The Best American Poetry

The Poet's Notebook [by Andrew McCarron]

REVIEW OF KYTHE HELLER’S FIREBIRD

 

Last August, I read Kythe Heller’s new book-length poem, Firebird (Arrowsmith Press, 2020), in a single sitting. Inspired by Sufi mysticism and by traumatic and kairotic events from her own life, the poem performs a theology of transformation in which purgative fires of struggle and pain become a path to awaken on. Pain in the poem isn’t something to be forgotten once things get better, or an illness to be narcotized, nor is it an occasion for poeticized identity narcissism. Pain becomes a site of grace, a pyre in which holy flames burn silence into song, madness into mysticism, body into spirit, and self into community.

The poem began as a series of notebook jottings. Kythe explained her process in an email:

I think of notebooks expansively, not only as a conventional and necessary literary practice on the page but also as an initiatory practice -- translating dreams and actual events and insights, into scraps of images, films, sounds, song, ritual, shared dreams or poems with which people can experiment and live new realities together. Over the course of several years of intensive spiritual practice, while writing Firebird, I also started a collective of artists and creatives, first in NYC and then in Cambridge, MA, eventually called VISION LAB, and some of the original material for Firebird came out of these living experimental notebooks. I was writing and then we also started to act out these dreams together, which led to more writing. The work became a book and then a set of fluid performance ritual pieces, living poems, performance scores or inhabited, experimental poems, like a living notebook of new forms.

As the title suggests, the poem’s element is fire, both in its destructive and transformative capacities. The flames surround, engulf, and transform a feminine subject who takes on several related identities: a teenage runaway, a burning girl, a feral child living in society’s margins, and a mystic-poet. The storylines of these individuals come in and out of focus -- at times existing as parallel novels in miniature and other times merging into the fold of a single story. The 64-page poem, which has an experimental quality due to frequent shifts between verse and prose, expressive uses of punctuation, ambulatory perspectives, and incantatory rhythms, is divided into five interlocking sections, with each section building on the resonances of the sections that precede it: “The Burning Girl”; “Mattress Under The Overpass”; “The Spirit Neither Sorts Nor Separates”; “Runaway”; “That Heart.” Whether the mysterious subjects who breathe, burn, and “become” across the five sections are different people, the same person, the poet herself, or even the reader remains unclear at first. The shifting pronouns (I, she, you) create a shared experience of brokenness and becoming familiar to seekers who walk down the spiritual path. 

The poem invites the reader into its life, mining experience for shared magma: “The body of eyes everywhere a joyful sobbing: everywhere a crackling wash of cries where the glowing coals emerge / just at the center of the fluff of ash and blackened fabric--” Like Eliot’s Quartets, Firebird doesn’t present “the lifetime of one man only.” I felt this to be true when I first read the poem last summer and even more so when I reread it this past week. Like her mentor and friend Fanny Howe, Kythe’s poetry performs mystical theology in a language of experimental poetics that invites the reader in. Both writers seek to say something barely communicable but commonly experienced by spiritually oriented people, which, according to Paul Tillich, is potentially everyone. 

A burning girl haunts the poem, setting its pages ablaze. She sits at the center of the work in a circle of flames. At first, the girl’s obsession with fire is emblematic of a self-destructive impulse, a promethean urge destructively rendered: “But how could I open the door / while she stood there burning?” the poet asks. The burning girl, a possible Jungian shadow, shows up at her door demanding entry. “I stood at the door of my life / but she was already there,” reads the opening couplet. “Her skin swollen. / And in her eyes / pain like a flower opening its body forever.” By the poem’s second page, it becomes clear that the poet and burning girl are the same person. Like the Gerasene Demoniac described in the gospels, the poet seems to be recalling a time when her self-unity was fragmented by the trauma of abuse, neglect, and social estrangement. Fire becomes an object of seduction for the girl. It calls to her like flames call to a pyromaniac. 

The burning girl is depicted at first as problematic, uncontainable, dangerous. Who’s more feared than a fire-obsessed, self-harming woman with wild hair living in the woods on the outskirts of town? The poem touches on this in an interpolative moment: “There were fire marshals signaling. This is illegal, they said. With enormous effort, I prevented myself thinking the thing inside the match that wanted out. And then, because I had to, because the fire could not be prevented, I wrote this.” As Jungians know, the key to our evolutionary growth as people can often be found in the bewildering symbols and plotlines that populate our fantasies and nightmares. Everything is meaningful.  

Fire becomes a meaningful site for transformation through the poem. The firebird is the phoenix, the immortal bird from Greek mythology that cyclically regenerates from the ashes of the fires that consume it. The subject of the poem is transformed through a process of negation that, like death by fire, is brutal and unspeakable in its infernal erasures. Birth names are burned away (“...She wanted meaning. / And her given name sounded fake, like a porn star”), previous selves and their aspirations are burned away (“to burn away what she was, what she meant / to become--”), suffering and desire are burned away (“Look inside the mattress, the suffering / burns. The desire / to heal again through suffering burns”), possessions are left behind (“Leave all that is mine on the street again”), and the body and its sensations are immolated as well (“Joy or anguish, to be born in fire, in the elemental moment, to feel the flames coursing over my bones, caressing every cell with light / until at last the fire bent down low over / the rib cage, / and reaching, reached in”). What remains is the beating heart of who we are at the level of shared spirit (“Never knowing the difference / between your own heart pumping 1,640 beats a minute / and the heart of the world into which you fly / What trust”). The turbulence and pain of the past aren’t disavowed. They become a path that culminates in compassion and moral clarity.   

Like many poetic works that engage the immaterial world, the experience of Firebird doesn’t easily lend itself to the prodding and summations of literary criticism. The poem performs its purpose in its own apophatic terms when read or performed. Perhaps this is why it has been performed as a musical album in collaboration with the composer/musicians Andrew Stauffer and Nicholas Denton Protsack of Sounds Like Things, as well as four short video poems, in collaboration with talented video and movement artists Anya Yermakova, Grace Jackson, and Marizo Siller, among others.

When our society talks about positive change on an individual level, it’s often couched in material terms. We talk about changing our careers, our life partners, our scenery, our cognitive, affective & narrative patterns, and our brain chemistry. Firebird enacts a different sort of change, a change of spirit that renders everything we’ve lost, all our scars, all our shocked silences, and all the times we’ve been alone in the darkening wood – into a meaningful process. It’s a process through which we can find our hearts “melted into the form of liquid pearl.” Even if we remain exiled from the homes of our birth, there’s nothing in our lives that can’t help us find a final home in the capacities of our heart. The final line of Firebird asks, “In that heart, what point is there in dying or being born again?”  

"Retronym time" from "Time Pieces" [by Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967-2009]

from "Time Pieces" by Rachel Wetzsteon

Cheering: it was done.
But soon the Great War would be
renamed World War One. 

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

"Time Pieces," a brilliant sequence of haikus, firstappeared in The New Criterion and was selected by Kevin Young forThe Best American Poetry 2011 and by Robert Pinsky for inclusion in The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition, which Scribner published in 2013. A Yale alumna, Wetzsteon did her graduate work at Johns Hopkins and Columbia. She taught at Barnard College. A poet of great intelligence and formal ability, she had just been named poetry editor of The New Republic when she died by her own hand on or just before Christmas 2009.

-- sdl (11/11/18)

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets? 

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you, today?

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

Woman and Skeleton [by Albert York]

The Winning Entry: "When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan" [by Angela Ball] with judge Jim Cummins's comments & runners up

Charles Bukowski in One Corner; in the Other, Bob Dylan

If anyone should take eighteen-shot Dylan Thomas’s name,
it’s me. I challenge you to a duel
with two bottles of Four Roses.

--Chuck, that may be you, but
me, I crossed the green mountain
I slept by the sea.
you’re walkin’ in dreams
where black is the color
and nothing the number.

Bob, I got to tell you
I’m sorry for my wife
I’m sorry for anyone’s wife.
If you want me, find me clinging to a freight car,
Find me underground.
But you’ll never find me
vagrant in the rain, nabbed by a rookie cop,
a skirt, no less,
in Long Branch, New Jersey.

-- Angela Ball

James Cummins writes:

As with most of David's prompts, this one resulted in some terrific entries.  I went with Angela Ball's poem for the first prize, but there was a good pool to pick from (I counted eight entries as possibles).  It came down to some great lines.  Angela wrote (in Buk's voice) "I'm sorry for my wife / I'm sorry for anyone's wife" which seemed to me to combine the compassion B. tried to keep hidden with the world-weariness we love about the guy.  And the ending, referring to Dylan's run-in with the police in 2009, who thought he was a homeless vagrant, was perfect; the word "skirt" was inspired.  George Schaefer's prose-poem "scene" takes second; it combines the grittiness of many of the entries with a lyric grace I love.  "The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour" and "Poetry only happens when nothing else can" are two examples.  And again, the ending is perfect.  Finally, Adam Baron's poem gets honorable mention for the use of the word "dumb," the moon sitting on Bukowski's solipsistic rim, and the friendly atmosphere of two schmucks having a moment together.  The difference between these three and at least four or five other entries is as thin as the bill Buk slides into his favorite pinball machine.  Thanks to all.  

George Schafer's prose poem (second place):

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

A jaded old bard pounds a shot of J.D. and mocks an idealistic young troubadour. “So just how many beers must one man drink before he’s allowed to pass out?” The bartender chuckles at the joke. The young troubadour debates if Jesus will ever forgive these sins. Loose leaf papers holding his poems gets blown away in the wind. With a soul deader than a dead Christmas tree, the jaded old bard orders another beer and another shot. The bluebird in him allows him to order a round for the idealistic young troubadour. After all, poetry only happens when nothing else can. The sooner this kid learns the ways of the world the better. The young troubadour claims everyone gets stoned so he can abide. He pulls up a stool and throws down the shot. Old poet says “Don’t try.”

Adam Baron's poem (third place)

When Charles Bukowski Met Bob Dylan

Night fell, broke.
One day they'll reward you old man.
Chuck laughed. Me? Not me, but I'll tell you
this: if I knew guitar I'd strum the
moon out of the dumb sky. I'd make it sit on
the edge of my glass - and stare
at me for a change.
But you don't, Bob said
and Chuck laughed. Then I'll leave it
where it is, which he did, and
though Bob tries now and then, he
can't shift it.

Bill Zavatsky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Zavatsky. Photo by Nora Howard

____________________________________________________________

104 Bus Uptown

 

How bad can it be,

dear wacky New York City,

when the first twelve lines

of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

blink down at me

from a poster on this bus

brought to us

courtesy of the MTA

and the Poetry Society of America

(of which, incredibly, I am a member!)

and, to its right, above the rear door,

another poster: Charles Reznikoff’s little poem

about how “the lights go out—”

in the subway

“but are on again in a moment,”

a poem I will be teaching to my students

in a few weeks’ time.

And perched in the center back seat

(she got on at Seventh Avenue and 42^nd Street),

sitting all alone, as if on a little stage

lit by the bus-window daylight of midtown New York,

the beautiful actress Beverly D’Angelo

whom I can’t bring myself to ask

if she is Beverly D’Angelo, except that I

recognize the perfection of her charming overbite

as she chews gum like mad over wild blue eyes agog,

behaving as if she’s never sat on a bus before

or as if she expects a passenger to leap up

at any moment and cry, “Action!,”

with the cameras rolling like the eyes in my head

as I turn now and again to look at her

in her white jacket and skirt that don’t

quite match, a silk turquoise blouse

that color-keys her enormous eyes

(which just got off with the rest of her

at 57^th and Eighth), and I’m lucky

enough to have been handed this

piece of paper twenty minutes ago

by someone on the street who must be

a secret agent for poetry, though it seems

to be merely an advertisement flyer

for 45^th Street Photo, on the back of which

I’ve just written this poem  

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Zavatsky has published two full-length books of his own poetry, most recently Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose Press), three chapbooks, and two books of co-translation (Earthlight: Poems by André Breton, with Zack Rogow; and The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, with Ron Padgett). His poems have appeared on CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has been teaching since time immemorial, most recently a poetry workshop via Morningside Poets in Manhattan. [For more information on, and poems by, Bill Zavatsky, check this link.]

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                Beverly D’Angelo

 

"The Morning Line" by David Lehman: Poetry Feature of the Month on "The Common"

Today The Common published The Morning Line, the title poem of my new poetry collection, as its poetry feature of the month. I wrote the poem on May 22, 2020, having always wanted to write a poem with that resonant title. The phrase dictated the subect matter: chance, gambling, and faith. Here are the opening two stanzas of this extended three-part meditation. -- David Lehman

The Morning Line

— May 22, 2020

1.

You can pick horses on the basis of their names
and gloat when Justify wins racing’s Triple Crown 
or when, in 1975, crowd favorite Ruffian, “queen 
of the century,” goes undefeated until she breaks down 
in a match race with Derby winner Foolish Pleasure. 
Who could root against Ruffian? 
Did patriotic Englishmen cheer 
when Sir Winston won the Belmont last year? 

I rejoiced when Monarchos, a ten to one bet, became 
the second horse ever to break the two-minute mark
at the Kentucky Derby. Why did I pick it? I liked the name.
Those two minutes in May 2001 and the giddy hours after 
now seem a little like a garden party in England in July 1914 
as the nineteenth century approached the finish line 
and collapsed.

Please click here to read the rest of the poem.

The Thief at the 8th Street Bodega [by Aspen Matis]

Shortly after my husband disappeared into a funeral 
I began to shoplift prepared foods from salad bars.
Each morning, I woke in the mermaid bra
I’d worn under my wedding gown,
with consequence: I became a prisoner
of bad rituals.

There are storms in fall
in New York state,
quick darkness in the middle of the day
in the stares of friends.

Humiliation 
is a hot orange color I see daily
like a gutter along a sidewalk, 
forever clogged with the muck of summer’s leaves. 
And lightning is temporary,
but the fire that raids
the fruit from trees
turns the world black for a generation,
when the sudden electricity is electrosurgery, 
removing all green lettuce from the heart.
Plums: also gone.

I wanted the world
to take care of me;
stealing from anonymous crates,
I wanted to win back
tangible dreams, too imprecisely
conjuring my lost husband.
Or his shade of violet rage, mute beige 
apathy, death in good health.
What is loss’s color?

maybe silver, like a dream I keep
or from a screen—
that old film
where a girl followed
a boy to New York.

At a bodega on 8th,
a couple is touching.
He kisses her cheek
how sweetly he buys her
milk and a can of golden peaches.
I see it, vividly. I pick a soft pear 
from the black crate
and strut
out onto the sunlit bluish
grey sidewalk like
I am invisible.
Like the sun is night.

I can’t go on.
I place the pear on the concrete 
and begin to walk again.
This gutter is too straight
and it is daytime.

Aspen Matis is the author of Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir (Little A, June 2020). Called “fearless…A beautifully written story of inspiration, courage, and ultimate transformation” by Booklist, the book was a #1 Amazon bestseller in memoirs. Author Deepak Chopra said the memoir “will open the door to empathy, compassion, and healing.” Novelist Aimee Bender called Your Blue Is Not My Blue “gorgeous…a gripping read that wrestles honestly and sensitively with the ways we connect and the ways we miss one another.”

Matis’s short-form writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Psychology Today, Salon, Bloomberg, and Marie Claire. Her first book, the critically acclaimed memoir Girl in the Woods, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Called “a powerful read” by O, The Oprah Magazine, the book made The Guardian's annual top 50 list. The New York Times named Matis “a hero.”

Click here to read interviews of poets conducted by Aspen Matis for the Best American Poetry blog.

An Introduction to Martin Johnston (Part 1) [by Thomas Moody]

Martin Johnston was a member of a generation of Australian poets who, in the words of John Tranter, “revitalized Australian poetry” in the late 1960s and 1970s. Born in Sydney and brought up on the Greek island of Hydra (where Leonard Cohen was a frequent houseguest), Johnston’s upbringing provided his poetry with a unique reference point: he knew ancient Greek, learned katharevousa Greek (an artificial hybrid conceived in the 18th century) and spoke and wrote demotic Greek, thimotki. As a child he immersed himself in Homer and in his teens began translating the work of modern Greek poets such as George Seferis and CP Cavafy.

As the eldest son of Australian literary royalty, the essayist Charmain Clift and George Johnston, whose novel My Brother Jack won the Miles Franklin Award and is a seminal piece of mid-century Australian literature, Martin seemed predestined to be a writer. Johnson’s poetry is immensely allusive, evocative and erudite. His remarkable knowledge of classical Greek, his lifelong interest in chess, and his innate curiosity which led him to explore esoteric philosophies all find their way into his poetry.

 

In Nadia Wheatley’s introduction to Johnston’s recently issued selected poems, Beautiful Objects, she notes “Martin Johnston did not speak demotic Australian. But his Greek was the people’s Greek”. It is for this reason, perhaps, that his translations of contemporary Greek poetry come to us with such power and immediacy, and might represent the best entry point into his work.

Here are two of such translations. The first is an anonymous folk song, one of dozens which Johnston had been translating since his days as a schoolboy. The second is by Andhreas Karandonis, for whom, I’m pleased to report, google has no answers.

 

Pass By My Country

My friends of Roumeli, and you, sons of Moria,
by the bread we have eaten together,
by our brotherhood,
pass by my country and by my people.
Don't enter the village by sunlight
don't enter the village by moonlight
don't shoot your guns
don't sing your songs
for fear my mother might hear you, and my poor sister.
But if they come and ask you, the first time say nothing,
and if they doubly ask you, a second and third time,
don't tell them I've been killed and make them sad hearted.
Just tell them that I've married here, here in these parts,
I have taken the grave for a mother-in-law,
the black earth for a wife,
and these strewn stones for my brothers and cousins.

                                                    —Anon

Old Horoscopes

Now don't you fret, Mr Sylvester, nothing wrong with the shop
though I won't say it's the best—pride before a fall and so on,
and besides, you never know what you're in for.
    But as I was saying,
I was born around the same time as plenty of others,
each of us due for something different. Some of us
    having to work,
others getting learning, or love, or being pious in monasteries,
or summer holidays by the sea or in the hills,
or the highest honours of state.
Anyway, Mr Sylvester, I turned out to be a boy, of course,
which pleased my parents no end. My father celebrated
by taking a couple of potshots at the rooftrees across the road
and the trees (it was winter) kind of shone in the snow.
Everyone was happy and shouting, and he pulled 
the blinds back
and peered out at the first star he spotted—
actually it happened that only one was shining
at the time, the evening star as we call it.
He had this idea that he could bargain with the star,
maybe come to some agreement about my future;
who doesn't want his son to be a king? But,
well, Mr S., as you can see, i never did become a king 
or anything of the sort.
True enough, I've turned out to be a good tradesman
with one of the best businesses in town. Even so—
if I could only ask that evening star to come down a bit closer
and make an appointment, over there beyond the last trees,
I'd skip the till for a while and ask it:
What was the arrangement? Did you take any notice
of my father's look, of my poor father's pleading gaze?
 
                                                    —Andhreas Karandonis

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Over There

I have always assumed that my body would provide
reliable transportation to carry me through the day
and no I will not extend that metaphor
and if you know what that means
you’ll know what I mean.

John Ashbery once said
“I never get up before the crack of noon.”
Pope Francis said
“I am Argentinian. You know
how an Argentinian commits suicide?
He climbs up on top of his ego and jumps off.”
“That’s all, Bruno,”
Fairfield Porter said to his dog.
Does it help to know that Bruno was a golden retriever?
And that Fairfield was invisible?

--Ron Padgett

Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. Padgett’s most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). Forthcoming is Dot (Coffee House Press). New York City has been his home base since 1960.

The New York School Diaspora (Part Fifteen): Ron Padgett [by Angela Ball]

Carved from silence, Ron Padgett’s “Over There,” refuses to “extend” its opening metaphor. Yet it is expansive. As in Frank O’Hara’s poems, all people known in fact or reputation, living or dead, are free to enter, to be heard. “I never get up before the crack of noon,” says John Ashbery, at once sardonic and cheerful, invoking both “crack of dawn” and “crack of doom.” The pope, God’s arm on earth, imagines his own suicide in a joke—though in it, his ego remains, a vertical ghost.

As in Kenneth Koch’s late poem, “Proverb,” “Les morts vont vite.” Though we may prefer to regard mortality as “over there,” world vanishes for all: poet, pope, dog, even painter—maestro of the visible (of course, he names his dog a color, a color the dog isn’t). Reading Fairfield Porter’s succinct send-off to Bruno, we hear Mel Blanc’s Porky Pig sputter “Th-that’s all, folks”—the phrase Blanc chose as epitaph.

The office Fairfield Porter performs for his dog, Ron Padgett’s “Over There” performs for us. In surrounding mortality with play, he looses its darkness. Art’s scarifying knowledge confers power. Yes, it helps.

--Angela Ball

Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker: Syntax, Sound, and Sensation

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. He was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014.  He received the 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2016

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

from the archive; first posted September 29, 2016

The End of Summer--Tutti Frutti Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

Summer is ending, but the impulse to pile on the fruit is almost irresistible. For Labor Day I made a Lemon Mascarpone tart with a combination of plums, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. Right away the Italian description "tutti frutti" came to mind. It translates as "all the fruits." I didn't manage to do that, but I did my best. 

A week later for my friend Elizabeth's birthday, I made Patricia Wells' Lemon Lover's Tart, because lemon is her favorite. I've made this tart over and over, but I've never made this Tutti Frutti version. I also wanted to try out my tartlet tins.

The pandemic has made all kinds of obsessions seem less weird. I'm studying French and Italian on Duolingo, talking things over with my little cat Patsy, and all summer I made fruit tarts. Oh, I also wrote a lot of poems. I call that a good summer. Thanks for sharing it with me. -- Barbara Hamby

RIP Stephen Dunn, 1939-2021 [by Howard Altmann]

Stephen Dunn passed away in June of this year. He was 82 and had suffered from Parkinson's. An exquisite and life-affirming Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, he took the ordinary and made it extraordinary. He moved silence to new depths of sound. He touched the untouchable and handed us the treasure of what can be discovered in all that's buried between us; within us; in all that we have. -- Howard Altmann

Poem for People Who Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry [by Stephen Dunn]

 

Relax. This won't last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there's a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he'll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you're busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party's unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don't think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don't know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it's needed. For it's apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don't give anything for this poem.
It doesn't expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house. And if you're not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:

Good. Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You're beautiful for as long as you live.

 

https://poets.org/poet/stephen-dunn

https://poets.org/poem/here-and-now

"The Two-Party System" [by Walter Carey]

The Republicans are like
a drowning man
who pulls down
his rescuer thinking
he's pulling him to safety

and the Dems are like
the girl on the shore
who pulls down
her boy-cut hipsters
when no one's watching

-- Walter Carey

"Bad Workshops" [by Alan Michael Parker]

In the Spring of 2013, I taught the worst undergraduate poetry workshop ever. The students were marvelous and curious and smart; the writing distinctive; the books were scintillating; the visiting poets I brought wow, wow, wowed us; the final projects demonstrated learning and promise; and the camaraderie was memorable. Everything came together. Why then was the workshop so awful? Because all of the above assessments were mine, based on my aesthetics, to make me happy, and far too much of the learning was merely parroted. And I didn’t realize until later that summer how much I had fallen for my own image in the mirror of my pedagogy. It wasn’t a workshop, it was a self-portrait.

Of course, criticism of the standard workshop method, the “workshop poem,” and the Po’ Biz remains a commonplace in higher education, low-hanging fruit. I have eaten such plums: they are not delicious. Nevertheless, I would like here to enumerate even more criticism of the workshop, in the name of teaching a better workshop. What follows is a critique of a peculiar system of learning in which I believe, and in which students prosper. I offer, then, some issues that I haven’t seen discussed as much as I’d like, and I do so trusting wholly that the internet will protect me from the spurious anti-intellectualism, ad hominen whining that runs rampant in so much of our social media. I trust, too, that many good teachers of writing have already addressed my concerns in their classes, and for these teachers, the oddments I offer will seem simplistic and self-evident. But maybe not.

Contrarily, ultimately, I shall offer my optimism: I believe that the workshop, and some version of the standard workshop method, are right for the teaching and learning of poetry writing. So there. As a graduate student colleague once declared of my poems in Denis Johnson’s workshop, millennia ago, even of this compost, a pretty petunia might yet grow. (Not to dishearten, but that colleague became a powerful literary agent.)

Here are a few of my concerns. Following each, I offer remedy, mostly approaches that I have begun to explore in my teaching over the past two years. My hope is that these musings inspire and incite more than dictate... the ideas, dear people, the ideas...

Old New Critics

The standard workshop method assumes that the poem exists in a vacuum. Sure, readers are expected to Google what they don’t know, and provide a gloss on allusions or esoterica, but mostly we’re close-reading based on the idea that the text is self-contained, all of its meanings waiting to be divined. In this procedure, the poem could be a poem written in any moment, last year, five years ago, next month, and by anyone in the room; the poem’s hiding everything we need to figure out the poem, and we’re all scientists of the poem, committed to its self-contained (yielding and un-) truths.

I don’t know about you, but I gave up reading this way twenty-five years ago, when I discovered Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination—gosh, even the most doleful literary critics rarely default to New Criticism exclusively any more—and yet I continued to act as though such hermeneutics best suit the teaching of creative writing.

One way to address the matter: shift the conversation away from the assumption that the poem knows all. Which is not to suggest that the critique of the work be eliminated, but that “what works/what doesn’t” need not be handed to the poet like a prescription at the end of a class session. Instead of laying claim in the name of explicating try asking: What’s the poem about on the surface? What’s it really about? Distinguish between content and subject. What assumptions about language, and power, may be read in the poem’s procedures? Why this poem now? What’s been left out of the poem? What are the poem’s formal ambitions? What’s remembered about the poem later? What image abides? These questions necessarily recognize that the poem exists in a cultural context, in an historical moment, and aspires to a condition of art.

There are many such questions to ask, as a way to speak to the poem’s purview without sacrificing rigor—and ultimately, if the questions are well-asked and pursued thoughtfully, the poet may feel empowered fully to write, revise, and write again.

Real Poets

Oh, the lives we lead. No one believes that we’re pure products of our childhoods, and yet, that assumption pervades what’s not said in workshops. Autobiography necessarily complicates our abilities as writers to revise, given the connection between the life and the text, but even more of a problem, early poets usually believe they are the “I” in their own poems—this despite the workshop’s default terminology, using “the speaker” to differentiate between author and character, a move that for an early poet simply glosses over the problem. As such, early poets may read their colleagues’s poems as thinly veiled forays into the autobiographical, the presumption a cherished secret. Of course, these early poets are right, and the “I” is an attempt to contain and perform the “real” person—it’s true in my poems too, when I’m not fanatically inventing speaking selves, further complicated by my enthusiasm for fictional childhoods. But even still, there are other ways to think about the self, and other ways to approach an early poet’s work of art. The self in a poem is not only a palimpsest.

Ask the poet at the outset what she or he wants from readers, and from the workshop. Ask the poet to identify what she or he was trying to work on, what couldn’t be fixed, or what feels right. Yes, use the word “feels.” Ask the poet the “secret title” of the poem, that is, the title she or he uses when thinking about the poem. Ask the poet to identify the moment in the poem of greatest invention—and don’t define “invention,” so that the term can be treated formally or semantically. Ask the poet to identify who in her or his life should not read the poem, using initials if need be.

In other words, before the critique begins, acknowledge the living artist’s role in the production of the work of art. Turn the subsequent conversation to include these ambitions.

When validation of the living writer-in-the-room becomes part of the workshop, the opportunity arises to shift focus from the autobiographical past to the artistic present, while keeping an eye on the changeable future.

Medical Ethics

In the standard workshop method, the poet reads the poem aloud, shuts up, we talk, bingo, the poet takes home a broken poem, diagnosed, the poet unhappy. Are all poems broken? Need this be the only approach to a poem that’s not yet succeeding?

Any way you can, teacher, change it up. Conduct a workshop in which only the very best moments in each poem are up for discussion: ask the cohort “What’s the sequel to this poem?” Conversely, “What’s the prequel?” Lead a discussion of the poem’s use of silence—I know, irony abounds, but behave yourself. Ask the question Joseph Brodsky would ask us, when reading Auden, “For what moment was the poem written?” In other words, by any means, while critiquing the poem valorize the effort, and never default to the diagnostic, and never pathologize.

Professor for a Day

I wonder sometimes if I were to close my eyes, would my students still look at me when they speak? (And, of course, how would I know?) Students are so often so anxious to impress—which I certainly felt in the presence of my teachers. Too often, students critique a colleague’s poem while searching for my approval. My authority reigns, and I’m not only talking about the history of gendered power in the workshop environment. Paradoxically, when I move to correct the problem, I perpetuate its condition: by instructing people to talk with and to one another, I reify my ability to give orders.

It’s naturally a huge challenge for the teaching artist, to empower students without sacrificing expertise. Of late, I’ve been trying not to provide a summary at the end of each discussion, i.e. I don’t want the final say. I sit in a different chair each week, hoping to disabuse myself of the inevitability of my authority, and even more hopeful that the students will address one another. I appoint a Professor-for-the-Day—they’re encouraged to call on me as needed—or, alternatively, the person to the left of the poet becomes the primary respondent. I try not to digress on the use of the lower case ‘i’ in Lucille Clifton’s work, at least not in class, even though that information might appear relevant. Instead, I hope to note the phenomenon and then move to another subject, or better yet be moved. I wait an extra week to provide the poet with my written commentary, so that I don’t overwhelm the efficacy of the workshop discussion, or drown out anyone. It’s all so I don’t talk first and last.

These days, from the outset, I warn students that while I think I’m right, I’m asking that they help me to see how I’m not, and that doing so needs to be more than showmanship, or a game. I want us to be wrong together.

Available Now: The Best American Poetry 2021

Find your copy here.

Homage to Irving Berlin

with thanks to Rick Winston

And if you can, listen to Bruce Adolphe and Fred Child on NPR's "Great Performances": they may just take a Berlin standard ("Cheek to Chek," say) and have it performed as if it were a Mendelssohn piano concerto.

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.

Relevant Nature [by Vincent Katz]

In 1928, André Breton published the novel Nadja, loosely based on a brief affair. Text from the back cover the Grove Press edition, translation by Richard Howard, calls the novel “the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life” and goes on to state, “The first person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work — pictures of various ‘surreal’ people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja’s presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.” Breton invented a genre, the book as photographic prose poem, which has found new life today.

In Breton’s day, taking all the photos and having them printed and readied for publication were arduous tasks; today all that is almost an afterthought. Some creative artists today have been stimulated to try to reinvigorate the photograph in its relation to text, thereby heightening both the potential of image, usually produced via that mundane accessory, the smart phone, and the text, which often lingers in some nebulous zone, neither poetry nor prose, a different gambit from the blending of the two that entranced French authors last century.

When Claudia Rankine used photos in her epoch-marking Citizen, the images were usually in the mode of illustrations, or jumping-off points for her verbal manifestations. In her follow-up, the massive and in some ways more experimental Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), the photos are still illustrative, often historical in nature, but they are simultaneously more deeply embedded in the book’s meaning.

A more experimental approach, one with deeply satisfying results in terms of the co-habitation of word and image is s*an d. henry-smith’s Wild Peach, published by Futurepoem in 2020. henry-smith is an artist and writer, and everything about Wild Peach makes it clear the book has been thought about as an object in its entirety. The endpapers and dividers are a dusky mustard yellow. The typography and layout of the titles is raw and energetic. Eager to get to the first section, “in awe of geometry & mornings,” one turns the page and finds a centered photo of a hazy view of a dried-out field being moisturized by the obscuring fog above it. Turning the page again brings us to the book’s first text, “dirty nails,” which begins, “eat me Infinity Serpent High Priestess of Sun the flowers we ate went straight to my hips rosy red w/ sweet water linen draped I feel so squishy today…” An erotics of the word reminding me of de Kooning’s erotics of paint is quickly palpable. Yet this short text ends surprisingly, “…I inhale light dirty pupil learns today how mud purifies & an increased sensitivity to nightshades I lift my head from the train tracks it is nice to sweat it reminds me that I am open whether I like it or not the conditions will decide”. This book is open, “dirty nails” beseeches almost that, despite everything not in our favor, we too should lift our heads from whatever train tracks we may find them on, to live in the squishiness of our real.

As the book continues, it swerves and peaks, picks up velocity, then swoops. All along, it is bringing us, however we are: “if it doesn’t cost me my life, it doesn’t cost anything at all.” Suddenly that line reminds me of a line from a different context, but now they are inextricably bound. It’s from a rehearsal by the Grateful Dead; before they start, Jerry says, “We’ve got nothing to lose but our lives.” I love that line too, because our lives are the most valuable things we have (wait a minute, did I not know that before reading Wild Peach?), and yet we must risk everything in any moment if we (the planet) are to survive. As henry-smith puts it in “calm down calm down,” “I’ve wasted a lot more time than necessary looking for the tools / they’ve always been right before me”. Wild Peach is a lush volume, the poetry as much as the photos, which are mostly of nature, but viewed in a way that makes it contemporary. Relevant nature. The more I read and look, the more I am amazed by its generosity.

My Parents on Yom Kippur, 1948 [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Kora Lives! [by Vincent Katz]

WKCR is on, as it often is at this time of day, and they are playing selections from Miles Davis’s fusion period — “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Splashdown,” to name two. It is providing the right vibe, as the radio often does, to composing thoughts about two books that are on my mind. When I was a teenager, a little after those Miles tunes were released, I had some favorite books of poetry. They were talismans, I carried them with me, they could ward off depression and evil by their mere presence, without even needing to be opened, or read. Part of that had to do with their physical presence. I remember the series of books Gary Snyder published with New Directions, especially, one summer, Earth House Hold. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, published by Grove Press (the edition with the red and purple cover overlaying a photo of O’Hara seated on a Gothic stool). The same poet’s Lunch Poems, from City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, back when the covers were not glossy. They were printed on soft card stock, each title in identifying format and design, differentiated by the color combinations. Lunch Poems will always recall the orange and blue in its layout. Another book I carried with me everywhere that summer I was 15 was another title from the Pocket Poets Series, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

I loved Kora in Hell. Just gazing at its cover was of inestimable benefit to me, and I enjoyed reading it. It felt very adult, its jokes easily understood, its thought-connections sublime and not necessarily accessible to all. It represented a kind of secret knowledge. This was unlike some of Williams’s better known poetry, which prided itself on using everyday language and meeting the reader halfway. That poetry was modern, in that it didn’t always feel like what poetry was supposed to feel like, but it was anti-modernist, or maybe non-modernist, in its ratcheting down of degree of difficulty. Anybody could read those poems (though not anybody can write them!). Kora was different. I liked the classical reference in the title, the Greek word kora itself, coupled with that word “Improvisations.” I think that was the one that got me the most. I was listening to a lot of jazz; the idea of improvising a book, or sections that made up a book, was thrilling to me.

Looking around last year, I realized I no longer had that copy of Kora, so I ordered another one. I made sure to order one from one of the earlier printings, a first edition it looks like. I just wanted to make sure I got one that looked and felt like the originals, as though it was made of cotton, dyed red. “March had always been my favorite month…” the prologue tells us. And, “What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination be called verse.” I agree with Williams that these are not like French prose poems, but to my mind they are poems in prose, or rather, one long poem in prose:

“Fools have big wombs. For the rest? — here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further : if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.”

That is the first section of the first “chapter”. Each chapter is composed of three numbered sections, some have which have corresponding texts in italics. I was going to say that my reading this time, some forty-odd years later, showed that these early experiments of Williams’s were not as successful as I remembered. But the reading, the looking at the text, does not allow me such an easy assessment. A poem can be made of anything we are told in Chapter XX. In the final chapter, we learn, “The particular thing… dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry.” A little more on imagination’s transformative power (“How ridiculous!”), how leaves blowing on the ground have forgotten the branch on which they grew, yet "somehow invoke a burst of warm days  not of the past  nothing decayed : crisp summer!” And the final paragraph informs us:

“Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises : this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness.”

Maybe it’s the way I read it that needs to change. Instead of starting at the beginning and attempting to forge straight through, I should glimpse things here and there, creating my own patterns within those suggested by the poet in his improvisations. Kora was first published in 1920 by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. At that time, Williams was half the age he would be (74) when the next edition, published by City Lights, came out.

Anne Waldman has a granddaughter named Kora. Anne the adept of so many traditions, including the Greek. I’ve been reading her many books, trying to keep up with her, delighted. Lately, I got focused on her 2004 book, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, published by Penguin in the Penguin Poets series. The books Waldman has published with Penguin form a remarkable series in that they are not so much collections of separate poems as book-length meditations on specific areas of consciousness: Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Trickster Feminism.

Structure may be the most particular of all, as it is devoted to a specific subject, a specific location, a specific object, a specific man-made holy sanctuary devoted to the veneration of the divine: the Borobudur stupa, built in the 9^th century CE in Java, Indonesia. An introductory note explains: “Designed as both mandala or psychological map for the Buddhist pilgrim, as well as a spiritual challenge to the curious layperson or secular aesthete, Borobudur was built on a hill that sits on Java’s lush Kedu plain. It has a long and complex history and was almost lost until its ‘discovery’ in the nineteenth century… Most powerful at this site perhaps is the narrative sequence of reliefs carved into the million stones, narratives which teach a spiritual, gentle, and harmonious way of life. The reliefs are arranged so that as one ascends the stupa the stories turn complicated and abstract… Borobudur is essentially an image of the world according to the Buddhism of the Mahayana.”

Waldman’s book is not so much about the stupa as it is a guide to Mahayana in the form of experimental poetry for which the poet has become known. Waldman has taken cues from Williams’ In the American Grain, his epic poem Paterson, and Charles Olson’s call for “a saturation job,” applying study to a wide range of topics. In Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, the reader is treated to Waldman’s takes on the “Four Noble Truths,” “Walking out of Six Styles of Imprisonment” (hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, warring god realm, god realm), 4^th century stories of the Buddha, “Mantra” (with paraphrase of Milton), “Steps of a Bodhisattva,” “Mudra,” “An Aside on Karma,” “Peregrinations of the Dakini” a Glossary and Bibliography. A Magnificent, Beneficent Tome! All should carry it with them! Come to the River, Put Down your Book, and Dive!

 

“Nations are narrations

Spiritual sites are narrations

Ineluctable witnesses to other narrations

Are the panoptic meditators in their own bell jars…

A connotative splendor resides here…”