The Best American Poetry

A Special Request from Poet Mark Bibbins: Donate to Support the Publication of Poetry!

Mark Bibbins (L) and David Lehman photo (c) Star Black, 2009

Dear Friends,

 

Many of you know personally what a solitary endeavor writing can be.

 

As my new book of poems came together, the shift from a solo project to a collaboration was as alarming as it was exhilarating. I’m extremely lucky that the people at Copper Canyon Press are my collaborators. There’s not another nonprofit press more worthy of your support.

 

I’m grateful for the partnership I’ve had with the the Press over the years, the most recent evidence of which is my new collection, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full. Publishers Weekly gave my book a starred review and also named it one of their top ten poetry picks for this season.

 

Craig Morgan Teicher at NPR writes, “The book’s a little crazy,” and I’m in no position to disagree.

 

I’m grateful that Copper Canyon took a chance on this book—even when it’s a little crazy—and I hope you’ll join me in thanking them for the work that they do for poets every day, by making a donation to their current fundraising campaign.

 

The press aims to raise $5,000 by the end of National Poetry Month. Can you help us reach this goal?

 

Most of the money will be used to publish more poetry books.  The rest will be used to help get my book into the hands of poetry students who actually need more crazy in their lives.

 

NPR also says that They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full is “too cool (or hot) for school.”

 

As a teacher myself, I appreciate the irony of such an appraisal, and so does Copper Canyon. That’s why we want to use a portion of the money raised during this campaign to send 400 copies of the book to college students across the country.

 

Not only will your generous donation fund a nonprofit press that could really use your support, it will also help us engage the imaginations and intellects of young readers.

 

And if you do give, I will send you a personal gift in thanks for sharing my appreciation of poetry and Copper Canyon Press. If you give $50 or more, I will sign a copy of my book for you. If you contribute $500 or more I will also send you a one-of-a-kind collage, made by me just for this campaign.

 

Thank you so very much!

 

Mark Bibbins

 

P.S. Any gift you make to Copper Canyon Press is tax-deductible. Please give generously. Thank you!

 

With your support Copper Canyon Press will:

• Send 400 copies of Mark Bibbins’s new book to classrooms across the country
• Get books into the hands of young readers
• Say “yes” to collaborating with our poets and supporting their careers
• Support our community of book designers, typographers, cover artists, and editors
• And naturally:

Put poetry into the hands of everyone who, like you, believes poetry is vital to language and living.

Your tax-deductible donation helps publish extraordinary poetry for a dedicated, appreciative readership.

Thank You,
Copper Canyon Press

PS: As a special thanks to you for your gift of $50 or more, we'll send you a signed copy of Mark Bibbins's new book, They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full. Donors who contribute $500 or more will also receive a one-of-a-kind collage, made by Mark Bibbins just for this campaign.

"Reassured by Walter Lippmann / And sustained by Haig and Haig": Who wrote these lines?

A reader has written to us asking if we know the author and title of a poem that ends

Reassured by Walter Lippmann
And sustained by Haig and Haig.

I had to admit that I don't know but would ask. So please, if you know, tell me, and I'll pass along the "news that stays new." My only hint is that my correspondent came across this poem way back in 1941, during his freshman year in college. To me the lines sound like Auden, or someone trying to sound like Auden -- or possibly Weldon Kees. Lippmann was the most popular high-brow political columnist of his time, and Haig and Haig is the name of a Scotch. -- DL

"Two Bottles of Glenlivet" [by James Cummins]

To dinner you bring the Scotch matching
the beautiful friends who are hatching
this glorious meal
and the glorious feel
of the moments from Time you are snatching.

There once was a man come to dinner
whose outer life stood in for his inner;
he ate with great gusto,
till his waistline did thrust-o,
and he left most decidedly not thinner.

There once were two gents from Glenlivet
who agreed great Scotch could greatly rivet
your attention and command
to the great task at hand:
life, and the friends who help you live it!

    for David

-- James Cummins

This Monday at KGB: Roger Reeves + Russell Dillon

Roger Reeves + Russell Dillon

Monday, April 28, 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

 

Roger Reeves's poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. Kim Addonizio selected “Kletic of Walt Whitman” for the Best New Poets 2009 anthology. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, two Bread Loaf Scholarships, an Alberta H. Walker Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and two Cave Canem Fellowships. He earned his PhD the University of Texas-Austin and is currently an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His first book is King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013).

 

Russell Dillon is the author of Eternal Patrol (H-NGM-N BKS 2013), co-editor of Big Bell, and author of the chapbook Secret Damage. He began life in New York, continued it in San Francisco, and now continues it further in New York.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ONLY TWO READINGS REMAIN IN OUR SPRING SEASON: 

 

May 5   Ariana Reines + Laura Sims  

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

D.A. POWELL, YOU WERE GREAT IN BED [by Brian Bouldrey]

In the classroom, in the writing workshop, the killing criticism among undergraduates is the “P” word: Pretentiousness.  Some kid says it about a story with a borrowed form or a poem quoting Aristotle, and that workshop is over, that writer is dead in the water, you’ll never see that poem again.  To be honest, it’s an accusation that’s leveled at so many aspects of writing—foreign words and praises, philosophic quotes, big words, little words, a code of ethics, a lack of a code of ethics, the evocation of myth (that children would be anti-myth or myth-free terrifies the hell out of me)… if pretentious means to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed, isn’t every writing teacher exhorting their student to “write what you don’t know” (which I do) encouraging pretentiousness?

 

I think there’s more at work here.  The history of writing has been the history of reading, and for the longest time, literacy was low and attached to money, privilege, and a classical education.  Montaigne knew Greek and Latin and probably that dirty dirty poem by Catullus—but his French, ugh, sounds so pretentious.  In our weird idea of warped American democracy, anybody showing signs of uppity privilege looks like a hipster dickhead.  “I used to love ideals, but that wasn’t cool,” D.A. Powell writes in the poem below.

 

And so all the work of the knower must ironically become even more encoded—elitist, even—veiled in jargon, sarcasm, and the inarticulate hero saying articulate things (Homer Simpson: “To alcohol! The solution to, and cause of, all life’s problems!” (and by the way, it is commonly believed that quoting Homer Simpson is not pretentious—but that would be a mistake)). 

 

Prosody is a kind of encoding, an ordering of the world that is artificial, and therefore, I guess, pretentious.  So then along comes free verse, which just, you know, sounds more free, like free love.  But the music is hidden there, encoded, just as well. 

 

Are there subject matters that poets ought not write about?  Because they are unspeakably painful or not to be fully known and therefore the occasion of pretentiousness? Because they are uncouth, inappropriate, not for the dining room?  Because a love that dare not speak its name?

 

I have been including illustrations all this week from a beloved 1941 book about Paul Bunyan, Work Giant.  It is filled with encoded secret signals about sexuality and only the initiated, only those trained to look for it, can see Paul’s red hanky in his right pocket, the long, shaftlike neck of Babe the Blue Ox.  It’s there for you to see, and when you do, you feel good about yourself a little, don’t you?  That you have the intelligence and imagination to enter into the elite society of the Private Club of the Pretentious Knowers.  I have created a secret club of writers who have encoded a copy of their book to me, with the elite and special inscription, “For Brian, you were great in bed.”  Was I truly great in bed for all those writers?  It’s a secret.  Books are souvenirs, but they are also secrets that can be found out if you just take the time.

 

I don’t know if it’s good or bad.  I do know that much of my own self-education was powered by a desire to crack every secret code—to learn every language and every system of hermetic knowledge and every secret handshake to every secret society. 

 

D.A. Powell’s poetry pleases me because it feels encoded, full of music, and image, and memory, and emotion, sure, but a private joke, too, a joke of the society of Babe the Blue Ox is Secretly a Penis.  As a gay man writing about the poetry of a gay man of the same age, can I just say that when you spend a lifetime making a routine of hiding certain facts about yourself that really ought to be evident and open, you take great pleasure for the rest of your life to cultivate irony, private jokes, and new languages.  Call us pretentious.

 

Here is a “The Great Unrest”, a poem in Powell’s glorious new collection, Useless Landscapes (Graywolf, 2012), that is openly and secretly my favorite musing on age and desire.  Let me lay in the moonlight,” he writes, and then corrects his own grammar, “lie”, and with the correction of grammar, the correction of meaning.  Everything has a secret meaning, there for you to find and thrill to.

 

THE GREAT UNREST

 

You’d think, bedraggled as I am by the illness of my age,

I’d be able to lounge a little.

 

That I’d shut out the noise, as others do,

and I would sigh and sleep.

 

Let me eat Tootsie Pops, I’d think.  Let me lay in the moonlight

And grow the opposite of babyfat.

 

Lie, I mean.  Let me lie.  I have had to wrestle with grammar

all my life.  And what people call ideals.

 

I used to love ideals, but that wasn’t cool.  Plus there was money to be had.

And ass. Scads of ass.

 

Now I forget.  The principal’s your pal and not the principle.

At least I’ve retained that.

 

Give up your sleepless nights the man on TV said.  Talking to me.

Like, how did he know?

 

I could have dozed through half a dozen shows and all the ads.

Even commercial noise

 

Might have eventually been absorbed into my dreams.

It might have become my dreams.

 

But it’s hard for me to lie still (lay still?) While I am getting fucked.

Sorry.

 

It’s late and you been at me all night and I hadn’t risen from it.

I was tired.

 

I’m even more tired.

 

But now I’m up.

 

D.A. Powell is up.  Get it?  Get it?  Useless Landscapes is the best book to have in bed.  And D. A. Powell is the best poet to ride out my guest blog this week. It’s been a filthy privilege to write about my favorite bedmates.  I hope to have many more literary bedmates in the future.

 

 

Trusting the process [by Christine Thiele]

(Ed. note: This post is part of series by contributors to The Widows' Handbook. You can find previous posts here. sdh)

Writing is a very tricky thing.  It takes courage and surrender. It requires initiation and patience and I run short on both in most the areas of my life. When writing begins sometimes I don’t, well, most times I don’t know where it will end or where it will take me.  Blogging has become a life line for me.  It has transformed my inner world into an outer world. It keeps me sane.  It connects me to those I may never know and deepens my love for words.

Trusting my intuition is the most difficult part.  Many times I begin a piece and then let it go.  I put it aside because the depth the intuition was begging me to delve towards is painful and I don’t like pain!  My writing began years ago as a collegial sharing of words during my years as a youth minister. Now, it has transformed into an outlet of my deepest hopes, fears, longings, and all the stuff I couldn’t say out loud to those around me.  My intuitions kept bringing me back to the words.  Intuition kept dropping the words in my head and poking me to bring them to life with my hopes, fears, and longings.

It has taken form in many, many words…

Resolve.

Change,

Hiccups,

Wipeout,

October,

Treading,

Icing over (well, that’s two words)

Longing,

Hope, and

Lunacy.

 

So many words, so many thoughts, so much to let flow through me…surrender…that’s another word.  Surrender. I really think when I trusted my hands to let the words flow through them my writing became a life line.  I let the words flow from brain to fingers without stopping the honesty, hurt, love, hope, and fear. It became the artistic expression I had hoped it could be.  It became a way to connect with the unconnected.  It became a way for me to see the beauty of my pain.  It continues to allow me the grace of reflection on my journey merely by rereading words from my past.

Trusting my new muse, the grief I lived with after my husband’s death, has been a tricky endeavor.  Grief is a raw, somewhat intolerant muse.  Its depth feels like I will drown in it at times. It challenges me to take the feelings, wrap them in words that I struggle to find and then arrange them in some sort of meaningfulness. Many times I think the meaning is present only for me, but I am often surprised that the work I struggle the most with, and that I feel has no sense to it, is the work that touches the wider audience.  Somehow, I think the struggle adds to the meaning…even when it feels inadequate to me.

Trust the process.

Up and down, back and forth, the words force their way through me and compel me to put them together.  I have had words help people and infuriate people.  I have had people believe me to be a crazy person and others find wisdom.

Words have pulled me through the dark and lonely days and nights of widowhood.  Years have passed and one thing has been there for me every time I need it…writing.  When I could barely breathe because he was gone, I could write.  When I didn’t want to get out of bed because he was gone, words would float through my mind. When I was overwhelmed by my role as sole parent, I could put my frustration on a page and reach beyond the walls of my home that seemed to be suffocating me in what could have been.  Blogging brought me a place of expression, release, and empowered me to endure my broken heart, my broken life. 

Blank pages on a computer screen became a mirror of my journey through grief.  The words gave hope to my journey.  The words became a point of growth and propelled me toward the future.  They helped me see the worthiness of my pain and that life was still very worthwhile too.  Even a future, a future without my husband, a future I never wanted to think about again, was worthwhile.  Not only was it worthwhile, it would become a life full of joy and compassion…two things I thought were gone forever. 

Through my journey, I have been blessed to be included in a collaboration of courage.  I have met others who were also willing to share their stories for others.  I have been connected to projects that encourage the broken-hearted to mend their hearts and continue to strive for love and a new normal.  When I was first widowed, this was not something easily found.  I am so proud to have my words included in the revolution of how we acknowledge grief.  To be included in creative, works of art that take the remarkably raw, painful, yet hopeful and courageous, takes my breath away and humbles me greatly.

The thought of my words being included alongside the beautiful poems and prose of The Widow’s Handbook is amazing to me. When I think of my journey, my loss, and the solidarity that my words bring me, I feel incredibly fortunate…believe me, I see the irony in it…the worst moment of my life leading me toward those feelings…is not lost on me.  Intuition, surrender, and trusting the process…both of writing and healing from the unhealable…astound me and I have trouble wrapping my mind around it all.

I will continue to trust, though.  I will continue to surrender.  I will continue to miss him and heal my heart when it aches.  I will continue to write and let the words take me where they will and when I get to other side of their plan, I will feel lucky to have them floating within me…always.

Christine Thiele is a free lance writer, high school history teacher, and a former professional and volunteer youth minister. She has written for The Journal of Student Ministries, YouthWorker Journal , Grief Digest, OpentoHope.com and is a contributing author in Open to Hope, Inspirational Stories of Healing After Loss and several other essay collections.  Along with her writing, Christine is raising her two sons.  Since her husband's death in 2005 from pancreas cancer, her writing has been focused on grief and healing issues.

Tonight! Live from Lincoln Center! Poetry and the Creative Mind

For the third year in a row, our resident social media expert Leah Umansky will be live tweeting the hottest ticket in town. Follow us on twitter @bestampo to catch her witty observations.

Leah Umansky is the author of the Mad-Men inspired chapbook, Don Dreams and I Dream  and a full-length collection, Domestic Uncertainties,  She is the curator of the COUPLET Reading Series in NYC, and writes for Tin House and Luna Luna Magazine among others. Visit her site at: http://leahumansky.com

KATE DANIELS, YOU WERE GREAT IN BED [by Brian Bouldrey]

Meditations on the beauty of obscenity:

 

• Obscenity, like comedy and irony, is an undermining of order; its first feel is fun, fun at the expense of somebody serious who needs to be there, gathering in their skirts.  We all take turns being the fun one and then the serious one.

 

• Tess Gallagher, in “The Lover of Horses” writes about a daughter taking care of a drunken father, “I made up a strong broth, and as I poured the steaming liquid into a Thermos I heard myself utter syllables and other vestiges of language which I could not reproduce if I wanted to.”  Later, she writes, “For the rest of the morning I sat under the cedar tree and smoked. My thoughts drifted with its shifting and murmurings, and it struck me what a wonderful thing nature is because it knows the value of silence, the innuendos of silence and what they could mean for a wordbound creature such as I was.” Obscenity, I think, is the freeing consolation for we, the wordbound who cannot always bear the heavy value of silence.

 

• The dirtiest poem, according to the internet, is Catullus’ Carmen 16, “Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo…”, “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you,/Bottom Aurelius and catamite Furius/ You who think, because my poems/ are sensitive, that I have no shame/ For it's proper for a devoted poet to be moral/ himself but in no way is it necessary for his poems…”  Every once in a while, in one of the merrier, more thoughtful dives, I will find Catullus’ poem as graffitti.  It means something more vital to me when I read it as graffitti.

 

• The word naughty comes from Christian thought about the Fall of Man.  Everything has value in God’s creation, and only the wicked can nullify, naught-ify God’s valuable things; the word originally meant, “possessing nothing”.

 

• In 1984, when I was editor of the college literary magazine, we received a poem  that was a sort of broken haiku, no art to it, really, just a line:  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck our love goes down the scum river.”  It was terrible, and obscene, and the editorial committee had a good laugh, but here I am thirty years later, reciting it fondly from memory, and publishing it.

 

• My brother is a metalhead and likes to take his children to metal concerts; it’s a family affair.  The Jackson County Fair featured a visit by the now-venerable Godsmack, a name that did not please my mother.  “I hope you’re not going to see that GODSPANK,” she warned my heedless brother. I love Godspank—it sounds dirtier than the merely sarelegious she disapproved of.  Don’t tell my mom, but I think she invented a new obscenity.  And that’s a compliment, for there can be a beauty to obscenity; the crime of cursing is the crime of cliché (which is a terrible crime, the poet’s sacrilege).

 

• Thomas Bowdler’s name was turned into a verb. He was the one who edited out all the naughty parts of Shakespeare, to produce The Family Shakespeare.  Out, out darn spot.  If my name were to be turned into a verb, to Bouldreyize would mean that one make naughty things that were not naughty in the first place.

 

• A very memorable and prurient thing happened when that great lyric intelligence, Kate Daniels came to visit our campus a couple of years ago.  The eponymous poem of her collection, “A Walk Through Victoria’s Secret” (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), is about old bras and lactating and the life of, well, boobs.  Daniels’ poems, full of long lines and generous narrative and a mind that transforms politics and sex and history and her own life into a beautiful music.  Because I am often making things naughty, I turned to my colleague and collaborateur, John Bresland, The Straight Guy I Know.  “Are men really turned on by Victoria’s Secret underwear?”

 

• “Brian,” he said, “my fondest fantasy is to be the captain of a fishing trawler that rides down Michigan Avenue and crashes through the glass doors of the Victoria’s Secret flagship store.”  More than fantasy, this obscenity felt like myth.  A few months later, I was walking along the Thames in London, and saw John’s fantasy a reality.

 

• But I have made too naughty a collection of poems that are so vital to the body, the body politic, and sex.  There is a poem I can’t stop thinking about, “Doc”, a poem about an attempt at interracial love and lust, a narrative that would offend hateful hearts but breaks mine.  I keep thinking about the t-bone steaks of this poem, and the line, “No one who could possibly care/Knew we were there, alone, reverberating/ Inside the prison house of history,/Longing to touch each other/ Free from context.”  The beauty of obscenity is trying to escape the prison of history and old narrative, to write a new story that will seem an obscenity to the thick-blooded. 

 

• The burden of our terrible history, of our bodies, of racism and sexism, perhaps it can be lightened just for a moment by lyricism.  “Sing sorrow, sorrow, but let good win out in the end,” laments the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon.  That’s what Kate Daniels does.

 

Doc

 

His last name is lost now, misfiled
In the archives of my personal history
But I've never forgotten him,
That cute, black, pre-med sophomore
From Lafayette, Louisiana, who wore
Aviator glasses and tattered khakis,
So intent on becoming a surgeon
His roommates called him Doc.
I remember he lived on the ground
Floor of a garden apartment with sliding
Doors and vertical blinds that one of us
Must have locked and twirled shut
To ensure our privacy. Grilled t-bones
Decorated our plates, and while we cut and chewed,
I regaled him with an anecdote of poor Ted Roethke,
So psychotic in his mania, he believed
He was a lion. "Bring me a steak,"
He said to the waiter. "Don't cook it. Just
Bring it." And for some reason, both of us
Laughed. Then I quoted the phrase I had always loved,
"Suddenly I knew how to enter the life of everything around me."

In the silence after that, the end of the evening
Approached quickly. I could taste the beef grease
On my lips, and feel its heaviness in my gut.
The hot, arousing smell of cooked flesh
Filled the air between us. And before I realized it,
Doc was leaning toward me, his eyes limpid
Behind the huge lenses of his glasses,
His mouth relaxed, his hands soft.
I could find nothing in his face
To frighten me, and something old
Inside was punctured and started to empty,
Draining itself like a boil, or a chancre.  
And though that felt like a healing, poison
Still poured out dampening the space
where Doc and I now stood, close enough
To smell each other...
 
No one who could possibly care
Knew we were there, alone, reverberating
Inside the prison house of history,
Longing to touch each other
Free from context. One kiss
Would transform me to the n***r-lover
My old friends determined I'd become.
And Doc would be pilloried beside me
For impersonating the race-traitor
A black man loving a white girl
Was called back then...
All it would take to free ourselves
From the old narratives and continuous
Loop reruns of our national nightmare
Was six more inches and a slight elevation
Of my quivering chin. The lower halves
Of our bodies were already touching,
And Doc's arms looped loosely, encompassing
My ass. But when I touched him,
When I raised my hands and fit them
On the smooth brown bulges
Of his muscled biceps, the automatic ignition
Of cultural reproduction switched on,
And the feeling that filled me then
Was something like a rush of wings
Unfurling and souring the room
With a musty odor...  For a few hours,
Doc and I had cleared the air
Of racial difference and met
Each other in a rare element, debrided
Of color.  Now, as our bodies clamored
For the culmination, clouds of old history
Reverse-fumigated the room, and something
As ominous and unambiguously black
As Poe's raven, croaking its warning,
Nevermore, infected the room. Thus,
I tensed and flexed before I turned my cheek
To make a landing pad for the silken slide
Of Doc's sweet lips on my schoolgirl's skin.
And then, without looking again
Into his beautiful eyes, I picked up
The cage I had brought, and turned to go.  
I fitted the quilted cover down over the silver bars
And listened to that darkness quiet
Instantaneously the creature that lived
      inside.                         
Then I bore it away with me, swinging
In my hands, and walked home alone,             
through the darkened, shuttered streets.

 Kate Daniels, you were great in bed the first time.  I am always trying to keep up with you. SMOOCH.

Announcing the Poetry in Motion Springfest: Come one, come all to Vanderbilt Hall on April 26 and 27, 2014

If you haven't visited New York City's Grand Central Terminal in a while, this weeked would be a great time to go. Take in the beauty and energy of this New York City landmark and enjoy the POETRY IN MOTION SPRINGFEST:

A Two-Day Festival of Poetry, April 26-27, 2014
Vanderbilt Hall, Grand Central Terminal

On Saturday, April 26 and Sunday, April 27, in celebration of National Poetry Month, MTA Arts for Transit & Urban Design presents Poetry in Motion Springfest, in partnership with the Poetry Society of America, the nation's oldest poetry organization. The program was inspired by New York State Poet Laureate Marie Howe, Arts for Transit's de facto Poet in Residence, who is dedicated to bringing poetry to everyone in the metropolitan area.

The celebration is free and open to the public and takes place in Grand Central Terminal's Vanderbilt Hall from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. on both days, featuring a variety of poetry activities:  

•  The Poet is In: an array of award-winning poets, including NY State Poet Laureate Marie Howe, Brooklyn Poet Laureate Tina Chang and Bob Holman, founder of the Bowery Poetry Café, will sit in a booth (inspired by Lucy's booth from the Peanuts comic strip) and write poems for those who request one;
• Two interactive installations from students of Poetry Everywhere, a collaborative class taught by Howe and Gabriel Barcia-Colombo at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, Tisch School of the Arts: Vital Signs: Pulse Poems by Sarah Rothberg, which projects verses based on a reader's pulse, and Deer Dear by Yu-Ting Feng, which invites the viewer to help a deer with writer's block compose a poem.
• The Poet is You: writing activities for young people to compose poems and display them (ages 6 and up; space is limited. RSVP required. Register at www.nycharities.com)
• Poetry Projections from the popular program Poetry in Motion® will be projected on walls, designed by artist Gabriel Barcia-Colombo;
• The Human Mic:  Call-and-response recitations of poems by American poets Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and Lucille Clifton.  (No previous experience necessary.)  
• Music Under New York: A variety of musicians from the MUNY program will perform throughout the festival.
• …And other surprise guests!

"Springfest brings our beloved Poetry in Motion® program to a grand setting, with a weekend of poetry and music inside the elegant Vanderbilt Hall. Millions of riders discover poetry in subway cars, but Springfest gives them the opportunity to experience firsthand the feeling of reciting and writing it. Whether it is meeting poets or engaging in one of the interactive installations, there will be so many ways to create a personal moment in an inspiring public space," said Sandra Bloodworth, Director, MTA Arts for Transit & Urban Design.

"The Poetry Society of America is committed to placing poetry at the crossroads of American life, and Grand Central Terminal is an ideal arena for fulfilling this mission. The PSA is honored to collaborate with MTA Arts for Transit & Urban Design and New York State's Poet Laureate Marie Howe and all the other marvelous artists and poets who will contribute to this exuberant feast of literary and artistic offerings.  Come one, come all to Vanderbilt Hall on April 26 and 27, 2014," said Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America.

For a full schedule of events, please consult www.mta.info/art or www.poetrysociety.org/events

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 2

On Monday, April 21, 2014 at 12:27 PM David Lehman wrote:

 

Dear Megan, Betty, and Henry, and hello to Harry Crane,

You were absent last night so I thought I'd let you know what you missed.

It is Valentine’s Day 1969. There will be two declarations of love and a lot of flowers. The amorous blonde real-estate agent, a California girl in the Beach Boys sense, tells Pete she loves his flowers and him. He's luckier than he knows. But unhappy.

The unhappiest of the lot is Peggy, who doesn’t know it’s Valentine’s Day until teammates Stan and Ginsberg point this out in the morning elevator. She thinks the roses sent to her secretary (Shirley) by her fiancé (Charles) are meant for her and must have been sent by Ted. Wishful thinking takes the form of hysteria and she sends messages to LA-based Ted  -- as morose and enigmatic as ever – that he must find incomprehensible and so he ignores them. It made me review the history of her love life: Pete, Duck, the leftwing journalist she calls “the Jew” when she and her mother have a fight. That’s it.

Now there are two black secretaries. No one can tell them apart so Shirley calls Dawn Shirley, and Dawn calls Shirley Dawn. The symmetry of their situations on this day (each is transferred, but not fired, by disgruntled bosses) makes its point about the evolution of racism: from segregation and exclusion to marginalization and suspicion. I hate myself for using the word “marginalization” but am too lazy to think of something better.

Joan gets an office of her own. On relations of bosses and secretaries: “Scarlett and Harry are practically married.” Getting it on with his secretary is a longtime Harry trait. For the first time it occurs to me that Harry Crane has the same name as Harold Hart Crane but has nothing else in common with the author of “The Bridge.”

Roger gives off an air of defeat.  In the street someone has said to him, “Mind your own business, Kike.” Was it because he was wearing a homburg? Who still wears a hat in 1969? Only the Jews.

Lou or Lew (who occupies Don’s office) remains clueless, insensitive. What does he do all day?

Memorable lines: “Keep pretending. That’s your job.” (Dawn).  “No one feels my existence” (Pete). “Just cash your checks. You’re going to die someday.” (Ted).

Sally Draper, beautiful in makeup, remains the truth-teller. “Do you still love Megan?” “Why don’t you tell her you don’t want to move to Los Angeles?” On the car radio as her dad drives her back to her prep school: “Eleanor” by the Turtles.

Don sleeps late, watches “The Little Rascals” and sit coms on TV, measures how much Canadian Club he’s drinking per day, pays Dawn for office info. Writes note to excuse Sally’s absence. What should he write? The truth, she says. And when she asks why he is not working, he says he told the truth about himself – but at the wrong time and place, to the wrong people. And what is the truth? “Nothing you don’t know.”

The old Don, poker-faced, tells Sally that they are going to leave the diner without paying. But it’s a joke, and they smile in recognition of the rogue impulses that link them.  So when she tells her dad, before closing the car door, “Happy Valentine’s Day. I love you,” it is not just a formula she utters but. . .the truth.

Love,

Trudy [Campbell]

(I wasn't there either but turned up in a Smirnoff's commercial: "Done and done.")

On Monday, Apr 21, 2014 at 4:57 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear Trudy,

Excellent summary of the show. You did look fetching in that Smirnoff commercial (though, SORRY!, the wisdom of choosing that cheap muscle rub over, say, grey goose, absolut, Stoli, or many others (almost any other self respecting vodka!) escapes me. You truly looked grand , pretty, and relaxed with your long hair, half dancing down the liquor store aisle, and you’ve slimmed down since the baby. All this proves that you’ve only prospered since giving that philandering Pete the boot (at least we can cling to this belief till a new episode contradicts us.) Hope Tammy is doing well. Off in the wilds of distant, uncharted california, Pete’s looking jowly, paunchy and dressing like an over the hill golf pro , in case that gives you a secret twinge of vengeful pleasure.

Sally Draper wins an emmy for darkest eyebrows on a female on tv, except on occasions when a Frida Kahlo biopic is being shown. The heavy black brows suit her, and seem to be a direct genetic reference to how intensely she is spawn of Don. Yes, Sally is shaping up to be quite a beauty, not surprising given her pedigree, and at bottom, daddy’s girl.

Bout time Joan got her own office!!

Will someone please find Peggy a handsome, kind, calm, understanding, patient boyfriend? Before she brings a pistol to work or starts having to mark her liquor bottles as Don is doing, just to keep track of personal consumption. Maybe she’ll get addicted to valium?

Funny tech difficulties with coast to coast intercoms of the era, waaaaay pre Skype.

 Great double entendres about dating and sex flying across the table during Don’s well lubricated lunch with another ad man who might woo him away from his current position, eg “Don’t spoil the mood,” “I’m just looking for love” etc.

Sally’s private school pals cram into a little femmy dorm room, envying their classmate whose mother has just died...with Sally allowing as how she’d give anything to “get Betty underground.”

Lou is so repugnant (that actor is doing a great job making us hate him, with very little, few lines, no backstory at this point) that I am looking forward to some kind of horrendous disgrace befalling him soon, hopefully at the hands of a woman.

Did Roger send Joan flowers on valentine’s day, saying they were from her (their!!!) son? Were we ever given a plot twist that dispensed once and for all with Joan’s inept armed forces surgeon husband? How is her little boy? How’s her love life?

Oh Peggy! You haven’t found the way to be a generous, fair, good tempered boss. You’re channeling all the wrong parts of Don. Your innocence is turning to brittleness too soon.

Till next week,

Megan, Betty, and Henry

 

Find "Point Counterpoint" Season 7 Episode 1 here.

MAUREEN MCLANE, YOU WERE GREAT IN BED [Brian Bouldrey]

My great friend and longtime editor Miriam got her start, as so many of us do, editing porn.  She worked for a group of magazines aimed at the straight male market with names that sound classy (High Society, Swank, Club International, Juggs (everybody wants sex to be something akin to putting on the Ritz—if you want to find a gay bar in Europe, just look for the “gentleman’s club” sign featuring the tuxedo, top hat, and monocle of a silhouetted Mr. Peanut (are we out of all the parentheticals yet?))).  Miriam’s job was to “clean up” the letters to the editor, full of reader fantasies and experiences.  And yes, as you may have suspected, she was also the author of many of the letters. 

“There were a lot of real ones,” she reflected on those golden days of yore.  “The guys who wrote about liking boobs needed the most work.  All those misspellings, the bad grammar, the dull repetitive motorboating.”  But the letters written by the perverts?  The constructors of auto-erotic Rube Goldberg machines, the purveyors of props made from ordinary household appliances, the dreams of naked cheerleading pyramids and mile-high encounters—“they were always well-written and hardly needed my edits.”  Just as I suspected: the perverts are smarter and more creative.

I’m not saying Maureen McLane wrote letters to Swank, but I’ve never seen a line of poetry she wrote that I felt the need to edit, even if they are fragmentary, momentary, glimpsed, gone.  Perhaps that is because it doesn’t seem as if McLane entirely crafted the rhyme and rhythm of her poems—I love that it is as if she is a force of nature, one that chisels the words and images out of the glaciers or granite she writes about.  McLane is always finding the lyricism in the world, or carving it out of the rock and putting it on the page.  Like Paul Bunyan, she knows how to move large things around a landscape with ease and elegance.  She sits upon the roof of each poetic shanty and squeezes the logs so tightly together that no chinking is necessary.

Incarnation

Some are gay

In an old way.

It has its charms.

 

The kids are like

Hey…wassup…

Except they don’t say

Wassup.  Hey.

 

The women with children

Who are nonetheless

Virgins.  Mrs. Dalloway.

 

The body a nest

Of sockets

And unplugged cords.

 

The body without

Organs has finally arrived

Its wireless folds

 

Almost tangible.

Years ago

I wanted to die

 

When you made me feel

We were fungible,

Everything repeatable.

 

Later I floated

Like a spirit

In a spirit photograph

Above my life.

 

I shared a skin

with my skin.

I was in

my  life not of.

I hovered above.

 

Then I descended

A millennial reincarnation

Surprising myself o

Out of that ghost.

 

Carnations grow

In sandy soil.

You can touch

Them. Hey.

 

And there are things that other people say, which sound like music to her and us, she quotes somebody saying, in “Glacial Erratic”,

“I need to write

Good fast music.

All my good music

Is slow.”

She may have said that and quoted herself, or somebody else may have said that, but it seems the battle cry of This Blue, McLane’s latest set of songs just out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).  This month I am the guy carrying around this new volume, even if Maureen hasn’t signed it for me yet.  I love that she is not afraid to give voice to base thoughts as well as wise ones, so that she opens the door to the body, in the mind/body dialogue. 

She’s always respectful and sometimes abashed by environment and time, the continuum where life goes on.  The pastoral plenty can sometimes overwhelm. “There are too many cedars here,” she laments in “Haunt”, a poem in her previous collection, after a poem in which there are a lot of cedars, which leads to putting her elbows in bird shit. “Have I been resting my elbows in birdshit?” she asks, then, “I have been resting/my elbows in birdshit!” The world, like the mind, is fecund.  Sometimes we get our elbows dirty.

In This Blue there’s plenty of perv: “All Good” has boy anuses, “That Man” may be Sappho with a low opinion of that man, and there are boobs, libertines, and sex in “Tell Us What Happened After We Left”

They Were Not Kidding in the Fourteenth Century

They were not kidding
when they said they were blinded
by a vision of love.

It was not just a manner
of speaking or feeling
though it’s hard to say

how the dead
really felt harder
even than knowing the living.

You are so opaque
to me your brief moments
of apparent transparency

seem fraudulent windows
in a Brutalist structure
everyone admires.

The effort your life
requires exhausts me.
I am not kidding.

 

“The body is a nest of unplugged cords.”  Maureen McLane is so good at plugging us in and getting plugged in.  You will love This Blue.  You want somebody smart in bed.  Because heavy petting is more fun and less work than heavy editing.

 

 

 

PAUL BUNYAN, YOU WERE GREAT IN BED [by Brian Bouldrey]

             I am of two minds about pretty much everything—I’ll growl against the Death of the Book but when I have to move my books to a new household, I wish death upon my books.  Moving my books makes me ask the great philosophical question of the age, “What is a book?”  The object, the thing on the shelf with paper and stitching and all those words, letters like ants toiling in an antfarm.  What books do I send away, what books do I keep, in my home, in my office, in the lackadaisical lending library?  The ones that fill my home, then, are well-beloved because so ponderous.  They are souvenirs.  Souvenirs of having spent a period of my life with the book (I will always remember that Christmas with Buddenbrooks; that feverish “vacation” in Cabo with Thom Gunn’s Man with Night Sweats; the nowhere legal proofreading job mostly spent reading Proust with Jessica).  Those books are near my bed.  So are the ones that I re-read when I’m sick at heart (always poetry when I am sick at heart, ALWAYS, I read poetry like the broken-hearted drunk-dialing old lovers). 

And there are the books that have been signed by their authors.  I like the signature, for the same souvenir reason—Borges said, “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”  I like to be surrounded by the bodies of these remarkable people.  Call me morbid. People are their books, they really are.  The book that should have made the author’s career because she is better than those reviews, I cradle in my arms like an ignored child.

Among my signed editions, I have a very special collection of souvenirs, books signed in a very special way.  They have the frisson of intimacy to them.  They say, literally (and I know how that word is thrown around these days, so literally, “literally”), “For Brian-You were great in bed!”  And there are, as of this writing, 69 volumes with this inscription.  “Never have I experienced such pleasure,” writes Dan Chaon in my copy of Await Your Reply, “You have touched me in places I did not know existed.”  “What a magic wand (wink wink),” extols Achy Obejas on the title page of Ruins.  Are any of these inscriptions true?  Why ask?  You are people dedicated to literature.  Fiction is epistemologically truer than history. Back off.  Let’s just say this collection of “souvenirs” is based on a true story.

Many have wanted to jump on the bandwagon.  Few have balked.  Some have slipped around it with “You were great in bread” and “You were great in bed, wish I had been there.” The most vulgar and enthusiastic signators are the children’s book authors and the academics—they never get to be naughty, and here’s that big chance.

But it’s the poets—oh, you poets.  You talk like the demons who threaten Buffy the Vampire Slayer before she stabs the shit out of them, all obscure hyperbole, metaphor, and blank verse.   “With thanks for our nocturnal maneuvers together.”  “Thanatos grappling with eros: the memory lingers….” Come on you guys.  You want into the library or not? There’s a script.  Stick to the script.  

This is the part where I say, thank GOD there is no script for poetry.  If I ask you to stick to the script, don’t listen to me.

Books are great in bed.  My friend Gwenan was reminiscing this week about the death of Gabriel Garcia Marquez about first reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, “I read it over a weekend in 1986, only stopping to eat and sleep.  It was like an affair.”  I love my favorite writers the way I love lovers.  My favorite place to have a writer is in bed.  From boyhood, I took my favorite books to bed, and hid under the covers with them.  Paul Bunyan, for example.  Work Giant.  Among other things.  Paul Bunyan, you were great in bed.

There have been poets who have pleased me with their inscriptions and their poetry.  I have taken them to bed—if not in the flesh, then in the word.  I have wrestled with them, thanatos and eros.  In the next few days, I’m going to feature a few bedmates of mine, poems by poets who know what “good in bed” means.

Leslie McGrath is a fine poetic bedmate of mine, and here is a beautiful poem to kick us off—something to wrinkle the sheets of her first collection, Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage (Main Street Rag, 2009).  By way of introduction, it is my opinion that every self-respecting poet should have a decent cunnilingus poem.  Even if it’s a theoretical cunnilingus poem, which is the sort of cunnilingus poem I would write.  McGrath’s cunnilingus poem is a real cunnilingus poem.  Listen to the other beats in her line; sometimes what you think is meter is a lyricism of beats, a lubrication of alliteration and all the other marvelous figures of repetition that the up and down and round and round of sex and dance and fun.  McGrath can teach us all something about motion in the ocean!

Oooo Oooo

I like animals with faces

like yours; animals

who stand on all twos, whose

bicameral hearts

beat hot cha-chas

in thoracic palaces

while a hip’s marimba lick

goes noticed, goes

goddamn she fine

while all the while

those hands they

skitter, slip up, rake down,

part me like a monkey

splits a mango, sticks

his animal mouth in there, his

animal tongue in there, his

animal face like yours.

 

Watch for lots more poetic bedroom activity this week in the new, repaired Best American Poetry!

Freud Quiz #31: The Acquisition of Power over Fire [by David Lehman]

To explain how man acquired the power of fire, Freud appeals to which of the following:

(1) The story of Prometheus, the Titan, who stole the fire of the gods and gave it to humankind, hidden in a phallic-shaped hollow rod. For this crime he was punished most vilely: each day a vulture feasted on his liver, which in ancient times was regarded as the seat of all passion and desires.

(2) The organ that Heine describes in these lines: "Was dem Menscen dient zum Seichen / Damit schafft er Seinesgleichen." ["With that which serves a man to piss / He reproduces his own kind."] The child thinks he can do both things at once. But the adult knows that "the two acts are as incompatible as fire and water."

(3) The fact that the penis is sometimes in a fiery state of excitation that justifies calling it a cock in English (or a vogel, or bird, in German). In such a state, urination is impossible

(4) The example of fictional characters such as Gargantua and Pantagruel in Rabelais and Gulliver in Swift [see illustration] who put out fires by pissing on them, dramatizing that such an action is natural and must be renounced by mankind if we are going to achieve civilization and its attendant discontents.

(5) Hercules can achieve his triumph over the hydra-headed water-snake of Lerna only when he uses fire to burn out the snake's one immortal head -- which seems counter to the thrust of our argument until we "reverse the manifest content."

(6) All of the above. -- DL

Contemporary Canadian Poetry [by Eduardo C. Corral]

This week I'm featuring the work of Souvankham Thammavongsa.

At the Farm

I was sitting in the car counting the black flies



They had come in through the open window



There were four



One was on the rearview mirror



The other three were perched on my left hand



I heard a gunshot by the barn and thought nothing of it



We were at a farm



I saw a cow come charging forward with half its head gone



A man with an axe came running behind it



He hit it once



Once he hit it



And it fell to the ground



Everything was eaten



Its eye appeared in a soup that night



Everything was accounted for

Noor

The Arabic word for light 



Two circles sit side by side 



Twins, equal in size and shape and the space they both contain 



They had been made to be like each other 



Up there, one contains all light



Kept at a distance, as far away as a lost love, a hope long past, an apology 

that changes nothing 



The other by its proximity seems only to have light, a compass for 

the sun, a backseat to, a smaller sidekick 



On this sheet of paper, these two circles look to be the same, as close in 

likeness as they could ever be 



Stripped of light, one is like the other, as small, as equal, as alone 

Stouffville

The houses rise up overnight,

brushing over fields of dandelions,

bright circles

soon to be grey fluff. 

It seems the swans

don't know yet. 

The reservoir now a parking lot,

row upon row of outlines of white. 

Ever loyal to daylight and rain

but never quite knowing how hard the storm,

soaked and stooped,

they keep their manners

in all of this. They still come out, preened,

their long white necks bending,

a curtain call, a curtsy,

bending and bowing down,

bowing down, down low for bits of that sun. 

Postcard

The real hour of the day is not known



The sky is blue-grey



The snow is flat in these fields



Bare trees line themselves along the horizon like shards from black glass



The sun, if it will rise today, will begin on the left



Every shape of cloud has been here once



In an hour, the buildings will be the first to rise into view



Each building, a neat ordering of glass and light



Nearby a needle sticks out



Two circles at the pointed end, a thread-through, the start of a beading



These circles are different in size



They do nothing but offer us a different view of ourselves



An assemblage of pretty dots and moving bits



Into this, we are coming for the real hour of the day

(Poems from Light by Souvankham Thammavongsa, copyright 2013 by Pedlar Press)

Q&A

Nick Thran: When you began to lay all of these poems out together and think of the book as a whole, how much did the subject and presence of light throughout just naturally settle into its various pools and angles, and how much did you have to go in like a technician in order to switch bulbs, adjust the brightness, etc.?

Souvankham Thammavongsa: I always begin with the idea of the whole book. I know I am writing a book from the beginning. I worked from the whole first.

I'm interested in repetition and space and margins. I am interested in what it means to have very little. I knew writing about light would touch on all those things, or I was going to make it do that.

One of the things I struggled with early on was how to sustain the energy of the word--I didn't want to keep looking for the word light and I didn't want it to be predictable. Sometimes I hid it inside another word like "flight" or used another language or hid it behind an emotionally charged event or made the tone of the poem carry it. Sometimes I relied on a different meaning of the word or just the sound. The poems when read together were "in light of" the other. The idea of light and the word light work the way the grid does when you are beginning to draw. Eventually, you don't need it. You stop looking at the lines and there's a drawing there. What it took to get each poem to fall into the whole of the book felt very unnatural. I knew something equally unnatural should happen in the work and I think it takes place in the bareness and the clarity of the language.

Bios

Nick Thran is the author of two poetry collections: Every Inadequate Name (Insomniac Press, 2006) which was a finalist for The Gerald Lampert Award (Canada's prize for debut collections), and Earworm (Nightwood Editions, 2011) which won the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Arc, The Best Canadian Poetry 2010, Geist, Maisonneuve, and The Walrus.

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in a Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand in 1978. She has written three poetry books, the most recent of which is Light (Pedlar Press, 2013). Light won the 2013 Bookie Award for Best Book of Canadian Poetry. Her first book, Small Arguments, won a ReLit prize, and her second collection, Found, was made into a short film by Paramita Nath and screened at film festivals worldwide.

(photo credit Jennifer Rowsom)

My Mother and Marijuana [by Stacey Harwood]

My Mother's Hands, April, 2013

My mother was a grade school teacher for over 30 years. She taught both 3rd grade and kindergarten in the public school system and was one of those teachers who changed the display outside of her class room for every season and holiday. She made intricate murals that were quite beautiful and imaginative. She used craft paper and cotton fluff and whatever else was on hand and would cut out shapes with scissors and paste them to the background. I seem to remember helping her but I'm not certain that I did.

My mother in one of her aprons.

My mother was also a talented seamstress: She made aprons and a set of kitchen curtains for every season. She made a play circus tent that fit over a card table. She made fake-fur slip covers for giant rolls of bubble wrap that we used for seating (my father was a plastics salesman and "sealed air" was one of his customers).  She knew how to mend things and taught me how to do the same. ("Mend" is such an antique word.) She sewed our Halloween costumes and matching outfits for my sisters and me. A lot of cross-stitch and rick rack were involved.

My brother Hunter ready for trick or treat

L to R: Hunter, Stacey, Tami, and Amy Harwood

This is all to say that in addition to working with her mind, my mother loved working with her hands; it breaks my heart that she is unable to do so anymore because of her severe arthritis. It is only with great difficulty that she can unscrew a bottle or open a bag of frozen vegetables. Plus, she's in constant pain. "You don't know the half of it," she said, when I asked her how bad it had gotten.

When I read about the relief that marijuana brings to arthritis sufferers I was eager to find a way for my mother to try it. I didn't want her to get high -- she lives alone -- so the usual delivery systems were not an option. There were recipes online for a tincture that could be applied topically but I had no way of controlling the strength or safety of something I would concoct myself. I've followed the medical marijuana scene closely and am impressed with what the communities are coming up with in California, Seattle, and Colorado. It seemed we would have to wait for marijuana use to be legal in New York. Given that our legislature is particularly corrupt and unable to act, I'm not expecting legalization to happen any time soon.

Then, a few months ago friends visited from San Francisco.  Turned out that they knew someone who knew the person behind "Doc Green's Pain Relief Cream."  A few weeks after our friends returned home, a well disguised package arrived with a 4 oz jar of lavender scented theapeutic cream inside. My mother's early April birthday seemed the perfect occassion for her to give it a try.

The cream has a silky texture and is lightly scented. "It feels lovely when I put it on," says my mother. And yes, it helps a lot with the pain. She's been using it on her shoulder. The only downside she says, is that she doesn't get high. Maybe I'll bring a joint the next time I visit her. -- SDH

Mary Jane and Mary Warner [by DL]

Who would have guessed that the path to legalization would go through medicine first and then commerce? You would have thought the example of Prohibition -- how ineffective it was, how unpopular, how much crime it bred -- would have brought about reefer acceptance twenty years ago.

No doubt the odds would have been better if Clinton hadn't said "I didn't inhale." (Notice the syntactical repetition: "I didn't inhale," "I didn't have sex with that woman.") My friend points out that the two Super Bowl teams this year came from the two states that have legalized pot for recreational use: Colorado and Washington. CNBC is running hour-long documentaries on how growers are handling product, reaping profits. Tax revenues are enticing. Whole new markets are opening for aroma-free pipes to give you a pure experience.

It's happening not only because greed is a great incentive but also because the product in question has many beneficial effects and is highly popular among almost every political constituency but mostly because greed is a great incentive. I say it's happening because I can see the wall of worry that will have to be climbed for Mary Jane to make it -- or, to alter the metaphor, the residue when your dreams go up in smoke.

On such a day it's pleasant to recall that Louis Armstrong kissed Mary Warner daily, not just on 4:20 of 4/20, but maybe especially so on the day after the end of pailndrome week, when each day was numerically the same backward and forward ( 4 / 19 / 14). Such mathematical certitude is as blessed and rare as the conjunction of the mind and the opposition of the stars in Andrew Marvell's "Definition of Love."

-- DL

the conjunction of the Mind, And opposition of the Stars. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16162#sthash.GRMWMH2f.dpuf

Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by James Stotts

Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and Little Star Weekly, its mobile app version, will be offering a poem every Sunday this spring. This is her inaugural post.

The sixteen poems by James Stotts that we published in our very first issue of Little Star were, I believe the first poems he ever published, or nearly.  I received them from my colleague the poet Melissa Green, who wrote to me, “Oh, my dear, but we've found one of the Tribe, the James Stotts I wrote to you about. I just haven't had time to send you his poems—he's coming to my new digs with my old roommates […] and we're going to give him succor and kindness and welcome him in. This young man is quietly chewing the bark off trees, alone and without a community—[…] He was born in the Rockies, studied Russian, went to Russia, married a Russian, reads Russian—well I can't tell how well, but his house is full of all our beloved poets—and he seems to have them all in a cellular level...” He certainly did.

Most of Stotts’s poems seemed to share the same horizon, where a dull half-lit sky meets a blighted earth, and a lonely man, hung-over or a little drunk, navigates his way among the world’s last things.  He is saved not by answers but by song: the rhymes come closer, the rhythm approaches the heartbeat, and at the end the language itself seems to offer some simple orientation, a firm bed on which to plant a foot. His unwavering commitment to the lower case requires a moment of adjustment but suits him fine. The reader feels they are eavesdropping on his thoughts, in which he sets so little stock he does not even bother to clothe them in type.  And yet these thoughts are born up from beneath by a stately rhetoric as old as Herbert—and indeed the pivot at his final couplets often calls the metaphysicals to mind.

In “sonnet where i sober up” the speaker looks up to find a sky where the old furniture has fallen into disrepair. The celestial corridors of Tiepolo have been replaced by a parkway with its littered median; the halos surround cop cars’ flashers. Instead of angelic choirs, scuffed bones and hair hoarded by rats. The image shifts to an inadvertent reliquary: our fragments are stashed behind a blind wall by scavengers.  The speaker, hung over, feels the shadow of death in his own body; like Odysseus and Aeneas he’s had a brush with Lethe, but in his Lethe had the upper hand. And then, the turn.  “I piss” (naturally) and “brush off the skin and earth into a little death nest.” Then for the second time he addresses an unknown “you.”  We first met “you” in the first stanza: “this is the hidden meaning of morning by your own admission.” Now, “this is, in your own words, not such a bad place to begin.”

The poem does not invite us to say who is “you.” But we might hear it as both an internal and, in the spirit of the day, external one.  It is characteristic of our diminished expectations that as the poem ends, “begin again” is rhymed with “oblivion.”

—Ann Kjellberg

 

sonnet where i try to sober up

old parkway in the sky, blown

in and out like blinking shoppers through the cloud and ozone

treacly distant nightlights, dying in dust and ruin

this is the hidden meaning of morning by your own admission

 

the products of our lunatic inventory

measured out in the powderblue halos that haunt the cop cars

and the skyblack bones of what’s been redacted:

reenacted bits of bread and clothes the rats stuffed in their holes

hair and glass arrested between the walls and furnace

 

the long invisible threads that led back home

these blueblooded shoeblot eyes, dry and starving after some

brush with lethe—a brittle rubberband oblivion

i piss, brush off the skin and earth into a little death nest

this is, in your own words, not such a bad place to begin again

—James Stotts

Brian Bouldrey, Guest Author April 21-25

This week we welcome back Brian Bouldrey as our guest blogger.   Brian is the author, most recently, of The Peasants and the Mariners (GemmaMedia, 2013).  He has written three nonfiction books; Honorable Bandit: A Walk Across Corsica (University of Wisconsin Press, September 2007), Monster: Adventures in American Machismo (Council Oak Books), and The Autobiography Box (Chronicle Books); three novels, The Genius of Desire (Ballantine), Love, the Magician (Harrington Park), and The Boom Economy (University of Wisconsin Press), and he is the editor of several anthologies. He is recipient of Fellowships from Yaddo and Eastern Frontier Society, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Western Regional Magazine Award.  He is the North American Editor of the Open Door literacy series for GemmaMedia.  Teaches fiction, creative nonfiction, and literature at Northwestern University.

Welcome, Brian.

In other news . . .

We're pleased to announce that once a week for the next several we will feature posts by Ann Kjellberg. Ann is founder and editor of the fine Little Star, an annual journal of poetry and prose, and its mobile app, Little Star Weekly. 

 

-- sdh

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 1

Betty Draper shoots birds (from “Shoot” — Season One, Episode 9)

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 4:16 PM, David Lehman wrote:

Dear January Jones,

How did you like last night's doings?

Here are my observations:

(1) "Poor Peggy." Some things don't change.

(2) So Don is ghosting, and his replacement at the firm is a dullard.

(3) Pete is in a surprisingly good humor. Maybe the 70s, that awful decade, will be good for the likes of him.

(4) Poor Megan. Some things do change.

(5) Do you think we will see more of the passenger who sat next to Don on the flight back to New York?

(6) I agree entirely with the lovely grown-up daughter who forgives her daddy at brunch in the Plaza (but hold, please, the eggs benedict.)

(7) With how many bodies does Roger share his (or whose) bed?

(8) Is Don still living in the NYC flat he owned with Megan -- only it has fallen into disrepair to the extent that he can't close the terrace doors?

(9) Don't throw your lighted cigarettes on the terrace, Don. Only you can stop forest fires.

(10) In transition: Ted; Joan. Absent: Betty, Sally, Bert Cooper. What is Ginsberg thinking?

I love your gin, which I am sipping this very evening.
Love,

David

---

On Friday, Apr 18, 2014 at 8:08 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

 

Hi David,

Due to several categories of glitches, I was not able to watch the mad men episode till last night, hence my delay in responding to your vital 10 part query. And now we viewers have the second episode almost upon us.

1. Poor Peggy indeed. And poor Joan. When will the Mad Men bra burning/Gloria Steinem/1st wave feminist episode be aired?

2. Don's replacement is worse than a dullard, and hopefully will do something really outrageous to get himself run out of the company on a rail so Don can return, UNLESS the move is going to be to have Don start his own renegade agency, maybe in California, rescuing Peggy and Joan and a few other worthies in the process. Likely?

3. Pete is ever vile and deliciously snarky. And he looks horrid in golf shirts! Which is perfect! (or was it a tennis shirt?) How soon will Don boff the blonde real estate babe Peter had his arm around?

4. Poor Megan in so many ways! Which will destroy her first? Her marriage to Don or her having willingly walked into the maw of deepest darkest Hollywood?
5. I would like to see more of the woman on plane. What are the chances?
6. I'm a little fretful about what moves Roger's daughter is going to pull now that she has "forgiven" him. I smell membership in a cult or weird religion on the horizon as the reason she's so "forgiving" now. Maybe born again?
7. Those orgies are going to sap Roger's strength. But I like his spirit of inquiry about everything.
8. I share your confusion about where Don is living now...since he's still being paid maybe he kept that swank flat? Yet with Megan's rent in Laurel Canyon or Hollywood Hills, or wherever she moved, and her not seeming to be employed in movies and TV quite yet, perhaps he's had to take a smaller cheaper place where the doors stick? What are those doors a metaphor for?
9. Yes, forest fires and coyotes...this is what passes for a portrait of California.
10. I wish you and Stacey were bi-coastal as Mad Men now seems to be!

Going to a Dodger game tonight. They are playing the Diamondbacks. Hope they squash them.

much love,

a.

More on de Man on Demand [by Jim Cummins]

Brooks Hits the Canvas

(Ed note: Here is one of many responses to Peter Brooks' review of Evelyn Barish's The Strange Case of Paul de Man. You can find David Lehman's letter to the NYRB here.)

If you read Brooks' reply you see immediately the man's intellectual dishonesty and bad faith.  His first sentence launches an ad hominem attack: since Lehman is "already on record as a vehement detractor" of de Man, this naturally discredits all Lehman's opinions about de Man.  This obvious ploy conveniently allows Brooks to avoid addressing any of the documented evidence that led Lehman to his (supposed) vehemence in the first place.  (By the way, is calling de Man a "scoundrel" really vehemence, or just a simple statement of fact?)  In this manner, Brooks is able to occlude and dismiss the real issue(s) at hand!  Incredible.

But this is in keeping with what Brooks does to Barish: he substitutes his own trope--in her case, "Mr. Ripley"--then attacks the trope as if it were her argument.  Again, as with Lehman, he conveniently allows himself the freedom to smear Barish with a trope that has nothing to do with Barish, Paul de Man, or the facts at issue, thereby relieving himself of the responsibility for answering any of her actual arguments.  A few flaws in her book somehow dismiss the overwhelming case she makes against de Man?  I don't think so.

There's some poison in the Charles River that has been seeping into the soil and air there since 1620 at least.  I did a study a few years ago in which I researched three books of essays on Mark Twain.  These books were from a series called generally the "Twentieth Century Views" series--each volume was a collection on one major writer--that were published in the 1960's and sold widely to undergraduate populations as basic critical support of the pantheon.  I forget the precise figures, but the essays had something like almost an 80% correlation to Harvard; that is, nearly 80% of the authors of the essays had been educated at Harvard, or taught there, or both.  One of the authors, Leo Marx, is primarily responsible for the negative reading of the last third of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that obtains even to this day for most readers.  From our perspective, Marx's reading can now be seen as a whitewashing, unconscious or not, of the smug racist (and anti-Semitic) "liberalism" that permeated the genteel WASP boys'-club culture at Harvard (not to mention the other Ivies)--a culture that Twain sought to razz and expose and demolish in HF.

Peter Brooks took his B.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard.  Throw in the disgraceful actions by Harry Levin, et al, and the entire American side of the de Man saga ends up being a Columbo episode, where the whole Harvard muck out of which Brooks surfaces becomes apparent to the viewer, if not to the villain(s).  With this tasty addition: the irony of deconstructionists and their apologists pulling in an authority-system from "outside" the "language game" is rich, very rich, indeed.