The Best American Poetry

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

    In 1969, students can fly half-fare on standby. Sometimes it is cheaper than the bus, so I fly everywhere I can. I am to accompany Alicia from New York back to Goddard College in Vermont, and stay with her for a few days. Goddard is an experimental school on the fringe of a fringe era. We have an offer to ride in a school van with several fringe people. We decline, opting instead to fly. The others think that is incredibly bourgeois of us.

    We are to change planes in Boston, but get bumped off the second plane (we didn’t know standby status kicks back in when you change planes). It is 10 p.m. and it doesn’t look like there will be any standby seats available for a couple of days.

    But we are young and it is 1969 and we know that whatever happens will be good. Indeed, “It’s always good” is kind of a mantra for us, based on a remark made by Steve, a young psychology instructor at Goddard who conducts encounter groups. When I heard one session was “emotionally bloody” with people “freaking out,” I asked Steve how he thought it went. He smiled beatifically and said, “It’s always good.”

    Alicia remembers that the van is going to make a stop at Clark University to pick up her roommate, Nora, who is staying with her boyfriend. Problem is we can’t remember his name.

    Finally, Alicia blurts out “Gary Moore,” and I say, “I’ve got a secret,” and she says, “What?” and we go on like Abbot and Costello until I realize that Gary Moore is the name of Nora’s boyfriend and Alicia learns that Gary Moore hosted a T.V. show called “I’ve Got a Secret.”

    Gary Moore’s phone number isn’t listed, but we decide to go to Clark and take our chances. We catch a bus to the Boston bus station and a bus to Worcester. When we arrive, we start asking people if they know Gary Moore. No one does. We leave the bus station and start walking, slightly buzzed by the adventure, toward campus.

    I am totally enjoying the pointlessness of what we are doing, when Alicia screams “Look!” and I see a van driving in our direction. “It’s them, I know it’s them.”

    I start waving my arms, but the van passes us. It screeches to a halt and backs up. “I told you it’s them,” we hear Nora squeal. The driver sticks his head out the window—he is all hair—and yells, “Far out!” Nora comes flying out and hugs Alicia and me.

    Steve comes out of the van and, without even acknowledging the miracle or questioning why we are on the ground at all, explains that it is too late, they have taken two other passengers, and there isn’t room for us. He signed out the van and is responsible for everyone’s safety.

    Nora and the others urge him to reconsider, and I say, “Come on, Steve, it will be good.” Steve smiles beatifically and says we can come along if we’re willing to squeeze into the baggage area.

    Throughout the bumpy ride, sounds of chanting and laughter waft back to us as we occasionally doze, entwined. As we approach Plainfield, I awake into a sweet, trancelike state. I hear Steve say, “This is one of those college experiences we’ll all remember.”

The Pulitzer win of Gregory Pardlo, Baltimore and what Poetry can do.

Sometimes we are given exactly what we need to do; exactly what’s required of us. And when this happens it means we have been gifted with the immense good fortune to know and understand, Purpose. Even if it is Purpose only in a moment and not for one’s whole life or something impossible like that, we should count it amongst our blessings.

 It is with that in mind that I’m sitting here thinking about what to talk about in a blog platform for Best American Poetry in the few days I have the opportunity to do so. I tell my students all the time, to write not just ‘what they know’ , but to write from their current obsessions. What do you care most deeply about in the moment? What do you obsess over? Write from that place. To teachers I say, teach from that place. Let the immensity of the love or rage that is currently consuming you drive at least some of the pedagogy that informs your practice.

 How then to talk about Baltimore?

 I’ve been searching for ways ever since Trayvon Martin’s murder, and particularly since the absolution of his murderer, to use my life as a writer, as platform to speak to the experience of being Black in America, an experience that the Martin case I thought, was going to finally hip America to. I wrote poems, essays, manifestos about places from which I pledged to begin the work of making America see us. I thought the time was so ripe for work to begin and for some other parts of America to finally recognize that the work needed to be done, right now. And then we got us another Trayvon, almost once a week up until Baltimore’s Freddie Gray. The evidence keeps mounting in the form of dead black bodies, made so by white police, or individuals who feel they have every right to police our bodies. At different turns, I found myself outraged, hurt, weeping, too paralyzed to get out of bed, feeling guilty for no longer being young and taking to the streets, for needing to take care of my daughter instead, for not treating my own body as a more holy object all these years, for not recognizing that I had the right to say No.

 This past week was announced the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, awarded to Gregory Pardlo, a Black man for sure, a friend, one whose book was rejected – according to the New York Times – by every major publisher… before Four Way Books snatched it up. In a week of such sadness and rage, I saw how the celebration of the brother was a godsend and absolutely needed. I hadn’t spoken to him in the minute, but I sent him a note.

 Look… I understand no less than Auden has told us that ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Fuck him on this one. Turns out he has several more intelligent and useful quotes. Poetry helps me not run into the streets and get suicided many days. It allows me to celebrate my child, and not spend the lion’s share of my time weeping into full glasses of alcohol. Poetry helps me grid the impossible with the unimaginable enough to make sense of what my body is doing in the world, with its ‘trying to walk around’, with its ‘doing things’ and ‘pushing forward’ when it seems like these might be the most pointless pursuits ever. Many times it feels pointless for no reason other than the skin I’m in. I teach Creative Writing in a juvenile jail, so I’ve become very aware too, that poems (and all art for that matter) allows young men who have been narrowly defined, to add something to their evolving definitions of self, that is of their own making. They get to do – ironically, while confined – what we believe might be the most central emotional work of any adolescent; to build and reframe the ‘I’ with which they’ll eventually be tasked with ‘trying to walk around’ and ‘pushing forward’  (that is, if our brilliant idea of charging children as adults, lets them out of prison before they’re 40). I get to see poetry do some very concrete and real shit, and so with the pictures of Baltimore etched indelibly on my brain, I called the local bookstore. They said they had one left. I paid for my drink, left the Bulls game at half time, climbed on my bicycle and headed there to get Pardlo’s book, Digest before the store closed.

 I don’t know what I expected to find in Pardlo’s book. I’d enjoyed his first offering, Totem from 2007. The brother is cerebral as all hell, sometimes difficult so. His vocabulary makes me feel lightweight stupid at times. I certainly didn’t expect some sort of Baraka-esque response to what was happening around me, but I knew the brother could write his ass off, could build an image and extend a metaphor until your heart is up in your mouth, there being no space left in your chest for it. I expected Pardlo’s book to make me feel.

 The first time I read any poem I read it just for the enjoyment. I want to be surprised and taken aback. I want to experience wonder or feel a new way to experience grief. I want to be moved to celebrate or throw a Molotov cocktail. The second time I read a poem I’m almost invariably (if I loved the poem) trying to figure out how to teach it, how to lead discussion and built a writing exercise out of it, and most often I’m thinking about my guys at Free Write Jail Arts at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. I’m probably depriving myself of some very wonderful moments with poetry, going back to it so quickly to analyze and pull apart rather than allow it to soak in again. But we live in desperate times, and often my life feels like there isn’t a moment to lose. Part of the pedagogy is about staying relevant, teaching living poets because they too, have to live through the Baltimores and the Fergusons we’re having a hard time wrapping our minds around.

 The cliché of course from all of us who teach incarcerated youth is that ‘they could have been anything’ if not for poverty, the wrong crowd, the social set-up that leads some inexorably towards crime. When I work with youth in the free world, the same applies of course, but more often than not they’re not facing the prospect of something so gargantuan that the idea of Future Possibility is rendered moot. We can confidently tell them they are the next generations leaders because well… they are – and they have the youth, energy and opportunity to make it so.

 One of the more riveting photos to emerge from the Baltimore rebellion today features a young woman with hot pink hair, a cell phone in one hand, a brick in the other ready to launch. She is wearing too, tights with an attractive cubist looking print. Like so many other youth of color in America, she has reached the end of her rope. She is done and is now turning to face the police who injure and kill citizens in her city every day. The shot echoes the now iconic shot of a young man in Ferguson, this past summer, clad in an American flag tank top, about to return launch a teargas canister at the cops. Both pictures made me proud of our youth, of the fact that they refuse to back down, that they have the energy, passion and sense of leadership to take to the streets and demand a change with their very bodies if necessary. I want to prepare my boys to be able to do that when the time comes, to know the world and the History that has brought them to this place, such that they might have cogent analyses of their times and be able to bring them to bear when they’re called upon to do so. I wondered last night as I thumbed through Pardlo’s book how would I help them ‘do that time’ and keep their minds intact enough to be ready when they were out and that day came. Pardlo’s first poem, Written by Himself, offered this:

 I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet

whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;

I was born across the river where I

was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,

broadsides sewn in my shoes…

 Our young people (incarcerated or otherwise) will need among other things, the capacity for crafting their own mythologies. The ability to mythologize the circumstances of our birth, to imagine ourselves special beings brought here through extraordinary circumstances, is akin to the deep solemn pride I take on when I consider myself the descendant of folk who survived the Middle Passage, slavery, the aftermath of slavery, neo-colonialism, neo-imperialism, and well… the GOP. In Pardlo’s first poem is the bold declaration of a body come through multiple trials designed to thwart it to even get here. I want that innate knowledge for my boys, this idea that, according to Pardlo, I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

 I was excited to find the poem as soon as I opened his book, and equally so today, when I got to Philadelphia, Negro (to be clear the poems in this book are phenomenal; gem after gem grace these pages). In it the poet as a young boy recalls America from the vantage point of the bi-centennial celebrations in 1976, and his introduction to the television series Roots. He writes:

 …I was not in the market

for a history to pad my hands like fat leather mittens. A kind

of religion to make sense of a past mysterious as basements

with upholstered wet bars and blacklight velvet panthers, maybe,

but as such a youngster I thought every American a Philadelphia

Negro, blue-eyed soulsters and southpaws alike getting

strong now, mounting the art museum steps together

like children getting swept up in Elton’s freedom from Fern Rock

to Veterans Stadium, endorphins clanging like liberty-

themed tourist trolleys unloading outside the Penn Relays,

a temporal echo, an offspring, of Mexico City where Tommie

Smith and John Carlos made a human kinara with the human

rights salute while my father scaled the Summit

Avenue street sign at the edge of his lawn holding a bomb

pop that bled tricolor ice down his elbow as he raised it like

Ultraman’s Beta Capsule in flight from a police K9 used to

terrorize suspicious kids…

 If you feel the breathlessness of that verse in the same way you feel the breathlessness of the History being made while you watch images of young people who can finally take no more and have resolved to fight back, it is because like any poetry that (sorry Auden) does something, it find the moment it is written for before the moment arrives sometimes and Pardlo makes it so what it do with a sentence that begins back at A kind of religion, in the second line of this excerpt and doesn’t end until the end of the excerpt. As if that’s not enough, Pardlo’s line breaks are doing so much Work – what with the Summit which his father scaled ending the line, though mid-phrase to pull you towards the next line where his father is further exalted at the top of the street sign where he is holding that bomb/pop. It is, one might argue, at this point of the sentence that the un-ending image finds purchase, at its highest point, and thank God that it is there for us to find, for me to find on a day that Baltimore appears to be burning. Thank God, someone had the good sense to recognize its brilliance, its relevance, such that the book earned its author one of the most prestigious prizes anyone can hope to secure. Thank God Gregory Pardlo defied Auden and wrote a book that does something.

 I did not share Philadelphia, Negro with the boys today. I’d already prepared a curriculum for today that involved Written by Himself, Saul Williams’ Children of the Night and Federico Garcia Lorca’s City That Does Not Sleep. I’ve seen young men leave our classrooms and head toward County to begin long sentences – 6 years, 15 years, 40 years. I have seen them do short stints and emerge into the world already. They leave almost all of them believing themselves to be also poets and artists. They’re fixing their minds for the long haul, to emerge from the hardest part of their lives ready to lead. This is the legacy of work like Pardlo’s that this week also had the good and deserved fortune to be announced as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Look at Baltimore. Find the real news about the youth mobilizing and leading there. This is what we’re a part of. This is what Poetry can do.

 

 

Under the Influence – O, Miami poets reflect on their inspirations

Posted by Chauncey Mabe in special arrangement with Best American Poetry, April 2015

As all but the most delusional poets know, originality doesn’t really exist. Every writer is beholden to the books he or she has read or the writers whose work he or she admires. That’s the idea behind the “Under the Influence” reading sponsored by The Betsy-South Beach and O, Miami each year during National Poetry Month.

The program originated four years ago.  FIU poet Campbell McGrath, O, Miami (and former McGrath student) P. Scott Cunningham, and Daniel Halpern, poet and Ecco Press editor were on hand. Also present via video was Stanley Kunitz, Halpern’s teacher. Kunitz read a poem by Hyam Plutzik, the father of Betsy owner Jonathan Plutzik. Kuniz and Plutzik were contemporaries who knew each other’s work well.

Since that first evening, it’s become an annual collaboration between O, Miami and The Betsy, with Campbell McGrath at the helm.

“I love this event,” McGrath told the capacity audience at The Betsy’s BBar one recent evening. “It never fails to enhance our understanding of the poets who have influenced us.” He opened with another poem by Plutzik, the humorous Drinking Song.

And, because McGrath and the two poets reading with him are also writing professors, the evening demonstrated how influence is received, transmuted, and passed to the next generation of poets. Julie Marie Wade, also an FIU poet, read “A Jazz Fan Looks Back,” by the late African American poet Jayne Cortez.  “We’re told to write what you know,” Wade said in connection to the poem, “but it’s better to write about what you love.” She added, “This poem makes me want to learn more about jazz.”

Daisy Fried opened with Frank O’Hara. A visiting writer-in-residence in The Betsy’s Writer's Room (The Betsy is host hotel for O, Miami during Poetry Month), Fried identified O’Hara for younger members of the audience as “a midcentury New York poet.” She lauded him for always “going for the emotion.” She promised that all three of her influence poems -- the poets also read two of their own -- would be about motherhood, though, she cautioned, “not in the way you might expect.”

McGrath lamented the past year as a bad one for poets. Tomas Transtromer, the Nobel Prize-winning Swedish poet died in late March, he noted, He read a poem titled “The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak,” by GalwayKinnell, who died last October. It was a vivid poem of aging and loss, beautifully rendered. McGrath told a story about playing softball against Kinnell when he was a graduate student at Columbia.

Homage was paid to foreign poets, with Fried reading from the works of Cesare Pavese, an Italian writer of the first half of the 20th century, while McGrath read a poem by the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra(who turned 100 last September) in a translation by William Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. “In translation a poem is not exactly what was intended,” Fried said. “But influence comes from a variety of directions.”

Late in the evening the poets turned to their own work with an appropriate modesty. “It’s strange to make claims abut your own poetry when you’ve been reading from such great poets,” McGrath said. But he went on to read a long, terrifically visual poem called “Elvis Presley 1957.”  Wade, a leading younger lesbian poet, read a charming work, part of a series, in fact, called “Portrait of Jodi Foster As the First of the Movie Girlfriends.”

Wade, a leading younger lesbian poet, read a charming work, part of a series, in fact, called “Portrait of Jodi Foster As the First of the Movie Girlfriends.”

Guest Blogger, Chauncey Mabe is a seasoned journalist with a 20-year legacy of exemplary literary criticism for South Florida’s Sun Sentinel. This Spring, with funding from The John S. and James L Knight Foundation, The Betsy-South Beach has engaged Mabe in a project to document literary programs from the inside out– sharing the creative viewpoints of wide-ranging writers who connect with Miami’s literary community through residencies in The Betsy’s Writers Room (betsywritersroom.com ) during March, April, and May, 2015.

O, Miami is a poetry festival, with a mission to reach every single person in Miami-Dade County with a poem during the month of April (National Poetry Month). Under The Influence is one of O, Miami’s annual events, held each year at The Betsy Hotel, hosted by MacArthur genius award winner, and Florida poet, Campbell McGrath. (Omiami.org)

Op-Eds declaring the Art of Poetry dead... are dead!! [by Roger Bonair-Agard]

Every few years or so, we are told by someone new that poetry is dead. I’ve been writing poetry seriously for about twenty years now, and I can recall at least five such elegies during that time. I’m sure they came before as well. I’m sure they will come again.  Indeed, when my friend, Silvana, sent me a link to the latest such death knell (this week by Christopher Ingraham, in The Washington Post) I told her I had no intention of responding to it, because, well… I had poems to write. But then I remembered I was gifted this great platform this week and figured it was probably as good a time as any to address it.

In deciding how I’d enter this discussion, I wanted to begin straight off with a screed on how whiteness in the form of  ‘evidence’ and ‘empiricism’ is always interested in reducing to cold, hard numbers, ideas and beauties that were never meant to be thus confined. I wanted to analogize Mr. Ingraham’s data, with the dismantling of public school education through the turning of our children’s educational lives into an argument of profit vs loss. I thought to talk about hip hop’s ubiquitous influence on the world as evidence that poetry is alive and well, sure as I am that rap is the most important (and rigorous) poetic form of the 20^th Century, but I needn’t have searched so far to find my evidence. I walked into a South Side Chicago Elementary this morning, where I teach a theatre residency to second and third graders. One of my third-graders, in the bi-lingual class (they have been almost painfully shy this entire time) got up to share this response to the weekend poetry exercise I gave them:

 I hear the voices of the dogs, the bears the snakes / I see the refuge in the eyes of cows. / My dreams are about fire and flesh. / Nobody knows about one graveyard under the stars in the skies in our world…

 I’d introduced them to Federico Garcia Lorca on Friday past.  This morning they introduced Lorca back to me. They invented and re-mixed. They found the break in Lorca’s music, looped it and re-imagined it. I could go on and on and share five or six of the more prodigious efforts from these young people (who are still struggling with expression in this, their second language), but it dawned on me that I have the good fortune every day to be part of the narrative evidence that states definitively that poetry is now, has been and always will be, alive and on the rise. Let me be clear; my instinct was to be dismissive of Mr. Ingraham, but I am betting that Mr. Ingraham does not get the gift that I got this morning, and get so often because I teach theatre and Creative Writing to young people.

 Of course Mr. Ingraham’s article has graphs, has ‘irrefutable’ numbers, which suggest that less people read poetry now than ever. While I found some of his choices of reading the data to be flawed, I’m not interested in entering that struggle.  Toni Morrison, one of the most lyric and lyrical poets of our time reminded us recently that some conversations are just designed to take us away from our work, and so we must remember our work and not indulge those conversations.  Instead here is my work:

 My mother introduced me to poems; the first of those being the poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Edward Kamau Braithwaite. Later she drove home the message of the significance of my being a black boy in the world with the poems of Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, Derek Walcott and others that I then found on my own. I migrated to the U.S. from Trinidad and Tobago when I was 19, and all my attempts at art and verse ceased. It was another seven years before a friend dragged me late one winter night into a pre-gentrification abandoned building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn to hear poets do their thing. I was watching ESPN. I almost didn’t go. I left there that night, went home and immediately began writing again. That night (drumroll for the saccharin cliché), poetry saved my life, though it was many more years before I understood my desperate leap and grab at it. It was (and still is) a way for me to understand my world and make sense of its madness by bearing witness, by asking improbable questions, by remembering and re-mixing so that I can consistently draw lines between one aspect of myself and another, one aspect of my reality and another – and often when those realities seem so implausible as to appear surreal.

 Put another way; for many of us it is impossible to go to anything but poetry in the world that has given us Trayvon Martin, Rekia Boyd, Michael Brown, Acai Gurley, Oscar Grant, Kimani Gray, Katrina, Gentrification, the West Bank, the GOP, 2 million incarcerated, private prisons, and the myriad other violences visited on us, and so we know that poetry isn’t ever dead. The question of course, is why the haste to bury it every few years or so. What does poetry do that someone is so often ready to declare it obsolete? The sadness of course is that often these prognosticators come from within our gates, but it is perhaps instructive that when they do, they are often on the waning side of their lives, careers and influence.

 I know this blog entry will not be enough to stave off the next set of trumpet blowers marching around poetry’s citadel, but for those of us who need the comfort of being reminded that it’s all good, I want to let you know that in America this week, on the South Side of Chicago, a nine year old who speaks English as a second language, wrote this:

 In the sky there’s nobody asleep./ I live in Earth./ a man finding a door to exist./ And my voices make fire or find refuge in one…

 Let’s talk about some poetry for the next few days, shall we? It appears there is so much of it to consider.

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Inspired by "[Poetry] strips the veil of familiarity from the world, and lays bear the naked and sleeping beauty which is the spirit of its forms.” Shelley

This Just In: MARIAM ZAFAR WINS FIFTH ANNUAL PAUL VIOLI PRIZE IN POETRY

The fifth annual Paul Violi Prize in Poetry has been awarded to New School MFA in Creative Writing student Mariam Zafar. The second-place winner is Timothy Baker, and honorable mention goes to Zachary Lutz. Each will receive a cash prize and be recognized at the MFA in Creative Writing commencement ceremony.

The prize, which is awarded annually to a second-year MFA Poetry candidate, was founded in 2011 in remembrance of Paul Violi. Violi was not only an esteemed and influential poet but a dedicated and caring teacher. He taught at The New School for many years before his passing in 2011. The Paul Violi Prize was established by Violi’s friends and family, who raised funds for an annual poetry award to be given to exceptional students in his honor.

Mariam Zafar is a Pakistani-American writer pursuing her MFA in Poetry at The New School. A desert dweller at heart, she writes between Miami, Dubai, and New York City. Her poetry is forthcoming in Bird's Thumb and The Ink & Code. When she's not working on her collection of poems, you will find her scavenging for the best cup of chai in town.

Tim Baker is an MFA candidate in Poetry at The New School based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Coachella Review and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, and his prose work has appeared in articles for Newsweek Special Editions, TV Guide, and CBS Watch!, among other publications. He is a graduate of Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Zachary Lutz is a writer in Brooklyn. He is an MFA candidate at The New School and an ex-Ohioan.

Find out more about the Paul Violi prize and the New School Writing program here and here.  

Tonight at KGB: Mark Wunderlich & Kelly Forsythe

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Mark Wunderlich & Kelly Forsythe

Monday, April 27, 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

 

Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Earth Avails (Graywolf Press, 2014) and Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004). His first collection, The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), won the Lambda Literary Award. 

 

 

 

 

 

Kelly Forsythe has poems published in Black Warrior Review, American Poet, and Columbia Poetry Review. She is the editor of Phantom Limb.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upcoming Spring 2015:

May 4   Norman Minnick + Chris Jansen

May 11 Cate Marvin + Jericho Brown    

May 18 Matthew Rohrer + Geoffrey Nutter + Randall Potts

 

 

 

Roger Bonair-Agard, Guest Author April 27-May 1

photo (c) Reginald Eldridge

This week we welcome Roger Bonair-Agard as our guest author. Roger is a native Trinidadian and Brooklynite. He is the author of three collections of poetry. The most recent collection, Bury My Clothes (Haymarket Books, 2013) won the Society of Midland Authors award for Poetry and was long listed for the National Book Award. He has been published in Harvard Online, Callaloo, Drunken Boat, Poetry Magazine Online, Gulf Coast & Academy of American Poets: Poem A Day, Crab Orchard (forthcoming) and elsewhere. He teaches Creative Writing with Free Write Jail Arts and Literacy Program at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. He lives in Chicago. You can follow Roger on twitter: @rogerbonair

Welcome, Roger. 

-- sdh

Poetry in Scotland: Think StAnza [by Bill Manhire]

(Ed note: This is the final post about poets and poetry in Scotland. You can find all posts in the series here. We thank Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library (in Edinburgh), for so generously introducing us to these fine poets.)

The Australian publisher Ivor Indyk recently wrote a short essay for the Sydney Review of Books on the very different economies of poetry and prose. Along the way he had this to say about the experiences of poets at literary festivals:

Poets are treated as the poor cousins of the book world at writers’ festivals, put on first thing in the morning or later in the evening, when they can be processed in bulk.

Increasingly the answer to this problem – at least in the UK – is the festival dedicated solely to poetry. Sometimes this can be a one-off, as in London’s Poetry Parnassus, attached to the 2012 Olympics, but usually poetry festivals work best as annual events: in England, think Aldeburgh and Ledbury; in Scotland, think StAnza  .

That capital A in StAnza gestures towards the festival’s location, St Andrews, a township on the coast about 50 miles north of Edinburgh. St Andrews is an ancient settlement – its cathedral, now a splendid ruin, was built in 1160 – and the modern town is a small town, not a mall town.  The permanent population is about 17,000 residents, but this swells considerably with university students, golfers and tourists  (“almost 1,000 years of looking after visitors” notes the town’s tourist portal).

St Andrews boasts Scotland’s oldest university, founded in 1413. The English Department there is well supplied with poets – John Burnside, Robert Crawford, Don Paterson, Jacob Polley and, until recently, Douglas Dunn – who make a fine complement to the annual festival. But the university is probably best known as the place where Kate and Wills first met. Royals trump golfers and poets every time.

 For me, St Andrews has a personal dimension: it’s where my parents – New Zealand sailor and Scottish schoolteacher – honeymooned towards the end of the Second World War. For a while, I even believed I’d been conceived there.

StAnza itself is a magnificent creation. It started in a low-key way back in 1998, and now each year takes over the town for four or five days in the first week of March. The festival brings in major international figures – this year Caroline Forché, Alice Notley, Paul Durcan, Ilya Kaminsky – and schedules them alongside their UK equivalents: Simon Armitage, Ian Duhig, Glyn Maxwell, Kei Miller, Sinead Morrisey and others. In between there are a whole range of performers, participants and events: writers from Shetland and the Faroes, from Sardinia and New Zealand and Mallorca; poets showcasing journals such as Poetry London and The Wolf; slam poets; an annual lecture (this year from Glyn Maxwell); hands-on workshops with the festival poet in residence; a large public masterclass led by Simon Armitage, where emerging poets submit to being critiqued not only by Armitage but also both by members of a very large audience (the event, like most at StAnza, was sold out).

StAnza is a world of big names and big gestures, of centre-stage events, but also a world where amazing things take place in the nooks and crannies. There were panel sessions over breakfast: one on translations, one on poetry as unfinished business, one on poets and islands. I took part in this last one. It helps if you come from a country where one island is a waka (ocean-going canoe) and the other is a giant fish hauled to the surface by a trickster god who happens to be a passenger in the canoe. (I was born on the waka but live on the fish.)

Then there were small round-table sessions, where poets like Paul Durcan read and talked to a group of no more than 16 participants. (For obvious reasons – intimacy is on the table – these sold out faster than anything else.) There were “past and present” sessions, where for example Caroline Forché talked about Mark Strand and Ilya Kaminsky discussed Paul Celan. There was a busy poetry market – where small presses displayed and sold their wares: all the way from serious and significant publishers like the Mariscat Press to cottage-industry versions of Hallmark Cards. The amazing Scottish Poetry Library  had a stall there, and was a presence throughout the festival.

The Emergency Poet was also on hand, ambulance and all, and happy to prescribe appropriate poems to festival-goers in need of therapy.

I suspect quite a few people might have needed the Emergency Poet’s services.  StAnza is one of those festivals where the energy levels are high. The centre of town is buzzing with poets and poetry readers. Events are spread across a whole range of smaller venues, complementing the wonderful Byre Theatre where most of the poetry action takes place. In the Byre you can watch short poetry movies, check out installations and exhibitions, or find yourself accosted by strolling players.

You can also eat food or buy a drink in the Byre – hence these beer and coffee coasters.

It’s no wonder then that the plaudits roll in, from festival-goers and from the poets.  Andrew Motion, ex UK poet laureate, calls StAnza “one of the most dynamic poetry festivals anywhere in the world”. Mark Strand described it as “a beautifully run festival. All those poets! All those good poems!” The late Alastair Reid used the phrase “generosity of spirit” when describing the festival, and that seems entirely just.

I’ve been to StAnza twice now (once in 2009, and again this year), and have had extraordinary pleasure from it both times.  It’s a festival which has significant continuities, yet keeps coming up with surprises.  I rather wish I’d been there in 2007 for the surprise that Alastair Reid sprang at the festival close.  He read his famous poem “Scotland” to the assembled crowd, then declared that this would be the last time he would ever read it.

“Then,” notes the StAnza archive , “he set fire to it.”

New Zealand poet Bill Manhire was a participant at this year’s StAnza festival.

Point Counterpoint: David Lehman and Amy Gerstler on Mad Men Season 7 Episode 10

Mad Men (c) Anna West, 2015. 15" x 11" Oil on Canvas

Dear Amy,

In a show as well-written as "Mad Men," there is always some competition for the  best line of the week. Here are my choices.

#1: "When I watch television, the commercials are my favorite part." This is said by Sarah, 17, one of Sally's friends, flirting with Don, who later (defensively) says she is "fast." Don is treating the girls to a restaurant dinner before they take off on a "twelve states in twelve days" bus tour. One reason I like the line is its ironic self-consciousness, which makes me take a second look at the commercials punctuating this week's episode. And I have to say that among all the spots for cars, credit cards, bad new movies,prescription drugs and their side effects, snack foods (Doritos), cable TV's indisputably evil empire (Time Warner), and "4G LTE signal" gadgets, the only commercial that holds my attention is that for the new Apple watch. I have no intention of buying one, mind you, being quite satisfied with the Omega on my wrist, but it is arresting -- unlike the mediocre stuff that keeps interrupting a show that is, after all, an elegy for Madison Avenue and the advertising campaigns of yore.

#2: "I'm a little nearsighted; I'm not blind." Said by Richard, a man in search of an optometrist who lucks into meeting Joan instead and has the wit to keep the conversation going and to land a dinner date with our favorite red-head. Is he good enough for her? We'll see.

#3 "This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life." Said by Peggy to Don during an employee-review session. If there is a line that sums her up, or at least defines her characteristic position among the shenanigan-prone characters at Sterling Cooper, for better or worse this is it. 

#4) "This conversation is a little late. . .and so am I." Said by Sally to her mother, showing a ready and somewhat cruel wit. Rebuffing the attempt at mom-daughter candor, she is really saying: I can out-bitch you, Betty.

#5) "You don't have any character. You're just handsome." Said by John Mathis, who is about to be fired, to Don. The line reminds me of an anecdote about handsome Robert Taylor, who plays Ivanhoe, among other movie heroes, and was married to Barbara Stanwyck for twelve years. To critics who complain that he is a wooden actor, the correct response begins, "If you look like Robert Taylor. . ."

#6) "This place reeks of failure. It's an $85,000 fixer-upper." Said by the real-estate agent, Melody by name, who is trying to sell the Upper East Side  penthouse apartment Don and Megan had shared. The lines are informative -- that price in 1970 would have to be multiplied by at least thirty in today's market -- and it is one of those thesis sentences ("reeks of failure") that leaps out at you. Yet Melody, surprising herself, sells the apartment after all, and there you have Don: managing to move forward despite the occasional stink of failure, still true to his idea of what masculinity looks like even when others around him let their facial hair get in the way or buy their clothes somewhere cheap instead of Paul Stuart.

I teach on West 12th Street so it's nice to know that that's where Joan lives.  But tell me why does she tell Richard she's been "divorced twice"?  Other questions for you: How do you like Glenn Bishop now that he has had the growth spurt that I can say from experience is one of the glories of being a high school senior? Given characters named Whitman, Crane, and Ginsberg, is it significant that Glenn's last name is that of a famous poet?  (Was this new info? I remember Glenn's mother, who worked for JFK in 1960, but not her last name.) Finally, as a writer, don't you relish the fact that Roger, asked to produce a 2,500-word speech on a tight deadline, would delegate the task?

 

Love,

David

 

Hombres Locos [April 25, 2015]

Dear David,

I love your “best lines of the week” conceit for this week’s blog post.

This was my favorite episode of the (SOB!!!) final season so far, due in large part to generous helpings of Sally, Peggy, Joan, and Betty, all my favorite Mad Men femmes. With at least 3 of them involved in sex-related situations or conversations during the episode, life couldn't be better!

(GIANT ASIDE: Speaking of commercials-as-punishment, which you brought up in your opening paragraph: I sometimes end up re-watching Mad Men episodes on the computer. And while grateful that AMC makes them available this way for further study, the strategy for delivering commercials during these online viewings is heinous. Quartets of commercials abruptly interrupt the show, often at key moments (nothing new there). But unlike watching network TV as you described, where you usually get an array of different commercials each break, online you see the same one or two commercials EACH DAMN TIME. During some of the frequent commercial barrages, you see the same single commercial four times back to back. (I turn the sound off so at least I don't have to hear them.) Highly obnoxious. When this indignity occurs, I console myself by leaving the room, to pet dogs, secure snacks, pee, or take a close look at my eyebrows in the bathroom mirror (always edifying, I find. You can tell your future by scrutinizing your eyebrows.) And I keep a list of the products that are advertised in this mind-battering, abusive way, so I will remember NEVER to buy ANY of them. I feel Don Draper would rather be celibate for life than ever allow ads for any product Sterling Cooper represented, be it peanut butter cookies or pantyhose, to bludgeon a poor, lowly computer user in this abusive way. END OF CRANKY ASIDE.)

I love two pairings or doublings in this episode. ONE: we get to see both Joan and Don woken up as the show opens. Don's overslept and his realtor lets herself in to show his on-the-market house, and thus wakes him. On the opposite coast, Joan, on a business trip, is awakened in her hotel room by her annoying mother, who's babysitting her little boy back in New York, calling too early because she just can't keep it straight about the time difference. We get the fun of hearing what Joan orders for breakfast from room service, which is a perfect character description of Joan via food: “A glass of skim milk, a grapefruit, a pot of coffee..............(significant PAUSE) ..........and some French toast.”

The second pairing is a kind of image/dialogue rhyme. When Joan is having sex with Richard for the first time, there's a little jokey pillow talk about how avid he is. He teases, “I just got out of jail.” She smiles and sweetly replies, “And you're acting like it.” When Sally and Betty are dealing with travelers checks for Sally's impending school trip, Betty lamely tries to extract a promise from Sally that she won't launch into teen nymphomaniac mode on the trip: “There are going to be boys everywhere. So I hope you won't act like you were just let out of a cage.” This is an interesting remark on a number of levels, but the image of surging sexual appetite being analogous to being freed from a cage or jail is arresting (ha ha).

The mother/daughter scene with Sally and Betty was excellent. It made me realize that, in many ways, Sally is more sophisticated than Betty. Maybe this is true of most mothers and daughters, once the daughters reach young womanhood? Betty seemed suddenly hopelessly old-fashioned and out of touch trying primly to warn Sally about “boys.” As you noted, Sally used the opportunity to land a verbal sucker punch.

This episode contains one of Betty’s finest hours, in my view. She is often the beautiful woman fans love to hate, but in this episode, dealing with the distraught Glenn Bishop who's about to ship off to Vietnam, she actually treats him tenderly, with a mixture of maternal and sexual wisdom we rarely see from her. She is kind to him, and rebuffs his awkward advance (I thought) with real gentleness and concern, her vaunted haughtiness and narcissism nowhere in sight. She knows what he needs to hear at this crucial moment. “You're going to make it, I'm positive!” There has always been chemistry between Betty and this kid, ever since he was a small boy. (I also applaud Mad Men's writers, for being brave enough in early episodes to allow their story line to deal with the sexuality of children, and I admire the way they have pursued that plot thread now in this final season, rather than dropping it, though it is a hot potato topic.) It's been so amazing to watch Glenn and Sally grow up and come of age on this show!

I loved Don and Sally’s terse interchange as she was boarding the school trip bus. She may at times seem more sophisticated than Betty, but her relation to Don is a different  story, and of course they are very alike. He's able to take on the chin her rather vicious adolescent attack on his parenting, and his reply is to tell her that while she's beautiful, she could be so much more. For all his Don Juan antics, he takes women seriously, and in some cases tries to get them to take themselves seriously as well.

There's online scuttlebutt about Joan's two divorces...claiming she was married to someone named Scottie prior to her tying the knot with the inept Army surgeon, but I'll have to do further research. Glenn has performed that miracle that adolescents do, turned from a lumpy, funny kid to a wonderful creature, a tall, good looking young man (yuk hairdo, facial hair scraggles and sideburns of the period notwithstanding.)

Since you were speculating, David, about what the closing scenes of Mad Men will be, I wonder if the show's last moments are going somehow to involve Don’s so-called “Gettysburg Address,” the speech about the company's vision and future direction that Roger has sloughed off onto our favorite Lothario? What thinkest thou?

Till the next installment,

love,

Amy

10 POETS FOR THE REVOLUTION [by Christopher Soto]

Many of the early-career poets that I come across in MFA programs, major publications, conferences, readings are writing in a similar fashion— first person narrative poems,  left aligned, less than one page in length, tight language, controlled temperament, image centric, high lyric… Sometimes, I read these poems and spin in their artistic splendor. Sometimes, I read them and feel cold (as if I’m hugging a dead body at the morgue, a lifeless body in its finest cloths). Sometimes, I pray to Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, June Jordan, Essex Hemphill, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, Tatiana de la Tierra, Akilah Oliver, Etheridge Knight and ask for their resurrection, strength.

In writing this post, I want to highlight the work of poets whose words BREATHE, rebel, are fiercely independent and politically centric. I am want to celebrate the (mostly) non-MFA poets who can give you an analysis of the relationship between poetic craft, class privilege, and white supremacy. I want to celebrate the poets who will laugh at me (for posting this article with an organization whose name perpetuates the concept of this settler-state).  These are the poets who would more likely spend their money supporting social movement work then submission fees for poetry journals. These are the poets who have been and will be standing at the forefront of the next protests against police brutality. Let’s take a moment to celebrate their fearless independence (& listen to their calls).

*Also, please know that there is much overlap, nuance, amongst the two “camps” of poets that were just described. (It gets really complex when trying to distinguish collectives of poets from one another stylistically and politically). This post is not intended to be an analysis of poetic movements, rather I hope that it serves as a starting point for people interested in contemporary poets who also mobilize politically.

 

1. Alok Vaid-Menon is a transfeminine South Asian writer, performance artist, and community organizer based in NYC. For the past six years they  have organized  in solidarity with racial, economic, and gender justice movements in the US, South  Africa, India, and  Palestine. Their creative and political work grapples with questions of power, trauma, diaspora, race, and desire. Alok currently works at The Audre Lorde Project and is on tour with DarkMatter, a trans South Asian art collaboration with Janani Balasubramanian.

 

Excerpt from girls wear blue; boys wear pinkwashing

“how many words does it take to dismantle a bomb?

  how many words does it take to erase a border?

  how many words does it take bring back the dead?”

 

2. Juliana Huxtable was born and raised in College Station, Texas and currently lives in New York, NY. From 2010 to 2012, Huxtable worked as a legal assistant for the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program. She is a co-founder of a queer weekly party in New York City called SHOCK VALUE and she is a member of the House of Ladosha. In 2015 Huxtable had a sculpture of her, photographs of her, and poems of hers featured in the New Museum Triennial. Huxtable regularly includes her poetry into her DJ sets and has also has recorded poetry on the song "Blood Oranges" by Le1f. Her poetry was also included in the runway soundtrack for the Hood by Air in New York Fashion Week.

 

Excerpt from Real Doll

“THEY HAD DEVELOPED THE MOST ADVANCED

SYSTEMS FOR MAPPING DESIRE KNOWN TO MEN

(LITERALLY). THEY ALL SEEMED SATISFIED TO

LIVE IN A WORLD OF TOPS/BOTTOMS MASC/

FEMMS DIVIDED INTO VARIOUS SIZE, SHAPE, HAIR

LEVEL, ETC AFFILIATIONS. IT WAS LESS A RESULT

OF SEXUAL EXPLORATION THAN A MARKET PLACE

THAT MIMICKED THE ARTIFICIAL VOLITION OF-

FERED BY A SHOPPING MALL. THE COMPLEXI-

TIES OF DESIRE WERE DENIED PRIMA FACIA, IN

LIEU OF THE EASY, GREASY, SLEAZY AND CHEAP

ALTERNATIVE. FUCKING OR GETTING FUCKED

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY… POSSIBLY MORE IF YOU

COULD TOLERATE HIS BREATH…”

 

3. Jackie Wang is a writer, poet, musician, and academic whose writing has been published by Lies Journal, Semiotext(e), HTML Giant, BOMBlog, along with numerous zines. Her essay “Against Innocence” provides insightful analysis on penal systems and race theory. She’s currently writing a book for Semiotext(e). Originally from New Port Richey, Florida – “people call it New Port Nowhere” – Jackie moved to Cambridge, MA this fall to start a PhD program in African and African-American Studies and History at Harvard University.

 

Excerpt from LONELY WOLVES ON THE FLOOR OF THE WORLD

“In ‘Teinte Ban’ Bhanu Kapil writes, ‘I

wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote

this.’ She wanted to write the race riot

from the perspective of the brown girl on

the floor of the world but instead she writes

the luminous edges of the girl’s inverted

body. Ante-narrative told in color. A

delirious study of the body at the expense,

as she writes, of the event.”

 

4. Alan Pelaez Lopez is an AfroLatin@ that grew up in Boston via La Ciudad de Mexico, documenting his existence as an undocuqueer poet, jewelry designer, and bubble tea addict. Alan currently works at the Dream Resource Center in Los Angeles, which is a project of the UCLA Labor Center. He is a member of Familia: Trans*, Queer Liberation Movement.

 

Excerpt from Speak

“Open your mouth

Go ahead, I give you permission to call me a jota

Una marica

And a faggot

Tell me I’ll never be like you

Call me ese negro pendejo

That nigger

Spick

And illegal

Teach me to beg my mom to get me contacts

But not clear contacts

You know, those that’ll keep me safe from harassment

The blue ones”

 

5. Stephen Boyer is the author of Parasite (2013), Ghosts (2010), and was a lead compiler of the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology. Currently, they're diligently working on a series of nature-related poems. Their work can be found online, in many zines and an assortment of publications.

 

Excerpt from In my past lives I must have met everybody

“wandering around Strand Bookstore in a miniskirt flirting with staff

 yes I’ll have sex for money

 I thought for sure I had been a renegade 1960’s visionary gay pornstar

 or Frank O’Hara or Sylvia Plath sans husband

 but Ariel keeps suggesting my interpretations are self involved

 that I was a girl, then a boy that died alone of AIDs”

 

6. Jos Charles is a white, genderqueer, femme, queer, dyadic, able bodied, neurodivergent, thin, natural born US citizen, native english speaker, lower middle class person, with access to education, piece of shit. Jos Charles is the founding / editor of THEM (a trans literary journal).  Jos Charles has published poetry with BLOOM, Denver Quarterly, Feminist Wire, and more.

 

Excerpt from I INTERNALIZED UR MISOGYNY AND THEY CALL ME DYSPHORIC

“male flesh: a fiction we can’t afford

 and yet i swallow.”

 

7. Lara Lorenzo is a poet and human services worker based in Brooklyn. In her writing and political work, she explores connections between misery, interpersonal violence, and systemic violence, with the aim of developing strategies for resisting and dismantling all three. Her writing has appeared in Nepantla, Toe Good Poetry, October, and Third Text, among other places. Follow her on Twitter @babaylanti.

 

Excerpt from WHAT CAN I DO TO DESTROY AMERIKA?

“a big god voice boomed false start!

& maybe it was but i wasn’t sorry

we had no other way to begin

under empire a person is always

choosing to be wrong

 go to hell said the god voice

history chimed, its blue mind rhyming

across a field of wild energy & i prayed

 let us not be deceived by what passes

for life in this place”

 

8. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University.  Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University, and she is currently on tour with her interactive oracle project “The Lorde Concordance,” a series of ritual mobilizing the life and work of Audre Lorde as a dynamic sacred text. She has several books in progress including a book of poems, Good Hair Gone Forever. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, was awarded a Too Sexy for 501-C3 trophy in 2011, and is one of the Advocate’s top 40 under 40 features in 2012.

 

Excerpt from Prophecy Poem (impermanence after Phillis)*

“black bodies disappearing into death, state-sanctioned choke-holds.

it will not always be this way

the impossibility of breathing.

it will not always be this way.

I listen to my ancestors when they say

it will not always be this way

to steady my steps I have to pray

it will not always be this way

it cannot always be this way

it will not always be this way

it will not always be this way,

i will continue to say”

 

* Poem was written collectively at Bright Black Webinar Series for Brilliance Remastered.

 

9. Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam. He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent (Hawai’i Dub Machine, 2011), and author of three collections of poetry: from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008), from unincorporated territory [saina](Omnidawn Publishing, 2010), and from unincorporated territory [guma'] (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014). He is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa, where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing. Perez’s poetry focuses on themes of Pacific life, immigration, ancestry, colonialism, and diaspora.

 

Excerpt from understory

“how do

new parents

 

comfort a

child in

 

pain, bullied

in school,

 

shot by

a drunk

 

APEC agent?

#justicefor

 

-kollinelderts--

nālani gently

 

massages kai's

gums with

 

her fingers-

how do

 

we wipe

away tear--

 

gas and

blood? provide

 

shelter from

snipers? disarm

 

occupying armies?

#freepalestine— ”

 

10. Margaret Rhee is a feminist poet, new media artist, and scholar. Her research focuses on technology, and intersections with feminist, queer, and ethnic studies. She has a special interest on digital participatory action research and pedagogy. Her scholarship has been published at Amerasia Journal, Information Society, and Sexuality Research and Social Policy. As a digital activist and new media artist she is co-lead and conceptualist of From the Center a feminist HIV/AIDS digital storytelling education project implemented in San Francisco prisons. As a poet, her chapbook Yellow was published by Tinfish Press/University of Hawaii. She co-edited the collections Here is a Pen: An Anthology of West Coast Kundiman Poets (Achiote Press) and an online anthology Glitter Tongue: Queer and Trans Love Poems.

 

Excerpt from I love Juana

“Is there a queer of color Jesus? Is there a queer of color Queen?

 And a queer of color Bible titled disidentifications?”

Three Stranger Encounters of the New York Kind [by Alan Ziegler]

    I reach a supermarket corner—a one-way aisle with two-way traffic—and encounter a suited man. When on a collision course with a stranger, you choreograph a little dance ending with a nod and a smile. One of us will have to do the back steps of the supermarket cha-cha. He barrels through, declaring “I don’t negotiate.”

    He won’t dance; don’t ask him.

*

    I make my way to exit through the rear door of the 104 bus, dreading the walk up the hill against the bitter wind. I feel a sting on the back of my head and turn to see a deranged stranger eyeing me with disdain. I process the sensation and realize I have just been whacked upside the head. I stare him down and back him up a step, then smile crazily and say, “What took you so long?”

*

    On the corner of 72^nd Street and Broadway in July, a stranger in a long black coat comes running to me, desperation in his eyes. “Do you know what happened?” he implores.

    “Where?” I ask.

    “Anywhere!” he shrieks and runs off.

    I am making a list, should I run into him again.

SAD GURL: The Consumption and Contextualization of POC Pain [by Christopher Soto]

            I always wanted to be a sad white girl. I wanted to be sad like Lana Del Rey. I wanted a sadness that could be so universal, that it’d move everyone to tears. A sadness that everyone could relate to. “I want a summertime, summertime sadness.” … Yes, I’ve experienced that before. I know where that’s coming from.

            Lately, I’ve been thinking about the contextualization of POC sadness. My sadness is viewed in terms of all that is surrounding it. My sadness is about domestic violence, homelessness, queerness, gender dysphoria, intergenerational trauma passed down from the Salvadorean civil war, etc., ETC…My sadness is something to observe, consume, sympathize with BUT NOT EMPATHIZE WITH (not to mobilize for). Most people do not know how to interact with my sadness. My sadness is so multifaceted, it speaks twenty languages.

            This past year, Citizen by Claudia Rankine was released and white people all across the literary world discovered racism. The sadness in Claudia Rankine’s book was eaten for breakfast, lunch, and dinnertime. Everyone was talking about Citizen and micro-agressions and feelings. But I didn’t see any of the white people in my MFA program marching next to me when Mike Brown was killed by the police in Ferguson, when Erica Garner was killed by NYPD. I didn’t see any of them working to dismantle the systems of oppression which created my sadness / my community’s sadness. Yet everyone raved about how revolutionary that book was. REVOLUTIONARY FOR WHOM???!!!

            There was this article that I was reading a while ago (which I cannot currently find) which discussed sadness in terms of the medical industrial complex. The article was talking about the over-diagnosis of depression in the United States and ways that other parts of the world interact with deep sadness… Thinking about sadness in terms of regional / systematic pain faced by particular groups of people. For example, PTSD faced by the communities attacked by US imperialism… Okay, I don’t want to stray too far from topic.

            Here’s what I want to say… I want people to act, I want people to mobilize around POC sadness. Don’t just feel bad about our stories, consume us, and spit us out… I don’t care if my stories make you feel bad about queer youth homelessness. I don’t care if you read my work and talk about it with your friends at brunch. That doesn’t matter. I want you to give your money to the Ali Forney Center and make the problems stop. I want you to donate your money to Black & Pink to support queer folks in prisons.

            Right now, everyone knows that brown folks are killing it in the poetry scene. It feels like the mid 90’s when Jennifer Lopez, Marc Anthony, Ricky Martin, and Shakira were all on MTV. And white girls were getting spray tans all over the country. It was a moment of Latino pop splendor that had seldom been seen before… Felt like that moment was going to last forever (but it didn’t). This is what happened—white people got tired of publicizing us and found a newer trend. They got tired of consuming us.

            This is what I’m scared about— Lately, I’ve been working on this UNDOCUPOETS CAMPAIGN (with Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo). We were protesting first book discrimination against undocumented poets (who were not allowed to apply to contests without proof of US citizenship)… In mobilizing for this contest, we noticed one reoccurent theme— WHITENESS (11 out of the 12 publishers that we worked with were white). This says a lot about why the nationalistic guidelines were there in the first place. This also should be something to worry about, for the sake of POC poetry.

            If all of the publishers are white, then it doesn’t matter how many brown judges get appointed / how many brown poets those judges choose to publish (because we are still operating under a white-supremacist system). Our stories and our lives are underneath a white hand, and white people get to decide when and how our sadness, our trauma, our narrative poetry comes into / out of fashion. White people get to decide how our sadness is treated. “The master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde). If white people actually care about POC poetry then they need to do at least two things- one mobilize politically against the white supremacist power structures that are murdering our communities. Two, mobilize for our leadership in their publishing houses and support us throughout all realms of the poetry community.

            A BROWN BOY GETS SHOT BY A WHITE COP. A BROWN BOY WRITES POEMS ABOUT HIS OWN DEATH. A WHITE MAN BUYS AND SELLS THE STORIES FROM THIS BROWN BOY. THE BROWN BOY SITS AT WHITE FEET AND WAITS FOR A PAYCHECK. (THE BROWN BOY GETS PAID FOR NARRATING HIS OWN DEATH TO WHITE PEOPLE). I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I will not write narrative poems for white people. I WILL NOT ALLOW MY NARRATIVE / MY HURT / MY SADNESS / MY LIFE TO BE BOUGHT /SOLD /CONSUMED / SHAT OUT (& never actually addressed). I will not allow it!

            (I’m such a hypocrite).

            In my dream poetry-world there would be more POC leading poetry publishing houses. And there would be more support for the existing POC publishers (such as Noemi Press, Tia Chucha, and Cypher Books). There would also be no submission fees for anything. Oh, and artists would get paid for their work. Yes, artists would get paid for participating in conferences, and readings, and retreats, and everything… Damn, that’d be such a nice world… I’d be living like a KWEEN, glamorous like Lana Del Rey.

Will Gary at Cafe Loup, December 2012

The late Will Gary flashes his irresistible smile as he joins David Lehman for late-night hijinks at Cafe Loup, December 2012.

Gabriel Don was there with her camera and snapped this picture.

One year later Will, 46, died in Brooklyn's Methodist Hospital after treatment for damage to vertebrae in his neck — a herniated cervical disk, the result of a gym injury. In addition to being the best-looking security guard in Manhattan, Will was also possibly the friendliest, and his presence at the front desk of 66 West 12th Street was all the assurance that anyone teaching or studying there needed as they went to the elevators that would lift them to their offices or classrooms. -- DL

LETTERS TO OUR MAMIS Y PAPIS: LOVE FOR QUEER MENTORS [by Christopher Soto & friends]

 

I wanted to do a fun / campy post where some of my queer poet friends could celebrate the people who have helped them develop as writers and humans. (Where we could celebrate the people who let us imagine a world outside of corporate slumber and heteronormative family models). Quickly, I’d like to thank some of my mentors- Griselda Suarez, Eduardo C Corral, William Johnson. Love you so much! For letting me know that I could be brown, queer, a poet, and FIERCE and surrounded / affirmed by community. For guiding me and holding me and feeding me and laughing with/at me and creating opportunities for me. HOLY SHIT, Ive been a messy-gurl in this life. And y'all have supported me through all of it. Yayayyy!!! ... And now, the rest of the LOVE PARADE---

 

STEPHEN BOYER

Dodie Bellamy came into my life at a critical time, I was straddling the worlds of university and night life, a day job and porn, yet still broke, barely surviving, depressed, and full of dreams. My advisor at USF, the poet D.A. Powell, knew I was miserable and after reading my work suggested I meet Dodie and apply to the weekly, private workshop she offered as a way of getting out of the trappings of the institution and enter the queer San Francisco I ran away, seeking. At the time, I wanted to be making art and writing but it seemed impossible to go from notes to actualized work, everyone seemed so cool and connected and then I met Dodie who showed me the shit covering all the “cool people’s” faces as she refocused my energies on craft, form, politics, experimentation, and most importantly–continually demonstrated the strength necessary to remain yourself in this apocalyptic world.

 

DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES

I cherish my semesters spent slipping poems under Mark Doty's door, picking up his comments on my poems in his mailbox, and meeting occasionally throughout the semesters when he was my undergraduate thesis advisor at the University of Houston. My getting feedback from the poet who wrote "Charlie Howard's Descent", the first poem to ever make me cry, a poem Jericho Brown introduced to me while we sat in the Gulf Coast Magazine office and talked about poetry and our crushes, made me fearless when confessing and questioning my queerness through poetry, an exercise that in many ways saved my life. I am eternally grateful. Mark Doty, I celebrate you.  

 

KEVIN KILLIAN

Hello Loma thanks for asking me about this!  At my age the mentors I could name are mostly passed on now.  Allen Ginsberg, Thom Gunn, Robin Blaser, Harold Norse, James Schuyler, from each I learned something about how to proceed in the world.  A trio of friends made me the writer I am today, the New Narrative group of Steve Abbott, Bob Gluck and Bruce Boone.  The poets of my generation were shot down by AIDS, so we lost Essex Hemphill, Sam D'Allesandro, Reinaldo Arenas, Tim Dlugos, David Wojnarowicz; from each I took resolve to keep alive and to get out a message.  And in recent years my queer mentors have become young, so bright and smart and able to see things more clearly than I ever could, my models in many senses: Andrew Durbin, Lucas de Lima, Evan Kennedy, Brian Teare, Stephen Boyer, dozens more.  You, Loma, I've looked up to you, bizarre as that might seem to you :-)  xxx Kevin K.

 

OCEAN VUONG

When I think of mentors and community-building, I think of Eduardo C. Corral.  Eduardo makes it possible for so many of us. I think it’s important, even necessary, to see poem-making as something akin to person-making, an act where life and art not only informs each other, but are strengthened and enriched through a fluid and seamless dialogue. This is what Eduardo exemplifies for younger writers like myself: a way to move forward on the page—but also with our bodies, bodies that are so often under threat from a world bent on extinguishing its most vital voices. Eduardo teaches me that to be scared is never to be weak. That to love and care for something—and to express it freely and openly is the most radical act of self-preservation. For that, I am grateful.

 

CA CONRAD

Peppy thought of me as her protégé when I was 19.  We called her Queen of the New Age Drag Queens and she taught me to read tarot through the zodiac, a template I still find to be one of the most reliable and vivid forms to harness.  Other boys were in mechanic school but I was in tarot class spread naked on the bed where Peppy and I spent most of our time studying one card at a time.  When I would visibly merge with a card, when I would finally GET IT, Peppy would lean over and start to kiss me.  She would say, “Time to reward you for learning and time to reward myself for teaching.” 

 

MICHAEL KLEIN

Adrienne Rich always read my poems and once, when I was having a sad life in Cambridge in the '90's and wondering if I should let poetry go, she told me to never give it up--to stay with it because she believed in what I was doing and had always believed in what I was doing--way more than I ever did, and way more than more people around me did.  And she always told me the truth.  About everything, and especially about my poems.  Of course, we loved each other.  I'd known her most of my life, but as it is with many great writers, she loved the writing more than she loved me, so she went to the heart of the poetry and saw where it was being too self-referential or--her most common criticism--being made with too many words.  My second book, "then, we were still living" was dedicated to Adrienne, who e-mailed me, after reading it:  "This is the only book that has ever been dedicated to me, and the only one I need."

 

CHING-IN CHEN

I made a film-poem called "We Will Not Be Moved: a Story of Oakland Chinatown" in a workshop taught by Madeleine Lim, who runs the Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP), a community organization which provides free film workshops to queer women of color. It was an ambitious project to finish our films within the time of the workshop (16 weeks!), especially for most of us who came into the workshop with little to no film experience, but Mad expected it of us and I wanted to do it and prove her right. The last night of our workshop when we were showing our films to the class, my film crashed and would not load! Mad looked at me and said, you could either get back to work and re-create it while it's still fresh in your mind -- or you could wait (but when you get far from it, you might not get back to it) so why not just do it now? I heard her and committed to re-creating it for our showcase in the next week because Mad called me to be true to my best sense of myself and this is still a lesson I keep practicing and learning to this day.

 

EILEEN MYLES

James Schuyler being the big one because he always made it clear that life was the problem, poetry wasn't. He put things in the right order. Michelle Tea for her knock out generosity & reminding me that poetry was a place. It was still outside of me, like an explosion of queer brilliance meeting. Also Amiri Baraka who taught me how to fight back in public. His resistance to lesbian poetry being "revolutionary" struck me as really queer and provocative in a way that wound up being affirming and in the end friendly. He was a great poet that taught me that contradictions always belong.

 

DANEZ SMITH

Avery R Young thank you for teaching me to always been my trillest self to every piece of art, to bring in all things black & new and black & old and every bit of sugar or blunt or song necessary to make the work werk. The bravery, urgency, and ingenuity you create with has taught so many of us. I remember handing you my chapbook for some notes and you handed me back myself, better. Your work and your lessons teach us how to create art that is intelligent, of the heart, and transformative for artist and audience alike. And you know we be fixin’ ham sandwiches after we be doin it.  Be Lean On Me get these kids to do the right thing blk!

 

TOMMY PICO

Pamela Sneed taught me how to read. It sounds so simple, but knowing what yr saying and what you have to say can be frustratingly unclear. Especially if you've been raised to believe yr perspective and experience has no value. Through her guidance and by her example, Pamela showed me how to pay attention to myself, to the words that build the lines that build the stanzas that build the poems that guide the voice--and in that way to value not only my work but also myself. I have no freaking clue what I would have done without her, but thankfully I don't have to wonder!

 

ARISA WHITE

Nikky Finney, Thank you for reflecting back to me that sometimes you feel like a write “with a stiff collar on.” I needed to hear that, to figure out why I yoked my voice, what was holding me back from getting into the natural groove of my own prosody. I was afraid to be too black, to be too woman, to reveal all those marginalized identities in my work, and as a result I gave up my “natural swimming style.” I can say, I’m not just dead-man floating, I’m breaststroking, I’m putting some butterfly in it, too. Getting my hair wet, I’m not afraid to do.

 

ROBERTO MONTES

If it wasn't for Mark Bibbins I would be something other than myself. It's his fault. His poetry, kindness, and intelligence has shown many of us the way to survival in an unfriendly world. We can't help but be better for knowing him.

 

FATIMAH ASGHAR

Kazim Ali, You were the first poet I ever read who dared to be both Muslim & Queer. Your book sat like a nightlight by my bed, a wandering I could sink my feet into. I have only met you once, but thank you for teaching me patience in your line breaks. Your words make me feel less lonely, strong enough to begin building my own home. May all us queer muslim poets leave our words as smoke signals to each other, a gentle way to find each other.

 

ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

We owe letters to each other, poet Norma Elia Cantú and I; I'm writing this now while visiting my family in La Frontera, which is not unlike Norma's Frontera in Canícula, and remembering that somewhere back in my apartment in New York is an addressed envelope stuffed with paper awaiting. Norma is a poet you write to when off-season on the Gulf Coast, with the wind ripping at the wet-sand-stained pages, the seagulls chasing the shadows of your pen. This is the letter I should be beginning, one humid night, my head heavy with the blunt sun of overcast skies, but somewhere Norma is wrapped in her shawl, singing that we met, we've already begun, the tide, the tide rolling in, within the tide we speak the distances we both have crossed since.

 

JUSTIN PHILLIP REED

Gahd loves me so much that she lay down one long micro-braid the size of the Mississippi for me to follow and find the poet Phillip B. Williams, who has, in two short years, shown me the friendship, kinship, and unordinary love over which Homer’s Greeks dragged each other. Where would I be without Phillip? Not here, not with this coconut oil in my hair and these relentless endeavors on the pages at my right and these gender-queer friends in my inbox and all this Black love in my heart. He has guided me toward Ceremonies and “Crispy Business", Nina Simone and Sharaya J, the MetroLink and The Amen Corner, right through the terza rima sonnet, and even called my momma when I was in jail. Phillip—who insists that I read wider, write harder, dig deeper, and love (myself, even) bigger—is a blessing, and I can’t sit down and stop testifying.

 

ANGELO NIKOLOPOULOS

Glenda Jackson's performance as Gudrun Brangwen in the film Women in Love, based on the D.H. Lawrence novel, taught me everything I know about poetry.

 

JOEY DE JESUS

I am always hesitant about contributing to a list of writers, especially a list of writers on other writers but I want to contribute to this to celebrate two writers who have been mentors to me in different capacities, not that I matter. And while I love my mentors, it is just as important to celebrate my unlearning their wisdoms in order to construct some sort of semblance of myself. The first is Kazim Ali, under whom I studied for years at Oberlin College. In the classroom Kazim measured my breath, he tempered my tude, he let me off the hook and off the leash. Outside, in the wild, he has seen me hurricane into madness, and was there when I found myself on the other side. I think his craft must have instructed him in some kind of patience--the utilities of silence, this what I've learned from him. The second mentor of mine is Doug Powell, who has taught me to celebrate my fortitude. He, too, has been there for me in doomy hours... Doug once told me about his long-time fear of the full-stop period, why he avoided writing in sentences; he viewed them as analogous with a death. I think of all my tiny deaths.

 

L. LAMAR WILSON

I am Nikki Giovanni's son. She called me this, first, a few months after she advocated for me to come to Virginia Tech, where I completed my MFA with her help & that of Erika Meitner, Lucinda Roy, Fred D'Aguiar, Ed Falco, Jeff Mann, & Bob Hicok. You see, Nikki is shockingly generous. I mean, after our first conversation, in which I was interviewing her for my employer at the time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she told me I was a poet, sounded like one, both in cadence & in tenor. At her behest, I sent poems to Tech, where she's been giving of her time & unabashed hope for nearly three decades. My first year there, I wrote poorly. I was hiding behind, not writing through, persona & then, in a meeting, she said to me advice I carry today: "If you don't start writing for yourself​ first & saying what you have to say, you're not going to be a very good writer, & you have what it takes to be one, Lamar. Just tell your stories." The next day, I wrote "Ars Poetica: Nov. 7, 2008." I shared it with her during our next independent study session on what has been canonized as the Black Arts Movement, which ​Nikki's work has helped define.​ Reading it, s​he beamed as only she can​, & I felt like a poet. Finally. Weeks later, I found out she was going to publish this poem, one of my first private successes, in her anthology The 100 Best African American Poems, that she was placing it after "leroy," a powerhouse by my namesake Amiri Baraka. (He was born Everett Leroy Jones., I Leroy Lamar Wilson.)  That's what mamas do. That's what mentors do. I am blessed to be one of the many, many Nikki Giovanni has claimed & catapulted. Just look at Kwame Alexander & Nikky Finney to see others doing wildly successful things. But I have to say it: I've been prodigal, too. I've been disobedient, made a mess of things, did it my way. & yet, after a bit of quiet repose, Nikki has always assured that I can come home. & I always, always will. ​

Hold Me Before I Disappear: On Duende & Death Culture [by Christopher Soto]

“Duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive… The duende, by contrast, won’t appear if he can’t see the possibility of death, if he doesn’t know he can haunt death’s house, if he’s not certain to shake those branches we all carry, that do not bring, can never bring, consolation” Federico García Lorca.

 ---------------------------------------------------------

            By the age of 16, I had more dead friends & relatives than I wanted to count. … I lost too many people in my life, too young.

            When starting grad school at NYU, I told my professor that I could not write poems like all the other students. I told her that I came from a death culture- a place where death was always lingering, where time felt like scarcity.

            The other students would spend weeks, months, meditating over their poems, contemplating the smallest revisions. But not me. I always wrote as if I were next to disappear, as if I would be gone, mid-sentence… And that’s how I held my poems, as if they were in the process of disappearing... And that’s how I held my lovers, as if we were in the process of disappearing… As if they would be in my arms one second and then gone in the next. And for me, so much of my writing, feels like one big sloppy shout—an attempt at telling you, “I’m here! We’re here! And we’re dying!” Fuck.

            I think about some of the viejas that I met, who refuse to cry. They would attend funeral after funeral, and keep their jaws clenched tight. They had no space to shed another tear for death. I think about the moment (at age 16) when my dog died and I began to laugh. I thought that God was playing a joke on me… God had already taken away all of the people that I love and all I had left was this mangy dog. Dead dog. Stupid joke.

            There is this poem that I wrote called “DEATH NEVER GETS EASIER JUST MORE EXPECTED.” I threw it away. Nothing good lasts... I’m sorry but my mind is starting to spiral... Let me tell you a bit more about death culture, as it pertains to poetry.

            When I speak of death culture, I am not talking about docupoets-- poets of documentation who reference artifacts and attempt to record various histories. When I speak of death culture, I am speaking about A FRAME OF MIND, a sense of one’s mortality, and NO this does not accompany some sweet feeling of relief or freedom. Death culture produces a deep and silent pain, a feeling of injustice (cuz we should not be dying like this, so easily). Death culture is not the state of disenfranchisement, it is a byproduct of disenfranchisement.  Death culture makes poets produce in a survivalistic frenzy... Death culture is not my current state, I have gotten much older and more privileged now. I have food, safe housing, a college degree, and no funerals to attend. (Death culture is something that I am slowly slipping away from). Hopefully.

            Death culture means that the expected trajectory for your life is much shorter, that you do not have the privilege of meditating on “craft” or its exportation. Your poems are not attempting to be timeless. Your poems are visceral, vital, dying as you produce them. Your poems are one big sloppy shout. You understand that each person is built from a million dead stories. Each poem is built from a million dead words. In death culture, you are never given the chance to live. You die so that others can live, beautifully, and write beautiful poetry. You die in the empty bullring so that their performance has an element of risk. Your poems are shitty so that theirs can be “well-crafted.”

          Death culture informed the work that my friend wrote, after her brother died, after her other brother got incarcerated, and her father got sick. Death culture informed the work that my friend wrote, in all those years that he feared deportation, all the times that his mother would not let him go outside (because she feared immigration officers would take him away)... These poets, and other people living in death culture, are not in most literary cannons. They never had the opportunity.

            When I think of death culture, in relation to duende, I am talking about two separate but interacting entities. For me, I think of duende as a spirit and I think of death culture as a FRAME OF MIND. I believe that people who live in death culture are more vulnerable to experiencing duende. (Death culture surrounds people with constant rupture, vulnerability, and exposes them to duende)... Yet, people who live outside of death culture can still have a relationship to duende, they can still experience death (without being entrapped by it).

            For me, duende is contingent upon its relationship to survival. Duende is only beautiful because the artist can taste death, can barely elude death. Duende is beautiful when death makes itself most present, when the artist appears to be on the verge of breaking. But who gets to survive? Whose survival gets celebrated? Not death culture. That miserable FRAME OF MIND (the incessant pain). That poet, who holds everything frail and undervalued. That poet who lives, day to day, one moment away from their own disappearance.

UNDOCUPOETS PETITION: OUTCOMES & ACCOMPLISHMENTS [by Christopher Soto]

Alternatively Titled: Liberal Victories, Radical Failures

            In January of 2015, Javier Zamora, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, and I started the Undocupoets Petition to protest first book contest discrimination. We launched an article online with Apogee Journal, displaying the names of 400+ poets, publishers, academics (who stand in solidarity with us). We stood up to ask that submission guidelines no longer read “proof of US citizenship or permanent residency.” Many people opened their ears and hearts. Many people supported us in this endeavor.

            The Lambda Literary Foundation launched an interview with Wo Chan, VIDA launched an interview with Cristian Flores Garcia, and Fusion News interviewed Marcelo, Javier, and me. The news of these articles was covered thoroughly by the Poetry Foundation, Coldfront Magazine, and others (such as this wonderful blog post by Miguel Morales)… We were also inspired by the outreach of poets such as Jennifer Tamayo (who is currently working on another article about Undocupoets) and the words of Janine Joseph in her recent article Undocumented, and Riding Shotgun. Also, worthy of mention is the Undocupoets Petition Reading which was hosted at the Asian American Writer’s Workshop and drew a large audience. A lot of media was produced by, with, and for Undocupoets in these past few months.

            In the coming months, I will also be helping to edit an issue of the Southern Humanities Review, dedicated to Undocumented Writers. We (as a collective of poets) are also submitting some panel proposals for various conferences at the moment. This is all to say–

            All of the articles, activities, voices helped contribute to some major changes within the poetry community. Here are all of the publishers / organizations which have responded to the Undocupoets campaign–

CHANGES PUBLICLY ANNOUNCED

Letras Latinas(Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, Red Hen Poetry Prize): Manuscripts must be of original poetry, in English, by one poet who resides in the United States.

Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets): The competition is open to emerging poets who have not previously published a book of poetry and who reside in the United States.

Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships): Applicants must reside in the U.S.

Persea Books (Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry): U.S. Citizen and/or currently residing in the United States.

Crab Orchard: All unpublished, original collections of poems written in English by a U.S. citizen, permanent resident, or person who has DACA/TPS status are eligible.

BOA Editions (A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize): Entrants must be a legal resident of the U.S. or have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) status, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), or Legal Permanent Status (LPS).

Academy of American Poets (Walt Whitman, etc.): U.S. Citizen / resident of the United States for a ten-year period prior to the submission deadline or January 1 of the prize year for those awards that have no application process, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) status, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), Legal Permanent Status (LPS), or any subsequent categories designated by the U.S. authorities as conferring similar enhanced status upon non-citizens living in the United States.

 

CHANGES PRIVATELY ANNOUNCED

Sarabande Books (The Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry): Sarah Gorham stated that all Undocupoets will be able to apply for subsequent contests. The new guideline wording will be announced when the next submission season opens.

Poetry Society of America (Chapbook Fellowship): Brett Fletcher Lauer stated that the guidelines for this contest would change from “US Resident” to “US citizens or any person currently residing within the US” during the summer of 2015; when new chapbook submissions are opened.

American Poetry Review (Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry): Elizabeth Escanlon stated that all Undocupoets will be able to apply for the subsequent contests. The language agreed upon is “Applicants must reside in US.” This announcement will be made public when the new call for submissions is announced.

National Poetry Series: Stephanie Stio stated that the organization will be making changes to their guidelines in consideration to undocumented poets shortly (within the next couple of weeks). The wording of these changes has not been decided yet.

OUR CONCLUSION

            The submission guidelines of many contests are more open than they used to be. We want to celebrate the work that our community has accomplished. We want to rejoice at the resilience and strength of all Undocupoets. We also want to acknowledge that the new guidelines are still not completely inclusive.

            Marcelo, Javier, and I are fighting (in solidarity with our community) for the complete inclusion of all Undocupoets. We will not forget about our friends who have been deported from the US and are finding their ways back into the country. We will not forget about our friends who are living in the U.S. (without DACA, TPS, LPS). We are constantly thinking about all of the poets, people who are coming and will continue to come into this country undocumented. Our long-term goal for this project is still to completely eliminate any documentation check in poetry, asking for forms of government identification.

            We want all Undocupoets to know that your words and thoughts are valuable. We want all Undocupoets to know that your struggle is seen, acknowledged. We want all Undocupoets to know that, if you are able to submit to one of these contests (or any other contest) then do so. We will fight with you, for you, if ever feel that you’re being silenced. Seriously. You are not alone. We are yours in this struggle. We celebrate your resistance and perseverance, above all else. We thank all of the Undocupoets who helped us make these HUGE changes in the poetry community. And we thank all of the publishers who have worked to make more inclusive guidelines. Gracias Gracias Gracias.

Happy 4/20 Mom! [by Stacey Harwood]

My Mother's Hands, April, 2013

My mother was a grade school teacher for over 30 years. She taught both 3rd grade and kindergarten in the public school system and was one of those teachers who changed the display outside of her class room for every season and holiday. She made intricate murals that were quite beautiful and imaginative. She used craft paper, felt, and cotton fluff and whatever else was on hand and would cut out shapes with scissors and paste them to the background. I seem to remember helping her but I'm not certain that I did.

My mother in one of her aprons.

My mother was also a talented seamstress: She made aprons and a new set of kitchen curtains for every season. She made a play-circus tent that fit over a card table. She made fake-fur slip covers for giant rolls of bubble wrap that we used for seating (my father was a plastics salesman and Sealed Air was one of his customers).  She knew how to mend things and taught me how to do the same. ("Mend" is such an antique word.) She sewed our Halloween costumes and matching outfits for my sisters and me. A lot of cross-stitch and rick rack were involved.

My brother Hunter ready for trick or treat

L to R: Hunter, Stacey, Tami, and Amy Harwood

This is all to say that in addition to working with her mind, my mother loved working with her hands; it breaks my heart that she is unable to do so anymore because of her severe arthritis. It is only with great difficulty that she can unscrew a bottle or open a bag of frozen vegetables. Plus, she's in constant pain. "You don't know the half of it," she said, when I asked her how bad it had gotten.

When I read about the relief that marijuana brings to arthritis sufferers I was eager to find a way for my mother to try it. I didn't want her to get high -- she lives alone -- so the usual delivery systems were not an option. There were recipes online for a tincture that could be applied topically but I had no way of controlling the strength or safety of something I would concoct myself. I've followed the medical marijuana scene closely and am impressed with what the communities are coming up with in California, Seattle, and Colorado. While medical marijuana is now legal in New York, the rules are so complicated and arcane that it will likely be years before anyone can experience its benefits. 

Then, a year or so ago friends visited from San Francisco. Turned out that they knew someone who knew the person behind "Doc Green's Pain Relief Cream."  A few weeks after our friends returned home, a well disguised package arrived with a 4 oz jar of lavender scented theapeutic cream inside. My mother's early April birthday seemed the perfect occassion for her to give it a try.

The cream has a silky texture and is lightly scented. "It feels lovely when I put it on," says my mother. And yes, it helps a lot with the pain. She's began by using it on her shoulder but lately has needed it for her hands and wrists. Sometimes, it's the only thing that works when the unbearable pain keeps her awake. 

I've since discovered new sources for marijuana based healing balms, cooked up in home kitchens by forward-thinking generous entrepreneurs. It angers me that such a useful product is not readily available. 

-- SDH

(This is an update of a post previously publish in April, 2013.)

Christopher Soto (aka Loma), Guest Author April 20-24

Christopher Soto (aka Loma) is a queer latin@ punk poet and prison abolitionist.  They have poems, essays, and book reviews published in print and online. They edit Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color with the Lambda Literary Foundation. They are an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU and the 2014-2015 intern at Poetry Society of America. In 2015, they co-founded the Undocupoets Campaign (with Javier Zamora and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo) to protest the discriminatory guidelines which many publishers used, barring undocumented people from applying to first book contests. They currently reside in Brooklyn but will soon be moving to the Bay Area.

Welcome, Christopher. 

-- sdh

Overheard: University Place & 14th Street [by Stacey Harwood]

He: I'm on a new diet.

She: No, what diet?

He: Didn't I tell you about the challenge?

She: No.

He: It's with SoulCycle. I signed up. 

She: Soulcycle? Ugh. So first they torture you and then they starve you? 

-- sdh