply -” Dickinson provides such a convincing psychological photograph that, once this fiery image appears in the imagination of the reader, it’s nearly impossible to extinguish. The image is lasting because it’s provided in such stark contrast: we nearly expect the fourth line of that second stanza to rhyme with its second line because that’s the expectation created by the first stanza. This defiant unexpectedness gives the line its subtle visual force.

Edwin Denby, another poet able to do this, wrote poetry known for a somewhat elegiac mood, a certain bittersweet severity, and a terseness or brevity. Although Denby’s poetry also contains much wry humor, each short poem can seem like a photographic still-life, as consistently captured through stark description, a portrait of the details of his metropolitan life.

Without much of the surrealist quality that attracted me to other New York School writers, there has always been a quality to the poetry of Edwin Denby that satisfies on an almost visual level. In lines such as:

New York dark in August, seaward
Creeping breeze, building to building
Old poems by Frank O’Hara
At 3 a.m. I sit reading
Like a blue-black surf rider, shark
Nipping at my Charvet tie, toe-tied
Heart in my mouth—or my New York
At dawn smiling I turn out the light
Inside out like a room in gritty
Gale, features moving fierce or void
Intimate, the lunch hour city
One’s own heart eating undestroyed
Complicities of New York speech
Embrace me as I fall asleep

The scene is set in very few words, and the reader is immediately subsumed in Denby’s world. There is almost a painful clarity that, if not lingered upon because of its conversational tone, can almost be missed entirely. The drama provided by much of Denby’s work is somewhat muted but always very human. But the mechanical function of lines such as “At dawn smiling I turn out the light/Inside out like a room in gritty/Gale, features moving fierce or void/Intimate…” provide a big return on your investment of minimal time.

Denby shifts in his poetry very quickly from macro to micro and back, which is that at which Dickinson excelled. Other than simply gleaning the details and preoccupations of both writers as those qualities are displayed in the literal meaning inherent in the poems, this poet still marvels at how the visual aspects of the work of these two poets can absolutely haunt the mind. 

 

Best American Poetry 2013 Book Launch at the AJC Decatur Book Festival, Saturday, August 31, 4:15-5:00

The Best American Poetry 2013 Book Launch
First Baptist Decatur Sanctuary Stage
with readings by Jericho Brown, Denise Duhamel, David Kirby, David Lehman, Thomas Lux, and Kevin Young. 

Books will be for sale, signing to follow reading.

More information here.

A Supermarket on Facebook and 'Free Union' by Breton [by Larry Sawyer]

[Happy birthday, Guillaume Apollinaire, 1880–1918]

André Breton's agenda to destroy bourgeois forms of consciousness with the exploration of desire as "a theatre of provocations" is possibly most apparent and memorable in his poem from 1931, "Free Union." In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images on Facebook I came upon a request made by Mark Lamoureux for surrealist love poems for a wedding ceremony and saw a comment by Noah Eli Gordon that Mark ought not to choose "Free Union" because it objectifies women. I would submit that 

"Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions."

So, in Breton's conception of this poem there is no true object. Not in any typical sense. I would argue that in Breton's conception of this poem the images presented and the result is to show through some small crack in our realities that women, men, and all of the objects in our world are much larger than we previously supposed and also conjoined. The lightning released by the poem is bizarre, haunting, and does indeed contain some baroque element of schlock. This is absolutely why I love it. Most have stated that it actually memorializes a particular woman and wasn't directed toward women. 

Whether modern society has supplanted our primal consciousness with some false rationality is debatable, perhaps, but the poem "Free Union," even its title, seeks to conjoin the disparate elements of our being through an analysis of what drives us on our most elemental level--desire. Reader, please substitute the word "wife" in the poem with "husband" or any other number of words--the goal is some indefinable totality that is supra-conscious.

Unlike Thomas Campion's "There is a Garden in Her Face," the famous poem published in 1617, i.e.,

There is a garden in her face

Where roses and white lilies grow;

A heav'nly paradise is that place

Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.

 
Breton seeks to cross the chasm inherent in the blason as it existed since Clément Marot's time in 1536 by using an apparition of the form to praise but he does so by skipping a crucial step. To Breton his 

 

... wife whose hair is a brush fire

Whose thoughts are summer lightning

Whose waist is an hourglass

Whose waist is the waist of an otter caught in the teeth of a tiger

Whose mouth is a bright cockade with the fragrance of a star of the first magnitude

Whose teeth leave prints like the tracks of white mice over snow

Whose tongue is made out of amber and polished glass

Whose tongue is a stabbed wafer

The tongue of a doll with eyes that open and shut

Whose tongue is an incredible stone

My wife whose eyelashes are strokes in the handwriting of a child

Whose eyebrows are nests of swallows

My wife whose temples are the slate of greenhouse roofs

With steam on the windows

My wife whose shoulders are champagne

Are fountains that curl from the heads of dolphins over the ice

My wife whose wrists are matches

Whose fingers are raffles holding the ace of hearts

Whose fingers are fresh cut hay

My wife with the armpits of martens and beech fruit

And Midsummer Night

That are hedges of privet and resting places for sea snails

Whose arms are of sea foam and a landlocked sea

And a fusion of wheat and a mill

Whose legs are spindles

In the delicate movements of watches and despair

My wife whose calves are sweet with the sap of elders

Whose feet are carved initials

Keyrings and the feet of steeplejacks

My wife whose neck is fine milled barley

Whose throat contains the Valley of God

And encounters in the bed of the maelstrom

My wife whose breasts are of night

—

And are undersea molehills

And crucibles of rubies

My wife whose breasts are haunted by the ghosts of dew-moistened roses

Whose belly is a fan unfolded in the sunlight

Is a giant talon

My wife with the back of a bird in vertical flight

With a back of quicksilver

And bright lights

My wife whose nape is of smooth worn stone and white chalk

And of a glass slipped through the fingers of someone who has just drunk

My wife with the thighs of a skiff

That are lustrous and feathered like arrows

Stemmed with the light tailbones of a white peacock

And imperceptible balance

My wife whose rump is sandstone and flax

Whose rump is the back of a swan and the spring

My wife with the sex of an iris

A mine and a platypus

With the sex of an alga and old-fashioned candles

My wife with the sex of a mirror

My wife with eyes full of tears

With eyes that are purple armour and a magnetized needle

With eyes of savannahs

With eyes full of water to drink in prisons

My wife with eyes that are forests forever under the axe

My wife with eyes that are the equal of water and air and earth and fire

(trans. by David Antin)

 

The poem confounds our preconceptions, driving us toward a point where we begin to question our learned associations and free-fall through the sensory impressions of the poem, if we submit to it, which guides us toward a reckoning with what we thought was reality. His wife, on an elemental level, absolutely is. The equation “this is that” runs throughout. The surrealist biomorphic melds all into one and transcends boundaries, rather than providing mere simile (think Robert Burns, “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose,” 1794).

“My wife with eyes of savannahs” as a line of poetry may be easy to disparage but as evidence of the Surrealist plot it is Exhibit A. This is just a single poem in a concerted worldwide movement that attempted nothing less than the overthrow of time itself.

This poem is an attempt to map the dark matter, even if its center is the rather formulaic "my wife." For Breton poetry was just a beginning point and the goal was a revolution of mind and a total liberation from the self-imposed confines of the dualities that prevent our full awareness. A reverse engineering of surrealist method doesn't do much justice to its otherworldly aims.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Untitled," collage by Andrew Lundwall

 

Larry Sawyer, Guest Author August 26-30

Larry Sawyer is the author of Vertigo Diary (BlazeVox, 2013), and Unable to Fully California (Otoliths Books, 2010). His poetry has appeared in Action Yes, The Chicago Tribune, Coconut, Court Green, Esque, Exquisite Corpse, Forklift Ohio, Milk, MiPOesias, National Poetry Review, Poets & Artists Magazine, Shampoo, Skanky Possum, Van Gogh's Ear, Vanitas, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. In addition to being a poet he has curated the Myopic Poetry Series in Chicago since 2005 and is also the co-director of The Chicago School of Poetics. He was chosen Best Poet by The Chicago Reader in its 2012 and 2013 readers’ polls. A recent interview is up on Tony Trigilio’s Radio Free Albion.

Welcome, Larry.

In other news . . . Save the date: September 19, 2013, 7:00 pm.  Celebrate the launch of the Best American Poetry 2013 at the New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY. Free. With Series Editor David Lehman and Guest Editor Denise Duhamel and an all star line up of contributors: Kim Addonizio,John Hennessy,Anna Maria Hong, Major Jackson, Lawrence Joseph, Noelle Kocot,Dorothea Lasky, Dorianne Laux, Amy Lawless, Amy Lemmon, Anthony Madrid, Sally Wen Mao,Vijay Seshadri, Mitch Sisskind, Stephanie Strickland, Wendy Xu.

-- sdh

"Happy Forty-Three, Graham Foust!" [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

GRAHAM FOUST (8/25)

Foust is forty-three.
Don’t try to annihilate me.

His Christian name is Graham.
The Lion will lie to the Lamb.

The Nixon Administration
Has made a promiscuous oration.

And Foust is forty-three:
A degenerate virgo like me.

•

Kit Marlowe wrote to Foust.
He was feelin’ cat-and-moused.

But Foust wrote back to Marlowe:
“I’ll come by the apartment tomorrow.”

Madrid was in the car,
A pale and watery star.

He wiped his weepin’ e’e,
’cuz Foust was forty-three.

•

ERRATA: [by A. Van Jordan]

ERRATA: So, a few days ago I quoted a part of Gwendolyn Brooks' Annie Allen, from "the children of the poor" poem. I said it was in the "Anniad" section of the book, but it's actually in the last section, "Womanhood." Why didn't anyone write in to correct that? :-) Anyway, I just wanted to set the record straight before I signed off. Thanks! ~AVJ

Gettin’ Over: How It is in the Poem is How It is in Life [by A. Van Jordan]

So, for my last blog, I spoke to some poets to get an idea of what I should do, and I think I’m going to take a cue from poet John Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie), who suggested that I talk about “soul music,” or possibly about “poetic mentors,” but I’m taking a bit of a slant approach to this, and I’m using both of his suggestions: I want to talk about the blues as a form from which we can learn how to close a poem. In fact, the Blues Stanza, for the longest, was the only American poetic form—and still is the only “traditional” American form, which simply is to say it has a long tradition that we can extend, vary, and translate into the 21st Century. And I also want to talk about poets and thinkers who influenced my thoughts on this subject.

My real understanding of the blues as a poetic form came while I was in my MFA program at Warren Wilson College. In our penultimate semester at Warren Wilson, we have to do a craft essay. I chose the Blues as a Poetic Form by looking at the work of Langston Hughes, Etheridge Knight, and Cornelius Eady. My supervisor was the poet Eleanor Wilner—a great poet, a great spirit, and a blues woman at heart—who guided me and indulged me through thinking about the blues stanza. What place does this stanza hold in contemporary poetics? What can we learn from it? Who were its masters? Etc. This was back in 1997, and I’m still learning from this exploration.

I recently heard Chase Twichell give a wonderful talk on form in which she mentioned how we can’t do form just for form’s sake. We have to push the form to be more flexible. “Amen, sista,” I said in my head, sitting in my seat. I loved the fact that she also pointed out how form, in itself, can be easy to do; it’s making it bend to your will to say something about the human condition that’s hard, making it your own language. When I think about the blues stanza, it’s a form that really forces this need to speak beyond the form. The blues stanza is largely unsuccessful without transcendence.

Transcendence is really what we take from this form into our muscle memory as we write free verse. We need to push the form toward a turn, much like the sonnet, but at the end as opposed to toward the middle. The turn often takes the shape of one or more of the following:

1. Reversal of Fortune
2. Higher Knowledge
3. Stoic Acceptance as a coping mechanism
4. Humor
5. Luck or Supernatural intervention

When you look at this list of ways in which the blues stanza can be resolved—and, to be clear, this is NOT a complete list of possibilities--we find that we can apply these to most free verse poems. But I came to understand this not only through listening to a good deal of blues—Eddie Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bessie Smith, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, John Lee Hooker, and Big Mama Thornton, as favorites—but also from reading some profound books on the subject. Mostly, I read everything the late great Albert Murray wrote, the novels and the essays, and then I read everything he referenced.

Earlier in the week I talked about favorite books. If I extended my list past three, a book that would be in my top ten is The Hero and the Blues, by Murray, who died at age 97 on August 18, 2013, the day before I started this blog.

Albert Murray, known as a novelist and essayist, was also a poet; he published a collection at age 85. If you want to see some real blues transcendency played out in a poem, check out his poem on Faulkner, which was published in the New Republic: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114389/poem-albert-murray-william-faulkner-noun-place-verb .

When I heard Chase Twichell give her talk, I thought about how she’s extending an argument on form that reminded me of Murray. Murray presents an argument for the extension of tradition through working within its original forms—even when artists think of themselves as working “experimentally.” Murray was no square. He was not only hip to change in all its forms but he also was hip to the traditions from which those innovations emerged. With regard to the blues as a form, he aptly makes this case for the extension of its tradition and the tradition of all form in art, in his chapter “The Blues and the Fable in the Flesh”:

“…To refer to the blues idiom is to refer to an established mode, an existing context or frame of reference. But then not only is tradition that which continues; it is also the medium by which and through which continuation occurs…Perhaps a better word for experimentation as it actually functions in the arts is improvisation…The more any art form changes, by whatever means and by whatever methods, motivations, or infusions, the more it should be able to fulfill its original function.”

This could be taken both as sound advice on approaching form and as an ambition for experimentation. At first glance this might sound rigid, but upon further rumination one may be able to see how liberating this can be as an approach. When we think of “improvisation,” we often think of a certain freedom, but we’re actually hearing, in music, a musician at play in form. So, I’m constantly thinking about the ways in which we can bring that level of improvisation to our forms. And we have contemporary examples: I think it’s unavoidable to say that Denise Duhamel falls under this category in every one of her books. I also put Marilyn Nelson, A. E. Stallings, and Natasha Trethewey in this category, book by book. Jen Bervin plays with the sonnet form in singularly original ways in her work Nets. Marilyn Hacker belts out a long Coltrane-esque improvisation in Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Evie Shockley is like Miles when he still did ballads in her book The New Black. And Ellen Bryant Voigt bends the sonnet to a blues scale in Kyrie…We have many examples of “improvising” in form in poetry. And, fortunately, we still have poets devoted to extending the blues form, specifically: Calvin Forbes, Sterling Plump, Honoree Jeffers, Tyehimba Jess, and Kevin Young, to name a few.

The basics of the blues form is a three-line stanza in which the first line makes a statement or asks a question, the second line offers a variation of the first line, and the third line offers a response or a resolution. (Often, too, it’s a four-line stanza in which the second or fourth lines may finish a clause from the first or the third lines, respectively.) I say “resolution” because the first line is usually a statement that lays out a situation, a dilemma, in which the speaker is found. I often tell my students that ‘how it is in the poem is how it is in life.’ The “dilemma” posed in the blues stanza is often what most people think of when they think of the blues: a speaker who has lost a job, who has no money, who has lost a lover, etc. But the poem has to find transcendence in some way to respond to this situation, much in the way that we have to respond to dilemmas in life.

We’re most used to seeing variations on this basic form in that three-line stanza, either in an AAB or an AAA rhyme scheme. An example of a fairly traditional blues stanza can be found in this excerpt from Eddie Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” in which our speaker copes with the loss of his lover, four lines at a time:

“…Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul
I wouldn’t mistreat you, baby, for my weight in gold.
I said, Lord, have mercy on my wicked soul.
You know, I wouldn’t mistreat nobody, baby, not for my weight in gold.

Well, I folded up my arms and slowly walked away
I said, Farewell, Honey, I see you on “Judgment Day.”
Ah, yeah, oh, yes, I slowly walked away.
I said, Farewell, Farewell, I see you on “Judgment Day.”

In the blues form, one of the masters on the page is Langston Hughes. Consider the “The Weary Blues,” line by line, in which he reinterprets the blues idiom, often by breaking from the rhyme pattern within the middle of a stanza. Also, throughout, Hughes riffs on the form by extending the possibilities of the stanza. In a framed narrative of reverie, the first-person speaker gives report of our hero in third person. This allows the speaker to dip into the basic blues form, quoting the singer, and still improvise around it, telling his story. Although the “Negro” gets sleep, a relief, Hughes maintains the associative pattern of struggle, even in the final lines, offering the bittersweet transcendence of coping:

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway . . .
He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied—
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

Humor, Higher Knowledge, and Coping mechanisms abound in “The Weary Blues.” What we can learn from the form is to allow ourselves to play within form, to improvise, and to extend tradition, but—just as we remember in the sonnet with the volta—we can also remember to find our way out of the dilemmas we pose by trying to find transcendence, even in free-verse poems. That’s a lesson we learn from the blues not only for our poems but also for our lives.

Keep transcending,

~AVJ

The Assemblage of Poems [by A. Van Jordan]

Okay, so, today I’m cheating a bit. If you’re a student of mine out there in the world, and you’re reading this blog today, you will have heard much of what will follow. Or, possibly, you weren’t listening to me the day I talked about sequencing the manuscript, and what follows will be new and fresh to you.

In an earlier blog, I talked about the importance of reading full collections of poems, in sequence, cover to cover. Most people will tell you that it’s just good for you to read a lot of poetry; indeed, they’re right. As I said earlier this week, I would only add that it’s good to read with an annotating mind. Part of that annotating mind should pay attention to how the book of poems is sequenced, and you should ask why: Why does this poem open the collection? Why does this poem close the collection? Why does this poem open or close this section of the collection? Those poems usually tell us something about the arc—emotionally, psychologically, even structurally--of the book.

When most people read novels that have been recommended by friends, even if they’re 700-page tomes, the reader will take her time going from page 1 to page 700, in order. If I hand a collection of poems to a friend and say, Check out this great collection of poems!, they will invariably flip through the book, find a title that intrigues them, and they’ll begin reading—possibly on page 37 of a slim 50-page collection. Why is that?

Well, first of all, (not to answer my question), there’s nothing inherently wrong with this behavior. I just find it curious. I find it particularly curious when I’m talking to an MFA student working on her thesis and she reads a collection in this way and then tells me she’s having a hard time sequencing her own manuscript. Again, there’s no law against this, and no one will slap the back of your hand with a ruler for doing it. It’s just strange, particularly if the goal is to learn how to sequence a book. Most people don’t read poetry collections. I’m sorry to report this to you, dear American poet, but it’s true. Sadly, more people are watching reality TV than reading our books. As a result, unlike ballerinas or filmmakers or cellists or sculptors, most of our audience is made of practitioners of our craft. We may be the only artists who suffer this level of insularity. (If you can think of others, let me know. I think we should form an encounter group or something.)

Our narrative IQ’s are higher than our lyric IQ’s because we read and watch a lot of narrative arcs in our lives. It’s pretty hard to escape. Whether we’re watching good cable TV, taking in a good drama on stage, reading a page-turner of a novel, reading a brilliant comic book, or watching the NBA finals, we’re locked into a sequenced narrative. As a result, we get it in our muscle memory. We have to work to get the sequence of a collection of poems into our muscle memory, too.

The tough part is that there’s no one-way to sequence a book of poems. Period. Every book is a few books; it depends on the sequence of the same selection of poems. That is to say, if I take any published collection of poems and change the sequence, it will be a new book. Why? Changing the sequence changes the experience of reading the book. We sequence the poems, hoping to manage “the experience of the read” as much as we can.

Sequencing the Manuscript:

The first rule of assembling poems for a sequence or a manuscript is that there are no rules. When people ask me about this process, my answers are usually somewhere between Zen and flippant: If you know what the order is before you start writing, something is wrong.

In general, most people are simply looking for direction, a rudder of some sort, even a GPS. The bad news is that there is no direction or map for the process; the good news is also that there is no map with a single route. Instead, however, there are options.

The one element I hope for at the outset of making a manuscript is a thematic purpose. That is to say, what I long for the most is a goal to write toward. I want to know what I want to say to the world in these poems. This may sound like a lofty goal, but it’s also a pragmatic one. When I say goal, what I mean is an idea that I can explore and with which I can wrestle. Once I know what idea I’m writing toward, I can at least begin the journey; I just won’t know the route before hand.

The dynamic of equifinality takes over at this point: Having multiple routes to the same destination. So, at the beginning, I’ll know where I want to go, but I won’t know how I’ll get there. In a strange way, this offers me some comfort. I don’t feel as lost. At this point, I’ll attempt to articulate what I want to say in a succinct sentence or two. In film, this is called a logline: a brief description of the film (poetry collection) that also sums up what its goal is. A logline for the Best Picture Academy Award Winner The Hurt Locker might read as follows: A US bomb-squad soldier stationed in Iraq wrestles with his commitment to serve in the war and his acclimation back home to the family he loves. When we’re dealing with a film, it’s fairly safe to allow a logline to sum up the plot. If we’re talking about a collection of poems, this becomes a bit trickier; I’d even say that it’s not only not possible, but it’s also not a good approach. What we’re really trying to encapsulate is the feeling or sentiment we hope to achieve when the reader finishes the collection and turns the last page: What will the reader say she learned by the time she turns that final page? This is what I ask, at least, as I head to my destination. This could be something like: These elegies illuminate the struggle one experiences while trying to find balance after being derailed by a familial tragedy. One I wrote for myself a logline of sorts that was more specific for what became my second book, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A: A woman’s life serves as an example of how fragile developmental years are in our lives, once she faces her first moment of racism at the age of 13. These “poetic loglines” are not set up to sell the book, per se, but they do provide an idea of what you might hope to achieve. Upon the journey, of course, this may change—which will usually be a good thing. I have yet to change a logline for something I’m writing to find that it was a mistake. Once I have a sense of the destination, I then set out to discover what route will organically emerge from the process. And I do believe this should be an organic process; I simply keep my eyes peeled for what appears to be the structure.

Structural Options:

In my mind, I have a few structures—and many variations on these structures, I want to underscore, as well—for which I look. I keep an eye out to see what emerges from the chaotic storm in front of me simply to see which route offers the most satisfying end point. Keep in mind, there are always, at least, two to three books possible in every assemblage of poems. That is to say, once you come up with one structure--one route, if you will—there are always other routes to take. I, at this point, go back to my initial question: What do I want to leave the reader with? As I explore ways of answering this question, I look for certain patterns and variations of patterns:

1. Linear Route: The poems could have a fairly linear sequence of events, directional locations, sequential time elements (seasons, chronology, etc), or even a linear reversal that moves in reverse chronological order. I look for some linear thread that can be held with fidelity or shifted out of experimentation.
2. Collage/Montage: I use both terms because I think they both operate similarly, but they offer different experiences. In collage, the movement is more of a movement of oppositional action—finding foils of themes like life and death, for example—or oppositional shapes—like toggling between long-sequential poems to shorter aphoristic ones. This can also be a combination of both. You can move between themes and between sizes or styles, toward an accumulation of feeling. In Montage, the actions still maintain a linearity as the opposition of poems come together. In both cases, the energy of the collection is built upon the collision of themes and styles.
3. Mimetic: The structure of the collection could mimic in theme and style mapping, the gathering of news reports, an archive of historical documents, film, musical notation (jazz, hip hop, operatic, etc), dance choreography.
4. Epic: If you have the chops for it, you can try to write in one structure and tell a story in the verse. Walcott’s Omeros comes to mind, and, of course, so does The Odyssey and Paradise Lost, for that matter. I think of this as a book-length poem that tracks one figure on a journey that tells us a good deal about the psychology of the world in which she or he inhabits.
5. Combinations of the Above: many of these can be combined to create other organic, experimental structures. And, of course, there are others that can be discovered.

These are just options as approaches, but this doesn’t create a complete blueprint for how the poems will be placed. One can’t say that because the poems are moving like a montage, I know that this long poem will fall in the center of the book. This may ultimately happen, but it won’t be simply because you think the poems are emerging in some sort of montage; it will happen because this is the journey on which you choose to lead the reader toward the final moment in the collection. No matter what, this has to be the guiding principle.

Some Practical Advice:

That being said, we also have no control over what experience the reader will have with your book; we can only approximate it. Once we offer one image or one theme, we are at a point of stasis in the manuscript. That is, if you sequence eight poems together about how a father abused and molested a child, we will be anesthetized to this by the tenth poem or so. Unfair, yes, but true. But once you offer lighter moments in between, other examples, possibly, of how the child trusted the father, vied for acceptance from the father, how the father suffered from a chemical imbalance and didn’t realize what he was doing--the conflict of these two ideas creates a new tension, a new dynamic in the sequence. We’re constantly looking for these new dynamics to emerge. If you’re okay with that, you’re probably close to the answer of what the sequence should be. The reason the process becomes organic is because we’re often looking for ways in which we can disturb an emerging emotion or theme.

In film, this is achieved with the combination of sound, lighting, set design, composition of the shot, etc. There are so many ways to set up oppositions and create tension that the combinations become bottomless. Well, I believe we have as many options as a filmmaker; we simply don’t utilize them enough. We can play with the poems on a sonic level of meter and even rhyme, lineation, imagery and metaphor, composition of the field, form, etc.

Keep in mind that the sequence of poems has no right answer. For this reason, I’d suggest not asking more than two people for their opinion on what works. Really, you just need a reader, someone who will tell you what their experience was while reading the manuscript: When they didn’t understand something, when they didn’t like something, when they were intrigued, etc. I believe you should ask one smart person whom you trust, and see what he or she says. I don’t believe this person has to be a poet, either. In fact, it might even be better if they are not.

~AVJ

"8/22/08" Poem by David Lehman at Poets.org

8/22/08

Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando as Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.

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