The Best American Poetry

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

Photo © Alex Pieros.

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

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

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

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Arson Prevention Program [by Shanna Compton]

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

The river continues
as though no one
were missing

The country moves toward
violet abutments

ever adjacent
to the idea we
once had of ourselves
redacted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

>>>>

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

Announcing "101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium" [eds. Matthew E. Silverman and Nancy Naomi Carlson]

101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium edited by Matthew E. Silverman and Nancy Naomi Carlson (Ashland Poetry Press) is here.

The editors write:

<<< In the face of rising antisemitism, we feel this anthology is necessary now more than ever.

We have selected one poem from 101 contemporary poets, both Jewish and not Jewish, writing with a Jewish sensibility. Our contributors include both the next generation of Jewish voices, as well as established voices, including such notables as Ellen Bass, Bruce Bond, Sharon Dolin, Marilyn Hacker, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, Ilya Kaminsky, Joy Ladin, David Lehman, Matthew Lippman, Jean Nordhaus, Alicia Ostriker, Linda Pastan and Marge Piercy. We have tried to cover a wide variety of themes, with only one or two poems devoted to the same topic, including inter-marriage, the Holocaust, Jewish rituals (including burial customs), Sabbath and holiday traditions, Torah, Midrash, traditional Jewish foods, Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino, and anti-Semitism, among many other themes.

What makes this anthology unique is that there is no definitive anthology of contemporary Jewish poetry that represents over 100 poets writing from the year 2000 and on, as well as the fact that the majority of these poems have never before appeared in print. >>>

"Traditional and radical, secular and holy, the poems in 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium come to us just as we need them. The poets here celebrate a culture and caution against hatred, all the while making incredible art. Silverman and Carlson have gathered a stellar and diverse group of poets and poetic visions. "

 —Denise Duhamel

About the Editors:

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, essayist, and editor.An Infusion of Violets, her second full-length poetry collection, was published by Seagull Books (2019), and named a “New & Noteworthy” title by the New York Times Book Review. 

Matthew E. Silverman teaches at Gordon State College and he is editor of Blue Lyra Press. He is co-editor, with Deborah Ager, of Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. 

from the book:

Gennady Katsov
An Invective

Do not build cities where cemeteries once stood:
In their infrastructures, their pipes and foundations,
Horror still grows that oozes out of the corpses,
And the storehouse of faith and infidelity clogs up.
Do not build cities over places of execution,
Nor over sanctuaries, and never over a battlefield,
For no desire will be so fulfilled, for what’s to come,
Its outcome will be made only more atrocious.
Nor should cities be established in times of confusion
Or during periods of crisis, or havoc, or epidemic:
They will emerge like phantoms out of nightmares
In the form of bats that come to one in bad dreams.
And this someone who will eventually awaken among
Necropoli, places of execution, barracks, Place d’Armes,
That are everywhere and always, deeded to the future,
Will not stumble over streets paved with grave stones.

Translated from the Russian by Alex Cigale

Meet the Press: Tupelo Press Anthologizes Poetry of the Pandemic

Dante Di Stefano: Tupelo Press just released the anthology Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic. Could you tell us a bit about this anthology and its genesis?

Kristina Marie Darling:  I had the privilege of co-editing Four Quartets with Tupelo Press’s Publisher & Artistic Director, Jeffrey Levine.  When curating the anthology, we wanted to showcase the many different styles and aesthetic approaches that writers have taken in depicting what is essentially a shared experience.  To that end, we chose sixteen chapbook-length folios, including two collaborative folios; a folio in translation from the original Korean; innovative folios like Dora Malech’s postmodern lyrics and Mary Jo Bang’s captivating hybrid text; and folios that honor tradition and reframe it for a thoroughly contemporary cultural moment, like Jon Davis’s Pandemia and Maggie Queeney’s The Patient.  Though some of the work was specially commissioned for the anthology, we felt it was important to also hold an open call.  In the end, we were humbled by not only the sheer volume of submissions, but the artistic vision and the quality of the writing.  This open call enabled us to present twelve established voices alongside four exciting new ones.  And because we received so many outstanding submissions, we featured many of the poets in Tupelo Quarterly’s most recent issue, TQ22. 

DD: Four Quartets, as you note in the introduction to the anthology, bears witness to life during the pandemic. It is timebound, historic, and (what Carolyn Forché has called) evidentiary in ways that other anthologies are not. Stephanie Strickland’s poem “Time-Capsule Contents” underscores, in its title, the preservative impulse of the anthology. There was also a very quick turn-around from conception to publication for this book. Could you talk about how these factors influenced your editorial work on this project?

KMD:  To help deliver such a timely book at the right moment, so that readers see their lived experience reflected in the poetry, was an honor and a privilege. In this moment of pandemic, protest, upheaval, and isolation, we felt it was important to present a project that cultivates community through the literary arts.  We at Tupelo Press have been thrilled to see Four Quartets achieving this goal, our recent zoom launch being one example.  It was heartening to see over eighty enthusiastic guests who came out to celebrate poetry—which has been, truly, a light in dark times. 

Let me just say that the completion of this timely anthology would not have been possible without Tupelo Press’s gifted staff, which includes Allison O’Keefe & Jacob Valenti, Operations Administrators; David Rossitter, Managing Editor; Kirsten Miles, Director of the 30/30 Project; Alan Berolzheimer, Consulting Editor; & Emily Bruenig, Fulfillment Coordinator.  They were instrumental in designing the anthology, sending out proofs, and gathering materials such as author bios and photos, but also fulfilling the donor rewards for the Kickstarter campaign that made the book possible.

DD: There are two collaborative section in this book, the excerpts from a long poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung and the poems co-written by Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito. This type of collaboration seems particularly moving and effective during a time of physical distancing. Could you discuss what you found most notable in these collaborations?

KMD:  It’s exciting to see the ways that technology has invited a spirit of collaboration even in this difficult cultural moment.  Traci and Brynn actually completed their co-authored folio long distance, so what a thrill to see them perform together during our Zoom launch.  Yusef and Laren also gave a captivating collaborative reading during our online celebration, and how great that people from all over the world could experience these wonderful performances, which shine a light on both artistic intention and collaborative process. 

DD: How did you decide on the organization/ordering of the anthology?

KMD:  We sequenced the anthology to highlight thematic and stylistic continuities.  We also wanted to create a narrative arc through the arrangement of the poetry, beginning with writers bearing witness to our current moment in the most powerful of ways, and then, moving forward to inspire a sense of hope, community, and generosity of spirit.  For this reason, we felt it was important to place Denise Duhamel’s Strength near the end of the book, for example, along with Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito’s Wild Recovery & Rick Barot’s wonderful prose pieces. 

DD: B.A. Van Sise’s stunning photographs have their own section. How do these images contextualize and converse with the poems in the anthology?

KMD:  I think of the anthology as a ledger of both history and community, of solitude and the lyric imagination.  In this respect, the photographs serve a necessary documentary purpose, while at the same time affirming the confluence of literature and the fine arts, of the ways that poetry can be illuminated by other mediums and disciplines.

DD: South Korean poet, Lee Young-Ju, translated by Jae Kim, is the only international voice in the volume. Can you talk about her poetry and the dialogue it opens with American pandemic poetry?

KMD:  I was excited to see Lee Young-ju and Jae Kim’s submission because of the sheer beauty and innovation of the poetry and the incredible skill of the translation.  But also, it places the American writers in the volume in a global context, while also evoking a sense of shared community and grief across the boundaries of nationality, language, and identity. 

DD: In the introduction to Four Quartets, you reaffirm Tupelo Press’s commitment to supporting underrepresented groups. Can you tell us more about this commitment?

KMD:  I’m so glad that you asked about this.  In addition to Four Quartets, Tupelo Press published the first anthology of indigenous American poetry in over twenty years, which places gorgeous creative work alongside essays on craft and artistic tradition.  The anthology, Native Voices, was co-edited by CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader.  Our catalogue is comprised of over 60% women and non-binary writers, compared to other university and trade publishers, whose ratio hovers around 30 or 40%. 

Additionally, when I first joined the staff of Tupelo Press, I felt it was important to expand and diversify our editorial process, and to that end, we have implemented panels of preliminary judges for each of our contests.  More specifically, we have hosted panels of all women and non-binary poets, as well as panels comprised of a majority of writers of color.  These preliminary judges, who represent artistic excellence across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and aesthetic standpoint, offer an opportunity to bring additional perspectives and voices into our editorial discussions.  This practice ultimately challenges me as an editor to expand my sensibility, my thinking about poetry, and to interrogate my own aesthetic preferences.  

DD: What was the most surprising, edifying, or otherwise remarkable aspect of editing this anthology?

KMD: Even in a time of isolation, it’s been wonderful to see the many forms that collaboration can take, whether it’s co-authoring a ghazal, translating, deconstructing a larger literary tradition, or reframing an artistic inheritance for our current cultural moment.  I’ve enjoyed seeing poets in conversation with visual artists and with one another, but also, it’s been inspiring to witness artistic exchange and literary community persisting even in the most adverse of circumstances.  

DD: Since this is a Meet the Press interview, can you tell us a bit about the history of the press and your involvement with it?

KMD: Jeffrey Levine founded Tupelo Press 22 years ago and released our first 5 books in 2021. Since then, we’ve published approximately 275 additional titles, and to great acclaim, always taking such care that the look and feel of our books matched the brilliance of the writing. We’ve launched so many important careers, including Ilya Kaminsky, Jennifer Militello, Matthew Zapruder, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Maggie Smith, and on and on. We’re especially proud of our recent anthologies, Native Voices and Four Quartets, and of our long-standing commitment to provide a platform for women, people of color, and LGBTQ writers.

Since joining the staff of Tupelo Press, first as Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and later as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, I’ve been intrigued by the ways that our books bridge the gap between literature and the fine arts, whether through the creation of artisan quality editions, or through collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.  Tupelo Quarterly, the online literary publication of Tupelo Press, was created to deepen this aspect of the press’s mission and extend its presence into the digital realm.  In recent years, we’ve created a singular space for collaborative texts, poetry films, cinepoetry, sound poems, and more. 

DD: What should readers look forward to from Tupelo Press?

KMD:   I have to say, our current list of new and forthcoming titles is one of our strongest yet. We will be publishing a book of poetry and archival collages by Katy Didden: as well as Chee Brossy’s first full-length collection, Stegner fellow Corey Van Landingham’s second book, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens; Laurel Nakanishi’s Berkshire Prize winning collection, Ashore; a book of stunning visual poetry by Naoko Fujimoto; and a debut book of poetry by Kelly Webber, whose sheer talent and graceful metaphors astonished us during our recent July Open Reading Period. 

DD: Here are four brilliant poems from the anthology. I wanted to end with these because they are among my favorite in the anthology and because they give a hint of the range and caliber of poetry contained therein.

---

Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito

    Dear Past

    I couldn’t do it again, that worrying. Time before 
    our wild recovery, before I learned
    my prayers in the gray kingdom, before shelter
    was a signal for burning eyelids 
    and grief tea. Tribes more ancient than memory 
    walk through you. They wander 
    the thinnest sky, place between pen and page, 
    neighbor and trigger, frontline 
    and garden: whole homelands exist 
    on faith alone. I couldn’t do it again: 
    all of the forgetting, my spirit fleeing my body 
    for another present. Do I forgive you? 
    You carry my grandmothers. I carry verses. Your panic 
    is almost mine, but I refuse 
    the enemy’s image. Truce is a mask 
    made of pressed flowers. Daughters unleash 
    a nation of broken sons. Dear replica 
    shotgun, dear unroped memory: Did I suffer enough?

---

Shane McCrae

    When Our Grandchildren Ask Us What America Was Like Before

    We lived in giant     tin eagles we used rags

    Wrapped around human bones as torches we were dogs

    Each dog in its own bird     we didn’t speak

    To each other but     yes we could talk

    Yes they could hear us yes     they didn’t answer

    Our questions     but they heard

    Us we spoke light     to light the corners too     dark for the torches

    Those shadows even light     from burning bones won’t touch     yes

 

    A god’s shadow     is cast inside

    Its body     no they weren’t gods

    No     more like noises made     music by dancers

    We made the shadows then     we searched

    The shadows then we made new shadows when we danced

    Again     we spoke around the torches no     we could-

    n’t hold them like you would we had     no hands

    We held them burning in our teeth and smiled

---

Denise Duhamel

    The Unreturning, 2020    
        (after Wilfred Owen)

    The prez calls us THUGS, has his henchmen hurl
    Teargas and flash bombs. Then he builds a Wall/
    “Baby gate” around the White House. Appalled,
    We adorn it, lauding the afterworld

    With wreathes and crosses, signs reading “Stay Woke,”
    “I can’t breathe.” His last minutes, George Floyd called
    To his momma. Tamir Rice was enthralled
    With his BB gun. Cops kick in bike spokes

    Of Brooklyn protesters. Last May, at dawn
    Police shoot Dominique Clayton, remind-
    Ing us it’s not safe to sleep while black. Drained
    Of life—Michael Brown, Sandra Bland. Guns drawn,
    Tasers zapping, America’s vile blind
    Spot. This hothouse, this “pushing daisies” chain.

---

Dora Malech

    After “The Day After My Father’s Death”

        to keep the other children safe
        from my infectious grief
        they left me in lockdown
                —Bill Knott

    Explain quarantine to children,
    says the headline. If they could
    read, we could leave the truth
    lying around for them to trip
    over, but these little ones are
    still blank and shiny as their own
    wet thumbs, so we say
    this is a one-time thing.
    We’re near the end.
    We can see them again soon,
    meaning each missed
    someone. Soon, near, one,
    can, we say. Those were the
    generic words the mini-mart
    had, so we stocked up quick,
    watched rain drip off the roof.

---

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-five books, which include Look to Your Left:  A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2021); Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2021); Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; DIFFICULT:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry (Black Ocean, forthcoming); ANGEL OF THE NORTH (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming); and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which will be launched by Persea Books in the United States.  Penguin Random House Canada will also publish a Canadian edition.  Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; five residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors.

Conversation by the Sea [by Vincent Katz]

What do you feel makes life okay?
You are constantly feeling older.
The way people speak is changing.
You no longer know what they want.

What do you mean by that word
Respect? I mean knowing my life
Has been lived for a purpose.
Or purposes. I wake up and think,

All is gone. But then the clarity
Of morning reveals it is not.
Something is here more valuable
Than diamonds, than fame.

What is that something? Do you see
Yourself in other places? I am
Trying not to imagine other places,
But rather to inhabit the place

I actually inhabit. If I am able
To transfer comfort to others, able
To let those younger take the reins,
Then, perhaps, I can live respected.

from  Vincent Katz's new book Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020). "A virtuoso collection" -- Elaine Equi. Photo credit: Vivien Bittencourt (London; May 27, 2016). 

On "My Life in CIA" by Harry Mathews [by Richard Beard]

From a piece in the TLS shortly after Harry Mathews's death in 2017:

<<<|
My Life in CIA (2005), set in 1973, is narrated by a character called Harry Mathews, an American Oulipian leading a comfortable life in Paris. He has no evident source of income, so his friends increasingly believe that he works for the CIA. They can’t believe that anyone would write like Mathews for a living, or possibly even for fun. To discourage these rumours, “Harry Mathews” pretends to be an actual agent, because if he’s genuinely CIA then no one will dare refer to it. He moves around Paris like a spy, until convinced that he’s being followed. He then posts a sealed envelope through the slightly open rear window of a car, a small Peugeot hired in advance for exactly this purpose. Inside the envelope is a cryptic page of text, a mystery without a key: “In the wake of last week’s disappointments . . .”. The fake CIA code settles into a familiar pattern:

Dependable Quesnel had to be replaced by Sévigné. Grignan and Corneille did excellent covering. La Rochefoucauld and La Fayette kept things moving forward and their slick diversions allowed Fénelon to score, finding his range on the third try: Bossuet will no longer be a problem.

This performance gives Port Royal many reasons to be cheerful. Our strength in depth and collective resolve bodes well for next week’s tricky visit to Sainte Chapelle.

Harry may or may not have been CIA (he insisted that genuine agents never used the “the”, under any circumstances), but he was now linguistically committed to an equally exclusive organization located in deepest Somerset:

This performance gives Norton many reasons to be cheerful. The squad’s strength in depth and collective resolve bodes well for next week’s tricky league visit to Yatton.

My original code-like text, hidden weekly in a provincial newspaper, becomes a fictional code in Mathews’s Oulipian novel My Life in CIA.

Registers are often mixed in Mathews’s work, but what can this mean, if anything? The text slipped through the back window of the Peugeot is a ploy, but to anyone tailing Harry the code should appear heavy with potential meaning. An academic researcher, or a spy, might already have set off on a journey of discovery. Who are these mysterious people? True to Mathews’s intent to mystify, his rugby stand-ins are both real and obscure, mostly theological figures from the turn of the eighteenth century. Quesnel is a Jansenist, Fénelon anything but. Beautiful Madame de Sévigné is married to ugly Monsieur de Grignon. The writers Corneille and La Rochefoucauld offer a classic diversion, and the doomed Bossuet is another court theologian. Such research is possible, in dogged doctoral style, but it misrepresents how Oulipian text is generated. The source is usually arbitrary, and surprising. You can only decode the mystery text in My Life in CIA if you know that Madame de Sévigné is in fact Steve Penny, replacement full-back from Norton in Somerset. Until now, only two people knew this: me and Harry Mathews.

About halfway through, My Life in CIA stops for a brief survey of the world in 1973 (Chile, Watergate, Jackie Stewart). There is news of the Oulipo: “At our May meeting, several first generation Oulipians blamed newer members for taking the group too seriously and spoiling their fun”. Not an accusation that could ever be levelled at Mathews. As Dennis Duncan noted in his TLS appreciation after Mathews’s death, Harry is never far from a punchline, but he’s creating “a fictional world that is surreal without being chaotic or arbitrary, one in which a not-quite-discernible order is operating beneath the surface”. Harry Mathews claimed that his early literary experiments were “as Oulipian as can be, but they were in English. Nothing wrong with that, but I knew the Oulipo was much more responsive to work in French”. His redeployment of my rugby report still feels resolutely un-French. It’s as if he intended this Anglo-Saxon conundrum of a source text to muddle the sombre puzzle-solving minds of the new Oulipo. Harry’s fun would not be spoiled. I’ll miss him.
>>>

Richard Beard is the author of six novels and four books of narrative non-fiction. He is a Visiting Professor (2016/17) at the University of Tokyo, and has a Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. For more of this article, click here.

The Many Golden Bees that Hum Inside My Heart: 3 New Books

[3 Book Recommendations by Dante Di Stefano]

The Last Orgasm
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2020

In her own words, Nin Andrews’s new collection is a “book of poems of gratitude, admiration, memories, grief, and love.” The Last Orgasm accomplishes what Andrews has accomplished throughout her body of work: to consistently write a poetry of complex intelligence, empathy, and humor; no one else in American poetry combines quite so seamlessly the metapoetic, the allusive, and the mirthful. Andrews displays an ecstasy of influence everywhere in The Last Orgasm, as she evokes, honors, and queries the likes of John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Denise Duhamel, Antonio Machado, Maureen Seaton, Tim Seibles, Walt Whitman, and many more. This is a book to be read and reread for its delights, for its wisdom, and for its acknowledgement that poetry (and the poetry of a self-unfolding-in-time) is far more heady and far more elusive and far more omnipresent and far more fleeting than any definition of it might imply. The first stanza of the poem “Last Night” conveys some of the beauty and strangeness to be found in these pages:

    Last night I dreamt
    that the bees—the many golden bees
    that hum inside my heart—
    were leaving, one by one,
    flying through a hole in the screen
    and into the night.

Every page of The Last Orgasm hums with such mystery, such sweet lack, such release.

Naming the Lifeboat
Justin Gardiner
Main Street Rag, 2020

In his essay on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden invokes Samuel Johnson to explain the aims and impetus of Frostian poetics: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” Justin Gardiner’s debut poetry collection, Naming the Lifeboat, recalls Auden’s Frost-by-way-of-the-good-doctor. Gardiner, who has lived in Antarctica and travelled through many remote wildernesses, writes the kind of poetry that has everything to do with joy and survival. The poems in Naming the Lifeboat traverse the South Pole, the high seas, Laos, Bolivia, the suburbs, the small towns, and the remotest regions of the United States. Gardiner explores the interior landscapes of grief, love, and pain, detailing family mental illness, romantic relationships, and everything in between. These are poems of pilgrimage, poems where a finely-calibrated wisdom leans into deep longing: “Given the traveler’s lot, / all arrival is invitation / to future loss—.” If you want to read the kind of poetry where epidermis meets bark and the mind loves the heart, this is the book for you.

Bone Chalk
Jim Reese
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019

Poet Jim Reese’s nonfiction debut, Bone Chalk, contains two dozen essays filled with the careful attention to detail and the emotional intelligence that characterizes his poetry. Reese draws his subject matter from a lifetime in the Great Plains and he assays the people and the landscape of this region with clarity and nuance. Formally, Reese variegates his approach to the essay, providing straightforward narrative memoirs, braided narrative essays, short lyrics, and incorporating epistolary elements; Reese also echoes poems he has written, composing essays from bumper stickers as he did in his poetry collection, Really Happy (NYQ Books, 2014). The essays' subjects range from a loving portrait of a mother-in-law to a lighthearted memoir of being a college mascot, from a lyric observation of teenagers in line at a pharmacy to a deep exploration of crime and violence in the Midwest. Perhaps the most notable essay in the collection, “Never Talk to Strangers: Twelve Years in Prisons and What Criminals Teach Me,” details Reese’s experiences teaching poetry in prisons, while exploring the personal ways violent crime has shaped his life. Even when writing about the weightiest of issues, Jim Reese employs a warmth and a humor that forms the amiable core of his aesthetic. The essays in this collection feel like affable prose poems stacked one on top of the other. If you want to feel the pulse of the heartland, Reese will guide your hand to its wrist.

"Mystery and Solitude in Topeka" [by Mark Strand]

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

from Almost Invisible. For other poems we have posted by Mark Strand, along with notes on them, click here and here.

Island [by Vincent Katz]

When someone looks at the sea,
Not when they are thinking vindictively
About fame and why they didn’t get
Their fair share, how to get back at

Someone—then, the mind is free,
Momentarily, the human ability to
Look and be free. But that’s only
On the boat. On solid ground,

Mind grinds to thinking, to be
Alert, witty, back on terra firma.
I want to scent water, fresh this
Time, get these sensations

Like of an earlier time, or maybe
A time to come, when we all will
Have a sense of water, the birds,
They continue to call through air.

from  Vincent Katz's new book Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020). "A virtuoso collection" -- Elaine Equi. Photo credit: Vivien Bittencourt (London; May 27, 2016). 

"I am Trying to Break Your Heart" [by Kevin Young]

I am hoping
to hang your head

on my wall
in shame—

the slightest taxidermy
thrills me. Fish

forever leaping
on the living-room wall—

paperweights made
from skulls

of small animals.
I want to wear

your smile on my sleeve
& break

your heart like a horse
or its leg. Weeks of being

bucked off, then
all at once, you're mine—

Put me down.

I want to call you thine

to tattoo mercy
along my knuckles. I assassin

down the avenue
I hope

to have you forgotten
by noon. To know you

by your knees
palsied by prayer.

Loneliness is a science—

consider the taxidermist's
tender hands

trying to keep from losing
skin, the bobcat grin

of the living.

From Dear Darkness by Kevin Young (Knopf, 2008)

The Godfather of Trolling, or Who Was Lucian? [by Michael Fontaine}

One hundred years ago, in April 2020, we were lucky to host Michael Fontaine as our guest author, just as his timely translation of Vincent Obsopoeus's How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing (Princeton) came to print. Michael continues to explore this subject and has recently published a companion piece in Classical Wisdom Litterae. Here's an excerpt with a link to the full essay. The publisher has generously agreed to drop the paywall for the November issue. A bonus: check out the stunning illustrations, especially those of the Dürer frescoes, for which Michael needed special permission to share. 

Continue reading . . . 

-- sdl

ps. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, and five of Michael's April blog posts.

"From a Rome Book" [by Clark Coolidge]

The man walked down gradually under the handholds.
The time it takes to spy the letters and mark them.
In this whiteness of lights the words seem to
inch into each board of page.  Either that or this
is the most colored light I have ever seen, by.
By rights, I should know enough to be bored by
all this. But that I will never be. My smile
a curvature of unknown enclosure. Disclosed
only to be what’s known?, then I’ll scribe
just what’s left out in a day.  Those piercing
places where the unknown joins as neatly to more
of itself as the what’s only studied.  Make it all up
out of the world as the world once made up of itself.
Try at the glass, at the opening space, at the
full and windward and colored to the last.

Ed. note: With thanks to Geoffrey Young, publisher of The Figures, the press that published Coolidge’s Odes of Roba in 1991

Saturday, December 12: Celebrate the Best American Poetry 2020

We're not going gentle into the end of 2020! Join us this Saturday for a celebration of Unamuno Author @PaisleyRekdal's selection for @BestAmPo 2020 Anthology! RSVP: https://t.co/tZfNxlOScl 🥳🤠🤗@DesperateLit #Unamuno53 pic.twitter.com/f1dWMdbBtQ

— Unamuno Authors Series (@UnamunoAuthors) 

Elizabeth Bishop and the Grateful Dead [by Jeffrey Harrison]

  (San Francisco, 1968-69)

Whether she ever saw them perform we don’t know,
but she did go to a Janis Joplin show,
and Thom Gunn’s account of smoking a joint with her
backstage at a group reading makes it easier
to imagine her chatting with Jerry during a break
(about Billie Holliday, or Baudelaire, or Blake)
if not dancing in the aisles during one of the band’s
already notoriously labyrinthine jams
like the one between “Dark Star” and “Saint Stephen”
(a new song in their repertoire that season).
He would have been twenty-six, she fifty-seven.
She might have let it drop that Donovan
wanted to record “The Burglar of Babylon,”
he might have praised her trippy “Riverman,”
but she probably wouldn’t have uttered the phrase
she’d used in one of her unfinished essays
to describe the music of a rock band she’d seen
several times that year: a fucking machine—
though that might have led to a flurry of wit
or perhaps a killer rendition of “Love Light,”
with Pigpen lewdly rapping, in the second set.
Unlikely? Still, I’d like to think it happened—
my favorite poet meeting my favorite band.
Her partner then was in her twenties and
had connections to the music scene. Also,
in the year and a half she lived in San Francisco,
the Dead gave over sixty-five performances
so you’d think she’d have seen them once. Is
that too much of a stretch? Well, this just in:
five or so years later, on one of her trips up
to her beloved Nova Scotia, Bishop
brought as a present for her teenage cousin
a copy of Europe ’72—a triple album
gathered from live concerts—telling him
the Grateful Dead was a band to know about…
and also that it was okay to smoke pot.

—Jeffrey Harrison, Between Lakes, Four Way Books, 2020.

"Little Star, 2015" [by Mary Jo Salter]

But soon, I’m told, I’ll lose my epaulets altogether
and dwindle into a little star.

                                      —Joseph Brodsky, 1940-1996

Joseph, how is your sense of irony
holding up in Heaven?
Did you know, by chance, that the United States
released in 2011

a postage stamp in which your youthful visage
is price-tagged at Forever?
When did you think they’d do that for you in Russia?
How about Never?

Yet here you are, their little star, depicted
in the city you called Peter;
your troubles have been weighed at seventeen rubles
on the poetry meter.

Pressed like a headstrong schoolboy to the corner
of the envelope,
your image puts me in mind of your doting mother,
who never lost hope

she’d see you again (although of course she didn’t)
as she stood in line in
the post office, holding a letter to be franked
with the face of Lenin.

from The Surveyors  by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2017). Reprinted with permission.

Mary Jo Salter (pictured above with the late Mark Strand) is the author of A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems from her longtime publisher, the house of Alfred A. Knopf.Her work has appeared in seven volumes in the Best American Poetry series. (The selectors were Richard Howard, Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Mark Doty, and Dana Gioia.) She writes with a respect for form and meter, for the shape of a poem  and its music, that is most unusual these days, and most precious when the poet has as good an ear as Mary Jo Salter. She sees or hears the poetry in a misprint or mishearing; and when the insight sparks a poem, the writing sparkles. "We'll Always Have Parents," is the title of her poem in the 2018 Best American Poetry.

As befits a student of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Jo balances the exigencies of sincerity and wit, candor and tact. In her recent poems she has written wonderfully about the condition of growing old -- something that none of us thought he or she was doing to do. She is also a skillful parodist and satirist, as "No Second Try" and "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.", two of the poems we have highlighted this week, demonstrate. Thank you, Mary Jo, for giving us this opportunity to showcase your poetry. -- DL

Edna St. Vincent, M. F. A. [by Mary Jo Salter]

Chic and petite, blind to her destiny
of being hailed upon her death the worst
sometimes-excellent poet in history,
she ran the reading series, and ranked first
in her year despite some issues, namely those
pretentious, creaky sonnets emailed late
for workshop, densely wrought with “thee”s and “thou”s,
Apollo’s “dewy cart,” man’s “frosty fate”…
Her classmates listened, bored, without a clue.
Still, they liked her, partly because she friended
everybody who asked, and fucked them too,
lending them each some notoriety
by blogging through the night how things had ended.
Plus, she knew people at A.W.P. 

From Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2013).

"Dependable Epigraphs" [by Tony Towle]

                       

Dependable Epigraphs

My epigraphs will prepare you for the excursion
                         but not for the ruts in the road.

                                                                           — Virgil                                                                                       

Stay well ahead of your turnips in the garden of life. 

                                                            — Michel de Montaigne

Never parade your ignorance; a discreet amble down a side street will suffice.

                                                                 — Benjamin Disraeli

Don’t swat flies close to the ear of God.

                                                            — St. Francis of Assisi

Metaphors are the unstable companions of an already impractical fellow.

                                                                                                — Henry Ford

Those who are not willing to subvert the law do not have sufficient stake in the outcome of events.

                                                                        — Niccolò Machiavelli

 If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, religion is certainly the first.

                                                                                                          — Voltaire

Everywhere I go I find a poet has already been there neurotically before me.

                                                                                                 — Sigmund Freud

Socializing is networking to no purpose.

                                                                        — Oscar Wilde

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

                       — Paul Valéry, as quoted in the original French at a press conference by George W. Bush

Farewell, O insatiable biographers of the future.

                                                            — William Shakespeare

Pimp my soporific and annoying orchestral arrangements, bitch.

                                                                                    — Lawrence Welk

The peasant’s place is in the hovel.

                                                 — Harry & Leona Helmsley

The woman’s place is in the novel.

                                                — Henry James

Never let Henry James have the last word.

                                                             — Edith Wharton

You’ve got to know when to stop.

                                                 — Leo Tolstoy

from Winter Journey (Hanging Loose Press, 2008)

Mr. Boyfriend [by Mary Jo Salter]

New lover, known and unknown,
you’ve risen before dawn
and, delicious in suit and tie,
you lean down to the bed
to kiss my rumpled head
the tenderest goodbye.

A military bearing
adheres to what you’re wearing.
Oh, how many years
who knows he is a man
and not a boy?—who steers
himself through the long day

and rides it, come what may,
in a waft of aftershave
and the bracing, scratchy starch
of his dress shirt?  As you march
off to the office, brave
and clear-eyed in your tortoise-

shell glasses, looking gorgeous,
I feel both safe and weak
slipping back to your kiss
in my sleep, and the light graze
of your cufflink on my cheek.

from The Surveyors by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2017). Reprinted with permission

"No Second Try" [by Mary Jo Salter]

Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery…

W. B. Yeats, “No Second Troy”

Why should I blame him that he filled his days
With mistresses, or that he came home late
To meet most ignorant trust with smiling ways,
Such thoughtful gifts, and claims that I looked great—
Whatever that meant, though clearly not desire?
What help if I’d been wiser, with a mind
Simply to hurl his laundry in the fire,
Rather than buy his tall tales with a kind
Solicitude and a deluded kiss,
Having cleaned his house from stem to stern?
Why, who else could he use, a guy like this?
Was there another wife for him to spurn?

From Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter (Knopf, 2013)

Mary Jo Salter's work has appeared in seven volumes in the Best American Poetry series. (The selectors were Richard Howard, Paul Muldoon, Billy Collins, Kevin Young, Mark Doty, and Dana Gioia.) She writes with a respect for form and meter, for the shape of a poem  and its music, that is most unusual these days, and most precious when the poet has as good an ear as Mary Jo Salter.  She sees or hears the poetry in a misprint or mishearing; and when the insight sparks a poem, the writing sparkles. "We'll Always Have Parents," is the title of her poem in the 2018 Best American Poetry.

As befits a student of Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Jo balances the exigencies of sincerity and wit, candor and tact. In her recent poems she has written wonderfully about the condition of growing old -- something that none of us thought he or she was doing to do. She is also a skillful parodist and satirist, as "No Second Try" and "Edna St. Vincent, M.F.A.", two of the poems we are highlighting this week, demonstrate. (Compare "No Second Try" to William Butler Yeats's "No Second Troy.") Thank you, Mary Jo, for giving us this opportunity to showcase your poetry. -- DL