The Best American Poetry

An Introduction to Toby Fitch: & ici an aussi trysting the rules (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

 

“Without paranoia, there’s nothing. My knowledge of 

homeland trivia is nothing if not

chaotic, historically inaccurate..."

 

 

Toby Fitch works in the great tradition of Australian (post-/modernist) poetry that takes play seriously and regards irreverence as a sincere expression of esteem, and stretches from Christopher Brennan’s 1897 pastiche of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés to John Tranter’s innovations in “proceduralist” compositions, and unwittingly passes through the oeuvre of the fictional Ern Malley. Over the course of his six collections to date, Fitch has paid tribute to this lineage by borrowing from both its source material and apparatus to construct a poetry that offers something entirely new: an unnerving ability to make the reader an accomplice to the poetic experiment, a kind of involuntary collaboration that is most pronounced when Fitch’s ambition seems to be to dismantle the poem itself. What I find most interesting about Fitch’s poetry is not so much the novelty of his techniques as the peculiarity of their effects, which  frequently remind me that in our alchemic relationship to language, we are the more combustible element.

If a feature of modernism has been to remove the all knowing, all seeing poet from the center of the poem and invite the reader in to participate in the imaginative act, then Fitch plunges us ever deeper, to make us complicit not only in the poem’s achievements, but also its messes, its wrecks, its verging collapse. As the speaker of “Village” tells us:

 

i am a permanent & frustrated civilian

bloke of the global village 

thought to be post-everything as all new taste is 

voided across the furnishings

interior becomes exterior my private abode exploding

up to meet the cities from above

 

It's a nuanced way of representing our modern compulsion to "explode" the distinctions between private and public, to externalize our inner life, to blur the line between actor and spectator. In the process, Fitch makes us co-conspirators in his strange, mischievous world. In this aspect, his work might find a precursor in the art of Bruce Naumen.   

Fitch’s early experiments in poetic form and aesthetics often pit the volatility of language (the randomness of mistranslation, say) against the exactness of design. These sculptured poems, which at first glance appear entirely confident of their jurisdiction, begin to grow less certain of their structures the moment we enter them. The two arrowhead-shaped stanzas of “Narrows”, from his debut collection Rawshock (2012), seem to hurl down the page in a propulsion of words which is both mimetic of the poem’s shape and seemingly hell-bent on destroying it, like termites that, in the words of Manny Farber, “eat away at their immediate boundaries.” Fitch achieves this through his finely tuned ear for the traditional instruments of poetry (condensing, slant-rhymes; line breaks positioned in the mid-points of action) and how language works outside of poetry, that is: misunderstood, mangled, and patched together. Rawshock, for instance, is a paronomasia of “Rorschach”, and references a poetic sequence in the book which reshapes the Orpheus and Eurydice myth using the ten original Rorschach inkblots as templates.

Or take “Mauvement”, with its liquefaction of language into a kind of precipitation of data, in which certain words come in drops of syllables, so that we are able to locate the vice in our “de vices”; we find the error in the "conq/erors of the world"; and our weather systems arrive regendered (for so long exclusively given female names) as a "male storm".

"Mauvement" from The Bloomin' Notion and Other Stories of Beau

What we get here is Fitch's fixation with the way language can be broken open by mistake/pun/(mis)translation to reveal a more genuine meaning lurking within, which is to say: there is much truth to be found in the unintentional, the error. The poem also exhibits Fitch’s talent in playing with our physical expectations of reading a poem: tilting one's head to align ourselves with "Mauvement", the words, rather than secure themselves in place, begin to cascade away from us, so that we become increasingly unbalanced and begin to experience a form of slippage ourselves.

There is a latent energy in Fitch's poetry that our attention—never wholly innocent—explodes to life. In many of his poems, the reader can be made to feel like a wolf who has sidled its way into the stockade and stirred up the horses—a few lines in and one half expects the fences to come crashing down and the words to bolt off the page. 

In his third collection, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, Fitch turns his attention to Rimbaud’s Illuminations, flipping each poem upside-down to “write backwards through them, hijacking and re-versing their content”. Fitch tell us he relies upon “the French of Rimbaud, the translations by John Ashbery, the filter and slippage of every language on Google Translate, a sense of reckless abandon, and an ear/eye/err for the pun” to construct an extraordinary book that reverses the cultural loop of the colonial circuit, and opens up the possibilities of what it might mean to be “Australian” (he interchanges the moniker "Aussie" with the French aussi: also, as well, too), while puncturing some long held national delusions.  

But before I go any further into the political concerns of The Bloomin’ Notions, I want to share some lines that give an overall sense of the delight the collection takes in language, and the revelations that arrive in the form of fluke, error, blooper: 

“& the relevant delusion is a man w/ money/& ici an aussi trysting the rules/that like a tonne of organic eclairs/drape a new noir across the Bois-like lure” (from “After the Orgy”)

“To the lovemobile! Because I’m the original/inventor of desertion” (from “Vices”)

“i don’t have a pacifier for the vile despot i cling to” (from “Aphasia”)

"there will be no headlines/tomorrow what a relief! but i will have to pay/some serious rent to re-carpet this womb!" (from "In Fancy")

 

Within these slippages and puns lies a more profound interrogation of one of Australian poetry’s preoccupations: how to shape a poetics from such a genocidal colonial past, when, as Jonathon Dunk observes “any simple assumption of formal cadence implies and reifies colonial possession.” Australia is at once both a replica of Europe and its opposite, it’s antipode—an extension of the European imagination, first as mythic paradise, then as island jail, all the while being in reality home to the oldest continuous culture on Earth. It has cultivated a national character that is informed by both malformed ideals of “Australianness” and a long-held inferiority as Europe’s subaltern.

One way for Australian poetry to approach the problem is to intentionally mishandle, mistranslate and botch its European cultural inheritance, to master the canon forced upon it and then rearrange it. In Fitch’s essay Aussi/Or, which explores Australian poetry’s tradition of such mistranslations, he writes of the political principle of a poetry “generated by paronomasia—by the difference and sameness in words; a poetry of multiplicity that questions truth, mastery, authority, and symbolic structures by trespassing upon and through them, undermining them; poetry that “offers you up” a serious parody, serio ludere, a paradox in terms; a poetry of unreason, that transgresses boundaries.” The Bloomin' Notions certainly fits this bill.

Speaking on his poem “In Fancy” (a mistranslation of Rimbaud's "Enfance", and also a clever play on "infancy"), with its magnificent first line “why on earth would I blow open the safe/of childhood?” Fitch  describes his “inversions” as “partly procedural, partly just play, part larrikin, part love, it’s a ‘down under’ conceit, this method of writing backwards.” One would struggle to think of a better set of ingredients with which to advance an Australian poetics.   

 

 

The Bloomin' Notions of Other & Beau (Vagabond Press, 2016)

 

N.B. I have used screenshots of "Mauvement" to best illustrate the physical nature of Fitch's poetry, and whose design and typography are far beyond my ability to reproduce. You can click the image to get a larger, clearer, and isolated view of the poem. -- T.M.

A poem from The Awl by Matthew Zapruder [posted by Mark Bibbins]

I love the way this poem captures the sad, sweet, isolated longing of adolescence. The tension created by the interplay of short lines and sneakily unruly syntax seems to mirror the experience of tentatively feeling one's way toward, eventually, hope. —MB

When I Was Fifteen

When I was fifteen
I suddenly knew
I would never
understand geometry.
Who was my teacher?
That name is gone.
I only remember
the gray feeling
in a classroom
filled with vast
theoretical distances.
I can still see
odd shapes
drawn on the board,
and those inscrutable
formulas everyone
was busily into
their notebooks scribbling.
I looked down
at the Velcro
straps of my entirely
white shoes and knew
inside me things
had long ago gone
terribly wrong
and would continue
to be. When
the field hockey star
broke her knee,
I wrote a story
for the school paper
then brought her
the history notes
in the snow.
She stood
in the threshold,
a whole firelit life
of mysterious
familial warmth
glowing behind her,
and took them
from my hands
like the blameless
queen of elegant
violence she was.
Walking home
encased in immense
amounts of down
I listened to
the analog ghost
in the machine
pour from the cassette
I had drawn
flowers on.
Into my ears
it sang everything
they told you
makes you believe
you are trapped
in a snow globe
forgotten in a dark
closet where exhausted
shadows argue
what is sorrow
cannot become joy,
but I am here
from the future
to tell you
you are not,
all you must do
is stay asleep
a few more years
great traveler waiting to go.

Matthew Zapruder’s most recent book is Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017). His fifth collection of poetry, Father’s Day, came out from Copper Canyon in fall 2019. He is associate professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California and editor-at-large at Wave Books.

from the archive; first posted March 1, 2019

David Trinidad: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

David Trinidad and his mother Joyce, graduation from junior high school, 1968. 

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Sonnet

The day she died, my mother divided

up her jewelry, placed each piece in Dixie

cups (on which my father had written, with

magic marker, the names of her children

and grandchildren): her aunt’s pearls, her mother-

in-law’s topaz and amethysts, her own

mother’s plain gold cross.  Earlier, I’d held

a mirror while she put on her lipstick

(Summer Punch) and ran a comb through what was

left of her hair.  She stared at the gray strands

in her hand—not with sadness, but as fact.

When she placed the last ring in the last cup,

she looked up at me and said, “We never

have enough time to enjoy our treasures.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________

David Trinidad is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry.  These include Swinging on a Star (Turtle Point Press, 2017), Notes on a Past Life (BlazeVOX [books], 2016), Peyton Place: A Haiku Soap Opera (Turtle Point, 2013), and Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems (Turtle Point, 2011).  Digging to Wonderland is forthcoming from Turtle Point in 2022.  He is also the editor of A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos (Nightboat Books, 2011) and Punk Rock Is Cool for the End of the World: Poems and Notebooks of Ed Smith (Turtle Point, 2019).  Trinidad lives in Chicago, where he is a Professor of Creative Writing/Poetry at Columbia College. [See this link for more poems by David Trinidad.]

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David Trinidad by Billy Sullivan

"On This Very Street in Belgrade" [by Charles Simic, born today]

On This Very Street in Belgrade

Your mother carried you
Out of the smoking ruins of a building
And set you down on this sidewalk
Like a doll bundled in burnt rags,
Where you now stood years later
Talking to a homeless dog,
Half-hidden behind a parked car,
His eyes brimming with hope
As he inched forward, ready for the worst.

-- Charles Simic (born May 9, 1938). Photo of Simic, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 1992, holding a copy of the book, with David Lehman at a reading organized by Bill Wadsworth of the Academy of American Poets in October 1992.

Sweet Tooth [by Lera Auerbach]

Ink on Paper by Lera Auerbach

I walked
around the house
in search
of chocolate.
(There must be
some chocolate
somewhere, right?)

No, I don’t think
it’s a sweet tooth
craving,
I just have
an excess
of dissonances
today.

Chocolate makes
dissonances
resolve.

(Or it doesn’t.)

Regardless,
somehow,
you feel
better.

(Or you don’t.)

Oh well,
At least,
you’ve tried.

 

Two Poems (by Mitch Sisskind)

                      Die Verwandlung

So sick and tired of waking up

Every morning as myself again!

Oh let me awaken tomorrow as

Kafka's beetle struggling to open

His bedroom door which symbolizes

His heart though he is physically

And emotionally unable to open it

But he keeps on trying as I too

Would keep trying to empty the

Dishwasher which symbolizes how

I once checked my bank balance

Online and when I saw that $11,000

Had disappeared from my account

I kept checking it again and again.

 

 

               The Imperfect Enjoyment

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's how I learned there's nothing left:
What once was a gift now seemed a theft
By that guy who looked like he had it it all
So I shoved him hard up against the wall
And said, 'You've read no poems in your life
'So your girlfriend here will be my wife.  
'Come on, honey,' I said, speaking to her
Like the alpha rooster which they prefer
And just like that we're on the 405
Heading north and I feel really alive
For a minute or so until I recognize 
By the alexandrite change in her eyes
That nothing is left, so now I know
About when to enter and when to go.

On Freud's birthday, the definitive "what do women want?" [by David Lehman]

Freud’s Immortal Question

Or, one student’s adventures in higher yearning

By David Lehman

May 6, 2018

To: Colleagues in the Writing Module

From: Jack Hexter

Many of you who have worked with Richard Treacy will be impressed by the progress he has made, as shown by his essay (below) on the take-home final (open-book, three hours).

Sigmund Freud asked, in evident exasperation, “What do women want?” Based on your understanding of at least three of the works we read this semester, how would you answer Freud’s question? Be sure to give a title to your essay.

What Women Want

by Richard H. Tracey

Some would say they want to get married and raise a family. Others want to “have it all.” I am not sure whether that is even possible, but it is the ideal pursued by some. I think the answer is more complicated than that.

It is hard to generalize about women, but I will try, because half of us are them, slightly more than a majority, and maybe even more than that according to demographic studies indicating that women live longer than men, and it is something like 50.2% versus 49.8% of the population. So technically it is possible that they could vote a woman president into office if they all stuck together.

When I think of Antigone, Major Barbara, The Death of Ivan Ilych, the Bible, and even Lucky Jim, looking for what they have in common, each woman is a unique individual, with an identity that sets them apart at the same time that they belong to a larger group, just like each of us who come from different backgrounds, and yet, as was mentioned in class, there is “unity in diversity” for despite our variegated pasts we share a “stake in humanity” by endeavoring to do the same little everyday things like brush our teeth, put on our clothes, and eat breakfast before we come to class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9 A.M. in Hartwick Hall.

Let me give an example. Of these various female characters. And what they want. Since that is the question. They all want to help. Antigone helps her brother, Barbara tries to help those whose souls need saving, Lady Britomart tries to help her family and herself, and Praskovya helps society by conforming with it. Also, Eve helps to fulfill human destiny by eating the apple, and Kurtz’s fiancée in Heart of Darkness wants to help the war effort in the Congo by honoring Kurtz and the sacrifices he made.

Thus, each of these four women leads an individual life, with individual desires that sets them apart. One desires the ordinary, one the extraordinary; one desires to save souls, and one wants to be the center of attention.

Yet they have one thing in common. Whatever they desire, each wants to succeed in that desire. And furthermore each goes to extremes to fulfill that desire. Praskovya ignores her husband’s death, Antigone hangs herself, Barbara accepts the entirely different philosophy of Undershaft, Eve bites into the apple and then brings it to Adam, not knowing what the consequences will be, and Margaret throws fits. Women, then, desire what she will, but always desires success.

Sadly there may come a time for each of them when enough has gone too far. But for whom could it be different?

Speaking personally, it is very hard to say what a woman wants. Freud would not have asked it if the answer was obvious. He would probably answer in terms of “sexual desire,” which I find hard to believe considering that sex is not necessarily overrated but is merely one facet of a life in which there are other aspects including quality of life issues (food, beer, having a pet, etc.), sports (football being the obvious example, but again this transcends gender, e.g. the U.S. women’s soccer team), politics (Hillary Clinton), and yes, even our studies, which may be the key to future success if affluence is the goal or if you want to get into law school, the Peace Corpse, or the foreign service, which has a test which I hear is a bitch.>>

For more of "Freud's Immortal Question," this link should direct you to  The American Scholar (September 4, 2012).

Jacques d'Amboise, dancer (28 July 1934 - 2 May 2021) by Mindy Aloff

Jacques d'Amboise during a curtain call following his variation in Who Cares?, 1979 Credit: © Steven Caras, all rights reserved

In the Hollywood film of Carousel, Jacques d’Amboise—hemmed in on both sides by lines of dancers—suddenly takes off into a sequence of four precisely placed double air turns and then, reorganizing his focus, streams aloft into a leap, his legs beating before him as he sails. This is virtuoso ballet dancing, by any measure. However, it is a different kind of virtuosity than d’Amboise’s colleague, Edward Villella, displays as, say, Oberon in the film of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Both men are performing classical steps with the same exactitude, but they aren’t performing them to the same effect.  In his memoir, I Was A Dancer, d’Amboise makes it clear how much he admired his colleague’s dancing; Villella was at once his brother-in-arms and a nonpareil standard. And, in the twenty-four roles that Balanchine created for d’Amboise, not to speak of his casting and coaching of the latter in the title role of Apollo (for some devoted members of the NYCB audience, he was the definitive Balanchine Apollo), Balanchine made it clear how important d’Amboise was to him.

Jacques d’Amboise and Allegra Kent in 1957 in George Balanchine’s “Apollo.”

D’Amboise was a head taller than Villella, longer boned and less visibly muscled: The comparison might be a quarterback against a boxer. (Villella was an actual welterweight boxing champion at the New York Maritime Academy; he also lettered in baseball.) They both jumped high and landed with buoyancy, but Villella, with a more compact physique, put more torque into his preparations for jumping and turning. And although both men achieved brilliant batterie (the beating legs), it took the dancer with longer limbs a nanosecond more time to perform the opening and closing of his legs than it did his colleague. Villella’s beats, now legendary even on film where (as Villella’s greatest chronicler, the critic Arlene Croce, could have put it) they read as a blur, were slightly faster in fact, and the power of his movement made them register as much faster in effect. Villella’s feet also pointed more sharply than d’Amboise’s, making Villella’s beats seem extra-clear. There was something else. Villella performed classical allégro combinations with a phrasing that arrested their momentum at the height or most complex part of the step, giving a flashing photographic moment of stillness in the midst of motion that seemed almost unreal. (Among Balanchine’s ballerinas, Merrill Ashley achieved that effect, too.) Yet d’Amboise did not “stop” mid-stream that way; he showed the poses beautifully, but he displayed them in the course of the dance current. He didn’t enunciate them. And he didn’t show the sculptural power involved in initiating classical steps. He performed steps as conversational gestures, as elements in a larger song—and the song, with its unpredictable counts and uninflected climaxes, was written by George Gershwin for his good pal Fred Astaire, even when Gershwin was channeling the fantastical imagination of Fauré, the clinical intelligence of Stravinsky, the melodic raptures of Tchaikovsky, and even when his onstage figure was trying to learn to walk on the way to Parnassus or to catch a Sylph on the fly or to wrangle a Gypsy momentarily transforming herself from a lion to a lamb. I have always thought that Balanchine himself, who loved theatrical surprise and magic, either once danced or wanted to dance that way, perpetrating the illusion nightly, on union time, that the physical work of dancing could be shielded from the audience, as the entrances of his ballerinas are so often shielded from sight until, Presto!, there they be at center stage. 

With respect to d’Amboise’s skills and sensitivity as a partner, I’d like to quote the dance historian and critic Janet Light, a member of NYCB’s audience going back to the 1950s (and, as a child, a student at SAB). Since I only began to look at the company in the mid-1960s, I asked her for her longer-lived impression of d’Amboise’s stage relationship to his ballerinas. She wrote as follows:

“Remembering the irresistible Jacques d’Amboise, it’s the person onstage that lingers with me, rather than Jacques in any one ballet or role. I think it’s connected to how he partnered many of Balanchine’s important ballerinas. He could shift the focus of his own performance to his partner, and the dedication of his attentiveness let the audience know there was no place else he would rather be.  He could hold his own with them all while remaining generous and true: Squiring the witty Tanaquil LeClerq in Western Symphony’s rousing Fourth Movement; tracing wondrously a luminous Allegra Kent’s loosened hair in the haunting Afternoon of a Faun; punctuating with his wide stance and arms thrown back Melissa Hayden’s steely arabesque balances in Stars and Stripes’ hold-your-breath Fifth Campaign. Jacques d’Amboise became a star but seemed onstage a real person, meeting the challenges of a great repertory that shaped him into an artist, and in turn, helped dance in America take flight.”

In his memoir, d’Amboise—frequently admired as a partner yet always extending praise—wrote: “I loved viewing Conrad Ludlow. . .and the poetry he brought to a pas de deux.”

Jacques d’Amboise was beloved by audiences and much-honored for his art as a dancer and choreographer. He was also central to his family, and he enjoyed the knowledge that his own children—two of the four became successful dancers—esteemed him for his art as well as for his affection. Even so, he wasn’t awarded a MacArthur Foundation (“Genius”) Fellowship in 1984, the year he retired from performing, for his stage achievements. He received it as a Dance Educator, the founder of the National Dance Institute. The laurel was given to d’Amboise, a high-school drop-out (at age fifteen, he left both SAB and academic studies to join NYCB) who had analyzed what dancing is beyond the lines and extreme poses and the superstructure of the steps with names. D’Amboise taught dance as full-bodied gesture, action, energy the dancer learns to regulate instantaneously (“Precision and exactness are steps toward truth.”), all in service of two principles: to teach individuals how to relate to one another through rules of engagement, also known as decorum and respect, and to transfer the civilization one’s generation inherited to the generation poised to receive it. He taught himself how to offer these core principles to children as small as infants and adults of all ages, traditions, and walks of life so that they understand them and, most wonderfully of all, want to inhabit them.

Poetry has been important to NDI’s teaching and the performances of its school children because d’Amboise cherished it; he also practiced writing it. D’Amboise’s memoir is peppered with references to poets—Yeats, Auden, Yevtushenko, Hafiz (the fourteenth-century Persian master of the ghazal). You can also see him in his poet’s mode while he’s teaching dance to small children affiliated with NDI in a 4’06” film, on Vimeo: Jacques d’Amboise—Whispering Poetry, one of eight film portraits that director Nick Davis made in 2016 as part of larger project, called “Eight over Eighty,” about productivity while aging. I actually saw d’Amboise teaching in person that way around that period in an elementary school in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood, as part of another project that I was up to. Even in 2016, his spine was curled forward as he walked, and I winced to see him hobble only a short distance.

Nevertheless, once he was demonstrating to the students what he wanted them to learn about arts and civilization, he was in the zone—alive, highly energized, sparking with ideas and imagery in an electrifying example of basic cultural pedagogy for elementary school beginners.

The Nick Davis film captures that transformation in four minutes through editing. Suddenly, d’Amboise is quoting, almost perfectly, Robert Burns: “See how Maria leads the dance!  She’s life itself. / I never saw a foot so nimble and so eloquent. And the sweet, whispering Poetry it makes / Shames the musicians.” Or, suddenly, he’s showing a boy how gesture evolves from language. Pointing one of his little fingers to his own temple, he says, “In here, there’s a dream.” He lets the finger drift away from his body. Then, we’re watching him with the boy. Taking one of the boy’s hands, he points its little finger gently toward the child’s temple, saying, “In here, there’s a dream. Take it out (he guides the child’s hand around to where the boy can see it), “look at it” (the boy focuses on the tip of the finger, all at once a girl in the center of a circle focuses on her finger), and then d’Amboise whispers “and sending it up,” and we see an entire class, each student raising both arms carefully, hands with palms up, while she lifts her gaze toward them: Presto! Port de bras with a difference. D’Amboise begins a small peroration on why New York dancers are the best. The diverse class is entirely spellbound.

“I’ve always been happy,” d’Amboise ended his memoir. I’m not sure I believe him, but if that was the story that he told himself to function as the magician who enraptured those children with dancing and poetry, then who cares? 

Mindy Aloff is an Editor-at-Large for The University Press of Florida. She is completing a book on dance for the "Why X Matters" series of Yale University Press.

Barbara Henning: PIck of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Barbara Henning, Selfie Photo on 11-1-20 at 4.44 PM

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Here We Are

 

Off to the stationery store on Avenue A

to buy paper and metal bookends.

At least 58 people died in Europe

this week in a brutal cold wave,

plunging temperatures to 17 degrees

below zero.  When I step inside,

I'm suddenly phlegmy and coughing. 

Blood starts pouring out of my

left nostril.  A funny old woman

hidden inside a blue hooded coat

darts out the door.  Republicans

point at the millions of immigrant

workers pouring into the country.

Then I look in the mirror and see

a funny looking old woman

with her head wrapped

like a mummy and a tissue stuck

in her nose. King Tut's mummy

was recently removed from

the sarcophagus, and placed

in a climate-controlled box

to be displayed at a museum in Luxor. 

My husband often had a bloody nose.

Maybe we'll find each other

in another life. When I think of

losing my children, I feel my body

crack into pieces. China's cracking

down on subversive meditating

disciples of the Dalai Lama. 

Be thankful for now, Barbara.

Today. This minute. Here we are.

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Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and eight collections of poetry, most recently a collection of poems, Digigram (United Artists Books 2020) and a novel, Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). She is also the editor of Prompt Book: Experiments for Writing Poetry and Fiction (Spuyten Duyvil 2021), as well as The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (BV) and Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna). She is Professor Emeritus at Long Island University in Brooklyn.  [“Here We Are” from A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press, 2015) is used by permission; © 2021 by Barbara Henning.]

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In this Nov. 4, 2007 file photo, Egypt's antiquities chief Dr. Zahi Hawass, center, supervises the removal of the mummy of King Tutankhamun from his stone sarcophagus in his underground tomb in the famed Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. © REUTERS / Ben Curtis