The Best American Poetry

Sandy Koufax Named "Sports Illustrated"'s Favorite Athlete

In honor of Sports Illustrated's 60th anniversary, SI.com is republishing, in full, 60 of the best stories ever to run in the magazine's history. Today's selection is on Sandy Koufax, whom the magazine named its favorite athlete of the 20th century. Koufax, the youngest person elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame, was the first pitcher to throw four no-hitters and win three Cy Young Awards. The story, by current SI writer Tom Verducci, originally appeared in the July 12, 1999 issue

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He sat in the same booth every time. It was always the one in back, farthest from the door. The trim, darkly handsome man would come alone, without his wife, nearly every morning at six o'clock for breakfast at Dick's Diner in Ellsworth, Maine, about 14 miles from their home. He often wore one of those red-and-black-checkered shirts you expect to see in Maine, though he wasn't a hunter. He might not have shaved that morning. He would walk past the long counter up front, the one with the swivel stools that, good Lord, gave complete strangers license to strike up a conversation. He preferred the clearly delineated no-trespassing zone of a booth. He would rest those famously large hands on the Formica tabletop, one of those mini-jukeboxes to his left and give his order to Annette, the waitress, in a voice as soft and smooth as honey.

He came so often that the family who ran the diner quickly stopped thinking of him as Sandy Koufax, one of the greatest pitchers who ever lived. They thought of him the way Koufax strived all his life to be thought of, as something better even than a famous athlete: He was a regular.

Dick Anderson and his son Richard, better known as Bub, might glance up from their chores when Koufax walked in, but that was usually all. One time Bub got him to autograph a napkin but never talked baseball with him. Annette, Bub's sister, always worked the section with that back booth. For three years Koufax came to the diner and not once did he volunteer information to her about his life or his career. It was always polite small talk. Neighborly. Regular.

Koufax was 35, five years since his last pitch, in 1966, when he came eagerly, even dreamily, to Maine, the back booth of America. He had seen a photo spread in Look magazine about the Down East country homestead of a man named Blakely Babcock, a 350-pound Burpee Seed salesman, gentleman farmer and gadfly whom everybody called Tiny. Tiny would invite neighbors and friends over for cookouts and dinner parties, during which he liked to consume great quantities of food, then rub his huge belly and bellow laughingly to his wife, "So, what's for dinner, Alberta?" Tiny's North Ellsworth farmhouse caught Koufax's fancy at just about the same time one of his wife's friends was renovating her farmhouse in Maine. Wouldn't it be perfect, Koufax thought, to live quietly, almost anonymously, in an old farmhouse just like Tiny's?

Alberta Babcock was pulling a hot tin of sweet-smelling blueberry muffins from the oven when Koufax first saw the place in person, and the old Cape-style house was filled with so many flowers that it looked like a watercolor come to life. Koufax was sold, and on Oct. 4, 1971, Sanford and Anne Koufax of Los Angeles, as they signed the deed, took out a 15-year, $15,000 mortgage from Penobscot Savings Bank and bought what was known as Winkumpaugh Farm from Blakely and Alberta Babcock for about $30,000. A cord was cut. The rest of Sandy Koufax's life had begun.

The Babcocks had lived in the farmhouse since 1962, but no one was exactly sure how old the place was. Property records were lost to a fire at Ellsworth City Hall in 1933, and records from 1944 list the farmhouse's age even then only as "old." Nestled on the side of a small mountain off a dusty dirt road called Happytown Road and around the corner from another called Winkumpaugh Road, the farmhouse was the perfect setting for a man hoping to drop out of sight, even if that man was a beloved American icon who mastered the art of pitching as well as anyone who ever threw a baseball.

A man so fiercely modest and private that while at the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship, he didn't tell his parents back in Brooklyn that he was also on the baseball team. The man whose mother requested one of the first copies of his 1966 autobiography, Koufax, so she could find out something about her son. ("You never told me anything," she said to him.) The man who in 1968, two years after retiring with three Cy Young Awards, four no-hitters and five ERA titles, mentioned nothing of his baseball career upon meeting a pretty young woman named Anne who was redecorating her parents' Malibu beach house. Koufax did offer to help her paint, though. It wasn't until several days later that she learned his identity -- and he learned hers: She was the daughter of actor Richard Widmark. They were married six months later in her father's West Los Angeles home in front of about a dozen people.

The last two years that Anne and Sandy Koufax lived at Winkumpaugh Farm were the first in his life when he was bound by neither school nor work. After commuting from Maine during the summer of 1972 for his sixth season as a television commentator for NBC, he quit with four years left on his contract. He loathed the work. He could tell you every pitch thrown by every pitcher in a game without having written anything down, but there was a problem: He didn't like to talk about himself. At a meeting before Game 5 of the 1970 World Series, fellow announcer Joe Garagiola noted that Cincinnati's starting pitcher, Jim Merritt, had an injured arm. "I said, 'Sandy, what a perfect thing to talk about. That's what you had, too.'" Garagiola says. "But he said he didn't want to talk about himself. He wouldn't do it."

"Every time he had to leave Maine to work one of those games, it broke his heart," says MaJo Keleshian, a friend and former neighbor who attended Sarah Lawrence College with Anne. She still lives without a television on land she and her husband bought from Koufax. "He was very happy here. He came here to be left alone."

Since then only his address has changed -- and many times, at that. DiMaggio, baseball's other legendary protector of privacy, was practically Rodmanesque compared with Koufax. DiMaggio was regal, having acquired even the stiff-handed wave of royalty. We watched the graying of DiMaggio as he played TV pitchman and public icon. Koufax is a living James Dean, the aura of his youth frozen in time; he has grayed without our even knowing it. He is a sphinx, except that he doesn't want anyone to try to solve his riddle.

Koufax was the kind of man boys idolized, men envied, women swooned over and rabbis thanked, especially when he refused to pitch Game 1 of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur. And when he was suddenly, tragically, done with baseball, he slipped into a life nearly monastic in its privacy.

One question comes to mind: Why? Why did he turn his back on Fame and Fortune, the twin sirens of celebrity? Why did the most beloved athlete of his time carve out a quiet life -- the very antithesis of the American dream at the close of the century? For the answer I will go searching for the soul of Sandy Koufax, which seems as mysterious as the deepest Maine woods on a moonless night.
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See you in September . . .

Ed note: We're taking a much needed break to enjoy the remaining days of summer. We'll be back on September 8th. Meanwhile, we hope to see you at these events:

An Evening with Edward Hirsch.
Wednesday, September 3, 2014
6:30 PM to 8:00 PM.

66 W 12th Street
Room A510 New York, NY 10011

Edward Hirsch is the author of, most recently, A Poet’s Glossary (Houghton Mifflin, 2014) and Gabriel: A Poem (Knopf, 2014). His first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers, was published in 1981 and went on to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. Wild Gratitude (1986), his second collection, received the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Hirsch has won an Academy of Arts and Letters Award, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been a professor of English at Wayne State University and the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Moderated by David Lehman, poetry coordinator and professor, the School of Writing.

The Best American Poetry 2014 Launch Reading

September 18, 7:00 PM

The Auditorium at 66 W 12th Street
New York, NY  10011

Series editor and School of Writing professor David Lehman joins contributors to The Best American Poetry 2014 to launch the 27th edition of this acclaimed annual anthology.

Readers will include Lucie Brock-Broido, Mark Doty, Joel Dias-Porter, Natalie Diaz, Sean Thomas Dougherty, Cornelius Eady, Ross Gay, Le Hinton, Major Jackson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Hailey Leithauser, Frannie Lindsay, Cate Marvin, Shara McCallum, Valzhyna Mort, Eileen Myles, D. Nurkse, Sharon Olds, Greg Pardlo, Roger Reeves, Patrick Rosal, Jon Sands, Jane Springer, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Rachel Zucker. 

Free, no tickets required.

Both events sponsored by the New School School of Writing. 

Books will be for sale.

Tempus fugit, or Late August [by Moira Egan]

(Seamus Heaney & Damiano Abeni, Casa delle Letterature, May, 2013)

 Blackberry-Picking

        for Philip Hobsbaum

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

 

(from Death of a Naturalist)

 

This year, my intention for teaching is to get the students to think about physical details from all five senses. This is the poem I'm taking in for the first day. Thank you, Seamus. 

DRIVE: Car Poems [Kelle Groom]

Greenery, Atlantic Center for the Arts

Three years ago, I moved the contents of my house into a storage unit, and left to live and write in a number of places I’d never been before. Since then, I’ve moved 20 times. Now I’m in residence for two months at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains which I see out my studio window. A blue haze created by the breathing of trees.

Atlantic Center for the Arts

I’m not an efficient traveler with a well-packed suitcase and car. I’ve had a basketball in my jeep since I left, but haven’t played for years. But the basketball reminds me of a photograph of a sand mandala I saw at Atlantic Center for Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Seven Tibetan monks came to ACA in 2001 to create the mandala. When they finished, the monks prayed, then blew the sand away.

I heard the monks had played basketball at the court down the road on Turnbull Bay. When I worked at ACA, I thought I’d go to the court one day on my lunch break, play where the monks had played, but never did. Still, when I saw the basketball in my jeep, I saw orange robes flying on a white court.

Before this drive to Virginia, I finally took the basketball out, and it pained me. But I was making room for a jug of coolant, quarts of motor oil, things that could keep me moving down the road. My jeep lower to the ground with the weight of books filling plastic totes in the back. Thousands more in storage, it hardly seems overdoing it to carry a hundred with me.

Before I started this trip three years ago, a painter, Trish Thompson gave me two gifts I bring along. A hematite statue of Guanyin inside a palm-sized woven bag I can wear around my neck. In my memoir, Trish had read of my encounter with Guanyin in the Boston MFA, how I’d learned that she wouldn’t leave the world until no one is suffering.  I said that I'd carry her with me. But Trish said, No, she’ll carry you. Trish also gave me a painting in place of an old painting of hers I’d longed for: “Purple River #2.” It was the river behind her house that she walked every night. But she wasn’t as interested in the finished paintings as in the process of making them. So she’d painted over it. Gave me a new one.

I’d heard of a woman who, when she traveled, would pack almost nothing. Buy her clothes in thrift stores when she arrived, then donate them back when she left. I admire her as I admire those who climb mountains. I can’t imagine what it would be like to travel so lightly.

Opening my suitcase in Florida this July, I found I’d packed a freezer bag of mittens. In another suitcase: purple gloves, wool scarf and hats from Wyoming and Provincetown. The gloves have a story too, but I hadn't meant to bring them into the 90 degree heat. Here in Virginia, where I’ll be into October, I found several bathing suits in my suitcase, but no coat.

I drove to Central Virginia from New Smyrna Beach, Florida in a 1997 Jeep Cherokee with nearly 170,000 miles using the GPS on my phone. I found myself driving alone in the dark, in pouring rain through seemingly endless farmland in South and North Carolina. Before dark fell, I’d had fields of green on either side. I saw a sign for Peaches and several churches. One convenience store. Narrow two-way traffic on hilly roads. Later, I learned that this isolated dark road had been unnecessary. I could have taken easy 95 all the way to Richmond, then veered toward Lynchburg.

Over the hood of the Jeep: Arriving at VCCA

In these three years of travelling, I’ve relied on my beat-up old jeep, kindly described as rugged. It’s still carrying me to new places. When I write, I want to be lost, surprised, to go somewhere I haven’t been before.  I’ve written poems for my cars -  a Toyota I had many years ago, and an Oldsmobile. Both poems inspired by Barbara Hamby’s wonderful "Ode to My 1977 Toyota” from her American Odes in Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press):

“... Remember the months
I drove you to work singing "Some Enchanted Evening"?
     Those were scary times. All I thought about
was getting on I-10 with you and not stopping. Would you
     have made it to New Orleans? What would our life
have been like there? I'd forgotten about poetry. Thank God,
     I remembered her. She saved us both.”

William Stafford’s devastating “Travelling in the Dark” always pulls me to the side of the road, beside the speaker and the unborn fawn, the wilderness listening. It’s from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems, Graywolf, 1998:

“My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.”

 

I asked other poets to recommend “car” poems. Brian Spears directed me to Stephen Dunn’s “The Sacred” (from Between Angels, W.W. Norton, 1998) which begins:

“After the teacher asked if anyone had
    a sacred place
and the students fidgeted and shrank

in their chairs, the most serious of them all
   said it was his car
being in it alone, his tape deck playing

things he’d chosen, and others knew the truth
    had been spoken"

Deborah A. Miranda gave me a copy of Linda Hogan’s beauty, “Driving at Night” (anthologized in Kurt Brown’s Drive, They Said: Poems About Americans & Their Cars (Milkweed, 1994). The poem closes with these lines:

“Bless the horse
and the clothing left out on a line,
armless sleeves
with nothing to hold but air.
And houses
where women and men
are lying
asleep at night
dreaming all the dark roads
out of the world.”

Drive, They Said of course reminded me of Robert Creeley’s poem, “I Know a Man" (from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley,University of California Press, 1991):

“the darkness sur-/rounds us what/can we do against/it, or else, shall we &/why not, buy a goddamn big car,/drive, he sd”

When I mentioned Creeley’s poem to Patricia Spears Jones, she directed me to Hettie Jones’ second poetry collection, Drive (Hanging Loose Press, 1998). From her poem “Hard Drive”:

“I have always been at the same time
woman enough to be moved to tears
and man enough
to drive my car in any direction"

Suzannah Gilman sent me this delight that turns elegiac: "Barbie's Ferrari" by Lynn McMahon in New American Poets, edited by Jack Elliott Myers and Roger Weingarten:

“This is Attention. This is detail fitted to sheer
Velocity. For her knees, after all, are locked—
Once fitted into the driving pit, she can only accelerate
Into a future that becomes hauntingly like the past:”

Sophie Klahr recommended Jim Daniels’ poem, “Wheels,” from Places/Everyone, (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985) in which a brother’s life is seen in photographs of him waving from trucks and cars and motorcycles:

“My brother helmetless
rides off on his Harley
waving
my brother's feet rarely touch the ground-
waving waving
face pressed to the wind
no camera to save him.”

Mark Pursell thought Tony Hoagland might have one, and Shane Seely guessed it to be “Honda Pavarotti” from Donkey Gospel (Graywolf Press, 1998).

“But wherever I was going, I don't care anymore,
because no place I could arrive at

is good enough for this, this thing made out of experience
but to which experience will never measure up.
And that dark and soaring fact
is enough to make me renounce the whole world

or fall in love with it forever.”

I’m sure there are other car poems, and I’d love to read them. But I’ll close with a poem about travel by Deborah A. Miranda from her collection, Indian Cartography (Greenfield Review Press, 1999). I would not have met her if I hadn’t traveled to Virginia, where by chance our paths crossed for a handful of days:

“Migration”

Five a.m., at the burnt end of a fierce October.
It's dark, quiet. I wish I were on the road,
traveling, a thin paper cup of coffee
hot in my hand, dawn coming up
on the horizon and all around me
the outline of shaggy pines, uncut pasture
flashing past car windows. 

I'd go north into the foothills,
to one of the passes—
Snoqualmie is open, I think—
over the Cascades and down
into the flatlands of eastern
Washington. I could be there by noon time,
walk the arid soil beside the Columbia.
I'd sit in a lonesome sandy spot, listen
to the restless water, smell the scent
of departure. 

This time of year, birds gather—
Canada geese in clouds of gray and black,
herons stick-legged under generous blue cloaks—
and my body, ready, waits for the moment
when wind insists, sunlight strikes
a true angle, triggering in my heart
some secret knowledge of direction. 

Provincetown harbor

JAMES MERRILL’S HOUSE: A TENANCY [Kelle Groom]

James Merrill

The year I was born, when I was less than two weeks old, celebrated poet James Merrill published his poem, “A Tenancy” in Poetry. It would appear the next year in his collection, Water Street, which drew its name from the house Merrill shared with his partner, David Jackson in Stonington, CT.  He owned the property at 107 Water Street from 1955 until his death in 1995, when he gave it to the Stonington Village Improvement Association (SVIA). The SVIA had the vision to create a writer-in-residence program. They kept everything in the apartment as Merrill had left it, and the first writer arrived later that same year. 

In the heavy snow of last January, I arrived at 107 Water Street in my salt-eaten green jeep for a four-month residency. James Merrill’s Queen Anne/Colonial Revival house was built in 1901. Turreted like a castle. Dark sapphire front door. Merrill’s barber, Doug Radinocci, whose shop is on the ground floor of the building, was the first person to warmly greet me: You’re the poet. 

I hauled my suitcases and books and printer up narrow staircases to the third floor where two apartments, James Merrill’s and David Jackson’s would be mine to live and work in until late May. A tenancy. The program’s director, Lynn Callahan, had left tulips in a clear vase and a welcome note on the long dining room table in the Jackson Apartment.  In my yellow bedroom, Mary McCarthy had spent her honeymoon. It must have been her fourth husband, James West, a diplomat, she married in 1961. She was 49. The year I was born. The year of Merrill’s “A Tenancy.”

At the head of the stairs, around the corner from the Jackson apartment, is the yellow door with a gold metal sun that opens to Merrill’s apartment.  A kitchen with what appear to be Merrill’s instructions to guests on a whiteboard. His awards framed on the wall. Bedroom with an electric green wooden floor. Sitting room with a massive gilt mirror that barely clears the ceiling. Blue wallpaper of bats and clouds. A portrait of Merrill's sister that someone slashed, slice still visible though repaired. Eames chair too fragile to sit in. Oriental rug. A stained glass window. Scarlet pink walls inside the tower room where Merrill and Jackson conducted séances with the Ouiji board, here at this milk glass table. The transcriptions of those sessions led to Merrill’s 17,000 line epic poem, The Changing Light at Sandover. 

Between the telephone room, which also houses Merrill’s phonograph and music library, and his hidden study, which disappears behind a sliding bookcase, is a steep staircase to the fourth floor. It’s an open room of sun with a black and white checkerboard floor, windows on all sides, and a sliding glass door that opens on a deck with a view of three states that meet out there in the water: Stonington Harbor to the right, Rhode Island’s Little Narragansett Bay to the left. Straight ahead, if I could see that far, is Long Island Sound, Fisher’s Island, Montauk.

The end of Stonington Borough is called The Point, but the whole thing really is, just a quarter-mile wide, a mile long, at the far eastern edge of Long Island Sound. Protected in a harbor, but still an arrowhead of land jutting out with water on three sides.

Snow on top of snow. The sky white, like a screen.  Looking out the window of the hidden study, I had an eerie feeling the world had turned into a blank movie while I wasn’t looking. Dark blue water rushes out to sea so fast I can feel the tow. Snow on the opposite shore. A small seaside town, the Borough they call it. I love Merrill's library, the rows of thin spines that signal poetry collections. Bookcases line the Jackson apartment too.

When Merrill published his poem, “A Tenancy,” he was 35 years old.

       

“I did not even feel the time expire.

I feel it though, today, in this new room,

Mine, with my things and thoughts, a view

Of housetops, treetops, the walls bare.

A changing light is deepening, is changing

To a gilt ballroom chair a chair

Bound to break under someone before long.”

 

I read the poem in Merrill’s own copy of Water Street in the sitting room on Water Street, stained glass behind me. In front of what I’ve nicknamed the Mirror of Versailles, which reflects the entire room, there’s a photo of Merrill ("Jimmy" to his friends) sitting before the mirror, leaning forward as if listening. The poem ends:

           

“And then, not asking why they come,

 Invite the visitors to sit.

 If I am a host at last

 It is of little more than my own past.

 May others be at home in it.”

 

While I’m in residence, I’ll write poems, as well as prose on the subject of fear and living with uncertainty. I’ll write about fear in the scarlet Ouija tower room where Merrill and Jackson contacted spirits for twenty years. In the room that a previous writer-in-residence said, always felt occupied. Merrill’s use of the Ouija board as a method to access the subconscious made sense to me. I admired it.

It scared me too, alone in the house, in the dead of a very long winter. The room often bright with sun coming in from the harbor. Windows hung with crystals, and one from the chandelier. They are each the size of a baby’s fist. The one window without a hanging crystal has a stained glass yellow-green bird and above its head: “Dum spectas fugio” which I hoped was not a kind of spirit calling tool. It translates: “While you watch I fly.”

But I felt James Merrill’s benevolence, and was intensely grateful for the space he’d made for me. For the kind of generosity that allows a man to give a house to a town. When I read his words, “I let the light change also me,” I thought, yes, I want  that too. I spent many days bundled up and walking through snow along the harbor to the Point, through the Borough, to the old Velvet Mill, on the paths of Barn Island.

One of the first books I opened in the Jackson apartment was James Galvin’s Elements (Copper Canyon, 1988). There is a wall of books between the bedroom and the kitchen. And though I was desperate for coffee every morning, the poetry collections would stop me. I read Galvin’s poem, “It Just So Happens”:  “You said the only cure /For anxiety was fear./Now solitude undoes loneliness / Like a ribbon from your hair.” I’d keep those lines with me, along with Merrill’s, through the winter.

In one of the issues of Poetry stacked under the red blanketed daybed in the secret study, I found that one of e.e. cummings last poems (or at least one of last poems submitted, to Poetry, two months before he died unexpectedly) has a kiss in it. When the editor wrote to thank him for the poem, he sent back a postcard and wrote in red and blue ink, Thank you. When the poem was published, e.e. cummings was already gone.

In Merrill’s house, I had a strong sense of the continuous life of the poet. When I’d had my second book of poems accepted for publication, and was wondering what new poems I would write, what a third book could possibly be, Mark Strand gave me his copy of The Continuous Life. He said, I thought you should have it. I understood that I’d find the poems by writing them. By reading the work of other poets. In James Merrill’s house, that continuum seemed a kind of tenancy, all of these voices present, and I was one.

WHAT CAN POETRY DO? Part 2 [Kelle Groom]

For the last three years, I’ve been traveling and writing about the subjects of fear and living with uncertainty. This month I’m in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, glad to be in residence at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I live and work in the fellows’ residence and studio barn complex, surrounded by 400 acres of rolling pasture and farmland. 

Composer Ayesu Lartey @ VCCA

Last week, Ayesu Lartey, a writer, performer and composer in residence, offered to sing for us, five people at a time in the barn silo. The white silo door is located within the Normandy style barn, on the far wall of the artists’ kitchen. The walls are white too, with the door blending in, so you might not even notice it’s there. Or dismiss it as a closet. But inside is a 60 foot tower with glazed red brick walls, and a black ladder to the conical roof.

Only five of us can enter the silo because that’s all the space can hold. We sit on benches on either side of Ayesu who stands in the center. With the door shut, and the light switched off, it’s pitch black. I have a fear of enclosed spaces, of not being able to find my way out. In this kind of dark, I lose all sense of direction, of exit.  I don’t know if I can do this, I say. But Patricia, who sits across from me on the other bench, said, You’ll be okay. You’ll hear the music.

In that perfect dark, I thought, okay, go into the music. Ayesu sang “Amazing Grace.” I wish you could hear it, wish I could play the recording which I’d accidentally erased. I’d been trying to trim it, cut off my words of fear preceding his song. Just give you the song. But now all I have to give you is my fear and this story of how I went into his song in the silo. It circled us and rose. We breathed it. The silo held corn in the years before the artists arrived, a cylinder of gold. Ayesu’s song transformed the silo into a sacred place, and all of us inside.

More than 20 years ago, I read Ellen Bryant Voight’s poem “Song and Story,” in The Atlantic. It is one of the poems that I hear over and over. Especially, this line: “The one who can sing, sings to the one who can’t.”

I think of it so often in relation to writing. On Tuesday, eight poets responded to my question, What can poetry do? The conversation continues here, with eight more poets who sing for us:

PATRICIA SPEARS JONES:

Thulani Davis' once said to me after attending a good friend's funeral years ago: Poets  sing us into the world and sing us out of the world.  I think she meant we create the lullabies and the elegies.  We shape language to meet human needs (my feeling about this).  Poetry matters as does music and dance and picture making/picture fragmenting.  We live in dark times.  We have always lived in dark times.  Poets have been making poems that light the way or embrace the darkness.  Or we let our work suffer the consequences of neglect-the relentless debasement of humanity. 

TERESA LEO:

Adrienne Rich has said that “Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.” Though I have written celebratory poems, love poems, I have especially turned to poetry in the darker times to make sense where there is no sense, during grief or rage where one feels simultaneously paralyzed and ready to explode—a friend’s suicide, a loved one’s serious illness, a betrayal.

For these types of poems, I think of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, where he says that “wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones” as a way to describe what he calls “the most decisive type of aggressiveness, which is postponed aggressiveness, aggressiveness that bides its time.” Bachelard talks about how creatures in shells, like mollusks, that may appear to be stationary or to display very little motion, actually have energy amassing inside their containers, a force that, in its own time, will explode. 

When dealing with subjects like grief or rage, the poem might begin from the vantage point of Bachelard’s mollusk, which “by staying in the motionlessness of its shell…is preparing temporal explosions, not to say whirlwinds, of being.” Within the confines and safety of this shell, all hell can break loose—wailing and head banging and fist pounding—all imperceptible to the outside world. Hopefully if things gestate enough and are worked through enough and refined enough, out the opening will come the poem—a creature connected to both the internal chaos and external world, if not wiser then more aware, carrying a shell that simultaneously contains and releases.

SHANE SEELY:

In 1996, a year before I started writing poems in earnest, I moved to Kansas to attend graduate school. I had left my home in rural Pennsylvania with a desperation that I masked as enthusiasm, but once in Kansas I was lonely and lost in a landscape so open that I felt as though I might, at any moment, fall straight off of it.

I spent my evenings pacing the floor of my little four-plex apartment, reading poems aloud. In this new, alien landscape, I was trying to figure out what it meant to be from (and to have left) where I’m from—a throwback place of timber and farms where, on clear nights, you can see the Milky Way. A place where the first day of each deer season (doe and buck) is a school holiday. A place where, in sixth grade speech class, more than one boy gave a speech demonstrating how to clean a hunting rifle. A place where, when I stopped playing football after eighth grade, a town cop stopped me on the street to convince me to reconsider. So did the school librarian. I had wanted out, and now, here I was, lost and sad in Kansas, pacing my little rooms and turning and returning to James Wright, who was lost and sad and trying to figure out what it meant to be from Martin’s Ferry, a little mill town on the Ohio River.

In “Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio” I heard exactly the tones of grief—exactly the mixture of nostalgia and and bitterness, belonging and alienation, that I felt. Mine was not an industry town, but I knew the proud fathers, the love-starved mothers, the suicidal boys. I knew the desperation that comes from choosing what traps you. I read the poem over and over aloud, and each time it said to me: I know. It’s not just you. And that’s what a poem can do—it can sing to us in our darkness like we wish our mothers had. And it can invite us to sing back, like coyotes calling to each other across a canyon, so that we all might feel less alone.

SOPHIE KLAHR:

I went through a period of terrible health problems in my early twenties, debilitated by disease both physical and psychological, Years later, when I had been well for a good long while, my father gave me a poem that he’d written during the height of my illness.  Let me say this more clearly: my father, not a poet by any means, had written a poem at a time when he feared for my life, a poem which he showed to no one. No “I” appears in the poem, and the “you” of the poem is the type of far off second person that shows up sometimes when people write about the most intimate details of their lives, when the subject feels too immense, too bewildering. While I’m sure that at the time, my father turned to various people for support, what he also turned to was the action of making a poem. One of poetry’s greatest utilities is its capacity as both balm and companion. Grief and fear are places where one so often stands alone (It seems impossible to fully share any loss), but somehow, poetry is able to stand with us, to be a place where we can catch our breath, like a sudden raft at sea. 

I'm lucky now to be healthy, and lucky to have seen the poem where my father rested, for a minute, when he was afraid that he was going to lose me. It’s a kind of monument. Were his poem a place, I think I’d return there year after year (with my father, if he wanted), to see how the land was changing, to see how the sky still looked from that hill. Yet another thing that poetry can do— it can make us grateful to have survived. 

MICHAEL PAUL THOMAS:

Poetry can tell you when the train is coming and if it's a cargo or passenger. It can tell you how to hang your white wood folding chair in the cow pasture and how to unfold it when you are ready to sit there so that it looks like you are at a wedding with one guest and no bride or groom.​ Poetry can make you hear the poems recited by the nearly blind poet on 92nd street so that you and your beloved feel as though you feel heat from the earth's core that becomes a vibration in your legs and in your tears. Poetry can summon your own hooting in response to the barn owl's call at one a.m.  Poetry allows you to hear voices of those you love and those you hate and those you grieve flooding from your mouth.

KELLY CHERRY:

What can poetry do? It can take the reader to places not previously known: dark places, bright  places. It can make music for your ears. It can create an experience not previously had by the reader, and it can teach the reader. Teach the reader what? Reality. Poems may be like dreams, but they are not dreams. A poem takes us closer to the things of this world, nearer to truth, face to face with oneself.

What can poetry do for the poet? It takes the poet out of time. Working on a poem, one forgets time. One lives in eternity. One is surprised upon returning to the world, which may have changed. The poet's perspective may  have changed. For the poet, writing a poem is as exciting as white water rafting, as dangerous and exhilarating as Bungee jumping. Poets are not sedentary, not in their minds; they take enormous leaps, walk for miles, dance, and holler. Writing a poem is like playing a game of chess with God, were there a God.

GREGORY PARDLO:

Frankly, poetry is a survival strategy for me. I‘ve always had great difficulty ordering my mind in a rational, linear manner, and I often seem to be coming out of left field at odd times. As a kid, this caused a tremendous amount of shame. For years I dealt with that shame in self-destructive ways, but the one empowering way I have avoided feeling self-conscious, stupid or crazy (and I mean that with a sense of humor) is when I view and process the world through the lens of poetry. Poetry reassures me that other people see and feel the things mere language isn’t equipped to convey. It reassures me that there are indeed alternate and always undiscovered realities.

ILYSE KUSNETZ:

Recently, I’ve been thinking about poetry’s ability to help us grieve – for ourselves, for each other – and always to bear witness. Suffering is very often a private thing. But to become more than just suffering, something transformative, it needs to be shared. This is why we have ritual. And poetry is a kind of ritual, with its own conventions, its own internal logic of organizing and ordering emotion and different registers of language. Poetry is the closest grief has to expression in language. Without it, we would be reduced to a single, unending cry of inexpressible hurt. With it, we exercise our prerogative to be human, in conversation with a grief that would otherwise destroy us.

The American Scholar's Next Line, Please: The Tanka in Toto

In last week's Next Line, Please contest, judge David Lehman invited readers to write a two-line stanza, or "tanka" to build on Paul Breslin’s winning haiku from the previous week. Here's what Lehman has to say about the winning submission:

----------

In the contest for the best two-line tail to Paul Breslin’s haiku, the laurels go to Barbara Shine:

 

The wheat bends before the wind,

rehearsing its surrender.

 

The highly visual first line shifts our focus from the sickle to the grain—from the manmade tool to the part of nature it means to glean. The second line delivers a double jolt: “rehearsing” introduces a theatrical metaphor, and “surrender” a military one, and somehow the combination of the two terms is more sensual than it is threatening. The lines are very musical. I would single out the brilliant double alliteration of “b” and “w” words in line one and the consonantal repetition of “nd” sounds: bends, wind, surrender.

Continue reading here.

WHAT CAN POETRY DO? Part 1 [Kelle Groom]

Earlier this month, I read Edward Hirsch’s New Yorker interview on the death of his son and on Hirsch’s process of writing about his son’s life and about losing him. He began with the facts, writing a dossier, and then he wrote poems. The poems became a book-length narrative poem, Gabriel, to be published by Knopf next month. The interview is extraordinarily moving, and I kept coming back to Hirsch’s words on writing the poems: “The whole time, I’m desperately trying to be faithful to Gabriel’s life, so that he’ll come through.”

After reading the interview, I thought again of Mary Szybist's beautiful National Book Award acceptance speech, this in particular: 
 
"Sometimes, when I find myself in a dark place, I lose all taste for poetry. If it cannot do what I want it to do, if it cannot restore those I have lost, then why bother with it at all? There’s plenty that poetry cannot do, but the miracle, of course, is how much it can do, how much it does do.”

When I read the Hirsch interview, I was teaching  in Atlantic Center for the Arts' "your word" Teen Creative Writing Residency, a phenomenal multi-genre summer writing residency that offers 9^th through rising 12th grade writers workshops and mentorship. At lunch with three other poets: John Murillo, Nicole Sealey, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, I mentioned  Hirsch’s interview and Szybist’s words – how they kept circling. What can poetry do? I asked them.

In the weeks that followed, Gaza was bombed, Michael Brown was murdered, a small Missouri town became a war zone. I wondered if my question even mattered. But there was Szybist, already asking, what can it do in a dark place? So I asked several poets to tell me, What can poetry do?

SOPHIE CABOT BLACK:

If poetry is a muscle not used enough, as some of us have come to believe, then poetry can teach us about the new. Poems ask us, remind us, to both surrender AND pay attention.

Some have quoted Stanley Kunitz as claiming that poetry is the syntax of survival. I continue to wonder on that: is this too much to ask of art, and is this a survival of the poet, or of the reader-- or does it even matter, as long as something is changed afterward. As to taking us all to a greater place, I do not think poetry comforts in the same way other art does: it does not tell a story, it does not end neatly, it does not help you forget.  I might argue instead that poetry is the syntax of epiphany. Yes, poetry can save, but more as art which is not about itself, and instead asks us to move closer.

NICOLE SEALEY:

I liken writing and/or reading poetry to annealing, the process of cooling glass to relieve its internal stresses. Man is as fragile as glass. Poetry, even at its most unnerving, can relieve stress and, in so doing, feed the spirit.

TERRI WITEK:

Because of my own limitations, the wildest language I occasionally speak inside English is poetry---but if it has to be only this, the deep, repeatable weirdness is enough.   I am thinking  a little about Pasiphae and the bull —how she needed the wooden skin of a cow to lie with the great bull of her desire.    The resistance she forges between herself and what she can’t possibly understand is how she tricks herself into making a minotaur—and here let’s just say metaphor.   What poetry can do is prove it’s worth crawling past ourselves—even through huge fakeries--to test  the simple impossibility of  letting unlike things lie down together.  To let ourselves be filled with an aching strangeness that makes things both better and worse. 

NICK FLYNN:

I once rode in a car through Paris while a woman I barely knew read a poem into my ear—Apollonaire? Villon? It was a cabaret performance she’d do & she offered to do it for me.

Each word vibrated inside my head.  

For years I’d tried to read Rilke, yet failed—what I mean is that I didn’t get Rilke. One night I read the Duino Elegies out loud to my then-girlfriend—by the end we were teary & renewed. 

 A poem, I realized, could do what roots do—cling to darkness, search out hidden rivers, feed the visible world . .  . 

KASEY JUEDS:

I often picture poems as containers—little jars, perhaps, or bowls—that manage to hold whatever is placed in them—no matter the smallness of the poem or the largeness, the seeming unsayableness, of the emotion. It’s this generosity of poems, this capaciousness, that I think has most changed and enabled my life. Because I do think this is something—an enormous thing—that poetry can do: make a life, make it sustainable and real and true, make it sometimes joyful, sometimes simply bearable. Reading poems, and trying to write them, I continue to find containers—homes—for the human-animal feelings that have nowhere else to live, nowhere else to go. Because those states of being can find poems in which to rest, I am infinitely less lonely.

Of course there are times, too, when that lived experience of poem-as-home feels impossibly distant. These are the times when I can’t write or even read: the most painful times. Even then, I think, poems are waiting. Even when I’m not aware they’re waiting or able to feel I will ever live inside them again, they are.

MARCELO HERNANDEZ CASTILLO:

It’s difficult to say what poetry can do as I’m driving long distance to visit family in mourning over the loss of a father. A great poet and good friend recently told me that “Art is always larger than our definitions of it.” We are farthest away from poetry the moment we try to describe it, and what it can do. But to describe is different than to experience. We are never alone with poetry, we must always enter it in the company of another whether we are aware of it or not.  It is where the inward landscape meets the outward landscape. But poetry can kill, it can defeat us as much as it can renew us. Poetry, as Li-Young Lee said, almost always happens on the out breath, the dying breath, when our bones become soft. So we become more aware of ourselves in the dying breath as more is revealed to us. It is as Paul Valéry’s wife said, “larger than visible things,” so it is comprised of the sum of the visible. Everything is the beginning of a poem, but not everything can be a poem.

In some circumstances, poetry cannot exist, in many more it isn’t enough. As Breton famously said, “The Marvelous is always beautiful. Everything Marvelous is beautiful. Nothing but the Marvelous is beautiful.” But I think poetry is what is left over after beauty, incapable of pain. The moment the poem ceases to be a poem is when it becomes Marvelous and Beautiful, when it can do great things. Then and only then can poetry heal, can it serve as simulacrum for something we are not meant to name.  So you can either praise the beautiful, or praise what is left over. I will choose the one that is most like a bridge and soak my hands in it.

JOHN MURILLO:   

I don’t know. The particular tradition of American poetry I’ve inherited is one in which art is considered to serve a social function.  Poets witness, speak truth to power, preserve the history of the tribe, etc.  But in light of certain recent events, I’ve begun to wonder whether some of us overestimate the impact our work has on the world, or, more dangerously, believe that writing is, itself, activism and therefore somehow absolves us of having to do anything more. 

As a poet, as a teacher, I have to believe that poetry can help make us more compassionate, more thoughtful human beings.  I’d like to think, for instance, that if Ferguson, MO, police officer Darren Wilson had committed to memory certain passages of “Song of Myself”, that if he walked with these lines in his bones (the way I do), he may have operated from a set of impulses different from those that led him to gun down unarmed eighteen year old Michael Brown.  Maybe if he’d read the work of a Ross Gay or a Rickey Laurentiis, he’d have seen something different when looking at that young black man.  But savages don’t read.  And Michael Brown is as dead today as Walt Whitman.  Poetry couldn’t save him any more than it could save Eric Garner.  Or Oscar Grant.  Or Trayvon Martin.  Or Jordan Davis.  Or Sean Bell.  Or Amadou Diallo.  Or Prince Jones. Jr.  Or Henry Dumas, who although he was, himself, a very fine poet, could write nothing to stop New York transit cops from murdering him one cold April night forty-six years ago.  So it seems that whatever poetry does, it’s not enough.  I would never say with Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen.”  But neither can I any longer console myself with rapper Talib Kweli’s notion that “singing is swinging and writing is fighting.”  It’s not.  And it’s not.

JENNY BROWNE:

I wrote a little ars poetica about The Boss that suggests at least some of what I believe poetry can do, namely create a human-sized space for the both the flaws of memory and the empathy of imagination, a place to pause and pay closer attention to both words and the world:

Lately I’ve been listening to Springsteen sing Stolen Car, remembering that part about the guy really hoping he gets caught so he doesn’t disappear entirely.  And when the lost wife in the song talks about the love letters and how reading them made her feel one hundred years old, I think about how you almost want her to say love letters, and then one hundred times better.  She could have said that.

Florence Cassen Mayers: "The sestina is my poetry"

Dear David (2)                       

I’ve been meaning
to thank you so much
for publishing my work
on The Best American Poetry
blog a few months back.
Isn’t it the same old

same old:
well meaning
folk post great feedback,
then with not much
delicacy: “Why restrict poetry
to the sestina? Why work

rework
that old
form? Wouldn’t your poetry
mean
much
more if you didn’t look back?

Back
off. You make the work
much
too hard. Discard what’s old,
just say what you mean,
write unencumbered poetry.”

David, the sestina is my poetry,
its structure is the back
I lean on. What I mean
is, I’ve learned to work
and play the old                                                                                               ‘
strictures with much

pleasure much
of the time. My poetry
is never old-
fashioned, but does hark back
to 12^th century work.
It means

so much that you back                                          
me up. Poetry is my work                    
until I’m old. I mean it.

-- Florence Cassen Mayers

A 21ST CENTURY RAIN: Interview with Brian Turner, Author of My Life as a Foreign Country [Kelle Groom]

photo (c) Kim Buchheit

Brian Turner’s latest book is My Life As a Foreign Country: A Memoir published by  Jonathan Cape/Random House UK (June 2014) and in the U.S. by W.W. Norton & Co. (September 2014). His two collections of poetry are Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, 2007) and Phantom Noise (Alice James Books, 2010; Bloodaxe Books, 2010) which was short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in England. His poems have been published and translated in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and Swedish.

His poetry and essays have been published in The New York Times, National Geographic, Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience. He received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division (1999-2000).

He directs the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College and serves as a contributing editor at The Normal School. Find out more about him at his website here.

Kelle Groom: Brian, your stunning memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, will be published by W.W. Norton next month. Tim O’Brien wrote of its brilliance, “It surely ranks with the best war memoirs I've ever encountered—a humane, heartbreaking, and expertly crafted work of literature.”  As a poet and author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections chronicling the experience of war, what drew you to write a war memoir?

Brian Turner:  I didn’t initially set out to write a memoir. A few years ago, in early 2009, I was awarded an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship—a truly astonishing opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, for an entire year. I’d written several short pieces for Peter Catapano (for “Home Fires” at the New York Times) and then, as I traveled under the Amy Lowell Fellowship, I began trying my hand at a series of haibun—a traditional Japanese travelogue. Of course, I ended up mangling the form and I’ve yet to figure out how to fully inhabit an English-language version of the haibun form. That experimentation led me to an approach to the essay that was far more fragmented than work I’d done in earlier essays. I was beginning to learn how to trust the jump cut, the bright turn from one thought to another—as well as the reader’s ability to cross the wide synapses between disparate fragments.

I was excited by the short pieces I’d written, and that enthusiasm evolved into a much larger, uncharted essay I began to write while traveling from one country to another. Looking back, I can see how that meditation grew in fragments, one country at a time, as I boarded a train or stowed my gear on a ferry. Once I’d reached about ninety pages of material, it was edited down to a much tighter, leaner piece of writing. The Virginia Quarterly Review published that now twenty-two page essay (“My Life as a Foreign Country”) and I knew a book had announced itself.

Part of what I enjoy about the essay, as a form, is that I feel as though I can explore the wide canvas of the page, and, by extension, even more of the tertiary and dimly-lit pathways of the imagination.

Kelle Groom: My Life as A Foreign Country is comprised of 136 chapters (and two short bookend pieces).  Did you always see it organized as over a hundred short chapters? How did your work as a poet influence the structure? When you first began writing the memoir, how and where did you start?

Brian Turner: Once I had the first chapter, I dove in headlong and committed myself to seeing this book through to its last page. The first chapter (which no longer fully exists in that form) braided several narrative and lyric threads together, fragment by fragment, in a style that depended upon successive accumulation of revelation. I challenged myself to create a different stylistic approach in each chapter of the overall book while simultaneously developing the initial threads to a greater and greater complexity throughout. One early reader said, upon completing the book, that each chapter had a kind of internal culture that the reader needed to adapt to and learn. For example, I wrote one chapter as a 3-act play and another as a semi-linked series of haibun.

I’m grateful for the early readers and writers who sat with the book at this stage and shared their thoughts on how the work might mature. By this point, I was working with Alex Bowler at Jonathan Cape. Alex is brilliant and he rolled up his sleeves to dive into the bizarre creature I’d placed before him. We disassembled the entire book, piling like items/events/meditations together to regroup the internally braided threads by type. The book was then reordered in something close to what it is now (though that effort would take many more drafts to accomplish). The one image that I held in mind, from first draft to the last, was something I called a 21^st century rain. Even from the beginning, I had a vague sense of some cascading visual hallucination, something beautiful and terrible all at once, that would appear near the end of the book. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a sense of it.

Kelle Groom: Why was it important for you to find parallels in the history of war?

Brian Turner: The movement of the mind through an extended meditation, as in the essay, can allow us to witness some of the connections binding our own internal wiring together. It can help us to see how the year 1862 or 1924 or 1965 might speak to the year 2003. In the vocabulary of the poet, we’d say that parallels work in ways similar to a rhyme scheme. This begs the question—what can be learned from the echoes, or repetition, of sound? In the case of war, perhaps when we begin to recognize generational parallels we are actually beginning to chart a kind of pathological inheritance, one handed down from generation to generation, often from incredible people, people we might revere and whose character we might deeply wish to emulate, people we love. This is certainly true in my case.

Kelle Groom: Your memoir is stunningly imagistic. How did you work to create such powerfully visual/visceral scenes? Did you rely on memory? Photographs?

Brian Turner: A wide range of research went into the writing of this book—from calling up old friends and creating a series of email conversations with family members (most in California, with some as far as Perth, Australia) to the study of historical books, books on flora and fauna, photographs, old journals, and much more. Some research cast light on language, offering tones and textures for a descriptive passage, for example. Some research, promising at first, left me retracing my steps out of dead end streets.

Of course, I did my best to inhabit the moments under construction on the page. Memory is the faulty guide for much of it, but I tried to accept the blurry edges and missing portions the way, perhaps, the term wabi sabi is sometimes used in conversations on aesthetics.

Brian Turner, Mosul. Photo (c) Tom Bosch

When we stand before ancient ruins and experience a sense of breath-taking beauty, our minds clearing away the debris and reconstructing the invisible to its former glory, isn’t there also a doubling that takes place which intensifies the experience, offering the sublime? In moments like these, we hold two contraries together in the same moment—the resplendent past coming alive within the ruins whose beauty is also inescapable. They are one and the same. We are witness to both the compression and expansion of time itself. And, here’s what intrigues me even more: the entire process is analogous to writing and the act of memory. We build and rebuild the invisible with language, while living within the ruins of our own lives.

Kelle Groom: How do you write about terror and the unspeakable grief of war? In his introduction to Best American Poetry 1991, Mark Strand wrote of his father reading his first book of poems: “The ones that mean most are those that speak for his sense of loss following my mother’s death. They seem to tell him what he knows but cannot say.” This ability to tell us what we cannot say, is what matters most to me in poetry. I understand, in particular, the importance of form when writing of violence and grief.  Can you talk about how poetry works in/enters your memoir? What did poetry offer you?

Brian Turner: From the time I was a small boy, I loved to read books on history. In fact, before I wanted to grow up and become a major league baseball player, I wanted to be an historian (at about seven or eight years old). Still, one of my problems with history mirrors some of the issues I have with memory—most of history is a vast and overwhelming vault of the unrecorded, the lost, the excised, the deliberately omitted.

Historical accounts, films on war, war stories—they are often composed of streamlined narratives that follow a fairly traditional arc. I didn’t find that steady narrative in my own experience of a combat zone. I experienced something much more fragmented and lacking in cohesion. The art of collage, a kind of pointillism of experience—this was the form that I thought might help me explore the questions I had before me as I sat down with an empty notebook, pen in hand. Great meaning can be culled from the silences between things, as well as the things themselves. Invisible threads tie one fragment to another. What are the threads, and what can we learn from them? I believe this is part of the reader’s work, part of the joy of listening deeply to a book… Poets converse with silence, as much as they do with language.

Kelle Groom:  Would you talk about the importance of empathy in My Life as a Foreign Country? I’m struck over and over by the urgency to see through the eyes of Iraqi citizens and soldiers.

Brian Turner: First, I’ve struggled with the ethics involved in attempting to inhabit another’s experiences and to ‘write them down’ as I imagine those experiences to be. At the same time, I’m trying to shape the meditation in a way that includes the cares and wonders and concerns I have for the world. I’m hoping any potential reader will grant and recognize that these are my attempts to widen the lenses available to the world of this particular memoir. And this process is something I’ve done all of my life. The old clichés remain valid—we can better understand our lives and the world we live in when we imagine ourselves in someone else’s shoes, when we try to understand where someone is coming from…

It’s more than that, though. At a much more human level, my heart was not a closed room, one shut off from the lives of those around me. And around me, in Iraq, millions suffered and struggled (and still do). And for those who might want to kill me? How could I not recognize their humanity? How could I not also recognize that many of their possible reasons for doing so were sound? All of this has only amplified over time, rather than diminishing.  

Kelle Groom: Of your memoir, Nick Flynn wrote, “One question echoes through these pages. How does someone leave a war behind and walk into the rest of their life?” Is this answerable?

Brian Turner: My hope is that the last few pages of the book might prove useful in considering these questions.

Kelle Groom: One of the most powerful sections of your memoir begins:

“The soldiers enter the house, the soldiers enter the house. 

Soldiers, determined and bored and crackling with adrenaline, enter the house with shouting and curses and muzzle flash, DET cord and 5.56 mm ball ammunition. The soldiers enter the house with pixelated camouflage, flex-cuffs, chem lights, door markings, duct tape. The soldiers enter the house with ghillie suits and M24 sniper rifles, phoenix beacons and night vision goggles, lasers invisible to the naked eye, rotorblades, hellfire missiles, bandoliers strapped across their chests.”

Can you talk about the creation of this incantatory chapter?

Brian Turner: I was an infantry sergeant while in Iraq. I was also one of my platoon’s demolition guys. During the various missions my platoon took part in, we conducted so many raids that they blur and meld in my mind. They break into pieces, fragments, moments, voices, sounds, gestures, images. When I think of those raids, the fragments roll in like waves, one after another. In this sense, the form in this section is organic and it builds in intensity, just as my own body reacts to the gathering of memory.

The key to finding my way into this section, however, came from an unexpected and phenomenal source: Rick Moody. I saw him read his absolutely stunning story, “Boys” (from Demonology) during a visit he made to Lake Tahoe, where I direct the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing. The form he created with that story has incredible velocity; it’s a vehicle with great power. It’s a gift I’ve done my best to honor.

 

South of Bagdad. Photo (c) Brian Turner

"Before You Were Born" [by Michael Lally]

I could memorize my poems
and declaim them from stages
in avant-garde spaces and
coffee house traces of
somebody else's ideas
and call it performance art,
but I already did that
before you were born.

I could put them on stages as a one-man show
or in the mouths of pros and blow you away
with the passion story of my life
and call it avant-garde post-modern
deconstructivist language theater,
but I did that too, when you
were still in grade school.

I could live on the streets
sleep in abandoned buildings
drink cheap rotgut
take whatever drugs are offered
and tell you to go fuck yourself
when you tell me to give up
the life of a poet and get a job,
but I already did that
before you were a gob of spit
hanging from the lip of
Charles Bukowski who had a
nice secure job at the post office back then.

I paid so many dues for the life of
the poet I lived, I once nailed all my shoes
to a board and called it art and then
tore it apart so I could wear them again.

I suffered, I starved, and so did my kids,
I did what I did for poetry I thought
and I never sold out, and even when I did
nobody bought.

I could memorize my poems
and declaim them from stages in
avant-garde spaces and coffee house
traces of somebody else's ideas
and call it performance art,

but I already did that
before you were born

-- Michael Lally

This poem originally appeared in December.

Poetry from Aotearoa/New Zealand 10--Tom Weston's 'The Old Dog'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Old Dog

 

A slipping away on this still day.

Autumn in the warmth that is the wood of things.

 

A comfort in the old dog, like a rug.

Spiders get busy in the sun, knitting a past.

 

We write poems for dead fathers, for all that dies,

for all that dies by our hand.

 

A distant music, cars on the road.

Even birdsong, interrupted, the eternal trump.

 

The vein is open to the heart, unsuspecting as ever.

A heaviness comes upon ... upon me.

 

This heaviness, just wood to build the sky,

just sky to mask our deceptions.

 

I am building a great tower:

the wood in which all good things have gone.

 

Tom Weston.

 

Born in 1958, Tom Weston is a poet, solicitor and, most recently, a judge.  In the latter capacity, he has served around the islands of the South Pacific as well as in Christchurch, where he lives (and where he remained during and after the devastation of the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes). Weston has published four poetry collections, of which The Ambigious Companion (1996) and Naming the Mind Like Trees (2004) are illustrated by one of Australasia's most inventive painters, Joanna Braithwaite. 'The old dog' is taken from his most recent book, Only one question (Steele Roberts, 2014)—a collection of poems which, he says, 'came into existence pre-earthquake but have been shaped and moulded post-earthquake'. Bearing in mind his profession, Weston's judgements on the world are commendably open-ended, elliptical and never tautological. With their many registers of voice (supplied by a lively cast of walk-on characters), the poems occupy a social space—equal parts courtroom, suburban street corner, outrigger canoe and drawing room facing the Southern Alps.

further information about Tom Weston: http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/Writers/Profiles/Weston,%20Tom

Kelle Groom, Guest Author August 25-29

This week we welcome Kelle Groom as our guest author. Kelle's poetry collections are Five Kingdoms, recognized in Entertainment Weekly's "Best New Poetry" (Anhinga Press); Luckily, a Florida Book Award winner (Anhinga); and Underwater City (University Press of Florida.) Her work has appeared in Agni, Best American Poetry (2009 & 2010), The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, Poetry, and The Writer's Almanac. Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl is a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, B&N Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor's Pick. A 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, she is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from Black Mountain Institute, University of Nevada-Las Vegas, Library of Congress, and James Merrill House, among others. Recently Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, Groom is now on the faculty of SNC’s low-residency MFA Program. Find out more about Kelle Groom at her website here.
Follow her on twitter @KelleGroom .

Welcome, Kelle.

In other news . . .

Ed Hirsch joins David Lehman at the New School. Wed, September 3, 2014, 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm. 66 West 12th Street. Details here.

The Best American Poetry 2014 launch reading extravaganza featuring David Lehman and twenty-four contributors selected by Terrance Hayes, guest editor for 2014. The Auditorium at the New School, 66 West 12th Street, NY, NY. Free. Details here.

--sdh

Seeking peace by Rabbi Rachel Barenblat

(ed note: another wise post by Rachel. sdh)

Lately I've been working on finding the right balance between paying attention to the world and its many injustices, and cultivating an internal sense of peacefulness and compassion. Against this backdrop, a friend recently shared with me a teaching from her Buddhist practice. According to this way of thinking, if one increases one's own suffering, one adds to the suffering of the universe; if one increases one's own peacefulness, one adds to the peacefulness of the universe.

via velveteenrabbi.blogs.com

Book Rec: Lynn Xu’s Debts & Lessons (Omnidawn, 2013) [Sara Eliza Johnson]

I first encountered Lynn Xu’s work in a church in Seattle, which was fitting, as her reading was as close to a spiritual experience as a poetry reading can possibly get for me. I am not typically floored by poetry readings, but I savored every pearlescent syllable, as if each word could be grasped somehow beyond sense and sound—word as star-crumb, vibrating stone, dew-eye on a blade of grass. The poem she read was “Lullaby,” which she dedicates to Charles Baudelaire:

Lie me down to heal in sleep, do not let me wake
In sin, the tongue
Cancels another year, another painted storm
In the coral caves, some pious poet
Drunk on vapors
Swatting tomb-bats in the nightwood, would that
Wayward bark sunned white
Be also thunder, a hill of bones drumming—thud
Thud, a wake
Of buzzards braiding into the loosening skull—the redoubled fists
Of students like an island in the bramble chained—I have been told
To reason, lawless, empty, without rights—
But I am old
Not age, I have been told
To match its columns by our footfall, prophet—I am not
The straw or garland of our Sirens, not the brow
Of holly, nor the warble
Of any lark

By the time the buzzards were “braiding into the loosening skull,” I found myself intoxicated, caught within the sonic current, the vibrant (and fascinatingly strange) gust of images. Xu writes of her work at the Poetry Society of America:

Several mirrors and revolving doors away, some blue planet shades into our sky.  Intoxicated by this, as if by its own clairvoyance, the poem displays its plastic powers—fluoresces and, over time, decays.  Still a transient and delicate substance, language nevertheless secures for us a strong interior, sharpness against our natural world.  Of course, its occult successes in this regard must meet an equal measure of unsuccess: such that the leafy dark in the Courbet retain its phatic life, and the crisscross of rubble in Egypt not beautiful to the point of transparency or terror.  Sometimes, a poem is made to furnish restlessness. 

That word—“restlessness”—emerges again in an interview at HuffPost, and indeed a sensation of restlessness whirs through the density and intensity of the language, its shifting sediment like thought-material stirring in the subterranean dark of an unconscious mind. A mind in the process of dreaming, or remembering.

The title Debts & Lessons is an allusion to the first section of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, wherein he pays tribute to those who have instructed and influenced him. Xu's book circles around inheritances—of languages, histories, traditions, minds, memories—both implicitly and explicitly conversing with them. The section “Lullabies” (the source of the poem I heard), for example, is a gathering of poems dedicated to literary influences: Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Gu Cheng, Celan, Apollinaire, Artaud (to name a few, and to show the range). Or, for example, the section “Night Falls” engages implicitly with the inheritance of language, offering a sequence of linguistically hybrid poems—in Chinese and English, two languages Xu grew up speaking—set opposite their “translations,” which are not translations in the literal sense. It is almost as if they are translations of some other element of the poem beyond language itself, or as if translation here is a process of remembering. Perhaps in some sense they display that nothing is “lost in translation"—that translation itself is a process of creation and recreation. And that is how the poems read: not only as the process of creation, but also of the evolutionary process that draws from that well of terrestrial memory, that inherits and reinvents the primordial material again and again.

Debts & Lessons is language—is world—as a “transient and delicate substance.” As a latticed cloud of breath in the air. It is the poem as blood vessel configuration. The poems are intricately quiet, yet at times surreally violent. Some images disturb or trouble the waters (as with "scuds of wheat/ eyelid by eyelid dividing me" or "the prehensile television of our minds"). Some words pierce the firmament. Purchase it here.

*

(Thanks very much to BAP and Stacey Harwood for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts this week!)

On Debussy's Birthday [by David Lehman]

08 / 22 / 08

Today in 1862
Claude Debussy was born.
I remember where I was and what I was doing
one hundred years and two months later:
elementary algebra, trombone practice,
Julius Caesar on the record player
with Brando as Antony, simple
buttonhook patterns in football,
the French subjunctive, and the use
of "quarantine" rather than "blockade"
during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
It was considered the less belligerent word.
Much was made of it in 1962,
centenary of Debussy’s birth.
And if today I play his Rhapsody
for Saxophone and Orchestra
for the ten minutes it requires of
my undivided attention, who will attack me for
living in Paris in 1908 instead of now?
Let them. I'll take my stand,
my music stand, with the composer
of my favorite Danse Tarantelle.

-- David Lehman

Art that Haunts: Ovid's Actaeon [Sara Eliza Johnson]

Source: McSweeney's

Some of the most affecting artwork—or, at least, the art that really “gets” me—is the art that haunts. Not many scenes in literature have stuck with me quite like Ovid’s tale of Actaeon, the hunter who became the stag in his own hunt. The hunter whose own hounds dismembered him. The precise moment in that scene that haunts me is his scream, which lies somewhere between man and animal, which “has a sound, although not of a man, yet such as a stag is not able to utter.” Why can’t I shake it?

In his 1919 essay on unheimlich, or the ‘uncanny,’ Freud writes that he is not so much interested in “the theory of beauty, but the theory of the qualities of feeling." The uncanny, he continues, “belongs to all that is terrible—to all that arouses dread and creeping horror. . .that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar. . .Something has to be added to what is novel and unfamiliar to make it uncanny." Freud builds here on the definition of unheimlich originally proposed in 1906 by Ernst Jentsch, who identifies the peculiarly unsettling sensation as one arising in “intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always be that in which one does not know where one is, as it were,” and especially “‘doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate.” He reveals “heimlich” to have two definitions, one being “familiar” and the other “secret,” and concludes:

. . .among its different shades of meaning the word heimlich exhibits one which is identical with its opposite, unheim- lich. What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. (Cf. the quotation from Gutzkow: “We call it unheimlich; you call it heimlich.”) In general we are reminded that the word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory are yet very different: on the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.

Certainly these early nineteenth century considerations of unheimlichkeit would be foreign to Ovid. Still, The Metamorphoses consistently demonstrates an ‘uncanny’ brand of horror that, once experienced, intrudes upon their “fairy-tale”-esque aura. Transformation here, when a form of violence, leaves human bodies in a liminal state between human and “other.” Such metamorphoses are thus incomplete. Not quite human, not quite animal, they are often Dr. Moreau-vian or Frankenstein-ian abominations which, once fully imagined, become unsettling to behold. Apollo can still hear Daphne’s heart beating behind the bark of the laurel tree, like the tell-tale heart of a dismembered body still beating beneath the floorboards. Lycaon retains his human eyes. Conversely, Juno cuts Argus’s many eyes from his severed head and uses them to adorn her bird. The familiar has been transformed into the strange, yet still evokes itself. This is the realm of unheimlicht.   

It is tempting to dub these as metaphorical gestures that simply represent earthly phenomena (e.g. an origin story for the eye-like markings of the ordinary peacock, far less terrifying to imagine than a bird with a body of eyes), or else “fairy-tale” transformations that remain easily digestible because a reader understands them to be fictional. And, indeed, many of the tales and the images that come to embody them in The Metamorphoses invite allegorical interpretations.

But each grand metaphor, each transformation that makes “art” of a victim, in turn contains the slow and painful destruction—or dismemberment—of a mortal human body and mind that nonetheless resists complete disappearance. Each symbolic image, even the “beautiful” laurel, contains the nightmarish distortion that begat it. The uncanny sensation arises at the moment the empathetic reader realizes the object (or animal) in such an episode retains not merely a physical attribute (hair or eye color) of its human form but a trace of its humanness. Lycaon is not quite a wolf. The eyes of the animal do not resemble his in color but in their act of looking, in their “fierce gaze,” suggesting they are still his human eyes. Note that a “literal translation” of this moment reads as “his eyes glare the same,” also emphasizing their action rather than their appearance. Lycaon is closer to a werewolf, to a monster; he resists classification.

The tale of Diana and Actaeon, which quickly escalates into the domain of cinematically nightmarish horror, features perhaps the most unsettingly ‘uncanny’ moment in The Metamorphoses.* Actaeon, of house Cadmus, has finished hunting and wanders the woods alone. Diana, also “weary from hunting,” bathes in her sacred cave, which Nature itself has sculpted into its own piece of art. When Actaeon wanders from his familiar path and happens upon the cave, god and human realms converge; though her nymphs scream and rush to hide Diana’s naked body, they cannot hide her skin from him completely. She furiously sprinkles his head with water and piece-by-piece, limb-by-limb, she transforms him into a stag. Now terrified, still unaware of his own transformation, Actaeon runs from the cave and through the woods. He is surprised at his own swiftness—until he catches a glimpse of himself in the river. He sees the stag’s “face” instead of his own, and wants to say “Poor me!” but cannot find his voice. (A literal translation: “he was about to say ‘Wretch that I am!” no voice followed. He groaned; that was his voice; and tears flowed over features not his own; only his former mind remained.”) His own hunting dogs begin to chase him, and, trained well by his own hand, they advance on him, easily down him, and sink their teeth into him again and again. As they wound him—perhaps even as theyeat him alive—he groans, and “though the sounds/ he utters are not human, they are not/ the sounds a stag could voice.” The dogs “tear in pieces their lord” as he hears his hunting companions calling and calling his name.

Freud proposes that “dismembered limbs, a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet which dance by themselves—all these have something peculiarly uncanny about them. . .”  However, while the image of Actaeon’s dismemberment is certainly gruesome and horrific, and while a reader might experience general panic or terror (or at least discomfort) as they process its unfolding, the umheimlich itself lies in the moment of his groan, which “has a sound, although not of a man, yet such as a stag is not able to utter.” Actaeon, much like one of the stags he had watched fall earlier that day, collapses, and groans in a pool of his own blood, and the sound he makes is inhuman—but not the “godly” inhuman of Achilles, nor the inhuman of the natural, animal world to which a “lowly” (but humble, innocent) stag belongs. Like Lycaon-as-wolf, Actaeon is not quite a stag, but he is not a human being either. He is, as he suggests himself to be, a “wretch” that exists outside of the natural order of animalia. 

What is this sound he makes? It is an ‘uncanny’ one—simultaneously familiar and strange. Ovid does not liken the groan to anything else on earth; he leaves the sound mysterious and open to imaginative interpretations. All he reveals is the unnaturalness of the “voice,” its abnormality, that the sound is out-of-place. 

Imagining the sound of Actaeon’s groan—only described as existing somewhere on the spectrum between the sound of a man and a stag—is not a passive activity for a reader. The moment asks the reader to situate his or her self in the world of the moment of the poem, to not only become more intimate with that horror but to help construct it.  The reader mentally enters the literary space rather than merely “reads” it. This (terrifying) moment of intimacy helps to “[efface] the distinction between imagination and reality” (that’s Freud again!) typically absent from a fairy-tale narrative. For a second, however brief, reader and poem merge.

And so, too, reader and “character” merge, heightening their empathic relationship with the imagined figure and so unlocking access to his inner world, for throughout the scene Actaeon himself is stuck in the province of the uncanny or unheimlicht. His mind is out-of-body, and his body is out-of-place, all is strange, and yet all is simultaneously familiar, as if he is experiencing a version of déjà vu: “On those same slopes where he once gave—/ he now is given—chase: he has to race/ away from his own hounds,” and, later, as the hounds mangle him, “he would delight to see—not feel and fear—/ the sight of his hounds’ ferocity.” Unsurprisingly, Freud identifies a relationship between unheimlicht and déjà vu, writing that “something uncanny” arises during an “involuntary return to the same situation,” such as being lost in the forest, “when every endeavor to find the marked or familiar path ends again and again in a return to the one and the same spot, recognizable by some particular landmark.” Actaeon experiences an “involuntary return” (of a sort) to his earlier hunt, to its “same slopes” and paths, with one major difference: instead of watching the familiar spectacle from a privileged position of spectator or voyeur, as a reader does the poem, or as a viewer does a film or theatre, he becomes the spectacle itself. 

At this point, Actaeon is both tongueless and eyeless—he is able to hear and understand his name but not say it—and without these “powers” he is unable to reorient himself into his position as “master” or “lord.” He has become his own art: not a stag, but instead the hunt itself he so loved, which is, essentially, the production of fear, terror, and destruction for another animal. This transformation—a distorted “translation” of his body into his own perverse desires—is his punishment for tainting a holy space with his presence, and so “wounding” the virginal Diana with his own gaze; her cheeks blushed “the color crimson” when he saw her, which evokes the “mountain slopes stained with blood” from Actaeon’s earlier hunt.  As the abomination Diana makes him, Actaeon not only gains access to the experience of the “other”—the animal—that he once watched from the safety of distance, but also the monstrosity that exists within himself. As in Freud’s uncanny, all that was “once concealed and kept out of sight” within the familiar experience “comes to light” for him.

Actaeon physically moves from the periphery to the center of vision through his transformation, but the retainment of his “former mind” in the body of the stag—his memory of the “familiar” experience as the hunterof the stag—generates a tension between the two positions that emphasizes his liminality, i.e., hisbetweenness: the incompletion of his metamorphosis from human into animal (or spectator into spectacle). Actaeon is living the culmination of unheimlicht at the moment of his spectacular destruction. Consider further Freud's etymological treatment of the word: “heimlich is a word the meaning of which develops towards an ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other a sub-species of heimlich.” The other hunters watching the scene see only the familiar spectacle of the hunt; what is “concealed, kept from sight, withheld” from them is Actaeon himself, who remains somewhere between absence and presence—as the absent presence unable to announce itself. 

Metamorphosis itself hinges on a period of liminality, in which two forms converge somewhere “between” states of existence. Ovid's transformations frequently exhibit, rather than elide, this liminal period. It is as if Ovid slits open the belly of transformation to reveal its inner workings. The execution of Acateon's changing is no exception:

There were no other threats. But then she set
a long-lived stag’s horns on the head she’d drenched;
she made his ear-tips sharp, stretched out his neck,
and changed his hands to feet, arms to long legs,
and cloaked his body with a spotted hide.
That done, timidity was added on.
And now Autonoe’s heroic son
takes flight and, as he races, he’s amazed
at how much speed he has.

Actaeon does not instantaneously become the stag but undergoes a process—the contortion of his form toward another form. Much like the sound of his groan, existing somewhere between man and stag, his liminal form verges on the grotesquely strange for those readers who venture to imagine it. This transformation is on one level a process that simulates the creation of art through a distortion (however beautiful the final result). 

The presence of unheimlich and horror in The Metamorphoses is what in part gives the work its complexity. Each ‘uncanny’ moment of transformation forges an equally unstable relationship between the creation of art and the destruction of the mortal body within the poem, calling attention to the fear of “final” death that drives us to create lasting images that inevitably contain pieces of them (of both their hands and mind). Never “perfect” in its own transformations, illusory and palpable, and summoning both past and present realities, certain poetry is haunted by a world both old and “familiar,” and haunts the world in turn. 

Some of the most affecting art and poetry produces the “uncanny” feeling—much like the feeling of déjà vu—in the sense that it distorts and troubles a moment of “being” (of body, of humanity, of self and mind). In short, sometimes it’s good for us to feel a little strange, good to feel a little unsafe, to allow ourselves, like Actaeon, to divest ourselves of spectatorship and enter the work as if a part of its inner workings and transformations.

*The Mandelbaum translation was used for the purposes of this post.

A Little Tribute to the Bee [Sara Eliza Johnson]

Electron micrograph of the honeybee. Credit: Annie Cavanagh. Source: wordlesstech.com

When I was a graduate student living in Oregon, a colony of bees built a hive in the wall of my garage apartment. I didn't notice their presence until one day I came home to find them swarming around a hole in the siding in a bulbous-black and unnervingly loud mass. Some days after that I’d find about a dozen of them inside my house. They'd crawl across walls and windows, confused about how exactly to get back to their hive. They’d pace up and down the screen behind the sliding glass door—my only door—and (because I had a slight fear of bees) I’d spend an embarrassingly long time debating how to free them without getting stung, or if I should leave the house at all. While my landlord secured a beekeeper to transport the colony, I became obsessively fascinated by them. Once I pressed my ear against the wall and listened to their hum and swell. I wrote a poem about them. I read Virgil's fourth Georgic, wherein "bees own a share of the divine soul and drink in the ether of space" and "the rotting blood of the ox has brought forth bees." I also discovered cool facts about them, such as:

• They can barely see red, but they can see a mystery color—UV light—called “bee purple.” The International Bee Research Association explains: “When you look at a white flower, the petals just look white. But, when a bee looks at a white flower it also sees lines that guide it down to the nectar—these lines reflect UV light and are invisible to us, but to the bee they are 'bee purple.’”
• In 1997, a mathematician named Barbara Shipman proposed that bees can not only perceive quarks, but that they use these quarks to choreograph their dances.
• Even if bees can’t see quarks, they can see polarized light, which allows them to navigate using a solar compass. They can sense the position of the sun, and use that information to communicate—or “dance’—the coordinates of food sources to other bees. They conduct all these complicated calculations and navigations with a brain the size of a sesame seed.
• As this list at Mental Floss notes, bees’ brains “stop aging” when they “do jobs usually reserved for younger members” and they can “recognize human faces.” Their brains also "rewire" themselves when they adopt new tasks.
• Bees have been to space (my own personal dream)! Discover Magazine reports: "On the April 1984 Challenger flight, 3,300 bees, housed in a special but confining box, adapted perfectly to zero gravity and built a nearly normal comb." But the bees wouldn't defecate out there; they held in their excrement for seven days.

The bees have been disappearing en masse, abandoning hives that still have live queens, capped brood, and ample stores of honey and pollen. Colony Collapse Disorder is real, unfortunately, and the cause—at least the theory of the moment—appears to be a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids, though other contributors include parasites, pathogens, malnutrition, and climate change. The disruption and decline of bee populations has already affected agricultural production, and this segment at The Guardian reports that of the 100 crop species responsible for providing 90% of food, 71 require bee pollination, and that certain species of flower will go extinct without bees. Bees are not only fascinating—they are essential. And so for today I have gathered some work for an informal poetic tribute: a handful of poems that immortalize the bee, which has captivated and inspired artists and scientists alike for thousands of years.

***

Play in Which Darkness Falls

Raymond Roussel

Two girls runaway from the Home. They have a revolver
in their possession. The Sisters Of Our Lady have given up
looking for them, returning in the night with soft candles.
The sleek clouds have thrown their riders, and the bees
are returning to the honey, the clover at the edge of the
cliff black as eyelids, damp as blue mussels flexing at the moon.
The girls look in the stolen mirror, then throw their shoes
in the sea. They take off one another’s dress, posing
on the rocks that jut out over the faded water of the last days.
The clover beat down from their splendid feet, the clover
quiet like a vault. Nearby in a ship named for early death,
I drink wine like a city. Anchored far off the continent of love.
Strange, but bees do not die in their own honey, and how the dead
are toted off, how the sweet moons are deposited in the catacombs.
The clover at the edge of the sea like a chemise, place
where animals have lain. They help one another with their hair,
their dresses blowing back to land. They look over the
cliff, spit on the beach. Birds I have never seen going by.

--Frank Stanford

***

Sevillian Ditty
                 To Solita Salinas

     Daybreak
in the orange grove.
Little gold bees
were out after honey.

     And where can
the honey be?

     It’s in the blue blossom,
Isabel.
In the bloom
of that rosemary plant.

     (A little gold seat
for the Moor.
A seat that glitters
for his wife.)

     Daybreak
in the orange grove.

--Federico García Lorca (trans. Alan S. Trueblood)

***

Carrefour

O You,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild white honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees.

--Amy Lowell

***

Fragment 146

neither for me honey nor the honey bee

--Sappho (trans. Anne Carson)

The World is Too Much with Us [by William Wordsworth]

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

(c) 1802

Poetry & Inhumanity: "Anti-War Art: Nearly Impossible"? [Sara Eliza Johnson]

Deep in the midst of the most recent Israel-Palestine conflict, Noah Berlatksy asks over at The Atlantic if anti-war art is truly possible. His qualified answer is that it is not possible—or is "nearly impossible"—to create anti-war art because art inherently "makes its subject interesting and arresting and meaningful" through narrativization, beautification, or aestheticization, as he demonstrates through a series of (cherry-picked) examples, including the famous "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen (1917) and the less famous "Peace" by Rupert Brooke (1914). "[I]f war becomes a source of meaning, it seems like people, and nations, will continue to try to find meaning in the glory, or the ugly truth, of war," he argues. Because art creates "meaning," and "meaning" legitimizes the act or object to which it is attributed, and gives that act an illusion of purpose, it follows that art that aestheticizes or strives to "mean" cannot be "successfully" anti-war. Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), for example, packages war into a bildungsroman, which he claims renders it subservient to a tangentially relevant narrative, which thus  compromises its anti-war message. Even art that is non-narrative, fragmentary, or explicitly gruesome often aestheticizes war, which makes it "appealing" to consumers, and this appeal, he implies, negates any work the art does to complicate or combat the war machine. For Berlatsky, it all comes down to the problem of "beauty" (and its lesser counterpart "aestheticization”): art inevitably tempers the brutality of war and atrocity by filtering that brutality into something structurally, psychologically, and emotionally palatable.

I commend Berlatsky for asking the question itself. The need for American poetry that at least considers state-sanctioned violence and its ramifications—the terror it inflicts on both non-Americans and American soldiers (see this article on working for the drone program)—is pressing, particularly as our local police forces continue to militarize (with the help of the Pentagon). It may not seem to the people (or poets) of the United States that we are "at war," with all our pleasant distractions and domestic quagmires, the almost tyrannical allure of both televisual and online entertainment, our gun problem that fuels our mass-shooting problem, our police brutality problem, our (entangled) problems of poverty, classism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, with 9/11 now thirteen years past, Bin Laden assassinated, and our still-ongoing War on Terror happening distantly Elsewhere. Yet our nation is, indeed, engaged in multiple military conflicts. A poet in my doctoral program is on a leave-of-absence because he is serving overseas again; our drones remain active in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. We subsidize other countries' operations. In response to the rise of ISIS, President Obama has again authorized airstrikes in Iraq. 

Binh Danh, Untitled (In the Realm of Pain), 2005. Image courtesy of www.cpacphoto.org/

Many projects exist online—such as The Holocaust Name Database, Humanize Palestine, and Naming the Dead—that identify victims by name and age (and sometimes a smiling photograph) to remind viewers that they were human beings before they were victims, soldiers, or "collateral damage." He loved birds like no one did. One time he gave me doves as a gift. Most poetry about war, violence, and atrocity similarly asks its viewer to identify or psychoemotionally connect with both aggressor and victim alike. One of the most important Holocaust poets,  Tadeusz Różewicz, who died just this year, wrote visionary poems in which imaginable horrors chafe against remarkable moments of tenderness (read one here). Many contemporary poets have recently responded to current events with calls for empathy.  Solmaz Sharif's poignant and necessary "Look" and "Drone" address the United States' legacy of devastation and terror in the Middle East with a dedicated eye: Shahida, headless, found beside Saad Mosque was a real person—a corpse found in Falluja after the siege—who is now buried in a makeshift cemetery in Falluja's football field, alongside hundreds of others ("killed because of four dead American soldiers," Mustafa Hamid told The Observer). It is not necessarily true that such artworks undermine an anti-war (or anti-violence) project because they make violence or war "appealing." To argue as much is to underestimate the collaborative power of empathy and anger. Whether narrative, non-narrative, or hybrid, works of art that encourage the viewer to see the "good" in the Othered enemy, or that humanize the dehumanized, perhaps make empathy and humanization "appealing," not the violence itself.

I put the term in quotation marks now because I do not believe that marking these distinctions in art—"pro" or "anti" war, political or apolitical, propaganda or "truth"—is productive, or even possible. Certainly the poet's rhetorical "intentions" have little to no bearing on how a work of art is experienced, and, anyway, I am averse to treating poems as arguments to be parsed and reduced to thesis statements.

But we are still in the realm of the "human," and still discussing work that aims to produce an empathetic emotional (ergo socialized) response: after identification with victims comes sadness for them, and then perhaps the kind of anger on their behalf (in the case of state violence, systemic violence, or violence the state predominantly excuses or ignores, such as rape or police brutality) meant to breed disgust and revolt. This is work that still is, in some sense, "palatable" to the average "consumer" because the successfulness of its strategy hinges on being "understood," or at least on engendering an identifiable emotion—on being acutely and particularly felt—and response. But what of art about war or atrocity that embraces ugliness to its extreme, or that makes the viewer flinch without relief? Art that actively deflects digestible "meaning" and the "appeal" Berlatsky claims it brings? Art that assaults by either public (e.g. the performance artist) or anonymous presentation (e.g. graffiti)? What about art about inhumanity that is anti-humanist, or that aims to be, or evokes, the nonhuman? "Conceptual" or "uncreative" art in which the artist avoids tampering with the "evidence" or inserting his or her magesterial "voice" into the work? And what about projects that do not re-humanize victims through an affirmation of their humanity, choosing instead to further accentuate the dehumanizing brutality, to focus the lens on the gross product of War, such as the corpse, the absence, that art cannot recover?

Image courtesy of http://www.dewezet.de/

Let's consider, for example, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn's visual installation The Incommensurable Banner (2008), a collage featuring photos of Iraqi "War on Terror" victims—those images too disturbing or politically controversial to be included in "mainstream" media outlets—that runs four meters high and eighteen meters long. The curator of the exhibition that featured The Incommensurable writes that Hirschhorn's piece "confront[s], not merely killing, but the extreme mutilation of bodies by cluster bombs, 20mm canons, hollow-point ammunition, indeed the entire, lengthy evolution of the means to tear apart flesh most efficiently." Hirschhorn omitted all context—including names—from the photographs because

When people ask who is this, what happened to them, and where, they distance themselves from what they are looking at. We are living in a dictatorship of information, of facts. We know everything, we know from our endless 24-hour news channels that every day 10 people die here or there. We want to know, but we don't want to see.                      

The Incommensurable is certainly shocking, disgusting, and profoundly disturbing, as well as ethically complicated. Once you finally force yourself to look at the photographs—to commit to seeing, rather than scanning—as one reviewer did, your eyes might lock on "a torso, the lower half a mash of purple; a body, its head lying nearby; a dark red smear that was presumably once human." The curator called this inhuman smear "abstract." Simply assembling "found" images rather than, say, altering them (or otherwise commenting or editorializing) resists the aestheticization that bothers Berlatsky, but it also prompts questions of exploitation and consent. 

Yes, in choosing to expose the corpse rather than memorialize the life, Hirschhorn both accentuates our sense of vulnerability and implicates us as contributors in the military operations we support with taxes and votes (implicated regardless of whatever our personal stance on the necessity or value of such operations might be). Moreover, by removing all context or identifiable information, the work not only evades the "filtering" effects of "informational" language, but also erases the lines that "official" language draws among the dead, i.e., between "militant combatant" and "civilian," or "target" and "casualty." But The Incommensurable also frustrates another kind of identification—that social identification between the viewer and the photographed subject. When we see portrait of the dead—the woman's unadulterated smile at her wedding, the boy's school photograph, or even the unmarred face of the cadaver—we recognize ourselves and our own stories in it; the photograph approximates a mirror. Hirschhorn's project both invites and denies this empathetic connection. We know the corpse is human, but we do not recognize ourselves in the mirror—in the body the bomb scattered across the dirt, the caved-in face, the "abstract" smear of material that "was presumably once human"—though we know intuitively that we should. We cannot quite say that the smear is, or was, "a man." 

From this disconnect arise those agitating waves of fear, anxiety, and nausea. Certainly it is natural to feel nauseous at the sight of mortal wounds, and this response can perhaps be deemed empathetic. But this revulsion is not the site of the project's power. The project's power lies in our inability to locate ourselves in that human "smear" or "mash" wrought by twenty-first century weapons technology—this feeling that we should be able to connect with the figure, to find our common humanness, but cannot—that rouses a visceral disorientation that can only be described as uncanny horror. The collection of photographs swells to overwhelm the viewer, like the wave of blood in The Shining, and when the wave breaks what remains is not explicable "meaning," not the familiarly discursive narrative that recycles itself across eras ad infinitum, not quite discernible sadness or anger or helplessness on behalf of victims, but the nightmare residue: a sensation of wrongness, like a nightmare-splinter in the brain, that is not easy to extract or even understand. And perhaps better to not understand it as we understand certain other feelings, such as sympathy and anger—to not have a word to describe exactly how we feel and why—because then the sensation would be easier to resolve, and what we have resolved is no longer our problem. What has been reconciled is more easily forgotten. Horror awakens us, lingers within us, and the discomfort maintained by that lingering is important.

A page from Holocaust Museum. Image courtesy of www.bbk.ac.uk (Click to enlarge.)

Can any poem approach the experience—the simulated and lasting horror—of The Incommensurable, a project that shocks us in part by omitting language (which, according to Hirshhorn, creates comfortable distance by filtering, describing, critiquing, contextualizing, translating)? Many poetic investigations of war and violence treat language as a surrogate body, as the mutilated material in itself; syntax, form, and even words themselves are torn apart, scattered or smeared across the ground of the page or screen. Ironically, however, perhaps the poetic project that comes closest to the experience of viewing The Incommensurable is Fitterman's Holocaust Museum, a project in which the photographic evidence is not provided or simulated but erased, leaving only the contextual information: names, dates, circumstance. Fitterman lists caption after caption without their photographic referents. If the images of Hirshhorn's banner gather to rise like a wave, the captions on Fitterman's page lie atop one another like bodies in a pile. Here, "[l]oss—erasure and absence—is made palpable by the marked suppression of the missing photographs," as Charles Bernstein writes at Jacket2. As in The Incommensurable, if we truly attempt to look—if we do not only "scan" or "read" the captions, but engage with the project's visuality (i.e., it's lack of visual material)—power here lies in that perpetual frustration of human identification and recognizability. Again and again Holocaust Museum invites us to access only to deny us access, and as we mentally circle the holes where the images should be, try to imaginatively reconstruct the face we know should be there—like the ghost-word on the tip of the tongue, the ghost-memory at the brain's periphery—we find ourselves in the realm of horror, somewhere within the void represented, within that psychoemotional space both inexplicable and irreconcilable. If the photograph—at least the portrait—approximates a mirror for the viewer, the viewer here sees not quite emptiness or blankness, but a disfigured or distorted echo of the human who had been.

Much powerful and complicated work "about" war and violence cannot be considered "anti" (or "pro") because it resists both argument and aestheticization. It asks difficult tasks of us, both emotional and intellectual. But even much work about violence that is explicitly and discernibly "rhetorical" or aestheticized—such as the poem that produces the familiar empathetic response—still retains value beyond the rhetorical or aesthetic.

When we were little girls, my friends and I used to play the game Bloody Mary in the bathroom at the roller rink, which had no windows and thus was very dark with the lights turned off. It's a simple game: alone and in total darkness, stand with your back to the mirror and say her name thirteen times, then turn around to face her. We feared we'd see her—this woman covered in blood, who would kill us—in the mirror, and were relieved to see our selves instead, though sometimes we thought we'd caught a glimpse. But for a moment in the turning, we were unsettled and amorphous, at once the corpse, the threat, and the familiar face, and perhaps the most potent work about war, violence, and atrocity blurs these lines for us, and cultivates for us an experience too complex to be explained.