The Best American Poetry

Ishmael Reed on Tokenism

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On Tokens and Tokenism

From George Washington to Jill Biden, Black literature has long been plagued by ignorant white patrons, who arbitrarily anoint a few writers as symbols of the Black experience

BY

ISHMAEL REED

JULY 07, 2021

Tokens are the bane of Black literature, and for that matter, Latinx, Native American, and Asian American literature. They are often selected arbitrarily as symbols by those who know little about Black literary traditions or literature in general, and their work overshadows the production of writers who might write as well or better.

From George Washington, who anointed the poet Phillis Wheatley back in the day, to Jill Biden, who gave Amanda Gorman the nod earlier this year, a powerful white patron can offer a Black writer huge sales and exposure. In return, these writers become the go-to sources about the Black experience for readers as well as academics who are spared the trouble of viewing Black writing as a tradition that extends at least to the 1700s. This includes Black writer-slaves who wrote in Arabic. Instead, we are limited to renaissances, each generation canceling the previous ones.

Both John A. Williams and John Oliver Killens, who wrote as well as any of the tokens, agreed that once a powerful white literary trend-maker or institution selects a token, segments of the Black cognoscenti line up to ratify the choice no matter their politics. Before the decline of the Black newspapers, those writers who were neglected by the outsiders, who control the patronage networks, could get some space. Langston Hughes, John A. Williams, and Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote for newspapers. Dunbar’s newspaper, The Dayton Tattler, was supported by his classmate Orville Wright. Black writers had influence over which of the younger writers would receive support.

Then came the ascendancy of critics who are housed in universities and paid by foundations. These critics decide which writers will receive grants that might provide them the time to complete creative projects. Critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. controls the patronage of at least three foundations. He often provides grants to his Harvard colleagues instead of awarding them to creative writers. Contrast this with the generosity that Richard Wright extended to a struggling James Baldwin. In 1948, Wright used his influence to provide Baldwin with a Eugene Saxton Memorial Trust fellowship from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

For my part, after the publication of my novel Reckless Eyeballing I was left as literary roadkill because I took aim at some of the dizziest ideas of bourgeois feminists, among them women who regarded Valerie Solanas as a hero, viewed male ejaculation as “an act of war,” or argued that Emmett Till, who allegedly whistled at a Southern white woman—who confessed on her deathbed that she lied—was just as guilty as his murderers. Luckily, I received a cash award from the great poet Gwendolyn Brooks that helped to sustain me, financially.

Who are some of the writers that have been neglected by these guardians of patronage more likely to extend grants to fellow professors than to struggling artists? One of today’s most important Black female writers is homeless. Fortunately, her classic novel is in the midst of a revival as a result of a boost from The Paris Review. She could use a grant.

So could Louise Merriweather. Ninety-five-year-old Merriweather had to raise $36,000 through GoFundMe for round-the-clock care after she contracted COVID-19. Her 1970 Harlem novel, Daddy Was a Number Runner, was as good as any Harlem novel including Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. But those who curated Black culture at the time might have found some of her characterizations uncomfortable. For example, her novel reports that Harlem girls had to submit to fondling by lecherous shop owners in exchange for food (a practice that still goes on in my Oakland inner-city neighborhood, except the predators might be Muslim immigrants who have a traditional family in the suburbs and a “baby momma” in the ghetto.) Merriweather might have also been obscured because of her role in halting the film production of William Styron’s 1967 Confessions of Nat Turner, in which the Black hero was subjected to trendy pop psychoanalysis by the author—to which she took objection.

Mrs. Merriweather is a writer who doesn’t hold back. She could have used the backing of Karen Durbin, the white feminist former editor at The Village Voice who takes credit for Gates’ rise as a public intellectual. A Black writer who worked there told me that the white women who had editorial positions were always encouraging her to attack Black men.

Durbin and her ilk are part of a tradition of token creators that reaches back to George Washington. So flattered was Washington by Phillis Wheatley’s 1775 tribute to him that he offered to publish her poem, a panegyric to his achievements, but decided that it would be vain and instead sought to have the poem published by another publisher. Washington sold a slave for rum, raffled off slave children to pay his debts, and was a dedicated fugitive slave hunter. Maybe Ms. Wheatley was not aware of Washington’s treatment of slaves who lived in miserable conditions, according to a visitor to Mount Vernon as he worked to have her poem published. Regardless, Phillis Wheatley became the most famous Black person of her time, and the first Black American literary token. I’m sure that some other poets and storytellers of her time were just as good.

I often get into arguments with liberals, Black and white, when I direct them to writers who write as well as the tokens. They are invested in the belief that because they’ve read Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) they have Black literature covered. Very few of the tokens had as much support from powerful sources as did Baldwin, whose champions were the members of the New York literary elite—literary modernists like William Phillips of The Partisan Review, and Philip Rahv, who was responsible for Baldwin’s receiving a contract for Giovanni’s Room. One of the reasons that Phillips published Baldwin’s Everybody’s Protest Novel, a fierce critique of notable Black protest novels like Richard Wright’s Native Son (albeit with an ironic title, since protest also runs through Baldwin’s novels), was because Phillips regarded Wright as lacking patriotism.

Phillips was the chairman of a literary organization of which I was a member. Without having read their work, Phillips deemed two of my nominations to the board to be unqualified. They were the late Toni Cade Bambara and Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom are now part of the canon. Silko was just elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

If the champions of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, which promised to redeem white liberals instead of harming them, had read works other than The Fire Next Time, they would have discovered that by the time he wrote Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, a roman à clef, in 1968, Baldwin had given up on redeeming liberals. In this novel, he gave his sponsors on the white left the finger in such a scathing manner that Mario Puzo was hired to do a hatchet job on the book in The New York Times Book Review on behalf of The Family, the New York literary establishment, which has been laying tokens on Black writers for over 100 years.

After that rebuke of those who brought him fame, according to Truman Capote, who was interviewed by Cecil Brown, and published in Quilt magazine by the late Al Young and me, the New York establishment then treated him like “shit.” Baldwin was replaced by Eldridge Cleaver, who, according to Ralph Ellison, another token with powerful white sponsors, was also “publicity sustained.” The same issue of Quilt carries a story by Mona Simpson, then a student. She is now the publisher of The Paris Review.

Presently, there are more Baldwin imitators than Elvis impersonators. Every token and his brother are writing letters to their nephews. But Baldwin was shrewd. He was writing to the “Chorus of Innocents” who was looking over his shoulder. His was a variation of the old indulgences game that was promoted by the Catholic church in the late Middle Ages. Buy my product and you’ll only have to spend one year in purgatory instead of two. Of course, the Baldwin cult neglects to mention the Black writers that he stepped on during his ascendancy.

The newest star creator is Jill Biden, who heard Amanda Gorman read poetry and chose her as an inaugural poet. Predictably, the Black cultural elite swooned all over this choice, and powerful whites with media power who know little about Black literature chimed in. A chorus of academics and intellectuals, who display their militancy at every opportunity, endorsed Ms. Gorman’s trite, platitudinous high school patriotism, the poetic equivalent of the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Chinese American poet Genny Lim was called a “racist” for pointing out the flaws in the poem.
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 from Tablet (July 7, 2021)
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/tokens-tokenism-black-literature

A Summer of Fruit Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

What says summer more than the gorgeous fruit that descends on the markets? Apricots, berries, peaches, figs, plums, and so much more. I am a dedicated jam maker, so I usually concentrate my efforts there. But I also love to bake. I find it relaxing, especially after a long and especially grueling semester. With graduate admissions, 16 defenses, and two Zoom classes, this was more exhausting than it usually is. I was ready to do some cooking and try to become a human being again.

I subscribe to New York Times Cooking, and a recipe came up that I thought I'd like to try--Gâteau Breton. It was adapted by Melissa Clark. I love her recipes. Her cookbook, Dinner in French, really helped me get through the first part of the pandemic. Sitting down to a civilized dinner seem to keep the chaos at bay. The glasses of wine probably helped, too.

I made the Gâteau Breton. It was delicious. I served it with crème fraîche--ooh, la, la. It looked just like the photo in the NYTimes, not something that always happens. An obsession was born. I thought why not make fruit tarts to take advantage of the summer's bounty. The Gâteau Breton used dried plums and rum, but fresh fruit was already in the markets. I had a couple of good tart recipes, and I wanted to find more.

In his essay "Are You Still Writing About Your Father?" Tony Hoagland says that a poet is lucky to have an obsession. I certainly have my core obsessions, but I also like to cultivate peripheral ones that talk to the big mamas. I never know if they are going to crop up in my work, and sometimes they don't, but as Keats says you have to work in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. Who knows what will happen? I love that feeling, and nothing is better than a slice of tart with an afternoon cup of tea.

Here's the recipe: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1017854-gateau-breton

Next tart: Patricia Wells is a baking goddess!

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She  is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all  published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here. 

Dispatch from a Distance -- Turning Toward the Sun [by Cara Benson]

It comes again. Every year. Every year I wonder, how does it happen, this miracle of growth, of green of flower of budding breeding migrating and the prolific swelling smells of earth coming alive into growing season. It’s iconic, awe at the miracle of cyclical rebirth. Ancient, even. Persephone, after all, had her own cult. I’ll admit that I’m not opposed to fancying myself a goddess traipsing through fields of hayseed ferns and the start of what will bloom into goldenrod in a few months. (Or to having a cult following, if I’m honest.) But the goddess of spring in long ago Greece was also the goddess of the underworld, that dark place humans have mythologized for millennia, and I do not think this is by coincidence.

TS Eliot famously said that April is the cruelest month. And then there’s the violent response to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, itself a symbolic disruption of tradition. Breeding season is a surprisingly dangerous time. Tender new shoots get trampled. Birds fail to fledge and get eaten. Only thirty percent of young songbirds survive. I saw a fawn, just born!, not a foot and a half high on bowed and shaky legs, wobbling its way behind the mother as she leapt out of sight into the woods. The babe not so much leapt, but bobbled. How easily this little one could get snatched. There are bear in these woods, and they wake up hungry. Other predators, too, including the most impactful of the lot – humans. Not just as hunters or destroyers of habitat, but also as drivers of two ton vehicles that smash, squash, and ravage flesh with barely a bump registering under the tires in some cases.

photo of yours truly by tc tolbert

Are you ready to riot yet? I am. And I am that trampler, that driver. As aware and watchful as I am, I’ve hit and killed probably more creatures than I know. Only yesterday a woodchuck ran out so close to my car there was no option for me to avoid it (though I’ve been accused of going up on two wheels to screech around a frog or chipmunk). There was a commotion under the car but in the rear view he/she kept on across the road behind me. Was it merely a matter of him getting banged up a bit? Did he make to the other side to die? Notions of locating and waiting for wildlife rehabilitators occurred to me, then I let this one go and drove on, crying. I think he made it. I do. Through the tears that I kept wiping so I wouldn’t create another potential casualty, I couldn’t help but notice the profusion of wild phlox and rhododendron along the road, both brightly hued flowers known for attracting hummingbirds and other pollinators. It didn’t seem enough, the magenta. But I continued on. What other option is there?

There is another choice, isn’t there, and that is to turn away. To avoid the rear view mirror. To remain in denial that everything that is born ends. What’s more, that at times I will be the one behind the wheel. And while I have intimate experience with the desire to stay shielded from at best unpleasantness, at worst tragedy, the fact remains: no one gets out of here unscathed. (I know we know this, and it bears repeating, and repeating, and...)

Everything changes – that’s the ultimate lesson of seasons, I suppose. And now even the seasons themselves are changing from what they’ve been for millennia, which is altering everything else on the planet. Life as we know it exists within such a razor thin margin in atmospheric conditions. The slightest of shifts could sooner than later take us out of the grift. Rendering earth unlivable is assuredly a primary rejection, perhaps the Freudian death drive in action en masse. (For the record, the ones cashing in on this are the über-drivers here, dragging the rest of us along in their quest for domination; but that ‘rest of us’ is varied, with varying degrees of individual and collective responsibility.)

What does it look like to face this? To, as Terry Tempest Williams writes, “find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts”? For me this means learning how to embrace my love for the world even as it’s under threat. One way I do this by paying attention on my walks. This might not sound like it requires the strength of which Williams writes, but I assure you this can be quite tricky ground. I’m quick to ascribe what might be merely a seasonal variation to a sign of a changing climate and suddenly my cavorting is shot through with worry. (My mental and emotional states can be as vulnerable as a baby bird some days.)

What is a normal seasonal fluctuation? Keen observation over time, the kind that puts a feeling for the rhythms of one’s surroundings into one’s bones, seems key to knowing what's typical. While this is only my second year on the hill, I did remember from last season a particular pool of water in a mud rut that became the site of blobs of gelatinous amphibian eggs. This year, the rain early on was such that there was no continuous water to provide a breeding ground. Some of this is to be expected, I told myself. But then the more reliable vernal pools that had exploded into a croaking frenzy in an early warm spell this season were not as flush with eggs as I thought they should be.

Reader, I despaired. The pond had been positively jumping with life during breeding, so much so that I could hear the orgy well before I came in view of the water. Had a subsequent cold snap killed off this season’s generation? And if so, is that part of the usual brutish and short ways of the wild or something less, eh, natural?

I was relieved to find later that the eggs must have been submerged in ways I didn’t detect because there they were, those squirmy tadpoles, propelling in multiple directions just under the surface, after all. The hatching had happened! That said, I’m not convinced that there were enough tadpoles for this generation of wood frogs to be on track, but then I am not systematically nor objectively observing in the field here. There are too many variables in my incipient data collection (geared toward anecdote) that I have no idea how to control for. More importantly, it’s only been two trips around the sun I've been observing. Is this a normal amount of offspring survival? Did I miss other batches of tadpoles and the numbers are where they need to be? Am I predisposed to panic, even if that could be considered an appropriate if not necessarily helpful response? (That’d be a yes for sure on that last one.)

I did turn to the internet for a deeper dive on seasonal cycles, a warming planet, and the mating habits of my newfound beloveds, Rana sylvatica. There’s much more to say about how climate variability impacts species survival as various triggers in response to the environment for where and when to breed are finely calibrated to avoid predation, to ensure sufficient food sources, and to react to other elements that support a healthy population, but I’d like to get up above tree line for another view on facing our changing biosphere.

I live about a two hour drive from the Adirondacks, a 10 million year old mountain range in northern NY State. There are 21 summits in the Daks that poke through the clouds into what is known as the Alpine Zone. Life is rare, fragile, and endangered above 4000’. Trampling here is a travesty. Many of the High Peaks summits have been perilously roughed up over the decades of hikers putting boots to ground in their quest for bagging the highest points in the range. For the record, I love summitting mountains. I also love the mountains themselves. These feelings and activities can absolutely co-exist. During the 1970s and 1980s, however, adventure pursuits overtook the peaks and acres of the most rare of ecosystems in the State were getting worn away in front of the eyes of those who were paying attention.

What to do? The answer they chose was to double down on observation. Various organizations working in tandem launched long-term monitoring programs. While most of these species are 10,000 years in the making, the data collectors have been able to determine quite a bit of useful information on the health of and the challenges to these plants over the past fifteen years. This information fueled an education outreach program, and now ADK Summit Stewards await eager hikers on top of the popular peaks during the busy months (which have become increasingly busier). They teach people to do the rock hop, to notice particulars in the awe-inspiring terrain, and to develop an appreciation for the rarity of the environment they’re standing in. The result, so far, has been an undeniable success. By all accounts the summits are rebounding in response to the greater awareness engendered by this effort. 

Diapensia blooming

On a recent hike I took up Haystack, the third highest peak in the range at 4960’, the weather turned as it does in the mountains and shifted from the predicted mostly cloudy to full on rain for the remaining hours of the trip. The trails to Haystack are rocky, choppy, and then fully exposed and scoured by wind and elements. It was tough going. My gear is well used, so it wasn’t long before I “wetted out” (got soaked to the bone). Breaking tree line was dramatic and felt quite desolate. Gray rock. Gray sky. Soggy soul.

The incline is such in spots that scrambling is required, fingers needing to find cracks in the rock to support the climb. As a result, I was closer to the mountain, literally, and focused intently on its surfaces. Pulling up above one particular ledge, I poked my head out over the ridge and saw the tiniest spots of bright white in the crevices and folds in the slope. As I got closer I was amazed to discover Diapensia in bloom. I might sound like a nerd, but this is a plant that grows at the rate of around 1/2 inch every 50 years and flowers for only a week. I wasn’t even aware of this "pincushion plant" until a summit steward on a previous hike taught me what it was. And then to come upon it unexpectedly in bloom? And so profusely, it turned out, up the sides of the hill? This did my heart a world of good. And oh how I needed it. These moments keep me in the game.

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Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Hobart, Fence, 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; Whose Woods; Roads and Seeds, A Trace; Hunting Season; and Animal Tracking. 

An Interview with Jennifer L. Knox [by Aspen Matis]

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, A Gringo Like Me, and, most recently, Crushing It. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The developer and curator of the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, she teaches at Iowa State University.

I corresponded with Ms. Knox via email about poetry as an access to our subconscious, the joy (and profundity) of incongruous humor, humanity’s “endless capacity for self-deception,” and writing poetry as a means of purposeful dissociation—a counterintuitive, healthy path to healing. We also discussed the subtle beauty of poems that “have a bridge player’s memory,” the masterful way the “bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways.”

 What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

I write poems to dissociate in a healthy, purposeful way that doesn’t leave me hungover, in jail, or dead. I’ve long suspected that there was a physical component to the act of writing poems, because I feel good when I write poems, but I feel stupid when I engage in exclusively mental pursuits, like math. Recently I read that traumatized brains access an unprecedented calmness when they dissociate; though that calm is, in itself, addictive, purposeful dissociation is a healthy path to healing. Imagine putting on an astronaut suit and bounding around the smoldering ruins of your childhood. You see an object that terrified you long ago: an empty tin can with a fork sticking out. “We can use this!” you shout to the reader and hold up the can, which no longer scares you at all. Our “conversations” are different every time; I never have to be the same speaker. I can be Zsa Zsa Gabor, or a tree stump, or an SOS signal floating up from the ocean floor. As poems are relatively short, I only have to breathe the atmosphere for a brief time.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

Poetry gives us access to our subconscious, which we need to heal and evolve.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Defy expectations.

Your work is often praised for its sharp humor. The New York Times calls your poetry “massively entertaining,” and the Los Angeles Review writes of your “laugh-demanding wit.” Of your work’s tone, The Critical Flame says “Knox’s humor is the kind of funny which is surprising, generous, and vulnerable, and which demands generosity and vulnerability from the reader. This is the kind of funny we have found in writers as various as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Kenneth Koch.” What, in your view, is the relationship between humor and truth? Between levity and profundity?

There are different kinds of humor. The one I enjoy using most often is incongruous humor, which defies the reader’s expectations, and my own as I write the poem. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it’s scary. Either way, not getting what I thought I was going to get feels very “true.”

Your most recent book of poems, Crushing It, is widely acclaimed. Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “Darkly inventive… This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words,” and The New York Times Book Review says that the work “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” What inquiry or exploration unifies the collection?

Our endless capacity for self-deception—even in the face of the Anthropocene. 

What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I would love it if readers felt that they had been seen in a perfectly imperfect way.

From 2016 through 2017, you developed and curated the online crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, which honored Iowa birds through “the words and stories of bird lovers, bird watchers, writers, artists, musicians, teachers, students, scientists, nonprofits, federal and state organizations, environmental stewards, and nature lovers.” The project was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and over 750 people from around the world contributed original writing. What inspired this exciting project? And what exists at the nexus of poetry and flight? Of birds and wonder? Are you yourself a birder?

Iowa Bird of Mouth began with the question: why are some people compelled to create and others are not? For the Iowa Arts Council fellowship, I envisioned an online space in which people felt their words belonged, as if they were all part of one giant squawking, undulating flock. I researched crowdsourced poems (such as David Lehman’s long-running “Next Line, Please” project at The American Scholar) and saw that anonymity, access, and an inspiring subject were essential in motivating “norms” to participate. Iowans have an affinity for wild birds. Iowa Filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to hear. But birds were the bling on our farm.”

I hoped that wild birds would draw people to the poem, and they did. Though I have adopted many parakeets and lovebirds, I knew nothing about wild birds. Thankfully, Iowa Young Birders Director, Tyler Harms, volunteered all his mad ornithological skills. I’m gobsmacked that Iowa Bird of Mouth happened. I’m pretty sure the reason I was able to pull it off was that the universe needed it to exist, though I don’t know why. You can see the website here. My essay about the project in American Poetry Review is here. The text and code are available for use in non-commercial projects. 

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Folly, hubris, self-deception, coping mechanisms, animals, TV, counter-intuitive manifestations of kindness and love, mushrooms, telecognition, homing instincts, science, crime.

The Los Angeles Review writes that your poetry “leaves the reader a different person.” To what extent is a great poem like a chemical element, reactive, interacting with the atmosphere of the moment—forever altering those who discover it, like sun on seeds?

My mother is an excellent bridge player. She has to pay attention to and remember everything that happens during the play of a hand. The poems I love have a bridge player’s memory. The bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways. Flannery O’Connor’s surprising yet inevitable ending is established by the end of the first line. So like a seed, the poem is waiting to pop. All it needs is the light of your attention. 

Kryptonite: A Parable for Bastille Day

"You can't cancel me. I'm Superman."

<<<
Superman 
is just a  flash in the pan. . .

I've been  around the world in a plane,
Settled a revoltuion in Spain,
The North Pole I have charted,
But I can't get started with you. 

On the golf course I'm under par, 
Metro Goldwyn wants me to star,
With queens I have a-la-carted,
But I can't get started with you . . .
>>>

(from "Can't Get Started," music Vernon Duke, lyrics Ira Gershwin; you'll hear it in the background of Chinatown, which has a world-class soundtrack from Jerry Goldsmith.)

A Rainy Night on Broadway in 1957

The Poets House Controversy: The Protest and Monica Youn's Response

from Poets & Writers

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The letter protesting the temporary closing of Poets' House during the pademic, because the institution is saddled with debt] recognized the work and commitment of the board, [executive director Lee Ellen] Briccetti, and [pmanaging director Jane] Preston to sustain Poets House, but described being “saddened and deeply unsettled that, through whatever combination of financial and intra-staff/management crises, the organization has fired its entire staff in an abrupt, unkind, and otherwise questionable manner.” Belladonna* added that the board’s press release did not “assuage the appearance of anti-union, anti-whistleblower retaliation around the timing of this extraordinary move.”

The letter went on to ask the board of directors why they did not opt to furlough staff if they intend to reopen the organization, and why they did not organize a “community-wide fund-raising campaign.” (The iconic San Francisco bookstore City Lights, for example, launched a GoFundMe in April after the pandemic forced it to close; it has since raised nearly $500,000.)

“Without pretending to be versed in the full specifics of institutional culture at Poets House,” the letter continued, “the grievances we are reading about are familiar to us: a personality-driven system of management; exploitative wage labor structures that use the poverty of poetry to take advantage of committed workers, who are often young; desired donors actively being protected from having to reckon with or curb their racist and transmisogynist habits. These are dishonorable and corrosive practices that your staff was correct to call out—for their own workplace environment and for the larger causes at hand.”

The letter concluded by urging the board to reverse their decision to fire staff and to let them unionize. “We want other organizations to learn by your example (take note) because they are no different. There is no poetry in exploiting workers and protecting power. We ask you for an honest engagement with your community. We ask you to commit resources not to lawyers and stonewalling but to positive change. We ask you to accept the need to change and respond ethically, with care for all concerned.”

On December 9, board member and poet Monica Youn responded to several of the questions raised in the Belladonna* letter, and reinforced that the organization temporarily closed because it was operating at a $200,000 deficit and running out of operating funds. She noted that, unlike many literary nonprofits, Poets House faced the challenge of financing and fund-raising for its main service—operating a free, physical library and event space—that was now closed due to the pandemic.

Youn went on to address the charge of union busting: “I am a member of the UAW. I spoke at a UAW rally during which I pulled my child out of school rather than cross the picket line in October. I also work on antiracism and gender equity issues both as part of my job and in my nonprofit involvements. If I thought for one second that that the closing of Poets House was in some way a pretext for either union busting or retaliation for complaints about DEI issues, I would resign from the board immediately.” She added: “Along with other board members, I reviewed financial and other documents as well as the plan to address DEI issues. I didn’t just take management’s word for it. My fiduciary duty is to the institution and to its continuing mission to the public. Although we were focused on the financial crisis rather than on the unionization issue, I and what seemed to be a majority of the board felt that a union rep could serve as a useful liaison, as it has for other arts nonprofits.”

As for the timing of the decision to suspend operations, Youn pointed out that the staff filed the union petition when the organization was nine months into the pandemic and “basically teetering on the edge of the cliff.” She added: “That was just when we were running out of money.” She repeated that the board made the decision when they did so they could pay severance and back vacation pay.

As to why the organization did not opt to launch a public fund-raiser, Youn said it wasn’t seriously considered by the time it became clear that their emergency fund-raising campaign—which they had launched to a smaller group of donors and members of the board itself, raising $189,938, of which the board gave $125,632—was not going to cover payroll for much longer; Youn says payroll expenses amounted to $17,000 per week. Youn also noted that the board did not furlough staff because they are not positive what form Poets House will take in the future. “We did not want our staff to not be seriously looking for jobs and to think that this existential crisis was only short-term—this was a long-term crisis for our revenue model, and Poets House was likely to change its structure and functions in order to survive in this new reality,” she said.

Youn also noted that “the pandemic created challenges for more informal workplace conversation,” and that it was exacerbated by Briccetti being on bereavement leave from late February to mid March, and then on personal leave from June through October.

When asked about the depiction of the workplace shared in Di Liscia’s November 20 piece for Hyperallergic, Youn acknowledged that staff had raised issues about the workplace, but added: “We are taking these issues seriously and we are taking the steps to address them. Yes, there are communication problems. I think a lot of organizations are going through similar periods of self-assessment at this point. We have heard about incidents that made staff uncomfortable and that we plan to address as part of our DEI efforts going forward, including DEI training for the staff and board. Our last communication with staff about specific candidates for DEI facilitators was on November 2, and we had applied for and received funding for this training, which will take place when we resume operations.”
>>>

See "Former Poets House Workers and Board Dispute Reasons for Suspension" (by staff; December 11, 2020). Pictured: Monica Youn.

https://www.pw.org/content/former_poets_house_workers_and_board_dispute_reasons_for_suspension

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nine): David Kirby [by Angela Ball]

I Wish I Were a Cannibal

because if I were a cannibal I could cook you and put you on a plate
and eat you up but I’d be a magic cannibal so you’d come back tomorrow
and I’d prepare you in a new way and eat you up all over again
or, wait, not a magic cannibal but a cannibal who lives on a magic island
where people who are crazy about each other just keep devouring
the other person every day and then do it again and again and again.
Today I think I’d like to roll you gently in flour, then dip you in
an egg wash and some bread crumbs and slide you into a skillet
in which I have heated butter and olive oil and cook you for three
minutes on one side and two on the other and put a slice of cheese
on you and stick you in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese.
I’d like to make a carrot soufflé out of you. Or a sandwich. But not
just any sandwich: one of those jumbo hot dogs the Chileans call
a completo and for good reason because it’s slathered in tomato
and pickle and guacamole and mayonnaise and sauerkraut and whatever
else you want to put on it. A completo has to have a lot of toppings
or else it’s not completo. Or a Primanti Bros. sandwich from
the famed Pittsburgh deli of that name that consists of capicola
and provolone topped with french fries and cole slaw and tomato
slices on sourdough. Or wait, I know, the Monte Cristo, which is
truly the Cadillac of sandwiches in that you make it by putting
turkey and ham on Dijon-coated white bread which you coat
with a well-beaten egg and cook until brown on both sides and then
sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve with red currant jelly
alongside for dipping, although you’d be delicious dipped in anything.
I’m certainly not going to turn you into a strawberry pretzel salad!
It’s not even a salad, though also delicious. I’d like to smother you,
by which I mean not put a pillow over your face but first make a roux
out of flour and vegetable oil the way they do in Cajun country
and add onion and celery and garlic and chicken broth and then immerse
you and cook you on the lowest heat possible until you emerge tender.
Tender . . . listen to me! How could you possibly be more tender
than you are now! Or sweeter. Notice that I haven’t mentioned dessert.
Why would I? You’re sweeter than ten desserts—a hundred!
If I eat you and dessert both, I couldn’t eat anything for the next three
days except insulin lollipops. I wish you were a shot of whiskey
so I could toss you down my throat or a bottle of beer so I could chug
you on a hot day or a glass of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo so I could
sip you slowly in the presence of one of the yummy dishes I have
described above even though that means I’d be consuming you twice,
which, come to think of it, is not the worst idea I’ve had lately.
I wish you were a cigar so I could stick one end of you in my mouth
and light the other. I wish I were a cigar as well so we could both
go up in smoke. Let’s send smoke signals to everyone on the mainland.
We’ll tell all the other lovers to join us. Bring your toques, lovers!
Or should it just be us? Romantic dinner for two or Bruegel-esque
banquet with dogs and children and big thick-bodied Dutch peasant
types larking about to the tune of a drum and pipe band. And dice,
of course. Peasants love to gamble. Who doesn’t? Why, the first time
I saw you, you were doubling down at the blackjack table, and I myself
am hardly averse to a hand of baccarat or chemin de fer. Did you hear
that? Dinner bell! I think I’ll marinate you for two hours or maybe
overnight in umm lemon and ahh garlic and ooh thyme and

 

David Kirby's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense” and was named one of Booklist’s Top 10 Black History Non-Fiction Books of 2010. His latest books are a poetry collection, Help Me, Information, and a textbook modestly entitled The Knowledge: Where Poems Come From and How to Write Them. He teaches English at Florida State University.

“I Wish I Were a Cannibal” is forthcoming in Help Me, Information, which will be out from LSU Press this summer.

You might call this a love poem, but that'd be selling it short. I've actually told students they can print out a copy on Valentine's Day and give it to their baby doll and say they wrote it, if they like, because it works just fine as a poem from one person to another. But I had a bigger picture in mind. I hope every reader had a mom who said something along the lines of "you're so sweet, I could just eat you up," which is really my starting place. After that I pile on the calories and the trans fats, but then alcohol shows up, as do cigars, dancing, art, dogs, card games -- the whole world's in this poem. Let's put the whole world in our poems. And then eat it.
--David Kirby

The New York School Diaspora (Part Nine): David Kirby [by Angela Ball]

David Kirby, poet of constant surprise, returns consumption to the frank lust of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, as visualized in Tony Richardson’s movie and its lovers’ meal where each voracious bite implies a sex act. Kirby doesn’t devour his love with kisses, but “with tomato and pickle and guacamole and mayonnaise and sauerkraut and whatever else,” marinates her “for two hours or maybe / overnight in umm lemon and ahh garlic and ooh thyme. . .” A taboo isn’t violated, as in the wonderful title of the satirical novel by Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People is Wrong. It simply doesn’t exist.

This impulse recalls the original poets of the New York school in their wish to abolish intermediaries between poem and reader, that shows itself in Frank O’Hara’s desire to place the poem between people rather than pages, “lucky Pierre style”; in John Ashbery’s gift to us of his mind transposed to language; in Kenneth Koch’s “new addresses” to War and other abstractions—their effect on us is direct, so why not their representation? James Schuyler gives us his coffee cup, his Korean mums, not as representatives of something else, but as themselves: life’s components. When he sips his coffee, it’s as if a still-life artist were eating the fruits and hams being painted, as of course they did, outside the frame of art. Why do we need the frame?

David Kirby’s “I Wish I Were a Cannibal” doesn’t. It consummates metaphor, makes tenor and vehicle one. How great to be free, eating love as avidly as Mark Strand’s avatar dog eats poetry. And aren’t they, after all, the same, unending as this poem with its connecting “and.”
--Angela Ball

Stacey, I think I'm in!

From “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” [by Vid Simoniti]

For all who are wondering what the philosophers in England are up to, take a look at “Game-changer: A Philosophy for Homo Ludens” by Vid Simoniti, a review of Games: Agency of Art by C. Thi Nguyen (Oxford UP). Here are the opening grafs:

<<
“Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.” When Jeremy Bentham notoriously declared all pleasures to be interchangeable, he chose a children’s game to represent pleasures of the lower sort. What entertainment could be more banal than push-pin, a sort of Victorian “thumb war” played with pins? Since Bentham’s day, though, games have come a long way. Video games now create more revenue than television, music or films. Together with board games, they span a variety of subgenres, and foster loyal communities of connoisseurs and critics. And yet games are still largely considered to be (mere) entertainment rather than art. They are seldom given sustained attention in literary reviews, say, or in university syllabuses.

Thi Nguyen’s philosophy of games seeks to redress this bias. Games are an art form, Nguyen argues, and their medium is human agency. Just as a painter manipulates pigments to create a likeness, so a game designer induces the players to live out certain patterns of doing things. Chess compels us to deduce and to plan; poker to dissimulate and to take risks; and the ungainly choreographies of Twister push us towards hilarious self-abasement. The art of games is the creation of such “agential modes”, be they intense or jovial, cerebral or daft.
>>>

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/games-c-thi-nguyen-review-vid-simoniti/

Buck Downs: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buck Downs, 2019. Photo by Steven Phillips

______________________________________________________________________________

More Special Music

 

            looking in my face

            at the shaving glass

 

                        a glass of air

                        I work by feel

 

            a dozen souls

                        have died

            in this body—

            reincarnation

running in reverse—

 

            the great glam drone

            of heart & head

beating together—

                        that’s my jam—

_______________________________________________________________________________

A native of Jones County, Miss., Buck Downs works as a publishing consultant and writing coach for corporate clients, technology developers, and authors who need individual attention. In 2017, Furniture Press Books of Baltimore published a selected poems, Unintended Empire. His most recent book of poetry is Not Right, Now! (Buck Downs Dot Com). For thirty years he has distributed his poems as a series of postcards and other author-published ephemera. (Click here for Buck Downs on writing.)

_________________________________________________________________________________

In Defense of Ange Mlinko [by David Lehman]

Ange Mlinko is one of our most astute and courageous critics.  She is unafraid to speak her mind; she has a subtle intelligence, does her homework, arrives at an opinion and states it with precision and without worry about crossing the boundaries of conventional wisdom. It is this rare quallity of critical intelligence brought to bear on poetry, something she cares deply about, that would make her valuable even if the times were not as inimical to free spech as they are. Herself a poet, she has a vigorous and lucid prose style.

Here are two brief sections of her characteristically engaging review of two books, Adrienne Rich's Of Women Born and Hilary Holladay's biography, Ther Power of Adrienne Rich (Doubleday, 2020). The review appeared in the London Review of Books (15 July 2021) under the heading "Waiting for the Poetry."  I have a feeling the piece is causing a ruckus in some circles, but it should be read -- the whole piece, not just excerpts -- because of its heartfelt, mindful engagement with an important poet, whatever your politics or your affection (or lack of same) for Adrienne Rich. -- DL

<<<

The collections that mapped Rich’s personal and ideological trajectory during the tumultuous aftermath of [her late husband] Conrad’s suicide include The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978). Stylistically Rich broke no new ground: when she abandoned formalism, she found her footing in the confessionalism of Lowell’s Life Studies and Plath’s Ariel – which, as Holladay points out, ‘had driven a stake in the heart of New Criticism’. But her work was now getting exhilarated responses, such as Margaret Atwood’s review of Diving into the Wreck, with its twist on Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry:

‘When I first heard the author read from it, I felt as though the top of my head was being attacked, sometimes with an ice pick, sometimes with a blunter instrument: a hatchet or a hammer. The predominant emotions seemed to be anger and hatred, and these are certainly present; but when I read the poems later, they evoked a far more subtle reaction. Diving into the Wreck is one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it; but what you think about yourself.’

Atwood wasn’t alone. Elaine Showalter, Catharine MacKinnon, Robin Morgan and Susan Griffin were among her admirers. Reporting on the crowd that descended on a women’s bookstore when Rich gave a reading in New York, Holladay says that she ‘was welcomed as a sort of messiah’.

Overall, however, the verdict was mixed and would remain so throughout her career. Holladay refers to an ‘enigmatic’ review by Rosemary Tonks, but there’s nothing enigmatic about it: it is the frank confrontation of a poet of the Nerves with a poet of the Will:

‘In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry?’ Reading the poems, Tonks suggests, we are given ‘the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts’:

'This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility.'

But what really puzzles Tonks is Rich’s fixation on secondhand suffering. She describes the milieu of the poems as ‘living a life very close to the life of newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper’ – a brilliant observation – and marvels at the mind’s ‘intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own ... Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.’ She’s right: Rich’s poetry is overwhelmingly one of sirens heard in the night, cataclysm streamed from the radio. ‘I find myself in tears,’ she writes in ‘Merced’. And then:

I think of Norman Morrison
the Buddhists of Saigon
the black teacher last week
who put himself to death
to waken guilt in hearts
too numb to get the message
in a world masculinity made.

It’s this that makes her so relevant today – when otherwise comfortable people live in thrall to newsfeeds and phone alerts. Rich’s Collected Poems is a century’s compendium of emergencies, telegraphed in proper nouns:

Mississippi, Harpers Ferry, Jaurez, Catalonia, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Central America, Lebanon; ‘Appomattox/Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma’; ‘Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here.’

Helen Vendler wrote dismayed reviews of Rich’s work, excoriating the stereotypes, the bombast: ‘One longs, reading Rich’s A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, for the poem to take an unexpected byway, to reverse itself, to mock itself, to question its own premise, to allow itself, in short, some aesthetic independence. In Rich, the moral will is given a dominating role that squeezes the lifeblood out of the imagination.’ But one doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort – unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal. Yet Holladay reveals the extent to which actual, first-hand suffering also informed Rich’s aesthetics: diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, she struggled with bouts of debilitating pain and underwent successive surgeries, including one to screw a metal ‘halo’ to her skull to relieve pressure on the spinal cord. She suggests that Plath’s unkind description of Rich in her twenties – ‘little, round & stumpy’ might be explained by the steroids Rich took for her condition.

. . . . .

Is there a moral here about the futility of self-willed ‘identity’? Or is it a cautionary tale about the religion of achievement? Was Rich afraid that her deepest identity, that of a poet, would vanish without endless revolution? (Remember she was only six when her father published her first poems.) Whatever the case, a stable identity eluded her. That didn’t deter her from creating a poetic record that amounts to more than a thousand printed pages. Her admirers see a woman who stood up to authority, lived by her principles and modelled resistance to racism, misogyny, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, militarism, antisemitism, and class privilege – they won’t be deterred by Holladay’s revelations of interpersonal difficulties. When Lowell died, she wrote to Carruth that ‘his death left me feeling virtually nothing at all’ – though they had been lovers only ten years earlier. Even her relationship with Cliff was fraught with power struggles and substance abuse. They endured until Rich’s death from complications of rheumatoid arthritis in 2012, aged 82. Cliff followed in 2016, aged 69: ‘Alcoholic hepatitis and chronic alcohol abuse were identified as conditions leading to the cause of her death.’

Animus was Rich’s muse. While many were struck by her courage in rejecting the National Medal for the Arts in 1997, it was the culmination of a series of highhanded refusals: in 1977 when Loyola College of Maryland offered her an honorary doctorate, she copied her letter of refusal to the Baltimore Sun. Honorary degrees, she claimed, were a ‘ritual of tokenism’. The same year, she refused to write letters of recommendation for the Guggenheim, and instead wrote to the foundation condemning its discriminatory criteria. As she had been a recipient not once but twice, this repudiation was aimed partly at her own earlier self, the driven ingénue and Harvard wife, who used the ‘St Gugg’ largesse to fund her Oxford education and then to go to the Netherlands (a rejuvenating sojourn part funded by a concomitant spousal award to Conrad). ‘She had made a Talmud out of her life,’ Holladay suggests, ‘the multiple meanings of which demanded endless study, debate, and interpretation.’ But the image that sticks with me is of Adrienne Rich at home in Santa Cruz, recently liberated from the metal halo, tending to a collection of cacti.>>>>

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n14/ange-mlinko/waiting-for-the-poetry

Photograph of Ange Mlinko from University of Florida (Department of English); caricature from The New Yorker. 

Against Censorship [from Len Gutkin in The Chronicle of Higher Ed]

We note the efforts of Len Gutkin, in The Chronicle Review, to push back against the worrisome censorship, self-censorship, and shaming on social media that have made it difficult for writers of all kinds, in all genres, from speaking out and expressing ideas that may go against the grain of contemporary orthodoxy. Here's a sample from his post dated July 12:

<<<

You Can’t Say That

Last month, the New York Post reported that Brandeis University’s Prevention, Advocacy, and Resource Center had published an “Oppressive Language List,” enumerating terms that one should strive to avoid. The list is real, and many of the suggestions seem quite reasonable, if rather obvious (ethnic slurs and so on). But others raised eyebrows. For instance, is the word “picnic” really associated with lynching? (No, as Reuters explains, and the word was eventually removed from the list.)

And what about phrases like “take a stab at,” “killing it,” and “take a shot at” — all rejected as “Violent Language” by Brandeis? Such prohibitions might seem to have less to do with ethics than with the metaphysical dream of a language free of all figuration. “Truth,” Nietzsche wrote, is a “mobile army of metaphors.” But “mobile army” sounds awfully violent. I suggest instead: “Truth is a roving ad hoc committee of administrators.”

&

• “I’m almost 60, and in these many decades I’ve seen people — some of them good friends — taken down by all kinds of things. Alcohol and drugs, mostly … You know what finally took me down? F—ing Twitter.” In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan on trying to shake an addiction. For more Twitter-skepticism, check out two Review articles: Justin E.H. Smith’s “How Social Media Imperils Scholarship” and Gordon Fraser’s “The Twitterization of the Academic Mind.”

• At Critical Inquiry, Frances Ferguson reviews The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: “It is a history of literary study pitched against the accounts of literary professionalism that have given us the sense that we should guide our thinking about literature by doctrinal statements.” In the Review, Buurma and Heffernan previewed a portion of their argument.

• At the London Review of Books, Ange Mlinko writes, not entirely admiringly, about the poet Adrienne Rich: “You have to be accustomed to winning prizes, and quite certain of your place in the pecking order, to grandstand like this … One doesn’t read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort — unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal.”

Write to me at: [email protected] or [email protected].

https://www.chronicle.com/newsletter/chronicle-review/2021-07-12

>>>

Len Gutkin

Len Gutkin is a senior editor at The Chronicle Review. His first book, Dandyism: Forming Fiction From Modernism to the Present, was published in February 2020 by the University of Virginia Press

What Remains? [by Lera Auerbach]

Ink on Music Paper © Lera Auerbach

 

 

What do I remember? 

Sounds, sound all around. 

I don’t know words yet, but I can feel melodies of phrases. 

Everything is music: the voices of people, the wind outside, the bell of the streetcar.

When people speak loudly, I want to cry – there are more sounds than I can hold! 

I have no space left to breathe and gasp for air.

The voices become quieter, slower, lower… 

I can breathe again.

 

(Volume) 

 

 

(2)

 

Mama is teaching her students. 

I am crawling on the rug.
I already know the names of the notes – Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si.
They are my friends. Each note is a different sound,
and each note is a different color. 

Mama is explaining how sound flies.

If sound can fly – where are its wings? 

Perhaps, they are invisible – the sound is flying and flapping its invisible wings.

How does the sound look without its wings?

Lying on my belly, I try to imagine the body of the sound, without wings.  

Instead of the body – I only see wings – wings of different colors.
‘Do’ is white with a rainbow overflowing on feathers, ‘Sol’ is golden, ‘La’ is red.

I understand now: the sound is the wings – long or clipped, colorful, wavy…
The sound is the flight itself and the trail of after-flight;
the wound left in the air, disappearing like ripples in water.

The sound is what continues to echo in the memory when nothing is sounding.

 

(What Is Sound?)

 

(3)

 

My mother is carrying me in her arms,
“Look at your stroller now. Look at it for the last time.
You will never see it again.”

I see the doorway to the bedroom.
There is my stroller – red, much taller than me.

But what is ‘never’? 

What a strange word – so heavy –
this moment is forever engraved in my memory:
the red stroller and my mother’s words.

 

(What Is Never?)

 

 

(4)

 

My parents do not buy a new stroller.
Instead, they roll me around in a folding carriage,
an accessory intended for a large doll.
I do not like that doll. I’m afraid of her –
her plastic complacency, her empty eyes.
But the doll’s stroller is helpful – I quickly tire of walking.

When I was born, the doctors said I had problems with my legs
and would not be able to walk.
For a year, my frightened mother took me for therapy every day.
I walked ahead of schedule. 

More than walking, I love flying while listening to music,
hundreds of winged creatures – sounds –
holding me up, not letting me fall.

 

(Canceled Sentence)

 

 

(5)

 

My grandmother, Alichka, walks poorly. 

Her legs are bowed like two letters C’s. Pain hides in each step.

Alichka brings me to the Tsvilling Square. 

(She rolls me in the stroller from the doll I do not like.)

On the bench, next to her, sits an old woman with a mourning veil. 

She is mourning for her son. There was a war. Yurochka was only ten. 

He was all swollen from dropsy and hunger. 

He asked for a gun, "Just shoot me, mama." 

The doctor said Yurochka would not survive the night. 

He did not survive.

Alichka: “Maybe you can help us tomorrow with Lera?

Her parents are at work; she’s too weak for a nursery,

but it’s so difficult with my legs.”

 

Marianna entered my life – the guardian of my childhood.

 

(Are You Still Watching Over Me?)

 

 

(6)

 

I'm three and a half.
I can already read words and notes.

I create fairytales and stories –
l tell them to my old Rönisch upright piano.

Without music, words lose their magic. 

If I stand on one leg and press the piano pedal with the other foot –
the wings of sounds become so long
they can fly far away into the great unknown. 

Yet I feel that all is distorted, not what it could be…
But what could it be? 

 

Where do the true sounds hide?

 

(Searching)

 

(7)

 

Too bad that seated, I can’t reach the piano pedals. 

Mama does not allow me to play the piano while standing.
She says it is bad for my professional education.
Luckily, she’s not home during the day, and Marianna doesn’t mind. 

While standing, I can press the pedal and paint an ocean of sounds.
The ocean is calm. The ocean is enormous.
The ocean is the bluest of blues in E-flat major.
Arpeggios of waves slowly float under my fingers. 

 

Now a lonely sail appears / amidst the blue mist of the sea…

Rebellious, it seeks out a storm.*

 

The melody of the sail is full of awe. The sail is thirsty for the storm. 

– Ah, you want a storm? I'll show you a storm!

 

In between the sea and clouds proudly soars the stormy petrel.

He cries out, and the clouds hear his joy in the bird’s cry of courage.

Thunder sounds in foamy anger, the waves groan with the wind in conflict.**

 

A thunderstorm rages in C minor – lots of pedal, clusters of thunder, glissandi of winds. 

 

The ocean was swollen and sullen

Its billows were boiling with fury.***

 

One still hears the theme of the sail,
but it is irreparably destroyed by its daring dream. 

It is drowning – the theme of the sail sounds lower and lower,
sinking to the bottom of the sea.

 

Now the storm has passed.
The ocean is calm again, as before.
Triadic waves splash softly as if nothing had happened.
Only far in the clouds – a memory –
one can hear the theme of the dreamy sail.

I sob with delight and horror at the drama
that just erupted beneath my fingers.

 

*Mikhail Lermontov

** Maxim Gorkyi

*** Alexander Pushkin

 

(The Monstrous Power of Music)

 

(8)

 

When Mama returns, I want to repeat for her the story of the brave, lonely sail. 

But the theme of the sail is different now, and the waves are not the same... 

I cannot repeat my story. As in a crooked mirror –
what was beautiful before has turned into its ugly caricature.

I’m crying, no longer with delight, but with shame: everything’s false again.

Where did the true sounds disappear?

 

(Where?)

 

(9)

 

Mama says, “If you wish to save ‘true’ sounds,
you need to write them down as soon as they are born.”
She hands me a Notebook for Music.

“How do I write them down? With words?”

“Why words? You already know how to write notes.
When you have ideas for words, you should use letters,
but when you hear music – you should use notes.
With the help of notes, you can always find your way back
and remember what you played.
Music notation is a time machine
to travel to the past and to the future.
Written music remains forever.”

 

“Mama, what is ‘forever?’”

 

(What Remains?)

 

(10)

 

Every morning I remember that I have to go to kindergarten and begin to cry.

Papa comes to my crib. He is holding a small empty jar.

I keep on wailing.

“Here, take this – it’s a piggy bank for tears. Tears are precious,

and they should be protected. If you are so intent on crying,

then cry into this jar and save your tears.”

I obediently cry into the jar, accumulate tears.

Each drop – like a caught note written in my Notebook for Music.

Perhaps music notes are unshed tears? 

 

Where are you, my piggy bank of tears?

 

(Unshed Tears)

 

 

Po-Biz and Letters to Nancy Mitchell and Amy Gerstler [by Nin Andrews]

Sometimes as poets, we need to get together and bitch, my friend, S., says. So last week we got together to bitch about po-biz. Her complaints are familiar ones. Like many poets and writers today, she feels overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. She’s published a lot, has a few books out, and has had teaching stints here and there, usually as adjunct faculty. But she says, I 'm almost never invited to give readings or speak at conferences. I don’t sell many books, and I'm beginning to ask myself, What the hell am I doing? She points out that the literary world mirrors the economic world. 1% of us are rock stars, and the rest are street musicians.

I tell her my latest absurd idea: I think we should start helping each other, maybe writing each other fan letters. We could get pompoms and have pep rallies for fellow poets. I say it as a joke, of course, but the truth is, I love writing fan letters. Sometimes when I can’t write, I imagine myself as a gum-chewing, unstable, teenage  groupie who is in awe of  poets, and who writes them fan mail.  In fact, right now I am in the middle of writing a silly fan letter to Nancy Mitchell because I just started reading her latest book, The Out-of-Body Shop, and it's terrific.  My letter begins: 

Dear Nancy,

Do you have a southern drawl? I swear I can almost hear the lilt when I read your lines. I love a good drawl, and I love your poems even more. Maybe one day I'll get to hear you read them out loud! 

I wanted to tell you how the other day when I was getting my hair done, I read your poem, "Work," the one about working a late-shift at the factory.  I burst out laughing when I got to the parts where the you talk about a woman who kept her man in line by weaving her hair around his zipper. "What's so funny?"  my beautician, Kylie, asked, so I read the poem out loud to all the ladies at the salon. We laughed so hard, one woman said she almost got perm fluid in her eye. Kylie said to tell you that if you want to keep a man, you just put a little salt on his tail. I don't know what she means, and I'm not sure I want to know. Do you?

I also loved and laughed at the poem “Praise.” 

Praise

You be my Sunday

morning hot

butter-swirled

syrup-drizzled

whipped-cream-

dollop-topped

hand-scratch-made

pancake.

I be your coffee cup,

Star-bucked.

But when I tell S. about my fan letter-idea, she's not enthused. She's not in the mood to laugh. Instead she tells me about the literary magazines that accept her submissions and collect fees, but never respond to her work. Years go by, she says, and I hear nothing. Sometimes she writes query notes, and they, too, go unanswered. I know exactly what she means. Oh, the unfairness of it all!  

I tell her about a rejection note I received years ago that read: Dear Poet, Your poems have been in our office for ten years now. The editor still has not read them and he never will.  He doesn’t give a shit about your poems or anyone else’s.  (I learned later at AWP that the note was probably written by a grad student who despised the professor/editor. The review is no longer in existence.)

I'm also reminded of my first editorial job. I was in eighth grade, and my friend, Ginny, and I were given the job of editing The Bell Ringer, the eighth literary magazine. After spending a recess reading submissions, we decided that only our own poems deserved publication. We had just ten poems between us, so over the next few days we happily wrote many more, penning our poems in loopy script on stencils before taking them to the office to be mimeographed.    

In high school, when I reread The Bell Ringer, I was overcome with embarrassment—not only by my egotism but also by the poems. In eighth grade, as it turns out, I had a fondness for words like prettily, merrily, verily, and frolicsome.

Also in high school I began working at the New Dominion Bookshop and buying poetry books. There were always a lot of poetry books on the sale table, and C.C.Wells, the bookshop owner gave them to me for a song. C.C. once said he never understood why anyone would want to be a poet because no one wants to buy poetry, much less read it.  Would anyone write a poet a fan letter? he asked once. (Why we were discussing fan mail, I don't remember.) That’s when the idea for writing fan letters to poets began.

One afternoon, while working at the shop, I read Some Trees by John Ashbery, and I fell in love with his poem, “The Instruction Manual.” I wrote Ashbery my first fan letter:

Dear John,

Do you mind if I call you John?  

I am sitting in the New Dominion Bookshop and reading “The Instruction Manual,” and there’s only one customer here, a bald man who called me Missy and asked me, "Ain’t you a pretty little thang?" Have you ever been called a thang, John? Mr. Wells, the bookshop owner, says I should never let on when a customer gives me the creeps, so I am reading your poem, “The Instruction Manual,” and not looking at him and not thinking of the word, thang. I’m saying to myself it’s no big thang. Not like this poem, which I like so much, I am trying to do what it does—resting my elbows on the table and staring out the window so I can be someplace else . . .

That's just an edited form of my original letter to Ashbery that went on and on about "thangs" and my favorite song back then, "Wild Thang." Over the years spanning from high school to college and after, I kept a literary journal in which I continued to compose inane and embarrassing fan letters to the likes of Henri Michaux, Denise Duhamel, Robert Bly, Tim Seibles, James Tate, Yannis Ritsos, and Amy Gerstler. I was particularly smitten by Amy Gerstler (whose last name spellcheck always changes to Gerstner).

Over the years, I have written a few fan letters to Amy Gerstler. In one early letter I imagined I was sending her The Bell Ringer. I said I had a suspicion that we were kindred, frolicsome souls.  In another I wrote that I had had a vision that she was the reincarnation of Emily Dickinson. I was certain that if she had her druthers, she would lead a cloistered existence. I asked if she, like Emily, had a large white dog, and if she, like me, was the kind of gal who prefers dogs to men.

  One of my favorite Gerstler books was the out-of-print book, Past Lives, which looks like a grade school composition book and has a few pages that replicate first grade penmanship exercises, other pages with photographs stuck to them, and others are abecedaries and  others that I can’t describe. You have to see the book to believe it. Past Lives might not be Gerstler’s best book, but if you have a slightly perverse sense of humor, this is a book for you.

Of course, I didn’t just write fan letters in my journal. I also complained bitterly about po-biz.  I’ve always hated the process of entering the literary lottery. And like S., I like to bitch. In a one entry, written when I was taking a class in Cleveland with Alberta Turner, I wrote:

Alberta says I should start sending my work out, but I HATE submitting poems!! Just last month I sent 5 poems to New American Writing. I figure I am new to writing and American. So I qualify, right? Wrong. Paul, the editor, wrote back that I didn’t meet his “editorial needs.” What does the term, “editorial needs” mean? Can Paul’s needs be pinpointed?  Defined? Met? I am feeling miffed.

 Miffed was one of Alberta Turner’s words. She said all poets feel miffed. Like me Alberta Turner admired Amy Gerstler.  I remember once when she spent the night at our house in Cleveland, we talked into the night, and I showed her Gestler's fan letter to Boy George from her book, The True Bride.  Clearly, no one writes a fan letter like Amy Gerstler.

Dear Boy George,

Only three things on earth seem useful or soothing to me. One: wearing stolen clothes. Two: photos of exquisitely dressed redheads. Three, your voice on the radio. Those songs fall smack-dab into my range! Not to embarrass you with my raw American awe, or let you think I’m the kinda girl who bends over for any guy who plucks his eyebrows and can make tight braids—but you’re the plump bisexual cherub of the eighties: clusters of Rubens’ painted angels, plus a dollop of the Pillsbury dough boy, all rolled into one! We could go skating, or just lie around my house eating pineapple. I could pierce your ears: I know how to freeze the lobes with ice so it doesn’t hurt. When I misunderstand your lyrics, they get even better. I thought the line I’M YOUR LOVER, NOT YOUR RIVAL, WAS I’M ANOTHER, NOT THE BIBLE, OR PRIME YOUR MOTHER, NOT A LIBEL, OR UNDERCOVER BOUGHT ARRIVAL. Great, huh? See, we’re of like minds. I almost died when I read in the Times how you saved that girl from drowning . . . dived down and pulled the blubbering sissy up. I’d give anything to be the limp, dripping form you stumbled from the lake with, draped over your pale, motherly arms, in a grateful faint, as your mascara ran and ran.

from the archive: first posted July 9,  2018

The Divine Comedy [by Mitch Sisskind]

 

Inferno

Oh for God's sake you don't

Have idea number one about

Basketball or horse racing,

You could never navigate

Your way around a wine list

And the many childish books

You've been reading about

Hieroglyphics will never get

You through an actual papyrus.

When will you emerge from

Your eggshell and realize that

The universe doesn't revolve

Around you, for God's sake?

Oh dear God! God in heaven!.

Purgatorio

Oh for God's sake! Oh dear Lord

Have mercy! Dear God on high!

Good God! Good Lord! Oh God!

Oh for God's sake! Let us pray!

Have mercy, Lord! Oh my God!

Praise him for his beneficence!

Oh for God's sake! Oh Lord!

Sing praises of God's name!

Oh my dear Lord and Master!

Who is like unto the Lord God?

Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest!

Oh for God's sake! Hallelujah!

Let us sing his praises! Oh God!

Hallelujah! Oh for the love of God!

Paradiso

I've been (is this the right word?)

An ignoramus. I revere Liszt but

Now I see his being irresistible

To a woman like Marie d'Agoult --

An exceptionally serious woman --

Derived from his own seriousness

Which, however, never expressed

Itself through anger or violence.

In recitals Liszt did sometimes

Physically wreck a piano and

In 1838 in Vienna he destroyed

Three pianos in one concert

But those pianos were in poor

Shape to begin with and Liszt's

Response was exasperation but

Not anger properly so-called.

Theophrastus (quoted by Seneca)

Proclaimed it impossible for

A good man to resist anger in

The presence of a bad man or

In evil circumstances but Seneca

Disagreed to the effect that

'Surely no one is more peaceful,

More free from passion, and

Less given over to hate than

A good man.' Consequently

Liszt was loved by women as

Was Berlioz also to an extent.

Amen. May it always be so.

 

 

Why Lee Wiley?

Lee Wiley (1908-1975) was the greatest girl singer you may never have heard of. Try her interpretations of these tunes:

Let's Fall in Love
O! Look at Me Now
Manhattan
Street of Dreams
Soft Lights and Sweet Music
Time On My Hands
Looking at You
More Than You Know
My One and Only
Ghost of a Chance
How Long Has this Been Goiung On?
I've Got a Crush on You
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
Glad To Be Unhappy

--DL

Lionel Fogarty [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

I first came across Lionel Fogarty's poetry in The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry edited by John Tranter and Philip Mead. At the time, I was pretty well ignorant of contemporary Indigenous Australian poetry. High school English had stopped at Browning and Hopkins and hardly ventured into Australia at all, let alone Indigenous Australian poetry. In fact, the only mention of Australia's first nations peoples in our state's curriculum back then was to be found in "Aboriginal Studies", an elective, which I took, and which focused heavily on the land rights movement of the time and not at all on modern Indigenous artists, ignoring the interdependence of the two.

Fogarty's poetry is unashamedly political, but it is his experimental use of the Aboriginal Australian language, innovative, often surreal, that has garnered him praise of the kind from John Kinsella, as being "the greatest living Australian poet." One of my favorite of Fogarty's poems is "Appearance Shadows", in which the speaker considers the nature of disappearing as a kind of negative action—for a disappearance to occur, something has to "un-occur", be removed, taken away, so that "Magic give disappearing acts to appear" and "We cannot define disappearing life as appearing in the present." The poem is haunted by Australia's history viewed as a disappearance of Indigenous peoples and culture.

 

 

The poem I'd like to introduce is, however, an assertion of being, and, it seems to me, an introduction in itself. "Fellow Being" opens with the declaration that "we aboriginies in humanity" and goes on to, in part, describe Aboriginal people and their profound relationship to their land: "An aboriginal is nature's soil, you pick it up hold it in your / hand and / you will feel our growth in the ground." It is a relationship that is felt and known without being able to be "understood", and therefore, impossible to explain. Fogarty's poetry is a bridge to this feeling.

 

Fellow Being

An' we aborigines in humanity.
The pulses of the red sun give a beat in aboriginal people.
The kissing of winds to trees are the love between
aborigines.
Even the water we drink is the pure tears aboriginals share.
We wisely in our humanised aboriginal homes are united
under all one colour.
The aboriginal is the bread of man's rich land.
We are the rocks of ages and purpling skies.
Look at every scenery in bush you will see an aboriginal face,
body and spirit.
The aboriginal is not owned by any human being on earth.
Our presence is the flesh of fresh new worlds.
We are music that floats into a wonderful not to all ears.
An aboriginal is nature's soil, you pick it up, hold it in your
hand and
you will feel our growth in the ground.
We are the gods of man in this land but then we are not
humans.
Yet we are part of you kind now hey.
The earth above is our spirituals.
And now if you speak our tongue, don't mean you are native.
The sea, hills and lakes are in our hearts and minds.
The universe is belonga to dem big spirit creator.
Oh, now man you go out there to find out more of us, who
down here.
Well listen to that fish talk and you will know we ate it the
other day.
And if you talk to a bird of paradise you find they are people,
same with
all creatures here, we aboriginals com from them.
If you feel the heat of the sun, you feel us.
If you see and feel the light of the darkness then you have
just touched an aborigine.

 

Name the Artist

Name the artist, the painting, and the year!

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eight) The News from Great Britain: Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

THAT THING

We once had one in our house
with handles on both sides. But
I forget its name. Sometimes

I even forget my own. The self is
an overlaying of multiple identities,
comprised not just of what is

remembered and forgotten, but
of how one is located in the wider
questions of belonging, memory

and solidarity. At least, that is what
was on my mind as I lit a bonfire
in the kitchen, which is where

I was located. It’s a mystery as to
what that lump is but the chances
are it’s nothing to be concerned

about. There are better reasons
to lay awake at night worrying
yourself sick. I am from here,

I thought, and recognise the pots
and pans, and how if one polishes
them enough they shine like brilliant

household suns. I think I may go
and live in a shed when all this is
over. In the last twenty years

average house prices have grown
about seven times faster than
average income. That’s on my mind

as I write this, and watch the fire
brigade go about their business
with consummate professionalism

and gusto. It occurred to me also
that Galileo said “Nature’s great
book is written in mathematical

symbols”, although I think he said it
in Italian and it’s not really relevant.
It’s interesting what crosses one’s

mind as the events of the day occur,
watched by miserable youths and
unquiet presences who, with nothing

to do but act as reminders of what
has been lost, refuse to stay home,
and instead nibble away at the edges

of what would otherwise be a perfectly
acceptable existence. Here comes
another little person trying to attract

my attention. Take my hat, please.
You’ll see it’s not been keeping much
warm at all. Those are shadows

taking shape before my very eyes,
and that’s a horror show over
there, and those little horror shows

gathered around them will, I guess,
be their children. How awful!
The boys and girls I have known,

the workmen and the labourers
on the estate, they are in the past
now, of course, but they are still

kind of present, although I don’t
know their names, and never
did. And when old Chivers choked

on a chicken leg everyone thought
it was a joke until it was too late.
That was a learning experience for

all of us, and is on my mind as
I write this. The burning issues of
the day are ablaze with themselves

but grow tiresome. To be a fireman is
apparently the career of choice among
an increasing number of university

graduates, and is a sign of the times.
Yes, thank you - I will have another
of those canapés. They’re delicious

even if they’re not home-made.
And thank you for reading this.
You’ve made my life better, briefly.

—Martin Stannard

from “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters”

Leafe Press, 2020

https://www.leafepresspoetry.com/2020/05/martin-stannard-reading-moby-dick-and.html

Martin Stannard lives in Nottingham, England, and his poetry and reviews have been published widely since the late 1970s. He has also had the honour (and pleasure) to read his work at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City. He was the founding editor of joe soap’s canoe magazine from 1978-93 which, after Martin in 1980 discovered the work of Paul Violi (with whom he subsequently became a close friend), was the first magazine in the UK to regularly publish New York School poets including Ashbery, Koch, Violi, Charles North and Tony Towle. The magazine’s complete archive can be found as downloadable PDFs at www.martinstannard.com/jsc. In 1993 he arranged and accompanied Koch and Violi on a reading tour of the UK, after helping to organize an exhibition of Koch’s collaborations with artists at The Wolsey Gallery, Ipswich, Suffolk.

Martin’s recent publications include “The Review” (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2020) and “Reading Moby-Dick and Various Other Matters” (Leafe Press, 2020). More information can be found at www.martinstannard.com

Like most of my poems, “That Thing” is language-driven, insofar as it’s not about any thing in particular, but takes a line or phrase as somewhere to begin and heads off to a place I don’t know exists until I get there. The starting point here, as far as I recall, was an overheard phrase (“with handles on both sides”) describing some object or other. What follows is helped along by four or five other snippets culled from I can’t remember where, but most of what is said in the poem is from inside what I like to call my brain, joined together to make what I hope is a coherent (sort of) object. It occurs to me now that the last two lines could perhaps be stuck on the end of almost every poem I’ve ever written, albeit with an irony warning.

--Martin Stannard

The New York School Diaspora (Part Eight) The News from Great Britain: Martin Stannard [by Angela Ball]

Martin Stannard’s “That Thing” meditates on an emergency: a bonfire lit by the speaker. We get, amid flames, this stunning observation on pots and pans: “how if one polishes / them enough they shine like brilliant /household suns.” The lyric moment dissolves as the speaker holds forth on surrounding phenomena. A patrician anti-Whitman, he rejects multitudes; speaks with a pre-emptory directness not unlike Frank O’Hara’s in one of several poems called “Poem”: “I am thinking my own thoughts, who else’s?” Oblique subject-shifts disorient as we bowl along his association-stream to a party we have catered (mediocrely), to land in our role as readers, receiving thanks given with one hand and retracted with the other. There’s an obtuseness reminiscent of another O’Hara “Poem” in which the speaker arrives in the middle of the night to find his host lying “flat on a sheet of blood”: “There are few hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest / only casually invited and that several months ago.” With the hauteur and finesse of a Jack Benny, “That Thing’s” delightfully absurd persona, sheathed in aplomb, presents us with a world of incongruities, its source of absurdity not merely events, but our take on them. “The burning issues of / the day are ablaze with themselves / / but grow tiresome.”

--Angela Ball