The Best American Poetry

"This is a photograph. . ." [by Katie Peyton]

1. (a self-portrait in Mexico by Savannah Spirit).

This is a photograph.

 

My friend photographs her body at 40, in Ajijic, in December. She says that is when the conditions are right for photography, when needles of light will attach like music. She takes a hundred shots, sends a few out into the world, and waits for the next December.

 

She knows cameras lie. Words smudge. She doesn’t know but suspects that one day her skin will be a ritual space on which weather will gather. I don't really know her: friend made event, a broken line, a porcupine of light.

 

She gave me this photograph, and I show it to people who come to my apartment. Do you like it? I ask. They say, it’s amazing. Then, oh my gosh. I see the woman!

2. (a painting by Alannah Farrell)

This is a painting. 

There’s a blue hand, dead center, and below it, a pair of human legs. They’re in a room, which seems to have a remnant of an older room inside of it. The light from the east is dead and golden, an ancient warning to sailors who lived in worlds without rooms.

The arm is lost in the afternoon; the hand is the color of daybreak. The front leg looks real: an unreliable narrator. The back leg reaches out: a bad victim.

I’m trying to remember the story, but these legs don’t keep diaries. They are too personal. Life is precarious here. 

I do remember when the hand leaves—when it puts itself on the knob and turns itself—it walks off with the door. 

I see a hand, but the legs see only the infinite space between yellow and blue. 

There is no other world, however hard you want there to be.

Why is there no furniture? He says other girls are easy. The legs don’t know how to answer and don’t answer. Who answers that.

I remember reading the only thing that travels faster than light is shadow. It makes sense, if you think about it: shadow is just an absence, really nothing at all. 

In paint, the shadow is real. In paint, even light ages.

Absences don’t obey speed limits. Even if they are posted clearly. But legs vote.

Centuries later, he still haunts the light. 

-- Katie Peyton

Image 1: Savannah Spirit, Eye of the Sun, 2017, Archival pigment print, 20 x 30 inches.
Image 2: Alannah Farrell, Sleep Paralysis, 2018, Oil on linen, 11 x 14 inches

 

Listening to Grace Cavalieri's Interview with Jorie Graham (by Nin Andrews)

I love this interview with Jorie Graham. I think it’s oddly seasonal,  a perfect podcast to listen to now in the darkest time of the year, in the season of myth and magic. I love how Jorie Graham, like Philip Brady, thinks in terms of our cultural beliefs. 

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, at least listen to the opening when Jorie Graham describes how she imagines, when writing a poem, that she is trying to get the attention of an unwilling listener, or “a person such as a God who has heard every prayer already, every request, every outraged voice and is tired of humanity, and has turned his back or her back." She explains that “there is such a moment in the Bible that used to terrify me when I was younger, when Moses hides in a cleft of a rock and watches God’s back go by. And I used to think, God’s back? He turns his back on us?”

 

Jorie Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the Forward Prize-winning and T.S. Eliot Prize-nominated Place (Ecco, 2012), From the New World: Poems 1976-2014(2015), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (HarperCollins, 2005); Never (HarperCollins, 2002); Swarm(2000); The Errancy (1997); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Materialism (1993); Region of Unlikeness (1991); The End of Beauty (1987); Erosion (1983); and Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980). She has also edited two anthologies, Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language (1996) and The Best American Poetry 1990. Her newest collection of poetry, Fast, released from Harper Collins in May 2017, received the Bobbitt Award frm The Libary of Congress.

"The Artful Dodger" (a poem for Sandy's birthday) [by David Lehman]

As a boy (who destroyed his eyesight
reading in the dark by flashlight,
I went to the library
for Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
because I had heard of the artful dodger
and figured he must have played for Brooklyn;
and even now, years later, as an English major
(who has read five novels by Dickens)
I still like to think of the artful dodger
as a baseball player, a pitcher preferably,
Sandy Koufax to be exact:

                                            After
shutting out the Twins in the fifth game
of the 1965 World Series, Sandy was asked
by Vin Scully (the Dodger announcer,
like me a redhead) on television
how he felt. "Like a hundred years old,"
Sandy replied, softly, sincerely
embarrassed by the camera more than the question
and by an arthritic elbow, pained.   

                                                       Three days later,
he came back, despite insufficient rest
and the curious absence of his curve ball,
again to shut out Minnesota, this time
in the decisive seventh game,
with a show of skill and determination
that demoralized the opposition,
Killebrew, Allison, and company.
                                                      "Sandy,"
now how you feel?" asked the persistent Scully.
"Like a hundred and one," was Sandy's reply
as an hysterical Lou Johnson (who hit
the game-winning homer) poured champagne
over his bashful dark semitic head.

-- David Lehman

(published in The Paris Review #63, Fall 1975; never collected)

The Frosts in Montana [by Tami Haaland]

When I came to Billings, I heard, vaguely, that Robert Frost had visited several times and somehow had family ties here. I knew he was raised in California and had western roots, but these ties came much later in his life. Robert and Elinor Frost’s youngest daughter, Marjorie, came to Billings in 1933 when she married Willard Fraser, who would later become one of the city’s most beloved mayors. Sadly, Marjorie died an untimely death from childbed fever not quite a year later. Robert and Elinor didn’t travel to Billings for the wedding, but Marjorie’s illness brought them here immediately, and they stayed for seven weeks until her death and afterwards to help with the new baby. Robin Fraser grew up here  and graduated from the local high school in 1952, with her grandfather as commencement speaker.

The letters provide some information about Robert and Elinor's stay in Billings. Their mail was forwarded to 244 Burlington Avenue, though I don’t know for certain if they stayed there. Visiting the Frost house in Shaftsbury, Vermont brought some doubt to my mind because Elinor Frost was pictured at another location, though that doesn't mean anything either. She could have been visiting someone. The focus of their letters in that period is on Marjorie, her suffering and their loss, with the forwarding address as the primary clue to location. One way or another, I like to think of them when I drive past. 

After Marjorie’s death, Robert Frost spoke at Eastern Montana College, now Montana State University Billings, and at Rocky Mountain College, though nothing seems to remain from those talks. In 1952, however, he visited both campuses again. The lecture he gave at MSUB was recorded and appears in the Norton collection, Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus.  In this presentation, he talked at length about metaphors and other figures of speech, one of his favorite subjects, and ulteriority, which he defined in this talk as “double meanings”:

            There are figures of speech, metaphors, that have more lasting value than others. But all
            of them, you learn—as you read poetry—you learn to know that you must leave ‘em;
            love ‘em and leave ‘em. They have their beauty. . . . That’s all.

            . . . Some poems are almost without that ulteriority. But almost always there’s a figure
            within the poem, scattered figures in details or in a figure of the whole.

He goes on to say that “intimation” and “hinting” are other words one might use to describe ulteriority (25). I think of it as the subtlety of good metaphors whose surface might be deceptively simple. 

Marjorie’s poetry shows this quality of ulteriority just as her father's poetry does.  The Frosts contemplated whether to publish Marjorie’s poetry after her death, and ultimately they decided that they would. Her small volume, Franconia, came out in 1936. You can read more about their story and hers by digging through the letters (You can also find an essay about her in These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry, edited by Lisa Simon and Brady Harrison, also on Project Muse). Her best poems are elegantly precise and often brief, sometimes only a quatrain or two. Occasionally they are quirky.  Frost even considered “If I Should Live to Be a Doll” as the title poem for her book because of its “strangeness” and because it would not “savor the least bit of memorial lugubriousness.”  While Elinor Frost wanted to see some of the poems in The Atlantic or Yale Review, she said Robert didn’t want to approach any magazines. He wrote that “the poems are good enough for publication regularly, though I doubt we will have the heart to submit them to public criticism” (Grade, Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost). Yet three of the poems did appear in Poetry Magazine the year before the book was published. For a time, Frost intended to include his poem “Voice Ways” as a preface to Franconia.

Curiosity drew me to Marjorie and her story, and from time to time something new surfaces. Some years ago I wanted to learn more about the history of Montana poetry, in part for very personal reasons. I had noticed a pattern of women writing and then stopping after one or two books and I suppose I feared that pattern might take hold in my own life. I was searching for authors who might have been forgotten, combing through the special collection rooms across the state and reading poetry in the Frontier Magazine along with the reviews published there. As I was browsing in the Montana Room in the local public library, I came upon a beautiful book, 37 pages, with a delicate orange pattern on the cover. It was Franconia, and when I mentioned it to various people who knew about the Frosts, it seemed to be a surprise. Somehow it didn’t become a noticeable piece of the Frost lore in Billings. And this is what I love about primary research. There is an excitement of "discovering," and behind the discovery, there is often a story.

 

Squibs 246—263 [by Alan Ziegler]

246. After Hitting Snooze: Once again I am on a talk-show panel, and the host asks questions for which I have witty and insightful answers, often contradicting what another guest says. Once again every time I try to interject, a panelist talks over me, and the host never intervenes on my behalf or calls on me. Once again the longer I am ignored, the angrier I get until I start railing that no one is listening to me. Once again they continue to act as if I am not even there. I don’t know why I keep going back on this damned show.
     
247. Newspaper editor to irascible reporter in There Goes My Heart: “You have to give me more respect. Or better copy.”
     
     
248. The goal of poetry is to split hairs on the heads of however many angels fit on the head of a pin.
     
     
249. I teach what I know. My students can cook sensational omelets, fingerpick “Guabi Guabi,” and make my wife very happy. But as I grade the final exams, my mind goes blank: I can’t remember my mother's maiden name, Xavier Cugat’s wives, the infield of the 1954 Brooklyn Dodgers, which corner had the best egg cream in midtown in the 70s, why the Senior Prom ended with everyone thinking I wound up in a ditch, what I said that got me this job, etc. I call my only A+ former student and ask him to grade the exams. He refuses. I am fired and he is hired. I am now in his class doing extremely well because I was one hell of a teacher.
     
     
250. The rain is the river coming home.
     
     
251. If you can’t follow a rule, enjoy being the exception that proves the rule.
     
     
     
252. The movie theater of my early youth was the Kinema on Pitkin Avenue under the El in East New York, where I had to turn around in my seat during House of Wax, my first—and last—3-D horror movie. Years later a teacher corrected me for pronouncing cinema with a hard c.
     
     
253. It happened so gradually I hardly noticed: one day I realized I could tell if it was John or Paul singing lead.
     
     
254. Ko-Rec-Type: Two wrongs make a white.
     
     
255. This sweet and salty trend has its roots, as far as I know, at Morris’s candy store in Lynbrook in the late 50s when my friend mischievously reached for a pretzel rod from the counter dispenser and dropped it into my malted.
     
     

256-261. Faits Divers fromThe Insect Times (with gratitude and apologies to Félix Fénéon)

            Remains found splattered on the kitchen wall have been identified as fly Bill Smits. Preliminary tests indicate a newspaper slaying. Police will be buzzing the usual suspects.

            In what is suspected of being a ritualistic cult murder/suicide, every member of the ant colony under the bathroom sink was poisoned. Investigators found traces of the poisonous substance on the feet of the Queen.

            With a bright future ahead of her, caterpillar Susan Sweet was stepped on last night by a humongous neighbor child. “She was about to metamorphose any day,” her distraught fiancé said while perching shiva. “I told her I’d wait for her. We were going to fly away together. We looked forward to our great great great great grandchildren settling in Ontario.”

            Flea Sam Smith died, apparently of natural causes, at his last known address on the right hind leg of Duke the dog. “He was quiet,” said Duke. “I barely knew he was here.”

            Half a tick named Conrad Stick was burned to death while burrowing in a calf. He is survived by his better half, who is currently in seclusion.       

            Roach Emily was found flattened. “She was the slow one,” her mother said. “We always said, ‘The poor dear will never survive a nuclear war.’”

262. A dean informed me that my review committee for reappointment was offended by my use of the word hardass in my professional statement. “Smartass,” I said. “Excuse me?” he replied through pursed lips. “Smartass,” I repeated. “The word I used to describe me in my early career was ‘smartass.’”
     
     
263. Caption: Wife to husband sitting fretfully at his desk: “How could you have the appearance of a conflict of interests when you don’t have any interests?”

Amplified vs. Transformed: Robbins & Balanchine [by Stacey Lehman]

Mr. d’Amboise in the title role of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” in 1962. “I want American boy!” Mr. d’Amboise said Balanchine told him. “He wanted me to be a wild, untamed youth, not just look pretty and make poses.”CreditJack Mitchell/Getty Images

[Jerome] Robbins took what you did naturally, enhanced, packaged, and presented it--he helped you become more of what you already were. [George] Balanchine took the music, developed his own ideas of movement, and challenged you to become more than you thought you could be. With Robbins, you were amplified; with Balanchine, you were transformed. 

                    - from I Was A Dancer by Jacques d'Amboise

Ain't that a kick in the head: Dean Martin Died on Christmas Day (1995)

 

 

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Rebecca Lindenberg

from Love, an Index

A

Abandon, what I did when you touched me
            that winter with an ungloved hand.
Ache, the heal of broken things: bones, disappointments. 
Allegories 
    of Love, Fragonard’s babycolored paintings,
            Ovid’s pursuers and storied looms, his Atalanta 
            her golden balls. The longing to know 
            how things become what they weren’t always.
    of Death, skulls, as in depictions of the penitent
            Magdalene. What should knowing we’ll die
            elicit? What does salvation have to do
            with being safe?
Angelbones, you alone
            have them. Where the wings came off. Where the wings belong.
Apartments, 
    Brooklyn, its winding stair reminding me
            of Yeats: “all men rise to greatness by..”
            A bicycle chained there. 
    South Dakota, we gave your son the only bedroom,
            woke early to salted baguette and snow.
    Salt Lake City, a porch ghost, a view
            of the valley’s glittering grid, my sister, your
            poor broken friend, we grilled squid 
            on the Smokey Joe. Tripod. Carpet. Halloween.
    Laramie, a basement, a stoveless kitchen,
            toaster-roasted eggplant, baseboard
            heat and sex in woolen socks.
    Rome, 5B, stone floors, white kitchen, white as the madness 
            I felt there, a bed that was twin beds held 
            together with so much duct tape, always 
            suggesting itself as metaphor;
Anger, 
    yours, with your father maybe, me maybe.
    mine, with you for finding expression of it 
            towards my family instead; there are other ways 
            of telling the story of our two angers, entwined 
            like bodies in the act of love. But in this one 
            I am not a villain.
Anne Carson, 
    the “Short Talks” from Plainwater, poolside 
            in Greece during an Easter Parade, clanking 
            in doorways for ouzo and bread; 
    The Autobiography of Red, in which Geryon 
            understood that people need
            acts of attention from each other.
Attention (see also: Anne Carson)
            “Geryon understood that people need acts of attention from each other.”

B

Binary, 
    code, allows a computer to represent text – b 
            is "000011110”. L-O-V-E too is a series 
            of 1’s and 0’s where 0 means “off” and 1 means “on”. 
    opposition, like presence-absence, male-female, love-
            innocence, love-hate, love-longing.
    star, two astronomical bodies orbiting each other 
            so closely they’re lost in each other’s light, and appear as one.
Bogota, city in the Andes surrounded by steep
            jungle. We did not fight in Bogota. Beaten 
            gold. White sanctuary. We love
            the Mexican restaurant full of wooden stairs
            overlooking vast expanses of Modernist architecture, 
            colonial plazaslit-up slums. La Candelaria
            is home to statues of ghosts, presence of absence. 
            Carts sell hot corn. We passed a woman
            laying on the sidewalk, pregnant a second time – 
            her belly swelled in half-globes around a dark scar
            like a peach around its deep groove. Storytellers 
            ride the busses, shattered petals and piles of thorns 
            and broad bruised leaves carpet the lot 
            where a flower market teems in the day. Sushi
            joint. Iranian embassy. A row of buildings trimmed 
            in tropical flowers and razor wire. Bookstore. We watched 
            Bollywood dubbed into Spanish on the old-fashioned TV 
            in your sublet apartment.
Bollywood, where love is an exhuberant fantasy
            of song. Many stories stop before they end.

C

Chopin
    etude. Major keys seem to have to do with light, minor
            keys with shadows cast by Major keys. 
    nocturne, an evocation of watchful owls, shimmer 
            of satin and violins. Or of a woman at a desk 
            with a glass of wine, trying to see through 
            her own reflection in the window.
    prelude, an introduction to the silence that follows it.
Comfort, erotic. (Example: Campion, “For when she comes 
            where comfort is she never will say no.”) 
Compromise, I will get up early with you 
            so long as there is coffee. 
Conversation
    about poems, you like “the sound of rice
            poured into a pan.” I like the bird 
            who rings like a wetted wine-glass rim, 
            and the bird who casts its shadow on the sea. I like
    poems, “held between two people, Lucky Pierre-style.”
            (See also: Frank O’Hara.) With Coleridge, when done reading 
            “I rise as though in prayer.” Such poems gather 
            everything into the now of the poem. I want to gather 
            everything into the now of this poem, but I can’t. 
            All is gloss (see also: Gloss).
Coquette, you called me once. Coy, you called me. I am
            neither. I am all candor and anxiety. But whatever
            I am, I am all for you.

D, E

Deadwood, ringing with slot machines. We drank pear wine
            in a cheap motel. I said “you take me
            to awll the noicest places” in a funny voice because
            it wasn’t true yet and I didn’t care. You funny-
            voiced me back, “Whaddya want? They got ice
            machines, they got HBO, dial up some
            va-va-voom.” We laughed. We showered 
            together and your peppermint soap gave me chills.
Desire, a chord played deep in the bass of the body. It’s good 
            to feel and to forget.
Divorce, far from a way you thought 
            you had of thinking of yourself. This story
            includes a divorce, which is how I come in.
D.H. Lawrence (see also: Desire), tells us “no, no, it is
            the three strange angels – admit them,
            admit them!” 


Emily, my sister, a wit and when asked what single thing 
            she’d bring to a desert island, she said: “a yacht.” 
            Like me, she fears to make mistakes.
Epithet, 
    Homeric, such as “swift-footed,” even when he’s sitting down,
            or perhaps “breaker of horses.” For women, “soft-braided” 
            or “glancing.” I have some for you, tall man, with your angelbones
            and your poppyred birthmark and your soft, soft hands
            and all those songs you made. My myth-maker. My great dark man.
Ex-, a prefix meaning “formerly and no more,” 
            connoting renunciation, affixed 
            to such nouns as lover and Catholic; 
            not likely to be placed before certain other 
            nouns, like sister or “breaker of horse” or bicycle.
Eye (not to be confused with I), in the Middle Ages
            (as recounted by Andreas Capellanus) it was thought 
            impossible to desire anything you’ve never seen, thus
            blind could not love. But there are other ways 
            of paying attention. (See also: Attention)

* * *

as originally posted, May 30, 2010:

Rebecca Lindenberg currently holds a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is completing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah.  No Tell Motel first published this poem in February of this year.  Rebecca wrote, "I wanted to give some of these poems a form that was more conceptual than metrical – hence “Love, a Footnote” and “Love, an Index” are both part of a series that uses scholarly apparatus to talk about passion, physicality, memory. I hope these forms will help reveal an underlying harmony between “eros” and “psyche,” two abstractions that sometimes seem superficially incompatible."

Mitch Sisskind presents a poem by Shaindel Beers

I found the work of Shaindel Beers online. I was interested that she grew up in rural Indiana where once I was wont to roam. In the town of North Liberty a man asked me the date. I told him and he replied, “Eighty-five years ago today I shot my first duck.” Then he began to cry. The great Theodore Dreiser was an Indiana native, as was his brother Paul, who wrote the beautiful song, “Moonlight on the Wabash.” Also from Indiana: James Dean, Michael Jackson, and Alex Karras, one of the last players to wear a leather helmet in the National Football League. Shaindel Beers' book A Brief History of Time draws on her early life in a very authentic way. Her hometown is not far from Culver, where my friend B. attended the military academy. An overweight dyslexic math prodigy addicted to aspirin, B. was a bridge champion at Culver. But that’s another story, one that was played out several cicada generations before the following poem was written…

Cicadas

Where will we be the next time
they emerge, in 17 years,
when brood X nymphs first wriggle their way
out of exit holes, climb the trunks of oaks and maples,
sun themselves on viburnum,
pale and helpless, before their wings dry
and darken
so they can fly safely to trees to mate, lay eggs,
and die?
I'm not sure I have a concept of 17 years.
I remember Ronald Reagan was President,
I was jealous of my friend Lindsey because
she had a Debbie Gibson hat.
The Princess Bride came out, and is still
my favorite movie.
Seventeen years in the future seems daunting.
The boys at the little league field behind my house
will be men, the neighbors’ dog will be dead
and the tree in my backyard
will no longer be mine.
I could be living anywhere—
not one to put down roots, I can't even guess.
Just yesterday, I realized, looking out your window,
that in less than two months
new trees will greet me from another window.
No longer the canopy of hardwoods,
but lush, tropical greens year-round
1,300 miles away from you.
And though we've talked about this,
I wonder what you're thinking,
what you would like to be doing
with the seventeen years that this year's
nymphs will spend underground,
burrowing, living on the roots of all those trees.

-- Shaindel Beers

from the archives; originally published July 7, 2009

An Interview with Philip Brady (by Nin Andrews)

As a continuation in my series of blog posts on the nature of truth, specifically autobiographical truth in poetry, I thought I’d interview Philip Brady whose most recent collection of poetry, to Banquet with the Ethiopians, as well his new book of essays, Phantom Signs, deal directly and indirectly with the questions I have been pondering.  

NA: As I mentioned in my recent interviews with January Gill O’Neil, Nicole Santalucia, and Dante Di Stefano, I had a poetry professor once who hated what he called “dishonesty in poetry.” He hated it when poets used the first person, and then described illnesses they never had or divorces or . . .  who knows, maybe their own funerals. I am wondering what you think? 

In your poetry as well as in your essays, the personal and the mythic are profoundly linked. Do you think of the I in poetry as a sort of myth? The personal as a construction?

PB: Nin, I am completely honest on the page. Naked. Virtually transparent. It is true that I suffer occasional lapses in orthography. Queens, for instance, is spelled, in my father’s hand, “Galway.” And Father himself is transcribed as “Telemachus.” While Mother is indubitably a goddess, she did not prove, regrettably, immortal. And my wife, in spite of being spelled “selkie,” is not in actuality trans-species. These variorums may be addressed in the next edition.

I share your poetry prof’s aversion to doctoring. Untruths inserted in order to enhance status, embellish memory, hide sin, wring sympathy, or gain financial advantage must be censured. If, for instance, a certain University College Cork player signing “Rick Barry” autographs did not actually dunk a basketball against the Cork Blue Demons in Gurranabraher in 1976, any claim to the contrary is bollix. Likewise, if Homer didn’t write the Iliad and Odyssey, he should stop collecting royalties.  

 NA:  In your essay, “The Book I Almost Wrote,” you describe your efforts to write a memoir, and how, after recovering from heart surgery, your concept of the memoir completely changed. You decided to write the memoir in verse instead. Somehow that made all the difference? Why?

PB: Partly it was perspective. Coming back from a near-death experience, I felt far away from the tribulations of a seventh grader in summer camp, where the prose memoir-in-progress was set. As Walter Ong has said, “One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death.” So there was the desire to lift things off the page.  Having just emerged from the place of the Muse, I wanted to compose and be composed by a living body, which is verse.

NA: How does verse change the dynamic?

PB: It changes speed, and allows for radical distortion of scale. Since they are margined, sentences must create believable scale and maintain pace.  Speed can of course vary, but not in the dramatic way that it can change in lines. Lines can stretch each moment to an operatic recitative. Or they can move so quickly you skip or transpose whole lines. (I squint at any reading that doesn’t dwell on one line and skip another). Homer can take ten lines for a greeting, and flash through ten years of war in fifty days. So lines aspire to render the moment, repeated, varied, flawed with each enactment. Even in print, they retain an aura of private darkness—what I call in one phantom sign a “hex.” Sentences are webbed in the tissue of syntax. But lines are only loosely page-bound; each line is connected to the whole by rhythmic echo, but not necessarily by sense, punctuation, or chronology.

NA: You write in that same essay that you “began to see that there was no home, no element anyone could own or even belong to, except for the moment reaching for a single line.” That sounds very Zen. Could you elaborate?

PB: It’s the condition of utterance that I’m reaching for—the breathing and vanishing moment. I’ve heard that scientists say that that the present is ten-to -fifteen seconds. Maybe that’s why lines tend to be four to six feet. Each line is its own present. Bernard Knoxsays wrote that each of Homer’s dactylic hexameter lines displays the arrangement of the whole poem. Each begins with conflict and possibility, and proceeds through a variety of sounds to fill the metrical requirements. But each line ends with the same strict pairing of dactyl and spondee. The poem is inside each line—from possibility to finality. By the end of the Iliad, the force of the story has been welcomed and displayed sixteen thousand times. Of course lines too are time-bound. They are, in a sense, signatures rather than enactments of this ever-present. They are phantom signs. As a long-time practitioner of the prose poem, Nin, I wonder if you would agree that prose poems aspire to utterance without even the written score of lineation. They yearn to be neither sentences nor lines. They yearn toward the moment reaching for a single line—just beyond the human. For me, this yearning is at the heart of poetry. Poetry is the only art form which cannot be fully apprehended in one species—neither sight nor sound. Perhaps the last three thousand years of written verse is an elegy for a time when lines were conceived and spoken in one breath.

NA: I love what you are saying here. I could never put it in words as you do.

I also love how in your essay, “Are Lives Matter?” you describe the literary desire to escape the confines of one’s identity—even to be no one, meaning to be no one in the way Odysseus tried to be no one. In the way Dickinson wanted to be no one. 

And yet those people who become “someone” are somehow owned by history? So their stories are not their own? Again “truth” is not literal truth?

PB: The greatest transformation of identity seems to me in folding three dimensional beings into two dimensions of the page. And as time passes, what we know about those who have made that transition grows less.In all cases,  identity is unsustainable. The further back we go, the more it’s corrupted—from history to rumor and finally to myth. We know Einstein’s hairdo and Mickey Mantle’s bourbon. But Daniel Boone? Sappho? Zarathustra?

NA: In your essay, “Lines and Sentences,” you write: “Memoirists are tattooed with sex; they reek of hormones. When people talk about the difference between memoir and fiction, that’s what they mean. It doesn’t have much to do with imagination: memoirists make up as much stuff as novelists do. The difference is that memoirists stand bowel-deep in the stench of their own creations.”

Could you say a little more about this?

PB: Well, for instance, in your next book, which I’m delighted to say is forthcoming from Etruscan, you conduct a dialogue involving “Nin” and “Orgasm.” Both speak; both are heard. The author is both and neither. There is a fiction at the heart of non-fiction. And vice-versa. There’s something of the memoir, perhaps, even in Homer. Samuel Butler says that considering Homer’s Trojan sympathies, he must have been a Trojan himself—at least on his mother’s side. So, memoirists and novelists are both tattooed with selfhood. What’s different is the position from which they speak: whether author or narrator.

NA: Again, I love what you are saying here, as I love your latest book of essays.

There are so many great poems and essays in Phantom Signs.

One of my favorite lines in the book is: “The first poet to come to nought was Homer.” As a publisher and a poet, would you like to say a few words about that?

PB: Homer, I think, is the perfect example of our yearning to connect myth and time. We don’t know who Homer was, when or where he lived, or if he even existed. Nine cities in Greece claim his birth. Some brilliant and crazed scholars argue he spoke Basque, or that Troy was really in Cambridgeshire.  If Homer came to “nought,” it was by way of the process of emerging from myth into time—becoming a chirographic poet. Clearly, that happened—the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down, somewhere by some process. But was it by one person, as “Unitarian” scholars argue? Or by many, as “Analysts” say. Homer walks between two worlds: the world of many, and of one. As a publisher, of course, I am always a “Unitarian.” I promote our authors as individuals—we pitch their bios and credits. Yet, there is something of the “Analyst” too in this enterprise. Writers disappear into the text, which remains fixed even as their authors change. Publishers enable and monitor this transformation. As I say in “Edited,” “Writers don’t make books. They make stories, poems, plays, and memoirs. We make books.”

NA:  Again, I love that. I’d like to close this interview with a poem of your choice and/or a brief excerpt from the book.

PS: Here’s a bit from Youtube.

And here’s one of “Nine Phantom Signs.”

 

Hex

         There is a word that I am loathe to say. It sends a small shiver up my spine. Not the usual—fuck, cunt, shit, prick, ass. Nor the sloppy ones like darling, pumpkin, sweetie pie, lambkins. Hearing “Yaddo” always made a friend wrinkle her nose, but I lack allergies to odd-sounding words like firkin or Iroquois. I pronounce with equanimity terms that portend evil, like triglycerides. I am not dismissive of tongue twisters or ululation or jaw harping. I jabber to my cat. I sing alone.

            It’s just this one word. It does not relate to sex, exactly, though one of its definitions is a body part. I would not say it out loud to myself, or to others if I could safely circumlocute. I would not have it uttered within earshot. The French version doesn’t squick me, which is ironic since the English is an obscenity in French. It is not a fetish; it does not fester behind a veil of incense and fishhooks. Though I can write the word, to write it while admitting that I would not say it—this I cannot.

            I hex this word. I do not curse or swear. I hex it. If I spoke my hexed word you would not cringe. It is not shameful. But to say that I cannot say it would color my humanity; it would divide us, reader, in this particular. Hex is the lust of virgin silence, the tensing of the unfired synapse, the spell between bars of the equal sign. Hex causes and precedes. Sans hex, words perfectly denote. They mean the same to everyone. They lack gaiety. 

            Every utterance is spun, like a charmed quark, by its hex. If all my hexes were perfectly aligned with Yeats’s, I would have composed “Lapis Lazuli.” Maybe I did. Loopy hexes spat out a book-length tale in blank verse. It zigzagged between myth and time. It opened with a list of everything that happens and does not. On the cover, it says To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. The name beneath is the same as the name beneath these words. Usually, it’s bad form to talk about one’s own book, but it’s OK here because it did not sell and if my name is on the dust jacket, it is only because none other has stepped forward.

            The 265^thitem on the list of everything and not reads simply, “Thersites.” So in my phantom sign, that is my name. Telemachus is my father. Homer is a novice scrivener. Fearless is a perfect gay child who lived inside my body and Odysseus and Achilles and Agamemnon are counselors at a summer camp for boys.

 

The heroes of Thersites’ beach camp
Were Agamemnon, Achilles, and Odysseus. 
And so were the heroes of my beach camp.
I named them from the paperback I’d nicked
From a bin outside the Main Street 5&10.
“A Great Adventure Story,” it was billed.
“The Greatest War Novel Ever Penned.”
Perched on a spavined bunk I clutched the book
And when Achilles or Odysseus
Or royal Agamemnon strode by,
I buried my nose till pages came unglued. 
 

            Before my book dissolved to my phantom sign it was composed of sentences. Stong and regular, they pulsed across the page, right justified, chapter upon paragraph. Then one autumn afternoon deep in midlife, there was a numbness in the syntax, a dependent clause cracked and then, an explosion.

 

I died, I think. It could be
A child’s fingers trace the livid script—
A cave figure or totem. It could be
My stitched chest is a chirograph
Metastasizing into memoir.
Thus my body, transcribed, rocks
Backward, washed clean of birth,
Forward into days charted by lines,
Backward like a wave or a half rhyme
And forward into the summer of 265
When I first bent solemn to the page.
 

            The sentences were no longer mine. They were no longer sentences. They were pent up. But they were still colored by my hex. Otherwise they might be “Lapis Lazuli.”

 

Philip Brady’s most recent release is a book-length poem, To Banquet with the Ethiopians: A Memoir of Life Before the Alphabet. He is the author of a previous collection of essays, By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard, (ForeWord Gold Medal, 2008) as well as three books of poems and a memoir. His work has been awarded the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Ohio Governor’s Award, and six Ohio Arts Council Artist Grants. Brady has taught at the National University of Zaire, University College Cork, and Semester at Sea. Currently, he is a Distinguished Professor at Youngstown State University and Executive  Director of Etruscan Press. He also serves on the MFA faculty at Wilkes University.     

Gaga at the Opéra: catching dreams and connecting with "Decadance" [by Tracy Danison]

Photo: Children at the Opéra Garnier, October 2018 

Just before the show began the man loomed up over the children perched in the rows just ahead and below. They squirmed around to look. He told them, “‘Decadance’ is divided into several parts. See which part makes you dream. Then, after, tell us your dream.” They snapped back to watch to show

For the premiere of Ohad Naharin’s Decadance at the Opéra Garnier, we perched in the fourth balcony, right, fourth row, a very good value proposition if your eyes are still sharp, as ours are. Lacing together figures and themes from a variety of other works and interpreted by some of the world’s most professional and best classical dancers, Decadance showcases Naharin’s “Gaga” approach to dance performance.

Photo: Aurélien Houette rehearsing, 2018 © Julien Benhamou / Opéra National de Paris

Performers has to learn the Gaga dance dialect for Ohad Naharin’s “Decadance”. Gaga, observed Aurelien Houette, a 20-year veteran of the ballet, connects “the material and physical with energy, with the immaterial and imaginary”

Naharin believes movement is the universal language of universal values: Gaga is his dialect. Opéra cast dancers had to learn Gaga for the performance. A distinct ruffle rippled through the sharp-eyed dance-lovers already in rank, when about 20 sweetly excited children ranging from 6 to 10 took up most of the seats in the rows below. One of the adults who was with them, a teacher, we suppose, said they were the young studies from the Opéra ballet school.

Next Line, Please: The Life of Words [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Anyone looking for a weekend treat? Because we've got one fresh from Next Line, Please!

Dr. Lehman begins his column saying, "It can help the poet to think of language as a living thing that doesn’t stand still and that seems to have a mind of its own." Much like the colloquially "word vomit," or that meandering Freudian slip. He goes on to say that "to write poetry is not so much to play with language as to live the life of words." And you don't have to tell me twice, that the word-driven life practically writes itself.

This week, we will be working with anagrams. What's more, we will be making anagrams of our own names, unlocking the hidden secrets and treasures our markers may contain. Here's the prompt:

For next week, then, I propose that you make as many anagrammatic words as you can out of your name. From David I get:

Diva
Avid
Id
Did
I

Lehman yields:

He
Man
Male
Name
Am
Ha
Lame
Lean
Luna
Lane
Mane
Me
An
Hale
Mean

I typed the words in the order they occurred to me, itself a fact that might prove useful.

Once you have assembled such a list, write a poem in which every line contains at least one of the words (10 to 14 lines). As a rather extreme example, here’s this stab at a self-portrait in five lines:

That David is avid comes as no surprise,
But his diva days ended in luna time
When his very name seemed to mean
A lane to the land of the id. I did it;
I am he: lean, hale. Male. He man? Ha.

Deadline: Saturday, December 15, midnight any time zone. Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

Poetry at Milltown State Park [by Tami Haaland]

On a chilly October afternoon a group of us met at Milltown State Park in western Montana. We stood above the Clark Fork River where we could see the Blackfoot River flow in from the north, and together they make their way westward, eventually spilling into the Columbia and flowing into the Pacific. Historically the park is a passageway, has always been a passageway not only for rivers but for the Salish and other Northwestern tribes moving out to the plains to hunt bison, or for various waves of settlers moving always farther West.

Now, there is a steady hum of traffic from I-90 with additional cars coming down Highway 200 to meet the Interstate. The tiny towns of Bonner and Milltown are below, with East Missoula only a little farther West and Missoula past the bend in the river and Hellgate Canyon a few miles away.

It is impossible to recreate a pristine sense of what it must have been like pre-automobile and train, but the place is serving the same function as it always has, and so as we began our journey through this landscape, we talked about accepting all sensory detail, traffic noise alongside bird call and wind in the trees, as part of what characterizes this location.

This was another of the Humanities Montana programs offered in conjunction with State Parks. The park ranger, Mike Kustudia, and two Americorp employees joined in the hike. We began by gathering in a circle and reading a short passage from N. Scott Momaday: “There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them, walked in them, lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind’s eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say: I am who I am because I have been there, or there” (from the essay,“Sacred and Ancestral Ground”). This quotation appeals to me because it removes the stigma of being new to a place; it places the emphasis on engagement rather than duration, and it is in the nature of the park system to welcome new visitors.

We hiked through the forest along a deer path, past a huge elderberry whose purplish berries seemed almost floral in the crisp fall air, and arrived at an overlook with its placards about wildlife, geology, the people who traditionally moved through this landscape, and Copper Baron William A. Clark, who owned a large ranch below where we stood. It was Clark’s idea to build a dam there so that he could float logs down the Clark Fork to the mill. Of course he had a hand in the mill, as he had a hand in Montana politics and anything else that might serve his purposes.

While the dam may have seemed like a good idea at the time, it was unfortunate that a massive flood happened soon after its creation, bringing loads of toxins down the Blackfoot from the mine above and depositing it in the reservoir behind the dam. Arsenic poisoned both the surface and groundwater and, unfortunately, the people who drank it. Late in the twentieth century, the area became a Superfund site, and so restoration work eventually happened and the park now exists on reclaimed land.

At this point in our journey, Mike Kustudia talked us through the history, and we asked questions until we felt familiar with the story of this place. We read Heather Cahoon’s poems from basalt magazine and Victor Charlo’s “Agnes," honoring an elder from his Salish tribe. The last lines were especially poignant: “Why did I learn how to write? Why did I want to? / Is it worth the loss of your world going away?” We also read Paul Zarzyski’s “Graveyard Shift at Bonner Mill,” which pays homage to the many workers who lived in tiny row houses below, to Richard Hugo, and to the “Milltown Bar, [where] Hugo’s poems [are] preserved / there forever under glass.”  

After a period of writing and reflecting, we continued on, down a trail through forest switchbacks to the river bottom. At one point we stopped to watch and listen to the birds beside us. They were in the tops of pine trees rooted far below, so we were eye level with their lively exchanges and flitting movements.

Where the trail meets the floodplain, we stopped at Tunnel 16 ½ on the old Milwaukee Road. For the moment this tunnel is blocked off, but it is destined to open and thus provide continuous connection from Missoula along the Kim Williams Nature Trail into Milltown State Park. And then we moved into the confluence area, the river bottom where the reservoir used to be, and talked about the 300-year old tree stumps, like ghostly sculptures, from trees cut down when Clark built the dam in 1908. Lush grasses line the river, one of them tinted a subtle red. Mike told us that particular grass is fond of heavy metals, in this case arsenic that has not disappeared from the area despite all cleanup efforts.  

We gathered in a circle two more times, once at a point where the Salish camped before journeying toward the plains. We spent time reading what we wrote earlier, reflecting on the landscape or our favorite moments during the hike. This was the end of the park, and it was time to return. 

Some of us rode up to the overlook parking lot and some of us hiked. When we arrived, we stood in a circle once more. We had spent a little over three hours together in 40-degree weather enjoying a landscape that some of us knew intimately and some of us had only encountered for the first time. I read Richard Hugo’s “Making Certain It Goes On,” a poem set on the Blackfoot featuring a drunk fisherman, the mill and the old dam. At the end of the poem, the speaker and the “you” he addresses, presumable the reader, imagine a statue honoring the fisherman after his death and signaling abundance: “this community / going strong another hundred years.” The poem, like the reading from Momaday, is inclusive, though Hugo's work characteristically implies hardship as well as the possibility of escaping it.   

We stood quietly. We spoke our thanks to each other for the day, for the poems and how they helped to shape our time together. No one wanted to be the first to step out of the circle. 

Orange Noir: Charles Willeford's Noir "Heresy" [by David Lehman]

           You can read The Burnt Orange Heresy as either a murder mystery or a parable about the hoax element in modern art. Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel (Carroll & Graf) gives satisfaction on both counts. It is an inverted detective story in the approved noir manner: the first-person narration takes us into the killer’s mind. Yet not until digesting most of the book does the fallible reader guess who is to be murdered and why.

          The plot centers on a painter named Jacques Debierue, avatar of “Nihilistic Surrealism,” whose most famous work is “No. One.”-- meaning both “number one” and “nobody.” Debierue, a European transplant, lives in Willeford country: Palm Beach, Florida. James Figueras, an art critic with his eye on the main chance, obtains an interview with the great recluse. To ingratiate himself with an influential collector, he agrees to steal one of Debieurue’s paintings.

          The catch is that there are no paintings to steal. Like a version of Mallarme as dreamed by Borges, Debierue is convinced his ideas are so far superior to any possible execution that in logical consequence he does not paint. Instead he has committed his life to the “unfulfilled preparation for painting.” He puts in his four hours daily, “a slave to hope,” yet always refuses in the end to violate “the virgin canvas.”

Figueras has no such compunction. After breaking into Debierue’s pristine studio and discovering there is nothing to pilfer, he sets fire to the place, counterfeits a painting by Deberieu, forges his signature, then writes the article that offers the definitive interpretation of works that never existed. In a curious way it is as if painter and writer have colluded to invent Debieurue’s “American period.”

Willeford, highly esteemed for his Hoke Moseley novels, weaves the aesthetic theory and the criminal mischief expertly together. The Burnt Orange Heresy is a rich enigma: a monument to “a qualified Nothing,” suggestive of “deep despair” on the one hand and total “dedication to artistic expression” on the other. It is noir not only in the sense of, say, Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black canvases but also in the violent romantic sense of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.

-- from the archives; originally in Tin House

Tom Lasorda on Frank Sinatra (happy birthday, Frank)

<<< 

Today is Frank Sinatra's birthday.  We should all celebrate because he was a tremendous man who touched many, many lives.

He did something for me that I never ever thought possible, and that I will always be thankful for.

Frank called my mother and my sister-in-law answered.  He asked for Ma Lasorda and said it was Frank Sinatra calling.

My sister-in-law hung up in him.

I called back and said, "Hey, that was really Frank.  Put Mom on the phone."

Frank told my mother that he was coming to Philadelphia for a concert and wanted to invite her to be his guest.  He also told her that he wanted her to cook my favorite meal, scarole and beans, and hot peppers and sausage.

Well, to ask an Italian lady to cook is a very high honor.

So Frank comes to Philadelphia and pulls onto our block. Jilly, his right-hand man, gets out of the car and knocks on our neighbor's door.  He asks is Ma Lasorda is there, and of course she tells him that she lived next door.

That lady saw Frank and within twenty minutes there was a swarm of cars and the police had to be called in.

The next night at the concert, Frank sent a limo to pick up my mother.  There was a doctor and nurse in the limo who Frank wanted there just to make sure she was okay.

They got to the show, and her seats were in the front row. As Frank started the show, which was at the Valley Forge Theater, he introduced her to the crowd, came down from the stage to give her a kiss and flowers, and dedicated the entire show to her.

What a man!

So today I wish Frank's family all of my love, and I will always treasure the memories we made during our friendship.

Happy Birthday, Frank.
>> 

Orestes (by Mitch Sisskind)

Who then were the chiefs
and the lords of the Danaans?
I could not tell the multitude
of them nor name them, not if I
had ten tongues and ten mouths,
not if I had a voice never to be broken
and a heart of bronze within me,
not unless the Muses of Olympia,
daughters of Zeus of the aegis
remembered all those who
had come beneath Ilion.
                                    Iliad, Book II

These were the policemen, retired and active,
Accompanied by their wives, who like a great
Flock of birds attended Frank Umschlager’s
Retirement dinner at the Cucina Albanese
And their laughter reverberated off the ceiling
Until the night wound down with Al Jablonski
Saying a few words and then Frank Umschlager
Said a few words himself at the end of the night.

It showed respect for Frank Umschlager how
Representatives of all twenty-four police districts
Were there although in Frank Umschlager’s career
Frank Umschlager had not actually worked in all
Twenty-four districts, but in the districts where
He did work he crossed paths with officers who
Moved on to other districts so the upshot was
Officers from all the districts attended that night.

There was some horseplay among the policemen
As they greeted one another, laughingly playing
Some grab ass as the wives also exchanged hellos
But the wives in a quieter way because the wives
Didn’t know each other that well and because most
Of them would just as soon have stayed home
But they were there in Frank Umschlager’s honor
Because they were the wives of the policemen.

As when a great flock of birds lands in the trees,
The policemen sat down at the tables designated
For their respective police districts, each policeman
Accompanied by his wife, and then the waiters
Who seemed to appear out of nowhere filled their
Water glasses, took their drink orders, and offered
The appetizers of minestrone soup, bruschetta,
Or crab cakes, which was the most popular appetizer.

At the table of the 001 district there was Bob Dreher
Whose father Dub Dreher worked for many years
In the old Area South Detective Division when it was
The private fiefdom of Lieutenant Slick Negronida.
Joe Bona was also at the 001 table, and so were
Ravko Micevik, Herb Bevens, and Phil Trymowicz,
All of them accompanied by their wives that night
Like a great flock of birds at the Cucina Albanese.

Ravko Micevik, the gray-haired man, retired now
from 001 where he worked patrol for many years,
He opened his mouth and he said, “I remember
“Going to Sox Park as a kid when there was
“A late innings pitcher’s duel with no score until
“Minnie Minoso came up to bat and I prayed for
“A home run on the next pitch and he hit it over
“The fence and ever since that day I believe in God.”

From 002 came Barney Lanaham and his wife,
Angelo Caniziaro and his wife, Al Louderman
And his wife, Konstantin Gekas and his wife,
Gene Fiebig and his wife, and Kevin Bechina,
Ed Glinicki, Karl Deutsch, Bob Lietz, Sal Manus,
Jimmy Nytko, John Pipala, and Gus Catomerislos,
All of them also accompanied by their wives,
As was Edward Jesovic accompanied by his wife.

From the 003 District came Jim Capesius who
Was the boss of the shooting range and who
In all his years on the street was never forced
To fire his gun but now at the shooting range
He taught what he never had to do on the street
But when he opened his mouth no one doubted
He could have done it if the occasion had arose.
He lived in Norwood Park as many policemen do.

Besides Jim Capesius and his wife at the table
For 003 were these police officers, all of them
Accompanied by their wives: Frank Latallia,
Archie Malhot, John Lasser, Ben Garcia, Bill Davis,
Ralph Maruska, Joe Kaderabek, Dave Lansky,
And Al Love, whose father Milton had worked in
The old Area North Detective Division when it was
The private fiefdom of Lieutenant Artie Epler.

From the 004 District which is called the Quad
There came Tim Leidy, Lou Palmer, Bob Gancarz,
Sam Chichester, Kurt Glinski, and their wives,
All under the unofficial leadership of Lee Kopak,
The gray-haired man, who opened his mouth
And said, “If they had the designated hitter in
“Minnie Minoso’s day he would still be playing
“And he would be in the Hall of Fame by now.”

Some from the 004 drank beer as they ate
Appetizers and there was wine for the ladies
But most of these policemen from the Quad
Drank rum and Coke in honor of Minnie Minoso.
Kurt Glinski, the gray-haired man, opened his mouth
And said, “The Green Olive had bean bag sessions
“On Monday nights where Minnie Minoso used to
“Drink a whole big pitcher full of rum and Coke.”

Kurt Glinski continued, “If you want to drink a drink
“As a drink ought to be made, if you want to play pool,
“If you want to drink alone or with six of your friends,
“If you want a perfect jukebox, if you want to watch
“Belly whomping or want to belly whomp yourself
“The Green Olive is the place for you. Minnie Minoso
“Was a regular and he could have gone anywhere
“In Chicago but he was a regular at the Green Olive.”

What about the 005? That night 005’s delegation
Was led by Bud Budnik, the gray-haired man
Accompanied by his wife. He had worked
Third shift for the bulk of his career. Vic Fantozzi,
Steve Girdzius, Leo Jungers, Hank Fahrenbach,
Bill Antonick, Jake Fennessey, Dick Grublesky,
Pat Moonan and their wives rounded out
The 005 delegation like a great flock of birds.

Then the waiters cleared the appetizers’ remnants
And the main courses of the night were announced,
Which were the lasagna, the rigatoni gorgonzola,
The chicken rotolini, or the linguini with clam sauce.
John Czarnik at the 006 table wanted the lasagna
As did his wife, and also as did Gene Hugentugler
and his wife, and Mike Davros and his wife,
But Jerry Frosch and his wife wanted the rotolini.

Moving on to the policemen from the 007,
Big Joe Smolnarski was the leader of the pack,
With his hair the color of iron gray like clouds
Over Lake Michigan on the winter mornings
When Joe Smolnarski made extra money by
Snowplowing driveways. Joe Smolnarski
Was accompanied by his wife as also were
Mort Musk, George Henry, and Sid Milsaps.

From the 008 there came Fred Lipkowicz,
Elroy Baker, Luke Botica, Nick Di Giola,
Walter Bednik, Wayne Burzyzh, Phil Delia,
Bob Alongi, and Joe Furmanek who told how
Minnie Minoso’s sixty-fifth birthday party
Was held at the old Calumet Beach Inn and
Minnie Minoso said, “I’m sixty-five but I am
“Still hitting them with the bases loaded.”

Representing the 009 that night like
A great flock of birds were Stan Chiliki
And his wife, Bob Donek and his wife,
Al Dibicz and his wife, and Pat Galvin,
Sam Guistolise, Phil Hess, and last but
Not least Sergeant Guido Indellacotto
And his wife, as were Pat, Sam, and Phil
Accompanied by their wives that night.

Fred Keuter led the 010 delegation
That included Tom Bouras, Jake Conley,
Vic Getsudas, Leo Riba, Bob Buzek,
Buddy Popko and other policemen
Too numerous to mention, all of them
Accompanied by their wives, and as the
Evening wore on the talk turned to how
Minnie Minoso could do no wrong.

Vic Getsudas then opened his mouth,
The gray-haired man, and he said,  
“One time I saw Minnie Minoso outside
“The old 2350 Club with Plush Falbo
“And I knew he was up to something but
“It was an unwritten rule how Minnie Minoso
“Could do no wrong. I also used to see him
“Outside the bowling alley on Diversey.”

Leo Riba said, “Minnie Minoso got himself
“A pass in the 010 and all over Chicago since
“The word came down from on high that
“He was the fair-haired boy so to speak.
“On account of he was Minnie Minoso,
“We were told to look the other way if
“Minnie Minoso got involved in something
“Because the word came down from on high.”

From the 011 we had Walt Figler, Al Koenig,
Hix Baskin, Max Coffindafer, and John Lekis,
All of them accompanied by their wives.
Hix Baskin, the gray-haired man, said,
“Except when he was playing baseball
“Minnie Minoso never wore a baseball hat.”
Max Coffindafer said, “Even on real hot days
“Minnie Minoso never wore short pants.”

Regarding 012, it was the private fiefdom
Of Lieutenant Bob Hilliz who on this night
Had Phil Bruno, Tom Coyne, and Len Ficht,
In his entourage, all well along in years
And each man accompanied by his wife.
Bob Hilliz opened his mouth and said,
“As a boy I got a Mickey Mantle baseball card
“But what I really wanted was Minnie Minoso.”

Then with a look of bemusement on his face
Bob Hilliz continued and said, “I traded
“Mickey Mantle to Fuzz Voit who now works
“In the Sanitation Department for Minnie Minoso
“And I never gave it so much as a second thought.”
Phil Bruno said, “If I had it to do over I might join
“The Sanitation Department but a lot of those guys
“Are big time booze hounds, understandably.”

Just as in many office buildings there is no
Thirteenth floor or in cities there is no
Thirteenth Street, there is no 013 District
In the Chicago Police Department so we skip
Now to the 014 District which is bounded by
Elston Avenue on the east, Division Street
On the south, Belmont Avenue on the north,
And Central Park Avenue on the west.

From 014 were Bob Ceska, Chuck Risko,
George Ramboldt, Pete Kula, Bill Lewis,
Gene Podgorniak, and Louie Rappmann,
All of them accompanied by their wives.
Bob Ceska, the gray-haired man, was
Always warmly greeted by police officers
Because of Bob Ceska’s annual parties on
Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day.

His annual parties were in Bob Ceska’s
Large backyard and all the police officers
Were automatically invited along with
Their wives, asking only that everyone
Pitch in some food or a drink item and
In all the years of the parties only once
Had there been a rainout at which time
Everyone transferred to inside the house.

It was a tradition at Bob Ceska’s parties
That at some point during the party
When everyone was feeling good
That Bob took out a record player
And played an old record of military
Marching songs like Anchors Aweigh,
The Marine’s Hymn, Over There, and
Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder.

When the music started everybody
Would sing along and then march
Around the outside of Bob Ceska’s
Backyard or on the occasion when
The annual party was rained out
They marched around Bob Ceska’s
Living room and even spilled over
Into the kitchen and the dining room.

Usually besides the police officers
There would be some local celebrities
At Bob’s Ceska’s annual parties like
An ex-Notre Dame football player or
Old Cubs or White Sox players such
As Moe Drabowsky who in his career
Actually played for both the Cubs and
The White Sox at one time or another.

But over the years Moe Drabowsky became
Persona non grata among the policemen
At Bob Ceska’s parties because Moe Drabowsky
Never brought Minnie Minoso to a party and
The policemen were saying to each other
How Moe Drabowski needed a kick in the ass
Since he never brought Minnie Minoso,
Because of which he needed a kick in the ass.

We proceed to the 015 table where a
Waiter found Ed Barnes, Sam Cognato,
Pup Erickson, Bob Ganz, Mike Kozumlik
And their wives, to whom the waiter
Reiterated how the main courses were
The lasagna, the rigatoni gorgonzola,
The linguini with clam sauce, or the
Chicken rotolini on this evening.

Sam Cognato shrugged his shoulders as if
To say, “What difference does it make?”
He ordered the rigatoni. Mike Kozumlik,
Ed Barnes, and Pup Erickson had lasagna.
Bob Ganz, the gray-haired man, said,  
“Minnie Minoso used to call the Black Angus
“And say, ‘I like to eat and I’m not afraid to pay
‘For it, so I’m coming over in twenty minutes.’”

Mike Kozumlik, the gray-haired man
Was something of a walking encyclopedia
And he said, “Was that the old Black Angus
“In Arlington Heights? Uncle Andy’s Cow Palace
“On Harlem Avenue was a good restaurant
“And Leoni’s on Lake Street in Melrose Park
“Was a good restaurant as was Toscano’s
“At 2439 South Oakley Avenue in Chicago.”

Mike Kozumlik went on, “The Millionaires Club
“On South Wabash Avenue was Minnie Minoso’s
“Old stomping ground despite the fact of how
“The clientele in the Millionaires Club was all
“Stumble-bums mooching after the boiled eggs,
“Turkey, chicken, ham, bread rolls, and soup
“At the free salad bar. The salad bar was actually
“Invented in a town called Plover, in Wisconsin.”

From 016 were Tony Menze, Sub Peterson,
John McRory, Pat Osuscik, Fred Krenzer,
Randy Jedlick, Hank Hubley, and Lee Gipps,
All of them accompanied by their wives.
Tony Menze opened his mouth and said,
“When I worked in traffic the Bryn Mawr
“Exit off the Outer Drive was considered
“To be a real gold mine by a lot of guys.”

Tony Menze continued, “One night I pulled
“Over Minnie Minoso who was going about
“Seventy miles an hour. I said, ‘Hey Minnie,
‘Where are you going in such a hurry?’
“He said, ‘I’m going to see my girlfriend.’
“He got a pass for being Minnie Minoso
“But the Bryn Mawr exit off the Outer Drive,
“Was like shooting at a fish in a barrel.”

The 017 was represented by Mike Black,
Roy Delafield, Ed Gilwa, Kurt Kuhnlie,
Alphonse Irgang, and Rudy Kotchendorf,
All of them accompanied by their wives.
Ed Gilwa said, “Years ago I worked with
“The late great Artie Epler in the old
“Area North Detective Division when it
“Was at Belmont and Western Avenue.”

Mike Black opened his mouth and said,
“In the old days you know who else was
“At the Area North Detective Division?
“Marty Klemko, but he was withering
“On the vine. He was a policeman’s
“Policeman but was hamstrung for years
“Because Artie Epler, for all his good qualities,
“Refused to let him show what he could do.”

Now we leave the 017 table and go to
018’s table where the fine police officers
Will Brod, Neem Sancino, Walt Crews,
Francis Cotomi, and Joe Bliss were eating
And talking good-naturedly to each other
As their wives also talked good-naturedly
Among themselves, so that the two groups
Were more or less oblivious of one another.

Francis Cotomi the gray-haired man said,
“I don’t like this terminology of the so-called
“Viagra Triangle, which to me is nothing but
“Glorifying the old Rush Street nightlife area
“Of small fry out of town tourists here for
“The sales conventions. I don’t know about
“Viagra but those dumb hicks drink beer
“On Rush Street for fifteen dollars a bottle.”

Joe Bliss explained to Francis Cotomi,
“It’s called the Viagra Triangle because
“Rush Street, State Street, and Chicago Avenue
“Form a triangle, and men there take Viagra.”
Will Brod then huffed and puffed and said,
“Minnie Minoso didn’t care about Viagra.”
Walt Crews huffed and puffed and said,
“Minnie Minoso didn’t know what Viagra is.”

At the table occupied by the fine policemen
Of the 019 District – they were Matt Corey,
Bert Hesser, Lester Gancarz, Mike Torys,
Ab Frick, and Doug Nyder, all of them
Accompanied by their wives – Ab Frick said,
“Minnie Minoso had great admiration for
“Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz who was
“An old-time dyed-in-the-wool Sox fan.”

Ab Frick, the gray-haired man, went on,
“When Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz
“Administered the oath of office to the first
“Mayor Daley, Minnie Minoso held the Bible
“Because at that time in 1955 the Sox were
“At the height of their powers and the Mayor
“Was every bit of as big a White Sox fan as
“Was Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz.”

We move now to the 020 table which was
Populated by these fine policemen and
Their wives: Jake Skinkle, Ben Knudtson,
Marv Brege, Larry Cluck, Luther Meeks,
Dennis Pothmo, and Cam Schumacher
Whose years on the street were finished
And now he sat behind a desk at the 020
Interviewing applicants for liquor licenses.

As for the policemen of 021, these men
Whose names were Jim Mudd, Bo Jentsch,
Leo Marubio, Al Gronau, Herb Samelius,
Eddie Jelic, Hank Sinclair, and Bobby Minkus,
All of them accompanied by their wives,
Were finishing their main courses and
Were getting ready for the dessert of either
Tiramisu or New York-style cheesecake.

So too were the policemen from the 022 --
Earl Tanner, Billy Kleinhultz, Steve Frangos,
And the O’Shea brothers, Bob and Michael,
All of them accompanied by their wives --
They too were looking at the desserts
Of Tiramisu or New York-style cheesecake
Of which the cheesecake was chosen by
Most of these policemen and their wives.

Steve Frangos said, “Minnie Minoso always
“Ordered stuffed shrimp anywhere we ate.
“Every single time like clockwork he ordered
“Stuffed shrimp and the funny part was how
“I started ordering stuffed shrimp myself
“And it got to the point where whenever
“The two of us walked into a restaurant they
“Automatically gave both of us stuffed shrimp.”

At the 023 table were Frank Fleishlieber,
Mike Burchmore, Press Clark, Sam Desauer,
Sal Devino, Vic Formeliam, Bruno Miltzow,
And Hap Magnus, and each of those policemen,
Those gray-haired men of the 023 District
Who were accompanied by their wives like
A great flock of birds, they had the cheesecake,
Every last one of them had the cheesecake.

So too did Herman Kanefsky of the 024
Have the cheesecake, the gray-haired man
Had the cheesecake as did Jack Grommnik,
Vern Holwick, Stan Jozwiack, Mike McCarthy,
Theo van Breems, Am Buba, Dave Kuzda,
and Bob Kyle – they had the cheesecake,
All of them accompanied by their wives,
And their wives too had the cheesecake.

Now Frank Umschlager was stopping by
All the tables, he was having a few laughs
At each table and then he would move on
To the next table until finally at the last table
He came to the 024 and the aforementioned
Jack Gromnik, Vern Holwick, Stan Jozwiack,
Mike McCarthy, Theo van Breems, Am Buba,
Dave Kuzda, Bob Kyle, and Herman Kanefsky

Herman Kanefsky sang For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow
As Frank Umschlager dropped by the 024 table
As he had dropped by all the tables that evening,
And then while the waiters were pouring coffee
For the policemen of 024 Al Jablonski stationed
Himself at the front of the room and when he
Banged a spoon on a glass a silence descended
As when a great fish descends under the water.

Frank Umschlager also fell silent, no longer
was Frank Umschlager sharing a few laughs
At the 024 table as he realized that Al Jablonski
Was going to say a few words and then he himself,
Frank Umschlager, the man of the hour, would say
A few choice words of his own as the silence kept
Descending like when a great flock of birds lands
All at the same time in a deserted cornfield.

Al Jablonski, the gray-haired man, opened
His mouth and said, “Considering how much
“We all dislike Frank, I want to thank you for
“Coming out tonight. The streets of Chicago
“Are a lot safer with all of you dingbats here
“In one place. But seriously, we love Frank
“And we love his wife albeit from a distance,
“So here’s a real quick recap of Frank’s career.

“For the past thirty years Frank Umschlager
“Has been running down leads, making arrests,
“Breaking down doors, pulling his gun on people,
“And logging overtime whenever he possibly could.
“The upshot is, Frank Umschlager may not embody
“What a Chicago policeman is supposed to be but
“God help us he embodies what a Chicago policeman
“Actually is. Hey, I’m just kidding you, Frank!”

Then Al Jablonski took a glass off a table
And raised it and said, “Congratulations,
“Frank, you’re a good man, my friend.”
He took a sip of whatever was in his glass,
As did the other policemen around the room,
Even if there was only water in their glasses,
And as this was happening Frank Umschlager
Stepped up and shook hands with Al Jablonski.

As Al Jablonski slipped away Frank Umschlager
Addressed all the policemen gathered there,
All of them accompanied by their wives,
He addressed the policemen with a sincere
Tone of voice, he seemed pretty calm, but then
As he continued his voice choked up a little
So he had to get control of himself before
He could start to speak again, which he did.

He took a drink of water and then he said,
“In German the name Umschlager means
“To beat around the bush which is funny since
“I don’t like to beat around the bush so it’s
“Like calling a tall guy shorty or a fat guy
“Skinny because it really means the opposite.
“Umschlager means to beat around the bush
“But I don’t like to beat around the bush.”

Frank Umschlager then said, “Be that as it may
“People have no idea what being a policeman
“Is really like, you’re putting your life on the line
“Every day whether it’s ticketing a nice old lady
“In Lincoln Park or locking up stumble-bums,
“Jack-rollers, the mopes, lowlifes, or whatever.
“You guys who worked the wagon third shift,
“As I did for five years, you know what I mean.”

Frank Unschlager went on, “You want to know
“Something else that people have no idea about,
“Which is the furthest thing from their minds
“As they go along their merry way? People have
“No idea about the importance of Minnie Minoso
“To the Chicago Police Department, they don’t have
“Idea number one about how Minnie Minoso is
“On our minds every second as Chicago policemen.

“If you were to ask Mister Joe Citizen of Chicago,
“Do you see those policemen in that squad car,
“What do you think they’re talking about right now?
“I can promise you that the answer you will get
“Would not be they’re talking about Minnie Minoso.
“But they probably were talking about Minnie Minoso
“Because Minnie Minoso is what being a policeman
“Means from your first day at the police academy

“Why is Minnie Minoso important to us as policemen
“And why is Minnie Minoso important to me personally
“As a policeman? I’ll tell you a couple of quick stories.
“I got a call about a fight at the DMV on Elston Avenue
“And while I was there I saw Minnie Minoso at a desk
“Attempting to renew his driver’s license and there
“Appeared to be some sort of problem going on
“So I walked over and I said, ‘What’s the problem?’

“The woman said, ‘He can’t read the eye test letters’
“Which were on the wall behind her because of how
“Minnie Minoso was pretty old at the time so I said
“‘Let’s try it again’ and then I read the letters myself
“And I said ‘He did it’ but she said ‘He didn’t do it’
“So I said ‘He did it’ and she was going to bitch
“About it so I looked at her again and she shut up.
“I’m sure many of you have your own such stories.”

 “Another time I was in the old Ann Sather’s restaurant
“On Belmont Avenue and I saw Minnie Minoso standing
“By a table eating the smorgasbord or whatever it was
“And then a guy comes and says, ‘Hey, that’s my food,
‘I just went to the bathroom.’ The guy was bitching
“So I went over there and said ‘What’s the problem?’
“And the guy said ‘He’s eating my food, I went to the
“Bathroom and I came back and he’s eating my food.’”

“So Minnie Minoso said, ‘I come from the poor country
‘Of Cuba and I don’t like to see people waste any food.’
“But the guy refused to take no for an answer and
“He said, ‘I wasn’t wasting it, I went to the bathroom’
“So I said, ‘He doesn’t like to see people waste food’
“But the guy was bitching about it so I looked at him
“And he shut up. I said, ‘Here’s your smorgasbord’
“And I felt like sticking his head in the smorgasbord.”

At that point Frank Umschlager took a deep breath
So it looked like he might start to cry but he didn’t.
He took another drink of water and then he said
“Another time I was at the Sox game on opening day
“And they introduced Minnie Minoso before the game.
“There were some high school kids standing there
“That were laughing so I said, ‘What’s so funny?’
“So one said, ‘Minnie is a girl name like Minnie Mouse.’”

Frank Umschlager went on, “Another kid said that
“Minnie could mean something little like a miniskirt.
“So I told them how I didn’t think that was funny
“And how I was going to straighten them out about
“What people don’t know about Minnie Minoso.”
Frank Umschlager took another drink of water
And he looked across the room at the policemen
All of whom were accompanied by their wives.

He then went on, “But everybody in this room
“Already knows what I told those young kids.
“Look at Joe Smolnarski over there from 007,
“He knows what I told those young kids,”
Frank Umschlager said as he pointed his finger
In a very friendly way at Joe Smolnarsky,
The gray-haired man, who then nodded
His head slowly like an old gray horse.

Frank Umschlager continued, “Look at Al Gronau
“Over there from 021. How are you doing, Al?
“Al Gronau knows what I’m getting at now,
“Hell yes, Al Gronau knows what I told the kids
“At Sox park when Minnie Minoso was introduced.”
Whereupon Pup Erickson from the 015 leaped
Up like a great fish jumping out of the water
And he said, “Orestes Minoso! Orestes Minoso!”

After that it was Gene Podgorniak’s turn,
The gray-haired man from 014 who leaped up
Like a great fish and said in a loud voice
“His real name was Orestes Minoso!”
Then other policemen who were there
Such as Lee Gipps and Walter Bednick,
And Jake Skinkle leaped up and they said,
“His real name was Orestes Minoso!”

Frank Umschlager finally began to cry and
He said, “Orestes Minoso!” and they were
All yelling “Orestes Minoso! Orestes Minoso!”
-- Steve Girdzius, Sam Guistolise, Gene Fiebig  --
And they all marched around the room
All of them accompanied by their wives
Like a great flock of birds and their laughter
Reverberated off the ceiling of Cucina Albanese.

 

An Interview with Dante Di Stefano (by Nin Andrews)

 

As you might have guessed from my recent blog posts, I have been thinking a lot about the nature of truth, specifically autobiographical truth, in poetry. After all, we seem to be in era where everyone is questioning the nature of truth in every kind of writing.  As I mentioned in my interview with January Gill O’Neil, I had a poetry professor once who hated what he called “dishonesty in poetry.” He hated it when poets used the first person, and then described illnesses they never had or divorces they never went through or . . . who knows, maybe their own funerals. So I wanted to ask several poets how they navigate this question. A fan of the works of Dante Di Stefano, I thought I’d ask him a few questions. (Let me add that I love asking Dante anything, even the most inane questions because he always has such brilliant answers. I'm thinking of starting a column with the title, Just Ask Dante.)

NA: I love your poem in this year’s Best American Poetry, and I think it speaks to the essence of what made you want to be a poet. Or maybe it is simply stating that you already were, at seventeen, in essence, a poet.  (Of course, by saying that I am admitting that I am reading the poem as truth.) But reading it, I would not imagine that you set out to be an autobiographical or confessional poet? 

 

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished, and I wanted
only to love in that insane, tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

 

And let me add, before you answer the question, that this poem as well as the others in this interview is from your forthcoming book, Ill Angels, that will be published by Etruscan Press next summer. I am so looking forward to owning that book! 

DDS: Thanks for your kind words, Nin. No, I didn’t set out to be a poet at all, of any kind. I’ve always loved reading and writing, but in high school I read mostly novels, and I kept a daily journal that mostly consisted of reactions to the books I was reading, quotes from those books, lists of new words I’d discovered, and philosophical statements (that I’m sure would make me cringe if I read them today). “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” begins with an autobiographical detail; it’s true that I read Dostoyevsky’s four big novels when I was seventeen. The poem attempts to recreate the frenetically pitched set of emotions that one only experiences either in the pages of a Russian novel or in the throes of adolescence. None of the images and phrases are drawn directly from Dostoyevsky. Rather, I try to evoke what Milan Kundera called “the magical charm of atmospheres”: recalling what it felt like to lie alone in my twin bed at night pondering the fate of Dmitri Karamazov, dreaming of a girl I liked in my homeroom. “Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen” is an attempt to capture those lost atmospheres from a novelistic or cinematic vantage point.

NA: I admire your poems about your father’s illness and death. One of these poems is called, “A Defense of Confessional Poetry.” Are you a defender of confessional poetry? Do you consider these poems to be confessional?

DDS: The poems about the illness and death of my father are deeply autobiographical. Most, if not all, of the details in these poems are true to the events as I recall them. Whenever I write about someone I know I tend not to embellish. Of course, remembering is an inherently slippery proposition, but I try to remain moored to the truth of my recollection. Sometimes, I feel like this fidelity to “truth” is a failure of imagination on my part. However, it would feel like a betrayal if I invented additional details about the day my father died, if I changed a second of my daughter’s birth, if I altered my wife’s personality, simply in service to a poem. In this sense, I can understand the objections of your college poetry professor.

The title “A Defense of Confessional Poetry” was a bit tongue in cheek, but in the poem, I was also trying to emphasize the transformational and restorative aspects of reconciling, or attempting to reconcile, the death of my father with my complicated feelings toward him.

I’m not a defender of confessional poetry (or of any poetry for that matter). I deeply admire the first-generation Confessional poets (none of whom, except for Sexton, approved of the label “Confessional”). These poets (Berryman, Snodgrass, Lowell, Plath, Sexton) provided a radical rejoinder to the orthodoxies of high Modernism and New Criticism, while opening thematic space for subsequent generations of poets to write about virtually anything. It should be noted that Confessional poetry comes to prominence along with the Beat Generation and the New York School at the height of the Cold War. These schools of poetry overlap with, and bleed into, the civil rights movement, the counter-culture, the feminist movement, and the gay rights movement, all of which signaled fundamental changes in American society. In these movements, speaking personally became a crucial form of intervention in the public sphere and an overt political act. The Black Arts Movement is also a part of this helix.

From the time of its coinage to present day, the term “confessional,” as applied to poetry, has proven problematic. M.L. Rosenthal’s initial formulation of the confessional mode of writing (in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies) posits confessional poetry as a kind of “soul’s therapy.” (“Soul’s therapy” sounds downright ridiculous in 2018.) Confessional poetry since Rosenthal’s appraisal of Life Studies, although variously defined, remains contingent upon the linkages between personal revelation, private guilt, and public authenticity. 

Today, in the world of reality television, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, the boundaries of the personal and the private have blurred. The forms of confession practiced across the spectrum of contemporary media are staged and superficial, contingent upon spectacle, less concerned with discovering truths than they are with generating celebrity. Confessions (and scandals) may abound in social media today, but little retains the power to shock or to foment meaningful political change. It’s undoubted that the autobiographical lyric and the shadow of the confessional mode continue to dominate the mainstream of contemporary American poetry. However, there’s so much reality-clutter in our culture, so many ways that poets (and non-poets alike) shape and pedal virtual selves, that the lyrical gesture toward autobiography and confession loses its dynamism against the backdrop of so many proliferating identities and revelations. It seems like identity and authenticity are more contested from more perspectives than ever before.

I’m somewhat suspicious of the overreliance on autobiographical detail in my own poetry because it opens the door to the corrosiveness of narcissism, sentimentality, and nostalgia.  I’m constantly at war with these things, and with my own inexhaustible naivete. At the same time, I don’t generally confess things that are shameful in my poetry, although I recognize the power in that gesture. I don’t want to put all my business in the street. Many of my poems are persona poems, or poems about music and language. I strive to be protean, to speak in tongues; I’d like to get to the point where I could have access to the imagination in the manner of William Blake, Christopher Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson (Not to be as great as any one of them, but to write one or two poems that approaches “The Proverbs of Hell” or “Juilate Agno” or “The Windhover” or “I taste a liquor never brewed”).

NA: In your poem, “Bronx Pyramid,” you open, “Sometimes you might be tempted to invent/a memory  . . .” and later you write, “I have come to know that I am not I/and you are not you in the music; . . .”

I love this poem, and I wanted to know if you could elaborate on the sentiments expressed in it.

 

The Bronx Pyramid
after Carlos Henriquez

Sometimes you might be tempted to invent
a memory from a Brook Avenue,
a curandera’s chanting resurrects,
a stillborn third son, brujo’s serpent tongue,
a trumpet blown over the arco of
ordinary seconds. Now, I hear time
cajole a rhythm from the embalmed worm
of reverie hidden in my own heart.
I have come to know that I am not I
and you are never you in the music;
here, where musician and audience meet,
we remain thirsty for the what that is
and is and hangs there like a mother’s name,
carving infinite care from the silence.

 

DDS: “The Bronx Pyramid” is an attempt to write from inside the music of Jazz bassist Carlos Henriquez. Henriquez is one of my favorite contemporary musicians and this poem tries to articulate what it feels like to dwell in the notes of his music. It occurs to me that we never question how autobiographical a Coltrane number is, and yet if you listen to A Love Supreme you come away with the sense that this music has laid bare a life before you. In great music, there is an intimacy and a vulnerability we are invited to share in as listeners. This holds true for other kinds of music too; it doesn’t matter if Bob Dylan lived on desolation row or if Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. A poem can be encoded with truth in the same way as a pop song or as a jazz number. What I think I come to understand in “The Bronx Pyramid” is that the music of Jazz and poetry (and Rock and Soul and on and on) begins with the dissolution of the self. One of the greatest joys I know is to be in the midst of composing a poem, or saying a poem, free from the strictures of self-definition, charged with negative capability, awash in what Galway Kinnell called “saying in its own music what matters most.”

NA: Also, in your poem, “Stump Speech,” you begin:

You undress in poetry, but in prose
you redress. You grow old in prose, lose teeth,
forget the face of your brother, but call
to your dead and dying in poetry.

For you, poetry is reaching for a different kind of truth than prose?  

DDS: I believe poetry has a different way of embodying truths than prose does. Quoting Milan Kundera again, “prose: the word signifies not only nonversified language; it also signifies the concrete, everyday, corporeal nature of life.” For me, prose embodies the incremental, the calendric, the historic, the national, the transnational, and the immediate; of course, poetry has something to do with those things too, but poetry thresholds itself between restraint and effusion. It has more to do with the mythic, the atemporal, the visionary, the legislation of unacknowledged worlds (to paraphrase Oppen); of course, prose can tread that ground as well, but I don’t think in quite the same way as poetry does. Also, the distinctions between poetry and prose have collapsed quite a bit, under, among other things, the weight of what Christian Wiman called “the train wreck of broken-prose confessionalism.” I’m not as pessimistic about broken-prose confessionalism as Wiman is, and I haven’t quite articulated all the differences I intuit between great poetry and great prose, but I sense there are clear distinctions. Part of why I write poetry is to clarify those distinctions, and to come closer to understanding what poetry is.

 NA: In your poem, “For My Creative Writing Students,” you have these lines:

“The need to say what you can’t say unspools/ itself from your mouths and hymnals a hope/as blue and speckled as a robin’s egg.” Do you think of poetry as a way to say what can’t be said? 

DDS: I believe there are truths conveyed in poetry that go beyond the limits of language, what Frost called “the sound of sense,” what Donald Hall called “the unsayable said.” I don’t think poems have so much to do with intention; poems are a kind of throbbing through words that accrues to music, what Stevens meant by “the dove in the belly.”

NA: I love that. Honestly, I would love to keep asking you questions just to read your responses. But I will stop for now. I thought maybe we could close with "Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering."

 

Dreaming of Hokusai at Sloan-Kettering
 

Because all the animals are kings and queens,
I wait for the rain to paint me; I long
to dream the butterfly dreaming me while
the blood lotuses into test tube,
pillow cherry blossoms the lolling head,
and all over the world the living still
go on living despite the needle’s truth,
stitching saline into this purple vein,
as a hawk is painted onto a bough
and the window beads itself up with rain.

The great wave continues to crash against
the clear sky, peasants fly kites from the roofs
that appear higher than Mount Fuji’s snow,
the fisherman’s wife fucks an octopus
or two, and the paddies remain tended
even when the south wind blows your hat off.

We, in our frail bodies, are woodcut, sketched
on silk, silkworms ourselves, ideograms
for dying, riders galloping a ridge
toward a mountain we will never reach.

There is no way to paint the swan in you,
or the heron taking wing, the village,
its terrible stillness before the fire.

For now, you have only the orderly
joking with the phlebotomist, asking
her to draw your blood in a bikini
next time; this is your temple, your tea house,
your watermill frozen in its churning,
a wheel of rivulets like braided hair,
or like the sutures in your throat and chest.

And the hospital might trick you into
believing this pain might make you holy,
but you are already holy, the stooped
millworker with a turtle on a string,
the surface of a lake without ripples,
the portly monk laughing in his Saki,
the lumberjacks sawing planks in heaven,
the sound of traffic on 68th Street,
the sill cleaving flight, a regent of air.

 

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). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. Along with María Isabel Àlvarez, he is the co-editor of the anthology, Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

 

Listening to Grace Cavalieri's Recent Interview with George Bilgere (by Nin Andrews)

In my recent interview and classroom visit with Nicole Santalucia, Nicole and I talked about confessional poetry, and her students joined in the conversation. I was so interested in her students’ questions and comments, I am still thinking about them. One of the questions that stuck with was about the difference between autobiographical and confessional poetry.  I am paraphrasing here, but the student seemed to be asking, If you write about your life, then aren’t you a confessional poet?

The question came at the end of our time together, but I would have liked to have answered by talking about poets like Frank O’Hara, Billy Collins, and George Bilgere, poets who serve as a nice contrast to confessional poets. Or better yet, by playing Grace Cavalieri’s recent interview for The Poet and the Poem with George Bilgere in which Bilgere talks about his teaching method, his young boys, his writing process, and ideals. “The challenge for me,” Bilgere explained in the interview, “is to try to write interesting poems out of a commonplace life.”

About George Bilgere, Grace comments, “He can take an ordinary event and make it a knife through the heart.” The interview is short, entertaining, and so worth listening to, I want everyone to hear it. But if you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, be sure to listen to the unpublished poem, ““For the Slip and Slide,” that is about twenty minutes in. It’s a masterpiece.

Below is the title poem from his most recent collection.

 

Blood Pages

 

Someone gave my little boy
this illustrated book about whales
and every day he carries it to me,
demanding we read through its pages
about the biggest whales, the blue ones,
and the fiercest whales, the suave
orcas in their tuxes, and the mild
sperm whales with their baleen
and blow holes and benevolent gaze.

 

Which is fine. Everyone likes whales,
but of course being a boy
he wants to focus on the "blood pages,"
as he calls them, just two of them
inserted like an accidental dose
of reality in the middle of the book,
where the great whales are hauled up
like minnows onto the decks
of the Japanese trawlers, their strength
broken against the diesel winches,
blood pouring from the smoking wounds
where the harpoons struck and exploded.

 

I want to page forward to the dolphins
somersaulting above Sea World, but he
wants to see leviathan stripped
of his lordliness, skinned
alive on an ocean of blood
by small men with their scarlet blades,
their watch caps and cigarettes,
making good money on the long cruise
but nonetheless longing for home,
for the touch of their wives,
for their own children on their laps.

 

George Bilgere’s seventh book of poetry, Blood Pages, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018. Bilgere has received grants and awards from the Pushcart Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation through the Library of Congress, and the Ohio Arts Council. 

He has been awarded the Midland Authors Prize, the May Swenson Award, the Ohioana Poetry Prize, the Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature, the University of Akron Poetry Prize, and a Creative Workforce Fellowship through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture in Cleveland. 

Bilgere is familiar to National Public Radio listeners from his many appearances on Garrison KeillorÍs The WriterÍs Almanac and A Prairie Home Companion. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland and hosts a weekly poetry radio show on WJCU.FM called Wordplay. He has a marvelous wife and two incredibly cute little boys.

Poets & Artists 100: all hail Didi Menendez [by David Lehman]

Poets & Artists 100 is here.

Click here and you'll arrive at a Didi Menendez's groundbreaking magazine devoted to "figurative realism" in art -- with poetry tossed in by such stalwarts as Nin Andrews, Grace Cavalieri, and Denise Duhamel.

Figurative realism is a good name for a movement in favor of representational art with the human figure  at its center. The revival of the nude as an aesthetic ideal is significant. It is especially impressive in a puritanical era and may be a harbinger of welcome changes to come. The black and white painting on the left is by Dirk Dzimirsky, who curated the "Figurative Art" show up now.

The current issue of Poets & Artists includes gorgeous, sensuous paintings by such new (to me) artists as Anne-Christine Roda, Aixa Oliyeras, Veronica Winters, Megan Read, Nadine Robbins, Conne Karlera-Sales, Daniel Maidman, Victoria Selbach, Miriam Escofet (Portrait of Sophia, on right). It's an exciting development, a cry for beauty against brutality.

-- DL

First People's Buffalo Jump State Park [by Tami Haaland]

For years I’ve been on the Humanities Montana “Conversations” roster, a speaker’s bureau arrangement that sends many of us around the state on various adventures. This past Monday, for example, I spent two hours at Skyview High School in Billings working with seniors who had written research papers and were in the process of turning them into poems for the oral presentation part of their assignment. 

This fall, the current poet laureate, Lowell Jaeger and I, spend a day with teachers in the far eastern side of the state talking about how to work poetry into their curriculum. We've both visited many schools, along with ghost towns like Virginia City, county fairs, book festivals, libraries, and other events from one end of the state to the other. The Poet Laureate role means somewhere around 10,000 miles of travel, and though my term ended in 2015, I’ve continued to provide poetry-related presentations.  

Last spring, Humanities Montana asked a few of us—Lowell Jaeger, Caroline Patterson, Dave Caserio and yours truly—to come up with proposals for state park events that would deepen people’s experiences in these areas by introducing writing, art, poetry and discussion.  We were all excited about this prospect. In years past I had partnered with a local land institute to offer poetry workshops on the prairie. I’ve also created hiking / creative writing classes for my students. We hiked locally and explored a favorite trail in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, stopping to read poetry, write, and share our work along the way.  This new opportunity sounded like great fun, and I said yes when the ranger at First People’s Buffalo Jump State Park contacted me to arrange a September event.

First Nations Buffalo Jump was heavily used from 900 to 1500 BCE, before the introduction of horses dramatically changed the culture of the plains. At this site, fourteen different tribes from around the Northwest would gather periodically to herd buffalo over a cliff and in this way provide sustenance for a season or two.

Some might consider the site desolate. The prairie can strike people that way because it’s so arid, and by September, there isn’t much green left in the panoramic view. Up close, wild flowers, juniper, or sage offer a splash of color in contrast to the sandy soil and straw-colored grasses of late summer. From the prairie below, the ridge above looks modest. It’s hard to see the steep drop off.

This site is a bit out-of-the-way on the road between Great Falls and Helena, a few miles from a small town called Ulm. Three people joined me at the buffalo jump, a former student who drove four hours from Roundup, composer and pianist Philip Aaberg and his friend who were en route from Chester to Helena.

We started with a historic overview of the buffalo hunt. The ranger told us how a 13-16-year-old boy was chosen to be the buffalo runner. He would wear a buffalo calf robe, and he, in turn, would choose two friends to wear wolf hides. The three would go out to the herd, the wolf boys wandering near the back and the buffalo runner in the front, crying like a calf until the lead cow would respond and come towards him. In this way they would lure the herd up the gradual incline at the back of the hill. Meanwhile everyone else prepared by praying for a successful hunt, setting up drive lines—low rock walls that would contain and manage the bison at the top of the hill—and gathering hides and branches to swing about as they chased the bison over the cliff. Below, people prepared to butcher, to cook, and to work on the hides.

After a few days, the herd would arrive at the top of the hill, and then the buffalo runner would cast off his bison robe. Oral history indicates that once the lead cow saw she had been fooled, she would be enraged and the stampede would begin. The buffalo runner, brave soul, would lead the bison forward and jump off the cliff at a predetermined spot where he could cling to some piece of rock or overhang while the herd went sailing off the edge.

We listened to the park ranger recount the process as we sat in the visitor center facing out toward the jump. Wooden benches were strewn with wolf and buffalo skins, and more exhibits filled the adjoining room, where we could move deeper into the history of the place if we chose. Rangers created the exhibits in consultation with the people whose ancestors had traveled here, whose methods were well documented in the oral histories of the tribes.

After leaving the visitors center, we meandered up the hill, talking, speculating, reading placards. We also talked about writing and composing. Much of Phil’s work is inspired by landscape and the natural world, so I asked him how that process happened for him. He shared an experience about a commission he had to write a piece based on a particular ecosystem.  He began walking in the area, thinking, trying to find a way in, when a bird flew up. And that was the way in. “Nature is interruption,” he said.

I see what he means. Walking in a wild ecosystem creates an adjustment in the mind. When we are removed from dailiness and busyness, a different rhythm takes over. Interruptions of color, light, creature or movement, can mark a beginning of some sort, or a focal point. I’m speaking mostly from experience. Having grown up in the prairie, I was always attracted to the treasures—the bright colors of flowers, the possibility of agates, bones of small animals in a sea of short grass or a snake crossing my path. Quite of few of us from the northern Montana prairie have cited the expanse and the openness as part of what feeds the imagination and conditions us to respond through art, music, or writing.

We lingered in one place and another on the way up, imagining what it must have been like to witness one of these hunts. In an area called the pishkun, where blood was cooked into pudding, bone chips appeared like confetti against the soil. When we arrived at the top, we didn’t hike to the prairie dog town, in part, because we had all seen prairie dog towns elsewhere.  As we rested for our descent, we read poetry, particularly Lois Red Elk’s “This Awareness,” in which she explains her traditional Lakota worldview that includes both nature and spirits. “Everything that existed was my friend and teacher,” she says. Some of our group took time to write, some scanned the horizon. From where we stood, it looked like an easy slope down to the prairie and we understood how the bison could be fooled. It’s not until you get closer that you see the fatal drop off.

On the way down, two hawks circled, a grouse flew up to surprise us, and as we came a little closer to the visitor center, we stopped at the Sun Dance Lodge, then commented on the teepees, much smaller than what is customary now. Teepees this size would have been used when this jump was in its heyday,  the Dog Days when things had to be smaller because there were no horses to carry the long poles and heavy skins of a larger home. 

What a treat to spend three hours hiking and musing with friends. Though our group was small, this collaboration between Humanities Montana and the State Parks is bound to grow.

At the end of the day, Phil and I revisited an idea we've had before. We’d like to try a music / poetry workshop, maybe in a place that will allow people to see far into the distance and walk for miles if they want to. Now for the planning.