The Best American Poetry

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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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

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. . .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.
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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. 
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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?
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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]

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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.”
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"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.  

Poet Spotlight: Michael Wasson [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, I'm thrilled to introduce another one of our talented contributors, Michael Wasson.  Michael is the author of This American Ghost (YesYes Books, 2017). His poems appear in American Poets, Beloit Poetry Journal, Drunken Boat, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Best New Poets, and Bettering American Poetry.  He is nimíipuu from the Nez Perce Reservation in Idaho.  I'm pleased to present his poem, "Mourning Ceremony." Enjoy!  

 

Mourning Ceremony

hipe’síweme kaa wáaqo’ ‘ilcwéew’cixnim cilakátki
‘iceyéeyenm wéetesne péetek’ene. They carved and now
Coyote distributed Monster’s body to various lands.

 

When grief is allowed to us it’s in the stern shape and voice of a man
who walks around ‘n yells at us and his hollering holds our faces
while we are handed polaroid photographs and old portraits
and lip-stained cups with either coffee or red Kool-Aid rings inside
and dirty paintings and ashy ashtrays and almost clean enough pots
and iron skillets and washed pans and jean jackets still glazed
with the scent of sweat ‘n armpits and pine-rubbed flannel coats
and pants so dirty when you glide your hand across ‘em dust slips off
and fades into the blaring gymnasium lights
and cracked and bent glasses frames with a little resin of ear oil
and a smear of dried blood still in the screws and plain moccasins
and porcupine quill roaches ranging from child-size to adult-size
worn out shoes and torn boots and a wristwatch an elderly woman
puts to her ear and keeps it there like a phone and a phone
though we don’t have enough money to buy an answering machine
to record your lost breathing soft into some spooled static
and a collection of tapes and your Black Sabbath and Beatles
and Jimi Hendrix and the Eagles and Led Zeppelin and Credence
Clearwater Revival and the blankets you took with you
when you ended up homeless for a little while and slept along
the Clearwater River and baskets with nothing inside them
and door knobs and rugs and your dirty shirt that had Mickey Mouse
adorned in a headdress and more blankets and letters and notes
and he’s yelling at us that this is the only time we get to mourn for you
for this loss and for this collection of your life that we broadcast
across this throbbing I feel up here in these wooden bleachers
and across the sudden loneliness taking ahold of our burning throats
that you need to hear us and that you are never coming back
that we are weak people who are holding your separated body
in our wrecked arms ‘n hands and on our laps ‘n behind our eyes
and we grip onto these monstrous pieces of you until we break
into this ancient song now flooding the air and shaking the overhead lights
burying you beneath this rush of desperate longing
and face your bright and drawn-out vanishing of ‘ilcwéew’cixnim tim’íne
your sáw’is kaa sayaqi’sníx kiké’t núunim ‘ipsúusx pipísne pawic’asc’asnóoya
and sound our tightening ribs so wide even all the long dead ones can hear
each of our gym-lit bodies bursting and wailing and blooming open.

 

Grateful acknowledgments to As/Us, where this poem first appeared.  

 

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please visit our Kickstarter page.

Poet Spotlight: Karenne Wood [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to continue a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Karenne Wood.  Karenne Wood is an enrolled member of the Monacan Indian Nation who directs Virginia Indian Programs at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. She holds a MFA in poetry and a PhD in linguistic anthropology. She has worked at the National Museum of the American Indian as a researcher and at the Association on American Indian Affairs as a repatriation specialist. In 2015 she was honored as one of Virginia’s Women in History. Karenne is the author of two poetry collections, Markings on Earth (2000) and Weaving the Boundary, (2016). Her poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, Orion, and Shenandoah.  

Here is one of her contributions to the anthology project, "Deer Woman."  Enjoy!  

 

 

Deer Woman

He hunted me into the clouds as I sought the blue
star-petaled flower, its scent like magnolia and peach.
I left my family in the meadow to pick my steps
Across patched snow, where fields grasped edges of sky.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean.

Alongside, the forest held his shape. His scent rose to me
with the wind. Too late I knew him, too late to find cover,
and I ran as I was made to—haunches taut, nostrils steaming,
like a swallow I darted into glistening whiteness.

When I tired, he was there. His circle tightened.
Dark, and dark-eyed, hypnotic—I could feel his hunger
as my own. I had taunted his dreams more than once,
dreamt that mouth, the merciless craving in him.

There is within some of us a longing to be stripped clean,

To give it all—strings of sinew, tufted hair, marrow,
white ropes of fat, to bare the body’s pulse. I froze,
heavy with the need to dissolve into him, his mouth
the deep red song of an appeasable desire.

On the wind, I hear another song, my family calling out
to me, calling me into my name. But I cannot return
from this altitude, bound to his hunger, which is a kind
of love. I will kneel in a cloud’s wisp of grace, to discover

how completely our own wanting wounds us.

 

Published in Weaving the Boundary, University of Arizona Press.   Grateful acknowledgements as well to Shenandoah, where this poem first appeared. 

 

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

Poet Spotlight: Ishmael Hope [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press’s forthcoming anthology project, Native Voices, I’m pleased to announce a series of posts honoring Indigenous poetry from North America.

But first, I’d like to say a few words about this exciting and necessary anthology. Tupelo Press is eager to celebrate a more complete version of the story we tell—about ourselves, our past, and what is possible in language. In this book, the first of its kind, every poet will present new poems, as well as an original essay, and a selection of resonant work chosen from previous generations of Native artists. Our anthology is intended to embody the dynamic and ongoing conversations that take place in Indigenous poetry through writerly craft across generational, geographic, and stylistic divides.

With that in mind, it is an honor and a delight to introduce one of our poets, Ishmael Hope, with a piece entitled “Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea”….

 

“Canoe Launching into the Gaslit Sea” 

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to band together, form
a lost tribe, scatter as one, burst
through rifle barrels guided
by the spider’s crosshairs. We need
to knit wool sweaters for our brother
sleeping under the freeway,
hand him our wallets and bathe
his feet in holy water. We need
to find our lost sister, last seen
hitchhiking Highway 16
or panhandling on the streets of Anchorage,
couchsurfing with relatives in Victoria,
or kicking out her boyfriend
after a week of partying
in a trailer park in Salem, Oregon.

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to register together,
lock arms at the front lines, brand
ourselves with mutant DNA strands,
atomic whirls and serial numbers
adding ourselves to the blacklist.
We need to speak in code, languages
the enemy can’t break, slingshot
garlic cloves and tortilla crumbs,
wear armor of lily pads and sandstone
carved into the stately faces of bears
and the faraway look of whitetail deer.
We need to run uphill with rickshaws,
play frisbee with trash lids, hold up
portraits of soldiers who never
made it home, organize a peace-in
on the walls of the Grand Canyon.
We need to stage earnest satirical plays,
hold debate contests with farm animals
at midnight, fall asleep on hammocks
hanging from busy traffic lights.

Now, as much as ever, and as always,
we need to prank call our senators,
take selfies with the authorities
at fundraisers we weren’t invited to,
kneel in prayer at burial grounds
crumbling under dynamite.
We need to rub salve on the belly
of our hearts, meditate on fault lines
as the earth quakes, dance in robes
with fringe that spits medicine, make
love on the eve of the disaster. 

 

For more information about our mission, and how you can help, please check back for information about our fundraiser, which will be available in the coming days.

"One More Eclipse" [by Hilton Obenzinger]

August 21, 2017
The Grand Eclipse
I have it in my calendar
The next time it comes around
I’ll be dead, or at least I hope so
But no Totality here 
In San Francisco
Only the Path of Partiality
And I’m not at all impartial
When total or even partial darkness
Blots out fear
Or does it erupt with fear?
Will there be mobs screaming in the streets
Nazis on the loose
Like some old movie?
Teenagers running out of the movie house
Ahead of The Blob?
In fact I plan on watching that movie
Or digging into a book
While everyone else slips on their glasses
To take a look
At the Cosmic Clock
Ticking to a stop
I have no need to witness
The Solar System as it makes its rounds
I have seen it circle in my Heart
I have felt it revolve around my Soul
As Suns and Moons orbit
Marking all of Time
Should I forfeit Eternal Life?
Or should I savor Partial Life?
I’ll look inward
When the Sun gets to blot
Or I’ll watch the flowers in my yard
As they tilt upwards
Towards the Dark

-- Hilton Obenzinger.

Note that Gertrude Stein liked sitting with her back to a beautiful landscape. -- DL

"It sounded as if the Streets were running" [poem by Emily Dickinson]

XXXIV

It sounded as if the Streets were running
And then - the Streets stood still -
Eclipse - was all we could see at the Window
And Awe - was all we could feel.

By and by - the boldest stole out of his Covert
To see if Time was there - 
Nature was in an Opal Apron,
Mixing fresher Air. 

                  -- Emily Dickinson

-- sdl

 

 

 

Sus Utcunque Evanescens [by Laura Orem]

AWP began over 20 years ago to help professionalize the MFA as a terminal degree so that writers working in academia would be eligible for tenure. The logic was that teachers with the MFA could go back to their institutions and be as eligible for a tenured position in writing and literature as any PhD. As we all know, it hasn't worked out that way. What none of us – AWP included – anticipated was the slide of academia into business model it now embraces, which undermines tenure and relies heavily on poorly paid contingent (part- and full-time) faculty. There is a dearth of positions and an abundance of writers seeking positions. In other words, to quote Abraham Lincoln when asked about being besieged by eager office seekers, "there's too many pigs for the tits" – and in fact that mama pig has vanished into thin air.  More accurately, she has been slaughtered by administrators, CEOs, and an industry that views students as customers rather than the product – and therefore its faculty not as colleagues in a larger mission, but as worker bees. Other than a handful of prestigious chairs or professorships for big-name writers, tenure-track positions for poets teaching in the land of Composition and Intro to Literature where most of us reside are so scarce as to be virtually non-existent. We need to rethink the purpose of the MFA if we want it to survive – and if we want to make a living.

How many poets do you know who hold tenured or tenure-track teaching positions? There are some – and God bless them, too. (Believe me, I'm not envious – I just marvel that they were able to do it.) Now, how many poets do you know who are existing on the verge of poverty while doing the Adjunct Shuffle over several schools, counting coupons and praying they will have a job next semester? I bet it's a lot more. I'll even bet it's you.

It's easy to understand the attractiveness of the teaching life. I taught for almost 20 years, and for most of the time, I loved it. For one thing, it's deeply important work. If you are lucky, now and again you get one of those students who you know is going to change the world – and you get to be justly proud you might have had a hand in that. You get to talk about the thing you love most – words and language – with colleagues who understand its importance. There are lots of exciting things going on around you – student productions, guest speakers, art installations, gatherings. You get to be self-directed (it's your classroom) and you get chunks of time off between semesters. And, most wondrous of all, you have unfettered access to that bastion of civilization: the academic library. The goodies that still exist are indeed good.

Only…you don't get paid remotely enough. In fact, you get paid wages so low that colleges have become the intellectual sweatshops of the Western world, particularly in the humanities. Academia is frequently cited by unions and labor advocates as one of the worst offenders in abuse of the gig economy. Contingent faculty have no job security. Your classes are often over-enrolled; you likely don't get benefits; you are expected to have office hours even if you don't have any office space; you probably don't get a vote in faculty meetings (in fact, you may not even be on the email list for faculty meetings). The institution indicates how little you matter by paying you less per hour than a barista at Starbucks and by subtly and not-so-subtly letting you know that, should you jump ship, there are plenty more where you came from. As for your writing, it only exists for the institution insofar as it can bring in publicity, prestige and more students. Poetry thrives on campuses in spite of the institution, not because of it. The sad reality is, despite its lip service to the lofty goals of higher education, academia today treats teachers like a 1910s shirtwaist factory boss treated his sewing machine girls.

We need to ask ourselves how academia has sustained this teaching model for so long. It's simple: By dangling the carrot of "maybe" – maybe next year, maybe when so-and-so retires, maybe we'll take it up with the Board, maybe, maybe, maybe. We want it so badly to be real that we willingly subject ourselves to a predatory and exploitative working environment in the hope that tomorrow things will be better.

Poets (and other writers), we need to stop this. Remember that old cliché about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different outcome? Yeah, that. This is of course not to say everyone should instantly stop teaching. But understand what's going on. It's time to stop waiting for the invisible pig to reappear. Like Godot, she's not coming.

But…but…how? What else is a poetry degree good for?  Lots of things, bunky. The MFA can be leveraged in many ways – editing, publishing, marketing, content writing, and so on. Despite received wisdom, humanities degrees show employers that applicants have a broad range of knowledge and critical thinking skills. Or you don't have to leverage it all. Go work in a field you like that doesn't care about your MFA.  Go be a doctor, a lawyer, an insurance salesman, a baker, a candlestick maker, an office manager, a dentist, an engineer, an HVAC installer, a farm hand, a fighter pilot, a web designer, or a barista at Starbucks, where not only will you be better paid, you'll get free coffee. Look, all jobs are annoying at some level. That's why it's called work. Be creative. The one thing poets are is creative.

But if I don’t teach, how will I have time to write? Well, get off Facebook, for starters. Another thing to think of is how much time and intellectual energy is spent grading papers, planning classes, meeting with students, and worrying if you're going to be able to pay the electric bill. Teaching's "time off" lure is largely illusion, especially if you are scrambling to pay bills over the summer break. Lucille Clifton wrote her first books as a stay-at-home mom while raising six stair-step babies. Wallace Stevens sold insurance. William Carlos Williams was a doctor, and Rafael Campo is one right now. Dana Gioa worked in advertising, and Bob Hicok owned his own auto die design business. Poets writing now run non-profits, practice as psychologists, and build fine furniture. You want to write, you'll figure it out.  And it's easier to figure out if the utilities haven't been cut off.

Then why get an expensive MFA at all? Because a good MFA program isn't really about teaching credentials anymore – it's about learning your craft and finding your beloved community. We live in a world which is happy to tell you every day that what you do doesn't matter. The MFA begs to differ. Can you get by as a writer without one? Of course you can. Does getting an MFA enrich your writing life?  A good one does.  In fact, the MFA program is probably the one place in academia where the mission of good writing and decent pay for faculty still exists. (The irony is that academic institutions love MFA programs, especially low-residency MFA programs, because they bring in significant money with low overhead in the form of student housing and other services, and a lot of publicity and prestige for the school.)

If you want an MFA, you must move beyond thinking that it's going to make one whit of difference to your chances of getting a good teaching job. Because it isn't, any more than it's going to help you move up in line for astronaut training. This isn't AWP's fault or the MFA program's fault. The playing field has been seismically shifted. We have to shift, too, to move into thinking more broadly about what other things the degree can give us. As for me, getting my MFA at Bennington was the most important thing I ever did. When I went there, I felt like I finally got to put my Batman suit on after a lifetime of walking around as Bruce Wayne. It made me part of a history and community of writers. And yes, it was expensive. In fact, it took me eighteen years to pay off my loans. But it took so long because I was making bupkis at teaching. To make ends meet, I taught here, I taught there, I taught everywhere at once (my record was eight writing classes in one semester). Even after years of adjuncting when I finally had a full-time (but still contingent) position, composition was still languishing at the bottom of the salary scale. If I had had a job that paid appropriately, I would have paid my loans off a lot sooner. But I was committed to the idea that my MFA meant I was supposed to be a teacher, no matter what. So for almost twenty years, I scrambled for those breadcrumbs.

It's time to change the paradigm. We as poets (and other writers) will have to change it, because why should academia? Tuition costs have risen astronomically while faculty salaries have stagnated; colleges are raking it in on the backs of its faculty. So as for me, even though I loved teaching, I will not teach in a college composition department again. For one thing, I can't afford it. For another, I refuse to participate any longer in a system that thrives on exploiting most of its workers. In reality, academia as a contemporary institution doesn't care about your art or your teaching. It only cares about the bottom line.

And I leave you with this: the average cost of an MFA in creative writing today is around $30,000. A 2018 Jeep Grand Cherokee starts at $30,595. That's stripped, with no bells and whistles – and as soon as you drive it off the lot, its value drops exponentially. You'll also have to trade it in again some day and get a new one.  Just sayin'.

"Because I am involved in mankind" Join the campaign to help poet Doug Lang

This comes to us from poet Bernard Welt via Terence Winch: 

[O]ur friend and colleague Doug Lang faces serious medical issues, and his expenses exceed his resources—as so often is the case with those who have devoted themselves to writing and teaching. We are reaching out to you, the community for whom Doug so often proved a tireless advocate and ally, to donate what you can to defray the expenses of his care at Springvale Terrace in Silver Spring MD.

Doug Lang, born in Swansea, Wales, came to the US in 1973, and quickly became the most American of poets. In Washington, DC, he has been for many years a human hub of the local community of writers and artists. The reading series he directed at Folio Books helped establish the DC-New York-Bay Area poetry axis that fostered the work of dozens of emerging poets in the ‘70s and ‘80s. His own work, in collections like Hot Shot, Magic Fire Chevrolet, and Dérangé, and in many small-press and zine publications, has influenced American poets and poetry for decades. His erudite command of literature, cinema, music, and visual art, his wit, and his indefatigable spirit of patience and good will have inspired the admiration of writers throughout the US and around the world.

Please help Doug Lang's friends reach their fundraising goal so that Doug can get the medical help he needs. 

Find out more about this campaign here. And please spread the word. 

-- sdl

This Just In: Reagan to Run Against Bill de Blasio! [by Arthur Krock]

Inside sources tell us that Tom Selleck (above left), who plays police commissioner Francis (Frank) Reagan on TV's "Blue Bloods," has established a New York City residence on the down low in order to place his name in nomination for this year's mayoralty race in New York. 

Selleck has long nursed political ambitions. The surprise is that the actor, wooed by Republicans, is mulling over the idea of running against Mayor de Blasio in the Democratic primary. 

 

The rumor has excited fans of the veteran actor. "Staten Island needs more respect," said one islander, Stella Carabella, who noted that the Reagans eat their Sunday night dinners in a big house on Staten Island. "It's the most underrated borough," she told New York Post reporter Jackie Lyons.

 

The Reagan family was said to have discussed the possibility of a mayoral run with yes votes from Danny, Jamie, Erin (played by Bridget Moynihan, pictured right) and Nicky. Grandpa Henry abstained, as did Linda Reagan (Danny's spouse). Jack and Sean, though too young to vote, voiced their support. Vanessa Ray, who plays Eddie Jenko, Jamie's partner, refused to comment though she did call attention to the dubious fundraising tactics of the de Blasio administration. It is conceivable that Eddie and Jamie, who kissed on November 11, 2016, will campaign in tandem for Jamie's dad. Henry Reagan (played by Len Cariou) refused to explain his abstention on the key vote but insisted that, contrary to published reports, the TV Reagans are unrelated to the late Ronald Reagan (above right). The early Ronald Reagan was an FDR Democrat who supported abortion rights during his tenure as governor of California, which means a lot to my wife Stacey.

 

Erin Reagan moved to New York City at age eighteen and began her modeling career with high-profile appearances in Vogue and Elle. "Erin and I are alike," Bridget Moynihan told David Frost, with the crucial difference that unlike the police commissioner's daughter, who is an assistant district attorney, she (Bridget) dated Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady for three years (with an amicable parting of the ways that was duly reported in People in 2006). Brady is the father of their son, John Edward Thomas Moynihan, who turns ten on August 22 of this year.

 

Bridget is unrelated to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan. She resides in Pacific Palisades and is married to businessman Andrew Frankel.

 

-- Allie Reynolds

 

 

Ed. note: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Arthur Krock is a pseudonym for Yankee pitcher Allie ("the Chief") Reynolds.

Боб Дилан – оракул и иконоборец [trans. Andrey Gritsman]

Дэвид Лиман – известный американский поэт и литературный деятель, основатель знаменитой и престижной BestAmerican Poetry (ежегодной антологии современной американской поэзии). Он также является составителем и редактором Оксфордской антологии поэзии, автором нескольких сборников стихов и эссеистики и замечательный переводчик русской поэзии на английский (в особенности – Владимира Маяковского).

Ниже мы приводим полный перевод статьи Дэвида Лимана в блоге Wall Street Journal, где он пишет о присуждении Нобелевской премии Бобу Дилану и анализирует творчество выдающегося рок-поэта. Текст публикуется с разрешения автора.

Не успело в прошлом месяце появиться известие о том, что Боб Дилан получил Нобелевскую премию по литературе, как начались баталии. Энтузиасты припоминали, как мистер Дилан ворвался в культуру и изменил ее. Как его фразы стали летучими. “The times they are a-changin” («Времена, они меняются»). “There are no truths outside the Gates of Eden” («Нет правды за Райскими Вратами»). “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” («Не нуженсиноптик, чтобы понять, куда ветер дует»). “He not busy being born is busy dying” («Тот, кто не занят рождением, занят умиранием»)

for more, click here

Is Phone Rage a Defence? A Recurring Fantasy [by Stacey Lehman]

Phone rage: for those times when someone who is texting bumps into you and you trip so you grab their phone and drop it in the sewer. 

Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms's Women (Belated Happy Valentine's Day!) [by Alex Cigale]

From ON UNIVERSAL BALANCE

...And, having returned home, Nikolay Ivanovich said this to his wife:
“Do not be afraid, Ekaterina Petrovna, and do not worry. Only there isn’t any equilibrium in this life. And the mistake is only off by some kilogram and half for the entire universe, but still, it’s amazing, Ekaterina Petrovna, it is simply remarkable!”

THE END.

[September 18, 1934]

From Russian Absurd: Daniil Kharms, Selected Writings (Northwestern University Press, World Classics series; officially published on February 17, 2017)

∞

First of all, my apologies for the delay in posting this: I must again excuse myself by repeating that, like so many of us, I've only just returned from DC and the AWP. And so, dear reader, please accept this, my belated Happy St. Valentines's Day wishes to us all: may each of us seek to daily find within ourselves those inner resources that enable us to feel and express our love. Yesterday, I was helped on this occasion, during a particularly difficult personal time and in this unsettling historical moment, by going to see a film with two people I care about very much. While Lion is far from a perfect picture, what else is there in this world that can better evoke in us those cathartic and complex feelings of pity and empathy more than the innocence of a child?

I also wish to say that I had all the relevant selections from the book ready to go before I got on the road, but, to quote E. M. Foster: "How do I know what I think until I see what I say?" What I want to tell you about today is an experience of censorship I had with the Russian Absurd, Daniil Kharms Facebook page I had started, intended to promote the book with a series of selections, including the poem that follows here. The response I received to it was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it doesn't follow our Advertising Policies for adult products or services. We don’t allow images or videos that show nudity or cleavage, even if it’s portrayed for artistic or educational reasons." While I appealed the decision repeatedly, including finally to a live person, explaining that the post contained neither nudity, nor cleavage, nor certainly any videos, it got me exactly nowhere.

The situation became only more absurd, when Facebook's response to a prose piece in tomorrow's follow up post, "Daniil Kharms on Spirit," that I thought not only innocuous but genuinely elevated and uplifting was: "Your ad wasn't approved because it calls out to specific user attributes (ex: race, religion, age, sexual orientation, gender, disability or medical condition, financial status, membership in a trade union, criminal record, ethnicity, name). Such ads may offend users and lead to high negative sentiment." To make this already far too long introduction shorter: to put it mildly, Kharms, like so many of us today, had a "complicated relationship" with all of mankind, and even with God "himself".  I hope you will read on for yourself, and I will only add here the following words from my introduction to the book: 

"Humor and horror, Eros and Thanatos, degradation and sadomasochism jostle one another, side-by-side, in these stories and poems. Kafkaesque and Chekhovian situations and motifs from Pushkin and traditional Russian fairy tales are recognizable in Kharms’s sparse prose, yet they appear diseased, stripped down to their bare essentials, as if contorted by the terror of impending arrest and doom." And we might add, "by the terror of love gained and love lost". And now, most of the rest of this, I would like to be in Daniil Kharms's own words.

∞

You can sew. But that’s all bunk.
I’m in love with your pudenda;
it’s moist and smells abundantly.
Another man would peek, let out
a squeak, and, sealing his nose, scram.
And wiping your fluids from his hands
would he return? Oh, what a question;
suddenly, there can be no other.
Your juices are to me sheer joy.
You think my words are an excrescence
but I’m prepared to lick your cunt
without break for breath and swallow
the delicious squim of your mallow
until I begin to burp and grunt.

(Daniil Kharms, 1931)

"Joseph Brodsky once quoted Anna Akhmatova, about an improbable Kharms sentence: 'Only with Kharms could that ever work. Never with anyone else.'" (From Ian Frazier's group review of all the books heretofore available in English translation in The New York Review of Books, which includes his own very personal experience discovering, translating, and failing in the attempt to communicate to Anglophone readers how and why Daniil Kharms's works are "funny".)

∞

From “Thoughts about a Girl”

And when she passes by aflutter,
As if on air, not a word do you utter;
And when with a knowledgeable hand
She makes contact— you understand.

And when she lightly, as though dancing,
Sliding her lovely foot across the floor,
Proceeds to offer her perky breast for
You to kiss— then it is impossible not

To shout out loud and lovingly blow
From her firm breast a dust mote,
And recognize how touching your lips
To her youthful breast is pointless.

January 21, 1935

 

In every church bell there is spite
In every red ribbon there is fire
In every young woman shivering
In every young man his own steed.

[1936]

 

March 20, 1938

Came to the window naked. In the house across the street someone must have taken an exception, the sailor’s widow, I think. A policeman came barging in, with the yard sweeper, and someone else in tow. They declared that I have been disturbing the neighbors across the street from me for over three years already. So I have hung some curtains. What is more appealing to the eye, an old woman wearing nothing but a chemise or a young man, buck-naked? And for whom is it less acceptable to show themselves au naturel?

∞

This was my own "working" version of the book's cover. Being a very visual and concrete person, as I was developing and completing the book, being able to see both the "big picture" and the individual pages helped me in doing so. Here, I had "cut" and reversed what I believed to be a double "wedding portrait" of Daniil Yuvachev and Esther Rousakov. Kharms's first wife, she was the daughter of Jewish Russian-French “expats,” and part of the "reverse immigration" that had returned to Russia after the Revolution.

From the Notebooks. July 27. Who could advise me regarding what I should do? Esther brings with her misfortune. I am being destroyed along with her. What must I do, either divorce her or . . . carry my cross? I was given the choice to avoid this, but I remained dissatisfied, and asked to be united with Esther. I was told yet again, do not be married! But despite “having caught a scare,” I still insisted, I still tied my fate with Esther’s, till death do us part. I myself was to blame for this or, rather, I did it to myself. What has happened to the OBERIU? Everything vanished as soon as Esther became a part of me. Since that time, I have ceased to write as I ought to and have only brought misfortune upon myself from all directions. Is it that I can’t be dependent on women, no matter which one it is? Or is the nature of Esther’s character such that she brought an end to my work? I don’t know. If Esther is filled with sorrow, then how can I possibly let her go....

Kharms developed a highly personal and involved symbology, mostly involving an almost kabbalistic play with the letters of her name (his symbol for her as a whole person was the window). Esther Rusakov (née Ioselevich), was repressed, along with her entire family, in 1936.

Before I enter, I will knock on your window. You will see me in the window. Then I will walk through the door and you will see me in the doorway. Then I will walk into your house and you will recognize me. And I will enter you, and no one, except you, will see me and recognize me.

You will see me in the window.

You will see me in the doorway.

[1931]

∞

The woman in the following picture is Alice Poiret, another of "Kharms's women;” both she and his first wife, Esther, have most often been literally cropped out of the few surviving photos of Kharms that have come down to us. Kharms had dedicated a number of poems to Alice, including the following:

Before me hangs a portrait
of Alice Ivanovna Poret.
She is as gorgeous as a fairy,
devious, worse than a snake,
she is cunning, my Alice,
cunning as Renard the Fox.

[ January 7, 1933]

∞

October 16, 1933

Petersburg

Talent grows, destroying, building.
The sign of stagnation is well-being.

Dear Klavdia Vasilyevna,
You are a remarkable and genuine person! As much as it grieves me not to be able to see you, I won’t be inviting you to the Children’s Theater or to come to my city. How heartwarming it is to know that there still exists one human being animated by dreams! I don’t know what word one can use to express that force which so delights me in you. I usually call it simply p u r i t y. I have been thinking about how wonderful it is, that which is primal...

… I’m genuinely delighted that you take your walks like so, in the Zoological Garden. Especially if you take walks there not just for the sake of walking, but also to observe the animals— I will fall in love with you even more tenderly.

Daniil Kharms

October 20, 1933

I have studied women for a long time now and can definitively say that I know them with flying colors. First and foremost, a woman likes to be attended to. Let’s say she is standing right in front of you or is about to, and you make it seem as though you’re hearing and seeing nothing, and act like there’s no one else in the room; this inflames female curiosity. And a curious woman is capable of practically anything.
The next time I will intentionally stick my hand deep in my pocket with a quizzical appearance, and the woman will plant her eyes on me, like, what’s going on here? And I will slowly draw out of my pocket some sort of spark plug. Well and good; the trap has been sprung, and the fish is in my net!

July 1935

One of the principal sources of divergence of human paths is the matter of preference for either skinny or plump women. I propose we reserve alleys in public gardens for quiet strolling, with two-seat benches distributed two meters away from each other; furthermore, thick bushes should be planted between the benches so that those sitting at one bench are not able to see what is happening at another. On these quiet pathways, the following rules must be enforced:
1. Entrance is forbidden to children, both alone and accompanied by a parent.
2. All noise and loud conversation are strictly prohibited.
3. Only one woman may take a seat next to a man, and only one man next to a woman.
4. If the person seated on a bench is resting their hand or some sort of other object on the free seat, you may not join them. Alleys should also be reserved for walking in solitude, with metal armchairs for single people. Between the armchairs, bushes. Entry is forbidden to children; noise and loud conversation are prohibited.
— —
As a rule, pretty women do not stroll around in gardens.

September 28, 1935

One personage, wringing her hands in sorrow, was saying, “What I need is an interest toward life, and not at all money. I am seeking enhancement, not advancement. I need a husband, and not a rich man but a true talent, the director Meyerhold!”

The Sensual Woodsman

When in the distance flashed saws
And the axes had started ringing,
My girlfriends all became dearer.
I’m in love with them ever since.

Oh, girlfriends, my dear girlfriends,
So pleasant to sense you with my hands!
You’re all so smooth! All so solid!
One more wonderful than the next!

It’s so pleasant to touch your breasts,
Brush my lips the length of your legs.
Oh, help me people, dear people.
Oh, help me God, my dear God!

August 24, 1938

From An Obstacle (August 12, 1940) Previously published in Narrative Magazine (free registration required)

Pronin said, “You have very pretty stockings.”
Irina Mazer said, “So you like my stockings?”
Pronin said, “Oh, yes. Very much.” And he ran his hand down her leg....

From A Lecture (1940)

Pushkov said:
“A woman is the lathe of love.”
And he immediately got punched in the face....

From “The Power of...”

Faol continued: “Take, for example, love. It may be for better or for worse. On the one hand, it is written: you must love . . . but on the other hand, it is said: do not spoil . . . Perhaps it is better not to love after all? But it says: you must love. But if you do love, you will spoil. What to do? Perhaps go ahead and love but in some other way? But then why is it that in all languages, the same word is used to designate both this and the other love? So, this one artist loved his mother and this one plump young girl. And he loved them each differently. He handed over to the girl the larger part of his salary. The mother often starved while the girl ate and drank for three people. The artist’s mother slept in the hallway on the floor, and the girl had at her disposal two very adequate rooms. The girl had four coats and the mother just one. And so, the artist took from his mother her one coat and had it altered into a skirt for the girl. So that, in all respects, the artist spoiled the girl but his own mother he didn’t spoil, but loved her with a pure love. However, he did fear his mother’s death, but the death of the girlfriend he feared not, and when his mother died, the artist cried, and when the girlfriend fell out of a window and also died, the artist didn’t cry but found himself another girlfriend. And so it seems that a mother is prized as one of a kind, as though she were a rare stamp that cannot be replaced with another....”

September 29, 1940

You can read the rest of this powerful late "fiction" in the selection of seven prose pieces I had previously published in International Quarterly.

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Daniil Kharms’s second wife, Marina Malich's (Durnovo) memoirs were recorded and published by the literary historian Vladimir Glotser in his book Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms (My Husband Daniil Kharms; available only in Russian).

From the Notebooks. May 26 [1938]

Marina stays in bed all day in a foul mood. I love her so very much, but how harrowing it is to be married.
I am tormented by my “sex.” For weeks, and sometimes months, I have not known a woman.
1. There is one purpose to every human life: immortality.
1a. There is one purpose to every human life: achieving immortality.
2. One pursues immortality by continuing his bloodline, another by accomplishing great mortal deeds in order to immortalize one’s name. And only the third leads a righteous and holy life in order to achieve immortality as life eternal.
3. A man has but two interests: the mundane— food, drink, warmth, women, and rest; and the celestial— immortality.
4. All that is earthly is a confirmation of death.
5. There is one straight line upon which all that is mortal lies. And only that which is not plotted on this axis may serve as confirmation of eternity.
6. And for this reason man seeks a deviation from this earthly road and considers it beautiful or brilliant.

And, last but not least:

From Symphony No. 2

...Well, to hell with him. I will tell you about Anna Ignatievna instead.
But to tell you about Anna Ignatievna isn’t so simple. First of all, I know practically nothing about her and, second of all, I just fell off the stool and forgot what I was about to say. Better I tell you about myself.
I am tall in height, not stupid, dress colorfully and with taste, don’t drink, don’t patronize the horses, but do like the ladies. And the ladies do not avoid me. In fact, they love it when I accompany them. Seraphima Izmailovna has invited me time and again over to her place, and Zinaida Yakovlevna also told me that she is always happy to see me. And with Marina Petrovna I had this amusing episode, which is the one I want to tell you about. The episode is really quite ordinary, but still very amusing, because Marina Petrovna turned, owing to me, entirely bald, like the palm of your hand. It happened this way: I came over to Marina Petrovna’s and she “boom!” and turned completely bald. That’s it.

June 9– 11, 1941