The Best American Poetry

Full of Strange Experience: Seven Brief Reviews by Dante Di Stefano

Swarm Queen’s Crown
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Fathom Books, 2016

Stephanie Adams-Santos’ collection of finely-wrought, barbed, numinous lyric poems weaves from “a few warbled jags of wind” a laurel for all searchers enthralled and menaced by the beauty of a world “full of strange experience.” These are poems composed “in the tight sling of the chrysalid,” “belted to the bolt of being,” where every word sounds “lassoed to a bell.” Adams-Santos pitches her poems between chrysalis and swarm, self and world, I and thou, aware “of the secret lathe / now turning in the pulp / of our living.” “Tongue,” a representative poem from the middle of the collection, reads:

            Loin of the skull

            who lives
            in the bell
            of my bone,

            little black place
            of music—

            If you have vespers,
            O won’t the toad come?

Swarm Queen’s Crown presents for our inspection real gardens with imaginary toads in them, the voluptuous gasp at the center of a thorny prayer.

Echolalia in Script: A Collection of Asemic Writing
Sam Roxas-Chua
Orison Books, 2017

Echolalia in Script gorgeously collects Sam Roxas-Chua’s asemic writings in a gallery of images contextualized by the title poem. The stunning examples of open form writing in this book are “flawed disiderata,” failed cartographies, “troubled cantatas,” “true languages born of beak & exhale.” As Roxas-Chua notes in the introduction, his interest in wordless open semantic forms of writing parallels his work as a poet and stems, in part, from his personal history: “born to Filipino parents, adopted into a Chinese family, and then later immigrating to America resulted in a number of displacements that prevented me from taking claim to country or language.” Echolalia in Script is a book of elemental, angelic, visionary beauty rendered in the illimitable shorthand of the divine, an austere infinite tracery, a singing Forever composed of untranslatable Nows.

Porous Borders
David Giannini
Spuyten Duyvil, 2017

Each poem in David Giannini’s Porous Borders unfolds as “a gymnast who somersaults from a balance beam, but never lands; instead she becomes that somersault.” These, as Giannini calls them, “vertical prosepoems,” spin out from the mundane, through “a place of lyric dissociation,” “smuggling the invisible over the borders of normative prose.” The poetry in this collection is luminous and strange, as if cribbed from a dream of Paul Valery assayed and translated by Russell Edson. With élan and slapstick precision, Gianinni’s poems bristle like porcupines “in an unlit cellar full of inflated balloons. Porous Borders is a particularly vibrant addition to the history of the American prose poem.   

Our Lady of the Orgasm
Nin Andrews
MadHat Press, 2016

Nin Andrews’ funny, buoyant, joyous, and deeply intelligent chapbook, Our Lady of the Orgasm, picks up where her collection, The Book of Orgasms, left off when it was published seventeen years ago. Like her two most recent full-length collections, Why God Is a Woman and Miss August, Our Lady provides further proof of Andrews’ mastery of the prose poem. In Andrews’ work, the vocation of the poem and the orgasm are the same: “it is their job to keep the sacred balance, to keep us all from curling inward like a scroll, never to be read or known.” With great skill, Andrews’ poetry sorts through the disparities between real and potential, between form and freedom, between fiction and nonfiction, between prose and poetry, urging her readers away from solipsism and superficiality, from the theoretical to the angelic. Reading a prose poem by Nin Andrews is like learning how to fly through a blizzard, or like growing gills and remembering how to breathe underwater.

The Thin Wall
Martha Rhodes
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017

Martha Rhodes newest collection of poetry, The Thin Wall, trains the compound eye of the lyric on the burdens of inheritance that constitute selfhood.  Through the thin walls of these poems, angles of vision go askew, family histories and relationships snare and fracture, forgotten “greenesses” pop up, and the dead “take all we have.” Each poem in this collection is a door leading to another door, a kafka-esque series of routines “all seen clearly from this place we want to remain / inside forever, place of Etcetera.” The Thin Wall posits all remembering, and indeed all perception, as tenuous, fraught, and wildly shifting. Martha Rhodes’s poetry is uncompromising, febrile, night bound, visceral; she offers no balm. She provokes. She unsettles. She makes you feel the disappointments and disruptions of everyday life flying in your knuckles. 

Paterson Light and Shadow
Poems by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Photographs by Mark Hillinghouse
Serving House Books, 2017

Paterson Light and Shadow pairs the poetry of the city’s finest living poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, with the arresting tonalities of Mark Hillringhouse’s photography. The conversation between Hillringhouse’s stirring black and white images and Mazziotti Gillan’s deeply moving autobiographical poems brings to life the vibrant history of one of the first cities of American poetry, birthplace of Allen Ginsberg and muse to William Carlos Williams. In “December Dusk,” Mazziotti Gillan writes: “A precariousness steals over things / at dusk when darkness bleeds the light away / and our shadows stretch their long fingers.” An exquisite precariousness steals over the graffitied factories, the abandoned boxing gyms, The Great Falls, the diners, the side streets, the public schools, the crumbling monuments, and the dilapidated stoops enshrined in the pages of this book. For Hillringhouse and Mazziotti Gillan, Paterson is a place both haunted and sacred; at any moment the drab and ramshackle might give way to memory’s “dizzying panorama, luminous / and vast.” Paterson Light and Shadow is a love note to an archetypal American place unfolding in the dialogue between word and image; to eavesdrop on the discussion between Mazziotti Gillan and Hillringhouse is to understand more deeply their charged and fortifying relationship to this remarkable city.

Just Another Day in Just Our Town: Poems New and Selected 2000-2016
Bruce Bennett
Orchises Press, 2017

Just Another Day in Just Our Town is Bruce Bennett’s second New and Selected, picking up where Navigating the Distances left off in 1999. Throughout Just Another Day Bennett weds his technical mastery to a big-hearted embrace of the quotidian; he marshals sonnet, villanelle, and a variety of other measured forms to explore the ever-shifting and diaphanous contours of his life as a poet, professor, and husband. Bennett’s verse bears the fingerprints of the poets he lovingly parodies in the selection culled from Loose Canon: Christina Rossetti, Poe, Robert Browning, Hardy, Burns, Yeats, Frost, Bishop, Williams, Pound, and Dickinson. In “I Dwell,” Bennett writes:

            I dwell in Gullibility –
            A fairer House than Doubt –
            That gives me lots of Choices –
            That I can’t live – without –

Bruce Bennett’s true abode is in the sonorous notes of the poetic line. These poems are proof of a life lived with Blakean exuberance and Keatsian beauty. Whether meditating on the life of his father, imagining swimming in a watering can, or railing against Donald Trump, Bruce Bennett’s Just Another Day in Just Our Town offers a selection of poems both timely and timeless.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Proof that the Brain Is a Bucking Horse: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Tim Seibles's One Turn Around the Sun

One Turn Around the Sun
Tim Seibles
Etruscan Press, 2017

Tim Seibles’s newest collection, One Turn Around the Sun, examines the chimaeras and constellations of selfhood that make up a life. Seibles ranges from six months after his own conception to his fifty-ninth year, depicting with great nuance the complicated lives of his parents, and meditating on how those lives dovetailed into his own.  The interlocking poems of One Turn Around the Sun read more like an autobiographical novella punctuated by villanelles, or a suite of jagged solos played on the bad axe of the self, than as a traditional collection of poetry. Reading this book is like listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: one comes away with the impression of a fully articulated vision of awe at what it means to live, to age, to long, to acknowledge death, and to attain an infinitesimal speck of paradise through music. Seibles aims to cull the quark from the neutrino, to apprehend the bits “of your life straggling / behind you—empty cans / hitched to the newlyweds’ car.” In the title poem, Seibles voices the collection’s central concern: “I believe it is hard to be human, to be these / new animals, hard to say yes to this singular / blood   and to the flying world that made us.” For Seibles, it is the flux of personality and the fleetingness of our time on this planet that binds us to one another and allows us to remain partially intelligible despite the difficult bonds that sing us to distance.

Seibles constantly navigates and remaps the distances between parent and child, citizen and state, lover and beloved, self and world, poet and reader. Although the details of a life skitter away and memories scuttle, although the stifling sleet of American history rains through these lines, Seibles inveighs with Blakean fluency against the displacements caused “by jobs, by septic religion, ghost-dick capitalism, television—.” Against all that stultifies, Seibles enjoins:

            Suppose, just once, you saw a middle-aged maniac
            skating telephone wires like a squirrel, or one
            glad woman jumping balconies and boulevards
            as if time were a trampoline—think how gladly
            you would lose your mind: look
            what the Takers have taken and the monsters

            they have made, the tame zombie-playmates
            they have made of us: smiling, bobbing
            for the job, trotting along, when we might be trolls
            under their bridges—billy goats butting their
            smug asses—when we might re-write the world!

            What is that restlessness? What is this rage?
            Proof that the rose still burns in your blood—
            root and branch, thorn and bloom, proof
            that your brain is a bucking horse, that
            your soul remembers and bites the leash; I want
            such teeth in my mouth. Why can’t we
            have a world worthy of the wheeling sun? 
            The Earth is a house that flies! 

            Fuck all the powers that be.

One Turn Around the Sun is proof the brain is a bucking horse, that we might re-write the world, that time is a trampoline, that the earth is a house that flies, that our orbits are circumscribed by the gravitational pull of our loves, and that we must spend what little time we have on this globe learning to bear the beams of these mysteries.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Nicci Mechler of Porkbelly Press

DD: On your personal website, you have a great quote: “In a perfect world, Audre Lorde and Joseph Campbell would sit down over a few pints of Mudder’s Milk to speak about the way our dreams and magic connect us all, teach us all—the way both are vital to a full and vibrant expression and expansion of culture & self.” Can you start the interview by talking about these artistic forbearers, and what it means to you to run a poetry press in America in 2017?

NM: Thank you. No one’s ever asked me about that one before!

The book that most affected me in college, still the one I give to friends at any opportunity, is Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. We choose pieces for Sugared Water, our anthologies, and our Porkbelly chapbooks in the place where struggle, speculative work, humor, sure voice, feminism, and the intimate journey converge. Ray Bradbury might call it tipping out the “beautiful stuff” we hold inside of us, or the voices to help “lead [us] through the dark.” Everything, for us, is about the journey, and accompanying the poet or writer along the way. Our staff interests touch everything from hiking to graphic novels, expressionist printmaking to death positivity and queer theory. We bring that to our lit.

The majority of our writers are women or female identifying, trans, non-binary, queer folx. We support the work of immigrants and expats, multicultural and intersectional work. We love first books, those starting out, and books by poets and writers well on their way. Our poets range in age from teenage to octogenarian. We look to regional artists when we can, and make a lot of our cover art in house. Running a press in 2017 America is, for us, the work of citizens of the world making way for important voices, marginalized voices—voices we need.

DD: How did Porkbelly Press come into being?

NM: Sugared Water came first, a market for genre-straddling work, for speculative work, for new writers and experimental writers and established writers trying something new, for humans letting us into their internal landscape. I decided to go with a handmade approach, a callback to years of making zines, using traditional printmaking and bookbinding methods.

After a few people sent packets of poems clearly from a series (most of our chapbooks are clusters of poems), and many of those poets had no chapbooks listed in their biographical statement (why not?), I did a lot of thinking about the books I owned and what was missing. I’d read this book is the thought that convinced this artist-writer-printmaker-bookbinder to ask for those poems to make books of them. Some generous, lovely poets (and writers!) took me up on that, and trusted a fledgling press with their book.

A handful of our titles still come from poets and writers we find in our Sugared Water queue.

DD: Tell us about Sugared Water.

NM: Sugared Water is a handbound, limited edition literary magazine. Each cover is printed by hand using traditional printmaking methods. Our most recent issue, no. 5, combines screen printing and letterpress (vintage wood type individually inked with 2-5 colors and pulled on a Vandercook Proof Press). We made 240 of our first issue, but since our storage is a box in my closet, I’ve come down to about 100 numbered copies per issue. We’re currently staffed entirely by women,

We look for work that’s sharp and image-dense, work that makes us stop and look up from what we’re reading. Work we’re thinking about days after we’ve read it. We feature a large number of women and genderqueer folx, and we make space for trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and those living in between or everything. No hate speech. Magic, yes. Speculative, yes.

Each issue is supposed to be 56 pages, but some seasons we’re a little greedy and hit 80. 

DD: You’ve published some incredible poets, notably Chen Chen, E. Kristen Anderson, and Eloisa Amezcua. Amezcua’s Mexicamericana seems a particularly necessary poetry collection in the Trump era. Can you tell us a bit about this collection?

NM: Yes. We’re so honored to have these voices, established and up-and-coming, and I’m so, so thrilled to be part of so many literary histories. Porkbelly Press published Chen Chen’s first book. When I read a first book and have trouble believing it’s a first book, and I think—how has this ever been passed up? Why isn’t it already an object people can hold? Why aren’t people already gifting this to friends who need it?’—that feeling is why I started a press in the first place.

This collection is a light in the dark.

Mexicamericana is a cluster of poems about being, about identity, otherness, and the strength it takes to persist, to cross borders, borders sometimes separated by a dangerous line. It’s about people dying for politics, the resilience of self and identity and the convergence of selves, the fact that people are not illegal. People are not illegal.

People are not illegal.

People are dying.

And people are surviving.

And we won’t have a fucking wall.

DD: Tell us about the other amazing collections that are a part of your 2017 chapbook series.

NM: 2017 has sex and body autonomy and desire and infertility (fertility too) and so much strength. 2017 investigates survival and intergenerational trauma, erasures made from punk rags (more sex), ritual, feminist monsters with sharp teeth & blades, blood, bone, and power. Our authors this year: Amber Edmondson, Kelly Lorraine Andrews, Melissa Atkinson Mercer, Donna Vorreyer, Anita Olivia Koester, M. Brett Gaffney, Lindsay Lusby, Kristi Carter, Maggie Woodward, and Eloisa Amezcua. By the time this interview appears, we’ll have just released Apples or Pomegranates by Anita Olivia Koester, Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem by Kristi Carter (covers hand-printed in metallic ink!), and will soon release Found Footage by Maggie Woodward (including erasures!), and Blackbird Whitetail Redhand by Lindsay Lusby.

DD: Porkbelly Press also publishes micro chapbooks, collections of 8-10 pages. How does the micro chapbook as a form differ for you from a regular length chapbook?

NM: Micros tend to be single arcs or very tight clusters of work. It’s an opportunity for poets & writers to send a small sampling out into the world, though they’re curated with the same attention to design and detail as our chapbooks. It’s a taste that can be enjoyed easily in a sitting.

DD: How has Cincinnati influenced the press and your work as a poet/artist?

NM: My father worked close to the river for many years, and I often spent a portion of my weekend downtown at the jewelry manufacturing company where he served as vice president. He worked long hours, and I was there with him more than a few times when the rest of the shop was empty. My childhood is steeped in the architecture, landscape, and lore of this city, and I carry that with me today. It’s why my press is named Porkbelly, after the pork belly trade in Cincinnati. A fellow printmaker beat me to the name Steamwhistle (a local letterpress studio), paying homage to the shipping history of the city, which nestles into a wide bend of the Ohio River. Best American Poetry blog did an interview with Glass recently—Tony named his press after a major trade in Toledo; I suppose we Ohioans have a thing for industry.

DD: You are a talented visual artist. I admire the work on your website, particularly the assemblage to Emily Dickinson titled “Open Me Carefully.” How has your work in the publishing field influenced your art and vice versa? (Clearly, the stunning design of your books is one point of connection).

NM: Thank you so much. “Open Me Carefully” is an homage to a book of the same name, detailing the relationship and letters between Emily Dickinson and her childhood friend, Susan (who moved in across the hedge and married Emily’s brother). I spent a semester avoiding Henry James and mining Dickinson’s poems for erotic poems ostensibly written for Susie, of which there are many. My focus is inexhaustible now and again, always following the personal connection, the surprise, or the secret. Attention to detail and craft spring up from an education in art and writing. It’s inevitable.

Craftsmanship and the hand of the artist are important elements in Porkbelly’s line. I grew up writing stories, making art, and climbing trees to hide, to read, and to ambush my cousins with water balloons. Precision is very important in all of these endeavors.

My visual education certainly informs my writing, and when it came time to start a magazine, and then a press, it lent me the confidence and skills necessary to hand-produce books of a quality with which I’m happy, and which delight (I hope!) the recipients and authors. Though that means a double helping of self-criticism sometimes, and more stress about the occasional 1/8^th inch variation in cover size than I’d like to admit, I am honored to help in bringing these books into being.

DD: What draws you to the chapbook? What can the chapbook offer that a full length collection can’t?

NM: At Porkbelly, each chapbook is made by hand from start to finish, and I love the variety of chapbook design and presentation. I can afford to collect more small works; I can afford to produce more. Most importantly, hand-binding and experimentation in production are valued in chaps. Chapbooks don’t give you time to be distracted—they feel intimate and quirky. Chaps may contain several arcs, but it’s a distilled potion.

DD: What’s forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018?

NM: More first chapbooks investigating things like navigating chronic illness with body-love (first-generation Russian-Jewish-American Minadora Macheret’s Love Me, Anyway), a first book by a Muslim woman of color (Noor Hindi’s Diary of a Filthy Woman), a book of ekphrastic poems inspired by Diane Arbus’ photographs & a poet’s journey (How Darkness Enters a Body by Sarah Nichols), erasure poems imagining the voice of Elizabeth Short reclaimed from a crime novel about her murder (Dreamland for Keeps by Sarah Nichols), and a collection of prose poems which left us speechless (Lisette Alonso’s Wednesday’s Child).

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a Porkbelly Press poet?

NM: Yes, absolutely. Below is a selection from Eloisa Amezcua’s Mexicamericana. This poem was selected for Best American Poets 2017 and first appeared in Public Pool. In her chapbook, it’s spaced a little differently, with a lot of white space for breathing room, and several page-turns to punctuate it.

            Watching Underworld, Inc. Episode 3: Human Cargo

            The Pima County Morgue,

            approximately 110 miles

 

            from my childhood home,

            houses John Doe, Jane Doe,

 

            [sexless] Doe. Dated remains

            found in the Sonoran Desert—

 

            nameless and alone. The medical

            examiner holds a fragmented

 

            cranium, points to where

            the eyes would go. 

 

                            /

 

            I cross the border        on foot.

            My father         waits for me

 

            in the McDonald’s       parking lot

            one block         into America.

 

            I stand        in the line

            labeled             Ciudadanos.

                        

                            /

 

            Francisco, a people smuggler

            in Nogales, says his secret

 

            is training others

            to hide and survive.

           

                                /

 

            I don’t remember much           from middle school

            US History—               who lead the troops

 

            that took          Fort Ticonderoga         or who forced

            General Pemberton                 to surrender in 1863—

 

            but I remember            like yesterday

            the sound of my mother’s voice

 

            practicing         the Pledge of Allegiance

            before her                    naturalization ceremony.

                

                                /

 

            A Border Patrol agent

            explains how after five days

 

            on foot in the desert,

            skin begins to split

 

            from the burning sun—

            flesh exposed and open.

 

            Nothing can be done once

            the breaking has started.

           

                            /

 

            Gratitude is a word that comes to mind.

           

                            /

 

            In Phoenix, Magdalena buys and sells

            moneyless migrants wholesale—

 

            their families unable to pay off cartel

            trafficking rates. Three women/girls sit

 

            one room over, faces hidden with pillow cases—

            they're background. And Magdalena, she talks

 

            a tough talk, says business is business

            and business is good. Her face concealed

 

            by a black bandana and mirrored sunglasses

            reflecting the camera back into itself.

        

                            /

 

            When the show’s over,            I’ll call my mother

            just to hear      the sound of her voice.

 

            Como estas?           she’ll ask.         And I’ll lie,

            tell her things are fine the way

 

            she’d say          the same to her mother

            thirty years before                    when she moved

 

            to this country                         alone

            with her husband.                    I’m haunted

 

            by that for her.             I moved thousands of miles

            away                alone                just to feel

 

            closer. Before        we hang up, she’ll say

            Dios te bendiga, picture me signing myself

 

            or kissing a crucifix                  I can’t bring myself

            to wear.           A blessing I don’t need

          

            but I take it                 anyways.

 

Nicci Mechler is a graduate of Northern Kentucky University (BFA Studio Art, Masters in English). Between research, novel revisions, poetic alchemy, reading, retreats, and caring for roomies, rescue dogs, and rescue kitties, she makes art, edits the literary magazine Sugared Water, and runs Porkbelly Press (a micro press in Cincinnati, OH). She is also the editor and maker of several zines, including the body image zine LMLMB.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

The Body Elaborates Its Ministry: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Alexandra Lytton Regalado's Matria

Matria
Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Black Lawrence Press, 2017

Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s debut poetry collection, Matria, examines the prodigies constellated between motherhood and motherland, between English and Spanish, between the United States and El Salvador, between the self and a selfless apprehension of suffering in the world. Regalado’s finely-wrought poems roar in a language haunted equally by “la Carabela de Colon,” “piramide of moreno kewpies / y los hijos de Hernán,” and the cul-de-sacs of the American suburbs where a family becomes “a hallway / of closed doors.” Matria ranges across geographic, cultural, and temporal borders, offering a complicated vision of North and Central American life at the end of one century and at the beginning of another. Like the Lotería cantor’s riddle in “Salvadoran Road Bingo,” Regalado’s words remind us: “Day after day, our fingers in the wounds—here it is, touch it, there is the proof—surviving is what we do best.” Matria, however, is about much more than survival; it is fundamentally a book about how “the body elaborates its ministry” and how ordinary cells might become a vessel of grace, “rooted in / the things unknown but longed for still.”

“La Mesa,” perhaps Matria’s central poem, writes through Carolyn Forché’s “The Colonel,” broadening the scope of the original poem to explore the class and power dynamics of Salvadoran life in the post-civil war era. Regalado’s poem begins by addressing and echoing Forché: “Yes, what you’ve written is true.”  The poem then pans out, past the sack of severed ears, past the death squads of the 1980s, past the stories of the ex-guerilla leader turned president, through sandbagged streets where divisions are as transparent and unbreakable as the bulletproof glass of an SUV. The bleak reportorial heft of Forché’s poem, strikingly counterbalanced by the lyricism of its prose, is replaced by a simple urgency at the heart of “La Mesa”: a mother trying to explain her homeland, her life, to her son. This relationship between mother and son provides the subject matter for one of the most moving poems in Matria, “The T'ai Chi of Putting a Sleeping Child to Bed,” which reads:

        In the lull of evening, your son nested in your arms
        becomes heavier and with a sigh his body
        sloughs off its weight like an anchor into deep sleep,
        until his small breath is the only thing that exists.

        And as you move the slow dance through the dim hall
        to his bedroom and bow down to deliver his sleeping form,
        arms parting, each muscle defining its arc and release—
        you remember the feeling of childhood,

        traveling beneath a full moon,
        your mother's unmistakable laugh, a field of wild grass,
        windows open and the night rushing in
        as headlights trace wands of light across your face—

        there was a narrative you were braiding,
        meanings you wanted to pluck from the air,
        but the touch of a hand eased it from your brow
        and with each stroke you waded further

        into the certainty of knowing your sleeping form
        would be ushered by good and true arms
        into the calm ocean that is your bed.

Ultimately, Alexandra Lytton Regalado’s Matria transcends the narratives it braids together and the meanings it plucks from the air; like all good poetry it does more than say and mean. It cups your face and runs its hand across your brow. It touches. It gently directs your gaze. It allows you this ocean, this dreaming.  

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

The Ghosts All Wear Confederate Gray: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Nin Andrews' Miss August

Miss August
Nin Andrews
CavanKerry Press, 2017

Nin Andrews’ newest collection, Miss August, provides further evidence that she is perhaps the most agile practitioner of prose poetry writing today. Written from the alternating perspective of three characters, Sarah Jane Lee, Gil Rhett Simmons, and May Dee, Miss August chronicles the connections that these characters forge at Chinquapin Hill Farm in Lessington, Virginia during the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Andrews nimbly shifts between registers and dialects as she moves between the three characters, rendering a lyrical, but plain-spoken and arresting, version of three mid-twentieth century southern voices. The South that Andrews evokes obsessively confronts the legacy of what the locals call, “The War of Northern Aggression,” while denying the full truth of the foundational sin of slavery and the continuous transgressions of Jim Crow.  In Lessington, the ghosts all wear confederate gray and “raspberry blight got blamed on General Sherman and the burning of the South.” Miss August ably addresses issues of racial discrimination, child abuse, mental illness, gender inequity, sexual identity, and class differences, in a coming-of-age story that resonates even more deeply in 2017 as the open wounds caused by misogyny and white supremacy continue to suppurate.

Andrews explores how her characters’ lives are circumscribed and poisoned by the racist southern worldview that surrounds them. When Sarah Jane asks Gil’s father, Mr. Simmons, an abusive, manipulative, philandering, alcoholic, whose family bloodline “traced back to the Order of the First Families of Virginia,” about lynching, he replies: “You know they only lynched criminals, Sarah Jane. Some white folks were lynched, too. The way I see it: Lynching is a whole lot cheaper than the electric chair. And quicker too.” Mr. Simmons embodies a type of witless equivocation that continues to perpetuate white supremacy on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line in the twenty-first century. Running counter to Mr. Simmons, and all that he represents, are the countless silken ties of affection that Andrews draws between Sarah Jane, Gil, and May Dee; these characters are powerless in Lessington: an illegitimate daughter, a boy struggling with his gender identity, and an African-American servant. The care that these characters show each other mitigates the indignities they suffer. As they gallop across the alien landscapes of the stories they tell each other, they dream of planets where everyone is “destined to be an angel”; as Gil puts it: “At night we slept on our bellies so our wings could grow.” Miss August allows us access to the interior lives of three fully realized characters, who, much like many of us, strive to see past the hummingbird into the honeysuckle bloom. Nin Andrews’ Miss August is a must-read examination of the ways personal and collective histories perpetually rewrite the present.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Anthony Frame of Glass Poetry Press

DD: How did Glass Poetry Press come into being?

AF: Glass originally started as the journal, Glass: A Journal of Poetry. It was edited by me and my wife, Holly Burnside, and we released our first issue in March, 2008. It started because we had seen a number of journals start up, release an issue online, and then disappear from the web. We wanted to see if we could create something more permanent. We had no real editing experience and no real plan beyond posting our info on a few sites and hoping people would send us work to consider. When we started, we used a free yahoo email account and a free blogger website and yet, somehow, people sent us their wonderful work. In 2014, though, we had to decide if we could keep Glass going. We were both going through career changes and we were having trouble responding to submissions in a timely manner. We felt we weren’t doing right by our readers and our writers, so we decided to close the journal. We kept the website up, though, and made a commitment to our poets that we would keep the site live on the web for as long as we possibly could.

Pretty much as soon as we announced Glass was closing, I started thinking about chapbooks. I love chapbooks. I love their size, their relatively small cost, their variety. I love the idea of working one on one with an author on a finished project. I love the idea of being a completely independent press that can take real risks on work that other presses might not be able to take. And I love the idea of this little book you can hold in your hands and put in your bag or purse and pull out to read, start to finish, during your lunch break. In 2016, I was awarded an Individual Excellence Grant from the Ohio Arts Council and I decided to put a portion of that award towards pursuing my dream of running a chapbook press. I already had the Glass website, and people still remembered Glass: A Journal of Poetry, so calling it Glass Poetry Press made sense. I spent four or five months researching materials and other presses, talking with friends who run presses, and talking with poets who might be interested in letting me publish their chapbooks. And in August, 2016, Glass Poetry Press released Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain, the first entry in the 2016-2017 Glass Chapbook Series. I screamed when I finished stapling that first copy. And I’m not going to lie – I still scream a little when I finish the first copy of every new title.

DD: The motto of your press is Precision, Vision, Inclusion. Could you expound a bit on these aesthetic values and how the chapbooks you’ve published, so far, exemplify them?

AF: Those are three elements of glass that I admire most (one nickname for Toledo, Ohio, is The Glass City, because we were the glass capital of the world, which is why we originally named the journal Glass). Glass, as both object and art form, is incredibly precise. It also assists vision, whether through eyeglasses or telescopes or whatever. And glass can incorporate anything – it is a very inclusive object and medium. I also admire these features in poetry – precision of language, the vision of the poet, and the growing inclusiveness of the community. So, for the press, those are both what I look for in the work I publish and what I strive for as an editor.

I’m hopeful that these three elements can be seen in the work I’ve published. I think about Ariel Francisco’s Before Snowfall, After Rain – the careful use of language in Francisco’s poems, whether his long poems or his very short ones. There’s incredible precision in his work. Similarly, Steven Sanchez (To My Body) and Kate Fadick (Self Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen) are incredibly precise artisans of words. Sanchez writes these absolutely stunning lyric narratives and each line is as tight as any I’ve ever read. Fadick’s lyric meditations are so precise, every single word carries the weight of fifty pages of prose. And there’s intense vision in these chapbooks. Jennifer Givhan’s Lifeline is a visceral exploration of childloss, motherhood, and mental health (and love, which I think is often overlooked in her work). Givhan is a great example of the vision I admire because she has had a number of collections released in a short period of time (in addition to her Glass chapbook, she recently released two full lengths: Landscape with Headless Mama, from LSU Press, and Protection Spell, from University of Arkansas Press). Reading all of these together, you can see a clear vision of the world of the poet and of the world the poet wants to create. Lastly, as an editor, I am committed to equity in publishing. And I want that inclusiveness to be about both publishing underrepresented writers and about the styles of poetry I’m publishing. During the first two years, I will publish ten chapbooks. Six of the chapbooks are written by poets of color, three are by LGBTQ poets, and six are by women poets. They vary in style from narrative poetry to meditative poetry and Jennifer Met’s Gallery Withheld is a collection of concrete/shape poems.

DD: Tell us about the chapbooks forthcoming in your second year?

AF: I’m really excited about this second series of chapbooks. There will be five chapbooks again and four of the chapbooks are debut collections (though, one of the authors, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, also recently won the Kundiman Prize for her full length collection, Shahr-e- jaanaan: The City of The Beloved, which is a book I’m really looking forward to reading).

We just released Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost, which is just phenomenal. It’s a series of poems about love and loss and longing, hidden as a series of recipes. February is a real rising star from Nigeria and his poems in this collection (and his poems that is showing up in journals) are incredibly fresh and exciting.

Also, coming during this series are Malcolm Friend’s mxd-kd-mixtape, which is a fantastic collection of narratives about family and identity. Friend’s poems are heavy with music, which helps ground the work, and they’re full of intense depth and connectivity. I’m working on the first proof set of mxd-kd-mixtape right now and it’s really hard to focus on the layout details because I just keep getting drawn into the poems.

In Bad Anatomy, which will be coming out in February 2018, Hannah Cohen gives us poems about growth, womanhood, politics, and love. Cohen writes poems with a careful precision that allows us to really fall deep into her subjects, her speakers, and her images. She has this wonderful fresh voice that manages to mix elements of Plath and Olds and Sappho, but also with a truly unique tone and style. It’s a really outstanding series of poems.

Melissa Atkinson Mercer’s ghost exhibit is a sequence of prose poems with each one acting like a placard in a museum. The movement, sequencing, and pacing of each poem builds this amazing narrative of the family at the center of the poems. I remember reading the manuscript when it was first submitted and being completely blown away by the complexity and efficiency of how Mercer created the chapbook.

Finally, the series wraps up in June, 2018, with Adeeba Shahid Talukder’s What is Not Beautiful. Talukder’s work is really incredible. Her lines are clear, but complex and packed full of nuance. What is Not Beautiful examines a new marriage and mental health and Talukder approaches her subjects with such precision and depth. Talukder is a master of these tight, short lines that pack volumes of imagery and emotion in just a handful of words. And the music of her poems knocks me out of my chair every time I return to her manuscript.

I could talk for hours and hours about these chapbooks and I, for real, cannot wait to share them with the Glass readers. But for now, here, I think I’ll end by saying that of all the many benefits of running Glass, easily the best is the privilege of being able to sit with and read these manuscripts, to fall in love with them and then to help others find and fall in love with them too.

DD: What have been some of the challenges you’ve faced, starting a new press?

AF: To be honest, I’ve been incredibly lucky. On the one hand, I’ve had a few friends who run presses who have always been there with advice when I’ve been confused (especially Margaret Bashaar from Hyacinth Girl Press, who has been willing to share her experiences and advice with me so many times). I’ve also had a number of readers who have followed the press from the beginning and have helped spread the word on the press’s behalf in so many ways. The support and encouragement from the community and from readers has been amazing and I don’t know how I’ll ever repay all of the kindness that has been shown to me.

The main challenge has been time. I work a lot of hours at my day job and that means I don’t always get orders out right away. But I try to be as quick as possible. I also have friends and family, so balancing time between work, the press, and a social life (plus my own writing) is something I still struggle with.

Then there are the technical aspects of running the press:  figuring out what the best method of shipping is (the folks at my local post office are probably sick of listening to me tell them that they’re overcharging me), learning how to find artists who will provide cover art and figuring out what a fair price is for their work, making sure I’m getting the best materials for the chapbooks at the best price.

It’s important to me that I can keep the cost of purchasing the chapbooks low without charging reading fees which means making sure that the cost to make them stays low. I’ve made choices early on that maybe weren’t the best choices (receiving submissions through Submittable, buying ISBN numbers, etc…), so I’m constantly evaluating and reevaluating those choices. And learning how best to market the chapbooks so I can get as many copies in the hands of readers as possible. It’s a constant learning process running the press. And I kind of love that about it. There’s always something new to look into and figure out. But, once you think you know what you’re doing, you find out that you really need to learn more, which can also be a little frustrating.

Still, all in all, somehow the press continues to thrive and grow and I remain amazed by the trust writers and readers continue to place in me. I’ll keep trying to live up to that trust.

DD: Tell us about Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

AF: Everything related to Glass began as Glass: A Journal of Poetry in 2008, as I discussed above. It seemed like an obvious choice to bring the journal back when I opened Glass as a chapbook press. I like to think of the journal as being complimentary to the press, but it also has a lot of flexibility. When I first reopened it, it was a weekly journal that spotlighted a single poem each week. Starting this year, I’ve shifted to a monthly format. Each issue includes 10 poems (sometimes, a few more) and throughout the month we also publish interviews, reviews (edited by our Reviews Editor, Stephanie Kaylor), and current events poems in our Poets Resist series (edited by Catherine Ellis Chambers). I like that the journal allows me to share the work of so many poets, especially since budget and time constraints mean I’m only able to publish five manuscripts through the chapbook series.

DD: You have an unusual day job for a poet and book publisher; you work as an exterminator. How did you come to work in the extermination business? How has being an exterminator influenced your work as a poet and publisher?

AF: Ha! Yeah, I don’t know many other exterminator poets, to be honest. It’s an interesting industry to work in. I got this job, basically, because I was born into it. It’s a family business, started by my grandparents. My uncles took over for them and now my cousins run it. It’s a little weird driving around with my name on the side of my truck (Frame’s Pest Control – “Don’t get stung by inexperience. Give us a buzz.”) but, it pays the bills. Honestly, it’s a pretty good job for me. I’m outside rather than behind a desk and I see different places and people each day. It’s also a job where I’m constantly learning new things, which, as a writer, is pretty great.

My work has definitely been influenced by my job. On the one hand, pest control gives ample opportunities for new subjects and images for my poems. But, also, this is very precise work. There’s a decent amount of science required to be able to do pest control effectively. And that scientific precision is definitely finding its way into my work. Even at the linguistic level. I’m fascinated by the language of pest control. Pyrethroids is a fantastic word, musically, and there’s something rhythmically interesting about the phrase “Juvenile Insect Hormone Regulator.” And “Instar” — honestly, is there a better word? So, all of that is finding its way into my work. I’m still figuring out how I want to use that material, how to merge the diction of pest control with the music of poetry. I’m reading a lot of Sharon Olds and looking at how she utilizes anatomical diction in her work. It’s a process, like everything else, but it’s a pretty interesting process, I think.

As for the press, my job brings a lot of advantages, mainly because I’m not bound by anyone else. I’m not university supported, either through the press or through my day job, so I don’t have to worry about how various other people are going to react to what I do with the press. This independence lets me look at my submissions and choose the ones that best fit my vision of the literary world that I want to see, without any input (for better or for worse) from anyone else. I really cherish that independence.

DD: What was the subject of the first poem you ever wrote?

AF: Oh, wow, yeah – so, my aunt and uncle had this wall in their laundry room in the unfinished portion of their basement and, basically, they encouraged everyone to write little messages on the wall. I think it was supposed to be inspirational sayings and things like that, but mostly it was just random things we’d heard in songs or on movies. But I thought the idea of this cluttered wall was really really deep. And I had just started really reading poetry and I thought that wall would be a great poem. So, I can’t remember any of the lines other than the opening line: “This wall is cluttered.” I don’t remember much else about it other than that it was a really bad poem, even for a seventeen year old.

DD: What was the first poem you reread multiple times?

AF: It was probably Stephen Crane’s “Many red devils ran from my heart.”

Many red devils ran from my heart
And out upon the page.
They were so tiny
The pen could mash them.
And many struggled in the ink.
It was strange
To write in this red muck
Of things from my heart.

Crane was the first poet I fell in love with, especially this poem. I don’t know – something about this Ars Poetica really spoke to me. The darkness, the angst, the speaker’s discomfort and feeling of strangeness, it all pretty much gelled with my young, grunge outlook on the world and art. I’ve grown a lot since then, both in how I see the world and how I see art, but that poem still brings me back to being seventeen and full of nihilistic naiveté.

DD: If you had to have one line of poetry tattooed on you, what would it be?

AF: Without question, I’d pick these lines from Rane Arroyo’s “The Burrito King of Toledo, Ohio”: “I’m addicted to dawn/to light, to vision.” (as a backup, I’d choose “You’ll see how we give/birth among the ruins” from Wisława Szymborska’s “Notes from a Nonexistent Himalayan Expedition”)

DD: If you had to have one song lyric tattooed on you, what would it be?

AF: “Thunder wishes it could be the snow” from “Purple People” by Tori Amos, with part of the refrain from The Dave Matthews Band’s “Pig” as a backup: “While you’re dancing on the ground,/why think of when you’re gone?”

DD: The newest chapbook you’ve published is Logan February’s How to Cook a Ghost. Could you end the interview by telling us a bit about this collection and giving us a poem from it?

AF: How to Cook a Ghost is one of those collections that is really hard to fully explain. It’s a chapbook that really needs to be experienced. Logan February has done a really amazing thing with this series of poems. He’s dug deep into ideas of love and longing and loss and handled them all with a truly unique voice and style. I remember the first time I read How to Cook a Ghost, when it was first submitted, and trying to think of another sequence of poems that I could compare it to and I seriously couldn’t. That’s part of February’s genius. There really is no one like him.

The chapbook is a series of poems that explore those themes I just mentioned, but February approaches his subjects through the experience of eating. So, each poem, in a way, is a recipe. Follow the instructions and you might end up with a wonderful glass of lemonade. Or you might end up with the closure you need to understand a past love. It is truly astounding how carefully, and seemingly effortlessly, he holds these poems together. And his imagery is simply breathtaking. And the accumulation of these poems – this is a manuscript where the parts are incredible on their own but the whole manuscript still manages to be greater than the individual parts. Here’s a sample poem:

            Food Poisoning

            Do not eat that
                                     you are only lying to yourself.

            All of that sugar
                                     – chocolate       [honey & milk]
                                     – ice cream       [prismatic gore]
                                     – poison            [blue blackness]
             and your heart has not been
                                                   broken yet.

            Why do you fill yourself
            with the very things that
            will not stay inside of you:

                                    candied gravel & other indigestibles?

            You have made yourself sick,
            praying for a miracle,
            kneeling
            over the toilet seat – cry:
                                    I heave to make myself holy.

            When an odd thing
            shows you its oddities,
            why are you surprised?

                                          This herb will cleanse you –
                                           juice it, drink, repeat:
                                          he is a boneless body with two faces

            until you understand

            some foods do not taste very good,
            but then, they will not start to rot
            in your stomach.

Anthony Frame is an exterminator from Toledo, Ohio, where he lives with his wife. He is the author of A Generation of Insomniacs (Main Street Rag, 2015) and of four chapbooks, including To Gain the Day (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015) and Where Wind Meets Wing (forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press). He is the editor/publisher of Glass Poetry Press, which publishes the Glass Chapbook Series and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. His poetry has appeared in Third Coast, Harpur Palate, Boxcar Poetry Review, Muzzle Magazine, The Adroit Journal and Verse Daily, among others. He has twice been awarded Individual Excellence Grants from the Ohio Arts Council

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Toward a Stranger Home I Home: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Adam Houle's Stray

Stray
Adam Houle
Lithic Press, 2017

Adam Houle’s Stray exhibits a technical virtuosity uncommon in a debut collection of poetry. Not only does he demonstrate a mastery of sonnet and couplet, but in poem after poem Houle’s finely wrought lines and exacting syntax “turn their leverage in tight spaces.” The poems in Stray are “checkpoints in the interior,” “scattershot/ into the fractures of fugitive rays” emanating from love, desire, and the difficulties constituted by daily life. Houle constantly revises the rapture upon which he verges, cues up puzzlement, and privileges the “helixed descent” that ends only when ear meets earth. Stray contains loving portraits of a woodworking father and of a studious wife, alongside persona poems from a future timber baron and from a Yellowknife girl. Houle praises equally the lonely bedbug, “tag-a-long armed / with anticoagulant / and an endless gut,” and an armadillo stretching to climb a fence, “a hardback hymnal / opening, taut and self-explained.” Houle’s gift is to present the world in all of its black ice menace, besieged and fissured, yawning against hope, and yet to allow for the consolation that comes in the continued twirl of the Northern Lights, in the last green dance of the day, in the conjugations and declensions mouthed beside a spouse in the dark. 

Stray abounds with a Frostian darkness and dread; as in Robert Frost’s best work, Houle’s best poems concern themselves with the interstices between grief and reason. Also, like Frost, Houle is fundamentally a poet of married life. His poem, “A Paper Hive Earns No Quarter,” exemplifies Houle’s commitment to the philosophical and to the connubial in the face of all that is fraught, dumb, and stinging. The poem reads in full:

            It’s hell, I think, to see them flit that way
            at dusk back to us, swarming our willow
            where, limb-perched, they flex in shadows. You pray
            they quit us; I pump the poisoned bellows.
            Love, things can grow too large for us to love,
            so let my labor mean. I’m wreathed in smoke,
            an axe-handle clenched in a leather glove.
            You cough and gripe. I give the nest a poke
            then, cocking back, let loose a full-on swing.
            It all explodes. They’re too smoke-drunk to know
            it’s me they hate and fail to sink a sting.
            The job is done. I clasp the bellows closed.
            Look, wife: dazed on your chipped garden gnome
            one dumb wasp thinks she drives her stinger home.

Smoking out the wasp nest in this sonnet, like the writing of the sonnet itself, initiates a dialogue with the beloved, and in both tasks meaning accrues through a labor that is meant to contain the expansive, the threatening, the random swarm encroaching from the shadows. Here, as everywhere else in Stray, revelation is shared and gestural, the result of a tandem perspective, a communion earned by callouses on wreckful, busy, rosary-wrapped hands. It is with such hands that one might build a strange and grateful home, a small stanza of light in which to dwell. I have lingered in the light of Stray a long while and I recommend that you do so, too.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Jessica Kristie of Winter Goose Publishing and William Stratton, Author of These Things Too Have Shape

DD: How did Winter Goose come into being? Can you give us a brief history of the press?

JK: In 2011 I started WGP from a desire to stay close to the written word as a writer and lover of art. The success of our press came quickly with an overwhelming amount of submissions and support from the writing community. We’ve now published over a hundred books and carry several award-winning authors and titles in our catalog.

DD: Tell us a little bit about your poetry catalog. What do Winter Goose books share in common?

JK: Our poetry catalog ranges in variety from traditional form poetry to a more extensive catalog of contemporary poetry and poets. Our poetry books are all laced with a genuine heart-felt journey through the eyes of many different perspectives. In that genuineness, we find a common thread for all our poetry catalog.

DD: What are you looking for in prospective authors?

JK: We are looking for unique and well-designed writing with a strong voice. We publish based on quality more than what the industry may consider marketable material. We appreciate the process of writing, whether fiction or poetry, and are always excited to find the next fresh and talented new voice.

DD: You’ve published two of Bill Stratton’s poetry collections. Can you tell us about what you most admire in his poetry?

JK: Bill brings a strong sense of self with his writing. He writes from a place that brings you in and keeps you there. It’s genuine, raw, and heartfelt. The power shines brightly through his words and gives him a solid foundation that we honor and appreciate.

DD:  You grew up in a rural area of upstate New York. Can you talk about how this upbringing influences your writing and how the natural world figures in your work?

WS: I don't know if I can say anything I haven't already tried to say in my poems, though what I've tried to say has filled a decent part of two books now, so perhaps I ought to try. Where I am from is central New York, more hills than mountains, more dead farms and dollar stores than mines or mills. It's beautiful and haunting, and within my life I saw the end of a certain way of life and the movement into another; from working on farms and local factories to an economy that never really sees the upswing when the country does well and feels every bit of pain when it does not. Drug addiction and violence have increased, as they have in a lot of places where poverty is a problem. Still, there are amazing people there whose friendship I value greatly and who often appear in my poems. I obviously have a lot of conflicting feelings about where I am from, but I'm also fiercely loyal—my friends from home know that, and to me, that is very important. Of course it's a rural place, and in particular I grew up on an old farm with several hundred acres to roam, and several thousand acres of state land on two sides. I spent a lot of time alone in the woods when I was a kid. My father subscribed in part to the idea that I should leave the house whenever I wanted or could (and sometimes when I did not) without a curfew or expectation on return. "He'll come back when he's hungry," I remember him telling my stepmother. As a result, there is little I do not know about those woods and fields. It is a tiny corner of the earth, and I am very aware of how sheltered I was in some ways, despite my fierce independence and oppositional defiance. Those years are formative, and for me, they helped to form a sense of self which maybe relies too much on itself to construct meaning; that is, I often had a hard time relying on others when I reached adolescence, because in my isolation I taught myself that I was all that I needed. Turns out, or so I think now, that's not always the best way to go about life. It taught me patience and that examining simple things at length and in detail can yield surprising results. It taught me that I am something small and fragile and mortal but also big and powerful and destructive. It taught me about consequence. I digress. The natural world is, in short, important to me not only as a writer, but as a person. I hope I do it some justice in my work. Since I believe, in some part, that writing is a process of pulling the internal (reflection, insight, observation, interpretation) and externalizing it as language, I recognize and do my best to work with the kind of internal abilities the natural world endowed me with. I have learned to listen for the voice I recognize as my own, and it is often easiest to see in the natural world. I hope that answers the question.

DD: In These Things Too Have Shape you have poems about being stabbed and being punched in the face. Different forms of violence punctuate the otherwise gentle forward movement of this collection. Could you discuss the role of violence in your work?

WS: This is an important topic for me, and one I think writers ought to speak to more often. I would like to think myself a non-violent person. I would like to think that I no longer need violence in my life, either as way for conflict resolution or as a means of self-discovery, both of which have been a part of my past. I do my best to work through anger and violence internally now, recognizing them for what they are: destructive and unnecessary, and usually ineffective. That said, if I ignore the role that violence has played in forming the person that I am, or if I dismiss the part is has played in the world I grew up in, I am lying to my readers and worse, to myself. The world is sometimes a violent place, and it does no good to pretend otherwise. I say this not to advocate for violence, but to advocate confronting it, to advocate for resolving root problems that lead to violence, to advocate for self-reflection. Often people pretend they are not capable of violence—that’s the worst kind of fallacy. I believe we ought to admit to ourselves, each of us, that we are capable of being violent creatures, hurting and even killing, because I believe it is only with this admission that we can even attempt to solve violence as an epidemic worldwide, and within our own homes. In addition to this, I think poetry and writing in general has its roots in violence. Some of our oldest recorded writings for instance, are incredibly violent. We don't teach Beowulf or Gilgamesh to glorify violence. But to pretend that those works are not riddled with violence is silly. For me, a careful examination of what that violence is, how it operates for the characters and for the narratives, why it exists and what it measures...those are important questions, which I think we might overlook at times. So yes, my poems on occasion record violence, but they are non-fictional instances of violence (as far as my memory operates) and they serve an important function not only for the book, but for me. I would very much like to think that what readers I have are able to engage that violence on several levels, and that their reactions are both visceral and honest.

DD: You begin the collection with my favorite poem, “Milkweed,” which seems really to be an Ars Poetica. In this poem, you write that the burst remains of a milkweed pod are your Paris. What is your personal definition of poetry?

WS: Oh dear. I guess I might say: Poetry is that which, if I attempt to define it, I will sound pompous and moronic at the same time. Milkweed is as close as I can get to a definition, and hopefully I sound neither, but odds are good that someone out there think I sound one or the other or both fairly consistently.  I think, ultimately, whatever my definition is, it's not completely static, and hopefully you can get a feel for it by reading my poems, which I would vastly prefer to attempting to distill it in a definition here.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

WS: I don't think I read nearly enough contemporary poetry to be any sort of judge. I don't really read enough contemporary poetry, period. I do my best, but there’s so much of it out there, I rarely feel like I'm doing even a passable job. At the risk of sounding completely self-centered, I do read every journal that publishes my work cover-to-cover, and I've found some amazing poems, poets, and friends that way. I suppose I see a trend towards narrative poetry slowly gaining ground on lyric poetry. I recently had a discussion with an editor and poet friend of mine about the types of poetry he sees for submissions. He explained to me about Hoagland's essay and the skittery poet (which I then had to find and read), and I have to say I agree, though again my experience is limited. Personally, my aesthetics run less associative and “experimental” (though that term irks me), but I recognize that those poems have value outside of my taste preferences. I've always thought poetry might want to consider allowing accessibility to be a word which, instead of gathering scorn, might have value. I have had a poet nearly take a swing at me for the very idea that poetry should be able to be 'accessible' if it so chooses. So, I would like to think that poetry today is, increasingly, large enough to accommodate all types of poems and all types of audiences. I certainly think it can be, and while I don't buy a lot of books that don't fit my aesthetic, I am honored to be published in the same journals as those that differ, and I would very much like to live in a world where both can exist peacefully, as it were. 

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

WS: Ha! Prufrock maybe? I'm terrible at memorizing poems, it’s embarrassing. Prufrock was the first poem though, that made me think: "Shit. I wish I had written that." and really feel it.

DD: We both attended Binghamton University as undergraduates at the same time, in the late 90s and early 00s. I was lucky enough to be in Liz Rosenberg’s poetry workshop and Michael Klein’s creative nonfiction workshop with you. How did Binghamton University influence your development as a writer?

WS: Looking back on my life as a writer, I have been so fortunate. Not only to be in those classes with you (and several other talented, amazing people), but also to have the teachers I have had. From a very young age I was lucky enough to have one or two who would challenge me, push me, allow me to invest myself in learning and education and writing. Liz, Michael, Ruth Stone, David Chirico and others at Binghamton, a couple of very good high school English teachers, even a teacher who had me in a gifted and talented program in elementary school. As I write this, I am recovering from the loss of one of my great mentors in writing, Tom Lux. Along with Stuart Dischell and a few others at the Sarah Lawrence summer program for adult writers, he helped me to discover that writing was, actually, a thing I could not live without. I have met and worked with some amazing writers over the years, many of whom are also amazing people. David Rivard and Mekeel Mcbride helped guide me through my graduate program, and I was lucky enough to Charlie Simic as my thesis advisor. I was able to spend a day with Phil Levine less than a year before he passed, and we spent a few hours talking about poetry and writing and poverty and how we both felt a sense of responsibility to the people and places that raised us.  I have so many wonderful moments with so many wonderful writers, and they just keep coming. Lately I have been lucky enough to be accepted into a group of talented writers in Burlington and I am lucky enough to say that Major Jackson now reads my poems every week, for example. Not all of my encounters with poets and writers have been positive ones, and certainly I have met some writers which, for one reason or another don't seem interested in engaging with me. But overall, I have been blindingly fortunate. It is my great desire to be able to give back to poetry and writing and young poets and writers what has been given to me.

I'm not sure I can specifically say exactly what Binghamton did for me as a writer, the time now seems to all blend together.  I'm not sure I can quantify my time there in a satisfactory way. I suppose it will have to suffice for me to say: It influenced me greatly, and I would not be the writer I am today without it.

DD: I’d like to end with your poem, “Harness,” which appeared in a recent issue of Field. Could you introduce us to this poem?

WS: “Harness,” like the vast majority of my poems, is in large part non fictional and narrative. My father really did drive a team of draft horses, they really did take off with me on their backs, and I really was found some time later in an old apple orchard/pasture. To me, that's important, though I've heard from others that the distinction holds less meaning for a reader, and I have only their feedback to go on. When I became a father, my perspective and thoughts on my childhood started to shift. In particular, one day, I remembered this story, told to me many times by many family members. I was too young to really recall the incident, though I remembered instantly the smell of the horses and how the world looked from their backs. When I started to process the memory through the experience of a father, I nearly had a panic attack. I have no idea what I would do if my daughter disappeared up and over a hill on the back of a massive spooked horse. Chase them, I suppose. As for the ending, I think what was most telling about my memory was that I did not remember specifically that event, though I remember many others and I remember generally things about the horses. To me, that indicates that the event, while terrible and traumatic for the adults in my family, wasn't for me. I thought about that a long time, and the story of what passed between Angel and I came to me slowly, in the way things sometimes do when they have truth without adhering strictly to fact.  I often write instinctively, doing my best to lose myself in the process, listening more than speaking (the exact opposite of how I revise). In Harness, I think I was somewhat successful in tapping into my own voice, and finding a way to translate a real event of my life into the fantastic we sometimes need to connect experience to the universal.  I'm not great at talking about my poems, or at least, I aspire to be much better than I am. I hope that suffices.

            Harness

            They tell me I was too young to remember
            the day the horse team spooked and broke
            the reins and left my father empty-handed,
            running after them with me on their backs.
            I rode every time he took them out, Marsha
            one was called and Angel the other and I was
            too young (maybe four) to be up on their
            broad backs, without a saddle, but they were
            so calm not even a shotgun made them bolt
            and my father was so young and proud
            not even his son could scare him. I was
            never scared, their black manes smelled
            so good and the rise and fall of their shoulders
            as I lay on my stomach pulled the horizon
            up and down and I kept the flies from their face
            with a long branch. Now that I am a father
            and my father is dead I think he must have
            felt, in the moment the reins left his hands
            and the trace snapped, that all of what his life
            had led to up to at that point was now in full
            flight from him, his hands never so empty
            as right then and it was a beautiful day
            to lose a son. I was lost for only an hour
            they tell me, but I know the truth: the horses
            and I ran to the thickest part of the old
            orchard and there I passed into Angel
            and Marsha watched as Angel passed
            into me and that is why still today on spring
            days in the sun when the people are all
            very happy to have the warmth I am remembering
            a collar and the feel of a boy on my back
            and the taste of wild apples sour and sweet.

Jessica Kristie is an award winning author, social entrepreneur, and a lover of poetry. She is an advocate for art, an activist against human trafficking, and a soulful contributor to the strengthening of our creative communities. Her novel, Barbed-Wire Butterflies, donates 100% of all print royalties and a percentage of digital copies and merchandise to fight human trafficking. Look for her poetry collections, Dreaming in Darkness, Threads of Life, and Winter Dress, as well as her eBook offering to creators, Weekly Inspirations for Writers & Creators. You can find her fusion of poetry and music with the collaboration, Kristie & Cloverfield, released through Ultrasonic Music Germany, and available everywhere. Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica Kristie discovered her passion for writing as a child. Along with her creative side, she works in the publishing industry, is an avid supporter of all creative souls, and hopes to draw readers into her world through shared emotion. She inspires to forgive, remember, and heal, while continuing to dedicate herself to fighting social injustices.

William Stratton currently lives in Colchester, Vermont. He teaches writing and poetry at SUNY Plasttsburgh, and is associate poetry editor at the Saranac Review. His first full length collection of poetry, Under The Water Was Stone (Winter Goose Publishing, 2014) has been nominated for the Kate Tufts Discovery award and the Eugene Paul Nassar Award. His second book These Things Too Have Shape was released in January of 2016. His poetry is published or forthcoming in: FIELD, Sugar House Review, Spillway, The Cortland Review, Best of Pif Magazine, The North American Review, Connotation Press, Canary, and others.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

& Is There a Bridge Where the Displaced Go After They’re Gone?: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Zeina Hashem Beck's Louder than Hearts

Louder than Hearts
Zeina Hashem Beck
Bauhan Publishing, 2017

Zeina Hashem Beck’s second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts, begins with the lines: “I write in English the way I roam foreign cities—full of street light/ & betrayal, until I find a coffee shop that speaks Arabic.” The poems in Louder than Hearts range across Tripoli, Mosul, Syria, Beirut, London, Paris, and New York, illuminating what is simultaneously most foreign and familiar in those places: the fundamental human drive to connect with others through language and the complexities of doing so in a world divided by cultural, religious, linguistic, and political boundaries. Hashem Beck writes from a certainty in the consolations of the written word. For her, a poem is “a tree without roots/ a street with enormous wings”; each line here both defies uprooting and takes flight, suddenly and assuredly. As the title poem notes, the motions and avowals in Hashem Beck’s work are bound but not beholden to tradition: “The woman in me is thousands/ of years old, her voice louder/ than hearts and derbakkehs.”   The ancient tattoo of drumbeat and bloodline cross corridors, balconies, playgrounds, land-mine fields, broken houses, wastelands, continents, oceans, and ideologies. Louder than Hearts bears witness to the scarred and to the disconsolate, to the war-ravaged and to the displaced, to the strange interior countries one must survey and commit to memory if one is to understand the reality of human suffering.    

Above all else, Zeina Hashem Beck’s work attempts to translate her particular understanding of human suffering into a poetics of radical empathy. Her poem, “Body,” emblematizes the elegiac uplift and heartache at the center of this collection. The poem reads:

            Body

            For Hassan Rabeh, young dancer displaced from Syria, who killed himself by jumping from a seventh-floor balcony in Beirut,
            Wednesday, June 22, 2016

            & perhaps you flew. I read the news, how you plunged from the seventh floor, a Beirut balcony,
            & I am filled with a sound of sirens, a need to be alone. This war this theater this city this.
            & I was at a Da Vinci exhibit at the museum this morning.
            & what a blessing, to say I was at a Da Vinci exhibit this morning.
            & he was a pacifist who designed killing machines, for money always comes from warlords.
            & he, who like no other knew of the divine proportions of the body,
            & he who preferred to trace limbs & ligaments
            & the glide of bat wings in the air, he who preferred the theater,
            & the projector, & the drum, & bridges, imagined the machine gun
            & the submarine, & the tank, sculpted a bullet with a more precise dance.
            & oh how the mind bends & how light & shadows fall.
            & you, young dancer, tell me, what do you know of the flight of birds,
            & of the difference between theatricality & war, dissection & witchcraft, dance & death?
            & were you searching for your Palestine in Damascus, for your Damascus in Beirut,
            & were you looking for Allah in the joint, the spine, the twirl?
            & that last scribble your body made in the air, was that you,
            & were you trying to write backwards, to lift instead?
            & did you? Tell me, are the mountains blue in the distance?
            & does poetry matter, & does dance?
            & is there a bridge where the displaced go after they’re gone?

Here, as always in the poetry of Zeina Hashem Beck the world pliés before us in all of its ruthless beauty and terror. Hashem Beck does more than merely commemorate the life and mourn the loss of Hassan Rabeh in this poem. She articulates the endless adhan of art. She proclaims our ummah as everywhere, on the round earth’s imagined corners, where a poem might begin to take shape, to be uttered, heard, and remembered.  

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Kelly Forsythe and Emily Grise of Copper Canyon Press

DD: I’d like to start by quoting the last five lines from Jim Harrison’s poem, “Books,” published posthumously in Dead Man’s Float:

            I must sell these books, some quite rare,
            or exchange them for good food and the wine
            I can no longer afford. I used to look
            at pages 33, 77, 153 for the secrets of the world
            and never find them but still continue trying.

Could you use these lines as a jumping off point for discussing the good work you do as a publicist at Copper Canyon Press?

KF: Ha! What a great line from Harrison to start our conversation. I am the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon, which means that I work to get our authors and their books print and broadcast media coverage. Because Copper Canyon is a nonprofit, part of my job also involves working to increase the visibility of our donor campaigns and reader engagement programming.

EG: As Copper Canyon’s Associate Publicist, I manage the press’s digital footprint —  primarily on social media. Social media serves to amplify press coverage for our books and authors, support the press’s development initiatives, and help build relationships with our community of readers and the literary community at large. The digital landscape is always changing and it’s my job to keep up, so there’s a lot of answer-seeking and not-finding and then continuing-to-try; that’s part of the fun.

DD: Jim Harrison’s Dead Man’s Float and C.D. Wright’s ShallCross are both amazing books, capstones to admirable lives in poetry and the arts. Do you see the marketing of these books differently than other books? Could you say that your work as a publicist in these cases is also to elegize and to praise?

KF: My role as a literary publicist is to advocate for poetry, and to shout from the rooftops when we get a beautiful collection in our hands. Both of these books are capstones, and that is an important quality that I took into consideration when we developed the publicity campaigns. They were handled with care, and both went out to reviewers with Letters from the Editor, contextualizing the work and honoring the legacies of the poets. The coverage they received was predominantly focused on the poetry itself, with remembrances and retrospectives woven in.

EG: Elegizing both Jim and C.D. felt in the wake of their passing more like an organic, communal act of which the press is only a part. Spending as much of my time plugged into online conversation as I do, it was incredible to witness the chorus of so many voices — writers, readers, academics, students, family, friends — sharing with the digital world the impact these poets had on their lives and their work. ShallCross and Dead Man’s Float naturally became important touchstones for this collective eulogizing. Ongoing eulogizing, really; I don’t know that the world will run out of things to say about either of these poets any time soon.

DD: What do poets most need to know about publicizing a book of poetry, in your opinion?

KF: I think poets should know that social media is a crucial part of how readers discover new books today. Online reviews, literary journals that publish their issues digitally, and presses that help celebrate its authors accomplishments through Twitter and Facebook, are all part of the publicity process. It’s also important to have an author website for readers to learn more about you. I think that a lot of poets don’t believe that mainstream media is engaged in poetry, and in some cases, it isn’t — but in many circumstances, reviewers and editors are taking note of poetry and looking for ways to celebrate it.

DD: How important is an author’s use of social media and overall web presence in publicizing a book?

EG: Generally speaking, I think the importance of a particular poet’s online presence is proportional to the importance of that presence to their readers. As a publicist, you want a book and its readers to find each other, so if a poet’s readers – actual and potential – are online, I think it makes a measurable impact if the poet is online too.

There are always exceptions, of course, and I wouldn’t push a poet to jump into the digital abyss if they’re not going to feel okay about being there. Managing a social media presence takes time and energy, and it’s publicly performative so it can drain your reservoir of self (hi, introverts!). A poet’s primary responsibility is to write poetry, so if Twitter takes away from that instead of feeds it, I respect the choice say “pass.” (That’s part of why I do the job I do: so poets can poem first.) But if social media fits comfortably into a poet’s life, their use of social media can really help make space for their book in the world and find the readers who’re going to love it.

DD: Since the last time Kelly was interviewed for this blog, by Nin Andrews, in 2012, Copper Canyon Press has launched several initiatives to raise funds and increase the variety of poets it publishes. One such initiative is the New Poets Project. Could you tell us a bit about this project and Javier Zamora’s new collection?

EG: The New Poets Project campaign used crowdfunding to raise funds for debut poetry collections by extraordinary voices like Zamora’s. Copper Canyon is a platform for both established and emerging poets, and for the latter, debut books can be the critical jumping-off point for long-ranging careers and can carry a lasting impact in the poetry world. We’re invested in the power of these debut books and the poets who write them – poets like Camille Rankine, and Ocean Vuong and Javier Zamora. It was great to see the literary community rally around these writers.

The emotional ground that Unaccompanied covers is remarkable. There’s a physical journey embedded in the book – an incredibly compelling one – but the internal landscape Zamora explores is equally rich and deeply considered. The sense of urgency in these poems sticks with me after I read them, too.

DD: Camille Rankine’s poetry seeks to propel the passive reader into active and aggressive questioning. With intense lyricism, Incorrect Merciful Impulses charts the anxieties, the blindness, and the perplexities characteristic of urban life in contemporary America. Compassion foregrounds Rankine’s poetic inquiry into the confluence of identity, history, politics, mortality, and culture, in a nation endlessly implicated in violence, domestically and overseas. To me, this book is emblematic of the timely and timeless quality of Copper Canyon books. Which books recently published by Copper Canyon Press resonate most deeply with you in these dark political times?

KF: One could (and has) made the argument that all poetry is political. See: this, or this.

But as far as specific Copper Canyon titles that have resonated with me (in addition to Camille’s collection), these would make the shortlist (among many others):

            Roger Reeves’s King Me
            W.S. Merwin’s The Lice, a 50th Anniversary reissue
            Javier Zamora’s Unaccompanied
            Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky With Exit Wounds
            Lisa Olstein’s Late Empire

DD: Kelly, your digital chapbook, Helix, is available online at Floating Wolf Quarterly. I enjoyed the lyric intensity of this collection. The first four lines of the title poem were particularly emblematic of the strengths of the chapbook as a whole:

            That you may have been small, gene. A tiny cross
            of parental freeways. Little fragment of extended
            tastes: likes, dislikes, hair color, eyes.
            That our thrills could be found in the departure—

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

KF: My work at Copper Canyon Press has changed my life. Hands-down: as a writer, reader, and a professional. I think I am probably a more sensitive marketing professional because I’m also a poet (actually I’m going through my own “first book” publishing process with Coffee House Press right now). So there are some insights I definitely try to apply to my job — about how vulnerable it can be to publish a book — for all poets regardless of their experience or publication history.

As far as how working at Copper Canyon as a publicist has influenced me as a poet: it has exposed me to so many different styles and types of poetry, and through that exposure I have experimented, imitated, reconsidered, and re-imagined, my own writing. I read many manuscripts throughout the year in order to prepare PR plans, sometimes multiple books a week, and often in raw form without final edits or revisions. This is a practice that has affected my vocabulary, my understanding of lineation, my theory on titling poems...the list could go on.

DD: Emily, I love your prose poem, “The Rabbit,” which appeared in the New Delta Review.  It manages to be playful and new and to deeply engage Francis Ponge’s work at the same time. The poem ends wonderfully:

            Rabbit, I think I am saying I would vote for you if only I had a better
            grasp of your platform.

            Rabbit, I think, if you were my father, we’d go out to lunch every week
            and despite our labored conversation, I’d kiss your furry cheek before
            I hurried out of your car.

How has your work at Copper Canyon Press influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your work as a publicist?

EG: Thank you for such a kind reading of “The Rabbit!”

Surrounded by the work of incredible poets at Copper Canyon, I’m both inspired and daunted, moved to write and stunned into silence. Consuming good poetry is nourishing to me as poet: it feeds me rhythms I want to borrow and phrases I obsess over and forms I want to play in and new ways of being that I want to inhabit for a while. It wakes me up to the world again so I can write about it. But it also greases the machine of self-doubt; it feels like I’m always navigating this push and pull  – a healthy tension, I like to think.

The flow of influence in the other direction is less fraught: my life as a writer serves as a welcome source of empathy for me as a publicist working with other writers. I can’t fully inhabit every poet’s experience, of course, but I can honor the vulnerability and bravery of what they’ve done to craft a book through the careful attention I give that book, and through the work I do that helps that book make its mark, because I’ve felt that vulnerability myself. I value my own experience as a point of reference in that sense.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as a publicist?

KF:  It is really gratifying to see sold-out readings or lectures, rooms packed with people waiting to listen to poets read their work.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

KF: It needs more readers.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

EG: Can I cheat a bit in my response? The first and truest-feeling answer that came to my mind in response to this excellent question isn’t quite a poem but words from a poet: Audre Lorde’s well-known assertion that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I carry those words around with me and visit them often. They call me out, they move me forward, they teach me and inspire me and feed a fire under threat. These words name the world; they’re the lens I need to really see it. I want to keep that close.

KF: My poem would be W.S. Merwin’s “Variation on a Theme,” from his collection Moon Before Morning, and it will also appear in The Essential Merwin this Fall 2017. The line: “thank you whole body and hand and eye / thank you for sights and moments known.”

DD: Speaking of W.S. Merwin, I’d like to end with a poem from the remarkable Garden Time; “The Present” is maybe the most Blakean poem in a very satisfyingly Blakean collection:

            The Present

            As they were leaving the garden
            one of the angels bent down to them and whispered

            I am to give you this
            as you are leaving the garden

            I do not know what it is
            or what it is for
            what you will do with it

            you will not be able to keep it
            but you will not be able

            to keep anything
            yet they both reached at once

            for the present
            and when their hands met

            they laughed

Kelly Forsythe is the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon Press. Prior to working with Copper Canyon, she was a consultant for the web team at the Poetry Foundation, and worked with the marketing department at Poets & Writers Magazine. She has given lectures on publishing and book publicity at NYU, The Academy of American Poets, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Manhattanville College. Her publicity endeavors at Copper Canyon include Natalie Diaz’s When My Brother Was an Aztec, Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds, and Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda. She is on the Board of Directors for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and the author of Perennial, forthcoming from Coffee House Press in 2018. In addition to her work with Copper Canyon, she edits Phantom, an online journal, and teaches creative writing at the University of Maryland. Photo: Janessa Jackson

Emily Grise serves as Associate Publicist for Copper Canyon Press and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Missouri - St. Louis. Previously, she served as an Assistant Editor for Natural Bridge and a reviews writer for DIALOGIST, and is currently Associate Poetry Editor for WomenArts Quarterly — a St. Louis-based art and literary journal which features work by womyn artists. She teaches creative writing for pre-teens with the St. Louis Writers Workshop. Photo: Tim Young

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Unto Others: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Filthy Labors by Lauren Marie Schmidt

Filthy Labors
Lauren Marie Schmidt
Curbstone Books, 2017

Lauren Marie Schmidt’s newest collection of poetry, Filthy Labors, roars with boundless defiant empathy on every page. For Schmidt, poetry is earned communion, restorative utterance, the expression of a belief in a secular, music-bound, Eucharistic reality underwriting daily life, an affirmation of the fact that our mutual individual brokenness, made manifest in the word, is what constitutes true communion. The poems in Filthy Labors draw their inspiration from Schmidt’s work as a poetry instructor at The Haven House for Homeless Women and Children; Schmidt also draws on her personal family history, exploring the difficult affections and the dense connective tissues that bind generations together, and often tear us apart inside. Schmidt arranges the poems in Filthy Labors around six of the seven Catholic sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Communion, Confirmation, Anointing of the Sick, and Holy Orders; she leaves out Marriage, an omission that felicitously underscores the collection’s commitment to gender equity and female agency in the face of a rabidly misogynistic culture. Each poem in this collection works as an outward sign of an inward grace (the grace is love, emblazoned with the hard-fought duende of Schmidt’s tremendous heart). Filthy Labors posits a sacramental view of the world, unmoored from the false trappings and mystifications of organized religion. Schmidt’s only prophet and priest is Whitman, with his call and response: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?/ I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,/ In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass.”

Filthy Labors sees clearly the face of a young father running for miles after his daughter’s errant kite, the neck of a homeless mother with “Justice” tattooed on it, the face of a man changing his elderly father’s soiled underwear, a woman named Milagros breathing Spanish in her daughter’s ear, the faces of mothers blooming on the eternal verge of struggle, pain, fear, defiance, rebirth. Schmidt evokes the wounds and truths of the many worlds she has passed through. She deftly moves between forms and registers, exploring the limits of the ghazal and the pantoum, unafraid to shift from the vernacular to the vatic. Schmidt also bravely explores her own privilege and blindness, as she poignantly does in “The English Teacher Gets a Lesson in Inference,”

            You got any kids? Dionna asks.
                         No, I say, I don’t have any kids.

            You ever been pregnant?
                         I don’t have any kids, so…

            That ain’t the question
                         that I asked you, she says.

            Then she folds her arms across her chest
                         and waits for me to answer.

Schmidt’s poetry, here and everywhere else in this collection, calls us into radical sympathy with others, grounded in the conviction that poetry might shine and quench and slip its tongue between our lips and pray. Filthy Labors is the product of far more than mere astute observation fused to talent and training. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s work never wavers in its commitment to the connections that occur off the page, in the air around a dinner table, in the common room of The Haven House, in all havens and the unsafe spaces between.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Braided Interior: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Heisenberg's Salon by Susan Lewis

Heisenberg’s Salon
Susan Lewis
BlazeVox Books, 2017

Susan Lewis’s new collection of prose poems engages the complex routines and the constantly shifting contours of daily life in the twenty-first century with great humor, terror, anger, and insight. Like Kafka, like Borges, Lewis explores the uncertainties that underwrite a life, and that linger in the margins of the page; from such uncertainties, and from the chaos embroidered into the antimacassars of the quotidian, Lewis’s prose poems present themselves as an endless gallery of rooms wherein one might dwell on the raging absurdities and the gentle profundities of existence. In these poems, Lewis introduces a man overwhelmed by the complexity of most things, refugees from the native urban clatter, a god of guilt trying to sharpen the curvatures of space-time, a girl who knows her waking life is an illusion, figures sidling into their lives like shy crabs, motivations stunted, discourses un-tongued, the logic of the stutter-step and the sucker punch, the language of bureaucracy colliding with medusa-headed vernaculars and scientific lexicons. Lewis’s ultimate subject, however, is the protean, indeterminate, baffling conundrum of the self, the mystery and multiplicity of our own individual discrete interior worlds.

For Susan Lewis, the prose poem provides a frame within which passionate inwardness and exteriority might overlap, exchange places, negate each other, and continue their distinct pinprick shinings. These poems take form in the interstices of desire, “caught between reciprocity & the cutting edge,” providing glimpses of a “braided interior, veiled though it remained by a haze of evasion.” At their best, the poems startle and skitter, nimbly shifting stances between sentences, darting between parable and parabola—acidic, exquisite, and surreal in the way that only the waking world can be surreal. The poem, “A Variable Equation,” is characteristic in its method; the poem reads, in full:

"This one had a weeping cat. In fact, he was a cat himself, when the notion struck him. He could leap from pool to pool like raindrops. When the pair of them cried, the earth beneath them shuddered, from pleasure or impatience. One day the cat’s tears dried up. It lay still becoming something else. Its man never found out who had ordered the new body, but he knew then & there he must get one like it. You could say he lorded it over his pet, but it was the cat become moonbeam which nurtured him before he had a self to speak of."

Like a cat become moonbeam it is impermanence that nurtures these poems and moves them rapidly outward. Heisenberg’s Salon offers poems that are by turns cosmopolitan and sage, wry and idiosyncratic, eccentric and expertly executed. Each poem here creates a home for another—newer, stranger, older, atomized—way of life. Susan Lewis exposes the flux within the habitual, the unruliness of the very molecules within the customary; these outlandish internal geometries vanish and reappear as the ever-shifting furniture of the self.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Danny Rosen of Lithic Press and Adam Houle, Author of Stray

DD: How did Lithic Press come into being?

DR: Before Lithic I was a geologist, an astronomer, and a teacher of earth and space science. Lithic means, pertaining to stone. Long before I became a geologist, my Dad was the poet of the family, so the possibility of poetry has always been about. I wrote a poem in second grade that gave me a good feeling. I wrote a poem in 1992, another in 1994, then they started coming more frequently. About 12 or 15 years ago, I became close with Jack Mueller, a lifelong constant poet-maker with deep knowledge and strong presence. He is a prolific trickster. As Hank Stamper might say, he'll “never give a inch.” Jack was a fixture in San Francisco in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, with Ginsberg, Corso, Doyle, Hirschman, Cherkovski, and the ongoing gang. He is a mountain (in the house at the top of the hill at the end of the road.) Thousands of 3X5 cards and bar napkins with rapidly sketched cartoons, sharpened by fast comment, piled on the dining room table. They captivated me. “Let's make a book of these napkins!” That became, Whacking the Punch Line, and that was the beginning of the Lith.

Lithic Press started taking off about two years ago when I hired Kyle Harvey to do design and layout work. Kyle is a beautiful human: multi-talented, motivated, poet-musician-artist, and a brilliant designer! It is amazing to work with him! Lithic would not be what it is without him.

DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Lithic poets share in common?

DR: Our catalog has about 30 titles from 20 writers. A little more than half are chappies, the others, perfect-bound longer collections. With the idea of creating rare books, we've done a couple of cloth-bound, numbered, Limited Editions (Jack Mueller's, The Gate, and Kierstin Bridger's, Demimonde.) There is one anthology, Going Down Grand, Poems from the Canyon, that includes poems from more than 50 writers, and a couple of cartoon books, collections of Jack’s, compression sketches, along with, Whacking..., there is, Who Said Hawaii? I can imagine publishing books on Natural History or really anything that becomes obvious to make.

As far as I know, all Lithic writers put their pants on one leg at a time. I’m attracted to writers who pay attention to language in addition to any feelings, destinations, or particular sympathies. In all our books, I find some essence of existence, some insight, some play that makes the journey more stimulating.

An overriding thought that Mueller has ground into me and his many minions is, Obey Emerging Form, which comes to him directly from his acquaintance with Robert Duncan, and the importance he gave Olson’s thoughts on projective verse. The idea has grown in me, transcends my writing, leads me to drill, bolt and hang rocks from ceilings and trees... led me to open a bookstore. I look for manuscripts that obey emerging form.

DD: Can you talk about the importance of your bookstore?

DR: Books take my breath away, always have. I still see myself in the library as a kid, looking up at all the shelves. As I struggled to write a report, the night before it was due, I couldn’t fathom how all those books could have been written: so many words, sentences, paragraphs, page after page. It was magic. Still is. I’ve always loved to be among books, each one a little universe. Or a multiverse. Or just one good verse. I have Montaigne pinned on the wall,

“...I never travel without books in peace or in war. Yet many days or months go by without my using them. Meanwhile, time runs by and is gone ... you cannot imagine how much ease and comfort I draw from the thought that they are beside me...”

The bookstore has exposed rafters from which I hang rocks, pine poles, beaver-chewed willow sticks, globes of planets, asteroids, books, and who knows what’s next! Trilobites crawl across the counter. There are spinning chunks of basalt and rocks that hang up from the floor. The bookstore is a classroom, a field trip destination for school groups, a community center, a meeting place, an art gallery. We have frequent poetry readings, scientific talks, and music shows. It’s a thinker’s hangout. I ran a planetarium for many years, the bookstore is an extension of that.

Located in a small town on the western side of a western state, on the 2nd floor of The Old Bank Building, a block off the main drag, in a country whose president doesn’t read too much, business is best during our events. I’m optimistic, our name is spreading, drop-in traffic is increasing.

DD: Could you tell us about some of the titles forthcoming in 2017 from Lithic Press?

DR: We had an open reading last year for chapbook submissions, and three chappies are soon to come out from Karl Plank, Trish Hopkinson, and Kevin Carey. Four or five other chappies will come out this year. In addition to Adam's Stray, we’ll have four additional longer length poetry collections, including, Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, by Eugene, Oregon poet, Sam Roxas-Chua. In a break from tradition we’ll be publishing a chapbook of non-fiction by John Fayhee called, Driving Around the West with Drugs. We are also going to re-issue Jack Mueller's, Whacking the Punch Line, as a coloring book for grown-ups. All the titles are in the catalog on our website, here.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

DR: The first full-length collection I did with Lithic was Jack Mueller's, Amor Fati, which started with paper-clipped and stapled, crumpled piles of papers and manuscripts stacked on the milieu of Jack’s dining room table. Molding that into a book, in the thunder and wonder of Jack’s arguments with himself, was hugely invigorating. It took four years. I sent it to The Boss. Three years later it looks well worn on his desk. A major theme in Springsteen’s recent autobiography is indeed, amor fati.

DD: How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

DR: Before Lithic Press began to grow, there was about ten years during which I had a lot of very quiet time. I ran an observatory in southern Africa. I worked at night. The days were free, there were giraffes out the window, I tracked zebra and rhino, spent days on the hillside with the baboons, hyenas were about at night. The sky, the land, my friends... were all new. Time moved slow. My home in Colorado is a sanctuary. There is an observatory, beaver ponds, birds of prey, coyotes at night. I live with dogs. I’ve been blessed with enough nothing to get something done. Since I opened the bookstore, poems come less frequently than before (but I did get published! My, Primate Poems, came out late last year.)

I love facilitating the making of books. But as a publisher, I’ve had a glimpse of something of a mania among writers, and anyone who has ever written anything, to ‘have a book.’ Maybe it’s related to celebrity culture and the urge toward ‘fame.’ It can be ugly. I want to work with writers who write because they can’t help but to write. Books, for them, obviously need to be made. While writing remains important to me, I take my poems as they come and don’t worry too much at the time that passes in between. I don’t force it. As so many have said, I am a poet - when I am writing a poem. Otherwise, I am just another chump looking at the stars, paying taxes, dusting the shelves... I am attracted to writers who have vibrant connections with the world - beyond writing.

DD: Could you introduce Adam’s work and discuss the strengths of Stray?

DR: “Solitude's Best Apprentice” is the title of first poem in this collection. It details the mastery Adam’s father displayed with woodworking tools, making something from ‘nothing.’ Adam’s work is like his father’s hand on the chisel. Every poem is finely wrought with attention to detail, knowledge built from long apprenticeship, and a helpless desire for the work.

These poems are written from the inside out, like a Kesey novel, and like in a Kesey novel, I am drawn to what I do not know. I might get the names over time, stumble on dark paths, take sure steps with sharpened knives, severed ties, lies, and all kinds of unsaid. His longer poems are explorations from some honed place to wherever. He wanders. He remains open to ‘begging home a stray’ - up in Ralls - where I’ve never been but it feels familiar. Adam’s book looks to the north and walks off. He is a husband. His short poems are a fist. He has a glacial scar carved on his whorl.

In the Lith, above my head, The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead hangs from the ceiling on 24 gauge silver wire. The 1954 cloth-bound edition had been gnawed off the shelf and partially buried next to the compost pit by my book-loving bitch, Luckie. It hangs just above the bar table. I have to sit up straight to read from it (who sits up straight these days?) Randomly I find,

“...It often seems to me that European man was at his best between 1400 and 1600. Since then our appreciation of beauty has become too overlaid with intellectualization. We educated people have our aesthetic sense too highly cultivated and do not come to beauty simply enough...”

Whitehead goes on. Adam’s poems come to beauty (and brutality, and a wide variety of intense mundanities) with an educated simplicity.

DD: The sonnet, the near sonnet, and a kind of nonce sonnet punctuate Stray. In a way, this is the phantom form underwriting the collection. Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with this form?

AH: I really like the verb “punctuate” here. I think of received forms as a way to address tradition, to offer a small aside to the arc of where we’ve been and where we might be going. For me, the sonnet makes sense. It’s elastic, it’s flexible, and it can stretch gracefully and with resonance. It’s a way for me to organize my thoughts. Thematically, there’s a lot of, well, straying, physically, spiritually, emotionally—we stray from obligations, from duties, from love, from home, but I like that there are formal returns in the collection, which I hope echo in sound and sense from one poem to another. That underwriting you mention serves as a ghost refrain of sorts. Each poem is a crafted thing, but, once I started really considering how all the poems were in discussion with one another, I realized how a collection, too, is a crafted thing; it’s curated, tweaked, and shaped. I found a lot of comfort and joy and frustration and doubt in that process, and the sonnet and its looser relatives—the “Staring Down” couplets, too—offered touchstones for the shape the collection ultimately took. 

I think of poems in general and received forms in particular as balancing authenticity and artifice. They’re crafted and structured to highlight the appearance of spontaneity, to feel necessary, and that they could not be otherwise. There’s a tautness in working toward authenticity and artifice, a fundamental tension, that I enjoy, and I find real satisfaction in reading poems that navigate and explore those concerns. So I tried to write the sort of poems I like reading.  

DD: The pronounced influence of a Catholic upbringing shines through in many of the poems in this collection. Could you talk about the connections between Catholic culture, faith, and poetry?

AH: Being a cradle Catholic gives life a shape whether you want it or not, and, like the sonnet or poems in general, offers places to dwell, rooms for us to knock around in for a while before bustling back into the world. For me, being raised Catholic provided way stations for my days, big and small rituals that marked time passing and gave that time meaning and shape: the rosary, for one, but also the larger rituals, the events that celebrated transitions from one phase of life to another, Baptism, the Eucharist, Confirmation, Reconciliation. Those are stylized moves, rich in circumstance and filled with gesture and longing. The ritual expresses and evokes, enacts and points toward the hope for structures that transcend. Catholicism was the vehicle for these concerns, but that’s a circumstance of geography and history, a chance happening. It certainly could have been otherwise, but it wasn’t otherwise. I can’t undo that. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my Catholicism, no matter how lapsed still fires off in my synapses, it’s baked in and feels nearly genetic. In all my thoughts and feelings and approaches, the Church, in both positive and negative ways, has its say. And, for me, I find that poems have something of that structure that brought comfort and meaning and expression when I was growing up. I’m not glib about those tensions. Poems are rituals unto themselves. When poems are working well, they’re living chambers with intricacies and shapes—sonic, formal, rhetorical, metaphorical—, but they’re also expanses with possible selves and ambiguities shaped consciously and unconsciously, but shaped with intelligent hearts and empathetic minds. Those are the ones I want to write, and they’re the ones I want to read and reread and tape to people’s doors when they’re not looking. 

I’m not a good Catholic in the way my grandmother would define it. I’ve not gone to Mass in a couple years, I’m ragged with doubts, and there is much that I find challenging. That said, the sense of wonder and awe in my gut, the realization that the world can be one place of majesty and terror, profound humaneness and abject cruelty, strikes me as a particularly spiritual issue. On the other hand, the Winter Daphne’s in bloom, and the Camellias are too. And there are swing sets and a broken down garbage truck and a fundamental collapse of political obligation to serve from below and to do so with sincerity and decency and intelligence. Those tilt-a-whirl scales have been slamming around for a long time, and we’re all of it. Poems, for me at least, can offer a shape to that. Poems, like religious belief, like ritual, can offer distillation and elevation and attention. They’re also “the things of this world” and I like to think of us all as Wilbur’s heaviest nuns working on our difficult balance.   

DD: Who are the poets that have influenced you the most?

AH: I take something from almost everything I read. I love reading Frost’s North of Boston, flipping through Pound’s Pisan Cantos and seeing what sticks. I find Cummings’s Tulips & Chimneys, especially the five parts of “Chansons Innocentes,” influencing my thoughts quite a bit. I read a lot of Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop. I return to Harmonium, too. Plath’s bee poems, Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle, those are important to me, too. CK Williams, the early stuff especially, and Philip Levine, the gritty gentleness I found there stuck with me. I read Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires and Refusing Heaven probably more times than I should have.     

DD: What contemporary poets do you most admire?

AH: First, I’d be faithless and unkind if I didn’t say how much I admire the poet-mentors at NMU and TTU who worked with me. You hear stories about negligent faculty, and maybe you see some of it, too, but that was not my experience when it came to talking poems, getting feedback on my work, getting suggestions for places to submit, and the like. And the fellow students I worked with at both places were supportive, motivating, and talented. In those ways, I’ve been very fortunate. 

I also admire, in no particular order, Frannie Lindsay, David Bottoms, Robert Morgan, Sarah Lindsay, Connie Wanek, Martha Serpas, Peter Everwine, Lance Larsen, and Christian Wiman. I heard Ross Gay read “Nursery” a while back, and it’s never left my ear. I like Steve Scafidi’s work, too. Yusef Komunyakaa’s Talking Dirty to the Gods was a revelation as was Heather McHugh’s Upgraded to Serious. Karen Skolfield’s Frost in the Low Areas, the title poem especially, is excellent.  I also enjoy Alberto Ríos’s work. Edward Hirsch’s Special Orders comes to mind, as does Thomas Lynch’s Walking Papers. I also admire Terrence Hayes. He was in a small town one over last year, and his talk meant a lot to me.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

AH: There’s a ton of room to write in terms of form and content. I find good poems all over the place, and I don’t know if they’ll be historically good, but that’s not the point. They’re good right now, and I like reading them. Maybe in five years I’ll cringe at those same poems I liked so much. But that’s taste and maturity and whatever else goes into our critical faculties. The poetry landscape seems to be okay with itself, and the mountains, deserts, swamps, cities, burgs, and towns are livable. Auden talked about reading work he knows isn’t very good but that he liked—it was his time, though, so what’s the problem? I read Verse Daily and Poetry Daily most mornings and subscribe to some lit mags, and I’m dazzled and moved and energized by the variety. I have critical assessment, of course, and I rank and sort and stop reading if I don’t like something, but I don’t get too severe about it. The stakes are high, they’re very high, but the importance of poems in my life won’t be made more meaningful by severity or exclusionary reactions. If I don’t like something, I stop reading. I might come back to it. I might not. I like wondering which poems being written now will last and be loved years and years from now. Cases can be made, I guess, but I can spend my time better by supporting the work I love. I think the variety we see is a sign of health, a realization of the importance of poetry in our lives.   

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

AH: Meaningful engagement with and support from our communities. I’d like to see more opportunities for poets in public schools or running workshops in rural communities and to have those events recognized as essential to the well-being of the community, not anomalous or cute. That’s close to me. I live in rural South Carolina and got to work with students on a Saturday workshop where we studied haiku, traditional and contemporary, discussing how image can work, how it expresses and evokes, how it suggests. That was a meaningful day; we had a lot of fun, but it was more than that. We slowed down. We read. We talked. We wrote. We wrangled with our responses, and, in doing so, we tried to make a shape for those responses. There are instrumental values there, skills that transfer to other aspects of our lives. But that’s a lucky by-product. It is inherently worthwhile to read carefully, to consider a poem on its own merits, and to respond in a community to your thoughts on the matter. It’s a way of thinking and feeling. And poetry adds real value to our lives. I have this little story in my mind of two state troopers sidled up to each other in their Interceptors in the median of a state road, driver’s side window to driver’s side window the way they do, exchanging well-read poetry collections.

DD: If you could only read and say and remember one poem (written by someone else) for the rest of your life, what poem would it be?

AH: Milton’s Paradise Lost. For a few reasons: I could win friends and gain influence by having marathon recitations. I could run for office, win, and recite it as a filibuster, providing explication as needed, sort of like Patton Oswalt’s Star Wars filibuster but way more serious. Lame joke aside: Paradise Lost is audacious and ambitious and so satisfying to read. Almost every line is worth our attention.   

DD: I’d like to end with the poem “To the Bed Bug.” This poem surprised and delighted me. For me, it gently evokes John Donne’s flea. Could you introduce this poem?

DR: I asked my old climbing buddy, Smeds, if he felt bad squashing the skeeters. He said he didn't like the killing but when they marched on his territory it was war.

Reading Donne’s, “The Flea,” is to listen in on some impassioned reasoning from 400 years ago. Reading it gave me a headache (behind my right eye.) Oh, darling, just smoosh the damned thing already and take my heart. But what a glimpse into the ways of the days of way back when: those manners, the intricate speech patterns, all the fluffy frilleries, same goddamned insects.

Adam’s “little buddy” could be seen as playful pondering. What will they say 400 years hence when this Bed Bug is encountered? Perhaps it will sooth a headache and cause a yearning for this high time: it displays an openness to fun, such easy speech, such an indication of freedom to wander where thought will roam - with such nuanced insight, same hot blood.

                        TO THE BED BUG

                        Little buddy chugging
                        innocuously enough
                        beneath my cotton sock,

                        tag-a-long armed
                        with anticoagulant
                        and an endless gut,

                        welcome to me,
                        a humble type-O host.
                        My blood is your blood,

                        eh, ami? Or is it amie?
                        Classy, aren’t I?
                        Urbane and friendly,

                        worrying French gender
                        that way. You’re worth it,
                        best lesson in commensalism.

                        I get you. I’ve taken
                        the orphan’s clingy ride
                        with style, rendered myself

                        immune to all but need.
                        I, like you, work to keep
                        a bleeder gently bleeding.

 

Danny Rosen founded Lithic Press in 2008, and the Lithic Bookstore & Gallery in 2015. His book, Primate Poems, came out in 2016. The chappie, Ghosts of Giant Kudu, came out in 2013 from Kattywompus Press. Danny’s genetically based optimism is arises from his familiarity with deep time and big space. He worked in geology, astronomy, and for many years ran the Western Sky Planetarium, providing astronomy education for schools and communities throughout western Colorado. 

Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. Claudia Emerson selected his work for Best New Poets 2010. Nominated for both a Pushcart and for Best of the Net, he was also a semi-finalist for the Boston Review/“Discovery” Prize and a finalist for the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry. He earned a PhD from Texas Tech and currently lives in Darlington, South Carolina with writer and editor Landon Houle. 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

 

 

The Braille Flowers of Remote Perfume: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s What Blooms in Winter and David Lehman’s Poems in the Manner Of

Poems in the Manner Of
David Lehman
Scribner Poetry, 2017

What Blooms in Winter
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
NYQ Books, 2016

At first glance, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s new collection of poetry, What Blooms in Winter, has little in common with David Lehman’s recently published Poems in the Manner Of. Mazziotti Gillan’s collection maintains the thematic and aesthetic continuity that runs throughout her body of work; Mazziotti Gillan, here, as everywhere else in her work, earnestly relates the life story of a working class daughter of immigrants, growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who made a place for herself in the poetry world. Lehman’s newest collection, on the other hand, catalogs the poet’s influences and enthusiasms, providing a series of nimble homages to the writers who have been fellow travelers on the road from An Alternative to Speech to The Best American Poetry 2017. While Lehman’s protean cosmopolitanism might jangle against Mazziotti Gillan’s homespun emotional éclat, both What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of share the distinction of being finely wrought collections by poets whose contributions to the nation as teachers, organizers, anthologists, and supporters of the arts are inestimably great.

In many respects, David Lehman’s Poems in the Manner Of serves as a companion volume to his recently published The State of the Art: A Chronicle of American Poetry 1988-2014. If The State of the Art scans, with tremendous discernment, the bright stars and the penumbras of the contemporary American poetry scene, then Poems in the Manner Of directs a similarly acuminous gaze at the poet’s own personal canon.  The poems in Poems are more than mere stylistic imitations of poets that Lehman admires; Poems in the Manner Of reads as the compendium of affections and predilections that have steered a life in poetry. In a sense that runs parallel to the lyric narrative chronicling of a lifetime unfolding in Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s work, Poems functions as a spiritual autobiography, a grand map of misreading, a pheasant disappearing in the brush, a search for the inexplicable, a renovation of experience, a purging of the world’s poverty and change and evil and death. Lehman frames the poems in this collection with prose that often further illuminates the intimate resonances carried in the lines. For example, Lehman prefaces “Goethe’s Nightsong” with the following remarks: “My father, who arrived in the United States as a refugee from Hiter’s Germany, used to recite this German poem by heart with an uncanny gleam in his eyes. It has often been translated but never, to my mind, satisfactorily.” The poem, a translation of “Wandrers Nachtlied,” reads:

            Over the hills
            Comes the quiet.
            Across the treetops
            No breeze blows.
            Not a sound: even the small
            Birds in the woods are quiet.
            Just wait: soon you
            Will be quiet, too.

Lehman includes several other translations in Poems, of Apollinaire, Baudelaire, Mayakovsky, and (loosely, but most entertainingly) Max Jacobs. Each translation signals a deep encounter with the poem in question, a further implicit elaboration of Lehman’s aesthetic stance and tastes.

In addition to translations, Poems in the Manner Of includes among other forms, the cento, the prose poem, a Dylanesque rock ballad, a Jazz standard, and a poem in the shape of a multiple-choice test (on Freud).  Throughout the collection, Lehman interrogates as he reverences—Lehman’s poetry, here, is a species of criticism—the work of Catullus, Li Po, Lady Murasaki, Shakespeare, Bashō, Christopher Smart, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Rimbaud, Cavafy, Yeats, Stein, Frost, Rilke, Stevens, Williams, Woolf, Kafka, Millay, Parker, Moore, García Lorca, Michaux, Hemingway, Borges, Neruda, Auden, Lowell, Brooks, Bukowski, Plath, Sontag, Koch, and O’Hara. A love of the silver screen (and the Great American Songbook) runs like a discrete tributary through the long list of writers Lehman honors in these poems. Also, running through these poems at every turn is Lehman’s own adventurous, gregarious, indefatigable life in poetry. This is a life that celebrates equally “the smell of Galouises and Gitanes sans filtre,” “the taste of white nectarines in upstate New York,” the prose of James Joyce, the lyrics of Johnny Mercer, the way that Manhattan felt in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s. David Lehman’s life as a poet, as a scholar, as an educator, has been one turned outward on the world, characterized by generosity and an overriding passion for the written word, by an unrelenting wonder and a simple desire to understand the complicated celestial mechanics of poetry. Poems in the Manner Of continues Lehman’s poetic project, gathering paradise, one grain of sand, one universe, one wildflower, at a time.  

Like David Lehman, Maria Mazziotti Gillan has tirelessly promoted the work of countless poets and writers. As the director of The Poetry Center in Paterson, New Jersey, as the editor of the Paterson Literary Review, as the head of the Creative Writing department at Binghamton University, and, overall, as a champion of community outreach through poetry, Mazziotti Gillan has spent her life nurturing literary talent and encouraging young writers of all ages to find a home on the page. What Blooms in Winter continues the stylistic and thematic patterns that have been Mazziotti Gillan’s hallmark for the last four decades; Mazziotti Gillan’s is a poetry of endlessly expanding democratic vistas, grounded in, and forever returning to, the Riverside neighborhood of Paterson during the fifties and sixties. Taken as a whole, Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry obsessively confronts her experience coming to terms with her hyphenated identity and her working class origins. As the poet Joe Weil has noted, Mazziotti Gillan’s poems aspire to the aria; and like the aria, each poem needs to be considered as part of an operatic whole. These poems are her biancheria, her embroidery work, homemade, artful, delicate, her dowry for future generation; as Gillan says, in the poem “The Lace Tablecloth and the Patterns of Memory”: “all the people I have loved are tucked away/ carefully in my mind, so that I can lift them out/ and remember and be comforted.”  Not only does poetry comfort, for Gillan it restores. Each poem in Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work represents a Whitmanesque attempt to chronicle her own American journey as the daughter of Italian immigrants.

Although Mazziotti Gillan’s poems often alternate between contemplating love and loss, grief and joy, pride and shame, these emotional tropes merely provide the backdrop for her exploration of how the mind and the heart constitute themselves in any given act of recollection. In this sense, her poetic project runs parallel to the English Romantics, particularly Wordsworth.  Also, like William Blake, Maria Mazziotti Gillan would agree that “a tear is an intellectual thing.”  The intellect and the emotions overlap and intermingle in all of her poetry. What Blooms in Winter retraces the subject matter that Mazziotti Gillan has obsessively confronted throughout her body of work: the poverty of her early childhood, the experience of growing up as “a good Italian girl,” the concerns of motherhood, family, death, love, and the complicated miracle of remembering all that is no longer present.  Like Mazziotti Gillan’s recent collections Ancestors’ Song and The Silence in an Empty House, What Blooms in Winter also contains many poems about travel, and topical poems about an earthquake in Nepal, terrorist attacks in France, and Nelson Mandela’s funeral. Most surprising in this collection, however, are the short lyric poems that haven’t featured prominently in Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry since her early books. “Dream Sequence,” for example, reads in full:

            I imagine moving under green water
            as though I could breathe without an airtank.

            I am a silver fish and imagine goldfish gliding
            past without noticing me,

            and I, my body suddenly free of awkwardness,
            move with such grace, I could be

            a young girl again, lithe and slender,
            as though I had been born to inhabit this world

            like the sea creatures, my body shimmering
            in the watery dark.

This gorgeous, lithe, alacritous ten line poem stands in apt counterpoint to the torrential approach of the typical Mazziotti Gillan poem.  Poetry, for Maria Mazziotti Gillan, offers a way to inhabit this world, despite the reality of pain, suffering, and death; gracefully, once again in What Blooms in Winter, this poet butterflies the dark.

Reading What Blooms in Winter and Poems in the Manner Of back to back during National Poetry Month 2017, I am reminded most forcefully of the virtues of a life in poetry. To paraphrase David Lehman, paraphrasing W.H. Auden, these books show that contemporary poetry not only survives, but thrives, in the valley of its saying. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman are the kinds of poets all young poets should aspire to emulate; both poets have placed the care of others and the interests of poetry above their own work. Both poets have taken E.M. Forster’s epigraph to Howard’s End as the watchword for their careers: only connect. The impulse to celebrate and to understand underwrites the imperative to connect in the work of both Mazziotti Gillan and Lehman. The connectivity privileged by the lives and works of true poets such as these always and inevitably runs counter to the superficial forms of interconnection that bind the lives of so many contemporary Americans. Both Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Lehman remind me that truth and beauty will never come either from social media and mainstream media or from the worlds of politics, business, and law; truth and beauty unfold face to face, and on the page, and both are infinite domains. Our work as lovers of poetry is to undo the damage of haste and dwell there—in the eye, in the ink—together.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Jeffrey Shotts of Graywolf Press

DD: In an interview you did with Poets & Writers Magazine, you discuss working on William Stafford’s The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems during your first years at Graywolf Press. This was the first Graywolf Press book that I ever purchased and remains one of my favorites. In reading through interviews you’ve done over the years, it strikes me that much of your thoughts as an editor parallel many of Stafford’s insights as a poet. Could you begin by discussing what Stafford’s work has meant to you as a reader and an editor?

JS: Thank you, and I’m glad to think of our experiences of the Graywolf poetry list as running side by side and starting with Stafford. I grew up in the middle of Kansas, not far from Hutchinson, Kansas, where Stafford grew up. My high school English teacher, the terrific Carole Ferguson, noted my interest in poetry, and mentioned Stafford and gave me a copy of “Traveling through the Dark.” It was the first time, really, I considered poetry as an ongoing art, and a poet as a living person, and someone who suddenly seemed proximate, when all else were wheatfields and churches. So Stafford’s very being changed everything. I share with him, very much still, a sense of landscape and severe austerity, and a shame at what our country perpetrates against so many, including our own citizens, as well as ourselves.   

DD: Stafford also wrote: “We may be surrounded by a system of talking and writing that falsifies event after event, decision after decision, relation after relation. Tangled in this system, we perpetuate it. Like porpoises in a drift net, the harder we try, the more we are entangled…When a writer works he is like someone who sets himself in a closed room and then invents new exits.” These words, published in the early 1990s, seem even more apt in 2017. In the spirit of these words and in this era of “alternative facts,” what is the place of poetry?

JS: I agree with Stafford’s statement, that we are entangled and complicit in our entanglement, as long as we emphasize, as he does, that it is worth trying to escape, even in the most futile of times, perhaps like these, where our language is under assault, if not our sanity. We can’t always free ourselves, but we can sometimes loosen the nets and snares that are tightening around others. I think poetry is a force for recognizing the positions of other people who may be like us or who may be little like us, but for the duration of a poem, and the echoing after, we speak in and with another person’s voice. That’s a truth, or at least it can put us in relation to a truth, for which there is no “alternative fact.” I think the poetry that we need right now shows us, sometimes unbearably, the failures of power and of language and of political leadership and the consequences of our collective action and inaction. I am thinking very much of works that many readers are turning to, such as Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Solmaz Sharif’s Look, and Layli Long Soldier’s WHEREAS—works that position the reader in relation to confrontations of race, or examinations of the language of war, or the emptiness of false apology. The place of poetry is to show us the truth for what it is, and the lies for what they are. That isn’t new, per se, but neither are “alternative facts.” Kevin Young has an absolutely brilliant and ambitious nonfiction work coming this fall, titled Bunk, that has been many years in the making, and that so importantly demonstrates that American history has run parallel to the American hoax and to the American brand of racism, from Barnum to Trump. In publishing such books, and in many genres, Graywolf aims to combat fakery with literature of integrity.  

DD: Susan Stewart’s career retrospective, Cinder: New & Selected Poems, is out this month. Tell us what you most admire about this collection.

JS: Many years ago, at Washington University, Carl Phillips implored me to read the poetry and critical works of Susan Stewart, and ever since, her clarity has been a touchstone and example of the lyric possibilities of both traditional and experimental poetry. Cinder is a perfect starting place for those who may not yet have been charmed by her particular ingenuity, and it’s a celebration of a remarkable ongoing career for those who have been reading her poetry and scholarship for years. I certainly admire the formal brilliance across these poems—the poem in the shape of an arrow, say, or the poem seemingly breaking down into an array of symbols and punctuation, or the poem that configures hell as a moving into and out of repeating lines, or the new poem in the form of gas-pump TV screens. But more than that, I admire the extraordinary sensibility behind these poems, one that is very concerned with the human capability for memory, individually and collectively, and concerned with our culture’s oppression of our human senses. I’m thinking, for example, of one of her masterpiece poems, “The Forest,” and the way the poem grapples with the question of how any of us will still be capable of experiencing a forest, in conception and in reality. So many of the poems, taken together, are reminders of art’s ability to record, encapsulate, and pass on our sensual experience. That’s an argument both of body and imagination, and of course, it’s an environmental and cultural argument, as well. Cinder opens with a terrific and generous group of new poems that alone is worth the book. I hope it’s an opportunity to celebrate a unique presence in contemporary poetry.

DD: This year Graywolf will publish the debut collections of Layli Long Soldier, Mai Der Vang, and Erika L. Sánchez. What can we expect from these three new voices in the poetry world?

JS: All three of these poets offer very exciting first books this year, and they all point ahead to work that will matter for a long time.

WHEREAS by Layli Long Soldier is a kaleidoscopic work, in large part a kind of searing rejoinder to the duplicity of government documentation, double talk, and pretend apology. The title sequence reconfigures the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans, which was never spoken aloud, nor were tribes invited to receive the apology, and which was then buried as a text inside larger legislation. So was this even an apology? WHEREAS attempts to answer that question. It’s an important and innovative book, and one that has been a long time in its making.

Afterland by Mai Der Vang is a historic publication, the first major award-winner by a Hmong American poet, and we’re really proud to be publishing it at Graywolf as the winner of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Carolyn Forché selected the book for its really moving recounting of the Hmong exodus from Laos during the fallout of the Vietnam War, and the resilience and survival of the Hmong culture in exile here in the United States. The imagery of these poems is so unique—otherworldly and haunting in regard to “afterland” as the country refugees flee to and as the spirit world of the afterlife.

Lessons on Expulsion by Erika L. Sánchez is a bold combination of personal poems about growing up the daughter of undocumented Mexican parents and almost journalistic poems about sex workers, narco traffickers, and immigrant laborers. The subjects here are important ones, and Sánchez makes them feel vivid and very close, while also turning a discerning eye on the history of both sides of the border (and beyond), as well as on herself, sometimes with a deadpan and self-effacing wit. This is a really audacious book, and an important one.

It’s a hugely exciting time for poetry with so many amazing first books!

DD: In a recent book review written for the New York Times, David Orr writes of the first book:

"If you’re an author who specializes in, say, writing about science for general readers, then your first book will be regarded by most people as . . .the book you wrote first. That it was your inaugural effort will have no special significance; your work will be judged the way books are typically judged: as interesting or dull. But if your goal is to write about the imaginary lives of imaginary people or — particularly — to write poems, then your first book may be another matter entirely. Because now it’s not merely the book of yours that happened to have the earliest publication date. Now it is the start of your career."

Could you discuss your thoughts on the essential specialness of the debut collection in poetry? What have you learned about debut collections by reading and editing so many of them?

JS: Orr is right, I think, in that we seem to think of a poet’s development as something with a beginning, an arc, and an ending, and it’s often the work of scholars and critics to make a lot out of what it means for a poet to have a career. In fact, Craig Morgan Teicher is working on a book to be published by Graywolf about poetic development, titled We Begin in Gladness, which will look at various paths and directions—many of them not easy nor at all straightforward—as examples useful to readers and to poets getting started and wondering what a “career” even looks like. What does it mean for a poet to have a life in the art?

It’s true that a poet only gets one first book, and while more first books of poetry are published than ever before, many of them through first-book prizes and contests, there is the pressure for a first book to make a statement. I think poets feel a pressure, understandably, to come out with a book quickly and to have that book get attention, and that’s an impatience imposed by academic professional expectation if not by the ambitions of poets themselves, in many cases. It means publishers like Graywolf see a whole lot of first book manuscripts, and first-book contests like the Walt Whitman Award are flooded with thousands of submissions. It also means that way too many poets get overlooked at the stages of the first book, and perhaps even more so, the second book. That’s a reason why Graywolf feels it so important to collaborate on the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, for a first book by an American poet over the age of forty, and partner on the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, for an African American poet’s first book, including most recently Donika Kelly’s amazing debut, Bestiary, which is one of the first books Orr is reviewing in the New York Times piece you quote from.

While I think every first book (or otherwise) is hopefully different and distinct, and so I hesitate to try to offer broad commentary about them, but in order to answer your question, I would say that many first books want to be acceptable, they want to win the contest, and they want to be liked. But fewer first books want to challenge, they want to risk, they want to unsettle, and they care less that they are liked and more that they are read and even resisted.   

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

JS: Every time a writer considers editorial suggestions and on certain things the writer pushes back, I feel encouraged that the writer is assured in their vision and ready to be published. It means perhaps seeming foolish or seeming just plain wrong or off base, but it also means I feel I have done my job in approaching the line that the writer has deliberated upon and decided is the defining line of what they sound like. That is the invisible work in the intimate space between writer and editor. It’s very encouraging to me as an editor.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

JS: The incredible groundswell of young poets right now, among them some individually brilliant talents, but more importantly, together creating a sense of collective greatness by way of national community defined by artistry and activism. That is encouraging as a development not just in contemporary poetry but in our world.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JS: American poetry needs serious, astute, challenging, and regular poetry critics and reviewers who are people of color, and who are women, and who are given an ongoing byline in the visible print and online publications that middle-aged or older white men are regularly holding and have been holding for a very long time. Solmaz Sharif very rightly mentioned recently that we need a great, new criticism to run alongside the great, new poetry of our time.

DD: If you could only read and remember one poem for the rest of your life, what poem would it be and why?

JS: You’re describing a world I don’t want to live in. We exist for multiplicity not just for singularity, and the single poem can only be great because it exists in a world with other poems in it. And if I knew I had found the one poem to be read and remembered for the rest of my life, and could name it for you, I think I could no longer do my job as an editor, nor could I continue to read poetry. Luckily, it seems, I haven’t found that poem yet, and I’m happy to be left in this fallen world where I am still searching for it among the many life-changing imperfect ones.

DD: What prose, music, and other art have most influenced you as a poetry reader and editor?

JS: An ongoing, revolving list might today include:

The prose and plays of Samuel Beckett.
The visual artwork of Kara Walker.
Any music that does not have lyrics.
The essays and criticism of Eula Biss.
The patterns and variations of offense and defense deployed by the Kansas Jayhawks on the basketball court.
Whatever Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée is.

 

DD: Could you tell us a bit about some of the other Graywolf Press titles out later this year?

JS: In 2017 poetry, in addition to the titles mentioned above by Stewart, Long Soldier, Vang, and Sánchez, Graywolf is publishing:

Danez Smith’s big, bold second book, Don’t Call Us Dead, a really exciting and moving collection about race, police violence, illness, and the body in crisis;

Stephen Burt’s new collection, Advice from the Lights, which contains poems of memory and nostalgia, and also on gender identity, especially in the Stephanie poems throughout the book;

Mary Jo Bang’s A Doll for Throwing is a sequence of prose poems in Bang’s unique signature language about the Bauhaus School in Germany, its artists and art (from which the title comes), and in particular the life of Lucia Moholy, who struggled so much of her life to be recognized for her photographs documenting the school, before the Nazis closed it in 1933;

Fred Marchant’s best book to date, titled Said Not Said, which is a book about moral and ethical questions, what gets spoken and what goes unspoken, and it includes a really wrenching sequence of poems about his sister’s long suffering from mental illness;

we are expanding and reissuing a truly essential book, The Half-Finished Heaven, by Nobel Prize winner Tomas Tranströmer, in Robert Bly’s seminal translations, which Graywolf first published in 2001, but we’re now glad to offer for the first time all of Bly’s known translations of Tranströmer’s luminous poems;

and we are publishing in November a really fascinating book, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries, edited by Martha Collins and Kevin Prufer, which will present original poems with multiple English translations, followed by a brief essay about the challenges of translating that work, all in a wide trim size to allow readers to see the poems and translations side by side by side.

Each year, Graywolf features online previews of all of our books in a given genre across the year, and for a better rundown on this year’s offerings, you can find the poetry preview here.

DD: I’d like to end the interview with my favorite poem from a Graywolf Press book, Christopher Gilbert’s “Listening to Monk’s Misterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair” from Turning into Dwelling. Could you introduce this poem (and this amazing book)?

JS: Every interview should end with this poem and with celebration of Christopher Gilbert. It’s a poem from Gilbert’s Walt Whitman Award winning book, Across the Mutual Landscape, which was selected by Michael S. Harper and published by Graywolf in 1984. It was Gilbert’s only published collection in his lifetime, but it has long been a kind of touchstone first book—in certain circles a cult classic—for its vision and music, as in this poem. Gilbert sees the syncopations and patterns of Thelonious Monk’s Mysterioso, which walks forward and backward in intervals, as akin to the patterns of braiding. But more than that, it’s the movement of offering and taking back, being called into a space that you might not normally be invited into, like braiding your sisters’ hair. There’s no music like Gilbert’s, part homage to jazz, sure, but the music of a mind making sense of itself and calling itself to be. Like music, it’s a poem whose language exists seemingly in and out of time, a participation with mutuality, and one that never arrives or tries to arrive at completion.

After Gilbert’s death in 2007, through Ed Pavlic and Terrance Hayes, we found that Gilbert had been working for a long time on a second collection, called Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation, which had been entrusted and edited by Fran Quinn and Mary Fell, and in 2015, we were able to publish Across the Mutual Landscape and Chris Gilbert: An Improvisation together in one book, titled Turning into Dwelling, with an introduction by Terrance Hayes. It’s landmark work, and it deserves as many readers as it can get, and it certainly deserves—thank you, Dante—the last word.   

            Listening to Monk’s Mysterioso I Remember Braiding My Sisters’ Hair

            What it’s all about is being
            just beyond a man’s grasp,
            which is a kind of consciousness
            you can own, to get to
            be at a moment’s center
            and let it keep on happening
            knowing you don’t own it—

            which is moving yourself close to, being
            particular to that place. Like my two sisters
            taking turns braiding each others’ hair—
            hair growing against their weaving, they formed
            a flow their hurt and grace could mean
            as each took turns pulling the comb through
            the other’s knots and their little Vaseline.

            A knowing which makes the world
            a continuity. As in your core
            something calls to you
            at a distance which does not matter.
            As in the world you will see yourself
            listening to follow like water
            following its wave to shore.

            To arrive in your life you must
            embrace this letting, letting
            which is a match for the stream
            through flowering field and the tall trees
            wandered into and the river wearing beads
            just ahead which you go into
            further on because you can.

            This going so is something else—the way
            it flows into always something deeper and
            over your head, a kid with “why” questions.
            Your answer is a moment struggling to be
            more than itself, your straining for air
            to have the chance to breathe it free.
            It’s alive you’ve come to,

            this coming into newness, this dis-
            continuous mind in you looking up, finding
            an otherness which trusts what you’ll become—
            for me, my sisters once offering,
            “You want to learn to braid my hair.”
            If we are blessed in this world
            it is in feeling this—

            i.e., there are circumstances
            and you are asked to be
            their member. Not owning but owning in—
            a participation, like Monk’s implied words
            reaching for their sentence: “If you can
            get to it. . . .”

 

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey Shotts is the executive editor of Graywolf Press.

 

 

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016).

Zero at the Bone: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance

Edited by Michael Boughn, John Bradley, Brenda Cardenas, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson,  Kass Fleisher, Roberto Harrison, Kent Johnson, Andrew Levy, Nathaniel Mackey, Ruben Medina, Philip Metres, Nita Noveno, Julie Patton, Margaret Randall, Michael Rothenberg, Chris Stroffolino, Anne Waldman, Marjorie Welish, Tyrone Williams

Dispatches Editions, 2017

At a hefty 740 pages, the new anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance symbolically and actually enacts the oppositional imperatives embedded in its title.  50% of the proceeds from the volume are being donated to Planned Parenthood. The assembling of the anthology itself, spearheaded by Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, represents a model for activism and mobility in a time of political emergency. Boughn and Johnson brought together eighteen other editors from diverse aesthetic and cultural backgrounds to solicit and to curate the work of more than 350 poets in roughly two months. As Boughn and Johnson note in their incisive introduction, “Poetry and Resistance,” the book “is not intended as an offering of unique, sophisticated “creative writing.” It is first and foremost, a collective, insurgent call that is part and parcel of a sovereign people’s challenge to a narcissistic oligarch and his lackeys, who smirk now from their temporary perches of power. Its pages are bound in direct, literal ways, to the historic worldwide marches of January 22^nd—and they stand as evidence that the vast majority of American poets (and artists and writers of all kind) revile the new reactionary dispensation.”  In addition to enumerating succinctly the premises underwriting Resist Much, Boughn and Johnson’s introduction trenchantly explores the limits and potentials of poetry as resistance. The anthology is worth purchasing for the introduction alone, which sounds a hopeful note for the many thousands of practicing writers in the United States today who will register dissent “in the embattled commons, and not just in journals, personal collections, or anthologies like this one.” 

The anthology begins and ends with poems registering dissent beyond the narrow scope of the 45^th President’s election and inauguration. Lorenzo Thomas’s poem, “Inauguration” initiates the anthology, by recalling the Reagan and Kennedy administrations, and by summoning the ghost of Robert Frost in order to evoke a counternarrative to the Manifest Destiny both lauded and complicated in Frost’s work. In “Inauguration,” Thomas rewrites the famous first line of Frost’s “The Gift Outright”; Frost’s “The land was ours before we were the land’s” becomes Thomas’s “The land was there before us / Was the land.” Thomas’s version radically re-envisions historical notions of ownership, privilege, and class, while halving, enjambing, and subverting Frostian blank verse on the syntactical level. By beginning the anthology with this revolutionary inversion of a poem Frost claimed as a commentary on the Revolutionary War, Boughn, Johnson, and company, inaugurate Resist Much as an anthology concerned with troubling superficial ways of seeing and articulating; Lorenzo Thomas’s poem moves its readers backward and forward in time, opening a dialogue between literary tradition and the mechanisms of empire. Likewise opening these dialogues, the anthology ends with Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!,” a poem of grim forebodings and astringent ironies, the bleak flipside of the democratic vistas Whitman celebrated throughout Leaves of Grass.  

Reading “Respondez!” at the end of this anthology further affirms, as if any affirmation were needed, the towering stature of Whitman as poet of these United States. Whitman wrote “Respondez!,” at the same time as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” but ultimately left it out of later editions of Leaves of Grass, such as the 1891-92 version. Despite Whitman’s exclusion of the poem, it is perhaps the most comprehensive assessment contained within Resist Much of the failures in contemporary American politics and culture. As Boughn and Johnson remark in their introduction “Respondez!” was Whitman’s: “sharply ironic demand that U.S. America respond to the betrayal of its democratic promise, its abandonment of equality for oligarchy, of fraternity for institutionalized racism and sexism, of spiritual generosity for greed and money grubbing, and of liberation of Eros for a violent, Calvinist repression of human energies.” Whitman’s impassioned plea reads as ominously timely in an era of so-called “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Whitman writes:

            Let murderers, thieves, bigots, fools, unclean persons, offer new propositions!
            Let the old propositions be postponed!
            Let faces and theories be turn'd inside out! Let meanings be freely criminal, as well as results!
            Let there be no suggestion above the suggestion of drudgery!
            Let none be pointed toward his destination! (Say! do you know your destination?)
            Let trillions of men and women be mock'd with bodies and mock'd with Souls!

Although murderers, thieves, bigots, and fools have always helmed the ship of state, perhaps at no time in American history have meanings been so freely criminal. Perhaps at no time has our destination been so unclear. Perhaps at no time have so many American men and women been mocked in body and mind, have felt so acutely the Dickinsonian “zero at the bone” when contemplating the fate of their nation and the face of their president. At no time in recent memory has the theory of America announced itself so stridently and so overtly as management, caste, and comparison.

The writing anthologized between Lorenzo Thomas’s “Inauguration” and Walt Whitman’s “Respondez!” opposes any theory of America grounded in racism, homophobia, classism, xenophobia, and an ever-shifting panoply of disparate hates and fears. The poems in this volume are written in what Evie Shockley calls “the heartbreak edge of midnight.” These are songs sung by a fugal choir to the northernmost stars, the wayward child, the coercive lover, the dependent child, the reluctant mother, the unfaithful lover, the elusive mother, the waking nightmare, the “dear, dear we.” Resist Much includes work from as aesthetically different poets as Ron Silliman, Linh Dinh, Rodrigo Toscano, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jason Schneiderman, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Alicia Ostriker, Michelle Peñaloza, Craig Santos Perez, R.A. Villanueva, Fady Joudah, and Brenda Hillman, to name a few. The editors listed above also contribute poems. The contributions come from emerging and established poets of varied camps and approaches to poetry. The unity and inclusiveness practiced in this anthology offers a pointed critique of the fractious polarization overwhelming American political discourse. This inclusiveness offers a heartening example for other anthologists, editors, and publishers to overcome aesthetic orthodoxies and to embrace the kaleidoscopic possibilities of what constitutes a poem.

Eileen Myles and Denise Duhamel’s anthologized poems provide a good example of how two accomplished and wildly distinctive poets might address the same subject through widely different means. Myles poem, “Creep,” reads:

            ugly nightmare
            eating too much
            dunking your head in water
            over and over
            again. Feel bad
            for your kid
            all of them
            but most of all us
            bad nights
            when I was young
            and drinking pred
            atory men
            with swollen
            heads would
            buy me drinks
            and want to fuck
            me again &
            again because
            I was nothing
            to them and he is
            our president
            now.

Myles deftly puts into conversation the misogyny displayed by “our president” with the predatory violence that contextualizes the everyday experiences of American women. Trauma and rage dovetail in this poem and counterclaim us. Denise Duhamel similarly explores the dovetailing of rage and trauma in American misogyny. Her poem, which cleverly parodies Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky” begins with a quote dated October 9, 2016, from the then-candidate, casually dismissing comments that clearly celebrate objectifying and violating women:  “It’s just words, folks. It is just words.” Duhamel begins her poem:

            ‘Twas nasty, and the slithy bimbos
            Did gyre and whine in the pageant:
            All piggy were the gold diggers,
            And the moms who breastfed in public.

            “Beware the pussy, my son!
            The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
            Beware those plastic surgery tits, and shun
            Any frump who won’t put out!”

Carroll’s nonsense verse provides an apt point of departure for satirizing a politician whose entire worldview depends upon the simultaneous denial and attenuation of the power of language. Duhamel, like Myles, foregrounds her poem in the present, but uses the present to explore how misogyny works in a wider historical and social sense.

Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance offers a wide array of poems, addressing issues from misogyny to climate change, ranging from the collapse of the fourth estate to police violence, exploring the fascistic tributaries of American culture that have always been running beside us, but which have pooled themselves in the current administration. The poets anthologized here bear witness against injustice past, present, and future. In his excellent recent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, historian Timothy Snyder urges: “Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read Books.” Resist Much affords many examples of reinventing and repurposing language in order to confront tyranny and fascism. Editing this book was one act of resistance, buying this book is another, reading it a third. This anthology does not merely symbolize the widespread resistance to the current administration among poets and writers. Resist Much signifies the strength of a literate and politically conscious America, which will not be duped by the mountebank tactics and the empty rhetoric of politicians.  As Whitman would affirm, it is up to writers, governments, and households alike, to brace themselves against “the eminence of meanness, treachery, sarcasm, hate, greed, indecency, impotence, lust.” Buy this book today, read it, and spread the word. Resist.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Alchemical, the Body Becomes a Mound of Jewels, an Ancient Hunger: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Kaveh Akbar's Portrait of the Alcoholic

Portrait of the Alcoholic
Kaveh Akbar
Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017

In his essay, “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking,” Lewis Hyde notes: “as a person becomes alcoholic he turns more and more into the drug and its demands. He is like a fossil leaf that mimics the living but is really stone.” Kaveh Akbar’s debut chapbook, Portrait of the Alcoholic, initiates a reverse fossilization that catalogs the hungers, atomizes the absences, and amplifies the dailiness of 21^st century American life. Akbar’s fierce unfettered intelligence roams from the sublunary to the interstellar. One moment, Akbar’s poems view the world from the perspective of sand watching silt dance in the Nile River. The next moment, Akbar’s poems look on, from the other side of the stars, past the astronaut dangling from the umbilicus of the space shuttle, to the earth itself “wilding around us” in “a severe sort of miraculousness.” Akbar knows the language of riptide and rogue comet; in these poems, “eternity looms / in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap.” The self in Akbar’s poems is a shifting palimpsest of insatiable desires, mystic visions, exilic energies, and adhesive love. As Akbar puts it in “Every Drunk Wants to Die Sober It’s How We Beat the Game”: “I have always been a tangle of tongue and pretty / want.”

Akbar’s “tangle of tongue and pretty want” is Whitmanesque in its scope, evoking the visionary tradition of English language poetry from Christopher Smart and Thomas Traherne through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Allen Ginsberg to present, and reformulating that tradition within the framework of an Islamic cultural background with its own distinct visionary poetic tradition, ranging from Rabia Basri and Fariduddin Attar, through Jalaluddin Rumi, to Mian Muhammad Baksh. In “An Apology,” for example, Akbar writes:

                                        As a boy I tore out
                        the one-hundred-and-nine pages
                        about Hell in my first Qur’an.
                        Bountiful bloomscattering Lord,
                        I could feel you behind my eyes
                        and under my tongue, shocking me
                        nightly like an old battery.

The transgressive act of tearing pages from the Qur’an recalls Fariduddin Attar’s poem “I Have Broken My Vows,” in which the speaker enjoins: “Throw me out of the mosque, / As I went there drunk last night.” In fact, Akbar’s poetry ingeniously inverts the trope of drunkenness found in Islamic mystical poetry. In Portrait of the Alcoholic, sobriety, not inebriation, becomes a metaphor for the intoxicating nature of communion with the divine. The divine, in these poems, can be found equally in the ordinary housefly and in the dilated pupils of a beloved. In “Eager,” Akbar affirms: “I like the life/ I have now        free as an unhinged jaw           but still I visit my corpse.” Here, as everywhere else in his poetry, Kaveh Akbar chooses astonishment instead of despair, joy instead of mere survival, gratitude for the alchemical body, and its ancient hungers, become a mound of jewels. Portrait of the Alcoholic must surely presage a bountiful, radiant, bloomscattering body of work to come.  

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson, editors of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and its new book series, Dispatches Editions

DD: Dispatches Editions grew out of Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. Can you tell us a bit about the genesis of both the website and the press?

MB: They Jes’ Grew.

I was going to leave it there, but Kent told me I have to say more.

1. Jes’ Grew, for those who don’t know, is the epidemic at the center of Ishmael Reed’s hilarious prophetic noir, Mumbo Jumbo. It’s hard to put your finger on Jes’ Grew because it doesn’t stay still long enough. It’s related to Emerson’s whim but it’s got more rhythm which I like to think Emerson would have enjoyed. If it’s dance – and it is dance – it’s also a freedom of mind that can look like dance. Or sound like it. It’s a “psychic epidemic.”

Things Jes’ Grew when all of a sudden you start moving and not only can’t you stop, you don’t want to stop. Inspiration is a sad Atonist imitation of Jes’ Grew. Jes’ Grew takes the top off. Jes’ Grew is a mortal threat to civilization and its discontents – as Ishmael Reed said, it belongs under some ancient Demonic Theory of Disease. Right now we can see Jes’ Grew starting to spread again, infecting millions with its laughter and its anger and its passion and its movement. Swaying its hips and marching down the middle of the street. The mass movement is moving and Jes’ Grew is its feverish disease, its Nkulu Kulu of the Zulu, a locomotive with red green and black python entwined in its face, Johnny Canoeing up the tracks.

Dispatches Jes’ Grew in a crucible of talk and mind and laughter and anger where all good things grow. Boom. Then there it was, dancing. Kent saw that and took it up several notches. We started off slow and picked up steam one day at a time and Jes’ Grew.

KJ: Though Mike and I are quite aware that posting on the Dispatches site has been considerably slowed the past number of weeks… We’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the work on the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, soon to be released by Dispatches Editions. 350+ poets and 740 pages. (Actually, Tennessee Reed, Ishmael’s daughter, is in it, so there’s that chance growth to Mike’s reference, I suppose.) But we’ll get back to our usual cranky senior-citizen selves. Dispatches from the Poetry Wars will keep advancing by projective force of institutional critique, one unsuspected accretion leading instanter onto another, as someone else more or less once memorably put it… Of course, most of what we do is totally by the seat of our pants, as you might imagine. Dancing sitting down, etc. It is how we’ve done it, how we like it, and how we’ll keep rolling.

And strange that we’ve been doing it only for nine months, that it’s developed this much and attracted such a readership in this initial gestation, our audience consistently growing. One gratifying thing has been getting lots of communications from folks (some of them not eager to publicly share the confidences!), from poets of different aesthetic backgrounds and generations, telling us how much they dig Dispatches’ outlier charge, its willingness to be impolite in this deeply cautious poetic field, where people walk around on quiet toes most of the time, afraid for their “careers.” In any case, it’s become evident many readers appreciate that we confront and satirize and critique, with no special allowances for anyone, ourselves not excepted. Or is that “ourselves included,” I grew up in Uruguay with Spanish double negatives and I get confused. On the other hand, it’s been gratifying, and confirming, too, to not get any communication from some folks or institutions! Like the Poetry Foundation, which we’ve gone after a tad, it’s true, and which has clearly determined to pretend we don’t exist. Gratifying, I mean, in the sense of being a bit entertaining, really. Well, “Onward, Subcultural soldiers,” as the old-time hymn goes!

DD: In your first dispatch, you write: “Poetry is and always will be an unruly opening of profound modes of oppositional thought, a constant reset of “knowledge” and its categories, a site of revelation for unprecedented form and exorbitant meaning.” How do you see these “modes of oppositional thought” operating in this era of “alternative facts” and what you’ve called a “reality TV ontology”?

MB: Modes of oppositional thought operate within, and in fact are part of the crucial in-formation of, temporary autonomous zones that proliferate a-centrally to greater or lesser degrees in relation to the Given. They are openings, the play of emergence where you pick up news of that elsewhere that is here, always here and in this moment that Octavio Paz named otherness. Alternative facts and Reality TV ontology are conditions that only signify within the discourses determined by modernity. And as Charles Olson tried to tell people, we are already way past that.

No wonder the categories are breaking down. No wonder truth is evaporating in the desperate struggle to adjust to our groundlessness. It’s modernity’s truth without meaning, truth as an accurate measure of only the material extension of the cosmos, truth as fact whose techne creates the massive commodification machine that feeds the endless markets that arise to create sites where brief, fleeting experiences that resemble what used to be called meaning occur at endless points of purchase. What a deal. And even poetry, which I used to consider the anti-commodity, the death of commodification, has been turned into a token to advance careers, establish hoards of cultural capital, and found academic empires.

Temporary autonomous zones celebrate groundlessness as opportunity for the imagination to go on a tear. They don’t require bourgeois truth because modes of oppositional thought are creative, not reactive. We are the inheritors of the inevitable disintegration of a 500-year-old system riddled with violent, irresolvable contradictions that are coming to head. Temporary autonomous zones are forays into what John Clarke called “world completion,” looking out, not back, seizing the opportunity to articulate new groundings that refuse to become grounded.

KJ: That is a wonderful passage in our first, opening Dispatch, isn’t it? A kind of encapsulated Poetics. I wish I’d written it. But Mike usually comes up with the best lines. Not that I don’t get lucky and trip across a few myself. Which Mike then revises for me. No just kidding. The two of us actually have a fully fraternal and non-competitive collaboration. Quite amazing, really, that we’ve gone on this long, at this level of intensity, with no major blowups. Not exactly the most common thing in poetry circles.

I have just one comment here, about Mike’s use of the term “alternative fact.” It’s not really a disagreement with what Mike says, so much as an expansion of the term into other criteria: Poetry is its own alternative fact, the constructive ethical flip side to the manipulative “alternative facts” of ideological dissimulation and propaganda. To poach from Picasso (or was that Pessoa?) we aim to lie our asses off in name of the truth. And to poach from Eileen Myles’s cool blurb on the back of the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology, we will drown their banal, manipulative lies with the clear water of our truth-telling ones. (Mike, don’t blow up on me for first time for disagreeing with you here!)

DD: Kent, you and Michael have spent your artistic lives challenging orthodoxies and status quos inside and outside the poetry world. How, if at all, has this mission changed post-election?

KJ: Yes, I suppose that is true, how we’ve spent our artistic lives. It’s one reason we are outsider pariahs with overdue AARP cards. Not to mention that it’s why we never get invited to any poetry soirees on either of the three coasts (I’m including the Great Lakes, there, where I live). Or in the Dakotas or Saskatchewan, for that matter. So: Know what you are getting into, thou hordes of young poets at the AWP, now yearning to emulate our gadfly proclivities…

Seriously, I know what you’re getting at, Dante: That in the introduction to the anthology, Mike and I forcefully call for a united front of poets, across the tendencies and factions. And this is something the big book represents and enacts, to be sure, as its contents reflect all manner of “aesthetic” allegiances, from the colloquial and prosaic to the experimental and paratactic. Calling for such a united front would seem to provisionally put “poetry war” critique on hold, right? So, you ask a good question.

But I don’t think the matter has “changed post-election,” really, at least not in that manner. I myself go way back with this united-front position, and far back beyond my days as a publishing poet, in fact, to the mid-1970s, when I first become active in socialist politics. Extending those learned principles, I wrote an essay that was pretty widely circulated at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, titled “Bernstein’s ‘Enough!’” wherein I called for provisional poetic unity via the temporary collective vehicle of the Poets against the War project, and somewhat acidly berated the infantile sectarianism shown at the time by Language Poetry figures like Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, and Ron Silliman. More recently, I published an essay in Lana Turner, titled “No Avant-Garde,” where I called for the thinking-through of a broad cultural front, wherein writers and artists would deprioritize their aesthetic differences (but without giving them up!) vis-a-vis the tasks of principled unity around issues of progressive cause and action. Not that there aren’t others out there who might disagree with my views, and I am eager to invite them into exchange, if so! But poets, especially “Left” ones, generally don’t seem to like to debate too much in public, alas.

Of course, there is nothing new about such proposals. Such principled united-front strategy is at the heart of Left history and policy—it’s even the core assumption of the internal operations of bolshevist parties, before the Stalinist era! Not to mention social-democratic ones. What I’m saying is not that aesthetic differences be ignored or that critique be suspended. To the contrary, such critique must continue and be understood as part of the very process of cultural solidarity construction. What must happen, though, is that poets rise above their narrow poetic allegiances and predispositions of coterie to see that these don’t have to trump (sorry) the greater responsibility of collaboration and solidarity in the current conjuncture. Because that, most unfortunately for poetry’s politics, in and out, is what has happened: though there are some crossovers, poets of different aesthetics largely don’t talk to each other. Poets of the Geraldine Dodge Festival mainstream pretty much ignore and dismiss poets of the Avant wing of things. Avant poets think they’re so far ahead of slam poets in NYC or Chicago that they don’t need to pay them heed, for the slam folks are clueless about their more sophisticated vanguard understandings, and so forth. This is all sophomoric, cliquish bullshit and has to cease. There are many avenues and ways of collaboration between the poetic “tendencies” that haven’t even begun to be explored, and it will be in that comradeship, volatile to be sure, that the richest and most productive aesthetic debates will evolve. And may those debates be honest and fierce, as they should be. But the first step is to give up on this crap of “screw your poetry, ours is more of the common language and working class,” or “ours is more advanced, this is the analytic form we need, not your sorry workshop stuff” etc. We need to bring it all together, now, I would say, and see what happens. No one is above anyone else because no one really knows what the answer is. You know what I mean?

MB: Nothing has changed. Nothing. It is the same terrorist state that has operated in the US since Winthrop and the General Court expelled Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Sometimes it dresses up better, and sometimes it likes people to think it is “nice.” But it goes on shooting unarmed black men like Charles Kinsey, lying on his back with his hands in the air yelling “Don’t shoot.” (We have a precise found poem about this at Dispatches.) It goes on dragging Sandra Bland out of her car and lynching her in her cell for being an uppity black woman.  Bang. The Poetry Wars are important and ongoing, even as we join multiple antagonists from that war to resist the current regime, because poetry is the only news worth knowing, and without waging a struggle for that, the careerists will succeed in locking it all up in the Great Philadelphia Poetry Detention Center (aka Great Philadelphia Poetry Warehouse and Media Center), where it will be alphabetized, categorized, and filed away for easy consumption in podcasts and use in marketing programs to increase the cultural capital of the Poetry Capitalists. Fuck that.

DD: You and Michael have written an amazing introduction to the anthology Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance, in which you discuss the origin and intent of the project. Could you restate for our readers how this anthology came about and how it seeks to inaugurate a resistance to the Trump administration and its policies?

KJ: Thank you for saying that about the essay, Dante. Mike wrote to me on the day after the election, no doubt hungover, like I was, and he said, “Maybe it’s time for an anthology.” Because my head was stuffed with gauze alcohol swabs and I wasn’t thinking straight, I immediately wrote back to him, “OK, sure, let’s do it!” Then I can’t remember exactly what happened, it’s sort of a blur. Mike yelled at me a few times and I yelled at him, then we made up, or maybe we did not; we sometimes like doing yelling at each other.

Our masterstroke was pulling in a team of twenty incredible and dedicated poet-editors, who then went to the wall to bring people to the book. You can see their names on the cover. We totally decentralized the book’s production, out of emergency necessity, and (excepting the many unsolicited submissions we received to the Dispatches site, which Mike and I handled) the many editors had full autonomy over their solicitations and selections. Full mutual trust, risky but necessary. Then we gathered all this stuff, after thousands of emails back and forth between everyone, and went through a million more logistical nightmarish details, and Mike heroically handled all the formatting and technical labors, because I don’t even know how to create a PDF, and we put it all together, handling a second and fourth round of nightmarish logistical details, and then we wrote the intro and sent it all off for final design to the talented Lynne DeSilva-Johnson, one of our co-editors, and here we are, after being at 770 pages, and then having to edit the formatting down to 740 at the last second, because the spine couldn’t handle the thickness otherwise. This all happened in less than ten weeks. Right now, as we write, Valentine’s Day, the pornographic complicity (in more ways than one) of the Trump clique with the Russian mafia is coming clearer and clearer. Love to you, from tens of thousands of poets in the world, neo-Fascist johns.

MB: It Jes’ Grew.

DD: Despite the dire political situation confronting the United States at this moment, your introduction strikes a hopeful note for “collective measures of performance and action that move beyond the printed page.” Could you talk about “the new dimensions of activist vision” that may energize poetry in the coming years?

MB: Poetry is resistance by its very nature. It exposes the structures of containment that bind us mentally and spiritually, and materializes acts of freedom that break through that containment. Some people, like William Blake, realized that and made their writing into an ongoing revelation of our condition, a weapon for liberation, an act of resistance that still propels us further, beyond those mental chains. Others just get an MFA or an advanced degree in Poetics and carry on with their poetry careers. With the rise of a mass movement, and I do think that is what we are seeing in relation to the naked aggression of Trump’s regime against decency, compassion, care, even the idea of “democracy” itself, (poetry) business as usual is over. Poetry that brings the news will become more and more a part of people’s daily lives.

KJ: What Mike says. And we should be especially keen right now to the experiences of poetic/cultural activist movements in other places and times, study them for lessons we might apply: experiences where poets have reimagined the very meaning of “poetry” and thus given it unsuspected powers of influence and inspiration within the broader dialectic of struggle. We mention a few of them in the introduction, like the example of the CADA group and its allies during the Pinochet period, in Chile. American poets should look at the cultural guerrilla tactics of vanguard groups like CADA and others and seek to apply them to current Trumpian conditions. The stage of ideological, transgressive struggle has been set by the neo-fascist theater producers themselves. It’s time to occupy that stage with epic cultural actions and anti-actions, moving the meaning of radical performance into four and more dimensions, trashing all the B-movie scripts they had dreamt of directing.

DD: Reading through the manuscript of the anthology, Pierre Joris’s piece, “A little contribution to a how-to of resistance” caught my eye. The piece ends:

                                                                                Vision-in-resistance/ resistance-in-vision as essential
            modes of action. (Revolution we’ve learned goes in circles, eats its own, creates bureaucra-
            cies.) Bertolt Brecht said: What times are these when / To talk about trees is nearly a crime, /
            Because it avoids speaking of all that’s evil! Paul Celan answered: What times are these / when
            A conversation / is nearly a crime, / because it includes so much / that’s already been said. I
            add: What times are these when a US President can define “real freedom” as the ability “for a
            person or nation to make a living, to sell or buy.”

It seems to me that the dialogue enacted in these lines is emblematic of the anthology’s project as a whole. Could you riff off of Joris (and Celan, and Brecht) and discuss this dialogue?

MB: Well, the key is Pierre’s opening equation: vision-in-resistance / resistance-in-vision. We need to keep in mind that the struggle we are engaged in is not simply “political” in so far as that is defined as a negotiation/struggle for power in a civic arena. The power at stake is the power to define a world as we emerge from the wreckage of the last Sampo. Poetry is uniquely placed to respond to that necessity because of its freedom in language, its creative potential, its necessary but indeterminate meaning which is entangled with vision. Not all poetry does that. A lot of it is all about buying in. Pierre’s injunction is to keep the vision active and non-central because without that, the same old tyrannies, tyrannies of meaning and power which are like wave and particle in quantum mechanics, will be reborn with new names. What times are these is a really good question to keep in mind not as some kind of closure, but as an opening between or beyond the particular horrors of our moment.

KJ: If I could offer this thought, triggered by your reference to Brecht: One genre-avenue for poets in the coming period that could be more explored, at least in regards to insurgent poetic engagement, is Poet’s Theater. What unsuspected estrangement-effects might happen when poetry and theater interface? More theater by poets! Not the largely nihilistic, hollow kind that we have had since the late-Language poetry phase up through Flarf, but a vibrantly radical and committed new form of poetic staging, one that learns (albeit with critique!) from Brecht, Erwin Piscator, John Arden, and Margaretta D'Arcy, say. Not that I’m all that in-the-know about theater; I’m certainly not. But there’s a space of action for poets here, no question.

DD: Resist Much / Obey Little has eighteen editors.  I was wondering if a few of the editors could give me a comment on their involvement in this project and the importance of this anthology right now.

Nita Noveno: This anthology is urgent literature for our democracy. Working on the editorial team with Mike, Kent, and the others for the past few months (all online) was a pleasure. They were responsive, flexible, and encouraging in what was a challenging process. I especially appreciated their openness and energy in the endeavor. It was all worth it for a formidable and inspiring book.

Philip Metres: I was happy to be a contributing editor, to solicit poems from other poets, as part of a wider chorus of resistance to the election of Donald Trump. The naysayers will say that this is not enough. Of course it isn't enough. Poems themselves can never replace the prose of political engagement (voting, calling and writing congress people, canvassing, writing letters to the editor, protesting, boycotting, divesting, and the rest) but poetry can be part of our vocal commitment to democratic life, to the quest for human liberation, social justice, and planetary health. In the end, I'm less interested in the rhetoric of resistance than I am in the possibilities of the revisionary imagination to create the beloved community.

Kass Fleisher: I wasn’t part of the Outrage Action (I call it) after the election—I had been working the election in three states—not the presidential, but for three senate races, in PA, IL, and CO. But when you’re phonebanking, you hear some weird shit (people say the damnedest things into their telephones…) so I knew this was going to go down hard. I was also working citizen journalism on Facebook and getting killed by the right *and* the left. And I’ve been a feminist activist since 1982 and had been telling anyone who would listen to me, No way does this country elect a woman in a landslide. (Usually I spared people the lecture on nativism.) So when people started shrieking from any platform they could find on November 9, I was not among them. I had predicted 3 recounts, and I was bummed that we weren’t getting the recounts I wanted. lol. (Just so you know how dumb I am: I predicted them in PA, NC, and someplace I now forget—I can check my records but I doubt anyone gives a damn. I had been saying, “Pennsylvania is the new Florida.” But NC was a shock to me. Did not see that coming. In my defense, neither did James Carville. (Ha.)

One of my bubbles is the poetry bubble, and the thing folks in that universe were shrieking in The Great Aftermath (:>) was, We have to make poetry, we have to make poems, we poets have to work through poetry, let’s make some poems, who can publish some poems. To be honest, my first thought was, Stop voting for the Green Party when you’re running against an idiot; and my second thought was, What can poetry achieve in this situation.

It wasn’t a question because, really, I thought—nothing.

But I’ll tell you what, and I speak now as an anthologist and a micro-press publisher, I really liked what Kent and Mike came up with. (And other people may have been involved; it was Kent who approached me.) It wasn’t a howl in the wilderness—they got very well organized very fast. I’m in awe of how fast, and I love the model of finding X number of editors and giving us the freedom to solicit and edit people/works of our choosing. That was genius, and they also cared nothing for aesthetic schools or “what kind of poetry”—we were told “relevant.”

Immediately I began to think of this as an avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. It was clear that the recently revived Inaugural Poet thing was not going to happen, and if poetry can achieve something in our current situation, it would have to be in an avalanche.

And that’s what we have here—a fucking avalanche of anti-inaugural poems. I loved getting to work with the people who answered my own call, and I loved working on their pieces, which were all over the place in terms of structure and topic and form—and so what I see now that the damn thing is together, is that this avalanche of poems has a function. I’m scheduling a launch for it in my remote area for a couple of reasons: one is that folks of all bubbles still need a place to gather and process and plan to activate in this environment; and because the avalanche is so impressive that they will gain an appreciation for poetry of wildly varying “types.”

The way this thing was put together was *perfect*; the outcome is reflective of that initial blast of organization. I wish I’d been in the room for that—I probably would’ve said, You people should’ve worked a polling place. I’m that kind of asshole, lol. Folks in this particular bubble, and I’m one of them—we tend to be quite isolated—we work alone—we don’t always get out much—my own writing pals are scattered to the winds—so, it’s great that they found this way to bring us together, and with this magnificent result.

Can’t say enough about what they achieved here. I’m grateful.

Andrew Levy: Resist Much / Obey Little is BIG, with the voices of 350 contributors. When Kent and Mike asked for my participation as a contributing editor on the anthology, I didn’t hesitate. We could have easily, with a little more time (and money), attracted 3500 poets with valuable things to say at this moment in our country’s history. I’m teaching a literature course at CUNY this spring. The following statement from Martin Luther King, Jr. is the epigraph to the course syllabus: “This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed non-conformists…The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority… Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” (From Strength to Love)

Mindful of partisans such as Steve Bannon encouraging empire and its requisite illusions of apocalypse, whose armies of ruin offer paratory glances of an abandoned tomorrow, on the planet Earth the creatively maladjusted poets in Resist Much / Obey Little speak truth to power, thereby holding warring factions of American unreason accountable. How do mechanisms of social abandonment, in the imaginary hatred of the undevelopable, in a loss of sympathy for and understanding of the human and non-human, accompanied by the rise of nationalism, collide in silence with stultified invention, as, for example, in Trump’s nominations of Betsy DeVos, Jeff Sessions, his immigration ban, and further deplorable executive orders. Resist Much / Obey Little challenges that drift into a common “normalizing” chord that so much of America’s collective unconscious and corporate media is rife with. That’s a significant accomplishment.

DD: Could you tell us a bit about Kent’s new book published by Dispatches Editions, Homage to the Pseudo Avant-Garde?

MB: It collects Kent’s work since 2008. As with most of Kent’s writing, it is sui generis. I mean, it is all part of the tradition of satire, satirical resistance animates his work, but each address finds its own particular form, the necessary form. From Middle English rhyme to mini-biographies to prize lists to bumper sticker verse, Kent is always inventing what is necessary to the articulation. It is often hilarious, but always deadly serious. I’m poaching myself from my intro to the book, I admit.

KJ: If I may, and it’s the only thing I will say about the book, and this is entirely Mike’s doing (he is a master of book layout and design): It arguably has the most exciting cover image of any North American poetry book in the last decade. I got lucky.

DD: The titles of two forthcoming titles from Dispatches Editions seem quite timely: A poet's guide to the end of the world, by Lisa Jarnot, and The Metaphysics of Survival, by John Clarke. What can we expect from these two books?

MB: John Clarke is a sadly under-recognized writer, partly because of his relation to Charles Olson, but largely because he was a deeply democratic person, someone who was committed to his work with no sense of ambition beyond the community of its interest. But I think it was Al Cook who said that Jack went as far beyond Olson as Olson went beyond Pound. The book is a collection of various pieces by Jack. The center of it is a book within a book edited by his friend and colleague, Al Glover, called toward a #6. It is a collection of letters, poems, and bibliography which gives you a strong sense of the complexity, immense range, and dynamic of Jack’s thinking. In addition, there is a long piece called “Lots of Doom” that is a transcription of a “reading” from 1971, three essays he wrote on Charles Olson, and some odds and ends. Lisa Jarnot wrote a terrific introduction and Daniel Zimmerman wraps it up with a profound meditation called “Knowing Jack.” Lisa’s book is a mystery. You could say we commissioned it. So you know it will be perceptive, insightful, and with a sharp edge.

KJ: We also have others in the tentative works: A book of strange and moving serial manifestos by the mysterious OBU group, a book by Laynie Browne, a translation by Chris Daniels of the astonishing and almost hereabouts-unknown Brazilian poet Orides Fontela, a profound and hilarious book of aphorisms by John Bradley, a rich collection of Mike’s own essays, and numerous other surprises to be announced.

DD: I’d like to end our conversation with a poem from Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Would you select one and introduce it?

Mike and Kent: This is the poem, published in 1979, by the great and ridiculously neglected Umbra-group poet Lorenzo Thomas, which opens the book, as epigraph. It’s almost as if he were visited, back then, it seems to us, by some Nostradamus-like vision of January 20^th, 2017. We suspect there wasn’t anything “mystical” involved, but there’s something here in the undercurrent, as they say, that seems compellingly channeled across the long present. Listen poets:

            Inauguration

            The land was there before us
            Was the land. Then things
            Began happening fast. Because
            The bombs us have always work
            Sometimes it makes me think
            God must be one of us. Because
            Us has saved the world. Us gave it
            A particular set of regulations
            Based on 1) undisputable acumen.
            2) carnivorous fortunes, delicately
            Referred to here as “bull market”
            And (of course) other irrational factors
            Deadly smoke thick over the icecaps,
            Our man in Saigon   Lima   Tokyo   etc   etc

                        — Lorenzo Thomas

Michael Boughn's most recent book, City — A Poem from the End of the World, was published in 2016 by Spuyten Duyvil. Hermetic Divagations — After H.D. is forthcoming in March, 2017 from Swimmers Group in Toronto. Together with Victor Coleman, he edited Robert Duncan's The H.D. Book for University of California Press. He lives in Toronto.

 

(Kent on the Left) Kent Johnson's latest books are A Question Mark above the Sun: Documents on the Mystery Surrounding a Famous Poem "by" Frank O'Hara (Starcherone/Dzanc), I Once Met: A Partial Memoir of the Poetry Field (Longhouse Books), and Homage to the Pseudo Avant-Garde (Dispatches Editions). With Kristin Dykstra, he is editor of Materia Prima: Selected Poems of Amanda Berenguer, forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

Burning Down Suburbia: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Sjohnna McCray's Rapture

Rapture
Sjohnna McCray
Graywolf Press, 2016

Sjohnna McCray’s debut collection, Rapture, celebrates the lives fountaining through a single life and transmutes the eddies of those lives into an aria. Like the blossoms seen falling through a kitchen window in McCray’s poem, “The Pear Tree,” the poems in Rapture helicopter to earth, “suicidal brides plummeting.” These poems skitter on the edge of adoration, limned with want, cankered with loss, honeyed with the sweet fearful immensities of the strange thisness shuttling between the heart and the mind. Many voices vertebrae the poems in this book in registers of devotion, passion, ire, sorrow, and jubilation. McCray draws on the details of his birth: his father was a soldier and his mother was a “comfort woman.” In “Bedtime Story # 1” McCray describes his parents after they had first met: “they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple:/ the unassuming black and the Korean whore/ in the middle of the Vietnam War.” From these details, McCray explores the complicated notions of Americanness that his life embodies, implies, and challenges: “an extravagance of small pauses,/ / many caesuras.” However, McCray’s work as a whole concerns itself with recreating the infinitesimal moments in a life, situated on the threshold of song, when past, present, and future overlap and we are most ourselves.

McCray’s lines are most themselves when Eros and Thanatos equally inhabit them. In the last lines of the book, McCray redefines “rapture” as the moment before an orgasm, “an old LP, a needle tracing static,/ a record ready to drop.” Meanwhile, outside, walnuts smack on the roof, a cardinal shakes on the line, and “still we refuse to yield/ back into being singular.” For McCray the refusal to be anywhere else but in the posture of eternal embrace constitutes the very groundwork of existence; we are always dying into each other, into our pasts and futures, into our ghosts and regrets. Throughout Rapture, McCray opens a dialogue with his father, whose life and legacy constantly swans into the poems. The poem “Portrait of My Father as a Young Black Man,” for example, reads:

            Rage is the language of men,
                   layers of particulates fused.

                   Rage is the wine
                            father pours to the ground

                            for men whose time has passed. Rage
                            is gripped in the hands

                   like the neck of a broom held tight. Rage
            gets stuck in the throat, suppressed.

            Rage is a promise kept.

Although rage is part of the vocabulary Rapture sorts through, the real language of this poem and every other poem in this book is love. Whether commemorating the lives of his parents, hailing his beloved, burning down the suburbia of his own adolescence, or elegizing the tragic life and death of the poet, Reetika Vazirani, Sjohnna McCray is driven to the page out of love.  Rapture is a reminder that we are at our best when we refuse to yield back into being singular, a timely and timeless collection to laud on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2017.

 

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize, 

A Husbandry of Risk and Want in a House Run by Mothers: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Tommye Blount’s What Are We Not For

What Are We Not For
Tommye Blount
Bull City Press, 2016

Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook, What Are We Not For, artfully explores what it means to live inside a black queer body at this particular time in American history. Blount’s sinewy poems are bound together with countless silken ties of desire, fear, and affection for the world in all of its wounding might. Ranging from tightly made free verse, to sonnet, to villanelle, these poems perpetually shrapnel into each other. Each poem shuts its mouth “around the rough ramble of wordlessness” and redirects its gaze to the pulsing lycanthropic chiefdom a body carries within its provinces. In this collection, the mutt of the first poem, “Bareback Aubade with the Dog,” who snaps the thin leash of yes, transforms into the werewolf of a later poem, who is beaten “until skin becomes wound/ then scab then hide.” What Susan Howe said of Emily Dickinson could be said of Tommye Blount as well: “Poetry leads past possession of self to transfiguration beyond gender.” However, Blount never forgets the whiplash logic of a culture founded on the destruction of black bodies. As the speaker in “The Tongue” notes: “…I have the tongue/ of some endangered animal. No one can understand me.” What Are We Not For retrieves the seams in the seamless transition from scar tissue to carapace. More importantly, this powerful collection celebrates the “sweet body” and the affirmation that buzzes inside the hive of the self at its most sated and at its most insatiable.

For Blount, nevertheless, the sweet body is also the site of unspeakable pain. A dog, forever barking, forever muzzled, runs through these poems toward that pain. The figure of Pinocchio, which recurs throughout the poems, foregrounds that pain in his interrogations of realness. “Geppetto’s Lament” begins: “Off to mess with what I made him, the boy/ forgets he is not a boy. Forgets these/ strings and this paddle, shaped like a cross, are/ in my hands.” The pain of Pinocchio, who in the poem, “Pine,” cuts the inside of his thighs with his father’s whittling knife, emblematizes the struggle of anyone who attempts to define the self against normative cultural expectations. Blount deftly questions the surreptitious pacts and the hidden strings that bind son to father, beloved to lover, lynching victim to crowd, body to spirit, spirit to word. As the title poem notes:

            What Are We Not For

            but to be broken
            like the deer resting on the side of the highway,
            in a bed made of

            its insides? Isn’t the scene
            always the same—the rump and legs
            frozen in one last kick?

            I, too, have lost my gaze,
            the grip of the wheel—
            like the one that plowed into

            the deer. Wheel, will—it’s all the same.
            And the ear does fail me at times,
            as it must have the deer

            that should have listened better.
            Francine, on the other end of the line,
            tells me I’m not listening; to listen

            to my body or I won’t last long. We never
            last long, do we? It all breaks—
            the line pulsing forward, the line pause,

            the long bone of it all. After all,
            I am a broken animal. I am brokered
            in the name of the wheel.

Despite this constant breaking, Tommye Blount stays on the line. He knows that our bodies may be museums, but they contain more than mere artifact. The lynching of Frank Embree in 1899 appears in one window of the body, right next to Matthew Shepard’s murderer, Aaron McKinney, in 1998. And yet, if the body is a site of trauma, it is also a dance floor. Channeling the famous choreographer, Willi Ninja, Blount defiantly exclaims, “Bitch, give me a body/ and I will show you how it works” and jubilantly continues: “One day I will show you the world/ is one big ass ball—/ / a house run by mothers.” Reading this chapbook, one husbands risk and want and pain and sorrow, only to access ultimately such unfettered joy. Reading What Are We Not For is as necessary as breathing, grieving, and loving.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). He is the winner of the 2015 Red Hen Press Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review's 2016 Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and the 2016 Manchester Poetry Prize,