The Best American Poetry

"Texting" [by David Lehman]

Does the triumph of the text message
over the phone call or voice mail
imply that they were wrong all along,
those analysts of the text
who said that the spoken word
is invariably “valorized”
to the detriment of the written word
in the most primal of binary oppositions
that the myrmidons of critical theory
were determined to dismantle
by “valorizing” the bottom half
of any ratio, be it day-night, white-black,
male-female, dominant-submissive,
the haves versus the have nots,
parents and children who dress alike,
and even truth-falsehood, fact-fiction,
cause and effect, as if each pair
were in perpetual conflict,
the universal dialectic having seen to that?

Traveling and Returning [by Tami Haaland]

Long ago, during the summer when I graduated from high school and turned eighteen, I went to Europe with the Montana Youth Choir. It was the usual month-long, fast-paced trip through eight or nine countries with buses and tour guides. We were endlessly in awe of the world and ourselves walking around in it, singing in places like Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. It’s the sort of thing  many young people do every year, and for me, as with so many others, it was a lucky introduction to a larger world.

One unusual part of that trip was our passage through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin. Our choir directors warned us to keep our cameras out of sight and to be highly respectful when a guard would likely walk through our bus, a curious, almost smiling guard, as it turned out, who nevertheless carried a machine gun. I remember the barbed wire on top of the wall but what stuck with me most was a row of landmines and a row of red geraniums neatly spaced on the East Berlin side. When we drove into the city, it was as if the war ended yesterday. The buildings were ragged and pock marked in contrast to the sparkling newness of West Berlin.

When I was planning this trip, I thought I would go back to Berlin, go back to Paris, see as much as possible while I was in Germany  and maybe go to other countries as well. Last summer I went briefly to Stavanger, Norway for the first time, a three-day side trip from England, to see relatives and the family farm, purchased in 1799. It was a thrill, and I wanted so much to return, thought I might jet up there again for a day or two, the equivalent of my jetting over to Winchester for a couple of days.

Fortunately, before I left the U.S. I had a conversation with a friend who wisely advised me to go for immersion rather than making more whirlwind journeys, even to a place that feels like home. Or to places like Paris and Berlin which would also require more planning and more time.

When I went to Strasbourg the train would have arrived only two hours later in Paris, and I felt a bit of longing as I stepped off rather than continuing on. But the idea of immersion is what I tried to stick to, especially given teaching obligations and other events that began to fill my schedule. Outside of my brief episode in England, which was easy and familiar, I stayed mostly in southern Germany. Even in that decision, I felt the daily pull, which I have mentioned in previous posts, teeter tottering between walking into town or hopping on a train to someplace new. Ultimately, I’m pretty happy with the balance that governed my days.

On my last Sunday there, I took the train to Heidelberg and spent hours walking, first downtown, then up to the castle—a sort of elegant monstrosity built in stages. The place is huge and has some decidedly touristy attractions, like the largest wine keg in the world and a very interesting Apothecary Museum full of seventeenth-century remedies. If I am honest, what I liked most was the climb up to this castle which is situated on a small mountain. Walking quickly from the street below felt like walking in the mountains at home. The body likes this workout and the challenge of climbing. This walk and the steep climb to the Philosopherweg or Philosopher’s Way on the other side of the river were the best workouts of my 23 days in Europe. But of course there’s much more—The Philosopherweg was a haunt for Romantic poets Joseph Eichendorff and Friedrich Hölderlin who are commemorated there. Beyond that, it’s just a great place for faculty and students at the university to walk along the side of the mountain with the river below. Many generations have.followed this path.  

When I was still trying to find my way around in Heidelberg, I happened to take a side street to the river. Here, I came across the outline of the former synagogue destroyed on Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938. There is a similar memorial near the train station in Ludwigsburg, where suitcases with the names of those who were deported sit inside the outline of the synagogue, and nearby is a screen with revolving images and biographies. Both of these memorials contain an altar where people place flowers, candles and bright stones. Train stations have memorials as well, lists of the people who were deported. When you ride the train in Germany, you know you may be traveling the same path that Holocaust victims were forced to travel. Part of the memorial at Dachau is a short railroad track and the platform where people would disembark before entering through the main gate. Only a few days into my visit, I went to Dachau, and I find myself mostly silent when thinking about it. Or rather, I don't think so much as feel great sadness. It’s hard to fathom such darkness, harder still to find words that explain what it is to be there.

Yet in my classroom and among colleagues at Ludwigsburg University there was open conversation about the past and the manifestation of neo-fascism and white supremacy in contemporary society. Since the focus of our seminar was Montana Literature, my students and I read and discussed chapters from James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and poems by Lois Red Elk, Mandy Smoker and Heather Cahoon. I showed them maps of tribal territories before and after Caucasian settlement. We also talked about how Hitler admired U.S. policies for Native people.

In England, a teacher told me that Britain is beginning to acknowledge what colonialism meant for the people who were colonized. In the U.S., only in recent years have memorials to slaves begun to emerge and there are few Native American memorials. Near where I grew up in the northern, rural part of Montana, the Marias (Baker) Massacre occurred in 1870, but it, like other massacres, is still not widely known or commemorated. 

In Germany there are daily reminders of the Holocaust: outlines of former synagogues, small gold squares in the sidewalk with the names of Jewish citizens who lived and worked there, lists of people who were deported. Major camps where the SS were trained or where millions of people were murdered have become world renowned memorials.

I think a lot about Jung’s description of the shadow—the side of individuals and societies that we may try to run from, our dark underside, but of course, no one can escape their shadow. Further, Jung says that if we don’t come to terms with it, then we risk being controlled by it, which brings me back to poetry. Poetry doesn’t cater to either-or fallacies or polarization or denial. Poetry will ask us to take a good look at the shadow and get comfortable with ambiguity. Poems ask us to look, and then look again. 

Meet the Press: Shrew & Cat in the Sun Press

Dante Di Stefano: In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988 John Ashbery wrote: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” Considering the efflorescence of political poetry right now, and your own background as a union organizer involved in direct political action, could you begin the interview by riffing on Ashbery’s quote and its relevance to the political poetry being written in the Trump Era?

Joe Weil: I think a lot of political poetry preaches to the already converted, but in that sense it is as vital a trope as carpe diem is, or as vital as an elegy for a recently deceased poem might be. That might make political poetry seem dangerously close to a conventional form or rather formula (lots of rhetorical devices including anaphora, lots of listing and enumerating, the use of invective, the inserting of a We and a Them, and so on).  But when Political poetry fails, like when most poetry fails, it fails in the way its puts lines and nouns and verbs together. It does not fail intrinsically because it is political poetry. There is nothing innately wrong or inferior about political poetry. Much of the world’s best poetry is political... Blake’s Chimney Sweeper poem (the one in the Experience section) succeeds both as a political poem, but also as a powerful poem about the suffering of child laborers. Its words are so well chosen and so chilling. It is as great a poem as Goya’s “Saturn Eating his Children” is a painting. Most of the poems we love by the romantics were deeply political. Time has blurred the causes, but left the images and the main ideas of freedom and newness vivid. Political poetry might be considered tacky or obvious, but it surprises me Ashbery didn’t take to it, since he often liked traipsing the thin line between the sublime and the tacky, the lyrical and the obvious (he loved playing with cliché) . One of his poems ends with: “Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulations.” That ominous declaration rings politically true at this moment in time though the poem was written in the 1950’s. Political poetry, when it is good, continues to have many lives and uses. It transcends its moment and exceeds its own cause. Done well, it is both anciently sudden and suddenly ancient. It does not date

DD: In the “Pre-Rambles,” or introductory essays, to the first two issues of Shrew you lay out some guidelines for the magazine. I’m most interested in your idea of a “pre-standard” aesthetic, a concept that I think connects to another idea you’ve written about, a “Eucharistic vision” of poetry and the world. Could you unpack these concepts for us?

JW: If you start with “Standards” you’re already publishing poems that fit a mold. The mold may not be precise or even visible, but it’s there. The editor is imposing his or her “ur” poem on every poem that passes through. In a "pre-standard" idea of publishing, you find people willing to enter. So you find poets rather than poems and you say: Hey buddy, got a poem for me?” The magazine is not based on excluding the many to pick the few. I always thought this was too much like the cool bouncer at a disco saying who can and who can’t get through the door. Most of the time the criteria run along these lines:  

Poet A writes a poem about the color blue. It gets rejected. Poet B, a widely known poet writes a poem about Blue, it not only gets accepted, but the editor brags about having Poet B in the mag. Let’s say both were of equal quality: well, then, the true standard was not quality, but hierarchy.

When I started this Shrew, I asked friends whose work I liked to send me something. They sent it and I published it, and I also did the same with the art. “Pre-standard” does not mean an absence of standards. Rather, it means “toward a standard.” You start with people of good faith, friends or at least poets you’ve met under good circumstances, and you ask them to join you. Free play eventually finds the rules, but the rules can never find free play. So, I begin with free play. And yes, it is part of my idea of Eucharistic reality, of being part of a body where all are welcome to enter. It’s strange because, if you give people free play, they start creating their own standards, often far more exciting and interesting standards than you, yourself, would have imposed. I hate snobbery. I think it is the source of all race and class and gender hatred. So death to snobs. But there is something that is a healthy snobbery: you don’t let those who like to play the bouncer at the disco in. They might create a room full of beautiful people, but who knows if that’s really the best room for a party?

DD: Part of what makes Shrew so dynamic and vital is that it champions, both implicitly and explicitly, the overlooked, the broken, and what I’ve heard you call the “motley,” that is, what Hopkins would call “dappled things.” Could you talk a little bit about poetry and all things counter, original, spare, strange?

JW: I love comic poetry, and by that, I mean something different than just Billy Collins. I mean work with the fool’s cap, with the touch of Harlequin, with deep sadness to the comedy so that you know the clown is dancing on the edge of a steep cliff and the banana peels are flying off to meet him and to kill him.. I love poetry, also, that can laugh at itself, that breaks the 4th wall. I also revere poets like Vallejo who I know was the poet equivalent of someone who lived his art so intensely that he became the Shema—as did Emily Dickinson. I know he is not the greatest of all Spanish poets, but my favorite poet in Spanish is Miguel Hernandez, who I first read when I was 18 and everyone in my family was dying. His fierce love and integrity destroyed me—in the best way. He broke me down. I love May Swenson, especially her sex poems. Wanda Coleman is a poet I return to as well as Wallace Stevens, Bob Kaufman, Williams, and Whitman, also Carolyn Kizer, Maggie Nelson. I’m very motley in my tastes. I might read a sonnet by Milton, a sonnet by Wanda Coleman, King Lear, and funny poems by the California poet Ronald Koertge, all in one day. Why not? I like the magazine to go in many different directions. I always liked the idea of motley. When I was very little, I always dyed all my Easter eggs every color so that they came out a sort of sloppy brown, but if you looked close enough,  if you put your eyeball right up against the egg, all the colors were still in there, and they were like some beautiful brawl of colors—all swirling around and through each other. I think I’m still that way. The sheer mess of it all delights me.

DD: Maria, tell us about your experience as Guest Editor for Shrew.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Guest Editor, Shrew Issue 10: I Love Shrew because the design of the journal is beautifully clear and clean. I really like the layout and the combination of poetry and art. I love the Pre-Ramble and the way it gives each editor a chance to frame the issue and to contextualize the work chosen. I am thrilled with Shrew’s combination of poetry and art. I think the art opens the poems up to another way of seeing and feeling. For me, I feel uplifted by the combination. In short, Joe Weil’s concept for Shrew is brilliant.  

DD: Tommy, what made you want to help Joe Weil develop Shrew?

Tommy Stella, Managing Editor, Shrew: I’ve helped Joe with a few projects in the past and I’ve always enjoyed every single one of them. One day I logged into Facebook and saw a status update that Joe made talking about how tired he was of magazines and how he was going to start his own magazine that celebrates writers and writing, etc etc sic sic sic. I immediately messaged him and asked what he needed.

DD: How is what Shrew is doing different from other journals are doing?

TS: The goal of Shrew is to combine what I’ve learned from working for various online newsletters and social media accounts with Joe’s knowledge of the poetry/magazine world (combined with Colleen Curry’s fantastic design). Our current goal is to make a product that is accessible to poetry initiates and to general readers. The beauty of Shrew is that everything is meticulously designed. We are completely open to every single writer who submits to us. And we mean that.

DD: Colleen, what motivated you to take on the task of designing an online literary magazine?

Colleen Curry, Graphic Designer, Shrew: Joe was my poetry professor in college. When I heard that he was looking to start a digital zine and that nobody had stepped into the role of designer yet, I volunteered. I have a lot of respect for the poems Shrew publishes and strive to showcase them in a way that is unique, timeless, and never takes itself too seriously.

DD: What do you see Shrew as providing that differs from other current online zines?

CC: Shrew is a platform first and a magazine second. It's founded on the idea that poets thrive in a network. All of Shrew’s strength lies in the insight of its contributors and the thought put in by Joe and other guest editors to anthologize a theme, practice, or place and to start a dialogue which can then continue online, sometimes in a future issue.

DD: How, as the designer, would you describe the look of Shrew?

CC: It’s punchy and that’s deliberate; I wanted to approach Shrew as a brand. Publishing is a turbulent industry, always in flux, and the way we consume media is constantly changing. I want Shrew to be able to keep up with that, so everything from the magazine itself to our website and social media is grounded in a few simple, highly adaptable design elements. (Yes, it's a lot of red.)

DD: Joe, you have also published several books by other poets under the imprint of Cat in the Sun Press. Could you talk about that press and the books you’ve published there?

JW: I first published my former student Micah Towery because Micah had been so vital to my life early on at Binghamton University. He had helped set me up with a mic so that I could do my Joe Weil morning poem show which appeared on Facebook and had over 600 members at one time—including the poets Dorothy Laux, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Patricia Smith. Then Micah and my former student Adam Fitzgerald set up THETHEPOETRY.com which was initially a platform for my rants and essays, but which we opened up to many young poets and writers who later became far more famous than I. Micah did so much and I did his book Whale of Desire, which I love. Then, my wife Emily and I asked Micah to come on board and he is really the one who makes the press possible, but we published a book of poetry and art by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, which Emily spent a great deal of time editing, and we did several other books, including a book of essays by Alfred Corn, which Micah edited and put together. We run it this way: I have the book put together, edited and designed,  and then it is put on print on demand, and the poet keeps all profits from the book. I don’t get a dime, not even a percentage. So the poet maintains control of his or her art. I think it works best that way. Maria claims it gave her a whole new part time career as a painter because people started buying her paintings when they saw the book. Before this, I was involved in creating Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. I like creating presses and zines, but then I tend to run away after they get established. I like inciting things and then getting out of town before it becomes boring.

DD: You are married to a talented poet, Emily Vogel. How has being married to her changed your relationship with poetry and writing?

JW: I’m a devout malpracticing Catholic. Marrying Emily is my means toward not being damned to hell. It’s my vocation. It’s a sacramental marriage and I know this is going to get me jeers in some quarters, but, hey, it’s the cultural belief of my Irish Catholic ancestors. Before we had kids, Emily and I would wake up, kiss, get dressed, have some breakfast, then go to separate floors of the house we rented and write all day. We’d meet again in the evening, watch a movie, fall asleep and get up to do it all over again. Emily also painted, so there was a lot of paint on the floor. I play piano, guitar and several other instruments. So we were always doing our art. We started doing gigs together and then we also sang and played music with the readings. Eventually, we wrote a book together called West of Home, a book of responsorials, which ended up as a play produced by the Wombat Theater company at KGB Bar in 2013 (or it may have been 2014). We’ve done a lot of interesting things, but now we have two children, both on the autistic spectrum. Their presence in our lives, and our love for them, has re-shaped everything. They broke three of my guitars and I finally decided this was a message from God (I don’t play guitar that much anymore). Emily is a fantastic poet who doesn’t always get involved in my projects. She has her own, including being poetry editor of Ragazine, As for as my relationship to poetry, poetry was always my secret imaginary friend who came from the other side of the universe through the tiny holes in a screen door. Poetry still comes to visit me. Being married to Emily and loving my children has made those visits even more welcomed and necessary. I write more poems about being a father now. Can’t help it. They’re more surreal and more conversationally lyric than my former narrative poems. So I’ve changed, but not on purpose. I don’t know what the changes will amount to yet.

DD: How have your young children changed your understanding of poetry?

JW: I am sixty. I do everything far too late in life. My children arrived when I was 54 and then 55. They are on the spectrum and largely non-verbal. They present challenges that I already experienced by having an older brother who had suffered damage to his brain, had a hemispheral removal that didn’t stop his convulsions, and eventually ended up blind and paralyzed. I like to fool myself that I got a training in love and caretaking from my brother that will help me with my kids, but that’s not so. I have never experienced a love as fierce as I feel for my children. Trying to explain it would be a catastrophic failure. They are going to be six and five and still are not potty trained. I joke and sing and talk to my wife while cleaning the poop from their legs. When Gabriel can’t sleep and is stimming (a term in autism meaning self-soothing movements) I stay up all night and try everything I know to comfort him and help him sleep. Clare has lively conversation with objects and qualities of light, and shadows. She is in a world I wish I could visit, just to love and understand her more. My children have affirmed for me that love is the only impossible thing I will ever accomplish. I love them. I wipe the poop from , the world where people think they understand autism because they watched a movie once. How do you explain that love crushes you into something you never intended, but that’s okay? You can’t. It sounds trite. Everything I say about my children sounds trite. Perhaps someday I will be able to say one thing that seems to me to be absolutely accurate and worth saying.

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

JW: I think American poetry needs more listeners, people who don’t want to be poets so much as read or go to readings. The trend in all the arts is that everyone in the audience is also in the business. That’s like LA where everyone might have done some acting or knows producers or would-be directors. Maybe this is good and I don’t want it to change too much, but I think, overall, it makes me worry about this all being solipsistic. I think American poetry needs more ways for poets to come up. Right now, there’s the academic MFA, or there’s the spoken word route. Both are limited, and as they gain power, both create false binaries and are too rigid a frame. I began reading in bars. I was spoken word in that sense and still am, but I don’t do the formulas. I don’t read with slam voice or with that slightly fry voice, little question at the end some academics use. There are affectations I’d like to see less of. I’d like to see more ways to succeed, more small grass roots community readings. I’d like to see funds for small readings all through the country and I’d like those funds to be administered by the hosts of series, so a poet who wrote a book could actually go around and get paid—and be a local force. I had an idea for a poetry union with a gauntlet of readings all tied together in a loose affiliation, a sort of circuit. They do it in slam and they do it in academia (but unofficially). The presses could be acknowledged by certain series and their poets sent out to tour for, say, a modest 200 a reading. I’d love to see book carousels at every series with the local mags and latest books and chaps in the carousels. I’m not holding my breath.

DD: I heard you’ve been writing bird poems lately. If the following poets were birds what kind of birds would they be? Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Schuyler, & Joe Salerno.

JW: Wallace Stevens: Plump shrike, wonderful at what he does, but rarified and sometimes cruel.

William Carlos Williams: Sparrow would be too obvious, probably more one of those parrots or canaries that have survived in cold places by living near electric stations and hot boxes.

Gertrude Stein: A noble Ostrich.

Charles Olson: A very grave, but kindly Stork.

Ezra Pound: A parrot in an old Edwardian house crying: “crack, crack! Thy winter winds! Bah!!!”

Emily Dickinson: Definitely a hermit thrush singing from a rare perch on a clothesline at dusk.

Gwendolyn Brooks:   A blue jay, someone who loved taking beautiful things to her nest, but could also drop an acorn with great precision from a hundred feet of sky to hit the bullseye of some idiot’s head.

James Schuyler: A beautiful pine warbler. I love his flower poems.

Joe Salerno: Ah, my dear friend Joe. Joe liked boat-tailed grackles. He loved the iridescence in their feathers. He would be a boat-tailed grackle, but one which, if he heard a child crying, would come over and gently begin to sing.

DD: Your friend, the late Joe Salerno, deserves a much wider audience than he has had. That he has had any posthumous audience at all is largely because of your efforts, which involved, among other things, publishing his book, Only Here. Could you discuss his importance to you as a poet and as a friend?

JW: My efforts were certainly not alone. The poet Sander Zulauf did far more of the heavy lifting and Salerno’s family did far more to keep his legacy alive. I help because I loved him, miss him, and I purchased so many copies of his book that I can still give one every year to a student I think will love his work. I helped because he was damned good as a poet and because I loved him, because he may have been the best human being I ever met. As a poet, everyone at the local New Jersey readings became attentive the second he stood up to read. We all loved his poetry. He’d won the Hopwood Award at Michigan, but you’d never know it. He never told anyone about his degrees in philosophy and the workshops he attended at Michigan where he more than held his own with Gregory Orr, Les Josephs and Jane Kenyon. He quit poetry for many years to raise his kids. I met him when he was forty and just getting back into the scene. We became friends naturally and by accident. We always went to readings together and he often drove me there and back because I didn’t always have a car. For months after he died, I could still feel his presence in a car, his denim or his flannel shirt beside me. He left an actual physical life behind him wherever he went. A new poem by Joe was an occasion. Then, the way he listened! He’d quote back lines from poets who were reading for the first time, encourage them, become their mentor in about ten seconds.

DD: I’d like to end with a poem by Joe Salerno, the title poem from Only Here.

            Only Here

            I wake
            Holding the blue piece
            Of a dream. And lying still
            On the cloudy pillow,
            Before the day’s first word
            Spreads meaning out over the world,
            I let the morning rain
            Be all I am.

            And in the slender
            Stone-colored light, the ordinary
            Promises of my life are made again,
            Attaching themselves silkenly
            Like rain to the window
            Or my car glazed like a white rose
            In the driveway.

            And the dream
            Now cold, blows away
            Like history, my wife
            Stirring beside me, the feathery touch
            Of our first child turning
            In her widening belly. Downstairs
            The kitchen waits. There is nothing
            To decide. Everything asleep
            Is about to awake, the day
            Set like a mighty clock
            In the silence.

            Opening our eyes,
            We lift the world; the universe
            Tossed like rain from the tips
            Of our lashes. Only here
            Our ordinary eyes learn to find eternity—
            There is nothing else. The luster
            Is the plainness we walk in;
            This poverty we rise to
            At the end of dreaming—
            The sacrament each day
            Of our feet touching
            The floor.

---

Joe Weil is an assistant professor at Binghamton University. His reviews, essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He has four full-length collections of poetry; his latest collection of poems is A Night in Duluth, published by NYQ Books. In 2013, he was the recipient of the People's Poetry Award by Partisan Press. Joe Weil co-founded Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. He has since created Cat in the Sun books with his wife Emily Vogel. He is the Editor in Chief of Shrew. Having grown up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Weil now lives in Binghamton with Emily and two small children, Clare and Gabriel.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007). She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010), The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012), The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica, 2013). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.

Tommy Stella is a writer who earned his MA in English from Binghamton University. His recent comic book, I Think It Will Be Okay, is available to read on his website. He is a writer for Need2Know, Daily Pnut, Headlines and Heroes, and The Lunch Read. He also does book PR at Wunderkind PR and is the assistant to author Charles Soule.

Colleen Curry is a New York-based writer as well as a self-taught designer and artist. She is a graduate of Binghamton University.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

 

"The Day Was a Bargain" [by Ron Horning]

No matter how happy or comfortable I think I am in room 111,
reading Flowers by the window, Playback stretched out in bed,
or seated at the desk, near the ashtray on which a Lucky burns,
typing notes from the steno pad that could lead to more poems,

eventually I have to get out. My idea of hell is too much heaven
(an idea I wouldn’t defend, though I also don’t care what X said)
so out I go, to Washington Square Park, maybe, for a few turns
around the outer edge of a greener world, near church and signs,

or, further out, the Art Institute, or down to Market by Chinatown,
or even, if I really want to walk, all the way to Golden Gate Park,
or, to cross the Bay, the foot of Broadway for Berkeley by thumb.

Speeding over the Bay Bridge can by itself erase the deepest frown
and the driver’s almost certain to suggest a joint. I’m home by dark
and, having bowled up in a VW on the way back, pleasantly numb.

Next Line, Please: Hazards, Brawls, and the Value of Bad Titles, Tee Up! [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week on Next Line, Please we saw risks, perils, bad titles, and numbers on parade.

Christine Rhein's  “Occupational Hazards,” moves from one to 12 and back in the course of a work day:

One coffee after another. Two bosses. Three days
to corporate reorg, worldwide meetings, four
or five hundred PowerPoint slides you need
to start drafting. That smile—6 p.m., at your desk—
Boss A stopping by while buttoning his coat:
“remember, it’s all about moving the goalposts.”
At 7, Boss B: “remember, it’s all about moving
up the ladder … we’re counting on you to work
your magic.” Eight times nine columns, rows,
ways a spreadsheet can be skewed. Ten o’clock =
dinner deleted. 11:30 = bedtime = your pillows
propping the laptop + its steady overheating +
your nightstand printer running out of black.
Twelve years and counting. One life. One life.

There’s so much to like here: the way the opening draws you in, the business jargon (“reorg”), the movement of numbers mixed with breaks like "worldwide meetings" and the bosses "counting on you."

Pamela Joyce S did fine things with a couple of titles on David's “bad titles” list. Pamela used the “one to 10” option and took desirable liberties with some of the numbers (“Wonderland,” “create,” “benign,” “tension”):

Welcome to Wonderland, where your sublimation
is our pleasure. We too desire your secret dreams,
always très discreet, like damselflies dining in
delphinium. Those damn selfies for Tinder will
never be reviled by five angels of redemption,
nor deep-sixed to protect the innocent. We at
Wonderland understand the seven virtues and sins,
the sheer weight of them and how you long to create
something of nothing, transform dangerous to benign,
illicit to inspired, explicit tension to tender lines.
Please explore our Psychomachia room where you
will find a willing muse, music, art, and words to mine.

Truly sublime.

Another title on the “bad” list sparked Steve Belin-Oka’s surprising apicultural adventure, “Self-Portrait in a Side-View Mirror”:

This dying bee—a wonder it’s lived
until this late in the year, last week’s snow

an insulin shock dose to the raving leaves,
which lift and swirl in whirlpools

of wind. The November sun’s mad buzz
through the gauze of clouds. I watch

a hawk veer west, clasp a dove
in its talons. Say as a child I believed

sugar water in eyedroppers would save
vulnerable creatures. Now I know

malarial sepsis will hatch in the blood
of the weak. Despite pity, despite quinine.

Click here to read the full post, with even more hazards and brawls.

As for next week, it's time to tee up! We have a brand new prompt to play with, and the name of the game is word golf. In this exercise, poets focus in on the words at the end of each line, changing that word one letter at a time until the first end word has morphed into its opposite. For example, good to evil, or, white to black. It's a really fun and interesting endeavor, and you'd be quite tickled by how well the tension builds. Can you do it in 11 lines? 14?

Visit the American Scholar's page to see an example of a successful game of word gold (I mean, golf!) and to enter your candidate!

Tommy Dorsey and Frank Sinatra Collaborate on "How About You" [on TD's Birthday]

I like potato chips, moonlight, and motor trips. . .on TD's birthday ( November 27).

 

An Interview with January Gill O'Neil (by Nin Andrews)

I had the honor of reading with January Gill O’Neil at Brookline Booksmith’s in Brookline, Mass. back in March 2010 when her first book had just been published. What a thrill it was! Afterwards we sat at a table with friends, signing books and chatting. Like me, the audience was profoundly moved by January’s poems and performance, and everyone was singing her praises. Now, just in time for Christmas shopping, her third book, Rewilding is available from CavanKerry Press. All three books of her books are profoundly autobiographical and manage to pull me into her world with such grace and ease, I want to keep reading and rereading her work. Needless to say, I was delighted when she agreed to do an interview.

NA: Do you ever feel self-conscious, or exposed, when writing your deeply personal poems?

JGO: No. As I tell my students, you can write about anything—but you don’t have to publish everything you write. I’m a pretty up-front person. I don’t have anything to hide. That being said, I wouldn’t publish anything that might embarrass my family. But then again, I have a potty-training poem that gets eye rolls from the kids so there’s that.

NA: I had a poetry professor once who hated what he called “dishonesty in poetry.” He hated it when poets use the first person, and then describe a life they have not lived--he said they were lying to their readers. But it seems to me that poets are more interested in writing a beautiful poem than telling the truth. In other words, given the choice between truth and beauty, most choose beauty. Yet you seem to be able to do both. Do you ever feel that you have to make that choice? What do you think about “lying” in poetry?

JGO: No, I don’t think I have to make a choice; however, little lies are fine. I mean, at some point the poet is working in service to the poem. In order to do that, a writer has to let go of the origin story in favor of art. So, if the setting of a poem takes place during the day but works better for the narrative if it takes place at dusk, I’m OK with that.

NA: I love the poem, “On Being Told I Look Like FLOTUS, New Years Party 2014.” I’d love you to post it below and say a few words about it?

JGO: People say I bear a resemblance to our first lady. (I’m flattered but I don’t see it.) But on this occasion, it struck a nerve and I needed to respond poetically. In a strange twist of fate, I went to the White House in 2016 for a celebration of National Youth Poetry and while I did not meet Michelle Obama, I came awfully close. Rumor has it that my poem made the rounds that summer at the White House. 

 

On Being Told I Look Like FLOTUS, New Year’s Eve Party 2014

 

Deep in my biceps I know it’s a complement, just as
I know this is an all-black-people-look-alike moment.
So I use the minimal amount of muscles to crack a smile.
All night he catches sight of me, or someone like me, standing
next to deconstructed cannoli and empty bottles of Prosecco.
And in that moment, I understand how little right any of us have
to be whoever we are—the constant tension
of making our way in this world on hope and change.
You’re working your muscles to the point of failure,
Michelle Obama once said about her workout regimen, 
but she knows we wear our history in our darkness, in our patience.
A compliment is a complement—this I know, just as the clock
will always strike midnight and history repeats. This is how
I can wake up the next morning and love the world again.

 

NA: I admire the arc of this book, how it moves from a broken place to one of union, from divorce to “rewilding.” At what point did you see this arc forming?

JGO: Honestly, I can’t remember. Writing is so fluid that I just think of poems as poems, rather that arcs or themes. But yes, at some point the poems were living together in sin and I needed to make an honest manuscript out of them.

NA: When did you know the title of the book?

JGO: I saw a TED Talk by George Monbiot, who talked about the idea of rewilding the world as a way of saving the planet. I guess I liked the idea of saving myself.  

NA: I also enjoyed the poem, “On Seeing Gwendolyn Brooks after Her Reading at LIU Brooklyn, February 1996.” Is Brooks a major influence? If you had to pick one poet, just one, and say he or she has influenced you the most, would it be Gwendolyn Brooks?

JGO: Ms. Brooks is one of my influences. Meeting her was an experience I’ll never forget. But if I had to pick just one—which is hard because I’ve had many teachers and mentors—it would be Sharon Olds. I’ve also been influenced by Toi Derricotte, Lucille Clifton, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, and Marie Howe.

NA: And what if you had pick one poem that has influenced you the most?

JGO: Tough. I would say “The Victims” by Sharon Olds—not sure why. There’s a fierceness in her work that I admire, and that poem encapsulates it for me.

But I also come back to “Gratitude” by Cornelius Eady, “Won’t You Celebrate with Me” by Lucille Clifton, “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand.  Those poems are more like mantras for me.

NA: Your children play a prominent role in your poetry. Do they read your poems? Offer opinions? Do you worry about what they will think?

JGO: They are teens—they don’t want to read anything I give them, much less my work! I take them to readings that I think they will enjoy, a few times a year. At my last reading I read a poem about their father that I felt might be sensitive to them. So we talked about it before the reading, and they were fine with it.

As I mentioned earlier, I would never publish anything that would embarrass my family, but I feel I have lots of room to write the truths that need to be told.

NA: You are Conference Chair at the Portland AWP in March? You know how I shudder at the mere mention of the conference. Tell me one reason I should go this year.

JGO: Me!

And, our lineup this year us fabulous! The AWP conference staff—the entire AWP staff—has put together an amazing lineup including Colson Whitehead, Nikky Finney, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tayari Jones, Kaveh Akbar, and Cheryl Strayed. Yes, the conference is big, but I’ve learned over the years how to manage the experience, so I don’t get overwhelmed. I meet so many writers at the conference doing innovative, creative work. But I also meet MFA students who are just getting a glimpse of the literary world and how vast it can be, as well as professors who are opening doors for the next generation. AWP has been with me my whole literary career, so I’m happy serve the organization in any capacity I can.

NA: You teach, write, blog, run workshops, run the Mass. Festival and AWP, and you are a single and rewilding mom. Do you sleep?

JGO: No.

But soon I’ll be stepping down from running the Mass Poetry Festival. It’s time. And I need to plan for our big move from Massachusetts to Mississippi! I was awarded the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence  at the University of Mississippi, Oxford for 2018-2019. The kids and I are moving to Ole Miss!

NA: I’d love to close with a poem, “Tinder,” another favorite of mine.  

Admittedly, I wrote the poem “Tinder” before the dating site Tinder was a thing. Still, it works.

 

TINDER

 

Admit it: you miss the sex.
That part of you closed up shop,
hung a Gone Fishing sign
on the marriage after it ended.

It is an unattended campfire
burning itself to the embers
on a cold January night, bits of ash
floating into the air and disappearing.

How can you not think of the campers
around the fire ring, leaning in to warm
their hands over hot tinder? Small kindling
laid over tops of logs. Like a survivalist
you have learned to live on less.

It burns from the inside out
from a place you had forgotten,
where the hot coals reveal what you really are:
awake, ablaze, afraid, alone. A good camper
never leaves a campfire unattended.

You know you are more like the alders
bordering the encampment,
more like a twig among the thin,
brittle branches of leafless trees,

more like the pleasure of the tongue,
the lift and compression of breasts held
closer to the glowing red heart,
closer and closer to earth and below
to the in-door turned out-door
after baby after baby. Oh, baby—
anything can be ignited by a match.

 

January Gill O’Neil is the author ofRewilding (fall 2018), Misery Islands (2014),and Underlife (2009), published by CavanKerry Press. She is an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, and a board of trustees member with the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and Montserrat College of Art. From 2012-2018, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Cave Canem fellow, January’s poems and articles have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others. In 2018, January was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and was named the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence for 2019-2020 at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She lives with her two children in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Barbara Stanwyck and "Witness to a Murder" [by David Lehman]

Witness to a Murder

She saw a murder.
She bought all the papers.
She pocketed the murdered woman's earrings.
She called the police.
She smoked a cigarette.
She told her story and was not believed.
She deduced that the door had been tampered with.
She answered the doctor's unreasonable questions reasonably.
She heard the woman say one thing: "Mr. Peabody will see you in the drawing room."
She didn't back down.
She insisted she saw the ex-Nazi kill the girl, "Joyce Stewart."
She didn't write the threatening letters that were typed on her machine.
She didn't get ticketed, just scolded, for speeding on a scary mountainous road.
She took the elevator down.
She ran in the street.
She hurried up the black and white steps pursued by shadows. 

8 / 19 / 08

Schiller and Other Poets in Marbach, Germany [by Tami Haaland]

On one of my last days in Germany, I went to Marbach, only a few minutes by train from where I was staying. I had considered it over the previous weeks because it was Friedrich Schiller’s birthplace, but I didn’t realize the Schiller National Museum along with an extensive Literature Archive is the centerpiece of the town. 

Schiller was born in Marbach in 1759, when his father served in the military for the Duke of Württemberg who lived in Ludwigsburg. Later Schiller’s father retired to manage the parks, forests, and botanical gardens I have mentioned in earlier posts. Now these areas provide public space for the city, but at that time they were part of the Duke’s plantations and hunting grounds. I wonder if young Schiller skipped along the tree-lined walkways or whether his father created some of the nearly hidden pathways through the vegetation around the castle. 

Because of his father’s connection to the Duke, the Schiller family was subject to the Duke’s wishes, and when Friedrich reached the age of thirteen, the Duke insisted he be sent to military school.  The family had hoped he would become a minister, but the education he received allowed him to study medicine and law. Still, the Duke’s intrusion into the family sparked a life-long interest for Schiller in how power can be abused, a theme that appeared in his first play, The Robber. It was performed in Mannheim, and Schiller spent time in jail because he failed to ask permission to leave Ludwigsburg. In addition to jailing him briefly, the Duke also insisted he never write drama again. It wasn’t long before Schiller sought asylum and refused to abide by the Duke’s orders.

The elegant museum devoted to his legacy opened in 1903.  There are no English translations for the exhibits as in many German museums, but it is a rare treat to see the handwriting, portraits and personal effects of so many writers. One wing of the classically designed museum is devoted exclusively to Schiller. A wall of portraits dominates the first room, and additional rooms are focused on his letters and manuscripts. For me, the pages that show his revisions—lines crossed out or arrows that specify where lines should be moved--are favorites because they reveal more about the mind at work than pages with a perfect surface.

Beyond the manuscripts, I found myself admiring a rough drawing he made of his arm and closed fist. One room contained his clothes—two sets—one more formal than the other. Something about these personal items—his hat, his shoes, his mirror—provide the imagination with more access to the mystery of the person than any of the portraits. He owned a large quartz crystal and several prisms, and I can only assume he was fascinated by light.

The second major wing of the museum houses the work of his contemporaries—Goethe, Hölderlin, Kant, Mörike and many others. Here, there are only small samples, a page or two from each person with presumably many more stored in the library archives.

A connecting hallway in the basement allows access to the Museum of Modern Literature. The entrance,  a narrow, dark green room, is devoted to Eduard Mörike who was born in Ludwigsburg. His death mask appears near the door, and as in the older museum, some of his personal effects are on display. The most notable part of this exhibit is a series of wooden pieces of different lengths leaning against the wall, each with an engraved line from the poem “Am Mitternacht” (“At Midnight”). The exhibit invites slow reading and contemplation while walking the length of the room.  In the poem, a personified night, “leans dreaming against the mountain wall.” She is the mother of small streams who sing to her a lullaby about the blue skies of day, but “she is tired of it / and thinks the blue skies sound sweeter.”  Her discontent is a bit surprising, and in the context of the poem it is understated. She cannot escape either her identity or time. 

Further into the modern museum, two exhibits will extend into 2019, The Invention of Paris and Thomas Mann in Amerika, which had not quite opened when I was there.  The Invention of Paris features candid street photos of Paris and the work of writers such as Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan. Here, too, each display case holds manuscript pages and letters. A few samples are available at the link above.

On the way back to the train I found myself winding through the city's seventeenth-century houses and cobblestone streets. Though it would have been nice to visit Schiller’s birth house, where his family lived until he was four, it was too late in the day. The Schiller Museum was enough, and now that I've left Germany, I'm finding the well-orchestrated and layered website provides access to treasures far beyond what I encountered while I was there. 

The Best Thanksgiving Ever [poem by Jennifer L. Knox]

After the meal, Sandy decided we should spice up charades
by slapping the loser’s butt with a ping-pong paddle.
Whenever Ed got slapped, he farted because he was so nervous.
The ladies won, slapped all the men’s butts, but then what to do?
“Take off your clothes!” I told Sean, who didn’t seem like the kind
of guy who’d do such a thing—but he was, and he did. Then Jim
took off his clothes. Then John. And then the other Jim
who brought all the lovely bottles of wine. And finally Ed.
Deb came out of the bathroom and saw five big men naked in the kitchen.
They screamed, “Take off your clothes!” We all figured she would,
and she did. Then Sandy the Slapmaster, then me, then Tomoko
who kept her glasses on. We walked around the house naked,
talking about how it was to be naked with other naked people,
how none of the guys had boners, and how cold it was out in the garage.
Somebody found a big bottle of vodka. We made a no-hugging rule.
John kept trying to open the curtains and show the neighbors
what they were missing. Deb thought an orgy was imminent,
but since we’d all spent a lot of time in Iowa, I didn’t think it would fly.
Jim passed out. Ed put a robe on. I passed out. We woke up
the next morning in t-shirts, ate bagels from Bagel Land, and said,
“We all got naked last night.” That afternoon, on our way
to the Walt Whitman Mall, the ladies gave each other nicknames
ending with the word “Bitch.” Deb was Stupid Bitch,
Sandy was Gentle Bitch, Tomoko was Fucking Bitch and I was Precious Bitch.
All the bitches agreed that slapping people’s butts with a paddle
was something we needed to do every weekend, that this was the best
Thanksgiving ever, and that Ed had the biggest dick we’d ever seen.

-- from Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 68, 2011

Phantom Signs: A Review of Philip Brady's New Collection of Essays

Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City
Philip Brady
The University of Tennessee Press, 2019

Philip Brady’s new collection of essays, Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City, assays the enthusiasms and hidden architectures of a lifetime spent in academia and in poetry. Brady, poet, professor, basketball player, editor, and book publisher, brings tremendous erudition and empathy to bear on topics ranging from the wrath of Achilles to the flat earth theories of Kyrie Irving. Phantom Signs offers dispatches from the interstices between middle age and old age; the essays in this volume derive their momentum from the competing imperatives of the poet and the editor. As Brady notes in the introduction, “this book emerges from the tension between these two modes of being in the world: the writer’s dark, the editor’s light.” Brady’s subject matter is multifarious, vertiginous, constantly overlapping; the approach of the essays themselves are by turns Borgesian, Deleuzian, and Dionysian. Brady is not afraid to stutter step, to sucker punch, to jackknife, to parry, to juke, to barrel down the lane, to take a charge, to lay out, to confess, to faux-disclose, to retrace, to praise, and to re-envision himself and his ideas through a kaleidoscopic array of experiences—from his childhood in Queens, through his Peace Corps days in Zaire, to his years teaching at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

Phantom Signs skitters playfully between memoir and criticism, impelled forward by the inspired imaginary chirography of luminary figures—real and fictitious, heroic and infamous—beginning with Chinua Achebe, Achilles, and Aeneas, and ending with Zarathustra, Robert Allen Zimmerman, and Louis Zukovsky. Brady recounts love affairs, travel, aging, a late marriage, recollections from early childhood, the innerworkings of a small poetry press, the insights gleaned from a life wed to great literature.  Along the way there are notable observations, such as: “Poems are so enigmatic. Each emerges from some private darkness which publication does not entirely dispel. No one wants to be taken in by a false poem. An accidental verse.” Here, as everywhere else in Phantom Signs, Brady emphasizes the mysterious, the atomized substance of words charged with the ambition of enduring. In an essay that served as a commencement speech for the Wilkes University MFA Class of 2016, Brady writes: “When I say that writing begins with failure, I mean only that it begins there—what happens next is what counts. Most people give up. I think that those who make writing a life’s vocation aren’t necessarily the most talented; they are merely the most willing to experience profound and continuous defeat.” For those of us who love poetry, it is lucky that Philip Brady is one of those who haven’t given up.

---

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Paul Berman on Michael Walzer on "Tablet"

from Paul Berman [left] on Tablet in the second of a series of highly provocative and thoughtful essays on the American left and the dangers of anti-Semitism.

<<<

Michael Walzer has brought out a book called A Foreign Policy for the Left, in which he argues that, when people on the American left contemplate domestic affairs, they do so in a thoughtful, sober, and serious manner—or, at least, they make what Walzer considers to be an honest effort. But when those same people turn to world affairs, they slip into a different habit of mind, as if sliding from one lobe of the brain to another. 

**

The question of world affairs arises, and the left-wing public responds by thinking: “Everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.” No elaboration seems required. From that one assumption follow all the others. 

**

There is the spectacular instance of left-wing delusion about the Islamist political movement—the left-wing supposition that something has got to be progressive about the Islamists, even if the Islamists appear to be medieval reactionaries; and the further supposition that Islamism’s enemies among Muslims and non-Muslims alike must surely be the actual reactionaries, even when the enemies appear to be liberals and progressives. Here is a “politics of pretending” in a double-twist pretzel version.

**

You can read about Bernie [Sanders’s] shortcomings in Truthdig, where he turns out to be a major sellout, a non-socialist because a non-anti-imperialist, and a tool of the sinister Democratic Party. The anti-Zionists and the fantasists yearn for an American [Jeremy] Corbyn [head of Britain's Labour party]. They want a national leader who will denote as realistic their own fictions and dreams about faraway dictators; and will usher the fictions and dreams into the American mainstream; and will say nice things about Hamas and bad things about Israel; and will offer an appalling speech to the Democratic National Convention; and will stand shoulder to shoulder with the outright bigots; and will drive everyone with a Jewish soul out of the left, except for a pitiful handful.

But America has produced no such leader. America has produced Bernie Sanders. America is different. Not different at every moment, but, even so, different.

 

Scary Stuff: Paul Berman Reports On the Predicament of the Jews in France Today

<<<
. . .in France, a great mass of Jews have lately undergone experiences that are unimaginable in the U.K. Some 50,000 French Jews, or 10 percent of the entire Jewish population, are said to have decamped from one place to another within central France (or have emigrated to Israel) during the last few years, in order to escape quotidian persecutions from neighbors who have come to accept the Islamist doctrine. The intermittent massacres and murders of Jews in France and in Belgium have added up to a low-level protracted terror.
>>>
<<<
Anti-Zionist street protests got underway [in Paris] in the summer of 2014, at the time of the most recent of the full-scale Israel-versus-Hamas wars in Gaza, proclaiming solidarity with Hamas. At a demonstration in Paris—called by one of the smaller Trotskyist parties, not under Mélenchon’s leadership, but drawing on the public that is his—a street full of marchers broke into a cry of “Death to the Jews!” And “Jew: Shut up, France is not yours!,” together with “Allahu Akbar!,” and “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!,” which are not normally Trotskyist slogans. 
>>>
<<<
Do the many American campaigners, student councils, minor and major politicians, immigrant activists, distinguished intellectuals and vigorous chants add up to the kind of political force that anti-Zionists have amassed within the radical left in Britain and France (and elsewhere in Western Europe)? Is there a possibility that, having assembled a great many supporters, the newly cheerful left-wing anti-Zionists in America will succeed in hollowing out whole portions of the culture of the traditional liberal left in the United States, on the European model? Or is anti-Zionism in our own country mostly an annoyance, perhaps larger and friskier than a university fad, but not vastly so, and easily brushed off? Is America, in short, different?
>>>

Paul Berman, "The Left and the Jews," Tablet (November 11, 2018)

The Best American Poetry 2018 at the Southern California Poetry Festival Sunday, November 18, 6:00 PM

At Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center
*681 Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291

November 18,  6:00 p.m. *Free

Fats Waller Live in 1935 [by David Lehman]

You and I both know why
“all my blondes and brunettes”
become
“all my Harlem coquettes”
when Fats Waller sings
“Lulu’s Back in Town”
after playing it on the piano
in 1935.

Think of that: in 1935
when everyone was supposed
to be miserable, here was Fats Waller
in his derby hat mustache cigarette and huge grin
playing and singing for the sheer joy of it

 

Poets and Their Places [by Tami Haaland]

My time in Germany is coming to a close, and for the past week I’ve been conflicted each day about whether to stay in Ludwigsburg or head out on the train to other parts of Germany, France, or Switzerland. In Ludwigsburg, I can walk through Favoritepark and the palace botanical garden on my way to downtown or choose a slightly different direction and stroll the palace gardens of Monrepos. The town has become familiar to me now, and I like having my small apartment as a home base. On the other hand, I would like to see as much as possible before I go back to Montana. The Favoritepark train platform is three minutes away. I can take the S4 to Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (main station), and from there, a person can go anywhere. With the Deutsche Bahn phone app, it’s a breeze to buy an inexpensive ticket.   

Last Tuesday I visited Strasbourg, just over the French border. The town has a long history of independence dating back several hundred years and is now the site of the European Union Parliament. When I arrived at the main station, I asked for directions at the information desk, and it was easy from there. I walked along cobblestone streets until I arrived at Strasbourg Cathedral, distinct from many other cathedrals because of its pink stone.  Once inside I sat near a pillar for some time thinking about who had been there, who was here now, how many hands over how many years contributed to this stunning space. 

Among its regular visitors, for a time, was Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe. He spent a year studying law at the University in Strasbourg and made a regimen of climbing to the outside balcony of the cathedral. There he would quiet himself, then step out onto a small platform with no railing, and in this way he would address his vertigo. In his autobiography, he speaks about this exercise as a pivotal experience. It allowed him to overcome his fear of heights, which then allowed him to see and do more in his subsequent travels to Italy and elsewhere.

After I returned from Strasbourg that evening, I spent one day and part of the next walking around Ludwigsburg or staying in my apartment with notebooks and computer, sometimes glancing out the window at the train platform. Then, around noon on Thursday, I made a spur of the moment decision to go to Tübingen.

Unlike many German cities, Tübingen wasn’t bombed during World War II. Germany is a patchwork depending on where the bombs fell, with some cities almost entirely decimated and then rebuilt afterwards with simpler, unadorned surfaces. But in Tübingen, the medieval city center is still intact and lively with small shops and many bookstores leading to the university. Narrow cobblestone streets curve up and down above the Neckar River that borders the old city. The castle, high on a hill above these buildings, now belongs to the University and houses ancient art ranging from 40,000-year-old figurines carved from mammoth ivory to Egyptian sarcophagi and Greek pottery. In addition to the museum’s ancient figurines, I was especially thrilled to see one of the gold death masks from Mycenae and a sculpture of a Minotaur head from Crete.

I went to Tübingen, however, because I wanted to see where Friedrich Hölderlin lived. One of the German Romantics, he spent his university days in Tübingen with his two philosopher friends, Hegel and Schelling. Much of his work appeared prior to 1805, when his life was marked by a major shift. He was accused of treason but had a mental breakdown that left him hospitalized in Tübingen. At the end of a year, he was pronounced incurable and released. Luckily, a carpenter’s family who had read his earlier works took him into their home, where he lived in a tower on the river just below the old city. He was given three years to live but survived for thirty-nine, though his family and friends neglected him after his breakdown. In their PEN/USA Award-winning Translations of Hölderlin, Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover provide an account of his importance to contemporary literature. 

I imagine Hölderlin watching people on an adjacent island or carriages crossing the bridge. His tower would have given him a perfect view of the river and anything that passed by. I wanted to see the interior of his tower, but the museum is closed for renovations and won’t open until 2020.

Since arriving in Germany two weeks ago, I’m thinking in short German phrases and attempting longer sentences, then plugging up the holes with English. This situation would probably improve if I could stay longer. Though I don’t expect to make much headway before my reentry into the US next week, I did recently buy a poetry anthology fittingly called Deutsche Gedichte, a lovely blue hardback with shiny copper polka dots. Originally published in the 1980s, it’s been updated and re-released this year, and while I’m taken with its cover design, I’m also doing a bit of translating. In the flurry of wondering where I should go next, focusing on individual words and lines is a pleasure.

Right now, I’m working on Ingeborg Bachman’s “Mein Vogel” (“My Bird”). She opens with these lines, “Whatever happens: the devastated world / will sink back into twilight.”  Despite the devastation, I think the lines are hopeful. They have to do with the overriding presence of natural rhythms. Light returns in the morning. No matter what, twilight and darkness settle in.

As I write this, a perfect half-moon shines through my little window. Maybe I’ll go to Heidelberg on Sunday.

James Schuyler's first poetry reading: November 15, 1988

 

When James Schuyler gave his first ever poetry reading, it was at DIA's SoHo headquarters -- on Mercer Street, if memory serves -- and there was a long line snaking around the block, and I remember seeing Henri Cole, and Douglas Crasew, and Jonathan Galassi, and a whole lot of other people, and John Ashbery introduced Jimmy by saying "he makes sense, damn it" and getting a loud laugh for some reason when he said "this is not the time and placer to discuss" something or other. 

With thanks to Andrew Epstein, and acknowledgment of his splendid "Locus Solus," New Yor School-centric blog, we can post this rare video of that reading of November 15, 2018 -- thirty years ago today. -- DL

https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/new-video-of-james-schuylers-legendary-debut-reading-in-1988

Claire Croizé’s “Evol” positions love of body & improvisation for take off [by Tracy Danison]

 

Photo: “Evol” © Herman Sorgeloos

“Evol”– an anagram of “love” which also recalls “evolution” – shares the love of the bodies of the dancers and the beauty of their movements

… [The Angels] see cleary

that [Humans] are not really at home

in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains

some tree on a slope, that we can see

again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,

and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit

that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.

First Duino Elegy, Rainier Marie Rilke (A. S. Kline)

“There is something of Giselle in it,” said I to Karine, darkly, after seeing Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”) the other evening at the Espace Cardin. It’s not that I object to the hokey melodrama; neither Karine nor I are strangers to inconvenient evolutions of affection, god knows.

Emotive incontinence or problematic pregnancy, either, for that matter. But.

I meant to tell her that Giselle or Verklärte Nacht or most other ballet-classic dance pieces use the body to tell a story rather than using the body so that it tells some-body’s story. So, I think the need to tell Verklärte Nacht’s story – de Keersmaeker wrote the choreography for the music, after all – means that the fluidity of Samantha van Wissen’s modern-dance expressionism (of bodily feeling and emotion) must necessarily stumble over Schoenberg’s made-just-for-ballet-style melodrama.

Photo: “Verklärte Nacht”, Courtesy Festival d’Automne

She’s pregnant by one man but loves another. But what’s hers will be his says the beloved.

Since the whole strength of Claire Croizé’s Evol – which opened at the Théâtre de la Bastille not too terribly long ago – is that the some-bodies tell themselves, there’s no worry of expression stumbling over a story. The art in Croizé’s choreography is in keeping the way wide enough for improvisation that works as performance; she does that.

Inspired by Rainier Marie Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which hold that a human being exists outside of thought, belief, tradition, philosophy and religion, Croizé says the idea behind Evol - an anagram of “love” which also recalls “evolution” - is “to share the love of the bodies of the dancers and the beauty of their movements”. As Evol goes forward, sometimes accompanied by music from David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, sometimes by silence, performers improvise personal movement that expresses their different personalities.

Evol opens with the cast spreading itself in a diagonal line, back corner to front corner, across the stage, giving the impression of a spray of salt or of flower petals. Two women performers – I identified them as “Blue” and “Grey” in my notes – detach. They remain non-positioning in respect to each other as they dance silence, though it does seem that Grey uses her body as a semaphore from go; from this begins an almost by-the-numbers introduction of personalities, of some-bodies.

I was struck by what seemed an almost continuous signaling and semaphoring, although it

Hands and arms point and wave more than propel and position

seemed to me more non-intentional tendency in movement than deliberate attempt to establish communication, at least at first. So it is that hands and arms point and wave more than propel and position, while strong costume identities and costume alterations and changes, highlight, without establishing, different potentials for positioning among the performers. The development of these potentials – couple, group, female-male, female-female, male-male – evolve up until the show ends.

About 10 minutes in, Ziggy Stardust makes rhythm and beat available to the evolving personalities. Plants begin to furnish the stage and define space. What was signaling and semaphore seems to become interpersonal stories that parallel a progressive positioning of all.

Performers become more articulated around music, although this does not mean that performers systematical, or even often, dance to the music… rather they use music to articulate their positioning: sometimes the spectator watches movement through the music, sometimes performers express feeling within the music. This said, there is a lovely moment of straightforward ballet to “Major Tom”.

Photo: “Evol” © Herman Sorgeloos

The development of the potential positionings – couple, group, female-male, female-female, male-male – evolve up until the show ends

“Major Tom” presages an increasing synchrony that, with performers all dressed up, becomes an equally lovely finale of dance and rhythm (not interpretation) to “Rock & Roll Suicide”.

I felt, although neither Karine nor the people next to me agreed in the feeling, that strong improvisation was a factor in making the piece more mechanical than fluid. The observation isn’t necessarily a criticism in the context. Evol isn’t about an approach to movement such Ohad Naharin’s “Gaga”, but about “spontaneous synchrony”, real improvisation. Where there is more spontaneity in movement, performers must assess their positioning in the movement around them: a certain holding back, which visually translates as “mechanical”, is the result.  

Conception and choreography: Claire Croizé / Performing co-creators: Claire Godsmark, Youness Khoukhou, Emmi Väisänen, Jason Respilieux / Dramaturgy:

Étienne Guilloteau / Lighting: Jan Maertens / Costuming: Anne-Catherine Kunz / Production: Action Scénique vzw : Kunstencentrum BUDA (Courtrai)

Claire Croizé programming

 

Next Line, Please: Title Precedes Text [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please, quizmaster Lehman provides a new prompt for NLP regulars to try out.

For this prompt, let's start with on of these two titles: “Occupational Hazards” and “Barroom Brawl.”

The former works because "it is part of our discourse, a phrase that can suit many purposes or occasions;" and the latter because "it, too, is a familiar phrase and may conjure up a very concrete scene."

Now on to the rules...

Write a poem 10 to 15 lines long. A second constraint might prove useful. For example, you may write a 10-line poem divided into two five-line stanzas, both of which have identical last lines.

Or—and what a stunt it is—a 12-line poem in which the numbers from one to nine appear in English or homophonic form. You are encouraged to take liberties. The word for “five” in French sounds like “sank”; “four” is “fear” in German; “nine” is “nein” in that language; the word “one” is included in “wonderful.” It’s a wonderful paradox that constraints act as liberators of the imagination.

Visit the American Scholar's page for the full post and to enter your candidate!

Thursday, November 15, 6:00 PM: An Evening with the Poets of Sage House

Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, & Carmen Torrado Gonzalez with David Lehman 

Thursday November 15 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Buffalo Street Books
The Dewitt Mall
215 North Cayuga Street
Ithaca, New York 14850

Spend an evening with the poets of Cornell University Press: Cheryl Quimba, Ange Romeo-Hall, Dean Smith, and Carmen Torrado Gonzalez! By day – they publish some of the leading academic and trade books in the country and world. By night – they emerge from Sage House to write and share their own evocative, imaginative, and inventive works. Join us for a reading with Ithaca’s poet-publishers & special guest David Lehman!