The Best American Poetry

Casting the Net [by Vincent Katz]

As this is my final post as guest author, I would like to cast my net and highlight some of the interesting books that have come across my desk in recent months:

Diane di Prima Revolutionary Letters (Last Gasp of San Francisco, 2007)

Forrest Gander, Eiko & Koma (New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #8, 2013)

Ferreira Guilar, Dirty Poem (New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #18, 2015), translated from the Portuguese by Leland Guyer

Mike DeCapite, Radiant Fog (Sparkle Street Books, 2013)

Thomas Devaney, Calamity Jane (Furniture Press Books, 2014)

Thomas Devaney, Runaway Goat Cart (Hanging Loose Press, 2015)

Elaine Equi, Sentences and Rain (Coffee House Press, 2015)

David Meltzer, No Eyes: Lester Young (Black Sparrow Press, 2000)

I have been getting more and more involved in the work of Diane di Prima of late. This summer I taught a course at Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program entitled “Theogonies: What Poets Do When They Write Gods.” We examined the role of theogonies in poetry, particularly epic poetry, beginning with Hesiod, looked at Plato’s objections to Hesiod and Homer, and then jumped to the 20^th century, where we studied how Charles Olson took epic and the idea of modern mythologies in a completely different direction. We took a careful look at di Prima’s work, in particular her Revolutionary Letters, which attains epic sweep in its role of speaking for the tribe, elucidating its beliefs, and stirring it to action. We also looked at her epic Loba, which embodies a shamanistic, feminist, animist, and animalist worldview.

While at AWP last spring, I picked up two pamphlets from the new New Directions series. At 85, Ferreira Guilar continues to be an important figure in contemporary Brazilian poetry. He started out an ally of Concrete Poets (Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari, among others), who were based in São Paulo. Guilar, who was living in Rio, branched off on his own path of neo-concretism, embracing the Communist Party after the military coup of 1964 and pursuing poetry of a humanist bent, while reveling in informality of style and language. Many Brazilian artists had to flee the dictatorship, and Guilar wrote his remarkable poem while in exile in Buenos Aires in 1975. In it, he attempts to return to the city of his youth and to re-create all he experienced then:

 

  

 

                        Or when

we wake up early and stay

                        in bed musing through

                        the early-morning process:

                        the first steps in the street

                                                            the first

                        sounds in the kitchen

                                                until from rooster to rooster

                        a nearby

                        rooster

                        erupts

                        (in the backyard)

                        and the tap of the laundry tub

                        opens to gush the morning

 

Forrest Gander’s contribution to the ND pamphlet series is a group of texts that work around the Japanese dance duo Eiko and Koma, who have been performing their spectacular, primal, work for over four decades now. Gander uses a constantly shifting poetic approach to come to terms with their timeless, yet highly physical, performances, in which they often perform completely naked in slow, writhing, movements that suddenly explode into new situations. In “Entanglement,” Gander writes:

 

            This as love story. His hand,

               his hand feeling for her.

Face, emphatically angular. Her in-bent

     arms spread like a cormorant’s.

   He wobbles toward her spasmodic,

               through invisible web…

 

Mike DeCapite writes in prose, yet I think of him as a poet, as he is constantly working through moods and situations, rather than in narratives per se. He is, on the other hand, not like William Burroughs, intentionally exploding narrative through the disruption of cut-up technique. Rather, DeCapite takes the reader on unexpected rides through unfamiliar (at least to most readers I would wager) places. In the Preface to Radiant Fog, he explains how he earned a nickname from a boxing coach in San Francisco, who had known guys in Brooklyn with names like Frankie Bats and Joey Braciol’:

Once, he said, “You’re always outside, sitting on a bench, out walking around, looking at the puddles, looking at the leaves. I’m gonna give you the name Mikey Outside.”

I said, “What, because I go for a walk? That’s so bizarre to you it earns me a nickname?

“Mikey Outside,” he said.

 And of course Outside has more than one meaning; perhaps the coach was something of a literary critic himself, as he divined the essential nature that makes DeCapite a poet.

As to the other poets on my list — Thomas Devaney, Elaine Equi, and David Meltzer — in their quite different ways, one could say they form a troika of the pinnacles of contemporary poetic practice.  Devaney’s Calamity Jane came into being as a libretto for performance artist Jeanine Oleson, and the book contains a cogent foreword by Brenda Coultas. One of the most fascinating aspects of the book, apart from the Western ambience that strangely, because of its dislocation, reminds me of Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger in places, is that the poems are in the voice of Jane, that is, Tom writing as Jane. As Coultas points out, Jane herself was gender-obscuring. And strangely, too, at times one begins to hear Tom through the voice of Jane:

 

Whatever I might look like, wherever

I might be — it wasn’t in my eyes,

it was the whole me — a burning nag

            with a heart. All mettle.

Never not wild.

 

Write that down.

 

Elaine Equi is our poet laureate, no matter what anyone says. She will be. She speaks for everyone, out of a particular space and language that is hers alone. How she does that will likely remain a mystery. At this point, her lines shimmer with the ecstasy of being right, every time. Not that you would know that from asking her. Her self-deprecating humor would never allow her to take the mantle. Fortunately, for us, it is already a given. Her newest book notches up that mastery. Her sense of history, as well as the immediate moment, is unerring. In “Zukofsky Revision,” she writes:

 

If I wish to convey this accurately,

I must choose not the exact right word,

 

but rather the right inexact word

that allows for a similar amount

of vagueness and ambiguity.

 

David Meltzer is uniquely positioned to craft a meditation on jazz legend Lester Young. A musician himself, who grew up amid the jazz worlds of New York and Los Angeles, Meltzer is also a poet of the most refined subtlety.  He is the ultimate outsider, who is simultaneously caretaker of a vast knowledge of alternative pathways, poetic, musical, spiritual. His book-length work, No Eyes: Lester Young, published in 2000, was based on a photograph taken during Young’s last year, when he was staying at the Arvin hotel and would look out the window to chart the activity of the clubs across the street:

 

clear moon slice

what a night for death

streetlight eye pain

beserk neons down Broadway

they stand in doorways coffins

deal & hustle it’s all good

& done & I’m still chorusing

naming not blaming

no retreat merely returning

Kudos to Tom Clark [by Vincent Katz]

Over the past 5 years, Tom Clark has been quietly publishing some of the best work of his life (which is saying a lot). I identify the following books of poems:

Feeling for the Ground (BlazeVOX, 2010)

Something in the Air (Shearsman, 2010)

At the Fair (BlazeVOX, 2010)

Canyonesque (BlazeVOX, 2011)

Distance (BlazeVOX, 2012)

The Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)

Evening Train (BlazeVOX, 2014)

There may be others. These seven books account for some six hundred plus pages of poetry that see Clark deeply investing his earliest poetics with a hard-hitting concision in the facture, combined with a wistful yet ultimately optimistic sense of observation. This observation can take place in the poet’s immediate neighborhood, the changing fabric of north Berkeley, where he lives with his wife, Angelica, or it can travel the universe, via Clark’s omnivorous reading and wide-ranging research. He uses his knowledge knowingly, that is, specific details are marshaled in the service of a deeper message, delivered with wit and sophistication.

There is much that is elegiac in the tone of these poems, but the emphasis on the mind thinking and the eloquence with which these tonalities are orchestrated add up to an experience that is terrifically energizing. The way Clark uses line-endings and continuations is unerringly precise. We know we are in the presence of a master. Here is an example, the poem “To a Certain Friend,” from Something in the Air:

 

 

Presence comes before everything, even before being

The you to whom everything once belonged

If by everything one means the fullness of nature’s beauty

You must remember now that much has been taken from you

Grief too will go from you as from sorrowing songs

Sorrow goes, leaving nothing for you after a while

But the memory of the melody, some old familiar tune

That’s lingered on long past the moment you first sailed

Gracefully into the room, as if all the modern languages

Were coming down to me so that I could say these things

 

Then there are poems that are haiku-like in their brevity, American takes on the immediate and the passing, such as “Fame” from At the Fair:

 

A hot dog paper blows across

the infield, passing into

shadows near third base.

 

Other poems register, in language that becomes surprisingly activated, a particular scene observed. One such poem is “Full Moon through Clouds” from Canyonesque:

 

Illuminating

the brief deep blue middle

of the night window

between the third

and fourth in a series

of cold Pacific storms

through an opening

in the flotilla of big

low rain saturated

city light pink underside

tinted clouds

a brilliant full moon

 

Some of Clark’s observations take place on the web, and those familiar with his blog Beyond the Pale can attest to his acuity in combining words with carefully researched images. Here’s one example, a poem embedded within a series of images, Clark’s usual posting technique. This time, the poem comes from painter Jim Dine:

Beyond the Pale

 And Clark himself adds a comment:

 “In case it doesn't totally go without saying, there are a lot of poems in this giant poem of Jim's, and a lot of meanings, Jim's, yours, mine — and he's open to all of them, of course.

Sometimes an incorrect educated guess is the only thing that will get you through the night.

Had stubbornly thought maybe somebody would get up the nerve to pip a squeak about the poem, think it's great, hate it, have a feeling, one way or another, as in — whatever, like, don't like, am confused by, but — dream on, old timer.

Pretty obvious that at least the hosts here (okay, boring old people, but we get to think things too, nothing so smart as the thoughts of the idiot young, but still) were impressed, honoured, grateful.

The psychogeographic mapping power, gestural energy and emotional drive of the thing, remarkable.

To entertain the weird idea that poems should mean or say anything at all about anything real, or have anything at all real buried within them, or should deserve and earn and receive actual serious attention, before being filed under whatever idle categorical predisposition, is, of itself, a sort of violation of the current way of things — too demanding, like. To be serious, to mean something, to admit to and attempt to honestly articulate strong feeling — total no-no's nowadays, ask any ambitious junior professor anywhere.

Just saying.”

Poem: Dante Lucked Out [by David Lehman]

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence, 1465. Photo from Wikipedia

T. S. Eliot held that Dante was lucky
to live in the Middle Ages
because life then was more logically organized
and society more coherent. The rest of us however
can’t be as sure that if we’d had the fortune
to walk along the Arno and look at the pretty girls
walking with their mothers in the fourteenth century,
then we, too, would have composed “La Vita Nuova”
and the “Divine Comedy.” It is on the contrary
far more likely that we, transported
to medieval Florence, would have died miserably
in a skirmish between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines
without the benefit of anesthesia
or would have been beaten, taunted,
cheated, and cursed as usurers
two centuries before the charging of interest
became an accepted part of Calvinist creed
and other reasons needed to be produced
to justify the persecution of the Jews.

David Lehman’s “New and Selected Poems” was published by Scribner in November 2013. 

from LA Jewish Journal, August 19, 2015

Trochaic Theory Favors Sanders, Fiorina, Rubio [by David Lehman]

(Ed note: Pundits have begun to ask David Lehman to apply his trochaic theory of predicting election outcomes to the current slate of candidates, both Democrat and Republican. He first described the theory on the BAP blog in 2008 when his analysis favored Barack Obama. (It also favored Obama in 2012.) Find more about his theory here. Lehman's now classic interviews on the subject are pasted below. sdh)

What do Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan have in common?

Yes, all were presidents. But so were Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Bush.

No, what the nine presidents mentioned have in common is that each of their names is a double trochee. That's right -- nine of the last 16 presidents scan their names to the tune of "Okla-homa." A trochee is the inverse of an iamb; in the former, there's a strong stress followed by a weak stress (e.g., "Harry").

Your chances of getting elected president go up if your name conforms to this pattern -- or if, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, your scansion is extraordinary and metrically favorable.

In the current electoral climate, the clearest winner is Bernie Sanders, whose name is a classic double trochee (even if you spell out his first name -- Bernard -- as long as you pronounce it as the British do, with the accent on the first syllable). Bobby Jindall would also score high but only if (1) he were a viable candidate and (2) you accept Bobby as a legitimate first name. The counter-example of Jimmy Carter will be offered, but it might be argued that his resort to a nickname instead of the proper "James Earl Carter" may help account for his failed presidency. Well, OK, how viable a candidate is Bernie? I don't know. I'm not really political.

Probably the most interesting candidate, from the point of view of metrical theory, is Carly Fiorina. Her name translates as a trochee followed by a dactyl and a trochee. It is similar to Franklin Roosevelt if you leave out the D (but you can't).

Marco Rubio has a trochee followed by a dactyl, also an interesting variant.

According to trochaic theory, Donald Trump's chances would improve considerably if he changed his name to Donald Trumpet.

The guys with one-syllable first names (Mike, Ted, Scott, Chris) have little chance. Rand Paul -- two spondees (two strong accents back to back) -- taps into the George Bush rhythm but without the obvious advantages that Jeb Bush has. But what is Jeb's real first name? And why has he dodged the issue?

If this is equivocal, well, it's early in the process. May we remind all that trochaic theory favored Barack Obama in both 2008 and 2012? -- DL

 

Tales of the Nineties: “Because We Matter Too Much in this World….” [by Alan Ziegler]

I dream I’ve taken Dulcinea, our dusky conure, outside to accompany me on my rounds as she does in the apartment, clasped to my shoulder, leaning this way and that. But the weather turns cold and rainy, and she starts shivering. I cradle her in my hands and hold her against my chest, transfusing my warmth, thinking of Tom Paxton’s “Rambling Boy”: “He got the chills and he got them bad/ I lost the only friend I had.” I take her to the vet who once told me that in a former life I was a bird. He spends a lot of time with Dulcie and says, “That’s all I can do. We’ll just have to see if she’s strong enough to come through this.” I ask the vet why the two of us are so wrapped up in saving this tiny creature, and he replies, “We matter too much in this world….” As I sob at his eloquence, I awaken dry-eyed but near tears, sure I will never forget what he said, if I can manage to write it down.

Monday, September 21: DL x 2 - David Lehman and Deborah Landau at KGB Bar

85 E 4th St New York, New York

7:30 PM - FREE

David Lehman is the author of many collections of poems, including New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), Yeshiva Boys (Scriber, 2011), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins, Soft Skull Press, 2005), and The Evening Sun (2002). Among his books of non-fiction are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Shocken Books, 2009) and The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a "Book to Remember 1999" by the New York Public Library. His newest work, Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, will be published on Oct. 27, 2015. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and is the series editor of The Best American Poetry. He is on the core faculty of the graduate writing program at the New School. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, NY.

Deborah Landau is the author The Last Usable Hour, a Lannan Literary Selection published by Copper Canyon Press, and Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. A third collection of poems, The Uses of the Body, is newly out from Copper Canyon. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, Poetry, The New Yorker, The Best American Erotic Poems, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. She teaches in and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

-- sdh

Granary Books at Columbia U. [by Vincent Katz]

Tonight I went up to Columbia for the opening of “The Book Undone: Thirty Years of Granary Books” at the Kempner Gallery Rare Book & Manuscript Library on the sixth floor of Butler Library. It is worth the trip! Curated by Sarah Arkebauer and Karla Nielsen, the exhibition includes about one third of the astounding 164 books Granary (proprietor, Steve Clay) has published since beginning operations in 1985. Some of the earliest Granary publications seemed to pick up from the tradition of Jonathan Williams’ Jargon Books, which got its start in the early 1950s at Black Mountain College, at the instigation of Charles Olson, who told Williams, “Don’t ever be intimidated by the disdain or the disinterest of the world. Get yourself some type, get yourself some paper, and print it.” This statement could serve as the motto for the Mimeo Revolution that flourished in the 1960s and ‘70s and was a mainstay for the dissemination of poetry that had small but passionate followings. In its early days, Granary published books by Williams, Fielding Dawson, and John Cage, all of them with BMC credentials. Granary is also devoted to the Mimeo Revolution itself, as anyone who saw the inspiring 1998 exhibition at the New York Public Library will remember. Clay and Rodney Phillips, a curator at the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, organized the exhibition, and they co-edited the accompanying book, published by Granary: A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, which documents many of the poetry zines of that era and the poets and artists who created them. This book should be required reading, and it probably is in the most advanced literature classes around the country and beyond.

 

As time went on, Granary’s interests expanded to include such artists and writers as (and this is only a selection!) (in roughly chronological order) Johanna Drucker, Buzz Spector, Susan Bee, Lewis Warsh, Jerome Rothenberg, Kimberly Lyons, Robert Creeley, Alex Katz, Charles Bernstein, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan, George Schneeman, Joe Elliot, Julie Harrison, Carolee Schneemann, Bernadette Mayer, Lyn Hejinian, Emilie Clark, Pierre Joris, Larry Fagin, Trevor Winkfield, William Corbett, Clark Coolidge, Keith Waldrop, Kenward Elmslie, Alison Knowles, Joe Brainard, Susan Howe, David Antin, Emily McVarish, Kenneth Goldsmith, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Simon Pettet, Duncan Hannah, Leslie Scalapino, Marina Adams, Anne Tardos, Ron Padgett, Maureen Owen, Yvonne Jacquette, John Yau, Archie Rand, Bob Perelman, Francie Shaw, Norma Cole, Alice Notley, Alan Halsey, Steve McCaffery, Marjorie Welish, James Siena, Jen Bervin, John Ashbery, Kiki Smith, Kathleen Fraser, Hermine Ford, Ceclia Vicuña, Edward Sanders, Raphael Rubinstein.

(Page from Johanna Drucker and Susan Bee's A Girl's Life, Granary Books, 2002)

Granary’s books are remarkable because each one is unique in design. Clay has a sixth sense for knowing which approach — whether trade edition or limited edition artist’s book — is appropriate for each outing, and he knows exactly how to achieve the end he and his collaborators have in mind. Often, these structures are teasing what can conceivably be considered a book, and yet they are all books. Above all, the central character is complicity. This is a tradition of people working outside the mainstream, banding together to make poetry books in exactly the form, size, and quantity they desire. The installation is exquisite. The three dimensional and tactile qualities are exposed for all to see, to examine, to admire, to enjoy, and to learn from. Take a trip to Columbia. Your senses will be energized.

William Matthews Surprises Even His Friends [by David Lehman]

It turns out that the late Bill Matthews (1942-1997), author of A Happy Childhood and other works of poetic excellence, had a side to him that not even his admirers suspected.

<<< 

President William Matthews sat where American presidents have always sat -- his back to the south wall of the room, facing northward across a wide antique desk toward the classical marble fireplace that dominates the north wall. His chair, unlike that of most of his predecessors, who had favored personalized, made-to-measure seating, was a factory-made, high-backed swivel chair of the kind any senior corporate executive might have. For “Bill” Matthews, as he insisted his publicity posters call him, had always through his successive and successful election campaigns stressed his ordinary, down-home personal tastes in clothing, food, and creature comforts. The chair, therefore, which could be seen by the scores of delegates he liked to welcome personally into the Oval Office, was not luxurious. The fine antique desk, he was at pains to point out, he had inherited, and it had become part of the precious tradition of the White House. That went down well. But there Bill Matthews drew the line.

When he was in conclave with his senior advisers, the “Bill” that his humblest constituent could call him to his face became the formal “Mr. President.” He also dropped the nice-guy tone of voice and the rumpled bird-doggrin that had originally gulled the voters

Into putting the boy-next-door into the White House. He was not the boy-next-door, and his advisers knew it; he was the man at the top

>>> 

See Frederick Forsyth, The Devil’s Alternative, for more details. -- DL

Experiments in Publishing/Escape Through Poetry [by Vincent Katz]

I am thinking about time, how it divides and separates. I have been attempting to locate myself in the present, and I think I am getting better at it, but it is hard work. The mind wants to slip back into the past, to glory over supposed triumphs and fret over past defeats — or to pump itself up over things it is looking forward to or cower over things it is apprehensive about. Yeah, you know the drill. But to be in the present, when one can achieve it, is a gift to oneself, and ultimately to everyone else as well. Meditation is a practice for this, and so is going to poetry readings.

 

I’ll always remember an early poem of Anne Waldman’s called “Things That Make Me Nervous” — and the entire poem reads “Poetry readings. / People. / Dope. / Things I really like.” Which, back in the day, all went together. I looked up the poem and found it in Waldman’s collection Baby Breakdown, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1970. It was in a period when major publishing houses thought it made sense to go with the zeitgeist and try publishing some far-out poetry, almost as though they were record companies, gambling that one of these books could be the Next Big Thing. Others in this class include Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire, published by Holt Rinehart and Winston in 1969, and Tom Clark’s Stones, pubished by Harper & Row, also in 1969. These were hardcover publications with dust jackets and very sharp design, seemingly because the decisions were left to the poets. Joe Brainard blanketed Padgett’s book with white stars on a royal blue jacket, cover and endpapers. His hand-lettering of the title and author’s name is exquisite. Clark’s book also has jacket design by Brainard, in this case a large piece of yellow swiss cheese on a black background with the author’s name on the vertical axis. Brainard also contributes a blurb, which begins, “Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and he always will be a poet. I don't know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don’t think anyone else does either…” Ted Berrigan’s “liner notes” for Waldman’s book are typically effusive. He starts out casually, “Anne Waldman is easily the most exciting poet of her generation, and Anne and her poems are among the great pleasures of everyone’s generation. Half the population of America is under 25, and Anne Waldman, at the age of 25, is a star. It seems she can do anything, and she has, and does …” Later, he adds something as true today as it was in 1970: “She has altered all our lives for the better simply by her presence, for she is no wielder of power, but simply a presence that permits everybody to be themselves and more often than not their best selves in the world…” He concludes, “This book is an ordinary miracle.” I love that Berrigan dated this blurb, printed on the book’s dustjacket folds, “May 18, 1970.” Baby Breakdown is really a far out book! The half-title and title page are hand-drawn by Waldman, and the inside of the book also features experimental typography and layout.

  

Tonight I heard two poets reading their poetry, Bobby Byrd, from El Paso, Texas, and Todd Colby, from Brooklyn, and they both, in very different ways brought me back into the sound of a human voice. That seems obvious, but it’s not. Too many times, at readings, there’s a different sense, an overriding thought, usually, of how is this going to come off, what’s my percentage in it, the calculation of a laugh, or a particular point of view that will give the poem, or more to the point, the poet, support. Poetry doesn’t work like that, nor do poets. First of all, it has to be about the poem, or the poetry, not the poet. Not that poets are not glamorous, fascinating, and fun to look at. And not to deny that they are the authors of their work. But there has to be a moment in the reading when you forget all about the poet, who they are, where they live, what they are wearing, who’s that sitting in the back row, and you are left floating, coasting on a wave of words that takes you to a place you simply could not have imagined before you came to the reading.

 

Proof that People Are Reading the Other 74 Poems

Harvard professor Stephen Burt (pictured left) has named his ten favorite poems from "The Best American Poetry 2015." Take a look here.

 

Is his list the same as yours? Let us know your picks in the comments field.

 

For Burt's favorites, click here:

http://bostonreview.net/blog/stephen-burt-sherman-alexie-best-american-poetry

Kudos for Victoria Kelly [by David Lehman]

Victoria Kelly has an impressive educational itinerary. She studied at Harvard, Iowa, Dublin. Her poems and stories have begun to appear in the best places. But what is unique about her is that, in addition to the subject matter that everyone has by virtue of being alive, she writes from a rare vantage point. Her husband is a US Navy fighter pilot who has been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this and related circumstances allow her to address all manner of things usually ignored in contemporary poetry.

Ms.Kelly has a flair for similes so good that they can enact a poem's closure, as when she brings to a close "Standing On the Airfield, Before War." She is speaking of a durable love that is "not dazzling / or eager or brave / like an old man before a party, / fixated on a tie, and his wife waiting / patiently in the kitchen, letting him decide." There is an entire domestic drama here unfolding in the minutiae of language -- an adverb ("patiently"), two participles ("waiting," "letting him"), and a pair of governing adjectives ("old," "fixated"). 

Ms. Kelly shows that ingenuity and deep feeling are not incompatible. In "Quantum Theory," for example, the focus is on a ribbon, "said to have been touched by a saint," that the speaker's mother received back when "masses were still said in Latin." Fifty years have gone by, and to counteract a sense of change and loss, the poet offers a vision based on a scientific premise -- that time is elastic, that "there are moments that go on forever," and that therefore "somewhere out there, / my mother is still being given that ribbon."   

Perhaps best of all is Ms. Kelly's ability to speak to and sometimes for a community to whom attention must be paid. Take the title poem. What happens "When the Men Go Off to War"? The change, the emotional upheaval, the knowledge that some of the men won't come home again, invites a retreat into fantasy: "the base has disappeared" and the wives "set up for a few weeks at a time / in places like Estonia or Laos -- / places where they still have legends, / where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night / is surprising but not unheard of." The poem concludes as happily as such a poem can, with "our matte of red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers," though "our husbands look at us a little sadly, / the way people do when they know / they have changed but don't wait to say it."

When the Men Go Off to War is a superb introduction to a poet we'll be hearing a lot from as time goes by.

-- David Lehman

Cynthia Macdonald (1928-2015) [by Moira Egan]

Cynthia Macdonald died last month at the age of 87. Typical for our Social Media Age, I found out about her death on Facebook. This sad news was often relayed with a comment along the lines of "I hadn't known her work, and it's blowing me away." Cynthia had published half a dozen searing and beautiful books and won many of the major prizes for poets; she wrote libretti, was an opera singer, and a psychoanalyst. Cynthia was one of the most formative and helpful people in my life, as I made my slow and complicated way back into being a poet.

Cynthia was my professor for two summers at Columbia University. I had to take the summer courses because I was working full-time at the Law School to get the tuition exemption so that I could pay for this extremely expensive degree. I couldn't skip out from work more than twice a week to take the requisite classes, almost all of which were held during the 9-5 work day. What was born of necessity soon became one of the most meaningful and useful experiences of my time in the MFA program. 

In those days, Cynthia was co-teaching the summer class with Richard Howard. With Richard's lexicographical, polyglot genius and Cynthia's wicked wit and brilliant way with metaphor, they were an utterly formidable team. Things I remember from the class: poems by Thomas James, in those now-famous, "samizdat" xeroxed copies; they came to mean a great deal to many of us. Words like susurrus, palp, and estrenar, which, though I rarely see or use them, take me back every time to those summers of intelligent immersion in the beauty of words. Cynthia's pronouncement that "writers who are subject to writer's block are usually adults who didn't play as children." That hit home. 

Another time, I don't remember why this happened, but I certainly remember that it happened: Cynthia, imitating the improbability of operatic deaths, let out a classically trained, high-something note that went on for what seemed like hours, and that shook the windows of our dingy little classroom in Dodge Hall. Someone had graffitied "DUCK DON'T" just above the "DODGE" that was emblazoned on the pillar of the old brick building that housed the School of the Arts. This was Dodge Hall before the coffee bar in the lobby, the Dodge hall whose wooden railings up the stairs had been known to inflict serious splinters in the hands of those foolhardy enough to grasp onto them during the ascent to the 4th floor Writing Division.

That second summer was the real font of memories. My father had died in February of that year. When Cynthia showed up again, so happy to be back in her natural habitat of New York City, she asked me how my previous school year had gone. "Well, my father died," I answered, first thing. She truly understood what a blow it had been, on so many levels. We talked about his life as a poet, about his frustrations and failures, and what I would then do with that. After a kind and in-depth conversation about my loss, we moved on to gossip and chat: about the rather notorious visiting prof we'd had ("That must have been very difficult for you," she'd said), and about the ever-changing cast of characters in the cosmic game of musical chairs that was the poetry department at that time.

That summer, for reasons I won't go into here, I had asked for an additional reader for my graduate thesis. Cynthia was the one who had drawn the short straw. "Moira," she said to me after a week or so, "I come here in the summer to teach and to be in New York, not to read somebody's thesis, and when I was told I was going to be a reader for your thesis, let me tell you, I wasn't very happy." Pause. "But, after all that, I'm really enjoying it!" 

I will always be grateful to her for having understood my over-the-top metaphors and fast-and-loose use of form. Her thesis evaluation was so eloquent and lovely that part of it formed the basis of the blurb she wrote when, years later, my first book was published. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To borrow the title of her last full-length collection, "I can't remember" the extent to which we kept in touch during those in-between years, but I know that we did. In the summer of 1998, I was getting ready to leave for a teaching job in Greece. Cynthia was in New York, and so was I, packing up my life and figuring out how I was going to do this monumental thing: move to a country I'd never even visited, where I knew not one soul. And Modern Greek? How would I communicate?

I do remember that she and I arranged to meet at a restaurant on the Upper West Side. We ordered cold white wine and fried calamari, and we talked and gossiped like old friends. She asked what my various classmates were up to. She told me about the challenges and joys of her psychoanalytic practice. She told me how much she missed the beau she'd been with for a few years, with whom she'd recently had a break. I won't say here exactly what she told me, because it was rather personal, but it was poignant and sweet. I told her of my excitement about going to Greece, and my fears about not speaking the language. "Well, you know your etymologies," she said, encouragingly. She insisted on picking up the check. 

We hugged good-bye, and that was the last time I saw her. 

And that's how I'll remember Cynthia: generous to a fault, smart beyond all reckoning, a veritable force of nature. If you aren't familiar with her work, please do seek some out, and be prepared to be astonished and maybe even a little bit frightened by just what a metaphor can do.  

Rest in peace, Cynthia. You are much missed. 

[photo of Cynthia Macdonald by Gay Block, from the Folger Library]

 

 

 

These Days We Measure By [by Vincent Katz]

I am excited to be starting a new season, Fall, my favorite season. It is said that every poet has a favorite month. October was Jack Kerouac’s. For me, it is the season. Even though a friend once said, “Spring is my favorite season, except for Summer,” for me Fall is the season that is filled with new beginnings and renewed buoyancy. It is the season in which classes start again and people migrate back to the city from the country. It is the season of cold evenings and Friday night plans. I actually like the days getting dark earlier and the rhythm of the leaves falling, a dance that will finally end when all the leaves are down, and the trees go to sleep for the winter.

It is also Rosh Hashanah. I feel a resonance with the energies that have to do with understanding among peoples, repentance, and taking responsibility for one’s actions. As described in Wikipedia, today should be, literally, “a day of shouting or raising a noise” or, and this I like even better, a Feast of Trumpets. In addition it cites, “three important stages as the spiritual order of the Ten Days of Repentance (the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) unfolds: On Rosh Hashanah Jewish tradition maintains that God opens the books of judgment of creation and all mankind starting from each individual person, so that what is decreed is first written in those books, hence the emphasis on the ‘ketivah’ (‘writing’). The judgment is then pending and prayers and repentance are required. Then on Yom Kippur, the judgment is ‘sealed’ or confirmed (i.e. by the Heavenly Court), hence the emphasis is on the word ‘chatimah’ (‘sealed’). But the Heavenly verdict is still not final because there is still an additional hope that until Sukkot concludes God will deliver a final, merciful judgment, hence the use of ‘gmar’ (‘end’) that is ‘tov’ (‘good’).” In my own interpretation, I take this to mean that the writing that we, as poets, do must be held accountable to the highest judgment and that it must contain within it, not necessarily expressed literally or rationally, our most profound beliefs. Again, in my own interpretation, I take this whole period to mean that, through self-reflection, we must make every attempt to be not simply tolerant but actually open to others, particularly those whose opinions and beliefs may be most alien to us.

And that thought reminds me of someone who embodied those principles. Born the daughter of a rabbi in Kiel, Germany, she immigrated to New York City at the age of three and lived an exemplary life devoted to the arts and freedom of expression and thought. She once told me it was important to engage those on the opposite end of the political spectrum; otherwise, we would never have a chance of convincing them. No one could accuse her, however, of compromising. Her adult life and art practice were devoted to the core principles of Anarchism. I am speaking of Judith Malina, one of the great heroes of contemporary theater and poetry presentation and a remarkable poet herself, whom we lost this year. Judith, first with her husband, Julian Beck, and later with partner Hanon Reznikov, and most recently with Brad Burgess, founded and fired The Living Theatre, legendary not only for its social activism, street theater, audience participation, and full nudity, but also for its productions of poet’s theater, including a 1952 production of John Ashbery’s The Heroes and later productions of plays by Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, as well as for the poetry readings it hosted by such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, Gregory Corso, and Ray Bremser, not to mention Charles Mingus with Kenneth Patchen. In the rare Homage To Frank O’Hara (Big Sky 11/12), on page 71, one can find reproduced two photographs of O’Hara. In the first, he sits at a simple wooden table, with a jug of water, reading from a sheaf of papers at a benefit reading for Yugen magaine. In the second, he stands in front of two paintings installed for a reading of writers from Daisy Aldan’s Folder magazine. Both readings took place at the Living Theatre in 1959.

So with that, I begin — the week, the season, and the continual renewal each of us must undertake if we are to aspire to being human in the deepest sense of the word. And make no mistake, poetry is at the core of that effort — for all of us.

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

 

Vincent Katz, Guest Author September 14-18

Vincent Katz with Alain Kirili's Sculpture (c) Ariane Lopez-Huici

This week we welcome Vincent Katz as our guest author. Vincent is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Swimming Home (Nightboat, 2015). He edited and wrote the introduction to Poems to Work On: The Collected Poems of Jim Dine (Cuneiform, 2015). Katz is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT, 2002; reprinted 2013) and the author of The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton, 2004), winner of the 2005 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He lives in New York City, where he curates Readings in Contemporary Poetry at Dia Art Foundation. You can follow him on twitter @SextusVKatz.  Find out more about Vincent Katz at his website here. 

Welcome, Vincent.

In other news . . . 

David Lehman and Sherman Alexie to host The Best American Poetry 2015 Launch Reading at The New School

Thursday, September 24, 2015 at 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm 
The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street, 
Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall
66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011

-- sdh

Michael Roth on "the end of higher ed as we know it"

Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan Universities, writes frequently on the fate of higher education, with particular attention to the changes wrought the technological revolution.

From a recent piece in The Atlantic:

<<<

Given the drumbeat of doomsday declarations about higher education in recent years, it might be tempting to dismiss The End of College as part of the pile-on by would-be disrupters. But that would be mistake. While Kevin Carey, a Washington education-policy analyst at the New America Foundation, may have swallowed too much of the disruption Kool-Aid, his call for more accessible student-centered universities is a powerful response to some of the real problems that beset these institutions today.

In 2008, Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, along with Michael Horn, published Disrupting Class, an account of how “radical innovation” would change K-12 education systems. In 2011, Christensen and Henry J. Eyring came out with The Innovative University, which explored how higher ed would have to respond to the pressures of technological change—if it were to survive at all. Christensen’s publications have been followed by a wave of books, articles, op-eds, and films pronouncing the imminent demise of higher ed as the country knows it.

>>>

Read more here on such subjects as MOOCS, the transformation of universities into rites of-passage country clubs rather than houses of learning, the value now placed on the "gospel of disruption," the so-called "hybrid university" in which research and teaching are inextricably linked, and whether traditional learning of traditional disciplines is still possible -- and on what terms.

For what is found there [by Julia Shipley]

In graduate school, my professor assigned us the task of reading the newspaper and responding to something found there, an assignment I found maddeningly difficult, but appreciable for its exercise of palpating that place between the personal and public, the unbright line between the intimate and civic. Then in my the final semester, in the fall of 2001, as I was cobbling together my thesis in a refurbished horse stall--a quiet place, two miles from my attic apartment above a busy doctor’s office, an event occurred of such magnitude, that its ashes continue rain down into everything I’ve read or written since.

I may have been one of the last people to learn of the World Trade Center attacks because in the horse stall, I was alone save for the sound of skittering in the walls.The office didn't have a proper bathroom so when I drove back to town to for lunch, a store cashier began to narrate all the unfathomable events, one by one, in sentence form, so that her words struck my mind once, and then again, then her words collapsed one certainty, and then another. What I also remember was, at the end of that day, Galway Kinnell read his poems at the Galaxy Book Shop.  

In the years following graduation, I fumbled forward in search of that lucky intersection of life and art. I was working in dairy barns and flower fields, in food service and eldercare, in tutoring and teaching, ever-scanning the want ads of the local paper in search of something else, something more.

In 2005 I landed a dream job as a writing instructor at a small college, where I was obliged to offer a course called “Writing and Speaking to the Issues,” wherein I coaxed students to find the nexus between their interests and the world around them. As we spent class after class steeped in source material and case studies and persuasive arguments, I longed to include another form of expression. Perhaps as an outlet, or as the culmination of wanting to unite verse with the age-old forum of public discourse, I pitched a monthly poetry column to my local newspaper, the Chronicle. 

What if the men who died miserably for lack of what is found there, (as goes Williams Carlos Williams oft quoted ‘Asphodel That Greeny Flower’) could be saved instead, or perhaps die less miserably for having found a poem by a Vermont author like Julia Alvarez, Major Jackson or Ruth Stone in newsprint? For five years I conducted this news + poems experiment, introducing a poem pertaining to season and place by a Vermont writer, and by the end, I’d found if I’d saved anyone, it was only myself, as I veered my back toward newspaper work, this time entering by front door, to write about issues affecting neighbors and friends, to find myself daily treading that tricky place where the personal and public mingle. I’ve got printer’s ink on my hands, again. 

From the archive: 9/11/2008 (by Stacey Harwood)

My office is in a building adjacent to Ground Zero.  The ceremonies are about to begin. The ramp at the far end of the pit is lined with flags of the victims' homelands. Otherwise, there isn't much to see.  A few more tourists than usual, and overnight, employees in one of the office buildings managed to drape an "Obama for President" banner across two floors.

-- sdh

September 11 [by Lera Auerbach]

September 11th     

Can you breathe this air,
this thickening air?

The ashes of people are in our nostrils.

Can you hear this silence?
this screaming silence?

The ashes of people are in our throats.

Can you see this city,
through the cloud of dust:
primordial particles,
hieroglyphs of destruction?

The ashes of people are in our eyes.

No bodies were found.
The hospitals remained empty
with doctors and nurses
waiting for patients. 

No bodies.

The ashes of people are in our blood.
This silent cry has no answer.
The ashes of people are in our guts.
We will never be the same.

The dead grow their roots in our hearts.

                                     - by Lera  Auerbach 

On Local Rows [by Julia Shipley]

Over a decade ago, I moved to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom, an area composed of three sparsely populated counties in the topmost rightside portion of this long skinny state. I lived alone. I went to work and drove home on lonesome dirt roads passing more woods and fields than houses. I wondered who my neighbors were. So, I subscribed to the local paper, The Barton Chronicle, and little by little, week after week, I boned up on the characters and issues of this interesting outpost. As time went on and I met actual people--those whose letters to the editor I’d read, and those who’d episodes had merited brief mentions in the court report. Then I started to become curious about the people behind the news. Not just the school boards and town selectmen, the politicians and athletes, the alleged burglars and billionaire developers, I was curious about the people who were doggedly going out, asking questions and issuing their findings in the paper itself. Once, after inviting a local reporter to come speak to my college freshman about writing, she reciprocated, inviting me to come visit the Chronicle’s office where I met a handful of good-natured, middle-aged people in a basement room people all staring at computer screens at their individual but unanimously chaotic desks.

The Chronicle is almost as old as I am. The original plates from the first issue are screwed to the wall in a far corner of the office known as the mailing room: March 28, 1974. “Whatever happened to Spring?” reads the caption under a photograph from the front page of the papers debut.

Started by Chris and Ellen Braithwaite, a husband and wife team, quasi-back- to- the-landers who relocated from California and Canada to ensconce themselves in the Kingdom at a farm called Entropy Acres, The Chronicle was born in large part out of the hopeful idea, (akin to build it and they will come) print it and they will read.

They did, and forty years later, Reader, they still do. I just picked up this week’s edition: Brownington needs a new road foreman; Lake Region’s well is going dry; Sidelined rail cars worry neighbors.

Back when I interviewed Chris Braithwaite on the occasion of the paper’s 35^th birthday, he described the essential paradox of what makes a local newspaper necessary and at times exceedingly difficult to produce. “News stories aren’t necessarily easy stories,” he told me, “because they are about or involve friends…People aren’t just subjects. And that is perhaps one of the major differences between community journalism and ‘the Biggies.’”

A few years late I pressed Mr. Braithwaite again on the dividing line between reporter and reported, between informer and advocate. I emailed him in November 2009 to ask: How do you train in objectivity? You must have an opinion on some of the things you report because some of these things will affect you?

Braithwaite replied tersely (but gamely) the next day with, “Proposed experiment: Read the page 1 story about the proposed Lowell wind turbines (Wind friends, foes focus on Lowell Mt. by Chris Braithwaite November 4, 2009,) then decide whether the Chronicle favors or opposes wind power in general. Then read the editorial. Did you get it right?”

I got it wrong.

He continued, “The reporter’s job is to understand the interests involved and lay them out coherently, like a good sports writer advancing a world series game. You can’t do that well if you let your misguided affection for the Yankees color your assessment…so you learn not to.”

The Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, he too lived and wrote from pastoral precincts not unlike the Northeast Kingdom. He too heard the news, and noted his neighbors fissuring over issues. In his case, it wasn’t the same sex marriages and the mountain top turbines, but passionate property squabbles. In his poem ‘Epic’ he writes, “I have lived in important places, times/When great events were decided, who owned/That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land/Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims…”

And I love, I treasure his conclusion: contemplating the significance of local matters in light of the larger world’s stories, he’s tempted to dismiss the provincial fuss,

Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.