The Best American Poetry

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]

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

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.

"Days of Penitence and Awe" [by David Lehman]

The haiku form, whose virtues begin with enforced concision, can function well as a stanza in a poem that tells a story or makes an argument, or so I found in 2007 when, for a month and a half in the early Autumn, David Shapiro and I corresponded daily by haiku. Here is my "Days of Penitence and Awe."

In temple I prayed
and chanted Holy! Holy!
Holy! And was scared.

Father forgive me.
For what? For things done, not done.
The time I wasted.

For “scared,” read “sacred,”
its anagram. I am, said
the Lord. The terror!

The terror! Isaac
knew it. But do we? Faithless
friends exit the scene

after wasting years
playing Falstaff drinking and
praising his own past.

He believed in what?
In Prince Hal, who loved him but
had to reject him.

What do we believe?
Money money money said
Roethke and Lawrence.

We believe that life in
an office is hard work and
a cocktail at five.

We believe in pills.
Chemistry and medicine
can make us young. Vanity

fair as life is not.
We believe there are two outs,
bottom of the ninth.

Bottom of the night.
Vulgarity supreme, a
loud new century

of madmen in robes.
People have asked me what is
my favorite word.

I say “you.” Sometimes
I think the most potent word
in English is Jew.

O could I absent
myself from my daily rounds!
I would return as

the count of Monte
Cristo or Joseph revealed.
So I fondly dream.

Just so my mind roams
while the rest of me sits here
in temple and prays.

from Yeshiva Boys by David Lehman (Scribner, 2009).

-- DL

For the Stars Over Paterson [a review by Dante Di Stefano]

When the Stars Were Still Visible
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s newest collection, When the Stars Were Still Visible, continues the poet’s decades-long Proustian excavation of time and memory. In Gillan’s oeuvre, time, and memory, sometimes occluded by, but never subsumed in, nostalgia, form a garden of forking paths the poems journey through, on the way toward a kind of secular earned communion. This journey takes Mazziotti Gillan away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl her poem “Growing Up Italian.” The story that Mazziotti Gillan so frequently returns to is the story of how a young girl (a daughter of immigrants, born into poverty) whose first poem was published in Saint Anthony Messenger carved out a life for herself as a successful poet and professor. For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming-of-age narrative that it often asserts. Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian American families. Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.

When the Stars Were Still Visible centers the remembering self as it retraces and rewrites the concerns and the tropes that have constellated Mazziotti Gillan’s work since her collection Where I Come From was published in 1995. Readers of Mazziotti Gillan’s work will recognize a familiar cast of characters from her previous volumes: her immigrant parents, her husband, her son and daughter, beloved family members, friends, classmates, and the ghosts of Paterson and San Mauro. Similarly, the themes that thread throughout all Mazziotti Gillan’s previous books reassert themselves with remarkable clarity in When the Stars Were Still Visible, delivering another moving exploration of love, family, loss, and mortality. In the title poem, Mazziotti Gillan writes: “So many memories swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope, / and so impossible to explain.” To full expression’s kaleidoscopic impossibility, Mazziotti Gillan holds up hundreds of shards of specific memories as shining and tightly-packed as the silver balls her Zio Guillermo made from the foil inside his Camel cigarette packs.

The poems that stand out the most in When the Stars Were Still Visible are the ones that either fill in an as yet poetically underexamined corner of the poet’s autobiography or feel like a resolution to a part of the poet’s autobiography that has supplied the material for many earlier poems. “Taking my Brother to the Barber” provides an example of the former kind of poem. In this poem, a sibling relationship spanning more than seventy-five years spirals out in a bittersweet aria ending on the brother’s huge dark uncomplaining eyes. “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage” provides an example of the latter kind of poem. In poems from previous volumes, such as “Is This the Way It Is Between Mothers and Sons?” from All that Lies Between Us, Mazziotti Gillan has explored the distance between adult son and aging mother. However, in “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas…” the distance collapses as the son reaches out to encourage his mother using the lines of the Welsh poet’s most famous villanelle. Just as many of her poems end in uplift, “My Son the Lawyer…” resolves (in uplift) the mother-son story arc that runs throughout her body of work.

In Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, her father forever whistles as he walks back home from an evening playing bocce and drinking wine at the Società Cilentana. Her mother forever places a bowl of steaming farina on the counter of the kitchen on 17th Street. Frank Sinatra’s voice forever booms from the jukebox in the basement of the student union at Seton Hall University. The popular girls in her seventh-grade class forever form a club called the Ritz Girls and go about their exclusionary work. She and her sister forever make paper dolls in the tiny closet of their room, unaware that it is what they don’t hold in their hands that will transform them. Her husband is there, young and handsome. Her children are there. The Paterson from her childhood is there, along with her parents and siblings. The sadness and weight of time are there. And so is a barely articulable lightness. She is singing. As she says in the poem “Last May in San Mauro, Cilento, 2017”: “I hold the memories close to give me comfort when I am most afraid.” Reading her work, I feel less afraid of aging and what comes after. I feel her warmth. I hear her singing. I see the stars over Paterson. What else could a reader ask for?

An Interview with Lawrence Joseph [by Aspen Matis]

Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). His other books of poems include So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017), Into It (FSG, 2005) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973 – 1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a nonfiction novel. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law (emeritus) at St. John’s University School of Law and lives with his wife in New York City.

I corresponded with Mr. Joseph via email about poetry as an access to viewing and comprehending “the inner lives of a culture,” the language of law, and the power of musicality to jolt us into new worlds. We also discussed the writing of poems as a “prayer for illumination and perfection.”

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

I write poems because I need to. Making poems is an integral part of my sensibility, of who I am. Poetry, for me, is human language in its most charged, distilled form, deeply infused with emotion and feeling, intellect and sensuality. A poem is an aesthetically composed object, an expression of the poet’s interior and exterior worlds. Robert Hayden described “the writing of poems as one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities,” as “a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.” I wholeheartedly agree.  

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?

Poetry helps us make sense of, and see, the realities of the worlds that we individually and collectively live in. It shows us the inner lives of a culture. At any given time it is the common voice with in us.  

Your most recent book of poems, A Certain Clarity, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March of 2020. Described by the publisher as “passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable,” the work presents selections from your six prior books of poetry. The New York Times calls the book “a major work of American art.” In your perception, is there an inquiry or exploration that unifies this newest collection? An underlying intention? And what do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Each of my books has been written as a book, not as a collection of poems. My intention was that A Certain Clarity also be read as a book in itself. From the beginning — my first book, Shouting at No One, was published in 1983, and included poems written back to the mid-70s — my poems have addressed the power structures of American imperial war-making, finance capital, racism, misogyny, and ecological destruction, revealing the vicious hatred in America of the poor and weak. But, also from the beginning, I’ve set against these worlds of cruelty, violence and subjugation deeper truths — for me, the most human truths — of beauty and love — truths which, first of all, I believe in, and are, ultimately, what in my work I wish to leave my reader with.

You are the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City, and — writing as an attorney — you have published on the subjects of employment, tort and compensation law, labor, jurisprudence, and legal theory. John Ashbery once called your work “poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness.” Is there a place in your vision where your legal and poetic fascinations meld, like tin-lead alloy wires becoming solder? Or are these professional threads necessarily distinct — two independent filaments of your mind’s tapestry?

In the United States the language of law covers every social, economic and political issue. During my forty-five years professionally as lawyer, I’ve practiced and taught this language, written critically about it, know it well, and have used it in my poetry. When Wallace Stevens, a career-long practicing lawyer, was asked about writing poetry and being a lawyer, he replied: “I don’t have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind.” I feel the same way.

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

I’m writing my next book of poems, which will pick up where my last book, So Where Are We? left off, in early 2016, before Trump’s presidency and the pandemic. I’m also working on several prose projects, in various forms and genres.

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

I’m always learning my language, the American language, which, of course, is constantly changing, as America itself is constantly changing. Over time, I’ve created my own tradition. I look for poets and poems that jolt me into their worlds. I take apart poems that I love on every level of form and content that I can imagine and try to write poems that will have the same effect on a reader that these poems have had on me. And music, sound — poetry is, above all, sound. Be as attentive to the sounds of your words as you are to what your words say.

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

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

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

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

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” 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?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

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

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

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

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

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

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

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

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

"Jackie Kennedy" [by Mary Maxwell]

Jackie Kennedy

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

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

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

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

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

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

from Cultural Tourism by Mary Maxwell (LongNookBooks, 2012).
Ed. note: Jackie Kennedy shares her birthday of July 28 with Marcel Duchamp and John Ashbery.

Carolyn Heilbrun on Barzun, Fadiman, and Trilling [by Barbara Fisher]

When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. By Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Carolyn Heilbrun is best known for her books of feminist theory, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny and Writing a Woman’s life, but she also wrote a small book that few seem to know, titled When Men Were the Only Models We Had: My teachers Barzun, Fadiman, Trilling. Published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2002, this compelling book describes a young woman’s earnest search for an appropriate academic model when there were none.

The three models Heilbrun found for her motivation, inspiration and fantasy were, of necessity, men. There were no older women for a young woman to admire, emulate or imitate. The few women who were literature professors at universities were sadly deficient as models. They were unmarried, unloved, and unbeautiful. Heilbrun did not want to be them, but she did not want to be excluded from the world of male accomplishment.

Thus, she was in the uncomfortable position of wanting to join a club that did not want her as a member. Even more uncomfortable was her desire to join the club while also wanting to dismantle it.

Before recognizing her wish to be a serious student of literature, she admired the unpretentious writing of Clifton Fadiman, whose modestly titled and popular book Reading I’ve Liked, she delighted in at the age of fifteen. Fadiman, whom she never met, considered himself a pitchman-professor, a popular commentator, a mere book reviewer. Heilbrun writes of him with affection and admiration for his curiosity, his precision, and his unpedantic prose.

She writes about her Columbia professor and subsequently her colleague Jacques Barzun with gratitude. Although terrifying at first, Barzun was kind and courteous to students. He happily shared with Heilbrun his interest in detective novels as well as his appreciation of high culture. Most importantly and surprisingly, he offered her something like friendship as well as encouragement.

But it is Lionel Trilling, remote, diffident, and shy who truly captured her spirit and her mind. Although she grew somewhat disenchanted with him, she treasures what he represented to her — an important kind of honor and courage and an “enduring gift for inspiring with its essential magic a piece of literature only seriously engaged with for the first time.” (p. 145)

But what drew her to him most powerfully was that he seemed to offer salvation, “Not religious salvation, of course, but a sense of how to live in a culture I both treasured and wished to overturn. What Trilling provided was an acrobatic balance between ‘bourgeois’ values and the need radically to affect them.  It was in literature that he believed this balance, and profound instruction on how to live, could be found.” (p. 26)

When accused of having no position, of always being in-between, Trilling responded, “Between is the only honest place to be.” (p. 52) Between was where Heilbrun lived at the time.

I have tried to reconstruct how I came to know Heilbrun. I believe it happened like this. Heilbrun, as the token woman, sat on a committee that awarded fellowships in the spring of 1969, when I applied for financial aid to continue on for my second year in the graduate program in English literature at Columbia. Against her strong objections, the committee denied me the fellowship that she believed I deserved. She fought for me and lost, and then she sought me out to reassure and encourage me. It was an extremely kind and generous thing to do.

Though I hardly knew her when she brought me this comfort and consolation, I came to know her, value her, and confide in her.

Some of what I confided in her about my time at Bennington College, she borrowed for a character in one of the detective novels she was working on in secret at the time. Titled Poetic Justice and featuring her female detective, Kate Fansler, the fiction was published under the pseudonym Amanda Cross in 1970. The character who resembles me has been elegantly idealized. Stunning, beautiful, and expensively dressed, she is named, like me, Barbara. She is also fierce and fearless, and the only character in the novel with enough guts to deliver a scathing put-down to Professor Cudlipp, the villain of the piece. Lionel Trilling forms the basis for a major character in the same novel. Only slightly disguised as Professor Clemance, he turns out to be the unwitting murderer in the case. Many years later, when ther portrait of Barbara in the fiction was brought to my attention, I was flattered by my cameo appearance and completely surprised to learn of Heilbrun’s second career.

I knew Carolyn in 1969-70 at a time before she became an outspoken feminist, while she was still trying to be admitted to the unwelcoming Columbia fraternity. Denying her Jewishness and disguising her feminist beliefs, she moved uneasily and probably unhappily about Columbia. As one of the very few women professors on campus, she was a person of great interest to me, but she was not a figure I wished to emulate. Only later did she herself become a mentor, a model, and a heroine for me and for a multitude of smart, ambitious women.

Barbara Fisher is currently working on a biography of Lionel Trilling.

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes [by Witold Gombrowicz]

Who hasn’t wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy – the Hegels and Kants, the Nietzsches and Sartres – thought of the human condition? It has never made for easy reading, the pondering of such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks tend either to get things wrong or to massacre the language.

Still, the reader aproaching Kant or Hegel needs help, and when it comes from someone with a sense of humor and a refusal to be boring, my heart leaps up.

So it did when I opened Witold Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (trans. Benjamin Ivry; Yale University Press), an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences. Descartes had one important idea, “absolute doubt.” Kierkegaard had grown up on Hegel’s philosophy, then suddenly “declared war on him, in one of culture’s most dramatic moments.”

Gombrowicz (1904-1969), arguably Poland’s greatest modern novelist, took Schopenhauer's pessimism in stride. Schopenauer's "is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality." 

Gombrowicz writes with a comic wit that made him persona non grata in his Soviet-controlled homeland. He spent his last years lecturing in Paris. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, which he was working on when he died, is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken in your junior year.

-- DL (2004). Reading the book rekindled my fascination with Schopenhauer and inspired me to write my poem "The Will to Live," which went on to win the Laurence Goldstein Award from the Michigan Quarterly Review. Pictured above: Raphael's "School of Athens."  

An Interview with Jennifer L. Knox [by Aspen Matis]

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, A Gringo Like Me, and, most recently, Crushing It. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The developer and curator of the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, she teaches at Iowa State University.

I corresponded with Ms. Knox via email about poetry as an access to our subconscious, the joy (and profundity) of incongruous humor, humanity’s “endless capacity for self-deception,” and writing poetry as a means of purposeful dissociation—a counterintuitive, healthy path to healing. We also discussed the subtle beauty of poems that “have a bridge player’s memory,” the masterful way the “bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways.”

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

I write poems to dissociate in a healthy, purposeful way that doesn’t leave me hungover, in jail, or dead. I’ve long suspected that there was a physical component to the act of writing poems, because I feel good when I write poems, but I feel stupid when I engage in exclusively mental pursuits, like math. Recently I read that traumatized brains access an unprecedented calmness when they dissociate; though that calm is, in itself, addictive, purposeful dissociation is a healthy path to healing. Imagine putting on an astronaut suit and bounding around the smoldering ruins of your childhood. You see an object that terrified you long ago: an empty tin can with a fork sticking out. “We can use this!” you shout to the reader and hold up the can, which no longer scares you at all. Our “conversations” are different every time; I never have to be the same speaker. I can be Zsa Zsa Gabor, or a tree stump, or an SOS signal floating up from the ocean floor. As poems are relatively short, I only have to breathe the atmosphere for a brief time.

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

Poetry gives us access to our subconscious, which we need to heal and evolve.

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

Defy expectations.

Your work is often praised for its sharp humor. The New York Times calls your poetry “massively entertaining,” and the Los Angeles Review writes of your “laugh-demanding wit.” Of your work’s tone, The Critical Flame says “Knox’s humor is the kind of funny which is surprising, generous, and vulnerable, and which demands generosity and vulnerability from the reader. This is the kind of funny we have found in writers as various as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Kenneth Koch.” What, in your view, is the relationship between humor and truth? Between levity and profundity?

There are different kinds of humor. The one I enjoy using most often is incongruous humor, which defies the reader’s expectations, and my own as I write the poem. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it’s scary. Either way, not getting what I thought I was going to get feels very “true.”

Your most recent book of poems, Crushing It, is widely acclaimed. Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “Darkly inventive… This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words,” and The New York Times Book Review says that the work “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” What inquiry or exploration unifies the collection?

Our endless capacity for self-deception—even in the face of the Anthropocene. 

What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I would love it if readers felt that they had been seen in a perfectly imperfect way.

From 2016 through 2017, you developed and curated the online crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, which honored Iowa birds through “the words and stories of bird lovers, bird watchers, writers, artists, musicians, teachers, students, scientists, nonprofits, federal and state organizations, environmental stewards, and nature lovers.” The project was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and over 750 people from around the world contributed original writing. What inspired this exciting project? And what exists at the nexus of poetry and flight? Of birds and wonder? Are you yourself a birder?

Iowa Bird of Mouth began with the question: why are some people compelled to create and others are not? For the Iowa Arts Council fellowship, I envisioned an online space in which people felt their words belonged, as if they were all part of one giant squawking, undulating flock. I researched crowdsourced poems (such as David Lehman’s long-running “Next Line, Please” project at The American Scholar) and saw that anonymity, access, and an inspiring subject were essential in motivating “norms” to participate. Iowans have an affinity for wild birds. Iowa Filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to hear. But birds were the bling on our farm.”

I hoped that wild birds would draw people to the poem, and they did. Though I have adopted many parakeets and lovebirds, I knew nothing about wild birds. Thankfully, Iowa Young Birders Director, Tyler Harms, volunteered all his mad ornithological skills. I’m gobsmacked that Iowa Bird of Mouth happened. I’m pretty sure the reason I was able to pull it off was that the universe needed it to exist, though I don’t know why. You can see the website here. My essay about the project in American Poetry Review is here. The text and code are available for use in non-commercial projects. 

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Folly, hubris, self-deception, coping mechanisms, animals, TV, counter-intuitive manifestations of kindness and love, mushrooms, telecognition, homing instincts, science, crime.

The Los Angeles Review writes that your poetry “leaves the reader a different person.” To what extent is a great poem like a chemical element, reactive, interacting with the atmosphere of the moment—forever altering those who discover it, like sun on seeds?

My mother is an excellent bridge player. She has to pay attention to and remember everything that happens during the play of a hand. The poems I love have a bridge player’s memory. The bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways. Flannery O’Connor’s surprising yet inevitable ending is established by the end of the first line. So like a seed, the poem is waiting to pop. All it needs is the light of your attention. 

"112th Street" [by James Longenbach]

112th Street

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

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

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

So little behind you,
So much ahead—

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

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

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

 

An Interview with Adrienne Su [by Aspen Matis]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Dear Sylvia,

Give me your bitten hand.

I will paint each moon sliver—

Amaryllis red.

If you are a girl

swirled in the thick of a dream,

I am a play

of red-tongued wolves and barn owl howls.

Let me curl into your hair, crawl beneath

your winter. Scrawl me in lines.

Let me mean everything to you.

I promise lavender and honey cakes

and the taste of Christmas roses.[1]

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

 

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

Poets Love Marilyn Monroe [by Heidi Seaborn]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

say au revoir.”

 

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

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

        By Edwin Morgan

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

Crumpled orphan, nembutal bed,

white hearse, Los Angeles,

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

That Death should seem the only protector –

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

become an inquisition and a torment –

That the many acquaintances, the autograph-hunters, the

inflexible directors, the drive-in admirers should become

a blur of incomprehension and pain –

That lonely Uncertainty should limp up, grinning, with

bewildering barbiturates, and watch her undress and lie

down and in her anguish

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

only dissolve her! A method

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

Los Angeles! Olivier! Los Angeles! Others die

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

Let no one say communication is a cantword.

They had to lift her hand from the bedside telephone.

But what she had not been able to say

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

I have no regrets, because if I made

any mistakes, I was responsible.

There is now – and there is the future.

What has happened is behind. So

it follows you around? So what?’ – This

to a friend, ten days before.

And so she was responsible.

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

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

white hearse of the child of America follow you around?

 

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

 

The Death of Marilyn Monroe

By Sharon Olds

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

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

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

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

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

 

Marilyn Monroe

by Frank Bidart

Because the pact beneath ordinary life (If you

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

induces in each person you have ever known

panic and envy before the abyss,

what you come from is craziness, what your

mother and her mother come from is

craziness, panic of the animal

smelling what you have in store for it.

Your father’s name, she said, is too

famous not to be hidden.

Kicking against the pricks,

she somehow injured her mind.

You are bitter all that releases

transformation in us is illusion.

Poor, you thought being rich

is utterly corrosive; and watched with envy.

Posing in the garden,

squinting into the sun.

 

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

Meet the Press: Roof Books & Queenzenglish.mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DD: How did Roof Books come into being?

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

 

"The Professionals" [by Laura Cronk]

 

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

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

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

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

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