The Best American Poetry

The Bookstore and the Psyche [by Megin Jimenez]

First of all, many thanks to Stacey Harwood and David Lehman for this opportunity to share a few thoughts and for hosting this community. I enjoy reading the broad range of voices represented here and am happy to take part. (Recent guest posts that have stayed in my thoughts include Robert P. Baird's thoughts on how poetry "spends it all" and Amy Glynn Greacen's week of posts on Rome, language, chance, loss.)

Today is Sunday, day of looking out the window, day of strolls, day of meditational cleaning, day of loafing, day of reading. Sunday is the day I often find myself at the bookstore, so I thought I would start with a little ode. I started thinking about the importance of this space after reading an opinion piece by technology writer Farhad Manjoo called "Don't Support Your Local Bookseller" published on Slate in December, which was almost comically tone-deaf (possibly to generate maximum page views?) regarding the various roles a bookstore plays in a community or in the life of an individual. He argues that if you love books, you should embrace and prefer Amazon, as it allows people to buy even more books and generates "smart" recommendations of other books you would like based on its access to vast book-buying data, versus the limited tastes and knowledge of bookstore employees.  He compares shopping at independent bookstores to shopping at the more expensive Whole Foods rather than your regular grocery store: a luxury experience. I don't think I need to bring up counter-arguments, as I have no doubt that Manjoo already got a lot of heat from book lovers, and I am no doubt preaching to the Bible-study group in defending the value of a bookstore here. I'm also setting aside the questions of economic models, the publishing industry, e-books vs. print, "what people buy", etc., as much has been eloquently written on these issues already. What the piece made me ponder is what psychic space the bookstore inhabits. What does it mean to love the book as an object? It's not simply about sentimentality, or possession, or the fact that used bookstores are required to have a fat cat in them in order to be fully respectable.

The Secret Joy of Books

 

"A book ought to be an ice pick to break up the frozen sea within us."-- Franz Kafka

-- etrelles

Awards for Poetry, Plus a New Anthology (posted by Bruce Covey)

This morning I decided to launch a major new poetry award, called The Super Important Totally Awesome Major Major International Poetry Award, with its easy-to-memorize acronym SITAMMIPA.  It will carry as much prestige as the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, or National Book Critics Circle Award.  Each year a staff of experts will choose five finalists from all the nominees, then I will mail out ballots to 50 prominent poets to vote for the winners (two categories:  Full and Chapbook-length).  Each winner will receive $20 from me, plus, most importantly, all the incredible prestige that will come with the award.  I’m totally serious.  Well, I mean I fully intend to give out the awards, at least. 

Please email nominations for the 2011 SITAMMIPAs to me at [email protected].  Winners will be announced sometime around the end of January, and I’ll send out checks just after.  I’m certain we’ll get major, important coverage in all the major, important news venues.

The idea for this major, important new award came from a conversation I had today with another poet about the ways in which awards and anthologies can fragment community by creating an artificial sense of privilege or exclusivity.  I don’t think this state of poetry is anyone’s fault—it’s just that we all (well, many of us) have slipped into a mode of discourse in which we (readers and editors alike) equate a selection for an award or an anthology as some sign of objective superiority, rather than the opening gesture of a conversation.  When Rae Armantrout (deservedly!) won two of the three major poetry awards, wasn’t it also an acknowledgment of the work of Rae’s poetry community?  In addition to buying Versed, which is a terrific book, shouldn’t everyone also go out and purchase titles by Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, and Carla Harryman?  And/or other poets with whom Rae’s work has been in conversation?  And bookstores everywhere carry these titles on their shelves?  

We can, in other words, become introduced to or begin to engage a particular poetry community through an award or anthology as entry point.

Her waking state can be termed the true yellow cling peach of romance

In a word, anatomy

She will return as a harmless subject envied by none

Neighborhood: abandoned former battlefield

Social structure: artsy/inefficacious

Favorite leisure pastime: whining/watching rented movies

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings

They have been put in alphabetical order

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove

If it is a wild tune

I threw away punctuation

Never reject anything. Nothing has been proved

Back into the city to find that lost serenity

I woke from it. Nothing anywhere lacked definition

--Lyn Hejinian, “11^th Dream of July,” from Coconut Five
 

And: 

Across sculpted surfaces glowworms manage excess with initials some call instincts and others choose to relish for their own sake. How many times has a gift become a crisis? 

Beatles do not ask this question. They ask another question. Will the debris linger on the anchor? Much has been made of baleful themes waiting to be realized. But upright legs rub together regardless of gender.

Phrasing is everything clamoring for connection organized by jealousy. Emoluments for hands scale up the spine of another's mate. Dust lit on chunk. There were consequences and results never acknowledged by either.

Crashing through the waves with their jaws interlocked, the fighters kill each other then duck under a wreck where the coolest of nights collect their orgasms.

A grandstand above is not the place to sit when the psyche below wants revenge. Such arrangements can't control a wing tickling inside the breast or the barb that curls down the smooth of a butt or the knee that picnics on the outside of a strange creature's toe. It is not safety one seeks in a shadow.

Across sculpted surfaces theories speak to me as poems. Literacy in fields of discourse crumbles amongst freaky sounds. Here are the sirens of not knowing everything. The map of whatever is stilted. More than one bird has pinched an ear, which burns in tenderness and loses a hard-on.

Alternatively, a bird pinches an ear. Alternately, a bird pinched an ear.

Alphabets like insects may triumph over the arrangements made from their parts more than is normally thought. Even as languages disappear the headspace made in the damage converts to tongue.

Between an ecstasy and its other is a factory. Bees nest inside its abandoned parts. In a photo the factory seems old and still. It is never still. The photo is a distraction used to orient brains toward the shell of their prey. 

-- Carla Harryman, “not ensnared, they wait: Noise for Adorno,” from Coconut Eleven

Best American Poetry, each year, generates wonderful conversations.  The easiest possible critical response to an anthology (and, sadly, the most common) is to list the poets who were omitted, but “shouldn’t” have been, or to dismiss particular inclusions.  We all do it—it’s this type of conversation’s default posture.  Fortunately, however, we’re at a point in poetry in which an anthology can be constructed along many, many aesthetic lines, and within each of those lines, with many, many possible and various points.  For me this is one of the greatest parts of poetry—that at the end of each year we can take time to reengage the many incredible poems we read throughout the year and discuss why and how each is “best.”

In addition to the new award above, Coconut will publish an anthology sometime around the beginning of 2013.  The anthology will be edited only by me and will include my choices of approximately 100 amazing and original poets who help to comprise what, in my opinion, is new and interesting in poetry today.  Upon the anthology’s publication, I’m going to create a blog to allow readers to post their choices for which poets should have been included.  Then, sometime the next year, Coconut will publish a companion anthology filled with only those poets nominated by readers.  The first volume wholly, individually subjective; the second, democratic.  

What do you think?  Don’t forget to email me your choices for the best book and chapbook of poetry published in 2011!

See you tomorrow, Bruce

Towards an Iranian-American Reading List--Final Post by Guest Blogger Roger Sedarat

My thanks to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me to guest blog for the week. My week of blogging concludes with a brief recommended bibliography of Iranian-American writing. Of course there is much more than this, and I’m sure to regret missing some books as soon as I post. (Fellow Iranian-American writers, please don’t hate me if I leave you out; this is not easy, and keep in mind I’m basically a house husband when I’m not writing, with 2 young boys intent on destroying the house unless supervised). By all means add on in the comments section with other recommendations. Like the content of my brief updates, these selected texts vary in their investment in Iranian and/or American culture, as well as the degree to which they inhabit the formative hyphen between “Iranian” and “American.” Anyway, here it goes:

• Sons and Other Flammable Objects, by Porochista Khakpour.

 This was a favorite of both my graduate and undergraduate students in sections of Middle Eastern-American literature I taught last semester in the Queens College English department. It was a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice Award and has won almost too many awards to list here. There are better reviews than I can post, but I mention as a key take away Khakpour’s ability to seamlessly underpin a contemporary post-911 story of an Iranian-American family with Oedipal drama from classical Persian antiquity. It’s also just great storytelling, and the Iranian connection is never forced, meaning it’s integral to the narrative.

 

• Septembers of Shiraz, by Dalia Sofer 

This novel, based mostly in Iran but written in English, has also been reviewed so widely and so favorably that it’s especially reductive to offer further acclaim here. The story localizes the harsh political effects of the Islamic Republic of Iran soon after the Islamic revolution by focusing on a Persian Jew imprisoned because of his class and religion. It came as no surprise when I read that the author cited Ha Jin’s Waiting, as an important influence. Though in its own way, Sofer’s novel reads with such great passion and clarity.  

 

• Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, translated into English by Shole Wolpe.  

There are a lot of great translations of Persian poetry out there, and this is one of them. I cite this particular book, winner of the Lois Roth Persian Translation Award, because it better translates the work of the first real modern feminist poet as poetry than some other more academic attempts. Of this I remain rather opinionated, having read far too many scholars attempting to give life to ancient and modern Persian verse though ultimately settling too much for meaning without sufficient attention to style. Wolpe uses her skills as a poet to bring both together here. 

 

•  When Skateboards Will Be Free, by Said Sayrafiezadeh 

 Like translations of Persian poetry, there are a plethora of memoirs by Iranian- Americans. I  post this one for two reasons: 1). As ethnic genre, the Iranian-American memoir is almost monopolized by females, and so having a male perspective is worth noting. 2). This one is especially exceptional. Focused on providing a lucid perspective of his childhood in a household defined by communist sensibility, Sayrafiezadeh’s book offers great humor as well as insights into the dynamics of family. The author has recently won a Whiting Award, had a story appear in The New Yorker, etc. If that weren’t enough reason to envy him, all of my female students have crushes on him. (Bastard).      

 

• A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans, Edited by Persis Karim and Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami. 

While other Iranian-American anthologies have followed (and even more are on there way), I cite this one because with it these two editors really defined—even founded—what has come to be called “Iranian-American” writing. (Persis Karim is also the founder of The Association of Iranian American Writers, about which I blogged yesterday). The range of genres and voices provides a great perspective on what it can mean to live as an Iranian-American (even the brief forward offers great insight into such a hybrid space). 

 

The Ayatollah's Democracy: An Iranian Challenge, by Hooman Majd 

Majd thinks, and writes, like a true intellectual, looking deeper into surface level analysis on the political state of affairs in Iran. He especially excels at making insightful connections of culture, people, and specific events within the Islamic Republic of Iran, such as the last contested presidential election. I daresay if you are looking for one recently published book to understand the current situation of Iran, this is it.

 

 

• The Drama of Ezzat Goushegir 

Though she writes in several genres, I especially want to plug the plays and  monologues of this Chicago- based author. We read together on a panel at last year’s AWP panel, and she performed a piece about an older Iranian woman struggling with her life as she worked behind a cosmetics counter. This 15 minute monologue had impeccably timed humor and a very authentic voice that consistently emerges in Goushegir’s other work as well. 

 

Your Book Here [by Jake Adam York]

Last week, my wife and I snuck away into the mountains. I packed only one book. The plan was to read the land—penstemon, aster, Indian paintbrush, lupin, aspen, lodgepole, spruce—and come back to the books and e-mails and blogs after a few days completely offline.

But in the lodge where we stayed two nights, the sign for the “Library” caught my eye, and I couldn’t resist a quick inventory of the shelves.

In retrospect, it makes sense: the lodge is kind of a toney place, and the library is stacked by or for the toney sorts who frequent it (this was my first time, and it’s hard to imagine when I’ll have the money to come back). The books fell into four categories: business books (art of the deal etc), mystery/intrigue novels (Tom Clancy et al), children’s books, and accidents. The business books took up most of the three-shelf library. The accidents were comprised by To Kill A Mockingbird, a book about Copernicus, and a Peterson’s Field Guide to stars and constellations—and I imagined these being left by elderly guests.

There was not a single book of poetry, nor a book that contained a poem—and though this was not a surprise, I thought about leaving behind the copy of Wind in a Box I’d brought along or the recent issue of New South I found in the car when we were unpacking, but I wanted to keep these books, and in general I’m averse to leaving behind or even giving away a book.

  Still, the idea has stuck with me, like any number of YouTube clips in which an author installs his or her own book on the shelves of a Barnes and Noble.

(source)

(See also: this.)

Here, it seems to me—however much anyone would say it’s just about getting seen—that this guerrilla placement, moraying on the sharks of distribution, is basically a way inserting oneself into some representation of authority or taste. To place one’s book this way—especially a title published by a smaller, independent press, or even a self-published title—is to make a statement about the book’s worth, even if it gives the particular bookstore too much credit. (Does anyone do this at The Strand?)

(By the way, what happens in a bookstore when someone wants to buy the inserted book?)

*

Inserting a book into the lodge library would not exactly be the same thing, but I think my impulse responds to some of the same desires—to see what is most valuable to me represented in some index of power—though it may also be implicated in my assessment of the lodge’s hospitality, my asking whether the place had everything I might need to be comfortable.

If I go back, if I leave a book there, will it be an act of valuation? Will it be a gesture, however likely to be lost or erased, to the next poet who stays there?

*

What would I leave behind?

On the drive down the other day, I thought about shipping the lodge a box of back issues of Copper Nickel—after all, the lodge has all these wonderful wooden buffalo carvings that would be nicely rhymed by the Copper Nickel logo—or sending them a gift subscription to Kenyon Review (on whose blog I’ve been thinking about books lately) or finding at my office the stack of duplicate and orphaned copies of books I often teach.

Though I wonder what the staff of the lodge would actually do with a box of poetry books if they have a library completely bereft of them in the first place?

*

I’m packing up to move, for a few months, across the country. I’m going to pack an “extra” book or two in the spare-tire well, to plant in just such a place—if not in a hotel or lodge library, then maybe in some public library, maybe even in my home town, which I’ll pass through in a few weeks.

*

A list of titles that might be appropriate to install in the cities and towns I’ll pass through soon (and so, a kind of mix tape for the road):

• Denver, Colorado: John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out
• Hays, Kansas: Larissa Szporluk, Isolato
• Kansas City, Missouri: Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Gospel of Barbecue
• Columbia, Missouri: Hadara Bar-Nadav, A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight
• St. Louis, Missouri: Tara Betts, Arc & Hue
• Paducah, Kentucky: Kyle Dargan, Logorrhea Dementia
• Clarksville, Tennessee: Noah Eli Gordon, Novel Pictorial Noise
• Nashville, Tennessee: Adrian Matejka, Mixology,
• Chatanooga, Tennessee: Brian Barker’s The Black Ocean
• Fort Payne, Alabama: Martha Ronk, In A Landscape of Having to Repeat
• Gadsden, Alabama: J. Michael Martinez, Heredities & April Bernard, Blackbird Bye Bye
• Atlanta, Georgia: Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City

 

LIT Magazine #19 Release Party

Click on it for the full details!  Should be awesome!

Death to the Death of My Hard Drive [by Michael Schiavo]

My father suffered a series of brain seizures due to sleep apnea at the end of August '09 and I, his only child, was responsible for taking care of him (my mother passed away from breast cancer in 1995).  So I flew down to Naples, Florida. He didn't know who I was. He would answer your question with the same question. You could tell he was fighting, tell there was some recognition in his eyes, but the engine wasn't turning. The first few weeks were scary, but he soon began to recover. I returned to Vermont with a promise to visit as soon as I could and with the happiness that not only was my father alive, but seemed to be a man that I hadn't known in about a decade. And it would be easy to visit him any time: I'd lost my job at the Northshire Bookstore because of my month-long absence.

My hard drive died last Thursday, the day before my 34th birthday, the day before I was scheduled to visit my father in Florida. I was upset about my hard drive, but the good people at Driversavers made it sound like nothing more than a standard fail. It would be expensive to recover the data, but they seemed confident they could do it.

I received the call yesterday.

Complete physical damage.

Nothing can be recovered.

My shaking was imperceptible at first. The light-headedness soon followed. 20 years of writing. Notes. Work from other poets, all the poems I'd selected for my new literary journal, The Equalizer. Syllabi. Résumés. List of published works. Correspondences. Years and years of poetry. All gone.

We HEART Marfa! (endless travelogue by Jessica Piazza)

Plans have changed.  Negotiations have been made.  Hill country has been eschewed, and Marfa is now, officially, our favorite place ever.  We’re staying an extra night here.  Also, maybe we’re never leaving.  After the morning we had, who would have thought today would have turned out so great?  Not us, I tell you.

At the cold, dawn-dark Days Inn in Van Horn, TX—after a breakfast of egg-like disks on stale mini-bagels and NO WAFFLES because some mean lady took the last one and, adding insult to injury, said “too bad because these are so good— we almost got busted for not reporting our pet to the front desk.  (Yes, we lied.  But Special is so good!  He would never cause any damage!)  Anyway, by then we were certainly enthused to speed our way merrily along Highway 90 toward better, artsier days.  “Speed” being the pivotal word there, as somewhere down the road we got pulled over for going 84 in a 75 mph zone.  (Really?  I mean, that’s not that fast.)  Thankfully, I have a system for getting out of speeding tickets, especially in Texas.  I banter.  You think this wouldn’t work, but it does.  The guy (aviators, five o’clock shadow first thing in the morning, pure Texas Highway Patrol) looked at my New York license and my Cali plates and asked “where exactly ARE you from, anyway?”  From the way he said it, neither answer was better—obnoxious Yank or ditzy LA rich girl—so I just told the truth, which is that I'm from both places.  

I then went on to make a fool of myself.  “But I went to school at UT, so I’d never root for the Trojans, I’m all ‘hook ‘em, Horns!’ you know!” “I hate UT,” he deadpanned.  Josh couldn’t help it.  He snorted.  Quietly, but still.  Anyway, the point is, he may hate the Longhorns (and I may have been lying, since I care about football a lot less than, say, getting a waffle at the free breakfast bar at a bad motel), we still got off with a warning only.  Which was fabulous.  We drove away (at a reasonable speed), blasting Wu-Tang (the cop would have loved that, I bet) and giggling.

 

Shortly after, we reached Prada Marfa, an art installation just on the border of Valentine, TX.  For those of you who don’t know it, Prada Marfa is an art installation, a free-standing building on the side of the highway, lit from the inside and surrounded only by desert, where several Prada bags and (all right foot) shoes are starkly displayed.  It’s pretty incredible.  The rumor is it’s partially funded by Prada and that they select the merchandise for display themselves, but I haven’t found confirmation of that.  

 

Either way, it’s funny, since the whole affair is a fairly stark commentary on the ridiculousness of consumerism and “luxury” when juxtaposed with nature (the beauty of it, but also the desolation) and the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.

Congratulations Denise Duhamel - Academy of American Poets Spotlight Poet

We heart Denise Duhamel, our recessionista poet, so we were delighted to learn that she's in the spotlight over at poets.org.  Head over there to read about her.  And check out this video of her recent reading at Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL.  Go Denise!

Denise Duhamel at Books and Books from Andrew Hevia on Vimeo.

The Greatness of Bookstores (by Larry Epstein)

Bookstores are sacred spaces. Their promise of wisdom and discovery, their anchoring communities of thoughtful readers, and their providing people who can offer informed reading suggestions make them indispensable. I think it's a good goal in life to have a bookstore as the place where everybody knows your name.

Of course, the independent bookstore I describe is endangered, overwhelmed by retail giants and online competitors. Those of us lucky enough to be been in some great stores will always remember them. I can still recall the moment, decades ago when I was very young, wandering into City Lights in San Francisco and being delighted and astonished that the store provided comfortable chairs to sit and sample a book. Reading was as prized there as on my own couch 3,000 miles away.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce
in front of Shakespeare and Company

Among the many dedicated booksellers in history, Sylvia Beach is one I most admire. Sylvia--it's revealing that after reading so much about her, I can't call her by her last name--opened Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She was among the brave young women who had flocked there for personal freedom and to champion the modern in art and literature. Sylvia sought to give birth to herself; she had even changed her birth name of Nancy. She wanted to live in a world of her own making, then a difficult task for any young woman, much less a minister's daughter who loved other women.

She moved to Paris and noticed that a literary review she wanted could be purchased at Adrienne Monnier's bookshop. Sylvia went to buy the review, and met the woman with whom she shared a long-term love relationship. Monnier offered French books, but Sylvia was determined to provide American books. After opening a shop around the corner, she eventually moved Shakespeare and Company across the street from Monnier's store. Both women saw their bookshops as lending libraries. Women readers didn't have the funds to buy books. Because women were excluded from universities, Sylvia knew those women ached for knowledge. Sylvia also thought a book ought to be read before it was bought.

Sylvia pioneered the art of making a bookstore's windows attractive. She carefully placed literary magazines there, and readers were enthralled to discover the author of a story or poem in such magazines might be inside the bookstore ready for a chat. What an array of writers showed up there to borrow books or to give readings or--who knows?--maybe even to buy a book. T.S. Eliot was there, as were Gide, Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop, Malcolm Cowley, Janet Flanner, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, Sherwood Anderson, and many others. Hemingway walked in for the first time announced himself by taking off a shoe and sock to show Sylvia his war scars. She fed the artists who needed food and loaned money to others. Her store served as Hemingway's post office.

Americans came to Paris to see the Lost Generation, a term first used by a garage mechanic with whom Gertrude Stein spoke at a hotel. Hemingway used the phrase as the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, making it famous. The Americans transformed the lending library into a bookstore. They spent real money, probably shocking Sylvia.

In 1922, Sylvia published Ulysses. No one else would take the chance, and very few would work with an author as demanding as James Joyce.

Sylvia kept Shakespeare and Company opened from 1919 until 1941 when the Nazis occupied Paris. The store was closed after Sylvia refused to sell a Nazi officer her last remaining copy of Finnegans Wake. Sylvia spent six months in an internment camp. She never opened her store again.