The Best American Poetry

VITALLY YOURS [by Peter Fortunato]

Lately, I spend considerable time “beating the drum” for my newly published novel, Carnevale, hoping to call people’s attention to what I’ve done. I like the drum metaphor, since I am a drummer and know that the instrument can be played in various ways—rhythmically, above all, but depending on the music to be made, either softly or somewhat more loudly. So this is another thing I’m learning, having produced a novel: I’ll have to do plenty to get my book the attention it deserves, and do it in ways that feel good to me. Publishers these days can rarely afford publicity campaigns for their authors, and so I’m “branding” the book and branding its author; that is, being myself and advertising my book without braying like an ass.

I’m a fan of the TV series Mad Men, as are some other readers of The Best American Poetry blog. I’ve seen all the episodes at least twice, and over the years I’ve drawn various sorts of inspiration from the show. I admire the quality of the writing and acting, and the details of the mise-en-scène, which are so evocative of an era I remember well: in the 1960s and 1970s, as our society changed profoundly under the influence of economic prosperity and media saturation, kids of my generation were initiated into the consumerism that continues to dominate American life. Products became virtual members of our households, and this was achieved due to the intelligent, although sometimes unscrupulous, efforts of advertising copy writers and creative teams like those depicted on Mad Men. The show is a reminder of how our economy has come to depend on product consumption, and also, the necessity of ever more, ever new imagery to keep this yearning uppermost in the collective consciousness. This is one theme I take seriously in Carnevale.

I myself am not the typical American consumer, having long ago made it a discipline to determine the difference between what I need and what I want. I’m not prudish about my decisions, and in fact I like to think I’m a connoisseur of my pleasures. I dare say other artists would also consider themselves as such, and agree with me on how great the pleasure is of making our art. Why else would poets especially carry on with their work, given how the majority of our fellow Americans ignore it? Well, as I said a while ago, a novel is a different kind of writing from a poem—for one thing, it has commercial potential. Is it a luxury? Can I convince anybody of the necessity to read Carnevale? Here’s a link to what one reviewer recently said about the book: https://booktrib.com/2019/11/go-on-carnevale-with-this-debut-literary-mystery/

One of the best poetry writing students I ever had in class at Ithaca College was a marketing major who went into advertising. After college, I received a small handmade pamphlet of poems from him, but then I never heard from him again. I have no idea if he continued to write poetry, but it wasn’t surprising to me that a person gifted with wit and verbal dexterity would choose to go into advertising. Whether or not a steady job on Madison Avenue fed or drained his creativity, whether or not like some of the characters on Mad Men, the profession consumed him as if he were only a thing called “a creative,” in this connection I remember that the poet Lew Welch did mange to live off the royalties from a famous product tag he wrote: “Raid kills bugs dead.” As for me, I’ve learned that beating the drum has to be done consistently and rhythmically in order to be fun.

I believe in Carnevale, for many reasons: it’s a good story, it has a cast of compelling characters, and it addresses serious issues, both personal to the characters and pertinent to society as a whole. For example: just what is the role of art in a capitalist-consumerist culture? How can institutions of higher education prepare young artists to stay true to their visions in the marketplace? What are the rewards for creating works whose raison d’être is simply that the works demand to exist?   Among other things, as Guido goes forward seeking happiness in love and work he wonders if he’s wasted his energies “with confusion and despair, two whores who suck me dry.” Many of us in the course of our lives will ask similar questions.

Carnevale doesn’t provide easy answers.   It’s a celebration of life, its tempo mostly allegro, but I hope it will make readers think as well as laugh and cry.

(My painting below is titled Vitally Yours. You can see more of my artwork at my website peterfortunato.net)

 

COMING OF AGE IN A BRAVE NEW WORLD [by Peter Fortunato]

One thing I’ve repeated to my students over the years is that if you want to become a writer or an artist, you need to act on that desire and then continue despite the obstacles you’ll face. The world will probably dis you for your foolishness and some people will try to talk sense into your honey head, but don’t let anyone or anything stop you: in fact, use your challenges and obstacles and failures and shame to go on—as Guido does in Carnevale (My painting below is titled Storm Light. A detail from it is featured on the novel's cover.)

Guido's journey out of childhood, his coming of age story, is also a journey through a labyrinth of recollections. Reflective people reminisce about growing up, including the bitter-sweet memories of opportunities missed and the treasures lost along the way. Writers shape that material, sometimes beginning only with a single thread of a story-line and raveling that up into the fabric of an entire work. Take for example, the tale of The Lightning that Guido hears as a teenager at his grandmother’s birthday party: that’s something from my own history, a family story that I never heard recounted with as much detail as I ended up imagining for this important scene in the novel.

            "The lightning had not come through one of the open windows," she says abruptly, looking around at everyone. "You remember? The windows were open, but it crashed through the wall. Like a shooting star it burst into our midst, with its blue and white fire like a bridal gown trailing. Yet it did not hurry: it made its stately way about the central pillars of this room illuminating everything. I sat completely still, expecting I knew not what from the hand of God.  

            "Incredibly, without so much as touching a candle wick, it finally flew out through the same opening by which it had come. There! Exactly there!" She points to the wall, and with x-ray vision, I see the ancient hole behind the plaster. "That extraordinary moment passed, and sitting stunned in the darkness, we could hear the rain falling outside, the storm rumbling distantly, like a battle far off. We stirred awake, and Ernesto, you leapt to your feet, ran to the window, and signaled all clear."

            She takes a quick whiff of the air. "I can still smell the electricity, and perhaps there is something else. Fear, perhaps." Her voice whispers away into eerie silence.

            I have been to this place before, where Nonna's eyes glitter with lightning and the condition of my soul seems bright and dark at once. And sometimes, when the big dining room is packed with a hundred guests, gazing into the ether above their heads I myself have seen the lightning in its orbit, or else alone in bed, staring at the ceiling of my room I can see it like a comet making its way back to us. Perhaps it was an angel, I have thought, but also I have told my friends it was like the ghastly thing hurled at Ichabod Crane by the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. When someone objects, "How can you know so much about this? You weren't even born!" I recollect my grandmother, all of time at her command, and I too become a breathing statue.

Not only did I want to preserve certain childhood memories, but in Carnevale I wanted to give voice to the difficulty and the necessity of leaving home: in one way or another we all have to do this if we’re going to claim our own lives. I’m not just talking about finding a profession or an income, but rather setting out to become ourselves. It’s not a straight line, as Guido learns; hence the novel’s allusions to labyrinths.   But to do this fully—that is, in appreciation of our roots—even as we move forward, we have to find the right relationship to our family of origin and hometown. Although neither will continue to exist as we remember them, their influence on our lives does go on. Often, like Guido, we might feel the need to unearth bits of a past we’ve previously dismissed or neglected or actually repressed. Because I’m a hypnotherapist I have first hand experience helping others to find the value in their past histories. (To learn more about this area of my work, visit my website, peterfortunato.net )Writers often rely on this reservoir of material, sometimes obsessing over certain themes whose recurrence gives a signature voice to individual books or to an entire body of work: William Faulkner, for example.

Guido, as the novel’s narrator, is for me a mask through which to speak a little of what I know about myself as an artist, an Italian, a Buddhist practitioner, and a sexual being. In writing his story I was able to explore some of my own obsessions in a different way and at greater length than in my poetry. My hope is that the novel will transport readers through time to a very particular place that never quite existed, but which might have, in the Hudson Valley; a place that shares some magic with the “brave new world” Shakespeare’s young lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, feel they’ve discovered at the close of The Tempest. That’s one way I think about the 1960s and 1970s. (My painting below is titled Dance Mask.)

Carnevale tries to preserve a balance with the world of experience whereby innocence and hopefulness are not simply lost or brutalized or regarded cynically. In fact, Leo’s painting of Gwen and Guido, titled Goodly Creatures, is a direct reference to this theme of The Tempest—and as an object of art, that painting sustains the moment when innocence is about to be bid these characters goodbye so that another sphere of wonder, more difficult to encompass, is encountered.

 

 

IS YOUR NOVEL CARNEVALE ABOUT YOU? [by Peter Fortunato]

"Is your novel about you?"

That question has become very familiar, and partly it has to do with the use of first person narration. Besides that, anybody who knows I’m a poet as well as a painter, that I’ve taught at several colleges—one of them reminiscent of the fictional Hudson River College—and that I grew up at an Italian American restaurant and resort during the 1960s, is likely to wonder if the book’s narrator, Guido Diamante, is an alter ego of mine. But the novel isn’t only about Guido: it has quite a cast of characters beginning with his immediate family which is dominated by his grandmother. Among other things, Carnevale is a family saga.

“Nineteen years, you say? It took nineteen years to write it?”

Yeah. It’s a big book. It wouldn’t let me leave it behind, even though I did try to abandon it, and at one point the project lay fallow for six years. (I’m a slow writer, anyway, and a single poem can take me years to finish, and I’ve learned this is good.) My novel ripened at its own rate, sometimes more quickly than at other times. I discovered a healthy distance from the subject matter and characters once I realized how liberating it is to write long form fiction. I also discovered how challenging it is for the narrating voice to manage the individual voices of all the characters, their consciousness and also their unique speech during dialogues. However, once you have the right way of telling a story—voice and tone—things start to clarify of themselves. Different writers have different ways of trying to describe how characters and their stories come to life, but really it’s rather magical.

In one way, I think I could actually say the book is about me, meaning it represents how I learned to write a novel. Indeed, it starts out with the protagonist, Guido, believing he’s writing a memoir, which he abandons for various reasons when he returns to his teaching position at HRC. Other writers will get what I mean about the work being a reflection of yourself over the time you were creating it—not that this meta understanding will be important to most readers, who mainly want a good story and characters they can believe in.

One of the differences from writing poems was in my realization that an early analogy with which I encouraged myself was inexact: I thought that making poems was to cabinet making as writing a novel was to building a house. In terms of attention to craft and the scope of the respective projects this might be fair to say, but a novel needs more horsepower than a poem or short story to propel it. Or I could say, it needs a large enough floor-plan to integrates a lot of different rooms where the action takes place. One advantage for my storytelling in this book is the physical fact of the Villa Giustovera, where Guido’s childhood was lived (and which, yes, I remembered from my own childhood) and where his mother continues to live into the present time of the story. Here’s a partial description:

The Villa was "our house," and I knew how strange a place it was compared to the ordinary houses where other people lived.   For one thing, privacy was rare amid the busy, peopled rooms, and the idea of “family” sometimes felt as vague as it did inclusive, because our house was also the Hotel, the Resort, the Restaurant. Although there were three different bars over the years in three different rooms and a cocktail lounge that was continually remodeled, the Villa Giustovera was never called the Bar, except by my father and his pals. To my mother, it was usually referred to simply as the Place or the Business—but it was also, indisputably, her home since childhood.

The Place haunts Guido in several ways, most obviously because of all the memories associated with it. His grandparents’ generation and their stories connect him to events that happened there before he was born, and whether or not a reader believes that Guido is actually psychic, these ghosts speak through him. Tarot cards play an important role in Guido’s life, just as they do in his grandmother’s, and they help Guido to learn more fully about his people and certain events from the long ago past. I myself am a Tarot reader and I relied on the cards as part of my writing process.

I needed to answer an urge to complete the novel, to a great extent because I wanted to preserve certain elements of my own history, but also because I wanted to salvage the memory of a more rural Mid-Hudson Valley that’s now gone. The book does end up in 2008, not so long ago, but even that era, the Great Recession, is already fading from the collective psyche. Beyond this, I wanted to write a coming of age story that would resonate for any reader.

A NOVEL IS ANOTHER KIND OF WRITING [by Peter Fortunato]

So I wrote a novel, and it’s just been published: Carnevale. The name means “carnival” and it refers to a gala masquerade party held at the family run, Italian American restaurant of the protagonist’s childhood. Sure, this part is based on my own youth, but no, the book isn’t truly autobiographical. I have mined some of the same material from my Italian heritage before in my poetry, but a novel is different—let me explain.

 

While a lyric or narrative poem written in the first person voice isn’t to be assumed autobiographical—we refer to its speaker as “the speaker” or “the persona”—a novel is by definition a work of fiction. Its great appeal to readers is that we know it’s going to take us places we haven’t been to in the same way before, neither in actuality nor in our imaginations, and the novel proposes to do that on its long river of words. If we’re lucky, we’ll find that we enjoy living in that book, on that craft, for some time. A collection of poems can also do that, of course, and an entire collection might be narrated in the voice of a character its author has adopted, a persona or “mask” she is speaking through for her purposes. But a novel goes further—at least that’s what I found. For starters it had to do with loosening my language beyond the constraints of the metrics that the music of poetry requires. Oh, I’ve read aloud to myself every line of Carnevale many times, and I trust my ear, and the narrating voice of the main character, but still, it’s another kind of writing.

When I’ve told people of a new collection of my poems has just been published, the responses tend to range from whole hearted “Congratulations!” to the polite, “That’s nice,” to “Well—I don’t really understand poetry.” Usually, it’s only fellow poets who will ask, “Where can I get it?” These reactions indicate something about the paradoxical position of poetry in the collective American psyche: It’s fascinating to the general public that people continue to write it and that some enjoy reading it, but to grasp its essence requires a certain sensibility. I agree with what Stanley Kunitz once said, that people are glad to know poets still exist, even if as readers they don’t care to spend much time with their words. But almost everybody has read a novel or two, and a lot of people have dreamt of writing one (usually based on what they imagine as their own adventurous lives!), and to be told by an actual writer that his actual novel is now on sale generally elicits enthused reactions.

Here are some: “Congratulations! What’s it about?” “Is it on Amazon?” “Who published it?” “How long did it take you to write it?” “Is it available for e-readers?” “Is it an audiobook?” What I’ve concluded is that the fact of the novel’s existence, whether in print, electronic or audio format, seems to people to be inclusive, in contrast to the way that poetry, alas, is often regarded as exclusive; that is, only for some readers.   (Footnote: Carnevale is in print and electronic formats, but not yet an audio book; I plan to record it as soon as possible.)

It’s the question, “What’s it about?” that lately gives me pause before I reply. The book has meant so much to me over so many years, and it’s such a relief not to be hawking it to literary agents, that I just don’t feel like giving a packaged reply anymore. People do sometimes sincerely ask of a poet, “What is your poetry about?” and while that question makes some poets squirm to the point of almost blurting out “Read it and find out for yourself!” I think it’s understandable that before they invest their time and attention, prospective readers expect that a novel, a big book, will have a plot and interesting characters and readily identifiable subject matter. Once the book is in their hands and before their eyes, they will have their own relationships with it. I’m not in control of that. Most people don’t know how to respond to poems, even if they’ve read and liked a collection. But, as I’ve said, with a novel things are different. There are characters and drama and comedy depicted, the stuff of ordinary life painted by the author’s hidden hand. There’s a lot for people to relate to.

Over the many years I was writing Carnevale—about 19, including final revisions right before publication—I condensed my “elevator pitch” to these 48 words: “Carnevale begins as coming of age story set in the Hudson Valley at an Italian American resort in the 1960s. The painter Guido Diamante’s memory is jarred when he returns to teach at the Hudson River College in 2008 shortly after the suspicious death of his rascal mentor.” But that isn’t what I said recently when a friend at my gym asked me, “What’s it about?”

We’d each just showered after our workouts and were in the process of getting dressed, and I really didn’t feel like giving one of my practiced synopses, but also, this guy is a friend around ten years older than I who’s from Poughkeepsie, where some of the novel is set, and so for a moment I hesitated. I really wanted him to read it and like it.

Then I replied: “It’s about an artist. He’s Italian. He lives in the Hudson Valley. I made up most of what happens.” The next time I saw him, about a week later, he said, “I’ve read the first three chapters. I’m glad they’re short. They bring back a lot of memories.”

"The Triumph of Bullshit" [by T. S. Eliot]

Did you know that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit"?  Neither did I until I started reading The Poems of T. S. Eliot, volume one (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the massive tome edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in an heroic act of scholarly dedication. Of its 1311 pages, approximately nine hundred and sixty are devoted to commentary, and I cannot imagine a more meticulously annotated book of TSE's greatest hits. I meant to review it nearer its pub date last December, but to do it justice would require forty seminar hours. The commentary and notes are immensely valuable. Eliot is no doubt the profoundest modern poet, and the one with the greatest lasting influence. And it is good to remind us, as the volume does, that in his younger days, Eliot had an irrepressible sense of humor that was gloriously incorrect. For example, consider "The Triumph of Bullshit," one of tse-tse's "scabrous exuberances," in Ricks's phrase. Stanza one follows:

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

You can read the rest of this curiously erudite poem here. -- DL

Writing In The Face Of Death: Review of David Lehman's "One Hundred Autobiographies" [by Sandee Brawarsky in The New York Jewish Week]

David Lehman, October 23, 2019. photo © Stacey Lehman

Even when David Lehman can barely walk, he can write, and he can listen.

Throughout the three years of his struggle with bladder cancer, he writes every day. He has crafted those paragraphs and pages into “One Hundred Autobiographies” (Cornell University Press), a stirring memoir that unfolds in 100 short chapters.

The title was a gift from a friend, the poet Mark Strand, who told Lehman that he wanted to write a memoir called “One Hundred Autobiographies.” In 2014, when both Strand and Lehman were battling cancer, Strand told his friend that he could have the title “if he didn’t get there first.” Strand died later that year.

Lehman is a distinguished poet, writer, literary critic, teacher and anthologist who divides his time between New York City and upstate Ithaca. Among his many books of poetry are “New and Selected Poems,” “Yeshiva Boy” and “The Evening Sun,” which was part of his five-year-long project of writing a poem a day. He inaugurated and edits “The Best American Poetry” series, and also published nonfiction works including “The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets” and “A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.” A prolific writer, he contributes a regular column to The American Scholar.

In the summer of 2014, Lehman is in pain and senses that something is wrong. Cancer is the last thing on his mind. He is sent to a series of doctors and undergoes many painful procedures before being diagnosed. And then there are more tests, surgery, other procedures, some redone a number of times; he is at times on the edge of life.

Continue reading here.

One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir by David Lehman [Review by Diane Cameron]

There are many personal stories of cancer. Many self-help stories and many memoirs. And yes, there are even cancer poems.

 

But now we have a book that is both a cancer story and a work of literature that happens to be a memoir by a poet. We would not wish cancer on anyone, not even—as we say—our worst enemy, but now some gratitude because cancer has given us a gift in the new book:

 

“One Hundred Autobiographies” by poet and scholar, David Lehman.

It is true that for a writer everything is material, and that for a writer everything is examined through the lens of language, so of course from his first suspicions Lehman began to craft a story—the real and awful story --of his bladder cancer.

Continue reading over at Love in the Time of Cancer

 

Diane Cameron is a writer, speaker, teacher, coach, and spiritual director. She is the author of "Looking for Signs", "Out of the Woods--A guide to Long-term Recovery" and "Never Leave Your Dead." 

 

Available Now: "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir" by David Lehman

One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir by David Lehman.
Cornell Univ, $22.95(248p)ISBN 978-1-5017-4645-1

Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, “the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite.” He muses on why he writes: “I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist.” Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin’s hat, “which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed.” After reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: “the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil.” In his final reflection, being in excellent health—though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve—he advises that “even on bad days, there are pleasant hours,” and “it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand.” Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. (Publishers Weekly starred review)
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--sdl

Steven Rea, Guest Author September 9-13

This week we welcome back Steven Rea as our guest author. Steven is the author of The Hollywood Book Club: Reading with the Stars, just out from Chronicle Books, and also Hollywood Cafe: Coffee with the Stars and Hollywood Rides a Bike: Cycling with the Stars. Formerly the film critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer, he lives and works in Philadelphia and Maine, and keeps a collection of archival Hollywood photographs that now numbers in the thousands. He posts new photos several times a week at Rides a Bike. Follow Steven Rea on Facebook and Twitter, @Steven_Rea.

Welcome, Steven.

In other news: Don't miss the Best American Poetry 2019 launch reading on September 19, 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM (EST) at the New School. (The Auditorium, Room A106, Alvin Johnson/J.M. Kaplan Hall, 66 West 12th Street, New York, NY 10011. More information here) 

-- sdl

"Signs of the Times" by David Lehman [reviewed by Merle Rubin}

A favorable review will warm an author's heart even if he becomes aware of it some twenty-eight years -- to the day -- after it was published.

De Man's Deconstruction [in the Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 1991]

Signs of the Times by David Lehman

Reviewed by Merle Rubin. Merle Rubin regularly reviews literature and contemporary fiction for the Monitor.

LONG before the scandalous revelations about Paul de Man's wartime writings for the pro-Nazi press came to light, deconstruction - the school of literary criticism most closely identified with him - was a hotly controversial topic inside and outside academe.

Proliferating in the hothouse climate of graduate-school literature departments in the 1970s, deconstruction had spread far beyond academia by the end of the 1980s. It has become the word of moment - in David Lehman's phrase, a sign of the times - applied to everything from new fads in clothing and architecture to the questionable tactics of Wall Street junk-bond dealers. David Lehman, a poet, mystery writer, journalist, and graduate school veteran who covered the de Man story for Newsweek, offers "debunking" as a rough-and-ready synonym for deconstruction.

In "Signs of the Times," his spirited, immensely readable guide to "Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man," Lehman also provides a far more complete summary of deconstruction's salient points: First, there's the assumption (derived from linguistic studies earlier this century) of an unbridgeable gap between signs (words) and the things they are supposed to signify. This leads to the supposition that language has a life of its own: It determines what we think and how we see, and not the other way around. We are its prisoners, unable to do without it or get around it. Therefore, when we read a text - be it a sonnet by Shakespeare or an ad for margarine, the United States Constitution or a Gothic romance - we are justified only in watching what the words are getting up to: Any effort to evaluate literary merit or discover the author's intended meaning is a pointless exercise.

For all the panache he displays in unmasking the pretensions of deconstructionists, Lehman is not entirely hostile to deconstruction. Nor is he the kind of writer who glibly dismisses what he fails to understand. His discussion of deconstruction in particular - and of literary criticism in general - is lively and well-informed. He even makes a good case for the value of "soft core" deconstruction as distinct from the "hard core" variety: The former is free-spirited, playful, creative, open-ended; the latter is a pseudo-religious cult that thinks it has all the answers and brooks no rival schools.

If the first half of Lehman's book is a shrewd, enlightening, witty, often entertaining look at the academic politics of literary criticism, the second half has the dramatic impact of a suspense novel. The deconstructionists' hubristic dismissal of biography and history met its nemesis in the form of incontrovertible biographical and historical facts. De Man, a Yale professor regarded by his colleagues and students as the most honest, intellectually rigorous, and disinterested of scholars, was discovered to have concealed the facts about his past. The silence he maintained to his death in 1983 was as disturbing as the transgressions themselves.

Ironically, it was a young Belgian graduate student - an admirer of de Man's work looking for more of the master's writings - who came across de Man's youthful contributions to Belgian collaborationist newspapers. The story came out in 1987, four years after de Man's death. De Man's colleague, Derrida, to his credit, advised full disclosure and publication of these wartime writings. But the elaborate contortions into which he and other die-hard deconstructionists twisted themselves to make excuses for de Man's pro-Nazi writings and his concealment of his past constitute what really amounts to a third scandal.

For a two-year period ending in November 1942, the young (20- and 21-year-old) Belgian-born deconstructionist-to-be contributed some 180 articles on literary and cultural topics, mostly to the French-language collaborationist newspaper Le Soir (popularly dubbed "Le Soir Vol," that is, "the stolen evening"), after the occupying Nazis took it over six months before de Man signed on to write for them) and for a pro-Nazi Flemish-language paper. As Lehman points out, these articles were written at a time when the outcome of the war was in doubt, when the Nazis were out to win the "hearts and minds" of conquered Europeans, and when European Jews were being fired from their jobs, deprived of their property, and sent off to concentration camps. Set in the context of history, de Man's pompous pronouncements on the "centrality" of Hitlerian thought in European culture and the "marginality" and second-rate nature of Jewish contributions are hardly difficult to interpret.

Some of de Man's defenders, however, as Lehman shows, came up with some ingenious - and utterly implausible - defenses: De Man may have meant his articles to be read ironically, they claimed. Since de Man never discussed his wartime activities (beyond allowing people to mistakenly assume he had been involved in the Resistance), his former colleagues were left to ponder whether young de Man had written these pro-Nazi pieces out of genuine conviction or mere opportunism. Colleagues like Geoffrey Hartman (a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany) had little doubt that de Man's wartime writings were morally wrong. But Hartman and others saw in de Man's later deconstructionist writings a kind of "atonement: a way of dissolving his former smug certainties in a thoroughgoing outlook of skepticism."

More strident - and bizarre - defenses took the line that "journalists" and others now condemning de Man for his past were themselves in the position of Nazis condemning Jews! But, in the final analysis, it is very hard not to agree with Lehman's conclusion: "[F]or a thinker ... whose hard-core brand of deconstruction stressed the 'indeterminacy' of texts - surely there was some relation between the texts he was intent on forgetting [his collaborationist articles] and the texts in which he campaigned to forget the 'author,' his 'ideas,' and his conscious 'meaning.' Deconstruction had long given people pause because it makes no provision for moral action and dismisses the historical dimension in literature. These omissions seemed all the more disquieting, and perhaps the more intelligible, in the light of the de Man disclosures." Beneath the dispassionate, disinterested tone that magisterially commends tradition on the one hand, post-modernity on the other, one senses the same motivating force: opportunism.
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https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0709/09132.html

Meet the Press: Press 53 & Patricia Colleen Murphy’s Bully Love

Dante Di Stefano: How did Press 53 come into being?

Kevin Morgan Watson: Up until 9/11, I was a writer of short fiction and some poetry, and was having some success publishing my work. After 9/11, the stress of being a full-time student—finally earning my BA in English—and being a full-time employee in the airline industry, with a wife and three small children at home, writing became impossible. To find peace, I began editing for other writers and teaching workshops. I found that I enjoyed this process and that I was pretty good at it, so after I lost my job in March 2004, I decided to start a small publishing company to have something creative to do until I found a real job. I opened Press 53 in October 2005 and by March 2006 it was clear that publishing was my real job.

DD: What changes in poetry publishing have been most notable for you since the press began in 2005?

KMW: I talked with my poetry series editor, Tom Lombardo, about this recently. Around the turn of the century (2000), there were only ten low-residency MFA programs, and today there are close to fifty, so there are a lot more poets with advanced degrees looking for work and looking to be published. Also, online journals were few and not taken seriously by many writers. The poetry community was vast but places to publish were limited. Today, almost every literary journal and magazine has an online presence. Places to submit poetry have grown wildly, and most magazines now accept simultaneous submissions. At our quarterly online journal, Prime Number Magazine, our submission periods run quarterly and we’ll easily receive more than 400 submissions for poetry. If our guest editors aren’t quick to read and respond, they can miss out on fifty to seventy poems that were accepted by other magazines or journals. As for publishing poetry books, we can’t publish all the fine collections that come our way, and where we used to publish five or six poetry collections a year, we are now publishing ten to twelve. That could be attributed to our growth at Press 53, but it is also an indication of how many people are writing and reading poetry.

 DD: What do Press 53 poetry collections have in common?

 KMW: We have eclectic tastes but one common thread is that the poetry we publish is accessible. We stay away from abstract, experimental poetry and anything overtly religious or political. An occasional poem in the collection crossing these lines is fine, but stay too long and you won’t make the cut.

DD: There’s an interesting line in your bio: “Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication.” How has the decision not to write for publication affected your writing life and your work as a publisher?

KMW: My decision to no longer write for publication came by default. I tend to run on one track all the time, so when I entered the publishing world, it became my focus. I still make notes or toy around with an idea for a story or poem, but it’s only for my own enjoyment. I rarely write anything down. I used to constantly think about writing, fleshing out story or poem ideas, piecing together the puzzle, but after almost fifteen years of editing and publishing, it’s hard to believe I was ever that person. I was a writer for most of my life, but the “writer me” is either gone or waiting for another lifestyle shift. I’m not sure which, but I do think the writer in me will only return if I make the decision to step away from the publishing business.

DD: What is something that most poets might not know, but should, about the work of small press editors?

KMW: In the small press world there are no deadlines, only undeadlines. For every project you complete another one has taken its place. They just keep coming. You’d better love editing, because that’s all your going to be doing; that and writing press releases, managing a website, overseeing layout and design work (if you are not doing it yourself), handling sales in-house and at conferences, managing inventory, doing the bookkeeping, and wishing you could read more for pleasure.

DD: Could you introduce Patricia Colleen Murphy and Bully Love?

KMW: Patricia won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry, our annual poetry manuscript competition that is judged by our poetry series editor Tom Lombardo (Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections). Tom reads every manuscript that comes in, which was 414 for the 2019 competition, and he is the only judge. Patricia teaches at Arizona State University and is the founding editor of Superstition Review, and she has been a joy to work with. But since Tom selected Bully Love, I would like for Tom to make that introduction.

Tom Lombardo: There were two things that won the Press 53 Award in Poetry this year for Patricia Colleen Murphy: her series of hiking poems and her series of elegies. All of her other poems were very good, and they carried her submission into the final eight, then the final three. The hiking poems and the elegies were my “gut feeling” poems that surpassed all other submissions. My decision came, as it usually does, at the ninth reading of the finalists. The collection that continues to unfold its arms to me generally surpasses all the finalists. Murphy’s poems in Bully Love are grounded in the senses, and that appeals to me as an editor. Metaphor, synesthesia, metonymy, and irony come forth via sensory experiences. Level of energy of the writing and the figuration remains high throughout. I was lifted from the literal on each page. Patricia’s poems are landscape-driven—from southwestern Ohio to the southwest U.S. Her poems expose their bleak fertility and their bleak desolation and turn them into metaphors for her life.

DD: Trish, the title of your new collection comes from the last line of your poem, “Day Trip, Cave Creek Guided Tours.” The poem is about a guided tour through the Sonoran Desert with a group including “five women breaking / the monotony of mid-careers” and “three portly men in from Denver.” The poem ends with the following lines:

        Our wonderfully conditioned
        and well-mannered horses nod
        across state trust land, their noses
        quietly suffering our pats of bully love.

This poem ably deploys some of the key tropes that run through the collection: the desert, travel, love, and a kind of suffocating middle-class conformity to be railed against. Could you talk about some of these through lines? 

Patricia Colleen Murphy: I spent 22 years in Ohio. I moved to Arizona when I was 22 years old to get my MFA in poetry at Arizona State. I moved also to escape many things: family dysfunction, snow, loneliness, and what I perceived as failure. 

Arizona didn’t welcome me at first. I struggled with not only the landscape but also with the culture. It was harsh. It also seemed for sale. So much of the landscape and the history was offered up for the amusement of people who had no intention of engaging with it in any real way. 

In this poem the horses represent that lack of connection; that lack of humanity. We pat the horses but we do nothing to understand them, to care for them, to sustain them or promote them. That image of the nose pat represents the offering of self-serving or insincere affection based on a selfish desire for personal excitement. 

That was something I suffered as a child from my mother, who was capable of showing me love only when it served a need of her own. 

I should say I have always adored horses. They recur many times in these poems as a reverent image. But for me there is something striking about selling this cowboy experience to people whose only goal is to be consumers of a culture they never intend to understand. 

DD: Your incredible first poetry book, Hemming Flames, centers around the trauma caused by severe family disfunction (mental illness, abuse, attempted suicide). Bully Love still expertly contemplates the lingering affects of those traumas, but the emphasis in this collection shifts to an exploration of self against the backdrop of Arizona and the American West. You frequently return to the death of your parents, and your partner John’s parents throughout the book. John’s presence is much more significant in Bully Love than it was in Hemming Flames. Hemming Flames was also much more allusive, in terms of its direct evocation of figures like John Berryman, Anne Sexton, and so on. These are some of the differences I noticed between the two collections. Could you elaborate on these differences and talk about the differences between having a first and a second book published?

PCM: Bully Love was written first, but Hemming Flames found a publisher first. So in Bully Love you’re reading earlier poems. It probably took my parents dying for me to feel free to explore the more significant depths of the suicide attempts, the alcoholism, the abuse you read about in Hemming Flames. The poems in Bully Love are younger, more tender, more open. 

In terms of the publishing experiences, there were significant differences and similarities. The editors of Hemming Flames did not want me to change a word, but the series editor Tom Lombardo for Bully Love had a strong hand and guided me through some revisions I could not have made without his insight. He was incredibly generous throughout the process. He pushed me to cut broken parts that I was hanging onto for sentimental reasons. He pushed me to develop themes I felt were clear but were not. I am grateful for his energy and insight. 

As far as similarities go, both releases were very quick. Under six months. I have seen many colleagues wait two years so while I’m grateful for the speed, I also scrambled in some ways to get the book ready and to set up readings and reviews and interviews. Most outlets want six months in advance so by the time the proofs were ready I was already two months out. 

DD: When I was reading Bully Love, I kept on thinking of two quotes that align with, and move in counterpoint to, your collection. The first one is from a Cid Corman poem: “It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father?” (You could substitute “mother” or “family” for “father.”) The second quote is from an old Paris Review interview with Stanley Kunitz: “All poems are love poems.” (I would like to believe this quote is true, but I’m not sure.) I was wondering if you would riff on these two quotes a bit?

PCM: Ah yes, the Kunitz quote is a favorite, but of course we can substitute “love” for other words like death or birth or family. I do feel that when a poet devotes the energy to a subject even that devotion is an act of love. It’s a generous act: to point the mind’s eye onto a subject long enough to make art from it. I talk to my students sometimes about “dropping the M-bomb,” meaning that as soon as you put a mother in a poem you have added not only your own layer of experience, but you are tapping into the reader’s most intimate emotions. There are some poems in this collection that draw on that energy. 

DD: Your dogs make several appearances throughout the book. They offer one of several different types of love examined throughout the collection. How has being a dog owner influenced your poetry? What is your favorite dog poem?

PCM: I was never a dog person, and my first dog came when I was 32 years old. That was Buckeye, who was a gift from John’s mom Betty. Betty died in September of 2005 and then in January 2006 Buckeye drowned in our pool after I left the house for less than an hour. I came home and found him and fished him out. It felt like such a symbol of being completely alone.  

We mourned Buckeye in ways we could not mourn Betty, though we felt her lack in our lives more profoundly than any other lack. She lived with us for two years when she was very ill and she got us Buckeye as an anniversary gift. My dogs have been a joy but also a challenge. That’s why they enter the poems, I guess, because they force me to face fears and failures. 

I can’t recall a favorite poem about a dog, but the essay “Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard is one of the most poignant pieces of writing about many things, dogs included, and I share it with students all the time. Beard truly captures the depth of comfort, companionship, and intimacy we have with our pets. Her old collie is dying at the same time she is suffering several other unspeakable losses. 

DD: You are a prolific traveler. Could you list the top five places you’ve visited? 

PCM: Galapagos
           Kilimanjaro
           Cadaques
           Los Roques
           Buenos Aires

DD: What travel destination has most impacted your work as a poet? 

PCM: I might have to say Thailand. Two of my most weighty poems are about Bangkok and Phuket. 

DD: Where would you like to visit that you haven’t yet?

PCM: I really want to go to Morocco. We tried in December but couldn’t put the pieces together. Other top destinations are Malaysia, the Philippines, New Zealand, and Chile. 

John is really hot to go to Georgia. We are leaving now for Finland, Latvia. Lithuania, Estonia, and Ukraine. 

DD: What are you working on now?

PCM: A memoir and another collection of poetry. It really helps me to move back and forth between prose and poetry. 

DD: What are you reading now?

PCM: I have several going right now. Karen Brennan’s short story collection Monsters. Sally Ball’s poetry collection Hold Sway. James Comey’s memoir A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. And Adam Johnson’s novel The Orphan Master’s Son.

DD: I’d like to end with one of my favorite poems in the collection, “The Same River Twice.” Could you introduce this poem? (Say whatever you want related to its composition, etc)

PCM: This poem underwent a major revision thanks to Tom Lombardo, who had a wonderful influence on the entire collection, and who pushed me to explore several themes more deeply. Here I examine the turn when a relationship moves from new and thrilling to safe and comfortable. And for me all those terms are good terms. 

The poem started as a more abstract examination of our love. Tom pushed me to take it to image. Coffee time is a sacred time in our house. And we take the ritual with us wherever we go. More deeply I feel so grateful that our values align so closely. It is hard for me to imagine being with a partner who held vastly different beliefs about the universe. 

John and I have been together for 25 years. When I first met him, I truly fell for him (I fell in love) and part of it had to do with how far out of my comfort zone he pushed me. Now he is my comfort zone! Truly. And what a gift. What a gift those years are. 

Of course, the title comes from Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” I am grateful for the flow of our relationship and the intersections of our lives. I’m grateful that we have grown and changed and that we have done it together. 

            The Same River Twice

            Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.
            When we met, he was studying fluvial

            geomorphology—the way rivers transport
            sediments. He tied flies under a hot halo of light.

            When we hiked he explained rock formations.
            Now there are several things besides love.

            Two dogs who curl on couches with ears
            fanned out like chenille throws. A city

            full of climate-change deniers. Evenings,
            it takes several hours reading in chairs

            for us to feel human. We fall asleep at 8 p.m.
            Mornings, we like to kiss then pour coffee.

---

Kevin Morgan Watson founded Press 53 in October 2005, and in 2010, with award-winning author Clifford Garstang, Kevin co-founded Prime Number Magazine. As a publisher, he has worked with writers ranging from first-time published authors to winners of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Kevin has earned awards for his own writing in both short fiction and poetry, but he no longer writes for publication. He also serves as an advisor for student adaptation of short fiction to screenplays with the screenwriting faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, School of Filmmaking in Winston-Salem, NC. 

 

Tom Lombardo, of Atlanta, Georgia, is editor of Tom Lombardo Poetry Selections, a Press 53 imprint. Tom actively reads journals, magazines, ezines, and anthologies in search of poets to bring to Press 53 by way of his poetry series. Tom is a widely published and respected poet, and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year. He has published two collections of his own poetry: What Bends Us Blue (WordTech, 2013) and The Name of This Game (Kattywompus Press, 2014). In 2008, Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries.

Patricia Colleen Murphy won the 2019 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Bully Love, published by Press 53 as a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection. She founded Superstition Review at Arizona State University, where she teaches creative writing and magazine production. Her collection Hemming Flames (Utah State University Press) won the 2016 May Swenson Poetry Award, judged by Stephen Dunn, and the 2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award. A chapter from her memoir-in-progress was published as a chapbook by New Orleans Review. Her writing has appeared in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, and American Poetry Review, and has received awards from Gulf Coast andBellevue Literary Review, among others. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). 

 

 

 

"One Hundred Autobiographies": a starred review in PW

<<<
One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir

David Lehman. Cornell Univ, $22.95 (248p) ISBN 978-1-5017-4645-1

Poet and critic Lehman (Poems in the Manner of...), who was treated for bladder cancer in 2014, brilliantly captures the despair, uncertainty, and anger he felt in these 100 short reflections on life, death, and writing. Likening his ordeal to the plot of a novel, he declares, “the road connecting memory and desire is not linear... one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite.” He muses on why he writes: “I write to assert my will to live. To prove I exist.” Throughout, he reflects on literature and pop culture figures to tell his story: arriving at the hospital for treatment wearing his fedora, Lehman recalls the movie Some Came Running and Dean Martin’s hat, “which he wears even in bed, even in a hospital bed.” After reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Lehman ponders the concept of evil: “the real question is not whether you believe in god as such but whether you believe there is such a thing as evil.” In his final reflection, being in excellent health—though, like many cancer patients, he acknowledges that this might just be a reprieve—he advises that “even on bad days, there are pleasant hours,” and “it is amazing how much pain the body can withstand.” Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain. (Oct.)
>>>

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-5017-4645-1

On James Tate's Last Poems [by Matthew Zapruder]

James Tate's posthumous collection of prose poems, "The Government Lake," is officially published by Ecco Press on July 2, 2019. It is a terrific book. I asked Matthew Zapruder to say a few words about it. Take it away, Matthew. -- DL

<<<
It feels so strange to hold Jim’s last book of poems in my hands. I remember standing in the poetry section of the erstwhile Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, in the spring of 1994, holding his Selected Poems. I had been admitted to the MFA program at UMass Amherst, and though I knew Tate’s name, I don’t believe I had ever read any of his poetry. I opened the book (the very same copy which I ended up buying a few minutes later, and which I am now holding), randomly, to page 96, and read a poem with the intriguing and unlikely title “The Distant Orgasm.” 

In retrospect it turns out this was an odd choice, because it’s a kind of collage-y shaggy dog narrative that is not at all characteristic of Tate’s poetry. But I liked it so much; it was weird and funny and honest, and I particularly loved how he spent a long time describing, as he was about to step over the threshold of his apartment and into the hallway, his foot:

the foot is becoming

aware of something

the awareness moves

up the ankle

into the calves

the knees and into the thighs

the thighs say

this neighbor of mine

is not dying

no she is not dying

 

At that moment I probably felt a lot like that foot, gradually becoming aware of something that I would come to feel a lot more of over the many years of reading Jim’s poems. Let’s call it life in all its goofy sublimity, its horrible hilarity, its pathetic surrealism, its grandiose ridiculousness. 

After buying that Selected Poems and reading it, I made my decision to study with Jim and colleagues at UMass. It helped that I was going back to the same area where I had studied as an undergraduate, which made leaving my beloved Bay Area a little less of a blow. I also bought books by Dara Wier and Agha Shahid Ali, and read them with great amazement, too. Look at all the things you can do in a poem! Who knew? Not me. I went there and studied and it changed me forever, and I have often looked back with the most immense gratitude for those teachers and my life as a poet. 

I write a little more about this wonderful book, The Government Lake, as well as Jim as a teacher,  for the Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/03/07/james-tates-last-last-poems/ — and about one of my favorite poems from the book, “The Argonaut,” at the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/poetry/poetry-of-america/american-identity/matthewzapruder-jamestate.html 

Even though I gave this book a lot of thought already, I was not prepared to hold an actual copy in my hands. It feels quite final. I have the poems, but I still miss Jim a lot, and always will. No one meant more to me as a poet than he did, and no poet did more to change my life. The jacket is a beautiful red, and the art is a perfectly strange and gorgeous rooster by the marvelous Pablo Amargo. It’s a great book if you know Jim’s work, and if you don’t, you can begin here and work your way backwards or any way you want. You too will be changed for the better -- forever.  

-- Matthew Zapruder 
>>>

Lunching with Elaine Equi [by David Lehman]

Sometimes, when lunching alone, I bring Elaine Equi along for company,
rereading Ripple Effect sipping a cup of strong black coffee and slipping
into the room where Fairfield Porter paints the light, and solitude
rhymes with altitude, attitude, multitude, lassitude, and beatitude.
That’s how I see and hear things, too. And the music is “John Coltrane’s
Central Park West,” where Elaine names the tenor saxophonist playing
“if [she] were having an affair / with myself as a married man.” Now if
we’re talking shop I’d have to pause here to talk about the line-breaks
because her rhythms her timing depend on them and the rhythm
and wit of her poems is their greatness, often achieved in short lines,
bite-size bits, though her prose poems are pretty amazing, too, such as
“Ultra Confessional” (the shoplifting stage follows the age of living in
“Victorian  novels on the verge of swooning”) and “Found in Translation,”
which praises not only “whatever cannot be killed by the translator”
but all translations, even bad ones, because reading itself
is a version of translation, a chain of logic leading to the epiphany
that “it would be great to learn French in order to read
William Carlos Williams.” The “perversely patriotic” narrator
of one of Elaine’s poems liked S & M before terrorism killed it
on the evening news. I know what she means but share her confidence
that new sources of inspiration will continue to show up
as two beautiful hookers helping her decide what to wear.

Meet the Press: PANK Books—A Conversation with Jessica Fischoff

Dante Di Stefano: You have an exquisite poem called “My Body is a Library” published in Diode, that ends with the following stanza:

 

        I’ve renamed every flower
        For the women who came before me
        I’ve rewired the plane, redrawn the key
        And untied the ribbon from my neck
        Without dropping my head at my feet.
        If all it takes to lose myself is burning the history that
        Brought me here, then hand me the match.
        A story beginning with self-immolation
        Doesn’t always end in ashes.

Reading these lines, I was struck by how they parallel the PANK mission to publish poetry from “a place inhabited by contradiction, quirk and startling anomaly, where the known is made and unmade, and where unimagined futures are born.” Could you begin the interview by riffing on that mission and your own words?

Jessica Fischoff: I think PANK’s mission statement really encapsulates itself. I’m not sure I could phrase it any better, but I can say the raw spaces writers allow themselves to access when creating is the place I aim to put myself in with my own work.

DD: How did PANK Books come into being?

JF: In 2016 John Gosslee started PANK Books to publish diverse and important full and short length books that deserved attention. In conceptualizing the press aspect of PANK it was important to him that all books the press published had the full support of all of the editors regardless of which editor brought the book to the press. As of 2019, Chris Campanioni, Maya Marshal, and Ashley M. Jones have all chosen books for publication alongside John Gosslee.

DD: Tell us about the books in the PANK catalog.

JF: PANK Books has a very strong eight title catalog of little and big books that range in orientation, voice, craft, and genre. The main thread of our books is that they are inclusive in their support of all marginalized voices. We’ve published new writers, veteran writers, and in 2019 we published a book by a writer who had never published a creative work. We’re always reading, we’re always interested in publishing work we know is important to read.

DD: What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges for women-run presses?

JF: I’d like to answer with questions I ask myself, and that any editor and writer should ask themselves at least once.

How does the curation of a publication change amongst editors of different genders and backgrounds?

Do women editors read differently than editors who are not women?

Do different topics and styles of writing resonate with me differently than non-female editor counterparts, or does it come down to my personal taste?

How do I know whether what I’m publishing and how I’m managing as an editor is because I am a woman, or because I’m drawn to certain writing styles and management techniques?

How much of the writing I’m drawn to is because I am a woman and how much is because I am myself?

At the end of it, I think the personal inclination towards any kind of specific work is likely based on who we are as individuals first.

DD: Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from PANK Books.

JF: We’ve slated a number of publications as 2020 releases. The titles include short essays, choreo-poems, and a book that plays with the incorporation of music as text. Our book contest runs through September 1st, and we’re selecting potential full-length manuscripts in poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and little books for publication alongside the contest winners. Our judges are press authors and our Reviews Editor. The winning authors will judge next year’s contest, which keeps the thread of our mission in the PANK family.

DD: How has being a cellist influenced your work as a writer and editor?

JF: I’ve played in a number of indie bands over many years, and collaborated with other musicians, practiced, recorded, scheduled tours, promoted, and designed albums. The processes mirror managing a publication and press. I work with people to produce something beautiful and creative, something I am excited to share with the world, something I love. 

As a writer, I think musically. I read everything out loud and listen to the rhythm. I admit I tap my foot to some lines to hear the beat. Music influenced the way I write, where the line breaks, where the rhythm rests, and the arc, and turn.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a PANK poet?

JF: I’ve picked two poems I love.

        Regala un huevo con una mano y con la otra, mata la gallina

                 By Steve Castro

        Some people are encyclopedias.
        I’m more like the ashes after a book
        is burned. Every burned tome dissap-
        pears. The Apples will also vanish.
        If the sun that devours books
        got caught in a gargantuan
        Library of Congress mousetrap
        and died with a broken neck as a result,
        then I would bury the sun in the cemetery
        reserved for vanishing apples and book ashes.
        My father once stole the spotlight
        and ended up doing two months in jail.
        My papá is malo. He’s the type
        to give you an egg with one hand
        and kill the chicken with the other.

        YOU’RE ONLY HUMAN WHEN SOMEONE IS LOOKING
                By Joanna C. Valente

        Some of the women in town
        thought Mary ought to be punished.
        Her belly grew to a hearse.
        She prayed for a sailboat
        to carry her uterus on a milk sea.
        Dragonflies swarmed her flamingo-pink
        plumage. She watched
        boys shred guitars. May
        the distortion mince all
        the tired women
        inside her. A doctor suggested
        lime in tea—an exorcise. May she
        shoot wind to hear grass buzz,
        to know which she is sprouting
        inside her.

---

Jessica Fischoff is the Editor of [PANK] and author of the upcoming little book of poems, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (Across the Margin, 2019). She has a degree in English and Journalism from University of Iowa, where she studied the lyric essay under the mentorship of John D’Agata and went onto the Creative Nonfiction MFA program at The University of Pittsburgh where she served as an Editorial Assistant at Creative Nonfiction and began to write poetry under Dawn Lundy Martin, and Ben Lerner. Her writing appears in Diode Poetry Journal, Fjords Review and The Southampton Review.

Jessica's little book, The Desperate Measure of Undoing (ATM 2019) is available for preorder.

[PANK]

Grace Cavalieri Reviews "Playlist"

Grace Cavalieri reviews Playlist by David Lehman. University of Pittsburgh Press. 64 pages.

<<<
Lehman, already at the forefront of our literary culture, writes a music retrospective inspired by his friend, the late great poet A.R. Ammons. In 1965, Ammons’ book Tape for the Turn of the Year premiered poems written on a cash-register tape. In these, he gave us permission “to say and du anything.” And so, Lehman does — chronicling jazz icons of the 40s 50s 60s — as well as film/TV stars. This book will break your heart for all that’s passed, and especially how tenderly Lehman revives it.

By identifying song and singer, Lehman traces this country’s cultural story and tells us what the past is worth, and why. And this is where you fall in love…the poet’s personal involvement…where he was the night of…what he was drinking…how he felt…not reminiscences, nothing so cheap as that, but actual shards piecing his own life together through music, day by calendar day.

What is the central issue of any book- length poem? With Ammons, it was claiming his right as poet. With Lehman, it’s a true devotion to the meaning and spirit of that great human endeavor, jazz — as well as classic pop culture. Lehman is knowledgeable about music’s traditional story, and he takes it out of the corner, away from music connoisseurs, to animate it for all readers. The passion and strength of the poet shape stories of singers and musicians, at times making song out of words. The writing fluidly connects 72 pieces, and the accumulation demonstrates the soul of innovation: i.e., film and music now become poetry. A man, obedient to “The Stars,” revels at the intricate beauty that’s given him such lifelong pleasure.

12/3/17

When I listened to “Ralph’s New Blues”

(Modern Jazz Quartet) the epiphany was

the music that remained when the melody

was removed — even for such as I who

can’t think of a better way to say

our love is here to stay than the song.

>>>

from

from "April 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews" by Grace Cavalieri in Washington Independent Review of Books

• Grace Cavalieri
• April 11, 2019

I Will Wear My Wounds in Chapters: Six Chapbooks

To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018

Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:

                        …Oh, forgive me, Lord,
    how human I’ve become, busy clicking
    what I like, busy pushing
    my cuticles back and back to expose
    all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me
    tell your creatures how sorry
    I am, let them know exactly
    what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
    too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
    Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
    horns, braid back those long-
    frayed endings of every nerve tingling
    with all I thought I had to do today.

To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.

Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018

Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:

    As if Shakespeare
    could turn in
    his grave after
    Giampiero
    our guide
    tells of Juliet’s
    balcony and her
    statue removed
    from the courtyard
    because thousands
    of tourist hands
    cracked
                    its bronze
    breasts
    by rubbing them
    “for luck in love”
    and I wonder
    does anybody
    care who
    now visits
    her perch and
    house walls
    fucked
    by graffiti.

Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.

The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019

Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:

    A bird in the kitchen
    this morning.
    It was enough.
    A song among tangerine bowls.
    Near the open window
    atop the butcher-block table—
    grapefruit, 
                     a spoon.
                                    Unequivocal.
    Peering out into darkness.
    For Sunrise. 
    Knowing 
    it will blind.

    Too much.
                         Hallelujah. 
    Even the seeds.

Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.

[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:  

 

    The one that belonged to her
    The one where the light hit for the first time
    The one between our houses
    The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
    The one the dog squeezed through
    The one at three over the candle and cake
    The one at three at the checkpoint
    The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
    The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
    The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
    The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
    The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
    The one he went through, hairs shooting out
    The one she went through, blood turning up
    The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
    The ones we put up when she was born
    The ones we passed to leave for good
    The ones we paid quarters to get through
    The one they learned the names of Presidents for
    The ones they needed social security numbers for
    The one I touched in the dark of my room
    The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
    The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
    The one we tried to jump and failed
    The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
    The ones in the books that made animals of us
    The ones that told us who we weren’t
    The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
    The ones that kept flowers
    The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
    The one she went through too tired to find her way
    The one they have chosen to give them purpose
    The different one I have chosen
    The one I haven’t yet found
    The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen                                                                               

Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”

Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:

    The corn in aisle nine pops
    when you pay
    with your NRA Visa.
    In the gun-shaped produce section
    there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
    pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
    To enter, all you have to do
    is show up and say, I hate gays.

Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.

And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018

In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.”  Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering it.

---

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

For Prose Writers Who Want to Write Poetry: A Reading List [by Terese Svoboda]

Prose writers make sparks through character and plot, endlessly blackening the page from one margin to the other. But there are some who recognize that sometimes emotion needs to breath. I like to point those prosestitutes (as Walcott used to call them) toward the prosy end of poetry. These poems present the idea of word choice and white space as muscle, poems that are not just the co-opted regulation subject-verb-object but also are not dauntingly complex syntactically. Seemingly. Five books of poetry for fiction writers who really want to jettison their agents and struggle in the poet's pure genre:

The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky. How to take prose lines and hold them in poetic tension.

Childhood of an Equestrian by Russell Edson. Master of the funny dialogue prose poem.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. Have you read it lately? It's so clear it burns. It also teaches line break strategy plus advocacy.

The Movie At the End of the World by Tom McGrath. Blacklisted but a poet with a breath like Whitman who takes history and America head on.

All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby.  A funny mix of high and pop cultural references turned into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. Shows how form can be your friend.

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schultz

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

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Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

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A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

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Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.