Dante Di Stefano: Kenneth Koch, adding to the famous adage by Wallace Stevens, said: “Not only is all poetry experimental, but all that is truly experimental is poetry.” When I think about the work Canarium Books has published I think of this Koch quote. Can you begin by discussing the Canarium catalog along the lines of the experimental (the surprising, the anti-quotidian, the unorthodox)?
Joshua Edwards: I don’t trust anything poets say, but I like the way Koch’s adage sounds! U.S. poetry’s standard metric of experimentalism has a lot to do with syntactical disruption, fragmentation, and the deployment of philosophy and its problems, and I think many of our books fit the bill, but newness isn’t what we’re most interested in as editors. We certainly do our best to publish work that challenges modes of inquiry, explores how language can be used, wonders what’s worthy of attention and obsession, and reimagines forms, but mostly we’re looking for unique visions and interesting thinking.
DD: How did Canarium Books come into being?
JE: I guess you might say it was an experiment. A year or so after graduating from college I had the idea to start a journal, mostly as a way to educate myself about poetry, and through poetry, about the world. I had no idea what I was doing and no money, but I was fortunate to find funding and to cross paths with a few great young poets in Oregon, and with their help The Canary was born. That lasted six years, until we decided to transform the journal into a press ten years ago. At that time I was graduating from an MFA program at University of Michigan, and I pitched an idea to the program for a collaboration, whereby they’d help with printing costs and interested students could help out as readers and managing editors. Miraculously it all worked out. The first two books published were Union! by Ish Klein and Tod Marshall’s The Tangled Line, and we’ve recently published our 26th and 27th.
DD:Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book is such an amazing book. Not only does Buffam succeed in taking an ancient form and rendering it in a vividly contemporary way, she’s composed a hybrid text, which is exceedingly complex and, yet, easily accessible. She winds up writing a book that is a serious contemplation on motherhood in the digital age, and at the same time its one of the funniest books in recent memory. What do you find most notable about this book?
JE: I find all the characteristics you mention to be notable, but for me it’s the consciousness at the center of A Pillow Book that makes it so powerful. Suzanne is incredibly funny, and I think she has a profound understanding of the relationship between humor and its dark or difficult sources. There’s a kind of electricity that runs through all of her books that holds everything together while also creating moments that jump off the page. But I’m skirting your question. I guess my answer would be that I find the sharp, sustained portrayal of restlessness to be my favorite aspect of A Pillow Book.
DD: What does American poetry need more of, in your opinion? Less of?
JE: The young poets who are starting presses and doing all sorts of great stuff right now are really inspiring, and I think they can answer this question better than me, but I’ll offer my cranky answer nonetheless: What poets in America and all people everywhere need is health care, safety, and affordable lives, but speaking specifically about poets in this country, they need more freedom and less nationalism and “culture.” About 80 years ago somebody (Herman Bonnert or Frank Zacone or Henry Maar or someone without a good publicist) had the idea to twist a balloon into a recognizable animal shape. Whatever made that first balloon animal happen—be it the chance encounter of a clown and a giraffe at balloon factory or a person’s desire to make a child laugh at a birthday party—is for me the poetic moment, when imagination brings something surprising into the world. (Take that, Koch and Stevens.) A lot of poetry is the product of a manner of thinking, which trades the classified impulses of creation for a kind of political affect or performance. Wonderful things can still happen in this mode, since language has its own magic and the individual mind is ultimately irrepressible, but it’s hard to make a great work of art with the qualifications of an industry. The overwhelming majority of the poets I know compete with each other for a handful of academic jobs. Teaching is of course an absolutely amazing career and time to write is a miracle, but the industry that has been built up around creative writing is out of control. I think poets need to be very aware of the institutions that support them and the technologies used to disseminate their work.
DD: What is on the horizon for Canarium Books in 2018 and beyond?
JE: Our recently-released 2018 books are giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper and Anne Kawala’s Screwball, which are both super examples of poetic experimentation. 2019 will be slow for us as publishers, since we’re focusing on our current roster of authors and none of them have manuscripts that will be ready this year, so we’re going to take that time to do some other things. We helped our friends at Marfa Book Co. to put on a poetry festival in August 2017 and we’ll likely do that again next summer. We’ve also organized performances by a couple of my favorite songwriters (who I think of as poets with guitars), Mitski and Christopher Owens. I’d like to keep doing that when the occasion arises. In 2020 and beyond, there are a couple of new books by current Canarium folks lined up and a translation or two.
DD: Tell us a bit about Anne Kawala’s Screwball (translated by Kit Schluter).
JE: Screwball is a wild ride. Like John Beer’s Lucinda, it’s a book-length poem or verse novel that changes forms as it goes, and every page offers something unexpected. I won’t go into the plot too much, for fear of ruining some surprises, but I will say that it involves a huntress-gathress, an iceberg, and an adventure that traverses geographies. Anne Kawala is a virtuoso, and this is a book that puts on display her vibrant imagination as well as a multitude of technical talents. Hats off to Kit Schluter for his excellent translation.
DD: You recently published giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?
JE: There’s so much going on in AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper that any description I could give of its themes and ideas would be reductive and not do justice to giovanni’s great book, so I’ll just stick with the basics. The book is a collection or gallery of poems, many of which incorporate or are comprised of images (mesostics, illustrations, performance scores, drawings), that explore lives, how we’re perceived, and how we live together, among other things. We’ve got a page at our website with recordings of giovanni reading beautifully from the book, so I’ll end by directing folks there: http://www.canarium.org/recordings
Joshua Edwards co-edits Canarium Books and works at bookstores in West Texas and Chicago. He’s the author of Castles and Islands, Imperial Nostalgias, and Architecture for Travelers, among other collections; he translated María Baranda’s book-length poem, Ficticia; and his photographic projects have been exhibited at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Rice University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Galveston Artist Residency, the Pensacola Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Information about his work and the reading tour he’s currently on can be found at www.architecturefortravelers.org
He painted an apartment for her once, just to get her off his hands; then he was sayonara, gone. He never heard about the drugs, the nude frolic in a public fountain, the ward. When she escaped, naked under a stolen lab coat, he was asleep in another city.
She stuffed the coat in a mailbox; she knew her ecstasy would be brief, & she wanted all of it. A black bus driver called the cops.
Now she wears a box on her hip, electrodes stimulating what and where he’d prefer not to know, at lunch. She fluffs up her vegan salad, and he lifts his glass of water, to have something to do. Both of them are counting on lunch to somehow say they’re sorry.
But watching his cleverness, she thinks he’s the same old dickhead he always was, denying her; and he can’t believe he once pulled toilet paper out of this woman’s asshole, before licking same. He feigns delight in a cheeseburger she declares revolting, even as she hopes she’s not gulping too much wine. Carefully, they check out their reflections in the mirror next to their booth, each of them idly considering what it might be like this time.
Michael Trusnovec and Laura Halzack in Paul Taylor’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rehearsal). Photo: Paul B. Goode
Somewhere in a sealed box in a basement is a single copy of a thirty- or thirty-five-page typed profile I wrote around 1999 of the choreographer Paul Taylor. Based on scores of conversations and hundreds of hours of observing his rehearsals and his company's performances during the 1990s, the most important thing in it, by my lights, concerns his relationship with music. And the most important points in that section are that: 1) his mother was especially partial to strings, and many ofTaylor's scores in which strings dominate are somehow connected with his feelings about her, and, 2) although he couldn't read music, he would listen to recorded works viscerally, many times, and, for music he was thinking of choreographing, he would record the intuitive way he counted the length of musical phrases—sometimes with periodic rhythm but mostly not—meticulously writing out his counts in pencil on ruled-paper notebooks. When he was in creative rehearsals, these pencil counts would be by his elbow, as close if not closer than the ash tray for his cigarettes. His counts were like an electrocardiogram of whatever recorded performance was representing a piece of music to him. The choreography would then be made according to his personal counting of heartbeats (so to speak) in phrase after phrase, rather than according to the way the composer (or an analytical musical interpreter, such as Mark Morris) would physically structure that stretch of musical time. Taylor's counting method based entirely on listening, provided, in essence, an additional ghostly line of musical experience—a counter rhythm—only it was both inaudible and visceral. When he was really cooking with the counts, and the dancers were really “on,” the experience could be mystifyingly profound, and yet, if one tried to pin down why, one came up against a version of “Aw, shucks, I just put some steps together,” a cloud of “unknowing,” which, of course, kept the sticky fingers of critics out of the real creative juices. The addition of Taylor's counting system as a silent layer to a musical composition can result in a dance as a multileveled entity, every so often an entity almost as complex as The Rite of Spring.
Taylor choreographed Stravinsky's Rite, giving the première in 1980—but in the two-piano reduction, not the more familiar orchestral version. I've often wondered whether one reason for that choice might have been because Taylor's own way of listening was so competitive with the subject of his listening that for an audience to sense the physical-auditory energy that Taylor brought to the experience required the clarifying percussive texture of two pianos rather than the comparatively exotic instrumentation of the composer's orchestration. And having two pianos playing music that is choreographed with two interlocking stories (one about a detective and one about a dance rehearsal) points up the bi-tonality that is one of Stravinsky's achievements in this music, points it up, that is, without a casual listener's being able to perform a gotcha operation on the sources of the fantastical effect in the theater. Stuart Hodes, one of Martha Graham's leading dancers and a teacher of distinction who has thought so highly of Graham's genius that he has compared her favorably to Shakespeare, has also written that, in his opinion, Taylor's version of the Rite—entitled The Rite of Spring (The Rehearsal)—is the greatest dance made in the twentieth century.
It was the second dance that Taylor made to Stravinsky's Rite, as well: The first was his “dance of Death, leavened with light touches”: the 1963 Scudorama, a beach-blanket vision of Hell, containing a long, excruciating solo created for Bettie de Jong, which was choreographed to Stravinsky's music but, owing, I believe, to problems of obtaining rights to that score, is performed to another one made to measure by Clarence Jackson. (Taylor would do this bait-and-switch procedure with some regularity. I saw him do it with a solo for Andrew Asnes that was rehearsed to a sea chantey and performed, as I remember, to Schoenberg. Among other things, such a procedure gives the dancers imaginative levels of musical possibility that keep dancing alive.)
In the event, I'd spent more than half a year researching and writing this profile, on a typewriter, at the end of which the magazine that had commissioned it told me I was mistaken: they “never” published profiles, and, furthermore, owing to a “meltdown” in the office (a trusted staffer was revealed to have made up some forty-five columns of “fact”), the kill fee I'd been promised wasn't forthcoming; nor were the wages for two subsequent columns. After months of pestering Payroll, I was finally paid, although the wear and tear of having to plead and harangue took its toll. Paul said I should just submit the profile to another periodical, but it had been written to the specs—and for the readership—of the magazine that commissioned it. I gave it up as lost, yet it was I who lost. Paul had invested a lot of time in this story and demonstrated considerable kindness to me, giving me space to write in the basement studio of his historic Vandam house; bringing me to Mattituck, the quasi-farm home where he really lived, where I met his beloved longtime companion, George Wilson (“Babe”), and where Paul himself made a delicious vichyssoise for lunch. His generosity to many artists and writers is well-documented. But so was his withdrawal when he felt he had been treated unjustly, and he never forgave me for not getting that profile published elsewhere. I had wasted his time. In one way or another, as far as he was concerned he put me in Scudorama forever. I had earned it.
But I never lost my passion for his work, never lost admiration for his company or his imagination. From the very first program of his I saw, in Oregon, in the 1970s—with the 1978 Diggity and the 1975 Esplanade—I was of his party. In the next life, where I'm going to become a dancer, I want to perform his work. I'm touched to the core bythe physicality, the transitions from air to earth, the chevron-like “birding” ensemble formations; the curvilinear beauty of shoulders and knees; the variations on Renaissance contrapposto, which implicate the spine, the crossbar of the shoulders, the abdomen, and the pelvis in feats of internal balance and muscular fluency; theeloquent vocabulary of gestures and poses familiar from everyday action, the many themes and variations on the image of cradling in the lapor the hand: these constitute “home” to my sense of the world in dance terms. It was a tremendous privilege to know this artist at all, not to speak of living in the right era to follow along in the audience as his choreographic career unscrolled. And he has devoted chroniclers busily at work even as I write this: the scholar Angela Kane and his much-trusted biographer Suzanne Carbonneau, both writing books about him and his dances. Another chronicler, if of a different kind, is the appointed successor to run the company, Michael Novak, a Paul Taylor dancer in his dreams way before he auditioned for the company, a detail I happen to know because he was one of my students when he was an undergraduate. All his teachers knew that it was only a matter of time before Michael would be performing in Esplanade.But Taylor knew more than we did.
Short takes:
Paul thought as a trained painter, considering proportions, foreground and background, flatness and depth, and, with tremendous sensitivity, color and tonality. And he dramatized movement as a practiced writer, frequently advancing his choreographic line in the direction of a story, with a beginning, middle, and end that can be summarized.
He was a dog person.
He had no love lost for organized religion. He once told me that all the ills of history could be traced back to religious wars and religions' misapprehensions of the world. Nature—unsentimentally considered—was the worthwhile repository for the spiritual impulse: the Nature of magnificent butterflies and other insects that are caught and pinned for study; the Nature of scudding clouds and the physics that put men on the moon; Nature red in tooth and claw or in the lapis lazuli of the poets, Wallace Stevens or Whitman or Shakespeare or Dante or Neruda.
And he loved the historic animations of Walt Disney, from the time he first enjoyed them as a preadolescent. It's in his dances: Snow White, The Sorcerer's Sofa, most impressively in the cold patterns of the post-9/11 Promethean Fire, whose Bach score, arranged by Leopold Stokowski, Paul first heard, he told me, in the 1940 Fantasia, where it is associated with a kind of celestial awe. Affection for the output of historic Disney—who, during the 1930s, was considered by some critics to be not only America's most popular artist but also its most avant-garde, an achievement indeed.
Mindy Aloff, is the Dance Editor of The University Press of Florida and the author of Hippo in a Tutu: Dancing in Disney Animation and a collection of poetry, Night Lights. She is also the editor of Leaps in the Dark: Art and the World by Agnes de Mille and of The Unpicturelikeness of Pollock, Soutine and Others by Louis Finkelstein and is the author-editor of Dance Anecdotes: Stories from the Worlds of Ballet, Broadway, the Ballroom and Modern Dance. Her essays, features, reviews, and interviews on dance, literature, film, and other cultural subjects have appeared widely in U.S. and European periodicals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Dancing Times, The Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Find more about Mindy Aloff here.
Here is a brief excerpt from Dana Gioia's introduction to The Best American Poetry 2018:
<<< The situation of poetry is impossible to describe but easy to summarize. No one fully understands what is happening because poetry and its audience are changing too quickly in too many places. There is considerable continuity with the past. The traditional ways in which poetry has been written, read, and evaluated still have relevance, but those methods don’t always seem very useful in understanding new developments. Old theories (including postmodern ones) are incommensurate with the present realities. There is no emerging mainstream replacing a dying old order. There is no mainstream at all — only more alternatives. The best metaphor is not death but birth. The poetry scene isn’t a cemetery; it’s a crowded, noisy maternity ward.
So don’t panic. Poetry is not in danger, at least no more than usual. New forms of poetry don’t eliminate established forms, though they do influence and modify them. Culture is not binary but dialectical. A new generation of poets and readers drawn from every segment of society is expanding the art to meet new needs and seize new opportunities. Poetry now has as many categories as popular music. What plays at Harvard won’t get anyone on the dance floor in East Los Angeles, and that’s just fine. All styles are possible, all approaches open, and everyone is invited. >>>
A fuller excerpt from Dana's introduction appears in the current Los Angeles Review of Books. The book itself will reach bookstore shelves any day now. -- DL
a footnote is a link and a quotation is a photo and a poem can be easily deleted evenings Tell me, tell me, delete me instantly, isn't a reference a reverence, isn't a name a sign, isn't an allusion a profile Eat my profile, old song and read for information and spam for perhaps beautiful misinformation, as hair and water rhyme and think and look, tell me! The hardest to paint are hair and water So paint hair as water, paint water as hair. Even in New York with Basho and you I miss New York with you and Basho without which no tree ocean
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in an early performance of her groundbreaking "Violin Phase", part of her larger work "Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich" (1982)
Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge and, both inventor of a model of the whole universe and refugee from a political nightmare, he would have known. That’s why, at least here at a sticky table at the Bal perdu café, dance – once subordinate to music and mere complement to the eternal word – is important, why choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is my Fall newsmaker of choice, with a wide variety of her performances figuring in the Fall Paris Performance Calendar
The Paris Festival d’Automne (a “biography” of which features in The Best American Poetry, March 14, 2018) this year honors de Keersmaeker as a dancer and choreographer, giving an attentive spectator the opportunity to recognize her contribution to the promotion of the “movement arts” – dance, dance-performance – a contribution that will grow and flourish as new, diverse, performing artists come to maturity in coming years.
A quick glance at the creative collaborations and performers on view in the festival’s offer shows that de Keersmaeker is as much a determined activist and promoter of dance and movement performance as she is a dancer and choreographer.
Andros Zins-Browne, an alumnus of P.A.R.T.S, performing "Already Unmade" at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2017. The creation figures in the Festival d'Automne's Portrait of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker program.
Herself an alumna of Maurice Béjart’s Ecole Mudra, the seedbed of contemporary dance-performance in Europe, de Keersmaeker is the founder of the dance performance school P.A.R.T.S (Performing Arts Research & Training Studios, Brussels). With alumni and teachers such as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Salva Sanchis, both in view in Paris’ Fall 2018 season, and, just off the top of my head, diverse others such as Noé Soulier, Daniel Linehan or Boris Charmantz, whose work goes well beyond de Keersmaeker’s own choreographic practice, P.A.R.T.S is a seedbed for contemporary dance and performance.
Known for pure vivacity in movement and geometrical precision in spectacle and today a fixture in Europe’s dance-performance firmament, de Keersmaeker, who was born, brought up and is still based in Belgium, has said that music taught her everything. Keersmaeker debuted as a choreographer in 1980 with Asch but came to notice in 1982 with a choreography in dialogue with Steve Reich’s processive suite of Piano Phase, Come Out, Violin Phase and Clapping Music.
De Keersmaeker founded her Rosas dance company in 1983, concomitant with her celebrated Rosas danst Rosas piece, whose ability to generate passion from abstract minimalist gesture and repetition has made it a milestone in post-modern choreography. Since the beginning of her career, de Keersmaeker has sought to develop a distinctive, what I call, “co-expressive”, choreography with polyphony, classical, atonal, jazz and rock, from the late medieval Ars subtilor (En attendant, 2010) to Bach (Mitten wir im Leben sind, 2017) to Arnold Schoenberg (Verklärte Nacht, 2014) and Miles Davis (Love Supreme, 2017).
Radouan Mriziga, a P.A.R.T.S alumnus, rehearsing his creation "7" at Lafayette Anticipations' new performance space, May 2018. "7", which turns on the relation of the body and the "Seven Wonders of the World", will feature at Lafayette Anticipations' inauguration of its new performance center
In view of de Keersmaeker’s ongoing contribution to the arts of movement, it is not surprising that a personal performance of the solo “Violin Phase”, a part of Fase (1982), kicks off the first edition of Echelle humaine (“Human Scale”), a new annual dance-performance festival sponsored by the arts foundation Lafayette Anticipations. Echelle humaine’s debut session will baptize the foundation’s newly-renovated building at 9, rue du Plâtre, the newest addition to Paris’ contemporary arts-dedicated real-estate. Designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA architects, the building, which opened in March 2018, features a system of four mobile platforms that enable configurations of more than 50 different volumes and spaces.
De Keersmaeker’s solo is followed on by a program of performance – each associated with one of the possible space configurations – by Radouan Mriziga, Andros Zins-Browne and Eleanor Bauer. All are alumni of P.A.R.T.S.
Lafayette Anticipations supports contemporary creation, especially in the visual, experiential and movement arts, for the Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette and the Fonds Famille Moulin.
Charles Ives’s second symphony as conducted by Bernstein in 1951 climaxes in “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean” which Peter Frank sang with the words “Charles Ives steals his tunes from all over” applying Sigmund Spaeth’s method for memorizing melodies you may never forget such as “This is the symphony that Schubert wrote but never finished” or (and maybe this, too, was a Peter Frank invention) “Mozart’s in the closet, let him out, let him out, let him out”
For extra credit: the chap on the left is (1) Peter Frank (2) Sigmund Spaeth (3) Charles Ives (4) Bernstein (5) Schubert
The author of the correct answer will have the satisfaction of being absolutely right. -- DL
This week week on Next Line, Please, Mr. Lehman offers us a brand new prompt, and as usual, it's a best of the best!
Write a poem about “the best” example you know of:
the best practitioner of any field, art, craft, profession
the greatest string quintet or chess match
the best third baseman ever to don a Yankee uniform
the best first line of a novel
the most beautiful Vermeer painting
the most interesting museum
the best statue in Central Park.
You get the idea. Take liberties: What was the best century in which to be alive? What is the greatest line Shakespeare ever wrote? What's the best topping for pizza or ice cream?
And for those of you who think that the superlative "best" is actually the worst, write a poem as to why “the best” is a contested term.
Entries should be 14 lines or less, due this Saturday at midnight any time zone.
And a special addition: To the authors of (1) the best poem and (2) the briefest, we’ll send a complimentary copy of The Best American Poetry 2018.
The Tibor de Nagy Gallery is pleased to present Oh, What Fun! an exhibition of John Ashbery's collages made from 2015 until his death in September 2017. This will be Ashbery’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first at the gallery’s Rivington Street location.
Oh, What Fun! consists of group of works inspired, as with his previous collages, by Ashbery’s long held fascinations, many since childhood, with cartoons, movies and other forms of popular culture. Much of the imagery and source material is culled from his personal trove of collections, such as board games, French puzzle plates, old postcards, and other treasured knick-knacks that fill his homes in Manhattan and Hudson, New York. Ashbery became interested at a young age by surrealism, particularly the collage novels of Max Ernst and the work of Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell. A more direct and collaborative influence was his friend Joe Brainard, at times making collages side-by-side with him in Brainard’s house in Vermont and sharing found materials for future collages. Although Ashbery started making collages as an undergraduate at Harvard with one appearing on the cover of the Harvard Advocate in 1948 (a collaboration with Fred Amory), and he first publicly exhibited a single collage in a group exhibition at the Drawing Center in 1977, it has only been in the last decade that his collages have become more widely known.
Tibor de Nagy Gallery is located at 15 Rivington Street on the Lower East Side Tel: 212 262 5050. | Web: www.tibordenagy.com | Email: [email protected]
Nine years ago, book designer Charlie Orr came up with a brilliant idea: why not make covers for books that do not (or do not yet) exist. The covers could quicken the composition of the book, thus totally reversing the usual order of things. Or the cover can exist as a piece of conceptual art that has the virtue of giving us a reproducible image instead of existing as merely an abstraction.
Charlie got me to buy into the project in a big way, and he created three book covers for books that I can imagine myself writing.
Here's what Charlie says: "Lehman’s project for the The Hypothetical Library would be an ambitious one, were it to be fulfilled. Vowing to write two volumes a year for the next five years, he promises to lift the veil away from historical events to reveal the hidden facts. Sadly we will never get the actual stories since this library is only hypothetical, but I hope you enjoy the three interpretations of what could have been, what might have been, and What Really Happened."
For Charlie's post of March 8, 2009, including the covers for "What Really Happened at Yalta" and "What really Happened on November 22, 1963," click here
(Ed note: When I learned that Vincent Katz's friend Morgan Russell passed away on July 17, I asked Vincent for a tribute. He generously agreed and just last week sent these two poems. The first is a poem he wrote in memory of Morgan, and the second is a poem of Morgan's that Vincent published in VANITAS. You can find out more about Morgan here. sdl)
Thallus, you letch: softer than rabbit fur is your phallus and sack of nuts that dangle from your old man crotch, festooned with cobwebs, and still you’re as greedy as a gonif
[line missing here]
Give back the things you stole from her -- her cape, handkerchief from Spain, etchings from Carthage, bracelet of Salome -- things you claim you inherited from your folks.
Spare me your obnoxious jokes. Get your sticky hands off her stuff, and send it to her, or I swear I’ll kick your ass and make you twist like a toy battleship in the bathtub when a hurricane hits the sea.
Every Friday for the past 40-odd years the Owl’s Head Lobster Co has set up shop in the parking lot of the Triphammer Mall here in Ithaca, NY. At 6:45 am the two friendly proprietors, who have traveled from the coast of Maine, open the van's back doors and do a brisk business selling seafood to a long queue of in-the-know locals. A few years ago a small farmers market took hold nearby so it’s possible in one stop to find everything one could want for summer meals of fresh fish, corn, and tomato salad (or corn and tomato salad).
The Owl's Head Whiteboard
I try to get to the truck before nine or risk missing out on the choicest cuts. Lately Owl’s Head has carried sushi-grade tuna. At $19.99/lb it’s pricey but still a relative bargain compared to what it would cost in New York City or even at our local Wegmans. I haven’t been able to resist buying a rich dark slab whenever it appears on the whiteboard that lists the day’s catch.
My go-to preparation of this tuna has been poke (POH-kay), the Hawaiian specialty that hit the mainland a few years ago and spawned a wave of “fast-casual” restaurants that serve both traditional and custom versions of the now popular dish. An added benefit is that it is served raw; no need to turn on the oven or light the grill on a hot summer day.
Turns out that nearly 15 years ago, long before poke became trendy, Garrett Hongo published a recipe in the New York Times. I basically follow his recipe though I've been unable to find kukui nuts so I add a tablespoon or so of toasted sesame seeds. I also add a bit of tamari.
I wonder if Garrett would approve of my version. Here's what he says about his experience of eating this delicious dish:
Thirty years ago, in Hauula, on the windward side of Oahu, my family gave a big homecoming party for me at the Crescent Diner on Kamehameha Highway. I was 19 and hadn't been back to Hawaii since I was 10, when my parents moved us to Los Angeles. When I arrived at Honolulu Airport, the entire clan was waiting for me. My grandfather had assembled all the aunts and uncles and the cousins of all ages and put a trio of them together in a guitar and ukulele band. What song they sang I can't recall, but it moved me to tears.
My grandparents owned the diner, and they had closed it for the celebration. On a long wood counter by the cash register were trays of nuts, smoked octopus, dried squid and bottles of Primo, a local beer. One of my aunts brought from the kitchen three long platters of a dish she had picked up from the chef at the hotel kitchen where she worked. This was poke (pronounced POH-kay), the Hawaiian raw-fish salad made with marlin and ahi (yellowfin) or aku (skipjack) tuna. Though I'd often eaten sashimi, poke was then completely new to me -- delicious rubies of cubed fish dressed in light sesame oil, garnished with minced bits of reddish-brown seaweed and the ground centers of kukui nuts.
This week’s prompt brought us from a predetermined opening line (“It is impossible to love the same person twice”) to a predetermined closing line (“A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball”), both from the notebooks of Joseph Joubert, as translated from the French by Paul Auster.
Pamela Joyce S took a few whacks at it, resulting in this lovely (and biting) poem: “The Art of Loving Thought”
You, my love, are an impossible river. If crossing once is unwise, twice is suicide. I steel myself and venture in, treading tenderly among your bruised blue minnows. Tadpoles scatter seeking cover as we spar and bear our arms. Impossible to win or lose, I humbly twice surrender. But, oh my dear, your deadly art is like seeds of shrapnel speeding through my heart. I cannot speak, retreat, or think at all, Your thoughts are as real as a cannonball.
Eric Fretz goes in another direction, performing great feats of wordplay that I find quite genius:
It is impossible to love the same person twice. It isn’t possible to love the sane person’s wife. It isn’t possible, Tulip, the sane person’s wise. If it’s not plausible two lips, insane parson’s why. (The crazy vicar wore a mask and never spoke in words Except, when out of earshot, to the birds: “Forgive me, starlings, for you know that I have sinned,” And waited for a prophet, like the wind, A thawed Isaiah acting as a commoner, A thaw disaster aching as a common awl As thou, Israel, aching as a cannon calls: “A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.”)
Following suggestions from fellow contributors, Byron combined parts from two entries and came up with something really special, the repetition of the last line packing a punch.
It is impossible to love the same person twice. But it is possible to think. To the happy man at end of day each thought is a drink of spring water but not to the soldier in the field or the condemned man against the wall to whom A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball. But our romance was different. It was a war full of border skirmishes, ceasefire treaties brokered by domineering hegemonic powers, isolated anarchist outrages, antiwar protests, and the last thoughts in a dying soldier’s mind. A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.
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First, above all, I live forever. And thereafter redecorate paradise in the majesty of the roof nightbulb, DJ Lucifer, at predawn hours terrifies the floorboards to give way to Apollyon’s abyss, reflecting scarred light on the wall. The mirror alive with tremors.
Herons bring news of consolation. I rebuke them for my brilliance and enrich uranium in my cove across Navy Island. The hospital vanishes in the fog, so I arrange rain to restore magenta ginger lilies where my mother walked to born me. Malignant fireflies at Christmas; sorrel then sorrow, such is Kingston, there funky carols seethe asphalt with famine.
Forever ends. Never a moment holds ‘still-here,’ when sand murmurs through my fingers. I number and chant down stars, ellipsoidal as fire ants with, “I think I will be killed once I die!” and again return the Super Ape, to conquer the Roof Club, rip off Apollyon’s hell fence; skin him; dance thundering subatomic dub music, until my rage yields settled coral. A million embers of eyes split from coals to see me loom out the shadows’ sunray by the turntable wearing a splash crown.
Eloisa Amezcua’s debut collection begins with a self-portrait poem in which the speaker, as a child, sinks to the bottom of a pool “legs akimbo,” “screaming words she shouldn’t know.” The image of this particular kind of underwater singing is both familiar and strange, and it establishes the thematic concerns of Amezcua’s poetry. From the Inside Quietly explores the way language binds and separates us. Amezcua charts the transgressive and luminous potentials of the lyric as she describes teaching her mother English over the phone, arguing with her sister about keeping a handgun in the house, walking home alone, sitting at her father’s bedside in the hospital, and navigating the downside of a romantic relationship. The speaker of these poems seeks not only to translate the dire, raging, and riven interior music of her consciousness, but also to open herself up to the lacunae and stillnesses where that music might be tendered and touched:
This is how I was taught to love: to silence yourself is to let others in.
Amezcua manages to speak radiantly through her own silences. This blazing debut presages great things to come.
Field Theories, Samiya Bashir’s latest collection, uses the language of quantum mechanics to frame a complex investigation of “this skipscrapple world.” Bashir challenges social, linguistic, and aesthetic conventions as she examines the way myth, history, and language shape our perception of selfhood. In Field Theories, “the world stays unstable / anyway,” despite our best efforts to glide effortlessly onward; the page itself becomes a destabilizing field wherein the sonnet, the prose poem, and even the poetic line might be recalibrated. In one of the collection’s central observations, Bashir notes:
You know how the universe blinks and we exist for a minute or two with our
classic hits station and our marshmallows our wars and flags and television and
shit. Coke bottles falling from the sky to an old man’s village and the white people just
laugh and laugh and line up to pay and laugh and get paid and laugh. That’s what they made.
What Samiya Bashir has made is a collection of poetry that disputes the facile assumptions of continuity that hoodwink us into believing in the immediate redemptive power of our national and personal narratives. Nevertheless, Bashir holds out this hope: “Still, somehow, we are / laughter. We are the doorway out. / We are (again) the doorway in.”
“Desire is reaching out for the sweet maybe,” the speaker in the first section of Victoria Chang’s new collection remarks, attributing this observation to Aristotle. Barbie Chang, the heroine of the first and third sections of this book, yearns to be in the heart of possibilities forever denied to her; she remains on the periphery of the social circle of mothers at her daughter’s school, she tends to her aging parents in their failing health, she attempts to navigate the complexities of her relationship with her “Mr. Darcy.” Chang’s real subject is the loneliness at the heart of contemporary American life:
Barbie Chang loves Evites Paperless Party Posts that host her
ego patch her holes she puts barrettes on her heart so other
people will see her will hear her her heart is made of hay is
disturbingly small held in its cage she is never late when invited
This loneliness is digital, linguistic, and factional; it has something to do with the ways we define ourselves and the physical layout of our lives. The America that Barbie Chang inhabits is an “America that most people don’t care / about on most days.” Barbie Chang dwells in endless exile, but the vibrant sonnet sequences in the second and fourth part of the book provide an alternative to permanent ostracism by positing the salvific potential of love, even when it hurts and haunts: “love is / the only thing that is not an argument.”
Leila Chatti’s chapbook, Tunsiya / Amrikiya, chronicles the poet’s experiences as a Tunisian American, deftly exploring issues of identity and notions of national belonging. Chatti’s poems are at their most poignant and searing when they focus on her parents, and on her complex relationship to her father’s Islamic faith. As she puts it in “Night Lament in Hergla”:
There is no world in which I am not haunted, no willing God to relinquish me. My mother taught me death comes wailing from the shadows, my father all ghosts exist in smoke. I search the sky for light long extinguished, make wishes on their bright graves.
Tunsiya / Amrikiya haunts because it provides a beautiful testament to the hopes of immigrant parents and to the realities of their children lost among the Bougainvillea of Raleigh in spring and inhaling the crisp night air of East Lansing in autumn. Leila Chatti’s voice reasserts the primacy of love and connection, running counter to the discourse of hate and fear propagated by those in power. Chatti’s poetry offers its readers arnica and eyebright for the Trump era.
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
