The Best American Poetry

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

In her brilliant introduction to State of the Art (Pittsburgh, 2015) by  David Lehman, Denise Duhamel writes: David takes his cue from Charles Baudelaire who advised, "Always be a poet, even in prose."  I love that quote--it sounds so sexy yet true.

Roundtable on Contemporary Translation and Politics/ posted by Sandra Simonds

 

Speaking with Marie Buck, Jennifer Scappettone, Guillermo Parra, Daniel Borzutzky

and Johannes Göransson

 

There’s a sense that I get that American poets seem to only like to read other American poets? Am I wrong about this, right? Why is it important to read poetry in translation, or is it?

 

Guillermo Parra: When I think back on my own education as a poet, from approximately 1988 onwards, translation was there from the very beginning, with Stephen Mitchell’s translations of Rilke, Louise Varese’s Rimbaud (a particularly important event in my life, her translations still resonate with me today on a very personal level) and Eliot Weinberger’s Paz (though I was reading Paz in both English and Spanish, it was Weinberger’s amazing translations that probably made me think translation was something normal and everyday, since jumping back & forth between the two on facing pages I thought of them, at the time, as a young undergraduate, as equivalents, equals).

 It’s extremely important to read poetry in translation, especially for North American poets because it helps us open our eyes to the world. I do notice that quite a few North American poets are woefully unaware of large swaths of poetry throughout the world. Of course, that’s a privilege that North American poets alone have, the luxury of not having to think about the rest of the world. Because I’m Venezuelan-American, and I grew up both in the U.S. and Venezuela, I’m particularly interested in Latin American poetry, and we all know Latin American poetry remains quite invisible or non-existent for most North American poets. Aside from several big names, such as Neruda or Paz. But this invisibility, while it does frustrate me, tends to just motivate me more, it pushes me to work harder at my translations of Venezuelan (and a handful of Peruvian) poets at my blog and in magazines & books.

 Marie Buck: I do feel like the conversation is more U.S.-centric than it ought to be. It makes sense to read literature in translation—why limit yourself? It also seems like we can ask very different questions if we’re reading across cultural contexts. How do writers across the world respond to a specific series of events like the financial crisis or Occupy? What are the different ways that enunciation and subjectivity can work in poetry? How does self-reference work in poems? For instance, Ben Fama’s “June Emotional Poem” (http://thefanzine.com/june-emotional-poem-cum-patiri/), which I read the other day, ends with “this sounds like / a poor man’s ‘Ben Fama’ poem / but I am a poor man”. The ending self-reference reminded me of the ghazal form, and of Ghalib’s poems, and of Agha Shahid Ali’s use of the form (though I don’t know much of Ali’s work, actually). I’m a total sucker for this gesture—I love the ending self-reference. So now I am wondering where else similar gestures occur, how they work differently or similarly in poems across time and language and culture. I have to admit that I am pretty American-centric in my reading, more than I would like to be. But,  in general, I wish the poetry conversation were a bit broader. I haven’t actually done this yet, but I’ve been wanting to organize a reading group to read older work and maybe non-American work and definitely work that is not as much a part of the M.F.A. canon. For the most part, the poetry community is organized around readings, and the reading scene will generally skew toward contemporary work in English. It’d be good to find ways to have poetry events that bring people together to think about a broader range of work.

 Johannes Göransson: I actually think Americans can be quite interested in foreign poets, but that tends to happen on a grassroots level - I get more requests for translations than I can keep up with, books by Aase Berg, Kim Hyesoon, Hiromi Ito are very frequently reviewed. But they are reviewed on websites and small magazine and not as often in the more prestigious journals. The gatekeepers and defenders of “the field” of contemporary poetry (ie professors, critics etc) are opposed to foreign poetry because it almost always goes against the orthodoxies that hierarchies and “fields” necessarily depend on. Translation is volatile; it makes too many poets, too many versions, too many lineage to put into nice structures. But this is partly what makes translation interesting and important. I tend to think Art does better if those hierarchies are unsettled. And, since this is the US, still something like an imperial culture, I think there’s a strong political element to this unsettling, even if I don’t think the rest of the world exists to teach Americans lessons, and poetry doesn’t exist to teach Americans that not all poetry looks the same.

 Daniel Borzutzky: What do UnitedStatesian poets like to read?  Beats me.  

 I just looked at the SPD monthly top-selling poetry books and here’s what the numbers tell us.  

 May 2015:  One book in translation made the list out of 20

April 2015: 0/20

March 2015: 2/20

Feb 2015: 1/20

Jan 2015: 1/20

Dec 2014: 0/20

Nov 2014: 0/20

Oct 2014: 0/20

 So, US poets don’t like to read books in translation - apparently that’s true.  I think it also means that US publishers, even small presses, don’t like to publish books in translation.  

 I don’t know what such a list would look like in the rest of the world.  My guess is that there probably wouldn’t be that many books in translation in most other countries either.  Though I don’t have the numbers: just the suspicion that xenophobia is not unique to UnitedStatesian letters.  On the one hand.

On the other hand.  We are an immigrant culture.  Certain gatekeeping circles spout the need for diversity and for inclusion, but there’s nothing in the history of US poetry, or US experimental or quote-un-quote avant-garde poetry that leads us to believe that this is much more than spouting.  The avant-garde gatekeepers are racists.  They don’t like foreigners either. And there’s not much of a desire to think about ourselves in relation to the rest of the world, to think about how the rest of the world has shaped us (and not just how we have shaped it), and to think about the nationalist implications of shutting out foreign voices.  There’s not much of a desire to think about how that SPD bestseller list, with just 1 work in translation, is symptomatic of a nationalistic impulse that defines what even small press poetry in the US looks like.  No one can afford to be surprised by this: the poetry small presses are nationalists!

 

Is it important to read books in translation? There’s lots of ways to answer this question.  I’ll start with a simple answer:  The small press poetry books in translation are BETTER than the ones that are not in translation.  This is pure subjectivity.  But just to keep things local:  take a look at the translated titles that Action Books has published: Hiromi Ito, Kim Hyesoon, Raứl Zurita, Oliviero Girondo, Maria Negroni, Valerie Mejer, Tytti Heikkinen, Jorge Santiago Perednik.  Books of poetry don’t get much better than these.  And these are amazing, prolific, well known writers in their native countries and there aren’t a lot of other publishers who would touch these books.

 Look at Ugly Duckling's recent Latin American translations alone: Alejandra Pizarnik, Cecilia Vicuňa, Cesar Vallejo, Luis Felipe Fabre, Marosa di Giorgio, etc…

 So the books in translation are better!

And by better I mean: they hit you harder, they care more about their words, they are scarier, fiercer, wilder, stranger, more beautiful, etc….

 This is not to say that all the books in the countries these writers come from are that good.  But it’s just to say that if you’re a contemporary translator and you’re taking on a translation project there’s nothing to be gained from it other than an occasional PEN grant and some miniscule cultural capital.  So if you have good taste you are more likely than the rest of the world to create a good project. Scientific reasoning!

 If you’re a translator, people will ask you to talk about translation.  Though they will rarely ask you {read: me} to publish translations.  I at least get more invitations to talk and write about translation than I do to publish it.  US poets and academics like to talk about translation.  They like to talk about translation more than they like to read work in translation or to publish it.  That’s silly.  But it’s worth thinking about for a minute: why are people more interested in talking about translation than they are in actually publishing and reading translation? I’m going to ungenerously suggest that it’s connected to a self-congratulatory liberalism that is proud of itself for gesturing towards the foreign, pointing towards the foreign, highlighting how interesting and relevant is the foreign without actually reading or publishing it.  But maybe this also has to do with a very narrow conceived sense of the country we live in.  Translation, through the gringpo  lens, is something that happens elsewhere, outside of our normal practice.  Foreigners fall outside our normal practice.  It’s a denial perhaps of the ways in which millions among us are constantly translating and living their lives in translation.  For the small press poetry world foreign language writing is a thing that happens over there, on that side of the border, and not among us.  The toxic stance against identity politics articulated in US avant-garde writing has is racist; it promotes nationalism as well in its desire to ignore and mistrust the foreign.

 We here in the US are shitty.  Also the rest of the world is shitty.  Reading books in translation reminds us of this.  The rest of the world is as shitty as we are, only it’s a different kind of shit, and the poets have different approaches  to documenting and responding to the shit.  And we understand through translation that all the countries are shit.  And the neoliberalism we shit gets shat back upon us through translation. When a Latin American poet writes poetry critical of her nation-state this should not be read outside of a larger transnational framework that implicates US-style neoliberalism as a global strategy intended to level, intend to disappear cultural and local particularities. And we have a lot to learn about how other nations made us into ourselves by the ways in which the shit we flung at them has come back across the border to soil us, to nurture us, to influence us, to accuse us and hate us and condemn us and interrogate and shape us and love us.  

 Also, writers from other countries predict what is going to happen in the US.  Roberto Bolaño and Horacio Castellanos Moya understood that Kenneth Goldsmith was ignorantly going to exploit the body of a state-murdered African American man before Goldsmith even did it.  Moya’s Senselessness showed us, before the KG VP shit show, how privileged white people, quote-un-quote leftists, love to look for art in the pain and murder of minorities killed by the dominant society.  

 Also, books in translation open up a space for what the larger culture doesn’t want: multilingualism.  The work that translators, writers, activists, amazing humans Jen Hofer and John Pluecker are doing around creating multilingual spaces and advocating for language justice is amazing in its vision and activism.  Multilingual books in translation provide a model for how we might consider making the rest of our art and community spaces more multilingual, more open to welcoming and acknowledging the foreign.  

In short, read books in translation because: they are better; the translators are publishing more interesting writing than the non-translators; so that you can understand that our own neoliberal inferno is swimming around in the bucket of shit with all the other neoliberal infernos.  

 Jennifer Scappettone: Daniel is generous in wondering whether the US is alone in reading so few books in translation. I’m going to go out on a limb and say (without taking the time to excavate statistics—since we are pulling this together quickly and off-the-cuff) that US poets are a special kind of provincial. As Guillermo puts it (& we likely all agree), they enjoy a distinctive privilege: the luxury of not having to think about other cultures, given the lingering US economic and cultural dominance over the rest of the world. That luxury makes them—makes us—lazy. Beyond that, it seems clear that US poets can plow their way to fame more efficiently via a distinctive brand of innocence, which we might call ignorance—through self-referentiality, by which I mean less reference to oneself in a poem than a social-media hall of mirrors based on self-promotion, and on citing and propping up one’s immediate peers. I blame this partly on the education system, given that many aspiring writers are introduced to poetry in school, and on the workshop tactic of the traditional MFA, which allows many creative writing students to get away with reading their peers’ writing without too many interruptions from other cultures. I blame it on specialization, given that many in our generation who lack independent wealth have sought shelter in the academy, and the academy measures success through mastery of specialized fields. Even in an academic context that gives lip service to diversity and interdisciplinarity, there is little to no reward—and perhaps even demerit—for learning a language one has not already “mastered” by age 22 in order to become a slightly more attuned citizen of the world. There is little to no reward for bringing under discussion, let alone translating, books hailing from cultures that are not already broadly thought to possess copious amounts of cultural capital. There is suspicion of work in translation, as if the very basis of Western culture had not come down to us at third (or fourth, etc.) hand. A slowly mutating shortlist of foreign authors that one ought to know circulates through polite conversation (sometimes without acknowledgment that they have been translated), but one can pass as culturally literate more fluidly if one doesn’t make interlocutors uncomfortable by invoking foreign authors with unpronounceable names. This provincialism is as much historical as it is cultural.

 I’m exaggerating, of course, to make a point. And there are notable cherished exceptions in the small press and university publishing spheres: Action, Ugly Duckling, yes, and Litmus, Archipelago, Burning Deck, Nightboat, to name a handful; historically, Green Integer; the University of California Press, which publishes the Poets for the Millennium Series, and other university presses that keep translations in print.... Now Commune Editions is taking an interest in leftist writing from around the world. Journals such as Asymptote, Aufgabe, and Gulf Coast have promoted translation tirelessly. Many journals do seek out translation in theory, but leave all the work of obtaining permissions to the translator in practice. Journals really need to make more of an effort on that front if they want to broaden their scope.

I learned about modernism, and most of the poetry that I came to care about, largely through translation, because I went to an undergraduate school with a conservative literary curriculum: through Ezra Pound’s translations, and Charles Wright’s translations of Eugenio Montale and Dino Campana, which I read on my own. These works offered models outside the immediate workshop world that dominated at that time, of poems about back porches and ploughs, and led me to go to Japan and Italy to work and learn languages immersively instead of getting an MFA. I think it’s important to learn other languages, as many as feasible, because it stretches your outlook—cognitive, linguistic, cultural, political and otherwise. It’s important to read in translation partly because it forces you to appreciate that you don’t, you can’t possibly, apprehend everything—but the reaching anyway is what it takes to make a commons.

 Johannes Göransson: Daniel, I think you make an essential point about the academic study of poetry. Scholars love to say that they are interested in the “transnational” or some such - and they would certainly never say they were opposed to translation - but when it comes to actually reading and writing about foreign works, they tend to get shy. Translation as a theoretical topic is good, but to engage with foreign literary works in translation is something else; such an activity would not only have to forego illusions of mastery, it would also inevitably lead to challenges of the academic status quo. Academic discussions of translated texts tend to fall back on facile notions of “context” - as if all foreign texts had one stable, reductive “cultural context” which would explain (in best academic, new historicist way) the work of art. I wrote about this issue here: http://www.thevolta.org/ewc51-jgoransson-p1.htmlOne of the scandals of translation is that it shows that way works of literature are too volatile for reductive contextual readings; rather poems forge all kinds of contexts, and these are often cross national.

And I don’t think the “MFA cannon” is worse in this regard than the experimental/PhD cannon. In some ways I think the PhD cannon is worse - the MFA degree allows for a fluidity that the PhD canon with its rhetoric of mastery and field does not. I teach in an MFA program and I teach works in translation all the time but that’s of course not the common practice. But that’s of course an exception.

Jennifer Scappettone: All academic programs are limited in approaching poetic questions insofar as they prescribe requirements according to pre-established categories (disciplines, national languages, etc.) about which poetry normally couldn’t care less. Those of us who teach have to transgress those categories and work at eroding them while empowering students to think critically and ecstatically about work in translation. Increasing numbers of students in this country are, in fact, bilingual and have already by their university years absorbed some dogma that they need to think exclusively in English. My students (undergraduates especially) are really galvanized by discussions of work in translation and love to think about how they were brought into English.

 Do you see yourself as a more traditional or more experimental translator, meaning do you feel a certain loyalty to the original text, or do you allow the poet in you to come out and take over? Along those lines, is there a right or wrong way to translate a text? Do you feel a loyalty to the intent of the poet in the original language? Is translation a more artistic or scholarly exercise for you?

Guillermo Parra: I am neither a traditional nor an experimental translator. Although I do tend to place a great deal of value on the original source text. I feel a certain reverence for the source text that prohibits me from distorting it too much. There’s definitely no right way to translate. All methods are valid if you come up with a poem at the end. While I’m very loyal to the intent of the poet in the original language, I do take liberties with the language. This is something I learned from hearing the poet & translator Michael Hofmann speak when I was at BU in the late 1990s, but also in interviews where Hofmann talks about one of his translation methods: he works very quickly on his first drafts, moving fast and not thinking too much about mistakes or style. I’ve adopted this method and that speed allows me to forget the poet I’m translating, to a degree, and to recreate the poem, or traces of it, with my own language.

Translation is mainly a creative exercise for me. I see it as an extension of my own writing as a poet. Even when I’m translating a short story, novel or essay, I’m writing/translating as a poet, as someone who’s constantly looking beyond the surface of the text, finding resonances within myself that pick up vibrations from the text. Lastly, I feel a particularly strong loyalty to many of the writers I translate. Some of them are actually friends of mine, so the connection is personal. But because Venezuelan literature is unknown in the U.S. I feel it’s my duty to help some of these poets be read by a wider audience. This is especially the case for my work with José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930), who was also ignored for decades in Venezuela. I believe there’s an aspect of translation in which I’m channeling not just the poetry but also the poet I’m translating.

Marie Buck: I’m not actually a translator in any traditional sense. A lot of my work, though, has been experimental translations or rewritings of already-existing poems, always from English to English. In my first book, Life & Style, which came out in 2009, I translated Emily Dickinson poems and, working from already-existing English translations, some poems by Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and other Symbolist writers. The book also contains text from an issue of a celebrity magazine, too. I entered the text into MySpace searches to find text to collage. I was really intrigued by the sort of tonal rhyming that seemed to occur between the Symbolist texts and all the angsty teen writing that proliferated on MySpace. I picked source texts that allowed me to work through some themes I was interested in: publicity and privacy, especially in relation to gender, the public performance of affect or emotion, public expressions of wanting to be wanted.

 For most of my projects, it’s felt important to have some source texts that I’m writing through. I’m invested in the frame of translation in that it forces me to think about my work in a larger, less individual context. I suppose what I’m most interested in in poetry, generally, is the relationship between individual affectsand larger social-historical moods, especially with regard to political resistance. I don’t really want to write about moods, though; I want to invoke them, and working through multiple pre-existing texts, with their distinct tones and registers of language, is how I like to do that. The poems I’ve been working on more recently aren’t translations, but I am using sources from the 1980s (when the full defeat of the 1960s and early 70s was really sinking in culturally), as a way to write about political disappointment, repression, fear, and hope in Occupy and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

Johannes Göransson: I don’t agree with the common American insistence on autonomy: the experimental translator as maintaining some kind of sovereignty. That this is experimental, progressive, avant-garde. I am fascinated by the translator’s role precisely because we are not in control, not in power. I don’t want my translations to be their own, new artworks. That feels actually like a conservative stance - conservative in that it wants to maintain the idea of the poem (and the translation) as autonomous artwork, wellwrought urn - when that is what translations challenges - and conservative in the sense that these experimental methods often ends up turning the foreign work into something closer to contemporary American experimental poetry. (At the same time I think something like James Wagner’s Trilce or Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl are profound possessions and meditations on the sounds of foreign poetry.) I think translating is mostly an inherently radical act.  

I’m an immigrant. I was always translating. A lot of my favorite writers - many of the writers that have influenced me - are Swedes, so I’ve translated them. There’s an obsession with the nature of the original/copy - are they faithful? Are they even the same? - in discussions about translations. This never bothered me. Of course I have always known it’s not the same text, but that has never stopped me from translating, from reading texts in translation. Joyelle and I wrote a booklet called Deformation Zone (we took the title from an Aase Berg poem in translation) and that’s more the way I see poetry and translation: as these zones where texts are always changing and morphing. It is important to note that foreign texts are often in fact very experimental. So that Aase’s work is radically non-fluent - deforming the Swedish language in all kinds of ways - so that to produce a “good” English version would in fact be deeply treasonous. I think this shows the lie of the standard binary of faithful vs loose, traditional vs experimental.

Daniel Borzutzky: Hmmmm….I’m not sure that for me this is the right binary...between traditional and experimental if what experimental means is inserting yourself into the text in order to take it over.  And I think it would be important to put works like James Wagner’s Trilce and Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl in a separate category from the work that I’m doing as a translator.

And I think to say that you are an experimental or traditional translator puts the focus on the translator and not on the work being translated.  In other words, if the work in the original language is aesthetically unconventional/experimental, etc… - then the translation should mirror that sense of experimentation.  But I personally would be reluctant to say that the translator’s aesthetics should be what determines the approach to the work being translated.  For me it’s the other way around.  

I’d agree with Johannes that rather than being an experimental move, in a UnitedStatesian context especially, such overt ego insertions can be reflective of imperialist domination tactics (and we may sound kinda old fashioned here). And these moves certainly date back to the 1950s in the US when early translations of Neruda and Vallejo were starting to circulate, and to the US modernists as well.  And often the tactics involved trying to fit the work into translation to match the translator’s aesthetic agendas and not the translator trying to make the work in translation match the aesthetic of the author.  

Of course, translators will inevitably have their own aesthetic agendas and they will mold translations in certain individualistic ways.  No big problems there.  But I think when we’re talking about bringing work into the US, with its tradition of subsuming and exploiting other cultures and countries, then there are political implications in thinking that the work to be translated is so easily mutable to fit into an aesthetic ideology.This tendency, has colonialist implications that create a hierarchical relationship that overly empowers the translator and makes the foreign language its subject to be dominated.  

I’m sure there’s no one “right” way to translate a text and there’s probably 8000 “wrong” ways.  But as Johannes has noted elsewhere, there’s also a culture of suspicion surrounding translation that mirrors the suspect treatment applied to immigrants.There is an exaggerated focus on the ways that the translation might be “wrong”.  And this continual focus on the ways that the translation might be wrong has the effect of keeping publishers from publishing work in translation.  Because the publishers are excluded from knowing the original language, the rest of us are excluded from having access to the work in translation.  The immigrant becomes suspect for what she might infect the culture with, and the translated text becomes a site of constant suspicion about the accuracy of the translation, its authenticity, and the value of the original text in the original language.  As the SPD top 20 listings show us, the choice the publishers and readers make is to stay away from the languages they don’t understand.  

So yes, I feel a loyalty to the original text in the original language.  The text in Spanish has a particular relationship to standard Spanish.  I try to recreate that relationship linguistically; and I address my loyalty by contextualizing the politics and the histories that the original text is responding to.  In Zurita’s case, he is didactically responding to the murderous policies of the Pinochet regime and situating those policies within a global continuum of mass violence and neoliberal exploitation.  For me it’s important to expose this.  

Translation is part of my artistic practice.  I translate the work of writers that I love, writers who are important to me, and who have influenced my writing and thinking.  I don’t hide the ways in which I am influenced by the work I translate, and my work as a translator has shaped the way I think about and approach my own writing.    

Jennifer Scapettonne: I wholly agree with what Johannes and Daniel have said about the imposition of the translator into the body of a text. While there is no authorless translation, the whole process ought to lure us outside of ourselves—even further than when composing our “own” work. One’s tactic of translation should be in continual metamorphosis depending on the forms and methods of the work at hand (and that can and will change even if the author of the original is the same). The concept of experimental translation was useful insofar as it meant to counteract the faux polish of literary translation of the sort bent on smoothing out disjunctions in an original text and eliding the distance between languages. However, it seems to me that the term as currently bandied about in US poetry circles has become degraded; it has come to license superficial engagement with the original text, subjection of the other to gimmicks and whims, whereas the commitment obliged by translation (including innovative transmutations like Zukofsky’s Catullus or Carson’s Sappho, or Rothenberg’s Navajo Horse Songs) can, in sincerity, take years or even decades to build toward. Facile acts of “translation” can come to mirror the vampiric and, yes, colonial aspects of certain “avant-garde” acts of appropriation. It seems to me that only a culture as narcissistic as this one can collapse categories of engagement to such a degree and call so many sorts of appropriation by the name of translation. Translation is a deeply empathic act: ideally, it’s a two-way channel.

Translation is an inextricable part of my poetic practice and part of my research. These vocations are in a harmonic relation to one another, and the tendency to separate one practice from the other, to divide translators as technicians from poets and scholars, is another species of historical amnesia and cultural blindedness. Research is necessary to create a context of reception for the work and try to conjure its aspirations, particularly when the author being translated is no longer present as interlocutor. As a poet one can attempt an echo of those aspirations and their form. I am wary of teams of translators that include a scholar or native-language “informant” and a poet working in the “target” language—a strategy that dominates the translation market, perhaps because it seems more authoritative, less prone to “error”—precisely because this strategy reinforces a division of labor and of linguistic facility at odds with the original impulse.

I wanted to ask a question about the recent political activism in the poetry world in the US--particularly the political activism which has led to what might be called the fall of conceptual poetry via the calling out of racism in avant-garde poetry practices. I know that that Heriberto Yépez has responded (GP has translated his response) and I’m wondering what this activity looks like or what sense it makes on a more international level, removed a bit from the claustrophobia of American poetry social media. Thoughts? Does this fall of conceptualism matter, say in Sweden, Venezuela?

Johannes Göransson: It’s a complicated question. Sweden has a long tradition (going back to the 1960s concretists, such as Öyvind Fahlström and Åke Hodell) of what might be loosely termed conceptual poetry. But it was always much more overtly political and activist than the current US incarnation. And also way more humorous as well as defiantly populist (in difference to Goldsmith’s overt elitism, these poets read Warhol as a populist, and thus left-wing, artist). Though in the late 90s, several young Swedish scholars (most prominently Jesper Olsson) were educated in langpo/conceptualism american style and came back, started a journal (OEI), got academic positions, wrote books, invited American poets over etc. This way the Swedish conceptualism got an american spin. Nevertheless, OEI and others associated with them did bring attention to a lot of contemporary Swedish poets that may be considered loosely “conceptual,” such as Johan Jönson and Jörgen Gassilewski. But we might compare two controversies: Johan Jönson stirred up a huge controversy for supposedly “advocating class hatred” with his book about being working class and wanting to kill the right-wing prime minister. Not only is Jönson far more unruly in his method than the more “puristic” (we allow for a little “massage”) decorum of US conceptualists (it’s seldom clear when he’s sampling and when he’s just writing about his own experiences), but in imagining killing the prime minister, his “controversialness” seems the opposite of Kenny Goldsmith’s reading of the Mike Brown coroner’s report. But OEI and the Modern Museum in Stockholm are currently organizing a conceptual poetry reading which features mainly US poets like Goldsmith, so apparently not everyone has heard of the demise of conceptualism. But Swedish poetry is extremely engaged in matters of race and I have heard from a few poets who are concerned about this.

On the whole, the most exciting Swedish poets would hardly be considered "conceptual" from a U.S. perspective. Poets like Leif Holmstrand, Aase Berg, Sara Tuss Efrik, Maria Margareta Österholm, Athena Farrokhzad, Elisabeth Berchtold, Helena Boberg, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa, Lidija Praizovic are maximalist, gurlesque, gothic, queer, unwieldy, tastelessly political, tastelessly about the body. I prefer to see Johan Jönson with his excessive, messy, often hateful, poetry as part of this group of writers. Also, I love some of the influential neo-Romantic poets who started publishing in the 1980s, such as Ann Jäderlund and Eva Kristina Olsson, who are writing some of their best, strangest work these days. You can see sampling practices in many current poets - Aase Berg, Johan Jönson, Leif Holmstrand, Helena Osterlund, Athena Farrokhzad, Elisabeth Berchtold, Helena Boberg, Aylin Bloch Boynukisa, Lidija Praizovic - but the result is not decorous high art, it’s often maximalist, gurlesque, queer, unwieldy, overtly political, overtly about the body.

Jennifer Scappettone: Some internationally-oriented authors in Italy have taken to the most visible impersonations of today’s conceptualism—i.e. Kenny Goldsmith, probably due as much to his work with ubuweb (which does offer the public free access to the work of international avant-gardes—though Heriberto Yepez has lately critiqued this curatorial strategy as “The Ubu Degree of Poetry Inc.”) as to the international hijinks and headlines. The Italian literary scene is still highly masculinist, and I don’t even think Vanessa Place or the authors contained in I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women have received any attention. But postwar modernists and the neo-avant-garde in Italy were intimately related to first-wave conceptualism, and far more politically committed—in the form of action as opposed to artists’ statements. (I recently wrote an essay for Moderna about Amelia Rosselli’s conceptualism, and the relation of constraint to imprisonment in politically committed postwar writing, music, and art.) I would ask US readers to look outside for alternative models of engagement. There is reinvigorated interest—perhaps more in Oakland than in Italy—in Italian feminism at the moment; there is an upswelling of interest in operaismo, or workerism. I would point interested people to literary and political journals like Alfabeta2, the second instantiation of the provocative 1970s-80s publication directed by Nanni Balestrini.

That said, it would be healthy if the current “Body of Michael Brown”/ “Mammy” debacle led to a reinvigorated debate surrounding race in European literature (though I doubt it will, because the sensationalism of the Goldsmith/Place pieces wouldn’t hold up; it’d be the work that arises in response to sustain an international discussion). In a nutshell, race in Italian culture has traditionally been framed in terms of “the Southern question,” with the impoverished South racialized and despised to a degree hard to imagine from here, given that the signature differences in skin color are relatively slight. Now that Italy is seeing so many waves of immigration, leading to Roma families’ banishment to unlivable conditions in peripheral encampments, and thousands of refugees from North Africa being left to drown in the Mediterranean, alarming and categorically different forms of racism are an undeniable part of the cultural scene. None of this will be solved by conceptualism.

Marie Buck: Well, as Jen said, this seems like a good moment to look elsewhere. I was really glad to see Vanessa Place removed from the AWP subcommittee she was on, since I think that a lot of her work creates a hostile environment for writers of color. However, I don’t take her or Kenneth Goldsmith to be representative of conceptualism, the experimental tradition, or the avant-garde (though I’m very skeptical of the contemporary application of the term ‘avant-garde’ myself). I see people making a lot of claims about the experimental tradition as a whole, which seems to imply that more traditional poetry in the U.S. somehow generally has good politics around race (definitely not true). And if we take Goldsmith and Place as representative, we also elide the many writers and artists of color who have made non-racist and/or anti-racist work using conceptual or more generally experimental strategies.

At the same time, a lot of conversation about the ‘experimental tradition,’ for lack of a better term, within experimental writing communities is so short-sighted. For instance, I don’t feel like there is a lot of conversation about or knowledge of the Black Arts Movement in the poetry circles that I travel in, and the BAM is clearly an avant-garde by most definitions.

Generally, it seems unfortunate that the conversation has focused so heavily on Goldsmith/Place/MCAG. The Goldsmith/Place/MCAG conversation at this point feels a bit like the Rachel Dilazel conversation: click bait that’s masquerading as a conversation about racism. We really need actual anti-racist activism that operates outside of the (relatively tiny) poetry community, that builds political power through organization. (I.e., we should certainly try to make the poetry community less racist, but I don’t think we can ‘fix’ poetry without changing the whole society. And the poetry community isn’t a particularly strategic space to organize from, so it is probably better to be involved in Black Lives Matter, or Fight for 15, or adjunct organizing, or etc. than to remain focused on the poetry community.) And we need thinking about aesthetics and race. I don’t know. Last week I went to the new Whitney and saw the really phenomenal exhibit America Is Hard to See, which includes a wall of anti-lynching art, a lot of work about the AIDS epidemic, a section on industry and the rust belt, a section of feminist performance work, and a lot of other stuff. Yesterday I went to a launch for the new edition of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and heard the author, Michele Wallace, speak, and it was great. I guess I feel like the Goldsmith/Place/MCAG conversation does not go very far, and it really just makes me want to read more widely and attend events that are not poetry readings, and I want the poetry community in general to be able to think with a wider range of writing and art related to race, aesthetics, oppression, political organizing, and so on. (And this conversation is definitely making me want to focus outside the U.S. a bit, too.)

Johannes Göransson: I don’t agree with all the ideas proposed by the MCAG, but I think it is doing really necessary work. On some level, this is very much like the Black Arts Movement: the statements have the kind of harsh manifesto-energy of the historical avant-garde and the BAM but I don’t think that means that it’s shallow or limited. It is focused like manifestos, I would say. It does tie in with a lot of the statements we have made in this discussion about the implicit nationalism of a lot of US academic poetry discussions. But other than that I agree with a lot of what you are saying here.

Daniel Borzutzsky: I can speak a bit about Chile, but without much confidence that I am accurately representing the ins and outs of the Chilean poetry scene.  I can speak anecdotally, about conversations I have had with friends, and I can give some impressions.  

I’d start by saying that I don’t think Goldsmith and Place, and their ugly appropriations of African-American bodies, are something that is talked about in Chile.  The number of Chilean poets who really care about what is happening in contemporary US poetry is equivalent to the number of US poets who really care about what is happening in contemporary Chilean poetry: not many.  From what I can tell, a handful of people read Heriberto Yepez’s essays, but I think the general impression is that this is a gringo debate and context.  I don’t know to what degree people know or care about this very particular and ugly form of racism.    

Jen was discussing racism in Italy.  In a Chilean context, for a Chilean reader of Goldsmith/Place, the discussion of race won’t have the same resonance as it would in the US.  As in Italy, those from the Southern part of the country, the indigenous, and specifically the Mapuche, have been abused, discriminated against, killed and violated for centuries.  And there is perhaps also an analogous discussion (to the US) about the appropriation of Mapuche traditions by artists in Chile who are outside of their community. But from what I understand the question of who is inside and outside is complicated by a far reaching mestizaje. On the other hand, and as I’ve written about elsewhere, the unfair expectation that indigenous artists only work in their traditions is also one which is prevalent and which is illustrative of a backwards form of racism.  

So, I’m not sure what that what you’re calling the fall of conceptualism matters much in Chile.  

But Chileans would also argue that there is a Chilean tradition of conceptualism and the avant-garde which doesn’t need to look to the US as a model.  There’s lots of places to start, but if you’re looking at uses of found text Juan Luis Martinez’s La Nueva Novela  (http://juanluismartinez.cl/obras/nueva_novela/nueva_n.html) from 1971 is an amazing book that's way ahead of its time.  And Cecilia Vicuña,, especially in her visual art starting in the1970s, was working in conceptual modes that long pre-dated what we in the US are currently calling conceptualism..  US readers will be familiar with some of the other giants of the Chilean avant-garde, like Huidobro and Parra.   But there are plenty of other models as well, who were well outside of the reach of the US, and so I’d end here by emphasizing that Chileans don’t need to turn to the US to find models of conceptual art, and that  US models like Goldsmith would have little resonance there.  

 (Question directed to Jennifer): You talk about a kind of superficial or “vampiric” translation mode that is more cultural appropriation rather than translation whereby the translator uses the original text as a way to assert more strongly or more powerfully a “lyric I.” Am I understanding this correctly? I’m wondering about this because I think I explicitly do that in my own translations of Baudelaire--like it’s intentional but I feel that I have to defend myself because he is also the privileged “master”--so I’m wondering if this type of vampiric translation, as you call it, is acceptable in some way if the original is in itself, the master--in some sense, I am his other. Can’t these things work both ways? Which bridges to something Johannes was saying in the idea that there is a sense in which translation practice can be volatile and disruptive of hierarchies, something Marie and Daniel also allude to. At the same time everyone seems to be saying that there is a suspicion around translation, because it’s inherently pluralistic in the same way that people are suspicious of writing collaborations and I think that there is a sense in which that suspicion also speaks to the political power of translation because it’s threatening and makes us re-examine our own writing practices and assumptions about what a poem is. Concluding thoughts?

Jennifer Scappettone: I was referring to a collapsing of the categories of appropriation and translation that seems typical of US literary scenes at this moment, and might be read as another sign of the privilege of an English-centric culture that does not need to work to learn and communicate in another language. I find this blurring of categories distracting because appropriation and translation, while related, are not the same. Working glacially on comprehension and expression across multiple languages, and attempting to approximate the semantic and/or formal properties of a poem in another language, are qualitatively different from the kind of translation game or exercise now possible with tools like Google Translate. Don’t get me wrong: I think these exercises can produce interesting results and potentially provocative meditations on globalization, algorithms and artificial intelligence, etc. But such exercises seem to be more fashionable and fun to engage these days than “normal” translation, which is more deferential to the cultural difference of the original text, perhaps more abject—and which, as noted earlier, attracts relatively few US publishers, readers, and reviewers. Brandon Brown’s work is an interesting example of experimental translation in which the text is apparently wildly divergent from, say, Catullus, but based on years of commitment and study. Ventrakl was an extreme example of devoted deformation, but didn’t call itself a translation; perhaps only an “umdichtung,” “woven around” the original, could make us think so hard about translation as a problem.

 Eunsong Kim gave a powerful talk at the &NOW festival’s “m0ngreL PoeTiKs” panel about appropriation and the archive, with Carrie Mae Weems’s appropriation of daguerreotypes of enslaved people vs. Kenny Goldsmith’s appropriation of the Michael Brown autopsy report at the center (Harvard’s Peabody Museum asked Weems to pay permissions fees for the daguerreotypes’ reuse; she refused, but a deal was made wherein Harvard purchased her final pieces). Kim’s central point was that conceptualism has licensed various acts of freewheeling appropriation that don’t think or feel hard enough about their relation to the archive. Translation really needs to think and feel through its relation to the archive—word by word, phoneme by phoneme.

The example of your translations from the French, and of other sorts of subversive translation, is to me a different issue. I like the point above (expressed most pointedly by Daniel) that translation, rather than showing that other cultures are ethically superior to the one in which we are living, can also remind us of the horrible consistencies in a, for example, current neoliberal universe: exposing forms of white supremacy, exploitation of the poor, sexism, planetary decimation, totalitarianism that are inextricably linked to the ones we are living and witnessing in the immediate moment, yet approached from different perspectives, which are threatened with obliteration under global capitalism. The choice of who one translates is of course paramount; one of the tasks of the translator is to pull marginalized voices within those systems into a different kind of legibility, and (like most of us here) I’ve focused my efforts on poets who implode the fraught ideology and expression of “mother tongue” and “fatherland” from within. But translators can also rewrite history by forging strategies of confrontation with “master” texts. This is something I’m grappling with at the moment in translating a sort of nemesis, FT Marinetti, after having devoted over a decade (and counting) to translating Amelia Rosselli, a committed Communist who lived the Cold War years in fear of the CIA—whose father, the Jewish Italian Resistance leader Carlo Rosselli, was assassinated through the global Fascist network, leading to a protracted exile. While sickening and often enraging, it has felt perversely crucial for me to think through the poetics of figures like Marinetti and Ezra Pound, whose revolutionary aesthetics are hailed while their reactionary politics are rejected or, too often, elided—to grapple with the relation between art and ideology. Translating a work Marinetti composed in 1943-44 from Venice, a city he once rejected for being too feminine, “Oriental,” foreign-loving, and passéist, while Fascism was going up in flames—and trying to expose the war of desire and violence at the heart of Futurism’s attitudes toward women and the global South—has become a vengeful occupation. I don’t feel the need to distort the text to the degree you might have in translating Baudelaire, because the publication records are different—translating Baudelaire becomes a conversation not just with the now canonized master text, but with innumerable other translators. When the historical record has so many gaps, it’s perhaps enough just to make the brawls and blindnesses within a text itself visible.

Marie Buck: I really appreciate what Jen is saying here. I think at the time I wrote my book that includes what we’ve been calling ‘translations,’ I was referring to them as translations. The book doesn’t actually include that term, though; the way you’d know the poems I was working from is that I always kept the titles. I’ve had people read the book without noticing that I’m appropriating or riffing on, or really, I’d actually say the right term would be writing through, other poems. And I think I’m glad I didn’t include the word ‘translation’ within the book because I agree that the word ‘translation’ might not make a lot of sense there. I did major in German in undergrad and so I have actually translated things, in a totally amateur way, in the past. I really like that process and it definitely feels like an entirely different endeavor, one that should have a specific word that doesn’t get used for other things. (I do have a pretty intense relationship with some of the poems I was writing through, but translating in the sense that the rest of you here translate is not what I was doing, for sure.) That said, I am definitely interested in thinking about translation and these other types of engagements with texts in the same conversation.

 Daniel Borzutzky:  Again, I don’t know if the suspicion around translation is because it’s pluralistic.  I think it’s simpler than that.  People are nervous about what they don’t understand.  And we live in an English-centric, anti-immigrant environment where language use and border crossing are perniciously legislated, where language use and border-crossing are sites of actual violence done to actual people.  I don’t really need to moralize about what kind of translation and translation-based activities poets are involved in.  And I am not particularly interested in talking about the nuts and bolts of translation.  I am deeply interested, on the other hand, in translation and its relationship to dissidence and the political realities the translated text is exposing.  And I am also interested in thinking about translation and multilingualism as a form of critique and activism.

I’ve written elsewhere about Don Mee Choi’s work with Kim Hyesoon, and in particular her statement that her “translation intent has nothing to do with personal growth, intellectual exercise, or cultural exchange, which implies an equal standing of some sort.  South Korea and the U.S are not equal.  I am not transnationally equal.  My intent is to expose what a neocolony is, what it does to its own, what it eats and shits.  Kim Hyesoon’s poetry reveals all this, and this is why I translate her work” (Freely Frayed,ᄏ=q, & Race=Nation. Wave Books, 2014).

I really appreciate what Don Mee is opening up here.  It blows up the notion that translation exists in order to further the goals of diversity and multiculturalism.  And instead, by my reading, she rightly politicizes the translator by positioning herself as a communicator of dissidence.  It replaces a well-intentioned though bogus and unrealized intent (multilingual/national diversity) with a pointedly political one (to critique, to be a mouthpiece of criticism, to interrogate and expose).  And as with Zurita and Chile (and political Latin American writers in general), Hyesoon’s poetics begins as a critique of Korea but is inseparable from a critique of US imperialism.  I find the clarity of Don Mee’s focus here refreshing and inspiring. And the suggestion I see in it, and this goes back to the question of how translation fits into my artistic practice: I’d say that there is a political stance and commitment in my poetry that is hopefully paralleled by a political commitment to translate….

And then I’d again point to the work that Jen Hofer and John Pluecker do with the Antena collective (http://antenaantena.org/).  The way that they have articulated the importance of translation as it relates to language-justice, and the creation of multilingual community spaces, is for me another inspiring example of some serious thought and action about how the translator moves beyond language transmission and into practical modes of grassroots community activism.  

On the homepage of their website we are told that “Antena views aesthetic practice as part and parcel of language justice work.”  

The work they are doing, and the articulation of these positions, has helped me grapple with some of these larger questions we have been talking about in regards to the way that the suspicion of translation mirrors the suspicion of immigrants.

There are plenty of instances outside of poetry, with journalistic or didactic writing, where translation can actually be a dangerous act. And we talked plenty about the imperialism involved in appropriative translations in the US.   But I point to Don Mee and Jen and John as examples of poets who are troubling the boundaries of the translator and the material to be translated in very different ways, in ways that at once expose imperialism while offering methods of critique, and of improving people’s daily lives in meaningful, serious ways.  

And on a different note, and thinking about poetry as political action, I’d cite Kristin Dykstra’s incredible commitment to bringing Cuban poets into translation and circulation in the US.  This is not easy work because of the continuous practical and bureaucratic hurdles that are tied to US-Cuban relations (just emailing alone with Cuban poets can be difficult).  But Kris has navigated them with great care and compass and skill, and has given us an incredible array of Cuban poetry, writing we would not otherwise have access to.  Kris’s work, through its action and vision and dedication to making sure we hear voices we are not supposed to hear, demonstrates the ways that translation can serve as meaningful, political and literary activism.  

Jennifer Scappettone: I just want to echo Daniel’s praise for Antena (and also Don Mee/Hyesoon!). I’ve been really floored and moved by Antena’s creation of spaces aimed at thinking through and enacting language justice in various cities, most recently Los Angeles. Their work is empowering people who constantly have to negotiate English-language dominance in a very concrete way. Antena’s conceptual platform also asks us to rethink the commonly held notion that “transparency” between languages is the answer. In my introduction to PennSound Italiana, which is aimed at “liberating” Italian-language texts as sound, I quoted Antena’s “Manifesto for Ultratranslation,” which also calls for “untranslation, undertranslation, overtranslation, an excess, extranslation, a lack, a limit, an excrescence, an impropriety, distranslation, retranslation, multitranslation, a mistake, a conflict, dystranslation. An understanding of the potential in not understanding.” Antena is a unique example of experimental translation in action. It asks us to find ways to put our skills to work in quotidian contexts dominated by an increasingly hysterical fear of outsiders while stressing that assimilation is not the answer.

 

Contributors

Marie Buck is the author of the poetry collections Life & Style (Patrick Lovelace Editions, 2009) and Portrait of Doom (Krupskaya, 2015), and she teaches literature and writing in Brooklyn. Some of her recent poems appear in Poems By Sunday, a Perimeter, and Fanzine. 

Jennifer Scappettone is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her books of poetry include From Dame Quickly and the bilingual Thing Ode / Ode oggettuale, translated in dialogue with Marco Giovenale; she edited Belladonna Elders Series #5:  Poetry, Landscape, Apocalypse, featuring new writing by Etel Adnan and Lyn Hejinian, and her prose and visual poems. Exit 43, an archaeology of landfill and opera of pop-up pastorals, is in progress for Atelos, with a letterpress palimpsest, A Chorus Fosse, coming soon from Compline. She edited and translatedLocomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, which won the Academy of American Poets’ biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize, and is at work on new translations of Carla Lonzi and F.T. Marinetti. In 2009 she guest-edited a special feature devoted to contemporary Italian poetry of research for Aufgabe 7, and she recently launched PennSound Italiana, a new, ongoing sector of the audiovisual archive devoted to Italian poetry, with a focus on experimental and underrepresented voices in the field. Recent prose appears inBoston Review and Jacket2. Collaborative work has included performances of Exit 43 with the Difforme Ensemble in Rome; digital archaeologies with Judd Morrissey; libretti, scores, and vocal concepts for PARK, directed and choreographed by Kathy Westwater; and sonic documentaries for X Locus, a site-specific installation conceived with AGENCY architecture and composer Paul Rudy for the courtyard and Trajan’s aqueduct tract at the American Academy in Rome. Her critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice was published in 2014. 

Translation links:

Work on Amelia Rosselli at Zoland Poetry:

http://www.zolandpoetry.com/featured/scappettone/featured1.html

 

Circumference podcast, with Montana Ray:

http://circumferencemag.org/?tag=jennifer-scappettone

 

Translations in progress of F.T. Marinetti’s Venezianella the Futurist:

http://bostonreview.net/poetry/npm15-jennifer-scappettone-translation-filippo-marinetti

Daniel Borzutzky is the author of the poetry collections The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (Nightboat, 2015), The Book of Interfering Bodies (Nightboat, 2011), The Ecstasy of Capitulation (BlazeVox, 2007); the chapbooks Bedtime Stories for the End of the World (Bloof Books, 2014), Data Bodies (The Green Lantern, 2013), One Size Fits All (Scantily Clad Press, 2009), and Failure of the Imagination (Bronze Skull Press 2007); and a collection of short stories, Arbitrary Tales (Ravenna Press, 2005). He has translated Raúl Zurita’sThe Country of Planks (Action Books, 2015) and Song for His Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010); and Jaime Luis Huenún’s Port Trakl (Action Books, 2008). His writing has been translated into Spanish, French, Bulgarian, and Turkish, and has been anthologized in, among other publications, Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing; La Alteración del Silencio: Poesía Norteamericana Reciente; Malditos Latinos Malditos Sudacas: Poesia Iberoamericana Made in USA; A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years; and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century. Borzutzky’s work has been recognized by grants from the PEN American Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Daniel’s translations : http://www.kenningeditions.com/kenning-editions/ordinance-1-memories-of-my-overdevelopment-by-daniel-borzutzky/

http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Poetry&id=189

http://circumferencemag.org/?p=2873

Poet and translator Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970 and lives in Pittsburgh. His most recent translation book is the novelThe Conspiracy (Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014) by the Venezuelan writer Israel Centeno. In 2013, he edited a special issue of Typomagazine dedicated to Venezuelan poetry (http://www.typomag.com/issue18/). This month, his translation of a 1964 manifesto by the Venezuelan collective El Techo de la Ballena was published in The Brooklyn Rail (http://brooklynrail.org/2015/06/poetry/why-the-whale).

 Poet and translator Johannes Göransson emigrated with his family from Skåne, Sweden to the United States at age 13. He earned a BA from the University of Minnesota, an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his PhD from the University of Georgia. He is the author of several books, includingHaute Surveillance (2013),Entrance to a colonial pageant in which we all begin to intricate (2011), and Dear Ra (A Story in Flinches)(2008). He has translated Aase Berg’s Dark Matter (2012), Transfer Fat (2012), andRemainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg (2005) as well as Henry Parland’s Ideals Clearance (2007).

 

Ten Autobiographical Fragments [by Alan Ziegler]

One Plus One (1956): When one of the older kids in the neighborhood is told he “has no balls,” he replies, “I’ve got two of them, how many do you have?”

    This is a question I have never asked myself.

    That night, in the bath, I nervously count.

    One. Two.

    And no more.

Bobby and Joanie (1964): Someone tells me that in 1961 he was staying with a friend in Cambridge. From Harvard Yard he heard a male and female voice having a drunken argument. “Stop it, Bobby,” said the female. “Aw come on, Joanie, come back here,” said the male.

    I will repeat the story many times, to the great pleasure of my listeners, who will choose, as I do, based on no evidence, to believe they were Dylan and Baez. 

 

Sartre’s Concept of Good Faith Demonstrated by a Waiter in a Chinese Restaurant (1965): My father’s won ton soup is lukewarm, so he calls over the waiter and says, “The soup isn’t hot.”

    “Soup is hot,” the waiter declares.

    “No it isn’t,” my father says.

    The waiter sticks his finger in the soup, and agrees with my father.

 

Do You See Where You Are? Do You Know How You Got Here? (1965): During my driver license (yes, that’s what NY State calls it) road test, the examiner asks me to cross a six-lane highway. I get halfway across when I realize there’s an onslaught of cars coming from the right. I squeeze the brake pedal and hope everyone stays in their lanes.

    The examiner looks up from his clipboard and calmly asks: “Do you see where you are?”

    “Yes.”

    “Do you understand how you got here?”

    “Not really.”

    He makes a notation, clicks his pen shut. His work is finished.

 

What He Does (1974): One of our transient roommates is Ralph, who works for EMS. He never talks about what he does.

    One night, we’re all watching the local news. The reporter describes a triple murder in the Bronx, and says, “One of the victims was dead at the scene, the other two died at the hospital.”

    “Two were dead at the scene,” Ralph says under his breath. “And the other one died in the ambulance.”

 

Concentric Circles (1970): She’s a friend, she says she is horny, I ask what are you going to do about it, and she responds: “I thought about fucking you, but I knew you wouldn’t because of your girlfriend. You see, you put a circle around yourself. You’ll do anything within that circle, but you won’t even consider going outside of it.”

    I tell her that I am always working on widening that circle.

    She replies: “You’ve missed the entire point.”

 

Two Things My Mother Said: “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.” “Like this you kill a day.”

    “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken” is attributed to John Buchan in 1919, and later appropriated into a song made famous by Faron Young and Maurice Chevalier.

    “Like this you kill a day” seems to be hers.

 

Shithole (1983): I have some kind of intestinal bug that won’t be snuffed. To make sure I don’t have an exotic parasite, the doctor sends me to a diagnostic lab that specializes in feces. You need to get several negatives before they rule out parasites. The lab is a converted apartment. Everyone there is leaving samples; often, chemical inducements are required.

    I could go on, but I don’t want to write it. And you wouldn’t want to read it.

 

Youthful Pain (2001): I trip and scrape my knee against the pavement. During the two-second delay between the act and the pain, I remember crying as a little boy when I scraped my knee. As the pain kicks in, I think of John Berryman’s line “I am not a little boy,” and I feel tearful.  It hurts so good to be a little boy for a few seconds.

 

Mama Rat and Her Children (2001): While the moon is being eclipsed, a mama rat and her children are crossing Riverside Drive as a taxi is paused at the Stop sign. The mama stops in the middle, waiting for the kids to catch up. The taxi driver honks his horn—two gentle beeps. The kids speed up and the whole family reaches the other side. The taxi goes on his way. The moon returns.

Harwood Named Poet Laureate of the Farmers Markets in NYC!

I’m thrilled to announce that I have been named the first poet laureate of the New York City Greenmarkets, the largest and most diverse outdoor urban farmers market network in the country, with over 50 locations throughout the five boroughs. My job is to select poems of high literary merit that showcase foods and beverages that are seasonal and specific to our region.

The poems will be printed along with recipes by noted cookbook authors and chefs and distributed free at all markets.  

One of the first poems I’ve picked is “Nettles” by Katha Pollitt from Antarctic Traveller  (Knopf,1982). Katha has graciously allowed GrowNYC reprint it. To read her poem and the accompanying recipe, click on the link below: 

"Nettles" by Katha Pollitt

Do you have a favorite food poem? Please enter the title and poet in the comment field. 

-- sdh

Letter to a Young Nonprivileged Poet by Sandra Simonds

 

Letter to a Young Nonprivileged Poet:

Sometimes younger poets come to me and they want to know how to get his or her voice out there in poetry. I’m not sure why they ask me, but whatever. I’ll take it for what it is. Let me first say, if you are a rich poet or poet who went to an Ivy League school or probably both, or a tenured white male professor, stop reading now. This post isn’t for you. There are tons of resources out there for you and this is not one of them. This post is for ordinary poets, poor poets, adjuncts, and other people who don’t have the means, resources and connections in the poetry world and are struggling to get their voice heard. I totally get it and I want to help you!

First of all, you have to understand a very basic truth: the poetry world is full of rich white poets and being rich and white, having rich white parents, and having connections is a major reason poets become successful. More money, less problems. More white, less problems. So, try to understand this and get that. Let’s say it together: rich white poets are far more likely to become successful poets. That is just the history of poetry and it hasn’t changed much.  If you are a POC who isn’t rich, you have even more of a hurdle, obviously. So, what to do? Here are some tips to help you:

My first tip is to make a community and stop sucking up to authority figures and gatekeepers in poetry to try to get poetry favors because this doesn’t do anything for your poetry and is mostly a waste of time. Why? Authority figures and gatekeepers will almost always favor white males and people who have resources to begin with. STOP DOING THIS. Let me tell you a story. I have been living in Tallahassee for a decade because I went to PhD school here at Florida State University and I cannot tell you the number of students who go through the PhD program spending their entire five years sucking up to creative writing professors they think are going to get them book deals. This is a terrible method, my friends, and a waste of your time! From what I have observed, some students did get book deals from the connections that these professors had but the students who did were….wait for it….white males!  Surprise! Don’t make this mistake. Let’s review: Your professor is more than likely not going to get you a book deal and probably thinks you are annoying for asking because he/ she has more important things to do like relishing in the fact that he/ she has a tenure track job teaching in an MFA / PhD program when the academic job market is literally collapsing at his / her feet. This professor is probably clueless as hell to his/ her class position and the fact that you are probably never, ever, ever, ever going to get a job like his/hers.  If you are a poor or have any other disadvantages,and you are on this futile path, listen to Dr. Sandra and abandon this path now.  Let’s review: abandon path abandon path good god, poet abandon path!!!…..take a new path to...your university’s copy machine…..

Do you get free copies? I hope so! USE THE COPY MACHINE to make chapbooks and send your chapbooks to all of your friends to build an audience and make your own damned connections with people you actually care about who share your aesthetics and politics. Making chapbooks is fun and easy. Google how to do this. I made my first chapbook back in 2005 with a friend I made in PhD school who also came from a fairly poor and unlikely poetry background. Both of us USED THE COPY MACHINE and made a zillion copies of our chapbooks and sent them out to our friends and created an audience for our work. Also, make friends with that guy/ girl in the English department who sits at the front and has to deal with all the professors all day and have him/ her send out your chapbooks FOR FREE. Every year or so, I still make my own chapbooks and send them out to my friends and new readers, even though I have written five full length poetry books. I still really enjoy the process of making books and it connects me to my roots as a poet.

Let’s move on to the next thing: I am 37 years old and I have never won a poetry prize. You don’t need to win a poetry prize to get your poems out there. Sure, send to the prizes since you think a prize will help you to get an academic job you are probably not going to get anyway because…surprise! You are poor or a POC or both or have a disability—but go ahead and try—I did that and still do, but prizes don’t mean very much if you have a politics. Dr. Sandra, what do you mean by a politics???? Let’s move on…..

My advice is that your poems have some kind of politics.  This doesn’t mean you have to write political poetry. I’m not saying that. I, too, write the occasional poem about gazing at a field of daffodils. But you are a poor poet! You are a disabled poet! You are a queer poet! You have something TO SAY and I promise you other poets like yourself want to hear it.

I have long been involved in social justice movements. When I was a graduate student, I probably spent more time as a labor organizer than I did either on my own poems or on my classes. Again, I’m not writing this for rich poets, as this advice is totally irrelevant to your experience and is contrary to your interests but if you are a poor poet or any poet who has come from a disadvantaged background, one without privilege, do yourself and the people around you a favor, join the struggles for liberation of poor people and POCs that are taking place all around you. Do what it takes to fight police brutality, and if that isn’t your thing….free animals from cages like the animal liberation people do, or feed hungry people with Food Not Bombs, or if you are really lazy sign some moveon.org petitions,  but my suggestion is that you get into the streets to fight your oppression and involve yourself deeply in this practice and from this involvement not only will you wed yourself to something bigger than your ego, not only will you flourish as a person, but I can assure you that you will grow as a thinker and as an artist and your poems will be better for it. And, ultimately, if your poems aren’t better for it, then you have done something truly righteous and real. And these struggles don’t have to be within the poetry world—they can be outside of it and that’s fine. But by being poor, you are already a political person and there are millions of people out there like yourself. It may not look like this from the confined and myopic lens of your MFA program, but it’s true. These other poets need and want to hear from you. 

Once in a while, privileged white man or woman will bemoan the fact that he/ she doesn’t have an audience. “Sandra, I feel like I’m getting old and no one is reading my poems,” he / she says to me. My response to this is well, maybe you aren’t saying anything important or don’t have anything that other people can connect to. Maybe millions of people in this world are struggling to put food on the table and you are worried about what kind of car to buy. Maybe no one wants to hear about the dreams and fantasies of a tenured white male professor who has nothing to worry about? Maybe some of us are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from student loans, ever think about that? I’m just saying! No one cares about your cute little dream poems and that’s why no one is reading them. These people should probably do everything in their power to support people like US but most of them don’t, so why are they crying to me? But this isn’t about them…..

Last thing…. If you have a politics, there will be haters. Some of them will be people you thought were your friends, some will be anonymous trolls, some will be rich poets who don't think you have the right to write poetry, some people are a combo of all the above and some people are just plain mean. Haters are like free verse, there's a million ways to be a hater. If you are a woman writing poetry with any kind of politics, you are going to get emails, mentions on twitter and all the other bs from condescending mansplainers who will do what it takes to silence your voice. My advice is: delete, block, ignore and move on. When I published my first book, Warsaw Bikini in 2009, my first “review” was some douchebag on Amazon who decided that he was going to “review” my breasts. It was humiliating. I had worked so hard on this book. It was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. I thought I had done everything in my power to be taken seriously as a poet, and this was a huge blow to me. But, I had a community and ironically, I had this community because I was an outspoken feminist and leftist so I got all of my friends to flag the review and it got taken down. But the message was clear that this was going to be a hard road to be a poet and it still is. There are all kinds of haters and the best thing to do is form a community or audience (either online or in person or both) who will have your back and respect your art and politics.

I realize that I wasn’t “supposed” to become a poet. Maybe that is the same for you. Being a poet is really easy if you are privileged because you don’t really risk much. If you fail, your mommy or daddy or whoever will be there for you but for people like us, it’s much harder. That’s why we have to bond with each other and support each other and share our secrets. HELP EACH OTHER. You know how hard it is out there as a poet, so help your friends who come from similar backgrounds.

To better assist you, I have rewritten a paragraph of Rilke’s 1903 letter to a young poet and updated it to help the nonprivileged poet (I have struck through the parts of Rilke which are irrelevant to us, and added in bold pertinent information):

 

There is only one way: Go within procure a squad. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does my squad stretch out its roots in the deepest place of my heart poetry and political life? Can you avow that you would die if you or any member of your squad were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Do I have anything that’s important enough to say that will change the lives and material conditions of the people around me? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, “I must," then build your life upon and fight for the liberation of all oppressed peoples. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge.

Or you can simply replace Rilke's letter with this if nothing I have said here makes sense:

 Diane di Prima

Hope this helps xoxoo, Sandra

Notes On Confession (Part Two) by Sandra Simonds

 

I decided I would become a philosophy major in college because philosophy meant being smart. Now, I knew nothing about philosophy save for the modest amounts of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre I found on my mother’s bookshelves at home. I was a seventeen year old French Existentialist, just like all of my other nerdy friends and yes, I wore all black every day and smoked cigarettes outside of the town 7-11. But when I got to UCLA, when I took my first philosophy class, not only did I not understand very much of what they were talking about (okay, yeah, I was stoned a lot, but it was college and I did just fine in my poetry workshops, so what was the deal????). All I remember was an ethics class where the male graduate teaching assistant asked us hypothetical questions like if we were on a boat and the boat was going to sink and everyone on the boat was going to die unless you did x,y,z do you save one person or the entire boat given these certain conditions blah blah blah and I knew right then I didn’t care. Plus, during our final exam, these male graduate students sat at the front of the auditorium indifferently playing chess. This is what philosophers do, I thought. They sit and play chess and could care less about our personal pain and feelings. I also remember feeling really stupid, like even before I could answer the questions on my final, I just felt dumb. Philosophy was “objective” and I, as a person, sure as hell wasn’t. I was emotional and messy and now I felt intimidated and self-conscious about that and I was never, ever going to know the "right" answer about that damned sinking boat.

Fast-forward to 2003. I’m done with my MFA and living in San Francisco and I have a boyfriend who reads a lot of Alain Badiou so I’m like okayyyyyyy, I should read Alain Badiou and so I start reading him and I’m like what is going on here? It’s not that I don’t understand some of what Badiou is saying, but I just feel deep down I can’t relate to it and it makes me feel hysterical because reading Badiou brings back all of the old feelings I had as an undergrad. Not only do I feel dumb, but now I felt like a dumb, emotional, girl.

Fast-fast-forward to about six months ago. I find this piece of writing, “Poetry and Communism,” in the new issue of Lana Turner written by non other than Alain Badiou! Here’s the first line of the piece, “In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists.” Alright, Alain, I’m with you. I’m a communist. I’m a poet. I think, this is great, a philosopher is writing about communist poets. Then he goes on to name these truly great communist poets, and my heart sinks-- none of the poets he lists are women! Not one! I was angry and annoyed by the piece, and, like a good communist, I posted a link to “Poetry and Communism,” on Facebook and aired my grievances. You have to understand, I wanted to like it, but how could I take this all male lineup seriously? Some people on Facebook defended the piece, “but Alain is an old philosopher who doesn’t know that much about poetry” and “you have to accept the spirit of the piece despite its drawbacks!” The usual excuses.

Well, it so happens that a poet named Katy Bohinc joined the discussion and it turns out she has written an entire book of poetry about Alain Badiou and suddenly everything that I’ve felt about philosophy, it’s male-ness, logicalness, infuriating “universality” comes together. I suppose every patriarchal dark cloud has a feminist silver lining, and the silver lining was being introduced to Bohinc’s book  “Dear Alain.”

 “I couldn’t think my way into you I can’t think my way out of you”—On Katy Bohinc’s Dear Alain

For a book supposedly so relentlessly devoted to Alain Badiou (there’s also the occasional letter to Slavoj Žižek, a diary entry here and there but they are few and far between), it really isn’t about him, nor the specifics of his philosophy. It’s much more a book about how to confront, reject  and restructure the troubling unequal power relationship and tensions that arise between the old male philosopher and the young female poet. Bohinc writes, “The problem ultimately is that to define anything is to take a position of power. Are you comfortable with your power? I hate power. I refuse to define. I refuse it. I refuse to be powerful, I refuse to make sense, I refuse I refuse. I refuse in protest. I’m a soft, silly, wild flower basket of love.”

At times she’s angry with him, at times indifferent, at times frustrated, at times erotically attached. And, like the Low book I wrote about before, the book is lengthy—over 200 pages of letters. It’s a conceptual project, the letters are written in prose and the prose isn’t particularly lyric. Still, it’s working in the confessional mode: “I always feel a glow, the best when I confess to you and you say “no” and explain to me why I’m wrong,” she writes. But I don’t want to make it seem like the work is simply a collection of reactions to Badiou because that would put Badiou front and center, make him the star of the show, and I really don’t think that the book is even about him in the first place except to reject him, his form, for something, not opposed to him, but radically different. How do we build new forms of understanding given that this is our model, the symbolic male philosopher? How do we take those indifferent graduate students playing chess during my final as an undergrad—stoic, indifferent, unemotional—off the stage?

In that sense, the book reminds me a little bit of the spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the camps that were set up. How do you build something for yourself and your comrades that’s new but not opposed since opposed still gives authority to the existing order? What does it look like to move beyond the old power relationship (kill the father), to move beyond rejection? Part of the struggle and protest of the book is an attempt to let go of that powerful relationship and part of the joy as a reader is to see that other systems can be built, other modes of understanding that are complex, interesting and plural, based in feminine practice. Bohinc’s letters are affirmative and enthusiastic about these possibilities.

One of the fascinating ways the book argues for this is that it makes a strange communist and pluralistic argument about astrology and horoscopes, which are typically gendered “female”:

"I like horoscopes. You know what’s nice about them? They’re equivalent. I mean, I’ve seen bad horoscopes, but I mean everyone has one…The busboy could have the sweetest chart you ever saw. The president a mass of jungle fucked oppositions. There are always eight planets and twelve houses at play. So instead of boring labels - “middle aged, loveless douchebag” or “beautiful young thing” or “rich” or “poor” or dominant American culture “high, low, forgettable” – SO BORING - instead I read a chart and get this complex system of complex adjectives which beyond alleviating my thirst for complexity also seems leveling. Each chart has a complex personality. You know, like a human being.”

There’s a great moment at the end of the book where, finally, Badiou pens a reaction to Bohinc’s project (as far as I understand, the letter is authentic):

“This strange book, Dear Alain, by Katy Bohinc can be represented as such: you have a great countryside named “Alain Badiou,” the park of Alain Badiou. And she looks and walks through the park, with a perspective supported by a thought, an effect, maybe even, a love?...She knows there exists under the name “Alain Badiou,” a park, and so she addresses him, this supposedly dear Alain, at times with affection, at times in anger, at times almost indifferent, and at times revealing forcefully her difference and opposition through the poetic vehemence of her writing to the serenity she sees in the park of philosophy. Day after day, Katy returns to this park and her eye changes, her relationship with “Alain Badiou” varies like the time that passes, and her thoughts inscribe themselves in small texts that in the end compose a kind of ode to the park.” 

But in a very interesting and unexpected turn, what we really see is Alain Badiou himself, walking through the park of her book, bewildered, for he recognizes nothing as he has become a stranger in a world he mistakenly believes is about him, a stranger to himself in a strange book. This is no longer the “serene” park of philosophy he has built, that he is comfortable with, but rather a place where his position as the patriarchal philosopher is diffused and rendered confusing, a glimpse of what power looks like looking at power estranged from its order. It’s a world that does not bear a relationship to him, the park is a funhouse mirror of the park obscuring the world he mistakenly believes is him and his. At the end of the letter, it’s obvious that the philosopher fails to make meaning of what he has read. How disappointing it must have been to read a book that is supposed to be about you and isn’t. You think you were going to the park and you are suddenly dropped in the middle of the ocean. So, when he reads the book as a kind of ode to the park, him, it’s obvious he has completely missed the point which is a nice revelation—that it’s possible to build a world of language on the feminine, confession, affect, plurality, irrationality—poetry. In other words, it really is possible to kill your philosophy daddies or at the very least confuse the hell out of them.

I actually don’t want to make it seem like I hate Badiou because I don’t. In fact, there’s a really moving passage in  “Communism and Poetry,” that I love very much where Badiou writes, “Communist poetry, with its resource of gentleness combined with that of enthusiasm, tells us: rise up with the will to think and act so that the world may be offered to all as the world that belongs to all, just as the poem in language offers to all the common world that is always contained therein, even if in secret. There have been and continue to be all kinds of discussions about the communist hypothesis: in philosophy, sociology, economics, history, political science … But I have wanted to tell you that there exists a proof of communism by way of the poem.”

So, Dear Alain, I think Bohinc has done a good job of exactly what you describe, except you are no longer at this world’s center. 

Some Notes On Confession (Part One) by Sandra Simonds

 

Some Notes On Confession (Part One)

 

Why is it that we can say things in poems that we can’t say in real life? I’ll admit, poems have gotten me into a lot of trouble and I suspect some of the poems I have written are behind a number of broken friendships and broken relationships—okay, just broken everything. But I’m not a confessional poet! Never have been. Still, I’ve told the same truth in many poems that I couldn’t tell people in real life. Probably, in real life, I’m just a coward and in poetry, I’m braver. But why? Poetry can function like a dark and creepy confession booth but at the same time, you don’t really have to be sorry, you don’t have to feel bad. You can tell the story and walk away.

Inevitably, after I give a poetry reading, someone will come up to me and ask, “but is that true? Did that really happen?  Well, maybe.  And I’ve had the same questions after reading the poems of my close friends who are poets. I think to myself “Becky never told me this juicy bit of information that she’s now revealing in her poem…was it real? Was it true?” Because unlike fiction, people inevitably assume that the speaker in a poem is the writer. I do it. I’m sure that you do it too. And poets can use this blurry line to their advantage.

Last year, a few of my students got a hold of one of my poetry books at the university library where I work. One of them stopped me and said “Dr. Simonds, do you really think about killing yourself every day?”  I was taken aback. I had written this in one of my poems. “I do and I don’t,” I told her. I mean I did write a poem called “Poetry Is Stupid and I Want To Die,” so it must mean that sometimes I feel this way.

It happened and it didn’t. Maybe and maybe not. This is at least part of the story of poetry—it kind of happened that way sort of. We write poems to make stories out of our histories, and then we go on to believe the stories we tell and tell them again and again. Sure, poets are liars but they are also really, really good ones.

But enough about me. I’ve been reading some recent books by younger contemporary poets who work with aspects of confession, expanding the parameters around the discourse of the self, on their own feminist terms, but who also have only a tangential aesthetic relationship with the confessional school of poetry we associate with poets like Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. These poets see the self as an a priori construct of language, history, patriarchy and capital, and so what emerges from these conceptual understandings of confession is a kind of play, not only of language but also of ethics and values that work to disrupt the oppressive structures of their worlds. Over the next few days, I’ll be writing about a few younger female poets who are working with aspects of confessional poetry, the first of whom is Trisha Low.

 

“I’ve Turned into A Parody of Myself”: On Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge

The first section of Trisha Low’s conceptual confessional project asks what it means to commit suicide and come back, older, wiser, more complicated and more pained, year after year in a double enactment of both Plath’s Lady Lazarus figure and biography. In a series of suicide notes arranged chronologically from childhood to young adulthood she meticulously chronicles the torment, whimsy, kitschy humor and melancholy of this struggle.  “This is an apology,” Low writes in one note and “this might seem like some sort of confession” in another. Her logic is one of self-hatred, disavowal and feminine refusal wrapped in the context of legality, the last will and testament, the adolescent girl literally enclosed in the masculine architecture of a terrifyingly redundant bureaucratic language i.e., the oppressor’s in the boring details. There’s no way out, only passwords to give away to the remaining friends and family who will be there after she’s gone: “email password: dollcollector, UK bank account pin code 2189”; material possessions flow out of the book in a sort of somber comedy.

Morbid, excessive and self-indulgent might be ways to describe the tenor of this book, but that’s its aesthetic, what it’s trying to do. And, of course, the more suicide notes that accumulate, the more frightening because, though the notes get more desperate, more thought out, more fucked, after all she is getting older, the more meaningless they become in a stand-up routine of the girl who cried wolf. How could anyone believe her now? In our first world neoliberal order of affect, in our landscape of positivity and affirmation, the book is marked by its willful and persistent nihilism, the desire to not only be destroyed but to disperse the destruction of the self across the subject’s world, artifact by artifact and to make what’s left behind, the people, the world, the order, whoever will listen suffer. If suicide is the ultimate personal revenge provoking chaos, despair and destroying the people and things left behind, then writing the suicide note over and over is the revenge fantasy, the fantasy of destroying the order but never being able to really pull the trigger. It’s the tedious and desperate binge purge cycle that produces nothing besides enacting the formal order of our enslavement to the binding injustices of our world. To state in other terms, there never will be a compleat purge, at least not in this context. Question: What do intelligent teenage girls who know they have very little agency do? Answer: They think about suicide and develop eating disorders.

And what is interesting about the way that Low’s confessions are conceptual is that it follows a basic materialist logic that the truth is not in the confession after all, but rather in the order, in the structure, of the text. This is not to say that the writing isn’t good, it is. In fact it is almost too real and in that realism, there’s a kind of plurality (this could be anyone’s eating disorder, anyone’s suicide note), and thus this self-hatred takes on a new form—it is a self-hatred universalized, and we begin to see that a woman’s self-hatred is a necessary and sad cog in the wheels of capitalist society. Capitalist society is dependent on a woman’s self-hatred to keep going.

It seems a gross transgression for Low to turn teenage suicide into parody, let alone self-parody, but it’s the universality of the letters—the fact that any teenage girl real or imagined, could have written them is both painful but also possibly a site of liberation. I went online and typed in google “suicide note, teenage girl” and within two seconds this came up: “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out, and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in. For you mom...the necklaces...For you, Nana & Papa...GingerSnaps (always reminds me of you)...For you Ingrid...The Happiness Project. And Dad...the Godiva chocolate truffles. I love you all...I'm sorry. I love you.”

And now from Low’s The Compleat Purge:

I guess you guys will have to deal with all my stuff–but just make sure for me, please, that these people get these things:

Tasha:

Breakfast on Pluto DVD

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe DVD

(This is embarrassing, but) Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire book (British edition)

King Kong DVD

The Corpse Bride DVD

Lord of War DVD

Revolver DVD

The Lords of Dogtown (for that blonde boy in Elephant, she thinks he’s really cute)

Chicken or the egg? It’s the same voice, the same form. At some point in this sequence, Low writes “I have become socialized to sometimes think of my life as some kind of high school movie with people, colors and words clearly delineated, hierarchies strictly defined.” And that is true, except that truth has nothing to do with belief and everything to do with the material reality of capitalist relations both in our fabricated lives and in our fabricated deaths. We can fake death, as she has, because death is also a kind of fake. “I have become a parody of myself,” Low writes and it could not have been otherwise, at least not without a collective engagement and refusal that moves beyond solipsism. The teenage girl is stranded, alone and abandoned with no way out; thus her desire for not only revenge but to brutally enact it over and over becomes unsurprising and universally meaningful.

In the nebulous sea of these suicide notes, Low gets to a precise truth in the form of a question which is how is that such affect, we never doubt the sincerity of the speaker, such sincere emotion can be made so counterfeit if we take counterfeit to mean something that can be passed off so easily as genuine. How can something so genuine, in the hands of this writer, remain so unbelievable? Even in the material outcroppings of our will to die, we are conformists because suicide notes are all the same.

This is all to say that there is structure to confession. In this case, the structure is the form of the suicide notes of a young girl and what we think to be the intimate longings, the deep sentimental desires are shown finally to be mechanical and easily reproduced for we are all shaped, molded and deranged by the same forces of racism, patriarchy and capitalism. We want the suicide note to be personal, but thank god it isn’t—there’s a way in which the mundane structure of it, the profane affect, tells us that our desires are not ours, that our deepest emotions and sentiments, in Low’s young protagonist, are not real, that they have been made and developed by forces that in themselves can one day change and this something not fueled by hatred but rather, love.

 

Which is to say that for such a revenge fantasy, as the Complete Purge is, one has never seen so many I Love Yous. The book brims with them. “I love you.” “I love you.” “I love you.” They close the letters. “I love you mom and dad.” “Just know I love you.” “I love you.” “Take care, darling, if you’re reading this I’m gone and I probably already miss you.” “I love you.” “I love you.”  “Take care, I love you.” “I love you, take care.”

 

Sandra Simonds, Guest Author June 22-26

This week we welcome back Sandra Simonds as our guest author. Sandra is the author of four books of poetry including the forthcoming Steal It Back from Saturnalia Books, The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2012) and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry 2015 and 2014, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Poetry, Fence, The Chicago Review, The Awl, and other places. Follow her on twitter @sandmansimonds.

Welcome back, Sandra. 

-- sdh

My Father’s Hands: for Matthew Ziegler, 1920-2001 [by Alan Ziegler]

    I have a tie with a Windsor knot made on my neck by my father's hands. He stood behind me and I watched his hands, trying to memorize the path of the fabric. Now all I remember are his aged hands, which my hands are beginning to resemble.

    My father’s hands: a child’s hands that carried his dead dog to bury in a lot before his mother came home so she wouldn’t see what he saw; a young man’s hands that carried my sister when she was an infant, blue with an undiagnosed disease, out of the hospital that had given up on her, into the car and to another hospital where her life was saved; hands that lovingly touched my mother; hands that never struck me in anger; hands that delivered milk, bread, and laundry through storms and illness; hands that were called upon to throw dirt on my mother's casket way way too soon; his hand on the kitchen table, near the end, as if he is about to throw the dice for the last time.

    Hands that steadied me as I posed on a pony in Brooklyn: I looked at that photograph dozens of times before noticing him crouching behind me, the way he would, decades later, tying the Windsor knot.

Looking at the World with Salerno Eyes [by Lisa Vihos - bonus day]

I have developed what I am calling “Salerno Eyes,” this being the phenomenon of seeing everything from the perspective of the awareness I gained while in Italy, in the presence of so many amazing poet-activists. So for example, when I sat this past Thursday evening by the large, terraced fountain that graces the front patio of Sheboygan’s Mead Public Library, I thought, “how can I use this space for a community poetry event?” The space is calling out for oratory. Now that I have returned from my own personal Mt. Parnassus, I am sure I could make this happen.

I was at the library because the small press that I helped to found four years ago, Pebblebrook Press, was having a reading of our four most recent authors who would read from their books: 

• Erik Richardson, a berserker stuck in traffic (a 32-page chapbook of poems that speak to the poet’s fascination with math, mythology, and fatherhood)

• Marilyn Zelke-Windau, The Momentary Ordinary (a 131-page collection of poems and original drawings that transform the everyday into something extraordinary)

 

• Mark Zimmermann, Impersonations (a collection of 73 lipograms, a form that restricts the letters of the alphabet that can be used in each poem to the letters in the poem's title.)

• and Karl Elder, who read from  On Earth as It Is in Heaven, his novel that we will be publishing later this summer. (I was so enthralled by his reading, I totally forgot to take a picture of him. I'm sorry, Karl!) 

As I listened to these poets read their work, I could not help but think, “the oral tradition is alive and well.” I felt validated and on-task. I felt like all these disparate pieces of my life are starting to come together. It is a good time to be job hunting. I am sure the perfect job is waiting for me, right around the corner. I just have to look for it with my Salerno Eyes.

 

Ciao, ragazzi!!

 

 

Next Line, Please: A Winner and Introducing Angela Ball (by David Lehman)

 

For last week's "Next Line, Please" contest over the Amercan Scholar, David Lehman challenged readers to submit poems with secret messages embedded in them. He announced the winner on Tuesday, June 16. He also announced his summer hiatus, during which Angela Ball will run the show. In addition to being a talented poet and distinguished professor, much loved by her students at the University of Southern Mississippi, Angela is an imaginative editor, who has assembled special issues of Mississippi Review and Valley Voices. 

Here's what Lehman had to say about this week's winner: 

“Conscience versus Consequence”

To say I am impressed with the ingenuity on display in this week’s entries is to risk understatement. I’ll just say that the decision to pick a winner gets more difficult each week—and that the association of poetry and secrecy remains a fruitful one. I opted for a tie this time between two acrostic poems that could not be less alike: Christine Rhein’s clandestine investigation of secrets and Millicent Caliban’s high-spirited tip of the cap to the nation that was born on the 4th of July.

Continue reading over at the American Scholar. 

-- sdh

Everything Else I Wanted to Say to You [by Lisa Vihos - Day 5]

I have come to the conclusion that it is quite impossible to sum up all the epiphanies that took place over five days with 80 plus poets from 21 countries.I cannot even begin to name all the dots that were connected, seeds planted, and friendships made. I do know that together, we observed how small gestures move adroitly between grand actions, and how each person's story comes forward into the realm of possibility.We learned that the rhythm, tone, and gesture of words convey their meaning just as much as meaning conveys meaning. Capisce? We learned we have a lot more to do, both apart and together. There is a big world out there that needs the balm of the poet. Andiamo, ragazzi! 

I want to offer some very specific thank yous to the following people for making this conference happen: First, to Valeriano Forte, the poet and organizer of 100 Thousand Poets for Change in Salerno, for his generosity of spirit, and for opening Salerno to all of us.

Valeriano Forte before an image of poet Alfonso Gatto

 

Filippo Trotta inside the Fondazione Alfonso Gatto

To Filippo Trotta, grandson of Alfonso Gatto and director of the Fondazione Alfonso Gatto, for his vision and support.

To Greenpino, the artist who wrote the poet’s words on the city’s walls and on the ground of the piazza and who said again and again with his photo portraits of us, “The World is Poetry.”

To Donatella D’Angelo for making the vision of the conference a graphic reality.

To student of language Guilia Sensale for “getting inside our minds” to do the lion’s share of translating. Without her, so much would have been lost between us.

To poets Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion for starting all this and keeping the faith.

 

Poster designed by Donatella D'Angelo

In addition, ti volevo dire: 

Grazie to the one whose heart was beating
like he was at a wedding
and to the one who was a native in a strange land.
Grazie to the one who secured our apartment
and who woke me at 5:45 the last morning to
hug me goodbye.
Grazie to the one who swept me off to Paestum
and the one who gave me tips about Dublin.
Grazie to the one who went home to Macedonia to
continue the struggle there
and to the one who spoke for the Roma
and to the one who spoke for the Yazidi
and to the ones who spoke for schoolgirls in India.
Grazie to the three angels of Salerno
and to the one who exchanged books with me
and to the one who admired my hair and gave
me her long poem.
Grazie to the one who sang her poems with 
such force and beauty
and to the one who knew Hurry Curry in Venice, CA.
Grazie to the one who gave the best bear hugs ever
and to the ones who admitted being introverts
and to the ones who shared their excellent photographs
and to the ones who work with children
and to the one who knows crowd funding. (We
will get this going yet.)
Grazie to the one who shared her films
and to the one who led the "Micro-Poems"
and to the creator of the paper boats.
Grazie to the ones who went with me to the Villa of Mysteries at Pompei
and to the one who went with me days later to see the Book of Kells.
Grazie to everyone who danced and to those who bought me something small or large
and to the one who taught me to say “ci vediamo domani.” (see you tomorrow!)
Grazie to the one who brought his daughter, who was thirteen and a poet
and to ones who sat in the café with me while I remembered my late father and cried.
Grazie to the one who is a poet with her camera
and to the one who founded River Styx, the poet laureate of St. Louis.
Grazie to my co-emcee at Saturday night’s reading
and to the one who shared my sister’s name (spelled only slightly differently)
and to the ones with the beautiful smiles
and to the creator of Medusa, process person par excellence and limoncello supplier extraordinaire.
Grazie to the one who gave me her friendship and half of her sandwich
and to all those who shared their hearts. That means EVERYONE.
(Note: if you feel I have not given you a specific shout-out here, please be advised I have looked at the list. Know I am thinking of you! Yes, you!)
Grazie to those who encouraged me to speak Italian, the language of my maternal grandparents.
Most of all, thank you to those who were not able to come,
the ones whose visas were denied for one reason or another.
We missed you terribly. As we look foward to the next conference,
we will plan how to grow this movement so that everyone,
everyone who wants to come can do so.
We are going to figure this out.
Poetry can change the world
one person, one poem,
one breath, one heartbeat
one gathering
at a time. 

Last but not least, thank you, Stacey Harwood for the opportunity to blog at The Best Amercian Poetry this week. It is always a pleasure and I learn something whenever I do it. Best regards to you and David. 

—LV

 

Two Fathers at Macy's, 1992 [by Alan Ziegler]

    Sinatra sings about an unlikely couple: “She was Mozart, I was Basie… She was polo, I was racetrack.” Although Erin’s father, Paul, doesn’t frequent polo matches, my father is frequently racetrack, and they do make an unlikely pair:

                        He is South, he is Brooklyn

                        He is Europe, he is Vegas

                        He is Episcopal, he is secular Jew

                        He is PhD, he is high school

    But the refrain would be:

                        He loves Erin and Alan

                        He loves Alan and Erin

    And for both of them it is always 5 o’clock somewhere:

                        He is martini, he is martini

    They get along splendidly when Paul visits New York, so Erin and I don’t feel too badly when we ditch them at Macy’s, saying, “We’ll meet you back at the top of the escalator in ten minutes.” An hour later we are lingering over tea in the basement café.

    The longer we linger, the more concerned we are about the consequences. After 20 minutes all they’d have left to talk about is how worried and pissed they are at their runaway children. They’ve probably split up and are searching the World’s Largest Department Store.

    But as we head up the escalator, they are right where we left them, in animated conversation, with barely a nod to us. Finally, Paul says, “Matty was just saying, ‘If the kids are any longer, we’re going to have to start shopping for furniture.’” And they both laugh.

    This is a story they will each tell for the rest of their lives. 

A Prayer for the Oral Tradition (Or, What I Learned in Salerno) [by Lisa Vihos – Day 4]

 

Which Way to Go? (My Dublin Feet)

 

The blogger respectfully asks that you read this post out loud.

Heavenly Mother/Father Poet Above Us, Source of All Our Contemplations,

Having roamed the streets of Salerno after midnight with my fellow poets,
speaking our verses under a June moon, I came to these eternal questions:
What is this thing called poetry and what distinguishes it from spoken word?
What distinguishes it from song? 

As fast as the questions came, answers quickly followed:
1) Nothing, my child and 2) Nothing, but song adds melody to lyrics.   

Although I have not done an exhaustive study on these matters,
I do have some shreds of evidence that lead me to the conclusion that poetry,
spoken word, and song are all manifestations of the same phenomenon, that is,
the oral tradition. Here, for your consideration: 

ONE: A while back, I heard the poets Anne Waldman and John Giorno at the 30^th anniversary of Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Both poets spoke all their poems from memory. At the time I did not think “spoken word.” I only knew the poets’ words were riveting and I vowed to make mine more like them. 

Yes! 

TWO: Fellow conference-goer, poet from Malaysia Elaine Foster, has this to say about the matter: “Poetry has always had an oratory nature. Poetry was first and foremost an oral tradition….There is no difference between spoken word and poetry in terms of actually being poetry. It is all poetry.”  

Yes!
(and the snapping of fingers)* 

THREE: My 17-year-old son plays guitar, drums, and piano. You could say he is musically oriented. He often sends me song lyrics by bands he admires because he knows I will find them interesting. He intuitively recognizes that song lyrics are poetry. 

Yes, and yes again!
(Snap snap snap) 

FOUR: Did you ever notice how easy it is to remember the words to a song? Do you know why this is?

I repeat, borrowing a method from the tradition of which I speak,
poetry, spoken word, and song are all manifestations of the same phenomenon,
that is, the oral tradition. 

The oral tradition goes way back, as you know. It is the fertile ground out of which all storytelling and poetry have grown, grow now, and will continue to grow in the coming generations.

The instinct to speak, to be heard, to pass wisdom from one mind to the next,
to share the past so that we can learn from it in the present and thus make a better future;
all this is the impetus behind our human inclination to partake of the oral tradition. (snap snap snap)

Human beings live to make meaning, and while some prefer to do this by creating images
(they are called artists), a large sector of the human race engages in making meaning
by using words. These are the writers, sometimes called poets. 

When metaphor, rhyme, rhythm, word choice, repetition, intonation, and gesture get involved in this telling, it becomes poetry. 

It is that simple. 

Then, at the extreme prose end of 21^st century manifestations of the oral tradition we find radio podcasts (This American Life, Serial, and StoryCorps) and the phenomenon known as The Moth.

So, who put the oral in oral tradition?

We did. Human beings. With our mouths, vocal chords, tongues, teeth, lips, and voices. Don’t forget our brains and our hearts. The oral tradition is the most basic element of our humanity. 

Poetry is not a mystery nor should it be wrapped in rarified language that separates it from the language of daily life. 

Poetry is everywhere, we just need to recognize it as such and say it, sing it, share it, and sometimes, even cry it out loud for everyone to hear.

This is what I learned with the poets in Salerno and to them I say:

Thank you
I love you
Amen

* Finger snapping at poetry readings began in the late 1950s in New York in the era of the Beat poets at the venue, The Gaslight. “The Gaslight was weird then because there were air shafts up to the apartments and the windows of the Gaslight would open into the air shafts, so when people would applaud, the neighbors would get disturbed and call the police. So then the audience couldn't applaud; they had to snap their fingers instead.” From Quora, an online community that answers all your burning questions about pretty much everything.

Happy Birthday, Ron Padgett [by David Lehman]

In 1968 I didn't really know you though
Dick Gallup, who sat next to me
in Kenneth Koch's "Modern Poetry"
class, invited me to a party and
there you were and I went to hear
you read and went through old
copies of Columbia Review to read
your poems (including the one
signed "the sloth sloth") and why
am I telling you this? Because it's
your day of the year, and you're a gem
as well as a Gemini twin, and I
would tip my fedora to you if
I were wearing one as men used
to say when men wore fedoras.

-- David Lehman (June 17, 2013)

We Grew Up to Be Poets [by Lisa Vihos - Day 3]

I am thinking back to Saturday, June 6, at the 100 Thousand Poets for Change World Conference in Salerno, Italy. We’d been talking all day about “Art and Activism” and then, “The Oral Tradition,” and then we had a three hour poetry reading. It was great, but also a bit grueling and we were all rather worn out. So what did we do? First we ate a delicious meal in the sanctuary, specially catered for us by a local osteria. Then, of course, we danced.

The band was Compagnia Daltrocanto. They play traditional Neopolitan music, which to my ear was a kind of Latin, Italian, Greek, Macedonian mash-up with some hints of Scottish (due to a wind instrument that sounded something like a bagpipe).  After a day filled with so many words, it was great to cut loose. There was a lot of sweating.

And then, “the young poets” announced that the midnight open mic would be done as a walking tour through the streets of Salerno, culminating down at the sea. It was late. I am old (ish). But I had to ask myself, how often in this life does a person get to walk down to the Tyrrhenian Sea and say poetry? With a bunch of other poets? I don’t care if I’m old (er). I would have to be pushing 90 to pass on an opportunity like that.

And so, I went. The poetry that night was intense and had an oratory nature. There were litanies, diatribes, and hip-hop rhymes. My poems are usually quiet and philosophical, and when you are out past midnight speaking poems in the streets of a foreign land, you want something a bit more, well, happening.

David Loret de Mola, Sacramento, CA, USA

Eriata Oribhabor, Lagos, Nigeria

Pilar R. Aranda, Milinalco, Mexico

Siobhan MacMahon, Dublin, Ireland

 

Abdelhadi Said, Rabat, Morocco

 

Canuto Roldan, Mexico City, Mexico

Angels of Salerno: Richard Paa Kofi Botchwey (Ghana), Zorro Maplestone (France), Emily Weitzman (USA)

 

In my purse, I was carrying a book of poems written by school children that I had gotten earlier that day from a new friend, Menka Shivdasani, who is the 100 Thousand Poets for Change coordinator in Mumbai, India. The Music of the Spheres is a compilation bringing together poems that children have written over several years in conjunction with the 100TPC festivities there. Here is one I read:

 

What’s This All About?

Solemn and sober, loving and calm
Tranquil and serene, two fingers of the palm,
White like a dove, sweet as love
Calm as ever, in today’s day, hard to remember.

I’m not part of your world,
I feel so left out!
All that lives in your world
Is war and noise, what is this all about?
Why don’t you be a little civilized?
Join hands and don’t fight,
Ghandhiji, Mandela, take something from them,
Hold up a white flag,
Be peaceful like them.
Truce, harmony, they’re different forms of me,
If you are any of them, you’re of a kind like me! 

Malvika Mehra
Bombay International School
Class – 5 

 

As Menka writes in the book’s forward, 

“The writing in this book represents the poets of tomorrow. Some of them, no doubt, will continue to write despite the responsibilities that they will face as grown-ups. They will hone their craft, trim the rough edges, and mature into serious writers. As they do this, hopefully they will remember the concerns they had as children, which prompted them to create the poems in this collection. 

“This is the generation that will build the world of the future. If we can sensitize them to issues that matter at an early age, then perhaps there is some hope that they will make this world a better place. As adults and teachers, it is our job to encourage young ones, but the truth is, in our strife-torn era there is a great deal that we can learn from them, too.”

There we were, a bunch of poets standing under the moon in Salerno. We had taken to the streets to share some poems. I was swept away by the thought that deep in our hearts, we really are all still children, looking to make life fun, carefree, and enjoyable. No matter how many years our bodies live on this earth, inside, we continue to need the same things that all children, all human beings, need: love, friendship, respect, expression, good food, music, dancing, understanding, attention, and laughter. Lots and lots of laughter. Let me close with another poem from a wise soul in Mumbai:

 

Me reading from The Music of the Spheres

Thinking of the World

I’m sitting here in India,
Thinking of the world,
The world I’m gonna grow up in,
The world I want to twirl. 

No World War I
No World War II
No World War III or after. 

Just peace and love,
And smiles and hugs,
And care of one another. 

Just peace and love,
And care and hugs,
And lots and lots of laughter!

Keya Bajaj, Bombay International School, Class – 4

Ti Volevo Dire [by Lisa Vihos - Day 2]

Ti volevo dire is a sign in the window of an unassuming storefront located in a tiny alley off a main cobblestone artery in Salerno, Italy. “Ti volevo dire” literally means, “I wanted to say to you.”

The eggshell-colored and slightly crumbling walls of this alley are covered in words written in black and red paint; poems by Salerno’s native son, the poet Alfonso Gatto (1909-1976). Gatto is recognized as one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20^th century, a practitioner of hermetic poetry, a form of obscure and difficult verse, in which the language and imagery are subjective, and where the suggestive power of the sound of words is as important as their meaning.

This storefront is the headquarters of the Fondazione Alfonso Gatto whose mission is to spread the work of Gatto by organizing cultural events like literary festivals, artistic interventions, writing workshops, and conferences like 100 Thousand Poets for Change. The foundation is committed to “the welfare of the region, in the belief that the use of expressive art can help to build more inclusive societies.”

Wow, I am all for that. In fact, since I am in between jobs right now, I think that maybe I need to start my own foundation for the working people of Wisconsin. My foundation will be dedicated to helping people recognize how much poetry and art is already present in their everyday lives. Lord knows, we need something around here to wake us up before it is too late. But, I digress.

When I posted the “Ti volevo dire” sign as my Facebook profile picture, Wisconsin poet and friend Tom Montag  commented, “Please, say it…”

And so, here I go:

Ti volevo dire: 
There is something comforting about a small corner market that sells local fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese, crackers, and salami. Who needs a “supermarket” with 30 kinds of potato chips and a wall full of toothpaste?

Ti volevo dire:
How pleasant it is to sit for a couple hours in a café and watch the world go by. 

Ti volevo dire:
Thank you for the self-serve espresso maker in the third floor conference room. Thank you for the daily dose of pastries.

Ti volevo dire:
Whatever you do, watch where you are stepping. And then, don’t ever use a potentially broken elevator.

Ti volevo dire:
Do not refer to the young poets and the old poets. There is no age where poetry is concerned.

Ti volevo dire:
In Italy, if you sit still long enough, someone will bring you a bowl of olives.

Ti volevo dire:
It was an honor to stand outside the house in which Alfonso Gatto lived and read one of his poems aloud. I honestly can’t remember which poem it was. Thus, I will end with this one translated by Philip Parisi and appearing in the book, The Wall Did Not Answer. 

 

Lazarus

Where are you running to, Lazarus, unscathed
where tree trunks amid rocks and bones
detained you through the parched land?
You're afraid of talking, afraid that your dark
spirit may speak.
In death you met your rest,
you could not awaken yourself.
Now you talk to the deaf wall,
you talk to the aged olive tree
and what you were you dare not think
nor who you will become by being.
Now you heed the disbelief that touches you
and tells you the truth
believing its own hands.
Incredible Lazarus, believed in
for what you will be tomorrow,
a bicyclist on the road.
Out of agony Jesus asked you
for the news you have about death.

Lazzaro

Dove fuggi, Lazzaro indenne
ove pedali tra pietre e ossa
per l'arida terra che ti tratenne?
Hai paura di parlare, paura che possa
parlare il tuo spirito oscuro.
Con la morte eri giunto al tuo riposo,
non poteva destarti.
Ora tu parli al muro
insensato, parli all'ulivo annoso
e qual eri no osi pensarti
e chi per essere sarai.
Ora attendi l'incredulo che tocchi
e che ti dica vero
credendo alle sue mani.
Incredibile Lazzaro creduto
per quel che sei domani,
un ciclista sul via.
Gesù ti chiese in conto d'agonia
notizie della morte che tu sai.

My friends, ti volevo dire, may you arise and greet the new day like Lazarus risen from the dead. May you find comfort in corner stores, in cafes, in sitting with your friends of any age, making manifest the dream of a world that is both just and peaceful, where everyone's place at the table is assured.

May you find a place as rich in poetry as Salerno, and may you make it your own.

 

 

"Panama Hat" [a poem by David Lehman]

                                            for Stacey

“What kind of poems do you write?”
she asked and I said occasional poems
each day is an occasion take today

The sun shone on my face
shielded by a Panama hat
made in Ecuador

and the fate of a leaf in a hurricane
was the day’s best simile for financial markets
where the value of green keeps going up.

The trees and the grass are vying
in the green competition
because “good is as visible as green”

and the lawns are emerald
like the eyes of my beloved
when she saw the ring with two hearts

and an emerald crescent
in the jeweler’s case.
The food tasted good

and simple: beans and rice, chicken,
coconut sorbet, white cherries, lemonade,
and Matthew’s concoction with Cynar and jalapeno-infused gin.

The ice cubes in the glass
sounded like nothing
but themselves.

The sky was blue
The shirt fit
I washed the car.

The newspaper reported
that Cambridge is catching up to Oxford
in real-estate prices

and my thousand words on “To His Coy Mistress”
were nicely illustrated
as I sat and sipped in the sun.

And then I read the new bio of Duke Ellington
and Helen Forrest’s own story
and tilted my hat as I walked

celebrating the day the occasion for
taking a walk enjoying the light
and my new Panama hat.

-- David Lehman

The poem appears in Jujubes

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/52508ca0e4b078f5507265fc/t/556d8f00e4b0d78223bf0089/1433243392043/JuJuBes+Magzter.pdf

Standing in the Gap [by Lisa Vihos]

                                    “You will come to understand only when you stand in the same gap with me.”
                                       —Richard Paa Kofi Botchwey, The Tale of an Orphan

Graffiti Bleu, Guilia Sensale, Pilar R. Aranda, and Youssef Alaoui stand in front of a poem by Alfonso Gatto painted on a wall in Salerno.

I begin this week of blogging high on the fuel that comes from spending a week with 80-plus dynamic and diverse poets from all over the world. We came together in the name of 100 Thousand Poets for Change (100TPC), a movement founded in 2011 in Guerneville, California by poets Michael Rothenberg and Terri Carrion. The purpose of 100TPC is to harness the power of poetry, music, and the arts to build community and create a more peaceful, just, and sustainable world. This gathering—our group’s first world conference—took place from June 3 to June 8 in Salerno, Italy, the birthplace of Italian poet, Alfonso Gatto. 

I begin this first post with the words of a new friend, a young man with an old soul, Richard Paa Kofi Botchwey from Accra, Ghana. His book,The Tale of an Orphan, has grabbed me by the heart. Orphaned at age five, Richard nonetheless found his way to obtain an education and to overcome loss and despair. His story chronicles the many challenges he has faced growing up into the writer that he is, and his positivity is contagious. Standing with him, standing with the others, I am able to see this world in which we live with newly evolving eyes. 

 

We came from Australia, Canada, The Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Ghana, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, India, Ireland, Kosovo, Lithuania, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, The Netherlands, Nigeria, and Serbia. American poets came from: Baltimore, MD, Calexico, CA, Chicago, IL, Claremont, CA, Columbia, MD, Decatur, GA, Ellicott City, MD, Guerneville, CA, Kansas City, MO, Larchmont, NY, Los Angeles, CA, New Orleans, LA, Princeton, NJ, Rochester, NY, Sacramento, CA, San Francisco, CA, San Luis Obispo, CA, St. Louis, MO, Venice, CA, Waco, TX. And yours truly from Sheboygan, WI. If I forgot anyone's point of origin, forgive me. Let me know and I'll correct the record.

In Salerno, our days were filled with round table discussions on The Poetics of the Feminine, The Oral Tradition, Art and Activism, Growing the Movement, and Building a Sustainable Community. Our nights were filled with scheduled readings, open mics, poetry in the streets, and of course music, dancing, great food, and lots of red wine and limoncello. There were intense large group conversations and quiet one-on-ones. As poet Graffiti Bleu of Sacramento, CA put it so well, “Beyond the midnight open mics, round table discussions, politics, guerilla street poetry, wine & song... there were conversations & exchanges of wisdom that meant more to me than anything else.”

 

Santa Sofia Church Complex, Salerno, Italy

I got back to the U.S. four days ago (I had an amazing power layover in Dublin and then decompressed for three days in Chicago) and I am still a bit jet-lagged, honestly. Last night was my first night home in my own bed. I slept soundly and dreamed the dream of one who is weary from the road. I am still absorbing all that transpired in the upper room of Santa Sofia and down in the cobblestone streets of the city.

In Salerno, I experienced poetry as spoken word, as the harbinger of change, as a call to protest and a call to community. All this will continue to wash over me for a long time to come. This week, as I search for a new "day job," I plan to mull over what I have recently learned at my "night job," my poet-job. I will make sense of these new threads woven into the fabric of my world, my writing, my “me.” 

I will stand in the gap with you between birth and death, between dream and waking, between past and future. I will stand in the gap with you and I promise I will have more to share with you tomorrow.                                                                                                                                                

Lisa Vihos, Guest Author June 15-19

This week we welcome back Lisa Vihos as our guest author. Lisa is a poet, blogger, and grant writer living in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Currently in a period of transition between jobs, she recently took a break from everyday reality to attend the inaugural 100 Thousand Poets for Change World Conference in Salerno, Italy where she was honored to hang out with poet-activists from all over the world, share poems in multiple languages, and envision how poetry can make the world a more just and peaceful place. Along with two chapbooks, A Brief History of Mail (Pebblebrook Press, 2011) and The Accidental Present (Finishing Line Press, 2012), her poems have appeared in Big Muddy, The Camel Saloon, Forge, Main Street Rag, Mom Egg, Red Fez, Seems, Verse Wisconsin and other journals and magazines. She is the poetry and arts editor for Stoneboat Literary Journal and is pleased to be back for her fourth gig at Best American Poetry online. Visit her blog at Frying the Onion.

Welcome back, Lisa. 

-- sdh