The Best American Poetry

Contemporary Canadian Poetry by Eduardo C. Corral

This week I'm featuring the work of David O’Meara.

So Far, So Stupid

All those selfies I posted
look really great. So spontaneous. Arm

tentacled through bad light past the frame,
an umbilical toward my ego.

Freud, meet Descartes. Intentions,
like airports, look deceptively the same,

then you get a security pass
for the doors just off the escalators.

Inside my mind, there’s another mind,
like a prop warehouse,

dramatically cluttered at times.
I go there, for the wind machine

and free-standing door
I just slam and slam.

How I Wrote

You must change your life, but first,
wait a few minutes. After all, Rilke couch-surfed
from castle to château for a decade before
his internal mood ring shifted to purple
and signalled the muse. He finessed this later
as creative possession: an impulse so focused
he’s said to forget the time of day,
though Wikipedia claims he never missed
a meal at Duino. Big deal. Whatever
it was, he could direct the spirit’s surges
and knew how to work a crowd in its wake.
Imagine him on Facebook. LOL.
Precious, yes, but how not to be
when you’re born in Prague and write
about angels. In any case, you won’t catch me
mooning along parapets and sea walls;
not because I wouldn’t, but so far
there’ve been no offers. I booked a week
at Banff in a forest studio,
ate scones, startled a ground squirrel,
kept forgetting to bring a jacket,
and one night heard blues harmonica
drift from the aboriginal arts lodge nearby.
I texted a friend who’s Ojibwa. WTF?
He wrote back ‘Why don’t you go
over there and ask them what they’ve got
to be blue about?’ Touché.
So I managed some edits, and through
the skylight watched yellow leaves
parachute the branched heights to amass
as ground cover. No thought-fox
raised its rusty snout, or gifted prints
across the page, though a few fingers
of cask-strength Scotch made
the waiting a little easier. Paradox:
to be perfectly here, you must
stop thinking about it, then it’s on.
Most days I leaf around trying to sidle
out of the peripheral sight of myself,
so when I focus again, I might
be astonished, do something real, feel
like Jarrett at Köln, overtired
and saddled with the wrong piano,
forced to work the corners we get
backed into. It might be a thunderbolt,
but mostly a mule I keep thinking of
when I picture myself in the grind between
the start of some work and its end result,
but like an apprentice before the koan,
I’m afflicted by the absent revelation,
never sure if it’s better to change the light bulb
or stare into the dark.

Silkworms

Home-grown for extra income,
they’re warmed in the watts
of a standard light bulb
till the egg forms a worm, small
like a hair. Each one feasts
on mulberry, a month-long course
of shiny leaves, chubbing themselves
into a pale, lazy wiggle.

They wish to be a kimono cloud,
ball of fog, white
shrouds spun for their own ghosts
as they nod off to a creaking dream
of legs and wings. They wish
they were metaphor.

To let them stretch would tear
sleek work, so each cocoon
is dropped in a rolling boil, their
lives pinched out like fingers
on a match head.
The strands are reeled on a row
of spools,
and the cocoons jig and iridesce
until the corpse is undressed.

Somewhere, Nowhere

There was little time left to be young
and stupid, so I hitched due west
on the 17, cold thumb to autumn.
Outside Sault Ste. Marie, ground mist
and the turned-up collar.
I slept in a ditch.

A man from Provence waved
me toward a camper van; we traded
goals of getting to the coast,
though he talked of Fresno, Oaxaca,
and the way south to Chile.

North of Superior, the going
was rough on gear and brake, flashes
of lake between terraces of the Seven’s
granite and pine. Past dark,

we found a side road, parked, ate
sandwiches, bet almonds on cards,
talked origins of Mad Hatter
and Winnie the Pooh. Inside
my sleeping bag, with no bleed
from the usual streetlights,
it was an inkwell cave.

It was medieval night
and I ceased feeling any links
to what was real, just a stinging
trust at being in the middle of nothing

but my life. It was like that for days,
until I was dropped off near Golden,
the boot knife velcroed to my ankle,
symbol of how luck and stupidity
ride the same edge.

(Poems from A Pretty Sight by David O’Meara, copyright 2013 by Coach House Books)

Q&A

Brecken Hancock: Many aspects of your work remain with me after sitting with your books—philosophical attention to listening, interrogation of the function of art, close attentiveness to what’s gained in visiting foreign countries, the rise and fall and rise of intimacy in relationships—but I most want to ask you about time travel. In a recent interview with rob mclennan, you assert, “Any artist is responsible for addressing the age he/she lives in, making connections to the past, and imagining the future.” In your work, I’m interested in the places where your attention to time becomes literal: in “Occasional” we’re addressed by the Poet Laureate of the Moon; in “Vicious” Socrates and Sid Vicious speak to one another as citizens of an imagined afterlife; in “Arriving Early” two versions of yourself co-exist, one who caught his bus and one who took a taxi; in “Letter to Auden” you use the medium of poetry to communicate directly with the deceased; and I could go on. I’m a science fiction fan at heart, and I find something nerdily satisfying about this co-option of the genre of poetry to speculate wildly across time and space, connecting disparate characters and having them take up your philosophical obsessions. What is it for you that makes poetry particularly appropriate for this speculative approach to time and philosophy? What role do past and future play as you address the age we live in? And, if you really could time travel, what would be your first stop?

David O’Meara: I think we time-travel every day. We live in a future tense as much as we inhabit our past actions. How else could we plan and imagine? We spend months planning a trip that lasts a week. Even before a simple walk to the corner store, we have projected ourselves into the next hour, imagining the route we’ll take, buying the milk, etc. An afternoon nap is pure speculation. Tuesday’s dinner is just starting to be conceived. Likewise, there are several theories disputing the idea that time is an arrow. Multiverse theories and branch points raise haunting questions. If we can remember into the past, why not into the future? If time isn’t causal, then something that’s already happened is still happening; we just don’t know how to access the route to get there again. A passage from Tomas Transtromer’s prose-poem “Answers to Letters,” reads in translation, “Sometimes an abyss opens between Tuesday and Wednesday but twenty-six years may be passed in a moment. Time is not a straight line, it’s more of a labyrinth, and if you press close to the wall at the right place you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices, you can hear yourself walking past there on the other side.” Poetry, particularly lyric poetry, can take temporal leaps through association. With the use of a central image we can cross great swaths of time and space, we can traverse them in a single line. By imagining, we form a mental picture of some other place, real or ventured, and travel there. “At the end of my suffering / there was a door,” Louise Gluck writes. Or James Wright: “Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, / Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.” Do these places exist? Yes, and no. But I think poetry can, and should, speculate in this way for the sake of perspective and juxtaposition. Perspective: the view with distance from a fixed point, as juxtaposition is placing two things near each other for comparison. When we have Greek myth and small-town Ontario in an Anne Carson book, or the tension between the miraculous and the mundane in Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” we can inhabit both worlds. Poetry, through metaphor, is equipped for this. We can take something out of its own context and verify its emotional/philosophical consistency on an unfamiliar plane. Which is probably the ridiculous purpose of giving Socrates and Sid Vicious a scene together. And I think verification is the impetus for most science fiction and time-travel literature. What can we change with a second chance? How will we act with breadth and scale? What is fundamental?

What would be my first stop? A few historical periods come immediately to mind—Tang Dynasty China or nineteen-twenties Paris—but it would probably be most fascinating to travel forward, spend a few weeks in 3000 CE. And very sobering, no doubt. Either way, the photos might change a few current policies.

BIOS

Brecken Hancock’s poetry, essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Riddle Fence, Event, CV2, Grain, The Fiddlehead, and Studies in Canadian Literature. She is Reviews Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine and Interviews Editor for Canadian Women in the Literary Arts. The Art of Plumbing, her most recent chapbook, is out with above/ground press and her first full-length manuscript of poems, Broom Broom, is forthcoming with Coach House Books this spring. She lives and walks dogs in Ottawa.

David O’Meara lives in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the author of three collections of poetry and a play, Disaster, nominated for four Rideau Awards. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Prize, the Trillium Book Award, a National Magazine Award and he won the Archibald Lampman Award twice. His most recent book is A Pretty Sight (Coach House Press, 2013). He is director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and was the Canadian judge for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Congratulations to University of Arizona Poetry Center

 

We've just learned that the University of Arizona Poetry Center is getting much deserved recognition. The Poetry Center is the proud winner of a 2014 Governor’s Arts Award!  Since 1981, arts organizations have been recognized for their passion, creativity and devotion to the excellence and diversity of Arizona’s arts and cultural community.

The Poetry Center, housed in a 17,500–foot landmark facility on  University of Arizona Tuscon campus is a significant national center for the appreciation and enjoyment of poetry and literature. Dedicated in 1960 by Robert Frost and located in one of three landmark buildings for poetry in the U.S., the Poetry Center’s world-renowned library of contemporary poetry and diversity of literary programs serve more than 30,000 people year. The Poetry Center also is a leader in developing poetry curricula in Arizona and provides online resources for teachers and parents. More than 1,000 poets and writers have been presented to southern Arizona audiences through the Poetry Center including the state’s new Poet Laureate, Alberto Rios.

You can find out more about the University of Arizona Poetry Center here.

Her Vouchers [by Howard Altmann]

“I’ve never met a real poet before.” That’s what she said when she found out. “I didn’t know people are still writing poetry.” That’s what she said when she lost her place in line. “Can you make a living writing poetry?” That’s what she said when her flight was delayed. “I don’t really like poetry to be honest.” That’s what she said when her flight was cancelled and the snow picked up.

Fair enough: I travel in the wrong circles. But shall I stand by the plant or is the aperture angling for something just a wee more exotic? Members of the jury, distinguished practitioners of the form, dwellers in the dark and fiddlers in the field, poetry fellows on both sides of the Atlantic, zoo-keepers and bee-keepers, where oh where is our guide?

And I mean one page primer or six-page tract, glossy fold-out or pocket-sized cheat-sheet, go-to handbook or coffee table gift stuffer, ten-minute podcast or daily tweet––there is a hole, ladies and gentlemen, in this country and no one, no one seems to be talking about it, thinking about it, editorializing about it. If we don’t have an app soon, are we to blame our senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle? Or are we to blame ourselves, our navel-gazing poetry-selves?

Now, in full, dual-citizenship disclosure, I must confess mine’s been a general mumbling and fumbling the way through, a kind of defensive posturing as default position. And it’s carried me along on both coasts, in Canada and the U.S., at weddings and at wakes, by the garden of my thoughts at the crashing of my dreams. Yet in 2014 transparency, I’m either pleased to report or shocked to reveal that a more aggressive shape has begun, finally begun to take form, hover and penetrate: “Why haven’t you met a real poet before? What is wrong with you anyway? How can you not like poetry?” “Where do you live?”

This strategy is not for everyone. Certainly. It may not even be for me. There are many kinks to be worked out and I’m still a ways away to getting to them. That said, that said there’ve been some early rewards, definitely some early rewards, and I’d be remiss and utterly selfish and totally late to the party not to share a few of them here––which I will. She did, after all, give me her vouchers.

A demain.

Submission Guidelines for Open Press Poetry Prize [by Nin Andrews]

 The Open Poetry Prize is open to all poets who can comply with the following guidelines.

1. The Open Poetry Prize is open to all poets who are in possession of a manuscript, a name, an email address, a phone number, and a check for thirty dollars. Please be sure you meet these requirements before submitting to our contest.

2. Open will consider all manuscripts that are in a single font, are single-spaced, and that contain no more than seventy pages.  All manuscripts must be received by April 15. 

3. Open will not make exceptions or accept excuses from your mother, your professor, or God.

4. Open will consider all manuscripts that mention in their cover letter how much they love Open Press and its poets.  

5. Open will consider all manuscripts that mention in their cover letter which Open Press books they have read, why they love them, which they plan to review, and why they want to become one of them.

6. Open will consider all manuscripts that mention in their cover letters how many readings they can secure for other Open authors and how many friends they have on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets.

7. Open will consider all manuscripts with open eyes and minds.  If you would wish that they be closed, please choose another publisher.

8.  Open will consider all manuscripts including manuscripts written by themselves, their professors, their students, and their relatives.

9. Open will not consider any manuscript that is lost.

10. Open will not consider any epics, manifestos, or epic manifestos.

11. Open will not read multiple manuscripts by the same author. Nor will we read the same manuscript with a multiple titles and multiple arrangements of its poems.

12. Open will not respond to bribery, blackmail or suicide threats.  If you are a criminal or have suicidal impulses, please do not submit a manuscript to Open.

13. Open does not wish to know which famous poets you know, have studied with and/or have slept with.  Please do not inform us of these details.

14. Open does not want to go out to dinner with you right now.

15. Open does not care what you are wearing.  Please do not include photos with your entry.

16. Open will not comment on rejected manuscripts and owes you no explanation for its editorial decisions.  

Also please do not do any of the following: 

17. Please do not use Elmer’s glue to stick the pages of your manuscript together.

18. Please do not include glitter or stickers in your envelope.

19. Please do not enter the contest if you don’t want to publish your manuscript,  or if you think you might be sued for libel if the manuscript is published.

20. Please do not enter the contest if you would rather have another press publish your manuscript.

21. Please do not enter the contest if you expect Open to wait all summer for you hear from a preferred publisher.

22. Please do not enter the contest if you plan to continue shopping the manuscript around after it has been accepted, and then to make up an elaborate excuse, should another publisher snatch it up.

23. Please do not enter the contest if you are not an honest person. 

24. Please do not enter the contest if you are psychotic, vindictive, or harbor ill will towards fellow poets.

25. Please do not enter this contest if you think you are the only real poet living today.

26. Please do not enter the contest if you have never read a book of poems. 

27. Please do not enter the contest if you think you are the next Rod McKuen or Mary Oliver.

28. Please do not enter this contest if you post glamorous photographs of yourself every day on Facebook.

29. Please do not enter the contest if you do not brush your teeth. And floss.

30. Please do not enter the contest post mortem.

Thank you for your interest in the Open Poetry Prize.

If we select your manuscript, we will allow revisions, but please do not send us an entirely new book and call it a revision.

We pledge to choose at least one manuscript to publish.  We hope your manuscript is the one we choose.  While we do not care if we know you or do not know you, we do hope you are not a bot. 

Howard Altmann, Guest Author March 31 - April 4

This week we welcome Howard Altmann as our guest author. Howard grew up in Montreal, graduated from McGill and Stanford, was a banker for a bit, left that world more than a bit ago, and has lived in New York City for a byte-sized amount of time. He is the author of two poetry collections, the second of which, In This House, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2010. His poems have appeared in Little Star, Poetry, Slate, The Yale Review and elsewhere, in addition to the anthology, New Writings of the Americas: From Patagonia to Nunavut, forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press. Read his poem "Fragments" here and "Desert Sounds" here.

Welcome, Howard.

-- sdh

Putin Versus Obama on the Phone [by David Lehman]

Putin (in Russian): Barry, what can I do?

Putin's translator (in English): The president of Russia sends his noblest respects and sentiments to his American counterpart.

Obama (in English): This bullshit of yours -- Crimea, the Ukraine -- couldn't come at a worse time for me. It is so nineteenth-century.

Obama's translator (in Russian): President Obama is very pleased to have a constructive dialogue with you on matters of mutual concern to our great nations.

Putin (in Russian): You have some fucken nerve dictating to me about troop movements considering how many boots you put on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan and they aren't anywhere near your goddamn borders.

Obama's translator (in English): All right. This one time I'll let you ask me about my affairs.

Obama (in English): I'm willing to overlook a lot. Like the death of ---- [name redacted for security reasons]. When he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen; I didn't ask who gave the order, because it had nothing to do with business.

Putin's translator (in Russian): He say: If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.

Putin (in Russian): I don't feel I have to wipe out everybody. Just my enemies.

Obama's translator (in English): That ain't the way I wanted it! I can handle things! I'm smart! Not dumb like everybody says! I'm smart and I want respect!

Obama (in English): We're both part of the same hypocrisy, Mr Putin, but never think it applies to my family.

Putin's translator (in Russian): He says he has been reading Anna Karenina with great admiration.

Putin (in Russian): I'll change...I'll change. I've learned that I have the strength to change.

Obama's translator (n English): He tell anecdote from Gogol's boyhood: Every time he put his line in the water he say a Hail Mary, and every time he say a Hail Mary he catch a fish.

Obama (in English): Tell him I don't like violence. I'm a businessman; blood is a big expense.

Putin's translator (in Russian): He say he no want anything to happen to you while his mother is alive.

Putin (in Russian): I got a business to run. I gotta kick asses sometimes to make it run right. We had a little argument, Freddy and me, so I had to straighten him out.

Obama's translator (in English): There are negotiations being made that are going to answer all of your questions and solve all of your problems. That's all I can tell you right now.

Obama (in English): Tell him he can do me a solid.

Obama's translator (in Russian): President Obama asks his counterpart whether he is ready to use all his powers and all his skills do him the service that he promised.

Putin's translator (in Russian): He don't want his mother to see him that way.

Putin (in Russian): I put a special tape on the trigger and the butt and I left it noisy. That way it scares any pain-in-the-ass innocent bystanders away.

Putin's translator (in English): You got everything you need? The chef cooked for you special, the dancers will kick your tongue out and your credit is good. Draw chips for everyone in the room so they can play on the house.

Obama (in English): You can sign up for Obamacare.

Putin (in Russian): Tell your boss he can ask for anything else, but this is one favour I can't grant him.

Putin's translator (in English): Only if I can keep my own doctor!

-- David Lehman

Edgar Allan Poe endorses Return to the Gold Standard [by David Lehman]

Ed Poe, long a proponent of the Bretton Woods monetary system, has come out in favor of a new gold-exchange standard. Congressman Poe (Republican, Texas) has introduced legislation that would return the nation to a gold standard albeit in drastically revised form.

"For anyone living under a rock, the price of a troy ounce of gold is now officially in bear market territory," said Alice Elgar, who covers the sector for Cantor Fitzgerald. "What Ted Poe is proposing is a kind of bailout package in reverse for investors -- whether in bullion or in gold-mining stocks -- who are twisting in the wind." 

Under Poe’s plan, the dollar would be fixed to gold at a specified price. Say the peg is $1,300. If gold goes over that figure, the Fed sells bonds. Under that figure, the Fed would inject cash into the system by buying bonds. "An effective gold standard can be that simple," says Steve Forbes, the editor of Forbes, who has run for president on a business-friendly platform centered on a flat tax. (See "New, Poe-tent Gold Standard," Forbes, May 27, 2013, p. 15). "The Poe bill's basic operating gold-standard principle and its specifics provide plenty of grist for the mill, which is all to the good," says Forbes, which sounds like a lukewarm endorsement but he really likes the idea.

In his keynote speech at the Gold Bug convention in Jackson Hole in May, Poe said he wanted "to usher the US into a new era of fiscal propriety." He painted a grim picture of current uncertainties. "If you have ever witnessed a financial meltdown, like those afflicting Lehman in 2008 and Detroit this year, you don't need me to tell you how scary it is. I have seen a barely discernible fissure widen so rapidly that my brain reeled. I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder. There was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters, and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of my life." Poe, who writes his own speeches, delivers them without notes.

The gold standard as the anchor of U. S. currency died on August 15, 1971. President Nixon issued the directive. He felt he had little choice. The cost of the Vietnam War and the persistent U. S. trade deficit forced his hand. The dollar could no longer realistically be backed by gold bullion on the basis of $35 per ounce. "The change was announced as a temporary measure but like most such it quickly became permanent," said Cantor Fitzgerald, who oversees the pension plan of the Mosaic Law and Tile Society, the nation's largest non-prophet. Fitzgerald, who quotes Keats and other greats, jokes a lot, and laughs so hard he sometimes seems on the verge of cracking up, usually makes this reporter feel like a sophomore who has wandered into a lecture for upperclassmen majoring in the dismal science. "Henceforth American money would be backed not by a metal but by the good faith of the United States government with the result that the value of the currency has fluctuated with the value of gold."

Little lamented at the time, the gold standard has lived on in the same way that a repressed memory takes uncanny forms in dreams or waking life. In a notorious TV commercial aired only once, Bunter (right) advises Lord Peter Wimsey (left) to get a smart city broker (played by Max Shylock) and allocate ten per cent of his assets to the commodity or to shares in mining concerns. "Even at a three-year low, an ounce of gold is worth more than eight hundred pounds, m'lrd, and you get a free smart phone plus ten thousand frequent flyer points if you play your cards right, close to the chest, what?"  

The metal’s decline in global markets has been attributed to the likelihood of reduced monetary stimulus by central bankers at the same time as you have a slowing of the growth rate in China. "The logic is not unassailable," said Eddie Cantor with a wry smile. "But, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein on roses, it is what it is."

-- David Lehman

Nin Andrews Goes Beyond the Pale

On Tom Clark's always lively and imaginative "Beyond the Pale" blog, Nin Andrews takes center stage today with a splendid poem triggering off an equally splendid chain reaction of smart comments. Take a look! -- DL

Body as land. Body is land. [by Natalie Diaz]

It is most important to know where we have come from. Where I live, from our front doors we look north and see the very mountain at which we were created—bluish and zigzagged with bright white granite and a little lopsided from when the super boy tried to lift it but could not. Out our back doors, we look south and see the jagged purpled peaks, cobalt snake of river, and pale dunes where we will pass when we leave this world. Each day, we walk between these two points of our existence—our life and our death—the possibilities and the limitations of our bodies.

At 'Avi Kwa'ame, the creator stabbed his staff into the ground and water poured out and became our river. We are the mixture of clay and river. We are of the earth. Our land is fed by the river. Our very name, ‘Aha Makav, describes us as the people at the side of the river—the river and the land are how we call ourselves. We cannot be separated from our land or our water any more than we can be separated from our name. Without the river, without the land at its side, we are not who we were created to be. We were not just made up from our land, we are our land.

Our lands and our bodies are connected in a way that creates a specific knowing of each. They cannot be parted. They exist as extensions of the other. The word for earth, land, dirt, is ‘amat. The word for body is ‘iimat. The abbreviations for both are mat-. Mat- is the prefix that begins many Mojave words that describe or are connected to the body and the land. Our language is corporeal, carrying with it both the body and the land.

Mojave land can be brutal. Unless you know it, it can suck the very life from you. There is a heat in this desert that most cannot endure. A hunger and thirst in the very land, animals, and people that can devour a stranger or even a friend. Our bodies have been broken into and scarred again and again by history, just as the land has been. We hold both the beast of this landscape in one fist and the beauty of it in the opposite fist. Through my land, I will show you the miracles of our bodies. And through the body, I will show you the marvels of this land. Wild. Violent. Filling. Emptying. Free. What is in our bodies to be told has come from the land—on the page, I become the creator of both, and I press my pen into them, like a rib. 

This Monday at KGB: Matthew Zapruder + Charlotte Boulay

Matthew Zapruder + Charlotte Boulay

Monday, March 31, 2014

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, including Sun Bear, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2014. His most recent book, Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon, 2010), was selected as one of the year’s top 5 poetry books by Publishers Weekly, as well as the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, and the 2010 Northern California Independent Booksellers Association poetry book of the year. His second collection, The Pajamaist, was chosen by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, he lives in Oakland, where he is an editor at Wave Books and a new member of the Core Faculty at the MFA in creative writing at St. Mary’s College of California.

Charlotte Boulay grew up in the Boston area and attended St. Lawrence University. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she taught writing for five years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. Her first book, Foxes on the Trampoline, will be released spring 2014 by Ecco Press. She lives with her husband in Philadelphia.

 

 

 

 

Remaining Spring 2014 Lineup:

Apr 7    Nate Pritts + Jennifer H. Fortin + Adam Fell       

Apr 14  Scott Hightower + Jeffrey Harrison  

Apr 21  Brian Blanchfield + Christopher Salerno   

Apr 28  Russell Dillon + Roger Reeves  

May 5   Ariana Reines + Laura Sims  

May 12  Mark Bibbins + Lucie Brock-Broido + Season Finale Party   

The Language Transubstantiation of Santa Claus On the Rez [by Natalie Diaz]

I shouldn’t be thinking of Santa Claus in March. But, this picture I took in the desert behind my house was taken in October. Besides, I wanted to write something less heavy about language and words, their power to make a thing more itself, to make one thing another. 

I showed this picture to my Elder, and he said, "Well, I guess no Christmas this year. Santa is dead." Which reminded by of Charles Harper Webb's poem, "The Death of Santa Claus."

For this post, I’m going to share an anecdote about Santa--

The Mojave word for Christmas is Nyevathii ivaak. The missionaries used Christmas day to lure Mojaves to church. They gave them fruit. They each got a piece of candy. Sometimes they even got a present.

Because Santa Claus was just as mysterious a white man as Jesus, the two saviors blurred together in their minds. Jesus was dead, they had been told, and Santa Claus appeared out of nowhere on the same day every year. Both Santa and Jesus seemed to have come from the sky, and they both kept ending up at the church. Hmmm. The conclusion: Santa Claus was the ghost of Jesus. Christmas in Mojave means The Ghost Came, means the ghost of Jesus is here in a red suit, and he’s got candy--he's Santa Jesus.

"The Meaning of It" [by David Lehman]

All poetry is experimental poetry. All experiments are failed experiments. All poetry is personal. You can argue about it all you like, but usually we go on one assumption, not being too worried if the answer we come up with will matter to anyone but ourselves. We get to make sentences. The missing ingredient in each sentence is time. Time surrounds the sentence. For example, the experiment was a success but the chemist died. The quip depended on who was saying it. All confessional poetry is admissible, the lawyer said. The doctor said she was losing her patience. The defense maintained that it is admissible as evidence but not as sex. The jury debated the meaning of it. Philosophers, both amateur and academic, debated the meaning of “it.” The amateur wondered at the vastness of the three questions: where did we come from, what are we doing here, and where is there left to go? The professional philosopher, a serious and taciturn person with an excellent head for logic, defined the terms and arrived at the humbling knowledge that out of the four words that make up the phrase “the meaning of it,” only two made any real sense, and they are “the” and “of,” the uses of which in language as a system can hardly be overlooked. A last-minute confession broke the deadlock and lessened the convicted man’s sentence. The judge threw out the confession, saying confessions are invariably exaggerated. Yet the jury’s foreman held the attention of all when he smiled in the benevolent, avuncular way promoted by Hollywood producers in the hey-day of the studio system. “All exaggerations are true,” he said in the sensible manner that older people had back then even when they spoke arrant nonsense. “On the other hand, the systems are never the same.” This time the speaker was a woman, as intelligent as she was beautiful, intensely aware of her sexual attractiveness to men, unafraid to exploit it even if it led to bourgeois conventions she suspected she was supposed to shun but also, on the whole, loyal to solid feminist practice. She said one sentence only -- "I don't exist" -- and disappeared from my life. “The systems are never the same,” a second woman echoed, this time a cheerful and adventurous person who ran her share of risks but had a fund of good luck to keep her from getting into trouble. “Language as a system is a closed circle," she said. "The ‘studio system’ is a convenient marker for the period in history when the making of Hollywood movies was dominated by such studios as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, Columbia, Twentieth-Century Fox, Warner Brothers."

He was sure of one thing. A glass of club soda with a lime wedge or even better a tall glass of homemade lemonade dominated by ice cubes was all that it would take for the experience that would quench his curiosity once and for all. He had a hunch he would recognize it when it came. And as he walked he thought, and as he thought he talked, and the hours went by like miles in an air-conditioned town-car you rented for the black-tie occasion. All exaggerations are true or have their source in truth.The desire to escape this truth cannot be overstated. Poetry is escapism therefore. But poetry is also evidence of sex. Sex is exaggeration. Confession is to sex as belching is to a fine meal in a friendly home when you are two middle-aged couples who have forgotten their lines but had a fine old time with the guys talking about basketball and lfe and the women doing what two women put in that situation invariably do. It doesn't take a genius to figure it out. You just need to listen, to think, and to be quiet once in a while. No evidence is required.The impulse of the moment was proof enough that their love was real. Sex is not evidence. All evidence is personal. All politics is impersonal. There is something to be said in favor of impersonal sex, where it is rendered as a straightforward cash transaction, but we left that stage on another continent. The brush with the unknown changed us in some way not visible to others and not well understood by ourselves. And so I offer you this y-shaped glass chilled to perfection with only the twist of a lemon peel as adornment and the aroma of juniper in the air. These sentences have I written in lieu of the message you expected you would find. I'm confessin' that I love you. Do you [word or words missing here] love me too?

-- David Lehman (rev. 3 / 20/ 14)

History: The Great American Lullaby [by Natalie Diaz]

Words become words because we need them. I don’t know what they are before that—impulses, energy, trilobites, Hydrogen—who knows. But once they become words, I believe in them, the power and the glory of them. Even the ugly ones—those terrible angels of our mouths—beating like dark wings from our throats—savage, nigger, half-breed, chink, faggot, indian, redskin. We built them—like bombs—with our need to break each other.  

I am drawn to the words that hurt me most—No.—I mean to say: I am not afraid to put into my mouth the words that hurt me again and again. The people who first gave them to me didn’t always tell the truth, so I take them in and spit them back out—the bones of them, the parts nobody wants to talk about now—and I tell them my way because I got tired of choking on them.

History is the name of the greatest American lullaby. When we know the words to it, we feel like better people, church-going people. We feel like we have learned something. Worst of all, we feel like it is over. This is what history really means to most white people: It is over.

It might as well be the title of all the history books in high schools across the nation— 

Teacher: Class open up your It Is Over text to “Chapter 2: We Fucked The Indians Again But Jim Thorpe, So It Is Over.”

Tommy: Didn’t we read that last week.

Teacher: No, Tommy, last week we read “Chapter 1: We Fucked The Indians But That Was A Long Time Ago Which Means It Is Over.” This new chapter has blankets in it, and Hotchkiss.

No, the worst part is that when we memorize the words to History, we get sleepy. Our eyes are lulled close. Just like at the end of “Rock-a-bye-baby” nobody asks what happened to the baby because they’re already asleep.

What is my point? Words carry within them the dark things we have done and the dark things those dark things continue to do. It is important that we know our words better than anybody else.

This is what I tell my students: Every word. And not just that word, also the word it was before. And the word that word was before it became the word you are using. Know those words the way they were when they first meant themselves. The beginning of language must have been something else—each sound like an entire song—a want we wanted so badly that it began like a lightning spark in our minds and rushed downhill to the lamp wicks of our tongues where it lit into a word. Fire, someone said for the first time in the universe, and for the first time in the existence of the ear, someone heard, Fire—how it must have burned.

So if every word is Promethean, why shouldn’t I rivet them all to the rock and tear them open?

What a gift: to know every word a word has ever meant.

What a wound: to know every word a word has ever meant—

Our word for policeman translates to the people who rope you, and our word for jail is the place you are roped. It’s the same word we use to describe roping cattle.

The US government used to rope Mojave children, sat on horseback and lassoed them like animals. They put them in the back of wagons or made them walk behind their horse all the way to the boarding school, leaving their mothers wringing the hems of their dresses in grief. My Elder teacher told me this: Grandma used to say that after they rounded up Momma and the other kids and took them away, all the dogs ran in circles in front of the houses and ran up and down the river banks crying and crying because they wanted their kids back. Those poor dogs cried and cried and cried. They went mad with crying. Today, when we talk about the law, the police, the justice system, we are talking about those men on horses who roped our children and took them away. We hear the crying. It is not over. It is happening again and again in those words.

School, or huchqol hapoove, means the place they put and keep children. And they did—they took Mojave children, their best shot at crushing us. And once there—nyayuu hapoove is our word for closet—my great grandmother was given a switching and locked in a closet for the day when she was caught speaking Mojave.

Language is nothing if not violent—No.—Language is silent when it is not violent.

Our word for metal is ‘anya kwa’oor, which means it has a golden light. Metal came to us first in a prophecy, which translated roughly goes something like this: It will come across the ocean and land here. It has no head, no arms, no legs. It is oval-shaped. It will move through us up our shorelines. The metal that was prophesied was not the metal of pots or pans or rakes—it was a bullet. Anytime we speak of metal, we are speaking of the way it first came to us—sometimes by going through us the way bullets have always done.

So when I say know your words, I mean the ones that have shaped your mouth and your page. Look at them, listen to the things they have endured, the things they have done. Even if they are one part memory, they are also another part living. Maybe what I have been trying to say is that when you walk into the room of your poem and hear History playing in the background, you find that poem, you look that poem in the eye and say, Wake your ass up.

Blast from Ze Past: What I was thinking about in 1990. . .[by David Lehman]

Derridadaism [1]

"Philosophy?  
Cela suffit!" [2]
Said the man
Named de Man. [3]
J. Hillis Miller:
J. Phyllis Diller. [4]

1. Geoffrey Hartman's term in Saving the Text. An alternative spelling, Derrida(da)ism, subversively reveals the Russian yes within the demotic term for father.

2. The Saussurean difference between Kant and cant is blurred, deferred, and reinscribed in a Derridean display of differance.

3. A neglected trope, the paradigmatic palindrome deconstructs itself into a reversed binary opposition that terminates in an undecidable aporia, as when a pedestrian gets stuck in a revolving door (de Man's image).

4. Miller on deconstruction: "It suggests the image of a child taking apart his father's watch, reducing it back to useless parts, beyond any reconstitution." Diller on phallogocentrism: "It recalls the printer's error that closed up the space between the second and third words of the sentence the pen is mightier than the sword."

-- David Lehman [Times Literary Supplement, 1990]

So You Think You Know English Literature [by David Lehman]

(1) When Shakespeare wrote about “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” he was referring to
(a) the indomitable will of the British people
(b) the lamentable condition of churches in the south of England
(c) Autumn
(d) his old age and impending death
(e) trees

(2) One of Milton’s sonnets concludes, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” The subject of the sonnet is
(a) the wait staff in London’s legendarily overpriced restaurants
(b) the attendants at the Last Supper
(c) the mob cheering the beheading of King Charles
(d) blindness, his
(e) death, his wife’s

(3) “The soul selects her own society” and the lines that follow were written by
(a) a man
(b) a woman
(c)  the child (e.g., “the child is father to the man”)
(d) Tennyson
(e) Magna Carta

(4) According to T. S. Eliot, which of the months is “cruelest”?
(a)  November
(b) "A drear-nighted December"
(c) “All seasons are cruel to the craftsman who would do a good job.”
(d) “Midwinter spring”
(e) Free verse

(5) Match the novel and the character:
Pride and Prejudice                   Isabel Archer
Crime and Punishment              Hiawatha
War and Peace                          Venus
The Power and the Glory           Beyonce
The Naked and the Dead           Queequeeg

Tune in tomorrow for yesterday's answers and more of the same! -- DL

In All Ways An American Poet: David Lehman's "New and Selected Poems" at The New School [by Nora Brooks]

A volume of collected work is an opportunity to reflect on the trajectory of a poet’s life and career, and David Lehman’s essential new book, New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), reveals threads of both American and European sensibilities, an array of influences. On the one hand, there’s a way in which Lehman’s work is quintessentially American. At David Lehman’s appearance at the New School poetry forum last Wednesday, moderator Laura Cronk commented that Lehman is “in all ways an American poet,” one who writes truly American love poems such as the effervescent “When a Woman Loves a Man,” which we had the pleasure of hearing him read.  The title echoes the song “When a Man Loves a Woman”—just one instance of how popular American music often weaves its way into his work.  A couple of examples that come to mind from the collection is a recent poem “Sixteen Tons” and a poem from 2002, “Radio” which references a song played by jazz pianist Teddy Wilson.  

Another thing that strikes me as particularly American is the current of humor running through his work. Standing at the podium in a natty ‘40s style suit, hair brushed back neatly, Lehman had the audience laughing out loud all through his reading of “One Size Fits All: A Critical Essay,” a comment on the form of the critical essay made entirely through a careful sequence of transition words, and “Rejection Slip,” in which the speaker praises the benefits he is reaping from the pain of rejection, with no small jolt of comedy injected into the verse.
Cronk also commented on the trope of “intelligence work” that threads through the volume, joking that perhaps Lehman really was passing in his identity “as one of our foremost critical writers; as American poetry’s most important anthologist and most generous champion; as a beloved teacher; and most importantly as one of our very finest poets.” The poem that most directly references this trope is a section of “Yeshiva Boys” subtitled “Intelligence” in which Lehman writes: “I had a very good cover as a fellowship student/ in comparative literature at Cambridge, and few guessed/ the true nature of my employment…,” though there is in a sense in many of the poems, as in much of 1990’s Operation Memory, of Lehman stepping outside of American culture in order to view it from a different angle. There is a certain melding of European and American perspectives.  As Cronk put it, “David Lehman is an American in every best sense, an 'Escape Artist' able to step outside of an American sensibility to reenter it more fully.”  Lehman added to this notion of the escape artist that John Ashbery had once remarked that “we need all the escapism we can get”—that perhaps we need to retreat from the consciousness of certain ills into the contemplation of certain ideals and beauty.

Like Ashbery, Lehman spent a considerable period in Europe as a young man. The three poems Lehman began with were in fact translations, one from Henri Michaux: “In the Queen’s Chambers.”  Lehman discovered this poem when, as a grad student at Cambridge,he was also spending a lot of time in Paris.  Michaux was for Lehman a “happy-go-lucky Kafka.”  A translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone” was first finished in 1978, resided in a  desk drawer, was revised and revised, and finally come back to life. It was published in The Virginia Quarterly Review last year, which then awarded Lehman the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry.  Apollinaire was a big influence on Frank O’Hara, who in turn was a major influence for Lehman.Lehman commented that: “it took chutzpah to associate myself with such greatness.” Finally, a translation of Goethe’s “Nightsong” was rooted in a childhood memory for Lehman: “my father used to recite this with a strange gleam in his eye.”  His father had had to learn these and other poems of Goethe and Schiller as a boy in Germany.

In the end, this inclusiveness and generosity of vision may be the most American impulse a poet could have. Lehman’s work spans the Atlantic, but even that is still not the full extent of his reach. Lehman’s incredible range of methods and music is also on view in this collection, and this includes his two books of daily poems, The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun, a practice Lehman kept up for five years and heartily recommends.  And as he told us from the podium, in all the many forms and structures and material to be found within this collection, “it does seem to me that the same person wrote all these poems.” In other words, there is a remarkable unity of vision in this volume from “the most alive of all living poets,” as Cronk remarked.

As maybe is fitting for a retrospective bringing together over seven volumes of work, Lehman ended the evening with the poignant frisson of these lines from “The Story of My Life:” 

And so, now that I have it, what do I do with the happiness of this moment?
I, who never took a writing workshop but have taught many,
think of how I would handle the assignment for next week’s class.
I write about a boy, not me but like me, in green tennis shirt
and khaki shorts, a blue baseball cap and well-worn brown moccasins,
and the boy want nothing more than to sit in the sun
but always arrives too late: the diagonal line dividing the yard
into equal areas of sun and shade
vanishes as soon as he gets there.
That’s all. I write it in the third person, call it “Story of My Life.”

-- Nora Brooks

If What I Mean Is Hummingbird, If What I Mean Is Fall Into My Mouth [by Natalie Diaz]

In Mojave, the words we use to describe our emotions are literally dragged through our hearts before we speak them—they begin with the prefix wa-, a shortened form of iiwa, our word for heart and chest. So we will never lightly ask, How are you? Instead, we ask very directly about your heart. We have one way to say that our hearts are good, and as you might imagine if you’ve ever read a history book or lived in this world, we have many ways to say our hearts are hurting.

The government came to us first in the form of the Cavalry, then the military fort (which is why we are called Fort Mojave), and finally the boarding school. The government didn’t simply “teach” us English in those boarding schools—they systematically and methodically took our Mojave language. They took all the words we had. They even took our names. Especially, they took our words for the ways we love—in silencing us, they silenced the ways we told each other about our hearts. 

One result of this: generations of English-speaking natives have never heard I love you from their parents, which in their eyes, meant their parents didn’t love them. However, those parents never said, I love you, because it didn’t mean anything to them—it was an English word for English people. There is no equivalent to it in the Mojave language—the words we have to express our feelings, to show the things berserking in our chests for one another are much too strong to be contained by the English word love. 

But after boarding schools and work programs sent them to the cities for work, our children stopped speaking Mojave—they were beaten if they were caught talking or singing in their language. Maybe when they came home their parents spoke to them all about their hearts, but if they did, the children didn’t understand anymore. 

It is true, the Mojave language does not say, I love you—and it is equally true that the government was hoping we would quit expressing this toward one another, that we would never again give each other tenderness. While we don’t say, I love you, we say so much more. We have ways to say that our heart is blooming, bursting, exploding, flashing, words to say that we will hold a person and never let them go, that we will be stingy with them, that we will never share them, that they are our actual heart. And even these are mere translations, as close as I can get in English. 

Despite Cavalries and boarding schools, our language is still beautiful and passionate—it carries in it the ways we love and touch each other. In Mojave, to say, Kiss me, is to say fall into my mouth. If I say, They are kissing, I am also saying, They have fallen into each other’s mouths. 

The word for hummingbird is nyen nyen, and it doesn’t mean bird—it is a description of what a hummingbird does, moving into and out of and into the flower. This is also our word for sex. Mat ‘anyenm translated to English means the body as a hummingbird, or to make a hummingbird of the body. On a very basic level we have a word that means body sex hummingbird all at once.

 

I think of the many lame things people say when they want to have sex with someone--imagine how much more luck they would have if they came to you with that lightning look in their eyes and that glisten in their mouths and said just one word: hummingbird. And you would think: bloom, sweet, wings that rotate, heart beating at 1,260 beats per minute, flower, largest proportioned brain in the bird kingdom, syrup,iridescent, nectar, tongue shaped like a “w”—which means something close to yes.

Recently, an adult learner who is teaching her children the language in her home asked our Elders if they could teach her to tell her son that she loves him. They told her that we have no word for that. But, the learner insisted, I need to know because I never heard my parents say that to me, and I will not let my son grow up without hearing me tell him that I love him. The Elders asked her, What is it you really want to tell him? The learner was emotional at this point, her words had caught in her throat. Instead of speaking, she made a gesture with her arms of pulling someone closer to her, and then she closed her eyes and hugged her arms against her chest. Ohhh, one of the Elders exclaimed, Now, we have a word for that—wakavar. 

Maybe there is no great lesson to be learned here, but when I sit down to write a poem, I carry all of this language with me onto the page--I try to figure out what I really mean, what the words really mean to me. I don’t ever want to say, love, if what I mean is wakavar, if what I mean is hummingbird, if what I mean is fall into my mouth. 

Losing Farther, Losing Faster: Reading Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" While Trying to Save My Native Language [by Natalie Diaz]

 

At Fort Mojave, the reservation where I grew up and recently moved back to, I am not a poet—my work is in language revitalization. There are only three living Elder speakers of our Mojave language. My Elders and I work together—against history, against memory, and especially against silence—to document and record our language, to teach it to others, to make it live again.

Where does Elizabeth Bishop fit into this picture? Well, I carry her with me. She and I share at least one thing in common, our loss. And as she has said and re-said: The art of losing isn’t hard to master. This line is a small prayer that I push through my mouth’s machinery daily.

I come from a life shaped by winning—in my first season as a Lady Monarch basketball player at Old Dominion University, I won 34 games and only lost 2. When I played overseas, I received bonuses for winning games. But in this new chapter of my life, the work I do with my Elders to save our Mojave language has tested the values that made me one of the best athletes in the nation. Language revitalization is, in a sense, the art of losing. The fate of our language exists in the tongues of the three Elders who still speak it and in the hands of those of us working to preserve it. It was a hard lesson for me to learn and one that kept me from sleeping for almost two years: no matter how many hours I worked, no matter how hard I tried, I would not be able to save all of my language. I would lose some of it, a lot of it. There are words that once existed that I will never hear, that my Elders have forgotten. One of the saddest moments is when my Elder teacher cannot answer a question, when he looks at me and says, You are asking me because you don’t know the answer, but I also don’t know the answer, and there is nobody left for me to ask. When I began this work, I did not know that I had taken on a job of loss. In order not to be crushed by it, I have had to embrace it, to learn to exist within it and be successful at it, as successful as anyone can be at losing.

While Bishop and I have loss in common—don’t we all?—her loss and my loss are different—aren’t everyones’? For example, in the poem, Bishop loses a watch: I lost my mother’s watch. If I translated Bishop’s line into Mojave, I would say: Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym.

But our word ’anya means more than one thing—and since Mojaves never had watches, it only recently means “watch.” So while Bishop can be overcome by the singular loss of her mother’s watch, an object that means and means to her, that carried away memory and emotion and love with it—the loss for my language and people is even more devastating and vast than hers. What I mean is, in the Mojave language, the line Intay nyanya ‘achinaalym can also mean each of these things:           

        I lost my mother’s hour.

        I lost my mother’s sun.

        I lost my mother's light.

        I lost my mother’s day.

        I lost my mother’s time.

Or maybe Bishop and I have lost exactly the same thing—equally vast—we have lost our mothers, we have lost our pasts, the part of our lives when suns and days and time were not measurements of pains or failures. But whereas Bishop might have been stopped by her loss, I must keep going.

Loss doesn’t mean to me what it once did. What I cannot do doesn’t stop me anymore—it now shapes what I can do and helps me to appreciate what I do have. I choose not to stare into the void of loss, but instead I step inside it, stick my fingers into it, put my ear to it, try to find as many words for it as I can. This is no different from the way I build my poems. I don’t run from the disaster of what history has done to my people and our language, I chase it down. Sure, I will lose some things, I lose something—a thousand things—every day, but I know that I can be both farther and faster, and what I will gather and succeed at in my losing is ultimately what I can save of my language.

“Vanishing Languages,” a National Geographic article, opens with this fact: One language dies every 14 days. So, two weeks from now, there will be one less language spoken and heard on this planet. At Fort Mojave, we have decided that it will not be our Mojave language. 

Soon after earning my MFA, I was lucky enough to meet the poet Ted Kooser at a writing festival in Idyllwild, California, and we began exchanging small notes and postcards in the mail. Most often, we talked about my desert and his barn, the slow back roads we both drove, maybe about the owl that hooted through his night, and if so, then surely about what owls mean to my people. Most of his post cards were his own illustrations. On the back of one that hangs in my office, he wrote: It might be that the work you are doing for your tribe will be far more important that any poem you will write. Of course, he is right.  

Learn more about our Mojave language revitalization--click here to watch this PBS special on Fort Mojave language recovery efforts.

A Fistful of Quarters [by Charles Coe]

Last week at work I got this email from someone who lives on my block:

Hi neighbors,

Just to let you know both our cars were rifled through last night. Neither was locked and I don't see any damage but the glove compartments were searched through and loose change taken …I've called the police to report it. I guess we'll start locking our cars now.

I sent a sympathetic reply, resisting the impulse to add, “ARE YOU SERIOUS? YOU HAVEN’T BEEN LOCKING YOUR CARS?” That would have been rubbing salt in the wounds.

We live on a one-block dead end with six houses, a twenty-minute walk from Harvard Square. With thirteen years in the ‘hood I’m a newbie; there are two couples in their seventies whose almost middle-aged children were born and raised here. I rent the first floor of a house, with my landlords on the second floor. Between our house and the one next door is a brick patio we call “Red Square” (this is the People’s Republic of Cambridge), where we have potluck cook-outs every Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day. I’m usually the grill man.

All of which is to say that it’s a close-knit little street—as bucolic as you get in the city—but it’s not Mayberry or Pleasantville. Nonetheless there are enough people in this part of town who leave their cars unlocked that someone’s decided it’s worth their time to skulk around at oh-dark-hundred trying doors. 

I don't understand people who leave their cars unlocked. I always lock mine wherever I go. When I visit the country I sometimes get kidded for being a paranoid city boy. But my friends are welcome to their fun; be just my luck to leave my car unlocked the night some bear decided he needed a new GPS.

So now my neighbors lock their cars. For a while they’ll probably feel mad and sad when they do, but sooner or later that’ll fade and it’ll become automatic. Just one of the countless adjustments we make because we realize not everyone’s honest and kind. No big deal, really.

But for them, the world that’s our little street will never be quite the same. And though they might have been a little naïve I’m sorry for what they’ve lost—something a bit more than a fistful of quarters.

 

 

 

Charles Coe is author of two books of poetry:  “All Sins Forgiven: Poems for my Parents” and “Picnic on the Moon,” both published by Leapfrog Press. His poetry has appeared in a number of literary reviews and anthologies, including Poesis, The Mom Egg, Solstice Literary Review, and Urban Nature. A novella, Spin Cycles, will be published by Gemma Media in September, 2014. He is the winner of a fellowship in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Charles’s poems have been set by a number of composers, including Beth Denisch, Julia Carey and Robert Moran. A short film based on his poem “Fortress” is currently in production by filmmaker Roberto Mighty. Charles is co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union, a labor union for freelance writers. He has been selected by the Associates of the Boston Public Library as a “Boston Literary Light for 2014.”

 

Contemporary Canadian Poetry by Eduardo C. Corral

This week I'm featuring the work of Sina Queyras.

Elegy for the Letter Q as It Appears in The Waves

No question, it was the quality of the quadrangles quailed with queues (in quads) that no queen – queer or not – would have sufficient qualities to (quarter or no) quarrel her way through. Though quarrelling might be thought common, a quest among quirky and quizzical quartets, it was actually quite uncommon. Quietly she quivered in a quicksilver quarto of quoits. She was quickest, at least quicker, and she quarrelled, quenched and in quotations, finally, quizzically, quit.

Like a Jet

Little streams passed all over their bodies.
– Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

1
A hole in the sky where softness hung,
A crater where the world was, a moment
The size of Manhattan: amazed
We are not all sliding in.

I skirt abjection, drag my nails against
The hours. My eyes for one more glimpse,
Ochre (August, the rough tear of cotton,
The lace and wire, a harness of

Clinging). There is no shrugging off
Weight, no exit ramp, no ease or release,
Perpetual shoulders on orange alert, jaw
Scraping the floor, the body contorts,

The body is fluid: I am leaking,
I no longer care who sees me leak.

2
I held her briefly at the end because finally
She could not scowl me away. Felt her unlatch,
A small mass, rocketing like helium, body
Already a swelling replicate of self.

I could see no verve, no afterburn, no spirit
Lingering, just my empty reaching out:
How the dead can cower on the wing of
A plane or, like a missile, shoot out of sight.

Muffled drum of heart, my lungs, aging boxers
Swelling in a crow storm, hungry as Buck
Mulligan for her words, I chew them now,
Hollow seed pods catching on my tongue,

Those whiskers of good intention: sad
Eliot’s jet, as if hoarding, gorging, on pain.

3
Every last vein crammed with absence. Hers
Yours, ours, I must return to the now.
Two Incompatible screens, the pixelated grief,
The polyurethane grief, stuffed, animated,

Shrunken sweaters aping across an abandoned
Gym, Sexton’s arms outstretched, smoky
Scotch a glass clinking across the honeyed floor.
I await your return and, with it, futures

Uncorking. Hold tight, spray of time, we don’t
Race to death, it comes at us; there is no safety fence.
Once you drop, you walk into the forest as though
You owned it, you turn, wave, inhale black of day,

Exhale sight. Inhale death, exhale life, Ozymandias:
Everything that lives is light and she is now dark.

4
Time, they say, time, and with it healing but also
Recrimination and upset, my tumourette an airbag
Behind my eyes, blind me, my lack of patience:
Why is my exuberance rewarded? Hers snuffed?

Siblings crumble slow, unremarkable
As fences across the prairie. Who set the bar
So low? Who has tagged her foot? Mine?
Those red lines traced across a chest,

A lung split open: hard pebbles of light
Pelt your ease. Those high-wire walkers vibrating
In the pain know something of loss’s
Hammer, a persistent drum kit open under

The eave where pincers crack
A fly skull.

5
She is everywhere, the widening screen,
A surge in the weather, pages blooming,
Lines with animal movements, useless stalking.
I stare into the soup, trying to ignite some memory

Of eating. Sweet rain where Raven, carrying summer
Storms, stomps the air: a bull, head ready to draw
The sky closed. The more death we know the closer
We are, and yes, the onward path, packed with guilt

And smart knots where pleasures show. I go to
August with her horses, to the clover path under
The power lines. There is no traceable reaction to
The arbutus’s shedding while all else blooms, we

Upswing and trill, tunnel our emotions. No more death
Please: bite hard, I want to feel the future coming.

6
I felt something snap just now. It wasn’t you parting
Your body – it’s months after that, as if all this time
Grief has been spinning our heels and now we slow, steady,
Let it nestle into a fold with the lost coins and lint.

Where you were, the sawed-off limbs of a birch, a scorch
Of concrete, a hemline, shoulders wedged, socks like muffins
Oozing out of jeans, fashion is also exhausted, and who
Cares about whims, please save me from abstraction.

Who will sort the apples? Leonard. Leonard will sort the
Apples. Frederick will drive the car. Jack will feel for you.
Describing is owning. Give me a woman with a lens
In her hand. Give me a woman with a will to read.

Give a woman a lost woman, an open vista, a stack of vellum,
Give me Time, give me swagger, give me your ears.

7
All the gods know is destinations. I have raised
A glass, my eye, your hook. Let’s face it, the world
Is a shrinking place and hungry: too much grief
To feed. I float away from you on hard

Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. Words
If they were soil, I would throw them back into the
Compost pile and wait for spring. Those ‘this is how
It is’ speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets.

I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.
Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so often
Hindsight. Outside Holly Golightly’s townhouse
There are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern.

Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.
It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp.

Elegy for Agnes Martin (click on pic to enlarge)

<

(Poems from MxT by Sina Queyras, copyright 2014 by Coach House Books)

Q&A

Nick Comilla: In works such as Expressway, you explore the various ways that increasing communication and connections in a globalized world both brings us together and separates us. I'm wondering what you think of this phenomenon regarding Canadian identity and poetry. Having lived in both the US and Canada, to what extent do you think national identities (and national poetics) are something we adopt and pick up along the way versus something innate and unchanging - both in terms of identity but also the impact that has on poetry? To what extent does the Expressway cross international borders - both literally and figuratively - and what does that mean for Canadian poetry in contrast to American poetry?

Sina Queyras: Thanks for the question, Nick. At one point I thought about using the highway from Toronto to New York as a way to foster discussions around mobility, nationality, global relations and climate change. I moved to the United States a year before 9/11 and stayed another six after. My time there was really guided by a sense of despair over the disconnect not only of our daily lives, but our lives as poets, the vast difference between our lived and writing lives. I say this because I thought that this was tied to identity, and that Canadians were somehow more connected, but I am not so sure that is true anymore. There are real differences, such as access to health care, more relationship to wild perhaps--but on either side of the border we struggle to be as truthful to ourselves and to our readers as we can handle being. We also struggle to have a kind of elegant writerly life and be real in the world and in the poetry. This is increasingly difficult to achieve anywhere in the world.

Bios

Born on a military base turned ghost town in Rome, NY, Nick Comilla currently lives in NYC. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Poetry is Dead, Lambda Literary and HOMO Magazine. He is a poetry/fiction MFA student at The New School where he is currently working on his first book project, Ghosts of Montreal.

Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award–winning Lemon Hound, Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound.