The Best American Poetry

Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Glyn Maxwell

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 sixth post.

Glyn Maxwell is sometimes considered a “difficult” poet, but not in the tricky, jocular manner of John Ashbery or Paul Muldoon. Maxwell challenges because the progress of his poems follows their inner, musical logic to an unusually intimate degree; his poems compel his readers to learn another way of thinking. 

For his signature poem “This Whiteness,” a kind of ars poetica, we are lucky to have a Rosetta Stone of sorts in his newish book On Poetry. On Poetry reminds us that the poet facing the blank page is also the poet facing extinction; the whiteness on the poem’s right side is nothingness pressed back, by the something of the poem. The whiteness of the poem is also silence, and its darkness, its mark, is breath.  The whiteness is also time, and the poem its conquest—the conquest of time through form.  Hence in “This Whiteness” the poem begins threatened by an avalanche—an annihilating onslaught of whiteness that also threatens suffocation and extinction.

The poem, set at an alpine ski resort, “begins” four times, each time nearly defeated by whiteness and rallying.  Its speaker envisions himself first as a skier, outracing an avalanche of snow, “motion caught.” Then a climber sheltering himself in “these little stanzas” against a predatory wildness, the whiteness. Each start moves closer to his human reality. In the third start he’s in the town at the mountain’s base and spots an “angel,” an emissary of whiteness (“I ran from a word like that but I didn’t make it”). In On Poetry Maxwell writes that for a poem to thrive against whiteness it needs “a heartbeat,” and here, as so often, it finds its heartbeat in yearning (the love song, the elegy).  The angel disappears of course (“I’m bereft like she was everything”), but the speaker, lingering without purpose, has “earned a stripe from whiteness”; they spend the day together; it leaves its card.

It’s lovely that this existential confrontation plays out in the wry imagination of a person not skiing at a ski resort, a marginal plight if there ever was one, watching the day unfold as changing light on snow (whiteness becomes blue by the end of the day, like the sky, the celestial infinity). Its concluding valhalla (small v), where heroes linger: a café table with a view on an empty chairlift, quite a quotidian Jacob’s ladder.

For Maxwell form is a poem’s musculature, but his form, recalling Frost’s, is deeply organic. Its repetitions and shadows are the instruments of his logic, and that’s why his poems can seem so hypnotic and mysterious.  The line-break, as he writes in On Poetry, is the poem’s fortification against the nothingness of the white side, and mastering it is the foundation of poetry’s power.  In “This Whiteness” skiing is the shadowy metaphor for the poem’s reversals.  (Brodsky, who has a cameo here, makes a similar case in his essay on Rilke, “Ninety Years Later,” arguing that the “turn” of verse—Latin, versus—had its origin in the Greek orthographic practice of boustrophedon, named for the turns of an ox while plowing. As in “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” the poem discussed by Brodsky, “This Whiteness” features decisive turns.  The angel turns away from the speaker—“typical angel”—and then the speaker from her—“when I glance back … her place is taken.”)

Accordingly, this poem works its turns, with subtle outside rhymes of the first and fourth lines, plus multiple internal echoes, to build its little shelter against the threatening whiteness.  Skiing is turning with the whole body, as the line turns on the breath. The poem's mastery of whiteness is grounded in the body. By its end the poem has internalized its parlay with whiteness, and the poet, from his cafe table, becomes a serene witness at whiteness' edge.

Glyn Maxwell’s most recent book of poems in the US is One Thousand Nights and Counting: Selected Poems.  In England this has been followed by Pluto. Hear Glyn Maxwell read “This Whiteness” here at Little Star.

 

This Whiteness

This whiteness followed me at the speed of dawn.

A life-form in the fingers of an avalanche

I was, I was motion caught, I was a spot

found out by white, some foe of it, some germ

 

at frantic speed. The world sips its gluhwein,

high above in the tinkling chalet, stuffed,

beside the fire and betting on my chances—

who? down in the valley somewhere, blue now.

 

Gone, I begin again. Such is the motto

stamped on me by whiteness I enrage

by naming anything. That I only breathe

by naming I attempt to call my credo—

 

and see, the whiteness slashed me like a creature.

Stock-still I wait. They stash in these little stanzas

welcome rations but the thing’s outside,

pawing the air and pitiless with hunger.

 

Gone, I begin again. In the lovely village

every morning’s Christmas, and the shops

out-glisten nature. Nobody’s from here.

Enormous empty boots line up, the average

 

girl is an angel trying some on. An angel.

I ran from a word like that but I didn’t make it.

I made this shelter, I, and she doesn’t know it.

I won’t be there when she turns, typical angel,

 

time her own. I went, I began again—

it’s only the quest of the cold thing for the warm thing,

vowels to soften all, she cups hot chocolate

outside The Blue Grill, freezing in the sunshine,

 

and I think of Brodsky saying that for a star

to love its neighbor—there’s where the big idea

was had, such were the distances it traveled…

He made that out of words, but he lived there,

 

when one great desert left him to another,

twice. She ties her boots. What I mean by angel

is one who comes from nowhere to reveal

there’s nowhere but from now on it won’t matter.

 

She looks at where I was, then cools her gaze

as the hooded happy groups go slushing by

toward the hut that sends them to the mountain.

When I glance back from the peaks around, her place

 

is taken by some family and I’m

bereft like she was everything. The young

go sailing overhead, they’re all like them.

To not go up, to come this far from home

 

for nothing earns a stripe from the whiteness. We,

it and I, will spend the day alone

and dazzled in this blinding bright valhalla,

writing postcards from it we’re unlikely

 

to send until we’re gone, if ever. The sunlight

gave like a billionaire and falls like one,

in just an hour with red signs switching on

in every language till it’s out of sight.

 

The line of empty boots is back, the angel

nowhere to be seen but the old station,

posted there with all the past forbidden.

I saunter back with whisky to my table

 

and see the whiteness left its card. Evening.

The snow’s the blue of being not a thing

that ends and empty chair-lift after empty

chair-lift swing around and are still going.

—Glyn Maxwell

 

"Action Figure" [by Micah Zevin]

1. George was a doll chased by a gang of kids with baseball bats
   through little league fields.

      2. He was someone you’d fake friend, more stuffing than boy.

      3. He’d be your puppet, your mannequin, and your funhouse mirror.

      4. He’d become the you that you knew, the you that you told him to.

      5. George would take you to the abandoned railroad tracks to meet his friends,
          the ones who found old fuel containers and lit them on fire.

      6. That place doesn’t exist.

      7. George lived at the bodega, playing the original Mortal Kombat.

      8. When George lost video games he’d smash his fists against the monitor
           until he was asked by the owner to leave.

      9. He was a doll, a skinny stick figure, those knockoff Doritos that would stain
           your tongue orange.

      10. George was useful for his complicity in acts of vandalism.

      11.  He was a doll, the kind you’d bury in your closet until you needed him again.

-- Micah Zevin

 

Amanda J. Bradley, Guest Author May 26-30

This week we welcome Amanda J. Bradley as our guest author. Amanda is the author of  Oz at Night  (NYQ Books, 2011) and Hints and Allegations (NYQ Books, 2009). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Paterson Literary Review, Ragazine, Gargoyle, Rattle, Pirene's Fountain, and The New York Quarterly. Amanda earned a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Washington University in Saint Louis and an MFA in Poetry Writing from The New School in Manhattan. Find out more about Amanda J. Bradley at her website here.

Welcome, Amanda.

In other news . . .

Next Line, Please: Help the American Scholar Write a Sonnet

On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar  launched a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a  sonnet. David Lehman wrote the first line and selects subsequent lines from among those submitted by you. Here's the sonnet to date:

How like a prison is my cubicle
And yet how far my mind can freely roam
From gaol to Jerusalem, Hell to home.
Freedom ends or starts with a funeral.

For details on how to submit your line for consideration, go here.

-- sdh

APIA Series: Eugenia Leigh Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

The next fearless poet to be featured is Eugenia Leigh! Here’s another honey badger who will be riding the wave of this summer’s Honey Badgers Don’t Give a B**k Tour. I am endlessly excited to showcase Eugenia’s work and go on an epic book adventure with her. Not only is her work full of the kind of vitality, toughness, heartbreak, and faith that begets the most devastating poetry, Eugenia is an amazing spirit and fantastic reader.

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, and the Asian American Literary Review, Eugenia serves as the Poetry Editor of Kartika Review. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the following poem “We Called it the Year of Birthing”, Leigh begins with a story of making, of genesis: “God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this/into a bird, he said…And make with this,/ a new father.” From the beginning, we understand that what God is asking of the speaker is painfully inconceivable. It is up to the speaker to rise up to the request—to turn brave, to pick up shards, her own traumas being “sordid with similar beaten people”. To turn these fragments, these wrecked objects—feathers and bolts and nails—into something whole and human, requires a kind of alchemy.

But magically, forcefully, the next stanza turns, creating its own poetic alchemy: “Others of us—/the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds/to form tools. Then we spend our days/mending bent humans or wiping the humans/mired by all the wrong fingerprints.” This poem is not a poem about merely facing the past. This poem is not a poem about merely pain. This poem is about the courage it takes to collect the darkest scrap, the vestiges from one’s history, the raw spaces, and heal them by re-making, re-building, re-birthing—the speaker and the speakers are agents of creation rather than decimation, reclamation rather than repudiation. At the end of the poem, we are rewarded with a moment of absolute wonder: “The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,/ we hovered over this child who, unlike us,/ was born whole.” The thrill and triumph of this line is not without its acknowledgment that the baby born into this new family is “unlike us”. This poem moves from the impossible to the miraculous in four short stanzas. Be on the lookout for Eugenia Leigh’s forthcoming collection from Four Way Books, Blood, Sparrows, and Sparrows!

 

 

We Called It the Year of Birthing

 

 

God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this

into a bird, he said. He threw me a bowl of nails. And make with this,

a new father. God gave some people

whole birds. Readymade fathers with no loose bolts.

The rest of us received crude nests. Used mothers.

 

I banged the nails into two planks of wood

and marched around a church screaming, Father, father

until friends appeared, hammering

the scraps they were given to make something of themselves.

 

When beaten hard enough, some people scamper into corners

sordid with similar beaten people. Others of us—

the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds

to form tools. Then we spend our days

mending bent humans or wiping the humans

mired by all the wrong fingerprints.

 

The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,

we hovered over this child who, unlike us,

was born whole. You were given a good mother, we said. A good father.

Each one of us prayed.            We scrubbed our soiled hands

before we held his swaddled body.

 

                            first appeared in PANK

 

 

Interview 

 

In the words of Angry Asian Man, who are you? What are you all about?

I am a poet and question asker who believes in miracles and believes in you. I am the friend you call when the world is skeptical of your latest, looniest dream. My favorite kind of human is the kind who was almost crushed, but came out the other side with a laugh and a giant middle finger toward the hell that almost claimed her.

 

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, my first collection of poetry, will be published by Four Way Books this October. It is not the book I intended to write, but it’s the one that needed to be written.

I credit my “guardian angel poet” Laure-Anne Bosselaar for honing in on the first poem I wrote about my father and encouraging me to explore that narrative. As a close-minded young poet resistant to becoming “another poet writing about her fractured family,” however, I stayed in the mud of bad poems hiding in extravagant metaphors for many months before resigning to the idea that Laure-Anne might be right. The story I needed to tell might be my personal history after all.

It wasn’t until Marie Howe then gave the assignment to write a poem about “where I come from” in a litany devoid of metaphors or my other literary crutches that I started to tell the truth as brazenly as I could manage. I wrote those first poems six years ago, and I don’t know whether I could write them now. I hope to honor that younger poet by presenting this book to the world with fervent intention and without any apologies.

 

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

I love the secrets poets embed into their line breaks and wonky forms. I believe every tiny revision a poet makes will change the poem’s overall impact a hundredfold. This might be because I err on the side of finding meaning in everything—not only in poetry, but also in life—and I love poetry because every word and break and white space is infused with meaning. My favorite part of the practice is discovering what the physical shape of a poem or the sound of a poem might be trying to say, and then laboring to bring out that hidden layer as much as possible.

 

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

The Bible was my first exposure to poetry—not only the Psalms, but also much of the prophetic books, which are also part of the Jewish Tanakh. Religious scriptural texts truly are the original experimental, cross-genre masterpieces. The book of Genesis, for example, tells two creation stories, and in the first of the two, the narrative is written entirely in prose until God creates humans. Then suddenly, injected into that first prose chapter, we see three surprising lines of poetry to describe the way God creates humans, as if to say that’s how well crafted we are.

How anyone could mistake this piece of art for a scientific account baffles me. It sounds to me like this story was written to help us rewrite how we perceive ourselves and perceive the world around us. That’s both the magic and the danger of powerful writing: it can reshape our worldview.

The first contemporary poets I fell in love with were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I was 13 years old and drawn to their ruthless honesty and their pains because this was the age I first began to struggle with my own will to live. I do often wonder, however, how much of my personal worldview and my own style of writing at that young age were influenced by their words. 

 

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

I am more comfortable writing about violence, death, pain, and rampant brokenness, but I am interested in what it looks like to write also about renewal and redemption in a way that isn’t saccharine and stays true to our struggles. How does a poem shake the humans and demand that we all have hope without being preachy? Or should we dare to do that at all?

For a long time, I believed an artist’s most important job is to report what we see and know with unflinching truthfulness. But what if an artist’s job is also to challenge what we see and know by imagining possibilities beyond our present realities? Maybe this is a conclusion the better and wiser poets have already come to, but I am only now coming to them myself. The learning process begins with writing terrible poems about positive things, which I’m attempting to do lately.

 

Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life [Terence Winch]

Last week, on 17 May 2014,  in the Theater at Madison Square Garden, I gave the graduate commencement address and received an honorary doctorate from my alma mater, Iona College.  A number of friends have suggested I post the text of the speech, and so here it is.

____________________________________________________________________

 

Thank you, Iona faculty & staff, friends & family.  It’s an honor to have this opportunity to speak to you, my fellow Gaels,  this afternoon here at Madison Square Garden.  I’m still recovering from a recent vocal cord surgical procedure, so please excuse my fragile voice.

Like all of us vulnerable humans who finally finish with formal schooling, at least for now, you are about pursue a post-student life of fear, doubt, ambition, and self-delusion.  To assist you as you confront the universe as newly credentialed, highly educated persons, I offer you my address today, which is called   

Contentment Is Wealth: The Top Ten Ways to Ultimate Success & Happiness in Life

 10. Self-Forgiveness—Learn to forgive yourself, for you know not what you do much of the time, at least if you’re like me. It’s harder than one might think to engage in self-forgiveness.  Sometimes it’s actually easier to go with guilt, depression, anxiety, anger, self-loathing— these and other well-established choices are always available to our needy psyches. But shun them. Life is too short, something those of us who are getting up there know better than anyone. And while you’re at it, try even to forgive others. See also: self-acceptance.

9. Anger management—Do not press “send” when you’re pissed off without first having someone you trust read the crazy diatribe you’ve just written.  I have learned the wisdom of this directive through ugly & painful firsthand experience.

8.  Hygiene—Get your teeth cleaned professionally twice a year.  Believe me, you’ll save a lot of money and grief in the end.

7. Accomplishment—If there’s something meaningful you want to accomplish, don’t get overwhelmed. Achievement is most often the result of an accumulation of many minor incremental steps that are really no big deal.  Alcoholics Anonymous encourages recovering drinkers to take it one day at a time.  The truth in that advice applies to many of life’s struggles.  The great novelist & short-story writer Flannery O’Connor wrote in one of her letters, “If you do the same thing every day at the same time for the same length of time, you’ll save yourself from many a sink. Routine is a condition of survival.” Scholars talk of how African-Americans—over centuries of spirit-crushing slavery and its long aftermath—practiced the art of Making a Way Out of No Way, of transcending suffering as much as possible through resilience and creativity. And through that fierce commitment to make a way out of no way, came incredibly rich traditions in music, literature, and other areas of accomplishment, not the least of which were sheer survival and endurance.  Never give up.

 [left: Flannery O'Connor]

 6. Finances—Don’t lend money to poets or fiddle players. Although I must make clear that poets and fiddlers occupy a place of high status in my own worldview.  I am also very fond of button-accordion players, to whose ranks I belong.  I started playing music as a kid, but I never really had much by way of instruction, so I wound up a musical illiterate, which sometimes drives my son Michael, who is a very accomplished musician, a little crazy. I like to say that I’m self-taught, and that I had a really bad teacher. But here, let me say something about perfection:  perfection is another thing to shy away from.  During my years at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in DC, I helped produce many publications, and among the first of them was a book on Navajo blankets. I learned that it was and is the practice of Navajo master weavers to always introduce something they call “the spirit line,” a little flaw woven into the pattern of the rug, so as not to compete with, and thus offend, the Creator, the Great Spirit.  Imperfection, in any case, makes life more interesting.  Oh, and let me retract what I said at the start of this number:  If you want to be favorably immortalized by poets or have musicians compose a tune in your honor, always lend them money, or, even better, save yourself the trouble & just give them the damn cash.

 5. Have Mercy—I love the sound of the word mercy. A one-word poem. I want some mercy. For me. For everybody. Forgiveness implies a wrong erased, but mercy is more the simple  bestowing of benevolence. Visit people in the hospital or the nursing home even though you, along with the rest of us, hate hospitals and nursing homes. Significant intangible power is generated when mercy is released into the atmosphere.

 4. Critical Thinking—Don’t respect your elders or people in authority unless they have actually earned that respect. Let me here recommend a piece of writing that I first read as an undergraduate at Iona & that has stayed with me since, and that is George Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” written in 1946.  Orwell [photo left], who once memorably assailed what he called “all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls,”  was a prophetic writer, as his novels 1984 and Animal Farm clearly show.  Orwell will help you de-construct all the intellectual malware infecting our political discourse.  For me, critical thinking involves inventing your own definitions by thinking about what any concept really means to you. People today often say, for example, they are “spiritual” but not necessarily religious, and I felt I needed to define spirituality for myself, which I decided means having an inner life, interior life, the life of the mind, the examined life. It means to go deeper into yourself. Likewise I define “critical thinking” as intellectual wakefulness, mindful attentiveness to whatever you encounter. Not always easy to do.   Let me also salute William Blake [right], the great visionary & eccentric 19th-century English poet, who said: “Without Contraries Is No progression,” and “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind. “    Those are among a number of Blake’s proverbs I memorized when I was an Iona undergraduate & they’ve stayed with me all my life.  And they seem as true to me today as they did in the 1960s.

 3.  Fake It—Sometimes you will have to fake it, you will have to make it up out of nothing, you will have to just go on your nerve, as the great poet Frank O’Hara once prescribed, and those are often the times when you break through to a sense of clarity & insight about yourself.    O’Hara also wrote, in one of his poems, that

            the only thing to do is simply continue
            is that simple
            yes, it is simple because it is the only  thing to do
            can you do it
            yes, you can because it is the only thing to do

I have always found great comfort in those lines, in their wonderful assertion of spirit & tenacity.  And speaking of faking it, don’t forget the Imposter Syndrome, that sense we have that we’re all just pretending to be something we’re not. It’s okay, it’s all part of faking it. Let it go. Live with it. We are all imposters. Forgive yourself (see #10).

 2.  Risk Taking—Never get the extended warranty. And always buy the raffle ticket—I’ve won the raffle at least 3 times in my life; if you want to be an opera singer, or work with chimpanzees, or start your own detective agency, don’t wait till you’re an old person. On the other hand, don’t drive blindfolded.   

 1.  The last & most important of the top 10 ways to ultimate success & happiness in life—The  Moll Niland Principle.  My mother was a farmgirl named Bridie Flynn from Loughrea in county Galway in Ireland. She was one of 11 children, and she died in 1962 when I was 16 and still in high school, and I still miss her, 52 years later. Out of those 11 in her family, only 3, my mother and 2 of her brothers, came to the U.S. So I have many relatives back in Ireland, including cousins in Ballyvaughan, county Clare, on my father’s side. And in 1980 I went over there with my band—the one, true, authentic Celtic Thunder (not to be confused with that slick PBS tv program that, shall we say, borrowed my group’s name)—and asked my then-girlfriend Susan, whom I married the following year, to come with us.      

During that trip, we had many adventures, but the highlight for me was when I took Susan to meet my Auntie Moll, the eldest of my mother’s siblings, amazingly still alive & going strong in 1980 at age 96.                                                              

 [photo: My mother, Bridie Winch [nee Flynn],wearing the dress with the big bow, with friends & relations, Galway, 1930.]

She lived in a very humble, thatched-roof cottage in the countryside, where she still cooked on an open hearth turf fire. She had these beautiful, big eyes and a benevolent aura about her. Recalling her now, remembering the richness of her spirit, brings to my mind the title of a well-known traditional Irish tune called “Contentment Is Wealth.” Susan and I sat next to each other, Auntie Moll facing us. We chatted for a bit, but then at one point she took hold of our hands, grabbed them firmly, and looked us both in the eye and said, “Are ye enjoying life?”   We thought for a moment because it felt like the most important question we’d ever been asked, & then said yes we were. She squeezed our hands happily and said, “That’s good. Enjoy life.”  I know—it’s not a complex or arcane idea, but coming from this extraordinary old woman who had lived so long & knew so much, it felt to us like the most profound and profoundly simple & necessary lesson of human existence:

ENJOY LIFE.                                 

Thank you, and congratulations to all of you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Terence & Jesse Winch with Auntie Moll (Niland), Ireland, 1980

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Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 6

On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 3:55 PM David Lehman wrote:

She Did It Her Way

      Twinnings: parallel lines that meet somewhere between the cross-country plane and the clouds above. I'll list a few.

      Peggy has just turned thirty, and Joan is nearing forty.  No fear could quite compare with the fear of becoming an old maid.

      On the flight back to LA are Megan and Pete’s fuck-bunny Bonnie, for whom Pete is not quite Clyde enough, and both are disconsolate for one reason or another.

      Stephanie Paterik tells me that when Roger and daughter rough it in the Catskills, Dad and offspring adopt identical sleep postures. That was two episodes ago.

      And this week, when the episode concludes with Don and Peggy and Pete at a Burger Chain, their formation echoes the visual configuration of Ted, Peggy, and Pete a year earlier at the airport lounge where they sit and everyone but Ted laughs, because everyone but Ted has been drinking whisky sours, and Ted is about to fly them in his little plane and catch hell from his wife -- only in the Ted episode it's a triangle and here it's more like Don and Peggy on one team and Pete on the other.

      Prejudices persist. When Bob Benson bails out the handcuffed GM executive who “tried to fellate an undercover police officer,” the cop on duty says, “good night, ladies.” And when Bob – the only character who looks good in a plaid jacket – says he “struck out” yesterday when looking for a suitable present for Joan, her mother pipes up: “The Jews close everything on Saturday.”

      This one-time shomer Shabbat yeshiva boy wonders: can the office be as judenrein as it was back in the benighted days of 1960? Gone are Ginsberg, to the loony bin; likewise the secretary who married Roger, took acid with him, won a big divorce settlement, and why can’t I remember her name? And then there's the latter's cousin, the pint-sized copywriter who went west, grew facial hair, went Hollywood, and after enduring one taunt too many, socked Roger in the solar plexus in season six.

      Is Megan having an affair? Stacey said so as soon as she heard Don offer to bring a suitcase of her stuff (a fondue maker!) when he visits her next in LA, end of July, to which she replies she’d like them to meet somewhere else – “Not LA, not here, just us.”

       The episode centers on Peggy and how she will handle the creative work for the national Burger Chef campaign. Pete imagines he is praising Peggy when he says there isn’t a better woman in the ad business – but she, and we, hear it as a left-handed compliment. Though the presentation gets Lou's approval, she knows there is something wrong with her family-friendly sequence of  guilty mom, indulging dad, and hungry kids in the car. So what does she do? Light up a cigarette, have a drink, chew out an associate – just like the master himself.

      Everything leads up to the heart-to-heart with Don. “Now I’m one of those women who lie about their age. I hate them.” She wonders, “What did I do wrong?” He answers, “You’re doing great.” In an epiphany that doesn’t quite announce itself as such, she asks, “Does this family exist anymore?” by which she means the family toward which she has pitched her ad – a family that eats as a group rather than watching television alone together. “What if there was a place you could go and there was no TV and you could break bread and anyone you were with was family?” And then on the radio comes the familiar opening chords of Frank Sinatra singing “My Way,” his mega-hit of 1969. “And now the end is near.” And Don and Peggy dance. (Will they end up together? Maybe, said Ron and David. No way, said Yoav and Stacey.) But taking her cue from the familiar voice, she will do the ad her way.

      The literary allusion in the last scene is masterly. Pete and Peggy and Don sit at a Burger Chef. In a way each is a loser (and remember, even Sinatra in “My Way” says he is “tired of losing”), they come from very different backgrounds, yet they form a sort of family.  She is going to have her ad shot here, because, she tells Pete, it’s “a clean, well-lighted place.” “Okay, Hemingway,” Pete has the wit to reply. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” one of Hemingway’s finest stories, the setting is a café in Madrid, where men in quiet desperation go to drown their sorrows. They believe in nothing, they do the most drastic things, like trying to take their lives, for nothing, because nothing matters. Nada. In one of Hemingway’s bravura performances, the word “nada” orchestrates a paragraph. In the mind of the waiter closing the café at two in the morning the word “nada” replaces the nouns in the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.”

      It is the use of one literary allusion to counter another: Lou (who, according to a friend of mine, an advertising veteran, is the most believable character in the whole show) has responded enthusiastically to the original ad Peggy drew up for Burger Chef. “It’s good to see family happiness again,” he says, and the line’s true significance becomes clear when you take it into account that “Family Happiness” is the title of a novella by Tolstoy.

      The ironies are multiple. An American fast-food joint takes the place of the Spanish café with the zinc bar and the brandy drinks that sound so exotic in a foreign tongue. Yet the nihilistic desperation is the same, even if Don, Peggy, and Pete smile gamely in the artificial camaraderie of their work.

      There's my report, dear Amy. And I never even got around to Joan’s defiant response to Bob Benson’s proposal.

 -- DL 

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:17 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear David,
 
(You continue to field musical and literary allusions popping up in our favorite show with the alacrity of a legendary outfielder, a Raul Mondesi, or perhaps a Dusty Baker.)

THE FAMILY EPISODE:

(could this theme have been writ any larger?)

We began this episode with Peggy and cute, nerdy male office minion doing market research in the Burger Chef parking lot after sundown. The scene looked very B movie-- shadowy, streetlit. A beleaguered mom with kids roiling in back seat of her car hurriedly answers Peggy’s queries about her family’s fast food habits, eyes glued to the ten dollar bill she’s been promised. The birth of the focus group? Oh, America, whither thou goest?! So Peggy starts on the outside, standing uncomfortably, peering into a car in a dark, trying to keep her voice smiley and bright whilst gripping her clipboard, straining to get the data she needs. As you point out, by episode’s end she has moved into the light, sitting in the blindingly over-lit Burger Chef interior, in a booth with a pair of key members of her work “family.” The man who she lost her virginity to, whose baby she bore and gave away (Pete) and the man who has been her symbolic father, her mentor, who she desperately wants to be (Don.) Don’s small, wordless motion to Pete in the last moment of that scene, indicating to that egotistical blockhead (Vincent Kartheiser is soooo brilliant at playing narcissism) that he has a smear of catsup on his upper lip, is beautiful. It’s familial, intimate, and at the same time a bit condescending and smirky.

Speaking of family, Joan bravely fends off a marriage proposal from a gay colleague, Bob Benson, who wants her to be his “beard.” His offer to make a kind of alternative family with her, and be a father to her tiny son, while allowing both adults to pursue separate sex lives, doesn’t appeal to her. “We could comfort each other through an uncertain world,” Bob says, coaxingly. He even offers her a ring, a sort of image rhyme with the notorious scene in last week’s episode, in which poor demented Ginsberg, now in the loony bin, offers Peggy his lopped off nipple in a little jeweler’s box. Bob’s proposal quickly turns to a less-than-kind hard sell when Joan balks. “I am offering you,” Bob says rather loftily, “more than anyone else ever will.” I found Joan noble in this scene. “No, you’re not,” she demures, “because I want love, and you should, too.” Joan’s hard-won dignity is a radiant element of her considerable beauty.

Speaking of the varieties of love (or high altitude lust): Pete and his paramor Bonnie’s retreat into an airport bathroom at 30,000 feet for a quickie put me in mind of a paperback that was in heavy rotation amongst Junior High school girls I knew back in 1969, the year this season of Mad Men takes place. The book, which came out in 1967, is Coffee, Tea or Me. It purported to be a memoir chronicling the sexual adventures of a pair of randy young stewardesses. Later, the “memoir” was revealed to be the concoction of a PR dude called Donald Bain. Predictably, we pre-teen and teenage girls were ravenous all during secondary school to get our hands on any book that mentioned sex. The Happy Hooker (1971), The Godfather (1969, I forget which specific chapter, none of us read any other parts of the book, I’m afraid) and The Harrad Experiment (1962) were a few of the extracurricular titles that joined the immortal Coffee, Tea or Me on our secret mandatory reading list. I do have a growing fear that someone in this series is going to die in plane crash. Sometimes I read the gorgeous opening/credits sequence, where Don is falling, falling, falling, that way. I hope I am wrong.

Stan is wearing love beads to the office! I still think he has a yen for Peggy. They seem to understand each other on deep levels, and perhaps it’s symbolic that during a phone conversation about work Stan is eating a banana and his shirt is open to his navel. I know everyone and their cousin thinks that Peggy is going to sleep with Don. Maybe she will. I think she should sleep with Stan. There. I’ve said it. If only Stan could have been a fly on the wall, an invisible witness to the scene in which Peggy, unable to sleep because she knows she has to totally rework the Burger Chef pitch, does a sexy little jog across the room when she gets up in her semi transparent nightie, he might not be able to hold back any longer.

Later in the show, Pete grumbles, “I hate the word family.” Well may he say so. He has been absent from his little daughter Tammy’s short life so long she doesn’t recognize him. When he comes to visit, she refuses to come out from behind her nanny’s skirts, and is frightened of him as she might be of an intruder. Pete waits around after his paternal visit, after putting his daughter to bed, for ex-wife Trudy to come back from a date, getting smashed on her booze. He confronts her drunkenly and is so belligerent she eventually says, “You’re not a part of this family anymore.”

Footnote one: Correspondent Benjamin Weissman informs interested viewers that actor John Slattery, who plays Roger Sterling, looks buff in his steam room scene this episode because he’s a real life surfer. For his own safety, we hope Mr. Slattery wears more than a gym towel when riding the big waves (there are SHARKS out there, John!) Speaking of sharks, the dialogue in that steam room is pretty vicious, quite biting.

Footnote two, in closing speaking again of family: My mother in law as absolutely swooning over the scene where Don and Peggy slow dance. OOOOh, she sighed. He was so tender with her. She seemed so overcome that I ran to the medicine cabinet for the smelling salts, in case they were needed, but that wonderful lady kept her head.

That’s all till next week.

APIA Series: Matthew Olzmann Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

Our next featured poet is Matthew Olzmann!

Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, received the 2011 Kundiman Prize and was published by Alice James Books. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, Forklift, Ohio and elsewhere. Currently, he is the coeditor of The Collagist, and a Visiting Professor of Creative Writing in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College.  (matthewolzmann.com)

I am enthralled by the poems of Matthew Olzmann. They are often funny, poignant, lyrical, astute—and when he reads them, they come alive like little beasts leaping from the page. In the following poem, Olzmann asks us to consider the remains of such a beast—the skull of a dinosaur—as a metaphor for our navigation of the fallacies our hopes create. “I know what it means/to watch your good fortune change its mind”, he writes, as he switches dexterously from the narrative of the chagrined archaeologist to the speaker’s own memory. And disappointment, the shell-shocked stillness of that realization that what was true minutes ago is actually false, is something we can all empathize with—we find ourselves dreading the supermodel’s discovery, the moment “when the light ruin[s] everything.” Sometimes what we dream is that much brighter at the moment we realize that it won’t come true—the “new world” that we craved, “its beaches of untouched skin”, “moons that smelled of a hundred flowers”, or “I-Could-Live-Here-Forever Land and Holy-Shit-Was-I-Wrong-Land”. Olzmann mixes pure sincerity with joyous language, as well as humor; I laughed at the brilliant lines “What kind of animal is this?/ I call it: The Motherfuckerasaurus.” Immediately preceding these lines, there is a different emotional tenor, one of painful longing. These exhilarating shifts in tone sets the wonderfully varied emotional landscape of Olzmann’s poem: this landscape does seem like a “new world”, one that, despite the poem’s sentiment, fulfills our many hopes as readers.

The Skull of an Unidentified Dinosaur

 

does not belong to the dinosaur skeleton

to which it has been attached. 

A man thought he made an amazing

discovery.  Now, it’s a towering mistake,

one for which he’ll likely lose his job,

but only after taking this skyscraper

of bones—with its eye-sockets

like windows to hell—apart.

Femur by mandible, I know what it means

to watch your good fortune change its mind. 

Like that time in college, when my friend’s

supermodel cousin invited us to a party

and accidentally kissed me in the dark.

She thought I was someone else—I have

no idea who—but the gist of the story

can be seen in her freaking out

when the light ruined everything.

For a moment, I thought I discovered

a new world.  And what a world it was—

with its beaches of untouched skin,

and its moons that smelled of a hundred flowers.

I named that land I-Could-Live-Here-

Forever Land and Holy-Shit-Was-I-Wrong Land.    

Einstein says imagination is more important

than knowledge.  Certainly, it’s kinder. 

I imagine the man who wired these

dinosaur bones must have imagined

his vision was real, must have pictured

it alive. Covered in flesh, the imagined life

can also be terrifying—able to cleave you

open with the swipe of a claw

or devour you in seconds. 

But as it is now, having never existed

after tricking you into believing,

it eats at you more slowly, lets you feel

every new rip in your gut, makes you beg:

What kind of animal is this?

I call it: The Motherfuckerasaurus.

And, technically, that’s not the right name,

but neither is the word stamped here now—

in block letters, on a bronze plaque,

screwed to the floor.

       First published in Gulf Coast

Interview:

Who are you? What are you all about?

I like how Ocean Vuong answered this same question a couple days ago, saying, "Some days I feel like a human. Some days I feel more like a sound."  I like the flexibility of that answer, allowing for an identity in flux.  For me too, it changes rapidly, from moment to moment.  Right now, there's a baseball game on the radio.  I'm all about—this October—the Detroit Tigers winning the 2014 World Series. If this fails to happen, I'll be all about them winning it in 2015.  I'm easily distracted, and what I'm "all about" is constantly in motion.  I'm all about the newborn lambs and piglets on the farm of the college where I teach. I'm all about the mountains that surround this place. In the autumn, when the leaves begin to fall, you can see houses behind the tree line that you didn't know were there.

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

I just finished what I hope will be my second book, and I'm working on poems that might become another project.  I usually don't think in terms of "projects" or even "books" while I'm writing. I write poems independently of each other with no thought as to how they might be connected. Even if I'm consciously writing poems that are obviously linked to each other, the series as a whole usually fizzles out after 3-10 poems and I go back to writing individual poems, one at a time, over and over. Much later, I go back, sort through them and see how they relate to one another.  So the "genesis" is always in the steady accumulation of individual poems. The "transformation" comes from sifting through the piles, slowly becoming aware of correspondences in the work, and then trying to enhance, undermine, or complicate those correspondences.

That said, I feel like—maybe for the first time—I'm working on a series of poems that feel intrinsically connected to each other.  It's a sequence of letters, mostly, and it's gone on long enough that I think it's more than just a quick "series" of poems.  We'll see.

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

Something that I didn't expect to invigorate my writing practice that ended up impacting it in a big way (especially the poems I'm currently working on) was improv theater.  A couple of years ago, for fun, I took some classes at GoComedy—a comedy club located just outside of Detroit, in Ferndale, Michigan.  The performers at that theater were some of the most talented artists I'd ever met.

Improvisation, I thought, was something that came from the opposite impulse that most of my writing comes from.  As with many writers, I like to think about what I'm going to say before I say it.  Then I like to write it down. Then delete it. Then write it again. Then look up synonyms for some haphazard word. Then maybe set it aside for a while, come back later, and revise. That's not how it works in improv.  You're on a stage and you have to say something right now.

Also, in the revision of poetry, much of the work often comes down to the necessary excising of material that's not working.  In improv, you can't reject, remove or delete anything. You have to say "Yes" to everything and build from that.  If something doesn't work, you can't just remove it; you have to justify it, build from it, and somehow make it fit.

These were challenging concepts for me, but they were also revelations and taught me new ways of thinking about the creative process. And while I still prefer to think something out and revise it, I learned to value speed, spontaneity, wildness and escalation in the creative process—in the initial drafting—much more than I had previously.

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

Influence is such an enormous subject, and it's impossible to name everything and everyone that shapes a person as a writer.  Everything and everyone is a potential influence.  It's hard to go through the world and not be stunned and awestruck all the time.  In terms of writers, Robert Hayden, Larry Levis, and Wisława Szymborska are poets that I've been turning to with increasing frequency in recent months. 

Steve Orlen, Stephen Dobyns, Heather McHugh, Brooks Haxton, and Martha Rhodes were teachers of mine, and all of them had a profound and lasting impact on the way I write. 

People like Sarah Gambito and Joseph Legaspi and the community they've created at Kundiman have shaped—maybe more than anyone—my ideas regarding literary citizenship, and the type of person I hope to be as I move through the writing world. 

"Lineage" is an interesting concept. I've been fortunate to have a number of wonderful teachers and mentors in an MFA Program, Kundiman, and writing conferences such as Bread Loaf and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Each of them has shaped and continues to shape the writer I am and the writer I'm trying to become.  If we were to "map" it out as a family tree, it would probably look like a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon scenario where everything is threaded through everything else.  For example, I did my MFA at Warren Wilson. A couple of my teachers went to Iowa. There, they met people like Donald Justice, who studied with folks like Berryman and Lowell. Lowell studied with John Crowe Ransom. At Kenyon College, Ransom started the Kenyon Review and, seventy-something years later, David Baker (Kenyon Review's current poetry editor) offered me a fellowship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.  I'm sure we could keep going backwards and forwards until we connect each of us to Whitman to Donne to Horace.  Horace used to teach in the MFA program at Syracuse, etc. 

I find myself constantly inspired by writers who are emerging right now.  Cathy Linh Che, Jamaal May, Tarfia Faizullah, Michael Mlekoday, and Brynn Saito have all put out books of poems in the past year that are stunning.

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

The next poem is always the thing I'm trying to say but haven't said yet. Even if it's something I've already said, I'm trying to say it better.  I hope the future holds a successful variation of that poem many times over.

"After Hearing Laughter and Feeling Something Jump on my Hip, 2:45 AM" [b Megan Kellerman]

If I stay awake, would you fall straight past
my lips to the parts of my body
that would tell you truly—I can’t help it—
I’m here with you for good. Even

when you pushed life-panic onto me
for hours, then said, “I want to fuck,”
and I turned around and let you,
and you joked afterward that

we’d probably still break up.
You smiled and I said low,
“Could you not do that
after we just had sex?”

You stopped and nodded
in a not entirely convincing way.
It’s almost two years later and
I’m still here with you, for good. Even

though you left me two nights later, let
the jagged edges of every neglected thing
in my life curl in on me, your hands failing
to reach out and strum me calm like the instrument

you loved. The last time we met, you confessed
your worry that every wrong thing that would ever happen
to me after you would be your fault. I pled
my strength, but to be honest, I don’t remember

correcting you. And now, I don’t want to tell you
that it’s 3 in the morning and I’m writing this,
but it’s 3 in the morning and I’m writing this,
spooked into insomnia and, not knowing

what else to turn to, I’ve turned to you,
stubborn memory living out your days
without me. I run smooth lines over your frame
and justify thinking of you, if only for the reason

that any bump in the night is not as bad
as everything else we turned into.
My sleep-cracked fear could never be as real
as that last scare: your smile without the light.

-- Megan Kellerman

"Van Gogh" [by Steven Klett]

My favorite sex position is the Van Gogh.

I won’t draw you a picture but it ends with you
cutting off my ear.

We can only do it twice.

-- Steven Klett

Any Questions with Krazy Frank Kafka [Pourquoi moi?]

Different Life/Different Poems [by Ellen Steinbaum]

It’s one of those clubs you don’t want to join, but since I didn’t get a choice, I am proud to be among the voices--brave, diverse, honest--in The Widows’ Handbook. Some of the writers were widowed only recently, while others, like me, write from a loss much farther behind us. In fact, my husband Carl died in 1996 and my contributions to the anthology are all in the section called “A Different Life. “ And that’s what I have, a different life. Different poems, too. 

A few years ago I was invited to write an essay on “why I write.” It was one of those moments writers know so well of writing to see what it is you think. I’m not sure I had recognized it specifically before, but what I realized was that I write to notice. I have always felt that one of the pleasures of writing was its demand that you pay attention in the world. I had even written about noticing as an act of consecration. One poem in which I write about tending plants, says, “apply attention--plainest form of love” Another ends, “what is holy in this life/is noticing.” 

So it came as a shock to realize that despite all that noticing I had missed a kind of big thing--mortality. Looking back I am stunned by my innocence. I was left alone after 33 years of marriage and what shocks me now is how I didn’t see it coming. Not just Carl’s death, but Death. 

I had lived a fortunate life in which several beloved people had died, but not really before their time or out of generational sequence.  When they died, I felt sadness and I missed them, but I wasn’t railing against fate. And, although I had certainly read and written poems that dealt with mortality, what I find hard to believe now is how I had never really gotten it before, never thought about how death is the most real thing about life. Somehow that had escaped my notice. I had never thought about how death is not waiting somewhere out there, distant, but is, rather, something we live side by side with every day, every minute, intertwined. Never thought about the ending rules our lives and elevates them. Never thought about how it is the dirty secret and the sacred gift. 

But now it really had my attention. It became my subject, my muse.  My poetry had usually been grounded in the details of my life and I couldn’t stop writing about this. My first book, Afterwords, is specifically about Carl’s illness and death.  I wrote the poems in real time, as I was going through the experience, from the early days of diagnosis through to a point a year or so after he died.  

Sometimes people said to me, “That must have been therapeutic for you to write.”  It was never poets who said that, of course. Poets know that, while it may be “therapeutic” to get down a first draft, the next step is to make it poetry, to take a dispassionate look at it and revise it into something more. I was definitely aware that I wanted to put together a collection that might speak to others thinking about loss.  But the goal I had in mind was for the book as companion, but also--maybe primarily--as poetry, without compromise. The reason I am so pleased to be part of The Widows’ Handbook is that I think it, too, holds both those objectives.

I may not have given much thought to mortality before Carl’s illness but the shadows were there all along. In both of my subsequent books there is at least one older poem--written before my life changed and before his ended--that fits right in. Just as we make discoveries in other poets’ work with each reading, we see new things in our own. I may not have noticed, but, yes, the shadows were there all along. 

“Of course,” my husband, Jim, would say: he is a psychoanalyst. My life is different now and part of that is my new marriage.  Jim was also widowed, and he and I are, every day, aware of our good fortune in finding each other and sharing a life that is a blurred mix of past and present. And so my poems are in the “Different Life” section of the anthology. This poem of mine is one I think of as symbolic of what that looks like:

Last night his late wife

came to him in a dream
then slid away, kept
slipping out of reach
down foreign streets
while I slept beside him
in our bed where my husband,
gone more than a decade now,
calls to me from time
to time, wants help
finding his cufflinks, keys.

 I see mortality as a more explicit presence in my work now. It creeps in no matter what else I think I am writing about. In my most recent book, Brightness Falls, I have a poem called “Getting the Picture,” which began as kind of a silly musing on how, when Jim and I were dating, we couldn’t find good words to refer to each other. (Boyfriend/girlfriend? Lover? Partner? Um...no.) But then, at the poem’s end, what presented itself was:

know this: it will
not last. Best not to hesitate. Hurry.
Don’t waste the time before
the light runs out.

 It could be simply part of getting older, this difference in my writing. I find myself drawn most often these days to work by older poets. There is energy and insouciance in youthful writing that I love, but I really treasure the perspective that age and experience bring. For those of us whose lives have been shattered, it is heartening to see, for ourselves and through the words of others, that there is more. 

At readings from the anthology, we read our own entries and also work by other contributors. It’s a privilege and a delight to read their words. It’s also a reminder that, though we have each been through very different experiences with a single common core, we all have survived and we continue. We go forth and live our lives. It’s not the same life. It’s a different life.  New and different work grows out of it.

 Ellen Steinbaum is the author of three poetry collections, Afterwords, Container Gardening, and Brightness Falls. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in Garrison Keillor’s anthology, Good Poems, American Places, and The Widows’ Handbook. She has also written and performed a one-person play, “CenterPiece.”  A former literary columnist for The Boston Globe,  she writes a blog, “Reading and Writing and the Occasional Recipe,” which can be found at her web site, ellensteinbaum.com.

APIA Series: Cathy Linh Che Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

Next up in the APIA series, we have Cathy Linh Che! I’m lucky to go on a book tour, Honey Badgers Don’t Give a B**k Tour, with Cathy this summer – fearless Asian American poets going on a roadtrip adventure to read poems, adventure, eat noodles, enthrall, and explore (follow us on Twitter @BadgersOfHoney).

Cathy Linh Che’s work is borne out of necessity and survival. In the past few months, I’ve had the privilege of giving several readings with this indomitable poet, as we share not only a press but also multiple literary communities. When Cathy reads her work, it’s as if she saws herself open for her audience to behold. There is a tremor, a sob, a revelation. I am always astounded by her bravery and her sincerity, her honesty and her intelligence, and how powerfully the language of her poems embodies her lived experience.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James, 2014), winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, Kundiman, Hedgebrook, Poets House, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Asian American Literary Review, The Center for Book Arts, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency. She currently lives in Brooklyn.

In the following poem “My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death”, Che opens with a menagerie—a moose, a donkey, and an ox, all expelling from the speaker’s mother’s mouth. The strangeness of the opening image, its texture and surprise, only builds up as we approach each new stanza. The wildness of the animals in the first stanza undercuts the domestic imagery that pervades the next stanza—the kitchen knives, spoons, sinkhole, AC, wood paneling, market fish. However, the domestic is not static in this poem—rather, the domestic space here is torn apart as the “hoa mai cracks open” to invite the sky, the air, and the rain. In the last stanza, we travel with the speaker into a different kind of interiority—the interiority of her mother’s body, the interiority of grief—the “torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn't, I was drowning, I was swirled in, I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life.” The moment disorients us, as the mother’s body becomes the new embodiment of domestic space, complete with “furnishing” and “swollen heart”. To live inside this space—to return to the space of mother’s body as an older person, the reader and speaker must reformulate what it means to be nourished, what gets sacrificed for survival, and this is ridden with the guilt of “crowding” the furnishings, inhabiting too much space to bear. We end with the speaker declaring “I became a woman wearing my mother’s skin”. It is a moment of finality, as chilling for the reader as it is unsettling for the speaker, as she realizes that what’s left is the skin she wears imparted by her mother. If you do not have a copy of Split, get one NOW!   

 

 

My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother's Death

 

She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey and an ox, out of her mouth, years of animal grief, I lead her to the bed, she held my hand and followed, she said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke, and now her eyes red as a market fish, and now, she dropped like laundry on the bed.

The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons, her mouth a sinkhole, she wanted all of it, the house and the car too, with the AC and wood paneling, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low, until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain—

the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn't, I was drowning, I was swirled in, I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I crowded the furnishing, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large until I became a woman wearing my mother's skin.          

 

                                    From Split, Alice James Books, 2014

 

 

Interview

 

 To quote Angry Asian Man, who are you? What are you all about?

           

Let's begin with something that my friend Solmaz Sharif said to introduce a reading for Hyphenated Poets: Ethnic American Writing Against Type (and I’m paraphrasing here): “I see the self as porous.” And Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes.” With this in mind, I'll make some statements about who I am and what I’m about:

My parents lived in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. They clandestinely escaped on a boat soon after the fall of Saigon in 1975. In a recent interview my mom told me that she had no choice but to leave. When I asked, “Were you afraid,” she said, “Of course. I was afraid of dying.”

So, who am I? I am my family and my family's stories. I am my great uncle who was disappeared. I am my father who was drafted into the South Vietnamese Army and fought, an unwilling soldier, for over twelve years. I am my father's brother and aunt's children who were gunned down in one great massacre. I am my grandmother’s grief, and also her endurance.

I am also a girl who was sexually molested repeatedly over the course of eight years by multiple boys and men. This is a scary fact—and it upsets me to say it. I feel exposed putting it out there. But speaking about difficult things seems a necessary act. I hope that putting my writing out there can help others feel less alone.

 

Tell me about your current or most recent project.         

My first book was recently published, and I’m still reeling from that. I doing readings and helping to plan the Honeybadgers Don’t Give a B**k Tour, which kicks off this summer, with three other Asian American women with debut poetry collections: Sally Wen Mao, Eugenia Leigh, and Michelle Chan Brown.

In the fall, I am returning home to Southern California to begin research on my parents' experiences as extras for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now.                        

From 1975-76, my parents lived in a refugee camp in the Philippines. During that time, Apocalypse Now was being filmed, not too far from their camp. My parents, along with the other refugees, were hired to play extras in the film, as South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians—which they were. But they also were asked to play the people they'd just escaped from, the Viet Cong.

I hope to interview my parents and watch the film with them, which I haven’t done in years. I want to hear about their impressions and listen to their commentary. In the film, they get no speaking parts, they follow someone else’s script, they are placed in the margins. I want to give them a space to speak freely. I want their voices in the center of a narrative.

 

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s). What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

I'm excited when people reach out to me and tell me that my work has moved them. It's helped me understand what publishing means—it is a way to communicate to others who can't be in the same room as you.

One thing that I’ve learned in creating a collection of poems: You don’t have to say it all in a single poem. Poems talk to one another. They echo. They grow. They share images and in the sharing, deepen and expand them. Certainly, Jack Spicer was an important figure for me in that regard. He felt that his early poems were ‘one night stands’ and his later poems were conversations.

           

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

High school touchstones: William Faulkner, Langston Hughes, H.D., William Carlos Williams

College heroes: James Baldwin, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Lucille Clifton, Kim Addonizio, Li-Young Lee.

Grad school discoveries: Anne Carson, Srikanth Reddy, Jack Spicer, Sylvia Plath

After grad school wonderment: Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine. Martha Collins, Natalie Diaz

And my impossibly impressive peers: Matthew Olzmann, Bianca Stone, Amber Atiya, Solmaz Sharif, Ocean Vuong, Wo Chan, Paul Tran, Javier Zamora.

I am, of course, forgetting and omitting important voices, but these are writers who today light my world aflame.

 

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

For me, poetry is not about ego and banging on some pots and pans and celebrating your own accomplishments, but rather, it is about celebrating all of us: our complexities, our mysteries, the ways that we experience the world around us, the ways that we can get knocked down and stand back up, be hopeful and not just endure, but love and thrive.

Throwback Thursday: David Lehman and Piotr Sommer, Poland, 2005

Piotr Sommer and David Lehman, Warsaw, October 2005.

"Autobiography" [by Amy Leigh Cutler]

I am afraid
she cannot save me
but watch how the birds
gather her in circles

she knows something I do not
or why would she hold her chin that way
while I am hunched"
in the forest eating my stale crumbs

I tell her to hold me
and she does
but only a little
and not crying like I need

it is only us and the dirt
between rings and rings of trees
I choose one rock for a pair of birds
and when I feed her the meat she smiles

unable to kill the beauty herself
I know how hungry we are
so I speak and she moves until the birds
gather us again in circles

-- Amy Leigh Cutler

Inertia [poem by Susan Elliott Brown]

 Before it was lit, the cigarette
lay dormant in the pack. A set
of foreign lighters from our trip
abroad didn’t always have a chipped
case. Colors depict a banneret

in battle, saving a small brunette;
I’m reminded of when we met:
a cigarette balanced on your lip,
                       before it was lit.

Palm skin against mine, always wet
like a humidor’s sick-sweet sweat
that kept your cigars fresh, unclipped.
You’d rest one between your fingertips—
like in a silent film vignette—
                        before it was lit

Susan Elliott Brown is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi where she received the 2014 Joan Johnson Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, The Atticus Review, The Ampersand Review, and Alehouse, among others.

APIA Series: R.A. Villanueva Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

Next up in our APIA Kundiman poetry series: R.A. Villanueva!

R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, his honors include the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry and fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review. His writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including AGNI, Bellevue Literary Review, The Common, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives in Brooklyn and is a Senior Lecturer at New York University.

What I love about R.A. Villanueva’s poems are their complexity of diction and detail, their lyrical precision and grit, their dance between the strange ephemera of daily realities and the sublime. In one such poem, “Sacrum”, Villanueva mixes the ancient with recent memory, recent history, to consider the way our bodies remain long after our lives have departed. In the opening three stanzas, Vesalius the anatomist is aligned with Abraham and Achilles, to give us three different experiences of ways the “sacred bone remains”. Then in the fourth stanza, the poem takes a shift into the “I”—a surprising perspective, given the seeming omniscience of the initial voice. It shifts into a conversation between the “I” and “you”, one that is at once intimate and singular. The poem literally travels through time—into the not-quite-present (that also deserves an elegy). The speaker imagines the “you” experiencing Greater Bangkok, the “fires and protest tambourines”, the “makeshift triggers”. “Sacrum” is a poem that unsettles the divide between histories, contexts, and geographies—it crosses borders, it sings, simultaneously elegiac and full of reverence. I’m definitely looking forward to R.A. Villanueva’s debut collection, Reliquaria, which is out September of this year from the University of Nebraska Press.

 

Sacrum

 

Though lacking the breadth

and mass of the iliac wing,

this sacred bone remains,

for Vesalius, broad as hunger,

as grand and spacious

 

as the sea. But he leaves names

and reasons for others, wants

only the seven figures of the thorax,

cares more about the Cartilages

of the Rough Artery.

 

He does not mention how this holy

place, cut from the ox-calf wrapped

in fat, was Achilles’ mourning offering,

how the blessed ram, shank broken

over the fire, was Abraham’s sacrifice

 

after his son. When I think aloud,

Nothing we do living

can be as beautiful

as what the living will do

with our bones, you reply

 

with ceremony, recounting

cremations from your childhood:

boys at pyre’s base sifting through ash

for that fragment of sternum

which resembles a man

 

lost in meditation, those shards of hip

worthy of marigolds and hand-thrown urns

to set upon the Ganges. Years later

you find yourself home, on the edge

of a Greater Bangkok throttled

 

with fires and protest tambourines.

There amidst talk of the hereafter

and makeshift triggers, you tend

to a lung bruised through the cage

of the ribs, send photos of Varanasi,

 

its bargefields and silks, a barber

drawing his knife across the cheeks

of the dead and their brothers.

What I have yet to show you back

is Sta. Rita de Cascia, its reliquary

 

chapel overtaken by flowers, this

grave mason preparing a space

for my Grandfather as we watch

the youngest girls of the barangay

lifted up and passed, kicking

 

at the air, over the face of his casket.

Someone whispers, So that his spirit

will keep to heaven, and then I know

I am not entirely here: I stare

as a boy trowels earth into a paste

 

of mortar and spit; I hear Vesalius

take his artists to the head and

its moveable sutures, the bulwark

of temples made for the soft nerves,

formed for the sake of the eyes; I kneel

 

beside priests burning camphor

upon the ghats, brace this eldest son

for what he must break with his hands

and the sight of his father’s soul

freed from the fabric of his skull.

 

                First published in Ninth Letter

 

 

Interview

 

To quote Angry Asian Man, who are you? What are you all about?

Here is an animated GIF of a small chicken strutting, Velcro-strapped to a plunger.

And here, some context: a quintet of researchers curious about the mechanics of dinosaur movement, posture, and mobility fastened prosthetic tails to domesticated chickens. Because living Tyrannosaurs are hard to come by (mass extinction, alas), their hope was to “gain important insights into previously unexplored aspects of bipedal non-avian theropod locomotion” by observing changes in the gait of “extant birds.” That is to say, they strapped sticks to the backends of twelve juvenile chickens and video taped them as their newly weighted spines adjusted themselves to new centers of mass closer to those of ancestors earlier in the bird line. 

Ingenious.

I am the kind of person fascinated by nearly everything in orbit around — and connected with — that image. From the title of the study (“Walking Like Dinosaurs: Chickens with Artificial Tails Provide Clues about Non-Avian Theropod Locomotion”) to the acts of imagination powering their simulation’s design, from their leaps of conception to the phrases “experimental chicken” and their word “energetics,” there’s something like poetry in it all.

Consider how that which is often forgotten or domesticated can (with conjuring and risk) reconfigure our sense of where we came from and who we are. Consider how present things contain vestiges of the past. Like Marianne Moore, consider aloud: “Do the poet and scientist not work analogously?…Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision [because our] objective is fertile procedure. Is it not?”

 

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

Reliquaria is my first collection of poems and it is a variant of an earlier manuscript titled This Skeleton Coast.

On a macro level, Reliquaria resembles its predecessor; the bodywork remains essentially the same. There is one poem outside of three sections, each section inflected by that first poem and an accompanying epigraph. Because there’s such a range of formal experiments and shifts in time and perspective/voice in the book (including a fairly extensive Notes section that offers another sort of narrative), the overall architecture wants to serve as a calibrating and complicating force.

And so, in terms of transformations, most of those happened inside that structure: re-ordering poems, replacing older poems for newer ones, exchanging an epigraph taken from T.S. Eliot’s Ariel Poems for one from José Garcia Villa’s Doveglion; etc.

And the difference in title? Reliquaria is a gift from one of those internal alterations. In moving “Sacrum” to its current place at the very beginning of the book, This Skeleton Coast no longer felt like a fitting name for the collection as a whole; it didn’t quite set the fugue in motion. Reliquaria is an invented word, sacred-sounding, a play upon the music of a “reliquary / chapel overtaken by flowers.”

 

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

The ever-fraught, ever-fresh marriage of form and idea is infinitely exciting. There’s a moment from Thom Gunn’sThe Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography that speaks of this preoccupation better than I ever could:

“Rhythmic form and subject-matter are locked in a permanent embrace:…in metrical verse, it is the nature of the control being exercised that becomes part of the life being spoken about. It is poetry making great use of the conscious intelligence, but its danger is bombast—the controlling music drowning out everything else. Free verse invites a different style of experience, improvisation. Its danger lies in being too relaxed, too lacking in controlling energy.”

I’ve discovered that negotiating that desire to be cerebral, conscious-of-materials, and emotionally-resonant reallymatters to me. Indeed, the writing that I admire most often finds its own ways to live in and work those spaces, those rivalries.

By the way, have you seen this video of the Manhattan Bridge?

A student of mine once asked me about how civil engineering had anything to do with writing. I showed him that short film and rambled on about give and rigor, flexibility and frame-building, elasticity of thought and tensile strength. Whether suspension bridges or sonnets, we yearn to make things that hold and move us.

 

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

I like that word, “lineage.” It calls up associations with inheritance and congenital defects and evolution (convergent, divergent). My immediate response to is to offer this woefully incomplete catalogue of those I am beholden to—and humbled by: Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne Sexton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Lucille Clifton, Octavia E. Butler, John Berger, Anne Carson, Jack Gilbert, Kurt Vonnegut, José Garcia Villa, and on and on.

 

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

For Susan Sontag, being a writer “means trying to understand, take in, connect with what wickedness human beings are capable of and not be corrupted—made cynical, superficial—by this understanding.” Writing for her is a martial art, a discipline.

Here’s to hoping that the future affords me the chance to keep paying attention to the world that way. And here’s to your word, “yet,” which sounds like faith.

Dinner Party [poem by Susan Elliott Brown]

 In the room women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

-T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

 

A woman said a lamp in the parlor
reminded her of Michelangelo’s
sculpture, but he was the only sculptor
she knew by name.
Another woman agreed and mentioned
that chapel somewhere in Europe
she thought he may have painted.
He knew the pope, right? The wine
is delightful, and probably from Italy,
like Michelangelo himself.
And the colors of the wallpaper?
Truly inspired. A balding man
passed by without notice. The women
turned to architecture, one asserted
the house was surely in the Tudor
style, while another claimed her own
was Victorian, though most everyone
assumed she lived with her mother
and a cat named Leonardo. The man
carefully selected a peach from the fruit
bowl, turning it over and over in his hands.
The women assumed him an artist,
partly because of his clothing,
guessing he’d likely paint a still
life of the peach, alone on a table
with a shadow stretching out to its left;
He must have a brilliant understanding
of light and dark, probably an expert
on the Renaissance and Europe.

Susan Elliott Brown is a PhD student at the University of Southern Mississippi where she received the 2014 Joan Johnson Award in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, The Atticus Review, The Ampersand Review, and Alehouse, among others.

APIA Series: Ocean Vuong Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

Happy Spring!

I’m Sally Wen Mao, your guest blogger for the week, and this month, my first book, Mad Honey Symposium, is coming out. You can check it out at the Alice James Books website or Amazon. Here’s a review on Publishers Weekly and here’s one on The Literary Review.

May also happens to be Asian Pacific American Heritage month. This week I’ll be featuring a few APA poets who are fellows of Kundiman, an Asian American poetry collective based in New York. I’ll feature a poem and a short interview with each poet. The first in this series is Ocean Vuong.

 

 

Ocean Vuong is a recipient of a 2014 Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from Kundiman, Poets House, Civitella Ranieri Foundation (Italy), The Elizabeth George Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. Poems appear in Poetry, The Nation, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. He lives in Queens, NY. (www.oceanvuong.com)

I first got to know the incomparable Ocean Vuong when he came to Ithaca for a residency at Saltonstall Artists Colony in the fall of 2013. Ocean is a poet who deserves to be listened closely. That is because the voice in his poems ripples, sears, and dazzles, a voice that disarms with its contradictions, but also a voice that listens back. The reader will take note of the way in which his speakers experience haunting. In the following poem “Telemachus”, he disarms the reader from the beginning with the phrase “like any good son, I pull my father out/of the water.” The father, the epicenter for the speaker’s contradictory emotions—ire, tenderness, reverence, fear, empathy—is surprisingly vulnerable. The speaker has the power in this narrative: the will to act, the will to “drag him by the hair/through sand”, the will to “touch/his ears” and “turn him over”. The combination of violent images (“bullet hole in his back”, “bombed cathedral”) with sacred images highlights the great tension of the poem: that is, to actually look at or behold someone unbearably close to you, to see the image of his face come alive before you, that is difficult to survive. “To face/ it”, he writes, “The cathedral in his sea-black eyes.” The ending, an act of mercy and an almost-redemption: “The face not mine but one I will wear/to kiss all my lovers goodnight:/the way I seal my father's lips//with my own and begin/the faithful work of drowning.” The poem brims with complexity, tenderness, and violence, and as my students have said, Ocean’s work is “deep without confusing the reader”, which in a sense, is the ultimate compliment.

 

 

 Telemachus

 

Like any good son, I pull my father out

of the water, drag him by his hair

 

through sand, his knuckles carving a trail

the waves rush in to erase. Because the city

 

beyond the shore is no longer

where he left it. Because the bombed

 

cathedral is now a cathedral

of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far

 

I might sink. Do you know who this is,

ba? But the answer never comes, The answer

 

is the bullet hole in his back, brimming

with seawater. He is so still I think

 

he could be anyone's father, found

the way a green bottle might appear

 

at a boy's feet containing a year

he has never touched. I touch

 

his ears. No use. The neck's

bruising. I turn him over. To face

 

it. The cathedral in his sea-black eyes.

The face not mine but one I will wear

 

to kiss all my lovers goodnight:

the way I seal my father's lips

 

with my own and begin

the faithful work of drowning.

 

                    First published in Beloit Poetry Journal

 

Interview 

 

To quote Angry Asian Man: who are you? What are you all about?

This is something I'm still trying to figure out. It's hard to put language to it because I feel like what I am keeps changing every day. But maybe I'm not supposed to know. Do I even want to know? Some days I feel like a human. Some days I feel more like a sound.

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

I just completed my first full-length poetry collection so my mind is taking a respite from poetry at the moment. Which gives me space to work on this essay about fire escapes—something I have been thinking about for a couple of years. And there are so many of them in New York—most of the time I am looking up at all those little dark steel skeletons. I have found that the more I observe them the more I see them as representations of art. There’s this allure to the idea of a utilitarian vehicle of “escape”, and that something so infused with connotations of danger is also fully present and visible in our daily lives. In a way, the fire escape achieves what I aspire to do with poetry: explore my own fears and desperations without shame or guise—and I think: how can my work as an artist be as honest and clear as the fire escape? What would the poem look like if it was all fire escape and no building? All bones for departure? What formal enactments, what rhetorical gestures would have to occur for the poem to inhabit such a space? And, most importantly, how does the view differ from up there?

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

Language excites me. Irrational thought excites me. I spend most of my time listening instead of writing. A shard of language might come: a phrase, a word, an anagram, and I'd just keep it in my pocket, like a little seed, warming in my fist. In a good year, I draft about 6-8 poems—and maybe 4 or 5 of those will be decent enough to keep and revise. I like to test and explore that creative process, see how far a poem develops without ever writing anything down. I think I'm most invigorated by watching images grow in my mind, how they shift and move, how they layer themselves through days, months, even years. In this way, I feel more akin to a strange and ephemeral mental space shared by all artists, not just poets: the space of absolute potentiality, unbounded by genre or the limits of their tools. I think I write so slowly because I don't ever quite want to leave this space. The physical poem, for me, is just an artifact of all its senses. Maybe this is why writing is so fraught with anxiety for me. What I find on the page, even at its clearest manifestations, is only a residue. But sometimes, if I'm lucky, that's more than enough.

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

I tend to find my influences in independent moments rather than entire works—even going as micro as the singular line or syntactic units. In this way, I try to find influence in nearly every poet I read. Of course, this is not always the case—but I think it's still beneficial to read with this gaze, this aspiration. I just figure that if someone spent so many hours writing and thinking about a work, there must be something it can teach me. Naturally, this inclination extends beyond poetry. And maybe it's helpful to approach a work of art sans the confines of its genre—or even its artist, but more as a phenomenon of raw observation—removed from ego and the (faulty) expectations harbored through one's name, identity, or school of thought. In short, I try to approach the world as an artist by trusting in its inherent potency—and my work is only one interpretation of its abundance.

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

I don't really know. I often find myself writing to the terrified versions of myself. And maybe all I really want to say—if anything at all—is that you (whoever you are) are not alone. Maybe because this is what some of the most important writers in my life have been telling me over and over again in their myriad and unique ways. I go back to the boy I once was, the boy who hid in the library during recces to read a book covered in his lap so no one will know he has betrayed “fun” for secrets. So no one will know he loves words. Because lovers of words were thought to be weak and effeminate. And effeminate boys were strange and strange things don't last very long in this world. So I read to find my own hand in the pages of books. In the future, I want to keep holding books. To touch myself on each page, saying “I am here. I am here. I am here.”

Lagarde, Hirsi Ali, Rice, and Abramson: Welcome to the BAP blog [by David Lehman]

It has come to everyone's attention, even ours, that three notable women were to give the commencement addresses at three notable American institutions -- and that all three came to nought. Brandeis was going to award an honorary degree to human rights activist Ayaan Hiri Ali, who ran terrible risk to life and limb for criticizing Islam, voicing her dissent from the view that doctrinaire Islamist and jihadist doctrine are aberrant. Brandeis students and faculty voted her down, interpreting her declarations as examples of hate speech. Christine Lagarde, who heads the International Monetary Fund, decided against speaking at Smith College in view of the campus uproar directed at her economic policies. Condoleeza Rice, George W. Bush's national security adviser, and in his second term his secretary of state, was set to speak at Rutgers's graduation ceremonies when petitions denouncing her warmongering made her think twice. Like Lagarde, she withdrew. A fourth woman, Jill Abramson [pictured right], the first woman to hold the top editorial position at the New York Times, lost her job a few days ago either because she was impossible to work with, because she asked for a raise, or because she hired a top Guardian editor from England.

We wondered what Lagarde, Rice, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali [pictured left] would have said to the graduating classes, and we would be interested in Abramson's take on what happened at the nation's graying paper of record. So we are inviting the four of them to blog for us at their convenience. In particular, we hope to ask Abramson whether she regrets the tattoo of the New York Times's gothic T that she sports on her back. We would ask Hirsi Ali whether, in view of the righteous indignation of the university town of Waltham, Massachusetts, she would revise her assertion that “Islam is imbued with violence, and it encourages violence.” Lagarde [right] stylishly wears Chanel and the couture of other major Parisian designers. Does she think the Smith protestors were motivated in part by a backlash against French fashion, in part by her professed egalitarianism? (She has said, “It’s a question of not so much pushing the boys out of the picture but making the whole frame bigger so that both men and women access the labor market, contribute to the economy, generate growth, have jobs, and so on.”) As for Rice [left], we wonder whether the Rutgers students, vociferous admirers of the music of "gigantic, gigantic, gigantic, big, big love," were rebelling not only against Rice's role in framing foreign policy for the 43rd president but also against her preference for Mozart's decidedly unfashionable Piano Concerto in D minor, which she played with the Denver Symphony Orchestra at the age of fifteen, as well as works by Brahms and Shostakovich?

We would post the three canceled commencement addresses, though doubtlessly we have been beaten to the punch by such bastions of freedom of speech as The New York Review of Books and The Yale Daily News. -- DL

Monday Comics by Nin Andrews