The Best American Poetry

Grace Cavalieri Reviews "Playlist"

Grace Cavalieri reviews Playlist by David Lehman. University of Pittsburgh Press. 64 pages.

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Lehman, already at the forefront of our literary culture, writes a music retrospective inspired by his friend, the late great poet A.R. Ammons. In 1965, Ammons’ book Tape for the Turn of the Year premiered poems written on a cash-register tape. In these, he gave us permission “to say and du anything.” And so, Lehman does — chronicling jazz icons of the 40s 50s 60s — as well as film/TV stars. This book will break your heart for all that’s passed, and especially how tenderly Lehman revives it.

By identifying song and singer, Lehman traces this country’s cultural story and tells us what the past is worth, and why. And this is where you fall in love…the poet’s personal involvement…where he was the night of…what he was drinking…how he felt…not reminiscences, nothing so cheap as that, but actual shards piecing his own life together through music, day by calendar day.

What is the central issue of any book- length poem? With Ammons, it was claiming his right as poet. With Lehman, it’s a true devotion to the meaning and spirit of that great human endeavor, jazz — as well as classic pop culture. Lehman is knowledgeable about music’s traditional story, and he takes it out of the corner, away from music connoisseurs, to animate it for all readers. The passion and strength of the poet shape stories of singers and musicians, at times making song out of words. The writing fluidly connects 72 pieces, and the accumulation demonstrates the soul of innovation: i.e., film and music now become poetry. A man, obedient to “The Stars,” revels at the intricate beauty that’s given him such lifelong pleasure.

12/3/17

When I listened to “Ralph’s New Blues”

(Modern Jazz Quartet) the epiphany was

the music that remained when the melody

was removed — even for such as I who

can’t think of a better way to say

our love is here to stay than the song.

>>>

from

from "April 2019 Exemplars: Poetry Reviews" by Grace Cavalieri in Washington Independent Review of Books

• Grace Cavalieri
• April 11, 2019

I Will Wear My Wounds in Chapters: Six Chapbooks

To Those Who Were Our First Gods
Nickole Brown
Rattle, 2018

Nickole Brown’s To Those Who Were Our First Gods explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. In language both colloquial and lyrically charged, Brown examines how predation and kindness play out on “this whole stubborn, / beautiful, fucked-up planet,” which is spinning toward ecological doom, pocked (at least, in America) by chain-stores and fostering “this clocked-in, bottled, florescent-lit existence.” In “A Prayer to Talk to Animals” Brown articulates the central impulse of the chapbook:

                        …Oh, forgive me, Lord,
    how human I’ve become, busy clicking
    what I like, busy pushing
    my cuticles back and back to expose
    all ten pale, useless moons.  Would you let me
    tell your creatures how sorry
    I am, let them know exactly
    what we’ve done? Am I not an animal
    too? If so, Lord, make me one again.
    Give me back my dirty claws and blood-warm
    horns, braid back those long-
    frayed endings of every nerve tingling
    with all I thought I had to do today.

To Those Who Were Our First Gods focuses on more than what we’ve lost by estranging ourselves from the natural world; it upholds and elegizes “that iridescent song,” “the soft and liquid cathedral” of the animal’s body, which, more often than not, ends up wrapped in a black bag and thrown away. Reading Brown’s poetry reminds one that to be an animal is to be alive in desire and suffering.

Traveling Cluster: Poems in Italy
David Giannini
New Feral Press, 2018

Traveling Cluster, David Giannini’s latest chapbook, is an incandescent travelogue, an homage to Italian culture,
a love note to Italy itself. Giannini details his travels through Rome, Florence, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria and elsewhere, while paying tribute to the likes of Michelangelo, Dante Alighieri, and Federico Fellini. Giannini’s masterful craftmanship, his humor, and his varied formal approaches make this chapbook a journey as enjoyable as the one the poet took himself. Traveling Cluster always remains cognizant of the English fascination with Italia; Byron, Shelley, and Shakespeare all receive mentions. “In Verona” affords one such instance:

    As if Shakespeare
    could turn in
    his grave after
    Giampiero
    our guide
    tells of Juliet’s
    balcony and her
    statue removed
    from the courtyard
    because thousands
    of tourist hands
    cracked
                    its bronze
    breasts
    by rubbing them
    “for luck in love”
    and I wonder
    does anybody
    care who
    now visits
    her perch and
    house walls
    fucked
    by graffiti.

Giannini quotes Anna Akhmatova early on in this chapbook: “Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life.” How fortunate that the poems in Traveling Cluster allow one an immediate return to such a dream.

The Body as Passage
Nathan C. Lipps
Open Palm Print, 2019

Reading Nathan Lipps’s The Body as Passage calls to mind lines from Robert Bly’s translation of Goethe’s “The Holy Longing”: “I praise what’s truly alive, / What longs to be burned to death.” Lipps stacks and splinters images in a devotional poetry that seethes with life and longing. Grief, loss, and a reaching toward the sacred braid throughout the simple want at the center of these well-made poems. Lipps charts a certain type of spiritual loneliness against a stark midwestern backdrop—ruined barns amidst acres overgrown with black locust trees. The first poem of The Body as Passage, “Before Death,” exemplifies the strengths of the collection as a whole:

    A bird in the kitchen
    this morning.
    It was enough.
    A song among tangerine bowls.
    Near the open window
    atop the butcher-block table—
    grapefruit, 
                     a spoon.
                                    Unequivocal.
    Peering out into darkness.
    For Sunrise. 
    Knowing 
    it will blind.

    Too much.
                         Hallelujah. 
    Even the seeds.

Like many of Lipps’s other poems, “Before Death” proceeds austerely, with a quiet confidence, toward the ineffable. This chapbook, the first book by Lipps, surely presages strong work to come.

[GATES]
Sahar Muradi
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Sahar Muradi’s [GATES] elegantly engages the dislocations inherent in language, war, and illness. Muradi’s chapbook deftly renders the fractured ruminations of a young person coming to terms with her father’s cancer and America’s war against her ancestral homeland. As the chapbook’s title suggests, each poem is a threshold, a point of departure, which is also a point of entry. The first poem of the book illustrates well this liminality:  

 

    The one that belonged to her
    The one where the light hit for the first time
    The one between our houses
    The one I crawled through to sleep on his chest
    The one the dog squeezed through
    The one at three over the candle and cake
    The one at three at the checkpoint
    The one between the earth and the sky, the refrigerator with wings
    The one where he met us after one year and was a stranger
    The one at the park, the one at Up Park, the one at Down Park
    The one that pierced my face and they pointed and laughed
    The one that took them away from me in a tube and sent them back to me tired
    The one he went through, hairs shooting out
    The one she went through, blood turning up
    The one we all went through to get to the blinking lights with the cherries
    The ones we put up when she was born
    The ones we passed to leave for good
    The ones we paid quarters to get through
    The one they learned the names of Presidents for
    The ones they needed social security numbers for
    The one I touched in the dark of my room
    The ones we couldn’t talk about, ever
    The one we had to close behind us to stay in, to keep neat, to not be tempted
    The one we tried to jump and failed
    The one he jumped and wasn’t forgiven
    The ones in the books that made animals of us
    The ones that told us who we weren’t
    The ones that hurt, that swung and cut and rattled long after they left
    The ones that kept flowers
    The one I went through to go north, to go abroad, to go east, to find my cardinal ways
    The one she went through too tired to find her way
    The one they have chosen to give them purpose
    The different one I have chosen
    The one I haven’t yet found
    The one I am looking through now with the narrow slots and passages unseen                                                                               

Here, as elsewhere in [GATES], Muradi combines a finely-attuned imagistic imagination with a bighearted embrace of the ordinary. Sahar Muradi writes as original and as compassionate a poetry as one would expect from a poet who proclaims: “I will wear my wounds in chapters.”

Spoiled Meat
Nicole Santalucia
Headmistress Press, 2018

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat capers along the interstates and through the one-horse towns of central Pennsylvania, past and present. Santalucia’s antic foulmouthed lyric engagements with everyday life foreground the madcap and the astonishing; as she writes in “Barefooted Lesbians”: “Just yesterday I fell in love, I fell on the sidewalk, / I fell into a pile of jackknives.” Spoiled Meat explores the homophobia and the misogyny graffitied everywhere across the suburban and rural landscapes these poems render so well. Oftentimes, the poems address how violence intersects with misogyny and homophobia. “Supermarket Blowout” provides a characteristic example of this intersection in its final lines:

    The corn in aisle nine pops
    when you pay
    with your NRA Visa.
    In the gun-shaped produce section
    there’s a raffle for the 20-gauge-melon-
    pump-action with a 26-inch barrel.
    To enter, all you have to do
    is show up and say, I hate gays.

Santalucia’s response to this hatred is a surreal, slapstick, and, ultimately, vivifying humor. Don’t be afraid to walk barefoot across the cornhusks, shotgun shells, and chicken wing bones that litter the floor of these poems; the trek will provide you with many consolations, not the least of which is a good old-fashioned belly laugh in the face of the pure products of America as they continue to go crazy.

And God Created Women
Connie Voisine
Bull City Press, 2018

In the poem, “Via Dolorosa,” Connie Voisine writes: “What I took to be a ticket / turned out to be some kind of evil sprite / who might fill my mouth with cement…” And God Created Women levitates throughout, in just this way, between menace and magic. Voisine’s ultimate subject is the beleaguered and blessed self; as Voisine notes in “Self-Portrait as Sphinx”: “…Strewn is me, / not human, not any one thing, who must / accept the awful answer…” The poems in And God Created Women are barbed and beautiful, twisting with an ache that renders them unforgettable. The best poem in the collection, “(Her) Middle Ages,” consists of stutter steps, snippets of conversations, non sequiturs, and sentence fragments that accrue into an overwhelmingly powerful examination of the bonds between mothers and daughters; the poem begins: “I know men who would // rape you. That’s why. // As long as the sea is wild.”  Voisine’s poems pierce and rend; And God Created Women is the kind of chapbook that will wound you into remembering 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, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). 

For Prose Writers Who Want to Write Poetry: A Reading List [by Terese Svoboda]

Prose writers make sparks through character and plot, endlessly blackening the page from one margin to the other. But there are some who recognize that sometimes emotion needs to breath. I like to point those prosestitutes (as Walcott used to call them) toward the prosy end of poetry. These poems present the idea of word choice and white space as muscle, poems that are not just the co-opted regulation subject-verb-object but also are not dauntingly complex syntactically. Seemingly. Five books of poetry for fiction writers who really want to jettison their agents and struggle in the poet's pure genre:

The Performance of Becoming Human by Daniel Borzutzky. How to take prose lines and hold them in poetic tension.

Childhood of an Equestrian by Russell Edson. Master of the funny dialogue prose poem.

Diving into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich. Have you read it lately? It's so clear it burns. It also teaches line break strategy plus advocacy.

The Movie At the End of the World by Tom McGrath. Blacklisted but a poet with a breath like Whitman who takes history and America head on.

All-Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby.  A funny mix of high and pop cultural references turned into formally strict, lyrically extravagant poems. Shows how form can be your friend.

A Kickstarter Worth Supporting: For Walt Whitman’s birthday: War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Memorials by Binh Danh & Robert Schultz

Our great national poet’s concerns during the Civil War apply with striking relevance in our own moment of war and dividedness. Whitman’s humane example and his central trope—the leaves of grass as sign of democracy and renewal—rebuke directly the White Nationalists who marched in Charlottesville chanting “Blood and Soil.” For Whitman, American blood in American soil was not a tribal claim, and for him “the land entire” was the most fitting memorial to the war dead, “South or North, ours all”:  ". . . [T]he land entire [is] saturated, perfumed with their impalpable ashes’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d, and shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and every flower that grows, and every breath we draw . . .."

In War Memoranda, forthcoming in May in time for the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth, Binh Danh’s photographs of Civil War memorial sites, using the nineteenth-century cyanotype process, evoke at once the past and present. And Robert Schultz’s chlorophyll prints offer portraits of Whitman and Civil War soldiers embodied in the flesh of leaves, physically enacting the central trope of Leaves of Grass—especially when the leaf used has been plucked from a “witness tree” known to have stood on a battlefield during the war. This book of art, poetry, and comment includes a generous selection of Whitman’s poetry and prose, 51 photographs, with essays by poets David Lehman and Stanley Plumly and by scholars Barbara Bair (Library of Congress) and Molly Rogers (author of Delia’s Tears). War Memoranda will be printed in a fine art edition limited to 500 copies and is available for pre-order through a Kickstarter campaign that will end April 2, 2019. Signed copies and original artworks by Danh and Schultz are available as premiums. For more information use the search link http://kck.st/2DvOExn or go to Kickstarter.com and search “War Memoranda.”

-- sdl

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

___________________________________________________

Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

____________________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

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An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

 _______________________________________

The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

________________________________________

Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

A Process Note

All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief.  My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
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A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell 

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.

Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?

Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs   of lovely   & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.

Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.

I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the

Poet Spotlight: Veronica Golos [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Veronica Golos is the author of three poetry books, Rootwork: Lost Writings of John Brown and Mary Day Brown (3: A Taos Press), Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, poems from which are translated into Arabic by poet Nizar Sartawi, and A Bell Buried Deep (Storyline Press, 2004), co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch, and adapted for stage and performed at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont, CA. Golos has lectured at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, Hunter College, Julliard School of Music, Regis University, University of New Mexico, Dine Technical College, Kansas State University, and Colorado State University; she is co-editor of the Taos Journal of International Poetry & Art, former Poetry Editor for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, and core faculty at Tupelo Press's Writers Conferences. She lives in Taos, New Mexico with her husband, David Pérez.
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Artist Statement

What is "difficulty" in a poem? And to whom is it difficult? And why? The debates over what is Feminist poetry for example, underscore a question: Is there a feminine voice? And if so, is it one relegated only to the female? IN my own work, I have the female voice, that is, poems clearly in the voice of a women, to be one that may be, I hope, perceived as universal, as well as particular. I model this thinking based on comments made by Toni Morrison. In my newest collection, GIRL, I find that both the text, content, and texture of the poems create in many readers a disturbance. That creates both link and space between the poet and the reader. It creates movement. Ultimately, what we mean to do, I think, is the "break the ice" that surrounds the reader, and, the poet.

____________________________________

Poem     because

her mother inscribes          an open=eyed Braille         with her slap slap slap                                   

the girl           never                          cries   refusing                                     

            her secret     to her chest

like the Spartan boy                        and his fox

 

inside her     in the hold

of her mute                           never  

 

the blue-black                      of the slap

face arms her back

 

invisible                                that ink

 

^^^

 

sometimes in the summer she heard singing

            dense music peeling from the bark of trees

                        who sang? wind like weeping. whose?

                                    a wild sound roiling

                                                into the lovely ears of the girl: "live, yes, live."

 

^^^

 The dark god has stuffed my mouth with silk -- Vikas Menon

 

Poet Spotlight: Karla Kelsey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Karla Kelsey is the author of four books: Knowledge Forms the Aviary; Iteration Nets; A Conjoined Book; and Of Sphere. With Aaron McCollough she edits Split-Level Texts and with Poupeh Missaghi she edits Matters of Feminist Practice. Her website is www.karlakelsey.com.

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Difficulty: A Spillage

To honor being’s complexity requires, of necessity, a fray along the edges of the known, a jostling of the lens of representation, a discharge of difficulty. Difficulty: resistance, a refusal to compress or cauterize excess according to received form. Or according to received relation, knowledge, sensation, thought, utterance. Because in what overflows the easily recognizable body, object of thought or material we find vivacity, living tissue, incandescence powering syllable, word, sentence, line, text. And thus to reinvent what has been given, to make and be made new, to bathe in the thrill of what transpires beyond ease.

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A Folio of Poems by Karla Kelsey

THRALL

Enthralled     to the buzz of neon we yield to instruction     we stare
at the gallery’s sole object     a red square of light projected     on the wall
source invisible. We     yield, I yield inhaling 1-2-3-4-5     exhaling 1-2-3-4-

5 mind sky-blank and     you, you stand beside me     a solid object,
steadfast in Yves Klein Blue.     If you yield I do not know because      
surrender is     individual     is sole     my body, my I, my     mind, my

me abandoned to mystic red, scarlet red, coquelicot red and I     cock-lee-co      
I red-corn-rose     I wild-poppy-poppy, do you     pulse with this, you, next
to me, you blue, you     International Klein Blue?     The square pulses

me poppy     source invisible, with the same     questionable status of
objects revealed     many years ago by a boardwalk     psychic     off-season
air crystalizing     just before snow.     Holding up the nine of swords

she had said     this is you as you believe yourself     to be, facedown and    
pierced     by these swords. But notice the flat sea, the rising sun     and so
pull     will you pull-pull     who will pull-pull     tucking a greasy strand

of hair under a purple     turban, yes, she wore a purple satin     turban    
those swords from your back? Whetted blades     hilts of hammered gold    
the psychic said     cigarette, sweatshirt with rhinestone-studded cat my time

us nearly     up     they need to come out. The cat’s emerald eyes     flash      
in candle light.     Petals crumple     in the bud     then bloom, showy    
before flattening and   radiate out a perfect red disk before falling away.

____________________________________________

The swords had     needed, I     need, needed     need mystic     scarlet  
coquelicot     red corn roses coursing through my body seeding, blooming,
tissue-heads     shuddering in     wind. I need because       under fabrics and

plastics we are exposed, vulnerable to     impression and it is exhausting    
this pretense     otherwise, exhausting to wake early, make coffee, shower,
dress     advance into the day with formal hello and     yesyes as if the moment

wasn’t all around us vibrating     green and     shimmering and     spitting
gravel     like sparks, like stars.     As if we didn’t ourselves vibrate     star    
spark. And after noon the vibration   becomes inner violin, tremolo up to

a high pitch, tremolo down and at night the sea, violet     lashing     lashing    
leather     wealing skin. And the wounds     singing     until the salve of
sleep, mugwort and     sage, ravensara dabbed on in dream.     Or here

before the gallery’s red square of     light, stigmata vision, biochemical    
aria     of photons through pupils igniting     photoreceptors at the backs
of eyes.     Pulse triggered along the optic nerve neurons fire and     fire

a sensation of     color simulating the body where the swords had been
until     one day     the plant body     awakens     to stigmata     not wounds
but pollen collectors, little flicking tongues     glandular tissues emanating

viscid secretion as, for example, in the orchid     the offering of orchids on
each side of     dying. Their bright     mouths and soft     exhalations sticky
with ontological     clarity. Here in the gallery the body pours with stained-

glass     light       and I vibrate, you vibrate     I-you vibrate, our photo-
receptors discharging nerve impulses such that Monet’s   Les Coquelicots
or Poppies     Blooming, 1873     flashes onto the screen     of my mind.

___________________________________________________________

Red square of light     a breezy day     the bank of poppies like stigmata
blotted     a boy in a sailor hat and a woman in blue     woad blue or indigo
blue     not International Klein Blue, but yet she is     your mother, perhaps

she had once been     brighter, and the small boy, the small boy     was
you. You     prior to full expression, prior to     standing here in the gallery    
next to me in the twenty-first century, the small cake of     ultramarine    

lodged inside your abdomen not yet     awakened     you and your mother
walk     broken brushwork and     divided light.     You walk     in
1873, in Argenteuil, suburb of     Paris, an agréable petite     ville     despite the

tanneries, silk mills, ironworks, gypsum mines producing     plaster of Paris.    
Producing statuettes.     Enormous iron forms.     You and your mother    
Camille Doncieux, impressionist muse with     halfmoons of dusk below her

eyes, she is so Camille     such a Camelia     imported half-rose this Camille    
Léonie Doncieux, Camille Donciex Monet, Camille     Monet, Madame C.
the First.     You and your mother walk     or are pushed by incline and

wind     and even this       pushing     is gentle, easy, in     Argenteuil     1873,
Are-jaunt-oy, Argent-euil, from argento, silver     silvery, shiny     gleaming    
surface of the Sein and from     -ialo, clearing, glade, place of     silver, place

of     shine quickly rebuilt after the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War.     Just
fifteen minutes from     Gare Saint-Lazare, the Sein     widening to permit
regattas, banks forming a graceful     promenade where mother in her hat    

where you with your small dog take each day     the air. Argenteuil’s decline
in agriculture a pity, yes a     pity but     wonderous the advancement of    
industry, modernity     say the painters, say     not only Monet but Sisely,

Renoir, Manet, Caillebotte, Pissarro, Degas, and Cézanne lighting     their    
cigars in the     shine, adjusting the brim of your mother’s hat so that her
face     dapples, her petit fils, her pink dress     dapples and     large stone

houses, gardens, are to be had for a     song. Monet will paint 180 canvases    
here     immortalizing sailboats and regattas, train trestles and     towpaths,
gardens and     factories, picnics, idylls     Camille-Camille     wanderings.

Poet Spotlight: Vi Khi Nao [by Kristina Marie Darling]

VI KHI NAO is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014.  Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.
________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Textual difficulty allows me to take wit to the next level of the linguistic playing field. Textual difficulty can also make one’s work more disruptive and when done right, more electrifying and sharp. I love and I try to condition the materiality of humanity’s mundane emotions so they align homosexually with my love affair with tenderness. Sometimes they express themselves non-linearly, awkwardly, and playfully on the page and I let them be so. They may look difficult, but they are not really. Humor is important to me. No one in the heteronormative culture wants amnesia, but amnesia exists when obvious connections appear to be absence, thus provoking humor. More known for my Sapphic writing, some of these poems here take a homosexual detour, provoking some comedic heterosexuality that resembles more loosely to a lemonade stand. This is where sometimes my writing stands: at the intersection between amnesia & wit.

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A Folio of Poems by Vi Khi Nao

G O O D  M A R R I A G E S  S H O U L D  L I V E  O N I C E

Slender glacier teases the innocent husband

To hand over his wife, the ice tray.

The icy husband resists

Of course, he resists

The wife, divided and compartmentalized

Sometimes the husband notices a pool by his side

Love is confusing: indeed, when husband can't gather wife together

On Sunday and on thirsty days

Husband places three quarters of wife in a glass

No one believes in singing with divided tears

A choir is required, and then a drink to quench the thirst of voices

Husband can't believe that wife

Can hold a mosquito that long

He can brush away her subconscious

By draining her of her liquid free will

Sometimes volition doesn't belong to husband entirely

Sometimes wife can be thick, like jello

Even solid objects can be unfaithful.

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T R A N S C R I P T S A F T E R E M P T I N E S S : O N

I N C U B A T I O N A N D R A P T U R E [i]

This sparkle, after the great forfeiture, fathered vacuity. Her mounting nerves at a loss.

After the fright, seizure in prolonged tenderness.

Our desires—she clamps in her private closet for me.

Below the orchard: an unwieldy climate, burdened with crystal. Extra-large to counter the atmosphere of dampness—a lover’s heart, feasibly—never comfortable about releasing fear.

Her offspring unbuttons fragrance of verdant madness, hung to the tributary by a cedar tree.

If a sapling has to die, why not for bereaved moonlight? Its happiness, muted by light.

Abandoned in a rental car, love would fade, jokingly; not really.

 

* * *

It’s possible to surrender now, after the body resists rapture.

But a blouse forgives—

while waiting for spring to arrive—Her ears close their doors, patiently delaying the echoes from departing the room—as

A river, not yet employed by the Milky Way, steps into the body of another river—

To change the discourse of time

But hunger, doubt, emptiness—these all travel flippantly, casually without lovers

Stabbing their backs

* * *

 

The summers came and departed. Leaving verdant holes in the sweaters of winter

Kiss me in the afternoon and I will tell you everything

Not shattered nor shamed by flight of resistance

Our enemies dressed in rice noodles deliver on a moped

To incubate is not easy, it’s easier to watch the eggs cross the street than the chickens

Every step counts, despite what the statistics of hit & run tell us

Don’t be deceived by the fake changes we see & report

We all throw our children into the garbage bins because we know they have a high tolerance for insomnia

So stab the night if you want; it won’t get you very far.

 

[i] Ayumi Malhotra, Mia: “Notes from the Birth Year: On Gestation and Becoming”: https://www.poetrynw.org/mia-ayumi-malhotra-two-poems/

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T H E   A F T E R N O O N                                O N   I M P U L S E  

 

Just before morning closes                                Her deformed smile

Your hands dismiss                                           Respiratory foams

Razored on the edge                                        Your face

Couldn’t resonate with me                                So let us be foes in the aftershave

Poet Spotlight: Allison Benis White [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Allison Benis White is the author of Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize and a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her first book, Self-Portrait with Crayon, received the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, 2017 Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. Her next book, The Wendys, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2020. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

In her introduction to her novel Sula, Toni Morrison writes, “Outlaw women are fascinating—not always for their behavior, but because historically women are seen as naturally disruptive and their status is an illegal one from birth if it is not under the rule of men.” To be an “outlaw woman” on the page, to create a disruptive, ungovernable, or unclassifiable text, is vital to my poetics, as it serves to ensure an intellectual and aesthetic freedom outside the binary, the linear, the traditional. “The duty of the writer,” Solmaz Sharif writes, “is to remind us that we die. And that we aren’t dead yet.” This is a tall order, which often requires a new kind of language, syntax, form, and/or approach. The outlaw or difficult text asks the reader to give themselves briefly to an unfamiliar world, to a particular mouth and mind, to another human being who will die but is not dead yet.

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A Folio of Poems by Allison Benis White

DARLING

Come back, Wendy, Wendy, Wendy.

—J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

________________________________________                                    

“And Wendy fluttered to the ground with an arrow in her breast.”

       Maybe this is the dream

                                                   of the dead bathed in milk—

                                                                                                                                                               

so many red feathers

 

in my mind. I remember being alive  

         as a child—on a towel in the grass,

                                                                                   

                             from a white plastic kettle,

 

                                                       I poured air into a cup,   two cups.

 

 

 

           What else still     but to imagine heat, sugar, death.

                                                                                                           We drank nothing

 

                                                                     and it was good.    

___________________________________________

“‘A lady to take care of us at last,’ said one of the twins, ‘and you have killed her.’”

 

 

   Smoothing the brain,

                                       holding a knife   to build another

 

                 mother. Like a house in the trees,

                                                       I wanted to believe in God

                                                                                                           to be safe

                                                                                         and have somewhere to go.

 

We are all the same   and inconsolable, legs twitching                               

                                                                 during the nightmare.     Please wake me up,

 

                                 press one finger between my eyes

                                                                                             like a doorbell.

__________________________________________

Meet the Press: Headmistress Press: An Interview with Mary Meriam

N.B. The following responses by Mary Meriam are a kind of tonal cento in the spirit of Nicole Santalucia’s newest chapbook, Spoiled Meat. To read a more forthright appraisal of Santalucia’s new work, look at the generous recommendation Meriam offered on the February 2019 Reading List over at Poetry’s Harriet blog. Also, check out Santalucia’s chapbook here. While you’re there, you might acquaint yourself with the many finely written chapbooks available in the Headmistress catalog. ~Dante Di Stefano

 

How did Headmistress Press come into being?

Some bitch like me sets the fire, cranks the heat, makes an online journal of lesbian poetry and art, Lavender Review, swallows the flare.

The flower pots and lesbian poems blaze one little fire at a time. Books sprout from Headmistress Press, thanks to some bitch Risa Denenberg taking care of the practical side.

Could you talk a bit about your catalog? What do Headmistress books have in common?

Yellow fires and red fires and cover art by lesbian artists, 52 books that are on fire. Pick the best chicken hut, make the best gas station, send them through the post office, and the readers: all on fire. 

Tell us about your Lesbian Poet Trading Cards.

When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames, Rita Mae Reese knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. Her fire burns in the Chicago Tribune. Pretty soon Kathleen Rooney swirls in flames: Call attention to lacunae in the traditional literary canon and the clouds shrivel up. Dry out and put a face on the absences that exist in many readers’ knowledge. Drop like dog shit and provide another strategy to fight the invisibility that is often all too prevalent in the assembly of both anthologies of past writers and the tables of contents of current literary journals, as when editors say things to the effect of “we wanted to publish more work by (insert under-represented group here), we just couldn't find any.” 

You’ve published two books under the Sally Jane Books imprint. Could you tell us about these titles?

To the sides of the streets and highways, where heroin addicts are left for dead, we start a wild and free imprint, where farmers grow lettuce, we trade sheep, text and art in exciting, fun, and innovative shoelaces and guns. 

What else is on the horizon for Headmistress Press?

2019 AWP Book Fair in Portland.

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

Some bitch like me. 

Nicole Santalucia’s Spoiled Meat won your most recent Charlotte Mew chapbook contest. Would you tell us about the contest and about Santalucia’s book? 

Spoiled Meat is a foul-mouthed rural fantasy, allegory, satire. It’s rage against the world’s waste, sickness, horror, corruption, injustice. It’s a witch’s hell-call for change. Some bitch Santalucia recounts the apocalypse with authority, takes the blame, makes the change. 

Could you end the interview with a poem from Spoiled Meat?

Here’s the bitch-action I nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

            Pennsylvania on Fire 

            Some bitch like me sets the fire, 
            cranks the heat, burns the toast, swallows 
            the flare. 

            The flower pots and front lawns blaze 
            one little fire at a time. Flames sprout 
            from the gardens on Hanover Street. 
            Yellow fires and red fires and motherfuckers 
            drive trucks that are on fire. The chicken hut, 
            gas station, post office, and the neighbors: all on fire. 

            When the train passes through this neighborhood of flames 
            a gust of wind knocks over the bitch who lit the first match. 
            Her fire burns on fear. Pretty soon the black sky 
            swirls in flames and the clouds shrivel up, 
            dry out, and drop like dog shit
            to the sides of the streets and highways
            where heroin addicts are left for dead, where farmers
            grow lettuce and trade sheep for shoelaces and guns,
            where starving cows are auctioned and eaten alive, and the people 

            confuse women for beef and love for needles. 

 

            From Spoiled Meat by Nicole Santalucia

---

Mary Meriam co-founded Headmistress Press, edits Lavender Review (lesbian poetry and art), and is a professor in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas-Monticello. Her newest collection, My Girl's Green Jacket, is reviewed at Entropy and Lambda Literary. A new poem appears in the February issue of Poetry.  

Poet Spotlight: Julia Story [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Julia Story​ is the author of ​Post Moxie​ (Sarabande Books), the chapbook ​The Trapdoor​ (dancing girl press), and the chapbook ​Julie the Astonishing​ (forthcoming in March 2019 from Sixth Finch Books). She is a 2016 recipient of a Pushcart Prize and her recent work can be read in ​Sixth Finch, Tinderbox​, and ​Tupelo Quarterly​. She is a Midwesterner who now resides in Massachusetts.
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A Brief Statement about Textual Difficulty

The poems I am working on now are based on the life of Christina the Astonishing, the 12th-century saint who came back to life at her own funeral and then spent the rest of her days living in trees and towers, as she had rejected heaven and had chosen instead to return to earth for a life of suffering. As I write these poems, some of which are her (the “her” is a character called Julie rather than Christina) letters to Jesus about her chosen life on earth, I find them getting smaller and smaller--the poems themselves are small, but the images too diminish as Julie spends her life erasing herself, or as already erased. Living on the edges of things and people, her experiences (and even her prayers) can be best documented in fragments.

_________________________________________ 

A Folio of Poems by Julia Story 

Poems from ​Julie the Astonishing

 

How She Would Return from the Dead.

The body brought out like empty wood,
silent as a dark whale in dark water.

The body a citadel in trees: getting there was
land-swimming, pushing aside loneliness,

a white man in rubber boots and all
his little dogs, the sun flashing in and out

like god’s face upon the water before
the invention of cardboard and radio

transmissions. And then the second before
she knew she was going to give it all up—

everything, all of it, until she was walking
down the road in the dark with lungs full

of the scattered, old-fashioned promises
of beginning again—the house

of her body would light up, the feet
marching as they had been instructed to do.

________________________________

My fugue state, but brittle.
Pieces of me broke off,

each one a little you.
That night we washed our

socks together in the hotel
sink then watched an old

Murder She Wrote.​ A blank
face as white as breaths on

the screen. I wept because
I knew it was my face.

Then together we went
into the painting of the ocean.

_______________________________

We approach the defunct
nudist colony.

Worn chorus of evening
doves, no naked folks.

Every moment
an ossuary.

I’m a body.
You are dead

like the invisible
nudes. But you

walk with me.
The moon

mothered in clouds.

______________________________

As you know, I am no one’s
bride. And yet I belong to you

and you are like me, a suit
of armor made of mercury.

The creatures lilt and gambol
when they sense our hovering.

I am a wraparound porch
bound to my own heart

and you an afternoon
filled with street corners.

_________________________________

The smaller I am, the easier it is
for people to dream of me.

I go into their heads like a seed,
planting my tiny doorway

and crudely through it come
these awful resurrections.

They gave me a homestead by a little lake,
rustling itself in the breeze.

But the land rustled up three corpses
by the end of winter.

How industrious this sadness is,
making its ramp into me every day.

Building its house and also its saw,
its level, its nails, and whatever

substance makes these walls.

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
_________________________________

A Process Note

I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
_________________________________

On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”

Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.

Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure. 

_________________________________________

A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?

Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says

Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back

Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)

the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]

well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time

[schottische] slow polka to you

and over the table, the bedspread
                               under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's 

The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece 

Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]

________________________________

Sandwich

Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.

You — in the white shirt —

I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.

You don't know that.

It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.

They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.

You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.

Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.

M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.

They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.

What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.

I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —

A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.

There was a tremendous knocking.

_____________________________________

Shame Helps

A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.

How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.

And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.

______________________________

Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.

                                                Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
            (he's got courage like Turing)           

                        They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
            Big logs

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up

e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
                                                penis.

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

______________________________________

What? is your line

I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice

windowless

quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

an absent Noah leaves the room

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE

the chorus   too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

but I or you end up in a boat
racing   it's a matter of race

____________________________________

1718 – Nantucket Beach

Poet Spotlight: Traci Brimhall [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014.  She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

A Process Note

The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment.

Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins.

_________________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion  

 

Maria Helena:

The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.

 

Maria Thereza:

In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth.

 

Maria Helena:

We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.

 

Maria Thereza:

Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.

 

Maria de Lourdes:

In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas.

 

Maria Thereza:

Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:

 

Maria Madalena:

Will we survive?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Of course not.

 

Maria Madalena:

Will the country?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Ask again later.

 

Maria Madalena:

Is God's love absolute?

Maria Aparecida:

Nana, nenê.

Maria de Lourdes:

The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers' wounds. It's painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.

 

Maria Helena:

It’s nailing together the gallows.

 

Maria Thereza:

It’s combing men's hair with its fingers, singing,
o nenê dorme no chão, and measuring their necks.

__________________________________________

In Which the Chorus Explains What Was Stolen in 1966

Poet Spotlight: Adeeba Shahid Talukder [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.

Artist’s Statement

As a Pakistani-American and neurodiverse poet, I am, at different times, both included in and excluded from my understanding of Self. My own thoughts elude me, though I have spent many years scrutinizing and pulling at their threads. My work resides in the Urdu poetic tradition but in the English language. My poems are still trying to understand themselves. So naturally, I have received criticism for my poems’ lack of “access.” It is the curse of being “other”— a rejection by those who hold power, but also their impatient curiosity.

To understand the perversity of many readers’ obsession with access, consider predominant Western attitudes towards Eastern countries, then consider, for instance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted his imaginings of undressed Muslim women in The Turkish Bath (1862). From this dimension, the idea of access is vaguely colonialist and orientalist, where reading a poem becomes an act of conquest, and the intent goes from honest engagement to intellectual domination. When the reader begins to feel themselves deficient in this regard, it becomes a “sour grapes” situation, where the inaccessibility of a poem proves it lesser.

What if we were to interrogate our motives behind reading poetry? To quell the desire for control and humble ourselves before each poem? What if we were to restrain ourselves from “[tying] a poem to a chair with rope/ and [torturing] a confession out of it”?

Subh-e-firaaq:

            Morning of Separation

  

You’re a saint, the mountain carver
told the lonely Shireen. More even
than stone.

He carved for her,
almost

a stream of milk. Then threw
himself off.

Fell, his limbs
with the leaves he clutched.

_______________________________________

Exotica: Three Poems

 

Ambrosia

He is a glass cup                 
in her hands;                                     

she pours
wine, honey, and lime-

light. A thing                   
of beauty;

 

Conquest

he steals

a glance or two,               
begins to stare—

she is the shape
of a woman. His

eyes are steel.
She blushes.

He moves closer,
demands her

secrets.

 

Domination

A cure for lust.

_________________________________________

 

On Beauty

When I was 19, I trembled
to meet men’s eyes.

Scarf, burqa, black
eyeliner. I was more
than Muslim,
more than beautiful,
more than sexual.

They wanted to know
what they could not
see.

~ ~ 

The cruel beloved of Urdu
poetry slays her lovers

with glances, leaves them
to languish, rubbing

their foreheads
in her doorstep’s dust. In this
intricacy is power:

I cannot lift
a suitcase, which means
I will never have to.

~ ~

James once wrote me poems

as Majnoon,
as the nightingale, as the prey.

I was engaged. Together,
we witnessed the snow consume
all of Ann Arbor,

picked it up in fistfuls, tossed
it up in the dark,

watched it fall like a spell.
He vowed to profess Islam,

as long as you know you’re the only god
I’ll ever worship.

~ ~

Poet Spotlight: Jennifer Minniti-Shippey [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Jennifer Minniti- Shippey is the Managing Editor of Poetry International literary magazine, Director of Poetic Youth programs, and a lecturer at San Diego State University. Her most recent collection of poetry, After the Tour, is available now from Calypso Editions, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Salamander, Spillway Journal, Cider Press Review, and others. Visit jennyminnitishippey.com for more.

A Process Note

I’m interested in private vocabularies, private languages at work in lyric poems. There is, in the particularity of image, an assertion of individuality: only this speaker could have made the images of this poem; what emotions you draw from the arrangement of images are yours. I’m also fascinated by how pursuing a sound through a poem can add energy, mystery. When a sequence of sounds “makes sense” to me, I’m generally inclined to leave it, even if it creates unlikely connections between images or narrative points. I haven’t thought of this as “difficulty” before, but I can see the ways it asks the reader to be involved in the meaning-making of a poem. I see also how important it is to me to use my own, particular, private language in the writing of these pieces.

 *

Last Days of June 

A whole sun-skinned nation
later and I am on my knees
in the trolley, the trolley south
bound, everything dark and rattling—
June in this country comes
jacarandad and sky-bruised—and me
wailing hallelujah quite
silently, good-bye brave ponies
grazing in the green wind, good-
bye thin socks abandoned
to the soft mercies of rain,
good-bye plastic peonies on the high
heels of happiness.
I am trying, just try
ing to love this again, my life.

 *

Questions for Adam

What is love to you: the walls,
beyond the walls,
the garden, beyond the garden, the alley—

what of the words you made,
that avocado pitted,
that dog wriggling on the carpet,
that poetic form,
shorelines unmourned,
in what bright east heaving ocean you buried
your feet—

wanderer, o wanderer,
you ribless, you gutted, you
black-haired belovéd first,
what of ash stockpiled in the sideroom,
what of our mother dust,
our Juliet balcony, our aloe vera,
bright green walls and our red bookcase—

what is love to your black-penned vision
made in the shape of a god,
or some kind of cloud,
cumulous or nimbus,
what is love to your silence,
click-clack the machines of your dreams,
uncut nails of the Airedale terriers,

string of patio lights hung by your here-now
generosity, what of the garden? What of
what is beyond—

*

Third Tour

there’s waiting, then wait and
how dare you take so long to get here,

air blasted past dust and dusty blinds,
detonation of overripe, out-seasoned

vine-grown tomatoes, so
come through, blown open:

I’ll make tea, pay half the bills,
we’ll census dead birds and marvel

at their eyes still, still
unblinking into us

*

Sig Sauer

she put a gun in my hand   why else would I hold it?   I wanted her   the flags were half-masted   I wanted her so I held it   tell me about your war   I wanted her gun   in my hand, that not-heavy darkness   tell me your war, have you fed it?   here on my knees in the desert   a weightless dark in my hand   on my knees and wailing, a gun   on my knees in the desert   what danger in the market?   on my knees wailing a gun   in the purse, in her hand   what danger   a market   for desire, mark the prices   her hand inside me a gun   her gun inside, my desire   for every desire, a price   put a gun in our hearts   the trigger will pull us   the flags are half masted   we desire our war

*

When my dead meet they hold hands

 

In the land of Linnea                       and     of Sarah

red bougainvillea blossoms

            by whipping wind              are blown

through the heavy oak door.                    

 

The wind blows also through light-bodies.

 

            This one has eyes

                        she speaks

                                    On the left, she has a voice

                                                                        she watches

They crowd me.

 

Breasts press against my elbows           

                        warm palms in my back’s hollow

            a tongue in the dark                                    of my mouth.

 

A jade-green hummingbird in the red arbor,

                                                wings shiver wings in my hair

            they whisper

                                    as they lean              close above me

                                                                                                as they stay.

                     

Why

 

are the straw hats in the middle of the highway?               I shout.

 

Memory replaces nothing, not

                                    brown eyes or blue, not

                                                blonde hair or

bones or skin.

 

to my dead, living

                        to my dead, living jade-green

                                                                        to my living dead, jade-green

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!