The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry 2020: Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor Paisley Rekdal

The 2020 edition of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Paisley Rekdal, the award-winning poet and author of Nightingale, proving that this is “a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title” (Chicago Tribune).

Since 1988, The Best American Poetry anthology series has been “one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world” (Academy of American Poets). Each volume in the series presents some of the year’s most remarkable poems and poets. The 2020 edition is guest edited by Utah’s Poet Laureate Paisely Rekdal, “a poet of observation and history...[who] revels in detail but writes vast, moral poems that help us live in a world of contraries” according to the Los Angeles Times. In The Best American Poetry 2020, she has selected a fascinating array of work that speaks eloquently to the “contraries” of our present moment in time.

The Best American Poetry 2020 is available for pre-order here.

--sdl

"Smoking in Heaven" [by Robert Hass]

Watching young poets in the early evening
Smoking on the terrace outside the poetry reading,
I wondered if there would be a smoking terrace
In heaven. I have a friend, dead now,
A Catholic who was unimpressed by the prospect of paradise
Until he discovered a group of medieval theologians
Who had proposed that there was a special kind of time
In eternity. They gave it a Latin name.
Like my friend, they couldn’t conceive of a God
Who would force them to live forever
Without sunrise and sunset. His wife, a skeptic,
Called it decaffeinated time, at which he shrugged wryly.
This idea of life after death made him very happy,
Which was, as far as he was concerned, the point.
He’s been dead now for almost a decade,
So I suppose he knows one way or another
Whether there is nothing after death and no one there
To know it or not. The smoking terrace would, of course, be out of doors,
So it wouldn’t be as depressing as those smoking rooms in airports
Where people with grey skin submit to their addiction
With religious humility. You could light up and walk to the edge of the clouds
And watch the fragrant smoke you were expelling
Drift into the decaffeinated sunset. It made me wonder
If there were coffee in heaven. Or sex. I knew a woman
Who said that the main reason for sex,
As far as she was concerned,
Was the cigarette afterward. And if there were sex
In heaven, why would there be anything else? Probably
So that you could also watch Canada geese settle on a lake
Just as the moon was twilighting the surface of the water
In luminous little scallops. The young poets
Should read Allen Ginsberg who said that poets should set an example
By not submitting to what he called “the nicotine haze
Of capitalism.” Probably in the heaven without tobacco
The couples are walking by the sea, having already made love,
And the moon, almost unnaturally large,  is just coming up,
And the color of the moon on the water is just like what
Their bodies are feeling, contented but still tingling,
And in the moonlight they can see a pack of feral goats
With their beards and inhuman eyes grazing on the hillside, also contentedly,
As if time and eternity were the wrong ideas altogether,
And the women would have come in with their Greek masks on
To walk the shoreline and dance what fate is.

From Summer Snow by Robert Hass (Ecco, 2020), an extraordinary new book by the poet, author of The Apple Trees at Olema and Twentieth Century Pleasures, editor of Poet's Choice, and guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2001. Kudos, Bob. -- DL

Poem Beginning with a Line after Yehuda Amichai [by Didi Jackson]

Past the window in the room where we make love
waves follow one another like lines of laundry
as the cliffs unfold, spilling like bolts of cloth into the bay,
and it is the anise, they say, the snails
are after, defining the roads of Serifos
like small-change coins, curled and climbing fierce
as soldiers up each stalk in numbers so thick
they could be plucked like white berries ripe
with June, and they too would taste of licorice
succulent in a time of honey and nettles.

from Moon Jar by Didi Jackson. Red Hen Press, 2020.

Pick of the Week (from "Urban Renewal: xxvi. Washington Square") [by Major Jackson]

When all that cautions the eyes toward the imminent
slide of autumn to arctic winds, the canopy of English elm
and sycamore leaves like colored coins fall and widen
a hole letting more light spill in, heaven’s alms
to earth whose ashen gray and white will soon be all the rage,
our guilty secret is the baby grand playing Glass’s Orphée
Suite for Piano. Nearby Butoh dancers writhe & almost upstage
with white-painted faces of horror (portraits of Nagasaki?),
and past the fountain’s water plumes, a drug-riddled couple
shares the smoldering remains of an American Spirit,
their grizzled dog roped to a shopping cart and frayed duffel
bag, this city’s updated version of American Gothic.
Our reddish-haired pianist lets the melancholic notes
float to high-rises on Fifth above its triumphal arch,
like a film in reverse where the golden foliage is read by a poet
as autumn’s light pours in. “Don’t Get Around Much
Anymore,” The Ink Spots’ Decca cover spins on a phonograph,
an era spiraling soft then held by his gentle pen.

from The Absurd Man by Major Jackson (NY: Norton, 2020). 

"The Elevated Train" [by Edward Hirsch]

                                               Yesterday I climbed the stairs

                                               and took the “L”

                                               to 1965

                                               where I was stuck

                                               in the heart

                                               of downtown Chicago

                                               waiting for my grandmother

                                               to finish her shift

                                               in the coat department

                                               at Three Sisters

                                               so she could treat me

                                               to a luxurious dinner

                                               at Fritzel’s

                                               before she disappeared

                                               into the elevated train

                                               that carried her

                                               to a station

                                               near her studio apartment

                                               in a third-floor walk-up

                                               on Lawrence Avenue

                                               where she turned on the TV

                                               for company

                                               to drown out the noise

                                               rattling

                                               from the tracks.

from Stranger by Night by Edward Hirsch (Knopf, 2020). First published in Five Points.  

"You, Reader" [by Major Jackson]

So often I dream of the secrets of satellites
and so often I want the moose to step
from the shadows and reveal his transgressions,
and so often I come to her body
as though she were Lookout Mountain,
but give me a farmer’s market to park my martyred masks
and I will name all the dirt roads that dead-end
at the cubist sculpture called My Infinity,
for I no longer light bonfires in the city of adulterers
and no longer smudge the cheeks of debutantes
hurriedly floating across the high fruit of night,
and yes, I know there is only one notable death in any small town
and that is the pig-farmer, but listen, at all times
the proud rivers mourn my absence, especially
when, like a full moon, you, reader, hidden behind a spray
of night-blooming, drift in and out of scattered clouds
above lighthouses producing their artificial calm,
just to sweep a chalk of light over distant waters.

from The Absurd Man by Major Jackson. NY: Norton, 2020. Major Jackson chose the poems for The Best American Poetry 2019.

"Monroeville, PA" [by Ed Ochester]

One day a kid yelled

"Hey Asshole!"

and everybody on the street

turned around

 

from Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New by Ed Ochester (Autumn House, 2007).

"On Nature" [by Lawrence Joseph]

        And the puzzles surrounding the cosmological constant,
        spacetime imploded into existence. Ten to fifty years
        between asbestos breathed and mesothelioma
        discovered, a rare form of cancer in the lungs
        or heart, or, if in the stomach, spreading
        quickly to the liver or spleen. Uploaded
        onto one of a half-a-billion or so blogs: “The human
        imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a subproduct,
        merely, of the neural activity of a species
        of terrestrial primate”; and in another, that other
        dimension, the Hudson River, black and still,
        the day about to open at the Narrows’ edge.
        Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chill’s
        blue sensation in the eyes. One week buds, then
        the temperature’s up and the landscape turns yellow,
        in a few days the wind scratches the blossoms,
        in a few weeks the sun scorches the leaves.

       I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write
       a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin.
       Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost
       Arctic sea ice, bits of bone on killing grounds,
       electromagnetic air. Atrocious and bottomless
       states of mind, natural as air.

from So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph (2017). Reprinted in A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems  by Lawrence Joseph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).

"Hidden Bird" [by Joseph Ceravelo]

Song birds enter the morning
the pre-dawn before the fires,
you know, when the night floats away
like vapor on a lake,
or like kisses in the woods.
Songs that even creation
might not remember.

Continuous, threaded, as if
a cherry pit were stuck
in the throat
to produce the trumpet of the branches.
So varies, yet never, changing
through all the days, since
reptiles fell to earth.

I give up the reason for the sound
I give up the creature of sound
and the creator of the creatures
and of us and of dawn and
air and of vacuum
and human inhumanity.
I give up the song.
I give up the place.

From The Collected Poems of Joseph Ceravolo (ed. Rosemary Ceravolo and Parker Smathers; Wesleyan University Press, 2013). The poem was chosen from The Nation by Terrance Hayes for The Best American Poetry 2014. For more about Joseph Ceravolo's  Collected, click here.

"Bikini Waxes and Taxes" [by Beth Gylys]

You don’t want to head to Florida
with a Chewbacca crotch,
nor for Congress to pass
a tax cut for the rich.

Terrifying thoughts: tufts
weaseling out the edges
of your bathing suit, billionaires
with blond wives posing
behind placards of dollar bills.

There is need, and there is
need. You go see Rosa
from Brazil, whose art
involves nudity and pain,

who is unfazed by your
spread-legged shame,
who stares at your privates
like they’re a mission.

You suck in your breath
as she slathers the searing wax
on your nether regions,
the same day the Senate scrawls
numbers in the margins—
more zeroes than you can comprehend.

There is debt, and there is debt,
and you will not scream
as she coaches: breathe, breathe—
your hair yanked by the root,
follicles bleeding.

The rich, whose wardrobes cost more
than most families’ net worth,
say trickle and down—throw crumbs
to the plebes from the decks of their yachts.

The bald, nubile stinging pink will heal.
The poor will continue to be poorer.

from Body Braille by Beth Gylys (Iris Press, 2020). 

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov---Soviet Texts (Terence Winch)

Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov  (1940–2007) died of a heart attack on the Moscow metro  at age 66.  An artist of incisive comic genius with a taste for the bizarre, he would no doubt have found the circumstances of his death somewhat amusing. As Soviet Texts, an excellent new collection of his work translated and edited by poet Simon Schuchat (with Ainsley Morse) and published by Ugly Duckling Presse, makes clear, Prigov’s central literary mission was the dismantling of the language of officialdom. He is a satirist, a parodist, whose writing is a mocking commentary on the political misuses and other abuses of language. [photo left: D.A. Prigov]

The lead-off piece in Soviet Texts is entitled “Under Me,” and it sets the tone for the entire collection.  A long list-poem offering “a procession of details, elements, events, which took place ‘under me,’” it showcases Prigov’s absurd, expansive, comprehensive knowledge of history, art, and culture (not to mention sports and porn):

            And Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Kim Basinger, Michael Jackson appeared under me

            Tarantino, Platini, van Basten, Wim Wenders also appeared under me.

            Jeff Koons appeared under me, too

            And Ciccolina appeared under me

            And Ravi Shankar appeared under me

            Mike Tyson, Schumacher, Agassi, Magic Johnson appeared under me, too

In “Description of Objects,” Prigov takes aim at the deadly form and diction of Soviet propaganda in a series of pieces each beginning with “Comrades!” and proceeding to offer ridiculous definitions of everything from eggs to apes. Authoritative nonsense and faux logic lead to the final conclusion of every description: “For the reasons indicated above, its actual existence is considered unlikely.” In the brilliant mock-heroic “Moscow and the Muscovites,” one of my favorites, Prigov takes on inflated, nationalistic jargon, exposing its ludicrousness along the way: “Moscow is everywhere—its peoples are all over/ And where Moscow’s not—there’s only emptiness.” “Twenty Stories about Stalin” are scripture-like parables about Uncle Joe that are ultimately anti-hagiographic.

Also a prolific visual artist, Prigov clearly deserves the wider appreciation that this book will certainly bring him. As Simon Schuchat [photo right] notes in the frontmatter: “While Prigov’s writing is very definitely of the Soviet and post-Soviet world, it is also fully equal to, and sometimes consonant with, contemporaneous avant-garde writing elsewhere in the world.”   

Soviet Texts thrums with Prigov’s subversive sense of humor, almost making one hungry for something irony-free.  Though I don’t think you find that in his writing,  I thought these lines from “Terrorism with a Human Face” came closest, and could even serve as his epitaph:

            When the years have passed and the currently wild

            People have forgotten many things

            Fear of me will tear through all of Great Russia

            For what I wrote! But it was the truth, after all!

Meet the Press: Free-Grace Press—A Conversation with Clifford Jackman

Dante Di Stefano: How did Free-Grace Press come into being?

Clifford Jackman: Free-Grace Press was created because we wanted to publish books that are about using the readers imagination. Our books are sculpted art / a  kinetic sculpture that you can carry around – an Artist's Book. We desire to recreate the joy of looking, feeling, reading, and using one’s imagination.

At our physical foundation is the genderless and often anonymous Pamphleteer publisher that was born slowly after the invention of the printing press for the masses. From Jane Anger (1589) to Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin (1776) we adore the brutal honesty and high art of Pamphleteering.

We believe those Pamphleteer times and today’s Internet (self-publishing) times are very similar.  The internet’s abandon and freedom is similar in spirit to the free-for-all that Pamphleteering was, and/or, is.

Another brick in our foundation is the Artist’s Book championed most recently by William Blake (1757-1872). His combination of drawings and paintings with text was groundbreaking. Since then artists and writers have carried on the tradition of an Artist’s Book through Dadaism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism. The respect Blake had for literary prose did not make it through to Conceptualism (1970’s). And that’s when aesthetics and philosophy dominated the Artist’s Book design so there were very few literary stories – just visual, conceptual, and philosophical stories. So at Free-Grace Press we aim to continue this tradition of the Artist’s Book.

DD: Tell us about the first book Free-Grace has published, The Worming of America by Autumn Leaf.

CJ: Well literally it’s an answer to another Pamphlet published in 1615. We published The Worming of America as a rebuttal to Joseph Swetnam’s pamphlet / novel published in 1615 titled, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward, and Unconstant Women: or the Vanity of Them, Choose you Whether: With a Commendation of Wise, Virtuous and Honest Women: Pleasant for Married Men, Profitable for Young men, and Hurtful to None.

Genre-wise, it’s a blend of historical fiction, alternative history, and literary fiction. It’s a post-modern study or play on questions of femininity, debt, sin, and freedom.

The story is told by a first person narrator -  Autumn Leaf (aka Susan Hutchinson), and it transports readers to Colonial Boston(1650) where The Worming of America (WoA) explores oppression in a Puritanical time as seen through the eyes of Anne Hutchinson’s daughter. Autumn throughout her day investigates / debates, the English Civil War (royalty and/or white slavery), the Free-Grace Controversy, and how America unified for a militaristic revolution.

DD: Tell us about the books you’ve slated for publication in the next few years.

CJ: The second book Free-Grace Press is publishing in 2021 is, Mother’s Day in the Empire State, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women. Mother’s Day, again is written in modern day prose. It’s about motherhood in contemporary Appalachian society. The author is a 50-year-old woman - Constance or Connie Munda - she is a single Mom in upstate New York and a Child Protection Services (CPS) officer. She investigates two mothers for child abuse on Mother's Day, one mother lives within poverty Appalachia, and the other lives within luxury Appalachia. The release date is Mother’s Day 2021, and it is 70,000 words. Thirty illustrations accompany the book. The narrator, Connie Munda, is the daughter again of an American heroine. She is the daughter of Anna Jarvis, the woman who started Mother's Day in 1906 - whose story is almost as compelling as Anne Hutchinson's story.

Our next third book will be the beginning of a trilogy called, Sagg;, Or Life in Free-Grace.  It's a modern-day analogy to Henry Thoreau’s Walden; Or Life in the Woods. All three will be in the epistolary novel form. These letters are written by Sam Kane, a 50-year-old man in modern day prose, and the launch dates are staggered yearly starting in the spring of 2022. Each novel within the trilogy will be approximately 70,000 words and will have again 30 Illustrations. The novels are called Sagg; Or Life in Free-Grace, because Sagg is a pond in Southampton, NY and Free-Grace is the root of Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods.” The narrator Sam Kane is a divorced dad from New Jersey who is writing letters to his son and daughter about his life and failed family in the epistolary novel form. It follows Walden’s chapter, subject, and topics, very closely, but the narrator / Sam Kane, is unaware his life going down the same path as Thoreau’s experiment in the woods.

DD: What kinds of books are you looking to publish going forward?

CJ: Well, the above 4 books should take us to 2024.  But during that time we’ll evolve into publishing more author’s work because we’re correlating a great design / publishing team for Free-Grace Press.

DD: Why should poets read a book like The Worming of America, or some of the other forthcoming Free-Grace titles?

CJ: Poets would like WoA because the prose is jazzy, rhythmic, and lyrical. The WoA prose also cares deeply about the reader and showers respect on all of five senses.  And more importantly WoA taps into the 6^th sense / the inner eye with its prose and illustrations. Tapping this extrasensory perception or sense - that we all have - is what the successful poet does and where the poets’ work should live. The poet would enjoy WoA because as publishers we too have tried to boil it all down to a metaphysical or transcendental truth.

DD: What small presses do you admire?

CJ: Presses we like are –

1 – Haymarket Books –

2 – Seven Stories Press

3 – Fine Art Gallery Presses - Davis Zwirner Books and Hauser and Wirth Publishers.

DD: Here is a brief excerpt from The Worming of America to end the interview.

1 – Chapter 14, Subchapter - Autumn Leaf , pg. 185.

Nothing -

Yes, Laura,” I say. “My Nothing is a sleepy, subconscious scientific space — which mathematically is half your life. And, most important, this Nothing sleepy space you mock is a self-less space, it’s a free-grace space — a place to rest, a place of dreams. This Nothing is a blank piece of paper, perhaps a blank page inside a book?”

I continue, “What shall you do with this Nothing? Is Nothing in the Table of Contents? Is there an illustration of Nothing? Do you look up Nothing’s page number, excited and thrilled — turning the pages to witness Nothing and then you thumb your way to Nothing, and then your disappointed… wondering why is Nothing nothing? You turn the page hoping there is a back page for Nothing? Some small print, a clue, maybe even an address for Nothing? Could there be linear notes for Nothing? Cliff’s Notes for Nothing? Someone’s notes, not even a Penny-Saver coupon for Nothing?”

“But Nothing…  is nothing… and we think this is another nothing scam. We then pause and think with this thin piece of paper in between our fingers that is Nothing, we think about creating something out of this nothing. Is this the blank page for my greatest poem I will create? Is this blank page left for me to I draw out my masterpiece in charcoals? Or perhaps I just rip this blank page out, this Nothing, I will tear out and fold it up into an origami bird and/or a paper airplane and fly Nothing around? What a wonderful flying and chirping Nothing that would be!”

As I finish saying these words I pretend to be folding up a piece of paper and then I throw my imaginary hyper plane towards the Mayflower candle lamp variable and my class and I watch in amazement as it spins, and circles the Mayflower lamp before slowly flying, flapping, and floating out the door — Origin O.

I continue, “Nothing is that pause or breath between  words when singing or reading poetry… Nothing is the space between a painter’s strokes of paint that can be anything: a mountain or a mite, anything at all. This is Nothing — this is free-grace.”

---

Clifford Jackman is the Creative Director at Free-Grace Press.

Geoffrey O'Brien's "Phantom Empire" [by David Lehman]

Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire (1993) is one of the all-time great odes to Hollywood. In gorgeous prose O'Brien adopts the associative logic of a Hollywood dream to address the subject of movies in general and specific movies that illustrate a point or document a lifelong love of the screen. The insights are imaginative and spring off the page. Examples:

"The decades were not successive but simultaneous. . . . Certain individuals developed specialized tastes for particular years: there were self-created 1929 people, 1957 people. 'I've been in the forties for months.' History was the rack from which they picked hats and gloves, witticisms and courtships."

"You could end up adopting a whole life. Young people chose to become dead actors, walking around in borrowed accents and clothes. James Dean went everywhere. . . . It could get out of hand; there was such a thing as caring too much. Some found it necessary to follow Jimmy into his death car, to share Marilyn's pills."

Watching Rene Clair's A Nous liberté (1931) forty or more years after it was made, knowing what happened in the interim, "was like watching, in slow motion, the prelude to a car crash." 

"John Ford constructed a scale model containing all he wished to preserve of civilization -- a portable world in which John Wayne and Ward Bond could swap drinks and war stories until the end of time. . . ."

"You wore [the director's] eyes like a pair of trick glasses  turning everything you looked at into a military parade (John Ford), a masked ball (Max Ophuls), a series of medieval tableaux (Sergei Eisenstein), a blank-verse melodrama enacted by shadows (Orson Welles), or a fever dream in which you giggled as you watched your worst fears materialize (Luis Bunuel)."

"What you knew of history came off the screens. Periodically you had your memory jogged by a rapid montage of history's greatest hits: clips of the most memorable earthquakes, plane crashes, invasions, assassinations. Each event had its clip, and finally became its clip."

"President Reagan was just another Clint Eastwood fan. Eventually the ceremony would roll around and the awards would be handed out for best century, best war, best achievement in political manipulation."

To anyone who loves (or is just curious about) Dead of Night and The Fallen Idol, The Woman in the Window and The Dark Mirror, The Blue Angel and Stray Dog, La Chienne and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, I joyously recommend The Phantom Empire -- DL

Three Book Recommendations for National Poetry Month, 2020

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai
Ha Jin
Pantheon Books, 2019

Ha Jin’s biography of Li Bai (formerly known as Li Po and Rihaku in the west) provides a vivid survey of the great poet’s life. Bai (701-762 A.D), a legendary figure in Chinese poetry, is said to have drowned while drunkenly chasing the reflection of the moon in a river. The Banished Immortal, although constantly taking account of the myths clustered around Li Bai, focuses more intensely on the verifiable aspects of the poet’s life and work. Ha Jin’s compelling prose not only renders a highly readable overview of Bai’s life, but also provides an interesting gloss of Tang dynasty bureaucracy. Bai’s wanderlust, his political aspirations, his poetic skill (often employed in service to his political ambitions), his setbacks, his literary friendships, his Daoist spirituality, his naivete when negotiating court intrigues, and his gregarious heart make this biography read like a novel. Ha Jin brings Li Bai alive in his writing; he also conjures a world where poetry held a central place by providing interesting digression about Tang poetry devotees like Ge Qing, a street policeman in Jing Prefecture who was “so devoted to the poet Bai Juyi that he tattooed more than thirty of Juyi’s poems on his body, as well as drawings inspired by his verses” and was called “Bai Juyi’s Walking Poems and Pictures.”  The world that Li Bai moved through bears little in common with our own, but American poets might find inspiration in the naked ambition of this itinerant immortal.

Playlist
David Lehman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

In a 1996 Paris Review interview with A.R. Ammons, David Lehman said that Ammons’ long poems: “seem in some ways deliberately imperfect—casual, expansive, all-inclusive, loose.” The same could be said for Playlist, which is a direct homage to Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. Like many of Ammons’ long poems, Playlist unfolds in increments, held in place by the calendar and given momentum by the playlists on Sirius radio and by the enthusiasms of the poet—jazz, poetry, cinema, the great American songbook, and crooners like Sinatra. There’s a cosmopolitan sprezzatura to Lehman’s long-poem, a spritely dailiness, surprisingly intimate and lush, as open to chance as a turn of the stereo’s dial, efflorescing in descriptive passages such as:

    after I step out of the car
    and onto my favorite perch
    above Cayuga’s waters, the porch
    where majestic trees devoid of leaves
    stand like scarecrows
    the sky a deeper hue an orange
    and blue blaze dipping
    below the horizon

In Playlist, Lehman has succeeded in doing something that hasn’t been done much since the passing of Ammons, viz., he’s written a book-length poem that is propulsive in its readability. Playlist is a testament to a literary friendship of the highest caliber, and an artifact from a life lived in a studied circadian dialogue with art, literature, and music. Anyone who lives poetry, and loves it, should read this book.

Helping the Village Idiot Feed the Chickens (or the Brutal Procedures of Procuring Dinner)
Joe Weil
Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, 2020

The title of Joe Weil’s newest collection might leave some readers nonplussed and might initiate others into the mysteries of another uniquely variegated collection by one of the most underrated poets in America. This is a book contingent upon what Weil himself might call an aesthetic of the motley, a book that contains multitudes—ranging from a Petrarchan sonnet to a poem about the Staten Island Ferry that begins: “a boy vomits over the stern.” Weil’s is a leaping poetry that moves from gazelle to silver maple, from the memory of a mother looping his belt in grade school to a line from Rae Armantrout.  Helping the Village Idiot evokes the imagistic intensity, the technical mastery, and the assured iconoclasm of mid to late career James Wright. As Weil notes in “Ars Poetica (or the failure to be jade),” alluding to Robert Lowell’s famous notion: “I am all raw in my very cooked way.” Indeed, Weil’s poetry combines vigor with technique and a canny knowledge of multiple poetic traditions. However, Weil’s autobiographical lyric poems shine brightest, such as “Poem for Emily Ten Years In,” a gorgeous love poem for the poet’s wife, a wily ars poetica, and a poem about raising children with Autism. The collection ends with a poem, “Compline,” that recalls Seamus Heaney’s dictum that poetry is earned communion:

    Come: touch this wind.
    Out of a vagrant longing
    that stands through the night in the house of the dawn,
    lift up your chalice with worn mumbled prayers
    and sing to ghosts.
    May the hour genuflect praise
    and deepen the dark river’s gaze
    that holds the trees and houses accountable
    to whatever they Shelter.
    It is this residue in things,
    this now, that abides with us,
    that gives us bread
    to break.

If you want to have your heart broken and your faith in humanity reaffirmed at the same time, buy this book.

---

Note: I read these three books over the past few weeks and they provided me great solace and inspiration during these trying times. I highly recommend all three books, and, indeed, any books written by Ha Jin, David Lehman, and Joe Weil. ~Dante Di Stefano 

On Lawrence Fixel's "Flight Patterns" [by Peter Johnson]

In the history of the American prose poem from 1965 onward, I would argue that one writer and one collection stands above the others. The writer is Lawrence Fixel, and the collection is Truth, War, and the Dream-Game: Selected Prose Poems and Parables, 1966-1990 (Coffee House Press, 1991). Fixel specializes in the “modern parable.” Such a parable, exemplified in the works of Kafka and Borges, offers a “devastating illumination of a world split between psyche, spirit, and material concerns.” Fixit adds that in this kind of parable, “paradox is a key element, opposing the identity of opposites to any commonsense, linear, or literal world.” Here is the first parable in TWD, called “Flight Patterns.”

 

 

“Flight Patterns” 

“Between the void and the sheer event . . . .” 

—Valéry 

1. 

It is said, of the millions that undertake the journey, that the greatest number are lost somewhere along the way. To prove this, evidence is produced, statistics gathered, witnesses summoned. There are even films of the long, straggling procession, which presumably reveal the fate of the missing. Yet it appears no one-—ourselves included—is deterred by this, for it is equally intolerable to remain where we are. 

 

2. 

. . . Word continues to arrive from monitors at the highly equipped tracking stations. They report a whole series of unexplained dots and dashes on the flickering screens. Even the most experienced observers-—using the most advanced techniques—concede that the habitual flight patterns can no longer be interpreted . . .  

 

3. 

I have seen some of the incoming messages. They bear such strange notations as “missing in action,” “dead on arrival,” etc With so many different languages, from such different worlds, the gap between what is transmitted and received continues to widen. 

 

4. 

I have resolved not be upset by any of this. To limit myself to what can be verified by sensory evidence. One thing is clear, whether we travel the direct route of desire, or detours of illusion, we still miss connection. Something is there—ahead or behind us—and we are drawn in that direction. For a time we seem to have arrived . . . . But as the wind changes, the mist descends, we can no longer tell where we are. 

 

5. 

Let us suppose, for instance, that you have been where I have been. We meet one afternoon in a village in Jo a neighboring country . . . .Jining the crowd in the plaza, we observe the stately walk of the costumed women. Moving on, we notice in contrast the immobility of the vendors: the heavy bodies squatting beside earthen jars. 

 

6. 

Is the scene familiar? Then let memory take a further step: to that moment when armed men in gray uniforms appear . . . .Suddenly we feel a sharp intersection of competing gestures, of inviting and disturbing fragrances. Someone drops petals in front of the candle-lit altar; someone else throws poisoned meat to the hungry dogs . . . . Speaking of this later, disturbed by our fragmented impressions, the question arises: What name can we give to this land? 

 

7. 

We may of course continue the search, each producing letters, photographs, documents. Or simply recognize that, between any two witnesses, we can expect these differences. Each might then retreat into a private retrospect . . . . But what if we decide to give up these wanderings, returning to this body, this present time? It may then occur to us that what signifies this world is nothing else but the current of our feeling. And as for the flesh that dissolves. Disappears. Who can say it will not appear again? If not in this form, this familiar image, then perhaps as an intention that moves through silence and the quickening wind. 

 

“Flight Patterns”―What a wonderfully ironic title, juxtaposing both the freedom and uncertainty of taking wing with the certainty of a preconceived pattern, which we may choose to follow so we don’t get lost. It’s an ideal position to be in, but one that, ironically, Fixel’s parables always argue against, since no matter how hard his narrator tries to find a fixed location from which to make sense of his surroundings, uncertainty prevails. It’s appropriate, then, that “Flight Patterns” begins with this Kafkaesque opening: “It is said, of the millions who undertake the journey, that the greatest number are lost somewhere along the way.”  Still, the narrator adds, we persist because “it is equally intolerable to remain where we are.”  

Nickole Brown's The Donkey Elegies

[A Review by Dante Di Stefano]

The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems
Nickole Brown
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020

Nickole Brown’s new chapbook, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems, continues the project she initiated in her chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018); this project, as the poet herself articulates it, proposes to build an antipastoral bestiary comprised of poems spoken in “a queer Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature: beautiful, damaged, dangerous and in desperate need of saving.”  As did To Those Who Were Our First Gods, The Donkey Elegies explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. Brown draws on her experiences working with donkeys in several animal sanctuaries and overlays those experiences with a complex array of personal, cultural, historical, and linguistic associations connected to this humble and hearty mammal. The Donkey Elegies does what any good essay does: it assays (it tests and examines, but it also attempts), it suggests (rather than expounds), it spirals outward while tethering the attention to one unparaphrasable idea; the essay, as form or genre, is, after all, the donkey of literature: sinewy, indefatigable, often overlooked. Like her central subject in this book, Brown’s poetry hauls steadily onward, tender and tough, lit with the knowledge that holiness dwells in the common, the low-life, the baseborn.

Throughout the collection, the lowly donkey becomes a metonym for the oppressed “who carried us from that squat existence of flint strike to entire cities,” and “who blistered and tore, who blew their knees and threw their vertebrae hauling the stone and laying the tracks, plowing one field and then the next.” Here, Brown not only alludes to slavery from the ancient world to the antebellum South, but also surveys the exploitation of laborers like her “illiterate, hammer-swinging grandfather,” and the coal miners and tenant farmers of her native Kentucky. Those laborers are the same as all the ones who are continually “made draft, made compulsory, forced into conscription, like all those boys in my mama’s class that won that twisted lottery and came home from Vietnam unable to tell the slam of a screen door from a land mine.” The unassuming and eminently tractable donkey rehearses, in its very plodding, the survival strategies of those whose extrinsic worth has been bound to their work, and whose ongoing struggle has been to resist the erasures that their worth-bearing work necessarily entailed. 

For Nickole Brown, however, the donkey’s symbolic resonances remain deeply personal, tied as she is to generations of laborers and survivors. These personal connections begin with the idioms of Brown’s Kentucky childhood. Brown notes these idiomatic roots in the fourteenth section: “the church ladies would say they hadn’t seen me in a donkey’s years even if I had missed only a few Sundays, and all us kids knew to avoid Uncle Leon because the man could talk the hind legs off a donkey and that telling grandfather what to do was about as good as putting a steering wheel on a mule.” These folksy benign figures of speech contrast with the misogynistic donkey jokes examined elsewhere in the chapbook. The toxic masculinity attached to the word “donkey” (as slang for “vagina,” and therefore, as troubling synecdoche for “female”) provides Brown with a space to consider misogyny in American culture, and how that misogyny has informed her own story, intersected as it is with class issues and regional inequities, “a birthright, that would’ve never let me see a day in school past tenth grade, and by the time I’d even think about going back for my diploma, I’d be trapped with too many babies and a shit husband to boot.” All the way through The Donkey Elegies, Brown evokes, with gut-punching clarity, the prevalence and preponderance of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender-based discrimination that contextualize American life. Like the donkey, and like many women in America, Brown notes that she survived by moving forward “regardless, in spite of everything.”

Reading about moving forward, not merely surviving, but assaying-into-song, feels especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second to last section of The Donkey Elegies, Brown writes:

    And here we are, on the brink again, testing the promise of rainbows with who-knows-how-many continents’ worth
    of glacial melt and less and less forest to save. There is no beauty

    in nature I see anymore
    that I recognize
    as simply beautiful
    without adding a prayer
    of please, don’t die.

Nickole Brown’s poetry does what all truly great poetry does: it reminds us that we are always on the brink and that there is so much to save as we skitter on the edge of an incremental apocalypse. The Donkey Elegies reaffirms a truth we know in every molecule of our animal-selves: to live like the donkey is to live in a Dickinsonian Forever composed of Nows. Buy this book, send a copy to a friend; it is a balm in uncertain times, a book of great, enduring, lyric power and imagination.

---

To read an insightful and formally inventive review of this chapbook, in which Julie Marie Wade compares The Donkey Elegies to Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, go to Lambda Literary here.

To read an Oxford American interview with Nickole Brown, go here.

To find out more about Nickole Brown’s poetry, visit her website here.

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.

Plague Poem #2: ["The Plague" by David Lehman]

The Plague

Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
which I want to re-read this week
(now that the frogs, the lice,
and the locusts are upon us)
because his hypothesis is
that the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague
he has in mind is bubonic,
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
Fleas from infected rodents transmitted it.

In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things,
it's a false alarm, says one, and let's not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will -- the competitive desire to live
while others are dying -- is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.

3 / 15 / 20

Bittersweet Worlds [by Nin Andrews]

A few summers ago I was in Maine, looking out from our house at a meadow full of bittersweet when I asked a poet-friend and gardener extraordinaire, “How do you get rid of bittersweet?” The bittersweet was everywhere, strangling ferns and bushes and covering parts of the meadow where blueberries once grew. “It’s best to ignore it,” she said. “Look past it at the sailboats gliding across the bay because you can’t get rid of bittersweet. It’s like a hydra. You cut off one head, and two grow back in its place.” She was right. The more I pulled out the bittersweet, the faster it grew back. Finally, in a moment of frustration, I hired a man with an excavator to dig up the patch of the meadow where the bittersweet had taken over. Gradually, the meadow grew back in to its natural and beautiful self.

Now, when I look out at the meadow where the bittersweet once grew, I think of Maureen Seaton’s title poem, “Sweet World,” from her latest book published by CavanKerry Press, which I have retitled in my mind as “Bittersweet World.” Instead of invasive plants, Seaton writers about cancer with her characteristic wit and honesty and eloquence.  When I read her work, I pray, “May the bittersweet leave her with only the sweetness that she is.” I am such a fan of her poetry.

Sweet World

I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash

Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath 

at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V 

as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding

a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.

Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused 
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me 

and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days. 
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. 

Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app 
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before. 

A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it. 

Seaton’s book, Sweet World, and my friend’s advice to look past the bittersweet and out at the ocean, and to focus on sailboats gliding by instead of invasive plants, reminds me of the sports writer’s, Tim Wendel’s book, Cancer Crossing about his younger brother, Eric, who was diagnosed with leukemia at three years old but survived until he was ten on an ongoing regimen of chemical cocktails. The story goes back and forth between the story of the pioneering doctors who did their best to save Eric, his family life, and his father’s obsession with teaching the family to sail on Lake Ontario.  

The sailing serves as both a metaphor for cancer—for being at the mercy of the ever-changing whims of the winds and weather, and as an escape from it, a way of concentrating on something else. In one passage, Wendel describes a day when the family sailed into a squall, and his sister, Susan, chose to remain on deck:

“What were you doing up there?” I whispered, not wanting to get her in trouble with Dad.
“Singing,” she said.
“Singing? But why?”
“It made me laugh,” she grinned. “How the wind swept the words away from me before I could hear them.”

I looked at her as if she was crazy. Yet in the months ahead, I began to understand her tenacity and gallows humor in such conditions. Perhaps she realized that the squall line was somehow an omen for what we would encounter, on and off the water. Sometimes such storms would be on us before we knew it, and the only thing we could do was to hang on and find the courage to sing through it all.” (page 73-74)

The book is a heartwarming account of family life, cancer, medical advances, grief, sailing, life in the 60’s and 70’s, and more. It demonstrates how many stories an author can tell in a memoir, even a memoir specifically about cancer. The mix is where the magic of the book occurs.

I am also reminded of David Lehman’s book about his experience with cancer, aptly titled, One Hundred Autobiographies, a title he credits to the poet, Mark Strand, who died of cancer in 2014.  Like Cancer Crossing, Lehman’s book is a collection of interwoven stories in which Lehman displays his unique ability to keep the mind sailing, even when the body is faltering. Like Wendel, he compares cancer to a storm. Chapter 71, “The Sublime Pain of Being,” begins:

Not a day without pain. If not the neuropathy, the problems of adjusting to your prosthetic device, which sometimes malfunctions. The scar where they cut you open and the irritated skin surrounding the stoma. The seemingly interminable indigestion. These are unpleasant but banal. Only on some days do you feel the sublime pain of being alone in the universe. Like the experience of standing on a hotel terrace in Miami during a hurricane watching the wind subdue the royal palms, taking them down, all the way to the point where they are level with the ground; the storm howling in delight at its conquered foes—it puts the fear of the Lord in you. Back in September 2005 I was in Aventura on Florida’s Atlantic coast when Hurricane Katrina made landfall there. The passengers aboard the aircraft two days later were as hushed as the audience hearing a certain four-and-a-half minute John Cage composition.

The book also describes aspects of our Kafka-esque medical system. I was particularly disturbed by this entry from his wife, Stacey’s journal, an entry written at the end of a day of waiting for Lehman to emerge from surgery:

I was alone in the waiting area. Everyone else had gone home. The room was decorated like a cheap chain motel lobby and the garbage bags overflowed with empty fast food containers and coffee cups. Boxes containing scattered slices of cold pizza covered the counter near the coffee machine.

"You can wait for him in his room," the OR receptionist said when I next approached her. "At last," I thought. She gave me the room number, but her counterpart on the urological floor had no record of David. The nurses wanted me to go home. "There’s nothing you can do here," they said. "We’ll let you know when he’s released to his room."

I took the elevator to the recovery suite, but it was crowded, and I seemed to be in the way so I took a seat in the corridor. While watching the nurses tend to David, I did something I rarely do: I burst into tears. "Why is this happening? Why isn’t he in his room yet?"

Ms. Brady, "the patient advocate," went to find out. She returned with a smile on her face, her arms wide, as if she were going to embrace me.

"He’s staying here tonight," she said. "In recovery. Doctor’s orders." She was ebullient. It didn’t make sense. What was there to be happy about? "Now you must absolutely go home," she said. "You can’t stay here all night."

Why not? And why isn’t he in the recovery room?

As one would expect from any book by David Lehman, moments of literary insight and inspiration as well as autobiography, dreams, fantasies, and more, so much more, are woven into the text. In Chapter 30, "What's the Story," he explains his choice of narrative structure: 

I don’t know how the ordeal is going to turn out, and the road connecting memory and desires is not a linear path but a series of quick right and left turns dictated by the local authorities somewhat whimsically to regulate the flow of traffic. Glen, my literary agent and boon companion, thinks I should write an anatomy of cancer on the model of An Anatomy of Melancholy. But one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite, and if you have gotten a reprieve and time is still on your side, you must do what you want and only that.

Finally, I want to mention Cati Porter's poems from her book, The Body at a Loss, in which she describes how a diagnosis changes one's world. In her poem, "The Solution," she, too, uses the ocean as a metaphor for her experience. 

The Solution

One day you awaken to the sound of waves
And the world has dissolved, as sugar into water—

The sudden shift in being, from solid into liquid,
And your matter no longer matters, and when you rise up

To the surface you find there is no surface,
That all potential universes have in fact melted

Into each other, and that all that could be
Had, said, done, been, true,

Has melded into one, fluid as the sea,
Empty and full at once—because that is the way

Of it, as one day the world seems steady, solid, then
The next, the world is nothing more than a vast unboundedness

Where we drift with currents that are driven
By no moon, no you.

Francisco’s Rubén: A Latinx Poet Gathers His Graces [by Michael Dowdy]

After Rubén : A Book Launch for Francisco Aragón with Fellow Macondo Readers takes place on Tuesday, March 3, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at the Central Library, Latino Collection and Resource Center as part of Writer's Week at San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad Street, San Antonio, Texas.

The following is excerpted and adapted from the Foreword to After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), by Francisco Aragón. 

Alan Pelaez Lopez has argued that the “X” in “Latinx” signifies an historical wound rather than a rhetorical trend. In Pelaez Lopez’s formulation, the wound of Latinidad emerges from four sites that correspond to the four sides of the X. The violences of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and heteropatriarchy—the inability of language to fully articulate their impacts and define how vulnerable bodies navigate daily life in the Americas. At the crossroads of this volatile equis, I’d like to propose, Latinx poetry has the unique capacity to gather the worlds of the wounded: their tongues, triumphs, and hardships, their wounds and the words for drawing near them, perhaps even the words to begin building another world from within their aches and sorrows. Readers are fortunate to encounter in Francisco Aragón’s new collection of poems and prose After Rubén a passionate, wise, and sensitive guide to these worlds.

With joy, pluck, and a welcoming hand, Aragón’s lines and sentences take us to meet the people and their places. His mother, “head brimming with phrases” in English and amulets for escaping the sweatshop. His father, “portly, sugar / in his blood, a whiff of something // on his breath as he speaks of the Sacramento / River.” A sister, her voice “sturdy as the metal / table and chairs / in the patio.” Cities north and south, where numina float and settle, “as if a place—León, / Granada—could speak, / whistle, inhabit / a timbre.” A Nicaraguan woman testifying about the Contra War, whose words “gather and huddle / in my throat.” Unitedstatesian scoundrels, alas, such as Joe Arpaio, one of the empire’s cast of grotesques—“we’ve caught a glimpse / in the jowls of your sheriff: / bulldog who doubles as your heart.” And, approaching rapture, the poets who whisper and sing in Aragón’s ears and in the poems in his book.

Aragón has collected in After Rubén several lifetimes of a life in letters. From the “short / skinny boy” with a skateboard and “books in my backpack,” to the man in a hotel mirror who’s come to resemble his father, the constant is poetry and poets. Here, Aragón is a poet fierce and compassionate, wizened and empowered by his experiences as a gay Latinx man. Here is the tireless advocate for other poets, who share our air or breathe within poems we share with others. After Rubén meditates on family, both inherited and made, through filiation, through the words of living and dead. And our guide animates his dead, for, as he writes, “the dead are very patient.”

The Rubén of the title is, of course, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Rubén—innovator of Latin American modernismo, not to be confused with Anglo-American modernism. Darío—recently “discovered” queer poet whose poems Aragón reinvents and reinvigorates. Rubén—beating heart of the collection, a body of poems and poets in communion across space and time. Consider the line just above. Borrowed from Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, it serves as the evocative epigraph to After Rubén, where the dead are present, vigilant, and sensuously alive.

In this urgent book, and in our urgent times, after Rubén has many meanings: temporal (i.e., succeeding Darío); homage (praising Darío); inspiration (creating versions, riffs, and imitations inspired by Darío); trajectory (following in Darío’s footsteps); and pursuit (chasing Darío). These meanings converge in “My Rubén,” the gorgeous autobiographical essay that concludes the volume. Aragón’s beloved poet encompasses his mother’s—on demand she would recite sentimental lines to young Francisco. And his father’s—his favorite was Darío’s fable of St. Francis of Assisi, which Aragón rewrites as “The Man and the Wolf.” Of After Rubén’s many achievements, the most enduring may be Aragón’s intimate, generous, and deeply generative reintroduction of his Rubén Darío to readers in North America. Our charge is clear: to reread the mariposa modernista with the grace, care, and solidarity with which his compatriot Francisco Aragón has read him for us.

 

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His poems have appeared in twenty anthologies, most recently The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press) and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightbook Books). Others include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (W.W. Norton), Deep Travel: American Poets Abroad (Ninebark Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism. A native of San Francisco, CA, he directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Aragón divides his time between Washington, D.C. and South Bend, IN.  

Michael Dowdy is a poet, critic, editor, and essayist. He is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press) and the co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press). As a poet, his works include a book, Urbilly (Main Street Rag), and a chapbook, The Coriolis Effect. He is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina where he teaches poetry and Latinx literature. He's been a faculty fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Originally from Blacksburg, Virgina, he taught at Hunter College/Cuny for a decade before moving to South Carolina.