The Best American Poetry

"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

Much better late than never. . .a (more or less) favorable review

Today (3/31/21), Caesura posted Inspector Watt's review of Poems in the Manner of, and in a curiously contrarian way I am pleased that in the poetry business, in which it sometimes seems that business is always personal (in defiance of the Corleone family's command not to mix the two), a review of a poetry book can appear four years after the book's pub date.

You ask who is Inspector Watt? I don't know, but the pseudonymous one also comments on Maureen McLane's 2014 volume This Blue and Chelsea Minnis's 2018 collection Baby, I Don't Care, with its wonderful title: Robert Mitchum's line in Out of the Past (which so well sums up Mitchum's attitude that it served as the title of Lee Server's biography of the actor). Inspector Watt's idiosyncratic style makes one wonder whether he praises with feigned damns. -- DL

<<<
Poems in the Manner of  by David Lehman. Scribner Poetry, 2017 ($18.00)

There are two ways to look at this strange book of poetry, which “channels” poets from Catullus to Joe Brainard.  If you’re not convinced that Lehman can imitate any poet you can name, at the end of the book, just for good measure, he includes his satirical lyrics for songs by Bob Dylan, Lorenz Hart and Irving Berlin, and Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer.  Lehman can parody anyone, with aplomb and humor.  Here’s his tribute / goof on Bashō’s famous haiku: “Pond / Frog / Splash.”  So, on the one hand, the book is a display of brilliance.  But on the other hand, it wonderfully illustrates where contemporary American poetry is — driving forward by looking in the rear-view mirror.  This book implies that the best poetry is behind us.  The new and improved poets who have rose petals tossed at them by critics for their shockingly new and improved poetry pale in comparison to the poets listed on the front cover of Lehman’s book: Emily Dickinson, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Pablo Neruda.  OK, Ernest Hemingway not so much.  Damn you, David Lehman.  You’ve left me elated and depressed.

https://caesuramag.org/posts/anvil-and-rose-10

On James Schuyler's "Arches" [by Edward Hirsch]

              James Schuyler is often celebrated as a poet who celebrated the everyday and ordinary, what he called “the pure pleasure of / Simply looking.”  He took a walk or peered through his window, and the poem became the daily record of what he saw.  He had a keen eye and reveled in particularity.  But Schuyler was afflicted by periodic bouts of mental illness and he was often looking at life from the outside, as through a looking glass.  The reason that daily life takes on such a luminous glow in a great deal of his work is because he was effectively cut off from it much of the time.  He cherished the familiar because it was never quite familiar enough, never something that he could take for granted.  He reminds me of the eighteenth-century English poet, Christopher Smart, in the way his work spotlights and exaggerates familiar things.  Both fastened themselves to daily life as a meaningful way to hold onto the world. 
            It’s not necessary to pathologize Schuyler’s enthusiasms or the way that he took pleasure in describing ordinary things.  But this way of looking at some of his work from this angle does help account for its psychological pressure, its odd intensities.  The language is plain but seems psychologically lit from within.  He looked hard at things, but he wasn’t an Objectivist poet, like Louis Zukofsky or George Oppen.  There is an inner nervousness driving his work.   
            Schuyler’s mental health was fragile, and he was institutionalized several times in the 1970s.  In 1975 he wrote “The Payne Whitney Poems” while he was interned at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York City.  He published the entire eleven-poem cycle in the New York Review of Books in 1978.  The diary-like series subsequently appeared in The Morning of the Poem (1980).  Here, as the poet David Herd suggests, “Schuyler presents in miniature many aspects of his work: the importance of observation, a fascination with the vicissitudes of weather, a fondness for the collage-like list (as in ‘Sleep’), and, throughout the cycle, a sense that in writing one might better make oneself at home in one’s world.”
            “The Payne Whitney Poems” are nervous, low-key, focused on the daily, sometimes funny.  The opening lines of the poem “Trip” set the tone and establish the subject: “Wigging in, wigging out: / when I stop to think / the wires in my head / cross: kaboom” (“Trip”).  Here’s the poem “Arches”:

                                                        Arches

                                              of buildings, this building,
                                              frame a stream of windows
                                              framed in white brick.  This
                                              building is fireproof; or else
                                              it isn’t: the furnishings first
                                              to go: no, the patients.  Patients
                                              on Sundays walk in a small garden.
                                              Today some go out on a group

                                              pass.  To stroll the streets and shop.
                                              So what else is new?  The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

            The title runs into the first line and the poem sets off on its own hesitant string of thoughts.  As so often happens in Schuyler’s poems, the speaker is looking out the window and recording what he sees, as if the window serves him as a protection against what Gaston Bachelard calls "exterior dizziness."  He is engaged but slightly removed from it all.  The lines are cut short, the rhythm jittery.  There isn’t much to hold onto.  What’s striking is how immediately Schuyler’s speaker begins adapting (“Arches // of buildings, this building”) and correcting (“This / building is fireproof, or else / it isn’t”) what he observes.  The buildings narrow to a single building.  The poem itself is visually “framed.”  The speaker is looking through the enclosure of his own window and through the arches that “frame a stream of windows / framed in white brick.”
            Everything is provisional, every statement leads to a revision.  This building is fireproof or, whoops, it isn’t.  There’s dry grim humor in the recognition that in a fire the patients will go before the furnishings.  The uncapitalized word patients is immediately capitalized.  This poem has the simple language of someone who has come through a great catastrophe, who needs to remember how to use language again.  It is very shaky and tentative.  
            There is a tiny drama here.  The speaker is looking at the windows of the other buildings, at the patients walking in the garden on Sunday.  He isn’t one of them.  They’re free, or somewhat free, to stroll about; he is not.  He takes a moment to ask himself “So what else is new?”  It is almost as if he is trying to think of something interesting to tell a visitor.  He seems slightly desperate to come up with something fresh in a place where life has come to a standstill, where nothing new seems to happen.  That’s why he turns to the weather:

                                                                                 The sky
                                              slowly/swiftly went blue to gray.
                                              A gray in which some smoke stands.

            Schuyler manages to capture the texture of a small moment in time, how the day darkened and dusk sets in, simultaneously slowly and swiftly.  No other poet would have jammed those two words together as “slowly/swiftly”.  A person is sitting or standing by the window as the day closes shop.  As soon as he describes the sky going from blue to gray he immediately corrects this observation, noting a “gray in which some smoke stands.”  The three alliterative s sounds—“some smoke stands”—enact the way that the day comes to a lingering and yet sudden close.  Something can still be seen, something preserved.  Something is left standing.  But it is mist and vapor.   
            The poet Michael Hofmann hears an undertone of nervous amusement in this poem, despite everything.  He writes: “However halting, impaired, almost uncommunicative the poem, I still have the perverse sense that the station to which it is tuned, however low, is merriment.  The sentences may be mumbled and reluctant and short and full of wrong turnings, but there is still a low ebb of wit in them—in the macabre speculation, in the observation of others like or unlike himself, in the unexpectedly fluent linkage of smoke and fire.  It is, in other words, and perhaps again unexpectedly, literary.”  This is well said about a poem that is somehow hesitant and yet sure of itself.  It seems quietly aware of its own construction, of being made in front of us.  The speaker of this poem is ill, but the poet who crafted it was healthily—slowly/swiftly—making a new kind of poem.   

From 100 Poems to Break Your Heart  by Edward Hirsch (published on March 30, 2021, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Above left: James Schuyler. 

An Interview with Mary Jo Salter [by Aspen Matis]

Mary Jo Salter is the author of eight poetry collections including A Kiss in Space, Open Shutters, Nothing by Design, and A Phone Call to the Future. Her most recent book of poems, The Surveyors, invites readers to evaluate and ponder the way things have turned out—for the poems’ speakers, and for us all—in this new century. In a tone of ironic wonderment in the face of life’s surprises, the collection reveals both puzzlement and acceptance.

I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Salter via email about the radical nature of unexaggerated truth, the 17th century poets who inspire her, and the foresight and brilliance of the rare reliable critic. We also discussed her newest book-in-progress, Zoom Rooms.

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

Tell the truth. I don’t mean “tell the facts,” of course; poetry isn’t reportage. What I love about my favorite poets, what makes them “radical,” is that they neither bury their emotions (though they might profit from reticence or obliquity as a style) nor, even worse, exaggerate them. They dare to speak truly about human experience—or some personal subset of experience—by means of the genuineness of their emotional register. I’m impatient with writers who profess to be overcome by joy or outrage or despair in the face of relatively minor daily events. On the other hand, I love the way some of our greatest poets elevate daily detail itself, the in-the-moment weight of being alive, to the point of bringing us to laughter (Larkin) or goosebumps (Dickinson) or tears. Elizabeth Bishop, an emotionally reticent poet, is a master of this weighted dailiness—think of what she makes, in “Sestina,” of an almanac and a teakettle and some buttons that look like tears.

You’ve served as an assistant editor for the Atlantic Monthly, as the poetry editor of The New Republic, and you were a co-editor of the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. What was the most gratifying aspect of these editorial positions for you? What did you enjoy most about these jobs? Was there a common thread, a vein of gold each shared?

As a young slush-pile reader at The Atlantic, I wasn’t allowed to make decisions on my own; those were up to the poetry editor, the late Peter Davison. The happiest moment in my two years of opening envelopes at The Atlantic was in discovering some luminous poems by the self-described “late bloomer” Amy Clampitt, who had just started publishing a little. Peter did publish her, then and afterward. My writing her a fan letter (I was 24, she was 59) led to one of my richest literary friendships, which lasted for Amy’s final 15 years. I’ve edited two editions of her work and still serve as one of her literary executors, and I feel she is still present in some way every day of my life.

Being sole poetry editor at The New Republic was more challenging. But it was good aesthetic training to make independent choices for those three years. I gave up that job because of the demands of co-editing the Norton Anthology. And that experience—from 1992, when I started reading for the fourth edition, to the publication of the sixth edition in 2018—is too vast to encompass here. I’ll just say that it was an honor to be along for the ride with my co-editors Margaret Ferguson and Jon Stallworthy, and upon Jon’s death, Tim Kendall. They were modest souls, despite their erudition, and our literary taste was shared to such a degree that we could good-naturedly take each other’s suggestions. It was a given that we mere humans couldn’t possibly arrive at a definitive canon. Being humbled by that fact was actually freeing.

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

What a wonderful question! It just so happens that I spend a lot of my mental life in the 17th century. No poet has brought me more pleasure than Shakespeare (though my main attachment is to the plays), and then the 17th also includes Donne, Milton, and Herbert. I wrote my master’s thesis at Cambridge about Herbert, and an epigraph by him appears as an opening to my first book. I wrote a play once about Milton meeting Galileo (an encounter which actually happened), and I’ve slipped a scene from Paradise Lost into the title poem of my most recent book, The Surveyors. This is what happens to my literary crushes, I guess: they become characters in my work.

The affinity I feel with the 17th century extends to Dutch paintings of the period (I can think of at least four poems I’ve written about them). Maybe my answer here relates to your first question. I feel that the best artistic work of the 17th century tells the truth—from the hyper-realist still lifes to the low-rent tavern scenes to the warmly humanist portraits. That truth extends to the amusingly vulgar love poems of Donne, or to that side of Shakespeare that invents Falstaff or the “rude mechanicals.” It’s an era that is formally ingenious, a brainy feature that delights me. And yet the era aspires to purity of feeling, which finds no better exemplar than in Herbert. His feeling of inadequacy before the splendors of God’s creation is sincere, but the self-demanding craft by which he becomes a “creator” is, to me, almost super-humanly perfect.

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not?

Certainly there are reliable critics. You may rely upon their values, even if you disagree ultimately with a particular judgment. Great poetry critics aren’t always practitioners, but most of my favorites are. No poem Wordsworth ever wrote was better than his prose preface to the Lyrical Ballads: he uncannily anticipated our sensationalist age, and the small, quiet, but necessary role poetry could play in counteracting it. Closer to our own time, nobody’s criticism seems better than Auden’s—not merely the witty, epigrammatic essays in The Dyer’s Hand (which Joseph Brodsky rightly said should be every poet’s Bible) but the insights he embeds in poems. Auden’s elegies for Yeats and for MacNeice are disquisitions on why art matters, but not more than existence; and his long prose poem at the end of The Sea and the Mirror, in which Caliban sounds more like Henry James, does the same.

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

I have a sonnet sequence about our current techno-human pandemic age that is the title poem of my forthcoming collection of poems, Zoom Rooms. I have no aptitude for science, but the history of science fascinates me, and projections about its future even more. What I’m trying to do is to write poems that might last a while, by means of addressing universal human concerns; and yet I feel compelled to engage with the speedily changing, cyborgian flavor of contemporary life. Our descendants may find it more interesting to read poems that were written by machine-learning machines than by old-fashioned humans. I was about to say “we’ll see”—but we won’t. We’ll just have to keep on writing.

Only Death Wows Me [by Mitch Sisskind]

Only Death Wows Me

 

Hi, all. A couple of things. Only death wows me.

Mansions, big private yachts, I can appreciate

That stuff but it doesn't wow me. Not even birth,

Because first nothing is there, then something

Is there -- but once it's there it's like it's always

Been there, which doesn't wow me. With death

However something is there and then it isn't,

But in a weird way it's still there and maybe

Even more than before, like when you find

The dead person's false teeth lying around.

You know what else? Steve Jobs' last words

Were wow oh wow because he was so wowed

By the whole thing, which I can totally understand,

Because, as I mentioned, only death wows me.

 

Ed. note: "Only Death Wows Me" is a new poem and not included in the Collected Poems 2005-2020, about which you can read more here.

An Interview with Denise Duhamel [by Aspen Matis]

Denise Duhamel is the author of Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She guest edited The Best American Poetry 2013 (Scribner) with David Lehman, series editor. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Duhamel via email about her newest book Second Story, her guidance for young poets, the radical nature of telling the truth, and poetry as a place where words exist to help people live by expressing the sublime.

Your new book of poems Second Story is sharp and vibrant, painting the humdrum and the disastrous alike in bold and searing images that endure in my mind like places I’ve really been and scenes I’ve really lived. The poems awakened in me both wonder and fear. In flashes of joy and insight, the collection “investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment,” exploring themes of climate change, exploitation, poverty, robbery, social complicity, personal agency, resistance to sacrifice, guilt, memory, and the convenience of forgetting. In the words of the publisher, “With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, [Duhamel] bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.” What would you like to share with readers about the second story you illuminate so powerfully in this latest collection? Why is the oft-hidden nuance you highlight and evoke so important to perceive?

When I moved to Florida in 2000, I was confident that Al Gore would become president, that we’d have clear policies to curb ecological degradation. I was so sure of it, in fact, that I moved into an apartment close to the ocean. It wasn’t so much that I had my head in the sand (no pun intended) the years that followed. I still understood the urgency—and by 2005, I had lived through my first major hurricane, Wilma, which made its Florida landfall barely two months after the more infamous Katrina. Then I live through the disaster of the Deepwater Oil Spill in 2010 and the insidious BP commercials that followed, promising “funds to study the Gulf’s wildlife,” like BP was somehow the good guys. But 9/11, the subsequent wars, and the financial crash of 2008, kept me busy protesting other things. I still had a naïve hope that the climate crisis, horrible as it was, was manageable and that eventually politicians and industry would respond accordingly. One of my first political acts was as a fifth-grader writing to President Nixon protesting aerosol cans that were harming the ozone layer. When the EPA banned them shortly thereafter, I had a sense of accomplishment and justice that must have infused my thinking. Then in 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed my apartment just ten days before Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. I kept a journal in my most terrified moments and transformed these entries into “Terza Irma,” the long poem in the center of Second Story. Once I’d finished that poem, I started to write others about my Uncle Wil, an early environmentalist who rode a Vespa when I was a teenager. Corporations continue rob our natural resources, which made me think of all the other things robbed from us, including our very lives in cases of police brutality and Covid-19. Shortly after I’d finished the Second Story, the pandemic hit and I put in two extra poems that also address the severity of our political moment. 

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? 

All of the above! We are lied to, day in and day out. Advertisements, self-help books, and politicians have coopted language to such an obscene extent that “friends” are now just clicks on Facebook. And don’t even get me started on how our former president perverted the word “patriots.” Poetry is a place where words are there to help people live, to say something sublime. Poets aren’t selling anything, not even their books really, as you can hear people read poems for free on Vimeo or YouTube.

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

To tell the truth, warts and all.

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

Yes! I am of the age now when I start sentences with “Thirty years ago, I…” so I am entering my “impart wisdom” decades. Even though I don’t understand all the challenges young poets face, which are slightly different than the ones my generation faced, I would like to say to young poets…Be fierce and fearless. Don’t worry about the fame or recognition part—easier said than done, I know. But each poet’s path is different. I had three small press books (all out of print now) before Kinky was published by Orchises Press, a press no longer publishing books but lovingly maintained by Roger Lathbury. I was 39 before I was hired by Florida International University, my first permanent, “real” job. I was 40 before University of Pittsburgh Press started publishing my books. Not everyone will win a big book prize their first time out. Or ever. If you love poetry, you love poetry. If you read a lot of good poetry, you will get better at writing it. Being patient doesn’t come naturally to me, but I work at being patient every day, especially as I coax out my poems. I hope that will give some comfort and perspective to the young poets coming up.

An Interview with Alan Ziegler [by Aspen Matis]

Alan Ziegler's books include Love At First Sight: An Alan Ziegler Reader; The Swan Song of Vaudeville: Tales and Takes, The Green Grass of Flatbush, So Much To Do, The Writing Workshop, Volumes I and II, and The Writing Workshop Note Book. He is the editor of Short: An International Anthology of 500 Years of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose Forms. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Tin House. As a professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching and was chair of the Writing Program. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Mr. Ziegler via email about his book-in-progress, Based on a True Life: A Memoir of Sorts. We also discussed his wisdom for young poets, the themes that most fascinate and inspire him, and the “radical” practice of nourishing one’s poetic roots (through notebooks, dreams, and reading as sources of poetic protein) so those roots might continue to branch outward.

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life?

Poetry lets my inner life go out and meet my outer life. Interesting things happen when they team up.

Why do you write poems?

George Mallory said he wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it’s there.” I write poems for the opposite reason: Because they’re not there. Yet.

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

Radical is associated with root; and roots, of course, need moisture. Some in medieval medicine extolled radical moisture as a life force, which—though eventually depleted—could be refreshed to extend life. The most radical thing a poet can do is nourish your poetic roots so they keep branching out. (Nourishment can be provided through notebooks, dreams, reading, and constant vigilance for sources of poetic protein.)

In many of your squibs and prose poems, your deft use of absurdity renders a clear and illuminating picture of human nature and the human condition—where do these squibs come from? Your life and sleep-time dreams? Pure imagination? The news and bygone news? To what degree are they “true,” and to what extent are they nonfiction?

I started writing aide-memoires based on moments of my life that I didn’t want to forget, and images that kept peeking out for no discernible reason. I gave myself an arbitrary goal of 99 stories (long since surpassed), with the premise: “Everybody has 99 stories to tell, and if you know them long enough, you’ll hear them all.” I felt a little guilty about embellishing here and there, until I adopted this William Maxwell passage from Billie Dyer and Other Stories: “For things that are not known—at least not anymore—and that there is now no way of finding out about, one has to fall back on imagination. This is not the same thing as the truth, but neither is it necessarily a falsehood.” I came up with the title Based on a True Life and stopped worrying about it. (A friend suggested I just call it a novel, which I found tempting but unearned.) 

I give equal attention to any memories—momentous or just a moment—that compel me to preserve them in language. The death of a parent and the infidelity of a lover are in the mix with buying a plastic comb in a White River Junction vending machine and having my head shaved when I was eight. They’re all connected: I bought the plastic comb on my way to visit the unfaithful lover; my father was the one who had to shave my head due to an infection.

When David Lehman and Stacey Harwood generously gave me the key to the Best American Poetry blog, I had a space to work through the memory pieces and also mix in prose poems, fables, aphorisms, fragments, etc. They didn’t stop me so I kept on.

What, in your mind, unifies your many distinct squibs—might they someday form a book?

Daniel Nester wrote, in a comment, “please tell me there will be a collection,” and how can I decline after he said please. I settled on the genre-neutral term squibs (one translation of Baudelaire’s fusées) and started numbering them. What had seemed to be all over the place now had a space to occupy, and the task became to organize a subspace that could constitute a book. I tried several approaches for unifying the pieces, and finally settled on a roughly chronological order of autobiographical pieces interspersed with texts that exist outside of time but share sensibilities with the memories.

I’ve been repeatedly buoyed by Best American Poetry Blog compatriots, especially Kent Johnson (who called them a continuation of Kafka’s journals), Mitch Sisskind, and my go-to rabbi David Lehman—all are brilliant writers and I am humbled by their readership. The manuscript is currently under the guardianship of my dear agent Annie DeWitt (The Shipman Agency).

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated by works that have great replay value. Virtually every wonderful painting has it—you’ll never hear anyone say, “We can skip the Vermeer because I’ve already seen it.” There are songs and movies one can experience over and over, feeling a combination of comfort in anticipation of what’s next and the excitement of discovering something you haven’t seen or felt before. Likewise, there are poems that continue to inspire me after dozens of readings, such as Max Jacob’s “The Beggar Woman of Naples,” Juan Ramón Jiménez’s “The Rubber Stamp” from Platero & I, and Wisława Szymborska’s “Going Home.” I think what they have in common is capturing what Cartier-Bresson (quoting Cardinal De Retz) called the “decisive moment.”

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

Never tell yourself a preemptive No when you think something isn’t worth writing or you can’t do it justice; Miles Davis said, “I never think about not being able to do anything. I just pick up my horn and play the hell out of it.” Try to get past the “I don’t like writing but I love having written” attitude: love the act of writing (with all the ups and downs of love). I’ve never heard a tennis player say after a grueling match with aching legs: “I don’t like playing tennis but I love having played.”

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

Photography energizes me, whether I’m in Paris or looking out my window. I could be half-asleep on the couch, but if my peripheral vision glimpses one of the local hawks, I’m up and at it. I’m interested in what can be done after the picture has been taken to make something new, such as cropping multiple details from an image and organizing them into a montage juxtaposed with the original image. I’m beginning work on an image/language essay on baseball. And of course more squibs.

An Interview with Elaine Equi [by Aspen Matis]

Elaine Equi's witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Among her other titles are Sentences and Rain, Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. She teaches at New York University and in the MFA Program at The New School. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Equi via email about her newest book of poetry, the poetic nature of eccentricity and mundanity, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, and the bewitching powers of 17th century poet Robert Herrick.

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

Funny you should ask. I was just thinking that my inner life seems to have disappeared. I’m not quite sure why that happened, but I do know that I think of poetry as a tool for getting back in touch with it. By inner life, I mean some larger sense of self — what people used to call “soul” or “psyche.” I know meditation is helpful in that regard, and I do a little of that. But for me, the fastest and most reliable road inward is poetry.

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? 

I think poetry can do all of those things. I like the way poetry can articulate moments we all experience that might otherwise go unnoticed. Haiku is a great form for making you more focused — mindful and appreciative of what’s going on around you. But I also love poetry that opens up imaginative and aesthetic space. I like fantasy and speculative realities — time travel, clones, dream worlds.

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

I am honestly not a very radical person. I’m just not the type. I consider myself more of an eccentric. I have a poem, “Ode to Weird,” that says “All poets are weird/ even when their poems/ try to appear normal.” I was being playful but also truthful. Recently, I’ve discovered there’s a whole critical movement devoted to defining and exploring the notion of weirdness. The late Mark Fisher has an excellent book, The Weird and the Eerie, on this subject.

Stylistically, do you consider yourself a minimalist? 

I think I go on a little too much to be a true minimalist, but my writing is definitely informed by my love of short poems. Some of my favorite poets are Sappho, Basho, Issa, Williams, Niedecker, Creeley, Aram Saroyan, Joe Brainard, and Rae Armantrout. I like aphorisms, epigrams, fragments, haiku, lists, jokes, and concrete poems. In short, I never came across a short poetry form I didn’t like.

The Intangibles, your newest book of poems was praised widely. Of it, Albert Mobilio wrote, “Always count on Elaine Equi’s nimble gymnastics to flip the ordinary around and create something rich and strange… These poems do not wear their brooding hearts on their sleeves but rather flirt and banter, drawing us close before revealing their ruminative complexities.” Bob Holman praised the collection, writing, “If Emily Dickinson were alive today, her name would be Elaine Equi. Each of these poem gems is a secret; to know them, simply read them.” What was the impetus and engine of this latest collection? 

I’m very much a poet of the mundane, so there are poems about pills, perfume, food, yoga, and reading murder mysteries. But I also wanted to reflect on how technology and social media were increasingly playing a much bigger role in our lives (this was in 2019). I wanted to observe that shift, and at times, complain about it. However, I must say that since the pandemic, my attitude is changing. I’m grateful to be able to order what I need, teach my workshops online, and stay in touch with family and friends. I even sort of like Zoom poetry readings.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I’m fascinated with how technology is changing the way we communicate. I’m also interested in writing about the body, something that’s inherently grounded in the physical. And since I’m getting older — in poems about aging.

What else? Dance, visual art — anything to do with color.

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

I admire the wit of many poets from those eras, but Robert Herrick is my absolute favorite. He wrote great short poems and some long ones too. His work is succinct, often hilarious, and pretty racy for a vicar (a position he once held). There is also a magical side to his writing. Many of the poems are spells or charms for the purpose of courting his Muses/ mistresses, banishing evil sprites, and insuring the success of his book. Obviously, they worked.

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

Photography has always been a big inspiration. I love taking pictures, looking at pictures, and thinking about pictures. I’ve already done several projects that combine words and images and I hope to do more in the future. Writing poems in the form of captions to go with my photos is very satisfying. It feels like two different sides of me are collaborating.

The Haiku Masters of Japan drop in for a visit [by David Lehman]

Thanks to Bob Hass, I'm
reading the haiku masters
of Japan -- Basho,

Buson and Issa --
in one essential book: The
Essential Haiku,

published by Ecco,
with smart intro and useful
notes by Mr. Hass.

Examples follow.
(Translators do not observe
strict syllabic count).

Here is Basho as
rendered by B. Watson in
fifteen syllables:

"It's not like anything
they compare it to --
the summer moon."

And now for Buson,
trans. by Yuki Sawa and
Edith M. Shiffert:

"I go,
you stay;
two autumns."

Issa, the last of
the three, wrote the following
(trans. Robert Huey):

"Children imitating cormorants
are even more wonderful
than cormorants."

This post, which went up
ten years ago, concluded
with my rules-be-damned

three-word translation
of Basho’s famous beloved
haiku of the frog:

Pond.
Frog.
Splash.

An Interview with Nin Andrews [by Aspen Matis]

Nin Andrews’ poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies including Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry.  The author of six chapbooks and six full-length poetry collections, she has won two Ohio individual artist grants, the Pearl Chapbook Contest, the Kent State University chapbook contest, and the Gerald Cable Poetry Award. She is also the editor of a book of translations of the Belgian poet, Henri Michaux, Someone Wants to Steal My Name.  Her book, Why God Is a Woman, was published by BOA Editions in 2015. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Ms. Andrews via email about her newest book of poetry, her understanding of poetry’s position in our present society, poetry’s liberating role in her own life, the themes that most fascinate and inspire her, and her perspective on the most radical thing a poet can accomplish in her work.

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

I blame my mother for everything.

She was a terrible mother, and the most wonderful mother imaginable. A semi-autistic dairy farmer, she despised touch and intimacy in all its guises and was better at handling calves than children. A brilliant linguist, she knew French, German, Latin and Ancient Greek, and studied with Richmond Lattimore in college. She spent countless hours reading aloud to her children in a voice like Katharine Hepburn’s, frequently returning to the Greek myths, the Odyssey, the Iliad. If she was anxious, as she was when I was sick (and I was sick often), she sat by my bed and read poetry. “What does it mean?” I’d ask. “Hush,” she’d answer. “And listen.”  She never liked explanations.

In my earliest memories, poetry and myths were part of my daily life and dreams. We had no TV or neighbors. The stories my mother read filled my imagination. They were part of how I understood the world. And they were magic, the only magic I knew. How could I not want to be a writer?  

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? 

Society—I’ve never been a fan of it.

Even in elementary school, I remember studying the city states. Athens, the celebrated birthplace of democracy, was where women were the property of fathers or spouses. Sparta, the terrible warring polis, was where women were educated and athletic—and exercised in the nude (at least that’s what my mom said). I wanted to be Spartan, but without the warriors. I wanted to delete the warriors. But what would Sparta be without warriors?

There’s so much of every society I’d like to delete. I’m not sure what role poets play in society. Does society care for poetry? Remember Plato wanted to banish the poets.

I suspect that the average American thinks poetry is found in Hallmark cards. I can’t stand greeting cards. So many are a way of putting syrup on life’s turds.

That said, I do think poetry is a force for personal change, a reprieve from suffering, a glimpse of truth and beauty, a compass that helped me relate to my cold and brilliant mother, and more, much more.

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

Poets can look back.

Like Orpheus and Lot’s wife. Or they can look forward like Cassandra. None of these characters are popular with society. I picture society as a city of righteous Lots.

Your book of prose poems Miss August explores racism in Virginia in the midst of desegregation from multiple perspectives. What inspired Miss August? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I hope first and foremost that readers will enjoy my books. But I do have a habit of writing about things people tell me not to write about. Orgasms are one. Racism, another. I grew up steeped in racism. If I write about the past, I write about racism. I don’t mean just color-coded racism.  

As early as first grade, when I was a cross-eyed kid at an all-white private school, started after integration became law in Virginia, I was teased for having “ugly eyes.” A farm kid, accustomed to insults, I shouted back, “Well your mama musta’ mated with a rhino.” I was sent to the principal’s office for “talking like white trash.” And for using the word “mate.”

“What’s white trash? And why can’t I use the word mate?” I asked my mother after school. She didn’t answer—she just said I needed to stop talking like the farmhands. And she started giving me elocution lessons.

I think not-answering is a problem. Not-talking about topics—it’s like putting a lid on a hot frying pan. Society does that. If I could give anything to readers, I’d give them the willingness to lift a few lids.

In your first poetry collection, The Book of Orgasms, you introduce the orgasm as an ethereal presence, a muse who begins a dialogue with her human counterparts. And your most recent book of poems, The Last Orgasm, imagines a conclusion to that dialogue: a bold collection of wry, fantastical, feminist meditations on sexuality, desire’s origin, love’s nature, and—ultimately—desire’s ending. What inquiry or interest birthed this beautiful and subversive new collection?

I’ve been lucky. I’ve enjoyed the company of so many great poems and poets, and I’ve had time to dream, to write, to love. And I have loved deeply. But I know all good things must end—including orgasms and poems. Even while composing them now, I can see them leaving. I wanted to say farewell in this book, to prepare myself for the last orgasm and poem.

You edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the Belgian poet Henri Michaux, and in the book’s introductory essay, "Finding Henri Michaux,” you write: “With Michaux, it was passion at first glimpse. … He's not even a poet… he's something else. I still consider Michaux to be something else entirely, …I think of him as an anti-poet, an anti-god, a Buddha, a cure for my suffering. Michaux demonstrated a different method and reason for writing. …He suggested another way of being, writing, thinking, observing, so unlike any I had experienced...” What was the experience like of editing a poet you so admire? And what draws you to Michaux’s poetry? How do his words reach you so profoundly, and what have you learned from his work about what is possible for yourself as a poet?

I never felt up to the task of editing Henri Michaux. But I’ll forever love his character, Plume, happy-go-lucky Plume, who lives out some of my worst nightmares. When Plume travels, strangers wipe their hands on his coat, serve him terrible food, refuse him lodging. When he goes to the doctor, the surgeon chops off a finger. But it’s all fine with him. After all, what’s a man to do? These poems are funny and irreverent, and they expose dark, psychological truths. Michaux taught me that you can write or say anything as long as you keep smiling and laughing. 

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

My father used to say, “Nin, put a lid on it,” meaning keep your mouth shut.  And, “Don’t make a fool of yourself.” My theme as a writer is: be daring. Make a fool of yourself. My dad was a gay man who lived his life as a straight person. He was an artist who rarely painted. I don’t want to live or write as if I am not myself.

"Spring" [by Angela Ball]

My feelings just took a turn for the better,
While thinking of white flowers turning into strawberries,
Of clover turning into bees, of crowds of wisteria
Swelling and swelling.

People often think I have a friendly dog but it is just me:
My wide arm-span for folding tablecloths, my feet that seem worn
Not just by me, but many.

I had this feeling once before, when I was walking through rain
And wet leaves in shoes that were red and navy.
Much of me hadn't been tried out, and I liked that.

-- Angela Ball
[from NIGHT CLERK AT THE HOTEL OF BOTH WORLDS, University of Pittsburgh Press]

from the archive; first posted March 20, 2010

Larkin, Uncensored (On Human Bondage, Donald Davie, and Barbara Pym)

Philip Larkin wrote this poem -- which he characterized as a "cri du cock" -- in 1943, when he was 21:

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

*

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," Larkin penned this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Which was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsley Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, which, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

*

Larkin had a flair for limericks. He had a high regard for Barbara Pym's writing, but that didn't prevent him from composing these lines:

The chances are certainly slim
Of finding in Barbara Pym
      (I speak with all deference)
      The faintest of reference
To what in our youth we called quim --

The three poems are from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Good old Phil, / Over the hill / From the start. / Bless his heart. 

[from the archive; posted March 20, 22 and 23, 2013]

I would give all I possess
(money, keep, wallet, personal effects, and articles of dress)
To stick my tool
Up the prettiest girl in Warwick King's High School.

*

To the tune of "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do," Larkin penned this 1974 epistle (unsent) to Professor Donald Davie:

Davie, Davie,
Give me a bad review;
That's your gravy,
Telling chaps what to do.
Forget about style and passion,
As long as it's in the fashion --
But let's be fair, it's got you a chair,
Which was all it was meant to do.

The last lines are the poem's weak link and Larkin 's friend Kingsley Amis suggested that he change them to "But it's got you a chair, which, let's be fair, / Was the most that you had in view."

*

Larkin had a flair for limericks. He had a high regard for Barbara Pym's writing, but that didn't prevent him from composing these lines:

The chances are certainly slim
Of finding in Barbara Pym
      (I speak with all deference)
      The faintest of reference
To what in our youth we called quim --

The three poems are from Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Good old Phil, / Over the hill / From the start. / Bless his heart. 

[from the archive; posted March 20, 22 and 23, 2013]

Walt Whitman’s “Reconciliation” [ by John Brehm]

At the height of the American Civil War, Walt Whitman spent three years visiting wounded and dying soldiers in the hospitals in and around Washington, D.C. He would bring them small gifts, whatever they most needed or wanted—a pair of socks, some rice pudding, a shot of brandy—and wrote letters home for those who were unable to write themselves, too sick or in many cases illiterate. Most importantly, he sat and talked with them, sharing with all who desired it the healing power of his presence. Whitman admired the stoicism with which the soldiers bore their suffering—many of them were as young as 15 and 16, with no friends or family near—and often held vigil until they died. By his own estimate, he visited between eighty to a hundred thousand of the wounded and sick. These visits lasted from an hour or two to all day and night. In critical cases he would sometimes take up quarters in the hospital and keep watch several nights in a row.

          Conditions in the overcrowded wards were ghastly—gangrene and other infections killed more soldiers than their injuries—and the long hours Whitman spent there nearly ruined his own health. And yet he considered those three years “the greatest privilege and satisfaction, (with all their feverish excitements and physical deprivations and lamentable sights,) and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life.” The compassion he brought to these soldiers opened him to “undream’d-of depths of emotion.” Nor did he discriminate between Union and Confederate, or between black and white. “I can say that in my ministerings I comprehended all, whoever came in my way, northern or southern, and slighted none…. I was with many rebel officers and men among our wounded, and gave them always what I had, and tried to cheer them the same as any.”

          Among the many remarkable aspects of Whitman’s wartime service, perhaps most remarkable is this willingness to tend to Confederate as well as Union soldiers, even though his own brother had been wounded at Fredericksburg, and would later nearly die of starvation in a Confederate prison. Whitman’s compassion made no distinctions, and that generosity of spirit informs one of his great short lyrics about the war, published in 1865, after the fighting had ended.

Reconciliation

 Word over all, beautiful as the sky! 
Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again,
           and ever again, this soil’d world:
For my enemy is dead—a man divine as myself is dead;
I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin—I draw near; 
I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

          Whitman places the hoped-for reconciliation between North and South within larger cycles destruction and purification, where Death and Night are personified as sisters who “incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world.” (The repetition of soft “s” sounds reinforces the soothing, restorative quality of the process Whitman describes). He may have been thinking of the women who served as volunteer nurses during the war, the way they would have bathed the soldiers, cleaned their wounds, endlessly it must have seemed. But from witnessing such specific acts of care, Whitman creates an image of cosmic cleansing, a sense that the masculine forces of war and violence will always be met and transformed by the feminine energies of compassion and renewal.

          In the second part of the poem, Whitman gives us a specific act of earthly reconciliation, as he bends down and kisses his “enemy” where he lies “white-faced and still, in the coffin.” He calls this fallen Confederate solider “my enemy” but recognizes that ultimately he is “divine as myself”; that there is no difference, no separation, between them; that their shared divinity—in Buddhist terms, we might say their basic goodness—is vastly more important, more real, than their allegiance to opposing sides of the conflict. But what an extraordinary thing to say, and to do. Whether or not Whitman actually kissed a Confederate solider in his coffin—it’s quite possible he may have done so—or simply imagined it, the gesture, the willingness to make contact, to bridge the physical space between them, represents an act of reverence that transcends all boundaries.

          “Reconciliation” embodies the truth of non-separation; we see that truth not only described but acted out before us. As such, the poem models a quality of loving awareness and compassionate behavior we might aspire to ourselves. Can we see the divinity in those we regard as enemies? Can we connect with the basic goodness that exists undisturbed below whatever harmful mind-states we encounter in another? Can we act with gentleness and kindness even in the midst of hatred and violence? No doubt we will often fail, but reading deeply and holding in mind poems like Whitman’s “Reconciliation” can help keep the aspiration alive.

from The Dharma of Poetry by John Brehm (c)2021. Reprinted by Wisdom Publications. www.wisdomexperience.org 
This is the first half of Brehm’s opening chapter, “Wisdom and Compassion: Walt Whitman.”
https://wisdomexperience.org/product/dharma-poetry/

Meet the Press: Plan B Press and Alan King’s Crooked Smiling Light

Dante Di Stefano: The poems in Crooked Smiling Light meditate on complicated family relationships. What are the advantages and the challenges of foregrounding the domestic and the autobiographical in your writing?

Alan King: The advantages to this approach is that the stories come off as being authentic since I’m pulling from my own experiences. These are opportunities to connect with readers on a real level because everyone has complicated relationships with a loved one.

The challenge is if my parents read my work, they’ll read it out of context and wonder why I’m “embarrassing” the family. My father and I made a lot of progress from those tense moments. There’s a chance he sees some of these poems and our relationship deteriorates, with all the work we did to get to where we are for nothing. So, there’s that.

DD: Much of this chapbook concerns itself with fatherhood. The book begins with complicated father-son relationship explored in “In Your Dream” and “Counter Punching” unfolds in dialogue with the father-daughter relationship explored in a poem like “The Land of Innocence.” Can you talk about the trope of fatherhood in your own work? Are there any father-son, father-daughter poems written by other poets that you find particularly compelling and instructive?

AK: Tim Seibles’s poems about his dad in his recent collection, One Turn Around the Sun, had a nuance that was lacking in my own poems. His poem, Ode To Your Father, really showed me how to humanize my dad while being critical of him at the same time. He tells the story of his dad that made me feel like I had a full picture of him. That’s what I wanted to start doing in my work.

DD: Who are your favorite poets?

AK: Aw man. That list changes, but the consistent ones are Tim Seibles, Destiny Birdsong, Kelly Harris DeBerry, John Murillo, Asha French, Jan Beatty, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, and Stephen Dobyns. Those are a few who come to mind.

DD: Like many contemporary love poems, “Gluttony” upends the notion of an idealized and exclusive beloved, meditating as it does on extramarital desire within a committed relationship. Why approach the love poem in this way?

AK: I felt the approach had to be real. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean you stop seeing attractive people besides your spouse or partner. Those feelings are natural, and the urges are what makes us human. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having those feelings. It’s up to the person on whether they will act on those cravings.

DD: The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement directly and indirectly provide a context for Crooked Smiling Light. Could you talk about how recent events have shaped your writing life?

AK: I think Steven Leyva explained this well in his “Nerd Volta” column for the Washington Independent Review of Books, when he said that my earlier poems “were always tempered…with a kind of whimsy.” In light of recent events, “the whimsy has largely given way to an often-unguarded lament,” of what he called “a licked chop.”

I alluded to things in my earlier work. Tim Seibles, who was one of my mentors when I was going through the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, told me to stop hinting at things. Just go there. Sometimes a point-blank approach is necessary to drive the point home with readers.

DD: stevenallenmay, how did Plan B Press come into being?

stevenallenmay: Plan B Press started as the publishing wing of a 30-day poetry festival that occurred in Berks County, PA each April during National Poetry Month. The festival itself has been taking place in Berks County each April since 1999. The Press was meant to publish participants of the Festival, however over time that mission has evolved as the Press moved from Central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, PA to the Washington DC area. The Press has been focused on giving voice to poets at the beginnings of their writing journeys since 1999.

DD: Can you tell us about your back catalogue?

s-a-m: We have published over 100 books in our 20+ year history and many of them have gone out of print for a variety of reasons. This is not an unusual occurrence for a small press which primarily publishes chapbooks. Our Back Pages is a visual blast of the journey we have been on as publishers as well. Some of the poets we have published have gone on to greater success (C L Bledsoe, Alyse Bensel, Jake Syersak, Michael Leong, and Robert Miltner to name but a few) 

DD: What does the future hold for Plan B Press?

s-a-m: We hope to rise from the pillow to slay the ennui of life each day for the foreseeable future. 

DD: What do you find most compelling about Crooked Smiling Light?

s-a-m: Alan’s voice. We had the privilege of publishing him in our most well-known book, Full Moon on K Street edited by Kim Roberts back in 2010. I have attended a number of readings of Alan’s since then and am always rewarded by his voice and delivery. He has quite a presence in a room when he reads. His work on the page is equally engaging as well. 

DD: Can you end the interview by introducing a poem from Alan’s collection?

s-a-m: “Gluttony”, probably because there is a video of this poem which is a work of art in its own visual right. Plan B Press has always been interested in the presentation of poetry beyond ink on paper. And Alan W. King embodies a multidisciplinary approach to poetry that we welcome and embrace. It’s an honor to be working with him on this project. 

Gluttony

Combing the bargain bin,
a woman, who's not your wife,
brushes beside you—asking
if the Roy Hargrove CD you're holding
is any good.

She's close enough for you to smell
her ginger-patchouli body wash.

The angle she gives you
in her leather bomber jacket—
the one unzipped, showing a white tee
retracing her athletic stomach and arms.

The jacket, with its collar flared,
makes her a bright blossom
booming its honey dew–scented tune
along her neckline.

And your father's voice,
from two decades before, warns you
about gorging on everything you see.

You were 16 the first time
he told you, when your hunger hovered
like that summer at Myrtle Beach—

sistas strutting the boardwalk
beneath a honey barbecue sun,
whose sweet light made each of them
a long stretch of marinade, a chromatic
scale of flavors along which
your tongue was burning to play.

And isn't temptation always lurking,
eager to hold our common sense hostage?

You tell the flower woman you're married
after she points to a flyer for a Roots show
and says y'all should go.

When she asks are you happy?
you remember a brotha once asking
how you could love one woman
when the world's a buffet—

the possibilities of pleasure
laid out like jumbo crab cakes,
lasagna rolls, and buffalo wings.

What's gluttony, if not a symptom
of our own hunger consuming us?

Wasn't Jack as careless, selling
his sustenance for a handful of beans?

You remember the story
of the stalk that almost made him
a hungry giant's grub.

You still hear the pastor preaching
about gluttons wearing the rags of drowsiness,
which is how your wife found you
stumbling through the days.

Your life before her was a string-less violin,
a dark garden of wilted sunflowers, a camper trailer
rusting against a moldy brick wall.

You were once a city of power lines,
boarded up clock towers, junked cars
and blazing drum barrel fires.

What she saw in you, only her heart knows.
Just like it knew you'd leave the temptress
back at the listening booth watching
the automatic doors close behind you.

At 16, you thought all there was to living
was filling your appetite—
too young to know love
is the everyday meal,
that the lack of it kills quicker
than the absence of food.

---

Alan King is an author, poet, journalist and videographer, who lives with his family in Bowie, MD. He’s a communications specialist for a national nonprofit and a senior editor at Words Beats & Life‘s global hip hop journal. King is the author of POINT BLANK (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Aquarius Press, 2012). He’s a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of Southern Maine. His poems and short stories appear in various literary journals, magazines and are featured on public radio. 

 

"Not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be": Aspen Matis in Conversation with Mitch Sisskind

Photo © Alex Pieros.

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

Often when people have some ability or inclination, they become aware of that or others might point it out to them. Then they’re well-advised to develop that ability. If you’re seven feet tall, try playing basketball. Unfortunately, there can be blocks against it. You might refuse to play basketball for the very reason that you’re seven feet tall. But if you’re a certain kind of person—let’s call it a creative person—and you don’t act upon that fact, there can be problems. In “Madmen” someone says of the main character, “This is what happens to an artistic personality who isn’t an artist.” So I have to give it a shot.
 
Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his/her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation? 

When I was in middle school the girls learned to speak Pig Latin. They liked speaking it fast to each other, both for its own sake and because the boys couldn’t do that or understand it. As I remain a “boy” after all these years, much of academic criticism is like Pig Latin to me. Meanwhile, Auden wrote that negative criticism always turns into showing off, so it's best to skip it as a writer or as a reader. Sometimes wonderful critical insights appear spontaneously. My professor Angus Fletcher once casually remarked, “Freud is such a great writer. He can make you believe anything.” Negative and positive at the same time!

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

I have a few inspiring alter egos that can help me write. One of them is the “peckerwood”—a sort of backwoods man in the modern world who breeds dogs. But he's not a Trump person. He’s deeply apolitical and anti-materialist. He likes it when his car breaks down. He would see Trump as soft, materialistic, and frightened of dogs. Perhaps surprisingly, V.S. Naipaul shows real understanding of peckerwoods in his book on the American South. Other alter egos are the Torah scholar, the sorority girl of the 1950s, and the Chicago policeman. Maybe a common theme would be people who have passionate, unconventional interests that they desperately want to communicate, and they assume that the reader shares their interests. I identify with these people. I don't have to “get inside” them. They’re inside me.

Your new book of poems, Collected Poems, is rich with moments of delightful surprise, sudden twists beyond the mundane moment and into themes that feel vast and universal. How do you achieve this element of freshness? Was this volume’s unifying quality of surprise a conscious choice?

I like characters and voices that are hard to identify as either mundane or transcendent. If I can create that indeterminacy, whether in a short poem or in a whole book, I hope it brings the surprise and freshness you refer to. On the other hand, some readers find this unpleasantly confusing. I’ve gotten both of those responses to my writing and also in other areas of my life.

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

Kenneth Koch said that a poet is interested in the word “ashtray” while a prose writer is interested in all the people who have used the ashtray. Poets young and old should to be sensitive to words or phrases that catch their interest, that strike a spark, however slight. See what you can make of that. I recently came across the phrase “make cow eyes,” meaning to flirt, and I was able to write a poem from that starting point. Stuff like this can happen in wondrous ways. You may know that Lewis Carroll thought of the last line of his long poem “The Hunting of the Snark”—“For the snark was a boojum, you see”—before he wrote anything else.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?
I’ve done lots of ghostwriting with publishers large and small. After that experience, in my own work I’m much more comfortable with self-publishing. I don’t like soliciting people to take an interest in my writing and the snail’s pace of the whole thing can also be demoralizing. I’m getting ready to do a new book of poems that I want to call “Bringing in the Sheaves.” I like not having to consult with a publisher about the title or about the cover. I hope people like my work, but I want to have full responsibility, whether it succeeds or not. I find writing easier now than at earlier points in my life. That is certainly exciting, although it’s still not exactly easy and it shouldn’t be. As Emily Dickinson stated, it’s “all we know of heaven and all we need of hell.” Surf and turf. Nothing better than that.

Click here to listen to Mitch Sisskind on WKCR's "Bookworm" with Michael Silverblatt, click here to read Mitch's blog posts. Order Sisskind's Collected Poems here. 

Aspen Matis is the author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir (Little A, June 2020). Called “fearless…A beautifully written story of inspiration, courage, and ultimate transformation” by Booklist, the book was a #1 Amazon bestseller in memoirs. Author Deepak Chopra said the memoir “will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing.” Novelist Aimee Bender called Your Blue Is Not My Blue “gorgeous…a gripping read that wrestles honestly and sensitively with the ways we connect and the ways we miss one another.”

Matis's short-form writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Psychology Today, Salon, Bloomberg, and Marie Claire. Her first book, the critically acclaimed memoir Girl in the Woods, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Called “a powerful read” by O, The Oprah Magazine, the book made The Guardian's annual top 50 list. The New York Times named Matis “a hero.”

The Arson Prevention Program [by Shanna Compton]

It is exceedingly difficult
to come to terms
with the facts—
someone you love
is redacted

The river continues
as though no one
were missing

The country moves toward
violet abutments

ever adjacent
to the idea we
once had of ourselves
redacted

You must listen
to what’s there
& to what’s left out

You must love too
the silk & the must
of the ash

Ed. note: "The Arson Prevention Program" is from (Creature Sounds Fade) by Shanna Compton. Black Lawrence Press, 2020. "You have to see how these poems sound in your head." -- Dara Wier. 

Elizabeth Bishop’s final exam at Harvard [from Dana Gioia's new book]

<<<<
A university student should have at least one unforgettable teacher during his or her formative years. So it was with poet Dana Gioia, California's poet laureate and the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2018. In 1975, he began his last year as a graduate student in English at Harvard. He faced a choice: taking Robert Lowell‘s class on 19th century poets, or Elizabeth Bishop teaching “Studies in Modern Poetry.” She rarely attracted more than a dozen students – but she attracted this one, who would go on to be chairman of the NEA. The class dwindled down to five, four of them undergraduates by the second meeting. But the friendship of the poet and the poet-to-be endured. After each class, he walked with “Miss Bishop” to their respective quarters, since they lived in the same direction from Harvard’s Kirkland House.

The story is one of several told in Gioia’s new book Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life, out in January with Paul Dry Books. Also included in the collection are accounts of John Cheever, Robert Fitzgerald, James Dickey, and more. The publisher, too, has a story: he was a stock options trader, and a successful one, but the Harvard grad had a secret yen to be a publisher (read that story here). The Stanford Publishing Course convinced him to have a go.

Back to the class in the basement of Kirkland House: Elizabeth Bishop was new to teaching and it showed. “I’m not a very good teacher,” she began. “So to make sure you learn something in this class I am going to ask each of you to memorize at least ten lines a week from one of the poets we are reading.”

“Memorize poems?” one of the dismayed students asked. “But why?” Miss Bishop’s reply was modest and sincere. “So that you’ll learn something in spite of me.”

The class final at the end of the term, in Dana’s own words: “Our final examination surprised even me. A take-home test, it ran a full typed page (covered with the hand-scrawled corrections that by now were her trademark) and posed us four tasks unlike any we had ever seen on a college English exam. Furthermore, we were given exact word lengths and citation requirements, as well as this admonition as a headline: ‘Use only your books of poems and a dictionary; please do not consult each other.'”

The final hurdle of the test was this, in Bishop’s words:

Now, please try your hand at 24 lines of original verse; three poems of eight lines each, in imitation of the three poets studied, in their styles and typical of them. (In the case of Lowell, the style of Lord Weary’s Castle.) I don’t expect these pastiches to be great poetry! – but try to imitate (or parody if you prefer) the characteristic subject-matter, meter, imagery, and rhyme (if appropriate).

We may not have consulted each other about the answers to this test, but, walking out of Kirkland after the last class with the final in our hands, we could not help talking about the questions. Miss Bishop had gone off to her office, and we were alone.

“I can’t believe it,” one of the undergraduates moaned. “We have to write poems.”

Someone else offered the consolation that at least everything else on the exam was easy.

“Yeah, but we still have to write poems.”

*

Gioia's conclusion: “By this time, I had realized that, for all her fumbling disorganization, Miss Bishop had devised – or perhaps merely improvised – a way of teaching poetry which was fundamentally different from the manner conventionally professed in American universities. She never articulated her philosophy in class, but she practiced it so consistently that it is easy – especially now, looking back – to see what she was doing. She wanted us to see poems, not ideas. Poetry was the particular way the world could be talked about only in verse, and here, as one of her fellow Canadians once said, the medium was the message. One did not interpret poetry; one experienced it. Showing us how to experience it clearly, intensely, and, above all, directly was the substance of her teaching. One did not need a sophisticated theory. One needed only intelligence, intuition, and a good dictionary. There was no subtext, only the text. A painter among Platonists, she preferred observation to analysis, and poems to poetry.”

>>>>

from The Book Haven (Stanford University), December 1, 2020; click here for the full article and illustrative photographs.