The Best American Poetry

"Miniver Cheevy" [by Edwin Arlington Robinson]

On the subject of brilliant closure, consider the endings of the final two stanzas here. Notice the power of understatement -- how rhetorical restraint can serve to underscore rather than undermine. I'm thinking of "kept on" in the last stanza, and even more so "and thought" in the second to last. -- DL

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

   And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old

   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold

   Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,

   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

   And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown

   That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town,

   And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,

   Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

   Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace

   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediæval grace

   Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

   But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

   And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

   And kept on drinking.

Loren Goodman, Guest Author December 15-19

This week we welcome back Loren Goodman as our guest author. Loren is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, Suppository Writing (2008) and New Products (2010). He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College, UIC Creative Writing Director, and Pacific Correspondent for The Best American Poetry Web Blog. 

Welcome back, Loren. 

--sdh

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

The Invisible - On Fitness and Writing [by Jess Smith]

Hello friends - this is Jess Smith and I want to start by saying I'm grateful to Stacey and David for giving me the space on here to connect with all of you.

For the next few weeks I'll be exploring the connection between physical fitness and writing. Long obsessed with both, I'm hoping to examine the relationship between the body and the pursuit of writing from many angles - why are so many of the most exciting poets I know also obsessive runners? Why are so many of the poets I know former hardcore athletes, some of them even flirting with professional status? Alternately, why do some writers slyly criticize the pursuit of physical fitness? Is fitness an addiction like anything else, and we poets are somehow more prone to be seduced by its high?

And, as with any work, I'm excited to see what answers come to questions I've long had about myself and my own dogged pursuit of fitness, often at the sacrifice of sitting down to write. I look forward to posting here and to hearing your thoughts on the matter, all you poet-athletes out there.

For my first post, a little background on my time as a yoga teacher. Happy reading and happy weekend.

I can always tell when my students have crossed what I think of as “the yoga line.” They go from doggedly pursuing the postures - breathing raggedly, eyes darting about the room to see if they can imitate other students, flopping into child’s pose in mock defeat - to total acceptance. I can tell by the way their faces go blank, by the symmetry of their inhales and exhales. I can tell when they’ve let something go they didn’t even realize they were holding on to.

This boundary is significant not because these students can suddenly put their ankles behind their necks or hold handstand in the middle of the room, but rather that they are practicing. Truly, mindfully practicing. Just as someone can be taught to write a technically perfect sonnet but not how to breathe life into it, I can teach my yoga students where their bodies are supposed to go in a given posture (right foot here, left elbow there), but teaching them how to practice is an entirely different pursuit.   

Despite its significant presence in my life, I’ve always found yoga to be a difficult thing to write about. How to say what emptiness feels like? An emptiness that need not be filled? As if you are now complete because you are empty?

Yoga feels uncool to discuss, too soft and frilly for a serious writer. I’ve never quite known how to explain what it means to me without sounding didactic or egomaniacal. I came to teaching, I think, because it was the best way to talk about yoga, to be grateful for it, without actually having to talk about it. But if I’ve learned anything from yoga, as with writing, I know you have to sit with the things that make you the most uncomfortable. You have to push into them with both hands and risk sounding uncool, soft, frilly, whatever. As long as you’re trying, then you’re practicing.

 

 A quick overview for my non-yogi readers: what we often think of as yoga in the western world is actually one limb of an eight-limbed pursuit. The postures and physical exertions are a means to an end - the end being (fingers crossed) enlightenment. Every bend, twist, flip, and breath is in the service of creating a generative energy in the body. Or, as a great teacher of mine put it, “Yoga does not transform you but restores you to your natural state.” It sounds obscenely new age, I realize, but this is the truth of yoga.   

Yoga and writing, for me, achieve the same outcome, which is ultimately harmful to my work. When I have completed a satisfying practice, as with a full day of writing or a great poem draft, I feel empty. I don’t feel compelled to write or read or even speak to anyone. Sometimes, when I’ve had a particularly intense practice, I even have a hard time eating for a while, as if my body is still settling into itself and I am an outsider. I wouldn’t want to disturb the process.

But, just as with writing, not all practices are satisfying. Sometimes I have the wind at my back and others I wonder how I ever got into yoga in the first place. I feel like a failure, a fraud, a drinker who pretends she’s a yogini but is really just a drinker. No matter what, though, I always feel done after the fact. Even with a stiff, breathless, difficult, hungover practice - I walk away powerwashed. This is problematic, of course, because I need something in me, some dirt in the wound, some itch I can’t reach, to write.

This is not to say I think of writing as therapeutic. In fact, I wholly reject that idea and think it does a disservice to the discipline required to put pen to paper day after day. Whenever I have students or friends ask me if I work through trauma with my poetry or if writing makes me “feel better,” I am at a loss. Yes, of course writing makes me “feel better,” but that’s not what I’m doing here. That’s not the point. I think of this logic the same way I think of yoga logic: yes, I like having a better butt and being more bendy, but that’s not what I’m doing here.

It’s not that I’m offended. I find it nearly impossible to be offended by a question, by someone else wanting to understand me better, but I am uncomfortable finding a suitable answer. What I can say is that I am excessively human. I am weak and needy and riddled with anxiety. I have a hard time sharing the truth of myself with others because I have a hard time knowing what it is. For years, I wrote to overcome the constant sense of loss I felt. This is not uncommon. When I came to yoga, it was the first time anything else made me feel as relieved as writing. It satisfied the little disciplinarian in me, it took an axe to the frozen sea inside, it reordered the sensible, it left me feeling intact - a feeling I’m grateful for, of course, and suspicious of, still.

 

It’s an extremely gratifying moment when I watch my students cross the “yoga line” I described. I understand, then, that they understand. That they feel the emptiness. It is akin to the silence that makes a poem a poem and not just a set of broken sentences. As Robert Bly put it in his essay A Wrong Turning in American Poetry, “A human body, just dead, is very like a living body except that it no longer contains something that was invisible anyway. In a poem, as in a human body, what is invisible makes all the difference.”

  Originally from Georgia, Jess Smith now lives and works in New York City. Her work can be found in Sixth Finch, Phantom Limb, Ghost Town, The Best American Poetry Blog, Lumina, and other journals. She received her MFA from The New School in 2013.

"December 14" from The Daily Mirror [By David Lehman]

December 14

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy sphere, 
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work 
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, 
That never touch with inarticulate pang 
Those dying generations-at their song. 
The One remains, the many change and pass 
The expiring swan, and as he sings he dies. 
The earth, the stars, the light, the day, the skies, 
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream 
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines, 
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -- 
Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery, 
If but some vengeful god would call to me, 
Because I could not stop for Death, 
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love. 
My playmate, when we both were clothed alike, 
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, 
Suffer my genial spirits to decay 
Upon the bridal day, which is not long? 
I thought that love would last forever; I was wrong. 

***

These translations were downloaded from the web:

Ce centre ton lit est, ces murs, la sphère:
le travail vieux non jamais terni, voyant, merveilleux 
de la main, du pied, de la lèvre, de l'oeil, du front, 
de celui contact avec douleur inarticulée ceux qui meurent 
génération à leur chanson. Celui reste, 
les nombreux changement et passe le cygne expirant, 
et pendant qu'il chante il meurt. 
La terre, les étoiles, la lumière, le jour, 
les cieux, ombre blanc-d'une chevelure
comme un rêve sans limites hors du crépuscule, 
hors des cèdres et des pins, pensent pas 
à eux, au trop-Péché la musique less pensees et à son mort 
d'ombre, et à la misère, si mais un certain dieu vengeful 
appellerait à moi, puisque je ne pourrais pas m'arrêter 
pour la mort, pour ne pas retourner. 
Ont mis à la terre le bon endroit pour l'amour. 
Mon ami, quand nous tous les deux avons été vêtus de même, 
devrait thé et gâteaux, après qu'et glace, souffrent 
mes spiritueux réconfortants pour 
se délabrer sur le jour nuptialenqui n'est pas long? 
J'ai pensé que l'amour durerait pour toujours; j'avais tort. 

***

Diese thy Mitte des Betts ist, diese Wände, thy Bereich, 
die getrübte, gaudy, wundervolle alte Arbeit 
der Hand, des Fusses, der Lippe, des Auges, der Braue, 
des dessen nie Note mit inarticulate Pang 
die, die Erzeugung-an ihrem Lied sterben. 
Das man bleibt, vielen Änderung und führt 
den ablaufenden Schwan, und während er singt, stirbt er. 
Die Masse, die Sterne, das Licht, der Tag, die Himmel, 
A der weiß-behaarte Schatten, der wie ein Traum grenzenlos ist aus der 
Dämmerung heraus, aus den Zedern und den Kiefern heraus durchstreift, 
denken nicht an sie, Thou hast thy Musik AuchSünde und ihren Schatten 
Tod und Elend, wenn aber irgendein vengeful Gott zu mir benennen 
würde, weil ich nicht für Tod stoppen könnte, um nicht 
zurückzukommen. Bedeckten den rechten Platz für Liebe mit Erde. 
Mein Spielkamerad, als wir beide gleich gekleidet wurden
sollte I, nachdem, Tee und Kuchen und gefriert, 
erleiden meinen genialen Geist, 
um nach dem Brauttag zu verfallen, der nicht lang ist? 
Ich dachte, daß Liebe für immer dauern würde; Ich war falsch. 

Hail to thee O Scarriet bard thou never squirt

And this, too, is part of the discourse -- oops, I mean the "national conversation" -- about poetry.

<<<

42. Jorie Graham The more striving to be relevant, the more she seems to fade

43. Alan Cordle Strange, how this librarian changed poetry with Foetry.com

44. Janet Holmes Ahsahta editor and MFA prof works the po-biz system like no one else

45. Paul Muldoon How easy it is to become a parody of oneself!

46. Cole Swensen Some theories always seem to be missing something

47. Matthew Dickman Was reviewed by William Logan. And lived

48. James Tate For some reason it depressed us to learn he was not a laugh riot in person.

49. Geoffrey Hill His poetry is more important than you are

50. Derek Walcott A great poet, but great poets don’t exist anymore

51. Charles Bernstein A bad poet, but bad poets don’t exist anymore, either

52. Kay Ryan Emily Dickinson she’s not. Maybe Marianne Moore when she’s slightly boring?

53. Laura Kasischke She’s published 8 novels. One became a movie starring Uma Thurman. Who the hell does she think she is?

54. Louise Gluck X-Acto!

55. Rae Armantrout “Quick, before you die, describe the exact shade of this hotel carpet.”

56. Heather McHugh “A coward and a coda share a word.”

>>>

All I can say is: Jeepers, creepers, where did you get those peepers?

Ahem said my friend Flicker. It's more like Flaubert's "Dictionary of Received Ideas." Well, maybe.

And there are comments on the picks, earnest as all get out. The public chimes in! For example, Mary Douglas: "I wholeheartedly agree with Scarriet in awarding the top place to Valerie Macon—in her appointment as poet laureate of North Carolina and in her subsequent resignation. . .When Valerie Macon was appointed Poet Laureate of North Carolina on July 11, 2014, I was jubilant, as I realized she had made it through the gates without the tedious, tendentious counting up of prizes, accolades and tenures. I considered it a miracle. The criticism of her made me gleeful, almost giddy, because I realized she had soared above it all on the merits of only loving poetry and writing it for and out of love: the thing I most believe in (next to God and Christ) of all things left to believe in on this earth. . .On July 17, 2014 I was at home, halfway listening to the radio (local news) and doing, as a friend of mine says, “little busy things” around my minuscule apartment, when I heard the announcement: Valerie Macon has resigned. . . Oh no, I said and dropped what was in my hand. Fortunately, it was only a feather duster and nothing breakable etc.
>>>

Click here for the whole listicle, 2013 vintage, or here for the 2014 version of "Poetry's Hot 100" as brought to you by Scarriet.

This post is brought to you as a public service dedicated to those who quote William Carlos Williams on the subject of poetry and news.

Meet the Press: Karen Schubert in Conversation with Patty Paine, Editor of Diode Editions

KS: Before I ask you about your press, I’d love for you to tell us where you are and how you came to be there.

PP: It’s lovely to talk with you, Karen. I’m writing from Doha, Qatar.  The heat is finally relenting a bit, and we’re just a few days away from Eid. I’m looking forward to both the cooler temperatures, and a week off from school!

I was a student in the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth when VCU established a branch campus here. VCUQatar arrived in 1998, and was the first American university established in Doha. It has since been joined by Weill Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Carnegie Mellon. I was interested in coming here because I wanted to know more about this region, and I have always been interested in travel. After high school, I joined the marine corps, in part, to travel, but sadly, went from boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina, to the School of Music in Norfolk, Virginia, and was then stationed in Quantico, Virginia. I didn’t manage to get very far from my hometown of Vernon, New Jersey. In 2005, I had been out of the MFA program for a few years, and was teaching at VCU in Richmond when a position opened up in the English program at VCUQatar. I jumped at it, and was fortunate to get hired. This is my 10^th year here. I’ve been here much longer than I thought I would be, but VCUQ continues to be a place that offers enormous opportunities for personal and professional growth, and I can see myself staying another 10. It’s quite a momentous time to be in Qatar. The country is growing rapidly, and it’s especially interesting to observe the bristling dynamic between tradition and ambition.

KS: diode poetry journal came into being sometime during your 10 years at VCUQatar? 

I arrived in Doha in 2005, and in 2007, started diode. When I was in the MFA program at VCU, I had the good fortune to intern at Blackbird the year before it went live. Blackbird was one of the first journals to go online, and in my humble opinion, it continues to be one of the very best journals, online or otherwise, in existence. My time with Blackbird piqued my interest in starting an online journal, and this was further fueled by feeling somewhat isolated from the poetry community. Jeff Lodge, one of the founding editors of Blackbird, came to teach at VCUQ in 2007, and he was instrumental in helping me get diode up and running. He’s wholly responsible for the design of the journal, and even though he’s now back in the US, we continue to create the journal together. Diode has far exceeded my initial hopes. I’ve had the opportunity to publish emerging poets, and poets I’ve admired for years, including teachers and mentors.

 One of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had as an editor is this one, which I wrote about in the preface to 3.3:

“When I started diode, I hoped to create a community of writers, something I missed in my own life having moved to Doha, Qatar, in 2005. I missed being a part of a community of poets, and I hoped diode could create such a community. I enlisted Jeff Lodge to serve as co-editor, and in the fall of 2007 diode was launched. Diode has come to exceed our hopes in every way. We have connected with so many amazing, generous poets, and thoughtful, passionate readers. It has been an honor to be a part of this community.

Even after three years, diode continues to create connections we couldn’t imagine in 2007.  Like this one: When I was sixteen, a sophomore at Vernon Township High School in Vernon, New Jersey, a teacher read a poem about finding a dead mouse in a cupboard. I had almost no experience with poetry. I had a vague remembrance of having read “Jabberwocky” in grade school, and an even more opaque recollection of a Frost (?) poem with an image of mountain peaks that the teacher pointed out resembled a saw blade. This “mouse poem,” as my memory filed it, slapped me awake to poetry, and began my own attempts at writing. The imagery was striking, and tangible. I could see the poem in my mind and it stuck there. For thirty years. Then came Facebook. A few months ago I found Therese Mattil, an English teacher from my high school, on Facebook and we began corresponding. I paraphrased a few lines from the “mouse poem” and asked her if she remembered it. Not only did she remember the poem I had heard back in 1980, she is its author. I’m delighted to be able to present this poem, and one other, by Therese Mattil, in this issue.”

KS: I have so much respect for diode. I love its spare aesthetic, and the poems I’ve read are arresting and well wrought. By now, we know the presence that online journals have in the writing landscape, but it must have seemed like a leap at the time.

Diode Editions, your press, opened with the chapbook A Concordance of Leaves by Phil Metres, and has published a chapbook by Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito, as well as full-length collections by T.R. Hummer and Joshua Poteat. As an editor, what did you want to do with a press that you couldn’t do with a journal?

Thank you so much for your kind words about diode. Jeff Lodge designed the site, and is responsible for its clean aesthetic. When we started diode it did feel a bit like a leap, but we hoped that we could produce a journal that published exciting, eclectic, and engaging work, and that diode would have a long life. Now, approaching our 8^th year, diode has wildly exceeded our hopes. There was a point when I wasn’t sure if I would be able to continue diode. My husband passed away 15 months ago, and in the aftermath, I deeply doubted that I was up to the task of keeping diode going. But, when I dove into the submissions, I found such hope, solace and inspiration. I always knew that diode was an important constant in my life, and I am deeply grateful that it has also become an essential part of my healing process.

 Diode Editions has allowed me to present a larger offering of the work of poets I very much love and admire. It has also afforded me the opportunity to make actual, tactile, objects. I work at a college of art and design, and over the years have grown more interested in the visual arts, particularly in book making and cover design. Making chapbooks has allowed me to converge my interests, and my teaching, with art, design and book making. For example, I used Philip Metre’s lovely chapbook A Concordance of Leaves as the basis of a class project in a creative writing class I taught. Before the book was published, the students read and discussed it very closely, and Phil was kind enough to work with my students as they engaged with his chapbook. It inspired their own writing, and through their close reading, taught them a great deal about poetry. Since my students are heading into the design fields, I asked them to create cover designs for the book. With Phil’s help, we selected the cover. It gives me great joy that VCUQ students designed the cover of A Concordance of Leaves. I’ve also been able to work with VCUQ graduates on the layout of the books.

 KS: Tell me why you were drawn to Phil Metres’s manuscript. Is there a Diode Editions aesthetic? Were you conscious of looking for work that your Arabic students would seize? On one level I’m asking if you think of poetry as a bridge between cultures, but also asking if you see your press as working to build that bridge.

I do think that poetry has the power to bridge cultures, and I hope that diode and Diode Editions has created even a single plank in that bridge. I think poetry can help us understand and appreciate the differences among us as we gain a greater sense of, and appreciation for, all that unites us. The potential to bridge cultures did draw me to Phil’s manuscript, but what enamored and excited me, was the stunning beauty of the work, and the careful, thoughtful and often breathtaking way he negotiated, and internalized his experience of attending a wedding in Palestine, an experience that was simultaneously de-stabilizing and deeply enriching. The single, long poem of Concordance is a deep and meaningful exploration of borders, of place, and of love, and he transports the reader across these borders through skillful indexing, and beautiful imagery. The fact that Concordance is deeply relevant to my students, and this region, was a wonderful bonus.

I think this passage from Concordance illustrates what moved me about the book, and compelled me to publish it: 

ورق 

            (

 

the last time you rose from the bed

of this parched ocean, its dried swells

            (

now hills & swales, sister you left

your new love at Tel Aviv / his history

            (

 

holding him at passport control / he passed

an olive tree necklace to you saying

            (

 

a country is more important than one person

you’d carry it ten years around

            (

 

your shoulders / & now this country draws you

the way olive roots draw invisible water

ورق  

(

 

sister soon you will be written

alongside your future

            (

husband in the book of books

& though our father’s passport held aloft

            (

will not stop the Sabra tank

from blocking the road

            (

you will find another way

back & soon new sisters will inscribe

            (

 

your body with henna

ink your feet & open your hands

 ___

I try to not have any definable aesthetic for diode, to keep my particular biases out of the editorial process. I’ve found the process of selecting poems for diode, or books for Diode Editions, to be an ineffable, almost alchemical process. Because of the volume of submissions I receive, I have to read through them fairly quickly. When a poem, or manuscript creates a pause, stops me in my tracks, so to speak, my attention is stilled and piqued. It’s a sensation more than something I can articulate—a feeling of being startled, snapped awake, sometimes like being pushed or slapped, sometimes nudged or caressed. Whatever the sensation, what soon accompanies the sensation is an urgency to share the work with others.

KS: What is your submission schedule for diode and Diode Editions?

 I read all year, and we publish three issues a year.

 KS: You were one of several editors for Gathering the Tide, a wonderful collection of Arabian Gulf poetry translated into English. I used it in my classroom and it was phenomenal to teach. My students were moved by the range of subjects, styles and emotional tenor, and the book lent itself well to all kinds of wider discussion. Congratulations on this incredible publication. How has the anthology been received?

Thank you so much for using Gathering the Tide! It’s lovely to hear that your students were moved by the poems. The anthology has been well received, and it is finding a place in classrooms all over the world. It’s the only anthology that presents contemporary poetry in translation from the Arabian Gulf, and I think it offers a unique glimpse into this region at a time of great change, and at the poets working in this context. It also powerfully demonstrates, I believe, the deep commonalities that connect us.

 KS: Would you like to speak to The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf? It is beautifully illustrated.

 Like many of the projects that I’ve been involved in at VCUQ, The Donkey Lady was inspired by my students. I taught a topics course on folk and fairy tales, and asked my students to collect folk tales from their parents, or grandparents. The stories that came in were fascinating in their similarity to, and differences from, the stories I had grown up hearing. The subtle differences in the regional versions of familiar stories I received were richly culturally nuanced. For example, in the regional version of Cinderella, called “Hamda and the Fairy Fish”, the description of traditional dress and customs were much different than the Cinderella stories I had experienced. There were also several stories that are unique to this region, such as “The Legend of Mai and Ghaillan,” a pour quoi tale that describes how the dhow (a fishing vessel) came to have a sail.

As a component of story collecting, I asked the students to illustrate their stories, and it was immediately apparent that there was an opportunity to present illustrated stories from the Gulf region in book form. I worked with Michael Hersrud, a graphic design professor, Don Earley, a professor in art foundation and fashion, and Jesse Ulmer, an English professor. We also collaborated with Dr. Sara Al Mohannadi, an English professor from Qatar University. Her students also collected stories in Arabic, and then translated them into English. We assembled a large team of current, and former, student artists and designers, and over the course of two years created The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf.

 For a sense of the stories and illustrations, one can see and hear a story here:

 http://vimeo.com/65555706

  KS: Thanks very much for taking the time to tell us about Diode Editions and the other work you're engaged in. We look forward to seeing you at AWP.

Thank you! The pleasure has been all mine.

Karen Schubert is the author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently I Left My Wings on a Chair, a Wick Poetry Center Winner (Kent State Press 2014). Her work appears or is forthcoming in Extract(s) anthology, Traveling Stanzas, Poets’ Quarterly, and Common Threads. Awards include a 2013 residency at Headlands Center for the Arts and 2014 Pushcart Prize nomination. Read David Hassler's Meet the Press interview with Karen Schubert here.

  Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing), The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire Academic Press). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, Verse Daily, The Atlanta Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor of diode poetry journal and Diode Editions. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar where she teaches writing and literature.

D.M. Spitzer may I publish you? [by Philip Brady]

I am a sucker for those baseball stadium marriage proposals. The private moment gloriously public. The fan cam. The mock-embarrassment. The roar of the crowd. So, I thought I'd give it a try here, on the Best American Poetry Blog.

Last night, I spoke on the phone with a man I'd never met, D. M. Spitzer. He had submitted his manuscript, "A Heaven Wrought of Iron" to Etruscan for consideration. It's a long poem that is also a poetic reading of The Odyssey. Not criticism, or commentary, or pastiche. A companion, perhaps. A new rendering, in the mode of Alice Oswald's Memorial and Zachary Mason's The Lost Books of the Odyssey and Chris Logue's War Music. I loved it. It felt immediate, yet arrived from a far place--maybe an ancient blog excavated near Hisarlik, Anatonia. 

I told Mr. Spitzer that Etruscan was very interested, and that I'd be in touch again very soon with a decision.  

Mr. Spitzer said that he hadn't published sections of the manuscript in periodicals, because the work depended on the accretion of the voice, the lapping rhythms of an idiom that seem familiar yet strange, like dream echoes. So I'll refrain from quoting passages here. Bad marketing, perhaps, but this is my first public proposal.

Still, I make my plea before the assembled audience of BAP from the box seats of the blogosphere, in the knowledge that I will have departed the field before a response can be registered, and that the stadium will have to hold its breath until the publication date in the Spring of 2016, though of course they can check updates at www.etruscanpress.org.

D.M. Spitzer, will you accept my proposal of publication of "A Heaven Wrought of Iron"? I promise to take good care of it. Please call or write at your earliest convenience.

 

Later this morning....

D.M. Spitzer has accepted my proposal. I'm thrilled. The crowd roars. Here's a cutting from "A Heaven Wrought of Iron" forthcoming from Etruscan in 2016.

 

odyssey i:  turning

  

What is man but turning

out of himself towards

a beyond of difference,

into the region where risk swarms

in the wreckage and buries

the vast reflectivity of air

down into dust? 

 

Who but a god might sing

this flotsam and jetsam creature,

the turning already into otherness,

the othering itself?

  

 

“What I will say is bent and wanders

because it knows its course”

[Od. 1.179]

 

 “You are the child of suffering.

Upon your face, in your eyes

beauty lingers

for an instant, then

it takes you with it.

 

Remember all those beautiful ones

who once stormed and raised the dust

in their lengthening shadows?

They ran with your father

and they have gone beyond the sea.

 

You are the same.”

 

Now muster the only

human reply,

son of pain,

filled with the clear breath

of divinity:

 

“I do not know myself.”

  

At the end of speech

a grey shimmer

shakes the air

and is already gone.

 

Behind you and above

in the thin square of light

and red painted tiles,

the heavy, dark wing-beat

of the goddess

pulses the air

around you

alone

 

and her figure is a

charcoal cloud-bird

drawn on a cave wall,

a vulture’s penetrating

shadow with the sharp eyes

of an owl in the dark.

  

Beneath the heavy cloak of darkness

let a foot

fall

where you cannot see.

 

A god has cleared the way.

 

                                                                                                                                 whole night through

there

veiled and alone

[Od. 1.443]

Breakfast with Blue Eyes [grace a Amy Gerstler]

"Stay up late. Everything is better at night." Remembering Mark Strand (1934-2014)

(Ed note: When we received the sad news that Mark Strand had died, we invited readers to post their memories of him. You will find them below. I've also included an excerpt of David Lehman's review of Mark's Dark Harbor (1993, Knopf), which ran in the Chicago Tribune. sdh)

Moon Poem by Mark Strand , 2013, Bascove, pigment print, drawing & collage, 30” x 43”

 

From Mark Strand's Farewells: Celebrating A Book-length Poem Of `Sustained Literary Grace' by David Lehman (Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1993)

In "Dark Harbor" we catch glimpses of the poet celebrating "how good life/ Has been and how it has culminated in this instant," lunching with his editor at Lutece, then striding along the pavement, well-fed, lanky, in his "new dark blue double-breasted suit." A poet of glamor for whom light is "the mascara of Eden," he also is a poet of romance who speaks of the ". . . feel of kisses blown out of heaven,/ Melting the moment they land."

As the nation's fourth poet laureate Strand took part in a number of panel discussions devoted to the problems of contemporary poetry. At one such, somebody raised German philosopher Theodor Adorno's famous question: "How can one write poems after Auschwitz?" Strand retorted: "How can one eat lunch after Auschwitz?"

Strand's point is that poetry may be as necessary as lunch, and that one "cannot" yet one does enjoy one's pleasures, despite the knowledge we have of the horrors that the human race has committed. Are poems about Orpheus or angels-Strand writes about both, as did Rilke-necessarily evasions of death and evil? And if they are, should that damn them? Poetry does have a moral dimension, but it is not a moral instrument exclusively. Nor is what Auschwitz represents the whole of our morality.

Strand's poetry is a vehicle of the moral imagination simply because it amply accommodates the world of material things as well as the impulses of the spirit. Like one of the resuscitated poets described on the last page of "Dark Harbor," Strand is now "ready to say the words (he) had been unable to say-/ Words whose absence had been the silence of love."

Mortality as a fact and as the name of our chief fear is the base condition of his new work. Continuous is the need to say farewell to the things that require, and requite, a poet's attention. Death is the mother of beauty; poetry is a valediction forbidding mourning.

The book's penultimate poem is a remarkable example of a "moralized landscape," in which the sea and the mountains embody different aspects of the human condition. The noise of the breaking waves had once frightened him, writes Strand, "But in those days what did I know of the pleasures of loss,/ Of the edge of the abyss coming close with its hisses/ And storms, a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks./ Sending up stars of salt, loud clouds of spume." (Read the full review here.)

Kateri Lanthier said...

He was a brilliant and inspiring poet and a generous, kind man. I met him years ago in Toronto, when he came to read at IFOA: International Festival of Authors. We chatted afterwards (we talked about Elizabeth Bishop and the Maritimes), he signed his book and I asked if I could send him some of my poetry. He gave me his address. I summoned the courage to send him some work. In reply, he sent me the kindest letter I've ever received. I cherished it for years, although I stopped writing poetry for over a decade. When my first collection, Reporting from Night, was finally being published in 2011, I realized that the poems I'd sent to him were in the manuscript and wondered if he would permit me to use an excerpt from his letter as a blurb. I sent an e-mail to him at Columbia and got a reply back within an hour! He said yes. This is what he had written about my poems: "Their intensity and limpidity, their invention--all wonderful. And their narrative arc--always implicit--gives them a lovely delicacy." I will always be extremely grateful to him.

Elizabeth O'Connell-Thompson said...

When I was in the NJ Governor's School for the Arts program, one of our instructors shared this with the group. We were the combination of awkward and unruly you'd expect of seventeen-year-olds who'd worked themselves into a program that involved going to class for a month during their last summer of high school. "Keeping Things Whole" was put in front of us, and as we all read and reread the poem, our usual smart remarks and clumsy attempts at scholarship failed us; our breathing slowed, we sat quietly for a long time, looking up to each other, then back at the page. Even now that poem puts me in a place of feeling both great and small that few other things can, and I owe Mark Strand a true debt for such a gift--one he didn't even know he gave.

Angela Ball said...

Mark Strand caused a sensation when he visited Ohio University in 1972. Already enthralled with his poems, we could hardly believe his handsomeness. The one detail that charmed me most--the small rip near the elbow in his sky-blue oxford-cloth shirt. In 1983 he visited the Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to give a reading. He was a cordial and gracious guest, even advising me on my (ill-conceived) romance. He gave me his best wishes that things would work out. I believe that the next time I talked to him was in 2006, in NYC. "Did things work out?" Mark asked me. "Yes, we lived together for a long time--ten years unmarried, 6 years married. Then he left me for one of my graduate students." "Men are pigs," he said.

Andrey Gritsman said...

MARK STRAND

“The Remains,” from his 1970 collection “Darker.”

Translated into Russian by Andrey Gritsman

Я расстаюсь с чужими именами. Опустошаю карманы.
Снимаю обувь и оставляю на обочине.
Ночью перевожу часы назад.
Открываю семейный альбом и смотрю на свои детские фото. 
Ну и что это дает? Время делает свое дело.
Я называю свое имя. Говорю до свидания.
Все слова улетают по ветру.
Я люблю свою жену но покидаю ее.
Родители встают со своих тронов
в молочных залах облаков.
Как мне запеть? Время говорит мне кто я.
Я меняюсь но остаюсь все тем же.
Расстаюсь с жизнью но она все живет.

Ann Kjellberg said...

He told me that he wrote his poems formally, and then un-formed them. I think he was being mischievous...

Beth Bachmann said...

Mark Strand taught me the secret to poetry. But I can't tell you. It's a secret. I have been lucky in my life to spend several nights over the past decade chatting with Mark Strand on a porch in Tennessee. One night I asked him to sign a copy of his children's book, The Night Book. He asked, "Where did you find this?" and then wrote this inscription, "Stay up late. Everything is better at night."

Lloyd Schwartz said...

How many times can you actually remember the first poem you ever read by someone? "My Life by Somebody Else" was my first Mark Strand poem--I'm pretty sure it was in The New York Review of Books. What a startling and unforgettable new voice. He became the most imitated poet in America. A few years later, he felt he had reached a dead end. He said at a poetry reading, at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge, that we were listening to someone whose star had fallen. But how wrong he was.

BookshopGhost said...

I loved his reading style, but I couldn't afford his book, so I asked him to sign the book I had with me - Bevington's complete Shakespeare, the fourth edition - and he eyeballed me for a second, then bent over the textbook. When he passed it back, I found a speech bubble extending from the Bard's mouth on the frontispiece: "Mark Strand is a nice guy and not a bad poet. I say so. Wm. Shakespeare."

Also:

Remembering Mark Strand by Brenda Shaunessy

L'uomo che cammina un passo avanti al buio (Mark Strand, 1934-2014) [by Moira Egan]

I Am What Is Missing: Mark Strand, Forgive me; I Get It Now -- by Amy Glynn

Sonnets and Fast Breaks: A Conversation Between David Lehman and Terrance Hayes about The Best American Poetry 2014

(Ed note: Scribner has launched a new on-line magazine and its first issue features a conversation between Best American Poetry Series Editor David Lehman and 2014 Guest Editor Terrance Hayes. Follow this link to read an excerpt. The full interview is reproduced below. Click on the cover image above to purchase The Best American Poetry 2014. -- sdh)

 

 

 

 

 

(Image left: John Ashbery & David Lehman (c) Star Black. R: Terrance Hayes)

 DL: Terrance, when you look back over the year you surveyed for The Best American Poetry 2014, what surprised you the most?

TH: One of the many surprises was just how many literary journals are out there. It's hard to believe — no, I can't believe poetry isn't thriving when so many editors are dedicating time and energy to so many publications. Here are some of the amazing journals I was unaware of before my editorship:  Make Literary Magazine, Little Patuxent Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Spillway, The Normal School, ABZ Poetry Magazine, Willow Springs! One of the vital fringe benefits of The Best American Poetry is discovering these publications. I hope they get a few new subscribers because of it.

DL: I hope so, too.  I never tire of saying that lit mag editors are among the unsung heroes of American poetry. You know who I think is an underrated poet? Nabokov. I take it you admire him from your decision to cast your introduction in the form of a fake q-and-a with Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire fame.

TH: Nabokov is an early and enduring guide -- muse, really -- for me as a writer. Lolita was my first love. When I read it for the first time at 20 years old or so, it prompted something I'd never experienced as a reader: something like ecstasy by way of the language and horror by way of the implications. (I feel similarly reading a lot of Flannery O'Connor.) In any event, Pale Fire prompts similar complex feelings because of the ways it combines poetry, fiction and criticism. I love that it implies that "close reading" requires, or maybe prompts, a sort of delusion. Looking at poems, little constructions of suggestion and innuendo, requires, or maybe prompts, a little craziness. Who better than Charles Kinbote, then, to help us into an anthology of contemporary poetry: contemporary songs, illusions, and shadows?

DL:  Lover of wordplay that you are, do you think verse forms, traditional or ad hoc, are making a comeback? You and I both do variants of the "golden shovel." Sometimes I suggest that aspiring poets take an Auden sonnet, retain the end words, omit the rest and fill in the blanks.

TH: No, I don't think traditional forms are making a comeback, but that's only because I don't think they've ever really gone away. We all need something to push against or outgrow or reinvent, and I believe all the old fashioned forms are where we start and sometimes return to... I suspect if we look under Gertrude Stein's bed we'll fine a sonnet or two.

DL: My old mentor, Kenneth Koch, has a poem ("Fresh Air") in which a mythic personage called "the Strangler" targets bad poets, such as "the maker of comparisons between football and life." To my knowledge no such strictures exist regarding comparisons between basketball and poetry. So I ask you, the dude who guarded Ray Allen in high school, what is the equivalent of a fast break in a poem?

TH: Oh, that's a great question! My answer is syntax--- the way a sentence adjusts its rhythm and angles as it moves across line breaks is surely akin to the way a body or bodies adjust speed and direction in a fast break... Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem "Carrion Comfort" comes to mind. Not in its subject necessarily, but in its verbal grace and athletic syntactical contortions.

Maybe there isn’t room for the whole poem, but behold the linguistic equivalent to a Lebron James fast break:

Carrion Comfort

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

DL: That Hopkins sonnet has one of the all-time great last lines. I sometimes write a poem and notice only afterward that it is in 14 lines with a break around the 8th or 9th line. Do you fall back on the sonnet as a kind of default form? Our anthology opens with one -- albeit an unconventional one -- by Sherman Alexie.

TH: There have been sonnets in all of my books. It's the form I return to most often. It's a centuries old box always waiting to be reshaped, adapted, filled with new words. I love to see what new things poets do with the form. Hence my attraction to the very smart Alexie poem. Alexie also has an on-going interest in poetic form, I think. I can recall a short story of his which utilized the sestina form.

DL: Oh, I love the idea of hiding a sestina within a prose paragraph. Edmund White does that in one of his early novels ("Nocturnes for the King of Naples"). With so much to like in modern and contemporary poetry, does it drive you crazy to see reviews that treat the poet as if he or she were a criminal on the dock? I wonder when the snark arrived – the little imp that instructed magazine editors to commission articles on the “most overrated poet” or the like? I'm not asking reviewers to be cheerleaders, but there is something a little cheap, even cynical, in the excessively nasty pieces that turn up regularly in well-funded magazines.

TH: On one hand, I think the constant assessments (and self-assessments) of poetry (or any cultural phenomena) are ages old. Whether the reviews and lists and critiques are good or bad, outrageous, misguided, I see them as an avenue for people with an interest in poetry. I suppose the feeling of despair comes when the writing seems to be more about the reviewer/critic/list-maker than the actual poetry... It reminds me of the feeling I used to get watching the young Geraldo Rivera. It was as if he needed to situate himself at the cinematic center of whatever drama or tragedy he was covering. It seemed being first was more important than being right. A lot of the online articles on poets and poetry often seem driven by the same quality of self-importance. The more “followers” and potential followers, the worse it is. I guess people just want to be “viral.” (How did “viral” become a good word?) I'm glad to read any provocative or new news about poets and poetry, but these days I trust blogs like Structure and Style or your own Best American Poetry blog where the odor of ego is not a distraction.

DL: Thanks for the plug. I hope you will agree to be a guest blogger on the BAP blog. It is a pity that ego should get in the way of poetry, which seems to require egolessness (also known as "negative capability"). But if most critics are failed poets, that's also true for most poets, alas. As a teacher, do you have a shit list of instantly poetical words you hate to see students use in a poem? Like "cicadas," or like "cupped" as a verb? And a second question: do you think a proliferation of bad poems, stimulated by contests or creative writing classes or whatever, is bad for the art (inasmuch as it lowers the cultural denominator) or good (inasmuch as it is a sign of vitality)? Please answer either -- or both.

TH: Years ago Michael Harper told me "nice," "cute," and "amazing" are three words that never belong in poems. I've been trying to work them into a poem ever since. No luck yet, but I haven't given up. My attitude-- that what's bad might be made good--maybe shows in my response to your second question...

I think the challenges of what makes a poem good or bad have always been with us. Maybe the scale is more evident, more prolific because there are more publication venues these days. It makes the hunt for what anyone considers good or bad more intense, but not impossible. 

DL: Every year when The Best American Poetry is published, I ask my students to write two poems, “one that is better than the best poem in the book and one that is worse than the worst poem.” It’s liberating for them to know they’re entitled to dislike one of the “best” poems. But the real surprise is that in writing a deliberately bad poem, they may happen onto something pretty good.

To pursue the basketball analogy a little further: which poet from the previous generation would you single out as the most difficult to guard?

TH: That's a very tricky question. "Guard" implies a poet to be stopped or maybe overthrown... Uhhh, I don't even think I can say who's the Poet-Jordan of the 90s or the Magic-poet of Magic's era... Certain poets who maybe are not "franchise poets" like Ashbery are still distinct for an inimitable style of play: Allen Grossman, Harryette Mullen, Rae Armantrout, Ed Robeson-- I'm thinking of poets hovering in the avant garde domain, I guess. Poets who write the sort of poems that prompt mutual pleasure and mystery... You can't guard what you can't touch!

DL:  I sometimes think of the prose poem as the equivalent in poetry of the free throw in basketball. Something that should go in, if you’re a professional, and yet Shaq missed a lot of them. Any comment? 

TH: I hadn't thought of it before, but yes, maybe the prose poem is akin to the free throw in that both appear very easy--free of line breaks "should" mean easier, but, no sir. These days I love to go to the gym and do little more than shoot free throws for a few hours. It becomes a meditative act. So I'd probably have associated it with something more formal, something less surreal than the prose poem. But forget that: the prose poem is a smarter parallel.

DL: In your introduction to The Best American Poetry 2014, you say that the 1990 volume, edited by Jorie Graham, was the first book of poems you ever purchased – and that you own all the books in the series. Which are your favorites?

TH: Well, I've taught Rita Dove's 2000 edition more than any other-- partly because it was published around the time I began teaching poetry, partly because it covers such a wide array of styles. And I know, just about by heart, every poem in Graham's edition. Philip Levine's poem "Scouting" and Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It" are still among my very favorite poems. In fact, it's easier to recall favorite poems than favorite books and poets. Allen Grossman's "The Piano Player Plays Himself" from Ashbery's edition-- one of my very favorite poems in the world; Thom Gunn's "The Butcher's Son" from Louise Guck's 93 edition; Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poem, "Scouting the Famous Figures of the Grotto of Improbable Thought," from Ammon's 94 edition; Larry Levis' "Anastastia and Sandman" from Tate's 97 edition. My two favorite poems by Charles Bukowski appear in the series, I discovered the awesome prose poems of Phyllis Koestenbaum (whatever happened to her?) in this series. I first encountered Dean Young in the series-- he's regularly amazing.  If I were to make a list of my top twenty contemporary poems, maybe 60-70 percent would come from the BAP series. I have lots of favorite poems from the last ten years as well, but it'll be another decade before I can say which poems stay with me.

DL: Great answer. Do you have a question for me?

TH: I've long wondered what an edition solely in your hands would look like. I doubt any of the past, present or future editors could do a better job than you alone. What sorts of qualities would you look for in your dream BAP anthology?

DL: I’m grateful for the compliment, but I’d have trepidations about taking on the task. If I did it, I think maybe I would get obsessive, try to read everything, and do little else, though that does not seem like a practical solution. I would hope to find someone like David Lehman to send me packets of poems at regular intervals, nudge and cajole me, and make sure I hadn’t overlooked something vital.

During your year reading for The Best American Poetry 2014, did you write much poetry of your own? If yes, is it because reading poems, especially good ones, acts as a spur?

TH:  Yes, I wrote while I was hunting poems. Whenever and whatever I'm reading I often approach as a miner (looking for creative influences/resources), teacher (a teachable poem isn't the same as a poem that opens the roof) and fan (looking to have the roof torn off). I found lots of roof rippers and even poems that were both teachable and awe-inspiring, but I can't recall any one poem directly impacting a poem I wrote in the last year or so. Eventually, I'd love to try what Sherman Alexie does with the sonnet form and what Rosemary Griggs does with the "Script Poem." Subversions and appropriations of form are always of interest to me. 

The Sea Is Wild Tonight

A Pilgrimage to Ancient MFA's

                               

On the westernmost ledge of Europe near Slea Head in the Kingdom of Kerry, huts of corbelled stone cluster by the Atlantic. Clocháns, they are called, quarried from native rock and hefted into place a thousand years ago, though a thousand years means little to these sea-sprayed fields. If not for the hand-printed sign advertising, “Dunbeg Stone Fort—Beehive Huts Ahead,” I might have trundled past, having my hands full keeping my rental from careening into gorgeous oblivion. I unfold my Yankee length from the sedan and rattle the chain until a pensioner in burdocked overalls shambles down the path to unlock the gate and collect the two Euro admission. As we climb gorse hillocks he keeps up a hum of badinage about Skellig Michael and the Book of the Dun Cow; Kevin and Colmcille and the Blind O’Driscolls, as if raillery could coax them back to life.

“Where’s home?” he asks; then mulls “Ohio” knowingly, as if to seal the secret. At the crest of a mound, he stiffens a finger at the dense, silent city of beehive huts.

They are eight flint humps rising from packed clay. I circle them, then lean against the largest, patting its warty flank. Somehow, with no moldings or wood supports, the makers have executed a mousehole-shaped doorway. I peer into the thigh-high portal, then bend deeper to enter the dark. Inside, moss and clay close in. As my eyes adjust, flecks of daylight pierce the unmortared stone.

Re-emerging into light that now seems brilliant, I wonder who lived here. I don’t know much about 8^th century architecture, but it’s clear that more commodious hovels could have been dug, even out of straw. And there was wood here once, before the forests were cleared.

     “Twas the poets,” crows our host, with a look that seems to mock an age that mistakes height for stature.

     As he expounds on the annals of this desolate place, rhapsodizing about bards who memorized thousands of lines and fili who encoded the esoteric ‘rosc’ poetry—“the like of which wasn’t heard again until that Joyce fella”—it dawns on me that these were early MFA’s. Our guide doesn’t know the exact requirements, but the curriculum, he says, took between twelve and twenty years to complete, depending on the degree. There were brehons, a class of poet-lawyers who could splice royal lineages as far back as Finn MacCumhal, and monks who cribbed a hunk of western civ on moldy vellum. Behind the monks lurked the specter of druids, whose secret examinations were so perilous that only one in three survived.

     Well, between the ritual deaths and the frigid dorms, the registrar wouldn’t have been too busy.

It’s commonplace to say that MFA programs produce too many writers. Asked if writing programs didn’t wind up discouraging young writers, Flannery O’Connor famously replied, “not nearly enough.” But it seems an odd complaint. After all, what’s wrong with breeding talent?  Ancient cultures set aside resources for artistic training; why shouldn’t we? And while we’re at it, why not pipe in some heat and cut a skylight?

Over the last half-century, MFA programs have allowed generations of students from diverse backgrounds to cultivate their gifts. Even if most of our graduates don’t wind up on Oprah, they will have experienced an apprenticeship in a mind-broadening field; they will have learned principles of form and nuance that translate into many occupations, and they will have plumbed their potential for self and world-awareness. At the very least, they will have become better readers.

Thus preaches my committee in Ohio and thus have we held during the long years shaping a new consortial MFA program: a cluster of four state universities, each encrusted with a bureaucracy as hermetic as these huts. Appealing for the benediction of the Board of Regents, we spaded proposals, chiseled curricula, and spread spread-sheets over roundtables like fresh straw. The campaign took as long as it once took to certify a bard.

One document we had no trouble composing was the Needs Statement. Having viewed the dizzy graphs, we knew that there’d be plenty of applicants. In Northeast Ohio, just as across the country, the workshops are filling up.

We had a bit more of a problem when it came to explaining what we thought all these students would do when they graduate. They could teach, of course; and we put that down right away. Numero Uno. But a glance at current classes—one prof for fifteen students—revealed that none but a few would achieve this august goal. PhD’s are in the same boat:  they survive at about the same rate as wannabe druids. What fraction of our grads climbs on the tenure track? The graphs didn’t say.

Without certification they can’t teach in public high schools, but they might hook up with Poets in the Schools programs, or join the swelling army of adjuncts, or coach soccer at prep school. But even jury-rigged, the ark leaked. So we needed another plank. And we found one:

While the MFA is not a vocational degree, creative writing and publishing constitute a large enterprise that requires new talent…. Major companies in Northeast Ohio depend on a supply of skilled writers and editors. The internship collaboration with local communities, as well as the teaching experience available to MFA teaching assistants, will equip our graduates to enter new and expanding writing fields.

Fair enough. The world needs editors, technical writers, advertisers; and the MFA degree is an ideal preparation for all sorts of writing, just as the committee claims. But today, with the whitecaps mounting coastal granite and the wind stinging the wildness into a wet squint, it all seems awfully tame. I think of a tenth century poem scrawled in the margins of his calligraphy by a monk in a stone settlement just like this one.

     The sea is wild tonight.

    No need to fear

    that Viking hoards will come

     and terrify me.

 Do I envy that ancient poet scanning the Atlantic through a chink in his beehive hut? He faced no committees, no boards. No need to justify his scarecrow muse.  But I don’t yearn to take his place. I’d miss the food and company and light and warmth, and those Vikings sound more dangerous than a provost.

Yet today I could almost yield to the conceit that even in Ohio we live on the edge of a great ocean, peering into the mist, the way these ancient hut dwellers peered out. The sea is not the Atlantic with its terrifying ships, and our universities are far from beehive huts. They are capacious, starbucked, crackling with Wi-Fi. In fact, they seem more like great longships themselves, raiding coasts the Vikings never dreamt of. 

And what, to stretch this metaphor, do they raid? Why do these splendid vessels terrify?

Drenched and stiff-limbed, I think with tenderness of the rolling seas of Ohio. I’m proud of the work that my colleagues and I did conceiving, planning and implementing the NEOMFA program. From four separate entities we made a web. We forged bonds among our faculties and paved the way for a program with a virtual campus encompassing hundreds of square miles. We fostered a community that crisscrosses the rust belt. We’ve even laughed about getting a school bus. Still, I feel uneasy. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but in all our meetings I never felt truly at home. I never wrote or spoke in my own language, never thought about the wayward accidents that had nourished my own writing life or how to bring them to bear on younger lives. Not that I want to calligraphy our proposal on parchment, or chant it in rosc, or storm the Regents, proclaiming like Cuchulain, “I give no more proof than the hawk gives that he’s no dove.” But as I recall our solid, serviceable, and successful proposal, with its headings and sub-headings and graphs and samples, I wish that somewhere in the margin I had doodled, “the sea is wild tonight/ No need to fear…”

What I feared then was abandonment. If we didn’t sell our program in terms administrators approved, we would not be allowed a seat on the great ship. What I fear now, after we’ve been ushered on board, is that in composing a plan shaped by the university’s priorities, we tainted something essential at the core of creativity. It might be something felt only in the dark, when even the chinks of light fade.

I fear, even more than slashed budgets and fainting enrollment, being absorbed by a culture that tolerates but does not sustain us. I fear that in defining ourselves in foreign terms like ‘accountability,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘utility,’ we forsake the place where we are most useful, accountable to the voices that speak through us from the past. I fear that in gaining a chair at the amply-set table, we lose our way back to a grave darkness that, once extinguished, may be beyond recovery.

How would such a self-fulfilling proposal look? What would I change, after a pilgrimage to these ancestral MFA’s? It’s tempting to say I’d fling the doors open to artists and performers and visionaries and yes, even lawyers—if they were bold enough to enter a world without codicils. I’d ask students to choose an authentic art using the tools most native: sound, memory, insight, or vision. Writing is not the only way to find this place; it’s just a technology, and should not rule by fetishistic power. Of course we’d have no poetry majors, fiction majors, creative non-fiction majors, translation majors, or playwriting majors. Erase the boundaries. Instead of huddling them into genres, let specialties emerge and entwine out of immersion in all.  Modern descendants of early MFA’s should know that they have more in common with the motley inhabitants of this silent city than with people who make advertisements or briefs or newspapers—or university proposals. Open the workshops. But close the craft & theory courses: veil the mysteries from all but initiates. For internships let’s have real ships. Require penniless travel and field work in pastures instead of offices. Teach work that pays the rent, engages hand and mind and frees us from selling genius to a market which twists talent to its own ends.  Give credit to poems that bring rain—or in this climate, stop it. Credit for stories that sift into the underworld. Credit for not writing sequels. Graduation comes at the point of exhaustion or death or a re-entry into selfhood that bears the world inside. Yes, it’s tempting, in the slanting rain as I trudge back to my car from a hillock near Slea Head, to revise our MFA proposal. But I don’t want these changes, except in dreams where Ohio is a stormy coast.  With my colleagues at home, I stand by the words we wrote.

     But I want a larger space for such dreams. Or should I say—after squeezing into a beehive hut—a more intense space, so real and present that it might tint the fluorescent light of a committee room or throb in the engine of an old beater bearing a student across the whaleroad of Northeast Ohio. Let this small dark space remind us who we are, where we come from, and what, if we fail to dream, we might become.

(from By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard  University of Tennessee Press) 

TALES OF THE SIXTIES: JEALOUSY IN THE AGE OF LIBERATION [by Alan Ziegler]

            Alicia and I are monogamous. In some 1969 circles, fidelity is an impediment to liberation, and jealousy a means of oppression. Occasionally Alicia wants to discuss it, “not because I want to change it, but because I want to understand the contradictions.” We go to school in separate states, and I'm worried that our states of mind are drifting apart.

            I try this argument: Sure, sexual fidelity is a linchpin of an oppressive system, and in the best of new worlds one could have a main squeeze and be up front about squeezing others on the side, no more threatening than dancing with someone else (“She showed me some new steps I can’t wait to show you”). That’s the way it will be. But there’s a grandfather clause — if two people fell in love with the old mind-set, they have the option to live by it.

             She buys it.

            Still, I am nervous when Alicia writes that her roommate has dropped out of Goddard, and a guy named Sean, who is crashing classes, is staying in her room. “There’s nothing to be jealous about,” she assures in her letter. “He’s just a friend.” At least she is accepting the possibility, if not the appropriateness, of jealousy.

            When I mention to my friends that a guy is staying with my girlfriend, their eyes widen and I say, “Hey, it’s no problem, we need to get beyond possessiveness.” I do request that Sean find another place to sleep when I come up the next weekend, though it never bothers me when another woman is in the room while we have muffled sex under the covers.

            Sean is there when I arrive. Wan with a scraggly beard, he is more puppy than wolf, and I score points with Alicia by feigning interest in the architectural drawings in his notebook. “You were so nice to him,” she says after Sean leaves.

             I have it all: sexual fidelity without begging for it, while maintaining my progressive reputation.

             On Saturday afternoon, Alicia is at one of the endless meetings they have in their group house, figuring out how to govern themselves without government. Today’s topic is dishwashing. I stay in the room to do schoolwork. I am enrolled in a course called “Sex, Censorship, and Literature” (we call it “Porn 101”). The professor told me the highest grade I can get will be a D because I have missed so many classes to spend time with Alicia (“No points for irony.”) To avoid an F, I have to do a decent textual analysis of White Thighs.

             I soon get bored with the book, in which women ejaculate and their hairy armpits are erogenous zones. I pace around the room: unmade twin beds, a smattering of books and papers, modest stereo equipment, and a poster of the Last Supper tableaux posed by modern-day hippies. I pick up Sean’s black, beaten leather sketchbook — the kind I’ve always wanted — and flip through the pages, admiring his meticulous drawings. I come across a diary entry in Sean’s tiny, precise lettering, unlike my baby scrawl.

             The entry is in the form of a letter to Sean’s girlfriend, starting with how much he misses her and a reference to the changes they are both going through. People are going through lots of changes these days. The Firesign Theater’s Nick Danger is told, “I can’t knock success, but you still put me through too many changes,” Phil Ochs sings “Changes,” and some people I know swear by The Book of Changes.

             I am enjoying the letter — glad these aren’t my girlfriend’s changes — when the words slept with jump out from a sentence down the page. Alicia leaps out next. Heart fluttering, I read like Evelyn Wood’s star pupil: .... faithful .... up here .... haven’t slept with anyone .... except once .... Alicia .... wasn’t good .... agreed .... not again.

            I am quick to confront the federal government or the university administration, but I tend to delay confrontations with those close to me, especially Alicia, rehearsing them in my head until either the issue goes away on its own or I have a persuasive argument. But I cannot delay this one. Though I feel disoriented and dizzy, I have to confront Alicia immediately.

             I wade to the room where the meeting is, and open the door. They keep right on with their free and open debate: "I have the right to let the dishes get dirty if I don’t mind eating on them!” I catch Alicia’s eye and beckon her to the door.

             “What’s wrong?”

            “You know what’s wrong,” I say, as if I have read the journal aloud to her. “Did you sleep with Sean?” I ask, hoping that the journal’s narrator is as unreliable as the one in White Thighs.

             Instead of dissolving into tears as she crumbles into my arms begging forgiveness, she is calm and defiant: Yes, we have done it once, it wasn’t good, it happened weeks ago, there is less to worry about now with Sean since it is out of the way, we aren’t married or even living together though who knows if even that would preclude it with someone else, she is sorry I found out the way I did.

             Alicia has clearly gone through some changes. Her brown eyes are emboldened by a confluence of forces that has me beating on against the current, borne ceaselessly into the future.

             If I say the wrong thing, I may lose her. I rally my will, promise her I will work on the relevant issues she’s raised, and start thinking of women I can screw.

             That night in bed I touch Alicia's arm. She reaches down between my legs, and when I get hard she starts to sob.

(from the working draft of Based on a True Life: A Memoir in Pieces)

Next Line, Please: Rhyme Sandwich [by David Lehman]

Illustration of Edward Lear's "There was an Old Man with a Nose."

For the new installment of the American Scholar's Next Line, Please contest, David Lehman has invited readers to write a limerick: 

Everyone who likes rhymes and jokes has at least one good limerick in him or her. No one has yet figured out a way to put the limerick to anything but lighthearted use. But the British poet Wendy Cope showed great originality in paraphrasing (and parodying) the five sections of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as five limericks, which you’ll find if you click here.

The five lines of a limerick amount to a rhyme sandwich, an eminently suitable form for saucy wit. The best limericks are bawdy but too good-natured to seem truly obscene. Their humor keeps offense at bay.

Here’s a famously anonymous example that has made it into several light-verse anthologies:

An Argentine gaucho named Bruno

Said, “Sex is one thing I do know.

Women are fine,

And sheep just divine,

But a llama is numero uno.”

Continue reading for the rules and to enter your own limerick. 

-- sdh

Basketball at 60 [Philip Brady]

I’ve been happy these days, moment by moment, and the mind that once roiled with lust and rage is tranquil. The big questions have all been answered. How will I do? Whom will I love? What will I untimely suffer? What dread fire?

But that’s not all.  I feel a presence. Not too close, not imminent. An impending shadow, out there in the zone of tinnitus or climate change.  Age. I am on the verge of withering into truth.

Yet, at noon on Mondays and Fridays, I spread my leaves, grab my gym bag and trot to the rec center. I am playing basketball again.

It’s been so long since I suited up that I don’t know what to do with my bifocals or wedding ring. The shorts are bloomers, the jersey is an ad banner, and the clown-big sneakers swoosh.  The nets are distant as Joyce’s God; the floor is hospital parquet. There’s even a three-point line (three is two in a game to eleven by ones).

But I’m back. Nothing has changed. And everything.

 

I don’t feel old. If I woke alone in a strange bed, I’d have no notion if I were thirty or sixty.  Pull the blinds and my prana could lounge through any of ten thousand mornings, teaching or biking or bavading or banging the bodhran sans calendar. I’ve lost no bandwidth of memory, no inch of height.  I was already bald. I have no children or corporate ladder to notch years. My job is stagnant, my town timeless as Brigadoon.

But change is coming. By fall or slide or decrepitude or aphasia, in some nearly foreseeable season it will come. Age. The vestibule of empty.  I expect it, as I once anticipated manhood.  And like manhood, it will arrive all at once.

But for now, I am ageless. Everywhere but here.

Of course, I’m not really playing, if playing means being in the game. Most basketball activities are no longer available to me. I can’t sprint, or box, or shoot. I have no hops. Good thing I’m lefty, since I can barely lift my right arm above my shoulder. My eyes seem ok, and from wrist to fingertip I’m unimpaired. And in this pick-up game I’m still tall. I can slouch my ass down to Bethlehem and post up.

Who are these lunchtime hoopsters? They are the quick. Neither moribund nor slow. For the quick, the future is a distant rim, the past a no-look turnover. What transpires here and now—on the court, on earth—is all that counts: How good? How long?  Always? Anyone else?

For the quick I am not ageless. I am a portent.

I look the part. Bald helps, but I bring so much more: bypass scar, droop eye, liver spots, cabbage knees. I jog as if through swamp. I am my own slow-mo replay. My countenance bears witness to campaigns beneath rusted rims. I am six degrees from Dr. Naismith.

The quick take heed. They profer no trash. Both sides cheer my rare scores. A budding paramedic asks twice if I’m alright. Through whole sessions I am unjostled.  Today, after yawning through my abbreviated up-fake and arthritic hook, my defender patted my ass. “Fundamentals, Old School,” he purred. “Sound.” 

To the quick, I am a semi-portable totem.

After lunch, I hobble back my desk, gulp Powerade and lour. After lunch, I am an editor. Poetry editors are not quick. We plod. We stall. We are in daily congress with the ageless. So what if quick verses flash by? Let them break unmetrically and enjamb on a dime.  When stanzas drive head down, when they fade from three for two, when they won’t pass, I tap my comic-strip fedora and chomp my wraith cigar.

“Fundamentally unsound,” I  growl.

I pat their ass and sit them on the bench. Then I roll out the x’s and o’s.

“Ok Speedsters, huddle up.”

 

    They stroll through gentian and coltsfoot to the pond’s edge,

    while last light silts the water. Dusk

    and Monet believes again this is his masterwork; that’s why

    he stays; to be inside the painting unscrews

 

“Stop there, Ace. Gentian? Coltfoot? You’re from Queens. They’re just botanical symbols to you.  And the line breaks? Yes, I get it: torquing the syntax, that little stutter step. Yes, dusk at the margin is eerie and seems to swallow all six beats.   But where to go from there? You’ve pushed the caesura to the brink, but haven’t laid down the dream cadence. You’re riffing off no pattern. 

My fingernail screeches across the board.

“Past ‘Dusk’ the silence is so grave I’m shouldered out of the dream and I never reach Monet. It’s all one direction. Only one thing happens.”

I rap my knuckle on the three last words.

“Dusk. Why. Unscrews.

"They’re real and here and now.  You think they enjamb, but for me they end stop. I can’t go back.  I’m standing alone out of time.”  

I swipe the board clean. “Next.”

 

      There is a place in far north Canada…

     To lurch, crooning in moonlight from the pub…

     
     Broke in my mother’s country

     where there are no woods…

 

“What do they do, these gambits?  They live. Here in the blessed world. I get it. And why not say what happened, as Lowell asked. But Lowell first ran years of suicide sprints. His ‘what happened’ was a refuge; yours is an adventure.

“So stop. Look again. Why not say it awake: in sentences.  When Pound said that poetry needed to be at least as well written as prose, he wasn’t talking about grammar. He meant—or I say he meant—that sentences will always be our first way of moving through the waking world. One on one on one. Forward. Capable of being seen.  But they move in one direction. Lines have to offer something else, compassing return.

“Poetry isn’t a set of conventions any more than basketball is an industry. It’s  a way of doubling, of being in and out.  You play, and your mind sings, daydreams, makes love, or enters a dark forest.  It happens once in sentences.  But lines glide back and forth, above and below the rim. They are the present absence.” 

 

But I can’t tell these rookies anything, any more than I could tell anything to that gunner who first cribbed those boards—that is, the quick kid that was me so long ago. 

It’s not their fault, I know.  It’s me. I’ve lost my touch. I can’t play the quick. They are bright and earnest and freshly pixelated. But they are completely present. They press full court. They charge both ways at once.  

And they can’t play me.  To them, I am already bronzed.

Lunchtime is different. It doesn’t take place all at once. All the lunchtimes of the past close in. Because my legs are slow and my mind quick, one sneaker runs in the shade of once and the other paces alongside in the glare of now.

This poor forked animal trundling between tenses? Once it battled Mazembé under a Katanga moon; once it autographed “Rick Barry” for skinheads on a Dublin tram; once it played—really played—with spirit, sweat and nerve—on this very court at lunchtime eons back, when flesh and soul were ‘twined.

But it is only grappling  with now that once achieves final form.

The quick sense this; in my rooted footwork and palsied dribbling they glimpse the form in which we all drift, quick and slow, toward agelessness, encompassing three decades and three hundred.  

These I can play with: poems of the ages. From a far once they utter now—the ultimate three for two by ones. And whether once took place in Troy or Lubumbashi or at Monday’s lunchtime when a quick kid windmilled the winning score,  without the ageless nothing can touch now. 

 

So afternoons at my desk I play the ageless, who are still quick. In this game, everything still counts.

The semicolon in the last quatrain of “Easter 1916” still counts.

                       

    We know their dream; enough

    To know they dreamed and are dead. 

Does Yeats mean it is enough to dream? That we should believe the dream because the heroes died for it? Is Yeats the last Romantic?

Or has he taken his talents to Team Modernism? Do we know only their dream: Do we know the dream only well enough to know that they did dream, distantly as the awakened know?

A comma tips it one way; a period the other. The semicolon keeps us waiting still, paused in the infinite fraction between “enough” and “to know.”

 

Richard Tottel, on the verge of scratching, “It was no dream, I lay broad waking” for “For it was not a dream, I lay awake” on the galleys of his Miscellany, still counts.

If he does it, the tabloids howl.  

“The Knight kept it real,” the blogs claim. “Wyatt’s a genius. Tottel’s a bum.”

But what if the waking needs to be taken slow, as Ted Roethke tweets, so the body can glide ten thousand days at once. Maybe Tottel fears an untimely fracture.

As I still fear.

 

And Homer—nicknamed for some hobo ballplayer. Does he count? Somewhere between the quick success of his first book and the first draft of his second, with the banquets and tributes and guest appearances, he’s lost his game.

The Iliad opens in sync with his Olympian coach. “Begin dreaming here,” he commands.

    Start at the point where Agamemnon, son of Atreus,


    that king of men, quarrelled with noble Achilles.


By the time he pens the sequel, he’s lost touch.

    So now, daughter of Zeus,

    tell us his story, starting anywhere you wish.

 “Please Muse,” he’s begging her, “Start dreaming anyplace. I don’t know where I am. Please keep me in. I’ll play with everything I have left.”

 Far into overtime these contests are still in doubt.

And in my hip-sore gait, in my trash-muttering, in my spasmic bound—just maybe—the quick will sense that nothing happens at once, and that everything now continues to season, and that even the ageless yearn and fear to age.

And them, the ageless? At lunchtime Mondays and Fridays, if they lean forward from the cheap seats of the Garden’s blue heaven, they might still hear me gasp,  “Keep me in. Play me the fundamental sound. Let me, for this one hour, count.”

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

H.L. Hix Took His Writer's Block Out Back and Shot That Sucker Dead [Philip Brady]

And another thing about The Other Sky. Aron Wiesenfeld's images will appear on two new book covers this Spring: Nin Andrews' Why God Is A Woman  from BOA

and Joseph P. Wood's YOU. from Etruscan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I look forward to seeing these books from two of my favorite poets.They have something in common besides the images: Nin tells us why God is a woman, and Joseph explains why man is sumpin else. 

 

Meanwhile, here's an address given by H.L. Hix at the Wilkes University Low-Residency Creative Writing graduation banquet. 

 

I do not take lightly the privilege of speaking within a community of writers committed to their craft, led by a distinguished and dedicated faculty, so let me reiterate my thanks to Bonnie Culver for the opportunity to join your work in this way.  Her vision and her tireless labor have created an environment in which we all of us here may flourish as writers. 

Wilkes University is an institution of higher learning, and the creative writing M.A. and M.F.A. programs are advanced degrees.  To live up to such a context, I should offer you something august and effete, something profound and magisterial.  Instead, the title of my talk is:

I Took My Writer’s Block Out Back and Shot That Sucker Dead

  My claim is simple: there is no good reason to endure writer’s block, ever.

My argument, too, is simple: the very concept of “writer’s block” congeals out of a number of misconceptions, and correcting those misconceptions clears the way to eliminating the problem.

My methodology will be equally simple: I’ll identify two of the relevant misconceptions, propose alternative conceptions, and derive from those alternatives practical techniques that guarantee you need never give in to writer’s block.  Then I’ll hint at other misconceptions and solutions we could pursue in a longer talk than this one will be.

Here’s a place to start.  The field of psychology has a guidebook known by the acronym DSM, short for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, that attempts to identify, describe, and classify mental disorders.  Its aim is to guide professionals in their diagnosis and treatment of mental issues.  But suppose a major entry, one often consulted, such as the entry on depression, were anachronistic and misleading.  Suppose it described depression as the direct result of childhood sexual trauma, rather than as a symptom of particular variations in brain chemistry.  The result would be a lot of unnecessary suffering by a lot of people.  A lot of patients would spend a lot of hours talking out their sexual histories with a lot of bored therapists, while their serotonin levels just kept right on being low.

If there were a DSM for writers, a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Writing Disorders, surely Writer’s Block would be a frequently consulted entry.  The DSM for writers I’m imagining here currently describes Writer’s Block as a debility that one suffers, and for which there is no cure except waiting it out: sitting passively at one’s desk, staring at the blank page or blank screen for as long as it takes, until something comes.  But I say that’s as profound a misunderstanding as the notion that people who are depressed all have unresolved sexual issues from childhood, and need to talk them out. 

The real DSM doesn’t make that mistake, though popular culture does: professional practice of treatment for mental disorders has predominantly to do with psychiatry; popular portrayals, with psychotherapy.  And there are similar discrepancies in other fields.  There is a popular image of the scientist, for instance, that one can see in films and in cartoons: the wild-eyed man (yes, it’s usually a man) with furious hair, wearing an ill-fitting lab coat, hunched over bubbling beakers and test tubes, concocting some potion.  Fortunately, real scientists know better than to imitate that popular vision.  They know that science almost always has to do with experimenting, and almost never with concocting.  There is much more method than madness. 

Something analogous holds, I suggest, in regard to writers.  There is a popular image of the writer as a genius, who sits in a café wearing a beanie or who hunches in a shady dive sipping absinthe, scribbling the mysteries that flash across that racing mind, the way the rest of us might scribble our dreams upon waking.  Real writers don’t often fall for that clumsy popular notion: I know a lot of writers, but none of them wear beanies, and if they’re sipping absinthe they haven’t been sharing any with me.  Still, writer’s block is a way of falling prey to more subtle misconceptions.

 

Inspiration

So here is one example of a misconception about writing, and the cure for writer’s block implied by a more accurate conception.  One popular conception assumes that writing happens in a flash of inspiration.  This is a widely-held view among those who do not write, but it is also a tempting one for those of us who do.  Remember the story Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells about the origin of his poem “Kubla Khan”?  It’s a perfect example: I had taken — upon doctor’s orders, of course — “an anodyne” (laudanum, an opiate whose effects many leisured Brits of the nineteenth century much appreciated), so I was sleeping, and I had a vision.  When I woke up, I wrote it down word for word, but while I was writing I was interrupted by a visitor, and when I returned the vision was gone, so I was left with just a fragment.  Coleridge’s words offer the ultimate writer’s fantasy: “The Author” (Coleridge speaks of himself in third person, as “the Author,” capital A), the Author “continued for about three hours in a profound sleep, at least of the external senses, during which time he has the most vivid confidence, that he could not have composed less than from two to three hundred lines; if that indeed can be called composition in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.”

Alas, however, Coleridge’s tale about the writing of “Kubla Khan” is to the reality of the writing process what Baywatch is to the reality of life in America: fine as escapist fantasy, perhaps, but neither accurate as a description nor sound as an ideal.  And just as I might find myself unlucky in love if I took seriously the tv’s insinuation that only men with square jaws and women with round boobs are desirable, so I might find myself in writer’s block if I took seriously the insinuations in Coleridge’s poetic creation myth.

A more accurate conception of writing, though, wards away the danger.  The misconception we call “inspiration” pretends that writing occurs in a single step.  The inspired writer just writes the work, start to finish, first word to last.  Again, think of film depictions of the inspired writer, rapidly scribbling brilliant words across the tablet, barely able to keep up with the rapid dictation of the muse.  The truth is that writing is a two-step process: first, one gets something on the page, then one revises.  On such a conception, writer’s block goes from inevitable to impossible.  Suddenly what I call “the Stafford solution” is available to us.  I call it that by appeal to the funny — and beautiful and wise — answer the poet William Stafford gave once in an interview, when asked what he did when he faced writer’s block.  He replied, “I lower my standards.”  The insight in Stafford’s reply is that the quality of the final work bears no relationship to the quality of what is first written down.  If writing is a one-step process, then everything I write has to be brilliant.  If writing is a two-step process, then the quality of what I put on the page in step one need bear no relationship to the quality of what will be on the page after step two.  Because there is a step two, step one (“put something on the page”) can really mean “put something — anything — on the page.”  What I first put on the page can be terrible, even stupid, and that implies nothing about what will be there after I’ve revised.  If we make explicit what is implicit in Stafford’s reply, we take away its wit, but we make the point plain: I solve writer’s block by lowering my standards in step one of the writing process.  If my writing doesn’t have to be brilliant at the start, if it can get brilliant along the way, then I’m unstuck.

 

Improvement

While we’re on the subject of revision, it’s worth adjusting also a misconception that is about revision.  It’s more subtle than the nonsense about inspiration, but it still enables writer’s block.  The misconception is that revision is the process of steadily improving one’s work.  Sounds nice, but actually it’s paralyzing.  If it were true, it would mean that every change I make has to be a change for the better.  And how could I make that the case if I didn’t know in advance what changes will work?  That’s just as stifling as the one-step it’s-brilliant-from-the-first-moment fantasy of inspiration.  Instead of everything I write having to be good, and my having to know it’s good when I write it, the requirement just gets shifted to revision: every revision has to be good, and I have to know that when I make it.

The adjusted conception I propose is that revision is an ongoing process of experiment.  It may result ultimately in improvement, but things might get worse before they get better.  This change is the sister of the one I just suggested, a recognition that revision in particular, like writing in general, occurs in two steps instead of one.  Instead of thinking that in revising I am directly and immediately improving the draft in question, I would more aptly think that I am creating a comparator, an additional alternative, and then selecting between them.  That sounds like a subtle difference, and maybe it is, but in relation to writer’s block the result is huge.  If revision were improvement, then I’d have to understand what was wrong with the draft in question and know how to fix the problem before I could revise.  The two-step revision process allows me to extend the Stafford solution to revision: I can continue to have low standards!  The new draft that emerges from my revision can be worse than the old draft being revised: so what?  If that turns out to be the case, then in step two, selection between the alternatives, I just choose the older draft.  Then I run through the process again.  I can produce as many bad drafts as I need to, and I just keep choosing the old draft until I finally happen on a new one that is better. 

Notice the practical difference this makes.  To make improvement steady, I would have to be smart: I would need to identify the problem with the current draft before starting in on the next one.  But if I’m just creating a second item in order to choose between the two, then I don’t have to be smart at all, and I don’t have to have figured out what the problem is.  I can make myself a list of variables, and mechanically apply rules that relate to them.  One variable is length: I can add enough to this poem or paragraph to make it half again as long, or cut enough to make it half as long.  Another variable is point of view: if the current version is in first person, I can change it to third.  And so on through any number of variables.  The ease and power of this is that the rule being applied doesn’t have to be rational.  Regarding the variable of word choice, I once wrote a sequence of poems in which the step from one draft to the next was that I applied the rule that I had to take a word from the first poem and substitute it for a word in the second poem that had the same number of syllables, then take that word and put it into the third poem, and so on, all the way through the sequence.  It’s a silly-sounding rule, but think of what it did for me.  It’s important to avoid “flat” diction (predictable words in predictable places), but it’s also hard to identify which words are predictable.  I didn’t have to find the predictable words: I just started substituting words one for another, and let the predictable ones get replaced.  There’s always a rule to apply, and applying them is always safe, because I’m not at risk of making a false step: I’m just creating a second version so I can compare the two and choose whichever I prefer.

 

Etcetera

You get the idea.  In relation to substance addiction, there’s a term, “enabling,” to refer to ways in which those associated with an addict can (without meaning to) “enable” the addict to fulfill the addiction.  In relation to writer’s block, misconceptions about writing itself act as enablers.  We could extend the list well beyond the two I’ve just described.

• The idea that writing is always self-expression leaves no options at moments when one has nothing to express; recognizing that writing can also be discovery is freeing.

• The idea that writing results primarily from introspection leaves no options at moments when I look inside and there’s nothing there; recognizing that writing can result from various forms of research frees me to go find things elsewhere.

• The idea that good writing is wholly original leaves me no options when nothing original is coming to mind; recognizing that writing, even the greatest writing, makes use of conventions, allows me draw on conventions also.

And so on.  I’ll conclude by simply noting that this writing program emphasizes the point I’m making.  The idea that writing is a solitary endeavor is also an enabler, one that is shut down by the recognition that writing occurs within community, and that one can find, in a community such as this one, help from others: writing teachers and writing friends.  This beats writer’s block anyday.

H.L.Hix 

Mark Doty + Vijay Seshadri + Season Finale Party

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

This Monday at KGB: Mark Doty + Vijay Seshadri + Season Finale Party

Monday, December 8, 2014

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

MARK DOTY's Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008. His eight books of poems include School of the Arts, Source, and My Alexandria. He has also published four volumes of nonfiction prose: Still Life with Oysters and Lemon, Heaven's Coast, Firebird and Dog Years, which was a New York Times bestseller in 2007. The Art of Description, a handbook for writers, appeared in 2011. Widely anthologized, his poems appear in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and many other collections....Doty's work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, two Lambda Literary Awards and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. He is the only American poet to have received the T.S. Eliot Prize in the U.K., and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ingram Merrill and Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundations, and from the National Endowment for the Arts....Doty lives in New York City and on the east end of Long Island. He is Professor/Writer in Residence at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Two new books are forthcoming, both from W.W. Norton: What Is the Grass, a prose meditation on Walt Whitman and the ecstatic, and Deep Lane, a new volume of poems.

VIJAY SESHADRI is the author of Wild Kingdom (1996), The Long Meadow (2003), which won the James Laughlin Award, and 3 Sections (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Pulitzer committee described the book as “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.” Seshadri has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has worked as an editor at the New Yorker and has taught at Bennington College and Sarah Lawrence College, where he currently directs the graduate non-fiction writing program.

A Dialogue Among Genres [Philip Brady]

Here it is—my first word of Blog. Wait, that was it. There. Now, no. Slithery little beggar, that first word. Well, I guess there is no word, and no here.

When I read blogs, I always thought the blogger was right there—typing away.

“Sunny day, scalp itches, kettle’s whistling.” That’s the point, no?

Web Log. Date stamped. Drafty. Provisional. The Blogger Is In— or as much as could be downloaded—which turns out, by fantastical coincidence, to be the same dosage found in non-blog writing.

Writing, says I, takes time. No, not takes: Consumes. Lays Waste to. It is to time as Kong is to a banana. And the worst is poetry. 

In a poem the poet situates themselves. In a blog, the reader does so. You peruse this on a certain morning, (or 17.5 seconds of it—the average blog read) munching your cereal and banana, and I attest it was composed close to that day. We agree to breakfast contemporaneously, to the extent that our shared fruit deprives you and I of the same natural light.

But beyond that, no guarantees for the week. For all I know, what we are reading on Monday, December 8, 2014, may have been dunked in Styx, not Trix. But whenever it takes place, I'd like us to join a dialogue among genres. 

Here's the cover of a new book coming out this Spring from Etruscan,  a dialogue between Bruce Bond, a poet, and Aron Wiesenfeld, an artist. It’s called The Other Sky.

 

In his introduction to The Other Sky, Stephen Dunn writes, "Aron Wiesenfeld’s paintings have a haunting clarity and odd beauty, and Bruce Bond is a gifted lyric poet. Between the two artists is a kind of call and response. The paintings invite speculation, and thus the lyric poet is driven to imagine and tell the stories that are behind them. In other words, Wiesenfeld activates in Bond the narrative poet. The result is a rare collaboration of sensibilities. Both artists seemingly hide nothing from us, one with a kind of photographic sureness, the other with syntactical precision. Both like to be clear about the mysterious."

 

Here is a paired image by Aron Weisenfeld and poem by Bruce Bond from The Other Sky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Delta

 If you are going there by foot, prepare to get wet.

You are not you anymore.

 

You are a girl standing in a pool

of clouds as they catch fire in the distance.

 

There are laws of heaven and those of place and those

who see the sky in the water,

 

angels in ashes that are the delta’s now.

They say if you sweep the trash from your house

 

after dark, you sweep away your luck. If you are

going by foot, bring a stick,

 

a third leg, and honor the great disorder,

the great broom of waterfowl and songbirds.

 

Prepare to voodoo your way, best you can, knowing there

is a little water in things

 

you take for granted, a little charity

and squalor for the smallest forms of life.

 

Voodoo was always mostly charity.

People forget. If you shake a tablecloth

 

outside at night, someone in your family dies.

There are laws we make thinking

 

it was us who made them. We are not us. We are a

floodplain by the Mississippi

 

that once poured slaves upriver to the fields.

We are a hurricane in the making.

 

We could use a magus who knows something about

suffering, who knows a delta’s needs.

 

We understand if you want a widow

to stay single, cut up her husband’s shoes.

 

He is not himself anyway and walks

barefoot across a landscape that has no north.

 

Only a ghost tree here and there, a frog,

a cricket, a bird. And if the fates are kind,

 

a girl with a stick, who is more at home, being homeless,

than you will ever be.

--Bruce Bond

 

And for another dialogue among genres, here is a radio interview I did about the oral tradition and the small press world with Erika Funke of Wilkes-Barre NPR.