The Best American Poetry

To Live Without Answers: Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Maboroshi [by Mari L'Esperance]

My sincere thanks to Stacey Harwood and BAP for inviting me to be a guest blogger this week. It’s been a process and an adventure to give focused consideration to each of my posts, revisit themes that are important to me as a person and a writer, and share them with BAP’s readers. I welcome hearing from you if you have comments or questions and look forward to continuing the exchange. Thank you for reading—for paying attention. —ML

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"Sometimes life presents us with large, painful, unanswerable questions, and we cannot simply ‘get over them.’" —Roger Ebert, from his review of Maboroshi

 

    When I feel saturated with words and thoughts, I turn to images to recalibrate. I first watched Kore-eda Hirokazu’s exquisitely beautiful and sad film Maboroshi no Hikari (Maborosi is the English title) alone at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District. The word “maboroshi” 幻の光 roughly translates as “phantom light” or “mysterious light”. The film made such an impression on me that I went home and wrote about it in my journal, so have the date: December 5, 1996. I’d run across an ad for it in the Roxie’s free announcement sheet and something about the thumbnail synopsis intrigued me enough to travel across town on a weeknight to see it. Maboroshi is Kore-eda’s debut film and remains my favorite of his. Over the years I’ve internalized its moods and layers with numerous viewings. As certain books synchronistically “appear” in our lives when we most need them, Maboroshi was exactly the film I needed at that juncture in my life. I was reeling from a personal loss and was at loose ends, swimming in the liminal, with absolutely no idea which way to turn or how to configure my life. In its way, the film provided a tether, an empathic lens through which I could begin to understand my own loss and feel seen and understood. This is what great art can do.

    The film opens with a memory or dream of a grandmother leaving her son’s family to return to her home village “to die”. As the old woman walks across a bridge, a young Yumiko (the film's protagonist) runs after her, begging her to come back, but the old woman keeps walking. She doesn’t return. Fast forward to Yumiko as a 20 year-old adult: she’s living in Osaka in a small apartment near the train tracks and is married to her childhood friend Ikuo, who works in a factory. They have an infant son, Yuichi. The couple’s relationship is playful and affectionate. One day Ikuo doesn’t return from work and a policeman arrives at their apartment to give Yumiko the news: Ikuo has been killed by a train as he was walking on the tracks. As his body has been disfigured by the trauma, the police don’t allow Yumiko to see it. The subsequent scenes of Yumiko’s grieving are wordless and, except for a minimalist score, imbued with deep silence.

    Five years later, a matchmaker introduces Yumiko to a widower with a young daughter a little older than Yuichi. They live in a remote fishing village (Noto) on the Japan Sea. Yumiko agrees to marry him and moves to Noto with her young son. The widower, his daughter, and his aging father welcome the young woman and her child and present them to the community. Yumiko's new husband is kind and patient and gives her time to acclimate. The children take an immediate liking to one another. Things seem to be looking up for Yumiko. But she continues to be haunted by the mysterious and violent circumstances of her first husband’s death.

    Stephen Holden described Maboroshi in the New York Times as “a pictorial tone poem of astonishing visual intensity and emotional depth. Watching the film, which has little dialogue and many lingering shots of the Japanese landscape, one has an uncanny sense of entering the consciousness of the main character and seeing through her eyes….. Instead of searching for psychological explanations, it discerns a deeper design for Yumiko’s life.” [italics mine]

    The works of art that profoundly mark our psyches are the ones we return to again and again. Maboroshi is such a work for me. More than anything, it helped me to live with “large, painful, unanswerable questions” when little else could. I’ll leave you with the English-subtitled trailer.

Mari L’Esperance 3.6.15

All Mixed Up [by Charles Coe]

I was clearing out my desk at home and stumbled over an old cassette tape—a dance mix that my friend and former housemate Lawrence Fine and I put together for our annual Halloween party.

Had no idea what was on the tape but I dug out an old boombox that plays cassettes and popped it in. Here’s what we were shaking our moneymakers to on Halloween night of ‘89, just a few days before the Berlin Wall came crashing down...

Chaka Khan – “Signed, Sealed Delivered”

Greg Kihn Band – “Our Love’s in Jeopardy”

Marvin Gaye – “Heard it through the Grapevine”

Katrina and the Waves – “I’m Walking through Sunshine”

Edgar Winter’s Band – “Give it Everything You Got”

The Fixx – “One Thing Leads to Another”

Power Station (with Robert Palmer) – “Some Like it Hot”

Yes – “Owner of a Lonely Heart”

The Kinks – “You Really Got Me”

Wang Chung – “Everybody Wang Chung Tonight”

Herbie Hancock – “Rockit”

Michael Jackson – “Thriller”

If you want a dance mix now, you get on your iPhone, pluck some tunes from your list and you’re all set. Takes fifteen, twenty minutes. Back in the day you had to grab an album, put the needle on the blank spot and turn on the cassette deck. And if the record skipped fifteen seconds before the end of the cut you cussed, backed up the tape and recorded something else over it. Lawrence and I spent a week making that thing.

But it was worth it; our annual Halloween party was circled in red on our friends’ social calendars. The hangout, eat and drink area was on the first floor; the basement dance room was tricked out with lights and a killer sound system. And we had themes: one year it was the Wizard of Oz. I rented a scruffy Cowardly Lion outfit, but Lawrence wouldn’t settle for no steenkin’ rental. A master craftsman, he bought a roll of roofing tin and spent a month before the party making an incredible Tin Man outfit with articulated joints. He could have won any costume contest in Boston with that thing, but he was perfectly happy to wear it at our party, collect his rightful share of “oooohs” and “ahhhhs”, and hang it on the wall afterwards.

One year I went as Tammy Faye Baker (big blonde wig, lavender gown, fake eyelashes and hyperbolic makeup.) Another time, in a nod to my Catholic schoolboy roots, I bought a nun’s outfit at a costume shop and wandered the party as “Nun of the Above.” Someone asked, “Tell me sister, which of the snacks your friends have provided does the Lord like most?”

I calmly replied, “All snacks are created equal in the eyes of God.”

Good times…

 

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

"I am usually a decisive person, but . . . " David Lehman on this week's "Next Line, Please."

Over at the American Scholar, David Lehman has been mid-wife (?) to a crowd-sourced sestina. The poem is nearly finished. Here's what he has to say about the sestina-to-date: 

I am usually a decisive person, but the entries this week were so solid that I found myself hemming, hawing, flipping, and flopping until finally and quite impulsively I chose Angela Ball’s candidate for stanza six, composed (she tells us) “to follow Christine Rhein’s lovely stanza.”

This solves two problems, at least tentatively, as I can now summarize our efforts in a six-stanza sestina lacking only a three-line envoi and a title.

Continue reading and submit your candidate for the envoi over at the American Scholar. 

Who? (by Mitch Sisskind)

Sixth grade, a new kid came,
Fat kid, terrible at sports,
But a genius, played the violin,
And when we got math workbooks
On the first day of sixth grade
He finished the workbook that night,
Was supposed to take a year!

So smart was he that the teachers
Hated him, put the kid in front
Of the class and said, ‘Do you believe
In God or are you too smart to believe
In God?’ The kid said he didn’t know
At first but finally said he did believe
In God, because he had to.

Once at lunch he said the name
Jascha Heifetz and we all laughed
At the name and wanted him
To say it again but he wouldn’t
Say it because he didn’t like us
Laughing at the name Jascha Heifetz
That was like somebody sneezing.

Then one day at a movie theater
We were buying popcorn and there
Was a cardboard cutout of a guy
With a guitar and the kid said to me,
‘It’s Elvis Presley’ and I said, ‘Who?’
He said, ‘It’s Elvis Presley, he was on
‘The Ed Sullivan Show last Sunday.’

How strange, how unlikely it now
Seems, my introduction to Elvis Presley.
But we shared a destiny, the kid and I --
So years later, when I fell in love with
His wife, I was all shook up: my hands
Were shaky, my knees were weak,
I couldn’t stand on my own two feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tales of the Nineties: Give Me a Name [by Alan Ziegler]

    Now retired from his laundry route but still working at the motel Saturdays and Sundays, my father goes to the racetrack almost every weekday—Aqueduct fall and winter, Belmont spring and summer. Some days he never sees a horse in the flesh, betting at the last minute and watching the monitors under the stands.

    He has developed dozens of ten-seconds-at-a-time relationships: “Did the two catch the nine?” “Why didn’t he go to the whip sooner?” “They shoulda never taken him down; I’ve seen much worse.”

    On a trip to Las Vegas, at the Riviera Sportsbook, he comes across one of the racetrack faces and he says, “Hey, I know you.” The other man sticks out his hand and says, “Yeah. From the track. Mort.”

    “Matt.”

    Back at the track, they become friendly, without last names or phone numbers. Mort always comes with Terry, who does all the driving. My father refers to them as “the boys.” If one of the boys is sick or away, neither comes. Days can go by without them, then the boys are back without missing a beat: “The seven hates the mud.” “I thought the three was going to steal it.”

    My father and Mort plan their Vegas trips to overlap whenever possible. They watch races together at the Riviera, get each other coffee and bagels, and go their own ways at night. Mort often exasperates my father, arguing that the nine came in when it was clear that the four overtook him, or that Frank Sinatra is playing the Sands, when it’s Frank Sinatra Junior: “Yeah, that’s what I said, Frank Sinatra!”

    Weeks go by without the boys showing up at the track, longer than ever before. My father spots a guy who hangs out with them, and asks him if he knows what’s up.

    “Oh yeah,” the guy says, looking at his pencil-ridden program, “he died.”

    “Who died?” my father asks, heart pounding and neck tense.

    “Yeah, he died. Heart attack. I thought the six was going to take the three but he just couldn’t get outside.”

    “Who died?!” my father demands. “Give me a name.”

    The guy looks at my father quizzically.

    My father puts his hands firmly on the guy’s shoulders and says softly, “Please. Give me a name.”

    The man is distracted—it is three minutes to post.  

    “Give me a name.”

    “Not Morty. The other guy.”

    My father lets go, pats the guy on the back, and they go to separate windows to make their bets.

My Borderlands: Location “of Potent Unresolve” [by Mari L'Esperance]

The following is adapted from Betwixt and Between: Embracing the Borderlands of My Mixed Heritage, a piece I wrote for Discover Nikkei in January 2013.

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“I wish to work perpetually on the borders—to me, it is a place of potent unresolve—untainted by one culture (camp) or another, a limbo in which I am free to create my own citizenship and, hopefully, my own gods.” —Ocean Vuong

 

    The symbolic and psychological meanings of “borderlands”—both internal and external—have been my preoccupation for years, as a poet, writer, and woman of mixed Japanese ancestry. It’s a preoccupation that comes with the territory. I am the daughter of a Japanese mother from an upper middle-class family and a New Englander father of French Canadian heritage who grew up in a working class, bilingual family. My parents raised my brother and me with both cultures in various locations in California, Micronesia, and Japan. This last is why I also consider myself an adult Third Culture Kid—a person who’s been raised in places and cultures other than her parents’ passport country/countries. TCKs internalize aspects of all the cultures in which they’ve been immersed while not having full ownership in any. Consequently, I’m adaptable, curious, restless, and can live pretty much anywhere. My least favorite question is “Where are you from?” because it is impossible to answer. I’m from everywhere and nowhere. If I were to use a food metaphor to describe my internal experience, Asian hot pot (or nabemono in Japanese) probably comes closest. Although I mostly felt “other” as a younger person, and not in an affirming sense, in midlife I’ve finally learned to settle into and appreciate my unique background and have mostly let go of struggling to “fit in”. I’ve come to learn that I prefer the in-between.

     In late 2012 I relocated to the Los Angeles area after more than two decades in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City. L.A.’s a good place for in-between-ers. In this sprawling metropolis with no center, a place that’s in a perpetual state of transience and flux and whose population represents every culture and continent, I can finally enjoy a sense of internal and external spaciousness. L.A., like Hawai’i, is a place where I can blend in and feel like myself—all of my selves.

    When I’m not in Japan—a country that I consider my spiritual home and love to visit when I can—my primary contact with Japanese culture has been via my excursions to Japantowns in the Bay Area (San Francisco and San Jose) and now Los Angeles (Little Tokyo, Sawtelle, and Gardena). I don’t think of myself as Japanese American because that’s an identity, a community’s history, that my mother’s family doesn’t share. To me, the Japanese American experience seems to be intrinsically tied to the internment on U.S. soil of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War II. That said, there is something deeply nourishing about spending time in J-town, an urban borderland that’s not America and not Japan, but where I find solace—a feeling that’s almost belonging—in familiar objects, images, and food.

    In J-town I can connect with my mother and all the meaning she and her culture have held for me. Few things make me happier than spending an afternoon alone, wandering the narrow arcades and browsing the cluttered shops. I like to eat a comforting lunch of oyakodonburi (literally "parent and child"—seasoned chicken and egg over hot rice) or tempura soba (deep-fried prawns over buckwheat noodles and broth), window shop, and haunt the aisles of Kinokuniya Books—unable to read much Japanese, but savoring the sight of kanji-covered book spines and splashy pop-culture magazines, the sumptuous color photographs in books about Japanese gardens, traditional farmhouses, art, cooking, flower arranging, and more. In downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo, there’s the added bonus of the beautiful Japanese American National Museum, an important community resource. The gift shop alone is worth a visit. I once spent several hours there reading through all of Allen Say’s gorgeous picture books. Somehow I feel better, more cohesive and grounded, after these J-town afternoons.

    In Japanese British filmmaker Ema Ryan Yamazaki’s excellent documentary Neither Here Nor There, she movingly describes her own struggle to define and integrate the various strands of her mixed heritage and growing up between Japan and England. Like Yamazaki, I am learning how to be “other” and yet also belong.

 

Mari L’Esperance 3.5.15

Phil Levine & the Burger Bitch [by Kate Daniels]

photo (c) Vanderbilt University

About twenty years ago in Nashville, when Philip Levine was Vanderbilt University’s visiting writer, there was a Burger King on 21^st Avenue South, at the edge of the college’s magnolia-fringed campus.  It had a large parking lot that butted up next to a place called San Antonio Taco, where Vanderbilt students lined up to buy galvanized buckets of long necked beers on ice to ease down their guacamole tacos and buffalo wings.  The parking lot belonged to Burger King, but SATCO customers often parked there.

Nowadays, Panera Bread (which has replaced the Burger King) employs a large, male security guard festooned with handcuffs and a police baton to patrol the lot, making sure the spaces reserved for Panera customers go to Panera customers.  But back in 1995, Burger King had a sole female employee performing that job.  Anyone who’s spent time around college students can tell you it’s dangerous to get between them and their beer.  So it was not unusual to see this woman – in her late fifties, early sixties – running out of Burger King in her brown polyester BK uniform, a matching kerchief flapping around her neck, a matching cap bobby-pinned to her dyed blond hair.  Like a lot of people who do these kinds of jobs, she was a good employee, and took her work seriously.  To discourage the students from parking where they wanted to park, she sometimes shook a rag at them, sometimes she just called out.  Overwhelmingly, (of course) they ignored her.  When she wasn’t trying to chase off illegal parkers, her duty was picking up trash.  You’d have thought anyone could see it was a miserable job, and taken pity.    Still, it was a job, right?  And in 1995, she must have been making $4.25/hour – minimum wage at that time – $170/week if she worked full time.  Some of the students called her the Burger Bitch.  I just hope she never knew…

As it happened, my colleague and best-friend-of-Vanderbilt Creative Writing, Vereen Bell, sometimes had a cup of coffee and did a little last minute paper grading in the Burger King before crossing the street to class.  It was convenient, cheap, quiet.  It’s hard to describe Vereen: somewhere in his late 70s now, he’s an iconic figure at Vanderbilt where he’s taught for more than half a century, he’s pretty much transformed the English Department from its midcentury roster of white-men-teaching-white-men into the lively, diversified department it is today.  (Read about Vereen here)

In the English Department, we were thrilled when Phil won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth on April 18, 1995.  He actually took the call in his office with his door open.  Vereen was in his office, across the hall, ready with a bottle of bourbon.   I was in an office just a few doors down – brand new to Vanderbilt, taken aback by its surface formality and the constraints of a conservative campus culture.  “Please be quiet,” warned a placard hung in the hall outside the department.  “Voices can be heard from within.”  I’d never been part of an English Department where talking was discouraged…

As soon as Phil confirmed he had won (“Yes. Isn’t it sweet?” he said to my colleague, Mark Jarman.), I watched in astonishment as various faculty and staff rushed up and down the hall, arms full of liquor bottles, or wrapped around trash cans, commandeered as ice buckets. Soon, a full blown party was underway in the Department’s Duncan Library.  What I remember best is the expression on Phil’s face – bemused, pleased, still something a little bit held back (maybe because Franny wasn’t there).  I read later that he said, of the Pulitzer, “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good.”  His face reflected those split emotions that afternoon.

Well, what does this have to do with the Burger Bitch, her miserable job, and her pathetic little life picking up trash and chasing drunk college students out of Burger King’s parking lot?

Just this:  when Phil gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt later that semester, Vereen Bell introduced him.  The reading was packed.  When it was time, Vereen unfolded his tall frame and made his way to the podium.  In his slow-paced and garrulous manner, with his soothing, south Georgia accent, he began to talk, bypassing entirely the impressive literary credentials of Philip Levine. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties. 

“She came and sat down at the table with me,” he said.  “She told me what her job was, and how hard it was, how difficult it was to get the students to listen to her.

“Then she asked me what my job was.  ‘Well,’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed, ‘I teach over there at the college.’  She brightened up right away.  ‘You do?’ she answered.  ‘Then would you do something for me?’  ‘Sure,’ I said.  ‘Would you please tell those girls not to laugh at me because of my job?’”

In the audience, our own laughter, our wry smiles, the subtly self-congratulatory atmosphere we’d created around ourselves of having a Pulitzer Prize winner on faculty dissipated instantaneously.

For a few seconds – and I will never forget the feel in the room – Vereen let us sit in that.  

And then he said, “Maybe you wonder why I’m telling you this story.  Well, it’s because it’s the best way I can I can think of to introduce Philip Levine.  He understands how that woman who works in the parking lot at Burger King feels about things.  And he writes poems about it.”

Now, that introduction – so astonishingly apt, so unique in American poetry – has become Phil’s epitaph…

Kate Daniels is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.  Her most recent book is A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU: 2011).  It includes “Crowns,” a poem she wrote for Philip Levine.

Malinda Markham: Felt Intelligence, Compassionate Interiority [by Mari L'Esperance]

    

    American poet Malinda Markham was just 44 years old when she died in September 2012. I didn’t know Malinda intimately, but she and her intense, quiet poems made a deep impression on me. Possessing a singular voice and style, she struggled with debilitating depression for much of her life. We can only wonder what she’d have gone on to create had she lived. Malinda was not one to self-promote, but those who knew her work championed it. “A breathtaking debut, Malinda Markham’s poems bring with them an exquisite poise and restrained—yet sensual—elegance that is truly remarkable,” wrote David St. John about her first book Ninety-five Nights of Listening, which Carol Muske-Dukes selected for Bread Loaf’s Bakeless Prize and that was published in 2002 by Houghton-Mifflin. Bin Ramke wrote of her second book Having Cut the Sparrow’s Heart (2010 New Issues, winner of the Green Rose Prize): “No one else writes poems anywhere near these in felt intelligence, in glorious sensual detail.”

    I met Malinda in 2005 in a Bay Area poetry group. She was bringing new poems for the group to discuss, several of which she included in her second collection. Although I didn’t connect with everything of hers that we read, I recognized her gift and creative ambition. Malinda had previously lived in Japan for several years, teaching and translating the work of contemporary Japanese avant-garde women poets. My mother was Japanese, so we shared a love for Japan and its culture. I liked Malinda, but she was private and we rarely socialized outside of the group.

    A few months later, Malinda moved back to Tokyo to work as a financial translator for a Japanese securities firm. With an MFA from Iowa, a PhD from the University of Denver, and a prize winning first book, Malinda had decided early on that she didn’t want to teach in academia because it was more important to her to maintain close contact with the Japanese language. She saw translation work as a way to do this. I respected her courage and determination to carve out this new professional path while continuing to write poems when and as she could. It was not an easy path: the work was grueling and her hours were long. She was lonely in Tokyo, despite being immersed in the language and culture she loved.

    In the spring of 2007 I traveled to Japan to visit my family and met Malinda for dinner at a Spanish restaurant in the Tokyo neighborhood of Tsukishima, at the edge of Tokyo Bay. We talked at length over paella and Spanish red wine. Malinda seemed upbeat and laughed frequently. She mentioned her loneliness, but said work kept her busy. We barely talked about poetry. Afterward I walked her to the subway entrance, where we said our goodbyes. I thought she looked fragile and a little unsteady as she descended the stairs, although the wine might have had something to do with that. It would be the last time I’d see her.

    Three or four years later Malinda moved to New York City to continue her financial translation work. She wrote to me in January 2012 that she didn’t like New York; it was too cold and she felt more isolated and unhappy there than she had in Tokyo. She wondered if returning to San Francisco might help. I suggested ways she might connect with others. In February she wrote that she’d started a meditation class and loved it, so I felt hopeful for her. We continued to correspond sporadically. Her emails were always thoughtful and encouraging. In June a brief message from her was supportive of a career change I was considering. I checked in on her again at the end of July, but received no reply. The news of her death saddened me, but I intuitively understood that she’d exhausted her options and could not go on. “The glass island I called my own did not shield / the waves from me.” (from “What Gravity Demands”).

     I think of Malinda often and keep her poems close to me. Her efforts to persist despite her pain were heroic. In an email written exactly eight months before her death, in which she enthusiastically agreed to recommend me for a summer conference, she wrote: "’Trust’ is really a key word right now, isn't it? I'm struggling with it, too, trying to trust that there's ‘something’ out there (the Universe) that wants me to fit into it and will help show me how. Cheesy though it sounds, I tell other people whatever I've learned along the way, so I'm hoping to get a positive stream going, if that makes sense. I mean, I hope for fulfillment, but I want to share it, too. If it comes. I mean, when it does.”

One Must Have a Mind of Spring [by Mari L'Esperance]

    The season of renewal has begun to arrive here in our corner of Southern California. If you’re not from SoCal, you might be one of many who think we don’t have spring—or any “real” seasons, for that matter. I can tell you that we most certainly do. Since returning to this part of the world over two years ago, I’ve learned to appreciate the subtleties of seasonal emergence and transformation. If one pays attention, the signs are everywhere. The air is softer and the light takes on a different cast. A songbird is once again building her nest in the abandoned hanging planter under the eaves. Having soaked up our precious and all-too-brief winter rains, the foothills are blanketed in new green and the large shade trees lining the avenues bud and leaf out. Plum, apple, pear, and citrus trees are blooming, as are camellias. The shadows of rain clouds pass over the shoulders of the San Gabriels. Our valley is cleansed and smells sweet again. Summer’s prolonged heat blast is still a distant mirage.

    With the arrival of spring, my mind is also across the Pacific, in my uncle’s garden in Kamakura—a historic seaside city less than an hour by train southwest of Tokyo and strategically situated between sea and mountains (to avoid invasion by warring feudal clans at the time of the city’s founding in the 12th century). My uncle and his family live next to Engaku-ji, the second of Kamakura’s five major Zen temples, on the same land where he grew up with my mother and their family. I try to visit Japan every other year or two, and in the spring, the hopeful season. This year I can’t manage a trip, so my Kamakura spring unfolds from memory.

    The roubai (wintersweet in English) that we planted for my mother in 2004 usually blooms in late January, putting forth its waxy yellow flowers with their sweet, spicy fragrance. The Japanese consider roubai to be a harbinger of spring. This year’s winter was so cold that no roubai blossoms appeared, my uncle told me. In late February or early March, depending on the weather, the plum (ume) trees’ pink and white blooms and the showy, broad-faced camellias emerge. By late March my uncle’s Japanese magnolias have flowered and the cherry trees have stepped out in their frothy dresses of palest pink; in their transient fullness they are glorious to behold. My favorite stage is not full bloom, but when the tissue-thin petals begin to drift down like snow, covering everything. The intermittent liquid cry of the Bush Warbler (uguisu) cascades through the branches. Also in March, young bamboo shoots (take no ko) begin to nudge above the earth and are harvested for their tender, sweet meat; to eat fresh bamboo shoot is a seasonal ritual and a spiritual experience (once you’ve tried it, plain or prepared in a myriad ways, you can never go back to canned). As the days warm, purple daikonsoh (radish blossoms), wild iris, and spidery forsythia line the roadsides and footpaths. By late April the hills are laced in a tangle of wild wisteria and the hydrangeas at Meigetsui-in—another Zen temple located a few doors down from Engaku-ji—begin to bud. By June throngs of visitors will clog Meigetsu-in’s grounds to photograph its famous garden’s hundreds of meticulously maintained hydrangea plants covered in hat-sized blooms.

    My visits to Kamakura are quiet, shaped around simple, familiar activities. We share meals and sit in the garden in fair weather. My uncle and I take daily walks into town to shop, rewarding ourselves afterward with steaming bowls of tempura soba at our favorite soba shop. More than fifteen years ago we hiked the forested hills together; now he walks slowly, and with a cane—more time to admire the flowers, he says. We visit my favorite temples: Zuisen-ji, sparsely visited and tucked away up in the hills of northeastern Kamakura, and Hokoku-ji with its stunning bamboo garden. Tohkei-ji, which once provided sanctuary to women fleeing abusive husbands, has a lovely graveyard and a dimly lit, cozy teashop surrounded by verdant foliage. I like to visit Engaku-ji just before I leave Japan, entering from the west along the Philosopher’s path (Tetsugaku no michi). The great Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiro is buried at Engaku-ji, his black marble tombstone unmarked but for the single kanji character mu (無—emptiness, nothingness). It’s the temple where my mother and her siblings played under the great wooden main gate (Sanmon), which dates from 1783. They played like all children do: in the present moment, innocent of a great war that was brewing on a faraway continent—a war that would change Japan, and our world, forever.

 

Mari L'Esperance 3.3.15

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

(c) Nin Andrews 2015

Our Father in the Wind: Remembering Philip Levine [by Mari L'Esperance]

   

photo by Geoffrey Berliner

 A little more than two weeks after his death on Valentine’s Day from pancreatic cancer, I am still acclimating to the reality of a world without Phil Levine. In my exchanges with some of Phil’s friends and former students, for the most part we seem to agree: Phil still feels very much alive among us. This is the strange and mysterious work of grief as it makes its way through us—tricks of the mind played by denial and disbelief. I’m not one for linear stages, for I believe grief has its own circuitous path and affects each of us in different ways. My own grief has arrived in waves since learning of Phil’s illness just two weeks before he died—a moment I’ll long remember. I turn to his poems, share them with others. I read his letters, in which I can still hear Phil’s clear, singular voice coming through his spidery handwriting, scrawled in fountain pen on lined sheets of a yellow legal pad. Online I listen to his interviews and readings, laugh out loud at his humor. There’s Phil on my computer screen at a reading just last summer—alert and vigorous, keenly intelligent, wisecracking for his audience, not missing a thing. Like the grease-stained factory worker in his poem “Coming Close,” I could reach out and touch him. And then I remember: Phil is gone.

    As a teacher, Phil was warm, grounded, irascible, funny, opinionated, tender, confrontational… and deadly serious about the art and practice of poetry. He had little patience for foolishness or willful cleverness, in our poems and person. Phil’s no-nonsense approach to teaching, his passionate talk about poetry and his favorite poets, enlivened and inspired us, made us want to write better poems. He was tough on our work, but, in my experience, always spoke in service of the poem. Around the time he was awarded a Pulitzer for The Simple Truth, Phil said in a radio interview that in a poetry workshop there are a dozen people in a room and one of them is getting paid to tell the truth. His style didn’t endear him to everyone, but he wasn’t there to make friends. He was there to challenge us to be the best poets we could be.

    In a poetry climate that can often seem driven by austerity, careerism, and self-interested striving, Phil’s generosity, his willingness to be available and responsive to poets and poetry lovers from all walks of life, was a rare and precious thing. He maintained regular correspondence not only with friends and former students, but with strangers as well. For many of us who studied with him, formally and informally, Phil’s teaching and friendship, his belief in us and our poems, made all the difference in our lives. I am still learning from him.

    I’m grateful that Phil got to read Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (2013 Prairie Lights Books), which I co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín, while he was well and could enjoy the tributes, could let the collective love sink in. It’s a book we put together in a spirit of inclusivity, holding in mind the legions of poets Phil taught and mentored over the decades, some of them now passed on, too. "Franny has decreed that I read only one... essay each day," he wrote to us. "She has a point. I might come to believe what everyone has written & go through the roof." Of course, that was Phil’s way of letting us know how deeply touched he was—that he, too, had received and benefited from his relationships with poets across more than five decades of teaching.

     How incredibly lucky we are to have had Phil in our lives for a while. Despite early losses, his was mostly a good life—a long, rich, and fully lived life. Up until cancer caught up with him, he was writing and publishing new poems, giving readings and talks, recording poems to jazz accompaniment, traveling with Franny. Phil and Franny (who, in essential ways, made possible Phil’s life in poetry) nourished and supported countless poets, helped us to feel that we and what we make deserve to be in the world. Now, as Tomas has said, it’s up to each of us to pay this generosity forward. From the bottom of our hearts: thank you, Phil. We love you. We remember you.

 

Mari L'Esperance 3.2.15

Introducing Scottish poets 5: Meg Bateman [by Robyn Marsack]

Allegory

On the single track roads in the Highlands
we seek each other’s eyes,
giving way to some,
beckoned through by others,
in a slow, supple dance.

But down goes my foot where the double track starts
as I swing away at twice – three times – the speed,
aware of nothing  but my own thoughts,
driving free, without hindrance.

Rarely need I pull in
for another to pass,
rarely does another wave back.

 

Cosamhlachd

Air rathaidean cumhang na Gàidhealtachd
siridh sinn sùilean chàch-a-chèile
’s sinn a’ gèilleadh do chuid
is gar leigeil seachad aig càch
ann an dannsa sùbailte sèimh 

Ach sìos lem chois far an tòisich an rathad mòr
agus air falbh leam aig dhà, trì, uiread an astair,
gun diù do chàil ach mo smuaintean fhèin,
’s mi dràibheadh gu soar, gun bhacadh.

’S tearc a-nist a dh’fheumar
stad do dhuine eile,
is ’s tearc a smèideas duine air ais.

from Transparencies (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2013)

Meg Bateman’s first collection , Aotromachd /Lightness, made a stir when it was published in 1997. Here was a writer in Gaelic, not a native speaker (she  studied Gaelic at Aberdeen University and began to write her own poetry in that language), speaking of intimate subjects in a voice that was full of insecurity and yet boldly challenged the received view of Gaelic poetry – certainly as it was received by an English-speaking audience.

Anyone who has driven in the Highlands knows what Bateman, who lives on Skye, is describing in this poem, the decisions and the courtesies of negotiating a single-track road. But close communities, whether linguistic or physical,  are also confining: we can read the poem as an allegory of island life, even of Scottish life; of  choosing to write in Gaelic (for a community of less than 60,000 readers) or English.

Mostly self-translated, Bateman’s poetry  evokes both the timeless and the contemporary: love and disposable diapers. Carol Rumens has remarked: ‘The poems have the strength and simplicity of art made for a community rather than an elite, though they are far from artless.’

To find out more, visit

http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/meg-bateman

www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/aug/05/poem-of-the-week-meg-bateman

For more poems, and to hear Meg Bateman read,
http://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/iomallachd-2463#.VPN6k_msUlI

 

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…

Please go to  www.justgiving.com/byleaveswegive   or www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/about/support-our-work to donate online

This Monday at KGB: Billy Collins + George Green

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Billy Collins & George Green

 Monday, March 2nd, 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

 

Billy Collins was born in New York City on March 22, 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems (Random House, 2013), Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems (Random House, 2012); Ballistics: Poems (2008); She Was Just Seventeen (2006); The Trouble with Poetry (2005); Nine Horses (2002); Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001); Picnic, Lightning (1998); The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Questions About Angels (1991), which was selected by Edward Hirsch for the National Poetry Series; The Apple That Astonished Paris(1988); Video Poems (1980); and Pokerface (1977).

George Green’s first book of poems, Lord Byron’s Foot, won the New Criterion Prize in 2012 and the Poets’ Prize in 2014. His work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Poetry 180; 180 More Poems; The Best American Poetry 2005, and 2006; The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets; and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds. Green grew up in western Pennsylvania but has lived for over three decades in Manhattan’s East Village. He teaches at Lehman College, CUNY, in the Bronx. In 2014 he received an award for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

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. 

Mari L'Esperance Guest Author March 2-6

This week we welcome Mari L'Esperance as our guest author. Mari was born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-New Englander father. Her collection The Darkened Temple (2008, University of Nebraska Press) was awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. An earlier collection, Begin Here, was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. In 2013 Prairie Lights Books published Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, which L'Esperance coedited with Tomás Q. Morín. L'Esperance is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University and the recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She lives in the Los Angeles area. You can find out more about Mari at her website here.

"No matter how maudlin . . " David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind Discuss Their Teacher Kenneth Koch