The Best American Poetry

"Virginity" [by Amy Gerstler]

Virginity 

Lying down on the rug with someone and getting dust
bunnies in your hair. The eloquence of long pauses.
Passing notes rather than speaking. A basement fogged
with pot smoke. Trying to read another body via its breathing.
The idea that if you kiss someone you can taste what they
just ate. Refusing to eat what your mother cooks anymore,
which hurts her feelings. But you can't stand dead sautéed\
animal inside your mouth now, so you have to spit it out.
The myth that innocence is protective. The idea of not
being able to stop. Reading secret magazines a cousin stuffed
in the bottom of his sleeping bag. The idea that someone
curious about your body isn't interested in the private theatre
of your mind. Theories that there might be a kind of
violence about it. How mother insists that without true love
it's just worthless humping, and the idea that for the life
you aspire to, she's probably wrong. What your body has
promised for so long. The idea of your disastrous premiere.
The idea of someone laughing at you after. The idea of
hoofprints, stampede damage, stuff crushed underfoot.
The idea of keeping all this hidden as you slowly lotus open.

From Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin)

See also this interview with Amy Gerstler
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/roll-call-a-conversation-with-amy-gerstler/

and this poem by Amy Gerstler selected and discussed by Angela Ball
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/11/the-new-york-school-diaspora-part-nineteen-amy-gerstler-by-angela-ball.html

An Interview with Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell [by Aspen Matis]

In celebration of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s 75th anniversary, this November the venerable publisher will be releasing The FSG Poetry Anthology, a book comprising the wide range of poets FSG has brought to light over the decades. Edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell, the collection includes work by every poet FSG has published in its 75-year history — not so much a compilation of “greatest hits” as a selection of poems that feel alive and vital to this day.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s initial forays into poetry included books by John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell. Over the years FSG has published international voices (Leopardi, Rilke, Pablo Neruda and Adam Zagajewski), Nobel Prize winners (Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, and Louise Glück), and emerging voices (Roya Marsh, Chet’la Sebree, and Valzhyna Mort). The FSG Poetry Anthology captures the spirit of the house’s diverse poetry list and makes for a vibrant celebration of the publisher’s rich poetic history.

I corresponded with Mr. Galassi and Mr. Creswell via email about poetry’s capacity to reveal “what is going on under the surface of the culture” and to say “things it doesn’t seem to be saying,” the act of reading poetry as akin to “listening to the noise in the wall.” We also discussed the fallibility of any given reader — how “great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great” — and the inevitability of great poems once “their innovation catches on,” often in retrospect. 

The FSG Poetry Anthology is dedicated to the memory of Robert Giroux, who joined the firm headed by Roger Straus and John Farrar in 1955. Giroux signed up Berryman, Bishop, Jack Kerouac, Robert Lowell, Flannery O’Connor, and Jean Stafford and, eventually, Randall Jarrell, Allen Tate, and Louise Bogan. (And, some years later, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes.) How was Mr. Giroux so effective at identifying, attracting, and cultivating poetic talent?

JG: Giroux had had a long and distinguished career as an editor at Harcourt, Brace, one of the leading literary publishers of its time. Among his authors there was T.S. Eliot, who was also a central figure at Faber and Faber in London, which he’d made the leading poetry publisher in the U.K. (if not the world). Plus, Bob’s best friend in college, at Columbia, was John Berryman. So you could say he was ideally suited to publish poets, and no doubt they recommended their friends to him. He had the perspicacity to choose well.

The anthology includes work by nearly all the poets FSG has published since Mr. Giroux’s arrival at the house, presented in broadly chronological sections. According to the anthology’s introduction, this structure “affords some sense of how the company’s editorial perspectives have evolved over the decades, and how the scope of FSG’s poetry has gradually expanded from Giroux’s classic core in widening, more or less concentric circles.” How has FSG’s editorial perspective on poetry evolved over the decades?

JG: New editors bring new enthusiasms, new interests. And as authors mature and age, new voices emerge, and the readers’ taste change, too. It’s a natural, you might say an actuarial process. I think you can see in the book how international poets became important on our list, and how our interest in new strains of American poetry developed and broadened over time. 

RC: One of the deep satisfactions of making this anthology was to discover the many hidden — and sometimes not-so-hidden — byways that run between poets of different generations and sensibilities. It begins with one of Berryman’s “Dream Songs” (number 22), a poem of quick changes, which mixes vernacular language with lots of other voices and registers. I hear echoes of Berryman in so many later FSG poets — so he’s one example of a widening but concentric circle. On the other hand, there are just as many poems that we hope will make readers think, “I’ve never heard a voice quite like that before.” A tradition is made of individual talents, after all.

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

JG: The anthology was planned as a way of celebrating FSG’s 75th anniversary this year, and of marking how central poetry has been to the entire company enterprise. As the two members of the editorial department currently involved in editing and publishing poetry, Robyn and I stepped up to the challenge. 

RC: The challenge and also the pleasure. It was wonderful to have an excuse, during the long hours of our endless quarantine, to read through the archive of FSG’s poetry. Maybe even more fun was to talk about the poems with Jonathan, who knows the nooks and crannies of this archive better than anyone. The hardest part, of course, was whittling down our choices. Our initial list was three or four times as long as the final selection. We chose poems that were characteristic of the individual poets, but we were also on the lookout for poems that somehow rhymed with others in the collection.

The anthology’s introduction expresses FSG’s conviction that “poetry is fundamental to literary expression, that it is here the writer strikes her distinctive note most powerfully.” 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? 

JG: Poetry, it seems to me, always reveals what is going on under the surface of the culture. It predicts developments; reading it is like listening to the noise in the wall. It can disturb, inspire, frighten, confirm our fears, and our hopes. It is always, I think, saying things it doesn’t seem to be saying. And I think it captures the spirit of a moment, of a culture. As Pound said, it’s news that stays news. 

RC: I’ll only add that I don’t think poetry ever has just one role to play — not in the present, and not ever. It’s impossible to say what poetry is in any final sense, because poets are always coming up with new things to do with it. This often happens through the translation of foreign poetry, which is something FSG has always been committed to publishing.

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

JG: I think true poetry is an authentic reflection of the poet’s mind. That is the most radical, the most fundamental thing. 

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?

JG: We need more poetry criticism, not less. Great critics read below the surface and help open up what the poet is doing--sometimes better than the poet can. Poetry needs to be talked about, challenged, deeply responded to.  Real poetry can always meet the challenge. Lesser criticism fades and has no real lasting effect. But the reception of poetry is something that happens over time. It needs to be digested, mulled over, read and re-read. 

RC: It’s well known that the big critical outlets — with few exceptions — make less and less room for poetry. But poets and poetry readers have come up with ways to find each other: at readings, through independent presses and small magazines, on social media. I think our critical culture is more diffuse than ever, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s no shortage of passion — including invective! Let one hundred flowers bloom.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you both?

JG: To me, the poet’s voice is all-important, their angle of approach to the universe. That is the theme. They can be writing about toothpaste or birdsong; it doesn’t matter. It’s how it’s done that’s all-important.

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

JG: Very often, the best books do not win the prizes. Because readers are fallible; they get distracted by externals, by fashion, by the heat of the moment. In my view, real things emerge in the long run. We’re all fallible, needless to say, editors as much as anyone, of course. I do believe though, that there is an absolute value, a fundamental integrity, that survives all our failings — very Platonic of me, I admit. 

RC: A different way of making the same point is to say that great works often try to do something new, and are therefore hard to recognize right away as great. Once their innovation catches on it seems inevitable, but of course it only looks that way in retrospect. And great books aren’t always perfect books. Berryman’s Dream Songs, to use that example again, is full of daring performances and many of them fall flat (or worse). Sometimes great books have to survive their own failings, too.

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

JG: My only thought is that poets need to respond to whatever is impelling them to write. That listening, that following, is its own reward.

RC: My day job is teaching and studying Arabic poetry and there’s story about Abu Nuwas — the great, polyamorous eighth-century poet of Baghdad — that I especially love. The short version goes that when Abu Nuwas was a young man he approached a master of the tradition named Khalaf al-Ahmar and asked how he could become a poet. The master told him to go away and memorize 10,000 lines of verse. Abu Nuwas came back some time later and al-Ahmar asked him to recite all 10,000 lines. Abu Nuwas did so flawlessly. “Now forget them,” says the master. “Then you’ll be ready to be a poet.”

What is poetry’s greatest role in both of your inner lives? Why do you read poems?

JG:  From early on, poetry struck me as the most concentrated and powerful means of expression. I still believe that the contraption of the poem is a miraculous thing that often takes on a life of its own, and even drives the poet to make it.  It sounds mystical and I'm not a mystic. But I am always looking to be blown away. And it happens, again and again.

RC: For me, reading poetry isn’t a specialized activity. It isn’t something I do on the side or for any particular reason. I don’t think of it as belonging to my inner life any more than it belongs to my outer life: it’s part of both. Because there are poems for all occasions and moods. I read poems while waiting for the subway, or putting my kids to bed (or putting myself to bed); I read for wit or wisdom or consolation; I’ll read poems on the screen or the page (though I prefer the page); and I’m as likely to enjoy a poem about an exotic animal as one about Susan Sontag, or visiting the underworld, or falling in love. The anthology has poems about all these things, incidentally.  

What inquiry or exploration — if any — unifies the anthology? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

JG: This anthology, like any anthology, represents a winnowing of a particular field, in this case the field of poets FSG has published over its history. It might well have been different, but this was the particular path that the house ended up taking. There’s so much that's not here, but there are a lot of great moments--of perception, expression, deep surprise, real beauty. It’s exhilarating to come on these. We hope readers enjoy doing just that, just as we did. We want them to be blown away, too.

"The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" [by Aspen Matis]

Here are excerpts from Aspen Matis's piece "The Joy of the Gamble: A Conversation with David Lehman" that the Los Angeles Review of Books published on Saturday, November 27:

ASPEN MATIS: Congratulations on The Morning Line. What would you like to share about the origins and creation process of this newest collection?

DAVID LEHMAN: The Morning Line is really a gathering of the best and most ambitious poems I’ve written (or completed) in the last five years, which has been a particularly fruitful period for me, perhaps because it followed my bout with cancer and brush with death. The book consists of poems (and a prose poem) that represent a range of my interests — everything from love to lunch, gambling to stamp collecting, music and martinis. I am inspired — to the point of writing poems — by the lives and works of Villon and Mayakovsky, Talmudic tales, jazz standards, Schubert’s Rosamunde overture, verse forms and word games, puzzles, wisecracks, big philosophical questions, the life of the mind versus what the French call la vie quotidienne. In college and since, I took seriously what we used to call a “liberal arts education,” the idea that an educated person should have an active relation with art, music, literature, history, and philosophy.

Some poems come easily, some take forever. It took me 20 years to write “The Complete History of the Boy,” which is a sort of biography-in-progress of a 15-year-old poet.

Learning you had just defeated cancer makes the vitality of the poems in The Morning Line all the more stunning — thank you for sharing about that difficult fight. This context makes the book all the more triumphant. Why, I wonder, is the period following devastation so often beautifully vital? And how, in your experience, might death’s presence in our lives contribute to our greatest awakenings and birth our truest work?

Your questions cut to the quick, Aspen. I guess if I could put it in one prosaic sentence, I’d say: All the things you usually take for granted, whether driving past a field of corn or admiring the nobility of your dog standing guard at the door, well, you take them less for granted. Okay, I can be less prosaic. I’ve come into contact with death and as a result I have wounds but also strength I never knew I had.

In a clear-eyed and familiar voice, The Morning Line paints a nostalgic impressionistic masterwork that at once entertains the imagination and illuminates the big questions we’re now facing as a society. The book embraces, in John Hennessy’s words, “subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Good questions. What unifies the book, I think, is the poet’s sensibility and craft and a certain quantity of joie de vivre and heartfelt happiness despite the uncertainty, noise, ugliness, and even misery that threaten to defeat the impulse to celebrate, an impulse fundamental to all creation. As to what the reader is left with, you’re in the best possible position to answer that question.

In the book’s eponymous poem, “The Morning Line,” you write of gambling as an aspect of human nature — and of human folly. With intensity and grace, the speaker evokes a seductive picture of chance as “abstract art,” observing how “the gulf / is sometimes wide between the odds / set by the handicapper for the morning line / and the betting public at the track / when the horses reach the starting gate.” Why do you suspect that — as the speaker expresses — “[g]ambling is a natural human instinct”? Are you yourself a gambler, in some sense of the word?

Life is a gamble. Even when you don’t realize it, you are making a wager. Crossing a busy city street, you are betting that motorists are rational and sane, undistracted, and obedient to a system of alternating green and red lights. That’s a trivial example, but think of the choices we make when it comes to colleges, companions, relationships, and careers.

When I quit the academic world to become a full-time freelance writer, I took a huge gamble. It worked out, though at the time the odds were long. I feel like my life is a gamble, and perhaps that is why I don’t gamble in casinos.

In the same poem, the speaker draws a stunning connection between instability and religion, evoking God in “the risk you feel / when you are so deeply involved with another person / that you cannot imagine living your life without her.” That powerful stanza concludes: “The inevitability of loss, a much-misunderstood aspect / of gambling, is not a deterrent but an attraction.” Why, in your view, is instability so compelling? Why is risk-taking (such as risking love) a joyful high?

Life without risk, even if possible, wouldn’t necessarily be desirable. What makes a baseball game exciting to a fan is that the outcome is unknown. It is happening, it is real, and it can go either way. If love came with a lifetime guarantee, would it still be love? Would it be love if it didn’t have the fear of loss?

Graham Greene once said that he went to Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, Africa not “to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity” to which the London blitzes had addicted him. That makes sense to me.

For the entire piece, please click here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-joy-of-the-gamble-a-conversation-with-david-lehman/
Photo credit: Stacey Lehman. Cover art by Ricky Mujica. The Morning Line was puiblished bby the University of Pittsburgh Press in September of this year.

The Heart Has Reasons [by John Skoyles]

And I wrote those reasons 
on the ruled grid

of an index card
to preserve the moment, Madam,

when the panels of the hotel
elevator closed,

leaving just us.
A sigh and a kiss

did nicely, Lady,
but when the doors

opened again,
you were again nowhere

near, and now
the file card’s lost too,

with its logical
numerical slate.

I’ve misplaced this and that 
over the years, Dear,

but the things I miss most, Miss,
are listed on that card.

from Yes and No by John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon University Press)

Theme Music: Schubert's Rosamunde Overture

from "A Good Week for a Birthday" (in The Morning Line by David Lehman):

What would I choose as my theme music
if I were the classical music disc jockey
maybe Bernstein’s overture to Candide
or Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Cakewalk”
or Schubert’s overture to “Rosamunde”
in honor of John Scheuer
I have my Tolstoy to look forward to
and if music can stand for peace (the food of love)
today’s poem is a little tribute to the novel
summarized TV-Guide style:
Pierre loves Natasha and Napoleon invades Russia.

 

"Horizontal Women" [by Amy Gerstler]

from Amy's new book, Index of Women (Penguin)

Horizontal Women

Women free-falling, fainted, or overcome, arms raised
or flung. Women mostly young and unsung. Women
diving for pearls. A girl tossing her curls, or out cold
mid-clinch. One muddy gal asleep in a ditch. Women
leaping or snoring. Prone women imploring. A babe
brainy as any female could get. A woman who doesn't
know she's pregnant yet, lying on dry grass awaiting
hard rain. Women in pain. A twist with braceleted
wrists. A chick who insists she can't stand up till
you say yes. A lady you'd never guess would get
herself murdered. A woman unheard who just
lies there and cries. A femme who mightily sighs.  
Woman as some kind of horizon, another woman's hand
on the back of her head. Or, instead, each she is the line
at the farthest place you can see, if you squint your eyes,
where the sky seems to descend to touch land or sea.

"My Ego" [by Amy Gerstler]

This week we are showcasing poems by Amy Gerstler from her new book INDEX OF WOMEN (Penguin). Three poems will appear, each at 10 AM, in honor of the college course catalogue's "MWF at 10:00 AM." Today's poem is "My Ego."-- DL

My Ego

is a dented suit of armor, a designer gown
with grimy lining. She's the cause of false beliefs.
She fucks up my ability to love. She's prickly
and tender as an artichoke heart. She proposes
to me so frequently I can't hear other people
speak. She's a self-annointed guide who materializes
at my side with a flourish of trumpets and a bullhorn.
She's a forged love letter, a jailer impersonating a
friend. She's a series of flashbacks in which I'm
both victim and hero. I try to bribe her into exile,
but she calls herself my servant and falls weeping
at my feet. I'm forever banishing her, this mistress
of disguises, even as she clamors back into my lap,
begging my pardon and getting all kissy with me,
grabbing my hand and jamming it down her blouse.

from Index of Women by Amy Gerstler (Penguin).

"Sportswriter" [by Dean Smith]

"Sportswriter"

Hartzell’s cartoon bird
on the front page of the Sun
taught me to read—
“Birds edge Bosox” or
“Orioles drub Twins.”

My team routed,
pummeled, crushed,
and bombed  opponents—
just like the B-52s
in the headlines. 

Years later, in smoke-laden
hallways and shibeens,
the inquisitive eyes
of Jiminy Cricket
peered over horned rims,
grilled my father
for answers.

Others had names
like Tanton, Henneman,
and Bill Free, who dressed
in the style of Superfly
or Charles O. Finley.

“Nobody cares about
the labor pains, just the baby,”
my father told them
on the record. “That referee
is a gutless son-of-a bitch.”

I composed lines
after every game—
imagining myself
in the locker room—
from a stool
in the Owl Bar,
telling strangers
I wrote sports
for the Sun.

But I wasn’t a writer
or a coach’s son
when I looked
in the mirror
at my audience
of one—

drunk yet again.

from Baltimore Sons by Dean Bartoli Smith (Stillhouse Press). 

Dean Smith is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including "American Boy" and "Never Easy, Never Pretty: A Fan, A City, A Championship Season." Having completed five years as director of Cornell University Press, he left in 2019 to take the helm at Duke University Press.

"In Baltimore Sons, the city rises inside the breath of memories that are the history of a place. In Smith’s terse language, Baltimore is the heart of the nation, containing all the hopes and wrecked dreams, drawing them along the persistent presence of our tragic bonding with drugs, guns and violence. Walking the aisles of an army surplus store, finding a loaded revolver inside an old shoebox, sitting alone in a diner with a hot roast beef sandwich, these are the markers of the common experience of men growing up in cities. . . .  Baltimore Sons is the vision of a just life rising in the consciousness of a believer whose hope is rooted in what is real."

 Afaa M. Weaver, author of Spirit Boxing

John Updike in 2004: New Novel Seethes With Sex [by David Lehman]

e

2004‑11‑01 00:06 (New York)

Books: Updike's Novel Seethes With Sex; Philosophy Made Simple

     (Review. David Lehman is a critic for Bloomberg News. The
opinions expressed are his own.)

By David Lehman.

     Nov. 1 (Bloomberg) ‑‑ No one is better than John Updike at capturing the bedroom habits and customs of solid, middle‑class Americans ‑‑ especially the generation that came of age in the tranquil 1950s, experimented in the liberated 1960s, and changed partners in the narcissistic 1970s.

     Updike always gives you your money's worth of fine prose at the service of amorous complexity and erotic intensity, and ``Villages,'' his new novel, doesn't disappoint. Our hero is a randy computer programmer named Owen Mackenzie, a pioneer in the field, who meets his first wife, Phyllis, at MIT. So far, so unlike Updike himself ‑‑ who went to Harvard and needed tutoring to work up the parts of the novel dealing with software and IBM, where Owen gets his first job.

     Yet in all the critical ways, Mackenzie seems the author's alter ego: college in Cambridge, first job in New York City (at ``The New Yorker'' in Updike's case), then going independent in a little town in Massachusetts. In ``Villages,'' the town has the generic name of Middle Falls and is the site of Owen's lifelong education in conjugal pairings, female sexuality, heterosexual relationships ‑‑ all the things Updike writes about supremely well.

                           Village Sex

     Two other villages figure in the story. The deep past takes place in Willow, Pennsylvania, where Owen grows up and has his first dose of carnal knowledge. The present‑tense portion of the book is centered in Haskells Crossing, Massachusetts, where Owen and wife number two, Julia, have gone to grow old together.

     How Owen moves from Phyllis to Julia, with what consequences and what grief, is the heart of the narrative. The decisive events in Owen's life are his marriage to Phyllis and his departure from the IBM cocoon to set up shop with Ed, his partner from the Bronx. His marriage and his business make it possible for him to live life to the fullest. The question Updike doesn't ask but hopes that we will is whether Owen must sacrifice these relationships, as if the pursuit of happiness required no less.

     I won't give away the novel's turning point except to say that ever since Scott Fitzgerald in ``The Great Gatsby'' and Vladimir Nabokov in ``Lolita,'' a car crash has always been an expedient way to eliminate a character whose time has come.

        Updike's Women

     Updike on the subject of women is a bit like a brainier Henry Miller with a subtler sort of misogyny. The story of Owen's marriages, affairs and one‑night stands resembles an unabated love song spiced by surprising details and speculations. Having sex with the self‑involved Alissa, for example, Owen ``felt like a translator who had to be present so that Alissa could communicate with herself.''

     The novel's true climax occurs in the space between two exclamations in Owen's mind as he watches Julia in her sleep. ``How lovely she is, naked in the dark! How little men deserve the beauty and mercy of women!''

     It's not the story but the fineness of perception and thought that carries you through ``Villages.'' Updike takes us from the era of repression through the era of the pill and of plentiful ``safe sex'' ‑‑ incredible in retrospect.

     There are wonderful nuggets of insight throughout. Owen, the affluent husband who, inside, is still a poor child of the Great Depression, can never feel fully at ease among the affluent.

                            No Socks

     Updike tells us in a wicked sentence that ``Owen especially admires two peculiar traits of the male rich: their ability to grow more and more polite as the object of their courtesy becomes more and more annoying, and the ability to wear shoes, not just moccasins but loafers of fine leather, without socks.''

     Though there are a couple of false notes, these don't get in the way. A yammering character who won't shut up even during the sex act seems a lift from Faye Dunaway's performance in the 1976 movie ``Network.''  And when Owen's business partner orders a cappuccino in a New England restaurant in the 1960s, you wonder whether Updike forgot how unusual a menu item espresso coffee wasuntil the 1990s.

     ``Villages'' gives us a man's life depicted as a series of infidelities and revelations. Look at the work ``prioritized'' does in this sentence about a computer geek's conception of sex: ``Copulation ... is so powerful and highly prioritized an event that we take pleasure not only in our own but in that of others, even of a daughter or wife as she draws away from us into the sexual seethe.''

     Agree or disagree, you have to admit this is provocative stuff. ``Villages'' may not have the sheer dazzling brilliance of Updike's ``Rabbit'' novels or ``Bech'' stories. But minor Updike is still a major treat.

       John Updike's ``Villages'' is published by Knopf (321 pages, $25).  

In Memory of John Hollander (1929-2013) [by David Lehman]

Today (10/28) is John Hollander's birthday, a fit occasion to re-post this notice from 2013:

John Hollander died two months shy of his 84th birthday. He had been in poor health. We join the many who mourn him. He was the eleventh guest editor in the history of the Best American Poetry series, an obvious choice to take the helm of the 1998 edition. John, who taught at Yale, did so many things, all of them well. He was a poet of exquisite wit and formal prowess; a tireless scholar and critic of rare acumen; a distinguished editor and anthologist, with an extraordinary range that included the whole of American poetry, modern fiction, light verse, satire, and the great flowering of poetry criticism that marked the first two thirds of the twentieth century. (See, for example, Modern Poetry: Essays in Criticism, which John edited for Oxford University Press in 1968.) He was a born teacher; Chaucer had him in mind when he wrote, "And gladly wold he lerne, and gladly teche." He is an inspiration and his influence is something we are badly in need of today.

Among his books I have a special fondness for Rhyme's Reason, an indispensable "guide to English verse," in which the poet exemplifies each form or metrical arrangement he defines. Reflections on Espionage, a book-length poem, uses the apparatus of spydom to demarcate the territory of American poetry. Everyone has a code name: Auden is Steampump, Frost is Morose (because it sounds like the Russian word for "frost"), Lake is Elizabeth Bishop ("Lakey" in Mary McCarthy's The Group), Lac is Robert Lowell ("Cal" backwards), Image is James Merrill, and Hollander himself is Cupcake. If spies are poets, each needs a cover -- just as each poet needs to make a living or figure out some other way to subsidize the true work he or she does.

Powers of Thirteen, a stellar sequence of thirteen-line poems, may be my favorite of all of John's poetry collections. I reviewed it in Newsweek (January 23, 1984):

<<<
No one has ever doubted John Hollander's poetic virtuosity. As early as his first volume, "A Crackling of Thorns" (1968), his technical mastery and ingenious wordplay were in abundant evidence. There are, however, those who charge that Hollander lets his sheer talent get the better of him; they find him too allusive and elusive, too self-delighting in his poetic conceits. "Powers of Thirteen" doesn't so much vindicate Hollander as show such complaints to be largely beside the point. An audaciously original sonnet sequence that in effect reinvents the rules of the game, "Powers of Thirteen" prove that it's sometimes wise for a poet to exaggerate the very traits in his work that some critics most loudly deplore.

"Ecstasy affords the occasion and expediency determineds the form," wrote Marianne Moore of the genesis of a poem. In Hollander's case, it would be nearer the mark to say that all the occasions of poetry, be they ecstatic or ruminative, public or esoteric, follow from his choice of forms. Here Hollander has fashioned a form remarkable for its rigor -- or, rather, its supple responsiveness to his touch. There are 169 poems in the sequence: exactly 13 to the second power. Verging upon but veering from traditional sonnet structure, each poem contains 13 lines; each line, 13 syllables. These constraints liberate rather than inhibit Hoillander's imagination. The poems' formal design gives the sequence its unity, leaving this most protean of poets free to vary his delivery, his tone, his subject matter -- even his personality.

A flea bite, in a famous poem by John Donne, develops into the occasion for a sexual invitation. In "Powers of Thirteen," poetic logic similarly links apparently disparate phenomena. Among the most engaging poems in the sequence are the 13 that deplore that curious number and everything that it calls to mind, from "triskaidekaphobia" (fear of the number 13) to the "thirteen-tone scale / Of falsifications" and the 13 stripes on Old Glory. One of these poems delineates the flag; the terminal rhymes ring changes on "red" and "white," while stitched into the upper left corner of the poems are six "blue" rhymes, marking off the flag's "changing crew of constellations." In the preceding poem, the fact that there are 13 cards in a suit and as many weeks in a season gives rise to this fusion of metaphors: "Winter wields only the spades, Summer brandishes / Hot, black clubs, Spring showers hearts about and Autumn shows / A fall of diamonds in our climate of extremes." The conceit is anything but gratuitous; it widens into a meditation on paradise lost. In contrast to "our parents in Eden," who were "dealt / The perfect year's full hand of intermingled weeks," we do not enjoy "continual spring and fall." A last pun clinches the case: "Death deals, and cheats with the false promise of final trumps."

Writing in serial form enables Hollander to conceive his work as "a perpetual calendar." Along the way we pause to ponder the anomalies of "May-day," an "inglorious" Fourth of July and Labor Day ("when shirking hardly looks like working / Yet sounds far too much like it"). Investigating the sources of his inspiration, Hollander invokes an all-purpose "you," who stands for any number of "bemused" muses. The subjects treated to these I-thou dialogues range from philosophy to public statuary, from the seasons to erotic desire. Above all else, "Powers of Thirteen" celebrates linguistic possibility, "The power of 'might' that makes us write" -- and the multiplication of metaphors that ensue.
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We ran the piece under the heading "Triskaidekaphhilia." -- DL

From the archive; first published in 2013

"Stick" [by James Cummins]

It was intra-squad, not a real game,
But teenage boys don’t know the difference;
And to the pitcher who’d just thrown
An adrenaline-powered fastball at my head,
I was a pretender he could intimidate.
When the next pitch nearly took off
The top of my left knee, I knew,
With all the force of a mystical vision,
This talented boy, this ace of the staff,
A senior expected to bloom after showing
Such promise last year, such grit, such
Competitive fire, would fail.  I saw it
In his eyes when I got back up; I saw
The momentary hesitation, the confusion.
I knew the next pitch would be right
Down the middle of the plate, and as fast
As all the pride in his body could muster.
And he knew I knew; that was the key.
He didn’t know how, but he knew;
And it scared him, this giant of a boy,
That a stick of a kid he could break
In half in study hall, or a parking lot,
Would stare back at him as I stared back.
You never know who’ll relish the arena;
Who won’t care what he looks like,
As he approaches the game from his side,
Watching you watching him as he steps up.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
But it depended on my believing what
Had transpired between us the last two.
His arrogance became my coldness;
I’d done this before, and he hadn’t.
The pitch was pretty, a beauty of a pitch,
And a few seconds later it hit a limb
Of a sycamore behind the left field fence.
“You’re going to have a bad year,” I yelled
As I trotted down the first base line,
Even then disliking myself for shouting it;
But something will rip out of you
In those moments, both you and not you;
It's not just triumph.  Bullies, sociopaths,
Narcissists—you have to demarcate—
You have to spell out a moment’s meaning
For them, in words they can’t mistake,
Because to them others have no outlines—
Other people are just blurry shapes
At the edges of their self-absorption.
And facts aren’t facts; you have to replace
The voice in their heads with a new voice:
I glued that home run to a voice
That jeered like the voice of his father,
Perhaps, or his mother, or a brother;
A voice that said this is your stupid soul
Flying over the fence after being struck
By the oldest weapon in the world,
A wooden stick.

From Recalcitrant Actors (2021, Dos Madres Press) by James Cummins,

The Last Word on Napoleon [by David Lehman]

The last word on Napoleon has not been written. More than 600,000 books have been published about the military genius who crowned himself emperor of France in 1804 and united the rest of Europe in fear. Does the world really need another book on Napoleon? Yes, if only because our fascination with him endures.

As Alistair Horne points out in his cogent and highly readable account of “The Age of Napoleon” (Modern Library, 219 pages, $21.95), every era refashions Napoleon in the image of its own aspirations. But there are constants. For generations since he lost his final gamble at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon personified courage, leadership, ambition. Only heroism or madness can account for some of his gambits, and so he tends to be popular among professional soldiers and inmates of loony bins. The diplomacy assuring European peace for the ninety-nine years preceding World War I resulted directly from the British and continental reaction to Napoleon, whose image takes a body blow when authoritarian dictators bent on world conquest come to power.

On the other hand, Napoleon represented – not only in France but in all of Europe – the triumph of an idea made possible by the French Revolution but realized only in the meteoric career of the Corsican-born artillery captain who, at age twenty-four, saved the day for the French army at the Siege of Toulon in 1793. Two years later, he dispersed a Paris mob with a “whiff of grapeshot,” as historians have termed it, and thereafter rose irresistibly to power, replacing the anarchy of revolution with order and military ardor.

To Ralph Waldo Emerson, champion of American self-reliance, Napoleon was the model of a “self-made man.” To other illustrious observers it seemed that the spirit of Romanticism and Rousseau culminated in him. But he was as much a despot as a liberator, capable of cruelty, some of it gratuitous, and full of an overweening arrogance. Beethoven composed the Eroica symphony in Bonaparte’s honor but withdrew the dedication in disgust, ripping up the title page, on learning that the French republic had terminated in Napoleon’s imperial coronation.

Horne, the author of two previous books dealing with Napoleon’s military career, devotes this little tome to his social and cultural impact. “The Age of Napoleon” is rife with arcane details (that, for example, matches were invented in 1809) and ironic asides. The cemetery of Pere Lachaise was Napoleon’s monumental solution to “the urgent problem of creating space for the grateful dead of Paris.” If Josephine showed too much cleavage, Napoleon would tear off her dress and throw it into the fire or spill a bottle of ink on it. “She put up with a lot,” Horne comments.

To Josephine, the love of his life, Napoleon wrote hot passionate letters from whatever front he happened to be on. “Arriving home in three days,” he instructs her after the battle of Marengo. “Don’t bathe.” He loved Josephine hopelessly, despite her infidelities. “She had the prettiest little ----- imaginable,” he told a confidant. But that didn’t stop him from divorcing her in 1809. Needing a male heir, Napoleon married the daughter of the Emperor of Austria, the Grand-Duchess Marie-Therese, a nubile nineteen-year old said to have had a bovine expression, who dutifully bore him a son.

Legendarily capable of inspiring his troops to overcome bigger and better-equipped opponents, Napoleon inspires or haunts the heroes of great novels. The battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest victory, figures in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Waterloo does the same in Stendhal’s “Charterhouse of Parma,” which opens with the declaration that the French army’s triumphal entry in Milan in 1796 “taught the world that after so many centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor.”

Not that the Napoleon complex is always or even usually benign. Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s other masterpiece, “The Red and the Black,” comes to a bad end following the Corsican’s star. Raskolnikov, in Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment,” suffers under the delusion that he is a type of the Napoleonic man, who is exempt from all laws except those of his own making. As a result he murders two harmless old women.

Napoleon exalted glory higher than all else, and the glory he craved came at a steep cost. He was, said a contemporary, “the kind of general who needed a monthly income of ten thousand men.” In twenty years of warfare more than a million lives were lost in France alone. What should frighten us most about Napoleonic hero-worship is that he serves as the primary role-model not only for lunatics in asylums but for genocidal maniacs. It is possible to consider Adolf Hitler as precisely a perversion of the Napoleonic ideal. Like Napoleon, the Nazi dictator was expert at manipulating public opinion and ruthless in the exercise of power. Both aspired to world domination, and both tasted defeat at the hands of a Russian winter.

But the Fuhrer had none of the French Emperor’s saving virtues. No war criminal, Napoleon instituted major civil reforms and imposed, in the Napoleonic code, a coherent legal system on the whole of the continent. An early proponent of a Jewish homeland, he restored freedom of worship in post-revolutionary France. He began the reconstruction of Paris that turned it into the world’s most magnificent city.

Above all, Napoleon embodied – in his own example as much as in his edicts and decrees – the radical idea that careers should be based not on birth but on merit. He proved that a poor boy from a remote island could, through the sheer force of his personality, intelligence, energy, and will, vault higher than kings and popes and, in his words, “push back the boundaries of greatness.”

written for Bloomberg, 5 / 14 / 04

Flying Into the Unpredictable: Publishing During a Pandemic [by J. Chester Johnson]

(ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl)
My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuster), was released on May 5, 2020 in the midst of a raging covid pandemic that relentlessly and unmercifully brutalized New York City. Those of us who reside in the City and who could do so clung to the interiors of our homes, going outdoors with much fear and trembling.

Into this environment, Damaged Heritage had been published. In turn, a book launch, scheduled for the New York City Harvard Club, was kyboshed, and both my agent and publisher told me to “cool” my expectations on book sales, for Damaged Heritage would be flying into the unpredictable, but clearly adverse headwinds of covid with bookstores everywhere then being shuttered for indefinite periods of time. So, I then chalked up my new book as just one more learning experience to be encased among others that friends and relatives suggest should make me stronger; however, I was getting too old to make much use of such learning experiences. . .I thought.

Nonetheless, there were obviously new paths to be conquered in response to the pandemic. Zoom-type presentations and book plates replaced traveling for in-person gatherings and face-to-face signing of personal inscriptions. On-line interviews then prevailed. At the same time, accommodations were now made possible as a result of new ways of reaching the public. For instance, on Sunday, June 28^th, 2020, I conducted a zoom appearance at 8:30AM before a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida that lasted an hour; just three hours later, I made another zoom presentation on the book before the Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia.

Such a tandem would not have been possible in the absence of zoom or its equivalent. Indeed, I’ve already given nearly 90 presentations, including interviews, on Damaged Heritage. I found that zooms allowed me to reach more people and to participate in more places. Moreover, podcasts represented not an insignificant part of the book marketing effort. Zoom-type appearances will undoubtedly be with us for future “book tours”. One cannot predict an experience like the covid pandemic affecting the way future practices will be conducted; however, speaking as one, I found the results from new approaches of marketing books often quite effective and satisfying.

Damaged Heritage had three, main messages. First, it told of a terribly murderous massacre of African-American sharecroppers and their family members – known as the Elaine Race Massacre – on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta; too few people knew anything about this event, which was conceivably the worst attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. Second, the new book told of my maturation process in discovering that my favored grandfather participated in the Massacre; in addition, notwithstanding my having grown up in a racist family in the very racist region of the Massacre, the process also led this erstwhile white Southerner to the embracement of both Black liberation and a progressive, structural format for racial reconciliation between Blacks and whites.

Third, Damaged Heritage tells the story of racial reconciliation and deep friendship that developed between Sheila Walker and me for seven years and extended to family members on both sides. Sheila was a descendent of victims of the Massacre, granduncles who were shot numerous times by white posses and left for dead, but survived. For several years, Sheila and I talked publicly in numerous forums about our reconciliation. She died in March of this year, and I was requested by her family to give the eulogy.

The torture and murder of George Floyd occurred only three weeks following the release of Damaged Heritage. I simply had no idea how much the racial reconciliation and deep friendship that existed between an African-American woman (Sheila Walker) and a white man who grew up in the South along the Mississippi River (namely, me), as described in this book, would resonate with people following the death of George Floyd that resulted in public outpouring of grief and horror by both Blacks and so many whites, together with consequential confrontations between citizens and law enforcement, including, on occasion, federal troops. Sheila and my racial reconciliation and friendship, combined with the disclosure of this unknown event, the purposefully hidden story of the Elaine Race Massacre, seemed to galvanize readers to Damaged Heritage.

For example, in late July, 2020, two months following release of the book, I was informed by my publisher that Damaged Heritage stood at #3 on a significant Amazon Best Seller list for books sold through Kindle. More recently, I found that the book had been included in Goodreads’ multi-year list of Best Nonfiction Books of Horrifying Events, alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – admittedly, my book is down the list, but nevertheless on the list.

The ole saw that “timing is everything” has its use, but I prefer to believe and adhere to a terse epigram I discovered that had been written cryptically in small, printed letters and incongruously on the gray walls of a New York City latrine located in a writers’ hangout: “Just keep writing”. Part of this book had been written as far back as 2013; filling in the blank spaces between the lip and the cup meant years. One shall never know, and one should never guess. Just keep writing.                                                                                                                                  

Chester Johnson is a poet and nonfiction writer. In addition to Damaged Heritage, he has written three, other books, recently published: St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, and Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Find out more about Chester Johnson here.

Listen: Tracy K. Smith Reads and discusses Kamilah Aisha Moon's "Irony" and Louise Erdrich's "Stone Love" from The Best American Poetry 2021

 

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

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

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

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’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

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

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

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

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

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

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Morton Marcus

The First Laugh 

The first laugh was God creating the universe. That guffaw is still exploding in all directions, hollowing out and filling the farthest reaches of space.

What could have been so funny? The idea of light and sound after all that darkness and silence? After the eons of brooding and grumbling?

It must have been something bigger than we can imagine, something that elicited more than a cackle, a chortle, a chuckle or giggle, a snicker or titter.

Something say as big as a billion chandeliers of stars, millions of spinning galaxies with super nova popping like flashbulbs inside them.

Or maybe not. Maybe something as small as an ocean or a mountain, a whale or an elephant, or even us.
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About 18 months ago, when Morton Marcus knew that he was terminally ill and was preparing the manuscript for his phenomenal final book, The Dark Figure in the Doorway (White Pine Press), Mort sent me a batch of poems that he wanted to include in Sentence, which he had so generously supported with his work, his money, and his good will. Because I have always admired Mort’s humor, intelligence, humility, and reaching after “something bigger than we can imagine,” it was my pleasure and my honor to be able to include some of Mort’s final work as a tribute to a long and various career, which included not only poems and prose poems (see his excellent Pursuing the Dream Bone from Quale Press) but film criticism and a public radio interview show in California. One of his many guests on that show was Christopher Buckley, who says of Mort:

I was always impressed with his poems, and equally with his writing on poetry—clear, direct, accessible, specific, accurate, historical, all in service of poetry rather than the poet himself—whether in interviews, informal or formal critical evaluation/appreciation. But the great energy and character of the man was the thing. I found that especially evident in the prose poems, but regardless of form, what I always found was a generosity and a wide-ranging embrace of experience of life on the planet.

Near the end, when the diagnosis was bad, but before he was feeling the worst effects, he sat down and wrote up his essay, “My Life with Weldon Kees”, for the anthology in homage to Kees that Christopher Howell and I were editing. He worked hard and consistently and sent me a hard copy with a disc and a note saying he wanted to get this done before he was done—he was dedicated to the work, to contributing to the larger project of poetry. Mort always worked hard, on his own work and on appreciating the work of others. I recall the radio interview I did with Mort for his NPR radio show from Santa Cruz —I was amazed and a little embarrassed that he had invested so much time and attention on my new book, was so supportive. He always made time for you and let you know he was focused on you, something I am sure his students appreciated for over thirty years. Mort had the great character it takes to make great poems. He is missed by many.

Morton Marcus passed away at his home in Santa Cruz in October, 2009.
-- Brian Clements

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2010.

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2021

Find your copy here.

Now published: "The Morning Line" by David Lehman

September 15, 2021. Pittsburgh, PA. -- The University of Pittsburgh Press announces the publication of David Lehman's new book of poems:

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The Morning Line is David Lehman’s most ambitious book to date, combining wit, quotidian charm, and off-the-cuff spontaneity in poems that proffer candid and moving meditations on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age.

"The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range," writes Major Jackson. "Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified."

A poetic ventriloquist, Lehman expertly imitates Catullus and François Villon in new poems and offers his fresh translations of Mayakovsky's “Cloud in Trousers” and Hölderlin’s “Half-Life.” The element of joie de vivre in Lehman’s work is distinctive and unusual in contemporary poetry.  

The Morning Line includes such tours de force as “Tales Told To Tevye,” which The New Yorker published in its flash fiction series, and “The Complete History of the Boy,” a loving look at the growth of a son’s mind. The title poem is a prose meditation on gambles, wagers, risk, and the high stakes of the Corona virus pandemic.  >>> 

You may order the book from online vendors or directly from the University of Pittsburgh Press:
https://upittpress.org/books/9780822966616/
$18 paperback.

Praise for The Morning Line:

“’Everyone was supposed / to be miserable:’ but here are these poems—poems that, like Emerson before them, are most serious when they’re most playful, most profound when they sound childlike.  David Lehman is a writer of many kinds of poetry, many kinds of prose, but whatever he writes is unmistakably his—and ours. Lehman lets us become who we are, which sounds as if it should be easy: we need him, and, until he writes even more, The Morning Line is his best book.

--James Longenbach

In The Morning Line, David Lehman engages us at his most companionable. His voice is inclusive and intimate, his intelligence inexhaustible, embracing subjects ranging from the perfect martini and accompanying jazz recording to profound questions of faith. These poems bring us into conversation with Baudelaire, Catullus, Mayakovsky, Voltaire, and Elaine Equi, are often humorous and always joyful. Reading David Lehman is an antidote for loneliness.

--John Hennessy

Ever the bon vivant and sophisticate, David Lehman is too savvy to write boorish poetry, purely sentimental lyrics furiously sodden with all the lumps life hands us. Instead, he hears the melodies and plays the keys. The Morning Line arrives like some miraculous rendition of your favorite tune, only stylized and torqued to his jocular spirit and encyclopedic range. Buoyant, wildly funny and terrifically alive, his poems summon that forgotten age where wit and learnedness reigned and the reader, enriched by a jetsetting speed, reemerged soulfully fortified.

-- Major Jackson

Is Shakespeare Still Readable? [by Vincent Katz]

I am excited to be back at the B.A.P. post desk! This week I plan to riff on things I’m reading and see where that takes me. I usually read a mix of favorites and new work, often going back to things that have affected me powerfully in the past. I like the way books come to litter a place, diving into obscurity for extended periods before resurfacing bold-faced and re-determined to command respect. Alternatively, there are those books that lie there perennially, always available yet untouched for months or years at a time. This summer I picked up such a book and threw it into my overnight bag — the updated Folger Library edition of Hamlet, published in 2012 and edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. I think it belongs to my son Oliver. I say “think” as I found it in the vicinity of his room; there is no handwriting in it I can identify as his, and no evidence he ever looked at it.

 

We used these same editions when I was in high school, probably read the same syllabus. There may be a tendency to look down on these editions as “school” editions, or to think that one should be able to read Shakespeare without notes at this point, that one should be able to get what one gets out of the words alone. I am here to tell you that, unless you are really schooled in sixteenth-century poetry (and I know some of you are), then this is not the case. I understand a lot more of Shakespeare than I did when I was in high school, but there are still usages I want to fine-tune in my reading. And this brings me to the beauty of these editions. They are not at all precious, you can take them anywhere, they are clearly and elegantly designed, they have the benefit of having the notes on pages facing the text, and, for this reader at least, the choices of which usages to include notes for were judicious.

 

For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, when Hamlet is prepping Horatio to observe the King’s reaction during the play Hamlet has prepared for him, here are some of the notes given:

84: comment: observation

85: occulted: deliberately hidden

86: unkennel: a term describing the driving of a fox from its lair

89: Vulcan’s stithy: forge of the Roman god of fire and metalworking

92: censure of: i.e. forming an opinion about; seeming: appearance, behavior

 

Here’s the passage:

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,

Even with the very comment of thy soul

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt                      85

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,

And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,                          90

And, after, we will both our judgements join

In censure of his seeming.

[Maurice Jones as Hamlet in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2019 production]

The reading is enhanced, made easier, by this helpful edition. I now want to read all of the plays in these editions. I picked up Hamlet in Oliver’s room, thinking, there is a reason I needs must read this text again (Shakespearean English is quite addictive!). And there was. The embodiment of madness, was it not of love fomented? Was it purely of his father’s motive? And what did that entail? I’ve been reading it to my mother, and we love to repeat to each other, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” It’s an oral art, a text made to be used onstage. It is simultaneously some of the best poetry in our language. I wonder if it is really passing out of use now. I mean, do kids love this language as much I did at their age, and still do?

[Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, on Shakespeare at Play's iOS app]

Meet the Press: Etruscan Press's Tribus Imprint

Dante Di Stefano: In the introduction to Trio and to the book that preceded it, Triptych, you discuss the concept behind Etruscan Press’s new Tribus imprint. Could you talk about how Etruscan’s new model came into being and some of the benefits of publishing a three-in-one volume?

Philip Brady: The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. It’s heartbreaking because it’s one thing to be turned down by a stranger and quite another thing to be rejected by someone who has already shown commitment to your work. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along by a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. I had always admired Robert Miltner’s work. That’s when the idea of Tribus came to me. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. I contacted the three authors. Fortunately, they enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, exploring connections and working together.

DD: What was it about the work of Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop that threaded together for you when you began to think of the project that would become Trio?

PB: Each book is replete and fully empowered. Still, presented in one codex, webs of continuity appear. Trio highlights the way that women, in the penumbra of the patriarchy, fashion conduits for life, power, and loss. Trio augurs identity within and beyond selfhood. Trio reconfigures utterance by stretching, almost to breaking, line and syntax (as Daneen Wardorp says in an interview, “I love enjambment.”).

Composing their books separately, together three poets orchestrated what Diane Raptosh calls a “triunity.” In a “Trialogue” included in this volume, they converse, riffing off each other, weaving “centos” of one another’s lines, a poetics which, as Raptosh writes, let her “feel the  tendrils themselves turning into a new kind of work.”

DD: There are two more Tribus selections in the offing, one including a collection I wrote. Could you talk about these two forthcoming books?

PB: So, the next step was to actually solicit a Tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific. and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, Dante, your new manuscript showed up. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought: Etruscan Generations. You agreed first, and then I sent Hix and Heyen your manuscript and asked for something to go with it. They both replied right away, and we have a new Tribus.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems powerfully connected. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

DD: Sadly, Daneen Wardrop, whose collection Endless Body, closes out Trio, passed away before the book’s publication. What do you find most memorable about her work, in this volume and elsewhere?

PB: Dante, I sit before this question and come back to it over and again. So many images: first seeing Silk Road—the delight of entering into that magical, historical journey of Donata Badoer; watching as the work emerged, working with Daneen through a succession of cover images—she was an astute art lover with a trove of references and connections—talking about the poetics of evoking  the past in poems which employ and resist narration…And then on to Endless Body—an unframed sequence crafted out of one of poetry’s prime elements—the art of enjambment—as if in breaking, lineaments reveal the oracular—the space where story yearns forward onto the empty page, the exhaled breath. All too soon to speak of. All too soon to be.

DD: Karen, I was first introduced to your work through Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of what you call tiny stories and essays. From 1985 to 2005 you co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose. I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about your long engagement with short prose. There’s only one prose poem in Planet Parable, “I Saw Egrets Flying.” What has short prose taught you about lineated poetry (and vice versa)? How did your understanding of short prose inform the multiplicity of stanzaic patterns and formal choices on display in Planet Parable? When you are composing, how do your poems begin to assert themselves in formal terms?

Karen Donovan: Thanks for all these questions, Dante. Yes, Walker Rumble and I founded ¶ way back in 1985 and published 25 issues over 20 years, working with hundreds of writers doing ingenious things with short prose. The work spanned categories – prose poem, flash fiction, microfiction, creative nonfiction, essays, letters, lists, rants. We described the contents of ¶ as “short bursts of ordered sensibility of 250 words or less” and let folks decide what to submit under that wide sky. Forging literary ground in the universe of shortness was a fantastic editorial experience. All during that time, I was making my living as an editor and professional writer, but in my creative life I was writing lineated poetry and never thought of myself as a writer of prose. When I started doing the prose pieces that wound up as Aard-vark to Axolotl, it was mainly just to play with the cool vintage illustrations in an old Webster’s dictionary we owned. Before too long, I realized I was writing paragraphs and had to laugh. The form had evidently percolated into my body and all it needed for a spigot was that dictionary.

What short prose taught me is that it must be as well written as poetry, to set Ezra Pound’s dictum on its head. You can’t have a wasted syllable. “That first line is pretty close to that last line,” as Walker once said.

Whether I’m writing poetry or prose, I try to craft strong sentences and put them in the right order. It's usually very clear when I need end-stopped lines and when I don’t. The egrets piece in Planet Parable that you mentioned is a good example. It tries to make transparent the long, loose discursive process of thinking while taking in continuous, seemingly random data from the world. It’s a slightly distracted internal disquisition that unfolds in time, so I wanted a stream of prose. Versus poetry, which is really a method of obliterating time. Everything in a poem happens at once, even in a narrative. The idea crystallizes and pops into existence and hits the reader like a photon.

Making a formal choice is a matter of knowing where the energy is in my idea. What form will allow me to capture it? Sometimes I think about form before I start writing, and sometimes I let the content pile up and dictate its form to me as I go (trusting in Levertov’s great description of form as “a revelation of content”). Form sticks to content quite mysteriously. Form is also a good editing tool. I often like to write in syllabics, which has its own handy, built-in Exacto knife. One of the most formally experimental pieces in Planet Parable, “This Is Why Advanced Ontics Is Taken Pass/Fail,” is constructed of decasyllabic lines that break apart as the poem moves forward and then reheal as the poem concludes. I needed to handle an onslaught of ideas from biology, chemistry, quantum physics, metaphysics, and more, and I wanted the poem to be both show and tell. Syllabics gave me the structure to hang on to this trapeze act. But still – it’s made with sentences.

DD: There’s a prose piece from Aard-vark to Axolotl that I kept thinking of when I was reading Trio, “The memory fruit,” which begins: “You are not singular. You are not really yourself. Something else makes you: deep snow, grief offered names, love as portable as a small stone.” Could you riff on the experience of publishing your work in a three-in-one volume, and the work of Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop in light of “The memory fruit”?

KD: Dante, you are clairvoyant. Calling up “The memory fruit” from Aard-vark to Axolotl is more relevant to the making of Trio than you could know. The illustration that goes with this piece is titled “Achene of Buttercup in vertical section, showing solitary seed.” I was writing about loneliness, the experience of losing a friend to whom I had a lifelong soul connection, the shock of realizing how much of my identity had been formed in her presence and now felt as if it had disappeared with her. And now… Diane and I lost Daneen to very sudden death, right when we were getting ready to celebrate the publishing of Trio, after months of intimate poetry conversation, immersed in one another’s language, resewing our lines together as centos, and birthing this volume together. The sense of loss is very similar. Our work and our minds are in explicit relationship, literally bound together. Trio itself is now the memory fruit. My hope is that it will go on generating attachments among our books every time a reader looks into it.

DD: I love one of the last lines in Planet Parable, “the vast thirsty ashes of the world” over which the rain speaks. There’s something so lovely and sad about the intense music of this moment, a moment that emblematizes Planet Parable’s thematic and formal concerns. What points of connection do you see in Planet Parable’s telescoping ecopoetics, the historical excavations of Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body’s exploration of corporeality and consciousness?

KD: Why the hell isn’t this beautiful project we are living going better? Is it possible to do it another way? All our books cohabitate with this question from different sides. Diane’s book sings with the mind and spirit of a woman who saw an alternative: “My advice was cultivate that love / which craves the happiness / of partner most, his or her / person next. Yourself last. / Be kind to the new. // In freedom / is safety. When people / learn this, they’ll know equality.” Daneen says, “Don’t worry about the awe. / There is no history except slate, / no biography except occasional winter wheat, / deer treading sun.” In the last poem in Endless Body, she asks, “At what rip in the gravity do we enter?” In its vast, thirsty ashes, the world yearns always to re-create itself after it is destroyed.

DD: Would you share a memory of Daneen Wardrop while working on this project and talk about the significance of Endless Body for you as a reader?

KD: Endless Body is endlessly generative – in subject matter, language, image, tone. Reading it is an experience of motion, tendency, current, experiment. Many of the poems are titled using word variants from Dickenson’s drafts. The book’s openness flows from Daneen’s receptive, absolutely original sensibility. Every conversation and email thread we shared brought that same light.

Here’s an example. One of her ideas for doing a reading together was to invite the whole audience in. I quote her: “If we end up doing readings virtually, we might ask people to use the chat function to suggest an image or idea they’re interested in/obsessed by that day at that minute. We might then, among the three of us, be able to find one of our poems that speaks to or complements that idea and choose to read that. It would probably be chaotic to do that for the whole reading, but we could have a couple of those interludes? This may be totally out there, but given the claustrophobia I sometimes feel with zoom, it might be cool to think of ways to air things out, widen things out.” Exactly. Air. Wideness. Out. That’s Daneen!

DD: Diane, In Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, you write through multiple personae inhabiting a variety of formal approaches. You’ve written many persona poems throughout your career, most notably in your collection, American Amnesiac, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve heard you speak eloquently about writing persona poems here. How was writing through and about the historical figures in Run different from persona poems you’ve written in the past? What other thoughts can you share about writing persona poems? What are some of your favorite persona poems written by other poets?

Diane Raptosh: I believe every poem is a persona poem, including—and perhaps especially—poems crafted from the I. American Amnesiac is in some respects a weirdly autobiographical poem, despite the fact that its speaker, Calvin Rinehart/John Doe (from Amnesiac) is a formerly affluent white man whose life specifics do not much resemble my own. But his status as participant-observer, his sense of being simultaneously subject and object, his many neuroses and certainly his anxious obsessing over the state of America are characteristics I consider my own. As for why write anyone writes persona poems, this portion of John Keats’s Negative Capability seems helpful: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, The Moon, The Sea . . . —the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” These sentences make good sense to me.

John Doe felt like someone I needed to fill in for; he felt more or less like a real person think-feeling in my mind. Writing about and through Victoria Woodhull—with her array of secondary characters—felt similar. I identified with her in many ways: she was all raw energy, unschooled, eccentric. I am “educated,” yes, but I come from humble beginnings. It felt easy to “become” Woodhull, as I have bucked many of the same restrictive scripts put in place for women, including traditional marriage, lifelong monogamy, and more. I love to take on voices and topics that allow me to learn as I compose. Why write what I know?

In terms of other persona poems, I studied carefully Tyehimba Jess’s incredible verse collection Leadbelly as a primary model for writing persona poems about a historical figure with a cast of other, necessary characters included. His was my go-to text for how to bring to life a historical character. So too, I would like to give a shout-out to my Trio mate, Daneen Wardrop’s Silk Road, which, as Phil mentioned, is written in the persona of Donata Badoer, Marco Polo’s wife. What an incredible book! Beyond these, Patricia Smith writes some of the most powerful persona poems I have ever encountered. Her “Skinhead” is stunning. Of course, Robert Browning’s duchess is in the background, looking as if she were alive. James Tate has great persona poems, as do Robert Hayden (“Night, Death, Mississippi”) and the poet Ai. I love her work. For the past decade or two, I have found it easier to arrive at emotional truths through writing persona poems; doing so allows me to enter a sense of boundlessness. That said, right now, I am at work on a manuscript written from the I. The time feels right to risk some things from that pronoun.

DD: What did you learn about nineteenth century American culture and literature through the creative process that you hadn’t learned through scholarly research?

DR: I’ve always been an American history buff and did a lot of scholarly research for Run. Understandably, I encountered differing narratives about who Woodhull was. But I wasn’t looking for that exactly. I wanted to uncover and offer a possible version of her—from birth through her presidential campaign—based in “fact” and informed, imaginative conjecture. I wrote the book from a conviction that all history is what Plutarch called historia: both fact (chronicle history) and fiction (feigned history). Mostly I wanted to get Woodhull’s story out there in the best way I knew how: through poetry. I was bugged that it took me until I was almost 55 years old even to have heard of her! Doing the research, I was reminded of how much the 1870s mirror our times in terms of, well, the usual categories: oligarchical economic structures, slavery-centered political frameworks, misogynistic scripts, caste systems, racism…. I was researching and drafting the book during the Trump/Clinton campaign. It comes as no surprise that long before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain sources, nineteenth-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. To answer your thoughtful question (at last!), I feel that to understand someone, you have to become them. I’d like to try being everyone! This is what literature helps us do. Rather than aiming to arrive at an “objective” understanding or at some definitive rendition of Woodhull, the creative process enabled me to enter—through acts of imaginative, empathic transport—the essence of Woodhull, as well as to channel the energies and voices of other figures important in her inner circle.  

DD: Could you share some thoughts on the Emily Dickinson who appears in Endless Body? What is the Dickinsonian influence or imprint on Trio as a whole?   How does Dickinson inform what Daneen Wardrop called the “spiritual conversation” unfolding in this three-in-one book?

DR: What a wonderful question. I would say there is a Dickinsonian tonal complexity, or perhaps better: a tonal mischievousness at work in Trio as a whole. Equally present: an overall Dickinsonian wit. More on Emily Dickinson’s overall imprint in the final paragraph.

Dickinson appears in Wardrop’s Endless Body implicitly and overtly. I would go so far as to say that Dickinson is “the blade in the melody” of Endless Body, which Wardrop herself points to in her poem “+ Glowed + Absent—through.” Dickinson inheres in every endless dash—that pointer, that magisterial gesture, that “vast barrette” mentioned in Wardrop’s “+ Catch my + slips so easy.”

More specifically, I would say that her poem “Emily Dickinson undressing” (which begins with this epigraph by Roland Barthes: Imagine [if possible] a woman dressed in an endless garment...”) is a map by which we might effectively navigate Wardrop’s whole book. In this piece the poet suggests that “If I knew how to pray, words would cross wefts / of endless garment / bobbins still spinning in the world—” This is precisely what Endless Body does: with every taut line, with each knowing turn, it stitches a limitless fabric: “Some veils are red. // Some tulle is ripped. // In this deep tippet the world starts”—the full while the poet rips through to eternity. As Wardrop’s I types out her words, seams redden and glow—. These seams form the spiritual conversation that all of us in Trio are having. I hope readers too will experience this numinous quality. This immanence. These bladed melodies.

The + Glow + Absent—through. Similarly, Karen Donovan invites us all in her poem “So Many Swans Could Mean Something” to stand “on the great divide where the mind / is always leaving the body behind.”

DD: Would you also share a memory of Daneen Wardrop and talk about her legacy as a poet, scholar, teacher, and person?

DR: There is so much to know about Daneen; every day I uncover some new mystery about her. Her roles in rock, folk, and bluegrass bands—as lead singer and guitarist throughout her college years—transformed into a tenured English professorship at Western Michigan University, 1990-2020. During that career, she earned many awards, including the Distinguished Faculty Award at WMU and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was a nationally renowned Emily Dickinson scholar (Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (1996), Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009), as well as Dickinson’s poetic heir apparent. She inspired her colleagues, students, and friends—from those associated with WMU to poetry lovers and climate advocacy communities.

In 1997 Daneen adopted her daughter Lian from China: Lian is featured in many of the poems in Endless Body (“LiLi and I speak to each other raining hands—” says the poet in “Afternoon”). I also have a daughter from China right around Lian’s age. Daneen and I had a number of conversations about our adoption experiences. We traded stories over Zoom about airport experiences with our “backpack babies”: how we literally had to sprint—daughters buckled onto our bodies—from one mysterious office to another, for meetings with adoption officials in China. Daneen’s multi-layered poems about adoption continue to move me—through. I’ve no doubt that she was a first-rate mother, daughter, sister (“My family speaks to each other with thunder on their sleeves, / whiskers in their bellies,” according to “Afternoon.”)

Honestly, I feel as if I was just beginning to know her as a friend. She was very funny, deeply authentic, and modest to a fault. She was incredibly large hearted. A kinder person we might never know.

As for Daneen’s poetic legacy, I would point to her ability to take on almost any subject, any persona, any tone, with mastery. I would easily place her among the most brilliant American poets I have encountered. Her work is a high-wire act of heart and erudition, pause and profusion, compression and munificence.  Endless Body is her tenth book.

---

Poem from Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body:

Gift

A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.
White box painted with red and yellow flowers
bright as patois. No perches like on a bird house?
. . . a butterfly house. Each slot hardly wider than a match—
the wings must have to shut together to enter.
Do the butterflies tilt and fly in without stopping— 
clapped-closed and no stopping?
She was dry, thin lips
cut as the line around a country.
The box came without instructions.
This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.
Why would they want to be in there,
darker than an inside.
I will not retract a single tilt of her face.    

---

Poem from Karen Donovan’s Planet Parable

So Many Swans Could Mean Something

I don’t want to talk about what we have lost, I am not sure
there is a difference between prayer and conversation

anymore, why anything happens, why thinking
is like this breathless occupied midnight.

Out back where the clouds skim the black surface
of the pond, it’s as if we called them, and now

you are saying, Look, the whole flock is here.
They drift, nickering, white boats on a moonless tide,

making and breaking engagements on a night when everything
gets decided. It is time to sleep, but who can sleep?

The water could not be blacker. We watch them,
lights off in the house, window slid wide,

standing on the great divide where the mind
is always leaving the body behind.

---

Poem from Diane Raptosh’s Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love

This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.
This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.
This is my lover. But when I seize love, summer trees sing off-key.
This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.

This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, it is despotism.
This is my law: it is ruddy—leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.
This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I will have it.
These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.

This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.
This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.
This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall.
This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.

This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.
This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life.

---

Philip Brady is the author of five collections of poetry: The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics (Broadstone Books, 2021); To Banquet with the Ethiopians (Broadstone Books, 2015); Fathom (Word Press, 2007); Weal (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999) winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize; and Forged Correspondences (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. Brady’s poetry has received the Ohioana Poetry Award, The Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artists Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, a Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

Karen Donovan’s new collection of poems, Planet Parable, was published in 2021 by Etruscan Press in an innovative multi-author volume called Trio, which also includes complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her two other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays inspired by the illustrations in a vintage Webster’s dictionary owned by her grandfather. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose.

Diane Raptosh’s verse collection, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award as well as for the Housatonic Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. An active ambassador for poetry, she has given workshops and readings everywhere from riverbanks to prisons. The holder of the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, she teaches literature and writing at the College of Idaho, where she also co-chairs the program in criminal justice/prison studies. Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, published in a collection of three poets’ works, is her seventh and most recent book (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

 

Daneen Wardrop was the author of five poetry collections: Endless Body (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021); Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018); Life as It (Ashland Poetry Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award; Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015); and The Odds of Being (Silverfish Review Press, 2008). She was also the author of several works of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England, 2009). Wardrop’s honors include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert H. Winner Award, judged by Jean Valentine. She was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and died on April 8, 2021.

An Interview with Justin Jamail [by Aspen Matis]

Poet and attorney Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. His poems and commentary have appeared in many journals and online publications, and he is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. Raised in Houston, Texas, he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

I corresponded with Mr. Jamail via email about the radical nature of uncommon wit, the arena of poetry criticism as a realm “where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed,” and the pleasure of rereading great works many times over. We also discussed the intimate relationship between clarity and metaphor thought Mr. Jamail’s original definition of “exchangeable bonds” in the context of a poem: “Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.”

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

I write poems for fun, as an intellectual challenge or game, and because I think poems can be beautiful. Also to impress my wife and other friends.

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

Very generally speaking, it seems to me that art is necessary for the good life. I just mean that as an empirical observation — I don’t have any explanation for why it is necessary or what it “does,” and I am not interested in those questions at all. That man does not live on bread alone can also be taken as an empirical observation rather than as a moral or theological principle. That is what I mean here. Poetry is a kind of art, so it fills that role in “our present society” as it has in every other society. Its comparative advantage, I guess, is that it fits in the pocket or average memory and, among literary arts, seems to me to place the least burden on the audience. Its apparent necessity notwithstanding, our present society rather overvalues art and poetry than undervalues it — or so it seems to me.

In your view, in what way does our present society overvalue art and poetry? I imagine that’s an uncommon perspective, among poets.

Oh, I mainly mean expressions that seem to reveal an expectation that promises more from art than it can give. Expectations that poetry will make the audience better, wiser, or more successful people or citizens, for example. Or, as a very different example, any expectation that any aesthetic experience can approach the value placed on oil paintings. It’s modern cant (there’s an 18th century influence!). I would gladly have all awareness of the existence of Picasso erased from my mind in exchange for the current market value of one of his paintings. Probably.

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

Demonstrate uncommon skill and wit without the appearance of effort or diligence or pride.

Your book of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Poet and editor David Lehman praised the collection as a “book worthy of its legacy,” in which one “can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this debut collection? Is there a particular inquiry or exploration that unifies the book? And what do you hope readers will be left with, after the final page?

These were what seemed to be most of the best poems I had written over a pretty long period. Tony Towle, one of my favorite poets, was nice enough to give me advice on the ordering in addition to some splendid editorial comments. I hope the audience likes the poems. For someone as authoritative as David to have sensed the influence of poets as great as Koch and Violi is pretty humbling. There is no doubt that those poets exert a huge influence on my sense of what makes a poem successful.

What do you do (beyond listening) when “The room pulls away” and you are standing, as in your fine poem Early April Subway?

Write poetry! — or anyway a line or two.

What are exchangeable bonds, metaphorically speaking?

Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.

You dedicated your book to “My fathers” — who are these men? 

Jeffrey Jamail and David Lifson

You are an accomplished attorney, currently the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden; is there a place in your creative practice where your legal and poetic fascinations unify? Or are these lines of work necessarily distinct — two independent threads of your life’s tapestry? 

I don’t see much connection. The scenes and clichés of office work life enter poems fairly often, I notice. Hmmm… I may write a Georgics of the office…

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

Robert Herrick. Andrew Marvell. Shakespeare of course if we are talking early 17th century (is he part of the “long 16th”? Probably.). I read a lot of 17th and 18th century sermons; I think it is a neglected area of excellent English literature. If I had the time for an academical career I would concentrate on this. I read some poems by Sarah Egerton and Anne Finch last year and liked them quite a bit. I like Oliver Goldsmith’s writing. It’s hard to be inspired by 18th century poetry because there is a lot of “inside baseball” — references to each other and contemporary events and so forth. But I admire it a great deal. Those poets were masters of skills I don’t seem to have developed to any meaningful degree.

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?

Poetry criticism is an area where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed. I have been told that one should not argue about taste, but that is not a reason for extending one’s exposure to bad taste. When poetry is critiqued well, what happens is that a critic has told convincingly in what way a poem or poet is successful or unsuccessful. This is valuable because it can form what is really only an impression of taste (or something) into clear ideas. Sometimes criticism can be the occasion for general remarks on mankind, of course. Such writing is often also a pleasurable or beautiful thing in its own right.

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

I haven’t noticed much correlation, but I don’t read enough to take an intelligent view. The results of the system seem consistent with the construction of the system?  

The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language! For every such book that I have neglected, there must be dozens of less famous works. Also, I think I could defend an observation that there has been a steady increase in the quantity of literature of all kinds and all qualities. What keeps me, in particular, among those responsible for great works falling into obscurity is that I reread favorite works many times over. I guess I have a terrible memory for literature!

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

Read more.

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

A Georgics of the office and more short lyric poems that I hope my wife will like.