The Best American Poetry

For Autumn: Poems by Latino/a/xs: Rachel McKibbens

illustration by Isabela Ramos

 

sermon

by Rachel McKibbens

 

Each time I see a woman

walking in a grocery store

 

or sitting on a bench

in a park or a funeral parlor,

 

I want very much

to taste the woman,

 

lick every blessed

inch of her from the

 

bottom of her calloused

heel to the top

 

of her glorious head.

If she is wearing an eye patch,

 

I want to lift its smooth

and sleeping lid,

 

whisper something sweet

beneath it, push my tongue

 

around its spoon-like edge.

If the woman is older,

 

I want to taste the history

carved into her flesh,

 

learn each translucent hair

of every fragile limb.

 

If she is missing a breast,

I want to taste the bright

 

and rugged scar of it,

press its ghost-soft nipple

 

against the bridge of my

mouth. If she is a mother,

 

I want to soothe her many hands,

trace each silver bolt of

 

childbirth etched along

her torso, taste the salted

 

hole of her, this sacred,

this blood hot church.

 

 

Rachel McKibbens is a Chicana poet and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She is the author of three books of poetry:  Pink Elephant (Small Doggies) Into the Dark & Emptying Field (Small Doggies) and blud, forthcoming on Copper Canyon Press. In 2012, McKibbens founded The Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat, an annual writing retreat in the US open exclusively to women of color.

For Autumn: Poems by Latino/a/xs: Rita Maria Martinez

Eating Corn

by Rita Maria Martinez

 

I watch as you dip the knife

in the tub of Country Crock and slather

the cob, witness the methodical dismemberment,

how you eat one kernel, one row at a time,

from left to right like a typewriter.

The plate before you an immaculate kingdom,

mine littered with fallen kernels,

autumn’s escapees exiled from sudden death.

I bite into my cob carelessly, juice streaming

down the sides of my mouth and feel reckless

and in love with the world for now,

the way you must’ve felt as a boy

when converting Jeffrey’s sandlot

to a mud pit, when you kneeled, haphazardly

scooped piles of mud with an army

of Tonka trucks, your legs and hands

coated with the dark richness, a pleasure

so sweet and transient because Jeff’s mom

hosed you down, the sound of water

spiraling from the spigot prayerful

in the afternoon heat, nothing to show

for your toil but sopping calves and shins,

hands and fingernails clean, yet anticipating

 the evening’s battle when you’d reign

victorious over shredded husks on your plate,

your hands anointed with butter.

 

 

 

Rita Maria Martinez loves all things Jane Eyre. Published by Aldrich Press, Martinez’s first full-length poetry collection, The Jane and Bertha in Me, celebrates Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel—as well as the bicentenary of Brontë’s birth. Martinez’s poetry also appears in the textbook Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction / Literary Nonfiction, Poetry and Drama; and in the anthology Burnt Sugar, Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish. Martinez has been a featured author at the Miami Book Fair in Florida; at the Palabra Pura reading series in Chicago; and at the Poetry at the Dali series in St. Petersburg, Florida.  Martinez is a guest contributor for the Poets & Artists blog. Visit her website here.

A Poet to Not Only Watch but Embrace with Open Arms: Taylor Johnson by Abdul Ali

I can't say enough positive things about Taylor Johnson, a DC-based poet, who is making a splash in poetry communities off and on the page.

Read Taylor's poem, "This is How you Enter a Poem," from the literary journal, Winter Tangerine.

 

Sitting, at the east end of the bay, eating a salad

after someone you love tells you to stay safe.

 

And safe you are here, where everyone wants to look

doesn’t want to look at you and you wonder why she tells you

 

to stay safe. Then you see the man’s body enter

the window of this poem. You’d like to start over.

 

There is a black man in this poem, dead, as you

might assume. And you are wondering how he got here

 

and by whose hands. The poem could end here

with you left to consider, perhaps, your own

 

hands, their violence: how many bugs you’ve killed,

whose face you really meant to hit when you broke the dry wall,

 

the speed at which you counted out your mother’s pills.

 

But the poem is saying something else, so

you look to the body, closer, still

idling in the window. You think:

                                                      blood, 

                                                      You think guns,

                                                      You think black,

                                                      the police,

                                                      You think more guns,

                                                      some crying,

                                                      You think feet,

                                                      Louisiana,

                                                      You think more blood,

                                                      someone prostrate in the street.

 

And the poem could live there, in the body,

as some poems are wont to do.

 

But you are ashamed, the poem

couldn’t even say his name,

 

the dead man in the window. You wonder if that’s really what

the poem wants to say, the dead man’s name.

 

Here, you are working to forget

that the man is black. You are worried

 

the poem will say what all poems say

when the body is black: history, history,

 

the future!, make it up, music, the future no more.

And you are tired of those poems.

 

If you think this poem isn’t for you, it is.

The dead man could be your cousin, and not

 

kin. So what does the poem do now?

You want the poem to unrun the blood 

 

from his body, unkill the man

whose name the poem won’t say.

 

But this is just a poem. You are listening to

Sam Cooke and he’s pleading, nearer

 

to thee and it won’t be very long and you

remember the ten guns that wanted

 

you dead not too far from now,

how you were almost a body

 

in someone’s poem.

Has this poem brought you far

 

enough away from the bay, your salad,

and your lover on the phone asking

 

for your safety? In the poem

the man is dead, dying again.

 

And what have you done?

This morning you walked

 

along the highway eating

a peach as if no one you loved

 

has ever died. And they haven’t:

the moths follow you, they wait

 

for you against your screen door and

dance as the wind passes through

 

the trees, and the trees too

are those you’ve loved

 

and lost, how they are everywhere,

how they keep coming.

 

The man in this poem mustn’t be

dead, or stay humbly lying on

 

the window’s edge. No, he’s on

your back

 

telling you how to walk.

 

Taylor Johnson is a poet from Washington, DC. They have received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, Lambda Literary Foundation, VONA, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. Their work appears in the minnesota review and Callaloo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Variable Foot (by Nin Andrews)

This comic is based on a few lines from the introduction to William Carlos William in The Oxford Anthology of American Poetry that made me laugh:

“I write in the American idiom, “ Williams noted, “and for many years I have been using what I call the variable foot.” One of the secrets of American poetry is that no one knows what “the variable foot” really is.

Required Reading by Abdul Ali

It's not very often that an essay published in a literary journal stops me in my tracks. The December issue of POETRY features an essay, "A Politics of Mere Being," from the esteemed poet and critic Carl Phillips. 

Check it out. I hope it will challenge, if not cause you to rethink, your allegiance to identity politics that are mostly external and reader-response based. 

A Politics of Mere Being by Carl Phillips  [An excerpt]

When my first book of poems came out in 1992, I learned what it could mean to be seen as a political poet for no other reason than because of who or what one is. Rachel Hadas, who selected the book for publication, wrote a wonderful and uncannily accurate introduction, from which the publisher excerpted the following for the back cover:

Internal evidence would seem to indicate that [this] is a poet of color who is erotically drawn to other men. The reductiveness of such terms is one lesson of In the Blood, with its    ...    constant dissolving of one world into another.

I say uncannily accurate because I had yet to acknowledge to myself, let alone others, my being gay; about the color part, I’d been pretty aware, of course, all my life. Sexuality would end up being the primary lens through which my early work got read; and given how relatively new it still was to speak of queerness openly, and given the relative newness — and unknown-ness — of HIV and AIDS, the poems were seen as particularly relevant: political, let’s say.

As for color — blackness — there are only two poems in the book that speak to this issue specifically (or as others have put it, there are only two “black poems” in the book). The first, “Passing,” is a kind of resistance to being told that black experience has to come down to a single experience:

The Famous Black Poet is

speaking of the dark river in the mind

that runs thick with the heroes of color,

Jackie R., Bessie, Billie, Mr. Paige, anyone

who knew how to sing or when to run.

I think of my grandmother, said

to have dropped dead from the evil eye,

of my lesbian aunt who saw cancer and

a generally difficult future headed her way

in the still water

of her brother’s commode.

 

I think of voodoo in the bottoms of soup-cans,

and I want to tell the poet that the blues

is not my name, that Alabama

is something I cannot use

in my business.

 

 

 

In a Subjunctive Mood: A Playlist for (Stuck) Writers by Abdul Ali

On those days when I am aimlessly scratching about in my notebook, music saves me. The lyrics of a song get the ceiling fan inside my head spinning. And before you know it, I’m inside a groove, propelled forward, in conversation with the artist.

Here’s a playlist I just created for writing days. Let me know what you think. Please share what you listen to on those long nights when the deadline is dawn.

Try these:

“Redbone”: Awaken, My Love. Childish Gambino

“Wrote My Way Out”: The Hamilton Mixtape. Nas, Dave East, Lin-Manuel Miranda &

“Nightmare Bush’It Whirl”: Variations in Time: A Jazz Perspective. Amina & Amiri Baraka

“Old Man River”: Aretha Franklin. Laughing on the Outside (Remastered)

“Alright”: Kendrick Lamar. To Pimp a Butterfly

“Melatonin”: A Tribe Called Quest. We Got it From Here…Thank You 4 Your Service 

“Borderline (An Ode to Self Care): Solange. A Seat at the Table

“Purple”: ThiDaniel. Purple

“Love and Happiness”: Al Green. Greatest Hits

“Flamenco Sketches”: Miles Davis. Kind of Blue

“Ne Me Quitte Pas”: Nina Simone. The Best of Nina Simone

“Thieves in the Temple”: Prince. The Very Best of Prince

“Feel Like Making Love”: Roberta Flack. The Very Best of Roberta Flack

“Higher Ground”:Stevie Wonder. Number 1’s

“Baltimore”: Jazmine Sullivan. Nina Revisited: A Tribute to Nina Simone

Letter from a Young(ish) Poet by Abdul Ali

If I had it to do all over again, I would do it exactly as I have done it: jumping both feet in the deep end without a lifeboat.

To my knowledge, I am the only poet from my cohort to publish straight after graduation (less than a year after graduating, I won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize.) In retrospect, I remember having mixed feelings about it all. The moment I received word, I received mostly notes of congratulations from my circle of friends, but there were a few notes that stand out. Maybe it was the tone. One poet wrote to let me know he was a finalist of the contest and is looking forward to reading my book (read: he wanted to see if I was deserving of being picked.) So, I began this journey feeling unsure of myself. Feeling lots of pressure. Why did they select my manuscript?

Sure, I really enjoyed the validation that came with winning a prize, but there is an interior journey as a poet that one must take. Getting published doesn’t necessarily mean that one is growing, discovering oneself, and figuring out where you fit in in this world. The two are separate journeys. And it’s difficult to quiet the noise and get sure about what your aesthetic sensibilities are, what you want your work to do in the world, and by all costs, not get sucked in to wanting to become famous. With the ubiquity of social media, it’s almost impossible not to get sucked in to wanting to post “…and this happened” or you’ve just placed a poem in this “journal” or you’ve gotten accepted to this residency. It all becomes a drag after a while. You lament the good old days when you spoke unabashedly about something honest that made you feel vulnerable and you released it on the page then shared it with the public in person.

//

I’ll admit that I didn't (and still don't) fit the typical profile of any of the poets coming out of a graduate creative writing program.  My kid was almost finished elementary school at the time. Graduation felt like the interruption of a blissful honeymoon. Suddenly, I needed to find a job. Poetry was a luxury at that point until it wasn’t. It became more necessary than air. I began to remember why I started writing. Why I cared about it. The space that it filled in my life. Those moments of political unrest, the restless nights, the sleepless nights. I wasn’t alone in feeling restless. The more I made my rounds connecting with readers, and audiences my world got bigger.

My first few teaching appointments were teaching composition, so it didn’t really matter professionally that I had a collection of poems in the world. Talking about poems wasn’t what I was paid to do. And so, I learned to split myself into halves: one half thought a certain way at work and the other was ravenous for a jolt of emotion. I wanted to remind myself that I was still alive. That this was just a part of my journey, not the entire thing.

I knew nothing (and admit that I still do not) about promoting books and becoming “relevant” in the way that many poets leverage social media and other resources to do this. And yet, I managed to perform with a band twice, toured the east coast, manage to get on a number of syllabi, read with amazing poets. Exciting stuff! The best part of it all is sharing the work with readers. Getting asked hard questions. Figuring out, each time, how these poems have crystalized in a way that they hadn’t at the time I wrote them. Of course, I privately envy my friends who brag about how many books they’ve sold, but more than anything this journey has taught me to delight in what I do have rather than the list of things I do not have.

So, what’s next? How can I challenge myself to grow as an artist and not repeat the same tricks that folks seemed to enjoy from my debut collection? The truth is I have no idea. A part of me is excited and scared shitless. Meanwhile, I travel wth my notebook recording lines of conversation, passages from books, off-key headlines from newspapers, images from dreams. Something is coming and I'm completely fine with not knowing what that something is.

In an effort to explore this question, I’m dedicating all of my posts this week to engaging poets and poetry collections that have made an impact on me and the reading public at-large.

 

 

Abdul Ali, Guest Author December 5-9

This week we welcome Abdul Ali as our guest author. Abdul is the author of Trouble Sleeping, winner of 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle, Plume, The Journal, Gathering of Tribes, New Contrast (South Africa), Poet Lore and the new anthology, Resisting Arrest, among other publications. He is the recipient of two Literature fellowships from the DC Commission of the Arts and Humanities and is a fellow of the Cave Canem Foundation. He teaches High School English at a private college preparatory school in Baltimore, MD. Find out more about Abdul Ali here. 

Welcome, Abdul. 

-- sdh

For Autumn: Poems by Latino/a/xs: Ruben Quesada

Glasgow ruins, by A Tangled Mind in Motion

 

 

FALL FEELING

    (from Las nubes by Luis Cernuda), translated by Ruben Quesada

 

Upon the old ruins it rains,

                The autumn still green,

Odorless, dreams blossom,

                And the body gives in.

 

I’m raptured in the fountains,

                Along the valley there are sheer figures,

And amid the vast pale air, brilliant

                Blue wings.

 

Beyond the fresh babbling is the sacred

                Halo of death.

Nothing is gained nor lost.

                My memory grows dark.

 

Everything is true, except hate, as harsh

                As the gray clouds

Passing vainly above this treasure,

                Furiously made dim.

 

 

SENTIMIENTO DE OTOÑO

 

by Luis Cernuda

Llueve el otoño aún verde como entonces

                Sobre los viejos mármoles,

Con aroma vacío, abriendo sueños,

 

                y el cuerpo se abandona.

 

 

 Hay formas transparentes por el valle;

                Embeleso en las fuentes,

y entre el vasto aire pálido ya brillan

                Unas celestes alas.

 

 Tras de las voces frescas queda el halo

                Virginal de la muerte.

 

Nada pesa ganado ni perdido.

                Lánguido va el recuerdo.

 

 Todo es verdad, menos el odio, yerto

                Como ese gris celaje

Pasando vanamente sobre el oro,

                Hecho sombra iracunda.

 

 

 

Ruben Quesada is the essays editor at The Rumpus, senior editor at Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and digital content editor at CantoMundo and the Latino Caucus.  He is also the editor of a forthcoming volume of essays on Latino poetics from University of New Mexico Press, the author of the poetry collection Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press) and translator of the early 20th century Spanish poet Luis Cernuda, Exiled from the Throne of Night (Aureole Press). His poetry, prose, and short films have been featured at The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Stand, The California Journal of Poetics, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Poetry Foundation. He’s held fellowships and residencies at the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and CantoMundo. Ruben is invested in the creation of community infrastructure and the promotion of Latino writers at all stages of their career.

December 5, 2016: Monday Night Poetry at KGB Bar - David Lehman + Elizabeth Powell - 7-9:00 pm

85 East 4th Street  New York, NY

 

David Lehman is the author of many collections of poems, including New and Selected Poems (Scribner, 2013), Yeshiva Boys (Scriber, 2011), When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005), Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (with James Cummins, Soft Skull Press, 2005), and The Evening Sun (2002).  Among his books of non-fiction are Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Shocken Books, 2009) and The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a “Book to Remember 1999” by the New York Public Library.  He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and is the series editor of The Best American Poetry.  He is on the core faculty of the graduate writing programs at the New School and New York University. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, NY.

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances won the Robert Dana Prize in poetry, chosen by Maureen Seaton, and will be published by Anhinga Press in 2016. In 2013, she won a Pushcart Prize. Powell has also received a Vermont Council on the Arts grants and a Yaddo fellowship. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Barrow Street, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, Harvard Review, Handsome, Hobart, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Slope, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, Post Road, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha and the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing and Publishing. Born in New York City, she has lived in Vermont since 1989 with her four children.

 

David Lehman and KGB series co-host poet Matthew Yeager, 2011