The Best American Poetry

From Eroticism to Extinction 8 | 83 | 22 | 00 | 44 [by Katie Peyton Hofstadter]

8 years | 83 days | 22:00:44

I recently gave an art-tour to a group of graduate design students. It was the week of the Climate Strikes, Greta Thunberg was at the UN, and our President was mostly skipping school for a discussion of "Religious Freedom" (unless you're Muslim, I'm assuming).

After some soul scratching, I decided to twist the classic theme of love and death, in a way that spoke to this week. Here are a few stops in the tour, From Eroticism to Extinction.

The first stop is Greene Naftali gallery, where we see Paul Chan's The Bathers Dilemma. Industrial fans blast air upwards into nylon air dancers, which dramatically stiffen and wilt, over and over again, in a simulation of sex and flags and, hey, let’s say freedom (religious or otherwise).

In other words, they respond to pressure by dancing.

The androgynous bather's tiny (tiny!) suits draw attention to what is hidden (the tiny, but oh so important, bits these turgid tube balloons definitely do not have). "Progress takes a toll, especially on those who want it most," writes Chan. From his statement:

Resistance wears down the spirit, and makes a mess of the body and mind. It is a shame that it feels natural to expect suffering in oneself for the sake of ending it in others, and commonplace to accept this terrible symmetry as the price one pays for progress.

The bather in art breaks with this terrible symmetry by offering an image of another way forward. Works that take up this motif invite us to reflect on how pleasure renews us. They are reminders that pleasing and being pleased – without aggression or guilt – expands our capacity for fellow feeling. 

This "other way forward" channels the words of poet Audre Lorde, who said in 1978:

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

The most-discussed piece is an air dancer in a glass case. Is it happy, my students want to know? Is it trapped in the display, or does it enjoy being watched? We spend a moment watching the wiggler in its double bikini bottoms, contemplating our own gazes. It feels like we are in school and getting away with something.

We end with a passage from writer, scholar and activist adrienne maree brown (from Pleasure Activism). "Feeling good is not frivolous," writes brown. "It is freedom.”

The exit leads through a beach installed outside the gallery. Our feet crunch in the white sand. Across the street, we climb up to the High Line, Chelsea’s award-winning park, built on an old elevated freight rail line.

Ruth Ewan's monumental Silent Agitator is installed at 24th Street. It celebrates historic labor victories, like the five-day work week and eight-hour workday. (Victories being eroded by the decades-long right-wing assault on labor unions and the more recent rise of the "gig economy”) 

Ewan’s installation is inspired by Ralph Chaplin's classic turn-of-the-century illustration for the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. They feature a call-and-response, echoed in Ewan’s work: "What time is it? Time to organize!" The illustrations were distributed as “stickerettes” (drawings and slogans printed on small slips of gummed paper), which were also called "silent agitators."

Ewan’s Silent Agitator is funded by members of the Mugrabi family, whose 5-billion-dollar empire and aggressive art-trading and market-making (think: 800 Warhols in a warehouse) pretty blatantly undercut the idea that an hour's work entitles a laborer to a fair slice of our planet's finite wealth and resources.

Speaking of the planet's finite resources, we are now on to the Extinction part of the tour.

Earlier that day, a group of artists (full disclosure: I regularly see one of them naked in my apartment) had launched ClimateClock.world, an effort to put carbon budget countdown clocks up all over the world. Responding to a special request, they’d also custom-built one of these clocks for Greta Thunberg, but when she attempted to bring the physical clock into the UN for her speech, it was confiscated by security. (It did, after all, kind of look like a bomb.) Anyway, the clock is up and running here. It's open-source, so you can install the digital clock widget, or use the maker-kit to build your own physical clock.

This climate clock was erected in Berlin by Fridays for the Future just a few weeks ago.

 

Every morning, my phone tells me exactly how much time has passed (2019 years, 10 months, 9 days, 8 hours, etc) since some god-like dude was born in a manger. It's standardized for our global techno-capitalist economy, and accurate enough for high-frequency trading—but is it helping us survive?

Salvador Dali's The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931 96

 

My students love clocks. They love Dali’s Persistence of Memory. They love Ewan’s Silent Agitator. Since they were young, they've been told they were going to "save the world." How about a clock for that?

 

 

Event: Tomorrow at 6pm, comedic performer Morgan Bassichis will host an event at the Silent Agitator monument, called "There's a better life and you think about it, don't you?" The title is taken from Dolly Parton's 9-5. The event will feature Tayo Aluko, Ruth Ewan, Brooklyn Women’s Chorus, the New York City Labor Chorus, the Sing in Solidarity Chorus, and Lynn Marie Smith “aka” The Motown Diva. It will celebrate "the uplifting significance of song in the exhausting work of labor organizing,” and it’s billed as an “evening of fun, lively performances” that “invites musicians and organizers from across the city—and the world—to come together in affirmation that the time we have together need not be all work and no play."

Credits:
Paul Chan, installation shots from The Bather's Dilemma
Ruth Ewan, "Silent Agitator," photo by Timothy Schenck
Fridays for the Future, carbon clock at the Gasometer, photo by Euref AG/Schwarz
#ClimateClock widget available here

Kent Johnson asks "Could Someone Tell Me Why?"

Kent Johnson has written an eight-page poem about The Best American Poetry, the American poetry scene and his place in it. "It is all in the honorable, august traditions of satire," he says. The poem is entitled "Could Someone Tell Me Why?" Click here to read the poem, which he prefaces with these sentences:

<<<
Yeah, so some of the people who were my former
friends are now dead. I feel bad about that, but then I
think to myself, Hey, life is short and at least you were
published in the Best American Poetry! No, I don’t
really mean that, just kidding, I’ve never thought that,
and never would I.
>>>

Chrstopher Beha on "Winning the Peace"

<<<
If you’re worried that the election of a populist demagogue with no apparent respect for democratic or constitutional norms has put the United States on the road to fascism, bear in mind the defining feature of totalitarian societies: they are places in which all modes of life are subsumed under the political, in which each citizen’s most important relationship must be his or her relationship to the state. This is why totalitarian governments reliably shut down or take over religious groups, trade unions, and other voluntary associations. The ultimate aim of scaling back our political attention is not apathy but the creation of autonomous space for social, spiritual, and aesthetic experiences. If creeping totalitarianism is your worry, such work is not a form of acquiescence but a form of resistance.
>>>

from Christopher Beha's brilliant "Easy Chair" piece in Harper's (May 2019)

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/05/winning-the-peace-political-obsession/

a poem from The Awl by Brandon Amico [posted by Mark Bibbins]

This poem is at least as relevant today as it was when Brandon wrote it three years ago, alas. [—M.B.]

 

“A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone”

                                                        —Huffington Post, March 30, 2016 

 

Gun that folds up into a teddy bear.

Gun that folds into a bottle.

Gun that folds into a dozen roses.

Gun that folds into a condolence card.

Gun that folds into a conference pass, a baseball ticket, a ticket to anywhere.

Gun that folds into your golden retriever, the usual tail wag. The jolt of electricity

     through the tail when you say its name.

Gun that folds into another gun.

Gun that folds into a prerogative, into an absentee ballot.

Gun that folds into a bulletproof necktie.

Gun that folds into rope.

Gun that folds into a grin without a face.

Gun that folds into legislation, and folds and folds again until so thick it can’t

      physically be folded again.

Gun that guns into a fold.

Gun that folds into an opening.

Gun that folds quietly.

Gun that folds into a weather forecast, a travel agent.

Gun that folds into a car key.

Gun that folds into a door key.

Gun that folds into a body.

Gun that folds into a mirror,

that shatters.

Gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.

Gun that folds into an anti-NRA sign.

Gun that folds into a picture frame.

Gun that swaggers into an argument.

Gun that folds into a pen. Gun that unfolds an ink cartridge.

Gun that folds white as paper, that writes its wishes.

Gun that folds its fingers into a steeple.

Gun that folds into a pantry.

Gun that folds into a knife fight.

Gun that folds into a sitcom episode without an ending.

Gun that folds into itself, that becomes more gun.

Gun that folds in err, in human.

Gun that folds into a cell phone; gun that calls your children home.

 

Brandon Amico is the author of Disappearing, Inc. (Gold Wake Press, 2019). He is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant, and the winner of Southern Humanities Review’s Hoepfner Literary Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Kenyon Review, and New Ohio Review, among other publications.

from "An Enemy of the People" [by Paul Berman]

People have been asking: since when, and for what reason, has Zionism become a dirty word? Paul Berman speculates on this question and reports on recent alarming events in France:

<<<
The Yellow Vest sidewalk mini-riot against Alain Finkielkraut [pictured right], the French philosopher, in Paris a few weeks ago—widely and even internationally reported in the press—deserves an additional commentary, apart from the obvious remark made by many people at the time, to wit, that manias against the Jews have gotten out of hand in France. Finkielkraut was walking in the street, when a group of Yellow Vests discovered him, and, recognizing his face, famous from a thousand talk-show appearances, shouted at him, “France belongs to us! Damn racist! You are a hatemonger. You are going to die. You are going to hell. God will punish you. The people will punish you. Damn Zionist!,”—along with “Go back to Tel Aviv!,” “Get lost, dirty Zionist shit!,” “We are the people!,” and other such cries, expressed with an air of violent menace—until he was rescued by a more sympathetic Yellow Vest and by the police.

<<
The sidewalk attack ought to remind us, in short, that Zola’s phrase (in his immortal J’accuse) was “imbecile anti-Semitism,” and not something adjective-free. Imbecility undergirds the phenomenon. If the attack on Finkielkraut revealed anything new, it was only by showing that imbecilities of different provenances can blend together—a loathing of the Jews compatible with the leftist tone of Yellow Vest economic protest; a loathing in the populist mode, with its rhetoric of “the people” against the Jews; and, as it happens, a touch of Islamist loathing, to boot. The most vituperative of the Yellow Vests shouting at Finkielkraut turned out to be an Islamist, known to the French police. The Yellow Vests on the sidewalk must have found the combination very exciting.
>>

<<
The American universities have become famous for those melodramatic scenes, with crowds of undergraduates convincing themselves that Satan or Joseph de Maistre is about to deliver a lecture, and must be stopped. But student fads are the least of it. In our era, the loftiest of intellectual journals have been known to execute their own editors at noon. If the French version of this sort of thing is different, it is chiefly because the best-known of writers, and not just the academics, can find themselves on trial now and then, not just in the “court of public opinion,” and not just in the American closed-door Title IX university hearings (which is bad enough), but in courts of law.

This has been Michel Houellebecq’s situation, brought up on charges in France some years ago for having insulted Islam, which, of course, he had done—Houellebecq, whose novel Submission, is routinely denounced as racist (though an exposé of anti-Semitism is one of its principal themes). Pascal Bruckner was obliged more recently to defend himself in court, not once but twice, because of his analytic dissections of the Islamist controversies in France—Bruckner, the author of An Imaginary Racism, whose crime can be guessed at from the title of his book. Georges Bensoussan, the historian of the Jews in the Arab countries (in a compendious 900 pages), was brought up on charges for having said in a radio interview that, among Arab families in France, “anti-Semitism is imbibed with one’s mother’s milk”—though, like Houellebecq and Bruckner, Bensoussan managed to avoid conviction (in his case because he had quoted someone else, and the court ruled that he had merely misspoken, and his intentions were not criminal).
>>

To continue reading the essay, published in Tablet, click here.  See also David Lehman's review of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission here.

a poem from The Awl by Josh Bell [posted by Mark Bibbins]

As many readers will be aware, the annual Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference is currently in full swing. We are ever on the lookout for Josh's "free-range / angels slumped out / on conveyor belts" here. —[M.B.]

Vince Neil’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, As Transcribed by Josh, in a Crowded Hotel Bar One Afternoon, Being a Poem Spoken in the Future, During the Upcoming AWP Conference of 2014, in Seattle, Washington

1.

Of the latter heroes I was most

supine, handed out

warnings to women who were pregnant

or were likely to become pregnant,

hope tucked bloodless

into saddlebag, neither hunter

nor borrower, sometimes

referred to myself as It—

as in charity is

its bird machine—a strap-on fashioned

out of bits of the foregone cross

coming at me from the future

in the tiniest and the most

lineal of dreams, my preferred

haruspex pondering

her retirement and my new

address as quickly

dirty as the last, in times of war

immune to alarum,

at least fifteen minutes away

from sword and armor, the valves of my heart

opening and closing slowly

like the wings of a new butterfly

at rest upon the battlements

of overweening Troy, and all

the maidens and immortals

2.

and the handful of princes who,

in those days, took time away

from their own troubled narratives

to stop and save me from myself or from

the ancient boy-scout Death

are now themselves long dead

by natural and/or

mythological causes. Don’t mention it

they seemed to say with their great

careful bodies

as they turned them from me in departure.

Don’t mention it and drifted leonine

and smooth toward the assault

on their promised

constellations and perhaps

the foreign-funded rebellions

of their homicidal children,

got upon or beneath majestic animals

and graduate students, ears crisp

but not always white

as snow. And where was I—year

of the jellyfish, cossacked,

bowing feastless

before capital—when they

in their turn required me

                                                [continued]

Brexit Envy [by Leon Elson]

Our correspondent in London reports on the mood over there now that Theresa May's plan for Brexit has suffered a second defeat in Parliament --  a defeat that has been characterized as "significant," "crushing," "major," and "catastrophic." Here's Leon's dispach. DL

Dear David
The Oxbridge elite can talk of little else than Brexit -- how to manage it. The country is more politically divided than ever I can remember it to be. If the vote to leave the EU was a harbinger of the Trump election, what in the States could mirror the chaos now prevailing here as the House of Commons rejects every proposal brought to it by PM May?

Are people fed up with Theresa May [pictured left]? Hard to say. She inherited this mess from her predecessor, who called for a referendum on exiting the European Union, thought for sure the move would be defeated, was stunned when it wasn't, and promptly resigned. There is something very sympathetic about Ms May and how she has conducted herself, remained calm and carried on. She has shuttled back and forth between London and Brussels with proposals and modifications of proposals -- it's like H. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy but his worked better. 

Of course what May has in her favour is that Labour is led by Corbyn, whose anti-Semitism is so blatant that some members of his own party have abandoned it. The wonder is that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, the longtime leaders of Labour, tolerated Corbyn, but that may be explained by the fact that he was an obscure backbencher who posed no threat to them or to Labour.

Poor Theresa lost her voice yesterday and there you had the perfect metaphor for her. No doubt she will continue her Sisyphean struggle to figure out how the UK can sever its European ties in a reasonable way. A "hard" Brexit with an abrupt cancellation of all existing compacts and trade agreements -- and with the probability of a "hard" border between Northern Ireland (which is part of Britain) and Ireland (which is part of the EU) -- would be unconscionable. But we could be heading that way. 

Dublin, Frankfurt, Paris, and New York have benefited from the uncertainty surrounding financial institutions centered in London. The blow to London's banking preeminence in Europe is real though probably not fatal.

At high table at Balliol the other night one wit commented that he had heard there was "Brexit envy" in the United States. This was greeted with laughter, for I wager that there is absolutely no one anywhere who envies us this sad spectacle. But now, dear David, I am anxious to know how this whole debacle is getting discussed in America. -- Leon 
>>>
<<<
Dear Leon,

I wish I could say that Americans are discussing Brexit options with great passion or with at least the sort of intense and amused curiosity that I recall in London, where I was, during the Anita Hill hearings. The general indifference to the rest of the world does us little credit. Some people I know, who like spending summers in France, may suspend this practice given what they hear of sporadic acts of violence and terrorism there. But nobody's canceling their Wimbledon tickets if they're lucky enough to have them. 

If it's any consolation we have a Congress as dysfunctional as your Parliament.

You have my sympathy and my hope that common sense will prevail as it used to do in Britain. We've got a lot of idiocy here, of course, but it's more fun talking about Byron and Shelley with you as we used to do. Do you still have that tawny port that I liked so much?

David

Poetry News from JFK by [Andrei Codrescu]

I like writing in airport lounges with two hours to spare before an overseas flight. This is the last pleasure left after airports became expensive holding cells in hell. I remember when you could run right up to the door of your airplane and they would reopen them for you if you were late. And as per Casablanca, you could part from your amor during a war. I also remember from the movies when couples parked by the airport to watch planes take off. That was entertainment in days past. I'm having these puffs of nostalgia in the lounge of British air between security warnings and threats to my luggage which, if left unattended, might sprout wings and leaves. To be sure, the Surveillance apparatus already knows that nothing in my luggage grows. Do they know what grows in my head? I saw Minority Report and I think it possible that people having bad thoughts are tagged already. But there is no way anyone can read your thoughts if you're writing poetry. For one thing, there is no poetry in your head before you write it. At least, there isn't in mine. I'm from the school of "If you want to know something, ask yourself and there it is: the answer." Most people with a question google the answer now, and there it is: the fake answer. The fake answer is actually "fake news." Google cannot and never will answer poetry's questions. Google will maybe come up with names and bios of poets and their poems, but it will never answer a real poetry question, like the one poet Ted Berrigan was fond of stating as a fact, though it was a question: "I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next." Indeed and likewise, there is no way for me to know what I think before I write it. As I write it I know what it is. Of course, if I have to formulate a question afterwards, I lose interest. Google is incapable of googling itself, that is to say: google cannot produce a question from an answer that even I don't yet know. Poetry resides only in the Ungooglable. For an erudite dissertation on the Ungooglable, please see "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" (Princeton, 2009), where I sink to the bottom of this. They are about to call my flight, so I'm pasting here two of my recent ungooglables:

 

Dogs of Aphora

An ounce of premounting is worth a pound of surmounting and a ton of dismounting.

The contrarian problem: I’m Bauhaus when they are Baroque, I go for the Baroque when they go Bauhaus.

We articulate when we daydream: contra naturam

Even in the deepest boredom the darkest melancholy the hopeless depression someone with a lighter and a knife is preparing to make you forget

Only curiosity makes things better: things hold your gaze if you look

The last day arrived after my first coffee

ants
ants form colonies of dread from each other’s bodies
let this one pass let this one go let this one say the said
not one hears the labor’s so intense and dense
I probe the rope swaying under foot and step
into the void where all I thought I was I never had

 

 

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.

___________________________________________

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: 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

Léonce et Léna: due to a change in situation... [by Tracy Danison]

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It’s been 7 hours and 15 days since you look your love away/

Since you’ve been gone I can do whatever I want/I can see whomever I choose/I can eat my dinner in a fancy restaurant/Put my arms around any girl I see/

But nothing I said nothing can take away these blues/'Cause nothing compares/Nothing compares to you

Nothing compares to u, Prince Rogers Nelson (Sinead O’Connor)

It’s the “7 hours” that gets me. 

I wake after four or five hours. She is sitting on my chest, her pubis somehow pressing hard on my breast bone, looking down into my face, occupying my interior commentary. I start counting the hours.  I remember only later that I’ve been doing this same half-lit heart-crush now for better than two weeks.

This isn’t the only sort of vaguely psychotic repetitive behavior I can get absorbed in. Since the 1980s, I have seen Georg Buchner’s Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck whenever I’ve noticed one or the other’s being staged Paris intra-muros.

Léonce & Léna and Woyzeck started getting regular play in the early 70s, just as I did, perhaps taking the place of the Situationist International. Both pieces have Ur-propos that can be welded into almost any post-1968 conundrum. For love (or is it duty? Or lust? Or congenital idocy?) Private Woyzeck, otherwise a barber, makes himself a guinea pig to a heartless doctor and a slave to a thoughtless hussar. Prince Léonce and Princess Léna both run away from personally untenable situations. Love or its material equivalent is out there, somewhere, but neither Léonce, nor Léna, nor Woyzeck can hide from the tragedy of the situation they were born into.

I was to the MC93 – Maison de Culture of Seine Saint Denis – for a ninth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), on the evening before the foggy ragged Sunday afternoon I went to see Léonce & Léna at the Théâtre des Amandiers in Nanterre, to the west of Paris.

Nanterre is the town where`68 broke out, where Situationism bore fruit, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit tapped his finger on a 500-page report on youth and observed that there wasn’t a word about sex in the whole damned thing. ‘Though that moment has been obscured by memory, the tear gas, strikes and street fighting and politics, everything that has really mattered, I think everything that’s happened since then, proves that sex and gender has mattered far more than anything else.  

undefined

The MC93 made a perfect setting for a tenth anniversary performance of Alan Platel’s Out of Context for Pina (Bausch), which included all the original cast members. Pina Bausch, died suddenly of smoking-related cancer in June 2009, though the piece is for her, not in her memory. If you’ve seen Bausch’s inimitable choreography you’ll see why that must necessarily be so.

There’s a lot of memory in the MC93, an angular bare-concrete slab building, located on the boulevard Lénine in a place called Bobigny. Thanks to Charles De Gaulle airport and its discrete but extensive underground police complex, Bobigny is site of the busiest immigration court in France. Following a foolish confusion of passports in the besotted wake of a morally shocking, day-long, all-night, series of vigorously consensual acts, I was able to create my own high-security memories there.

At the end of Out of Context, a scratchy-voiced version of Prince’s  Nothing compares 2 u reminded the cast as well as myself that nothing compares, period. Life just goes on; the performers returned one by one to the seats in the audience from which they’d hopped up onto the stage and begun the piece, becoming spectators to the ghost of their own memories.

I thought, “This play cannot ever be this play again”. A tear ran out of my eye. Probably because I don’t sleep enough.

Kaori Ito, now a much-in-view-performance-dance-choreographer with a babe in arms, was in the original cast of Out of Context. She came and sat back down in the seat next to mine; I asked her after if she felt as moved as I to reckon whatever was done was always finished forever. Ito said she did.

This time, Léonce and Léna seemed about taking your place, no matter what. That’s what I remember. So this. Is the situation now that all the Princes and Princesses, fifty years after ’68, must stand ground, make an end of the old memories while waiting for Léonce & Léna to play again?

Poets & Artists 100: all hail Didi Menendez [by David Lehman]

Poets & Artists 100 is here.

Click here and you'll arrive at a Didi Menendez's groundbreaking magazine devoted to "figurative realism" in art -- with poetry tossed in by such stalwarts as Nin Andrews, Grace Cavalieri, and Denise Duhamel.

Figurative realism is a good name for a movement in favor of representational art with the human figure  at its center. The revival of the nude as an aesthetic ideal is significant. It is especially impressive in a puritanical era and may be a harbinger of welcome changes to come. The black and white painting on the left is by Dirk Dzimirsky, who curated the "Figurative Art" show up now.

The current issue of Poets & Artists includes gorgeous, sensuous paintings by such new (to me) artists as Anne-Christine Roda, Aixa Oliyeras, Veronica Winters, Megan Read, Nadine Robbins, Conne Karlera-Sales, Daniel Maidman, Victoria Selbach, Miriam Escofet (Portrait of Sophia, on right). It's an exciting development, a cry for beauty against brutality.

-- DL

Paul Berman on Michael Walzer on "Tablet"

from Paul Berman [left] on Tablet in the second of a series of highly provocative and thoughtful essays on the American left and the dangers of anti-Semitism.

<<<

Michael Walzer has brought out a book called A Foreign Policy for the Left, in which he argues that, when people on the American left contemplate domestic affairs, they do so in a thoughtful, sober, and serious manner—or, at least, they make what Walzer considers to be an honest effort. But when those same people turn to world affairs, they slip into a different habit of mind, as if sliding from one lobe of the brain to another. 

**

The question of world affairs arises, and the left-wing public responds by thinking: “Everything that goes wrong in the world is America’s fault.” No elaboration seems required. From that one assumption follow all the others. 

**

There is the spectacular instance of left-wing delusion about the Islamist political movement—the left-wing supposition that something has got to be progressive about the Islamists, even if the Islamists appear to be medieval reactionaries; and the further supposition that Islamism’s enemies among Muslims and non-Muslims alike must surely be the actual reactionaries, even when the enemies appear to be liberals and progressives. Here is a “politics of pretending” in a double-twist pretzel version.

**

You can read about Bernie [Sanders’s] shortcomings in Truthdig, where he turns out to be a major sellout, a non-socialist because a non-anti-imperialist, and a tool of the sinister Democratic Party. The anti-Zionists and the fantasists yearn for an American [Jeremy] Corbyn [head of Britain's Labour party]. They want a national leader who will denote as realistic their own fictions and dreams about faraway dictators; and will usher the fictions and dreams into the American mainstream; and will say nice things about Hamas and bad things about Israel; and will offer an appalling speech to the Democratic National Convention; and will stand shoulder to shoulder with the outright bigots; and will drive everyone with a Jewish soul out of the left, except for a pitiful handful.

But America has produced no such leader. America has produced Bernie Sanders. America is different. Not different at every moment, but, even so, different.

 

Scary Stuff: Paul Berman Reports On the Predicament of the Jews in France Today

<<<
. . .in France, a great mass of Jews have lately undergone experiences that are unimaginable in the U.K. Some 50,000 French Jews, or 10 percent of the entire Jewish population, are said to have decamped from one place to another within central France (or have emigrated to Israel) during the last few years, in order to escape quotidian persecutions from neighbors who have come to accept the Islamist doctrine. The intermittent massacres and murders of Jews in France and in Belgium have added up to a low-level protracted terror.
>>>
<<<
Anti-Zionist street protests got underway [in Paris] in the summer of 2014, at the time of the most recent of the full-scale Israel-versus-Hamas wars in Gaza, proclaiming solidarity with Hamas. At a demonstration in Paris—called by one of the smaller Trotskyist parties, not under Mélenchon’s leadership, but drawing on the public that is his—a street full of marchers broke into a cry of “Death to the Jews!” And “Jew: Shut up, France is not yours!,” together with “Allahu Akbar!,” and “Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!,” which are not normally Trotskyist slogans. 
>>>
<<<
Do the many American campaigners, student councils, minor and major politicians, immigrant activists, distinguished intellectuals and vigorous chants add up to the kind of political force that anti-Zionists have amassed within the radical left in Britain and France (and elsewhere in Western Europe)? Is there a possibility that, having assembled a great many supporters, the newly cheerful left-wing anti-Zionists in America will succeed in hollowing out whole portions of the culture of the traditional liberal left in the United States, on the European model? Or is anti-Zionism in our own country mostly an annoyance, perhaps larger and friskier than a university fad, but not vastly so, and easily brushed off? Is America, in short, different?
>>>

Paul Berman, "The Left and the Jews," Tablet (November 11, 2018)

"Why No Nobel Prize in Lit This Year: The Real Skinny" [by Morris Phillips]

From our Stockholm correspondent, Morris Phillips, a pretty obvious pseudonym for a chain-smoking friend of ours (pictured above):

Dear David,

By now you've heard the cover story. A bunch of women were sexually harassed, assaulted, or disrespected by a French guy married to a Swedish poet who is a member of the Swedish Academy, and the French guy, an arts promoter whatever that is, went to prison when he was convicted of raping a woman in 2011. 

All of this is true, but the real reason behind the decision to award no prize this year is more complicated and Scandinavian.

The Academy, in a fit of melancholy disguising itself as boredom, had dug itself into a trench. With Bob Dylan in 2016 and Kazuo Ishiguro last year, the odds against an English-speaking author were like the odds against tomorrow from a prisoner facing the firing squad today. Besides: Roth was dead, Updike was dead, and long gone were such nobly neglected authors as Auden, Borges, Forster, Frost, Graham Greene, Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, and Gertrude Stein.

Turning to France, Stella Bergen said, "What about Patrick Modiano?" This was considered an enlightened solution until Greta Ohlsson reminded everyone that the Academy had already awarded Modiano the Nobel a few years ago.

The committee's search for an age-appropriate author of serious mediocrity and high moral aims had turned up the Platonic ideal of an author sympathetic to #Me-Too and staunchly opposed to the primitive masculine hegemony that characterizes ISIS. But while everyone loved the idea, the search was compromised by [REDACTED] and there was no concealing the fact that one of the academy members tied up with the accused rapist, though not literally, had found out the finalists' names and was making a killing in the gambling halls of Stockholm and, via proxy, at Ladbroke's of London.

Also, there was a nightclub called Forum, and don't even ask me what they were doing there, but funds from Swedish Academy members propped up the place. In one word: corruption.

 Being a member of the Swedish Academy is a lifetime appointment, so resignation by the two who were implicated in the mess was not an option. Furthermore no one likes lifetime appointments anymore. Just consider the Supreme Court and the Queen of England. 

Alicia Huberman and Joan of Arc advanced the idea that awarding no prize would make a statement more powerful for what it did not say, and Dr. Constance Peterson supplied the rationale, likening the decision to the interpretation of a dream by John Ballantyne when he thinks he is Dr. Edwardes and can't remember whom he killed, when, or how he has successfully assumed the identity of the murdered man, who looks nothing like him.

It was this motion that carried the day. A quote from Strindberg was considered for the press release but rejected as needlessly gloomy and insensitive to the tenor and alto of the time. -- M. P.

Raphael Rubinstein on "the best job in the world" [by Raphael Rubinstein]

<<<
One day a novice writer and college dropout submits a short story to a hip literary magazine named for a pair of then notorious avenues on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Although he lives far away on the Upper West Side, the aspiring writer is intimately familiar with the neighborhood because it’s where he has been buying the heroin he is addicted to for the last five or six years. During this time he has been supporting himself and his habit by working in the kitchens of a string of popular New York City restaurants. His story marries the two poles of his existence in the tale of a young chef trying to score heroin on the Loisaida who is turned away by his dealer because his arms are free of track marks.

Publishing the story leads to a successful book about the seamier side of restaurant kitchens, which in turn leads to an even more popular TV series. No longer obliged to work as a chef, and having successfully kicked heroin, the man begins an altogether different kind of life. As he later describes his new vocation, in the profane language that does much to distinguish him from more genteel purveyors of food culture: “I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”

After several seasons, a noticeable change comes over his TV show. Where once every episode was largely filled with scenes of him eating, drinking (he makes no secret of his love of alcohol) and chatting about food (more often than not purchased from street vendors), now more screen time is given over to the lives, often harsh, of the inhabitants of the far-flung places he visits, which include war zones such as Lebanon, Gaza, Libya and the Democratic Republic of Congo. What distinguishes him from conventional journalists is not only his exuberant cursing but also how he foregrounds his physical body: his voracious but discriminating palette, his long-suffering liver, his tattoo-covered forearms, and so on. The experiences he subjects himself to become his guarantee of authenticity; they make him into a kind of performance artist.

The place he loves more than anywhere else in the world is Vietnam, a country he first became intrigued by when reading Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American. Appropriately, it’s in Hanoi that he achieves what is perhaps his greatest moment: persuading the then-president of the United States who happens to be in Vietnam on a state visit to join him for a bowl of bun cha and some cold beer in a humble noodle shop. A simple meal shared with the most powerful person in the world encapsulates his message: that our common humanity is most readily found in the everyday act of eating, and in the infinite particularities of local cuisines.

Fully aware of his long sequence of good luck, he tells a reporter: “I have the best job in the world. If I’m unhappy, it’s a failure of imagination.” His last Instagram post, made just days before he hangs himself in a hotel room in Alsace where he is filming a new episode, is a close-up of a choucroute garnie, featuring a thick slice of ham atop of mound of sauerkraut, flanked by sausages, boiled potato and two very thick chunks of salted pork. A two-word caption expresses his perpetual defiance of all moderation, and his endless gusto for the good stuff that awaits: “Light lunch.”
>>>

"The Best Job in the World" was posted on June 15, 2018 by Raphael Rubinstein. See also the new show Raphael has curated, which includes Archie Rand's painting "Sisters" (1983):

VISIONS OF ARCADIA IN CONTEMPORARY PAINTING
Curated by Raphael Rubinstein
June 26th - September 29th, 2018
Opening Reception:
Tuesday, June 26th, 2018
6:00 PM to 8:00PM
417 Lafayette Street, 4th floor, NYC

New Trilling Essay Talk of the Town [by David Lehman]

The emergence of a previously unknown and uncharacteristically fiery essay by Lionel Trilling is all the buzz in intellectual circles. Our stringers at far-flung camupuses report the excitement at faculty clubs and academic production centers where Trilling's essays in criticism, particularly those written between 1940 and his death in 1975, command a respect accorded to few contemporaries, not because he had a penchant for oracular pronouncements (he did not) but because of the nuanced style of exposition in his writing, which reflected a mind of immense subtlety, irony, and complexity. By indirections he found directions out.

The reputation for what champions admired as subtlety (and detractors considerd coyness) may change with the posthumous appearance of an essay Trilling was said to have begun in 1967 but never completed to his satisfaction. The essay's working title was "I Hate the Liberals." Victor Mathis, the archivist who discovered the draft in Trilling's papers, insisted that marginal handwritten comments in the legendary Columbia prof's distinctive script imply "that this jest was a place-holder for an ultimate title along the lines of 'The Liberal Dilemma in an Age of Economic Decline'."

That Trilling, author of "The Liberal Imagination," had commenced on an essay critical of New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay and of what was vulgarly known as "limousine liberalism," a phrase Trilling dissects, made news wherever talking heads shmooze. "It's like an intellectual version of Tom Wolfe's outing of Leonard Bernstein's black panther party as 'radical chic'," said Jenna Clauss of the Brookings Institute. Marvin Murdeck of the McLuhan School of Publc Information emphasized that the title, though evidently a joke Trilling enjoyed, was "deliberately reductive of his thoughts on the whole question of political hypocrisy among union-smashing NIMBY elites who are incredibly full of shit but should not be cariacatured nevertheless."

Handmade signs declaring "I Hate the Liberals" have sprung up in affluent parts of Ann Arbor, Madison, Colorado Springs, Ithaca, Providence, Rhode Island, and Evanston, Illinois. Some say this is happening in the spirit of a joke. "It's post-modernism, man," said Josh Lucas, a freshperson at Northwestern, who has not yet declared a major but is leaning toward sociology. But there are those who see in the outpouring of anti-liberal sentiment the hyperbolic release of impulses long repressed. Professor Leon Elson, the Hayte-Jacques Professor of Applied Kenesiology at Florida Ache, compares the "I Hate the Liberals" fad with people screaming out the windows, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." Elson's point: "It's not so much a matter of art following life, or life following art, but life following life, and art, art, depending on how you define it."

continue reading here.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: Lafcadio Hearn, the ghost of islands [By Andrei Codrescu]

I signed up to write an introduction to Lafcadio Hearn's collection of ghost stories, to be published by Princeton University Press next year. Hearn lived in New Orleans for a few years in the late 19th century and was a beloved local. His Louisiana novel, "Chita" is still in print. I used his wonderful travelogue "Two Years in the West Indies" when I visited Martinique. The city of St. Pierre,  featured in the book, was no more, blown up by a volcano, but his other landmarks and vivid people lived on. I thought I knew plenty about Lafcadio Hearn when I took on the job. As it turns out, I knew little. There are over a hundred collections of books by Lafcadio Hearn: essays, stories, novels, travelogues, philosophical dialogues with Shinto and Zen monks, and, the strangest thing of all, there is a whole other Lafcadio Hearn, named Koizumi Yakumo, who is revered in Japan. There have been movies, operas, Noh plays, and hundreds of illustrated editions of his Japanese writings. He collected folk stories, interviewed monks, taught English literature in Tokyo, took Japanese citizenship and hated the West and the Meiji era that corrupted, as he saw it, the Japan that knew no shadows in painting before it opened to the West. He had four children in Japan, two of whom wrote books about their father. In the U.S. there are dozens of memoirs and correspondence published after his death. He died young, at the age of 54. At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America's best known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe and Stevenson have entered the literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with the remarkable exceptions of Louisiana and Japan. Yet, Hearn’s place in American literature is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called "folk wisdom." Lafcadio Hearn was a Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power. In other words, in the blink of an eye, or, as in one of his stories, the time it takes to burn an owl's feathers so that the nocturnal beautiful-girl-shape of the true creature might emerge. Hearn changed from one person into another, from a Greek islander into a British student, from a penniless London street ragamuffinin into a respected American newspaper writer, from a journalist into a novelist and, most astonishingly, from a stateless Western man into a loyal Japanese citizen. Yet, this life, as recorded both by himself and others, grows more mysterious the more one reads about it. It is like the Japanese story of the Buddhist monk Kwashin Koji, in “Impressions of Japan.” This monk who owned a painting so detailed it flowed with life. A samurai chieftain saw it and wanted to buy it, but the monk wouldn't sell it. So, the chieftain had him followed and murdered. But when the painting was brought to the chieftan and unrolled, there was was nothing on it; it was blank. A monk told Hearn this story to illustrate an aspect of the Buddhist doctrine of karma, but he might as well been speaking to Hearn about his own personae: the more “literary” Hearn becomes, via his prodigious output and the memories of his intimates, the more mysterious he becomes, until he vanishes like the painting. Lafcadio Hearn was born in 1850 not far from Ithaca, on the island of Lefkada in Greece, from the union of Charles Bush Hearn, an Irish surgeon in the British army, and Rosa Kassimatis, a beautiful woman born in Cythera, Aphrodite's island, about which Baudelaire wrote (in Richard Howard's memorable translation): "On Aphrodite's island all I found/ was a a token gallows wherein my image hung..." Hearn saw in Cythera the fatal beauty that would haunt his entire life. The island of Lefkada, said by Ovid in his “Ode to Love” to be the place where Sappho jumped to her death in the sea because of unrequited love, was Lafcadio's paradise, the womb-island from which he was expelled when his father returned and took mother and child to Dublin. While his father was abroad on  another military assignment in the West Indies, Lafcadio's mother Rosa fled Dublin with a Greek man, back to her "island of feasting hearts and secret joys," leaving Lafcadio in the custody of a pious Catholic aunt. Then a schoolyard accident in one of the British schools he resentfully attended left him blind in one eye. His father remarried, and his aunt's family became bankrupt, two unrelated yet near-simultaneous disasters. A seventeen-year-old Lafcadio wandered penniless in London among vagabonds, thieves, and prostitutes. In the spring of 1869, a relation of his father's, worried about the family's reputation, handed him a one-way boat ticket to Cincinnati, Ohio, where another relation of the Hearns lived. In Cincinnati his relation handed him $5 and told him to get lost.  A twenty-year-old Lafcadio found himself, once again, a penniless tramp. So far, with the exception of a few school exercises and some ghoulish poetry inspired by his fear of ghosts, Lafcadio Hearn had written nothing. In Cincinnati, he lived in the underworld, until the printer Henry Watkin allowed the young tramp to sleep on piles of old newspapers in his shop. Watkin, a utopian anarchist, encouraged him to read radical and fantastic literature. It was the age of socialism, anarchism, imperialism, untaxed wealth, unredeemable poverty, spiritism, snake-oil, newspapers, electricity, photography, telegraphy, telepathy, railroads, high art, and kitsch. A bounty of exotic objects and customs flowed in from the cultures of vanquished Native American tribes and recently freed African slaves. The astonished masses of immigrant Europeans, who were mostly peasants and religiously persecuted marginals, brought with them rich stories of folklore, customs, and beliefs. Hearn, like many new Americans, felt rightly that he  was living in a time of wonder and possibility. His education took a vast leap: he underwent a kind of osmosis as if he had absorbed the spirit of nineteenth-century America from the newspapers he slept on.Clumsily, with Henry Watkin's encouragement, he started to write. And so the moral of this story is: you need to have a miserable childhood to have an interesting life, and fuck you, Trump, with your immigrant phobias. Let's all become Japanese.

Now is the time to support this anthology: Native Voices: Honoring Indigenous Poetry from North America

Ed note: For the past two weeks we've featured posts by Kristina Marie Darling, associate editor-in-chief of Tupelo Press. She's been sharing profiles of poets who are included in the forthcoming Native Voices a new anthology exploring and celebrating contemporary Indigenous poetry. The Press has launched a kickstarter campaign to help bring the anthology to print. Here's more information about how you can support this important book. sdl:

Educators Roundtable: Dean Rader & CMarie Fuhrman [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.  For more information, visit his website. 

 

An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom. 

KMD:  You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others.  I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry.  What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them?  

DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way that highlights not just the thematics of poetic creation but its forms as well.

I also think more and more students are pursuing graduate studies in Native literatures. We definitely need more students--ideally more Indigenous students--getting PhDs in literature, English, AIS, and American studies. What has been missing for these students is a current anthology of Indigenous poetics that arms them to to graduate level work in Native poetries.

The second issue is about poets themselves and what gets taught in graduate creative writing programs. I think recent books by Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier might get taught in MFA programs, but there is a vast canon of Indigenous American poetry that does not get taught in graduate programs because graduate writing courses tend to focus on craft, and for years readers have been taught to read books by Native writers through the lens of theme or context or culture. This anthology helps correct that.

CF:  I agree with everything that Dean said.  As a teacher of Native Lit and advisor for our Universities IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program) I am responsible for teaching Natives and non-Natives about Indigenous literature.  I often teach classes for Native students only, but I have taught mixed classes as well.  What I have found in teaching both is that Natives would have to learn about Indigenous writing from a non-Native perspective and non-Natives were never given the chance to hear about craft or the impetus for a poem or story from the Native writer.  Often I would invite, via Skype or classroom visit, the writers and poets to talk to the students themselves, but this is not always feasible.  It is my hope that a collection like this one might be able to bring those voices into the classroom directly.  This way, both student and teacher may gain a better perspective and understanding of Native writing.

KMD:  In what ways is pedagogy politically charged?  Can our decisions as teachers create a more inclusive and just artistic community?  

DR: A great part of teaching is related to 1) knowledge and 2) comfort. Most poets and professors who teach did not, themselves, read poetry by Native writers in college or graduate school. So, they are less likely to teach it now. I think many professors shy away from teaching, say, Wendy Rose poems or Simon Ortiz poems or LeAnne Howe poems because they don’t know much about tribal histories or even larger Native histories. Furthermore, Native issues are not forefront in American culture right now the way African American and Chicano/a issues are. So, the political urgency of Black Lives Matter or the immigration debate may, for some, feel exigent. I would argue though American minority issues, the marginalization of people of color, and the absence of Natives from popular and political culture, and the larger issues of class make teaching works by Native writers paramount at this moment in history.

KMD:  What new directions do you hope that this anthology opens up within our thinking about poetry, literary tradition, and aesthetics more generally?  

DR: I hope this anthology encourages writers and professors to think about Indigeous poetry in terms of craft. I really hope our book shifts the lens a little bit so that people do not turn to Native poetry just to “learn about Indians” (as I heard someone say not long ago) but to learn about art. What if readers start thinking about Native poetry the way they think about Native painting and pottery--as modes of aesthetic production, as vibrant acts of creation.

CF: I can’t say this any better.

KMD:  Tell us about one particular contribution from the anthology that you would be excited to teach.  How would you utilize this particular work in the classroom?  

CF: I am excited to teach work by Nimiipuu poet Michael Wasson.  First, because he is from the Nez Perce tribe which is located here in Idaho, not far from the University.  Many of our students are Nez Perce and I think they would be honored and inspired to hear from one of their own.  Not to mention, Michael’s work is outstanding.  His poems are complex, multi-layered, and extremely poignant.  I am excited to bring poets into the classroom that reflect my students.

KMD:  Given the anthology’s unique structure, what does this book make possible within the context of writing programs?  For writing communities more generally?  

DR: The book’s combination of poetry and craft are going to be unique. I also like the idea that our book foregrounds influential poetic texts. This highlights the ways in which poetry is a kind of collaboration, or at the very least a conversation. It also helps illustrate direct influences and echoes.

CF: Generations and a sense of community are very important to Native people.  This book is way of honoring our teacher, our elders, and inspiring our children to write their truths as well.

Because this book is comprised of writing from poets all over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) it gives a more complete picture of the Native American experience, particularly the contemporary experience while honoring the past.  Though this book is not meant to be a historical work, it does help to fill the gaps in both the current events and the overlooked history of Native people in the U.S.

For more information about our anthology, our mission, and how you can bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.