The Best American Poetry

University cancels SONNETS as "products of white Western culture"

Hello, sucker. Thought you were smart to memorize a Shakespeare sonnet? Think again!

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from the London Daily Mirror 15 May 2022

University of Salford cancels SONNETS from writing course because they are 'products of white Western culture' amid push to 'decolonise the curriculum'

• University of Salford chiefs sideline sonnets from their creative writing course
• Second-year students will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment 
• Historian Dr Zareer Masani called the change ‘patronising’ and ‘outrageous’ 

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

PUBLISHED: 17:34 EDT, 15 May 2022 | UPDATED: 03:42 EDT, 17 May 2022

University chiefs have sidelined sonnets from a creative writing course over concerns they are ‘products of white Western culture’.

The poetic form, notably used by Shakespeare, has fallen foul of efforts to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ at the University of Salford.

Following a drive to make the course more diverse, second-year students at the university will no longer have to write sonnets for their assessment. 

Dr Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing course at Salford, said students would still be required to undertake exercises in composing sonnets.

Acclaimed examples include Percy Bysshe Shelley’s "Ozymandias" which includes the line: ‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

>>>

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10819139/University-cancels-sonnets-concerns-products-white-Western-culture.html

Sonnet 29

 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 

While it may be obvious to some professors that Shakespeare's sonnet 29 is not only the proiductf of white Western culture but also an act of "colonization," I, a former English major in the king's own regiment, don't understand the logic.  Bragging rights go to anyone who, in the comments field, can explain the reasoning to me. --  DL

"The Mysterious Romance of Murder": "Noir is the paradise of the damned. . ."

On Saturday May 14th The American Scholar posted my essay "The Last Cigarette," adapted from a chapter in my new book, THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER. Here's an excerpt -- and a link. --DL

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In the first sentence of Too Many Cooks (1938), Rex Stout’s narrator, Archie Goodwin, says that he “lit a cigarette with the feeling that after it had calmed my nerves a little, I would be prepared to submit bids for a contract to move the Pyramid of Cheops from Egypt to the top of the Empire State Building with my bare hands, in a swimming-suit.” That’s quite a lift to be gotten from a smoke.

Leave aside the rush of nicotine. Forget the ritual of opening a pack of unfiltered Luckies, Camels, Chesterfields, Pall Malls, tamping them down, pulling one out, lighting it, discarding the match, taking the first, satisfying long drag. Cigarettes are the greatest prop of all time: puffing, taking in the smoke, drawing in a deep lungful and slowly expelling it, holding the cigarette between your index and middle fingers, motioning with that hand to underscore a point.

“Cigarettes are sublime,” Richard Klein asserts in a book he wrote to console himself when trying to quit smoking.^[1] Sublime, maybe; sexy, for sure. “Cigarettes had to go,” the poet and noir connoisseur Suzanne Lummis concedes. “But the cinema lost a language. Aside from the smoking, the lighting of the cigarette could be handled so many ways with such different effects. Richard Conte, Robert Mitchum, all those guys—in two smooth gestures they’ll slide out that silver lighter and make the flame leap up, and we get the message—this is what unflappable cool looks like, virile confidence.”

There is the cigarette of loneliness, the  cigarette of desperation: Jean Gabin holed up in his attic room, chain-smoking his last Gauloises, as the police close in on him in Le Jour se lève. There is the cigarette of heartbreak, the chain of cigarettes that won’t help you “forget her, or the way that you love her,” with all the force Sinatra can put into the singular female pronoun in “Learnin’ the Blues.” And there is the cigarette of intense nervousness, jeopardy, and fear smoked by Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, stunning in black cap and veil with black dots. When with a shaky hand Dunaway lights up, Jack Nicholson points out that she already has a cigarette going, and says: “Does my talking about your father make you nervous?”

Lighting somebody’s cigarette is a powerful gesture, suggesting intimacy or the desire for the same. “If you’re going to smoke, you gotta learn to carry matches,” Dix (Sterling Hayden) says when he lights up Doll (Jean Hagen) in The Asphalt Jungle. Aldo Ray does it for Anne Bancroft at the bar in Jacques Tourneur’s Nightfall, and Glenn Ford performs the gallantry for Gloria Grahame in Fritz Lang’s Human Desire. When Lana Turner falters trying to light her cigarette, John Garfield does the honors, foreshadowing the adultery and murder in The Postman Always Rings Twice. The movie producer played by Kirk Douglas teaches the self-same Lana Turner how to smoke sexily in The Bad and the Beautiful, while Dick Powell has the flame Claire Trevor needs in Murder, My Sweet.

In her discussion of smoking, Suzanne Lummis also cites In a Lonely Place. Dix Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) sit at a piano with other couples, listening to the silky-smooth rendition of the lounge singer, vocalist and pianist Hadda Brooks: I was a lonely one, till you. “He lights a cigarette for her, and she takes it in her mouth, such an intimate gesture,” Loomis writes. “He whispers to her. They are so in love. And it will never be that good again. Nothing is going to be that good again, for either of them. If these characters had lives beyond the credits at the end, we know that each on their dying bed looked back and thought, ‘that’s what happiness felt like.’ And because someone who unsettles their composure enters the club, that happiness didn’t even last the length of the song. That’s noir.”

There is the cigarette of combat: According to Roger Ebert, Out of the Past (1947) is “the greatest cigarette-smoking movie of all time.” Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas wage war by cigarette proxy. “The trick, as demonstrated by [director] Jacques Tourneur and his cameraman, Nicholas Musuraca,” Ebert writes, “is to throw a lot of light into the empty space where the characters are going to exhale. When they do, they produce great white clouds of smoke, which express their moods, their personalities and their energy levels. There were guns in Out of the Past, but the real hostility came when Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoked at each other.”^[3]

The cigarette as a prize: In The Snake Pit (1948), a so-called “problem picture” dramatizing the plight of the mentally ill, Dr. Kik (Leo Genn) wants to reward Virginia Stuart Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) for the progress she has made. On the wall, a framed photograph of a severe Sigmund Freud looks on as the doctor kindly says, “What about a cigarette now?”

The romantic cigarette, in defeat: On television in the late ’50s, Sinatra in fedora and raincoat, with a cigarette in his hand, takes his seat at the bar. It’s nearly three in the morning, and he begins to sing “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” with only Bill Miller’s piano accompaniment. There’s a glass, an ashtray, and an open pack of smokes on the bar. Joe the bartender pours whiskey into the glass when the singer tells him to “set ‘em up,” and Sinatra strikes a match, keeps it lit, stares at the flame, while telling his new pal Joe that tonight he is drinking “to the end of a brief episode.” Only then does he bring the flame to the cigarette and take a puff. He keeps the cigarette between fingers, or taps the ashes into the tray, and holds the glass of whiskey while singing. The song as written ends with “the long, long road,” but Sinatra never reaches the period at the end of the line. After “the long,” he pauses, takes a drag of his cigarette, repeats “the long,” and lets the music drift off like smoke.

The cigarette of melancholia: A triptych of Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd—World War II army buddies who reunite 10 years later and realize that they loathe themselves and one another—shows the guys smoking and singing “Once I had a dream, what a joke / Gone is that dream, up in smoke” in It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), the most underrated of the Kelly and Stanley Donen movie musicals, with wonderful lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The macho cigarette, cool under pressure: In The Godfather (1972), Michael Corleone is standing in front of the hospital where his wounded father lies unprotected. Enzo, the baker, has chosen this moment to visit with flowers, and Michael enlists him to help stand guard. The two men are to stand there, impersonating gun men, in an effort to deter the hit men driving by. Enzo, understandably nervous, needs a cigarette. Hand goes to pocket, pulls out cigarette. But his hands shake, he can’t work his lighter. Michael calmly takes the Zippo and lights him up. The ruse works. Michael has displayed initiative and imagination, and the signature of that moment is his icy demeanor when firing up Enzo’s lighter. By contrast, the unfiltered Camel that Michael smokes at the end of The Godfather II (1974) is a mark of his aloneness. The cigarette is his only friend as he sits and broods on the end of an ethic, a family, a film.

The royalty of cigarette smokers are Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. The Big Sleep (1946) ends with the two of them in a car. She “guesses” that she’s in love with him, and he “guesses” that he’s in love with her. Says he: “What’s wrong with you?” She: “Nothing you can’t fix.” And next to the words THE END, there is an ashtray with two smoldering cigarettes in it.

Ah, cigarettes. What a wonderful prop. So sexy! Too bad they cause cancer.
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https://theamericanscholar.org/the-last-cigarette/

Today is the official publication date of THE MYSTERIOUS ROMANCE OF MURDER: CRIME, DETECTION, AND THE SPIRIT OF NOIR. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes:

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David Lehman’s “The Mysterious Romance of Murder” surveys “crime, detection and the Spirit of the Noir” in fiction, film, poetry and music. As one might expect from this distinguished poet and versatile man of letters, his sprightly new book isn’t just deeply knowledgeable, it’s also a lot of fun. >>>

-- Washington Post, May 5, 2022

It's not in my book, but I just remembered that James Merrill once told me that he thought smoking was "a form of suicidal yoga."

"Rasa" by Joanne Dominique Dwyer hits the stands!

From Rasa by Joanne Dominique Dwyer, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. It's terrific!

Chaperone

To keep watch. Not my indigo eye on the ball
nor in the blacklight peephole.
Not on the blisters dappling my feet.
Nor on the beauty or the ugly in the mirror.
But on the children in the playground and on the fur-matted squirrels.
From a wooden tower, the running herds.
From the leaning alabaster lighthouse, a one-armed mermaid
out-swimming the divers, with tanks on their backs –
chasing her, like erasers of magic.
Eye on the bird, that its head does not hit glass.
On the sky, for the sun’s second coming, though she
might have been inebriated when she swore to return.
My small room smelling like canned tuna fish in oil.
My dry cough keeping both of us awake.
Chaperone: The supervision of vulnerable women in public spaces.
A shepherd is a chaperone.
Neruda asking What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?
Derived from the French word for a hood or a cape.
Covering the eyes of a prisoner.
And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue.
I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue.
And someone did come and grab my wrists.

Ars Poetica of “Chaperone” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer

       The conception of the poem Chaperone was hatched from the word itself. I am enamored with the geneses and meanings of words. In the act of making poems, I often find myself going down the yellow brick roads and the snow-covered paths of etymology. A treasure hunt that feeds my propensity for leaping imagistic associations in my poems.

       The existence of oral and written language is proof enough for me that life, in all its marvels and mysteries, is worthy of digging one’s heart and heels into. And so goes the poet, heave-ho, not deterred by the glob of purple Jell-O or virescent leek aioli on her chin, into the fecund snake pit, into the scalding sea of lava, into the sunbaked salt flats of the imagination with only a canteen of water and a quill. And what gets pulled out of the hat of the poet’s mind is sometimes preordained through careful plodding and other times is an unexpected dinner guest. And on rare occasions a bedfellow or a take-to-the-grave beacon of light.

       What excites me about Chaperone is that sans a premeditated intention or conceit, other than exploring its etymology, the poem, without forced entry, unveils a communiqué. It’s as if the poet gets out of the way and the poem writes itself. The poem is no longer mine. I do not possess it; it possesses me.

       And what uncoils is a suggested hierarchy of what to keep our eyes on, what to care for and be custodial towards, and what not to. The poem advises us not be concerned with the mundane, the lurid, or the beauty and the ugly of our individual bodies. Instead, to focus on beings with less agency, like children and animals. A one-armed mermaid and an anthropomorphized sun extends the girth of the poem into the mythic – an area of great psychic and cultural importance. Asking for custodial attention there as well, less there be an extinction of the mythological as well as the natural world.

       The poem drops in register with two confessional lines about the ordinary and faulted life of the speaker – her cough and her room smelling like tuna. From there, several imagistic pit stops or fueling stations caravan in a powerful line from Neruda’s “Book of Questions.” Pablo becomes a guest star.

       The poem culminates in narrative – at first global or collective: And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue. Then ends with the autobiographical singular: I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue. /And someone did come and grab my wrists.

       The unexpected surfacing of the mud memory, in the act of writing Chaperone, was a raptured surprise.

Kristina Marie Darling Guest Author May 16-20

This week we welcome back Kristina Marie Darling as our guest author. Kristina is the author of thirty-six books, which include Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come:  Selected Poems 2014 - 2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Writing, newly available from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which was just launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada has also published a Canadian edition.  

An expert consultant with the U.S. Fulbright Commission, Dr. Darling’s work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; seven residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she has also served as an ambassador for recruitment; grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and Harvard University’s Kittredge Fund; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; an artist-in-residence position at the Florence School of Fine Arts; an appointment at Scuola Internazionale de Grafica in Venice; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors. Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly.  Beginning in the fall of 2022, she will also serve as Publisher-in-Residence at the American University in Rome. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she currently divides her time between the United States and Europe.  Find out more about Kristina here. 

Welcome back, Kristina. 

--sdl

Sudeep Sen introduces Sarah Arvio, Rachel Eliza Griffiths,Vidyan Ravinthiran. . .

For "Plume," Another Feather in the Cap

The new issue of Plume is out. Edited by the admirably imaginative Danny Lawless, issue #129 (May 2022) contains work by D. Nurkse,  Tomasz Różyck, Susan Aizenberg, Bill Stratton, Jeffrey Skinner, Cartol Muske-Dukes, Lauren Camp, and, well, why don't we just copy the TOC below the picture? I recommend the section "Poets and Translators Speak," in which the writers comment on their work. 

 Ephrem Solomon
Folk Memory 3, Woodcut and mixed media, 2015

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022

Poems

 D. Nurkse Poetry: A Mirror, a Pencil and an Envelope. Seven Minutes with D. Nurkse and Nancy Mitchell

Lauren Camp Small Scenes without Apology

Danielle Blau (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

David Lehman Three Poems from a Work in Progress

 Antonio Gamoneda Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022) translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Jeffrey Skinner Four From Delos

Mark DeCarteret Lives of the Postmodern Poets

Susan Aizenberg Forced March

 Tomasz Różycki Two poems by Tomasz Różycki translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Zoë Ryder White Close to now

Christopher Howell Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

Carol Muske-Dukes Spam Risk

Bill Stratton What Almost Killed You

Alejandro Escudé My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

The Poets and Translators Speak
Rosenthal, Stratton, Aizenberg, et. al.

Book Review
distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

Featured Selection
 A Travel Guide for the Exiled; An Interview with Zein El-Amine, by Leeya Mehta

Essays and Comment
A Kind of Sorcery: On Shame, Defiance and Moral Imagination by Richard Hoffman

Lauren Hilger, Guest Author May 8-12

This week we welcome Lauren Hilger as our guest author. Lauren is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016) and Morality Play (Poetry NW Editions, Summer 2022). Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens. For more about Lauren Hilger, visit her website here.  Follow her on social media: Twitter: @lauren_hilger  Insta: @lauren.hilger    

Read poems by Lauren Hilger here: 

Jersey Shore, Sixth Finch

Greenery, Chicago Review

 

Welcome, Lauren.  Sdl

Adrian Matejka Named POETRY Magazine's New Editor

Adrian Matejka has been named editor of POETRY magazine. Born in Nuremberg, Germany, Matejka grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and was named Poet Laureate of Indiana for 2018–19

 Here's the official announcement: 

Back in 2014, we posted Erin Belieu's conversation with Adrian:

Interviews with Poets--Day 3--Adrian Matejka (by Erin Belieu)

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

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EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

from the archive; first posted September 10, 2014

So this is turning out to be the most fun ever. How do I get my own radio show? If I got to spend my days just asking people I like ridiculous questions I could die perfectly happy.

 Speaking of people I like immensely, today we have Adrian Matejka. Adrian is a newer friend. I met him along with his wife, the poet Stacey Lynn Brown (more about her tomorrow), last year at the Miami Book Festival. Do you ever meet people and have that HUGELY affectionate reaction to them in seconds? I developed a crush on both of them equally and instantaneously.

 We were trapped with a motley collection of wet poets in a semi-busted restaurant (Miami’s twice-daily monsoon having driven us inside indiscriminately), and I started having that awkward, “introvert trapped in an extrovert’s body” reaction I have that rarely goes well for me socially.

 But some part of my mind was also paying attention to who Adrian Matejka actually is. Having been in the po bidness a long time, I find it very revealing to watch how poets react to suddenly being anointed the Baskin Robbins flavor of the year. Because poetry, as Hayden Carruth once said to me, is a looooong distance race.

 At that time, I knew Adrian’s most recent book, The Big Smoke, which had most well deservedly caused an admiring ruckus in the poetry universe. The Big Smoke, focusing on the life of the boxer Jack Johnson, is indeed a first class book, with The Boston Globe declaring that Adrian’s poems illuminate the heavyweight champion’s life “so boldly” that “one almost wants to duck.” The previous evening Adrian had been one of the featured readers for the book festival which meant being in some fancy company, and there was sunshine aplenty available to him in the flattery being dished up hot by his throng of admirers.    

 Which is to say, sitting at the dinner, I wasn’t going to be caught off guard if Adrian turned out to be full of beans. Even the best of us can end up accidentally drinking our own Kool Aid when the shots are free.

 But I am happy to report that Adrian, besides being a crazy gifted writer, is an entirely bean-free human being!

 This is not a man who has any interest in having the UV rays blown up his backside. Adrian is open, funny, smart, down-to-earth, interesting and most importantly, interested. I left the dinner dearly wishing we lived nearer each other.

Here’s what we talked about yesterday. Matejka's lines are bold:

************************************************************************************

EB: The titles of your three excellent poetry collections, Mixology, The Devil’s Garden, and The Big Smoke, suggest you are a person with a large number of vices. Do you drink and smoke a lot? Do you recommend this to other writers looking to improve their poetry practice? It seems like it’s worked well for you.

Also, as self-proclaimed mixologist, please share with us your favorite cocktail recipe. We’re counting on your expertise. 

AM: What's sad about this is I never realized I was putting my business on the street through my titles! Yes. I used to drink and smoke with vigor and sometimes it was attached to writing. But mostly it was attached to playing pool or avoiding writing, which are both sometimes more enjoyable than the act of writing can be. 

 I was a bartender for a while, too, back in the 90s when you could still fog up public places with secondhand smoke. I started questioning all of my behavior when I was at work one day and there was an old timer sitting at the bar, eating a salad with French dressing, and he would take a drag off of his cigarette between bites of iceberg lettuce. It was an intricate study in vice. 

 I'm going to admit now that I was a terrible bartender. I couldn't make anything past a Tom Collins. At the bar where I worked, it was more likely that a fight would break out than someone would order anything more complex than a Long Island Iced Tea. And I could pour a mean Miller Lite. 

 The crazy thing is I wasn't even thinking about mixing drinks when I titled Mixology. It was one of those great moments in the echo chamber of my own cracked-outness. I was thinking of the art of DJing and the art of being of mixed races—there should be a degree conferred for making it through these things. I thought I had come up with something revolutionary until I did a title check online and found all of pages of cocktail recipe books. That's when those sad trombones played and I made myself a drink. 

 So I don't have a good recipe, but Stacey does. She makes a malicious mojito. You should ask her about it. 

EB: Ah yes, fighting. Good segue. In this trilogy of debauchery you’ve created, the most recent book The Big Smoke, which was nominated for (insert all major prizes, including the Pillsbury Bake Off and Fields Medal for mathematics), centers on the life of the heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. 

 Beyond your innate licentiousness, Adrian, what attracted you to Johnson’s story very particularly? And more importantly, why not a UFC fighter? Wouldn’t that be more relevant to kids these days? Do you see yourself doing a sequence of poems in the voice of Tito Ortiz or Fedor Emelianenko?

AM: First, thanks for the kind words. It's been a wild ride for this book, to say the least. Jack Johnson is such a compelling figure for me because he is different from me in almost every way other than the gambling and carousing. That most definitely includes his fight game. 

 I'm a complete lightweight when it comes to brawling in the real world. I lost a fight in 3rd grade when this guy punched me in the nose. I was standing in the pocket, wailing away. I was a boxing fan back then, too, so I was talking trash while I was punching him. But as soon as he hit me in the nose, I was like, "It's cool. You win." Other than a few bar scuffles, I haven't been beyond posturing and pushing since then. So the opportunity to study Jack Johnson became an opportunity to explore a kind of courage—or maybe, just an absence of fear—that I haven't had since I was a kid. 

 Boxing is an action that's more like dancing than hand-to-hand combat. MMA is the opposite of that for me. The beauty in the motions leading up to and following the punches in boxing is largely absent in MMA because the dimensions of the fights are different. All of the contact in boxing happens vertically and above the waist, so there's a premium put on maximizing range and motion from the waist up when throwing punches. MMA allows for all dimensions, so fighters get arm barred on the mat and things like that. The action is horizontal and vertical. 

 You are right that most American audiences are more interested in MMA, especially since there are so few American title-holders in boxing. But what's missing—at least from a poetry standpoint—is history. Boxing is ingrained in all of our histories, regardless of nationality, race, or culture. It was on once someone figured out a fist could be as much of a weapon as a rock. Can you imagine what the first person to take an uppercut must have felt like? It was probably like that scene from Friday with Debo.  Now that I think about it, the guy who punched me in the nose in 3rd grade was about the same size as Debo. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that you've been in some brawls, Erin. When was the last time you got in a fight? Have you ever written about that experience? 

EB:  Yeah, I took a decent uppercut in 8th grade. Before that, I was identified as a jock and was taller than most kids for a brief, shining moment in grade school. I was never required to prove myself much on the playground. The tough girls frequently considered punching me for my smart mouth, but they weren’t certain that I couldn't handle myself. 

 Then one day getting off the bus in junior high, a girl named Marcia--who I discovered 20 years later was angry at me because she had a closeted lesbian crush on my best friend Teri--picked up my trombone case and clocked me upside the jaw with it.

 Talk about injury to the insult of playing trombone for 7 years. But I look back on it now and feel terrible for her. That must have really sucked for her, being in love with Teri and not feeling she could tell anyone. I hold no grudges.

 But I am glad you’re leaving the MMA to me as I have my heart set on writing poems from the point-of-view of Aleks Emelianenko's brilliantly awful tattoo; you know, the giant one on his back where the Grim Reaper is cuddling a baby? Very promising, I think.

 This conversation reminds me of the homosexual panic often visited upon straight guys watching MMA fights, which makes me think of the heterosexual panic visited upon straight male poets when considering the idea of dating a female poet. You, on the other hand, are married to a beautiful woman (the aforementioned Stacey Lynn Brown) who’s also a terrific poet. 

 Don’t you worry that she’s stealing all the poetry juju out of your house? How do you guys negotiate the unavoidable dark energy of competition when making art right next to one another?

Photo (c) Robby Campbell from Beached Miami

AM: Aleks Emelianenko's tattoo is straight out of Sons of Anarchy, so that makes me happy. You should definitely write that persona poem. Especially since Emelianenko is 6'6, which would make his tattoo the size of a small child. Make it happen! 

 I'm sorry to hear about the trombone to the face, though. It's not like those cases are light to begin with. I'm going to say it: playing trombone is pretty awkward in most ways unless you're J.J. Johnson or someone like that.

 Of course, I played the French horn and that's a whole other level of band-geekdom. At least the trombone has an occasional solo. The French horn just makes those long honking sounds in the background. And there's the matter of how you have to mute the thing. I used to get cracked on all the time about that. By trombone players, no less. That's one of the reasons writing is so great—there's no one there to see what you have to do to mute things. 

 Way back when I was in workshop, my friends and I had two rules: don't date anyone in workshop and don't date a memoirist. We didn't have a contingency for hanging out with a poet from another place. We were very regional. When Stacey and I got together, I knew we would get along socially, but I wasn't sure how things would work in relation to writing. We had very different introductions to and educations in poetry. We're the same age, but she was in graduate school while I was on the five-year plan in undergrad and then I took 3 years off before graduate school. So by the time we met, she had been thinking about poetry in a very complex and imaginative way while I was just figuring out what I wanted a poem to be. 

 I've benefited from her sophistication over the years, though I'm not so sure I have been all that helpful to her. I generally stay on my poetic grind—always writing even when most of the verse is terrible—while Stacey has a more metaphysical approach to the text. The two approaches don't often line up and I think that is one of the reasons things have worked well for us. Also, we have different aesthetic needs and different poetic neurosis. Which helps us to look for poems in different places, I think. 

 The one time there was overlap happened back when we lived in Oregon. Stacey went into a KFC to get something to drink while I waited in the car. The next thing you know, KRS-One was in the drive through, ordering a bucket of extra crispy and 8 biscuits. I heard him through the loudspeaker of the drive through before I saw him. He was in this green van with gold 5-star rims. Stacey was bugging out when she back to the car and the first thing she said after confirming it was KRS-One was something to the effect of "I call this for a poem." What? Now, this is when I was working on Mixology, which is full of hip hop culture. In my mind, seeing KRS-One at the KFC was a natural fit for my project. She called it, though, so I was out of luck. 

 I can't be the only person something like this has happened to, though. Have you ever had a squatter's rights conflict with someone over a poem subject? 

EB:  Dude, pretty boy bikers would pee their pants if confronted by the raw magnificence of baby-holding Grim Reaper. That’s some real deal, Russian prison artwork he’s sporting, after doing a stretch for armed robbery. IN RUSSIA.

Also, don’t try and sell me on the equality of the French horn’s dorkiness. My older brother played French horn specifically to avoid having the family spit valve passed down to him.

 Second also, yes, my partner Adam has recently starting stealing poems out of the house again. He’d been writing prose for a while, but recently turned back to the superior genre. I’m very careful not to point out anything good that he might swipe. He’s ruthless. No moral compass whatsoever. 

 Final question: don’t think too hard, but give me three books that are helpful to an emerging poet. Or three movies. Or three albums (do albums still exist?).

AM: Someplace in Russia, the man who inked Emelianenko's back tattoo is nodding along with you. The guy who plays Jax Teller is nodding, too. 

 Erin, that's a brutal question to end with. How about 1 of each? 

 1) Lunch Poems, Frank O'Hara. Every beginning poet should read the gorgeous book that's been imitated more often in the past 10 years than any other collection.

 2) Ghost Dog, Jim Jarmusch. An African American samurai who reads Mary Shelley? Old mobsters talking about Flava Flav and rapping “Cold Lampin’”?  Jarmusch shows anything is possible in film and in poetry if you get after it. 

 3) Maggot Brain, Funkadelic. It’s impossible to look at the world or language the same after listening to Eddie Hazel on the title track.

EB: Perfect! And two out of those three would have been serious contenders for my list, too (Lunch Poems and Maggot Brain). I don’t know that Jarmusch film but intend to Netflix it this evening.

 Thank you so much, Adrian Matejka, for this very edifying conversation.

My goal is to get you and Stacey down to Tallahassee to eat wings at my place while we watch a UFC fight. I used to watch them at Hooters with my friend Jared, but I felt like the co director of VIDA hanging out at Hooters sends the wrong message (though they really do have decent wings and the best televisions).

Bascove's Art and Barbara Griffel's Fashion Illustrations in the new "Stay Thirsty"

The new issue of STAY THIRSTY (volume 113) features Bascove's paintings (you'll find examples below), Jerome Charyn on "The Golden Age of Hollywood," the truly terrific fashion illustrations of Barbara Griffel (the third image below), a joint interview with Jean Hanff Korelitz and Paul Muldoon, and much else worthy of your attention. -- DL

Logo Design for Amy's Formals by Barbara Griffel

 

Denise Duhamel’s "Kinky" turns 25! [by Stacey Lehman]

Barbie and Ken,1960

And Limp Wrist magazine is celebrating with a special two-part issue. I'm on board! I love Denise's Barbie inspired book of poems and if you haven't read it, you owe yourself that pleasure. For a taste, I give you these lines, from Sensational Barbie:

        When Barbie was under
anesthesia, her whole body
replaced with smooth plastic,
she swore she heard her doctors
telling smutty jokes.
When the surgeons sliced off her nipples
to put in the silicone implants
they decided to leave the milk-outlets off
because, after this, the nerve endings
would be dead and Barbie
wouldn't be able to feel
anything anyway....

            from Sensational Barbie, by Denise Duhamel

Here's an excerpt from Dustin Brookshire's editor's letter to Limp Wrist's readers along with two poems from this landmark issue, selected by Kinky's author Denise Duhamel:

Anyone that knows me knows I’m the super fan of two Ds—Dolly and Denise.  I discovered and fell in love with poetry through the work of Anne Sexton, but it is the poetry of Denise Duhamel that showed me I could write the type of poems that I wanted to write. While a few high school teachers encouraged me to write poems, they taught that pop culture references don’t have a place in poetry. Denise, a queen of pop culture references, taught me otherwise. . . 
Kinky is the book I recommend that shows poetry can be about anything.  It’s the book I pull from when people tell me that they don't like poetry. It’s the book that (actually!) taught me something about the “Dolly rumor mill”—thanks “Barbie in Therapy, Part II” for enlightening me about the rumor that Dolly is a lesbian.  It’s a book that I keep a backup copy of in case my original is damaged beyond use. Kinky is a book that I turn to again and again, and it never ceases to entertain and inspire me. . .
Kinky turns 25 today, and this milestone birthday has inspired this special issue of Limp Wrist.  When I realized that the publication date of Kinky and Barbie’s birthday are only separated by eight days, I knew the universe was signaling that this special issue had to be created.  I’ll be forever appreciative that Denise immediately agreed when I asked if she would co-edit this issue.

Here are two poems from the Limp Wrist Kinky issue, chosen by Denise Duhamel:

In Defense of My Mother Who Never Bought Me a Barbie Dreamhouse

            by Caridad Moro-Gronlier 

I was too young to understand
just how young my mother was
when she worked the nightshift
at TRW, building spacecrafts
with her hands, too young to know
how it felt to hand over the whole
of her check to my father
who gave her an allowance—
ten dollars after 40 hours,
ten dollars he’d drop into her palm
every pay day.

I understood Barbie called the shots.
That Dreamhouse was hers, Ken,
an accessory sans the authority
to tell her what to do.

I wrote thirty-one letters
to Santa that year,
but he wasn’t in charge.

My father was.

I thought I stood a chance
because Mami loved Barbie’s
mid-century mod A frame too,
how the chalet gleamed up at us
from the slick pages of the Sears catalog,
the wonder of real jalousie windows
and wall-to-wall carpets unfurled
on the kitchen table where she calculated
just how long she’d have
to lay that chalet away,
just how much she’d have to beg
to convince my father to pay.
I watched her turn the page,
no dogear to save her place.

I’d like to say I was happy
with the Barbie Dream Plane
she placed under the tree, but I blamed her.
It would take years to understand
she didn’t want me to dream of staying put,
she wanted me to dream of flying away.

Abused Barbie
            by Dorianne Laux

Always wears long sleeves, scarves
to disguise her long neck, leggings
even in summer.  She flinches
when anyone raises a posable arm,
shoves an opposable thumb
at the door and tells her
to get out.  She drives
to the ocean’s ragged edge
with the top down, parks
near the pilings, a seagull
perched on each, the chains
between them swinging,
singing in the sea breeze. 
Here she can breathe, bring
the clean salt-scrubbed air
into her hollow body, one
of the first ever made
before they went to solid
plastic to make the legs
and arms more bendable
so she could throw them up
to cover her face. 

You can read all of Limp Wrist's Kinky issue here.
Find out more about Denise Duhamel here. 
Read Denise's blog posts here. 

-- sdl

Now published: “NYC From the Inside” edited by George Wallace

NYC From the Inside: NYC Through the Eyes of The Poets Who Live Here, George Wallace’s new anthology, offers 179 poets from New York.

From the press release:

“Full of marquee names and up-and-comers, the anthology traces elements of New York City’s past, chronicles its present and predicts its future, staking its claim on the city’s famous resilience, toughness and enduring appeal. The anthology’s official release (Blue Light Press, March 2022) corresponds with the two-year anniversary of pandemic-related lockdowns, World Poetry Day (March 21) and poetry month (April).

“George Wallace [pictuired, photo credit: Alexis Rhone-Fancher] , a five-decade fixture in New York poetry circles, is the book’s editor. Wallace is the Walt Whitman Birthplace’s writer-in-residence (since 2011), author of 38 poetry books, a creative writing instructor at Pace University and SUNY Westchester and Long Island’s first poet laureate (appointed Suffolk County Poet Laureate in 2002).

“ ‘New York remains a city on the ropes, its boroughs buffeted by fierce challenges from the pandemic’s economic effects,’ Wallace said. ‘But New York City’s poets pack a powerful punch. And in this anthology they’re saying, ‘Don’t call it comeback. New York City is captivating in good times and in bad, and it cannot fail.’

“Among the anthology’s notable contributors are Martin Espada, Eileen Myles, Quincy Troupe, Yusef Komunyakaa, Cornelius Eady, Andrei Codrescu, David Lehman, Vijay Seshadri, Anne Waldman and Marie Howe. Other major poets include Kim Addonizio, Ellen Bass, Charles Bernstein, Elaine Equi, Jane Hirshfield, Bernadette Mayer, Abiodun Oyewole, and Ron Padgett, plus late legends such as Robert Bly, Diane di Prima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Hirschman.

“The poets in “NYC From the Inside” slice the Big Apple into a montage of meaningful moments, concurrently occurring across cultural clusters and neighborhood nooks. It’s an anthology full of good old, bad old days and urbanization that brings both the liberation of prosperity and the colonization that too often comes with gentrification. Why do New York City’s poets think the city will survive and thrive?

As Alicia Ostriker, New York State poet laureate from 2018 to 2021, puts it, “‘NYC From the Inside’ is a gorgeous compendium: 179 poets you have and haven’t heard of, generating almost 360 boisterous pages of pure joy and pure pain, comedy and memory, satire and lament, lovers and haters, pizza and drinks and drugs and pavements.”

CONTACT: Shea Communications, LLC. Daniel Axelrod, 978-855-8935. daxelrod@sheacommunications.com

"Old Heart" by Peter Ferry [premieres May 14 in Detroit]

UNBRIDLED BOOKS                                                                                      8 February 2022

For Immediate Release:

                        STAGE ADAPTATION OF PETER FERRY’S NOVEL

                                                                        OLD HEART PREMIERES MAY 14 AT

                                                                        DETROIT’S REDFORD THEATER

DETROIT- The stage adaptation of Old Heart (978-1-60953-117-1), Peter Ferry’s award-winning novel about an 85-year-old American World War II vet searching for the Jewish translator he fell in love with in the Netherlands opens May 14 at historic Redford Theater in Detroit.

Directed by Karl King, this acclaimed novel from Unbridled Books has garnered a steadily widening readership since its first appearance in 2015. Dave Eggers called the book “astonishing.” The Chicago Tribune says the novel “will stay with you for keeps.” And Publishers Weekly asserts the novel is “life-affirming.”

The stage adaptation of Old Heart is coproduced by Detroit's beloved Redford Theater, one of the Midwest’s most successful community nonprofit theaters.

The book and play tell the story of American GI Tom Johnson who joins forces with 24-year-old Sarah van Praag and the Dutch resistance to smuggle food and supplies from the liberated south across Nazi lines to starving cities in the northern Netherlands. Their brief love affair collapses at the war’s end, and sixty years later Johnson, about to be sent off to assisted living by his family, disappears on a flight to Amsterdam. While his children desperately try to locate him, Johnson is determined to track down Sarah.

“We are thrilled to feature a remarkable midwestern cast for the premiere,” says Roger Rapoport, who adapted Ferry’s novel for the stage. The play will travel in the United States as well as the Netherlands.

“Like so many readers, I was knocked about by Ferry’s novel,” adds director Karl King. “Old Heart is a wonderful story that illuminates the courage of two young people fighting to save lives in a divided country at the war’s end. It’s a privilege to bring it to Detroit audiences.”

Old Heart is being hailed as an honest, unsentimental celebration of the power of love. Tickets are available at https://ci.ovationtix.com/36213/production/1084745

See the trailer here: https://vimeo.com/590676645

PETER FERRY:

Peter Ferry is the author of the 2008 novel Travel Writing (Houghton Mifflin). His short stories have appeared in McSweeneys, Fiction, Story Quarterly, OR and Chicago Quarterly Review. He is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Short Fiction and is a frequent contributor to the travel pages of The Chicago Tribune. He lives in South Haven, Michigan and Indianapolis.

FROM THE READERS:

Chicago Writers Association Novel of the Year

“This is a novel of love and of loss and of self-determination. Old Heart moves through time and grabs your interest on every page and will stay with you for keeps.”

— The Chicago Tribune

“Old Heart mingles a bit of suspense with precise, unsparing reflection on personal histories against a backdrop of difficult events. In this the novel might be compared to Wallace Stegner’s Crossing to Safety or Colm Tóibín’s The Master, and it is nearly as well written. It should appeal to readers of any age and might make a good gift for a friend in doubt about the possibilities for renewal late in life.”             — Chicago Book Review

“A life-affirming novel about love and second chances.”             — Publishers Weekly

“Old Heart manages to weave together an astonishing array of themes and layers—the perils and freedoms of old age, the complexity of family ties, the liberation of travel, and finally, Ferry presents and proves the bold and needed idea that it’s never too late to re-open the past to recast the present.”                                           — Dave Eggers

“Peter Ferry’s writing is wry and beautiful.”                                 — Elizabeth McKenzie

“Old Heart has the feel of an instant literary classic.”                    — Don De Grazia

ROGER RAPOPORT:

Roger Rapoport produced and cowrote the feature films Coming Up For Air and Pilot Error which have won nine best feature awards at festival around the world.  An investigative reporter, he is also the author of Grounded and Angle of Attack with Shem Malmquist, as well as of Citizen Moore and Hillsdale: Greek Tragedy in America’s Hertland.  He writes for many publications including STAT News, Wired, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Miami Herald and The Detroit Free Press. 

THE REDFORD THEATER:

Operating as a non-profit, the Redford has served Detroit audiences since 1928. This landmark theater famous for its classic Barton organ attracts loyal patrons from across the Midwest. Its blue-sky murals have been lovingly restored by a team of local volunteers. 

https://redfordtheatre.com/events/old-heart-world-premiere/

Contact: Roger Rapoport / IMDb page

Glenside Productions / 2441 Westwood St. / Muskegon, MI 49441

rogerdrapoport@me.com / (231) 720-0930

Frederick Ramey / framey@unbridledbooks.comprem-

The Indie Poetry Bestseller List

Poetry and bestseller in the same sentence? As compiled by the American Booksellers Association, four of the top fifteen titles on the "poetry bestseller list" are by Amanda Gorman, three by Rupi Kaur, two by Mary Oliver, one by Nobel laureate Louise Glück, one by Margaret Atwood. There is also one anthology that made the top 15: The Best American Poetry 2021.

<<<
The American Booksellers Association’s specialty bestseller lists provide a current snapshot of what’s selling in indie bookstores nationwide.

Here is the Indie Poetry Bestseller List, based on sales at independent bookstores nationwide for the eight-week period ending January 2, 2022.

1. Call Us What We Carry: Poems
Amanda Gorman, Viking, $24.99, 9780593465066

2. Change Sings: A Children's Anthem
Amanda Gorman, Loren Long (Illus.), Viking Books for Young Readers, $18.99, 9780593203224

3. The Hill We Climb
Amanda Gorman, Viking, $15.99, 9780593465271

4. Devotions
Mary Oliver, Penguin, $20, 9780399563263

5. I Hope This Finds You Well: Poems
Kate Baer, Harper Perennial, $12, 9780063137998

6. Home Body
Rupi Kaur, Andrews McMeel, $16.99, 9781449486808

7. Milk and Honey
Rupi Kaur, Andrews McMeel, $14.99, 9781449474256

8. Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems
Louise Glück, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 9780374604103

9. The Sun and Her Flowers
Rupi Kaur, Andrews McMeel, $16.99, 9781449486792

10. Clarity & Connection
Yung Pueblo, Andrews McMeel, $16.99, 9781524860486

11. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope
James Crews, Storey Publishing, $14.95, 9781635863864

12. The Best American Poetry 2021
Tracy K. Smith, David Lehman (Eds.), Scribner, $20, 9781982106638

13. Dog Songs
Mary Oliver, Penguin, $16, 9780143125839

14. Dearly: New Poems
Margaret Atwood, Ecco, $16.99, 9780063032507

15. Books and Libraries: Poems
Andrew Scrimgeour, Everyman's Library, $15.95, 9780593320198
>>>

A is for Oboe [by Lera Auerbach]

The virtual book launch of Lera Auerbach's A is for Oboe - The Orchestra's Alphabet, a book of poems for children about music, will take place Sundasy, January 9, 2022. Felicitations! Lera writes :

 

<< I had excellent collaborators: Marilyn Nelson, my dear friend and one of the most brilliant people I know, the fantastic illustrator Paul Hoppe, and a great team at Penguin-Random House and Serendipity Literary Agency. For the audio version of this book, we have the one and only Thomas Quasthoff as the narrator and numerous musical excerpts to illustrate the poetry. I want to thank RSO Vienna, Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, Leonidas Kavakos, Marin Alsop, and Luke Haaksma for lending their artistry to this project. Also, I wish to thank Sikorski, Boosey & Hawkes, BIS Records, and ORF – The Austrian Broadcasting Corporation for their blessings and support.A is for Oboe is my first publication with Penguin Random House, and I am very excited. >>

John Ashbery's Typewriter

John Ashbery's typewriter -- a wonderful title for a poem, methinks -- has turned up at Harvard. As the Harvard Gazette reports:

<<<
John Ashbery [pictured left with Jane Freilicher] dove head-first into poetry after arriving at Harvard in 1945. His biographer Karin Roffman described him as “a constant presence” in the Woodberry Poetry Room (formerly at Widener Library until 1949), where he would discover the works of W. H. Auden, the eventual subject of his thesis.

As a student, Ashbery attended readings of the works of W.H. Auden, Morris Gray, and Marianne Moore, discovered local bookshops, and befriended fellow poets, including Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, and V.R. Lang. “The great modernist poets were the poets he was imbibing,” Roffman said in an interview with the Gazette. “He was really thinking about the given canon that he was getting in classes at Harvard and then the personal canon he was making for himself.”

The experiences were formative for Ashbery, who died in 2017 at the age of 90, and Harvard has become the center of study on the celebrated poet. The University acquired his papers over a period of years and his reading library — donated by his husband, David Kermani — in 2018. Last month Ashbery’s typewriter, also a gift from Kermani, was installed in the Woodberry Poetry Room at Lamont Library, which will host an event, “Lunch Poems: Adventures with John Ashbery’s Typewriter,” featuring Roffman and Ashbery’s former assistant and editor Emily Skillings, on Wednesday, Nov. 17.

Much of Ashbery’s poetry throughout his career, was written on typewriters, but his love affair with the machines started after graduation. The budding poet didn’t have access to one during his studies likely due to the expense — he even got his thesis typed by someone else who did have one.

Class portrait and information on John Ashbery from the freshmen register during his days at Harvard. "A Sermon: Amos 8:11-14" by John Ashbery.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo
>>>

For more: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2021/11/john-ashberys-typewriter-installed-at-harvard/

November 9: Live via Zoom Tracy K. Smith and David Lehman present The Best American Poetry 2021

Click here to register.

Ed Ochester Retires as Pittsburgh's Poetry Point Person

<<
A toast to Ed Ochester, to whose retirement we raise our glasses in celebration of his editorial achievement (and poeitc prowess). As director of Pitt Poetry, Ed Ochester has published some of our most consequential poets displaying an ecumenicism of taste sharpened by high intellect, wit, and an ear for the language as spoken. The University of Pittsburgh has released the statement abridged here:

We are at once happy and sad to announce the retirement of our beloved poetry editor, Ed Ochester. Ochester has been the series editor and creative force behind the Pitt Poetry Series of the University of Pittsburgh Press since 1978 and published hundreds of collections by established and rising poets.

Ochester became a driving force of American poetry, working with such poets as Billy Collins, Etheridge Knight, Toi Derricotte, Larry Levis, Sharon Olds, Denise Duhamel, Lynn Emanuel, Tomas Transtomer, Gregory Orr, J. Allyn Rosser, David Wojahn, Kate Daniels, Alicia Ostriker, Jim Daniels, Andrei Codrescu, Adrienne Su, Dean Young, and David Lehman. 

In addition to Ochester’s work selecting and editing collections for the Pitt Poetry Series, he established the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize in 1981, one of the premier prizes for a first full-length book of poems. He was also the editor for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for many years.

Ochester is professor emeritus of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is on the faculty of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. In 2001, Ochester received Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Creative Achievement Award. Ochester has twice served as president of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, where he received the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature in 2006. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Sugar Run Road, Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and The Republic of Lies, and was editor of American Poetry Now.

The University of Pittsburgh Press is actively seeking Ochester’s successor. You can read more about the Pitt Poetry Series here.
>>

Tonight at 7 PM (East Coast time): Michael Caine and Poets (including Lally and Lehman)

Organized by Suzanne Lummis: << You won't want to miss this All-Star Line-up. It's a ZOOM event. Click event for link. Please join us! >>

"The Morning Line" by David Lehman: Poetry Feature of the Month on "The Common"

Today The Common published The Morning Line, the title poem of my new poetry collection, as its poetry feature of the month. I wrote the poem on May 22, 2020, having always wanted to write a poem with that resonant title. The phrase dictated the subect matter: chance, gambling, and faith. Here are the opening two stanzas of this extended three-part meditation. -- David Lehman

The Morning Line

— May 22, 2020

1.

You can pick horses on the basis of their names
and gloat when Justify wins racing’s Triple Crown 
or when, in 1975, crowd favorite Ruffian, “queen 
of the century,” goes undefeated until she breaks down 
in a match race with Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. 
Who could root against Ruffian? 
Did patriotic Englishmen cheer 
when Sir Winston won the Belmont last year? 

I rejoiced when Monarchos, a ten to one bet, became 
the second horse ever to break the two-minute mark
at the Kentucky Derby. Why did I pick it? I liked the name.
Those two minutes in May 2001 and the giddy hours after 
now seem a little like a garden party in England in July 1914 
as the nineteenth century approached the finish line 
and collapsed.

Please click here to read the rest of the poem.

Poems on Dylan & Bukowski: only two days left to get your entries in

On September 02, 2021 we accounced

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan": A Contest

As we head into Labor Day weekend, we announce a new contest:

"When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" 

With this as your title, write a maximum of 14 lines (verse) or 140 words (prose).

Post your entry in the comments field.

Entries will be judged on the criteria of excellence, lucidity, wit, and brevity. Prizes, including a copy of The Best American Poetry 2021, will be given to the best and to the briefest coherent piece of writing. 

Judge: Jim Cummins 

Contest end date Sept 30

Previous BAP contests were judged by Mark Strand, Paul Violi, and Mark Bibbins.

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest1winner.html
http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest2winner.html

http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/pages/contest3winner.html

See the winners for 2007 and 2009.

To see the entries, check the comments field here -- and click here for a couple of others:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/when-charles-bukowski-met-bob-dylan-terence-winch.html 

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2021

Find your copy here.