The Best American Poetry

Cubs Win Big on Bro's Birthday [for Mitch Sisskind]

Happy birthday Mitch

We did it for you

We beat the glamorous Giants and dogged Dodgers, which

Is a pretty big fucking deal and we did it for you

On your birthday because you

Are undoubtedly the greatest writer and

Ex-gemologist among our many fans

Around the country and even far distant lands --

And the genius who assembled this crew

Of Cubs as strong as Ajax and swifter than the wind

Was a bris kind

Just like you, Mitch Sisskind

 

--- Samuel Meshuga (10 /22/ 16)

 

Samuel Meshuga is the pseudonym of a writer and editor based in New York.

Tales of the Sixties: Allen Ginsberg’s Three Days in Schenectady [by Alan Ziegler]

Prologue: In late 1967, an English professor asked me to be Allen Ginsberg’s escort for his February 13 reading at Union College: “I think he’d be more comfortable with a student.” I wrote Ginsberg to ask if he’d add an event in our makeshift café, the North End. I figured I’d get a form letter from an assistant telling me Allen was too busy being Ginsberg.

    I was half right. He was too busy being Ginsberg to make plans, but it was Allen himself who replied.

[Dear Mr. Z—I don’t know my schedule as it’s made up by others while I stay home & avoid correspondence & do my work — poesy, solitude as much as I can get. See you I guess there, I’ll keep yr. address & number thanks for good cheer — Allen Ginsberg]

    Allen wound up staying at my apartment for three nights, before moving on to Rochester to meet with Norman O. Brown (whose Love’s Body was a hot topic). He visited classes, did radio interviews, and gave a reading at the North End (including “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and “Wales Visitation”).

    Here, through the prism of distant memory, are some moments from Allen Ginsberg’s three days in Schenectady.


Fitz Hugh: Allen’s main reference point to Union College is that Fitz Hugh Ludlow went here. All we know about Ludlow is that he wrote Union’s alma mater in 1856.

 

Ode to Old Union (Alma Mater)

Let the Grecian dream of his sacred stream
And sing of the brave adorning
That Phoebus weaves from his laurel leaves 
At the golden gates of morning.

But the brook that bounds thro’ old Union’s grounds
Gleams bright as a Delphic water,
And a prize as fair as a god may wear
Is a dip from our Alma Mater.

Then here’s to thee, thou brave and free,
Old Union smiling o’er us,
And for many a day, as thy walls grow gray,
May they ring with thy children’s chorus!

 

    We have referred to the “brook that bounds” as the “creek that reeks,” and someone once suggested that Ludlow must have been high when he wrote it “gleams bright as a Delphic water.” Allen informs us that this, indeed, may have been the case, that a year after graduating from Union, Ludlow published The Hasheesh Eater. (Many years later, Allen would be on the board of advisors to the Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library).


Dylan's Scarf: Allen notices the album jacket for Dylan’s John Wesley Harding propped against our stereo speaker, and points to the scarf worn by one of the people standing next to Dylan. “Dylan gave it to me,” Allen says, extending the scarf he is wearing.

Dylan's Poetry: We discuss Dylan as poet: “ ‘The motorcycle black Madonna two-wheeled gypsy queen!’” Allen declaims. “That’s as good as anything I’ve written!”


Uncle Allen: Allen walks by the poster of him wearing an Uncle Sam hat. He stops, backtracks, and signs his name on the ribbon.

Bathtub: I awaken in the middle of the night and step into the bathroom, startled to see Allen Ginsberg in his underwear crouching over the bathtub. He is washing his blue jeans.


Milkshake: Cliff Safane, Steve Radlauer, Rich Balagur, and I are heading to the White Tower (a White Castle knockoff) down the street. We invite Allen to join us, but he declines. As we’re leaving, he calls out, “Can you bring me back a milkshake?” We explain to the young man behind the counter whom the milkshake is for. He smiles wearily at the Union boys having fun with the townie.

Kerouac as Poet: We ask Allen if he thinks we could get Kerouac to come to Union. He says we might, “If you invite him as a poet!”


Pigs and Beards: A local radio reporter asks Allen his reaction to the state government proposal to “put a pig in every pot.” Allen replies he doesn’t understand the question, and the radio guy repeats with "hip" inflection, “You know, a pig in every pot?”

    I explain, “I think he means an undercover narcotics officer posted on every college campus.”          

    Another reporter asks him why he doesn’t shave his beard, and Allen replies, “I’m a traditionalist, my grandfather had a beard.”


Sunflower Tears: Word has gotten around about Allen’s extended stay, and I am fielding requests for his company, including overlapping invitations for dinner at a fraternity house and a visit to Professor Jocelyn Harvey’s Modern Poetry class. (See more about Jocelyn Harvey, one of my most influential teachers here).  

    We decide he can do both: I’ll signal when it’s time to leave the class and head over to the fraternity. But as the time approaches, Allen is reading “Sunflower Sutra”  (“Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul…Look at the Sunflower, he said…I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake—my visions…”) He segues to Blake’s “Ah! Sun-flower”:

                                Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
                                Who countest the steps of the Sun:
                                Seeking after that sweet golden clime
                                Where the travellers journey is done. 

                                Where the Youth pined away with desire,
                                And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: 
                                Arise from their graves and aspire, 
                                Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

    Tears trickle down Allen Ginsberg’s face. He tells us he is having a vision of Neal Cassidy (“Dean Moriarty” in On the Road and “N.C., secret hero of these poems” in “Howl”), who died ten days ago alone in the cold and rain alongside a railroad track in Mexico.  

    No way am I getting in the way of this magic moment. I decide to blow off the fraternity.  

    (Several years later, a high school friend meets a couple of Union College graduates. My friend asks if they knew me, and one replies, “Yeah, he’s a real bastard. He wouldn’t share Allen Ginsberg.”)


Party Talk: At a party at our apartment, Allen is talking to the painter Arnold Bittleman. Bittleman describes how he often paints deep into the night, looks admiringly at his canvas, and goes to bed convinced that he has created a great work of art—only to discover in the morning that someone must have broken in and ruined his painting. Ginsberg replies that he used to feel that way, but now, even as he is writing, he’ll think: “This is the same old bleeeecchhh.”

    A little later, Allen talks with two men about having children. Allen says he would like to have a child, but is not sure he could have the kind of relationship with a vagina that would require. A professor wails, “I’ll never know what it’s like to be pregnant!”


Classroom Talk:

Snippets (non-sequential) from a classroom visit, transcribed from a cassette tape that somehow survived being spindled after all these years:

    “Our own inventions change our conditions because our inventions are extensions of our senses…what Zen is preaching what everybody is preaching is awareness of the conditions so we don’t get trapped in the conditions and ignorant of what’s moving us around…we can change the conditions.”

    “The ecological disturbances caused by the technology have now gotten out of hand.”

    “I’m not against technology and science. I’m calling yoga another kind of technology.”

Technology

    “The whole funeral ceremony the Forest Lawn mythology of America; the way we treat death—unlike other cultures—gets to be that the sight of a corpse can freak somebody out.”

    “Gee, it’s hard to know [what Buber is saying]. I haven’t read all through Buber. I went and talked to him…”

    “You’re lucky around here at Union College, you’ve got trees.”

    “Unlike the Western forms that say, ‘Hell is permanent, heaven is permanent, God is a bearded man and you better behave. Eternal damnation!’ IMAGINE: eternal damnation—a thing that couldn’t exist without language!”

Eternal damnation

    "I don’t know if that makes sense to you. Does it?"


Epilogue: I would encounter Allen again eight years later. You can read about it here.

 

Sandy and Friends Say Good Luck to the Cubs and Indians [by David Lehman]

Special to The Best American Poetry blog

After the Dodgers were eliminated last night in the "friendly confines" of Wrigley Field in Chicago, where the Cubs under Theo Epstein's executive management triumphed 5-0, an emergency meeting of the rat pack was held with Sandy Koufax as toastmaster.

The fellows voted unanimously to give Dodger field manager Dave Roberts a pat on the back for a job well-done. On June 30, no one thought the boys in blue had a chance of overtaking the Giants for the NL West crown, let alone defeating Washington to qualify for the National League Championship series. 'It was a great season," Koufax declared before fielding questions regarding his post-season heroics versus the Yanees in 1963 and his legendary refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur in the 1965 fall classic.

Sandy toasted his Hall-of-Fame teammate Don Drysdale, now deceased. Sandy said: When the Twins knocked out Don [game one starter in Sandy's stead], the tall righthander told [manager Walt] Alston, "bet you wish I, too, were Jewish," and Alston was impressed by Drysdale's use of the subjunctive. Frank drank a shot of Jack and talked about his duet with Elvis Presley in March 1960.

Dean sang "Volare" and modulated into "On an Evening in Roma": "Do they take 'em for espresso, / Yeah, I guess so, / On each lover's arm a girl, l wish I knew, / On an evening in Roma." Then he took a drag of his cigarette and winked at Frank, who sang, "Come fly with me, let's fly, let's fly away / If you can use some exotic booze / There's a bar in far Bombay." It would be up to Koufax to determine the itinerary: Bombay first, then Rome? Notice Sandy's thin tie and the elegant pocket squares around the horn, a dead giveaway. -- DL

Scientists confirm human feline ancestry but President tight-lipped as Assembly radicals press for replacement action [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

Secretary Mimi, caught by a security camera, hurrying away after her ‘secret speech’ to the Intergalactic Interspecies Assembly in the Paris Catacombs last Friday. In the background, long-time “good friend” and companion, Assembly President Calypso.

There is a cat… a calico Tom... with whom I have become fast friends.

He bears the good old-fashioned name of Foulques, is yellow, young, dashing, of soft claw and satiric eye.

Foulques and I first met when he wished to pay me an uninvited visit. A firm refusal accompanied by a virtuoso-level spine stroke cum ear scratch surprised him as much as his exceptional good grace in clearing off surprised me.

When later I told Foulques of my wonder at his gentle manner, he related that he too could not help wondering about that kick that never came, about a firm refusal borne in a sweet caress, about the personal story behind it all.

Somehow, though I never cease to speak of my Foulkes, Karine has never met this remarkable feline. Yet, Foulques & I, as do Karine & I, share much besides un penchant fort for scratching and rubbing; perhaps the stars are crossed in this.

Foulques and I have become the tenderest of confidants. The strong jawed calico freely recounts the stultifying dynastic complexities of being scion of Feline Mercury, the Cat House responsible for delivering interspecies communications. The natural great-grandson of Behemoth, Foulques listens with perfect sympathy as I, Peter Pan’s bastard, confide my own existential frettings and fumings.

And, if truth be told, Foulques, whose interests range from fossil fish anatomy to flapping butterfly wings, is no more made for delivering messages between species than I am for shacking up with Wendy.

I raised my eyebrows high, then, at the slender Feline Mercury heir’s serieux as he thrust a press release detailing Friday’s dire doings inside the Intergalactic Interspecies Assembly at the Catacombs.

“Read, mon ami! Please.”

“Aux ordres, mon capitaine!” I murmur, sketching a vague salute.

I often call Foulques “Captain”. It’s his poise, air of command, I suppose.

Under a headline, “Assembly resolves human descent imbroglio”, I read,

After many months of wrangling, presentations from an interspecies team of geneticists sitting on the Intergalactic Distinguished Scientists Advisory Panel today showed Assembly members that humans, previously thought to be descended from simians, are, in fact, descended from felines, specifically, cattus cattus.

The finding was much anticipated.

Cats are a more developed order of primitive bear, the experts confirmed, which explains certain prehensile characteristics in humans as well as that species’ pseudo-bipedalism, that is, crawling often but not consistently.

Images comparing human ear hair patterns (above) with those of felines (above right) recently released by the Intergalactic Institute for Genetical and Memological Studies definitively point to a feline ancestry for human beings, turning up the heat on the Gradualist replacement strategies adopted by the Extraterrestrial Organization for Higher-Order Being and championed by Secretary Mimi. This photograph shows the remarkable similarity in hair patterns in feline and human ears. 

The presentations brought about a much-feared political crisis as Immediate Replacement Committee activists seized on the confirmation as fuel for their drive for an early replacement of humans as the Earth Dominant Species by cattus cattus: on or before January 1^st, 2016.

The current Intergalatic President and Secretary stand for what has come to be called a “Gradualist”

A life-scale schematic showing the feline-like hair pattern in the human ear. 

approach with no fixed dates. The policy has been much criticized for foot-dragging in recent years, though its proponents have claimed Gradualism amounts to enabling humans to hang themselves with less fuss and expense than the Assembly could do through more direct measures. They point to global warming and the oft-multiplying, and always murderous, Isms scything down millions and reducing the morale of survivors. Such facts, however, have done little to blunt recent criticism of Gradualism, especially of its architect, the long-serving premier, Feline Secretary for Earth Affairs Mimi, whom many see as excessively silky in her dealings with other species and, especially, humans.

Shelf-Reading the: Look No. 1 Continued on Stephanie Brown’s “Stacks” [by Heather J. Macpherson]

Before I continue with the second half of my essay, I would like to thank Managing Editor, Stacy Harwood-Lehman for giving me the opportunity as a guest blogger this week on BAP. I cannot express what pleasure it is to focus on a single poet during the course of a week. Thank you! Also, thank you to Stephanie Brown for spending so much time responding to my interview questions, and giving me permission to reprint “Stacks” in it’s entirety later in this post. Finally, thank you to Dr. Heather Treseler at Worcester State University for recognizing my sincere love of Stephanie’s work.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to write my first look at Stephanie Brown’s poem “Stacks”. I began with identifying the anaphoric inversion in her poetic line, which continues throughout her list-style poem from beginning to end and expresses the absolute philosophical resilience revealed in specific social and political situations. Librarians are not mere ‘keepers of books’ but represent a connection to community. The long-standing traditional perception that a librarian is a woman who checks books out at a desk is an antiquated image still conceived by members of the public. A librarian, like any other position, is not identified by gender, nor are they only responsible for printed words; a librarian, of which there are many different positions and roles, is involved with the community both in and outside the doors of Stephanie Brown’s “Ancient house” (line 7). Brown clearly states in her litanical verse the role and provisions of the public library:

Place to hide from bullies the

Opinion piece the

Children meet the

Service dog the

Fire the

Proper and calm welcome the (lines 16-21)

The library is a sanctuary, a place “to hide” and a place for conjecture whether others like it or not. It is a place for children to grow and experience programs, usually free, that they may not otherwise experience. It is a congenial atmosphere, sometimes quiet and calm and sometimes not so much when “Angry crazy shirtless the” (line 15). Brown’s poem pays homage to the history to the institution, both current and past. Her reference to “Librarian casanova Philip Larkin the” (line 23) is the longest line in the poem with the anaphoric “the” hanging like a cliff. Much like the determiner as the surface holding the anvil, here, “the” acts as the edge of influence. Larkin was not only recognized for his poetry and novels, but he was employed as a librarian for over forty years. The dedication to the profession and the public is not always recognized the way it should be. Following the Larkin line, Brown takes us on a rhythmic departure:

Cemetery plot dug open the

Ideas inside the

Spine broken the

Conversation the

Preservation the

Interpretation the

Empty station the (lines 24-30)

The nine-syllable line “Cemetery plot dug open the” has a quiet, simple tone that suddenly breaks into two lines opening with long i vowel sounds, followed by four lines opening with anapestic pentameter or hexameter (“Interpretation the”). At this segment of the poem the litany gets louder with Brown’s use of internal rhyme and “the” connects each active noun from one line to the next. Yes, “the” connects each line from beginning to end in her poem, but at this moment, and it is an important one, “the” drives the exaltation of political speech back to antiquity: “Rosetta Stone the” (line 31). Brown does not let us forget where the institution originates; the Rosetta Stone  is a symbol of knowledge, language, and war. Napoleon once had possession of the Rosetta Stone, but it was taken from him after he was defeated by the British. The claim of ownership on knowledge, the desire to fight and steal for the sake of knowledge is the

Moment between thoughts the

Information beyond the

Beyond the

Limitless the

Sky (lines 35-39)

These final lines in Brown’s poem address the idea of possibility, the ‘if only’ we chose to recognize the weight of possibility in our individual lives and outer community, all is “Limitless the”. Brown’s “Stacks” allows us to peruse the shelves of past and present, reconsider the gravity of choice and experience. The public library, the stacks, provides an opportunity to be forged as expansive as the heavens. Shouldn’t we take it?

 

Stacks

by Stephanie Brown

Democracy is the

Library is the

Temple of learning the

Dangerous the

People’s university the

Cradle of civilization the

Ancient house the

Keeping of knowledge the

Private breakthrough the

Tall glass windows the

Moment of eureka the

Truth the

Bad conduct the

Upskirt photos the

Angry crazy shirtless the

Place to hide from bullies the

Opinion piece the

Children meet the

Service dog the

Fire the

Proper and calm welcome the

Chairperson the

Librarian Casanova Phillip Larkin the

Cemetery plot dug open the

Ideas inside the

Spine broken the

Conversation the

Preservation the

Interpretation the

Empty station the

Rosetta Stone the

Tablet and phone the

Doors open the

Rest the energy the time the

Moment between thoughts the

Information beyond the

Beyond the

Limitless the

Sky

Shelf-Reading the: Look No. 1 at Stephanie Brown’s “Stacks” [by Heather J. Macpherson]

The following is part one of my commentary on Stephanie Brown's poem "Stacks."  

I first encountered Stephanie Brown’s poetry in The Body Electric: America’s Best American Poetry from The American Poetry Review (W.W. Norton, 2001) and I recall so vividly my reaction to two of her poems, “We Librarians are Going to Baja” and “I Was a Phoney Baloney!”. Mind was blown. Period. The level of sarcasm and wit clung to my brain cells. What I cannot tell you is how many times I read and re-read these poems; the voice, style, structure, spoke to me in a way that I had not experienced in my reading life, and of course my (slightly) younger self connected with several themes (sex, identity, class) present in these two pieces. Who am I kidding, my older self continues to connect intimately with these poems as well as the broadening scope of Brown’s oeuvre.  At the time I was working on my M.Ed. in Library Media Studies, and I only just recently left behind eighteen plus years of librarianship -although I keep my hand in at a lovely public library on Saturdays as a children’s librarian. It is hard to let go, and Brown's poem reminds us of the "Preservation the / Interpretation the" (lines 28-29) of the self and our greatest institution. In "Stacks," repetition functions as the forging tool.

Brown’s anaphoric inversion breaks away from the traditional use of anaphora often applied at the beginning of the poetic line. Instead, Brown places the repetition at the end of the line. Here, the determiner “the” enjambs each brief line enforcing unusual power in a three-letter term we often take for granted in the English language:

 

Democracy is the

Library is the

Temple of learning the

Dangerous the (lines 1-4)

 

“The” not only acts as a modifier, but determines the nature of reference. Immediately we are ‘in it’ drenched with political organization and majority because the people are the democracy and the “Library is the/Temple” of the people. The public library is a  sovereign nation; it is all things to all people as it represents, dare I say it, the cornerstone of democracy. Conceptually, the opening term is quickly reinforced by “the” and this is the path we are on until we reach the poem’s end. Brown’s anaphora also forces the reader to move from line to line rather quickly, affecting rhythm, tone, and speed and all three of these devices radically position the speaker’s voice:  

 

People’s university the

Cradle of civilization the

Ancient house the

Keeping of knowledge the (lines 5-8)

 

Notice the first two lines of the poem end with “is the”. We see an immediate radical shift when “is” disappears after line two and “the” completely takes over; it is the strike on the anvil. “Stacks” does not hesitate or pause, there is no punctuation housing the images of “Bad conduct” and “upskirt photos” (lines 13-14) or “the / Angry crazy shirtless the” (lines 15-16). We are patrons here. We wander through the stacks to seek and find. “Stacks” is a litany for all time. After all, the public library is a church of freedom; it is the one institution in the United States that is for the people.  

 

An Interview with Stephanie Brown, Part 3: The Ring Lardner Reference, Skepticism & Foreign Countries

 

Part 3 concludes my interview with Stephanie. I look forward to posting commentary on her poem "Stacks" on Thursday and Friday. 

Another one of your poems from Domestic Interior, "Self-Portrait at the End of the First Half of My Life," maintains a perfect-pitch sardonic wit that considers self-reflective attitudes about societal codes on the body and pregnancy. I wonder if you could talk about how the Ring Lardner references may (or may not) connect to appearance and motherhood?

The Ring Lardner reference is really just so much about my personal reading growing up—I was a huge fan of Marshall McLuhan and he mentioned Ring Lardner’s quotation, “Some like ‘em cold,” in The Mechanical Bride. That book influenced a lot of my first thoughts about how bodies are viewed as commodities and as parts rather than a whole. The body is something separate from the life and the individual in it. I know that most of my life I lived with this feeling and belief. In fact, I did not know it was ever questioned until I read that book—and after that I read a lot more of the subject—art history books, costume and fashion books and feminist theory—much of the feminist theory I read echoed my own feelings about the body.  Ring Lardner represents also a tough guy writer that I was fond of.  I had a big crush and soft spot for those men city writers who were around in the early 20th century and the world of men they described. I think I was in love with them or they were my inspirations/muses.I loved the idea (idealized, of course and not real) of tough newspaper writer/fiction writers/playwrights who were hard drinkers, city-savvy, not innocent, elusive, and not at all domestic. A good example would be the whole world portrayed in the USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos. There is just a male, city, energy—I don’t know how else to explain it—testosterone?—that propels the narrative and I found it very attractive. In painting, the counterparts would be Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh. I just love the city of Edward Hopper and Reginald Marsh.

Another big influence on me was Nathanael West. I liked modernist male writers, as an ideal. I never have liked 19th century Romanticism and now that I think of it, I really never liked those kinds of men the poets were; I have been more of an 18th century and 20th century reader and  admirer. I do think some men “like’ em cold—cold, distant and not intimate. It is probably very much the case now with a lot of internet porn in people’s lives where sex addiction has a devastating effect on people. The best thing I’ve seen or read on it is the movie Shame with Michael Fassbender.

"Time, Waste of" (Domestic Interior) reminds me so much of an earlier poem, "I was a phony baloney" from your first book, Allegory of the Supermarket. It is not the mere use of the term "phony," but the "culture" that exists in each of these carefully structured poems. Does an underlying concept, such as "culture" determine or assist in the structural lineation of your work?

This question is just a fabulous question. I always feel intimidated by this kind of thing—to be completely candid, I don’t even know how to answer that. I mean, I think your reading of it is the answer—yes, I’m sure that I did that with my lineation, but it is more of an unconscious process that has to do with sound and making lines read how I want them to. That overall theme is definitely in the background, informing everything. I sort of can’t answer this except to say thank you for reading it this way. I mean to say that I feel inarticulate and unable to answer this using any kind of critical or interpretive language. I don’t know if you’ve ever been around painters when they describe their paintings—they don’t talk about theme or meaning—it’s like, “I wanted to use yellow, and white and round shapes were calling to me because I was looking at rocks in my garden.” That is sometimes how I feel when trying to answer questions about how I composed something.

Memory and addiction are prevalent themes in your poem, "Problems in My Interior Monologue” (Map Literary), which assists in developing an unreliable narrator who recalls moments that may or may not have occurred. Do you concern yourself with the reader’s accessibility?

Oh yes, I want to be accessible. I am completely on the side of the reader. I feel very strongly that way. Perhaps that was because I went to school when the vogue was for making readers do work, not caring about their experience, and lots of questioning of the role of “authority” in authorship being a bad thing. Deconstruction. So I was part of that era—and it made me really never use sentimentality and to be a skeptic. But the poems one writes under that influence are terrible. They are poems that need footnotes, not in a playful way, but in a deadly serious way, because the poet has not really finished the poem.  I always felt it was as if the writers were trying to write their own scholarship. For instance, I went to a reading where the author gave a long explanation about the scaffolding behind her work—something like, “I used five Greek myths in a cycle to talk about my son’s death, which are the lines of the chorus which alternates with the straight narrative.” I think you should not talk about it or call attention to it in the poem. You have to be confident that that structure is strong and the reader will feel it—they should feel it, or why else use Greek myths?

One type of reader is the scholar who does find those things in the poem, but the poet should not be calling attention to it—I mean not just as an introduction at a reading, but poems are constructed like this too.  It’s like, do you want to hear the recipe or eat the brownie?  I want readers to eat the brownie. I don’t want them to know all the tricks and secrets. I think there is no reason to write if you are not writing for a reader; the purpose is to elicit emotion and thought from them. Making the reader work, tedious writing so that you can show your muscles and your talents—that’s just narcissistic writing. The older I get, the more I believe this. Writing is a craft. Last year, I was in a house that was built by hand. You could see all the dovetail joints, and the man’s craftsmanship with wood. You could see how he placed the windows in just the right spots to make the best use of the sun. But if it were not livable, what does it matter? In fact, it was a livable, joyous space: a gift of this person’s hands. You could see his dovetail joints—wonderful, musical, clever lines in a poem, let’s say, but the door worked, the kitchen was practical—it all worked together. It was a gift. Trying to not be accessible, on purpose, or as a technique, is either done because the person has to write in code, for some reason—or just is a selfish act. I’m dogmatic about this. I read a lot, and I love elegant, effortless prose and works that are well-edited—that have cut out all the boring parts, as Elmore Leonard said; or Faulkner’s “kill all your darlings. “ I like a delight when I read. Prose or poetry that one can read it easily without a lot of mental torture (which is not the same as complexity of subject)—that’s true artistry.

You've written, or alluded to your son's brain tumor in several poems including "A Foreign Country" (American Poetry Review). This particular poem seems to carry a different tone and level of emotion compared to many of your other poems. How do you control tone in your writing, and how does your son feel about you sharing these experiences with readers?

Again, this is hard to talk about as I don’t know that I always try to control tone; it’s just the way the poems writes itself, but I will say that I am much more intentional about making tone sound the way I want it to, now. The tone in “Scary Narcissist”...I tried to be weird and kind of ambiguous. I do control tone in that way, and I know how to intentionally do a deadpan tone. In the composition of the brain tumor poem, it started with that anaphora, and then as I was writing it. I remembered the funny moment when he talked about not wanting to die a virgin. I guess the control of tone, in this case, came from honestly letting the whole of the experience come to light. That in a very dark time, when I thought my son was going to die, there was a true moment of levity. And that is the true experience. Also that it was January and it was hot. Meaning that one could have gone in a cliched or sentimental direction and say that it was in the dead of winter, and also note something else from the experience that I did not—he did not want or take any pain medications after the surgery. I could have said he was “courageous” there, but that’s not true.  He just probably has a high pain threshold.

I do attempt a conscious thing in my poems where I throw in a line that is unexpected to manipulate tone. An example would be in the poem “Notre Dame,” with the lines, “Even my husband / After we got back together / Laughed at that” which moved the whole story forward by erasing all the details that got the speaker to that point. I also have a desire to write poems now that might “break your heart.” I want to feel like I do when I hear a song where a young man is singing about his broken heart, or how much love and attraction he feels. I like to be moved like that. Time is short, we need to connect quickly, and I want to affect how you feel. If you can feel sorrow or feel happy, I want you to from my work. My sons and my husband—this is just part of our life, my writing, and we don’t talk about it. I don’t even think my kids are that aware of what I’ve actually written. I used to run a reading series (with others), Casa Romantica in San Clemente, where they heard me and others read. My son was at the reading where I read that poem—I had just written it—he still had the bandage and visible scar on his head. He probably doesn’t even remember this. It was more about the cookies afterwards, I’m sure.

After the surgery, he never wanted to talk about it and would never consider it as having been a big event in his life. I think because it made him different from others during that adolescent time of conformity.  He is also a very private, quiet person who doesn’t reveal a lot. Once in a while, though, he’ll say something like, “Hey, I survived cancer.” I don’t know. My poet identity is sort of in a separate compartment. My older son, who is working in film, seems a bit more interested in the fact that I’m an artist.

Is a release of your third collection in the near future?

I just finished the collection and the title is Thanksgiving Dinner in a Rich Zip Code.

Besides poetry and essay, have you written in other forms and genres that we should be aware of?

I have only published these two, and some blog posts. I do write short stories and would like to publish a collection. I have that as a goal. I also have a topic for a memoir and I may write that. Life has to give me an answer, though, as to what happens in it and whether I will need to write it. I am living it now.

An Interview with Stephanie Brown, Part 2: Taking Permission: Motherhood, Poetry Writing & Casual Sexism [by Heather J. Macpherson]

 

If I might backtrack a little to your commentary on feminist concerns: What strikes me the most in "Mommy is a Scary Narcissist" is the concept of looking, whether at the self, others, or being examined, which brilliantly opens the poem in the first line with eyelid reconstruction. Your development of looking carries on throughout the poem as this speaker, much like the woman observed in "Marble Obelisk," falls apart. Do you think we are our own worst enemies in our desire, perhaps through our motherly experiences, to please others? I am curious if the repetition of "Mommy" along with anaphora is consciously used to increase a level of anxiety in the poem for the reader? Are these favorite techniques in your poetry writing?

 

Oh, I really love the connection you made between the eyelid surgery and looking! That is great—not something I consciously chose, but obviously there—so wonderful to have a good

reader see that. Thank you. I think the kind of person I’m describing is much more sinister, if you will, than regular types of mothers being our own worst enemies in wanting to please people. That’s definitely there and I was certainly a perfectionist when I was younger and a young mother. But I really, in both poems, was thinking of a culture of narcissism and the kind of women who are the consorts of a type of successful man who is essentially absent in their hearts and minds, as he also is attending to his own image. The “Scary Mommy” would be the mother of the woman in “Marble Obelisk.” In “Scary,” the mother is also sort of in a religious (specifically Catholic) swoon—kind of like a narcissistic Virgin Mary. The “male gaze” is also there. This is a kind of Catholic woman I’ve known, as well. Or really any religious woman—there is often a competition about who is more pious or charitable. It’s also living a life where 95% of your identity is about being looked at and even engaging in a constant performance. I really identify with the idea of living in a constant performance. I believe I have freed myself from this for the most part. The people is these poems are neighbors and/or kin to the people in “The Neighborhood of Successful Marriage.”  It’s all business, it’s all the public self. I was trying to make that poems fill someone with anxiety and even revulsion. That is how I felt discovering this person while writing her into existence.

 

People always ask me about using anaphora and I think that it is definitely a technique that heightens the effect of whatever you’re trying to do to affect the reader, but really this is just the way I hear poems in my head. I think perhaps it’s a way for me to remember lines before I write them down. That is just the way they come to me. I usually keep them as they appear and sometimes go back and change drab words to sharper words, but it seems to be an innate way I hear words. I’ll send you a copy of something I wrote recently that is all anaphora, another library poem. It just came to me like this and I extended it as I wrote it down.

 

I could not agree more with your statement about "a dark side to any kind of mothering." I often think that mothering is perceived as a fantasy-induced Mary Cassatt painting, portraying the mother as loving, nurturing, and appearing 'put-together' in a perfect frame to be admired for eternity. And that is what we see in American “family portraits” appearing in Christmas cards, and so on. Oh my, the whole ‘Mommy Blogging thing’ that was after my time—how utterly exhausting to be writing or following them. All the baking blogs and cooking blogs with  brownies on a vintage green ceramic plate and dusts of powdered sugar like fairy dust, snow, on table top, on kids’ freckled noses. Someone in my town photographs local sites and stores— it looks so Nantucket and amazing. You don’t see the grime, crap, trash and badness that exists in the same place. Mary Cassatt’s paintings are a great example of ideal motherhood and womanhood. In fact, perhaps her kindly vision was one reason she was accepted by male painters of that era. She is one of the few female painters to have been part of the successful coterie of artists in her own era. A couple of others are Judith Leyster who was a pupil of Frans Hals (she has a really good painting of a man offering a coin to young maiden and the woman, whose eyes are downcast, looks afraid; this is in contrast to the widely painted genre scenes of men in the same situation being taken by savvy prostitutes and madams, in a jolly sort of scene (men will be men! is the idea) and she shows the other side—a young maiden’s coming ruin). Another is Louise Vignee LeBrun in 18th-19th century France who was a portrait painter. Judith Leyster, “The Proposition” Not sure of this painter’s name, but there are many like it.  Mary Cassatt’s domestic scenes and portraits are not too far away from the other Impressionists’ domestic scenes. She would not have painted dancers in deshabille or odalisques, though, without perhaps raising a scandal. But that is often what you have to do to get success—and it’s also possible that none of that interested her, either.

 

Does writing poetry and being a mother go hand-in-hand, or do you try to maintain some

level of separation between these roles?

 

In the essay “Not a Perfect Mother,” I talk about how I’d write if I were not a mother, or if I were in jail or wherever I happened to be. To me, there is no conflict or separation—they’re just part of who I am.  I do think, though, that I compartmentalize parts of my life—but that’s just a personality trait of mine. I always knew I wanted to have children and write so these are natural things to me. What is more surprising is that I have found other talents in myself through my library career. I am now in upper management within county government and I really like it. I like managing people, decision making and policy writing. I like strategic planning and working on budgets. These are things I never thought I’d be doing when I was younger or even earlier in my career. Having children does limit the amount of time you can put into your writing career, and if you encounter complex issues and problems, like a child’s serious health issue, as I have, writing takes second place. Still, I wrote about it (“A Foreign Country” in a past issue of American Poetry Review) and so my writing self is always present. I have written poems about work; my writing self is there, too.

 

How did you become involved with the collection The Grand Permission: New Writings

on Poetics & Motherhood? You mentioned your essay from that collection earlier in our conversation. Can you talk a little bit more about your essay, "Not a Perfect Mother," and how you came to write it?

 

I had the good fortune of Brenda Hillman selecting my first book for the University of Georgia Poetry Series. Brenda and I corresponded some, and the subject was usually about motherhood. I think she just thought of me when asking poets to contribute. At that time my children were young and I was in the thick of raising them 24/7. Now they are 21 and 23 years old.  The hardest thing for me in life was getting away from perfectionism and competitiveness, and that’s what “Not the Perfect Mother” was all about.  Mothering young children was hard for me, and I never connected with other stay-at-home mothers when I was one. In many ways I did not connect with other people. A great deal of Domestic Interior is about that. The last poem in the book is about realizing my faults as a mother and feeling shame and humility. I don’t think I was a very good mother in many ways. I feel sad about that.  That’s probably what I would write about now. I am often filled with tears and regret. At the same time I’d say that I was also a natural mother; it just happened. I was normal, the same as everyone else. I have known people for whom becoming a mother was like a really extreme change for them—they felt like a different person. That did not happen to me. I have come to realize that I’m a very mothering or motherly person. I think that is why I’m a good manager of people.

 

I’m also competent in traditionally feminine things like cooking, baking, decorating, entertaining and household management. I homeschooled my older son for two years and really enjoyed it. I am calm and solution-oriented in a crisis. All that is easy to me. My husband is the same way with traditionally male household work: he can patch the roof and fix the plumbing; repair anything, landscape the yard, etc. My husband and I are both good with traditional tasks, but it is in the background of our lives. We are readers and talkers. At the same time, I hate the idea of motherly people. I don’t describe myself to others that way. I do not want to look matronly, or perceived as smothering people. I mention this because I know people who seem to take pride in the fact that they can’t cook, blah blah blah. I don’t even cook anymore; my husband does. I certainly know how to cook and do it when I want to. I bake bread and cookies over the holidays. Others fetishize these roles, taking it all way too seriously. I say these things because I think it paints a fuller picture of who I am. My point is that the domestic sphere is a place I’m comfortable in.  I’m still mothering my children and I know that I will for the rest of my life. I really hope that I will be a grandmother someday. All these things—living life—become part of one’s subject matter in poetry.

 

Your poem, "The New Door" (Tabula Poetica, Chapman University, 2011), features a woman on the inside of the door, and a man, or men, of different identities, on the outside of the door. I am curious if this fable-like poem is not only addressing a certain fear felt by the female character, but is also addressing a bigger, feminist issue?

I like your interpretation that it could be multiple men. I was thinking about how men build houses for women to live in. And my husband had just replaced our door. I liked that he could take care of me that way, and I had to get used to it. Real estate is very erotic. Buying a house and making a home is erotic. I think the poem is about learning not be afraid of men and what they have to offer—there is a change in oneself when one lives with the opposite sex.  That was “the new door.” I don’t think you know what the other sex is like until you live with them.  I witnessed how a man really wants to please you; there is also a territoriality and keeping involved. We often look at this in a negative way, but it is also very loving.  I think it’s important for women to like the male psyche and accept it. I think in fact that we denigrate the male archetype too much. Having raised two sons, I feel this very deeply. The world has swung in the other direction; there is a lot of casual sexism about men thrown around. Men are allowed some very narrowly defined roles. At the same time, no one seems to like those roles, or behavior; I see a sick satisfaction some women have about it: “Boo hoo, you and your male privilege.” There is male privilege; I’m not an apologist for it, but there seems to be too little compassion for men. I think that’s feminist, but it's not an accepted point of view or an original one. I remember well the time period that I wrote “The New Door.” I had a lot of time to read. I was in a constant state of reverie. I was reading Of Woman Born by Adrienne Rich and The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill.

For Autumn: Poems by Latino/a/xs: Francisco Aragon

Unknown Distances, inkjet print on canvas, 2012, iliana emilia garcia

 

“UNKNOWN DISTANCES”

by Francisco Aragon

 

                                                            Not

this deserted stretch of beach this 

morning fog…

                        And that slick border of sand

would make a slapping sound

were I to run

                     barefoot

                                   along the very edge

                              (the foam

              on my left

receding)

as I did after school those years

four of them,

                      striding to the Cliff House

and back: practice.

 

Not

       this shoreline—a kind of liquid lace

gathering at the corners

 

of your mouth

that Sunday you ran with me:

the starter’s pistol, mile 1,

                                          mile 5,

                      veering 

off at mile 10…

                      —The San Francisco

Marathon I finished

at fifteen. Not

 

this ocean’s palette—muted, barely

green: a fringe of froth

                               along the top dissolving 

into sky, half this canvas

white

     —a kind of absence.

                                       But rather:

this human invention

—two of them—   

of weathered

wood, tightly woven

for sitting.

And if you were seated on the right, in the distance

                 and I in the one

on the left

             in the foreground,

                                         we’d  

be facing                          each other

               We might even

speak

 

 

Photo by Mike Cook

In 1998, after a ten-year residence in Spain, Francisco Aragón began a period of activity that included his own literary output, editing, translating, and curating. In 2003 he joined the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he founded Letras Latinas, the ILS’ literary initiative.  In 2010, he was awarded the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Arts, Literary Arts and Publications Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education, and in 2015 a VIDO Award by VIDA, Women in the Literary Arts. A CantoMundo Fellow and member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop, Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (2005) and Glow of Our Sweat (2010) as well as editor of  The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007), these latter two winners of International Latino Book Awards. He teaches a course on Latino/a poetry at Notre Dame in the fall and directs Letras Latinas in Washington DC in the spring and summer. For more: franciscoaragon.net . "Unknown Distances" first appeared in Nepantla and was written as part of PINTURA:PALABRA, a project in ekphrasis.

 

"Of a whorehouse in Odessa...." (by Mitch Sisskind)

Of a whorehouse in Odessa Isaac Babel wrote
That sometimes groans of pleasure lifted
The whole building six inches off the ground.
So too it was at the Commonwealth Hotel
On the corner of Pine Grove and Diversey
Where as kids we caused such commotion
In the coffee shop that once a bookmaker
Leaned from a phone booth and exclaimed,
‘This is a place of business!’ We laughed
And mocked him but in that same hour
As the hotel began to levitate we sought
His explanation  – he was known as
Mister Zah –  and he described fucking
As best he could but it was still a mystery.

 

 

 

An Interview with Stephanie Brown Part 1: Intentionality & the Influential Six [by Heather J. Macpherson]

Stephanie Brown is by far one of our most fearless contemporary American poets. Her first collection, Allegory of the Supermarket (University of Georgia Press, 1998) explores the dynamic extremes of suburban discord and the self. Her second collection, Domestic Interior (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) continues in a similar vein, just as strong if not stronger than the first, never once veering away from the societal grotesque. 

Stephanie's recent work has appeared in Connotation Press, Green Mountains Review, and my own press journal with Lea C. Deschenes, Damfino Journal. I am overtly thrilled to have had the opportunity to interview Stephanie about her work.

In your interview on Poetry.LA (5/2/2014) with host Mariano Zaro, you discuss moving away from writing long poems to writing shorter poems that focus more on the natural or mystical state of things rather than society. At what point did you decide to make such a dramatic change in both length and topic?

I think style and topic naturally evolve over time, and if you look at a writer’s work there will always be a signature or voice in the work that lets you know it’s the same person writing in different styles. I once saw a retrospective of an artist’s work where you could see the person was changing styles as each decade’s fashion changed—just copying leaders in the art form rather than natural evolution—I wanted to avoid that sort of thing.

For me I think it’s because that’s what I want to read. I am not really interested in a writer’s process being laid bare in the work—I want the scaffolding to be hidden and I want to read something that really moves me.  I think I got bored of the way I write most often, which is a kind of slow warm-up to the point, with good details, but after a while, who cares? I’m thinking of a poem of mine like, “Library.” I don’t want to write that kind of poem anymore.  I want to grapple more with the very strong emotions of life: DNA, if you will. That’s what we need artists to do. That’s what I need to read.

I like short, clever, pithy poems that reveal a truth about life. A poet’s job is to be a reporter and recorder and also to be a psycho-pomp, seer and mystic; a Pandora and a Cassandra and a spell creator and someone who can stir people deeply and even harm others. I have more moved into this area lately. I tried to make that transition around 2013-2014, I’d say. I’m not sure I really have, but I do feel the need to write in a different way. It’s hard to tell if I have. I have a desire to write shorter poems, but I’m not sure if I have really accomplished that. I think people want to be moved by what they read, hear or see. I want to write that way for them to have that experience. I am interested in pleasing the reader and making him feel.  

You were born and raised in California, and you have continued to live there, raise your sons with your husband, and work. Has living in different locations such as Pasadena, Newport Beach, San Clemente, influenced your poems, specifically when writing about class? I am thinking about two of your recently published poems, "Thanksgiving Dinner in a Rich Zip Code," (Map Literary) and "The Questions" (Connotation Press, Nov. 2015) but you have also written about class structures in other poems such as "Feminine Intuition," and "Fashion and the Fat Girl."

This is the really big question about my work, and probably the dead-center of my intentions or what motivated me in life.  I could write an essay on this, and so that I don’t go on too long, I’ll write some shorter impressions of what this makes me think of. I decided to put these into thematic parts—different angles in responding to the question.

Regional: I love southern California and feel very rooted here—I’m a defender of this place.  I feel very much like a Californian and love Jerry Brown, for instance. I like my town, my broader county—much maligned in casual conversation and not accurate in fact. I am very much a part of California and love it a lot with a feeling like patriotism, I guess. This is where the future is; it’s full of élan vital and freedom.

Literary influence: I have always been interested in the “novel of manners,” and my poems are novels of manners, if you will. My favorite novel is The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton.  I’m the town mouse, not the country mouse.  While I like to read a beautiful poem about a bird’s nest, it’s not my calling to write that poem. I am very interested in people’s behavior and what they do, what they tell themselves and how they act.  I find human behavior fascinating. I’m a very good mimic and can accurately capture people’s voice, tone, inflections and mannerisms. My older son also has this talent. He is hilarious. I have a very accurate sense of people—too much so. I can pretty much figure out a person and where they’re from and what kind of background, and what motivates them. I find people interesting and I love people.

Fascinating! I never thought to consider your poems "novels of manners" but as I re-read and examine many of them in comparison to the nineteenth century criteria I can see it, including "Thanksgiving Dinner in a Rich Zip Code." Do you think attitudes between men and women have stayed the same?  

That is a big question but: yes and no. I think we don’t emphasize the same things now—like you now don’t absolutely have to get married—but the same illusions and mental follies that you saw in the 19th or 20th century are often the same—or I think I mean to say that we can write about them in the same way—so the “novel of manners” never goes out of date. Tama Janowitz wrote a contemporary update of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth called A Certain Age. The novel is set in the social set of contemporary New York, and it was completely believable, and the end much more dark—to be alone and broke in New York (or any metropolis) today without any real skill, is to be extremely vulnerable. The point of that book, and it’s the same as Pride and Prejudice, is that some people need to compromise in order to get married—the example being Charlotte Lucas who married Mr. Collins. The woman in The House of Mirth should have taken the proposal of the decent Jewish man at the end.  

There was an article by Lori Gottlieb in The Atlantic a few years ago about what it means to not get married, and I think this is very real and truthful. It was unpopular and criticized because it goes against the idea that women shouldn’t compromise on their suitors. More insidiously, there is this notion of, “I’m not looking for a husband,” because “looking for” is gauche, or part of the evangelical class today, or seen as extremely old-fashioned and dated.  These kinds of women, who won’t “look” are, I think, another kind of House of Mirth today, or the sisters in Pride and Prejudice who get seduced and abandoned.  The people who can’t settle for someone—to me they are victims of faddish thinking along the lines of the ideal of bachelorhood that was espoused by Hugh Hefner, et. al., in the 1950’s. What that created was a cultural characteristic that made a generation of men believe that wanting to be married was somehow unmanly. Not wanting to “husband as a verb.” In a way, “husband as a verb” refers to a poem of mine called “The Questions”. There is now that internal conflict for women. They shouldn’t want marriage unless it’s a perfect meld of minds, hearts, goals, etc., and there has to be a grand passion—or nothing. But life alone is lonely. So, yes, nothing really changes. The novel of manners can be about other topics besides marriage, too. Tony Hoagland said my work was “sociological.” I am interested in the world, institutions, and how people behave. This election season is fascinating, isn’t it? So much that it reveals about “how we live now.”

And the novel of manners today is to talk about that—how we live today—kind of like those wonderful Trollope titles: The Way We Live Now and Can You Forgive Her? (I haven’t read them, by the way, just watched the BBC productions, but I have always loved those two titles).  A novel of manners today might be The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. It’s the whole entitled, rich world of not only money but endless possibility that was happening right before 9/11.  I can even remember, myself, two days before 9/11 we had my mom’s 80th birthday, and I remember thinking that the world, life, everything was so perfect and lovely and full and prosperous. It was a sunny, beautiful day. I had even bought a car that used more gas than I had in the past because gas prices were lower. (I never did that again).  It was the end of a generative time, of isolation, of Americans being out of the wide world. I think that novel captured that it ended. Another one of her books, I think it’s called The Woman Upstairs is spot on about a certain kind of woman who believes she is much more than she is, yet without enough talent, savvy or drive—she reminded me of women I know. There is even research about this: it’s called “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”  I think Claire Messud’s book captures that person as well as the character of a reckless, well-connected artist, who is the other main character.

Aspiration: Ambition is exciting. Winning and achieving is exciting; prowess and sureness of oneself makes a person beautiful and charismatic. I like glamour and clothes and beautiful things and places.  However, there is a terrible side to having class status: neuroses like learned helplessness, hypochondria, perfectionism, scrupulosity, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, and at its very worst, a lack of humility and care for others; inflated beliefs in oneself and one’s talents.  A lot of what you make happen comes from fate, not effort.  I think my poems address these subjects.

Feminist concerns: I think that the second part of “Feminine Intuition” says what I mean to say about all that I observed growing up and where I have lived. Also, a poem called “Marble Obelisk” in my first book, and “The Neighborhood of Successful Marriage.” “Marble Obelisk” was never accepted for publication but I included it in the book because it’s just about so many women I knew and observed; I used to see this one woman at my parent's club. I always imagined her feet cut off and struggling to walk. That poem was partly about her. Another one, “Mommy is a Scary Narcissist” is about a friend’s mother I knew growing up and other women I knew later in life; another poem that addresses this kind of woman is “Private School.” I just know these people inside and out. I think these are feminist concerns. Mothers are often the ones who perpetuate a lot of disfiguration of their daughters and teach girls how to be. There is a dark side to any kind of mothering. I never say this, but I probably should: these women are not my mother. My mother has a soupçon of this in her, but she was not a “debilitator.” I knew mothers who were devouring of their children—and fathers who were too, and the community of people falling into that category was also a huge influence. The rest of the world was easier than all that. I would say the probable truth I needed to write concerned the crippling power of money and patriarchy.  I say that with the caveat that many people do not believe these examinations of class are necessary to write about.  I kind of agree with that myself. I was lucky and had a lot of resources available to me. Working was a savior for me and provided me with ways ‘to be’ that didn’t allow neuroses to flourish. Being a chatelaine was the goal I rejected. They are not content; they are restless.

Class and social mores: Growing up, I spent 99 percent of my time thinking about my appearance. What a waste! And it was important in my family in a way that still makes me angry, though only maybe once or twice a year now. I can think of people I knew who became a sort of candied version of themselves, hollowed out and compromised and boring. There is a lot of boring, and wishing to be envied by others. Above all, even to be envied for being sincere and above needing others’ envy! To be charitable and show largesse, to be the kind of rich person who gets envied, along with praised. It is sincere, certainly, but very studied. I think there is a certain strata of people for whom their acts of charity and goodness are an effort to increase envy from others—to be so, above it all, and have so much excess money that one is forced to give it away. Or, if their actions are genuinely not about being envied, they are very out of touch. I remember listening to these donors talk about themselves with another group of donors, as if they were praising Albert Schweitzer or someone like that. It was pretentious and clueless, if not meant to incite envy. I’m not part of that world anymore. At all.

“Write what you know”: That’s what I did, and still do.

Fists that Bloomed Like Devotions: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Phillip B. Williams' Thief in the Interior

Thief in the Interior
Phillip B. Williams
Alice James Books, 2016

 

Phillip B. Williams' debut collection, Thief in the Interior, absconds with luminous witness from the darkest places in our culture: the shadow’s hem, the bull’s corpse, the trash bag full of dismembered body parts, and the spinning noose. In poem after poem, Williams sings in counterpoint to violent anthems composed in the American grain; Williams sings against “one nation coughing up black tongues.” He sings for the vanished, for the haunted, for the tortured, for the lost, for the place on the horizon where the little boat of the human body disappears in a wingdom of unending grace.  Thief in the Interior moves gracefully from pastoral through elegy to epithalamion; along the way, Williams deftly vivisects the sonnet and explores the lyric possibilities of forms as disparate as the calligram and the pecha kucha.  More importantly, Williams applies his dynamic syntax to an exploration of the buoyant wreckage inside the self, which might allow one to endure “the alluvial earth of grief” and “the hostile enigma” of misogyny, racism, and homophobia confronted daily in these United States.

Williams divides Thief into four sections. The first section begins with the poem, “Bound,” a poem that questions heteronormative cultural expectations and the strictures imposed by others on the self. Williams continues throughout this opening section to elaborate a series of tropes centered on decaying and broken bodies: a rotting bull’s carcass, lynched black bodies, a lacerated wrist. Williams nests these tropes within hallucinatory pastoral imagery. Reading this section is like listening to Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit” backwards underwater.   The second section of the book consists of one long poem, “Witness,” which details the death and dismemberment of a nineteen year old gay black man, named Rashawn Brazell.  “Witness” provides a keening meditation on the Brazell case, which both celebrates the life of the victim and ruminates on the broader cultural implications of this murder. As Williams puts it, the poem attempts to “tell how a city phantoms a boy, phantoms all witnesses.” The third and fourth section of the book continue to explore the personal repercussions of this type of phantoming.

In these two concluding sections, Williams shifts back and forth between threnody and serenade. Perhaps the finest poem in Thief occurs in the final section. “Do-rag” reads in full:

            O darling, the moon did not disrobe you.
            You fell asleep that way, nude
            and capsized by our wine, our Bump

            ‘n’ Grind shenanigans. Blame it
            on whatever you like; my bed welcomes
            whomever you decide to be: thug-

            mistress, poinsettia, John Doe
            in the alcove of my dreams. You
            can quote verbatim an entire album

            of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony
            with your ass in the air. There’s nothing
            wrong with that. They mince syllables

            as you call me yours. You don’t
            like me but still invite me to your home
            when your homies aren’t near

            enough to hear us crash into each other
            like hours. Some men have killed
            their lovers because they loved them

            so much in secret that the secret kept
            coming out: wife gouging her husband
            with suspicion, churches sneering

            when an usher enters. Never mind that.
            The sickle moon turns the sky into
            a man’s mouth slapped sideways

            to keep him from spilling what no one would
            understand: you call me God when it
            gets good though I do not exist to you

            outside this room. Be yourself or no one else
            here. Your do-rag is camouflage-patterned
            and stuffed into my mouth.

In many respects “Do-rag” is emblematic of the collection as a whole. Here, Williams begins by apostrophizing the beloved in a manner at once intimate and chiding. The motion in “Do-rag,” as everywhere else in Thief, is both intensely private and raucously public. We are ushered into a bedroom, into an interior monologue, into a dialogue with a lover, into a conversation with black culture, into a colloquy with American culture as a whole at this very moment, into an endless symposium on the self. Deep inside this nested parleying, Williams’ “fists that bloomed like devotions” signal strength and hope and love.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). 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.

Heather J. Macpherson, Guest Author October 17-21

This week we welcome Heather J. Macpherson as our guest author. Heather is the executive director at Damfino Press, which publishes an online journal, sponsors an annual chapbook contest, and publishes Five Poems, a yearly chapbook series. The most recent Five Poems is by Ilya Kaminisky. Heather's own poetry and other writings have appeared in Niche Lit Magazine , The Broken Plate, Spillway, Pearl, ATOMIC, CLARE Literary, OVS, Rougarou, and elsewhere.  She has twice been features editor for The Worcester Review, and is currently at work on her third feature, forthcoming in 2017. Heather is also finishing her second Master's degree and hopes to pursue a Ph.D. You can find out more about Heather at her blog, Scribble Hysteria. 

Welcome, Heather. 

-- sdh

You Don't Know What You've Got Till You've Won (by Nin Andrews)

 

After hearing about the Nobel Prize for Literature, I was reminded of my first grade class, particularly of a workbook for what was then called New Math. The workbook included pictures of sets of objects. Students were supposed to circle the object that did not belong. So one picture might include a bird, a dog, a pig, and a sandwich. The next, a fork, a spoon, a knife, and a tennis shoe. The next, a ring, a watch, a necklace, and a frog. What this had to do with math, I am still not certain.

But I liked the pictures, and I loved to think up stories in which one might want to include the circled items. I would explain to Mrs. Wallace, my teacher, that a sandwich could be used to feed the bird, the dog, and the pig. A fork comes in handy if you have a knot in your shoelace. The frog, of course, might have been a prince or princess once upon a time.

I was also reminded of discussions I had with the poet, Eleanor Ross Taylor, back when I was just out of college and first trying to understand the literary world. Eleanor had an acerbic wit and was unsparingly honest. Literary prizes, she suggested, are not all that you think they are. She talked at length about the different presses and literary connections and publishers one might wish to have in order to be a contender, and I remember feeling both disillusioned and discouraged. I concluded that literary success is a bit like economic success in our country. There is the top tiny %, now referred to as the 1%, and that one dreams of becoming a part of, and then there is the 99%.

Eleanor also suspected that certain winners are actually compromise-candidates. It’s hard to come to a consensus, she said, adding, we writers don’t agree on many things. That was especially true for Eleanor and me. She loved to ask me who my favorite writers were, and inevitably she would tell me just how much she disliked them. About my beloved Garcia Marquez, she said, I simply cannot abide him. Of the French surrealist poets I adored in those days, she said, Really, I’d rather not get a headache. But you just tell me why I should. Once, when I showed her a poem by Russell Edson, she said, I don’t know what that is. Do you? And we both burst out laughing.  

The Original Shoulder Shimmy!

-- sdh

Clearing a Path to Truth: On Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" [by David Lehman]

ILLUSTRATION: CHRISTOPHER SERRA

From the Wall Street Journal, October 15-16, 2016 

Not the least of Robert Frost’s accomplishments is that he managed to balance popularity with artistic excellence. Take “The Road Not Taken” (1916), arguably his most famous poem. You probably read it in high school. You will find it in any good poetry anthology. In its wizardry, the poem deserves the highest accolades. The irony is that it has often been loved and quoted for the wrong reasons. The further irony is that this misunderstanding itself testifies to the subtlety and genius of its creator. The critic David Orr has written an entire book—“The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong” (2015), newly in paperback—on this misunderstanding and the nuances of Frost’s design.

Here is the poem:

Continue reading here. 

"I nominated Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize. You're welcome" [by Gordon Ball]

People may not realize that Nobel Prizes, like other awards, are actively campaigned for. It is as if lobbyists, albeit unpaid ones, were out there petitioning the committee in Stockholm. Here is Gordon Ball's brief for Dylan, which is entitled  "I nominated Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize. You’re welcome" and which appears in today's Washington Post. Ball has campaigned for a Nobel for Dylan since 1996. -- DL

Bob Dylan aboard a train.

For decades I’ve admired the work of Bob Dylan, whom I first saw at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, but it was in August of 1996 that I first wrote the Nobel Committee, nominating Dylan for its literature prize. The idea to do so originated not with me but with two Dylan aficionados in Norway, journalist Reidar Indrebø and attorney Gunnar Lunde, who had recently written Allen Ginsberg about a Nobel for Dylan. Ginsberg’s office then asked if I’d write a nominating letter. (Nominators must be professors of literature or linguistics, past laureates, presidents of national writers’ groups, or members of the Swedish Academy or similar groups.) Over the next few months, several other professors, including Stephen Scobie, Daniel Karlin, and Betsy Bowden, endorsed Dylan for the Nobel. I would go on to nominate Dylan for the next dozen years. This year, he finally won.

Continue reading here. 

Highway 61 (Revisited) [by David Lehman]

In the name of Abe – biblical predecessor
of honest Abe, who freed the slaves,
and also Bobby’s dad -- I stand at your gate
with faith equal to doubt, and I say,
look out kid, no matter what you did,
and incredulity gives way to unconditional surrender.

Abe say “Where do you want this killing done?”
God say “Out on Highway 61.”
God directs traffic,
and young Isaac say it’s all right Ma I’m only bleeding.
And Ma say it’s all right boy I’m only breathing.
And Dad unpack his heart with words like a whore.

Young Isaac ain’t gonna work for Maggie's brother no more.
Ike no like the white man boss,
and when stuck inside of Mobile to even the score
he looks at the stream he needs to cross
despite schemes of grinning oilpot oligarch arschloch
who wanna be on the side that’s winning.

So he climbs up to the captain’s tower and does his sinning
and has read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books.
He no get where he got because of his looks.
He’s on the pavement talking about the government,
and he knows something’s happening but he don’t know what it is.
A strange man, Mr. Jones. Isaac Jones that is.

-- David Lehman

"Joy in Mudville" [by Peter Ferry]

We are disoriented.  Cubs fans are used to moving on to football by October.  Our association with baseball in the fall has usually been looking over someone’s shoulder at a TV in a bar asking, “Who’s playing?  Oh yeah?  What’s the score?”

This year is all new.  That’s because not only are the Cubs still playing on October 15^th, but they have a really good chance of winning.  Honest.  I would not have said that through eight innings on Tuesday night.  None of us would have.  No, despite 103 regular season victories, we were thinking 1969 when the Cubs blew a 9 1/2 game lead in September.  We were thinking 1984 when they were up two zip and got swept by the Padres in San Diego.  We were thinking 1989 when San Francisco made easy work of them in the NLCS and 2003 when Steve Bartman seemed a latter day manifestation of Billy Sianis’s goat or 2015 when the New York Mets swept the Cubs in the NLCS.   Now we are thinking, “Maybe, just maybe.”

That’s because Tuesday night the Cubs scored 4 runs in the 9^th inning in a come from behind playoff victory over the San Francisco Giants.  The Chicago National League baseball club had never done that in its 140 year history.  In fact, now listen to this, no one had.  No major league team in post season history had ever come from behind to score 4 runs in the 9th to win.  Sorry to be repetitious.  I could say it over and over again. 

How did they do it?  With children. Twenty-four-year-old Willson Contreras in his first half season in the majors drove in the tying run, and twenty-three-year-old Javier Baez in his first full major league season -- who is not only a wonderful baseball player but a gymnast and magician as well (look for his highlight film on YouTube in which he slides over, around, under and through tags, and in the field reaches behind himself in mid-air to tag out the other guy who can’t believe it until he sees the replay later) -- got the game-winning hit, and twenty-five year old Carl Edwards Jr. pitched a perfect seventh.  And that is not to mention 22-year-old-shortstop Addison Russell who looks like a fawn and may be the team’s best all-around player, or 24-year-old-Jorge Soler who got so excited earlier in the year  that he jumped out of the dugout and ran the bases with a teammate who had hit a homer, or 23-year-old Kyle Schwarber who wrecked his knee in the third game of the season going all-out to catch a ball in the outfield and is lying in wait for the 2017 National League, or 24-year-old Kris Bryant and gray beard Anthony Rizzo (he’s 27) who are vying for NL MVP honors or the best starting rotation in baseball or hired gun closer Aroldis Chapman who threw 13 pitches Tuesday not one of which was less than a hundred miles an hour to strike out the Giants in the 9^th.            

Wow!  This is such fun.  So much in fact that I didn’t mind at all not using the ticket my kids bought me for game five between the Cubs and Giants at Wrigley Field on Thursday.   Nope.  In fact, it was the very best baseball game I never saw.  

-- Peter Ferry

Hybrids Are Not Evil

 

            You might be forgiven for thinking they are – hybrids have been blamed for everything from the lack of diversity our food system to the fall of civilization (I jest). Specifically, they are often blamed for the disappearance of heirloom varieties. The truth, though, is that practically every plant you’ve ever grown, heirloom included, was once a hybrid. If that were not the case, we’d still be stuck with tomatoes the size of currents, bitter greens, and corn that could chip a tooth. Sometimes by accident, sometimes with intent, we’ve selected for foods with more flavor and fewer toxins, flowers that were bigger, brighter, and bloomed longer, trees that grew shorter or had more interesting forms.

            We use the term “hybrid” differently in the plant world than we do in the animal world. With animals, if we say hybrid, we mean a cross between two species – a lyger, a coy dog, a mule. With plants, the word hybrid may denote a cross between species, (this will be signified by an x in the binomial, as with Hamamelis x intermedia, the hybrid witch hazel) but it more often indicates a cross between stable phenotypes within a species – in animals, we call these breeds. So a hybrid beet, perhaps one bred from a parent which was bolt-resistant and another which had cool stripes, is no more evil than your Golden Doodle (your Golden Doodle may be poorly behaved, but it is unlikely to be actually evil).

            Because they are a cross between two species, animal hybrids are generally sterile. But plant hybrids are not generally sterile, because they are most often a cross within a species (even the interspecific hybrids are usually not sterile, because plants are just amazing that way). That first generation of crossing – the F1 generation (F for filial) – will produce viable seed, but you’ll get a mixed lot from it. Some of the F2 generation will be just what you want, some will have stripes but no heat resistance, some will take August weather but be plain old red. So, over time, you can keep planting the seed from your heat-tolerant, stripey beet, you can rogue out the ones that do not have the characteristics you want, and eventually you’ll be producing seed that consistently gives you the plant you want. When you finally get to the place that most of the seeds produce the plant you are looking for, you’ll have what is called a “stabilized”, or standard, variety.

            It’ll take time to get just what you are looking for, several generations at least. Did I mention that beets were biennial? Each generation takes two full years. Supposing you manage to stabilize your new variety in six generations, it’ll still take you twelve years to do so. Time is one reason we often stick with F1 hybrids; another is “hybrid vigour”. That initial out-crossing of genes creates a plant that grows bigger and is more productive than the parent plants – by a lot.

Here’s the total yield of a single sweet dumpling squash plant, a standard variety –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s that sweet dumpling squash hybridized with a mini-pumpkin. These all came from a single F1 plant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In addition to saving you years of patient breeding, and giving you plants that are consistently better producers for your three dollars per packet, plant breeders are doing us one more service when they maintain F1 hybrid lines. They are maintaining two lines of standard (heirloom, though that’s a fungible term) varieties every year, in order to have parents with which to produce those hybrids. They are protecting genetic diversity. Plant breeders, particularly small ones who specialize in regionally appropriate plants, are the good guys, and they deserve a hat tip.

 

A poem, from Wendell Berry, for seeds, those who coddle them, and those who plant them.

The Seeds

The seeds begin abstract as their species,
remote as the name on the sack
they are carried home in: Fayette Seed Company
Corner of Vine and Rose. But the sower
going forth to sow sets foot
into time to come, the seeds falling
on his own place. He has prepared a way
for his life to come to him, if it will.
Like a tree, he has given roots
to the earth, and stands free.

Wendell Berry’s “The Seeds” can be found in Wendell Berry, New Collected Poems, by Counterpoint Press. http://www.counterpointpress.com/dd-product/new-collected-poems/