The Best American Poetry

Two Poems by Dante Di Stefano

Dante Di Stefano's "Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen" was chosen by Dana Gioia for The Best American Poetry 2018. "Exodus," the second poem here, is of the same vintage. -- DL

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen

In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
[of the moon] will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.

Exodus

             It takes a lifetime’s blindness to see one’s father.

                        —Cid Corman

My father mumbled forth his violated commandments for half my life.  I inscribed them on incense and holy water and when I drank them they tasted like cigarette ashes in a coca cola can.  There were no tablets save the pills he didn’t take.  Like Moses stuttering to the stones and scrub brush, his dictates turned me into a desperate Aaron, bewildered, dutifully translating the fire raging in a reed thicket into the voice of God.  He slept for days on end, dreaming apple orchards. He believed the smell of college elevator steel was sacred.  Once he pronounced the stars memory-less pickpockets. He decried windows.  He expounded upon the intractability of silverware. I fought him twice and both times he had the strength of the archangel ascending into heaven, swooping down the mountain. Birds were not his emissaries. Canaan, he would have us all know, was a broken dinner plate and asparagus-spattered walls. From the edge of his hospital bed, I finally saw him unfolding in time and I could almost see him. Last night, as he nodded in his recliner, weak from the new medicine he’s taking, I knew no staff would split this rock.

from the archives; first posted December 18, 2020

First Poems: A Conversation with Philip Metres, Jessica Jacobs, Leah Umansky, Murray Silverstein, and H.L. Hix [curated by Dante Di Stefano]

In My Trade Is Mystery, Carl Phillips writes the following: “I’ve long been fascinated with the role of a first poem in a poet’s first book. It’s a bit like the literary equivalent of attending one’s first debutante ball.” Phillips explains that this first poem is how we’ve chosen to announce ourselves, deliberately and purposefully, to the world. This first poem is encoded with preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions that might either be reiterated or railed against throughout the course of subsequent books.

In the spirit of Carl Phillips’s observations above, I asked four poets with new books out to answer the following questions and respond to Phillips’s remarks. Here are the questions: could you include the text of the first poem in your first book below and discuss what is encoded in it for you? How long has it been since you wrote the poem? How different are you—aesthetically, personally, imaginatively—from when this poem was published in book form? How does your latest book unfold either in dialogue, or in argument, with your “original” poem?

The answers shared by these four brilliant, big-hearted poets delighted me and expanded my understanding of their individual bodies of work. I hope you find these responses (and these first poems) as interesting as I do. ~Dante Di Stefano

***

Philip Metres

    Primer for Non-Native Speakers

    This is an apple. What is it?
    A table. Some bread and tea.

    II.

    And this? This is a ruble,
    a rue, a wish I could sell you
    exactly what I feel.  
    A double negative: if you can’t
    not speak, then write. Sit and eat 
    the peeled apple in your hand.

    III.

    I understand X,
    but cannot speak Y.

    Possessive phrases: he has,
    she has, I don’t have.
    Look, I lack,
    says my language.

    IV.

    My language—

    A heavy winter coat,
    tight in the shoulders.
    Sour apples,
    plucked by the breeze.
    Dirt stars,
    smudges on knees.

    V.

    My camera is broken.
    Can you sing? Where can I
    hang my coat?

    VI.

    The titmouse chitter
               before song.

    The mad clap
            and wingstutter

    of lifting pigeons,
            an asthmatic’s wheeze.

    VII.

    A line at the beer kiosk—
    discourse in the past perfect,
    the present imperfect.
    Questions in the future indefinite.

    VIII.

    He missed his love.
    He brought with him.
    The sun already set.
    He wound up at the station.
    An inopportune time.
    “They beat you
    because of your face,
    not because of your passport.”

    IX.

    I have a few questions
    of a personal nature:
    Where is the toilet?
    How many acts in this play?
    What is the rate of exchange?
    Where does this street lead?

    When is my turn?
    You come after the speaker from Bulgaria.
    Who is speaking now?
    Could you speak
    even slower?

    X.

    Prepositions governing
    the accusative, the simple superlative
    of adjectives. The Moscow Metro
    is a most punctual subway.
    It is also most busy. I’ve lost
    my reflexive pronoun
    many times among the
    babushkas, bags, dacha bicycles,
    drunks and dogs.

 

    XI.

    Would you like to see
    Yury Gagarin’s spaceship?

    Would you like to visit
    the Exhibition of the National
    Economic Achievements
    of the U.S.S.R.?

    At the metro entrance,
    babushkas scolding
    other people’s children,
    someone selling fresh eggs,
    pickled cukes, kittens in a coat,
    and where the blast of cold
    meets the metro heat,
    the wordless pleading
    of a blind pensioner.

    XII.

    Reticence of winter streets.

    XIII.

    The constant stress of simple comparative:
    ours, yours, ours, yours.

    XIV.

    And in a dark stairwell, smell
    of drying urine,
    the light bulb stolen
    again this week.

    XV.

    And in a dark stairwell,
    a stone-drunk body.
    Iambic steps now running up stairs,
    the swear
    of a slammed door.

    XVI.

    And in a dark stairwell,
    a cry—
    she’s just learned the language
    of rigormortis,
    then teaches the drunk

    the declensions
    of an outraged woman’s fists.

    XVII.

    If anyone asks for me,
    I’m in Chapter Ten.

    XVIII.

    This is a label. What is it?
    A libel, a labia, a lust, alleluia.

    XIX.

    And this? A table.
    Some bread and a plea.

    XX.

    Please.
    What is it?
    You are wanted on the phone.
    There is no dial tone.
    The telephone is out of order.
    I’ll be waiting for your call.

    XXI.

    Goodbye, dear friends.
    I wish you every success.
    Have a safe journey.
    Please, stay.

    XXII.

    Let me introduce myself.
    I feel sick.
    How much must I pay
    for excess baggage?

                *

Poetically speaking, I was something of a late bloomer. I wrestled and floundered with language and form for much of my twenties, but like Jacob, I refused to let go. I found that working on translations helped, because I could live inside the architecture of another poet’s voice and vision, and try to find a language and form in English.

I was nearly a decade removed from living in Russia when I published “Primer for Non-Native Speakers,” what would become the first poem of my first book, in To See the Earth (2008). It’s a decidedly and self-consciously self-conscious and experimental poem, influenced by my year of living in Russia and my translations of the avant-garde poet Lev Rubinstein. I’d spent a year in Russia on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, studying “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change,” which basically gave me the chance to meet poets, translate, and figure out what it might look like to live a life of poetry. Though I did not meet Rubinstein until much later, I met him on the page, and found his work utterly delightful. Since the 1970s, influenced by Fluxus and other native avant-garde movements, Rubinstein wrote poetic texts on library cards—series of little card-sized poems that often blended and parodied all manner of discourses (official speech, traditional poetic language, street talk, etc.). “Primer” is, in part, a homage to Rubinstein and to the conversation primer as a found form, as I tried to discover myself in another language, and discover another language in myself. It’s playful, weird, and funnier than nearly all of my other poems.

Fugitive/Refuge, my latest book, carries with it some of things I learned along the way in Russia—the blessed idea that, as one poet put it, “my homeland is [Russian] literature.” The idea that we could make language-sanctuaries, expansive imaginative places of refuge, has been one that I’ve returned to, again and again. As with all my work, I’m constantly finding forms in the forms and shapes that language takes. Call it a hermit crab poetics, after the essayistic innovation. In the book, I have a footnote poem, a manifest poem, and many other poems that take their shapes from found forms. It’s also relentlessly concerned with travel—but in this case, the problem and poetics of human migration, a feature of global human existence that flared up with a certain intensity in the early 21^st century. We are all trying to find home. For some of us, that journey is a heartbreaking one of exile from a homeland, or houselessness in a blighted city; for others, it’s a long winding back to our own bodies. All of us, trying to home in.   

***

Jessica Jacobs

The first poem from Pelvis with Distance, a biography-in-poems of Georgia O’Keeffe/a self-portrait by proxy (White Pine Press, 2015):

IN THE CANYON I (ARRIVAL)

[Abiquiu, NM; present day]

From the outside, a small adobe butte: thick-walled and squat, with a roofed wooden deck that doubles its claim of desert. The shower, a black bag, dangles from a beam, and the outhouse, two minutes’ walk to the west, is a toilet on a platform with no walls. Inside, it’s tight as a ship’s hold, with a window punched into each white stucco wall. There’s no electricity, no reception. On the only set of shelves, the food I hope will last a month, which is how long I am to live here.

This morning—a life ago—the gray ribbon of highway fissured a thousand variations of red, from Santa Fe past pueblos of single-wides, scrawny dogs minnowing the heat-shimmers. Past the taquerias and feedstores of Española and onto 84. A stretch long and straight enough to invite excessive speed, it’s marked with descansos of makeshift crosses, flowers, and toys—an alternate triptik of lost children and travelers who died without reaching their destinations.

Then sixteen miles of rutted dirt road, the flat top of Pedernal hovering above—the mountain Georgia O’Keeffe painted obsessively, half-joking that God told her if she painted it often enough it would be hers.

To write these poems, I’ve come to live in her backyard.

At the ranch, I park in a back pasture. Transfer books, food, and my dog into the caretaker’s beat-up black truck. The final five miles are more tire tracks than road, helixed so tight to a riverbed—mostly dry in this driest June—we cross it thirteen times before leaving one canyon to enter another. Beyond a scumble of scrub brush and low-slung piñons, the cabin.

This noon sun devours all shadows. Only questions remain.

                *

I wrote this poem in the summer between my second and final year of the now no-longer Purdue MFA program, during one of the loneliest times in my life. Two years before, I’d walked away from a career in academic publishing—a promising, well-compensated career in which, by the end of many long fluorescent-lit days, I could barely remember what had filled my time, and certainly couldn’t say why it mattered. So on little more than a hunch that teaching and writing poetry might be more of what I was meant to do, I left Manhattan for the corn- and soyfields of Indiana.

The winter before writing this opening poem, I’d found myself transfixed in front of Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Pelvis with Distance” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, a painting whose foreground is a massive pelvic bone backed by a scrim of tiny blue mountains. Thus began seven months of reading every biography and scrap of her writing I could find, before heading to that primitive cabin in Abiquiu with a binder of notes, a crate of books, and as much trepidation as hope that I might one day write a book.

It was a month free of other people, with no media other than books to fill my time. Such solitude was the antithesis of loneliness. Instead, it was a space of light that “devour[ed] all shadows,” in which the kind of questions we often stop asking ourselves after adolescence (What does it mean to live a good life?) were given room to reemerge.

Looking back, that time in the high desert was a clear inflection point. Returning to the noise and hurry of the world, in short order, I fell in love, got married (a marriage that would end just shy of a decade later), got a visiting professor gig, and wrote my second book Take Me with You, Wherever Your Going (Four Way Books 2019) to try and capture the heady rush of love and those early years of commitment.

I also read the Torah in its entirety for the first time in an attempt to have some company in those big questions and, with that reading, began a slow walk back to the Judaism I’d left behind as a teenager. I immersed myself in scripture, biblical scholarship, and Midrash, which is writing about and into the Torah, and was moved to found Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the type of community I lacked and longed for in graduate school.

The seven months of O’Keeffe research became the precursor for the seven years of study it would take to write my most recent book. unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis, was published by Four Way Books in March, and continues to explore and expand on the questions that animated my first book’s first poem—that threshold, as well as the book and life of writing and literary community that lay beyond it. Reading “In the Canyon I (Arrival)” again, devoutly secular person I was at the time, I was surprised to find the word “God” there. I guess our obsessions, even when unknown or perhaps unacknowledged, find their way to the surface, waiting like wayfinder marks for us to notice and follow them toward what the deeper, less conscious parts of ourselves know we most need.

 

***

 

Leah Umansky

My first book is Domestic Uncertainties and it was published in 2012 with BlazeVOX.   I think Phillips’s is absolutely right.   My first poem, in my first book is called, “What Literature Teaches Us About Love” and it’s a poem inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. If you know me, you know that book is one of my deepest obsessions.  wrote that poem in 2009, fifteen years ago.   So much is encoded in that poem. I wrote that poem in the year that my marriage dissolved, soon after our one and only marriage counseling appointment where it was brought to my attention that I needed to be back in a poetry workshop. This was the first poem I wrote when I started putting together my application for Patricia Carlin’s  Poetry Workshop at The New School’s Continuing Education program, a course I took, two semesters a year, for over 10 years.  Looking back now, I realize how much that first poem set up my career as a writer -- my obsession with prose poems, my obsession with repetition, and of course, love.  

I am very different from when the book was first published. First of all, I’ve been divorced for over fifteen years. I've written five books of poems, I’ve been a high school and middle school English teacher for over fifteen years, and I’ve been the host and curator of the COUPLET Reading Series here in NYC that I started back in 2011.  I created a new identity for myself as a writer, a poet and a woman.  I also fostered and created my own chosen family, my own community of poets and writers, who shaped me into the person I am today.  I conquered fears I never thought I would conquer and I’ve taken many risks 

To be honest,  I can say the same about my writing.  My writing has grown more  expansive and more political, yet I believe it to be as inventive as it always was. One thing that has remained the same is my love for the ‘I,’ in a poem, and my love, well, for love. I have always been fond of wordplay and repetition in a poem, and I think my recent poems, even in my new manuscript I’m nearly done with, currently entitled Ordinary Splendor, that still bleeds over.

In terms of dialogue, I believe that every poem I write is a love poem. (Dante, you know this better than most as I show you many of my poems. ) I always believe that I am writing the same poem - it’s one of my biggest frustrations as a poet but then I realize that all art is about obsession in some shape or form. Even the darker poems about hatred and greed in my new collection, OF TYRANT (Word Works Books), are love poems, because through their darkness, they highlight,  love.  

*

 

What Literature Teaches Us About Love

How long does Heathcliff wait before he storms through Linton’s door? And how long does it take him to learn the words she wants him to learn. To learn the habits Cathy wants him to acquire. How long does it take him to adapt to silk and satin? To grow adept to words like master and sir and certainly?  And he does this for her.  And for love.  And for passion.  And for truth.  And for beauty.  And he does this for her. For all the things she wants in a life.  And he does this for her. And he does this for her. And he does this for her. And he does this for him, too, for when he finally gets behind that glass door; he will need this love.  When he finally gets beyond that door, he will learn that she is not his – and what he thought was just a new name, an appendix, a footnote, a seal, is more than a name:  it is an anchor to the world. And then, she crashes and is lost in the gasp of the night. He faces the bleak –and this is good enough for him – this life and love after death, because this all goes on beyond the grave. And after death there is no heart. And after death there is no unknowing for what could’ve been there is only what is. And there is only what has. And Love. Always Love. 

 

***

Murray Silverstein

The first poem from my first collection, Any Old Wolf (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2006) is the title poem. The book had already been accepted under the title, Hey, You, Alive, when I came up with the wolf poem. I’d been reading Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs, and somehow got to wondering how vowels sounded in the Hawaiian language, when the first line of the poem appeared: “Puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business on Old McDonald’s farm.” When the poem was completed I was sure it had to be in the manuscript, and asked the press to let me both open the book with it, and make it my title poem.

    Any Old Wolf

    Puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business
    on Old McDonald’s Farm,
    I once thought vowels were feed, like hay 

    and slop, and therefore the critters cried neigh
    or moo, oink or baa: they needed
    to be fed. They came with consonants

    like teeth, but vowels came from the man.
    And when night fell, wild ones crept
    around the barn to nab their share.

    The famous wolf in silhouette against
    the famous moon is howling back
    his vowels in praise—it’s good to be

    among the fed. The sadness
    in his note is need. Ah, to need
    he howls, but oh, to be well fed!

    He believes his w, his l and f are mortal,
    but his o grew from a seed
    that fell once from the moon.

    I am, I know, just any old wolf,
    but I eat of the i, eternal,
    and so I ah at the oo, which also is eternal.

    I took in a t from the teats of my ma
    but hunt the great farm for my e-i, o.

                *

The poem dates from the early 2000s. I turned sixty in 2003, had been a practicing architect for many years, and was just beginning to write poetry. I’d written some poetry in my teens and twenties, but had set that work aside when I became an architect. I kept reading poetry, though, slowly working my way through Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible, Dickinson, Whitman . . . . In my 50s, the desire to write returned. On a trip to Italy to scatter the ashes of my beloved mother-in-law, I kept a journal. Reading through it, noticing I was breaking the lines, my wife said, These are poems. Shortly thereafter, in a gift that changed my life, she gave me a blank notebook, inscribed with a line from the late-discovered Gospel of Thomas: “If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you,” and I was off to the races.

Now in my eighties, I find something of myself still “encoded” in that first poem: The speaker’s child-like frame of mind, a kind of organized innocence, the idea that our mortal bodies are laced with immortal cravings, that language itself contains the secret sauce whose ingredients are found in the religious imagination (“I eat of the i eternal”)—all that still matters to me, is still very much at the core of how I think and feel about poetry.

This morning, scanning around in a file of notes for future poems I find this:

    Inscribed in sounds and shapes, including the sound and shape of the ABCs, secrets wait (and want) to be revealed. Sighs and     wails, chuckles and smirks, want to be poems and songs; just as physical materials want to be buildings (Lou Kahn: “What do     you want to be, I ask the brick, and the brick says, ‘I want to be an arch.’”). Dark and elusive, reality wants to be governed by     elegant shapes and laws like e = mc squared.

    Your mother’s face before you had words. And behind her, in the shadows, your father: voice without face, body or shape.

I’ve been writing steadily since Any Old Wolf, and hopefully there’s been some development. The earlier work was clunkier, I think, and often, to my ear today, too wordy. I’m in my eighties now and being closer to the end imposes itself in a variety of ways. Be brief! But, in the thick of it, it’s sometimes hard to see the differences. The body speaks, of course. But the imagination speaks too, talks back to the aging body: Not so fast, with the despair! There are beginnings to be found in ends, right?

I’ve been reading The Divine Comedy again, with some poet friends, and trying my hand at translating passages from Purgatorio. Here’s a recent attempt at its opening lines:

    Hell behind me now, set sail   
                for better waters, little boat
    of my imagination, that second space, its seas

                made not of language, but language
    charts the way, where human spirits
                whispered clean, are worthy of the stars.

    In other words, dear Muse, I’m yours:
                Let poetry rise from what’s dead in me,
    and the mother of Orpheus guide my song.

That’s what I want, where I want to go. That space, that second space. Second Space, by the way, is the title of Czeslaw Milosz’s amazing last book, written in his 90s. I love the thought that poetry, with its roots in both song and the religious imagination, tries to navigate the strange waters of imaginative space, to  find and offer its readers a home there, in language. Once again: I am, I know, just any old wolf, but I eat of the i eternal.

So I guess, in a way, and given my late start as a poet, I’m basically “reiterating.” Though it feels more accurate to say, I’m trying to dive deeper into this mystery, which says Phillips, is our trade. A poem in my new book speaks in the voice of all that have died, and begins,

    You must change the past, you alive,    
    make it other, without so much suffering.

    Impossible, you say?    
    But think, you alive, what else

    is language for? Name the river    
    running through your thirsty selves.

 The three books (Any Old Wolf, Master of Leaves, and Red Studio) (with, I hope, a fourth to come), are that unfolding you spoke about in your initial question. But of course that observation must be left to a future reader.

I had a text exchange with my daughter recently—now a film-maker, and a middle-aged mother of two (she’s the child in the opening pages of Wolf)—which ended with me blurting out, “Life sucks but there’s love.” And right now that seems to me a pretty good statement of what my current efforts in poetry boil down to. I think I can say that Red Studio has become for me, in a way that characterized neither of the first two books, a kind of second space; you are invited to enter the imaginative space within which the struggle to make poems occurs. There’s a kind of “present at the creation” quality that, for me, is new and that moves me. The title poem is a comment on Matisse’s painting, L’Atelier Rouge, his famous portrait of the studio within which he works.

Red Studio includes a poem, “Solomon at Eighty” (part 3 of “Three Bible Studies”). It’s in the voice of King Solomon, builder of the mythical first temple; this Solomon, of course, in part, is me, retired architect turned poet. “I built my father’s temple then I quit,” he says, adding that he’s built a studio for himself behind the temple, where he’s working on two books. The first, he says, is almost done (let’s call that Red Studio), and he follows this with:

. . . . The other one’s a sketch and I’ll need time. Hidden in our bodies, at the center of all songs, is a secret song I hope to sing.

What “my Solomon” is referring to of course is his desire in old age to write the Song of Songs. (The scholar-redactors of the Hebrew Bible, in a moment of imaginative glory, named Solomon as the author of the sexy and transcendent, and otherwise authorless, Song.) Dante placed Solomon, pre-Christian by miles though he was, in his Paradiso, right next to the sun. I think about that, and hope something about this will appear in my next book: Exiled Dante, in plague-ridden Ravenna, soldiering through his own old age, places Solomon in his Paradiso, where, for the pilgrim, he clarifies what to expect from the resurrection of bodies: we won’t exactly be us when we merge with the wind, but we’ll Be.

Life’s secret songs are the forms of that Being, the songs that poetry aims to sing. Or this: the child that lives in a man of sixty, puzzled by all the e-i, e-i-o business on Old McDonalds farm, thought vowels were something to eat, and, hard though it is to imagine, twenty years later still does.

***

H.L. Hix

Thank you for this great question, Dante.  If Phillips is right about the first/first poem’s prescience, then the only really robust answer to your question would be a whole poetics, one that, having broken the code of preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions that engenders and organizes one’s life work, laid out in full that code’s grammar and lexicon.  Plenty, though, warns me away from taking on that task: I don’t want to wear out the welcome you have offered me into your project; I suspect that I am not the most reliable explicator of my own preoccupations, obsessions, and assertions; and I doubt that I could elaborate so comprehensive a vision.

To orient a more modest, more realistic approach, let me take a cue from another moment in Phillips’s book: “We are, each one of us,” he notes, “many selves simultaneously coinciding and refusing to.  The self that can provide — through articulated thought — a way through conundrum addresses that other self that can’t find, or has lost, the way.”  In place of presuming to undertake an exhaustive poetics, let me try in this response to your question simply to be the self capable of articulated thought, even though the poem was composed by the self who couldn’t find a way through conundrum.

Here is the poem:

    THE ACT

    1.

    We have practiced the act since I can remember.
    His father, also a knife-thrower, began teaching him when he was very young.
    I became his assistant soon after, for our parents had paired us when I was born.
    We married at thirteen, and began performing a year later, after his father died in an accident.
    The Circus called him “The Great Pietro,” though his real name is Dmitri.
    I used to weep over being forced to marry him.
    I said I could not love him.
    But Papa always said love is made of danger, not romance.
    I believe him now.
    I fear Dmitri more with each performance.
    I tell him I trust him, that I only act frightened.
    But the knives could really kill, and it is because of this fact that I love him.
    The knives are there always, not only on stage.
    If they were not there, I’d hate him.

    2.

    The circus posters say I’ve never missed.
    But one could say I’ve always missed.
    The act consists of my throwing the knives as close as I can to the target without hitting it.
    The appeal of the act is that the target is a beautiful young lady, and someday I might not miss.
    The audience pays not to see the lady’s death, but to see my ruin.
    Both views (that I’ve never missed, that I’ve always missed) are based on the same deception.
    They assume I have a target.
    The act depends on this deception, so my assistant dresses in a sequined outfit and acts frightened.
    But I have no target.
    For me she does not exist.
    Ever.
    If she existed even for a moment, she would exist on stage.
    For me she is simply never there.
    If she were there, I’d kill her.

                *

The poems in Perfect Hell are not ordered chronologically by date of composition, and “The Act,” though placed first, was not written earliest.  Still, it was written several years before the book’s 1996 publication, which means that when I wrote this poem, I was half my present age.  We most often speak of ourselves as unified persons living one life from birth to death, but we also have a contrasting way of speaking in which we identify as sequential selves replacing one another (as in “I’m a different person now than I was then”).  As the person writing this response to your question, the latter way of speaking seems more apt: in felt experience at least, I am a different person now than I was then.  The person who wrote “The Act” seems long ago and far away, a stranger I only half remember and don’t entirely trust, one of those friends with whom now that you are no longer in contact you wonder why you ever were, a “him” and not a “me,” a self my present self replaced rather than a self my present self fulfills.

But maybe that’s a price one pays for a life of writing.  Poetry has not offered me a stay against confusion, but I have tried with it to mitigate self-deception.  Whatever else is true about the person who wrote “The Act,” he was not who he thought he was.  I doubt poetry can kill self-deception, but I hope it can help sustain self-correction.  I take that as one reason why your question is so compelling: for all the distance and “disconnect” between those two selves, past him and present me, there are in “The Act” premonitions of my more recent poetry, continuities that connect his work then to my work now.  Thinking about this poem in relation to a more recent book resembles metaphor: finding salient likeness in distinct and mostly unlike items.

One compromise in the publishing process for Perfect Hell worked in favor of “The Act.”  In mid-production the publisher eliminated a signature, to cut costs.  To preserve as much poetry as possible, one space-saving design measure was to start sections on the left-hand page rather than the right (using the page usually left blank after a section title page).  Doing so allowed the poem’s stanzas to appear on facing pages, which highlights their symmetry: the reader can see that they have the same number of lines, without having to count the lines.  The stanzas’ equal length is not accidental, of course, and one principle behind it is that similarity of form accentuates difference of content: imposing on the two speakers the same constraint on how they speak heightens the contrasts in what they say.  I’m sure I was applying the principle intuitively in writing the poem; it wasn’t something I “said out loud” to myself.  But it is hardly a recondite principle available only to special favorites of the Muses: we apply it in the courtroom, in high school debate tournaments, and so on.  By these and other applications we recognize the principle’s connection to such ideals as justice, truth, and wisdom.  To call out violations of the principle we have a technical vocabulary (e.g. “epistemological injustice”) and an informal vocabulary (e.g. “shouting down” another person).  Jaron Lanier identifies the erasure of the principle in the insular algorithmic information sourcings of social media as a threat to democracy.  It is a structural principle, but it entails valuations and enacts revelations.

The “mirroring” that in “The Act” manifests first in that simple line-for-line match, giving two voices equal space for each to have its say, has proven important for me in many works that followed that first/first poem.  If I take my 2023 Constellation as the recent book with which to put “The Act” in dialogue, it’s a mirroring-times-two.  In “The Act,” the “her” who speaks the first stanza and the “him” who speaks the second are given the same number of lines, to emphasize their literally and figuratively facing one another, their equal-and-opposite ways of (not) seeing one another.  In Constellation, the mirroring is at a larger scale, and doubled, but it’s still mirroring.  The book has four poems, “Luminosities,” “Candescences,” “Grit,” and “Silt,” interrelated in such a way that each poem has two mirrors instead of one.  So for example the first poem, “Luminosities,” has two mirrors, the second poem, “Candescences,” and the third poem, “Grit.”  As with line count in “The Act,” so with stanza count in Constellation: each poem has fifty stanzas.  What the first-person speaker, the I, of “Luminosities” says reflects (against) what the I of “Candescences” says, just as what she says in “The Act” reflects (against) what he says.  But “Luminosities” has a second mirror: “Grit,” also in fifty stanzas, maintains a very explicit gloss or commentary relationship between a given stanza and its corresponding stanza in “Luminosities.”  In “The Act,” the two speakers are explicitly distinguished as the “him” and “her” of a married heterosexual couple, each in turn speaking in the first person.  In Constellation, the first-person speakers in “Luminosities” and “Candescences” are not distinguished so explicitly: they’re less like differently-gendered marriage partners than they are like the articulated-thought self and the lost-in-conundrum self that Phillips identifies.  Just as in “The Act,” though, or as in a courtroom, they are given equivalent conditions in which to have their say.

To hint at how the double mirroring in Constellation plays out, here are the first stanzas from each of the four poems (part of the stanza for the first two, the whole stanza for the second two).

            From “Luminosities”:

    Against landscape, butterfly.  Scolding its intemperate wings,
    strict pattern.  Within that pattern any moment of color,
    behind that moment one grain of dust.  There’s a reason we bow
    to brilliance: coruscations escaping a caught trout’s bright scales,
    ultramortality of meteor meeting atmosphere. 

            From “Candescences”:

    Empty of people, the streets, but not empty.  Not empty of foxes, for example, who if they notice me never let on.  If they were more wary, I might feel     more real, more myself.  More a self, any self.  I thought with all this walking I would locate something, and what I would locate would be myself.  Instead,     each spent breath shimmers and dissipates, and I follow that countdown, those ephemeral intensifications reflecting again what has been reflected already     off moon, cloudscrim, snow.

            From “Grit”:

    For intemperate, the reader may substitute indelicate, inflexible, inveterate, inviolate, insatiate, or any other four-syllable iambic word beginning with the     negative prefix in-.  Recall here (recall, indeed, throughout this entire work) the use of epithets in the Iliad and Odyssey, their application guided by rhythmic     context rather than by denotative content.  I defer here no more than Homer deferred there to reference as the exclusive source or arbiter of meaning.

            From “Silt”:

    This concern for distance is not peculiar to me, not a function of my misanthropy or my debilitating agoraphobia.  All sociability depends at least as much on     distance as on proximity.  Except when they’re forced into bait balls by dolfins or bluefin, herring maintain their group by each individual keeping its distance     from every other.  Starlings stipple a power line by settling each just far enough from the next not to be pecked by it.  I’m not trying to draw you closer to me,     my love, and I’m not trying to draw closer to you: I’m trying to establish and maintain enough distance.

The brilliant summer butterfly wing dust and fish scales in the first passage are mirrored by the shimmering moonlit winter breath in the second, and the word “intemperate” in the first passage is mirrored by “indelicate” and the words that follow it in the list in the third passage.  The foxes in the second passage are mirrored by the herring and starlings in the fourth passage, and by the butterfly and trout in the first passage.  And so on.  Like the speakers in “The Act,” the speakers in Constellation could be said to share a body of experience but to experience that experience quite differently.  Giving such speakers “equal time” through structural constraint in the way that I am calling “mirroring” is, then, a way for me to try to live up to the ideal that in The Language of Inquiry Lyn Hejinian so elegantly formulates: “It is the task of poetry to produce the phrase this is happening and thereby to provoke the sensation that corresponds to it — a sensation of newness, yes, and of renewedness — an experience of the revitalization of things in the world, an acknowledgment of the liveliness of the world, the restoration of the experience of our experience — a sense of living our life.”

I recognize that “mirroring” is a metaphor: stanzas with similar structures or images or themes can figuratively mirror one another, but are not literally mirrors.  I find the metaphor apt, though, to the pairing that structures these poems, because it appeals to the aspiration for self-knowledge that animates these (and so many other) poems.  We take literal mirroring as an indication of self-awareness or its lack: it is funny to watch a dog bark at a mirror, not recognizing the image there as its own reflection, and scientists consider it an indicator of self-awareness that a dolphin can recognize itself in a mirror.  Self-awareness travels readily from literal mirroring to figurative, making symmetrical structures uncanny and resonant expositors of interiority.

For me, then, the mirroring in these poems doesn’t supplement the poem with a technical flourish, an accessory complementing the ensemble that dresses up the poem.  It is not the formal icing on the content cake.  To the contrary, mirroring is integral to the poem’s operation.  Again, there’s a principle at work: we feel structure.  Structure is susceptible to analysis and explication, so a music theorist can “take apart” the structure of a Bach fugue.  But even a person (such as myself) with quite limited music-theoretical knowledge experiences emotion upon hearing the fugue.  One could say that’s all a Bach fugue is, a structure of tones, but it “works on me,” engaging my whole person: my emotions, my mood, my thoughts, even my heart rate and muscle tension.  Structure is evocative, even transformative: it changes the one who encounters it (as captured by the cliché that “music soothes the savage beast”).  In “The Act” I leaned on structure (such as what I’m here calling “mirroring”), and that early faith in (dependence upon) structure has continued in all my poetry since then.  It shows up in Constellation with a vengeance, in the doubled mirroring and in various other ways.

That first/first poem “The Act” and the recent book Constellation are not outliers for me in their use of mirroring.  What I’m calling “mirroring” here is an intensified form of comparison, certainly, but it is continuous with, not isolated from, our many modes of comparison: metaphor, parataxis, and so on.  From Aristotle through contemporary cognitive scientists such as George Lakoff, praise of metaphor has been consistent: I’m not the first person ever convinced of the revelatory power of setting things side-by-side!  My being so convinced, though, is behind my building “mirroring” into numerous other works in addition to these two.  My recent collection Moral Tales, for instance, has the same double-mirror structure as Constellation: a set of Plato translations with a set of the same number of Marie de France translations mirroring one another (a “him” and a “her” speaking in turn, just like “The Act”!), each set with its own mirroring gloss analogous to the mirroring glosses in Constellation. 

My recent “hybrid” book Say It Into My Mouth, too, makes extensive use of mirroring.  Each of its three sections could be described as “mirroring” in a way that resembles “The Act” and Constellation.

• The first section, “Always the clearest question keeps itself unanswered,” presents six pieces, each consisting of fifty couplets, and each couplet composed of two directly-quoted questions, the first from a male-identifying author, the second from a female-identifying author. The questions in each couplet, that is, mirror one another much as the stanzas in “The Act” mirror one another.
• The second section, “How opposition integrates itself,” gives a complete translation of the ancient Greek thinker Herakleitos, mirrored: it is actually two complete translations. For each passage of the original, “my own” “normal” translation into “my own words” is mirrored by a “translation” that is a direct quotation of a passage that was not intended by its writer as a translation of Herakleitos, or indeed as connected with him at all.
• The final section, “Two pictures of a rose in the dark,” consists of 82 segments, each a double mirroring. The first mirror is a passage from Ludwig Wittgenstein juxtaposed with a passage from Leslie Scalapino, and the second is a pair of quoted passages that reflect in some way the Wittgenstein and Scalapino passages.

Again, all this mirroring is not decorative, not an optional feature tacked onto what is essential in the work, like a vinyl roof added to a 70s sedan.  It is not, to borrow words from Wittgenstein, the wheel that, because it “can be turned though nothing else moves with it,” must not be “part of the mechanism.”  To the contrary, it is integral to and constitutive of the work itself.  Mirroring is one way (of many ways) to practice writing as discovery, as a mode of learning rather than teaching, of listening rather than speaking.  Mirroring doesn’t uncover something that was already there, it brings into being something that wasn’t there before.  Wittgenstein’s sense that “philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition” is interesting in itself, as is Scalapino’s observation that “Poetry in this time and nation is doing the work of philosophy,” but the two of them together, facing one another, create something new, a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  Mirroring is not me first having some really smart idea in my head and then using the writing as a means to offer that pre-existing idea to others: it’s the writing itself (the fulfillment of a process, the realization of a structure) creating and disclosing something that did not pre-exist the writing.  It’s not that I disclose something to the reader by means of the writing, but that the writing discloses something to me and the reader equally.  The writing is not a vehicle through which I teach the reader something I knew and the reader didn’t; it’s a way for me and the reader both to see something neither of us could have seen otherwise.

More might be said about mirroring.  For example, how might it participate in understanding of the relative properties (e.g. tallness) that Jennifer Cole Wright distinguishes from objective properties (e.g. rectangularity) and subjective properties (e.g. deliciousness)?  Similarly, in answering your question more might be addressed than mirroring alone, as for instance by exploring how Phillips’s assertion and your question tap into our widely-held worldview-shaping premise that origin is essence.  Stopping here, though, rather than continuing, seems surer proof of my gratitude for your including me in the larger conversation you are creating.  Suffice it to say, in answer to your questions, that in the thirty years since writing the first poem in my first book, I have become a very different person, but in at least one way, namely through the structuring principle one might call “mirroring,” that “original” poem does create a precedent that for my poetry remains actively in play.  I still trust it to elaborate tensions that inform our understandings and shape our lives.

The Poem Rivers Forward to the Sea: A Conversation Between Dante Di Stefano and H. L. Hix

Dante Di Stefano, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).

H. L. Hix, Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark (Middle Creek Publishing, 2023)

H. L. Hix: Not two weeks before we began this conversation, I read Carl Phillips’ My Trade Is Mystery, in which, describing his poetic development, Phillips carefully makes it explicit that the most formative influence on him was “not writers, but what they’ve written.” You say of Midwhistle that William Heyen’s “life and work incited this poem.” I’m inclined to take the two observations as clarifying one another by contrast of emphasis rather than by contradiction of principle, but I wonder what you would say.  I guess I’m asking about the importance of “life and work.”

Dante Di Stefano: Life and work—it’s a conventional figure of speech that you are right to examine. Do these categories really exist separately? I suspect not. I hope not. And why call it “work,” when it is, for me, at least, pure pleasure and leisure and play, unlike any “real” work I’ve ever done? 

Still, though, there is a very real tension and opposition between my “writing life” and my “real life.” As you know, I have two small children, and so, the amount of time I can devote to writing is exceedingly slim. I carve it out around the timetables imposed by the little beings afoot in my home and around the demands of my job, family responsibilities, yard work, cooking, cleaning, et cetera. So it goes for every writer.

I’ve never liked the idea of lived experience furnishing material for poetry. It seems too calculated and cynical. When I was young, I often heard young writers say that this or that bad thing that happened would be good material for poetry. To see the life as mere material for the work impoverishes both. Rather, I like your idea of one clarifying the other—the life fountaining through the work and the work fountaining through the life.

I would refer you back to the introductory statement of your book, Incident Light, a book of poetry that is a biography of your friend, Petra Soesemann, a biography: “of a sort: biography whose first fidelity is not to facts, but to imagination, biography that loosens reality’s hold, releases the life into lyric. Nothing attested, everything sung.” To live a life in poetry, for me, is to be after this loosening, to be a votary of this release, to praise the space where page meets flesh. As you say in Demonstrategy: “in poetry the ideal is not given, but ever at stake.” Perpetual re-staking. Infinite becoming. Faith.

When I write about Heyen’s life and work inciting Midwhistle, I suppose I’m only writing about his published oeuvre. How can we ever really know the closed room of another person’s life? I’ve never met Bill in person, but I know him through his writing better than I know many of my close friends. Or, at least, I think I do. I have a window into his life through his poetry and through his journals.

His journals are a staggering testament to his work and to his life. The tension between the demands of a suburban father and the needs of an ambitious poet are dramatized over the course of decades and span thousands of pages. Those journals date back to 1964. So, I have a grander, more granular, view of Heyen’s quotidian existence than I would with other poets whose work I admire and who have influenced me. Heyen has written an extensive chronicle of the most mundane and sublime aspects of his life in upstate New York. On one page he is having martinis with Anne Sexton, on the next he’s wondering if the garbagemen stole his golf clubs.

The elements of Heyen life that are like my own resonate with me, clarify my one view of my life and work. I live an average uneventful middle-class life that might seem stultifying to poetry. The crass consumerism, anti-intellectualism, and blunt meanness of the American median, the pettiness of the heartland I carry inside my chest seems an overwhelming impediment to living a life in poetry. And yet, here I am, happily frozen in midwhistle. 

I’m interested in how you see the phrase “life and work” when applied to your own lived experience in poetry and in relation to your varied approaches to poetry throughout your many books. Also, Harvey, you don’t write poetry that is autobiographical or confessional in the sense that much of the mainstream of American poetry has been for the past fifty years or so. Sometimes there is a detail that seems autobiographical in your work, but I can never be sure. For example, in Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark, you invoke Eliot in an autobiographical gesture: “Coffee spoons, yes, but also I have measured out my life / in long drives: mile markers, low clearance warnings, / construction zones…” I am interested to know what you think about autobiography in poetry. How does your lived experience filter into your various poems and projects? Into Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark?

HH: The mainstream autobiographical mode that you refer to has done plenty of good work.  Continues to do plenty of good work.  Central to that good work, I would argue, is its equalizing power.  In a society shaped by divisive and dehumanizing forces that work to concentrate entitlement in the hands of a very few, confessional poetry has worked to distribute entitlement, to recognize the validity of all voices, not only those of persons bearing a set of societally-secured identity markers.  Long live confessional poetry.  I read, and value, plenty of poetry in this mainstream mode. 

Its virtues and achievements, though, don’t keep it from also having limitations.  As for example Adrienne Rich points out in her Best American Poetry introduction: “I was constantly struck by how many poems published in magazines today are personal to the point of suffocation.  The columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line, can be narrow in more than a formal sense.”  I take this as one way in which your sensibilities and mine resonate.  Like you, I want poetry to help me “clarify my one view of my life and work,” but also like you I find that autobiography is not the only way to seek such clarity.

To arrive at a capsule account of why this is not a trivial, prudential matter of personal taste, one might juxtapose an insight from Reginald Shepherd with one from Kwame Anthony Appiah.  Shepherd, in “Toward an Urban Pastoral,” notes that in contemporary American poetry there is a tension between our “readily available, thoroughly worked-out” poetic language being pastoral and the fact that “the vast majority of the U.S. population, some 75 percent, lives in … urban areas.”  Appiah opens Cosmopolitanism by noting that for most of human history a given person’s connection was limited to a tiny number of others with whom that person had immediate and ongoing contact, but that now each of us is connected to all of “our six billion conspecifics,” even those whom we will never have any contact.

I take it that the two together imply high stakes in this question of life and work.  Humans have had thousands of years to work out a poetic language for the fact that what has effects on me vastly exceeds my capacity to perceive, know, and control: in traditions that shaped English-language poetry, Greek culture gave us Fate and Furies, for example, and Hebrew culture gave us God scrawling commandments on stone and asserting sovereignty from the whirlwind.  But now — in terms of human history very suddenly — it’s not only what has effects on me that exceeds my capacity to perceive, know, and control, it’s also the effects that my ideas, decisions, and actions have on others.  The worked-out language was worked out for radically different circumstances than those we live in now, and the familiar modes of autobiography take for granted a homology between self-awareness and one’s wake that just doesn’t hold.

That’s why so often I find myself not recollecting my emotions in tranquility, but triangulating: in the case of Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark by reading my life and work through notable works of natural history.  Does “triangulating” seem in any way apt in connection with Midwhistle’s attention to Heyen?  With your other poetry?  (I’m thinking, maybe obviously, of the many phenomena to which your individual poems connect themselves: spaghetti westerns, Sun Ra, 90s mixtapes, the Fermi Paradox…)

DD: I love the idea of triangulating. The lapsed Catholic in me is drawn to trinities of all kinds. I do feel like at least half of my poetry unfolds in a straightforward autobiographical mode, but I also feel the suffocations of that mode, and its limitations in an era when confession and revelation have become atomized and dispersed in a million memes and posts and stories on TikTok and Instagram and so on.

In Midwhistle, Heyen is an interlocutor, an incitement, an apostrophized other, a metaphor for the figure of the poet, an elder I admire, and an actual person whom I correspond with via the United States Postal Service. He is one coordinate. My son, Dante Jr., who was in utero at the time I wrote Midwhistle, is another coordinate. I am writing to and for him (to and for my daughter, Luciana, to and for my wife, Christina). Dante Jr., now almost two-years-old, is a beautiful boy, gentle, and happy, and full of love. When the poem speaks to him, it is crooning to the future, it is lullabying what is best in me forward into a future where I will no longer be. The final coordinate in the poem is the self, myself (“selfwrung, selfstrung,” “selfyeast of spirit,” “clearest-selved spark” as Hopkins would have it). The center of this triangle is poetry, love, family, home—what these experiences (poetry, love, family, home) mean, how they sing themselves out to a fetus, to midlife, and to an octogenarian.

Midwhistle is a long poem, a book-length poem, so it lopes along, loops back, re-triangulates as its metapoetics unfurl. As the poem unfurls, my enthusiasms unfurl as well: Anne Carson’s Sappho is there, along with Eddie Hazel’s guitar work, and Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and the poems and poets throughout the ages, and so much more. And the poem rivers onward as poems do.

I’ve been thinking about long poems for a long time—long poems and book-length projects. Rachel Zucker’s new book, The Poetics of Wrongness has a great essay called “An Anatomy of the Long Poem.” Zucker argues a long poem: 1) is extreme, 2) grapples with narrative, 3) takes time to read, 4) is confessional, 5) creates intimacy, 5) is “about” something AND is about nothing but itself, 6) resists “aboutness,” is instead muralistic or kaleidoscopic, 7) discovers itself, 8) allow the poet to change her mind, 9) changes the mind (of the reader and the writer), 10) is ambitious, 11) humbles the poet, 12) highlights process, 13) is imperfect. After reading many long poems and writing Midwhistle, I find myself in full agreement with this anatomy. I would distinguish between a long poem and a book-length project by citing examples: Tape for the Turn of the Year by A.R. Ammons, The Book of Nightmares by Galway Kinnell, Who Is the Widow’s Muse? by Ruth Stone, Playlist by David Lehman, and Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright are all long poems. I’d also classify Claudia Rankine’s Citizen as a long poem, although it manifests elements of a book-length project. Olio by Tyehimba Jess and Shrapnel Maps by Philip Metres, would be book-length projects, as would your books, Chromatic and Incident Light and God Bless and Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark.

I’m still figuring out distinctions within and between these categories, but I think a long poem unfolds either in one motion or in a series of interconnected motions. Its momentum carries it forward to the sea, even as it digresses in a thousand tributaries. A book-length project starts and stops. It tends toward hybridity. It is broken into discrete components (poems and prose) that are closely thematically linked and that diffuse like dandelion puff, but that accrete to meanings greater than the sum of their parts. I think all your books fall under my definition for book-length projects. When I am reading your books, I always have the sense that each line and phrase and poem and section was written with the whole architecture of the book in mind.

In Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark you’ve created an entire ecosystem of texts talking to other texts. The italic portion for your table of contents reads: “Each poem in this collection grows out of a sentence from an historically significant work of natural history. Rather than sequestering them in a separate “Notes” section, I have identified here those soil texts and seed sentences.” Then, you include the seed sentence (which is the sentence that you have planted in the soil of a quote from Darwin or Euclid or Giordano Bruno or whomever). The poems sprout from the soil and the seed. So, for example, your first seed sentence is “My senses straddle any boundary I draw.” The soil text you plant this seed in is from Aristotle’s Historia Animalium: “As to the parts internal and external that all animals are furnished withal, and further as to the senses, to voice, and sleep, and the duality of sex, all these topics have now been touched upon.” The poems grow from there. Each poem, a tree. The book is an orchard, and all the branches of the trees touch their neighbors and form a network. I am wondering how you see this ecosystem you’ve created.

Could you talk about long poems, book-length projects, your books in those terms? What have I gotten right? What have I missed? You always help me to see my way deeper into poetry. What do these longer motions and performances tell us about poetry and the world we live in?

HH: I love your distinction between long poems and book-length projects.  As soon as you introduce the distinction, any of us would add to the list examples that have mattered to us: The Descent of Alette and The Folding Cliffs, say, as long poems, and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers and Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea as book-length projects, and so on.  Extending those two playlists would be a pleasurable way for poetry-reading friends to spend an hour over beer.

I take it that the distinction is not a rigid binary, not an opposition of two sharply bounded, mutually exclusive natural kinds, but a loose grouping around family resemblances.  In that spirit, I would add a string of (“fuzzy” rather than “strict”) contrasts: long poem as sequential, book-length project as scalar; long poem as temporal, book-length project as spatial; long poem as organized by looking backward and forward, book-length project by zooming in and out; and so on.  And, yes, I would describe Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark as a book-length project rather than a long poem, and I find your each poem a tree, the book an orchard sense of the work apt. 

The poems all were generated by the same process.  In each case, the poem’s first complete draft had six five-line stanzas.  The end words of the first stanza came from that poem’s source sentence (the one quoted from a work of natural history and now reproduced in the Table of Contents), in the order of their appearance there, and then each of the remaining stanzas ended in one of those words, in the same sequence.  Revision altered that structure out of a lot of the poems, but you can still see its remnants in all the poems, and it survived intact in a few, such as “I gather evidence so I can leave evidence.”

My hope throughout the writing was that this way of relating to these works of natural history was a mode of active listening, with ultimately an ethical and ecological valence: deliberate assembling, as a form of resistance against the pervasive dissembling in the broader culture.  And, in fulfilment of your tree/orchard metaphor, parallel rows of evenly-spaced trunks, tangled roots invisible below, interlocking branches forming a single crown overhead.

Not long ago I read a fascinating book called The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, that early on distinguishes three sources of culture: “vertical” culture, acquired from parents and other given authorities; “horizontal” culture, acquired from peers; and “oblique” culture, acquired from other sources such as school.  It’s easy to unreflectively valorize one source.  Vertical culture is very stable, but, unchecked, is authoritarian.  Horizontal culture is fluid, but, unchecked, reduces to surface (think pop-culture fashions and memes, replacing one another ever more swiftly).  Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark participates in a project I take myself to be engaged in with all my work: trying to be as reflective and intentional as a I can be in what sources of culture I draw on, and how I draw on them.

From the very beginning of Midwhistle, you seem to me to be engaged in a book-length poem that could be described in those same terms.  The first section opens: “I’m listening to the earth, / to Bill Heyen read blackbirds / back into the sky above the earth.”  There is active listening, and reflective choice for oneself of your sources of culture, with Bill as a focal chosen “oblique” source.  I wonder whether to you, too, those terms feel applicable to Midwhistle (and to your work more broadly?), or if they feel artificially imposed.  And whether they seem to you relevant to our concern with integrating life and work.

DD: I do find those categories interesting and would be particularly interested in thinking through how they apply to the lives of whales and dolphins. William Heyen might represent all three cultural sources for me. I first encountered him in graduate school, through his 9/11 anthology and his collection Shoah Train; at that point, he would have been an “oblique” source. I then became press-mates with him and worked on our book, Generations; at that point, he would be a “horizontal” source, although I don’t really consider myself his peer or equal (or yours for that matter) in terms of poetry. As I read his work more deeply and corresponded with him, he became a “vertical” source, a kind of Bloomian poetic father, although one I don’t intend to kill off.

The cultural material that constellates Midwhistle and much of my other poetry comes from my enthusiasms in art, literature, history, music, film, and philosophy. I see my poetry as chronicling my interests as it charts my autobiography. In my poetry, I am saying to myself, to my wife, to my kids: this body of work is the world as I experienced it, this poem is a sliver of that experience to live through, this image/figure/trope/allusion is what I loved and love, and this line/phrase/phoneme is how I loved and love it, and you.

I’m orbiting away from your question, but as I do the penultimate lines from the last poem in Bored In Arcane Cursive come to me: “The whole system’s hum makes this my singing a being sung. / My one location marks my absence from all others.” If my poem sings of Bill Heyen or Charles Mingus or Marvin Gaye or my daughter or my wife or my dead father or my friends in poetry or Cy Twombly or Eavan Boland or whatever and whomever else, it is also sung by those people and things and the cultural artifacts associated with them. The self is a slurry, to borrow from your poem, but in poetry, it can cohere into a rickety coatrack onto which a tanager might alight briefly before taking wing once more.  

One of the stabilizing structures in Bored In Arcane Cursive is the cinquain stanzaic pattern which predominates. Going back to our previous discussion, the formal aspects of this collection tilt it in the direction of a book-length poem. Can you talk a bit about the five-line stanza and how you deploy it in this volume?

HH: I’m interested in the generativity of pattern, the capacity of repetition to invent.

I was not (to torque Theodore Roethke’s formulation) an “English poet who grew up on Greek,” so I didn’t learn until grad school that one of the ways “they” (Milman Parry and other scholars) rediscovered that the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed orally, and only later written down, was by noticing that the epithets (rosy-fingered dawn, the wine-dark sea) were not applied by how they fit into the narrative context but by how they fit into the metrical pattern of the line.  Achilles isn’t swift-footed Achilles when he’s running and lion-hearted Achilles when he’s being brave: he’s swift-footed when the poet needs that pattern of syllables to round out the dactylic hexameter line, and lion-hearted when dactylic hexameter demands that number of syllables in that order of stress.

I find that feature of those poems illustrative of something potent and inexhaustible: that the decision principle the poet is applying in choosing words is very simple and local, almost trivial, but the resulting word combination is complex and dynamic, even momentous.  It’s a kind of butterfly effect, a sensitive dependence upon initial conditions, that lets me, severely limited in my knowledge and awareness, tap into the limitless knowledge and awareness stored in the language.  The poet is doing one thing (in Homer’s case fulfilling a strict metrical pattern, in my case getting in five lines from one end word to the next), and the poem is doing something else altogether.

The particular formal principle is arbitrary (five-line stanzas are as “random” as dactylic hexameter), but deliberate fulfillment of the formal principle is a way to enhance one’s odds that what is formed according to the principle will, as you put it earlier, “accrete to meanings greater than the sum of their parts.” 

Midwhistle, too, deploys a five-line stanza throughout.  How would you answer your own question?  The Midwhistle stanza is, after all, a departure for you, different from the various stanzas (often no stanza divisions) in the poems in Lullaby with Incendiary Device, Ill Angels, and Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight.  It (your five-line stanza) participates in “reading my own blackbirds back / into my own backbone” and in making Midwhistle “the whole interior jewel / & thiefdom of a poem,” but why and how?  What urgency is it answering to?

DD: Harvey, I love what you’re saying here about the generativity of pattern and the decision principle of the poet. You’ve beautifully articulated everything I feel and intuit about form.  

In my first three books and in my writings that never made it into print, I’ve explored forms like the sonnet, the sestina, the kwansaba, and so on. More than anything, though, I’ve been interested in the ten-syllable line and its expressive and rhythmic capacities. I’ll probably be exploring the musical intricacies of the ten-syllable line for the rest of my life in poetry. In the past few years, however, I became interested in exploring shorter lines.

I read an interview with A.E. Stallings in a literary journal (I can’t remember which one), where she extolled the virtues of the seven-syllable line. I started to explore seven- and five-syllable lines after reading that interview.

When I started writing Midwhistle, it was in seven-syllable lines. My first draft was a ten-page column of seven-syllable lines with no stanza breaks. I mailed it to Bill Heyen. He wrote back something like, “this is great, but don’t you think a stanzaic pattern might give your reader some relief and open up the poem?” He suggested the cinquain. I was reading his book-length poem To William Merwin at the time. That poem is organized into stanzas where the lines are indented in a zigzag pattern. The pattern recalled a kind of lineation that I saw in the late 1990s and early 2000s; it may have been a stylistic fad of that era, although I’m sure one can find earlier and later examples. For an artful example of this style, look at poems in Jason Shinder’s collection, Among Women, such as “The One Secret That Has Carried.” This stepped lineation is a visual gesture, meant to lend velocity to the way the poem unfolds on the page as text, but not meant as a cue for how the poem should be read aloud. From these tributaries, I developed the stanzaic pattern of the stepped-septasyllabic cinquain seen here in a random stanza from Midwhistle:

I don’t want a poem to
            work at doing. Instead, it
should embody its own kind
                        of undoing, the kind of
            loosening that occurs when

When I was writing Midwhistle, there were moments when breaking the seven-syllable per line pattern was unavoidable, but overall, I found the stricture to be endlessly generative and propulsive.

The climate crisis is often on my mind. I often find myself writing about the natural world in terms of our shared impending environmental catastrophe. You’ve written insightfully about issues related to the climate crisis and poetry in Demonstrategy and elsewhere. Throughout your body of work there are many lines and images that could only come from someone whose connection to the natural world is emphatic and deep. Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark feels even more emphatic, more invested, more fraught. As your title indicates, you are exploring the way nature and civilization participate in a mutual script, an inscription process that is both legible and illegible. Could you tell me a bit more about these triangulations? (nature-civilization-script, climate crisis-poetic practice-lived experience, or some other variation?)

HH: No doubt there’s truth to Frost’s famous formulation that poetry offers “a momentary stay against confusion,” but I’m more intent, as a writer of poetry and as a reader of poetry, on tapping into another capacity of poetry, its ability to offer — to be — a provisional stay against reduction.

We have to be reductive to some extent, to survive.  I’ve always got too little information or too much.  I have too little information to know whether to trust the person approaching me down the aisle in the grocery store.  I can’t run a background check on everyone, so I use heuristics: the person is pushing a cart with some groceries already in it from other aisles and is pausing to check the expiration date on that tub of yogurt, so I won’t flee in terror.  I have too much information when I’m driving 80 mph on the interstate, so I narrow my attention: probably there are pretty ducks on that farm pond and maybe a gorgeous old ghost ad on the side of that rustic barn, but I’m going to keep my eyes on the lane stripes and the big truck passing me.

Reduction, though, however practical and necessary, wants limits: unchecked, it readily flips from beneficial to harmful.  If, for instance, I use culturally prevalent stereotypes as my heuristics (that’s an older, petite, white woman in the grocery aisle, wearing yoga pants, not a young, large, dark-skinned man wearing a hoodie — I’m safe!), then in my movement through the world I’m performing prejudice and hate, and furthering structural violence.

Reductiveness contributes to all those ills you mentioned earlier: “crass consumerism, anti-intellectualism, and blunt meanness of the American median, the pettiness of the heartland.”  Consumerism reduces human well-being to ownership of material goods: fulfillment is complicated, so I’ll reduce it to purchasing a pair of the latest style of sneakers, which is simple.  Poetry can be a nonreductive, even an antireductive, space, a stay against reduction.  Central to what I hunger for in the poetry I write and in the poetry I read is recognition of the irreducible: attending to, rather than attempting to eliminate, complexity.  I don’t purport to achieve that, either my life or in my work (to invoke our opening distinction), but I take it as a valuable regulative ideal, one that poetry can serve.

The nonreductive space, though, is inevitably more fraught than the reductive one.  I hope that Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark operates antireductively (“The warning signs / were there, but those same signs normally indicate calm”).  Midwhistle certainly does.  I think of (fraught) moments such as the meditation on watching High Noon with your father:

My father’s assassin face,
            which looked exactly like mine,
presages my son’s.  He will
                        share my name, this junior who
            will turn me senior, chrism

me an internal change like
            grace wrung from the sacraments
in my father’s faith.  Will this
                        son of mine look like me, like
            my father did, or I him?

Is resemblance contagion?
            Inheritance?  Atavism?
Legacy?

It’s not the only time you pose questions in Midwhistle (or elsewhere: I think, for instance, of your “Interrogative Solo” in Lullaby with Incendiary Device).  Which strikes me as another consonance in our work, or shared sensibility.  How would you speak of the question in relation to fraughtness, or to others of the concerns we’ve been thinking toward here?

DD: I love the idea of poetry as a provisional stay against reduction. This returns us again to a Rilkean notion of the poem as an experience itself (not merely as a reflection or as documentary of what happened), poem as experiential nexus, poem as dwelling place, as a Now (forever is composed of). A poem as a moment both capacious and fleeting, one pinprick in the infinite constellation of such pinpricks that make up a life. And, like any other moment, a poem is fraught, fully mysterious, brimming with nuance that is simultaneously imperative, indicative, subjunctive, interrogative, and optative.

You invoke Rilke at one point in Bored In Arcane Cursive Under Lodgepole Bark: “The torso does glow. I did change my life. / The problem is my conditions changed faster than I did. / The problem is my conditions shape me more than I shape them.” Taken out of context, I read into this stanza all that’s fraught and sacred and compelling in a life of poetry. Poetry as avowal, as renewal, as aperture, as ashes of a burned blueprint, as river opening into the ocean beyond the bay.

More and more now, my poetry addresses my loved ones directly. It’s the only conversation I can carry on now. I’m saying over and over: I love you and one day I will die. And what a miracle that is. The awe at what it is to be, the wonder of love, the terrible beauty of the nothingness that most likely bookends this consciousness writing to you. And something else amazing: our interconnectedness, the yearning for camaraderie, the attainment of simple friendship unfolding under the journeywork of the stars. 

What haven’t you done in poetry that you want to try? And what is the shape of your next project? What are you working on now?

HH: I hope your wife now, and your children at some point in the future, will see what you’ve just said, so they can keep it for themselves as one moment in that conversation of love.

For me, there’s something elemental — something very “beauty is truth, truth beauty” — in this association you’re making, of love and poetry.  Each is, or can be practiced as, a mode of attention.  (I’m thinking of Iris Murdoch’s “Love is knowledge of the individual.”)  Both love and poetry offer ways of recognizing totality in unity: “you’re the whole world to me” and “the world in a grain of sand.”  Love and poetry as parallel urgencies to be really with the person one is with, really in the moment one is in.

That urgency means that one answer to your question about what I haven’t done sounds glib, but I think you’ll know exactly what I mean: I haven’t written The Poem, the one that does contain the whole world.  There’s a kind of analogy for me with Wittgenstein’s “The real discovery is the one that makes us capable of stopping doing philosophy when we want to”: I haven’t written that ultimate poem, la última canción, the one that makes me capable of not writing poetry.

So I keep trying!  The next things out will be a poetry book called Constellation, from Cloudbank Books, and a prose three-part invention called Say It Into My Mouth, from BlazeVOX.  And I’m working now on a sister to my American Anger, to be called American Outrage.  It started simply as a memorial to persons killed in acts of gun violence (mass shootings, police killings, …), but has, perhaps predictably, become also a recognition of the various interconnected ways in which the U.S. is an outlier, and not in a good way, among “developed” nations: gun ownership (there are more guns than people in the U.S.), police militarization, mass incarceration, and on and on.  All of which are deeply gendered and racialized forms of violence and injustice.

What about you?  Maybe it’s a way to “wrap” this dialogue, for you to speak to the same questions.  What have you not done yet that you feel compelled to do?  What is your next project?  What are you working on (or what is working on you) now?

DD: I’m always grateful for your generosity of spirit and for your insight, Harvey. I do know what you mean about never having written The Poem. My ambitions tend in that direction as well. Although if finally writing a poem that was undeniable and durable and, in its own way, perfect were to lead me to stop writing poetry, I think I would prefer not to write that ultimate poem. I’d rather continue scrivening out a thousand and one imperfect foundlings, if only to set them consecutively on the doorstep of my heart. Still, I don’t know if I could continue to write without the impetus of the ambition that you invoke.

I’m looking forward to those new books of yours, especially American Outrage. I keep a copy of American Anger on my desk at work. It is the book that most clearly elucidates the state of the union over the past decade or so and explains how we arrived where we are now. I just received a copy of Constellation and I'm only beginning to dip into the luminous silt of its language, its incandescent grit.

There are several projects I want to do, but I’m still only ruminating on. I’d like to do a collection of essays about poetry. I’d like to write a biography of a poet (maybe Heyen or Hix?). I’d also like to uplift some of the books I’ve read recently, or which are coming out soon, by poets I admire.

Here’s a short list of truly amazing books that I haven’t been able to review, but which I wish everyone would read: Zeina Hashem Beck’s O (Penguin Books, 2022), Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s Relinquenda (Beacon Press, 2022), Jameka Williams’s American Sex Tape™ (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), Tara Betts’s Refuse to Disappear (The Word Works, 2022), and Celeste Lipkes’s Radium Girl (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023).

I’d also mention a few forthcoming titles I’m eagerly anticipating: Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Desire Museum (Boa Editions, 2023), Leah Umansky’s Of Tyrant (The Word Works, 2024), Christian Teresi’s What Monsters You Make of Them (Red Hen Press, 2024), and Marie Howe’s New and Selected (W.W. Norton, 2024). 

As for my own writing, I just finished a collection of poems similar my first three books in style and content. I also finished the first draft of another book-length poem, a sequel to Midwhistle; it unfolds in conversation with your work, Harvey. Each section is titled after one of your books and unfolds in dialogue with your poetry. I directly address you throughout the poem in the same way that I address William Heyen in Midwhistle. For the next few months, I’ll be busy revising these two manuscripts and hopefully both will find a home in the next year or two or three.

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H. L. HIX was born in Oklahoma and raised in various small towns in the south. After earning his B.A. from Belmont College (now Belmont University) and his Ph.D. (in philosophy) from the University of Texas, Hix taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and was an administrator at the Cleveland Institute of Art, before joining the faculty of the University of Wyoming, where, after a term as director of the creative writing MFA, he now teaches in the Philosophy Department and the Creative Writing Program. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai University, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at Yonsei University in Seoul, and the “Distinguished Visitor” at the NEO MFA.  He teaches in the low-residency MFA at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His poetry, essays, and other works have been published in McSweeney’s, Georgia Review, Harvard Review, Boston Review, Poetry, and other journals, been recognized with an NEA Fellowship, the Grolier Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Peregrine Smith Award, and been translated into Spanish, Russian, Urdu, and other languages. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming, with his partner, the poet Kate Northrop.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of four poetry volumes including, most recently, the book-length poem, Midwhistle (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). His other poetry collections are: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016); Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019); and Lullaby with Incendiary Device, published in a three-in-one edition titled Generations (Etruscan Press, 2022), also featuring work by William Heyen and H.L. Hix. He co-edited the anthology Misrepresented People (NYQ Books, 2018). He holds a PhD in English Literature from Binghamton University. He teaches high school English in Endicott, NY and lives in Endwell New York with his wife, Christina, their daughter, Luciana, their son, Dante Jr., and their goldendoodle, Sunny.

Meet the Press: Etruscan Press's Tribus Imprint

Dante Di Stefano: In the introduction to Trio and to the book that preceded it, Triptych, you discuss the concept behind Etruscan Press’s new Tribus imprint. Could you talk about how Etruscan’s new model came into being and some of the benefits of publishing a three-in-one volume?

Philip Brady: The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. It’s heartbreaking because it’s one thing to be turned down by a stranger and quite another thing to be rejected by someone who has already shown commitment to your work. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along by a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. I had always admired Robert Miltner’s work. That’s when the idea of Tribus came to me. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. I contacted the three authors. Fortunately, they enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, exploring connections and working together.

DD: What was it about the work of Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop that threaded together for you when you began to think of the project that would become Trio?

PB: Each book is replete and fully empowered. Still, presented in one codex, webs of continuity appear. Trio highlights the way that women, in the penumbra of the patriarchy, fashion conduits for life, power, and loss. Trio augurs identity within and beyond selfhood. Trio reconfigures utterance by stretching, almost to breaking, line and syntax (as Daneen Wardorp says in an interview, “I love enjambment.”).

Composing their books separately, together three poets orchestrated what Diane Raptosh calls a “triunity.” In a “Trialogue” included in this volume, they converse, riffing off each other, weaving “centos” of one another’s lines, a poetics which, as Raptosh writes, let her “feel the  tendrils themselves turning into a new kind of work.”

DD: There are two more Tribus selections in the offing, one including a collection I wrote. Could you talk about these two forthcoming books?

PB: So, the next step was to actually solicit a Tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific. and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, Dante, your new manuscript showed up. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought: Etruscan Generations. You agreed first, and then I sent Hix and Heyen your manuscript and asked for something to go with it. They both replied right away, and we have a new Tribus.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems powerfully connected. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

DD: Sadly, Daneen Wardrop, whose collection Endless Body, closes out Trio, passed away before the book’s publication. What do you find most memorable about her work, in this volume and elsewhere?

PB: Dante, I sit before this question and come back to it over and again. So many images: first seeing Silk Road—the delight of entering into that magical, historical journey of Donata Badoer; watching as the work emerged, working with Daneen through a succession of cover images—she was an astute art lover with a trove of references and connections—talking about the poetics of evoking  the past in poems which employ and resist narration…And then on to Endless Body—an unframed sequence crafted out of one of poetry’s prime elements—the art of enjambment—as if in breaking, lineaments reveal the oracular—the space where story yearns forward onto the empty page, the exhaled breath. All too soon to speak of. All too soon to be.

DD: Karen, I was first introduced to your work through Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of what you call tiny stories and essays. From 1985 to 2005 you co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose. I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about your long engagement with short prose. There’s only one prose poem in Planet Parable, “I Saw Egrets Flying.” What has short prose taught you about lineated poetry (and vice versa)? How did your understanding of short prose inform the multiplicity of stanzaic patterns and formal choices on display in Planet Parable? When you are composing, how do your poems begin to assert themselves in formal terms?

Karen Donovan: Thanks for all these questions, Dante. Yes, Walker Rumble and I founded ¶ way back in 1985 and published 25 issues over 20 years, working with hundreds of writers doing ingenious things with short prose. The work spanned categories – prose poem, flash fiction, microfiction, creative nonfiction, essays, letters, lists, rants. We described the contents of ¶ as “short bursts of ordered sensibility of 250 words or less” and let folks decide what to submit under that wide sky. Forging literary ground in the universe of shortness was a fantastic editorial experience. All during that time, I was making my living as an editor and professional writer, but in my creative life I was writing lineated poetry and never thought of myself as a writer of prose. When I started doing the prose pieces that wound up as Aard-vark to Axolotl, it was mainly just to play with the cool vintage illustrations in an old Webster’s dictionary we owned. Before too long, I realized I was writing paragraphs and had to laugh. The form had evidently percolated into my body and all it needed for a spigot was that dictionary.

What short prose taught me is that it must be as well written as poetry, to set Ezra Pound’s dictum on its head. You can’t have a wasted syllable. “That first line is pretty close to that last line,” as Walker once said.

Whether I’m writing poetry or prose, I try to craft strong sentences and put them in the right order. It's usually very clear when I need end-stopped lines and when I don’t. The egrets piece in Planet Parable that you mentioned is a good example. It tries to make transparent the long, loose discursive process of thinking while taking in continuous, seemingly random data from the world. It’s a slightly distracted internal disquisition that unfolds in time, so I wanted a stream of prose. Versus poetry, which is really a method of obliterating time. Everything in a poem happens at once, even in a narrative. The idea crystallizes and pops into existence and hits the reader like a photon.

Making a formal choice is a matter of knowing where the energy is in my idea. What form will allow me to capture it? Sometimes I think about form before I start writing, and sometimes I let the content pile up and dictate its form to me as I go (trusting in Levertov’s great description of form as “a revelation of content”). Form sticks to content quite mysteriously. Form is also a good editing tool. I often like to write in syllabics, which has its own handy, built-in Exacto knife. One of the most formally experimental pieces in Planet Parable, “This Is Why Advanced Ontics Is Taken Pass/Fail,” is constructed of decasyllabic lines that break apart as the poem moves forward and then reheal as the poem concludes. I needed to handle an onslaught of ideas from biology, chemistry, quantum physics, metaphysics, and more, and I wanted the poem to be both show and tell. Syllabics gave me the structure to hang on to this trapeze act. But still – it’s made with sentences.

DD: There’s a prose piece from Aard-vark to Axolotl that I kept thinking of when I was reading Trio, “The memory fruit,” which begins: “You are not singular. You are not really yourself. Something else makes you: deep snow, grief offered names, love as portable as a small stone.” Could you riff on the experience of publishing your work in a three-in-one volume, and the work of Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop in light of “The memory fruit”?

KD: Dante, you are clairvoyant. Calling up “The memory fruit” from Aard-vark to Axolotl is more relevant to the making of Trio than you could know. The illustration that goes with this piece is titled “Achene of Buttercup in vertical section, showing solitary seed.” I was writing about loneliness, the experience of losing a friend to whom I had a lifelong soul connection, the shock of realizing how much of my identity had been formed in her presence and now felt as if it had disappeared with her. And now… Diane and I lost Daneen to very sudden death, right when we were getting ready to celebrate the publishing of Trio, after months of intimate poetry conversation, immersed in one another’s language, resewing our lines together as centos, and birthing this volume together. The sense of loss is very similar. Our work and our minds are in explicit relationship, literally bound together. Trio itself is now the memory fruit. My hope is that it will go on generating attachments among our books every time a reader looks into it.

DD: I love one of the last lines in Planet Parable, “the vast thirsty ashes of the world” over which the rain speaks. There’s something so lovely and sad about the intense music of this moment, a moment that emblematizes Planet Parable’s thematic and formal concerns. What points of connection do you see in Planet Parable’s telescoping ecopoetics, the historical excavations of Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body’s exploration of corporeality and consciousness?

KD: Why the hell isn’t this beautiful project we are living going better? Is it possible to do it another way? All our books cohabitate with this question from different sides. Diane’s book sings with the mind and spirit of a woman who saw an alternative: “My advice was cultivate that love / which craves the happiness / of partner most, his or her / person next. Yourself last. / Be kind to the new. // In freedom / is safety. When people / learn this, they’ll know equality.” Daneen says, “Don’t worry about the awe. / There is no history except slate, / no biography except occasional winter wheat, / deer treading sun.” In the last poem in Endless Body, she asks, “At what rip in the gravity do we enter?” In its vast, thirsty ashes, the world yearns always to re-create itself after it is destroyed.

DD: Would you share a memory of Daneen Wardrop while working on this project and talk about the significance of Endless Body for you as a reader?

KD: Endless Body is endlessly generative – in subject matter, language, image, tone. Reading it is an experience of motion, tendency, current, experiment. Many of the poems are titled using word variants from Dickenson’s drafts. The book’s openness flows from Daneen’s receptive, absolutely original sensibility. Every conversation and email thread we shared brought that same light.

Here’s an example. One of her ideas for doing a reading together was to invite the whole audience in. I quote her: “If we end up doing readings virtually, we might ask people to use the chat function to suggest an image or idea they’re interested in/obsessed by that day at that minute. We might then, among the three of us, be able to find one of our poems that speaks to or complements that idea and choose to read that. It would probably be chaotic to do that for the whole reading, but we could have a couple of those interludes? This may be totally out there, but given the claustrophobia I sometimes feel with zoom, it might be cool to think of ways to air things out, widen things out.” Exactly. Air. Wideness. Out. That’s Daneen!

DD: Diane, In Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, you write through multiple personae inhabiting a variety of formal approaches. You’ve written many persona poems throughout your career, most notably in your collection, American Amnesiac, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve heard you speak eloquently about writing persona poems here. How was writing through and about the historical figures in Run different from persona poems you’ve written in the past? What other thoughts can you share about writing persona poems? What are some of your favorite persona poems written by other poets?

Diane Raptosh: I believe every poem is a persona poem, including—and perhaps especially—poems crafted from the I. American Amnesiac is in some respects a weirdly autobiographical poem, despite the fact that its speaker, Calvin Rinehart/John Doe (from Amnesiac) is a formerly affluent white man whose life specifics do not much resemble my own. But his status as participant-observer, his sense of being simultaneously subject and object, his many neuroses and certainly his anxious obsessing over the state of America are characteristics I consider my own. As for why write anyone writes persona poems, this portion of John Keats’s Negative Capability seems helpful: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, The Moon, The Sea . . . —the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” These sentences make good sense to me.

John Doe felt like someone I needed to fill in for; he felt more or less like a real person think-feeling in my mind. Writing about and through Victoria Woodhull—with her array of secondary characters—felt similar. I identified with her in many ways: she was all raw energy, unschooled, eccentric. I am “educated,” yes, but I come from humble beginnings. It felt easy to “become” Woodhull, as I have bucked many of the same restrictive scripts put in place for women, including traditional marriage, lifelong monogamy, and more. I love to take on voices and topics that allow me to learn as I compose. Why write what I know?

In terms of other persona poems, I studied carefully Tyehimba Jess’s incredible verse collection Leadbelly as a primary model for writing persona poems about a historical figure with a cast of other, necessary characters included. His was my go-to text for how to bring to life a historical character. So too, I would like to give a shout-out to my Trio mate, Daneen Wardrop’s Silk Road, which, as Phil mentioned, is written in the persona of Donata Badoer, Marco Polo’s wife. What an incredible book! Beyond these, Patricia Smith writes some of the most powerful persona poems I have ever encountered. Her “Skinhead” is stunning. Of course, Robert Browning’s duchess is in the background, looking as if she were alive. James Tate has great persona poems, as do Robert Hayden (“Night, Death, Mississippi”) and the poet Ai. I love her work. For the past decade or two, I have found it easier to arrive at emotional truths through writing persona poems; doing so allows me to enter a sense of boundlessness. That said, right now, I am at work on a manuscript written from the I. The time feels right to risk some things from that pronoun.

DD: What did you learn about nineteenth century American culture and literature through the creative process that you hadn’t learned through scholarly research?

DR: I’ve always been an American history buff and did a lot of scholarly research for Run. Understandably, I encountered differing narratives about who Woodhull was. But I wasn’t looking for that exactly. I wanted to uncover and offer a possible version of her—from birth through her presidential campaign—based in “fact” and informed, imaginative conjecture. I wrote the book from a conviction that all history is what Plutarch called historia: both fact (chronicle history) and fiction (feigned history). Mostly I wanted to get Woodhull’s story out there in the best way I knew how: through poetry. I was bugged that it took me until I was almost 55 years old even to have heard of her! Doing the research, I was reminded of how much the 1870s mirror our times in terms of, well, the usual categories: oligarchical economic structures, slavery-centered political frameworks, misogynistic scripts, caste systems, racism…. I was researching and drafting the book during the Trump/Clinton campaign. It comes as no surprise that long before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain sources, nineteenth-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. To answer your thoughtful question (at last!), I feel that to understand someone, you have to become them. I’d like to try being everyone! This is what literature helps us do. Rather than aiming to arrive at an “objective” understanding or at some definitive rendition of Woodhull, the creative process enabled me to enter—through acts of imaginative, empathic transport—the essence of Woodhull, as well as to channel the energies and voices of other figures important in her inner circle.  

DD: Could you share some thoughts on the Emily Dickinson who appears in Endless Body? What is the Dickinsonian influence or imprint on Trio as a whole?   How does Dickinson inform what Daneen Wardrop called the “spiritual conversation” unfolding in this three-in-one book?

DR: What a wonderful question. I would say there is a Dickinsonian tonal complexity, or perhaps better: a tonal mischievousness at work in Trio as a whole. Equally present: an overall Dickinsonian wit. More on Emily Dickinson’s overall imprint in the final paragraph.

Dickinson appears in Wardrop’s Endless Body implicitly and overtly. I would go so far as to say that Dickinson is “the blade in the melody” of Endless Body, which Wardrop herself points to in her poem “+ Glowed + Absent—through.” Dickinson inheres in every endless dash—that pointer, that magisterial gesture, that “vast barrette” mentioned in Wardrop’s “+ Catch my + slips so easy.”

More specifically, I would say that her poem “Emily Dickinson undressing” (which begins with this epigraph by Roland Barthes: Imagine [if possible] a woman dressed in an endless garment...”) is a map by which we might effectively navigate Wardrop’s whole book. In this piece the poet suggests that “If I knew how to pray, words would cross wefts / of endless garment / bobbins still spinning in the world—” This is precisely what Endless Body does: with every taut line, with each knowing turn, it stitches a limitless fabric: “Some veils are red. // Some tulle is ripped. // In this deep tippet the world starts”—the full while the poet rips through to eternity. As Wardrop’s I types out her words, seams redden and glow—. These seams form the spiritual conversation that all of us in Trio are having. I hope readers too will experience this numinous quality. This immanence. These bladed melodies.

The + Glow + Absent—through. Similarly, Karen Donovan invites us all in her poem “So Many Swans Could Mean Something” to stand “on the great divide where the mind / is always leaving the body behind.”

DD: Would you also share a memory of Daneen Wardrop and talk about her legacy as a poet, scholar, teacher, and person?

DR: There is so much to know about Daneen; every day I uncover some new mystery about her. Her roles in rock, folk, and bluegrass bands—as lead singer and guitarist throughout her college years—transformed into a tenured English professorship at Western Michigan University, 1990-2020. During that career, she earned many awards, including the Distinguished Faculty Award at WMU and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was a nationally renowned Emily Dickinson scholar (Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (1996), Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009), as well as Dickinson’s poetic heir apparent. She inspired her colleagues, students, and friends—from those associated with WMU to poetry lovers and climate advocacy communities.

In 1997 Daneen adopted her daughter Lian from China: Lian is featured in many of the poems in Endless Body (“LiLi and I speak to each other raining hands—” says the poet in “Afternoon”). I also have a daughter from China right around Lian’s age. Daneen and I had a number of conversations about our adoption experiences. We traded stories over Zoom about airport experiences with our “backpack babies”: how we literally had to sprint—daughters buckled onto our bodies—from one mysterious office to another, for meetings with adoption officials in China. Daneen’s multi-layered poems about adoption continue to move me—through. I’ve no doubt that she was a first-rate mother, daughter, sister (“My family speaks to each other with thunder on their sleeves, / whiskers in their bellies,” according to “Afternoon.”)

Honestly, I feel as if I was just beginning to know her as a friend. She was very funny, deeply authentic, and modest to a fault. She was incredibly large hearted. A kinder person we might never know.

As for Daneen’s poetic legacy, I would point to her ability to take on almost any subject, any persona, any tone, with mastery. I would easily place her among the most brilliant American poets I have encountered. Her work is a high-wire act of heart and erudition, pause and profusion, compression and munificence.  Endless Body is her tenth book.

---

Poem from Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body:

Gift

A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.
White box painted with red and yellow flowers
bright as patois. No perches like on a bird house?
. . . a butterfly house. Each slot hardly wider than a match—
the wings must have to shut together to enter.
Do the butterflies tilt and fly in without stopping— 
clapped-closed and no stopping?
She was dry, thin lips
cut as the line around a country.
The box came without instructions.
This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.
Why would they want to be in there,
darker than an inside.
I will not retract a single tilt of her face.    

---

Poem from Karen Donovan’s Planet Parable

So Many Swans Could Mean Something

I don’t want to talk about what we have lost, I am not sure
there is a difference between prayer and conversation

anymore, why anything happens, why thinking
is like this breathless occupied midnight.

Out back where the clouds skim the black surface
of the pond, it’s as if we called them, and now

you are saying, Look, the whole flock is here.
They drift, nickering, white boats on a moonless tide,

making and breaking engagements on a night when everything
gets decided. It is time to sleep, but who can sleep?

The water could not be blacker. We watch them,
lights off in the house, window slid wide,

standing on the great divide where the mind
is always leaving the body behind.

---

Poem from Diane Raptosh’s Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love

This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.
This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.
This is my lover. But when I seize love, summer trees sing off-key.
This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.

This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, it is despotism.
This is my law: it is ruddy—leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.
This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I will have it.
These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.

This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.
This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.
This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall.
This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.

This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.
This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life.

---

Philip Brady is the author of five collections of poetry: The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics (Broadstone Books, 2021); To Banquet with the Ethiopians (Broadstone Books, 2015); Fathom (Word Press, 2007); Weal (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999) winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize; and Forged Correspondences (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. Brady’s poetry has received the Ohioana Poetry Award, The Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artists Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, a Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

Karen Donovan’s new collection of poems, Planet Parable, was published in 2021 by Etruscan Press in an innovative multi-author volume called Trio, which also includes complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her two other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays inspired by the illustrations in a vintage Webster’s dictionary owned by her grandfather. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose.

Diane Raptosh’s verse collection, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award as well as for the Housatonic Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. An active ambassador for poetry, she has given workshops and readings everywhere from riverbanks to prisons. The holder of the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, she teaches literature and writing at the College of Idaho, where she also co-chairs the program in criminal justice/prison studies. Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, published in a collection of three poets’ works, is her seventh and most recent book (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

 

Daneen Wardrop was the author of five poetry collections: Endless Body (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021); Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018); Life as It (Ashland Poetry Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award; Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015); and The Odds of Being (Silverfish Review Press, 2008). She was also the author of several works of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England, 2009). Wardrop’s honors include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert H. Winner Award, judged by Jean Valentine. She was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and died on April 8, 2021.

For the Stars Over Paterson [a review by Dante Di Stefano]

When the Stars Were Still Visible
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s newest collection, When the Stars Were Still Visible, continues the poet’s decades-long Proustian excavation of time and memory. In Gillan’s oeuvre, time, and memory, sometimes occluded by, but never subsumed in, nostalgia, form a garden of forking paths the poems journey through, on the way toward a kind of secular earned communion. This journey takes Mazziotti Gillan away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl her poem “Growing Up Italian.” The story that Mazziotti Gillan so frequently returns to is the story of how a young girl (a daughter of immigrants, born into poverty) whose first poem was published in Saint Anthony Messenger carved out a life for herself as a successful poet and professor. For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming-of-age narrative that it often asserts. Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian American families. Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.

When the Stars Were Still Visible centers the remembering self as it retraces and rewrites the concerns and the tropes that have constellated Mazziotti Gillan’s work since her collection Where I Come From was published in 1995. Readers of Mazziotti Gillan’s work will recognize a familiar cast of characters from her previous volumes: her immigrant parents, her husband, her son and daughter, beloved family members, friends, classmates, and the ghosts of Paterson and San Mauro. Similarly, the themes that thread throughout all Mazziotti Gillan’s previous books reassert themselves with remarkable clarity in When the Stars Were Still Visible, delivering another moving exploration of love, family, loss, and mortality. In the title poem, Mazziotti Gillan writes: “So many memories swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope, / and so impossible to explain.” To full expression’s kaleidoscopic impossibility, Mazziotti Gillan holds up hundreds of shards of specific memories as shining and tightly-packed as the silver balls her Zio Guillermo made from the foil inside his Camel cigarette packs.

The poems that stand out the most in When the Stars Were Still Visible are the ones that either fill in an as yet poetically underexamined corner of the poet’s autobiography or feel like a resolution to a part of the poet’s autobiography that has supplied the material for many earlier poems. “Taking my Brother to the Barber” provides an example of the former kind of poem. In this poem, a sibling relationship spanning more than seventy-five years spirals out in a bittersweet aria ending on the brother’s huge dark uncomplaining eyes. “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage” provides an example of the latter kind of poem. In poems from previous volumes, such as “Is This the Way It Is Between Mothers and Sons?” from All that Lies Between Us, Mazziotti Gillan has explored the distance between adult son and aging mother. However, in “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas…” the distance collapses as the son reaches out to encourage his mother using the lines of the Welsh poet’s most famous villanelle. Just as many of her poems end in uplift, “My Son the Lawyer…” resolves (in uplift) the mother-son story arc that runs throughout her body of work.

In Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, her father forever whistles as he walks back home from an evening playing bocce and drinking wine at the Società Cilentana. Her mother forever places a bowl of steaming farina on the counter of the kitchen on 17th Street. Frank Sinatra’s voice forever booms from the jukebox in the basement of the student union at Seton Hall University. The popular girls in her seventh-grade class forever form a club called the Ritz Girls and go about their exclusionary work. She and her sister forever make paper dolls in the tiny closet of their room, unaware that it is what they don’t hold in their hands that will transform them. Her husband is there, young and handsome. Her children are there. The Paterson from her childhood is there, along with her parents and siblings. The sadness and weight of time are there. And so is a barely articulable lightness. She is singing. As she says in the poem “Last May in San Mauro, Cilento, 2017”: “I hold the memories close to give me comfort when I am most afraid.” Reading her work, I feel less afraid of aging and what comes after. I feel her warmth. I hear her singing. I see the stars over Paterson. What else could a reader ask for?

Five Recent Poems I Love [by Dante Di Stefano]

The following five poems were written by poets I deeply admire: Adam J. Gellings, Faisal Mohyuddin, Abby E. Murray, Nicole Santalucia, and Leah Umansky. I admire these poets because of their work, but also because they are warm, empathetic, kind, and genuine on the page and off.

1) “Prompt” by Adam J. Gellings

Adam J. Gellings doesn’t write poems so much as he partitions arrondissements of feeling on the page. Reading his work feels to me like being inside a Jim Jarmusch movie or a René Char poem. Listen to Adam read his poem, “Prompt,” and read the text here.

 

2) “Allah Castles” by Faisal Mohyuddin

There’s a gentle ferocity at the heart of Faisal Mohyuddin’s poetry, wildly spiritual, but grounded in the quotidian. The poem, “Allah Castles” is one of the great contemporary examples of a father-son poem; it’s also ecstatically mystical in the manner of John Donne and Rumi. Read “Allah Castles” here. Listen to Faisal talk to Ashley M. Jones about the poem here.

 

3) “Motherhood for Beginners” by Abby E. Murray

Abby E. Murray’s poetry continually seeks to define the self against the messiness of everyday life. Murray’s is a poetry of paradox and provocation, brilliantly imaginative, and exquisite in its use of language and in its intuitive movements. Listen to Abby read her poem, “Motherhood for Beginners,” and read the text here.

 

4) “Dear John Ashbery” by Nicole Santalucia

Nicole Santalucia’s vocation as a poet is to astonish. She’s the only contemporary American poet whose work makes me laugh out loud consistently. She’s also working on a series of poems that engage John Ashbery’s ouevre with the seriousness and the playfulness it deserves. Read Nicole’s newest “Dear John Ashbery” poem here.

 

5) "Unleashed" by Leah Umansky

Like John Ashbery, Leah Umansky doesn’t write about experiences. She writes out of them. Her poems shock me with their strange familiarity, their rhetorical acrobatics, their ability to resist the intelligence almost successfully. Hers is the contemporary poetry that embodies most for me the lines of Emily Dickinson: “Inebriate of air — am I — / And Debauchee of Dew —.” Read Leah’s poem, “Unleashed,” here.

Meet the Press: Roof Books & Queenzenglish.mp3

N.B. The following conversation with Kyoo Lee (also known as Q) and James Sherry centers on Q’s anthology, Queenzenglish.mp3, an amazing book I highly recommend picking up. ~DD

Dante Di Stefano: How did this project come into being?

Q: First, thank you so much, Dante, for your kind appreciation of the book.

The anthology grew out of the “mp3: merging poetry, philosophy, performativity” public seminar I launched in 2017 at the CUNY Graduate Center, supported by the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Center for the Humanities. As the faculty leader of the seminar, I started this sub-project on the “QueensEnglishToday.mp3” by organizing a reading and panel discussion at the GC on November 30, 2017. Then later that weekend, on December 3, 2017, we threw a sort of party, a more extensive and festive performance event at Queens Museum, [email protected] which I organized with Lee Ann Brown, where we formed an impromptu qLab (my name being “Q”). About a year later on December 08, 2018, some of the authors from the volume presented their texts and drafts at a session I curated for Queens Museum Biennale 2018, “QueensEnglish International 2018.” Poetic Justice is the initial and overarching theme for the “mp3” series I was exploring between 2017 and 2019, and so Queenzenglish.mp3 has this philopoetic genesis as well.  

This idea of doing a book was part of the project concept from the start, and so while I am the editor, Queenzenglish.mp3 remains truly and structurally a collaborative endeavor. I am ever so grateful to everyone involved, especially all the authors who have so enthusiastically and generously accepted the invitation to participate. I remember having some great conversations with Lee Ann and Paolo Javier, for instance, doing some brainstorming and napkin-writing. I was glad and grateful that James Sherry at Roof Books, a leading publisher in language poetry, was immediately receptive to the idea of putting together a book of this kind, and luckily, the fund from Mellon Foundation made that initial step possible. Rebecca Teich, Grace Caiazza, and Deborah Thomas at the press, along with James, also worked so hard on the project at every step of the way. So, this book benefited greatly from everyone’s expertise, enthusiasm, trust, goodwill, experiences, wisdom, support, and friendship, including Rachel Rose, the great artist and friend, who generously donated the exquisitely aquatic cover image which also rhymes so well with the conceptual vitality of the book.

DD: In your brilliant introduction to the anthology, you describe the project and explain the title. Could you provide a thumbnail version of these explanations for potential readers?

Q: Dynamic “Englishing” happening in Queenzenglish.mp3 performs the polyphonic futurity of the language in transit(ion): for us here, creative writing is critical thinking is connective reading.  

DD: One of the poems in this volume that stands out as a great example of what you call “dynamic ‘Englishing’ and its polyphonic futurity” is Steven Alvarez’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras.” I was wondering if you could talk a bit about this piece and how it embodies your project as a whole?

Q: It’s all “in the cracks” of and between and among languages, words, lines, its creative vacuities or transgenerative cavities. Steven’s “Queens: Quiero Que Me Quieras,” too, remembering  

        the reality that you are todos tus lengunas—yes—all yr tongues__
        remembering the peaceful of Queens—
        remembering those who wrote genius—& blissful drunkness__

and so on with such slidingly serial smooth jazziness re-members English as transEnglish in action. This translingual soundscaping in English is also deeply rooted in—while routed to—Queens as the site specified as such.  

DD: What did you learn about poetry (and your own relationship to language) through the work presented in this anthology?

Q: I always learn more about philosophy whatever “else” I seem to be doing or not doing or undoing. For this project, a sense of the magic of happening that is also made has been particularly palpable.

Philosophers: poetry envy is real, get over (here) with your Plato. This anthology is also one of the best things that happened to the field of the philosophy of language in recent years: The very fact that this category in the academic sub-field, “the philosophy of language” as in the philosophy of mind, is so monolingually and monologically framed, is already telling. I see the complex singularities of this anthology not just self-servingly as the editor of the book but as a future-facing reader and practitioner of philopoetics. Caroline Bergvall’s “Onward Afterword” also saw that so brilliantly.     

DD: Yanyi’s “Family Tree” stood out to me as a profound examination of what you call in your introduction “entanglished borderiding.” You say in the introduction: “Activating our own voices from where we are and are seen and heard and encountered, each of us began by actively listening, scribing, scribbling—across the boundaries and borders of all sorts and scales.” Could you talk about Yanyi’s piece and some of the other pieces that critically engage linguistic, national, and personal boundaries?

Q: Actually, the other day, I was telling Yanyi how wonderful it is that the book ends/reopens with the “Family Tree (After Luc Sante).” It was the alphabetical imperative of the name Yanyi that placed the piece at the end, yet the serendipity of it was notable as I was looking through the book again.  

Yanyi’s piece resonates with Steve’s to the extent that it also concerns linguo-cultural re-member-ing and life-wor(l)ding in motion/migration. Yet, it unfolds more edgily on a register more discursively corporeal and specifically genealogical and geopolitical, as it is set against the backdrop of the colonial modernity, the ideogrammatized “East-West” divide, and transactional transnationality of English as the language of trade (tradere “deliver, hand over,” part of tradition, too) as in “a primary text of Orientalism. My work as an artist is to try and talk to myself about my own race”:  

        The cost of being Chinese American is absorbing English as the primary text. […]
        […] I begin to remember. After all, I remembered it. Should it not belong to me? If I
        comes from my mouth, did I not eat it originally?

“I” and “It” emerging in these passages (first two paragraphs) perform their own gradual, irreferential entanglements via English that—literally—dissolves into the words on the page, especially in the second paragraph where you do not see “English” but only hear it performed; “My education begins to resemble my life, but also is not familiar.” This is indeed, as you observe, a very interesting embodiment of “entanglished borderiding,” part of what I myself happened to have started theorizing by recoding Writing-in-English into “Writing Entanglish” (Belladonna* Chapbook #188, 2015). Steve, Yanyi, and Q, among others, all play their music differently, yet all that is part of this music called Englishing. To re-cite the last epigram for my introduction to Queenzenglish.mp3:

        I remember coming across “comyn englysshe” a long time ago in a history of
                                                                                                    English class […]
        I agree with Ann Lauterbach, “a rose, after all, is still only a rose,
                                                                                                    but it smells sweeter
        when there are three of them” and even more when there are more of them.
                – Kyoo Lee, Writing Entanglish

DD: Thanks so much for your nuanced and insightful answers and for editing such a remarkable anthology, Q. James, what do you find most notable about Queenzenglish.mp3?

James Sherry: QE3 is notable for the amount of variation that might lead to change, mutation if you will. Some write from a personal point of view, some from a social point of view, some from the point of view of their surroundings and all of the permutations of those three. People are writing in prose, poetry, citation, and prose-poetry. People are writing with formal innovation and people are writing within a more transparent or received style. Will any of these different approaches to the issues catch on with a larger number of writers and lead to changing how we think about standards?

DD: In your essay, “Change and the Golden Rule.” The following paragraph struck me as particularly brilliant:

“Precisely because treating everyone as you would be treated assumes that everyone is like you when they aren’t, you know, because we have different selves, different cultures and different surroundings. We have different genes, experience, epi-genetics and environs. Variations galore. Meanwhile, the politics of grammar is based on a game where the prize is power. If I can make you write syntax like I do then you have a predilection to construct ideas like I do. While we may then have conflicts of self-interest, we continue to play the game of prisoner over and again as opposed to breaking omerta.”

Could you point out a few examples in the anthology where your ideas in this paragraph are put into practice?

JS: Most of the people in the book torque standards, leading to adaptation and change. Paolo Javier in “Programmed to Love: Remain as Beast” questions how much humans remain animal in a syntax that makes me read very slowly word to word to be sure I don’t revert to my usual mode of skimming to get the gist. When I read slowly, I get the point. When I read too fast, the intent of the piece eludes me. Kyoo Lee’s piece written with comments by Amy Evans Bauer and Laura Wetherington assumes that each reader takes a unique point of view, questioning the validity of standards. The very first line of Erica Hunt’s “Compliance” points out that we don’t live and hence cannot write in a single mode. M. NourbeSe Philip shows the many variations of a single word, “bamsie,” meaning rear end. Valentine Conaty raises questions that range from species variation to how individuals are both one and multiple all in the context of a field poem. Again, what’s notable about this book is variety, difference, and the individual expectation, the politics, and the ecology that writing needs to find methods, interest, and channels of connection to accommodate difference.

DD: How did Roof Books come into being?

JS: Roof Books started in 1979 with my interest in expanding Roof Magazine to longer formats. I was writing and editing on the cusp of NY School and Language Poetry, leaning toward finding new ways to express meaning. I have written long form essays on the trajectory of the publishing venture, showing how it changes with changes in the poetry world in my effort to keep current. There’s a whole chapter on this subject in my upcoming book Selfie: Poetry & Ecology coming from Palgrave later in 2021.

DD: How does this anthology relate to the other titles in your catalogue?

JS: In recent years, I’ve been moving Roof Books toward presenting an environmental model of writing rather than the language-centered writing of the 20^th century. QE3 by addressing how change occurs and presenting examples of change as well as discussions of the methods of change speaks to how I see writing evolving not only in a uniquely human way but according to the way change occurs throughout the biosphere. Language is not a human invention, but rather something humans discovered about how our world is constructed. I’d assert many of Roof’s recent titles as examples of how humanity and nature operate as a single complex entity.

DD: What else can we look forward to from Roof Books?

JS: Since QE3 was published in late 2020, Roof published an anthology of 31 contemporary Chinese poets in translation titled Urban Poetry from China edited by Huang Fan of Nanjing University and Daniel Tay, a NY-based translation editor. We just published Will Alexander’s magnum opus The Combustion Cycle that makes poetry of what Nathaniel Mackey calls “deep seas and distant galaxies that would make such a demand that his expended soliloquies implicitly ask and overtly answer.” Will’s Cycle relates to QE3 in the way it brings out ancient cultures and contemporary concepts overlooked by mainstream standards. And Brenda Iijima’s ecological masterpiece Bionic Communality, poems shaped to interface “all flora, all fauna, all mineral” in her search for a common ground for all living creatures.

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Kyoo Lee is a Professor of Philosophy, Gender Studies and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the editor of Queenzenglish.mp3 (2020) and the author of Reading Descartes Otherwise: Blind, Mad, Dreamy, and Bad (2013) and Writing Entanglish: Come in Englysshing with Gertrude Stein, Zhuangzi … (2015, chapbook). She is also the coeditor of journal issues on “Safe” (WSQ 2011), “Xenophobia & Racism” (Critical Philosophy of Race 2014) and “Derrida in China Today” (Derrida Today 2018).

Some of her recent academic recognitions include faculty fellowships from Cambridge University, the Mellon Foundation, Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS) and the Graduate Center, CUNY, along with a John Jay Faculty Research Excellence Award. Her philopoetic writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, Asian American Literary Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Dis, Flash Art, Randian, and The Volta among others. A member of PEN America Translation Committee and Poetry Translation Center (London, UK), she serves as the coeditor of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism and is on the editorial boards of Derrida Today, Open Humanities Press, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, and Women's Studies Quarterly.

James Sherry is the author of 13 books of poetry and theory and one of the leading proponents of both Language Writing and Environmental Poetics. His books includeThe Oligarch: Rewriting Machiavelli’s The Prince for Our Time (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), Entangled Bank (Chax, 2016), Oops! Environmental Poetics (BlazeVox, 2013), Four For (Meow, 1995), Our Nuclear Heritage (Sun & Moon Press, 1991), Lazy Sonnets (Potes and Poets Press, 1986), In Case (Sun & Moon Press, 1980), Part Songs (Awede Press, 1978). His work has been translated into nine languages including the Chinese edition of Selected Language Poems (Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House: Chengdu, 1993), translated by Ziqing Zhang and Huang Yunte. He is the editor of Roof Magazine and Roof Books, a seminal literary publisher, associated with virtually every innovative strategy in English language writing of the past 40 years, publishing over 150 titles of seminal works of language writing, flarf, conceptual poetry, new narrative and environmental poetry and poetics. He started the Segue Foundation in 1977 that has produced over 10,000 events in New York. Sherry was born December 30, 1946, and lives in New York City. 

 

A Note on Alison C. Rollins' Poem "Why Is We Americans"

Alison C. Rollins' debut collection, Library of Small Catastrophes (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), is one of the most spectacular first books I have ever read. The first poem I read from her, "Why Is We Americans," was published in Poetry magazine several years ago. The poem can be found in full here.

The following is an entry from a reading notebook that I keep, in which I respond to poems and passages of prose. Here is what I wrote about "Why Is We Americans" several years ago. If this interests you, pick up a copy of her amazing first book and prepare to be amazed. 

Alison C. Rollins’ “Why Is We Americans” begins as a riff on a line (and title) from the late work of Amiri Baraka; Rollins extrapolates the Baraka line into an anaphora-patterned meditation on notions of national belonging particular to the African American experience. The poet interweaves images from canonical western literature (“Walden pond,” “Jesus,” “Whitman,” “Orpheus,” “Darwin”) with images from the African American church (“the Pastor’s chattering chicklets,” “Psalm 23,” “mouths / washed out with the blood of the lamb”), and allusions to jazz music (“Roach and Mingus at Birdland,” Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamned,” and the concluding couplet, which references Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and raises the specter of lynching in a powerful way). The poem is as triumphant as it is incantatory, elevating sometimes mundane and sometimes extraordinary tropes into a profound celebration of Blackness. The vibrant surprising diction and the regular deployment of AAVE syntax imbue the poem with an astonishing energy at every turn: “We is clubbin’ woolly mammoths/ upside the head, jammin’ fingers in / Darwin’s white beard”; lines like these drive the poem forward with their sonic textures while continuing a critique of the exploitative and oppressive practices that vertebrae American life and American history. I love this poem. I feel like I could live in it forever—the explosive musicality of it, the joy of it, the strangeness of it. It is everything I look for in a poem: it is canny and subversive in its metapoetic view of American literature and culture, and it is infused with a hard earned duende that renders it unforgettable.

 

10 Poems from DIALOGIST

I have been the poetry editor at DIALOGIST since 2016. Working with Michael Loruss, the founder and managing editor, over the past several years has been one of the great lights in my life in poetry. Together, we have published and promoted many challenging, beautiful, wild, and necessary poems.

I love every poem we publish, and I am always amazed by the quality of the submissions we receive. We’ve been publishing a poem a week since 2019. Here are links to 10 poems I can’t live without (listed in no particular order). Below each poem, I’ve provided a short note on what I love about it. An audio recording by the poet accompanies most of the poems.

Check these poems out and look at our archives here.

To all the poets we’ve published over the last five years, thank you for sending us such brilliant work.

1) “Brazo” by Darren Donate
Note: The poem includes some disturbing photographic images of an injury (the poem is about the poet’s father, whose arm was injured doing factory work). It's such an amazing poem, reminiscent of Diana Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, in some aspects of its concrete/visual grammar. It’s an incredible poem about immigration, labor, family, and notions of national belonging.

2) “[Circumcise my heart, o genderqueer God.]” by Elana Lev Friedland
This heady sonnet, in direct dialogue with poems by John Donne and Meg Day, completely rends me every time I read it. This poem maps all types of kinships and identifications with a fluidity and grace that is unforgettable. I can’t wait until Friedland has a full-length collection.

3) “Your Quaint Conceit” by Alina Stefanescu
Roethke woke to sleep and took his waking slow. Stefanescu begins this poem: “I wake to cheap ontology.” What follows exhilarates and challenges. I’ve read Stefanescu’s poetry in other journals and when I see her name, I always know I’m going to love the poem I’m about to read. Consider the fifth stanza: “To appease is not apostrophe / but a rich bisque of climax, the cauldron / of yearn kept stirred.” See what I mean.

4) “Grief box” by Katie Richards
This long ambitious poem about motherhood, suburbia, and suicidal ideation, is imbued with the spirit of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. “Grief box” is a tour de force, a virtuoso performance that will haunt you.

5) “sermon” by Shaina Phenix
In this poem, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye collides with The Gospel According to Matthew to spectacular effect. Phenix explores the intersections between race, misogyny, and religion with great intelligence and with profound lyricism.

6) “POEM WRITTEN ON FATHER’S DAY” by Grace Q. Song
Song’s poem, equal parts thorn and salt, is a father-daughter poem I would put side by side with “Poem For My Father” by Toi Derricotte, “How Many Times” by Marie Howe, and “In Honor Of David Anderson Brooks, My Father” by Gwendolyn Brooks. When I think of father-daughter poems, I often think of Jason Shinder’s great anthology More Light: Father & Daughter Poems: A Twentieth-Century American Selection (Harvest Books, 1993). A twenty-first century anthology of the same kind would do well to include Song’s masterful poem.

7) “He Asked What Made My Brain Do That Thing Where I End Up On the Floor With The World Ending” by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick.
I love a long expository title, and Hardwick’s title is one of the most memorable ones I’ve ever encountered. This poem is a tornado, a night-blooming cereus in a greenhouse—ample, frenetic, interior as any a journeywork of stars.

8) “sunflowers: a myth, a painting” by Michelle Donahue
This textbox prose poem elides the phenomenological approaches of Gauguin and Van Gogh. It is achingly lovely, an ear to the earth. That other poet of sunflowers, William Blake, would approve.

9) “unpeeled” by Alli Cruz
This complicated, brilliantly written poem about sex, violence, misogyny, rape culture, and young adulthood should be required reading for every college freshman across the country. I look forward to reading great poems from Cruz for many years to come.

10) “COMPLETE” by Troy Varvel
Varvel’s powerhouse exploration of stuttering would make Robert Graves’ Claudius applaud. From its first line, “COMPLETE” explodes into alterior fluencies that affirm the beauty of the speaker at the poem’s center. The poem disavows normative speech patterns and offers up a searing and original music that always undoes me.

In Memoriam: Daneen Wardrop & Laura Boss

When a poet dies there is a vast caesura, a field of lilacs interrupted by wing beats and heartbeats and aches and aches and: snugly in the ampersand at the end of a life, they shine there, an em dash, a last ellipsis, a lovely lock of gray hair on the wrist of a daughter—…&

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Last week, two wonderful poets died within a day of each other: Daneen Wardrop and Laura Boss.

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I didn’t know Daneen (except through her poetry), but I was reading an advance copy of her latest book when I heard from the publisher we share about her passing. Wardrop’s newest collection, Endless Body, is part of a three-book-in-one collection called Trio, which also features books by Diane Raptosh and Karen Donovan, due out this summer. I had read her book, Silk Road, last year and was impressed by its virtuosic technique, it’s intense interiority, and the imaginative heft of the collection’s central persona (Donata Polo, Marco’s wife). Wardrop, a noted Dickinson scholar, imbibed and alchemized the inebriate air at the epicenter of Emily’s poems. Wardrop’s poems, especially those in her forthcoming collection, were transformative, transcendent, elegant, precise. Reading them I could not help but be amazed and reassured by the poet’s immensely intelligent, deeply loving, and wildly original presence. She is one of many many poets whose work deserves a wider readership and whose life in poetry has enriched us all.

Here are links to some of Daneen Wardrop’s books:

Trio: Planet Parable, Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body (Etruscan Books, 2021)

Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018)

Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015)

Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University of New Hampshire Press, 2009)

Here is a link to Wardrop’s poem, “name,” on the Academy of American Poets website.

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I first met Laura Boss sometime around 2012 at a reading at the PCCC Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey. Laura came up to me after the reading, said some kind words about a poem I had read, and quoted back a few lines that she admired. The handful of times I read in Paterson after that first occasion, I would always look for her in the crowd, usually sitting next to her longtime friend and Poetry Center director, Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Maria and Laura were alike in their enthusiasm for poets and for poetry, in their deep listening to the music around them, and in their fierce support of fellow poets.

Laura Boss founded Lips poetry magazine in 1981. She published Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Stone, David Ignatow, Marge Piercy, Michael Benedikt, Anne Waldman, Ishmael Reed, Gregory Corso, Ted Berrigan, Toi Derricotte, Alice Notley, Hal Sirowitz, Alicia Ostriker, Molly Peacock, and many more. She wrote an accessible autobiographical poetry, straightforward, rich, searching, and wild. She lived an amazing life in poetry. The next time I read in Paterson I’ll still look for her in the crowd.

Here are links to some of Laura Boss’s books:

The Best Lover (NYQ Books, 2017)

Flashlight (Guernica Editions, 2010)

Arms: New and Selected Poems (Guernica Editions, 1999)

Here is one of Laura’s poems:

LIVING TOGETHER
for Gregory Corso

I lived with Gregory for a year
or rather he lived with me
And though it was only a year,
it seemed like twenty
At night on my brown velvet sofa
he would write in his Chinese red silk
embroidered covered journal
with his brown ink Mont Blanc pen
that he had asked me to buy for him
and to get one for myself (though I never did)
The TV would be on and in memory always
tuned to a baseball game–
In the mornings we would make the run to Christie Street
for him to pick up what he needed to survive the day–
At this point, I was on a hopeless mission to get him to stop
to get rid of his years of bad habits
I was wearing my invisible Wonder Woman cape
but I was never successful like Wonder Woman
Sometimes we would go out to Maxwell Plum’s but
he could never sit for more than half the lunch
He took me to see the movie Napoleon but we only
stayed for half(it was incredibly long)
He stayed in my apartment and painted a self-portrait of himself
He kept changing the face–even once made himself black–
He had the skyline of San Francisco behind him
He painted a portrait of his friend Kerouac–
He painted a portrait of me and my eyes turquoise though
they are green and even made the sky turquoise
He made me look like a bitch—but the colors were beautiful
We went to San Francisco to find an apartment
but came back to New York when we were called that Ted Berrigan had died–
There was never I realize a chance that we would make it
We were like a fragile, fragrant homemade candle—
Its slight flickering wick
just waiting for the oncoming tsunami wave to blow it out.

(Originally published in the Connecticut River Review)

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Book Recommendation: Philip Brady's The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics

Philip Brady's The Elsewhere:  Poems & Poetics is a collection aimed at eternity.  Brady's new and selected provides an unabashedly bardic synthesis of the smoking girders and brickwork that make a life in poetry. Ranging from Queens to West Cork, from Youngstown to Lagos, The Elsewhere negotiates the landscape between recollection and release, between art and life, between impulse and sudden song: "I dreamt of holding fast to all I knew. / But memory's a muscle letting go." The essays on poetry, and the poetry itself, are Homeric in scope, Yeatsian in intensity, networked in a riot of wine-dark vectors and turning in a phantasmagorical gyre of allusion and erudition that spirals out into the enormous embrace of the music underwriting the everyday.  The Elsewhere is everywhere ambitious, but more importantly, its poems and prose dwell in a kind of singing that begins in the forever that is right here.    

This is the perfect book to pick up during national poetry month; it makes me wish there were more New and Selected collections that featured essays on poetics alongside the poetry. I'd like to see the same kind of book from contemporary poets who write incisive prose (like Paisley Rekdal, Mary Ruefle, Rachel Zucker, Tracy K. Smith, Nin Andrews, Martín Espada, David Lehman, Terrance Hayes, William Heyen, H.L. Hix, and on and on and on...).

In the meantime, I am happy to recommend whole-heartedly Brady's ambitious poetry and erudite prose. ~DD

Meet the Press: Plan B Press and Alan King’s Crooked Smiling Light

Dante Di Stefano: The poems in Crooked Smiling Light meditate on complicated family relationships. What are the advantages and the challenges of foregrounding the domestic and the autobiographical in your writing?

Alan King: The advantages to this approach is that the stories come off as being authentic since I’m pulling from my own experiences. These are opportunities to connect with readers on a real level because everyone has complicated relationships with a loved one.

The challenge is if my parents read my work, they’ll read it out of context and wonder why I’m “embarrassing” the family. My father and I made a lot of progress from those tense moments. There’s a chance he sees some of these poems and our relationship deteriorates, with all the work we did to get to where we are for nothing. So, there’s that.

DD: Much of this chapbook concerns itself with fatherhood. The book begins with complicated father-son relationship explored in “In Your Dream” and “Counter Punching” unfolds in dialogue with the father-daughter relationship explored in a poem like “The Land of Innocence.” Can you talk about the trope of fatherhood in your own work? Are there any father-son, father-daughter poems written by other poets that you find particularly compelling and instructive?

AK: Tim Seibles’s poems about his dad in his recent collection, One Turn Around the Sun, had a nuance that was lacking in my own poems. His poem, Ode To Your Father, really showed me how to humanize my dad while being critical of him at the same time. He tells the story of his dad that made me feel like I had a full picture of him. That’s what I wanted to start doing in my work.

DD: Who are your favorite poets?

AK: Aw man. That list changes, but the consistent ones are Tim Seibles, Destiny Birdsong, Kelly Harris DeBerry, John Murillo, Asha French, Jan Beatty, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, and Stephen Dobyns. Those are a few who come to mind.

DD: Like many contemporary love poems, “Gluttony” upends the notion of an idealized and exclusive beloved, meditating as it does on extramarital desire within a committed relationship. Why approach the love poem in this way?

AK: I felt the approach had to be real. Just because you’re married doesn’t mean you stop seeing attractive people besides your spouse or partner. Those feelings are natural, and the urges are what makes us human. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having those feelings. It’s up to the person on whether they will act on those cravings.

DD: The killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter Movement directly and indirectly provide a context for Crooked Smiling Light. Could you talk about how recent events have shaped your writing life?

AK: I think Steven Leyva explained this well in his “Nerd Volta” column for the Washington Independent Review of Books, when he said that my earlier poems “were always tempered…with a kind of whimsy.” In light of recent events, “the whimsy has largely given way to an often-unguarded lament,” of what he called “a licked chop.”

I alluded to things in my earlier work. Tim Seibles, who was one of my mentors when I was going through the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, told me to stop hinting at things. Just go there. Sometimes a point-blank approach is necessary to drive the point home with readers.

DD: stevenallenmay, how did Plan B Press come into being?

stevenallenmay: Plan B Press started as the publishing wing of a 30-day poetry festival that occurred in Berks County, PA each April during National Poetry Month. The festival itself has been taking place in Berks County each April since 1999. The Press was meant to publish participants of the Festival, however over time that mission has evolved as the Press moved from Central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, PA to the Washington DC area. The Press has been focused on giving voice to poets at the beginnings of their writing journeys since 1999.

DD: Can you tell us about your back catalogue?

s-a-m: We have published over 100 books in our 20+ year history and many of them have gone out of print for a variety of reasons. This is not an unusual occurrence for a small press which primarily publishes chapbooks. Our Back Pages is a visual blast of the journey we have been on as publishers as well. Some of the poets we have published have gone on to greater success (C L Bledsoe, Alyse Bensel, Jake Syersak, Michael Leong, and Robert Miltner to name but a few) 

DD: What does the future hold for Plan B Press?

s-a-m: We hope to rise from the pillow to slay the ennui of life each day for the foreseeable future. 

DD: What do you find most compelling about Crooked Smiling Light?

s-a-m: Alan’s voice. We had the privilege of publishing him in our most well-known book, Full Moon on K Street edited by Kim Roberts back in 2010. I have attended a number of readings of Alan’s since then and am always rewarded by his voice and delivery. He has quite a presence in a room when he reads. His work on the page is equally engaging as well. 

DD: Can you end the interview by introducing a poem from Alan’s collection?

s-a-m: “Gluttony”, probably because there is a video of this poem which is a work of art in its own visual right. Plan B Press has always been interested in the presentation of poetry beyond ink on paper. And Alan W. King embodies a multidisciplinary approach to poetry that we welcome and embrace. It’s an honor to be working with him on this project. 

Gluttony

Combing the bargain bin,
a woman, who's not your wife,
brushes beside you—asking
if the Roy Hargrove CD you're holding
is any good.

She's close enough for you to smell
her ginger-patchouli body wash.

The angle she gives you
in her leather bomber jacket—
the one unzipped, showing a white tee
retracing her athletic stomach and arms.

The jacket, with its collar flared,
makes her a bright blossom
booming its honey dew–scented tune
along her neckline.

And your father's voice,
from two decades before, warns you
about gorging on everything you see.

You were 16 the first time
he told you, when your hunger hovered
like that summer at Myrtle Beach—

sistas strutting the boardwalk
beneath a honey barbecue sun,
whose sweet light made each of them
a long stretch of marinade, a chromatic
scale of flavors along which
your tongue was burning to play.

And isn't temptation always lurking,
eager to hold our common sense hostage?

You tell the flower woman you're married
after she points to a flyer for a Roots show
and says y'all should go.

When she asks are you happy?
you remember a brotha once asking
how you could love one woman
when the world's a buffet—

the possibilities of pleasure
laid out like jumbo crab cakes,
lasagna rolls, and buffalo wings.

What's gluttony, if not a symptom
of our own hunger consuming us?

Wasn't Jack as careless, selling
his sustenance for a handful of beans?

You remember the story
of the stalk that almost made him
a hungry giant's grub.

You still hear the pastor preaching
about gluttons wearing the rags of drowsiness,
which is how your wife found you
stumbling through the days.

Your life before her was a string-less violin,
a dark garden of wilted sunflowers, a camper trailer
rusting against a moldy brick wall.

You were once a city of power lines,
boarded up clock towers, junked cars
and blazing drum barrel fires.

What she saw in you, only her heart knows.
Just like it knew you'd leave the temptress
back at the listening booth watching
the automatic doors close behind you.

At 16, you thought all there was to living
was filling your appetite—
too young to know love
is the everyday meal,
that the lack of it kills quicker
than the absence of food.

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Alan King is an author, poet, journalist and videographer, who lives with his family in Bowie, MD. He’s a communications specialist for a national nonprofit and a senior editor at Words Beats & Life‘s global hip hop journal. King is the author of POINT BLANK (Silver Birch Press, 2016) and DRIFT (Aquarius Press, 2012). He’s a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of Southern Maine. His poems and short stories appear in various literary journals, magazines and are featured on public radio. 

 

Meet the Press: Tupelo Press Anthologizes Poetry of the Pandemic

Dante Di Stefano: Tupelo Press just released the anthology Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic. Could you tell us a bit about this anthology and its genesis?

Kristina Marie Darling:  I had the privilege of co-editing Four Quartets with Tupelo Press’s Publisher & Artistic Director, Jeffrey Levine.  When curating the anthology, we wanted to showcase the many different styles and aesthetic approaches that writers have taken in depicting what is essentially a shared experience.  To that end, we chose sixteen chapbook-length folios, including two collaborative folios; a folio in translation from the original Korean; innovative folios like Dora Malech’s postmodern lyrics and Mary Jo Bang’s captivating hybrid text; and folios that honor tradition and reframe it for a thoroughly contemporary cultural moment, like Jon Davis’s Pandemia and Maggie Queeney’s The Patient.  Though some of the work was specially commissioned for the anthology, we felt it was important to also hold an open call.  In the end, we were humbled by not only the sheer volume of submissions, but the artistic vision and the quality of the writing.  This open call enabled us to present twelve established voices alongside four exciting new ones.  And because we received so many outstanding submissions, we featured many of the poets in Tupelo Quarterly’s most recent issue, TQ22. 

DD: Four Quartets, as you note in the introduction to the anthology, bears witness to life during the pandemic. It is timebound, historic, and (what Carolyn Forché has called) evidentiary in ways that other anthologies are not. Stephanie Strickland’s poem “Time-Capsule Contents” underscores, in its title, the preservative impulse of the anthology. There was also a very quick turn-around from conception to publication for this book. Could you talk about how these factors influenced your editorial work on this project?

KMD:  To help deliver such a timely book at the right moment, so that readers see their lived experience reflected in the poetry, was an honor and a privilege. In this moment of pandemic, protest, upheaval, and isolation, we felt it was important to present a project that cultivates community through the literary arts.  We at Tupelo Press have been thrilled to see Four Quartets achieving this goal, our recent zoom launch being one example.  It was heartening to see over eighty enthusiastic guests who came out to celebrate poetry—which has been, truly, a light in dark times. 

Let me just say that the completion of this timely anthology would not have been possible without Tupelo Press’s gifted staff, which includes Allison O’Keefe & Jacob Valenti, Operations Administrators; David Rossitter, Managing Editor; Kirsten Miles, Director of the 30/30 Project; Alan Berolzheimer, Consulting Editor; & Emily Bruenig, Fulfillment Coordinator.  They were instrumental in designing the anthology, sending out proofs, and gathering materials such as author bios and photos, but also fulfilling the donor rewards for the Kickstarter campaign that made the book possible.

DD: There are two collaborative section in this book, the excerpts from a long poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung and the poems co-written by Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito. This type of collaboration seems particularly moving and effective during a time of physical distancing. Could you discuss what you found most notable in these collaborations?

KMD:  It’s exciting to see the ways that technology has invited a spirit of collaboration even in this difficult cultural moment.  Traci and Brynn actually completed their co-authored folio long distance, so what a thrill to see them perform together during our Zoom launch.  Yusef and Laren also gave a captivating collaborative reading during our online celebration, and how great that people from all over the world could experience these wonderful performances, which shine a light on both artistic intention and collaborative process. 

DD: How did you decide on the organization/ordering of the anthology?

KMD:  We sequenced the anthology to highlight thematic and stylistic continuities.  We also wanted to create a narrative arc through the arrangement of the poetry, beginning with writers bearing witness to our current moment in the most powerful of ways, and then, moving forward to inspire a sense of hope, community, and generosity of spirit.  For this reason, we felt it was important to place Denise Duhamel’s Strength near the end of the book, for example, along with Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito’s Wild Recovery & Rick Barot’s wonderful prose pieces. 

DD: B.A. Van Sise’s stunning photographs have their own section. How do these images contextualize and converse with the poems in the anthology?

KMD:  I think of the anthology as a ledger of both history and community, of solitude and the lyric imagination.  In this respect, the photographs serve a necessary documentary purpose, while at the same time affirming the confluence of literature and the fine arts, of the ways that poetry can be illuminated by other mediums and disciplines.

DD: South Korean poet, Lee Young-Ju, translated by Jae Kim, is the only international voice in the volume. Can you talk about her poetry and the dialogue it opens with American pandemic poetry?

KMD:  I was excited to see Lee Young-ju and Jae Kim’s submission because of the sheer beauty and innovation of the poetry and the incredible skill of the translation.  But also, it places the American writers in the volume in a global context, while also evoking a sense of shared community and grief across the boundaries of nationality, language, and identity. 

DD: In the introduction to Four Quartets, you reaffirm Tupelo Press’s commitment to supporting underrepresented groups. Can you tell us more about this commitment?

KMD:  I’m so glad that you asked about this.  In addition to Four Quartets, Tupelo Press published the first anthology of indigenous American poetry in over twenty years, which places gorgeous creative work alongside essays on craft and artistic tradition.  The anthology, Native Voices, was co-edited by CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader.  Our catalogue is comprised of over 60% women and non-binary writers, compared to other university and trade publishers, whose ratio hovers around 30 or 40%. 

Additionally, when I first joined the staff of Tupelo Press, I felt it was important to expand and diversify our editorial process, and to that end, we have implemented panels of preliminary judges for each of our contests.  More specifically, we have hosted panels of all women and non-binary poets, as well as panels comprised of a majority of writers of color.  These preliminary judges, who represent artistic excellence across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and aesthetic standpoint, offer an opportunity to bring additional perspectives and voices into our editorial discussions.  This practice ultimately challenges me as an editor to expand my sensibility, my thinking about poetry, and to interrogate my own aesthetic preferences.  

DD: What was the most surprising, edifying, or otherwise remarkable aspect of editing this anthology?

KMD: Even in a time of isolation, it’s been wonderful to see the many forms that collaboration can take, whether it’s co-authoring a ghazal, translating, deconstructing a larger literary tradition, or reframing an artistic inheritance for our current cultural moment.  I’ve enjoyed seeing poets in conversation with visual artists and with one another, but also, it’s been inspiring to witness artistic exchange and literary community persisting even in the most adverse of circumstances.  

DD: Since this is a Meet the Press interview, can you tell us a bit about the history of the press and your involvement with it?

KMD: Jeffrey Levine founded Tupelo Press 22 years ago and released our first 5 books in 2021. Since then, we’ve published approximately 275 additional titles, and to great acclaim, always taking such care that the look and feel of our books matched the brilliance of the writing. We’ve launched so many important careers, including Ilya Kaminsky, Jennifer Militello, Matthew Zapruder, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Maggie Smith, and on and on. We’re especially proud of our recent anthologies, Native Voices and Four Quartets, and of our long-standing commitment to provide a platform for women, people of color, and LGBTQ writers.

Since joining the staff of Tupelo Press, first as Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and later as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, I’ve been intrigued by the ways that our books bridge the gap between literature and the fine arts, whether through the creation of artisan quality editions, or through collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.  Tupelo Quarterly, the online literary publication of Tupelo Press, was created to deepen this aspect of the press’s mission and extend its presence into the digital realm.  In recent years, we’ve created a singular space for collaborative texts, poetry films, cinepoetry, sound poems, and more. 

DD: What should readers look forward to from Tupelo Press?

KMD:   I have to say, our current list of new and forthcoming titles is one of our strongest yet. We will be publishing a book of poetry and archival collages by Katy Didden: as well as Chee Brossy’s first full-length collection, Stegner fellow Corey Van Landingham’s second book, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens; Laurel Nakanishi’s Berkshire Prize winning collection, Ashore; a book of stunning visual poetry by Naoko Fujimoto; and a debut book of poetry by Kelly Webber, whose sheer talent and graceful metaphors astonished us during our recent July Open Reading Period. 

DD: Here are four brilliant poems from the anthology. I wanted to end with these because they are among my favorite in the anthology and because they give a hint of the range and caliber of poetry contained therein.

---

Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito

    Dear Past

    I couldn’t do it again, that worrying. Time before 
    our wild recovery, before I learned
    my prayers in the gray kingdom, before shelter
    was a signal for burning eyelids 
    and grief tea. Tribes more ancient than memory 
    walk through you. They wander 
    the thinnest sky, place between pen and page, 
    neighbor and trigger, frontline 
    and garden: whole homelands exist 
    on faith alone. I couldn’t do it again: 
    all of the forgetting, my spirit fleeing my body 
    for another present. Do I forgive you? 
    You carry my grandmothers. I carry verses. Your panic 
    is almost mine, but I refuse 
    the enemy’s image. Truce is a mask 
    made of pressed flowers. Daughters unleash 
    a nation of broken sons. Dear replica 
    shotgun, dear unroped memory: Did I suffer enough?

---

Shane McCrae

    When Our Grandchildren Ask Us What America Was Like Before

    We lived in giant     tin eagles we used rags

    Wrapped around human bones as torches we were dogs

    Each dog in its own bird     we didn’t speak

    To each other but     yes we could talk

    Yes they could hear us yes     they didn’t answer

    Our questions     but they heard

    Us we spoke light     to light the corners too     dark for the torches

    Those shadows even light     from burning bones won’t touch     yes

 

    A god’s shadow     is cast inside

    Its body     no they weren’t gods

    No     more like noises made     music by dancers

    We made the shadows then     we searched

    The shadows then we made new shadows when we danced

    Again     we spoke around the torches no     we could-

    n’t hold them like you would we had     no hands

    We held them burning in our teeth and smiled

---

Denise Duhamel

    The Unreturning, 2020    
        (after Wilfred Owen)

    The prez calls us THUGS, has his henchmen hurl
    Teargas and flash bombs. Then he builds a Wall/
    “Baby gate” around the White House. Appalled,
    We adorn it, lauding the afterworld

    With wreathes and crosses, signs reading “Stay Woke,”
    “I can’t breathe.” His last minutes, George Floyd called
    To his momma. Tamir Rice was enthralled
    With his BB gun. Cops kick in bike spokes

    Of Brooklyn protesters. Last May, at dawn
    Police shoot Dominique Clayton, remind-
    Ing us it’s not safe to sleep while black. Drained
    Of life—Michael Brown, Sandra Bland. Guns drawn,
    Tasers zapping, America’s vile blind
    Spot. This hothouse, this “pushing daisies” chain.

---

Dora Malech

    After “The Day After My Father’s Death”

        to keep the other children safe
        from my infectious grief
        they left me in lockdown
                —Bill Knott

    Explain quarantine to children,
    says the headline. If they could
    read, we could leave the truth
    lying around for them to trip
    over, but these little ones are
    still blank and shiny as their own
    wet thumbs, so we say
    this is a one-time thing.
    We’re near the end.
    We can see them again soon,
    meaning each missed
    someone. Soon, near, one,
    can, we say. Those were the
    generic words the mini-mart
    had, so we stocked up quick,
    watched rain drip off the roof.

---

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-five books, which include Look to Your Left:  A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2021); Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2021); Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; DIFFICULT:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry (Black Ocean, forthcoming); ANGEL OF THE NORTH (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming); and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which will be launched by Persea Books in the United States.  Penguin Random House Canada will also publish a Canadian edition.  Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; five residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors.

The Many Golden Bees that Hum Inside My Heart: 3 New Books

[3 Book Recommendations by Dante Di Stefano]

The Last Orgasm
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2020

In her own words, Nin Andrews’s new collection is a “book of poems of gratitude, admiration, memories, grief, and love.” The Last Orgasm accomplishes what Andrews has accomplished throughout her body of work: to consistently write a poetry of complex intelligence, empathy, and humor; no one else in American poetry combines quite so seamlessly the metapoetic, the allusive, and the mirthful. Andrews displays an ecstasy of influence everywhere in The Last Orgasm, as she evokes, honors, and queries the likes of John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Denise Duhamel, Antonio Machado, Maureen Seaton, Tim Seibles, Walt Whitman, and many more. This is a book to be read and reread for its delights, for its wisdom, and for its acknowledgement that poetry (and the poetry of a self-unfolding-in-time) is far more heady and far more elusive and far more omnipresent and far more fleeting than any definition of it might imply. The first stanza of the poem “Last Night” conveys some of the beauty and strangeness to be found in these pages:

    Last night I dreamt
    that the bees—the many golden bees
    that hum inside my heart—
    were leaving, one by one,
    flying through a hole in the screen
    and into the night.

Every page of The Last Orgasm hums with such mystery, such sweet lack, such release.

Naming the Lifeboat
Justin Gardiner
Main Street Rag, 2020

In his essay on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden invokes Samuel Johnson to explain the aims and impetus of Frostian poetics: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” Justin Gardiner’s debut poetry collection, Naming the Lifeboat, recalls Auden’s Frost-by-way-of-the-good-doctor. Gardiner, who has lived in Antarctica and travelled through many remote wildernesses, writes the kind of poetry that has everything to do with joy and survival. The poems in Naming the Lifeboat traverse the South Pole, the high seas, Laos, Bolivia, the suburbs, the small towns, and the remotest regions of the United States. Gardiner explores the interior landscapes of grief, love, and pain, detailing family mental illness, romantic relationships, and everything in between. These are poems of pilgrimage, poems where a finely-calibrated wisdom leans into deep longing: “Given the traveler’s lot, / all arrival is invitation / to future loss—.” If you want to read the kind of poetry where epidermis meets bark and the mind loves the heart, this is the book for you.

Bone Chalk
Jim Reese
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019

Poet Jim Reese’s nonfiction debut, Bone Chalk, contains two dozen essays filled with the careful attention to detail and the emotional intelligence that characterizes his poetry. Reese draws his subject matter from a lifetime in the Great Plains and he assays the people and the landscape of this region with clarity and nuance. Formally, Reese variegates his approach to the essay, providing straightforward narrative memoirs, braided narrative essays, short lyrics, and incorporating epistolary elements; Reese also echoes poems he has written, composing essays from bumper stickers as he did in his poetry collection, Really Happy (NYQ Books, 2014). The essays' subjects range from a loving portrait of a mother-in-law to a lighthearted memoir of being a college mascot, from a lyric observation of teenagers in line at a pharmacy to a deep exploration of crime and violence in the Midwest. Perhaps the most notable essay in the collection, “Never Talk to Strangers: Twelve Years in Prisons and What Criminals Teach Me,” details Reese’s experiences teaching poetry in prisons, while exploring the personal ways violent crime has shaped his life. Even when writing about the weightiest of issues, Jim Reese employs a warmth and a humor that forms the amiable core of his aesthetic. The essays in this collection feel like affable prose poems stacked one on top of the other. If you want to feel the pulse of the heartland, Reese will guide your hand to its wrist.

Meet the Press: Iniquity Press, Vendetta Books & Big Hammer

Dante Di Stefano: How did Big Hammer and Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books come into being?

Dave Roskos: Big Hammer & the press began in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I moved to New Brunswick on July 4, 1986. Eliot Katz was the first New Brunswick poet I met. He was stapling posters around town for an upcoming poetry reading at The Court Tavern featuring Andy Clausen and the Lunar Bear Ensemble. He gave me a poster & encouraged me to come to the show & read in the open reading, which I did. There was no on-going poetry reading series in town at this time. The Roxy series from the early 80s had run its course and was history. I used to ask Eliot when the next poetry reading was every time I saw him. He must’ve gotten tired of me wanting to know when the next reading was all the time, because he encouraged me to start a reading series myself and then he told me how to do it.

I co-founded The Proletkult Poetry Circus at The Court Tavern in March of 1987, with fellow poet Chris Aubry. Bob Rixon was the first featured poet, followed by an open reading. The magazine grew out of the reading series & several other series in NJ, Philly & NYC including:  POETSWEDNESDAY at The Barron Arts Center, founded & run by Edie Eustice (earlier on with Sofran Crotty, later with Joe Weil), Liza Pille’s Tuesday night series at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, Jacko Monahan’s ongoing-for-decades series at The Brighton Bar in Long Branch, Frank Finale’s Without Halos readings in Ocean County, Betsy Robin Schwartz’s series at The Metuchen Public Library, Dave Lancet’s series at The Pipe Line & The Fringe in Newark, Lamont Steptoe’s series at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, Barbara Holland’s series at The Speak Easy in Greenwich Village, Enid Dame & Donald Lev’s Home Planet News  readings at The Cedar Tavern, Yictove’s series at The Knitting Factory, etc. The magazine included poets I had met through these various scenes, as well as poets from around the country who I only knew through the mail.

Big Hammer #1 was published in 1988. I typed it up with a typewriter onto sheets of 11 by 17 inch paper, double-sided, & had it photocopied at a local print shop. Ken Greenley and I used the MACS at The Roost, a free computer lab at Rutgers University, to type up “camera-ready” pages for the chapbooks and magazines. The Roost was open 24 hours, comfortable enough & conducive for stoned & even tripping poets typing up poems at 3 am. I typed Big Hammer # 2 & several chapbooks at The Roost. Big Hammer #2 was printed by my friend Tom Pulhamus, a poet (& later an editor at Long Shot) who worked as an off-set printer at Mike Cote’s Ploughshares Press. Mike let Tom print the magazine on his off-hours for the cost of materials. An enormous labor of love. Ken Greenley used to do guerilla print runs at his various office-temp jobs, printing his mag Half Dozen of the Other on the boss’s dime & time.

There was a vibrant poetry scene in New Brunswick in the 80s & 90s. Big Hammer was one of several New Brunswick-based poetry magazines at that time. There was Arbella, edited by Anthony George & Tom Obrzut, Conceptual Vandalism edited by Doctor Nein, Guillotine Broadside edited by Miriam Halliday & Matt Borkowski, Half Dozen of the Other edited by Ken Greenley, & Long Shot edited by Eliot Katz & Danny Shot. This was just in New Brunswick. Other notable NJ small press poetry mags of the time, which many of us read & sent work to, include Joe Weil’s Black Swan Review & Anti-Lawn, out of Elizabeth, Herschel Silverman’s Beehive, out of Bayonne, and Richard Quatrone’s Passaic Review.

DD: Your publishing endeavors reflect aspects of the poetry zine subculture of the 1980s & 1990s. I don’t know much about that subculture, but what I do know is that it was a confluence for multiple aesthetics, undergirded by a radical DIY poetics and favoring hybridity before “DIY” and “hybridity” were even terms that were bandied about so often. Could you talk about that scene, your role in it, and how it fit into (or didn’t) the broader world of poetry?

DR: The 80s & 90s zine subculture is simply a continuation of what is now called “The Mimeo Revolution” of the 1960s & 1970s. By the 1980s mimeograph machines had been largely replaced by Xerox or photocopy machines. Some folks even refer to the mags produced in the 80s & 90s as “Xerox Zines.” Most of the editors were also poets. Some of my favorite poet-editors from the 1960s & 70s include Tom Kryss (aka T.L. Kryss), Gene Bloom, D.r. Wagner, d.a. levy, rjs, Douglas Blazek, Diane DiPrima, John Bennett, Steve Richmond, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Marvin Malone, Kell Robertson, Charles Bukowski & Neeli Cherry (aka Cherkovski), A.D. Winans, F.A. Nettelbeck, Allen De Loach, & The Willie.

Three anthologies of 1960s Underground Poetry that I love above the others & return to the most are The East Side Scene, edited by Allen De Loach, The Living Underground, edited by Hugh Fox, and Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry edited by Charles Potts. These books are fun & taken together they are a master’s class on mid-twentieth-century American Underground Poetry.

The 1980s were a fun time to be a small press poet. There was a national network of poets connected by readings, magazines, fliers, posters, word of mouth, the telephone, & the post office. There were zine-review-zines like Fact Sheet 5. And there was Len Fulton and The Small Press Review, holding it down since the 1960s.

Some classic underground poetry mags from the 1980s include: Alpha Beat Soup edited by Dave Christy, Bouillabaisse, Cokefish, and Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup by Ana & Dave Christy, Planet Detroit by Kurt Nimmo, Poetry Motel by Patrick McKinnon, Action by Jim Cohn, Big Scream by Dave Cope, Big Fire Proof Box by Joel Kuszai & Chris Ide, Catalyst by M and Kathleen Kettner, Home Planet News by Enid Dame & Donald Lev, ArtCrimes by Steven B. Smith, Ben Guylas, etc, Impetus by Cheryl Townsend, Lactuca by Mike Selender, Guts by Keith Dodson, Fell Swoop by Joel Dailey, Raw Bone by Tom House, and road/house by Todd Moore. (There is a new book entitled Belvidere Books & Guns about Todd Moore & road/house press, edited by his son Theron Moore. It contains interviews with some of the folks mentioned here. I published Todd’s chapbook Blind Whiskey & the Straight Razor Blues in 2008).   

Some notable mags from the 90s include: Napalm Health Spa edited by Jim Cohn, THE-HOLD/Underbeat Journal by Cait Collins, Iconoclast by Phil Wagner, Transcendent Visions by David Kime, Lucid Moon by Ralph Hasselmann Jr., Driver’s Side Airbag by Michael Halchin, FUCK! by Lee Thorn, & Weird Poetry/American Living Press by Michael Shores & Angela Mark.

My friend Bree, of Green Panda Press & Least Bittern Books, created The Gonzo Library of the Indy Outlaw, Whole Books Meat & Ephemera, or The Outlaw Library, for short. Bree & some other poet-editor friends (rjs & Alex Gildzen) made a few posts in the beginning, but I think she mainly just set it up so that I could run with it. Bree is a poet-editor from Cleveland in the spirit & tradition of d.a. levy, Daniel Thompson, & Jim Lang.

Many of the poets & publications mentioned here are represented in The Outlaw Library: www.outlawlibrary.blogspot.com

DD: On your website you note Big Hammer (and I assume, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books) reflects: “a vision of America that is unfathomable to those in the suits & ties and even those with the ponytails and the birkenstocks. His poems are written by auto mechanics and plumbers and ferriers and people who know the difference between fuel injection and carburetors.” Does this mean a Working-Class vision of America? A nonprofessional, non-academic view? A Whitmanesque democratic vista? If so, what does this view offer that other views do not? How does this view connect to your understanding of poetry in general?

DR: That’s not my website. That’s The Outlaw Poetry/Free Jazz Network in France created by my friend Klaus Thiemann. That quote is by poet-editor Mark Weber, of Zerx Press. Very kind of him to say. & yes, sure, it means all that, & the kitchen sink. Throw in a mimeograph machine for good measure. Poems by & for Proles. I don’t know if it’s a view, or stance, so much as a way of life.

Poet-Editor LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) said something in 1960 that speaks to the rest of your question:

“I didn’t especially think that there was any charted-out area in which the poetic sensibility had to function to make a poem. I thought that anything--anything you could grab--was fit material to write a poem on. That’s the way I think about it. Anything in your life, anything you know about or see or understand, you could write a poem about if you’re moved to do it. (....) And I don’t think that there are any kind of standard ideas or sentiments or emotions or anything that have to be in a poem. A poem can be made up of anything so long as it is well made. It can be made up out of any feeling. And if I tried to cut anything out of my life--if there was something in my life that I couldn’t talk about...it seems monstrous that you can tell almost anything about your life except those things that are most intimate or mean the most to you. That seems a severe paradox.”

DD: You published Harvey Pekar’s essay on Sun Ra. Could you talk about that book and the relevance of Sun Ra and Pekar today?

DR: They were both DIY, long before that phrase was bandied about so often, as you said above.

Harvey’s Sun Ra article was first published in a Canadian jazz magazine called CODA in 1975. The article covers Sun Ra’s career till around 1973. The chap book/reprint I published also includes photos of Sun Ra & the Arkestra performing at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, taken by poet-editor Lamont Steptoe of Whirlwind Press.

Sun Ra will be relevant as long as musicians improvise, or forever. The Arkestra is his legacy, Afrofuturism, his compositions & recordings & poetry, what he did with the moog, The Outer Space Employment Agency, Space Is The Place!, & his most pertinent question of all: “It’s After The End Of The World! Don’t You Know That Yet?!”

Besides being a pioneer of Underground Comix, Autobiographical Comix & Per-Zines, & an accomplished & widely published Jazz Writer, Harvey Pekar also wrote serious literary essays. Harvey has a character in American Splendor named Herschel whom he  describes as a “working class intellectual.” When I met Harvey he thought it was great I was a furniture mover & when we talked on the phone a few years later he remembered that & it was a plus in his book. Not so much a plus in many a snob’s book. Harvey was a working class intellectual supporting himself & later his family as a “flunky file clerk” at a VA Hospital in Cleveland. Harvey said writers should get a “flunky job” that they don’t have to think about & allows more energy for the real work, which is writing. The day job is just about Survival. Later on after the American Splendor movie he got many book deals & wrote several graphic-novel-style history & social studies books, often with historian Paul Buhle. Besides a stack of mostly self-published comic books, followed by a stack of big name press hardcover & trade paperback graphic novels, Harvey left a sprawling paper trail of jazz & literary essays in publications as different as DOWN BEAT and B.N. Duncan’s TELE TIMES. Some of Harvey’s Iniquity Press/Vendetta chapbooks, including Sun Ra, are posted on the outlaw library blog.

DD: How has Jazz influenced you as a writer and an editor?

I like all kinds of music, like I like all kinds of poetry, but I’m real-heavy into Free Jazz. Free Jazz is the music of the streets. A clarion call to action. Listening to Free Jazz inspired me to pick up an alto saxophone & just start playing. I can’t really articulate how jazz influenced my writing or editing, but it definitely influenced my horn playing (which is not jazz or free jazz -becuz it’s not based in the blues-but sound poetry or noise). I named my son after Albert Ayler. I love the music. However, I was writing poetry long before I found Jazz. I’m not a Jazz Poet. 

The late & much loved Steve Dalachinsky was a great Jazz Poet. He used to write poetry at live jazz shows. He has a 250 page book of poems he wrote at every single Charles Gayle gig from 1987 till 2006 (The Final Nite).  THE MANTIS for Cecil Taylor 1966-2009 came out on Iniquity/Vendetta in 2009. Poems written at Cecil Taylor concerts. Pure Spontaneous Combustible Jazz Poetry from a Pure Jazz Poet Soul. Ya can read THE MANTIS for free at the outlaw library...   

DD: What are five Jazz albums every poet should should listen to?

DR: Here’s seven that I enjoy listening to: Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler, Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman, Ascension by John Coltrane, Humility In The Light Of The Creator by Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Congliptious by Roscoe Mitchell, & Giuseppi Logan’s first two records on ESP-Disk.

DD: One of the books that really stood out in your catalogue was Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper by Hungarian poet Géza Szőcs, translated by Paul Sohar. How did you come to publish this book? What do you find most compelling about this poetry?

DR: Great book of poems. All the books of Hungarian translations by Paul Sohar are published by Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek in Romania. Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper was edited by Zoltán Böszörményi, but Paul came up with that great title. Paul Sohar lives in NJ when he is not in Budapest. He approached me in the 90s & said that Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek needed an American publisher with ISBN numbers to partner with so that the books could be published & distributed in the USA. It’s been an honor to share in this collaboration, but I have to be clear that it is their vision & that they do all the work. All I do is provide ISBNs. Paul is tireless in his work writing & translating urgent poetry.

DD: Many of the books you publish are guided by an aesthetic that derives partially from mid-twentieth-century American poetry, especially the Beats, but also the so-called Confessional poets, and the New York School. Could you talk about this aesthetic and also about some of the authors you’ve published?

DR: Especially The Beats, but also Meat poets like Charles Bukowski & d.a. levy. Ted Berrigan a big influence on many poets in Big Hammer, far as The NY School goes, from younger poets (now in their 50s) like Chris Stroffolino, Candace Kaucher, Boni Joi, and Tom Obrzut to his friends & students like Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Joel Dailey, Joel Lewis, & the late poet-editor Tom Weigel, whose poetry sings in eternity.

Some gone poets I’ve published chapbooks by include Donald Lev, Kell Robertson, Andrew Gettler, Allen Johnson, and Ed Galing; all five represented in Big Hammer & The Outlaw Library. May the Muses crank out mimeographed broadsides of their poems & pass them out on street corners in eternity.

Again, it’s an everything including the kitchen sink with a mimeograph machine thrown in for good measure aesthetic.

I learned alot about mid-twentieth-century American poetry by reading Walter Lowenfels anthologies. I first read Cleveland poet-editor rjs in Lowenfels’ WHERE IS VIETNAM? I found a copy in a used bookstore in Asheville NC on lunch-break on a long-distance moving job, read it all the way home to Jersey in the cab of the truck. Years later I answered an ad in Factsheet 5 that rjs had placed giving away free copies of Douglas Blazek’s Broken Knuckle Poems, which he and Tom Kryss had published in the 60s. The copy of Factsheet 5 was from the 90s & it was the mid 00s but rjs answered & we traded books & zines generously & eventually published his Collected Poems on Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He introduced me to Tom Kryss & we too became friends & put out his book light dark light. This chain of events started by picking up that copy of WHERE IS VIETNAM? Walter Lowenfels was completely egalitarian. His anthologies are a big part of my education. He also turned me on to William Wantling & Olga Cabral, for which I am eternally grateful.         

Matt Borkowski is one of the reasons I started Big Hammer in the first place, to publish and promote his poetry. Same goes for Ken Greenley & Michael Pingarron. Three poets from off the streets of New Jersey who have left this realm for parts unknown. Their poems scream from under bridges & from factory floors, scrawled in blood on shithouse walls. Not just those guys, other gone friends as well, like Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, Stuart N. Ross, Charlie Mosler, & Bob Rixon; all from Jersey, all there in the beginning; along with alive-&-kickin’ poet-pals Joe Weil, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Anthony George, Tom Obrzut, John Lunar Richey, Lamont Steptoe, Chris Stroffolino, Dave Cope. All folks in the first two issues who have continued to be in Big Hammer over the years, creating a kind of core, most of whom have chapbooks &/or trade paperbacks from the press. Three other gone poets from the early days of Big Hammer, but who I never had the honor of putting out a book by, are Aisha Eshe, Barbara A. Holland, and Enid Dame. (Give them a read!) That’s only the beginning though. Ya can read the first 18 issues, & issue #21, of Big Hammer for free in The Outlaw Library, and see who else joins the party as time goes on, if you feel so inclined.

DD: Your own collection, Fall & All: Book 2, invokes William Carlos Williams. Could you talk about Williams’ legacy, and, also, about New Jersey as a home for poetry?

DR: I love William Carlos Williams. I sent poems to Allen Ginsberg when I was a teenager & he wrote back “Read WCW for complete grounding.” I find myself returning to Spring and All and Descent of Winter all the time. I also really dig Paterson. A man is a city. No ideas but in things. I can’t talk about WCW without also talking about Alfred Kreymborg and OTHERS magazine, which was conceived at Grantwood, an artist’s colony in Ridgefield, NJ, & which Williams helped edit. Kreymborg also put out annual hardcover anthologies, also entitled OTHERS, for a few years. The complete run of OTHERS magazine has been posted online at The Modern Journals Project (modjourn.org). You can also find affordable copies for sale online. It’s an education in early-twentieth-century poetry. Alfred Kreymborg did important work. OTHERS mag had a huge influence on Big Hammer 19 thru 21, as those 3 issues came out roughly one hundred years after OTHERS, & form a trilogy. I was blown away by how relevant these poems from a hundred years ago are today.

New Jersey has been a great home for poetry for me. The list of poetry reading series I ran off earlier, most of which were in NJ, speaks to that. That was just a list of readings I had gone to over the years. There were so many other scenes going on as well. NJ has a rich history, from Walt Whitman to Williams & Kreymborg to Walter Lowenfels, who lived in Mays Landing, to Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to Joe Salerno, & all the NJ poets I’ve mentioned in this interview. I’m happy to be from NJ. Rent is kinda high though.

DD: What can we look forward to from Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books?

DR: Gonna bring back my zine STREET VALUE. Eventually make more Big Hammers. Books by Beth Borrus, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Jen Dunford-Roskos, Loring Hughes, Katalin Mezey (translated by Paul Sohar), Joe Weil, Dwyer Jones, Tom Obrzut, Anthony George, John Lunar Richey, Damian Rucci, normal, Dave Church & Bob Rixon. That should keep us busy for a while.

DD: Could you end by giving us a poem or poems from poet (s) you’ve published?

DR:  Thank you for asking such great questions & thanks too for this opportunity to talk about poets that I love. Here are two short poems, by Matt Borkowski & Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, respectively...

A Walk Is A Prayer

a walk is a prayer if taken well,
one foot in heaven,
one in hell;

upon the earth where all have fallen,
a walk is a prayer

—Matt Borkowski

 

Wedding Song

“Gently Gently do one confident chore
in front of me lovingly, daily.” (Rilke)
Gently Gently do one confident task
in front of me lovingly, daily.
“Lead me this way near the garden.” (Rilke)
Lead me this way near the garden.
Gently, lovingly, confidently, daily.
Give me nights that are luminous
tantric
drala
above the enemy
Mountain Energies
“A man’s home is his wife.” (Talmud)
Behold our authenticity!
A woman’s home is to face everything--
or else!

—Miriam Halliday-Borkowski

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Dave Roskos has been writing poems since 1979 and has written several books including Intensive Care (Black Rabbit Press) & Lyrical Grain, Doggerel Chaff, & Pedestrian Preoccupations (Cat in the Sun Books/ReDUX Consortium). He lives in Seaside Heights with his wife, poet/collagist Jen Dunford-Roskos, and works as a Direct Support Professional for a non-profit Mental Health Agency.

Blurred Enchantment: A Review of Youna Kwak's sur vie

sur vie
Youna Kwak
Fathom Books, 2020

Youna Kwak’s debut collection, sur vie, calls for a brazen ear to hear its Precambrian limbic music. Kwak’s poetry is like nothing being written today, rife with “black ruminations, creaking / musculature,” “warm jubilance,” “crowbar bones,” “fish-thick / skin” and other opaque, but strangely tactile luminous fluxes. To enter into a poem in sur vie is to be etherized, atomized, and transfigured, to experience something at once coolly mystical and hotly mammalian; as Kwak puts it in her poem, “Racoon”:

            where you are is
            incompleteness, blurred

            enchantment in the center of the dance, where

            eyes all wallow, socket-hungry.

Here, as elsewhere in sur vie, Kwak’s poetry scavenges and scans the lonely unknowing at the heart of human experience, overlaying the instinctual, the habitual, and the ultimately unnamable with intellection and lyric fire.

Kwak’s lyric fire unfolds in dialogue with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet she directly invokes in the poem “Season of Bells’ Distant Flowering,” and whose presence shines like shook foil almost everywhere in this collection, as evidenced in the following stanza from “Waiting in the Garden”:

                        Were you smote to stillness by the object
             or did desire strike first? Fixing
                        later on its locus, sudden gleam of light
                        amongst the brambles. The fat plum, lazy dangle.

Interestingly, Kwak’s poetry reverses the inscape of the objects in the world it apprehends, unmooring those objects from their particularity and, in the process, unselving speaker and listener alike (blurred enchantment in the center of the dance). Everywhere in this poetry, the image comes first, but the image is “an image of ardor / unchecked, spilling / vines from the cabinet.” This spillage, this lyric enactment of the fungibility of all things, leads inevitably back to a contemplation of the body (what Hopkins called “mortal trash”) as corpse and container of a corpus of language (The Word made flesh—the What that will fall to the residuary worm). In some of the most memorable lines from sur vie, Kwak writes: “My mouth is cut to the likeness of / God, and instructs the newborn / in me.”

Ultimately, though, sur vie contemplates survival, this life we live and try in vain to make sense of, in all its estranging detachment and its thrumming intimacies. Youna Kwak’s poetry, “moonbitten, lit, a tatter of telegrams,” counters what Pound called “the tyranny of the unimaginative.” sur vie deserves to be widely read because it enacts the curious balm of a deeper knowledge in a time (like any other time) of so many superficial ways of knowing.  Assuredly, despite a wider uncertainty, Kwak holds out her hand to us and sings: “In appreciation I will persist with you.”

Meet the Press: Free-Grace Press—A Conversation with Clifford Jackman

Dante Di Stefano: How did Free-Grace Press come into being?

Clifford Jackman: Free-Grace Press was created because we wanted to publish books that are about using the readers imagination. Our books are sculpted art / a  kinetic sculpture that you can carry around – an Artist's Book. We desire to recreate the joy of looking, feeling, reading, and using one’s imagination.

At our physical foundation is the genderless and often anonymous Pamphleteer publisher that was born slowly after the invention of the printing press for the masses. From Jane Anger (1589) to Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin (1776) we adore the brutal honesty and high art of Pamphleteering.

We believe those Pamphleteer times and today’s Internet (self-publishing) times are very similar.  The internet’s abandon and freedom is similar in spirit to the free-for-all that Pamphleteering was, and/or, is.

Another brick in our foundation is the Artist’s Book championed most recently by William Blake (1757-1872). His combination of drawings and paintings with text was groundbreaking. Since then artists and writers have carried on the tradition of an Artist’s Book through Dadaism, Surrealism, and Conceptualism. The respect Blake had for literary prose did not make it through to Conceptualism (1970’s). And that’s when aesthetics and philosophy dominated the Artist’s Book design so there were very few literary stories – just visual, conceptual, and philosophical stories. So at Free-Grace Press we aim to continue this tradition of the Artist’s Book.

DD: Tell us about the first book Free-Grace has published, The Worming of America by Autumn Leaf.

CJ: Well literally it’s an answer to another Pamphlet published in 1615. We published The Worming of America as a rebuttal to Joseph Swetnam’s pamphlet / novel published in 1615 titled, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward, and Unconstant Women: or the Vanity of Them, Choose you Whether: With a Commendation of Wise, Virtuous and Honest Women: Pleasant for Married Men, Profitable for Young men, and Hurtful to None.

Genre-wise, it’s a blend of historical fiction, alternative history, and literary fiction. It’s a post-modern study or play on questions of femininity, debt, sin, and freedom.

The story is told by a first person narrator -  Autumn Leaf (aka Susan Hutchinson), and it transports readers to Colonial Boston(1650) where The Worming of America (WoA) explores oppression in a Puritanical time as seen through the eyes of Anne Hutchinson’s daughter. Autumn throughout her day investigates / debates, the English Civil War (royalty and/or white slavery), the Free-Grace Controversy, and how America unified for a militaristic revolution.

DD: Tell us about the books you’ve slated for publication in the next few years.

CJ: The second book Free-Grace Press is publishing in 2021 is, Mother’s Day in the Empire State, Or, An Answer to the Arraignment of Women. Mother’s Day, again is written in modern day prose. It’s about motherhood in contemporary Appalachian society. The author is a 50-year-old woman - Constance or Connie Munda - she is a single Mom in upstate New York and a Child Protection Services (CPS) officer. She investigates two mothers for child abuse on Mother's Day, one mother lives within poverty Appalachia, and the other lives within luxury Appalachia. The release date is Mother’s Day 2021, and it is 70,000 words. Thirty illustrations accompany the book. The narrator, Connie Munda, is the daughter again of an American heroine. She is the daughter of Anna Jarvis, the woman who started Mother's Day in 1906 - whose story is almost as compelling as Anne Hutchinson's story.

Our next third book will be the beginning of a trilogy called, Sagg;, Or Life in Free-Grace.  It's a modern-day analogy to Henry Thoreau’s Walden; Or Life in the Woods. All three will be in the epistolary novel form. These letters are written by Sam Kane, a 50-year-old man in modern day prose, and the launch dates are staggered yearly starting in the spring of 2022. Each novel within the trilogy will be approximately 70,000 words and will have again 30 Illustrations. The novels are called Sagg; Or Life in Free-Grace, because Sagg is a pond in Southampton, NY and Free-Grace is the root of Thoreau’s “Life in the Woods.” The narrator Sam Kane is a divorced dad from New Jersey who is writing letters to his son and daughter about his life and failed family in the epistolary novel form. It follows Walden’s chapter, subject, and topics, very closely, but the narrator / Sam Kane, is unaware his life going down the same path as Thoreau’s experiment in the woods.

DD: What kinds of books are you looking to publish going forward?

CJ: Well, the above 4 books should take us to 2024.  But during that time we’ll evolve into publishing more author’s work because we’re correlating a great design / publishing team for Free-Grace Press.

DD: Why should poets read a book like The Worming of America, or some of the other forthcoming Free-Grace titles?

CJ: Poets would like WoA because the prose is jazzy, rhythmic, and lyrical. The WoA prose also cares deeply about the reader and showers respect on all of five senses.  And more importantly WoA taps into the 6^th sense / the inner eye with its prose and illustrations. Tapping this extrasensory perception or sense - that we all have - is what the successful poet does and where the poets’ work should live. The poet would enjoy WoA because as publishers we too have tried to boil it all down to a metaphysical or transcendental truth.

DD: What small presses do you admire?

CJ: Presses we like are –

1 – Haymarket Books –

2 – Seven Stories Press

3 – Fine Art Gallery Presses - Davis Zwirner Books and Hauser and Wirth Publishers.

DD: Here is a brief excerpt from The Worming of America to end the interview.

1 – Chapter 14, Subchapter - Autumn Leaf , pg. 185.

Nothing -

Yes, Laura,” I say. “My Nothing is a sleepy, subconscious scientific space — which mathematically is half your life. And, most important, this Nothing sleepy space you mock is a self-less space, it’s a free-grace space — a place to rest, a place of dreams. This Nothing is a blank piece of paper, perhaps a blank page inside a book?”

I continue, “What shall you do with this Nothing? Is Nothing in the Table of Contents? Is there an illustration of Nothing? Do you look up Nothing’s page number, excited and thrilled — turning the pages to witness Nothing and then you thumb your way to Nothing, and then your disappointed… wondering why is Nothing nothing? You turn the page hoping there is a back page for Nothing? Some small print, a clue, maybe even an address for Nothing? Could there be linear notes for Nothing? Cliff’s Notes for Nothing? Someone’s notes, not even a Penny-Saver coupon for Nothing?”

“But Nothing…  is nothing… and we think this is another nothing scam. We then pause and think with this thin piece of paper in between our fingers that is Nothing, we think about creating something out of this nothing. Is this the blank page for my greatest poem I will create? Is this blank page left for me to I draw out my masterpiece in charcoals? Or perhaps I just rip this blank page out, this Nothing, I will tear out and fold it up into an origami bird and/or a paper airplane and fly Nothing around? What a wonderful flying and chirping Nothing that would be!”

As I finish saying these words I pretend to be folding up a piece of paper and then I throw my imaginary hyper plane towards the Mayflower candle lamp variable and my class and I watch in amazement as it spins, and circles the Mayflower lamp before slowly flying, flapping, and floating out the door — Origin O.

I continue, “Nothing is that pause or breath between  words when singing or reading poetry… Nothing is the space between a painter’s strokes of paint that can be anything: a mountain or a mite, anything at all. This is Nothing — this is free-grace.”

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Clifford Jackman is the Creative Director at Free-Grace Press.

Three Book Recommendations for National Poetry Month, 2020

The Banished Immortal: A Life of Li Bai
Ha Jin
Pantheon Books, 2019

Ha Jin’s biography of Li Bai (formerly known as Li Po and Rihaku in the west) provides a vivid survey of the great poet’s life. Bai (701-762 A.D), a legendary figure in Chinese poetry, is said to have drowned while drunkenly chasing the reflection of the moon in a river. The Banished Immortal, although constantly taking account of the myths clustered around Li Bai, focuses more intensely on the verifiable aspects of the poet’s life and work. Ha Jin’s compelling prose not only renders a highly readable overview of Bai’s life, but also provides an interesting gloss of Tang dynasty bureaucracy. Bai’s wanderlust, his political aspirations, his poetic skill (often employed in service to his political ambitions), his setbacks, his literary friendships, his Daoist spirituality, his naivete when negotiating court intrigues, and his gregarious heart make this biography read like a novel. Ha Jin brings Li Bai alive in his writing; he also conjures a world where poetry held a central place by providing interesting digression about Tang poetry devotees like Ge Qing, a street policeman in Jing Prefecture who was “so devoted to the poet Bai Juyi that he tattooed more than thirty of Juyi’s poems on his body, as well as drawings inspired by his verses” and was called “Bai Juyi’s Walking Poems and Pictures.”  The world that Li Bai moved through bears little in common with our own, but American poets might find inspiration in the naked ambition of this itinerant immortal.

Playlist
David Lehman
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019

In a 1996 Paris Review interview with A.R. Ammons, David Lehman said that Ammons’ long poems: “seem in some ways deliberately imperfect—casual, expansive, all-inclusive, loose.” The same could be said for Playlist, which is a direct homage to Ammons’ Tape for the Turn of the Year. Like many of Ammons’ long poems, Playlist unfolds in increments, held in place by the calendar and given momentum by the playlists on Sirius radio and by the enthusiasms of the poet—jazz, poetry, cinema, the great American songbook, and crooners like Sinatra. There’s a cosmopolitan sprezzatura to Lehman’s long-poem, a spritely dailiness, surprisingly intimate and lush, as open to chance as a turn of the stereo’s dial, efflorescing in descriptive passages such as:

    after I step out of the car
    and onto my favorite perch
    above Cayuga’s waters, the porch
    where majestic trees devoid of leaves
    stand like scarecrows
    the sky a deeper hue an orange
    and blue blaze dipping
    below the horizon

In Playlist, Lehman has succeeded in doing something that hasn’t been done much since the passing of Ammons, viz., he’s written a book-length poem that is propulsive in its readability. Playlist is a testament to a literary friendship of the highest caliber, and an artifact from a life lived in a studied circadian dialogue with art, literature, and music. Anyone who lives poetry, and loves it, should read this book.

Helping the Village Idiot Feed the Chickens (or the Brutal Procedures of Procuring Dinner)
Joe Weil
Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books, 2020

The title of Joe Weil’s newest collection might leave some readers nonplussed and might initiate others into the mysteries of another uniquely variegated collection by one of the most underrated poets in America. This is a book contingent upon what Weil himself might call an aesthetic of the motley, a book that contains multitudes—ranging from a Petrarchan sonnet to a poem about the Staten Island Ferry that begins: “a boy vomits over the stern.” Weil’s is a leaping poetry that moves from gazelle to silver maple, from the memory of a mother looping his belt in grade school to a line from Rae Armantrout.  Helping the Village Idiot evokes the imagistic intensity, the technical mastery, and the assured iconoclasm of mid to late career James Wright. As Weil notes in “Ars Poetica (or the failure to be jade),” alluding to Robert Lowell’s famous notion: “I am all raw in my very cooked way.” Indeed, Weil’s poetry combines vigor with technique and a canny knowledge of multiple poetic traditions. However, Weil’s autobiographical lyric poems shine brightest, such as “Poem for Emily Ten Years In,” a gorgeous love poem for the poet’s wife, a wily ars poetica, and a poem about raising children with Autism. The collection ends with a poem, “Compline,” that recalls Seamus Heaney’s dictum that poetry is earned communion:

    Come: touch this wind.
    Out of a vagrant longing
    that stands through the night in the house of the dawn,
    lift up your chalice with worn mumbled prayers
    and sing to ghosts.
    May the hour genuflect praise
    and deepen the dark river’s gaze
    that holds the trees and houses accountable
    to whatever they Shelter.
    It is this residue in things,
    this now, that abides with us,
    that gives us bread
    to break.

If you want to have your heart broken and your faith in humanity reaffirmed at the same time, buy this book.

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Note: I read these three books over the past few weeks and they provided me great solace and inspiration during these trying times. I highly recommend all three books, and, indeed, any books written by Ha Jin, David Lehman, and Joe Weil. ~Dante Di Stefano 

Nickole Brown's The Donkey Elegies

[A Review by Dante Di Stefano]

The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems
Nickole Brown
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2020

Nickole Brown’s new chapbook, The Donkey Elegies: An Essay in Poems, continues the project she initiated in her chapbook To Those Who Were Our First Gods (Rattle, 2018); this project, as the poet herself articulates it, proposes to build an antipastoral bestiary comprised of poems spoken in “a queer Southern-trash-talking kind of way about nature: beautiful, damaged, dangerous and in desperate need of saving.”  As did To Those Who Were Our First Gods, The Donkey Elegies explores the profound links between human beings and our animal kin. Brown draws on her experiences working with donkeys in several animal sanctuaries and overlays those experiences with a complex array of personal, cultural, historical, and linguistic associations connected to this humble and hearty mammal. The Donkey Elegies does what any good essay does: it assays (it tests and examines, but it also attempts), it suggests (rather than expounds), it spirals outward while tethering the attention to one unparaphrasable idea; the essay, as form or genre, is, after all, the donkey of literature: sinewy, indefatigable, often overlooked. Like her central subject in this book, Brown’s poetry hauls steadily onward, tender and tough, lit with the knowledge that holiness dwells in the common, the low-life, the baseborn.

Throughout the collection, the lowly donkey becomes a metonym for the oppressed “who carried us from that squat existence of flint strike to entire cities,” and “who blistered and tore, who blew their knees and threw their vertebrae hauling the stone and laying the tracks, plowing one field and then the next.” Here, Brown not only alludes to slavery from the ancient world to the antebellum South, but also surveys the exploitation of laborers like her “illiterate, hammer-swinging grandfather,” and the coal miners and tenant farmers of her native Kentucky. Those laborers are the same as all the ones who are continually “made draft, made compulsory, forced into conscription, like all those boys in my mama’s class that won that twisted lottery and came home from Vietnam unable to tell the slam of a screen door from a land mine.” The unassuming and eminently tractable donkey rehearses, in its very plodding, the survival strategies of those whose extrinsic worth has been bound to their work, and whose ongoing struggle has been to resist the erasures that their worth-bearing work necessarily entailed. 

For Nickole Brown, however, the donkey’s symbolic resonances remain deeply personal, tied as she is to generations of laborers and survivors. These personal connections begin with the idioms of Brown’s Kentucky childhood. Brown notes these idiomatic roots in the fourteenth section: “the church ladies would say they hadn’t seen me in a donkey’s years even if I had missed only a few Sundays, and all us kids knew to avoid Uncle Leon because the man could talk the hind legs off a donkey and that telling grandfather what to do was about as good as putting a steering wheel on a mule.” These folksy benign figures of speech contrast with the misogynistic donkey jokes examined elsewhere in the chapbook. The toxic masculinity attached to the word “donkey” (as slang for “vagina,” and therefore, as troubling synecdoche for “female”) provides Brown with a space to consider misogyny in American culture, and how that misogyny has informed her own story, intersected as it is with class issues and regional inequities, “a birthright, that would’ve never let me see a day in school past tenth grade, and by the time I’d even think about going back for my diploma, I’d be trapped with too many babies and a shit husband to boot.” All the way through The Donkey Elegies, Brown evokes, with gut-punching clarity, the prevalence and preponderance of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and gender-based discrimination that contextualize American life. Like the donkey, and like many women in America, Brown notes that she survived by moving forward “regardless, in spite of everything.”

Reading about moving forward, not merely surviving, but assaying-into-song, feels especially poignant during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second to last section of The Donkey Elegies, Brown writes:

    And here we are, on the brink again, testing the promise of rainbows with who-knows-how-many continents’ worth
    of glacial melt and less and less forest to save. There is no beauty

    in nature I see anymore
    that I recognize
    as simply beautiful
    without adding a prayer
    of please, don’t die.

Nickole Brown’s poetry does what all truly great poetry does: it reminds us that we are always on the brink and that there is so much to save as we skitter on the edge of an incremental apocalypse. The Donkey Elegies reaffirms a truth we know in every molecule of our animal-selves: to live like the donkey is to live in a Dickinsonian Forever composed of Nows. Buy this book, send a copy to a friend; it is a balm in uncertain times, a book of great, enduring, lyric power and imagination.

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To read an insightful and formally inventive review of this chapbook, in which Julie Marie Wade compares The Donkey Elegies to Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, go to Lambda Literary here.

To read an Oxford American interview with Nickole Brown, go here.

To find out more about Nickole Brown’s poetry, visit her website here.

Meet the Press: Able Muse Press

[N.B. The following interview with editor, Alexander Pepple, and poet, Susan de Sola, was conducted by Dante Di Stefano.]

 Alexander, could you say a few words about Susan de Sola’s new collection Frozen Charlotte?

Alexander Pepple: Susan is someone I was quite familiar with, a long while earlier, through her participation at Eratosphere—Able Muse’s online literary workshop—where I was always impressed with the quality of the poems she posted, and her incisive critiques, not to mention the stream of accolades and publication credits she continued to garner. Along the way, she also became a fine assistant poetry editor at the literary journal, Able Muse, print edition. Even with that level of acquaintance of her and her craft, I was stunned by the range of talent she displayed in the Frozen Charlotte manuscript when she eventually submitted it to the press. It’s a richly diverse collection of the serious and the light, the personal and the universal, of landscapes and people and animals, of heartbreak and ecstasy, of the sensual and the tragic. And I could on. One of the astounding aspects of the book is how well she was able to fuse all these elements into a cohesive and engaging wholeness—in the progression, the tension, the surprises, and the fun. And I haven’t even broached the technical prowess on display in the many poetic styles from free verse to blank verse, to sonnets, shape poems, ghazals, list poems, nonce forms, and more. It’s gratifying that several reviewers from journals such as Agni (“Lucidity unites the book’s poems”), Light (“This book will change with the light each time you read it. There is humor in the monumentally sad poems and pointed meaning in the funny ones”), Art Fuse (“In Frozen Charlotte, Susan de Sola provides readers with enough aesthetic pleasure and thoughtful commentary about today’s world to remind us of just how good—and necessary—poetry can be”), and other reviews have recognized and praised elements of Frozen Charlotte that won me over in accepting and publishing it. Frozen Charlotte not only enchants and enlightens, but also entertains.

Susan de Sola

Susan, how has living in Europe affected your poetry (besides proving the setting for several of the poems in Frozen Charlotte)?

Susan de Sola: Living abroad alters your perception of America. The changes seem more startling—you are removed from the gradualism of everyday life. You miss out on local action, and also local political satire and its therapeutic effects. I find myself writing and publishing topical verse in response to events at home. Daily life in the medium of another language changes your relationship to English. It estranges and intensifies it. But not hearing your native language also impedes certain avenues of memory. Sometimes I encounter a word I haven’t heard used in many years, and it fairly resounds in my ears. “gubernatorial, tush, deciduous”… to just name a few.

In this collection, you have a beautiful poem about North by Northwest, another about Bringing Up Baby, and a third that references Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby while discussing the early twentieth century Jewish American immigrant experience. How has cinema influenced you as a poet?

Susan de Sola: Cinema is hard to write about. It has the stillness and completion of something finished, but literally “moves.” How do you write about a story in motion? Can you assume your reader knows it? I’m intrigued by the disjunction between the sets of ideals promulgated by early Hollywood and the realities off-set, and also by how a medium may be so central and accessible, and yet so evanescent—much of its early history is already forgotten. I’ve recently written a number of poems about this, the group provisionally titled, “Messy Lives.”

Many of your poems unfold in dialogue with the work of poets and artists, ranging from Vermeer to Delmore Schwartz.

Susan de Sola: The best poems, paintings and pieces of music keep their mysteries, you never get to the end of them, and yet, they are touching remnants of something deeply human that has vanished. A poem may converse with them—or try to. It’s a conversation between the past and the present, and the present and the future. Animals (who don’t make art as humans do) also figure in a great many poems. I love animals and am fascinated by them, and by the often absurd encounters of the human and the animal. In this book, whales, crickets, Bactrians and piglets, among others, have their poems.

Images of stasis recur throughout the collection. The title poem invokes a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational. There are also many gestures toward a stillness beyond stasis scattered throughout Frozen Charlotte. It occurred to my while reading your poem, “The Cornell Boxes” that there was a metapoetics revolving around immobility at the center of this book; the poet might be “a carpenter of glass, an architect of stasis.” However, the stasis is gestational; eventually, something will bloom or explode from the motionless. You might similarly see the poet as a collector of “loot stolen from random scavenges, feverish clippings, flat taxonomies of / birds and beings…”  Do you see poems as Cornell boxes? Could you riff a bit on this idea?

Susan de Sola: When I first discovered the nineteenth-century Frozen Charlotte ballads and lore, I was haunted by the doll which later became associated with her frozen corpse. Our relationship  to death is so different today. The doll speaks the poem through me and I myself still find the poem unnerving. So, I think some of my impulse is historical. What was the past? Or pasts, as the collection is wide-ranging. But the past, although it seems immobile, doesn’t stay put—as you formulate so well: “something will bloom or explode.”

Sometimes the explosion is comic, sometimes tragic, and most often, some amalgam of the two. Another thing that might be part of the “poet as a collector” is variety. I love the idea of a poem as a Cornell box. Frozen Charlotte has a great variety of subjects, modes and styles. A poem itself is not static but it is generally a small structure. It is read in time, and it is at every turn in some way anticipating its imminent end. Perhaps this is another counterpart to “a kind of stasis that is both horrific and transformational.”

 “Shrine for 16” uses the structure of Jubilate Agno as it describes a collection of objects on a teenage boy’s bureau. Can you discuss the importance of Christopher Smart to you?  Who are some other poets whose work you love most?

Susan de Sola: I think, like many, I am drawn to Smart because there is a great deal of wit and quotidian matter in his poetry alongside great spirituality. A cat, in all its marvelous and familiar wonder, is sketched in the majestic rhythms of the King James Bible. When I contemplated a 16 year old boy’s (my son’s) collection of treasures, I wrote about contemporary objects, but I can see that “Shrine for 16” is touched with similarly elevated but affectionate cadences: “For he has scattered a profusion of pot pipes… For his key ring bears the ancient profile of the Playboy bunny... For he waxes manly and grows boyish./For he grows.”

The writers I love most include the James Joyce of Ulysses, about which I’ve published several essays. It’s a novel, but one unmatched in its exploratory, concentrated language; its sounding of depths with humor. The poets I most often return to are Milton, Herrick, Dickinson, Yeats, Brodsky, Rilke, and the singular Marianne Moore. And I love writing that straddles the comic and the tragic—Shakespeare above all.

Susan, can you give us a poem from Frozen Charlotte to end this portion of the interview?

Susan de Sola: This is a love poem, and it flowed out nearly complete, but at the time I had read recently John Berger’s assertions in Ways of Looking that a central male nude has been fairly unthinkable in Western art, which favors the male spectator or gaze and the female object. He wrote that if we tried to imagine classic female nudes (by say, Titian or Manet) replaced by a central nude male figure, the results would do violence not to the paintings but to our assumptions. I think perhaps I wanted to take up the challenge. There are very few poems, too, that praise and make central the nude male body.

    Blind, She Considers Her Lover

    Six blind Indians felt the elephant
    and made of it six entities.
    So is my love, for in the dark,
    where half a marriage is spent,
    you are many.

    First there is that silky fringe
    of frontward falling hair—
    you are a horse, fetchingly groomed.
    You shake your head and your forelock falls
    forward, steed.

    Then there are your collarbones which roll,
    like the bone of shells rolled by water
    collected in pebbles and driftwood and weed—
    you are shells on a beach,
    resting in kelp-hollows.

    Then the smooth skin of your back
    and chest, it sings with softness.
    You are bolts and drapes of some rich fabric,
    organic weave of silk to velvet—
    yes, you are a draper’s treasure.

    Lower, there is warmth, and coils, springs;
    countless corkscrews of millimeter breadth.
    I would guess a fine steel wool,
    its gauge innumerable zeros.

    The legs are sturdy, lightly forested,
    surely they are lichened logs.

    Yet between the moss and the steel,
    the strangest skin, unlike any other,
    stretched, nerve-rich, another color.
    Even if I were a blind Indian I’d know it;
    it is itself, it is not like another.

Alexander, how did Able Muse Press come into being?

Alexander Pepple: I’d say that moving the first incarnation of the literary journal, Able Muse—a review of poetry, prose, and art, from an online-only publication to a print format with online excerpts, was a primary catalyst for Able Muse Press coming into being. The literary journal, which had been hitherto an online-only journal, released the Volta Issue, Number 9, in summer 2010. That issue was a significant milestone as the very last online edition. From there, we embarked on the challenge of moving the journal to print. Indeed, we were sort of going against the grain since there was more of a mass exodus at the time: with several print journals, both the lesser known and the popular, turning off their printers and moving their releases to online only.

Essentially, the press started with two critical titles, released near concurrently: the inaugural issue of Able Muse, print edition, in winter 2010; and the Able Muse Anthology (with a long subtitle of best of the poetry, fiction, short stories, creative nonfiction, essays, interviews, book reviews, poetry translation, art & photography, reflecting what is encompassed in a typical issue of Able Muse). Right after, we released poetry collections from two wonderful poets: Catherine Chandler with Lines of Flight and Wendy Videlock with Nevertheless. And the rest just took off from there.

What is the relationship between the press, the literary journal, and the online community of Eratosphere and related blogs?

 Alex Pepple: Eratosphere and the literary journal have a close history based on a shared raison d’être. At the time, there was a dearth of journals accepting and publishing metrical poetry and a plethora of those committed to free verse only. This was a time when I was participating rather actively in online literary discussion forums. Given that state of affairs, I wanted to provide some outlet and hope to the metrical poets, by somehow counterbalancing that trend with an avenue that primarily focused on metrical poetry. However, I decided that we should still be careful to welcome the outstanding free verse submitted, since I did not want to reflect the reverse of the then prevailing status quo. In those days—late 1999 to early 2000—personal websites were not as commonplace as they are now. One had to essentially design them from scratch or through a website design company, which was, more often than not, tasking in time and skill, not to mention financially. There was none of today’s proliferation of appliance-style click-and-publish free web services for the masses such as Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress and the like. However, I did have an advantage—the technical knowhow and the facility with website creation. Thus, I was able to construct fairly quickly a forum website that stood out from most of the offering of the time in its aesthetics, ease of use, and convenience. With that, Eratosphere came into being, rapidly attracting a good number of members. Right after, I leveraged the work I’d done toward releasing Eratosphere, and the result was the Able Muse website, primed and ready for the release of the first online edition, Able Muse, Première Issue, autumn 1999.

There has been a shift in the literary landscape since that early history of Able Muse and Eratosphere, given that most journals out there now do allow metrical poetry to some degree . . . at least infrequently. I’d like to think that Able Muse has had a hand in encouraging that openness, both in terms of providing a platform for some of the best metrical poetry written today, and in terms of heightening the craft in that arena through the Eratosphere online literary workshop. The high selectivity of the material published at the literary journal, some of which was occasionally plucked from Eratosphere, has also raised expectations for the quality of metrical work in general, one hopes. The high level of the metrical poetry published in Able Muse is evidenced in the fact the poems from the journal have appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology series, in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, the Writer’s Almanac, and other popular venues.

The Able Muse annual contests encompass the journal and the press in that the winners of the Able Muse Write Prize for poetry and fiction, in addition to the contest’s monetary prize, also earn publication by the journal; and the winner of the Able Muse Book Award likewise achieves publication of their manuscript by the press in addition to the contest’s monetary award.

Some of it may sound confusing, but remember, if you mistakenly send communication intended for one of our entities to any of the others, we’ll slip it in the correct slot for you without your having to intervene or make any self-corrections.

Tell us about the Able Muse back catalog. What do Able Muse books have in common?

Alexander Pepple: Our catalog contains mostly poetry collections, a few fiction collections, and fewer novels. I should add that there’s also Word Galaxy Press now, which is an imprint of Able Muse Press. It’s more flexible in terms of the styles and the execution of the poetry and fiction accepted there versus at Able Muse Press proper, which is more stringent in its requirements. There’s our bigger list of more or less regular poetry collections—such as the posthumous poetry collection Character Shoes from Kate Light and that of the late British poet Margaret Ann Griffiths, Grasshopper, and the recent poetry collections: Indigenous by Jennifer Reeser, And After All by Rhina P. Espaillat, The Cupped Field (winner of the 2018 Able Muse Book Award) by Deirdre O’Connor, Time Is Always Now by Rebecca Starks (a finalist in the 2018 Able Muse Book Award), Saint Worm by Hailey Leithauser, and more.

We also have a smaller set of rather unique collections, illustrated and otherwise. These include a collection of poems by Ed Shacklee illustrated by Russ Spitkovsky (The Blind Loon: A Bestiary), a self-illustrated poetry collection by Wendy Videlock (The Dark Gnu and Other Poems), a collection of carmina figurata from Jan D. Hodge (Taking Shape: Carmina Figurata); there’s a book of selected poems from Emily Grosholz (The Stars of Earth, through Word Galaxy Press); there are fiction collections from Hollis Seamon (Corporeality: Stories), from William Baer (Times Square and Other Stories), and from A.G. Harmon (Some Bore Gifts: Stories); we have a novel series from William Baer (New Jersey Noir); and there are books of translation of classic poetry by John Ridland: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Modern English Translation and Pearl: A New Verse Translation in Modern English, both originally in Middle English by the anonymous fourteenth-century Gawain Poet; and I'm particularly proud of our anthology of translations, which was in the form of a special translation issue of the literary journal, guest-edited by acclaimed poet and translator Charles Martin: Able Muse, Translation Anthology Issue, Summer 2014 (No. 17—Print Edition). And there’s the book that started it all in 2010, the Able Muse Anthology.

Yes, we do have a diverse collection of books, but they have commonality in the exacting copyediting standards, for which we’ve been commended by several knowing readers, and for which the press itself has been honored with awards. There is also consistency in the high level of design for our books, made manifest in the high-impact book covers with a minimal-style presentation, as well as a consistent look of the interior, cutting down on frill and clutter for an engaging read with minimal distraction.

Another commonality for our books is that we’re not only highly selective about the manuscripts that we choose to publish—and thus, end up only publishing the very small number of books that meet our standards—but we also lavish much attention on their copyediting and design, resulting in books of a quality comparable to or better than those of any press out there, large or small. Hence, in just in a few years of operation, Able Muse Press has garnered some impressive recognition, including the following: One of the only two books we published in the first year was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award, and the other was shortlisted for the Poet’s Prize. Since then, our books have won the following honors: the Gold Medal for the Independent Publisher Outstanding Book Award, the Peace Corps Writers Best Book Award; finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award (multiple times); shortlist for the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Alex Award; finalist for the Foreword Reviews’ Best Book of the Year; shortlist for the Canada Council for the Arts’ Governor General’s Literary Awards; shortlist for the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize; Honorable Mention for the Posner Poetry Book Award; Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association, which included an award to the press itself for excellence in editing, printing and publishing. All of the above are in addition to placing at least two books yearly in the West Chester Poetry Conference First Book Panel, and garnering several positive reviews or placements in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac, Library Journal, Foreword Reviews and many more. In other words, the press might be small in size, but not in its accomplishment and that of the poets and writers it chooses to publish.

Tell us about some of the forthcoming titles from Able Muse Press.

Alexander Pepple: There is Book Two of William Baer’s New Jersey Noir novel series coming out in the next few weeks (late December 2019 to early January 2020). We’re really excited about this second release of the series, as are the fans and readers who enjoyed Book One and are eagerly awaiting the sequel. Of the first book, the five-star review from Foreword Reviews says: “New Jersey Noir introduces an ultracool hometown detective from Paterson, set perfectly in his well-detailed locales. The writing is crisp, sarcastic, wryly funny, steeped in New Jersey lore and anecdotes that add great historical and cultural dimensions to its mystery.” There are the poetry collections In Code by Maryann Corbett and Sally Thomas’s Motherland—a finalist in last year’s Able Muse Book Award contest. This is a collection sparkling with spirituality, moments of transformation, and memorable scenes from the commonplace and everyday life. There are also two notable forthcoming titles from our Word Galaxy Press imprint. The first is Spooky Action at a Distance by David Alpaugh, a collection of double-title poems. Kathleen Lynch says, it “offers readers a cornucopia of delights, complications, and some truly moving insights—all in an intriguing new form of his own invention. Alpaugh’s double-title form shows how two titles can be separate, like two photons miles apart, yet ‘entangled’ in meaning.” The second book from Word Galaxy is one of captivating drawings by James Kochalka, beautifully versified by Sydney Lea—The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy. Also planned for release in the near future are the posthumous collections Selected Poems and The Rule That Liberates: An Expanded Edition—Selected Essays, both by Richard Moore; and Progressions of the Mind, a posthumous collection of poems by David Berman.

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Alexander Pepple founded and edits Able Muse and Able Muse Press, and also founded and directs the Eratosphere online worskshop. His poetry and prose have been or will be published in Barrow Street, River Styx, American Arts Quarterly, Light, Think Journal, Euphony, Per Contra, La Petite Zine, San Pedro River Review and elsewhere. He edited the Able Muse Anthology (Able Muse Press, 2010).

Susan de Sola’s Frozen Charlotte (Able Muse Press) is her first collection. Her poems have appeared widely, in journals such as The Hudson Review, PN Review and The Dark Horse, and in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2018. The 2018 winner of the Frost Farm Prize, she has also been a finalist for the Autumn House (withdrawn) and Morton Marr poetry prizes, and is a past winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. She is a faculty member at the West Chester Poetry Conference, where she has also been a Poet in Residence, and is Assistant Poetry Editor at Able Muse. She will be a featured poet at the 2020 Newburyport Literary Festival.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016).

 

 

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

[A Book Recommendation by Dante Di Stefano]

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Ed. Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

In his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump,” published in the November issue of Poetry magazine, three time Best American Poetry contributor Martín Espada argues that in “the bicentennial of democracy’s bard,” Whitman’s democratic vision might provide Americans of the twenty-first century with a means to navigate the murk of a demagogic presidency and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Espada underscores that Whitman’s vision of democracy involved radical openness (“Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs”), empathy (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and polyvocality (“Through me many long dumb voices”). “Filthy Presidentiad” also juxtaposes Leaves of Grass against the current border crisis and examines Whitman’s legacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from José Martí to the aftermath of Hurricane María. Espada ends with a discussion of his own poem “Letter to My Father,” itself a reminder to “resist much / obey little,” a sentiment that would have resonated with the poem’s subject, Frank Espada, noted community activist, photographer, and creator of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. In short, “Filthy Presidentiad” is required reading for anyone who loves poetry, justice, courage, and freedom.

“Filthy Presidentiad” provides a clarifying lens through which to view Espada’s recent projects as poet and anthologist. Like “Letter to My Father,” Espada’s recent poem, “Floaters,” (published in the November issue of Poetry magazine) owes something to Whitman in its formal structure; more importantly, “Floaters” enacts Whitman’s injunction to poets of the future “to dauntlessly confront…injustice” and to “counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America.” “Floaters” reflects on the deaths of twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, Salvadoran migrants whose corpses were found and photographed face down after drowning in the Río Grande. The poem also examines the callous rhetoric of the “I’m10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group in response to the viral images of the tragedy. A few days ago, a far-right white supremacist website published an essay attacking Espada’s poem, “Floaters” and his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad.” At first glance, it might seem odd that such an attack would even happen, but, on further consideration, Espada’s poem, and his essay, represent an existential threat any group whose continuance depends on foisting indignities and silence onto those it deems its enemies. As with Whitman, the threads that connect the stars in Espada’s “Floaters” (and in “Filthy Presidentiad”) are the moral filaments of a great unbridled wildly diffuse imaginative sympathy.

Every poem in Martín Espada’s new anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press), expresses and embodies a similar form of imaginative sympathy. As Espada notes in his preface: “This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. To be sure, there are poems about Trump and his pathological demagoguery, or that rose in the throat of the poet the day after his election, some in mourning, some organizing the next protest.” However, the poems in these pages are not mere screeds, they are not solely jeremiads, they are more than the timebound marginalia of a miasmatic political era; surely, these are poems of witness in the sense that Carolyn Forché—a contributor to Espada’s volume—famously articulated in her introduction to her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting. This poetry of witness—poetry that is political but not broadly polemical, poetry that is evidentiary and resilient—is the kind of poetry Espada has been writing and anthologizing for his entire career in letters; this kind of political poetry flourishes now, perhaps, more than ever before in the history of American poetry. Espada’s long apprenticeship to Whitman, and to witnessing, ensures a critical rigor in the selection of poems included in the new anthology’s pages. Each poem in What Saves Us is what Julia Alvarez—another contributor—calls “an abacus of conscience” in her poem “Refugee Women.”

The range of poets and poems in What Saves Us astounds even as it fortifies; reading this collection from cover to cover, one walks away feeling more empathetic than outraged. At the heart of this anthology, the magnanimous golden splinter of a hard earned duende directs the reader’s gaze toward a hopeful future. This unexpected hopefulness arises perhaps because even the poems that predate the Trump regime in this volume—Elizabeth Alexander’s “Smile,” Donald Hall’s “A Prophecy of Amos,” Marilyn Nelson’s “Honor Guard,” Robert Pinsky’s “Serpent Knowledge,” and Daisy Zamora’s “Death Abroad,” to name a notable few—“assert,” as Espada puts it in his preface, “our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.” torrin a. greathouse’s “On Confinement” exemplifies the assertion of a common humanity in the face of state-sanctioned brutality as it explores the subjectivity of a trans woman forced to do time in a men’s jail, “where to fail at death / would be a breach // of my probation.” Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” similarly stands out as it details a university professor’s interactions with a privileged conservative student; this student “doesn’t know who / Fannie Lou Hamer is / and never has to.” Moon reframes the political, social, economic, and racial divides in contemporary America within the context of national and personal histories, as when the speaker of the poem moves from discussing her parents to wondering about her ancestors:

    How did they survive
    so much worse, the millions
    with all of their scars!
    What would these rivers be
    without their weeping,
    these streets without
    their faith & sweat?

Like “Fannie Lou Hamer” John Murillo’s poem, selected by Natasha Tretheway for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2017, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” hinges on an invocation of the speaker’s parents, which leads to a deeper investigation of what Espada phrases, in his preface, as “the indoctrination of violence that must be uprooted within us.”

Many poems in What Saves Us signal a comparable kind of uprooting. Leslie McGrath’s “Rage Bracelet” uproots the deeply ingrained nightmare logic of patriarchy: “every landscape wants a shadow / every abbatoir a drain.” Luivette Resto’s two poems uproot the fears connected with motherhood in a misogynistic and racist culture.  Maria Nazos’s two poems uproot xenophobia and domestic violence with an admirable formal dexterity. Richard Michelson’s “Fake News” uproots anti-Semitism and alternative facts from Chaucer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Chen Chen’s “The School of Logic” uproots homophobia. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s “The Social Worker’s Advice” uproots the hardheartedness of institutionalized mercy, arguing for an empathy that bears neck to fang. The most Whitmanesque of poems anthologized in this book, Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” uproots the very notion of inauguration on Inauguration Day 2017. Girmay’s poem contains multitudes, and its varied carols end:

    You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting,
    in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking
    out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here,
    witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage,
    which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love           You are
    who I love           You and you and you are who

Read What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump if only to celebrate “the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all,” so full of tenderness, fury, and love.

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Note: Below I’ve included four poems from the anthology: Richard Blanco’s “Dreaming a Wall,” Danielle Legros Georges’s “Shithole,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s “Daddy, We Called You,” and the title poem, Bruce Weigl’s “What Saves Us.” The anthology also includes poems by Patricia Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ocean Vuong, Tim Seibles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alicia Ostriker, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Afaa Michael Weaver, Danez Smith, Kwame Dawes, Chase Twichell, Paul Mariani, Rafael Campo, Jane Hirshfield, Jim Daniels, Brian Clements, and many more. See the full list of contributors here. I am grateful and humbled to have two of my own poems included in such estimable company. ~Dante Di Stefano

    Richard Blanco

    Dreaming a Wall

    I would build a great wall, and nobody    
    builds walls better than me, believe me…
                                        —Donald Trump

    He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his
    are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes
    his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.
    He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller
    and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out
    the nameless faces next door that he calls
    liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill
    for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps
    a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery
    colors of their homes, too small and too close
    to his own, painted white, with room to spare.
    He curses the giggles of their children always
    barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs.
    He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses
    to let light from their windows pollute his eyes
    with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining
    at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room,
    the goodnight kisses through every bedroom.
    Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news
    he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel
    to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor
    of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream
    where he stakes a line between him and all
    his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would
    their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red
    earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones
    with his bare fists and buries them in concrete.
    Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid
    heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes
    the last course high enough to imagine them
    more miserable and lonely than him alone
    inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn,
    breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.

 

    Danielle Legros Georges

    Shithole

    eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    I am the interrupter, hijacking your train
    of thoughts. call me maldito, cabrón,

    La Bestía. Get on top of me and I’ll throw
    you off after you beg. I’ll ride you like

    a borrowed mule. Drive you across the river
    and sell you up it. Call me coyote. Call me

    wolf. Call me whatever the fuck animal
    you like. Missionary. Priest. Call me

    Mr. President. I’m all green. A blue gasp.
    I’m the womb sterilizer, syringe and suction.

    I’ll drown you in a teaspoon of potassium
    chloride. I was born an abomination

    At the age of one I crawled out of the Congo
    dragging my sack full of hands.

    At the age of two I mechanized my scythe.
    At the age of three I wove myself a cape of flies.

    At the age of four I blow the noses off
    Sphinxes and studied the hieroglyphs

    of your tomb. At the age of five I became
    an angel, cunning, big-eared. at the age

    of six I shot down the moon then I shot down
    the sun. I am a nuclear bomb set for noon,

    the paratext of your nightmare,
    the translator of your tribulation.

    I am a constipation. The worm nestled
    in your colon. The parasite entering

    your left ear. The sweetest liar. The drone
    of your inner war. The architect of your gas

    chamber. The poisoner of your water.
    The multiplier. I am the radioactive

    sphincter. the unthinkable, intolerable
    bleached ass.

 

    Maria Mazziotti Gillan

    Daddy, We Called You

    “Daddy” we called you, “Daddy”
    when we talked to each other in the street,
    pulling on our American faces,
    shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

    Inside our house, we spoke
    a Southern Italian dialect
    mixed with English
    and we called you “Papa”

    but outside again, you became Daddy
    and we spoke of you to our friends
    as “my father”
    imagining we were speaking
    of that “Father Knows Best”
    T.V. character
    in his dark business suit,
    carrying his briefcase into his house,
    retreating to his paneled den,
    his big living room and dining room,
    his frilly-aproned wife
    who greeted him at the door
    with a kiss. Such space

    and silence in that house.
    We lived in one big room-
    living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,
    all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table
    around which we sat, talking and laughing,
    listening to your stories,
    your political arguments with your friends,

    Papa, how you glowed in company light,
    happy when the other immigrants
    came to you for help with their taxes
    or legal papers.

    It was only outside that glowing circle
    that I denied you, denied your long hours
    as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.
    One night, riding home from a date,
    my middle class, American boyfriend
    kissed me at the light; I looked up
    and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

    near Royal Machine. It was nearly midnight.
    January. Cold and Windy. You were waiting
    for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
    your face. I pretended I did not see you,
    let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you
    on the empty corner waiting for the bus
    to take you home. You never mentioned it,
    never said that you knew
    how often I lied about what you did for a living
    or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
    find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

    Today, remembering that moment,
    still illuminated in my mind
    by the streetlamp's gray light,
    I think of my own son
    and the distance between us,
    greater than miles.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    I honor the years you spent in menial work
    slipping down the ladder
    as your body failed you

    while your mind, so quick and sharp,
    longed to escape,
    honor the times you got out of bed
    after sleeping only an hour,
    to take me to school or pick me up;
    the warm bakery rolls you bought for me
    on the way home from the night shift.

    the letter
    you wrote
    to the editors
    of local newspapers.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    better than any "Father Knows Best" father,
    bland as white rice,
    with your wine press in the cellar,
    with the newspapers you collected
    out of garbage piles to turn into money
    you banked for us,
    with your mouse traps,
    with your cracked and calloused hands,
    with your yellowed teeth.

    Papa,
    dragging your dead leg
    through the factories of Paterson,
    I am outside the house now,
    shouting your name.

 

    Bruce Weigl

    What Saves Us

    We are wrapped around each other in
    the back of my father's car parked
    in the empty lot of the high school
    of our failures, the sweat on her neck
    like oil. The next morning, I would leave
    for the war and I thought I had something
    coming for that, I thought to myself
    that I would not die never having
    been inside her long body. I pulled
    her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
    inside out by the storm. I pulled
    her cotton panties up as high as
    she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
    was in sight. We were drowning on our
    tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
    when she stopped so suddenly
    we were surrounded only by my shuddering
    and by the school bells grinding in the
    empty halls. She reached to find something,
    a silver crucifix on a silver
    chain, the tiny savior's head hanging
    and stakes through his hands and his feet.
    She put it around my neck and held
    me so long the black wings of my heart
    were calmed. We are not always right
    about what we think will save us.
    I thought that dragging the angel down would
    save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
    in my pocket and rubbed it on my
    face and lips nights the rockets roared in.

    People die sometimes so near you
    you feel them struggling to cross over,
    the deep untangling, of one body from another.

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