The Best American Poetry

Rae Armantrout: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

______________________________________________________

The Craft Talk

 

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language

and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.

 

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in

armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

 

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she

heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

 

Why should I want to frighten her?

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

____________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                                    Man in chicken suit, 1900                                                 

 

To all the white boys who love me when I’m manic [by Erica Dawson]

To all the white boys who love me when I’m manic

 

and hypersexual and drunk and, how

should I say, easy, when we share a kiss

inside the cab or when I take my shirt

off in your office, when I tell you I

don’t mind the wife, girlfriend, partner, or when

you say oh god you feel different, I thank

you. Made me think I was special. We all

need some sense of our worth even if we,

right now, believe, though we do not know God,

the Holy Spirit calls us by our name,

says, Erica means honorable ruler,

tremendous voice sounding like Angelou

or Morrison, though both, no doubt, would want

no part of this. The Spirit and I flaunt

our airs, all arrogant and well-to-do

attitude, and you soak it up. Cooler

than other girls, you say. I take the blame

when it’s over, the sun up on the quad

or in the motel window, prosody

already on my mind. You’re under all

the covers of an alibi, still blank-

faced drunk. Round two? You’re Mary Magdalene

ready to wash my feet. I don’t know why

I need Jesus. Why I need you. To hurt

is human. Or vice versa. Yes. For this

they’ll take my Black card. Stay in, k? Come. Now.

 

from the current issue of The Common (no. 29)

Kenneth Koch Centennial: Saturday, May 17, 2025

TOMORROW: Saturday, May 17, 2025 Kenneth Koch Centennial: A Gathering May 17th, 10am ET—FREE The Flow Chart Space 348 Warren Street Hudson, NY 12534 REGISTER The Flow Chart Foundation is honored to present a daylong Gathering celebrating the legacy of Kenneth Koch on the occasion of his Centennial, featuring talks, readings, screenings, and short performances. This fourth annual Flow Chart Gathering event will take place at the Flow Chart Space in Hudson, NY, on Saturday, May 17, 2025 celebrating the life and work of this world-renowned poet, teacher, playwright, fiction writer, and collaborator. Guest speakers include: Andrew Epstein, Anthony Atlas, David Lehman, Dorothea Lasky, Emily Setina, Jordan Davis, Mitch Sisskind, and Susannah Hollister. Performers & playwrights include: Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Jess Barbagallo, Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

A Poem and an Essay by Debra Nystrom [by Nin Andrews]

 

Last week I came across this essay by Debra Nystrom in Agni about her her childhood, about her brother's meth addiction, about unbearable pain,  rural life, sexual abuse, family expectations, and so much more. I could go on about it, but, really,  I just want everyone to read it. And then read her poems as well. 

 

Debra Nystrom was one of the first poets I fell in love with. I don't see her work everywhere, but when I see it, I'm never disappointed. As C.K. Williams said, “The project of Debra Nystrom’s poetry isn’t merely to recapture and modulate experience, but to come to terms with it, to redeem it, in a radical way.”

 

Restless After School

By Debra Nystrom

 

Nothing to do but scuff down

the graveyard road behind the playground,

past the name-stones lined up in rows

beneath their guardian pines,

on out into the long, low waves of plains

that dissolved time. We'd angle off

from fence and telephone line, through

ribbon-grass that closed behind as though

we'd never been, and drift toward the bluff

above the river-bend where the junked pickup

moored with its load of locust-skeletons.

Stretched across the blistered hood, we let

our dresses catch the wind while clouds above

dimmed their pink to purple, then shadow-blue—

So slow, we listened to our own bones grow.

The Dayenu Cohort with Yehoshua November

. . .this year Yetzirah has a new offering for you. After successfully trying our first offsite workshop at the conference last year, 2025 will mark the official introduction of our inaugural Dayenu Cohort, with offsite workshops led by award-winning poet Yehoshua November.

Open to writers of all levels of experience and all traditions, the Dayenu Cohort is a way to expand the richness of our conference community and offer the in-person conference experience more broadly. In addition to morning workshops, Dayenu participants will receive a pass to all on-campus public events and an invitation to join us for our private Shabbat dinner. Learn more here and feel free to reach out to Danny with any questions you may have ([email protected]).

The Night Sinatra Died [by David Lehman]

Sinatra, snapping out of a haze,

noticed me sitting across from him

“Who the fuck are you?”

Just another fan, I said, on the day he died

I made anagrams out of his name

satin, sin, stain, stair, train, rain, star

and figured out my last message

I mean what I would say to him now

“your goodbye left me with eyes that cry”

on the other hand you left me the history

of your voice the record of the American century

from Roosevelt to Reagan you will live on

whenever I need to hear you (it has to be you)

sing “I Get Along Without You Very Well”

(Strand’s favorite) or “I’m a Fool to Want You”

(my choice) when your lover has gone

May 15, 1998

Jorie Graham on prose poems

It’s not just content out of context that creates the character of many of the poems in An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Jorie Graham gets further into this idea in her introduction to The Best American Poetry, 1990, a book she edited that year with David Lehman. In writing about the seven prose poems that were selected for inclusion, Graham noted that

One important formal development is the recent popularity of prose poems. We might think of them as, perhaps, the frontal approach; they are certainly—in many cases—the most extreme in their attempt to use the strategies of “normal” articulate speech to reach the reader. Their number, variety and sheer quality (and the extraordinarily different uses to which the form is put) caused me to think of this volume as, in part, a subterranean exploration of the form. (Graham xxii)

While [Michel] Deville suggests to us the issue of content out of context in the form, Graham is additionally introducing, the idea that prose poems often adopt what she calls a frontal approach. She suggests that the prose poems are most extreme in their use of common speech—in grammatical orthodoxy. Graham muses on to suggest that, in some ways, that year’s volume of Best American Poems, was in part, a below-the-surface look at the burgeoning form. Time and again, the poems in An Introduction to the Prose Poem reveal this characteristic of possessing language that leans perceptibly and regularly into its content.

painting by Matisse

https://n2poetry.com/2011/12/27/a-look-at-prose-poetry-an-introduction-to-the-prose-poem-edited-by-brian-clements-and-jamey-dunham/

Belle of Amherst [by Mitch Sisskind]

1.

Put aside the twaddle about her
Forced upon us in ten thousand
Books and other tedious varieties.
Nights in green eyeshadow she
Panther-like prowled Amherst's
Back alleys her brain abuzz with
Webster's definition of VOLCANO
As a hole or slit in the surface of
A mountain from which ejects
Smoke, flames, and the hot lava;
Of the legendary demonic VAMPIRE
Fabled to suck our blood at night;
And of HELL: the place to which are
Carried all those that are CAUGHT.

 2.

Preoccupied by photography ever since
That absurd daguerreotype image of her
Appeared in 1847 she presents herself
Several times a week at the sidewalk
Booth of Amherst's tintype photographer
Always in one or another of her favorite
Disguises though she has no illusions
Mr. Deutsch is fooled. Fishwife, harlot,
Little Bo-Peep, Jane Eyre, Cleopatra,
And Joan of Arc are some of her many
Incarnations until she convinces Deutsch
To teach her the process and transforms
Her room into a secret studio for creating
Hundreds of what we now call 'selfies.'

3.

As a word-lover she loved gamahuche,
Gamahuching, will be (was) gamahuched,
Or in a sentence: The bee gamahuched
The flowers. She marveled at the bees
Entering daffodils enveloped by sunlight
Refracted through tender golden petals:
Surely Solomon in all his glory never
Gamahuched like these and once at
Great risk she allowed herself mentally
To gamahuche Susan as when the bee
Enters the flower or wantonly imagined
Herself gamahuched by that stern Athena
Who lived just across the garden and who
Doubtless was gamahuched by Austin.

*ED resided across the back yard from
her brother Austin and his wife Susan.

"Before the revolution, man oppressed man. After, it was the other way around."

 

<<  The ferocity and imbecility of an autocratic rule rejecting all legality and in fact basing itself upon complete moral anarchism provokes the no less imbecile and atrocious answer of a purely Utopian revolutionism encompassing destruction by the first means to hand, in the strange conviction that a fundamental change of hearts must follow the downfall of any given human institutions. These people are unable to see that all they can effect is merely a change of names. >>

Joseph Conrad, author's note, Under Western Eyes (1911)

Sonnet XLV: Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night [by Samuel Daniel]

XLV

    Care-charmer Sleep, son of the sable Night,
   Brother to Death, in silent darkness born:
   Relieve my languish, and restore the light,
   With dark forgetting of my cares, return;
   And let the day be time enough to mourn
   The shipwreck of my ill-adventur'd youth:
   Let waking eyes suffice to wail their scorn,
   Without the torment of the night's untruth.
   Cease dreams, th' imagery of our day-desires,
  To model forth the passions of the morrow;
  Never let rising sun approve you liars,
  To add more grief to aggravate my sorrow.
  Still let me sleep, embracing clouds in vain;
  And never wake to feel the day's disdain.

"Negative Capability" [By David Lehman]

"Negative Capability"

from THE COMMON

 May 5, 2025  Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By DAVID LEHMAN

Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability” 
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey as Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which rests
     on the solidity 
of logic while “negative capability” stands for 
a destination you arrive at despite signs that say “dead end.”
A letter Keats sent to his brothers Tom and George
in 1817 is the ultimate authority, for it was there that he coined
“negative capability” for being in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, 
without any irritable reaching for fact.” Consider King Lear. 
The poetry is sublime and we love it despite the ugly atrocities 
without denying they exist. And therefore “beauty is truth,”
or “ripeness is all,” which, according to Yale’s Cleanth Brooks
in The Well Wrought Urn, means pretty much the same thing.

also see https://nasjournal.org/NASJ/article/view/2093/1829

Cardinal Zen [by Beatrice Leader]

Cardinal Zen took me under his wing.
Chicago-born Leo XIV beat the odds
fourteen to one in Vegas defeating
the Italian candidate, the hot favorite,
but remember the old conclave saw
"who enters as pope exits as cardinal."

As for Leo XIV, he is against
the state of "de facto atheism";
wears a red velvet cape
and ornate stole; roots for
the White Sox,
which shows he has faith.

filed by our Rome correspondent, Beatrice Leader. May 9, 2025. Painting by El Greco with thanks to the  El Greco-Roman Foundation.

The Cloisters

The Cloisters museum in Fort Trryon Park is where I spent many afternoons growing up in Washington Heights and Inwood. -- DL

Come one, come all: Kenneth Koch's centennial, Saturday May 17 at Flow Chart Foundation (Hudson, NY)

organized by Jordan Davis, Justin Jamail, Eric Longo and the Flow Chart Foundation:

Kenneth Koch Centennial Gathering

 

SCHEDULE (subject to change) for 5/ 17 / 25

[10am—bagels & coffee]

11am–11:15am — Welcome by Eric Longo

11:15am–12:00pm — Presentation I: Working with Kenneth Koch - Andrew Epstein and Jordan Davis

[12:00pm–1:00pm — lunch break]

1:00pm–1:45pm — Presentation II: Art Collaborations - Anthony Atlas

1:45pm–2:30pm — Presentation III: Making Your Own Days: Kenneth Koch and Education - Dorothea Lasky [2:30pm–2:45pm — coffee break]

2:45pm–3:30pm — Presentation IV: Kenneth Koch and Biography- Emily Setina and Susannah Hollister

3:30pm–4:15pm— Presentation V: Remembering Kenneth Koch - David Lehman and Mitch Sisskind

[4:15pm–5:00pm — break]

5:00pm–6:30pm — 1,000 Avant Garde Plays

A series of readings of Koch plays alongside the works ofcontemporary playwrights. Featuring (subject to

change): Corinne Donly, Diane Exavier, Jess Barbagallo, Ry Cook, Erin Courtney, Jess Barbagallo,

Karinne Keithley Syers, Kate Kremer, Lisa Clair, Lucas Baisch, Nazareth Hassan, and Rachel Kauder Nalebuff.

7:00-7:30pm - Remembering John Ashbery with poetry readings

Join a small group to walkfrom Flow Chart on Warren St. to Christ Episcopal Church's churchyard

Flow Chart Space | 348 Warren Street | Hudson, NY

Charlie Simic and the "Great Poets' brawl of '68"

Charles Simic files this report in the NY Review of Books blog.

<<
Back at Louis Simpson’s house in Stony Brook, during the farewell party on the last night of the conference, a fight broke out. People were standing in pairs or groups on the huge lawn sipping their drinks and, without any hint that something was about to happen, fists started flying. When a few tried to break it up, a punch would head in their direction and they would in turn join the melee. I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed. Looking back, I, too, have to admit that what we saw was pretty funny.
>>>

From the archive; first posted April 27, 2024. Photo from The Best American Poetry launch reading, 1992. For more, click here. -- DL

<<
Back at Louis Simpson’s house in Stony Brook, during the farewell party on the last night of the conference, a fight broke out. People were standing in pairs or groups on the huge lawn sipping their drinks and, without any hint that something was about to happen, fists started flying. When a few tried to break it up, a punch would head in their direction and they would in turn join the melee. I stood on the porch watching in astonishment with the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra and the French poet Eugène Guillevic. They were delighted by the spectacle and assumed that this is how American poets always settled their literary quarrels; I tried to tell them that this was the first time I had seen anything like that and it scared the hell out of me, but they just laughed. Looking back, I, too, have to admit that what we saw was pretty funny.
>>>

From the archive; first posted April 27, 2024. Photo from The Best American Poetry launch reading, 1992. For more, click here. -- DL

There's a certain Slant of light [by Emily Dickinson]

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

 

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

 

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

 

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

 

Great lyrics: Frank Loesser, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old"

<< This sheet music is for the song “They're Either Too Young or Too Old,” from the film Thank Your Lucky Stars. The music was written by Frank Loesser and composed by Arthur Schwartz, and the sheet music was published by M. Witmark and Sons of New York, New York in 1943. The cover features a blue and white striped inset that reads “Thank Your Lucky Stars” with portrait photographs of stars like Humphrey Bogart, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn, and Olivia de Havilland.  >>

sung by Bette Davis in Thank Your Lucky Stars.

One of the greatest World War II songs. -- DL

They're either too young, or too old,
They're either too gray or too grassy green,
The pickings are poor and the crop is lean.
What's good is in the army,
What's left will never harm me.

They're either too old or too young,
So, darling, you'll never get stung.
Tomorrow I'll go hiking with that Eagle Scout unless,
I get a call from grandpa for a snappy game of chess.

I'll never, never fail ya,
While you are in Australia,
Or otu in the Aleutians
Or off among the Rooshians,
And flying over Egypt.
Your heart will never be gypped,
And when you get to India,
I'll still be what I've been to ya.
I've looked the field over
And lo and behold!
They're either too young or too old!

They're either too bald or too bold,
I'm down to the wheelchair and bassinet,
My heart just refuses to get upset.
I simply can't compel it to,
With no Marine to tell it to.

I'm either their first breath of spring,
Or else, I'm their last little fling.
I either get a fossil or an adolescent pup,
I either have to hold him off,
Or have to hold him up.
The battle is on, but the fortress will hold,
They're either too young or too old.

PS There are many additional stanzas as you will hear if you listen to Bette Davis sing it.

Jimmy Dorsey's band, with Kitty Kallen's vocal .https://youtu.be/ai71VRXz48Q 

"That Harp You Play So Well" [by Shannon Doyne]

 

from The New York Times

Poetry Pairing | ‘That Harp You Play So Well’

By Shannon Doyne

 May 13, 2016 7:09 am

Credit Peter Arkle

In this, our last Poetry Pairing for the school year, Marianne Moore’s “That Harp You Play So Well” is matched with the essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” by David Lehman.

To view all of the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.

 

Editor of the influential literary magazine The Dial and author of several collections, Marianne Moore achieved both literary success and a degree of celebrity, famous for her tricorn hat and cape.

That Harp You Play So Well
By Marianne Moore

From “Pouters and Fantails”

Oh, David, if I had
Your power, I should be glad–
     In harping, with the sling,
     In patient reasoning!

Blake, Homer, Job and you,
Have made old wine-skins new.
     Your energies have wrought
     Stout continents of thought.

But David, if the heart
Be brass, what boots the art
     Of exorcizing wrong,
     Of harping to a song?

The sceptre and the ring
And every royal thing
     Will fail. Grief’s lustiness
     Must cure that harp’s distress.

---

Times Selection Excerpt

In the 2014 Sunday Book Review essay “Sing to Me, O Muse (But Keep It Brief),” David Lehman writes about what could be lost in a technology-oriented culture.

Maybe I dreamed it. Don Draper sips Canadian Club from a coffee mug on Craig Ferguson’s late-night talk show. “Are you on Twitter?” the host asks. “No,” Draper says. “I don’t” — he pauses before pronouncing the distasteful verb — “tweet.” Next question. “Do you read a lot of poetry?” Though the hero of “Mad Men” is seen reading Dante’s “Inferno” in one season of the show and heard reciting Frank O’Hara in another, the question seems to come from left field. “Poetry isn’t really celebrated anymore in our culture,” Draper says, to which Ferguson retorts, “It can be — if you can write in units of 140 keystrokes.” Commercial break.

The laugh line reveals a shrewd insight into the subject of “poetry in the digital age,” a panel-discussion perennial. The participants agree that texting and blogs will influence the practice of poetry in style, content and method of composition. Surely we may expect the same of a wildly popular social medium with a formal requirement as stringent as the 140-character limit. (To someone with a streak of mathematical mysticism, the relation of that number to the number of lines in a sonnet is a thing of beauty.) What Twitter offers is ultimate immediacy expressed with ultimate concision. “Whatever else Twitter is, it’s a literary form,” the critic Kathryn Schulz has written. True, the hard-to-shake habit causes its share of problems, “distractibility increase” and other disturbing symptoms. Nevertheless there is a reason Schulz got hooked on this “wide-ranging, intellectually stimulating, bighearted, super fun” activity.

The desire to make a friend of the new technology obliges us to overlook some major flaws: The Internet is hell on lining, spacing, italics; line breaks and indentation are often obscured in electronic transmission. The integrity of the poetic line can be a serious casualty. Still, it is fruitless to quarrel with the actuality of change, though in private we may revel in our physical books and even, if we like, write with pencil on graph paper or type our thoughts with the Smith-Corona to which we have a sentimental attachment. One room in the 2013 “Drawn to Language” exhibit at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art was devoted to Susan Silton’s site-specific installation of a circle of tables on which sat 10 manual typewriters of different vintages. It was moving to behold the machines not only as objects of nostalgia in an attractive arrangement but as metonymies of the experience of writing in the 20th century. Seeing the typewriters in that room, I felt as I do when the talk touches on the acquisition of an author’s papers by a university library. It’s odd to be a member of the last generation to have “papers” in this archival and material sense. Odd for an era to slip into a museum while you watch.

The one-minute poem may not be far off. With its need for speed, Twitter’s 140-character constraint brings the clock into the game. Poetry — a byte-size kind of poetry — has been, or soon will be, a benefit of attention deficit disorder. (This prediction is not necessarily made in disparagement.) Unlike the telephone, social media relies on the written, not the spoken, word, and I wonder what will happen when hip-hop and spoken-word practices tangle with the virtues of concision, bite and wit consistent with the rules of the Twitter feed. On the other hand, it is conceivable that the sentence I have just composed will be anachronistic in a couple of years. Among my favorite oxymorons is “ancient computer,” applied to my own desktop.

https://archive.nytimes.com/learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/05/13/poetry-pairing-that-harp-you-play-so-well/

Freud Quiz No. 32: Willie Mays weighs in

Heartfelt happy birthday wishes to the late Willie Mays born today, on May 6, 1931, echoing the birthday of Sigmund Schlomo Freud on May 6, 1856. The fact that the father of psychoanalysis and the Giants' great center-fielder shared a birthday

(1) would have been deemed inevitable to a student of their natal charts who was also a watcher of the skies.
(2) begs the question and / or dares one to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
(3) makes you wonder whether either knew that Robespierre was also born on May 6 
(4) proves that the best and most natural of center-fielders was playing unconscious in a sense Freud may be said to have uncovered in his studies of geniuses who had been naughty boys, like Goethe
(5) leaves even the most ardent advocates of the children of Taurus convinced that the two had nothing in common but their greatness, but Isn't that enough?

-- DL

(1) would have been deemed inevitable to a student of their natal charts who was also a watcher of the skies.
(2) begs the question and / or dares one to arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.
(3) makes you wonder whether either knew that Robespierre was also born on May 6 
(4) proves that the best and most natural of center-fielders was playing unconscious in a sense Freud may be said to have uncovered in his studies of geniuses who had been naughty boys, like Goethe
(5) leaves even the most ardent advocates of the children of Taurus convinced that the two had nothing in common but their greatness, but Isn't that enough?

-- DL

The new issue of "The Common" is here -- and uncommonly good

Dear Readers, It's a rainy spring day here in Western Massachusetts, the kind that seems to portend flowers, growth, and green. A perfect day to launch our spring issue, #29!   We excited to share a special portfolio of photography and translated prose from Amman, Jordan, a fascinating look at culture, history, and modernization in one of the Middle East's most diverse and booming cities. Browse online or order your copy now. If you're a fan of print, this one's a bright, beautiful, lime green color, and the inside cover and flaps are lemon yellow!  Check out these highlights:   Writing translated from the Arabic about the city of Amman, Jordan Full color and black and white photography of the architecture, business-owners, culture, and sheep (yes, sheep!) of Amman   Fiction about the US military bombing on the Hawaiian island of Kaho‘olawe, Hinduism's elephant-headed god Ganesha, and a motley cast of characters in an Austin boxing gym   Nonfiction about ritual indigo-dyed fabric-weaving in Cameroon Poems by Mary Jo Salter, David Lehman, Erica Dawson, Rick Barot, Terra Oliveira, and many more

Self-Doubt with poems by Diane Raptosh, David Tucker, and Peter Johnson [by Nin Andrews]

My book, Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems, was just released from Etruscan Press. I   am very excited. I am also enormously grateful to Etruscan Press, which is one of my all-time favorite presses. Not only do they publish many of my favorite authors including Tim Seibles, Dante di Stefano, Diane Raptosh, Claire Bateman, Colum McCann, but also, they are easy and enjoyable to work with. And the editorial assistance they offer is spot-on.

As thrilled as I am by this book making its way into the world, I am also filled with the familiar nauseating feeling of dread that I always experience when a book is published. The minute I hold a new book in my hand, I question everything I’ve written. No matter if I’ve receive a nice review, like this one, Southern Review of Books: Hidden Farm Life in “Son of a Bird”, or if I have enjoyed writing up an interview, Mackinaw Interview with Nin Andrews: Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poetry, or an essay, Eden Lost: Nin Andrews on the Pains and Rewards of Writing a Memoir About Her Father, I still feel overwhelmed with doubt.

I am especially doubtful now that I’ve waded into the genre of memoir. I find poetry much safer because it doesn’t claim to be the self in any literal way. How can any piece of writing really represent oneself? As Diane Raptosh puts it, “the self is a thousand localities.”  

[The self is a thousand localities]    

The self is a thousand localities
            like a small nation—assembly required: borders and roads;               

armies; farms; small and large pieces of parchment. I stand by
            all the territories I have ever been, even as I can’t

remember them. I am a locum—ear to the emperor penguin, a banner ad
            blinking to the hoi polloi. Since I’ve become John Doe, I swear

I can feel most objects with sixty digits
            instead of five. This makes me think

of my wife. Makes me miss her left collar bone. Her hips’ wingtips.
            A train moans from a far hummock.

Which reminds me that everyone I have to live without
            I must help to find a place within. Which is an act

of granite will. A strain. A ditty.
            An exercise in utmost beautility.

I often wonder: do other poets feel overwhelmed by doubt as I do? In this era of social media, it appears not. But then social media is an illusion, right?

I remember when my first book, The Book of Orgasms, was published by Asylum Arts. A large box of books arrived in the mail. I ripped open the box, picked up one book, read a poem, and then quickly put the book back, sealed the box back up, and carried it to the basement. I told no one about the book in my basement. Shortly after, the basement flooded. All the books had to be taken to the dump, along with the carpet and an array of boxes filled with childhood memorabilia. I was so relieved to get rid of those books. I thought, now that’s the end of that book.

This was back in 1996, before social media, before all the pressure was placed on writers to promote themselves. I miss those years! Somehow, in spite of myself, the book made its way into the world. I gave only one reading from the first edition of The Book of Orgasms, and it was to an audience of fifteen people.  

So why, after all these years and many books, do I still feel so unsure of myself?  I don’t know, but I think it might have something to do with the difference between writing and promoting your work. Or maybe it's just stage fright, as portrayed in this poem by Wislawa Szymborska.

 For me, writing poetry is a private act. Writing poetry is like dancing alone in an unlit room to music only I can hear. Because no one is watching, I can transform into the prima ballerina. I am so graceful, the air becomes my friend—it lifts me up and up. I orbit the ceiling a few times then, fly out of the window and into the heavens and beyond before I come back again and land noiselessly on the page. I have so much fun, I think, this should be illegal.  Then, someone turns on the light. I realize I am in a room with a one-way mirror, that everything I’ve done has been recorded. People can see in, but I can’t see out. It’s like a nightmare written by Sartre.  

The dance metaphor I used (and I do think writing poetry is like practicing ballet) reminds me of this beautiful poem by David Tucker. And, in a very different way, of a surreal poem fragment by Peter Johnson, master prose poet, whose humor and gift keeps me afloat in times like these.  

The Dancer by David Tucker

Class is over, the teacher
and the pianist gone,
but one dancer
in a pale blue
leotard stays
to practice alone without music,
turning grand jetes
through the haze of late afternoon.
Her eyes are focused
on the balancing point
no one else sees
as she spins in this quiet
made of mirrors and light—
a blue rose on a nail—
then stops and lifts
her arms in an oval pause
and leans out
a little more, a little more,
there, in slow motion
upon the air.

From Observations at the Edge of the Abyss by Peter Johnson

The dancing instructor who swears he is my brother. Who pretends to have read my translations of Catullus and walked my pug in a rainstorm that was so violent it forced the words “cyclone” and “bomb” to be used together. The guy who could argue about the length of Freud’s beard, and who once said, “What choices would you make if you lived your life hovering above the earth in a hot air balloon?” The dancing instructor who right now hands me a pair of shiny winged toe shoes and a coin guaranteed to grant me only half of what I might wish for.

Free download of Observations at the Edge of the Abyss is available here:  “Observations from the Edge of the Abyss” by Peter Johnson (bepress.com)