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Donald, when I thought of you
In a gold bathtub I worried
About losing my mind because
I’ve never seen you in a bathtub
But when you left me standing
Lump-on-a-log-like with my gift
For Michelle on Inauguration Day
I thought of you in a gold bathtub,
The fleece that covers you floating
And your phallus also floating --
Oh God, I felt trapped thinking
Of you watching a wall-mounted
Television set in a gold bathtub
And now I can’t stop thinking it.
These are poems of wit and humor but also deep emotion and clear intelligence, informed by Lehman’s genuine and knowledgeable love of poetry and literature. From Catullus and Lady Murasaki to Wordsworth, Neruda, Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, and Charles Bukowski, Poems in the Manner Of shows how much life there is in poets of the past.
Stay Thirsty Magazine has featured five Poems in the Manner Of. You can read them here.
-- sdl
Beauties married to beasts often long for experience of
culture and respond powerfully to poems about themselves.
To attract Melania's attention and help her realize
how she's being emotionally starved to death and get her
thinking that there might be a way out, I've composed five
sonnets. This is the first:
Melania 1
From what dull dream have you awakened,
Old boy, to a morning in Barstow, Needles,
Or another hot as hell desert truck stop
Whose Burger Kings, Taco Bells, and Arby’s
You have chosen out of mere perversity
As your semi-final resting place? Semi-final
Because you’ll not die here, you just thought
You might and half-wanted to since the
Drive into Los Angeles seemed too long.
But there a better dream awaits you:
Melania Trump in an old Civic pulls up
Beside you on La Brea Ave and asks
To borrow your Visa card and you say
Yes, Melania! Here it is, here is my card!
Wednesday (2/1) at Pen and Brush, 29 East 22nd Street between Broadway and Park Avenue. 7:00 pm. Free
Two falls ago, on the second round of drinks at the late lamented Puck Fair, a friend and I found ourselves talking—as often happens when two women writers sit down at a bar—about VIDA’s yearly count that tallies up the gender ratio in publishing and book reviews and the dismal numbers it often reveals. As my friend is the director of a nonprofit for poetry and I’m an editor at an independent press, the conversation eventually meandered into discussing the many amazing women we know in publishing. When we realized that no one had yet compiled a comprehensive list of the organizations, presses, and journals run by women, we began scrawling out our own. I spent a few more weeks crowdsourcing to find more names and eventually gave the list to VIDA to be published as a ever-updating community resource.
Around the same time that I was researching this list, I finished up a stint guest editing for Pen and Brush, the 122-year-old nonprofit for women in the literary and visual arts, who had just launched their publishing wing and moved to a new space, a beautiful art gallery in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. With the VIDA list in hand, I began Pen and Brush Presents, a monthly reading series that features women, non-binary, and genderqueer writers who read work in honor of the female editors who have nurtured and supported their work by publishing them in the past.
This Wednesday, Feb. 1st, we will be honoring the important work done for the literary community by Stacey Harwood, our gracious host here at the Best American Poetry blog, as well as Laura Cronk’s editing work for the wonderful literary food journal The Inquisitive Eater and Melinda Wilson’s work for the invaluable poetry resource Coldfront. Our readers will be the brilliant Elaine Equi (reading for BAP), Jen Huh (The Inquisitive Eater) and Crystal Curry-Vassilakis (Coldfront).
I would like to invite those of you who are in or near New York, to come join us this Wednesday (2/1) at Pen and Brush, located at 29 East 22nd Street between Broadway and Park Avenue. We'll lift a glass (or two or three!) to the talented poets who'll be reading and the amazing editors who have published them. The evening begins at 7 and extends as long as poetry and wine allows. All are welcome.
A cookbook is a historical and political document. Think about it. Pick up any cookbook and you will learn as much about the economic forces of its time as you would from any history book. What do the recipes tell you about the demographics of its preferred audience? What is their class? Their social standing? How accessible are the ingredients and challenging the preparation? I’ve often wondered why definitive histories of a period tend to leave out the goings on in the kitchen. If we don’t know what people were eating and how their food was prepared during this war or that upheaval, we’re missing a big piece of the pie, so to speak. Browse the cookbook shelves of a bookstore and you learn about current economic and social trends; visit the shelves of your local library and you’ll be amazed by once popular diet trends that are now obsolete.
A sub-genre of cookbooks that can teach us about the time in which they were written is the “charity” cookbook compiled by women and sold in order to raise money for a cause. The first such cookbook was A Poetical Cookbook, written over 150 years ago for the 1864 Sanitary Fair, to support those wounded, widowed or orphaned by the Civil War. The practice of selling cookbooks to raise money has thrived ever since.
Jan Longone, curator of American culinary history at the University of Michigan Hatcher Library points out that no matter what the specific cause for which charity cookbook raised funds, the underlying purposes began as “women helping themselves, helping other women to help themselves, helping still other women help themselves and finally blossomed into women taking on the role of helping to solve all societies ills. All the time learning how to organize, to write, to publish, sell ads to sell cookbooks to run a business and to network.” In other words, the making of a lowly cookbook helped women develop life-saving skills.
Today, I am continuing my discussion of poets who paint (or painters who write poetry) by interviewing Nancy Mitchell. I first encountered Nancy in her capacity as an Associate Editor of Plume, one of my all-time favorite literary journals. (Really, how could I resist a journal named after a character in Henri Michaux’s prose poetry? And if you don't know Michaux's Plume, check out this wonderful example of a Plume poem. ) I was surprised to discover that Nancy paints in addition to writing, teaching, and editing. (In order, spaced throughout the interview, are her paintings, “Anasazi/Stranger,” "Atonement," "Zac," and "Red Horse Red.")
I think of Nancy Mitchell as a kind of Zen poet. Her short and visual poems are wake-up calls to the small and seeming ordinary moments in a day. They acknowledge the yearning of the heart and soul and the inevitable presence of loss. She accomplishes so much in so little space, as in this painful but beautiful poem, “The Leaving”:
To steady me,
to keep me from rising—
that last night with him, lying down,
he placed his hand on the space
where my ribs furl back like wings
to steady me,
to keep me from rising.
And then there is this simple poem, "Tuesday Morning":
Her breath fogs the window,
the window clears,
fogs the window,
it clears again.
And I love this slightly longer poem, “What About”:
What about
sushi with the Merkles
merlot or cabernet would be fine with Martin
What about
taking Max for a stroll at sunset
taking Max
What about
dinner with the dean
coffee with Don at ten
What about
he said he’d call by 11
hopping in the shower at 11:15
dropping the whole thing
What about
she doesn’t like being on top
What about
mayonnaise method
of removing water stain
from wood
What about
Mother’s face
behind
a comic book
Brother’s face
What about
lime neon bra
with matching panties
a doll with my face
a full-time phone lover
a phone life
a phone liar
a phony
the silence of cold spoons
My first question for Nancy: How do you do it? How do you balance your time between painting and writing?
NM: Ah, Nin. I’m totally inept at any kind of time management.
I always got unsatisfactory marks on “Uses
Time Wisely” on my elementary school report card. I have no idea what “wisely” meant—I mean, who is to say— or how to achieve it, although I’ve earnestly tried to imitate those more efficient, enviable Do-Bees. Oh the “To-Do” lists made and left behind, unchecked, the grim resolutions!
But, now that I think about it, if I tracked the hours I might find a balance of attention or energy between the two, although it most likely would be heavy on the poetry side. What usually happens is that when I hit a wall with writing, or finish a project, I’ll need something more physical, tactile, and I’ll go fool around in my basement studio.
NA: How does the inspiration for a poem differ from that of a painting?
NM: In most, but not all, instances, poems are triggered by an external source—something read, overheard, “overseen” then I work backwards to identify the corresponding feeling. With painting, I have a vague feeling, and start fooling around with material until I’m closer to finding an image.
NA: And is there any overlap between your paintings and poems? In other words, do you ever have a poem that has a painting that goes with it?
NM: When I was working on the poems about a close friend’s struggle with addiction and recovery (12 years!) for my second book, Grief Hut (which is much more narrative than the poems in The Near Surround featured here) I did a couple of spontaneous portraits of him—it was as if there was an excess of dark, undifferentiated energy that needed to find some form. A wee scary, those paintings.
NA: How did you become a painter? A poet?
NM: My father, an oil-business executive, was madly in love with and very knowledgeable about painting, and his passion was contagious. My siblings and I whiled away many a Sunday afternoon in art museums with him. There were always art books opened everywhere, and even before he made his fortune and could buy original art, he’d hang reproductions around the house so art was a daily presence in our lives. As an undergrad Art History minor, I took some basic art classes, but it wasn’t until my three kids were successfully launched that I had time to experiment. I came to poetry belatedly, in my late thirties, when I fell in love with a poet and poetry—a packaged deal.
NA: If you had to pick between panting and poetry, which would you choose? And why?
NM: Hmm… although I paint, would never presume to call myself a painter. I don’t have the art school creds, and although I do exhibit from time to time, I don’t push myself to deadlines. I don’t think I have what I could call a body of work. Because I don’t hold myself (or am held to) the same juried standards that I do with writing, I’m less judgmental and accepting, and painting is more playful, and extremely pleasurable. I don’t procrastinate the way I do with writing— a blank canvas doesn’t accuse me. (However, as an aside, as a result of painting, I’ve come to see procrastination as part of the creative process, a storing up of material, of energy, a kettle of water on the lowest simmer.) I wish I could have this same pleasure with writing. Is it metaphorically significant that my study is on the second floor and my studio is in the basement? Maybe I should flip them? But, ultimately, it is poetry upon which I most humbly, doggedly, bring my feeble powers to bear— for better or worse.
NA: What is your definition of a perfect poem? A perfect painting? Or a perfect day? Or is there such a thing?
NM: A perfect painting is one that has a headwind of emotional energy behind it and is fully realized in one, say, four-hour session. A perfect poem is one that keeps calling me back and rewarding my diligence. A perfect day is one where I feel I’ve brought my full attention to whatever is at hand—and that includes all methods of procrastination.
NA: Do you think of art as a habit, a choice, or an act of faith? Either, or, or neither?
NM: I read somewhere that the most powerful form of reinforcement is intermittent, and that’s the reason gambling is so addictive. Maybe creating art
is like gambling, in that you never know when and what will pay off, but you’ve got to play to win?
NA: You are also the master interviewer for Plume Magazine. I wondered if you could say a few words about that?
NM: Master-that’s awfully nice of you! A couple of years ago, Danny Lawless, Plume’s editor extraordinaire, invited me to serve as Associate Editor of Special Features, and it’s been a lot of fun. Years ago I had a live jazz show on a local public radio station. I’d invite guest artists—musicians such as Blues songwriter/singer/guitarist Chris English, jazz guitarist Van Williamson and writers such as Jeffrey Skinner—to come on the show and play or read. Interspersed, we’d have a loose chatty, sort of Dinner with Andre interview, and I really wanted the Plume interviews to have that same spontaneous, live quality. So, if the interviewee, whose seven poems were being featured, was on board, rather than send a list of questions I’d send a salvo question. We’d chat back and forth via e-mail over a week or so, and see where we ended up. The February edition of Plume includes an interview with David Lehman. My fifteen (?) interviews, along with four others by different interviewers are forthcoming in Plume Interviews I, which I co-edited with Danny Lawless. My interview with you, which was a blast, appears in it.
Nancy Mitchell is a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner and the author of The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and Grief Hut (Cervena Barva Press, 2009). Her recent poems appear, or will soon appear, in Poetry Daily, Agni, Washington Square Review, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Poetry, Columbia College Literary Review, and Thrush, among others. She is the co-editor of and contributor to Plume Interviews I, forthcoming in February, 2017. Mitchell teaches at Salisbury University and serves as the Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume.
Lately I have been struggling with words. I think it has something to do with the politics of the time. I sit down to work, and my mind buzzes with white noise. I don’t know what to say or how to respond. There are all these wonderful WRITER’S RESPOND opportunities including Dante Di Stefano’s call for poems for his forthcoming anti-Trump anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America, but I have nothing to offer. Instead of writing I find myself staring out the window, doodling, or looking at artwork.
The recent post by Paul Tracy Danison about the visual arts and moving "beyond words" made me wonder about the role other arts play in a poet’s life. As does Didi Menendez’s POETS/ARTISTS magazine, which creates a beautiful dialogue between poetry and art. I also keep thinking of O’Hara’s relationship to painting and painters, of how David Lehman described him as “an action painter in verse" and wishing I could paint with either color or words.
Recently I discovered that two poets whom I admire also paint. I thought I’d interview them here, on consecutive days, and ask them to talk about their work.
The first is the poet, Claire Bateman, and below is her painting, "The Quietness Clock."
What I love about Claire is her mystical vision and her unique ability to make the normal seem transcendent, or the transcendent normal. When I read her poetry (or just talk to her), I see the world through an other-worldly lens. She is, at once, witty and serious, literal and figurative. Her flights of fancy take me both away from and towards myself. How? I have no clue. Whether she is talking about something as simple as doing laundry as in “Three Interiors” which begins:
1.
The cloud in the dryer doesn’t know it’s a cloud,
thinking it’s a demi-veil or a silk chemise,
items designed to never appear in a dryer.
Forming and falling apart, over and over,
the cloud couldn’t’ grasp the rules of laundry
if its life depended on them,
lustrous fog beholding a universe
a –tumble on the other side of the glass.
or talking about AA, as in her poem, “Anonymous, “which begins:
When AA offered me
the use of their Big Blue Book,
I respectfully declined, though
never has my life not been
either unmanageable
or about to become so
in subtle, indeterminate ways
I have no name for . . .
or talking about pain, as in her poem, “The Pain Suit”
If you happen to live in a broad and open place,
you can watch as it comes flying in your direction—
not really a suit, of course, just the mask and gloves,
though considering the effect, the term is apt.
You can’t hope it’s hunting some stranger, since everyone knows
that it’s visible only to its destined bearer;
you can’t clutch at bystanders, seeking a human shield,
since it passes through every obstruction without even slowing.
It’s probably best to become a city-dweller,
surrounded by walls, oblivious to its approach,
unless you’re one of the fools who step forward to meet it,
flexing their fingers to feel for the cleanest fit.
Claire is, to my mind, nothing short of magical. Mark Halliday agrees, calling her "the most exciting talent in the USA in poetry,"
NA: Claire--how do you do it? How do you balance your time between painting and writing?
CB: One of the ways I do it by treating space as time—that is, by spreading notebooks, paints, canvases, etc. out all over my apartment (I usually have several writing and art projects going simultaneously) so that what I’m engaged in is readily available. I work incrementally and in motion, for instance, painting while I talk on the phone (on Bluetooth), and scrawling fragments of possible poems in my journal wherever I go. As Elizabeth King says, “Work proceeds as a series of self-interruptions.” Because I live in a very small residence, and I’m not very organized, this means tolerating a fair amount of clutter, which is painful to me, though slightly less so than not doing the work. Maybe I can take comfort from the fact that, all appearances to the contrary, as far as the universe is concerned, it requires slightly less entropy for there to be something than for there to be nothing.
Despite the fact that I’m partly retired, I still have to sacrifice or cut back on various aspects of life in order to have time to write and paint; what I’ve decided I’m willing to give up is complexity in terms of presentation—that is, fashion, home décor, etc.—and also in cooking/eating. If you’re willing to have a bowl of cereal for dinner, you can save yourself a good hour or so. Also, I don’t have a television—if I did, I’d spend a fair amount of time watching.
NA: How does the inspiration for a poem differ from that of a painting?
CB: The difference is primarily in the very beginning. With writing, I have the source material of scribbled fragments (ideas, images, etc.) in my journals to bring to the page, ready to be combined/arranged/cut/rearranged/developed/transformed/contradicted. The visual art is usually non-narrative and non-conceptual; I arrive at the paper or canvas not knowing what I’m going to do, as in Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, where she quotes the ancient philosopher Meno: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?.” Whatever shows up initially comes more through and from my hands than my brain, and feels more immediate than writing does.
NA: And is there any overlap between your paintings and poems? In other words, do you ever have a poem that has a painting that goes with it?
CB: Both processes are improvisational, messy, and all-absorbing, and with both of them, most of the time it feels as though I’m nearly always in the frustrating middle—that I’ve already accumulated multitudes of possibilities in my journal, and that I already have a lot of paints and art pieces-in-process around me, and that with both, after a certain point in the work, I’m using the same process of adding and altering layers/dimensions.
Sometimes I use writing and art against each other. When writing feels difficult, I recalibrate my attention, giving more of it than usual to visual art, and vice versa, as though I'm thumbing my nose at whichever muse I find most recalcitrant; being ignored seems to inspire a muse to be rather more forthcoming.
In general, I suspect that my art informs my writing more than the other way around, primarily because I'm mostly an abstract artist. I think that in a somewhat diffuse way, as I've grown in art-making, my writing mind has become more sensitized to subtleties of color, texture, and composition, density, and proportion.
I do have one poem-painting duo.
From “Three Skies” (in Scape):
The holes in the wind are not indigenous to the wind,
nor may they be reduced to its absence;
they precede the wind and sustain it
as do roots the wilderness.
The holes in the wind are stitched
of ever-smaller holes
through which stillness works its way into the world
in varying harmonic combinations.
The holes in the wind are swarming the universe,
each with its singular mass, spin, and charge,
each finer than granulated diamonds,
and brighter than the White Forest,
which is not, as some maintain,
the Black Forest in winter,
but an entirely distinct entity
transposed with the Black Forest
at each upstroke of the sky’s one wing.
The painting is called “The Holes in the Wind.”
I’ve developed a slight occasional shaking in my right hand, for which I’ve learned to compensate by bracing my forearm against the table where I draw. That process triggered this poem:
Tremolando
Everyone’s raving about it: the new music
performed only by virtuosos with palsied hands.
Others have studied to simulate that tremor
as an actor might counterfeit a limp or stutter,
but it can’t be contrived, so they must merely listen,
then offer their unimpeded ovation.
But generally, instead of painting from or about my own poems, or writing about my art or art-making, I’m interested in creating art about the work of others, particularly Emily Dickinson. I’ve just begun this endeavor, and am not crazy yet about anything I’ve done with it, but I look forward to further play, since Dickinson’s poems are such an interesting mix of images and abstraction. Below is my monoprint in response to her poem that begins:
Four-Trees - upon a solitary Acre -
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action -
Maintain –
NA: How did you become a painter? A poet?
CB: I’ve always had a vague urge to dabble, but in middle age, after watching an artist friend at work, I felt almost physically compelled to work with line and color, so I jumped in, experimenting, taking classes here and there, and investigating various mediums and surfaces. Art has transformed my daily life; even when I’m not at my table working, I notice so much more than I did B.A. (Before Art), and feel so much more alive, that in a very real sense I’m not quite the same person. I’m also more aware of what I don’t notice—this passage by James Elkins in his book The Object Stares Back speaks to this issue, and is worth including despite its length.
... I might entertain the idea that there are two kinds of seeing, instead of the single equation that says seeing equals thinking. The first would have to do with expressions such as "illuminating a problem" or "shedding light on an idea." When it's put that way, then thought is the illumination, and the truth is what needs to be lit by thought. On the other hand, when I say I'm "reflecting" on a problem or something has "just dawned on me," then it's as if the truth is already luminous and my thought merely collects the light.
According to the first model, thought takes place in darkness. Ideas and things and selves must be in a primordial darkness until thought sends out its beams to reveal them. But if I reflect on something, then I exist along with various objects in the world, all bathed in a light that comes from somewhere else. In the first model, blindness is all around: it is the condition of the world, and a thought is like a flashlight that temporarily reveals some local object. In the second there is no place for blindness, except in my own mind. If I fail to reflect, if I decline to try to understand the world, then I become blind, or rather I give way to the blindness that is already within me. The second model, where the world is bright and suffused with thought, really has no place for catastrophic, ongoing blindness. If I live in such a world and I choose not to see, then I suffer a momentary blindness -- it might be a slip, and error, a blunder, or a mistake, or in visual terms, a blind spot, a moment or a day of hysterical blindness, amnesia about a trauma, or just a misapprehension, something I overlook, something I fail to notice. No matter how serious these blindnesses are, I can recover from them: I can become aware of my mistake; I can look again and see better. In the first model, where the world is dark and only thought can illuminate it, blindness is more permanent, and I may not be able to recover from it at all. That kind of blindness would include ingrained prejudices, permanent gaps in my thought, failures of imagination, psychotic breaks, fanaticisms and dogmas, and in visual terms, all the things I cannot see or that I refuse to see. Blindness would be all around. Every image would be a light in the darkness, and seeing or thinking would take place against a backdrop of blindness. In this way of setting the problem, blindness is the precondition and constant accompaniment of vision. It cannot be fully seen, but it must always be present wherever there is seeing.
I would be more content to think of the world as it looks each day, filled with light. The sparse shadows and dark spots that remain would be like the few gaps in my sight—the blind spot in each eye, for instance. If I choose to think this way, thought is beautiful and easy. All we have to do is conceive of an idea and it appears in front of us, bathed in the light of thought, clear and distinct in all its details. And sometimes this happens: if we know an issue very well, we can call it to mind and see all its contours, everything that is involved in it, without effort and in great clarity. But there are many other moments when the other model seems more true. If we do not understand a problem very well, then we cannot form a mental image of it. It seems dark, and thinking about it requires great effort. Even if we think hard, we may illuminate only a small portion of it, and the light we throw may make it look distorted. In that case we might say we can't see the problem very well, that we cannot generate enough light to illuminate its outlines. It is sadder, but it strikes me that this is much closer to the truth: like seeing, thinking is intermittent, unreliable, and difficult. Both take place in darkness and both depend on light. Blindness is their constant accompaniment, the precondition of both thought and sight.
Working with visual art, then, has enriched me with a deeper sense of both sight and blindness.
Autobiographically speaking, my father’s mother was a writer:
Both my parents were highly educated and spoke several languages. My father worked with photography (and later, collage) in his free time, and my mother was quite literary, a writer of short fiction, though our neighbors (at least up until I reached seventh grade) weren’t interested in such things—my mother recounted the story of how a neighbor told her disdainfully, “I had an aunt who read.” Having a lot of books around me and being a lonely-ish only child in a “different” kind of family created a favorable climate for solitary imaginative play. There was no censorship at my house—I read constantly, everything from New Yorker cartoons to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, and of course, my mother’s old diary and the great books of childhood.
I wrote my first poem at the age of five or so. In high school, I took creative writing classes, and received a fine classical literary education at Kenyon College. In my twenties, I discovered contemporary poetry through the Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee, where I attended my first poetry workshop. The first collection that I read, and which ignited me, was New American Poets of the 80’s—I still remember the chill I got upon encountering McKeel McBride’s “The Going Under of the Evening Land”:
NA: If you had to pick between painting and poetry, which would you choose? And why?
CB: Probably painting, perhaps because it seems more embodied, and thus more satisfying, yet, poetry is embodied too, in the physical book and as it travels on the vibrations of the voice, and I do experience it as a material entity within me, like music. Because they’re each embodied, though in different ways, this may be a non-rational preference on my part, or perhaps it’s simply because visual art is newer to me. However, I tend to prefer reading to both writing and creating art; I connect reading and art by making bookmarks (an image of them is below).
NA: What is your definition of a perfect poem? A perfect painting? Or a perfect day? Or is there such a thing?
CB: For me, and probably for most people, the perfect poem or painting is the one that seems (in its execution and in the unfolding of its feeling-sense) most surprisingly inevitable at the moment.
My perfect day would involve coffee, dark chocolate, unbroken solitude at home with many creative projects simmering, and a lot of snow and ice. It wouldn’t be perfect if it didn’t occur in the context of having a lot of people in my life at other times, of course.
NA: Do you think of art as a habit, a choice, or an act of faith? Either, or, or neither?
CB: Speaking of faith, inasmuch as I can imagine Judgment Day (whatever that may be), I envision it as, among other things, a revelation of everyone’s works of beauty/artistic exploration that remained undiscovered in life. The amount of art that’s recognized as such in the world has to be infinitesimal compared to what’s been created or even merely imagined only in secret throughout history because of limiting or oppressive circumstances of various kinds: all those smothered songs and crushed designs.
Art is certainly a habit, a choice, and an act of faith, as well as everything in between. Because I’m so aware of what an amateur I am and how much dreck I must produce in order to come out with anything I even somewhat like—the signal-to-noise ratio is appalling!—I have to constantly remind myself of what William James wrote: "Since when, in this mixed world, was any good thing given us in purest outline and isolation? ...The sole condition of our having anything, no matter what, is that we should have so much of it, that we are fortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of it altogether...Without too much you cannot have enough, of anything. Lots of inferior books, lots of bad statues, lots of dull speeches..." So we make the choice to develop the habit of art-making in faith that the act is worthwhile in itself, no matter the outcome. And personal as art is, there’s something impersonal and dispassionate about it as well; even if any one of us can’t create on any particular day or in any particular life season, other people are still creating freely. The work is part of the world; it’s always present.
Claire Bateman's books include SCAPE (New Issues Poetry & Prose); LOCALS (Serving House Books), THE BICYCLE SLOW RACE (Wesleyan University Press), FRICTION (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), AT THE FUNERAL OF THE ETHER (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), CLUMSY (New Issues Poetry & Prose), LEAP (New Issues), and CORONOLOGY (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences. She lives in Greenville, SC.
The photograph of Claire (below) was taken by Mary Robbins Hesketh.
We're thrilled to announce that Terence Winch's most recent album, This Day Too: Music From Irish America is now available for download from the Free Dirt site, Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon. You will find in these songs the same talent and insights that we so admire in Terence's poems. I love this video of the tender "Childhood Ground" with its haunting evocation of a lost time and place, made all the more moving by the spare arrangement and Eileen Este's pure, clear soprano.
You can purchase This Day Too here. Hint: Valentine's Day is fast approaching.
-- sdl
In January of 1974, a five-pound bag of sugar cost 85 cents; by year-end, just in time for the office cookie exchange, the price of the same five-pound bag increased to $2.35. The trend was driven by a complicated combination of geopolitical events, including bad weather that wiped out crops, changes in domestic subsidies, import quotas and tariffs, along with a growing national sweet tooth.
I was aware of the price-hike and the reasons behind it not because I was a preternaturally astute observer of market forces but because I worked after school and on weekends as a cashier for Shop-Rite supermarket in our largely working-class neighborhood. Where there had once been rows of yellow and white Domino sugar bags, shelves were empty. Cereal, candy, bottled juice, cakes and cookies, baking mixes, even TV dinners with their gelatinous desserts, were now out of reach for many customers. With soaring prices, the market behaved as if there were a shortage. Management cut back on inventory and over the course of the year customers who would typically buy one bag of sugar every couple of weeks hoarded it whenever word circulated that another price increase was on the horizon. For a short time, my store rationed sugar at one 5-pound bag per customer. Some families gamed the system by having each spouse and child march through the checkout line alone with a single bag.
For some of us, myself included, it was the best thing that could have happened. At the time, I took my coffee with three teaspoons of sugar and drank a lot of soda. During weekend lunch breaks, a friend and I would share a smoke and to satisfy the inevitable hunger attack that followed would devour a bag of Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies. There was no combination of sugar and fat that I would turn down.
My consumption of all things sugary had to stop. Over time I weaned myself of sugary drinks and sweetened coffee. It helped that nutritionists were finding an audience for their claims that sugar was detrimental to one’s health. They encouraged consumers to find alternatives, like fresh fruit for dessert and fruit juices or plain water instead of soda. Newspapers and magazines published recipes for sugar-free desserts. The sugar crisis of the ‘70s marked the beginning of my interest in healthy eating.
Alas, in the forty-plus intervening years, sugar and its evil sibling high-fructose corn syrup, continue to be a mainstay of the American diet. You find it in the obvious places but also hidden in processed foods like bottled salad dressings, canned soups, hot dogs, bread, and even in nut butters. While sugar alone has been cited as the cause of obesity and the associated illnesses (heart-disease, diabetes, and certain cancers), Gary Taubes, (The Case Against Sugar Knopf, December 2016) writes in the Wall Street Journal that “the evidence for the hypothesized chain of cause and unfortunate effects—eat sugar, become insulin-resistant, fatter and diabetic and then die prematurely—is ambiguous. It will probably stay that way. The National Institutes of Health have never seen the need for the expensive clinical trials that would be needed for a rigorous study of the issue.”
We do know with certainty that those whose eat a lot of processed foods are not as healthy as those who don’t and processed foods are where sugar lurks (along with other dubious ingredients). The good news is that the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a change in nutrition labels that will require manufacturers to list how many grams of sugar have been added to a product and what percentage of the recommended daily maximum that represents. Curious minds want to know, everyone else should know.
Read more at the Inquisitive Eater here.
In the TV show "To Tell the Truth," there were always three individuals pretending to be the prominent or accomplished figure, an adventurer or a football hero, and the panel had to choose who was the genuine article.
But Cary Grant stumped the panel.
Each of the three individuals named Cary Grant was extraordinarily handsome, suave, charming, and irresistible even though one was a glib ad man named Roger Thornhill, skillful at stealing a taxi cab or fobbing off girlfriends with gifts of chocolate and insincere praise. The second Cary Grant was a fast-talking newspaper editor ("Duffy! Get me rewrite!"), who can outwit Ralph Bellamy or whoever the designated rival is and recover the affections of alienated partners such as Irene Dunne and Rosalind Russell. The third showed up at the top of the Empire State Building to meet Deborah Kerr but she, though equally eager, gets hit by a car in the street below, and they do not consummate their affair to remember.
Born Archie Leach on January 18, 1904 in Bristol (England), Cary Grant spoke in an accent that sounds somehow British and yet is not out of place in any set of circumstances in the States. His versatility extended from the globetrotting realm of Hitchcock's thrillers (the England of "Suspicion," the South America of "Notorious," the French riviera of "To Catch a Thief") to comedies with leading ladies on the order of Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Eva Marie Saint. Possibly the handsomest leading man in the movies, though not the sexiest, he starred with both Hepburns, Katharine in a whole bunch of films and Audrey in Charade. He ties Jimmy Stewart as the most frequent Hitchcock hero. He became a US citizen in 1942 and never won a regular academy award, although he did collect an honorary Oscar in 1970.
Origin of name: Boring Hollywood legend has it that "Cary" came from his stage role as a guy named Cary in a musical with Fay Wray, and "Grant" was assigned to him by the studio. You and I can do better. "Grant me an hour, and I will carry you over the altar," he said sheepishly.
Marital status: five times, with wife #3 (Betsy Drake) the marriage that lasted longest. He had a genius for screwball romantic comedies and was a natural straight man -- in Frank Capra's "Arsenic and Old Lace," example.
His last romantic hurrah: Charade with Audrey Hepburn in 1963. The Stanley Donen-directed film also exploits the talents of Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, the Marche aux Timbres and the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Gene Kelly doing a carefree dance on the banks of the Seine (though filmed on a studio) is lovingly recalled by Miss Hepburn (Mrs Charles Lampert) as the hero and heroine hold hands under a bridge and a bateau mouche glides by. Cary Grant shrewdly insists that the romance begins on the lady's side -- he is acutely conscious of the age difference between him and Audrey Hepburn. But then you think about it and you realize that he is ever the pursued one -- that his good looks trump the ladies and he doesn't even have to make a pass to score. If life were a romantic comedy with a Nora Ephron accent, you could not do better than cast Cary Grant in the lead role.
From Charade: "You know what's wrong with you? Nothing." From North by Northwest": "The moment I meet an attractive woman, I have to start pretending I've no desire to make love to her." "What makes you think you have to conceal it?" "She might find the idea objectionable." "Then again she might not."
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There is, however, a blank where an identity should be.
Cary Grant took LSD more than 100 times, having been introduced to the narcotic by Betsy Drake. It helped him more than a posse of doctors in his lifelong quest to confront his identity. Best quote: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." The plot conceit generating North by Northwest, in which a Madison Avenue executive is mistaken for a CIA agent who doesn't exist, is based on an incident in Grant's biography.
A rose is just a rose: "I never had so much fun since Archie Leach died," he says in His Girl Friday. If you watch Capra's Arsenic and Old Lace, you'll see the grave of Archie Leach.
Posthumous scuttlebutt that doesn't shock anyone anymore: he may have been bi-sexual (LTR with flatmate Randolph Scott).
Dodger Fan Info: Shared exclusive box seats with Frank Sinatra and Gregory Peck at Dodger Stadium. Did not pay very close attention to the games.
Retirement job: Became a director of the Fabergé company and promoted the fragrance firm's products.
Vital stats: Rising sign Libra, moon in Aquarius; Water Cat (Chinese astrology); six feet one and a half inches tall.
The well-dressed actor's method was the opposite of the method of Marlon Brando. Brando wanted to find the character within himself. Cary Grant lost himself in the character he was playing.
Like a handful of other Hollywood giants -- Bogart, Cagney, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, John Wayne -- he was always himself and whoever he was depicting. When Bogart or Cagney want to shock you, they act like madmen, Bogart the paranoid ("The Caine Mutiny"), Cagney the psychotic bundle of rage who holds conversations with his dead mama ("White Heat."). Gable is always dashing, Cooper always stoical, strong, and silent, and John Wayne will never lose a fight or a battle. But Cary Grant is at heart a comic actor of supernal charm thrust into a melodrama of high gravity. And what he acts out is invariably a romance. No man is luckier in love than the Cary Grant that existed only in the movies. It is said that Ian Fleming concocted Jame Bond with Cary Grant in mind.
Polykarp Kusch
(Physics Nobel Prize, 1955)
She loved his brain but his body
Came with it. He could morph
A precise yet poetic Improvisation
On waves, clouds, or the wind
Into the most incredibly deep
Insights on nutrition, for example,
But then he would start taking
His clothes off and hers too.
He had this adolescent fixation
On her ass upon which he would
Expatiate while strutting around
Scrawny chicken naked until
One day she literally screamed,
Tell me about Polykarp Kusch!
Rapture
Sjohnna McCray
Graywolf Press, 2016
Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection, Rapture, celebrates the lives fountaining through a single life and transmutes the eddies of those lives into an aria. Like the blossoms seen falling through a kitchen window in McCray’s poem, “The Pear Tree,” the poems in Rapture helicopter to earth, “suicidal brides plummeting.” These poems skitter on the edge of adoration, limned with want, cankered with loss, honeyed with the sweet fearful immensities of the strange thisness shuttling between the heart and the mind. Many voices vertebrae the poems in this book in registers of devotion, passion, ire, sorrow, and jubilation. McCray draws on the details of his birth: his father was a soldier and his mother was a “comfort woman.” In “Bedtime Story # 1” McCray describes his parents after they had first met: “they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:/ the unassuming black and the Korean whore/ in the middle of the Vietnam War.” From these details, McCray explores the complicated notions of Americanness that his life embodies, implies, and challenges: “an extravagance of small pauses,/ / many caesuras.” However, McCray’s work as a whole concerns itself with recreating the infinitesimal moments in a life, situated on the threshold of song, when past, present, and future overlap and we are most ourselves.
McCray’s lines are most themselves when Eros and Thanatos equally inhabit them. In the last lines of the book, McCray redefines “rapture” as the moment before an orgasm, “an old LP, a needle tracing static,/ a record ready to drop.” Meanwhile, outside, walnuts smack on the roof, a cardinal shakes on the line, and “still we refuse to yield/ back into being singular.” For McCray the refusal to be anywhere else but in the posture of eternal embrace constitutes the very groundwork of existence; we are always dying into each other, into our pasts and futures, into our ghosts and regrets. Throughout Rapture, McCray opens a dialogue with his father, whose life and legacy constantly swans into the poems. The poem “Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man,” for example, reads:
Rage is the language of men,
layers of particulates fused.
Rage is the wine
father pours to the ground
for men whose time has passed. Rage
is gripped in the hands
like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage
gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.
Rage is a promise kept.
Although rage is part of the vocabulary Rapture sorts through, the real language of this poem and every other poem in this book is love. Whether commemorating the lives of his parents, hailing his beloved, burning down the suburbia of his own adolescence, or elegizing the tragic life and death of the poet, Reetika Vazirani, Sjohnna McCray is driven to the page out of love. Rapture is a reminder that we are at our best when we refuse to yield back into being singular, a timely and timeless collection to laud on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2017.
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, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. 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,
This just in: Our friend Elisha Wagman writes to tell us about an exciting group show on view at Undercurrent Projects in the East Village. Here's what Forbes Magazine has to say about the show:
On January 11th, 2017, just 9 days before Inauguration Day, Spirit will unveil the third chapter of her ongoing curatorial series, HOTTER THAN JULY: Hands Off My Cuntry, at Undercurrent Projects in New York City’s East Village.
“The first one was really just an experiment,” says Spirit over the phone from her home in Brooklyn. “I called it a ‘sexploration.’ I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
The latest show features work by Mike Cockrill, Lapis Danado, Annique Delphine, Courtney Frances Fallon, Adam Handler, Jones the Savage, Morgan Jesse Lappin, Joanne Leah, Nikki Peck, John Phelan, Alexandra Rubinstein, and Spirit herself, whose cheeky, not so safe for work, femme fatale self portraits frequently find the artist in hot water on various social media platforms. In fact, less than thirty-six hours before the show’s opening, Spirit saw her Instagram account deleted without warning.
I will be making regular contributions on the visual arts in France and Europe under the category “Beyond words: visual arts”.
For me, “visual arts” mostly means contemporary dance, circus and the various forms of visual representation (painting), but can certainly mean any non-language based creative effort – Daniel Linehan’s “dbdbh”, a truly fine dance performance at the Centre Pompidou last year, is a paradoxical example: Linehan invented a language then danced it, or, by dancing, created a language! Whatever, it was a cool idea and well-danced. Why not write it up it?
Since gadding about is my preferred method for general doing, it is by gadding that I shall make my choices of which and whose visual endeavors to think and write about under Beyond words: that’s as close to random as I can come.
I’d like other poets to join me in contributing ideas and observations to “Beyond words”. They, you, decide, as I shall, what creations fit the bill.
We shall say that all felt divergence between us adds to healthy creative tension: all to the good then, for this, the best of all possible endeavors.
Join with me, friends, in exploring Beyond words.
After all, if words have their uses, nothing is less sure than their true value.
Do words make worlds or do worlds make for words?
Was the Word there at the Beginning and will Strangled Whisper mark the End? Or did Bang begin it all and shall fire and ice finish it off? Poets, warriors and the people in their wisdom say both.
While whole empires have been built on words, words, words, each and every one of them has one day fallen apart for critical lack of content – whether bread or just plain sense of it all.
By contrast, visuality, even when it’s a mirage, never fails. And it just keeps on keeping on.
One look has made me fall in love, many times; the touch of a finger, the sleight of a hand, the crunch of gravel, have set exquisite shivers of both lust and fear up my spine in anticipation; sight has taken my breath in endless wonder; silence has made me pause in intellectual, mystical and moral reflection.
“Stopped in my tracks” by a word and “Stopped in my tracks” by what I see, then, are absolutely two different norms of experience.
A word is always somewhere a word of command, a world already ordered, delivered and installed by expert craftsmen. See and touch and hear are to stand on the threshold of understanding.
Join with me Beyond words. Poets ought to explore those arts that strive to show rather than say.
This is obvious, but I’ll use words to prove it, anyway.
Gadabouts go gadding so as to scope and shape Otherness. Gadding is escaping from the intolerable constraint of what one loves, ought to love, does not love, undergoes. In all this, then, Gadabouts are Poets, Poets, Gadabouts and gadding is poeting, poeting, gadding.
So far so good.
Except, poeting is word, sound; gadding is sight, hearing.
Which is an apparent unbridgeable conundrum.
However, beyond words, experience shows that satisfactory gadding-poeting identity fusion, or, Gadabout-Poet identity melding, or both, is achieved by battering sound against hearing, confounding word with sight. And the Poet remembers that see and touch are just beyond the reach of the words that shape them. And the Gadabout sees that, paradoxically, words can turn hear into listen, that they must name silence and might give tongue to the Otherness on which both gadding and poeting thrive.
I have also heard that Scientists have said that gadding’s cause is the same infernal brainpan itch as poetry’s. The miracle cure for brainpan itch, they have said, may very probably possibly be the creative vertigo of Otherness – her perception, his senses, her take on the world around.
Also, it has been demonstrated that all proof is louche.
Suffice to say that getting out to see what’s up in the visual arts and trying to toss words toward it refreshes, I think, the poetical mechanism and is very possibly healthful and fun, too.
Poets, join with me Beyond words.
Readers, join with us to support the visual arts everywhere.
What is reality?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-- Philip K. Dick
"Oy" is one of the greatest words in any language and I've noticed that people of all backgrounds quickly pick it up and start using it. Let's take a look at some situations in which saying "Oy" is very appropriate (click on thumbnail for full-sized image):
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
