The Best American Poetry

"Fedora, Trench-Coat, Cigarette, and Gun" [by David Lehman]

From The American Scholar July 17, 2021. Click here for the rest of this "Talking Pictures" post. Here's an excerpt:

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Humphrey Bogart was far from your conventional heartthrob. Not blessed with the looks of a Cary Grant or Gregory Peck, he was reliably good as a hoodlum or bootlegger, a Cagney sidekick in flicks of the ’30s, or an unlucky truck driver playing second fiddle to George Raft in Raoul Walsh’s They Drive by Night (1940).

Not until he was 41 did Bogart become a leading man. In Walsh’s High Sierra, (1941), Bogart plays Roy Earle, nicknamed “Mad Dog,” an ex-con on the lam after a heist goes wrong. Roy dies on a mountaintop, but not before winning the love of Marie (Ida Lupino). Even Bosley Crowther, the film critic for The New York Times, with his astonishingly low batting average, had  good words for Lupino and Bogart: she was “impressive as the adoring moll,” and he displays “a perfection of hard-boiled vitality.” Then to confirm that, these concessions aside, Crowther was his usual self, he added, “As gangster pictures go—if they do—it’s a perfect epilogue.” The right word would have been prologue, as what followed was a whole new genre of crime and noir movies.

The role of Sam Spade, the hard-boiled private eye in The Maltese Falcon (1941)—Dashiell Hammett’s novel adapted by John Huston in his directorial debut—made Bogart’s reputation and accounts for the image many of us have of him today. The tough guy who won’t let Mary Astor play him for a sap and outwits the wonderful Warner Brothers trio of Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Elisha Cook, Jr., is, as he points out, not “as crooked as I’m supposed to be,” even as he joins in the hunt for the legendary priceless black bird, which turns out to be a fake.

A wide-brimmed fedora and belted trench coat are as vital to Bogart as top hat, white tie, and tails are to Fred Astaire. A lighted cigarette dangles from Bogey’s lips. He is quick with a quip, and when this is pointed out to him as if it were a fault, he replies, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?” His voice conveys an aggressive world-weariness. It is difficult to impress him. He incorporates skepticism in the sound of his words. As he says in The Maltese Falcon, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”
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To read further, with commentary on Casablanca and The Big Sleep, link here. Photos are stils from The Big Sleep.  

An Introduction to John Tranter (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

The difficulty in introducing John Tranter is knowing where to begin. Surely any attempts to elucidate his poetry would be reductive, and any measure of its influence fall embarrassingly short. Tranter is a major poet and in my estimate the major Australian poet of the second-half of the twentieth-century (though John Forbes might have something to say about that). His renown stretches far beyond our antipodal boundaries. As his good friend John Ashbery wrote in the introduction to Starlight: 150 Poems, Tranter is an "international phenomenon".

Over his 20-plus collections, Tranter has seemed to live and die by the motto found in one of his most ambitious and accomplished poems, "Red Movie", that "an experiment which succeeds... is no longer an experiment, but has become / a demonstration of the obvious". Tranter's poetry always surprises and refuses to rest on its laurels—just as you think he's hit on a winning formula in one collection, he upends it in the next. Through his fifty years of writing he's employed a multitude of styles and techniques, but always present are his keen ear for the Australian vernacular, a frighteningly sharp intelligence, and a "larrikinism" that never lets his poetry take itself too seriously. 

 

 

The poem I'd like to share today is not particularly representative of Tranter's oeuvre, though it does exhibit several qualities that we can find in many of his poems: his wit, a love of the movies, and his extraordinary ability to absorb the essence of another poet and transmute it into a contemporary Australian landscape (both geographical and emotional) to offer us something at once uncannily familiar and entirely original. "After Hölderlin" is a favorite of mine, and I suspect it may be a favorite of Tranter's too, as it serves as the opening poem to his new & selected, Urban Myths. I plan on sharing much more of Tranter's poetry over the coming months, so stay tuned.

 

 

After Hölderlin

When I was a young man, a drink
often rescued me from the factory floor
or the office routine. I dreamed
in the mottled shade of many a beer garden
among a kindness of bees and breezes
my lunch hour lengthening.

As the flowers plucked and set in the little bottle
on the table still seem to hanker for the sun,
nodding in the slightest draft, so I 
longed for a library loose with rare volumes
or a movie theatre's satisfying gloom
where a little moon followed the usherette
up and down the blue carpeted stairs.

You characters caught up in your emotions 
on the screen, how I wish you could know
how much I loved you; how I longed
to comfort the distraught heroine
or share a beer with the lonely hero.

I knew your anxieties, trapped
in a story that wouldn't let you live;
I felt for you when you were thrown from the car
again and again; when the pilot
thought he was lost and alone, 
I was speaking the language of the stars
above his tiny plane,
murmuring in the sleepy garden, growing up
among the complicated stories.
These dreams were my teachers
and I learned the language of love
among the light and the shadow
in the arms of the gods.

 

Louis Armstrong: A Study in Aries Rising [by David Lehman]

Louis Armstrong was born on July 4, 1900 if you believe him or August 4, 1901 if you believe your lying eyes. Let's assume the latter as astrologically valid. A Leo, then, with Aries rising, Aries in his moon, New Orleans as his native city, and a lot of moon in his chart, and what you get is a born performer and, with significant celestial activity in Capricorn to keep him grounded, an entertainer who will never lose his popularity because he knows his public and regards himself as an instrument through which the Lord expresses his moody blues and swinging jazz. Music is supreme in his soul and his rejection of be-bop must be understood in this context. He shares a birthday with Shelley. Whom did you think that poet was evoking when he wrote, "Be through my lips to unawakened earth / The trumpet of a prophecy"? Not Dizzy or Miles, I can tell you that, but the old cornet player from the Back O' Town section (Jane Alley) in N.O. Also born on August 4 was Barack Obama. Make of that what you will.

Satchmo should be on anyone's list of great Philo-semites. Just read "Louis Armstrong + the Jewish Family," the keynote piece in Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words, Satch's selected writings (edited by well-named Duke professor Thomas Brothers and published in 1999 by Oxford UP). Others on the list of great Philo-semites are Nabokov and Emile Zola and. . . somebody please help me complete this sentence. 

Louis loved the Karnofsky family that gave him his first job and encouraged his study of music. "I had a long time admiration for the Jewish People. Especially with their long time of courage, takin So Much Abuse for so long. I was only Seven years old but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the White Folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for." Notice the idiosyncratic and very deliberate use of italics and caps, his favorite emphasizers. Louis was a writer; he took his punctuation seriously, he took his typewriter wherever he went, and he was always going; he loved typing even more than swimming. He also loved Jewish food, including matzos. The Karnofskys operated a mobile rag and bone shop, and Louis played a little tin horn on the junk wagon. "When I reached the age of eleven I began to realize it was the Jewish family who instilled in me Singing from the heart." He wore a star of David around his neck.

The blues came naturally to him. The best recording of the Arlen and Koehler standard, "I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues," is Armstrong's, with voice and with trumpet. Listen to "West End Blues," "St Louis Blues," "St James's Infirmary," "Basin Street Blues" as performed by the Hot Five with Earl "Fatha" Hines on piano. You listen and you know why "saint" is in the title of so many blues. At the same time -- and here's where Louis's Leo stands up and takes a bow -- he (voice, trumpet) makes happiness real. And after embodying Jazz as a style, a phenomenon, and a musical idiom in the 1920s -- I mean "Cornet Chop Suey," "Potato Head Blues," "Struttin' with Some Barbecue" with Lil Hardin on piano, and "Knockin' a Jug" with Jack Teagarden on trombone -- Louis went on to swing the American Songbook: "On the Sunny Side of the Street." "Jeepers Creepers," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," the amazing sides with Ella. The meaning of swing is in the lovelight burning in his heart. In 1967 he concludes a heartfelt letter to a jazz-loving Marine in Vietnam by typing out Hammerstein's lyric for "You'll Never Walk Alone." I once heard Louis recite the words of this song from Carousel, not sing them, just recite them, with the melody playing softly in the background, and there was not a dry eye in the house.

He loved gage and smoked it every day. He thought "gage," "Muta," "pot," or "some of that good shit," were better names for the heavenly stuff than marijuana. It was, he said, "a thousand times better than whiskey." He could write a whole book about it, he added. A day without Gage was a meal without wine. He also spoke eloquently of "the Genuineness of Asses." He loved his wife's (Lucille "always had the Choicest Ass of them all") but didn't see the point of denying himself the pleasure of "whaling" on the road. "Kissing will lead to fucking every time." One time at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas he "Grined" a lady he called "Sweets" -- "Struck Oil" -- and "planted a cute little baby." Jazz meant sex. Man, he felt alive. He was performing 100% of the time. But the horn redeemed the world. "I Can tolerate Anything, as long as it doesn't interfere with my trumpet."

Now I will play "Stardust," "Pennies from Heaven," "Alexander's Ragtime Band." Cutting up with Crosby on the set of High Society. Mixing with Sinatra on TV, "The Birth of the Blues."  And then back to the Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings of "Weary Blues," "Potato Head Blues," "No (Papa, No)," "Tight Like This," "Weather Bird."

Like Phillip Larkin, Armstrong detested be-bop: "Mistakes, that's all rebop is. . . .New York and 52nd Street -- that's what messed up Jazz. Them cats play too much -- a whole lot of notes, weird notes." He saw it clearly, Jazz reduced to a form of chamber music that the devout would listen to breathlessly if uncomprehendingly in darkened shrines. "You've got to carry the melody," he insisted. 

During the Little Rock crisis in 1957 he sent a telegram to Eisenhower urging the president to send in troops to assure the safety of the "little negro children" at Central High School. He called Ike "Daddy" and said that if he "personally" came "along with your marvellous troops please take me along. O God it would be such a great pleasure I assure you." Should the president wish to respond, he was advised that he could do so through Satch's "personnel manager," Joe Glaser, in New York. He signed off "Am Swiss Krissly Yours Louis Satchmo Armstrong." 

There was no way you could dislike Louis Armstrong. Now close your eyes and pretend it's the first time you're hearing the opening cadenza of "West End Blues."  -- DL

from the archive; first posted 2011

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)

I look up from lunch and see a guy dozing back in his chair
and I imagine my dead father that way, perpetual sleeping passenger,
his head full of roads. “And who cares,” he says in his dream,
“that since you’ll never wake, that you’re not inscribing memories?”
Describing a hallucination means you’re describing it
to someone, so who’s to say this isn’t part of the hallucination?
My odometer hit 123456 today and I had a minor celebration
and took a picture. They say as much about the idea of time
as they do the idea of reality, most recently in the mechanism
through which birds see the earth’s magnetic field. It’s a kind
of blue. I like that. Everyone you know is suddenly an art student.
Or how families have a recurring theme, generation to generation.
Measure the shoulders. Measure a taste for parsley. Hand tremors.
As in the Enquists vs the Gormans. The Enquists want the baby,
the child, as he’s three now, spring 1968, to be adopted out
through their side of the family to the Gallahers, and the Gormans
want to keep it in Portland, maybe cut a deal
over where it is and when. The Enquists sign the papers, though,
and the child is off on a Continental jet with a golden tail
to Kansas. (The painting keeps folding that we’re working on,
fretting along the edges of the frame.) A few weeks later,
the Gormans are still not taking it well. For them, it was
a kidnapping, and one, the mother, goes off somewhere,
and the father, the Enquist, goes looking for her
with some friends. One, driving, July 8, falls asleep,
and they cross the median, down the hillside, into the trees.
You fall asleep over this life, and you wake
in a doll playground in a doll town surrounded by a doll
forest. You’re planning some sort of festival.
The Enquists and the Gormans understand each other,
as a desert understands rain. As now, 50 years later,
they’ve all gone but for the mother and the child,
and he finds her one day in late fall, and she asks him
if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.

--John Gallaher                                       first published in LIPS, as "Golden (23)"

Though I’ve always known he died in a car wreck, I didn’t know until recently that my birth-father died in his sleep. Likewise, I’ve always known I was adopted (at age three), but the circumstances, as well as my birth-mother’s name, were a mystery, until I found her recently. I’ve been trying, since my book, In a Landscape (BOA 2014), to find a way to write as I’m thinking, to try to write the thinking itself, the imagination, but in a non-fiction landscape. From Lyn Hejinian, I think of it as thought transference, or articulating the inarticulate. Ashbery talks about this as well, describing it as a project reflecting how the mind works, the play of thought. I like these ideas, keeping in mind O’Hara’s directness (“I did this I did that”) and Miles Davis playing what the day presents. I’m not sure if any of this makes much sense to anyone but me, which is why I hesitate to put too fine a point on it.
--John Gallaher

The New York School Diaspora (Part Twelve): John Gallaher [by Angela Ball]

John Gallaher’s tribute to origins, “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” shares the breathless energy of Frank O’Hara’s elegy, “The Day Lady Died,” and its trajectory from the circumstantial to the transcendent. “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday” . . . “I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun / and have a hamburger and a malted. . ,” while the poet-speaker of “Garden of Mirrors” looks “up from lunch. . .” and imagines his dead father, “perpetual passenger, his head full of roads.” O’Hara records his lunch-hour movements; Gallaher celebrates his car’s 123456th mile. O’Hara’s bank teller’s name, “Miss Stillwagon,” is part of his day’s momentousness, along with “NEW WORLD WRITING,” “Verlaine,” “Bonnard,” “Strega,” and “Gauloises.” (Lady, not pinned to her daylight name, enters the poem via photograph.) Gallaher describes the navigation of birds, their precise jazz of vision, “a kind of blue”; linking it to a family’s serial mirroring: a set of shoulders, “a taste for parsley.” Then we hear, in third person, the story of his divided parentage, related as Enquists vs. Gormans—recalling Faulkner’s Snopes and Compsons, discordant tribes. Suddenly, the poem mirrors itself, registers the strain exacted by the telling, the difficulty of keeping the story within bounds: “(The painting keeps folding that we’re working on, / fretting along the edges of the frame.)” The father goes looking for the mother “with some friends.” He drives, then sleeps, and all disappear “down the hillside, into the trees,” dispatched in two phrases with the killing loveliness of a Hemingway title. At poem’s end the son has found the mother, “in late fall,” is with her in the way that Frank is with Lady Day at the 5-Spot: “while she whispered a song along the keyboard/to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing”(no end-stop). Art pre-empts time. John Gallaher’s “Garden of Mirrors (Architecture 23)” collapses fifty years as the mother asks her son “if his eyes are still a beautiful steel blue.”
--Angela Ball

(The New York School Diaspora will be on sabbatical till Tuesday, 31 August, when it will return as a biweekly feature.)

"How to Write a Villanelle" [by Martin Stannard]

Click here for "How to Write a Villanelle" -- and below that "How toi Write a Sonnet" -- by Martin Stannard, who writes:

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Good morning, and welcome to August.

 

This is to announce that "How to Write Poetry" is now available at its very own website: https://how2writepoetry.blogspot.com/

 

and today sees the release of Issue #2 of the series: "How to Write a Villanelle", which you will find there as a blog post , and also free to download as a PDF if you are looking for that special gift for someone who is difficult to please.

 

I know I said that #2 would be about how to write an epic, but several people responded to Issue #1 ("How to Write a Sonnet") by asking for help to write a villanelle, and so here we are.

 

Best wishes etc.

Martin
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Summer of Fruit Tarts--Figgissimo [by Barbara Hamby]

The sauna of a Southern summer seems made for figs. When David Kirby and I bought our house, I discovered an old fig tree near the driveway and the vegetable garden. The woman who sold us our house told us her father had had a victory garden there during World War II. Does the fig tree date back to the forties? I wish I'd asked her. 

A fig tree is a glorious creature with large leaves that look like the palms of a giant. I've planted two more trees since we moved in. We had to have a pine tree in the front yard removed, and I'm going to plant another one where the pine was. Early in the fall fig trees begin to loose their leaves, but when they start to leaf out in the spring, their bare brown stems erupt with little rosettes of green, and I know that the figs are on their way.

This summer has been miraculous. I usually make two flats (12-jars per flat) of fig jam. This year I made 36 jars, and two fig tarts.

I'm wondering about the figginess of this summer. Could the drought during May followed by torrential downpours be the reason? Probably not, because this is a pretty typical late spring into early summer. I have to compete with the birds and squirrels for the figs. This year I got all St. Francis of Assisi and addressed the critters. "Brother and sister birds, you take the high figs and I'll take the low ones. Then we'll all live as one. Brother and sister squirrels, I know you're hungry, too. Please take all you want, but please don't take a bite and then go on to the next fig. Let's share the lusciousness."

It seemed to work. Fig jam is one of mother nature's true gifts. Bread, butter, and fig jam with a cup of coffee or tea makes an ambrosial breakfast. With a strong stinky cheese it goes well with an aperitivo. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a crostata marmalata, the Italian breakfast tart, with fig jam. 

I inherited David's mother's copper jam-making pot, and I cook up two or three batches of jam every summer. Our trees have small brown figs called Brown Turkey, that seem to me more concentrated in flavor than their larger cousins. In my mother-in-law's recipe for fig jam the only ingredients are figs, sugar, and lemons. The most complicated part of making fig jam is fig curation. The season is only a couple of weeks in July. It starts slowly and then builds up speed. On good days I pick a pound in the morning and another pound in the early evening. Every two days I have enough for a batch of jam. But figs are tender little orbs. You have to watch them or they'll turn into mush. 

Since I had so many figs this year, I had plenty for tarts. My first tart was beautiful, but the crust was a disappointment. That's because I tried a crust that wasn't Patricia Wells' crust. The second one was beautiful and balanced. The recipe is from her great book At Home in Provence, which won a James Beard award when it came out in 1996. I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw her demonstrate some of the recipes. The copy I bought is falling apart because I've tried so many of the recipes. The fig tart is a variation on the apricot almond tart. The only change I made was that I substituted orange flower water for the almond extract. This photo is of the halved figs without the cream filling.

I'm hoping to find some purple figs at the market later in the summer, and try the recipe with them. Here's the recipe again: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

Next week: It's a Peach-luscious world

Yolanda Wisher: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2

Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood.
Walk up the sidewalk towards Chestnut Street.
Speak to the Rev holding the light-skinned baby,
ask his son to come put a new inner tube on my bike.
Cross Ludlow, past the mailbox on the corner,
Risqué Video, Dino's Pizza, and the Emerald Laundromat.
The fruit trucks tucked into 44th Street on the left,
house eyes shut with boards, fringes of children.
Once we went into a store sunk into the street,
owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,
from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,
where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,
draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman
behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic.
We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips,
eye the bean and sweet potato pies.

Back into the hot breath of West Philly, sun is setting.
The sky is smeared squash, tangerines in a glaze.
Three girls and one boy jump doubledutch. A white man
hustles from the video store with a black plastic bag.
We look for money in the street, steal flowers
from the church lawn. The shit stain from the wino
is still on our step. Mr. Jim is washing a car for cash.
John is cleaning his rims to Buju Banton.
Noel is talking sweetly to the big blue-eyed woman.
Linda, on her way to the restaurant. The sister
in the wheelchair buzzes by with her headphones on.

One night, a man was shot and killed on this block,
right outside our thick wood door. But not today.
Today is one of those days to come home from walking
in the world, leave the windows open, start a pot of
black beans. Smoke some Alice Coltrane. Cut up
some fruit, toenails. Hold on to the moment
as if time is taking your blood pressure.

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Philadelphia-based poet, singer, educator and curator Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013). Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016–17. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher was awarded the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She has collaborated with artists and organizations to create community-driven programs rooted in the practice of poetry as a public art, including a neighborhood poetry festival, literary takeovers of local museums, a series of poetry church services, and a poetic address to the nation. Wisher performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary. [pronouns: she/her/y'all]

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Reflections on Sam Truitt’s Tokyoatoto [by Andrew McCarron]

 

I am concluding my week of blog entries on the poet’s notebook with some reflections on the poet Sam Truitt’s marvelous recent book, Tokyoatoto (Station Hill Press, 2020). This book-length poem was composed in a small pocket-sized notebook during a ten-day trip to Tokyo in late Fall 2019, five months before the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down international travel. The poem begins in New York City as the poet travels to JFK Airport and concludes with his return. Impressions, thoughts, sights & sounds, and memories were jotted down in real time. Having lived in Tokyo from the age of three to seven, and having not set foot in the city or elsewhere in Japan since that time, the book enacts T.S. Eliot’s poetic dictum “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Truitt expresses something similar early in the poem when his plane begins its descent into Tokyo’s Narita Airport: “Gliding downward through clouds & then under & cotton & black mountains in gold light I found myself inexplicably sobbing now gliding downwards tears in & spilling from my eyes toward the most beautiful place on Earth 52 years coming home.”    

Returning to Japan at the end of his fifth decade of life, Truitt records the shifting parameters of his consciousness through words. He reveals the nature of this poetic project while waiting for a Tokyo subway sometime over the days following his arrival: “one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.”  

The book offers a sketch of those reflective moments in life when we try making sense of things, when we seek to express the accumulation of where and who we’ve been as we slide perpetually into the future. What it’s like, how one things moves into another, what we remember, the lacunas of what we forgot, what we’ve read, the mystery, and all the saw-toothed fragments of memory that weave continually through what we see: coalesce. The ever-expanding geometry of our consciousness reveals itself, momentarily, before the pattern changes.

It’s no coincidence then that the majority of Truitt’s odyssey occurs in transit: via foot, taxis, buses, subways, trains, and airplanes. Here’s some text from the flight over: “as we scoot over Siberian ice & crags & rock & out the grey & purple river-looped land in the orange light band I guess must now be south as north becomes it.” Or a moment toward the end of the book recorded on a subway: “& then I am in the subway wondering where exactly I am though knowing inordinately & knowing I need to do a quick search of my body to locate the ticket…” The movements that propel the poem frequently open up to flowerings of philosophical insight and questioning, such as the following moment in the middle of the poem: “you could say sex alone makes it worth it yet even sex wears thin & then you’re stuck with a habit of working within a structure…” No conclusion, though, is given much time to marinate before the focus leads elsewhere: “& so it goes back & forth until it is gone.”  

The structure and physical layout of Tokyoatoto is significant. Each page of typed text (one section per page) is presented opposite a facsimile of the handwritten page from the original notebook he kept from November 23 – December 3 2019, with almost no alterations or additions. Why is this? As Robert Creeley famously put it, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” The inclusion of the original handwritten notebook in the published book captures what it’s like to make sense of the intersections of past and present, place and moment, self and others, matter and spirit, and the familiar and the foreign as they’re consciously experienced in the flux of time. What unfolds across the work is an experience of the unified field without a deliberate fielding of the experience.

 

Note on author: Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer, and a host of the podcast Baffling Combustions. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts, he lives in Woodstock, NY.