The Best American Poetry

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poems (Week 12)

Stuck in Traffic

She meant it was good to yarn, no trauma
Now you get how you mistook
swotted totally at the braked drinks and slipped physics, you’re over

She’s bumping in for the show and doesn’t deign to risk
a charge or block, and her child ‘suffers absence’
Four churches sharpen the intersection

You know what? I cancelled, it wasn’t cogito precisely
but who could’ve, like I put it out there
my sessions and criteria all one-on-one a tray

across a bridge’s attempt at grace
while ads strew the transport’s view
into meshed ideograms of capitalism

I jibbed into a cube, shonky life blinking through a glass, a pick,
then hoiked what’s left of friends.
It’s of no purpose.

I don’t want to see him a radish or leek.
Chimes pester down what boredom spored
and goes, a meddler to the heath

You buy the lock for the door then the door for the lock
as cords corolla sealed ears that hyphen thought
to home in the electric fields

 

Gig Ryan

 

Gig Ryan (1956-) is the author of New and Selected Poems (Giramondo, 2011) winner of the 2012 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry and the 2012 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry . She is Poetry Editor for the Melbourne newspaper The Age and a freelance reviewer.  She has also written songs with her occasional bands Disband and Driving Past, releasing 2 CDs, Real Estate (1999) and Travel (2006).

 

Happy Holidays [by Laura Orem]

A confession - I'm not very prepared this week, having succumbed, as usual, the holiday insanity. Today I've got cookies, wrapping, and cleaning on the agenda, and, what with the rest of the holiday preparation, I just haven't had the time to think up something brilliant, moving, and appropriate for this week's post.

So instead, I'd like to share my all-time favorite Christmas poem. (I tried to get Black Jack and the sheep to pose for an illustration, but they were more interested in breakfast than art this morning.) This is a poem specifically about Christmas, but to everyone of whatever faith, or questioning, or none at all, blessings this holiday season and for the New Year.

"The Oxen" by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
 "Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
 By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
 They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
 To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
 In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
 "Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
 Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
 Hoping it might be so.




(ed note:  This post originally appeared on December 23, 2008)

Holiday Gifts 2013

RACHEL AND I ADDRESS THE 'DUCK DYNASTY' CONTROVERSY -- RATED X! (by Mitch Sisskind)

Yes, rated X! But stay with it because John Milton comes up at the end!

(ed note: warning, this is a frank discussion. You may not want to watch/listen if you are in a public place.-- sdh)

On Cocktail Parties and Being a Poet by Vandana Khanna

 

This weekend is the beginning of an array of “holiday” festivities awaiting me—houses humming with sweater-adorned bodies sipping equally adorned cocktails.  Everything smells vaguely of pine, cinnamon and candle wax.  The food and conversation is bite-sized: light, airy morsels of vacation plans and movies, shopping and relatives, directions on how to baste something.  Inevitably, talk turns to careers, professions, and jobs.  And that’s when the awkward pause happens. Whenever my husband introduces me as a “poet”, I can see the confused scrunch forming on foreheads, the nervous laugh bubbling up or the uncertain head nod like he’s suddenly speaking a foreign language. 

Here in LA people are familiar with screenwriters and novelists.  Actors, producers, even Oscar-nominated sound engineers are not out of the ordinary at gatherings.  But poets?  My party cohorts don’t know what to do with that information.  Perhaps they have a hazy recollection of a bushy-bearded Walt Whitman or a tightly-buttoned up Emily Dickinson from their high school English class.  Some might have even indulged in a few angst-ridden lines of rhyme in their teenage years.  But they don’t know what to make of it when they meet a person who calls herself a "poet" standing in front of them.  They don’t even know what questions to ask about being a poet and I totally get it.  There’s something about poetry that makes people’s palms sweat.  It makes them anxious like I’m going to force them to recite a Shakespeare sonnet in front of everyone.  For most people, poetry is other-worldly and distant.  Most of what we know of poets and poetry comes from either English classes or Hollywood movies, and neither version really helps to bridge the gap to real life.  The examples are painted as either reclusive and awkward or glamorous and troubled.  I suppose on any given day I could be one of those things—but most of the time, it seems like too much energy to try. 

Being a poet today living in America doesn’t much feel like those movie depictions, although who can resist a tormented Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath or Willem Dafoe as T.S. Eliot?  Most poets today have been writing for years on their lunch breaks and on Friday nights, at kitchen tables and cafes and bars.  We are workers just like everyone else.  We watch Jon Stewart like the rest of the world.  We carpool and occasionally, if forced, jog.  We will smile if provoked and almost never wear black turtlenecks.  Mostly, our minds are never quiet, even while driving our cars and washing the dishes, we are writing and revising lines in our heads.  We write where we can, when we can, on cocktail napkins and grocery lists, because we are haunted—by words, by trying to find just the right way to fit it all together.  The poets I know write as much as they can in between being parents and caretakers, while holding down jobs and paying their bills.  We do live in the real world, at least some of the time. 

And every so often we get enough poems together and lay them out on our living room floors, all those white pages and black ink.  All our work and imagination and days and days of writing strung together.  In those moments, yes, we are other-worldly, at least until the cat and the kids come running through.  So the next time you are at a cocktail party, take a look around, the one scribbling in the corner just might be a poet.  Offer her a drink and she might smile and recite a few lines…

Cheers!  Hope your 2014 is filled with good poems and many free moments to write.  And yes, that is a cocktail with bacon.

 

On Rejections by Vandana Khanna

 

Type in the word rejection into any search engine and you’ll probably get the images of writers and actors.  Yes, it took me exactly three days of blogging to bring up rejection.  I’m a poet, what did you expect?  Just as my students don’t believe that writing can be a lonely profession, they often don’t believe in rejection.  Apparently, when you are standing up in front of a classroom “teaching” you’ve gotten there, at least in their eyes, unscathed—you’ve never heard the word “no”, everything you’ve written has floated from your “send” button onto a printed page in some magazine (that everyone reads). 

I don’t like receiving rejections but they do humanize, everyone has been there.  I have been rejected by magazines, journals, and contests many times this year (and I still have a chance of a few more before the New Year).  Once I got rejected within 24 hours of submitting my work (ouch).  I think successes are not always as memorable as the disappointments.  My optimistic friends don’t believe this—but for me, it’s true.  I remember being a finalist for a book contest—it was me and two other folks whittled down from a couple hundred manuscripts.  I didn’t win—and this wasn’t the first time.  My friends who are actors remember losing every job that they really wanted, even years later.  There are some things the mind refuses to let go of. 

I’ve heard these mythic stories about Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein and E.E. Cummings being rejected.  How they eventually published their own work or stuck to it long enough for someone to recognize their brilliance.  I'm not sure this knowledge is going to make me feel better.  I’m never going to write like Sylvia Plath or E.E. Cummings so these stories meant to soothe me don't always work.  What does make me feel better is my 24-hour sulk.  Whenever my friends or I get a rejection for a job or a publication that we really wanted, we’re allowed to sulk.  We are allowed to be glum, to wear pants with an elastic waistband, to watch as much reality TV as we want (without judgment), to eat potato chips for breakfast if that is our choice.  We get 24 hours to be listless and apathetic and discouraged.  But then, we have to get back to work—we have to write or audition or teach or do something that propels us forward. 

When I tell my students I have a folder full of rejection slips I’ve saved over the years they look worried like at some point I’m going to need a hug.  But I’m not.  I don’t need hugs but I do need my rejections because they’ve taught me my own brand of resilience.  They’ve taught me to get up and keep getting up—every day, every week.  To push aside the potato chips and head to the laptop.  I’ve learned the obvious— that not everyone is going to like what I’ve put out into the world, but that’s okay as long as I like what I’m writing.  These rejections have taught me that writing should give me pleasure more often than not, and if it doesn’t, something is very wrong.  I’m allowed my disappointments but that shouldn’t stop me from being part of the conversation. 

I’m okay with the road getting a little rough here and there.  I’ll wrap my rejections around me like a shawl, hunch my back against the chill and keep going.

 

 

Break-Up Poems by Vandana Khanna

This fall I’ve been teaching creative writing again in a traditional classroom with 20 year olds.   Their smooth, unlined faces stare back at me with an array of emotions ranging from skepticism to wonder (expressions, that in the end, are troublingly similar)—they don’t exactly know how they got here or why they are here, but somehow we get to the first poetry workshop and their pages are full of break-ups.  There’s something about a writing workshop that opens up all the locked doors and we get poems and poems about his leaving, her heartbreak, how each of them wrecked it all.

There’s the unique affinity that break-ups inspire that we can’t resist writing or reading about—it is the great equalizer.  No matter how fresh or how distant the relationship, how many years have passed, we still have sense memories of those experiences—mine involve a parking lot on a warm summer night sitting on a curb, crying all over the dirty sidewalk. 

Although I’ve never written about that night, I remember that moment still so many years later and as readers, we remember and relive it within the world of the poem.  It’s that vulnerability, that kick in the mouth, the sopping-wet-on-the-inside feeling that we’ve all had.  Who can resist the emotions?  Hidden or raw, it’s there—the pain, the loneliness, all those images of things cracked open.  I experience it all over again with the students—how their hurt and tenderness rises on the page with red eyes, a blue bruised heart.  Its why even years later the thought of being stuck in an elevator with an ex churns my stomach, makes my tongue thick and clumsy.  These poems remind us that we are all ripe for the tearing—love is tenuous and we should remember that. 

So next semester, I’m going to dedicate a whole class session to break-up poems.  It’s on everyone’s brains from the beginning of the semester and I want them to see how experienced writers navigate these emotions without being too self-indulgent and exclusionary.  Good writing lets us in, even for a little while, with dignity or anger or embarrassment.  And that’s what we want, I tell my students, we don’t want to be on the sidelines.  We want to be let in.

Two poems that are on my list for next semester are Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?” from her book Lucky Fish and Paisely Rekdal’s “Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce” from her collection Animal Eye.  One makes me smile and the other makes me shiver. 

Are All the Break-Ups in Your Poems Real?

By Aimee Nezhukumatathil -  (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245516)

If by real you mean as real as a shark tooth stuck
in your heel, the wetness of a finished lollipop stick,
the surprise of a thumbtack in your purse—
then Yes, every last page is true, every nuance,
bit, and bite. Wait. I have made them up—all of them—
and when I say I am married, it means I married
all of them, a whole neighborhood of past loves.
Can you imagine the number of bouquets, how many
slices of cake? Even now, my husbands plan a great meal
for us—one chops up some parsley, one stirs a bubbling pot
on the stove. One changes the baby, and one sleeps
in a fat chair. One flips through the newspaper, another
whistles while he shaves in the shower, and every single
one of them wonders what time I am coming home.

Flowers from a New Love after the Divorce

By Paisley Rekdal - (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245908)

 

Cut back the stems an inch to keep in bloom.
So instructs the florist’s note
enclosed inside the flowers.
Who knew what was cut
could heal again, the green wounds close
stitching themselves together?

It doesn’t matter. The flowers, red
and white, will bloom awhile, then wither.
You sit in an unlit room and watch
the vase throw crystal shadows through the dark.
The flowers’ colors are so lovely they’re painful.
In a week, you’ll have to throw them out.

It’s only hope that makes you take out scissors,
separate each bloom and cut
where you last measured. Did you know
Venus was said to turn into a virgin
each time she bathed? She did it
as a mark of love. She did it

so as to please her lovers. Perhaps,
overwhelmed by pain,
she eventually stopped bathing
altogether. It doesn’t matter. It’s a pleasure
to feel the green nubs stripped, watch the stems
refresh under your blade. They’re here

because they’re beautiful. They glow
inside your crystal vase. And yet
the flowers by themselves are nothing:
only a refraction of color that,
in a week or two, will be thrown out.
Day by day, the water lowers. The red-

and-white heads droop, blacken at the stems.
It doesn’t matter. Even cut stems heal.
But what is the point of pain if it heals?
Some things should last forever, instructs
the florist’s note. Pleasure,
says one god. Shame, says another.

Venus heads, they call these flowers.
In a week or two, you’ll lose the note,
have to call the florist up.
With sympathy, you’ll think he says.
Perhaps: With love. It doesn’t matter.
You’ve stopped bathing. Alone,

you sit before the crystal
vase refracting you in pieces
through the dark. You watch
the pale skin bloom inside it, wither.
You petal, inch by inch.
You turn red and white together.

Hump Day Highlights

Another terrific review, this one by Grace Cavelieri, in this month's Washington Review of Books:

"Lehman is a combination of Mark Twain, Charlie Rose and John Le Carre with a little John Donne thrown in. Is he historian? Rabbi? Storyteller? Yes and more. I say, take the book on a cross country trip and you’ll find literary entrapment that keeps you from looking out the window . . . "

Read the full review here.

Listen to David Lehman reading 'Yours the Moon' on the PBS NewsHour Arts Beat.

Some times you just don't know what's going on in your own back yard. Turns out that a talented New School graduate student has been recording Poetry Forums and uploading them to the school's web page. Who knew? Now we know. You can listen to David Lehman with Auden scholar Edward Mendleson and award winning poet Tina Chang:

Audiograph: Edward Mendelson Moderated by David Lehman Read our review of this program here.

Audiograph: Tina Chang Read our review of this program here.

Denise Duhamel, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013 makes it easy for you to catch up on the poets you should be reading now with her reading list for her course Advanced Women Poets: Books You May Only Be Hearing about Now. The good news, writes Duhamel, is that "there is room in this Advanced Women Poets seminar, no prerequisite required."

Ford Madox Ford had a novel idea for how to evaluate a book. It's put to use in this review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's important new book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.

A Crucial Flare in the Dark: The National Poetry Series Wants You!

We leave you with this:

(via Remodelista)

-- sdh

 

 

On Best of Lists by Vandana Khanna

 

It’s that time of the year when everything is strangely candy-cane scented and glittering with a tourniquet of lights.  We are anxious with our lists, with our need to prove our thoughtfulness.  We want the “perfect”, unnamable thing to fill up our loved ones hands.  Inevitably, we turn to the experts who tell us what is the “best” of this past year: the best album of the year, the best gadget of the year and of course, the best books of the year.  Everyone has a list, but like all things in life, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 

I’m not sure what it means to be the “Best Book of 2013”.  I just know that if you ask me, I can list some great books that I’ve read over this past year.  My desk is overflowing with them.  

Many of the books that I love, that have changed my life, never get placed on lists, but they are all still worthy.  Here’s a quick survey of some “Best Poetry Books of 2013” lists out there:

Goodreads has got a list that gets voted on by readers:

http://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-poetry-books-2013

Slate.com’s list also includes a list of “Overlooked Books” and “Best Lines of 2013”, to which I say, Bravo!:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2013/12/mary_szybist_frank_walker_and_the_top_10_poetry_books_of_2013.html

Publisher’s Weekly was only able to list 5 best books of poetry this year (let’s hope 2014 is better):

http://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2013/poetry

NPR put out a good list of some noteworthy books of 2013 but has placed poetry and short stories together, because they are apparently the same thing:

http://apps.npr.org/best-books-2013/#/tag/poetry

 

So, the following is what I’ve read this year that I really liked.  The first list of books was published in 2013.  The second list is no different as far as wow-factor, they just missed the list because of expiration dates.  All of these books are interesting, unique and “perfect”.  I’ve calculated that I’ve bought about 18 books of poetry over this past year and I’m hoping for at least 20 in 2014.  I figure, I write it, so I should read it. 

If you are looking to fill up the hands of the ones you love with something beautiful and thought-provoking, then please consider the following:

Sky Ward, Kazim Ali

Bright Power, Dark Peace, Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito

X Marks the Dress: A Registry, Kristina Marie Darling & Carol Guess

Vow, Rebecca Hazelton

The Traps, Louise Mathias

Body Thesaurus, Jennifer Militello

Mezzanines, Matthew Olzmann

To See the Queen, Allison Seay

Incarnadine, Mary Szybist

Antidote, Corey Van Landingham

Small Porcelain Head, Allison Benis White

 

Below is a list of the poetry books I also bought/read this year—but were published prior to 2013:

The Lost Country of Sight, Neil Aitken

Fair Copy, Rebecca Hazelton

Loveliest Grotesque, Sandra Lim

Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, Erika Meitner

I Was There for Your Somniloquy, Kelli Anne Noftle

Animal Eye, Paisley Rekdal

On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year, Lee Ann Roripaugh

Bellocq’s Ophelia: Poems, Natasha Trethewey

 

Enjoy yourself—read a poem!

My First-Ever Blog Post Accompanied by a Confession by Vandana Khanna

 

I feel it’s only right to confess something in my first-ever blog post, (deep breath): I like to read other people’s blogs, especially poets I don’t know personally.  For the past decade or so while I have been having children, writing a book of poetry and teaching here and there, I have also been religiously (and secretly) reading poetry blogs and websites.  It is my lunchtime ritual—kitchen table, bowl of soup, laptop and blog.  Reading other poets’ posts is my way to connect with a poetry community without ever getting out of my pajamas…or flip flops.  I’m sure there are much smarter people who have written about whether us cyber voyeurs are really part of a larger community or are simply just eavesdroppers.  Either way, it’s what I do, what has gotten me through years of being homebound without being totally isolated.

For a writer, who for one reason or another (say the birth of twins for instance), can’t leave the house to go to a writer’s conference or even meet up with her regularly scheduled writing group because she hasn’t gotten around to showering for a few days, a poetry blog is the best way to keep that part of her, that poetry-part, breathing.  Its comforting to know that there are others out there who care as much about poetry as I do, more even, because they put their thoughts out into the world daily, weekly, monthly.  They are clever and persistent.  They write and publish and read, even when I’ve been too tired to do so.  Someone on the other end of the computer screen has kept the candle burning and to quote Frost, “that has made all the difference”.     

Yes I admit to trolling the internet looking for poets and their words in the world—they are my daily affirmation, my support group, my guilty pleasure.  I’ve found out about trends and controversies, been reassured that someone is counting the number of women writers who are getting published and talked about (thank you, VIDA); but mainly, I’ve found kindred spirits (unbeknownst to them)—other writers who feel the same joys and frustrations that being a poet encompasses—the poems that get rejected, the books that get taken, and the endless empty pages waiting to be filled.  This is really what our lives are made up of: words and pages and books.  There are so many poets out there writing about the craft and business of poetry that the sheer force of their knowledge, insight, and research have made me a better writer. 

So here are a few of my favorite poetry blogs and websites (out of thousands out there), some I turn to for sheer humor and support, others because they have smart things to say:

 Julianna Baggott (http://bridgetasher.blogspot.com/): because she’s a writer and a mom, and isn’t afraid to talk about both.

Sandra Beasley (Chicks Dig Poetry) http://sbeasley.blogspot.com/: because she’s a working writer and gives good insights into the business.

C. Dale Young (The Micro Muse) http://blog-cdaleyoung.tumblr.com/: because I can barely manage to do one thing right and he does many.

Brian Brodeur’s How a Poem Happens (http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/): because haven’t we all asked that question at some point.

Thank you, dear reader, for listening to my confession.

 

Poem by Tommy Pico [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders!

It's been about six months since my last post - I've been super busy getting my two new books to press. They both came out last month and it's been very exciting - and sometimes a lot to handle. More on that soon.

Right now I want to introduce you to a wonderful young poet who I met when he was in the MFA Program at the New School, Tommy Pico. His poetry is great; he grew up on the rez and writes movingly about it; he's been a community builder in poetry, starting reading series, putting out a magazine, etc. 

Pico has an app coming out in January with his poetry collection on it. I'll tell you more about that when it comes out. For now, here's a poem of his:

Inheritance

1. My mother was voted “best legs” in her senior high school yearbook, despite the fact that she was also student body president and editor in chief of the school paper. Only boys got superlatives like, “Most Likely to Succeed.”

2. Doctors say that Indians are predisposed to a lot of illnesses, like alcoholism and diabetes. At the clinic, patient history starts the first time you get sick. They ask me why don’t I eat, nearly commit me when I say because my great grandfather’s horses were stolen in 1890.

3. Myths aren't told to make things seem down to earth.

4. Thinking all the time vs Giving up (the butt).

5. Cigarette habit that kicks in around the third drink and the right lung.

6. Things that make me want to run: I) Seeing other people run. II) Eating a whole pizza. III) Everyone adoring the same person.

7. Upon being drafted into Vietnam, my father guided tanks through minefields in the jungle when he was very young. I have never not once walked in the wrong direction surfacing from the subway.

8. Waiting to be moved.

9. Waiting to be introduced.

 10. Always wanting to raise my hand first. 

11. My father's unfinished collection of poetry is called, "In the Days of Tall Cans and Short Hopes."

12. Songs to sing when the roommates are gone vs songs to sing at karaoke vs songs to listen to, pretending. 

13. Collections: do they get better, or just bigger?

14. Devin at Blue Olive. James at Pine State. Barry at Cup. Angelo at Dave & Busters. Jean Baptiste at Point Ephemere. Eric at Pop In. Federico at Monster Ronsons. BigGuySF365 at Adam4Adam. Me at Gmail.

15. There must be a word for this in some romance language, for looking down at your legs and seeing mom; for looking down at your hands and seeing dad. 

---

Great, right? Alright, more soon. I've missed you all terribly and hope to now start blogging at you regularly again. As always, don't kill yourself and I shall return to encourage you again.

love,

Jennifer

Review: Major Jackson at The New School’s Poetry Forum with David Lehman (By Nora Brooks)

In the last poetry forum of the fall season at the New School, poet and Harvard Review poetryeditor Major Jackson sat down with Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman after a moving reading of new poems and work selected from Jackson’s first three collections, Holding Company, Hoops and Leaving Saturn. Jackson and Lehman share a love of natty headwear—Lehman happened to be sporting a dark fedora on this occasion, and Jackson a light gray newsboy cap—that extends toward more subtle manifestations of a poet’s style in verse. Lehman brought up a quotation from Philip Roth that: “A liking for hats is essential if you’re going to be an American poet.”  Jackson, leaning back in his chair, responded humorously but in all seriousness that “this was not debatable. There’s a relationship between style and poetry. There’s something about what the surface conveys subtly that is enacted on the page. These are areas where you can create a style.”

Jackson’s own style draws on a multitude of influences.  A product of inner-city Philadelphia, he characterized his early years as a writer as his “brooding period,” a time when he was “drawn to poets who spoke to his existential angst.” He was heavily affected by Robert Lowell and Galway Kinnell’s lyrical engagement with historical and social issues, particularly Kinnell’s books Midsummer, The Bounty and White Egrets. This engagement with history is evident in both the series “Urban Renewal” that he has worked on since his first collection, the Cave Canem-winning Leaving Saturn, and in more recent poems like “Berimbau.” At the podium earlier, resting his large palms on each side, Jackson read to us from “Berimbau” in a warm low voice: “How in Congo Square/ African dance kept 600 slaves alive…sadder still/ How we must always ask, who are we?”

Lehman, leaning forward in his chair, inquired about another line of influence. Quoting what Jackson wrote on his Twitter page that morning he asked, “Would you consider that you are part of the eighth wave of the New York School?” Jackson replied that there was indeed a lot of influence from the New York School in his work, particularly in the most recent collection, Holding Company (2010), in which he emulated Ted Berrigan's habit in The Sonnets of recycling lines from poem to poem. Jackson elaborated: “I’ve lightened up over the years. The New York School led the way.” Lehman remarked that there was a lot of the New York School in Jackson’s prose poem “OK Cupid.” It has an organic unity that feeds back on itself:

…dating a white man is like dating insecurity, and dating insecurity is like dating a Hummer, and dating a Hummer is like dating the Pentagon, and dating the Pentagon is like dating a lost star, and dating a lost star is like dating a liberal, and dating a liberal is like dating a Jew….

Jackson has explained elsewhere that Jackson Mac Low’s procedural poetics was an influence here. In Major Jackson’s poem, this strategy generates a long absurd string of descriptors that becomes an odd mirror of the categories OK Cupid’s algorithm sets up around race, politics, gender relations and subcultures in America. Jackson’s “Why I Write Poetry,” which was selected by guest editor Denise Duhamel for The Best American Poetry 2013, has a similar sense of unspooling a long string of causal phrases: “because my son is as old as the stars….because I better git it in my soul / Because my grandfather loved clean syntax…Because I have been on a steady diet of words / since the age of three.” 

Interestingly, Jackson’s reading of “OK Cupid” to us veered from the text published in the most recent Tin House. Lehman was curious about the point at which Jackson had made that decision, whether he had brought a different draft or had improvised while reading. Jackson remarked that he was one of those poets who never stopped editing even after publication. Galway Kinnell would sometimes revise a poem for 20 or 30 years. Lehman remarked that it was good for the emerging poets in the audience to hear that the act of reading a poem aloud can teach an author something new about his or her work and that poems that have already been published are subject to revision nevertheless.

Jackson told us that another influence has been Joseph Brodsky’s Twenty Sonnets to Mary, Queen of Scots. He was particularly drawn to “that shape, that extended sonnet, that block of text.That form is always teaching me something about how to form and shape a self within that block.” The recent Holding Company, consists almost entirely of ten-line lyrical blocks that delve into subjects as wide-ranging as Nazi cinematographer Leni Riefenstahl, the catastrophist Immanuel Velikotsky, infidelity, heartbreak and Lorca, among others. It’s a playing with form that is reminiscent of his 70-page poem to Gwendolyn Brooks in Hoops, “To Brooks,” that ranges through varied places and moments of Jackson’s poetic development, all through a long string of cantos. 

This multiplicity of experience comes out in his language as well. Managing editor Stacey Harwood, raising her hand from the audience, noticed: “there is a very moving editing of detail because you select elements of your environment that are so precise.” New additions to the “Urban Renewal” series placed us in Madrid with the poet Mark Strand and sketched images of a Mediterranean island Jackson and his wife visited: “the morning sweet prayers of palm leaves…yucca leaves lifting like a chorus of arms.” Jackson replied to Harwood that: “Seeing is a statement of personality. What we see is a statement of who we are. Growing up going to Nashville, Tennessee, in the summers developed that sensitivity."

Lehman inquired what developments Jackson sees in American poetry from his vantage point as the poetry editor of the Harvard Review. Jackson said that he felt that the proliferation of MFA programs was working because he sees people “adopting all these different styles.” What he looks for the most is: “if the language is alive, if there is a kernel of the self. Being an editor often feels like being a curator of an exhibit of various voices. People are so much more complex than the categories we place them in, and the poems should reflect that.” 

Like Jackson’s oeuvre, such poems can’t be easily pigeonholed, splicing a voice from multiple experiences and influences, something Jackson sees as a strong positive: American poetry today is borrowing from an ever-expanding bank of cultures and styles. -- Nora Robertson Brooks

An Evening in Celebration of Marie Ponsot [by Karen Steinmetz]

Marie Ponsot held us in her spell, reading with radiant authority and a deep pleasure in the power and play of language at the University Club, NYC, where friends and family gathered Nov. 19 to celebrate her legacy as poet, teacher, and benefactor to The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College. It came as no surprise that Ponsot, class of 1940 and this year’s recipient of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (among her many other honors), asked the audience to hold applause when it broke out after she read a second poem. Quiet observation and imaginative attention to the power of poetic structures are key in Ponsot’s poetry. One thinks of Ponsot’s most recent book, Easy, and realizes that this ease is hard won, as she affirms in a PBS News Hour profile.

Each of the twelve poems Ponsot chose for Tuesday’s event reveals experience enfolded within experience, as in “Pre-text,” in which the first, lunging steps of a “sudden baby” lead backwards in time erasing suddenness in an eloquent gesture. In “On a Library of Congress Photo of Eunice B. Winkless, 1904,” a young woman’s proud but precarious control over the “animal horse” results in her fall into “a pool like a tame star.” In Ponsot’s luminous yet uncompromising vision, we come up short but still win. “Did it again. Damn Fool!” the rider exclaims, and the poem ends with an observation on the authority of the imagination, the poet asking, “And when do I act on better evidence?” In “Hard Shell Clams,” Ponsot commemorates the intimacy of a day shared with her father, yet remembers also “what I would not let us say.”

 A series of glowing tributes to Marie Ponsot’s legacy followed a convivial settling in. Dean Richard Greenwald of St. Joseph’s introduced President S. Elizabeth Hill, who praised Ponsot’s “generous embrace of life” and her poems that “blaze like the sun or glow like warming embers.” Alice Quinn, who edited Ponsot’s return to publishing with her 1981 Admit Impediment, remembered being careful not to damage “the copious beauty” and celebrated Ponsot’s “thrilling relation to the poetic canon and poetic form.” She described the eleven poems that appeared in a recent edition of Poetry as “marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity that will also break your heart.” To illustrate, she read Ponsot’s “Roundstone Cove,” which ends with the acute and comforting observation, “Fog hoods me. But the hood of fog is sun.” Rosemary Deen, co-author of Beat Not the Poor Desk, described Ponsot’s inspired teaching syllabus and expressed enduring admiration for the way this “mother, breadwinner, cooker of two French meals a day, and poet” managed to find “those twenty minutes before going to bed” to write. Finally, Jackson Taylor, Director of The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s and first to hold the newly endowed Ponsot Chair in Poetry, introduced Marie Ponsot by quoting her advice to him: “You gotta get lucky. The way to get lucky is to be open to luck.” Clearly, there is always another lesson to be learned from this brilliant poet.

 

UNABASHED

Unabashed

as some landscapes are

(a lakeshape, say,

lying and lifting

under a cupping sky)

so angels are,

entire with each other,

their wonderful bodies

obedient, their strengths

interchanging—

or so

we imagine them

hoping

by saying these things of them

to invent human love.

 

From Springing: New and Selected Poems, from Knopf, 2003

 

Karen Steinmetz’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Coal Hill Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among other literary journals, and in the anthology Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot. Her novel The Mourning Wars was published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in 2010. She is a Lecturer in Writing at Manhattanville College.

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poems (Week 11)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Delivering Tact

At your front gate
           an oily truck murmurs away
patiently enough, it could be said,
while two young blokes
           in tattoos and muddy denims
tug the small heavy sacks up to your house.

They are delivering tact
           and it’s expensive
but worth every penny of the cost,
given it makes the whole shebang
           tick along smooth and quiet
like the innards of a bedside clock.

That’s right: it lubricates existence.

You take delivery
           sign a docket
and the truck puffs up white dust.

Locked in a jail of ribs, the passionate heart
judders
           the way a cranked car used to do,
the whole system
                               suddenly coughing.

 

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

 

Chris Wallace-Crabbe (1934-) taught for many decades at the University of Melbourne where he gained a formidable reputation as a teacher and critic. He is one of the major voices in Australian poetry known beyond our shores.

Vandana Khanna, Guest Author December 16-20

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India and received her M.F.A. from Indiana University.  Her first collection, Train to Agra, won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize and her second collection, Afternoon Masala, won the Miller Williams Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press in 2014. She is a lecturer at the University of Southern California.

Welcome, Vandana.

 

-- sdh

Keep Your Top Ten Lists!

 

The Literary Man writes: 

As a counterpoint to the current glut of people blabbing about the same old novels, we would like to say a few words about David Lehman’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, our favorite book of poetry published in 2013.

. . .

This is excellent stuff, people. We often talk about enjoying poetry, and yet it’s sometimes difficult to know where to start. How does one stay in touch with contemporary poetry? Well, start here: with these NEW AND SELECTED POEMS.

Read the complete review here.

Because you brought a new kind of love to me. . . [by David Lehman]

There’s an old French saying,
“the whole of a man’s mystery
rests in his hat,” and if you
translate it into American
you get Sinatra smoking
and singing “Memories of
You,” “I Thought About You,”
“You Make Me Feel So Young,”
and “You Brought A New
Kind of Love to Me,” all
from the same 1956 session,
I love that voice and have since
the summer I was eight and
my friend Ann and I sang “Love
and Marriage” on Talent Night
at the bungalow colony when I’m
down there’s nothing like you,
birthday boy, singing “All of Me”
to lift me up and when I’m in love
I jump out of bed in the morning
singing “It All Depends on You” and
your voice comes out of my mouth

-- David Lehman (12 / 12 / 97)
from The Daiy Mirror (Scribner, 2000)

The Year's Greatest Typo [by David Lehman]

In Peter Carson's fine new translation of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (published by Liveright, together with Tolstoy's "Confession." in a single handsome volume), the eponymous hero writes, "I fell I'm fifteen years younger." You'll find this admirable typo on page 55, the very page on which he "missed his footing and fell" off a step-ladder, but the pain soon disappears, and Ivan Ilych congratulates himself on feeling "particularly well and cheerful." In fact, Ivan writes -- in his diary? or in a letter? -- "I feel I'm fifteen years younger," only here it comes out "I fell I'm fifteen years younger," as if a typo could inadvertently summarize the twists of the plot, for that fall off the step-ladder leads to his decline and death -- DL

David Remnick Salutes Roger Angell, Hall of Fame Scribe [by DL]

When managers Bobby Cox, Tony LaRussa, and Joe Torre are inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown next summer, the best baseball writer on the planet will also be celebrated. Click here for New Yorker editor David Remnick's tribute to Roger Angell on the occasion of his receiving, in Remnick's words, "the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, which has previously gone to the likes of Grantland Rice, Red Smith, Ring Lardner, and Damon Runyon. With respect to all the writers in the lifetime lineup card, Roger is the cleanup man. I.M.H.O., anyway. I am not quite sure how the exhibits will look, but I will be happy to see one of Roger’s tweed jackets, a spiral notebook shoved in the pocket, hanging right next to Ruth’s No. 3 and Gehrig’s No. 4."

I can't resist quoting more of Remnick's eloquent praise (with apt illustration):

<<<
Not to be peevish, but the award is a teensy bit belated, as there has been heated discussion for years in press-box circles about whether Roger, as a “magazine and book man” (as one voter called him), could fairly stand beside the beat writers, the men and women who attend every game and write up every contest, from the mid-August sleeper in the rain to the Homeric season-ending classics on All Hallows’ Eve. It’s good to see that the guild gave up its perquisites to honor the outlier. The truth is, though, that Roger, who is more accustomed, it is true, to writing on a more capacious deadline, is a versatile player; he can write quickly when the occasion, and the technology, demands it of him. When Mariano Rivera pitched his second-to-last game this year, Roger checked in the next morning on our Sporting Scene blog:

Mariano came on with one out in the eighth, and surrendered a single but no runs, and along the way gave us still again his eloquent entering run from deep center field; the leaning stare-in with upcocked mitt over his heart; the reposeful pre-pitch pause, with his hands at waist level; and then the burning, bending, famed-in-song-and-story cutter. All these, seen once again, have been as familiar to us as our dad’s light cough from the next room, or the dimples on the back of our once-three-year-old daughter’s hands, but, like those, must now only be recalled.

Upcocked. Reposeful. Our dad’s cough in the next room. All on deadline and without evident strain. (You try it!) But perhaps we can credit it to experience, to sufficient time in the press box. Roger is ninety-three. Unlike Mariano, he has not abandoned the field. He’s at the office nearly every day, reading fiction for the magazine, writing, kibbitzing, and advising. His devotion to writing, editing, and the magazine is as it ever was. The other day, he handed in an essay that is as fine a thing as I have read in many months, and it will run soon.

This is all to say: Roger, congratulations! Congratulations from us at the magazine and from your readers.

-- David Remnick
>>>>

A crucial flare in the dark: The National Poetry Series wants you!

Young writers, working mainly in deep private, even if they are in an MFA program, even if they have found their way to a coterie as some poets do, feel themselves when they are lucky to be conjuring a kind of magic, as if they were shaping liquid phospher, and then the work is done, with whatever psychic magic they've put into it and taken from it, and then what do you do? Looking at the world one of the things they'd see, have seen, is the National Poetry Series--poets reading poets in order to publish new work and keep the art fresh, keep renewing it. Not for the world at large but for those poets, the new ones or the ones with no special connection to the world of publishing, the NPS has been crucial, a flare in the dark, and it needs to be kept alive. -- Robert Hass

 For each of the past 35 years, under the stewardship of Daniel Halpern, the National Poetry Series has published five books of poetry. Do the math: that's 175 books of poetry by some of our most promising poets. The winning manuscripts, solicited through an annual Open Competition, are selected by poets of national stature and published in beautiful gift-worthy volumes. The list of winners is impressive. Three NPS poets have gone to win the National Book Award: Mark Doty, Terrance Hayes, and Nathaniel Mackey. Billy Collins, an NPS winner, became Poet Laureate of the United States. Judges have included many of major contemporary poets, including Nobel Prize winners Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, and Pulitzer Prize winners Louise Gluck, Robert Hass, Stephen Dunn and Jorie Graham. Click through the thumbnails below to see the 2012 winners: 

 

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Now, for the first time, the National Poetry Series is facing a financial crisis and is asking for our help. You can read more about the Series' financial shortfall in the New York Times.

You can easily make a donation to the National Poetry Series with PayPal. Find the details on the NPS website.

Or you can mail a donation to:

National Poetry Series
57 Mountain Avenue
Princeton, NJ 08540

Consider these testimonials:

Every year I look forward to buying the five books published in the National Poetry Series. It's like having a curator who gathers again and again the most exciting and diverse collections of poetry in the country, selections that continue to represent the breadth of American poetry. Not only is it the most distinguished series, it is also the only one I know of that consistently identifies, at an early stage in their careers, the writers we are likely to be reading for a long time. -- Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate of the United States.

By enabling five new volumes of poetry to appear annually over the past 35 years, the National Poetry Series has radically changed the face of American poetry.  A number of poets who are now among our best-known first appeared there as beginners, and might never have been heard from were it not for the publication opportunity the Series offers.  It's vital to our literary health as a nation that the work continue. - John Ashbery

How do today's poets, especially lesser-known ones, find an audience? How are readers, or would-be readers, introduced to new poets? Efforts to make this connection come alive deserve our gratitude and support, and the National Poetry Series is one of the most successful and long-lived. If you’re familiar with it, you know the quality and quantity of books it’s brought before the public. If you’re not, take a look at the list of works and poets (not to mention those who’ve served as judges) – and decide for yourself. - Jeffrey Brown, PBS News Hour

We hope you will help keep this necessary series in mind when you make your holiday donations to worthy institutions.

--sdh