The Best American Poetry

Kudos to Nobel Laureate Louise Glück

Kudos to the winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, Louise Glück, a wonderful poet whose work has appeared in many editions of The Best American Poetry. She was the guest editor of the 1993 edition and it  was a pleasure working with her -- and something of an education as well. She is as astute a close reader of poems as I know.

I remember, too, being the subject and addressee of one of her poems. This was the result of a bet as to who would win a certain book award that year. The loser of the bet had to write a poem and dedicate it to the winner.

From 1992 to 1994 a grant from the Lila Wallace -- Reader's Digest Fund enabled me, in conjunction with the Community School of Music and Art, to bring these poets to Ithaca: Mark Strand, Donald Hall, Charles Simic, Jorie Graham, A. R. Ammons, Louise Glück, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Each gave a public reading and did a session with Ithaca schoolkids. Louise accompanied me to the Montessori School on King Road where my son Joe was a student. 

The Best American Poetry 1993 was a highlight in our series. There were poems by Ammons (a huge chunk of "Garbage" that had appeared in APR), Ashbery, Bukowski ("Three Oranges"), Merwin "The Stranger"), Rich, Snyder, Stone, Strand, Tate, and  the greatly underrated John Updike ("To a Former Mistress, Now Dead").

There's Billy Collins, when his work was still a secret, and Denise Duhamel, then a new name. A magnificent poem by the late Tim Dlugos, "Healing the World from Battery Park," which saw the light of day because of the archival work of David Trinidad and the judgment of the editors of Hanging Loose. "I loved 'litany,'" the first published poem, a knockout, by the unknown Carolyn Creedon. Susan Mitchell's "Rapture"; Jane Kenyon's "Having It Out with Melancholy." Ron Padgett. Michael Palmer.

And Louise has an excellent introduction.

If copies of The Best American Poetry 1993 are available, you will be impressed and then some with the quality of the work Louise chose.  

In the University of Michigan Press's Under Discussion series, we published an excellent collection of critical essays devoted to Louise's work. Joanne Feit Diehl edited On Louise Glück. I still remember some of the catalogue copy, particularly "her searing honesty and compelling first-person personae." -- DL

Two Poems by Aaron Fagan

King and Trumpet

One night I was drunk at the Heartland,
And, apparently, I spoke to Dan, the bartender,
Because his roommate called the next night to say,
“My roommate, Dan, was your bartender last night.
I hope you don’t think I’m crazy for calling like this?”
A few hours later, after cocktails at the Green Mill,
She invited me home and screamed when she flipped
The lights on to find her chows, King and Trumpet,
Each with a dead kitten hanging from their mouth,
Which I wrapped in tin foil and buried them warm
In the backyard by moonlight smoking a Lucky.
That Sunday we met up near the Shell with the “S”
Burned out at the corner of Touhy before heading
To Leone Beach. She was so small, all that fit her
Was this worn out pink girls’ bikini she later made
A point of saying was see-through, her bobbed hair
Bobbing with baby-blue ribbons, nearly horizontal
In flip-flops and giant sunglasses, trying to hold back
Her chows. She’s a cop, a mom, and a boxer now,
Yet years before we met, when she was a stripper
In New York, she would shoot junk into the cowgirls
Riding torpedoes on her forearms, but after the beach,
She made us chicken and corn on the cob. Her hope
Was I’d write more and drink less, while she—
With the giant dogs at her tiny feet—painted
The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey over
A clown from her collection of John Wayne Gacy
Originals surrounding the bed where we made
Love and I first read The Double Dream of Spring.

 

Mise en Abyme

An erotic life
Of boredom
Enacts a fake
Movie with
Real violence,
Sincere as sun
Sparks lightning.

Looking out
Closed eyes,
Sagacity’s field
Is in arrears—
Video feedback,
Beside the point,
History a habit.

from A Better Place Is Hard To Find by Aaron Fagan (The Song Cave, 2020). Photo credit: Camilla Ha.

Dispatch From A Distance - Roads And Seeds, A Trace [by Cara Benson]

“There is a rhetoric to walking.” - Michel de Certeau

Most everyone I know right now is alternating between sheer terror over politics (I’ll leave it at that) and a desperate search for respite in order to manage the panic. Same here. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my previous Dispatches that I take to walking when trouble is afoot (sorry). It gets me out of my interior, both my four walls and my mind, and into the body and the outer world. As I am physically capable, which I try not to take for granted, I can just go. I don’t need to have a thing sorted out but eventually how to get home.

Of course walking is ripe for metaphor, that time-honored mechanism for making sense of the world, especially if one is writing about it. As I am walking to interrupt myself, to disrupt the mind’s search, seize, categorize, repeat, I will leave it to the reader’s imagination to make of this string of sentences what she will. In fact, I’m in a mood to write a series of digressions and left turns, similar, at times, to how I walk (this grove, that path, over a hill, why not). Again, so long as I make it back.

I’ll start off with a confession: I trespass. Beyond being of European descent in the US, what I mean here is that I sheepishly tiptoe past POSTED signs all the time. In my defense, I’m not traipsing across someone’s back yard. There are thousands of wooded acres around me that host no dwellings. I do not hunt, rip it up on ATVs, nor leave detritus behind (these are often the concerns) – quite the opposite. I typically pick up any litter I come across (Mylar balloons know no borders) or pull dead branches from squashing new growth. I am very careful where I tread so as not to tear moss, for example, from a rock. Not to create mud, to cause erosion. I pay close attention when I am walking through what I will call raw woods, when I am not traveling a previous path that has shown over time that the forest will be just fine with this trail boring through it. Whether on private or public terrain, I am acutely pained to tramp down green, to step on an unsuspecting red eft, to leave a trace. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk a road.

One of the draws for moving up on the hill where I live was that even the paved routes stretching out in the vicinity of my home hold a boundary with much wildness. This area is one of NY State’s largest contiguous forests. Seasonal waterfalls, rampant wildflowers, long stretches of wooded land or meadows fill as much of the lengths along these roads as do homes, though those are here and I am curious about them, too. As I wander roadside, these walks can lend themselves to notions of rural flâneusery. I am out of step with utilitarian travel, as the urban flâneuse is by strolling city sidewalks as she does. What is it I am browsing if not shop windows?

Dogs. I know where all the dogs are on these walks. Or should I say that they make themselves known. Some are more aggressive in their pronouncements than others and I make guesses about their people based on this behavior, like we do with parents and their offspring. I could be wrong, of course, but sometimes the humans are outside or yell from an open window and one in particular seems hellbent on confirming my suspicions. (For the record, I adore puppies and love to nuzzle the noses of dogs, but not all canines have been raised as snugglers. Just saying.)

Other creatures that are plentiful out here: chickens. They seem to be fearless in foraging right at the edge of passing cars or trucks. Roadside gullies must have the best pickings. I am proud to say I have become a pretty good clucker.

Site of the heron sighting

And once, a Great Blue Heron! Less than 20 feet from me I spotted his stately, curved-neck repose atop leggy stalks, raptly focused on a swampish watering hole for a catch for dinner. So sleekly upright. I caught his blended colors (not as starkly blue as one might expect) and slim-limbed silhouette among the young trees and stopped on a dime, just behind a larger trunk. Slowly, I moved back into sightline. Holy, the biodiverse world is a glory. I stood with him forever (3 minutes) until he powered off.

Then there’s Duck Duck and Buzz, two white fowl with orange bills, best buds, that have their own homemade pond in front of a neighbor’s house down the road in the north direction. Buzz is much bigger than Duck Duck. Or is it the other way around? The bigger one (let’s agree on Buzz) had come to my neighbor with a sibling. They were deeply bonded, I’m told, and when Buzz’s sib died, he was inconsolable. My neighbor (I can’t remember her name even to get it switched. No! It’s Laurie! Or is that the woman who lives down the side road?). Whatever her name, she, too, became distraught, caring as she did about her despondent Buzz, until one day driving along a county route down off the hill with traffic speeding by was young, soon-to-be-named Duck Duck on the side of the road. She turned her car around and pulled up beside him. Legend has it that she opened the door and Duck Duck hopped in. Now the two of them, the ducks, are inseparable, and LaurieLisaLiz has a superb set up for them. Lilypads in the pond, room to roam, nighttime digs for sleeping in the slightly abandoned barn along a path in the trees beside her house. Duck Duck and Buzz are a high point on my walks when I head this direction. I don’t always see them right away as they might be squatting down in the grassy banks of the pond. I crest a hill and crane my head to see if the stark white bodies are hunkered in or floating. They rise up when I see them! I always call out in the happy goofy voice I use with my cats. Duck Duck! Buzz! There you are. Such cuties. They quack quack, lowly, little duck noises. I only ever saw Elizabeth once, to learn the lore and to get their names. I’m grateful that I can use the syllables they’re used to hearing and that I’m hoping signal me as friend. My clucking is better than my quacking, so far. 

Occasionally as I walk I wonder, does anyone notice my peculiar patterns? My mutterings, farmer’s blows (clearing the nostrils sans tissues), conversing with birds and self and god as I go? My boisterous swishing of a stick? Deer flies and mosquitoes don't give a shit about spray repellent, so in bug season I whip around a piece of downed maple with chunks of acorns still clinging to the mast to ward them off. It’s my version of a handheld accordion fan and I use it to the fullest. The faster I walk, the faster I wave and chatter. I might as well be doing Python's Silly Walks. Though sometimes I “pull it together” if I hear a car coming, I am often caught in the act of exhibiting my private self in public.

It is a particular vulnerability to be the walking body roadside as a motorized vehicle approaches, then passes. I ready myself to leap, if necessary, and every so often find myself staring down the drivers. Same as with my imagined dog owners, I make guesses or have visceral responses to the sounds of the oncoming cars or trucks or motorcycles. The louder the machine, the more obnoxious the person, especially if it's an intentionally aggravated volume. Then the upending of my tiny narratives – what if it’s a beater, the driver too broke to fix it, limping along as best he can in a hostile economy (systemic thinking is never far). Then my sympathy is evoked. I hear you, sister. I get it, guy. A moment of solidarity whizzes by.

Something there’s more of on roadsides: trash. I feel like such a nellie, but I hate it. Sometimes, my better self works very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt that the scandalous crap at my feet blew out of their hands or backseat unknowingly. Or I labor to see it as part of the mosaic, to puncture romantic notions about purity, about humanless nature. I’m reminded of something I read on eco-regional studies, that nature ain’t just out there. Humans, after all, are creatures of the planet. It’s how we live on it, with it, with creatures and dirt and each other, cars and machines – all technology – included, that is at issue. This same article reported that crows were struggling in the initial pandemic lockdown because less people were driving, and their main dietary staple of roadkill had severely decreased as a result. It’s an interactive scape – everything. Planet. Where and how we walk. What it means to be wild. I love this expansion of how to consider the world and my small part in it. 

And then I think the person who dumped his truck ashtray out the window is an asshole. (Keep walking, Cara.)

Speaking of technology, sometimes I bring my phone with me to track time or to take pictures. A recent shot of Cardinal flowers, the scarlet-robed beauties lining a wet run as if they are marching up water greens to their blue source, was such a catch. But that’s deep woods. What do I photograph roadside? This is the season of color in the leaves: flaming reds, tangerine dreams, delicious yellows. The understory is marvelous, too. Goldenrod, Snake Root, and Joe Pye Weed, so designated after the English name of Mohican sachem Shauquethqueat who used the flower as remedy, fill fields and edges at eyelevel. I have been watching them bud, flower, sustain pollinators, and turn to seed, which I am now collecting from the public right-of-way. I carry scissors and paper bags to clip and transport fluorescences for seeding the land behind the church where I live. Back home, I store the bags where their contents can properly dry until it’s close to the first frost. That’s when I’ll cast them, then lightly walk the area to ensure good seed to ground contact. Seems I do want to make something of my wanderings, after all.  

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, and Whose Woods.

Met Percent: Week Twenty-Four [by Alec Bernstein]

Nize Baby!

Top: Épinette des Vosges, Amant Constant Lambert, late 19th c., not on view.
Bottom: Film credits, The Third Man, 1949; Album Cover, Soothing Sounds for Baby, 1962.

An épinettier (a player of the musical instrument; see above) followed Montaigne, along with his tutor, from room to room, playing tunes whenever he was tired or bored. This was a ritual he learned as a child.

“Being of opinion that it troubles and disturbs the brains of children suddenly to wake them in the morning, and to snatch them violently and over-hastily from sleep (wherein they are much more profoundly involved than we), [my father] caused me to be wakened by the sound of some musical instrument, and was never unprovided of a musician for that purpose.” - Montaigne, Of the Education of Children.

Raymond Scott, mid-century composer and early electronic music inventor, felt the same way about children and sound and recorded several volumes of Soothing Sounds for Baby. His quiet drones remind me of the zither’s constant vibrations. When I was about 10 years old I got an “AM / FM clock-radio” and contemplated each night what station I should wake up to the next day. Today, we have apps like Mornify or Spotify, “with science-backed morning playlists . . .” in case you don’t know how to wake up properly.

The zither, the dulcimer, and the pedal steel guitar, all descend from the French épinette. If you can get to Vienna . . . and if you are willing to sit in a theatre (the Berg Kino Theater, to be exact), you can hear modern zither music featured over real rubble in real post-war Vienna in The Third Man. The title theme was a Billboard number-one hit from April-July, 1950 - unheard of for the zither!

Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime seems like the kind of guy who would have an épinettier following him around Vienna to play whenever he got tired or bored. And as his lover Anna (played by Alida Valli) said, “He never grew up. The world grew up around him”.

 

Trumpet and Verse

Left to right:
Parade Trumpet, 1700,  gallery 680. 
Natural Trumpet in D, 19th c., gallery 680.
Bass saxtuba in E-flat, 1855, Adolphe Sax, gallery 680. 
Over-the-Shoulder Soprano Horn in E-flat, ca. 1880, John F. Stratton, gallery 680. 
Coach Horn in C, ca. 1825–89, gallery 680. 
One of Evelyn Waugh‘s ear trumpets, Forum Auctions, 2017 (estimated value, £1000-1500).

Left to right: 
Jean Cocteau reciting through a megaphone in his production of Les mariés de la tour Eiffel, 1921. 
Evelyn Waugh with one of his ear trumpets. 

There is little casual about these horns. From the Old Testament to the hunt, to our ongoing battle cries, they announce — “forcible” — attention.

“Cleanthes said . . . the voice, forced through the narrow passage of a trumpet, comes out more forcible and shrill: so, methinks, a sentence pressed within the harmony of verse darts out more briskly upon the understanding, and strikes my ear and apprehension with a smarter and more pleasing effect.” - Montaigne

Cocteau needed force in his ballet, because his themes were outlandish: "Sunday vacuity; human beastliness, ready-made expressions, disassociation of ideas from flesh and bone, ferocity of childhood, the miraculous poetry of everyday life.” So he turned to a horn, an “over-the-head-voice-trumpet”, increasing the power of his delivery.

Waugh used silence against those who displeased or bored him. By middle age, he’d become a pantomime villain with his ear trumpet — removed mid-sentence and brandished with devastating effect.

“They think that good rules cannot be understood but by the sound of a trumpet.” - Montaigne

 

Bells and Whistles (and Rattles)

The Kagura Suzu is associated with Shinto rituals at shrines and at court. Kagura (神楽) translates "god-entertainment" and encompasses instrumental music, songs, and dances. 
The Mayan bird whistle has two chambers: one in its head and one deeper in the body. The blow holes are in the tail and crown.  
The Native American Tlingit whistle depicts a double-headed eagle, and this bird could represent contact between Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast and Russian explorers. 
The polished Kuba whistle is used for the arrival of a king or the delivery of messages during hunts.

The Pre-Columbian rattle wards off evil. The terracotta mother figure nurses, and her mouth, belly, and necklace make soothing sounds.  
The English “precious and protective” baby rattles have whistles, a piece of teething coral, and silver bells. They were thought to ward off enchantment and disease. I think of Neil Postman’s Prisoners of Childhood, where he argues that preciousness signals both protected childhood and class structure. 

I wish I’d had any of these fine instruments as a kid. . . . I just had a pink rubber elephant squeeze toy. Years later working as a composer, I layered tape recordings of it, slowed and enlarged in my first studio Musique concrète piece,   Elephantomachia,   (battle of the elephants). Perhaps attempting some overdue off-warding.

 

Twist it, Clap it, Rub it, Whack it, Strike it

Top left: Damaru, 19th c., Tibet, gallery 684.
Top center: Clapper, ca. 1850–1750 B.C., Egypt, Middle Kingdom. 
Top right: Friction Drum (Lunet) 19th– 20th c.,Papua New Guinea, New Ireland, gallery 684.  
Bottom left: Gamelan, Saron Panerus Slendro, 19th c., Java, Indonesia, gallery 681. 
Bottom right: Robotic player piano, roto tom drums, and vibraphone, Aesthetic Research, Alec Bernstein & Daniel Carney,  Baltimore, 1980s.

The thod-rnga, or damaru is made from two human skulls. The drum is played by twisting it back and forth with one hand so that the small pellets at the ends of the strings strike the two drumheads. Buddhist power-tools to fight evil.

Clappers are among the earliest percussion instruments in ancient Egypt. This clapper is shaped like forearms and hands “wearing” bracelets on each wrist. Musical clappers were used at banquets, funerary processions, and other rituals. Precursors to the secularized applause machines of 1950s television.

Lunets are "friction drums" with three sound-producing wedges or tongues on top. The musician moistens a hand with water and rubs the wedges. The tones echo the cry of the island bird for which the drum was named.

The structures of gamelan music share forms with Javanese poetry. The Macapat texts, especially Kinanthi, fit into their individual melodic patterns, which are sung with the percussive orchestras. Themed metric systems are marvelous: Kinanthi, love poems; Durma, violent passions or fighting; Mas kumambang, longing or homesickness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_poetry#Sekar_madya_and_tembang_macapat.
And love those hammers. Not so far from my performance art/sound poetry, back in the day, the 1970s.

By the 1980s, digital control of analogue instruments was in vogue. My partner and I constructed systems to extend pianistic technique — any note, chord or cluster of notes could be performed live by aligning it to keys on a computer keyboard. The system relayed strike information to solenoids which struck the piano keys at the desired moment and volume. This same technique was applied to drums and mallet instruments, like the rosewood marimba I had. Real instruments, natural acoustics, no finger limits. This we called Aesthetic Research. 

“John Zisca of Bohemia, a defender of John Wicliffe’s heresies [the influential dissident within the Roman Catholic priesthood], left order that they should flay him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war against his enemies, fancying it would contribute to the continuation of the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them.” - Montaigne 

While viewing these instruments of the past (including my own), I felt more in than out of the tradition. Power tools go way back.

"A War in Tawara" [by Paul Hoover]

A War in Tawara

Add “A,”
A nut for a jar of tuna,
A Santa at NASA.

Borrow or rob,
Boston did not sob.
But sad Eva saved a stub.

Cigar? Toss it in a can. It is so tragic.

Don did nod,
“Dogma, I am God;
Devil never even lived.”

Evil Olive,
Ed is on no side.
Ed is a trader, cast sacred art aside.

Flesh saw Mom wash self.
Flee to me, remote elf!

God lived as an evil dog.
Go, do, dog!

Harass Sarah!

I prefer pi.
I, a man, am regal; a German am I.
If I had a hi-fi . . .

Jar a toga, rag not a raj.
Jar bar crab, raj.

Kayak salad, Alaska yak.
Key lime, Emily—ek!

Late, fetal,
Leon sees Noel.
Live, devil,
Laid on no dial.

Ma is a nun, as I am,
Mirror rim
Murder for a jar of red rum;

No lemons, no melon,
Never even
Noon.
No sign, in evening, is on.
No slang is a signal, son.
Nurses run—

Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo.
Oh, who was it I saw? Oh, who?

Poor Dan is in a droop.
Pull up if I pull up.

“Q,” said Dias, “Q.”

Rise to live, sir.
Rats live on no evil star.

Stack cats,
Solo gigolos.
Swap paws,
Step on no pets.
Sexes, exes,

Too hot to hoot,
Tug at a gut.
Tell a ballet
Tulsa night life: filth, gin, a slut.

U.F.O., tofu,

Vanna, wanna V?

Wow!
Was it a bar or a bat I saw?
Won’t lovers revolt now?
We panic in a pew.

Xerox orex,

Yawn a more Roman way!
You bat one in, resign in evening. Is Ernie not a buoy?

Zeus was deified, saw Suez.
ZZZZ, Otto, ZZZZ.

Ed. Note: Paul Hoover gave himself the challenge to write an abecedarius in which every line is a palindrome. The result, "A War in Tawara," is a tour de force. It is from his new collection-in-progress, The Windows. When Paul posted the poem on Facebook -- as part of the "8 poems in 8 days plus 8 invites" project -- he included the image below "When Paradise Arrived" by Enrique Chagoya.

"Psalm" [by Stanley Moss]

God of paper and writing, God of first and last drafts,
God of dislikes, god of everyday occasions—
He is not my servant, does not work for tips.
Under the dome of the roman Pantheon,
God in three persons carries a cross on his back
as an aging centaur, hands bound behind his back, carries Eros.
Chinese God of examinations: bloodwork, biopsy,
urine analysis, grant me the grade of fair in the study of dark holes,
fair in anus, self-knowledge, and the leaves of the vagina
like the pages of a book in the vision of Ezekiel.
May I also open my mouth and read the book by eating it,
swallow its meaning. My Shepherd, let me continue to just pass
in the army of the living,
keep me from the ranks of the excellent dead.
It’s true I worshiped Aphrodite
who has driven me off with her slipper
after my worst ways pleased her.
I make noise for the Lord.
My Shepherd, I want, I want, I want.

Ed. note: from God Breatheth Not All Men's Hearts Alike by Stanley Moss (Seven Stories Press, 2011)

Patricia Spears Jones: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

__________________________________________________________________________________

If I Were Rita Hayworth

 

I would hear Spanish first.

My father would teach me how to shimmer.

My mother would keep her mouth shut.

 

I would wear red dresses at age 12

and dance like a woman many years older.

I would dance in my father's arms.

 

Later I would dye my hair red

and pluck the last Spanish words from my mouth.

 

I would masquerade as an American­

that healthy girl next door who knows

how to crack a whip.

 

I would dream only in black and white

(after Technicolor, some peace is needed).

 

As the Studio built a whole world for me

full of fresh cream and gingerbread, I would seek

out the darkest men, nigger dark, then fuck them

into marriage. I would wed a Prince of Darkness

and bear daughters named for the perfumes of Arabia.

 

If l were Rita Hayworth, strung between living a lie

and bearing a sickness so furious it ages me to dream of it,

I would rage in my illness, make a black hole

wide enough to swallow the damnation of my beauty.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Patricia Spears Jones grew up in Arkansas and has lived and worked in New York City since the mid 1970s.  She is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, and anthologist. The recipient of the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers in 2017, Spears Jones is the author of A Lucent Fire New and Selected Poems and other books. Her poems are widely anthologized, including in the forthcoming in 250 Years of African American Poetry: Why African American Poetry Matters Today.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, msmagazine.com, and numerous other print and online journals.  She co-edited ORDINARY WOMEN: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets (1978) and edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat (2009). She curated programs as Program Coordinator for The Poetry Project at St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn.  She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University, and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence.  She has taught summer poetry workshops at Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center, Naropa, Rutgers University, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill and Wild Seeds Workshop for Medgar Evers College and at The Poetry Project, Poets House, Brooklyn Poets, for Cave Canem New York classes and at branches of the NYPL and the BPL. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. 

_______________________________________________________________________________________

"Drunken Winter" [by Joseph Ceravolo]

Oak oak!     like like

it then

      cold some wild paddle

so sky then;

flea you say

“geese geese" the boy

June of winter

of again

Oak sky

From The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo (Wesleyan University Press, 2013). The  poem initially appeared in Spring in this World of Poor Mutts, winner of the first Frank O'Hara Award in 1968, which was judged by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch. Books by Michael Brownstein, Tony Towle, John Koethe, and Kenward Elmslie were chosen for the series in subsequent years. Click here for more about Joe's Collected. 

A "civil engineer and regular family guy" (in Tom Clark's words), Ceravolo was born in Astoria, Queens, in 1934, went to City College, began writing poetry when serving in the US Army, and took a class with Kenneth Koch that proved decisive in his development as a poet. Many of us got our first exposure to Ceravolo's poems in the Paris Review when Tom Clark edited its poetry pages. Before dying of cancer on September 4,1988, Ceravolo wrote and published several other books with small presses, but what many readers, including ardent fans of Ceravolo's work, don't realize is that the man produced hundreds of pages of poetry in the last twelve years of his life. The poems -- some of which have dates in lieu of titles -- stand on their own and also figure as part of one long project: a chronicle of the poet's sensibility.

-- DL

Theory of the “bise”: why social distancing alone won’t stop a Covid redux in France [by Tracy Danison]

Masked and distanced but pleased to be there. Audience at Ayelin Parolin’s "WEG" dance performance, 12 September 2020, during the Atelier de Paris Indispensable ! festival. Photo © Benoïte Fanton

As I write, it is still early and, as nearly every weekday morning, the little kids downstairs are off to pre-school. I hear them rustling around on the landings, tugging on their wraps. I hear hurried Dads chivvying them down the stairs, hear them calling up “Bisous, Maman”, hear Mamans calling down, “Bises, ma Chérie, Bises!” La Bise or le bisou, used interchangeably, means “a kiss”, connoting “a little (viz., widdle, liddle, wittle) kiss(ie)”. It’s sweet sound in the morning and cheering. We need a little cheer too.

The corona stuff is getting old.

Though ICUs still have capacity, the Paris region and France in general are experiencing significant rises in both Covid-19 infections and hospitalizations. While the median age of those sick unto death, dying or dead, is 60, infection is spreading mostly in institutional settings such as workplaces and health establishments among 20- and 30-somethings. Up to now children in school are a negligible factor.

Authorities made masks mandatory in work places in early September. Lately they have taken marginal actions such as shutting gyms, requiring bars and cafés to close early and encouraging distance appointments. While able to take quick quarantine action thanks to institutional organization and firm public support, delays in producing test results - largely thanks to an un-thought – through free test-on-demand option – has seen authorities struggling to set up a reliable tracking system. Also, political concerns about privacy, some fears, especially among the young, of the lifestyle consequences of testing positive and assumptions both about the efficacy of technology and about what the public will bear, mean that the smartphone app hasn’t produced any miracles and that obvious moves such as collecting customer names and numbers in cheek-by-jowl gathering places such as cafés, bars and restaurants has not been tried.

In spite of the shortcomings, the rise, as in Italy and Spain, is something of a puzzle.

As far as I can make out, despite caterwauling and recrimination, France’s goddamned gumint is as stolidly competent as New York’s or Korea’s or Germany’s. Indeed, weren’t he such a caricature of an empathy-challenged nerd, President Emmanuel Macron’s faith in the power of solutions through strategic fact-based analysis and well-organized public action would almost be enough to make him liked.

Alas, unable to understand sociocultural issues more complex than those represented in an Isaac Asimov novel systematically gives people grounds for distrust of his good sense and judgment. For instance, Macron recently remarked that critics of his planned 5G or 6G or 7G – whatever – wireless net rollout were a passel of Amish. It is simply beyond the poor fellow’s power of imagination that some be-hatted, bonnetted organic farmers might actually have a notion of a “good life” that doesn’t include a smartphone and invasive advertising. Nor does it occur to Macron and his buds from engineering school that it is important that France has a lot of Amish-types who don’t wear bonnets and big hats perhaps, but who do frame the rigors of lockdown, unpaid hard work and lifestyle inconveniences as acts of human solidarity and not just enlightened self-interest.

Macron’s lack of imagination depresses, but it isn’t unique to France. Imagination, here and throughout the world, seems to be cowering out ce moment bizarre in sub-basement level 13, to the left of the abandoned tool-room, in the corner, not too far from the big rusty crack where the Terminator burst in from the future in the early 80s, under the moldy poster of Munch’s “The Scream” and the tattered 1956 Playboy centerfold.

It’s even harder to blame the bloody-minded Gallic masses than the goddamned gumint for the Covid Redux. Of course, in the same way that Charles De Gaulle disclaimed responsibility for his political failings as the country’s tendency to make too many kinds of cheeses when one or two good one’s would do, citizens dismiss vexations they don’t want to be blamed for by denouncing the inconscience et indiscipline des Français. However, as my teenaged daughter used to delight in observing, blaming the concitoyen is just a harmless way of burning off the cynicism and doubt generated by all the investment in Amish-style notions of citizenship. Any old walk to any old cheese shop in any diversely ethnic neighborhood is on the whole an object lesson in a public-spirited health and hygiene conscience et sérieux that most respectable stereotypes could impute only to Germans.  

Different kinds of distance. Simon Senn finds a fit with Arielle F’s virtual body for the Covid-time Zoom-live performance “Be Arielle F, 2020” at Lafayette Anticipations, Echelle Humaine dance performance festival, 23 September 2020. Photo © Mathilda Olmi

Since I shuffled back to Paris round about the first of September, I’ve been in constant attendance at two public schools and a teeming university, made frequent visits to bustling open-air and inside markets and supermarkets and public agencies, and, of course, traveled in over-crowded trains, buses and subways. So far, putting aside the usual suspects, the yahoos guzzling beer, smoking and yakking in the little urine-soaked niche near the betting shop, I’ve been the only one I’ve observed who has sometimes not worn a mask, even in the street. Also, for the record, I’ve been to five different performance venues, each with its own architecture and spectator-reception challenges – Atelier de Paris, Théâtre de la Bastille, La Scala Paris, Palais de Chaillot and Lafayette Anticipations – and eye-balled protocols and executions. Especially impressed by the efforts of the Théâtre de la Bastille, which opened with a strong production of Nathalie Béasse’s excellent Aux Eclats, and which has been designed for everything but non-intimacy and distance of any sort, I’ve seen nothing anywhere if not thoughtful application of the guidelines carried out by thoughtful people anxious to ensure the health and safety of others and of themselves.

So, no, it’s not the bloody-minded masses or the socially Amish among us to blame, either.

And, if it’s not the citizens and not the government to blame for the Covid Redux, I’ll blame la bise, point the finger at le bisou.

Like any kiss, large or small, une bise is not, is never just a kiss.

Neither love not hate, nor ever quite neutral, la bise is process, not thing, gerundive, not noun, an approach to the business and culture of life. Call le bisou, an “elan de bise”, a “kiss-drive”, toward a certain type of social entanglement whose closeness may or may not become intimacy, élan de bise always tends to a closeness that is intrinsically un-Covid-time-adapted.

Elan de bise may be unique to this particular culture but it is not the only socio-cultural drive in existence. My own American Gothic-style upbringing includes a drive toward tragedy, an élan that pushes me toward tragic (self-exculpatory) distance. The motive power of both is as enduring as it is strong and subtle. Even after 30 years of deliberately living elsewhere and otherwise, I was brought not too terribly long ago to hovering dry-eyed over my dying mother and, as adieu, squeezing her cold, papery hand but once and at that lightly. Elan de bise has been around a lot longer than the corona virus and is a lot more motivating (and socially important) than government health and safety regulations.

La Bise has force enough to reign among adopted Amish such as my dear old friend Uwe and I, as well as among just plain family and friends.

Théâtre de la Bastille management and staff made difficult decisions to make enough distance to make way for real theater performance in this otherwise closely-knitting venue. Scene from the premiere of Nathalie Béasse’s “Aux éclats”, 14 September 2020. Photo © Jean Louis Fernandez

Uwe invited me to his post-lockdown picture show in mid-Summer – the first time I’d seen him since lockdown … Uwe! Tracy! Super! Bisou, bisou! Ach! Zut! O! Man! Sorry! Ahh, well! Then, here’s a rub: Can a bow, a shouted remark, an arm in salute, be enough emotional satisfaction for an adult whose little piggy-toes you once bisoued to an ecstasy of coo and gurgle? Who can be sure? Conflicted, Uwe’s Juliette, his Martin and his Agathe, his friends, children and my acquaintances spent the whole evening desperately grasping for anti-Covid hygiene, but grappling mostly with each other, stumbling into each other with every clumsy elbow bump, spattering each other with every sentence of ever-closer-to-the-ear commentary, spewing subtle poison with every airborne hand-to-off-the-nose-mask kiss.

Elan de bise rules communities and neighborhoods as much as families and friendships.

My ear had been missing the “Bisous, bisous, Maman” of little Jena from the second floor. She’s usually an enthusiastic one. I know the parents Marie and Charlie hardly at all and probably won’t ever. But we’re neighbors and, among other things, we’ve done co-op general assembly and ce moment bizarre together … I went down and knocked at their door. Marie opened. Before either one of us could utter a word, a bathed, pajama-clad Jena, shouting “Bisou, bisou”, sprang from behind Marie. I fell back a little and, to keep the little brute at arm’s length, rather tenderly laid my hand on her head. I do like little kids; their naiîve enjoyment of life is infectious. I was glad to see Jena.  

By now Jena’s used to what she probably thinks of as social baulking, so, like an especially big and inquisitive kitty-cat, she dropped the bisou-bisou and hung in the social distance between us as we chatted. It was only when I was leaving that I realized I had spent the whole time stroking Jena’s hair!  I “forgot” to wash my hands until well afterwards. What sort of rational monster thinks of washing his hands after stroking the freshly-washed hair of a out-going, vivacious and sweet pajama-clad toddler?

Through in dignant form, the toddler’s “Bisou-bisou” also rules relations with big society, the miscellaneous characters that people one’s life – from supermarket cashiers to gardeners to work acquaintance and bureaucrats to landlords to local politicians to members of the gym – as well as with folks one reads about, hears or sees in life’s background, but only really meets by coincidental dribs and drabs.

I finally decided to go back to the gym last Saturday. When I got there, pretty early in the morning, Michel, the owner, was just locking the doors. Seeing me, being rather of the inconscience et indiscipline des Français school of social philosophy, Michel launched into his usual denunciation of France, the French, incompetent government and tax-gobbling bureaucracy. Just as he believes instinctively that his imitation of my accent is a comic masterpiece we both must surely enjoy, he believes that I, as an American-born, will sympathize with his criticisms of France and “the French”.

Both masked up – noses at a notional but friendly, normal, social distance of an inch and a half – Michel denounces and I lament the Closing of the Gyms, the latest plague to descend Ófrom on high. I pull away from Michel as I say I understand all the same what the government had to contend with and that, look-you, we are damned lucky to have rational government, anyhow.  I lean forward, he leans forward, I touch him on the shoulder and wish him courage! as he hops into his fancy car. Michel, not to speak of the ungrateful gimme-mine trainers he has not thrown to the wolves, must be under awful financial pressure. That’s what I had told him. Also, that I’ll be back.

In fact, we’ll all be back. Back because, maybe it’s true, the elan de bise is to blame prolonging the national agony. But, then, it’s surely one of the big reasons to come back, too. 

 

Soviet Humor

 

 

 

American reporter: "How's it going?"

An engineer in Moscow (circa 1948-1989): "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Preceded by a shrug. 

Followed by a shot of vodka.

 

Meet the Press: Iniquity Press, Vendetta Books & Big Hammer

Dante Di Stefano: How did Big Hammer and Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books come into being?

Dave Roskos: Big Hammer & the press began in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I moved to New Brunswick on July 4, 1986. Eliot Katz was the first New Brunswick poet I met. He was stapling posters around town for an upcoming poetry reading at The Court Tavern featuring Andy Clausen and the Lunar Bear Ensemble. He gave me a poster & encouraged me to come to the show & read in the open reading, which I did. There was no on-going poetry reading series in town at this time. The Roxy series from the early 80s had run its course and was history. I used to ask Eliot when the next poetry reading was every time I saw him. He must’ve gotten tired of me wanting to know when the next reading was all the time, because he encouraged me to start a reading series myself and then he told me how to do it.

I co-founded The Proletkult Poetry Circus at The Court Tavern in March of 1987, with fellow poet Chris Aubry. Bob Rixon was the first featured poet, followed by an open reading. The magazine grew out of the reading series & several other series in NJ, Philly & NYC including:  POETSWEDNESDAY at The Barron Arts Center, founded & run by Edie Eustice (earlier on with Sofran Crotty, later with Joe Weil), Liza Pille’s Tuesday night series at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, Jacko Monahan’s ongoing-for-decades series at The Brighton Bar in Long Branch, Frank Finale’s Without Halos readings in Ocean County, Betsy Robin Schwartz’s series at The Metuchen Public Library, Dave Lancet’s series at The Pipe Line & The Fringe in Newark, Lamont Steptoe’s series at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, Barbara Holland’s series at The Speak Easy in Greenwich Village, Enid Dame & Donald Lev’s Home Planet News  readings at The Cedar Tavern, Yictove’s series at The Knitting Factory, etc. The magazine included poets I had met through these various scenes, as well as poets from around the country who I only knew through the mail.

Big Hammer #1 was published in 1988. I typed it up with a typewriter onto sheets of 11 by 17 inch paper, double-sided, & had it photocopied at a local print shop. Ken Greenley and I used the MACS at The Roost, a free computer lab at Rutgers University, to type up “camera-ready” pages for the chapbooks and magazines. The Roost was open 24 hours, comfortable enough & conducive for stoned & even tripping poets typing up poems at 3 am. I typed Big Hammer # 2 & several chapbooks at The Roost. Big Hammer #2 was printed by my friend Tom Pulhamus, a poet (& later an editor at Long Shot) who worked as an off-set printer at Mike Cote’s Ploughshares Press. Mike let Tom print the magazine on his off-hours for the cost of materials. An enormous labor of love. Ken Greenley used to do guerilla print runs at his various office-temp jobs, printing his mag Half Dozen of the Other on the boss’s dime & time.

There was a vibrant poetry scene in New Brunswick in the 80s & 90s. Big Hammer was one of several New Brunswick-based poetry magazines at that time. There was Arbella, edited by Anthony George & Tom Obrzut, Conceptual Vandalism edited by Doctor Nein, Guillotine Broadside edited by Miriam Halliday & Matt Borkowski, Half Dozen of the Other edited by Ken Greenley, & Long Shot edited by Eliot Katz & Danny Shot. This was just in New Brunswick. Other notable NJ small press poetry mags of the time, which many of us read & sent work to, include Joe Weil’s Black Swan Review & Anti-Lawn, out of Elizabeth, Herschel Silverman’s Beehive, out of Bayonne, and Richard Quatrone’s Passaic Review.

DD: Your publishing endeavors reflect aspects of the poetry zine subculture of the 1980s & 1990s. I don’t know much about that subculture, but what I do know is that it was a confluence for multiple aesthetics, undergirded by a radical DIY poetics and favoring hybridity before “DIY” and “hybridity” were even terms that were bandied about so often. Could you talk about that scene, your role in it, and how it fit into (or didn’t) the broader world of poetry?

DR: The 80s & 90s zine subculture is simply a continuation of what is now called “The Mimeo Revolution” of the 1960s & 1970s. By the 1980s mimeograph machines had been largely replaced by Xerox or photocopy machines. Some folks even refer to the mags produced in the 80s & 90s as “Xerox Zines.” Most of the editors were also poets. Some of my favorite poet-editors from the 1960s & 70s include Tom Kryss (aka T.L. Kryss), Gene Bloom, D.r. Wagner, d.a. levy, rjs, Douglas Blazek, Diane DiPrima, John Bennett, Steve Richmond, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Marvin Malone, Kell Robertson, Charles Bukowski & Neeli Cherry (aka Cherkovski), A.D. Winans, F.A. Nettelbeck, Allen De Loach, & The Willie.

Three anthologies of 1960s Underground Poetry that I love above the others & return to the most are The East Side Scene, edited by Allen De Loach, The Living Underground, edited by Hugh Fox, and Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry edited by Charles Potts. These books are fun & taken together they are a master’s class on mid-twentieth-century American Underground Poetry.

The 1980s were a fun time to be a small press poet. There was a national network of poets connected by readings, magazines, fliers, posters, word of mouth, the telephone, & the post office. There were zine-review-zines like Fact Sheet 5. And there was Len Fulton and The Small Press Review, holding it down since the 1960s.

Some classic underground poetry mags from the 1980s include: Alpha Beat Soup edited by Dave Christy, Bouillabaisse, Cokefish, and Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup by Ana & Dave Christy, Planet Detroit by Kurt Nimmo, Poetry Motel by Patrick McKinnon, Action by Jim Cohn, Big Scream by Dave Cope, Big Fire Proof Box by Joel Kuszai & Chris Ide, Catalyst by M and Kathleen Kettner, Home Planet News by Enid Dame & Donald Lev, ArtCrimes by Steven B. Smith, Ben Guylas, etc, Impetus by Cheryl Townsend, Lactuca by Mike Selender, Guts by Keith Dodson, Fell Swoop by Joel Dailey, Raw Bone by Tom House, and road/house by Todd Moore. (There is a new book entitled Belvidere Books & Guns about Todd Moore & road/house press, edited by his son Theron Moore. It contains interviews with some of the folks mentioned here. I published Todd’s chapbook Blind Whiskey & the Straight Razor Blues in 2008).   

Some notable mags from the 90s include: Napalm Health Spa edited by Jim Cohn, THE-HOLD/Underbeat Journal by Cait Collins, Iconoclast by Phil Wagner, Transcendent Visions by David Kime, Lucid Moon by Ralph Hasselmann Jr., Driver’s Side Airbag by Michael Halchin, FUCK! by Lee Thorn, & Weird Poetry/American Living Press by Michael Shores & Angela Mark.

My friend Bree, of Green Panda Press & Least Bittern Books, created The Gonzo Library of the Indy Outlaw, Whole Books Meat & Ephemera, or The Outlaw Library, for short. Bree & some other poet-editor friends (rjs & Alex Gildzen) made a few posts in the beginning, but I think she mainly just set it up so that I could run with it. Bree is a poet-editor from Cleveland in the spirit & tradition of d.a. levy, Daniel Thompson, & Jim Lang.

Many of the poets & publications mentioned here are represented in The Outlaw Library: www.outlawlibrary.blogspot.com

DD: On your website you note Big Hammer (and I assume, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books) reflects: “a vision of America that is unfathomable to those in the suits & ties and even those with the ponytails and the birkenstocks. His poems are written by auto mechanics and plumbers and ferriers and people who know the difference between fuel injection and carburetors.” Does this mean a Working-Class vision of America? A nonprofessional, non-academic view? A Whitmanesque democratic vista? If so, what does this view offer that other views do not? How does this view connect to your understanding of poetry in general?

DR: That’s not my website. That’s The Outlaw Poetry/Free Jazz Network in France created by my friend Klaus Thiemann. That quote is by poet-editor Mark Weber, of Zerx Press. Very kind of him to say. & yes, sure, it means all that, & the kitchen sink. Throw in a mimeograph machine for good measure. Poems by & for Proles. I don’t know if it’s a view, or stance, so much as a way of life.

Poet-Editor LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) said something in 1960 that speaks to the rest of your question:

“I didn’t especially think that there was any charted-out area in which the poetic sensibility had to function to make a poem. I thought that anything--anything you could grab--was fit material to write a poem on. That’s the way I think about it. Anything in your life, anything you know about or see or understand, you could write a poem about if you’re moved to do it. (....) And I don’t think that there are any kind of standard ideas or sentiments or emotions or anything that have to be in a poem. A poem can be made up of anything so long as it is well made. It can be made up out of any feeling. And if I tried to cut anything out of my life--if there was something in my life that I couldn’t talk about...it seems monstrous that you can tell almost anything about your life except those things that are most intimate or mean the most to you. That seems a severe paradox.”

DD: You published Harvey Pekar’s essay on Sun Ra. Could you talk about that book and the relevance of Sun Ra and Pekar today?

DR: They were both DIY, long before that phrase was bandied about so often, as you said above.

Harvey’s Sun Ra article was first published in a Canadian jazz magazine called CODA in 1975. The article covers Sun Ra’s career till around 1973. The chap book/reprint I published also includes photos of Sun Ra & the Arkestra performing at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, taken by poet-editor Lamont Steptoe of Whirlwind Press.

Sun Ra will be relevant as long as musicians improvise, or forever. The Arkestra is his legacy, Afrofuturism, his compositions & recordings & poetry, what he did with the moog, The Outer Space Employment Agency, Space Is The Place!, & his most pertinent question of all: “It’s After The End Of The World! Don’t You Know That Yet?!”

Besides being a pioneer of Underground Comix, Autobiographical Comix & Per-Zines, & an accomplished & widely published Jazz Writer, Harvey Pekar also wrote serious literary essays. Harvey has a character in American Splendor named Herschel whom he  describes as a “working class intellectual.” When I met Harvey he thought it was great I was a furniture mover & when we talked on the phone a few years later he remembered that & it was a plus in his book. Not so much a plus in many a snob’s book. Harvey was a working class intellectual supporting himself & later his family as a “flunky file clerk” at a VA Hospital in Cleveland. Harvey said writers should get a “flunky job” that they don’t have to think about & allows more energy for the real work, which is writing. The day job is just about Survival. Later on after the American Splendor movie he got many book deals & wrote several graphic-novel-style history & social studies books, often with historian Paul Buhle. Besides a stack of mostly self-published comic books, followed by a stack of big name press hardcover & trade paperback graphic novels, Harvey left a sprawling paper trail of jazz & literary essays in publications as different as DOWN BEAT and B.N. Duncan’s TELE TIMES. Some of Harvey’s Iniquity Press/Vendetta chapbooks, including Sun Ra, are posted on the outlaw library blog.

DD: How has Jazz influenced you as a writer and an editor?

I like all kinds of music, like I like all kinds of poetry, but I’m real-heavy into Free Jazz. Free Jazz is the music of the streets. A clarion call to action. Listening to Free Jazz inspired me to pick up an alto saxophone & just start playing. I can’t really articulate how jazz influenced my writing or editing, but it definitely influenced my horn playing (which is not jazz or free jazz -becuz it’s not based in the blues-but sound poetry or noise). I named my son after Albert Ayler. I love the music. However, I was writing poetry long before I found Jazz. I’m not a Jazz Poet. 

The late & much loved Steve Dalachinsky was a great Jazz Poet. He used to write poetry at live jazz shows. He has a 250 page book of poems he wrote at every single Charles Gayle gig from 1987 till 2006 (The Final Nite).  THE MANTIS for Cecil Taylor 1966-2009 came out on Iniquity/Vendetta in 2009. Poems written at Cecil Taylor concerts. Pure Spontaneous Combustible Jazz Poetry from a Pure Jazz Poet Soul. Ya can read THE MANTIS for free at the outlaw library...   

DD: What are five Jazz albums every poet should should listen to?

DR: Here’s seven that I enjoy listening to: Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler, Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman, Ascension by John Coltrane, Humility In The Light Of The Creator by Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Congliptious by Roscoe Mitchell, & Giuseppi Logan’s first two records on ESP-Disk.

DD: One of the books that really stood out in your catalogue was Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper by Hungarian poet Géza Szőcs, translated by Paul Sohar. How did you come to publish this book? What do you find most compelling about this poetry?

DR: Great book of poems. All the books of Hungarian translations by Paul Sohar are published by Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek in Romania. Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper was edited by Zoltán Böszörményi, but Paul came up with that great title. Paul Sohar lives in NJ when he is not in Budapest. He approached me in the 90s & said that Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek needed an American publisher with ISBN numbers to partner with so that the books could be published & distributed in the USA. It’s been an honor to share in this collaboration, but I have to be clear that it is their vision & that they do all the work. All I do is provide ISBNs. Paul is tireless in his work writing & translating urgent poetry.

DD: Many of the books you publish are guided by an aesthetic that derives partially from mid-twentieth-century American poetry, especially the Beats, but also the so-called Confessional poets, and the New York School. Could you talk about this aesthetic and also about some of the authors you’ve published?

DR: Especially The Beats, but also Meat poets like Charles Bukowski & d.a. levy. Ted Berrigan a big influence on many poets in Big Hammer, far as The NY School goes, from younger poets (now in their 50s) like Chris Stroffolino, Candace Kaucher, Boni Joi, and Tom Obrzut to his friends & students like Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Joel Dailey, Joel Lewis, & the late poet-editor Tom Weigel, whose poetry sings in eternity.

Some gone poets I’ve published chapbooks by include Donald Lev, Kell Robertson, Andrew Gettler, Allen Johnson, and Ed Galing; all five represented in Big Hammer & The Outlaw Library. May the Muses crank out mimeographed broadsides of their poems & pass them out on street corners in eternity.

Again, it’s an everything including the kitchen sink with a mimeograph machine thrown in for good measure aesthetic.

I learned alot about mid-twentieth-century American poetry by reading Walter Lowenfels anthologies. I first read Cleveland poet-editor rjs in Lowenfels’ WHERE IS VIETNAM? I found a copy in a used bookstore in Asheville NC on lunch-break on a long-distance moving job, read it all the way home to Jersey in the cab of the truck. Years later I answered an ad in Factsheet 5 that rjs had placed giving away free copies of Douglas Blazek’s Broken Knuckle Poems, which he and Tom Kryss had published in the 60s. The copy of Factsheet 5 was from the 90s & it was the mid 00s but rjs answered & we traded books & zines generously & eventually published his Collected Poems on Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He introduced me to Tom Kryss & we too became friends & put out his book light dark light. This chain of events started by picking up that copy of WHERE IS VIETNAM? Walter Lowenfels was completely egalitarian. His anthologies are a big part of my education. He also turned me on to William Wantling & Olga Cabral, for which I am eternally grateful.         

Matt Borkowski is one of the reasons I started Big Hammer in the first place, to publish and promote his poetry. Same goes for Ken Greenley & Michael Pingarron. Three poets from off the streets of New Jersey who have left this realm for parts unknown. Their poems scream from under bridges & from factory floors, scrawled in blood on shithouse walls. Not just those guys, other gone friends as well, like Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, Stuart N. Ross, Charlie Mosler, & Bob Rixon; all from Jersey, all there in the beginning; along with alive-&-kickin’ poet-pals Joe Weil, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Anthony George, Tom Obrzut, John Lunar Richey, Lamont Steptoe, Chris Stroffolino, Dave Cope. All folks in the first two issues who have continued to be in Big Hammer over the years, creating a kind of core, most of whom have chapbooks &/or trade paperbacks from the press. Three other gone poets from the early days of Big Hammer, but who I never had the honor of putting out a book by, are Aisha Eshe, Barbara A. Holland, and Enid Dame. (Give them a read!) That’s only the beginning though. Ya can read the first 18 issues, & issue #21, of Big Hammer for free in The Outlaw Library, and see who else joins the party as time goes on, if you feel so inclined.

DD: Your own collection, Fall & All: Book 2, invokes William Carlos Williams. Could you talk about Williams’ legacy, and, also, about New Jersey as a home for poetry?

DR: I love William Carlos Williams. I sent poems to Allen Ginsberg when I was a teenager & he wrote back “Read WCW for complete grounding.” I find myself returning to Spring and All and Descent of Winter all the time. I also really dig Paterson. A man is a city. No ideas but in things. I can’t talk about WCW without also talking about Alfred Kreymborg and OTHERS magazine, which was conceived at Grantwood, an artist’s colony in Ridgefield, NJ, & which Williams helped edit. Kreymborg also put out annual hardcover anthologies, also entitled OTHERS, for a few years. The complete run of OTHERS magazine has been posted online at The Modern Journals Project (modjourn.org). You can also find affordable copies for sale online. It’s an education in early-twentieth-century poetry. Alfred Kreymborg did important work. OTHERS mag had a huge influence on Big Hammer 19 thru 21, as those 3 issues came out roughly one hundred years after OTHERS, & form a trilogy. I was blown away by how relevant these poems from a hundred years ago are today.

New Jersey has been a great home for poetry for me. The list of poetry reading series I ran off earlier, most of which were in NJ, speaks to that. That was just a list of readings I had gone to over the years. There were so many other scenes going on as well. NJ has a rich history, from Walt Whitman to Williams & Kreymborg to Walter Lowenfels, who lived in Mays Landing, to Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to Joe Salerno, & all the NJ poets I’ve mentioned in this interview. I’m happy to be from NJ. Rent is kinda high though.

DD: What can we look forward to from Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books?

DR: Gonna bring back my zine STREET VALUE. Eventually make more Big Hammers. Books by Beth Borrus, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Jen Dunford-Roskos, Loring Hughes, Katalin Mezey (translated by Paul Sohar), Joe Weil, Dwyer Jones, Tom Obrzut, Anthony George, John Lunar Richey, Damian Rucci, normal, Dave Church & Bob Rixon. That should keep us busy for a while.

DD: Could you end by giving us a poem or poems from poet (s) you’ve published?

DR:  Thank you for asking such great questions & thanks too for this opportunity to talk about poets that I love. Here are two short poems, by Matt Borkowski & Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, respectively...

A Walk Is A Prayer

a walk is a prayer if taken well,
one foot in heaven,
one in hell;

upon the earth where all have fallen,
a walk is a prayer

—Matt Borkowski

 

Wedding Song

“Gently Gently do one confident chore
in front of me lovingly, daily.” (Rilke)
Gently Gently do one confident task
in front of me lovingly, daily.
“Lead me this way near the garden.” (Rilke)
Lead me this way near the garden.
Gently, lovingly, confidently, daily.
Give me nights that are luminous
tantric
drala
above the enemy
Mountain Energies
“A man’s home is his wife.” (Talmud)
Behold our authenticity!
A woman’s home is to face everything--
or else!

—Miriam Halliday-Borkowski

---

Dave Roskos has been writing poems since 1979 and has written several books including Intensive Care (Black Rabbit Press) & Lyrical Grain, Doggerel Chaff, & Pedestrian Preoccupations (Cat in the Sun Books/ReDUX Consortium). He lives in Seaside Heights with his wife, poet/collagist Jen Dunford-Roskos, and works as a Direct Support Professional for a non-profit Mental Health Agency.

"To Ford Madox Ford, Still in Heaven" [by Mary Maxwell]

Since, as you’ve said, There is room in this world for infinities
of gods, would you mind too much if I made you one of mine?

As genius loci, a sort of outsized daimon of the desk, you’d
recline beneath a throw of papers, your lower lip hanging in that

distracted meditation often mistaken for a snooze.  We’d talk
of your beloved Biala and of Béziers bereft, as well as more

recent fires you prophesied in  life.  Did we do all we could?
The March of Literature defended all books from burning.

When Provence heard the cleric cry, “Burn them all!”
empathetic grapes shriveled on the vine as precious parchments

vanished in the flames. May bowls of bouillabaisse and bottles of
Cassis replace the barbarians’ sacrificial pyres, and as you breathe

my altar’s saffron-scented air, hear this foolish pagan’s simple-
minded prayer.  My dear girl, food and wine ARE culture!

Ed. note: From Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (Longnooksbooks, 2012). The poem alludes to Ford's brilliant poem on heaven, which you can find in Pound's "Confucius to Cummings" anthology.

John Ashbery's "Therefore"

Consider the weight of the word therefore in "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and here, in "Uptick," from his 2009 book Planisphere:

We were sitting there, and   
I made a joke about how   
it doesn’t dovetail: time,   
one minute running out   
faster than the one in front   
it catches up to.   
That way, I said,   
there can be no waste.   
Waste is virtually eliminated.   

To come back for a few hours to   
the present subject, a painting,   
looking like it was seen,   
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,   
but it has to pay attention   
to what’s up ahead: a vision.   
Therefore poetry dissolves in   
brilliant moisture and reads us   
to us.   
A faint notion. Too many words,   
but precious.

-- John Ashbery

Courtesy of the Flow Chart Foundation and a tip of the fedora to Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director. Click here to visit the foundation's website and check out the invaluable "Ashbery Resource Center" and ingenious "Ashbery's Created Spaces." -- DL