The Best American Poetry

A Poem Is a Place I Go (Lea Graham)

Now look around your tiny room/ and tell me you haven't got the power.

From Paul Farley's The Dark Film                                                                                                              

The places and circumstances of certain poem readings have stayed with me through the years.  The first time I encountered William Carlos Williams’ plums and icebox, I was sitting on the floor of the old (now replaced) Fayetteville High School hallway near my locker (pure fifteen year old angst!).  I remember Dickinson’s “If you were coming in the fall/ I’d pass the summer by” in Miss Eddy’s tenth grade English class.  I will always associate the New York School (O’Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Barbara Guest and James Schuyler) with the 1970s architecture of the University of Illinois-Chicago because that’s where I was introduced.  On Martha’s Vineyard one January, in a borrowed trailer-turned-apartment of a photographer friend, the disembodied voice of the Canadian writer, Robert Kroetsch, is called up for me along with his Snowbird Poems.  Another Canadian, rob mclennan, whose book, Paper Hotel, companioned me one summer when I bartended at the Hotel  Vernon in Worcester, Massachusetts.  From Providence to Chicago, I sat on a plane memorizing from Garcia Lorca’s Cante Jondo.  I’m convinced that if you’re in this business of poems, the experience of firsts or those moments of deep reading stay with you like any other significant relationship.  You remember where you met them and what they wore and the wood smoke in the air just off of Taylor Street that October.

 

This week I’ve mostly been writing and asking questions about the geographic nature of place and the names that evoke them.  As I’ve been thinking about this, I’ve been trying to connect or subsume my relationship with these geographies to poetry.  My favorite poems call up places, but not necessarily geographic ones.  I’ve been trying to figure out just what it is that feels like a poetic place to retreat or return, to indulge in, to argue and turn away from the tiresome self, to dance and sing and drink boxed wine, to meditate and live within what seems like the last privacy. 

            

A few books that I go to as places familiar:  Robert Kroetsch’s The Sad Phoenician with ditches of space between its poly-syndetons and lines of retractions, plays on cliché, threads of stories and the tortured humor of the writing self and of writing itself:

 

but      I keep my trap shut, I was dealt a tough mitt

and     any port in the storm they say: the dreamer, himself:

            lurching, leaping, flying; o to be mere gerund; no past,

            no future,: What do you do in life: I ing (15)

 

Or Thomas McGrath’s Letter to an Imaginary Friend that embraces the American landscape and history and rolls it back to us—from west to east—like a very smart, intricate rug that you can dance on:

 

I took them with me, though I went alone

Into the Christmas dark of the woods and down

The whistling slope of the coulee, past the Indian graves

Alive and flickering with the gopher light (5).

 

Or Gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems with its “Kitchenette Building” as a place to consider what is necessary to dream, what is essential to create art and the political reality of that creation:

 

            But could a dream send up through onion fumes

            Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes

            And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,

            Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms (3)

 

Or Jennifer L. Knox’s poem “Crawling Out of the Mouth of More” in The Mystery of the Secret Driveway, where I go to laugh and laugh at our excess:

 

            Have you ever seen that website with ER X-rays

of weird stuff people have unfortunately tried to

insert in their butts?  Lightbulbs, pepper grinders,

Mrs. Butterworth’s bottles, hammers, high-heeled shoes,

Ken dolls, umbrellas, unexploded WWII artillery shells….

My favorite: the man who’d poured wet concrete

in his anus and waited for it to harden before his lover

drove him to the hospital.  I took a sculpture class

in college:  Concrete grows startlingly hot just before

it hardens, like a bad idea before your own strange

hand shoves you in it whirling blades (70).

 

Ann Killough’s book, Beloved Idea, is a book that I return to in order to consider metaphor as a way of thinking. The poems are politically charged and in a nuanced way, lament the nation’s imagination.  They seem essential in this current political geography.  They are also funny and beautifully reaching.

 

In the poem “[(The) Horsemen],” she uses allusions and the space of the page to move her central metaphor along, exploring the nation’s love of “the end metastasis of the imaginary of the / end” (25).  The place of the poem allows for white space and feels like a room in which you would go to think:

 

            they come galloping out of the Good Book like metaphors gone

            completely amok

 

            the faces of the horses are immaterial, the motive of the riders is

            immaterial

 

            what happens is the people’s desire for them (25)

 

It’s this space that Killough uses to turn the poem from one allusion to another that still allows our own thoughts even as she travels and seems to lightly trip from one allusion to the next: the four horsemen of the apocalypse to Faulkner’s Light in August, The Wizard of Oz, The Godfather and finally, my beloved Everly Brothers:

 

            through which from the study window he watches the so hidden

            sign which he calls his operational destitution monument the nation rushes

            toward the site where were last seen [(the) horsemen]

 

            and falls into a deep sleep

 

            there’s no place like home

 

            in the formal and topological  sense however she has hope

 

            and thus like the godfather at the end of her poem beheads the horses

 

            one by one and leaves them in the bed of her nation wake up screaming

 

            my darlings wake up little Susie (26)

 

What I go to in this poem (again and again) is the tension between the space it provides to think and dream, to get angry and to reminisce, to study and to sing in contrast to its allusive travel.  It’s a poem in which I get to stay at home among the ferns and comfortable sofa and get dressed up to go to town all at once. 

 

***

 

It has been lovely being with you all this week.  Thank you for reading!

Warm regards,

 

Lea Graham, Poughkeepsie, NY

The Rivers Between Us: A Conversation Beginning in the Hudson River Valley with Claire Hero (Lea Graham)

The writer, Claire Hero, and I are neighbors here in the Mid-Hudson River Valley.  I live in Poughkeepsie and she, across the river, in Esopus.  We are also both transplants to the area.  We thought it would be interesting to begin a conversation about our sense of the river valley and see where it took us.  We were curious to find out how or if it had influence in our current writings.  You’ll find New York’s Hudson here, but our talk moves out to New Zealand, Northwest Arkansas, Minnesota, Chicago and Worcester, Massachusetts. We hope you’ll enjoy the ranging and exploratory nature of our talk as much as we did.

 

Claire Hero is the author of the chapbook, Dollyland (Tarpaulin Sky); Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press) and two other chapbooks: afterpastures (Caketrain) and Cabinet (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome and elsewhere.

 

***

 

LG:  I have been thinking a lot about how much I love the Hudson—and the trains that come with it and how it ties me to my home geography on the Arkansas, but how so often I feel daunted by all that the Hudson River brings--the historical significance of it (the Half Moon, the Hudson River School of Painters, etc.) and the enormity of its geographical properties (the estuary itself and the canyons that exist within it).  Sometimes the information bundles that come with the river and this valley sort of stun me in my writing.  

 

Btw, I like the notion of the frozen river between us!  We are neighbors, for sure, but the river as some kind of division or organizing line is interesting.  I always love how people say to me:  "Oh...you really need to move to this side of the river."  What they mean is the political left-ness of the communities to the west of the river, but they use "this side of the river" as a metaphor to talk about it.

 

How does this particular geography affect you?

 

CH:  Stuns, yes. The Hudson River Valley reminds me so much of New Zealand. In part this is due to the silencing factor of the landscape. What is there to say about the sublime?  

But I also like the Hudson Valley, I think, because it has always been a shipping lane. A thoroughfare. The means of exploration. It's like a poetic line.

 

LG:  Yes, the sublime....  I think in some ways for me, the Hudson River Valley reminds me of a grander version of the Arkansas River Valley, partly where I grew up and where my paternal side of the family is from (originally, store owners and cotton farmers in the bottoms). We just didn't have that sense of grandeur.  I mean Arkansas is, after all, considered--or at least for me in my childhood—part of the raffish edges of America!  So in so many ways, it is easier to see it without the grandeur of early U.S. history and the connection to the ocean (hence, Europe) getting in the way.  One of the things that I learned years after I had left home which helped me to reverse this notion of my home place as "backwards" was to read that there were so many accessible rivers that crossed and connected in the state of Arkansas that there wasn't an immediate need for roads.  You could get anywhere more or less in the state on the waterways.  Roads have always been a sign of progress, a measure of how successful or progressive a community is and its desire to connect with the outside and exceed the parochial.  It was a kind of relief and delight to read that the delay in road building was at least in part because of the river roadways that naturally existed.

 

CH:  Rivers as roads.  The Hudson River has frozen this year, two feet thick in some places, but the shipping lanes continue.  Things - information - passes through the Hudson Valley.  We are a thoroughfare.  We are a destination and a means through.  We can stand on the Walkway and watch the river move through and some of us cross over and some of us jump.

 

In New Zealand I was intimidated by the landscape.  It was too sublime.  Either you call out your name and hear only echoes of your own mutilated voice, or you pass through areas so empty, so unfinished, that you realize your car could tip over the edge and no one would find you.  In New Zealand I had to focus on the animals, which were entirely prosaic: sheep, millions of them, bleating each spring into silence.

 

But in New York, everything is wild.  It bears the oldest marks of white colonization of any place I have ever lived; stone walls, like rivers, like arteries, pass information through the broken forests.  Yet it doesn't feel entirely settled yet.  Coyotes howl through the nights.  There are whispers of bears.   New York doesn't have billboards, not really, no signs to clutter up the view.  The landscape feels almost languageless, in a way, as though anything could be scrawled across it, yet it is so wild, so lush, that you know that any mark you made would be, within the month, eaten by weed or water.

 

LG:  Languageless.  I completely agree.  But here's the dissonance for me:  It looks wild, lush and all, but the knowledge of how long people have been here--and particularly, the Europeans--makes me feel like anything I think about this river, this valley has already been thought, already been written about, discovered, or rendered into art.  I especially think about the painters—Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School.  Cole was thinking seriously about this place, its water and sky, or as he referred to it, “the soul of all scenery,” about 200 years ago.  While his concerns were mostly different than mine, I still find it daunting to think about the length of time people have been here and thinking hard on this place.

 

CH:  "Already been written about, discovered."  - To say that is to say we live in a fixed place, but the thing about places is that they are never fixed.  They bleed through boundaries.  Seeds, animals, humans: everything moves through, leaves traces, makes changes.  I'm thinking about the problem of this dissonance in two ways: palimpsest and translation.

 

Place names, stone walls, brass plaques: these are palimpsests.  I can see traces of the world that was here before, but somehow, I can't really touch it.  A mile and a half from my house is the church where Sojourner Truth's owners went each Sunday.  It's a museum now.  Inside, an older woman in a floral hooded sweatshirt will show you cases with wampum and bone fish hooks, moonshine bottles and an egg beater, the remnants of a sleigh factory destroyed in 1901.  None of these things help me understand where I have landed, yet somehow they congregate into an image.  A sentence.  A vocabulary for Esopus.  And there are other palimpsests: the bones of animals on the shoulders of the road, the wasp globes in the trees that winter reveals, the remains of someone's picnic washed up on the river bank.  In a poem like "reviving Coyote" I was trying to address such palimpsests: the coyote roadkilled at the end of my street growing through elements taken from women's Indian Captivity narratives.

 

 

reviving Coyote

 

Coyote slinks out of the road & into my hands. Out of my hands & into my mouth. With my teeth she bites the bark in two that binds her. With my tongue she licks the placenta off the words. Coyote steals out of my mouth & into my hair. Out of my hair & into my skin.  In my skin she drags the forest floor, looking for the bodies. In my skin she hacks back the dark. (& who are those masked that ring round the wood?—) Coyote sneaks out of my skin & into my lungs. Into my nose. With my nose the earth is clean as paper.  Coyote scrawls herself across it, crawls into my hands. With my hands she rends the voles in two. With my hands she opens a door. Inside I am waiting. Inside I offer her a kind of apple, some Indian cake, a bed of hides, & didn't we bed down, Coyote & I, in this shabby cave while the hunters searched for us in the vast boscage of the body? Didn't we couple in our fear? Coyote runs over my snowy terrain, marking my skin with her claws. How do I tell you that my body is the road upon which Coyote dies? How do I rear what births from my mouth?

  

CH:  Then there's translation. Recently I've been interested in bacteria, specifically in invasion and translation. Bacteria exchange DNA with members of their own and other species in three ways, but the most interesting to me is translation, whereby a bacteria cell can absorb naked DNA left by a dead cell and add it directly to its own. This leads to change, to adaptation. The “evolutionary butterfly effect,” as explained by the Italian biologist Telmo Pievani, is “the uncontrollable propagations of nonadaptive effects beginning from a functional modification.” Or, as Emily Dickinson would put it, “Infection in the sentence breeds.”

 

I am an invasive species. Anything I wish to say about the Hudson Valley has to pass through a mouth that has opened in many places. These places change my language, my hearing, my sense of how to name the world and what the world includes. I carry place in my accent, my mouth which refuses to give up the Minnesota O even after years away, and in my vocabulary, which swaps and absorbs new names for old things. To be transient is to be always translating, it seems, so there are gaps, but there is also that possibility of infection, of a new organ arising from a new combination. This is what I was getting at in a poem like “[Dredge up].”

 

 

DREDGE up

the earthwords,

hook them

onto your tongue –

 

*

 

these castings:

            the breakdown

of organic

matter

 

terraundeforming

 

*

 

& the slow

articulation

 

joint to joint

 

tongue to

whatever emerges

 

with various organs &.

 

 

 

LG:  The palimpsest and translation, yes.  As you talked about the church turned museum and all of the traces (moonshine bottles, egg beater, etc.) that are left from the turn of the century, I began to think of the various ways I’ve experienced that in all of the places I’ve lived.  Growing up for a time with my maternal grandparents on a large and working farm outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas, there were all kinds of traces of what had been there before.  One of the enduring images in my work is a toolbox stowed in the bathroom that was full of arrowheads, fishhooks, grinding stones, and Civil War cannon balls.  Each morning I would go into the bathroom and consider the mystery of that box containing the objects discovered from plowing.  These physical objects in this particular place connected with my learning Arkansas history:  my grandparents’ farm wasn’t so far off The Trail of Tears.  A few years ago, while visiting my father, who lives in the Arkansas River Valley area, I went to look at the gallows where Judge Parker, the “hanging judge,” presided.  I discovered not only that the names of those killed at the gallows were largely indigenous names, but that nearby was a bend in the river where you could have seen the tribes floating by on their forced relocation to Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears happened in more ways than one.

 

When I moved to urban places, I found these remnants in different ways.  In Chicago, there are the storefronts and cornices that are left over from businesses long gone that you notice for their elegance and/or out of place-ness within the surroundings.  For about a year or so I worked at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum as a docent. The house is located on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and was a pretty stark difference against the surrounding architecture.  To be sitting in this house that helped birth the Settlement House movement and early social work, but that was adjacent to the 1970s architecture of the campus, felt like a secret, in some ways.  I had a sense of that neighborhood before the university had arrived.  There was a quiet and solemnity among the 19^th century furniture and art that created an energy against Halsted’s traffic bustle, co-eds and Greektown up the street.  Teaching at the university when I was a grad student was a similar experience (though different sense of time) since we were teaching in classrooms with bolted down desks and these long, thin bullet-proof windows.  The university had been built around the time of the Chicago Riots and that history was built into its very rooms.  One of my early teaching tactics around analysis was to ask students why they thought their seats were bolted to the floor. 

 

When I moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived for eight years, I noticed the palimpsestic nature in the names of places.  When you talked to a Worcester native about Rizutti’s Goodnight Café burning down, he or she might say, “Oh, you mean what used to be Old Billy’s Lounge.”  There was even a certain pride among people who could name what the place had been called several businesses earlier.  And as you said, I wasn’t quite sure that it helped me understand where I was, but it did accumulate as image and tone of the place.  

 

I think you’re exactly right about translating.  The mouth that has opened in other places.  While the Mid-Hudson River Valley may seem overwhelming at times, I, too, think that I translate the place out of my various accumulations and sensibilities that come from elsewhere.  You with your Minnesota O, me with my love of double modals and slower, circuitous talking and walking.

 

CH: I envy you your toolbox of mystery!  My grandmother’s house was similar.  She was a hoarder, part of the generation that went through the Depression.  Everything, from button to jar, had value and a multiplicity of possibilities.  Like words, they accrued and offered.  They were for picking over and dreaming through.

 

You know, Lea, it’s funny that we’re both from river towns.  I grew up in a river town in southern Minnesota, and I have been wondering lately if living beside the river made me restless.  Is this why we are both so transient?  Oceans are grand but annihilating, and lakes are stable but stagnant, but a river is somehow always new.  It is passage and possibility.  It endures and erases and alters.  Often as a prelude to writing I go for a walk, and here in Esopus it means down the hill, past the overgrown orchard where the deer linger, to watch the Hudson.  And even better, the Hudson is tidal!  It moves both ways.  Like a poem,

Proper Names: Against the World’s Welter, Mystery Containers (Lea Graham)

 

In Billings, Montana my grandfather—a handsome young guy from Fayetteville, Arkansas—worked as a baker in a basement with a window that looked out onto a main street.  This was the Great Depression.  From there, each morning, he could see the legs of passersby, and from there he picked out the legs of my grandmother on her way to nurses’ training.  The story goes on to include her jilted fiancé, a whistle or catcall (not quite sure which), the strategic pink bathing suit tossed over her shoulder as she walked down that same street and a decision to wed that took about 24 hours.   I love this story for the specific place and perspective which tells me about these people, my family before they were my family.  Billings, Montana helps me call into place a place I’ve never been.  It helps me, in the words of Yi-Fu Tuan, “render the invisible, visible, …impart a certain character to things” (qtd. in Cresswell 98).  Our grandparents and parents—all of those people who came before us—are, in part, a mystery.  They knew the world before us.  They were, at least, slightly different people before we came along.  The fixture of proper names helps make visible that world we never knew.

 

In his essay, “The Reach of Place/To Reach in Place/Places Reaching,” the poet, Michael Anania, tells us:

 

Places, those areas of collective perception we have names for (home, the playground, Omaha, Chicago, Texas, The West) are conventions through which we offer a kind of stability to the world’s welter, even though our experience of places is, as much as anything, about change.  “You know, when I was a kid, the city ended here, and that,” you gesture toward an expense of highways, shopping malls and office buildings, “was cornfields.”  And the names that hold these conventions together are as certain and arbitrary as myth and as essential, though they are in general, but especially in America, the record of one or another kind of political, economic or cultural ascendency.  To the winner goes the naming.

While Billings was named after the president of the Pacific Northwest Railroad, Frederick H. Billings, the English name is rooted in the word “sword.” Given the history of westward expansion and the indigenous peoples of the area, the name is indicative of “the winner.”  To complicate things and reveal our American complexity, Montana is derived from the Spanish montaña, mountain.  Names: The Crow Nation, Benjamin F. Harding, Pompey’s Pillar, Beartooth Highway, Montaña del Norte.

Proper names work like mailboxes, according to the philosopher, Saul Kripke.  You may have visited Billings, Montana and so what you know of it—its restaurants, the light in the evening, the fact you lost your wallet there, its geographic expanse— all gets sent to the name.  Now that I’ve told you the story of my grandparents’ courtship and of the etymology of its names, you have other associations that all add to what you already know.  The name becomes, as Anania says, “a kind of stability to the world’s welter.”

Susan Briante’s Utopia Minus (Ahsata, 2011) provides such stability in her naming without dispensing with mystery.  When I first encountered the book, I was on a reading tour with another poet.  We drove hours from Oklahoma City to Tulsa to Fayetteville, Arkansas to Kansas City to Fulton, Missouri and back to Tulsa.  We read poems out loud.  We listened to Jay-Z’s Black Album.  We talked about our formation as writers.  We laughed at the various bumper stickers (Save the Ta-Ta’s) and the Moorish architecture of the Cheesecake Factory. We talked about Paris and Spain and our growing up years.  Reading Utopia Minus on this particular trip felt both comforting and estranging: Another mind in its reading and attentions and thinking on the daily occurrences.  A mind clearly engaged with, but also in awe of the world.  The poems didn’t seem to keep much—if anything—out of them.

In “Notes from the Last Great Civil War Story,” she begins in the note taking of the day’s events and reading, but as the stanza moves, it turns towards a slightly eerie temporal meditation:

 

            Our dog licks my teacup;

            late dog

            days of summer, I study

            new urbanism, racial

            uprisings, cultural memory,

            patterns of glassworks

            n some foreign field of sand,

            “high mortality events.”

            Death makes such a blunt box

            such a 24 hour news channel,

            video of a cypress tree

            which refuses to grow

            while a window

            around the screen

            goes from dark to light,

            day to night (11).

 

This reflection on the passage of time presents us with a kind of desolation.  While death keeps technologically rolling or being portrayed 24 hours, the window provides a natural world passage of time through its light and absence of light.  This opening stanza presents the backdrop for the “great story” we’re about to hear in which General Joseph Johnston “removes his hat as the corteges passes” at General Sherman’s funeral—his old adversary—

 

“saying Sherman/ would have done no less./ Johnston dies of pneumonia/ 2 weeks later” (11).

 

While the first part of the poem is the speaker moving among the banalities of the day, her studies, the observations of reports of death within the temporal life and death, it’s the ending that reveals the naming that exceeds stability:

 

            Woke this morning in Dallas

            with Bentonville, NC

            written on my palm (12).

           

It is the ending with the place names of Dallas and Bentonville, NC that provide us with two different energies—one, stability and the other, mystery.  Dallas, in this case, is a place where the actual life occurs.  The light in the window around the screen goes from dark to light. Dallas is that waking place, the living—with all of its properties.  Bentonville, NC, on the other hand, works both as a place name, but also, as an allusion and one that arrives with ghostly properties.  It works as both the name penned to the palm and forgotten about until morning, and as the site of a battle between Sherman and Johnston, the old adversaries, who came to terms after the war.  Sherman’s death inadvertently leading to Johnston’s death.

Like my own Billings, Montana, these two place names—Dallas, Bentonville, NC— serve to stabilize what the speaker knows (and remind as to what she’s been reading/thinking about), but also to unveil mystery.  Place names contain the unknown as much as what’s known, what’s stable.

           

 

Lydia Davis: in The New Yorker. And elsewhere [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

 Perhaps Lydia Davis is best known as a prose writer,
most recently of very short stories. But her work has 
also appeared in BAP anthologies,

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

 

 

 

Lydia's new book of stories 
is called Can't and Won't.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There's also a profile of Lydia
in this week's New Yorker magazine.
The link is below.

 

 

 

 

One little problem (maybe.) 

To read the New Yorker online
you have to be a subscriber.

So if you're not a subscriber, 
you can subscribe. Or if you're
not a subscriber, and you don't want
to subscribe, there's a link to another
article about Lydia. 

Maybe a better one. Or maybe not.
But about Lydia. And free.

 

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_goodyear

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/5c1059dc-a0ea-11df-badd-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2viITWHey

Among the Post-Holes and Potsherds and Grave Goods: An Interview with John Glenday (Lea Graham)

I first met John Glenday in person while walking a portion of the Great Glen Way from Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit, Scotland in 2012.  We had only a single mutual friend and poetry in common as way of introduction.   After walking the fourteen miles along the gorse-studded trail, above the Loch Ness, I arrived to the Glenday household where John and his wife, Erika, had already prepared a sign that captured their lovely and playful hospitality: Quiet--American Poet Sleeping.  What followed were several days of lively and thoughtful conversation about poetry, place and our political landscapes. One of the many things that intrigued me in our conversation was the different sense of inhabiting land.  I have long thought about the way in which particular geography and language intersect.  John Glenday, as you will see, thinks seriously about this intersection without allowing it to limit his poetic range.

John Glenday was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1952.  He is the author of three books of poems, the most recent, Grain (Picador, 2009) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His second collection, Undark, was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His first book, The Apple Ghost, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1989.  He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990-91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.  He lives with his lovely wife, Erika, and their children in Drumnadrochit in the Scottish Highlands.

***

LG:  To begin with a rather wide-ranging question: What kind of connection do you see between place and poetry?  Could you talk a bit about the link between your home geography and language?  Has the knowledge of your family residing in the same area for over 800 years had any impact on your writing?

JG: Poetry holds on to a place in the same way a plant does – it takes nourishment from the land it was rooted in – what else can keep a poem alive? But when I talk about place, it is irrespective of time. So for me the poem is also an archaeological examination – it digs down among the post-holes and potsherds and grave goods for evidence of how life was once lived. What else is poetry about? The fact that my name has been associated with the Scottish county of Angus for generations and generations accentuates this for me. It tells me that whatever I write casts a long shadow. But I am not territorial in my writing, so I’ve happily adopted Scottish Islands, mythology, non-existent places. They’re all grist to the mill. One of my earliest poems ‘The Apple Ghost’ is a simple description of a house in Nairn, Scotland, as I saw it at the time. The narrative of the poem was inherent in that house. All I needed to do was write it down.

***

The Apple Ghost

A musty smell of dampness filled the room

Where wrinkled green and yellow apples lay

On folded pages from an August newspaper.

She said:

‘My husband brought them in, you understand,

Only a week or two before he died.

He never had much truck with waste, and

I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

He passed away so soon…’

 

I understood then how the wonky kitchen door,

And the old Austin, settling upon its

Softened tyres in the wooden shed,

Were paying homage to the absence of his quiet hands.

 

In the late afternoon, I opened

Shallow cupboards where the sunlight leaned on

Shelf over shelf of apples, weightless with decay.

Beneath them, sheets of faded wallpaper

Showed ponies, prancing through a summer field.

This must have been the only daughter’s room

Before she left for good.

 

I did not sleep well.

 

The old woman told me over breakfast

How the boards were sprung in that upper hall;

But I knew I had heard his footsteps in the night,

As he dragged his wasted body to the attic room

Where the angles of the roof slide through the walls,

And the fruit lay blighted by his helpless gaze.

I knew besides, that, had I crossed to the window

On the rug of moonlight,

I would have seen him down in the frosted garden,

Trying to hang the fruit back on the tree.

                                    From The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989)

 

***

LG: You’ve talked to me about place as being connected to person and certainly, many of your poems seem to address a person or sentient being even as the poems are rooted largely in some kind of place.  Give us a sense of your own—and maybe the European—nexus of place and person.  Perhaps, you could also talk about names?  Given that Scotland is a country associated with clan names and places like Loch Ness (which you live near), do you think there is a special sheen in names and naming in your own work or that of other Scottish poets?

JG: I’m not sure, Lea. Names are such slippery things – remember what Paul Valery said: ‘to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.’ Names can come between us and the world, they can delude us into categorizing instead of appreciating. But they also change me, I believe, from an innocent bystander into a material witness. They do this by forcing me to look in an analytical way rather than simply to see.  It is essential, as an artist of any kind, to look in a penetrating manner at the world; to question it by observing it. Most names cast long shadows too – Mine comes from a small glen in Angus which in Gaelic means ‘the Glen of the fast flowing water’. So I can trek up into the hills and look down on my surname. I do this in the poem ‘Glendye’ of course. There’s not much there now – sheep fanks, heather and gorse, a thread of water. I like to imagine they are in me too. I also have the same name as my father, which I viewed as a blessing, and then a curse, and then a blessing.

***

Glen Dye

by that flinch in the Water of Dye

where its wersh soul swithers

through the Bog of Luchray

and on towards the Dee,

there runs a certain gentleness

of ragged stonework in an old sheep fank,

where a flush of broom pushes out;

and if you happened to lie in its doubtful lee,

come early spring, you might just hear

the wind clambering through, fluting

a note or two from a threadbare melody,

for nothing but its own sake.

                                     --From Grain (Picador, 2009)

)

***

LG:  In your book, Undark, you have a series of poems about the U.S. Civil War.  Could you talk about the genesis of these poems.  I believe they come out of photographs?  Talk about the process of writing about place and subjects that aren’t “your own” and yet, are so much your own.  “Artillery Horses Under Fire” seems a poem that you are intimately connected with or at least, you’ve rendered it as such. 

JG: All the Civil War poems are shamelessly appropriated from Shelby Foote’s brilliant book, or form Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days’. I’m not worried by this. After all, you can usually tell from the title what a poem is not about.  All the detail of the world – the terrible events, the pointless waste of lives, the bravery and self-sacrifice are all just ways in which the world is telling us how we work. The world is always doing that. The poet’s duty is to appropriate fact and fiction for the benefit of poetry. So in the poem you mention, it was the way the artillery horses would stand firm in harness while they were being shot that troubled me; and then I remembered how Union soldiers, advancing into gunfire over open ground, would turn up their collars and hunch their shoulders, as if they were advancing through rain, rather than lead. It is this tiny detail of the world that tells us a little of the big workings of things. If we can focus on detail and describe that, we can say more about the horror than any mere accumulation of statistics can do. So, in summary, these are not poems that try to be ‘American’, they are poems trying to talk about people, and how they live. The world will carry on giving us the clues – remember what happened to the glass negatives taken by Brady and others during the Civil War? Remember this, along with the Crimea, was the first war documented in photography. Those glass plates were sold to nurserymen after the war – the people were sick of images of the killing, they had no stomach for them. Can you imagine greenhouses glazed with the inverted images of the dead? What is that saying to us about us?

***

4. Artillery Horses Under Fire

That slap the minie balls make when they strike

sickens the heart.  Sounds just like pebbles

smacking into mud.

 

Mostly they fall straight off, then struggle

up again, shivering and stiff, but strangely

quiet till the next round comes.

 

Some simply twitch their flanks or slash

their tails across the wound , staring ahead.

You’d think it was a blowfly at them,

 

nothing more.  I remember at Cold Harbor we watched

as the last from a team of six stood firm

in harness with five bullets in her side.

 

She toppled only when the sixth ball sheared

through bone.  Not one was spooked, nor ran;

but then, the living were left limbered

 

to the dead.  We could hear the rebels cheer

as horse after horse dropped through its traces,

kicking the caisson sides.

 

They hardly make no sound—that’s what I hate.

Die as they must, God damn them.

I don’t know.  Some beasts act more like men.

                                --From “Whitman's War" in Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995)

Starred Review in Library Journal of Alan Ziegler's "Short" Goes Long

 From the March 1 issue of Library Journal:

Starred Review on MARCH 1, 2014 of Short: 

Arts and Humanities Ziegler (creative writing, director, pedagogy & teacher training, Columbia Univ.; The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes) has edited a blend of writing that, owing to its brevity, allows readings to blur from one piece to another, as the genre of "short" literature is built upon fuzzy definitions. The collection features authors from many languages, though predominantly from countries defined as Western. However, work from writers as diverse in style as the American Lynn Emmanuel's rumination, "April 18, the 21st Century," where she engages in a niche epistolary discussion both with and about French poet Charles Baudelaire; German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin's aphoristic comments on uncertainty in "Chinese Curios"; Jorge Luis Borges's self-objectifying "Borges and I"; and Stacey Harwood's playful "Contributor's Notes." Ziegler has not simply collected writings from many nations, he has also anthologized work from five centuries. At 300 plus pages, the book obscures this meaningful fact and nudges the collection from the genre of anthology to reference. In addition, Ziegler includes a complete bibliography of the pieces themselves as well as a short bio of each author. VERDICT The variation and brief nature of these writings are perfect for the busy reader, while the blurry genre types are good for those interested in experimental writing.—Jesse A. Lambertson, Metamedia Management, LLC,

 

On Tuesday, April 8, 2014 at 6:30 Alan Ziegler will read from and talk about Short  – including examples of prose poems and brief fictions from a variety of cultures. David Lehman will moderate. More information here.

-- sdh

Name your favorite NYC-inspired poem for the Library Hotel

The Library Hotel is looking for a poem to grace its lovely poetry garden. The poem will be beautifully printed on a large canvas and given pride of place in one of the hotel's public spaces. But which poem? Tweet the title of your favorite NYC-inspired poem to @libraryhotel @bestampo @tspoetry.

-- sdh

The Icebox, the 5 SPOT, Dead Possums on the Good Road: Places & Poems We Know (& Still Don’t Know) [by Lea Graham]

 
I’m writing this from a Polish-American restaurant on 1st Avenue and 12th in Manhattan. Someone is singing in the kitchen. I overhear other diners ordering borscht, two eggs over easy, coffee black and “is the cabbage hot?” This place is called “Neptune.” The beer is named “Warka.” While this isn’t my neighborhood, nor is NYC the place where I live, I feel completely at home here—a place comprised of so many other places. Perhaps because I’ve lived as a transplant so much of my adult life or because my first great love of poetry was the work of William Carlos Williams, place and writing poems has always been interconnected for me. For the past nine months, I have been curating a series with poets writing about “place.” What do they consider their places? How do they define place for themselves? Many of the poets have written about their current or early homes (the Delta, the Antelope Valley, Wyoming, Omaha, Memphis, Southern Illinois, Upstate New York, Southside of Chicago). Some have written on places they have lived (New Zealand, the Pacific Northwest) or places they return to (mountains, bridges). A few have said that place, as specific geography, doesn’t matter much to their craft—that the essential is the imagination and that place, in the words of Claire Hero, is “just a body to dream inside.” All of their essays have and continue to provoke my own thinking on the connection between place and poetry. What is it about places—and this American place—that preoccupies me and so many other poets? What is it about place that connects to poetry and the writing of poetry? Poets and places: Charles Wright’s back yard, Thomas McGrath’s “2714 Marsh Street [where he is] writing, rolling east with the earth, drifting toward Scorpio, thinking;” Charles Olson’s Gloucester, Emily Dickinson’s liminal spaces, Frank Stanford’s Arkansas, Carolyn Forche’s El Salvador, David Jones’s WWI battlefields, Frank O’Hara’s lunchtime NYC, W. C. Williams’s Paterson and all, Dennis Cooley’s Saskatchewan, Michael Anania’s Omaha and Chicago, Jack Gilbert’s Greece and Pittsburgh, John Matthias’s Camino de Santiago Compostela, Susan Briante’s Dallas suburbs, Joshua Harmon’s Poughkeepsie, Michael Robbins’s pop culture and literary allusive landscapes, Mary Biddinger’s Catholic Midwest, Anne Killough’s national metaphors, Jennifer L. Knox’s badass California. These are just a few of the poets and their places that began my interest and with whom I consider in my own poetic rovings. This week we will be thinking about names and their relationship to place and how individual poems function as places themselves—the line, the stanza, the allusive travel. There will be conversations with the Scottish poet, John Glenday, who will talk on the connection to his home geography, names and his sense of America and American poetry; and with the poet, Claire Hero, whose ideas of place are “animal.” Thank you for joining me in what I hope will be a solidly thoughtful and wandering week of poems and place. --Lea Graham, Poughkeepsie, NY

NBCC Poetry Finalist Denise Duhamel in Conversation with New School MFA Student Nora Brooks

The National Book Critics Circle awards reading and ceremony is this week and we're thrilled that Denise Duhamel's Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press) is among the finalists for an award in poetry. Denise was the guest editor for this year's Best American Poetry and we have admired her poetry for a long time. This year,The School of Writing at The New School enlisted students to interview finalists for the NBCC blog.  Here's an exerpt from Nora Brook's conversation with Denise:

NB: I was really taken with your phrasing “narrative postconfessional transgressive poetry” in your poem on finding new love, which comes after a divorce.  What was involved for you in making art from such personal material?

DD: A lot of deep breaths, and a lot of letting go.  I used Frank O'Hara as a starting point, a place from which I could build the frame and the anaphora.  O'Hara could write about joy like no other. He knew when to jump up and down, but also when to hold back. In his poem “Having a Coke with You,” he writes about the "the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary," implying the couple's privacy is treasured beyond the public display of the love poem.

NB: The title of that poem, “Having A Diet Coke with You,” is a nod to the Frank O’Hara poem of a similar title.  Do you see this book as being in the lineage of the New York School?

DD: Indeed.  I am a lover of the poets of the New York School, its first and also second generations (especially Anne Waldman and Joe Brainard.)  But Frank O'Hara was not locked only into the New York School. He also had many Beat poet friends and made a poetry film The Last Clean Shirt with Alfred Leslie, who also made the film Pull My Daisy, narrated by Jack Kerouac.  Like many other contemporary poets, I see my work as not belonging to just one school.  I am also influenced by the more earnest poems Sharon Olds and Dorianne Laux. Read the complete interview and find out more about the NBCC awards here.

Buy Blowout from Indiebound.

Tonight at KGB: Joseph Millar + Dorianne Laux

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Joseph Millar + Dorianne Laux

Monday, March 10, 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

 

Joseph Millar grew up in western Pennsylvania and was educated at Penn State and the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an MA in poetry writing. He worked as a commercial fisherman and telephone repairman for more than 20 years, and his accessible narrative poems often take working life as a means of engaging themes of class, family, and romantic love. Millar is the author of several poetry collections, including Blue Rust (2011), Fortune (2007), and Overtime (2001), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center, and Oregon Literary Arts. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program The Writer’s Almanac, and won a Pushcart Prize. Millar, who has taught at Pacific University, the University of Oregon, and Oregon State University, lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux. 

 

Dorianne Laux's most recent books of poems are The Book of Men (2011), winner of the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon (2007), recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award, andSmoke. She is the recipient of two "Best American Poetry" Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and The Best of the Net. In 2001, she was invited by late poet laureate Stanley Kunitz to read at the Library of Congress. Recent poems appear in The American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, and Tin House. She and her husband, poet Joseph Millar, moved to Raleigh in 2008 where she teaches poetry and directs the MFA program at North Carolina State University. 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

(c) Nin Andrews

The Beauty of Misunderstanding ( by Charles Coe )

Like most poets, I obsess about finding the word that says exactly what I’m trying to say; close enough isn’t good enough. I might take all day deciding between “outraged” and “indignant,” then change my mind the next morning.

It irritates me when someone calls his boss a “Nazi” because she wants him to show up to work on time. And I’m sure the toilet bowl cleaner in that TV commercial cleans toilets just swell. But “revolutionary?” Yet as nutty as I can be about word choices, there’s one area where I not only tolerate, but often enjoy hearing a word that’s not exactly “right”: when I’m listening to young people talk.

An adolescent boy once walked up to me at a potluck dinner and asked, “Did you make the spinach salad?” When I pled guilty he gave me a big grin. “It was really awesome,” he said.

The finger-wagging fusspot in me was miffed. “Awesome?” he huffed. “That word should be reserved for the Pyramids and Niagra Falls. Or to describe the sound of a dozen jet fighters screaming by a hundred feet over your head. These young people…harummmph....”

Yeah yeah yeah…all true. But it was nice to see a kid excited about a salad. And my salad, which I have to admit was delicious: baby spinach, wild mushrooms, garlic croutons, roasted beets, thin-sliced red onions, and a world-class blue cheese dressing.

Language mutates and evolves whether we like it or not, and all attempts to keep it preserved in amber are doomed. Just look at the comical efforts of L'Académie française—the guardians of the French language—to suppress “Franglish.” (“le week-end”…”je suis tired”). They might as well stand in the middle of a storm, collecting rain in teacups and throwing it back up to the clouds. 

Many of the shifts in language come from young people, in the form of slang, or when they use words like “awesome” or “diva” in ways that—for better or worse—become part of common usage. And sometimes when they make “mistakes” I think they’re actually improving on the originals. Like the preschooler who once told me, with great seriousness, that her grandfather has “Old Timer’s Disease.” Or the adolescent boy waiting behind me to cross at the light, complaining to his friend about a teacher:

“So he said he didn’t like what we were doing and he was going to ‘nip it in the butt.’”

“Actually, that’s not what he said.”

“What do you mean?  Dude, I was there.”

“Nope. What he said was ‘nip it in the bud.’ When you don’t want a flower to grow, you pinch the top off. The bud. You nip it in the bud, not the ‘butt.’

(Long pause) “Oh…”

Björk, the Icelandic pop singer, was once asked if she’d rather her countrymen write song lyrics in their native language instead of sometimes not-quite perfect English. She much preferred the latter.

“We misunderstand English so beautifully,” she said…

 

 

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. He is author of the novella, "Spin Cycles," to be published by Gemma Media in Fall of 2014. 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.”

Lea Graham Guest Author March 11-15

This week we welcome Lea Graham as our guest author. Lea is the author of the poetry book, Hough & Helix & Where & Here & You, You, You (No Tell Books, 2011). Her poems, translations and reviews have been published in Notre Dame Review, Southern Humanities Review and Fifth Wednesday. She is a contributing editor for Atticus Review’s feature, “Boo’s Hollow,” which showcases poets writing on place. She is an Associate Professor of English at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Welcome, Lea.

In other news . . .

Beginning Monday, March 11, Charles Coe will post on the second and fourth Mondays of the month. You can find his earlier posts here. 

-- sdh

"Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man" Back in Print

 
David Lehman's Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man is now available at Amazon as a Chu Hartley Publishers e-book. Writing in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani calls the book, "superb" and "fascinating": "It stands as a lucid and fiercely intelligent study of the disturbing implications of deconstruction, and at the same time, as an impassioned argument for a more humane study of literature."

 -- sdh

Contemporary Canadian Poetry by Eduardo C. Corral

This week I'm featuring the work of Nyla Matuk.

Don Draper

Moths feather your far gazebo
like young sailors on first leave.
You know something, and keep reminding me

of my own needs. You see an audience
of blooming heads and sugared bank notes,
and act accordingly. The swallows see it at five o’clock,

a Wolfman’s tragedy.
They hang themselves upside down,
handsome sienna prizes in the semaphore of bats.

Swayed by a summer night, I swing out
to your silk pocket square standing at attention,
a bird about-face. You’re the dark dew on the green grass of home.

Wishful Thinking

Nice, France

The busses will take you as far as the source of the Nile,
or to mad beautiful Marseillaises. It costs almost nothing

to get to perfume country, if jasmine, cigarettes and sinisterism
are what you’re after. Ships, geraniums, and old money

decorate the slumped logic of night, and it wastes no time
wrapping its rocky switchbacks around your slipped mind.

Melancholy fades, and you take out your navy jacket for our stroll
into splendour. What’s this town missing? Is it the taste of caviar

in my mouth, or is it the grass of youth? The casbah near the bus station
is a dream on repeat, and that might be

the best answer I’ll get. How desire becomes a hiving forest.
On the empty boardwalk, I must consider

this crime ring, this symposium of marriages,
evenings of middle-aged sentiment, and a faraway sigh

that realizes it has too much money. Why have we come south?
Feel the wind ballooning. It longs to bring on a gorgeous shudder.

One sunny day after another, Augusts come off the ocean
and shorten our lives. Winter with me here.

To An Ideal

I noticed you first, your birth a paranormal float on that sintered
causeway of white light. As a gift moves us to tears, so your

amatory pleas re-amortized all our uses for Moreau & Mastroianni
in La Notte, along Rome’s hospital road, the grace of her hardened outbacks

swayed by illuminations of buxom blondes on ceramic piazzas.
Do I take this man as a full bouquet? I do.

Bus stations when they mattered—when they épatait la bourgeoisie...
rounded the corners of each Viewmaster slide.

They called me the hyacinth girl, an allusive-historical
moment propice that fairly educated T. S. Eliot on Henry James.

Then James was labeled pale porpoise by Vladimir Nabokov.
Quick to judge; aesthetically judgmental. In truth, like a hyacinth,

a limp handkerchief, a little goodbye. Whomsoever has reason to object.
Juror, face the accused. Accused, face the juror. There’s that star moment,

the delicate cliffhanger when an Olympian gymnast’s taped feet come into focus
on TV, and it is the cliché, it is the still point of the turning of the world,

from which an analogical chain forms in our minds: torrential rain
to missed balance beam; Ayer’s Rock, resting as some junked furnace of the gods,

to a motherboard which, from Central Command on the Deity’s planet,
was sent the final last regulatory body for this mortal coil.

In front of the daily glow of your magic lantern, how do you adopt the
depressive position? How can such flickerings bring on suspicion, harvest

your light from perspective studies by Flemish masters? I can’t
know this, because there are some things that remain terrible, sublime,

agglutinous, in the gulf between what I notice and what I should want.
I look back in wonder. I’m always in recovery over such things.

Maybe curatorial velocity is realized with the help
of a lever-operated Scopitone, a one-armed bandit peep show.

Sunshine, so much of it, leaving a purple sheen.
Cinema of a fairy world, chimera of woods.

Cedar- and pine-framed memories of childhood.
The soft relief of those conifers across the lake, long and late.

My melancholias were prequels to my mortsafes.
Armed with the new logic, Paul de Man played the ingénue,

a Swiss Army knife of delusion and semblance. He depended on the kindness of
strangers. They fell away, and he became that awful unheimlich: himself.

Get this: Titan arum, the world’s largest flower, bloomed. A lime green
phallus, shot from the centre of an undulated, cabbage-purple cup of shrubbery.

If Longinus had a vagina. The long story of the vagina.
Pope says science can unite humans with God (Huffington Post).

The long and vagina of it.
Science says Pope can unite God with humans.

(Poems reprinted by permission of the author)

Q&A

Annik Adey-Babinski: The poems in Sumptuary Laws are brimming with rich language that leaves the reader almost breathless from their frenetic energy. Sound, from assonance to alliteration to the novelties of uncommon words, is rather pronounced in your writing. I am wondering about the role of breath in your work, and how the “exciting” language you’ve used in these poems affects the speed and energy of your poetry when read aloud. When composing, how conscious are you of the manipulation of your reader’s breath?

Nyla Matuk: Thank you for your interesting question. The phrasing and sound effects such as assonance and alliteration give some of my poems a certain breathless atmosphere. Poems such as “Petit-mort,” “Don Draper” or “Aquarium” require a kind of pause / speed combination when read. That tempo relationship, which becomes more obvious if the poems are read aloud, maintains the energy or excitement you perceived.

The sense, or meaning, is sometimes gleaned from the sound of poems like these ones, with their alternating pauses and speediness of word flow. In “Petit-mort,” syllabically similar words like “dream,” “breath,” “death” “dress,” “rave,” “rêve” and “red” and also slant rhymes like “ornamental dilemmas” culminate in the sense or meaning, which in this case, is the stoat’s “final stand” referring to a last gasp before a “small death” (in French, a petit mort, meaning orgasm).

So the speediness of the words put together, as the poem gallops toward its ending, also conveys, using sound, the particularity of the sense. I was especially conscious of the reader’s breath when composing this poem because it demanded constant sub-vocalizing as I wrote, to ensure that the order of the words worked for the sense to manifest accurately. In other poems, I am less conscious of the reader’s breath, and more conscious of the way words might sound if they are set side by side, or as an enjambment down to a new line.

Not all of my poems emphasize the energy of sound, but it’s a recurrent preoccupation in my writing and I have already composed a few new poems in this manner, since the publication of Sumptuary Laws.

Bios

Annik Adey-Babinski grew up in Ottawa, Canada, and studies in Miami at Florida International University. You can find her writing in recent issues of Salamander, Hobart, and Transom Journals.

Nyla Matuk’s first full-length collection, Sumptuary Laws, appeared in 2012 with Montreal’s Véhicule Press. A chapbook, Oneiric, appeared in 2009 with Frog Hollow Press of Victoria, B.C. Her poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming in, Maisonneuve, The Walrus, Literary Review of Canada, Hazlitt, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012, Poetry is Dead, The Fiddlehead, and PN Review among others. She was a finalist for the 2012 Walrus Poetry Prize and Sumptuary Laws was shortlisted for the League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for a first book of poetry. She lives in Toronto.

Uh Oh: Small Investors Pile In [by David Lehman]

If there are two sure-fire warning signs for the stock market, they are

(1) the re-entry of the retail investor, the little guys and gals whose fingers and toes were so badly burned in the 2008-09 market meltdown, and

(2) the search for "alternative income plays," such as emerging market junk bonds.

According to our man in the Street that begins with a river and ends in a cemetery, the first of these warning signs is upon us in a big way, with Mr and Mrs Main Street shifting their 50-50 stock-bond portfolios into "all in" common stock mutual funds.

Does that mean we have reached a market top? "Not necessarily," said my source (who wishes to remain unnamed). "Momentum counts for a lot, and it is as unwise to buck the main market trends as it is to fight the Fed. By sheer momentum, the rising tide will continue to lift all the boats through 2014."

But then what? "Steer clear of overvalued equities, as judged by balooning p/e ratios. That means you should resist the temptation to buy Tesla or Twitter or even Netflix. They are hot for a reason, but their current valuations factor in best-case scenarios for future growth. When somehting happens to prick the bubble, and that something could be anything from a foreign crisis to a natural disaster, the stocks to hold are the ones that are bound to recover their luster at some point. In this category are blue chips on the order of American Express, Boeing, Chevron, Disney, DuPont, JPMorgan, Lilly, Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Schlumberger. (This does not count as a recommendation list, merely an example of a diversified portfolio.) If you are employed and have a retirement plan, do not veer from your program -- you will enjoy the benefits of dollar-cost averaging and as a long-term investor you may make a bear market's depressed prices work for you."

Any tips? Our man in the street smiles. "When undecided between odd and even, I tend to go for the odd. Read Barron's, invest for the long term, and trust in god." -- DL

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in conversation with Frank Giampietro and Phil Metres of Cleveland State University Poetry Center

 

NA: Tell me about Cleveland State University Press. What distinguishes it from other presses?

FG (above, right): Well, our name—for one thing. We are Cleveland State University Poetry Center, not Cleveland State University Press. Of course this is a small thing, but it's important to me because it helps me remember that our mission should not only be to discover and publish the highest quality contemporary poetry being written today, but also to be the "center" for poetry in northeast Ohio.

That is, our mission, as I see it, should give equal importance and resources to the following three pursuits: 1. We must discover and publish the best contemporary poetry through our two yearly contest and New Poetry Series (BTW, the deadline for submitting a manuscript for our first book contest and open book contest is March 15 via Submittable). 2. We must solicit nationally recognized poets to come to Cleveland to give readings and workshops. 3. With the help of our graduate student interns in the NEOMFA, we must create inventive, interactive literacy/poetry programs and bring them to underserved communities in north east Ohio.

Another distinguishing feature is our longevity. CSUPC published its first book in 1971 and has since published over one-hundred-fifty titles.

NA: Every year I look forward to the winning books from Cleveland State’s competition. I am hoping you will say a few words about the winners from 2013?

FG: Sure. The Tulip-Flame by Chloe Honum was picked by Tracy K Smith as the winner of our 2013 first book prize. The poems in this collection are not only gorgeous and spare and lyrical, but they are also finely crafted. I know this because part of my job as an editor is to painstakingly give the author a very close reading of each line of each poem and then have a conversation with the author about issues of consistency of style, punctuation usage, and word choice. It's a very old-school way of editing. I have had to learn to not edit the heart out of a poem or line or phrase. But this method is also very rewarding for the poet because, for one big thing, it's rare to have someone read your poems so carefully. For another thing, it gives the author a kind of confidence in the poems she may not otherwise have.  And, it's very rewarding for me because reading so closely teaches me how to write and how to edit my own poetry—And, believe it or not, it's fun!

As a publisher, I like to involve the author in the design of the book cover and interior. Some poets do not want this responsibility and extra pressure, and hyper-awareness of production deadlines. This is perfectly understandable. Bur for those who do, like Chloe, the results can be stunning. Chloe and I agonized about the cover and whether or not we should use a combination of a matte and glossy finish or just stick with an all matte finish which is the current style of most books of poetry. Well, thanks to the amazing designer VJ Scribe, the matte/glossy combo turned out even better than I had hoped. When you first pick up the book you don't notice the shimmery gloss of the cover art. But then when you hold the book just so in just the right light, you SEE what it means to be a tulip-flame.

Here is a poem from The Tulip-Flame:

To The Anorexic

Sleepy child, what are you sewing? Where do you imagine you
will wear it? Morning falls like yards of satin in your lap. Each
time Mother wraps her arms around you, your shoulders are
smaller than she expects — do you enjoy this, that it takes a
moment to find you? It is winter and the fields are numb. Then
it’s spring and poppies flaunt their blood-soaked composure. For
months you’ve felt the tug of hunger, like a balloon tied to your
wrist. The sky asks nothing. Let your hand float up, and answer.

 A Boot's a Boot by Lesle Lewis won our open competition. This is Lesle Lewis’ fourth book. And what a wonderful book! I experience her poems as Derridean play. Her poems are unapologetically written in the same vein as Ashbery and James Tate and yet her voice is unique. The leaping that takes place between phrases and sentences and lines is raised up to the level of form. She strives for sincerity and excellence and has a persistent need to push the boundaries of the kinds of emotions that can be experienced through associative leaping. She is the skittery poets poet, if you will.

The amazing designer for A Boot's a Boot is Dede Cummings.

Stop Wanting by Lizzie Harris is a first book that got taken in large part because Tracy K Smith, our first book prize contest judge said if we are going to publish another book besides the winner, that's the one we should publish. I couldn't have agreed more, so several months later Lizzie's gorgeous and startling book of poems has appeared. Lizzie's poems make me think of raw, lyrical energy machines. Here's one from the first section of Stop Wanting ( BTW, the amazing designer of Lizzie's book is Adil Dara):

Before It Roots

take the body. Bury it.

Roll the body to show the face, let it see above.

if a man holds up a fist to you, pretend to drop the shovel. Hide your body from the storm clouds, find the richest soil. ask: What should grow from this?

geranium will sprout from the mound, flower with earlobe, petal like eyelids.

Whisper to the body, you are the last thing that soul hears. Make the body a promise:

You’llbe buried in the ground where no one can touch you.

Don’t lie to the body: No one will touch you again.

 

NA: What distinguishes a manuscript in a contest?  What makes it a winner?

FG: I'm very much a student of Pound when it comes to this question. I am just as severe and adamant about needing to discover the new. It takes very little time for me to decide what isn't a winner because I begin reading with the knowledge that most manuscripts are going to be a disappointment. Most are either too clever or too sentimental. For that matter, most poems are either too clever or too sentimental.

Then if a manuscript passes that test, the next thing: It has to be new. It has to make me think in a way that I never knew I could think. It's got to make a new wrinkle in my brain. Once these considerations are addressed, I get to about 10% of whatever I started with.

This is when luck, and of course, the judge comes into the equation. For the 2014 first book prize our judge is Ilya Kaminsky and for the 2014 open book prize the judge is Erin Belieu.  

NA: How about a Lesle Lewis poem?

YouHaveFinallySpentEnoughTimeAlone

It hurts like the death of a loved one even when we tell ourselves
no loved one has died and how much worse that would be.

The rain is dark pink.

We have dinner and in it there is not an inch of art.

It’s a recipe for winter squash soup.

It makes for a long line of women with crazy heads.

It makes for a throbbing curiosity.

We bury ourselves in the dirt under the water, but our bodies will
be discovered and we will be tried for the murder of ourselves.

Who will drop a flower from a window for us?

We tiptoe so we can be perfect.

We draw shapes around ourselves.

How we put it together matters.

We cut along the horizon lines.

In your face is another face I could love.

 

NA: Cleveland has some great local poets. Are there any books coming from Cleveland authors in 2014? 

FG:  We have a wonderful book coming out in the fall by the Russian poet, Arseny Tarkovsky, translated by Cleveland poet, Phil Metres.   Perhaps he can say a few words about this project.

NA: PNA: Phil, could you say a few words about your translation of Arseny Tarkovsky? Who is Tarkovsky?  How did you become his translator?

PM: (above, left): Arseny Tarkovsky (1907-1989) is one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century, a poet lauded by his elder, Anna Akhmatova, as “the one true Soviet poet.” I first read his work in 1992, just a few years after his passing, and was immediately intoxicated by the music and gravitas of his poems. He survived the entire Soviet era by his work as a translator of poetry.  He suffered a leg amputation during the Second World War after having been shot, accidentally, by a Soviet soldier on the front. Ironically, Tarkovsky—one of the most beautiful nature poets—had been stargazing and hadn’t heard the soldier call out for the password. Tarkovsky wrote under the shadow of Stalin for most of his early adult life, and only later did he emerge in the public sphere, though his renown grew with the publication of his first book in the 1950s and when his son (the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky) used readings of his father’s poems in his films The Mirror and Stalker. Anyone familiar with his son’s films will immediately recognize the kindred vision—its project of “sculpting time,” as his son once wrote, making art a kind of habitable temporality. There’s the scene that begins The Mirror, in which, for me, the main character is the wind, the wind rushing through everything in the landscape. That, to me, is the primordial Tarkovsky.

NA: This is not your first book of translations, right?  You also have a book from Ugly Duckling Press?

PM: This will be my fourth full-length translation project, and second in 2014. All of them were the fruit of seeds planted during a Watson Fellowship year way back in 1992-1993, in which I studied “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change,” interviewing poets, translating, and generally losing my mind in post-Soviet Moscow. They are: A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (2003), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), and Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties by Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014). Tarkovsky couldn’t be more different from Rubinstein, in tactic and theme. Tarkovsky works in traditional rhymes and meters, while Rubinstein is a classic postmodernist. It’s roughly the distance between Stevens and Ashbery. But I love both of them for their own genius. That’s the fun of translation: to inhabit such different aesthetics and word-worlds, trying to find some way of carrying across the magic, or making analogous magic.

NA: I’d love a sample poem from your forthcoming book.

PM: This is a poem about his near-death experience during the Second World War.   I wrote an essay about translating it that you can read here.

Field Hospital

The table was turned to light.  I lay
My head down like meat on scales,
My soul throbbing on a thread.
I could see myself from the outside:
I equaled no more
Than a stout market weight.
                                                     There
I was, amid the snowblind shield
Pocked along its western side,
In the circle of never-freezing swamps,
Of trees with fractured legs
And railway stations with split skulls,
Their snowy caps blackened
Again and again.
                             On that day, time stopped.

The clocks no longer ran, the souls of trains
No longer flew along the lampless levies,
Upon the gray flippers of steam;
Neither crow weddings, nor snow storms,
Nor thaws penetrated this limbo
Where I lay in disgrace, in nakedness,
In my own blood, outside the future
And its gravitational pull.

But then the shield of blinding snow
Shifted and began to turn on its axle,
And seven lucky planes flew low
Over my head, turning back,
And gauze grew hard as tree bark
All over my body, and another’s
Blood flowed into my veins, and
I breathed like a fish on sand,
Swallowing the hard, micaceous
Cold and blessed air.

My lips were covered with sores, and also
I was fed by a spoon, and also
I could not remember my name,
But the language of King David came
Alive on my tongue. 
                                    And then
Even the snow disappeared,
And early spring, rising on tiptoes,
Draped her green scarf over the trees.                    

 

Here are some links to some of our translations that should appear in the book:
Too Poems,(POETRY)
A blind man was riding an unheated train(POETRY)
I learned the grass as I began to write . . . (Center for the Art of Translation)
Two Poems(Guernica)
[O if only I could rise, regain memory and consciousness…] (The Journal Magazine)

NA: How does CSU find its authors?  Are they mostly from the CSU poetry contest? 

FG: Yes. We publish up to 4 manuscripts from our fist book prize and open competition. But, as in the case with Phil Metre's book of translations, sometimes we publish the best books, wherever they happen to come from.

NA: I had the pleasure of visiting one of your classes, and your students lingered after to tell me how much they loved your classes. Did students help out with the press?

FG: Yes. The ones who could dig what I'm doing were especially helpful. The others, not so much. I'm much more willing to adjust to my students’ ideas about poetry and taste in the classroom setting. In fact, I love teaching and I especially love teaching David Hume and about issues of taste. But as a publisher and business person, I find that most of the students I've worked with need more support than I have time to give—The very few who really get it, get it and help a lot and then go away too quickly to do their own amazing things.

NA: You also have this site, Poems by Heart.  What is that about?

FG: Ah, yes. That little site was born at Sewanee Writers' Conference. I had the idea like a lightning bolt and immediately started recording poets reciting poems they have memorized. I have every poet first talk about why they chose the poem or what it means to them to have memorized it. Then I ask them to recite it. But I haven't published a poem to it in a long while. It's one of the projects I can't wait to expand and update in the next year or two.

Speaking of expanding, on April 8th I'm launching a weekly, 26.4-minute-long (average commute to work in America = 26.4 minutes),  audio podcast called the "Don't Tell. Show." It's going to be a sort of Radio Lab / Studio 360 /  This American Life for the AWP crowd. I was so psyched to find that the domain name "DontTellShow.com" was available! Thanks, internets. Thanks, Ezra Pound.

NA: How many new poetry books does CSU publish each year?

FG: We have published as few as three but as many as five. This year we are publishing 3 to release at the AWP and fourth book of translations in September.

NA: What are some highlights of CSU Press?  (Feel free to provide links, photos, references, etc.)

FG: The two most fun things we did this year were participating in an annual event here in Cleveland called Ingenuity Fest. Ironically, what we did there was not at all innovative. We set up 4 typewriters. One was electric, the other three were manual. And we also provided paper. People lined up to write a poem on an index card. So many people wrote poems! So many people have never even touched a typewriter.

NA: How many new poetry books does CSU publish each year?

FG: We have published as few as three but as many as five. This year we are publishing 3 to release at the AWP and fourth book of translations in September.

NA: I’d like close with a poem of your choice from one of your poets.

FG: Your request reminds me of a thought experiment my 11 year-old daughter likes to pose to me that always has something to do with her and her brother falling off a cliff, and I can only save one them—

 

Born in San Diego on July 4th, 1970, Philip Metres grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.  He graduated from Holy Cross College in 1992, and spent the following year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, pursuing an independent project called “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Response to Historical Change.” Since receiving a Ph.D. in English and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Indiana University in 2001, Metres has written a number of books, including A Concordance of Leaves(2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), Ode to Oil(2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State 2008), Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront since 1941 (University of Iowa Press, 2007),  Instants (a chapbook, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006), Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein (Ugly Duckling 2004). and A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky (Zephyr 2003). His writing–which has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry–has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award (for the forthcoming Sand Opera), the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. His work has been called “beautiful, powerful, magnetically original” (Cleveland Arts Prize citation). Lawrence Joseph has written that “Philip Metres’s poetry speaks to us all, in ways critical, vital, profound, and brilliant.” His poems have been translated into Arabic, Polish, Russian, and Tamil.  He is an professor of English at John Carroll University in Cleveland, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing, and lives with his wife Amy and two daughters.

While earning an MA at Washington College and an MFA from Vermont College, Frank Giampietro was the president and general manager of a retail appliance business in Dover, Delaware. His first book of poems Begin Anywhere [available for purchase online from one of the following: Amazon | Barnes and Noble |Indiebound] was published by Alice James Books in 2008. He is the co-author of Spandrel with Denise Bookwalter and Book O' Tondos with Megan Marlatt. Awards for his poetry include a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from Sewanee Writers' Conference, a Kingsbury Fellowship from Florida State University, a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Florida Book Award. He is the creator of La Fovea, and Poems by Heart. His poetry, nonfiction, short-short fiction, and book reviews have appeared in journals including 32 Poems, American Book Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, CutBank, FENCE, Hayden's Ferry, Ninth Letter, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Ploughshares, Rain Taxi, Subtropics, and Tampa Review. He was a resident scholar at The Southern Review from 2010 to 2011 and the managing editor of Alice James Books from 2011 to 2012. Currently, Frank Giampietro serves as the interim director of Cleveland State University Poetry Center and visiting assistant professor of English at Cleveland State University and in the North East Ohio Master of Fine Arts program. 

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

A Blue Towel -- on James Schuyler [by Angela Ball]

In the radical simplicity of James Schuyler’s poetry, the world is constituted each morning in the form of what is here: a cup, an ashtray, a Korean Mum.  The job of the poem is to converse elementally, without judgment or hierarchies, but with a saintly respect for the small details that bring us to life.  Martin Heidegger, one of the philosophers most amenable to the New York School of Poets, made a plea against tracts exhorting large changes in society, but which in turn slight the present as "relatively impotent appearance,” "suggest[ing] that the fragile and transitory can safely be neglected." Schuyler’s style emulates that of artists Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher—both working against (Abstract Expressionist) fashion to represent the ordinary extraordinary of every day.  (I include here images of two of Frielicher’s beautiful paintings—to this day she is represented by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery—and Fairfield Porter’s portrait of John Ashbery and James Schuyler.)  In its intense interest in accepting the windows offered us, Schuyler’s poetic method implements in words Freilicher’s method of composing through gentle attention. Often in her work, the domestically pastoral (vases and paint jars of flowers)  consorts with the matter of the containing city. (Freilicher was once offered a fellowship to travel anywhere in the country to paint a scene: she choose to stay in her apartment to make a new window scene.)

Graduate poet Annette Boehm talks about Schuyler’s “unashamed reality”:

Part of this fascination with what is real is accepting that what is real can be different from what is generally acceptable or generally considered beautiful. Lehman [in The Last Avant Garde] quotes Schuyler’s recollection of an incident in the early 1950s: “We were walking along the beach at sunset, heading for a cocktail party. The sun was casting those extraordinary Technicolor effects on the sea and sky. John [Ashbery] turned to me and said, ‘I always feel so embarrassed by these gaudy displays of nature.’ I didn’t feel embarrassed at all” (260).

I think that Schuyler might enjoy hearing the journals from our class, the students’ daily observations of his work.  Here is literature student Anna Williams (we are using the FSG Selected Poems):

“March Here.” I like this poem for the way it positions the natural environment/weather with neon signs and tall towers. The wet of spring/March aligned with the wetness of “the hard-running river” and the “damp/from your bath.” I’m sure there’s a way to critique commodity culture in this. Also, the blurring of the lines between human and nonhuman worlds is critically rich. “December.” “Each December! I always think I hate “the over-commercialized event”/and then the bells ring, or tiny light bulbs wink above the entrance/to Bonwit Teller or Katherine going on five wants to look at all/the empty sample gift-wrapped boxes up Fifth Avenue in swank shops/and how can I help falling in love?” Yup. Commodities are dazzling and tempting. And to a certain extent I think that’s ok…I mean, it’s necessary to be aware of the implications of commodity culture, but we do have to live in this world. However if we enjoy something, I think it’s good to know what we are enjoying/where it came from/why. Significant that the wrapped boxes are “empty.”

“Thinness” was a great read. I’m loving Schuyler’s preoccupation with weather/seasons. “February expects others to be nicer/than it is itself: knowing this/about itself makes it a nice month/You have a pretty good character, February.”  Peace out, February. “your arms are so long/for such a short month.” See ya in 2015.

“Now and then.” I absolutely freaked when I started reading this poem. For my critical sensibilities, it is perfect. Seriously, I would read a stanza, freak, look away from the book in disbelief, and then start reading again like “no way no way no way how can this be so perfect?”

• and the dark tranquility of hemlocks encroaching on untilled fields

“You can’t make a living

plowing stones” subsistence

farming is well out of style: “You can’t call it living

without the margin”

coveted obsolescence!

“Horrible Cold Night/Remain at Home”/”Clear and Beautiful/Remain at Home”

Lots of great natural world imagery in this poem juxtaposed with industrial life. Love it. “Remain at Home” no matter the weather, because you need to recharge yourself for your boring job the next day! Just be apart of the system muuuaahhhahahahahahaha. I’m tired. I’ll bang this out critically better later, possibly in next class. It’ll be great fun.  – Anna Williams

And here is graduate fiction writer Jennifer Brown:

Like Koch, this first poem in his book is an odd one.

I like his poems so far. He is more philosophical than Koch or O’Hara, but more coherent than Ashbery. Less coherent than O’Hara and Koch, who are still my two favorite of the group, I think.

His weirder passages have more of a feeling of meaning than Ashbery’s weirder passages. They seem like they’re devised to elicit a certain feeling or create a certain image, and the words within the passages seem more connected to each other, and the passages more connected to the whole poem.

“…I am very sick really of all

the little concrete words such

as names of colors and effectively

used as in Art Reviews”

(Four Poems, 68-69)

It’s funny that he says this two lines after referring to plants as green. I like that the New York School poets will write passages into their poems that give insight into their own choices when writing poetry. This one helps me better appreciate and understand Schuyler’s choices of words, and it just makes me notice what a good job he can do evoking images without using the usual words associated with that image – a much better job than a description that uses those words would probably do.

I like how he names colors sarcastically or hyper-creatively sometimes. “A robin’s-egg blue robin’s-egg.”

“I do not believe in legends of food,

I believe in the food.

It is not what carrots are like,

It is the carrots.”

I like this passage. It seems Schuyler wants to move past conventional poetry, or what was conventional at the time, to get at something more real than what can be described or conveyed through metaphor. This would apply also to the above passage about colors. I’m not sure whether or not he gets there, but I can see a path toward it, or at least a longing for it, and the result is something worth reading whether it fully achieves what he wants or not. Thinking of it like that also helps me to understand Ashbery better. I still don’t like him as much as the other NYS poets, but his poetry seems less alien and meaningless when thought of that way. Maybe he and Schuyler were even working directly from one another’s ideas about what poetry should strive to achieve and had failed to achieve using conventional descriptions or through metaphors and other traditional poetic devices. - Jennifer Brown

Here is Annette Boehm, graduate poet, speaking of Schuyler in her own blog, Outside of a Cat:

-       Whether he is in the city or in the country, Schuyler always notices the weather, the season, the flora and fauna. Very few poems do not mention at least one or two of the above. Even music becomes plant-life for Schuyler. Take this passage from “Like Lorraine Ellison:”

-       And through the snares / sexily come saxes: through / solid shadow-green / of brushing leaves, clear /  as a blues, violet sage, / flowering saxes. I / send you all the love

-       “I never miss the garden section. / It describes heaven to perfection,” explains the speaker of “A Picnic Cantata,” and with all the very specific plant names, at times even taxonomy, and the detailed descriptions and observations of nature we find throughout Schuyler’s poetry, this could very well be him. The ever-changing view of trees, flowers, shrubs outside his window can capture his mind as much as any human interaction.

-       In the exuberant “Hymn to Life,” even the sun is alive, “Comes out from behind unbuttoned cloud underclothes — gray with use –” and while the plants become animal-like (“at the Reflecting Pool, the Japanese cherries / Bust out into their dog mouth pink”), animals become plant-like: “A cardinal / Passes like a flying tulip, a lights, and nails the green day / Down.”

-       Life cannot sit still, it constantly flows from one form to another, like water moving from solid to liquid to gas with great ease. It is as much in Hodge the cat’s ripped ear as it is in pear blossoms or the seizure he witnesses in the delicatessen. I love the ending of this (long) poem (including yet another personified month): “I like it when the morning sun lights up my room / Like a yellow jelly bean, an inner glow. May mutters, “Why / Ask questions?” or, “What are the questions you wish to ask?”  It seems to echo, again, in “Good morning,” which ends on this question: “Silver day / how shall I polish you?”

-       Lest you get the wrong impression, people also appear in Schuyler’s poems. We get to see through his eyes, for example, in “The Morning of the Poem,” a former lover: “he stood across / The street, in tweed, a snappy dresser, feet apart, head turned / In an Irish profile, holding an English attaché case, looking for / A cab to Madison Avenue, late, as usual, looking right out of a bandbox, / As usual.” And of course there are also his friends, his fellow poets and painters, — there’s a lot less name-dropping here than in, say, O’Hara, but the familiar names are all there. One person is omnipresent in these poems, the unnamed ‘you.’ Again in “The Morning of the Poem,” Schuyler explains that “When you read this poem you will have to decide / Which of the ‘yous’ are ‘you.’ I think you will have no trouble, as you rise from your chair and take up your / Brush again and scrub in some green, that particular green, whose name I can’t remember.” Like a painter knows his countless shades of green, even those that might be too faintly different from each other for the untrained eye to distinguish, Schuyler knows his friends will know how to read his ‘yous.’

-       Schuyler’s poems come as they are, in diverse body-shapes, skinny as rakes and only two, three words wide, or fat and full and covering numerous pages. Often, they are sweet notes, or bittersweet notes to a beloved or a friend. The poem “Steaming Ties” contains some very tender moments: “when I’m alone it’s hard / at times to know how unalone / I am, loved by you,” explains the speaker, and further on, he confides “ties are, even ties, / are silk and real. Your / voice to me is silk and rustles.”

-       While at times, Schuyler comes across as more contemplative and calm than his fellow New York poets, his sense of humor is intact, though at times wry and dark. There is also a child-like exuberance, like in this passage which, again, is from “The Morning of the Poem” (probably his best-known poem):

-       Rain! this morning I liked it  more than sun, if I were younger I would have / Run out naked in it, my hair full of Prell, chilled and loving it, cleansed, / Refreshed, at one with quince and apple trees.

-       It’s one of the moments where I really felt a kinship — the right kind of rain is wonderful and makes me feel the same way (though I don’t plan Prell into it). I like the passage for another reason, too, — apples and quinces. I like both, very much. The apples and quinces make a repeat appearance a few pages later in the same poem, this time linked to growing up and growing old: “the apple and quince trees / Looking so old, so unkempt: I remember planting them, they were just seedlings, or do I mean saplings?”

-      In “Letter to a Friend: Who Is Nancy Daum?” we’re told that “All things are real / no one a symbol” — very much a summary of Schuyler’s poetics of writing what is real and observing what is there. That’s not to say that there is nothing that could be read symbolically in his poems — there’s plenty. I also don’t claim that he takes no flights of fancy now and then — some of his images are fantastic and imaginative — but what I think it means is that it’s all rooted (like plant life) in the dirt and grit of the everyday.    - Annette Boehm.

Not to be ignored, “A blue towel” stands as title to a poem of lovers at the beach—no gap between it and the poem’s body: “went with us to the beach. / You drove the Green Bomb, / your panel truck.”  As in Freilicher’s paintings, the day is a collaboration between the natural and the manmade, a collaboration Schuyler finds supremely comfortable and comforting:  “We spread the towel / where we could lie and watch / the fierce and molten wonder / of the water.” In the poem’s choreography, the temporal and the eternal have a love dance: “waves” almost get “sneakers”; the men see “how a log was / almost hurled ashore then / taken back . . . .”  As the day and poem begin to end, flies play a prominent part:

. . . “These

insects are too much:

let’s go back.” The blue towel

and your trunks I hung out

on the line.  You took a

shower.  I made drinks.  Quiet

ecstasy and sweet content,

why are not all days like

you?  Happy with someone,

and that someone you, to-

gether on a blue towel

on sand beside the sea.

I think that “together” is intensified through separation, and that this poem invites us to share the conviction of simplicity—even to teach it to the angel, as Rilke does in his Ninth Duino Elegy (translated by Stephen Mitchell):

Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,
how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,
serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing–, and blissfully
escapes far beyond the violin.–And these Things,
which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,
they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

Big thanks to The Best American Poetry for welcoming me here.  And thank you, Students, for making these entries with me.  Tracie Dawson, graduate fiction writer, took the photos of the class.  And Susan Elliott, graduate poet, has set up a Facebook page for the upcoming Moorman Symposium on New York School Poetry and the South—the event our class is leading up to: https://www.facebook.com/2014moormansymposium. Lastly, thanks are due the late Charles Moorman, Medievalist and Academic Vice-President of the University of Southern Mississippi, for establishing funds whereby senior professors can engage the public with art and scholarship.  Charlie was also a poet, with a great sense of humor. -- Angela Ball

This Just In: Wednesday March 12, 5:00 PM - Rally to Save the New York Public Library

Our friend Annalyn Swan writes to tell us about this most important event. Please circulate this information:

Next Wednesday the Committee to Save the New York Public Library and fellow groups are having what amounts to a do-or-die rally on the steps of the 42nd Street Library, 5 p.m. After two years of fighting, we are trying to convince the City Council to redirect the $150 million that Bloomberg allocated for the so-called Central Library Plan--soothingly renamed the "renovation" plan by the library's high-priced PR firm. In a nutshell, the plan calls for the destruction of the book stacks in the main library, the shipping off-site of several million books, the sale of the incredibly popular Mid-Manhattan and SIBL libraries to developers, and the shoehorning of those libraries into the space where the stacks are now, which is a third the size of the two existing branch  libraries. It's a destruction/downsizing plan of epic proportions, to the tune of $350 million, that will change our venerable research library into a high-tech, Norman Fosterized architectural folly.

There has been growing negative press, including an item last week on Humans of New York that went viral. 220,000 likes and 30,000 comments later, we are suddenly on the social media radar as well as the subject of many articles at Atlantic.com, The Nation, The New York Times, etc. etc. (See savenypl.org.)

So PLEASE, if you can, come and show your support for books, and for scholarship. We are advocating that the monies be spent instead on bringing the book stacks up to code, refurbishing the mid-Manhattan library across the street rather than selling it, and sending much-needed funds to the starving branch libraries.

Thanks and hope to see you next Wednesday!

Ashes Ashes All Fall Down [by Angela Ball]

John Ashbery has a double life: as “John,” the person; and “Ashbery” the poet.  His poetry, too, has such a life.  In J.D. McClatchy’s formulation, derived from “Trefoil,” a poem that describes “trees / of two minds,  half caught in their buzz and luster,” it is ”buzz” (the voice of the quotidian, the silly, the shop-worn phrase) and “luster” (the voice of beauty that arises from memory and is expressed in language, but is somehow independent of both—in short, art).  It is both dimensional, riverine and mountainous, and a “planosphere” unfolded on a table.

 “Memories of Imperialism,” from his twentieth book, Your Name Here,  is based on a silly, deliberate mistake—the conflation of two Deweys: the admiral and the librarian. But according to the logic we follow every day, the mistake makes sense: we are our names—we inhabit the blank provided.  Ashbery’s poem simply takes the system at its word, creating a beautifully comic, bewildered character who embodies the absurdity and sentimentality of history as we mostly experience it: “Dewey took Manila / and soon after invented the Dewey decimal system / that keeps libraries from collapsing / even unto this day.”  The poem brilliantly juxtaposes the “flatness” of a numerical system with the “roundness” of experience—the collapse described at the poem’s start seems both a matter of weight and a matter of abstract order.  (Another poem in the volume, “Full Tilt,” mentions “a terrible syllabus accident.”) And, poignantly, the poem evokes the predicament of outliving one’s moment.  The young take it in stride that old heroes are supplanted by new.  It’s another thing entirely to know oneself redundant: one may be called “Admiral” still, but no longer admired:

 

To this day schoolchildren wonder about his latter career

as a happy pedant, always nice with children, thoughtful

toward their parents.  He wore a gray ceramic suit

walking his dog, a “bouledogue,” he would point out.

People would peer at him from behind shutters, watchfully,

hoping no new calamities would break out, or indeed

that nothing more would happen, ever, that history had ended.

Yet it hadn’t, as the admiral himself

would have been the first to acknowledge.

 

Your Name Here is dedicated to Ashbery’s partner of many years, “Pierre Martory, 1920-1998.” It ends with the title poem.  Isolated, this phrase reveals its strangeness.  A signature is both personal and impersonal—the space, which could be filled by anyone, implies a comic togetherness rather than a tragic uniqueness--but it is you, in two-dimensional form.  It indicates the round of a life: volition, commitment.  I think that “commitment” (to fixed ideas of truth, for example) is a quality that Ashbery runs from, while many poets pursue it as prize.  Also, there is the weirdness (fatality) of a phrase that functions both as command and description, as if the filled space is already a fait accompli.  As if the name already occupies its line, so like the one that connects two dates.  The declaration is also an indisputable fact: each of us occupies a “here.”  But its evocation also implies an opposite: the culmination, for Ashbery, of a lifetime of leaving out of his poems the very things we expect to see—his non-contractual contract with the reader.

For our class in The New York School of Poets, the students have read the thick collection of Ashbery’s early work, The Mooring of Starting Out, and the Harvard lectures collected as Other Traditions, which they have found revelatory of Ashbery’s own poetic method.  Jennifer Brown, graduate fiction writer, says this in her reading journal:

 For the most part, I really enjoyed Other Traditions. For poets whose work I haven’t read, Clare, Beddoes, and co. were surprisingly interesting to read about. Some of them sounded like characters from a Tim Burton film. 

Ashbery’s description of Wheelwright had me imagining something like Ashbery’s own ellipses-filled “hair banana” variety of poems, but the example at the end reminded me much more of Ashbery’s relatively traditional work such as “The Painter.” Wheelwright’s influence on Ashbery is apparent in the way that his poems are difficult to understand in any straightforward sense, but they are full of imagery that unfolds itself effortlessly in the reader’s mind and words that generate a sort of grip over the reader’s attention. You may not understand them, but you feel them anyway. My initial thought was that Wheelwright was more successful at this than Ashbery, until I took into account that I had only read two or three carefully selected examples of Wheelwright where I’d read a large range of Ashbery over two or three hundred pages.   – Jennifer Brown

In his own journal, graduate fiction writer Nicholas Benca speaks of the frustrations and rewards of reading Ashbery:

I did attempt to “water-ski” over these poems when they were not narrative, but the desire to understand, to follow line-by-line what the poem is attempting to communicate was a more dominant force than just letting it wash over me. As stated earlier, there were definitely pleasurable moments, but it took a lot of work to find them when the poems were more abstract/lyric (even a line like “Sand the bowl did not let fall” was mysterious and tough to decipher at first glance). There were poems like “The Boy,” which fall into that category for me and were still pretty stunning experiences—this poem in particular seemed to capture an experience of being a child (male) in a world of grown –ups/parents—the fear and lack of control of  “seeming to have fallen/ From shelf to shelf of someone’s rage.” Another element of Ashbery’s poems that I seemed to consistently enjoy is the final lines. Although it is tough to disagree with Ashbery’s own assertion that he seems to retreat farther from the object of the poem (and Lehman’s agreement that Ashbery seems to step back/never arrive at the destination), it seemed to me like the way Ashbery ended a lot of his poems was the closest I got to a key to what I should be getting from the writing. Yeah, maybe it never arrived, but it at least informed me of the direction I was heading, and yeah, the poems seemed to shift at the end, take a turn in an unanticipated direction, and when that occurred, it seemed to be a revelation—they place where meaning might take off from, a secret that announces it presence but isn’t wholly revealed. For example, I thought that the end to the “Pied Piper” was well done and an interesting turn from what I had expected as well as the ending to “America.” Poems that walked the line between narrative and abstract were generally my favorites in this collection—“Illustration” “The Painter” and “Night” were all compelling and tapped into an emotion as well as an idea  - Nicholas Benca

 

To end what I sign today, I’ll quote the close of “Your Name Here.”  The novel referred to is a digressive ten-volume life story, by Romain Rolland, of a brilliant musician’s trials and final triumph.  Almost a library in itself, its strict-looking plan—its “syllabus”--belies its somewhat anarchic content.  Rolland named it a roman-flueve—a river novel—that meanders into other, unexpected lives before at last arriving at its hero’s final success:

 

Things got real quiet in the oubliette.

I was still reading Jean-Christophe. I’ll never finish the darn thing.

Now is the time for you to go out into the light

and congratulate whoever is left in our city.  People who survived

the eclipse.  But I was totally taken with you, always have been.

Light a candle in my wreath, I’ll be yours forever and will kiss you.