The Best American Poetry

"Jackie Kennedy" [by Mary Maxwell]

Fabulous beast rumored to have roamed the dunes, a sighted unicorn
of sorts, gone to the Moors for a slumming late-night drink, or so
some claim. Somewhere behind her oft-photographed dark glasses,

possibly a private self.  Carrier of culture waving from the back of
the awful convertible.  Forty-four thousand acres of land protected
with her husband’s flourishing signature, just ahead of developers

eyeing the Provincelands and contemplating the construction of
a bridge from Long Point back to Plymouth.  At Land’s End, at
the Pilgrim’s landing site, did she order the very, very dry martini

preferred by Arthur Schlesinger? The Cold War’s narrow ties, its
playboy spies, gadgets and international girlfriends on the side. That
Atomic Age as one of optimism rather than doom, galactic horizons

as something other than a dump site for Earth’s waste. Outer space
versus inner resources.  Her favorite poem by Millay recalling all
our country’s youthful, windblown promise.  Iconic shared visage,

not only historic but component of us, a multitude’s satellite decade
with her as breathless bungling mother to a network generation. In
front of Town Hall, she’s resurrected in pillbox and tottering heels. 

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012). Jackie Kennedy shares her birthday of July28 with Marcel Duchamp and John Ashbery.

"112th Street" [by James Longenbach]

112th Street

If only once, if ever you have the chance,
You should climb a volcano. 
The hermitage at basecamp, the glasses of brandy—
That’s the past. 
Who wants to think about the past?

You want to push forward, climb higher, while all around you,
Inches beneath your feet,
Earth is seething, a river of liquid rock.

Will you make it to the summit—
The flying slag, the pot holes
Red as an open wound?
Of course you will, it’s easy; everybody does.

So little behind you,
So much ahead—

Once, walking up Broadway
Late at night,
Both of us a little drunk, flurries in the air, Christmas trees
Lining the sidewalk, block after block—

At every corner
You kissed me.
Then the light would change.

Ed note: from Forever by James Longenbach (Norton), pub date June 22, 2021.

 

An Interview with Adrienne Su [by Aspen Matis]

Adrienne Su is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Peach State, Living Quarters, Having None of It, Sanctuary, and Middle Kingdom. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including four volumes of The Best American Poetry. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, she is professor of creative writing and poet-in-residence at Dickinson College.

I corresponded with Ms. Su via email about poetry’s ability to translate “a question or problem into comprehensible form” and to “make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could.” We also discussed the exciting nature of creative works that elicit “a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks” and the power of strong and timely language to make “a constructive difference” in our world.

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

Writing poems is the most difficult and original thing I’m capable of doing. It uses all of my intellectual resources, as well as whatever small abilities I might possess in music, visual art, storytelling, and the many languages I’ve studied but can’t speak. Also, I find that writing a poem reduces the pain of nagging uncertainties, not by providing certainties, but by putting a question or problem into comprehensible form.

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

First, to make our everyday vocabulary do something no one previously thought it could. Usually this has something to do with the roots of words, the root of “radical” being radix, “root.” Second, to keep at poetry regardless of the recognition that does or doesn’t appear in the poet’s lifetime.

This past March, you wrote a powerful and wrenching opinion-editorial in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution about how “As the pandemic raged and many in power blamed China for everything, attacks on Asians followed.” In the context of the horrific racially-motivated Atlanta mass-shooting of Asian women, your essay shares a glimpse of your own experience as an Asian American woman from Atlanta. Relaying the ways in which you’ve navigated the rise in hostility and discrimination you’ve experienced in the past months, you write: “My job is safer than the jobs of spa employees, but I see anew how I coped with the pandemic under an openly racist president. When gyms closed and many took to walking for exercise, I cut back on going outside. After dark, I drove, even to travel two blocks. I appreciated the obscuring effect of masks.” What moved you to write this very personal op-ed, and what impact do you hope your words will have?

Thank you for this response to the piece. I wrote it because the news of the shooting left me feeling pinned by a boulder, and my initial efforts to roll it away — donating money, attending a rally — gave no relief. The boulder didn’t budge. Its weight was saying that I was not only capable of more, the task was also non-optional. Jennifer Joseph of Manic D Press, publisher of three of my books, gave me the needed nudge. As an Asian American writer who not only grew up in Atlanta but was one week from publishing a book of poems centering on Asian American Atlanta, I would be wrong not to speak up — and I needed to do it in a genre that moves faster and is more widely read than poetry. How long would the media be interested in Asian America? One, two weeks? If enough writers took up the cause, that interest could last longer. Strong op-eds by other Asian American writers were appearing by the day, so I also knew I needed to say something others hadn’t already said. In terms of speed, I’m the opposite of a journalist, so even with Jen and other writer friends responding to drafts, and with every obligation I could cancel canceled, that short piece took me four full days of obsessive writing and rewriting. My hope is that it conveys something others may have wanted to say about being Asian American in a time of pandemic and racial unrest but didn’t have the writing experience, access to publishing, or possibly even the English language to express — and that that makes a constructive difference, on any scale.

Your most recent book of poems, Peach State, explores Atlanta, Georgia’s transformation from the mid-twentieth century to today, as seen and shaped by Chinese Americans. Poet Mark Jarman describes the collection as “elegant, lucid, formally inventive,” and Paisley Rekdal, who edited The Best American Poetry 2020, calls the book “sly, smart and accessible, formally sophisticated and moving,” adding that Peach State is “a beautiful and thought-provoking meditation on food, race, and identity.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

In 2015 I saw how international Atlanta had become; being of Asian descent there was no longer the lonely condition I remembered from the 1970s. Both of these things had become clear to me through food: restaurants, grocery stores. In the early days, my family had simply done without many Chinese ingredients, but every now and then someone arrived with a suitcase full of treasures from New York, San Francisco, Taiwan, or Singapore. Today I’m the one who brings a suitcase full of treasures home to central Pennsylvania — from Atlanta. I wanted to write about these changes because, while Atlanta’s transformation was what I had wanted all along, it also meant the erasure of an era. I wanted to acknowledge and celebrate the Chinese Americans, including my parents, who were there many years before the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 inadvertently created major demographic shifts. I found that I was best able to portray their resourcefulness, creativity, loneliness, and joy through food. They laid a path for the substantial Asian population of today’s Atlanta — which I also wanted to celebrate. The writing process was a mixture of mourning and delight.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

When I look at shortlists, even longlists, for prizes, I think there is no “best” book. The books are usually doing different things and aren’t meant to be compared to each other. That’s why I think it’s so important that independent publishers and university presses stay around; they care most about the integrity of the work, and while they certainly need to sell books, they aren’t in it for the immediate public response. One day the overlooked great works may receive the recognition they deserve because someone kept them in print. Best American Poetry is a great vehicle for that, too, putting both known and unknown poets’ names in public libraries everywhere.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Have faith that your non-literary talents will turn out to be relevant to your poetry, but give it time to find its place. For many years, I was ambivalent about my interest in cooking. Cooking ability often translates into added labor, especially for women — labor that is generally unseen and repetitive and done at the cumulative expense of writing time. Eventually, my interest in food became a cornerstone of my writing life.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

Lately I’ve been writing prose, including a forthcoming piece on children’s books for New Ohio Review; a short piece for the Instagram page Apparel for Authors; and another short piece on Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month for USA Today. I’m working on a longer essay on Chinese restaurants. Poetry is still my main genre, but this moment in history seems also to be calling for prose. As when I first read poems that moved me, I remain the most excited by creative works that elicit a visceral response; I wish I could generalize about what constitutes such works, but it’s a gut response, an understanding one feels rather than thinks.  

Selfie with Marilyn Monroe: Writing in the Persona of Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

She was a just postcard at the MOMA, a stamp of pink and lemon yellow. Her mouth, a red smear, slightly open. Is that a word forming, wanting to slip from tongue to lip to air. Trapped in an Andy Warhol silk screen.

I bought the postcard, propped it on my desk. We gazed at each other.

What did I know about Marilyn Monroe—nothing really—blonde bombshell, actress, married to Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, something about the Kennedys, died young, suicide?  She was just a very famous face. But arguably the first female celebrity known by a single name. And still the most enduring. Even 60 years after her death, she’s still here, on YouTube, all over the Internet, and at the moment, in the form of a controversial statue in Palm Springs.

Why is that?

Turns out Marilyn pioneered multiplication—And I don’t mean math, but the concept of blanketing the world with her image, before the Internet made it easy— she was the first instant celebrity, it gave her power. She created the Marilyn Monroe image then projected and performed it over and over.

Think about yourself. How do you appear on Instagram, Hinge or Twitter? Isn’t social a form of  multiplication? Aren’t we all projecting and performing? Every selfie is posed and a pose. Even in real life, we perform some version of our self. I am now. So are you.

T.S. Eliot wrote about putting on a “face to meet the faces that you meet.” The daily act of assuming a persona. As a poet, to really explore our performance culture, I assumed someone else’s persona—Marilyn’s.

For two years, I became Marilyn in poetry. It began in Paris in July 2018. A place where I had first come as a student, even then assuming a role—dipping my tongue into the language to spend long nights in cafés and bars, drinking Pernod, smoking Gauloises and imagining myself Hemingway. But now, decades later, I had greater ambitions. I was going to become Marilyn Monroe.  Or maybe it had started earlier, in 1994 when I moved to Los Angeles and fell under the spell of faces plastered on billboards and ran into stars in the supermarket. The glitter of LA shaking onto my skin and sticking as I went about my life, working, raising my family. But all the time, perhaps it was there lurking—the desire to be someone else, to be the world’s most famous woman, to be Marilyn Monroe.

As I wrote, I came to know her many faces, the layers of her performance. I stripped away the façade, pushed against stereotype to try to find her truth. I found it. Sort’ve. It was fairly easy for me to capture her voice, to tell her story in poetry. She has a lot to say and poetry works for Marilyn. But as I’ve came closer to Marilyn’s truths, I’ve came face to face with my self—Maybe I used her as a foil. By becoming Marilyn, had I been avoiding my own lies?

In the end, the collection I wrote, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, is a poetic insomnia-inspired conversation between Marilyn and the speaker that confronts the truths that many women experience: abuse, addiction, careers, love, marriage and divorce, children and childlessness, mental health and death. In becoming Marilyn, I became closer to understanding myself.

At the Ritz: Plath, Sexton & Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

1958: Eisenhower’s in the White House, Explorer 1 satellite launched, The US. Supreme Court rules for school integration, Elvis joins the Army, the Yankees win the World Series, the microchip is invented, Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is published, Marilyn Monroe films Some Like it Hot, Sylvia Plath moves to Boston and joins Anne Sexton in Robert Lowell’s writing seminars.


It’s also the year I was born. But that is not why I’m here conjuring 1958. Or maybe it is, inserting myself into this story about an imagined cultural intersection of poetry and pop. In my mind, Plath and Sexton are having martinis at the Ritz Carlton in Boston. They’ve come from a Lowell seminar, their minds buzzing. At the next table is Monroe. She’d driven up from Connecticut where she lives with husband Arthur Miller. She’s newly pregnant, her body hormonally adjusting. She’s nervous that she’ll lose this one too, especially as she must fly to LA next month to start filming. As she sips her cup of tea, she thinks about Arthur, his struggles with writer’s block, her need to get away for a few days. Marilyn pulls her journal out of her handbag to write. Truman Capote’s book tumbles out. As she reaches down under the table to retrieve it, she notices the two women at the next table. All other eyes in the dining room are on her, but not theirs. They are deep in conversation. There is something about them that intrigues Marilyn. Does she know them from somewhere? Plath and Sexton are playing it cool. Of course, they know that Marilyn Monroe is sitting next to them. It is only as she looks directly at them, that they turn to meet her gaze.

From everything that I have learned in the research I undertook to write poems in the persona of Marilyn for my newest collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, neither Anne Sexton nor Sylvia Plath never met Marilyn. Plath wanted to, or her subconscious wanted to meet Marilyn according to a 1959 diary entry: “Marilyn Monroe appeared to me last night in a dream as a kind of fairy godmother. I spoke almost in tears of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us (her husband and herself) although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me a manicure. I had not washed my hair, and asked her about hairdressers, saying no matter where I went, they always imposed a horrid cut on me. She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.” Discovering this diary entry prompted me to write a poetic response from Marilyn to Plath:

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

In fact, as I drafted poems for An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, I had Sexton and Plath on my brain. That all three women suffered mental health issues and would die early by their hand was an obvious connection. But they also were living and making art and pushing against the constraints of being a creative, working woman at a time when women were expected to be homemakers. Sexton, Plath and Monroe began connecting into a single powerful force in my writing. I drafted a cento constructed of lines from poems all three women wrote in 1958. While that poem did not make it into my final collection, remnants of Sexton and Plath’s imagery linger in several of the poems, and specifically the bee imagery from Sexton’s “Said the Poet to the Analyst” and “Ringing the Bells” and Plath’s bee poems particularly “Wintering,” echo in my persona poem, “Hello it’s Me, Marilyn” where Marilyn is dying. Even now, beneath the lilt of Marilyn’s voice, I hear the lower pitched ones of Sexton and Plath in my ear—like a brilliant, feminist chorus and suddenly, there they are in the Ritz hotel, across from the Boston Public Garden, together and it’s 1958.

 

[1] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marilyn Monroe not only loved poetry and poets, poets have reciprocated in writing Marilyn into poetry. While I may be the first to write an entire collection centered around Marilyn, in doing so I have entered into a long tradition of poets who have written poems devoted to or referencing the famous actress.

Marilyn appears in passing in Frank O’Hara’s “To the Film Industry in Crisis” published in 1957, while Marilyn was still living, as “Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls” and more recently in Alex Dmitrov’s “LOVE” from his new collection LOVE and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2020):

“And yes, I love that Marilyn Monroe requested Judy Garland’s “Over

the Rainbow” to be played at her funeral. And her casket was lined in

champagne satin. And Lee Strasberg ended his eulogy by saying, “I

cannot say goodbye. Marilyn never liked goodbyes, but in the peculiar way

she had of turning things around so that they faced reality, I will

say au revoir.”

 

In fact, it is Marilyn’s tragic death that poets have explored over and over. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” from 1968, with her death as metaphor for America:

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

What innocence? Whose guilt? What eyes? Whose breast?

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

DiMaggio! Los Angeles! Miller! Los Angeles! America!

That Death should seem the only protector –

That all arms should have faded, and the great cameras and lights

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

call for him! call for him to strengthen her with what could

only dissolve her! A method

of dying, we are shaken, we see it. Strasberg!

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

and yet by this death we are a little shaken, we feel it, America.

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

perhaps she had said. ‘All I had was my life.

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

And if she was not responsible, not wholly responsible, Los Angeles?

Los Angeles? Will it follow you around? Will the slow

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

Then in 1984, Sharon Olds writes a poem with the same title that appears in her collection from that year The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984).

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

The ambulance men touched her cold
body, lifted it, heavy as iron,
onto the stretcher, tried to close
the mouth, closed the eyes, tied the
arms to the side, moved a caught
strand of hair, as if it mattered,
saw the shape of her breasts, flattened by
gravity, under the sheet,
carried her, as if it were she,
down the steps.

These men were never the same. They went out
afterwards, as they always did,
for a drink or two, but they could not meet
each other's eyes.

Their lives took
a turn-one had nightmares, strange
pains, impotence, depression. One did not
like his work, his wife looked
different, his kids. Even death
seemed different to him-a place where she
would be waiting,

and one found himself standing at night
in the doorway to a room of sleep, listening to a
woman breathing, just an ordinary
woman
breathing.

Marilyn’s death forever transforming the men, and the reader in Old’s poem. We cannot look away. In Frank Bidart’s 1996 poem, “Marilyn Monroe” that ran in The New Yorker, Marilyn becomes a vehicle for the idea and perhaps the impossibility of transformation.

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me—)

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

Even nearly sixty years after her death, Marilyn continues to serve as poetic muse, metaphor and mirror. And there’s no end in sight. Brava Marilyn!

Meet the Press: Roof Books & Queenzenglish.mp3

N.B. The following conversation with Kyoo Lee (also known as Q) and James Sherry centers on Q’s anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3, an amazing book I highly recommend picking up. ~DD

Dante Di Stefano: How did this project come into being?

Q: First, thank you so much, Dante, for your kind appreciation of the book.

The anthology grew out of the “mp3: merging poetry, philosophy, performativity” public seminar I launched in 2017 at the CUNY Graduate Center, supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Center for the Humanities. As the faculty leader of the seminar, I started this sub-project on the “QueensEnglishToday.mp3” by organizing a reading and panel discussion at the GC on November 30, 2017. Then later that weekend, on December 3, 2017, we threw a sort of party, a more extensive and festive performance event at Queens Museum, QueensEnglish@QueensMuseum.mp3 which I organized with Lee Ann Brown, where we formed an impromptu qLab (my name being “Q”). About a year later on December 08, 2018, some of the authors from the volume presented their texts and drafts at a session I curated for Queens Museum Biennale 2018, “QueensEnglish International 2018.” Poetic Justice is the initial and overarching theme for the “mp3” series I was exploring between 2017 and 2019, and so Queenzenglish.mp3 has this philopoetic genesis as well.  

This idea of doing a book was part of the project concept from the start, and so while I am the editor, Queenzenglish.mp3 remains truly and structurally a collaborative endeavor. I am ever so grateful to everyone involved, especially all the authors who have so enthusiastically and generously accepted the invitation to participate. I remember having some great conversations with Lee Ann and Paolo Javier, for instance, doing some brainstorming and napkin-writing. I was glad and grateful that James Sherry at Roof Books, a leading publisher in language poetry, was immediately receptive to the idea of putting together a book of this kind, and luckily, the fund from Mellon Foundation made that initial step possible. Rebecca Teich, Grace Caiazza, and Deborah Thomas at the press, along with James, also worked so hard on the project at every step of the way. So, this book benefited greatly from everyone’s expertise, enthusiasm, trust, goodwill, experiences, wisdom, support, and friendship, including Rachel Rose, the great artist and friend, who generously donated the exquisitely aquatic cover image which also rhymes so well with the conceptual vitality of the book.

DD: In your brilliant introduction to the anthology, you describe the project and explain the title. Could you provide a thumbnail version of these explanations for potential readers?

Q: Dynamic “Englishing” happening in Queenzenglish.mp3 performs the polyphonic futurity of the language in transit(ion): for us here, creative writing is critical thinking is connective reading.  

DD: One of the poems in this volume that stands out as a great example of what you call “dynamic ‘Englishing’ and its polyphonic futurity” is Steven Alvarez’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras.” I was wondering if you could talk a bit about this piece and how it embodies your project as a whole?

Q: It’s all “in the cracks” of and between and among languages, words, lines, its creative vacuities or transgenerative cavities. Steven’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras,” too, remembering  

        the reality that you are todos tus lengunas—yes—all yr tongues__
        remembering the peaceful of Queens—
        remembering those who wrote genius—& blissful drunkness__

and so on with such slidingly serial smooth jazziness re-members English as transEnglish in action. This translingual soundscaping in English is also deeply rooted in—while routed to—Queens as the site specified as such.  

DD: What did you learn about poetry (and your own relationship to language) through the work presented in this anthology?

Q: I always learn more about philosophy whatever “else” I seem to be doing or not doing or undoing. For this project, a sense of the magic of happening that is also made has been particularly palpable.

Philosophers: poetry envy is real, get over (here) with your Plato. This anthology is also one of the best things that happened to the field of the philosophy of language in recent years: The very fact that this category in the academic sub-field, “the philosophy of language” as in the philosophy of mind, is so monolingually and monologically framed, is already telling. I see the complex singularities of this anthology not just self-servingly as the editor of the book but as a future-facing reader and practitioner of philopoetics. Caroline Bergvall’s “Onward Afterword” also saw that so brilliantly.     

DD: Yanyi’s “Family Tree” stood out to me as a profound examination of what you call in your introduction “entanglished borderiding.” You say in the introduction: “Activating our own voices from where we are and are seen and heard and encountered, each of us began by actively listening, scribing, scribbling—across the boundaries and borders of all sorts and scales.” Could you talk about Yanyi’s piece and some of the other pieces that critically engage linguistic, national, and personal boundaries?

Q: Actually, the other day, I was telling Yanyi how wonderful it is that the book ends/reopens with the “Family Tree (After Luc Sante).” It was the alphabetical imperative of the name Yanyi that placed the piece at the end, yet the serendipity of it was notable as I was looking through the book again.  

Yanyi’s piece resonates with Steve’s to the extent that it also concerns linguo-cultural re-member-ing and life-wor(l)ding in motion/migration. Yet, it unfolds more edgily on a register more discursively corporeal and specifically genealogical and geopolitical, as it is set against the backdrop of the colonial modernity, the ideogrammatized “East-West” divide, and transactional transnationality of English as the language of trade (tradere “deliver, hand over,” part of tradition, too) as in “a primary text of Orientalism. My work as an artist is to try and talk to myself about my own race”:  

        The cost of being Chinese American is absorbing English as the primary text. […]
        […] I begin to remember. After all, I remembered it. Should it not belong to me? If I
        comes from my mouth, did I not eat it originally?

“I” and “It” emerging in these passages (first two paragraphs) perform their own gradual, irreferential entanglements via English that—literally—dissolves into the words on the page, especially in the second paragraph where you do not see “English” but only hear it performed; “My education begins to resemble my life, but also is not familiar.” This is indeed, as you observe, a very interesting embodiment of “entanglished borderiding,” part of what I myself happened to have started theorizing by recoding Writing-in-English into “Writing Entanglish” (Belladonna* Chapbook #188, 2015). Steve, Yanyi, and Q, among others, all play their music differently, yet all that is part of this music called Englishing. To re-cite the last epigram for my introduction to Queenzenglish.mp3:

        I remember coming across “comyn englysshe” a long time ago in a history of
                                                                                                    English class […]
        I agree with Ann Lauterbach, “a rose, after all, is still only a rose,
                                                                                                    but it smells sweeter
        when there are three of them” and even more when there are more of them.
                – Kyoo Lee, Writing Entanglish

DD: Thanks so much for your nuanced and insightful answers and for editing such a remarkable anthology, Q. James, what do you find most notable about Queenzenglish.mp3?

James Sherry: QE3 is notable for the amount of variation that might lead to change, mutation if you will. Some write from a personal point of view, some from a social point of view, some from the point of view of their surroundings and all of the permutations of those three. People are writing in prose, poetry, citation, and prose-poetry. People are writing with formal innovation and people are writing within a more transparent or received style. Will any of these different approaches to the issues catch on with a larger number of writers and lead to changing how we think about standards?

DD: In your essay, “Change and the Golden Rule.” The following paragraph struck me as particularly brilliant:

“Precisely because treating everyone as you would be treated assumes that everyone is like you when they aren’t, you know, because we have different selves, different cultures and different surroundings. We have different genes, experience, epi-genetics and environs. Variations galore. Meanwhile, the politics of grammar is based on a game where the prize is power. If I can make you write syntax like I do then you have a predilection to construct ideas like I do. While we may then have conflicts of self-interest, we continue to play the game of prisoner over and again as opposed to breaking omerta.”

Could you point out a few examples in the anthology where your ideas in this paragraph are put into practice?

JS: Most of the people in the book torque standards, leading to adaptation and change. Paolo Javier in “Programmed to Love: Remain as Beast” questions how much humans remain animal in a syntax that makes me read very slowly word to word to be sure I don’t revert to my usual mode of skimming to get the gist. When I read slowly, I get the point. When I read too fast, the intent of the piece eludes me. Kyoo Lee’s piece written with comments by Amy Evans Bauer and Laura Wetherington assumes that each reader takes a unique point of view, questioning the validity of standards. The very first line of Erica Hunt’s “Compliance” points out that we don’t live and hence cannot write in a single mode. M. NourbeSe Philip shows the many variations of a single word, “bamsie,” meaning rear end. Valentine Conaty raises questions that range from species variation to how individuals are both one and multiple all in the context of a field poem. Again, what’s notable about this book is variety, difference, and the individual expectation, the politics, and the ecology that writing needs to find methods, interest, and channels of connection to accommodate difference.

DD: How did Roof Books come into being?

JS: Roof Books started in 1979 with my interest in expanding Roof Magazine to longer formats. I was writing and editing on the cusp of NY School and Language Poetry, leaning toward finding new ways to express meaning. I have written long form essays on the trajectory of the publishing venture, showing how it changes with changes in the poetry world in my effort to keep current. There’s a whole chapter on this subject in my upcoming book Selfie: Poetry & Ecology coming from Palgrave later in 2021.

DD: How does this anthology relate to the other titles in your catalogue?

JS: In recent years, I’ve been moving Roof Books toward presenting an environmental model of writing rather than the language-centered writing of the 20^th century. QE3 by addressing how change occurs and presenting examples of change as well as discussions of the methods of change speaks to how I see writing evolving not only in a uniquely human way but according to the way change occurs throughout the biosphere. Language is not a human invention, but rather something humans discovered about how our world is constructed. I’d assert many of Roof’s recent titles as examples of how humanity and nature operate as a single complex entity.

DD: What else can we look forward to from Roof Books?

JS: Since QE3 was published in late 2020, Roof published an anthology of 31 contemporary Chinese poets in translation titled Urban Poetry from China edited by Huang Fan of Nanjing University and Daniel Tay, a NY-based translation editor. We just published Will Alexander’s magnum opus The Combustion Cycle that makes poetry of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “deep seas and distant galaxies that would make such a demand that his expended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer.” Will’s Cycle relates to QE3 in the way it brings out ancient cultures and contemporary concepts overlooked by mainstream standards. And Brenda Iijima’s ecological masterpiece Bionic Communality, poems shaped to interface “all flora, all fauna, all mineral” in her search for a common ground for all living creatures.

---

Kyoo Lee is a Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the editor of Queenzenglish.mp3 (2020) and the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2013) and Writing Entanglish: Come in Englysshing with Gertrude Stein, Zhuangzi … (2015, chapbook). She is also the coeditor of journal issues on “Safe” (WSQ 2011), “Xenophobia & Racism” (Critical Philosophy of Race 2014) and “Derrida in China Today” (Derrida Today 2018).

Some of her recent academic recognitions include faculty fellowships from Cambridge University, the Mellon Foundation, Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Graduate Center, CUNY, along with a John Jay Faculty Research Excellence Award. Her philopoetic writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dis, Flash Art, Randian, and The Volta among others. A member of PEN America Translation Committee and Poetry Translation Center (London, UK), she serves as the coeditor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism and is on the editorial boards of Derrida Today, Open Humanities Press, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

James Sherry is the author of 13 books of poetry and theory and one of the leading proponents of both Language Writing and Environmental Poetics. His books includeThe Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s The Prince for Our Time (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), Entangled Bank (Chax, 2016), Oops! Environmental Poetics (BlazeVox, 2013), Four For (Meow, 1995), Our Nuclear Heritage (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), Lazy Sonnets (Potes and Poets Press, 1986), In Case (Sun & Moon Press, 1980), Part Songs (Awede Press, 1978). His work has been translated into nine languages including the Chinese edition of Selected Language Poems (Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House: Chengdu, 1993), translated by Ziqing Zhang and Huang Yunte. He is the editor of Roof Magazine and Roof Books, a seminal literary publisher, associated with virtually every innovative strategy in English language writing of the past 40 years, publishing over 150 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative and environmental poetry and poetics. He started the Segue Foundation in 1977 that has produced over 10,000 events in New York. Sherry was born December 30, 1946, and lives in New York City. 

 

"The Professionals" [by Laura Cronk]

 

Who decorates movie sets, sitcom stages,
the kitchens used to advertise paper towels?
Who decorates doctor’s offices, the suite
of offices of a university president, of
a Wall Street accounting firm? Who chose
the paint color for the steel doors at
the bus terminal, the window casements
of the post office, who picked out the awning
at the hospital entrance? All of the patients
in the ER waiting room are held in an embrace
of turquoise and beige that was someone’s
decision fifteen years ago. The spy in the new
series has art on the walls of her D.C. house.
When did she hang it? A set designer wonders this
while hammering the nails. In the evenings
and on weekends, I make the decisions one by one.
Mid-century with a Victorian nod, Farmhouse
Minimalism, Scavenger Maximalism
with a sense of humor and on a budget.
It’s never quite right and never done.
The Shakers hung their chairs on walls.
They shook together but never touched.
Is that how they could do it? Make a home
and live in it, all at once?

from Lit Hub (February 5, 2021), a feature of four poems from Laura Cronk's new book Ghost Hour (Persea Books).
The ghost hour is "when middle age suddenly crashes into what one thought was merely the end of the middle of youth." -- Craig Morgan Teicher. 
https://lithub.com/four-poems-by-laura-cronk/

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

When Eliot wrote his thesis at Harvard,
He said philosophers doing philosophy was “ridiculous”—
That two thousand years of this insanity had gone on
Because they tried to explain existence
From the point-of-view of a platform outside it,
Which didn’t, and couldn’t, exist.  One has only
One's sightlines; and wherever you find yourself,
You're in the middle; and your sightlines
Are better or worse depending on the intelligence
You bring to whatever it is you’re looking at.
Avuncular language-riddles infuriated him,
And he made his disgust quite clear in his thesis.
Harvard offered him a chair on the basis of these ruminations;
And after he said no, Bertrand Russell screwed his wife.

From Recalcitrant Actors by James Cummins (2021). Published by Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). Cummins is pictured with John Ashbery, circa 2009.

An Interview with A. E. Stallings [by Aspen Matis]

A. E. Stallings is the author of four books of poetry: Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax, which won the Poet’s Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; Olives; and, most recently, Like. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, she lives in Athens, Greece.

I corresponded with Ms. Stallings via email about the addictive nature of creative discovery, poetry’s ability to “give life more abundantly,” a poem’s power to rescue readers across time and generations, poetry’s inexorable connection with humanity (and, thus, the medium’s longevity), and the fearlessness required of great critics—the boldness to lead with one’s aesthetics and taste. We also discussed the beautiful notion of “poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.”

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

Reading or knowing or memorizing poems probably has a greater role in my inner life than writing poems. A lot of writing poems is frustration or not getting anywhere or having crises of confidence: it means being willing to write bad poems. Of course, when you write a really good poem and you are discovering something as you write there is no other feeling in the world like it—it is addictive. I think what poetry can do in a way is give life more abundantly… there is a feeling of being fully alive and alert to the various-ness of the world. In a great poem, I feel fully conscious.

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

I think poetry has a diminished role in our present society at large, if we are talking about the Western Anglophone world. But that doesn’t trouble me much. Poetry tends not to be part of our discourse—I would put that down largely to its diminished place in our education. At the same time, you can look at the popularity of MFA programs—the number of people actively studying to be poets—or what a sensation Amanda Gorman was at the Inauguration, and you can see there is still a hunger for it. I don’t think it matters that poetry isn’t wildly popular, as long as it is deeply appreciated by some. Poetry was around before the alphabet and it will be around when thousands of species of plants and animals alive today are gone, when the glaciers are gone, when languages that exist now are gone, basically for as long as there are human beings. So I don’t worry about poetry at all. But a poem can rescue you, can keep you company even across time and generations. A memorized poem becomes part of your brain, and no one can take it away.

There are many people for whom poetry would be important if they were exposed to it as an enriching pleasure, rather than a school text for decoding. Imagine if people only learned music as music theory. Memorization and recitation, reading for pleasure, learning poetry by heart, these are the most important parts of poetic education.

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

Be out of fashion with the times. Write what you like. Write for your ideal audience.

Renowned literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks describes your poems as “never less than the true voice of feeling, and always more.” The MacArthur Fellowship committee praised your “mastery” of poetic form. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between form and meaning? Between structure and ingenuity? 

Structure and form, meaning and ingenuity, are ideally entangled. A sonnet that is also a great poem could only have been a kind of sonnet, not an ode or a ballad. A form—whatever that is, it could be a sinuous ribbon of spare free verse, or the blocky paragraph of a prose poem—should feel that it is pushing interesting choices and also undergirding those uncanny decisions. What you aim for ideally is something that feels both surprising and inevitable.

Your most recent book of poems, Like, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The judges called it “a collection of inventive formal poetry that challenges, gives shape to, and delights in how the art form mimics and distorts the universalities of life.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

I don’t tend to write poems in a programmatic way—I write the poems that are available to me at the time. As such, they tend to map loosely onto life events, and so be thematically related by accident. I think the biggest difference with this collection was the decision to put the poems in alphabetical order by title, which seemed to work surprisingly well.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I am fond of the Metaphysicals, particularly Marvell and Donne and Herbert. There is a poem by Matthew Prior I love (“Jinny the Just”). I am a fan of Keats and Byron (not so much Shelley, “Ozymandias” aside). With the Metaphysicals, the crash of science, intellect and emotion. From Byron, a way of writing about current events. From Keats, vowel music.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

I think the best critic writing today hands down is Ange Mlinko. She is willing to lead with her aesthetics and taste, something a lot of critics are afraid to do now, and then to support with her intellect and her ear and her wide reading. She is fearless. William Logan also leads with taste, and I often read him with pleasure (unless it is about me), but I don’t always trust the scathing wit to be in proportion to the “offense.” Still he is always worth reading, thought provoking, and, like Mlinko, fearless. 

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Some very good books do win prizes of course. But no, it isn’t always the best ones. I’ve been on committees for prizes, and the race does not always go to the swift—a committee has to come to a consensus, and consensus is often compromise. Also the sheer number of poetry books out there (this I think is partly to do with poetry’s professionalization) can make it hard to winnow. I’d like to think that while a lot of accomplished poetry drops away, great poetry will tend to emerge from the background noise sooner or later.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

Write what you like! Read outside of your generation. Read poems from other languages.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I am always trying to eke out the odd poem. I have been writing a lot of prose this year, essays of various kinds. Translation is endlessly fascinating to me. At present I am working on Virgil’s Georgics, which, as a poem concerned about the environment and politics, seems particularly topical.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

At first I read “inquiries” as “injuries,” which perhaps says something. I write a lot about discord and about under- and afterworlds, so I suppose these must interest me. Often it is an emotion I am after. I have started to think about poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.

"Why 'Nixonland' Matters" [by Joe Lehman]

When I was twenty-five, backpacking through Australia, I carried with me my hardcover copy of Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. It absorbed me for all seven months of my journey. I took flight to the land of Oz in late October 2008. Nixonland hit the stores in May of that fateful year of financial crisis. Having recently taken it off my bookshelf, I can report that the book holds up well and has a special relevance for us today. It is that rare thing, a thick history book suitable for a college class that is a most pleasurable page-turner.

For those of us born after the end of the ‘60s (I was born in 1983), we have long been used to the romanticized mythology of the era. We conjure up an image of bell-bottom-wearing long-haired hippies, driving around in psychedelic-painted VW buses, getting high on LSD and marijuana, protesting the war in Vietnam, and practicing free love.

Written from a left-of-center perspective, Nixonland has no illusions about the title figure and his presidential predecessor, yet rips the mask off the pastoral vision of acid-tripping dropouts and collegiate idealists to reveal a less pretty picture of moral anarchy, ruined lives, and gun violence. Read this book and your views of that era will lose their rosy hue. Perlstein paints a radical picture of a country gone insane with political brutality, cultural discord, and social decay. Flower people were not always loveable innocents:

           <<<< Love was in the eye of the beholder. At first downtown merchants welcomed the hippie district that sprang up on Plumb Street in Detroit; it was attracting people to their stores. Then they realized that the hippies liked their stores so much because they could panhandle from paying customers (“I wish we could have had the hippies without the dope,” said one merchant, after the forty-three shops on Plumb Street had shrunk down to six.) (185)  >>>>

Nixonland reads like one big Roman chariot race through hell. Stories of race riots, assassinations, bombings, a divisive war in Vietnam, infighting between (and within) left and right, and the reign of a Machiavellian president occupy every page.

One month before my departure to Australia the U.S. economy had come to the brink of collapse, and the Great Recession was in its early stages. On the first Tuesday in November, just over a week after I landed down under, America ushered in the election of the first African-American president. It was, despite the financial calamity, a hopeful moment. In the time since, however, the country has suffered riots, protests, mass shootings, a polarized populace, and a coronavirus sweeping through like a medieval plague. And as I leaf through my worn copy of Nixonland once more, I realize that I am no longer standing apart from the happenings of a chaotic world. The outbreak of COVID-19 did nothing to unify a polarized society. If anything the crisis in civility and the rise of discord have worsened. On Facebook, friendships terminate because of petty political disagreements, and the general tone of debate demonstrates that virtual bullying is as brutal as the physical kind. The Roman Chariot race through Hell that is described in Nixonland seems far more pressing today than it did upon its hardcover publication in 2008.

A history of America from 1964 to 1972, Nixonland goes from “all the way with LBJ” in 1964 to “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” in 1968; and from there to the resurrection of Richard Nixon and his reelection for years later despite a third-rate burglary on the offices of the political opposition at a previously obscure apartment complex called Watergate. In these eight years America went through what Perlstein bluntly calls a “second civil war.” Just as now, factions of left and right were continually feuding. Vietnam cut the population into two opposing camps. Young people declared war on people over thirty, and the reaction came swiftly enough from folks who pledged allegiance to Bob Hope, “God Bless America,” and Sousa marches on July 4th. “Nixon acted not despite the Silent Majority he described as so pure and decent, but in a sense on their behalf, and even at their request,” Perlstein writes. “His paranoia and dread were their own. Across the state of mind known as Middle America, a subterranean viciousness was bubbling ever closer to the surface.” (519)

Perlstein traces Nixon’s ascent to the presidency from the “wilderness” period when, after being prematurely written off, he scraped together the allegiances and alliances that gained him the 1968 Republican nomination for president. During his first term, he aspired to wind down the Vietnam War, engage in détente with the Soviet Union, and open relations with Red China. In two of those aims he may be said to have succeeded; Nixon was a canny politician and had the benefit of an extraordinary secretary of state. Peace “with honor” proved elusive. The ugly war dragged on. It is likely that on his own Nixon would never have committed half a million soldiers to an unwinnable war in Southeast Asia, as Johnson, McNamara, Rusk, and the Bundy brothers did. But how to end it?

The foreign policy successes did not lessen the amount of civil unrest in the nation. Perlstein juxtaposes the narrative of Nixon’s rise, his wielding of power, and his overwhelming defeat of Senator George McGovern in 1972, with descriptions of horrific crimes committed during the same period. These include massacres committed by the Manson Family in 1969 and Richard Speck’s slaughter of eight student nurses three years earlier. Perlstein also notes the shift in the civil rights and antiwar movements from nonviolence to militancy. “This was,” according to Perlstein “something Richard Nixon, with his gift for looking below social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath, understood: the future belonged to the politician who could tap the ambivalence–the nameless dread, the urge to make it all go away; to make the world placid again, not a cacophonous mess.” As for the personality of Richard Nixon, here was a man who could wake up the day after winning forty-nine of the nation’s fifty states and feel depressed.

Perlstein charts the period through an inspection of changes in pop culture. For example, he contrasts the reactions of liberals and conservatives to movies with polar opposite themes. In 1967, the right flocked to see John Wayne sound the fighting charge in the jingoistic Vietnam film The Green Berets. The New York Times critic panned the movie. Perlstein quotes the arch-segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond:

“I have not yet had the opportunity to see this movie,” he drawled. But “I have become convinced that this must be one of the most admirable movies of our generation, after reading the review which appeared last week in the New York Times. . . That set me to wondering what on earth the standards of criticism are that are current in the New York Times for a film that is patriotic and pro-American.” (278)

Meanwhile, the left was infatuated with images of Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway blowing away civilians and officers of the law until they meet their own gruesome fate in Bonnie & Clyde. Perlstein defines the reasoning of the movie’s instant fans: “They weren’t bad folks, went the movie’s moral logic, until an evil system forced them to extremity: robbing banks that repossessed farms, killing only when the System was closing in all around them… Bonnie and Clyde made those around them feel alive – all except the squares who were chasing them, who were already more or less dead anyway, with their sucker obsession with honest toil.” (209)

Apparently cinema is the mirror reflecting both sides’ sense of values.

Perlstein describes the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the attempt on George Wallace, and the bitterness that ensued. There were other eye-opening events that presage a scary future. In the “planned riot” in Cleveland in 1968, snipers from the “Black Nationalists of New Libya” executed several police officers; in 1971, during the Attica prison uprising in upstate New York, both convicts and guard-hostages were killed in an assault by state troopers. Perlstein illustrates, too, how the chaos in America dovetailed with violence abroad, such as the 1972 massacre of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich, Germany, at the hand of Palestinian terrorists. His reportage covers both the liberal and reactionary responses of ordinary citizens. A perfect example of an out-of-touch media occurred during the siege of Attica, when New York Times reporter Tom Wicker addressed a group of relatives of the captive prison guards. Wicker launched into an impassioned speech about the hostage-takers’ solidarity over their brutal treatment by the corrections authorities. The relatives responded by hurling insults and epithets at Wicker, protesting his obvious sympathy for the convicts.

Perlstein is able to draw an indissoluble connection between the events on the ground and the complex personality of Richard Nixon, with his uncanny ability to tap into the passions and political desires of the “Silent Majority” of Americans, who yearned for law and order amid the turmoil. These included the northern “hardhats” and the southern “rednecks.” Perlstein argues that Nixon saw the world in terms of the conflict between two student groups from his university days: the Franklins and the Orthogonians. The former consisted of the rich kids, polished and well-bred, who seemed to have the path to success paved for them. The latter group consisted of outsiders and striving underdogs from the lower-middle and working classes. Nixon himself was an Orthogonian; he rose from a hardscrabble background as the son of a California grocer. John F. Kennedy, his arch political rival, was the epitome of a Franklin; a millionaire’s son with matinee idol looks, a good war record, and the habits of a playboy.  According to Perlstein, for Nixon this dichotomy extends to every group of people. Perhaps surprisingly, the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein qualify as the Orthogonians of the newsroom. They are plucky questers, piecing together the facts of the Watergate scandal, with shoe-leather reporting, whereas the Franklins of the newsroom are the well-heeled veteran White House correspondents.

Nixonland is the second entry in Rick Perlstein’s quartet of books covering the emergence of the New Right. Before the Storm (2001) chronicled Barry Goldwater’s doomed GOP Presidential campaign of 1964; The Invisible Bridge (2014) follows Nixon's resignation through Ronald Reagan’s challenge to incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Most recently, Reaganland tells the tale of the much-maligned Jimmy Carter presidency and Reagan’s emergence in 1980.

What struck me about Nixonland in 2008 and continues to resonate in 2021 is the way Perlstein captures the idealistic cluelessness of the liberal side versus the cold Machiavellianism of the right. Just as Tom Wicker was blindsided by the reaction of his audience at Attica, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern was blindsided by the reactions he faced from the voting public. In one campaign stop, McGovern played a reel of gory photographs of wounded civilians in Vietnam, hoping perhaps to guilt-trip Americans into voting for him as the peace candidate. This was a misfire if only because the vast number of Americans are motivated not by sentimental appeals to their consciences but by practical self-interest. Richard Nixon clearly understood this, as he promised to pull out from the war “with honor” and appealed to patriotic and sometimes nationalistic impulses in the voters’ minds. Meanwhile the Democrats were busy shooting themselves in the foot, nominating Senator Thomas Eagleton for vice president, then ditching him post-convention when it turned out that he was a depressive who had seen shrinks and gone through shock therapy. Yet even in landslide victory, Nixon noted that his congressional coattails were shorter than he had hoped for, and he obsessed about his foes. Foes he certainly had. Nixon’s whole political career demonstrates the saying that even paranoids have enemies.

Today the insurgent progressive left of the Democratic Party seems to have perfected political guilt-tripping almost to a science. As a result, its losses are catastrophic (2016) and its wins often pyrrhic (2020). During the early years of the Obama presidency, I observed that Obama would have fewer problems if he learned the lessons of Nixonland. One lesson is that when facts are overtaken by narrative, it is difficult to overcome the narrative. For McGovern, it was impossible to defeat the label of being the candidate of “Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion.” Whether Obama’s Democratic successor Biden has ever taken the time to read Nixonland or not, I do not know. He should. It just may improve his chances for a successful presidency.

An Interview with Ishion Hutchinson [by Aspen Matis]

Ishion Hutchinson is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. A contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, he is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes. Born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, he now directs the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Hutchinson via email about how great poems, by their nature, console us while they also judge us severely. We also discussed the relationship between poetry and melody, the intersection of sound and meaning, and the necessity of becoming a “kindler” ― a fierce agitator against injustice, burning like kindle, always firmly fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.

Why do you write poems?

I write poems because it is my calling.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

In all those cases you’ve named, it’s the work of language to assert justice which is most pressing. Poetry is certainly central to that assertion, but whether in a gubernatorial way, to use a clumsy phrase, is at best questionable. What isn’t questionable is that the best poems give us consolation while, at the same time, they judge us severely. The way poems judge us is to demand that our capacity to imagine, which is to say our conscience, be more alive to the world and to never settle on a single view of it.

Still, I don't believe poetry tells “our present society” how to enact the things you’ve outlined.

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

If a poem is happening, then it is its own most radical thing, whether that poem might be the beautiful indignation of Robert Hayden’s miniature epic “The Middle Passage,” or the seemingly chaste lyric of Robert Herrick’s “Upon Julia’s Dress” (you can imagine the poetic inventiveness that goes into just the word “liquefaction” to capture the movement of silk!). It takes courage to do such making.

But I believe it takes an even greater courage to come to such making. Consider, for instance, that right now in Belarus and Myanmar poets are being killed and jailed for doing their work, poets who might be just writing about the movement of silk or bearing witness to governmental tyranny: in both cases, they continue to find the courage to write poems of integrity. Poets the world over, in less extreme circumstances, struggle to do their work with as much integrity. Sometimes they fail. And yet they find the courage to write poems. So every resonate poem is a radical thing, and an act of courage. 

Your work is often praised for its musicality, intensity, and nerve. Of your collection House of Lords and Commons, literary critic John Freeman writes, “What nerve and music his poems possess, how beautifully they chart the poet’s search.” The poet Ilya Kaminsky writes that “Hutchinson comes to us from the country called music, he stuns the reader with the sheer symphony of his sentences.” He goes on to remark on the “choral presence” of multiple tonalities within your poems. Poet Henri Cole writes that your “hammered language has a jazzy, classical, rough, painterly beauty.” It seems no reviewer can speak of your poetry without invoking music. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between poetry and melody? And what exists at the intersection of sound and meaning? Of language and art?

I’m always seeking in the melody of my poem what Pound calls melopoeia: which he defines, rather obliquely, as when “the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.” That the words are charged is what gives a poem its essential tension, and that charge is a definite resistance of the typical “sweet music” sense of melody which might not bear into account the fraught, ethical nature of words. I say “definite” then because the poem is a conscious act of interweaving unheard melodies embedded in words, so a hearer might hear what is not there in “their plain meaning.”

Actually, what’s not there but heard in those words are, I think, the “intersections” you referred to. In fact, these overlapping intersections make every poem an occasion of meaning. It’s in these intersections the reader of goodwill will find meaning on multiple registers. She will find herself there, too, magnified at a slightly elevated pitch. 

In a lecture at the Newcastle Poetry Festival 2019, you explored Frederick Douglass’s legacy, and what the idea of legacy means, through a close reading of poems by W.E.B. Dubois and Robert Hayden—and ultimately, you invited us all to become “kindlers.” What does it mean to be a kindler, and why is such an endeavor meaningful and important? 

The kindler idea I draw from a magnificent long poem by Frederick Douglass called, “The Tyrants’ Jubilee!,” from the line, “the fire thus kindled, may be kindled again” which became the title of my lecture. To be a kindler is to be someone involved deeply in the unfinished business of emancipation, to be the fierce-minded liberty lover Douglass was, to agitate in our moment against injustice, however construed. The agitation must be fierce, burning like kindle, but it must be fixed in the altruistic spirit of the root word kind.

Your most recent book of poems, House of Lords and Commons, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016. Poet Susan Stewart describes the collection as “the pure line of poetry, shaped by [Hutchinson’s] sun-lit vision and music,” adding that, “House of Lords and Commons has been wrested from suffering and cruelty, irony and violence. And, in the end, it is an act of forgiveness.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

The collection was published five years ago, so it’s no longer so new. I like that you asked about ambitions, and what I recall, to give a very drastic summary, is my attempt to explore the different breaches of the relationship between civil polity and poetry. What that crack-up sounds like? As I was doing most of the listening from this country, many of the poems became about arranging the psychic pressures between home and abroad.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

Really too many to name. The anthologies of those centuries, and not only in English, are my favorite to read. I return a lot to this stunning compilation of work from the pamphlet wars of the 17th—a favorite is Elizabeth Cellier’s Malice Defeated, a title I wish to steal one day. Milton is a constant, of course, especially his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. But of late I’ve been reading a lot of Milton’s younger contemporary, Lucy Hutchinson.

No way, again, a stable and short answer can be given to the question of what their work has awakened in me. I feel the raw alchemy of the intelligence and imagination of their fractious time working on my mind in the very syntax of their writing. Something gets transmuted, and usually whatever that it is, it has strong “relevance” to our contemporary moment. You need only to read, for instance, the first sentence of Milton’s Areopagitica to see what I mean.   

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’m working on a collection of essays, due out next year. My Douglass lecture will be included, so I’m excited about that, the chance to get it right or as close to right as possible.

A Note on Alison C. Rollins' Poem "Why Is We Americans"

Alison C. Rollins' debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is one of the most spectacular first books I have ever read. The first poem I read from her, "Why Is We Americans," was published in Poetry magazine several years ago. The poem can be found in full here.

The following is an entry from a reading notebook that I keep, in which I respond to poems and passages of prose. Here is what I wrote about "Why Is We Americans" several years ago. If this interests you, pick up a copy of her amazing first book and prepare to be amazed. 

Alison C. Rollins’ “Why Is We Americans” begins as a riff on a line (and title) from the late work of Amiri Baraka; Rollins extrapolates the Baraka line into an anaphora-patterned meditation on notions of national belonging particular to the African American experience. The poet interweaves images from canonical western literature (“Walden pond,” “Jesus,” “Whitman,” “Orpheus,” “Darwin”) with images from the African American church (“the Pastor’s chattering chicklets,” “Psalm 23,” “mouths / washed out with the blood of the lamb”), and allusions to jazz music (“Roach and Mingus at Birdland,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamned,” and the concluding couplet, which references Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and raises the specter of lynching in a powerful way). The poem is as triumphant as it is incantatory, elevating sometimes mundane and sometimes extraordinary tropes into a profound celebration of Blackness. The vibrant surprising diction and the regular deployment of AAVE syntax imbue the poem with an astonishing energy at every turn: “We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths/ upside the head, jammin’ fingers in / Darwin’s white beard”; lines like these drive the poem forward with their sonic textures while continuing a critique of the exploitative and oppressive practices that vertebrae American life and American history. I love this poem. I feel like I could live in it forever—the explosive musicality of it, the joy of it, the strangeness of it. It is everything I look for in a poem: it is canny and subversive in its metapoetic view of American literature and culture, and it is infused with a hard earned duende that renders it unforgettable.

 

"I Love Sex in All its Forms" [poem by Denise Duhamel]

When Denise Duhamel checked her spam folder for the first time in years, she found that so many women, mistaking her for a heterosexual man, had been leaving her messages. When she saw the subject heading “I LOVE SEX IN ALL ITS FORMS,” she immediately thought of her favorite poetry form, the “pantoum.” Here is a found pantoum from her new book Second Story (University of Pittsburgh Press).

“I LOVE SEX IN ALL ITS FORMS”
                    --Spam email from Mindy

Hi big guy. I’m lonely and wet.
Being in love—a blessing or a curse?
My boner brew will make you a better screw.
I just added three new naked photos.

Being in love—a blessing or a curse?
Text me. I guarantee we’ll have a blast!
I just added three new naked photos.
Want to hear me talk dirty in my luscious British accent?

Text me. I guarantee we’ll have a blast!
What should I do? I’m married but only want you!
Want to hear me talk dirty in my luscious British accent?
Need a hot date with a sexy lady?

What should I do? I’m married but only want you!
We don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone.
Need a hot date with a sexy lady?
I’m gorgeous and only 2.8 miles away.

We don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone.
Are you man enough to rock my world?
I’m gorgeous and only 2.8 miles away.
Here are some other girls you might like.

Are you man enough to rock my world?
I’ll prove to you we’re the perfect match.
Here are some other girls you might like.
Don’t forget to leave space in your life for me.

I’ll prove to you we’re the perfect match.
Are you available? Literally or metaphorically?
Don’t forget to leave space in your life for me.
It’s raining men, and I need one.

Are you available? Literally or metaphorically?
My boner brew will make you a better screw.
It’s raining men, and I need one.
Hi big guy. I’m lonely and dry.

This poem originally appeared in Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal at Washington College.

-- sdl

In Memoriam: Daneen Wardrop & Laura Boss

When a poet dies there is a vast caesura, a field of lilacs interrupted by wing beats and heartbeats and aches and aches and: snugly in the ampersand at the end of a life, they shine there, an em dash, a last ellipsis, a lovely lock of gray hair on the wrist of a daughter—…&

---

Last week, two wonderful poets died within a day of each other: Daneen Wardrop and Laura Boss.

---

I didn’t know Daneen (except through her poetry), but I was reading an advance copy of her latest book when I heard from the publisher we share about her passing. Wardrop’s newest collection, Endless Body, is part of a three-book-in-one collection called Trio, which also features books by Diane Raptosh and Karen Donovan, due out this summer. I had read her book, Silk Road, last year and was impressed by its virtuosic technique, it’s intense interiority, and the imaginative heft of the collection’s central persona (Donata Polo, Marco’s wife). Wardrop, a noted Dickinson scholar, imbibed and alchemized the inebriate air at the epicenter of Emily’s poems. Wardrop’s poems, especially those in her forthcoming collection, were transformative, transcendent, elegant, precise. Reading them I could not help but be amazed and reassured by the poet’s immensely intelligent, deeply loving, and wildly original presence. She is one of many many poets whose work deserves a wider readership and whose life in poetry has enriched us all.

Here are links to some of Daneen Wardrop’s books:

Trio: Planet Parable, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body (Etruscan Books, 2021)

Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018)

Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015)

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University of New Hampshire Press, 2009)

Here is a link to Wardrop’s poem, “name,” on the Academy of American Poets website.

---

I first met Laura Boss sometime around 2012 at a reading at the PCCC Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura came up to me after the reading, said some kind words about a poem I had read, and quoted back a few lines that she admired. The handful of times I read in Paterson after that first occasion, I would always look for her in the crowd, usually sitting next to her longtime friend and Poetry Center director, Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Maria and Laura were alike in their enthusiasm for poets and for poetry, in their deep listening to the music around them, and in their fierce support of fellow poets.

Laura Boss founded Lips poetry magazine in 1981. She published Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Stone, David Ignatow, Marge Piercy, Michael Benedikt, Anne Waldman, Ishmael Reed, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Toi Derricotte, Alice Notley, Hal Sirowitz, Alicia Ostriker, Molly Peacock, and many more. She wrote an accessible autobiographical poetry, straightforward, rich, searching, and wild. She lived an amazing life in poetry. The next time I read in Paterson I’ll still look for her in the crowd.

Here are links to some of Laura Boss’s books:

The Best Lover (NYQ Books, 2017)

Flashlight (Guernica Editions, 2010)

Arms: New and Selected Poems (Guernica Editions, 1999)

Here is one of Laura’s poems:

LIVING TOGETHER
for Gregory Corso

I lived with Gregory for a year
or rather he lived with me
And though it was only a year,
it seemed like twenty
At night on my brown velvet sofa
he would write in his Chinese red silk
embroidered covered journal
with his brown ink Mont Blanc pen
that he had asked me to buy for him
and to get one for myself (though I never did)
The TV would be on and in memory always
tuned to a baseball game–
In the mornings we would make the run to Christie Street
for him to pick up what he needed to survive the day–
At this point, I was on a hopeless mission to get him to stop
to get rid of his years of bad habits
I was wearing my invisible Wonder Woman cape
but I was never successful like Wonder Woman
Sometimes we would go out to Maxwell Plum’s but
he could never sit for more than half the lunch
He took me to see the movie Napoleon but we only
stayed for half(it was incredibly long)
He stayed in my apartment and painted a self-portrait of himself
He kept changing the face–even once made himself black–
He had the skyline of San Francisco behind him
He painted a portrait of his friend Kerouac–
He painted a portrait of me and my eyes turquoise though
they are green and even made the sky turquoise
He made me look like a bitch—but the colors were beautiful
We went to San Francisco to find an apartment
but came back to New York when we were called that Ted Berrigan had died–
There was never I realize a chance that we would make it
We were like a fragile, fragrant homemade candle—
Its slight flickering wick
just waiting for the oncoming tsunami wave to blow it out.

(Originally published in the Connecticut River Review)

---

 

Book Recommendation: Philip Brady's The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics

Philip Brady's The Elsewhere:  Poems & Poetics is a collection aimed at eternity.  Brady's new and selected provides an unabashedly bardic synthesis of the smoking girders and brickwork that make a life in poetry. Ranging from Queens to West Cork, from Youngstown to Lagos, The Elsewhere negotiates the landscape between recollection and release, between art and life, between impulse and sudden song: "I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. / But memory's a muscle letting go." The essays on poetry, and the poetry itself, are Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday.  The Elsewhere is everywhere ambitious, but more importantly, its poems and prose dwell in a kind of singing that begins in the forever that is right here.    

This is the perfect book to pick up during national poetry month; it makes me wish there were more New and Selected collections that featured essays on poetics alongside the poetry. I'd like to see the same kind of book from contemporary poets who write incisive prose (like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Zucker, Tracy K. Smith, Nin Andrews, Martín Espada, David Lehman, Terrance Hayes, William Heyen, H.L. Hix, and on and on and on...).

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend whole-heartedly Brady's ambitious poetry and erudite prose. ~DD

"The Last Orgasm" [by Nin Andrews]

Preface     

If anyone reads this book, they will think they know what kind of person I am. They will, I am certain, imagine me as someone else, someone I can never be—simply because I have written this book of orgasms, and this book will do that to them, and to me. It will make me appear to be the kind of person who is in the position to write about orgasms, who knows all about orgasms: their songs and dances and secret languages. They might go so far as to compare me to Noah Webster, claiming that just as he compiled an entire opus of words, carefully defining and distinguishing each one’s particular origin, pronunciation, spelling, and proper usage, so I have collected an opus of orgasms. And I will have to admit, with surprise, that even if I don’t imagine myself to be that sort of person, even if I don’t consider myself an author anymore, much less an author of an opus of orgasms, even if I no longer converse with orgasms in my daily life, the orgasms continue to seek me out, as orgasms will, as if they need my blessing, as if I and only I can hear their pleas, their wishes, their last breaths.

>>>>

When asked to describe her writing life, Nin Andrews once wrote: "I have always felt a little apologetic about my poetry. Because I am not sure that I am the person who writes it. Rather, some other mystery woman sits in front of my computer, typing happily away. This other is bold and loud, and my father, who met her on occasion, described her as unbecoming, uncouth, and socially unacceptable. When she was a girl, he threatened to wash her mouth out with soap and water, as was done in those days. Ivory soap—it made her vomit. But all the soap in the world could not clean or shut her up. It is she who gives voice to orgasms (or is it vice versa?), and who has not a worry in the world about what others think. Me, an inhibited wisp of woman, I can only watch her and sigh."

Ed. note: Nin Andrews's book "The Last Orgasm" (2020) is available from Etruscan Press. The "orgasms" collected here are in the manner of such writers as James Tate, Lydia Davis, Vallejo, Lorca, Henri Michaux, Frank O'Hara, Kafka, and Rilke.

Amy Gerstler in Conversation about "Index of Woman" [Sunday, April 18, 2021]

Chevalier bookstore:
L.A.'S Oldest Independent Bookstore, Est. 1940 

Virtual Event

Monday, April 19, 2021 at 7:00PM

INDEX OF WOMEN
by AMY GERSTLER

the author in conversation with LOUISE STEINMAN

FOLLOW THIS LINK TO JOIN: 

https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/amy-gerstler

 

From a maestra of invention (The New York Times) who is at once supremely witty, ferociously smart, and emotionally raw, a new collection of poems about womanhood

Amy Gerstler has won acclaim for sly, sophisticated, and subversive poems that find meaning in unexpected places. Women's voices, from childhood to old age, dominate this new collection of rants, dramatic monologues, confessions and laments. A young girl muses on virginity. An aging opera singer rages against the fact that she must quit drinking. A woman in a supermarket addresses a head of lettuce. The tooth fairy finally speaks out. Both comic and prayer-like, these poems wrestle with mortality, animality, love, gender, and what it is to be human.

AMY GERSTLER

Author

Amy Gerstler has published thirteen books of poems. The most recent is Index of Women (Penguin Random House, 2021). In 2019, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. In 2018, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Scattered at Sea, a book of her poems published by Penguin in 2015 was longlisted for the National Book Award, shortlisted for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was a finalist for the PEN USA Literary Award. Her book Dearest Creature (Penguin, 2009) was named a New York Times Notable Book, and was short listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Her previous books include Ghost Girl, Medicine, Crown of Weeds, which won a California Book Award, Nerve Storm, and Bitter Angel, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2010 she was guest editor of the annual anthology Best American Poetry. Her work has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, several volumes of Best American Poetry and The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. She is currently collaborating with composer, actor and arranger Steve Gunderson on a musical play. She is also collaborating with comics artist, author and scholar Trina Robbins on a comic about women comic book artists from the 1940s. 

LOUISE STEINMAN

in conversation

Louise Steinman is a writer, artist, and literary curator. Her work frequently deals with memory, history, and reconciliation. Her three books include: The Crooked Mirror: A Memoir of Polish-Jewish Reconciliation; The Knowing Body: The Artist As Storyteller in Contemporary Performance and The Souvenir: A Daughter Discovers Her Father’s War.  Steinman founded-- and was for twenty-five years the curator—of the celebrated ALOUD literary series at the Los Angeles Public Library. Her essays have been published widely, most recently in Los Angeles Review of Books.   She is the editor of the 2018 anthology: Country Gone Missing: Nightmares in the Time of Trump. Her installation, “Welcome the Stranger: An Urban Installation for Social Engagement” (with Dorit Cypis), was featured at the 2019 Lublin (Poland) Open City Festival. She is co-director of  The Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at the University of Southern California.  Her lead essay, “The Questions We Ask,” appears in the forthcoming volume A History for the Future: The Museum of Contemporary Art 1979-2000. www.louisesteinman.com

Join us here | 04/19 at 7PM PT on Zoom

An Interview with James Longenbach [by Aspen Matis]

Renowned poet and literary critic James Longenbach is the author of six poetry collections ― including Earthling, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award ― and eight books of prose. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Nation, and he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim +Fellowship, among other honors. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Longenbach via email about his forthcoming book of poems, Forever. We also discussed wisdom as a way of trying to stop time, how immediacy is constructed through language, the reality that "everyone writes what they’re given to write," and how perhaps poets ― and all people ― need a lot of road blocks in order to find a road. 

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

I like how writing poems makes me feel. We all listen to pop songs we love many times, and we don’t generally listen again because we can’t remember how the song goes; we like how it feels to move from the beginning to the end. I think our experience of poems, especially as we write them, is like that, like living acutely in time.

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

I’m not sure there is one! — though it’s important to believe there is one. Over the last 20,000 years most poems have been lost, and five or six have changed society; these days, how many people read Theocritus or Tennyson? It’s important to do the work, important not to formulate rules from anything; it takes a lot of forgotten poets to make a Theocritus.

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

Make a poem, which is also the most mundane thing.

If you were to teach a course in modern poetry, where would you begin?

Since the 80s, I’ve done just that lots of ways. These days I organize such a course not by authors (who in this format recur several times) but by verse forms — prose, several different kinds of free verse, sonnets, other rhyme and metrical schemes, songs, and so on. This arrangement changes, but the advantage is that I can better emphasize the great diversity of modernism.

How, in your view, is immediacy constructed through language? 

As I say in The Lyric Now, a great poem creates a sense of the now; the language is happening now; this is why we might keep reading Theocritus. There are lots of ways to do that, but I end up talking a lot about syntax, about how the order of the words creates in each poem a repeatable event in time; this is why, looking back, great poems have been written about (say) both the Holocaust and about sunflowers.

What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of Earthling? 

The poems of Earthling are all overshadowed, as I look back, by my mother’s death. She was old, it was both expected and shocking; but it took me years to figure out how to write about it, and really it wasn’t until, in “The Crocodile,” I haphazardly hit upon the idea of seeming to speak in a very contrived voice that I began to tell what felt like the truth. As that poem points out, maybe we need a lot of road blocks to find a road...

Writers who do more than one thing often face the problem of expectation: people tend to like to pigeonhole them. As a celebrated poet and critic, have you had to navigate the limiting assumptions of your readers and reviewers?

Yup. And my own limiting assumptions, too. But all poets are brilliant critics; they may not write their criticism down, that’s all. You need to have read (so to speak) a hundred great poems in order to write one good one.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Tons of them. Frost said famously that poetry is what is lost in translation, and Pound said poetry is what is made in translation — with that interesting word in English that corresponds to Theocritus’s Greek. To me, the latter definition has the advantage of seeming less mystical, more material, and poetry is of course a material art, a making of objects out of the medium, in our case the English language. Every human being has had the most complex emotions, but very few human beings have written poems.

Is your forthcoming book of poems, Forever, your most personal collection? What would you like to share about its conception and your vision for its life? 

In one sense, anything we write is deeply personal — what else could it be? But certainly the poems of Forever happened because of my ongoing coping with kidney cancer, and without question I have dealt with questions about mortality (which, looking back, I thought I already had!). Especially inasmuch as these poems are bound up with grappling with such questions, questions that often feel uncomfortably primal, questions of love, the poems feel to me deeply present.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Conrad Aiken won the National Book Award, and Aiken is a good poet, though he’s not often read. Prizes are of the moment, made of the moment and the moment’s judges, and sometimes history is eventually there, too.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

The philosopher Emil Cioran once said we become wise when we should have been depressed! That’s a little sly, but there’s something to it, too; wisdom is a way of trying to stop time, and time can’t be stopped, as our constantly and surprisingly changing poetry reminds us. There are no rules, and what works really well for one poem or one poet has nothing to do with the next poem or poet. All artists know a lot about sliding back to the bottom of the mountain...

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve been working on some new poems and some new essays, too. An essay on punctuation (especially its absence) in poetry from the 8th-century “The Seafarer” to the current Jos Charles just appeared in Poetry magazine, and a new poem called “Now and Then” has just come out in The Threepenny Review. I’m grateful. Everybody writes what they’re given to write, and doing so sounds as if it should be easy; but it’s very hard, and in my experience it gets beautifully harder. Often I wish I got to decide anything.

Larkin, Uncensored (On Robert Lowell)

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

On Robert Lowell

Lowell, Lowell, Lowell, Lowell,
Corn is the thing he does so well. . .

This version of the couplet was written in 1966; an earlier one was crafted in 1964. Among British academics Robert Lowell was considered top of the American heap in the 1960s and 70s.

from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. From the archive; first posted March 18, 2013.

On the Street Where You Live [by Robert Wrigley]

 

                        “Love takes time to overcome.”--Confucius

Certain love songs beloved by men are listened to with something like derision by women.  So I have been assured, by a woman, and I wonder about that.  I don’t doubt it, but I wonder.  I have known for many years that most of the canonical American songbook “torch songs,” for example, were written by men but in their classic versions sung by women.  Imagine Sarah Vaughn singing “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry.”  We are to believe she would never get over loss of the man for whom she carried forever “a torch.”  Right. 

But I would like to consider a song almost diametrically the opposite of a torch song.  I mean “On the Street Where You Live,” jaunty and upbeat, its lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, from the musical play My Fair Lady (Frederick Loewe wrote the music), first staged in 1956, when I was five.  The film version, which I saw in a theater in St. Louis with my parents and sister, appeared in 1964, right about the time I crashed face-first into puberty.  I remember being resistant to the improbable fact that the handsome young Englishman was standing on the street and singing, with orchestral accompaniment, but I also remember thinking that such a feeling as he expressed (turns out the actor was lip-synching; someone else did the expressing), that that feeling might be—I didn’t know—real.  I suppose I wanted it to be.  Why wouldn’t I?  He seemed so happy, so thrilled, that young man, and the lyrics of the song represented his happiness very convincingly, even to, or perhaps especially to, a thirteen year old boy. 

Somehow, I’m sixty-eight now, a year older than Alan Jay Lerner was when he died in 1986 of lung cancer, impoverished, owing the IRS over a million dollars, and unable to pay his medical bills.  Lerner was married eight times.  He said once, “All I can say is if I had no flair for marriage, I also had no flair for bachelorhood.”  (Something in that quip and its delivery is in his best lyrics too.)  It seems that Mr. Lerner might have felt the exhilaration his song expresses a few more times than anyone ought to. 

The character who sings the song in My Fair Lady, one Freddy Eynsford-Hill, is lost in infatuation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl taken in by Professor Henry Higgins, after she comes to him seeking elocution lessons.  The play, of course, is adapted from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.  Professor Higgins wagers with his friend and houseguest, Colonel Pickering, that he can turn Eliza into a passable young “lady,” one who can, with his lessons, function in the upper social caste of which he and Pickering are a part.

The scene in which Freddy falls for Eliza takes place at a gathering of exceeding privilege and decorousness, at a race track.  Women in gowns and elaborate, even outlandish, hats; men in tophats, tails, and spats.  The musical number in the scene is “Ascot Gavotte” (also known as “Ascot Opening Day”—its opening lines: “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer is here/Ev’ryone who should be here is here”).  Eliza does quite well among the hoity-toity until, in the midst of the race’s final stretch she can stand it no longer and with all her suppressed Cockney fervor bellows at her favored horse, “Come on, Dover! Move yer bloomin’ arse?”  The vocal intro to “On the Street Where You Live” includes Freddy remembering, and repeating, Eliza’s unfortunate (or fortunate) ejaculation; it even suggests that that ejaculation may be what, beyond Eliza herself (played in the film by Audrey Hepburn), precipitates his headlong fall. 

Soon thereafter Freddy arrives at Professor Higgins’s house with flowers.  Higgins, Pickering, and Eliza are having dinner.  The maid takes the flowers and invites Mr. Eynsford-Hill in, but he declines and at the bottom of the stair, back on the street, sings his song.

The plays, both the musical and its Shavian model, are fraught.  Shaw took as his inspiration an ancient Greek myth.  Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with one of his statues, which—presumably so deeply and intimately loved and, much more importantly, so perfectly created—comes to life.  In Lerner and Loewe’s version, Eliza is matter, medium, raw material fashioned by a man into an acceptable, respectable, lovable, and cravable woman—made so, created even, by a man.

To say that the gender issues in the movie went right over my head at thirteen is accurate and predictable and an understatement.  Although one might also say that the issues went over a lot of heads:  both the plays and the film were enormously successful.

But Freddy seems head over heels for a fully-formed woman, as far as he can tell, one who is just enough like but not at all like the other women in his circle.  Something about class is involved in it too, of course; Eliza’s sudden coarseness is electrifying.  Who knows what it might suggest to Freddy?  But what I’m curious about is this: could “On the Street Where You Live” be one of those love songs beloved by men but derided by women?  Does the man’s infatuation seem, well, fatuous?  The word “love” is never spoken in the song.  Does infatuation really have anything to do with love?  (One might ask something similar about music or poetry.)  Freddy has seen but hardly even met Eliza—just once—but he is intoxicated by her, the possibility of her.  He’s smitten.  Is it Freddy’s smittenness itself that is suspect?  Is the very act of feeling smitten by another person suspect?  In the hetero-world, in and out of movies, it’s usually the man who is smote, so to speak, and his condition, in terms literary and historical—and in reality—is all too often dangerous for the woman.  Think of Daphne and Apollo, Zeus and Leda.  The list is endless; it is added to every day in brutal stories in the news.  Vastly more women are killed by obsessed lovers and husbands than by infatuated strangers.

Is Freddy’s smittenness a form of potentially dangerous, power-mad insanity?  Probably not.  He seems too callow to be a monster.  Shaw resisted the “happy ending,” with Eliza and Higgins in love and together; the musical, not so much.  Higgins seems to realize his love, or his loss (though of what, exactly?  His dejected song, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” is another of the musical’s long-lived chestnuts).  But then Eliza returns.  The happy ending is at least implied.  As for Freddy, when Eliza leaves Higgins earlier, she tells him she’ll marry Freddy because he, at least, is one who loves her.  But in the end, that doesn’t matter.  She comes back to the man who, as it were, made her what she is. 

This is an excerpt from Nemerov's Door: Essays by Robert Wrigley
(Tupelo Press, North Adams, MA)

Paper $19.95

https://www.tupelopress.org