The Best American Poetry

We Have a Winner! [by David Lehman]

For the last fifteen weeks, we have worked on a sonnet -- publicly, collaboratively, courtesy of the "Next Line, Please" feature on The American Scholar website. Here is the winning sonnet. We wrote he poem line-by-line and had a lot of intellectual fun doing so. If you click here, you will get an explanation of the title and the rules of the game as it evolved.

Jailbreak

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       
Clutches the key, a jailer too stubborn to learn          
To read the graffiti. If need be, he can turn                  
A bouquet to a wreath. Then we will be                           

Two mourners arguing terms of interment. We must 
Appease our lust, our momentary bliss subject to
The rules of engagement. The conflicts of lust. Just

Look at the way they look at us. As though we're too
Precipitous with a plot, as if we can
Dig up the words to write the wrongs of man.      

The poem's authors are Michael C. Rush, Angela Ball, Elizabeth Solsburg, Christine Rhein, Patricia Smith, Paul Michelson, "Poem Today,"  Berwyn Moore, Joe Lawlor, Brandon Crist, Charise Hoge, David Lehman, and Millicent Caliban. A pseudonym -- and who knows, maybe even a heteronym -- is in the works.

A Silver Scruple and a Famous Dog (by Karen Steinmetz)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Emily Dickinson’s beloved Newfoundland Carlo does not appear often in her poems, but it is Carlo Dickinson refers to most often as her great companion in her letters from 1861-1864. The Carlo letters are clustered during the Civil War years, stressful, passionate years that include the horror of war, the Master Letters, and the intense activity of copying and sewing the fascicles. As has been well-documented, Carlo appears in the letters as companion, as surrogate, as Dickinson’s heart, and as a necessary chaperone in a Master Letter from 1861, when Dickinson proposes a reckless rendezvous, made safe by Carlo’s presence: “Could’nt [sic] Carlo, and you and I walk in the meadows an hour – and nobody care but the Bobolink — and his — a silver scruple?” The bird as witness and the silver of its scruple make me think of # 861:

            Split the Lark — and you’ll find the Music

            Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled —

            Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning

            Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

            Loose the Flood — you shall find it patent —

            Gush after Gush, reserved for you —

            Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!

            Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

The poem, copied by Dickinson into an 1864 fascicle, has a triumphal tone that almost seems a precursor to her more famous #1072 that begins, “Title Divine—is mine!/ The Wife—without the Sign” copied into an 1862 fascicle.

The fascicles are dated by changes in Dickinson’s handwriting, and Dickinson copied the poems into the fascicles, seemingly not in the order in which she wrote them. What does any of this have to do with Carlo? Mainly that Carlo figures large as a steadying force through the “White Heat” of these years.

Carlo isn’t listed in the subject index of Thomas H. Johnson’s The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Under “dog,” there is only a late poem beginning, “A Little Dog that wags its tail/And knows no other joy,” not a poem about Carlo.

Aside from an early valentine, written when Carlo was just a puppy, Richard B. Sewall identifies Carlo only with #186 that begins,

            What shall I do—it whimpers so —

            This little Hound within the Heart

            All day and night with bark and start —

Though Carlo might stand in for Dickinson’s heart, the Hound is little, and Carlo appears at the end of the poem as a staunch messenger:

            Tell Carlo —

            He’ll tell me!

I don’t think Carlo is ever little or ever a hound in Dickinson’s poems. To my mind, the poem where Carlo is stated as himself most truly in his role as companion is #520, in an 1862 fascicle. It begins:

            I started Early — took my Dog —

            And visited the Sea —

            The Mermaids in the Basement

            Came out to look at me —

After the first line of the poem, the dog doesn’t appear again, and Carlo is not named. Much has been written about the dog’s absence from the poem when the sea becomes threatening. Still, I see this as the poem where Emily Dickinson defines Carlo’s indispensible role in her life. Without Carlo, Dickinson could not face the sea that represents both terrors and pleasures: the sea she set out on when she couldn’t claim election, the sea that divided her geographically and otherwise from beloved friends, the sea that hid curious creatures and the terrifying gaze of the other, and the sea of sexual longing that threatened to obliterate all boundaries. The sea had to be confronted. The only possible companion for Dickinson on such a visit is the knowing and mute Carlo. Her rambles with Carlo in the hills around Amherst gave Dickinson the freedom of an elsewhere, unburdened by language and the human “Beings” she compares unfavorably to Carlo. His companionship is a portal into the space between words and worlds that allows poems to come. From 1850, the earliest date given any poem in the fascicles, until he died in 1866, Carlo was Dickinson’s familiar, opening doors. In Dickinson’s famous, heart-stricken letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson after Carlo died, she wrote only:

            Carlo died.

            Would you instruct me now?

                                            E.  Dickinson

Dog Dreams (by Karen Steinmetz)

Since it is mid-January, pouring rain, and I find myself writing about dogs as familiars and about their inevitable loss, I begin with a refrain from “Dog Dreams,” a sardonic song by Jonatha Brooke for her album Grace in Gravity with the Story. I tend not to command, scold, or restrain my dogs, but my dogs have been generally well-behaved, if sometimes a pain.  The refrain:

            Dog Dreams, Dog Dreams

            Please don’t wake us up!

                        No bad dog, No stay,

                        No basement, No way,

                        No choke chain, No dry food,

                        No fetch game, No, No, No

                        No bad dog, No stay,

                        No basement, No way,

                        No choke chain, No dry food,

                        No sit, lie down, roll over, SHAME

As we headed towards the solstice this year, the days were especially dark. It was hard to find peace of mind, and I wanted more than usual just to get away. The just-finished semester of teaching had left me feeling word-bled. What I wanted most was to be absorbed into unmediated experience, the way I am on a long walk with a dog. Our family dog is now eighteen years old and so sustained by our daily rituals that I am uneasy leaving her.

The smallish white terrier I am caring for is lighthearted, the only dog I’ve ever seen noticing stars, calculating the unbridgeable distance, accepting that they cannot be caught or cornered. It seems incongruous that Tally has grown old, can no longer run with me, can no longer even see the stars.

For those of us who engage with our pets as familiars, our connection loosens the bindings that words impose on perception. Our familiars are spirit guides and seem sent intentionally to us. Poet/painter Desiree Alvarez’s enormous, exotic rescue was such a dog. Soon after Bingo died, Desiree, Catherine Woodard, and I took a dog-less hike to a rocky plateau on Hook Mountain that Catherine had christened the Bingo Bowl, since we could pour water for the dogs into a stone hollow there, and read Desiree’s poem “Familiar” as a farewell.

 

Familiar

All day digging the hole,

then later lowering your body, still

warm with sun and heart,

wanting to join you down

deep in the earth’s brown pelt.

I dug you the most beautiful hole

filled with forsythia.

When grandpa’s old wood shovel broke

I got down to scoop the field dirt,

rocks, tear out the roots

while you watched. You, the long

walk up the slate mountain,

the swim across the high March river.

We lived large, every day of sautéed

butter and salt. You ran away

so many times in your wildness.

Always I got you back. I swear

that was you I saw when I drove

back to the city, coyote shimmering

by the roadside staring straight at me.

It rained as I made a ring of stones

on top of your grave, and the wind

blew a hole right through me

in the shape of a dog running

on my first night without you.

                                    Desiree Alvarez

I admire the unsentimental truth of “Familiar.” The dog provides companionship as her mistress digs the grave, understanding only that it is a profound endeavor. The speaker’s carefully described process of digging contains her grief and frustration. The dog is alive in the exhilarating activities of long, shared experience. The coyote by the roadside is both real and a messenger between worlds. Finally, the loss is realized in the compelling image of the hole blown through the speaker “in the shape of a dog running.” There is nothing here that is not true and necessary.

Familiars free us by giving access to what isn’t already bound up and marked off in words. Small wonder that the New England Puritans, so protective of boundaries, accused witches of projecting themselves into forbidden territory in the guise of familiars. This excerpt from W.S. Merwin’s “The Paw” from The Carriers of Ladders (2003) captures this merging and freeing of spirits in a poem about a favorite dog returning in a dream:

from THE PAW

I return to my limbs with the first

gray light

and here is the gray paw under my hand

the she-wolf Perdita

has come back

to sleep beside me

her spine pressed knuckle to knuckle

down my front

her ears lying against my ribs

on the left side where the heart beats […]

we are coursing the black sierra once more

in the starlight […]

The ellipsis is mine. The poem ends with the speaker waking, the final line, “but we are gone.” We.

I am grateful to Desiree Alvarez, winner of the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, for her permission to include “Familiar,” which will appear in Devil’s Paintbrush forthcoming from Bauhan Publishing during Poetry Month, April 2016.

“Dog Dreams” was written and arranged by Jonatha Brooke (Dog Dream Music/ASCAP) for the Story’s 1991 album Grace in Gravity. Here is a link: Dog Dreams

I excerpted W.S. Merwin’s “The Paw” from Doggerel: Poems about Dogs, edited by Carmela Ciuraru for Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets

Monday Comic by Nin Andrews

Karen Steinmetz, Guest Author January 11-15

This week we welcome Karen Steinmetz as our guest author. Karen is a poet and novelist. Her poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Coal Hill Review, Southern Poetry Review, The Midwest Quarterly, So To Speak: a Feminist Journal of Language and Art, Illuminations, Poet Lore, and the Still Against War anthologies published by Jamie Stern, Nan Lombardi, and Catherine Woodard in honor of Marie Ponsot. Her poetry manuscript, Little Heretic Gods, was a finalist for the 2010 Washington Prize and a semi-finalist for the Four Way Books Intro Prize. Her young adult novel, The Mourning Wars, was published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in 2010. She earned her B.A from New York University and her MA and MFA in poetry from Manhattanville College, where she currently teaches. Karen Steinmetz lives in the Hudson Valley, where she raised two children, Andrew and Kate with her husband Donald, a painter and environmentalist.

Welcome, Karen.

-- sdh

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Derrick Brown of Write Bloody Publishing

DD: The entry for “American Poetry” in an old edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry  and Poetics reads: “The often idiosyncratic strength, boldness, and ambition of American poetry derives from two interrelated factors: its problematic and often marginalized relationship to American society, and the lack of a defined and established literary class, culture, and audience.” You have published many strong, bold, and ambitious books of poetry in the past twelve years. Can you talk about how Write Bloody Publishing engages these problems of authorship and audience?

DB: Literary class sounds very Princeton, doesn’t it? I imagine it was written over flakey, buttered crumpets and a warm goblet of peasant blood. Write Bloody has an aesthetic and a belief guide for what gets chosen to go out into the world based off my personal taste and sense of boredom. I like people who live their ass off. I like the working class. I don’t believe in the sometimes masturbatory circle of academia lifting up only it’s peers into circles of acclaim. We recognized a problem: many poetry shows were very boring and not very authentic to the power of poetry. Tons of authors were writing about witnessing life’s grandeur and then would drone at a live reading for an hour, slobbering into podium mics like the world’s worst lovers. Their fellow professor’s would hem and haw, proud of the confusion. Poetry is not precious. Guitars shouldn’t only be revered in Opera houses. I found, through travel, there was a tribe of ‘underground’ authors who were writing well on the page and reading well out loud and I thought that this formula, along with the mandate of touring to build a fan base, could send a lightning bolt right through the butthole of the current poetry scene. It worked. It hurt, but it worked.

DD: How did Write Bloody come into being? 

DB: It was a lie. I was on a few other small presses and they were all folding. I had my first German tour coming up in 2001 or 2002 and I tried to buy old stock for the tour, but it was destroyed. I was allowed to reprint all my poems and tried to hunt for a printer who would get them rolling for tour. I found one in Ohio that gave discounts to publishers and said, “oh, um, yes. I’m a publisher.” My buddy made a fake website called “write bloody,” which was a Derrick Brown tour t-shirt slogan and I found Buddy Wakefield. He had a book cover and design that I felt wasn’t so hot and I offered to help him too. I went full time with it in 2004.

DD: Write Bloody has published over 111 books and 40 eBooks in the past twelve years. That seems like a breakneck pace! How do you do it? How many books do you publish in an average year? 

DB: We published 2 the first year. Then I realized I needed help and I hired two freelancers and we did 6 the following year, and then for a few years we would do 12 -16 and that was a huge mistake, doing 6 per season, or 12 a year because your layout people can reach max burnout. We are back to doing about 4 or 5 a year.

DD: How many books are forthcoming in 2016? Can you tell us about a few of these books?

DB: In 2016 we have Buddy Wakefield’s Stunt Water paperback, a new collection by me tentatively called, The Four Energies of Death. We have a new collection by Tara Hardy and a surprise author.

DD: According to your website, you are not accepting unsolicited manuscripts until, probably, March of 2016. You ask for a sample of 3-5 poems in lieu of a complete manuscript. What tips can you give for prospective authors? What do you look for in a manuscript? What can you tell us about the screening process for these manuscripts?

DB: My tips would be:

1. If you are submitting 3-5 poems, make the first one a short, beautiful and not shocking piece. We get a lot of shock and it gets boring.
2. Ask why I should care about the piece or subject you are writing about. Does your piece make a reader care?
3. Do not submit poems that cover several pages. Reader burn out is a real thing.
4. 4. Show range in your submission. 5 tragedy pieces make an author seem like a basket case.
5. Have your working world together before submitting. This means, have a website that looks good up and running. The website could have a video of you reading to show that you aren’t super annoying. Have a resume or tour schedule up. Have links to your friends and peers who are authors. Show the press that you are ready to work and are already hitting the ground running, even if you are a first time author.

DD: How many staff members work at Write Bloody?

DB: Just me. And a few beautiful freelancers including our VP of operations Madi Mae Parker, designers Nik Ewing (Local Natives) Matt Maust (Cold War Kids) and editors like Andie Flores.

DD: Once you’ve accepted a manuscript, how involved is the editorial process? 

DB: We keep doing a pass back approach with the author. We get the manuscript, then off to editor and then back to author to confirm or deny edits. Then I do my pass on edits and then back to author then off to proofreader, then to layout then upload to printer. We print in the USA.

DD: Your books have beautiful covers and are well designed. Can you tell us about the artists who make your books look so beautiful and so contemporary?

DB: I used to be in a band and I come from the era of the album art being important. I try and hunt for artists who have a musical or album cover feel to their designs.

DD: You have been a paratrooper, a gondolier, a TV weatherman, and a touring poet. How has this unique résumé influenced your work as an editor?

DB: Those jobs were fun. Everyone should do all of those jobs and keep the whiskey business, thriving!

DD: You are the author of five books of poetry and three children’s books. How has helming Write Bloody influenced your work as a poet?

DB: It used to shape my work in a negative way. I learned the wrong way that any project can kill your writing if you let it swallow your time and creative juice jar. I never wanted to be a publisher but I am an organized person and fearlessly naive, but not great at time management. I kept charging forward and produced way less personal work than I should have. Pulling back on submissions was one way I have attempted to reclaim some creative headspace, same with hiring our VP of operations, Madi. One way being a publisher has shaped my writing in a positive way, is that I can spot trends early and avoid them. I can also easily let go of any darling. I also feel for anyone and have tremendous respect for anyone running a small press or zine. Everyone should run a reading a few times and everyone wanting to be published should intern at a small house to see how nutso it can be.

DD: You are currently touring with the poet, Amber Tamblyn. You have performed with rock bands and have been called vaudevillian by some. Write Bloody poets are required to tour as part of their publishing contract. Can you talk about the impact of performance on the written word and vice versa?

DB: Poetry performance is usually the most memorable way to hear a poet but it is often the form that kills poetry for general audiences. If a poet becomes the cartoon, the heady and proud academic, the screaming slam poet with vocal burn, it’s curtains for the spread of poetry. It is rarely the page poem that sends people home saying, “I will never read that preachy, self-righteous, mumbo-jumbo, self-aggrandizing, mega horse shit jerk off again.” But page poetry never had the wildfire impact that live poetry has had. This is why the strange hybrid of poet who can write well and read well is the key to the future, or the popularization of poetry. 

Now, there are tours and super fans of poets, lines for poets that I have seen stretch 200 people long waiting to get a book signed or a hand shook (Andrea Gibson, Sarah Kay, Anis Mojgani, Taylor Mali, Ernest Cline, etc) A problem arises when folks fall in love with the idea of calling themselves a poet and their writing is usually too self-aware to be of any use to the public. They hang with mostly poets, do shows with mostly only poets and teach or study with mostly poets. I wish they knew that some poems are great for a manuscript, some for your journal to work through your own crud, and some that zing for the audience. Poets who are performers first, actors who smell of desperate perfume, writing shallow monologues with little care for editing or craft are not my cup of blood. I love authors who surprise me, who can be natural onstage, who show range, tell me a story of set-up, those who have killed ‘poetry voice.’ Much performance celebrates poetry voice and it shatters all my remaining vertebrae. I am thankful that there are more and more brilliant journals and presses launching authors who are exciting to see. I do see change. One change is that the slam seems to be a great place now for young people to work out the kinks and build a community and older poets are doing shows with comedians and fiction authors, musicians more. I love that.

DD: Many of the poets on the Write Bloody roster are veteran slam and spoken word artists. What are the unique challenges for a publisher of performance artists?

DB: One challenge is that it seems hard for authors who are performers to get booked at universities unless they have a ‘thing.’ A thing could be “I am an identity poet, I am queer poet, I am a funny pop culture poet, etc.” I think we all wish universities brought folks in just because their book ruled and the author is engaging. Another challenge is stage attire. Many of our authors still don’t know that it is a huge mistake to wear shorts onstage or light colored pants. I have made both mistakes, didn’t shake enough and paid for it. Once our authors get a foot in and are booked once at a book festival, they are usually the festival favorite. The challenge is shaking the spoken word moniker. Saying you are a spoken word poet usually has a curse, like saying you are in a Christian rock band. I tell our authors to pitch themselves as authors, unless it’s a young scene they are headed to. Some colleges only want ‘slam’ poets- which is odd, especially if there is no slam competition that night.

DD: One of my favorite books that you’ve published is Elaina Ellis’s Write about an Empty Birdcage. In many ways, this collection embodies the spirit of your press. Can you talk about what makes this a good example of a Write Bloody book?

DB: It’s muscular writing, right? She hits with no hammers. I think it’s a graceful book, proud, searching and no “fuck you, I know the truth and it’s all sorted out” fraud moments. It is typical in that it is moving, sometimes funny, and gives you that gut check that you long for in poetry. Also, you never feel lost.

DD: You’ve published a number of great anthologies, including the Learn then Burn anthologies. Do you have any new anthologies in the works for 2016 and beyond?

DB: We do not, although an anthology of the most useless blurbs does interest me.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had in the last twelve years as a book publisher?

DB: Getting distribution with SCB Distributors. They had to keep saying no to us because I didn’t keep financial records of growth. It took us three years to get our act together and it changed everything in regards to the dream of having an author’s fan base spread.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

DB: It needs more “unknown”, younger faces on the cover of Poets and Writers. It needs the fire of rage to be coupled with action steps to tackle the uncovered evils of our time. It needs to be on TV in a subtle way, slipped into sitcoms and films. It could use a few conservative voices that don’t suck. It needs poetry shows to embrace wildness.

DD: Some of the poets that Write Bloody has published, like Taylor Mali, have names that ring out in some corners of the poetry world.  Of all the poets you have published, who do you feel deserves more recognition than they have received?

DB: Any live show by Idris Goodwin or Buddy Wakefield, The full color art and poetry of The Pocketknife Bible by Anis Mojgani, Glitter In the Blood by Mindy Nettifee, The Year of No Mistakes by Cristin O’keefe Aptowicz, Birthday Girl with Possum by Brendan Constantine, Megan Falley, Racing Hummingbirds by Jeanann Verlee, Floating Brilliant Gone by Franny Choi and Slow Dance with Sasquatch by Jeremy Radin. These books are crushers that have possibly not sold 1000 copies. All our books are inspired but some authors have built something on the page that made me weep or die a little. Most of those authors have no connection to the academic world of writing and deserve cakes all day. I love all the authors we have and they inspire me to keep going but those books tackled me personally

DD: If you could publish any dead poet at Write Bloody, who would it be and why?

DB: Anne Sexton and Frank Stanford. I love dark swampy moods.

DD: Theodore Roethke said “Art undoes the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.” 

What is your definition of poetry? What responsibility, if any, does a poet have toward her/his audience? 

DB: Poetry is a bullet and the novel is a slow strangle.

Derrick Brown is a comedian, poet and storyteller. He is the winner of the 2013 Texas Book of The Year Award for Poetry. He is a former Paratrooper for the 82nd Airborne and is the president of one of what Forbes and Filter Magazine call: “…one of the best independent poetry presses in the country,” Write Bloody Publishing, which has launched over 112 books of poetry. He is the author of five books of poetry and three children’s books. The New York Times calls his work, “…a rekindling of faith in the weird, hilarious, shocking, beautiful power of words.” He is from Austin, TX.

Dante Di Stefano's poetry and essays have appeared recently in The Writer's Chronicle, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize, The Phyllis Smart-Young Prize in Poetry, The Bea González Prize in Poetry, and an Academy of American Poets College Prize. He earned his PhD in Poetry from Binghamton University and he makes his living as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.

I Don’t Like Poetry, I’m Not a Poetry Person [by Tara Skurtu]

Every time I hear someone say I don’t like poetry, or I’m not a poetry person, I think the opposite is true. I believe everyone is a poetry person. Poetry is just a form of storytelling, and we’re born to tell stories. A few weeks ago at Bistro de l’Arte in Brasov, Romania, I was rearranging the order of my manuscript, yet again, when a little girl wandered over to me, looked at my laptop screen, and rested her chin on my table. I asked her in Romanian if she knew poetry. Yes, yes, she said, I know poetry. I like it. Kids get it.

I once read Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” to a ten-year-old girl. We were talking about how a simple moment can be a poem. I told her I was going to read one that was just this. I wasn’t sure if the length of it would hold her attention—Bishop poems are so patiently written, and reading them requires patience. (I often tell my students that her poems are like beer—sometimes an acquired taste.) Also, based on my own experience googling several of the boat terms toward the poem’s end the first time I read it—bailer, thwarts, gunnels—I knew she wouldn’t understand all of the vocabulary. “I caught a tremendous fish…” As I read it, she sat quietly, looking from one object in the apartment to another. I couldn’t read her face, but she didn’t look particularly interested. “…And I let the fish go.” I looked at my young friend, who sat without talking for a moment. You know what? she said. You’re right. It’s about something so simple, it’s like it’s not even worth it. Oh. I probably shouldn’t have, but I felt a little bummed out. I knew she was just a kid, that this was just a poem—But then, she continued, she makes it worth it. The moral of this moment? Children teach us about poetry.

Somewhere along the way—usually around high school, sometimes college—a lot of students (mainly the ones who aren’t writing poems) become intimidated by poetry. They associate it with archaic grammar, rhymes, rigid form. It has to be understood one specific way, becomes something that can’t be penetrated. Before beginning a writing exercise for a Mass Poetry Student Day of Poetry one morning, a teenager raised his hand and asked me, Do we just write, or do we write in the form of a poem? The good thing is, returning to poetry is just like trying to use a second language you haven’t spoken or heard in a while: its essence remains intact. It’s all about getting started. I write Poetry is… on the board (I got this idea from my good friend, poet Derek JG Williams). Each student comes up and writes a word. Fear, feelings, imagination, story, fiction, life, art, analyzing, communication, nature, reality, honesty, mystery, melody, limitless, unknown, dreams, freedom, love, hidden. Sometimes unlearning is the simple act of realizing again what you once instinctively felt.

I like to begin each semester with an in-class guided writing exercise on memory. I have the students think of a moment in which their perceptions of themselves, the world, a person, changed. Another person must be present in this memory. I tell them to use specific details (and that detailed doesn’t necessarily mean more words) and not to worry about complete sentences. 20 lines max. I give a series of directions while they write, and I interrupt them constantly with these instructions—because this is how memory works: seemingly unrelated moments are triggered by senses, place, story. The whole thing takes less than 10 minutes. My current version of this exercise, simplified, is:

1. Write the place of this memory.

2. Focus, zoom in on the thing that stands out, what is happening.

3. Who are you with?

4. This person reminds you of someone, something. Relate this person to a person, image, object, sense, place, etc.

5. Change a detail of this memory (because memory is a narrative, and narratives can be altered).

6. You hear something.

7. Someone says something.

8. Change another detail.

9. You do something. What do you do?

10. Zoom in on what stands out.

Before they know it, they’ve drafted a poem of sorts that has place, metaphor/simile, character, dialogue, the senses, action, image. And, most importantly, something is at stake.

Speaking of stake, I mentioned in my blog post a couple days ago, Poetry at Stake, that I stabbed a poem with a mechanical pencil and tore the page to demonstrate at stake to my creative writing students in Brașov. Yesterday, my penultimate class of the semester, I decided to take this exercise one step further. I had everyone take out a sheet of paper. Think about what writing means to you now, what it represents. I told them to do something, anything, to their sheet of paper. I immediately heard a page being crumpled into a ball. Without hesitation they each knew exactly what to do. I participated as well. I poked a near-perfect hole with a pencil through the middle of a blank page. When everyone was done, I told them to turn their creation into words. I went first. I told them that writing, to me, is like looking through this small hole in the page at a distant object—first with one eye, then the other—the process of discovering your dominant eye over and over again. Their turn: equality, sadness, a boat that stops at the shores of emotions, frustration, many fragments put together to form something magic, a crown that makes me feel fabulous, a flower or a tree, an airplane, something useless that becomes beautiful, a butterfly on the way from one flower to another. Finally, they are poetry people again. Finally, no fear.

 

 

Thoreau’s Nephew: Romania’s Literary Slaughterhouse [by Tara Skurtu]

Poets be warned. Only in Romania is there a poetry reading series known as the slaughterhouse. It’s called Thoreau’s Nephew (Nepotu´ lui Thoreau) and takes place in a brightly painted, very smoky bar called Insomnia (sounds like a literary purgatory, doesn’t it?). I was invited to read there in 2013 while in Romania for the first time. In Sibiu the night before my 5-hour bus trip through Transylvania, a friend called out to me across Piața Mare, The poets in Cluj are not so nice!

Thoreau’s Nephew is a bimonthly club de lectură that was formed in 2008 by a group of writers, critics, and professors one night at Insomnia over drinks: Ștefan Manasia and Ștefan Baghiu (poets and critics), János Szántai (writer and film professor), and François Bréda (writer and theater professor). Their question: how could they transform this bar into a literary space where Romanians and Hungarians could feel at home?

Why the name, you might ask. Manasia says they were thinking of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and, in particular, that they saw Thoreau as a main figure of the anarchist movement. A perfect father for an anti-establishment poetry night. The name is tricky, though—in Romanian, nepot means both nephew and grandson. So, in a sense, the inspiration for this lecture club is that of legacy—one in which free speech is the law of the land. 

Here’s how it goes. The poems are printed and placed on all the tables in the bar—and, if they aren’t written in Romanian, translations are provided when available. The reading begins like any other. One of the Ștefans introduces the featured poet, who then reads for 20-30 minutes. (The most surprising part of this portion of the night is that everyone in the bar—the audience, on average, 60-80 people—is silent and listening, or reading and listening, to the poems.) After this is when the fun begins. The microphone is handed over to the audience. As Manasia puts it, Everybody becomes a literary critic for a couple of hours. This, he thinks, explains the success of Thoreau’s Nephew. Anything goes, and it does. Some people speak just to hear themselves talk (as with any Q&A), others debate from different corners of the room. The critiques build momentum, are known for getting tense. Meanwhile, the poet watches, listens, drinks (featured poets receive drinks on the house). “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” In this context, Thoreau’s sentence from Walden really hits home. The audience is honest, anything but gentle. It’s true—they’re not nice.

Manasia says they didn’t expect to have such a big success, big audience; but, from the beginning, it was the best literary event in town. In addition to Romanians and Hungarians coming to feel at home in poetry, the regular audience consists of lawyers, doctors, philosophers, painters, professors, critics, students, and general lovers of poetry. They come here and take the mic and say beautiful things, ordinary things, or crap about poetry.

A lot of writers call us the literary slaughterhouse, he says. I was a lucky survivor. I got invited back to read last month, and couldn’t wait. For two whole hours after my reading the audience went back and forth about atmosphere, strangled tone, too much description, not enough description, relevance vs. irrelevance, craft and content, black holes (the subject of one of the poems). Even the bartender got involved: You cannot see what exists in the black hole—but if you feel it, there is a poem. During one particularly tense moment, Manasia leaned over and said, This is a literary death match. I told him later that, to the best of my knowledge, we have nothing like this in the U.S. And I couldn’t wait to tell all of you about it.

On poets after their readings, Manasia tells me, Most of them are destroyed and they hate us for a while. And, Some people are invited back but refuse because they’re afraid. One older poet, speaking about his reading, said it made him feel like he was a student again. And, about two poets who read once and might never come back, They were sacrificed like two lambs.

WSJ Message in a Bottle: David Lehman Takes On Jack Daniel’s Sinatra Century

PHOTO: LETTERING BY ANGELA SOUTHERN; F. MARTIN RAMIN/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL (BOTTLE)

1. The Background

Frank Sinatra discovered Jack Daniel’s one sleepless night in the early 1940s. “It’s been the oil to my engine ever since,” he later said. He famously praised “anything that gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or Jack Daniel’s.” Frank always kept a bottle nearby, offstage, and he was buried with a flask of JD in his casket.

In her autobiography, Judith Campbell Exner—the moll who was mistress to both John F. Kennedy and the head of the Chicago mob—recalled a day spent with Sinatra. He “acknowledged the comings and goings of an endless string of visitors, growled at flunkies, drank martinis, ate lunch, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate hors d’oeuvres, drank Jack Daniel’s, ate dinner, and drank more Jack Daniel’s.”

By the mid-1960s, Sinatra could drink a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and still go on stage.

Like any respectable Sinatra aficionado, I’ve imbibed my share of Tennessee’s trademark sour mash whiskey. And as the author of a new book titled “Sinatra’s Century,” I had extra incentive to try the latest ultra-premium Jack Daniel’s bottle, sent to me by my editor at The Wall Street Journal. Called, by coincidence, Sinatra Century, the limited-edition 100-proof whiskey was aged in 100 “alligator-charred” oak barrels (so called for their scaly interior surface, the deepest of all the chars used to impart flavor and color to the liquor). It hit shelves in October, in plenty of time for toasts to Frank Sinatra on his 100th birthday, December 12, 2015.

I wrote my book because I’ve loved the singer’s voice, musical savvy and definitive versions of standards ever since I heard “All the Way” and “Witchcraft” on the radio when I was 8 or 9. Timing it to the centennial, I wrote the book in 100 parts, because Sinatra’s career ran parallel to and threw into relief what Henry Luce called the “American century,” and because the century is the perfect form for a subject with so many facets.

Continue reading over at the Wall Street Journal.

 

Sir Walter Raleigh's "On the Cards and Dice" [by David Lehman]

Before the sixth day of the next new year,
Strange wonders in this kingdom shall appear:
Four kings shall be assembled in this isle,
Where they shall keep great tumult for awhile.
Many men then shall have an end of crosses,
And many likewise shall sustain great losses;
Many that now full joyful are and glad,
Shall at that time be sorrowful and sad;
Full many a Christian's heart shall quake for fear,
The dreadful sound of trump when he shall hear.
Dead bones shall then be tumbled up and down,
In every city and in every town.
By day or night this tumult shall not cease,
Until an herald shall proclaim a peace;
An herald strong, the like was never born,
Whose very beard is flesh and mouth is horn

– Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

 "On the Cards and Dice" is my favorite poem by the redoubtable Sir Walter Raleigh. What I admire most is the sustained metaphorical ingenuity and the slippage in the analogy between games of chance (cards and dice) and the events of the Christian calendar culminating in the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The poem achieves a stirring and ominous effect, rising to a prophetic level, though at its base it is merely a vivid description of men playing poker (or bridge) and throwing dice. The implicit relation between gambling and religion is the poem's secret power.--  DL

Poetry at Stake [by Tara Skurtu]

Poetry has the logic of memory, the spontaneity of dreams, yet is much like calculus—each line is, in a sense, an asymptote composed of and continually approaching the limits of language in an attempt to reach an infinitesimal, wordless realm. This is also one way of saying that a good poem is unpredictable and has something at stake. We teachers get our fair share of student poems about puppies, sentimental love pains, the general first person loving the general world and wishing for general peace and universal happiness. Poems that could be about anyone doing anything anywhere at any time. But poetry shouldn't run in place—it should be running towards a wall and then through it. Sometimes be specific isn’t enough advice.

This year I’m teaching creative writing in English at Transilvania University of Brașov (and yes, it’s really in Transylvania). My students are doing something regularly that seems nearly impossible to me: writing poetry in a second, sometimes third language. A few weeks ago I asked them if they knew what “at stake” meant. They didn’t. We broke it down, delved into etymology: a pole, a stick. We discussed “burned at the stake,” “impaled on a stake” (the latter is easily understood in Romania, whose history includes the likes of Vlad III of Wallachia). Sometimes language requires demonstration. I placed an assigned printed poem on the table, then held a mechanical pencil above my head. I stabbed the poem, pinned it to the table, tore a ragged gash through the middle of the page. I asked them to give me some words to describe what this poem just went through. Risk. Danger. Limit. Loss. Yes.

Last year I taught composition at a women’s prison through Boston University’s Prison Education Program. These students have everything at stake every single day. My sister, who has been incarcerated on and off for years, taught me that there are no words for how important writing is in prison—especially poetry. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master”—one evening I wrote this famous first line of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” on the board. We were about to read Hamlet, and I was introducing them to iambic pentameter. Who taught you that? said one student, and, when I asked what these two words made them think of, another said, iambic contamination. To overthink the language we use naturally could indeed contaminate its fluency for a moment, but it also may create new paths of clear, precise expression. Sometimes a path is a form.

Poet Jill McDonough, who taught incarcerated college students for thirteen years, visited my class one night and discussed how the villanelle is a great form for expressing circular thoughts and obsessions. Things that matter. The following week, over half the class turned in handwritten villanelles ranging from the desire to cook a single meal at home, the irony of having to sew American flags, the simple act of being able to shave in privacy, the feeling of having more than a monitored visit with a loved one. And, here’s the best part: these villanelles hadn’t been assigned. What was at stake formed a need to rethink the rhythm of language, choose the right rhymes, write these poems.

The short version of that semester’s final paper was to diagnose Hamlet’s madness and its significance, and to back it up with the text. The last two weeks, one of my most engaged students was absent. She was in solitary confinement, a place meant to drive anyone to temporarily lose a mind. (And this is where it’s hard not to hijack my own blog post to write about the inhumanity at the core of our country’s swollen prison system.) The night the papers were due I opened my desk drawer to find, covering the attendance sheet, several sheets of mismatched paper with a handwriting in pencil I recognized. This student, in solitary and without access to the book, somehow managed to write a paper that worked through the entire tragedy. (She even improvised a works cited page complete with Jane Doe Publishing Co.) And, the surprise ending: though the stakes were high, Hamlet hadn’t lost his iambic mind after all. His logic—much like that of poetry—was driven by memory, was spontaneous yet calculated.

There’s only one poem I can think of that comes close to defining the essence of poetry, and in it there’s a literal stake. It’s Heather McHugh’s “What He Thought,” and at the end, Giordano Bruno, in an iron mask, is being burned at one in Campo de´ Fiori, 1600: “poetry is what / he thought, but did not say.” This is the definition of poetry at risk: it employs the limits of language, endangers the realm of the comfortable, approaches a silence or loss we feel yet can’t explain.

The Committees in our Heads: on Fear and Writing [by Tara Skurtu]

Raise your hand if you’re scared of writing. I am. I’m terrified of writing anything that’s not a poem. Especially blogs. They remind me of casual conversation, recorded. Or of a close-up photoshoot, a friend behind the viewfinder trying to convince me to act natural as I attempt to isolate the muscles around my mouth to make the kind of half-smile that says I don’t know I’m being looked at. I prefer the candid or the crafted, and the blog falls somewhere in between—it says, Act natural, but do it now please. A perfectionist’s worst nightmare.

But maybe this fear is just an excuse for not getting started. Last week I was sitting in Bistro de l’Arte, a cozy restaurant in an early 16th-century building—my favorite neighborhood spot in Brașov, Romania, where I’m teaching for the year—talking to my friend Gail over Skype about my blogophobia. Gail is the most wonderful cook imaginable. Cuisine is her GPS; poetry, mine. She told me about a moment in a book she read in which a young Italian man was teaching the narrator to speak Italian over a beautiful yet simple meal in Rome. Speak like you eat, she said, which is also to say, write simply. Write what you write.

Often the best writing advice comes from people who aren’t writers. If you can tell a whole story in a few lines, said my friend, you can write a blog. A whole story in a few lines made me think of one of my favorite poems, Andrea Cohen’s “The Committee Weighs In” (which appears here in The Threepenny Review and boldly begins her newest collection, Furs Not Mine, by Four Way Books). It tells a story in eight narrow lines. Ha! Sounds like an argument in one’s mind, said Gail, after hearing the title. I recited the poem. In it, the speaker jokes with her mother about winning the Nobel Prize—again. It’s a lighthearted game whose plays lull you along like an established meter—until the last word hits you through the heart.

It’s a little game

we play: I pretend

 

I’m somebody, she

pretends she isn’t dead.

A monosyllabic hammer, that word dead. Tell it to me again, said Gail. And this—retelling—is another usual difference between a poem and a blog. A good poem, like a good song, makes you want to reread, hear it again, write it into your mind. A blog, something more like thought—immediate speech.

Gail used to be poemphobic. She didn’t know how to approach a poem, said she didn’t understand poetry. Fortunately, poetry isn’t something meant to be understood. It uses language to express something that cannot possibly be said in words. It orients us, is a story, a moment, the argument within the mind. A poem approaches limits—of language, our own. And now, here Gail was, getting the essence of this poem after simply hearing its title. She was right. It was all about the committees in our minds. 

The committees in our heads, like fear, are necessary. Writing is easy, but writing well is one of the most difficult things to do in life. This may sound dramatic, but it’s true. It’s why I’ve been tormenting myself for three weeks about writing this post, even though all I’ve been wanting to do for three weeks is write this post. Every time we start a new poem, story, essay, blog, we are beginning again one of the most difficult things we will ever do. Every single time. Fear is natural, is necessary. It means something is at stake and we’re not completely in control. Countless times I’ve read, in interviews with writers, the interviewee ask, How do you write _____? And the answer is almost always, I don’t know. I’m convinced that anyone who says otherwise is lying, or in denial, or producing boring work that runs in place.

Write what you write doesn’t mean write what you know. We begin to know as we write. Writing is realizing, is taking a walk in a known neighborhood and noticing the details that blur by when you travel by a faster means. Walking is a good pace for thinking, for writing. Romanian trains are, too (I’m writing most of this on one now). Writers are always landing in different countries, listening to languages we don’t understand, trying sentence after sentence to see how much sense we might make. We’ll never get as good as we can possibly be, but, at the same time, we’re always getting better.

Writing—it’s a little game

we play. We pretend

 

we know what we’re doing. It

pretends it’s not in charge.

Write like you’re learning how. Seat your little committee in the corner where you can see them, then turn them to face the wall and pick up your pen. Or, like my dad taught me, turn a positive affirmation into an assertive demand. Look in the mirror, stare down that part of yourself that says, What if I can’t? Tell it where to go.

On the Impossibility of Teaching Creative Writing [by Tara Skurtu]

Have you ever heard of a tipperau? This is the first thing I ask my composition and creative writing students when I walk into a classroom on day one. They look at me, confused. I spell it on the board. No one has ever heard of a tipperau. It’s an ancient Romanian architectural structure, and you’re going to draw one right now. Now they really look at me. Like I’m crazy. I get a few whats and hows. (Especially when it’s a composition class.) This is great. They’re already outside of their comfort zones. Don’t worry, I’m going to tell you what it looks like. But here’s the thing: you have to draw it with your eyes closed. Usually here I get some laughter. But I mean it. I make them close their eyes, tell them I can see if they’re cheating, and then add one more rule. No talking while drawing. We begin.

The tipperau is a large rectangular structure, wider than it is tall. On the right side of this rectangle is a tall tower. This tower has a triangular roof. At this point, they’re really fighting the urge to open their eyes, and I usually hear a little laughter, some frustration. They want to ask questions, they want to get it right. On the left side of the rectangle is another tower, but this one is even taller. I don’t want to spoil the secret recipe of the tipperau on the internet, but I’ll tell you that I slowly describe a building similar to a cathedral (a bell in one of the towers, a large arched doorway), but with some quirky features like a circular window with bars and, finally, a moat—without a bridge.

And now for the best part. They open their eyes to inspect their stunning asymmetrical, rudimentary drawings full of geometric shapes as scattered about as they are cohesively arranged. I make them hold their tipperaus up high and show them to their classmates. Everyone is laughing at this point. It’s hard to be embarrassed about these beauties. The reasons are obvious, but I ask them why they’re not embarrassed. The answers range, but say basically the same thing: we had no idea what to expect, and we can’t be perfectionists with our eyes closed.

I tell them that drawing a tipperau with their eyes closed is what writing is like. Or, to be more precise, it’s what any creative process is like. You begin with an idea you don’t understand, and you move forward blindly, with an intuitive guidance that can’t be explained. Or, to put it more simply, from a single word—even an unfamiliar one (especially an unfamiliar one)—we create a world. And through the creation of this world we begin to understand the idea. Even if we start with the same word and are given the same instructions, the worlds we create will be unique. Not one tipperau looks the same as another. This speaks to voice, which many young writers are afraid they don’t have enough of. And the students are right, these worlds aren’t perfect. These tipperaus, I tell them, are rough drafts. Rough drafts can easily look like the work of a preschooler, and these certainly do. If they were to revise—literally, I tell them, “to see again”—their tipperaus with their eyes open, the next draft would be more refined, their towers might actually be connected to the main rectangle. A final draft (well, I don’t believe in the word final when it comes to poetry—I prefer to say “leave-alone-able) is a destination reached only through a process like this one. Process builds skill, and, to quote Elizabeth Bishop, “Writing poetry is an unnatural act. It takes great skill to make it seem natural.”

Do you know why you’ve never heard of a tipperau? I ask the students. Most times they know, sometimes they don’t. Here’s where I tell them I made it up. Our brains seek to make sense of the unknown. Minutes ago they had no idea what I was talking about, but now the tipperau exists as a visible and believable structure in their minds.

My father and Raymond Carver inspired this exercise. My father is the most imaginative person I’ve ever met. He can prank anyone into believing the most absurd story. His secret, he once told me, is to begin with the believable, then to gradually add components of the unbelievable. This is how he taught shapes to me. We’d sit side by side, each with a piece of paper and a crayon. Square, he’d say, and he’d draw one. I’d copy. Rectangle. Triangle. Circle. Slibeedoo. The slibeedoo, a structure that included all of the shapes interconnected, was something I believed to be real until the middle of kindergarten. This simple art lesson taught me how imagination shapes new realities for the mind. Turns out it was the best lesson for my writing. Now, on to Carver. After I read “Cathedral” for the first time, I wanted to experience what the narrator felt as he sat on the carpet drawing a cathedral with a ballpoint pen on a shopping bag, eyes closed, the blind man’s hand around his own. I drew a cathedral with my eyes closed. It looked shitty. I was a beginner again. And, aren’t we always beginners again in everything we do? This exercise made me remember this. It felt fantastic.

So, is creative writing something that can be taught? I’m not so sure it can. But I do believe teachers can create a space in which students see beyond their conscious and subconscious limits and challenge themselves to realize that they do know how to create a unique world, whether it be a poem, story, or essay. And the worlds of the genres— they’re not so different when you picture them as, say, an imaginary architectural structure made from a nonsensical word that you’re attempting to draw with your eyes closed. My advice about teaching creative writing could be summed up by the blind man in “Cathedral,” who created a space for the narrator to revise the way he saw the world he created on a sheet of paper, and also the world beyond that page. Close your eyes now. Keep them that way. Don’t stop now. Draw.

Tara Skurtu Guest Author January 4-8

We kick off 2016 with Tara Skurtu as our guest author. Tara is a Boston-based poet, teacher, and translator currently living in Romania, where she teaches creative writing as a Fulbright grantee. She is the recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, and her recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Plume, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Memorious,The Common, and Tahoma Literary Review. She has recently completed her first manuscript of poems, The Amoeba Game. Find out more about Tara at her website:  www.taraskurtu.com . Follow her on twitter @taraskurtu

Welcome, Tara. 

Happy New Year. 

-- sdh