The Best American Poetry

Meet the Press: Able Muse Press

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

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

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

Susan de Sola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Blind, She Considers Her Lover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alexander, how did Able Muse Press come into being?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

 

 

"Trickeration" [by David Barber]

TRICKERATION

            Cab Calloway, Cotton Club (1931)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author's note: 

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

Editor's note:

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

Lawrence Joseph on "One Hundred Autobiographies"

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

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

— Lawrence Joseph, Lit Hub

Ace Boggess Reviews “Playlist”

Playlist by David Lehman

Top of Form

Ace Boggess's review

Apr 07, 2019

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

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

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

by Ace Boggess 

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

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

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

[A Book Recommendation by Dante Di Stefano]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

    Richard Blanco

    Dreaming a Wall

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

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

 

    Danielle Legros Georges

    Shithole

    eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    sphincter. the unthinkable, intolerable
    bleached ass.

 

    Maria Mazziotti Gillan

    Daddy, We Called You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    the letter
    you wrote
    to the editors
    of local newspapers.

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

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

 

    Bruce Weigl

    What Saves Us

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

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

---

Great Blurbs de Nos Jours [by Mitch Sisskind]

Mitch Sisskind's candidates:

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

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

VITALLY YOURS [by Peter Fortunato]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

"Is your novel about you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading here.

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

Continue reading over at Love in the Time of Cancer

 

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

 

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

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

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

--sdl

Steven Rea, Guest Author September 9-13

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

Welcome, Steven.

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

-- sdl

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

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

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

Signs of the Times by David Lehman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.csmonitor.com/1991/0709/09132.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PCM: Galapagos
           Kilimanjaro
           Cadaques
           Los Roques
           Buenos Aires

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

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

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

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

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

DD: What are you working on now?

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

DD: What are you reading now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

            The Same River Twice

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

 

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

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

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

 

 

 

"One Hundred Autobiographies": a starred review in PW

<<<
One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the foot is becoming

aware of something

the awareness moves

up the ankle

into the calves

the knees and into the thighs

the thighs say

this neighbor of mine

is not dying

no she is not dying

 

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

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

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

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

-- Matthew Zapruder 
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Lunching with Elaine Equi [by David Lehman]

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