The Best American Poetry

Rowan Ricardo Phillips on the Tennis Circuit [by David Lehman]

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey by Rowan Ricardo Philllips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) effortlessly proves an important point and raises a fascinating question. The point is that a talented poet such as Mr. Phillips may double as an excellent sportswriter. The question is: what accounts for the affinity that poets feel for tennis?

A part of the answer -- only a part but a crucial one -- is that the tennis players on the professional tour today are remarkable by any standards. On top we have the matchless Roger Federer, crowd favorite Rafael (Rafa) Nadal of the muscular arms and chest, and Novak Djokovich, the gluten-free Serb, who has won the last three grand slams (Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open) and is the current king of the court. There are numerous others not far behind (Andy Murray, whose best days may be behind him, Juan Porto del Martin, Stan Wawrinka, and some exciting and very tall up-and-comers). On the ladies' side we have in Serena Williams an all-time great and, waiting in the wings, the player who upset Serena in the US Open last September, Naomi Osaka, among others.

Tennis played on the level of these practitioners at their best is a beautiful game to watch (not to mention that the players themselves are extremely handsome). Each player in a match of greats can bring out the best in the other -- as in fabled matches between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe in 1980 or between Federer and Nadal in 2008. And as when two boxers embrace at the end of a grueling bout, there is a level of unity between worthy opponents that transcends the brutality of antagonism. There is also a unique quality of sportsmanship such that when McEnroe, in his bad boy days, or Serena last September, violates it with a tantrum, we are as shocked and saddened as repelled. To take the most celebrated of all players on the male circuit, and to resort to a well-worn locution, Federer conducts himself as a champion off as well as on the court. There is the same grace in an extended volley between Federer and Nadal as was exhibited by Joe DiMaggio chasing down a fly ball in center field.

In 2016 Rowan Ricardo Phillips broke his Achilles' heel and found himself confined to a couch for the better part of a year in a house near Barcelona. To while away the time he watched matches on Spanish television where the commentators leave it in no doubt that they are rooting for Nadal, Garbiñe Muguruza, or any other Spaniard in competition. A tennis player himself, Mr Phillips watched some matches thrice in their entirety. And it was then that he decided he would follow the entire 2017 world tennis tour with the object of writing the present book.

Less a journal than a journey in pursuit of a sublime experience of "beauty that must die," The Circuit is a joy to read. Mr. Phillips explains tennis's unique system of scoring and includes a helpful glossary, and the book will be valuable to any newcomer attracted to watch Wimbledon next July with a Pimm's Cup in hand. For the aficionado, the prose delivers insights worth having; in two brilliant pages early in the book, Phillips brings Andy Murray's game and personality to light in prose that is as vivacious as it is lucid, and just wait till he gets to the rivalry between Federer and Nadal, which was the story of the sport in 2017.

I have a further reason for identification with the author of The Circuit. Like him I was on the disabled list for most of a year -- in my case, 2015 -- and spent much of the time watching tennis on television, though I cannot claim the distinction of doing that in Barcelona, with Spanish announcers, and celebrating the restoration of health by chronicling in vibrant prose a year's worth of tournaments.  -- DL

Susan Sontag Contains Multitudes (excerpt from "Dance in America" by Mindy Aloff) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

I'm still spending most of my reading time with Mindy Aloff's magisterial anthology "Dance in America." The volume spans three centuries and includes work by our most important dance critics along side poets (yes!), choreographers, literary figures, and dancers. While I'm learning a lot about dance and writing from the contributors, there's also much to be learned about putting together an anthology and writing head notes, those helpful guides that orient readers to the work that follows. Here's a remarkable sentence from Aloff's brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag's essay "On Dance and Dance Writing."

Novelist by ambition, essayist by temperament, filmmaker and playwright by will, public intellectual by circumstance, political activist by moral imperative, bisexual by nature, high-school graduate at fifteen, wife at seventeen, college grad (Phi Beta Kappa) at eighteen, mother at nineteen, acclaimed for her courage, damned for her arrogance: Susan Sontag's life was so full, and her friendships and love affairs around the world were so plentiful, that one wouldn't thing she'd have enjoyed much leisure to follow a demanding art form as theatrical dance. 

Sontag's essay is wonderful, of course, but it's Aloff's sentence that has stayed with me. Doesn't it make you want to keep reading?

There is No Final Word [by Vincent Katz]

For my final Guest Author post (already!) I am going to do a survey of things I see around my desk that are inspiring me as I look out the windows at water dripping off pendulous icicles and streaks of shadows and dying sun on the softening snow.

First off, there is Anne Carson’s If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002), in which Carson makes a representation of the classical text in its original language. She makes the fragmentary textual condition palpable. Many ancient poems come to us from papyruses that have been irreparably torn, resulting in the loss of words, lines, stanzas. Other fragments come to us in citations from later authors. Unlike most previous translators, who chose to translate only poems of Sappho’s that approach or can be made to emulate a complete state, Carson translated all the fragments we have. In her introduction, Carson writes:

In translating I tried to put down all that can be read of each poem in the plainest language I could find, using where possible the same order of words and thoughts as Sappho did. I like to think that, the more I stand out of the way, the more Sappho shows through. This is an amiable fantasy (transparency of self) within which most translators labor.

Carson is funny when discussing the uses to which poetry may be put by grammarians and pedants. We possess one of Sappho’s lines because someone named Apollonios Dyskolos in the second century CE cited it in his treatise On Conjunctions. The line is, “Do I still long for my virginity?” What a fantastic line! And how tantalizing not to have the rest of the poem.

She even goes on to that most remote category all classicists are familiar with, alternately delighting and despairing: when a song of Sappho’s is referred to but not quoted. In this category is a famous line from Solon recounted by Stobaios:

Solon of Athens heard his nephew sing a song of Sappho’s over the wine and since he liked the song so much he asked the boy to teach it to him. When someone asked why, he said, So that I may learn it and then die.

Carson writes, “As acts of deterrence these stories carry their own kind of thrill—at the inside edge where her words go missing, a sort of antipoem that condenses everything you ever wanted her to write…”

The Solon story reminds us that Sappho, as most ancient Greek and Roman poets, was a musician as well as a lyricist. In addition to her poems, she is credited with inventing the plectrum and the Mixolydian mode.

Carson’s translation of fragment 118 reads in its entirety:

yes! radiant lyre speak to me

become a voice

Jane Harrison’s Prolegomena to the study of Greek Religion, first published in 1903, helped to introduce a much more various method of understanding the ancient Greek world. She was one of the first to examine pre-Olympian cults and rituals, extending the study of mythology farther into the past and comparing it to similar patterns in diverse cultures.

Harrison’s words and her demonstrations of a shift from female- to male-centered religion resonate today:

To the primitive matriarchal Greek Pandora was then a real goddess, in form and name, of the Earth, and men did sacrifice to her. By the time of Aristophanes she had become a misty figure, her ritual archaic… Pandora is in ritual and matriarchal theology the earth as Kore, but in the patriarchal mythology of Hesiod her great figure is strangely changed and minished. She is no longer Earth-born, but the creature, the handiwork of Olympian Zeus… Hesiod loves the story of the Making of Pandora: he has shaped it to his own bourgeois, pessimistic ends… To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest… Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy…

Denys Page’s 1959 book, History and the Homeric Iliad, like similar books in this University of California Press series by E.R. Dodds and Hugh Lloyd-Jones, derives from the Sather Lectures he gave at UC Berkeley in 1957. Attempting to analyze the historical basis of the epics, he writes the following about the so-called dark ages in Greece after the end of the Mycenean era:

Towards the end of this period of eclipse a single voice was uplifted loud and passionate enough to ring through the ages. On the summit of a stony, rugged hill near Mount Helicon, among the untrodden ways, stood the joyless hamlet of Ascra—a bad place in winter, and disagreeable in summer, according to old farmer Hesiod. The earliest Greek personality known to us since the Mycenaean era, he tells us what he and others thought of the times in which they lived—not only the immediate present, but all the years since the age of heroes ended. And the emphasis falls not so much on the material as on the spiritual degeneration of Greece.

In order to best comprehend poems from Classical antiquity, it is necessary to consult the comprehensive commentaries that are periodically published to accompany specific authors. In the case of Hesiod, two massive publications by Martin Litchfield West (1937-2015) are essential reading. They are Theogony Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1966) and Works & Days Edited with Prolegomena and Commentary (1978). West brings a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of manuscripts, Greek and Latin literature of all periods, usages in all of Homer and all other Greek poets. In addition, he was one of the first Western scholars to study systematically parallels and predecessors in Babylonian, Hittite, Jewish, and Egyptian traditions, not to mention relevant later parallels.

We’ll leave this week’s final words to him. Here is West on Theogony:

When I say that Hesiod’s narrative is more condensed than Homer’s, I do not mean that he never says a word more than he need. His brevity is a brevity of thought, not of language… The most important and not the least remarkable fact about the dialect of Hesiod’s poems is that it is essentially the same as that of Homer…

Written language was a recent importation to Greek culture when Homer’s and Hesiod’s poems achieved the forms in which we have them now. In his intro to his Works and Days commentary, West writes this on Hesiod’s compositional process:

It is not to be supposed that having written a poem down Hesiod ceased to recite it, or that he abstained from reciting it in the middle of writing it down. With the work growing by stages, each activity may at times have run ahead of the other. After composing a passage in his mind he might either recite it to people before he wrote it or write it before he recited it. There is no reason why it should make a visible difference to our text. What he recited, however, would probably be closer to the written version when he had already written it than before, because the act of writing or slowly dictating a particular version must inevitably have tended to impress it on his memory. In the end, then, he was probably reciting a multipartite poem much like what he left in writing.

Except no! Keeping to our theme of song as poetry, we’ll end with Eric von Schmidt (1931-2007), a singer-songwriter who inspired Dylan in the early days (and whose album The Folk Blues of Eric von Schmidt appears on the cover of Dylan’s seminal Bringing It All Back Home, among other culturally significant detritus). Von Schmidt has a heart-breaking intensity to some of his vocal performances. It is so on his haunting version of “Fair and Tender Ladies,” written by Maybelle Carter of the Carter sisters. But in true folk tradition, von Schmidt invents lyrics to add to Carter’s. And in that, he is right in the tradition of the rhapsodes of Homer and Hesiod’s time. See you at the intersection of Song and Word!

George Balanchine for President! [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

George Balanchine (c) Martha Swope

I'm relishing my time with Dance in America, Mindy Aloff's important new anthology from the Library of America. It's a volume that one can roam around in and I've only just begun to do so. Last night I read Susan Sontag's "On Dance and Dance Writing," John Updike's "Genial, Kinetic Gene Kelly," and George Balanchine's "If I Were President." If only. Here's an excerpt from Balanchine to whet your appetite:

    If I were president, I would devote at least one speech to a very large section of our population which is not usually thought of or addressed as a separate unit by people in the government--I refer to the intellectuals and artists of the United States and to people who are interested in the intellectual and artistic life of our country, in other words in the spiritual and not just the material values of our existence.
    There are a great many of us: writers, painters, sculptors, actors, composers, instrumentalists, and dancers. And there are uncounted millions of those for whom their interest in our creative efforts is as important and sometimes more important than all the other ordinary details of their lives. That is why we would like the president to show an interest in and speak to us about the other half of our life--the nonmaterialistic part of life, which we represent. Actually this very large group of citizens of whom I am speaking has never made any very great demands. None of us is especially interested in money or power, but all of us want to be recognized and given the possibility to create and to enjoy art. Certain forms of art have received wonderful support from the public itself; from private citizens and groups of interested people who have created libraries and museums and supported symphony orchestras, and we them a great debt of gratitude. But writers and artists have never been accorded full recognition by a government body or official--and the person who first gives us this recognition will earn our wholehearted gratitude and support. . .
    This brings us to the important problem of our children who are our future. Their taste for art should be developed from early childhood. They should learn to love the beautiful and impractical as well as the useful and practical. One should give them fairy tales, music, dance, theater. This is real magic for children, and it is strong enough to overcome many dangers that threaten them, mainly because their minds are unoccupied and their imaginations unfed. developing these qualities in our children is the first step to promoting peace in the world--by giving them trud standards of what is most important in human life. Inner nobility will safeguard them from the cynicism of utilitarianism. Some twenty thousand young children saw special performances given for them by New York City Ballet. It was absolutely extraordinary to see how avidly they devoured those performances. The children must be reached before they are corrupted by life. 

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is widely considered a genius, and the greatest choreographer of the 20th century. As Aloff notes, he "left behind the greatest corpus of ballets the world possesses." You can read more of Balanchine's writing in "Dance in America," which you can purchase here. 

Find an interview with Mindy Aloff here. 

-- sdl

Ungovernable Venom: A Review of Joseph Spece’s Bad Zoo

Bad Zoo
Joseph Spece
Fathom Books, 2018

Joseph Spece’s new collection of poetry, Bad Zoo, questions, with barbed vehemence, the knowability of any self; the poems in this odd bestiary writhe with uncanny personae bent on articulating the extraordinary. Spece’s aesthetic lies far outside the mainstream of contemporary American poetry, in line with Fathom Books’ mission to publish texts “fit to meet—or be—the Gorgon: avant-garde, neo-gnostic, queer, monstrous, dire, Other.”  In Bad Zoo, Spece positions “a nasty, Queer, alterity; willfully ugly” against the malaise of the easy and the mundane.  Even the presentation of the text, with artwork by Darren Hopes and design by Eric Westerlind, defies the conventional. Bad Zoo concerns itself less with the precincts of memory and the autobiographical lyric and more with the provinces of alienation, alteration, and embodiment, wherein ordinary words might be forged into “a pinwheel of runes // like shivs in hot gold.”

The poetry in Bad Zoo is difficult and disorienting: the subject matter desultory, the approach off-kilter, wracked, scuttling. Spece engages figures as diverse as Herculine Barbin and Jason Vorhees, Matthew Shepard and Spider-Woman.  The debts the author acknowledges in the endnotes are telling: “to Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Bennett’s Pond, Vince’s THE ADRIFT OF SAMUS ARAN, Adams-Santos’ Swarm Queen’s Crown, Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., Rimbaud’s Illuminations, and the video games Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Parasite Eve (1997).” Throughout the many erasures and blackouts in this collection, one perceives that Spece is a poet near to the wild heart of life, despite his penchant for misdirection and his aggressively eldritch style. There are also moments of unchecked beauty and quietude here, as in “Cherry Heirloom”: — / I must write / the story of / absolute doe.” For these moments alone, Bad Zoo is worth the price of admission. This is certainly not a book for every reader, but if you are interested in reading ambitious, truly outré poetry, then Bad Zoo is a must-read for you. As Spece notes in “Lovely Colloquy”: “Transforming what’s strange is transforming.” Bad Zoo is transforming and transformative from start to finish.

---

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

 

 

Michael Dirda Reviews The Best American Poetry 2018

Michael Dirda's review appeared in the Washington Post on January 2, 2019 under the headline "How do you define authenticity? A poetry collection explores a modern problem." Here is Dirda's opening:

<< Verbal felicities, haunting or explosive imagery, the architectonic dazzlements of rhyme and meter — all these are dwarfed by American poetry’s reverence for genuineness, for authenticity. “Look in thy heart and write” advised Sir Philip Sidney’s muse, but that injunction has long been our own literature’s credo. Yet in their introductory essays to “The Best American Poetry 2018,” the 30th installment of this always excellent annual anthology, series editor David Lehman and this year’s guest editor, Dana Gioia, present dissimilar views on precisely what authenticity entails. >>

Among the poets Dirda singles out for praise are Julia Alvarez, George Bradley, Susan deSola, Dick Davis, Ernest Hilbert, Anna Maria Hong, Mandy Kahn, Jacqueline Osherow, Michael Robbins,  Allyn Rosser, Mary Jo Salter, A. E. Stallings, Agnieszka Tworek, and Christian Wiman.

Orange Noir: Charles Willeford's Noir "Heresy" [by David Lehman]

           You can read The Burnt Orange Heresy as either a murder mystery or a parable about the hoax element in modern art. Charles Willeford’s 1971 novel (Carroll & Graf) gives satisfaction on both counts. It is an inverted detective story in the approved noir manner: the first-person narration takes us into the killer’s mind. Yet not until digesting most of the book does the fallible reader guess who is to be murdered and why.

          The plot centers on a painter named Jacques Debierue, avatar of “Nihilistic Surrealism,” whose most famous work is “No. One.”-- meaning both “number one” and “nobody.” Debierue, a European transplant, lives in Willeford country: Palm Beach, Florida. James Figueras, an art critic with his eye on the main chance, obtains an interview with the great recluse. To ingratiate himself with an influential collector, he agrees to steal one of Debieurue’s paintings.

          The catch is that there are no paintings to steal. Like a version of Mallarme as dreamed by Borges, Debierue is convinced his ideas are so far superior to any possible execution that in logical consequence he does not paint. Instead he has committed his life to the “unfulfilled preparation for painting.” He puts in his four hours daily, “a slave to hope,” yet always refuses in the end to violate “the virgin canvas.”

Figueras has no such compunction. After breaking into Debierue’s pristine studio and discovering there is nothing to pilfer, he sets fire to the place, counterfeits a painting by Deberieu, forges his signature, then writes the article that offers the definitive interpretation of works that never existed. In a curious way it is as if painter and writer have colluded to invent Debieurue’s “American period.”

Willeford, highly esteemed for his Hoke Moseley novels, weaves the aesthetic theory and the criminal mischief expertly together. The Burnt Orange Heresy is a rich enigma: a monument to “a qualified Nothing,” suggestive of “deep despair” on the one hand and total “dedication to artistic expression” on the other. It is noir not only in the sense of, say, Ad Reinhardt’s black-on-black canvases but also in the violent romantic sense of Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past.

-- from the archives; originally in Tin House

Five Great Mystery Anthologies [by David Lehnan]

      A Catalogue of Crime
     By Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor
     Harper & Row, 1971

     Say you want to read a novel by a prolific crime author such as Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr, and you don’t know which to read in which order, and which to avoid. Let Barzun and Taylor be your guide. Revised and enlarged several times since it was first published in 1971, “A Catalogue of Crime” is the single best annotated compendium of mystery and espionage literature ever assembled. There are more than 5,000 entries in this work of heroic scholarship by emeritus Columbia Prof. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, Barzun’s late partner in crime-fiction criticism of the most practical kind. The editors render their generally reliable judgments succinctly and with a suitable amount of caprice. Nicholas Blake’s “Thou Shell of Death” has “complex situations and killings” and, oh yes, a “good use of snow.” The book proves once and for all that the murder mystery is, in Barzun’s words, “a highbrow enterprise, inescapably.”

     The Book of Fantasy
     Edited by Jorge Luís Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo
     Viking, 1988

     The great Argentine writer Borges wrote stories—he called them “ficciones” (“fictions”)—unlike anyone else’s. Some masquerade as literary criticism, such as one that argues that a version of “Don Quixote” by the nonexistent Pierre Menard is, though identical word for word with the original, superior to it. The distinctive Borges story contains an ingenious mix of mental puzzles and labyrinths, ironies and surprise endings, and “The Book of Fantasy” reflects his sure feel for the uncanny. Among familiar favorites, Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” can still scare, and Kafka’s “Before the Law,” a chapter of “The Trial,” can still perplex. Two wonderful surprises are “Macario” by B. Traven, the mysterious author of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” and “Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched” by the little-known May Sinclair. They enchanted me.

     The Book of Spies
     Edited by Alan Furst
     Modern Library, 2003

     On a Caribbean cruise I found this book in the ship library and whiled away the most pleasurable hours on the balcony overlooking the sea, reading expertly chosen excerpts from the greatest spy novels, including Eric Ambler’s “A Coffin for Dimitrios,” Joseph Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes,” Somerset Maugham’s “Ashenden” and Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.” Most fun for a reader is encountering something new, and I hadn’t realized that Anthony Burgess had written, in “Tremor of Intent,” a send-up of the spy genre that transcends its satiric aims and becomes an ironic version of the very thing it mocks.

     A New Omnibus of Crime
     Edited by Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert
     Oxford, 2005

     This recent anthology boldly evokes the title of Dorothy Sayers’s classic anthology of 1920. The editors aim to showcase the work of the four-score-and-seven years since. Here you’ll find the whole gamut, from the tough-guy patter of hard-boiled Raymond Chandler (“He looked tough, but he looked as if he thought he was a little tougher than he was”) to the more decorous detection practiced by Miss Sayers. Among the writers in between: The underrated Fredric Brown, representing the down-and-out world of noir, in which temptation can’t be resisted, failure is inevitable and well-educated family men can become bums overnight, “suddenly, for no reason you can define.”

     Triple Pursuit
     By Graham Greene
     Viking, 1971

     Once you get hooked on Graham Greene, there’s no turning back. Here we have three of his titles—“This Gun for Hire,” “The Third Man” and “Our Man in Havana”—which superbly convey the Greene world in which the eternal poles of good and evil trump the merely secular rules of right and wrong. Greeneland is a place where an ordinary, innocent man or woman can turn into a spy-master capable of large-scale deception, as happens to a vacuum-cleaner salesman in the sardonically funny “Our Man in Havana.”A few years ago I read three or four Greene novels in rapid succession and it hit me with the force of an epiphany that the whole genre of espionage, with its assignations, codes and betrayals, serves this author as an overarching metaphor for his true subject: romantic infidelity, in which the partners necessarily behave like secret agents. Newcomers to Greene who read “Triple Pursuit” straight through likely will be, for any number of reasons, similarly thunderstruck.

     Mr. Lehman is the author of “The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection” (2000) and the editor of “The Oxford Book of American Poetry.”

    From the archives; originally in the Wall Street Journal, February 3-4, 2007.

Support Poets! Here's your 2018 Holiday Gift Guide [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Of course poetry books top your gift lists but you can also support poets by ordering gifts from poets who, whether by inclination or necessity, make things that you can wear, eat, hold, and experience. Here are a few suggestions for holiday gifts. Click on the image for more information. If I've left someone out please add a description and link in a comment:

Clockwise from top left: Jennifer L. Knox makes herb and spice-infused artisanal seasoning blends with "no preservatives, MSG, dairy or other creepy shizznit." Deanna Dorangrichia makes stunning utilitarian ceramics that honor the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi. NEA fellow Molly Brodak is the genius behind the delicious and whimsical Kookie House. Follow Laura Orem on Instagram to snag one of her stunning otherworldly acrylic pour paintings. Kristy Bowen's dulcet dancing girl press and studio makes chapbooks, stationary, and beautiful custom jewelry hair clips (I want one!).  Paige Taggert created MACTAGGART Jewelry in 2003 and her beautiful wearable designs have gained a wide following. Alexandra Reisner's customizable jewelry is available from Caelum Designs. If you want want a ring engraved with “I heard a fly buzz” on the inside, she's the one for you. Combine the practical with the provocative with a tote bag, backpack or pouch inscribed with one of  Yahia Lababidi's inspirational aphorisms, available only from Lababidi Ink. This Day Too: Music from Iris America, Terence Winch's first album in roughly 10 years, is a rich gathering of traditional and original songs and tunes from one of the Washington DC area’s best-known Irish-American musical families. Winch in joined by brother Jesse and son Michael along with an all-star cast of D.C. traditional musicians.This is perfect music for your holiday celebration.

Give the gift of an experience and you will help create lasting memories: 

photo(c)www.aurorandjohn.com

Jezmina Von Theile learned card, palm, and tea leaf reading from her Romani-Sinti grandmother. You can schedule an in-person session in the New York City area, or schedule a phone session if you're out of town. Victoria Rowan is the "creatrix in chief" behind Ideasmyth, your genius amplifier. She offers a variety of services to "help creatives become more professional and professionals to become more creative. (ed note: I know from personal experience that if you have a project that's been languishing, Victoria will help you get. it. done!)

Books make fine gifts too! Here are three I recommend: 

David Lehman's Next Line, Please offers a masterclass in writing in form and collaborative composition. An inspired compilation of his weekly column on the American Scholar website, Next Line, Please makes the case for poetry open to all. Next Line, Please gathers in one place the popular column’s plethora of exercises and prompts that Lehman designed to unlock the imaginations of poets and creative writers.

The current volume of the Best American Poetry (2018) was guest edited by Dana Gioia and includes contributions from 75 poets. You'll find many newcomers alongside beloved favorites. Dana Gioia's brilliant introduction and Lehman's foreword set the stage for the poems that follow; the contributors' notes, a perennial favorite section, give readers a behind-the-scenes tutorial in how poems are made. 

Complete your loved-one's collection of the Best American Poetry series with this edition of the Best American Poetry 1988. A celebration of the first edition of Best American Poetry and a tribute to the late John Ashbery—the guest editor and one of the best American poets of all time—this thirtieth anniversary edition is a look back at the beginning of a renowned anthology series and an outstanding collection of poems.

-- sdl

Phantom Signs: A Review of Philip Brady's New Collection of Essays

Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City
Philip Brady
The University of Tennessee Press, 2019

Philip Brady’s new collection of essays, Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City, assays the enthusiasms and hidden architectures of a lifetime spent in academia and in poetry. Brady, poet, professor, basketball player, editor, and book publisher, brings tremendous erudition and empathy to bear on topics ranging from the wrath of Achilles to the flat earth theories of Kyrie Irving. Phantom Signs offers dispatches from the interstices between middle age and old age; the essays in this volume derive their momentum from the competing imperatives of the poet and the editor. As Brady notes in the introduction, “this book emerges from the tension between these two modes of being in the world: the writer’s dark, the editor’s light.” Brady’s subject matter is multifarious, vertiginous, constantly overlapping; the approach of the essays themselves are by turns Borgesian, Deleuzian, and Dionysian. Brady is not afraid to stutter step, to sucker punch, to jackknife, to parry, to juke, to barrel down the lane, to take a charge, to lay out, to confess, to faux-disclose, to retrace, to praise, and to re-envision himself and his ideas through a kaleidoscopic array of experiences—from his childhood in Queens, through his Peace Corps days in Zaire, to his years teaching at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

Phantom Signs skitters playfully between memoir and criticism, impelled forward by the inspired imaginary chirography of luminary figures—real and fictitious, heroic and infamous—beginning with Chinua Achebe, Achilles, and Aeneas, and ending with Zarathustra, Robert Allen Zimmerman, and Louis Zukovsky. Brady recounts love affairs, travel, aging, a late marriage, recollections from early childhood, the innerworkings of a small poetry press, the insights gleaned from a life wed to great literature.  Along the way there are notable observations, such as: “Poems are so enigmatic. Each emerges from some private darkness which publication does not entirely dispel. No one wants to be taken in by a false poem. An accidental verse.” Here, as everywhere else in Phantom Signs, Brady emphasizes the mysterious, the atomized substance of words charged with the ambition of enduring. In an essay that served as a commencement speech for the Wilkes University MFA Class of 2016, Brady writes: “When I say that writing begins with failure, I mean only that it begins there—what happens next is what counts. Most people give up. I think that those who make writing a life’s vocation aren’t necessarily the most talented; they are merely the most willing to experience profound and continuous defeat.” For those of us who love poetry, it is lucky that Philip Brady is one of those who haven’t given up.

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

Daryl Sznyter’s Synonyms [by Abigail Anne Frankfurt]

Daryl Sznyter’s debut collection of poem, Synonyms for (OTHER) Bodies is a raw, honest book that takes the reader beneath the poet’s flesh.

The narrator’s voice in the first poem, “The Virgin to Gabriel,” is both vulnerable and powerful. Sentences rub up against one another.  A passage that begins “My knees bruise softly” may end with the somewhat aggressive “clean up / your mess / leave / go / bother god.”

Sznyter plays with hard and soft language throughout the collection. She pays homage to poets such as Anne Sexton and Eileen Myles. In “Bad Girl” there are hints of Olga Broumas, “architect of my body.”

The title poem exposes the reader to an intimacy that is curt and painful. “I am fat and I am invisible / I go out to eat in groups / & the waitress always / seems to forget my food.” It’s as if one is reading lines out of the poet’s diary. Perhaps these poems are so discomforting because we have all felt this otherworldly disappearance of self.

Sznyter’s poems speak to family, her relationship with her hometown, and the stumbling beginnings of her romantic life. She finds strength in her body (“I Skip Work for Adult Ballet Class”) and resilience in who she is not and who she is becoming.

In this first collection, not only do readers hear the chilling clank of bone on bone, the rattle of prescription pills, and the sweat dripping down a sunburned back, but we also hear a voice that describes two worlds: one where the speaker was not permitted to speak and one that creates a world where she will no longer be silenced.

Daryl Sznyter is a brave new voice in the literary world.

Meet the Press: Green Writers Press—Dede Cummings, James Crews, & GWP authors/poets

Dante Di Stefano: How did Green Writers Press come into being?

James Crews: Green Writers Press, an independent, Vermont-based publishing company, founded on Earth Day in 2014, is dedicated to spreading environmental awareness and social justice by publishing authors who promulgate messages of hope and renewal through place-based writing and environmental activism. Former Little, Brown book designer, Dede Cummings, founded the press out of her home office in southern Vermont with the mission to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups and social justice organizations. Our list has expanded significantly, publishing such authors as Julia Alvarez, David Budbill, Chard deNiord, John Elder, Dr. M Jackson, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, and Clarence Major.

DD: Can you talk a bit about the “localvore” approach of the press, combining environmental activism with the work of publishing?

Dede Cummings: One reason we started Green Writers Press was to print our books sustainably, and use eBooks and audiobooks to reduce our fossil fuel use. We are excited to be publishing our own authors, and we welcome your support to help us spread the word. In today’s world of social media and online transactions, here are GWP, we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object, into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and eBook publishing.

Our vision is that, collectively, our printed and eBooks will become a chorus of voices of writers and readers, artists and photographers, who care about the fate of the earth and want to do something about it. Though we believe our books will be interesting to Vermont residents, Green Writers Press has national distribution and we hope to have a broad reach and impact. Our voices need to be heard, which is why we refer to our press as a global press. We are—we all are connected on this planet we love. It is our hope that we can create a community around our press and the books we publish.

DD: Using the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry as a point of departure, could you talk a bit about the poetic significance of Vermont? How has this place influenced you as a poet and editor? What, if anything, links Vermont poets as widely disparate as Major Jackson and the late Ruth Stone, for example?

From editor and former Vermont state poet laureate, Sydney Lea: While even as I make one, I myself feel somewhat impelled to challenge any generality regarding so wide-ranging a group of poets as those in our anthology.  Indeed, the “Vermontiness” of this collection may reside particularly in its non-homogeneity. Our little state has a rightful reputation for orneriness and individualism, and I think those qualities prevail first to last here. Yes, there is often among our authors a strong sense of place, but not always. There is often, but not always, a vivid consciousness of the seasons. I could go on, but what really abides in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Second Edition is the autonomous voice. No one poet here would be mistaken for another. I find that bracing and gratifying.

From editor and Vermont state poet laureate, Chard DeNiord: While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in [this anthology] claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich legacy of the state's poetic tradition. In addition to this, I would add that Vermont's legacy of fierce independence, self-reliance, and ingenuity, from its earliest settlers to its present citizens, continues to typify not only Vermonters, but its best poetry. Like its farmers, inventors, loggers, and sugarers, Vermont poets enjoy memorializing their state's stunning landscape and rugged character. Vermont is both a liberal and conservative state, pulling two ways at once just as a good poem does. One of the qualities that endures as a bittersweet yet alluring theme in much of Vermont poetry is its ironic double nature as an archetypal paradise and formidable wilderness. This seeming contradiction provides the perfect prescription for sublime poetry where the landscape intersects with Vermont's poets' lives in memorable ways, as in Robert Frost's "Home Burial," Hayden Carruth's "Emergency Haying," Ruth Stone's "Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Laundry," Major Jackson's "Enchanters of Addison County," Louise Gluck's "Burning Leaves," Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," Mary Ruefle's "Jewelweed," Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Headwaters," "David Budbill's "Sometimes," Julia Alvarez's "Homecoming," "Sydney Lea's "Dubber's Cur," and "Leland Kinsey's "Surviving Bulls." The rugged life-style that has typified the lives of so many Vermonters over the past three centuries, as well as the mystical Green Mountains,  continue to find their way into Vermont's contemporary poetry, as evidence by the more than 100 strong poets who fill this volume.

DD: Vermont Exit Ramps II puts the poetry of Neil Shepard into conversation with the photography of Anthony Reczek in interesting ways. What is the most notable aspect of this dialogue for you?

From Vermont Exit Ramps II photographer, Tony Reczek: Tamra Higgins, one of the founders (with Mary Jane Dickerson) of Sundog Poetry, in her wonderful introductory remarks at the Vermont Exit Ramps II Book Launch, said: “How fortunate we are to have the long-lasting friendship between Tony and Neil transubstantiated into this book!” 

That’s probably the most notable aspect of the VER II “dialogue” for me, how in many ways the book is a continuation of a conversation started some five decades ago, when we first began rambling around the Vermont countryside.  VER II carries on that same conversation, but our instruments have changed, and the riffs have a greater complexity and nuance.  But the conversation – no, the song – still emerges from that shared sense of wonder first encountered those many years ago.  We just keep riffing on it.

From Vermont Exit Ramps II poet, Neil Shepard: I agree with everything Tony and Tamra say:  how VERII transmutes a remarkable friendship spent rambling around Vermont for the past forty or fifty years into this crystallized series of poems and photographs that record the changing nature of the pastoral landscape.  

Most of the poems are what we’d call post-pastoral – they examine the flashpoints and tensions between natural and the human-built landscapes – whereas the photographs offer a mix of modes, sometimes casting backward to traditional pastoral images, and sometimes capturing the what-is of contemporary post pastoral Vermont. So, in this dialogue between old friends, sometimes the photographic images reinforce the poems, and sometimes they clash with the written word, But overall, what’s most remarkable to me, in addition to our ongoing friendship, is how two artists (poet and photographer) demonstrate their love and attachment to the Vermont landscape, which they both record and interrogate through the word and the photographic image.

DD: Tell us about some of the other books in your catalog. What elements link Green Writers Press poetry collections?

DC: Green Writers Press is proud to offer some stunning poetry books in our catalog. We are looking for new and emerging poets that write about the earth and our place in nature and the built environment, poets who give voice to those who are marginalized in our society, and established poets who want to publish with us and enjoy the benefits of working collaboratively. Green Writers signed the new poetry collection by Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, and we are thrilled to work with such a notable American poet as Pack. We also recently published Dirt and Honey, by Rachel Vasquez Gilliland, an emerging Mexican-American poet and feminist. Another upcoming book is titled Time Inside, by Vermont poet Gary Margolis, about his work with maximum security prison inmates. Last, but not least, GWP just published A Bouquet of Daisies, by seventeen-year-old poet, Megan Alice, with proceeds benefitting the Planned Parenthood Federation. We strive for a diverse chorus of poetic voices and our literary magazine, The Hopper, also awards a poetry prize, now in its third year. Winners include John Saad in 2016, Ralph Black in 2017, and our 2018 winner, Charity Gingerich. Our poetry editors are James Crews, Anna Mullen, Ellie Rogers, Emma Irving, Dede Cummings, and Caroline Shea.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JC: We have a bias for poetry that is accessible to as large an audience as possible, and because we are an independent press run almost entirely by women, we also believe that more female and transgender voices are needed in American poetry to give voice to those who have been kept quiet for too long. But as an environmentally-minded publisher, we hold close to Robert Bly's idea of "shared consciousness" with the natural world — an outlook long held by Native Americans before us. This idea puts forth that elements of the natural world are just as intelligent and conscious as humans (if not more so), and perhaps the current environmental crisis would not be so dire if more people saw the world in this way. We need more American poetry that acknowledges our essential interconnectedness as a planet and as a human species. To paraphrase the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, we'd like to see more poetry that awakens us from the illusion of our separateness. 

DD: What does the future hold for poetry at Green Writers Press? 

JC: Because our publisher is an award-winning poet in her own right, we give a lot of attention to publishing and promoting our poetry catalog. To that end, you can expect to see several new collections which showcase diverse American voices, and which unflinchingly tackle the environmental crisis. You can also look for anthologies that are in and of themselves forms of resistance against the prevailing fear and outrage infecting our politics and our country as a whole. For instance, we'll be publishing an anthology edited by our poetry editor, James Crews, called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, with a lovely preface by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

DD: You recently published Landscapes with Donkey by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (translated by Ellen Skowronski-Polito). Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

DC: Winner of the 2016 ASLE Translation Grant to support the cross-cultural sharing of ecoliterature, translator Ellen Skowronski-Polito presents Marrero Henríquez’s poetry and vision to an English-speaking audience. In Landscapes with Donkey / Paisajes con burro, Spanish poet José Manuel Marrero Henríquez follows a gentle, gray donkey on his travels through the hillsides of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located off the western coast of Africa. Wise and thoughtful, the pensive quadruped, a “doctor of the earth,” studies the limits of ground and sky  with the unique perspicuity of a donkey’s gaze. On a journey far beyond the pasture’s horizon, the donkey, humblest of poets, takes flight to the Americas, Asia and Africa and unravels the mysteries of this transcendentally beautiful and profoundly life-giving planet we call home.

José Manuel Marrero Henríquez is a poet, writer, essayist, and tenured professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He has published extensively on literary landscapes and on a variety of topics of Spanish and Latin American literatures. He has served on the advisory board of EASLCE (2010-2014) and is a member of the advisory board of Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. He has recently edited Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts (Franklin Institute, 2016) and is co-editor of Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el siglo de la gran prueba (Catarata, 2018). Paisajes con burro, his latest book of poems, was awarded a 2016 ASLE translation grant, and has been published as Landscapes with Donkey under the translation of Ellen Skowronski-Polito (Green Writers Press, 2018). His most recent endeavor of a Poetics of Breathing, a general ecocritical theory, resonates within his creative writing and advocacy of environmental issues.

A sample poem, the first one in the book, in Spanish and in English:

            La pezuña raspa el suelo
            para enterrar el punto
            que a su interrogación falta
            y el sol fortalecido esfuma
            la energía encarnada en el campo.

            No queda humedad en las cosas
            y se evapora la vida
            para siempre.

            No hay voces, niños,
            águilas, culebras,
            ni siquiera buitres,
            o ruiseñores.

            Dormitan en los libros.

            Terco, seco el páramo
            y azul el cielo, el burro
            escarba su pregunta
            en el suelo.

——-

            The hoof scrapes the ground
            to bury the point
            that lacks its question
            and the strengthened sun blurs
            the energy embodied in the field.

            Things lose their moisture
            and life evaporates
            forever.

            There are no voices, children,
            eagles, snakes,
            not even vultures,
            or nightingales.

            They doze in books.

            The páramo dry
            and the sky blue, the stubborn donkey
            scratches his question
            in the ground.

---

Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English, and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her seconds poetry collection, The Meeting Place, is due out in May 2018 from Salmon Poetry in Ireland, and she is at work on a collection of stories called Spin Cycle. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede is a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in West Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, newly installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.

James Crews is an up-and-coming poetry editor and poet himself, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in creative writing / poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column and grew to love the Great Plains. He now lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles from the Robert Frost Stone House.

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

A Review of Vita Readings: Lit from the Basement

Vita Readings: Lit from the Basement, the new poetry podcast from poet, Danielle Cadena Deulen, and her husband, Max Stinson, offers entertainment and edification for general readers of poetry and for experts alike. The premise of the weekly podcast, as articulated by Deulen, is as follows:

"We’re a married couple who discuss poetry in our basement while our children are sleeping as a way to reconnect with each other, think about broader world issues, and remember our lives before having children (when we had more than an hour a night to ourselves).

Our format is pretty simple. I’m an author and professor. Max isn’t.  I introduce Max to a poem, he asks questions about it, then we use it as a conversational prompt to discuss stories from our lives or issues we care about: love, literature, family, politics, parenting, spirituality, etc. The topics we cover are wide-ranging. Every so often, we have guests on the show who talk about a poem that is personally resonant for them."

Over the course of the first fifteen episodes, which come out once a week on Mondays, Deulen and Stinson (and guests) have discussed poems from poets, including Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Tracy K. Smith, Robert Hayden, Denis Johnson, Lisa Fay Coutley, Shara Lessley, Samiya Bashir, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jennifer Chang, Lindsay Bernal, and Richard Siken. Deulen generally begins the podcast by explaining the reason why a given poem was chosen for discussion; she then offers a close reading, which Stinson nuances by interposing questions from the perspective of a nonpoet.

As with most podcasts, the average episode, which runs about fifty minutes long, contains enough digressions to keep Tristram Shandy happy. These digressions often layer the close reading by introducing personal stories from the podcasters’ lives. The alternation between anecdote and scholarly analysis propels each episode forward with élan and buoyancy. Listening to Deulen and Stinson discuss poetry is a great joy; Deulen’s love for poetry is as contagious as it is deep. Stinson’s smart commentary deflates and demystifies even as it opens a space for Deulen to gather paradise about a given poem. The couple’s love for each other and for their children provides an unusual, but welcome, backdrop for their particular brand of poetry criticism. It is an honor to be welcomed into the home of two such fine people. Spend some time listening to Vita Readings. You will not regret it.

---

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

Meet the Press: Augury Books-An Interview with Kate Angus

Dante Di Stefano: How did Augury Books come into being?

Kate Angus: I started Augury Books in 2010 with Christine Kanownik, who I’d met in The New School’s MFA program. I’d been Meghan O’Rourke’s poetry reader at The Paris Review as well as a fiction reader at A Public Space so I felt like I understood at least the ins and outs of reading slush piles and such, if nothing else, and Christine was working at Litmus Press. Our friends Sharmi Cohen and Paul Legault had just started the translation journal Telephone (now also a book press affiliated with Nightboat Books), and my friend John David West had just begun his film website Moviefied NYC and I think, for me at least, watching them put their ideas into action made me realize: OK, yes, this is a thing our friends are doing and so can we. Around that time I’d been asked by a former poetry student of mine from Gotham Writers’ Workshop to curate a reading for The Rubin Museum’s “Talks About Nothing” series and so we decided to make that reading also a kind of publicity event to debut our press. After that, things moved quickly: Christine made a website on Wordpress, and we started soliciting poems from poets whose work we loved for an online literary journal, as well as opened up a reading period for manuscripts.

After the first year and our first round of books, Christine stepped down from Augury and Kimberly Steele and Matt Cunha, two other New School MFA friends stepped in. After a while, Matt also had to leave to focus on his outside work, but Kimberly and I kept on plugging away, adding on a former Augury intern, Nicolas Amara, as our Assistant Editor. Then in the summer of 2017, Joe Pan of Brooklyn Arts Press who was a friend and whose fantastic book Hiccups we’d published a few years earlier, approached me about becoming BAP’s first imprint and we enthusiastically said Yes. It’s been a great gift to become a part of BAP and bounce ideas back and forth with Joe and feel so supported.

DD: Could you talk a bit about your poetry catalog? What do Augury Books have in common?

KA: I think all of our books, not only the poetry titles but also our short story collections and our nonfiction title, although very different books by distinct individual voices, all do share certain qualities: surprising and vivid imagery, associative leaps, kinetic energy unfolding within the language, intellectual rigor, emotional expansiveness, and maybe also frequent use of the second person.

DD: In 2019, you’ll be publishing books by t’ai freedom ford and Arisa White. What can we expect from these books?

KA: These books are both such knockouts! I’m really excited that we are midwifing them into the world.

Arisa White’s book, Whose Your Daddy?, is a hybrid poetry and nonfiction memoir that delves deep into questions of how we are shaped by absence and inheritance, and how we grow. We had the honor of publishing Arisa’s Lambda-Literary-nominated poetry collection You’re the Most Beautiful Thing that Happened a few years ago and it’s such a pleasure to see her lyric playfulness and deftness manifest in this book too, as she takes additional artistic and emotional risks. The book takes the reader on a real journey of inquiry and healing.

t’ai freedom ford’s collection & more black is mesmerizing. Her poems, which she describes as “Black-ass sonnets” inspired by Wanda Coleman’s American Sonnets, are rebellious, stunning and revelatory. You can expect to have your socks knocked off; to stay up all night reading, pausing to sit and really take in each poem and let it echo inside you. These poems are so powerful and alive.

DD: What else is on the horizon for Augury Books?

KA: Well, most immediately, in October we are launching a book very close to my heart: poet and musician Alicia Jo Rabins’ Fruit Geode, a witchy collection of poems about motherhood, selfhood, herbalism, the divine and the human. Alicia and I first met as teenagers when we were finalists for the National Young Arts Foundation’s annual contest down in Miamai and then we were freshmen together at Barnard College, roaming around NYC reciting Poetry in Motion poems to each other and getting into ridiculous fights about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. I don’t really solicit work for Augury—before Alicia’s book and Arisa’s forthcoming memoir, other than the two chapbooks we published our first year, 100% of our titles have come to us through the Open Reading period, but I knew Alicia had this manuscript (her first book, Divinity School, won the 2015 APR/Honickman Prize) and I was dying to read it so I asked her to let me take a look. As soon as I read the first poem I knew that I wanted Augury to be Fruit Geode’s home.

DD: What is one thing American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

KA: Expansiveness. There should be more room for more voices and aesthetics and a way to make more people all across the board feel welcomed and at home. Sometimes I think poets can get caught up in defending their own turf, either in terms of artistic approach or clique or reputation or actual area, and I just don’t understand that. There is room for a lot of different approaches to our art. I don’t mean that everyone needs to collaborate or spend all their time making friends—solitude is important too and God knows I’m a bit shy and not the most outgoing person in any room—but I think that we’re all trying to do something beautiful and hard and we can respect and appreciate that we’re in that same boat together. Even if we don’t personally feel aesthetically aligned with what someone else is doing, at least we have that same impulse in common and can support each other in that.

DD: You have a great poem called “Schuyler today and the students” in which you say, so beautifully:

                                    What I like
            about Schuyler is the way sonatas
            and Coca-Cola flourish in the same stanza,
            morning glories opening
            their bright mouths, and trailing down
            tender vines.

I was wondering if you could talk a bit about James Schuyler and some other poets, past and present, whom you admire?

KA: Thank you so much; that’s really nice of you to mention that poem. I sometimes teach a Modern Poetry class at a fashion college in NYC and some students enroll because they’re interested in the subject but usually most are there just to fill a humanities credit and are on the fence about reading poetry. Schuyler changes all that. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve watched fall in love with poetry because of him. He wrote about things they recognize—streets they’ve walked down, he drinks soda and puts it in a poem, he writes about colors and plants and music and love and friendship and sadness and daily life in a way that they live too, and so when they read him they see their own lives echoed. The class always wakes up so much in that moment—a vivid energy sparks up the room.

There are so many poets I love, past and present, that it’s hard for me to only pick a few to mention, but I will say that Frank O’Hara, also, is someone whose work I return to over and over again. His charm and good nature, his energy and the way his poems unfold like you’re sitting on a bench at the park next to a friendly stranger who draws you into the most amazing conversation. And the beautiful longing in Rilke’s Duino Elegies I also have found myself going back to so many times over the years.

I love also Mary Ruefle for the associative leaps she makes, and the perfect strangeness of her poems. Whenever I read her, I want to write. Chen Chen’s work I feel the same way about—I have reread When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Future Possibilities at least 5 times so far—I even wrote him a fan message on Facebook. And Terrance Hayes—American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is necessary reading: chilling and beautiful and brilliant. I’ve also been really into Tommy Pico’s work lately and Jillian Weise and Ely Shipley and Jennifer Chang.

DD: Could you end the interview by with a poem from an Augury poet?

KA: This is a poem from Alicia Jo Rabins’ upcoming collection, Fruit Geode, which I mentioned before is coming out this fall. Beyond that, I think I’ll let the poem speak for itself.

            BOY, GIRL, ANGEL, GOLEM

            I am a slot machine
            I am a globe
            spin me
            put your finger down
            buy a guidebook buy a ticket
            find a cheap hotel
            in the Old City
            meet me on the roof
            for a drink
            show me the lights from above
            read my tongue my bellyshape
            boy, girl, angel, golem
            you dissolve my allegiance
            I forget who I was
            I learn to say my new name
            the globe collapses
            to a dot
            the dot is you
            I’d follow you anywhere

---

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

Kate Angus is the founding editor of Augury Books and the Creative Writing Advisor to the Mayapple Center for Arts and Humanities at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of So Late to the Party (Negative Capability Press 2016) and her poetry and nonfiction have also appeared in The Atlantic online, The Washington Post, Best New Poets 2010, Best New Poets 2014, and the Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-A-Day” email series. A former Writer in Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy, she currently lives in New York where she teaches at Gotham Writers Workshop, LIM College, and privately.

The JFK Murder Mystery (with gumshoe Tony Trigilio) [by David Lehman]

If, like me, you can suspend your usual horror at conspiracy theories in favor of the higher paranoia, and you have a weakness for poetry noir and are convinced that JFK was not assassinated by a lone marksman in the book depository building, have I got the book for you: it is Historic Diary by Tony Trigilio (Buffalo, NY: BlazeVOX). Trigilio uses a variety of styles and forms -- e.g., a pantoum for The Manchurian Candidate, diary entries in porose or prosey verse for the assassination witnesses who met violent deaths.

Here are a couple of sentences or lines lifted almost at random from this compelling new book:

"He shot the President on his lunch hour."

"The PTA overrun with communists."

"Tough to believe, in those 90 seconds
After the shots came off, a man could stash
A rifle, run down four flights of stairs, buy
Himself a Coke, stare down a cop."

"Dressed and sitting
upright in bed, November 8, 1965,
Kilgallen found dead of a drug
overdose, her case notes vanished -- "

"'The Queen of Diamonds'? What did she mean, 'The Queen of Diamonds'?"

-- DL

[from the archive; originally posted March 9, 2011. The image is that of the book cover Charlie Orr created for an unwritten book by me.]

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

Introducing The Best American Poetry 2018: Guest Editor Dana Gioia [video by Blank Verse Films]

This video was created by Mike Gioia for Blank Verse Films. For more BAP videos, scroll here. For more videos, subscribe to the Blank Verse YouTube channel. 

-- sdl

Save the Date: Thursday, September 20 The Best American Poetry 2018 Launch Reading

The New School
The Auditorium 
66 W 12 Street, New York, NY

7 PM

Best American Poetry series editor David Lehman and guest editor Dana Gioia headline an all-star cast of poets included in this year's much anticipated volume.  Join them for the launch reading, an annual rite of Autumn in New York.

Allison Adair, Kaveh Akbar, Andrew Bertaina, Bruce Bond, George Bradley, Brendan Constantine, Mary Ann Corbett, Cynthia Cruz,Warren Decker, Dante Di Stefano, Nausheen Eusuf, Jonathan Galassi, Sonia Greenfield, Ernest Hilbert, R. Nemo Hill, Anna Maria Hong, Marie Howe, Steven Kampa, Mandy Khan, Ilya Kaminsky, Karl Kirchwey, Nate Klug, Nkosi Nkululeko, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Alfred Nicol. Sharon Olds, Jacqueline Osherow, Elise Paschen, Wang Ping, Aaron Poochigian, Michael Robbins, Jill Rosser, Jason Schneiderman, Nicole Sealey, Michael Shewmaker, Adrienne Su,, Agnieszka Tworek, G. C. Waldrep, James Matthew Wilson, Ryan Wilson.

Read an excerpt from Dana Gioia's introduction here. 

Free and open to the public

Books will be available for purchase.  

More information here. 

Also for sale: the thirtieth anniversary edition of the series inaugural volume, The Best American Poetry 1988, Series Editor David Lehman, Guest Editor John Ashbery.  With updated contributors' notes and a new preface.

Meet the Press: Canarium Books—A Conversation with Joshua Edwards

Dante Di Stefano: Kenneth Koch, adding to the famous adage by Wallace Stevens, said: “Not only is all poetry experimental, but all that is truly experimental is poetry.” When I think about the work Canarium Books has published I think of this Koch quote. Can you begin by discussing the Canarium catalog along the lines of the experimental (the surprising, the anti-quotidian, the unorthodox)?

Joshua Edwards: I don’t trust anything poets say, but I like the way Koch’s adage sounds! U.S. poetry’s standard metric of experimentalism has a lot to do with syntactical disruption, fragmentation, and the deployment of philosophy and its problems, and I think many of our books fit the bill, but newness isn’t what we’re most interested in as editors. We certainly do our best to publish work that challenges modes of inquiry, explores how language can be used, wonders what’s worthy of attention and obsession, and reimagines forms, but mostly we’re looking for unique visions and interesting thinking.

DD: How did Canarium Books come into being?

JE: I guess you might say it was an experiment. A year or so after graduating from college I had the idea to start a journal, mostly as a way to educate myself about poetry, and through poetry, about the world. I had no idea what I was doing and no money, but I was fortunate to find funding and to cross paths with a few great young poets in Oregon, and with their help The Canary was born. That lasted six years, until we decided to transform the journal into a press ten years ago. At that time I was graduating from an MFA program at University of Michigan, and I pitched an idea to the program for a collaboration, whereby they’d help with printing costs and interested students could help out as readers and managing editors. Miraculously it all worked out. The first two books published were Union! by Ish Klein and Tod Marshall’s The Tangled Line, and we’ve recently published our 26^th and 27^th.

DD: Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book is such an amazing book. Not only does Buffam succeed in taking an ancient form and rendering it in a vividly contemporary way, she’s composed a hybrid text, which is exceedingly complex and, yet, easily accessible. She winds up writing a book that is a serious contemplation on motherhood in the digital age, and at the same time its one of the funniest books in recent memory. What do you find most notable about this book?

JE: I find all the characteristics you mention to be notable, but for me it’s the consciousness at the center of A Pillow Book that makes it so powerful. Suzanne is incredibly funny, and I think she has a profound understanding of the relationship between humor and its dark or difficult sources. There’s a kind of electricity that runs through all of her books that holds everything together while also creating moments that jump off the page. But I’m skirting your question. I guess my answer would be that I find the sharp, sustained portrayal of restlessness to be my favorite aspect of A Pillow Book.

DD: What does American poetry need more of, in your opinion? Less of?

JE: The young poets who are starting presses and doing all sorts of great stuff right now are really inspiring, and I think they can answer this question better than me, but I’ll offer my cranky answer nonetheless: What poets in America and all people everywhere need is health care, safety, and affordable lives, but speaking specifically about poets in this country, they need more freedom and less nationalism and “culture.” About 80 years ago somebody (Herman Bonnert or Frank Zacone or Henry Maar or someone without a good publicist) had the idea to twist a balloon into a recognizable animal shape. Whatever made that first balloon animal happen—be it the chance encounter of a clown and a giraffe at balloon factory or a person’s desire to make a child laugh at a birthday party—is for me the poetic moment, when imagination brings something surprising into the world. (Take that, Koch and Stevens.) A lot of poetry is the product of a manner of thinking, which trades the classified impulses of creation for a kind of political affect or performance. Wonderful things can still happen in this mode, since language has its own magic and the individual mind is ultimately irrepressible, but it’s hard to make a great work of art with the qualifications of an industry. The overwhelming majority of the poets I know compete with each other for a handful of academic jobs. Teaching is of course an absolutely amazing career and time to write is a miracle, but the industry that has been built up around creative writing is out of control. I think poets need to be very aware of the institutions that support them and the technologies used to disseminate their work.

DD: What is on the horizon for Canarium Books in 2018 and beyond?

JE: Our recently-released 2018 books are giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper and Anne Kawala’s Screwball, which are both super examples of poetic experimentation. 2019 will be slow for us as publishers, since we’re focusing on our current roster of authors and none of them have manuscripts that will be ready this year, so we’re going to take that time to do some other things. We helped our friends at Marfa Book Co. to put on a poetry festival in August 2017 and we’ll likely do that again next summer. We’ve also organized performances by a couple of my favorite songwriters (who I think of as poets with guitars), Mitski and Christopher Owens. I’d like to keep doing that when the occasion arises. In 2020 and beyond, there are a couple of new books by current Canarium folks lined up and a translation or two.

DD: Tell us a bit about Anne Kawala’s Screwball (translated by Kit Schluter).

JE: Screwball is a wild ride. Like John Beer’s Lucinda, it’s a book-length poem or verse novel that changes forms as it goes, and every page offers something unexpected. I won’t go into the plot too much, for fear of ruining some surprises, but I will say that it involves a huntress-gathress, an iceberg, and an adventure that traverses geographies. Anne Kawala is a virtuoso, and this is a book that puts on display her vibrant imagination as well as a multitude of technical talents. Hats off to Kit Schluter for his excellent translation.

DD: You recently published giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

JE: There’s so much going on in AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper that any description I could give of its themes and ideas would be reductive and not do justice to giovanni’s great book, so I’ll just stick with the basics. The book is a collection or gallery of poems, many of which incorporate or are comprised of images (mesostics, illustrations, performance scores, drawings), that explore lives, how we’re perceived, and how we live together, among other things. We’ve got a page at our website with recordings of giovanni reading beautifully from the book, so I’ll end by directing folks there: http://www.canarium.org/recordings

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Joshua Edwards co-edits Canarium Books and works at bookstores in West Texas and Chicago. He’s the author of Castles and Islands, Imperial Nostalgias, and Architecture for Travelers, among other collections; he translated María Baranda’s book-length poem, Ficticia; and his photographic projects have been exhibited at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Rice University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Galveston Artist Residency, the Pensacola Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Information about his work and the reading tour he’s currently on can be found at www.architecturefortravelers.org

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

Reaching Out For the Sweet Maybe: Four Brief Reviews

From the Inside Quietly
Eloisa Amezcua
Shelterbelt Press, 2018

Eloisa Amezcua’s debut collection begins with a self-portrait poem in which the speaker, as a child, sinks to the bottom of a pool “legs akimbo,” “screaming words she shouldn’t know.” The image of this particular kind of underwater singing is both familiar and strange, and it establishes the thematic concerns of Amezcua’s poetry. From the Inside Quietly explores the way language binds and separates us. Amezcua charts the transgressive and luminous potentials of the lyric as she describes teaching her mother English over the phone, arguing with her sister about keeping a handgun in the house, walking home alone, sitting at her father’s bedside in the hospital, and navigating the downside of a romantic relationship. The speaker of these poems seeks not only to translate the dire, raging, and riven interior music of her consciousness, but also to open herself up to the lacunae and stillnesses where that music might be tendered and touched:

            This is how I was
             taught to love:
             to silence yourself
             is to let others in.

Amezcua manages to speak radiantly through her own silences. This blazing debut presages great things to come.

Field Theories
Samiya Bashir
Nightboat Books, 2017

Field Theories, Samiya Bashir’s latest collection, uses the language of quantum mechanics to frame a complex investigation of “this skipscrapple world.” Bashir challenges social, linguistic, and aesthetic conventions as she examines the way myth, history, and language shape our perception of selfhood. In Field Theories, “the world stays unstable / anyway,” despite our best efforts to glide effortlessly onward; the page itself becomes a destabilizing field wherein the sonnet, the prose poem, and even the poetic line might be recalibrated. In one of the collection’s central observations, Bashir notes:

            You know how the universe blinks and we
            exist for a minute or two with our

            classic hits station and our marshmallows
            our wars and flags and television and

            shit. Coke bottles falling from the sky to
            an old man’s village and the white people just

            laugh and laugh and line up to pay and laugh
            and get paid and laugh. That’s what they made.

What Samiya Bashir has made is a collection of poetry that disputes the facile assumptions of continuity that hoodwink us into believing in the immediate redemptive power of our national and personal narratives. Nevertheless, Bashir holds out this hope: “Still, somehow, we are / laughter. We are the doorway out. / We are (again) the doorway in.”

Barbie Chang
Victoria Chang
Copper Canyon Press, 2017

“Desire is reaching out for the sweet maybe,” the speaker in the first section of Victoria Chang’s new collection remarks, attributing this observation to Aristotle. Barbie Chang, the heroine of the first and third sections of this book, yearns to be in the heart of possibilities forever denied to her; she remains on the periphery of the social circle of mothers at her daughter’s school, she tends to her aging parents in their failing health, she attempts to navigate the complexities of her relationship with her “Mr. Darcy.” Chang’s real subject is the loneliness at the heart of contemporary American life:

            Barbie Chang loves Evites Paperless
                          Party Posts that host her

            ego patch her holes she puts barrettes
                          on her heart so other

            people will see her will hear her her
                          heart is made of hay is

            disturbingly small held in its cage she
                          is never late when invited

This loneliness is digital, linguistic, and factional; it has something to do with the ways we define ourselves and the physical layout of our lives. The America that Barbie Chang inhabits is an “America that most people don’t care / about on most days.” Barbie Chang dwells in endless exile, but the vibrant sonnet sequences in the second and fourth part of the book provide an alternative to permanent ostracism by positing the salvific potential of love, even when it hurts and haunts: “love is / the only thing that is not an argument.”

Tunsiya / Amrikiya
Leila Chatti
Bull City Press, 2018

Leila Chatti’s chapbook, Tunsiya / Amrikiya, chronicles the poet’s experiences as a Tunisian American, deftly exploring issues of identity and notions of national belonging. Chatti’s poems are at their most poignant and searing when they focus on her parents, and on her complex relationship to her father’s Islamic faith.  As she puts it in “Night Lament in Hergla”:

            There is no world in which I am not haunted,
            no willing God to relinquish me.
            My mother taught me death comes
            wailing from the shadows, my father
            all ghosts exist in smoke. I search
            the sky for light long extinguished,
            make wishes on their bright graves.

Tunsiya / Amrikiya haunts because it provides a beautiful testament to the hopes of immigrant parents and to the realities of their children lost among the Bougainvillea of Raleigh in spring and inhaling the crisp night air of East Lansing in autumn. Leila Chatti’s voice reasserts the primacy of love and connection, running counter to the discourse of hate and fear propagated by those in power.  Chatti’s poetry offers its readers arnica and eyebright for the Trump era.

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