The Best American Poetry

Announcing New Series: "Creativity Rules" by Amy Lemmon

We're pleased to announce a new series, "Creativity Rules" by Amy Lemmon. Amy is the author of the poetry collections Fine Motor (Sow’s Ear, 2008) and Saint Nobody (Red Hen, 2009) and co-author, with Denise Duhamel, of ABBA: The Poems (Coconut, 2010) and Enjoy Hot or Iced (Slapering Hol, 2011). Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2013, Rolling Stone, Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Barrow Street, and elsewhere. Amy is Professor and Acting Chairperson of English & Speech at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Amy's series, "Creativity Rules" will appear here on Fridays.  

Welcome, Amy.

-- sdh

Blog Exclusive: Images from Bill Hayward’s Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs. [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

From Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs by Bill Hayward, © 2015, published by Glitterati Incorporated

Bill probably doesn’t remember, but we first met in the late ‘90s at a party in someone’s posh Upper West Side apartment. I don't remember whom the party was for but I do remember feeling a bit lost; I had recently moved to New York City from a small town in upstate New York and I didn’t know anyone at the party other than David Lehman. Somehow Bill and I struck up a conversation. I knew who he was—David had told me about him—but I knew nothing other than that he was a gifted photographer. During the course of our conversation he described his “Portraits of the Collaborative Self” project and told me that he was about to embark on a cross-country trip to take photographs. The fruits of the trip and of many other encounters are included in Act 3.

Here’s how it works: Bill meets with his subject and over the course of a session, some lasting several hours, they talk. At a certain point they’ll detect an emotional spark—a subject, a feeling—that has weight and meaning. The subject will begin to “play,” creating a backdrop using the raw material of a white roll of paper, black paint and a paintbrush. Most of the photographs show the subject in a studio but others were taken in a field, or in a desolate urban center. All are black and white. Unlike Act 2, the subject is clear; there are no grainy background or distortions. The magic is in what the play has yielded. Here’s Willem Defoe before a deKooning-esque painting of a large breasted woman. A mournful firefighter holds a scroll on which he’s written a list of names. One assumes these are the brother-firefighters who died on September 11. Trevor Winkfied stands before a paper filled with glyph-like shapes. Many of the subjects are artists, others are unknown (to me). You wonder what got them to the moment that is captured in the photograph. They’re provocative, humorous, whimsical.

The image above is from subsection entitled “Seventeen Bedrooms: A Spaghetti Western,” a collaboration between Bill and the visual artist Joanne Boldinger. In each image, Boldinger stands before a painting of a bedroom. No two are alike. In some, the bed is the focal point, it others it is a mere slice, glimpsed behind a distant door. Is there a room more charged with emotion than the bedroom?

Poetry in Transylvania - Sightseeing [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(Ed note: This is th final post in a four-part series about the Transylvania Poetry Festival. You can find yesterday's post here.

The Party’s (Almost) Over

But Transylvania wasn’t quite done with me. The next day, keeping their promise, Radu and Dragos took Tara and me to Targu Jiu to see the great Brancusi war memorial—a four-hour drive on some badly paved roads through some breathtaking mountain scenery. Radu and Dragos kept us in stitches. These old friends and colleagues, serious poet and critical thinker, turned into Click and Clack, the hilarious Magliozzi brothers on National Public Radio’s Car Talk. The jokes—few of them polite—never let up. Whatever tensions they must have felt running the festival dissolved into continuous gales of laughter.

Radu was particularly knowledgeable about Brancusi. We started at the Endless Column, the tower from which the souls of the dead soldiers ascend to heaven.

It was drizzling, but somehow the overcast weather seemed appropriate. Then we drove for about a mile to the other end of town, where the axis of the complex monument actually begins, at the River Jiu, in a park, with Table of Silence, where the slain victims rest:

The dead souls then follow the path through the park to the Gate of the Kiss, where they bid farewell to their loved ones on earth:

This is one of the greatest and most moving modern public monuments in the Western world. No wonder Radu was determined that we see it.

The next day, the rain was heavier, but since the art museum was closed, Radu took us to an extraordinary park in a forest just outside Sibiu: the ASTRA Museum of Folkloric Traditional Civilization. Stretched out over ten kilometers, it’s a series of actual medieval houses (some with thatched or grass roofs), churches, farms, and other workplaces—mills, stables, smithies—from rural Romanian villages, all rebuilt on this site—the largest park of its kind in the world.

 

The ASTRA Museum was not without its own sense of humor. Here’s rain-soaked Tara poking her head through a cut-out intended for photo ops.

After the festival, Tara moved into the more central hotel before her Fulbright took her to the city of Brasov to teach. That evening, we had an elegant, quiet dinner together at Kulinarium, a restaurant in the small square noted for its use of local ingredients. Next morning, at 4:00 AM, Tara came down to the lobby to wish me a safe journey, bringing bags of potato chips for me to nibble in the airport. Soon Radu and Dragos arrived to pick me up, with hugs and smiles, and return me to the world of airports, long flights (and longer layovers), to face a week of neglected deadlines and to tire my friends with stories about Romania: about good poets and good poems and new friends—and how eager I am to go back.

-- Lloyd Schwartz

Blog Exclusive: Introducing Bill Hayward's "Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs" Act 2 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I’ll just put this out there: I cannot stop reading Bill Hayward's Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs! It is my "Archaic Torso of Apollo." If I’m not looking at it, it’s looking at me. There is no hiding. When I close the book, it glows from within. Seriously. And I’m only at Act 2, which is where Bill really starts shaking things up.

He introduces Act 2 with a few paragraphs to explain his move away from traditional portraiture and toward experimentation. Traditional portraiture is somewhat exciting and interesting, “but in the final analysis, not lastingly fulfilling.” He documents his transition from formal to abstraction or, as he puts it “I commenced 'bushwhacking' in the darkroom (this is way before digital) and experimenting with print, paint, paper and scissors and following real 'brush strokes' of accident—disrupting what I knew of visual technique and tradition.” Think draftsman turned painter; they well know what they’re rejecting and they’re impelled to take the risk. 

Bill continues to observe and admire dancers both in photographs and paintings. He photographs them from every angle and while both still and in motion, nude or partially draped. The nudes in particular are gorgeous, with their long and muscular bodies. Bill captures them uninhibited in their nakedness, as if when set free from the artifice of costume, they can most fully express themselves.

The images below are from the second and eighth sub-sections of Act 2. They illustrate the artist’s progression as he turns away from tradition and toward disruption. We’re not in Kansas anymore, or Vogue.

From Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs by Bill Hayward, © 2015, published by Glitterati Incorporated

From Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs by Bill Hayward, © 2015, published by Glitterati Incorporated

Poetry in Transylvania Day 3 [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(Ed note: This is Part III in a four-part series about the Transylvania Poetry Festival. You can find yesterday's post here.)

Next day, I passed up Vlad’s talk (in Romanian) about his magazine and did a little more sightseeing with Tara. In the center of town, we passed seven formal weddings entourages (one near the picturesque Liar’s Bridge), and stopped at a little charcuterie for some slices of real Romanian pastrami. Then Tara took me up to the old clock tower for a look at the city from above:

That evening, Habitus would be the site of the last reading, and “The Crypt” looked particularly sparkling, and the translations would be projected onto a good movie screen. I was going to be the last reader—a position I didn’t take lightly. And the readers preceding me were all stellar. Hearing Anna Hallberg’s emphatically guttural Swedish added a savage auditory dimension to her poems. Several younger women poets immediately won me over. Orsolya Fenyvesi seemed a little nervous but I found her poems both touching and powerful. I especially liked “Der Hölle Rache,” which gives Mozart’s Queen of the Night a strong and personal new voice. Given Adela Greceanu’s shy and modest demeanor, you’d never know that she was a prize winning poet, novelist, and radio journalist. I loved the new and (I assume) semi-autobiographical poems she was reading about a girl named Adila. “The Provincial” begins “I lack any talent for being a woman.”

I’m sorry I didn’t really get to talk to the Romanian poet and Ginsberg translator Domnica Drumea; I especially admired her poem “Snow” (“the sun like an incision on the winter sky… I am a field of dirty snow”).The long family poem by 27-year-old Marius Conkan, the youngest poet in the festival, had a touch of Ginsberg too (“Dad used to bring home miners who were put to bed by his side, / he said they were his guardian angels”). The Moldovan poet Alexandru Vakulovski made his literary debut in 2002 publishing not only a book of poems, but also a novel, and a collection of plays. He’s wildly talented but I’m not sure he’s found the ideal English translators.

The Turkish poet, architect, and Hikmet scholar Efe Duyan was one of the most exciting poets at the festival—his poems were comic (“Russtylove” begins “I call you honeyovsky / didn’t we learn to love from Russian novels”) and tragic (sometimes both at once), ferociously personal and ferociously political. I was riveted, from the inventive “Call Centre”:

hello
for the day you met school friends for the first time
please dial your lucky number
for the times you ran tirelessly around the playground
press all the numbers at random
for the steamed-up windows of greasy spoons
dial the year of the last family summer holiday

everybody has times they're ashamed of
do not tell the numbers you pick for these to anyone
for the tea and poğaça breakfasts you had on the university lawn
put the receiver down and go out onto the balcony
if you wish to complain about time flying furiously past
please press down hard on the button
if you realise that you don't remember your granddad exactly as he was
look in the mirror

for the smell of dusty books in second-hand bookstores
say the third letter of an illiterate labourer’s name
for your neighbourhood tailor who was found dead in rags
please hold
for that unpredictable moment
that you touched the neck of a woman in your sleep,
dial the same number over and over again
after the beep

the day after the break-up
write in your notebook one hundred times
'I am never going to fall in love again'

beeep

to the extraordinary “Looking at the Newspaper Clippings,” which ends:

…destroyed some police cars, AP (Party of Justice) buildings, signboards of the Tercüman Newspaper. In the course of two days,

        those fateful days when everybody found another self within

more than one hundred and fifty thousand workers from 168 working place have participated in the demonstrations. Finally,

        three apples fell from heaven
        one apple agreed with those who went home and closed the shutters
        one sympathised with those who saw things through, with or without regrets
        the third discovered the beauty of rebellion

on June 17, martial rule was declared by the Government. Although the way had been paved for the 1971 military coup, the law amendment to the law that had triggered the demonstrations was cancelled.

        although this vivid cortege did not last forever
        a watch broken on this day
        still tells the same time

Efe was also a dynamic reader. In fact, when he chose to read without a microphone, I was relieved, because I didn’t know how I was going to hold my poems and a microphone at the same time and I would have been too timid to break the precedent. Efe wasn’t.

Then it was my turn. It occurred to me that no one had really publicly thanked Radu and Dragos and Vlad and Catalina and everyone who had done such a masterful job putting this festival together. So I did, and it was as if all the poets and the entire audience were waiting for just that opportunity. Applause erupted, and with the greatest enthusiasm.

Then I read—eight poems I hoped would be appropriate to the occasion: poems about writing, about my mother, about my unknown Romanian grandmother (how could I not read this one?), about love, about travel, and about language. 

Soon my fifteen minutes in the spotlight and the entire festival were over. Then we took some group photos:

and retired to Café Frieda for one last raucous dinner together: soup and schnitzel and delicious crepes stuffed with strawberry jam.

‘I Haven’t Broken Any Law’: Deborah Landau talks to Mark Bibbins [by Sam O'Hana]

‘I Haven’t Broken Any Law’: Deborah Landau talks to Mark Bibbins
New School Poetry Forum, October 7, 2015

The room was filled before she walked in. After Mark Bibbins’s introduction, Deborah Landau read from her latest collection The Uses of the Body, her third book from Copper Canyon Press. Landau, who leads the creative writing program at NYU, began by discussing how the daily occurrence of weddings outside her window in a Paris apartment led her to take on the subjects of love, connection and the passage of time. One of her sections is titled Mr and Mrs End of Suffering.

“The uses of the body are manifold,” Landau tells us, bringing the audience into a space concerned with enunciation, the erotic, and daily life. We’re not given photographic fidelity, but the edges of a detail pinned down from memory. These poems are not tapestries of image, or strings of associations, but the important shreds of a larger speech, as if the most important extracts of an historic confession had been corralled together in verse.

Landau’s poetry in these moments is not politics, and it is not dogmatic. “Let the long shadows gather in the hall,” she tells us, invoking a stance that could have come from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space -- a clear occupation with how humans see space, light and structure. We are the observers of a visual development, with no concern for the prerequisites or consequences. Speech acts like this rise without discernible origin as though a voice, coming out of the darkness of anonymity, possessed an uncanny personality despite its stark abstraction: “July. Disquiet. The trees.”

When Landau is more direct, there is humor and challenge in competing strength. “Men look at me like they have the thing I want,” is the fulcrum in a collection where the balance of sex and proximity is figured initially from afar. Here is a timely and effective contestation of the male gaze. However, closeness arises when the discussion turns to the family, “Pacing the halls at night / with him asleep on me.” Throughout the collection, and the reading, we hear from a speaker whose roles in daily life flicker between an intimate interior of, say, periodic caregiving, and a luxuriating, effervescent exterior: “Bellinis, cradles, carousels”.

A conception of femininity is less based on a gender binary, as a concerto of experiences makes up the body of the work: “Tomatoes. Keats. Meeting a smart man for a drink”. Writers on the body, Hélène Cixous and Michel Foucault for example, made up the focus of her PhD, and this influence is clear in her work today, though she also refers to Anglophone literary figures, John Berryman, Jean Rhys and James Joyce as ongoing inspirations.

The theme of the body also has roots for Landau in real life. An unexpected pregnancy and the challenge of growing into adulthood are ever-present themes. Crises, and other major life-events are met head on by a writer with a judicious commitment to “loving the pleasures and fearing the inevitable losses”.

-- Sam O’Hana

Tom Meschery, The Most Interesting Man [by Alan Ziegler]

    You know those commercials featuring “the most interesting man in the world?” Tom Meschery should have gotten the gig.

    Bio Note #1: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He received an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where his teachers included Mark Strand, Marvin Bell, and Helen Chasin. After Iowa, Tom ran a bookstore, taught for Poets in the Schools, and did physical labor before receiving his teaching credentials. He joined the faculty of Reno High School, where he taught Advanced Placement English and creative writing for 25 years; he also taught at Sierra College. Tom is the author of several books of poetry, including Nothing We Lose Can Be Replaced, Some Men, and Sweat: New and Selected Poems About Sports; he has also published the nonfiction Caught in the Pivot. In 2001 he was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

    Bio Note #2: Tom Meschery was born in Manchuria and spent five childhood years in a Japanese internment camp. He was an All-American basketball player in high school and college, and an NBA All Star. He played ten years, mostly for The Warriors (first in Philadelphia and then in San Francisco) and later for the Seattle Supersonics, appearing in two NBA Finals. His #31 has been retired by Saint Mary’s College (where his career rebounding record stood for 48 years), as has his #14 by the Warriors. Tom coached the Carolina Cougars and was the assistant coach for the Portland Trailblazers. In 2003 he was inducted into the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame.

    I’ve been fascinated by Tom Meschery since I heard about a former NBA star, whose name was often prefixed with “hard-nosed,” turning from personal fouls to personal poems. I started a list of “athletes who write poetry” for use with reluctant students when I toured high schools. Not long after my father died in 2001, I was moved and impressed by Tom’s poem “Working Man," in which he addresses his late father (more about this later). Over the years, I have read the poem to several of my Columbia classes, and one day a student said: “He was my high school English teacher!” Interesting.

    Recently, I talked to Tom (while he was recovering from his second shoulder replacement surgery); this piece is based on that conversation and other sources (see note on bottom).

 Manchuria to the NBA

    Thomas Nicholas Meschery was born Tomislav Nikolayevich Mescheryakov. His father was a hereditary officer in Admiral Kolchak’s Army. His mother was the daughter of Vladimir Nicholayavich, who participated in Kornilov’s failed coup against Kerensky: “My grandpa was put under arrest in the Winter Palace. Together with Nicholas II.” Tom’s mother was related to the poet Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo).

    Tom’s parents met, in exile, in Manchuria, and Tom was born in 1938. In 1939, Tom’s father went ahead to San Francisco; his mother was to follow with Tom and his sister when they obtained the necessary papers. They were awaiting voyage on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Mescheryakovs were placed in a Tokyo-area internment camp for women and children, where “there was no suffering” and they were fed well. Towards the end of the war, the guards gave them the rejects from intercepted Red Cross packages (lots of spam).

    They finally made it to San Francisco. In “A Small Embrace,” Tom writes in his mother’s voice addressing him; the poem ends:

                                    a voice kept yelling over the loudspeaker: citizens to the left,

                                    stateless to the right. A band was playing something cheerful.

                                    You pointed to the wrong father. I to the wrong husband.

    Tom’s weak English was mitigated by his size and athletic prowess. He became a star basketball player at Lowell High School, where he developed his game in a modest facility that was “full of shadows” with a corduroy floor and wood backboards.

                                                 

                                                       [from] Lowell High

                                    Our coach, who was as old as the building,

                                    Taunted and inspired us, swore and cajoled us,

                                    He taught us to play without frills.

                                    We became red brick and corduroy

                                    And learned to see through shadows.

    

Blog Exclusive: Bill Hayward's portraits, and Bob Dylan [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

The first Act in Bill Hayward's stunning Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs is a series of "traditional portraits." While he includes images that one would describe as "traditional," others hint at Bill's impulse toward abstraction and experimentation. President Ronald Reagan, for the cover of Fortune magazine, appears Presidential; on closer examination you can see that Bill has captured--in the tilt of Reagan's head, his slightly raised eyebrow, his lips parted and his arms crossed--the former president's belligerence.There's playfulness in the portraits of dancers, with whom Bill has a unique sympathy that he's nurtured for his entire career. I love the portrait of New York City Ballet's Edward Villella. Only a true dance lover would know to capture Villella when his hands are arranged in the signature Balanchine style; fingers loose and separated so that when the dancer is in motion, the audience sees the entire hand. McCarthy-era attorney Roy Cohn looks appropriately sinister. An aging Milton Berle seated before a painting of cabbage roses reveals the dark side characteristic of so many comedians. Here's someone you know and love; his stance and expression daring you to guess at what he's thinking. What was he thinking? 

From Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs by Bill Hayward, © 2015, published by Glitterati Incorporated 

(Ed note: This week we're featuring photographs from Bill Hayward's Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs. Find yesterday's post here. sdh)

Poetry in Transylvania Part II [by Lloyd Schwartz]

This is Part II of a four-part series about the Transylvania Poetry Festival. You can read Part I here.

1. Day Two

The next morning began with Tara taking me for a walk around Sibiu. There are two adjacent town squares, both essentially only for pedestrians. A carnival had opened in the middle of the larger square with many rides, including a little roller coaster which we promised—but failed—to try later (someone told us the rides would operate until 2:00 AM, but they shut down much earlier). Tara showed me the beautiful concert hall and the old city wall.

And took me to Pardon, her favorite café, with its surprising décor:

And everywhere, looking at us, were Sibiu’s characteristic rooftop “eyes.”

At 2:00 PM, there was a discussion at the library by all the poets, under the direction of Florin Iaru, the celebrated Romanian poet, fiction writer, and media personality. The subject was Poetry and Social Action. It was a lively discussion, which in my exhausted condition I can barely remember, though I think I said something about poetry being a source of empathy and how dangerous that could be.

That evening, one of my new friends, the Hungarian poet Orsolya Fenyvesi, and I were following people to the reading at the Evangelical Church but seem to have fallen behind. We kept walking, but anything that looked like a church seemed to be getting further and further away. My phone rang and it was Radu, who was worried about our whereabouts. He asked me to tell him what street we were on, but that didn’t help, and when he asked if there were any landmarks, this was the only one I could distinguish:

That told him what he needed to know and he came and collected us. Much to my embarrassment (and delight) he provided the waiting audience with a complete explanation for the late start.

It was another terrific reading, and perhaps more varied in tone than the first one. Florin Iaru, with his media background (he had his own cultural show on national TV), was the funniest of all the poets and one of the liveliest of all the readers. Iaru’s “Down with Reality!” begins: “Between fork-poems, firecracker-poems, the fortresses poem— / the suppository-poem slips comfortably easy!”

The program included another out-going reader, the Irish poet Matthew Sweeney, who had actually spent some time living in Romania. I found “Inquisition Lane,” the title poem of his newest book, particularly striking:

         I reached the river, and saw a boat there—
         without thinking I jumped in. The oars

         moved through the water by themselves
         and brought me to Inquisition Castle

         which had reassembled itself on the riverbank
         and welcomed me into its dark basement.

His fellow Irishman, Maurice Devitt, retired from a career in business to study and write poems. He’s won significant awards but hasn’t yet published a book. One of his poems was maybe the most poignantly understated poem in the festival:

The Watch

When tidying my house
I found your watch,
once splendent silver,
now a dappled snakeskin

of rust, fixoflex
set like crooked teeth.
I was seven
when I picked it up

to try it on.
Anti-magnetic.
Shock-resist.
Water-proof.

Each word a challenge.
I could make
the hands go backwards,
wanted to open the back

and find the 17 jewels.
It stopped one day
at two-fifteen
and held its breath

for thirty years.
I wind it now
and the mechanism spins
through memories of you.

In two hours it gains
twenty minutes,
keen to catch up
on everything you missed.

There was the senior poet Sebastian Reichman, who spends half his time in Paris, whose poems are rooted in Romanian surrealism. He was there with his elegant wife. Even before hearing him read his mysterious and compelling poems, you’d know from his silvery mane that he was a poet. I was thoroughly tickled by the quietly droll Belgian Paul Bogaert, and enjoyed two gifted Romanian lyric poets, the tough-minded, self-ironic Marin Malaicu-Hondrari (who is also a novelist) and soulfully urban Stefan Menasia (who also edits a literary journal). Not least of all, Tara Skurtu gave a tough and moving reading that made me very proud to have been her teacher—including poems that came out of her previous visits to Romania. Here’s a link to one of my favorites among the poems she read.

Acoustically, the ancient church was a great venue for a poetry reading or guitarist Marius Sararu’s musical interlude. But there were some technical issues. At every reading, each poem was accompanied by a projected English translation (then for all the poems not originally in Romanian, either Vlad Pojoga or Daniela Luca read a Romanian translation). But the bumps and crannies of a 14^th-century church wall don’t entirely cooperate with modern slide projections. So for the English speakers, the English translations here were harder to read.

Dinner was late that night, and given that I had to read the next night, I didn’t join the liberated readers for further revelry.

Blog Exclusive: Introducing Bill Hayward's "Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs" [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Photographer and filmmaker Bill Hayward has just published Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs (Glitterati, September 2015). Uncommon it is, and beautiful, and quite possibly the first of its kind. Bill has agreed to let us share his artistic vision with you by featuring throughout the week images from his extraordinary book.

Chasing Dragons documents in photographs, paintings, and film stills, Bill Hayward’s evolution over five decades from portrait photographer to abstract painter, filmmaker, and multimedia artist. The heart of the book comprises 346 images in five acts that are subdivided into sections, each with a particular focus and accompanied by brief passages of text or poems. These images quicken the imagination with an energy that seems to jump off the page. You can read Douglas Glover’s in-depth review of Chasing Dragons here.

Both David and I have separately had the experience of being photographed by Bill. When I scheduled my session, Bill told me to clear my afternoon of any obligations and he wasn’t kidding. When I arrived at his studio he asked, as a prelude to our session, about the kitchen of my childhood home – my mother’s kitchen. Over the next several hours I built with paper and string and other odd pieces a kitchen table that would be my prop while Bill took pictures. Memories surfaced, some pleasant, some frightening. I left Bill’s studio at dusk feeling both lighter and more vulnerable, the way one might feel after a psychological breakthrough. (The novelist Justin Taylor describes his photo session with Bill here.)

Over the years we’ve often written about or featured Bill Hayward’s work on this blog. If you're a fan, you'll welcome his new book; if you don't know Bill's work, now is your chance to discover this visionary artist.

sdh

Poetry in Transylvania [by Lloyd Schwartz]

Ed note: This week we'll be posting Lloyd Schwartz's reports from the Poets in Transylvania festival. Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English and teaches in the MFA Program at UMass Boston. His most recent book of poems is Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press), and his poems have been selected for The Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His other publications include the Library of America edition of Elizabeth Bishop, the centennial edition of Bishop’s Prose (FSG), and Music In—and On—the Air, a collection of his music reviews for NPR’s Fresh Air. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Thank you, Lloyd. sdh

Poets in Transylvania

1. The Festival Begins

 Teachers are usually doing things for students, but the reverse can also be true. As is the case with my former student at UMass Boston, a wonderful young poet named Tara Skurtu. When she got her MFA at Boston University, she was awarded a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and decided to use the grant to explore her Romanian roots. In Romania, she met poets, editors, and publishers, had her poems translated and published, gave readings, and was invited to participate in an international poetry festival in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu. This year Tara was returning to Romania on a Fulbright teaching fellowship. 

When the directors of the poetry festival, poet Radu Vancu and literary theorist Dragos Varga, asked her which American poets she thought they should invite to read this year, she suggested two of her teachers. And they agreed.

 Unfortunately, a last-minute problem kept Robert Pinsky in Boston, so on Tuesday evening, September 22, Tara and I started our Romanian adventure together: Boston to Munich (eight hours in the air with a five-hour layover), then another hour and a half to Sibiu.

Actually, preparations began more than a month earlier, with an email from Radu requesting the participating readers to send copies of the poems they were going to read, since they were going to be translated into Romanian for an anthology published by one of the festival’s sponsors, the journal Zona noua—and in the order they were going to be read, since the poems were going to be projected in English during each reading. I thought I had plenty of time before I had to decide, but I quickly selected eight poems to send Radu, though a few days later I changed my mind about one of them that I was worried had too many “American” references.

One reason I was eager to go to Romania was that my father was born there, in the city of Iasi. But Iasi, on the Ukraine border, was a fourteen-hour train trip from Sibiu, and fourteen hours was a lot closer than I ever was to my father. So Iasi was out. My partner, David Stang, asked if I would be anywhere near Targu Jiu—the site of one of the great 20^th-century monuments, the Endless Column, Constantin Brancusi’s 1938 memorial to the local heroes who had fallen in World War I. It seemed not so far away on the map, and when I asked Radu about the possibility of going there, he immediately replied: “You must see it! It’s only a day trip—I’ll take you.”

On Wednesday afternoon, September 23 (there’s a seven-hour time difference), Tara and I were picked up at the Sibiu airport by the young poet Vlad Pojoga, editor of Zona nuoa, and we crawled into Sibiu through rush-hour traffic, on a road as ugly as any commercial strip highway in America. But the city itself was a surprise. It was enchanting—picturesque and colorful as a fairy tale. Not remotely like the post-Communist urban dreariness I’d imagined. I was delivered to a grand hotel, Imparatul Romanilor (The Roman Emperor—the definite article in Romanian, I learned, is attached to the end of the noun), founded in the 16^th-century according to the dates over the doorway, and rebuilt around the turn of the 20^th-century. A row of flags were flying over the marquee (including an American and an Israeli flag).

The Hotel Imparatul Romanilor

 

The view from my hotel room.

I was sorry to learn that Tara, whom I was counting on to be not just my friend and traveling companion but also my translator (knowing no Romanian myself), would be staying at a more modern hotel about half-an-hour away.

The festival had actually already started two days earlier, with young poets reading all over the city, and with workshops in poetry and translation. “We intend to promote as professionally and extensively as possible poetry translation as a means of safeguarding national identities,” is one of the festival’s central themes. That evening everyone was invited to a screening of a prize-winning film by Dumitru Budrala, The Curse of the Hedgehog, a poignant look at gypsy life in rural Romania. Then off to dinner at Café Frieda nearby, where the participants would have all their lunches and dinners together. 

Aside from us two American chickens, there were poets from across Europe, from Dublin to Istanbul, encompassing, besides Romania, poets from Belgium and Sweden, Poland, Macedonia, Moldova, and Hungary (two poets from Iran and Bulgaria had to cancel). And they were all (as far as I could tell from the English translations for the non-English writers)—from the youngest to the most established—writing poems on an impressively high level. And the Romanian translations of my own poems, by the young poet Catalina Stanislav, seemed both witty and accurate, literally and formally.

At the center of the festival were three readings, each starting at 6:00 PM, in three different venues: an auditorium at the county library, a 14^th-century Evangelical Church, and the Habitus Bookstore, the beautifully refurbished brick and whitewashed crypt of the 18^th-century Catholic Church in the town square. The reading I would be part of was called “Poetry in the Crypt”—a playful if slightly sinister name for a literary evening in Transylvania.

The Grand Opening began with a video message from Robert Pinsky, sending his regrets to the festival organizers and participants and in particular to Tara and me. Then he read that hand-grenade of a poem that would have opened the festival: “Samurai Song.” Since the Iranian and Bulgarian poets were also scheduled for this event, it was a relatively abbreviated evening.

But still impressive. The senior reader was the wiry, longhaired, 62-year-old poet from London, Stephen Watts, almost whispering such piercing and punning “fragments” as “Birds of London,” in which “birds and bombs” come down through a “king-fissure / blue” sky. That program was also my introduction to some terrific poets who were closer to home, including poet and publisher Claudiu Komartin, the dynamic Moldovan poet and columnist Moni Stanila, and the prize-winning Romanian poet and prose writer Dan Coman, who was introduced as “a million-dollar baby” and whose poem “The Rape” begins: “not for a moment did I stop talking to myself as if to a woman,” and ends:

    nothing could stop me:

    I raised myself in all my splendor above my body I pinned him between the pillows

    and as if he were a woman a few strong and precise movements were enough

    for his stifled screams to cover my screams.

 
I was delighted to discover Martin Sendecki, the Polish poet (and journalist, too, of course—many European poets are both), whose poems included references to two of my favorite writers, Frank O’Hara and Raymond Chandler. And there was the Macedonian poet Nikola Madzirov, who writes in Cyrillic print but who is actually, among the Eastern European poets at the festival, the most accessible to English-speakers, since his book Remnants of Another Age is published in the US by BOA Editions (with an introduction by Carolyn Forché) and in the UK by Bloodaxe Books—expertly translated by Peggy and Graham W. Reid and Magdalena Horvat and Adam Reed. I liked his poems tremendously, like “Home” (which is included in his BOA book), which begins:

I lived on the edge of the town
like a streetlamp whose light bulb
no one ever replaces.

 Many of these Eastern European poets share a sardonic, un-self-important view of themselves and their situation. Yet each image explodes like a little time bomb. It surprised me that most of these poets read aloud not like the extroverted Russians I’ve heard, but with an interiority that borders on shyness, with no introductions or personal comments or anecdotes between poems. And many of them were on a circuit of poetry events around the continent. 

After the reading, the Romanian actor and musician Claudiu Falamas performed his Beat Bukowski at the Habitus Book Store. Tara had seen him do it last year, but jet lag had kicked in bigtime, and we were just too tired to stay.

 

Latina/o Poets On Liminal Spaces: A Conversation with Erika L. Sánchez [by Natalie Scenters-Zapico]

I first encountered Erika L. Sánchez’s work in a library at the University of New Mexico. Erika had graduated a few years before me, and I was working on a manuscript that would one day become The Verging Cities. Erika’s poems stood out to me because we were both writing about borders, immigration, narco-violence, and femicide though she grew up in Chicago, traveling in the summers to Mexico, and I grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border. I’ve always been very interested in how vividly Erika can reinvent the narrative of crossing in her poems and hold her speakers suspended in a liminal space. 

This interview is a part of a series titled Latina/o Poets On Liminal Spaces, you can read my introduction here, and the first interview with Javier Zamora here. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

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Natalie Scenters-Zapico: So my first question is, from one border obsessed writer to another, why the obsession?

Erika L. Sánchez: Oh, that’s a really good question. I feel like growing up everything was about having papers, not having papers. Mojados, you know, that was just always a family narrative. Crossing the border, and living in the United States, and who is legal. I think about my parents and how they crossed the border and how that was very, very transgressive in many ways. And how innocently I took on that transgression that they, I don’t know what the verb is…so they transgressed, so I sort of followed suit but very differently. And that created a problem actually for me and my family. I see my parents as rule breakers and I think it’s just inevitable that I write about borders of all kinds whether they’re physical or non-physical. It’s just always been a part of my life in some form. 

NSZ: So, is your family originally from Chihuahua, or…

ES: Durango. 

NSZ: Durango. So they’re from Durango, but you grew up in Chicago. How has that distance affected your work? You just described being interested in family stories of crossing, and that transgression to use your word, and how you’ve followed suit, and what it means to be transgressive, but in a different way than your parents. So how has that distance affected the way that you conceive of place?

ES: I grew up going to Mexico pretty frequently during the summer. And in some way those were the best times of my life. Looking back on my life, I was pretty unhappy as a child and there’s a lot of reasons for that. Some being that my parents were working a lot and it was very difficult. And so when I’d go to Mexico, it was liberating for me to go outside and see all these people I loved. 

I know I idealized it when I was a kid, so really what I write about is longing—wanting to be there, even though being there is impossible. And in that there’s a sense of loss. In my memory everything is fun and beautiful, but I know that that’s not true. Now there’s a lot danger lurking there, which is so different from what I grew up with. Now, I am filled with a sense of sadness that things are not the same. But mostly now, I am filled with a sense of sadness that things are not the same and that a lot of people have left it. 

NSZ: It’s interesting because I relate in a way. I was having dinner last night with some friends who are from Chihuahua and we were talking about how it’s this weird thing to say that you’re from the border because people immediately associate it with…they react like, “You’re from an ugly place.” And what’s heartbreaking is that it became a really ugly place, but that wasn’t always the reality. Until 2009 it wasn’t that bad, and it’s more complicated than making it a horror show. So it is hard, and it’s difficult not to romanticize what it was like before. 

ES: And I always knew that violence was there I just wasn’t surrounded by it, which is a very different perspective. And in finding all these things out there’s a sense of a loss of innocence. I mean this is the land that you love and it isn’t what you thought it was or it is no longer that. 

NSZ: So, in your work there is a lot of traveling and pausing and traveling again. For example, in your poem “Narco” published in POETRY, Rompemadres pulls a woman into the desert. And in “Donkey Poem” you have the ass with its thousands of years plowing the cracked earth and arriving with crumbling hooves, which it such a great image. And in this way, you have speakers who are perpetually caught in what could be called a liminal space. And to me your poems seem very interested in the act of crossing the border as a rite of passage, in which your speakers are stuck in that space. Now this is my reading, but would you say that you’re interested in writing or surviving that liminality?

ES: Yeah, for me I see it as what it is for me to create my own space. I feel like I’ve always been trying to carve out a space. I mean I’ve come to love my life, and the space that I inhabit, but I’d never really thought of it in the terms of liminality until now. I think that it definitely applies. It applies to me in the sense of being marginalized, which I am, but I also feel really empowered to inhabit this space. And, as I’ve said, I’ve always felt like I don’t belong in a traditional sense. And so, those things then begin to affect the poems. And yeah, there is a lot of moving in the poems, and a lot of confusion in grappling with identity, and this fear of never reaching a destination. I really like that idea, which I had never really thought of, the idea of moving towards something but not knowing exactly what. It’s like that Gloria Anzaldúa quote where she says something about this being her space, and that she has a right to that. And that is something that’s easy to take for granted, unless you’ve really had to fight for a space. 

NSZ: Yeah and as I kept reading your poems, I kept feeling this overwhelming sense of never quite getting there. The idea of movement is present in your work, and coming from a place, and pausing maybe in that process, but never totally reaching it. So your speakers are forced then to exist in that liminal space, which you do incredibly well. There are many other Latina/o poets who are interested in this same idea. Do you think that Latina/o poets are comfortable existing in that liminal space in their work? Do they occupy that space in American literature?

ES: I think that there are a lot examples of Latina/o poets exploring liminality and that in-between space in their work. But what I don’t know is if there’s comfort in that. I can’t speak for all Latina/o poets, but for myself I don’t always feel comfortable in that space. I think I just have to explore that space, because it happens to be where I am. And Latina/o poets aren’t really included in the canon as much as we should be. 

NSZ: Is immigration an act of exile into a permanent state of liminality? Is this liminality inherited or passed down?

ES: Yeah, I think about my parents, especially my dad, the things that he’s been through to get to this country and the things that he’s been through in this country. And in many ways by now he’s American, but he’s always longing for Mexico. And so, even though we have a life here there’s this sense of people always viewing you as not really a part of it. Which is why I think they’ve always longed for the life that they had, even though it was very difficult. And they’ve come to accept that they live here now, but a part of them longs for life back in Mexico. So it’s just layer upon layer of longing. 

NSZ: In many ways you pull from the stories of that liminal border crossing experience   in much of your work. I think of the poem “Narco” where you play with the saying, “Quién es el jefe más jefe?” which is used a lot in narco-corridos. Why are you interested in that kind of play? How do you engage with it?

ES: I think that always having been an Other, playing with what is both thrown at you and what you hear is inevitable. That being said, I don’t sit down and attempt to do this right? It’s more it comes to my mind, so that’s what I write about. I like to write a lot about stories I hear a lot, or things I can’t get out of my mind. It’s never something that I sit down to create. And so, I think I’m just interested in providing a different perspective, or writing about things that I’ve felt aren’t being talked about. It’s not really a system, it’s just how I write. The other thing that I kind of question is this idea of writing to show your identity. I write from a place of my experience, and so that inherently then is a part of my identity. 

NSZ: Yeah, I like what you just said about the difference between writing to say I am this identity, as oppose to saying I am this experience. And there’s something really disturbing about writing just to show that you are an identity, because in many ways you’re only justifying your own visibility to a dominant culture or white audience. I mean who else would really be interested in: I am this identity let me showcase it in these expected, played out, perhaps token ways. But then it begs the question why would writers feel that impulse do you think?

ES: I think some writers perhaps lack the rigor, in many ways. But it is disturbing, I don’t know, that you would be expected to perform in a way that is inauthentic to your community. I think for some writers that performance maybe comes easily because they have to enact it so often in American culture anyway. 

NSZ: Yeah, things to think about for sure…So I feel like you occupy this really interesting space in which you are an activist in your prose writing life. Can you be an activist and an artist at the same time? Has balancing these two things ever been an issue for you?

ES: I think I’ve always just done it. I think I wouldn’t know another way of doing things. And sometimes when I think about the balance of those two things, I think for me they just go hand in hand. You know, I’ve often felt obligated to speak in my writing for things that I see happening around me. In my novel I entered it with a real sense of what I wanted it to be for young adults, and how I wanted it to be activism in a way. 

NSZ: Do you think there’s more pressure being a Latina writer to want to write about issues that have affected your experiences, and as you said earlier, in turn affect your identity?

ES: Yeah I think there definitely is. You grow up in a community where, often times, you see so many people without a voice that you only want to give voice to that. You also want to create a space for that voice that is safe and recognized. So I’ve always felt the need to do these things.

NSZ: Earlier you made mention of Anzaldúa, so I have an Anzaldúa questions for you. So Anzaldúa was writing very much to question the machismo and nationalism in The Aztlán Essays, that came before her. And Anzaldúa’s work in Borderlands/La Frontera can very easily be read from a liminal perspective. How do you think we exist as Latina poets post-Anzaldúa?

ES: Oh, that’s a really good question. I mean we have a lot of different experiences than what Anzaldúa did, especially with regard to publishing. And she’s definitely provided for that space, for that vocabulary to explore Latina identity, which we can then build on. And a lot of what she writes about I also feel like I’m still writing about because there’s still more to be said. I feel like while she influences my aesthetics, there are still ways to make those experiences your own. And we’re still dealing with ways to present much of the violence that Anzaldúa writes about with new aesthetics. 

I think we both deal with Anzaldúa in our work, but we do it in different ways. This is something that I think that you’re exploring in interesting ways in The Verging Cities, which is very much in conversation with the violence of the female body that Anzaldúa was interested in, but you’re exploring it in new ways.

NSZ: Well, and it’s almost impossible for me to think that I would be able to do anything that I do with borders without her coming before me. She just totally changed the conversation. But also the work that she did to question the machismo in the Chicano movement was ground breaking. Do you think that there’s machismo in the poetry world that Latinas still face? And does this kind of strong cultural machismo make for a different kind of feminist? A feminism in the liminal space?

ES: Yeah, I think that it definitely exists. I mean I think that there are so many great Latina writers out there who are consistently overlooked. The fact that there are no Latina featured presenters at AWP Los Angeles speaks volumes to the ways in which we are overlooked and our work is overlooked. As far as where feminism becomes a part of that, I think that we constantly have to fight for what we have and help others to get there too.

NSZ: Well, and sometimes it feels like Latina writers are really only recognized in pockets, like within a community, but rarely given the spotlight as just being great poets aside from being Latinas. Which is why it’s important for poets like you to win the Ruth Lily, because then it’s really a victory for us all. 

ES: Yeah, I mean it’s exciting but I also think of the importance of mentorship, and how sometimes I get a little frustrated that I’ve never had a strong female mentor, let alone a Latina mentor. Most of my mentors have been men, a few white women, but mostly men. And it’s interesting because I would totally be that for someone else. I work very hard to be a mentor to those young women who need a model that it can be done, that you can be a Latina and have a successful career and this is how you can go about it. 

NSZ: Yeah, mentorship is a huge issue because it’s so important that as you climb you pull other people up with you. And then there’s the problem of what does that say about maybe the pressures societally on women writers, and Latina writers in particular, where they can’t mentor as much?

ES: Well I feel like we need to work harder to be that for other people and to help them. Because support is so important in giving someone the confidence to realize what they want to do. 

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Erika L. Sánchez is a CantoMundo Fellow and winner of the 2013 “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. She has received scholarships from the Fulbright Program and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Most recently she was awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in Boston Review, diode, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, Pleiades, Poetry, “Latino USA” on NPR, and the anthology Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (2015). Her nonfiction has been published in Al Jazeera, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian, NBC News, Rolling Stone, Salon, and many others. Sánchez lives in Chicago. 

Sinatra's Century by David Lehman: In Bookstores on October 27

Sinatra’s Century by David Lehman

In this set of affectionate and vibrant fan’s notes, poet and critic Lehman (A Fine Romance) celebrates Ol’ Blue Eyes’s 100th birthday (December 12) with 100 impressionistic reflections on the singer’s successes and shortcomings. He includes mentions of Sinatra’s tempestuous marriage to Ava Gardner and his relationships with Mia Farrow, Lauren Bacall, and Marilyn Monroe, among others. Lehman colorfully points out that Sinatra remains a part of the American cultural scene, with his songs playing in commercials, as background music in restaurants, and in opening and closing credits of movies and television shows such as Wall Street and The Sopranos. He also as a signature brand of bourbon named after him. Sinatra stays in the public eye, Lehman observes, not only because of his work as a movie actor and a singer but also because of his nonconformity and his fondness for being a maverick. Sinatra’s vocal range and phrasing were so pure and powerful that he had teenage girls swooning from the moment he stepped on the stage. Lehman describes Sinatra’s friendly rivalry with Bing Crosby, his lifelong friendship with Dean Martin despite their widely disparate personalities (Martin liked to get up early, Sinatra partied late into the night), his perfectionism, and his famous clashes with gossip columnist Rona Barrett. In the end, Lehman’s lively reflections wonderfully celebrate Sinatra’s enduring impact on his own life and on American culture. Publisher's Weekly. (Oct.)

Blues #5 [by Cleis Abeni]

What kind of form are the blues? When I say form, I do not only mean traditional verse forms like the sonnet. Everything that is intelligently conceived has form even if that structure is a nonce form (or a one-of-a-kind design). Moreover, even things that are ill-conceived have form (albeit, problematic arrangements). What I say here is different than some poets who only use the word form to signify a finite number of traditional, usually European-descended arrangements like the rhyme royal or the sestina.

The blues are and will always be a radical American art form because despite its deep penetration and proliferation within the art and culture of the United States and the world, it has always been marginalized. There is a certain violence to the way that the blues is cross-culturally perceived, a disenfranchisement that I understand intimately. The blues are an anti-normative form, a queer endeavor that challenges our attempts to institutionalize it all the time.

Thinking about the blues helped me to understand the world in forms. Understanding the world in forms means that I am always ascertaining the structures through which things are made. This understanding may be more radical for me than for others. When I was a child, I was habitually told that I was not normal. Growing up suspect meant that I became suspicious of normalcy itself. I began to associate the word normal with natural, unquestioned, deterministic states. What others understood to be normal, I understood to be just another made thing, or just another construction given hierarchical power, dominance, or control over me for a myriad of often mysterious reasons.

From these origins came a critical notion: even if I do not know the maker or have a name for the form, I know that it is made or being made. My first foray into truly critical thought (the kind that bespeaks true liberal arts of deeply free thinking) came when I understood that what seems normal is, in fact, just another construction.

Normalcy reassurances us as much as it controls us. We need reassurance at the same time that we need to question patterns of control. Understanding the world in forms means that I am always investigating the fault lines between what controls us and what we can control, or between how we make our worlds and how the world seems to make us. Things that others take for granted are subjected to enormous scrutiny.

Most people simply accept their assigned name, their assigned race, their assigned gender, and all sorts of other seemingly natural states. But even as a child, I never simply accepted these states. I critiqued them relentlessly. I wanted to understand the power within these constructions. Invariably, that power is confederated into forms, or into always shifting arrangements. I tried to describe, analyze, and interpret these forms. I created my own forms.

Let me explain why my perspective is radical even though it may seem that talking about form is the most traditional thing that any poet could do.

As a black child of extreme violence, I was, by definition, radicalized. Normalcy was a luxury that I did not enjoy. Even while I endured violence, foster facilities, and homelessness, I gained and sought privileges. My mother had me scholastically tested and when I scored high, she took me out of a predominately black, impoverished public school; fought to gain a scholarship for me; and, once obtained, enrolled me in a brutally uncaring, aloof, predominately white, wealthy private middle school in a nearby state outside of Washington, D.C. at enormous physical cost for me because I attended this school briefly while living in homeless shelters with my mother.

I would leave whatever homeless shelter at which we lived at 5:30 a.m. in the cold, dark of the morning and make an arduous, almost three hour journey: two city buses to a school bus stop on the edge of the city limits, and then forty-five minutes out of the city to a school where heads of state sent their children to study with body guards. When I arrived at the school I was filthy. I could never wash properly at the homeless shelters, and the walking between buses and the riding on sticky seats between other homeless people and workers leaving out in the wee hours to do manual labor made me even smellier. Invariably, I was often sick at that school whose name I will not mention. Malnourishment was a constant problem even while, maddeningly, I was attending a supposedly elite private school.

And yes, my physical state became a problem for a few of the school’s authorities, but the rest of that story is for another time. Suffice to say that this incredibly wealthy school did not compassionately come to my aid and create a program whereby my family received housing and fiscal aid while I attended the school. Apparently, they considered it enough that they offered me a scholarship. On the contrary, one teacher (who just happened to be one of the most favored, beloved educators at the school during my era) made it her personal campaign to remove me from her class (she could not stand the sight of me, the smell of me, and when I finally told her my family was homeless, she could not stand the very thought of me), and her campaign to get rid of me was waged on the grounds that, obviously, my home life and my very manner of being was not commensurate with study at such an august establishment.

And this teacher knew that she was wrong because, towards the end of my time at the school, she half-apologized and let me take two books as my own from her collection on the voluminous bookshelves of her well-appointed, spacious classroom, the same room from which she campaigned to banish me. In the end, she only let me take books for which there were multiple copies. Purely because I was interested in their titles, I chose two books that just happened to have been published around the same time in the 1940s, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph and The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry by Cleanth Brooks. That I was reading those books as a black middle schooler should tell you what kind of strange, radical child I was. I learned even then that some (though not all) seemingly progressive elite liberal arts schools fester with a hypocrisy within their souls whereby they do not always practice the lofty tenets that they claim to espouse as selling points when the time comes to value the most marginalized within their midst.

The combination of poverty, violence, yet intensive schooling (either by my own herculean, voracious efforts or intermittently within private institutions like that middle school or at the wonderful Levine School where I studied music theory, Solfeggi, and voice) created its own radical thoughtfulness within me. I was the kind of child who had read George Herbert Palmer’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey and Samuel Butler’s translation of the Iliad by the time I was six along with memorizing scores of poems and devouring my mother’s novels like Pearl S. Buck’s Imperial Woman. I would sneak and watch movie revivals from the back at the nearby Kennedy Street theater to the point where I already had a terrific knowledge of film by the time I was a middle schooler. I learned rudimentary music theory and both Benesh and Beauchamp-Feuillet movement notation during the same period and I was already performing professionally on the stage to make money for my mother as she fought to support her family.

But when I learned the blues, I truly began to understand the world in forms. The blues were my gateway to the highest form of intelligence as a critically aware black person in a vicious, unforgiving world so bereft of racial, economic, and gender justice.

Blues #4 [by Cleis Abeni]

It’s one thing to suggest the opposite of what you mean—classic verbal irony.

But, what if two different statements suggesting the opposite of their meaning follow each other in tandem.

Then, what if these statements were followed by others whose subtle meanings were deliberately scrambled.

And, further still, what if the entire scenario—the overall meaning itself—runs counter to what the statements suggest.

Well, this complex experience represents one of the most powerful formal characteristics of the blues.

I call this, “ironic juxtaposition” and it is one of three formal attributes that I discuss today.

Ironic Juxtaposition

The prototypical irony of the blues is that dejection is not only dejection, but something else: it could be rage, vindictiveness, or hope. The blues dramatize this root irony within their subtly clashing statements.

Let’s examine a 1951 song called “The Thrill Is Gone” by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell made famous by the iconic blues musician, B. B. King, as an example of ironic juxtaposition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Roland Godefroy, 1989, public domain

King’s work has been fresh on my mind because he died this summer.

Hawkins was himself an incredible black blues musician and his original version of the song is as much a revelation as King’s rendition.

And don't get me started on Aretha Franklin's 1970 version!

Take in mind that many versions of the lyrics and score of this song exist because each blues person adapts it for her or his own purposes. But the essential ironic juxtapositions remain.

After the first repeating statements, you’d think that the “The Thrill Is Gone” is a simplistic lament that only shares sadness.

Yet, as the statements progress, we gradually learn that the song is a rebuke of a malevolent lover who wronged the singer and, even more than a rebuke, the song threatens the beloved, suggesting that rather than the singer only being dejected and lonely for losing the beloved, the beloved will instead be sorry for the loss.

These subtle ironies keep commingling and soon, by the time we get to the song’s final lines, which often convey something to the effect of “I’m free from your spell,” we realize that the lament is, in fact, an acknowledgement that the thrill is very much alive: the wonder comes in the singer being rid of the beloved and living to testify about it.

Thus, the song itself is an anthem masquerading as a lament—a terrific form of situational irony.

Midway through Franklin's version, the chorus is sung by backup singers who splice into the song the great civil rights anthem rooted in the spirituals, "Free, free at last, thank God almighty I'm free at last!" 

Franklins' interpolation becomes the pinnacle of ironic juxtaposition for me among all the adaptations of this song.

Fractious Allusion

Even in the late 1980s, I was telling folks in my life that the music and poetry of the blues and jazz constitute Modernism just as much as the poems of extremely well-documented virulently racist poets who we are often taught heralded Modernism like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. For an in depth exploration of T. S. Eliot's awful cultural bigotry, I highly suggest reading Anthony Julius' T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, and even though Allen Ginsberg "forgave" him, and many apologize for him, Pound's bigotry was appalling.

In middle school, high school, and college poetry classes, youth are often taught that these problematic individuals are the kings of Modern poetry. Yet, so much of the time, black blues and jazz traditions are excluded from the annals of Modern poetry and that has bothered me since I too was taught a version of "high Modernism" that consistently left out home-grown black American folk artistry.

One of the most fabled hallmarks of poetic Modernism is the complexity of allusion to prior elite literary texts within "great modern poems." These allusions are said to represent the highest forms of greatness and the public must unlock the key to these references with arduous study.

But high modern poems by white men like Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane are not the only sophisticated artistry that weaves allusion. The blues frequently depend on complex allusions to black cultural life, and, without exaggeration, these allusions require just as much penetrating study as those within poems like "The Waste Land."

I called this hallmark "fractious allusion" because, in fact, one of the enormous impediments to understanding the intelligence of the blues is their contemptuous over-simplification, and this dismissal is bread in an undervaluing of the very lives referenced in the work. That's why I took the time to say that the blues are a kind of Black Lives Matter movement this week.

If you did not understand the allusion of "free, free at last" in Aretha Franklin's rendition of "The Thrill Is Gone" then your understanding of the formal ingenuity of the work is seriously compromised. 

Yet, these allusions within the blues are fractious because they also raise issues of access, power, and privilege. Many of the allusions in the blues point tropes of low-to-no income black life, including lots of inside references to popular figures and social traditions spawned within rural and urban jookin' joints, speakeasies, and nightclubs. These references are often invisibilized by a mainstream public that may only encounter very limited, watered down or white-washed versions of these figures and traditions in the most commercialized popular songs and music videos.

Improvisation As Composition

This last hallmark is simply expressed: composing is improvising in the blues, and ongoing structuring and invention is endemic to blues form. (This contention—that improvisation is composition—is examined in relation to black vernacular dancing in this essay.)

Next up: I close with a discussion of a blues lyric by Bessie Smith.

Tales of the Nineties: What He Does [by Alan Ziegler]

    Ralph 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.”

Blues #3 [by Cleis Abeni]

Ever heard the stereotype that blacks in the United States talk too loudly at movie theaters? Needless to say, blacks aren’t the only folks to shout out phrases at the cinema like, “Don’t go in there, fool!” as one wonderful man hollered during a moment in an easily forgettable scary movie that I watched around Halloween last year.

Yet, these provocative participatory moments encode a terrific hallmark that I would like to highlight and, while these moments may annoy some people—yes, the very same people who become surreptitiously alarmed by even the sight of a group of blacks in public or who become fearful by just the sight of a lone black man around them when walking in the city—these moments indicate a remarkable formal hallmark of the blues.

Provocative participation is the first of six elements of blues form that I discuss today and tomorrow. Take in mind that, as with most artistry rooted in the centuries-old folkways of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the African Diaspora, there is no separation between sound, language, and movement in the blues. These spheres interpenetrate even while the blues manifest differently on the page, on the stage, in song, in oratory, and in dance. For definitional context, visit the Internet’s many encyclopedic entries to learn about the basic history of the blues’ origins in the rural American South and its adaption of spirituals, field hollering, work songs, and ballads by enslaved Africans and their descendants.

Often when devotees explain hallmarks of artistic forms rooted in the African Diaspora, respondents say comments like these: “But European music uses antiphony all the time!” or “But all music matters not just the blues!” Mind you: deflection is a kind of bias. Indeed, many artistic forms engage the hallmarks discussed here. This fact does not obscure the particular ways that the blues configure these formal characteristics or the specific manner in which the blues matters within the cultures through which it proliferates.

And one final caveat: discussing general hallmarks should in no way suggest that the blues are not diverse. On the contrary, these general characteristics are always varied and contested throughout centuries of development. But, that I and others can point to these formal traits indicates the cultural strength and distinctiveness of the blues.

Provocative Participation

Like the man who shouted out in the movie theater last year, the blues contain a variety of provocative participation that is more than static call-and-response. My students within the jazz dance and music class at the semi-rural university (mentioned in yesterday's entry) often heard the refrains within the blues as inert, meaningless restatements. Inviting them to see beyond this assumption and understand repeated phrases from a different cross-cultural perspective was often challenging.

Repeated phrases in the blues provoke a both tense (strained) and intense (excited) relationship with the previously established theme. This provocation can be insinuation, rebuke, or alarm—as if the repetition elevates the concern implicit in the preceding statement. Polite, high bourgeoisie cultures sometimes demand quiet acquiesce: don’t participate, don’t react, don’t protest, and don’t be too provocative. Not so with the blues.

In the blues, repetition provokes reassessment, redirection, or even critiques of prior statements in a way that enlivens a conversation. Repetitions also strike out against the suggestion that the original statement may not have been entirely or rightly heard or understood. That may be why repetitions in the blues are so often coupled with improvised riffs in the form of vamped interrogations, nods (recognizing or affirming phrases), invectives (snippets of curses), and invocations (parts of prayers) like “I’m tellin’ you,” “Sure enough,” "What you say?" "Night and day!" "Have mercy,” “Y’all hear me?” or “Amen!”

These refrains also set up the ironic twist in the closing line of grouping of phrases. On the page, the AAB rhyme scheme of three-line blues stanzas organize this set-up. This set-up creates the effect of the entire group of phrases turning in on one another. When understood as a whole, the phrases reveal unexpected shifts in meaning that are best expressed through cascading provocative participation—like many voices calling out at the screen in a cinema.

The second line in this three-lined blues stanza by yours truly performs the basics of this provocative participation:

She swears her feet are daggers & her body ain’t free
I tell you, she swears her feet are daggers & her body ain’t free
Have mercy, she sure feels vicious when she walks over me

Counterfactual Progression

A blues scale—a pentatonic scale—-runs counter to the traditional scale of European-descended music—or the diatonic scale. A blues note is sung or played in a bent way, with a nonstandard pitch, or a slurred, melismatic style. The counterfactual progression of the blues scale and the blues note comprise the bedrock of jazz, rock, R&B, and most of the way popular music is composed and performed, however cursorily.

Here is a seven-note blues scale in C sung by yours truly (and I will be the first to admit that I was never a “great” entertainer, just a good study and a serviceable performer, so don’t expect a miracle within this quickly prepared recording by a very exhausted night creature):

A rough indication of a blues scale

Compare this blues scale to the traditional do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do scale sung by Julie Andrews in the Rodgers and Hammerstein song "Do-Re-Mi" from the musical and film The Sound of Music.

Shifting Vocality

One of the effects of provocative participation in the blues is that we are not always certain who is speaking to whom. Further still, we become uncertain as to whether the speaker is a unitary lyric voice, two voices contending against each other, or a chorus. Often these tensions rise in the blues quickly from one line to the next, creating a sense of heightened, ongoing dissociation. Refrains steady this shifting vocality, providing landmarks within the shifting voices. Later in the week when I talk about Bessie Smith’s blues song, “Gimmie A Pigfoot,” I hope to illustrate this formal attribute.

Tomorrow I will discuss three other formal hallmarks:

• Ironic Juxtaposition
• Fractious Allusion
• Improvisation As Composition.

 

 

Blues #2 [by Cleis Abeni]

Today, I share key overarching ideological truths about the blues. To begin, let me journey back to a time many years ago when I taught jazz dance and music (as well as writing) for a year at a large semi-rural Midwestern public university. On the first day of the class at the start of the year I asked my students to bring pictures to class for the next session of what they thought the blues represented. Most of my students were white, middle class young men and women. The largest group of students of color were Asian-descended and Latina (six, if memory serves). Two blacks were in the class. Demographically, the students represented what many Americans think of when they invoke “the mainstream.” 

Almost all of the students' pictures depicted an older black man placidly strumming a guitar like the image below (this photograph by Jean-Luc Ourlin from 2005 depicts the great blues musician John Lee Hooker and it is in the public domain): 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And about a fourth of the students' images depicted a white parody group called the Blues Brothers, which was created by the comedians Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as part of a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live in 1976 (this publicity still of the comedians appears here under fair use guidelines):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I asked the students to articulate the thinking behind their selections, and I encouraged them to word-associate (to write down individual words or short phrases) if they could not quite put their thoughts into complete sentences. I stressed that no one’s thoughts were wrong because all of their images are part of our perceptions of the blues. Rather than discounting their representations, my goal was to affirm them, study them, and expand on them with deeper and more trenchant reflection.

I still have my notes from my lesson plans. Most of the students wrote words like “sad,” or phrases like “down in the dumps.” Some wrote “cool” or “funny” and a few wrote “SNL,” referring to the late night TV show where the Blues Brothers group was created. One person wrote “old black guys singing about being sad” and another wrote “black slaves singing when they feel sad.”

During our discussion, the students elaborated on their articulations and soon they acknowledged that, overwhelmingly, their assumptions about the blues were that it was a tradition represented by either old black men who sing slow, mournful, downbeat songs about their sadness while playing the guitar or cool, hip, middle aged white men with dark sunglasses and black suits who sing funny, upbeat songs that parody the sadness of the old black men.

At one point in our discussions, two students debated the ways that each scenario suggested a kind of melancholic yet entertaining passivity, a willful sense of dejection (whether actual or ironized) and an inert experience of the easily-dismissed downtrodden. One of the students likened the downtrodden people that came to his mind when he thought of the blues to the homeless panhandlers that he saw in Chicago who ask for money when they busk around the entrances of public transportation. This student even said, at one point, that he first heard the blues from just such a panhandler and when another student laughed and jocularly asked if the student gave the homeless panhandler money, the student replied “no,” because the man smelled like alcohol and he feared that the man would just use the money to buy more alcohol.

Over the course of the first unit of the class, along with sharing the history of the blues’ origination and proliferation and learning a few blues, ragtime, and jazz dances and songs (and I will selectively share a little of this history soon this week), I tried to expand and redirect the students’ assumptions while also acknowledging that those assumptions are rooted in subjective versions of the truth (just as my own witness here is a subjective version of the truth). There is indeed sadness in the struggles of the blues and the blues have indeed been seemingly endlessly coopted by whites to the point where they are often considered to be a kind of inconsequential cliché of outdated black melancholia.

Yet, I continually found myself pushing back against the notion that the blues are a washed-up American cliché, an outmoded endeavor of diminished black personhood. So engrained was this assumption that my students found it hard to accept that the blues, as I argued, contain the ingenious hallmarks of high Modernism; that they are the transformation of melancholic stories of disadvantage into enactments of bawdy, sly resistance; that however mournful the music and lyrics may sound, they are about bearing active, ebullient witness to struggle; and that personal disclosure of the struggles and joys of folk life become political witness when shared to a world that often refuses to care about the particular lives of marginalized people.

These arguments were as difficult for some of my students to embrace as my other contention: that the blues were represented by just as many women as men, and just as many LGBT people as heterosexuals and cisgender (or non-transgender) people. This contention is borne out by the evidence of the lives of pioneers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Lucy Hicks Anderson (1886-1954), a black trans woman who helped run a network of underground Midwestern and Southern bordellos with other entrepreneurs like Ruby Taylor that showcased the most ribald blues and R&B entertainers. But, at the same time, the outspoken bawdy nature of the blues did not seem foreign to the students who discussed their constant exposure to rock and rap songs and dances, which seemed to be far racier. I was so glad  that the students weren't alarmed by the blues' insistent, frank examination of sex, death, illicit practices, and the recreational consumption of substances.

After the class was over I found myself journaling about my experience. So deep was that journaling that I often return to reflecting on these arguments every year. Key to my arguments is the truth that the blues are personal and the personal is political.

For me, along with black Americans’ sorrow songs (the so-called “spirituals”), the blues constitute the original artistic wing of a centuries-old Black Lives Matter movement in America expressed in musical and poetic form. In fact, one way of understanding the current Black Lives Matter movement is to see it as part of a long tradition of radical action that seeks to draw attention to the truth that the personal is political.

Within the blues, the personal is political because there are some people whose life experiences are devalued or vulgarized: their stories are not considered with the same wealth as others. At its worse, this devaluing leads to unjust violence, incarceration, and maiming, and at its least it leads to chronic disrespect, neglect, hostility, and contempt. Yes: that’s the blues.

The blues often make people uncomfortable in a similar way as the Black Lives Matter movement makes some people immediately deflect from black people’s experiences (failing to embrace and confront such experiences directly) in favor of saying, “all lives matter” in a dismissive hope that expression of black disenfranchisement will just go away.

Sadly, just talking openly about marginalization, just singing the blues, just ironizing struggle, just creating platforms for resistance--just doing any of these things makes some people uncomfortable despite the fact that most Americans are suffering gravely with high rates of income inequality, terrible access to quality healthcare, vicious patterns of violence, frequently polarizing contact with governmental services, and all manner of disenfranchisement. 

Disenfranchisement rests on a seemingly banal notion. This banal, false notion goes like this: “The life experiences of the most marginalized have no real relevance to the powerful or the favored.” This is a false notion because, invariably, the marginalized often do the under-acknowledged work that makes it possible for the powerful to be favored. The television shows that screen daily stories of marginalization and pathology literally depend on those stories for their wealth. Thus, in this false, banal notion, unless there is a proverbial riot, marginalized experiences can be ignored at the very same time that they are consumed and commodified. So deeply held is this notion that it infects both the powerful and the marginalized alike. Yes, those who are marginalized try to ignore the forces that constitute their own suffering just as much as the powerful ignore those same forces.

But, the blues puts it all out there right in our eyes and ears. The terms by which the marginalized and the powerful operate are wildly different: the marginalized are often apathetic or acquiescent just to survive because resources, opportunities, and capacities for action are so deeply limited and even actively constrained. But, for the powerful, there is little excuse for apathy in the face of suffering when possessed with outsize power and privilege: resources, status, opportunity, wealth, and access.

Most of all, the blues dispel the highfalutin, sidity, upper bourgeois, religious anxiety of the “confessional” bred within European-descended cultures--with all the trappings of shame and repression that are still dominant within “polite” societies--since Augustine wrote the Confessions around 400 AD. Rather than confessing, the blues provocatively testify and bear witness without the guilt, without shame.

These are the ideological truths of the blues. 

"Uniformity" Wins the Day: David Lehman Picks the First Line of the "Next Line, Please" Contest.

Last week, after a summer hiatus, David Lehman returned to run the American Scholar's "Next Line Please" contest. He kicked off the fall season with an invitation to submit the first line for a crowd-sourced sonnet. The only requirement? That the line end with the word "uniform."

He announced the winner today. He's what he writes:

There were so many good entries this week that it was even harder than usual to pick out a winner. I went with Michael C. Rush’s entry: “Our dreams as disparate as our days uniform,” in part because I think we can do interesting things with the antithesis set up between night and day, dreams and actuality. There is an implicit “are” between “days” and “uniform.” But I was also intrigued by the possibility of an invisible apostrophe after “days.” That is, a listener without seeing the poem might think that the word uniform in “days[’] uniform” refers to an item of apparel. It is clear that the primary meaning has to do with sameness (uniformity), but the buried metaphor has a definite appeal.

Continue reading over at the American Scholar and find out how you can can compete for line 2 of the crowd-sourced sonnet.  

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews