The Best American Poetry

This just in . . . 2013 Prizes for Contributors to *Poetry* Announced

Poetry has announced the winners of eight prizes awarded to poets, critics, essayists and photographers featured  in the magazine over the past year

August 13, 2013

CHICAGO — Eliza Griswold, Anna Maria Hong (BAP 2013), Laura Kasischke, Idra Novey, Miller Oberman, Randall Mann, Joshua Mehigan, Seamus Murphy and Michael Robbins are the winners of eight awards for contributions to Poetry over the past year. The prizes are awarded for poems, prose and visual content published during the past 12 months, from October 2012 to September 2013.

Continue reading here.

-- sdh

II. To China: Du Fu’s Cottage [by Sarah Howe]

 

If I could get a mansion with a thousand, ten thousand rooms,

A great shelter for all the world’s scholars, together in joy,

Solid as a mountain, the elements could not move it.

Oh! If I could see this house before me,

I’d happily freeze to death in my broken hut!

            –Du Fu, ‘My Thatched Cottage was Torn Apart By Autumn Winds’,

trans. Mark Alexander

 

Just over a week ago I found myself in the Sichuanese capital, Chengdu, standing in front of the thatched cottage of Du Fu. Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770), along with Li Bai 李白 (701-762), is of course the most celebrated of Tang dynasty poets. Looking over the vaguely Disneyish contours of his Chengdu cottage, with its low eaves and hummocked thatch, it’s hard not to think of the famous poem of his that begins with an Autumn gale stripping the straw from its roof, to leave his children rained on in their beds. Written when Du Fu was 50 years old, that poem builds up to a final vision picturing a mansion of ten thousand rooms in which (depending on how the translator deals with 士 shì) all the world’s scholars, or all the world’s poor, might shelter together. So impoverished was Du Fu around this period of his life that one of those children died of starvation. His official position had, scholars suspect, fallen foul of one outspokenly critical poem too many. After the Tang dynasty found itself riven by rebellion, Du Fu had fled the then capital of Xi’an, wandering across a devastated country until, weak and sickening, he reached the southwestern city of Chengdu in autumn 759, then spent the next year working to build his simple thatched hut by a stream.

According to the signs, what you now see tucked among the delightful gardens of Flower Rinsing Creek is actually a Qing Dynasty reconstruction of Du Fu’s cottage. (But given that the Qing ruled from 1644 to 1912, I wasn’t clear whether the current bui
lding’s vintage is closer to Milton’s Paradise Lost or Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’.) The poem about the autumn gale and ruined thatch only underlines the basic fact that all traditional Chinese wooden structures are, in some sense, ephemeral, even as they endure. This Ship of Theseus-like paradox struck me on my first visit to mainland China in 2004. One section of the Forbidden City had been sequestered behind blue metal hoardings. On the other side, conservationists weren’t swabbing surfaces with cotton wool; rather, workmen were sawing and hefting out wholesale the more cracked and flaking of the red-painted wooden pillars. (The sign read: ‘The ancient building is renovating. Excuse me for bringing trouble to you.’) If every single pillar, beam, and tile in the Forbidden City has been replaced at least once, is it still the Forbidden City? That question probably only occurs to us because our way of thinking has been shaped by Athenians (who might or might not have a ship belonging to Theseus).

Since I joined my current Cambridge college, Caius, as a Research Fellow a couple of years ago, I’ve had to get used to calling the figure known to the wider poetry world as J.H. Prynne, ‘Jeremy’, and to sitting near him at lunch. Despite the cavernously high ceilings in college hall, dinners there can get uncomfortably hot, and you will often see Jeremy at high table, wafting a silk fan painted with a Chinese poem, whose author and title have sadly escaped me since I last asked. This was not many months after I arrived at Caius, and Jeremy replied that many of the fan poem’s more obscure characters had once been printed in his memory, but had since faded. (Having in recent times been trying to grapple with a hundred or more new hanzi a week, I now know how this feels.) He then went on to tell the most wonderful anecdote about his College Tutor at Jesus, the man who had first begun teaching him Chinese, Laurence Picken. As Jeremy told it, Picken had been a biologist and had published a tome on the structure of the cell. But when Watson and Crick published the DNA paper in 1953, he saw the writing on the wall for his particular niche. He decided to turn fulltime to what had previously been a hobby – oriental musicology.

The most important discovery of Picken’s musicology career was his ‘rediscovery’ of Tang court music, which had once been thought lost because it survived only in scraps of documentation. In his search for the lost Tang music, Picken’s instincts led him to Japan – whose highly conservative culture has preserved so many aspects of ancient China – and then to Japan’s remaining ancient temples. One day, he had a flash of inspiration: what if he took the recordings he had been making of the monks’ chants and sped them up? What he found was that the monks’ austere drones transformed, when played back at double speed, into a lively rhythm that might furnish the dancing of an evening at the Tang court. When he compared this living musical relic to the scraps of Tang notation, they appeared to match. And so the Tang music once thought extinct, Picken managed to reconstruct to the point where it could be performed again.

This delightful fable of accidental preservation and unexpected recovery stayed with me. So when I came to read Prynne’s 2012 introduction to the Chinese translation of his Selected Poems – a talk reprinted in Cambridge Quarterly’s issue on China and the Cambridge English Faculty – I recognised it immediately. Within the prefatory talk, Picken’s is not only a story about history’s losses and gains; it’s a parable to take into the difficult process of translating a poem from one language into another, which involves its own tallying of gains and losses.

A few weeks ago I went home to visit my parents, so that I would get to see them before my next long stretch of travelling. Later that night, the house quiet except for the hum of the fridge, my mum brought down two books from upstairs – one was her secondary school Chinese poetry textbook, the other was a Hong Kong-printed copy of the 300 Tang Poems, which she had bought a few years later. I needed to trace the eye-scrunchingly small characters down the page with my index finger, working across from right to left in the old way. She would pause to help me with the characters I didn’t yet know, or where I couldn’t recognise the traditional equivalent of a simplified one. And so we read together – her reading the words in their Cantonese pronunciation, me sounding them out in my English-stilted Mandarin. My Chinese studies have not yet stretched to Cantonese, whose eight or so tones make it a more musical language than Mandarin, but also an even more fiendishly difficult one to learn. I read somewhere that Cantonese is likely closer than modern Mandarin is to the ancient pronunciation of Du Fu and Li Bai. The sonic effect of that midnight reading was lovely in its own right, as the sounds in the two different dialects crossed paths, sometimes almost overlapping, only to diverge again, as if harmonising with one another. 

I’ve seen those two books on the shelf as long as I remember, so it moved me to be able to pick them up and read from them, albeit haltingly and with much help. Because of their place in my mother’s early life, the books themselves already feel like precious survivors. But during that reading session, two further relics emerged from the tanned pages of the 300 Tang Poems. When the book was new, my mum had fashioned it an impromptu dustjacket from a cheap inkwash print bought off a stall, by now an interesting piece of ephemera in its own right. I had looked at its design of grey ducklings on a reed-edged pond many times, pulling it off the shelf as a child – it was the only thing in the whole volume I could understand. But that night, for the first time, I noticed a folded, much-yellowed rectangle of paper tucked into the dustjacket’s inside edge. When I pulled it out an opened it, it turned out to be a form, neatly filled in blue ink, which my mother had needed to submit, aged 11, to apply for her Hong Kong ID card. The over-neat, childlike English script wasn’t my mother’s handwriting, but apparently that of a ‘cousin’ – not a real cousin, but a granddaughter of the old woman she’d been left to lodge with at that time while her adoptive mother went out to work.

The second relic I recognised immediately as of my doing. It fell out when I flicked through the poems: a serrated-edged leaf of about two inches, pressed to an unnatural flatness, and desiccated to a purplish brown. I’d gone though a phase in Hong Kong of picking samples of the local flora when taken for walks, to stow in selected books around the flat. I think I had got the idea that this was the sort of thing little girls in England did. My parents eventually put a stop to it when it was discovered I had ruined an encyclopedia of the animal kingdom – whose colour prints of tapirs and whale sharks had filled my rainy afternoons – by crushing inside it a particularly large and succulent tropical bloom picked up outside our block. The deep pink nectar had seeped through several pages on either side, cementing them together. When I started at my primary school in England, they liked to have us learn classic poems off by heart. I’m not sure if the teacher thought she was being a wit when she assigned me – a recent arrival from the tropics – Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’. As it was, the poem’s warnings about the ‘gaudy melon-flower’, and its inferiority to restrained English blossoms, had come too late for this particular colonial child.

Where the purplish serrated leaf had sat undisturbed, for what could have been twenty years, between the pages in my mother’s copy of 300 Tang Poems, it had left a mottled ghost of itself. Before closing the book that night, I slotted the folded yellow form into its dustjacket niche, then placed the leaf carefully back on top of its printed shadow.

That day in Chengdu, when we had finished looking round Du Fu’s cottage, and I had photographed his supposedly replica desk, we strolled onward to another of the city’s famous parks. At that hour of the afternoon it was full of Chengdu’s elderly, seated with thermoses of green tea at the outdoor tables within the sprawling precincts of the park’s teahouse. Most were playing Mahjong, their quiet chat periodically punctuated by a fevered clacking as a table ‘washed the tiles’ (xi pai), all hands digging in to shuffle the plastic pieces around the centre of the table. As we followed the park’s bamboo-arched avenues, we came across an old man who was using one section of flagged path as a giant piece of paper for ‘ground calligraphy’, or dishu. Dipping his outsized brush – it was somewhere between brush and mop – into an old can filled with water, he used that ‘ink’ to trace out characters onto the path. Their scale turned the act of writing into a movement involving not only the hand, but the whole body, like a kind of dance.

I had heard about this ephemeral art of ‘ground calligraphy’, but had never seen it. It apparently had its origins in the public parks of Beijing in the early ’90s. One might read too much into that putative date and place of origin, but it made me think of the theme of transience and disappearance that runs through Chinese contemporary art of that decade. The work of one artist, Song Dong, sprang to mind particularly. He had begun as a painter at an early age, but after the trauma of events in Tiananmen in 1989, he ceased work for some years, before returning as a purely conceptual artist. In 1995 (perhaps inspired by the old men in the Beijing parks?) Song began to keep a daily journal, which he would write out in water on a large flat stone. Their putative record vanished faster than the days themselves. The following year, on a freezing New Year’s Eve night, Song performed a piece called ‘Breathing’. He lay down in a totally deserted Tiananmen square, face to the ground, so that his lips almost touched the pavement. Over the next 40 minutes his clouded breath played over the concrete flag, its vapour cumulatively freezing into a thin sheen of ice, which lasted for a few hours but was gone by morning.

Almost at the same time as we discovered the elderly Chengdu calligrapher, a posse of student physiotherapists out on a team-building exercise had already engaged him respectfully in conversation. He teased them about their difficulty understanding the traditional script, or fantizi, of his artwork.  Their generation, unlike his, had grown up only ever knowing the Mainland’s simplified Chinese script, first introduced by Mao in 1956. Eventually he handed over his brush-mop to one of the girls, who giggled and tried to refuse. The whole group laughed as she tried, jaggedly, to write out her name’s three characters with the unfamiliar instrument, which suddenly seemed as clunky in her hands as it had been deft in his.

In the midst of this intergenerational exchange, I asked the old man whether the lines he had written were those of a poem. He replied that it was a very famous poem by Li Bai – but in the old man’s thick Sichuan accent (which for me was verging on incomprehensible) it sounded more like Li Bei. When I got back that night, I identified the poem as Li Bai’s 關山月 (guan shan yue), ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’. The old man had only managed to get to the fifth line before being distracted:

 

The bright moon lifts from the Mountain of Heaven

In an infinite haze of cloud and sea,

And the wind, that has come a thousand miles,

Beats at the Jade Pass battlements….

China marches its men down Baideng Road

While Tartar troops peer across blue waters of the bay….

And since not one battle famous in history

Sent all its fighters back again,

The soldiers turn round, looking toward the border,

And think of home, with wistful eyes,

And of those tonight in the upper chambers

Who toss and sigh and cannot rest.

 

(Li Bai, ‘The Moon at the Fortified Pass’)

 

Written at a time when the Tang dynasty was at war with Tibet, this poem’s terrain is the Chinese empire’s vulnerable Western borders. Many of the place names it invokes are not, relatively speaking, that far from Chengdu, in neighbouring provinces at the country’s western edge. By utter coincidence, the ‘Jade Pass’ Li Bai describes as beaten by the thousand-mile wind is in fact the Yumen Pass in Gansu province, which we had visited just days before. A fortress guarding a gap in the Great Wall outside the city of Dunhuang, it served as a vital conduit for trade on the Silk Road. And so, a few days before we met the calligrapher in the Chengdu park, we had stood sweltering inside the shell of Li Bai’s ‘Jade Pass’, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the ancient soldiers to be stationed inside that hellhole of heat and dust.

In a further little twist, googling this Li Bai poem on the English language internet mainly brings up results associated with Chow Yun-fat’s role as a suspiciously Orientalist pirate captain in Pirates of the Caribbean 3, who recites (in Cantonese) its last four lines during the film. But the reason English language newspapers were so interested was because the poem was cut from the version of the film screened in China itself, along with almost half of Chow Yun-fat’s 20-minutes of screen time. Hollywood films are regularly censored in China for sex and violence, but it seems likely that the Chinese government takes special exception to what they perceive as retrograde Hollywood representations of Chineseness.  I was tickled to read that the scene, towards the start of Men in Black 3, where Will Smith ‘neuralizes’ the gathered crowd of Chinese onlookers to the chaos in New York Chinatown was also cut in China, possibly because it was taken as an allegory of Chinese government censorship as an attempt to induce mass amnesia. If the scriptwriters had really been that on top of their covert political allegorizing, it might have been a better film!

I didn’t get the chance to quiz the old calligrapher any further about the poem, because we had a date later that afternoon with a two-week-old baby panda called Hesheng, in whose company I shall leave you now...

 

 

–Sarah Howe 

Quote of the Day by Harold Bloom: Discuss

Prose poems...are cheating.

        (--Harold Bloom, today)

Save the Date: September 19, 2013 The Best American Poetry 2013 Gala Launch Reading

 

The New School

66 W. 12^th Street, New York, NY

Tishman Auditorium

7:00 PM

Free

With Series Editor David Lehman,
Guest Editor Denise Duhamel and

The Best American Poetry 2013 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 *

I. To China: That Blue Flower on the Map [by Sarah Howe]

 

The Savage is flying back home from the New Country

in native-style dress with a baggage of sensibility

to gaze on the ancestral plains with the myths thought up

and dreamed in her kitchens as guides.

        –Denise Riley, ‘A Note on Sex and “The Reclaiming of Language”’ 

 

This Easter I spent five weeks or so living and writing in Hong Kong. It was only the third time I had been back since my family left for England in 1991, when I was almost eight. That childhood migration didn’t surprise me or, I think, my Chinese mother (though my little brother was tearful for days after it was announced, believing he would have to leave all his toys behind). My father had swapped East London for the Far East thirty years earlier, but had always encouraged us to think of England – a country we had scarcely visited – as ‘home’. I had it marked with a toothpick Union Jack on the world map in my childhood bedroom. But two decades later, it was Hong Kong that had come to feel for me like a place in the imagination.

People often ask me how much I can remember of it – and the answer is, surprisingly, a lot. But of course they’re a small child’s memories. The yellow-crested cranes in the enclosure at the park. The banyans hung with fishing-line hairs that sentried my walk down the hill to the school bus. The neon-silver vista of the skyscrapered harbour, peered at through the kumquat trees that lined our living room window. But I had no residual sense of the island’s geography, of how those memories would relate to each other plotted on a map. So this year, in what turned out to be an unusually wet and sultry April even by Hong Kong standards, I went on long walks, trying to knit together the places I could remember, or at least could remember being told about – sometimes a bit of both.

My hope was that all this would seed new poems, but what I didn’t expect was the unintended fact checking of older poems I fell into. Unintended, because it hadn’t really occurred to me I might have got things wrong – or that it would matter if I had – in the handful of poems about Hong Kong I’d already written over the past few years. One long poem, ‘A loop of jade’, which interleaves my early memories with my mother’s childhood in ’50s Hong Kong, proved especially problematic. Some errors were simply factual – retelling a Chinese fable, and embroidering one particular scene, I’d placed the draped bride at the ‘head’ of her wedding procession rather than in its midst. If I hadn’t stumbled on a traditional bridal sedan (plus explanatory plaque) in the history museum, I would still be oblivious of that modest howler. With its smoothed dark wood carry-poles, it looked much too small to fit a person inside.

Other errors were more to do with visualisation – details that were slightly off. I’d written how worshippers casting their fortunes at the temple would ‘shake out a fan / of red-tipped / sticks’ from the cylindrical box, then pick one to entreat their fate. Yet when I stood in the courtyard at Wong Tai Sin, watching the rows and rows of people before the altar alternately bowing and rattling out their quivers of bamboo staves, I found I’d remembered the exact sound the sticks made when shaken (like clackier maracas), but that my mental picture, though vivid, was completely wrong. The sticks didn’t ‘fan’ out at all – I must have conflated them with the way playing cards spread – but rather sheared forward until, after several low bows on the supplicant’s part, one scarlet-painted tip would come to the fore. After some pondering of alternatives (bundle? box?) I finally deleted ‘fan’ and typed in ‘sheaf’, resolving that that was the best I was going to get out of one syllable.

Conflated memory was certainly the issue a few stanzas away, where I’d described the temple’s ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’. Many times in temple precincts on the Chinese mainland I’d seen these extraordinary wish-festooned trees – their every reachable branch tied round with torn strips of red cloth, like Rambo’s headband, onto which thousands of supplicants had permanent-markered their hopes. The idea of these trees made such an impression, I guess, that I edited them in to my mental summoning of Hong Kong’s temples. During Easter, in all the temples I walked around, I never saw any sign of this particular practice – the closest thing was the way people at Wong Tai Sin had clipped shiny-beaded lucky knots onto a patch of chainlink perimeter fence. 

Yet all these fact checking endeavours were complicated by the fact that the temple scene described in the poem was set 30 years ago: it was not something I or even my mother had witnessed directly, but part of her own adoptive mother’s experience. This old woman, who I never really knew, had taken in, somewhere in Guangdong province, the abandoned girl baby that would become my mother. Within a year of the adoption, by 1949, the Communists came to power and they fled, together with so many others, across the water to Hong Kong. When I was a newborn, my mother’s mother had gone to the temple to have blessed for me a jade bracelet sized for a baby’s wrist, and to have my future told. I asked my mum, but she didn’t think she’d ever seen any red-ribbon ‘fluttering, tree-tied pleas’ around and about such scenes. ‘There aren’t many trees left in Hong Kong,’ she ventured. ‘I don’t think people would want to risk hurting them.’ My adoptive grandmother seemingly never told what exactly the fortune-teller said that day. I wonder if he got it right.

These details might seem trifling, but cumulatively they made me think hard about what it means to tell the truth in a poem. Although descriptive precision has always been important to me, this more ‘documentary’ sense of truth is not a quality I’ve ever particularly sought out as a reader of poems. So it seemed strange to suddenly be getting het up about it. With a bit of thought, I became aware of all the small untruths I’d glossed over in previous poems, which had gone into making them feel right, artistically shaped. One example was the way I’d omitted the presence of my then boyfriend (now husband) from one or two poems based on our past travels in China. It just seemed more right – more true – to be wandering lonely as a cloud, especially when there was some kind of lyric quest at stake. I don’t think Marc minds being airbrushed...

The literary critic part of me suspects this is a naive set of questions to be asking – except that the literary expectations revolving around autobiography and ‘authenticity’ (I’m thinking now via Graham Huggan’s important book, The Postcolonial Exotic) seem particularly charged when (female) minority writers are concerned. What I had written in my latter years away from Hong Kong, was it – like the ancestral plains imagined by Denise Riley’s homebound Savage – so many ‘myths thought up / and dreamed’? My flurry of Hong Kong fact checking had, in fact, exposed the clash between a place in the imagination – the backdrop for one’s self-mythologizing – and a place where you might sublet a studio flat for five weeks.

That tension between reality and projection is one I’ve been thinking about a lot in recent months. I’m coming towards the end of my year’s tenure in the Harper-Wood Studentship from St John’s College, Cambridge. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s not far off heaven – a year’s grace in which to travel and write poems. I’ve used my time to learn Mandarin and to spend a substantial time in China and Hong Kong, writing poems on the way. I’ve been trying to work out how you might use poems to explore the historical encounter, broadly conceived, between China and the West (not least because I’m one product of that cultural encounter, albeit pretty far down the line). I’d like to spend the rest of my posts this week musing on a few highlights from my travels, which have stretched from Hong Kong in the East to the Silk Road in the far West. Perhaps the most enjoyable path I followed was in tracking, late last summer, the northward progress from Macau up to Beijing of the first and most famous of early modern Jesuit missionaries to China, Matteo Ricci (1552-1610). I managed in four weeks of buses, high-speed trains and internal flights a journey that took Ricci twenty-eight years.

But even as I trekked across China, I found myself still fascinated by Western accounts and imaginings of the country I was seeing – partly because I know I can’t escape the European cast to own my vision. The kind of willow pattern fantasizing you get in Chinoiserie is a mode that fascinates me, not least when it turns up in English language poetry. I recently stumbled across a moving example in a poem by the American poet Cathy Song:

 

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.

Think of it—a Chinese heaven   

where, except for his blond hair,   

the part that belongs to his father,   

everyone will look like him.

China, that blue flower on the map,   

bluer than the sea

his hand must span like a bridge   

to reach it.

An octave away.

                         (Cathy Song, ‘Heaven’)

 

Rather as I spent my first seven years staring at a tiny Union Jack blutacked to the pink triangle of England on my bedroom wall, the speaker’s son imagines China’s ‘blue flower on the map’ (like the blue flower gracing a porcelain bowl?) as the place where he will perfectly belong. I’ve experienced that same elated sentimental fiction of belonging all three times I’ve walked off the plane into Hong Kong airport – it even smells like home! That is, until I get a bit further down the arrivals corridor and realise that, though I might, from behind, for a second, mistake one of the older women for my mum because of the way her hair falls along her chin, they would never make the same mistake with me. On a flight from Lanzhou to Chengdu last week, the very nice stewardess asked me where I was from (‘Oh, Engelan!’), and then told me I looked like Lady Mary from Downton Abbey – a programme I’ve never watched, but know enough about to know I don’t look very much like Lady Mary. Maybe Downton Abbey stands to England as blue-white painted willows stand to China.

I have to say, I’m more comfortable with these lines of Cathy Song’s than I’ve ever quite been with a poem like Derek Mahon’s ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’:

 

While I sit with my paper and prawn chow mein

Under a framed photograph of Hong Kong

The proprietor of the Chinese restaurant

Stands at the door as if the world were young,

Watching the first yacht hoist a sail

– An ideogram on sea-cloud – and the light

Of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal;

And whistles a little tune, dreaming of home.

            (Derek Mahon, ‘The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush’)

 

The proprietor of the Northern Irish seaside town’s (one?) Chinese restaurant ‘whistles a little tune, dreaming of home’ – a home we’re meant to imagine corresponds to the ‘framed photograph of Hong Kong’ hanging above the speaker’s chow mein laded table. I know that Mahon is quite conscious of the way what looks at first like empathy here is actually, on closer inspection, a kind of overwriting – but then that kind of representational imposition is hardly alien to Ireland’s own colonial history. Of course the idea is that both men are equally outsiders, and usually I find Mahon compelling on place and home and exile and homelessness. (‘What's the difference between an exile and an expatriate?’ he jokes in one interview. ‘It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.’) Maybe it’s just ‘little tune’ that grates with me. Perhaps unfairly, I can’t help hearing that diminutive slip from qualifying the tune to qualifying its whistler. 

 

Plate with a view of Burghley House. Qianlong period (c.1745-1760). Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

I’d like to leave you with one other, to my mind, charming example of the problems involved in conceiving (let alone representing) otherness. This eighteenth-century Chinese plate is in the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and was produced to order for a British market hungry for Chinoiserie. The ceramic dish is decorated traditionally in blue and white, yet looks at first glance rather odd – it features a linear rendering of the Elizabethan facade of Burghley House, perhaps copied from an English print. But what makes the object so fascinating is the way its two artistic vocabularies, Western and Eastern – one might even say ‘realistic’ and ‘fanciful’, while noting the terms’ Orientalizing charge – sit in it side by side. That is to say, the backdrop the Chinese artist has imagined for this Lincolnshire pile is, to our eyes, the realm of fantasy. The house is set among a stand of twisting Chinese mountain pines, as a phoenix flies past in the glaze of sky.

 

–Sarah Howe

 

Sarah Howe, Guest Author August 12-16

This week we welcom Sarah Howe as our guest blogger.  Sarah was born in Hong Kong, before moving to England as a child. She studied at Cambridge and later as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard. She is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she teaches Renaissance English literature. Her debut pamphlet of poems, A Certain Chinese Encyclopedia (Tall-lighthouse), won an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2010. During 2012-13, she is the holder of the Harper-Wood Studentship for English Poetry from St John's College, Cambridge. Her first book of poems is forthcoming from Chatto & Windus. She blogs periodically at Prac Crit (www.sarahhowepoetry.com).

Welcome, Sarah.

-- sdh

"Crowded Hour" [by John Tranter]

A, Tangerine, lipstick 1962, daring
Hint of flame and wild behaviour,
E, lemon, sour surprise and rave, your
Suspicious self out for a welcome airing
On Fifth Avenue, your midday saviour
A transparent fellow spirit, the caring
Caress of a martini smoothly preparing
Your conscience to accept a second favour –

Bartender’s gift of one half-empty bottle –
I, corn silk hair, love at full throttle,
O, blue shadows, delicate gloom
Pricked with traffic lights in the evening air –
U, olive green of underwater hair –
Scuba, the acronym, in the crowded room.

-- John Tranter

First published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2013

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Jared Michael Wahlgren of Gold Wake Press

NA: I only recently heard of Gold Wake Press.  Where are you located? How long have you been in operation?  And are you the founding editor?

JMW: Gold Wake Press is located in the suburbs of Boston, Massachusetts. We started off publishing e-chaps on the web in 2008 and moved to print in 2010. Yes, I am the founding editor.

NA: What inspired you to want to be the editor of an independent press?

JMW: My experience of having my first book published was inspiring to me because it was such a smooth process. I wanted to provide an outlet for first time authors as well as established writers.

NA: How would you describe Gold Wake Press?  What makes it unique?

JMW: I would lean towards the lyrical, and experimental within and outside of the boundaries of poetry. We are unique in that we only publish around 4-6 titles per year, so we have to be fairly selective, and the books themselves though different may share common structures.

NA:  How did you come up with the name, Gold Wake?

JMW: Gold Wake comes from a line in my first published book, Silent Actor. I was searching for meaning within the poem itself, & asked what I should do. I believe I was thinking of Moses parting the seas at the time, though I forget. It’s a nice image. Also, I think the name can be a general metaphor for “good news.” If there’s a Black Ocean, there’s got to be a Gold Wake.

NA: Do you run book contests or solicit manuscripts?

JMW: Once in a while I solicit a manuscript if I’ve been following a writer’s style online for a while. I did so with Evan Kennedy’s Shoo-Ins to Ruin. I saw a poem of his in the Brooklyn Rail and offered publication of a full-length collection of his.

NA: What kind of writer do you hope to publish?  Or, asked another way, if you could publish three established poets, who would they be?

JMW: Darcie Dennigan, Sandra Beasley & Mary Ann Samyn

NA: And how would you describe the kind of poetry you are not interested in publishing? 

JMW: A lot of people shy away from greeting card verse. I dislike heavily emotional poetry.

NA:  I heard of Gold Wake Press from Kristina Marie Darling who has a new book coming out with you, X Marks the Dress.  It’s a book she co-authored with Carol Guess.  I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the book? 

JMW: Sure. X Marks the Dress is a very unique book in its structure and titles. The poem titles are all objects from a wedding registry and the book flows in a storytelling mode until a house fire comes at the end. The form of the text follows suit, ending with fragments of words and poems that depict as a house fire would.

NA: What are some of the happiest or proudest moments for the press?  Feel free to provide links to reviews, events, readings, etc.

JMW:For me, AWP 2013 was great because it was in Boston so I was able to represent the press (a bit) at the table and the reading at Trident Booksellers. Kathleen Rooney’s poems from Robinson Alone were selected by the Poetry Foundation. This was an apex. Three of her poems are featured on their website. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kathleen-rooney#about)

NA: I was thinking it would be nice to end with a poem from a Gold Wake author.

JMW: This poem is from X Marks the Dress: A Registry by Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess.

{Cups & Saucers}

My tea stains came from your picnic.  Now the kettle boils & shrieks.  Tomorrow you'll fasten your diamond cufflinks & leave me disheveled, waiting: torn dress, wilted corsage, clutching a few dollars for a cab.  When I open the door I feel a little old for a trinket or flowers pressed in a book.  But I should warn you: there are always mementos, & I've only begun my collection.  Before long I'll enshrine you on a red satin pillow.  I'll display your former self in a glass cabinet.

 

Jared Michael Wahlgren is a publisher for Gold Wake Press. He is author of Silent Actor (Bewrite Books, 2008), Valency (Blazevox [books], 2010) &  CREDO (Greying Ghost).

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.

Katherine ("Hava") Koch's Memoir of Her Dad and His Circle

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John Ashbery wrote a postcard to my mother in Rome, in 1955, when she was about seven months pregnant with me. From the turn of the twentieth century, the card shows a slim-waisted woman wearing a huge hat, beating away—with her parasol—a giant stork, from whose neck hangs a baby in a sling. "And The Villain Still Pursues Her," runs the caption at the bottom. The stork looks as though he's about to pierce her parasol with his long beak. It's hard to imagine what someone would have been thinking, in the early part of the century, to send this card. Would it have been addressed to a man? A woman? With what purpose? The idea seems to be that this slender woman can't stop getting pregnant, or can't keep herself from having a baby. "Unusually unreliable sources here have it that you're about to favor us with a poet," writes John on the other side, "I hope it's true. Suggest you make me the child's Aristotle ... P.S. If it's a girl, I suggest "Hava" as a nice first name."
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-- from "Love and Irony: Postcards from a Child of the New York School" by Katherine Koch

Read it here -- from Hanging Loose, Issue 102 - 201, and Poetry Daily

Library Memories (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

Public libraries shaped my life.

In the sixth grade I went regularly to a library in Queens. Most of my friends who went there were more intrigued by the bakery across the street. The main attraction was at a side window where this new food called pizza was being served. But I was going to the library for a project. My class was assigned what was called a special interest report. I wrote mine about Israel. This subject choice would have astonished my Hebrew school teachers. They had rarely encountered a student who so exquisitely combined indifference and inability. I wasn’t sure why I picked Israel. No one ever talked about the country. This was 1958, and it wasn’t particularly in the news. For whatever reason, I dutifully scanned the shelves, taking down books, reading them. I met another boy from another school. We agreed to meet each week so we could read together. That was a special kind of friendship. My work was the first research I had ever done. I didn’t know it then, but doing that research prepared me for my entire life.

My family moved to Sag Harbor, a small town on the eastern end of Long Island, a year later. The John Jermain Library was a few minutes walk from my house. It was a pleasant place, even if its collection was restricted. I read my first adult novel there. I was thirteen, unsure what to read. I was in the library looking for material when the librarian told me the place was closing in a few minutes, and I had to choose. My mind rushed. I didn’t know any title or any author. Then I saw the title Babbitt. I had no idea what the book was about, but I did recall that I had seen an Abbott and Costello cartoon in which the Costello character had called the Abbott character “Babbitt.” I thought the book must be funny. I took it home, sat on a couch, and began reading. I hadn’t finished half a page before I rested it against my chest and said words to myself to the effect that I couldn’t believe someone could get down so much truth on a page.

And so I began serious adult reading, starting with all the Sinclair Lewis books in the library. This resulted in a problem later that year. The film version of Elmer Gantry was released in July 1960. Following the advice of her sister, my mother told me that I was not allowed to see the film. I argued that I had read the book and so I knew what the film was about. It didn’t work. She wouldn’t change. I was still thirteen, and I didn’t understand why she couldn’t see that I was old enough to watch the film. As I got older, I found it easy to forgive her. For the rest of her life, though, she periodically apologized to me for what I thought was the only parenting mistake she ever made in her life.

The library in Sag Harbor was an unusual place. One day I stood in line next to John Steinbeck waiting to check out books. I had some strange experiences in the library. When I was fourteen, I took to reading novels about World War II. I read The Naked and the Dead, The Young Lions, and others. I wanted next to read From Here to Eternity, in part because James Jones was then living in nearby East Hampton. I went to the appropriate library shelf, but no Jones book was there. It was famous, I thought, and so it had to be there. Finally, I asked the librarian. “Oh,” she said, “We keep it up in the attic.” I gently asked if it would be possible for her to get it because I wanted to read it. “Do your parents know you’re getting the book?” she asked. My eyes were unblinking. “Absolutely,” I unashamedly lied, “In fact they suggested it.” This seemed to provide enough emotional cover for her, and she got me the dusty copy of a great book.

My mother was drafted into driving me to the much larger library in Southampton. There I could get books on philosophy. I read The Myth of Sisyphus and Bertrand Russell’s history of philosophy. I was quite taken by Kant and was determined to read him. I took out Critique of Pure Reason. I read through two pages and thought that perhaps I had gotten the Ukrainian edition. Kant went back to his place in the library.

That was the beginning. Later, there were many other libraries in my life, the lives of my children, and, soon, in the lives of my grandchildren.

But libraries are changing. People research on the internet. They go to the libraries to rent CDs and videos as much as books. I don’t know what the libraries will be like in ten or twenty years. Perhaps they will transform into community centers. I don’t mind change. And it wouldn’t matter if I did. It is just that, in my mind, the library in its traditional form saved my life. I want them to be around to save others.   

Are Your "Oys" Appropriate? The Many Faces of "Oy" by Mitch Sisskind

"Oy" is one of the greatest words in any language and I've noticed that people of all backgrounds quickly pick it up and start using it. Let's take a look at some situations in which saying "Oy" is very appropriate (click on thumbnail for full-sized image):

 

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Punk At The Met [by Sharon Preiss]

We’ll never get to the bottom of who ripped the first T-shirt and wore it as an anti-fashion statement. Or who first pierced flesh with a safety pin and claimed it as an accessory of opposition. Or who first spiked his hair in defiance to wearing it “straight.” Truth is, in the Punk movement none of this matters anyway. Sure, there is something identifiable as “Punk Fashion,” but one’s manner of dressing is only an external marker for an internal attitude, a way of living that might best be summed up like this: “Fuck The Establishment.”

And so the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show “Punk: Chaos to Couture” is a bit of a conundrum. Couture is about as far away in its sensibilities from Punk as Luciano Pavarotti is from Joey Ramone. Punk is subversive, it’s about turning the world on its head. Punk is born of rebellion and the sheer creative joy of fucking up the norm. Couture, well…. Couture is the absolute highest end of fashion and elitism – it’s exclusive, it’s expensive, it caters to la crème de la crème, and it is, for all its finery and particularity, consumer fashion. It is The Establishment to the nth degree. It is not, nor will it ever be, Punk.

That being said, the Couture clothing on display until August 14 is beautiful and provocative and clearly owes an extensive debt to the influential rips and tears and hardware and edgy de/re/con/struction of Punk. After three small introductory galleries attempt to tell the history of Punk -- mostly through looped film and soundtracks of the era’s seminal bands along with reconstructions of New York’s CBGB men’s room and London’s protopunk clothing store Sex -- the several galleries of the show are divided into various aesthetic categories: DIY Hardware; DIY Bricolage; DIY Graffiti and Agitprop; and DIY Destroy.  DIY, of course, means Do It Yourself, and here’s the conundrum again: no single person who ever donned one of these outfits did anything about it him/herself except wear it, if anyone beside a model wore any of this clothing at all. Punks create their clothing themselves to be worn in everyday settings, they do it themselves for themselves and for purposes equally utilitarian as aesthetic. Would I wear any of the clothing on display? You betcha, in a heartbeat. There are leather jackets with crazily inlaid zippers; shirts made of interlocking gold-tone chain and safety pins; luxe organza and tulle ballgowns hand painted with swaths of rich jewel-tones; dresses and pants and skirts and tops adorned with staples and studs and spikes. Would I consider myself Punk if I ever got to slip into one of these wonders? No, I’d consider myself rich and lucky. Punk is a look that you earn and create, not a look that you purchase.

The most intriguing of the galleries is the third portion of the introduction. On the center dais are fashions created by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren for Sex in the 1970s paired with contemporary outfits that mirror and echo the original. Careful examination exposes the cheaper fabrics and more slapdash construction of Westwood’s looks, while the newer clothes have a much heavier hand in their design. The placement of pins and zippers and straps and holes is carefully considered, and the fabrics are top quality, but the homage is clear and loving. The newer designs seem not to be merely rip-offs of the originals.

 And that’s exactly where and how the exhibit flounders. Even with the Punk music blaring in the background and the gallery that was designed to feel like an underground club, even with all the messy spiky wigs on every mannequin, even with the final mannequin of the show giving the exiting crowd the middle finger, the show seems to merely display how yet another original anti-establishment movement was co-opted by the establishment. 

Thankfully, it’s on this point that the book that accompanies the show so fabulously succeeds. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a catalogue look so little like the show itself, but thank goodness for that in this case. The book Punk: Chaos to Couture, published by The Met and distributed by Yale University Press, does exactly what the show does not, excepting that one small gallery: it places side-by-side original Punk style with contemporary Couture design. The book is chock full of period photos from the 70s paired with runway and editorial shots of the fashions inspired by the originals. The newer designs now feel less like a rape and rip-off and more like unrequited love. Couture will never be Punk, but, Lord, does it love it and does it want to be. The newer fashions now look both nostalgic and fashion-forward, something the galleries at the Met missed, no matter how loud the music or spiky the hair or dirty the model of the CBGB bathroom (which is, by the way, way off the mark – that model looks pristine compared to the real deal). 

I’m not sure why the Met didn’t use any of these early photographs in the show, but they make the loving connection between these two widely disparate worlds that Couture fashion on isolated mannequins does not. Perhaps that’s another way the book succeeds: in the photos the fashion is worn by people. Even on the runway, as outlandish as some of the looks are, what we’re looking at is people in clothing. The outfits are meant to be worn (well, most of them anyway), not isolated, fetishized, analyzed. As Richard Hell says in his essay in the book:

But clothes themselves, no matter how beautiful or interesting, are not great art: they remain decoration, unless they’re actually worn, vivified into soul plumage, by an artiste of personal appearance. There’s something inherently sad about clothes in themselves, and fashion, no matter how lovely or effective. Clothes are empty. 

See the show, marvel at the fashion, and be prepared for its emptiness. Then buy the book and be vivified.

The Most Beautiful Thing in New York (by Jeremy Schmall)

Usually when I tell people what I think the most beautiful sight in New York is, they just kind of stare at me funny, as though I'm lying to them or making a joke at their expense. Which is understandable, I guess, as what I'm talking about is in the subway, after all, and is basically just a mess of advertising offal. I'm referring to the layers of discarded ad posters that remain once the ad itself is stripped off.

Here's a picture of one:

See what I mean? It's gorgeous (and looks even more amazing in person). I feel like I'm in a museum every time I shuffle by one of these things, and actually I wouldn't be at all surprised to SEE one of these in the Met or MoMA, attributed to a famous abstract expressionist. Which is not to detract from the great abstract expressionists. In fact, without their work I doubt I'd see these as anything special. That is, if I saw them at all.

 

There's actually two different categories that I've noticed. The more abstract variant as pictured above, and a more intentional, shinily-glossed variety that the MTA has gone through the trouble to paint. I'm sure the MTA has a reason why they paint these things to a beautiful shine, but I don't care what it is. I just think they look beautiful

See for yourself.

 

Here's one more, which is at the G train stop right by P.S.1, the MoMA annex. Come on, guys/gals, just rope it off, charge admission, and you've got an exhibit on your hands. I call this one "Route 35 West, with Heather (a triptych)."

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

(Ed note:  This post originally appeared in March, 2011)

Late Summer Reading (part 1): Poets House Showcase [by Moira Egan]

I’m certainly not going to complain about where I spend my Augusts these days. But I must confess to a little pang of nostalgia when one dear poet girlfriend who lives in New York wrote to tell me about hanging out in the East Village with another dear poet girlfriend who will be staying in New York for the next few months. 

How I loved New York in August, especially my old, East Village stomping grounds. You know the story: the city empties out. It’s hot as hell, but the streets are relatively quiet, and you can walk in the shade. You can get a table without waiting 45 minutes. [I’ll never forget: one time my mother came to visit, and our first-choice place for dinner had a 45-minute wait. One of the group went to a nearby restaurant to check out that situation: there, it was an hour and a quarter wait. We stayed put. Mom said, “Now I really understand why you’re so tired when you come home. The hunting-and-gathering here is completely exhausting!”]

But in August, much less so. Or so it was when I lived there. Which (gulp!) I just realized, was fifteen years ago. How did that happen? 

And in other news, which I’m sure you’ve heard by now, poetry has died again. Many wise, eloquent, and even snarky protestations have been made. I’m going to add my voice to the crowd averring that poetry is most emphatically still among the living. And I’m going to do it in good Creative Writing Workshop fashion: by showing, not telling.

So if you’re in (or near) New York this August, and especially if you haven’t been yet, hie thee immediately to Poets House for this year’s Poets House Showcase. By popular demand (so there must be a few more people out there who don’t believe that poetry is dead), the Showcase has been extended until August 17. If you can’t find something to your liking among the nearly 2900 books of poetry on display, well, what can I say? 

 

I had the pleasure of seeing the Showcase, right before it opened, when I was in New York in June. I was leaving the next day to get back to Italy, so it was a rushed visit, but Executive Director Lee Briccetti graciously took me through the exhibition space – and of course, I wanted to stay all day. All week, for that matter. And yes, I admit, it’s a particular thrill when you have a book in that year’s Showcase. (Or two, if translations count!) 

Here is a listing of the books that are included this year. 

Just for fun, I scrolled through this list the other day and saw that Damiano and I have managed to get hold of just about two dozen of these titles. (That’s not too bad, considering that we have to add to the carbon footprint, in one way or another, any time we need to get a book!) I haven’t read every single poem in every one of the books that we have – not quite 1% of the books represented in the Showcase. But, even within such a small sample, I have to say that I have found poems that have made me cry, made me laugh out loud, made me re-examine certain ideas and, yes, even poems that have given me another perspective on Rome, the city in which I live. 

And so, to conclude, though it is wonderful and interesting to live a stone’s throw from a bunch of ancient monuments, whenever I visit Poets House, I get those New York State o’ Mind pangs. If you’re lucky enough to be close enough, get down there and see for yourself. It is an embarras de richesses, and you won’t be sorry. Viva la poesia!

(Poets House photo from Poets House website) 

Dispatch from Buenos Aires: Eight Months After 12-12-12 by Mong Lan

(ed. note: Last December we asked Mong-Lan to reflect upon violence that plagues her in home city. Here are her thoughts on the riots that erupted on a day that was intended to be a celebration.Read Mong-Lan's previous blog post here.)

“Cerraba los ojos y entraba en la ardiente oscuridad olvidado de todo, como el fumador de opio que al entrar al asqueroso fumadero donde el patrón chino huele a excremento, cree recobrar el cielo.”   (He closed his eyes and entered into the ardent obscurity, forgetting everything, as the smoker of opium who enters into the disgusting smoking room where the Chinese patron smells of excrement, believes to have recovered heaven.)   -- Roberto Arlt, Los Siete Locos (The Seven Crazies) (1929)

Nuestro destino (a diferencia del infierno de Swedenborg y del infierno de la mitología tibetana) no es espantoso por irreal; es espantoso porque es irreversible y de hierro.  El tiempo es la sustancia de que estoy hecho.  El tiempo es un río que me arrebata, pero yo soy el río; es un tigre que me destroza, pero yo soy el tigre; es un fuego que me consume, pero yo soy el fuego. El mundo, desgraciadamente, es real; yo, desgraciadamente, soy Borges. (Our destiny (unlike Swedenborg’s hell or the Tibetan mythology’s hell) is not awful for being unreal; it is awful because it is irreversible and of iron. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that steals me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.)  Jorge Luis Borges, "Nueva refutación del tiempo" ("New Refutation of Time"), Otras Inquisiciones, (Other Inquisitions) (1952).

[Translations from the Spanish to English by Mong-Lan]

The world, fortunately or unfortunately is sometimes real; it depends on how you look at it.  But what is there for those who have little or nothing? In the deep of the night, those who sleep on cold streets under winter blankets stir slowly like dead logs.

Grief like my own name, that follows me for centuries.  Grief like a three-headed creature that fights and argues with its own nature. Grief, scathed in tears. 

Buenos Aires, a city at war with itself, burns from the inside.  The youths burn cars to ashes.  Desperation rising, the economy has been about to explode for years now, and does so recurringly.

Perhaps the youths have been told they cannot do whatever their heart desires, for whatever reason, . . . helpless, yet wanting to leave a mark, and therefore they go out and destroy what belongs to those in authority, half-hazardly, burn cars, sack stores, destroy and take what is not theirs and what could not be theirs otherwise. 

La Nacion:  “El día del hincha de Boca terminó con barbarie y saqueos.”  (The day of the Supporters of Boca Junior soccer team ended with barbarity and sacking.)  That day was 12-12-12. 

I’ve been thinking (and feeling) about this for half a year and then some.  When connection breaks down, there is violence.  Where there is desire, unmet, there is often violence.  Although it was a day specifically named for celebration, for the supporters of the famous soccer team Boca Junior, ironically, the celebration ended in destruction hard to comprehend.

As if a war of the self, turned external, to a macroscopic gruesome level.  I witnessed the aftermath of it, so unbelievable that it was as if taken from a horrific movie.  Or it could’ve been the aftermath of a very real war.  It left behind a space that was empty and barbarous.  Destruction on a scale that is not understandable.   

During what was to have been a joy march, in celebration of the supporters of Boca Junior, it ended in utter senselessness.  The supporters of Boca Junior threw rocks, broke into the TV channel station, stole computers, telephones, anything and everything electronic.  Five shops broken into, among which was a cell phone shop, “Movistar;” a store selling men’s clothes, the Channel 13 TV studio, shattered by large rocks, and everything taken, computers, telephones; the McDonald’s lights busted, . . kiosks broken into, the shattered glass of lamps.

And the people walked around in disbelief . . . stunned, a reminder of the futility of life.  What was proven?  There is only freedom to destroy, to unfetter themselves from the shackles of their own non-ability and helplessness. Is it violence inherent in this culture, the soccer culture, that incites such fierce animosity, such energy that leads to destruction?  A lack of respect responding to a lack of respect, leading to more lack of respect? In the face of such barbarity, such violence, over 150 people were detained, but then released. What kind of coincidence is it that the present governor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, was once the president of the Boca Junior soccer team?

The elite Buenos Aires of Borges saw little place for such atrocity.  Borges, brought up in a bi-lingual household, read books in English as well as Spanish. The Buenos Aires of Roberto Arlt, that of the belligerent streets, the gritty daily existence of Porteños trying to negotiate their way through their crazed lives, resonates more with the pulse of uncompromising Buenos Aires.  Even then, perhaps Arlt could not imagine such violence on a grand scale.

Irreversible, awful, and seemingly unreal. 

Is it a question of using power correctly? The power to be, the power to exist, to use power to create, not destroy; using power not to hate, but to love.

Mong-Lan left her native Vietnam, on the last day of the evacuation of Saigon. Multidisciplinary poet, writer, dancer, visual artist, singer, and educator, she is the author of five books and two chapbooks, including her book on the tango, Tango, Tangoing: Poems & Art (the bilingual version: Tango, Tangueando: Poemas & Dibujos). Find a complete list of titles here. Mong-Lan has won the Juniper Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association's New Writers Awards, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a Fulbright Fellowship. She received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona. Mong-Lan’s poetry has been frequently anthologized -- in, for example, The Best American Poetry. Visit:  www.monglan.com

"Heroic Story" [by John Tranter]

An unremarkable birth in a provincial town –
No talk of comets in the sky, or groaning wells –
A turbid adolescence. The academic gown,
That ocean of literature, freshets of verse,
All fodder. He learns to sell what sells,
Grows from dumb kid to something of a talker,
Picks up French, German, even Erse
‘to read James Joyce in the original –’

Writes on baseball for the New Yorker,
Insists the plural of ‘paradox’ is ‘conundra’,
Boasts about sex while remaining virginal.
His articles on gastronomy touched the obscene.
Dying, he dreamed of that distant province: thunder,
Rain, everything over – what did it mean?

-- John Tranter
First published in the Harvard Review, 2013 

'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Shelley Breaks Bad

Is the Avant-Garde Dead? Long live the avant-garde! [by David Lehman]

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The avant-garde has been dead except conceptually since the triumph of Abstract Expressionism meant that everyone wanted to be avant-garde. Avant-garde as a distinction succeeded Existential with the same inexorable logic and force with which the avatars of pop art (Warhol, Rauschenberg, Johns, Oldenburg, Lichtenstein) displaced the "action painters" of the New York School (Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Kline, Newman, Gottlieb, Gorky, et al). It didn't help the latter's cause that the major abstract painters tended toward the suicidal. Ab Ex was a downer, suitable for a chapel in Houston. Pop Art was as happy as a wide paisley tie designed by Peter Max. Put it another way, Ab Ex was as hot as the radio vocies of wartime leaders in the 1940s. Pop Art was as cool as the image of JFK on TV.
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I wrote those words twenty years ago and I stand by them today. When everyone wants to embody a concept, and that concept involves an opposition to the center, the power, the Establishment, there is a contradiction that can be bridged only by a certain principled hypocrisy. The avant-garde artists of today are the ones who plagiarize phone books as if to illustrate the caricature of the bohemian 1960s poet solemnly reciting names and numbers in a Greenwich Village coffee house. (This caricature appears in season one of Mad Men.)  You have to scratch your head at the thought of a poet consciously imitating the type of bearded bard that persuades an advertising executive that there are lines of work or pseudo-work even more cynical than his own.

The critic Wallace W. Moon has suggested that "if you substitute the word fakers (or fakery) for the the word avant-garde wherever it appears you will gain in truth and you may end by achieiving a perfect example of the mass-produced, Derrida-infected poem you deplore." Moon, who follows these things more closely than I, has kindly provided a link to an example of the "compulsive critical discourse" in which, in the critic's words, "the fakers are as compulsive as plaintiffs in court  -- they can't stop yapping. It is a punishment Dante might have devised for them." I find it hard to wade through the writing, and will suspend judgment, but I accept what I take to be his central point. The competitors in the avant-garde contest are like capitalists in every sense except that they claim to espouse views diametrically opposed to capitalism. Also irrefutable, it seems to me, is Moon's argument that aesthetics have become a branch of sociology.

As for the illustration we have chosen for this post, Christina Hendricks as Joan Harris (nee Holloway) in Mad Men, I leave its semiotic significance up to you, dear reader.  -- DL

Martin Stannard's August 1, 2013 Now Available

On July 1, Martin Stannard, who lives in China and who posted here some time ago, put out a call for contributions to what would be a one-time only on-line journal.  Here's how Martin describes his project:

On July 1^st I invited a number of poets whose work I admire to contribute one of their poems to what would be a one-off online publication to go "live" on August 1^st. I also asked them to pass on the same invitation to a poet or poets they knew and admired. My plan was for the resulting collection of poems to be entirely chosen by the poets themselves, and for there to be threads of friendship and mutual admiration linking the work. I've done no editing or selecting. Poems arrived, and they are here to read.

It was also my (probably futile) intention to kind of take poetry publishing back to recapture something of the spirit of the mimeo age, which is where I began some 35 years ago: quick and simple publications that concentrated on the poem because the means of production gave you almost no alternative. Sometimes it's a relief to leave the flashy sophistications of state of the art websites behind, isn’t it? (Please feel free to disagree and/or to point out the paradox of saying all this here online.)

By my count, sixty-two poets contributed work, from C.J. Allen to Larry Zirlin, John Ashbery to Bill Zavatsky and many in between.

Read the complete publication here.

-- sdh

LIMERICKS [by Anthony Madrid via Facebook]

11.
There was a young man from the Bronx,
Loved drawing and redrawing ankhs.
When they asked for specifics, he spoke hieroglyphics,
That vexing young man from the Bronx.

12.
There was a young girl from Virginia
—I hesitate now to continue—
No matter in bed, she would lecture you dead
On the Dharma without and within ya.

13.
There was an old priest from the Point,
Who had to sit down to anoint.
His ankle was sore, ’cuz an ankylosaur
Irrepressibly gnawed at the joint. 

14.
There was a young man from St James,
Who consigned all his work to the flames.
When asked why he did it, he sadly admitted
It’s one of his dumb little games.

15.
There was an old man from Madrid,
Whose poetry went off the grid.
He longed to recite, and yet somehow in spite
Of that sumptuous fact, never did.

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