The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Jeffrey Shotts of Graywolf Press

DD: In an interview you did with Poets & Writers Magazine, you discuss working on William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems during your first years at Graywolf Press. This was the first Graywolf Press book that I ever purchased and remains one of my favorites. In reading through interviews you’ve done over the years, it strikes me that much of your thoughts as an editor parallel many of Stafford’s insights as a poet. Could you begin by discussing what Stafford’s work has meant to you as a reader and an editor?

JS: Thank you, and I’m glad to think of our experiences of the Graywolf poetry list as running side by side and starting with Stafford. I grew up in the middle of Kansas, not far from Hutchinson, Kansas, where Stafford grew up. My high school English teacher, the terrific Carole Ferguson, noted my interest in poetry, and mentioned Stafford and gave me a copy of “Traveling through the Dark.” It was the first time, really, I considered poetry as an ongoing art, and a poet as a living person, and someone who suddenly seemed proximate, when all else were wheatfields and churches. So Stafford’s very being changed everything. I share with him, very much still, a sense of landscape and severe austerity, and a shame at what our country perpetrates against so many, including our own citizens, as well as ourselves.   

DD: Stafford also wrote: “We may be surrounded by a system of talking and writing that falsifies event after event, decision after decision, relation after relation. Tangled in this system, we perpetuate it. Like porpoises in a drift net, the harder we try, the more we are entangled…When a writer works he is like someone who sets himself in a closed room and then invents new exits.” These words, published in the early 1990s, seem even more apt in 2017. In the spirit of these words and in this era of “alternative facts,” what is the place of poetry?

JS: I agree with Stafford’s statement, that we are entangled and complicit in our entanglement, as long as we emphasize, as he does, that it is worth trying to escape, even in the most futile of times, perhaps like these, where our language is under assault, if not our sanity. We can’t always free ourselves, but we can sometimes loosen the nets and snares that are tightening around others. I think poetry is a force for recognizing the positions of other people who may be like us or who may be little like us, but for the duration of a poem, and the echoing after, we speak in and with another person’s voice. That’s a truth, or at least it can put us in relation to a truth, for which there is no “alternative fact.” I think the poetry that we need right now shows us, sometimes unbearably, the failures of power and of language and of political leadership and the consequences of our collective action and inaction. I am thinking very much of works that many readers are turning to, such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—works that position the reader in relation to confrontations of race, or examinations of the language of war, or the emptiness of false apology. The place of poetry is to show us the truth for what it is, and the lies for what they are. That isn’t new, per se, but neither are “alternative facts.” Kevin Young has an absolutely brilliant and ambitious nonfiction work coming this fall, titled Bunk, that has been many years in the making, and that so importantly demonstrates that American history has run parallel to the American hoax and to the American brand of racism, from Barnum to Trump. In publishing such books, and in many genres, Graywolf aims to combat fakery with literature of integrity.  

DD: Susan Stewart’s career retrospective, Cinder: New & Selected Poems, is out this month. Tell us what you most admire about this collection.

JS: Many years ago, at Washington University, Carl Phillips implored me to read the poetry and critical works of Susan Stewart, and ever since, her clarity has been a touchstone and example of the lyric possibilities of both traditional and experimental poetry. Cinder is a perfect starting place for those who may not yet have been charmed by her particular ingenuity, and it’s a celebration of a remarkable ongoing career for those who have been reading her poetry and scholarship for years. I certainly admire the formal brilliance across these poems—the poem in the shape of an arrow, say, or the poem seemingly breaking down into an array of symbols and punctuation, or the poem that configures hell as a moving into and out of repeating lines, or the new poem in the form of gas-pump TV screens. But more than that, I admire the extraordinary sensibility behind these poems, one that is very concerned with the human capability for memory, individually and collectively, and concerned with our culture’s oppression of our human senses. I’m thinking, for example, of one of her masterpiece poems, “The Forest,” and the way the poem grapples with the question of how any of us will still be capable of experiencing a forest, in conception and in reality. So many of the poems, taken together, are reminders of art’s ability to record, encapsulate, and pass on our sensual experience. That’s an argument both of body and imagination, and of course, it’s an environmental and cultural argument, as well. Cinder opens with a terrific and generous group of new poems that alone is worth the book. I hope it’s an opportunity to celebrate a unique presence in contemporary poetry.

DD: This year Graywolf will publish the debut collections of Layli Long Soldier, Mai Der Vang, and Erika L. Sánchez. What can we expect from these three new voices in the poetry world?

JS: All three of these poets offer very exciting first books this year, and they all point ahead to work that will matter for a long time.

WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier is a kaleidoscopic work, in large part a kind of searing rejoinder to the duplicity of government documentation, double talk, and pretend apology. The title sequence reconfigures the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which was never spoken aloud, nor were tribes invited to receive the apology, and which was then buried as a text inside larger legislation. So was this even an apology? WHEREAS attempts to answer that question. It’s an important and innovative book, and one that has been a long time in its making.

Afterland by Mai Der Vang is a historic publication, the first major award-winner by a Hmong American poet, and we’re really proud to be publishing it at Graywolf as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Carolyn Forché selected the book for its really moving recounting of the Hmong exodus from Laos during the fallout of the Vietnam War, and the resilience and survival of the Hmong culture in exile here in the United States. The imagery of these poems is so unique—otherworldly and haunting in regard to “afterland” as the country refugees flee to and as the spirit world of the afterlife.

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez is a bold combination of personal poems about growing up the daughter of undocumented Mexican parents and almost journalistic poems about sex workers, narco traffickers, and immigrant laborers. The subjects here are important ones, and Sánchez makes them feel vivid and very close, while also turning a discerning eye on the history of both sides of the border (and beyond), as well as on herself, sometimes with a deadpan and self-effacing wit. This is a really audacious book, and an important one.

It’s a hugely exciting time for poetry with so many amazing first books!

DD: In a recent book review written for the New York Times, David Orr writes of the first book:

"If you’re an author who specializes in, say, writing about science for general readers, then your first book will be regarded by most people as . . .the book you wrote first. That it was your inaugural effort will have no special significance; your work will be judged the way books are typically judged: as interesting or dull. But if your goal is to write about the imaginary lives of imaginary people or — particularly — to write poems, then your first book may be another matter entirely. Because now it’s not merely the book of yours that happened to have the earliest publication date. Now it is the start of your career."

Could you discuss your thoughts on the essential specialness of the debut collection in poetry? What have you learned about debut collections by reading and editing so many of them?

JS: Orr is right, I think, in that we seem to think of a poet’s development as something with a beginning, an arc, and an ending, and it’s often the work of scholars and critics to make a lot out of what it means for a poet to have a career. In fact, Craig Morgan Teicher is working on a book to be published by Graywolf about poetic development, titled We Begin in Gladness, which will look at various paths and directions—many of them not easy nor at all straightforward—as examples useful to readers and to poets getting started and wondering what a “career” even looks like. What does it mean for a poet to have a life in the art?

It’s true that a poet only gets one first book, and while more first books of poetry are published than ever before, many of them through first-book prizes and contests, there is the pressure for a first book to make a statement. I think poets feel a pressure, understandably, to come out with a book quickly and to have that book get attention, and that’s an impatience imposed by academic professional expectation if not by the ambitions of poets themselves, in many cases. It means publishers like Graywolf see a whole lot of first book manuscripts, and first-book contests like the Walt Whitman Award are flooded with thousands of submissions. It also means that way too many poets get overlooked at the stages of the first book, and perhaps even more so, the second book. That’s a reason why Graywolf feels it so important to collaborate on the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, for a first book by an American poet over the age of forty, and partner on the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for an African American poet’s first book, including most recently Donika Kelly’s amazing debut, Bestiary, which is one of the first books Orr is reviewing in the New York Times piece you quote from.

While I think every first book (or otherwise) is hopefully different and distinct, and so I hesitate to try to offer broad commentary about them, but in order to answer your question, I would say that many first books want to be acceptable, they want to win the contest, and they want to be liked. But fewer first books want to challenge, they want to risk, they want to unsettle, and they care less that they are liked and more that they are read and even resisted.   

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

JS: Every time a writer considers editorial suggestions and on certain things the writer pushes back, I feel encouraged that the writer is assured in their vision and ready to be published. It means perhaps seeming foolish or seeming just plain wrong or off base, but it also means I feel I have done my job in approaching the line that the writer has deliberated upon and decided is the defining line of what they sound like. That is the invisible work in the intimate space between writer and editor. It’s very encouraging to me as an editor.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

JS: The incredible groundswell of young poets right now, among them some individually brilliant talents, but more importantly, together creating a sense of collective greatness by way of national community defined by artistry and activism. That is encouraging as a development not just in contemporary poetry but in our world.

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

JS: American poetry needs serious, astute, challenging, and regular poetry critics and reviewers who are people of color, and who are women, and who are given an ongoing byline in the visible print and online publications that middle-aged or older white men are regularly holding and have been holding for a very long time. Solmaz Sharif very rightly mentioned recently that we need a great, new criticism to run alongside the great, new poetry of our time.

DD: If you could only read and remember one poem for the rest of your life, what poem would it be and why?

JS: You’re describing a world I don’t want to live in. We exist for multiplicity not just for singularity, and the single poem can only be great because it exists in a world with other poems in it. And if I knew I had found the one poem to be read and remembered for the rest of my life, and could name it for you, I think I could no longer do my job as an editor, nor could I continue to read poetry. Luckily, it seems, I haven’t found that poem yet, and I’m happy to be left in this fallen world where I am still searching for it among the many life-changing imperfect ones.

DD: What prose, music, and other art have most influenced you as a poetry reader and editor?

JS: An ongoing, revolving list might today include:

The prose and plays of Samuel Beckett.
The visual artwork of Kara Walker.
Any music that does not have lyrics.
The essays and criticism of Eula Biss.
The patterns and variations of offense and defense deployed by the Kansas Jayhawks on the basketball court.
Whatever Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée is.

 

DD: Could you tell us a bit about some of the other Graywolf Press titles out later this year?

JS: In 2017 poetry, in addition to the titles mentioned above by Stewart, Long Soldier, Vang, and Sánchez, Graywolf is publishing:

Danez Smith’s big, bold second book, Don’t Call Us Dead, a really exciting and moving collection about race, police violence, illness, and the body in crisis;

Stephen Burt’s new collection, Advice from the Lights, which contains poems of memory and nostalgia, and also on gender identity, especially in the Stephanie poems throughout the book;

Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing is a sequence of prose poems in Bang’s unique signature language about the Bauhaus School in Germany, its artists and art (from which the title comes), and in particular the life of Lucia Moholy, who struggled so much of her life to be recognized for her photographs documenting the school, before the Nazis closed it in 1933;

Fred Marchant’s best book to date, titled Said Not Said, which is a book about moral and ethical questions, what gets spoken and what goes unspoken, and it includes a really wrenching sequence of poems about his sister’s long suffering from mental illness;

we are expanding and reissuing a truly essential book, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, in Robert Bly’s seminal translations, which Graywolf first published in 2001, but we’re now glad to offer for the first time all of Bly’s known translations of Tranströmer’s luminous poems;

and we are publishing in November a really fascinating book, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, which will present original poems with multiple English translations, followed by a brief essay about the challenges of translating that work, all in a wide trim size to allow readers to see the poems and translations side by side by side.

Each year, Graywolf features online previews of all of our books in a given genre across the year, and for a better rundown on this year’s offerings, you can find the poetry preview here.

DD: I’d like to end the interview with my favorite poem from a Graywolf Press book, Christopher Gilbert’s “Listening to Monk’s Misterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair” from Turning into Dwelling. Could you introduce this poem (and this amazing book)?

JS: Every interview should end with this poem and with celebration of Christopher Gilbert. It’s a poem from Gilbert’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, Across the Mutual Landscape, which was selected by Michael S. Harper and published by Graywolf in 1984. It was Gilbert’s only published collection in his lifetime, but it has long been a kind of touchstone first book—in certain circles a cult classic—for its vision and music, as in this poem. Gilbert sees the syncopations and patterns of Thelonious Monk’s Mysterioso, which walks forward and backward in intervals, as akin to the patterns of braiding. But more than that, it’s the movement of offering and taking back, being called into a space that you might not normally be invited into, like braiding your sisters’ hair. There’s no music like Gilbert’s, part homage to jazz, sure, but the music of a mind making sense of itself and calling itself to be. Like music, it’s a poem whose language exists seemingly in and out of time, a participation with mutuality, and one that never arrives or tries to arrive at completion.

After Gilbert’s death in 2007, through Ed Pavlic and Terrance Hayes, we found that Gilbert had been working for a long time on a second collection, called Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation, which had been entrusted and edited by Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, and in 2015, we were able to publish Across the Mutual Landscape and Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation together in one book, titled Turning into Dwelling, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes. It’s landmark work, and it deserves as many readers as it can get, and it certainly deserves—thank you, Dante—the last word.   

            Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair

            What it’s all about is being
            just beyond a man’s grasp,
            which is a kind of consciousness
            you can own, to get to
            be at a moment’s center
            and let it keep on happening
            knowing you don’t own it—

            which is moving yourself close to, being
            particular to that place. Like my two sisters
            taking turns braiding each others’ hair—
            hair growing against their weaving, they formed
            a flow their hurt and grace could mean
            as each took turns pulling the comb through
            the other’s knots and their little Vaseline.

            A knowing which makes the world
            a continuity. As in your core
            something calls to you
            at a distance which does not matter.
            As in the world you will see yourself
            listening to follow like water
            following its wave to shore.

            To arrive in your life you must
            embrace this letting, letting
            which is a match for the stream
            through flowering field and the tall trees
            wandered into and the river wearing beads
            just ahead which you go into
            further on because you can.

            This going so is something else—the way
            it flows into always something deeper and
            over your head, a kid with “why” questions.
            Your answer is a moment struggling to be
            more than itself, your straining for air
            to have the chance to breathe it free.
            It’s alive you’ve come to,

            this coming into newness, this dis-
            continuous mind in you looking up, finding
            an otherness which trusts what you’ll become—
            for me, my sisters once offering,
            “You want to learn to braid my hair.”
            If we are blessed in this world
            it is in feeling this—

            i.e., there are circumstances
            and you are asked to be
            their member. Not owning but owning in—
            a participation, like Monk’s implied words
            reaching for their sentence: “If you can
            get to it. . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey Shotts is the executive editor of Graywolf Press.

 

 

 

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

Napoléon, anal sex, a pretense of joy & the worldwide rise of winkie-ism [by Paul Tracy Danison]

 

Even the famous place are looking askew. Or is it me? No. Not me. Under winkie-ism, I can sincerely blame you.

Right off the bat to reflections à la française: fake news, fake sentiments, fake ideas, alternative realities.

I can see the enmisting Invalides, a former military hospital and veteran’s home turned into a rather ironic monument to France’s martial prowess.

Following the inevitable rout of France’s incompetently-led armed forces in 1940, the egregious Hitler made an effort to gain support from the country’s strong and anti-democratic National Right – made up, in spirit, and, in fact, of many of the same people whose 100-proof political spite combine with a thorough lack of military nous, mirabile dictu! led to the destruction of their old enemy, la République, la gueuse, that nasty, hoi-polloi-coddling whore, Marianne, as many of them often put it at the time. Hitler felt the French National Right should be made to feel as comfortable with thorough National Socialist German victory as they were with giving the Republican whore and its supporters a thorough fucking over.

Hitler’s idea was to bring the ashes of Napoléon’s tragically prematurely-dead boy, his only heir, tragic infant King of Rome, fondly called, in his time, “Little Eagle”, there, to les Invalides, true seat of French racial pride, there to “sleep” eternally beside his doting Father, formerly beloved & feared Emp’reur des français, scourge of Europe, as Hitler himself, a world-historical figure, and model for a certain type of overwritten Romantic Hero. He thought marketing such an alternative reality worthy of at least a small investment of looted resources. 

But, you cry, What sane person could possibly be struck favorably by such fake language conveying such fake sentiments, such fake history… such, such, such guff?

Well. Such persons apparently did exist to be favorably struck, since the next thing you know there were high officials in the French state calling for German victory, blithely sending the cops out to round up, among other Republican hoi-polloi, “racial aliens”.

So, fake works. The alternative realities thus constructed have before now been able to work to the catastrophic disadvantage of the few and of the many, without distinction.

This is strange for anybody who has the vague belief that people generally seek their self-interest.

My eye lights on the Invalides’ sublime cupola.

I am put in mind of a pornographic film featuring a fake cheerleader and, if possible, an even more fake “intellectual” nerd, well-hung, however, having vigorous anal sex.

The film sticks in my mind because, wincing greatly, the fake cheerleader exclaims, “I love this – I don't know why."

Why? Could it be the money? Not likely.

The fame, then? Not credible.

A friend of mine, whose sexual predilection is “bottoming” with other men, once confided, while pacing feverishly back and forth in front of my bed, that he had anal sex only and uniquely for love.

“Otherwise,” he cried, glaring at me as if I were responsible for this unhappy state of his affairs, “How can we fuck?”

Unlikely as it seems, the fake cheerleader, too, could have been doing it for love. I guess.

But as I think about it, it begins to dawn on me that the fake cheerleader’s perplexity is actually just eyewash for a particularly repugnant and widespread type of human perversity.

Like so many of us humans, using fake facts and sentiments about herself, she has previously created a catastrophically disadvantageous alternative reality for herself, which she clings to in an ecstasy of self-congratulation.

The fake cheerleader’s real pleasure comes not from actually fucking herself but from pretending she’s not cruelly mistreating herself, even to herself.

And in this obvious pretense, to my mind, she concisely represents the collective mind-set that elected Winkie Donald J. Trump, a blustering fool who openly boasts of supporting ideas and actions that will reduce the general well-being of most of those who voted for him.

The need for pretense explains the otherwise obvious stupidity of income-guaranteed French farmers who want to withdraw from the European Union, English working people who vote to throw themselves over a political-economic cliff to keep out a couple thousand Bulgarian carpenters, Hungarians who want to cozy up with Putin’s foul secret police apparatus, supposedly, to protect national sovereignty, after 70 years practice at being poor and unfree under variously fascist or communist boots.

“Whew”, as my late brother used to exclaim, theatrically wiping his brow, when any serious conversation with the adults in charge was forced on is, indicating his relief at a narrow escape from a potential train wreck of imbecilities.

 

Our era's first Big Winkie on Bonbon, his favorite Mack truck. Notice that faraway look. It's winkie-typical, even when the winkie is not obviously drunk.

Well, then. Not a single announced policy, not a single one of what reasonable people scrabbling for rational expression might call “Us-first” or “neo-national” positions, can, or is even meant to, give the least pleasure or advantage to any voter, apart from your occasional local Small Winkie who wants to fake being well-hung by waving a flag around.

For, if the “Us-first” electorate is who rational people seem to say it is, then, as constituting the big battalions of soldiers, entitlement beneficiaries and wage slaves, they can only suffer from proposed forays into pointless trade disruption, galloping inflation, non-existent public services, worse & less-accessible education, political instability, police brutality and war.

These soldiers, wage slaves and entitlement beneficiaries are a broad swath of ordinary citizens who are doing not so bad: your bank advisor, process engineer, mid-level civil servant as well as your vast pool of hardly-overworked “service representatives” and “associates”. What they are definitely not are dispossessed hillbillies or put-upon “marginalized” working people or unappreciated residents of a “forgotten rural” somewhere or another.

All that rationalizing political analysis talk of put-upon categories of people is just as much guff as Hitler’s King of Rome/Napoleon schtick.

This most recent catastrophe, like famine, is all about fake facts, fake sentiments and alternative realities. It’s about what humans are and how they work, about politics, not about facts on the ground. There’s plenty of food for the hungry. It’s just that nobody but people who aren’t involved in local politics really cares to make sure they get fed.

The truth is, keeping in mind that truth is in no way a remedy to fakeness, the famously economically-disgruntled marginalized citizen doesn’t exist, any more than famine-victims exist. Just as there’s nothing wrong with the food supply, there’s nothing really economic that’s wrong.

The farms are all heavily subsidized or, in US Appalachia, growing lucrative dope crops, and the old folk and almost everybody else almost everywhere in the West, except traditionally-mistreated minorities and newer immigrants, have subsidized, or free, housing, medical care, state pensions and plentiful food as well as leisure, culture and education should they want it.

Bah! The winkie-voting stiffs who have not moved out of the economically-declining areas of wherever they happen to be have jobs while those who have moved, given they are the majority race, face the daunting prospect of full employment.

In the evening mist that is now garlanding the elaborate but entirely fake tomb of the first of our era’s catastrophically fake leaders, I can see that a human tendency toward congratulatory self-fucking and the concomitant pretense is threatening to turn places I care about into winkie-countries, where politics is turned toward The Pursuit of Sourness.

I wonder if Karine will instantly perceive the affective baggage of a call to discuss her theory of Vaginal Perplexity and hang up or let her vanity kiss off good sense, so to speak? The call will go better with a drink. 

Tracy’s Lives of the artists: #1: Christine Champagne

Beyond words at the Bal perdu bistro

How do contemporary creators live and what do they make of it?

There are thousands of artists working in in France today.

If I had the nerve, not to speak of the time to listen to the end of the story, I’d ask each artist I meet, What do you live on? How do you live? And What’s your mood and attitude as you face the first two questions?

I’d do this because, myself a person with what they used to call a “checkered” story and, except for one small detail, an uncertain future, I’ve often supposed that someone besides my sweet boy might, after that one future certitude has kicked in, wonder how I looked at my life and managed my practical means and ends, compared, say, with the way Savage, Johnson or Boswell looked at and managed theirs? 

It is impossible to know how far any individual responses of any individual artist to such questions represent some general reality usefully comparable to whatever. All the same, when a series of even partial responses to even one of the three interesting questions, it might provide a starting point for other artists to put together their own, more complete, responses. Thus, using Tracy’s Lives of the Artists, handbook for the artistically perplexed, those who have not yet kicked on through to certitude could begin putting together a pastiche of first-hand stories that could help them understand their own situations.

Lyonnesse, Lyonnesse, Christine Champagne: "Creation is a sort of élan, a surge of presence from within me…"

So, when Christine Champagne, an artist working well beyond words today, wrote me a letter that touched intelligently on What do you live on? How do you live? What’s your mood and attitude? I saved and translated her words & sense to put together the essay that follows.

“I am looking at water and the sense I have of it”, Christine began, “So as to thread some video-sculptures and photos that I now have in my head around it (water). I am learning new stuff also… and in coming months I’ll be hand-developing my photos, which requires a little bit of set up! I am also on a team project on an angel theme where I will be doing the B&W photography. O! Yes. I am also modeling for a photographer friend: a pleasant, and also, a learning, experience on and about the other side of the lens; also learning some new techniques and a new way to look at my métier.”

Christine then went on to tell me about her experience living and working as an artist today in Paris, in France, saying that, basically, now, a working creator today – one who is not already in the infinitely small rank that makes up the publicly recognized “artist” on the private market or who is supported in some other way by the public market – cannot make a living as an artist, even in a small way. She concludes “This is just what I am feeling at the moment; I’m feeling upset; I don’t say this every day…”.

Perfection, Christine Champagne: “I want to bring some well-being to others, give them a spiritual break, to provide a bit of dream.”

Christine’s work, she acknowledges, aims not so much to pleasing the onlooker as at having a dialog with the onlooker’s heart. In that, perhaps, the creative product she wants to sell is different from others, so not really any more comparable to any other creative product on the market than she, as a person, is comparable to other creators. But, in terms of not making a living off her creativity, she asks me to keep in mind that, in addition to her personal creating, she teaches and makes original jewelry for another account.

“I don’t object to working for others or on things that aren’t of my invention”, Christine continues. “I feel I am creative in that, too. But, doing all that I do does not allow me to compensate the family for the costs I generate by my own creative work.”

Despite the tolerance and generosity of her family, she says, she winds up feeling guilty about being so little a contributor to the common enterprise… adding that, in a better world, money from her creative efforts would enable her to spoil her own people, at least a little, as well as enable more, bigger and better, more complex, productions.

“I love to experiment, break new ground,” she writes, “This takes time, it has to be taken forward carefully.” …But money takes time and time is money, even in Paris, and today’s creator, like most working people, especially, perhaps, the female ones, has no time.

The contemporary way of doing things is out of whack, Christine affirms. “It can’t be right,” she says, to not be able, even working a straight job elsewhere, to practice a vocation. A visual artist, like a barista or bank worker or assistant professor who wants to buy living space, some leisure time, or just be a bit above the bare minimum, is forced to work two or even three jobs.

Beyond the economic realities that today limit the lifestyle possibilities of most other working people, there is the way the creative market is organized that puts the brakes on hopes of an artistic career. “Unlike everybody else,” Christine points out, “And in addition to working steadily at other work, an artist who wants to even the most modest recognition has to take on several, unpaid, but highly necessary, jobs, quite distinct from her creative production: support functions such as marketing, logistics and technical work.”

Like any other merchandise, creative work doesn’t speak for itself, she says. But unlike other merchandise, nobody but the artist has to do all that support stuff before they can even get it to somebody who will put it before the public. Creative production “does not have My stuff by huge international brand stamped on it,” or even the reassuring imprimatur of some reputable gallery, she points out, which predisposes a buyer or exhibitor to believe in a creative product’s quality, taste and with-it-ness.

In our system, Christine says that, for instance, even if employers are obliged by law to pay a driver a minimal something for taking an overpriced box or a higher-paid worker from point A to point B, they are not obliged to pay any associated investment costs, such as driving license, clothes or car. So, too, for today’s visual artist.

The contemporary visual artist pays upfront, just like an Uber driver, for her tools and materials, plus for advertising, space rental – in short, 200€ here, 300€ there… The management, of course, that is, the curators, publicity agents, and so on and so forth, like the Uber management, get paid upfront and also generally work for somebody else. Of course, Christine points out, if the artist is not known or well-enough known, she has to, first, get these paid employees interested enough that they want to get the upfront money from the visual artist!

Illuminations, Christine Champagne: "My work is also a spiritual path, a search for the depth of life."

There are other particularities in the Paris market, Christine writes. Most galleries are strict rental arrangements as is a restaurant or cell phone sales point. “The owner rents the space, that’s all, allows the artist to fill up the gallery. If it sells, it sells. If not, the owner has his, even if the artist has nothing at all.” For the most part, the “self-interested friendship” of a gallery-owner à la Paul Rosenberg, who understands the work exhibited and promotes it does not exist for today’s working artists.

Christine has some trouble imagining how such a system developed, where no one takes any risk but the most vulnerable one, the producer. And it certainly is true that even the ceaselessly-wailing farmers have some protection, not to speak of notaries, lawyers, accountants, doctors, even those lowest of the low on the economy’s value-chain, have some sort of social-risk sharing arrangement, whether it is unemployment insurance or subventions or restrictive professional legislation.

Once and if the means are available to meet the public, Christine says, the nature of creative production makes an eventual meeting of minds with an interested public a costly, long-term project. “It’s interesting to demonstrate, to persuade, to force the brain to follow on an idea or a concept. All that’s good, I like it.”

But for this, the creator has to do a lot of exhibitions and be as present as possible on the scene and in the market. Understand that, in Paris, a stand at an exhibition costs between 1,000 and 10,000 euros, usually for three or four days and not including packing transport, lodging, meals or set up help.

Christine concludes her letter with a statement of her own intent in her creation, putting into question, at least obliquely, whether contemporary economics even leaves room for such intentions, even as a past-time or what one feels as an ineluctable vocation.

“I’ve said enough about money,” she writes. Money is necessary to live, but money is certainly not what motivates my creation. My work is also a spiritual path, a search for the depth of life. No, this way of putting it is not adequate: Creation is a sort of élan, a surge of presence from within me… I try to refine this feeling and to work it into sculpture, photographs, installations. I firmly believe that our lives are not limited to what we see of them in daily life”.

In the context of her personal motivations, then, for Christine, the almost impossible economic cost is worth the candle. “What is formidable in showing one’s creative production is the encounter with others,” she affirms. “It has no price, thank goodness.”

For Christine, the human exchange is in the creation of a vision shared for a moment, a unique bridge between two worlds, hers, his, theirs and mine, or maybe a bridge for all of us to the bigger, invisible part of living. “I think about things in different ways so that I can show my worlds, and make them available to everyone… “I want to bring some well-being to others, give them a spiritual break, to provide a bit of dream.”

 

Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: Rhina P. Espaillat

A river in which time quenches its thirst, 2015, gouache, colored pencil and ink on paper, Firelei Báez

Weighing In

by Rhina P. Espaillet

 

What the scale tells you is how much the earth
has missed you, body, how it wants you back
again after you leave it to go forth

into the light. Do you remember how
earth hardly noticed you then? Others would rock
you in their arms, warm in the flow

that fed you, coaxed you upright. Then earth began
to claim you with spots and fevers, began to lick
at you with a bruised knee, a bloody shin,

and finally to stoke you, body, drumming
intimate coded messages through music
you danced to unawares, there in your dreaming

and your poems and your obedient blood.
Body, how useful you became, how lucky,
heavy with news and breakage, rich, and sad,

sometimes, imagining that greedy zero
you must have been, that promising empty sack
of possibilities, never-to-come tomorrow.

But look at you now, body, soft old shoe
that love wears when it’s stirring, look down, look
how earth wants what you weigh, needs what you know.

 

Rhina P. Espaillat has published ten full-length books and three chapbooks, comprising poetry, essays and short stories, in both English and her native Spanish, and translations from and into Spanish. Her work appears in numerous journals, over seventy anthologies, and dozens of websites, and has earned national and international awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, the Richard Wilbur Award, the Howard Nemerov Prize, the May Sarton Award, the Robert Frost “Tree at My Window” Prize for translation, several honors from the New England Poetry Club, the Poetry Society of America, the Ministry of Culture of the Dominican Republic, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Salem State College. Espaillat’s most recent publications are two poetry collections in English titled Playing at Stillness and Her Place in These Designs, both available from their publisher, Truman State University Press, http://tsup.truman.edu. Espaillat has also published a book of Spanish translations titled Oscura fruta/Dark Berries: Forty-two Poems by Richard Wilbur, and a book of Spanish translations titled Algo hay que no es amigo de los muros/ Something There Is that Doesn’t Love a Wall: Forty Poems by Robert Frost, both available from Amazon.com.  She is a frequent reader, speaker and workshop leader, and is active with the Powow River Poets, a notable group she co-founded in 1992. "Weighing In" was first published in Where Horizons Go (Truman State University Press).

---

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles. 

David Lehman, Poet, Critic, Anthologist, Professor, and More (by Nicole Santalucia)

This is the sixth and final post in a series of blog posts to honor those whom Nin calls star-makers, meaning those who help make others’ literary lives successful.

When you say David Lehman most think of The Best American Poetry series, but he does it all:  anthologist, literary and cultural critic, editor, professor, star-maker, and poet. And more. Much more. But when I think of him, I think first and foremost of a brilliant poet, a man who seems always to have a poem moving through him, who can easily compose a poem a day, as he did for his collection The Daily Mirror. The way I see it, America is one lucky gal to have David-Lehman poems, David-Lehman wit, and David-Lehman exuberance flowing through her veins.  

When I say that David Lehman’s poetry is flowing through America’s veins it is both a metaphor and very much a reality.  Here’s just one recent example.  A few weeks ago I was invited to read poems at a peace rally in central Pennsylvania. Community members organized this rally—the main organizer is a dear friend, Neysa Thomas, who wanted to find a meaningful way to respond to an act of vandalism and hate speech that involved defacing the local high school’s property with swastikas. Many members of the local community and Neysa’s synagogue supported the peace rally’s efforts. As I chose poems to read, I wanted to include poems of peace and prayer, poems that concretely communicate awe, poems that tell a story and make a peaceful argument, poems capable of speaking directly to a community that is at a loss for words, and, well, I immediately turned to Yeshiva Boys. David’s poem, “Day of Penitence and Awe.” That moving poem is still echoing through the streets in this small P.A. town. The opening lines of the poem read, “In temple I prayed / and chanted Holy! Holy! / Holy! And was scared.” It’s David’s voice that’s flushing out the wound. Poets like David who master the art form are poets who teach, influence, and shape how we see the world. 

In his new and brilliant book, Poems in the Manner Of, David enters into conversation with poets from the past as he transmits his poetic influences and gives aspiring poets permission to embrace, imitate, and converse with the poets they admire (I will be using Poems in the Manner Of in my creative writing classrooms from now on). This collection is a shadowed contour of poetic forms, styles, voices, yet, as we journey through the tributes David’s wit and humor is often at its core. The book is a pure pleasure to read.

I laughed out loud when I read “Poem in the Manner of Emily Dickinson.”  Here’s the poem in its entirety:

Paradise—

Another poem that exemplifies the amalgamation of content and style is “Poem in the Manner of Williams Carlos Williams.” 

As the rain

washes her hair                                                     

the plums red

in the bowl 

on the table

with their dark

red rind wait

for her eyes

to see them

her hair still

wet still full

of suds as

three old men

watch her touch

she sees them

And as David says in his note to the reader, “Limiting myself to three words per line, I sought the jagged edges of a William Carlos Williams poem.” He goes on to inform us how his imitation is an attempt to capture WCW’s style as he also imitates a similar process that produced this gem.

Another poem from the new book that I admire, “Poem in the Manner of Pablo Neruda,” is briefly prefaced with the note: “The industrious Neruda wrote odes to many things –including laziness.” I read this as a stage direction because this poem performs the essence of Neruda’s many odes and it’s an interpretation.

Poem in the Manner of Pablo Neruda

Yesterday I was too lazy to write this poem.

So I wrote an ode to laziness

and put in yellow birds and purple plums.

I closed my eyes and wrote an ode to sleep.

I opened them and conceived of odes

to streets, rain, wine, a beautiful nude,                                                                      

my clothes waiting for me to wear them,

my toolbox, my medicine chest – 

but these I left unwritten.

Laziness demanded it. She was a beautiful nude,

and we sat on the porch and watched the storm.

And I didn’t write an ode to the storm and an ode

to dying in Paris on a Thursday afternoon,

an ode to dusk on a lonely country road,

an ode to chaos (the sea) and an ode to form,

to books, to Buddhism, to the stars and moon.

 

I thought that I’d ask David Lehman a few questions here…

NS:  David, you mention in the introduction of this latest collection how you began writing “poems in the manner of” back in 2002 and that the pace of producing slowed down, but the idea never went away. Could you talk about what you did during the dormant periods and about ideas that linger and eventually stick? There’s so much hope in knowing that the idea for this book lingered for well over a decade. Did you ever consider scrapping it altogether?

DL: I'm always working on multiple projects concurrently. Either that's because I'm a Gemini with Leo rising or I'm a workaholic or I'm just a guy who likes writing something every day. I always thought of this project as one that would take years to finish. Every so often I'd return to it and add a poem in the manner of someone I hadn't done before. Books take their time. Sometimes you so enjoy working on something you don't ever want it to end.

NS: Do you ever savor a project for too long or to a point that leads to new ideas/discoveries for other projects? I love the whole idea of writing "in the manner of" as opposed to "after" another poet or poem. I also love how you write poems "in the manner of" a whole decade or manner or mood. I was wondering if you could say a few words about the difference between a poem written "after" another poet, and a poem "in the manner of" another poet. 

DL:  Thank you for the compliment. I construe "poems in the manner of" to be wider in its application than "after." I like the idea that a poem can be a homage, a parody, an appreciation, a translation or adaptation, or an appropriation -- or any combination of these things. It was a great day when I realized that I could widen the project yet further by writing a poem in the manner of an Eric Ambler spy novel or a Johnny Mercer lyric for a Harold Arlen tune. That led to "Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard" and the ones dedicated to decades. I wrote almost twice as many poems as those included in the book. Among the ones I have shelved for now are poems in the manner of Victorian pornography, contemporary fiction, a romance novel, the Gothic manner, the "modern" manner, Sextus Propertius, Emerson, Hart Crane, as well as a short play about Shelley and his circle. These may yet have their day, who knows?  Revising is sometimes even more fun than writing.

NS: I love that you say revising is sometimes more fun and that you mention what led to "Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard." The book ends with two poems influenced by music: “Poem in the Manner of a Jazz Standard” and “Poem in the Manner of a Hit Song by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, c. 1945.”  Music is such a big part of many of your books. What song is running through you right now?

DL: There are two songs taking turns in my brain right now. One is the Gershwins' "I Don't Think I'll Fall in Love Today," a duet sung by Dawn Upshaw and David Garrison. The other is Leonard Bernstein's "Lucky to Be Me" from the show On the Town. Both are fantastic.

NS:  You are a poetry-father to many poets—you’ve guided and nurtured poets as they’ve made their way into the poetry world. You’ve influenced poets as a result of your contribution as an artist, teacher, critic, editor, etc. How do you balance between being a star-maker and an artist, teacher, etc. How do you do it all? Do you sleep?

DL: I need a lot of sleep and I work hard because I enjoy it. That's the simple answer.  I wish I had more time. There are many demands that are made of me and if I honored them all I wouldn't get any writing of my own done. 

NS: Speaking of working hard and loving what you do. I'd like to bring up The Best American Poetry series. How did you become The Best American Poetry editor? How did you come up with the idea for the series? To what do you attribute its great success?

DL: The idea came to me on the first of August 1987. I remember the very moment. I had moved the day before, from Ludlowville to Ithaca, and on this day I was driving back to pick up assorted house plants that we'd left behind. No one thought such an anthology would have a chance because of the presumed lack of interest in poetry. We proved the doubters wrong. A lot of people are interested in poetry, at least potentially, but we have to overcome a defeatist attitude and we have to bring some imaginative flair to the project of publishing our poems.

NS: Now I want to know if you still have any of those house plants. Do you? This isn't a question for the interview, but I am curious. Deanna and I keep killing house plants and replacing them. Well, except for one aloe plant that seems to have survived for a few years now. We've named some of the plants (Ms. Bart, Sanchez, Lady Woodrow) thinking that it might help them live longer, but no luck. On a different note, I am always so impressed with your memory.

DL: Our house plants seem to be doing pretty well though probably none are left from 1987. Geraniums are very hardy. My memory's still pretty good. I had to memorize a soliloquy from "Hamlet" for last night's class and I did it and it went over well.

NS:  Can you describe what goes into the editing process and how you choose the guest editors? Have you ever asked a poet to edit and had him or her turn you down?

DL: Very few have turned us down: some are too busy, some just don't want to do things that will interfere with their own writing time. In an editor I look for a poet of national reputation, who is writing well, whom I respect and whom I can get along with, and who would welcome the challenge with all the risks it entails—it is, after all, easy to offend friends and associated who don't make the final cut.  Each year the dynamic between series editor and guest editor varies.

NS: Give me a highlight—one of your best memories or moments of editing The Best American Poetry.

DL: In our first year John Ashbery chose a poem by Donald Hall, "Prophecy." John told me confidentially that he thought it would be an even stronger poem if a certain stanza were omitted.  Meanwhile he chose it for the “Best American Poetry 1988.” I asked Don for a comment on the poem and he told me he had revised it—he had removed the very stanza that John questioned. Great that their minds worked alike. When the series was new and we were establishing our name, the work was very hands on and I got to spend time collaborating with Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charlie Simic, Louise Gluck, Archie Ammons etc. Those were great days.  I'm proud of the discoveries we made. Certain poets were little known when we published them—Nin Andrews, Anne Carson, Catherine Bowman, Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Amy Gerstler, Terrance Hayes, Rodney Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kay Ryan, AE Stallings, Natasha Trethewey, Susan Wheeler, Dean Young, to name just a few. In New York one day in 1990 Mark Strand and I spent a great afternoon looking at potential cover art for BAP 1991. Ten years later Robert Hass and I met in a hotel room in Princeton for a marathon session in which the merits of various poems were discussed. When  Kevin Young  was the guest editor, another decade later, in 2010, we kept bumping into each other by chance—once at the Tibor de Nagy art gallery in New York, another time in a Boston restaurant. These are all happy memories. I have enjoyed my dealings with all the guest editors; I have broadened my ideas about contemporary poetry, and we have done something that is indisputably good for the art and its sometimes beleaguered practitioners.

NS: This is so cool to hear straight from the source! Can we close with a poem of your choice from your work?

DL: Gladly. I will attach the first of the new poems in my New and Selected Poems: "Sixteen Tons." 

Sixteen Tons

To prolong the moment

as a simile extends a sentence

about the heroine’s innocence

which she yielded to her lover and now

she hates him as Eve hates Adam

when she risks her life

to give birth to their child –

To sit in your car and listen

to the last bars of something great

(Bernstein’s “Divertimento for Orchestra,”

you find out later) and then you turn off

the engine open the door

and return to your life, “another

day older and deeper in debt” --

That’s what the authorities fail to get.

You can learn a lot from

the sportscaster’s present tense:

“Three years ago he beats out that hit,”

about a player who has lost a step or two

due to a leg injury.

Three years ago, we all beat out that hit.

When I escape from this party

of unloved doves and loveless hawks,

I shall head to my desk and write

the sonnet that praises the antique pen

used to write out prophesies of today

with you on my arm, unafraid.

-- David Lehman

 

 

Nicole Santalucia is the author of Because I Did Not Die and Driving Yourself to Jail in July. She teaches poetry at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and brings poetry workshops into the Cumberland County Prison.

Grace Cavalieri: Poet, Book Playwright, Radio Host, Reviewer, and Editor (by Nin Andrews)

This is the fifth in a series of blog posts I am doing this week to honor those whom I call star-makers, meaning those who help make others’ literary lives possible, and sometimes wonderful.  I don't know of anyone who gives as much to other writers and poets as Grace Cavalieri. I am so looking forward to reading her next book, due out next fall . . .

 

Every now and then I come across someone who does it all, and I think, How does this woman sleep? Grace Cavelieri is one of those people. Every few days I receive an email from her including a recent interview, podcast or feature on a poet or artist, or a set of book reviews, recently published in The Washington Independent Review of Books. I am just so grateful every time I hear from her. She is the embodiment of the gift horse that never stops giving. After all, there are so few good reviewers these days, and even fewer as dedicated as she is to promoting poetry as a part of her daily life.

Recent reviews by Cavalieri from Washington Independent Review of Books can be found here. Podcasts of her interviews, The Poet and the Poem” can be found here.

Whatever Grace Cavalieri does, she does with brilliance--and great love. Whenever I read her work or hear her interviews, I feel briefly enlightened and uplifted. There is always a kind of laughter and/or delight in her words, whether written or spoken. Not surprisingly, her own poems are insightful, personal, deeply imagined, and entertaining. A natural playwright, she has turned some of her poems into plays. I think her beautiful poem, “Letters,” from her collection, The Mandate of Heaven, speaks of her particular gift—of how and perhaps why she writes. Cavalieri is a poet who tells stories in verse that are the very stories that we’re not finished with.

 

LETTERS

If you ask what bring us here,

Staring out of our lives

Like animals in high grass,

I’d say it was what we had in common

with the other—the hum of a song we

believe in which can’t be heard,

the sound of our own

luminous bodies rising just behind the hill,

the dream of a light which won’t go out,

and a story we’re not finished with.

We talk of things we cannot comprehend

so that you’ll know about

the inner and outer world which are the same.

Someone has to be with us in this,

and if you are, then,

you know us best. And I mean all of us,

the deer who leaves his marks behind him

in the snow, the red fox moving through the woods.

The same stream in them is in us too

although we are the chosen ones who speak.

Please tell me what you think cannot be sold

And I will say that’s all there is:

the pain in our lives

. . . the thoughts we have . . .

We bring these small seeds.

Do what you can with them.

What is found in this beleaguered

and beautiful land is what we write of.

 

 

While some of her poems, like “Tomato Pies, 25 Cents” tell of her Italian childhood and Trenton, New Jersey, others enter the imagined lives and dreams of others, lives as varied as Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth century feminist, Anna Nicole, and the amorous residents of a nursing home. When reading Grace Cavalieri’s poems, I can sometimes see the beginnings of a dialog or drama, and the future of her poems as a play, as in this one about Anna Nicole:

 

 

 

 

NOTES FROM A DISTANT GLACIER

 

Interviewer: Do you want to be someone of worth?

Or do you want to be famous?

Designer: if they photograph you nude,

It’s called ART.

Critic: They should project her on the wall, the one WAAY far behind us.

Trainer: In life there can be only one winner.

Mother: Would you please sit like a normal person?

Manager: Take a pill, for God’s sake - any pill. Just do it.

Doctor: No medicine can make you stop feeling.

Lawyer: Don’t even think about it, Anna,

Death doesn’t care about you. You owe it to the world to make it pretty.

Director: Give them heart, Give them breast.

Lover: Being a blonde beauty doesn’t make you a whore, necessarily.

Anna looks out the window.

She sees the pink azalea outside. So pretty. That color.

So perfect. It must be fake.

And then there is this poem from the Anna Nicole series. I love how Grace captures the very aura of Anna Nicole:

 

ANNA’S ESTATE

 

At the ½ star hotel

the lower lip is painted bigger, to match

the dreams of being a star.

She blessed the lumpy beds, bought her own silk sheets.

This was before the moral issues, the legal issues,

the spirit of the law, the letter of the law,

the causes of death, junkies, drug addicts,

probable criminal cause, bodies exhumed,

frozen sperm, mystery sons,

living in sorrow, wrongful death,

undue influences.

Before the opalescent and oceans

where she could never find the truth in things,

where she wanted a photo album so bad,

so she wouldn’t die without memories--

one day, standing at the free continental breakfast

dragging her sleeve in the jelly,

someone walked by, touching her waist like a prayer,

like an enfranchisement,

and she was on her way,

in a dress made for someone much smaller,

trusting a stranger because he said,

The Good Lord can’t see what happens at Hollywood.

 

Very different in temperament are Cavaleiri’s poems about Mary Wollstonecraft such as this one:

 

I CAN THINK OF FAR WORSE THINGS

 

Than to be a governess-

saying “that’s that” and hustling children

To the bath-

Oh yes, far worse things…

Like prostitution, for example,

Or embroidering, for that matter…

Or marrying someone I do not love.

And although I’ve never had the pox,

And one eyelid droops a little,

I am not ugly. If I lack sparkle

It’s just because

There’s such a narrow light in this room.

Do people think I should be a squirrel or a rabbit?

In the shed eating wood? Unworthy of my work?

No, with twelve guineas saved

One could start her own school,

Or by some self respect,

Or even start a dowry.

If I have to work for people whose

Fortune was not made in this lifetime,

Then I will tend to them sweetly,

Saving this beautiful handwriting for night.

 

Clearly, whatever series she is working on, Cavalieri’s poems are rich in detail and enchantment.

So I thought I’d ask Grace a few questions:

 

1. Grace, first of all, how do you do it? How do you have time? You are also a mother and grandmother and a cook and . . . ??

I  have a magic wand. I can expand time whenever I love something. Your contacting me gives me so much good energy. It was 3pm before. Now it’s 2:45. See what a difference a happy event makes!

       2. I have this idea that you were born writing poetry. Tell me how you became a poet.

I have interviewed about 3,000 poets in 40 years and almost everyone said “You won’t believe this but I wrote as a child” I say “NO. Really?” It’s true, I believe all poets come out wired that way and see the world through language, and the edge of words rather than the words themselves. A neurological disorder perhaps.

       3. How does a poem come to you?

It starts with a feeling, then there are words. I rely on my nighttime mind a lot because who could make up stuff like that? I also like to play with language randomly and let it lead me “to the heart” as Jane Hirschfield says. I don’t mind memory and I often enter the building of my life to go up and down the elevator, stopping on floors to see what happened—turning that to narrative.

      4. Are currently you working on a new series of poems or a play? And how does a poem become a play?

Good question. As an example, I have 3 specific books of poems: one on Anna Nicole Smith, one on Mary Wollstonecraft, one on old folks at “Pinecrest Rest Haven.” After the characters were so alive, there was nothing to do with them but put them on stage and let them slug it out. They would not go away. My husband said he never knew who was coming down for breakfast any one day: an 18^th century feminist, a playboy bunny, or an ex-slave quiltmaker.

 My new play is Millie’s Sunshine Tiki Villas. I’m trying to transform it from my novella-in-verse by that title. But it wants to go nowhere in a hurry.

     5. Tell me about one of your favorite interviews? Can I have any quotes from an interview? Links?

Allen Ginsberg was so rude. He’d been marching all night in 1976 to protest something in DC and had no sleep and when I got him on tape he hammered everything I said and I stopped the interview and said “who would want to be with you for an hour?” And he did a 180, we became friends finally. Louise Gluck (my favorite!) stopped half way through and said she was through. She was tired, but I still had 30 minutes to fill so fortunately I remembered a book we hadn’t mentioned and we went on. A.R. Ammons arrived for an hour interview with NO BOOKS. Fortunately I had some of his. There were countless moments of breathlessness in the past 40 years.

      6. How did you start working with Didi Menendez?

A friend was published in MiPOesias years and years ago. So I sent in some work. She’s my cultural hero and I cannot say enough about what she’s done/ and been/ as a cutting edge curator of art in America. She mentioned making books (Casa Menendez Press;) and then published five of mine. She inspires me to give up fear. BE DIDI, I say to myself every night. Just change the world. No problem. Be DiDi.

      7. And the Library of Congress?

I was core staff co-founding WPFW-FM in DC where poetry was really the news that stays news. My show “The Poet and the Poem” was “live” for 20 years.

As a writer, I knew folks at the LOC Poetry Office and through that office, and its Public Relations, “The Poet and the Poem” was contracted with a handshake to run nationally*(*If I could find the funding. The Witter Bynner FDN came through and has stayed for 20 years.) It was agreed that if I could sustain the show, the Library would offer soft services—a room in THE HOUSE OF MEMORY. And I cherish every marble step there.   

      8. I’d love to close with another poem or an excerpt of your choice.

(From an early book Why I Cannot Take A Lover, Washington Writer’s Publishing House, 1976.)

Don’t Undersell Yourself

 

Consider the brown cow

Eating green grass

Giving white milk.

 

 

 

Grace Cavalieri’s new book is WITH (Somondoco Press 2016.) She’s the author of several books and produced plays. The most recent play, “Anna Nicole: Blonde Glory.” (Theatre for the New City, NYC 2012.) She celebrates 40 years on public radio with “The Poet and The Poem” now recorded at The Library of Congress. She’s taught at Antioch College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She’s the founder of two poetry presses in DC, still thriving, and is presently the poetry columnist for The Washington Independent Review of Books. Cavalieri was awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from WASH INDEP REVIEW. She received the George Garrett Award from AWP for Service to literature; two Allen Ginsberg Awards ; Paterson Award; Bordighera Poetry Prize; and the inaugural Columbia Award; A Pen Fiction Award; plus CPB’s Silver Medal. She was married to the late sculptor Kenneth Flynn. They had 4 children 4 grandchildren; and now there’s a new greatgrandchild.

 

 

 

Nin Andrews is the author of several poetry books, most recently Our Lady of the Orgasm. Her next collection, Miss August, is due out in a few weeks. Her website is Ninandrews.com

Marc Vincenz, Editor, Translator, Poet & Book Designer (by Nin Andrews)

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts I am doing this week to honor those who help make others’ literary lives possible, and sometimes even wonderful. Yesterday I talked about Danny Lawless, the editor of Plume. 

 

Danny Lawless’s partner in crime, co-editor, Marc Vincenz, is nothing short of a literary phenomenon. Born in Hong Kong to British-Swiss parents, he has lived in so many countries and languages, I wonder what language he dreams in. And which poets from around the world have been his primary influences. What language holds his music?

A translator of many German-language poets, his translation of Klaus Merz's collection, Unexpected Development, was a finalist for the 2015 Cliff Becker Book Translation Prize and is forthcoming from White Pine Press next year.

As a poet, not surprisingly, he is a man of many voices. His poems have a mythic and otherworldly quality, and seem to travel to other realms, far beyond expected and easily inhabited definitions. One senses mystical influences, as if he is seeking nothing less than to capture “the song of the world” or “the rapture of being alive,” in spite of inherent dualities. Yet, there is something both spellbinding and intimate in his work. He is also a deeply relevant and committed poet, with poems addressing the environmental demise of our planet. Whether ecstatic or despairing, witty or wild, his poems have a unique lyricism and vision.

His poem, “Damaged Music,” for example, addresses both his environmental concerns and his spiritual longing.

 

Damaged Music

Ache in the old wisdom tooth,

an experience of self-fulfilling

prophecy, a damaged music

and acres of elephant bones.

Here we go: Another evening

of cold fiction, the starved

ghosts of ancient citadels.

I wish I might breathe sparrows

into the sky or wind-weather

the wild grass. I yearn

for the smell of day

in spring, for a language

without words. May I

one day climb out

of that honeycomb of life

and enter another world

where there are no numbers

to contain all of this, and

the smooth, bloody

thickness of oil flows

into the smut

of an ever-endless sky.

One of my favorite Marc Vincenz poems is this beautiful poem, “Cassandra Knows How to Die of Beauty” in which he echoes Emily Dickinson:

 

Cassandra Knows How to Die of Beauty

 

Who knows

what it’s like to be dead

when we incessantly chatter

between rooms?

The name, love,

is crossed out.

Oh to write

letter after letter

belaboring

a fruitless cause.

A letter, of course,

seems like immortality.

 

So I thought I'd ask Marc a few questions. 

 

1. Marc, I wondered if you would answer some of my early questions, such as: what language do you dream in? What poets have influenced you?

The language of dreams. A good question, Nin. I’m not sure; do we dream in a specific language? Certainly I have had conversations in my dreams in several languages: English, German, Spanish, Chinese and a smattering of poor Icelandic, but whether the dream is “narrated” or “set” in any specific language, I don’t think I can really be sure. Every once in a while, a poem or the title of a poem emerges from a dream. For that reason I keep a notepad on my bedside table; I have been known to wake up with a jolt in the middle of a night and scribble down the residue of what still lingers. Recently this occurred with a poem about my father, “My Father’s Familiar.” It was probably three o’clock in the morning, and the entire poem poured onto the page as if it had been written somewhere else long ago. The poem materialized in English. My sense is that my dreams are multilingual, but that the root language is English—which is the language I speak with my mother and the language I mostly think in.

I am an avid reader of poetry. I probably spend over three hours every day reading poems. Normally, I have many books of poetry going at the same time. At this moment, I am reading Merwin’s translation of Dante’s Purgatorio; Terese Svoboda’s first book of poems, Laughing Africa; Campbell McGrath’s XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century; Hank Lazer’s recent book, Poems Hidden in Plain View; Hertha Kräftner’s Kühle Sterne (Chilling Stars); Kevin Prufer’s Churches; Richard Kenny’s The Invention of Zero (a hell of a wild ride); William Mathew’s Selected Poems; Women Poets of China, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung; and I just got my copy of Bill Knott’s Selected Poems (edited by the late Tom Lux) … and that’s not to mention the whole slew of poems I read from submissions, manuscripts selected for publication, the translations I am working on, or new candidates I am seeking out. Right now I am translating Klaus Merz’s selected poems (1963–2016), An Audible Blue. I am awash in poetic voices. In some way, they all have influenced me.

Here are some I have soft spots for: Tomas Tranströmer, Anna Akhmatova, Emily Dickinson, D. H. Lawrence, Nellie Sachs, Eugenio Montale, Yves Bonnefoy, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Robinson Jeffers, Reginald Shepherd, James Wright, Zbignew Herbert, W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Milosz, Novalis, Olav H. Hauge, Thoreau, Heraclitus and of course, Shakespeare and Goethe.

2. How many languages were spoken in your childhood?

I was brought up in a household that spoke three main languages: English, German and Rhetoromanish. On top of that, since early childhood (having been born in Hong Kong), I had the sounds of Cantonese and Mandarin clanking in my head. As a small child in the 1960s and ’70s, I played and scrapped with the children of the market-stall owners of Hong Kong’s Stanley Market and spoke fluent Cantonese. But my father worked with people from all over the world, and thus I grew up in a home that never had less than five languages careering around at any one time.

3. When did you decide to become a poet?

My first literary mentor as an undergrad at Duke University was Reynolds Price. He was constantly telling me that I might run aground on the same shores that William Blake was beached—with my mystical language and magical approach to verse. Reynolds preached complete clarity, and was mostly lauded for it (although he is predominately known for his fiction). And yet, Reynolds, aside from being a poet, fiction writer, essayist and novelist, was also a Milton scholar. Reynolds noted that T. S. Eliot himself famously criticized Milton’s syntax, saying it was “dictated by a demand for verbal music, instead of any demand of sense.” A little strange coming from the author of that oh-so-modernist The Waste Land. I am certain that Reynolds was delighted with this dichotomy. It may have been that fine line between syntax and sense that urged me to become a writer of poems. After I left Duke, I had made my decision. Of course, it took me many years and several incarnations before I began sending them out into the world, shepherding them between the covers of books.

 

4. Tell me about the art of translations. I am certain you don’t translate as they say Bly did, with a bilingual dictionary. And what inspired you to become a translator?

Originally I was satisfied with simply working on my own poetry—and fiction (my first novella is coming out soon from Spuyten Duvil Press), yet from time to time, these periods of silence would arise, when somehow I had over-saturated myself in my own imagined worlds. These periods sometimes occur when I have labored over one book or set of poems for so long that I need a complete change of scenery. The craft of translating helps me achieve a semblance of perspective on my own work. Anyway, it was during one of these phases when I was standing in the German Literature section of the Reykjavik Library and stumbled upon the work of the Swiss poet Erika Burkart. I began translating her book, Geheimbrief into English (it was recently released by Cervena Barva Press as Secret Letter) almost immediately, and without any particular goal in mind. After some months, I realized I had translated the whole book. Since then—almost nine years ago now, literary translation has become a part of my daily routine.

When I translate poetry from the German, my initial approach is much as I would own work: a rough sketch, an impression, a sense of how that voice on the page quivers. I attempt to crystalize the tone, the cadence, the rhythm and then the intent in English. All this is done almost fleetingly, without (after the initial reading) specifically referring back to the original. I go through this process, editing and refining for several rounds. It is only much later, when I have a working draft in English in my hands that I begin to compare both texts side-by-side. Sometimes, I will have diverged significantly from the root text; yet, it is precisely in these moments of divergence that I might discover the unique vibrations of the original. Once again, as with writing my own work, I need to return again and again.

I have had the good fortune also of working with a number of the poets I translate, listening together to find that frequency that brings their German into English. Their ears and eyes have also helped me meet these obstacles, and to realize that it is often in the most “untranslatable” passages that the magic may be found.

5. Could we have a poem from Unexpected Development? And could you say a few words about Klaus Merz?

With pleasure. Here’s “In the Course of Time”:

The dignity of travel

is seriously remiss,

establishes my companion:

We hurtle about in high-capacity boxcars

straight through time, ear-

marked, industrious, hunched over. And

behind the Potemkin

passengers, the world

ceaselessly scatters.

 

Klaus’s work is exceedingly condensed and concise. Initially, it appears to be sparse and, perhaps a little simple, yet on second glance it hits you, somehow resonating outside the page. When it sinks it, and sometimes it takes a few moments, you never quite walk the same—at least that’s my experience of it. Klaus’s poems are sound bites, intimate moments, distilled flashes of insight, and, for the most part, no more than five lines; you get a whiff of Ancients having walked here. It’s almost as if his work comes directly out of the Japanese haiku tradition. I think it has something to do with the Zen majesty of the Swiss alpine landscapes.

Although surely first and foremost a poet, Klaus is also a prize-winning fiction writer. His novella, Jakob schläft (Jacob Asleep), is, as literary fiction goes, a German-language bestseller. It was very recently published in English as part of a collection of three novellas by Seagull Books, Stigmata of Bliss (beautifully translated by Tess Lewis). Unexpected Development is the second collection of Klaus’s I have translated. The first was Out of the Dust (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), and right now, I am working on a third book of translations, Klaus’s selected poems (1963–2016), An Audible Blue.

6. How does the poetry world in Germany compare to that of the U.S.?

Most of the German-language poets I have translated are Swiss. As Swiss poet and publisher Markus Bundi has told me, “You can count the readers of poetry in Switzerland in a book of matches.” In Switzerland there are virtually no literary journals—online or otherwise. Much of the promotion of the books and the literary events surrounding poetry is in the hands of the “literature houses”—and the likelihood that you will get invited to read or debate poetical works boils down to the cred and connections of your publisher.

The poets I know in Switzerland who get their poetry collections published by higher-profile literary presses do so because they also write fiction. Basically, it is understood that if you want to publish your poetry, you had better deliver the occasional novel to make it worthwhile for the publisher. Today, in the German-language literary world, you find almost no poetry-only authors. And yes, in Germany, larger presses like Suhrkamp Verlag do release the occasional book of poetry—but these are few and far between, little literary prestige items to hold up to that flickering candle for posterity.

There is much to say on this subject—which we don’t have time and space for here. Germany, Switzerland and Austria, although catering to the same language audience, each have their little anomalies. Of the three countries, Austria, with its well-developed grant and stipend system, is probably the most supportive of individual artists. Basically, with the exception of a handful of small presses, few publishers are willing to take risks on poetry these days. To survive on poetry—at the very least, to create the semblance of a poetic career (in the U.S., there is still the “option” of the academic path) is a virtual impossibility in the German-language literary world.

7. You have a new book coming out … Could you say a few words about it? Maybe post a poem here from that collection?

Well, last December, Ampersand Books released a limited-edition illustrated chapbook of my long poem, Sibylline. Spuyten Duyvil is just about to release my translation of Jürg Amann’s last collection of poetry, Lifelong Bird Migration, but what I have been working on most recently—as yet unfinished—is a collection of my own work, The Syndicate of Water and Light. Here’s one from that collection-in-progress:

A Final Gathering

Filling up stolen time

with bids and

deceptions, with

an evening sky

flowing into

the house—

it is lovely

to see

above the city

in the flight

of the snow geese,

valor surpasses

honorable exile—

still, the party continues

and the streetnoise

winds down,

beneath the sniffles

and the coughs and

that faint voice enduring

murky suspicions.

I might be thinking

we are divided

like thieves, when

a trembling pre-

monition that things

are void

of substance, suddenly

washes over me.

8. How did you and Danny begin working together?

Danny was introduced to me by the prolific translator and poet, Alex Cigale, whose translation of the Russian absurdist poet Daniil Kharms was just released by Northwestern University Press. Danny and I struck up a friendship quickly, realizing that our poetic tastes mirrored each other. In 2013, MadHat Press joined forces with Plume to begin publishing the Plume poetry anthology. Danny also invited me to join his editorial team at Plume online. Since then, aside from publishing the anthology, we launched a new imprint at MadHat Press, Plume Editions, which, among other things, now also publishes single-author poetry chapbooks and collections—and soon, translations too. Plume Editions recently released a chapbook by W. S. Di Piero, The Man on the Water; but has many new books lined up for release, including full collections by Jeff Friedman, Chris Buckley, Sally Bliumis-Dunn, JT Barbarese and Jennifer O’Grady.

9. You also design the book covers for MadHat. Could you talk about the designing process? And maybe show two or three of your recent covers?

In a way, the cover designing process is a form of translation. More often than not, I’ll let the books sink in, reflect, reflect again—and then, all of a sudden an image will arrive in my mind. For example: fog on a beach, or a house reflected in a flowing river, or a lunar landscape, or … anyway, you get the idea. It is very much an artistic process—finding the image that fits, then—the typography that sinks in or soars out of the visual reflections of the book. Over the years, I have compiled an archive of my own photos, doodles, paintings, visuals captured on the fly. I often reach into my pot to see if something fits what I have in my mind’s eye. If not, I’ll create an image from scratch. For example the cover image for Michael Anania’s newest collection, Continuous Showings (MadHat Press, 2017) is based on a photo that I took in Varanasi, India; Matt Babcock’s new book, Strange Terrain (MadHat, 2017) features a photo that I took in southwestern Iceland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Hong Kong to British-Swiss parents, Marc Vincenz is the author of eight collections of poetry and several chapbooks. Vincenz is also the translator of many French-, Romanian- and German-language poets, including the Herman Hesse Prize winner Klaus Merz, Erika Burkart, Alexander Xaver Gwerder, Robert Walser, Ion Monoran. Jacques Chessex, and Jürg Amann. He has published eleven collections of translations. His translation of Klaus Merz's collection, Unexpected Development, was a finalist for the 2015 Cliff Becker Book Translation Prize and is forthcoming from White Pine Press. Vincenz has received many grants from the Swiss Arts Council and a fellowship from the Literary Colloquium Berlin. His own work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic, Georgian and Chinese; Bucharest’s Tractus Arte Press released a Romanian translation of his collection The Propaganda Factory, or Speaking of Trees at the 2015 Bucharest Book Fair. He is Executive Editor of MadHat Press and Plume Editions, International Editor of Plume Poetry, Co-Editor of Fulcrum, and lives and writes in Western Massachusetts.

 

 

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections. Her website is ninandrews.com.

 

Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: Richard Blanco

Los contempladores, acrylic on canvas, 2004, Tomás Sánchez

The Island Within

by Richard Blanco

for Ruth Behar

I’m still thinking about your porch light
like a full moon casting a foggy halo
in the frigid air last night, the bare oaks
branching into the sky like nerve endings
inches away from the frozen stars,
the pink gables of your Victorian home
protesting yet another winter for you
captive in Ann Arbor as you practice
mambo by the fireplace. I’m following
your red-velvet shoes to conga beats
and bongo taps taking your body, but
not your life, from the snow mantling
your windows outside, 1,600 miles
away from Cuba. I’m tasting the cafecito
you made, the slice of homemade flan
floating in burnt sugar like the stories
you told me you can’t finish writing,
no matter how many times you travel
through time back to Havana to steal
every memory ever stolen from you.

You’re a thief anyone would forgive,
wanting only to imagine faces for names
chiseled on the graves of your family
at Guanabacoa, walk on Calle Aguacate
and pretend to meet the grandfather
you never met at his lace shop for lunch,
or pray the Kaddish like your mother
at the synagogue in El Vedado, stand
on the steps there like you once did
in a photo you can’t remember taking.
I confess I pitied you, still trying to reach
that unreachable island within the island
you still call home. I thought I was done
with Cuba, tired of filling in the blanks,
but now I’m not sure. Maybe if I return
just once more, walk the sugarcane fields
my father once cut, drive down the road
where my mother once peddled guavas
to pay for textbooks, sit on the porch
of my grandmother’s house, imagine her
still in the kitchen making arroz-con-leche—
maybe then I’ll have an answer for you
last night when you asked me: Would you
move to Cuba? Would you die there?

Richard Blanco is the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in US history—the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban-exiled parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity and place characterize his body of work, including three  poetry collections (Looking for the Gulf Motel, Directions to the Beach of the Dead, and City of a Hundred Fires); and two memoirs (The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood and For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey). The University of Pittsburgh Press has published commemorative chapbooks of One Today, Boston Strong, and Matters of the Sea, the poem he wrote and presented at the historic reopening of the US Embassy in Havana. Blanco’s many awards include the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, and a Lambda Literary Award for Memoir. He is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, a Phi Beta Kappa Alumnus Member, and has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, Colby College, the University of Rhode Island, and Lesley University. In 2015, The Academy of American Poets named him its first Education Ambassador.

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“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles. 

Editor and Poet: Danny Lawless [by Nin Andrews]

This is the third in a series of blog posts I am doing this week to honor those whom I call star-makers, meaning those who help make others’ literary lives possible, and sometimes even wonderful.

It goes without saying that every poet is dependent on his or her editors. I’ve been amazed the few times I have guest-edited a magazine or helped judge a book contest—at just how much time and worry goes into the process. And most poetry editors do it for free.

A year or two ago, when I was guest editing an issue of Poets/Artists, I wrote what I thought was a nice rejection letter to an aspiring poet. His poems were in the “almost” category, and I wanted to let him know how much I had enjoyed reading his work. I sent off what I thought was a kind email, and received back an outraged response. Who the eff do you think you are, Nin Andrews? Well, I’ll tell you who you are . . . Over the next few weeks, I received a barrage of hateful and threatening emails from this poet. 

It occurred to me then that there is no such thing as a “nice rejection letter.” It also occurred to me that form letters have their place in the world. I was reminded of a friend who told me that David Lehman hated her. She just knew that was why she was never in Best American Poetry. Another poet told me that he would never get published in Poetry for the same reason. The editor, whom he had met briefly, had no respect for him. It seems that editors, despite their good intentions, despite everything they do for us poets and writers, are often objects of blame and rage.

Yet many editors are nothing short of self-sacrificing. While they are busy championing others, they often fail to champion themselves. I don’t know of a poet as self-effacing as Danny Lawless, for example, who is the editor of the wonderful online magazine, Plume, and of the series of books and chapbooks published by MadHat Press. He and his brilliant co-editor, Marc Vincenz, are two of my favorite editors to date. But when I suggested I interview Danny for this series on the star-makers of the poetry world, Danny immediately tried to bow out.

In my opinion, Danny Lawless is not only a great editor, he is also a unique and talented poet. Whether writing of his Catholic background, of his great grandmother’s backyard cremation or of his brother’s mental breakdown or his sister’s death, Lawless writes with emotional control, honesty, dark wit, and a clear eye for detail. His poems are at once witty and sad, profound and moving.

The title poem of his forthcoming book, “The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With,” first published in The Cortland Review, is nothing short of breath-taking. I don’t think I need to do more than post it here and point out that it has already received 2.6 thousand Likes. 

 

The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With

By Danny Lawless

Was a cubit long and weighed half as much as an average newborn U.S. baby.

Who sold it to her remains a matter of police conjecture, a "collector," most likely, or a friend in need

Of cash; no receipt ever surfaced. What she did between the time she got it and the act

Adds little to the picture: coffee at McDonalds, a few words exchanged with a balding man in an army

Jacket outside the 7-11 on Broadway, no phone calls, no letter. When my mother got the

News she was hanging sheets to dry on the backyard clothes line; neighbors heard her

Cry two blocks over and thought a cat had died. (Where, exactly, Father spent that afternoon: c.f

Conjecture.) How Irish-pretty she was, pale, petite, kind, smart and slyly funny are duly noted now on

Her birthday, in photographs and little tales that end in tears that end in silence: we the cage

And Rilke's panther pacing there, a thousand bars and beyond the bars no world but why.

 

Another Danny Lawless poem I admire is his poem, “Ant,” which speaks to both his existential angst and his characteristic Catholic humor. Again, no explanation is needed. The poem is a pure delight.

 

Ant

I confess it was I

Who stole a bag of hosts

From the sacristy

After serving eight o’clock Mass

And ate them for breakfast

With a bottle of chocolate milk

Behind the dentist’s office.

Who in eighth grade got a blowjob

From Angela

In the choir loft

One stormy spring afternoon

While the faces

Of your fiery prophets

Darkened with rage.

I who stole twenty tabs of oxycotin

From Gramma

When she had her teeth pulled.

Not to mention her car,

Which I wrecked and left somewhere in Tampa.

I who so many things.

Yet still you find me,

Lord,

This fine October morning,

Head bowed

Before the sports pages.

You who are the author

Of my most intimate desires

Ringing your bell

As if I were a child at recess,

And sending I see your most esteemed

Black-robed emissary

To fetch me.

   * * * 

So I thought I’d ask Danny Lawless a few questions here . . .

NA: I wondered if you could say a few words about your life as a poet—when did you decide to become a poet? Could you say a few words about your writing process?

DL: As you know, these decisions are rarely epiphanic. (I might have made that word up.) Ours was a reading family, though not initially of the literary type—the backs of cereal boxes, Reader’s Digest Condensed Novels, that sort of thing. When my brother was just becoming ill (schizophrenia), I recall he was —eerily as it turns out —obsessed with Conrad Aiken’s short story “Silent Snow, Secret Snow.” So, being nine, I read that and Guadalcanal Diary. Poetry came later – fifteen or so. My aunt, a Mercy nun, got her Ph.D. at Notre dame, with a dissertation on Stevens, and left a stack of his books around. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” probably was the first poem I ever read.

My writing process: in a word, slow. I tend to come out of the gate strong, then pffft! the piece evaporates. So I start another one, and again the disappearing act. Eventually I have ten or twelve such quarter-poems, and either something finally clicks, or I cannibalize the others to make one poem, if I’m lucky.

NA: Is it hard to balance being an editor and a poet? What is your favorite non-literary pastime?

DL: It didn’t used to be, hard I mean. When I started Plume, I hadn’t really written much in, I am mortified to say, twenty-five or thirty years! Reading, always, but this writing lacuna remains a mystery. Then, suddenly, within a few months of Plume’s first issue, I wrote a poem over the course of a week, then another, and another. It’s been the same ever since. Non-literary pastimes? Well, I’m from Louisville, Kentucky — if you’re a sports fan you know that means basketball. Sometimes I joke that there, your father hands you a basketball and a pack of Marlboro’s for your twelfth birthday. I say a joke, because it’s actually more like your eighth birthday. I played pick-up with colleagues well into my forties, and when they dropped out, with my students. Now I shoot around every day —we have a hoop in the alley out back —but have over the last decade or so become a runner. I like the solitude – The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was another favorite of my youth, and another odd earlier marker of what would come. By the way, it occurs to me that what is hard is reading so much marvelous poetry every day, in my inbox or from Submissions —terrifying and paralyzing, sometimes, to understand that you will never be that good.

NA: Could you say a few words about your forthcoming collection? When will it be   out?

DL: The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With and Other Poems is the book’s title: quite the conversation-starter, right? It will be released in Spring, 2018, from Salmon.

I’m still working on the arrangement of poems; I have a few “sections,” and some ideas, but most of the poems have been published —well, ¾ anyway. I hope, as you so kindly suggest, it is humorous, and dark, and witty, and sad, and profound —but, I’d settle for any two of those. We’ll see.

NA: What was the inspiration for Plume? MadHat? How did you decide to become an editor of Plume? What is the secret to its success?

DL: The origin myth of Plume I’ve recounted before, in one of those annoying Editor’s Notes I scribble out usually on the day before we need to go live with an issue: Creative Writing class, student, back row, clearly not paying any attention to my lecture as he scans his computer; I stroll back, expecting Facebook, games, porn – anything but what I discover a literary magazine he’s putting together. Hmmm. Meet me in my office: Let’s talk. Semester ends. We’ve become friends. Weeks of thinking I could do this… become weeks of laying out a website at Starbucks, emailing my favorite poets asking for work. The first to respond, within half an hour: Maureen McLane. Then others, and by the end of the week we had our first issue’s quota filled and half of the next’s. Who knew? Not I, that’s for sure.

The inspiration a story both shorter and longer. I was a terrible student. In high school and college, later, somehow having acquired the notion that I knew more than my teachers, whom I considered squares, pedants —a notion let’s say they did not share. So, I read what I liked; for better or worse, I am largely an autodidact. (I once had “Roquentin” printed on a few of my tee shirts.) Anyway, I made the Louisville Public Library my home away from home, starting at fifteen or thereabouts. I’d wander through the stacks, taking down this or that book, until one day a year or so in, I tumbled on Cioran. A Short History of Decay and The Temptation to Exist. His aphorisms were like poetry but no poetry I’d ever encountered. His indexes were my guide for a good spell. Then I found the surrealists and the prose poem, through Benedikt’s magnificent anthologies. (I loved them so much I taught myself the rudiments of French in order to read the originals and remain an unreconstructed Francophile.) Onward to the South Americans, the Eastern Europeans, the Japanese…albeit in the process overlooking almost entirely what was happening in America then —in the late sixties and early seventies. So, here I was, gob-smacked by these poets no one around me, certainly not my teachers, had ever read, or heard of. And there, too, though I didn’t realize it at the time, was the inspiration, I’m certain, for Plume. Someday, somehow, I’d do something to preserve this astounding work; I felt like a monk, the library in my head the scriptorium. Grandiose, eh? But I was very young, and that’s what the young do best. When the journal came along, I saw my chance. The very first idea was to publish these saints, as I had come to see them: Char, Reverdy, Trakl, Montale, Parra, Miłosz, Celan, Pavese, Guillevic, Machado, Follain – especially Follain, the most sadly under-read of them all, perhaps, although Merwin saved him to some extent. (Plume’s original name was Canisy, the title of Follain’s ineffable memoire in prose poems of his childhood in that tiny village.) And that remains its guiding spirit, I guess, even if we have strayed from the letter of its unwritten law.

As for the secret of its success —assuming we have been a success, and to whatever infinitesimal degree, I really think it has something to do with three things: 1) the number of poems we publish each issue is twelve —the Goldilocks principle, hit upon by chance, luck, again; “just right” for reading in a single sitting, like the ideal short story; 2) our “eclecticism” as so many readers term it — or “no aesthetic ax to grind” —one of our blurbs, from Jeff Skinner. In a single issue one might encounter, for example, Cole Swenson or Charles Bernstein, Alicia Ostriker, Sharon Olds, Bruce Smith, G.C. Waldrep, Nin Andrews, translations of Hsia Yü or Jacques Réda; and 3) our look” —clean, spare, without ads or other distractions that might take away from the thing-itself, the words on the page. (Yet, while I say this, I am reminded that we have added book reviews, essays, and Featured Selections of ten or so poems from a single author, and are fooling around with adding audio/visual interviews…one must to some extent keep up with the times, after all.)

NA: Can you give me a highlight—one of your happiest editing experiences?

DL: But there are so many! Generally, though, it’s kind of one long highlight: getting to “meet” and sometimes become friends with, in a way, with poets I have admired forever. Never did I imagine I’d correspond, for example, with Gerry Stern, Tomaž Šalamun, Jean Valentine, Nina Cassian, Lydia Davis, Yves Bonnefoy. Star-struck. But then, of course, that wears off, and they become, as they must, people, with their endearing little pleasures and strange antipathies. But, one editing highlight: a well-known poet asked me to take a look at a poem whose last few lines he wasn’t happy with. Which I did, with the greatest trepidation, and thought I had an answer, sent it off. That same day, he replied with the most gracious, heartfelt email, saying that I’d better watch out or soon I’d have poems pouring in over the transom. So, there’s that.

NA: I’d love to close with a poem of your choice, either from your own work or from Plume.

DL: Thanks so much, Nin. I think I’ll close with two, if you don’t mind, both  exemplars of the “I could never be that good” category and both from Plume.

Linda Bierds’ “The Bird Trap,” a poem I’ve read no doubt a dozen times —each reading a revelation, for the craft, surely, but also for how it illuminates the delicate, grave affinities between the two geniuses at its heart. The other Phillis Levin’s masterful “The Stroller,” which begins with the essential question of allpoetry, or at least one of its timeless queries: “And aren’t we all like this…”

                                       The Bird Trap
                         --after the painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger

But for clusters of red clothing, the painting
is monochrome, snow and river
in that ivory-going-to-gray a winter evening offers.

And under the evening, under
the sky and smoky horizon, traversing
the painting’s lower half, deep snow and the frozen river
exactly divide the scene:

two dozen birds near a riverfront yard, six of them flying;
two dozen people on the ice, six with arms extended.

And under their laughter and guttural chirrups
lies nothing but the scrape of skates
and the dull chatter of curling stones
as they slip, like great rounds of granite bread,
toward some gradually vanishing target
etched on the scored ice.

*                     *

Movements Alan Turing would love, had he seen the painting.
The balancing figures, of course, and the curler,
bent to a stone, putting a little English on it.
But also the target, invisibly sinking away--
rings, inner rings, and a center button—becoming
at last just a pattern in the mind.

*         *

It is 1952. The charge: gross indecency. The parlor:
cluttered. On a cheap violin, Turing is playing
“Cockles and Mussels”, the music’s wordless barrow
scraping past Wills and Rimmer, two seated detectives
who cannot stop mouthing sweet Molly Malone. Why not,
for these minutes, listen, the bugger so welcoming,
so quick to confess, as if two men together…as if
two men complicitly trying
the three condemned exchanges Turing so openly listed,
were free? And isn’t it almost legal, he asked,
and who is displaced, the world so shattered
we must speak in codes, in key clicks and ciphers,
rings, inner rings, the bow lifted, his unshaven chin
on the rest, breath in, breath out, fogging
the body, fogging the thin, yellowed,
almost mother-of-pearl varnish, over
and over, alive, alive-o.

*                       *

Two perils: in the lower left foreground
a large, dark hole in the ice; in the lower right
a bird trap—a heavy, wooden door
propped up at one end by a stick.

It makes a little lean-to, a little respite
in the snow, its soft floor sprinkled with seeds,

and its trip-rope, tied to the stick, so pale
in the winter yard that Turing must step closer,
must place his face near the old wood
and stiffened leather hinges

to see the rope arc upward--from the stick, through
the yard, then on through a narrow window
where someone invisibly watches.

Or doesn’t. The window so close to the painting’s edge
the trap seems harmless, unmanned, a simple
geometric shape, a kind of static pendulum
set to capture the turning world. And did they know,

       *                             *

Turing asked, that the proper way
to launch a pendulum’s bob
is by thread and candle flame? The bob
tied above its downward arc, the candle
burning through the tie. Foucault—more wine?--
knew this. Did they? No chance for interference then.
No clammy hands or coughs or tics.
No common human veerings.

*                      *

The house is almost outside the scene. A slice
of wall and roofline, a slash of bird-blind window.

In the foreground, left and right,
two perils, passive: allegory’s lolling greed.

             *                               *

One takes the utmost care, he said.
Clear path. Near-windless room. Star shape
painted on the floor to illustrate the journey.

Symmetry. Trajectory.

Bright candle. Silk thread.

The Stroller

—Phillis Levin                                                        

from The Plume Anthology of Poetry V 3

Odessa Steps,

Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”

And aren’t we all like this at times,
Bumping helplessly down the stairs

Into a street surging with fire,
The one whose eyes were upon us

Out of control of the handle
Attached to our carriage?

Why are we shocked when
The glasses drop and the face

Of horror crowds the screen?
The reel crackles, there is

No end in sight,
Nowhere to flee.

We have seen them before,
People who look surprised

To have lived so long: open
An album, pass a wooden door.

Late summer, the quiet creatures
Scurrying through grass

Know it’s time to start over,
Theirs a genesis we cannot reenter.

 

Daniel Lawless

3.3.2017

Daniel Lawless’s book The Gun My Sister Killed Herself With and Other Poems is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry Press, 2017. He has published poems recently in Cortland Review, Louisville Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Common, Manhattan Review, Ploughshares, B O D Y, Prairie Schooner, FIELD, Fulcrum, Asheville Review, , etc. He is the founder and editor of Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry.

 

 

Jen Campbell, Poet, Writer & YOUTUBE Reporter Extraordinaire [by Nin Andrews]

This is the second in a series of blog posts I am doing this week to honor those who help make others’ literary lives possible---and even wonderful at times.

Another woman to whom I and many writers owe a great deal of gratitude is the British author and former bookseller, Jen Campbell, who spends a part of her days talking about all things literary and promoting books and writers on her popular YOUTUBE channel. She is at once witty, charming, brilliant, and inspiring. Listening to her explain anything from a fairytale to a poetry book to a novel to various aspects of the writer’s life is both fun and enlightening. But be forewarned. Jen Campbell can be addictive. I have binge-watched her on occasion. She is my favorite virtual bookshop-stop.

An award-winning poet and writer in her own right, Jen Campbell has written several books including The Bookshop Book, which reads is like an ode to bookshops around the globe. In it, she describes 300 bookshops on six continents and includes insights from famous authors about their love of books and book stores.

In her section on the United States, she quotes Tracy Chevalier suggesting that the ideal bookshop might have chocolates, hidden among the books. (I’m all for that!) And Bill Bryson describes the literary discoveries one has in a bookshop--that ability to find “books that are forgotten classics, or books that didn’t get the chance to be classics because they weren’t discovered properly.” I think that is exactly why bookshops are so necessary. So many great books never get their moment in the sun, and with the Amazon take-over, how are we to discover them?

Her book, Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores, is delightful and funny and sometimes a bit shocking. Made up entirely made of quotes of things people say in bookshops, the book reminds me of some of the more humorous moments spent working at the New Dominion Bookshop (which I posted about last Friday.)  

A few examples:

Customer: I’m looking for some books on my kid’s summer reading list. Do you have Tequila Mockingbird?

Customer: Excuse me, do you have Flowers for Arugula?

Customer: Excuse me, do you have Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof?

 

But the scariest one was this one:

Customer: Hi, I just wanted to ask: did Anne Frank ever write a sequel?

Bookseller: . . .

Customer: I really enjoyed her first book.

Bookseller: Her diary?

Customer: Yes, her diary.

Bookseller: Her diary wasn’t fictional.

Customer: Really?

Bookseller: Yes . . . She really dies at the end—that’s why the diary finishes. She was taken to a concentration camp.

Customer: Oh . . . that’s terrible.

Bookseller: Yes, it was awful.

Customer: I mean, what a shame, you know? She was such a good writer.

I am so looking forward to Jen Campbell’s forthcoming books, a children’s book, Franklin’s Flying Bookshop, and her collection of short stories, The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night.

NA: I was wondering if you could say a few words about your transition from bookseller to YOUTUBE reporter. Do you miss the bookshop?

JC: I loved working in bookselling, and there are definitely parts of it that I miss. Especially pressing books into the hands of children. Children always say the best things, too. Such as:

Little girl (pointing to a cupboard under one of the bookshelves): Can you get to Narnia through there?

Me: Unfortunately, I don’t think you can.

Little girl: Oh. Our wardrobe at home doesn’t work for getting to Narnia, either.

Me: No?

Little girl: No. Dad says it’s because mum bought it at IKEA. 

Creating videos on Booktube is now part of my job, along with being a writer and other freelance work.

NA: You spend a lot of your time reading and promoting other writers, and yet you are also a prolific writer with two new books coming out this year. How do you find the books you promote?

JC: In bookshops and also by looking through the catalogues of small presses on their websites. I’m also approached by publishers with 30-40 review requests a week, but I only say yes to a couple of those. I only review books I want to read - that’s why Booktube is a different space to other media; I’m not paid to review books (though occasionally I work with companies such as the Baileys Prize and Northern Ballet). I hope it’s like checking in with a friendly bookseller.

NA: And you still have time to write?

JC:  Writing is my job (first and foremost) but obviously it wasn’t always that way. There were many years of working seven days a week in a bookshop, getting up at 5am to write before work, and then writing again in the evening. If you’re passionate about something, you have to make the time to do it.

NA:  On your YOUTUBE series, I particularly love your analysis of fairy tales. Your forthcoming short story collection is influenced by fairytales? Could you say a few words about it? Maybe give us an excerpt?

JC: No excerpts, I’m afraid - I’m not allowed to do that yet ;) - but I can say that it opens with a heart arriving in the post. Here’s the blurb:

Spirits in jam jars, mini-apocalypses, animal hearts and side shows.

A girl runs a coffin hotel on a remote island.

A boy is worried his sister has two souls.

A couple are rewriting the history of the world.

And mermaids are on display at the local aquarium.

The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night is a collection of twelve haunting stories; modern fairy tales brimming with magic, outsiders and lost souls. Advance praise has already come in from Carys Bray who called it ‘enchanting and whimsical, curiously beautiful and illuminating’ and Claire Fuller: ‘This book is full of character and magic, and I found myself mesmerised.’

NA: I’m wondering how the literary world in London compares with that in the U.S.?

Do you give a lot of readings? At bookshops? Pubs? Universities? Is there much of an audience for poetry?

JC: When a book comes out, I go on book tour - talk at bookshops and libraries, book festivals etc. The rest of the time, I give talks at universities or do workshops in schools. I run workshops online, too. There is an audience for poetry, but it’s smaller than an audience for other genres; I think that’s generally the case in most places.

NA: I love your poetry book, The Hungry Ghost Festival and am looking forward to reading the girl aquarium. I was wondering if we could close with a poem of your choice.

JC:  I’m not sure if you’re asking for one of mine, or a poem by someone else so I will offer both. x

This fantastic poem by Rebecca Perry and you can find some of mine here.

 

Jen Campbell is an award winning poet and short story writer. Her debut short story collection, 'The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night,' is forthcoming from Two Roads (November 2017) and her first children's book 'Franklin's Flying Bookshop' will be published by Thames & Hudson (August 2017). 

Jen is also the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops series, and The Bookshop Book. Her poetry pamphlet The Hungry Ghost Festival is published by The Rialto, and her collection in progress, the girl aquarium, won an Eric Gregory Award in 2016. 

Jen worked as a bookseller for ten years and now runs a Youtube channel, where she talks about all things books. She is currently a judge for this year's Somerset Maugham Award. She grew up in the north east of England and now lives in London.

Nin Andrews next book, Miss August, can be pre-ordered now, and is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press. You can find out more about her and sign up for her emails by going to ninandrews.com.

Nancy Mitchell interviews David Lehman for PLUME

What was it like to be interviewed by Nancy Mitchell, the poet and painter whom Nin Andrews profiled on the Best American Poetry blog (Jan 24, 2017)? I loved the exchanges while they were going on and again when Nancy put them together for Plume. Read it yourself and you'll see. It is always a pleasure to be drawn into an unexpected direction, which is what happened. I think both nancy and I were surprised at the turns the conversation took. 

If you haven't read Nancy Mitchell's stunning poem "What About," here it is as featured by Nin Andrews: --- DL

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

-- Nancy Mitchell

Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: Alexandra Lytton Regalado

"Pericos" (the flock), by Amber Rose, from the series "El Aviario." Year: 2014 Technique: Ink and acrylic on 1970s El Salvador legal paper.

                               you can count on it:

La Mano

by Alexandra Lytton Regalado

            For the more than 60,000 children from Central America who cross the border unaccompanied.
            With lines from Maya Angelou and Richard Wilbur

 Arcing above our apartment building,
          above the rousing city and green skirts
of the San Salvador volcano, a flock
          of wild parakeets comes to roost
outside our window; my nine-month son
          rests his head on my chest and all I want
is to draw the curtains, but he’s coughed
          all night and now his breathing
is slow, near sleep, though his eyes snap open
          with each squawk. I imagine the parakeets
preening their emerald feathers, joyful in their ceremony
          of clacks and trills. They are not musing
the capriciousness of nature as I am; they don’t know
          five thirty am, only that the sun has tinged
the mountainsides gold and that this alcove echoes
          their welcome beautifully. The wild parakeets tap
at the windowpane and my son stirs,
          raises his sleep-etched face to mine.
Together we slip past the curtain and discover
          seven green parakeets, perhaps a little smaller,
their feathers scruffier than I had envisioned.
          Two squabble over a prime niche and the stronger
one comes towards the glass, wings unfurled,
          fat tongue thrusting from his open beak. I want
to unlatch the window and sprinkle seed, lure them
          to perch on our shoulders and arms, anything
to make them stay longer. Instead, my son, rooted in
          the things unknown but longed for still—
greets them with the slap of an open palm to the windowpane,
          and in a clapping of wings
they leap from the narrow corridor at once, a raucus fleeing,
          with headlong and unanimous consent,
a disappearing stain, a distant murmuration
          swallowed from sight.

Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s poems and short stories have appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative, Notre Dame Review, OCHO, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. She is the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Prize and the Coniston Poetry Prize. Her poetry collection, Matria, (Black Lawrence Press) is forthcoming in 2017.  "La Mano" was first published in Green Mountains Review. Learn more about Alexandra here.
______________________

“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles. 

In Memory of Carol Troxell, Former Owner of the New Dominion Bookshop [by Nin Andrews]

As I stated in my previous post, I am going to be doing a series of blog posts in honor of those who help make others’ literary lives possible, and even wonderful at times. I was going to wait until next week to start the series, but then I realized that the Virginia Festival of the Book is happening now. I thought of Carol Troxell, the former owner of the independent shop, The New Dominion Bookshop, in Charlottesville, Virginia, who died last winter and who helped to establish the Festival. 

 Last January, on one of those typical drab winter mornings, I received a cryptic email from my friend, Anne Marie Slaughter, informing me that Carol Troxell had died unexpectedly. I was stunned. Carol was such a special woman. She was also a special kind of bookseller. The New Dominion Bookshop was (and still is, at least for now) a unique bookshop—one of those rare shops that serves as an ideal landing place for book lovers. The section for poetry is huge, and is in the front of the store, not tucked away in some dark, depressing basement or backroom. It’s such a dream to browse the books there, to spend hours going over the works of poets whose names I hear but can never find in book stores anymore. I have discovered so many poets on the New Dominion's shelves, some who have not been lucky enough to be reviewed or otherwise recognized. I discovered Amy Gerstler  there, long before she had won any awards. (I will have to do an I LOVE AMY post at a later date.)

In addition to displaying a vast collection of books (and not just poetry books, of course, though those are all poetry books in the photo to the right), Carol was a great promoter of poets and writers, regularly hosting readings and book signings, and, as I said in the opening, playing a large role in the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Carol and I go back to the 1970’s, back before she took ownership of the bookshop, when I was in  ninth grade, and Anne Marie and I worked at the shop after school. We spent many hours laughing and discussing literature with Carol when we weren't helping customers. Carol had this amazing knack for finding the perfect book for just about anyone. Including me.  I still remember the hot June afternoon when she took a slender volume off the shelf and said, I bet you would like this book, Nin! (She always said my name as if it had an exclamation mark after it.) The book was Gestures by Yannis Ristos, a poetry collection I am still in love with. How did she know I would love it? It wasn’t just an ordinary love either. At home I copied Ritsos poems over and over in loopy script, drawing little flowers and cartoons in the margins. I told Carol I wanted to become a poet just like Yannis Ritsos. Never mind that I was an adolescent girl from rural Virginia, and he was an old man from Greece, and the winner of the Lenin Peace Prize. Years later she recommended Murakami to me, a writer I adore but whom she could not abide. Explain him to me, she would say, hands on her hips. And I would try. What laughs we had!  I could go on and on, but I will stop for now . . . 

I can’t imagine what it would be like to own a bookshop in this era of Kindles and online shopping, but I know it would take someone with the kind of gifts Carol possessed to make it work. She was one of those holdouts who still believed in the integrity of physical books and bookshops. She saw books and her shop as a valuable part of the community, a way of bringing people together in mind and body and spirit. She is deeply missed.

 Nin Andrews' next collection of poetry, Miss August, is due out in May. You can sign up for her email (not sure if you want to do that!) or find out more about her by visiting ninandrews.com

The Star-Makers [by Nin Andrews]

Lately I’ve been thinking about how my father used to say, There’s no such thing as the self-made man. Think about it.

It was one of my father’s ongoing arguments with the world, with American optimism, and with the whole idea that anyone can succeed if he or she works hard enough. (My father grew up during the Depression. And, as he put it, his own father lost his shirt. As a young girl I always pictured my grandfather shirtless.) My mother would simply roll her eyes once Dad got started. And I would think of one of my favorite books, Harold and the Purple Crayon, which I re-titled, Harold and the Purple Wand.

Harold is self-made, I would say. Harold can draw the world and make it into anything he wants because he has a purple wand. (Was I the only one that noticed it wasn’t a crayon Harold held?)

Alone in my room, I daydreamed about what I would do with a purple wand. I drew endless pictures in purple. Sometimes I imagined making myself into a girl with wings. (Who doesn’t want to fly?) Other times a star.

My father, an artist and architect, took great interest in my artwork. But he wasn’t a fan of the Harold stories, or of my purple sketches. I would try to shield my paper to keep him away. Once, he pointed out that even Harold didn’t make himself into a star. He could only draw stars. Or make others into stars. (He was, back then, a bit too philosophical for my child-mind.)

In spite of his criticism, I spent days drawing purple girls, imagining myself as a kind of Haroldina, who wore glasses just as I did, but who lived in a world I could only dream of.

 

As an architect, my father took on many apprentices in his day. He spent hours both going over their blueprints and introducing them to builders and potential clients. He told me once that he never felt fully credited or thanked for his help. After his funeral, one of the architects he trained told me what a pain-in-the-ass my dad was. Without asking, my father would correct his blueprints, and he never thought anything anyone else drew was quite right. But his influence, this man added, is still present in all that he designs. And if he had not had him as a teacher, he would not have become the architect he is today.

I think of my father when I think of all the people who have helped me and other poets and writers, all of those who are the bearers of purple wands in the literary world, who have made others into stars, who have changed the career paths of other poets and writers, often without bringing much attention to themselves. I am thinking of reviewers, editors, anthologists, book sellers, interviewers, translators, social media divas, those who run reading series, and all those that buy books, or who take the time to love and share poetry.

Given stardom, many writers simply bask in the light. They don’t think of all those who helped them shine. But it doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t grateful. I think most of us just don’t quite know how to say thanks. Or how to say thank you enough. Because there is no enough.

So I thought I’d do a series of blog posts next week on just a few of the star-makers in the poetry world: a few of the reviewers, anthologists, editors, YOUTUBE reviewers, book sellers, and translators who have made others’ literary lives possible—and even wonderful at times.

Nin Andrews' is the author of several books including Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Southern Comfort. Her next collection, Miss August, will be published in May, 2017. You can find her and even sign up for her email (seriously?) by going to ninandrews.com.

Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: León Salvatierra (translation by Javier O. Huerta)

painting by Hugo Palma-Ibarra

 Upon Returning

From To the North, by León Salvatierra
(translation by Javier O. Huerta)


When I fled Nicaragua
was alone. The young ones had departed
or had disappeared, the young ones.  Women
elders had left, children
and songs. The wind and the aurora
It was nineteen eighty eight when I fled
Nicaragua
                    Was
Alone

Remained the park benches
(Maybe one person walked by there)
I was fifteen when I fled Nicaragua

There was no more talk
of Rigoberto. Bullets fell
on his chest like pearls. Cesar and his two brothers
were lost
Carlos remained in the mountain

Streets also disappeared
My house was abandoned
My father was no longer there
My mother
My brothers (alone)

The mango and almond trees had fled
Ants walked towards the shadow
I walked in the shadow

My neighbors—the ones in the big house—
purchased a dream
They fled to the United States
Managua—Miami: direct flight

I fled as MOJADO
spent nights
           wet
flying over rivers
over fields and roads
I went flying

passed across Guatemala, Mexico, and finally
                      entered
the United States of America

America was not the name of my beloved
America was my paralytic dream
America was not my home

Provider of people and articulations
Buses . . . Cars . . . Trailers
Brutal Force
          Men
                       White or Caucasian
                       Black African American
                       Native . . . Asian . . . Latino . . .
All colors
Beneath its face
was hiding verb and shame

America was not alone
Those were dark years
the sun set daily over my face
until one day
she could no longer hide me
           and allowed me to return
Stamped a seal on my heart and gave me flight

In nineteen ninety nine
A man will enter an Other Nicaragua

In nineteen ninety nine
                  Nicaragua
         continues to be
                             alone

At home surrounded by friends and memory
The mango and almond trees did not return
The ants remained in the shadow
my mother my brothers . . .

In nineteen ninety nine
I, too, was alone in Nicaragua

 

Al regreso
by León Salvatierra

Cuando yo me fui de Nicaragua
estaba sola. Los jóvenes se habían corrido
O habían desaparecido los jóvenes. Las mujeres
los ancianos se habían ido, los niños
y las canciones. El viento y la aurora
Fue en mil novecientos ochenta y ocho cuando me fui
Nicaragua

                         Estaba
Sola

Quedaron las bancas en el parque
(Tal vez una persona caminaba por ahí)
Yo tenía quince años cuando me fui de Nicaragua

No se escuchó más
el hablar de Rigoberto. Las balas cayeron
en su pecho como perlas. César y sus dos hermanos
se perdieron
Carlos quedó en la montaña

Las calles también desaparecieron
Mi casa estaba sola
Mi padre ya no estaba
Mi madre
Mis hermanos   (solos)

El palo de mango y el almendro se fueron
Las hormigas caminaron a la sombra
Yo caminé en la sombra

Mis vecinos—los de la casa grande—
iban comprando un sueño
Se fueron a Los Estados Unidos
Managua—Miami: vuelo directo

Yo me fui MOJADO
Pasé noches
        mojado
Volando sobre ríos
Sobre huertas y caminos
Me fui volando

Pasé a Guatemala, México y finalmente
                          entré
a los Estados Unidos de América

América no fue el nombre de mi amada
América fue mi sueño paralítico
América no era mi casa

Provista de gente y articulaciones:
Buses…Carros… Camiones
Fuerza Brutal

Hombres

      Blancos o caucásico
      Negro afroamericano    
      Nativo…asiático… latino…
Todos los colores
Bajo su rostro
cubría verbo y vergüenza
América no estaba sola

Fueron años oscuros
el sol caía diario sobre mi cara
hasta que un día más
no pudo esconderme
                        y me dejó regresar
Puso un sello en mi pecho y me dio alas

En mil novecientos noventa y nueve
un hombre va a entrar a Otra Nicaragua

En mil novecientos noventa y nueve
                                          Nicaragua

                      Sigue estando
                                                 sola

En mi casa rodeado de familia y memoria
No volvió el palo de mango ni el almendro
Las hormigas continuaron en la sombra
Mi madre mis hermanos…

En mil novecientos noventa y nueve
Yo también estaba solo en Nicaragua

 

León Salvatierra is the author of Al Norte (2012), a book of poetry published by the University of Nicaragua. In 2014, he received a Ph. D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century Latin American poetry. His literary work has been published in Central America and the United States, and recently translations of his poetic work have appeared in Poetry Magazine and the Notre Dame Review, and are forthcoming in a Central American Writing anthology, The Wandering Song. Currently, León is a Spanish Lecturer for the Peralta Community Colleges. In 1988, at the age of fifteen, he migrated to the United States and now lives in Berkeley.

 

Javier O. Huerta is the author of Some Clarifications y otros poemas and American Copia, both published by Arte Publico Press. He earned his MFA from the Bilingual Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. He translated Leon Salvatierra’s Al Norte as part of a larger project in which he is translating works in Spanish by undocumented and formerly undocumented writers. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles. 

Fragments 42-49 [by Alan Ziegler]

42. “Alan Ziegler, Author of Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”
    
43. A lone white horse wags its tail on the outskirts of Chamoux…

44. Sealed condom in the pocket of jacket inherited from my father. After exploring possibilities I remember he worked in a motel….

45. Always the man hand-rolling bagels at a table in the small shop in Penn Station, his face as round as a bagel, never looking at the dough, eyes peeled on the ever-changing line of faces, once or twice a week mine….

46. I haven’t seen her in five years and the first thing she says: “Is that a new shirt?” Yes.

47. Patient on the children’s ward at the Vermont State Hospital, periodically punches himself in the face and says, “Oooch!”….

48. We order cheeseburgers. She brings hamburgers. Before we can say anything, she looks at the plates and says, “I spaced on the cheese….”

49. The little boy points to the author picture on the book I bring to class and says, “That looks like you.” I reply, “It is me.” He looks again and says, “It doesn’t look like you.”

The Best Small Space Style: An American in Paris [by Stacey Lehman]

When you live in a tiny apartment, as I did when I first moved to NYC, it seems that much of your thinking is devoted to how to make the best use of the space. My first apartment in New York City was just under 200 square feet, including the bathroom. Gene Kelly's apartment here looks to be even smaller. You have to admire his design savvy and his dancer's grace makes navigating the space look easy. I love the dresser drawers on the inside of his closet. Also his pajamas.  

Welcome, Spring (as imagined in August) [by David Lehman]

"It Might As Well Be Spring":

Hammerstein's best lyric. Note the similes. The perfect song for Dick Haymes. Rodgers explained the music by saying that 

it depended on the movement of a puppet on a string. Once he established the musical phrase for that, everything else

fell into place. Spring, we've been been waiting for you a long time and the difference between poetry and prose is the

difference between the speaking voice and the singing voice

of the bird outside the window.

 

Zero at the Bone: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Edited by Michael Boughn, John Bradley, Brenda Cardenas, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson,  Kass Fleisher, Roberto Harrison, Kent Johnson, Andrew Levy, Nathaniel Mackey, Ruben Medina, Philip Metres, Nita Noveno, Julie Patton, Margaret Randall, Michael Rothenberg, Chris Stroffolino, Anne Waldman, Marjorie Welish, Tyrone Williams

Dispatches Editions, 2017

At a hefty 740 pages, the new anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance symbolically and actually enacts the oppositional imperatives embedded in its title.  50% of the proceeds from the volume are being donated to Planned Parenthood. The assembling of the anthology itself, spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, represents a model for activism and mobility in a time of political emergency. Boughn and Johnson brought together eighteen other editors from diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds to solicit and to curate the work of more than 350 poets in roughly two months. As Boughn and Johnson note in their incisive introduction, “Poetry and Resistance,” the book “is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated “creative writing.” It is first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part and parcel of a sovereign people’s challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22^nd—and they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation.”  In addition to enumerating succinctly the premises underwriting Resist Much, Boughn and Johnson’s introduction trenchantly explores the limits and potentials of poetry as resistance. The anthology is worth purchasing for the introduction alone, which sounds a hopeful note for the many thousands of practicing writers in the United States today who will register dissent “in the embattled commons, and not just in journals, personal collections, or anthologies like this one.” 

The anthology begins and ends with poems registering dissent beyond the narrow scope of the 45^th President’s election and inauguration. Lorenzo Thomas’s poem, “Inauguration” initiates the anthology, by recalling the Reagan and Kennedy administrations, and by summoning the ghost of Robert Frost in order to evoke a counternarrative to the Manifest Destiny both lauded and complicated in Frost’s work. In “Inauguration,” Thomas rewrites the famous first line of Frost’s “The Gift Outright”; Frost’s “The land was ours before we were the land’s” becomes Thomas’s “The land was there before us / Was the land.” Thomas’s version radically re-envisions historical notions of ownership, privilege, and class, while halving, enjambing, and subverting Frostian blank verse on the syntactical level. By beginning the anthology with this revolutionary inversion of a poem Frost claimed as a commentary on the Revolutionary War, Boughn, Johnson, and company, inaugurate Resist Much as an anthology concerned with troubling superficial ways of seeing and articulating; Lorenzo Thomas’s poem moves its readers backward and forward in time, opening a dialogue between literary tradition and the mechanisms of empire. Likewise opening these dialogues, the anthology ends with Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!,” a poem of grim forebodings and astringent ironies, the bleak flipside of the democratic vistas Whitman celebrated throughout Leaves of Grass.  

Reading “Respondez!” at the end of this anthology further affirms, as if any affirmation were needed, the towering stature of Whitman as poet of these United States. Whitman wrote “Respondez!,” at the same time as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but ultimately left it out of later editions of Leaves of Grass, such as the 1891-92 version. Despite Whitman’s exclusion of the poem, it is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment contained within Resist Much of the failures in contemporary American politics and culture. As Boughn and Johnson remark in their introduction “Respondez!” was Whitman’s: “sharply ironic demand that U.S. America respond to the betrayal of its democratic promise, its abandonment of equality for oligarchy, of fraternity for institutionalized racism and sexism, of spiritual generosity for greed and money grubbing, and of liberation of Eros for a violent, Calvinist repression of human energies.” Whitman’s impassioned plea reads as ominously timely in an era of so-called “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Whitman writes:

            Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!
            Let the old propositions be postponed!
            Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!
            Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!
            Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?)
            Let trillions of men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!

Although murderers, thieves, bigots, and fools have always helmed the ship of state, perhaps at no time in American history have meanings been so freely criminal. Perhaps at no time has our destination been so unclear. Perhaps at no time have so many American men and women been mocked in body and mind, have felt so acutely the Dickinsonian “zero at the bone” when contemplating the fate of their nation and the face of their president. At no time in recent memory has the theory of America announced itself so stridently and so overtly as management, caste, and comparison.

The writing anthologized between Lorenzo Thomas’s “Inauguration” and Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!” opposes any theory of America grounded in racism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and an ever-shifting panoply of disparate hates and fears. The poems in this volume are written in what Evie Shockley calls “the heartbreak edge of midnight.” These are songs sung by a fugal choir to the northernmost stars, the wayward child, the coercive lover, the dependent child, the reluctant mother, the unfaithful lover, the elusive mother, the waking nightmare, the “dear, dear we.” Resist Much includes work from as aesthetically different poets as Ron Silliman, Linh Dinh, Rodrigo Toscano, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jason Schneiderman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Alicia Ostriker, Michelle Peñaloza, Craig Santos Perez, R.A. Villanueva, Fady Joudah, and Brenda Hillman, to name a few. The editors listed above also contribute poems. The contributions come from emerging and established poets of varied camps and approaches to poetry. The unity and inclusiveness practiced in this anthology offers a pointed critique of the fractious polarization overwhelming American political discourse. This inclusiveness offers a heartening example for other anthologists, editors, and publishers to overcome aesthetic orthodoxies and to embrace the kaleidoscopic possibilities of what constitutes a poem.

Eileen Myles and Denise Duhamel’s anthologized poems provide a good example of how two accomplished and wildly distinctive poets might address the same subject through widely different means. Myles poem, “Creep,” reads:

            ugly nightmare
            eating too much
            dunking your head in water
            over and over
            again. Feel bad
            for your kid
            all of them
            but most of all us
            bad nights
            when I was young
            and drinking pred
            atory men
            with swollen
            heads would
            buy me drinks
            and want to fuck
            me again &
            again because
            I was nothing
            to them and he is
            our president
            now.

Myles deftly puts into conversation the misogyny displayed by “our president” with the predatory violence that contextualizes the everyday experiences of American women. Trauma and rage dovetail in this poem and counterclaim us. Denise Duhamel similarly explores the dovetailing of rage and trauma in American misogyny. Her poem, which cleverly parodies Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” begins with a quote dated October 9, 2016, from the then-candidate, casually dismissing comments that clearly celebrate objectifying and violating women:  “It’s just words, folks. It is just words.” Duhamel begins her poem:

            ‘Twas nasty, and the slithy bimbos
            Did gyre and whine in the pageant:
            All piggy were the gold diggers,
            And the moms who breastfed in public.

            “Beware the pussy, my son!
            The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
            Beware those plastic surgery tits, and shun
            Any frump who won’t put out!”

Carroll’s nonsense verse provides an apt point of departure for satirizing a politician whose entire worldview depends upon the simultaneous denial and attenuation of the power of language. Duhamel, like Myles, foregrounds her poem in the present, but uses the present to explore how misogyny works in a wider historical and social sense.

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance offers a wide array of poems, addressing issues from misogyny to climate change, ranging from the collapse of the fourth estate to police violence, exploring the fascistic tributaries of American culture that have always been running beside us, but which have pooled themselves in the current administration. The poets anthologized here bear witness against injustice past, present, and future. In his excellent recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, historian Timothy Snyder urges: “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read Books.” Resist Much affords many examples of reinventing and repurposing language in order to confront tyranny and fascism. Editing this book was one act of resistance, buying this book is another, reading it a third. This anthology does not merely symbolize the widespread resistance to the current administration among poets and writers. Resist Much signifies the strength of a literate and politically conscious America, which will not be duped by the mountebank tactics and the empty rhetoric of politicians.  As Whitman would affirm, it is up to writers, governments, and households alike, to brace themselves against “the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust.” Buy this book today, read it, and spread the word. Resist.

 

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 a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration: Maria Melendez Kelson

illustration by Danielle Chenette

El Villain

by Maria Melendez Kelson

"I fled the West Coast to escape them, but I still see illegals
Everywhere,” whines a letter-writer in our rural Utah paper,
Applauding a local ICE raid. “How does it feel to be a problem?”

Everyone (no one) wanted to ask Du Bois, circulating his elegant
Diction and mixed-race face among Atlanta glitterati, turn
Of the century, when the White Sixth Sense was “I can smell

Negroes and Jews.” The question ices my hair and eyelashes,
All Raza one family of suspects in this age of round-ups; am I
To breathe in prejudice, breathe out light? How does it feel

To be a problem? Some well-meaning White ones want a Christ of
Me, sacred heart on display. “Where are your documents
Naming this pain?” They hope for a nibble of rage. I see Lourdes,

Seven years old and sin documentos, embrace my daughter hello,
Good-bye, every day on their school’s front steps, the two of them
Giddy with girl pacts. When Lourdes solves subtraction problems,

Safe at her dim kitchen table, how does her mother, Elva, feel,
As her daughter works a language that will never add up to home?
Down the street, I see Rodolfo from El Salvador, legal refugee, dance

The glee of a Jazz victory in front of his big screen. Ask him how
Pupusas feel in his mouth, corn-dough communion with patria. His wife,
Inez, is fourth-generation Mexican American from Salt Lake City.
                                                                   Fuck these pedigrees. How does it feel

For Rodolfo, Inez, Lourdes, me, to be seen as not-quite-right,
Not quite US, not from around here, are ya?
I will not say. I will not display our stigmata.

We shouldn’t need papers to cross from familia to politics.
Ask the seer-of-illegals, the maid of ethnic cleansing,
How it feels to hold a broken feather duster.

  

 

Maria Melendez Kelson’s poetry collections (How Long She’ll Last in This World and Flexible Bones) have been finalists for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the International Latino Book Award. Her poetry, feature articles, and fiction appear in Poetry magazine, Ms. magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere. Her mystery novel-in-progress won the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for crime fiction writers of color from Sisters in Crime. She has taught writing and literature at Saint Mary's College in Indiana, Utah State University, and Pueblo Community College in southern Colorado, where she is currently a faculty member in English. Find her on Twitter: @mkelsonauthor.

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“Because We Come from Everything: Poetry & Migration” is the first public offering of the newly formed Poetry Coalition—twenty-two organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Coalition member Letras Latinas at Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present ten poems in March that engage with this year’s theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera’s poem, “Borderbus.” The poems in this project were curated by Francisco Aragón &  Emma Trelles.