The Best American Poetry

Koufax: Hurricane Sandy Strikes out the Side [by David Lehman]

The first Major League baseball game I ever saw took place in May 1957 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. The Dodgers, my team, were taking on the New York Giants, and my father took me on the long subway ride from Washington Heights, where we lived, to deep Flatbush, where Duke Snider patrolled center field, Carl Furillo played the caroms off the right field wall and nailed the runner trying to stretch a double, Pee Wee Reese gobbled up grounders and Gil Hodges completed the putout, and Roy Campanella won three MVP awards.

And who should be pitching for the Dodgers that day? A local boy, who played first base at Lafayette High  and basketball at the U of Cincinnati: a Jewish "bonus baby" with a fantastic fastball, a lot of potential but somewhat erratic results thus far in his Major League career: Sandy Koufax, born on this day in 1935.

Auspicious. Also, of course, heartbreaking to fall in love with a team that would move to California at the end of that very season, taking the Giants along with them. The Dodgers settled in Chavez Ravine, and Dodger Stadium, erected in 1962, remains the most elegant baseball park in the nation. It is also, amazingly, the third oldest. The Giants have given strutting San Franciscans something extra to cheer about in the last couple of years, but I like the Dodgers' chances with their astute new management this season.

On that May day in 1957 Duke Snider stroked his 1,500th major league hit. He also homered and made a graceful running shoestring catch of the line drive that ended the game. Koufax pitched into the eighth inning when Clem Labine relieved him. The final score: Brooklyn 5 -- New York 3. Ray Jablonski homered for the Jints (the authenticating detail!). I was eight years old and still remember Gil Hodges's smile when, before the game, he turned in our direction and acknowledged the greeting of a devoted fan.To this day I have never had a better seat at a ballpark than that one some ten rows back from first base at little Ebbets Field.

I have known a number of Sandys -- such as Sanford ("Sandy") Friedman, my classmate at Clare College, Cambridge, who quarterbacked our occasional touch football games and knew more than most of us about pipe tobacco, English cheeses, Renaissance poetry, and Wittgenstein.

But I am told that Sandy (like Leslie) is now assumed to be a girl's name -- as you could tell from the coverage of Hurricane Sandy back in 2012. That tempest did terrible damage, and was altogether lamentable, but it did suggest a nickname and an image for the greatest pitcher, who totally owned home plate for a stretch of six years in the early half of the 1960s. Hurricane Sandy. He had the most beautiful curve ball -- it bent like the semicircle that forms the top of a question mark -- but he could beat you even when that pitch deserted him. A steady flow of fastballs mastered the fearsome Minnesota Twins sluggers (Harmon Killebrew, Bob Allison) in game seven of the 1965 World Series, won by the Dodgers 2-0.

Now what brought on that memory?

Desire for spring as the winter of our discontent refuses to go gentle into the past?

All of that, plus the chance to praise my Dad, who took me to that game in May 1957 as he had taken me to the United Nations years earlier when it seemed like a significant entity; who gave up a Wednesday afternoon at the office years later for a pair of choice orchestra seats at "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," that perfect musical for the period; and who drove me to Yale (1965) and Harvard (1969) for memorable visits?

Nice to praise the greatness of Sandy Koufax and your own father in the same column, I must say.

--- DL

Originally posted on Sandy Koufax's birthday, December 31, 2015.

Streets of Paris: blocks, politics, passages and whatnot

This anecdote is perfectly true. This morning a guy with a white hussar-style mustache and heavy East European accent grabbed my arm as I was passing under a soaring concrete viaduct. Pardon, M’sieur, the hussar said, But has this viaduct always been here? I said, Mais, oui. He replied, I have passed here every day for 20 years and, do you know, Sir, I have never noticed the thing before? He strode off and I continued on. As I passed the passage des Soupirs (Sighs), also this morning and as I also do nearly every morning, I noticed that it is quite deep-set, set back away from the rue des Pyrénées. Suddenly, I realized, the passage of sighs might be more profound than I had thought.

I haven’t been publishing much in this latter half of the year now dying. You could be wondering why.

Of course, I certainly wouldn’t be the first to walk these fabled streets of Paris with words sticking in my head rather than flowing onto some handy foolscap.

Still, I would hope you would be wondering – if only because I’m one of those hearts whose cockles warm when someone says, “O, Good to see you; I’d hoped you weren’t sick!”

You may be thinking – even Karine, even she – may be thinking, “Surely, Nervous-Nelly-Tracy-wacy is all upsetty-wetty, what with the election of you-know-who.” (The other day I saw her unexpectedly, unsteady on her high-high heels, picking her way down the steps of the Opéra Garnier – that would be just after three pieces by Jiri Kylian.).

Also, she might think, I’m put off the public pen by the disheartening prospect of more political boobery blowing in on me from the Gallic, or, even, Teutonic, political territories. But, as Richard Nixon and his aides famously added to every bright idea, that would be wrong.

Karine would be wrong. (Her high-heels are no joke, especially if it’s slippery. She almost missed her step as I watched, too far away to catch her arm! Boy, what a disaster that might have been; she loves dancing so, a limp of any sort would devastate the woman. I’ve always loved her thin, muscly, almost stringy arms, her tough made-for-work hands – she might very well have really hurt her back as I looked on.).

Certainly, none of this can explain nonpublication, can it?

As long as I’m still out of Hell and can know it, neither that American man of the little winkle and disinflatable ego, nor that exceptionally coarse Madame Marine Lepen of the République française nor the oddly-but appropriately-named Frau Frauke Petry of the Bundesdeutschesrepublik have dominion over me or my imagination.

The rhetorical pitchforks of these political demons break no bones, you see, and, even if, here-below, seem is so often be in waiting, their sulfurous words are no brimstone; there is a diabolic reek, however.

Also, remember, I am a philosopher; Voltaire is my tinhorn god. I therefore expect very little from a species that, among other inexpressibly dumb things, destroys the bees that ensure its vital food crops and smugly congratulates itself on abolishing slavery among its own kind instead of asking itself what sort of species would invent it.

Count on it, the relatively small crowd of political cretins presently taking up considerably media space do not occupy even a tiny fraction of my waking-up thoughts, believe me.

I don’t wake up wailing because you-know-who’s election is a moral and political disaster whether he’s just a particularly wrong’un or an ordinary imbecile.

It is surely bad that from here forward, any namby-pamby objection one may have to cruelty or cruelty-based systems can be blown off with a careless wave:

“O! Stop your infernal worrying, Tracylein. Once he’s in office he’ll drop all this foolish hater stuff as surely as he’ll shave off the toothbrush mustache. He’s just talking to his base.”

His base? His base? His base, Friedrich?

For just a moment, consider that American office-and-emolument seeker as a human being rather than a mere political cartoon. What sort of human being – can you tell me? – wants to curry favor with a base who needs to be fed a diet of paranoia, anger and hatred?

Bad, too, is it that the booby belligerence – the lyin’, dissin’, flictin’ – of the new “movement” has become the general political mode. I really do fear that this loose, bad-tempered pushing and shoving, may actually bring about the Turner-Diary-like fantasies of confrontation that underpin so much of the politics of you-know-who’s boob base.

Why not? America has had a civil war and contrary to what we’re always trying to tell ourselves, a lot of the popular passion for it was based on paranoia about the “Slave Power”. Just because ending slavery was a good thing doesn’t mean the means of doing should thrill me or you.

I’d have preferred a vote in the House after reasoned debate and an agrarian program distributing 40-acres and a mule to ex-slaves.  I’m sure many of my political friends would say they would’ve too. Yet, I hear very little of re-reading Thoreau, studying King’s campaigns or rationally determining what circumstances merit putting one’s precious body-self on the line. I hear a great many things which it seems to me are just opportunities to gain bully points through booby belligerence…

The absolute worst thing about the whole vile mess was actually pushed right into my snout the other day and in an entirely unexpected way. And this, the worst of all things that might upset me enough not to publish, has not, as might suppose a certain female person whom I suppose is even now nervously tressing up her frizzy hair in her princessly tower, the while pretending her stubborn refus is firmness of cosmological purpose or some such…

Literary Journal Spotlight: Poet Lore [by Abdul Ali]

Publishing poems is a stressful undertaking. All those weeks bleeding into months of waiting. And let's not  talk about the stakes in getting published--the validation, the fleeting social media fame, the entries on the CV, or if you're an academic the tenure review folder. And yet, as a reader, nothing gives me more pleasure than to discover a new voice or to read a new poem by a favorite poet. I often lose whole days just leafing through the pages (or screen) of a literary journal. 

I've decided to try to create this series to bring attention to literary journals (and those who labor behind the scenes to keep them running) in hopes that these conversations can be useful to poets who are trying to figure out how to publish poetry.

I caught up with E. Ethelbert Miller and Jody Bolz, executive editors of the literary journal Poet Lore, to share insights about their journal and to demystify the anxiety-producing prospect of trying to publish in a journal that receives thousands of submissions per year.  

 

Both of you are seasoned poets and long-time readers of literary journals. What would you say sets Poet Lore apart from other journals? 

Ethelbert:  I think our journal is one the general public can enjoy. I feel it’s a publication that presents a “gift bag” for everyone. I also see Poet Lore upholding American literary traditions as well as venturing into the unknown and discovering new voices. Every magazine is unique because each reflects the vision of its editors. My views about what a literary journal can do were shaped by my working relationship with the writer and publisher Ahmos Zu-Bolton back in the 1970s.  I helped him publish Hoo-Doo. At that time, it was the sister magazine to Callaloo and Obsidian. Ahmos placed special emphasis on design and format. A journal has to look good as well as read well.  I like how Poet Lore looks and feels in my hands. When I read the list of contributors on the back cover page of an issue, I’m proud of the work I’m doing, the history I’m creating, the bringing to surface the blessings from poets.

Jody:  One thing that makes each issue of Poet Lore a fascinating read is the way the poems are arranged in relationship to one another: we place them in a narrative arc so that the poets are in conversation with one another from start to finish. Our Editors’ Page in the front of the journal invites readers to consider specific thematic threads that run through the selection of poems. We love the idea of presenting a chorus of voices in a wide range of tones, and the sound metaphor is no accident; at each month’s editorial meeting, we read the poems we’ve chosen for consideration aloud to one another.  When we can’t hear any kind of music (and I’m not talking about conventional meter and rhyme here but cadences and echoes), we don’t take the poem.

As editors and readers, what do you look for in a poem? What makes you say "yes" unequivocally?

Ethelbert:  I think I first say “no” to poems. I reject before I accept. I’m not looking for anything, other than what Hirsch once mentioned as being the pleasure poetry gives us. A poem is accepted by the magazine if both editors agree. So, to some extent the “yes” is a collective one. The accepted poem receives a democratic vote or what might also be viewed as a Supreme Court hearing. Editors should uphold the “law” of publishing good writing. Maybe the “yes” we say is the “yes” e.e. cummings once wrote about. Yes to everything that is beautiful in the world. Maybe at the end of the day I want a poem to love me back.

Jody:  There has to be something in the poem that calls us back to it—that makes us forget we’re editors, busy at our task, and makes us readers again. That “something” enchants or unsettles or entices us. It may even confuse us at first—but everything we need to know is in the poem if we reread it.  What do we look for? Hard to describe though easy to recognize: an authentic and engaging voice, an interesting sense of “the line,” a good ear, respect for the mysteriousness of human experience without any amateurish retreat into obscurantism. Carl Phillips (whose very first poem appeared in Poet Lore decades ago, has said that a good poem ends with the thwack of one door closing and the softer sounds of many small doors opening behind it.

Can you tell me about the "Poets Introducing Poets" feature? How do you go about selecting poets to be featured and the poet who writes the introduction?  

Ethelbert:  There is nothing worse than a stale journal. I think the “Poets Introducing Poets” feature keeps Poet Lore interesting and fresh. The feature means we can keep our fingers on the pulse of poetry being written across the US. I like that the editors selected for this section reside in different parts of our country and often have a different aesthetic or taste than I do. It helps to have a big net when editing a publication over a long period of time. The feature also helps to develop a community among writers. At one time the editors selected to coordinate the section were on our contributing editors’ board. Giving them this task meant they were doing more than just lending their name to the journal; they were also working for us. On a number of occasions the writer selected was one the editor had been mentoring.

Jody:  Ethelbert and I began editing the magazine together 15 years ago, and after the first year, we decided to add this feature. We asked Tony Hoagland, one of our contributing editors, to select a poet he respected whom we’d never published. He chose Adrian Blevins, whose first book of poetry was coming out at that time, and his introduction to her work included this marvelous line: “Because she has the syntactical skill, the rhythmic momentum, and associative neurology, and the tonal range to pull it off, reading a Blevins poem is like taking a carnival ride through an especially capacious soul.”  What a way to invite a reader into a portfolio of new poems! Soon after that, Cornelius Eady introduced Gregory Pardlo’s work, Alberto Rios introduced Kyle Grant Wilson’s work, Jane Shore introduced Nadell Fishman’s work; David Lehman introduced Jay Leeming’s work. Later, poets with a long relationship with the magazine began to participate: D. Nurkse introduced the poems of Inuit poet dg nanouk okpik; Natasha Trethewey (another poet whose first poems were published in Poet Lore) introduced the poems of Tarfia Faizullah…. Most of these pairings were teacher-student relationships, but Sandra Gilbert’s choice was the venerable Diana O’Hehir, author of seven books of poetry and fiction. The other popular feature we’ve added is our annual “World Poets in Translation” series, through which we’ve presented the work of remarkable foreign poets with incisive introductions by their translators. We’ve already published work from such far-flung places as Denmark, Turkey, Myanmar, Iran, Uruguay, and (in the coming issue) Togo. Poet Lore’s commitment to publishing world writers in translation goes back to the time of its founding in 1889.

Lastly, what advice would you give poets who'd like to see their work in your journal?  What should they do before submitting? And how do you accept submissions these days?  

Ethelbert:  People are always looking for advice. Too often the red light never turns green. People submitting work to our magazine should let it slow-cook on their desks first.  Put together four or five poems that show a range in style and voice.  How to submit?  Place your ear next to the last issue we published. If you hear yourself then send us something new and different.

Jody:  I agree with what Ethelbert says apart from the suggestion that a poet should submit a group of poems that show “a range in style and voice.”  Put together four or five poems that make an impression as a group.  We’re reading close to a thousand poems a month, and you want your work to stand out—to make an impression. Too many MFA candidates send us one villanelle, one prose poem, a list poem, and a persona poem; these submissions read like responses to workshop assignments. When you ask about any poem “Who’s speaking—and in what human situation?”  (which was Auden’s advice, I believe), you don’t want the answer to be “A graduate student trying to get published.”  The best advice of all, of course, is to subscribe to the magazine and read it cover to cover. That will tell you everything you need to know.

 

Poet Lore was founded in 1889. Its editors Ethelbert and Jody will be at AWP on the panel, "Old Journals, New Writing: Editors on History and Discovery," scheduled for 9:00am on Feb 10th. The panel will be moderated by Jody Bolz. Its panelists include Jeremy Schraffenberger, poetry editor of North American Review, Don Share of Poetry, and Kwame Dawes of Prairie Schooner. 

Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping, winner of 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize. You can follow him on Twitter @abdulali_ . 

Happy Holidays!

Uniqueness proven in Paris! Merry Christmas!

And, you thought, if anyone did, Saint Nicholas would know the unique truth of love. Alas, in Babylon, even he must sometimes lay himself down and analyze.

I happened to be paying attention this time. 2016 proved beyond a reasonable doubt that each human being is really unique.

Not namby-pamby unique, but really, tough-Charlie, unique.

If this uniqueness were not so, how then would we explain so many inexplicable events?

Also, the uniqueness of be is why the very good Fifi is so good and why I still do perversely love, have perversely loved, will perversely love, the very bad Karine instead of the so-good Fifi and vice-versa and so on.

Perversities induced by uniqueness are the root of comedy and of tragedy, Aristotle might have said if he'd known quantum mechanics as well as I have come to, without which perversities there would be nothing to ponder and get fussy about over past or coming years.

As well as no worthy entertainment. No, not even animal documentaries.

So, here’s to l’unique universel:

A tough-looking woman smokes a cigarette, gravely blowing the smoke into the morning mist, earphones artfully stuffed into her ears. She swings, very, very slow to some secret song that almost imperceptibly softens her features. She notices me with rather obvious neutrality. It’s not our first time together at the bus stop. I think she’s attractive. We get on before and behind each other, then quickly find a casual way to exchange a noncommittal first-time word or two. As we turn casually to resume looking neutrally out the window, I notice a little gold star of David around her neck. I wonder what she’s found out about me?

A little girl of whom I see only the mother’s laughing face is noisily hidden in the part of the madding crowd packed in behind me. Somewhere under my knees, she’s now singing a French version of The Farmer in the Dell, a radical switch from a flow of interesting questions and pertinent observations directed at her wide-eyed mother – O, this child does adore words, words, words. Words will do anything if only we will let her keep shaping them, firing them, laying them out for all to hear…

A guy dressed in cheap gym pants, tee-shirt and baseball cap. He’s decorated with gang tattoos. He sports an “Islamic” beard. I am reminded of the story of Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s savage counterpart and friend. Most, most delicately, he plucks a newly-arrived baby from the arms of its mother, ritually taking possession. Growling softly, he presses the tiny body against his chest, closes his eyes in ordinary ecstasy. The story goes that seven days with the temple prostitute did to civilize Enkidu.

A little English-speaking boy perched next to my ear sings a loud counterpoint to the Frenchified Farmer in the Dell. I recognize it as an Army boot-camp marching song: Ain’t no use in lookin’ down, he cries, Ain’t no discharge on the groun’. I twist my head. “Big boy”, I say in broad Ohio, “Where’d’ju learn that?” At camp, he says, rather coolly, I think, as if, along with I wanna be an Airborne Ranger, I wanna live a life of danger, kill, kill, killllll, this song is today’s real thing. I am, perhaps, his tone seems to imply, one of yesterday’s unreal things. “At camp,” I repeat and study the parents from under hooded eyes. 

A homo giganticus. A rugby man. At least, even in jacket and tie, it’s hard to imagine him as something other than that. A Haka-challenge expression presides over an overhung brow and great bulging shoulders: this is a man who hates getting up in the morning, hates riding crowded buses. A lustrously grey-haired woman, formerly blonde, slim, lively, laughing, has got hold of his huge ear, asking to use his cell phone. She gets Haka-face to slap his pockets, stretch and strain his mighty muscular body, strenuously extract his miniscule cellphone. An earlier incarnation of the girl singing beneath my knees, this woman can hardly stay in her seat as she explains to giganticus that her daughter is waiting, that she (both of them) could be late, and that the daughter cannot know she’s forgotten her cell phone and that he’s such a fine, nice, sweet, excellent fellow passenger to lend her his cell… He puffs his cheeks in the French way of a sigh, hands the phone over. She calls, explains, presumably to her daughter, that she’ll be on time and not to expect her to pick up her phone, etc. She hands the phone back to giganticus, with thanks that seem to make him want to disappear into his seat – not that these thanks are insincere or even that effusive. She declares to anybody who wants to hear: Some days everything goes off kilter, like, as if, Atlas had a crick in his back and that, as he tries to get comfortable, reality starts sliding this way and that …

A lady who has her hands so full of stuff she can’t even press the “Stop” button, let alone open the door herself. She has learned from the cats: if you squat in front of a door and watch it intently, it will open. It might take time hers and other peoples’, but what have we got if we’ve got no time? As I stand scrutinizing her, smelling the perfume of her existence, I understand that she has adopted the manner of cats in all things, not just in this. The bus stops. I press the “Open” button. She steps out traceless into the crowded street.

I wish you all joyous holidays. Along with the local merchants, of course. And this, certainly, with no intention to either piggyback as a free-rider on their Holiday-Buying-Initiative Investment program (HBII program) or to impugn said local merchants or any persons, groups or things associated with them, in any way whatsoever. In fact, these remarks are meant as a French-language lesson and do not constitute any ambivalent feelings towards those whose social contribution is greater than my own. So help me. This picture is taken with an unsteady, midnight cavorting hand.

A cheese shop along the street sells truffled Brie cheese. While I personally believe that Brie cheese was a proximate cause of the Peasant Revolt and has been implicated in many atrocities since, I think of the pleasure it gives Karine. She’s right wild about it and I have never hesitated to kiss her when she has wanted that. She smears it on tiny pieces of bread which she then very slowly grinds and mashes with her teeth and tongue. She is embarrassed by her avidity, her gourmandise; she flushes slightly and shrugs when she sees I notice it.

A smirk and jaunty wave from a fellow fitness enthusiast as he passes me on his way to work. He knows Karine; he witnessed the significant squeeze I gave to a certain Sabine’s very attractive hand before she skipped off up the stairway on the passage des Soupirs. I would like to be better than I am, but I know now that I never shall be any better than I should be, especially as long as I provide so much good entertainment for so many and as long as they provide so much good entertainment for me.

Once – this is long before the tragic events of late 2015 – Karine and I were walking up or down this same street, probably to do some shopping, perhaps to walk her to work, most likely for the hell of it. We were chatting, holding hands. She suddenly turned and flung her arms around me, pulled me very tight to her, put her mouth to my ear, whispered excitedly to me, “O! Joyeux Noël. Joie. Joyeux Nöel, mon amour, joyeux Noël.” She struck me dumb, so instead of speech, I hugged her tight to me, felt her, I really felt her, felt a trembling sob of her joy rise within me. Merci, Karine. Joyeux Noël.

Merry Christmas to all of you, too.

"Becoming a God" [by Thomas Moody]

I am a young man sitting
on the end of a bed in a
Motel 6 in Pensacola Fl.
holding in my hands a mask
carved by a decade of echos
of America’s proselytizers.
The mask is difficult to put on
for it is shaped by each
prophet to their image
and from second to second
it changes. It is the image of 
Elvis. I am Elvis, bloated
like an infection. Now I
deflate into a strong
black woman. I am Nina
Simone stamping her pain
into the piano. I am Einstein’s
greatest discovery: Leadbelly,
the homicidal harmonizer.
I am Dylan when he loved
being hated, sending himself
electric. I am Son House;
and Nick Cave; and Rowland
S. Howard at all ages and times,
but especially since his
death. I am Johnny Cash;
and Shane McGowan
before he got his new teeth.
The mask is glued on with
whatever I can find. Tonight
it is a cheap rum and ——
In the background plays
Bellringer Blues. Tonight
I will play a show nobody
will care to listen to
at a bar I don’t know the
name of. Nobody knows
who I am, least of all
myself, for I can never
tell how the mask will fit.

               *

I am a middle-aged man
sitting on the end of a bed
in the penthouse of the
Chateau Marmot being
pumped full of prescriptions
to rise me above the weather
so I can walk on stage tonight
for the fourth night in a row
at the Hollywood Bowl
and become a God.
I am living my version
of somebody else’s life.
No longer do I have to worry
about masks. There is no
mask, it has calcified
onto my face so that I have
become what I always
wanted and now I cannot
be anything else. I dream
Nick Cave’s dream of
pushing Elvis’s bloated
body up a mountain, like
Sisyphus rolling my
influences’ influences up
and up until they fall back
upon me and crush who
I was. I rise
and am no longer me:

I am a God on stage
at the Hollywood Bowl
and I’m not sure who
that is for no man can know
God and I cannot
be anything else.

"Morning Routine" [by Lily Bowen]

My legs look their thinnest
in the mirrored windows

of the Bed Bath and Beyond loading dock
on W 65th. Employees only,

I smile and say good morning
to the men smoking their cigarettes out back.

Every morning I admire them, my legs,
cascading over the pavement,

the 65% of my body that every fling
or boyfriend of my past has told me

is my greatest attribute.

I saw a girl with long legs and blonde hair
on the beach and she reminded me of you.

The same legs that have urged teachers
to pull me aside and inform me,

that skirt is too short to facilitate
a positive learning environment.

I would make my wingspan smaller and argue
those skirts passed the 3 finger test.

These legs are good for more than just looks, though -
They are strong and toned and prepared

to run from an attacker, to bike a Pan-Mass Challenge,
or run a New York City marathon.

But for now, they have a simpler task - to hold me up,
in heels that accentuate their longevity,

for me to stare at and admire in store windows
on my morning walk to work.

-- Lily Bowen

"15 Poems to Avoid" [by Rebecca Endres]

15 Poems to Avoid

1. The “very punny”
2. The overly enthusiastic— Dickinson!— Fan!
3. The simile that’s as overused as your favorite tee-shirt
4. The cliché that has all the teenagers rolling their eyes moodily
5. The hyperbolic behemoth, the extreme titan of a poem to end all poems, born of Apollo and watched over by Poe’s own raven
6. Speaking of which…anything involving a raven or a blackbird. Crows are iffy at best.
7. The poem that r e l i e s TOO much

on form

to make a point

                                    that could have been

(made)

easily

8. Don’t understate
9. TOO ABSTRACT TO UNDERSTAND
10. O! To attempt to venture thither and evoke the language of previous poets! Muses, be with me as I attempt to elucidate my Reader on the dangerous ignus fatuus of Trying Too Hard!
11. The nonsensical metaphor, a bird in a pair of fishnet stockings
12. The repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition, the repetition
13. Beware: when it comes to rhyming it’s all about timing.
14. The poem that spends too much time in a field of flowers, or in any proximity to a rosebush, especially a beautiful rosebush that also contains thorns.
15. When it comes to list poems, you’re on thin ice. So just watch yourself.

John Donne's "Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Eve"

 

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be:
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

-- John Donne (1572- 1631)

"Considered by many to be the greatest of all Capricorn odes." -- Alastor Crowley

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world’s whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be:
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all, that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.

-- John Donne (1572- 1631)

"Considered by many to be the greatest of all Capricorn odes." -- Alastor Crowley

A Husbandry of Risk and Want in a House Run by Mothers: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Tommye Blount’s What Are We Not For

What Are We Not For
Tommye Blount
Bull City Press, 2016

Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook, What Are We Not For, artfully explores what it means to live inside a black queer body at this particular time in American history. Blount’s sinewy poems are bound together with countless silken ties of desire, fear, and affection for the world in all of its wounding might. Ranging from tightly made free verse, to sonnet, to villanelle, these poems perpetually shrapnel into each other. Each poem shuts its mouth “around the rough ramble of wordlessness” and redirects its gaze to the pulsing lycanthropic chiefdom a body carries within its provinces. In this collection, the mutt of the first poem, “Bareback Aubade with the Dog,” who snaps the thin leash of yes, transforms into the werewolf of a later poem, who is beaten “until skin becomes wound/ then scab then hide.” What Susan Howe said of Emily Dickinson could be said of Tommye Blount as well: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender.” However, Blount never forgets the whiplash logic of a culture founded on the destruction of black bodies. As the speaker in “The Tongue” notes: “…I have the tongue/ of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.” What Are We Not For retrieves the seams in the seamless transition from scar tissue to carapace. More importantly, this powerful collection celebrates the “sweet body” and the affirmation that buzzes inside the hive of the self at its most sated and at its most insatiable.

For Blount, nevertheless, the sweet body is also the site of unspeakable pain. A dog, forever barking, forever muzzled, runs through these poems toward that pain. The figure of Pinocchio, which recurs throughout the poems, foregrounds that pain in his interrogations of realness. “Geppetto’s Lament” begins: “Off to mess with what I made him, the boy/ forgets he is not a boy. Forgets these/ strings and this paddle, shaped like a cross, are/ in my hands.” The pain of Pinocchio, who in the poem, “Pine,” cuts the inside of his thighs with his father’s whittling knife, emblematizes the struggle of anyone who attempts to define the self against normative cultural expectations. Blount deftly questions the surreptitious pacts and the hidden strings that bind son to father, beloved to lover, lynching victim to crowd, body to spirit, spirit to word. As the title poem notes:

            What Are We Not For

            but to be broken
            like the deer resting on the side of the highway,
            in a bed made of

            its insides? Isn’t the scene
            always the same—the rump and legs
            frozen in one last kick?

            I, too, have lost my gaze,
            the grip of the wheel—
            like the one that plowed into

            the deer. Wheel, will—it’s all the same.
            And the ear does fail me at times,
            as it must have the deer

            that should have listened better.
            Francine, on the other end of the line,
            tells me I’m not listening; to listen

            to my body or I won’t last long. We never
            last long, do we? It all breaks—
            the line pulsing forward, the line pause,

            the long bone of it all. After all,
            I am a broken animal. I am brokered
            in the name of the wheel.

Despite this constant breaking, Tommye Blount stays on the line. He knows that our bodies may be museums, but they contain more than mere artifact. The lynching of Frank Embree in 1899 appears in one window of the body, right next to Matthew Shepard’s murderer, Aaron McKinney, in 1998. And yet, if the body is a site of trauma, it is also a dance floor. Channeling the famous choreographer, Willi Ninja, Blount defiantly exclaims, “Bitch, give me a body/ and I will show you how it works” and jubilantly continues: “One day I will show you the world/ is one big ass ball—/ / a house run by mothers.” Reading this chapbook, one husbands risk and want and pain and sorrow, only to access ultimately such unfettered joy. Reading What Are We Not For is as necessary as breathing, grieving, and loving.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize, 

A Conversation with L. Lamar Wilson [by Abdul Ali]

Abdul Ali: I'd like to know how the process of writing your first book and receiving the kind of recognition you did either helped or intimidated you to begin work on something new? 

L. Lamar Wilson: It's really been a startling and beautiful experience, having Sacrilegion flourish first on the basis of word-of-mouth and love for Carolina Wren Press's always excellent work. Then came a number of very generous reviews and opportunities to read around the country. Then its poems morphed into a staged musical performance in Miami, and now, nearly four years after publication, they're beginning to appear in anthologies in the States and abroad (the Ukraine and possibly Germany soon). We're in our third printing of Sacrilegion, with more than 1,000 books in print, absolutely astounding for such a small press. I won the CWR prize in the midst of completing my doctorate at UNC-Chapel Hill, so I was eye-deep in scholarly essays and books about queer theory, sound studies, critical race studies, Afro-pessimism, and African American poetics. Now that I'm soon closing that chapter with the imminent conferral of the PhD, the hardest part has been consistently adherring to my early-morning writing rituals from which the best drafts of poems always emerge. 

AA: How do you know when a subject is right for your poems? And how are your approaching book #2 in terms of discovering your project? 

LLW:Poems start as a line a voice in my head says with such clarity that I must write it down. I rarely say to myself, "I'm going to write a poem today about __________." It starts with a line, then another, then others flow. I'm about a third of the way into my second full-length poetry collection now, and I've realized that in it, I'm continuing the journey I began with Sacrilegion, which featured “Resurrection Sunday,” a long poem that revisits a 1934 lynching in my hometown and generated the collection’s title. Whereas Sacrilegion limns the tightrope of piety, profligacy, contrition, and abjection through the voice and lens of one speaker marked “disabled” and “queer,” this new book's speakers command more mythic voices who meditate on the psychological impact of the recent upsurge in anti-black, State-sanctioned brutality on African Americans’ consciousness and the ways this violence affects our intimate choices. The ascendance of a neo-Nazi sympathizer to the presidency again has brought the KKK and related hate groups from the shadows, and America is experiencing its third wave of a so-called "Reconstruction." Just as Barack Obama's presidency sparked white male rage this time, black men's prominent leadership roles in the U.S. government in the wake of the Civil War and the past century's Civil Rights Movement fueled the first and second waves as angry white men threw public tantrums and terrorized every non-white male in their paths. 

 I grew up among the men and women who survived the hate crimes white men committed without recourse in the early- to mid-1900s, including the aforementioned lynching in a close-knit North Florida community that gives this second full-length collection its title. This book aims to gather the wisdom I gleaned from these now-deceased ancestors about thriving, basking in joy even, after witnessing such horror and enduring subsequent attacks by white male terrorists. Thus far, I have juxtaposed a series of “How To …” pieces with those that ponder the ways the imagery and video footage of dead and dying black people in the present day are shaping historical memories about a past that had been narrated as dead upon Obama’s election. We are a generation of men and women daily assaulted by these images and videos, and this book considers the revolutionary power in physical intimacy among black and brown men and women in sports, fieldwork, worship, and irreverent, sensual play—then and now. It also continues a long “middle passage” poem that explores the journey of the earliest-known African American survivors of white male terrorism: writers who had to unlearn their native Wolof, Twi, and other Igbo languages and master the King’s English.

AA: Do you have a poem you'd like to share with the readers of this blog? 

LLW: Ninety-four percent of black women tried to save the soul of America on Nov. 8, 2016. White male terrorism, to which many white women & far too many black men & other people of color have pledged allegiance, found a way into the White House through the "electoral college," the back-door entrance wealthy white men crafted into the Constitution to keep themselves in power. My ars poetica for this book, "How to Break Bread," will soon be published in Crazyhorse, but another, which explores my inner battle with responding to white male terrorism in my work, was published in Prime: Poetry and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). 

Malevolence

Only i missing here to make sense of it, 

As in internecine, as in interred, the deeper 

Meaning of it all, bad news for every body. 

How to step into its gays again & trade places 

With its queens, its Medeas & Madeas? Is this

What made i scant, shunned? Of what man & manner

Is i supposed to hate itself this time? It’s always 

The woman’s fault anyway. It’s always God’s will. 

O soul, who do you hate? Why can’t you stop beating 

Your meaty obsession with muscles & bears, lionizing 

The easy pray? Jocastas and their pregnant pauses. 

Prayer works only if you walk by sight, not blind faith,  

& i will never fit this profile your i’s write, that you 

Expect these eyes to replicate in every body we write,

Our black market McCoyed. It’s too heavy, the wait

Of this i broken beyond its selves, enough for you &

You & you to enter. Chipola, Chattahoochee, Suwanee, 

Tallahatchie, Jordan, Euphrates, Styx. Ol’ Man River …

This time, i am bound to cross these on your buts, but i 

Won’t bare this burden, these inches forecast, alone 

Any longer. You are coming with. You’ll have to help me carry the weight

& carnage of water, the audacity that keeps it flowing, no matter

The human cargo, the marriage of breath & marrow, 

Of hope snapped by the whir of a fan’s blades

By the backs of a man’s tied hands begging for 

The father & the son & the holy bitch i refuse to call him.

& what do i know of wading, of the prick of death 

Entered each time you’s open your back doors?

Just a backwoods song as keepsake have i 

To offer you. You should listen while 

i show you you in i.  m a l e v    i    o l e n c e. 

Your innards spilled on the turned page that tells

The same story you’s wrote on the one before i

Fell in the deep end, black&bluesed & saw you coralled 

In the continental shelf below i, blooming. 

You should know i hate loving you. 

You should know i will never stop.

 

AA: What advice would you have for your fellow poets who are trying to figure out the complicated journey of being an artist and navigating the poetry biz? 

LLW: First, don't believe the hype: yours or anyone else's. Believe only the growth (or the lack thereof) you see in the mirrors that poems are. Ask yourself whether your poems or the poems of the poets you love are still teaching you new things. If not, act—revise or otherwise turn the proverbial page—accordingly. Second, paraphrasing something Nikki Giovanni told me early in my journey, "Writers write. Write more, fail better, fail less. You can't publish anything if you're not writing every day. Write what comes and worry about genre or publishing venue after the work is done." To that end, I think a lot about Henry Dumas these days, not only because his life and career were cut short by senseless police violence amid that second wave of Reconstruction, but also because the brother wrote prodigiously before publishing a full collection. Poems. Fiction. Songs. Essays-in-verse. What we are lauding today as innovative, genre-bending work, Dumas did in the decade before his 1968 murder. Thank goodness beloved elders Toni Morrison and Eugene Redmond collected his genius in Play Ebony Play Ivory, Ark of Bones, and Echo Tree. Dumas knew the urgency of the moment, knew that what he saw happening to others might befall him, too, so he didn't throw away his shot. These days, we talk a lot about Alexander Hamilton, another prodigious brother killed by a jealous white man, because of the success of Lin-Manuel Miranda's play, but Dumas stands out to me because it's clear he wasn't following any treatise from LeRoi Jones-cum-Amiri Baraka or Larry Neal. Yet, he's left us a prescient tapestry to admire, a pattern to follow, as we quilt our own patchwork to freedom of fear of white male terrorism. The field hollers of his 1930s-1940s Arkansas childhood meld so hauntingly with the protest cries of the decade we would lose him to a white man's bullet. I'll be navigating the secrets he's left us with a group of young writers later this month at The Watering Hole.

 

L. Lamar Wilson is the author of Sacrilegion (Carolina Wren Press, 2013) and co-author of Prime: Poems and Conversation (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014). He teaches creative writing and African American poetics at The University of Alabama.

Abdul Ali is the author of Trouble Sleeping, winner of 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize.  He currently teaches High School English at a private college preparatory school in Baltimore, MD. You can follow him @abdulali_ . 

 

 

RAY DIPALMA R.I.P [by Michael Lally]

This is me and Ray sometime in the 1960s I believe...we first met at the University of Iowa when I arrived there after four years in the military to try and get into their Writers Workshop at the last minute without even a BA and managed to get them to not only accept me on the G. I. Bill but let me work on a BA and MFA at the same time.

I was a married veteran and Ray was a single ex-"seminarian" (he had spent his high school years preparing for the seminary and the priesthood) who was living the life of a bachelor in the swinging '60s...we became instant friends based on our mutually obsessive, even addictive, love of books and our ethnic "neighborhood" East Coast backgrounds (he an Italian-American from outside Pittsburgh, if I remember correctly, and me Irish-American from outside Newark NJ) among Midwesterners and WASP graduates of Ivy League colleges, etc. (probably a misconception on my part, but that was the feeling).

We remained friends until now, though there was a brief few years where we weren't in touch over some perceived slight—Ray was one of my dearest and oldest friends, but also one of the most demanding—but when another poet friend I had loved but wasn't talking to for some reason suddenly dropped dead of a youthful stroke, I decided I would never again let anything separate me from my friends, and got back in touch with Ray and remained close ever since. He was the godfather to my oldest son, and was visiting me and my then, now long deceased, wife when our son was born forty-seven years ago, and was the neatest guest we ever had in our apartments over the years, always leaving no trace of his having been there.

Ray and I spent a lot of time in the 1970s when we had both moved to Manhattan, hanging out at each other's pads and walking lower Fourth Avenue in what was then the used bookstore district where Ray could spot a rare find almost mystically. We'd be walking and talking and he'd zoom over to an outdoor table with bargain books and pick up the one rare find that he could resell for much more or that we both had been hoping to find but he always spotted first. We also spent Sunday afternoons watching NFL football games while stoned, with our then close friend, the recently departed poet Ted Greenwald.

By the time I moved back East at the turn of this century, Ray had burned a lot of bridges and we no longer had as many mutual close friends as we once had. I sensed the hurt this caused him, but it didn't change his behavior until more recent years when he began to express regrets and wishes to reconnect with old friends, and began to make an uncharacteristic display of his love for me and others and his gratitude for our friendship.

We spent most of our visits, me going to him in recent years, talking intensely about books and authors and poets and other cultural topics with a little politics, but eventually would get into retelling stories from our mutual pasts. He always had a special treat he had prepared that he believed I loved or would love and was a wonderful host. And I always left his presence feeling grateful and satisfied, both from the food and the conversation.

I will, and do, miss him deeply. May he rest in poetry.

[Here's a poem from one of his first books, Between The Shapes, a book he later dismissed, because soon after it he developed the unique style that made him an original (he's often cited as one of the founders of the poetry movement that became known as "Language Poetry"), but this poem was one of my favorites of his from the git go and seems even more powerful in these days:

THE PRIVILEGE

A gift
for the few
of the few

who
never had
to ask.

If you'd like to get a sense of not just his writing but his art work (he was a master with rubber stamps and collages and other forms of manipulating images) one of his last large collections that I cherish is his book The Ancient Use Of Stone.]

[PS: this more recent photo is of me, with soul patch, and Ray, with beret, after a reading we did several years ago at The Saint Mark's poetry Project in NYC]

"The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

-- by Charles Bukowski

Read more about Charles Bukowski here.

On My Wish List [Stacey Lehman]

"Do Not Be a Gentleman When You Say Goodnight" [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

 

Just like clockwork, I publish a book about every 25 years. I'm proud to say this new book includes an Afterword by BAP series editor David Lehman and an Introduction by 2010 BAP editor Amy Gerstler.

If you've been waiting 25 years, you'll want to get this book asap. Here's a link to the publisher, where your order
will be fulfilled at once.

You can also get the book on Amazon:

"To no place he is called...” 

To no place he is called 
And thither he is bound—
Cloudbursts, desiccated plains,
Nothing slows his Volkswagen.
Old Philadelphia disappears
In the trembling rearview mirror,
Chicago looms, then vanishes,
Houston fades, Dallas evanesces.
Those years of the yearning siren
Voice’s call—the longing intonation
Unheard or unacknowledged—
They like the towns and cities lie
Behind him now as to no place
He is called and thither he is bound.

 

Dorothy Parker's "News Item" by Nin Andrews

 

Sometimes I think reading Dorothy Parker is like reading a witty love-advice columnist. There is also this poem:

 

Unfortunate Coincidence

 

By the time you swear you're his,

Shivering and sighing,

And he vows his passion is

Infinite, undying--

Lady, make a note of this:

one of you is lying. 

How Frank Sinatra changed the world [by David Lehman]

Sammy Davis Jr. visits Dean Martin at the MGM studios, where the duo were making "Some Came Running" in 1958. The movie co-starred Rat Pack "mascot" Shirley MacLaine, who years later would affectionate describe her old friends as "primitive children who would put crackers in each other's beds and dump spaghetti on new tuxedos."

December 12 [2015] is the 100th birthday of Frank Sinatra.

From Las Vegas to New Hope, Pennsylvania, fans are toasting Old Blue Eyes at black-tie dinner parties with Rat Pack entertainment. Siriusly Sinatra satellite radio is going wall-to-wall Frank. He is the star of the month on Turner Classic Movies.

Why do people continue to celebrate this man? Begin with his musical genius. As long as melody and harmony are valued, people will listen to, and dance to, and make love to the sounds of Sinatra.

The first of his nicknames was "The Voice." The young man's voice was incomparable in its power, timbre, range and agility. There are the songs he sang in the 1940s as the boy singer in the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands and when he went on his own and wowed the girls who rioted at the Paramount in New York City for a chance to hear Frankie. And there are the songs he sang in the 1950s when the voice deepened and he began to epitomize a grown-up masculine ideal.

In the first category the songs include "All or Nothing at All," "I'll Never Smile Again," "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night in the Week," "Time After Time." In the second category: "You Make Me Feel So Young," "I've Got You under My Skin," "Witchcraft," "All the Way."

In the 1960s, the third decade of his dominance, Sinatra took swing to new heights with Count Basie ("Fly Me to the Moon"), dabbled in the Bossa Nova ("The Girl from Ipanema"), and made great songs sound like chapters in his own autobiography ("It Was a Very Good Year").

More often than not, it is Sinatra's version of a song that is definitive. He recognized that the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, Jimmy Van Heusen and many others had created classic American popular songs. By recording them, Sinatra renewed the life of great music.

Originally posted 12/12/15. Written for CNN. Reposted on the occasion of the paperback edition of "Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World."

Continue reading here. 

Writing a Lost Generation Novel (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

I wanted a writing challenge, as though my original plan of trying to write a complex mystery filled with twists, red herrings, and a sympathetic hero weren’t enough. Since the hero was a young American who liked literature, I decided to set the mystery in an interesting literary time and place. And so, 1925 Paris became the setting.

This immediately provided the first obstacle. I knew a good deal about the time and place, but not nearly enough to write fluently and with sufficient control over the subject. And so the research began. I re-read Hemingway and Fitzgerald novels, works by Gertrude Stein, non-fictional studies of the era, and whatever else I could find. I watched the films (including, of course, another viewing of Midnight in Paris). I listened to music of the era. I got guidebooks, read newspapers, tracked down the many memoirs.

When I finally felt ready, I cast about for characters. On the one hand, my story was armed with some of the richest characters in American literary history. On the other hand, how was I going to write dialogue between my hero and these witty, startlingly creative people? I didn’t just want to write about the authors. I wanted to have my protagonist helped by someone I deeply admire, Sylvia Beach who found the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Indeed, I decided to open the book by having the hero enter the store. Writing, I thought, would give me a decent chance to introduce readers unfamiliar with Beach to a most extraordinary person. I had seen videos of her speaking and read what she had written in an attempt to capture her voice. Although she had, with remarkable bravery, published James Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would, I wanted to write more about Hemingway. He had introduced himself to her by walking into the store, taking off his shoes and socks, and showing Sylvia his war scars. Sylvia Beach fed the writers and painters who needed food and loaned money to others. Her bookstore served many visitors, including Hemingway, as the local post office. She would also help my hero.

My novel began populating itself. The Lost Generation, I decided, would wander through the pages. I particularly enjoyed writing about Gertrude Stein, who terrified some of the writers. I also sought out some of Paris’ seedier locations for my characters to visit. The novel includes a true story of one of the most astounding con games in history. I put a murder mystery into this world and had my protagonist deal with the recurring emotional wounds that opened up in a horrific incident during the First World War. Satisfied that the dramatic material was there, I thought it would make for an exciting if daunting effort to write such a mystery novel.

That novel, Exiles: A Mystery in Paris, is available as a free Kindle ebook for five days, from today through Thursday. To get the book, just go to the Amazon page and download it. Feel free to let others know about this free novel. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed researching and writing it.

For Autumn: Poems by Latino/a/xs: David Dominguez

How I Became a Poet

by David Dominguez

 

                the Horses’ Heads/ Were toward Eternity–

                                “Because I Could not Stop For Death,” Emily Dickinson

 

 

In spring, my mother cranked open the window

and the master bedroom, struck by sunlight, filled

with the smell of lilacs and Mexican orange

that brushed the pane, and the bees swarmed the blossoms

and filled my ears with a workman’s buzz,

a buzz I never feared, for our cupboard glowed

with mason jars and red clover honey.

And from the shadows of the ant-infested apricot

and the garden we planted on Good Friday,

black-throated hummingbirds emerged and hovered

in jasmine tangled between fence slats.

I remember summer, the branch-webbed sky,

squirrels, blue jays, and dive-bombing mockers  

who strafed my head when I gathered vegetables because 

I wanted salt, lemon, and sliced cucumber.

One twilight, I found a black and yellow monarch

fanning its antennae, head, thorax, and abdomen;

I pierced its wings with a stick, held it

like a lantern against a bone-white moon, 

realizing its milkweed dusted veins and my veins 

carried blood to our bodies’ edges . . . 

and so knelt on my scabbed knee and buried it. 

In autumn, doves roosted in the rain gutter,

moaned at the moon-lit dawn as if their longing

might nudge the earth around the sun and bring back spring,

which I found hidden in patches of Bermuda

as my fingers raked through snails, twigs, and leaves

in search of pecans that brightened my heart

when I munched on them and watched Dad scan the sky

so I could see whirling rings of rock and dust:

anything is possible, he said, as I looked through the eyepiece. 

 

Most of all, I remember how in winter my mother felt

exhausted by the responsibilities of daughterhood—

Lo siento, Mamá, el doctor dice que tienes cancer;

or of motherhood—where’s Ranger, Mom?. . . 

Son, I let the doctor put him to sleep because he broke his back;

or of wifehood—I just got home from work, Dear,

and I cut my finger peeling potatoes, and it’s still bleeding.

She leaned against the counter, stared at the yard,

mourned the giant sun flowers propped against the fence,

and said, Come rest with me for a while, Mijo.

I sat Indian style on their bed as she unfolded the afghan,

reached to her nightstand drawer, and took out  

Poems by Emily Dickinson wrapped in a white dust jacket.

Her fingertips glided over the gardenia spread across the cover

and the words Dad had written on the first page,

To my wife with love, from your husband on Mother’s Day;

I’d fall asleep and see horses’ ears twitch and press towards eternity,

hooves clopping through fog caught between pines—

and then, my first words emerged and perched themselves

on power lines and trilled against the galactic sky.

 

 

David Dominguez holds a BA in comparative literature from the University of California at Irvine and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. He is the author of the collections Work Done Right (University of Arizona Press) and The Ghost of César Chávez (C&R Press). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as Crab Orchard Review, The Bloomsbury Review, Border Senses Literary Magazine, PALABRA a Magazine of Chicano and Latino Literary Art, Poet Lore, and Southern Review. In addition, his work has been anthologized in The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California; Breathe: 101 Contemporary Odes; and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing. New work is forthcoming in Miramar and in the anthology Latino Poetics (University of New Mexico Press, 2016). Dominguez teaches writing at Reedley College.

Outro: Poets Give Advice to Their Younger Poet Selves

I want to revisit my post from the top of the week. It is my wish that all of the poets out there working on that first (or next) book can take a breath and forget about outside expectations, to tap into that oyster of their imagination and yank out a pearl. This is what I will for all of my poet brothers and sisters (and those who may identify as neither or both). This is also what I will for myself. It's hard being an artist--the uncertainty of it all, exposing yourself to the public, trying to maintain good mental health is such a competitive field. Nevertheless, when you realize that you are a part of a global community of artists scratching to make their existence visible, it doesn't feel as lonely. 

I leave you with some words from poets that I respect who had the following to say when I asked them what would they tell their younger poet selves:

 

My advice is especially to women, who get discouraged easily. If a journal rejects your poems but invites you to submit again, DO IT! The editor of a prominent journal told me that the men who get that message from him almost always resubmit right away. And women, not for months or maybe ever.

Sarah Browning

 

I think the young need to find their own way in the world. Wait, that's not true. Read, read, read everything you can get your hands on. Then try it yourself without anyone telling you how you should do it.

Richard Krawiec

 

Put your pen to the paper and let your music flow like the river you are!

E.J. Antonio

 

I think I’d tell my younger self to remember that stuff that kills in a reading is often unpublishable.  Sometimes your emotion and presence helps it go over a lot better than it would on the page without you.  So that’s where you can edit some. Can I make this poem a killer poem for the reader at home too? Remember that it always helps to know somebody.  Hope for a little nepotism without the kinship part, whatever that's called. Make friends, find time to go to readings, AWPs.  Randomly tweet and post people’s work to your Facebook.  Now, I don’t think you should do this to get in good with people (though it may work)-I do it because I want to support & expose poets & I believe you reap what you sow. So…sow.

Cedric Tillman

 

I think it's important for a poet to locate and understand their moral compass. Hopefully with this comes an understanding of the role art plays in providing a person with direction and meaning in life. Looking back, I think I would encourage my younger self to read the Book of Psalms. 

E. Ethelbert Miller