The Best American Poetry

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

Auden's Predictions in "For the Time Being"

<<< Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions—feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmologies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the great masterpieces.

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to a good address and call himself Eros to become darling of middle-aged women. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are twenty years old. Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honors will be paid to silver tea-pots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, or malignant tumors, or four o’clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue, “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a death-bed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with the animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilization always has to call in those professional tidiers to whom it is all one it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic that they are instructed to exterminate. O dear, Why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? I don’t want to be horrid. Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it could only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself. I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrid practical joke. Why should he dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare he allow me to decide. I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every single night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born. >>>

from For the Time Being © The Estate of W. H. Auden

The speaker is King Herod, who has just ordered the massacre of the innocents, the slaying of the first-born of Judea. The question is whether Auden agrees with the predictions, particularly those in bold face. Is he, like Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, committed to the notion that that self-criticism is the writer's first obligation? When Herod says "I'm a liberal," is this a comment on Herod (self-delusion) or on liberalism? One could argue that Auden discredits these predictions by assigning them to the villainous Herod. Nevertheless, a case can be made that many of these negative predictions have come to pass.

The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended (Princeton University Press). DL

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.

"Days of Winter" and "Limbo" [poems by Sean Singer from "Today in the Taxi"]

Days of Winter

Today in the taxi I brought a Chinese couple, parents of a student at Columbia, from Amsterdam Avenue to JFK. The girl was crying, the mother was crying, etc. The parents sat in silence for most of the trip. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Chinese. I did offer them a little package of tissues. On the other hand, the sun came out and it warmed to 24 degrees.

A driver should find a fixed object on the road, such as a sign or a tree, and when the car in front passes it, count three seconds before his own car passes it. Then add a second for each hazard—rain, or darkness.

The road is not unlike a little pressed-between vessel that the car pushes along its black bloodstream. A psalm instructs that It will be as it is said.

Limbo

Today in the taxi, driving a commercial real estate type from 43rd and Madison to 57th and Park I said, “Would you prefer to go up Madison, or Park?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Either way we’re fucked.”

And it was true when a black pier of birds burst from the building, like fulfillment.

I too, seek to weave a memory from foam. A black bottle opener and the blackest bottle, and the flow of liquids. You cannot know it; you can see it.

General “Beedle” Smith reported that in April 1945 when they liberated Buchenwald, he witnessed:

“General Eisenhower go to the opposite side of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. I too became sick.”

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1974. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. Singer is the author of three books of poetry: Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find out more about Sean Singer here.  You can purchase Today in the Taxi, from Bookshop, Amazon, and Tupelo Press.

"The Garden of Allah" [by Boris Dralyuk]

The Garden of Allah Hotel, playground of the movie stars during the 20s and 30s, will be torn down to make way for a new commercial and business center. ... The hotel originally was the home of Alla Nazimova, late stage and screen star.
—Los Angeles Mirror-News, 1959

And now I watch another era fade,
Cyrillic letters scraped from shuttered storefronts,
tar-crusted bread, stale fish, stiff marmalade
sit sulking on the shelves, unchosen orphans
in what were once the bustling little shops
of Russian Hollywood. Hardly a soul now stops
to thumb the plums, frown at the penciled prices;
the neighborhood is lurching towards crisis,
all in slow motion. Rents climb out of reach
for émigrés ... There’s nothing new in this.
Think of Nazimova and of her short-lived bliss
beside her pool—her private Black Sea beach ...
She died a tenant in a bungalow
of a hotel razed sixty years ago.

from My Hollywood, Dralyuk's first book of poems (Philadelaphia: Paul Dry Books, 2022). Photo credit: Jennifer Croft.

"Cats" [by James Cummins]

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

From Recalcitrant Actors by James Cummins (2021). Published by Dos Madres (www.dosmadres.com). T. S. Eliot is pictured above. 

Poet Spotlight: Kelly Weber [by Emma Bolden]

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

Kelly Weber's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, The Missouri Review, Tupelo Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Cream City Review, and elsewhere. Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University, where she served as an intern with Colorado Review. She lives in Colorado with two rescue cats. More of her work can be found at kellymweber.com.

A Conversation with Kelly Weber 

Emma Bolden:  Your debut full-length collection, We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Can you tell us a bit about it? 

Kelly Weber:  I’m so excited for this collection to be making its way into the world. We Are Changed to Deer at the Broken Place considers asexuality, aromanticism, and the male gaze broadly through the prism of the myth of Artemis and Actaeon. So a lot of the book is about myth-making and finding the lyric space and language for my experience of asexuality and aromanticism. Some of the poems are variations on prose poem sonnet forms in order to consider and question inherited poetic traditions (and assumptions) of eros and its containers. They’re poems that are heavily concerned with place, particularly the kinds of rural areas I grew up in as a queer person.

EB:  One of the things I admire most about your work is the way that you work with form and structure: prose poems with virgules, lines broken internally with white space, placement on the page. How do you approach form and structure in your work?

KW:  Thank you so much for saying that! When I approach structure for a poem, part of my process for finding the right form is playing with visual arrangements that excite me. Sometimes a poem that just isn’t “going” in the revision process unlocks when I start pushing it around the page in new ways—the poem begins to “move” and breathe differently and the ideas change when I try out caesura, or shift from traditional lines to a prose poem with virgules, or use any other form idea that I think is fun to play with. The poem may not stay in that form, but I always learn something in the process. Sometimes the key is just trying out different forms to unlock the poem’s rhythm. Form can be a way to find pulse. Changes in punctuation, breath, and visual arrangement on the page can make the small but ultimate difference to surprise me and, I think, surprise the poem out into the open, finally. More experimental forms also feel like less pressure than really traditional-looking sonnets or villanelles, for example. Creating my own form rules clears the room out—so to speak—so it’s just me and the poem learning the dance together.

EB:  What’s the best and worst advice you’ve been given as a writer?

KW:  Such a hard question! I think all writing advice I’ve been given comes from a good place, but I ultimately learned a lot by determining which advice wasn’t right for me. I think the advice to know the purpose and function of every single part of your and your book is well-meaning, but I think that can reduce some of the mystery. Some of the best writing advice I’ve received came out of a roundtable conversation with some other writers and a visiting lecturer several years ago, when this subject came up. We were talking about the common advice that, as a writer, you’re supposed to know how to justify every single choice you make in a poem and understand everything happening in a poem and a book. And basically the conversation became about debunking that—that, in fact, there’s no way to understand everything happening in a book or poem, and in fact part of the pleasure of poetry is its mystery. Like another incredible writer, Kristin McIntyre, has said—sometimes we don’t know exactly what is happening in our poems, but we know it’s poetry. There’s a lot to be said for instinct. Dan Beachy-Quick talks about finding the formal logic of the poem while also not really knowing that or focusing on that while in the writing of the poem itself (that’s such a terrible paraphrase—sorry, Dan!), and I think that’s become such a part of my poetics. You don’t have to know everything of how one of your poems is working. Sometimes it just clicks in mysterious ways. You feel it in your body like weather. Even if you’re an expert in craft and critical analysis, I think it’s important for all of us to find the areas of mystery we can’t fully explain in our own poems and books—it’s how we know the poem is an alive thing.

EB:  As an asexual writer myself, I feel that your work is an important and vital addition to asexual literature. I’d love to hear your thoughts about asexual and aro/ace representation, in your own work and/or in literature more generally.

KW: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me! I think the biggest thing for me in my own work is that my poems come out of just one person’s experience. Everyone who’s ace or aro has their own unique, individual experience, so my poems reflect what it’s like for me to be ace, but others who are ace may have very different experiences from this. When I started to write poems about being queer, I had kind of a tough time finding other books of poems about asexuality. What representation there is (in poetry and beyond) is still systemically, predominantly white (and cis, and able-bodied, and thin-bodied, and neuroconforming / neurotypical, and other privileged identities) and dominated by white voices, like me—I have a ton of privilege and I’ve benefited from it. We need to improve that in our field and beyond, big time. We need a much more diverse variety of voices for true representation.

Outside of poetry, there are a couple great books out right now that I think have brought the topic and experiences of asexuality into wider conversations: Angela Chen’s Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex and Ela Przybylo’s Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality. I hope asexuality continues to enter the discourse more.

EB:  What are you working on now?

KW:  Currently I’m working on and thinking about poems that engage with the people dear to me whom I love platonically—family and chosen family and the many beloveds in my life. I’m also thinking a lot about my gender identity as a nonbinary person and the communities I’m so grateful to be a part of. I’m thinking about spaces for queer joy, including—sometimes—the body.

EB: What are you reading right now?

KW:  I’m currently reading the anthologies Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics and Subject to Change: Trans Poetry & Conversation. I also just started The Many Deaths of Inocencio Rodriguez, Iliana Rocha’s just stunning new book from Tupelo. I got to hear her read some of it a few weeks ago for an offsite AWP reading and it’s incredible. Highly recommend all three books, especially for National Poetry Month.

_________________________________________

 

"Rasa" by Joanne Dominique Dwyer hits the stands!

From Rasa by Joanne Dominique Dwyer, winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize. It's terrific!

Chaperone

To keep watch. Not my indigo eye on the ball
nor in the blacklight peephole.
Not on the blisters dappling my feet.
Nor on the beauty or the ugly in the mirror.
But on the children in the playground and on the fur-matted squirrels.
From a wooden tower, the running herds.
From the leaning alabaster lighthouse, a one-armed mermaid
out-swimming the divers, with tanks on their backs –
chasing her, like erasers of magic.
Eye on the bird, that its head does not hit glass.
On the sky, for the sun’s second coming, though she
might have been inebriated when she swore to return.
My small room smelling like canned tuna fish in oil.
My dry cough keeping both of us awake.
Chaperone: The supervision of vulnerable women in public spaces.
A shepherd is a chaperone.
Neruda asking What do they call the sadness of a solitary sheep?
Derived from the French word for a hood or a cape.
Covering the eyes of a prisoner.
And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue.
I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue.
And someone did come and grab my wrists.

Ars Poetica of “Chaperone” by Joanne Dominique Dwyer

       The conception of the poem Chaperone was hatched from the word itself. I am enamored with the geneses and meanings of words. In the act of making poems, I often find myself going down the yellow brick roads and the snow-covered paths of etymology. A treasure hunt that feeds my propensity for leaping imagistic associations in my poems.

       The existence of oral and written language is proof enough for me that life, in all its marvels and mysteries, is worthy of digging one’s heart and heels into. And so goes the poet, heave-ho, not deterred by the glob of purple Jell-O or virescent leek aioli on her chin, into the fecund snake pit, into the scalding sea of lava, into the sunbaked salt flats of the imagination with only a canteen of water and a quill. And what gets pulled out of the hat of the poet’s mind is sometimes preordained through careful plodding and other times is an unexpected dinner guest. And on rare occasions a bedfellow or a take-to-the-grave beacon of light.

       What excites me about Chaperone is that sans a premeditated intention or conceit, other than exploring its etymology, the poem, without forced entry, unveils a communiqué. It’s as if the poet gets out of the way and the poem writes itself. The poem is no longer mine. I do not possess it; it possesses me.

       And what uncoils is a suggested hierarchy of what to keep our eyes on, what to care for and be custodial towards, and what not to. The poem advises us not be concerned with the mundane, the lurid, or the beauty and the ugly of our individual bodies. Instead, to focus on beings with less agency, like children and animals. A one-armed mermaid and an anthropomorphized sun extends the girth of the poem into the mythic – an area of great psychic and cultural importance. Asking for custodial attention there as well, less there be an extinction of the mythological as well as the natural world.

       The poem drops in register with two confessional lines about the ordinary and faulted life of the speaker – her cough and her room smelling like tuna. From there, several imagistic pit stops or fueling stations caravan in a powerful line from Neruda’s “Book of Questions.” Pablo becomes a guest star.

       The poem culminates in narrative – at first global or collective: And the children sinking in the winter mud needed rescue. Then ends with the autobiographical singular: I was a child sinking in winter mud and needed rescue. /And someone did come and grab my wrists.

       The unexpected surfacing of the mud memory, in the act of writing Chaperone, was a raptured surprise.

"Brilliant & bright": A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It has been an honor and a privilege to join in this weeklong celebration of Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry.  Today, I hope you will enjoy this feature of poetry and scholarship by TQ contributor Nick Courtright.  As a editor that prides herself on a commitment to rigorous critical discourse and innovative writing, I'm thrilled to offer this conversation across the boundaries of genre and discipline."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. 

Nick Courtright is the author of The Forgotten World, Let There Be Light, and Punchline, a National Poetry Series finalist.  He is the Executive Editor of Atmosphere Press. His poetry has appeared in The Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and The Southern Review, among dozens of others, and essays and other prose have been published by such places as The Huffington Post, The Best American Poetry, Gothamist, and SPIN Magazine. With a Doctorate in Literature from the University of Texas, he lives in Austin with the poet Lisa Mottolo and their children, William and Samuel. 

A Conversation with Scholar-Practitioner Nick Courtright 

Kristina Marie Darling:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a gifted literary critic, with recent essays published or forthcoming in The Laurel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and more.  What has your practice as a literary critic opened up within your poetry? 

Nick Courtright:  I think it’s freed me to be more merciful in terms of what my poetry can mean. My critical approach revolves around the embrace of the most expansive interpretive range possible, one that takes into account the words, the history, the context, the whole bubbling heap of bad or wrong interpretations inflected by one’s own personal biases, etc. Because I take that tack in my critical appraisal of the meanings of others’ poems, I have to be generous in terms of what my own poems can mean. So although at this stage of my poetry career I’ve moved away from vagueness and abstraction, and try to paint very clear images, arguments, and narratives into my poetry, I really love for the overall takeaway of a poem to be ambiguous. I want the poems to be non-committal about whether their speaker is a hero or a villain, for example.

KMD:  In the spirit of the excerpt featured here, entitled “The Ecstasy of Influence,” I’d love to hear more about your literary and artistic influences.  What poets shaped your approach to craft and thematics? 

NC:  My earlier influences were of the Bidart, Blake, Bly, Lorca angle, with a love for odd images and confounding syntax and a pursuit of the ineffable. And in my latest poetry collection The Forgotten World I was thinking a lot about Kaveh Akbar and Ocean Vuong and others who just write with aching beauty about difficult personal journeys. But lately I’ve found myself most drawn to narrative directness and the comic, so I’ve been reading more George Bilgere, Mary Biddinger, Anders Carson Wee, and Emilia Phillips, for example. Highly recommend all of those—brilliant and bright. And enjoyable! All of those poets surprise me constantly, and like all great writers, they mess with other writers, transforming other writers’ aesthetics and subject matter. It's impossible and pointless (and less fun) to resist.

KMD:  I’d love to chat about the extent to which poetry and criticism overlap and intersect.  To what extent do you see poetry as an act of reading and response, a deconstruction of work that’s come before your own?   

NC:  I think all poetry is shaped by its precursors, whether hundreds of years earlier or the new release dog-eared on the bedside table. “Nothing new under the sun,” etc. But despite the derivative nature of all works of art, there’s much play at the boundary in which one’s own consciousness—itself shaped by the explosions of stars and deoxyribonucleic acid and junk streaming on Netflix—can contribute something at least with the illusion of newness. Even if it’s all just the shuffling of a preordained deck of cards, we can be surprised when we end up for four aces one right after another, and the more open we are to the alchemy of one’s own artistic collision with history.

Ron Horning on W. H. Auden in "The Brooklyn Rail"

The first question anyone interested in W. H. Auden’s poetry is likely to ask about the sumptuous new edition of the poems is, “What will I learn from these 2,000 pages that I don’t know from the Collected Poems, also edited by Edward Mendelson, that came out in 1976, has been in print ever since, and is 670 pages long?” Or, if you believe none of the poems Auden wrote after emigrating to the US bears comparison with those written in the late 1920s and throughout the thirties, “What will I find out about Auden’s best poetry that I don’t know from 1977’s The English Auden, also edited by Mendelson and still in print, where the poetry takes up a mere 300 pages?”

The answer to both is a lot, and the value added starts with the presentation. While the Collected Poems is retrospective, printing the poems Auden wanted as he wanted them by the time of his death, the Princeton Poems, exhilaratingly prospective, prints the poems as they first appeared in individual books, recreating Auden’s poetic development as it actually happened from 1928 to 1972, including many poems later eliminated, plus the poems from the posthumous Thank You, Fog. Also here are poems Auden published in magazines but chose not to reprint, as well as poems he didn’t publish anywhere, such as the first thirty-six lines of an unfinished 1940 sestina, “We get the Dialectic fairly well,” that sprang to life in The New York Review of Books last December.

Material changes are accounted for in textual notes that make up more than half the page count. Since the notes do not identify or explain names and other references, this may seem like a lot of unnecessary information unless you’re working on a PhD, but Auden treated his published books as notebooks and could make several different sets of revisions before deciding a poem was finished. This was certainly true up to his Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 and Collected Longer Poems, published in 1966 and 1968 respectively, and he might have made further changes to earlier poems and revised later poems if he’d had the chances he did in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Not only do the textual notes list Auden’s second, third, and fourth thoughts, they point out mistakes and euphemisms introduced by typists and publishers on each side of the Atlantic. So the notes are key to this edition of the poetry, which is both the climax of Princeton’s edition of Auden’s complete works and the foundation on which it was built.

And yet … you’d be hard pressed to find contemporary poems in English that exhibit an affinity with the poems gathered here, the kind of affinity that, without being anything like them, the early poems have with poems by Hardy and Frost, Yeats and Moore. Scads of poems in the 1930s and ’40s were influenced by Auden, some written by his friends, but the most recent readable and widely-available proof of his influence I know of is John Ashbery’s Some Trees, published in 1956, and a poem Philip Larkin added to his 1946 The North Ship when it was reprinted 20 years later, “Waiting for breakfast, while she brushed her hair.” This apparent remoteness is partly a result of the inevitable historicizing of a recognized poet and partly due to changes inside and outside poetry during the last half century.

Some markers are obvious. One example: for Auden, “man” and “mankind” are nouns that include women as well as men, and he’s not concerned about the long range effects of a shared name that privileges one sex over another. Unless a poem is a love poem or character study, “he” is the generic pronoun for anyone alive: you take it in stride to get somewhere with the poems, and if you don’t, goodbye. But what really sets Auden’s poetry apart from poems now is his perpetual technical engagement with the poetry in English that came before him, starting with Beowulf—a body of work he expands in all directions, contributing elegies, clerihews, sonnet sequences, ballads, prose poems, villanelles, and englyns. For starters.

The sheer surprising novelty and quality of the alliterative, politically inflected, and electrifying early poems—“The Watershed,” “This Lunar Beauty,” “A Bride in the 30’s”—owe as much to the times and Auden’s life while England was homebase, as they do to the country itself. He lived in Weimar Berlin a year following graduation from Oxford in 1927, taught in prep schools back in England, wrote plays with Christopher Isherwood, traveled to Iceland with Louis MacNeice, provided texts for Benjamin Britten to set, wrote scripts and did odd jobs for a government-sponsored documentary film unit, visited the Spanish Republican front in 1937, and was in China with Isherwood when the Sino-Japanese War broke out. Once he traded national frontiers for state lines, though, Auden settled into what was rapidly becoming a norm for US poets, supporting himself by writing criticism, anthologizing, and traipsing around the country from college to college, teaching, lecturing, and giving readings. After 1945 he spent summers abroad.

It was on their return trip from China in 1938 that Auden and Isherwood saw the United States for the first time, liked what they saw, and decided to move there: Isherwood to Los Angeles, Auden to New York. They came back early in 1939, preceded by formidable reputations, and some Britons never forgave them for what they considered outright desertion during the worst threat to their native country since Napoleon. But the two men were professional writers, not soldiers or diplomats, and expecting them to put their lives on hold for the national emergency makes as much sense as believing that Neville Chamberlain wouldn’t have signed the Munich Agreement if he’d read The Orators or Isherwood’s Sally Bowles. Worth remembering, too, is that homosexuality was a criminal offense in England until 1967.

Taken together, the poems fall into three main groups, with the English Auden succeeded not so much by a US Auden but, in the four long poems written during and right after World War II, by a consciousness cutting loose from England and Europe and finding its bearings in the States and a renewed commitment to Christianity. “New Year Letter,” “For the Time Being,” “The Sea and the Mirror,” and “The Age of Anxiety” were the last long poems Auden wrote, but he hadn’t stopped writing shorter poems, often in thematic suites, and he continued to write them, along with opera libretti with his partner Chester Kallman and a steady stream of translations and critical prose, until he died in a Viennese hotel room in 1973.

While his poetry does relax after 1947’s Age of Anxiety, it never loses its brilliance or technical ability, and the later lyrics are as remarkable in their more circuitous ways as the earlier pointed work. Here are the endings of “First Things First,” “Good-Bye to the Mezzogiorno,” and “Partition”:

Grateful, I slept till a morning that would not say
How much it believed of what I said the storm had said
But quietly drew my attention to what had been done
—So many cubic metres the more in my cistern
Against a leonine summer—, putting first things first:
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

                                    *

…though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.

                                    *

The next day he sailed for England, where he quickly forgot
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Besides assembling some of the most vivid poems ever committed to English, their pertinence no more confined to poetry than to the century in which they were written, these two books are also a monument to the acumen, scholarship, and perseverance of Edward Mendelson, Auden’s literary executor and the editor of the complete works, who brings to his task here, as he did to the eight volumes of plays, libretti, and prose, a single minded devotion usually associated with editors of Victorian poets’ letters, Cecil Y. Lang for instance, and, further back, establishers of texts like Herbert J. C. Grierson, whose 1912 edition of John Donne’s poems is still the only one that counts. You’d say Auden lucked out if you didn’t believe his work deserves this kind of meticulous and exemplary care.  -- Ron Horning

from The Brooklyn Rail, May 2022

Ron Horning is a poet whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanitas, and Blazing Stadium. He’s written about photography and rock-and-roll for the Rail.

"In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton" (Nightboat Books) [by David Lehman]

We welcome the publication of In the Empire of the Air: The Poems of Donald Britton, a posthumous collection by a wonderful poet who died in 1994, entirely too young. The publisher is Nightboat Books, and the work of editing it was shared by Philip Clark and the late Reginald Shepherd. I knew Donald well; he is represented in an anthology I edited, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, for which he wrote a statement about the occasion and objectives of one of his poems. It may be the only critical statement that he ever published. Three of Donald's poems appeared in a low-circulation magazine I edited, Poetry in Motion, in the late 1970s.

In the picture above, Donald is the fourth poet from the left. To his right is Tim Dlugos, with Dennis Cooper standing on the other side of Tim. Amy Gerstler is second from the right. Also in the picture are Michael Silverblatt, Bob Flanagan, and Ed Smith.  The venue is the Ear Inn and I'd have to guess the date as early 1980s.

Donald, a great fan of Mexican food (chimichangas), loved the music of Khachaturian, was born in Texas but you'd never know ity from his speech, wrote a sensually abstract poetry. Donald was a most hodpitabler man; in the 1980s when I lived in Ithaca, I sometimes stayed at Donald's place on my visits to the city. In one of them, the poem "Blue Skies" was in his typewriter. In a letter to me dated December 13, 1982, he wrote, “For the longest time I’ve wanted to write things [ie. poems] that are both funny and serious, obvious and mysterious. And in [‘Empire of the Air’], perhaps, I have succeeded. Less so in ‘Winter Garden.’ And ‘Masters of Self-Abuse’. . .well, it has its moments. Someday, you’ll have to tell me what you think.”

Here is the first paragraph of Douglas Crase's afterword to the new collection.

<<  The appearance in print of the selected poems of Donald Britton is an affront to cynicism and a triumph over fate. When Donald died, in 1994, it was sadly reasonable to assume that the influence of his poetry would be confined to the few who had preserved a copy of his single book, the slender, deceptively titled Italy, published thirteen years earlier. As the few became fewer it seemed all but certain the audience for his poems would disappear. Donald never taught, so there were no students to mature into positions of critical authority. There was no keeper of the flame to incite publication, no posthumous foundation to subsidize it, not even a martyrology in place to demand it out of sentiment. The survival of his work would have to come about, instead, as a pure instance of “go little booke”—an instance that must now warm the heart of anyone who has ever believed in poetry. It was the poems in Italy themselves, free of professional standing or obligation, that inspired the successive affections of two remarkable editors and the confident publisher of the present selection. Donald, who despite his brilliance was a modest and self-effacing person, would be surprised.
>>

Crase's afterword concludes with this thought about the "longevity" of poetry as opposed to a "career" in the field.

<<<       Donald’s posthumous success in inspiring the publication of his selected poems, coupled with the undeniable failure in worldly terms of his career, is occasion to wonder if the career is ever the same as poetry itself. From time to time a critic will observe that Hart Crane’s suicide, for example, or Joe Brainard’s decision to stop making art, may be regarded as proof the artist realized what his admirers don’t, that the work was a failure and the career could not be sustained. The critic doesn’t quite dare to draw the same conclusion from the abjuration of Rimbaud or the suicide of Sylvia Plath, which reveals of course that the logic in the first case was as opportunistic as it is preposterous. Someday a critic will do us the service of disentangling poetry from the standard map of a professional career. The map is a convenience to committees but meaningless to the future reader—the twelve-year-old boy or girl in San Angelo—the very reader poets must hope to have. What is useful to that boy or girl is sometimes no more than a phrase, perhaps a book or poem, amounting to a style of mind in which to escape or dwell. I recognized such a style of mind in Donald Britton and it made us friends. The first time I heard him read his work in public was at the Ear Inn in New York, the afternoon of March 7, 1981. Blond as ever, he was in that environment an apparition of nervous grace. I can’t say he connected with the audience; he certainly didn’t flatter it. He conveyed, perhaps too clearly for the occasion, his sense of an audience beyond the room. One got the feeling he expected to reach across time and elicit a response composed of the same respect for intellect and desire that we had there, in the Ear Inn, that Saturday afternoon. Donald's poems were not lessons or anecdotes. They are invitations to the unending contemplation of ourselves, and things beyond us, that makes the human species a window on creation.
>>>

Here is a poem by Donald Britton from the new volume:

Notes on the Articulation of Time

It becomes a critical account
of all that’s spoken, done:
the drawing in of breaths, even,
these nights whose atmosphere
reminds us of mountains,
white volumes of air. We need

these narratives, we want them:
the city lies before us
and some one person in the sleeve
of a streetlamp awaits
our enraptured attention
as we await the concept of the city

which tells us how we move
in the particolored geographies
about us. We can’t be certain
we are moving toward this person
nor do we require certitude.
It is enough to acknowledge

the movement itself, shavings
of light inscribing a circle.
Our childlike sense of the other
bears these forces toward
completion and renewal,
a lexis of infatuated sounds.

-- Donald Britton

From the archive; first posted May 18, 2016

Editor Spotlight: Hasanthika Sirisena [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Hasanthika Sirisena work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life(Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. She is currently faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts and Susquehanna University and she is acting editor at West Branch magazine. Her books include the short story collection The Other One (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016) and the forthcoming essay collection Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University 2021). 

Kristina Marie Darling:  You are an accomplished cross-disciplinary practitioner, whose work exists in spite of and beyond the categories of writing and art.  How did you first become interested in creating cross-disciplinary work?   

Hasanthika Sirisena:  I started drawing when I was very young. I never thought of myself as very smart and I struggled with English and with writing. Drawing allowed me to have confidence and gave me a means of articulating myself. I went on to study fine art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, in fact, have a BFA so I have a long and deep training in visual media. I really only started writing in my early thirties and for a little while I stopped drawing. Cross-disciplinary and hybrid work has allowed me to merge these two identities. 

KMD:  Tell me some of the ways that cross-disciplinary work is or can be politically charged.   

HS:  Cross-disciplinary work often asks us to think about and rethink our assumptions of form. For example, I’m currently reading Rosanna Bruno and Anne Carson’s The Trojan Woman, A Comic.  I was delighted when the book arrived and was the size and heft of a children’s book. The translation itself rethinks what it means to actually make a translation. The opening references James Baldwin and Joan Didion (and probably a few other writers I missed.) I can’t read Greek but I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming that the original play doesn’t allude to Baldwin much less quote Didion. The playfulness here—with the boundaries and capaciousness of language and intent—force me to confront how we decide who gets to make art and the audiences they make art for. 

But it’s the images themselves that are extraordinary. The images stand in for the actor and ask us to meditate on what an illustration—either drawn or acted—actually is.  How does an illustration contain force and agency? All this for a work that is also a profoundly antiwar message.  

Honestly, just asking us to stop and think and deliberate is a political act.  

KMD:  I’d love to hear about one piece from TQ that you selected or curated that stayed with you.  What made it memorable?   

HS:  Well, I wasn’t the one who selected Sarah Minor’s “A Poetry Comic” in Issue 25 but I’m deeply in love with it. Everything is so expertly rendered, from the quality, and energy, of the line drawings to the beauty of the language. I feel I could stare forever into the flames of “Photos from a fight appear to capture two people in love” panel. 

Laci Mosier is a former student of mine and I want to plug her collages (also in Issue 25). She is dedicated to the physical process of cutting, slicing, tearing—as opposed to computer generated collages—and I loved the physicality, humor, and deep intelligence of her work. (Quick note: I also do a lot of digital drawing and painting so I’m not at all against that.)  

KMD:  What advice do you have for poets who are interested in creating hybrid or cross-disciplinary work, who excel at writing but perhaps don’t have the technical facility with film, collage, or visual mediums?   

Poet Spotlight: Jenny Grassl [by Kristina Marie Darling]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly with The Best American Poetry, and to highlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this feature on poet and visual artist Jenny Grassl, whose interdisciplinary practice reflects TQ's commitment to bridging the gap between literature and the fine arts."--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly 

Jenny Grassl's poems have appeared in The Boston Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Laurel Review, Green Mountains Review, The Massachusetts Review, Ocean State Review, Lana Turner, Bennington Review, and other journals. Her work was published in a National Poetry Month feature of Iowa Review. Her manuscript DEER WOMAN IN THE DINING ROOM was selected as a runner-up for the Tupelo Press July open reading in 2021. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A Conversation with Poet & Visual Artist Jenny Grassl 

Kristina Marie Darling:  The poems featured here use the page as a canvas, a visual field.  In a world of left-margined poems, I find this approach bold, effective, and refreshing.  What advice do you have for poets who hesitate or struggle to take risks with form, to use white space as a unit of composition?  

Jenny Grassl: This is a great topic. I would say start by realizing that a block of left-margined poem stanzas or text is like a monument in a landscape. Often, its effect is to overpower that landscape, and overcome any evidence of the void. A poem that uses the whole page IS the landscape, and engages with the void. Get wandering, and start the journey. Push form to push content. Of course some poems work best in the traditional way.  

There exist great experiments with form in poetry. I am not sure how they lost relevance to so many of today's poets. I am thinking of Ted Berrigan, Clark Coolidge, John Ashbery, Tom Clark with Lewis Warsh, and Anne Waldman, among others. I was exposed to their work early on, and assumed I had permission to compose a page creatively. Lewis was my earliest mentor.

KMD:  In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also known as a visual artist.  What has your cross-disciplinary practice, and your background in the fine arts, opened up within your poetry? 

JG: In visual art, working with form/content tension while seeking beauty, constantly re-defines beauty. This has had real consequences for my poetry. 

Many issues are the same in both poetry and art: gesture, conflict, philosophy, story, emotion, social history, image, and patterning. Not least is celebrating the medium. Poetry that foregrounds language functions for me the way painterly painting does. However, I do not mean the conceptual language of Language poets. I prefer something more sensual. The medium reveals content, and is not subservient to it. Collage and layering as expressions of language have become more important in my poetry through visual work. And, indeed, the image—I build my poems with images.  

KMD:  Tell me about your text-based visual artworks and collages.  

JG: In digital collages, I work back and forth with elements and fragments of photographs, paintings, drawings, bits of nature, and typography. The shape is panoramic, yet I think of them as interior landscapes. I am interested in how the 

wide view might investigate something personal— making maps of consciousness.

In the paintings I focus on automatic writing. I paint, scramble, and layer the words so the meaning is obscured, while still existing with integrity within the work. Each letter is part of an automatic poem. Because the words are concealed, the painting becomes a texture of pure language. 

KMD:  What can poets learn from visual artists?  

JG: Visual artists play, visually. This is not to say that is all they do. Of course there is work and rework. Poets have the same possibility.   

Figure/ground relationships are important to visual artists, and can be for poets, in their use of text in white space. Creating positive and negative space, the tension of beauty emerges. This is not merely formal. We can also learn from painters and sculptors who honor their mediums. Language is actually as much of the body as of the mind.

KMD:  In your poetry, the silences and ruptures are nearly as charged as the words themselves.  Can you speak to the power of silence and the unsaid in poetry? 

JG: Silence and rupture exist in a woman's life in the shadow of monuments.

Break apart a tightly bound form and new possibilities are created. Sometimes this is urgent and disorderly—graffiti on the monuments, or a toppling. Often a phantom text emerges. Silence always visits the page. The question is how is it shaped or left to wander. What does it mean? In visual art the color red creates the after image of green. The darkness of text creates an aura of light but also the void. 

KMD:  What else are you working on?  What can readers look forward to?

Poet Spotlight: Cynthia Dewi Oka [by Wendy Chen]

"It is an honor and privilege to celebrate Tupelo Quarterly at The Best American Poetry and spotlight some of our extraordinary contributors.  Please enjoy this interview with Cynthia Dewi Oka, curated by TQ Managing Editor Wendy Chen".--Kristina Marie Darling, Editor-in-Chief, Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly  

Originally from Bali, Indonesia, Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Fire Is Not a Country (2021) and Salvage (2017) from Northwestern University Press, and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (2016) from Thread Makes Blanket Press. A recipient of the Amy Clampitt Residency, Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Prize, and the Leeway Transformation Award, her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, POETRY, Academy of American Poets, Poetry Society of America, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her experimental poem, Future Revisions, was exhibited at the Rail Park billboard in Philadelphia in summer 2021. An alumnus of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, she has taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, New Mexico State University, Blue Stoop, and Voices of Our Nations (VONA). For fifteen years, Cynthia worked as an organizer, trainer, and fundraiser in social movements for gender, racial, economic, and migrant justice. Her fourth poetry collection, A Tinderbox in Three Acts, is a Blessing the Boats Selection chosen by Aracelis Girmay and is forthcoming in fall 2022 from BOA Editions.

 

Wendy Chen: Congratulations on the upcoming publication of your fourth poetry collection A Tinderbox in Three Acts this fall as the next BOA Blessing the Boats Selections title! Has the way you put together poetry collections changed over the years?

Cynthia Dewi Oka: Thank you so much! I think the way I put together collections has changed from project to project, depending on the conditions of my writing life. Until very recently, I’ve always had to write around my primary responsibilities as a working mother. For instance, the poems in both Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Dinah Press, 2012; revised edition, Thread Makes Blanket, 2016) and Salvage (Northwestern University Press, 2017) were written in pre-dawn hours, which were the only time I could be alone and focus on poetry without interruption. With Fire Is Not a Country (Northwestern University Press, 2021), I had a bit more spaciousness because my son was older, and I could enforce fiercer boundaries around my writing time as an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College. I still had to work full time to support my family but at least I didn’t have to worry about debt because the program fully funded my studies with the Holden Fellowship. That was such a gift. I also researched and completed the first draft of A Tinderbox in Three Acts during that period. 

WC: Are there any particularly formative experiences to your identity as a writer? 

CDO: Teaching myself English by trial-and-error as a ten-year-old because the ESL program at my new school in Canada could not accommodate an Indonesian speaker was the most formative experience for me as a writer. I basically read everything in the school library with the help of a little electronic dictionary. It was helpful in terms of vocabulary, but I had to learn grammar by visually noting syntactical patterns in the texts, and then trying them out myself by writing short stories. Indonesian does not have tenses, so learning the nuances of time in relation to action in English was a bit like learning a new physics. Of course, I never encountered characters “like” me or contexts “like” the one I came from, but that has always been my reality, even when I lived in Indonesia because my family is Chinese Indonesian and under the New Order regime, most public expressions of Chinese culture and identity were outlawed. It’s wonderful, of course, to feel recognized by a text, but to me, experiencing difference and becoming aware of a wider range of human possibilities (and limitations) has always been the primary joy of literature. I didn’t, however, learn to speak English comfortably until I started listening to hip hop in my early teens. Before that, English just kind of sounded and felt like running water to me. The sonic patterning to rhythm, lexical play, and the enunciative and emotive qualities of speech as art in hip hop made it much more familiar to how I physically experienced my native tongue. Later, I taught myself poetry in a similar way, by reading widely – not just formally, but internationally beyond the American poetry echo chamber – and experimenting with syntactical, visual, and sonic patterns. 

WC: What is your revision process like? When do you know when a poem is “done’? 

For "Plume," Another Feather in the Cap

The new issue of Plume is out. Edited by the admirably imaginative Danny Lawless, issue #129 (May 2022) contains work by D. Nurkse,  Tomasz Różyck, Susan Aizenberg, Bill Stratton, Jeffrey Skinner, Cartol Muske-Dukes, Lauren Camp, and, well, why don't we just copy the TOC below the picture? I recommend the section "Poets and Translators Speak," in which the writers comment on their work. 

 Ephrem Solomon
Folk Memory 3, Woodcut and mixed media, 2015

Plume: Issue #129 May 2022

Poems

 D. Nurkse Poetry: A Mirror, a Pencil and an Envelope. Seven Minutes with D. Nurkse and Nancy Mitchell

Lauren Camp Small Scenes without Apology

Danielle Blau (Blessed Are) They Who Preserve

David Lehman Three Poems from a Work in Progress

 Antonio Gamoneda Antonio Gamoneda, from Book of the Cold (World Poetry Books, May 2022) translated from Spanish by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Jeffrey Skinner Four From Delos

Mark DeCarteret Lives of the Postmodern Poets

Susan Aizenberg Forced March

 Tomasz Różycki Two poems by Tomasz Różycki translated from Polish by Mira Rosenthal

Zoë Ryder White Close to now

Christopher Howell Ashes of Roses and Blue Chair

Carol Muske-Dukes Spam Risk

Bill Stratton What Almost Killed You

Alejandro Escudé My Fifth Tattoo at the Darkstar Ink Parlor

The Poets and Translators Speak
Rosenthal, Stratton, Aizenberg, et. al.

Book Review
distant transit by Maya Haderlap reviewed by Mark Wagenaar

Featured Selection
 A Travel Guide for the Exiled; An Interview with Zein El-Amine, by Leeya Mehta

Essays and Comment
A Kind of Sorcery: On Shame, Defiance and Moral Imagination by Richard Hoffman

" Why I Wrote 'Old Heart' " [by Peter Ferry]

From Nu?Detroit, this write-up of Peter Ferry's novel Old Heart, which has been adapted for the theater and will premiere in Detroit next week.

<<<
United States forces liberated the southern third of The Netherlands on September 17, 1944. On that date 47 years later, I wheeled my bike out of the driveway on my way to the Dutch school where I was teaching. I was astounded to discover that every house on my street was flying an American flag.

That Saturday, a marching band came down our residential street. My wife and I bundled up our two little kids and followed along. Two blocks away, beside a small canal, there was a crowd, a ceremony, martial music, the unveiling of a plaque and rounds of applause. We joined right in.

Since the celebration was all in Dutch, I later asked my neighbor what it was about. He told me that during World War II, the Nazis went through the towns and villages and took the bells from the churches to melt down for bullets.

“We hid ours,” he said. “We sank it in that canal and put it back in the belfry after the war was over.”

I turned and looked at the bell tower, the same one I passed every day walking my daughter to school. The war had never seemed so close.

With half a dozen World War I and II museums spread across the Netherlands, the country’s recent military history is much in evidence. On a cross country bike ride with some Dutch friends, we stopped for a picnic lunch and spread our blanket atop a concrete slab.

“What are we sitting on?” I asked my Dutch Fulbright partner Corinne Mostert.

“A bunker. It’s from the war.”

“Oh.”

It turns out that these abandoned fortifications can be found all along the coast.

In Hoek van Holland, there is an intact subterranean World War I fort that is now a museum. Much of the City of Rotterdam is a grim monument to the Second World War. Between May 10 and May 14,1940, the Nazis bombed its center to smithereens. The result was a blank canvas, and after the war it became a laboratory for architectural experimentation. The Dutch built dozens of structures — from railway stations to bridges to apartment buildings to markets — that became models or prototypes. Echoes of these innovative designs can be found around the world.

Right in the middle of the area that was destroyed stands the Stadhuis or city hall that dates to 1920.

“Isn’t that amazing,” I said to Corinne. “How could the Nazis have missed that?”

“'Because they wanted to. It’s where all the birth records were kept. It’s how they found the Jews."

The Dutch are not known to be demonstrative people, but feelings about the war still run deep. Some are negative, but others are not. Early on in the year we spent in the town of Veldhoven, our five-year-old daughter came out of her Dutch kindergarten in tears because she had had a bad day. So had her mom. So they cried together. A Dutch mother there to collect her child saw this and told her own mother about it. At Christmastime, a small neatly wrapped package appeared on our doorstep with a carefully worded note:

               Once long ago your people helped my people. I have always wanted to say thank you. This is my thank you.

Inside was a hand knit child’s sweater with a rainbow across the front.

I wrote Old Heart, in part, as a thank you of my own to the Dutch people and a tribute to their strength, resilience, spirit and enormous generosity.

Editor’s Note: Peter Ferry is the author of Old Heart, the award-winning novel adapted for a play premiering at Detroit’s Redford Theater May 14 and 15. Ferry was a Fulbright Exchange teacher in the Netherlands in 1991-1992. We asked him to reflect on some of the experiences that led him to write Old Heart, a bittersweet love story set at the end of World War II and in 2006.

for more from this write-up in Nu?Detroit click here

PW Reviews "On Becoming a Poet" (Marsh Hawk Press)

 

On Becoming a Poet: 25 Original Essays + Interviews
Edited by Susan Terris. Marsh Hawk, $21.95 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-73261-413-0

 

“While modern creative writing programs seek to develop the talents of maturing writers, essential information about the... craft can be discovered in the early memories of established writers,” posits Terris (Memos) in this solid anthology on being a poet. Twenty-five contributors lay out how they were brought to the form: David Lehman recounts in “Opening Shot” his experience reading “Song of Myself” in high school, while Basil King reveals in “The Past Is as Present as I Want the Future to Be” that “if as a young man a gallery or galleries had been interested in showing my paintings, I would have had no time to think about writing.” Philip Lopate keeps it short and sweet in “Poetic Influence: John Keats’ ‘When I Have Fears,’ ” in which he writes, “When I read this poem the first time, I was an adolescent, filled with doubts.” The essays are heartfelt, surprising, and show there’s no one path to becoming a writer: Mary Mackey, for example, argues in “Fevers and Jungles” that “the thing that did more than anything else to make me into a poet, was fever. But first it almost killed me.” Aspiring poets will find a rich vein of insight in these thoughtful pieces. (June)

Gilbert and Ernest Discuss "Rhymes Rooms' by Brad Leithauser

Gilbert: You poets are incorrigible optimists.

Ernest: What makes you say so? Aren’t poets always complaining that no one reads their work?

Gilbert: With some justice, too. Poetry is in a state of perennial deflation: unlimited supply, hardly any demand.

Ernest: Brad Leithauser says as much in his book Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. He says the "possible 'decline' of the role of poetry in American life" is the longest lasting subject of academic discussion.

Gilbert: That’s optimism for you.

Ernest: How so?

Gilbert: You guys are always writing books about poetry, as if it were a going concern. One book suggests that everyone can write the stuff; a second argues that hatred of poetry is a poet’s prerequisite, a third feels that it’s okay to hate poetry but spare some love for poems. What’s Mr. Leithauser’s like?.

Ernest: The title itself is an echo of John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason, arguably the best book out there for the novice.

Gilbert: Hollander exemplified the forms in addition to defining them.  Is this what Leithauser book does?

Ernest: No, but it introduced me to a great poem by Malcolm Lowry called “Strange Type”:

I wrote: in the dark cavern of our birth.
The printer had it tavern, which seems better:
But herein lies the subject of our mirth,
Since on the next page death appears as dearth.
So it may be that God’s word was distraction,
Which to our strange type appears destruction,
Which is bitter.

Gilbert: That’s an admirable piece of writing. What does the author say about it?

Ernest: He dwells on the postponed rhyme of “better” and “bitter.”

Gilbert: Nice to think that some poets still know about rhyme, meter, and form, and can make the case for constrictive forms.

Ernest:  Yes, he's the rare reader who appreciates the rhyme of "sultry" and "adultery."

Gilbert:  Byron is underrated, isn't he? Don't you love the rhymes in Don Juan?

Ernest: Yes and yes. But the best chapter in the book is about song lyrics, which Leithauser writes about with passion, acumen, and good taste: lyrics by Lorenz Hart,  Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. 

Gilbert: Thank you for recommending Rhyme’s Rooms. May I borrow it for the weekend?

Ernest: Yes, but it won’t necessarily support your thesis that poets are optimistic.

Gilbert: You poets are a disputatious lot.

from Ten Questions for Dara Barrois / Dixon [formerly Dara Wier]

from Poets & Writers, 4.5.22

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), whose poetry collection Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina is out today from Wave Books. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including In the Still of the Night (Wave Books, 2017), You Good Thing (Wave Books, 2013), and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2009).  She lives and works in factory hollow in Western Massachusetts.

Dara Barrois/Dixon (formerly Dara Wier), author of Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina.  

1. How long did it take you to write Tolstoy Killed Anna Karenina?
   It’s usual for me to be writing more than one book at a time; my guess is Anna’s book unfolded over the course of around five to seven years start to finish. When I write a poem I’m not necessarily thinking of it as a poem for a certain book unless I’m working in a form (e.g. Reverse Rapture’s nine-line, nine-stanza poems; in progress since 2020, something I’m calling Is a Citroen Xsara Braque even imaginable? half-sonnet, half-prose); most of things take shape as they go along, because of what’s happening in the world and in my life, in others’ lives at the time. In fact I’m afraid if I self-consciously try to write a poem to fit a certain book I’m going to fail miserably.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
   Oh, god. It’s all challenging. Maybe I’d say—challenge came when trying to see the book’s title. I like how titles can do so much. They can set a tone, suggest a scene, take care of a situation, jumpstart something, imply alternatives. The place they hold is a powerful place, isolated up there all by themselves.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
   1955–1967: everywhere, all the time, second nature, main preoccupation, unconsciously; I especially liked a cedar-lined closet with a typewriter stored on its floor, and a spot on the Mississippi River I thought of as my place to be at home.

Paul Auster on Stephen Crane (and Creative Writing)

fromThe Guardian (2 October 2021), an interview with Paul Auster about his new book on Stephen Crane, the novelist and poet.

Why did you choose to write about Stephen Crane?
I read him early, as a high-school student, as many of us did back then. The Red Badge of Courage was required reading for most high-school students. But then I lost contact with Crane and hadn’t thought about him too much. After I finished 4321, I was really exhausted and knew that I wouldn’t be able to write for some time so I took several months off to regroup. During that time, I read a lot of things that I had been meaning to read all my life. I started reading Crane again. The first thing I read was The Monster, which I’d never even heard of. I was so overpowered by its brilliance - it took me by storm and I was shocked at how good and deep and resonant it was. That inspired me to read everything else he’d written. My admiration kept growing. By the time I was done with his work I started investigating his life and realised how deeply fascinating that was. Finally, I decided to write a short appreciation of Crane.

Short?
That was my plan: 150 or 200 pages. Then one thing led to another and it turned into this new member of the Rocky Mountain chain. It’s an enormous book, I know. For a life that was that short, it’s pretty strange that I should have written so much. But it’s not just a biography, it’s also a reading of his work: it’s about evenly split between the two.

It’s a book that teaches us how to love Crane. Do you recognise yourself as a teacher?
I taught for five years at Princeton. These were writing workshops. I had a horror of them. Five years of teaching and I still have a horror of creative writing. Either you have an imagination or you don’t; either you have a feel for language or you don’t. I did have the feeling that I was an old man talking to younger people in this book. Not in a classroom, but around a dinner table and sharing my insight and enthusiasm for this writer and his work.

It feels like you admire Crane partly for how seriously he takes writing.
It’s the only way I understand writing. It’s certainly the way I’ve been all my life and it’s how every other writer I admire is – a kind of monomaniac. I’m not sure how you can make any art if you don’t treat it very seriously, if you’re not obsessed with doing it better each time.

Crane was very poor. Do we need to suffer for our art?
In order to unleash good work, there has to be something in you that feels out of balance. It doesn’t have to be financial distress - it could be emotional or amorous. Whatever the source is, the thing that has shaken life up for you, it’s distress that generates art.

Which book would you give to a 12-year-old?
I think I would give that 12-year-old Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This person would be old enough to read it without the filter of a parent and to understand how wonderful and imaginative and absolutely crazy it is. The main thing about giving books to young people is that you really need to show them the sheer joy of reading, the pleasure it can bring you. Nothing too heavy. Books that are effervescent – that’s what creates a love of reading. If I were to give a 15-year-old a book, I’d give them Candide. That’s when I read it and it changed my life. I laughed, I was shocked and I was inspired by it. That’s what a great book can do when you’re young.