The Best American Poetry

Balanchine on Dance [by David Lehman]

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is tremendously quotable – if only because so many of his bon mots are adapted from others. When he declared himself to be “not a man but a cloud in trousers,” for example, he lifted the line directly from one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems. Usually, however, the matchless choreographer offered not a straight quotation but an unacknowledged paraphrase. Here’s a basket of Mr. B’s observations.

“God made men to sing the praises of women.”

“When you have a garden full of pretty flowers, you don't demand of them, ‘What do you mean?  What is your significance?’ Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful.  We're like flowers.  A flower doesn't tell you a story. It’s in itself a beautiful thing.”

In Balanchine’s view, Fred Astaire was “the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times.”

“The ballet is a purely female thing; it is a woman, a garden of beautiful flowers, and man is the gardener.”

“In my ballets, woman is first. Men are consorts. God made men to sing the praises of women. They are not equal to men: They are better.”

“Dance is music made visible.” (Also, “See the music, hear the dance.”)

“There are no mothers-in-law in ballet” (also known as Balanchine’s Law).

“We all live in the same time forever. There is no future and there is no past.”

“Someone once said that dancers work just as hard as policemen, always alert, always tense. But I don't agree with that because policemen don't have to look beautiful at the same time.”

“In fact I disagree with everybody and I don't want to argue about it.”

“The mirror is not you. The mirror is you looking at yourself.”

And when he received the Handel medallion, he said, “I can't Handel it. . .so I'll Haydn it.”

See Arlene Croce's “Balanchine Said” in The New Yorker (January 26, 2009): “In later years, [Balanchine] waged a personal campaign against the twentieth-century fetish of originality. . . . He saw no harm in appropriating; and he stole and was stolen from – that was the way of art.”

Above: George Balanchine and Suzanne Farrell rehearsing Don Quixote in 1968.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Martha Rhodes, James Fujinami Moore, Ryan Murphy, and Sally Ball of Four Way Books

DD: Four Way Books began in 1991, as a venture between you and your graduate school friends: Beth Stahlecker, Jane Brox, Dzivinia Orlowsky, and Helen Fremont. How have these friendships influenced the evolution and tenor of the press?

MR: We really began in 1993, with first books in 1995. Brox, Orlowsky and Fremont ceased working for the press early on but have remained treasured friends. And I know that they are hugely proud of Four Way Books and of the time and energy that they contributed to the press. Beth Stahlecker, sadly, passed away in 1991 when the press was but a whisper between us. We published her first book posthumously and established a series in her name, The Stahlecker Series, for first and second books of poetry.

DD: In 2012, Jeremy Glazier wrote an excellent overview of the first twenty years of Four Way Books for the LA Review of Books. Gregory Pardlo’s Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize and Four Way Books continues to receive the critical and popular attention it deserves. Since 2012, what have been some of the other highlights in the story of Four Way Books?

MR: I would have to say Reginald Dwayne Betts’ book has been thrilling to work on, both in manuscript form and as a finished book. And I’ve loved working with Karen Brennan on little dark – she’s such a wonderfully eccentric writer, and such a brilliant craftswoman. (We have also just released her book of short fiction, Monsters).  I struggle to highlight just these when I am so enthusiastic about the books we publish, all.

DD: Pardlo’s Digest is remarkable for so many reasons. One reason I admire it is for the way the poems dramatize cognition, and yet remain so tied to the heart. Pardlo gives us Deleuze and Guattari along with an aisle in the Fulton Street Foodtown. The work of a father with young children is held in equal esteem with the work of the philosopher and poet. All the poems in this collection feel so timely and timeless and essential. What do you find most compelling about this collection?

MR: I am glad that you appreciate Digest for the terrific collection that it is. I guess what I love about the poems – from the first time I heard them to reading them in manuscript then in book form—is the readability of the poems themselves. Whether lyric poem or poem driven more by narrative, whether he is digging close to his feet or throwing the shovel further out, these are poems that speak plainly about complicated sometimes tangled issues. They touch the heart and light up the brain.

DD: Present day Brooklyn is so palpable in all of its contradictions and nuance in Digest.  The story of Four Way Books is inextricably linked with the spiritual topography of New York City. Can you tell us about this link? What does New York mean to you? What does New York mean for poetry?

JFM: I love this city, I truly do. I’m Angeleno by birth and temperament, so living in New York is at least partially anthropological, a study in compression and speed and experiments in stress. The city is unforgiving; it forces choice, and its luxuries are rarely free.

Recently I was at a talk with Ben Lerner on his new book The Hatred of Poetry and he mentioned that so much about what people hate about poets is tied up in that Whitman phrase “I loaf and invite my soul”. That whatever Whitman's intentions, there is an image in the broader pop culture of poets as indolent, self-indulgent sponges. Perhaps that is true of poets who do not live here; certainly I have met people who write with a casual ease, and I genuinely respect that as a way of working. But the poets that I know writing in New York now do not treat poetry lightly; they write under that same pressure and drive. Each word accounts for itself on the page. The poem pays its own rent.

MR: As for myself, I moved here from the Boston area. It was my intention to forego college and move to Washington Square Park where I knew I would become best friends with the poets there. “Over my dead body,” cried my father. I went to NYU, on the border of the park, and then transferred to the New School. I devoured poetry. I’d self-identified as a poet at 12 and I read, wrote, read and wrote around the clock. NYC, it seemed to me, was the only place to live. I went to readings every night, and all day and night on weekends.  Over time, I’ve become more reclusive and the city has less importance to me as a writer. Having run 3 reading series for decades, along with other activities, I’m a bit burned out, in truth and place = NYC—plays less of a role in my poetry life. At least I think it does. I might be very wrong about that. And certainly, when I listened to “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” every spring overlooking the Hudson, I think of Whitman and his beloved NY and look at the river, and then down my own street in Manhattan and think this is one hell of a back yard to pull from. Yet, New England is what really runs through my blood – its fields, sea, rivers, lakes, mountains. The hot, steamy summers, stilled town commons, white, green or black shuttered homes, lemonade mid-afternoon, quiet, easy. I don’t live there now, but do my best to be in New England whenever I can.

So, my relationship to NYC has changed as I’ve grown up in the poetry world – it seems less urgent a relationship than it used to. For poetry? I couldn’t venture to say.

DD: Cynthia Cruz’s newest collection, How the End Begins, startled and disarmed me. The poems are like tiny dioramas of wild longing and mortal desperation, like Emily Dickinson wielding Kafka’s ice-axe. One characteristic couplet from her poem, “Budapest,” comes to mind: “And who said I couldn’t/ die inside the warm balm of a lullaby.” Can you talk about this collection and how it continues the conversation begun in the other collections of Cruz published by Four Way Books: Wunderkammer (2014) and The Glimmering Room (2012)?

RM: Cruz's poems are shockingly hot in the way that only something very cold can be. She is a precise writer and what we see over the span of Cruz's recent collections with Four Way Books is an effort to continually renew and expand language—Cruz's articulation and exploration of the themes she is passionate about. The Glimmering Room uses dramatic personae, monologues, and characters. Wunderkammer, as the title implies, is a cabinet of wonders, filled with precious (often troubling) miniatures. How the End Begins stretches its address, embracing beginnings and endings at once, as evidenced in the title (also a sequence of poems), and everything in between (“The Birthday Ceremony”.) Her voice, her inventiveness, and her dexterity create poems as harrowing as they are beautiful.

DD: Four Way Books has cultivated relationships with many poets. You’ve published several notable collections by C. Dale Young and Kevin Prufer, for example. How does the editorial process change when you are working with an author over the course of several collections?

MR: C. Dale Young has published three poetry collections with us and one, his first, with Northwestern. We are now working on his debut fiction collection, The Affliction, which comprised of linked stories, you might even call it a novel in stories. C. Dale delivers nearly finished books, the editing that I do for him really addresses stylistic issues and I always defer to him, as any good editor does.

While I look at ordering decisions he’s made, and also look to see if there are poems yet to be written or poems that just aren’t needed in the books, I know that C. Dale has brought his manuscript through the wringer before submitting it to me. Same with his fiction collection, which I am editing now. While we’ve had a few discussions about the characters themselves, their motivations, conflicts, etc., the stories, I find, are beautifully crafted and realized. With CDY, I really challenge some stylistic decisions, which is an important job in itself.

Other authors turn in less realized manuscripts and the job then is to work with them over time, looking at multiple drafts, thinking about inclusion and exclusion of poems and stories, challenging the content and the ordering of material. A manuscript might go through revision, back and forth with me, over a year or more. It’s a thrilling experience for me, and I trust for them, to see fine collections become fully explored and turned on their sides to stand upright and even stronger for the work we do together.

SB: Kevin and I have worked together on four books now: we have a deep sense of each other as writers and readers, and probably anticipate each other's thoughts and reactions pretty well. A shift for me has been that I can't help but see poems and collections in relation to each other, so whereas with National Anthem and In a Beautiful Country we spent a lot of time talking about order and particular poetic strategies (the section breaks mid-sentence, the role of rhyme, tone in general--) now I am most interested in the ways his new ms., How He Loved Them, shows us a mind we haven't seen before, or a way of working and thinking and reckoning with the world that feels Pruferian and familiar and also new. I really trust Kevin and the ways he pushes himself. I think (I hope!) he feels something similar about the way I read the poems. They are utterly his and I love them, and then in addition, it feels like a collaborative and valuable endeavor to work together on how best to present them as a body to the world.

DD: Martha, you are a talented poet yourself. Your collection Mother Quiet (Zoo Press, 2004) has been a favorite of mine for several years. Anyone who has lost a parent will gather much solace and strength from this remarkable book. Your poems “My Brain was Enormous” and the title poem, “Mother, Quiet,” are particular favorites of mine. You explore the contours of grief and loss throughout this collection bluntly, but also in a fragmented fashion. Thank you for writing this book. What did you learn about loss, grief, yourself, your mother, and poetry throughout the writing of Mother Quiet?

MR: I am not sure that I learned about loss or grief from writing this book per se. What I learned, and continue to learn, is that presenting an emotional narrative, based in a life or imagined, is always challenging. I did not set out to write about my/a mother or loss of mind to disease, or, or, or. My books tend to become poetic sequences, and I kind of see all of them running into each other – At the Gate moves into Perfect Disappearance which moves into Mother Quiet which moves into the Beds. My 5^th collection, The Thin Wall, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017, is a departure from the others, a sequence of sorts too, but less autobiographical in nature (by that I mean that autobiographical and not, my other collections read as autobiography to a reader, I am aware of this, and may be in part or not, that’s for me to know!)  Anyway, this work is more eccentric, I would say, and the narrative threads of the highly lyric poems are even more disrupted than in past books. I would say, though, that with the other books, there are strong tethers that run through, poem to poem. Back to your question about grief and loss – I don’t deal with either well in my life – I am a thin-skinned person when out of my emotional comfort zone. But action – of any kind – writing, reading, socializing, working – reminds me that what ails does not take up 100 per cent of my brain and heart – ever. There is more to the life than the problem the life faces at a given moment. So the act of writing, it seems to me, for me, makes me healthier at that moment. I am doing what I need to be doing. I am doing something that no one else can touch. I hope that makes sense to you!

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

MR: My work as a teacher has influenced my work as a writer much more than my work as an editor / publisher.  Four Way Books, though it is my life’s work, is my job. I love my job. I love the books we produce, the staff, the board of directors, and the projects we engage in on a daily basis. But it is my job. Teaching, a job too, reminds me each day of what we need to do as writers. It reminds me to practice what I preach. As an editor, this can happen too, of course! But when I work with students on poems, I am really working with myself as well. I’ve carefully chosen my career – as publisher / editor and as teacher to feed into my work as a writer. The complaint I have, of course, is the sheer amount of work I face and how it eats into my time as a writer. I work a twelve month year. No sabbaticals to look forward to. That’s hard and wearing.

DD: You’ve taught at many universities and colleges. How has the creative writing classroom changed for you over the years?

MR: In truth, it NEVER occurred to me that I would a) publish a book and b) teach. I did not go to grad school to do either. I went to grad school to learn more about writing, and to get feedback on my poems. The mission was simple and pure. I taught because I was asked to teach. I published because I was encouraged to do so. Without those prompts, I’d be writing poems but I doubt I’d be teaching or publishing books. It was one of my teachers who said, “You are writing your first book.” This statement was the first time it occurred to me that maybe I, too, could write a book. Another teacher said, after graduation, “Send it out.”  And then ambition for the work really kicked in. I wanted to be seen, read. Now, it seems to me, many students see the prize before they’ve done the work. This isn’t a criticism on my part. It’s just an answer to your question. The climate has become much more career-oriented and that, I believe, informs the weather of the workshop.

DD: In 2010, you took over the directorship of Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Can you tell us about the work you do there?

MR: I am one of several conference directors. I am not on staff there but am contracted to run one of their conferences – the Conference on Poetry – that takes place during the summer. I’ve modeled it after the best conferences / residencies I know – Bread Loaf and the residency at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Faculty deliver classes during the week, run workshops, and give readings. There’s 15 hours of workshop during the week and 6 hours of classes. Time for discussion, writing, revising, and dancing. It’s a week in heavenly NH, overlooking the White Mountains.

DD:  In a New York Times profile on Four Way Books, you mention Robert Frost’s North of Boston as one of your favorite books. Can you tell us about Frost’s influence on your writing life?

MR: I like the psychological complexity that Frost achieves in his best poems, through daily speech, music, form and structure. I am character driven in my own writing, so I enjoy his sense of the dramatic and how he achieves drama on the page. Just look at these four entry lines to Frost’s poem, “The Fear”:

            A lantern light from deeper in the barn
            Shone on a man and woman in the door
            And threw their lurching shadows on a house
            Nearby, all dark in every glossy window

He is a master of setting, of positioning and illuminating, getting us to focus on people, situations, through location and re-location.

DD: What have been the most significant changes in the poetry publishing world since you began Four Way Books in 1991?

MR: Ha and Shhh… I knew next to nothing when Four Way Books began. I learned day-by-day. And still do.

Publishers open their doors to a wider range of work these days and are more inclusive as they curate their lists.  It’s certainly not as much of a club as it was, though there are many camps. The publishers I respect are becoming familiar with the camps. The pool as a result is larger and more vibrant than ever before.

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

MR: Readership. Buyers of books.

DD: What are some of the collections at Four Way Books that haven’t received as much attention as they should? Which poets have you published who deserve more recognition than they have received so far?

MR: I don’t think any of our books have gotten the attention they should, or writers the recognition they deserve. I think that’s true across the board for poetry and literary fiction. I truly believe that all of our writers – absolutely all – deserve more attention, wider readership – their books (not just a poem) deserve to be course adopted.

DD: Four Way Books prides itself on publishing an extremely aesthetically diverse catalogue. In so doing, you have sidestepped some of the counterproductive sectarian squabbles of the poetry world. Can you talk about this commitment to stylistic plurality?

MR: The commitment comes from our hope that everyone feels that they can submit to Four Way Books – established or emerging, MFA or no MFA, part of a literary community or not, narrative writer or intensely lyric. We aspire toward inclusiveness.

DD:  What forthcoming titles are you most excited about?

MR: I am excited about all, and look forward to the debut collection SCALE by Nathan McClain whose poems I’ve followed for a long time. It will be out in 2017. I am delighted that we are following our poets Andrea Cohen, Cynthia Cruz, Sara London, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Kevin Prufer, Daniel Tobin with new work in the near future.

DD: Can you end the interview by giving us one of your favorite poems from a Four Way Books author?

MR: One of our poets, Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, passed away this year, at a very young age, succumbing to a lung infection. She lived and worked in Houston (with a PhD from the University of Houston) and her first book, Shadow Mountain, won our Intro Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn. Her second book, Bear, Diamonds and Crane was also published by Four Way Books. This poem is from Shadow Mountain and is a section from the title sequence.

 ONE QUESTION, SEVERAL ANSWERS by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan

            Where did your father live?
                         House on Federal, City of Angels.

            Where did your father live?
                         Horse stall at a racetrack.

            Where did your father live?
                         Near the aqueduct, in a man-made desert.

            Where did your father live?
                         By a pear tree.
                         With pears, ripe pears from that tree.

            Where did your father live?
                         Block 25.

            Where did your father live?
                         With thin strips of tarpaper.
                         Pot under his straw mattress.

            Where did your father live?
                        Waiting in line to use the latrines.
                        Waiting in line at the mess hall.
                        Waiting for his parents.

            Where did your father live?
                        The Desert Chapel.

            Where did your father live?
                        With his brothers,
                        transplants—Joshua trees.

            Where did your father live?
                        In his mother’s heart.

            Where did your father live?
                       Barrack 12, Unit 3.

            Where did your father live?
                      With 5 strand barbs.
                      With windstorms and bitterbrush.
                      With years of snowmelt, glacial erasure.

From SHADOW MOUNTAIN © 2008 by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan. Appears with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.

Martha Rhodes is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

James Fujinami Moore, editorial and publicity assistant at Four Way Books, received his MFA in poetry from Hunter College in 2016. Prior to that he majored in English and dance at Middlebury College. He is from Los Angeles.

 

Ryan Murphy, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of The Redcoats and Down with the Ship. He has received grants and awards from the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Chelsea Magazine, The Fund For Poetry, and The New York State Foundation for the Arts.

 

Sally Ball, Associate Director at Four Way Books, is the author of two books of poems, Wreck Me (Barrow Street, 2013) and Annus Mirabilis (Barrow Street, 2005). In addition to her work with Four Way Books, she is an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Yale Review, and other journals, as well as online at The Awl, Narrative, and Slate.

 

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

Ohio-soul to the smarmy ones placed above me: why no paid vacation for American Fifi?

Series 1, Part 1: On whether she comes running at the snap of my fingers, the bonheur of Fifi here-below, the righteous rage of the Ohio-soul, a woman’s wrath, the true niceties of human nature, the real story of the French revolution and America’s real choice.

Aerial photo of here-below, where all the people I’ve ever met live. If you can prove you’ve ever met somebody from somewhere else, I’m your host for a drink on the Champs Elysées.

As I turn out from the rue Richard Lenoir, I notice the carrousel in the little triangular square just over Lédru Rollin, where the avenue runs into rue de la Roquette.

My Tobias loves to merry-go-round. I hum: the seasons they go round and round and the painted ponies go up and down; we’re captive on a carrousel of time…

We must have tried every one on the Right Bank. Plus the really good one at the Luxembourg garden.

I give the carrousel another glance as I turn into the café and invest a table.

We get around, Toby and I.

As far as I know, I have not snapped my fingers, not once, since I’ve known Karine, except for when we’re dancing, of course. Otherwise, I can’t keep time.

I’m sure she’d despise a man who’s got no rhythm.

Here she is, already. She’s at the door, pulling the door, coming in the door from the watery morning sunlight, stepping into the dust-speckled shimmer and shadow of the narrow room.

Although my heart is singing, I stay seated, at the farthest end, my hands folded on a newspaper. Almost as soon as she’s framed on the threshold, she catches my eye.

She’s breathing hard, as if she’s been running. She mimes a shiver, smiles largely, advances through the morning’s patrons – like Karine and I, the patrons are mostly parents fresh from delivering up their kids to school – makes her way through the thickly spread tables and chairs.

Close now. Chiaroscuro.

“O! You just look so good,” I say, get up.

Close enough now, Karine leans in and kisses me lightly, square on the lips – “You, too” she murmurs.

I take her hands in mine; I love that feeling; I want to kiss them, both of them; they nest in mine; I look at her face. Others are looking at her, at me, watching as we unfold us.

Karine has never said how she got the scar on her forehead, though surely she believes it mars her beauty…. I have never asked; there must be pains we keep for ourselves, I suppose.

As much as I do, I think, Karine does love la Rentrée. I think I can tell she does by the clothes she wears: a long, light, lined loose-weave hemp-cloth coat over her shoulder to catch the unruly breeze. Sorceress? Jane Eyre? Which? I’ll soon see. Worsted wool over twill cotton-linen-flax, silk, greys toward blues; those expensive-type Italian jeans that aren’t Levi’s, made to fit a woman’s ass rather than a sack of flour: Karine prefers touch to sight, favors clearness over depth, hides her knobby knees by deflection.

She’s wondering at the caesura, What can be going through his head?

I’m wondering nothing at all.

“Can we sit now?” she says.

This moment is so good, this retrouvaille, this right now is so sweet that I just stopped within it a second, to breathe the perfume of it. I have forgotten to sit down.

Fifi manages to get good relaxing vacations even though she can’t reasonably afford to go much further afield than the last terminal in the regional transport system.

I say, “Sure,” and laugh, slightly abashed.

We break off. Karine takes her coat off, smooths it over the back of a chair.

We sit, kitty-corner close to one another. She reaches to take my hand in both of hers. She holds me tight, I feel a light pull toward her, as if of a tide.

This lovely pleasure and pain of the la Rentrée – the return from government-mandated paid vacations, congés payés – applies to anybody who cares for it.

Even to agitated nobodies like Karine and I.

Even to the coal-heavers of the 21st century, to that 80 percent who exist mainly to facilitate 20-percenter consumption or to do the actual work for them: the servers, host/esse/s, drivers, the vastly underpaid intellectual “assistance” provided by people like my beloved Fifi, Karine’s well-educated-divorced-40-something-sister-with-two-kids-and-a-terrifyingly-distant-job-to-commute-to-from-her-semi-woodsy-slightly-hagard-suburb.

When she’s feeling foul and filthy, Karine mumbles that Fifi’s a booby. Booby, because, Karine says, Fifi makes a nasty, petty mush of her personal life; also Fifi did impractical and not practical studies; also, Karine’s eyes narrow on my back when Fifi and I slosh a little wine and josh over things we mutually like.

I think Fifi mostly does, has done, will do, good. She makes the best of everything. For example, she manages to get good, relaxing vacations for her and for her kids even though she can’t reasonably afford to go much further afield than the rain shelters at the last terminal in the regional transport system.

Whatever the stretch and strain of finding summer fun, the long break, along with her sense of participation in the national Rentrée project of getting the kids back to school, enables Fifi to put up, and put up fairly cheerfully, too, with the scratch-points of life here-below, where all the people I’ve ever met actually live.

“Points that scratch” are all those rude barbs on the socioculturoeconomical helix that take a lot of time and effort to rearrange for the 100-percent of us but for which, for the 20-percent, money takes off the sharp edge.

For example: “Fifi” means “girly” (people who love her named her that, insist on calling her that), underpayment is hopelessly systemic (she benefits from and believes in a liberal economy) and the pressure to household efficiency is unrelenting and morally & physically exhausting (she wants, however, to exercise her right to choose her lifestyle without any finger-wagging from the peanut gallery). If she had a million ducats in her current account, Fifi would be a real countess of cool, patient compromise.

So, no sooner has Karine sat down – of course, carefully avoiding all mention of Fifi, whose deservingness is nevertheless very much in my mind – than I blurt the moral equivalent of, Why the devil doesn’t American Fifi, and her brother, too, for the matter of that, get long, paid vacations?

“Karine, mon amour véritable,” I rasp, “Why can’t the smarmy, moralizing politicians of the United States of America come up with paid vacations for those ‘American people’ they are always enthusing about?”

“Points that scratch” are those rude barbs on the socioculturoeconomical helix that take a lot of effort to rearrange for the 100-percent of us.

Aside, I tell her I’ve already ordered, smile hard and continue.

“Paid vacation is proof of both a civilized commonwealth and simple niceness.”

I realize I’m panting.

Maybe Karine’s slit-eye jealousy of Fifi isn’t so misplaced after all?

“Paid vacation for all is like a liberal education or the ban on child labor, outside of economics, a niceness that enables life to thrive here-below,” I tell her.

“Rich people can afford to treat themselves nicely; citizens of a rich nation should be able to afford to treat each other nice, too.”

The server arrives with our breakfast things. I am silent as he arranges things on the table, listening to the flutter of the spirits of the air in my troubled brain.

Over a squawky-concertina rendition of some patriotic drivel-music, I seem to hear the stage drawl of Ed Sanders. Or is it Tuli Kupferberg? Or Ken Weaver? The Fugs, anyhow. The cracker voice intones, “Hell’safire, whas’to’ther cun’dtry o’nyEa’rth kin spendt a millionya dol’lars a se’cundt jist fur a-snuffin’ gooks?”

The flatus of righteous rage at the injustice of it all fills to the brim my prim-lipped Ohio-soul as Karine busies herself with her coffee and little cakes.

“Goddam ‘Merica!” I hiss at Karine, “When will Fifi get what she needs with her good looks!”

Fifi has kind of popped out. "Like that", as another Ohio boy might say.

Karine says nothing, takes one of her little cakes, the chocolate one with the powdered sugar on top, bites off the half of it, sets it down, brushes her hands.

She eyes me coolly, says, “Niceness is woolly-headed, mon Tracy.”

She splashes a little coffee into her mouth and points out, as she lately never tires of pointing out, “You mean, ‘not too mean’, not ‘nice’. Car, comme je t’avais dit cent fois, les gens sont des brutes, et, de surcroit, des vicieux…” – people are a bunch of bastards and corrupt bastards at that.

“These conges payés …” she begins and stops to stir a little white beaker of milk into her bit of coffee.

Spontaneously, she uses the drippy swizzle stick to stub the tip of my nose. I feel a dribble of milk there; milk is so sweet-sticky.

I see into the gesture: Karine believes me not only uninformed but also naïve. In her books, only naïveté is forgivable.

Worse, far from redeeming me in her eyes, the righteous rage of my Ohio-soul condemns me by tempering a certain natural, rough, amoral strength with goody-two-shoes moral slops: cul-cul la praline, she calls it.

Good for me, dammit, I tell myself. Sometimes I think the woman has seen combat.

I get a text message – does she wonder if it’s Fifi? I stare into the tiny screen.

 

 

Grace Notes: An Interview with the Incomparable Nin Andrews

Grace Cavalieri's interview with Nin Andrews is a must read. Here is a little sampler:

<<<

Poetry, when it’s happening, is like sex. It totally suffuses me. (I like the word, suffuse.) Afterwards I always forget how it worked. 

I don’t mean that I literally forget. Of course, there’ s a pen and paper. Or two people. But there is that aha moment, and I sometimes think, Oh! Now I know how this works! But if I try to do the same thing the next time, it’s boring. Because it’s that sudden appearance of a fresh and present moment I seek—something that is not yet past and not yet lost . . . I sometimes think of Martin Buber, how he talked of the different ways of relating to the world: the I-it being the most familiar, referring to relationships in which you see the world as a collection of objects, predictable and useful. And the I-Thou, meaning a a communion with others (or the world) and oneself. In the I-Thou, nothing is formulaic. (Or at least, that’s how I interpret Martin Buber and what he said at length in his wonderful book, I-Thou, or rather, Ich und Du. I love the sound of that, Ich und Du.) 

I realized from writing poems that I am a bit of mystic. (Or am I just a poetry addict?)  I will do anything for that moment of union. On a good writing day, I feel bold and crazy and sometimes insanely happy, wildly in love with words and the world. But after for several hours of writing, I am usually exhausted. But the I who writes is quite different from the I who lives in the world. When I am not writing, I am introverted and shy. I worry about ridiculous things. Sometimes I get so nervous, I forget my phone number, my address, my maiden name. 

>>>

I Built This Room [by Michael Malinowitz]

I built this room by myself
And put into it only things that would
Matter to me: around an eyelid
Window to view the last
Quarter moons, I stacked books,
Only those read or intended
And music which outnumber
Books. I hung just a few paintings,
One by my sister who until recently
I didn’t know I had (both
The paintings and the sister). The bed
Was a single, large enough
For another to lie near to me;
Especially in the case a wife arrived.
The apparatus to cook and clean
Didn’t take up much space; no TV
Nor radio; no phone. I let
Jesus Christ into this room, but
Under another name; others came
And went through the door. I had
No intention to leave once I set up
Stakes. You see, everything in it was mine.
What others brought, I took in:
The fecund flowers, the pollinated corn
Presented by mutes and midgets,
Kings and sailors, friends
And foes, too. I shaved twice a day,
Once for an imaginary walk
To the bank, the other to see myself
Better, or at least more than I did
Before I built this room. Aware,
Not from letters to desist, I would
Leave: not to build or sell---
To walk hand over hand, clouds
Over skies, stars over suns, hand
Over hand, again in one language.

-- Michael Malinowitz

"Some of our smartest people's silliest ideas."

 

The American Scholar introduces its podcast series. Click below -- or here -- for an intro: 

Download Smarty Pants Theme - 2016-09-28 at 4.35pm-1

--sdl

 

Syntax, Sound, and Sensation: Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. His honors include a 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 

 

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

This Just In: Fearless Election Predictions (2016) -- by David Lehman

   

I write as one who has correctly predicted every presidential election since 1980 with the possible exception of 2004. This is not to claim special powers of prophecy for myself. Rather it is the result of a mathematical algorithm based on statistical analyses of each of the past twenty-five election cycles, taking into account the peculiarities of a system in which it is altogether possible that a candidate who wins the popular vote may yet lose the election due to the disproportionate power of states as tabulated by the so-called electoral college or, in extremely rare cases, the Supreme Court.

A value-neutral approach to presidential cycles indicates a perhaps surprising tendency on the part of the electorate. In brief, this tendency manifests itself as a loyalty to certain states of the union -- California, for example, as the most populous state, which has given us Nixon and Reagan, and Texas, as the "lone star" state, home of LBJ and George W. Bush..

According to the statistical formula devised by Peat Marwick, confirmed by Pete Runnels, and corroborated by Peter Campbell, with modifications introduced by pundits Arthur Buchwald and George Gordon, the state that is due, indeed overdue, to host the next president is the state of New York, which has not been represented in the White House since the three-plus terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1932-1945).

The Roosevelt aura won him four elections but led to a backlash against the Empire State, which helps account for the defeat of Thomas Dewey in 1948 and the inability of Nelson Rockefeller to get himself nominated, as by rights he should have been, in 1964. The emergence of William Miller as the GOP's VP candidate in 1964 and Geraldine Ferraro as the Democrats' VP candidate in 1984, does little to assuage the feelings of New Yorkers who have come to resent Massachusetts as the home state of one recent president (Kennedy), two presidential nominees (Dukakis, Romney), and the Boston Red Sox. But denizens of the Big Apple need worry no more.

According to the rule of four-year recurrence, New York's comeback is inevitable. It is therefore an utter certainty that the next president of the United States will be a New Yorker whether by birth or by choice.

I am willing to bet a large amount of money on this prediction though I suspect that the logic behind my reasoning, if grasped in good faith by the Tattaglias and Barzini, will allow for no dissent.

Although the algorithm is the intellectual property of the Santino Foundation and cannot be revealed on penalty of a lawsuit, I will say that the principle of the four-year term, divided by the hundred years in a century, results invariably in a ratio of one to four. Ohio had its Taft and Harding, and now it is New York's turn to bring home the bacon. As Ira Gershwin put it, there's a boat that's leaving soon for New York.

NB: Minnesota, home of near-miss candidate Humphrey and landslide loser with dignity Mondale, may well be next in line, though Arizona (Goldwater, McCain) will put up a furious fight four years hence.

-- David Lehman

Bad Poems [by Alan Michael Parker]

I recently spent a couple of months writing and reading as badly as possible, a practice I now recommend.

During my hiatus, I worked diligently to figure out what “bad poetry” meant to me, and once I become empowered to disappoint, how I could appall myself in a poem. I felt vicious, intemperate, outrageous, sleazy, hysterical, cantankerous, willful. I made poems with unconscionable and irrelevant leaps, poems with overblown abstractions heaped upon abstractions (who will ever forget “the turpitude of forgiveness”?), poems with speakers pronouncing upon every character in sight (because “I” always knows so much better than her or his family), poems with social toxicities heightened further by specious speechifying. I made poems that clanked and thumped, beset by sneaker-in-the-dryer iambs, and conversely, poems that used non-metrical speech oblivious to all considerations of sound, the kinds of poems that deserve to be chopped up, but are too often just divided into lines and called free verse. I made poems that ended four times without beginning once, poems that left out crucial details, poems with no details. I made poems that suffered from gender whiplash, empathy deficit, emotional aphasia, and narrative ataxia. I hated every line I wrote (who will ever forget “the hounds of my heartbeat”?), and wanted nothing more than to ball up each of my poems and drown them in a bucket of my crocodile tears.

And I read appalling poems, too. I searched for well-known poets I thought over-rated, bought a book by each, scoured the Amazon algorithms for like-minded horrors, and read on, McDuff. Bruising poems that attempted to meld unethical politics and self-righteousness, those bedmates always stealing the too-small blanket. Vapid poems that combine cosmetically, in the name of originality, unrelated subjects—as Lear says, “two pernicious daughters join'd” (King Lear, 3:2:22). I drank each drop of the soured milk in my summer’s failing fridge.

I crawled inside the zeitgeist and curled into a ball. Oh, the ekphrasis! Oh, the Self as our One Hero! I read fourteen ekphrastic poems on the Dutch Masters by fourteen poets, and forty-seven ekphrastic poems on Frida Kahlo by forty-one poets. (Where goeth Van Gogh? Where fleeth O’Keefe?) I read eighty-eight poems in which the last two lines begin with “I...,” after not using the first-person throughout the whole poem (“Sudden I Syndrome”). I read forty-three poems that begin at dawn or at dusk, but only three that begin after lunch. I read an even two-dozen poems that are centered by Microsoft Word because the software can. I read sixteen poems that mention breasts in the first four lines metonymically. I read—and I believe this is a coincidence, but I cannot be sure—five poems in the month of May about pets running away, poems in which I began to cheer for the pets, “Run, Sparky, Run! Run from the horrid poem....” (I wondered if the pets running away in May had anything to do with April being National Poetry Month.) In one of these poems, the narrator promises to ‘whup’ the dog beater, but doesn’t, because the dog beater turns out to be an elected official: that poem ends with the line, “and this is an allegory, people.” I read thirty-one poems with “Why” in the title, twenty of which also have “Why” in the last line. In the moment, out of time, and bad poem mad, I read so many bad poems I couldn’t tell where the poems ended and my emotions began.

I began to believe there was sand in my mouth, Jell-O in my shoes. I felt as though I had done a Morgan Spurlock, and super-sized all of the awful poetry I could consume. The lines were too salty, my glass of metaphors too fatty: I was threatening my psyche with The Poetry Arteriosclerosis.

After two months of the most god-awful poetry, I became mean to those around me. I kicked my bicycle whenever the chain fell off; standing on the sidewalk, I kicked and kicked. One time, I was so mad at how my own new poem ended, I drove my car straight onto a restaurant’s lawn, and insisted to the policewoman that I receive a moving violation. I felt as though I had enlisted in a poetry assassination squad, a private cohort of beauty slayers, and my code name had become Buzz Kill.

But nevertheless, all the while, keeping a working notebook in which I recorded my abjection, I began to clarify what had ruined my work too often, and especially the kinds of go-to conventions of free verse I had inherited, and learned to teach.

And then I stopped, the alarm went off, and adorned with my obsessions once again, though a little more sure of my weaknesses, I began to write what I hoped might be “good” poetry.

My poems had changed: my poems had become zanier, woofier, airier, less subject to fad-ism, more emotionally unpredictable, both sadder and happier, less touristic, more polyphonic, more intuitive. I had become skeptical of the comma and the period—I, a badge-wielding member of the Punctuation Police. My poems had learned to bang around in the inexplicable, and I had learned to trust how the darkness felt.

And now I’ll tell the story backwards, at least partially. Here’s a passage that might help explain my initial motivation, aside from the endorphins of the self-flagellant. In “The Use of Theory,” an essay first developed in 1955 and revised again in 1963, French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet writes:

"There is no question, as we have seen, of establishing a theory, a pre-existing mold into which to pour the books of the future. Each novelist, each novel must invent its own form. No recipe can replace this continual reflection. The book makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone. Indeed the movement of its style must often lead to jeopardizing them, breaking them, even exploding them. Far from respecting certain immutable forms, each new book tends to constitute the laws of its functioning at the same time that it produces their destruction." (Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction; Northwestern U Press, 1989; trans. Richard Howard)

Substituting the word “poem” for the word “novel” here, and thinking about the unrecognizability of “each new book” to the readers of the moment, I am interested in the notion that a poem “makes its own rules for itself, and for itself alone.” Even within received forms, isn’t this what happens, the work of art becomes a combo of promises kept and un-, the poem a linguistic and prosodic entity predicated upon the appearance of constant reinvention? Consider, in this context, the opening of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet V”: “I am a little world made cunningly / of elements....” I believe that Donne is talking about the poem itself here, and the behaviors within the poem consistent with specific physical constants and the text’s idiosyncratic rules of gravity.

But somewhere between reinvention, promises kept and dashed, and style, I had suffocated in my old little world, in my AMP-ocentrism. It’s a struggle, I think, to act upon a mature vision without parodying whatever artistic progress one has ostensibly made. A mature vision may yet generate a single (and singular) poem: however, a mature vision that corresponds too easily and too readily to Robbe-Grillet’s notion of the “pre-existing molds” that yield to “immutable forms” – which I believe the mature artist invents for herself or himself – threatens subsequent works with the prospect of being paler imitations of art already done well.

In other words, if you’re in the box, it’s because you are the box. And the box might look pretty, but that’s because you made it.

I’m no Kenneth Goldsmith, and this is not a stump speech for the uncreative; I’m much more inclined to Cathy Park Hong’s understanding of the history of the avant-garde anyway. Nor am I arguing to write against one’s own talents, which I realize constitutes an extremely complicated idea packed into a gnomic truism. Nor am I saying the zeitgeist is only a prison. Instead, I’m trying to endorse a healthy skepticism of the familiar: lesser versions of our own best poems need to be preempted by continued experimentation.

When I wrote bad poems on purpose — and hold your tongues here, social media wags — informed by my reading of bad poems, I found myself filling in the silences and the spaces between the words. Appearances aside, I’ve never been a narrative poet: my poems often perform what I call “the attitude of narrative,” and present in narrative ways their lyricism without succumbing to story. Filling in the silences and spaces, for me, might have meant adding plot, undermining inference, dumbing down ambiguity — but really, what it means, and what I think may be the best individualized lesson I learned during my Season of Hell, is that sound by itself isn’t a sufficient poetic phenomenon until dynamically interpellated by white space and silence. Perhaps I’ve come upon a commonplace in music composition, and/or a truism implicit to my earlier work, but the idea seemed a newly articulated notion for me.

You might expect a rant in a piece I’m calling “Bad Poems,” as I detail all that is execrable in the art form today, and name the worst offenders. I’m not going to do that —in part because I have an allergy to negative campaigning, and it’s a bad year for vitriol, but also because I wrote horrifyingly bad poems myself, and now I know they’re in me.

Besides, I wouldn’t trust me. Whose opinions aren’t provisional anyway? What working artist could possibly believe in an idea beyond its utility in the studio? Although I want what I want from a poem, and I tend to teach what I want, my desires have proven fungible with age, disproven as I go. Moreover, I remain a man suspicious of what I call “managed aesthetics.”

I am often reminded of a moment in 1993 when I was adjuncting at Rutgers University, and moderating a forum at "Writers at Rutgers" with visiting Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. A persistent questioner insisted upon asking Milosz to share his “world view,” a mode of inquiry I couldn’t seem to countermand; the questioner was trying to pin down Milosz, to get the great poet to collate all of our truths for us.

Milosz was gracious — he raised a spectacular eyebrow and smiled at me; he could handle this one, his gesture said — and answered wryly: “A world view is a world order.” I feel that way about learned experience in poetry writing, about my “moves” and their power over my aesthetics, but bad poems have now helped me work toward unlearning such vanities.

Here’s Milosz reading on March 26, 1998. At the 8:35 mark, he reads one of his masterpieces, “The Day the World Ends,” first in English and then in Polish; that’s the wild, good Milosz poem for me.

Cartoons © Felicia van Bork, 2016

Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets [by Alan Michael Parker] - Part II

More wonderful answers by super poets... Part II of III... a follow-up post to...

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2016/09/eleven-questions-for-eleven-poets-by-alan-michael-parker.html

Question 6: Which poem in your book arrived mostly whole?

Elizabeth Colen: Quite a few of the poems in What Weaponry arrived mostly whole, in a sense.

While I rarely have moments where one perfect sentence follows another perfect sentence and so on, what I do have sometimes is a few focused hours of obsessiveness. In this, I write a line, read it out loud, and rewrite and read out loud until the line is perfect, move on to the next line and repeat, until I feel something is capital-D Done. Sometimes this takes an hour, sometimes five or six or eight. But the poem is complete after this. And more than half of these poems were written like this.

I wrote 90% of the first draft while traveling by train one summer several years ago. I had long stretches of time of the landscape rushing by and the sound of the train cocooning me. This combination of continuous forward motion and white noise ended up being an incredibly productive whole-poem space.

“Burnside,” for example came about after I learned the word “undersound” and a poem fell nearly whole out of that idea.

Carolina Ebeid: “Epithalamium for Alejandra & Wojtek” came to me in one swoop. This rarely happens to me. I want to believe other poems will arrive like that; I’d leave the porch light on for them. I usually work from the images/words/lines I collect in my notebooks, so that I am often building the poems through collage. On the golden occasion, I sit and write a full poem beginning to end. This kind of poem seems like a telepathic massage received, like I didn’t write it, I only acted as scribe. These poems tend to be short.

Max Ritvo: “Poem to My Litter” arrived word-for-word as a whole. I just needed to cut a sappy line at the end, and Paul Muldoon at the New Yorker made me see the light of that very quickly. “Poem to My Litter” has so many beautiful and tragic life facts in it—it's a poem about real life mice that had my real life tumors cloned into them so that we could test different chemotherapy poisons out on them. It didn't need the rather erratic help of my image-making faculties, it just needed a calm and compassionate and loving tone, with the right dose of self-awareness, to bring out the truth of my life in it. But I must say, its initial lineation was miserable—the poem was all scattered, droopy, ragged, ugly stanzas. I needed to whip it into beauty, and I needed the help of my genius editor and best friend Elizabeth Metzger to make me understand that long couplets were the best and most merciless way to expose the world.

Chris Santiago: “[Island of Fault Lines]” came about in the middle of a wicked thunderstorm. I was in a budget hotel on the island of Palawan, it was muggy as hell, and the power kept flickering on and off. I was cranky. Most of my anger, though, came from research: I’d been spending the last week hitting archives and museums, and doing interviews for a fiction project about the Philippine-American War. Few people talk about this war, although estimates for the civilian death toll range from 200,000 to 1,000,000. But my research took me beyond it, into the countless other misfortunes endured by Filipinos, on both sides of the Pacific. The anger had been building steadily, and developing its own logic; it became this poem, which, except for the ending, spoke itself onto the page in a single sitting.

Lee Sharkey: “Lashing the body from the bones” came all of a piece and quickly. Essentially a found poem, it is a distillation of the transcripts of the poet Peretz Markish’s testimony at his trial for crimes against the state in the last months of the Stalinist era, as published in Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov’s Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Markish was a Yiddish-language poet widely acclaimed in the early years of the Soviet Union but later executed along with twelve other prominent Jewish writers and intellectuals on what has become known as The Night of the Murdered Poets. My contribution to the poem consists entirely of my excisions. The testimony is so Kafkaesque it bore no emendation or commentary.

Clint Smith: The poem, For the Taxi Cabs that Pass me in Harvard Square, was written largely in a single sitting. It, like much of my collection, was written in a sociopolitical moment when conversations around racism were at the forefront of our country’s collective discourse. The problem is not that we weren’t talking about issues of race, but that we were largely talking about it in the wrong way. The average American’s conception of racism is that it is a violent interpersonal confrontation, and thus racism is imagined as singularly performative—something that only exist if it can be easily witnessed or observed. Additionally, much of the discourse centered around how the victims of racist acts—police violence or otherwise—would not have experienced such violence if they were better educated, or behaved with a different sort of decorum. This poem came to me during a winter evening in which several friends and I were attempting to hail a cab near Harvard, where I attend graduate school, to go to dinner in the city. Cabs continued to pass us until a white friend stepped to the curb of the street and was able to hail one on his first attempt. It is moments like those that disabuse me of the notion the race won’t matter once you attain a certain level of education, credentials, or prestige. Blackness remains the coat you can’t take off.

Tony Trigilio: Because it’s a book-length poem, I’ll focus on one segment that came to me almost whole, and required very little revision: the three pages written about a trip my wife, Liz, and I took to Madison, Wisconsin, right after a two-week cancer scare in summer 2015. This segment of the book, written about a crowd of people and ducks on a Saturday night at Madison’s Lake Mendota pier, came in one rush about a week after we returned to Chicago. I couldn’t get the physicality of the ducks out of my mind—couldn’t stop thinking about how these ducks were so unselfconsciously living through their bodies. The people lounging on the pier that evening, just before twilight, seemed to be living in much the same way, stuffing bratwurst sandwiches in their mouths and guzzling beer in midsummer Saturday twilight. Even without the cancer scare, we would’ve experienced the evening much like the people around us at the pier did—minus the bratwurst—but this night our bodies were lightened by the sheer, primal gratitude that we were simply alive.

Question 7: What are you doing formally in this book that’s new for you?

Elizabeth Colen: Well, it’s a novel in prose poems, which is either not really a thing, or it is a hybrid genre, or it is an ambitious pile of poems, or it is a novel that can’t sit still. I took two characters from a poem I had written years before (“Fifty Miles of Shoulder” from Money for Sunsets) and decided to give them more life and a fuller history, really get to know them. Because for all their effed-up-edness, I really liked and wanted to spend more time with them. So the concept itself was new, shaping a pile of poems into a cohesive narrative arc when I’m not generally a “narrative” poet. Within the text of the book also exists an erasure—words bolded throughout, which creates another layer of the narrative when read in isolation.

In some ways it’s vital for me to feel I’m doing something entirely new with each book, formally and in terms of content. Because otherwise, why bother? I suppose it might be different if I made a living off my books. You know, would I hit that bar to get the cheese each time? But as it is I’m just being accountable to the obsessions and allowing whatever form emerges.

Dana Levin: The composition of “En Route” took the longest, was the most fraught and foreign to me, and I still worry about whether it, y’know, works. I loved working in such short fragments, working with overheard speech, finding, finally, an overall conception that felt like it could orchestrate the parts into something a little more than ephemeral. Book-wise, bringing in our engagement with the Digiverse, from social media to on-line scrabble to taking selfies: this was new material to figure out tonally, since it’s so banal and intense and fun and significant and ridiculous, and pervades us all.

Lee Sharkey: Like many poets I see my work as being in conversation with the poetry that has informed it. That sense was particularly acute when I was working on this book, where I was engaged in retrieving fragments of what was almost lost, particularly in the case of Markish and Abraham Sutzkever, condemned to present-day obscurity as a consequence of writing in a tongue largely annihilated by genocide. In poems such as “Old World,” “Lyric,” and “Something we might give” I conceived the page as a simultaneous present where poets whose voices were inflected by the Shoah and I might engage in intimate exchange—a risky enterprise but one I felt impelled to. Integrating words from their poems directly into my own gave me the sense that they were speaking through my mouth, a way of ceding space to them, an act of homage in which reading and writing, listening and speaking and, it seemed, self and other, merged.

Clint Smith: To be honest, the act of writing a book itself was a new formal process for me. My relationship to poetry was born out of performance. One of the first times I felt viscerally moved by art was as a college student at a Friday night poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Café. It is impossible for me to write a poem without considering how the poem will sound aloud. I want to hear the music of the lines, the way the mouth is rendered a different instrument by every stanza. The entire tradition of poetry comes not from the page, but from the tongue – the griots, Homer, Shakespeare. Still, translating that music to the page has been a new and wonderful artistic endeavor for me. To think about how a poem will be received when I no longer own the sound has been so fascinating to work through.

Megan Snyder-Camp: The three sequences that make up Wintering were initially composed as haibun, which fit the travelogue arc of the book and offered a way to shuttle between research and daylight. A few years into my research, I came across unpublished archival materials involving “Couch’s Ned,” an enslaved man prosecuted for destroying the “Indian vocabularies” Lewis and Clark collected. The urgency I felt in sharing this story, and particularly the parts of this story that had been missing for the past 200 years, was tempered by the responsibility I felt, as a white writer, to proceed slowly and with clarity. This gas-and-brake shaped the work formally (hopefully not into a figure 8 train race). I needed a between-form, a both-form: interrupted, dropped, doubling-back. One day I came up with what I call stanzagraphs: six(ish)-line text units that are both right and left-justified, with a volta between stanzagraphs.

It proved a strict and generative form, and a bane to later editors and formatters. Each press had their own font and spacing, prompting significant changes in content each time the piece was to be printed. I like that these sequences must shift depending on where they appear, each specifically shaped by the limits of the field in which it appears, each version equally final and yet built from the others.

Tony Trigilio: Like the first volume, this book is written entirely in couplets. Book 2 swallows forms that aren’t conventionally suitable to the couplet. In this book, I’m often creating formal challenges for myself, including a sestina written in couplets—which eventually became a two-and-one-half page, nineteen-couplet sestina (with one hanging final line). I felt like I was persuading the couplet to admit a form it’s not usually comfortable with. I noticed the couplet-sestina is sneakier than a conventional sestina. I mean, a traditional sestina just announces itself to you—loudly, unabashedly—with its six blocked-out, six-line stanzas and the deceptive finality of its three-line refrain. Of course, I love this about the conventional sestina. But a couplet-sestina is furtive; it seems to unfold on the page like any other set of couplet pairs, but it does so in a stealthy way—repeating its end words almost shyly at first, even as the obsessive repetitions start to accumulate. It defies our expectations for the couplet and the sestina, creating a clandestine sestina, which, I hope, actually heightens the tension that comes from the cyclical logic of the conventional sestina form.

I also wrote the longest ghazal of my life for this book: a three-and-one-half page monster that’s actually part of a longer four-and-one-half page sentence. One page into the sentence, the poem shifts into a ghazal, just as I’m beginning to summarize the show’s interminable sixty-episode “dream-curse” plotline. The ghazal suddenly insinuates itself into the sentence—just as, for the Dark Shadows viewer, the dream-curse abruptly takes over the show’s narrative arc. A sentence that begins with an account of a trip my wife Liz and I took to Seattle drifts backward in time to a memory of a farcical lost-luggage encounter I had with USAir in the 1990s, then lands back at the Seattle Sheraton in late-2014, with the sun coming through our hotel window as the two of us watched Dark Shadows; and then, without warning, the dream-curse ghazal begins, eventually unfolding in such a way that the ghazal mimics a recurring dream (fitting, since the “dream-curse” was itself an entire plotline built around a supernatural recurring dream passed on like a loopy, psychic contagion from one character to the next).

Monica Youn: I’ve always been pulled toward the minimal, to extreme compression, to cutting things down to their hinges. But in this book I was consciously trying to resist that impulse, to go for the long sustain. I wanted to push how long I could stay immersed in a particular image, a particular syntactical unit, long past the time at which I would normally have moved on. It’s an effort for me to resist the urge to cut away, to think in terms of integral wholeness rather than exquisite fragments, to opt for the slow build rather than the jump-cut. I wanted to give an image and/or the argument time to develop enough materiality that it could push back against my authorial control. I wanted to give the poem time to find its own shape, form its own strata.

Also, it seems important that this is the first book I’ve written since I’ve stopped being a lawyer in 2013. One of the side effects of legal practice is that it changes your perception of time. When I was in private practice, I billed my time in six-minute increments; once I moved into public interest election law, I often had to respond to 400 emails per day. That sort of pace changes the texture of your thoughts. Since I stopped practicing law, I can feel a slow unclenching, the occasional mind-cramp. I think of my work in longer forms as, in part, a long-overdue stretching practice, a necessary corrective to years spent living in intensified snippets.

La Rentrée: Enlightenment New Year [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

We are not alone, we will never be alone, with our memories of our sweet sons and daughters at the Rentrée.

Calculating when France’s New Year – called la Rentrée, “re-entry” – begins and ends is pretty simple. Unlike Chinese New Year, which requires some functional knowledge of “lunisolar” calendars and historic Han migration patterns, you just have to know when most families are back in town after using up most of their accumulated government-mandated, yearly paid-vacation time. That’s around about when the school year starts, the first week of September.

In France, as elsewhere, harvest traditions, cooling temperatures and shortening days, along with the new school year, combine to make the end of summer a special moment. But, in most places, and this despite a clear plea from John Keats, the accent is on bittersweet Goodbye. La Rentrée, though, is a beginning, a renewal, a hopeful Hiiiiii again. The On se retrouve à la rentrée! of the month of June is a Happy Holidays! equivalent, meaning “We’ll pick up again in a New Year!”.

Rituals of reuniting – retrouvailles – go on throughout the month of September. Families – sure, many, of course, are sick of the enforced togetherness of summer holidays but just as many have been scattered to the winds by the obligations of blended families, summer studies and camp and travel. Families, as well as friends and colleagues enjoy the retrouvailles, but also discreetly celebrate putting on the familiar harnesses that retrain and regulate even our most tender relations.

It is good, after all, to get back into the swing of ordinary life. Endlessly invoking the start of school – I am plenty sick of this by the first week of October, let me tell you –  is a way of both underlining new beginnings in a broader sense and emphasizing the importance of individual participation in the workplace and in society as a whole.

At la Rentrée, in politics, as elsewhere in society, spectacular absurdities and failures can be overlooked and, if convenient, even forgotten, and new ones publically planned and executed. On streets and in offices and shops, people are brisk and mostly relaxed, despite endless warnings and reminders about all manner of dangerously loose -ists and -isms. In private life, rare is the face taut with suppressed distaste or anger; the hell that is the Other has not yet had the time to make the ordinary person hysterical.

I am not alone, I think, I shall never be alone, I think, in having golden memories of la Rentrée: of my sweet son, of the touch of his hand, of the sound of his voice, of his little kisses, of our morning strolls to school in the crisp autumn air.

Our step is firm. We together share a leisurely stride, Tobias, you and me, an easy-yet-determined progress fit for a new beginning.

Hearing still sharp from a long, peaceful night, ears attentively cocked for something possible, something new, we sometimes hear the sharp clink of cups and saucers.

The noise and fury of the city, still only rises at a distance, as if from behind a garden wall, just out of view scenting the watery light with hints of diesel, mid-day heat, fatigue, but as yet it has no dominion.

The Comics of Lydia Conklin [introduced by Alan Michael Parker]

The comics of novelist and cartoonist Lydia Conklin bristle with wondrous unfillable silences, à la Samuel Beckett, and wacky pointedness worthy of Roz Chast. Conklin’s especially terrific at the stare-down. But it’s her timing most of all that I love, how funny she is... wait for it... and funnier yet.

Here is a comic from her Lesbian Cattle Dogs series, expressly commissioned for this blog. 

 

Lydia Conklin is the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory University. She has received a Pushcart Prize, work-study scholarships from Bread Loaf, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, Jentel, Lighthouse Works, Brush Creek, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Caldera, the Sitka Center, and Harvard University, among others, and grants and awards from the Astraea Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Alliance of Artists Communities, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Her fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, New Letters, The New Orleans Review, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. She has drawn graphic fiction for Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Florida Review, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Bad Workshops [by Alan Michael Parker]

In the Spring of 2013, I taught the worst undergraduate poetry workshop ever. The students were marvelous and curious and smart; the writing distinctive; the books were scintillating; the visiting poets I brought wow, wow, wowed us; the final projects demonstrated learning and promise; and the camaraderie was memorable. Everything came together. Why then was the workshop so awful? Because all of the above assessments were mine, based on my aesthetics, to make me happy, and far too much of the learning was merely parroted. And I didn’t realize until later that summer how much I had fallen for my own image in the mirror of my pedagogy. It wasn’t a workshop, it was a self-portrait.

Of course, criticism of the standard workshop method, the “workshop poem,” and the Po’ Biz remains a commonplace in higher education, low-hanging fruit. I have eaten such plums: they are not delicious. Nevertheless, I would like here to enumerate even more criticism of the workshop, in the name of teaching a better workshop. What follows is a critique of a peculiar system of learning in which I believe, and in which students prosper. I offer, then, some issues that I haven’t seen discussed as much as I’d like, and I do so trusting wholly that the internet will protect me from the spurious anti-intellectualism, ad hominen whining that runs rampant in so much of our social media. I trust, too, that many good teachers of writing have already addressed my concerns in their classes, and for these teachers, the oddments I offer will seem simplistic and self-evident. But maybe not.

Contrarily, ultimately, I shall offer my optimism: I believe that the workshop, and some version of the standard workshop method, are right for the teaching and learning of poetry writing. So there. As a graduate student colleague once declared of my poems in Denis Johnson’s workshop, millennia ago, even of this compost, a pretty petunia might yet grow. (Not to dishearten, but that colleague became a powerful literary agent.)

Here are a few of my concerns. Following each, I offer remedy, mostly approaches that I have begun to explore in my teaching over the past two years. My hope is that these musings inspire and incite more than dictate... the ideas, dear people, the ideas...

Old New Critics

The standard workshop method assumes that the poem exists in a vacuum. Sure, readers are expected to Google what they don’t know, and provide a gloss on allusions or esoterica, but mostly we’re close-reading based on the idea that the text is self-contained, all of its meanings waiting to be divined. In this procedure, the poem could be a poem written in any moment, last year, five years ago, next month, and by anyone in the room; the poem’s hiding everything we need to figure out the poem, and we’re all scientists of the poem, committed to its self-contained (yielding and un-) truths.

I don’t know about you, but I gave up reading this way twenty-five years ago, when I discovered Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination—gosh, even the most doleful literary critics rarely default to New Criticism exclusively any more—and yet I continued to act as though such hermeneutics best suit the teaching of creative writing.

One way to address the matter: shift the conversation away from the assumption that the poem knows all. Which is not to suggest that the critique of the work be eliminated, but that “what works/what doesn’t” need not be handed to the poet like a prescription at the end of a class session. Instead of laying claim in the name of explicating try asking: What’s the poem about on the surface? What’s it really about? Distinguish between content and subject. What assumptions about language, and power, may be read in the poem’s procedures? Why this poem now? What’s been left out of the poem? What are the poem’s formal ambitions? What’s remembered about the poem later? What image abides? These questions necessarily recognize that the poem exists in a cultural context, in an historical moment, and aspires to a condition of art.

There are many such questions to ask, as a way to speak to the poem’s purview without sacrificing rigor—and ultimately, if the questions are well-asked and pursued thoughtfully, the poet may feel empowered fully to write, revise, and write again.

Real Poets

Oh, the lives we lead. No one believes that we’re pure products of our childhoods, and yet, that assumption pervades what’s not said in workshops. Autobiography necessarily complicates our abilities as writers to revise, given the connection between the life and the text, but even more of a problem, early poets usually believe they are the “I” in their own poems—this despite the workshop’s default terminology, using “the speaker” to differentiate between author and character, a move that for an early poet simply glosses over the problem. As such, early poets may read their colleagues’s poems as thinly veiled forays into the autobiographical, the presumption a cherished secret. Of course, these early poets are right, and the “I” is an attempt to contain and perform the “real” person—it’s true in my poems too, when I’m not fanatically inventing speaking selves, further complicated by my enthusiasm for fictional childhoods. But even still, there are other ways to think about the self, and other ways to approach an early poet’s work of art. The self in a poem is not only a palimpsest.

Ask the poet at the outset what she or he wants from readers, and from the workshop. Ask the poet to identify what she or he was trying to work on, what couldn’t be fixed, or what feels right. Yes, use the word “feels.” Ask the poet the “secret title” of the poem, that is, the title she or he uses when thinking about the poem. Ask the poet to identify the moment in the poem of greatest invention—and don’t define “invention,” so that the term can be treated formally or semantically. Ask the poet to identify who in her or his life should not read the poem, using initials if need be.

In other words, before the critique begins, acknowledge the living artist’s role in the production of the work of art. Turn the subsequent conversation to include these ambitions.

When validation of the living writer-in-the-room becomes part of the workshop, the opportunity arises to shift focus from the autobiographical past to the artistic present, while keeping an eye on the changeable future.

Medical Ethics

In the standard workshop method, the poet reads the poem aloud, shuts up, we talk, bingo, the poet takes home a broken poem, diagnosed, the poet unhappy. Are all poems broken? Need this be the only approach to a poem that’s not yet succeeding?

Any way you can, teacher, change it up. Conduct a workshop in which only the very best moments in each poem are up for discussion: ask the cohort “What’s the sequel to this poem?” Conversely, “What’s the prequel?” Lead a discussion of the poem’s use of silence—I know, irony abounds, but behave yourself. Ask the question Joseph Brodsky would ask us, when reading Auden, “For what moment was the poem written?” In other words, by any means, while critiquing the poem valorize the effort, and never default to the diagnostic, and never pathologize.

Professor for a Day

I wonder sometimes if I were to close my eyes, would my students still look at me when they speak? (And, of course, how would I know?) Students are so often so anxious to impress—which I certainly felt in the presence of my teachers. Too often, students critique a colleague’s poem while searching for my approval. My authority reigns, and I’m not only talking about the history of gendered power in the workshop environment. Paradoxically, when I move to correct the problem, I perpetuate its condition: by instructing people to talk with and to one another, I reify my ability to give orders.

It’s naturally a huge challenge for the teaching artist, to empower students without sacrificing expertise. Of late, I’ve been trying not to provide a summary at the end of each discussion, i.e. I don’t want the final say. I sit in a different chair each week, hoping to disabuse myself of the inevitability of my authority, and even more hopeful that the students will address one another. I appoint a Professor-for-the-Day—they’re encouraged to call on me as needed—or, alternatively, the person to the left of the poet becomes the primary respondent. I try not to digress on the use of the lower case ‘i’ in Lucille Clifton’s work, at least not in class, even though that information might appear relevant. Instead, I hope to note the phenomenon and then move to another subject, or better yet be moved. I wait an extra week to provide the poet with my written commentary, so that I don’t overwhelm the efficacy of the workshop discussion, or drown out anyone. It’s all so I don’t talk first and last.

These days, from the outset, I warn students that while I think I’m right, I’m asking that they help me to see how I’m not, and that doing so needs to be more than showmanship, or a game. I want us to be wrong together.

"A Woe of Ecstasy" [by David Lehman]

"A woe of ecstasy" -- Emily Dickinson's phrase: run with it. "Next Line, Please" invites you to write a brief poem beginning with this striking phrase.

https://theamericanscholar.org/in-handbags-purses-and-wallets/#.V-FRfPkrK00

Walter Lehmann [by David Lehman]

 

 

 

 

Have you heard of Walter Lehmann? I write about Uncle Walter's poetry in the new issue of John Tranter's Journal of Poetics Research. 

<<<

Among my father’s cousins, Walter Lehmann was exceptional in four ways: he kept the double n’s at the end of his surname; having escaped from Nazi Germany, he settled in Australia rather than England or the United States; he wrote poetry; and he was a fictional character, a persona and a pseudonym adopted by Gwen Harwood (1920-1995), an estimable Australian poet.

continue here 

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Frank O'Hara: "A Step Away from Them"

It's my lunch hour, so I go for
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches
and Coca-Cola, with yellow helmets
on. They protect them from falling
bricks, I guess. Then onto the
avenue where skirts are flipping
above heels and blow up over
grates. The sun is hot, but the
cabs stir up the air. I look
at bargains in wristwatches. There
are cats playing in sawdust. 
                                            On
to Times Square, where the sign
blows smoke over my head, and higher
the waterfall pours lightly. A
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
                   Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure, as Edwin Denby would
write, as are light bulbs in daylight.
I stop for a cheeseburger at JULIET'S
CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of
Federico Fellini, èè bell' attrice.
And chocolate malted. A lady in
foxes on such a day puts her poodle
in a cab.
               There are several Puerto
Ricans on the avenue today, which
makes it beautiful and warm. First
Bunny died, then John Latouche,
then Jackson Pollock. But is the
earth as full as life was full, of them?
And one has eaten and one walks,
past the magazines with nudes
and the posters for BULLFIGHT and
the Manhattan Storage Warehouse,
which they'll soon tear down. I
used to think they had the Armory
Show there.
                   A glass of papaya juice
and back to work. My heart is in my
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

(1956)

Ours is a Long Love Song: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Nate Marshall's Wild Hundreds

Wild Hundreds
Nate Marshall
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015

In the year or so since Wild Hundreds first appeared in print, Nate Marshall’s award winning debut poetry collection feels even more necessary in the wake of the historic wave of gun violence that has rocked Chicago in 2016. Marshall’s raucous, vivid, and relentless love letter to the hundreds neighborhood on Chicago’s south side provides an apt rejoinder to the 522 homicides that have occurred in the city as of mid-September. Wild Hundreds jukes between elegy and epithalamion as it celebrates a place where “each street day is unanswered prayer for peace,” and where, for some politicians, bureaucrats, and public school administrators “every kid that’s killed is one less free lunch,/ a fiscal coup.” With exquisite care, Marshall renders the denizens of his beloved hometown in all of their vibrant complexity, from the eighth grade graduate with his Sox hat askew, skipping stones in a pond at a public park, to his own Granddaddy, “all leisure suits & peppermint,” “all birthday money & slurry speech.” In this place, where the brilliant colors in a bouquet resemble a gang war, the colors of a Grandma’s rosebush reiterate the shade of a Vice Lord’s do-rag, and the dandelions wear Latin King gold, Marshall summons his own rage so that he can remix it into a percussive imperative to thrive amidst the beautiful struggle, and, more simply, to love.

Although Marshall’s collection rightly errs on the side of the laudatory, the poet incisively critiques Chicago’s failures. Throughout Wild Hundreds, Marshall scatters “Chicago high school love letters,” poems that are poignant and heartbreaking, realistically depicting teenage desire against the backdrop of urban violence and neglect. The winter break poems read:

            131.

            i would
            airbrush
            you on
            a t-shirt.

            156.

            i would fight for you
            like my shoes or my
            boys or any excuse
            for contact.

Later in the book, Marshall notes that the numbers in these poems represent the city’s homicides during the 2007-2008 Chicago Public Schools academic year. Marshall learned early on in life, while living in the predominantly white Mount Greenwood neighborhood, the amnesia and intimacy attendant on violence. In the poem, “Alzheimer’s,” Marshall notes:

            this is where i came from. whitefolk
            violence isn’t hypothetical to me. it’s not historical
            or systemic. its elementary school
            like Pokémon or sleepovers.

The Chicago that Nate Marshall evokes in Wild Hundreds is more than the sum of its shames and griefs and anxieties and break beats and scraped knuckles and smoking gun barrels and wild forgettings. It’s the windows rolled down on a Saturday evening in August. It’s that sweet old Curtis Mayfield Impressions song you hear out the window of a passing car, telling you to keep on pushing and it’s all right.     

Dante Di Stefano’s collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, The Writer's Chronicle, and elsewhere. Most recently, he is the winner of the Red Hen Press Poetry Award and Crab Orchard Review’s Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. He lives in Endwell, New York.

Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets, including Dana Levin, Max Ritvo, Tony Trigilio [by Alan Michael Parker]

When offered a guest appearance on the Best American Poetry blog, I decided not only to write a couple of articles that I’ve been mulling over, but also to celebrate new books of poems coming out this fall. I put out a call via Facebook and Twitter, and had such a strong response I was made to choose among submissions. I did so: I read the galleys and selected eleven poets to interview. (And I apologize to those this feature could not accommodate.) So, on July 2, eleven poets received the following charge:

Please answer five of the questions below. Elaborate upon your replies—that is, please explain your thinking, and explore the examples you’re citing—and nonetheless limit each answer to a paragraph or two. Concise, substantive responses would be preferred.

1. Which of these poems predicts your future?
2. What two moments in the volume, or two images from the poems, would you like your reader to remember most?
3. Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception?
4. Which poem in your book should be read aloud first—that is, not the volume’s first poem?
5. Which two or three poems might compete to be the volume’s singular ars poetica?
6. Which poem in your book arrived mostly whole?
7. What are you doing formally in this book that’s new for you?
8. List five books that mattered to you during the writing of your book.
9. List five events in your life that mattered to you during the writing of your book.
10. Which poem in this book could begin your next book?
11. Which poem in this book scares you the most?

One sad note: as many of you know, the poet Max Ritvo died this summer at the age of twenty-five. We are fortunate to have his poems, and also fortunate that even in his decline he was able to contribute sparkling responses to the interview questions. My condolences to his family and friends.

And in case you’re wondering, Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets took 143 emails.

Now the poets and their answers, a sampling of some of the brilliance we find in poetry today: Elizabeth Colen, Carolina Ebeid, Dana Levin, Max Ritvo, David Rivard, Chris Santiago, Lee Sharkey, Clint Smith, Megan Snyder-Camp, Tony Trigilio, Monica Youn. 

Elizabeth J. Colen is most recently the author of What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems. Other books include poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies, flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition, and fiction collaboration Your Sick. She teaches at Western Washington University.

  

Carolina Ebeid is a the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, Fall 2016). She is a student in the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and more recent work appears in Linebreak, Bennington Review, jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone House Reader.  

Dana Levin's new book of poetry is Banana Palace, out this October from Copper Canyon Press. A grateful recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, Levin serves each fall as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [Photo by Anne Staveley]

 

Max Ritvo (1990–2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of the chapbook AEONS, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Divedapper, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

 

David Rivard’s most recent book, Standoff, was published by Graywolf in August. He is the author of five other books: Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Among Rivard’s awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and the NEA, as well as two Shestack Prizes from American Poetry Review and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the University of New Hampshire, and lives in Cambridge. News & reviews of Standoff can be found at his website: www.davidrivard.net.

 Chris Santiago is the author of TULA, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. His poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds degrees in creative writing and music from Oberlin College and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Santiago is also a percussionist and amateur jazz pianist. He teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas. He lives in Minnesota.

Lee Sharkey’s Walking Backwards will appear momentarily from Tupelo Press. Her earlier collections comprise Calendars of Fire (Tupelo, 2013), A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid, 2008), and eight other full-length poetry books and chapbooks. Her work has been published in Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, FIELD, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Pleiades, Seattle Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship in Literary Arts, the RHINO Editor’s Prize, the Shadowgraph Poetry Prize, and Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry. A lifelong writer, editor, and teacher, she leads a creative writing workshop for adults recovering from mental illness and serves as Senior Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. [Photo by Al Bersbach]

Clint Smith is a writer and doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and was a speaker at the 2015 TED Conference. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Guardian, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere. He is the author of Counting Descent (2016) and was born and raised in New Orleans. More of his work can be found at www.clintsmithiii.com. Counting Descent is available for purchase here.

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering and The Gunnywolf. Her website is www.snydercamp.com. She lives in Seattle.

 

 

  

Tony Trigilio’s most recent collection of poetry is Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2 (BlazeVOX [books], 2016). He is the editor of the chapbook Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016), a collection of interviews from his poetry podcast Radio Free Albion. His other books include, most recently, White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and, as editor, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta, 2014). He plays in the band Pet Theories and teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he is Interim Chair of the Creative Writing Department. [Photo by Kevin Nance]

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which is currently on the longlist for the 2016 National Book Award, Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter (Graywolf Press 2003). Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. She currently teaches at Princeton University and in the Warren Wilson and Sarah Lawrence MFA programs. A former lawyer, she lives in New York.

Part I: Questions 1-5

Question 1: Which of these poems predicts your future?

Carolina Ebeid: The closing poem of the book “M, Marina” predicts a kind of future. In fact, the poem was supposed to be part of the next work. I decided to include it in You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior precisely because it didn't fit perfectly, to my mind. Therefore the book itself doesn’t actually feel shut. Rather, the poem acts as a leading to the next book. In formal ways, “M, Marina” also describes my present. It is written in serial form, made up of short, variegated pieces. While the poem centers around Marina Tsvetaeva, the serial poem is a form open enough to allow many observations into its orbit. Both this poem and “Veronicas of a Matador” function in the same way formally; much of the work I am writing presently relies on the same methods of seriality.  

Dana Levin: “At the End of My Hours,” of course!

But seriously: I don’t think I’d ever survive civilization’s collapse. I’m over fifty, not in apocalypse-withstanding shape, and trained to teach poetry. My only hope would be to convince a rag-tag band of survivors that they needed a shaman bard crone wom­­an.

Max Ritvo: All the ones that predict my imminent death due to Ewing's Sarcoma. I'm pretty sure they're hitting the nail on the head. And by "the head" I mean my head.

Lee Sharkey: Allow me to subvert the question to talk about a dream that led me on a journey. In the early summer of 2011 I woke in the middle of the night hearing the words “Tonight I am walking backwards”; I scribbled them in my journal before falling back to sleep. The sentence had the peculiar quality of utterance that has led me over the years to germinal poems, yet I had no idea what it might refer to. In a month I was to fly to Vilnius for an SLS seminar, an opportunity for me to explore the Jewish history and culture of a city that had witnessed both their heights and their depths, but I made no conscious connection between the trip and the image of walking backwards.

In Vilnius, I lived in the garret of an old building on one of the seven streets that had constituted the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Between 1941 and 1943, over 35,000 people were confined there; almost all would die at the hands of their captors, the majority by execution in the nearby killing fields of Ponar. I literally walked in their footsteps as I traveled the cobbled streets and as I climbed four flights of crumbling stairs to a room some number of them had crowded into and tried to sleep. By chance or fate I found myself “walking backwards” into the vexed history I claim as my inheritance. Night by night in that haunted room, in the company of the poetry of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, I listened to the silence as the poem of walking backwards grew into “In the capital of a small republic.”

Clint Smith: It’s difficult to say which poem predicts my future, but I know which poem speaks to the future I hope to live in: No More Elegies Today. The book, as a whole, is exploring the marathon of cognitive dissonance with regard to coming of age as a young black man in America. How does one reconcile ever-present tension between belonging to a community and family that celebrates them, and a larger world that dehumanizes them? What I want, for all of us, is a world in which that tension no longer exists. A world where the violence dissipates and black children grow up with the humanity left uncompromised, a childhood not shaped by its relationship to violence. As a writer, I think, I have a responsibility to both reflect the world as it is and then imagine the world as it can be. The role of the art is to operate in that imaginative space, to push beyond the boundaries of what we see. The violence black people experience is a part of our reality, but it is not our only reality. We are and always have been more than that which kills us.

Question 2: What two moments in the volume, or two images from the poems, would you like your reader to remember?

Carolina Ebeid: First: one of the sections in “Veronicas of a Matador” with the subtitle “weilian” says:

            With all the books
            I’ve read, my
            shadow makes
            a heavy thing,
            like a desert
            mammal having just
            eaten a creature
            smaller than itself,
            that had been eating
           a creature even smaller.

There are many figures for what the act of reading might be, and this is one.

Second: the title poem takes the image of the Merrill Lynch bull-statue on Wall Street and imagines the autogenesis of bees, a ritual performed on a heifer as described in Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV. The bees are said to be born from the decaying flesh of the animal after following the precise method. In my poem, the bees glisten like coins.          

David Rivard: One would be the final image in the title poem: a hole that’s been chopped in the roof of a house—in an attic room that no one knew existed—through which you can see a great bridge that seems to stretch over a vast expanse of ocean. This long poem funnels down entirely into that dream. A dream that I had over and over again for ten or fifteen years, and that I hope will return some day.
And maybe this, from “Here We Go,” the final poem in the book:

and samurai armor, those dragon scales
humbler than the pants that boys put on
between 5^th grade & 6^th

Simply, I like the kind of connection this image makes. The way it leaps between the worlds of men and boys, the quickness of it, which I like to think of as the product of a certain kind of wit based in perception. I write and read poetry to be surprised—to say something I didn’t know I had in me. For the freshness that carries. To demand that it happen is useless—it either happens or it doesn’t. But you can make yourself available to being surprised, and that practice has always been my favorite as a writer.

Monica Youn: The book has two recurring images—the tree and the trellis—which keep showing up in various guises and states of disrepair. I went fairly old-school with the symbolic motifs. I think of the tree as the totem of a kind of life force, “the force that through the green fuse,” etc. —a life force that can be absurd, or grotesque, or scary depending on its situational context. What’s gripping to me about trees, plants, anything alive is their unthinking determination to remain alive, to grow. It’s a kind of automatic pragmatism. If you cut a tree down, it will sprout from its stump, if you split it, it will try to knit itself back together, if you impose an obstacle, it will grow around and through that obstacle, it will incorporate that obstacle into its own body. Lots of terrible things happen to trees in this book, and there’s a damaged tree anchoring each section—the torn olive tree of “Hangman’s Tree,” the atrophied host tree of “Epiphyte,” the doomed fantasy tree of “Brownacre” and the grafted tree of “Blackacre.” I wanted the these tree images to inform each other, to grow and root through the book and take on their own life independent of any particular poem.

And the trellis—or the rope, or the mast, or the mold, or the yoke or the field—is necessity, the given, the factual, what the life force, the imagination cannot transform. I recently read a parenting book that proposed the French concept of cadre, or frame—of limits, but freedom within those limits. Blackacre is similarly about leeway and limits, about the acre you are allotted and the ways in which you can, and cannot, transform the given.

Question 3: Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception? Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception?

Elizabeth Colen: Wow! I see a list like this and I think: all of this, yes. Which is probably a common response. Maybe less ambition, less god and art and dreams, maybe. But those are in everything also. The loneliness of the body, through the lens of our human failings in love, through the death of the natural world, and mom and dad and the failings of perception. If I have to pick two I will say The Body and Loneliness. With everything I’ve done, there is a focus on the body, on the visceral. How perception sanctions action, how we move through the world. How sex and violence enacted physically bleeds in, distorts perception, damages communication and connection. The book retells a falling apart, a disintegration, motivated partly by loss and damage and partly by various forms of exile.

Carolina Ebeid: I adore lists such as the one you’ve made. I want to nod yes to each category. Yes, my book is about Loneliness. Yes, my book is about Human Failings. I was in a workshop in Austin with Mary Ruefle, and by the end of the semester, she wrote a poem naming a thematic “obsession” for each of us in the class according to the work we presented. Mine was “God.” Yes, of course, my book is about God and about the Body. I’m interested in this word “about.” One of Heather McHugh’s poems asks the question, “So what are your poems about,” to which she answers “They’re about / their business, and their father’s business and their / monkey’s uncle, they’re about // how nothing is about, their not / about about.” Yes, my book is about Perception and about The Natural World and about Dad. I feel confident this is true especially when I consider an obscure meaning of the word “about” used to denote a tree that has budded or “abouted.”  

Chris Santiago: Aren’t there only two subjects for poems? I heard Li-Young Lee say that, at least, at a reading; he then went on to argue that there is really only one subject. But if my book is preoccupied with Love and/or Death, it isn’t my death per se, or the death of what I love, although those are both part of it. It starts with filial love, and then looks backward/inward to imagine what died—both of the human and nonhuman worlds—so that my family, and other families in the Philippines and the U.S., could live.

My mother’s father, for example, never made it to the U.S.: he died of a stroke not long after he lost two sons to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. One of these sons was my uncle Flu, who was put in solitary confinement for several years for opposing Marcos; the other was my uncle Virgil, who was smart, well-loved, and musical, and who was killed by Marcos’s secret police at the age of twenty-one. My book digs into these absences, and explores their consequences, and the consequences of being an immigrant’s son.

But the poems also embrace and appropriate the unknown, and the half-known—the few words of Tagalog and Ilonggo that I know, for instance. To me, these syllables are like fragments of urns or maps. I try to use them to elegize the ancestors, the way of life, and the way of speaking that were never really mine, except by blood. Those losses that are specific to my family are broadened out, and traced back to older roots: the Japanese occupation during World War II; the American War and occupation of the Philippines; the long occupation of the Spanish before them; the Islamic, Chinese, and Austronesian histories that shaped the islands before them.

Tony Trigilio: Mom and Death, absolutely. Well, Sons and the Undead, too, I suppose. Dark Shadows (the television show) functions a conduit for my autobiographical writing: some of the book’s most revealing and vulnerable moments, for me, occur when ekphrasis and life-writing collide and the experiment takes me to unexpected and unchartered autobiographical ground.

In many ways, this book is an elegy for my mother, focusing specifically on the daily half-hour time slot we spent in front of the TV during the pre-linguistic and early-linguistic period of my life until I started kindergarten (the same year Dark Shadows was canceled). Barnabas Collins, the vampire of Dark Shadows, was a central figure in nearly all my childhood nightmares. My mother was a huge soap opera fan, and I watched the show with her every day in the first few years of my life. My earliest memories are of watching the show with my mother and then, at night, falling into recurring Barnabas nightmares. I was terrified of Barnabas and I couldn’t look away from him. I fell asleep each night with my shoulders hunched to prevent him from biting my neck.

Death is a major part of the book, too, and not just because the dead can’t seem to stay buried in Dark Shadows. I can trace the origins of this project to the deaths of several close family members from 2001 to 2010, a period of my life which also included an amicable but emotionally painful divorce. I had been trying to write about my Dark Shadows fixation all of my adult life, and these losses somehow triggered this project—the constant presence of death tapped something in me that allowed me, finally, to write about the show’s effect on my life. The book is also an effort to confront, and even court, my own mortality. I still have over 800 episodes of the show to watch—over 800 sentences to write—and I hope I stay alive long enough to finish the project.

Question 4: Which poem in your book should be read aloud first—that is, not the volume’s first poem?

Elizabeth Colen: To me, all poetry should be read aloud. If I start reading a collection out loud and the sounds don’t please, I’m highly unlikely to finish the book. That to me more than anything is what separates / elevates poetry from prose. I know other readers / writers of poems are led by image, or by the movement in logic. I’m moved by those things as well, but always as they are in the service of the sounds.

So, every poem in What Weaponry should ideally be read out loud? But that’s not what you asked, so I’ll try again: A devotee of Stein, I’m attracted to the various methods by which repetition can be utilized—sounds, rhythms, words. Direct repetition of phrase is something I’ve become more attracted to as I settle a bit more into trusting my own craft and process. Two poems that come together midway through What Weaponry and allow heavy usage of repetition of phrase are “The Balance of Terror” and “Hesitation Cut.” I think these two especially happen better out loud.

Parts of “The Balance of Terror” have a fluid movement between internal and external conversation that seems (to me, anyway) particularly heady when read out loud:

“The neighbor came over with a stack of our mail, saying something’s not right with that mailman. You had blank black eyes with that circle of blue; he could see right through you. And me standing in the doorway, saying silently not this time, not this time, eyeing the shotgun leaned against the wall. Bird in the fire and he spied this, saying nothing’s wrong. Not this time.”

“Hesitation Cut” follows and has several instances of repetition, the anaphora (and cataphora) toward the close reads: “I wanted to crack his nose or I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to slice his ear with a penknife or I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to wake him, shaking your father’s rifle at his cock or I wanted to cover his mouth with my mouth and breathe all the boy from him.”

Dana Levin: Gut response: “My Sentence.” I guess it offers prologue for the book. What I am doomed to love, and lose, and how those two drives—to love and to save against time—ignite the making of art. A first hint of what we all stand to lose, or encounter unrecognizable, in the wake of climate change.

David Rivard: “Swerver.” It’s the poem I most enjoy reading aloud myself. I like the way the language is inside the lifetime’s worth of experience that it’s narrating. I remember when I wrote that I felt as if music alone were holding all the disparate moments in this woman’s life together. It’s the music of a “spoken” language, and evidence of the narrator’s thinking and feeling about this woman. I wanted him to sound slightly surprised by what he’s saying, and hoped to get that sort of on-the-spot invention and improvisation into all the poems in the book.

In each of my books I’ve written about a woman I’ve never met, returning to her for reasons not at all clear to me. She has some features of character and biography that are a composite of a number of women I’m close to, it’s true—I’m provoked often to write about her because of something one of them does or says. But she isn’t any of them. I might say that she’s a projection of my anima, if I were a Jungian. I’m not. In these poems, as in “Swerver,” I meet her at different times of her life—some times she’s a child, others quite elderly. In a way, time is the true subject of these poems, its mysteries. That’s true of all the poems in Standoff.

Chris Santiago: “Some Words,” if only because it’s a personal favorite. It’s about having our first child, and how in those first few weeks, time seemed to both stop and to flash by. The poem is also about joy, and this idea that all language is translation; our words can’t help but fall short, especially when we try to use them to describe something as fleeting as joy. But words are still a kind of miracle. And by failing to recreate the “original,” so to speak, we create something new. The original for this poem was the clean sheets/nightbloom scent of our newborn son, especially right at his nape; in failing to contain or transcribe that joy, I ended up with this poem, which I consider a fair trade.

Lee Sharkey: “The City” began as an exercise, an attempt to work with the form David Ferry invented in his “One Two Three Four Five”: a single word is repeated in each line of a five-line poem, first placed at the front of a line and with each succeeding line moving further toward its end. I had been thinking about the vision of the City on the Hill and reading about cities of refuge in ancient Palestine, where those who had committed involuntary manslaughter were protected from punishment for their crimes. It was only when Jeffrey Levine accepted the completed manuscript of Walking Backwards for Tupelo and the press asked me to write a brief description of it that I realized the quest for a city “with water for cleaning and drinking” and “bread to quiet hunger” had become the thread that holds the book together. So, if you’re not wont to read books of poetry from the beginning, do turn to “The City” and read its fifteen lines aloud. I didn’t adhere strictly to David’s form, but the principle of progressive repetition in his model helped me construct a parable that opens the door to the journey.

Question 5: Which two or three poems might compete to be the volume’s singular ars poetica?

Max Ritvo: “The Curve”—this poem is kind of a creation myth in which Humans are not God's True Children, but Language is. We learn human beings are basically a rough draft to be God's incarnation on earth, and He or She learned that His or Her reality is better represented by the shifting, fluxing, self-contradicting, non-solid, neurotic medium of language. And so our human bodies are turned to God's soil, and language His fruit. I've always harbored the suspicion that I exist for the sake of poetry, and that it really doesn't give a lick about me at the end of the day!

“Touching the Floor”—this poem features a vision brought to mind by my sense organs, the miraculous and healing sensation of the marble tiles in my bathroom surging from my palms pressed into the tiles and up into my shoulders, like bulls charging up my arms. The poem then turns to the despair of the mind trying to make this image, The Bulls, last in language, or in memory, and the horrible unsuitableness of our poetry-making faculties, of the Mind itself to do the Body and its wonder's justice. This is my angry ars poetica—it's not a surrender of the Body to the Christ of Poetry so much as it is a wish that Poetry could somehow summon the world with the strength of a Body.

David Rivard: “Flickering,” the earliest poem I wrote for Standoff, could be an ars poetica. It’s totally explicit about the multiplicity that runs throughout the book—that sense that we’re composed of many selves—an amalgam of moods, feelings, guesswork, insights, and experiences. The sum of those selves is an enigma: an enigma that is both powerful and vulnerable. We catch a glimpse of it at odd, unexpected moments. We sense it more than see it: like sitting at a picnic table in a foreign country, and hearing a flock of swans pass overhead in the fog.

The title poem, “Standoff,” addresses the other sensation that runs through the book: that feeling that, while we live intensely in the world and are part of its colors and sounds, we live simultaneously in our heads. There’s something both wonderful and troubling about that to me—we’re searching for something in both places. It’s typical of the book as a whole that the poem flows through these seemingly random, “accidental” moments that have so much indecipherable meaning: some street food in Rome, a wintery night in Boston, news about a drone strike. The mystery takes place at street level. You’re standing on solid ground there, but how did that happen, and who are you really?

Wystan Knows Best [by David Lehman]

 “Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

“A parlor game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one's friends. A has a huge pier glass, gilded and baroque, B a discreet little pocket mirror in a pigskin case with his initials stamped on the back; whenever on looks at C, he is in the act of throwing his mirror away but, if one looks in his pocket or up his sleeve, one always finds another, like an extra ace.

“Most, perhaps all, our mirrors are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, though to varying degrees and in various ways. Some magnify, some diminish, others, whatever their owner does, will only return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images.

“But the properties of our own particular mirror are not so important as we sometimes like to think. We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection.”

[In “Lecture Notes,” in Commonweal, 6 November 1942, Auden begins this sequence of reflections with the sentence: “Every child, as he wakes into life, finds a mirror underneath his pillow.”]

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A vain woman realizes that vanity is a sin, and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors removed from her house. Consequently, in a short while she cannot remember what she looks like. She remembers that vanity is a sin, but she forgets that she is vain.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (in Commonweal 6 Nov 1942)  >> 

Psychoanalysis, like all pagan scientia, says: "Come, my good man, no wonder you feel guilty. You have a distorting mirror, and that is indeed a very wicked thing to have. But cheer up, For a trifling consideration I shall be delighted to straighten it out for you. There. Look. A perfect image. The evil of distortion is exorcised. Now you have nothing to repent of any longer. Now you are one of the illumined and elect. That will be ten thousand dollars, please."

And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first.

-- W. H. Auden, "Lecture Notes" (1942)

Note: Multiply the bill by twelve for 2016 dollars. The devil count remains the same. -- DL

Alan Michael Parker Guest Author September 19-23 & 26-30

photo (c) Karl Nussbaum, 2016

Alan Michael Parker is the author of The Ladder (Tupelo Press), his eighth collection of poems, along with four novels, including Christmas in July, forthcoming from Dzanc Books. He has edited or co-edited five books, including The Manifesto Project (with Rebecca Hazelton), to be published in January 2017, by the University of Akron Press. His awards include three Pushcart Prizes, two inclusions in Best American Poetry, the Fineline Prize, the 2013 and 2014 Randall Jarrell Prize in Poetry, the North Carolina Book Award, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Parker is the Douglas C. Houchens Professor of English at Davidson College. He also teaches in the University of Tampa’s low-residency M.F.A. program. More about Alan Michael Parker can be found at here. Follow him on twitter here.

Welcome, Alan. 

-- sdl