The Best American Poetry

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: December 6, 2023

Congratulations to Mary Jo Bang whose book A Film in which I Play Everyone was published earlier this fall by Graywolf.  Here’s a spectacular sample poem:

SPEAKING OF THE FUTURE, HAMLET

is saying, someday this day will be over.  
A moon will presumably still be above:  
a bone quiet, an inflatable in the scene 

—the cool blue swimming pool  
it finds itself in. And I will want to be. 
My mother, the Queen, will want only  

my father, the King. All will be want  
&get. And I will be me. And O, O,  
Ophelia—will be the essence of love.  

The love of a sister. Or, the love of the  
brother. Compassion. Forgiveness.  

All will be want & get. We will all be  
together, on stage & in dress, reciting  
our lines: “What a fine day. What a  

wonderful way. To be.” No sirens. Fifty  
stars, a cloud. A drawing of an all-night  
sky. We’ll be there. You as you. And I. 

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 29, 2023

Julia McConnell’s first book Landlocked was published earlier this year by Wheelbarrow Books of Michigan State University Press. The poems explore lesbian spaces in Oklahoma where the speaker also feels trapped/locked as she forges ahead to create a life.  Keeping her company in this wonderful series of poems are Walt Whitman, Mark Doty, Audre Lorde, and Elizabeth Bishop. You can preview her poem "Elizabeth Bishop Swipes Right" here:

https://www.screendoorreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/JC-Elizabeth-Bishop.pdf

Congratulations, Julia!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 22, 2023

For today’s post, I offer Jessica L. Walsh’s fiercely punk poem from her debut collection Books of Gods & Grudges, published in 2022 by Glass Lyre Press.

WHEN MY DAUGHTER TELLS ME I WAS NEVER PUNK

I say, honey, my being alive is punk. I made my life
out of grudges when I saw the odds placed against me,

when my role was to marry a man who’d kill me
and give me my hot young death, a guy named Charles

who would have and nearly did – the day I said fuck you
and threw his keys in the snow? That was punk.

When I called a nice guy who’d loved me steady
and thought what if I can try staying alive, that was punk;

when I had my last drink and surrendered the scene, that too was punk,
and yes I miss the me who would be dead

because I was a bottle rocket, a pipe bomb of a good time
but my being alive is the middle finger I never put down –

I did not let these days go by, I clawed each one from dirt,
and when I get my nails done I am stockpiling weapons,

when I buy groceries, when I gas up the car,
I am threatening to survive long enough to piss off

a million awful people to be alive in spite of,
I am promising to stay flagrantly alive:

This is my beautiful house. I am this beautiful wife.
How did I get here, I say, by my fucking teeth.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 15, 2023

For today’ poem, I offer a stunner by P. Scott Cunningham from the Summer 2023 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review.

My Heart, A.K.A. the Mango Tree Hanging Over the I-95 Retaining Wall at NW 65^th St.

 Miami, FL

 

    The job of the wall is to keep

the noise of the traffic from reaching the houses

on the other side, while the job of the tree is to grow

over the wall, stretching to eat the morning sun

it uses to manufacture the fruit that hangs,

for three weeks in June, like disobeyed traffic lights

changing slowly from the color of night

    to a shade of noon.

 

    No one ever picks these mangos

but the tree keeps on making them. It doesn’t

need a beneficiary to give a blessing, dropping

them without warning onto the asphalt

where they break and bleed out their juice

into a permanent shadow, the highway

like a piece of paper onto which

    the tree draws a picture of itself.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 8, 2023

Nick Flynn’s LOW was published yesterday by Graywolf. The title (and epigraph) is from a hauntingly beautiful song by a band with the same name.

Flynn’s poems haunt in very much the same way, one of the big themes of this set of poems being “home,” and what it means to those who come from a childhood of trauma as they provide home to a child they parent. The poems engage with our recent pandemic and quarantine, what it means to be in your home (if you are lucky) rather than the outside world. The poems engage with the unhoused (as did Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City).  And the poems engage with our home country, America, and its depravity (the book honors George Floyd) and an ancestral home—in Flynn’s case, Ireland. There are three big “note” prose poems in the book, one of which is “Notes on a Calendar Found in a Stranger’s Apartment.” In this poem, Flynn is invited into the home of his deceased neighbor and offered a flatscreen TV.  He catalogues the objects he encounters with affection and reverence—a retro calendar, a mysterious Polaroid, fortunes from cookies. This poem serves as a haunting once again of who we are as we try to make connections and what we will ultimately leave behind. LOW is an enchanting and important book.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: November 1, 2023

Kelle Groom uses all her poetry chops in her new “A Memoir-in-Essays” called How to Live which was published by Tupelo Press in October.  In these essays, she continues her quest for “home” in physical travels and travels of the mind (a journey she started in her previous memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl). Many of the essays read like meditated prose poems with their detail-rich imaginings.  Each essay is situated by the name of a place and marked by a year. (David Trinidad has written that Ginsberg told him to make sure he dated all his writing.) These places and dates serve as touchstones of a life much like a scrapbook of yesteryear, if scrapbooks could conjure such profound interiority. The essays take us all over the United States—from rentals to artist colonies, to houses now lost. (Think Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”) Groom revisits the child she lost and a doomed romantic engagement with heart wrenching precision. But there is also engagement with the outside world—especially well done in “This Used to be an Ocean” which discusses fracking in Buffalo, Wyoming. Part journalist and part journalist of the soul, Groom gives us an inside look at one woman’s navigation through our troubled and glorious world.

Congratulations, Kelle!

 

Wednesdays with Denise: Richard Blanco's "Homeland of My Body"

Richard Blanco’s Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems was published yesterday by Beacon Press. The book includes a generous sampling of his four previous collections bookended, so to speak, by two sections of new poems, one opening and another closing the book.

Since becoming the 5^th inaugural poet of the United States, Richard has become comfortable writing “occasional” poems and this volume does not disappoint in that regard. “One Pulse” was written in response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. “Until We Could” celebrates the tenth anniversary of Freedom to Marry. “Como Tú / Like You / Like Me” is dedicated to DREAMers, those impacted by DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.) In addition to his compelling subject matter, Richard grounds his poems with formal dexterity. Homeland of My Body includescontrapuntal/stereoscope poems; several ekphrastics; two ovillejos (a form often used by Miguel de Cervantes); a décima(a form popularized in Spain); and prose poems (one takes the shape of a reversed bucket list, completely with checkmarks while another uses the scaffolding of a living will). 

Blanco is most at home with the list poem, his anaphora always surprising as in his poem “Why I Needed To,” for which I’ve provided a link below.

Congratulations, Richard!

https://poets.org/poem/why-i-needed

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 18, 2023

Here is a dispatch from Peter Johnson….

The Question of the Day: Why would Peter Johnson, an established poet with a decent reputation, give away a book of fragments/prose poems called Observations at the Edge of the Abyss, when he has a loyal press who wants to publish it. (FREE DOWNLOAD HERE) https://works.bepress.com/peter-johnson-PC/1/

Perhaps the best way to explain why I would "gift" this book is to blame it on the late, eccentric poet Bill Knott.

 In 1999, the Knott sent me thoughtfully inscribed cheap, staple-bound pamphlets of his poems, sometimes quoting from my own prose poems in the inscriptions. On the inside covers of these pamphlets, in very large type, was written: “It should be obvious that if I could have found a real publisher for this book, I wouldn’t be doing it myself; no one wants the HUMILIATION of being a vanity author.” At the time, it seemed absurd that a publisher wouldn’t want a Bill Knott manuscript, but since then, I have witnessed even dumber editorial decisions.

Excerpts can also be read in Plume

https://plumepoetry.com/fragments-from-observations-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss-by-peter-johnson/

Do yourself a favor and get this freebie!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 11, 2023

It’s not unusual to find poets writing about pop songs, but it is unusual for a poet to write an entire book centered on pop music.  Enter the very funny Matt Mason, the Nebraska State Poet, who writes poems that veer from nostalgia to wisdom via Prince, Blondie, Dire Straits, the Go-Go’s, ELO, and Journey. His latest book Rock Stars (published last month by Button Press) is a book of poetry with a fierce beat, a book you can dance to! 

Here’s a sample poem about the great equalizer, about karaoke:

https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1116&context=oakwood

And "It's Not Unusual" by Tom Jones...

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: October 4, 2023

Erin Marie Lynch’s debut poetry collection Removal Acts is nothing short of astonishing. A descendant of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, Lynch’s title refers to the 1963 Federal Act that banished Dakota people from their homelands. From there she moves into all kinds of removals and erasures and violence, including poems about losing a dog and another about bulimia, in which the speaker tries to erase/remove herself in a whole new way. The book includes all kinds of visual representation, including concrete poems. One such poem is a “frame” where the text appears on the decorative outside, the picture blank except for very few words which include—“SORRY, THIS IMAGE IS NOT AVAILABLE FOR DOWNLOAD.” Another poem conjures the suffering of the poet’s uncle’s grandmother, a woman on a wooden wagon from a photograph found on FindaGrave.com. Elizabeth, a mother holding a child, is described around a blank silhouette in which we can imagine her. Another series of poems are in the shape of a tombstone for “Elizabeth.” In each successive version of the tombstone, the words are rubbed away, and in the final tombstone poem Elizabeth’s name is gone. Lineage is one of the themes of Removal Acts—and the book ends with a series of video stills in which Lynch puts on and takes off her great-grandmother Lenora’s Camp Fire Girls dress. Removal Acts is braided and nonlinear in the best way, in which the violence of the past is negotiated, mediated, witnessed.

Congratulations, Erin Marie!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 27, 2023

Today I wanted to give a shout out to The Unsung Masters Series, which brings forgotten poets to a whole new audience. The most recent volume is about Bert Meyers (1928-1979), a poet new to me. Edited by Dana Levin and Adele Williams, the book reprints poems from Meyers’ out-of-print volumes alongside commentary by critics, former students, colleagues, and his son. I’ve underlined so many passages in my copy, but thought I’d make my case for his genius by simply showing you some of his images about the moon:

We live in pain,

The moon’s an aspirin.

(from “Madman Songs”)

 

The moon, a giant freezer, hummed.

(from “The Old Engraver”)

 

…the moon’s been reached.

A few astonished flies

wrinkle the dust on its face.

(from “These Days”)

 

The moon’s a little goat

over there on the hill…

(from “Daybreak”)

 

…the moon has a dirty face

the stars are broken glass

in a dark and empty street

(from “Without a Chance”)

 

…at night the earth’s a woman,

the full moon’s her mirror.

(from “Images”)

 

You can find more information about the book and about Bert Meyers here:

 

https://www.bertmeyers.com/about

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 20, 2023

Sam Sax begins their hilarious, touching, and human/humane book Pig with an Orwell quote from Animal Farm—"“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” It is impossible for me to say which Sax poems I enjoyed more—“Miss Piggy,” “a pig pulls out of paradise,” or “james dean with pig.” Inventive and political, tender and sensual, Sax’s poems use the concept of “pig” to talk about police violence, capitalism/”this little piggy went to market,” pet pigs, religious dietary restrictions, the swine flu, the pandemic’s outbreak in pork plants, ecology, pig hearts used in surgery, and the celebration and degradation of the human body. When Sax learns that their grandfather castrated pigs as a young person, they imagine “castrato pigs singing/opera oddly/wagner probably…” and later, in a companion poem “Author’s Note,” they write “I’ve never bred pigs. never fed pigs…only read pigs. only/ begged to be pig-bred. only been/ called pig/a hundred times…” In “Experiments,” they imagine revisiting a classroom of fetal pigs. In “Squeal Like A Pig,” they recontextualize Deliverance through a tender queerness: “boy hurting/boy hurt/never imagined/I could leave/become the trees….”  Sax has seemingly and magnificently exhausted the subject, though they write in their opening poem “the first book written/about pigs was published/ in 3468 BC, the last will be this, until it isn’t….”

Congratulations, Sam!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 13, 2023

Ben Lerner’s The Lights was published September 5 by MacMillan. The poems contained therein are heady, energetic, and totally engaged with the now—our crisis as a nation and the world’s peril. Lerner contextualizes the horrors of our contemporary situation with the life of Whitman and the grass. There is a lot of grass in this book, actually—delicately pulled from the earth with reverence. Yet the weight of his subjects never feels too much as the tonal shifts in the book allow for humor. In the prose poem “The Media,” he writes “And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on my way to pick Marcela up from daycare and wanted to hear about your trip…Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to polished steel, especially on lake surfaces….”  And in the spectacular “Contre-jour,” a sparkly list poem chronicling luminosity of all sorts, Lerner injects, “I wish I’d known//you were a fan of light/I would have same some for you…”

Congratulations, Ben!

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: September 6, 2023

In May of this year, Press 53 published The Halo of Bees: New & Selected Poems 1990–2022 by award-winning author Michael Hettich. The “new” section, “The Shape of Moving” is a generous 34 pages. This volume is a must-have for readers who may not have all of Hettich’s earlier work. Handsomely presented, the book presents selections of his previous books and chapbooks, more than two dozen. Campbell McGrath writes, “Michael Hettich’s poems resemble half-remembered fables or lyrical dreams, animistic dramas played out in moonlit meadows, domestic interiors that shimmer like velvet jewelry boxes. Wisdom and enchantment are his calling cards, and he strews them about with purpose, like Hansel and Gretel marking the path home through the forest.”

Congratulations, Michael!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 30, 2023

We lost two amazing poets last week. Ed Ochester passed on August 22 and Maureen Seaton on August 26. Since 2000, Ed was my editor University of Pittsburgh Press. Maureen was my best friend and collaborator since 1987. I know they both also impacted the lives of so many of you. In addition to giving us their wonderful poems, they also were inspiring teachers, advocates, and poetry citizens. RIP (Rest in Poetry), Ed and Maureen!

Here is a poem by each of them from the Best American Poetry 2013. 

New Year 

after calling our son & daughter
to wish them happy & good luck
we get to bed early but get
a phone call from my mother
who died in April she doesn't
say where she's calling from though
I can hear laughter in the background
and she says Uncle Frank is making
his famous Manhattans which are
she adds gratuitously as always
a lot better than I was ever able to make—
"one of his really puts you to sleep"—
    and I have to reply "Mom do you know
    that you never once so far as I can
    remember have told me 'I love you"'
    and she says rather sadly
    "You've always been somewhat of
    a fool; don't you remember how,
    that time you passed out at my birthday party,
    one of your cousins told you later
    I cried out 'My son, my only son!'?"

--Ed Ochester

 

Chelsea/Suicide

In every myth there is a secret. Like the time I went looking for my childhood around the next bend in the Palisades and missed it, or the time teeth were discovered in my favorite uncle’s yard and he disclaimed ownership and sang falsettos.

I went to a meeting on 28th Street. The guy next to me had eyes exactly like yours, corpuscles hardening inside blue irises. He stood too close when he told me I would die if I didn’t ease up on myself. I thought he was right but I wanted him to step back so I didn’t have to see inside his liver, which was sodden, like mine, with tinges of red, white, and rosé.

He talked to himself in the middle of the room, the way he would talk to anyone who used hyperbole. He said: I tried suicide but it didn’t work. When he stuck out his hand I shook it.

I walked with him down 8th and we parted at 21st. I thought of all the times I’d dozed in my car near the river, how cops would come to my window and tap, telling me it wasn’t safe for a woman in the middle of the day in a car by the river in a world like this one.

--Maureen Seaton

 

A wonderful tribute, complete with many poems, by Maureen is up on SoFloPoJo:

https://www.southfloridapoetryjournal.com

And here is a loving remembrance of Ed:

https://www.wesa.fm/arts-sports-culture/2023-08-24/ed-ochester-pitt-poet-educator-obituary

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 23, 2023

I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, a debut collection by poet Candace Williams, was published this spring by Alice James. William uses erasure in order to be fully seen.  They expertly use other poetic forms—such as the bop and sonnet——but truly shine when they make poems by whiting out texts.  A poem about the Black Panthers is made from a 1902 New York Times article about a panther who escapes the Bronx Zoo.  They use their erasure powers to recast Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness and The Congo Diary; a 1906 New York Times article in which a white man has acquired a “dwarf” as a valet; a 1907 New York Times article in which a ghost is supposedly troubling Blacks in Brooklyn; and the 1996 Supreme Court decision saying that pretextual stops are not a violation of the Constitution. Candace Williams makes their political poems by showing their readers overt white supremacy as well as what is buried and what can be exposed. Williams is a poet to watch!

Congratulations, Candace!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 16, 2023

Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk: An Epic was published yesterday by Penguin. The book-length poem is broken up into three sections, with the speaker telling us “I used to man the Information/Desk in the center of the Great Hall of that Metropolitan Museum of Art.” While the book is a fascinating look at the MoMA’s collections and previous exhibits, it is also about the self at that desk, her desires beyond art. Her introductory “Invocation” sets up the themes explored in the next three sections, the “information” readers will be given. When a memory of her betrayal to a friend enters her poem “To the Jewel Wasp,” Schiff writes “…Well, that// was unexpected…Poems/are as a good a place for the past as the grass/is for the wasp…”. Schiff’s mundane duties—like handing out maps and accepting packages from bicycle messengers—are infused by and rub up against great works of art—Steichen and Rodin’s studies of Balzac; the Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt exhibit; and Louis XV’s desk. Questions like “What time is it?” (asked by John Kennedy Jr.) and “Where’s the bathroom?” (asked by pretty much everyone, it seems) jut up against the harassment of “Are those your real breasts?” or a boss who pulls “Betsy’s skirt down inside the Desk// on the other side of which visitors were grabbing our brochures…” This speaks to women in a workplace, even a workplace as refined as the MoMA. This speaks to the artworld. Beauty, forgery, men (artists and patrons) behaving badly. Schiff asks her readers “What is your desk//made of? I’m just writing on my lap right/now, upon which I once rocked my son.”  Information Desk: An Epic is a powerful meditation on art as the poet continues to make it.

Congratulations, Robyn!

Denise Duhamel on Barbieland

Back in the 1990s, creative writing professor Denise Duhamel made Barbie the subject of more than 40 poems for her book “Kinky,” a catalog of prevailing social ills and modern-day realities. (Titles include “Barbie as Mafiosa,” “Barbie Joins a Twelve Step Program,” “Barbie's Gyn Appointment,” “Math Class Is Tough,” “Afterlife Barbie.”) Selections were later translated and published in Germany as a 20-page chapbook named “Barbieland,” available for purchase in that country through vending machines.  (Click here for the full story.)

Duhamel has taught at Florida International University for nearly 30 years. She has 16 full-length poetry books and 11 chapbooks to her credit and has edited four anthologies. 

Here’s what she had to say the other day. 

FIU News: What was your relationship with Barbie prior to writing about her? 
Duhamel: I was not a collector or anything like that. At the time, probably 1966 or 1967, they seemed really expensive, so I only had one, and I remember my grandmother would sew these teeny tiny clothes for her. I had dye-your-hair Barbie, and I can’t believe they made that for kids. It came with ammonia and little sponges. She had blonde hair, but you could use a sponge to make her a redhead, and then you used another sponge to give her black hair. When I was playing with it, my mother had to open the windows. It was toxic. 

We didn’t have the Dream House, nothing like that. Now, it’s so consumer oriented. She’s like a starter. You buy her, you buy the other stuff.

What made you think Barbie would be the perfect protagonist for a poetry collection? 
The first poem I wrote about her is ‘Miss America 1990.’ That came out of my going with friends to a restaurant. We had the worst server possible, kept getting everything wrong. Someone said, ‘Oh, she’s such a Barbie.’ We used [the term ‘Barbie’] as a derogatory thing, like an airhead. And then we started talking about our Barbie stuff. One woman had very conservative parents, and she couldn’t have a Ken because they would have to be married. Another one grew up in Brooklyn, and her brothers used to jump over the Dream House and try to attack the Barbies. Another friend said that her brother took the dolls apart and buried the body parts in the yard.

I have nieces, one of whom just turned 40, and I was visiting them when they were 6 and 4. One of their doll’s heads popped off, and their father thought it was the most hilarious thing. They had a Ken, and he popped Ken’s head off and put it on Barbie’s body, and the kids were screaming. So in another poem, Barbie puts Ken’s head on her body and Ken puts Barbie’s head on his body to try and get into each other’s heads. My point was, ‘Can men and women really understand each other?’

Whatever I was thinking about, I could just put Barbie in that situation, and it became a way to make feminist statements that were funny. There’s a wink and a nod in the poems. When I look back at the thinking process, it was just one foot in front of the other, or one high heel in front of the other. I just kept going.

To you, what did she stand for?  
In my poems, Barbie is never in Barbieland [an alternate reality in which the dolls are in charge]. Instead, she’s being played with or torn apart, bitten by a dog, melting on a stove, just all sorts of abuse. As a writer, I started off not liking her very much. [That dislike] was about beauty standards and the ‘Barbification’ of culture. It was about certain archetypes of women. 

So, there was conflict there for you.  
Oh, yeah, even more so now as I get older.   

And yet here we are: She's comes to life. 
Tell me. It was 1994 or ‘95, in the East Village, off, off Broadway, that we did this one-woman show called ‘American Doll.’ We had done three or four shows, and then we got a cease-and-desist order from Mattel, which was so weird because I felt like there weren’t even that many attendees. We got in trouble only for two things, which were using a picture of a real Barbie on the poster – which we put up on telephone poles - and for a sight gag in the play where the actor tries to do jumping jacks and, of course, she can’t because she’s in her high heels and falls down.

For my book cover, I made sure not to use any real Barbie images. Instead, I found this painting that I call ‘Healthy Appetite Barbie.’

 

Inquiring minds what to know: Did you make seeing the moving a big deal?
I did, even though I really thought it was going to be terrible. Because of my experience with the cease-and-desist order, I figured this movie, sanctioned by Mattel, was going to be awful, just one big commercial for Barbie. But how could I not go? I wore my giant Barbie earrings and went with seven people. It was a blast, really fun. 

Any reason to believe the scriptwriters would have read your stuff? Any contact from them? 
Nothing. Director Greta Gerwig – who I think is a genius – never reached out. I guess she could have found the book somehow, but there was no direct communication. But I’m up for the sequel, if she needs ideas.  

Do you think Barbie has been unfairly politicized – I'm thinking particularly of responses to the movie – or does she have some inherently political stance? 
Well, her political stance would be consumerism, right? You would think that most people in America would be down for that. In the movie itself, when she goes to the real world and she’s ogled and she punches that guy in the face, that take down of the patriarchy is really funny. I guess some people were threatened by that. I don’t know. 

Did you ever see yourself as Barbie? 
When ‘Kinky’ came out in 1997, I had died my hair red because, back in the day, remember those dumb blonde jokes? When I was a kid, I had blonde hair. I remember trying this experiment because I read somewhere that if you had red hair, people will let you cut in line. Well, people were nicer to me. Well, not nicer but more respectful.

I think I was always trying to be the opposite of Barbie. I just wanted to be one  thing, not everything. I just wanted to be a writer, and I knew I wanted to be a writer from a young age.  

Barbie changes careers like an outfit. She wants to be a doctor, a social worker, the president, an astronaut. That always kind of annoyed me. I know it’s all play, but I’m like, focus!

Denise, would you say that dyeing your hair red was, after all, very much like the experience of your own childhood Barbie? 
Oh, my gosh! I never thought of that!

In the end, does Barbie maybe just want to be a toy? 
Exactly. But what a weird toy. 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 9, 2023

On July 25 Penguin released Terrance Hayes’s latest poetry book So to Speak. In it, he expands upon the American sonnet he so skillfully employed in American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. In fact, an American sonnet that opens the book begins “Things got incredibly ugly quickly…” and another poem entitled “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin” imagines “our future dictator” as a child asleep while Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone sing. Many poets have tried to write about the immensely horrible moments of George Floyd’s murder, but Hayes gives us the best of our all our attempts at elegy. Innovative forms follow—a PechaKucha, a ghazal variation, a cento, a walk through paintings written in the imperative, a sonnet in which Octavia Butler stars in a movie called Octavia Butler, several DYI sestinas (illustrated no less!).“An Extended Public Service Announcement” and “The Kafka Virus Verses” frame the pandemic. Hayes also offers more intimately personal poems about family—raising children and being a child. In a long poem called “Taffeta,” Hayes writes his mother is “so happy she didn’t kill me when she found out/she was pregnant. She’s so glad she didn’t give me/to the old woman who asked to adopt me.” Hayes has done it once again—offering poems that truly feel like offerings.

Congratulations, Terrance!

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: August 2, 2023

Sally Wen Mao’s The Kingdom of Surfaces was published yesterday by Graywolf Press. The book interrogates the Western gaze, the eroticizing/exoticizing of Chinese people, women in particular.

Each poem is a knockout that builds and complicates the theme. The poems often center on objects—jade, poppies, silk and silkworms, pearls and porcelain. In fact, three of the poems are shaped like vases. But hidden in those beautiful shapes are difficult realities of Chinese-Americans, then and now:

“In Atlanta,// a white man shoots/ Kills eight people//Most were Asian women/ He regards//not as ‘people’ but “temptations’”

and

“My century of humiliation began with my body”

The poet brings the historical up to our very moment, engaging with the crude, discriminatory remarks by the former president during the pandemic and the violence and fear his rhetoric caused. Sally Wen Mao was born in Wuhan.

At the center of the book is the ambitious title poem based on the 2015 MoMA exhibit “China: through the Looking Glass” and the Met Gala where the theme was China. The speaker situates herself in the exhibit—“When someone’s fantasy comes true, my nightmare begins.” She roams through the exhibit, where surreal, sometimes frightening, encounters ensue. At the “real” Met Gala, celebrities confused cultures—some wearing (Japanese) kimonos. Rihanna was the only celebrity to wear a gown by a Chinese designer.

There is so much to admire in this book—the glorious poetic forms, the precise diction and image-making, and the social/political chutzpah, just to start. Sally Wen Mao’s subject may sometimes be objects, but she refuses objectification as she becomes the subject in these poems.

 

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: July 26, 2023

On August 1, Graywolf will publish Roger Reeves’ Dark Days: Fugitive Essays. This is a gift of a book written by a poet with searing intelligence, whose escape into language—OutKast and Sun Ra, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Richard Wright—center his thinking about America’s troubled history.  Reeves celebrate the playfulness of Black speech while also examining its silences. There is the silencing that comes through erasure, but also the sacred silence of the ”hush harbor” where enslaved people came together to worship in secret. When Reeves agrees to give a reading at the McLeod Plantation in South Carolina, he finds himself drawn to a ginhouse where enslaved children, too young to work the fields, were charged with pulling hot bricks out of a kiln. He finds tiny fingerprints in the bricks that alert him to the fact that these children had to pull out bricks with their bare hands, certainly having burned them.  The tenderness with which Reeves tries to resist putting his own fingertips in the brick’s prints is worth the whole book—a metaphor for empathy and the limitations and terror we feel going back in history.  Dark Days builds with essays that are astonishing in their revelations as well as their forms. In an epistolary essay “Letters to Michael Brown,” Reeves gives us a series of correspondence from 2015 to 2022.  In the last such letter, he writes:

Michael, I thought of you when my daughter confessed her fear of being shot. Did you have that fear? Had you sensed your death as a boy, worried that you wouldn’t make it past twenty. As a boy, I had no expectation of living past twenty….

“Instructions for the Underground” is a list of imperatives that gains its power though simple variation that compound into complexities.  Here are just a few examples:

            IN THE UNDERGROUND, EAT WELL….

            LOVE WHAT YOU COULDN’T LOVE OUT THERE….

            BE AS ANCIENT AS YOU WANT TO BE…

Reeves’ appreciation for the necessity of the hush/the underground makes his readers rethink all our chatter, our speaking up. Silence is no longer prized in our age of outrage. He writes that “silence gets mischaracterized as passive, as noninvolvement, as capitulating to subjugation.” And later, “I wonder if our loquaciousness isn’t sinking us further into exploitation, a further fashioning of our bodies and pain as commodity…” In Dark Days Reeves contemplates the silence, the introspection necessary for eloquent responses to our increasingly frightening world. 

Congratulations, Roger!