The Best American Poetry

Caged But Free ... Lehman has picked line five of the crowd-sourced sonnet. You can write line six.

David Lehman has picked line five of the crowd-sourced sonnet-in-progress over at the American Scholar. You have until November 15 to write line six. Here's the sonnet to date:

Our dreams as disparate as our days uniform,                   
We crave a lovely scandal with someone well-known;     
Midnight champagne, penthouse lit by thunderstorm,    
In this version of darkness, we are never alone.                 

If marriage is a cage, we can force the lock, but he    

And here's what David has to say about line five and his requirement for line six: 

Line five of our sonnet-in-progress is also the first line of our second stanza, a lot rides on it. The best candidate, in my view, is Christine Rhein’s “If marriage is a cage, we can force the lock, but he …”  This line introduces the subject of marriage, the metaphor of the locked cage, and the conditional construction that leaves the reader wondering what “he” will do and how that will affect our situation of dreams, scandal, penthouse, and darkness lit up by lightning. . . 

For line six–the second line of stanza two of our sonnet in the making–the requirement is that the line must end with the word “learn.”

Continue reading here. . .

Remember: You must enter at the American Scholar site. 

-- sdh

Madame Bovary 2 [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

If anyone ever needed Debtor's
Anonymous it was Emma Bovary.
She loved aqua lampshades and hosiery
made of pink silk. Her husband was clueless
re: The big A. Brazen cuckolds slept stress-
free in Charles' own examining room.
"Why don't you go shopping with Leon?"
Charles said, the ultimate dummy in love
and finance. Thank God no shopping channels
existed in that part of France. Or Lotto.
The Medical Convention was not
where Emma wanted to go for kicks. Paris
was cruelly tempting with its frivolous
pastries, its crudités, its Eiffel Tower.

DD: It was through writing with you, Maureen, that my terror of writing sonnets evaporated. You are so skilled at compression. Through example, you taught me to get over my fear of writing in form. When we first started collaborating, I tended (according to Frost anyway) to write without a net, sometimes without a ball or racket! I’m sure it was your idea to hide our first lines from each other, start rhyming with each other’s second lines and then rhyme the final line of the poem with the first line. “Madame Bovary 2” also comes from our second round of “little novels,” written in 1997. I’m pretty sure we wrote this right after “The Scarlet Letter,” thus the “big A” was still on our minds. Remember all those yellow and black Cliffs Notes we bought and marked up as we wrote these poems? I recalled reading Madame Bovary in high school, but none of it stuck except Flaubert saying, "Madame Bovary, c’est moi,” which, of course, isn’t even in the book.

MS: I love that when we collaborate we sometimes write without a net and sometimes with the intensity/boundary of compression. On another note, I was surprised, looking back at our emails, that we’d done so much editing of our sonnets. Peacefully, as always. Here’s an exchange from our letters (not sure who is who) that shows how we negotiated what poems (and words) to include in the chapbook:

—In “Wuthering Heights 1” the word "buxom" may be problematic, as it also appears in “Madame Bovary 3”. Could we change a “buxom”?
—Let's take out “Wuthering Heights 1”.
—Do you want to take out the poem WH1 or the word “buxom” in WH1? I’d like to keep the poem and change “buxom” in MB3.
—Ok. That sounds fine by me. What can we change “buxom” to?

(We eventually changed “buxom” in “Madame Bovary 3” to “winsome”.)

A Poetic Form Based on Your Phone Number [by Robert Schultz]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                     NOV. 9, 2015

ANNOUNCING THE CREATION OF A NEW POETIC FORM

The Poertner . . .

is a syllabic poem of 10 lines in three stanzas, in which the number of syllables in each line is determined by the recipient’s phone number, for example:

7         Sparked because the area

5         code is the inverse

7         of her favorite form—haiku—

6         with people glued to their

2         cell phones,

0

4         it's a way to

6         connect without looking

7         up. To profess love on a

4         miniature screen.

- Emily Sierra Poertner

Devotees of the Poertner see it as a revival of Frank O’Hara’s Personism, “which puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style.”

About zeros: Parnassian practitioners of this form say that a zero dictates a skipped line with a return. Others suggest that the zero be used as a “wild card”; one can omit the line (as in the example above), replacing it with a space or, alternatively, write a line of any length, up to 9 syllables (as below).

The inventor of this form is Emily Sierra Poertner, and she is happy to receive Poertners at the number shown above. Her peers have named the form after its creator. On the question of the zero, Ms. Poertner says, “For me, it dictates a skipped line, but the form isn’t mine anymore. I see chains of Poertners flying around cyberspace, linking people like old-fashioned chain letters, but with sweet, funny poems instead of death threats.”

7         The poem must move between

5         author and reader

7         “Lucky-Pierre, style,” as Frank

6         O’Hara said. It must

2         move like

0         a letter, but now text

4         or email or

6         whatever comes next. It

7         must resist “must” in favor

4         of fun, of love.

-- Robert Schultz

Thanks for the Shout-Out!

One of the most interesting things to watch as [David] Lehman's forewords fare forward thought a quarter of a century is the increasing recognition of the Internet as a valid site for publication. The first full acknowledgment of this reality is in his foreword to the 2009 anthology, in which he states,"The Internet has multiplied the number of places in which a poem may appear." Following that is the announcement that in 2008, Best American Poetry launched its own blog. And that blog, I have to say, has become one of the liveliest expressions of the originating principle of the anthology. It is a daily sign, dispatched by David Lehman and the host of bloggers he has invited to join him, that poetry in all its forms is alive." 

 -- from The Judgement of Poetry, by Mark Jarman, The Hudson Review, Volume LXVIII, Number 3, Autumn 2015 (Review of David Lehman's The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry 1988-2014)

-- sdh

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Alice in Wonderland 2 [poem and commentary by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton]

There were things in Alice that would give Freud
the creeps. There were things in Caterpillar—
like anal retention and a stellar
denial—that made him the larva
most unlikely to cast aside angry flaws
and thrive. Economists rarely divide
and subtract at the same time, unlike
the Queen of Hearts who'd off the heads of gods
and eat bucketfuls of kidney stew and lard-
laced frosted cakes. Her heartburn was olive green,
the color of nightmares. Forget obscene
sex dreams, Alice saw it all, falling
into gravity-less worlds, crawling
through childhood where no one spoke her language.

DD: I am so happy, Maureen, that you saved the letter you wrote to Marilyn Johnson at Pearl Editions (in July of 2001) explaining our chapbook project. It reads partly, “The idea for Little Novels came about in a discussion Denise and I had regarding the sonnet. We were struck with the way a sonnet encapsulates a narrative. It seemed to us that a single sonnet (especially the contemporary sonnet) can tell a very long story in just fourteen lines. We thought: They’re like little novels!” I remember this conversation! We must have talked about this in the spring or summer of 1996. According to my notes on submissions, we started by sending out the companion poems “Frankenstein,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” “Little Women,” “Jane Eyre,” “Wuthering Heights,” and “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Prairie Schooner and Indiana Review were the first to take poems from the series. As you know, I’ve always been fond of the “Alice in Wonderland” sonnets which must have been written the following summer since we didn’t send those out until September of 1997. According to our exchanges on the poems, I gently persuaded you to keep them in the chapbook. Do you like the poem now any better? I know sometimes time changes the way we feel about our work. The “kidney stew” in this poem was originally “mutton stew,” but your keen eye noticed there was already mutton in “Jane Eyre 2.” You wrote, “Those English sure are limited meat-wise!”

MS: I was excited every time we began to “shrink” a book. I couldn’t wait to see where those hidden lines of exquisite corpse might lead us—to what imaginary groove. I think we could have written a dozen or more sonnets about Wonderland, Denise, and I would still have wanted more. How about it? The project seems so rarefied to me now as I look back on that summer (those summers?) in New York. Focused. Magical. Had The Gap opened yet to the cold shoulders of East Villagers? Was there a demon Starbucks across from the behemoth Barnes and Noble? How lucky we’ve been, writing together all these years. It’s true, time can change the way we feel about our work—and, in this case, I’m all in!

David Lehman in the Wall Street Journal (11/6/15) on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

One of Gustave Doré’s celebrated engravings illustrating the poem. PHOTO: ART RESOURCE

The scariest great poem in the English language was written by a young genius of limitless potential who turned into an opium addict, was besotted by German metaphysical philosophy, and was plagued by ill health and a loveless marriage. Though he considered himself a slothful failure, Samuel Taylor Coleridge left us a portfolio of astounding poems that includes not only “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” but “Kubla Khan” (which he characteristically denigrated as a mere “fragment”). He also produced a prose masterpiece (“Biographia Literaria”), invented the conversation poem (“This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”), and was present at the creation of a major literary movement.

With William Wordsworth, Coleridge was co-author of “Lyrical Ballads” (1798), the book that launched the Romantic revolution in English poetry. The first and longest poem in the book—one of only four by Coleridge (his collaborator had 20)—is the immortal “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

The two men had divided their task by subject matter. To Wordsworth were assigned the poems of “ordinary life,” to Coleridge the poems of a “supernatural” nature. But supernatural, as Coleridge fancied it, did not mean unreal. On the contrary, as he wrote in “Biographia Literaria,” the “supernatural” incidents and characters he meant to treat would seem intensely “real…to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency.” What was required of the reader, he went on, was just “that willful suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is a ballad, heavy on repetition, with at times a deliberately archaic diction (“Eftsoons his hand dropt he”) and at times a remarkable simplicity and alliterative musicality—as when the lone survivor of a calamity at sea feels his utter isolation: “Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea! / And never a saint took pity on / My soul in agony.”

Most of the poem’s 625 lines are in quote marks, a ghostly narrative told by the title character to a man on his way to a wedding feast. The old man’s “glittering eye” has mesmerized the listener, who hears a story the mariner has told before and will tell again as he roams around the world in a perpetual state of contrition.

The mariner had gone to sea in fair weather, on a ship full of sailors and with a benevolent albatross as escort. Without warning or provocation the mariner, with his crossbow, shoots the bird—and suddenly the luck of the sailors changes drastically. There is no wind; the ship is paralyzed, and the men on board hang the albatross around the guilty mariner’s neck. The men are listless, “with throats unslaked, with black lips baked.”

A ship approaches, but on it are only two figures: Death and Death-in-Life. They roll the dice, and Death-in-Life claims the albatross’s assassin, ceding the rest of the crew to her “Deathmate.”

The men die. Surrounded by their corpses, the mariner beholds the “slimy” creatures of the deep, despising them. But it is here that the redemptive epiphany occurs. As if blessed by an invisible agent, he looks into the sea and finds himself sharing the blessing with the water snakes below. The moment he blesses the repulsive creatures, the albatross falls off his neck.

This is the moral climax of the poem, the primary lesson that the mariner teaches his captive audience. All of creation deserves our praise. But the phantasmagoria has only just begun. The mariner sees the dead men rise in the air, “inspirited.” But the “lonesome Spirit from the south-pole”—as Coleridge puts it in the helpful prose gloss he added to the poem for an 1817 edition—“still requireth vengeance.” The mariner falls into a trance when his vessel moves northward at supernatural speed. He will have another ghastly vision of his shipmates before the terms of his absolution are communicated to him. He is to wander the earth reciting his tale. “The moment that his face I see, / I know the man that must hear me.”

The disaster at sea, the shipwreck, the ghostly visions and supernatural interventions—these, rendered in unforgettable verse, transcend the realm of morality and ethics. Coleridge here (and in “Kubla Khan”) achieves a power of enchantment unique in English poetry. When I think of this bard of the uncanny, I summon up the magical image that concludes “Kubla Khan”: “Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy dread, / For he on honey-dew hath fed, / And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Read this over at Wall Street Journal here. (paywall)

Read The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1817 edition, here. 

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton, Guest Authors November 9-13

This week we welcome Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton as our guest authors. 

Denise and Maureen have been collaborating for over twenty-five years. Their latest book Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations houses their earlier volumes Exquisite Politics, Oyl, and Little Novels.

Denise Duhamel is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Blowout (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Ka-Ching, Two and Two, and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, all published by University of Pittsburgh Press. She served as the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches poetry at Florida International University in Miami.

Maureen Seaton is the author of seventeen poetry collections, both solo and collaborative—most recently, Fibonacci Batman: New & Selected Poems(Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her honors include the Iowa Poetry Prize, Lambda Literary Awards for both lesbian poetry and memoir, the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, and an NEA Fellowship. Her work has been included in both the Pushcart Prize Anthology and Best American Poetry. She teaches poetry at the University of Miami, Florida. Follow her on twitter @mseaton9 .

Denise and Maureen will read together at the Miami Book Fair, November 22, 10:00 a.m.

Welcome, Denise and Maureen.

-- sdh

Notes on the Poetry Project, January 1, 1992 [by Daniel Nester]

I will close out this week with something from sorta-kinda from my new book. This is an early version of one of the chapters from my soon-to-be-released book, a memoir called Shader. 

This chapter tells the story of how I fell in love with New York City. It also has a lot more poetry world-related stuff, so it makes sense to me to share it here in BAP blog.

Wednesday, January 1, 1992. I greet the New Year from Derek’s cold concrete floor on East 37th Street. Black drapes enshroud the place in darkness and silence, save red lights and random bleeps from a wall of electronics.

I’m still stoned from last night, where I helped Derek DJ a party for Skidmore students who rented a space on Jane Street. At one point, we played “Walking on Sunshine” three times in a row while the party host, dressed in tan khakis and a rugby shirt, stood beside our booth, arms crossed.

We suspected cocaine was involved.

Derek just moved to New York City. He called his apartment “The Studio” because he’s interested in working in a recording studio, but also because it’s an illegal sublet and his place was zoned commercially. In one corner sits a mixing board, speakers, microphones, and a set of electronic drums; in another huge, sealed bins filled with pot.

Someday the next Fear of a Black Planet or Ride the Lightning will be recorded in his bathroom-less, 30-by-30-foot room in Murray Hill. For now, Derek sells pot and DJs parties to pay the rent.

Everything he says about New York makes me want to move there more. He’s played Sega against a Beastie Boy. He saw the Fat Boys record their cover of “Wipeout” in the studio he helps run.

I may be the one who graduated college, but in my mind it’s Derek who’s made it. By my fifth year of college, Derek had landed a modeling job and ended up on a billboard above a V.I.M. Jeans store on Lower Broadway.

We stood across the street once, admiring a 20-foot tall image of him. Two skinny models curled up on the floor around at his feet, reaching up his legs like he was a god.

And I thought to myself: I wear a tie to a proofreading job at Arthur Andersen. I make 11 dollars an hour. Derek gets to do modeling shoots, bang hot chicks and smoke all the pot he wants. Punk rock and hair metal have died on the vine, Freddie Mercury is dead, Nirvana has the number 1 album and the golden age of rap is over. And me? I’m still in fucking Philadelphia, checking the grammar on Arthur Andersen accounting reports.

***

Walter Benjamin uses the phrase “profane illumination” to describe surrealism, how to place language before meaning or even God is necessary for visions of the future.

Maybe it was time for my own surreal and profane illuminations.

***

Derek subletted his room from Lisa, a thirtysomething party planner whose 4,000-square-foot loft on the other side of the floor doubles as a space for Greek weddings and bachelor parties. This might explain the presence of the swan-and-cherub water fountain that gurgled in the middle of the living room, surrounded by Styrofoam Doric columns.

Before we left for the party, I used the hallway bathroom, and a woman dressed only in a French maid apron, and nothing more, was waiting outside. With a whip.

***

“Do you know where Saint Mark’s Poetry Project is?”

We’re playing Street Fighter on his 50-inch TV. The punch sounds pipe through studio speakers. He starts to kick my ass before I can get my bearing with the controller. We shout above the 8-bit din of karate chops and percussed punches.

“Never heard of it," Derek says. "Sounds like a place where pussy poet-types like you go hang out.”

As much as I’d like to stay and play video games all day, sitting around stoned in The Studio gets old. Leonard, a poet who owned a bookstore in Philly, told me about the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project. He said they host an all-day reading on New Year’s, a marathon event where anyone who’s anyone in New York poetry comes to read.

Allen Ginsberg will be there, Leonard said. Others I’d seen in movies and books I read outside of my college classes will be there as well—John Giorno, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll.

I want to spend the day out on my own—to find my tribe, as hokey as it may sound. I want to spend the day as a poet in New York.

“Could you just point me in the right direction?” I ask Derek.

“It must be on St. Mark’s Place, so that’s easy,” he says. “Go out the door, make a left. Then make a left on Third Avenue. Keep going until you hit St. Mark’s and make another left. St. Mark’s Place is only a two or three blocks long, so it should be there somewhere.”

***

Of course now I know directions Derek just gave me were wrong. But please remember the internet wasn’t invented yet, no Mapquest, no GPS. So cut us both a break.

Also: people from New Jersey don’t bring maps to New York. Jersey people think a city map comes with their brains or appears there once they pass Exit 12. Or we tell the cab drivers where to go.

It’s the Bridge and Tunnel Credo and we abide by it. Everyone I’ve ever met from the Midwest, for example, lands in New York armed with spiral bound atlases, tour guides, tip sheet printouts from friends on the cheapest beer or Indian food.

Jersey people just show up and ask other Jersey people. Or we tail Midwesterners.

***

So I go outside and sneak along the Queens Midtown Tunnel traffic on 37th Street, take a left downtown on Third Avenue. Murray Hill is by no means scenic, I know this now, but to my mind back then it was a stroll along the Champs Elysees.

The bodegas and doorman buildings and taxis in dormant midtown, the closed-up curry places on 29th, the large intersections at 23rd and 14th, all of it was part of my own production of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, everyone sing-talking, and I was Catherine Deneuve, ingénue from the provinces.

“Everything becomes an allegory for me,” Baudelaire writes. That was the life I wanted to lead. I want to allow things to happen to me, to be the flâneur, the dandy who wanders the streets, open to each experience what comes. I wanted to allow myself to get lost, to make mistakes, to loaf around.

I wanted to lead an allegory-filled life. I was 22 years old and walking in New York on my own.

***

I get to Saint Mark’s Place and I turn left and I start to look for the words "Poetry" or "Project," or anyone with a piece of paper reciting a poem. Nothing. Halfway down the block, I start to get nervous. Where is this place? Am I lost? Why is St. Mark’s Place deserted?

It’s New Year’s Day, 1992, and I figure real New Yorkers are still sleeping or snorting lines of coke in their apartments. Why did I go out into the cold only to get lost twenty blocks away? And why did I get stoned before doing this?

The tinnitus from last night’s acid jazz rings in my ear. Last night, after the countdown, I flirted with a beautiful Jewish girl. I knew she was Jewish because she asked me if I was Jewish. She only dated Jewish boys, she said.

I’m not Jewish, I told her, but I’d be willing convert. For her.

That’s all it took for us to make out for a few seconds behind Derek’s DJ table. She agreed to meet me for coffee that night at a bakery on the Upper East Side. Telling her I was going to a poetry reading the next day only made me seem more mysterious, I’d like to think.

As she wrote down the bakery’s address on a napkin, I imagined sitting beside her, twirling her brown curls, telling her I was already circumcised. It would be erotic in a sophisticated, Woody Allen movie sorta way.

***

I spotted a building in the middle of the block, its bottom half painted white. Down a half-flight of steps sat a circle of people, each holding what looked like manuscripts on their laps. This must be the place, I thought. The New Year’s Day Marathon Poetry Reading!

It didn’t surprise me that the attendees were mostly older men, or that half were black and the other half hippy white guys. This was the scene at most poetry readings. I spotted a lady in a Holly Hobbie dress who stood beside a coffee urn atop the table in the back.

She wiped the drip catcher with a paper towel vigorously, like it was a precious stone.

I found the first free folding chair and sat down and focused on the reading. Across from me a man was reading a poem.

“I am now clean more than 60 days,” he said. “I know I can make it. I know I can.”

I listened some more. And then I thought to myself that the work there seemed, well, pedestrian. It was hard for me not to be critical, having just taken my first graduate poetry workshop at Rutgers.

The poem from the next person, his voice Barry White-deep, also had a daily affirmation quality. Where are the metaphor and images, the figurative language? I thought.

I started to grimace. Was this as good as the work gets at St. Mark’s Poetry Project? What’s going on? Here I am on poetry holy ground and I am thinking, I can do better than these guys.

***

“Did you sign up for the reading yet?”

Holly Hobbie stood next to me at the coffee urn. We’re taking a break and everyone’s smoking out on St. Mark’s. The drip catcher is still attached to her hand, and she’s still buffing the steel.

“I didn’t know you could sign up,” I said.

This is my chance to be discovered, I think. See, I say to myself, being a flâneur can have its benefits. Like every aspiring poet in their early twenties, I just happen to have a printout of My Entire Collected Works in my backpack.

I start to think: how many minutes is the set? Is it one poem or two?

“This a surprise,” I said. “I thought the reading was only for famous poets.”

“Famous?” she said. “This is open for all of our clients.”

“Clients?”

Why would the St. Mark’s Poetry Project have clients?

As Holly explained to me the format of the reading, I concluded that this is not in fact St. Mark’s Poetry Project, that this was another place entirely. This was a place for people in drug recovery. The people here reading their poems were clients, drug addicts sharing their work to each other as they fought to stay sober—a particularly hard thing to do for some after New Year’s Eve, Holly pointed out.

The coffee urn gurgles, lets out steam. I take a cup, fill it with sugar and milk. Barry White voice guy points me in the direction of the Poetry Project.

***

When I was 22, those whole blocks in New York become an allegory for a wonderful confusion, a confusion of streets and cars and possibility, a chaos that calms me down. This is what life, what a city, should be.

I found the place I was looking for, and it was only when I got there I realized the name of the place used the same word Derek and his building mates used: Project. The Poetry Project. This seemed significant to me then. It was so warm inside, with food and coffee and poems. 

It was only when I reached my destination that I felt every missed connection, every day feeling out of place, without words, every song I felt spoke to me, every poem I heard read into the evening, was part of the same flâneurian experience. Things added up to something.

Lying on the rug off to the side of the Saint Mark’s stage that day, all of the poems seemed addressed to me.

It was all felt as one, a single poem.

***

That mistaken place on St. Mark’s, I found out, is the site of the Electric Circus discotheque, where Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Velvet Underground happened in 1966. It is also where I thought I would have my New York poetry debut in 1992.

That night, I walked uptown to the bakery to meet the Jewish girl, and I ended up talking to another girl by mistake. She was going to meet someone on a blind date, and thought I was the guy. Her date came and the Jewish girl never showed up.

I went back to Derek’s and recorded crappy demos all night.

It all made sense to me, all part of the same poem, the same song, which I would never get around to finishing.

20 Things Not to Do at an Open Poetry Reading [by Daniel Nester]

1. Write your name illegibly on the sign-up sheet.

2. Complain to host when he/she can’t read/pronounce your last name.

3. Go over the allotted time, so much so that you are mistaken for the “featured” reader, who has traveled three hours on an interstate to promote her most recent book, and has advertised the event on her personal website, Facebook author page, sent announcements college alumni listserv (undergraduate and graduate), as well as posted to Twitter and Snapchat accounts.

4. Go over time by reading a poem that combines several short poems into a single, multisectioned SuperPoem®, which uses different voices (precocious child, mermaid, Muddy Waters) and which features with an epigraph, a joke in Latin, which you do not translate and yet giggle to yourself before proceeding with main body of the poem.

5. Tell host you need to read first, last, or “when my friends get here.”

6. While onstage, complain about how bad most poetry is then fail to realize the mountain of social privilege and assumed power required to proclaim oneself the final gatekeeper of what counts as good or bad poetry.

7. Complain about writing workshops.

8. Then lead one yourself.

9. Read poem you just wrote about being outside at a coffee shop, which addresses your thoughts about how hard it is to write a poem in a coffee shop, what with all clanging of porcelain and milk getting frothed.

10. Mention journal your poem was published in before you read it, as if to say, you better like this poem.

11. Complain about poetry slam’s format and hip-hop MC style, being competitive or too showy or adhering to some random, three-minute limit.

12. Proceed to perform a poem, in hip-hop MC style, that clocks in at two minutes, 57 seconds.

13. Plan another open mic with the same people at the open mic where you are reading.

14. Prick thigh with ballpoint pen every time anyone says the following words: “darkness,” “fuck,” “loamy,” “gleam,” “amongst,” “nevermore,” “nothingness,” “cumquat,” “capitalism,” “shame.”

15. Complain about the exclusiveness and ivory tower mentality of colleges and all those student-types who take creative writing classes.

16. Talk about how you first discovered poetry with professor X in college.

17. Avoid speaking into the microphone provided by your host, then ask if people can hear you.

18. Read narrative lyric poem about any of the following: 1. your dog; 2. going out into the woods and feeling vaguely religious; 3. Sharing hummus with your lover.

19. Precede your poem by explaining everything about the poem—the story, inspiration, place it was written, time of year the action takes place—and then repeat this same information in the title of the poem. 
For example, your poem might be inspired by your going to art galleries with an ex-lover in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, in the middle of winter. Explain all this, and then introduce your poem entitled “Visiting Art Galleries with Ex-Lover, Chelsea, Mid-Winter, 2009.”

20. Promote an open mic at another open mic.

On "What Shall We Ask of Writers?" by Albert Maltz (1946) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Do his observations hold true today?

Over at Design*Sponge, one of my favorite blogs, Grace Bonney has introduced a new column wherein she asks favorite artists or designers to show and describe their teenage bedrooms. This got me thinking so I went through some old photos and found this one, of my sister:

She's reading "A Long Day in a Short Life," by Albert Maltz (1908 –1985), who wrote fiction, plays, and screenplays. Maltz was one of "the Hollywood Ten," a group of writers who were blacklisted when they refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee's questions about Communist Party affiliations, their own and those of their friends and colleagues. Maltz was fined and, in 1950, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. Blacklisted in Hollywood and unable to work there for many years, he moved to Mexico after his release from prison and remained until 1962.

In 1946 Maltz published a controversial essay in which he criticized the shallow aesthetic tenets of the left, questioning whether art was to be used as a weapon in the class war. Here are a few excerpts.

It has been my conclusion for some time that much of left-wing artistic activity—both creative and critical-— has been restricted, narrowed, turned away from life, sometimes made sterile —because the atmosphere and thinking of the literary left wing has been based upon a shallow approach. Let me add that the left wing has also offered a number of vital intellectual assets to the writer—such as its insistence that important writing cannot be socially idle —that it must be humane in content, etc. Schneider enumerated these assets and I take them here for granted. But right now it is essential to discuss where things have gone wrong—why and how. I believe the effects of the shallow approach I have mentioned—like a poison in the bloodstream—largely cause the problems Schneider mentioned. Indeed, these problems are merely the pustules upon upon the body, the sign of ill health . . .

Whatever its original stimulating utility in the late twenties or the early thirties, this doctrine—"art is a weapon" —over the years, in day-to-day wear and tear, was converted from a profound analytic, historical insight into a vulgar slogan: "art should be a weapon." This, in turn, was even more narrowly interpreted into the following: "art should be a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon." Finally, in practice, it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless or escapist or vicious. The result of this abuse and misuse of a concept upon the critic's apparatus of approach has been, and must be, disastrous. From it flow all of the constrictions and—we must be honest— stupidities—-too often found in the earnest but narrow thinking and practice of the literary left wing in these past years. And this has been inevitable. First of all, under the domination of this vulgarized approach, creative works are judged primarily by their formal ideology. What else can happen if art is a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon? If a work, however thin or inept as a piece of literary fabric, expresses ideas that seem to fit the correct political tactics of the time, it is a foregone conclusion that it will be reviewed warmly, if not enthusiastically. But if the work, no matter how rich in human insight, character portrayal and imagination, seems to imply "wrong" political conclusions, then it will be indicted, severely mauled or beheaded—as the case may be. 

Maltz was criticized harshly for the essay, so much so that he printed a retraction. Too bad. Do you think his observations hold true today? 

You can read the complete essay here. 

Maltz wrote the film "The House I Live In," a short in which Frank Sinatra teaches a group of children about religious tolerance. The title song is inspiring. You can read more about the film in David Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One-Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. 

Your Five Favorite Songs and Dances [by David Lehman]

I sometimes think that the ideal form for some poems may be the table of contents. Inveterate list-maker that I am, I am quite certain that the list or catalogue qualifies as a distinctively American form though hardly an indigenous one. Whitman’s lists in “Song of Myself” rank at the top of anyone’s list of great nineteenth-century list poems, and I’d argue that Cole Porter’s You’re the Top should occupy a similar position in the modern period.

Today, with Hollywood on my mind, I thought I’d offer up a pair of top-five lists, one devoted to the best performance of a song, the other to the best dance sequence, in classic American movies.

Songs:

1)      Over the Rainbow / Judy Garland / Wizard of Oz / Harold Arlen (music), Yip Harburg (words)

2)      As Times Goes By / Dooley Wilson / Casablanca / Herman Hupfield

3)      The Man That Got Away / Judy Garland / A Star is Born / Arlen & Ira Gershwin

4)      Well, Did You Evah? / Sinatra and Crosby / High Society / Cole Porter

5)      I'm Through with Love / Marilyn Monroe / Some Like It Hot / & Gus Kahn with Matt Malneck and Fud Livingston

6)      Bye, Bye, Baby / Marilyn Monroe, Jane Russell and male chorus / Gentlemen Prefer Blondes / Jule Styne & Leo Robin

7)      NY NY / Kelly, Sinatra, Jules Munshin / On the Town / Bernstein with Comden and Green

I see I got carried away and listed seven. Just think of it as a five-way tie for third place.

Dances:

1)      “Singin' in the Rain.” Gene Kelly. Singin' in the Rain. Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed.  

2)      “Never Gonna Dance.” Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Swing Time. Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields,

3)      “Cheek to Cheek”: Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Top Hat. Irving Berlin.

4)      “Yankee Doodle Dandy”. James Cagney. Yankee Doodle Dandy. George M. Cohan. 

5)      A toss-up between Astaire and Cy Charisse at the “Dem Bones Café” in The Band Wagon (Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz) and “America” (choreography Jerome Robbins; Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim), in West Side Story.

One virtue of such lists is that they reward the impulse toward inclusiveness.

Another is that they invite readers to counter with a rival list after voicing their outrage: How could he have left out “Comedy Tonight” from Richard Lester’s 1966 film version of Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum? Or "Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome," the great opening number featuring Joel Grey and chorus in Cabaret (1972)? How about Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen doing Rodgers’s “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” in On Your Toes, or Kelly on roller skates in It’s Always Fair Weather, or Dan Daley's drunk scene in the same movie, or the ballet that Kelly and Leslie Caron perform in Gershwin’s An American in Paris? About my own list, I note only and without comment that among composers only Harold Arlen and Leonard Bernstein appear more than once; among the performers, this is true of Sinatra, Astaire, Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Judy Garland.

And, David, can you really overlook the Bernard Herrmann song that loudly serenades Charles Foster Kane at the top of his career as a newspaper magnate?

And Dean Martin and company singing "That's Amore" in The Caddie ain't chopped liver.

Perhaps, in another post, I will talk about background music (like the stirring strain  Elmer Bernstein created for The Magnficent Seven or the march he wrote for The Great Escape) with a special sidebar on Herrmann's contributions to Hitchcock's movies.

Please nominate your favorites. -- DL

Swoonatra: The Hits Keep Coming! [by Stacey Harwood]

Sinatra’s Century by David Lehman

David continues to get well-deserved praise for Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. Friends both near and far are writing to tell him how much they enjoy the book. Sometimes they make recommendations, like this one from Richard Snow. It's very much of its time (1944):

Some Words on 'Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese' c. 1991 [by Daniel Nester]

A few years ago, a friend gave me a writing prompt: "re-visit an essay you wrote years ago and write another essay on that."

Very essayistic, I thought.

So I dug up an old paper, “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese,” which I wrote as an unmatriculated graduate student, and got to essaying.

Before I get started, I just want to say that I do like yogurt. I especially like it with cherries, strawberries, or blueberries. That’s because, I’m told, yogurt isn’t actually what it appears to be: the bacteria change the chemical make-up of the milk product, making it a completely different substance. Different, say, than cheese.

I am reading a printout of a 24-year-old piece of writing. My writing. The pages came from a friend’s word processor, which I borrowed whenever something was due and I couldn’t make it to the computer lab. It was really a typewriter with a floppy disk drive. Its dot matrix printer would issue dolphin-like sounds as it printed out, line by line.

The memory of old technology and these yellowed pages force me to think about an earlier version of myself, a writer but not yet a writer.

***

I wrote an essay. In this essay, I write about cheese, but also, in no particular order, fondue, city-dwelling, dinner parties, and a fear of cunnilingus.

I hate cheese. I hate how it smells, how it tastes. I hate how it goes down my digestive tract. It more than doesn’t agree with me—I disagree with cheese. It alienates me at the dinner table. Cheese is my kryptonite, my garlic clove; melted cheese is the goop that ruins my meals, smelling up the room, the dreaded killer ingredient that demarcates me from all that is cheese-loving.

The essay was an assignment for a graduate class I took the summer after I graduated college. I treated myself to two graduate classes at the Rutgers campus in Camden, NJ as a non-matriculated student in Fall 1991. I was 23. I had won a product liability settlement from a lawnmower manufacturer after one of its models drove off by itself and sliced off my Achilles Five years later, I cleared $40,000. Not a lot of money, as these things go, but it did give me some time to think and not work. I nicknamed the check "my ticket to the middle class."

Paying for these classes was my way of forcing the question of whether I was cut out to be a writer. I knew I was going to keep writing anyway, whether I knew if I sucked or not. 

Writers crave approval. No surprise there. Younger writers crave approval more so than older ones, I think it’s fair to say? Or maybe I’m just saying that to feel better, not that I am old. When I think back to coming up with things to write for this class, what I remember is a desire to impress not myself, but my teacher.

My ultimate dream: that I would be taken aside and told that I was a writer, a potentially a great writer. I wanted to rest under someone’s wing. I wanted someone to validate me not just as a writer, but as a human being. I'm still waiting for that to happen.

***

The class was called “Writing the Personal Essay,” I think. The assignment was simply to write an essay. There were no parameters that I can recall, no page count or word limit.

We were reading other essays—short pieces from people like Max Apple, Philip Lopate, and Nora Ephron. What I handed in was called “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese.” I look at these pages now and can say I’m proud of it in the way one might be proud after doing a song justice on a karaoke night. I can’t say that for much of the writing I did from when I was younger--most of it would charitably be called apprentice work. But this essay seems different.

***

I do eat pizza…with the cheese scraped off.  When you’re the lone cheese-hater in a world of goopy cheese enthusiasts, you adapt.  And, being the grand exception, I endure the Dreaded Cheese Question even when eating a slice of sauced-up crust. Of course, since my condition is so rare and inexcusable, everyone is entitled to bring up “Dan’s cheese problem.”

This is less about talent and more about ambition and imitation. It’s more about how writing, or learning to write, is often about manners and pedigree as much as it is about learning to write a sentence. I am amazed how I could mimic the style of 50-year-old essayists, how grumpy and old-sounding I sound.

There are a lot twentysomethings who say they write essays, but what they really are writing are short memoir pieces. Which is fine. To write a real essay, however, means you have accumulated a wide frame of reference and not a small amount of world-weariness. To accomplish both takes time. And age. One earns the right to be an essayist; one earns the right to go nowhere and back again.

***

This is partly why the current vogue for impersonal essays irks me so. The essay is the last bastion of the solipsist in a world of above-it-all discourse. It’s a place where the first-person can exist without worrying over what’s cool and what’s not. 

Back then, the attempts at hijacking the essay into some purely aesthetic experience were yet to happen. It was 1991; the essay and its practitioners were going about their business in a steady way. The Best American Essays series had started five years before. To write an essay, to me, meant coming up with an editorial, an opinion piece, or some research paper for a literature class. I was a poet and I wasn’t particularly jazzed about writing essays. As I look at the cheese-hatred essay now, I see that I am imitating the turns and dips of a classic, wandering essay. All by accident.

***

The equation goes like this: one person with a lack of adventurous nature plus three units of fastidiousness equals one dislike for cheese.  A given for this equation is that cheese would be my liberator from cheese-hating provinciality.

Pay attention not to the matter, but to the shape I give it, Montaigne writes. I didn’t know that quote then, but I wish I did. I never could write in a straight line or tell a story from beginning to end. My papers in college were enthusiastic outbursts, engaged only if I was interested in the literature at hand. I wanted to be given free reign to writing about anything I wanted to, but had no subject matter; I wanted to write in a distinctive voice, but didn’t have one yet. A lot of writers buckle under such a wealth of possibilities, and I was one of them. Call it attention deficit syndrome, but I needed form. I needed a name for it.

To 23-year-olds like me, to write meant talking about the Big Issues of The Day. This is precisely what 23-year-olds should not talk about: most 23-year-olds do not know shit. I was no exception. Here are some things I did know about: disliking most cheeses, hating some, and being picky and arch and bitter. 

Writing should start small, with infinitesimal topics. Montaigne teaches us this as he writes about books, friends, sex, meals. These are the places essays start from. I didn’t know this then. When I wrote about cheese all those years ago, it was the first time I wrote about something small to try to talk about something big. 

***

On the way from the student center to our classroom after a reading one afternoon, one of my teachers said to me that my prose “hangs like wet laundry on the line.” I wouldn’t dispute that my writing stank. But I see promise in my younger self; I see an enthusiasm.

At restaurants, from the golden arches to Greenwich Village, from South Philly to South Street, from Greek to Italian to Mexican, from Vegetarian to down home, I’ve had to request my dishes, from appetizers to dessert, sans cheese. The waiters seem to acknowledge my predicament, even if they—and I really hate this—get the order wrong, but those I am eating with always have to bring it up.  Not only that, but just as people add new twists or just plain invent untruths just to bring something up, those I sup with always have to raise the Big Cheese Question. “Why don’t you like cheese” is followed by particularized Q & A—“You really don’t eat cheese steaks” or “What about pizza? You don’t like pizza?”

I am trying to establish some world-weariness. The Philadelphia-centric ness of “South Philly to South Street” embarrasses me, as does “sans cheese”; it occurs to me I should have either written “without cheese” or went all-in with sans fromage.

I didn’t know French, although Ms. Hogan in third grade taught us the Our Father and the sign of the cross in French, well before we found out she was a lesbian and would live in Paris with her female lover.  I knew sans, that was it. I did initial-cap the Important Idea, which was then new to me as a stylized tick. I must have picked it up in rock magazines like Record or Creem or Spin.

I don’t know why I wrote “particularized.”  That’s just awful. 

But the em-dash-set off phrase—“and I really hate this”—would find a home in any magazine article or blog post.  It’s arch and grumpy and indicates this has happened many times before.

Another paragraph:

I do hate mayonnaise, white milky sauces and creamy dips. They’re all akin to cheese, however, in their ambiance, there reason for existence; that is, to lull and creamify the palate, oozing down awful bacteria enzymes and rotten milk, passing it off with the fancy rubric of curds and whey; or, the most painful, smelly, gooey, cataclysmic version of cheesedom, fondue.

Hooray for me is what I think when I read this. Hooray for “cataclysmic version of cheesedom.” Hooray for “fancy rubric,” whatever I meant there. When I read “reason for existence,” I think that maybe I did know some French phrases, and maybe I am using the English transliteration of raison d’être to an ironic end, which would have been kinda masterful for me at the time. I doubt it. 

I don’t know why I put “however” in the middle of the second sentence; my best guess is that I just learned that one should place this conjunctive adverb inside commas when placed mid-sentence. The same applies to the rather random use of a semicolon after “whey.”  I am sure I committing the usual college writer sin of using semicolons to sound smart and accomplishing the opposite.  If I wrote that now, I would have placed another verb after the semicolon or just broke off into a new sentence fragment entirely and avoid drawing attention to it more.

Maybe I was millionth monkey who wrote a Shakespeare play, or a boilerplate comedy-of-manners personal essay. I read this paragraph and feel relieved.

***

Perhaps the best part of the essay has nothing to do with what I say it how I use other people’s words. My roommate at the time suggested that there was a connection between my hatred of certain types of smelly cheeses to my aversion to performing oral sex on my lady friends. This was, to me, shocking, and I remember debating whether or not to include it in my draft. As it turns out, that was the most interesting part of the whole thing.

The sexual theory started in my late teens when I admitted to my old roommate that I had not yet had a satisfactory experience giving a woman oral sex.  In another brilliant equation by people appalled that I would not each cheese, I now had to deal with a feminist theory that held I was selfish for not liking cheese as if I did not want to gratify women by eating them.

This made no sense and complete sense at the same time, and that’s why it worked.

I feel tempted to update this passage in matters of fact. Or in one matter of fact. Namely: I got over whatever aversion to lady-pleasing I might or might no have had back then, and very quickly. The thought occurs to me that I could accomplish this by using figurative language, that I often enjoy munching on a nice slice of manchego or stilton from time to time. Something like that.

***

When I look at this essay about my hatred of cheese, I see attempts to sound sophisticated, or my version of sophistication as a 23-year-old from South Jersey. As William Carlos Williams might have put it, I had no peasant tradition to give me character. I was the son of a truck driver and a part-time secretary and went to the college nearest my home. My English professors were sophisticated Martians who didn’t tell tales from their own lives. I remember trying to make them break character. They never did.

I see this essay about hating cheese, ultimately, as paying attention not to the matter but to the shape I gave it, which wasn’t really hating cheese, but getting some corner of my mind on paper.

The Weakness in Me: Notes on Joan Armatrading [by Daniel Nester]

There are certain albums I pair exclusively with cassettes. I doubt there will be a tape revival anytime soon, at least as big as the current vinyl boom. Still, people of a certain age, myself included, continue to dub copies and take out write-protect tabs in our dreams.

My personal cassette canon includes Squeeze’s Singles 45s and Under, which one hot afternoon fused onto the top lip of the stereo in my 1972 Ford Country Squire and remained there for months. There’s R.E.M.’s Reckoning, which I purchased after hearing “Radio Free Europe” on a college kid’s stereo. Face Value, Phil Collins’s solo debut, was the only selection me and this dude who wore a confederate wool cap could agree on playing as we mopped up hallways at my Catholic grade school.

Then there's Joan Armatrading’s Track Record, which I bought on impulse one day at a Sam Goody. I only had an interview in Musician magazine to go on. That and the cover: a woman with her not insubstantial afro, who crouches in profile atop a grand piano in runner’s starting block pose.

***

“I never heard of Joan Armatrading,” the full-page ad from New York magazine reads, “but she knew me.” In the ad, a woman sits on an oriental rug, headphones off to the side. She sips tea and stares into the eyes of the Joan Armatrading pictured on her third self-titled LP from 1976, the one with her breakthrough songs “Down to Zero” and “Love and Affection.” “I discovered Joan Armatrading,” the ad continues. “An incredible artist who happens to be a woman. She’s been in the places I’ve been, felt the feelings I’ve felt.”

In 1984, there wasn’t that much difference between myself and the woman in the ad with the short Sandy Duncan haircut. I bought Track Record after a series of girls had turned down my offer of being their date to the junior prom. I now know that I first heard Joan Armatrading under ideal laboratory conditions: a rain-filled day, alone in a house, wearing headphones, drinking tea.

***

I write this a few months after seeing Joan Armatrading on what has been billed as her final world tour. I sat in the fourth row, accompanied by my wife and friends for what I regarded as a bookend to that afternoon more than 30 years ago. This was one of a few occasions where I wanted others to hear music I had listened to for years in some attempt to “convert” them, or at least appreciate what I appreciated. It’s been a mostly impossible task over the years (or too effortful, to use a word my old therapist used) to try and balance enjoying live music and making sure my companions aren’t in hell while as stand in front of bands with names like Lubricated Goat or the Blue Aeroplanes. But I try.

***

Armatrading’s career spans four decades, twenty-plus albums, a catalog filled with songs about love and losing love and relationships and solitude. Born in 1950 on the West Indies island of Saint Kitt’s, Joan Armatrading moved with her family to Birmingham, England when she was three. A 1977 New Yorker Talk of the Town piece focuses on her modest upbringing: her house and large family in the slum housing estates; the lack of formal musical training, the first guitar, purchased by her mother in exchange for two baby strollers; dropping out of school to work in a factory at 15.

Armatrading left for London to join the touring cast of Hair, then spent a year on the dole to write music with a partner, Pamela Nestor, with whom she split after her first album, 1972’s Whatever’s For Us. The record label bigwig, the story goes, had focused more on Armatrading’s voice and so she was signed as a solo act rather than as a duo. That split with her only songwriting partner is one of the only points of intrigue I can find in Armatrading’s past, and even that isn’t so juicy. Nestor produced one reggae-ish solo single a couple years later, and eventually dropped out of the music business altogether. Other than an abstract for her Ph.D. thesis, there’s no sign of her online.

***

Writing this, I find myself trying to dig up conflict or an arc in Joan Armatrading’s story, if only to bring some shape or context to my love of her music. Although it’s not necessary for me to know about people’s personal life to enjoy their art, I would be dishonest if I said that sometimes it helps me round out and even increase my appreciation. Take Dennis Wilson, the troubled late drummer of the Beach Boys. The main story behind the Beach Boys is of Brian Wilson, Dennis’s brother, the troubled genius who wrote the majority of the band’s classic songs. But there’s a subplot with Dennis Wilson, who died in 1983 at 39 and recorded a single solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, an uneven collection of Beach Boys-like tunes, in 1977. If Dennis Wilson wasn’t a member of the Beach Boys, and I didn’t know about his troubled life, I wouldn’t find myself rooting for him as I listen to Pacific Ocean Blue, overjoyed to hear the full realization of a minor songwriter’s talents. Without that story, I might have listened to the record once and sold it back to buy a Dire Straits CD.

There’s really no story or scandal to attach to Armatrading, no core narrative or specific identity to think about while listening to her music, and it’s largely by her own design. What sets her apart from other recording artists, besides her music, is who Armatrading is: namely, she’s a black woman who makes music in what has been, and still is, a white male genre of highly instrumental pop music. Maybe Joni Mitchell, another female artist, will pop up when coming up with other examples. There are others I know. For the most part over the course of her career, Armatrading has been most often compared to male artists—everyone from Jackson Browne and Elton John to Van Morrison.

“Ms. Armatrading’s music may be too tough or original for instant mass success,” John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times in 1980. “But she would seem likely to appeal to the same audiences that buy Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or Bruce Springsteen disks. Perhaps one obvious reason she hasn’t sold well so far with them is that she is black and female, and a strong-sounding woman to boot, all of which is still hard for some white, macho rock fans to accept.”

If there’s one thing I know about my fellow male fans, macho and not-macho, it’s when it comes to our worship of male rock stars, it’s that we need to know something about who we're listening to. In this sense, we are no different than teenyboppers who need to know which member of One Direction just got a tattoo. We establish thumbnails for each: Neil Young does whatever he likes. Bruce Springsteen works really hard. Elton John is gay but it’s OK. Van Morrison sometimes acts like a prick to his band. 

Try to come up with a similar précis of Joan Armatrading, and you come up empty-handed. This explains journalists’ inelegant and stupid comparisons of her to Tracey Chapman and Odetta, basically because they’re the other black women singers who play acoustic guitar, without much else in common. Armatrading has been a good sport. One 1988 Newsweek article focuses on the “flood of comparisons” to Tracy Chapman she’s gotten. Armatrading said she’s never met her and has only heard snippets of her music. What might they have in common is never really spelled out, only that they share a “throaty style of singing”?

***

The main appeal for Armatrading, besides her songs’ blend of jazz and pop, is her voice. Attempts to describe it can be measured by the degree to which they avoid failure. Joan Armatrading’s voice has been described as deep, husky, lyrical, flexible, throaty, genuine, gripping, no-nonsense, dusky, Odetta-like, headstrong, deceptively angsty, natural and artless, satisfyingly unpredictable.[1]

Also: eclectic, richly warm, gruff and percussive,[2] commanding, espresso-dark, cigar-smoky, a deep alto and gruff mezzo.[3]

Also: a “mannish, fluid alto, which at times recalls a young Nina Simone.”[4]

Also: “the aural equivalent of wrestling with a very strong woman.”[5]

***

The one real enigma has been Armatrading’s private life. Dubbed “Joan Armour-playing” by journalists, for decades she’s been cagey about her love life, her friends, sexuality. Questions about her private life have always been off-limits.

“The world doesn’t need to know what colour my bedroom walls are,” she famously told one reporter. But people do. Her songs are almost exclusively about matters of the heart, lovers and love. You would figure out something personal from all that.

Her choice of pronouns is maddeningly confusing—she prefers the second person, “you,” as opposed to a “she” or “he.” In many other songs, the speaker addresses two people. Here’s lyrics from “Down to Zero,” one of my favorite Joan songs and one of the greatest songs every recorded, if you ask me:

Brand new dandy
First class scene stealer
Walks through the crowd and takes your man
Sends you rushing to the mirror
Brush your eyebrows and say
There's more beauty in you than anyone

So who is the you here? A wronged woman? Man? Is Joan Armatrading hitting on the “you”? In the next verse, a “she” pops up.

Oh remember who walked the warm sands beside you
Moored to your heel
Let the waves come a rushing in
She'll take the worry from your head
But then again
She put trouble in your heart instead

Maybe this pronoun confusion explains why her songs strike me as so intimate: her songs are a direct address to the listener, mostly out of an effort to avoid giving away her own sexuality, which is all but certainly confirmed as a lesbian—more on that later—but the end effect is you’re listening in on an ongoing conversation among lovers, and you, dear listener, are one of them.

***

There’s a certain species of singer-songwriter who surrounded herself by rosters of crackerjack musicians. The list of star sidemen enlisted to play on Armatrading’s albums reads like a who’s who of British rock. Andy Summers played on her 1975 Back to the Night Album two years before he joined The Police, to name one noteworthy example. Mark Knopfler plays his Dire Straits guitar on the later album, 1986's The Shouting Stage.

The quality of an album doesn’t necessarily coincide with the musicians’ star power, but for my money it’s the early 80’s trio of LPs—1980’s Me Myself I, 1981’s Walk Under Ladders, and 1983’s The Key—where sidemen lift Armatrading into the stratosphere. Me Myself I has David Letterman band players Paul Shaffer, Will Lee, and Anton Fig on most of the tracks, along with the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemmons. Walk Under Ladders features Thomas Dolby on synthesizer, XTC’s Andy Partridge on guitar, and the recently deceased Rico Rodriguez on horns.

My impression had been that all these musicians volunteered to appear on Armatrading albums out of admiration of her work. But, after reading Sean Mayes’ unauthorized biography, I learned it’s more complicated than that. Producers like Glyn Johns and Steve Lillywhite lined up the musicians, and Armatrading often clashed with them in the studio, explaining her compositions and the sound she was trying to put together. There was a universal respect for Armatrading’s gift as a songwriter, but not many warm memories from these sessions.

***

I have to admit that I never gave her sexuality that much thought until the last time I saw Joan in concert at the Tower Theater in 1990. I looked around and scores of women were holding hands. I was 22, eight years since buying Track Record, and it was only then did I realize that this Joan Armatrading person might in fact attract an audience other than straight white men with mullet haircuts who played unironic air guitar to her music. I bought a biography on e-book for young adults recently, and that was how I found out Joan Armatrading had recently married her partner of many decades, Maggie Butler, in Shetland back in 2011.

These realizations seem obvious in retrospect. They also might explain how I rarely mentioned my love for her music to anyone else.

 

"The Weakness in Me" is one of those love triangle songs. I never related to threesome songs: I hardly could recruit one lover, let alone two, who loves me, at the same time. I never broke many hearts. The lyrics of “The Weakness in Me” add up to a fairly straightforward portrayal of someone who “has a lover who loves me,” while mulling over another offer, culminating in singing “I need you, and you.” It’s found several lives as backdrop to countless homemade fan videos dedicated to romances, real and imagined, on film and TV. Sometimes it’s the Melissa Etheridge piano and vocal cover of, but more often it’s Armatrading’s original.

A partial list of “Weakness in Me” fan videos [playlist here] include Andy and Sam from a show called Rookie Blue, Ashley Wilkes and Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With The Wind, Kate and Jack and Sawyer in Lost, a 2006 tearjerker called Loving Annabelle, Battlestar Galactica “(Starbuck, Apollo, Sam and Dualla…an unfortunate love story”), so many from House dedicated to House and Cuddy (sample comment: “It really looks like Cuddy is the one seducing him--an interesting view!”), Carla and Liam from Coronation Street, another German show called Hinter Gittern (Kirsten and Sascha), The OC (Marissa and Volchok), Gray’s Anatomy, Instant Star, Hanna and Carla in German soap opera Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), Emma and Sean in Degrassi, Twilight (name of video: “Bella’s Choice”). Some feature voiceovers with key dialogue. Others have lyrics from the song in Spanish or Thai or German superimposed on the screen.

I wonder if the people who create these videos are familiar with Armatrading’s other work, or if this song has taken on a life of its own.

***

The recent show in Albany was underwhelming. Armatrading’s voice is still in fine form, but it was a solo show with unfortunate choices in guitar tones and a slide show that featured images of 9/11 and World War II battles, as well as a screensaver-like backdrop that distracted from the music. I sat too close to the stage next to the speakers and had to strain to hear Joan’s voice. She seemed at times to be going through the motions. It will be some time before I go through another Armatrading jag, listening through her albums. I know it will happen. But most of all, I miss those days alone with headphones, listening to a cassette, rain falling outside.

 

[1] Nat Hentoff in The Nation, review of Show Some Emotion.

[2] John Rockwell, New York Times, 1975.

[3] John Rockwell, New York Times, 1979.

[4] Stephen Holden, New York Times, 1983.

[5] Playboy magazine, of course.

Inside the First Cover of Bohemian Rhapsody: An Interview with Tony Rivers [by Daniel Nester]

This year we celebrate the 40^th anniversary of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” complete with original artwork reissue of the single for Record Store Day’s Black Friday edition and “Bohemian Lager,” a Queen-endorsed brew made in--where else?--the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Over the years, the Freddie Mercury-penned song has evolved from FM radio staple to competition showcase for melismatics everywhere to something akin to public domain. There’s countless parodies: “Bohemian Carsody,” a car-themed parody by the all-female comedian troupe SketchShe, racked up 25 million hits. There’s also “Bohemian Gravity,” “Bro-hemian Rhapsody,” “Bohemian Momsody,” the Minecraft-themed “Bohemian Craftsody,” and “Nintendohian Rhapsody.” And that's just scratching the surface. 

Interpretations of “Bohemian Rhapsody” also abound. Ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro’s TED Talk cover has 5 million views and counting. Adam Lambert’s American Idol singing “Bo Rhap” led his getting a job sitting in for Mercury in real life, not just fantasy. Kanye West, the supremely self-confident rap artist and provocateur, opened his headlining set at last July’s Glastonbury Music Festival with the “Mama” heard 'round the world in a performance could be described charitably as pitch-imperfect. Remember Robert Wilkison? Arrested for intoxication in Alberta, Canada, he proclaimed his innocence with a full-throated “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the back of a squad car. He racked up 11 million hits. They did not let him go.

But who made the very first “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover?

Perhaps 1982’s Royal Philharmonic recording?

Or maybe the 1987 cover by Bad News, the comedy metal band?

Good guesses, but both are wrong.

The very first “Bohemian Rhapsody” was recorded for a Top of The Pops compilation and released in December 1975, three months after the song was released to the airways. Not to be confused with the television show by the same name, Top of The Pops were budget-priced compilations that featured studio musicians and singers recreating soundalikes of chart-toppers. We’re talking everyone from the Supremes to the Sex Pistols. Found on Top of The Pops #49, the “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover was recorded at De Lane Lea Studios, next to Wembley Stadium--where, it might be noted, Queen recorded early demos for tracks like “Keep Yourself Alive.”

Recently I tracked down Tony Rivers, one of the four Top of The Pops singers who sang the first “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover. He was also the vocal arranger on the sessions, a thankless task for which he was well-prepared: Rivers’ long and varied career includes tracks from early 60s vocal groups Harmony Grass and the Castaways, recordings with Pink Floyd and INXS, and backup singing for Cliff Richard and Elton John, all of which he’s written about in a new book, I’m Nearly Famous: The Tales of a Likely Lad.

Rivers was kind enough to let me pick his brain over email about the very "Bohemian Rhapsody" cover.

DN: Everyone covers or parodies “Bohemian Rhapsody” these days—from the Muppets, Phish, Flaming Lips, William Shatner, Zac Brown Band, Kanye West—everyone climbs Bo Rhap Mountain, it seems.

TR: Well, not, Not many could manage to put this together, least of all Kanye West!

DN: But you were the first.

TR: I have always assumed that, mainly because harmony wasn’t many singers’ strong point at that time, and it was the most complicated arrangement to learn in a few days and record.

DN: A few days? The original famously took three, four weeks.

TR: There were very few around who could have done it that quickly. It was a bit easier for us four, all coming up with vocal group backgrounds. All four of us sang on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” We usually took a day to lay down lead and backing vocal tracks, and would be on our way home by 11pm. Not this time!

DN: So it wasn’t easy to do, then.

No. With due modesty it was difficult for us because of the time restriction—maybe two or three days to live with it (once the committee had chosen it).

DN: By “committee” you mean the people at Top of The Pops?

TR: A small group of Hallmark employees, along with producer Bruce Baxter, would sit down prior to the planned sessions and choose the potential hits. That, of course, was the secret to the label’s success. I have no idea what their thoughts were in choosing “Bohemian Rhapsody” other than “what an amazing record!”

DN: The cover is pretty note-for-note perfect. How did you pull that off?

TR: As usual, I had the job of sorting out the vocal arrangement. I had to listen and memorize the parts. John Perry and Ken Gold were also listening and were both assigned lead lines that suited their voices, which they did brilliantly I think. Oh, and let’s not forget the late Stu Calver, who was the very high voice on the Roger Taylor parts—the “Gallileo”’s and so on.

Normally this wouldn’t be too big a deal, but with this song, I had to sit for hours at home listening and making notes, and writing notes and memorizing vocal lines—apart from the other tracks we had to do that day!

The time-consuming job of layering track after track of vocals ‘til we got the sound and the voicing right seemed to take forever. But in the end, it had been a great opportunity to find out how that song was put together.

DN: I’m still trying to wrap my head around you doing all of this in a few days, to be honest.

TR: The harmony parts were obviously part of the problem, but they are not difficult harmonies. The problem was lack of familiarity with the whole thing. We could copy sections piece by piece. The other problem was the time needed to achieve a similar “sound.” That kind of mass tracking which takes time, and that wasn’t usually available in big lumps. This was something with many lumps!

We were helped greatly the fact that all three of us had good range in our voices with JP and Stu blessed with fantastic falsetto range.

I believe we spent the early part and the rest of the day, singing whatever vocals or harmonies needed on the other songs that had been selected.

DN: You worked on other songs at the same time?

Memory tells me at around 7pm we started on Bo Rhap, bit by bit, until each section sounded good, and added voices until it did. We finished and hit the A406 around 7 the next morning, in a daze, rush hour traffic, “Gallileos” running round our heads.

I have nothing but admiration for the man who created it. Freddie Mercury. What a record.

A bit different from something like [The Sweet’s] “Little Willie”!

DN: The original version made a splash, of course, but the TOTP version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” made headlines as well. Kenny Everett, who famously played the test pressing of the original track, also played your cover.

TR: Kenny Everett was a big name at that time , and decided to see if the listeners could tell which version had taken months and fortunes to record and which was done in a few hours on a budget album! He played our version and Queen’s, cutting between the two, and asking “can you tell which one’s the ten-bob version, and which one cost 6 million quid to make?”

DN: Did you ever hear from the Queen camp regarding your camp’s cover version? I know you worked with Cliff Richard for quite some time, and Freddie Mercury and he were friends.

TR: Ken Gold was introduced to Freddie whilst on an Elton John tour of the USA. Ken decided to ask Freddie just what he thought about “that cover.” He looked pensive, then added “Hmm. An interesting version!”

I did meet Brian May once. He said to me “Hi, Tony! Roger and I used to go to see you live at Loughborough Uni/College, and you were a very big influence on our harmonies!” Not bad, eh?

Daniel Nester, Guest Author November 2-6

photo 2013 (c)Thomas V. Hartmann.

This week we welcome back Daniel Nester as our guest author. Daniel is the author of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press 2015). Previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II (Soft Skull, 2003 and 2004), and The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody, 2014), which he edited. He teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. Find out more about Daniel Nester here. Follow him on twitter @DanielNester

Welcome back, Daniel. 

In other news . . . 

David Lehman's Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World gets raves and is in bookstore's now. 

-- sdh

Nin Andrews Comic: Daphne

Latina/o Poets on Liminal Spaces: A Conversation with Carolina Ebeid [by Natalie Scenters-Zapico]

I first met Carolina Ebeid at the Mestizo Cafe in Salt Lake City where she was taking part in a reading for “Pintura:Palabra, a project in ekphrasis” in which Latina/o writers from across the country were invited to engage in writing ekphrasis and participate in workshops after spending time with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s “Our America: The Latino Presence in American Art” exhibition. Carolina was very warm with me, having recently selected two of my poems for publication in West Branch, one of which went on to be selected for Best American Poetry 2015. During her reading I was very struck by how well she is able to create pressure through stillness in her work. 

This is the last installment in a series titled "Latina/o Poets on Liminal Spaces." You can read my introduction to the series here, and conversations with Javier Zamora here, Erika L. Sánchez here, and Marcelo Hernández Castillo here. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

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NSZ: You’re the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Cuban mother. How has their act of immigrating, in passing through one space with the promise of getting to another space, passed on to you?

CE: It’s interesting that you call it an act of immigrating because that seems to be able to be answered with the fact that I was born, that my parents met on a bus in Massachusetts, and that resulted in my being able to be here in the world. Whereas if I were to change the word act to story, of the way that their immigration stories have been passed on to me, or how they exert pressure on me or my imagination that’s a much more complicated thing to entertain. They are definitely very different, my father’s incorporation into this country and society, and my mother’s stance toward this culture and society. So they moved first to Massachusetts, but then moved to New Jersey, and they lived in a very Latin American neighborhood. But a neighborhood close enough to the urban area of New York City where there were many, many cultures and languages. My mother in a lot of ways had open arms and she, as I said at CantoMundo, loved the opera. I think she had an optimism for the pace of life just outside of New York. I have to really talk about the differences between my parents. So, I don’t want to get too far away from your original question. Is there a way that you could ask a follow-up?

NSZ: I’m interested in the act of immigrating, and I call it an act because I’m using the word liminal, and because it comes from rites of passage. I think that there’s this sense that this act of immigrating and arriving in the U.S. will complete the rite of passage, which is not really the case. In many ways you’re held in this liminal space perpetually, and I’m also really interested for you how that liminal experience is passed on. So while for some it’s this idea of being held in an incomplete rite of passage, I argue that a lot of the incompleteness of that rite of passage is also passed on. I think that you can be held perpetually in that liminal space by your parents, or the stories of your parents. So my question: is the incomplete rite of passage passed on to you? How does that happen and how do you explore it in your art?

CE:  Well, let me ask this question. What would a completed rite of passage look like for an immigrant? Or, are you positing that that isn’t actually possible?

NSZ: Personally, and feel free to disagree with this, I don’t think it’s possible in this country. I think it can seem superficially possible, but often that leads to other kinds of violence like being the “model minority” or “the token minority” which leads us back to never fully being incorporated.  

CE: Yeah, an idea of success: having a house—that’s the idea of American success—certainly looking like everyone else. Okay, I don’t want to just say, I don’t know, but…

NSZ: Well you started discussing it in your first response. The idea of the stories themselves, and how that is passed on and exerts something over the imagination…

CE: …which may be why I’ve always felt like a misfit within my father’s family who all speak Arabic, and I don’t speak Arabic. I’ve felt even within that smaller culture, whether it’s the culture of a house or a wedding, I’ve felt certainly not incorporated. And that’s because of what we call, metaphorically, a barrier—a language barrier.

NSZ: So to my mind, though you might not think about it this way as the writer, you play a lot with liminality through form in your work. For example, in your poem “Anniversary” you write, 

My silence you undo like the moment the globes of overhead light in a ballpark/

shut/

their humming wattage—and the stars begin to swirl,’ she wrote on a valentine/

of paper.//

There’s this way in which you create moments of stillness on the page, and that stillness then creates this liminal space in form, where we know perhaps where we’ve been in the progression of the poem, but we’re not always sure where we will end up. So, how do you conceive of that stillness in your writing, how do you think about the way that it keeps us suspended in liminality?

CE: Well that line, there is the visual phenomena when you’re in a city and there’s too much light to actually see the night sky. So we drive out to the middle of no-where, or more rural areas, and there are so many stars. And I was imagining being in a stadium, which is itself a very communal space, a space where everyone is oriented towards looking at the same thing in the arrangement of seating, and suddenly the stadium lights going out and everyone would be looking up, so that’s another kind of spectacle. I’m associating stillness with a kind of quietude that makes something else very audible, where the quieting of the lights makes the light of the stars audible or seeable to us. And I suppose that within that silence there’s something else that we are tuning into. Of course, that something else is really mysterious, and I am really attracted to whatever that mystery is. I know sometimes we’ll talk about that as white space, which I think is entirely very noisy.

NSZ: I love this new poem that you have up over at Linebreak called, “Speak-House” in which there’s this voice that’s constantly asking in the poem, “Say something, say something, say something,” and I was struck because the title of your forthcoming book through Noemi Press is You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior. I was wondering where does the pressure to speak in answers come from in your creative mind?

CE: First of all, the speak-house comes from the latinate word locutorium, which is in a place where monks live that have taken a vow of silence. The speak-house or locutorium is the space in which they can speak. So it’s where they can receive visitors or be able to talk. And I can see that kind of space replicated in other spaces, like prison. I can see where that kind of glass wall is a type of locutorium, or speak-house. Where speaking is different, it’s a kind of communication, a breaking out of silence, where a normal pattern of life is broken and you can be more free. Personally in my life, I often feel gagged by own inability to order my thoughts, order my racing thoughts. Sometimes in conversation it will often happen, just like perhaps you can perceive, how I’m much more comfortable playing the role of the questioner in what we call everyday life, and in conversation. But on the page, in a poem, that’s where I think I can most express myself even though it’s within poetic rules and poetic grammar where I’m not after clarity exactly, but perhaps a kind of Carolina clarity. I’m interested in that difference, of a more everyday speech where there’s a premium put on a kind of discursive clarity—getting to a point, satisfying that end. As oppose to the poetic space, where there is no clear end point because it isn’t linear. I mean, poems are much more circular in shape. I really love thinking of that space as liminal because I like its associations, as you have held on to, that it is darker and doesn’t have the rational light of that revolution of scientific thinking. 

So I was thinking about that French phrase, which I’ll just say in English, the hour between dog and wolf, which is the hour of twilight. Which describes how as human beings we have biological eyes and are mainly diurnal animals. In that space it’s hard to see, so a dog could be mistaken for a wolf or vice versa. We don’t know whether to feel safe or not, or feel threatened, and that is that locutorium space I think. So where I was describing it before as a place of freedom, I don’t think it’s a place of freedom, and I don’t think it’s a space to just exhale, it’s the exchange that’s happening.

NSZ: As you were talking, I was thinking about how when I was in high school and in college I would take part in vows of silence to show solidarity with different border causes: taking down the border wall, stopping femicide and narco-violence. I was thinking about how there’s this way in which, that experience makes you realize how binding words are. And while not everyone necessarily has this experience in taking a vow of silence, I remember thinking that I was going to feel so relieved at the end of it and I would plan what my first words would be. But when the time came to speak, the words always fell short.

CE: That’s really interesting. I’ve never taken a vow of silence, personally. I’ve had laryngitis, which is very frustrating…

NSZ: (laughs)

CE:…which feels like a gag. And I’ve also had to be in Spanish-only speaking places and at very first that can be frustrating to not be able to really express myself. I can’t even say compared to English because sometimes I feel frustrated with English as well. But, yes, certainly speaking is in certain instances the frustrating thing because it does fall short, as you say. 

NSZ: And with that in mind, in your poetry, when your speakers do speak it’s often in these really beautiful lyric ways where their speech is sort of disjointed, disconnected, or they’re so deeply connected that it almost fogs the lens in this way that we’re looking at things in new ways. So how is the mere act of speaking a liminal act? Especially when you think of the importance of speaking as a woman, as a Latina, how can that be a liminal act?

CE: Well when you said fogs the lens because the speaker is too connected, I immediately thought of an image, where a physical lens, a camera lens, is so close up on the mouth and the face that it’s hard at first to see what it is a viewer might be looking at. It’s like the detail of a painting that might not make sense, like the leaf of a tree in a gigantic landscape, Hudson River School kind of nature scene of the nineteenth century. Whereas, taking just a small detail of a leaf you wouldn’t see the literal, the big picture. And I’m interested in that kind of communication. 

NSZ: I like this idea of a close-up to a leaf. It’s still a leaf, you’re not destroying the physical entity of the leaf, but the way in which what that leaf communicates through a close-up is very different. I think of Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema” in which she talks about the violence of the close-up. How in real life you would never get that close up to just one part of someone’s body where everything else is gone. That kind of close-up through a lens is impossible in our day-to-day interactions. But in film, where we suddenly have the power to do that, what we can communicate through the body is completely different. And you do something similar in some of your poems where we’re looking at something, as good poems do, from angles that we’re not used to, and how then does that provide a ludic voice within a superstructure in a liminal space?

CE: The capitalist culture is such a huge steamroller, flattening everything out that I associate Western culture with capitalism. Certainly writing poems within that is inherently subversive and ludic, some would even say ludicrous. I was asked the other day by someone who went to my high school, who had posted on FaceBook this hall of fame that he made up, with people who had graduated and who are now making six or seven figures. This is important because we’re a very big Latino culture, from various parts of the world, very first generation people. So actually they’ve done much better, because their children, the children of the people in the Hall of Fame, have made it, they have better lives. Which is measured in having things and being able to afford these things. But we would not be seen as successful as poets, and it’s not because we’re criminals who don’t contribute to society, who steal, or break down society. No, we as poets are unclassifiable in some way. They don’t know how to measure us. He was asking me what my book was about, and if I minded if I revealed my net worth, and A. it was hard to  explain what my book is about because we just don’t speak the same language. How could I answer that? He doesn’t understand poetry, he’s probably not read many poems, and, B. yes, I have trouble talking about my net worth, I don’t even know what my net worth is. But it’s hard for me to answer within a poetry culture what Latina/o writers are within that because it’s such a poly-vocal segment within the broader poetry culture.

NSZ: So do you hold yourself in a liminal space? Do other people put you there? Or, it just is?

CE: I mean, I live with a poet, and my son calls himself a poet, and I’m in a program, so I’m surrounded by people who value the same things that I value. But, of course, I’ve had experiences where the liminal isn’t understood, where I feel like a misfit. And to broaden the lens so much, living itself is liminal, from darkness to darkness, from dust to dust, we are….there’s one quality of liminality that I want to bring forward which is that it is transitional. You’re arguing that perhaps we are stuck in that transition, that there is no passing through it. But, in some ways, that is human experience because we don’t understand what it’s like not to be alive. I mean the experience before being born or the experience of being dead. But that’s in the broadest term.

NSZ: But I think that within a superstructure, as Latinas/os we’re in a much more uncomfortable space than others through experience. And it’s about what you then decide to do with that trauma, the trauma of your parents and/or of the self. Of course, we’re in a transitional space in life, which is a very Western Judeo-Christian understanding of life and death, but I think within Latina/o experience in the U.S. and within Latina/o poetics there’s a different kind of liminality. A liminality where you’re never enough of X or enough of Y, you’re not totally enough of anything. For example, I would even argue that a lot of these people who have “made it” with their net worth, I don’t know how much they really relate to the superstructure even on the level of their family stories and ways of understanding the world. I think that in many ways we are a lot of what our parents pass on to us. It’s difficult to escape it, and no amount of money, or the right clothing will let you escape it. 

CE: I can speak of the experience of passing where, people don’t immediately identify me as Latina and they will say things about Latinas/os that I find very uncomfortable. Or I’ll be around Latinas/os who will not think that I am of a certain culture, or that I don’t understand their Spanish. Which I don’t know if that’s filled with liminality, or the converse of that which is not incorporation. Both the same things, but different views of that experience. 

NSZ: Well, I think it’s about what you do when you’re held in that space. So sometimes it’s liminal and sometimes it’s not, but both are uncomfortable.

CE: I see. Do you see liminality as a poet as discomfort?

NSZ: Not always. I think it’s more about being subversive. Sometimes there’s real freedom in being subversive, and it can be very liberating in a positive way that can almost be euphoric. And then, sometimes it’s really painful, and it’s hard to put yourself in that liminoid space. In the liminoid, you’re also taking experiences from liminal acts and incorporating them into this idea of creating liminoid phenomenon. That’s why it can be painful to create real liminoid phenomenon because you have to put yourself in that space again, and take from it, and mine it. So as an artist you’re taking from myth in that moment, it’s not always from personal experience, it can be much deeper than that. 

CE: And now when you say it’s painful, I wonder if it’s painful because to be subversive you have to work in the shadows, there has to be more of a risk. I don’t know what relationship risk has to visibility or invisibility because the trickster may be visible, but in disguise. The trickster can appear, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that their identity is clear, true, or uniform. I don’t know, I’m very interested in all of these notes and figures you’re working with in order to describe the liminal and the liminoid.

NSZ: Physical spaces are so important in being a writer, so when you’re writing for the purposes of writing from that discomfort to create liminoid phenomenon, where do you feel the most free to create and question?

CE: Well, I think that I choose to be in a space surrounded by books, so my office can be that space. If I’m in bed writing, which I often do decide to write in bed, I call it the Proust roost because it’s said that Proust often wrote in bed. So even the bed itself has to be cluttered with books and papers. So the words of others, I have to have the books open and refer to ones that’ll be an irritant or a seed to spur something on that’s my own. I’m describing a place of solitude as well, and somewhat quiet, but then sometimes I can really work within a coffeeshop where I create a solitude within this boisterous and loud place where people are meeting, and working, and talking. Those describe the places where I actually do some writing. 

Sometimes writing happens in a bus on a commute. Which I suppose can be a liminal space, in that it is a transition, not exactly painful, not exactly liminal in the other ways, it’s certainly not a sacred space, but that it has to take place in a kind of respite of the day in which I’m not exactly in a class, I’m not at that destination, or at home. Similarly walking, jotting things down on paper, so that it happens between moments. I know Wallace Stevens would do this, he would walk to work, jot things down on pieces of paper, and then give them to his secretary who would transcribe them for him. I don’t have a secretary that’s going to do that work for me. 

And while I agree that writing poems is inherently subversive, inherently not how someone would measure a good way of spending one’s time because it doesn’t equal money, and that it doesn’t have a value that can be commodified in that way, I definitely don’t sit down and think I am being subversive. I don’t sit down and think I am questioning the superstructure in this poem…

NSZ: …No, that would be probably lead to not doing it at all…

CE:…that would be. But that space, if we are to conceive of it as a space, must be alone and apart. Turner’s description of that demarcation of sacred space and the non-sacred space is useful in this way because I do enter this apartness, this asocial space, where I’m answerable only to this transformation that’s about to take place, the poem that’s about to be written. I mean, wouldn’t you agree that it is a kind of sacred space and time?

NSZ: Yes, it is a sacred space and time and it is something that you really have to fight for as a writer. Not just societally, but even in your personal life. As in, I need this time and this space to do this especially as a woman, and I can imagine as a mother. We have to fight for it, even on the level of the domestic sphere. 

CE: Yes, and to fight for it means to recognize that it should be a priority. And so often, the domestic sphere of our lives demands that we not prioritize writing and making, especially as women and mothers. People will understand if I can’t get to something because life gets in the way. If I can’t finish an essay they will see that, well, of course my son needing to go to the doctor is more important, or needing to pick him up from school is more important than sitting and ruminating. So time is something to defend.

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Carolina Ebeid was granted a 2015 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, and has received awards and fellowships from the Stadler Center, CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Academy of American Poets. Recent work appears in Linebreak, Sixth Finch, and the Colorado Review, and her first book will be published by Noemi Press in 2016 as part of their Akrilica series. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers, and has begun a PhD in the University of Denver's creative writing program.