The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Nin Andrews in Conversation with Carey Salerno, Editor of Alice James Books, and Philip Metres

NA: What is the first thing you would tell people about Alice James Books if they’d never heard of the press and wanted to know about it?

CS:  Alice James is one of the oldest poetry presses in the country. We’ve published over one hundred and fifty authors and produce six books of poetry a year. We are located in Farmington, Maine and have been affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington for over twenty years. The press publishes a broad range of poetic voices and aesthetics, and though we strive to support women writers in particular, we publish, and always have published, men as well. 

NA: One of Alice James’ initial objectives was to give women more access to publishing.  Is this still your mission?  What is the ratio of men to women authors you publish?

CS: Absolutely, and the “initial objective” of giving access to women is still highly relevant today. One needs only to review VIDA reports, to scan TOCs of poetry journals, or to review the lists of individuals winning major awards to see there is still an imbalance. For every five women we publish, we publish two men.

NA:  Alice James is a community press, right?  How do you involve authors in the publishing process?

CS: Alice James was founded as a cooperative press, yes, and initially that meant that authors did everything from typesetting to marketing on theirs and other fellow Alices’ books. Currently, our authors are still very involved in the design and production of their individual collections. They collaborate with us on things like typeface, layout, and cover art. Authors with books coming out also, many times, work with another published AJB author to edit the book. Pairing authors up reinforces their bond as AJB poets and invests them in each others work. This mentorship-like partnership is also incredibly helpful for new poets, and in particular first book poets, as they find their footing at the press and within the world of publishing.

NA: How many books of poetry do you publish each year?  What distinguishes an Alice James poet? 

CS: We put forth six books of poetry a year. Some years we publish poetry-in-translation and some we publish special collections like our 40^th anniversary anthology or the forthcoming June Jordan Reader (2017). More and more, I think we may take on special projects related to poetry. An AJB poet is one that challenges common constructs, pushes boundaries, takes risks and writes from the gut. We gravitate toward poetry that reveals and stems from someplace deeper than the self. Often our books appeal to audiences beyond the poetry community because of this. Our press is known for its broad range of aesthetics, but within this range the common denominator is our poet’s engaged presence and sense of urgency in storytelling.

NA:  Do your poetry books come primarily from your competition?

CS:  They used to until quite recently, yes. As of 2014, however, we’ve improved our acquisitions process, and in doing so, solidified a way to offer a home to some of the poets who have already published with us, while also inviting in new voices from the community. We’ve paired down to one flagship manuscript competition a year (instead of the three we were doing), the Alice James Award, and we are looking forward to devoting, more exclusively, our resources to the work of reading manuscripts and cultivating the publications from that series.

NA:  You also publish translations.

CS: Yes, we do. We began taking translation queries in 2011 and are working hard to continue development of this program at the press. Our latest translation is a collection translated from Spanish to English by Curtis Bauer, titled Eros Is More by Juan Antonio González Iglesias (September 2014). It is a beautifully rendered book by a living Spanish poet.

NA:  I recently read an excerpt from one of Philip Metres’s poems here, and was quite taken with it. I see he has a new book, Sand Opera, coming out with Alice James Books.  Could you say a few words about it?  I would also like to ask Phil Metres a few words about his poetry collection.

CS: Erasure. Catastrophe. Denial. Culpability. Exposure. Obstruction. Fury. Despondency. To expound, Metres’ poems are composed via their amalgamation. He writes from the chaotic place within this comingling with clarity and profound insight. The lyric produced is haunting, horribly relevant, and necessary. It is song and prose and tame and wild. It is formal. It exists in its nonexistence. Bearing witness is not for the meek, and if the disintegration of identity, spirit, and mind doesn’t bring you to tears or madness when reading this book, I couldn’t fathom what would move you.

NA:  I am so impressed by the sheer beauty of Sand Opera. I love the transparent pages, the gray and black lettering, the redacted title page, the cover, how it all works together.  Such care went in to the design of the book.

CS: Book design is something the press is deeply devoted to, so thank you. The planning work for the design of Sand Opera started right as it was accepted for publication. I knew that there needed to be something more dimensional about the design than is typical and was so thrilled when Phil echoed these sentiments in our earliest talks.  He was so open to the possibilities for the book’s design, and that was instrumental in our effort. When we relayed our ideas for the transparencies to the designer, Mary Austin Speaker, things just seemed to click into place. She’s incredibly, wildly talented. The transparencies open up the interpretations of the words, poems, and depictions in the book, allowing for meaning to deepen and resonate even further. The more that is stripped away in this book, the more we find revealed.

NA:  Philip, tell me about the writing of Sand Opera.  You felt compelled to write it? 

PM: The immediate spark was my initial confoundedness—my absolute inability to write anything in the face of the 9/11 attacks, and then the Iraq War, and the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal. The photographs of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal—seeing people who looked like my cousins—brutalized by my fellow citizens, absolutely shook me. I was absolutely struck dumb, and everything I wrote felt partial, incomplete, stuttered, fractured.

This captures one of those moments, from the “Homefront/Removes” sequence:

On the flight overseas, the rows dotted with isolatos,
Each an island of eyes. I was looking (for), looking (like).
Ivan Zhdanov: what outside is a cross, inside is a window.
A white woman across the aisle eyed me the entire
flight. Her gaze widened and neck craned as I (her eyes)
slowly removed (her eyes) my shoes. What could I say?
Sometimes I’m afraid I’m carrying a bomb. That I’m a
sleeper and don’t know when I’ll awaken. I should have
said: Identity isn’t an end—it’s a portal, a deportation
from the country of mirrors, an inflection within a
question, punctuation in the sentence of birth. I said
nothing. Later, visiting a Quaker meeting, I sat among
scattered chairs. On the shores of breathing, all eyes
shut, I waded. Silence our rudder, silence our harbor. 

To read the commentaries about the scandal—repeated recently over the Senate’s 2014 Torture Report—was to enter into an Alice-in-Wonderland world where skin doesn’t bleed and nerves don’t cry out and people have no mouths to speak. That might explain why I was drawn to the cover by Iraqi artist Ayad Alkadhi, called “Baghdad II.” As I noted elsewhere, even the noted documentarian Errol Morris chose to interview only Americans for his film, “Standard Operating Procedure,” which explores the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It seems almost absurd that in our global and digital age, Morris did not interview or even meet with detainees.

It wasn’t until I found the testimonies of the abused prisoners that I began to work my way through that silence; their words were a testament not simply of the brutality, but also of surviving it, naming it, and saying that it would not silence them.  

NA:  And you brought the Iraq War, Abu Ghraib, and the Torture Report back to us, almost as a performance piece. 

PM: It’s weird that Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo) are now both “historical” and still very much present tense (the past is never dead, at least when it comes to dynamics that are very much alive). I’ve been interested in the principle and practice of the dialogical, which has meant that I’ve been trying to figure out ways to break open the monology of the lyric and return to poetry’s performative and dramatic roots. Although the “abu ghraib arias” is certainly a poem meant to be read on the page, it is also dramatistic in its possibility, and I’ve performed it with others (and the musician Philip Fournier) as a choral poem. Listen here. Though I began with the testimonies of Iraqis, it was really only when I incorporated both Iraqi and American voices that the arias started to become something like an opera or a play, a net of monologues in which each voice tries to make sense of what happened.

When people teach the book, I always recommend that instead of asking students what it means, ask them to perform it. Then all the symbol-hunting of the normative literature classroom becomes an attempt to figure out how to voice the unspeakable. Because you have to contend with regular text, grayscale, bold text, italics, erasures, redaction lines, vellum transparencies, and diagrams, any oral reading requires some sort of accounting of these material registers.

NA:  You’ve been a poet for peace, a poet of witness, since I’ve met you.  Yet this, I think, is your most powerful book yet.  I can’t imagine what it was like to write. 

PM: Thanks, Nin! I hope that Sand Opera might be part of a conversation about post-9/11 American attitudes and actions toward the Middle East in a way that Claudia Rankine’s Citizen has done so about race. I didn’t have that intention when I began it; I was just trying to make sense of what was happening. In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young writes: “A few years ago Robert Hass said to me, I still don’t know what I’m doing, at which point it occurred to me that not knowing what we’re doing is obviously the thing to do. So how does one get better at not knowing what one is doing?” As a superfan of Robert Hass, I find this revelation incredibly consoling.

For Sand Opera, some of the poems began as ways of reading and listening; the abu ghraib arias were essentially poems that enabled me to read the prison scandal. Other poems came about other ways. A voice would arrive in between waking and sleeping. Someone would say something. I’d hear a news story. By any means necessary poems come. I would start poems not knowing where they were going. A number of excellent poets helped me revise along the way. I threw out at least three times the amount that ended up in the book, and revised incessantly. I’m not proud that it took me so long, but every time I revised I could see the language become more obdurate, almost inevitable.

NA:  Is it a challenge—mixing poetry and politics?  A challenge you sometimes want to give up?

PM: Your question immediately made me think of how Billy Bragg responded, in “The Great Leap Forwards”: “Mixing pop and politics he asks me what the use is/I offer him embarrassment and my usual excuses/While looking down the corridor/Out to where the van is waiting/I'm looking for the great leap forwards.”

Trying to write anything that deals with something other than our own individual truth is difficult; it’s hard enough trying to figure out what our own truths are, much less those we might hold in common. Neruda asserted that political poetry was the hardest poetry to write, even harder than love poetry; he wrote some beautiful political poems, and also some duds (the ode to Stalin seems particularly cringeworthy). I spent ten years in graduate school producing a dissertation that became Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront, and that helped me see some of the possible paths. Between studying how poets struggled to write about war and resistance to war, translating Russian poetry, and trying to write my own poems, I had lots of poetic models to work with or work against.

Sand Opera attempts to have a conversation with the world. I recently came across this from Nadezhda Mandelstam, who proposes that (Russian) poets carry an ethical burden: “The work of the poet, as a vehicle of world harmony, has a social character—that is, it is concerned with the doings of the poet’s fellow men, among whom he lives and whose fate he shares. He does not speak ‘for them,’ but with them, nor does he set himself apart from them: otherwise he would not be a source of truth.”

While I embrace W.B. Yeats’ notion that poetry comes out of a quarrel with oneself, I don’t believe that means that one is writing only for oneself. It means that one is engaged in a process of inner and outer struggle simultaneously. “Easter 1916” is a beautiful political poem because we see Yeats’ vexatious feelings about the Easter Rising so vividly rendered; yet I can think of no greater poem that articulates the attractiveness and dangers of revolutionary violence. It is his ongoing conversation with revolution.

NA: How long did it take you to write Sand Opera?

PM: Sand Opera has been about a decade in the making (the earliest poems came probably around 2004 or so, and they kept coming. I probably went through hundreds of visions and revisions, I’m sorry to say. In another sense I’ve been writing it my whole life. My father was a Vietnam War veteran, who worked with families of P.O.W./M.I.A.s and became a psychologist. My mother, a lifelong pacifist, left the convent to study literature and later met and married my father. In the mid-1970s, with two young children, they “sponsored” a Vietnamese refugee family—which meant helping them find an apartment, work, and start a new life in San Diego. For a short time, I shared my bedroom with two of the sons, Lam and Dủng. I asked my parents, “where is their home?”

The book also propels forward through my work with the peace movement since the 1990s. The most memorable of my late 1990s activist pieces was a “post office action,” in which fellow activists and I attempted to send basic medical supplies through the U.S. postal service to Iraq, which was suffering under nearly a decade of U.S.-led economic sanctions; we invited journalists to cover the fact that the post office would not allow it. It was illegal to send band aids and aspirin to Iraq because of the brutality of the sanctions regime. According to U.N. sources, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died during the ten years of sanctions due to preventable disease. That longer view of the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq made everything that happened feel like it had happened before.

NA: Back to Carey—Do you publish any other political poets?

CS: Yes, absolutely. Two poets immediately come to mind: Brian Turner (Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise) and Reginald Dwayne Betts (Shahid Reads His Own Palm). Turner is a war vet and Betts an advocate in criminal justice. Betts has consulted on Supreme Court cases about juvenile conviction laws. Turner has endlessly advocated for vets and continues to keep us mindful that we are engaged in the longest war American history has ever known. The work of Shara McCallum and Monica A. Hand is also particularly shaped by the politics of identity. McCallum writes in her latest book, This Strange Land, about dislocation, cultural belonging and acceptance, and motherhood (always political), and Hand’s latest work, me and Nina, entwines present and past via the poet’s fascination with the life and work of Nina Simone.

NA:  How about anthologies?

CS: We published an anthology in honor of AJB’s 40^th anniversary in 2013. It is titled Lit From Inside (after a line Jean Valentine’s title poem from one of her earliest collections The River at Wolf, which appears in the book). The anthology includes poems by every poet published by AJB over our forty years of work and also a healthy dose of archival materials, including letters from Jane Kenyon, a handwritten blurb for Valentine by Seamus Heaney, and photographs of press founders working in the dead of night to typset AJB books at MIT press.

NA:  What are some of the happiest moments and highlights of Alice James Books?

CS: Wow, well any time a new book comes in the door it’s a celebration. There’s a sense of fulfillment, tons of potential energy, and incredible excitement for our author. We pour a lot of heart into each one of our books, as do our incredible team of talented designers, and when we hold it in our hands for the first time and crack that spine, oh baby it is magical. Highlights for us would also be seeing our authors go on to do great things after publishing with us whether it be winning a major award or landing a tenure track job. We also are very dedicated to the work we do with the students at the University of Maine at Farmington, and we get incredibly giddy when alums land their first job or book publication or even just complete a massive semester-long project. It feels good when the work we do makes a difference in someone else’s life.

NA:  Will you be at AWP?

CS: Absolutely, booth 1009

NA:  I’d like close with another short poem of your choice from one of your poets.

CS:  The amazing, seasonally appropriate meditation “Ridiculous winter flower” by Donald Revell (forthcoming in Drought-Adapted Vine, fall 2015)

“Ridiculous winter flower”

Ridiculous winter flower
  More perfect butter

On the ground the disused
 Ground beloved 

Must survive must live to tell
 Another orphan 

Something raised us
 Out of the dust 

Something gave us color
 A gold also tender 

I shall not tell its name
 I’m tired 

Laughter and piano teacher
 Ridiculous winter flower 

The gate’s wide open now

Carey Salerno is the executive editor of Alice James Books. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her first book, Shelter, was published by Alice James Books in 2009. You may find her poems in various journals in print and online. She is the editor, along with Anne Marie Macari, of the anthology Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books. 

Philip Metres is the author of a number of books and chapbooks, including Sand Opera (2015), A Concordance of Leaves(2013), abu ghraib arias (2011), and To See the Earth (2008). His work has garnered two NEA fellowships, five Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Beatrice Hawley Award, two Arab American Book Awards, the Creative Workforce Fellowship, the Cleveland Arts Prize and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. He is professor of English at John Carroll University.

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Follow Nin's blog here. Follow Nin on Twitter here.

This Just In: The National Poetry Series Has Extended Its Deadline!

 

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The National Poetry Series has extended the deadline
for its 2015 Open Competition!

Manuscripts postmarked by Friday, March 6^th, and submitted according to guidelines, will be accepted at the NPS office:

57 Mountain Avenue
Princeton, NJ  08540

Please visit www.nationalpoetryseries.org
for guidelines and general information 

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Tales of the Sixties: On the Road to Gopherwood [by Alan Ziegler]

    In the late 60s, I take a contemporary poetry class with Jocelyn, the only female professor in the English Department. She acquaints me with the imagist poets and the lyricism of colloquial speech ("Come on! Wassa ma'? You got broken leg?" in William Carlos Williams's Paterson). I don’t know it then, but it is my first step toward a life in a direction I never even considered. Her husband, Dave, teaches English at Albany State. When he is turned down for tenure, students protest, to no avail.

    Jocelyn and Dave do what many people talk about: drop out. She resigns her position and they buy land in Barry’s Bay, Ontario, Canada, embarking on a life as farmers.

    In September 1970—a few months after graduation—my roommate Rich and I decide to visit them. Jocelyn sends us a hand-drawn map of the area; the destination is a mailbox labeled “Gopherwood.” Early on a Sunday morning, we fly half-fare to Ottawa on our expired college ID’s and start hitching from Ottawa at 9:30 a.m. At around noon, we get stuck in an intersection. Cars slow down, look at us, and drive on.

    Finally a man picks us up. He has a French accent and is drinking beer. He talks about how he’ll pick up anybody because he was in the army for 22 years and was on the road a lot. He curses out the farmers in the area, and says they won’t pick up anyone who looks like a hippie. He drives us around town so that everybody can see he’s picked up two hippies.

    He tells us he is an outcast because “I drink and I’m free. I get money from the army, and people are jealous because I don’t have to work my land hard.” He was wounded several times and his “legs are almost useless.” He drops us off a few miles outside of town, where we’ll have a better chance of getting a ride.

     When it looks like there is no way we’ll make it to Barry’s Bay by dark, a bus appears with Barry’s Bay posted above the front window. Rich and I look at each other to confirm that it's not a moving mirage, then frantically flag it down. The driver points to the empty bus and says the only reason he is completing the run is to deliver newspapers. “I don’t know what to charge. How about a dollar?” Deal.

     We get to Barry’s Bay at dusk, but the only cab driver in town has to deliver the newspapers. He gives us directions to a man who might take us out to the farm. The guy isn’t home but his father-in-law invites us to come in and wait. He is in his seventies and is chain-smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. The only thing that interrupts his smoking is his convulsive coughing.

    The son-in-law never shows up, so Rich and I head back toward town, to spend the night in the one hotel. We stop at the bar, where we meet some teenagers. They were raised in Barry’s Bay but now live in nearby towns and only come home to get drunk at the hotel.

     The kids volunteer to take us out to the farm in their truck. It is a moonless night, and the driver speeds along the narrow gravel road, mostly on the wrong side of the imaginary white line. Everyone whoops each time the truck skids around a curve. Rich and I say nothing. If another car comes along we have no chance. We choose to risk death rather than be uncool with strangers (who may choose to kill us anyway).

     We make it to the end of the road; we have to go the rest of the way on foot. Rich and I grope toward the light of the cabin, which seems a Christina’s-World away. As we get closer we hear a dog bark, then see a flashlight, which leads us to Jocelyn’s welcoming embrace. I have never hugged a teacher before.

     Things aren’t working out well for Jocelyn and Dave and their three-year-old daughter. They have been working for years on a major anthology of contemporary poetry, and were counting on the royalties to subsidize the farm, but their publisher has been sold and the new owners dropped the project. Some relatives sent them an expensive shortwave radio to link them to the world, but they are going to sell it to get them through the winter.

     Rich and I help harvest the last of the vegetable garden. Dave asks me to ride along with him to shop at the nearest supermarket. He parks in the back lot and takes me to the dumpster, where we scavenge for sealed packages of recently-expired chicken.

     One morning Jocelyn finds part of a bear carcass near the front door. She deduces that a neighbor, knowing they can’t afford meat, left it there. Jocelyn marinates the meat for days, and my mouth waters whenever I pass it. Finally, on our last night, with winter setting in, the garden barren, and the radio gone, Jocelyn serves the bear meat. I chew and chew and chew until I can swallow, thinking of Chaplin eating his shoelace.

     When I get home, I look up gopherwood and discover the only known usage is God's instruction to Noah: “Make thee an ark of gopherwood…”

David Lehman in conversation with David Lehman at /kin/

 

(photo of David Lehman (c) W.T. Pfefferle)

Up on the /kin/ site, David Lehman's Self-Interview plus poems:

What are you working on?

A sequence of thirty sonnets entitled “Ithaca.” I have lived in Ithaca, New York, part time or full time, for more than thirty years. In the Odyssey, Ithaca is the hero’s homeland, his origin and his goal, to which he returns following the Trojan War and all the subsequent perils, hazards, and temptations Odysseus endures.

Are you drawn to the Homeric epic for reasons beyond this coincidence of names?

It is as Virginia Woolf writes, explaining her attraction to Greek tragedy: the spirit of the ancient Greeks "has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to living more than half the year indoors." And I love the Odyssey.

Why the sonnet form? And why thirty of them?

There’s a reason the sonnet is historically the greatest lyric form in English tradition. It’s extraordinary what you can do within that precise fourteen-line structure. Twelve lines are too few, sixteen too many, and the unequal distribution of the sonnet’s fourteen lines into two asymmetrical stanzas allows you to make the rhetorical shift or pivot that is crucial to your argument or theme. The sonnet sequence gets you to do at least two things at once, because each sonnet must stand on its own and as a unit in a larger whole. In 1987, I finished “Mythologies,” a sequence of thirty sonnets, each consisting of seven couplets, and it went on to win a prize at The Paris Review and to anchor my book Operation Memory. I had the model of “Mythologies” in mind when I began work on “Ithaca” two years ago. Each was undertaken at a crossroad in my life.

What is the biggest problem you face as a poet?

Death.

Can you put that in a more intellectually respectable way?

I used to think death was an extension of the reality principle. Then I began to question that assumption. I felt that reality and necessity were two different things. I recalled that Freud’s thinking on the question evolved to the point that he introduced the idea of a death impulse, a drive toward death. Death is the end of life whether you define end as finish or as aim.

For nearly five full years you wrote a poem each or almost each day. Do you still do that?

Maybe I will try that again sometime in a more limited way. Recently I conducted an experiment in the opposite direction: for thirty days I maintained radio silence, refusing to write poems even if lines occurred to me.

In your New and Selected Poems you have new translations from Guillaume Apollinaire and Henri Michaux. Are you making more translations?

I’ve done about twelve or fourteen of Baudelaire’s prose poems and I mean to keep going. A couple of years ago, I translated one of Baudelaire’s most famous prose poems, “Enivrez-vous” (“Get Drunk”), just because I needed it for a dinner toast and was dissatisfied with all the many translations I had read. Alan Ziegler liked my effort and chose it for his new anthology of poems and prose in short forms, Short. Around this time, my friends Jim Periconi and Cheryl Hurley organized a Baudelaire soiree and invited me to take part. I said yes and went to the shelf and picked out Baudelaire’s Petits Poemes en prose, an old favorite of mine. (Way back when, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the prose poem.) The best translations I could find were done a hundred years ago by Arthur Symons and are a bit creaky. So I thought I’d try my hand at it. I started with “Le Mauvais vitrier” (“The Bad Glazier”). Believe me, it is a major challenge to render a work like that into clean contemporary idiomatic prose that manages nevertheless to convey a flavor of Paris in the 1850s. I got totally involved in it, worked on it for weeks, draft after draft. The next few came with less struggle, but by its nature translation is approximative; there are no definitive translations, which means that every time you look over one of your attempts, you feel like making an adjustment.

You are on record saying that you turn to “Tintern Abbey” when your own spirits flag. What about the same poet’s “Immortality Ode”? Do you agree with Wordsworth that for the inevitable loss of “the radiance which was once so bright,” there is adequate compensation “in what remains behind; / In the primal sympathy / Which having been must ever be; / In the soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering; / In the faith that looks through death, / In years that bring the philosophic mind”?

continue reading at /kin/

Company that Keeps: Denise Duhamel at the New School [by Danielle Elizabeth Chin]

Photo credit: Gary Lanier

On February 18^th, a cozy crowd of New School faculty, students, friends, and admirers welcomed Denise Duhamel, honored guest of the Writing Program’s Poetry Forum at The New School. Duhamel’s dazzling smile, vivacious voice, and energetic demeanor elicited the audience’s attention as soon as she walked into the room. She graciously took the time to chat with friends and fans before taking command of the podium.

Duhamel, who received her MFA degree from Sarah Lawrence College, has published numerous collections of poetry, including her most recent, Blowout (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award, Ka-Ching! (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), and Kinky (Orchises Pr, 1997). She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. She has collaborated with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad to publish the anthology, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and served as guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013 (Scribner, 2013). Her play, How the Sky Fell (Pearl Editions, 1996) ran for four off-off-Broadway performances in 1997. Aside from being accepted into numerous international residencies, she has received many notable awards, such as from the National Endowment for the Arts, Puffin Foundation, Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater, and was named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow.

“I’ve known and admired Denise Duhamel and her poems for nearly twenty years,” said Mark Bibbins, Part-time Assistant Professor and moderator of the forum.

“We were ten,” Duhamel chimed in, inciting laughter from the room.

    “I remember being mesmerized as I still am by her openness, political engagement, fierce humor which as it so often does comes not only from places of anger and absurdity, but great tenderness and sadness sometimes too,” said Bibbins.

            “Thank you so much for coming and for braving this [frigid New York weather],” Duhamel said when she took the podium. “I was so sure that this [event] was going to be cancelled, that I didn’t ask any of my friends to come.”

            Duhamel read from her latest, Blowout, a book about a failed marriage, as well as a few new poems.  Poet Barbara Hamby has described the collection as a book that “chronicles the journey from heartbreak to new love [and] so much more…It is a meditation on love and the sacrifices we make to create it in tenements, in condos, on boardwalks, and in our own hearts.”

            Duhamel opened with “Old Love Poems,” which with its perfect honesty and nostalgic tenderness is sure to become an anthem for the broken-hearted.

    “I can burn the pictures, but not the poems/ since I published them,” read Duhamel. “Once my cousin told me/ not to write anything down because the words would be there forever/ to remind me of the fool I once was/…there wasn’t really a beloved there anymore,/ just a strand of hair each left behind/ on the other’s scarf or pillow, a cologne trigger/ …“It’s still hard/ for me to accept the notion of love outliving the lovers.”

When Duhamel conceived the title Blowout, she was thinking about “a big party or…some kind of disaster, like when your tire blows out.” Perhaps the more obvious blowout, which she admits she had not considered, was “the kind that you get in a hair salon.” Fittingly, however, “If You Really Want To,” one of the poems in her collection, takes place in a hair salon.

“[L]oneliness is holding a piece of cardboard/ under your new kitchen cabinets/ as the handyman drills holes for the hinges/ that will hold the door in place,” Duhamel said, reading from her poem, “Victor.”

Although many of the poems she read reveals the demise of a relationship and a person’s efforts to survive the aftermath, Duhamel’s spirited reading of them

Many of the poems she read reveal the demise of a relationship and the to survive the aftermath, which from the mouth of another reader might have let the reminder of heartbreak linger on too long. However, Duhamel’s skilled and spirited renditions coax the spectators to turn their heads from looking backwards and to live on.

In “How It Will End,” Duhamel convinces you to befriend the couple on the boardwalk, even though you already know, you too, will have to take one of their sides eventually.

During the Q&A, the audience felt less like spectators and more like dinner guests joining in on Bibbins’ and Duhamel’s conversation.

    “There are some poems that are better on the page and some poems that are more alive when read,” said Duhamel, when Bibbins noted the directness of her poetry and asked whether she was still inspired by slam poetry traditions.

            She is also a fan of fixed forms, such as the sestina and villanelles, though she admits she writes in these forms when she feels “stuck.” Duhamel even enlisted her friend, Honor Moore, nonfiction coordinator and faculty member at The New School to discuss her much-anthologized sestina "First Time: 1950."

“Don’t keep hitting the same note,” Duhamel advised those giving a reading or arranging a chapbook, drawing from her experiences at the Nuyorican Poets’ Café. “Let’s say Mark and I are slamming and he reads something really sad, I’m not going to compete with that. I’m going to read something hilarious.”

In Blowout, Duhamel shows you how to endure.

“[T]he plant…will bloom despite being uprooted,” she wrote in “Old Love Poems.” “It’s hard to believe when you are down to your last penny,/ when the soil is dry and rocky and full of weeds,/ when your love/ is freeze-dried into a metallic pouch and you are full of snarky rage./…Even if you no longer remember tenderness,/…you read the poem/ again, grateful, holding the words in your hands like a bunch of flowers”

Duhamel’s poems are like “a bunch of flowers.” They’re beautiful and diverse. They remind you that you are not surviving alone.

Ron Horning on David Schubert's Poetry

[A Save This Book feature from the Village Voice Literary Supplement (VLS) Number 16, April 1983. The piece was drafted in 1977 and finished, I’m quite sure, before I saw the January 1983 issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature devoted to Schubert. That, or I wanted to distinguish the real book—also edited by Theodore Weiss but beautifully and with the help of Schubert’s wife, Judith E. Kranes—from the hideous mélange of Works and Days (yes, why not drag Hesiod into it!). Can’t remember which.]

Initial A: A Book of Poems
Macmillan, 1961

            Forays into a city of the mind that looks like a photograph by Berenice Abbott one minute and sounds like a song by Franz Schubert the next, these poems are the lifework of a man with a gift for dramatizing his discoveries of emotions presumed lost—discoveries as likely to take place on street corners as anywhere else—and a penchant for making delicate deals with himself, out loud but so nobody else in the rush-hour crowd can hear. David Schubert wrote this poetry in Manhattan and Brooklyn during the ’30s and early ’40s. Its pleasures are still keen, plentiful, and open to all, though Initial A will be appreciated most readily by students of the New York School’s Poetry Department, whose faculty members are Schubert’s direct descendants.

            The John Ashbery fan will slip right into Schubert’s dream-induced logic: “Crying, you/Want to get off. But you know, you’ve/Just died. Indeed all the tears are/Counted, one by one, and safely filed away./Respectfully dried that were respectfully cried.” For readers of Kenneth Koch, there is prophetic playfulness: “Farewell, O zinnias, tall as teetotalers,/And thou, proud petunia, pastel windows of joy,/Also to you, noble tree trunks, by name/Elm . . .” And James Schuyler adepts will savor the fancy accuracy: “. . . cold/sky, the color of a quarrel. Premonitions of/disaster; of course, the month’s environment./Why do I keep thinking of you?”

            But admirers of Frank O’Hara are in for the biggest surprise. Schubert’s elegiac spirit, nervous skill, and quick gusto anticipate eerily the poet of “Chez Jane,” “Music,” and “The Day Lady Died.” Eerily—and marvelously:

                                                                  But then

            From the corner of a mood like Les Sylphides,

            Impossible, romantic as certain moons

            In certain atmospheres, then you called me

            From the corner of the street.

                                                —“The Happy Traveller”

 

                        . . . now I wait for her to speak

            The meanings which I must negate before

            I am admitted to the gayest person.

                                                —“Victor Record Catalog”

 

            No! On the vehicle, Tomorrow, I will see

            That man, whose handshake was happiness.

                                                —“Midston House”

 

            Schubert was 33 when he died in 1946, 15 years before Initial A was published, and the book’s flaws are those of a young writer: a few poems stunted by syntactic hot-wiring (loneliness), an overabundance of literary allusions (insecurity), and the annoying habit of breaking lines in the middle of a word (“originality”). His strengths indicate that he would have outgrown his affectations—in any case, as with O’Hara, what’s right about Schubert is more interesting than what’s wrong. Both men sit on the capacious twill lap of the rightest and wrongest American poet of all, O’Hara jauntily, Schubert with passionate sweetness. And although the song in Initial A has shrunk to a “fleeting memory,” heroically attenuated like the figures in a cityscape by Giacometti, the best of these poems prove that the self is as strong as ever.                                                     

—Ron Horning

Brownstudy (by Mitch Sisskind)

                                  They live retired, and then 
                                   they doze away their times in 
                                   drowsinesses and brownstudies.
                                                 -- Johnson’s Dictionary

She was the love of my lie,
The lie of my love. Oh God,
I can’t think straight anymore.
She was the love of my life!

Convoluted or plum contradictory
Are a lion’s feelings when it confronts 
A hippopotamus. Tell me about it! 
Oh God, I can’t think straight anymore.

Lies, love, laughter, lucubration,
Laceration, lasciviousness, lachrimosity --
Is that a word? I got news for you, pal,
It is now! I can’t think straight anymore.

Oh God, I can’t think straight anymore.
She was the hippopotamus of my love,
I was the lion in her eyes. She laughed 
So hard I thought she would bust a gut!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry from Scotland 4: Robert Crawford [by Robyn Marsack]

Full Volume

Diving-suited, copper-helmeted, no thought of turning back,
Led by his grey lead boots way, way off the beaten track,

He walks into Loch Ness. His unheard wife and daughter
Stand hand-in-hand on the shore. Underwater,

He ploughs on down on his own, bone-cold marathon,
Stomping the loch not for any sponsorship he’s won,

Not seeking front pages, nor getting caught up in some blinding
Damascus flash, but just for the love of that dark, reminding

Him and his folks here and all the folks
Back home that, despite the old jokes,

Hoaxes, photos, no-shows, and tourists’ tales,
Something is in there, out there, down there, flails and dwells

In inner silence. He wants to meet
It, to come back dry, dripping, and greet

The day from the loch’s beyond, its call
Calling inside him. Wants above all

To sound the loch’s full volume right at ground
Level, be lost in it, pushed by it, sung by it, not to be found.

 

from Full Volume (London: Jonathan Cape, 2008)

Robert Crawford, an exact contemporary of Robin Robertson (see no.3), is passionate about Scotland – past, present and future. His poetry is nourished by his native land, its intellectual and practical achievements – especially in the sciences – and its literary heritage; he has written the best modern biography of Robert Burns (The Bard, 2009). Hugely productive as an editor, critic and poet, he is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, and has recently published the first volume of a biography of T.S. Eliot.

He has written in Scots, made versions of Gaelic poems and translated from the Latin of Renaissance Scottish poets, and is keenly attuned to the spring of rhythm and the pleasures of rhyme, as in ‘Full Volume’. Typically, this poem is both playful and questioning. Crawford knows that the myth of the Loch Ness monster feeds a profitable tourist trade, and also that beneath that surface lies something truly unfathomed, not only the second deepest loch in Scotland, but something in the human psyche that needs to  
resist discovery.                                                                              

Find out more about Robert Crawford here and hear him reading and talking in the SPL podcast series. 

Friends, we need your help. We need to raise £100,000 for the building renovation which will hugely extend our reach. Your gift helps us to give: to lend books; to send books, poetry postcards and poets around Scotland; to record and send poets’ voices around the world; to bring people and poems together in care homes, schools, hospitals… Every donation counts, so click http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work

This Monday at KGB: Carol Muske-Dukes & Howard Altmann

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Carol Muske-Dukes & Howard Altmann

 Monday, February 23rd, 2015

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by David Lehman and Star Black

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of 8 books of poetry, 4 novels and 2 collections of essays & has co-edited anthologies. (Her most recent book of poems is TWIN CITIES, from Penguin, her book SPARROW was a National Book Award finalist.) She is professor of English/Creative Writing at the Univ. of Southern California and is former Poet Laureate of California.  She is bi-coastal (many years in NYC) and has written for the NYTimes, LA Times & the Huffington Post. Awards include NEA, Guggenheim, Castognola Prize from poetry soc. of america, Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers award, Pushcarts,  etc.  Published & anthologize widely, inc. Best American Poetry, New Yorker, Paris Review, cover of APR, Kenyon Review, etc. -  many anthologies.  She  also co-edited "Crossing State Lines: an American Renga" with Bob Holman - from FSG. www.carolmuskedukes.com

 

Howard Altmann is the author of two books of poetry, "Who Collects the Days," (Mosaic Press, 2005) and "In This House," (Turtle Point Press, 2010). His poems have appeared in Boulevard, Poetry, Slate, The Yale Review and elsewhere, and are forthcoming in the anthology, "New Writings of the Americas: From Patagonia to Nunavut (Texas Tech University Press, 2015). A Montreal native, he holds degrees from McGill and Stanford and lives in New York City.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upcoming, Spring 2015

 

Mar 2    Billy Collins + George Green  

Mar 9    Star Black + Yolanda Wisher + Sandra Simonds   

Mar 16  Jason Schneiderman + Ada Limon
Mar 23  Dark
Mar 30  Michael Morse + Sarah Rose Nordgren       

Apr 6    Jennifer MacKenzie + Chris Hosea 
Apr 13  3rd Annual Post-AWP Open Mic Competition
Apr 20  Kathleen Ossip + Spencer Short  

Apr 27  Noah Eli Gordon + Kelly Forsythe    

May 4   Norman Minnick + Chris Jansen

May 11 Cate Marvin + Jericho Brown    

May 18 Matthew Rohrer + Geoffrey Nutter + Randall Potts

*****

About the Series:

Labeled New York's best poetry series by such publications as New York Magazine and Time Out New York, the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series has hosted over 550 poets in more than 300 readings since it was founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman; it  focuses on combining established writers with the most exciting young and upcoming poets.  The list of past readers includes legendary American and international poets: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Richard Howard, Fannie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Marie Ponsot, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Anne Waldman and Charles Wright.  Currently, the series is curated and hosted by poets John Deming and Matthew Yeager.

About the Venue:

A former single-room speakeasy (one of Lucky Luciano's favorites) KGB Bar was transformed into a Ukrainian socialist social club in 1948. To this day, the bar retains original decoration from its former incarnations, including a red hammer-and-sickle flag hanging from the tin ceiling, plus stained-glass Beaux Arts cabinetry, red walls, Soviet triumph posters, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.  KGBBar is located at 85 East 4th Street in New York's East Village (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). Readings begin at 7:30 PM. There will be one ten-minute intermission. No cover charge for admission. All readings open to the public. Though it is smoke-free, the massive pervasive cigarette cloud that existed as little as twelve years ago (and contributed much to the venue's conspiratorial air) is still easily imagined. 

"The Economist" Tackles Anti-Semitism in Europe [by DL]

The headline: "The return of Jew Hatred."

The sub-head: "Europe has an obligation to protect its Jews."

The lede: "Toulouse, Brussels, Paris, and now Copenhagen. The list of European cities where Jews have lately been murdered for being Jews grows longer."

The bullshit transition: "Such worries are understandable, but they need to be put into context."

The fearless prediction: "The shooting at the Great Synagogue on Krystalgade does not herald another Kristallnacht."

Department of Inadvertent Humor: "Jews are targets, but so are groups of non-Jews: commuters, off-duty soldiers and, above all, cartoonists."

The irresistible touch: "and, above all."

The incontrovertible kicker: "The jihadists detest few things more than the sight of European Muslims declaring 'Je suis Charlie Hebdo.'"

The invisible typo: "Jew" for "few" in the last sentence.

From The Economist, February 21, 2015, p. 16.

Ready to Serve: A Drunk Serves Drunks [by Nicole Santalucia]

(Ed note: This is the fifth in our Ready to Serve series. Find previous posts here. sdh)

Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke in the film Barfly (1987)

The next thing I knew I was waking up under a tree in Recreation Park next to a homeless man mumbling to himself. I was pissed off he woke me up in the middle of the afternoon. He looked at me dead in the eye. I lifted my head from a pile of leaves and a few stuck to my cheek, stained it orange. I must have looked like a pile of garbage. I told this man that I had no idea what he was saying then took a swig of warm beer from the glass bottle under my shirt. This man told me that there was dirt in my drink and when I looked down I saw cigarette butts at the bottom of the bottle. I must have found an empty bottle in someone’s garbage and grabbed it before making it to the park at dawn. After getting out of my waitressing job at O’s Pub at 11pm I hit the bars in downtown Binghamton then disappeared into the brush.

My routine at work involved hiding in the kitchen, and eating a few fries and peanut butter chicken wings then serving the basket of grease to some old man in a golf shirt. Sometimes this old man was my grandfather. He’d order two or three $1.10 drafts of piss colored beer during happy hour and I would try to pull myself together and make small talk. He paid with exact change and I would keep the money. By the end of the night I’d have an apron full of dimes and sweaty dollar bills. We’d reminisce about when I played basketball in high school and I’d try not to spill drinks. Carrying two beers was the most I could handle. I’d have to focus all my energy on the pint glasses, one in each hand, and take baby steps as I made my way from the bar to the table ten feet away. I remember biting the collar of my turquoise shirt and wiping my sweaty palms on my apron, crumpling dollar bills and not tallying the drinks on the check so that I could steal the money. This job didn’t last long. I passed out in the kitchen next to a bucket of sauce. I didn’t show up for work after that shift because I knew they were going to fire me.

The last shift I worked as a waitress in 2001 I licked the back of the toilet and had puke in my hair. The usual suspects came in and out of the joint and no one seemed to pay much attention to my reckless serving. Surviving as a waitress when I was twenty-one years old meant trying to act human and blend into society. O’s Pub was a little hole in the wall in Endicott, NY, a couple of miles from IBM, where my grandfather and uncles dipped computer parts in chemicals for a living. I think the land in this corner of upstate New York is poisoned with all those chemicals. And I feel like I drank that poison. I don’t trust my memory. When I think about the year I worked as a waitress I recall the times when I didn’t make it home after my shifts. I still wake up every day thinking it's a miracle I made it far away from that life.

Nicole Santalucia received her MFA from The New School University and her PhD in English from Binghamton University. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project, a literary outreach program, in 2011. In 2013, Nicole won the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine Inc. forDriving Yourself to Jail in July—published in January 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in The Cincinnati Review, Paterson Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, 2 Bridges Review, Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, Burlesque Press and others.Nicole received honorable mention awards from Astraea Lesbian Foundation Writers Fund as well as the Allen Ginsberg Award. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

Poetry to Keep You Full: Celebrating Paul Violi [by Danielle Elizabeth Chin]

Standing room only at the Paul Violi tribute. L to R, front: Robert Hershon. Seated: Tony Towle, Sharon Mesmer, Rozanne Gold, David Lehman, Stacey Harwood, Luis Jaramillo. Photo (c) Gabriel Don.

On February 11^th, over a hundred colleagues, family, friends, former students, and admirers gathered in Wollman Hall at The New School to celebrate the poetry of the late Paul Violi and to launch a posthumous collection of his poems, Selected Poems 1970-2007 (Ginko Press, 2014), edited by Violi’s lifelong friends, authors Charles North and Tony Towle. Violi, who died in April 2011, had published a dozen collections of poetry, including Overnight (Hanging Loose Press, 2007), Breakers: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2000), In Baltic Circles (Kulchur Press, 1973), and Waterworks (Toothpaste Press, 1972). During his lifetime, he had been internationally anthologized and awarded numerous honors and grants, including two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award, and The Morton Dauwen Zabel Award.

Growing up in New York, Violi was not only a prolific writer but versatile in his endeavors. He graduated with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History from Boston University, traveled through Africa, Asia, and Europe during his time in the Peace Corps, worked for television, served as managing editor of The Architectural Forum, organized readings at the Museum of Modern Art while he was the chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, and taught at Sing Sing prison and numerous universities, including The New School’s graduate writing program. 

Even before David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator of the Writing Program and co-host took the podium to welcome the guests, Violi’s influence as a poet as well as a beloved professor was evident in the camaraderie that filled the room. The enthusiastic chatter about Violi’s poetry, the experience of working with him and sitting in his classrooms that pervaded Wollman Hall was so great, someone might have expected Violi himself to walk into the room. 

Lehman, who had anthologized Violi’s poem “Index” before he met the man of honor, recounts the time a hired driver had gotten him, Violi, Susan Wheeler, Elaine Equi, and Charles North lost in New Jersey, in a “situation perfectly poised between the ridiculous and the reprehensible.” Violi however, “[made] the best of an ignoble situation,” revealing he was just as, if not more entertaining than his poems.

Lehman notes that Violi was not only an accomplished poet, cherished professor, and “a boon companion,” but also “a fine writer and editor [whose] tact and judgment…would have made him a most astute and valuable critic if he had wanted such a career.” In a letter Violi sent Lehman, Violi wrote: “poems are supposed to compete with each other—that’s part of the fun, seeing where and how you try to top yourself.”

Perhaps it was Violi’s self-competing motivation that made his poems accessible, humorous, witty, and satisfying.

“Paul had a genius”—Towle said—“for taking absolutely unpromising prosaic material…and turning it into poetry.”  

“All of us at The New School are committed to Paul’s memory”—said Laura Cronk, Associate Director of the Writing Program and co-host of the event—“working to nurture and develop the kind of poets that he did, with kindness, seriousness, good humor, and a vital enthusiasm for the arts.”

Lehman also had a hand in preserving Violi’s work and memory.

“When [Tony Towle] and I first brought the idea of a Paul Violi poetry prize to David [Lehman]”—North said—“he loved it and set it in motion. And when we approached him about a book signing for [Violi's Selected Poems: 1970-2007, he was very eager to do that too and I don’t think either one would have happened without David.”

After Violi’s death in 2011, the New School established the Paul Violi Poetry Prize for second-year poetry students in The New School's graduate program. Plans to expand the prize are already in motion. The proceeds for Selected Poems: 1970-2007, copies of which were donated by Rebel Arts and Ginko Press, will not only perpetuate the Paul Violi Prize but also, as Lehman noted, “attract seed money for an eventual Paul Violi Poetry Fellowship.”

North, Towle, and the four winners of the prize since its inception--Alexandra Bennett, Alex Crowley, Carson Donnelly, and Justin Sherwood--read poems from the book.

“I imagine the pleasure the sight of this group would give to someone gazing from a higher vantage point,” said Cronk. “To quote Paul on his poem, ‘Snorkeling with Captain Bravo,’ ‘be a true seeker and fall forever upward like an angel bloop bloop bloop.’”

Lehman also read from his poem, "Romulus and Remus" which he had written in honor of Violi: “My late friend/ Paul Violi, whom I still see in the street/ Sometimes, walking along at an unhurried pace/ So if I walk fast I will catch up to him at the corner/ Before the light turns green.”

To which Violi, had he been there, might have responded with his poem, “Toward a February Songbook:” “Ah, now February is springtime for gray/ And I’m at my lighthearted best./ Heart as light as a hornet’s nest.”

Hearing Violi’s poems read aloud brought on an air of nostalgia, uproars of laughter, and a feeling of gratification akin to finding a steaming bowl of boeuf bourguignon upon returning home on a windy winter’s night.

Tales of the Seventies: The Runner and the Frozen Yogurt Watch [by Alan Ziegler]

    In 1978 I order my first digital watch—recently affordable—through a mail order deal from Texas Instruments. I pay for the basic $19.95 model, though I lust after the higher-tech $79.95 version with multiple features. Two months later, I find the coveted attempted-delivery slip in my tiny mailbox. Seconds after leaving the post office, I open the box and am surprised and thrilled to discover the expensive model—a mistake I am willing to live with.

    I spend an hour poring over the directions, setting time zones and calendars, learning how to measure elapsed time (down to the hundredth of a second). I start timing everything, from shaving to phone conversations. I am running five or six days a week, and I time my various routes and interim sprints, keeping track of personal bests.

    After my run, I sometimes reward myself with a frozen yogurt from a tiny store recently opened, the first of its kind on the Upper West Side. In mid-November, a sign in the window reads: Get your treats early in the evening, with bad weather we close early. And soon like all birds, we fly south.

    I go in for what turns out to be my last frozen yogurt of the season, and the guy behind the counter asks to see my watch. He is in the market for a digital watch and wants to know what mine can do. I proudly run through all the functions, and he says he wants one, where should he go. I tell him about the mail order.

    “But where would I go to get mine? I can’t wait two months.”

    “I don’t know. I guess Macys is worth a try.”

    He writes it down.

     I get a call from a woman who says she works for a fulfillment house. I tell her that sounds like an intriguing place. She replies that the wrong watch has been sent to a number of people, they’re not sure who, and if I received the wrong one I should mail it back for exchange. “Not me,” I say. “If I did, I’d be glad to, but I didn’t, gotta run, bye.”

    Later that afternoon, while running in Riverside Park, I fantasize about an undercover agent stopping me, asking for today’s date and, when I find the answer on my wrist, saying, “You’re busted; interstate fraud.” I laugh and pick up my pace. I check my watch: I have a good shot at bettering my four-mile record of 28 minutes and 4.3 seconds. I can hurdle the quadruple-seven-minute-mile barrier.

    I pump my legs harder as I approach the tennis courts. A ball comes flying over the fence and bounces into a bush about twenty yards ahead of me. “A little help?” a guy in tennis whites yells.

    When I was growing up in Brooklyn and Lynbrook, there was an unspoken vow to respond to any playground call for “a little help.” But I never stop for anything in the middle of a run, fearing that the aerobic chain would snap. Plus, there is a personal best to be had. “Sorry, I can’t stop,” I reply, speeding up to show I am a runner, not a jogger.

    “Yeah, run away, you asshole,” the guy screams and waves his racket in my direction. The word asshole coats my guilt with anger, and I decide he's some modern-day Pistol who thinks the world is his oyster (which he with tennis racket will open). 

    On my return loop, I keep my head down as I approach the tennis courts. Another ball flies over the fence. “Can you fetch our ball, please?” This time a sweet woman’s voice. Then I hear Pistol say, “Don’t ask that asshole, he doesn’t stop for anyone.”

    This guy isn’t taking me seriously as an athlete. Without breaking stride, I point to him and say, “Why don’t you stop your game and tie my shoes, asshole?”

    Let him come after me. My third wind is kicking in. I start my stretch-run a quarter of a mile early. Not used to running so fast on the narrow part of the path, I veer off and feel my arm scrape along the fence, followed by a jolt and a twinge in my shoulder socket. When I regain stride, I check to see how much time I’ve lost. The watch-face barely holds on to the strap: a fighter on the wrong end of a knockout punch, display blank. My shoulder aches.

    I finish my run, dizzy from hyperventilation. I’ll never know if I have broken the quadruple-seven-minute mile. And I can’t send the watch back for repair.

    A few months later I go in for my first frozen yogurt of the spring, and the same guy is behind the counter, in animated conversation with a customer. He points to his wrist and I hear him say: “And look, it’s a stop watch, and an alarm clock, and....”

Balzac Speaks of Salvation Through Sexual Intercourse (by Mitch Sisskind)

How else to keep alive the spirit
Of sans souci, the flame of youth,
But with sexual intercourse?
That sphere of glowing delight
To which, once I acceded to it,
The luminous channel has never
Closed to me – as all my work
Is wrought there, charity obliges
That I advertise its pleasures and
Fairly attribute the curious vitality
Derived there that each night
Invents names and faces for me
As if my heart were still a boy’s
And my pen were the prick of one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

(c) Nin Andrews 2015

This Monday at KGB: Michael Broder & Phillis Levin

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Phillis Levin + Michael Broder

 Monday, February 16th, 2015

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by David Lehman and Star Black

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

Phillis Levin's fifth collection, Mr. Memory & Other Poems, will be published by Penguin in April 2016.  She is the author of four other books of poetry, Temples and Fields(University of Georgia Press, 1988), The Afterimage (Copper Beech Press, 1995), Mercury (Penguin, 2001), and May Day (Penguin, 2008), and is editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001). Her honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Widely anthologized, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Southwest Review, Literary Imagination, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Plume, and The Best American Poetry (1989, 1998, and 2009 editions). She teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York City.

Michael Broder is the author of This Life Now (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2014). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Animal, Assaracus, BLOOM, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Poets.org, among other journals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn with his husband, the poet Jason Schneiderman, and a colony of feral cats. 

Upcoming, Spring 2015

Feb 23  Howard Altmann + Carol Muske Dukes

Mar 2    Billy Collins + George Green  

Mar 9    Star Black + Yolanda Wisher + Sandra Simonds   

Mar 16  Jason Schneiderman + Ada Limon
Mar 23  Dark
Mar 30  Michael Morse + Sarah Rose Nordgren       

Apr 6    Jennifer MacKenzie + Chris Hosea 
Apr 13  3rd Annual Post-AWP Open Mic Competition
Apr 20  Kathleen Ossip + Spencer Short  

Apr 27  Noah Eli Gordon + Kelly Forsythe    

May 4   Norman Minnick + Chris Jansen

May 11 Cate Marvin + Jericho Brown    

May 18 Matthew Rohrer + Geoffrey Nutter + Randall Potts

*****

About the Series:

Labeled New York's best poetry series by such publications as New York Magazine and Time Out New York, the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Reading Series has hosted over 550 poets in more than 300 readings since it was founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman; it  focuses on combining established writers with the most exciting young and upcoming poets.  The list of past readers includes legendary American and international poets: John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Billy Collins, Richard Howard, Fannie Howe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Molly Peacock, Marie Ponsot, Tomaz Salamun, Charles Simic, Mark Strand, James Tate, Anne Waldman and Charles Wright.  Currently, the series is curated and hosted by poets John Deming and Matthew Yeager.

About the Venue:

A former single-room speakeasy (one of Lucky Luciano's favorites) KGB Bar was transformed into a Ukrainian socialist social club in 1948. To this day, the bar retains original decoration from its former incarnations, including a red hammer-and-sickle flag hanging from the tin ceiling, plus stained-glass Beaux Arts cabinetry, red walls, Soviet triumph posters, photographs, paintings, and sculptures.  KGBBar is located at 85 East 4th Street in New York's East Village (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue). Readings begin at 7:30 PM. There will be one ten-minute intermission. No cover charge for admission. All readings open to the public. Though it is smoke-free, the massive pervasive cigarette cloud that existed as little as twelve years ago (and contributed much to the venue's conspiratorial air) is still easily imagined.  

Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 6:30 -8:00 pm Poetry Forum: Denise Duhamel

 

Klein Conference Room, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall

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

Denise Duhamel’s books of poetry include Blowout, Ka-Ching!, Two and Two, Mille et un Sentiments, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, and A Star-Spangled Banner, which won the Crab Orchard Award Series for Poetry. She was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013. 

A professor of English at Florida International University in Miami, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, and The Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for Theater. She has collaborated with numerous poets, composers, and visual artists, and is co-editor (with Maureen Seaton and David Trinidad) of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry. She has an international following. An off-off-Broadway production of her play How the Sky Fell ran for four performances in 1997. 

Moderated by Mark Bibbins, faculty, Writing Program.

Preorder your book for the event HERE

Sponsored by the MFA Creative Writing Program.

-- sdh

The Original - On Fitness & Writing [by Jess Smith]

The last piece! It's been so quick! Thank you all for your time, your thoughts, and your feedback. Every week, I look forward to hearing what you have to say. At the outset, I thought I was writing about these two subjects because I was an expert at the way they intersect. But, as with most things, digging deeper into their role in my life only proved how little I knew.

For this last installment, I decided to go back to the Source - my grandmother. That's her (and my grandfather), in this picture, with all the legs.

Happy Sunday, Happy February, and Happy Reading. Thank you all, again. 

 

***

My grandmother has a lot of sayings.

If your nose itches, you’re having company.

Step on a slug and you’ll be nasty for nine days.

Don’t rock an empty rocking chair.

That woman is all fur coat and no knickers. (This one is particularly funny considering the fact that, according to my mother, my grandmother spent most of the mid-to-late 1960s wearing precisely this outfit.)

While I have lived by many of these aphorisms, just by the sheer force of my helplessness in the face of their repetition, I never quite understood the way they shaped my grandmother’s worldview. She used these phrases, these aphorisms undoubtedly passed to her from her own grandmother, to ward off a world she saw as basically ominous. They were her talismans, the worry dolls she placed under her pillow at night full of wishes. The problem with wishes is that they have to be for something that hasn’t happened yet. They don’t work for undoing what is already done.

***

There are many different ways to want something. There’s biological want, the basic gimme-gimme of thirst and hunger and scratching an itch. There’s a languid, yawning sort of want, the kind that usually comes in late afternoon, fingers strumming lazily on the belly, curtains rustling, and so on. There’s ambition. There’s prayer, an official form of wishing. And there’s lust - of course - so much lust.

Then there is what I think of as dark wanting, which is (without fail) unsatisfiable. Hate, for one. Vengeance. There’s the lungless, full body seizure of grief, of demanding that something un-happen. Then there’s compulsion, which apes instinct but is its opposite. Instincts are meant to keep us alive. Compulsions lure us into the guise of relief while creating a higher tolerance to that relief. And habits, even habits are a way of wanting. We create routine around our bodies, our relationships, our pursuits in order to give them shape. To stave off the feeling of helplessness. As Nick Laird writes in his poem Feel Free:

                                To deal with all the sensational loss I like to interface
                                with Earth. I like to do this in a number of ways.
                                I like to feel the work I am exerting being changed,

                                the weight of my person refigured, and I like to hang
                                above the ground, thus; hammocks, snorkeling, alcohol.

***

My grandmother is very beautiful. I think it is important to say this, because her beauty has probably been the most important thing in her life, whether she chose it or not. We never went anywhere without someone commenting on it.

One of her favorite stories to tell is how thin she was after giving birth to her first child, my Uncle David. “Ninety-two pounds,” she’ll say. “The doctors made me drink a beer and a milkshake every night.” It was made clear to me from a young age that thin was deeply important. Preferably thin enough to need medical intervention.

I was her first grandchild. She was only 48 and did not yet want to be called Grandma, has never wanted to be called that. Her middle name is Ann, so somehow she decided on Annie. When I asked my own mother if she also wanted to be called Annie by my someday-children, as is tradition, she balked. “No, no,” she told me. “That is her name now.”

***

As someone who is afflicted with a certain measure of perpetual dissatisfaction (genetic, to be sure), I am easily prone to compulsion. Especially living in New York, I want to go and do everything all the time. My inertia is dizzying - when I’m spinning out in the city, there’s no end to it.  In order to survive my own high levels of impulsivity, I make many rules. I have a distinct and thorough punishment/reward system. This works well, most of the time, for both fitness and creativity: Run for an hour and then you can X. Write 1000 words and then you can Y.

Neither sitting down to write nor heading out to run are endeavors easily undertaken. I do both because I like the feeling after, not the feeling before. I also have a high measure of gratitude for the gift of choice I’ve been given - a healthy body, a healthy mind, a society in which my decisions are (mostly) my own.

And I do it for my grandmother - to play the reel of my life in the background of hers. I try to understand her ferocity, her sources of power, and what it means to her to see those forces in me. I try very hard to stay thin, to keep up my writing, as a measure of respect, and because I am a little afraid of her. Whenever I come home, she hugs me and holds me and kisses me square on the mouth. She either says something to praise me like “That figure!” or she says nothing at all, which means my figure is not quite up to standard. Truth is, I lighten my naturally dishwater hair not just because I think it looks better but because she is a blonde. Sometimes it seems as if she is the original blonde.

When I was a toddler, I slept over at Annie’s apartment all the time. She had a mini-trampoline on which she did aerobic jumping routines, a la Jane Fonda or Cheryl Tiegs. When she used to do her workouts on it, she tells me, I would stand next to her and try exercising too, imitating her movements. She would sometimes have to hold her breasts when they hurt from bouncing.  I would then grab my own chest, holding up nothing, never missing a beat.

We have a deal, she and I. My towheaded mountain queen. My haloed barefoot girl. My sweet, spiteful Sandra Dee.

***

“We didn’t really work out in the 60s,” Annie says. “I never even thought about it. But I loved long walks. I could walk for hours.” Walking may be the only physical pursuit that outpaces running, as I wrote about in my last piece, as a stimulant for many writers. As Philip Lopate put it in his book Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, "The mind relaxes through the calming, repeated movement of a stroll, while the legs' cadences trigger the rhythms of poetry."

Annie also loves to tell me about summers she spent on Belle Isle with her older sister Alice. Alice had moved away from their hometown of Harlan, Kentucky and gotten a job outside of Detroit. Annie would visit her there as a teenager and spend many afternoons at the beach.

“While everyone else laid in the sand,” my grandmother always tells it in her very southern, slightly childlike voice, “I would walk the shore forever and climb all up in the rocks. My hair was so blonde and I was so tan, you wouldn’t believe. And my feet would get all kinds of tore up.”

I love hearing these stories from her - about her solitude, her physical exertion. She sounds happy, which is not a sound she usually makes. Similarly, she loves talking about her youth running through the woods, ankle-deep in creeks, chasing her siblings up the mountainside. I wonder if she would have been an athlete - a runner, a dancer, a climber - had she been brought up differently, or in a different time. From what I gather, my great-grandmother was extremely proper. A real Southern lady. After a certain age, I’m sure, certain activities were not permitted. I imagine my great-grandmother (after whom I am named) was the kind of woman who didn’t have to tell you to stop doing something. You just knew.

***

My grandmother is a poet. As a young mother in Kentucky and later Ohio, she began writing poetry to combat loneliness and the onset of depression.

“The first poem I ever wrote was called ‘Solitaire’,” she tells me. “It had a lot of pretense because I wrote what I thought you were supposed to write - like you’re supposed to be happy and you’re supposed to be religious. But that’s not how I felt.”

At first, the attention brought her pleasure. Her aunts liked the work, even her mother. “Mom loved my poetry,” she says conspiratorially, “but never would have guessed that half of it was so pretentious.” My grandmother’s honesty, her willingness to call herself out, seems to me very brave.

Always a reader, she started devouring poetry books. Sometimes she would look for ads in the back of magazines - So You Want To Be A Writer? - though most turned out to be money-making schemes. Discouragement, it seems, is abundant. One need not even seek it out.

Even though she was still depressed, she tells me, the writing gave her an edge, a purpose to the depression. Despite her unhappiness, I like to picture Annie during this time: angelic young mother, furious and locked away trying to write a poem that wasn’t pretentious, going to church on Sundays and composing bitchy sonnets in her blonde head. Something about her rage seems appropriate, or at the very least exciting.

A few weeks ago, the most emailed New York Times article was a piece from the Well section titled "Writing Your Way to Happiness." It outlines a study that shows, among other benefits, that writing your personal story can improve mood and even stave off depression. “It may sound like self-help nonsense,” author Tara Parker-Pope says, self-consciously. “But research suggests the effects are real.”

***

This week alone, I have taken a ballet barre class, a yoga class, and a brutal but effective reformer-style class called BodyBurn that makes me feel like I’m going to throw up every time I walk in the door just from sheer anxiety over how hard it is. I haven’t been running much because of worry I’ll wipe out on all this miserable ice, but soon I’m sure I’ll resume my dates with Prospect Park.

What I’m saying is that I live in a place of abundance and choice. The world feels and has always felt (with a few glaring, brief exceptions) as if it was brimming with options. I am very aware that what stands between the things I want and me is mostly just me.

While I know my grandmother did not have nearly the options I am so lucky to have, she had more than she realized. Annie, I believe, knew what she wanted - to be a writer - but had no idea how to become one. She did the work, writing constantly, but never knew where or how or if. The wider world gave her immediate value for being beautiful, for being a mother, not for the pages she stored in a desk drawer upstairs.

***

Recently, Annie has given me a box full of her poetry handwritten in notebooks, loose leaf in folders, and some scrawled notes on torn corners of napkins. I’ve read much of her work but to have it all in bulk this way reveals a rich, devastating portrait of Annie and the things she wanted. All the fierce secrets she had. When Mark Strand passed away over the holidays, she was in tears. I had no idea she even knew who he was.

She’s also started pissing me off. Something about opening the seam of her writer life to me has given her license to criticize my own writer choices. Usually my biggest fan, she’s now calling me with aggressive questions: Well, why don’t you have a book yet? You have enough poems. (As if quantity of poetry meant a collection.) Why don’t you send to Esquire? I like Esquire. 

I’ve avoided her calls, here and there, knowing full well that she is right. She’s pushing me, stage-mother style, because of what she wanted once, still wants now. She’s really asking me what are you waiting for?

***

My grandmother’s sayings, like her poetry, are really just incantations, verbal armor against a difficult existence. She wanted to give them to me to protect me, to help create me. Annie is tragic and glamorous and can be very difficult to understand. Being with her brings me peace and tumult all at once, as if I am groping at her past along with her, measuring my future against the things she wants until I end up wanting them harder. As Zadie Smith says in her essay Joy, “The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it.”

I take immense joy in proving to Annie that I am her kindred, in affirming that I am part of her and that she matters to me to the point of madness. And, of course, that I heard all those things she said. I hear them now.

 

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.

 

Harold Arlen's Birthday is Today

Happy birthday, Harold Arlen
Born Hyman (Chaim) Arluck
Buffalo, NY
February 15, 1905

<<<
You're gonna love me, like nobody's loved me,
Come rain or come shine
Happy together, unhappy together
and won't it be fine
Days may be cloudy or sunny
We're in or we're out of the money
But I'm with you always
I'm with you rain or shine
>>>

Harold Arlen was the son of a cantor, born one hundred and ten years ago today in Buffalo, New York. He wrote the music for "Get Happy," "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," "Stormy Weather," "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea," "I've Got the World on a String," "Let's Fall in Love," "Ill Wind," "Paper Moon," "Last Night When We Were young," "Over the Rainbow," "If I Only Had a Brain," "Ding-Dong, the Witch is Dead," "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," "Blues in the Night," "Accentuate the Positive," "My Shining Hour," "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)," "Come Rain or Come Shine," "That Old Black Magic," "Hit the Road to Dreamland," "This Time the Dream's On Me," "I Wonder What Became of Me," "The Man That Got Away."

"I can't explain / It's the same champagne. . ."

-- DL

"Don't Change a Hair for Me" Happy Valentines Day My Funny Valentine

Which version do you prefer?

-- sdh