The Best American Poetry

Poetry on Vinyl: An Interview with Jeff Alessandrelli of Fonograf Editions [by Daniel Nester]

I suspect I know what you’re thinking, dear readers. “Poetry and vinyl records?” you exclaim. “That’s a recipe for commercial disaster!” 

To this hypothetical remark I would point out that interest in vinyl records is the highest it’s been in decades. While streaming remains the dominant way we listen to music, vinyl sales have outpaced CD sales for the first time in 34 years. Selling and listening to vinyl is no longer a niche interest for sad, middle-aged men trying to recover a mythical past; it’s for sad people of all ages!

One of the most interesting developments in the poetry on vinyl universe: Fonograf Editions, a bona fide literary record label that was founded in 2016 and has put out a steady run of superb poetry on wax, from Rae Armantrout’s Conflation to Nathaniel Mackey and Susan Howe’s Stray: A Graphic Tone (cover pictured here), and has recently branched out into CDs and print books such as Lovability by Emily Kendall Frey. There’s just so much to praise and cover in the Fonograf Editions universe, so I reached out to Jeff Alessandrelli, one of their editors. Over email, we talked about records as objects, an upcoming John Ashbery release, and branching out into books.

Fonograf has been around for a couple years now, and its backlist is really impressive. Can you tell me a bit about the receptions among the vinyl and poetry communities? 

Being at quite a few writing conferences and book fairs in the past few years has made clear that people are always really excited to see literary vinyl in the world—even if they don’t have a record player or really listen to records. All of our vinyl releases also come with a download card and poem/liner notes insert, so there have definitely been people who have bought our albums simply for the album-as-artifact (coupled with the electronic listening option).   

I do appreciate your whole packaging and pricing credo. You’re not going for the bespoke and often overpriced vinyl packages we see now during the vinyl renaissance,  but at the same time these are quality records with inserts and the recordings are always high quality.  

Whether it’s a book or record or t-shirt, the actual Fonograf Ed. object is supremely important to us. The goal with our albums is for them to be part of the owner’s collection for the long term. Meaning that I have a lot of literary vinyl records—from Gertrude Stein to Marianne Moore to Albert Camus to Langston Hughes—and I don’t listen to them every day. I sometimes go years without listening to them. But in my opinion the point of a literary album isn’t to constantly be putting it on your turntable; it’s instead to capture a specific time and place by a writer you really like or love. Our first three albums by Eileen Myles, Rae Armantrout and Alice Notley were all, to a certain degree at least, recorded live, and that exact experience will never be recreated, except in listening to the actual album. I like that concept/notion.

Where are your records physically made? Records are so much in demand that I have heard of actual shortages.

We’ve used a variety of different record pressing plants and suppliers over the years. One of the tricks is that most record pressing plants don’t also make album jackets/inserts, so what has often happened is that things are manufactured at different times and then it’s a process of coalescing everything together. That said, we’ve been lucky in that we haven’t had any major delays or anything of that sort…it’s been a learning process, though. It takes a lot of work (and $) to put a vinyl album out, 100%.   

Were there any specific record labels or publishers, past or present, that inspired you to do what you do?  

Caedmon Records was a big influence—a few years back I wrote a bit about Caedmon over here on the website TheFanzine.

OK, as they say in business meetings, blue sky thinking: what’s your dream record project? Any wish-list for releases, or is it a more organic process? 

Next year we’re putting out an archival John Ashbery LP, from a reading he gave in 76—that’s something we’ve wanted to do for a while. Our last LP release—Fodder by Douglas Kearney and Val Jeanty—is one that took a while to come together and we’re super happy with how it turned out. It was recorded live in Portland in the summer of 2019 and seems to supremely speak to our present moment. As for other LP releases—moving forward we’re looking to move more into actual music, albeit music that still has a literary bent. In November we’re releasing an album of original music by the poet/musician Brian Laidlaw that takes its album concept and (translated) lyrics from the 19th century French-Canadian poet Emile Nelligan. So we’re very excited about that.  

What's coming up next—any releases you'd like to plug, or photos of your headquarters you can share?

In the future we’re actually going to be as much a book press as a record label. In the last year we’ve released full length collections by the writers Dao Strom (which included a musical album component), Mark Leidner, Charles Valle and Emily Kendal Frey, with two forthcoming debut poetry collections by Brandi Katherine Herrera and Jan Verberkmoes. Next year we have the Ashbery LP, a magazine, a chapbook by Matvei Yankelevich, a poetry collection by Krystal Languell, and an essay collection by Hilary Plum. And in Winter 2023 we’re releasing two volumes by Alice Notley—one a 600-page collection (comprised of 6 books) of new work called The Speak Angel Series and the other a volume (tentatively) entitled The First Four Books of Poems, one that collects all of Notley’s now out of print early collections in one solidified book. So we have a lot in store and are verily hustling.  

Poetry on Vinyl: Ernest Hilbert’s Elegies and Laments [by Daniel Nester]

What would it sound like if a book of poetry had its own musical score, like a film, written specifically to match the poems line for line and word for word?

So begins the liner notes booklet that comes with poet and critic Ernest Hilbert’s LP, Elegies & Laments, which was released in a limited-edition pressing of 100 copies back in 2012. 

Ernest, Ernie, is a good friend. We are both South Jersey boys, both went to Rutgers-Camden, and are both poetry and music nerds. Ernie’s a a real renaissance man, a rare book dealer, and  bon vivant. To hear Ernie hold forth about metal metal bands of all varieties—hair, death, speed, thrash, parody, glam—is one of my life’s immense pleasures. 

It wasn’t that big of a surprise, then, to hear from Ernie about his plans to put out a record to go along with Sixty Sonnets, his 2009 debut collection from Red Hen Press.

[https://open.spotify.com/album/4IKzfIXSR8Z4HridaIklet?utm_source=embed_v2&go=1&play=1&nd=1]

What was surprising? The production value. This is not just a recording of Hilbert reading or performing poems. This is a music and poetry collaboration, produced by Dave Young and Marc Hildenberger, with orchestral composition by Christopher LaRosa. Sixteen poems feature over the course of four tracks, backed by the band Legendary Misbehavior and several string players. The record itself, a beautiful white-colored disc, sounds beautiful through my Technics 1200 turntable. 

Part One, “Failed Escapes,” features a kind of overture of famous spoken word and poetry snippets—Sylvia Plath, others—under a bed of transistor radio squelch sounds, and leads into the first four Hilbert poems. The remaining tracks pull off similar experiments, and even feature guest readers Paul Siegell, Quincy R. Lehr, and Kristine Young.

One question, when it comes to music combined with poetry performances, is if the music will overpower the poetry. There’s always the chance the music will drown out the vocals in the mix, or the music won’t really complement the poetry itself. Or, frankly, the music is more interesting than the poems. In Elegies & Laments, the music and poetry work together magically well, miraculously well. It’s a legitimate collaboration. The photos inside the liner notes show Hilbert drinking a beer at a studio console, watching the musicians lay down bass and guitar tracks, and smoking a cigarette on a rooftop with the Philadelphia skyline in the background. 

As with many things related to Ernie, I’m jealous I didn’t think of doing something like this first. Rounding up musician friends and colleagues to put together a musical score for a poetry book? It sounds like such a simple idea, at least now that Hilbert has done it. Here’s hoping more poets experiment with music with their poetry. And please: put out a vinyl record, so I can fill my house with more records.

Poetry on Vinyl: Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle [by Daniel Nester]

"You know what they say about actors performing poetry?” my old professor, Philip Levine, once asked our class. “They make bad poems sound good, they make good poems sound good, and they make great poems sound good."

I don't think we necessarily need to unpack that quote, which I think Levine got from someone else. Let's just let it hang in the air as we go over the next entry in our Poetry on Vinyl series: Some Haystacks Don't Even Have Any Needle.

I picked up my copy at Last Vestige record store here in Albany back in 2009. Released in 1970, Some Haystacks is in fact a companion double-record release to Some Haystacks Don’t Even Have Any Needle and Other Complete Poems, published by educational publisher Scott, Foresman and Co. in 1969, and edited by Stephen Dunning, Edward G. Lueders, and Hugh Letcher Smith. This is not a rare record. You can buy the record or book used online for under ten bucks. My ex-library copy comes from Doane Stuart, a private school that was located in Albany and now located across the river Rensselaer, NY (pronounced by the locals as REN-sler). File under “Smalbany”: as the library card shows in the image, my copy was once checked out by the sister of none other than the renowned poet and Doane Stuart alum, David Yezzi.

Some Haystacks, from the poem selection to the performances, adds up to a professional, sincere effort to get kids into a selection of poems that, while good and great, aren’t written specifically for young people. They’re not particularly scandalous for kids, either. I’m trying to imagine myself in school, listening to this record, and trying to get into poetry. I don’t think it would have done the trick. I think I’d probably dive back into my beloved Mad magazines.

It is indeed a trip to hear actors read these poems. Tony Randall’s take on e.e. cummings’ “since feeling is first” rings faithful and, well, actorly. Tony winner René Auberjonois (of Deep Space Nine and Benson fame) takes on Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” and does it justice. Anne Anglin, whose name I recognize from Scanners and who appears in a TV movie based on Mia Farrow's life, recites Larry Rubin’s “Warning,” a poem I’d never heard of, in an able, affable manner. 

“As the album was being planned, the taped interpretations were auditioned by several hundred students and by teachers and other adults,” reads the liner notes. “These audiences were asked to indicate their reactions to both the poems and their interpretations....the degree of enthusiasm, the spontaneity of discussion, and majority preferences determined the final structuring of the album.”

This account makes the album sound more of a joyless, scientific project than what it is, which is a recording of contemporary actors performing poems of mostly contemporary poems. Considered that way, it makes me wish there were more recordings like this nowadays, even if adds up to a noble experiment, even if it flattens our expectations of poetry and poems in some ways, and even if it doesn’t connect or work—it still does what poetry on vinyl does, which is bring poetry’s musical qualities to the forefront. I mean, imagine current actors reciting current poems from our own era, and putting it on wax, posting performances on YouTube and TikTok. You could do a lot worse with your time, no?  

Someone should digitize this record and post it online so more people can hear The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s Donald Harron recite James Wright’s “A Blessing,” or Robert Creeley’s “The Invoice.” Even if it wouldn’t float Philip Levine’s boat.

Poetry on Vinyl: Michèlle T. Clinton and Wanda Coleman, Black/Angeles [by Daniel Nester]

Record-listening and writing go hand in hand for me. It’s the throughline of my life. Heaven, if it exists, will consist of a room with a stereo, where for eternity I will put favorite vinyl records on a turntable, sit back, and listen. A cup of coffee or cocktail may be involved, as well as cleaning, organizing, alphabetizing, writing notes, or poem-editing. 

Maybe I am preaching to the choir here, talking about the benefits of listening to records and writing, although I know a lot of writers who prefer to write in silence or in a cafe. I’m not embarrassed to say that a good chunk of my life has been spent in chairs and on rugs, listening to discs of vinyl. And, while I wouldn’t say I am a record collector per se, I do own a few shelves’ worth.

This week, I’d like to share specific selections from my collection: poetry records and spoken word records. 

First up: Black/Angeles, a 1988 recording that features performances from two poets, one on each side: Michèlle T. Clinton on side A, and Wanda Coleman on side B. I got this record maybe 15 years ago, going by the price tag. I was unfamiliar with Clinton’s work when I picked this record up, but was jarred and rocked by the poems—they’re raw, punk, fiery. “Anti Apart Hate Art” is a favorite. At the time I picked this record up, the main draw was hearing Wanda Coleman’s performances, and they do not disappoint. 

An interesting detail is that the label that released this and other Wanda Coleman recordings, New Alliance Records, was founded in 1980 by Minutemen members D. Boon and Mike Watt, along with a friend from San Pedro High School, Martin Tamburovich. I recognize the label on records from my old Hüsker Dü and Descendents records.

Last year, the mighty Black Sparrow Press released Wicked Enchantment, a beautiful collection that covers Coleman’s career, edited by Terence Hayes. It’s a terrific introduction to Coleman’s work. Coleman who passed away in 2013, presented herself as largely existing outside the poetry establishment. With Wicked Enchantment, Coleman’s work is receiving a new look from that establishment, although it is a bit awkward to read largely white critics circle around and try to provide a critical framework for a poetry is both entirely straightforward and transformational and future-seeking. Wanda Coleman’s work on record deserves a second look as well, possibly even a box set of some sort. 

That prospect of a box set or even some reissues seems unlikely. Joshua Bodwell, the current publisher of Black Sparrow Press, informs me that the New Alliance label was consumed by the SST record label, an essential punk label that is also quite, well, terrible at working with its catalog and its artists. "I'm not sure those Wanda recordings will ever see the light of day again," Bodwell tells me over email.

"Wanda had such interesting overlap with the LA punk scene for a little while," Bodwell writes. "I was a huge SST fan before I ever read Wanda, so when I first learned about that overlap I was kinda stunned." Bodwell was kind enough to send a long a print of a photo by Suzan Carson he recently acquired of a very young Henry Rollins, who must have just taken as lead singer of Black Flag, and Wanda Coleman. (Google it; there is at least one thumbnail online.) To be a fly on the wall when that was taken!

Save the Date and Spread the Word: Reading in Troy, NY, September 13, 2017

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His newest book of poetry is Poems in the Manner Of. Other poetry books include New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. His most recent nonfiction book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. He teaches at The New School and lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York. David Lehman has been writing “poems in the manner of” for years, in homage to the poems and people that have left an impression, experimenting with styles and voices that have lingered in his mind. He has gathered these pieces in a striking book of poems that channels poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath and also calls upon for inspiration jazz standards, Freudian questionnaires, and astrological profiles. 

Daniel Nester is an essayist, poet, journalist, editor, teacher, and Queen fan. He is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects. His previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II, and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, and American Poetry Review, and collected in Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 

Susan Comninos is a freelance arts journalist and poet. Her book reviews, author profiles and trend stories have appeared in The Atlantic Online, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Jewish Daily Forward, among others. Her poetry’s most recently appeared in literary journals including Rattle, Harvard Review Online, Subtropics, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, The Common, Hobart and Southern Humanities Review. In 2010, she won the Yehuda Halevi Poetry Contest run by Tablet. Last year, she won a Tishman Review Staff Favorite prize, a VQR Writers’ Conference Scholarship award and a Poets Respond (to the news) contest run by Rattle. She has taught at The University of Michigan, RPI, Schenectady JCC, Temple Sinai in Saratoga and The Arts Center for the Capital Region.

Translating After the Roundup [by Richard Kutner]

What was it like to translate the memoir of a boy who escaped from a French-Nazi internment camp in 1942? One of my biggest challenges was recreating the exuberant, authentic voice of a scrappy eleven-year-old Paris street kid. I kept asking myself, particularly when translating dialogue, “Does this sound like a child?” I think that being an elementary school teacher for so many years helped me to understand how children think and talk. But kids today do not talk they way they did 75 years ago. I had to learn the street slang of 1940s Paris and put it into English that was appropriate for that period. Paris street slang is particularly spicy, and I needed to make sure that I kept its zing.

Sometimes it took many tries to capture the vitality of the language. How, for example, was I going to say, “Je dévale l’escalier à tout berzingue”? I worked on it for a long time and finally came up with “I zoom down the stairs full speed ahead,” which I think captures the energy of the French and keeps the important buzzing “z” sound.

Joseph Weismann, the author of After the Roundup, is unusually clearheaded, and his style is extraordinarily lively and direct. It is this very clearheadedness (and his out-of-the-box thinking) that saved his life. It was therefore of the greatest importance to me to use clear, direct language. Like him, I used vivid verbs and sentences that were short and uncomplicated (yet never choppy) to create a strong sense of immediacy. I avoided any language that sounded stuffy or slowed down the pace and force of his words.

The greatest challenge perhaps was dealing with overwhelming waves of emotion that I knew I’d have to face once again with every rereading. I have never experienced anything like what Joseph went through beginning in July 1942, when he was rounded up, put in an internment camp, brutally separated from his parents--and then decided to make a daring and difficult escape. In order to cope with this intense emotion, rather than shutting it out, I decided to try to imagine myself in Joseph’s situation, to feel his emotions as much as I possibly could, like an actor preparing a role, so that I could convey them in their full depth.

Despite its dark moments, After the Roundup is an uplifting and hopeful book. Joseph wrote it when he was 80, having kept his experiences locked away for 69 years, yet he was able to recall every detail of his ordeal. While some might not consider his style highly intellectual or literary, it clearly reflects his positive outlook and amazing life force. His book makes for compelling reading because of his intelligence, frankness, and energy, not to mention his one-of-a-kind, sometimes hair-raising experiences. It is a lesson for the world of today about what can happen when people are viewed as “others.”

After the Roundup is the true memoir of eleven-year-old Joseph Weismann, who was rounded up in Paris by the French police with 13,000 other Jews on July 16-17, 1942. He and 8,159 others—half of them children—were held in appalling conditions in the Vélodrome d’Hiver. From there, they were transported by cattle car to the transit camp of Beaune-la-Rolande. After being brutally separated from his parents and sisters, who were sent to Auschwitz, Joseph made a daring escape, inching his way under the barbed wire for five hours. Then what? How would he survive the war and reconstruct a life for himself? His problems had only just begun.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the Vélodrome d'Hiver Roundup.

Joseph is the only living survivor (of two) of the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande.

After the Roundup, by Joseph Weismann
Translated by Richard Kutner
© Indiana University Press, 2017

Notes on the Poetry Project, January 1, 1992 [by Daniel Nester]

I will close out this week with something from sorta-kinda from my new book. This is an early version of one of the chapters from my soon-to-be-released book, a memoir called Shader. 

This chapter tells the story of how I fell in love with New York City. It also has a lot more poetry world-related stuff, so it makes sense to me to share it here in BAP blog.

Wednesday, January 1, 1992. I greet the New Year from Derek’s cold concrete floor on East 37th Street. Black drapes enshroud the place in darkness and silence, save red lights and random bleeps from a wall of electronics.

I’m still stoned from last night, where I helped Derek DJ a party for Skidmore students who rented a space on Jane Street. At one point, we played “Walking on Sunshine” three times in a row while the party host, dressed in tan khakis and a rugby shirt, stood beside our booth, arms crossed.

We suspected cocaine was involved.

Derek just moved to New York City. He called his apartment “The Studio” because he’s interested in working in a recording studio, but also because it’s an illegal sublet and his place was zoned commercially. In one corner sits a mixing board, speakers, microphones, and a set of electronic drums; in another huge, sealed bins filled with pot.

Someday the next Fear of a Black Planet or Ride the Lightning will be recorded in his bathroom-less, 30-by-30-foot room in Murray Hill. For now, Derek sells pot and DJs parties to pay the rent.

Everything he says about New York makes me want to move there more. He’s played Sega against a Beastie Boy. He saw the Fat Boys record their cover of “Wipeout” in the studio he helps run.

I may be the one who graduated college, but in my mind it’s Derek who’s made it. By my fifth year of college, Derek had landed a modeling job and ended up on a billboard above a V.I.M. Jeans store on Lower Broadway.

We stood across the street once, admiring a 20-foot tall image of him. Two skinny models curled up on the floor around at his feet, reaching up his legs like he was a god.

And I thought to myself: I wear a tie to a proofreading job at Arthur Andersen. I make 11 dollars an hour. Derek gets to do modeling shoots, bang hot chicks and smoke all the pot he wants. Punk rock and hair metal have died on the vine, Freddie Mercury is dead, Nirvana has the number 1 album and the golden age of rap is over. And me? I’m still in fucking Philadelphia, checking the grammar on Arthur Andersen accounting reports.

***

Walter Benjamin uses the phrase “profane illumination” to describe surrealism, how to place language before meaning or even God is necessary for visions of the future.

Maybe it was time for my own surreal and profane illuminations.

***

Derek subletted his room from Lisa, a thirtysomething party planner whose 4,000-square-foot loft on the other side of the floor doubles as a space for Greek weddings and bachelor parties. This might explain the presence of the swan-and-cherub water fountain that gurgled in the middle of the living room, surrounded by Styrofoam Doric columns.

Before we left for the party, I used the hallway bathroom, and a woman dressed only in a French maid apron, and nothing more, was waiting outside. With a whip.

***

“Do you know where Saint Mark’s Poetry Project is?”

We’re playing Street Fighter on his 50-inch TV. The punch sounds pipe through studio speakers. He starts to kick my ass before I can get my bearing with the controller. We shout above the 8-bit din of karate chops and percussed punches.

“Never heard of it," Derek says. "Sounds like a place where pussy poet-types like you go hang out.”

As much as I’d like to stay and play video games all day, sitting around stoned in The Studio gets old. Leonard, a poet who owned a bookstore in Philly, told me about the Saint Mark’s Poetry Project. He said they host an all-day reading on New Year’s, a marathon event where anyone who’s anyone in New York poetry comes to read.

Allen Ginsberg will be there, Leonard said. Others I’d seen in movies and books I read outside of my college classes will be there as well—John Giorno, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll.

I want to spend the day out on my own—to find my tribe, as hokey as it may sound. I want to spend the day as a poet in New York.

“Could you just point me in the right direction?” I ask Derek.

“It must be on St. Mark’s Place, so that’s easy,” he says. “Go out the door, make a left. Then make a left on Third Avenue. Keep going until you hit St. Mark’s and make another left. St. Mark’s Place is only a two or three blocks long, so it should be there somewhere.”

***

Of course now I know directions Derek just gave me were wrong. But please remember the internet wasn’t invented yet, no Mapquest, no GPS. So cut us both a break.

Also: people from New Jersey don’t bring maps to New York. Jersey people think a city map comes with their brains or appears there once they pass Exit 12. Or we tell the cab drivers where to go.

It’s the Bridge and Tunnel Credo and we abide by it. Everyone I’ve ever met from the Midwest, for example, lands in New York armed with spiral bound atlases, tour guides, tip sheet printouts from friends on the cheapest beer or Indian food.

Jersey people just show up and ask other Jersey people. Or we tail Midwesterners.

***

So I go outside and sneak along the Queens Midtown Tunnel traffic on 37th Street, take a left downtown on Third Avenue. Murray Hill is by no means scenic, I know this now, but to my mind back then it was a stroll along the Champs Elysees.

The bodegas and doorman buildings and taxis in dormant midtown, the closed-up curry places on 29th, the large intersections at 23rd and 14th, all of it was part of my own production of Umbrellas of Cherbourg, everyone sing-talking, and I was Catherine Deneuve, ingénue from the provinces.

“Everything becomes an allegory for me,” Baudelaire writes. That was the life I wanted to lead. I want to allow things to happen to me, to be the flâneur, the dandy who wanders the streets, open to each experience what comes. I wanted to allow myself to get lost, to make mistakes, to loaf around.

I wanted to lead an allegory-filled life. I was 22 years old and walking in New York on my own.

***

I get to Saint Mark’s Place and I turn left and I start to look for the words "Poetry" or "Project," or anyone with a piece of paper reciting a poem. Nothing. Halfway down the block, I start to get nervous. Where is this place? Am I lost? Why is St. Mark’s Place deserted?

It’s New Year’s Day, 1992, and I figure real New Yorkers are still sleeping or snorting lines of coke in their apartments. Why did I go out into the cold only to get lost twenty blocks away? And why did I get stoned before doing this?

The tinnitus from last night’s acid jazz rings in my ear. Last night, after the countdown, I flirted with a beautiful Jewish girl. I knew she was Jewish because she asked me if I was Jewish. She only dated Jewish boys, she said.

I’m not Jewish, I told her, but I’d be willing convert. For her.

That’s all it took for us to make out for a few seconds behind Derek’s DJ table. She agreed to meet me for coffee that night at a bakery on the Upper East Side. Telling her I was going to a poetry reading the next day only made me seem more mysterious, I’d like to think.

As she wrote down the bakery’s address on a napkin, I imagined sitting beside her, twirling her brown curls, telling her I was already circumcised. It would be erotic in a sophisticated, Woody Allen movie sorta way.

***

I spotted a building in the middle of the block, its bottom half painted white. Down a half-flight of steps sat a circle of people, each holding what looked like manuscripts on their laps. This must be the place, I thought. The New Year’s Day Marathon Poetry Reading!

It didn’t surprise me that the attendees were mostly older men, or that half were black and the other half hippy white guys. This was the scene at most poetry readings. I spotted a lady in a Holly Hobbie dress who stood beside a coffee urn atop the table in the back.

She wiped the drip catcher with a paper towel vigorously, like it was a precious stone.

I found the first free folding chair and sat down and focused on the reading. Across from me a man was reading a poem.

“I am now clean more than 60 days,” he said. “I know I can make it. I know I can.”

I listened some more. And then I thought to myself that the work there seemed, well, pedestrian. It was hard for me not to be critical, having just taken my first graduate poetry workshop at Rutgers.

The poem from the next person, his voice Barry White-deep, also had a daily affirmation quality. Where are the metaphor and images, the figurative language? I thought.

I started to grimace. Was this as good as the work gets at St. Mark’s Poetry Project? What’s going on? Here I am on poetry holy ground and I am thinking, I can do better than these guys.

***

“Did you sign up for the reading yet?”

Holly Hobbie stood next to me at the coffee urn. We’re taking a break and everyone’s smoking out on St. Mark’s. The drip catcher is still attached to her hand, and she’s still buffing the steel.

“I didn’t know you could sign up,” I said.

This is my chance to be discovered, I think. See, I say to myself, being a flâneur can have its benefits. Like every aspiring poet in their early twenties, I just happen to have a printout of My Entire Collected Works in my backpack.

I start to think: how many minutes is the set? Is it one poem or two?

“This a surprise,” I said. “I thought the reading was only for famous poets.”

“Famous?” she said. “This is open for all of our clients.”

“Clients?”

Why would the St. Mark’s Poetry Project have clients?

As Holly explained to me the format of the reading, I concluded that this is not in fact St. Mark’s Poetry Project, that this was another place entirely. This was a place for people in drug recovery. The people here reading their poems were clients, drug addicts sharing their work to each other as they fought to stay sober—a particularly hard thing to do for some after New Year’s Eve, Holly pointed out.

The coffee urn gurgles, lets out steam. I take a cup, fill it with sugar and milk. Barry White voice guy points me in the direction of the Poetry Project.

***

When I was 22, those whole blocks in New York become an allegory for a wonderful confusion, a confusion of streets and cars and possibility, a chaos that calms me down. This is what life, what a city, should be.

I found the place I was looking for, and it was only when I got there I realized the name of the place used the same word Derek and his building mates used: Project. The Poetry Project. This seemed significant to me then. It was so warm inside, with food and coffee and poems. 

It was only when I reached my destination that I felt every missed connection, every day feeling out of place, without words, every song I felt spoke to me, every poem I heard read into the evening, was part of the same flâneurian experience. Things added up to something.

Lying on the rug off to the side of the Saint Mark’s stage that day, all of the poems seemed addressed to me.

It was all felt as one, a single poem.

***

That mistaken place on St. Mark’s, I found out, is the site of the Electric Circus discotheque, where Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable with the Velvet Underground happened in 1966. It is also where I thought I would have my New York poetry debut in 1992.

That night, I walked uptown to the bakery to meet the Jewish girl, and I ended up talking to another girl by mistake. She was going to meet someone on a blind date, and thought I was the guy. Her date came and the Jewish girl never showed up.

I went back to Derek’s and recorded crappy demos all night.

It all made sense to me, all part of the same poem, the same song, which I would never get around to finishing.

20 Things Not to Do at an Open Poetry Reading [by Daniel Nester]

1. Write your name illegibly on the sign-up sheet.

2. Complain to host when he/she can’t read/pronounce your last name.

3. Go over the allotted time, so much so that you are mistaken for the “featured” reader, who has traveled three hours on an interstate to promote her most recent book, and has advertised the event on her personal website, Facebook author page, sent announcements college alumni listserv (undergraduate and graduate), as well as posted to Twitter and Snapchat accounts.

4. Go over time by reading a poem that combines several short poems into a single, multisectioned SuperPoem®, which uses different voices (precocious child, mermaid, Muddy Waters) and which features with an epigraph, a joke in Latin, which you do not translate and yet giggle to yourself before proceeding with main body of the poem.

5. Tell host you need to read first, last, or “when my friends get here.”

6. While onstage, complain about how bad most poetry is then fail to realize the mountain of social privilege and assumed power required to proclaim oneself the final gatekeeper of what counts as good or bad poetry.

7. Complain about writing workshops.

8. Then lead one yourself.

9. Read poem you just wrote about being outside at a coffee shop, which addresses your thoughts about how hard it is to write a poem in a coffee shop, what with all clanging of porcelain and milk getting frothed.

10. Mention journal your poem was published in before you read it, as if to say, you better like this poem.

11. Complain about poetry slam’s format and hip-hop MC style, being competitive or too showy or adhering to some random, three-minute limit.

12. Proceed to perform a poem, in hip-hop MC style, that clocks in at two minutes, 57 seconds.

13. Plan another open mic with the same people at the open mic where you are reading.

14. Prick thigh with ballpoint pen every time anyone says the following words: “darkness,” “fuck,” “loamy,” “gleam,” “amongst,” “nevermore,” “nothingness,” “cumquat,” “capitalism,” “shame.”

15. Complain about the exclusiveness and ivory tower mentality of colleges and all those student-types who take creative writing classes.

16. Talk about how you first discovered poetry with professor X in college.

17. Avoid speaking into the microphone provided by your host, then ask if people can hear you.

18. Read narrative lyric poem about any of the following: 1. your dog; 2. going out into the woods and feeling vaguely religious; 3. Sharing hummus with your lover.

19. Precede your poem by explaining everything about the poem—the story, inspiration, place it was written, time of year the action takes place—and then repeat this same information in the title of the poem. 
For example, your poem might be inspired by your going to art galleries with an ex-lover in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, in the middle of winter. Explain all this, and then introduce your poem entitled “Visiting Art Galleries with Ex-Lover, Chelsea, Mid-Winter, 2009.”

20. Promote an open mic at another open mic.

Some Words on 'Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese' c. 1991 [by Daniel Nester]

A few years ago, a friend gave me a writing prompt: "re-visit an essay you wrote years ago and write another essay on that."

Very essayistic, I thought.

So I dug up an old paper, “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese,” which I wrote as an unmatriculated graduate student, and got to essaying.

Before I get started, I just want to say that I do like yogurt. I especially like it with cherries, strawberries, or blueberries. That’s because, I’m told, yogurt isn’t actually what it appears to be: the bacteria change the chemical make-up of the milk product, making it a completely different substance. Different, say, than cheese.

I am reading a printout of a 24-year-old piece of writing. My writing. The pages came from a friend’s word processor, which I borrowed whenever something was due and I couldn’t make it to the computer lab. It was really a typewriter with a floppy disk drive. Its dot matrix printer would issue dolphin-like sounds as it printed out, line by line.

The memory of old technology and these yellowed pages force me to think about an earlier version of myself, a writer but not yet a writer.

***

I wrote an essay. In this essay, I write about cheese, but also, in no particular order, fondue, city-dwelling, dinner parties, and a fear of cunnilingus.

I hate cheese. I hate how it smells, how it tastes. I hate how it goes down my digestive tract. It more than doesn’t agree with me—I disagree with cheese. It alienates me at the dinner table. Cheese is my kryptonite, my garlic clove; melted cheese is the goop that ruins my meals, smelling up the room, the dreaded killer ingredient that demarcates me from all that is cheese-loving.

The essay was an assignment for a graduate class I took the summer after I graduated college. I treated myself to two graduate classes at the Rutgers campus in Camden, NJ as a non-matriculated student in Fall 1991. I was 23. I had won a product liability settlement from a lawnmower manufacturer after one of its models drove off by itself and sliced off my Achilles Five years later, I cleared $40,000. Not a lot of money, as these things go, but it did give me some time to think and not work. I nicknamed the check "my ticket to the middle class."

Paying for these classes was my way of forcing the question of whether I was cut out to be a writer. I knew I was going to keep writing anyway, whether I knew if I sucked or not. 

Writers crave approval. No surprise there. Younger writers crave approval more so than older ones, I think it’s fair to say? Or maybe I’m just saying that to feel better, not that I am old. When I think back to coming up with things to write for this class, what I remember is a desire to impress not myself, but my teacher.

My ultimate dream: that I would be taken aside and told that I was a writer, a potentially a great writer. I wanted to rest under someone’s wing. I wanted someone to validate me not just as a writer, but as a human being. I'm still waiting for that to happen.

***

The class was called “Writing the Personal Essay,” I think. The assignment was simply to write an essay. There were no parameters that I can recall, no page count or word limit.

We were reading other essays—short pieces from people like Max Apple, Philip Lopate, and Nora Ephron. What I handed in was called “Some Words on My Hatred of Cheese.” I look at these pages now and can say I’m proud of it in the way one might be proud after doing a song justice on a karaoke night. I can’t say that for much of the writing I did from when I was younger--most of it would charitably be called apprentice work. But this essay seems different.

***

I do eat pizza…with the cheese scraped off.  When you’re the lone cheese-hater in a world of goopy cheese enthusiasts, you adapt.  And, being the grand exception, I endure the Dreaded Cheese Question even when eating a slice of sauced-up crust. Of course, since my condition is so rare and inexcusable, everyone is entitled to bring up “Dan’s cheese problem.”

This is less about talent and more about ambition and imitation. It’s more about how writing, or learning to write, is often about manners and pedigree as much as it is about learning to write a sentence. I am amazed how I could mimic the style of 50-year-old essayists, how grumpy and old-sounding I sound.

There are a lot twentysomethings who say they write essays, but what they really are writing are short memoir pieces. Which is fine. To write a real essay, however, means you have accumulated a wide frame of reference and not a small amount of world-weariness. To accomplish both takes time. And age. One earns the right to be an essayist; one earns the right to go nowhere and back again.

***

This is partly why the current vogue for impersonal essays irks me so. The essay is the last bastion of the solipsist in a world of above-it-all discourse. It’s a place where the first-person can exist without worrying over what’s cool and what’s not. 

Back then, the attempts at hijacking the essay into some purely aesthetic experience were yet to happen. It was 1991; the essay and its practitioners were going about their business in a steady way. The Best American Essays series had started five years before. To write an essay, to me, meant coming up with an editorial, an opinion piece, or some research paper for a literature class. I was a poet and I wasn’t particularly jazzed about writing essays. As I look at the cheese-hatred essay now, I see that I am imitating the turns and dips of a classic, wandering essay. All by accident.

***

The equation goes like this: one person with a lack of adventurous nature plus three units of fastidiousness equals one dislike for cheese.  A given for this equation is that cheese would be my liberator from cheese-hating provinciality.

Pay attention not to the matter, but to the shape I give it, Montaigne writes. I didn’t know that quote then, but I wish I did. I never could write in a straight line or tell a story from beginning to end. My papers in college were enthusiastic outbursts, engaged only if I was interested in the literature at hand. I wanted to be given free reign to writing about anything I wanted to, but had no subject matter; I wanted to write in a distinctive voice, but didn’t have one yet. A lot of writers buckle under such a wealth of possibilities, and I was one of them. Call it attention deficit syndrome, but I needed form. I needed a name for it.

To 23-year-olds like me, to write meant talking about the Big Issues of The Day. This is precisely what 23-year-olds should not talk about: most 23-year-olds do not know shit. I was no exception. Here are some things I did know about: disliking most cheeses, hating some, and being picky and arch and bitter. 

Writing should start small, with infinitesimal topics. Montaigne teaches us this as he writes about books, friends, sex, meals. These are the places essays start from. I didn’t know this then. When I wrote about cheese all those years ago, it was the first time I wrote about something small to try to talk about something big. 

***

On the way from the student center to our classroom after a reading one afternoon, one of my teachers said to me that my prose “hangs like wet laundry on the line.” I wouldn’t dispute that my writing stank. But I see promise in my younger self; I see an enthusiasm.

At restaurants, from the golden arches to Greenwich Village, from South Philly to South Street, from Greek to Italian to Mexican, from Vegetarian to down home, I’ve had to request my dishes, from appetizers to dessert, sans cheese. The waiters seem to acknowledge my predicament, even if they—and I really hate this—get the order wrong, but those I am eating with always have to bring it up.  Not only that, but just as people add new twists or just plain invent untruths just to bring something up, those I sup with always have to raise the Big Cheese Question. “Why don’t you like cheese” is followed by particularized Q & A—“You really don’t eat cheese steaks” or “What about pizza? You don’t like pizza?”

I am trying to establish some world-weariness. The Philadelphia-centric ness of “South Philly to South Street” embarrasses me, as does “sans cheese”; it occurs to me I should have either written “without cheese” or went all-in with sans fromage.

I didn’t know French, although Ms. Hogan in third grade taught us the Our Father and the sign of the cross in French, well before we found out she was a lesbian and would live in Paris with her female lover.  I knew sans, that was it. I did initial-cap the Important Idea, which was then new to me as a stylized tick. I must have picked it up in rock magazines like Record or Creem or Spin.

I don’t know why I wrote “particularized.”  That’s just awful. 

But the em-dash-set off phrase—“and I really hate this”—would find a home in any magazine article or blog post.  It’s arch and grumpy and indicates this has happened many times before.

Another paragraph:

I do hate mayonnaise, white milky sauces and creamy dips. They’re all akin to cheese, however, in their ambiance, there reason for existence; that is, to lull and creamify the palate, oozing down awful bacteria enzymes and rotten milk, passing it off with the fancy rubric of curds and whey; or, the most painful, smelly, gooey, cataclysmic version of cheesedom, fondue.

Hooray for me is what I think when I read this. Hooray for “cataclysmic version of cheesedom.” Hooray for “fancy rubric,” whatever I meant there. When I read “reason for existence,” I think that maybe I did know some French phrases, and maybe I am using the English transliteration of raison d’être to an ironic end, which would have been kinda masterful for me at the time. I doubt it. 

I don’t know why I put “however” in the middle of the second sentence; my best guess is that I just learned that one should place this conjunctive adverb inside commas when placed mid-sentence. The same applies to the rather random use of a semicolon after “whey.”  I am sure I committing the usual college writer sin of using semicolons to sound smart and accomplishing the opposite.  If I wrote that now, I would have placed another verb after the semicolon or just broke off into a new sentence fragment entirely and avoid drawing attention to it more.

Maybe I was millionth monkey who wrote a Shakespeare play, or a boilerplate comedy-of-manners personal essay. I read this paragraph and feel relieved.

***

Perhaps the best part of the essay has nothing to do with what I say it how I use other people’s words. My roommate at the time suggested that there was a connection between my hatred of certain types of smelly cheeses to my aversion to performing oral sex on my lady friends. This was, to me, shocking, and I remember debating whether or not to include it in my draft. As it turns out, that was the most interesting part of the whole thing.

The sexual theory started in my late teens when I admitted to my old roommate that I had not yet had a satisfactory experience giving a woman oral sex.  In another brilliant equation by people appalled that I would not each cheese, I now had to deal with a feminist theory that held I was selfish for not liking cheese as if I did not want to gratify women by eating them.

This made no sense and complete sense at the same time, and that’s why it worked.

I feel tempted to update this passage in matters of fact. Or in one matter of fact. Namely: I got over whatever aversion to lady-pleasing I might or might no have had back then, and very quickly. The thought occurs to me that I could accomplish this by using figurative language, that I often enjoy munching on a nice slice of manchego or stilton from time to time. Something like that.

***

When I look at this essay about my hatred of cheese, I see attempts to sound sophisticated, or my version of sophistication as a 23-year-old from South Jersey. As William Carlos Williams might have put it, I had no peasant tradition to give me character. I was the son of a truck driver and a part-time secretary and went to the college nearest my home. My English professors were sophisticated Martians who didn’t tell tales from their own lives. I remember trying to make them break character. They never did.

I see this essay about hating cheese, ultimately, as paying attention not to the matter but to the shape I gave it, which wasn’t really hating cheese, but getting some corner of my mind on paper.

The Weakness in Me: Notes on Joan Armatrading [by Daniel Nester]

There are certain albums I pair exclusively with cassettes. I doubt there will be a tape revival anytime soon, at least as big as the current vinyl boom. Still, people of a certain age, myself included, continue to dub copies and take out write-protect tabs in our dreams.

My personal cassette canon includes Squeeze’s Singles 45s and Under, which one hot afternoon fused onto the top lip of the stereo in my 1972 Ford Country Squire and remained there for months. There’s R.E.M.’s Reckoning, which I purchased after hearing “Radio Free Europe” on a college kid’s stereo. Face Value, Phil Collins’s solo debut, was the only selection me and this dude who wore a confederate wool cap could agree on playing as we mopped up hallways at my Catholic grade school.

Then there's Joan Armatrading’s Track Record, which I bought on impulse one day at a Sam Goody. I only had an interview in Musician magazine to go on. That and the cover: a woman with her not insubstantial afro, who crouches in profile atop a grand piano in runner’s starting block pose.

***

“I never heard of Joan Armatrading,” the full-page ad from New York magazine reads, “but she knew me.” In the ad, a woman sits on an oriental rug, headphones off to the side. She sips tea and stares into the eyes of the Joan Armatrading pictured on her third self-titled LP from 1976, the one with her breakthrough songs “Down to Zero” and “Love and Affection.” “I discovered Joan Armatrading,” the ad continues. “An incredible artist who happens to be a woman. She’s been in the places I’ve been, felt the feelings I’ve felt.”

In 1984, there wasn’t that much difference between myself and the woman in the ad with the short Sandy Duncan haircut. I bought Track Record after a series of girls had turned down my offer of being their date to the junior prom. I now know that I first heard Joan Armatrading under ideal laboratory conditions: a rain-filled day, alone in a house, wearing headphones, drinking tea.

***

I write this a few months after seeing Joan Armatrading on what has been billed as her final world tour. I sat in the fourth row, accompanied by my wife and friends for what I regarded as a bookend to that afternoon more than 30 years ago. This was one of a few occasions where I wanted others to hear music I had listened to for years in some attempt to “convert” them, or at least appreciate what I appreciated. It’s been a mostly impossible task over the years (or too effortful, to use a word my old therapist used) to try and balance enjoying live music and making sure my companions aren’t in hell while as stand in front of bands with names like Lubricated Goat or the Blue Aeroplanes. But I try.

***

Armatrading’s career spans four decades, twenty-plus albums, a catalog filled with songs about love and losing love and relationships and solitude. Born in 1950 on the West Indies island of Saint Kitt’s, Joan Armatrading moved with her family to Birmingham, England when she was three. A 1977 New Yorker Talk of the Town piece focuses on her modest upbringing: her house and large family in the slum housing estates; the lack of formal musical training, the first guitar, purchased by her mother in exchange for two baby strollers; dropping out of school to work in a factory at 15.

Armatrading left for London to join the touring cast of Hair, then spent a year on the dole to write music with a partner, Pamela Nestor, with whom she split after her first album, 1972’s Whatever’s For Us. The record label bigwig, the story goes, had focused more on Armatrading’s voice and so she was signed as a solo act rather than as a duo. That split with her only songwriting partner is one of the only points of intrigue I can find in Armatrading’s past, and even that isn’t so juicy. Nestor produced one reggae-ish solo single a couple years later, and eventually dropped out of the music business altogether. Other than an abstract for her Ph.D. thesis, there’s no sign of her online.

***

Writing this, I find myself trying to dig up conflict or an arc in Joan Armatrading’s story, if only to bring some shape or context to my love of her music. Although it’s not necessary for me to know about people’s personal life to enjoy their art, I would be dishonest if I said that sometimes it helps me round out and even increase my appreciation. Take Dennis Wilson, the troubled late drummer of the Beach Boys. The main story behind the Beach Boys is of Brian Wilson, Dennis’s brother, the troubled genius who wrote the majority of the band’s classic songs. But there’s a subplot with Dennis Wilson, who died in 1983 at 39 and recorded a single solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, an uneven collection of Beach Boys-like tunes, in 1977. If Dennis Wilson wasn’t a member of the Beach Boys, and I didn’t know about his troubled life, I wouldn’t find myself rooting for him as I listen to Pacific Ocean Blue, overjoyed to hear the full realization of a minor songwriter’s talents. Without that story, I might have listened to the record once and sold it back to buy a Dire Straits CD.

There’s really no story or scandal to attach to Armatrading, no core narrative or specific identity to think about while listening to her music, and it’s largely by her own design. What sets her apart from other recording artists, besides her music, is who Armatrading is: namely, she’s a black woman who makes music in what has been, and still is, a white male genre of highly instrumental pop music. Maybe Joni Mitchell, another female artist, will pop up when coming up with other examples. There are others I know. For the most part over the course of her career, Armatrading has been most often compared to male artists—everyone from Jackson Browne and Elton John to Van Morrison.

“Ms. Armatrading’s music may be too tough or original for instant mass success,” John Rockwell wrote in the New York Times in 1980. “But she would seem likely to appeal to the same audiences that buy Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or Bruce Springsteen disks. Perhaps one obvious reason she hasn’t sold well so far with them is that she is black and female, and a strong-sounding woman to boot, all of which is still hard for some white, macho rock fans to accept.”

If there’s one thing I know about my fellow male fans, macho and not-macho, it’s when it comes to our worship of male rock stars, it’s that we need to know something about who we're listening to. In this sense, we are no different than teenyboppers who need to know which member of One Direction just got a tattoo. We establish thumbnails for each: Neil Young does whatever he likes. Bruce Springsteen works really hard. Elton John is gay but it’s OK. Van Morrison sometimes acts like a prick to his band. 

Try to come up with a similar précis of Joan Armatrading, and you come up empty-handed. This explains journalists’ inelegant and stupid comparisons of her to Tracey Chapman and Odetta, basically because they’re the other black women singers who play acoustic guitar, without much else in common. Armatrading has been a good sport. One 1988 Newsweek article focuses on the “flood of comparisons” to Tracy Chapman she’s gotten. Armatrading said she’s never met her and has only heard snippets of her music. What might they have in common is never really spelled out, only that they share a “throaty style of singing”?

***

The main appeal for Armatrading, besides her songs’ blend of jazz and pop, is her voice. Attempts to describe it can be measured by the degree to which they avoid failure. Joan Armatrading’s voice has been described as deep, husky, lyrical, flexible, throaty, genuine, gripping, no-nonsense, dusky, Odetta-like, headstrong, deceptively angsty, natural and artless, satisfyingly unpredictable.[1]

Also: eclectic, richly warm, gruff and percussive,[2] commanding, espresso-dark, cigar-smoky, a deep alto and gruff mezzo.[3]

Also: a “mannish, fluid alto, which at times recalls a young Nina Simone.”[4]

Also: “the aural equivalent of wrestling with a very strong woman.”[5]

***

The one real enigma has been Armatrading’s private life. Dubbed “Joan Armour-playing” by journalists, for decades she’s been cagey about her love life, her friends, sexuality. Questions about her private life have always been off-limits.

“The world doesn’t need to know what colour my bedroom walls are,” she famously told one reporter. But people do. Her songs are almost exclusively about matters of the heart, lovers and love. You would figure out something personal from all that.

Her choice of pronouns is maddeningly confusing—she prefers the second person, “you,” as opposed to a “she” or “he.” In many other songs, the speaker addresses two people. Here’s lyrics from “Down to Zero,” one of my favorite Joan songs and one of the greatest songs every recorded, if you ask me:

Brand new dandy
First class scene stealer
Walks through the crowd and takes your man
Sends you rushing to the mirror
Brush your eyebrows and say
There's more beauty in you than anyone

So who is the you here? A wronged woman? Man? Is Joan Armatrading hitting on the “you”? In the next verse, a “she” pops up.

Oh remember who walked the warm sands beside you
Moored to your heel
Let the waves come a rushing in
She'll take the worry from your head
But then again
She put trouble in your heart instead

Maybe this pronoun confusion explains why her songs strike me as so intimate: her songs are a direct address to the listener, mostly out of an effort to avoid giving away her own sexuality, which is all but certainly confirmed as a lesbian—more on that later—but the end effect is you’re listening in on an ongoing conversation among lovers, and you, dear listener, are one of them.

***

There’s a certain species of singer-songwriter who surrounded herself by rosters of crackerjack musicians. The list of star sidemen enlisted to play on Armatrading’s albums reads like a who’s who of British rock. Andy Summers played on her 1975 Back to the Night Album two years before he joined The Police, to name one noteworthy example. Mark Knopfler plays his Dire Straits guitar on the later album, 1986's The Shouting Stage.

The quality of an album doesn’t necessarily coincide with the musicians’ star power, but for my money it’s the early 80’s trio of LPs—1980’s Me Myself I, 1981’s Walk Under Ladders, and 1983’s The Key—where sidemen lift Armatrading into the stratosphere. Me Myself I has David Letterman band players Paul Shaffer, Will Lee, and Anton Fig on most of the tracks, along with the E Street Band’s Clarence Clemmons. Walk Under Ladders features Thomas Dolby on synthesizer, XTC’s Andy Partridge on guitar, and the recently deceased Rico Rodriguez on horns.

My impression had been that all these musicians volunteered to appear on Armatrading albums out of admiration of her work. But, after reading Sean Mayes’ unauthorized biography, I learned it’s more complicated than that. Producers like Glyn Johns and Steve Lillywhite lined up the musicians, and Armatrading often clashed with them in the studio, explaining her compositions and the sound she was trying to put together. There was a universal respect for Armatrading’s gift as a songwriter, but not many warm memories from these sessions.

***

I have to admit that I never gave her sexuality that much thought until the last time I saw Joan in concert at the Tower Theater in 1990. I looked around and scores of women were holding hands. I was 22, eight years since buying Track Record, and it was only then did I realize that this Joan Armatrading person might in fact attract an audience other than straight white men with mullet haircuts who played unironic air guitar to her music. I bought a biography on e-book for young adults recently, and that was how I found out Joan Armatrading had recently married her partner of many decades, Maggie Butler, in Shetland back in 2011.

These realizations seem obvious in retrospect. They also might explain how I rarely mentioned my love for her music to anyone else.

 

"The Weakness in Me" is one of those love triangle songs. I never related to threesome songs: I hardly could recruit one lover, let alone two, who loves me, at the same time. I never broke many hearts. The lyrics of “The Weakness in Me” add up to a fairly straightforward portrayal of someone who “has a lover who loves me,” while mulling over another offer, culminating in singing “I need you, and you.” It’s found several lives as backdrop to countless homemade fan videos dedicated to romances, real and imagined, on film and TV. Sometimes it’s the Melissa Etheridge piano and vocal cover of, but more often it’s Armatrading’s original.

A partial list of “Weakness in Me” fan videos [playlist here] include Andy and Sam from a show called Rookie Blue, Ashley Wilkes and Scarlett O’Hara from Gone With The Wind, Kate and Jack and Sawyer in Lost, a 2006 tearjerker called Loving Annabelle, Battlestar Galactica “(Starbuck, Apollo, Sam and Dualla…an unfortunate love story”), so many from House dedicated to House and Cuddy (sample comment: “It really looks like Cuddy is the one seducing him--an interesting view!”), Carla and Liam from Coronation Street, another German show called Hinter Gittern (Kirsten and Sascha), The OC (Marissa and Volchok), Gray’s Anatomy, Instant Star, Hanna and Carla in German soap opera Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), Emma and Sean in Degrassi, Twilight (name of video: “Bella’s Choice”). Some feature voiceovers with key dialogue. Others have lyrics from the song in Spanish or Thai or German superimposed on the screen.

I wonder if the people who create these videos are familiar with Armatrading’s other work, or if this song has taken on a life of its own.

***

The recent show in Albany was underwhelming. Armatrading’s voice is still in fine form, but it was a solo show with unfortunate choices in guitar tones and a slide show that featured images of 9/11 and World War II battles, as well as a screensaver-like backdrop that distracted from the music. I sat too close to the stage next to the speakers and had to strain to hear Joan’s voice. She seemed at times to be going through the motions. It will be some time before I go through another Armatrading jag, listening through her albums. I know it will happen. But most of all, I miss those days alone with headphones, listening to a cassette, rain falling outside.

 

[1] Nat Hentoff in The Nation, review of Show Some Emotion.

[2] John Rockwell, New York Times, 1975.

[3] John Rockwell, New York Times, 1979.

[4] Stephen Holden, New York Times, 1983.

[5] Playboy magazine, of course.

Inside the First Cover of Bohemian Rhapsody: An Interview with Tony Rivers [by Daniel Nester]

This year we celebrate the 40^th anniversary of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” complete with original artwork reissue of the single for Record Store Day’s Black Friday edition and “Bohemian Lager,” a Queen-endorsed brew made in--where else?--the Bohemia region of the Czech Republic.

Over the years, the Freddie Mercury-penned song has evolved from FM radio staple to competition showcase for melismatics everywhere to something akin to public domain. There’s countless parodies: “Bohemian Carsody,” a car-themed parody by the all-female comedian troupe SketchShe, racked up 25 million hits. There’s also “Bohemian Gravity,” “Bro-hemian Rhapsody,” “Bohemian Momsody,” the Minecraft-themed “Bohemian Craftsody,” and “Nintendohian Rhapsody.” And that's just scratching the surface. 

Interpretations of “Bohemian Rhapsody” also abound. Ukulele master Jake Shimabukuro’s TED Talk cover has 5 million views and counting. Adam Lambert’s American Idol singing “Bo Rhap” led his getting a job sitting in for Mercury in real life, not just fantasy. Kanye West, the supremely self-confident rap artist and provocateur, opened his headlining set at last July’s Glastonbury Music Festival with the “Mama” heard 'round the world in a performance could be described charitably as pitch-imperfect. Remember Robert Wilkison? Arrested for intoxication in Alberta, Canada, he proclaimed his innocence with a full-throated “Bohemian Rhapsody” from the back of a squad car. He racked up 11 million hits. They did not let him go.

But who made the very first “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover?

Perhaps 1982’s Royal Philharmonic recording?

Or maybe the 1987 cover by Bad News, the comedy metal band?

Good guesses, but both are wrong.

The very first “Bohemian Rhapsody” was recorded for a Top of The Pops compilation and released in December 1975, three months after the song was released to the airways. Not to be confused with the television show by the same name, Top of The Pops were budget-priced compilations that featured studio musicians and singers recreating soundalikes of chart-toppers. We’re talking everyone from the Supremes to the Sex Pistols. Found on Top of The Pops #49, the “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover was recorded at De Lane Lea Studios, next to Wembley Stadium--where, it might be noted, Queen recorded early demos for tracks like “Keep Yourself Alive.”

Recently I tracked down Tony Rivers, one of the four Top of The Pops singers who sang the first “Bohemian Rhapsody” cover. He was also the vocal arranger on the sessions, a thankless task for which he was well-prepared: Rivers’ long and varied career includes tracks from early 60s vocal groups Harmony Grass and the Castaways, recordings with Pink Floyd and INXS, and backup singing for Cliff Richard and Elton John, all of which he’s written about in a new book, I’m Nearly Famous: The Tales of a Likely Lad.

Rivers was kind enough to let me pick his brain over email about the very "Bohemian Rhapsody" cover.

DN: Everyone covers or parodies “Bohemian Rhapsody” these days—from the Muppets, Phish, Flaming Lips, William Shatner, Zac Brown Band, Kanye West—everyone climbs Bo Rhap Mountain, it seems.

TR: Well, not, Not many could manage to put this together, least of all Kanye West!

DN: But you were the first.

TR: I have always assumed that, mainly because harmony wasn’t many singers’ strong point at that time, and it was the most complicated arrangement to learn in a few days and record.

DN: A few days? The original famously took three, four weeks.

TR: There were very few around who could have done it that quickly. It was a bit easier for us four, all coming up with vocal group backgrounds. All four of us sang on “Bohemian Rhapsody.” We usually took a day to lay down lead and backing vocal tracks, and would be on our way home by 11pm. Not this time!

DN: So it wasn’t easy to do, then.

No. With due modesty it was difficult for us because of the time restriction—maybe two or three days to live with it (once the committee had chosen it).

DN: By “committee” you mean the people at Top of The Pops?

TR: A small group of Hallmark employees, along with producer Bruce Baxter, would sit down prior to the planned sessions and choose the potential hits. That, of course, was the secret to the label’s success. I have no idea what their thoughts were in choosing “Bohemian Rhapsody” other than “what an amazing record!”

DN: The cover is pretty note-for-note perfect. How did you pull that off?

TR: As usual, I had the job of sorting out the vocal arrangement. I had to listen and memorize the parts. John Perry and Ken Gold were also listening and were both assigned lead lines that suited their voices, which they did brilliantly I think. Oh, and let’s not forget the late Stu Calver, who was the very high voice on the Roger Taylor parts—the “Gallileo”’s and so on.

Normally this wouldn’t be too big a deal, but with this song, I had to sit for hours at home listening and making notes, and writing notes and memorizing vocal lines—apart from the other tracks we had to do that day!

The time-consuming job of layering track after track of vocals ‘til we got the sound and the voicing right seemed to take forever. But in the end, it had been a great opportunity to find out how that song was put together.

DN: I’m still trying to wrap my head around you doing all of this in a few days, to be honest.

TR: The harmony parts were obviously part of the problem, but they are not difficult harmonies. The problem was lack of familiarity with the whole thing. We could copy sections piece by piece. The other problem was the time needed to achieve a similar “sound.” That kind of mass tracking which takes time, and that wasn’t usually available in big lumps. This was something with many lumps!

We were helped greatly the fact that all three of us had good range in our voices with JP and Stu blessed with fantastic falsetto range.

I believe we spent the early part and the rest of the day, singing whatever vocals or harmonies needed on the other songs that had been selected.

DN: You worked on other songs at the same time?

Memory tells me at around 7pm we started on Bo Rhap, bit by bit, until each section sounded good, and added voices until it did. We finished and hit the A406 around 7 the next morning, in a daze, rush hour traffic, “Gallileos” running round our heads.

I have nothing but admiration for the man who created it. Freddie Mercury. What a record.

A bit different from something like [The Sweet’s] “Little Willie”!

DN: The original version made a splash, of course, but the TOTP version of “Bohemian Rhapsody” made headlines as well. Kenny Everett, who famously played the test pressing of the original track, also played your cover.

TR: Kenny Everett was a big name at that time , and decided to see if the listeners could tell which version had taken months and fortunes to record and which was done in a few hours on a budget album! He played our version and Queen’s, cutting between the two, and asking “can you tell which one’s the ten-bob version, and which one cost 6 million quid to make?”

DN: Did you ever hear from the Queen camp regarding your camp’s cover version? I know you worked with Cliff Richard for quite some time, and Freddie Mercury and he were friends.

TR: Ken Gold was introduced to Freddie whilst on an Elton John tour of the USA. Ken decided to ask Freddie just what he thought about “that cover.” He looked pensive, then added “Hmm. An interesting version!”

I did meet Brian May once. He said to me “Hi, Tony! Roger and I used to go to see you live at Loughborough Uni/College, and you were a very big influence on our harmonies!” Not bad, eh?

An Interview with Richard Schober, Editor of The Whole Shot: Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso [by Daniel Nester]

It seems fitting that there's a Kickstarter campaign to publish a book related Gregory Corso. Back in the 1990's I remember stories, perhaps apocryphal, of Corso walking around the Poetry Project and telling people to give him a dollar. When asked why, he'd say because I'm Gregory Corso!

So when I saw the Kickstarter page for The Whole Shot: Collected Interviews with Gregory Corso, I knew that I had to support it.

I love underdogs, and Beat poet Gregory Corso (1930–2001) was an underdog’s underdog. He always struck me as the most dangerous and least housebroken among the core group of the Beats. Perhaps because of that image, Corso was regarded as the Ringo in the Beat fab four of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and Jack Kerouac.

A collection of interviews with Corso will hopefully start to change those misperceptions. Edited by Richard Schober, The Whole Shot collects 13 rare and out-of-print Corso interviews from 1955 to 1982, with a foreword by Dick Brukenfeld, publisher of Corso's debut 1955 collection The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems.

I emailed questions to Schober, who lives near Cambridge, MA, and we talked about the book, Corso, getting permissions, and the acronym OPM.

The Kickstarter will end on March 26, which would have been the Corso's 85th birthday. Get over there and help a worthy cause.

I guess I'll ask the obvious question first: Why Gregory Corso?

Back in the heyday of the so-called “Beat Generation,” the late 1950s and early 1960s, Corso was considered one of the most influential and groundbreaking American poets but, unlike the other major Beat writers (Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs), he has fallen into relative obscurity.

In my opinion, Corso was the most beat of the Beats. His backstory is fascinating. When he was just an infant, he was abandoned to foster care by his young parents and his mother just up and left. In 1941, after 11 years in a series of foster homes, Gregory’s father brought him home, thinking it would help him avoid the military in World War II. He ended up getting drafted anyhow and was shipped overseas.

Corso spent his early teens homeless on the streets of New York City and spent time in prison, including New York’s infamous Tombs, for a series of petty crimes. When he was 17, he was arrested one more time. As the story goes, he broke into a tailor shop to steal a suit so that he could impress a girl on a date. Since he had prior offenses, he was sentenced to two to three years at Clinton State Prison in Dannemora, New York. There, he educated himself by reading every book in the prison library including the 1905 Standard Dictionary from cover to cover. It was also in prison that he started writing poetry.

A chance meeting with Allen Ginsberg shortly after his release from prison led to introductions to both Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. The two poets and two novelists formed the inner circle of writers who launched the Beat movement.

Given that history, it’s hard to believe there hasn’t been a collection of Corso interviews before.

Similar works have been published for the other three major Beat writers (Empty Phantoms: Interviews and Encounters with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg's Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958-1996, and Burroughs Live: The Collected Interviews of William S. Burroughs, 1960-1997), so I figured, why not Corso?

I would really have liked to tackle a comprehensive biography of Corso but I don’t have the discipline for such a large project. I’m more of a researcher. I really enjoyed tracking down copies of these interviews in obscure literary magazines and old newspapers and then getting in touch with the copyright holders to negotiate permissions to reprint the works in the book.

How about a peek into the table of contents?

There are 13 interviews in “The Whole Shot” that span the most productive years of Corso’s career: from 1955, when his first collection of poems was published, to 1982, the year following the publication of his last book of all new poetry.

 

Which interview is your favorite?

If I had to pick a favorite, it would be Gordon Selerie’s interview, which took place in 1980. Corso gives the most details of his early years but, being conducted later in his career, he also gets to touch upon almost his entire body of work.

The beauty of this collection is that no two interviews are alike. The earlier pieces, back when the Beats were media darlings, are more humorous--light pieces for the general reading public, like the two Art Buchwald syndicated newspaper articles reproduced in the book. The later interviews are more in-depth, the tone is more serious, and the focus is more on poetry and poetics and less on the whole “Beatnik” phenomenon. Throughout them all, however, Corso’s sense of humor and his candor, his direct honesty, are evident. He was was a colorful character.

Is this your first time as an editor?  

I was an English major in college, not really by choice but because I changed my major so many times in my five years as an undergrad that it just so happened that I ended up with more credits in English than anything else since I had been taking writing and literature electives all along.

In my mid-20s, I edited and published one issue of a 32-page literary magazine--a few short stories and poems written by me and some friends. A true underground publication. I’m sure the vast majority of copies ended up under tons of garbage in a landfill somewhere. I sent copies to dozens of writers whose work I admired to get their feedback. Only Robert Creeley and Richard Brautigan responded, both positively.

Then, later on, my wife and I published four issues of a magazine full of tips and advice for owners of giant breed dogs. It was called Canis Max. We did most of the writing and all of the editing and were just about to break even when the distributor who got it into the bookstores went bankrupt.

Do you remember the first time you encountered Corso's work?

It was really by chance. Shortly after college, my roommates and I would haunt the used bookstores in Harvard Square (Cambridge, MA). I came across a copy of Corso’s The Happy Birthday of Death and picked it up just because I liked the title. I read it. I loved it. It was the perfect mix of humor and wordplay with a touch of surrealism. I was hooked and then went on to explore all the other Beat writers, mostly Kerouac.

This was really my first exposure to Beat literature. Even though I was supposed to read On the Road for one of my college classes, I ended up just reading the Cliff Notes.

As someone who has edited an anthology, I know first-hand that permissions, and the obtaining thereof, is often difficult. What has been your experience, getting permissions for these interviews? Have you had to deal with the Corso estate?

It was very time-consuming but not really frustrating. I don’t think I could have pulled it off without the Internet, though, to help me with my detective work. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to deal with the Corso estate, which was probably a good thing since none of his children responded to any of my requests. As it turned out, all of the interviews reproduced in The Whole Shot, the intellectual property, belonged in most cases to the interviewers or their estates who were much more responsive. A couple pieces were actually in the public domain.

What led to your setting up a Kickstarter?

In a perfect world, I would just shell out a couple thousand dollars of my own money, publish the book, and hope for the best. However, I have four daughters, two in braces and one going to college in the fall, so I really couldn’t justify investing anything but time and effort in something as speculative as an independent publishing project right now. If this book is ever going to see the light of day any time soon, it’s going to require a little bit of OPM, other people’s money.

This is actually my second attempt at funding The Whole Shot on Kickstarter. Back in 2011, I tried and failed but I think it was because I was a bit premature. The book was nowhere near completion. I only had a handful of interviews and still hadn’t received permissions to reprint them all. This time, the book is done--designed, laid out, proofread, and all the permissions are in hand. If it fails again, I’ll probably try a more traditional route to getting it published, maybe shop it around to some university presses at schools that have strong Beat literature programs.

 

What’s New at The Chicago School of Poetics

 

Now in its second successful year, The Chicago School of Poetics (CSoP) is kicking off 2014 with truly unique online course offerings and amazing opportunities to work with leading international poets in an intimate and collaborative setting.

From the comfort of your home or a nearby café, you can participate in courses using our innovative and user-friendly program—choose face-to-face, real-time video or simply listen in. Join an international conversation—courses have included students from Morocco, Canada, and Australia, as well as from the United States. This is a friendly environment for anyone who is looking to refine their work and connect with others.

In order to give students more opportunities to work with our faculty, we have initiated a new 6-week shortened course format that costs less and requires less of a time commitment. We’ve also streamlined our website, so courses are easier to find and registration is only a click away. Click here to register now: Class sizes are limited to maximize face time with the instructors.

Also, check back at chicagoschoolofpoetics.com for registration information about our next master class with Pierre Joris on April 26.

The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way!
—Eileen Myles

This is what a school truly should be – think of Black Mountain College – beyond all the boundaries & borders.
 
—Ron Silliman

 

I am surprised at how much I have learned and how much my writing and editing process has evolved.
—Angie T.

 

I felt lucky to receive such input from an established poet and the price was a bargain because I felt I gained a lot from the class.
—Michael S.

 

Winter 2014 Course Offerings

Poetics Level I with Kristina Marie Darling
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Blending lecture, written exercises, and in-class feedback this course is designed to help you view your poetry with the cold eyes that are necessary to make instinctual edits based on the many tools at your disposal.

 

Poetics Level II with Larry Sawyer
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CST
Poets use techniques such as automatic writing, random effect, shifts in writing method and even location, personal archeology, access to a wide variety of secondary source texts, found language, investigative poetry techniques, journal keeping, experiments with the basics of traditional forms, list poems, etc.

 

Pulse Poem Pulse with Barbara Barg
Mondays, February 24 – March 31
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Language is a poet’s instrument. This class focuses on developing dexterity and creativity with the rhythm, texture, and tonal qualities of language. Students will break language down to its melodic and percussive elements and explore rhythms and sounds from diverse, sometimes unusual sources.

 

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Unholy Spawn of Poetry and Story with Sharon Mesmer
Tuesdays, February 25 – April 1
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Students will examine some very early examples of what we now think of as “hybrid” writing, then blend the hallmarks of those early models (brevity, spontaneity, tightly-focused imagery) with contemporary ideas and techniques (collage, appropriation).

 

Shock the Monkey: Poetry and Mass Media with Larry Sawyer
Sundays, February 23 – March 30
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “Art is anything you can get away with” will be a stepping off point for an examination of how current or popular music, movies, and the cult of celebrity influences one’s world and therefore also one’s writing. Students will study the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of present-day celebrities and use appropriation, investigative methods, parody, the conceptual, replacement methods, hybrid narrative, and ekphrasis to push the limits of their poetry.

 

Erasure Poetry with Kristina Marie Darling
Thursdays, February 20 – March 27
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
This course will focus on erasure poetry, meaning poetry created by excising significant portions of a found text, which is then edited, shaped, and structured by the poet.

 

                                     

                                     

 

Chicago School of Poetics core faculty: Barbara Barg, Kristina Marie Darling, Steve Halle, Francesco Levato,  Sharon Mesmer, Larry Sawyer

 

An Interview with Brooklyn Poets Founder Jason Koo about The Bridge [by Daniel Nester]

Poet, teacher, and founder of Brooklyn Poets Jason Koo emailed me a few days ago to tell me more about its new venture, The Bridge, which he describes as “the world's first poetry networking site connecting student and mentor poets.” After a few exchanges, it turned into a real interview, which appears below. Brooklyn Poets launched a campaign to develop The Bridge; their Indiegogo page has a video and more details.

I enjoyed exchanging thoughts with Jason about poetry and mentoring, as well as new ways of teaching and learning--“delivery models,” as we say in the education business--and, of course, The Bridge.

 
I guess the first question I have would be: Is this a social media poetry site? 

Essentially, yes. The Bridge would be a social network for poets, though something like "craft network" would be closer to what we have in mind. There are a few examples of poetry networks out there, such as poetry.com, but the design leaves a lot to be desired and there's a lack of seriousness about craft--it looks like a site for amateurs.

Ah, the BBS and message boards. I remember them well. So The Bridge will take a different approach, I take it?

What we're hoping to build is a space where amateurs can interact with professional, teaching poets--poets who wouldn't be caught dead on a site like poetry.com. You see this on Instagram, where professional photographers share work in the same community as amateurs. But in our community, poets wouldn't just be sharing and commenting on each other's work, liking it, etc.; student poets--a better term than "amateurs"--would have an opportunity to get serious critiques of their work from mentor poets they admire.

On poetry.com, a "review" of a work consists of a little comment and some stars and everyone tries to accumulate points and badges. That sounds like a lot of fun, but no one's going to learn how to become a better poet that way.

Well, you also have an actual faculty, a super line-up of poets, from Melissa Broder to Jenny Zhang.

Meeting Flossie Williams on the Empire Line [by Daniel Nester]

There’s always the anxiety that the line to Albany is not the line to Albany.

I’m standing in Penn Station near Gate 6, waiting, I hope, for the Empire Service to board. A woman with mid-length blonde hair and a cotton Nehru-style jacket stands ahead of me. I ask if the line is the line for Albany and she says yes.

We talk about trains, then why we’re here. She’s a singer, she tells me. Opera and theatre. Teaches part-time at one of the colleges in Albany, not mine. I tell her I’m a writer, professor. Almost in passing, the singer mentions her current project: an opera about a poet.

Oh, I say. Which one?

William Carlos Williams?

She answers in the form of a question, as if I might not know who the name.

William Carlos Williams! I say back. He’s my favorite all-time poet!

It feels odd saying that; I mean, normally one would say “all-time favorite” when referring to a baseball player or movie. But a poet?

Anyway, hearing more about the Williams opera has to wait. It is confirmed that the line for Albany is in fact the line for Albany, and the crowd is moved uniformly toward the escalator.

We sit across the aisle, the train half-empty. The singer’s name is Kara Cornell (pictured above), and she lives upstate, a few towns over from me. In the Williams opera, she plays Flossie, the doctor's wife. A baritone-co-star plays Dr. Williams, two girls play the Williams sons as boys. Another couple plays art patrons whose name escapes me. And Ezra Pound. A singing Ez!

 

As way make our way past Yonkers, Cornell lets me look at the score. It’s a full-on opera, The News from Poems, written and composed by Susan Kander. I’d written a libretto once years ago, and I want to say Kander’s name sorta rings a bell. Initially a six-song cycle (“The Red Wheelbarrow,” “This is Just to Say” among them), Kander has expanded the work into a full-fledged opera.

Cornell loves her character. “It’s fun because she gets more drunk as the opera goes on,” she says. One scene takes place in Paris, where the Williams family lived from 1928 to 1929. She sings a Flossie snippet in clear mezzo-soprano.

“I love Paree, I love Paree!”

Even whisper-sung, Cornell’s voice fills our part of the train. No one seems to mind.

We have one Facebook friend in common, WAMC’s Joe Donahue, host of The Roundtable. I tell her about The Summer King, an opera composed by my old friend Daniel Sonenberg, about Negro League home run king Josh Gibson, for which I co-wrote the libretto.

Cornell’s repertoire is varied: solo, theatre, opera. Lately, there’s been a pattern, if two roles make a pattern. In another, recent performance, the opera Shining Brow, Cornell plays Catherine Wright, another, shall we say, less-than-happy wife of a prominent artist, architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

There will be a world-premiere atelier (workshop) performance of The News from Poems at The Center for Contemporary Opera’s Cell Theatre in New York on Saturday, November 2nd, 2013 at 8pm.

I mark my calendar. Amtrak's Empire line just got more business. 

I am always moved uniformly by a spirit of my uselessness on the train. Flossie-Kara and I check email on our devices. I’d cancelled classes today because I’d be travelling; students have been emailing me all day, anxious about the rather simple directions I gave them for their take-home assignments. I resolve to ignore them until I get home.

I drink the rest of my coffee, now cold, I bought in the train station, and read about Meg Ryan’s new private life in New York on the cover of People magazine. The leaves outside turn a deeper and deeper orange as we head further north.

 

ASS Ball at OLPH, Maple Shade, NJ, c. 1981 [by Daniel Nester]

At Our Lady of Perpetual Help elementary, the game we played for years was Wall Ball. All you needed was a wall and a ball. Actually, that’s the generic term we used, when one of the sisters or teachers asked us. Wall Ball meant we were throwing a rubber or tennis ball against the two-story tall brick wall and catching it, throwing it again. But then it got boring.  So we started keeping score, like how people play Horse in basketball.  If you tried to catch the ball off the wall and missed it, you got a letter: A, then an S, then another S.That spells ASS. When you spelled out ASS you assumed the position against the wall, bent over with your arms tucked in, cupping over your crotch, and the rest of us got in line to throw as hard as we could at the ASS target. I still remember the hiss from the tennis balls when one of the boys threw it, the sting as it hit my ass cheek or, worse, the tip of my tailbone. Some people took it easy, but most flung away as hard as they could. There was one day in maybe sixth grade, because we were playing in the back yard near the rectory, where we decided to play DICK ball, and got so far as to have one poor guy stand facing the firing squad, everyone aiming at his crotch. I think he put his social studies text in his pants. Sister Katherine, our principal, got wind of that and put the kibosh on it. Rarely did Sister Katherine come out herself to stop some ruckus.  In the Facebook page for our old school, everyone said they hated Sister Katherine with a passion, but I liked her a lot. I was scared of her something serious, but my mom worked for her, and I’d see her after school. She’d be calm, laughing at some joke my mom made. She had a deep voice, which she would make even deeper when she would be serious. When she hollered, she spoke in only spondees; nothing was unaccented when she would cry out, slapping the back of her left hand onto the palm of her right with each syllable, “GIVE THE BALL TO ME HONEY BUNNY.” It sounds hilarious now—who calls anyone honey bunny when they’re angry?—but trying to hear her voice when she says that in my head still sends a tingle up my neck.  Sometimes Sister Katherine would do that to me, and I think she did it to show there was no favoritism toward her secretary’s son.  But the other boys and girls, especially the delinquents, had no doubt I was a big brownnoser.  As much as I still care about what people think of me, I didn’t really care what they thought about that. Maybe it’s because it involved my mom, and my mom didn’t take any shit from anyone.  She was nice to everyone at school.  She’s six foot one, and I remember her coming up to the taller girls in seventh and eighth grade who slouched over so as to not look too much taller than the boys.

“Shoulders out, hon,” she would say, “You’re tall. Get used to it.”

An Apprentice’s Tale: On Philip Levine [by Daniel Nester]

What follows is an adapted version of an essay I contributed to Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, edited by Mari L'Esperance and Tomas Q. Morin and published by Prairie Lights Books earlier this year. The book collects accounts of Philip Levine as a teacher and mentor, and it was a real thrill to be included in the book, alongside some great writers.

Strictly speaking, Levine wasn't a mentor as much of a professor I had one semester. As I hope I explain here, he is much more than that, but the process of wanting a mentor, and accepting one, and seeking one, at least in my experience, is a complicated one, at least if you're me in your mid-twenties. 

I'm hoping to include this essay as well as its companion piece on another person I now call my mentor, Afaa M. Weaver, in a collection next year tentatively called Shader: 99 Notes on Grief, Puberty, and Making Out in Church, from 99: The Press.

 

***

When was the first time I saw Philip Levine? I’m pretty sure it was the first day of classes at New York University in the fall of 1995, out in the lounge with ratty couches, on the second floor of 19 University Place. He sat next to Gerald Stern. They talked about the food in New York and the great poets of Cleveland. Who? Hart Crane and…where in Ohio is Rita Dove from? Some of us joined naming names. Who else? d. a. levy? Yes, d. a. levy, I threw in his name. The desire to impress fogs my memory. Later, Levine sat at the end of the seminar table as we walked in, dressed in a sweater and collared shirt, nice jacket.

I had been in the city for a year, had committed to making something of myself as a poet, and assumed Levine and I would be simpatico, fellow blue-collar travelers. I might have even thought that I had “outgrown” Levine’s poems, fancying myself a more experimental type. The sequence of different disguises I wore in those days is still unclear.

What is clear is I was at once worshipful and ambivalent about being in the same room as the poet who redefined, for me, what was acceptable subject matter in a contemporary poem and how to go about writing about work. Here I was, 26, old by grad student standards, with this 67-year-old poet, in the flesh, about to read our poems for the next 15 weeks.

***

I do remember the first time I read Levine’s poems. It was the fall of 1991, my first poetry workshop, led by Michael S. Weaver (now Afaa M. Weaver) at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. I was a non-matriculated student who had limped through undergrad. We’re talking figuratively, but I also wore a polio brace on my right leg from a landscaping job accident. The figure I struck then was Dickensian. My leg clacked as I walked.

Weaver assigned several poets who remain favorites—Li-YoungLee, Sharon Olds—but the one who stood out for me was Philip Levine. You know the poem: “You know what work is—if you’re/old enough to read this you know what/work is, although you may not do it.”

His poems woke me up because I knew what work was. My grandfather, Curt Little, worked 20 years at a printer where he cut holes through green Turnpike tickets. When the owner went out of business, my grandfather lost his pension. I never heard him complain. My father, Mike Nester, worked nights as a truck driver, dead-lifted 40-pound boxes off the docks, rolled metal drums onto forklifts. My sister walked on his back, cracking verterbae into place. Through high school, I worked at a car wash, where I scrubbed white walls with wire brushes and dried off bumpers. I didn’t have proper work boots or gloves. I put plastic bags over my sneakears with rubber bands.

Philip Levine introduced the idea to me t hat blue-collar work is worthy of making it into a poem, of being poetic. Poetry was no longer just a rich person’s game. And so when Afaa Weaver, who worked in a factory for 15 years before entering the world of poetry, asked me, “What are you going to do with all these poems?” it changed my world. I sat up straight. He suggested this absurd thing called creative writing school.

 

***

As long as I can remember, I’ve had a conflicted relationship with the word “mentor.” It suggests to me a patrilineal passing of the torch or priestly rite of worship. I’m sure this started for me when poetry took the place of faith in God. I was about 19, and it was a welcome change. Still, I was skeptical of poetry. I wasn’t ready, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot to ‘surrender wholly to the work.’

Back then I was a nervous wretch, in most ways unmentorable; I was outgoing and social, but also insecure and rude and still hurting from a father who left us. If I wasn’t writing poems with empty driveways and union jackets left on the hanger, I was writing about nosehair-picking. There was no time to be genteel; a poem had to reflect the brute significance of the oppressed reality of the human spirit, what William Carlos Williams calls the “human particulars.” My particulars didn’t involve paintings, animals, or allusions to philosophy, which seemed to appear in every poem I read in literary journals. I’m tired just explaining it to you now, but back then, that was the credo.

I was needy. Sometimes, it was all I could do to blurt out, all at once, my life story, so that Levine understood me completely, knew why I was sitting in that chair completely, in that room, with these poems, with him. That temptation to confess sat at the tip of my tongue, lapsed Catholic that I was. At other times, I assumed he’d divine I was part of his blue-collar tribe, that we shared this common drudgery between us.

The assumptions varied, but it became evident that Levine just wanted to read and discuss our poems. He was going to read poems, mark them with a pencil, underline words, cross out others. And that, to me, is where the real mentorship began.

 

***

That first class, Levine addressed a rumor about his teaching methods.

“You might’ve heard,” he said, “some story where I tore up somebody’s poem in front of everybody, and this made many people upset, including the writer of that poem. That’s not true.”

I’d heard the story, as had everyone else, and we were surprised he met the story head-on. We knew Levine was a tough customer, or at least had a different communication style, from, say, Sharon Olds, who maintained a yogic calm as we picked each other’s poems apart. I think some of us would have worn it like a badge of honor if Levine tore up one of our poems; I know I would have.

It wasn’t all Kumbaya. Levine did confront us in class.

“What was the greatest book of ‘New York poetry’ ever written?” he asked us one night.

A pause hung in the air. My friend Christopher Connelly sat across the table from me. He said one word under his breath—“Lorca?”—so low it sounded like a cough.

“What was that?” he asked. “Did someone say Lorca?”

Connelly later said he thought he was wrong and should take back what he said. And just when he was about to, Levine pounced.

“Right!” he said. “You are absolutely right. Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York.”

This was a rare moment when someone got the right anwswer, or had any answer. A class with Philip Levine was more about finding the questions to ask.

 

***

Levine said he liked teaching at NYU because we “didn’t act like we were the anointed.” This was true. Our group of 12 were serious about work and gave each other, as we say, great feedback, as great as any class I’d been in, before or since. There were no alliances or payback pools, all of which I’ve seen and some I’ve participated in.

We were also not very sophisticated in the ways of the po-biz. In the years after NYU, I wished we’d been debriefed in navigating the confidence games every poet must play. I may sound like an old man who walked barefoot uphill to school, but back in our day, our program didn’t have much in the way of career advice besides a stack of Writer’s Chronicles and a bulletin board for crappy contests. Writing programs are more adept at faking these things now.

In recent years I have come to think it is good we focused on our poems and poetry in that room. It was a far more pure process, for one, to see our professor take each line of ours, pencil in hand, and match each individual talent to a tradition. Besides, what were we going to do, ask Philip Fucking Levine about what to put on cover letters, or how many poems you send with a SASE to Kenyon Review?

 

***

I am looking at a WordPerfect file of poems I wrote that semester: 47 poems, along with 40 drafts of others. One, “Parade,” a stanza-by-stanza imitation of Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” swaps Fats Domino’s “Careless Love” with Journey’s power ballad “Open Arms” and ends with oversexed MTV videos instead of a family of skunks.

Another poem is so shamelessly imitative of Levine’s I dare not mention its title, only that it involves chalk, an homage to his “The Poem of Chalk,” and frying potatoes, an allusion to his “The Simple Truth.” I know I was not the only one who cribbed words and allusions to spark up an interest in the old man. Imagine collecting these derivative poems from these souls week after week! Imagine the reticence required not to say, Knock it off, brown-noser. Stop imitating me, and write your own damn poems.

 

***

It is not uncommon for poets to send work to teachers after the semester is over, to keep in touch. It doesn’t make sense now, but back then I made a conscious decision not to do this. Levine offered me encouragement and direction, some direct advice. We talked about William Carlos Williams, about “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” and marriage.

I never attempted to keep up a correspondence with Levine. I don’t think he would have wanted to, but that’s not the point. I’m not sure what such a correspondence would have consisted of. Would I have kept on sending him poems, and he’d offer mild encouragement? It didn’t make sense, at least to me, to do such a thing, and to be honest, I saw it as kissing up or striving. Other people don’t feel that way, I know, but back then, that’s how it felt. There were people who bragged about “still talking” to their old teachers. Or maybe they weren’t bragging. Maybe these things simply happen. Regardless, my thought on this matter was always, and still is: Why bother them?

I worked as a secretary at NYU after graduate school, and occasionally I would see Levine in the gym locker room. There he was, Philip Levine, taking off his pants, or putting his towel in a gym bag. I think he swam. I did say hello to him once. It was awkward. We were both half-naked. He was nice, but I don’t think he remembered me, or remembered me in the way I would have wanted him to, which would have been as some poetic genius. It didn’t matter. We had spent our time together and that time was over. I read his poems, he read mine, and then we got back to work doing what we did before.

 

***

Although I have had many excellent teachers in my lifetime, I never thought I had enjoyed the benefits of having a mentor. My thoughts on these matters have changed. Maybe it’s because I am now a father twice over. Maybe I’ve gotten soft in middle age. What I’ve learned is it’s best to acknowledge one’s mentors, and, two decades later, that’s better than not doing anything at all. I look back with a terrible regret for not being open to having mentors or acknowledging them. I think of Afaa Weaver, my first mentor, as well as Philip Levine, because of their work backgrounds, sure; but also, frankly, that they take on a paternal glow in my rear-view mirror. They feel like my fathers.

I think back to years beneath that goddamn car wash blower, how I could scream along with it and no one could hear me. How it’s muffled my hearing to this day. Whenever I shift one foot to another, I know I don’t have to limp around anymore. I can stand straight up.

 

Introduction to The Incredible Sestina Anthology [by Daniel Nester]

What follows is the introduction I wrote for The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which is about to be released by Write Bloody Publishing. It's a culmination of about ten years of off-and-on work, which began when I edited the sestinas section of the McSweeney's website from 2003-2007. I wrote about that experience in Poets & Writers magazine; check out that piece here.

It was around this time that I dove into the sestina underground, where poets hid their single-sestina efforts deep in their hard drives, and others flaunted and fluttered their sheer love of sestinas, whole manuscripts of sestinas, double sestinas, sestina variants. I started to imagine what a whole collection, an anthology of sestinas, might look like: what would comprise a greatest-hits sestina book? What would the cumulative effect of reading 100 or more sestinas, all in one book, have upon the reader?

I started to collect sestinas. Hoard them, really. Folders filled with Xeroxes of inter-library-loaned sestinas, out-of-print sestinas, world-famous sestinas. I met in darkened parking lots to meet sestina informants, where words like rimas dissolutas and cansos redonda were whispered.

Slowly, the manuscript took shape into a proper book. In a couple days, the result, the modestly named The Incredible Sestina Anthology--shortened from its original name, The North American Bible of Incredible Sestinas--will be brought into the world. Only a few days ago did I get my own grubby Bavarian hands on a copy--in my college bookstore of all places--and the result, I daresay, is incredible. You can check out the Table of Contents here. 

What follows after the fold is a BAP Blog Exlusive, a reprint of the introduction I wrote for the book, I decided not to go in the wonky-scholarly direction, not only because that's just no me, as we say, but also because I think this book is for everyone, sestina nerds and nerds alike. Whoever you are, I hope you enjoy it.

“Moby-Cock: Phallicisms in Melville’s Moby-Dick” [by Daniel Nester]

<<<
Only one hand-written page remains in my files. “To travel the Pequod with Herman Melville,” I began, “is to embark on an exclusively male journey.”

To extract phallicisms from Moby-Dick is to simply draw upon an already existent masculinity and reinforce it. The phallus, erect and flaccid, attached and unattached, appears in many implied and hyperbolic forms in Moby-Dick; the archetypal male symbol appears not so much as a motif, but as a fundamental mark in a classic search for man-hood.

>>>
Read more of sestina-meister Dan Nester's term-paper adventures -- as recollected twenty-four years later -- here “Moby-Cock: Phallicisms in Melville’s Moby-Dick.”

Time to Announce . . .

Poetry readings!!!

First up is Frequency North, the visiting writers  series at The College of St. Rose in  Albany, NY and one of our favorites.

Curated by Daniel Nester, the eighth season kicks off on Thursday, September 20, with a reading by Saint Rose writing faculty (Kenneth Krauss, Nester, Hollis Seamon, Rone Shavers and Barbara Ungar) to celebrate the launch of the College’s new master of fine arts degree in creative writing.

Acclaimed writer Anne Trubek reads Thursday, October 18, as the series takes part in the National Day of Writing. (Location: Saint Joseph Hall Auditorium, 985 Madison Ave., Albany.)

 

Prize-winning young poet Eduardo C. Corral and former dominatrix now author Melissa Febos drop in to read Thursday, November 15.

 

All reading begin at 7:30 pm and except where noted, will be held in the Standish Rooms, Events and Athletics Center (Second Floor), 420 Western Ave., Albany.

 

For the complete 2012-2013 lineup, go here.

Frequency North, Slam Poetry in Albany and Other Readings-Type Things [Daniel Nester]

Greetings from the Capital Region, 800,000- and four counties-strong. We're north of the Hudson Valley, south of the North Country, west of Western Massachusetts, east of Central New York. So now you know where I come from (or from where I come).

Anyway! Stacey invited me to post here once in awhile to pass along news of events going on and stuff that goes on. So here goes.

Frequency North: The Visiting Writers Reading Series at The College of Saint Rose, is my little series, and starts up this Thursday, October 27, with two super novelists, Dana Spiotta and Tobias Seamon. Spiotta has been racking up quite a critical round of applause for her new novel Stone Arabia. Seamon's latest, The Emperor's Toy Chest is a follow-up to The Magician's Study. I published a sestina of his over at McSweeney's. I just came across this piece of his on that site as well.

On November 10, Megan Abbott, a mystery-noir master, comes to the series, which should be a blast. 

The Nitty Gritty Slam is the first proper poetry slam round these parts in over a decade. I've been keeping score and generally putting Frequency North support behind it. It's a combined effort with Albany Poets and Urban Guerilla Theater. We started last month, and it's been a real hoot. It's held at Valentine's, a rock club/bar that hosts lots of what has been called alternative music for quite some time now. Slams happen on the first and third Thursdays, and what's been interesting, for me at least, is that since there has been no set-in-stone slam here for so long, the work is quite strange, quirky. People read off the page. They're not overly rehearsed, as is often the case with slammers. It's hosted by a man named Dain Brammage (on right). Think about it. OK. Let's move on.

The New York State Writers Institute has an excellent line-up of writers, all top-notch, many familiar to those on the poetry world: Wayne Koestenbaum, Philip Shultz, not to mention Colson Whitehead and events sponsored by Fence magazine. Most events are held in the white concrete moon colony that is the SUNY-Albany campus, which only makes arriving at a warm room and a reading all the more miraculous.  

That's it for now. More soon.