The Best American Poetry

Happy new year with Doris Day & Maxine Sullivan and "Loch Lomond"

"A Hundred Years from Today"

"Loch Lomond"

O Today We'll Merry, Merrry Be

O today we'll be merry merry be
O today we'll be merry merry be
O today we'll be merry merry be
Tomorrow we'll be sober

Lara Egger: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A New New Guide

 

Look at this orange. When Rothko

painted No. 12, 1954, was he thinking

of a setting sun, or a piece of fruit?

In every language I know,

the word for both is the same.

In ancient Greek, there is no blue,

so Homer said wine-dark,

and honey was green; even the sky

stretched like a canvas above the Aegean

was cast in bronze. Sometimes, at night,

I worry about what I’m missing,

simply because I don’t know the word for it.

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Lara Egger is the author of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It (University of Massachusetts Press, 2021) which won the John C. Zacharis First Book award. Her poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Ploughshares, Copper Nickel, The Southern Review, Bennington Review, Ninth Letter, Conduit, and elsewhere. Originally from Australia, Egger now lives in Boston where she co-owns a Spanish tapas bar. 

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                                                    Mark Rothko, No. 12 (Red and Yellow), 1954, Oil on canvas.

 

A Brief Digression on Critics and Cops [by David Lehman]

Why do award committees pin the tail on the horse’s ass? Because award committees combine a universal truth (“everyone’s a critic”) with an old punch line (“the committee in charge of designing a horse came up with a camel”).

What is a critic? According to the critic Kenneth Tynan, “the critic is one who knows the way but cannot drive the car.” According to Kierkegaard, the critic resembles a poet as one pea another except that he lacks the anguish in his heart and the music on his lips – that is, everything.

As Emerson, left, would say, "nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Ignore the critics. They are full of shit.

The record of mediocrity that is the history of prizes suggests that a critic is a committee.

When Annie Get Your Gun opened on May 16, 1946, with Ethel Merman as Annie and one of the most glorious scores ever written for the stage, the critic Ward Morehouse of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that la Merman was “in her best form since Anything Goes” but that “Irving Berlin’s score is not a notable one.” Brooks Atkinson of the Times seemed to concur, characterizing the songs – "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "They Say It’s Wonderful," "Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," and the rest – as “routine composing.” But for dumbness after the fact, it is hard to top the assessment of Guys and Dolls that appeared in the London Sunday Times in May 1953 (three years after the show’s debut on Broadway). Quoth the critic: the show, “despite its striking, incidental merits,” is “an interminable, an overwhelming, and in the end intolerable bore.”

On the screen, the critic is depicted often enough as a venomous, haughty lout (Clifton Webb in Laura, left, between Dana Andrews and a portrait of Gene Tierney) or a conniver (George Sanders in All About Eve) or sometimes a guy who needs a drink because he has to choose between telling the truth and keeping his job (Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane). But in song-and-dance movies with Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly in them, the critic is transmuted into the figure of the cop who looks on the festive proceedings and glares skeptically (as at the end of Kelly’s performance of the title number in Singing in the Rain) or with amused toleration (as when Fred Astaire, sporting a boater, does his shoeshine number in The Band Wagon).

The cop is the reviewer saying, You’re not supposed to be having such a good time. Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Don’t you realize that life is serious and art must be the same? Art has a moral imperative. Literature is a criticism of life. To which objection, the best answer is the smile on Gene Kelly’s face as he wraps himself around a streetlamp and lets the rain pour down his face.

Happy birthday, Sandy Koufax (born December 30, 1935)

No self-respecting Dodger fan will want to overlook Michael Leahy's The Last Innocents: The Collision of the Turbulent Sixties and the Los Angeles Dodgers (HarperCollins).Independent of the Dodger fan base, students of baseball history will find much to enlighten them here about such subjects as the glory days of Sandy Koufax, the ailments (physical and mental) that plague big-time ballplayers, and the relations of management versus labor when Walter O'Malley owned the Dodgers.

There are terrific anecdotes based on interviews the author conducted with Sandy Koufax ("simply the best," as the Yankees advance scout noted in 1963), Maury Wills (who stole 104 bases in 1962), Wes Parker (maybe the slickest fielding first-baseman ever), Lou Johnson (hitting hero of the 1965 World Series), second-baseman Dick Tracewski, catcher Jeff Torberg, the underrated Ron Fairly,and others.The only thing I am not crazy about is the book's title, and the author may not have liked it either. The book is at its weakest when trying to correlate the fortunes of the Dodgers as a team and as a group of individuals with the "turbulent" decade of war, riots, assassinations, uprisings and political movements.

The most compelling pages are on Koufax, a ferocious competitor who was the key to the Dodgers' two World Championships and three National League pennants in the four-year stretch from 1963 through 1966. A hero to the Jewish community for his principled refusal to pitch the opening game of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, Koufax is enigmatic to the extent that his modesty, shyness, and reticence seem to indicate hidden depths of complexity. Like the "no trespassing" sign that begins and ends Citizen Kane, Koufax's avoidance of publicity is an invitation to let speculation and multiple points of view determine our sense of the man.

The other Dodgers interviewed for the book speak of Sandy with respect bordering on reverence. I didn't know that there was an anti-Semitic strain in some newspaper articles in the mid-60s. "Some skeptics suggested [that] perhaps Koufax was less a ballplayer than a budding businessman and bon vivant." Moreover, "some stories cast him as a closet intellectual, always grounds for suspicion in professional stories." The stories may have been planted by management hoping to improve their bargaining position or their public image. Koufax was underpaid not only in comparison to today's players but by any criterion of the time. And as Leahy says, "there can be no reasonable doubt" that anti-Semitism lay behind the stereotypes provoked by "newspaper references to Koufax's supposed business shrewdness and inferences that Koufax might be less committed to the Dodgers than to getting more money." 

By staging a joint holdout in 1966, Koufax and Don Drysdale got the raises they deserved -- and helped pave the way for the free-agency revolution that Marvin Miller was about to engineer. It was never a secret that Koufax pitched despite intense pain from arthritis; that he had to prepare elaborately for each game, and that he quit baseball at the height of his fame, age 30, because he was told that if he continued to pitch, he may ultimately lose the arm. He is the primary hero of this book, and we see him only through others' eyes, because he agreed to speak with Leahy only about his old friend Maury Wills.

Wills suffered from old-fashioned racism. Fierce in his play on the field, someone whose commitment to winning was absolute (in the manner of Chase Utley or Hunter Pence), he felt manipulated by Dodger management, and disrespected. Part of the problem was Vero Beach, Florida, where the Dodgers held their spring training for many years.The town's hostility to blacks was palpable. But management treated the star shortstop with contempt during contract negotiations. Remembering Dodger games in which the only offense was provided by Wills (who would beat out a bunt, steal second, steal third, and come home on a fly ball), I agree with those who contend that he belongs in baseball's Hall of Fame. Wills revolutionized baseball. He brought back the stolen base as a weapon. His career prefigured those of Lou Brock, Ricky Henderson, and Davey Lopes.

One thing I did not know about Wills is that he apparently dated Doris Day.

There must be a technical term for the degree of insecurity that plagued Wes Parker. Lou Johnson's story is that of the veteran minor-leaguer who is about to hang up his spikes when he gets one last chance and makes the most of it.Johnson hit the decisive home run when Koufax shut out the Minnesota Twins in game seven of the 1965 World Series. The game was played in Minnesota. "You could hear a cat pissin' on cotton after I hit it," Johnson recalls. As for Parker, the affable Tim McCarver says that Parker made "the best play I ever saw made by a first baseman in a game I was ever in." 

Michael Leahy's affection for the team is evident and understandable. He was a teenage kid at Dodger Stadium when Koufax pitched his perfect game in 1965. That game was, Leahy says, "the apotheosis of Koufax" and it must have felt magical to be in the stadium. As Leahy suggests, Koufax stood in relation to the Dodgers of the 1960s as Joe DiMaggio stood in relation to the Yankees twenty years earlier. 

Among the many other things I learned from "The Last Innocents," I'll leave you with a few. One is that Buzzie Bavasi, the Dodgers' general manager, was not entirely the jovial guy I had imagined. He was a tough negotiator and employed  a variety of tricks to fool a player into signing a lowball contract. In 1964 Ron Fairly came in for his contract meeting. Bavasi said he had good news. Tommy Davis had just signed. The contract is on the desk. Then Bavasi invented an excuse to leave the room. Fairly took a look at the contract on the desk -- a bogus document -- gulped and lowered his financial expectations accordingly. (The GM bragged about the tactic to newspapermen.) Buzzie did have a jovial side, and some players speak of him with warmth. But first of all he was O'Malley's henchman at a time when ownership routinely exploited the players. It is a business now. It was a business then.

With rosters changing as rapidly as they do, and with management and labor so often at odds, one has to wonder about fan loyalty to teams. In Philosophy 101 the professor asks you whether it's still the same hammer if you replace the handle. Is it still the same hammer if you replace not only the handle but the metal head? It is the same with a team. The Dodgers of 2015 are completely different from the Dodgers of 1956 -- different owners, a different city, different personnel, Yet the fans are unwavering. They are the only constant. And one is a little nostalgic for the time when certain players -- DiMaggio and Mantle with the Yankees, Koufax with the Dodgers, Ted Williams with the Red Sox, Stan Musial with the Cardinals -- played their whole career with just one team. And yes, I am still furious with the Mets for trading Tom Seaver to the Reds for what Ira Gershwin would call "plenty of nuthin," and nearly forty years gone by since that ugly day. Seaver should have worn no other uniform than that of the Mets.

With just three exceptions (Koufax, Drysdale, and rookie pitcher Don Sutton, who was nursing a sore arm), O'Malley insisted that all Dodger players go to Japan for a few weeks of games with Japanese teams following the 1966 season. The players were exhausted and many did not want to go. They had played 162 regular season games plus four in the post-season. Leahy's dry comment: O'Malley "found it hard to imagine why anyone would wish to pass on a chance to see Japan, especially when he was paying each player $4,000 in addition to their travel expenses." Players who rebelled, as Wills did, got traded. So much for management's loyalty to the players who defined the team.

When manager Walt Alston was asked who would pitch the seventh game of the 1965 World Series, Drysdale, whose regular turn it was, or Koufax on two-days' rest, Alston said, "the lefthander." Make of that what you will.

I was also glad to acquire the answer to the question "who moved Burright?" This refers to the calamitous ninth inning of the third playoff game between the Dodgers and Giants in 1962. Had Larry Burright, the team's rookie second baseman, stood at his usual place, the team may have made a double play that would stop the Giants' rally. According to Leahy, it was Leo Durocher, then the team's third base coach, who gave the disastrous signal that moved Burright out of position. But, then, Leahy does't really approve of Leo the Lip ("Nice Guys Finish Last"). In any case it's hypothetical. The Giants won the game and took the Yankees to the ninth inning of game seven of that year's World Series before expiring while Tony Bennett sang the hit of that fall, "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

If Koufax fascinates you, if you're curious about the game in which Giants' pitcher Juan Marichal used a bat to clobber Dodger catcher Johnny Roseboro's head, or if you just want to relive the crucial contests of 1963 and 1965, this is the place to go.

-- David Lehman

 

Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover [by Nin Andrews]

But that’s exactly what I did when I purchased Quan Barry’s poetry collection, Auction. The cover: a transparent blue toilet. How could I resist? It reminded me of how often I have searched for a see-through toilet for my grandchildren. You might laugh, but those toilets used to exist and were ideal for toilet training. The young like to observe their bodily functions.

I loved Barry’s novel, When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East, a mesmerizing, beautifully written read about Buddhism and Mongolia. I expected Auction to be another book on religion and culture. To some extent, that’s an accurate description, although Auction, unlike the novel, feels deeply personal.

Also, because of the cover, I thought the book might include a reference to Martin Luther. I know that might sound odd. But to my mind, a toilet + religion = Martin Luther.  Luther’s toilet (which you can visit in Wittenberg, Germany) has been referred to as “the seat of the Reformation.” It is also the seat of some seriously horrific anti-Semitic writing. Chronically constipated, Luther composed treatises on the lavatory, and he was forever praying for relief. God’s answer to his prayers—a serious case of hemorrhoids.

As a young monk, Luther, perhaps like Barry, struggled with the question: how do we deal with our inherently sinful nature. He drove his confessor nuts by confessing endlessly, never feeling cleansed. While Barry’s poems present a more eastern perspective, they pose similar questions. In her poems, the sacred and the profane are mingled, as are the horrific and the spiritual.

90° AND IT’S STILL SPRING

I paint my nails mint in an attempt to cool myself.
High winds and the Strawberry moon paddle is canceled.
At the all-day retreat at Deer Park, the lama tells us
we must wish that all sentient beings have the tools
to achieve happiness. Bub, look around, I silently think.
We are born of a nature to burn. We have not gone beyond burning.
Behind me, the kid with the prayer wheel like a god with a wheel.

Bernstein's Divertimento (and the maestro sans cigarette)

from "The Fight for the Future of Publishing" [by Alex Perez /The Free Press]

Inside the Book World

from "The Fight for the Future of Publishing" [from The Free Press] by ALEX PEREZ   / November 28, 2023
Ideological fanatics and fear have crippled the major houses. But new book publishers are rising up to take the risks they won’t.

The Old World

The disruption of the so-called Big Five who make up the publishing industry—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and HarperCollins—has been a long time coming. For two decades, their collective revenue, which was $25.7 billion in 2020, has been basically flat. Then, in 2022, that figure declined by 6.5 percent. 

Editors who spoke with The Free Press attributed that drop to people emerging from the Covid lockdowns and socializing more than reading.

But that’s not the whole story.

For years, there has been a growing politicization inside the industry, which editors describe as a slowly percolating illiberalism that makes it difficult to publish books by authors who don’t adhere to the new dogma. Out of fear of losing their jobs and friends, these editors (we spoke with ten across these publishing houses) insisted upon speaking anonymously.

“It’s so much harder to publish controversial books than it was when Judith Regan published Rush Limbaugh back in the day,” said an editor at a major publishing house, referring to Regan’s time as a Simon & Schuster editor in the early nineties, when she acquired a book by the conservative radio host.

The new dogma, industry insiders told me, is two-pronged: books should advance the narrative that people of color are victims of white supremacy; and nonblack and non-Latino authors should avoid characters who are black and Latino—even if their characters toe the officially approved narrative. (White authors who write about black or Latino people oppressed by white people have been accused of exploiting their characters’ trauma.) 

“It began, really, in 2010, 2012,” the award-winning author Lionel Shriver, best known for her novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, told The Free Press. “It’s just been getting worse, and there are a lot of characters or plot turns in my own earlier books that, especially if I didn’t have this pretty solid relationship with a mainstream publisher, would get me into trouble or would be called out, and I’d be told to change them, or if I were just starting out I would be rejected because of them.”

After Woody Allen’s memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing in 2020, it was picked up by independent publisher Arcade—and became a NYT bestseller.

One of the biggest flashpoints in the politicization of the publishing industry arrived in early 2020 with publication of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt.

Cummins’ novel—about a Mexican woman and her son who cross the U.S. border to escape violent cartels—won a seven-figure advance and was hailed by celebrities from Oprah Winfrey to Stephen King. But Cummins, being half-white and half-Puerto Rican, ran into trouble with Latino activists who accused her of appropriating Latino struggle. After protests erupted outside her publisher, the Macmillan imprint Flatiron, Cummins’ national book tour was canceled, and the publisher apologized for how the novel had been marketed. (Despite the controversy, American Dirt went on to sell more than three million copies. Cummins declined to comment for this article, saying she is busy working on her next book.)

At the same time, publishing houses started canceling books by established but “problematic” white male authors including Woody Allen, whose memoir was dropped by Grand Central Publishing, a Hachette imprint, in March 2020.

Then, in late May 2020, George Floyd was murdered. 

In an immediate attempt to appear committed to combating racism, the major publishing houses rushed to hire and promote editors of color. Several editors described the hiring and promotion frenzy of 2020 and 2021 as “excessive” or “obviously political,” and they identified several key diversity hires who alienated longtime editors, agents, and writers.

These included Dana Canedy, who had spent most of her career at The New York Times doing “corporate communications,” according to her LinkedIn profile, before being named publisher of Simon & Schuster’s flagship imprint; Phoebe Robinson, a stand-up comedian who now runs the Penguin imprint Tiny Reparations Books; and Adenike Olanrewaju, who was a publicist at Penguin and The New York Times, where she was also a newsroom contributor, before being named executive editor of HarperCollins. Since joining the house in late 2021, Olanrewaju has secured one deal, according to Publishers Marketplace. 

Neither Robinson nor Olanrewaju replied to requests for comment. Canedy, who left her position in July 2022 after two years at Simon & Schuster, told The Free Press that any claims she was “unqualified” for the job “are cheap shots likely made by an incredibly small number of unnamed sources who do not deserve my energy.” 

Human Resources departments at the Big Five were mostly behind the drive to hire and promote unqualified job applicants without any guidance, an editor at a major publishing house told me. The editor added that it was not uncommon, in late 2020 and 2021, to encounter new editors and editorial assistants who were out of their depth—“young people without previous publishing experience who struggled to write a professional email.”

Someone Who Isn’t Me, by the punk-rock musician Geoff Rickly, was published by Rose Books in July and is now in its fourth printing—a big feat for a first-time novelist and press.

At the same time, the new generation of junior editors and editorial assistants—steeped in the progressive identitarianism of the campus—were making their voices heard inside those companies. 

“Most of the people who we hired were literature majors,” another editor at a major publishing house told The Free Press. “They come in having read a lot more bell hooks and Jacques Derrida than even The Atlantic, not realizing they’re pretty radical.”

After the Black Lives Matter protests of the summer of 2020, many publishing staffers were “like, ‘Ben Shapiro is definitely a Nazi,’ and there was no point in trying to explain to people that Ben Shapiro”—a conservative Jewish commentator—“is definitely not a Nazi,” the editor said. 

Another editor said: “People were scared. People were afraid to lose their jobs. Still are.”

In addition to the new editors, a gradual feminization of publishing has made the industry less adventurous, Lionel Shriver said. “The problem is the editors, almost all of whom are women,” she said. “Women err on the side of trying to please, they tend more to be communitarians and risk averse and therefore, I think, the female takeover of publishing has made it cautious and bland.”

‘A New Generation of Ideological Fanatics’

With the new editors came new books by mostly untested, “diverse” writers whose stories featured characters struggling to overcome the shackles of whiteness or the patriarchy.

These include Rasheed Newson’s My Government Means to Kill Me, which was published in 2022 and has been described by its publisher, Flatiron, as “an exhilarating, fast-paced coming-of-age story” about a gay, black man. 

Nadxieli Nieto, an editor who joined Flatiron in the wake of the American Dirt fiasco, bought the book for $250,000. So far, according to the sales tracker BookScan, it has sold nearly 4,500 copies—not nearly enough to cover the advance. (BookScan, the book industry site from which sales-copy figures come, does not include digital book sales.)

Similarly, in 2022, Flatiron bought Elliot Page’s book—a memoir that revolves around the actor’s gender transition—for more than $3 million. So far, it has sold south of 68,000 copies, according to BookScan.

In 2021, Dial Press, a Random House imprint, bought Lucky Red—described as “a genre-bending queer feminist Western. . . following a young woman’s transformation from forlorn orphan to successful prostitute to revenge-seeking gunfighter”—for more than $500,000. So far, it’s sold about 3,500 copies.

In February, independent publishing house Zibby Books made its debut with Alisha Fernandez Miranda’s memoir My What If Year, which CNN International called the “the next Eat, Pray, Love.”

Then there’s Carolyn Ferrell’s Dear Miss Metropolitan, described by The New York Times as “a story of three young girls, Black and biracial, who are kidnapped and thrown into the basement of a decaying house in Queens.” Ferrell’s book was acquired in a “significant deal” (a.k.a. more than $250K), but has so far sold 3,163 copies since it was published in 2021.

“The rule of thumb,” one editor said about book advances, “is that if you paid $7 per book sold, you paid the right amount.” The editor added: “You can pay $1 million for something and have it be a bestseller and still lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,” even if you sell tens of thousands of books.

All the while, according to some prominent writers and editors, these publishing houses appeared to be discriminating against white male writers. In June 2022, best-selling author James Patterson called the difficulty white male authors were facing “just another form of racism.” After a backlash, he quickly apologized and said: “I absolutely do not believe that racism is practiced against white writers. Please know that I strongly support a diversity of voices being heard—in literature, in Hollywood, everywhere.” But one month later, acclaimed author Joyce Carol Oates made a similar point. In a tweet, she wrote: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested.”

A senior editor at one of the major publishing houses echoed these thoughts, telling The Free Press: “We flat-out decided we weren’t going to look at certain white male authors, because we didn’t want to be seen as acquiring that stuff.” 

When asked whether editors openly acknowledged that they were discriminating against writers because of their skin color, this editor replied: “I don’t think it was worded quite as blatantly as that. It was worded more like, ‘Is this the right time to be championing authors of more traditional backgrounds?’ Often, the language was a bit opaque.”

Adam Bellow, who spent many years at HarperCollins and St. Martin’s Press, a Macmillan imprint, before moving to Post Hill Press, a conservative publishing company in Nashville, acknowledged “generational change” is a fact of life. 

“It just so happens that, in this case, the new generation is a generation of ideological fanatics,” Bellow said.

Hoping It Might Be So [by Nin Andrews]]

There’s something wrong with me.  I think this every year in December. Because I don't like Christmas. To be fair, I don’t like any holidays. No, I like ordinary days, immemorable moments. I love to wake up and think, Nothing special is supposed to happen today.  I like to picture my perfect ordinary day while still lying in bed, the hours lined up like eggs in a carton. Not one of them cracked.

On an ordinary day, I swim. I love swimming. The pool, a chlorinated, pale blue ice cube, is my portal.  I dive in and enter another world . It’s similar to the world I enter when I write or read or meditate, but even quieter. No phones can reach me there. So many poems begin underwater. The only problem, I  need to write them down before I forget. I don't want to start a conversation before I jot down a few notes. 

But even swimmers are chatty around the Christmas holidays--they seem overcome with an urge to wish me happy or merry this or that. It’s all so very merry. What other time of year do we use that word, merry? Why not mix it up a little? Wish someone much jollity—whole bowlfuls of jollity. Wish them mirth.

Mirth is one of those words that doesn’t sound to me like what it means. Sort of like myrrh. The tree resin once commonly used in embalming. And also, as a medicine to cure, among other things, scurvy, hemlock poisoning, and baldness.   

Emerging from the pool, I could use some myrrh. Chlorine, after all, is like a desiccant--it seems to draw the natural fluids from the body. (No, I’m not going to elaborate on that. I’m not going to describe the code brown alert in the pool the other day either). Perhaps a little myrrh would make me appear alive again. I could use some Frankincense, too, which is said to hydrate the skin, reduce inflammation, and, according to my yoga teacher, enhance your mood and cure depression.   

How can I resist?  I just ordered some on Amazon, and it's supposed to arrive before the 25th. I sure hope it works. These dark winter days I am wishing for miracles, big and small. Which reminds me of Thomas Hardy’s Christmas poem, “The Oxen,” in which Hardy imagines going to the barn, or “lonely barton by yonder coomb,” to see the oxen kneel, “hoping it might be so.”  

painting by Richard Diebenkorn

In Favor of Thomas Traherne [by David Lehman]

The blessed babe in a divine Eden is a Romantic trope, but it received a pure exposition long before the age of Blake and Wordsworth. A shoemaker’s son from Hereford, Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) captured the radical wonderment of childhood in his poems. Educated at Oxford (Brasenose College), he published next to nothing in his lifetime, and for many years his poems were casually and mistakenly attributed to Henry Vaughan.

Not until the turn of the twentieth century was Traherne’s authorship of Poems (1903) and the prose Centuries of Meditation (1908) recognized. The latter comprises paragraphs of reflection that may be considered forerunners of the prose poem. Traherne wrote as one for whom angels were real. The child is “heir of the whole world,” able to converse with everything he sees. Clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars, he was born to celebrate creation: “the skies in their magnificence, / The lively, lovely air.”

From Centuries of Meditation:  “Once I remember (I think I was about 4 years old when) I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father's poor house: If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in Goodness: and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of Nature. And if He be infinite in Goodness, and a perfect Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things, and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me, unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then my Soul, or Body; nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas: all those were lost, and absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me, then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise, and rejoice in.”

"Stalin's Holidays" by John Forbes [Thomas Moody]

"Stalin's Holidays" is the title poem of John Forbes' second collection. Happy holidays!

 

 

Stalin's Holidays

 

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Juniper berries bloom in the heat. My heart!
‘Bottoms up, Comrade.’ The nicotine-stained
fingers of our latest defector shake as they
reach for Sholokhov’s Lenin—the verandah is
littered with copies—no, commies, the ones
in comics like ‘Battle Action’ or ‘Sgt Fury
& His Howling Commandos’. Does form follow
function? Well, after lunch we hear a speech.
It’s Stephen Fitzgerald back from ‘Red’ China.
Then, you hear a postie whistle. I hear without
understanding, two members of Wolverhampton
Wanderers pissed out of their brains, trying
to talk Russian. Try reading your telegram—
‘mes vacances sont finies: Stalin’. But we don’t
speak French or play soccer in Australia, our
vocabulary and games are lazier by far. Back
in the USSR, we don’t know how lucky we are.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: December 27, 2023

Earlier this year, Souvenir Spoon Books published Gregg Shapiro’s Refrain in Light.  With its sly nod to the 1980’s album by the Talking Heads, Refrain in Light embraces the historical geography of place, remembering what has come before and celebrating with odes to what is here now. In this Americana road trip of poems you’ll find verse both vintage (a “bicentennial Viewmaster”) and contemporary (“a blue land crab crossing Ocean Drive” in South Beach). Shapiro is a cultural critic and scholar of the heart who asks “whose homeland is this anyway?” In fact, this book is full of questions — What does fire want? What does a tornado want? Must we listen to songs from the Armageddon soundtrack? Read Refrain in Light to find out. It is only "Once in a Lifetime" that a poet like Gregg Shapiro comes around. Here’s a sample poem:

 SoFlo Barbie Rescue

​The worst part about living in South Florida isn’t elder

abuse or vaccine hesitancy, the humidity, or hurricanes.

It’s all the orphaned Barbies, in various stages of undress

and distress, piled like junkyard cars at American Thrift,

Goodwill and Hadassah Resale. Knotted, discolored, and

 

hacked hair, ink-stained skin and Sharpied pubic region,

missing a limb, with a double mastectomy. At least

the queens who shop at Out of the Closet on Wilton Drive

know how to make Barbie feel loved and valued again.

Take her home to mid-century architecture and decor.

 

Bathe her in Calgon, shampoo her damaged locks with

Kerastase Discipline Bain Fluidealiste, massage coconut

oil into her cracking scalp. Apply Lancome Hydra Zen

to her visage. Christian Louboutin Silky Satin Lip Colour

to make her perpetual smirk even more desirable, kissable.

 

Nothing but Chanel Le Vernis tints her finger and toenails.

A diminutive, white gold Rolex Oyster Perpetual Day-Date 36

with diamond-paved dial, diamond-set bezel and a diamond-set

President bracelet wrapped around her slender, tapered wrist.

Tiffany diamond studs for her ears with matching diamond

 

and platinum pendant for her throat. Dressed to the nines;

Stuart Weitzman Cinderella slippers adorn her perfectly

pedicured and arched feet. Only vintage Valentino or Karl

Lagerfeld will do when it comes to her gowns, to be worn on

the red carpet at galas or picking up a few nibblies at Sprouts.

 

 

Three Poets: Elizabeth A. I. Powell, James McCorkle, & Rick Bursky [by Nin Andrews]

Last week I started a series called A Virtual AWP, featuring poets that I would have loved to have met or heard read or lecture, whose books I'd have bought and had signed, had I attended. I felt then as I guess many feel now, that a dark wave was rising up above the planet. But I don't want to talk about that . . .

Instead I want to talk about poets like Elizabeth A. I. Powell whose book, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, was a New Yorker "Books We Love 2016" pick and whose new book, Atomizer, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University in the fall of 2020.  I have already been reading poems from her new collection including this lyrical essay from Plume, and this poem from The Los Angeles Review:

STALKING ME ONOMATOPOETICALLY                      

                                   “He closed my legs like a book,” Angela Carter

 I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic
poem that kept pounding on the door of my mind at four a.m.,
rousing me with a slap on the face with its metaphysics
of sick lust and panic. The order was dated March 1, 2016.
A Thursday. Rainy. The sociopoem smelled of Paco Rabanne—
A Cologne for Men— and was devilishly handsome, so elegant,
so English-lyrically, well-anthologized, and attractive, seemed to have a form
that suggested well-bred content, an understanding of stanzaic
architecture, and deep image. Yet, this poem I loved had once tried
to stab Dorothy Parker at a dinner party. He had claimed
to have French kissed Helen Vender and Allen Ginsberg.
How could I rationalize or reconcile my love for the poem?
The poem tried to kill me, too, with the same red child’s scissors
once,  then another time it was tar and feather, because, the poem said,
“I love you so much.” On therapeutic advice I sought the restraining order
against the poem because it couldn’t contain itself, pushed me
down with a conceit stronger than my fragile couplets, how
it leaked anaphora like anti-freeze, bluish over the page
and into my life uninvited, thinking it knew me
better than I knew myself. The poem’s arguments were convincing,
but it was all fanciful diversion. A lie. All through the day
and all through the night: That poem. The poem telling me I looked fat
in my Lord & Taylor dress. So, I bit the poem’s ear,
again and again, until it bled a scary personification of ears. Stalking
me onomatopoetically down the sidewalk to where I kept my secret
sonnet turns inside. I just wanted to take a nap in Brooklyn,
sleep inside my source material, that pale of settlement,
the origin and end of everything in my family. So that the end
of my suffering might bring an insight, but the poem
turned my nap in Brooklyn into a series of disturbing
and surreal faces that made me awaken into the possibility that
I was the one who was so wrong, so ruined, damaged,
unable to sing. Yet, sometimes, honestly, I loved
what the poem said, when it convinced me of my tyranny.
I wanted to let go. I wanted its untouchable love. I waited for the poem.
The sociopoem’s persona looked like Sir Mick Jagger, wore leather
pants, had biceps, smelled literary and up all night,
like bay rum and old books. The poem had a spell over me,
its incantatory propulsion got into my blood and bile
with its rhythms that made my heart race. It mailed me
threatening letters, collages containing articles about what happens
to women my age, how they die, again and again
alone and withering, like a nasty old tree
from a St. Vincent Millay sonnet taught
in girl’s boarding schools. I wrestled the poem
until it swore to bless me, but it blessed me
in a language that made me feel uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a vowelic yawp. It was a brutal stuttering ich
that made me feel sick, unclean, subway ridden,
which gave the poem a great joy.

Another prize-winning poet I admire and would like to have met is James McCorkle, whose latest book, published by Etruscan Press, is part of Triptych. I think the following excerpt from his poem, "Fire Regime," gives just a hint of what he's up to in this wonderful collection.  

After the warnings, each a measure for the next
an emergency of slowness

is this any worse than before

I am haunted by the thought

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

As language evacuates
its own territories
who is swept along

in the rescue, in the naming
in the columns for those saved, those lost, sold or free.

                            # # #

Finally, I want to mention my friend, Rick Bursky, whose new book, Let's Become a Ghost, is just out from BOA Editions. A surrealist and a truly unique  poet, Bursky is a poet I trust to entertain, inspire, and to take me places I've never been before.

 

I NEVER KNEW MY FATHER COULD PLAY THE HARMONICA

 

I'm sitting with my mother and brother
eating chili at the small dining room table.
My father, dead twenty-six years, wears a black suit,
stands in front of the window playing the harmonica.
There's nothing original about the world,
but we get up each morning and go to work anyway.
A doctor tells us my mother's lungs have weakened.
My father is playing the blues, which I guess
he learned in prison. No one knows who's lonelier:
the ghost or the person who sees the ghost.
Not wanting to embarrass my father I don't look

at the frayed edges of his collar or the hems of his pants.

Last week I forgot to do laundry

and wore the same socks two days in a row.

My brother is first to leave the table,

says something about returning phone calls.

It's rare that we eat dinner together.

Years ago I would have said the light falling

on my father's shoulders made them look like mountains

in the distance with the moon rising behind them;

now I think cardboard theater props.

Sometimes my eyes feel like loaded guns

and I close them for the same reason guns have safeties.

I should be telling this in the past tense

but that would be the beginning of forgetting. 

 

 

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including forthcoming Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her first book of poems, The Republic of Self, was chosen by C.K. Williams as a New Issues First Book Prize winner. 

Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. 

She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. In 2020, she will be Distinguished Visiting Writer at Oregon State University.

 

Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, James McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014). He received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill and the NEA, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

 

Rick Bursky is the author of Let's Become a Ghost Story (BOA Editions, 2020), I’m No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance (BOA Editions, 2015); Death Obscura (Sarabande, 2010); the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize-winning The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), and the chapbook The Invention of Fiction (Hollyridge Press, 2005). He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Originally from New York City, Bursky lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. For more information, please visit rickbursky.com.

 

from the archive; first published in April 2020

Avid Reader: On Bob Gottlieb [by David Lehman]

Did you know that in college Richard Howard was known as Dick Howard? Or that Robert Gottlieb, one of the great names in American book publishing, got his first job (at Simon & Schuster) by writing, when asked to state why he wanted to work in publishing, that he found the task impossible "since it has never occurred to me to be in anything else"? These are among the facts and anecdotes that enliven every page of "Avid Reader," Robert Gottlieb's memoir of a life spent in publishing, which was published in 2016 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux).

Though I feel like this book's ideal reader -- because, like the author, I went to Columbia, spent two post-graduate years in Cambridge (England), and have devoted my life to books -- I can recommend "Avid Reader" to anyone who would understand publishing as a profession and a business in the second half of the twentieth century and since. At S & S, Gottlieb was the wunderkind who revitalized the firm. He published a varied list ranging from William Shirer's monumental "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" to "Calories Don't Count." His great achievement was the publication of "Catch 22" by Joseph Heller, which was originally entitled "Catch 18" but had to be renamed because Leon Uris had come out with "Mila 18" about the Warsaw Ghetto. Gottlieb believes that Heller's "Something Happened," which disappointed the world, is even better than "Catch 22," so I promise to look for it next week at the Strand.

At Knopf, Gottlieb directed the list of the most prestigious (and "literary") of all New York houses, and for five years, he was at the helm of The New Yorker, succeeding William Shawn

If there is a moral to Gottlieb's memoir, it is that "personal conviction" is the most important thing that an editor brings to a book. The editor's job is not just to recognize the quality of the manuscript and to improve it but also to champion it, promote it, to share the good news. This is something that Gottlieb and his colleagues grasped before others did. But the anecdotes beat the morals.

Gottlieb has written on ballet and is co-editor of a volume of American songbook lyrics that I find indispensable. You will enjoy reading about "Dick" Howard, Lionel Trilling (whose generosity to the author was extraordinary),and Andrew Chiappe at Columbia; about F. R. Leavis and the Cambridge theatre scene in the 1950s; about "Mad Men" era New York; and about all the other arts in which Gotttlieb has a cultivated interest. (His favorite things include plastic handbags from the 1950s.) There are a lot of pointers that everyone in publishing ought to have: "Titles and covers can make all the difference." 

I loved learning that Bob Gottlieb liked reading till all hours and couldn't be bothered to attend morning lectures. I feel the same way. This is a sweet book.

from the archive; first posted September 2016

Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets, including Dana Levin, Max Ritvo, Tony Trigilio [by Alan Michael Parker]

When offered a guest appearance on the Best American Poetry blog, I decided not only to write a couple of articles that I’ve been mulling over, but also to celebrate new books of poems coming out this fall. I put out a call via Facebook and Twitter, and had such a strong response I was made to choose among submissions. I did so: I read the galleys and selected eleven poets to interview. (And I apologize to those this feature could not accommodate.) So, on July 2, eleven poets received the following charge:

Please answer five of the questions below. Elaborate upon your replies—that is, please explain your thinking, and explore the examples you’re citing—and nonetheless limit each answer to a paragraph or two. Concise, substantive responses would be preferred.

1. Which of these poems predicts your future?
2. What two moments in the volume, or two images from the poems, would you like your reader to remember most?
3. Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception?
4. Which poem in your book should be read aloud first—that is, not the volume’s first poem?
5. Which two or three poems might compete to be the volume’s singular ars poetica?
6. Which poem in your book arrived mostly whole?
7. What are you doing formally in this book that’s new for you?
8. List five books that mattered to you during the writing of your book.
9. List five events in your life that mattered to you during the writing of your book.
10. Which poem in this book could begin your next book?
11. Which poem in this book scares you the most?

One sad note: as many of you know, the poet Max Ritvo died this summer at the age of twenty-five. We are fortunate to have his poems, and also fortunate that even in his decline he was able to contribute sparkling responses to the interview questions. My condolences to his family and friends.

And in case you’re wondering, Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets took 143 emails.

Now the poets and their answers, a sampling of some of the brilliance we find in poetry today: Elizabeth Colen, Carolina Ebeid, Dana Levin, Max Ritvo, David Rivard, Chris Santiago, Lee Sharkey, Clint Smith, Megan Snyder-Camp, Tony Trigilio, Monica Youn. 

Elizabeth J. Colen is most recently the author of What Weaponry, a novel in prose poems. Other books include poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Lambda Literary Award finalist in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies, flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake, long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition, and fiction collaboration Your Sick. She teaches at Western Washington University.

Carolina Ebeid is a the author of You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior (Noemi Press, Fall 2016). She is a student in the Ph.D. program in creative writing at the University of Denver, and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. She has won fellowships and prizes from CantoMundo, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Stadler Center for Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work appears widely in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, Colorado Review, and more recent work appears in Linebreak, Bennington Review, jubilat, and in the inaugural Ruth Stone House Reader.  

Dana Levin's new book of poetry is Banana Palace, out this October from Copper Canyon Press. A grateful recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim, Whiting, and Rona Jaffe Foundations, Levin serves each fall as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [Photo by Anne Staveley]

Max Ritvo (1990–2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of the chapbook AEONS, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Divedapper, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

David Rivard’s most recent book, Standoff, was published by Graywolf in August. He is the author of five other books: Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Torque, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Among Rivard’s awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, and the NEA, as well as two Shestack Prizes from American Poetry Review and the O.B. Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, in recognition of both his writing and teaching. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the University of New Hampshire, and lives in Cambridge. News & reviews of Standoff can be found at his website: www.davidrivard.net.

 Chris Santiago is the author of TULA, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. His poems, fiction, and criticism have appeared in FIELD, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and the Asian American Literary Review. He holds degrees in creative writing and music from Oberlin College and received his PhD in English from the University of Southern California. The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Mellon Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, Santiago is also a percussionist and amateur jazz pianist. He teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas. He lives in Minnesota.

Lee Sharkey’s Walking Backwards will appear momentarily from Tupelo Press. Her earlier collections comprise Calendars of Fire (Tupelo, 2013), A Darker, Sweeter String (Off the Grid, 2008), and eight other full-length poetry books and chapbooks. Her work has been published in Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, FIELD, Kenyon Review, Nimrod, Pleiades, Seattle Review, and other journals. She is the recipient of the Abraham Sutzkever Centennial Translation Prize, the Maine Arts Commission’s Fellowship in Literary Arts, the RHINO Editor’s Prize, the Shadowgraph Poetry Prize, and Zone 3’s Rainmaker Award in Poetry. A lifelong writer, editor, and teacher, she leads a creative writing workshop for adults recovering from mental illness and serves as Senior Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. [Photo by Al Bersbach]

Clint Smith is a writer and doctoral candidate at Harvard University and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and the National Science Foundation. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and was a speaker at the 2015 TED Conference. His writing has been published or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Guardian, Boston Review, Harvard Educational Review and elsewhere. He is the author of Counting Descent (2016) and was born and raised in New Orleans. More of his work can be found at www.clintsmithiii.com. Counting Descent is available for purchase here.

Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering and The Gunnywolf. Her website is www.snydercamp.com. She lives in Seattle.

Tony Trigilio’s most recent collection of poetry is Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2 (BlazeVOX [books], 2016). He is the editor of the chapbook Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016), a collection of interviews from his poetry podcast Radio Free Albion. His other books include, most recently, White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and, as editor, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta, 2014). He plays in the band Pet Theories and teaches poetry at Columbia College Chicago, where he is Interim Chair of the Creative Writing Department. [Photo by Kevin Nance]

Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which is currently on the longlist for the 2016 National Book Award, Ignatz (Four Way Books 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Barter (Graywolf Press 2003). Her poems have been published in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. She currently teaches at Princeton University and in the Warren Wilson and Sarah Lawrence MFA programs. A former lawyer, she lives in New York.

Part I: Questions 1-5

Question 1: Which of these poems predicts your future?

Carolina Ebeid: The closing poem of the book “M, Marina” predicts a kind of future. In fact, the poem was supposed to be part of the next work. I decided to include it in You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior precisely because it didn't fit perfectly, to my mind. Therefore the book itself doesn’t actually feel shut. Rather, the poem acts as a leading to the next book. In formal ways, “M, Marina” also describes my present. It is written in serial form, made up of short, variegated pieces. While the poem centers around Marina Tsvetaeva, the serial poem is a form open enough to allow many observations into its orbit. Both this poem and “Veronicas of a Matador” function in the same way formally; much of the work I am writing presently relies on the same methods of seriality.  

Dana Levin: “At the End of My Hours,” of course!

But seriously: I don’t think I’d ever survive civilization’s collapse. I’m over fifty, not in apocalypse-withstanding shape, and trained to teach poetry. My only hope would be to convince a rag-tag band of survivors that they needed a shaman bard crone wom­­an.

Max Ritvo: All the ones that predict my imminent death due to Ewing's Sarcoma. I'm pretty sure they're hitting the nail on the head. And by "the head" I mean my head.

Lee Sharkey: Allow me to subvert the question to talk about a dream that led me on a journey. In the early summer of 2011 I woke in the middle of the night hearing the words “Tonight I am walking backwards”; I scribbled them in my journal before falling back to sleep. The sentence had the peculiar quality of utterance that has led me over the years to germinal poems, yet I had no idea what it might refer to. In a month I was to fly to Vilnius for an SLS seminar, an opportunity for me to explore the Jewish history and culture of a city that had witnessed both their heights and their depths, but I made no conscious connection between the trip and the image of walking backwards.

In Vilnius, I lived in the garret of an old building on one of the seven streets that had constituted the Jewish ghetto during the Nazi occupation. Between 1941 and 1943, over 35,000 people were confined there; almost all would die at the hands of their captors, the majority by execution in the nearby killing fields of Ponar. I literally walked in their footsteps as I traveled the cobbled streets and as I climbed four flights of crumbling stairs to a room some number of them had crowded into and tried to sleep. By chance or fate I found myself “walking backwards” into the vexed history I claim as my inheritance. Night by night in that haunted room, in the company of the poetry of the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, I listened to the silence as the poem of walking backwards grew into “In the capital of a small republic.”

Clint Smith: It’s difficult to say which poem predicts my future, but I know which poem speaks to the future I hope to live in: No More Elegies Today. The book, as a whole, is exploring the marathon of cognitive dissonance with regard to coming of age as a young black man in America. How does one reconcile ever-present tension between belonging to a community and family that celebrates them, and a larger world that dehumanizes them? What I want, for all of us, is a world in which that tension no longer exists. A world where the violence dissipates and black children grow up with the humanity left uncompromised, a childhood not shaped by its relationship to violence. As a writer, I think, I have a responsibility to both reflect the world as it is and then imagine the world as it can be. The role of the art is to operate in that imaginative space, to push beyond the boundaries of what we see. The violence black people experience is a part of our reality, but it is not our only reality. We are and always have been more than that which kills us.

Question 2: What two moments in the volume, or two images from the poems, would you like your reader to remember?

Carolina Ebeid: First: one of the sections in “Veronicas of a Matador” with the subtitle “weilian” says:

            With all the books
            I’ve read, my
            shadow makes
            a heavy thing,
            like a desert
            mammal having just
            eaten a creature
            smaller than itself,
            that had been eating
           a creature even smaller.

There are many figures for what the act of reading might be, and this is one.

Second: the title poem takes the image of the Merrill Lynch bull-statue on Wall Street and imagines the autogenesis of bees, a ritual performed on a heifer as described in Virgil’s Georgics, Book IV. The bees are said to be born from the decaying flesh of the animal after following the precise method. In my poem, the bees glisten like coins.          

David Rivard: One would be the final image in the title poem: a hole that’s been chopped in the roof of a house—in an attic room that no one knew existed—through which you can see a great bridge that seems to stretch over a vast expanse of ocean. This long poem funnels down entirely into that dream. A dream that I had over and over again for ten or fifteen years, and that I hope will return some day.
And maybe this, from “Here We Go,” the final poem in the book:

and samurai armor, those dragon scales
humbler than the pants that boys put on
between 5^th grade & 6^th

Simply, I like the kind of connection this image makes. The way it leaps between the worlds of men and boys, the quickness of it, which I like to think of as the product of a certain kind of wit based in perception. I write and read poetry to be surprised—to say something I didn’t know I had in me. For the freshness that carries. To demand that it happen is useless—it either happens or it doesn’t. But you can make yourself available to being surprised, and that practice has always been my favorite as a writer.

Monica Youn: The book has two recurring images—the tree and the trellis—which keep showing up in various guises and states of disrepair. I went fairly old-school with the symbolic motifs. I think of the tree as the totem of a kind of life force, “the force that through the green fuse,” etc. —a life force that can be absurd, or grotesque, or scary depending on its situational context. What’s gripping to me about trees, plants, anything alive is their unthinking determination to remain alive, to grow. It’s a kind of automatic pragmatism. If you cut a tree down, it will sprout from its stump, if you split it, it will try to knit itself back together, if you impose an obstacle, it will grow around and through that obstacle, it will incorporate that obstacle into its own body. Lots of terrible things happen to trees in this book, and there’s a damaged tree anchoring each section—the torn olive tree of “Hangman’s Tree,” the atrophied host tree of “Epiphyte,” the doomed fantasy tree of “Brownacre” and the grafted tree of “Blackacre.” I wanted the these tree images to inform each other, to grow and root through the book and take on their own life independent of any particular poem.

And the trellis—or the rope, or the mast, or the mold, or the yoke or the field—is necessity, the given, the factual, what the life force, the imagination cannot transform. I recently read a parenting book that proposed the French concept of cadre, or frame—of limits, but freedom within those limits. Blackacre is similarly about leeway and limits, about the acre you are allotted and the ways in which you can, and cannot, transform the given.

Question 3: Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception? Which of the following two is your book about: Love, Art, Beauty, Death, God, Self, Ethics, Dreams, Mom, Dad, Ambition, The Body, Loneliness, Friendship, The Natural World, Human Failings, Sensuality, Perception?

Elizabeth Colen: Wow! I see a list like this and I think: all of this, yes. Which is probably a common response. Maybe less ambition, less god and art and dreams, maybe. But those are in everything also. The loneliness of the body, through the lens of our human failings in love, through the death of the natural world, and mom and dad and the failings of perception. If I have to pick two I will say The Body and Loneliness. With everything I’ve done, there is a focus on the body, on the visceral. How perception sanctions action, how we move through the world. How sex and violence enacted physically bleeds in, distorts perception, damages communication and connection. The book retells a falling apart, a disintegration, motivated partly by loss and damage and partly by various forms of exile.

Carolina Ebeid: I adore lists such as the one you’ve made. I want to nod yes to each category. Yes, my book is about Loneliness. Yes, my book is about Human Failings. I was in a workshop in Austin with Mary Ruefle, and by the end of the semester, she wrote a poem naming a thematic “obsession” for each of us in the class according to the work we presented. Mine was “God.” Yes, of course, my book is about God and about the Body. I’m interested in this word “about.” One of Heather McHugh’s poems asks the question, “So what are your poems about,” to which she answers “They’re about / their business, and their father’s business and their / monkey’s uncle, they’re about // how nothing is about, their not / about about.” Yes, my book is about Perception and about The Natural World and about Dad. I feel confident this is true especially when I consider an obscure meaning of the word “about” used to denote a tree that has budded or “abouted.”  

Chris Santiago: Aren’t there only two subjects for poems? I heard Li-Young Lee say that, at least, at a reading; he then went on to argue that there is really only one subject. But if my book is preoccupied with Love and/or Death, it isn’t my death per se, or the death of what I love, although those are both part of it. It starts with filial love, and then looks backward/inward to imagine what died—both of the human and nonhuman worlds—so that my family, and other families in the Philippines and the U.S., could live.

My mother’s father, for example, never made it to the U.S.: he died of a stroke not long after he lost two sons to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. One of these sons was my uncle Flu, who was put in solitary confinement for several years for opposing Marcos; the other was my uncle Virgil, who was smart, well-loved, and musical, and who was killed by Marcos’s secret police at the age of twenty-one. My book digs into these absences, and explores their consequences, and the consequences of being an immigrant’s son.

But the poems also embrace and appropriate the unknown, and the half-known—the few words of Tagalog and Ilonggo that I know, for instance. To me, these syllables are like fragments of urns or maps. I try to use them to elegize the ancestors, the way of life, and the way of speaking that were never really mine, except by blood. Those losses that are specific to my family are broadened out, and traced back to older roots: the Japanese occupation during World War II; the American War and occupation of the Philippines; the long occupation of the Spanish before them; the Islamic, Chinese, and Austronesian histories that shaped the islands before them.

Tony Trigilio: Mom and Death, absolutely. Well, Sons and the Undead, too, I suppose. Dark Shadows (the television show) functions a conduit for my autobiographical writing: some of the book’s most revealing and vulnerable moments, for me, occur when ekphrasis and life-writing collide and the experiment takes me to unexpected and unchartered autobiographical ground.

In many ways, this book is an elegy for my mother, focusing specifically on the daily half-hour time slot we spent in front of the TV during the pre-linguistic and early-linguistic period of my life until I started kindergarten (the same year Dark Shadows was canceled). Barnabas Collins, the vampire of Dark Shadows, was a central figure in nearly all my childhood nightmares. My mother was a huge soap opera fan, and I watched the show with her every day in the first few years of my life. My earliest memories are of watching the show with my mother and then, at night, falling into recurring Barnabas nightmares. I was terrified of Barnabas and I couldn’t look away from him. I fell asleep each night with my shoulders hunched to prevent him from biting my neck.

Death is a major part of the book, too, and not just because the dead can’t seem to stay buried in Dark Shadows. I can trace the origins of this project to the deaths of several close family members from 2001 to 2010, a period of my life which also included an amicable but emotionally painful divorce. I had been trying to write about my Dark Shadows fixation all of my adult life, and these losses somehow triggered this project—the constant presence of death tapped something in me that allowed me, finally, to write about the show’s effect on my life. The book is also an effort to confront, and even court, my own mortality. I still have over 800 episodes of the show to watch—over 800 sentences to write—and I hope I stay alive long enough to finish the project.

Question 4: Which poem in your book should be read aloud first—that is, not the volume’s first poem?

Elizabeth Colen: To me, all poetry should be read aloud. If I start reading a collection out loud and the sounds don’t please, I’m highly unlikely to finish the book. That to me more than anything is what separates / elevates poetry from prose. I know other readers / writers of poems are led by image, or by the movement in logic. I’m moved by those things as well, but always as they are in the service of the sounds.

So, every poem in What Weaponry should ideally be read out loud? But that’s not what you asked, so I’ll try again: A devotee of Stein, I’m attracted to the various methods by which repetition can be utilized—sounds, rhythms, words. Direct repetition of phrase is something I’ve become more attracted to as I settle a bit more into trusting my own craft and process. Two poems that come together midway through What Weaponry and allow heavy usage of repetition of phrase are “The Balance of Terror” and “Hesitation Cut.” I think these two especially happen better out loud.

Parts of “The Balance of Terror” have a fluid movement between internal and external conversation that seems (to me, anyway) particularly heady when read out loud:

“The neighbor came over with a stack of our mail, saying something’s not right with that mailman. You had blank black eyes with that circle of blue; he could see right through you. And me standing in the doorway, saying silently not this time, not this time, eyeing the shotgun leaned against the wall. Bird in the fire and he spied this, saying nothing’s wrong. Not this time.”

“Hesitation Cut” follows and has several instances of repetition, the anaphora (and cataphora) toward the close reads: “I wanted to crack his nose or I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to slice his ear with a penknife or I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to wake him, shaking your father’s rifle at his cock or I wanted to cover his mouth with my mouth and breathe all the boy from him.”

Dana Levin: Gut response: “My Sentence.” I guess it offers prologue for the book. What I am doomed to love, and lose, and how those two drives—to love and to save against time—ignite the making of art. A first hint of what we all stand to lose, or encounter unrecognizable, in the wake of climate change.

David Rivard: “Swerver.” It’s the poem I most enjoy reading aloud myself. I like the way the language is inside the lifetime’s worth of experience that it’s narrating. I remember when I wrote that I felt as if music alone were holding all the disparate moments in this woman’s life together. It’s the music of a “spoken” language, and evidence of the narrator’s thinking and feeling about this woman. I wanted him to sound slightly surprised by what he’s saying, and hoped to get that sort of on-the-spot invention and improvisation into all the poems in the book.

In each of my books I’ve written about a woman I’ve never met, returning to her for reasons not at all clear to me. She has some features of character and biography that are a composite of a number of women I’m close to, it’s true—I’m provoked often to write about her because of something one of them does or says. But she isn’t any of them. I might say that she’s a projection of my anima, if I were a Jungian. I’m not. In these poems, as in “Swerver,” I meet her at different times of her life—some times she’s a child, others quite elderly. In a way, time is the true subject of these poems, its mysteries. That’s true of all the poems in Standoff.

Chris Santiago: “Some Words,” if only because it’s a personal favorite. It’s about having our first child, and how in those first few weeks, time seemed to both stop and to flash by. The poem is also about joy, and this idea that all language is translation; our words can’t help but fall short, especially when we try to use them to describe something as fleeting as joy. But words are still a kind of miracle. And by failing to recreate the “original,” so to speak, we create something new. The original for this poem was the clean sheets/nightbloom scent of our newborn son, especially right at his nape; in failing to contain or transcribe that joy, I ended up with this poem, which I consider a fair trade.

Lee Sharkey: “The City” began as an exercise, an attempt to work with the form David Ferry invented in his “One Two Three Four Five”: a single word is repeated in each line of a five-line poem, first placed at the front of a line and with each succeeding line moving further toward its end. I had been thinking about the vision of the City on the Hill and reading about cities of refuge in ancient Palestine, where those who had committed involuntary manslaughter were protected from punishment for their crimes. It was only when Jeffrey Levine accepted the completed manuscript of Walking Backwards for Tupelo and the press asked me to write a brief description of it that I realized the quest for a city “with water for cleaning and drinking” and “bread to quiet hunger” had become the thread that holds the book together. So, if you’re not wont to read books of poetry from the beginning, do turn to “The City” and read its fifteen lines aloud. I didn’t adhere strictly to David’s form, but the principle of progressive repetition in his model helped me construct a parable that opens the door to the journey.

Question 5: Which two or three poems might compete to be the volume’s singular ars poetica?

Max Ritvo: “The Curve”—this poem is kind of a creation myth in which Humans are not God's True Children, but Language is. We learn human beings are basically a rough draft to be God's incarnation on earth, and He or She learned that His or Her reality is better represented by the shifting, fluxing, self-contradicting, non-solid, neurotic medium of language. And so our human bodies are turned to God's soil, and language His fruit. I've always harbored the suspicion that I exist for the sake of poetry, and that it really doesn't give a lick about me at the end of the day!

“Touching the Floor”—this poem features a vision brought to mind by my sense organs, the miraculous and healing sensation of the marble tiles in my bathroom surging from my palms pressed into the tiles and up into my shoulders, like bulls charging up my arms. The poem then turns to the despair of the mind trying to make this image, The Bulls, last in language, or in memory, and the horrible unsuitableness of our poetry-making faculties, of the Mind itself to do the Body and its wonder's justice. This is my angry ars poetica—it's not a surrender of the Body to the Christ of Poetry so much as it is a wish that Poetry could somehow summon the world with the strength of a Body.

David Rivard: “Flickering,” the earliest poem I wrote for Standoff, could be an ars poetica. It’s totally explicit about the multiplicity that runs throughout the book—that sense that we’re composed of many selves—an amalgam of moods, feelings, guesswork, insights, and experiences. The sum of those selves is an enigma: an enigma that is both powerful and vulnerable. We catch a glimpse of it at odd, unexpected moments. We sense it more than see it: like sitting at a picnic table in a foreign country, and hearing a flock of swans pass overhead in the fog.

The title poem, “Standoff,” addresses the other sensation that runs through the book: that feeling that, while we live intensely in the world and are part of its colors and sounds, we live simultaneously in our heads. There’s something both wonderful and troubling about that to me—we’re searching for something in both places. It’s typical of the book as a whole that the poem flows through these seemingly random, “accidental” moments that have so much indecipherable meaning: some street food in Rome, a wintery night in Boston, news about a drone strike. The mystery takes place at street level. You’re standing on solid ground there, but how did that happen, and who are you really?

from the archive; first posted September 18, 2016

Ben Jonson, "A little winter-love in a dark corner"

 

Waste of Time.—What a deal of cold business doth a man misspend
the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendering visits,
gathering and venting news, following feasts and plays, making
a little winter-love in a dark corner.

-- Ben Jonson, (1572–1637)

 

My college roommate Ben cracked about History, specifically History 3001X , with professor (and ex-Senator) Walter Johnson: "it's a waste of time."  But then, and now,  you could argue that history with anyone is a waste of time -- certainly, for an American with technological know-how who believes in computers and artificial intelligence. Then you think you've found a definition of history: a waste of time. Then you read Ben Jonson, who believes that life itself is largely a waste of time. Then you think of the oceanic whispers, the gusts of wind that announce the changing of the guard, as fall loses its colors and winter arrives in white.  -- from Sal Ramada, "Hilton, Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour." See also Mark Gardner, The Dying Fall.

On Poetry and Miracles [by Nin Andrews]

Tis the season of miracles—Hanukkah, Christmas, Santa Claus. My grandchildren can barely contain themselves. “Grandma,” they ask, “Is Santa really going to come down the chimney?”  One of them suspects that Amazon might be Santa Claus. Or, as she reasons, he might need a little help from UPS.

Of course, it’s not just the young who are in festive moods. My niece just finished her chemo treatments. A fellow swimmer at the Y informed me today that she is finally pregnant after years of failed IVF treatments. Yesterday, when I was eating a sad looking Mediterranean salad at Panera’s, debating whether to risk contracting salmonella when a young man at the next table knelt on the sticky floor beside his table and proposed to a blushing blond in sweat pants. “Yes!” she shouted. “YES!” as he slid the diamond ring on her finger. I clapped and took photos with their iPhones.  

It is also season of record sales, or so I am told at the local book shops. Best-selling books are selling best. My friend who works at the second-hand bookshop says they have no more books about miracles on the shelf, books like The Secret, The Course in Miracles, Think and Grow Rich, Super Attractor and other books about manifesting your dreams. Poetry is selling, too, they assure me. But of course, it’s a small market.

I confess that I, too love miracles, and books on miracles. Recipes for bliss and healing. Books that tell me I only have to do __________, and my life will blossom like the Amaryllis on my window sill.

Mary Oliver, the best-selling, feel-good poet of our time, loved by my yoga teacher, answered this question in “Wild Geese” with the line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”  Is that all?  

I guess it depends on your definition of a miracle. For me it means simply stopping time. (Okay, maybe that’s not so simple.) Writing, meditating, reading—all take me into outside of ordinary time.  And offer a kind of magic. Poetry, in particular,  can seem like a dream manifested, a spiritual gift.

I love what  David Lehman says in Columbia Today on The Joy of Poetry, when he refers to writing poetry as “one of the highest callings.” And:

“Poetry is personal,” says Lehman, reflecting on its diminished role in modern times. “It’s not written to effect social change. It’s written to add to the store of knowledge and to enhance our sense of the beauty of creation. It’s an act of celebration. Sometimes it’s an act of mourning. It’s fundamental to the human heart.”

There are so many books of poetry to celebrate this year. First on my Christmas wish list is Hell I Love Everybody, the Essential James Tate, which Denise Duhamel mentioned in her weekly post. Hell, I love everything Tate wrote. For those who love philosopher poets, there’s Harvey Hix’s Moral Tales.  A short poem from Hix:

E pluribus unum.

We’re like barkeeps provided with various
available bottles (pleasure sweet as honey-made mead,
sober judgment, alcohol-free, clear and bitter
as tonic water . . . ) and charged to mix one perfect drink.

There are also books to look forward to in 2024 including Jessica Jacobs’ unalone and Phil Metres’ Fugitive/Refuge, which appear to have the exact same cover.!?  

I caught a glimpse of an early draft of at Jacobs’ manuscript, and I have read enough to know that unalone promises to be the perfect gift for those of us who are fans of midrash, as is the book, Let There Be Light, the Real Story of Her Creation, by Liana Finck, a graphic novel, which The New Yorker lists as one of the best books of the year.  I love books that reimagine our origin stories.

And I love the fairy tale opening, Once upon a time. Or just Once. Which brings me to the last book I will mention that I am looking forward to: Danny Lawless’s forthcoming collection, [I tell you this now].  A sample poem:

Once

Beautiful, gliding word, although perhaps less a word
than an exhalation; circa 1300
a simple adverbial generative⁠—an f-like s become ce
affixed to the Middle English æne, meaning
“formerly, at one time” per the OED. Nevertheless,
its intent always complex, contextual: sometimes a little wince
in there, a little ache. Desire, too. And wonder.
Once, we begin, our lips puckered, as if for a kiss,
but a kiss that never comes, breathless, forever in the past.

Seven Terrific Anthologies [recommended by David Lehman]

* Louis Untermeyer, A Concise Treasure of American Poetry (Pocket Books). A peerless one-volume introduction to American poetry. Untermeyer's biographical notes and comments are exemplary. See the note on William Cullen Bryant.

* The New American Poetry edited by Donald Allen (Grove Press). In the 1960s battle of the anthologies, Allen’s -- which represented the counter-cultural, adversarial, and avant-garde alternatives to the academic poetry of the time -- won readers’ hearts and minds and gained legitimacy for the Beats, Black Mountain poets, and the New York School.

* The Viking Portable Poets of the English Language, edited by W. H. Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson. This attractive but sadly out-of-print five-volume set is a nostalgic lit major’s dream, covering English poetry from the Medieval and Renaissance periods through the Romantics, Victorians, and Edwardians. Alice Quinn, former poetry editor of The New Yorker, and I compared notes and discovered that both of us go to book sales and snap up a copy of any volume to give as presents.

* Dwight Macdonald's Parodies (Da Capo). This superbly entertaining book contains monuments of merriment by Max Beerbohm, Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, and Lewis Carroll -- as well as an inadvertent self-parody by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Da Capo Press reissued the book with an introduction by Veronica Geng in 1985: “If Parodies were a man, I’d marry it (him, them).”

* Reading Lyrics, ed Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball (Pantheon). Whether you consider them as poems or as occupying a field of their own, the best lyrics of Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Johnny Mercer, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Frank Loesser, Dorothy Fields, Oscar Hammerstein, Gus Kahn, Leo Robin, and many others amount to an American cultural glory full of wit and romance and charm. This is an indispensable book.

* Harvey Shapiro, Poets of World War II (Library of America). The scariest war of the twentieth century produced memorable poems, some well-known (Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"), some little known or under-appreciated, including works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Lincoln Kirstein, Kenneth Koch, and Yvor Winters. This is a very smart anthology edited by the late poet (and former editor of the New York Times Book Review) who flew 35 missions as an Air Force radio gunner in Europe during the war.

* The Oxford Book of American Verse edited by F. O. Matthiessen (1950). Professor Matthiessen's brilliant introduction and sagacious choices made this the American anthology of record in midcentury, and it still holds up. It served me as a constant resource when I edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry in 2006.

Ed. note: A version of this piece appeared in The Week in April 2007.

You choose (part 3)

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: December 20, 2023

 

Earlier this year Ecco/Harper Collins published Hell, I Love Everybody: The Essential James Tate. For fans of Tate, the book is essential!  As a fan myself, I even own Lucky Darryl (a novel Tate co-wrote with Bill Knott in 1997). Edited judiciously by Emily Pettit, Kate Lindroos, and Dara Barrois/Dixon, the book is whittled down to just 52 poems, their reasoning to make an “intimate book.” And it works!  In the foreword, Terrance Hayes lists a delightful account of readers and how they found Tate’s work. And I feel compelled to add my own. As an undergraduate at Emerson College, I found a used copy of his book The Lost Pilot. The title poem is an elegy for Tate’s father—and looking at the birth and death dates made me queasy. I myself was 22 when I first read this poem. Tate’s father, a co-pilot of a fighter B-17, was killed in World War II when Tate was just a baby. I loved the title poem so much—a child creating a father he never knew. Congratulations, editors! And rest in poetry, James Tate.

 

The Lost Pilot

for my father, 1922-1944

 

Your face did not rot

like the others—the co-pilot,   

for example, I saw him

 

yesterday. His face is corn-

mush: his wife and daughter,   

the poor ignorant people, stare

 

as if he will compose soon.

He was more wronged than Job.   

But your face did not rot

 

like the others—it grew dark,

and hard like ebony;

the features progressed in their

 

distinction. If I could cajole

you to come back for an evening,   

down from your compulsive

 

orbiting, I would touch you,   

read your face as Dallas,   

your hoodlum gunner, now,

 

with the blistered eyes, reads   

his braille editions. I would

touch your face as a disinterested

 

scholar touches an original page.   

However frightening, I would   

discover you, and I would not

 

turn you in; I would not make   

you face your wife, or Dallas,   

or the co-pilot, Jim. You

 

could return to your crazy   

orbiting, and I would not try   

to fully understand what

 

it means to you. All I know   

is this: when I see you,   

as I have seen you at least

 

once every year of my life,   

spin across the wilds of the sky   

like a tiny, African god,

 

I feel dead. I feel as if I were   

the residue of a stranger’s life,   

that I should pursue you.

 

My head cocked toward the sky,   

I cannot get off the ground,   

and, you, passing over again,

 

fast, perfect, and unwilling   

to tell me that you are doing   

well, or that it was mistake

 

that placed you in that world,

and me in this; or that misfortune   

placed these worlds in us.