The Best American Poetry

“Smart Women Adrift”—& Tom Drury [by Katherine Zlabek]

Back before my time on the family farm, we had too many farm cats. As you may or may not know, farm cats are cats that wander by their own free will to a family farm. They catch mice and birds, and occasionally the farmer will give the pack of them a scoop of feed in an old aluminum pan that’s nestled into some barn straw.

 

The cats come and go, and that’s why it’s best not to give them too personal of a name. Something like “Calico,” or “Old Blue Eyes,” will do.

 

Now, at the time our farm had too many cats, another farm, the farm of a friend across town, had no cats. Every farm needs a few good cats.

 

And so my family lured a pack of cats into our cattle trailer with that aluminum pan of feed, slid the door locked, and took off across town. When they got to the friend’s farm and slid the door open, there was—one kitty and a pan.

 

The other cats had been either too intelligent or too doomed to make the trip.

 

*

I start with this story for two reasons. The first reason is that this is not unlike a happening in a Tom Drury novel—rural, inexplicable, possibly morbid, but not without its humor. The second reason is that the phrase “too intelligent or too doomed” could be applied to the women of the Smart Woman Adrift novel—a term Katie Roiphe coined for the genre in this 2013 Slate article. (It also would not be strange for some misguided man in these Smart Woman Adrift novels to call women, “kitties.”)

 

Now, for some reason, these have been the only novels I can read as of late—Smart Woman Adrift novels and Tom Drury. It might have to do with the pacing of mind for which I apologized on Monday. These novels are like friends that find mind’s pace and jog alongside, making the tedious, the disappointing, the “of course it would be that way,” fantastically arresting.

 

But they seem, in that first glance, unlikely companions. Drury’s novels are primarily set in the “driftless area.” The driftless area (also the title of Drury’s second novel) is that area of the Midwest that the glaciers kindly left unflattened. It’s primarily farmland and river and cliffs and mines. Small towns scattered about like jack and ball. Tight-knit families and chicken feeds and versatile trailers. It’s the area where all those cats vanished without so much as a note. It’s not an area without its wanderers and mystery, but I’ll get back to this shortly.

 

The Smart Woman Adrift novels tend to be set in cities along either American coast. There is a lonely, urban atmosphere about them. That, or the women take to the road to think, to speed, to show themselves and others that they can. Safety never comes first. Risky decisions are tacked on to precarious situations. Roiphe describes the novels as follows:

 

[T]here is a radical fragmentedness, a supremely controlled tone, a shrewd and jaded observation of small things, a comic or wry apprehension of life’s absurdities, and pretty yet melancholy vignettes of the state of being lost. They center around an intelligent but emotionally fragile or keenly sensitive woman without a man, or moving from man to man, a woman, in short, without a stable or conventional family situation, in a state of heightened, nervous awareness.

 

Now, I should say that a very intelligent person recommended Roiphe’s article and the genre to me, and that another very intelligent person recommended Drury’s work to me some years ago. That is how literature spreads. But an awful lot of books come with recommendations, and an awful lot of those are wonderfully written, but these are the only books that stuck this year.

 

A sampling would include all of Tom Drury, all of Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule, Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers, and so on….

 

*

The writing in both Drury and the SWA novels tends toward minimalism. The dialogue is spot-on. Strangers tend to remain strangers, which means, as we all know from childhood, that they will be dangerous in some way; they will also be incredibly important to these plots. There is, moreover, a certain sense of the gothic in these books, and it’s particularly American: the overlooked and the repressed come to the surface in exactly those places thought safest—the cities flocked to for hardworking anonymity until a “name” is made, the small town where danger seems unimaginable because nothing new is supposed to happen there.

 

And, of course, there is the humor. It’s always there.

 

Here are two, for lack of a better word, “break-up” scenes. The first from Drury’s latest novel, Pacific, and the second from Adler’s Speedboat. In this scene from Drury, Wendy has just locked Jack (one of these wanderers I warned you about) out of the house, as she’s become aware of his past. 

 

 

Jack backed the Mustang into the garage, where he found three boxes on the concrete floor. Opening them to make sure she hadn’t kept his music system, he saw that she had baked him a pie, wrapped it in wax paper, and laid it on top of his shoes and moccasins. He took the pie out and placed it on the floor, determined not to take her charity. But it looked good, so he put it back in the box.

 

He loaded the trunk and closed the lid and tried the key to the door in the garage.

          “Not this one either,” said Wendy from the other side.

          “Thanks for the pie,” said Jack.

          “Oh. You’re welcome. It’s apple.”

          “Hey, Wendy.”

          “What?”

          “Remember when I said you were smart?”

          “No.”

          “Well, I’m not so sure about that anymore. I think you might have a learning disorder.”

          “You don’t scare me.”

 

 And now read Adler’s scene, which follows a man moving across the country, and almost daring a woman to meet him, knowing she won’t. Or so he thinks. Watch for some of the same elements: startled wandering, an abrupt break, a history catching up with the characters’ fresh steps, and, of course, that sense of absurdity.

 

 

When I arrived at Aldo’s door, he met me with a smile that seemed surprised, a little sheepish. We talked awhile. Sometimes he took, sometimes I held, my suitcase. I tried, I thought, a joke. I asked whether there was already a girl there. He said there was. He met me in an hour at the corner drugstore for a cup of coffee. We talked. We returned to the apartment. We had Scotch. That afternoon, quite late, I flew home. I called him from time to time. He had his telephone removed a few days later. Now, for a while, he’s here again. He’s doing a political essay. It begins, “Some things cannot be said too often, and some can.” That’s all he’s got so far.

 

A suitcase light enough to held throughout a conversation, three boxes with room for an apple pie. These characters can drift because there is so little holding them down.

 

*

I have been thinking, lately, about the incredible number of books we writers tend to own, always with the underlining, the checks, the marginalia. And while we can get into a car, or on a scooter, an airplane, a train, we will almost always be paying rent—or perhaps a mortgage—for a place to keep our books, whether it be home or a storage unit. Books ground us, and call us back to a physical place. Perhaps this is the real danger of an iPad--driftability. 

 

This Magic Moment: The Great Bewildering Action [by Katherine Zlabek]

My nephew, when he was two- or three-years old, bit into the wall—a nice bite of the corner paint and plaster—because something had not gone as he’d planned. He was so frustrated that all he could think to do was to bite the wall.

 

My mother was a self-described happy-go-lucky teenager. She stayed up late smoking and dancing. Ran across yards at dawn to get the best catch of fish in the neighborhood. The boys loved her, and her boyfriend wanted to marry her. But, instead, she joined the convent at seventeen, and stayed there for around eight years.

 

My father was supposed to go to graduate school in Missouri, and packed his apartment into a car. He drove down and found he couldn’t register for classes. He stayed the weekend. He paced for hours outside the registrar’s office, and then took off, back north and asked for his job back. And then he met my mother while she was dressed as a cowgirl. That’s how life works.

 

It is a family trait, one I’ve inherited in heaps, to make strange decisions. Or to act without thinking—or, rather, thinking correctly—as I can assure you there is typically a lot of brooding. Other times, there just seems to be no clear cause, a dot that’s off the chart.

 

I met a writer friend for coffee recently, and he said he’d read this book, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn’s Papers, written by the Norwegian Knut Hamsun in 1894. My friend told me I would like it, particularly this part where the main character is so frustrated by his love interest, that he takes her shoe off and throws it into the water. (They are on a boat, I presume; the book is next on my reading list.) And while I have yet to read it, I have to admit that I do love this moment. In fact, I often find myself reading and writing for exactly this kind of moment—the one that is surprising and doesn’t always make sense.

 

Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (a read that I think would improve a person if a person returned to it often enough) contains an essay titled, “Rhyming Action.” This essay begins with many pages in which Baxter contrasts, delightfully, the work habits, attitudes, and personalities of poets-in-general and fictionators-in-general. He calls poets “the nobility of the writing world.” He comments on their often surprising and always beautiful lives. Of prose writers, he says:

 

Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces…. Prose writers have to spend hours and hours in chairs, facing paper, adding one brick to another brick, piling on the great heap of their endless observations, going through the addled inventory of all the items they’ve laboriously paid attention to, and it makes them surly—all this dawn-until-dusk sitting for the sake of substantial novels with sentences that have to go to the far right-hand margin of the page.

 

I can vouch for the presence of this sullenness-by-bricklaying. I remember, some years ago, having a story workshopped in which a character wore moccasins. This was too much, a workshopper said, unless the character was Native American, and if that was the case, just when was the story set?—it seemed contemporary. Granted, it was likely some greater flaw in my writing that made the moccasins seem wrong.

 

Still, in nearly all my interactions discussing poetry with poets, there is great praise of the surprising moment, the twist, the hinge toward the unexpected or ethereal, the word or phrase that snaps the whole poem into another dimension. It seems to be what makes a poem truly great. Meanwhile, fiction can be very good, or even, again, great without this element of surprise. And if a fiction writer wants it—whether “it” be moccasins or general shoe-flinging—it must be done very carefully, perhaps even sneakily.

 

In another fiction workshop, not quite as long ago, we were reading a book selected by a student. We were all picking books that term, so that we could better understand one another’s taste. Anyway, this fellow student-friend had said that her first reading of this particular book had been a magical experience, and that this was why she wanted to read it—to see how it worked, to break down the magic.

 

This troubled me. It shouldn’t have. I knew that this was why we all gathered around the table, to figure things out. It was something I often said to my students—“Let’s break this down and analyze it”—and I meant it. It was something I did regularly, pen in hand. It is a healthy and important thing for a writer to do. But as a general rule I don’t want to break apart the stories and books and movies and art with which I fall immediately in love. And the phrase, “to break down the magic,” seems such a sad one. As though we need to set the beauty of that first moment aside for the sake of knowledge, so that, almost mechanically, we can recreate the same book or story or poem.

 

Of course, this isn’t what the person meant, and it’s not what I mean when I say it to students. It’s simply part of what we all do in order to keep the river of literature flowing with whatever contributions we can muster.

 

There’s the world of the work and there’s the world in which the work is written. And there will always be writers who advocate for both worlds to be fully known, some who want one world to remain a mystery and the other to be straight-forward, and then there will be those who want mystery on both sides. I fear I am one of these. Though I swear that, in the classroom, I try to act otherwise.

 

In Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World—another collection of essays on fiction that I’d highly recommend—he advocates for the mystery, both in the piece and the process. He speaks about the use of omniscience for creating the greater mysteries—meaning something much richer than a secret—and the potential dangers in using an authorial voice that “knows too much.” He writes that, “there can be no discovery in a world where everything is known. A crucial part of the endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark.”

 

And where would any of us be if Emma Bovary, in a burst of some emotion and without looking back, hadn’t inexplicably thrown her last five-franc piece over her shoulder to the blind beggar who unwittingly tormented her?

 

Or without the fearless Flannery O’Connor and her unpredictable twists, whose Parker decides to (perhaps, “is driven to,” or “is inspired to,” would put it better) get the face of God tattooed on his back, thinking, among many other panicked things, that it would finally be a tattoo his wife would enjoy—only to have his wife beat him out of the house with a broom?

 

Recently, Disney simplified the whole thing. While watching one of their movies with my niece, a troll or a wood gnome came forward in the middle of a song, and said something to the effect of, “People make bad decisions when they’re sad or stressed or scared.”

 

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Salvatore Scibona’s novel, The End, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. The book is hauntingly brilliant and this moment has stuck with me.

 

Once, you were eating a pear, you were scraping the meat off the core with your teeth. You were being very meticulous, as you are. (We were walking arm in arm from the theater, where we had made a game of whispering made-up translations of the words of the play, which we had not understood.) We were talking and I made a joke in English, my first one, that you had pared the pear to the bone. And you laughed. And then you popped the core in your mouth and chewed it and swallowed it down. And later we wondered why you had done that. What had come over you, to eat the core of the pear, stem and all? And here is what at long last, two nights later, after we had given up on the hope for an explanation, you said, snatching sense (such as it was) from the jaws of nonsense (so to speak): You said, ‘I did it on purpose.” Which was not a because at all, we both knew. But it was the answer.

Next Line, Please: The Big Reveal: The American Scholar's Crowd-Sourced Sonnet

Three months ago, the American Scholar initiated a contest to write a crowd-sourced sonnet. With line fourteen chosen, all that remains to complete the poem is a title.   Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate. Here is the completed sonnet:

 

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.

 

Say what must die inside that I may not

Cast down this die and cross the Rubicon,

Thence to the true hell: the heat in Tucson,

Where drug lords blaze loads of coke, meth, and pot.

 

Freedom starts or ends with a funeral.

I once watched men with Uzis guard the Pope.

No hope, no hope, no hope, no hope, no hope.

 

What buzz can cheer this gloomy canticle?

Redemption is a swift revolving door:

A revolution ends the inner war.

 

Here is what David Lehman writes about line fourteen:

You, dear contestants, saved your best for last—or next to last, as I’ll explain in a minute.

There were so many strong submissions for line 14 that I could not help wavering and flip-flopping before choosing Katie Whitney’s “A revolution ends the inner war.” The word “revolution,” too often and too loosely used in the 1960s, is le mot juste here, applying very specifically to the mechanism of the revolving door but also implying upheaval—whether a planned insurrection or one that comes about because of a host of factors, like the Great War that began 100 years ago. Thus the word in this context means itself and its opposite. It is lovely to have that paradoxical double meaning of “revolution,” to end on the “inner war” of our conflicted made-up self, and to have the word “end” itself figure in the sonnet’s final gasp.

Frank Bidart cops second-place honors with the dramatic suggestion that we end line 13 with a comma and conclude: “Like sex. You loved sex, but survival more.” Truth is not always as beautifully put.

Continue reading here . . .

A Beautiful Thing Has Passed / Why My Mother Stalked Professor K at a Truck Stop off I-80 [by Katherine Zlabek]

 

I was driving, some years ago, to Michigan. Both of my parents were in the car. Or perhaps it was a truck, or a van. I say this because we were riding tall on the road. I was in some twisted phase of moving, from Michigan to Ohio. The exact circumstances are now shady, apart from the fact that I was already feeling nostalgic, and that, due to the demands of the body, there was no avoiding the truck stop a few miles ahead.

 

And then a car passed us. The driver wore an old cowboy hat, and since we were riding tall, I could see she also had on cowboy boots. I knew who this was. It was Professor K. 

*

 

In undergrad, Professor K had introduced me to Dickinson and to Ginsberg, to Mr. Eliot and the ragged pair of claws he should have been. I read Lolita for the first time with her. There Professor K was, passing by us in her glory and her cowboy boots. Because of my nostalgia, she also stood for the many professors I met at that time in my life and—yes, I will say it, as nothing short of it happened—the worlds they opened to me. I was a wide-eyed kid from the farm, and how beautiful and important it all was to me then and was while I drove and still is now. The learning was like music and, though I should have, I hardly knew what it meant outside of itself.

 

Undergrad was the last time in life when I didn’t teach college students in one way or another. At that time, I didn’t know all of the tricks I’ve since been taught and of which I’m now hyper-aware: the card up the sleeve, the thermos under the hat, the wooden nickel tucked into the boot. These professors did not seem to need tricks. They were intelligent and clever and passionate and that combination will trump a trick any day.

 

I digress. I romanticize. 

 

But it was a wond’rous thing to walk into campus with a cup of coffee while the sun was just rising, first to the library to wake the brain, and then to class at eight, which would have been, if I remember correctly, looking at all of the world’s best art thrown up onto a wall in a room that was always kept twenty degrees too warm. 

 

I’m sure that by now someone has gone ahead and fixed the thermostat.

*

 

As Professor K passed us, I remembered the interview she had done with the undergrad newspaper. I knew the details then, but now they are all too fuzzy to dare repeat. Suffice to say, she did not have her doctorate handed to her, and the process of obtaining it included, at some point or another, children, a station wagon, and a tent. 

 

While she worked, the music was NPR, classical, but when she traveled, she always traveled with Willie. 

*

So Professor K and Willie Nelson passed by us. Normally, I would not have said a thing. I would have savored the strange encounter and the flood of memories. My life was transitioning from one phase to the next, and the sighting seemed a sign that good things would come.

 

But it was a long drive, the conversation was running low, and so I told my traveling companions everything I remembered about her. I probably even told them that she was listening to Willie Nelson. 

 

Then I saw her blinker up ahead, by the exit to the truck stop. The same stop we’d planned to make. 

 

“Oh no,” I said. 

 

Out of excitement, my mother was repositioning herself in her seat. 

 

My father, having a mind similar to my own (indeed, perhaps the source of my own), said, “Keep going. Keep going to the next exit.”

 

But my fate was decided. I, too, put on my blinker. I tapped the brakes. A beautiful thing, a whole past, was about to have the dirty-fingered mark of the present all over it. 

 

Had I known what was going to happen, Professor K, I would have mentioned the horror of having anyone approach you at a truck stop, particularly this truck stop and, furthermore, the bathroom at this truck stop. A stranger, at that, who seems to have a bushelful of details about your life and education and taste in music. Professor K, I apologize. But you handled it with your natural, cowboy grace.

*

 

And now, I ask you to explain the nature of this meeting to me. It has perplexed me for some years.

 

While I pumped gas, Professor K left the truck stop bathroom and came right toward me. Professor K made remarks about my upcoming move. She asked how I was. She wished me well. Professor K was pleasant. Still, I felt a chance meeting would have been better under different circumstances.

 

What was the source of my discomfort?

 

a) Simple—Professor K did not actually remember me, and could not disguise this.

 

b) Simple—an undoubtedly strange conversation had just taken place in a truck stop bathroom, far out of my hearing. Neither of us knew how to react.

 

c) We were not used to chatting at the gas pump about this and that. We used to talk about books and all of the fish and desperation and forests and buzzing flies that were found in them.

 

d) An egg, C.S. Lewis says, must hatch, or risk going rotten. Nature says so, too. Perhaps felt I had been caught mid-process. (The egg being an undergrad, in this case, and the hatched chick being an academic.) (Or, rather, the egg being anyone with a set of ideas, the hatched chick—the chicken, if you will—being the one who makes use of those ideas, and the rotten egg being the rotten egg that even the children tease.)

 

e) All of the above.

 

 

And how should one have reacted to the situation?

 

a) Call an analyst.

 

b) Visit the Archaic Torso of Apollo—“You must change your life.”

 

c) Call Willie Nelson. With him, buy a station wagon and a tent. Look at all the best art in the world daily. Never fix a thermostat.

 

d) Both a and b.

 

 

Is there still hope?

 

a) Yes.

 

b) I am a rotten egg.

 

 

Happy Birthday John Ashbery!

Greetings from Sodus, NY (circa 2003). We took a trip and we thought about you . . .

-- sdh

“But I Always Thought That I’d See You Again” / Thoughts on Sending / A Medley for You Travelers [by Katherine Zlabek]

Throughout my posts this week, you will see travel as a recurring theme. Forgive me. I’ve been on the road a lot this last year, on the job market, and with a “we’ll see,” rootless attitude. It’s been difficult to get the pacing of highway travel out of my head. 

 

I was driving through the Midwest recently. That heavy feeling was upon me. You know the one. When it seems you’ve left the good stuff behind, and that you’re driving in the wrong direction. The radio wasn’t kicking out any winners. I was about to shut it off, but then James Taylor came along with his song, “Fire & Rain,” and saved the day, as he sometimes does. 

 

James and I mused as we cruised through Indiana. We talked about the past. Of course, we reached no conclusions, but we enjoyed the musing.

 

*

While having dinner with a close friend who lives some ways away, I told him that I doubted we would ever see each other again. I often say this to friends during dinner. And lunch, and coffee. It has become a thing. But at the time I say it, I believe it. Very little about any of my companions’ situations or my own seems stable enough to assume otherwise. My friend, on the other hand, had no doubt that we would see one another again. 

 

On top of this conversation, we had ordered pig ears, and we were feeling very guilty about it.

 

Goodbyes often hold these two desires nestled into one another: The first is the need to move on with life, and the second is that pull to see the person again. Of course, much literature, and many marriages and friendships and revolutions, revolve around these two desires. To stick with the somewhat impersonal, you have Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, and Brideshead Revisited. Then there are some of the more recent films on the subject—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, My Blueberry Nights, and even Francis Ha.

 

Typically, one of the characters will see these desires as working against one another: a bright future v. being with the other central character. This is one of the reasons why we read and watch so intensely, to see what this character will throw away in order to move on or move past. Like packing a suitcase, these characters can only fit so much. Then they leave the bed, the room, the apartment, a mess of love letters and shoes and vitamins that didn’t make the cut.

 

Of course, there is always the one possibility where both of these desires are satisfied. That is when the two characters move on together toward a new thing, go forth on a new path or paths.

 

And of course this possibility is ignored by, or invisible to the character doing the leaving. The story wouldn’t be interesting if they did. But someone always sees it, whether it’s another character or the reader/viewer or your mother or your lover. And the arc of the whole thing is the negotiation of whether or not this will come to be.

 

I did, indeed, see my friend again. And again.

 

*

I have grandparents who eloped in Galena, Illinois. Elopement is the most romantic gesture in my book, or one of them. My friends seem to practice it regularly. But these grandparents were farm kids from Wisconsin, the children of Bohemian immigrants. It was the Depression. After they eloped, they were afraid of returning home—What would people think? The family? Would they be welcome? And so they went to live with their cousins, the Pertles, in Chicago. They stayed there for months. 

 

*

There can be, of course, and usually are, twists on the plot of leaving behind and moving forward. One is being sent away. Or viewing someone’s absence as the result of your sending them.

 

One of my great friends has been suffering a particular heartbreak for over a year now. As we know, heartbreak can last for longer and shorter periods of time, but a year is nothing to shrug your shoulder at. After a year, I sent her this quotation from Philemon: 

 

I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me, so that he might be of service to me in your place during my imprisonment; but I preferred to do nothing without your consent, in order that your good deed might be voluntary and not something forced. Perhaps this is the reason he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back forever, no longer as a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother—especially to me but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord.

 

These sentences, Paul’s, are written in the midst of imprisonment. All three parties in the passage had been involved in a situation or a labor or a deprivation that was forced on them. Paul allows a startling absence in his own life, and then the person is sent, given, freed—and possibilities exist again. Things can be better than they were before.

 

Other translations replace “heart” with “stomach,” or the more grisly figures of digestive speech. When the sadness is on you, it’s best to pay those other translations no mind, and to know, I am sending him, that is, my own heart, back to you. I wanted to keep him with me….

 

*

And then there is another kind of sending, Sam Cooke’s:

 

Darling, you send me. Honest, you do—honest, you do—honest, you do. 

 

*

When my grandparents felt it wise to return home from the Pertles’, the siblings they had left behind with the farm work, took off. They traveled, the burly men, across America for months, and sent postcards. The postcard backs were filled with questions about the crops and about everyone’s health. 

 

The questions, in the grand tradition of postcards, were left unanswered until the brothers returned. 

 

The questions signaled that they were, in many ways, still there with the family, the land, the cows. The inability to be answered contained the hard fact that this was their time for going, to be gone. The answers piled up.

 

This morning, I am sending a postcard. 

 

*

That day spent driving, unexpectedly, with James Taylor, driving away from some and towards some others, we talked, among other things, about John Donne and his wife and some lines about distance.

 

“So let us melt,” Donne writes in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.” It sounds romantic enough. And then he closes with this:

           

            Our two souls therefore, which are one,

                        Though I must go, endure not yet

            A breach, but an expansion,

                        Like gold to airy thinness beat.

 

The melting, whatever physical or spiritual closeness enables it, is not for the purposes of melting into one another, or for “Fading Into You,” as Mazzy sings. The poem includes no diminishment of self for human love. No falling or weeping. No, the melting allows them to be apart. For their souls and love to expand, beautifully, “like gold to airy thinness beat.”

 

I told James Taylor that I’d found, for the last several years, great comfort in the thought of such an expansion. And James told me that he was sure that love did not work that way. And he changed the station, which had been getting fuzzy, and like that he was gone. Replaced by a song about the basic mechanics of sex.

 

So let us melt. 

 

*

My dear, the Pertles no longer reside in Chicago, and there’s work that needs be done on the farm.

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

(c) Nin Andrews

Poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand 6 -- Peter Bland's 'Beginnings'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beginnings

Guthrie-Smith in New Zealand 1885

 

Who am I? What am I doing here
alone with 3000 sheep? I'm
turning their bones into grass. Later
I'll turn grass back into sheep.
I buy only the old and the lame.
They eat anything--bush, bracken, gorse.
Dead, they melt into one green fleece.

Who am I? I know the Lord's my shepherd
as I am theirs--but this
is the nineteenth century; Darwin
is God's First Mate. I must keep
my own log, full of facts if not love.
I own 10,000 acres and one dark lake.
On the seventh day those jaws don't stop.

Who am I? I am the one sheep
that must not get lost. So
I name names--rocks, flowers, fish:
knowing this place I learn to know myself.
I survive. The land becomes
my meat and tallow. I light my own lamps.
I hold back the dark with the blood of my lambs.

Peter Bland

In 'Beginnings' Peter Bland revisits the life of an important colonial figure, W. H. Guthrie-Smith (1862-1940), who settled in New Zealand as a young man and leased a massive sheep-station called Tutira in the Hawkes Bay region. In 1921 Guthrie-Smith published Tutira--the story of a New Zealand sheep station, which went on to become a classic of New Zealand literature. Bland uses the figure of Guthrie-Smith to make some wry remarks about the changing face of 19th century New Zealand with its new covenant of Christianity, enlightened thinking, taxonomy and sheep-farming. (For much of the 20th century, the nation boasted about having ten sheep for every human inhabitant.). 

Peter Bland was born in North Yorkshire, England, in 1934. Arriving in Wellington, aged 20, he studied at Victoria University; during the 1950s and 60s he was a key figure, with James K. Baxter, Alistair Campbell and Louis Johnson, in the Wellington Group. Since the 1970s, he has oscillated between Northern and Southern Hemispheres--and is presently based in Auckland. Not surprisingly, given the geographical shifts of his adult life, he continues to cast an incisive writerly eye over such matters as immigration, the expatriate condition and cultural identity, all handled with his characteristic wit, fellow feeling and tenderness (the latter quality is also much in evidence in his many poems about family).  'Beginnings' was included in Bland's Selected Poems (Carcanet, UK, 1998) and also appeared in his Collected Poems (Steele Roberts, NZ, 2012); his two most recent collections of poetry are Breath Dances (2013) and Hunting Elephants (2014). Peter Bland is also well known as a theatre and film actor in both New Zealand and England.

Katherine Zlabek, Guest Author July 28 - August 1

This week we welcome Katherine Zlabek as our guest author. Katherine is a native of Wisconsin. She received her M.F.A. from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Literary Review, The Rumpus and elsewhere. In 2012, she won an AWP Intro Journals Award. Her novel-in-stories LET THE RIVERS CLAP THEIR HANDS has been a finalist in a number of competitions, including the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award in 2012. This summer, she finished her PhD at the University of Cincinnati, where she was a Taft Dissertation Fellow. Find her at www.katherinezlabek.com. 

Welcome, Katherine.

In other news . . .

Thursday, August 7, 7:30 PM: An Evening of French Poetry and American Port with Frédéric Bouché and David Lehman. Details here.

-- sdh

 

Unleashed Aphorisms - Teaser (1) [by Lera Auerbach]

A few aphorisms from my upcoming book:

 

1. When words are few, each finds its place. It’s easy to get lost in a crowd. 

 

2. Hearing voices is not insanity, writing them down – is.

 

 

3. Do not argue with idiots, they will outsmart you.

 

4. Most memories are forgotten more than once.

 

5. It's not fully yours until you have shortened it.

 

6. If you are a big ship, stay away from shallow waters.

 

7. Some weeds are worth cultivating.

© 2014 Lera Auerbach [Fall of a Hero]

When Florence Cassen Mayers writes a letter, she does so in sestina form. . .

Ed. note: We asked Florence Cassen Mayers to blog for us at a mutually convenient time. This is how she replied. We ran this and four other sestinas of hers in April 2014.

Dear David

How gracious you
are to ask me to write
five
blogs
about the sestinas
in Dan’s book

his incredible book,
you
know sestinas
are what I write.
I’ve never written a blog.
I’m filled with terror: five!

Will five
do justice to his book?
What can I say in a blog?
You
honor me, but I’d rather write
sestinas.

I’ve practiced sestinas
two score years and five.
I’d gladly  write
a book
for you,
but a blog?

Blogs
are not my thing. Sestinas
are. I could send you
five
from my unpublished book                  
or happily write

new ones, but must I write
a blog?
Dan’s book
celebrates the sestina.
Let’s give him a high five.
If it's OK with you

I’ll write five sestinas.                     
not five blogs
to praise his book. What say you?

-- Florence Cassen Mayers

It Even Has an Image File, I Am a Real Blogger [by Lindsay Daigle]

I am not a blogger, I am a poet. This week though, I was both. And it was thrilling—scary and vulnerable, fun and really pleasing. In determining the direction this fifth and final blog might take, some favorite go-to poems came to mind. Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” is one that I constantly return to. Oranges are pretty great. So is the color orange. Sardines aren’t so bad either. What I really love it for is its ability to say so much without saying anything at all, what it says about the composing process, about what it is to be an artist and a notice-er. It’s the sort of poem that asks for noticing— It’s plainly spoken, but honest and exposed in its plainness. (The speaker says, “Oh.” That’s all he needs to say.) I’m now going to read it again. You should too:

Why I Am Not a Painter [by Frank O’Hara]

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

We need so many words to express a word, twelve full poems to get at orange without ever using the word itself. This is why I spend so much time close-reading with my composition students. We spent an hour yesterday coming up with and interpreting over 50 definitions for “critical inquiry.” We could have continued the conversation well into the afternoon, asking things like— Do we inquire into issues that trouble us, or is it more of an uncertainty? Is it uncertainty or a crisis of belief? Are we destabilizing those beliefs or questioning their validity? Do we mean validity or is it a matter of global stakes? Are personal stakes a part of global stakes, or is it the other way around? If we have a personal investment in what’s being researched, is it more difficult to be critical? Is it important to be critical of our own input as much as others’? What do we really mean by critical? Not taking texts at face value? Pushing texts beyond summary into the realm of further understanding? Does further understanding, the journey of discovery, ever really have an end? Is discovery the process or the product? …

And now I’ve written twelve lines sparked from O’Hara’s poem (and therefore oranges?) in which the poem isn’t mentioned at all. Part of me says, “Whoops!” The other part says, “Well, yeah. That’s how it works.”

“There should be / so much more, not of orange, of / words, of how terrible orange is / and life. Days go by.” These are my favorite lines. Words (and therefore oranges?) are exalted here. There are not enough of them. But they’re also terrible in the ways that life is both terrible and wonderful. Poetry attempts to expand the limits language places on our ability to share human experience. Days go by, more life happens, more words are needed to fully experience it.

One of my dearest friends is moving from Milwaukee to New York City in a few weeks, something I did six years ago. Even now I can’t adequately explain what that experience was like – how I felt necessarily pulled to the city, tethered to it as though my left arm rented a studio apartment in Gramercy while the rest of me went for daily runs along Lake Michigan. My friend’s experience is similar, it seems, but there’s no telling which part of her exists where. She might not know until she receives her first piece of mail addressed to her Astoria zip code. And even then, there should be so much more.

 

"SARDINES" by Mike Goldberg

It’s troubling to always be attempting this sort of explanation of human experience. Being a poet is actually quite masochistic. Even O’Hara says, “I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.” This is not to say that visual artistic methods are “easier” or less limiting than verbal/textual. I really don’t know because I am not a painter either. What I do know is that Mike Goldberg’s painting called “SARDINES” has no sardines in it, the same way that the poem called “ORANGES” has no oranges (or orange) in it. But the painting is actually full of sardines – the thought process following sardines, their implications, their many versions and colors and patterns, shapes and non-shapes, and the remnants of the word itself scrawled and painted over. We do what we can to represent the days that go by. We try to understand our lives and convey that understanding so that others might better understand theirs too. It’s a cyclical process, both terrible and wonderful.

Thursday, August 7, 7:30 PM: An Evening of French Poetry and American Port

photo of Frédéric Bouché (r) by Heather Ainsworth

 

Join David Lehman and Frédéric Bouché for a summer evening of:

Poetry & Port

Thursday, August 7, 2014

7:30-9:00 PM

Ports of New York Winery

815 Taber Street

Ithaca, NY

Sample Ports of New York’s delicious white or red Meleau wine while listening to David Lehman read his award-winning translations of poetry by Charles Baudelaire, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Henri Michaux. Frédéric Bouché will treat you to poems in their original French, all in the intimate space where he crafts wines unique to the Finger Lakes.

David Lehman is the creator and series editor of the annual Best American Poetry anthology, now in its twenty-sixth year. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry and is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013). He was awarded the Virginia Quarterly Review Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry for his translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s “Zone.”

Frédéric Bouché is the owner and winemaker of Ports of New York, where he produces the bold red and elegant white “fortified” Meleau wines using the traditional method associated with the production of Port. Bouché built his winery from the ground up, using salvaged materials for much of the building's façade. He maintains a small but fascinating museum which includes winemaking materials passed down in his French winemaking family for several generations. Arrive at 7:30 for a brief tour.

Books and Port will be for sale.

For more information contact [email protected] or Ports of New York: 607-220-6317   

“That My Plain Clothes Hid Hooves and Haunches”: The Relation Between Lyric & Narrative [by Lindsay Daigle]

In his poem “Now You’re An Animal,” Mark Doty asks, “What is lyric?” This question remains worthy of asking again and again (—which might be why what follows here is extremely underdeveloped…!). Lyric poetry shifts seemingly at the rate that our communication methods shift. And I don’t just mean from horse-and-messenger to postal snail mail to e-mail to text message. I mean the way we also speak to each other’s faces, the words we choose in order to express ourselves (personally or digitally), the rhetoric of the self. Traditionally, the lyric takes up personal human emotion. (But not always in a direct way.) It values sound, rhythm, the image, the line, and not necessarily chronological logic or sentence structure. (But not all these things, and not all the time.) The lyric poem has a musical cadence. (But not always.)

So what is it, really? There’s a lot to be said about it, to the point at which the lyric becomes undefinable. The easiest answer to the question “What is lyric?” is simply “Not narrative.”

I struggle when having this conversation with my Introduction to Creative Writing students. I can provide a multitude of examples showing what might be considered “lyric poetry” (“Remember when we read James Tate? Yeah, not that.”). It seems though that presenting many examples only confuses them, causes them to wonder why this category exists if there are so many different forms/methods/sub-genres that fit it. It isn’t until we read Doty’s poem in tandem with some in-class writing that they really start to get it, and I start to see some of the most exciting and substantive poems produced from those undergrads that I’d seen all semester.

First, I write this on the board:

I thought, This is the relation between narrative

and lyric: one minute you're on 23rd Street

trying to find an address, and the next

you're naked under a wet crown of horns.

 

Then, I read the poem to them aloud (after they’ve read it on their own as homework):

 

Now You're An Animal [by Mark Doty]

I'd expected to sit for my portrait

in the photographer's studio—

chilly morning, fierce April wind on Sixth

slicing through my jacket and sweater,

 

new blur of the trees overhead—

but at the loft, a huge roll of white paper

hung from the ceiling, blocking a wall of windows;

 

he handed me a bucket of black paint

and brushes and said, Now, how would you

like to represent yourself? I wasn't ready

for that. It wasn't noon, I'd hurried across

 

the city, and didn't feel awake to the task

of metaphor. Then we were talking, easy, about

what others had done—he photographed painters,

 

actors, whoever he liked in the arts—

and how dancers often leapt before the white field

he'd offered them. And I said,

I've always wanted antlers, and began to paint

 

high on the big page black reindeer horns,

in thick strokes, the paint dripping nicely,

and when I finished I could stand

 

beneath them and the serious, branching

architecture seemed to spring from my head.

He stood at the other end of the room,

framing me upside down in his lens. He said,

 

That's wonderful, what do you want to wear?

I didn't know. He said, Take off your shirt,

and I did, and he said, Now you're an animal!

 

I ripped open the buttons of my jeans

so as to be a lustful beast, and he cried,

Yes, that's it! And though it was a joke

still I was seized by a sort of heat;

 

I took deep breaths, tilted my head up,

stood in the center of my own authority

while he lifted sheets of film and pushed

 

others in again, and clicked the lens.

He said, That's good, what else? I don't know

how else to do it unless you're naked.

And I said, I'm okay with that, and without

 

even my watch or ring, only the arching

crown tangling high into the air above me,

I felt the up-pushing pulse of some originating flame.

 

I thought, This is the relation between narrative

and lyric: one minute you're on 23rd Street

trying to find an address, and the next

you're naked under a wet crown of horns.

 

That's how fast we slip into the underlife.

Later, out in the daylight, I thought,

What if my students see this picture?

 

or the Dean of Liberal Arts?—but only

after I'd walked back out into

the elevator and the lobby, onto the sidewalk

with an odd warmth banked inside me,

 

creaturely: the undertime, beneath

the new haze of trees overhead,

bud time, the sharp spring wind

 

equal parts ice and green. What is lyric?

I wanted the animal seen

that I might know him. Even

waiting at the blustery intersections,

 

I was warmed by the incipient leaves,

and I held the antlers high in the wind,

their heart radiating down into my face,

 

and on the street a few men knew what I wished:

that my plain clothes hid hooves and haunches.

Then, I underline in different colors on the board: narrative and on 23^rd Street trying to find an address; lyric and naked under a wet crown of horns. Then, together we generate lists of characteristics of “narrative” and “lyric” based on what they read/heard from the poem, as well as the specifics underlined in the passage. As with most large group discussions based around list-making, after a couple suggestions are written, students shout out more and more amazing additions more and more rapidly. They become confident in their understanding. They take chances, which start mini-discussions along the way.

Once the lists seem exhaustive, it’s their turn to write. First, I ask them to write some lyric lines—“If you were given a blank canvas and a bucket of paint, how would you represent yourself with it?” Next, some narrative lines—“Recall a time in which you were trying to find an address. Tell us about it.” Then, I ask them to rewrite both sets of lines intertwined together – first lyric line, first narrative line, second lyric line, second narrative line, and so on – with attention to revision into a cohesive piece (i.e. changing bits of grammar and syntax so that the lines are fluid from one to the next). Then, they pass their completed piece to the left. Their classmates read the completed piece with a pencil handy. They’re on the lookout for striking moments and surprising bits of language that they’ll then share with the class.

What results is truly extraordinary – the kind of language that balls the fists in delight, asking for more. Through this exercise, my students gather that lyric and narrative do not have to be so disparate. It’s a relation, not a difference. The most exciting moments in poetry happen when lyric and narrative intersect, plain clothes hiding hooves and haunches.

Doty says, “I wanted the animal seen that I might know him.” Lyric is how we reveal ourselves to ourselves. Narrative is the attempt to find the animal’s address.

The List, Seagulls, & Paul Guest Shouting [by Lindsay Daigle]

When I was little, I liked to make lists of things: sports I liked to play, bands/singers I liked to listen to, R.L. Stein books I’ve read and have yet to read. It was all usually things I liked, things that sort of defined me at the time. Today, I was similarly moved to make such a list, but this time, of TV shows I like, ones that warrant binge-watching entire seasons at a time. I don’t quite know why I’m compelled in this way. Why is the act of making a list a pleasurable thing? Is it the thinking process, the discerning? The result, the seeing them all together? Once I’ve exhausted the obvious ones, I’m forced to think of ones I might have forgotten about otherwise, thereby perhaps reinvigorating the idea? Homage? Inclusion? (Exclusion?) Is it like creating a club and I’m the leader who gets to approve membership (like picking teams in grade school kickball)? Am I attempting to keep myself organized? If I write down every city I’ve ever been to, will I then know myself more fully? Am I better able to hold myself together after listing every film that has ever made me cry?

 

And following this list of questions, another— Why the list poem? Similar to my list-creating desire’s elementary origins, the list poem is a technique often introduced to the young writer as a handy image-compiling tool. Some primary school teachers ask their students to create list poems to introduce themselves to their classmates, or when poetry is brand new. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s productive, straight-forward self-reflection. And all of these are assets to someone in her late 20s (or, anyone older than primary school age) too. The list poem enacts this youthful ease of compartmentalization, while engaging with the more mature task of exploring a thing from all its angles.

 

Catherine Bowman makes lists in “Sylvia’s Photo Album,” “Things To Eat, Paris, 1953” and her series of “Things To Do” poems, all from The Plath Cabinet.  Susan Firer’s list poems include “Small Milwaukee Museums,” “Where Song Comes From,” and “The Wave Docent.” Paul Guest gives us “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge,” “To-Do List,” and “Things We Agreed Not to Shout,” which is reproduced here:

 

 

Things We Agreed Not to Shout [by Paul Guest]

 

 

Mom is dead. Dad melted. Again.

Bitter recriminations. Bitter infidelities. Bitter.

Streisand is on. Finnish curses on the firstborn

of everyone who held us back. My credit rating.

Your many catalogs of shame. Scrapbook time.

 

Do you remember where we sank the kindergarteners?

 

Infectious constipation. In our spare time,

we enjoy perfecting methods of evisceration.

 

Bingo. Also, fire. Let’s make a baby.

 

Not anymore. You feel kind of weird inside.

 

My brother’s indiscretions. My indiscretion

with your brother. That lost weekend in Vegas.

Landslide of therapy. Moving to another state. Again.

 

We are running out of America. Faster.

Right there. Good girl. Judas Priest lyrics.

Freebird. Woo. Random latitudes.

 

Imagined injuries. Getting tired of your meniscus.

Seriously. Routing numbers

and decade by decade

delineations of your bra sizes. Beginning with the seventies.

 

You promised. I thought you were

asleep. I thought you wouldn’t mind it.

 

Surprise.

 

 

The list poem inherently invites the reader into its space. It asks for suggestions. What’s left out here? What could be added to this list? What kinds of things have you agreed not to shout? (To Guest’s list, I’d add, “Curse words at seagulls in the morning.”)

 

But there’s also a clear reason why the reader’s additions are not a part of the list already (so clear that it probably doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway): This is not my list. This list is a representation of the speaker at a particular moment in time. It’s possible that he might agree next week not to shout curse words at seagulls in the morning. But at the time of the poem, it wasn’t a defining piece of his character. Maybe it’s a piece of mine though… So maybe I’ll create my own list… And oh, another reason the list poem is so spectacular! The encouragement of new poems. And then, years after you write your own “things I’ve agreed not to shout” poem, you might write another one because maybe you’ve decided to start shouting at seagulls since then. It’s a wonderful process, really.

 

So I’m going to go make a list of all my favorite TV shows. Who really knows why. But when I’m done, the list will exist, and I will have it to look at and consider its implications, what it says about me as a TV watcher, an entertainment seeker, an American, a human being. And maybe I’ll never look at it again. Or I’ll make another list in 15 years because this list doesn’t define me anymore. Or maybe I’ll make a poem of it, like John Ashbery’s “They Knew What They Wanted,” a list poem comprised of film titles. And then he’ll write a poem in response to mine comprised of only TV show titles. And then… well, the list goes on, doesn’t it?

Wedding Poems & Piles of Books in the Living Room [by Lindsay Daigle]

When a dear friend asks you to read a poem at her wedding, the “Of course!” response is full of glee and honor, but also pressure and panic – at least, for me. This is because each time this has been asked of me, I’ve been given the task of not only reading the poem, but choosing it too (or, in some cases, writing it). In other words, I am to create a moment within the small amount of moments dedicated to an entirely special day in the lives of people I love and care for. And since I am “the poet friend,” there’s a certain amount of expertise expected from my fulfilling of this role. I assume that the poem I choose will not only say something about the nearly wedded couple in question, but also something about me – about what I value in poetry, about what is “good” poetry, about my wealth of poetry knowledge, etc. (And yes, I realize this perhaps silly anxiety may not be shared by any of you, readers. And yes, I also understand that this wedding is not about me. But, well, this was my thought process. And, well, this is me being honest about it.)

 

As a result of all this silly anxiety, I made a few decisions right off the bat: 1) The poem should not come from any sort of “wedding poem” internet search. 2) The poem will be contemporary, which rules out possible “typical” wedding go-tos, like Keats or Shakespeare or Neruda. 3) If possible, the poem will come from my own collection of hard copy poetry books.

 

The combination of these decisions provided me with the rare opportunity to sit in my living room for an entire Saturday surrounded by piles of books. (And now my PhD student self is laughing so hard that I lost my train of thought.)

 

I really had a great time with this— Through this process of pulling books from shelves, flipping through them, and moving them from pile to pile, I recalled some worthwhile observations/made some worthwhile discoveries, such as:

 

1)      I own 2 copies of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White.

2)      My copy of Lolita is right next to my copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran, which sprung the idea to write a poem called “Reading Lolita in the Laundromat,” which happened and was really awkward.

3)      The layout of the Table of Contents page is a truly important decision that affects the aesthetic experience of the reader.

4)      I do not differentiate between my composition pedagogy books and my creative writing pedagogy books on the shelf because I believe in their highly valuable crossover.

5)      I used to read a lot of Tom Robbins.

6)      Library of America editions of collected poems are overwhelming and Bible-y.

7)      I just need to get Watt, and my Samuel Beckett collection will be complete.

8)      I am not entirely drawn to [own] poetry that celebrates or is cheerful. I dig the melancholy, the dark, the kinds of wedding poems that are only wedding poems because they reveal the realities of human interaction and the messiness of the human condition.

 

Nevertheless, I broke a rule or two and narrowed down my search to four poems: Frank O’Hara’s “To You,” T.S. Eliot’s “A Dedication To My Wife,” Jeffrey McDaniel’s “The Archipelago of Kisses,” and David Lehman’s “When a Woman Loves a Man.” I read them all aloud to my betrothed friend. After each poem, she smiled and did the “poetry reading mmm,” so I knew I was on the right track. We decided on Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem for its entertaining and performative appeal, its teary-eyed sweet ending, and the fact that I’ll read it right before their vows (and therefore, their I do kiss).

 

 

The Archipelago of Kisses [by Jeffrey McDaniel]

 

 

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow

on trees, like in the old days. So where

does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy—like being

unleashed with a credit card

in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.

The sloppy kiss. The peck.

The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't

be doing this kiss. The but your lips

taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.

The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.

The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad

sometimes kiss. The I know

your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older,

kisses become scarce. You'll be driving

home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,

with its purple thumb out. Now if you

were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's ruby door

just to see how it fits. Oh where

does one find love? If you rub two glances together, you get

a smile; rub two smiles, you get

a spark; rub two sparks together and you have a kiss. Now

what? Don't invite the kiss

to your house and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get

suspicious and stare at your toes.

Don't water the kiss with whisky. It'll turn bright pink and explode

into a thousand luscious splinters,

but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of your body

without saying good-bye,

and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left

on the inside of your mouth. You must

nurture the kiss. Dim the lights, notice how it illuminates

the room. Clutch it to your chest,

wonder if the sand inside every hourglass comes from a special

beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,

then look up the first recorded French kiss in history: beneath

a Babylonian olive tree in 1300 B.C.

But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection

of function and desire. The I do kiss.

The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when

I'm dead, I'll swim through the earth

like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

 

 

Yesterday, the Poetry Foundation/POETRY Magazine posted on Facebook an article from their website that compiles poems appropriate for weddings – only 36 hours or so after my raucous living room bookshelf disruption. That post urged me to write this one, to wonder the implications of being the-one-who-reads-the-poem at a wedding, to ask who else might want more from their wedding poem web searches. The Foundation’s list, however, is a great one. There are certainly some gems on it I wouldn’t have considered before (Kenneth Koch’s “To You,” Dora Malech’s “Love Poem,” C.D. Wright’s “Everything Good Between Men and Women”), while also incorporating some of those staples (Neruda, Keats). It’s a nice little list.

 

After all this, maybe this means I should create my own list, my own database. Maybe I should buy more poetry books. Maybe I should just cool it when I’m asked to choose a poem as a representation of something wildly important. Or maybe it’s good to care so much.

Who Will Conclude Our Crowd-Sourced Sonnet?

We need line 14. . . Please submit your candidate here

The sonnet so far:

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.

Say what must die inside that I may not
Cast down this die and cross the Rubicon,
Thence to the true hell: the heat in Tucson
Where drug lords blaze loads of coke, meth, and pot.

Freedom starts or ends with a funeral.
I once watched men with Uzis guard the Pope
No hope, no hope, no hope, no hope, no hope.

What buzz can cheer this gloomy canticle?
Redemption is a swift revolving door

http://theamericanscholar.org/help-us-write-a-sonnet-line-thirteen/#.U86EW2OTMSk

All those Young Lives Betrayed [by Charles Coe]

In Sharon, Vermont, a quiet little spot off I-89, about an hour shy of Montpelier, sits the Vermont Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I had time to stop so I decided to take look, winding my way through the woods to the parking lot. The Memorial was dedicated in 1982, but by the mid ‘90s the site had fallen into disrepair and was in danger of being closed. An outpouring of community support convinced the governor to keep the site open, and Vermont legislators decided not only to rescue and restore the site, but to make it the center of a “green” rest area, with state-of-the-art renewable energy systems.

Inside the reception center the walls were covered with the history of the Green Mountain State’s involvement in the war, where the young men came from, and how many lost their lives. And there were black-and-white photos taken in 'Nam of sons of Vermont—mostly shots of them in the mundane business of fixing a jeep or eating C-rations from a can.

I walked outside to the monument itself, crossed a short footbridge decorated with American flags, and came to a stone marker where 138 names were carved, the names of 138 young men who traveled across the seas to a land most hadn’t even heard of, and who never came back. Behind the monument a simple white disk lay in the grass, imbedded with the words: “MIA: We Shall Never Forget.”

It was late on a weekday afternoon, and I was the only person there. I sat on a bench for a long while listening to the birds, and the breeze through the trees, then walked across the little footbridge and back through the reception center.

I walked past the photographs of the soldiers and a hot anger gripped my chest at the thought of the cynical empire builders who tossed those young lives away like poker chips. Richard Nixon, whose “Peace with Honor” blather was little more than an attempt to placate his party's hawkish right wing. Robert MacNamara, who went to his grave without expressing any genuine remorse. And Henry Kissinger, who's made a fortune as a pundit and advisor to right-wing governments; to him the fact that the war cost 58,000 young American lives seems like an afterthought. Maybe as you're reading this his wife's flicking a piece of lint off his tuxedo on the way to yet another Manhattan plutocrat cocktail party.

I doubt if any of those men ever saw, or would have cared to see, the words spoken by “Gold Star Mother” Louise Ransom at the memorial’s dedication ceremony in 1982:

TO GRIEVE

We will remember how they

looked the last time we saw them.

We will also remember

the weddings never attended,

the houses never built,

the children never born,

the fields never plowed,

books never written

and the songs never sung.

 

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

 

“Stanza My Stone!” Cried No One On Any Sort Of Regular Basis [by Lindsay Daigle]

I like to terrify my students with what imagery is capable of. Moving past the “red as a rose” and “hot like summer” kinds of images is certainly at least one full 75-minute Introduction to Creative Writing class period (+ several reading and writing assignments). It’s when those reading/writing assignments urge the initial eyebrow-snaking “I hate poetry!” sighs out of their mouths that I know the true conversation has begun. When I hear those frustrated sighs, I can’t help but laugh a little, nod, smile, ask “Why do you say that?” I listen to the reply, still smiling (partially because I want them to be honest without fear of insulting me, their poet-teacher), then say, “You don’t hate it.” I then silently revere Wallace Stevens and Jennifer L. Knox for helping me accomplish what I set out to do: First stage, terrified; second stage, “whoa…”

During these moments, I’m often recalling what it was like for my undergraduate self to encounter such imagery-rich poetry as Sharon Olds (“The shadows lie down like stunned animals in the corners / and I set myself up in bed like an invalid, / a damaged woman, the books, the cup of tea, / the notebooks. I prepare to receive / the long gold finger of fire / when it inches sideways into the window and / drops its molten bar across my legs / like a police lock”) and Lyn Hejinian (“It is happiness to dream / The men ask me where is the charred pot and I say it is in the car trunk / The men deny that the slopes have walked into the creek / They are probably right and keep consuming / Fire they need—”). My eyes widened with ineffable emotions as my highlighter colored those pages raw. The emotions were a simultaneous exclamation of “Oh?” and “YES!”, humility and empowerment, fear and exhilaration. In the words of some sort of “I lived it, you can too” motivational speaker, that’s when I knew that I not only loved poetry, I needed it.

This isn’t to say that I expect my students to have the same emotional reaction to the image as I did. Some of them, certainly, arrive to class equipped with experience and appreciation. They’ve skipped the question marks and headed right into exclamation points. And this is wonderful. There are also those who never move past the stage of fear and/or disdain. They’ll either stay silent during the poetry half of the semester, or their eye rolls will be so loud that I – always the self-reflective instructor – will take note and wonder if I am, in fact, losing the poetry vote.

This also isn’t to say that I teach creative writing because I want everyone to love it like I do. But I like to think that mere exposure to poetry is an asset to anyone’s rounded educational experience. To be a citizen of the world, it’s important, I think, to know what words can do, to be able to use them like little tools, to piece them together like many sticks of gum carried in a pants pocket that, once chewed and molded together, can plug a leak – until the word-patch is no longer strong enough, and then new pieces of gum need to be chewed. (Oh, I am no Lyn Hejinian.)

So when I ask my students to read things like Stevens’ “The Man On the Dump” in tandem with Knox’s “Notes From the Future,” I truly hope that they’re considering imagery from every which way. An evocative image will engage the senses, point to something specific, and maybe change the way you experience something. This is why I am so drawn to “The Man On the Dump.” The image!-image!-image!-ness of it does all these evocative things, while pointing directly at imagery itself, and asking it for more.

 

The Man On the Dump [by Wallace Stevens]

 

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.
The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche
Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho…The dump is full
Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.
The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,
And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems
Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,
The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box
From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.
The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says
That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs
More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.
The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green
Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea
On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew
For buttons, how many women have covered themselves
With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads
Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.
One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,
Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox) ,
Between that disgust and this, between the things
That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)
And those that will be (azaleas and so on) ,
One feels the purifying change. One rejects
The trash.

             That's the moment when the moon creeps up
To the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time
One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.
Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon
(All its images are in the dump) and you see
As a man (not like an image of a man),
You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

I would have no greater pleasure this day than to close-read this entire poem for you, dissect and dig through it, unpack its every bit of “dewiest dew.” Instead, I will grab onto the final two words of the poem, the same word twice, one capitalized, the other not, partially out of grammar-correctness, but also because the first “the” qualifies the second “the.” After a poem that acts as a garbage pile of both typical and atypical poetic imagery, that final abstract line is almost more shocking than any other fresh, concrete image that could be used instead. The “truth” is “the the.” The what? Exactly.

What I’m trying to get at here (—something bless the babbling nature of the blog!) is that it’s the act of pointing to the specific, not necessarily the specific itself, that holds the true value of imagistic experience. It’s not enough to “cry stanza my stone” (—request poetry of the mundane?). It’s the that, and the that, and the that over there too – the noticing, the capturing, the translation of brain image to word image, and especially, the recreation of those images into new pieces of chewed-up gum. -- Lindsay Daigle

The Fourth Annual New York City Poetry Festival: July 26 & 27

250 poets. 5 boroughs. 2 days. ONE CITY.

The fourth annual New York City Poetry Festival promises to be bigger and better than ever, with over 60 poetry organizations and 250 poets participating on three main stages; a Vendor’s Village where local booksellers, artists and craft makers will sell their wares; healthy and delicious food truck options (including Morris Grilled Cheese, the Palenque Columbian Food Truck, Big D’s Grub Truck, and the Mudtruck); a beer garden sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery, poetry­inspired installation art throughout; the Ring of Daisies open mic; and the 3rd Annual Children’s Poetry Festival, complete with writing games and its own fourth, all­kids stage.

All of this poetry and fun takes place on Governors Island, a 172 acre destination in the heart of New York Harbor, only 800 yards from Lower Manhattan, and even closer to Brooklyn.

The festival opens at 11am and closes at 6pm on July 26th and 27th. Plan to arrive at the ferry landing at least 30 minutes prior to your desired arrival time. For a complete timetable of events, please check out the festival lineup!

For more information, visit the New York City Poetry Festival website.