The Best American Poetry

Nickole Brown's The Donkey Elegies

[A Review by Dante Di Stefano]

The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems
Nickole Brown
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020

Nickole Brown’s new chapbook, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems, continues the project she initiated in her chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018); this project, as the poet herself articulates it, proposes to build an antipastoral bestiary comprised of poems spoken in “a queer Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature: beautiful, damaged, dangerous and in desperate need of saving.”  As did To Those Who Were Our First Gods, The Donkey Elegies explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. Brown draws on her experiences working with donkeys in several animal sanctuaries and overlays those experiences with a complex array of personal, cultural, historical, and linguistic associations connected to this humble and hearty mammal. The Donkey Elegies does what any good essay does: it assays (it tests and examines, but it also attempts), it suggests (rather than expounds), it spirals outward while tethering the attention to one unparaphrasable idea; the essay, as form or genre, is, after all, the donkey of literature: sinewy, indefatigable, often overlooked. Like her central subject in this book, Brown’s poetry hauls steadily onward, tender and tough, lit with the knowledge that holiness dwells in the common, the low-life, the baseborn.

Throughout the collection, the lowly donkey becomes a metonym for the oppressed “who carried us from that squat existence of flint strike to entire cities,” and “who blistered and tore, who blew their knees and threw their vertebrae hauling the stone and laying the tracks, plowing one field and then the next.” Here, Brown not only alludes to slavery from the ancient world to the antebellum South, but also surveys the exploitation of laborers like her “illiterate, hammer-swinging grandfather,” and the coal miners and tenant farmers of her native Kentucky. Those laborers are the same as all the ones who are continually “made draft, made compulsory, forced into conscription, like all those boys in my mama’s class that won that twisted lottery and came home from Vietnam unable to tell the slam of a screen door from a land mine.” The unassuming and eminently tractable donkey rehearses, in its very plodding, the survival strategies of those whose extrinsic worth has been bound to their work, and whose ongoing struggle has been to resist the erasures that their worth-bearing work necessarily entailed. 

For Nickole Brown, however, the donkey’s symbolic resonances remain deeply personal, tied as she is to generations of laborers and survivors. These personal connections begin with the idioms of Brown’s Kentucky childhood. Brown notes these idiomatic roots in the fourteenth section: “the church ladies would say they hadn’t seen me in a donkey’s years even if I had missed only a few Sundays, and all us kids knew to avoid Uncle Leon because the man could talk the hind legs off a donkey and that telling grandfather what to do was about as good as putting a steering wheel on a mule.” These folksy benign figures of speech contrast with the misogynistic donkey jokes examined elsewhere in the chapbook. The toxic masculinity attached to the word “donkey” (as slang for “vagina,” and therefore, as troubling synecdoche for “female”) provides Brown with a space to consider misogyny in American culture, and how that misogyny has informed her own story, intersected as it is with class issues and regional inequities, “a birthright, that would’ve never let me see a day in school past tenth grade, and by the time I’d even think about going back for my diploma, I’d be trapped with too many babies and a shit husband to boot.” All the way through The Donkey Elegies, Brown evokes, with gut-punching clarity, the prevalence and preponderance of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender-based discrimination that contextualize American life. Like the donkey, and like many women in America, Brown notes that she survived by moving forward “regardless, in spite of everything.”

Reading about moving forward, not merely surviving, but assaying-into-song, feels especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second to last section of The Donkey Elegies, Brown writes:

    And here we are, on the brink again, testing the promise of rainbows with who-knows-how-many continents’ worth
    of glacial melt and less and less forest to save. There is no beauty

    in nature I see anymore
    that I recognize
    as simply beautiful
    without adding a prayer
    of please, don’t die.

Nickole Brown’s poetry does what all truly great poetry does: it reminds us that we are always on the brink and that there is so much to save as we skitter on the edge of an incremental apocalypse. The Donkey Elegies reaffirms a truth we know in every molecule of our animal-selves: to live like the donkey is to live in a Dickinsonian Forever composed of Nows. Buy this book, send a copy to a friend; it is a balm in uncertain times, a book of great, enduring, lyric power and imagination.

---

To read an insightful and formally inventive review of this chapbook, in which Julie Marie Wade compares The Donkey Elegies to Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, go to Lambda Literary here.

To read an Oxford American interview with Nickole Brown, go here.

To find out more about Nickole Brown’s poetry, visit her website here.

Three Poets: Elizabeth A. I. Powell, James McCorkle, & Rick Bursky [by Nin Andrews]

Last week I started a series called A Virtual AWP, featuring poets that I would have loved to have met or heard read or lecture, whose books I'd have bought and had signed, had I attended. I felt then as I guess many feel now, that a dark wave was rising up above the planet. But I don't want to talk about that . . .

Instead I want to talk about poets like Elizabeth A. I. Powell whose book, Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter, was a New Yorker "Books We Love 2016" pick and whose new book, Atomizer, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University in the fall of 2020.  I have already been reading poems from her new collection including this lyrical essay from Plume, and this poem from The Los Angeles Review:

STALKING ME ONOMATOPOETICALLY                      

                                   “He closed my legs like a book,” Angela Carter

 

I sought a restraining order against the sociopathic
poem that kept pounding on the door of my mind at four a.m.,
rousing me with a slap on the face with its metaphysics
of sick lust and panic. The order was dated March 1, 2016.
A Thursday. Rainy. The sociopoem smelled of Paco Rabanne—
A Cologne for Men— and was devilishly handsome, so elegant,
so English-lyrically, well-anthologized, and attractive, seemed to have a form
that suggested well-bred content, an understanding of stanzaic
architecture, and deep image. Yet, this poem I loved had once tried
to stab Dorothy Parker at a dinner party. He had claimed
to have French kissed Helen Vender and Allen Ginsberg.
How could I rationalize or reconcile my love for the poem?
The poem tried to kill me, too, with the same red child’s scissors
once,  then another time it was tar and feather, because, the poem said,
“I love you so much.” On therapeutic advice I sought the restraining order
against the poem because it couldn’t contain itself, pushed me
down with a conceit stronger than my fragile couplets, how
it leaked anaphora like anti-freeze, bluish over the page
and into my life uninvited, thinking it knew me
better than I knew myself. The poem’s arguments were convincing,
but it was all fanciful diversion. A lie. All through the day
and all through the night: That poem. The poem telling me I looked fat
in my Lord & Taylor dress. So, I bit the poem’s ear,
again and again, until it bled a scary personification of ears. Stalking
me onomatopoetically down the sidewalk to where I kept my secret
sonnet turns inside. I just wanted to take a nap in Brooklyn,
sleep inside my source material, that pale of settlement,
the origin and end of everything in my family. So that the end
of my suffering might bring an insight, but the poem
turned my nap in Brooklyn into a series of disturbing
and surreal faces that made me awaken into the possibility that
I was the one who was so wrong, so ruined, damaged,
unable to sing. Yet, sometimes, honestly, I loved
what the poem said, when it convinced me of my tyranny.
I wanted to let go. I wanted its untouchable love. I waited for the poem.
The sociopoem’s persona looked like Sir Mick Jagger, wore leather
pants, had biceps, smelled literary and up all night,
like bay rum and old books. The poem had a spell over me,
its incantatory propulsion got into my blood and bile
with its rhythms that made my heart race. It mailed me
threatening letters, collages containing articles about what happens
to women my age, how they die, again and again
alone and withering, like a nasty old tree
from a St. Vincent Millay sonnet taught
in girl’s boarding schools. I wrestled the poem
until it swore to bless me, but it blessed me
in a language that made me feel uncomfortable.
It wasn’t a vowelic yawp. It was a brutal stuttering ich
that made me feel sick, unclean, subway ridden,
which gave the poem a great joy.

Another prize-winning poet I admire and would like to have met is James McCorkle, whose latest book, published by Etruscan Press, is part of Triptych. I think the following excerpt from his poem, "Fire Regime," gives just a hint of what he's up to in this wonderful collection.  

After the warnings, each a measure for the next
an emergency of slowness

is this any worse than before

I am haunted by the thought

Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives?

As language evacuates
its own territories
who is swept along

in the rescue, in the naming
in the columns for those saved, those lost, sold or free.

                            # # #

 

 

 

Finally, I want to mention my friend, Rick Bursky, whose new book, Let's Become a Ghost, is just out from BOA Editions. A surrealist and a truly unique  poet, Bursky is a poet I trust to entertain, inspire, and to take me places I've never been before.

 

I NEVER KNEW MY FATHER COULD PLAY THE HARMONICA

 

I'm sitting with my mother and brother
eating chili at the small dining room table.
My father, dead twenty-six years, wears a black suit,
stands in front of the window playing the harmonica.
There's nothing original about the world,
but we get up each morning and go to work anyway.
A doctor tells us my mother's lungs have weakened.
My father is playing the blues, which I guess
he learned in prison. No one knows who's lonelier:
the ghost or the person who sees the ghost.
Not wanting to embarrass my father I don't look

at the frayed edges of his collar or the hems of his pants.

Last week I forgot to do laundry

and wore the same socks two days in a row.

My brother is first to leave the table,

says something about returning phone calls.

It's rare that we eat dinner together.

Years ago I would have said the light falling

on my father's shoulders made them look like mountains

in the distance with the moon rising behind them;

now I think cardboard theater props.

Sometimes my eyes feel like loaded guns

and I close them for the same reason guns have safeties.

I should be telling this in the past tense

but that would be the beginning of forgetting. 

 

 

Elizabeth A. I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including forthcoming Atomizer (LSU Press, 2020). Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker, and was a Small Press Bestseller. Her first book of poems, The Republic of Self, was chosen by C.K. Williams as a New Issues First Book Prize winner. 

Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Electric Literature, Forklift, Ohio, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pank, Ploughshares, Plume, West Branch, and elsewhere. 

She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Northern Vermont University. In 2020, she will be Distinguished Visiting Writer at Oregon State University.

 

Born in St. Petersburg, Florida, James McCorkle is the author of Evidences (selected by Jorie Graham for the 2003 APR-Honickman First Book Award) and The Subtle Bodies (Etruscan Press 2014). He received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of fellowships from Ingram Merrill and the NEA, he teaches at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.

 

Rick Bursky is the author of Let's Become a Ghost Story (BOA Editions, 2020), I’m No Longer Troubled By the Extravagance (BOA Editions, 2015); Death Obscura (Sarabande, 2010); the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize-winning The Soup of Something Missing (Bear Star Press, 2004), and the chapbook The Invention of Fiction (Hollyridge Press, 2005). He received his BFA from Art Center College of Design and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Originally from New York City, Bursky lives in Los Angeles where he works in advertising and teaches poetry in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program. For more information, please visit rickbursky.com.

Plague Poem #2: ["The Plague" by David Lehman]

The Plague

Albert Camus wrote The Plague,
which I want to re-read this week
(now that the frogs, the lice,
and the locusts are upon us)
because his hypothesis is
that the bubonic plague
has broken out in Algeria,
in the coastal town of Oran,
in the 1940s. The plague
he has in mind is bubonic,
the Black Death of the fourteenth century,
which killed a third of Europe.
Fleas from infected rodents transmitted it.

In The Plague the bureaucrats muddy things,
it's a false alarm, says one, and let's not call it
a plague but an unusual type of fever.
Lots of plagues in history, yet each comes as a surprise.
The will -- the competitive desire to live
while others are dying -- is most intense in a calamity.
Nine months from now more babies will be born.

3 / 15 / 20

Bittersweet Worlds [by Nin Andrews]

A few summers ago I was in Maine, looking out from our house at a meadow full of bittersweet when I asked a poet-friend and gardener extraordinaire, “How do you get rid of bittersweet?” The bittersweet was everywhere, strangling ferns and bushes and covering parts of the meadow where blueberries once grew. “It’s best to ignore it,” she said. “Look past it at the sailboats gliding across the bay because you can’t get rid of bittersweet. It’s like a hydra. You cut off one head, and two grow back in its place.” She was right. The more I pulled out the bittersweet, the faster it grew back. Finally, in a moment of frustration, I hired a man with an excavator to dig up the patch of the meadow where the bittersweet had taken over. Gradually, the meadow grew back in to its natural and beautiful self.

Now, when I look out at the meadow where the bittersweet once grew, I think of Maureen Seaton’s title poem, “Sweet World,” from her latest book published by CavanKerry Press, which I have retitled in my mind as “Bittersweet World.” Instead of invasive plants, Seaton writers about cancer with her characteristic wit and honesty and eloquence.  When I read her work, I pray, “May the bittersweet leave her with only the sweetness that she is.” I am such a fan of her poetry.

Sweet World

I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it.
~Felicity Smoak, The Flash

Wonder what I'd be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband
besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath 

at Delmonico's. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat
or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V 

as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V
flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding

a lot like the war movies of my fifties' childhood. My cranky Chihuahua
was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate.

Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused 
with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me 

and I was left to my own mind, which is what I'm missing most these days. 
Unless that's it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. 

Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app 
designed to mess with me. I've never thought to call the world sweet before. 

A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you're
a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you're still standing in the middle of it. 

Seaton’s book, Sweet World, and my friend’s advice to look past the bittersweet and out at the ocean, and to focus on sailboats gliding by instead of invasive plants, reminds me of the sports writer’s, Tim Wendel’s book, Cancer Crossing about his younger brother, Eric, who was diagnosed with leukemia at three years old but survived until he was ten on an ongoing regimen of chemical cocktails. The story goes back and forth between the story of the pioneering doctors who did their best to save Eric, his family life, and his father’s obsession with teaching the family to sail on Lake Ontario.  

The sailing serves as both a metaphor for cancer—for being at the mercy of the ever-changing whims of the winds and weather, and as an escape from it, a way of concentrating on something else. In one passage, Wendel describes a day when the family sailed into a squall, and his sister, Susan, chose to remain on deck:

“What were you doing up there?” I whispered, not wanting to get her in trouble with Dad.
“Singing,” she said.
“Singing? But why?”
“It made me laugh,” she grinned. “How the wind swept the words away from me before I could hear them.”

I looked at her as if she was crazy. Yet in the months ahead, I began to understand her tenacity and gallows humor in such conditions. Perhaps she realized that the squall line was somehow an omen for what we would encounter, on and off the water. Sometimes such storms would be on us before we knew it, and the only thing we could do was to hang on and find the courage to sing through it all.” (page 73-74)

The book is a heartwarming account of family life, cancer, medical advances, grief, sailing, life in the 60’s and 70’s, and more. It demonstrates how many stories an author can tell in a memoir, even a memoir specifically about cancer. The mix is where the magic of the book occurs.

I am also reminded of David Lehman’s book about his experience with cancer, aptly titled, One Hundred Autobiographies, a title he credits to the poet, Mark Strand, who died of cancer in 2014.  Like Cancer Crossing, Lehman’s book is a collection of interwoven stories in which Lehman displays his unique ability to keep the mind sailing, even when the body is faltering. Like Wendel, he compares cancer to a storm. Chapter 71, “The Sublime Pain of Being,” begins:

Not a day without pain. If not the neuropathy, the problems of adjusting to your prosthetic device, which sometimes malfunctions. The scar where they cut you open and the irritated skin surrounding the stoma. The seemingly interminable indigestion. These are unpleasant but banal. Only on some days do you feel the sublime pain of being alone in the universe. Like the experience of standing on a hotel terrace in Miami during a hurricane watching the wind subdue the royal palms, taking them down, all the way to the point where they are level with the ground; the storm howling in delight at its conquered foes—it puts the fear of the Lord in you. Back in September 2005 I was in Aventura on Florida’s Atlantic coast when Hurricane Katrina made landfall there. The passengers aboard the aircraft two days later were as hushed as the audience hearing a certain four-and-a-half minute John Cage composition.

The book also describes aspects of our Kafka-esque medical system. I was particularly disturbed by this entry from his wife, Stacey’s journal, an entry written at the end of a day of waiting for Lehman to emerge from surgery:

I was alone in the waiting area. Everyone else had gone home. The room was decorated like a cheap chain motel lobby and the garbage bags overflowed with empty fast food containers and coffee cups. Boxes containing scattered slices of cold pizza covered the counter near the coffee machine.

"You can wait for him in his room," the OR receptionist said when I next approached her. "At last," I thought. She gave me the room number, but her counterpart on the urological floor had no record of David. The nurses wanted me to go home. "There’s nothing you can do here," they said. "We’ll let you know when he’s released to his room."

I took the elevator to the recovery suite, but it was crowded, and I seemed to be in the way so I took a seat in the corridor. While watching the nurses tend to David, I did something I rarely do: I burst into tears. "Why is this happening? Why isn’t he in his room yet?"

Ms. Brady, "the patient advocate," went to find out. She returned with a smile on her face, her arms wide, as if she were going to embrace me.

"He’s staying here tonight," she said. "In recovery. Doctor’s orders." She was ebullient. It didn’t make sense. What was there to be happy about? "Now you must absolutely go home," she said. "You can’t stay here all night."

Why not? And why isn’t he in the recovery room?

As one would expect from any book by David Lehman, moments of literary insight and inspiration as well as autobiography, dreams, fantasies, and more, so much more, are woven into the text. In Chapter 30, "What's the Story," he explains his choice of narrative structure: 

I don’t know how the ordeal is going to turn out, and the road connecting memory and desires is not a linear path but a series of quick right and left turns dictated by the local authorities somewhat whimsically to regulate the flow of traffic. Glen, my literary agent and boon companion, thinks I should write an anatomy of cancer on the model of An Anatomy of Melancholy. But one lesson of any brush with death is that time is finite, and if you have gotten a reprieve and time is still on your side, you must do what you want and only that.

Finally, I want to mention Cati Porter's poems from her book, The Body at a Loss, in which she describes how a diagnosis changes one's world. In her poem, "The Solution," she, too, uses the ocean as a metaphor for her experience. 

The Solution

One day you awaken to the sound of waves
And the world has dissolved, as sugar into water—

The sudden shift in being, from solid into liquid,
And your matter no longer matters, and when you rise up

To the surface you find there is no surface,
That all potential universes have in fact melted

Into each other, and that all that could be
Had, said, done, been, true,

Has melded into one, fluid as the sea,
Empty and full at once—because that is the way

Of it, as one day the world seems steady, solid, then
The next, the world is nothing more than a vast unboundedness

Where we drift with currents that are driven
By no moon, no you.

Francisco’s Rubén: A Latinx Poet Gathers His Graces [by Michael Dowdy]

After Rubén : A Book Launch for Francisco Aragón with Fellow Macondo Readers takes place on Tuesday, March 3, from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm at the Central Library, Latino Collection and Resource Center as part of Writer's Week at San Antonio Public Library, 600 Soledad Street, San Antonio, Texas.

The following is excerpted and adapted from the Foreword to After Rubén (Red Hen Press, 2020), by Francisco Aragón. 

Alan Pelaez Lopez has argued that the “X” in “Latinx” signifies an historical wound rather than a rhetorical trend. In Pelaez Lopez’s formulation, the wound of Latinidad emerges from four sites that correspond to the four sides of the X. The violences of settler colonialism, anti-blackness, and heteropatriarchy—the inability of language to fully articulate their impacts and define how vulnerable bodies navigate daily life in the Americas. At the crossroads of this volatile equis, I’d like to propose, Latinx poetry has the unique capacity to gather the worlds of the wounded: their tongues, triumphs, and hardships, their wounds and the words for drawing near them, perhaps even the words to begin building another world from within their aches and sorrows. Readers are fortunate to encounter in Francisco Aragón’s new collection of poems and prose After Rubén a passionate, wise, and sensitive guide to these worlds.

With joy, pluck, and a welcoming hand, Aragón’s lines and sentences take us to meet the people and their places. His mother, “head brimming with phrases” in English and amulets for escaping the sweatshop. His father, “portly, sugar / in his blood, a whiff of something // on his breath as he speaks of the Sacramento / River.” A sister, her voice “sturdy as the metal / table and chairs / in the patio.” Cities north and south, where numina float and settle, “as if a place—León, / Granada—could speak, / whistle, inhabit / a timbre.” A Nicaraguan woman testifying about the Contra War, whose words “gather and huddle / in my throat.” Unitedstatesian scoundrels, alas, such as Joe Arpaio, one of the empire’s cast of grotesques—“we’ve caught a glimpse / in the jowls of your sheriff: / bulldog who doubles as your heart.” And, approaching rapture, the poets who whisper and sing in Aragón’s ears and in the poems in his book.

Aragón has collected in After Rubén several lifetimes of a life in letters. From the “short / skinny boy” with a skateboard and “books in my backpack,” to the man in a hotel mirror who’s come to resemble his father, the constant is poetry and poets. Here, Aragón is a poet fierce and compassionate, wizened and empowered by his experiences as a gay Latinx man. Here is the tireless advocate for other poets, who share our air or breathe within poems we share with others. After Rubén meditates on family, both inherited and made, through filiation, through the words of living and dead. And our guide animates his dead, for, as he writes, “the dead are very patient.”

The Rubén of the title is, of course, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867-1916). Rubén—innovator of Latin American modernismo, not to be confused with Anglo-American modernism. Darío—recently “discovered” queer poet whose poems Aragón reinvents and reinvigorates. Rubén—beating heart of the collection, a body of poems and poets in communion across space and time. Consider the line just above. Borrowed from Jack Spicer’s book After Lorca, it serves as the evocative epigraph to After Rubén, where the dead are present, vigilant, and sensuously alive.

In this urgent book, and in our urgent times, after Rubén has many meanings: temporal (i.e., succeeding Darío); homage (praising Darío); inspiration (creating versions, riffs, and imitations inspired by Darío); trajectory (following in Darío’s footsteps); and pursuit (chasing Darío). These meanings converge in “My Rubén,” the gorgeous autobiographical essay that concludes the volume. Aragón’s beloved poet encompasses his mother’s—on demand she would recite sentimental lines to young Francisco. And his father’s—his favorite was Darío’s fable of St. Francis of Assisi, which Aragón rewrites as “The Man and the Wolf.” Of After Rubén’s many achievements, the most enduring may be Aragón’s intimate, generous, and deeply generative reintroduction of his Rubén Darío to readers in North America. Our charge is clear: to reread the mariposa modernista with the grace, care, and solidarity with which his compatriot Francisco Aragón has read him for us.

 

Francisco Aragón is the son of Nicaraguan immigrants. He is the author of Puerta del Sol and Glow of Our Sweat, as well as editor of The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. His poems have appeared in twenty anthologies, most recently The Wandering Song: Central American Writing in the United States (Tia Chucha Press) and Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightbook Books). Others include Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies (W.W. Norton), Deep Travel: American Poets Abroad (Ninebark Press), and Poetry of Resistance: Voices for Social Justice (University of Arizona Press). In 2017, he was a finalist for Split This Rock’s Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism. A native of San Francisco, CA, he directs Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies. Aragón divides his time between Washington, D.C. and South Bend, IN.  

Michael Dowdy is a poet, critic, editor, and essayist. He is the author of Broken Souths: Latina/o Poetic Responses to Neoliberalism and Globalization (University of Arizona Press) and the co-editor, with Claudia Rankine, of American Poets in the 21^st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press). As a poet, his works include a book, Urbilly (Main Street Rag), and a chapbook, The Coriolis Effect. He is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina where he teaches poetry and Latinx literature. He's been a faculty fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities and at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Originally from Blacksburg, Virgina, he taught at Hunter College/Cuny for a decade before moving to South Carolina. 

SAVE THE DATE ITHACA: February 27, 2020 David Lehman reads from "One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir"

Thursday, February 27, 2020 5:30 pm  Reading, Q&A, and Book Signing 215 N Cayuga St, Ithaca, New York 14850 607 273 8246 info@buffalostreetbooks.com

In One Hundred Autobiographies, poet and scholar David Lehman applies the full measure of his intellectual powers to cope with a frightening diagnosis and painful treatment for cancer. No matter how debilitating the medical procedures, Lehman wrote every day during chemotherapy and in the aftermath of radical surgery. With characteristic riffs of wit and imagination, he transmutes the details of his inner life into a prose narrative rich in incident and mental travel. The reader journeys with him from the first dreadful symptoms to the sunny days of recovery.

This "fake memoir," as he refers ironically to it, features one-hundred short vignettes that tell a life story. One Hundred Autobiographies is packed with insights and epiphanies that may prove as indispensable to aspiring writers as Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Set against the backdrop of Manhattan, Lehman summons John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling among his mentors. Dostoyevsky shows up, as does Graham Greene. Keith Richards and Patti Hansen put in an appearance, Edith Piaf sings, Clint Eastwood saves the neighborhood, and the Rat Pack comes along for the ride. These and other avatars of popular culture help Lehman to make sense of his own mortality and life story. One Hundred Autobiographies reveals a stunning portrait of a mind against the ropes, facing its own extinction, surviving and enduring.

"Lehman’s exquisite essays illustrate the ways that beauty can flow out of pain." Publishers Weekly 

"Lehman’s memoir pulses with life and memory." from "Writing In The Face Of Death,"Sandee Brawarsky, New York Jewish Week

David Lehman and Johnny. photo 2020 © Stacey Lehman

Cry Hard, Cry Fast: Ken Tucker Takes on John D. Macdonald

Continuing my fitful John D. MacDonald reading, I just finished ‘Cry Hard, Cry Fast’ (1955). It’s about a highway auto accident. In each of the first five chapters, we’re introduced to people in cars who’ll be involved in the accident. MacDonald sketches in their lives, and what led them to be on the road on this day. It’s a tricky narrative challenge, to keep starting with a character, stopping, and going on to someone new, but MacDonald does it so deftly that you keep everyone in your mind. The middle of the book has a discussion of the physics of auto crashes and how insurance companies calculate the results: great, precise stuff. ‘Cry Hard’ isn’t even a thriller, really—just one car contains people who’ve committed a crime, but no crime is committed in the course of the novel. I loved it. I have some other stuff to read now, but my next MacDonald will be, I think, ‘A Bullet for Cinderella.’

-- Ken Tucker

Roger Kahn, Author of "The Boys of Summer" (1927-2020)

When there are so many to mourn 
-- in one week Kirk Douglas, George Steiner, Alice Mayhew --
the death of Roger Kahn is what I am thinking of
as I nurse my martini at the Knickerbocker
and his great book "The Boys of Summer"
about my boyhood team the Brooklyn Dodgers
when I came of baseball age in 1956, age 8,
the last hurrah (Newk 27 wins, Duke 43 hrs,
Erskine and Maglie no-hitters and, for the last time,
Jackie Robinson danced off third base)
and then the team moved to LA in 1958.
The Boys of Summer! They were giving away
paperback copies of this wonderful book
at a bank in Brooklyn in 1973, with five former players
on hand, to sign copies. My copy is in Ithaca
and I'm in New York City, so I can't name
all the guys who signed my book but one of them
was Carl Furillo and this gave me the chance
to praise his post-season clutch hitting heroics in 1959
and tell him he was my father's favorite Dodger.

-- David Lehman
Note: Shotgun Shuba was definitely there; I think Billy Cox also.

The Perfect Valentine’s Day Gift: A Constellation of Kisses, Edited by Diane Lockward [by Nine Andrews]

It’s February, and Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. I know the perfect gift for someone you love, especially someone you love to kiss: A Constellation of Kisses, edited by Diane Lockward and published by Terrapin Books. It’s a beautiful collection from start to finish. As Lee Upton writes in the foreword:  

<<<
A kiss is never just a kiss—heat-seeking, information bearing, coded. In this inspired collection, poet and editor Diane Lockward has assembled over 100 poems about kisses written by many of our best contemporary poets. You'll find kisses longed for, kisses auditioned, kisses rehearsed. Ritualistic kissing. Delicious kissing. Kissing that comforts the grieving. Kissing that blesses a union . . .  

May there be no end to the most genuine kisses, the right kisses, the ones that are good and meant for us to savor. And while we're at it, let's wish for no end to poems about kissing.
>>>

I thought I’d ask Diane Lockward to say a few words about the anthology.

What inspired you to put together an anthology of kisses?

I don’t remember when the idea first hit me, but it churned in my brain for quite a while. Then I saw that the poet Brian Turner had just put out an anthology about kissing and my great idea hit the floor. I figured he’d just beat me to it, but ordered his book from the library. To my great delight, it turned out that his book is all prose. So my idea was resuscitated. I then put my plan together and put out the call for submissions.

How long did it take to collect 100 great kiss poems?

The call was open for six weeks. From the day it opened, I was bombarded with submissions. The idea seemed to be very appealing to lots of poets. After all, who isn’t interested in kissing? And there are so many different ways to approach the topic. I’ve done three anthologies; this one received by far the most submissions. Making selections was very difficult. I had to consider not only the quality of the poems but also the variety of approaches, tone, form, length. I had to say no to many worthy poems. And I am haunted by the fear that I said no to some poems I should have said yes to. But I did not want an enormous collection. So about 100 poems seemed a good limit.

I’d love to have you post a few kiss poems below, and say a few words about them.

Last Kiss

First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who
count such things say an average person kisses for a total

of two weeks in a lifetime. And you realize your two weeks
was up some time ago. Suddenly there is kissing everywhere

you look. And you learn that cows kiss and squirrels. Puffins,
snails and meerkats! And you are overcome with sorrow and

an overwhelming desire to kiss—to be kissed. And you learn
that’s called basorexia and you have it. You watch the lips

of strangers in the supermarket—wonder if one would want
to kiss you. You know now that a minute of kissing burns

twenty-six calories and that a man lives up to five years
longer if he kisses his lover before he goes to work. You want

to tell someone that. And what’s worse, unlike the first kiss,
the last slipped by unnoticed—unnoted. It might have been

a spring day when daffodils answered the sun’s invitation or
an autumn day when everything else was burning. Or simply

a day you took out the garbage, did a load of wash. Then, someone
comes and takes your hand and you remember words

to a song you thought you’d never hear again and you remember
all those sunsets you forgot to watch and the smell of woods in rain.

And you remember the river, the river—how it presses
its mouth again and again to the swollen sea.

                                    —Jane Ebihara

Nightmare Kiss

The middle of a kiss, and though he opened
up wide and wider, her own small jawbones gave
a little crack and stuck, and look what happened:
as if she’d fallen in an open grave,
he swallowed her at last, and then she wandered
in a dark saturated country where
the red land throbbed with capillaries under
electric stars. A kiss had brought her there,
a simple kiss that rained and filled her head
with blood, a nightmare kiss, a wrong man kiss;
why had she kissed a man with such a mouth,
with such thick teeth and jaws, such tongue, instead
of kissing someone who would let her out,
kissing someone nicer, who ate less.

                        —Tony Barnstone

How could I not love Jane Ebihara’s “Last Kiss”? There’s so much to be learned here about kissing. The poem is full of facts. Who knew about the kissing of meerkats and puffins? Who knew the word basorexia? The poem is also full of whimsy and longing. It breaks my heart that the speaker’s last kiss is one she does not remember. The longing is contained and controlled within the two-line stanzas, yet spills out so tenderly in the closing images of the poem—that river kissing the swollen sea! What a perfect ending.

With the Barnstone poem you get a sense of the variety in the anthology. This poem is, of course, also about kissing, but it takes a very different approach to the subject. It’s grotesque with its monstrous kiss, the poor woman literally consumed by the wrong man’s kiss. There’s nothing tender here. But what a smart poem! It’s a beautifully executed, two-sentence sonnet, though the reader is so pulled in by the subject matter that form might easily be missed. As in Ebihara’s poem, the imagery is wonderful. There’s the landscape of the man’s mouth where the woman now dwells and the stunning final image of the nicer man she might have kissed, one “who ate less.”

I’d also love a poem from you—maybe a romantic poem, or that wonderful poem, “My Husband Discovers Poetry”?

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband’s coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Diane Lockward is the author of four poetry books, most recently The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement (Wind, 2016). She is also the editor of The Practicing Poet: Writing Beyond the Basics and two previous craft books, The Crafty Poet and The Crafty Poet II. Her poems have been included in such journals as Harvard Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Prairie Schooner. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, and The Writer’s Almanac. She is the founder and publisher of Terrapin Books. 

Pal Johnny, Our Greatest Story Writer [by David Lehman]

John O'Hara, author of "How Can I Tell You?" -- one of the subtlest stories in the language -- among other masterpieces, has one memorable sentence in his Hollywood novel, The Big Laugh (1962). It is said to the movie actor Hubert Ward, the book's protagonist:

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There's more people see you in one picture than ever saw all of Shakespeare's actors in his whole lifetime.
>>

I am reading Geoffrey Wolff's admirable biography of  Mr O'Hara, The Art of Burning Bridges, and I am inspired to read or re-read O'Hara's short stories. No one, not even Hemingway, can so brilliantly tell a story primarily in dialogue form. I greatly enjoy certain of O'Hara's novels, such as Appointment in Samarra and Ten North Frederick, and someday I will get around to reading them all. But in the genre of the short story, O'Hara is the best we have.

John O'Hara's Stories are available in a Library of America edition put together with an introduction by Charles McGrath, formerly the deputy editor of The New Yorker, in which magazine O'Hara published most of his best work. Of O'Hara, Lionel Trilling wrote in the introduction to Selected Short Stories of John O’Hara (1956), “The work of no other American writer tells us so precisely, and with such a sense of the importance of the communication, how people look and how they want to look, where they buy their clothes and where they wish they could buy their clothes, how they speak and how they think they ought to speak.”

Trilling had previously written, in the New York Times (March 18,1945), "[O’Hara] is…the only American writer to whom America presents itself as a social scene in the way it once presented itself to Howells or Edith Wharton, or in the way that England presented itself to Henry James, or France to Proust… He has the most precise knowledge of the content of our subtlest snobberies, of our points of social honor and idiosyncrasies of personal prestige. He knows, and persuades us to believe, that life’s deepest intentions may be expressed by the angle at which a hat is worn, the pattern of a necktie, the size of a monogram, the pitch of a voice, the turn of a phrase of slang, a gesture of courtesy and the way it is received."  

The Library of America also has an edition of four of O'Hara's novels from the 1930s, including Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8. -- DL

Meet the Press: Able Muse Press

[N.B. The following interview with editor, Alexander Pepple, and poet, Susan de Sola, was conducted by Dante Di Stefano.]

 Alexander, could you say a few words about Susan de Sola’s new collection Frozen Charlotte?

Alexander Pepple: Susan is someone I was quite familiar with, a long while earlier, through her participation at Eratosphere—Able Muse’s online literary workshop—where I was always impressed with the quality of the poems she posted, and her incisive critiques, not to mention the stream of accolades and publication credits she continued to garner. Along the way, she also became a fine assistant poetry editor at the literary journal, Able Muse, print edition. Even with that level of acquaintance of her and her craft, I was stunned by the range of talent she displayed in the Frozen Charlotte manuscript when she eventually submitted it to the press. It’s a richly diverse collection of the serious and the light, the personal and the universal, of landscapes and people and animals, of heartbreak and ecstasy, of the sensual and the tragic. And I could on. One of the astounding aspects of the book is how well she was able to fuse all these elements into a cohesive and engaging wholeness—in the progression, the tension, the surprises, and the fun. And I haven’t even broached the technical prowess on display in the many poetic styles from free verse to blank verse, to sonnets, shape poems, ghazals, list poems, nonce forms, and more. It’s gratifying that several reviewers from journals such as Agni (“Lucidity unites the book’s poems”), Light (“This book will change with the light each time you read it. There is humor in the monumentally sad poems and pointed meaning in the funny ones”), Art Fuse (“In Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola provides readers with enough aesthetic pleasure and thoughtful commentary about today’s world to remind us of just how good—and necessary—poetry can be”), and other reviews have recognized and praised elements of Frozen Charlotte that won me over in accepting and publishing it. Frozen Charlotte not only enchants and enlightens, but also entertains.

Susan de Sola

Susan, how has living in Europe affected your poetry (besides proving the setting for several of the poems in Frozen Charlotte)?

Susan de Sola: Living abroad alters your perception of America. The changes seem more startling—you are removed from the gradualism of everyday life. You miss out on local action, and also local political satire and its therapeutic effects. I find myself writing and publishing topical verse in response to events at home. Daily life in the medium of another language changes your relationship to English. It estranges and intensifies it. But not hearing your native language also impedes certain avenues of memory. Sometimes I encounter a word I haven’t heard used in many years, and it fairly resounds in my ears. “gubernatorial, tush, deciduous”… to just name a few.

In this collection, you have a beautiful poem about North by Northwest, another about Bringing Up Baby, and a third that references Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby while discussing the early twentieth century Jewish American immigrant experience. How has cinema influenced you as a poet?

Susan de Sola: Cinema is hard to write about. It has the stillness and completion of something finished, but literally “moves.” How do you write about a story in motion? Can you assume your reader knows it? I’m intrigued by the disjunction between the sets of ideals promulgated by early Hollywood and the realities off-set, and also by how a medium may be so central and accessible, and yet so evanescent—much of its early history is already forgotten. I’ve recently written a number of poems about this, the group provisionally titled, “Messy Lives.”

Many of your poems unfold in dialogue with the work of poets and artists, ranging from Vermeer to Delmore Schwartz.

Susan de Sola: The best poems, paintings and pieces of music keep their mysteries, you never get to the end of them, and yet, they are touching remnants of something deeply human that has vanished. A poem may converse with them—or try to. It’s a conversation between the past and the present, and the present and the future. Animals (who don’t make art as humans do) also figure in a great many poems. I love animals and am fascinated by them, and by the often absurd encounters of the human and the animal. In this book, whales, crickets, Bactrians and piglets, among others, have their poems.

Images of stasis recur throughout the collection. The title poem invokes a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational. There are also many gestures toward a stillness beyond stasis scattered throughout Frozen Charlotte. It occurred to my while reading your poem, “The Cornell Boxes” that there was a metapoetics revolving around immobility at the center of this book; the poet might be “a carpenter of glass, an architect of stasis.” However, the stasis is gestational; eventually, something will bloom or explode from the motionless. You might similarly see the poet as a collector of “loot stolen from random scavenges, feverish clippings, flat taxonomies of / birds and beings…”  Do you see poems as Cornell boxes? Could you riff a bit on this idea?

Susan de Sola: When I first discovered the nineteenth-century Frozen Charlotte ballads and lore, I was haunted by the doll which later became associated with her frozen corpse. Our relationship  to death is so different today. The doll speaks the poem through me and I myself still find the poem unnerving. So, I think some of my impulse is historical. What was the past? Or pasts, as the collection is wide-ranging. But the past, although it seems immobile, doesn’t stay put—as you formulate so well: “something will bloom or explode.”

Sometimes the explosion is comic, sometimes tragic, and most often, some amalgam of the two. Another thing that might be part of the “poet as a collector” is variety. I love the idea of a poem as a Cornell box. Frozen Charlotte has a great variety of subjects, modes and styles. A poem itself is not static but it is generally a small structure. It is read in time, and it is at every turn in some way anticipating its imminent end. Perhaps this is another counterpart to “a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational.”

 “Shrine for 16” uses the structure of Jubilate Agno as it describes a collection of objects on a teenage boy’s bureau. Can you discuss the importance of Christopher Smart to you?  Who are some other poets whose work you love most?

Susan de Sola: I think, like many, I am drawn to Smart because there is a great deal of wit and quotidian matter in his poetry alongside great spirituality. A cat, in all its marvelous and familiar wonder, is sketched in the majestic rhythms of the King James Bible. When I contemplated a 16 year old boy’s (my son’s) collection of treasures, I wrote about contemporary objects, but I can see that “Shrine for 16” is touched with similarly elevated but affectionate cadences: “For he has scattered a profusion of pot pipes… For his key ring bears the ancient profile of the Playboy bunny... For he waxes manly and grows boyish./For he grows.”

The writers I love most include the James Joyce of Ulysses, about which I’ve published several essays. It’s a novel, but one unmatched in its exploratory, concentrated language; its sounding of depths with humor. The poets I most often return to are Milton, Herrick, Dickinson, Yeats, Brodsky, Rilke, and the singular Marianne Moore. And I love writing that straddles the comic and the tragic—Shakespeare above all.

Susan, can you give us a poem from Frozen Charlotte to end this portion of the interview?

Susan de Sola: This is a love poem, and it flowed out nearly complete, but at the time I had read recently John Berger’s assertions in Ways of Looking that a central male nude has been fairly unthinkable in Western art, which favors the male spectator or gaze and the female object. He wrote that if we tried to imagine classic female nudes (by say, Titian or Manet) replaced by a central nude male figure, the results would do violence not to the paintings but to our assumptions. I think perhaps I wanted to take up the challenge. There are very few poems, too, that praise and make central the nude male body.

    Blind, She Considers Her Lover

    Six blind Indians felt the elephant
    and made of it six entities.
    So is my love, for in the dark,
    where half a marriage is spent,
    you are many.

    First there is that silky fringe
    of frontward falling hair—
    you are a horse, fetchingly groomed.
    You shake your head and your forelock falls
    forward, steed.

    Then there are your collarbones which roll,
    like the bone of shells rolled by water
    collected in pebbles and driftwood and weed—
    you are shells on a beach,
    resting in kelp-hollows.

    Then the smooth skin of your back
    and chest, it sings with softness.
    You are bolts and drapes of some rich fabric,
    organic weave of silk to velvet—
    yes, you are a draper’s treasure.

    Lower, there is warmth, and coils, springs;
    countless corkscrews of millimeter breadth.
    I would guess a fine steel wool,
    its gauge innumerable zeros.

    The legs are sturdy, lightly forested,
    surely they are lichened logs.

    Yet between the moss and the steel,
    the strangest skin, unlike any other,
    stretched, nerve-rich, another color.
    Even if I were a blind Indian I’d know it;
    it is itself, it is not like another.

Alexander, how did Able Muse Press come into being?

Alexander Pepple: I’d say that moving the first incarnation of the literary journal, Able Muse—a review of poetry, prose, and art, from an online-only publication to a print format with online excerpts, was a primary catalyst for Able Muse Press coming into being. The literary journal, which had been hitherto an online-only journal, released the Volta Issue, Number 9, in summer 2010. That issue was a significant milestone as the very last online edition. From there, we embarked on the challenge of moving the journal to print. Indeed, we were sort of going against the grain since there was more of a mass exodus at the time: with several print journals, both the lesser known and the popular, turning off their printers and moving their releases to online only.

Essentially, the press started with two critical titles, released near concurrently: the inaugural issue of Able Muse, print edition, in winter 2010; and the Able Muse Anthology (with a long subtitle of best of the poetry, fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry translation, art & photography, reflecting what is encompassed in a typical issue of Able Muse). Right after, we released poetry collections from two wonderful poets: Catherine Chandler with Lines of Flight and Wendy Videlock with Nevertheless. And the rest just took off from there.

What is the relationship between the press, the literary journal, and the online community of Eratosphere and related blogs?

 Alex Pepple: Eratosphere and the literary journal have a close history based on a shared raison d’être. At the time, there was a dearth of journals accepting and publishing metrical poetry and a plethora of those committed to free verse only. This was a time when I was participating rather actively in online literary discussion forums. Given that state of affairs, I wanted to provide some outlet and hope to the metrical poets, by somehow counterbalancing that trend with an avenue that primarily focused on metrical poetry. However, I decided that we should still be careful to welcome the outstanding free verse submitted, since I did not want to reflect the reverse of the then prevailing status quo. In those days—late 1999 to early 2000—personal websites were not as commonplace as they are now. One had to essentially design them from scratch or through a website design company, which was, more often than not, tasking in time and skill, not to mention financially. There was none of today’s proliferation of appliance-style click-and-publish free web services for the masses such as Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress and the like. However, I did have an advantage—the technical knowhow and the facility with website creation. Thus, I was able to construct fairly quickly a forum website that stood out from most of the offering of the time in its aesthetics, ease of use, and convenience. With that, Eratosphere came into being, rapidly attracting a good number of members. Right after, I leveraged the work I’d done toward releasing Eratosphere, and the result was the Able Muse website, primed and ready for the release of the first online edition, Able Muse, Première Issue, autumn 1999.

There has been a shift in the literary landscape since that early history of Able Muse and Eratosphere, given that most journals out there now do allow metrical poetry to some degree . . . at least infrequently. I’d like to think that Able Muse has had a hand in encouraging that openness, both in terms of providing a platform for some of the best metrical poetry written today, and in terms of heightening the craft in that arena through the Eratosphere online literary workshop. The high selectivity of the material published at the literary journal, some of which was occasionally plucked from Eratosphere, has also raised expectations for the quality of metrical work in general, one hopes. The high level of the metrical poetry published in Able Muse is evidenced in the fact the poems from the journal have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology series, in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, the Writer’s Almanac, and other popular venues.

The Able Muse annual contests encompass the journal and the press in that the winners of the Able Muse Write Prize for poetry and fiction, in addition to the contest’s monetary prize, also earn publication by the journal; and the winner of the Able Muse Book Award likewise achieves publication of their manuscript by the press in addition to the contest’s monetary award.

Some of it may sound confusing, but remember, if you mistakenly send communication intended for one of our entities to any of the others, we’ll slip it in the correct slot for you without your having to intervene or make any self-corrections.

Tell us about the Able Muse back catalog. What do Able Muse books have in common?

Alexander Pepple: Our catalog contains mostly poetry collections, a few fiction collections, and fewer novels. I should add that there’s also Word Galaxy Press now, which is an imprint of Able Muse Press. It’s more flexible in terms of the styles and the execution of the poetry and fiction accepted there versus at Able Muse Press proper, which is more stringent in its requirements. There’s our bigger list of more or less regular poetry collections—such as the posthumous poetry collection Character Shoes from Kate Light and that of the late British poet Margaret Ann Griffiths, Grasshopper, and the recent poetry collections: Indigenous by Jennifer Reeser, And After All by Rhina P. Espaillat, The Cupped Field (winner of the 2018 Able Muse Book Award) by Deirdre O’Connor, Time Is Always Now by Rebecca Starks (a finalist in the 2018 Able Muse Book Award), Saint Worm by Hailey Leithauser, and more.

We also have a smaller set of rather unique collections, illustrated and otherwise. These include a collection of poems by Ed Shacklee illustrated by Russ Spitkovsky (The Blind Loon: A Bestiary), a self-illustrated poetry collection by Wendy Videlock (The Dark Gnu and Other Poems), a collection of carmina figurata from Jan D. Hodge (Taking Shape: Carmina Figurata); there’s a book of selected poems from Emily Grosholz (The Stars of Earth, through Word Galaxy Press); there are fiction collections from Hollis Seamon (Corporeality: Stories), from William Baer (Times Square and Other Stories), and from A.G. Harmon (Some Bore Gifts: Stories); we have a novel series from William Baer (New Jersey Noir); and there are books of translation of classic poetry by John Ridland: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Modern English Translation and Pearl: A New Verse Translation in Modern English, both originally in Middle English by the anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain Poet; and I'm particularly proud of our anthology of translations, which was in the form of a special translation issue of the literary journal, guest-edited by acclaimed poet and translator Charles Martin: Able Muse, Translation Anthology Issue, Summer 2014 (No. 17—Print Edition). And there’s the book that started it all in 2010, the Able Muse Anthology.

Yes, we do have a diverse collection of books, but they have commonality in the exacting copyediting standards, for which we’ve been commended by several knowing readers, and for which the press itself has been honored with awards. There is also consistency in the high level of design for our books, made manifest in the high-impact book covers with a minimal-style presentation, as well as a consistent look of the interior, cutting down on frill and clutter for an engaging read with minimal distraction.

Another commonality for our books is that we’re not only highly selective about the manuscripts that we choose to publish—and thus, end up only publishing the very small number of books that meet our standards—but we also lavish much attention on their copyediting and design, resulting in books of a quality comparable to or better than those of any press out there, large or small. Hence, in just in a few years of operation, Able Muse Press has garnered some impressive recognition, including the following: One of the only two books we published in the first year was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and the other was shortlisted for the Poet’s Prize. Since then, our books have won the following honors: the Gold Medal for the Independent Publisher Outstanding Book Award, the Peace Corps Writers Best Book Award; finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award (multiple times); shortlist for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Alex Award; finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ Best Book of the Year; shortlist for the Canada Council for the Arts’ Governor General’s Literary Awards; shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize; Honorable Mention for the Posner Poetry Book Award; Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, which included an award to the press itself for excellence in editing, printing and publishing. All of the above are in addition to placing at least two books yearly in the West Chester Poetry Conference First Book Panel, and garnering several positive reviews or placements in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac, Library Journal, Foreword Reviews and many more. In other words, the press might be small in size, but not in its accomplishment and that of the poets and writers it chooses to publish.

Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from Able Muse Press.

Alexander Pepple: There is Book Two of William Baer’s New Jersey Noir novel series coming out in the next few weeks (late December 2019 to early January 2020). We’re really excited about this second release of the series, as are the fans and readers who enjoyed Book One and are eagerly awaiting the sequel. Of the first book, the five-star review from Foreword Reviews says: “New Jersey Noir introduces an ultracool hometown detective from Paterson, set perfectly in his well-detailed locales. The writing is crisp, sarcastic, wryly funny, steeped in New Jersey lore and anecdotes that add great historical and cultural dimensions to its mystery.” There are the poetry collections In Code by Maryann Corbett and Sally Thomas’s Motherland—a finalist in last year’s Able Muse Book Award contest. This is a collection sparkling with spirituality, moments of transformation, and memorable scenes from the commonplace and everyday life. There are also two notable forthcoming titles from our Word Galaxy Press imprint. The first is Spooky Action at a Distance by David Alpaugh, a collection of double-title poems. Kathleen Lynch says, it “offers readers a cornucopia of delights, complications, and some truly moving insights—all in an intriguing new form of his own invention. Alpaugh’s double-title form shows how two titles can be separate, like two photons miles apart, yet ‘entangled’ in meaning.” The second book from Word Galaxy is one of captivating drawings by James Kochalka, beautifully versified by Sydney Lea—The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy. Also planned for release in the near future are the posthumous collections Selected Poems and The Rule That Liberates: An Expanded Edition—Selected Essays, both by Richard Moore; and Progressions of the Mind, a posthumous collection of poems by David Berman.

---

Alexander Pepple founded and edits Able Muse and Able Muse Press, and also founded and directs the Eratosphere online worskshop. His poetry and prose have been or will be published in Barrow Street, River Styx, American Arts Quarterly, Light, Think Journal, Euphony, Per Contra, La Petite Zine, San Pedro River Review and elsewhere. He edited the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).

Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press) is her first collection. Her poems have appeared widely, in journals such as The Hudson Review, PN Review and The Dark Horse, and in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2018. The 2018 winner of the Frost Farm Prize, she has also been a finalist for the Autumn House (withdrawn) and Morton Marr poetry prizes, and is a past winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She is a faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference, where she has also been a Poet in Residence, and is Assistant Poetry Editor at Able Muse. She will be a featured poet at the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival.

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

 

 

"Trickeration" [by David Barber]

TRICKERATION

            Cab Calloway, Cotton Club (1931)

Rhythm, look what you went and done.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.
The sneaky one, the snaky one,
The breakneck one, the hellbent one.
Rhythm, you are the guilty one.

Rhythm, you are a loaded gun.
Rhythm, you’ve left me all undone.
Rhythm, you are the slinky one,
The funky one, the freaky one,
The harum one, the scarum one.

Rhythm, I took you one on one.
Now look at what you’ve gone and done.
Rhythm, you are the righteous one,
The badass one, the brass-balls one.
Rhythm, you are the one who’s won.

Rhythm, I am the broken one,
The token done-in chosen one.
Rhythm, you are the golden one
To everyone, the only one
Who showed me how it should be done.

Rhythm, you call us and we run
To something new under the sun.
Rhythm, you are the dodgy one,
The deadly one, the guilty one.
Rhythm, look what you’ve gone and done.

from Secret History by David Barber (Northwestern University Press, 2020). Photo: Cab Calloway.

Author's note: 

The jive dance song “Trickeration” was recorded by Cab Calloway and His Orchestra in New York in October 1931, the same year Calloway’s band was hired by the Cotton Club as a replacement for the touring Duke Ellington Orchestra. In short order, the Calloway and Ellington ensembles were installed as the club’s two house bands. The poem draws on both the lyrics of “Trickeration” and Calloway’s 1938 book Hepster’s Dictionary: The Language of Jive.

Editor's note:

David Barber is a maestro of the music of poetry, as this poem and others in his new book ("Aria." for instance) demonstrate. His control of the forms and techniques of verse is exemplary and makes Secret History a delight. Barber, who has appeared twice in The Best American Poetry series, is the author of two previous books and is the poetry editor of The Atlantic. He teaches writing at Harvard University. 

Lawrence Joseph on "One Hundred Autobiographies"

The poet Lawrence Joseph was asked to name the book or books he liked best in 2019. He picked Toi Derricotte’s I: New and Selected Poems ("30 new poems, and generous selections from Derricotte’s five important earlier books of poetry") and Jana Prikryl’s No Matter ("her second book of poems, set primarily in a post-2016 presidential election New York City)."

His third choice: "A book of nonfiction by one of our best poets—David Lehman’s One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir. While in throes of fighting cancer, Lehman wrote every day he could, as a way of imaginatively affirming his existence and escaping the terrible ordeals of pain, dread, and emotional chaos. First of all figuring out a formal strategy, as expert poets do, Lehman then crafts a brilliant, inventive portrait of a mind, in language in which everything counts. The book’s moral seriousness and theological and ancestral powers provide extreme aesthetic pleasure—Lehman’s forms of language are forms of life, always life. One Hundred Autobiographies teaches and instructs its fortunate readers, like all great literature, which it is. "

— Lawrence Joseph, Lit Hub

Ace Boggess Reviews “Playlist”

Playlist by David Lehman

Top of Form

Ace Boggess's review

Apr 07, 2019

I read this book in one sitting, interrupted only by a brief smoke break, and probably will read it again today. I enjoyed it that much. While Playlist purports to be “a poem,” each segment a meditation on the music of a day, I found it more a collection and, most importantly, a return to form for poet David Lehman, recapturing the magic of the daily poems from his books The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun. These pieces thrum and muse. They dance. They mourn. The poems (or segments) are kinetic and playful. They carry the reader along at full speed but nonetheless with full stops in between. I've often said that one of the best aspects a poet can have is the ability to show reverence and irreverence for the same subject at the same time. Lehman is a master of this. In “12/21/17” amidst the sadness of nostalgia for deceased friends A.R. Ammons and John Ashbery, Lehman writes:

“and later that day I wrote
a poem for John Ashbery
let's have it, he said.
okay I said here goes
and John said he liked it
particularly the third line
(the poem was two lines long)”

This book is filled with remembrances of these poets, but also the joys of music and old movies. Playlist is such a wonderful book to read. I only wish it were a hundred pages longer.

by Ace Boggess 

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2763087182  

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2763087182?fbclid=IwAR1vF5w9gPP2bAkcxjK1ajLV-6xTVBTo8GK3v7zPceyjgPVHp9fJrmuKDDU

http://www.gyroscopereview.com/2017/07/843/

 

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

[A Book Recommendation by Dante Di Stefano]

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Ed. Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

In his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump,” published in the November issue of Poetry magazine, three time Best American Poetry contributor Martín Espada argues that in “the bicentennial of democracy’s bard,” Whitman’s democratic vision might provide Americans of the twenty-first century with a means to navigate the murk of a demagogic presidency and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Espada underscores that Whitman’s vision of democracy involved radical openness (“Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs”), empathy (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and polyvocality (“Through me many long dumb voices”). “Filthy Presidentiad” also juxtaposes Leaves of Grass against the current border crisis and examines Whitman’s legacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from José Martí to the aftermath of Hurricane María. Espada ends with a discussion of his own poem “Letter to My Father,” itself a reminder to “resist much / obey little,” a sentiment that would have resonated with the poem’s subject, Frank Espada, noted community activist, photographer, and creator of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. In short, “Filthy Presidentiad” is required reading for anyone who loves poetry, justice, courage, and freedom.

“Filthy Presidentiad” provides a clarifying lens through which to view Espada’s recent projects as poet and anthologist. Like “Letter to My Father,” Espada’s recent poem, “Floaters,” (published in the November issue of Poetry magazine) owes something to Whitman in its formal structure; more importantly, “Floaters” enacts Whitman’s injunction to poets of the future “to dauntlessly confront…injustice” and to “counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America.” “Floaters” reflects on the deaths of twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, Salvadoran migrants whose corpses were found and photographed face down after drowning in the Río Grande. The poem also examines the callous rhetoric of the “I’m10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group in response to the viral images of the tragedy. A few days ago, a far-right white supremacist website published an essay attacking Espada’s poem, “Floaters” and his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad.” At first glance, it might seem odd that such an attack would even happen, but, on further consideration, Espada’s poem, and his essay, represent an existential threat any group whose continuance depends on foisting indignities and silence onto those it deems its enemies. As with Whitman, the threads that connect the stars in Espada’s “Floaters” (and in “Filthy Presidentiad”) are the moral filaments of a great unbridled wildly diffuse imaginative sympathy.

Every poem in Martín Espada’s new anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press), expresses and embodies a similar form of imaginative sympathy. As Espada notes in his preface: “This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. To be sure, there are poems about Trump and his pathological demagoguery, or that rose in the throat of the poet the day after his election, some in mourning, some organizing the next protest.” However, the poems in these pages are not mere screeds, they are not solely jeremiads, they are more than the timebound marginalia of a miasmatic political era; surely, these are poems of witness in the sense that Carolyn Forché—a contributor to Espada’s volume—famously articulated in her introduction to her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting. This poetry of witness—poetry that is political but not broadly polemical, poetry that is evidentiary and resilient—is the kind of poetry Espada has been writing and anthologizing for his entire career in letters; this kind of political poetry flourishes now, perhaps, more than ever before in the history of American poetry. Espada’s long apprenticeship to Whitman, and to witnessing, ensures a critical rigor in the selection of poems included in the new anthology’s pages. Each poem in What Saves Us is what Julia Alvarez—another contributor—calls “an abacus of conscience” in her poem “Refugee Women.”

The range of poets and poems in What Saves Us astounds even as it fortifies; reading this collection from cover to cover, one walks away feeling more empathetic than outraged. At the heart of this anthology, the magnanimous golden splinter of a hard earned duende directs the reader’s gaze toward a hopeful future. This unexpected hopefulness arises perhaps because even the poems that predate the Trump regime in this volume—Elizabeth Alexander’s “Smile,” Donald Hall’s “A Prophecy of Amos,” Marilyn Nelson’s “Honor Guard,” Robert Pinsky’s “Serpent Knowledge,” and Daisy Zamora’s “Death Abroad,” to name a notable few—“assert,” as Espada puts it in his preface, “our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.” torrin a. greathouse’s “On Confinement” exemplifies the assertion of a common humanity in the face of state-sanctioned brutality as it explores the subjectivity of a trans woman forced to do time in a men’s jail, “where to fail at death / would be a breach // of my probation.” Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” similarly stands out as it details a university professor’s interactions with a privileged conservative student; this student “doesn’t know who / Fannie Lou Hamer is / and never has to.” Moon reframes the political, social, economic, and racial divides in contemporary America within the context of national and personal histories, as when the speaker of the poem moves from discussing her parents to wondering about her ancestors:

    How did they survive
    so much worse, the millions
    with all of their scars!
    What would these rivers be
    without their weeping,
    these streets without
    their faith & sweat?

Like “Fannie Lou Hamer” John Murillo’s poem, selected by Natasha Tretheway for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2017, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” hinges on an invocation of the speaker’s parents, which leads to a deeper investigation of what Espada phrases, in his preface, as “the indoctrination of violence that must be uprooted within us.”

Many poems in What Saves Us signal a comparable kind of uprooting. Leslie McGrath’s “Rage Bracelet” uproots the deeply ingrained nightmare logic of patriarchy: “every landscape wants a shadow / every abbatoir a drain.” Luivette Resto’s two poems uproot the fears connected with motherhood in a misogynistic and racist culture.  Maria Nazos’s two poems uproot xenophobia and domestic violence with an admirable formal dexterity. Richard Michelson’s “Fake News” uproots anti-Semitism and alternative facts from Chaucer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Chen Chen’s “The School of Logic” uproots homophobia. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s “The Social Worker’s Advice” uproots the hardheartedness of institutionalized mercy, arguing for an empathy that bears neck to fang. The most Whitmanesque of poems anthologized in this book, Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” uproots the very notion of inauguration on Inauguration Day 2017. Girmay’s poem contains multitudes, and its varied carols end:

    You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting,
    in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking
    out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here,
    witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage,
    which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love           You are
    who I love           You and you and you are who

Read What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump if only to celebrate “the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all,” so full of tenderness, fury, and love.

---

Note: Below I’ve included four poems from the anthology: Richard Blanco’s “Dreaming a Wall,” Danielle Legros Georges’s “Shithole,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s “Daddy, We Called You,” and the title poem, Bruce Weigl’s “What Saves Us.” The anthology also includes poems by Patricia Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ocean Vuong, Tim Seibles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alicia Ostriker, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Afaa Michael Weaver, Danez Smith, Kwame Dawes, Chase Twichell, Paul Mariani, Rafael Campo, Jane Hirshfield, Jim Daniels, Brian Clements, and many more. See the full list of contributors here. I am grateful and humbled to have two of my own poems included in such estimable company. ~Dante Di Stefano

    Richard Blanco

    Dreaming a Wall

    I would build a great wall, and nobody    
    builds walls better than me, believe me…
                                        —Donald Trump

    He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his
    are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes
    his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.
    He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller
    and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out
    the nameless faces next door that he calls
    liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill
    for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps
    a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery
    colors of their homes, too small and too close
    to his own, painted white, with room to spare.
    He curses the giggles of their children always
    barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs.
    He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses
    to let light from their windows pollute his eyes
    with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining
    at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room,
    the goodnight kisses through every bedroom.
    Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news
    he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel
    to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor
    of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream
    where he stakes a line between him and all
    his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would
    their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red
    earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones
    with his bare fists and buries them in concrete.
    Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid
    heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes
    the last course high enough to imagine them
    more miserable and lonely than him alone
    inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn,
    breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.

 

    Danielle Legros Georges

    Shithole

    eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    I am the interrupter, hijacking your train
    of thoughts. call me maldito, cabrón,

    La Bestía. Get on top of me and I’ll throw
    you off after you beg. I’ll ride you like

    a borrowed mule. Drive you across the river
    and sell you up it. Call me coyote. Call me

    wolf. Call me whatever the fuck animal
    you like. Missionary. Priest. Call me

    Mr. President. I’m all green. A blue gasp.
    I’m the womb sterilizer, syringe and suction.

    I’ll drown you in a teaspoon of potassium
    chloride. I was born an abomination

    At the age of one I crawled out of the Congo
    dragging my sack full of hands.

    At the age of two I mechanized my scythe.
    At the age of three I wove myself a cape of flies.

    At the age of four I blow the noses off
    Sphinxes and studied the hieroglyphs

    of your tomb. At the age of five I became
    an angel, cunning, big-eared. at the age

    of six I shot down the moon then I shot down
    the sun. I am a nuclear bomb set for noon,

    the paratext of your nightmare,
    the translator of your tribulation.

    I am a constipation. The worm nestled
    in your colon. The parasite entering

    your left ear. The sweetest liar. The drone
    of your inner war. The architect of your gas

    chamber. The poisoner of your water.
    The multiplier. I am the radioactive

    sphincter. the unthinkable, intolerable
    bleached ass.

 

    Maria Mazziotti Gillan

    Daddy, We Called You

    “Daddy” we called you, “Daddy”
    when we talked to each other in the street,
    pulling on our American faces,
    shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

    Inside our house, we spoke
    a Southern Italian dialect
    mixed with English
    and we called you “Papa”

    but outside again, you became Daddy
    and we spoke of you to our friends
    as “my father”
    imagining we were speaking
    of that “Father Knows Best”
    T.V. character
    in his dark business suit,
    carrying his briefcase into his house,
    retreating to his paneled den,
    his big living room and dining room,
    his frilly-aproned wife
    who greeted him at the door
    with a kiss. Such space

    and silence in that house.
    We lived in one big room-
    living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,
    all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table
    around which we sat, talking and laughing,
    listening to your stories,
    your political arguments with your friends,

    Papa, how you glowed in company light,
    happy when the other immigrants
    came to you for help with their taxes
    or legal papers.

    It was only outside that glowing circle
    that I denied you, denied your long hours
    as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.
    One night, riding home from a date,
    my middle class, American boyfriend
    kissed me at the light; I looked up
    and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

    near Royal Machine. It was nearly midnight.
    January. Cold and Windy. You were waiting
    for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
    your face. I pretended I did not see you,
    let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you
    on the empty corner waiting for the bus
    to take you home. You never mentioned it,
    never said that you knew
    how often I lied about what you did for a living
    or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
    find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

    Today, remembering that moment,
    still illuminated in my mind
    by the streetlamp's gray light,
    I think of my own son
    and the distance between us,
    greater than miles.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    I honor the years you spent in menial work
    slipping down the ladder
    as your body failed you

    while your mind, so quick and sharp,
    longed to escape,
    honor the times you got out of bed
    after sleeping only an hour,
    to take me to school or pick me up;
    the warm bakery rolls you bought for me
    on the way home from the night shift.

    the letter
    you wrote
    to the editors
    of local newspapers.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    better than any "Father Knows Best" father,
    bland as white rice,
    with your wine press in the cellar,
    with the newspapers you collected
    out of garbage piles to turn into money
    you banked for us,
    with your mouse traps,
    with your cracked and calloused hands,
    with your yellowed teeth.

    Papa,
    dragging your dead leg
    through the factories of Paterson,
    I am outside the house now,
    shouting your name.

 

    Bruce Weigl

    What Saves Us

    We are wrapped around each other in
    the back of my father's car parked
    in the empty lot of the high school
    of our failures, the sweat on her neck
    like oil. The next morning, I would leave
    for the war and I thought I had something
    coming for that, I thought to myself
    that I would not die never having
    been inside her long body. I pulled
    her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
    inside out by the storm. I pulled
    her cotton panties up as high as
    she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
    was in sight. We were drowning on our
    tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
    when she stopped so suddenly
    we were surrounded only by my shuddering
    and by the school bells grinding in the
    empty halls. She reached to find something,
    a silver crucifix on a silver
    chain, the tiny savior's head hanging
    and stakes through his hands and his feet.
    She put it around my neck and held
    me so long the black wings of my heart
    were calmed. We are not always right
    about what we think will save us.
    I thought that dragging the angel down would
    save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
    in my pocket and rubbed it on my
    face and lips nights the rockets roared in.

    People die sometimes so near you
    you feel them struggling to cross over,
    the deep untangling, of one body from another.

---

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

". . . an excellent blurb line is, "i put this book in my son's/daughter's suitcase when he/she went of to Harvard/Yale/Berkeley." it shows you have a family, which makes many people feel closer to you, and it also shows that you trust the book enough to put in in the hands of your kids -- in whom you have a huge financial investment.

another good line is, 'if you read only one book this year, make it this one.' Because that sort of gives them permission not to buy any more books this year. but if it's getting close to the end of the calendar year this line could look funny -- in that case make sure you say 'if you only read one book this fiscal year....' "

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.”