The Best American Poetry

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 4

On Tue, May 6, 2014 at 12:30 AM David Lehman wrote:

 

Dear Amy l'ami de mon ame,

Is Don done? Has he reached rock bottom or just the bottom of a borrowed bottle of Smirnoff's from the desk of Roger Sterling? What do you think lies ahead for our hero? I'll think about that myself, while waiting for your answer.

The psychedelic posters that pop up, the Milton Glazer imagery, remind me that I was a confused twenty-year-old that year, clever though naive, easily wounded, stunned by adulthood on the one hand and by the rapidly changing cultural expectations of kids like me, sloganeering to make love not war (whether actually able to do either very well). Gertrude Stein wrote that "in our youth there is nothing we are more intolerant of than our own sins writ large in others." I see the hippies in the commune upstate, where Roger Sterling visits like an alien in a blue blazer, and see myself in both halves of the antithesis -- as one of the bearded granola eaters but also as the silver-haired ne'er-do-well who smokes weed with the young kids but would attend the campfire in a jacket and tie. I see myself in both groups and like myself in neither and the 1960s are coming to an end.

It is, we are reminded insistently, 1969, year of anticipated miracles (the moon landing, Woodstock) and unexpected ones (Chappaquiddick, and the erstwhile hapless New York Mets managed by Gil Hodges will win the World Series). Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint," in its distinctive yellow cover, is the novel of the year and naturally Don Draper is reading it. And as the computer invades the office, I wondered whether the history lesson was getting the better of the fictional energy in the "Mad Men" dialectic.
When Stan tells Ginsberg that the computer, a space-occupying contraption that a bunch of electricians are installing, is or is fated to be "the Mona Lisa," the statement makes a point not only about the coming primacy of the computer but also about the persistence of the "Mona Lisa" as the apotheosis of high art vaulted into highest eminence. You think of how Duchamp put a mustache on the Mona Lisa, that T. S. Eliot said that ""Hamlet" was "the Mona Lia of literature," and you realize the weight the writers are putting on Stan's simple sentence. But maybe you also wonder whether all these historical markers are taking the place of drama.

Has the series lost some of its energy? Let's take a long view. We have a lot of characters and some of them are stagnant. Peggy. downing a shot, has no romantic life to speak of. If Joan does, we don't know it. Megan and Betty are off-stage. Pete, looking creepy in sideburns, has a Betty-type blonde on his arm, his real-estate agent. What does she see in him? I say, shrugging.  He is the conduit to a brand-new national campaign for Burger Chef. Yes, the 1970s, decade of hamburger chains, is upon us.

Roger and Mona get back together for a failed mission. They fail to rescue daughter Margaret, who has abandoned husband and daughter to become a communard in the Catskills. Mona thinks Margaret has been "brainwashed" and Margaret insinuates that her mother, to get by, has to lock herself in the bathroom with a pint of gin. Roger is willing to giving it more of a shot. He smokes dope with the kids, sleeps in a sleeping bag outside beside his starry-eyed daughter, but for one night only. "I'm tired of accepting society's definition of me," Margaret says in the showdown scene with her parents, and I flinch. Yes, conversations like that were taking place all over. But there was an intellectual element and often a political one in the rebellion and if it would be unrealistic to expect the fictional Roger and Mona to understand it, you wonder whether viewers are in any better position to do so.

As to Don, I have never seen him in such despair. He gets drunk, nothing unusual about that, but acts drunk, as he never used to; gets belligerent as never before. Will Freddy of AA-fame --  Freddy who once disgraced himself by peeing in his pants in public -- be our boy's salvation? Freddy gives him a good talking to, and the next morning a clean-shaved Don can assure Peggy that he will meet her deadline. It is possible that he can accept the role-reversal, accept that his one-time subordinate is now his boss, and shine when the opportunity arises. But I get the feeling that fate, or Matthew Weiner, has something more dramatic in store.

David

 

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 11:48 PM Amy Gerstler wrote:

Dear Professor Lehman, Doctor d’toutes choses Mad Men:

THE SCOTTISH PLAY
(Thank you for teaching me the word “communard!”)
But let’s begin at the beginning. The episode opens with Pete and his sharky blonde bombshell real estate peddling girlfriend (who, as you astutely point out, could be Betty Draper’s sister) eating dinner on a lantern lit restaurant terrace. Bonnie seems poised to play Lady MacBeth to Pete’s MacBeth. She’s all shimmery ambition, greed and goading. “I love watching you work” she purrs when she thinks Pete’s made a cagey business move at the restaurant. (Weirdly, Pete just seems embarrassed and starts stammering. What’s up with that?) In her, Pete has a consort that’s as snaky, maybe even snakier, than he is. I loved his ex wife Trudy and miss her, but she was Pollyanna to his Machiavelli. Pete needs a ruthless babe who can hold her own with him.

RED EPISODE(S)
This episode seemed like the RED episode to me. I feel I am just waking up out of some dizzy, plot obsessed stupor to the amazing uses of color in Mad Men (the word “MAD” in the logo always appearing in that arresting red.) The same RED or thereabouts is the splashy color, only a little faded, of the New York Mets pennant Don finds under the desk and hangs on the wall in his new office, which is Layne’s old office (and Layne hung himself there.) The red couch that Ginsberg wants to salvage at all costs from the repurposed “creative lounge”  where the huge  new computer is being housed is a symbolic point of contention in this episode. The main figure in the Milton Glazer poster you noticed is red. Roger’s grandson Ellery (visiting the office because his mother has run off to a rural commune upstate, hence the term “communard” deftly lobbed by you, professor) is clad in bright red overalls. On the famous Portnoy’s Complaint book cover you cited, author Phillip Roth’s name appears in Mad Men red. Burt has a huge red Mark Rothko painting in his office. Etc. Etc. No doubt I am one of the last Mad Men obsessives to be jolted by this assaultive repetitive red. Or maybe they are all utterly different reds my TV screen homogenizes to seem like the same shade?

BUMMER?
The only false note in this episode for me is when Burt angrily blows off Don’s suggestion that the Lease Tech dude installing the block long computer in the office (Lloyd) is ripe for a pitch...so someone should pitch him. The guy wants to start advertising his growing-like-wildfire business. I can readily believe that Burt is so furious with Don for past fuckups that he would rebuke Don at first blush, saying that he’s on probation and isn’t allowed to bring in new clients. What I had a hard time swallowing is that Burt would go further: refusing  Don’s subsequent suggestion to go ahead and allow someone else to try to land Lease Tech, if Don’s banned from trying to reel in new biz. Instead, Burt acts like he doesn’t care about a fig the prospect of landing this potential client, like he’s offended by the very idea. That doesn’t seem like Burt at all: ignoring a lucrative account begging to be snagged. But I have infinite faith in Matt Weiner. Perhaps Burt is only waiting to spring this idea at the next partner’s meeting, leaving Don out of it entirely, further humiliating Don and taking all credit for himself?

I LOVE FREDDIE
Will he drag Don off to Alcoholics Anonymous? To what effect? Great acting job, full of rumpled heart and slightly fumbly subtlety, by Joel Murray. I love that this reformed alcoholic character is named Freddie Rumsen. (RUM- SIN)

RURAL RUMINATIONS AND DADDY’S GIRLS
The farm visited on a school field trip in a previous episode seems to have paved the way (or smoothed the dirt road) for the rural commune in this one, complete with soft chicken cluckings on the sound track. And yes, one theme of the episode currently under discussion, if this isn’t too heavy handed an observation, mon professor, is The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost. Don is being made to pay handsomely for previous sins, again and again. It seems everyone at the office is against him. Roger: heedless hedonist, profligate, selfish, famished to taste all of life’s experiences, has sired a daughter who’s a chip off the old block, and he doesn’t like it one bit when she start to emulate him. She’s very much daddy’s girl, as Sally Draper, Don’s daughter is also her father’s daughter, bold, perceptive, intelligent, headstrong, capable of canny deception or searing honesty, intensely independent, etc. And Peggy seems as though she is trying to BE Don, her erstwhile mentor, god help her, so I count her as another form of daddy’s girl in the series. Peggy’s hitting the bottle at work, Don-style. She’s enjoying lording over her former boss (sadly, many a daddy’s girl has taken this attitude toward a formerly domineering daddy laid low.) I could  stretch this idea even thinner and say that there are ways in which Joan, arguably Roger’s protégé, is another breed of daddy’s girl. She has some of Roger’s objectivity, and has maybe even improved upon it. Roger, after all, is not only Joan’s former mentor but the real daddy of her son. 

Parenthetically: The actress who plays Roger’s runaway daughter Margaret (communard name: Marigold) is wonderful, don’t you think, professor? This episode is just about first time we’ve seen this character smile! She seems utterly transformed, pretty hair flowing down her back. Gone are the uptight bun, the designer clothes. She looks and sounds and moves like a completely different person from the sourpuss pill box hat wearing debutante we’d known.  

EWWWW
Is anything more horrid than the patronizing way Lew addresses girls and women as “sweetheart?” And he has inflicted Don and Peggy on each other hoping that they will both “implode.” Chained them together like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.” Lew’s a great villain. I can barely look at him.

Au revoir, and Until Sunday,

A.

"The Metaphysical Martini": In memoriam, Werner Dannhauser

<<<
I HAVE NEVER met a martini I did not like. Under no circumstances would I assert that any martini is as good as any other; my mind may be soaked, but not in rampant egalitarianism. I am willing to argue, however, that while the best martini demands to be called "perfect," the worst is nevertheless passable, and far better than no martini at all.

Surprisingly enough, so wondrous a drink has failed to spawn much of a literature that celebrates its wonders. It may well be that most sane men would rather drink martinis than read about them and would rather read about them than write about them. Yet that tempting explanation fails to satisfy, simply because martinis can be held in one hand, so that anyone who can talk and chew gum at the same time can just as well teach himself simultaneously to sip a martini and to read or write about it.

Nor will it do to contend that the absence of a library of works on the martini constitutes an undisguised blessing because writing about them would resemble what Leo Strauss once called "the loathsome business of explaining a joke." That was in another context and besides the great man's imposing list of virtues did not include a love of martinis. A mystique surrounds martinis, to be sure, but it does not suffer from an attempt at articulation. Indeed, for many of us the joy of drinking martinis is enhanced by talking about the joy of drinking martinis.

WHAT, THEN, can the matter be? The safest explanation takes into account the drink's youthfulness. The martini was born in the nineteenth century and has flourished--perhaps peaked--in ours. The occurrence of phenomena necessarily antedates their comprehension, as Hegel might have remarked, and no wise man tries to hurry history, as Adlai Stevenson did in fact maintain, so true understanding may have to await the fullness of time, to borrow Martin Luther's felicitous phrase.
>>>

For more of this classic essay, which originally appeared in the November 1981 issue of The American , click here.

"Hail bounteous May that dost inspire, Mirth and youth, and warm desire . . ." The Poetry Society of America holds its Spring Benefit, Tuesday, May 20 at the New York Botanical Garden

On Tuesday, May 20, beginning at 6:00 pm (4:30 for those departing by special bus from Manhattan), the Poetry Society of America welcomes the season with its annual Spring Benefit Dinner. This year you can head up to the New York Botanical Garden for a private tour of the Garden's major spring/summer exhibition Groundbreakers: Great American Gardens and The Women Who Designed Them. With a stunning evocation of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Maine, and exhibits highlighting the rich and artful history of some of the gardening world's most significant innovators, the Garden celebrates the women who pioneered landscape and garden design, writing, and photography during the early 20th century.

The tour will be followed by a dinner to celebrate a groundbreaking woman in our own field: Jill Bialosky —poet, novelist, memoirist, and Executive Editor at W.W. Norton & Company—for her distinguished contribution to the landscape of poetry.

Go here to purchase tickets or contact PSA's Development Director, Elsbeth Pancrazi, at (212) 254-9628 or [email protected]. 

Braving Storms: John Foy on “Point of View”

(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts so good we're going to share them with you this week. --sdh)

John and Lorna on the beach in Brewster before the hurricane

In late August 2011, the very outer edges of Hurricane Irene were felt in Cape Cod as the storm, by then an extratropical cyclone, moved inland toward Vermont and New Hampshire. At the time, I was in Brewster, on the Cape, with my wife (the painter Majo L. Foy). We were staying with our friend, the poet and translator Lorna Knowles Blake (pictured here), her husband Bob Batterman, and their two beloved Portuguese Water Dogs. The name of their beachfront home is Point of View, from which today’s poem takes its title.
 
“Point of View” (I wrote this one) is a celebratory poem about the hurricane. During the storm, I happened to be in just about the safest place: the vast mudflats of Brewster at low tide. Out there on the reaches of sand, there was nothing to blow away or crash down. So I was in the rare position of being able to revel in the wall of wind.

continue reading here.

Braving Storms: John Foy on “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”

(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts were so good we're going to share them with you this week. --sdh)

“A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” – Here, again, a storm of grief, this time over a young girl who perishes in the firebombing of London during WWII. The poet, Dylan Thomas, doesn’t know the girl who has been incinerated and buried in the rubble. He claims that he will refuse to mourn her death, and on one level he does. If you accept just the denotational gloss, he says that never—until the apocalyptic end of time—will he mourn the child’s death. Such is his “mighty vaunt,” as Seamus Heaney has called it, uttered in “death-defying strains,” but the music of his words is very clearly the orchestration of a monumental sadness. The sorrow is in the syntax. This is the tortured, hyper-dramatic grammar of a voice that is keening operatically.

continue reading here.

"Lehman's ethos will survive as its disapora finds employment elsewhere. . . " [by David Lehman]

How lovely to wake up, read the paper, and see your adventures and follies writ large for the world to admire!

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, zum beispiel, "Critics will see Lehman's fading legacy within Barclays as good riddance." Well, OK, but please know that on my end, at least, there are no hard feelings. I think fondly of the days when I learned to double-stripe my Barclay's checks, changed my dollars into pounds, and was able to fly from Paris to London though broke thanks to my Barclaycard, the first time I ever used a credit card. And then Nixon devalued the dollar by going off the gold standard and my pounds bought more than bucks on the continent.

The Journal's Francesco Guerrera goes on. "After all, Lehman's aggressive, risk-taking culture produced the reckless bets that destroyed the firm. And Lehman's brand of investment banking -- pugnacious, scrappy, and paranoid - is an anachronism in an era when the chief executive of Goldman Sachs grows a beard in an apparent bid to soften his and the firm's image." Now hold on. I please guilty to the charge of nourishing a "risk-taking culture" that has sometimes led to "reckless bets." On the other hand, I bet a sawbuck on California Chrome to cop the Derby, doubled my bet on the colt at the Preakness, and sat oiut the Belmont,because I don't believe we will have another Seattle Slew for another half a decade, and I invite anyone to review the recent performance of my so-called "aggressive" portfolio, which consists of American Express, Berkshire Hathaway, Caterpillar, Disney,  Exxon, Goggle, Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, Pepsi and Wells Fargo. In any event, I intend to eschew facial hair whatever the heck they're doing at Goldman.

"And yet, Lehman brought a lot to Barclays." So don't trade all your Lehman green-and-white for Barclay blue just yet!

"It is possible that Lehman's ethos will survive as its disapora finds employment elsewhere." Possible? It's a sure thing, as fast as you can say Michael Milken, Drexel Burnham, or Jock Derrida.

"Wall Street [is] less risky, less indebted and (probably) much better regulated than preimplosion Lehman, but desperately less profitable."  May I point out that "desperately" delivers the knock-out punch in that graf, and that the parenthetical "probably" blunts the force of that first clause? I would quarrel with "preimplosion" but I do love the word, especially in its unhyphenated form.

The take-away: until its untimely demise in 2008, Lehman's long-term record at fixed-income investing, equities, and mergers-and-acquisitions advisory, remains a shining light in Times Square as on the downtown street that begins with a graveyard and terminates in a river.

-- DL

Elizabeth Walters in Conversation with Pulitzer Prize Winner Vijay Seshadri Part III

(Ed. note: This is Part III of an inteview with Vijay Seshadri. Go here for Parts I & II. sdh.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EW. Are there certain poets you go to again and again in your own reading?

VS. Lately, actually, I have been returning to the poets who I call the great suicides in American literature, and by those poets I mean Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Weldon Kees, and Hart Crane. And they all seem to possess something that is interesting to me, and they represent a sort of psychological reality which is compelling to contemplate. I’ve always read those poets and I’ve always admired them, but now I tend to see something in them that I could actually make use of for myself. So those are sort of the poets I’ve been circling around and thinking about, thinking about both their successes and their failures and why. And Plath is so interesting. And there are so many ways in which she’s interesting which haven’t been properly explicated, I think. So much of her effects aren’t really accounted for.

EW. When you say Plath’s effects aren’t accounted for — are there things that people are overlooking?

VS. In conversations I’ve had, in accounts I’ve read of her in essays and reviews and stuff, nobody seems to talk about the effects and what they portend. Nobody’s ever really accounted in things that I have read the relationship between the psychological storm she was experiencing and the work she was writing. And that is really an extraordinary thing, those last poems she wrote — I think 30 of them in one month, and you look at those and you say, what is going on there? And there’s still a large body of readers who reject her, repudiate her, who find something — who push her away, push that work away. That’s interesting to me too.

EW. Are there any poems you have written that you were especially happy or relieved to finish, or that left you especially satisfied when you finished them?

VS. I love all my poems, of course. I don’t want any of them to think that I love it less than I love other poems. But there’s a poem in my first book (Wild Kingdom), it’s called “Lifeline,” which I was particularly happy to have finished. It was one of those poems that was not only a burden and a chore but took me to a new level of control and understanding of literature. And it was written at a time when I was particularly troubled and taxed by my existence, by money problems, not having any sense of direction, and a lot of those things are translated into the poem in an interesting way.

I love that first book of mine, and it really didn’t get much attention. This book (3 Sections) is getting all the attention, and that book got almost none, so I particularly think about that poem within it. It’s about someone who gets lost in the woods; it has a plot that is a very simple one. It actually appeared in Best American Poetry (in 1997).

EW. I like that the cover design (for 3 Sections) uses the number “3” and not the word “three. ”

VS. I had to have that. I mean, that comes right from Berryman. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved 77 Dream Songs, that book, and the 7 and the 7 are numbers. So I would never have had the 3 spelled out. And that’s a particularly beautiful 3 (in the design), I think.

EW. How do you view the state of poetry in America or the world today — what things excite you, what concerns do you have?

VS. I think there’s a lot of discourse about how this or that is a problem in American poetry. I mean, my experience of it — and I’ve served on lots of panels and kind of across the country — is that the art is flourishing as it never has before. And that might not be reflected in the sales of poetry books, but I don’t think the sales of poetry books are an indication of the health of the art. I think an indication of the health of the art is how many good poets there are. And in every region there are poetic cultures, and it’s very much the practice of poetry and the extent of the poetry that is determining the health of American poetry.

I think in terms of the larger culture, there’s something so American about that. The nature of American democracy allows people to realize that yes, they too have a personal relationship to creation. And they turn to poetry to explore that creation. . . .

I’ve always heard this complaint about MFA programs, but the MFA programs have done their jobs. They’ve produced an extensive amount of great poets over the past years. It’s just been a real flowering.

Elizabeth Walters is a writer, editor and teacher. She lives in New York City, where she is earning an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University.

Braving Storms: John Foy, “On My First Son”

(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts were so good we're going to share them with you this week. --sdh)

Here’s a storm that’s internal and emotional. Ben Jonson wrote “On My First Son” in 1603 after the death of his seven-year-old boy, Benjamin. The storm he is weathering here is that of inconsolable grief.
 
Professor Edward Taylor, at Columbia, told us how as a young man he first taught this poem to a roomful of graduate students. He said he broke down in tears in front of the class, overwhelmed by the naked sentiments Jonson expressed, who otherwise was known for his tough, cynical take on things.

continue reading here.

Review of “The Best American Poetry 2013″ ed. Denise Duhamel [by Julie Marie Wade]

(Ed note: this review comes to us from Night Owl, the online publication of OWL, Ohio Wesleyan University’s literary magazine. -- sdh)

In 2001, I was heading to graduate school to pursue a Master’s degree in creative writing.  My Aunt Linda had been diagnosed with breast cancer and was moving home to live with her mother.  We seemed to pass each other like ships in the night, or more precisely, like ferry boats in the Fauntleroy harbor.

I wanted to give my aunt a gift that she would always remember.  I tried to imagine what that gift might be.  Aunt Linda, though shy about her artistic endeavors, had always loved painting and writing poems.  The den at my grandmother’s house was filled with her art books and brochures from museums she had visited in Europe.  There were no poetry books that I could recall.

On one of my last nights in Seattle, I browsed the shelves at Twice Sold Tales, my favorite used bookstore on Capitol Hill.  There I found two copies of The Best American Poetry 2000.  I did not know the series then.  I sat on a stool and began reading the first poem in the anthology— Kim Addonizio’s “Virgin Spring”—which described in heartbreaking detail a film I had never seen.  The final lines will always haunt me:

 

I don’t know what to make of the sister. She’s the one who knows the
     world is brutal

and goes on, scattering seed for the hogs, the one who says nothing,
     the one who survives.

 

I bought both copies of the anthology that night.  One I kept for myself, and the other I gave to Aunt Linda, suggesting we read and discuss one poem each month by phone and email as a way of keeping in touch.

There are seventy-five poems in each issue of Best American Poetry.  My aunt and I made it to forty before she died.

*

Guest editor Denise Duhamel writes in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 2013, “Walt Whitman knew that in order to have great poets we need to have great audiences.  The readership of The Best American Poetry series is that audience” (xxviii).  While “great,” like “best,” is an inherently subjective term, I like to think of my Aunt Linda and me as two distinctive facets of that audience.  As a student, writer, and future teacher of poetry, The Best American Poetry series would soon become a staple of my education and an essential handbook for my literary career.  (I know I am not alone here.)  For Linda, the anthology was something else altogether—an introduction to a world of contemporary poets she hadn’t even realized was there.

continue reading here.

Elizabeth Walters in Conversation with Pulitzer Prize Winner Vijay Seshadri Part II

(Ed. note: This is Part II of a three-part interview with Vijay Seshadri. Go here for Part I. sdh)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EW. You write in both poetry and nonfiction. How does an idea for writing end up becoming a piece in one form or the other?

VS. The prose I write is really — it’s about something. I have a subject, I have a topic. I've written essays about literary figures, or I have a specific period of my own experience that I want to render in straightforward narrative terms. The aspect of the irrational in that kind of writing is fairly well-controlled, whereas with poetry, I don’t think subject matter is primary. I think subject matter is — it’s not incidental, it’s not accidental, but the activity of writing is taking place somewhere else, and so it is not as if an idea will turn into prose or an idea will turn into poetry, and it is not as if I am sort of doing both all the time.

I am primarily a poet, and I am primarily engaged in working with language the way a poet does. Every once in a while, I say, “Oh, I should write about my experience as someone who loved baseball,” or “I should write a memoir of a friend of mine who was important to me and who died,” and that’s very conscious stuff. . . .

What happens in the writing of a poem is something floats out or whizzes by and you just try to grab it and hold on and see where it takes you. I know where I'm going in my prose, I don’t know where I’m going in my poetry, and I guess that's the difference between the two of them.

EW. The second section of 3 Sections is a personal essay, “Pacific Fishes of Canada,” and the third section is a poem that is titled “Personal Essay.” Do you think that prose and poetry inform each other in your work?

VS. Yes, but very much at the level of what we were talking about in [Alice Quinn’s Columbia MFA] class — which was making sentences and the different psychic reality engendered by different commitments to sentences. I am very much, in my pedagogy especially, trying to teach students about how powerful form is in function, in generating material. So I would say that there is that aspect of it: The prose puts you in a different rhythmic environment and therefore imposes upon you different choices and different tones than poetry, where you have a degree of rhythmic freedom and liberation brought on the line that the sentence does not give you.

I’m not saying one is better than the other. I don’t think one is better than the other; I think they're both interesting. I think the reason I had two long artifacts, one of which was poetry and one of which was prose, had to do very much with my kind of interest in the levels of interiority that one could afford that the other couldn’t afford, because everything in “Personal Essay” takes place in my mind, where there’s so much externality in “Pacific Fishes of Canada,” so much of an element of journalism, even. And so the personal almost sneaks up on you.

EW. I noticed that it’s two pages into “Pacific Fishes of Canada” before the “I” really makes an appearance. I thought you handled that really elegantly, moving from the beginning.

VS. Writing personal essays, you have to have some sort of architectural sense about what you're writing, and that’s true of journalism too, you need to have a floor plan. So I had made it very clear that I was going to enter personal experience and into the self, and I had to have a long sort of runway (of background information) so I could rise into that. Also, I had the obligation to render a world as clearly as I could, to give people a sense of history and geography and an environment. With a lyric poem, you can just do so much with metaphor, you can get through things so fast, and you don’t necessarily have that freedom in prose. You have other freedoms in prose that you don’t have in poetry.

EW. How does being an educator inform how you interact with language and writing?

VS. I’ve never been one of those people that subscribed to the notion that those who can’t do, teach. I don’t think it’s true at all. It certainly hasn’t been true for me in that teaching allows me to always be thinking about the basics of writing, so it always keeps my interest in writing refreshed. The problems are always very alive for me, the problems of writing, the problems of my writing and other people’s writing, and because I'm teaching new texts and great texts all the time, I’m always picking up knowledge, information, technique about great writing from teaching those texts.

Teaching at Sarah Lawrence takes a lot of time, though, and it takes a lot of energy. So that might be a small drawback relative to people who have other jobs. . . . We’re very lucky to be teaching, those of us who have to teach or do teach, because we get the summers off and that’s an incredible advantage for writers. Teaching, all and all, has been good for me. I used to be an editor, and I would work 48, 49 weeks a year, and, as a teacher, I work 30 to 32 weeks a year. That has been really an incredible luxury for my writing.

EW. What are some texts that you enjoy teaching?

VS. This semester, I’ve done a lot of new, interesting and wayward pieces of writing. I have taught both in my graduate class and my undergraduate class a wonderful piece of journalism from the 1980s by Susan Sheehan called “Missing Plane,” and it appeared in three issues of the New Yorker (in May 1986). It’s this incredibly detailed sort of account of what the title says it is, a missing plane, a missing World War II plane that was found in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. The first part of it is the discovery of the plane, the second part of it is the recreation of the identities of the people on the passenger manifest, and the third part of it goes back to the war and describes how the plane might have been lost. I’ve known that text for a long long time, and it’s known among people who are sort of connoisseurs of journalism, especially around the New Yorker, this is a legendary piece.

I try to introduce a lot of journalism, good journalism, into my nonfiction classes, and that’s all I teach at Sarah Lawrence. I will assign a text by Janet Malcolm, for example. We read The Journalist and the Murderer and we read Fatal Vision by Joe McGinniss, which is what The Journalist and the Murderer is about. . . . That was kind of fascinating, thinking about those issues of research and metajournalism. Janet Malcolm is a writer I admire very much.

I also taught kind of classic nonfiction writing, I gave them Joseph Mitchell, I gave them Orwell, people like that. . . . I also taught In Cold Blood for the first time, and that’s a book I’ve known and loved forever.

EW. If you taught poetry, what poems and poets would you want to include?

VS. Right now, I think I would be really interested in teaching a lot of contemporary poets. . . . When I am writing poems, I don’t want to read contemporary work, because I don’t want to be distracted. Usually I will read people who are really useful to me going backwards, from the 1970s back to — well, back to the beginning, but mostly for the past 100 years.

If I were teaching poetry now, I would use a lot of contemporary texts, and that’s something I never did. When I was teaching poetry, I felt that it was my job essentially to teach a literature course . . . that it was my job somehow to introduce people to the great canonical texts.

EW. Is that because students don’t get exposed to the contemporary poets as much?

VS. No. I think that young students, especially in MFA programs, they seem to be insufficiently aware of the past. For me, historically, I had to teach them about people they might night never encounter and show them how good they were. Someone like Alexander Pope, for example — I always felt that if you understood why Alexander Pope was one of the greatest poets in English who ever lived, then you would understand what poetry really is. Some (students) had barely heard of Pope.

. . . . I guess now I’m more agnostic with that. I don’t really know if it’s the case that in order to be able to write a poem, one needs to be able to appreciate Pope.

Tomorrow: Part III. Who do you read?

 Elizabeth Walters is a writer, editor, and teacher. She  lives in New York, where she is earning an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University.

Braving Storms: John Foy on “Storm Fear”

(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts were so good we're going to share them with you this week. --sdh)

“Storm Fear” has always been one of my favorite early Robert Frost poems. Like “The Seafarer,” it’s an adversity poem that finds the speaker wondering how he’ll manage as the elements work upon him. In this case, it’s a blizzard at night in the country.
 
Frost’s deployment of rhymes and iambs was instructive to me early on, showing how a poet who worked in form could modulate into freer-looking verse that used varying line lengths and an irregular though nonetheless tuneful rhyme scheme, all the more lovely and alive because of its unpredictability. This, clearly, was one way to let a poem breathe.

continue reading here.

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

On Tuesday, May 6, The American Scholar will launch a website experiment in writing crowd-sourced poetry—in this case, a Shakespearean sonnet.

Our own David Lehman, the series editor for The Best American Poetry volumes, has provided the first line for the sonnet, and will solicit a new line from our web audience each week. Lehman will pick finalists and a winner on the subsequent week, and readers will be encouraged to comment on his choice of the winning line.

Please join us for what we hope will be an amusing and enlightening poetic undertaking, and encourage all the poets and would-be poets you know to try their hand at “Next Line, Please.”

Lehman’s first line:

How like a prison is my cubicle

Look for Lehman’s introduction and our instructions on Tuesday, May 6,  at:

theamericanscholar.org/nextline

And remember to check back each Tuesday to watch the sonnet grow.

David "Shades" Kirby and David "the Hat" Lehman keep Hattiesburg, Miss. safe during Moorman Symposium

  David "Shades" Kirby (center), working security, gives the all-clear for crime boss David "the Hat" Lehman. Also pictured, L to R: Stacey Harwood, Fae "the Doc" Dremock, and Tom Holmes. (Photo credit: Billy Collins.)

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Elizabeth Walters in Conversation with Pulitzer Prize Winner Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection 3 Sections (Graywolf Press, 2013), recently took time away from a schedule full of teaching and fielding media requests to respond to our own interview request. In announcing the honor earlier this month, the Pulitzer Board cited 3 Sections as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.” Seshadri has published three other books of poetry, The Long Meadow (Graywolf, 2004), Wild Kingdom (Graywolf, 1996), and The Disappearances (HarperCollins India 2007), a collection of selected poems that marked the first time he was published in his native country of India. Seshadri was born in Bangalore, moved to the United States as a child and earned a BA from Oberlin and an MFA from Columbia University. He teaches undergraduate and graduate nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives with his family in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Ed note: this interview has been edited slightly for clarity and length. sdh)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EW: First, congratulations on winning the Pulitzer!

VS. Thank you really much. It’s really quite an amazing experience. I hope you get to have it some day.

EW: How has it changed your life so far?

VS:I’m getting an amazing number of calls and messages of congratulations from friends from every part of my life, from 40 years ago on. That’s been really gratifying, and then media requests, especially from India, where it turns out I wound up on the front page of every newspaper, or this is what one of my correspondents told me, and there are a lot of newspapers in India.

The number of messages I received on Facebook was amazing, and I don’t know how to use Facebook, although I have it. That cyberspace conversation that everyone is engaged in — you really see the scope when something like this happens.

EW:Could you talk a little bit about your composing process — how an idea starts and becomes a piece of writing?

VS: Usually I start out instinctively with a phrase that sounds right to me, because it’s clean, it’s uncluttered and it sort of suggests a whole experience that I can excavate. That’s basically the genesis of most of my poems.

Every once in a while, I will start out with a concept. I’ll start out with an idea, say, that I’m going to write a poem about writing, or I’m going to write a poem that changes the grammatical subtext midstream (as in the shift from the first to the third person in “The Descent of Man,” printed in 3 Sections and first published on the website of the Academy of American Poets). Often those exercises don’t turn out to be successes, but sometimes they do.

I think when you’re starting out as a poet, you want your inspiration to be predictable. And as you grow more accustomed to writing, you recognize that inspiration takes many different forms, many different logical forms, many different experiential forms. You relax about the idea that you don’t know where the poem is going to come from. Because you don’t know, and you can’t ever know, where a poem is going to come from. . . . At this point, I have given up trying to control the process. . . .

A phrase suddenly pops into my mind, and that phrase — the poem is generated out of the development of that phrase into other phrases.

EW. Do you hold yourself to a writing routine?

VS. I have little notebooks where I jot things down, and that happens just about at any time. But that’s just the beginning of composition, and composition basically takes place, for me, in the morning, and it usually takes place if I don’t teach. When I teach at Sarah Lawrence, I usually have conferences also during the day, because we have a tutorial system, so it’s unlikely that I get anything done during those days.

I get up and then I work and my process is — I guess people looking at it from the outside would say that I’m a frustrated writer in the sense that my ratio of unfinished pieces to finished pieces is about 10 to 1, which is very, very high, I think. Many of my fragments are pretty large, and I always hold out the hope of finishing them, and that still may happen with a lot of material. But most writing does not lead anywhere for me, and it takes a certain resilience and capacity for endurance for me to continue.

There are periods when I don’t write at all, but I’m always reading. That’s the one constant — I am always steeped in literature in one way or another, and talking about writing and thinking about writing as a teacher. So in some sense, even when I’m not finishing anything, I really feel like I’m engaged in the art.

Tomorrow: Poetry? Prose? Both?

Elizabeth Walters is a writer, editor, and teacher. She lives in New York, where she is earning an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University.

Braving Storms: John Foy on “The Seafarer”

(Ed note: Earlier this month, our friends over at Ideasmyth ran a series post by poet John Foy. His theme was "braving storms" and the posts so good we're going to share them with you this week. --sdh)

The theme this month at the Ideasmyth blog is “braving storms.” To address it, I’ll be posting poems that deal in one way or another with storms, of the real sort or the figurative kind. In literature, storms are rarely meant to be mere external events. A storm outside usually points to a storm inside or to something else that is more than just weather.
 
“The Seafarer” is a good place to begin. It’s an Old English poem that comes from the Exeter Book, a tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The author is unknown. The excerpt I’ve posted below is a loose translation by Ezra Pound. In its harsh, consonant-clanging Anglo-Saxon music, it tells of the hardships a sailor endures during winter storms at sea. It can be read as a sapiential poem urging fortitude in the face of misery, danger and deprivation.
 

Continue reading here.

Poetry & Taxidermy, Every Girl's Dream [by Allison Campbell]

Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman are hilarious and beautiful. This happens to be my favorite combination for poetry and people, so last night's reading for the 2014 Moorman Symposium was like going to a town where "candy canes grow on trees," "the streets are paved in pastries," and "there are no clocks," somewhere a lot like Gnürsk (a city in Poland you can visit in David Kirby's poetry).

I want everyone to experience Gnürsk. It would be a shame for anyone to miss out. But if you haven't had the pleasure of hearing these poets read, there's another way to travel -- buy their books! Until your Amazon Prime box arrives, here are a few excerpts. (Posting just parts of these poems is a little like pouring the white dust that collects inside the candy cane's clear plastic wrapping into your hand, but even these bits are sweet!) 

Denise Duhamel read "Victor," from her collection Blowout, a 2013 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

when the handyman says let's take a shower together

and see what happens you almost drop the cardboard

and the mound of sawdust

that you wish didn't look so much like a mound

and you say are you crazy and the handyman sulks

well it was worth a try and you ask

why did you wait so long to ask me out

knowing he would have had a much better chance

when he first started the tile work

and you probably would have given anything

                         just to have someone hold you

Barbara Hamby read "Reading Can Kill You" from her 2014 book of new and selected poems On the Street of Divine Love. Below is a choice snippet, but read it in full at Poetry Daily.

and we sat in the dark next to the blazing enamel stove 
         and for breakfast drank tea from the samovar sweetened 
with jam and talked about Gogol's sentences and Mandelstam's 
         despair, and then at night it would be love and vodka, 
so when Satan showed up with his entourage, we were borne along 
         on his cloud of smoke, joining his diabolical magic show, 

 

David Kirby, who you can hear at The Cortland Review's site, read the opening poem from his collection A Wilderness of Monkeys, "Do the Monkey, Yeah," and the audience's aardvark associations will be forever changed.

Aardvarking is something I am rather an expert on,

        at least in the sense that I aardvark as well as

the next fellow--as long as the next fellow

        is Don Giovanni or Casanova! Just kidding

 

In closing, David Lehman took us out and up into the stars by reading "Yours the Moon," from his New and Selected Poems. 

Yours the moon
mine the Milky
Way a scarf

around my neck
I love you
as the night

loves the moon’s
dark side as
the sky, distant,

                                 endless, wears her
                                 necklace of stars
                                 over her dress

                                 under my scarf
                                 that she wears
                                 against the cold

Books were brought and bought and signed. But I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention the animal kingdom. At the post-reading reception, we talked poetry and taxidermy. Turns out looks can kill, books can kill, but bullets are pretty brutal, too.  

 

 

Ann Kjellberg presents a poem by Anthony Madrid

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 third post.

A couple of years ago the young Chicago poet Anthony Madrid published a book, I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say, apparently consisting of sixty-four ghazals; we published one of them, “Beneath Your Parents’ Mattress,” in our app, Little Star Weekly.

The ghazal is an ancient classical Eastern form that pervades the literature of multiple languages and traditions.  It had its origins in a sixth-century Arabic panagyric but found its full expression in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Persian of Rumi and Hafiz. It spread, partly through the energies of Sufi mysticism and Islamic court traditions, throughout the Middle East to Turkey, North Africa, and Northern India (whence Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali brought the ghazal to modern American literature with an anthology of new ghazals by dozens of English and American poets in 2000).

The classical ghazal is an exacting form: ten to thirty lines of rhyming couplets and identical length, with the second line repeating a refrain and the last couplet playing off the poet’s name, either literally or figuratively. (Read more ghazals in Little Star.) But Madrid’s book is anything but an academic exercise. His completely original take illuminates a paradox lurking in the ghazal’s biography: that a form so highly structured became the foundation of an ecstatic religion that embraced music as a vehicle for revelation and eroticism as its germinal metaphor.  Madrid’s ghazals, like Rumi’s and Hafiz’s, often find the speaker in the clutch of love, and driven from there to further reaches of apprehension. The poems of the ghazal masters were set to music and became the vehicle of an ecstatic religious practice.  In both love and verse, a constraint becomes a provocation. Madrid’s poems are divided into chapters and even identified, somewhat jokingly, in a way that looks scriptural: “1.1,” “1.2,” etc. And constraint has its own place in them, as we’ll see. (That he likes a constraint can be seen too in his sixteen limericks recently published in Little Star #5.)

True to form, “Beneath Your Parents Mattress” offers a hilarious, sexy cosmology inside a profane poem of love.  Generally, Madrid keeps the ghazal’s couplets but not their metrical constraints; in this one however he starts off with a bravura metrical stroke: two dactylic lines with pyrrhic caesura.  That we are speaking of one’s parents’ marital bed in such a form throws a strobe light on the ghazal’s invitation to ontological sex play.  The first couplet sets up a kind of joke Divina Commedia in which the cosmic architecture springs up and down from the terra firma of one’s own conception. The joke is redoubled by the appearance of moles in the second couplet as some kind of genealogical–temporal astronauts.

In the third stanza we meet our heroine, who surfaces throughout the book as a kind of archangel of sexual promise. Her bondage toys stand in for infernal props, and the challenge of her has the magnitude of potential damnation. (Here another ancient Eastern poetic form that shadows Madrid’s book, the hija, or invective poem, makes an appearance: “let herds of city buses packed with foreigners drive over my hollow corpse.”)

As we pass over the poet’s hollow corpse, the poem eyes a potential transition from the infernal to the celestial. Angels are found to be girls, and the blood pounding in one’s own ears is the element that surrounds them; the cosmological is within; the moment of passion offers transit to the furthest reaches of space or thought.

Madrid’s poem doesn’t quite get us there; the door is unopenable.  The poem leaves him—invoked by name as the ghazal requires—rubbing away his “charm-bangle.” It is this, to me, that makes the poem modern—not just its jokey sexual references and casual self-denigrations. The poet glimpses something, even yearns for it, within his language and his longings, but leaves us entangled in the low-magical promise of the totem that is his own body. He is “angry.” That is mysterious, and interesting.

 

Beneath Your Parents’ Mattress

Beneath your parents’ mattress is a stairwell leading downward.

That bed is like a door on which your parents knocked to summon you.

 

Moles are a kind of meteor. Their careers are knots in the earth.

Because the earth is a ball, the way out of the maze is straight up.

 

Punishing young woman, fueled by a river of burning stones,

Put up your black snake whip, set aside your thorny iron ball on a stick.

 

For, if I do not solve, within the next few hours, the eternal tormenting mystery of love,

Then let herds of city buses packed with foreigners drive over my hollow corpse.

 

Angels in the bath! But they’re not really angels; they’re merely girls.

And that water is hardly water. It is the blood in your own ears.

 

And everything from passion’s aphelion to integral calculus is telling you to go.

But always you find the hinge of the door on everwhich side you pull ...

 

madrid has a black charm-bangle. When he’s angry, he rubs the black charm-bangle.

Right now his fingers are white from how hard he’s rubbing the black charm-bangle.

—Anthony Madrid

 

Love Songs have All the Answers [by Allison Campbell]

The second day of the Moorman Symposium began with an informal Q & A with poet Angela Ball and visiting poets Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman. Lehman started things off by asking everyone about their favorite writing assignments. Here are summaries of their advice on how to get to good writing:

Angela Ball: Give obstructions. Which may or may not include writing the poem in Cuba (an exercise in writing based off the Danish film The Five Obstructions) 

Denise Duhamel: Haiku hurricanes. Make it rain, good lines of poetry. (Students write lines of 5 and 7 syllables on slips of paper. Then, just as human paraphernalia is picked up, mixed up and laid back down in real deal hurricanes, the lines are collected and redistributed.) 

Billy Collins: Haiku memorization and destruction. (Students write a haiku, walk around campus memorizing the haiku, then return and destroy all paper evidence of the haiku. The survival or extinction of the poem is now their responsibility.)

David Lehman: Translation and mistranslation. (Have students translate a poem written in a language they don't know. It helps them give up some of their self and collaborate with language.)

Barbara Hamby: Poets' letters, read them. (Let students see Ovid, Keats, Dickinson, Rilke, and Rimbaud struggle with life - and the gruel of finding an artist's life).

David Kirby: Soul Siblings. (At the beginning of the term, have students write down three poets who are not influences but who they would like to be at a beach house with for a weekend. These are their guides.)

Billy Collins: Create and destroy a happy farmer. (*Disclaimer, this is for writing fiction.* Part 1: Write of a happy farmer - everything is coming up giant squash and healthy children. Part 2: Destroy his happy life.)

David Lehman remarked that this story had been done before and was called the Book of Job, which made everyone laugh and seriously contemplate the inescapable-ness of the Bible. What story can be new?

Hearing the poets talk about their influences was another highlight of the conversation. Even though David Kirby said influence is "something you see in the rear-view mirror" and Collins added "the rear-view mirror of influence wears a flag of convenience", this did not stop each from sharing a bit of what inspires them. 

Angela Ball spoke of the female painter Paula Modersohn-Becker's Self-Portrait with Amber Necklace and Denise Duhamel talked about contemporary French artist Sophie Calle mailing her bed from Paris to a stranger in San Francisco.

When David Lehman discussed popular songs, jazz standards, and what they can teach about wit, economy and rhyme, things took a decidedly musical turn. He noted connections between Shakespeare's "Sonnet 130" and "My Funny Valentine". Reciting some lyrics to illustrate the point soon turned into singing. A Lehman and Collins duet! Audience members came in on the refrain, and it felt as though this sing-along answered all the questions we did and did not ask that afternoon. What more could be said (sung)?

David Kirby, answered this question by reciting, "Take your spoon out of your cup, when you drink your tea, take good care of yourself, you belong to me." Explaining that the lyrics show the leaps that poetry thrives on - the escape from having to explain in prose, something like "because your spoon will almost certainly stick you in your left or right eye."

The slapstick humor of hitting yourself with your own spoon lead Collins to comment upon how many songs start funny, and then become very sad in the end. A last round of singing began:

I make a date for golf, and you can bet your life it rains.
I try to give a party, and the guy upstairs complains.
I guess I'll go through life, just catching colds and missing trains.
Everything happens to me.

Funny, then:

I fell in love just once, and then it had to be with you.
Everything happens to me.

The sad love song silenced the singing. Now, even more was understood.

Contemporary Canadian Poetry [by Eduardo C. Corral]

This week I'm featuring the work of Amanda Jernigan.

Encounter

A friend, seeing his babe in ultrasound,
imagined it an astronaut, “behind
glass dome reflections, lost in space…,”
and so I had that image close to mind
when the technician finally tipped her screen
to me, revealing—not an astronaut, but Earth,
so “small, light blue, so touchingly alone.”
Thus Leonov. It was a commonplace,
back then, that once we had the earth in sight,
the isolation of the planet “known,”
we would clean up our act, would mend our ways—
a kind of cosmic recognition scene.
So much for that, the skeptic in me says.
And yet as I beheld you floating there
I felt myself grow small, the air grow thin,
as if I were the one adrift in space,
and you the one who might yet pull me in.

Dos-à-dos

We settle down to sleep at night,
affectionate, facing one another,

or torso fast to torso pressed
as if our hearts could speak together.

Mornings, we wake back to back.

However much we love, there's something
in us always turns away.

Let us forgive this in each other.
We can make it up by day.

May 31st

The crabapple tree is abandoned
to bloom, the sky to blue, the barn-
boards to the weather. Try
as I might to abandon myself
to work, I hear you splitting
wood. You've lost your father.

Scale

Three weeks before our son was born
you went out east to build a barn
from panels of translucent glass:
set in the middle of the marsh
with nothing close at hand for scale,
the barn might have been large enough
to accommodate a man, or small
enough for him to reach his arms
around it. It took a while to build
the barn: the week you planned to be
away stretched into two. You said
you felt like Odysseus, his wife
and infant son at home, detained
for years beyond his expectations.

I think about Odysseus,
set in the middle of his story,
nothing close at hand for scale:
it's hard to tell if it's his ship
that carries him back home, or he
who carries his black ship back
into harbour. A lot of things are like
that now: these days I carry around
our son, who one day will carry us
around, inside him.

The poems "Dos-à-dos," "May 31st," "Encounter," and "Scale" are from the collection All the Daylight Hours, by Amanda Jernigan, published by Cormorant Books Inc. (Toronto). Copyright © 2013 Amanda Jernigan. Used with the permission of the publisher.

Q&A

Kateri Lanthier: You have an adept and unshowy way with rhyme, subtle and yet certainly powerful. “Mornings, we wake back to back. // However much we love, there’s something / in us always turns away. // Let us forgive this in each other. / We can make it up by day.” (From “Dos-à-dos” ) Your work connects strongly with the canon through epigraphs, quoted phrases and echoes, and polished rhyme and metre. Do you think there’s a swing back towards rhyme among contemporary North American poets? (The work of Americans as diverse as A.E. Stallings, Frederick Seidel and Gjertrud Schnackenberg suggests that some, at least, wish to keep it alive.) Have you been influenced by particular Canadian poets who deploy rhyme and do you feel a deep impulse towards it -- does it have a seductive hold on your practice?

Amanda Jernigan: "Seductive hold" is apt! There is a sensual pleasure to rhyme, for sure — sensual, and primary. I grew up on rhyming poetry: "Eve" and "Ozymandias …" and "Kubla Khan" and "Little Orphant Annie," read aloud to me from The Home Book of Verse by my maternal grandfather. There was also Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, and Peacock Pie by Walter de la Mare; a child's anthology of Dickinson poems called I'm Nobody, Who Are You?; and, of course, A. A. Milne's Now We Are Six and When We Were Very Young. I'm sure that these early influences have had a more thoroughgoing effect on my work than have any newer ones. But there are certainly contemporary Canadian poets whose use of rhyme affirmed for me that I could use this legacy of my childhood reading. Richard Outram, whose work I encountered when I was in my late teens, was important, here — but also Jay Macpherson and George Johnston (both of whose work exhibits, like Dickinson's, a deceptively childlike quality, at times).

Somebody-or-other called rhyme "that ancient goddess of happy coincidence," and I like that very much — but rhyme is also closely associated with another ancient goddess: Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. In this age of digitization, it is easy to forget that the real business of living is not to school computers but to school brains — "to school an intelligence and make it a soul," as Keats put it. So what is needed are not technologies that make things memorable to computers but technologies that make them memorable to human beings. Rhyme is one such technology. Metre is another. Ancient and effective, both.

Then, too, rhyme is part of the a-linear aspect of language: the part of language that can reach backwards or forwards in time, that can tie itself into knots. That's part of its fascination for me. Even the words of colloquial prose have a secret life, in their sounds, whereby one will call out to another across a syntactic interval, large or small. A good poet, it seems to me, will train herself to listen in on this sotto voce conversation, whether or not she chooses to turn it up in the mix. (And poets do sometimes have good reasons for wanting to submerge the links of rhyme, rather than highlight them: I think of certain rigorously discontinuous poems by Toronto poet Souvankham Thammavongsa.)

I don't feel sufficiently well read in the work of my contemporaries to comment on this matter of the resurgence of rhyme, in any general way. I certainly don't think rhyme ever went away: as I said above, it's there, in language, whether we listen to it or not. What excites me, in poetry, is not so much rhyme in itself as it is the intelligent or unexpected use of rhyme, in the nexus of other poetic techniques, to achieve a certain effect. To pull a recent example from my shelf — here's Darren Bifford's poem "St. John of the Cross," from his 2012 collection Wedding in Fire Country:

ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS

To know your road you must walk eyes closed into the dark

His eyes so tightly shut
   what he sees
is not the dark of each

pupil like prairies at night
  but two jewels
thieved within two fists:

held just right they shine;
  shining they cut.

This is no nursery rhyme — but its effect is no less dependent on rhyme, on the sharp edges of those -ight and -ut words, exposed at line endings or buried mid-line, played off against the jewel-in-darkness glimmer of those long-ees. I think, too, of brief, memorable poems by Mark Callanan and Jason Guriel ("Nativity," "The Buried Hatchet") where rhyme is at work in an almost clandestine way — but no less important, for that. One of my favourite contemporary Canadian poets, Steven Heighton, is a total sound-junky: rhyme for him is as much momentum as it is semantic or mnemonic device:

Bad luck, it's said, to enter your own name
and numbers in the new address book.
All the same, as you slowly comb
through the old one for things to pick

out and transfer, you are tempted to coin
yourself a sparkling new address,
new name, befitting the freshness of this clean-
slating, this brisk kiss

so long to the heart-renders — every friend
you buried or let drift ...

I could go on! But, you know, I think that on some simple level rhyme is music; music is joy, and pleasure, and exuberance. I think I'm channelling Peter Pan, here, to go back to my childhood influences. ("I am youth. I am joy. I am freedom!") There's always seemed to me something a bit grumpy — a bit, well, Captain Hookish — about the desire to banish rhyme from the poetic toolbox altogether. It's perhaps no coincidence that the Captain eventually gets his comeuppance from that crocodile, time, with its slant-rhyming mantra: "tick tock, tick tock, tick tock …"

Bios

Kateri Lanthier holds a BA and MA in English from the University of Toronto. She is a freelance writer and editor specializing in design, architecture and art. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals in Canada, the United States and England, including Descant, Grain, Matrix, The Antigonish Review, Saturday Night, Quarry, Writing Women, London Magazine, The Toronto Quarterly, The Acrobat, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and are forthcoming in Great Lakes Review and Green Mountains Review. Her first collection of poetry, Reporting from Night, was published by Iguana Books in 2011. Her poem “The Coin Under the Leftmost Sliding Cup” won the 2013 Walrus Poetry Prize and is included in the anthology The Best of Walrus Poetry (ed. Michael Lista).

Amanda Jernigan has worked as a writer, scholar, editor and teacher. Her first book of poems, Groundwork, was published by Biblioasis in 2011, and her second collection, All the Daylight Hours, was published in 2013 by Cormorant Books. She lives and works in Canada with her partner, the artist John Haney.