The Best American Poetry

The Poetics of Distraction [by Jerome Sala]

Studying the rise of the novel, the distinguished scholar Franco Moretti wonders how people managed to read so many of them. He points out that though the numbers of readers in Western Europe roughly doubled in the 18th century, the circulation of novels increased 30-60 times.  He concludes that this was possible because people learned to read in a new, distracted way, surfing through titles, as it were.  Drawing on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Moretti argues that such a way of consuming helped people adapt to rapidly changing social and economic conditions.  It enabled them to become early multi-taskers.  And because the vast majority of what they read were action and adventure novels, their distracted reading also helped distract them from everyday tedium (like the action blockbusters flicks of today).

Moretti’s ideas got me thinking about the ways we’re taught to consume poetry.  If anything, what we learn in school about the form is the complete opposite of “distraction.”  Maybe it’s changed since I was a student, but I remember being taught that the form demanded rapt attention – that it was no country for the lazy reader.  (Of course, to be fair, something similar, if not as severe, was preached about the novel.)  In any case, I was wondering if there even was a more relaxed way to consume poetry.  And then I remembered how popular “Magnetic Poetry” once was in the corporate world where I work. 

 

Back in the early 90s, it was not uncommon when you strolled office halls to see, on the sides of file cabinets, tiny white, magnetic tiles forming snake-like patterns of humorous, surreal and usually mildly erotic word combinations.  It was as if Dave Kapell, the inventor of Magnetic Poetry (not a poet himself, but a musician), had found a way to market the Dada poem.  Dada offered a recipe for writing: cut up words from a newspaper, place in a bag, shake, empty, and record the results.  This was to make it easy for all to be poets.  But Magnetic Poetry made it even easier: they cut up the words for you, and placed a magnetic backer on them so they could be affixed to any metal surface.  And, judging from the fun people had playing with the tiles, magnetic poems did serve a function: they distracted their writers from a little of the tedium of 9-to-5.  As a result, the “Magnetic Poem” may be one of the bestselling poems of contemporary times: according to their website, over 3 million kits were unloaded.

With the rise of the Internet, the tiles quickly vanished from offices.  Now there are an infinite number of word recombination programs.  There are engines for writing entire poems, haiku generators and Magnetic Poetry itself has a free site with virtual tiles.  My current personal favorite is here, where a ghostly silhouette types your poem to order, from a flowing stream of words you play around with.  But there’s a drawback for me, to all this creative randomicity: I get bored with these games quickly.  It’s as if the tedium I was trying to escape, returns, like the fabled repressed. It all reminds me of what a copywriter friend told me in the early days of the Internet: it’s a revolution, all right, but often a dull one.  That’s why it’s necessary to keep hopping from site to site of these poem generators: as soon as some part of you recognizes a program at work, what you’re playing with loses its unexpected charms.

 

(Referred to in this piece: Franco Moretti.  “The Novel: History and Theory.”  New Left Review 52, July-August 2008.)

 

Jerome Sala lives and works in New York City.  His latest book of poems is Look Slimmer Instantly from Soft Skull Press. Read his other Best American Poetry post here.

 

from the archive; first posted October 29, 2008

from “The Hitchcocks” [by Peter Ferry]

“Call me Tommy,” the boy said.

They didn't. They called him “Earl” or “Earl the Pearl” or “Earrrl” or Earl the Girl.”

“Don't pay your brothers any mind,” his mother said peeling carrots into the sink. “Earl is a good name. It was your grandfather's name. Wear it proudly.”

“It's the name of an English Lord, said his father with dismissive impatience. That was how he said most things, and only his mother found it charming, and then not always and later not at all. Not even his father called him Earl or Earl Thomas or Tommy. He called him The Boy to distinguish him from his brothers who were nearly men by then, and what started as a description became a name, or nearly a name.

When the teasing or the indifference or the impatience got too bad, Earl left his place and went up the canyon to the Hitchcock's old ramshackle house. He didn't advertise the fact because he sensed even as a small boy that his family considered the Hitchcocks strange. And they were strange.

Wonderfully strange. Three brothers spaced a year apart the youngest of whom was a year older than Earl. Three brothers who talked fast, who walked fast often in lockstep with arms held at their sides, who usually had a purpose or a mission when no one else around him seemed to have either.

They would spread maps out on the dining room table and study them half standing, half leaning, one knee on a chair, pointing, talking all at once, tapping with their index fingers. They discovered or perhaps invented old Indian trails. They found an ancient wagon in the woods encased in vines which they were quite sure was a "caisson." Earl had no idea what a caisson was, and when he repeated the story to his parents, his father laughed derisively. “A caisson!” he said. That's when Earl stopped talking about what he did at the Hitchcocks' place.

What he did mostly was watch. What the Hitchcocks did was let him watch and, he was to realize looking back on that time, also perform for him. He became their audience, and as such they accepted him. That didn't happen at home. He watched the Hitchcocks build model airplanes using tiny tubes of glue and tweezers. Then they hung the planes from the rafters in their common room, something Earl knew that his parents would never allow. "Now this is Spitfire AB910 that flew 143 operations between 1941 and 1945," one of the Hitchcocks would say holding a tiny decal with the tweezers and studying it through a magnifying glass as he placed it on the plane's fuselage "just so. A steady hand is required." That's how the Hitchcocks talked. Earl was quite sure that they were all geniuses. He “arrived at this conclusion” (also how they talked) after a heated debate on the nature of genius, and who was (Einstein, Fermi, Madame Curie) and who wasn't (Henry Ford, Franklin Roosevelt and Lucile Ball included for consideration because someone in Parade magazine had called her a “comic genius”). Earl loved their debates. He watched them as if they were sporting events. The Hitchcocks paced, gestured, jumped up suddenly and sat down emphatically. They argued over the uses of nuclear power, who wrote Shakespeare's plays, space travel, the existence of God, UFOs, socialism, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of The New Deal. Their favorite topic, however, was the “future.” They were forever speculating about what the future world would look like.

"The Orgasm Farm" [by Nin Andrews]

It was a beautiful spring day in 1947 when Barb and Joe moved to their orgasm farm in scenic Virginia. Though they had spent years studying orgasmic farming methods, they decided that nothing could compare with hands-on experience. Barb and Joe were tired of being armchair scientists. Ready and eager to practice what they had only read about, they settled down to business. At first the farming was a struggle. Barb complained of feeling plowed under. Or too hot and sweaty. She was not accustomed to physical labor. Joe enjoyed farming so much, he didn't even stop for meals or sleep. Once Barb ran home to her mother. Joe had to beg her to return to the orgasm farm. Things were a little rocky, but Joe was determined that their relationship would become better without the use of any chemicals or hired hands. People laughed at them then. But Joe was a good man, patient and relentless. Willing to try again and again to plant an orgasm or two. His hard work paid off. That was twenty years ago. Today Barb and Joe have the most prolific orgasm farm around. They work well together and love what they do. Their little youngsters skip merrily in the verdant pastures. Barb and Joe know that someday new generations will carry on where they left off. They know others will come to enjoy it as much as they do.

from the archives; first posted March 17, 2008.

Introduction to The Incredible Sestina Anthology [by Daniel Nester]

What follows is the introduction I wrote for The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which is about to be released by Write Bloody Publishing. It's a culmination of about ten years of off-and-on work, which began when I edited the sestinas section of the McSweeney's website from 2003-2007. I wrote about that experience in Poets & Writers magazine; check out that piece here.

It was around this time that I dove into the sestina underground, where poets hid their single-sestina efforts deep in their hard drives, and others flaunted and fluttered their sheer love of sestinas, whole manuscripts of sestinas, double sestinas, sestina variants. I started to imagine what a whole collection, an anthology of sestinas, might look like: what would comprise a greatest-hits sestina book? What would the cumulative effect of reading 100 or more sestinas, all in one book, have upon the reader?

I started to collect sestinas. Hoard them, really. Folders filled with Xeroxes of inter-library-loaned sestinas, out-of-print sestinas, world-famous sestinas. I met in darkened parking lots to meet sestina informants, where words like rimas dissolutas and cansos redonda were whispered.

Slowly, the manuscript took shape into a proper book. In a couple days, the result, the modestly named The Incredible Sestina Anthology--shortened from its original name, The North American Bible of Incredible Sestinas--will be brought into the world. Only a few days ago did I get my own grubby Bavarian hands on a copy--in my college bookstore of all places--and the result, I daresay, is incredible. You can check out the Table of Contents here. 

What follows after the fold is a BAP Blog Exlusive, a reprint of the introduction I wrote for the book, I decided not to go in the wonky-scholarly direction, not only because that's just no me, as we say, but also because I think this book is for everyone, sestina nerds and nerds alike. Whoever you are, I hope you enjoy it.

***

First things first. You’re asking: Why in the world should I read a book of sestinas? I’m picturing you there after you plucked this book off a shelf. Maybe you’ve checked out its cover’s cool spiral pattern, or you’re previewing it online.

You’re asking: What in tarnation would compel anyone to collect a book of poems that use a form invented in medieval southern France, written in English 700 years later? Or maybe you’re asking: What the freak is a sestina anyway?

These are all reasonable questions.

Even those who’ve heard of this form or are inside the poetry world may ask what a sestina is. Believed to have been invented in the 12th century by Arnaut Daniel, a troubadour who influenced Dante, the sestina is a 39-line patterned form that has spiraled into a new life in English in the past 100 years or so.

Instead of a rhyme scheme (like the Shakespearean sonnet’s ABABCDCDEFEFGG) or a regular meter (like iambic pentameter’s da-DUM times five) or syllables (the 5-7-5 of English Haiku), a sestina uses a spiral, formed in a pattern of words that appear at the end of each line. Over the course of six stanzas of six lines (sestina translates as “six” or “sixer”) and a seventh three-line stanza, these end words, called teleutons or repitons, appear in a different order in each round, except for the final three-line stanza, called the envoi or tornada, which uses all six end words in a triumphant send-off. The last end word of each stanza is the first word of the next, which is why the sestina is called a linked form. Graphed-out in a word pattern, each number representing an end word, the sestina looks something like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

Why this pattern, you ask? The words spiral out to form the next stanza of the sestina. Like this crappy drawing I did just now:

This sestina pattern informs Matt Madden’s comic sestina, “The Six Treasures of the Spiral,” included here, and certainly is the reason why there are so many references to circles and spirals throughout this incredible anthology.

But isn’t this all ridiculous, you may ask? Sure! Also: insane, laughable, fun. Other guide-book descriptions are also ambivalent; they range from “elaborate” (Babette Deutsch) and “complicated” (Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz) to “often maddening” (Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux) and a “minor form” (James Fenton). Sestinas require “the poet’s deepest love and conviction,” Karl Shapiro writes, “as these take on a rather obsessive quality—if the poem is to offer us more than the pleasures of contrivance.” Ron Padgett, in his Handbook of Poetic Forms, describes the sestina as “delightful” and its spiral numerology an “ideal experiment for the mathematical mind.”

More than 800 years since its invention, the sestina survives and thrives in the modern world. After the troubadours, the sestina went silent, revived only occasionally. Why? Because that pattern is pretty freaking complicated. You saw that spiral graph, right?

After Sir Philip Sidney’s three sestinas in the 1570s, including his double sestina “You Goat-herd Gods” (78 lines!), there was a 200- year gap in English-language sestinas. Then, toward the end of the 19th century, there was a mini-comeback with Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. Rudyard Kipling’s “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” came in 1898, and ten years later came Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte,” included here, which sparked even more interest in the form.

By the mid-20th century, the English sestina renaissance began in earnest. Now, poets of each generation—no matter which stripe, school, movement, team, or club—have climbed Mt. Sestina: from Sherman Alexie and Louis Zukofsky to Patricia Smith and Elizabeth Bishop, from Carl Philips and Mark Strand to Wendell Kees and Marilyn Nelson. Formalists love the sestina for its ornate, maddening word repetition; avant-gardists love the sestina for its ornate, maddening word repetition. W.H. Auden’s “Paysage Moralisé” uses many of the same end words as Sidney did in “You Goat-herd Gods.” John Ashbery mashes up the Popeye comic strip. James Merrill uses variations of one, two, three, four, five, and six as he moves through the poem.

But is the sestina just a novelty, a technical exercise? It can be—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but the sestina’s formal constraints and linguistic freedom also open up new possibilities. One true test of any form—situation comedy, coming-of-age story, threeminute pop song, basic black dress—is how well it holds up when its boundaries are tested, when an artist smashes and stretches it, kicks the tires and soups up the engine. The sestina offers something for every poet. Let’s break out the big words: postmodern artifice, numerological mystery, procedural wordplay, conceptualist or formalist reverie. All these terms apply when explaining the sestina’s appeal.

Writing a sestina is like long-distance running, where going the distance puts the mind into a kind of trance. The challenge of using each end word seven times leads to “cheating,” swapping out soundalikes (“four” and “for”) or end words that can be a verb and a noun. Sometimes poets use one or more super-flashy words that stand out (see Amanda Nadelberg’s “My New Pet Word Is Mozzarella” or Harry Mathews’s “Histoire,” both included here). A sestina forces the poet to give in to echo and chance, to repeat when it’s just wrong, to sprawl on a wrestling mat just to get through the first draft.

Sestinas fail. There are sestinas that, on the surface, may strike the reader as, well, bad. Or dull. Or trite. Or “workshoppy.” “Mediocre talents are irresistibly drawn to forms like the sestina,” John Frederick Nims writes in his excellent study of the sestina, “which offer easy satisfaction in that they seem only forms that need filling out, like an application for a library card.” These revelations, shocking to some, have led many poets to dismiss the sestina form altogether, as if no other bad poems have existed elsewhere. James Cummins, whose essay on the sestina is a must, has a different take. “The sound of a bad sestina might be the sound of life leaving the beast,” he writes, “but at least it’s life.”

In many ways, this incredible book is several anthologies in one. One comes from my time as a sestina editor. I’m not kidding; it was a thing. From 2003 to 2007, I held the job title of Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. During that time, I read hundreds of sestinas a month, and published, on average, one sestina per week. My choices tended to coincide with the humorous, topical spirit of the website. Several poets from McSweeney’s are included here: Rick Moody, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Jenny Boully, Steve Almond, and Rachel Shukert.

Another comes from getting tips from fellow sestina nerds: Star Black’s “Hi Yo,” from Double Time, her collection of double sestinas; an excerpt from The Whole Truth, James Cummins’s collection based on the Perry Mason TV series; Jeffery Conway’s project based on the camp classic Showgirls; Sandra Beasley’s and Geoff Bouvier’s wicked innovations; and Quraysh Ali Lansana’s and Sarah Green’s modern fables.

Still another group of poets have to be included if an anthology of sestinas can call itself that with a straight face: Donald Justice, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Hacker, Florence Cassen Mayers.

After many of the poems included here, you will see excerpts from our “Behind the Sestina” interviews, which will, I hope, offer the 23 writers’ insights on the origins of their poems and the appeal of the sestina form. To read the full interviews, as well as more information about sestinas, visit the book’s website at incrediblesestinas.com. You won’t be disappointed.

And now is a good time to return to our first question: Why the freak should we read a book of sestinas?

Because a sestina is always full of life.

Because of its patterns.

Because of its spiral.

Because of its swagger.

Because we live in a world where something as ridiculous and beautiful as the sestina still exists.

Because poets honor their history by writing and reading sestinas.

Because a poet is always up for a challenge.

Because you’ve already read at least one sestina, hidden inside this introduction.

Because there is a particular kind of beauty and wisdom that can only be unlocked by writing a sestina.

So now you know. Let’s start the spiral.

from the archive; first posted October 21, 2013.

It was around this time that I dove into the sestina underground, where poets hid their single-sestina efforts deep in their hard drives, and others flaunted and fluttered their sheer love of sestinas, whole manuscripts of sestinas, double sestinas, sestina variants. I started to imagine what a whole collection, an anthology of sestinas, might look like: what would comprise a greatest-hits sestina book? What would the cumulative effect of reading 100 or more sestinas, all in one book, have upon the reader?

I started to collect sestinas. Hoard them, really. Folders filled with Xeroxes of inter-library-loaned sestinas, out-of-print sestinas, world-famous sestinas. I met in darkened parking lots to meet sestina informants, where words like rimas dissolutas and cansos redonda were whispered.

Slowly, the manuscript took shape into a proper book. In a couple days, the result, the modestly named The Incredible Sestina Anthology--shortened from its original name, The North American Bible of Incredible Sestinas--will be brought into the world. Only a few days ago did I get my own grubby Bavarian hands on a copy--in my college bookstore of all places--and the result, I daresay, is incredible. You can check out the Table of Contents here. 

What follows after the fold is a BAP Blog Exlusive, a reprint of the introduction I wrote for the book, I decided not to go in the wonky-scholarly direction, not only because that's just no me, as we say, but also because I think this book is for everyone, sestina nerds and nerds alike. Whoever you are, I hope you enjoy it.

***

First things first. You’re asking: Why in the world should I read a book of sestinas? I’m picturing you there after you plucked this book off a shelf. Maybe you’ve checked out its cover’s cool spiral pattern, or you’re previewing it online.

You’re asking: What in tarnation would compel anyone to collect a book of poems that use a form invented in medieval southern France, written in English 700 years later? Or maybe you’re asking: What the freak is a sestina anyway?

These are all reasonable questions.

Even those who’ve heard of this form or are inside the poetry world may ask what a sestina is. Believed to have been invented in the 12th century by Arnaut Daniel, a troubadour who influenced Dante, the sestina is a 39-line patterned form that has spiraled into a new life in English in the past 100 years or so.

Instead of a rhyme scheme (like the Shakespearean sonnet’s ABABCDCDEFEFGG) or a regular meter (like iambic pentameter’s da-DUM times five) or syllables (the 5-7-5 of English Haiku), a sestina uses a spiral, formed in a pattern of words that appear at the end of each line. Over the course of six stanzas of six lines (sestina translates as “six” or “sixer”) and a seventh three-line stanza, these end words, called teleutons or repitons, appear in a different order in each round, except for the final three-line stanza, called the envoi or tornada, which uses all six end words in a triumphant send-off. The last end word of each stanza is the first word of the next, which is why the sestina is called a linked form. Graphed-out in a word pattern, each number representing an end word, the sestina looks something like this:

Stanza 1: 1 2 3 4 5 6
Stanza 2: 6 1 5 2 4 3
Stanza 3: 3 6 4 1 2 5
Stanza 4: 5 3 2 6 1 4
Stanza 5: 4 5 1 3 6 2
Stanza 6: 2 4 6 5 3 1
Envoi: 2/5 4/3 6/1

Why this pattern, you ask? The words spiral out to form the next stanza of the sestina. Like this crappy drawing I did just now:

This sestina pattern informs Matt Madden’s comic sestina, “The Six Treasures of the Spiral,” included here, and certainly is the reason why there are so many references to circles and spirals throughout this incredible anthology.

But isn’t this all ridiculous, you may ask? Sure! Also: insane, laughable, fun. Other guide-book descriptions are also ambivalent; they range from “elaborate” (Babette Deutsch) and “complicated” (Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz) to “often maddening” (Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux) and a “minor form” (James Fenton). Sestinas require “the poet’s deepest love and conviction,” Karl Shapiro writes, “as these take on a rather obsessive quality—if the poem is to offer us more than the pleasures of contrivance.” Ron Padgett, in his Handbook of Poetic Forms, describes the sestina as “delightful” and its spiral numerology an “ideal experiment for the mathematical mind.”

More than 800 years since its invention, the sestina survives and thrives in the modern world. After the troubadours, the sestina went silent, revived only occasionally. Why? Because that pattern is pretty freaking complicated. You saw that spiral graph, right?

After Sir Philip Sidney’s three sestinas in the 1570s, including his double sestina “You Goat-herd Gods” (78 lines!), there was a 200- year gap in English-language sestinas. Then, toward the end of the 19th century, there was a mini-comeback with Algernon Charles Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, and others. Rudyard Kipling’s “Sestina of the Tramp Royal” came in 1898, and ten years later came Ezra Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte,” included here, which sparked even more interest in the form.

By the mid-20th century, the English sestina renaissance began in earnest. Now, poets of each generation—no matter which stripe, school, movement, team, or club—have climbed Mt. Sestina: from Sherman Alexie and Louis Zukofsky to Patricia Smith and Elizabeth Bishop, from Carl Philips and Mark Strand to Wendell Kees and Marilyn Nelson. Formalists love the sestina for its ornate, maddening word repetition; avant-gardists love the sestina for its ornate, maddening word repetition. W.H. Auden’s “Paysage Moralisé” uses many of the same end words as Sidney did in “You Goat-herd Gods.” John Ashbery mashes up the Popeye comic strip. James Merrill uses variations of one, two, three, four, five, and six as he moves through the poem.

But is the sestina just a novelty, a technical exercise? It can be—and there’s nothing wrong with that—but the sestina’s formal constraints and linguistic freedom also open up new possibilities. One true test of any form—situation comedy, coming-of-age story, threeminute pop song, basic black dress—is how well it holds up when its boundaries are tested, when an artist smashes and stretches it, kicks the tires and soups up the engine. The sestina offers something for every poet. Let’s break out the big words: postmodern artifice, numerological mystery, procedural wordplay, conceptualist or formalist reverie. All these terms apply when explaining the sestina’s appeal.

Writing a sestina is like long-distance running, where going the distance puts the mind into a kind of trance. The challenge of using each end word seven times leads to “cheating,” swapping out soundalikes (“four” and “for”) or end words that can be a verb and a noun. Sometimes poets use one or more super-flashy words that stand out (see Amanda Nadelberg’s “My New Pet Word Is Mozzarella” or Harry Mathews’s “Histoire,” both included here). A sestina forces the poet to give in to echo and chance, to repeat when it’s just wrong, to sprawl on a wrestling mat just to get through the first draft.

Sestinas fail. There are sestinas that, on the surface, may strike the reader as, well, bad. Or dull. Or trite. Or “workshoppy.” “Mediocre talents are irresistibly drawn to forms like the sestina,” John Frederick Nims writes in his excellent study of the sestina, “which offer easy satisfaction in that they seem only forms that need filling out, like an application for a library card.” These revelations, shocking to some, have led many poets to dismiss the sestina form altogether, as if no other bad poems have existed elsewhere. James Cummins, whose essay on the sestina is a must, has a different take. “The sound of a bad sestina might be the sound of life leaving the beast,” he writes, “but at least it’s life.”

In many ways, this incredible book is several anthologies in one. One comes from my time as a sestina editor. I’m not kidding; it was a thing. From 2003 to 2007, I held the job title of Assistant Web Editor for Sestinas at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. During that time, I read hundreds of sestinas a month, and published, on average, one sestina per week. My choices tended to coincide with the humorous, topical spirit of the website. Several poets from McSweeney’s are included here: Rick Moody, Denise Duhamel, David Lehman, Jenny Boully, Steve Almond, and Rachel Shukert.

Another comes from getting tips from fellow sestina nerds: Star Black’s “Hi Yo,” from Double Time, her collection of double sestinas; an excerpt from The Whole Truth, James Cummins’s collection based on the Perry Mason TV series; Jeffery Conway’s project based on the camp classic Showgirls; Sandra Beasley’s and Geoff Bouvier’s wicked innovations; and Quraysh Ali Lansana’s and Sarah Green’s modern fables.

Still another group of poets have to be included if an anthology of sestinas can call itself that with a straight face: Donald Justice, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht, Marilyn Hacker, Florence Cassen Mayers.

After many of the poems included here, you will see excerpts from our “Behind the Sestina” interviews, which will, I hope, offer the 23 writers’ insights on the origins of their poems and the appeal of the sestina form. To read the full interviews, as well as more information about sestinas, visit the book’s website at incrediblesestinas.com. You won’t be disappointed.

And now is a good time to return to our first question: Why the freak should we read a book of sestinas?

Because a sestina is always full of life.

Because of its patterns.

Because of its spiral.

Because of its swagger.

Because we live in a world where something as ridiculous and beautiful as the sestina still exists.

Because poets honor their history by writing and reading sestinas.

Because a poet is always up for a challenge.

Because you’ve already read at least one sestina, hidden inside this introduction.

Because there is a particular kind of beauty and wisdom that can only be unlocked by writing a sestina.

So now you know. Let’s start the spiral.

from the archive; first posted October 21, 2013.

The Bravest Grope a Little [by Amanda Smeltz]

A brief reading of Emily Dickinson’s We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight. 

The poem formally performs the encounter with darkness Dickinson describes:

Physical sensation of lights going out in stanza one.

Halting attempt to get one’s bearings back, stanza two.

A turn toward metaphoric darkness – & all its possible meanings – in stanza three.

Then! Ethical instruction in stanza four. The Bravest – grope a little…

And in stanza five, the results: what happens if someone in the darkness is brave.

I admire the halting motions of the early stanzas of this poem, all those dashed clauses inside the lines, emulating the uncertainty of being in literal dark. Then in the last two stanzas, the caesurae, the halting go away almost entirely.  She suggests, in the lines’ fluidity, what gracefulness awaits the brave.

I especially admire the slant rhyme at the poem’s end: sight / midnight / straight. Dickinson wants us to be brave in the dark and grope around for insight. Noted. But that slant rhyme lets us know she doesn’t think life will go perfectly straight from our bravery. I like that measured encouragement. Dickinson knows too much about life to suggest we’ll get perfect sight back after being plunged into darkness. Anyone who’s grieved a death or had something wretched and wrong happen knows that. Losses are real.

But I also like that mischievous moment where she says, listen. If you grope around in the dark, as you should, you will crack your skull into a tree. That moment where I stub my toe – Fuck! – because I was rooting around in my dark kitchen at 3 am for treats and end up with a bodega BLT all over my couch, a pig in shit.

What am I trying to say?  It’s hard to feel okay when I am having an Evening of the Brain. When life plunges me into darkness. I won’t feel okay and I shouldn’t. Anyone who tells me to smile at my job while I feel lost can go pound sand. But if I can at least muster the courage to feel around a bit in my discomfort and confusion… perhaps I will find new contours in the room. Or at least the roast beef in the back of my fridge. 

-- Amanda Smeltz

from the archive; first posted October 14, 2013

"They say a man's shoes are the first thing a person notices. . ."

I can still see his in my mind. Leather boots, dark like night, shining like mirrors. I'd never seen such shoes. In the tiny town of Pavlovo, Czechoslovakia, where I grew up, everyone had a farm, so boots were worn. But not shiny boots, not like these. 

Shooting up and out the tops of his boots were billowy pants, no crease. His crisp shirt was tucked flat under his belt. A tightly tailored jacket covered in shiny buttons and pins drew my eyes up to his dark, smoothed-back hair. His elegant, calm face framed the gleaming monocle in his eye. 

I did not yet know that this was the man called the "Angel of Death." I did not know that Dr. Josef Mengele was the Nazi physician who performed amputations without anesthesia, plucked out and collected blue eyeballs, tossed live babies into crackling fires, and gave twin girls candies before shooting them in the neck and using their corpses for medical experimantaion.

I knew none of these things. How could I know? I was a fifteen-year-old boy. All I knew, standing in that line in Auschwitz, was that my father, Joseph Grünfeld; my mother, Tzyvia; my sisters, Simcha and Rivka; my five-year-old baby brother, Sruel Baer; and I, Maximilian, were in trouble and far from home. 

-- from Measure of a Man, A Memoir: From Auschwitz Survivor to Presidents' Tailor by Martin Greenfield with Wynton Hall. 

Tom Disch's "Letters to Dead Editors"

On July 1, 2008, at 11:16AM, Tom Disch revealed God's "other" Big Idea of the day. He called it "Letters to Dead Editors."

<<<
Another were-there-but-world-enough theme anthology. It was to have been a whole collection by yours truly, and the first letter would have been sent to Mrs. Gaskell, who inmho should be included with the great Victorian novelists, along with the woman she wrote the biography of, Charlotte Bronte. Recently the BBC has given Mrs. G. some of the attention she merits. So much so that she doesn't really need me beating the drum for her, tho my letter would have been written in response to her great novel about the urban underclass, Mary Barton. What she brought to bear was a humorless (but perceptive) Moral Earnestness and a patient trompe l'oeil realism about the daily life of the miserable-most poor. By comparison Dickens comes across as lazy and/or sneeringly cruel.

I've tried writing such letters to real-life good writers, but they are too busy trying to grab the brass ring or otherwise advance up the ladder, or else simply think me pushy or wicked or dumb and don't write back or just say thank you, goodbye. Maybe it would be different now in the era of blogs and email, but back then my epistolary charms had no effect on the likes of Louise Erdrich, et al. As indeed, they shouldn't have. There are too many possible venal reasons why we don't write to our favorite celebrities. But to those safely dead and in their vaults--why not? The idea would be to address them as though they were real people, not statues swathed in marble togas and bronze crinolines, and as though they'd been keeping up with the things they had usually been interested in.

If anyone wants to give it a try, you could post a specimen letter here, but this should not be the usual Anything Goes comment. Mere japery on the order of "Shit happens" as one's whole letter to Dale Carnegie would rate a quick dele from God's red pencil. But I do think, and so does God, that it might be a nice book. Indeed, He often writes such letters Himself and sends them poste restante to the big post office on high.

-- Tom Disch (February 2, 1940 -- July 4, 2008)
>>>

from the archive; first posted November 1, 2008

On Yehuda Amichai, as translated by Chana Bloch [by Joshua November]

 “And I Will Dwell Amongst Them, Amongst Each One:” The Individual Life as a Sanctuary in the Poetry of Yehuda Amichai

A personal tribute to Chana Bloch, key translator of Amichai’s poems

Author’s note: The following essay was inspired by my recent participation in an AWP panel honoring Chana Bloch. Panelists were invited to consider Chana Bloch’s influence on their own poetry.

--By Yehoshua November

As an undergraduate at SUNY Binghamton, I studied under the poet Ruth Stone. During my first workshop turn, she announced to the class that my poem sounded like a translation, albeit not a bad one.  Confused and embarrassed, I returned to my college apartment.  On my desk, I spied a copy of the first poetry collection I had ever purchased, The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the second section of the book composed of Chana Bloch’s translations of Israel’s leading poet.   This was 1999.  Amichai would pass away one year later, a few short months after the publication of Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation of his final volume, Open Closed Open. I had just entered a relationship with—and began writing poems devoted to—a dark-haired young woman with a space between her front teeth, the woman I would marry less than two years later.

This is to say, from the outset, even when I was unaware of it, my poetry and personal life have been significantly shaped by Chana Bloch’s translation work.  Perhaps, as a side note, I should admit that, despite my Jewish day-school upbringing, I had managed to spend enough time on baseball cards, reruns of MacGyver, and other unspecified pursuits to manage not mastering modern Hebrew. Certainly not well enough, at the time, to read Amichai’s poetry in its original language. Thus, for me, like so many, Bloch served as the access point to one of the greatest poets of the last century. 

Several years ago, I attended a poetry reading by the recently deceased Polish poet Adam Zagajewksi.  When asked what was lost in reading his poems as translations, he said, “Nothing. I feel, even as they are rendered in English, these are my poems.”  As a devoted non-Polish speaking fan of Zagajewski, this answer felt like a fantasy fulfilled.  According to Bloch and her co-translator Chana Kronfeld, the same may not hold true in the case of Amichai translations.  As Bloch and Kronfed point out in an essay on translating Amichai’s final poetry collection[1], much of Amichai’s puns and word associations go unrepresented when rendered in other languages.  They add that modern Hebrew is a kind of “echo chamber” of its Biblical precursor so that everyday contemporary speech resounds with meanings rooted in antiquity.  They point, for example, to the Hebrew word shem, which translates as name. The plural form of the word, Shemos (names), serves as the Hebrew title of the second book of the Torah (referred to in English as the book of Exodus). Shem also brings to mind Hashem, an informal title for the Divine, a way to refer to God without mentioning one of the sacred, un-erasable names.

Given the absence of the rich diction that flavors Amichai’s original Hebrew, Bloch and Kronfeld wonder at Amichai’s popularity amongst his non-Hebrew speaking readers. [2]They conclude that he “crosses the language barrier” because “[h]is images make poetry out of the non-poetic things of ordinary life” and because he “makes a virtue of accessibility.”  In introducing one of my poems included in The New York Times Magazine—the one time I enjoyed this distinction--Matthew Zapruder noted that my poetry is characterized by “radical clarity.” As a Chassidic Jew, being called radical in the largely secular poetry world did not come as a surprise to me; however, I never imagined the accessibility of my poetics would be the reason.  Is my poetry really radically clear?  And if so, how did I arrive at this atypical aesthetic?   Is Amichai’s work—exceedingly accessible poetry further simplified when translation strips it of association and word play—also radically clear?  Perhaps Ruth Stone’s observation about my student poetry as a kind of translation has remained largely applicable.  If it’s true my poetry is more accessible than that of many of my contemporaries, perhaps, at least in part, this is due to many years of reading Bloch’s translations of Amichai. It’s strange and pleasurable to think this may be the case.    Interestingly, in a tribute to his mother, Jonathan Bloch writes[3], “When I was a child, [my mother] wrote the word ‘clarity’ in black marker on an index card and taped it to the wall above her typewriter, where she would see it when she looked up from writing. I remember seeing that index card with the word clarity, in fading marker, hanging there for many years. I think that clarity was her lifeline, to the end.”

Looking back, it’s not hard to trace a number of my poems’ rhetorical underpinnings to Bloch’s translations of Amichai.  Employing the language of negation in “When I Banged My Head on the Door, Amichai writes[4], and Bloch translates, “…and I didn’t scream ‘Mama’ and I didn’t scream ‘God.’/ And I didn’t prophesy a world at the end of Days/ where there will be no more heads and doors.”  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, it’s more than likely this same language of negation, and particularly negation of spiritual idealism, that sparked or pushed along my poem “I Made a Decision,” which reads:

Once, before either of us was twenty,

in the cafeteria, I watched your mouth

enclose itself around a plum.

Because I was young and you were beautiful,

I did not say, This is just a physical body nourishing itself.

And I did not say, Perhaps this is the other half of my soul.

I made a decision with a young man’s body,

and my soul continues to thank me.

Aside from questions of craft, a recent tribute to Bloch I participated in asked its panelists to consider Bloch’s exploration of her Jewish faith and her desire to examine what she called “the inner life.” Here, too, I think it’s instructive to return to Bloch’s translations of Amichai. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, Amichai departed from a life of tradition as an adult. One finds no shortage of poems doubting the Divine in his body of work. In this spirit, Bloch and Kronfeld note[5], “Amichai’s reception outside Israel has tended to oversimplify the meaning of his work, blunt his irony, and even—so help us!—present him as a poet of fuzzy feel good religiosity.”

Yet, I think a traditional Jew, especially a Chasidic Jew such as myself, can find Amichai relevant and compelling, even without overlooking or distorting his iconoclast streak.   This is because Amichai’s work echoes a central Jewish theology relevant to notions of the inner world and Jewish faith. Or at least his work offers a secular iteration of that theology.  [6]As Chassidic and Midrashic teachings point out, the Divine instruction to build the Tabernacle, and by extension the Holy Temple, reads[7], “Make a sanctuary for Me, and I will dwell in them.”  In the verse, the Divine voice does not note, “I will dwell in it,” as grammar would dictate. Rather, it states, “I will dwell in them,” in each one, implying that true construction of a Sanctuary entails each individual sanctifying the ordinary moments of his or her life, locating holiness in the mundane.   For this reason, and in contrast to ascetic religions, traditional Jewish practices engage the body and the world.  According to the Jewish mystics, each time a Divine command is performed with a physical object—and Judaism abounds with such commands—divine light, Or Ein Sof, is drawn down to, and absorbed by, the item in use.  Surprisingly, in this theology, one’s body and its daily undertakings constitute a kind of Divine Temple, especially when acts are carried out with Divine purpose.  And, in a sense, the Temple the individual creates proves more central to daily life than the larger structure of the communal Holy Temple.  

The ambition to sanctify the quotidian is present in much of contemporary poetry, but few poets seem to see the body and the individual life as a kind of sanctuary to the extent that Amichai does. Or in Amichai’s secular iteration, the interior world of memory seems just as important as larger real-world history and geography.  In this sense, the personal and historical, the interior and outer worlds, compete, coalesce, and get conflated, recalling the Jewish theology of the literal communal temple structure and the idiosyncratic temple of each individual life. Given Bloch’s focus on the inner world and Jewish faith, it’s not surprising she was drawn to and served as a leading translator of Amichai’s poetry.  Let me close with a Bloch translation of an Amichai poem which appears to best represent the individual-life-as-temple ethos.  Significantly, in the poem, Amichai refers to David’s Citadel, a Herodian tower in Jerusalem whose name calls to mind the Holy Temple, which, in the Song of Songs, another work Bloch co-translated, is also referred to as David’s Citadel. Here, quite literally, Amichai, like the Midrashic-Chassidic teachings, prioritizes the individual human temple of daily life over the larger historical structures: 

A prose poem from "Tourists,"[8] by Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch 

2

Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down

my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their 

guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with

the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman 

period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said 

to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch 

over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the 

left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables 

for his family."

Photos: Amichai above; Chana Bloch below

Let Us Now Praise People We Want to Have Sex With [by Janice Erlbaum]

The praise poem was all the rage in certain circles in 1993. Kathy from Pussy Poets started it; she wrote a praise poem for Bobby Miller, and one for me, called “Mary Jane Girl.” “Mary Jane Girl” was all about how I would get her high and listen to her relationship problems with DC, and how awesome of me that was. I loved Kathy, too, but I never wrote a praise poem for her.

I never wrote a praise poem for anyone. The closest I came was a poem I wrote for Eliza, which wasn’t written so much for her as it was written to impress her. The poem was named for my old friend Melissa, and it implied that Melissa and I had slept together; in fact, we had not. But I wanted Eliza to think I had some credibility as a lesbian so that she would like me, and isn’t wanting someone to like you one of the highest forms of praise?

Eliza didn’t have any praise poems, though she had a response poem, which was kind of the same thing; just another way of flirting. Maggie Estep had a poem called “Fuck Me,” so Eliza wrote a response poem called “No, Fuck Me,” and of course Maggie heard about it and was flattered, but she didn’t swing that way, so Eliza read it to me, dancing ahead of me on the sidewalk on Allen Street, really performing the hell out of it. I was dying to swing Eliza’s way, and I almost did, for a few weeks there, after which she dumped me in the middle of Tompkins Square Park. Then I wrote a poem with Eliza’s name in it, but it wasn’t a praise poem.

I started dating Paul, who put me in just about every single one of his poems, which was his way of paying me back for letting him live with me and supporting him while he smoked all of my weed. He read one on stage at the Nuyorican one night – “And Janice will fill you up! And Janice will set you free!” – and I cringed, ashamed. Everyone knew how cheap I was, that I could be bought for the price of a few lines of not very good poetry.

In the meantime, DC wrote a praise poem for me. It was called “For J.E.,” and the word “genius” was used. This caused me to think about dumping Paul for DC, who had his own apartment, and a job, and was also a much better poet than Paul was. So I wrote a poem dedicated to DC. This caused Kathy to retire her praise poem for me, and to change one of the characters in the screenplay she was writing from a wonderful best friend type to an inane slut.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that no poem will get you laid faster than a praise poem, but if you use one to sleep with another poet, you’re either going to wind up supporting them while they smoke all your weed, getting dumped in the middle of Tompkins Square Park, or alienating your best friends. Probably safer to stick to limericks.

from the archive, first posted April 2, 2008.

"Shouldn't the Sonnet?" [by Sandra Simonds]

Picture: Steve McCaffery, the structure of the sonnet

I.                    Is the Sonnet a Fascist Form?

 Somewhere, supposedly, William Carlos Williams calls the sonnet “a Fascist form.” Can someone tell me if this is true? I asked a number of poet friends, looked and looked, but couldn’t find the quote ANYWHERE. Even if he didn’t write it, the phrase has an irresistible ring to it and lots and lots of poets agree that writing in any form is like being told what to do by an authoritarian jerk. But…wait a second…I’ve read poems by Fascists and the poems don’t look anything like sonnets. Not even close.  All that those poems do is praise guns and airplanes in long, messy lines.  So, what’s the deal? I guess even Fascists don’t write in Fascist forms.

II.                  Sonnets and Power

 Now, it’s easy for me to fool myself into thinking that I’m in love so sometimes I get all tangled up in love triangles, squares and octagons. Maybe it’s a poet’s disease. Last summer my partner and I had a whole bunch of problems that eventually led to a seven month separation. During that time, I thought that I had fallen in love with a few men at the same time (all poets, of course, since they suffer from the same disease) which culminated in my buying a plane ticket (never used) to meet a man on the internet I’d never met who kept saying nice things to me (and my poetry) on Facebook. I know, I know—it’s pathetic and embarrassing but here’s the thing, at the same time as all of this messy stuff was happening, I was writing sonnet after sonnet so I couldn’t stop myself from getting involved deeper and deeper in all of these pretend romances because I swear to god it was totally helping my poetry.

Auden talks about how Shakespeare‘s Dark Lady sonnets are all about the humiliation that comes with what he calls the “Vision of Eros.”  Basically, what he says is that when the Dark Lady becomes a real person, and not an object that he can control, he gets frustrated because he never really liked her in the first place. He’s just trapped in his own sexual obsession and frustration. Exactly! I was never really in love with these men, but I did want them to want me, like it was a game, a game perfect for TRANSLATION into the sonnet form. In real life relationships people are always vying for power but in the sonnet, it’s the poet and the sonnet that are in a struggle to the death. The problem is that the poet is at a huge disadvantage because the sonnet has the history OF THE SONNET on its side and almost always wins.  As Sina Queyras asks in an essay on the sonnet for the Harriet Blog: “Are you writing the “writing the sonnet or is the sonnet writing you?”

 III.                How Do We Define the Contemporary Sonnet?

There’s no consensus on how to do it. Does it have to have a traditional rhyme scheme? Does it need to be written in iambic pentameter? Does it have to be about unrequited love?  Does it even need to be fourteen lines? Ask twenty poets these questions, and you’ll get two-hundred answers. And simply calling a sonnet a sonnet doesn’t really make it a sonnet.

I decided that I would call my sonnets “sonnets” when they become worthy of passing through the gates of Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, a quasi-mystical anthology of sonnets that I have compiled and that is housed in a three ring binder in my desk. My teacher in PhD school, David Kirby, taught me how to do this. Whenever I come across a sonnet that is fit to enter Sandra’s GREAT BOOK of Sonnets, I type it out, print it and add it to the book. I try to memorize the extra-special ones.

One of the poems I have recently added is from Great Balls of Fire (Coffee House Press, 1990) by Ron Padgett:

                    Nothing in That Drawer

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

                    Nothing in that drawer.

I love Padgett’s simultaneous reverence and irreverence towards the sonnet expressed through the play between content and form. As Stephen Burt and David Mikics write in the introduction to The Art of the Sonnet, the sonnet is a form of, “rapturous praise, bitter exclamation, and step-by-step reasoning” but this example turns all of these notions upside-down. Even as the poem takes on the quality of a joke, the joke isn’t shallow or without a deep understanding of the sonnet’s history of posing a problem that it seeks to, if not solve, explore. I love that the empty drawers, line by line, come together to build a chest of emptiness. The take home message here seems to be that every time you write a really good sonnet, it’s kind of creepy like building a piece of furniture with the ghosts of history. One day someone is going to open one of Padgett’s drawers and some monster is going to pop out and scare the crap out of the reader.

 IV.                Bernadette Mayer

 Bernadette Mayer’s sonnets are captivating for all of the wrong reasons. Most of her sonnets aren’t even sonnets. In an essay posted on Jacket, Juliana Spahr writes that “one of Mayer's sonnets has a long prose note attached to it on landlords and rent. Another has eight lines. Another twenty-seven. Some rhyme in doggerel. Some in more elaborate patterns. Some have regular rhythm. Some not. The grammar continually violates the conventional regularities of the sonnet. Lines are split, are jammed; they spill over. Metaphors mix. The book as whole serves almost as an encyclopedia of the sonnet's possible violations while still remaining a sonnet.” Despite all of the formal deviations in Mayer’s book that Spahr notes, the poems seem to come together to point back to some imaginary Ur-sonnet. Someone tell me what makes up the Ur-sonnet!

Last fall, while staying with the poet Nada Gordon, I finally got to read a copy of Mayer’s book, simply titled Sonnets. In an email, I asked Nada to tell me what she thought about Mayer’s sonnets and she responded by saying, “What I love is how they are at once formally disciplined and also fabulously casual. This was the beauty, I think of much of first generation New York School writing as well, and she inherited that touch. I think that sonnets in general are powerful because they speak to our (Western, at least) expectations about how ideas should unfold and convince.” Here’s one of my favorites from the book:

 You jerk you didn’t call me up

I haven’t seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You’re drinking your parents to the airport

I’m through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It’s the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of

the Cobra Commander

* * *

To make love, turn to Page 32.

To die, turn to Page 110.

 
V.                  Failure!

 My first attempts at writing the sonnet were as a nineteen-year-old undergrad. I wrote a sonnet about the fjords of Denmark. I wrote one about the mongoose. I wrote one or two about drinking on Sunset Boulevard. They were all awful. My friend, Rebecca Hazelton told me that her first attempt at writing sonnets was also as an undergrad. “My professor handed it back with one line circled, and said, "This line works." The rest was pretty dismal, but I was crushed. Didn't try to write another sonnet for years, but I did learn that sometimes you take one line from a poem and scrap the rest, so that was important.” My friend Justin Marks told me that he doesn’t think the sonnet is a “complete form.” He says, “I’ve done drafts where the poem is basically fourteen lines that feel like they go together but somehow don’t add up to anything. They have no movement to them, or don’t wind up anywhere.”  All of this gets me wondering whether or not the form is a “mature one,” more suited for an experienced poet. After all, Shakespeare was pushing thirty when he wrote his sonnets. So was Sidney and Elizabeth Barrett Browning was almost forty when she started writing the Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Kasey Mohammad, a Renaissance scholar, has written a book of sonnets called Sonnograms some of which are included in my GREAT BOOK. The poems are postmodern, Flarfy, anagrams of Shakespeare’s sonnets. When I taught Shakespeare last year, I had my students read them alongside Shakespeare’s and most of my students were horrified, arguing that Shakespeare’s sonnets are all about love and truth and those great eternal things and that Mohammad’s sonnets were “trashy” and “made no sense.” “Shakespeare was a genius!” they cried. Most of them thought Kasey’s poems were failures. But one or two of students LOVED his poetry, defending it on the basis of its novel use of formal constraints, humor, and contemporary “feel,” arguing that the poems are like Shakespeare but for their generation. What I enjoy is how the poet feeds Shakespeare’s language into a technologically-mediated landscape, uses his own “subjectivity” to rearrange the words and lines and ends up with an entirely new language that cannot escape carrying around the heavy burden of the forms of history. I leave you, finally, with the poet’s take on Sonnet 47 (“Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took”):

The the the the the the the the the the Death (Hey Hey)

Hell yeah, this is an English sonnet, bitch:

Three quatrains and a couplet, motherfucker.

I write that yummy shit to get me rich:

My iambs got more drive than Preston Tucker.

I also got that English rhyme shit straight,

That alternating shit the verses do.

Word: every foxy mama that I date

Feels how my goddam prosody is true.

And I don’t mess with no Italian shit;

I only blow your mind the one way, ho.

I line it up four-four-four-two, that’s it:

That’s how I do my sonnet bidness, yo.

My mad Shakespearean moves are “phat,” or “def”:

They weave my pet eel Lenny—what the eff?

from the archive; first posted August 15, 2012

Who's Who on A. R. Ammons's "Shit List" [by David Barber]

David Barber

from LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS

 

[1] AMMONS, A. R.

[Broadside]: Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity

[Winston-Salem, North Carolina]: Privately Printed for Stuart Wright, 1979.

Price: $300.00

Unbound. Broadside. Measuring 7” x 16”. A bit of faint creasing else fine. Only 30 copies printed; printed as a Christmas greeting from Wright and Ammons, each of whom received 15 copies. Although not called for, signed by Ammons below his printed name. A humorous poem, sort of an Everyone Poops of the animal kingdom, with the closing epigram In stercore veritas. See Wright A22, ABC checklist. OCLC locates five copies.

Item #503822

Between the Covers: Rare Books Inc.

Gloucester City, NJ 08030 USA

[2] Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity. Ammons, A. R.

Primary Category: Literature/Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by: Coulehan, Jack

Date of entry: Sept-13-1995

Summary

This poem is essentially a list of the splendid variety of shit in the world. It begins: “You'll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are . . .” and continues the catalog for 45 lines, from gosling shit, through cricket and mandrell shit, ending with “the shit of the wasteful gallinule.”

Commentary

One way to sing joyfully about the plenitude of nature! This poem is an ecstatic celebration of shit. It is also a celebration of language, particularly the spoken word, for this is a poem meant to be spoken. For a more reflective and meaningful (in the concrete sense of “meaningful”) poem on shit, see Maxine Kumin's “The Excrement Poem” (see this database).

Primary Source: Worldly Hopes (Norton 1982)

NYU Langone Medical Center

LitMed: Literature Arts Medicine Database

[3] shit-list  n. a (notional or real) list of people in disfavour.

1942   L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §336/2   Blacklist, … shit or stink list.

1945   Amer. Speech 20 263   In the vulgar talk of the barracks, soldiers uninhibitedly use the

                phrase shit list, for a list of men whom one dislikes and is anxious to see embarrassed or           

                inconvenienced.

1953  C. Beaton Diary Aug. in Self Portrait with Friends (1979) xviii. 267  He [sc. Truman Capote]

          uses with a toughness that is healthy and refreshing all sorts of extremely crude and indecent

          phrases: ‘Oh, he’s on my dream trade.’ ‘He’s on my shit list.’

1965   Liberator Aug. 23/1  Sweet Mac is on my shit list.

1970   R. D. Abrahams Positively Black i. 8  Moynihan had made it onto the black shit-list in spite

           of his obvious sympathies.

2006   S. Gillespie Pissed off  ii. 29   People on my shit list can count on being cut off permanently. I

           don't suffer fools gladly.

Oxford English Dictionary. This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, September 2011; most recently modified version published online December 2022).

[4] “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration…

In poem after poem Ammons obsesses over the philosophical question of “the one and the many” as others may obsess over their favorite basketball team or popular singer. Consider the opening of “The Fairly High Assimilation Rag” (1983): “Plato derives the many from the one and Aristotle / the one from the many.” In a nutshell, the question of the one and the many is whether reality inheres in countless particulars (the many) or whether there is a motion and a spirit (the one) rolling through all things. Understood as a tug-of-war between unity and diversity, the question has an immediate application to the American scene….  Not “a whit manic” about Whitman’s influence, Ammons uses the inventory for the same reason it appealed to the author of “Song of Myself”: it is democratic, anti-hierarchical, a gathering of particulars, a reveling in what is at the “base” of the triangle, “base” understood as having an ethical or class meaning as well as a geometrical one. “Shit List” (1982) is an apt illustration of the irreverent Ammons inventory. 

David Lehman, “A. R. Ammons: ‘God Is the Sense the World Makes without God.’ ”

American Poetry Review (May 2006)

[5] Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.”

Guide to the contents of the Journals of Archie Ammons found in the Cornell University Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections Archie Ammons Papers, collection #14-12-2665

Journals of ARA: Box 7

Volume 50, Page 109

76. Letter from Betty [Academy of American Poets] to A.R. Ammons, dated 12 May 1970.
77. Letter from Richard Howard to A.R. Ammons, dated 10 May.
78. Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Tuesday.”
79. Leaf containing 4 poems, titled: “Hearkening,” “Image,” “Village, Town, City—Highway,

      Road, Path,” and “Meander.” Date unspecified.

80. Letter from Harold Bloom to A.R. Ammons, dated “Friday.”
81. Draft of a poem, titled: “Hearken.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
82. Draft of a poem, titled: “6 September.” Date unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y.
83. Draft of a poem, titled: “Shit list; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.” Date

       unspecified, written at Ithaca, N.Y. 2 leaves.

84. Letter from A.R. Ammons to Harold Bloom, dated 7 May 1970.
85. Letter from A.R. Ammons to Richard Howard, dated 6 May 1970.

[6] … a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit

With Ammons, even among such themes, one rarely feels “cramped in abstraction’s gilded loft,” because the poems, high and low, know just where they are, and they tell us. American modernism and whatever has followed it are heavy with long poems which attempt to contain the fragmentary, but lacking integration, are archives at best, and more often cluttered drawers. In the three astonishing long works in Collected Poems (“Extremes And Moderations,” “Essay on Poetics” with its poems within a poem, and “Hibernaculum”), we see how no poet is so alive to the processes linking the one and the many, the part and the whole, the high and the low, as Ammons is. He has always been simultaneously in flight toward “the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark” and knee-deep in his own backyard. “Shit List; or, Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” is a joyous catalogue of ninety-five kinds of animal shit. Who but Ammons could include such in a book called Worldly Hopes? 

Mark Dow, Boston Review (Dec 2001/Jan 2002)

7] Subject(s): Feces – Poetry

Title: Shit List; or Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity

Description: Broadside by A. R. Ammons; one of thirty privately printed for Stuart Wright, Christmas 1979. Inscribed “For Reid [ie, Reid Overcash], ho ho, Stuart [ie, Stuart Wright].”

Date: December 1979

Original Format: Extent 17cm x 40cm

Creator(s): Ammons, A. R. (1926-2001)

Subject(s): Feces – Poetry

Location of Original: East Carolina Manuscript Collection

 

[8] (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art)

Ammons’s most outlandish foray into a maggot aesthetic—and perhaps his most extreme experiment in reversing hierarchies—is the poem “Shit List; or, Omnium-Gatherum of Diversity into Unity,” a forty-five–line poem that consists entirely of different kinds of animal feces….

Ammons’s irreverent reverence for the lowly and quotidian (what could be more everyday than shit and shitting?), his Hopkinesque love for the “pied beauty” of the world’s variety, his brazen and comic refusal of poetic decorum, his often scatological appraisal of the human body and its daily processes, and his penchant for Whitmanesque cataloging and enumeration—all come together here. But “Shit List” is also a conceptual work, fueled as it is by a triggering idea that is at least as important as the poem’s content (i.e., list every kind of feces you can imagine and call it a work of art). Like many conceptual everyday-life projects, it creates an archive of everyday life, an “omnium-gatherum,” or hodge-podge collection, that displays the enormous variety of specimens making up a category. It is a repository of information, a work that deliberately employs excess as a formal device for thematic purposes, and an act of collecting and gathering as a form of attention and “radical mimesis.” [….]

The title jokingly takes the slang phrase (“he’s on my shit list”) and literalizes it, forcing readers to think about what an actual “shit list” might entail. The poem participates in a long line of list poems, but takes their Whitmanic desire to exhaust the world’s variety to an extreme. From its first line forward, the point of “Shit List,” of course, is affirmation, as it rejoices in the variety and awe-inspiring qualities of excrement. It also has an implicit moral dimension—the poem’s very existence, and the brio with which it flouts rules of propriety, serve to combat puritanical repression and any ideological forces that would relegate such basic, daily, and bodily facts of life to silence and oblivion.

Andrew Epstein, “The Tiny Invites Attention: A. R. Ammons’s Quotidian Muse.” Chapter 3 in Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford 2016)

[9] A. R. AMMONS: A CHECKLIST

Broadsides

Recording. Winston-Salem, NC: Shadowy Waters Press, 1975.

Breaking Out. Winston-Salem, NC: Palaemon Press Limited, 1978.

SHIT LIST. Privately printed gift for Stuart Wright, 1979.

Chicago Review, 57, 228-234 (Summer 2012)

 

Ed note.: This is a chapter from David Barber's manuscript, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS: 22 TAKES ON THE POETICS OF LISTS. He has also finished a new collection of poems, Naked (frothcoming from Northwestern UP). Barber is the former poetry editor of The Atlantic. The photo next to #5 is of A. R. Ammons. Photo on top: David Barber. See www.davidbarberonline.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is resemblance contagion?
            Inheritance?  Atavism?
Legacy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Archie Ammons’s “Speaking” [by Roger Gilbert]

For my last post on A. R. Ammons [in June 2008], I thought I’d discuss the textual history of one of his very late poems, “Speaking.”  Our genial host here at The Best American Poetry blog, David Lehman, arranged for this poem to be published in The New Yorker a few months after Ammons’s death in February 2001.  He also included it in the excellent selection of Ammons’s poems that he edited in 2006 for the Library of America.  Extremely attentive readers may have noticed a small but significant textual discrepancy between the poem’s two published versions.  Here is the poem as it appeared in The New Yorker:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need broach the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; lone, ever,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

And here is the poem as it appeared in the Library of America Selected Poems:

Speaking

There will be rains I’ll need
no shelter from; cold winds
no walls need brook the chill of for me:

when fire splits seams
out of the ground, I won’t
need the warmth at all; love, even,

when you who have given
your days to me, when you
come close, I won’t sense

that last approach: not
knowing how to speak,
I’ll say nothing.

The variable phrase occurs at the end of the sixth line: “lone, ever” or “love, even.”  (The substitution of “brook” for “broach” is a more straightforward correction of a typist’s error.)  Three drafts of the poem exist: two manuscripts and one typescript with handwritten emendations.  In both manuscripts the phrase is ambiguous and could be interpreted either as “lone, ever” or “love, even,” though in one it looks more like the first and in the other more like the second.  What initially tipped the balance in favor of “lone, ever” is the fact that the typescript contains that phrase.  For various reasons I won’t go into, I’m quite certain that the typescript was made not by Ammons himself but by an assistant; however, the fact that he made other changes to the typescript but allowed the phrase to stand would seem to suggest that he meant it to be part of the poem.  

This may in fact be a case of a typo establishing itself in the poet’s own mind as superior to the original phrase; the most famous instance is Yeats’s acceptance of “soldier Aristotle” in place of “solider Aristotle” in “Among School Children.”  After discussing the line several times, however, David and I eventually concluded that “love, even” was in fact what Ammons must have meant when he first wrote the poem.  Though “lone, ever” undeniably resonates with Ammons’s abiding sense of solitude (see my post on the hermit lark), “love, even” performs a more integral function in the poem, completing its catalogue of forces to which the dead speaker will be immune: rains, winds, fire, even love.  

The poem’s last line also underwent significant change.  In one manuscript it appears as “I won’t have anything to say”; in the other Ammons changed it to “I will have nothing to say”; and in the typescript he crossed that line out and substituted “I’ll say nothing.”  In general his revisions moved toward greater economy, and I believe that this last version would have been his final choice.  But in the absence of an authorized text, editors must make their own choices, based on the evidence at their disposal and their knowledge of the author’s work and mind.  The fact that this poem foretells its author’s withdrawal into the silence of death makes more poignant the necessity of choosing his words for him.

from the archive; first posted June 25, 2008

Happy Brthday to Jane Russell

Happy birthday to the sensational Jane Russell, who was born on June 21, 1921 and passed away in 2011.

She caused a stir in 1954 when she sang "Lookin' for Trouble" while wearing a bodysuit with three strategic cutouts in The French Line. Producer Howard Hughes reportedly designed the film's outrageous costumes himself. -- Stephanie Paterik

froim the archive; first posted June 21, 2012 by Stephanie Paterik.

"Saturday" [by Mark Ford]

After bursting through the allusion-barrier so dramatically, as related on Thursday [Oct. 16, 2008], there has been no stopping me, and I would like to conclude my very enjoyable stint as your guest-blogger with a poem in a genre my young self would have despised, ie. the poem about another poet –- which, come to think of it, was exactly what the poem imagining Whitman’s youthful conquests in my last post, was too. Oh well…. This one is about Hart Crane, and is in prose – to be precise it’s in the form of a letter addressed to the editor of a literary journal. The rest, I hope, explains itself. Thanks for having me, and for the many entertaining responses I’ve received; it’s been a ball…. I should perhaps say in preface to this piece that Crane was christened Harold, but shortly after deciding to become a poet adopted his mother’s maiden name of Hart.

The Death of Hart Crane

Sir / Madam,
I was intrigued by the letter from a reader in your last issue that recounted his meeting, in a bar in Greenwich Village in the mid-sixties, a woman who claimed to have been a passenger on the Orizaba on the voyage the boat made from Vera Cruz to New York in April of 1932, a voyage that the poet Hart Crane never completed. According to her Crane was murdered and thrown overboard by sailors after a night of such rough sex that they became afraid (surely wrongly) that he might have them arrested when the boat docked in Manhattan. This reminded me of a night in the early seventies on which I too happened to be drinking in a bar in Greenwich Village. I got talking to an elderly man called Harold occupying an adjacent booth, and when the conversation touched on poetry he explained, somewhat shyly, that he had himself published two collections a long time ago, one called White Buildings in 1926, and the other, The Bridge, in 1930. I asked if he’d written much since. ‘Oh plenty,’ he replied, ‘and a lot of it much better than my early effusions.’ I expressed an interest in seeing this work, and he invited me back to his apartment on MacDougal Street. Here the evening turns somewhat hazy. I could hear the galloping strains of Ravel’s Boléro turned up loud as Harold fumbled for his keys. Clearly some sort of party was in progress. At that moment the door was opened from within by another man in his seventies, who exclaimed happily, ‘Hart! – and friend! Come in!’ The room was full of men in their seventies, all, or so it seemed, called either Hart or Harold. The apartment’s walls were covered with Aztec artefacts, and its floors with Mexican carpets. It dawned on me then that Hart Crane had not only somehow survived his supposed death by water, but that his vision of an America of the likeminded was being fulfilled that very night, as it was perhaps every night, in this apartment on Macdougal Street. At the same instant I realized that it was I, an absurd doubting Thomas brought face to face with a miracle, who deserved to be devoured by sharks.
Yours faithfully,
Name and address withheld.

(Mark Ford)

from the archive; first posted October 18, 2008

Wednesday [by Mark Ford]

It was announced on the radio this morning [Wednesday, October 15, 2008] that the British Library has paid half a million pounds for a collection of the manuscripts of Ted Hughes. Hughes was a great believer in the importance of writing with a pen, rather than on a keyboard, and I remember a late letter included in his Selected Letters, which I recently reviewed for the New York Review of Books (it's in the current issue), in which he attributed the decline in quality of stories submitted for a prize for teenage fiction which he judged to the fact that the stories were all written directly on to the computer. Probably every writer has his or her set of peculiar 'conditions' which have to be met for the work to get written. Hughes had a particular penchant for writing on train journeys, and in small enclosed spaces like the tiny hall where he set up his study in the flat in Chalcot Square where he lived for a couple of years with Sylvia Plath. Speaking for myself, I need loud music to get me going, and I'm not alone in this. In 1993 I took part in a poets' tour of Japan with MIck Imlah and Simon Armitage. Simon brought over cds of the latest band to emerge on the Manchester scene - I forget who it was - which he'd play at deafening volume while knocking out a poem. I find, like Hughes, I can  write almost nothing directly on to a screen with any satisfaction. Even this blog I've been writing out long hand first, and I've an idea in the blogosphere (spelling?) that this might make it unique. If you don't believe me I'll send you my handwritten drafts - for a trifling consideration, certainly for far less than what might be fetched by an equivalent page of Ted Hughes.

Hughes was published by Faber and Faber (though in fact there was only ever one Faber -it was Faber and Gwyer initially, but Gwyer dropped out, so they  doubled the Faber to make it sound better). Hughes was taken on by T.S. Eliot after The Hawk in the Rain won the Poetry Center's First Publication Prize for 1957, judged that year by W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender. In those days Faber were located at 24 Russell Square ('that magic address!' as Philip Larkin once exclaimed), and if it's raining and I get the tube into work, my walk from Russell Square tube station to University College London takes me past the old Faber offices, now a part of London University. A round brown plaque commemorates Eliot's editorial labours there, and I've often wanted to locate his precise office, which had two doors so he could slip out the back when Vivienne made one of her unwanted visits in quest of her errant husband. And it was there late in life that he found true love with his secretary Valerie ('Say hello to Valerie / Say hello to Vivienne' as the Bob Dylan song puts it). By then Eliot had come to be known as the Pope of Russell Square, and young poets approached his august presence in abject states of fear and trembling. The American poet Donald Hall recalls visiting Eliot on his first trip to London, and, after some desultory literary chat, finally asking the master for some serious advice. Eliot thought hard, and then asked Hall if he would be wintering in London. The eager ephebe replied in the affirmative. Eliot nodded, pondered again, and finally said, 'Then I advise you to purchase some long underwear.'

(Mark Ford)

from the archives; posted October 15, 2008

Haunted by Dead Souls and Lively Angels: Jennifer Homans’s "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century" [by Mindy Aloff]

Mr. B. airborne (left), and in a deep plié during a 1961 teacher workshop. Photograph © Nancy Lassalle

George Balanchine (1904-1983) is generally considered the greatest--and, with 425 known works, the most prolific-- choreographer of the twentieth century, possibly of any century. By the time that Jennifer Homans, his newest biographer (herself an erstwhile professional ballet dancer and the author of Apollo’s Angels, the much-heralded history of ballet) decided some ten years ago to write a book about Balanchine, his life and work had been examined intensely in several languages.

First off, in English alone, there were five critically appreciated book-length Balanchine biographies (by journalist Bernard Taper, whose book was based on his interviews with Balanchine for The New Yorker; by Richard Buckle, the critic and biographer of Serge Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky; by the ballerina Moira Shearer, star of the film The Red Shoes; by Robert Gottlieb, the head of Alfred A. Knopf and a member of NYCB’s board who had programmed company seasons for ten years as a volunteer; and by the music critic and biographer Terry Teachout). Francis Mason’s anthology of memoirs I Remember Balanchine, which runs to six hundred pages, could be considered a sixth biography.  Balanchine himself had (with the editorial assistance of Mason) already published a long autobiographical essay on his career up to his early years in the U.S. and--assisted editorially by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom he had co-founded both the New York City Ballet and its affiliated School of American Ballet--theoretical essays on music and choreography and on the filming of ballet. 

Kirstein, on his own, had published two books on the history of NYCB plus a personal memoir; and Balanchine had given long, unguarded interviews concerning his thought processes to Ivan Nabokov and Elizabeth Carmichael at Horizon Magazine, to the Russian journalist Solomon Volkov, and to essayist and poet Jonathan Cott. Furthermore, scores of his dancers and nondancing colleagues had produced remembrances of him, and biographies and other studies of Balanchine’s collaborators contain extensive information. There were the unpublished memoirs of him (by ballerinas Ruthanna Boris and Karin von Aroldingen)—not to speak of the many studies of his ballets, beginning with historian Nancy Reynolds’s Repertory in Review, critic Nancy Goldner’s two excellent collections of essays, and the collected reviews and penetrating essays of Edwin Denby and Arlene Croce. And there is the large section on him in the immense oral history by dancer Frederic Franklin, Balanchine’s choice as ballet master at Sergei Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, where Mr. B worked in 1940 and then again, as the company’s resident choreographer, from 1944 to 1946.

And when Homans was starting, there were already available many analyses of his choreographic process in the video programs that constitute The Interpreters Archive and of The Archive of Lost Choreography, produced by The George Balanchine Foundation. (In these film shoots, currently numbering 75 and counting, the original principals and/or early principal casts of individual ballets, going back to 1925, coach younger dancers to pull from their dancing bodies what Balanchine had asked for when the works were being made.) 

So, when a press release from Random House, the U.S. publisher of Homans’s Mr. B: George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century, and the dust jacket of Granta’s British edition of the book present it as the “first major” biography of its subject, a reader familiar with the literature is brought up short.

More perplexing than that are the covers of the U.S. and UK editions. Their common source is an image by Martha Swope showing a rehearsal moment from Slaughter on Tenth Avenue, a ballet Balanchine made for Suzanne Farrell and Arthur Mitchell in 1968, based on the number he’d choreographed for the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes. On both book covers, Swope’s photo has been severely tampered with, but more objectionable is that they present the relationship of Balanchine and Farrell as a summarizing illustration of Homans’s title, “George Balanchine’s Twentieth Century.”

Farrell was a very great dancer indeed, but to encourage the notion that her relationship with Balanchine overshadows his entire career is not only distorting but is also unfair to the book, which diligently attempts to relate his story from cradle to grave. Homans offers enough here for a small monograph about what made Farrell’s dancing unique to Balanchine, viz. that, by choice, she did not use her technique in service of conventional models of perfection, which was fortunate, as Balanchine did not want perfection. Homans is fascinated by how their mutual experiments with Farrell’s capabilities led the ballerina to make impeccably arresting musical choices freshly at every performance and to look beautiful even when her body was violating academic rules of classic dance: That is, Farrell somehow intuited what Balanchine really wanted from dancing and, even more, to his delight eventually taught him what he ought to want.

"A bona fide work of art . . ." Copland Dance Episodes at New York City Ballet [by Mindy Aloff]

The "long-footed godesss" Mira Nadon , aloft, and company in ‘Copland Dance Episodes’ Photo © 2023 Erin Baiano

People are talking about Justin Peck’s new ninety-minute ballet, Copland Dance Episodes, for thirty principals, soloists, and corps de ballet members of New York City Ballet. It is a bona fide standing-room only, standing-ovation hit and also aesthetically controversial. Against audiences excited by it as a work of non-narrative theatrical dance are some who register strong objections—or simply dismiss it as bland and inconsequential. I’ve seen it twice; the first time, I was among the objectors; the second time, I suddenly saw its parts anew and its references clearly. The second time, what had seemed blurry and unspecific suddenly snapped into a bona fide work of art, complete with fascinating textual engineering and a haunting visionary subtext. What originally had seemed to be mere repetition had the “mere” swapped out for “meaningful.” Both times, the dancers were thrilling, but the second time they also seemed in service of a statement larger than themselves—a chilling statement about the entire country. The structure of the libretto in the program—twenty-two chapters or sections, each with its own title-- gives a clue that, although there is no declared narrative, the ballet is not storyless. The fact that my second sighting of Copland Dance Episodes occurred the night of the President’s State of the Union address was purely coincidental.

The score for this ballet is derived from four of Copland’s most beloved compositions: the anthemic Fanfare for the Common Man and the dances Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, and Billy the Kid—in other words, Copland’s most popular music, all richly melodic and dynamically orchestrated and dating from the build-up to World War II and from the terrifying years of the war itself. All are also brilliantly optimistic sound paintings marked by brass and percussion, even Billy, whose drama is tied to the murderous costs of the country’s westward expansion. Justin Peck, a native of Washington, D.C., spent much of his childhood in San Diego and most of his young adulthood in New York. He’s partly a westerner biographically; however, the American West that Copland created was cleared, plowed, and barn-raised from the heritage of American song—“a couple of cowboy tunes,” he once told me in an interview, out west in Portland, Oregon: the kind of music that doesn’t need explanations to make its case with anyone who listens to it, thanks, of course, to its harmonic and rhythmic presentation by a student of Nadia Boulanger. NYCB’s orchestra, led by company music director Andrew Litton, played the Copland sumptuously, with pleasure and commitment.

Peck’s choreography responds to each of Copland’s long musical lines, canonic interludes, and unexpectedly accented phrases with the assurance of a person in his own home. He does not, like Balanchine, set up a conversation with the music; he marries it, registering its emotions and its tonal variety while also creating imagery that invokes “common man” situations, such as horseplay among peers, a romantic couple on a carousel, a trio who share space and light but not interior worlds. Toward the end of the ballet, when we’re listening to the part of Billy the Kid that creates a gunfight through percussion, the marvelously variegated lighting by Brandon Stirling Baker suddenly throws many crossing figures into silhouette (the section is titled “Shadowboxer”), and we’re rocketed out of one couple’s dysfunction into a hallucinatory enlargement--today’s gun-sickened streets of Newark or L.A., Dorchester or East New York. Manipulating light, space, and choreography, Peck effects astonishing transformations. A hand that is tendered in a moment of submission becomes, once grasped, the agent of disunion. A head gently resting on a heart (a detail that Peck has slyly plucked from Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo and recontextualized), placed on that heart once too often, lightly yet decisively becomes the lever for divorcement. A section that ends with several male figures Biblically pointing straight skyward is revised in a subsequent section that ends with several female figures pointing forward into the future on a forty-five-degree angle, and that image is subsequently revised by a group of male and female figures seated in a circle, each lifting one leg with the foot pointed (the circle invoking a nocturnal moment in Billy when Eugene Loring’s outlaw is triggered into ruminations by a campfire). Tiler Peck’s variation to the “Simple Gifts” tune from Appalachian Spring does not quite lasso the entire herd of conflicting emotions that animate the Bride of Martha Graham’s frontier-wedding masterpiece, but how charming the analogy is. Peck’s pairing and then uncoupling of the long-footed goddess Mira Nadon and />the elementally mutable figure of Taylor Stanley was, for me, a risk worth taking. Their duet, with its partnered cartwheel and little catch step piquantly sited on the music, is one of the loveliest of Peck’s I know, and the intensity of its communication through dance movement made me think of the works of Alexei Ratmansky, who is about to join NYCB as a choreographer in residence. Peck’s ballet is bathed in color as well as pure light: Greeting the audience is Jeffrey Gibson’s drop, both minimalist in its geometric targets and triangles and maximalist in its multicolored profusion of forms, as he puts it in the program “inspired by indigenous American artifacts with the lyrics and psychedelic palette of disco music.” The program also notes that although Gibson’s painting “fuses his Choctaw-Cherokee heritage and experience of living in Europe, Asia, and the USA,” its references “span club culture, queer theory, fashion, politics, literature and art history.” The cast is costumed in Ellen Warren’s leotards and tights, each person given a unique combination of deeply saturated, contrasting hues, with no single, overall colors allowed. Welcome to the twenty-first century. In case the audience forgets that’s where we are, the ballet opens on a tableau of the full cast, each person uniquely positioned and wrapped in a transparent tulle-like packaging. Nearly everyone then runs off into the wings to remove the wicked caul of yesteryear and returns in up-to-the-minute living color, bright-eyed with eagerness to, once again, embark on Peck’s westering of their spirits. 

Mindy Aloff's book of essays, Why Dance Matters, was recently published by Yale University Press.

[Editor's note: The New York City Ballet will perform "Copland Dance Episodes" during its spring 2023 season. Buy tickets here. sdl]

Catullus, Sappho, and Jackie DeShannon [by Susan Brind Morrow]

Catullus (above left) is the best translator of Sappho (right), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own.

Catullus was (according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary) “doctus,” learned, “but he used doctrina in his own way.” He was an original mind, and a real wit who knew how to insult people. Intelligence and skill are the soul of wit, and one marvels at the crystalline economy of words at which Catullus is truly unsurpassed.

Take Catullus 85,

Odi et amo. quare id faciam fortasse requiris
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior

I hate and I love, why do I do this you may ask.
I don't know but I feel it and am on the cross

Catullus uses the technique of elision, running words together for effect, to merge the words hate and love into one, creating an implicit sense of the tension between two opposing forces that are tearing one apart. He then runs the sound of senti-et excrucior together, as though feeling and pain were inextricably linked.He ends the couplet with a word he has made up excrucior/excruciate (a word that is so apt it has been used ever since). Catullus uses it as sort of a joke, a word-play that describes what he is doing: He is not merely complaining about suffering in love. He is creating a classic Greek poetic structure and a word that points to what it is: ex crux, a cross, a chiasmus.

That Catullus was a highly trained and brilliant writer first, and a lover second, is indicated by the fact that he called his girlfriend Lesbia in a nod to Sappho, a famous poet who had lived on the island of Lesbos six hundred years before he was born.

In his memoir Speak Memory Nabokov describes the desired amorata of a young man from an aristocratic family as a rich older woman whose husband is preoccupied with affairs of state. Lesbia was just such a person, and she was only available to Catullus, one of her many lovers, from time to time.

Thus Catullus writes,

Caeli, Lesbia nostra,
Lesbia illa, illa Lesbia
Quam Catullus unam plus quam se atque suos amavit,
Nunc in quadriviis et angiportis
Glubit magnanimis Remi nepotis

Caelus, our Lesbia,
Lesbia this, this Lesbia,
Whom Catullus loved more than himself and his own,
Now in alleys and doorways
Strips for the rich descendants of Rome

(There is much scholarly speculation about Catullus’s intended meaning of glubit- which means to peel)

That Sappho was sapphic would have been news to Catullus. Sappho wrote songs to be performed at weddings, in which the focus was naturally the bride who moved like the moon among stars, or was like the first hyacinth of spring, smashed into the snow by the shepherds with their feet.

Catullus was not a professional writer like Sappho. He was an intellectual who belonged to the urban society of his day. He came from a rich family. His father entertained Caesar. He had, as he says more than once, too much free time. Until he died at the age of thirty (apparently by his own hand), he wrote for himself. Catullus begins his little book, which contains some of the finest poetry ever written in any language, with the phrase

To whom shall I give this charming little book...

It is difficult to capture the sense, beauty and complexity of these two great masters in another language, (although Ben Johnson’s 'tis with us perpetual night is a good call for perpetua una dormienda). Catullus (51) is the best translator of Sappho (31), managing to create both a sense of the original and something that stands as an original poem on its own. Both poems are filled with tactile words and phrases that closely capture the physical response of falling in love. Catullus, typically making up words, uses: tintin/tinnitus- my ear’s ring, for Sappho’s epirrombeisi (as though the ears were full of bees). Sappho has wonderful lines like greener than grass am I. She uses the Greek words sick, cold, and troma, trembling. Catullus has flamma demanat- flame descends my limbs, for Sappho’s lepton d’autika xro pur, a slender flame runs under my skin. Sappho has glossa eage (my tongue breaks), Catullus, lingua sed torpet (my tongue stiffens).

The best translation of this poem around today was written by 21 year old Jackie DeShannon in 1963 and recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 1975, Every Time That You Walk in the Room. Deshannon (one of the great songwriters of her time, who wrote Needles and Pins in her teens) unknowingly captures the classic verses, and the force, delight and excitement of the actual writing of Catullus and Sappho. DeShannon (singing it in this YouTube clip) may have been around Sappho's age when Sappho wrote the original:

With the Sun [by Mary Gilliland]

Want more shade? Want more sun? A plant demonstrates its answers—via height or sturdiness or angle of inclination. About the spring ephemerals, though, there’s no need to worry the question. They emerge when trees are bare of leaves.

The thing about bulbs: they are easy to plant and, when conditions optimize for new growth—the slant of sunlight in the spring, its rains—their green shoots rise, “conspiring with the sun,” then bloom year after year—and multiply. Descendants of my mother-in-law’s handful of Narcissus poeticus, the poet’s narcissus aka pheasant’s eye, number in the thousands all over not only our land but friends’ gardens all over town. 

In September and October after a day of contact-intensive teaching, I would spend an hour or two planting yet more bulbs, recovering some of the energy expended on one-to-ones with college students. Gardening helped me keep faith with poetry until in my late thirties I heard about places that give writers residencies. Were the poems penned in my tired off hours worth pursuing? Seems so. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown invited me for 7 months. I put my job on the line. I had to skip my annual Cornell ritual of enlarging John Keats’ “To Autumn” on the copier at the fall equinox and taping his poem to my office door for the season.

Once the ephemerals have bloomed and their foliage finishes doing its thing, their above-ground parts disappear. You can walk over the spot and never know that, below ground, life has stored its feast of chlorophyll until next year’s spring thaw. They sleep in summer and through the winter—the snowdrops, corydalis, virginia bluebells, daffodils….

Was Provincetown a dormancy for me or an emergence from? I think the latter. My dormancy as a poet was self-induced (family and ethnic background prolonged the tendency). My long off-season at FAWC reset my priorities for when to work, and how, and why.

On campus the following autumn, a former student spotted me on the quad. How was I, where had I been? Did I know that when students from my creative writing seminar saw each other, they’d sometimes nod meaningfully, lean in, and intone (he was leering now, loving the rhythm): “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep/steady thy laden head…”? Apparently my ecstasy in class about enjambement was forgotten. No matter. They remembered Keats’ words.

Yesterday I stood up from weeding the gooseberry patch and paid attention to a long-term hunch: that I’d been fastening my kneepads upside down. I tried them the other way, cushiony part over kneecap, thin part below. Squat-kneeling again, the back of my knee was no longer working the velcro loose as it bent. This sort of thing also happens writing a poem. There, too, it can take several years to realize your hunch. The hours don’t count. I don’t count the hours.

My new collection, by a poet who did made her way back to Ithaca, will zoom launch via Odyssey Bookstore on November 9 at 7 PM.
                                                                                                        —MG, 26 October 2022

NEVER CEASE [by Mary Gilliland]

Persist, I say, fellow poets: if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. Here we are—making protest—or praise—or revelation—while others devote themselves to making war. In a world out to maim, kill, and discourage the sensitive, how does gardening steady my head?

I plant baby giants: dawn redwood! and the cucumber magnolia and tulip poplar whose 80’ leafy canopies will shade someone well after I take my last walk-away. The gardens around the house and in its woods, which for decades were bless-my-mess, are coming together now. My marriage is (almost) past the days when my husband would see me still out there and call: “Anyone would think that weeding is your spiritual exercise!” The life and art of insight! outdoors we expand: felling dead trees, clearing brush, dividing the perennials—over time.

Once-upon-a-times that we have lived are brought to mind by some featured plants. An enjambement of sorts, of our reincarnations, our reinvention of selves that are somehow also continuous. Fast growing Metasequoia, dawn redwood, the only one of its species that can prosper through the winters of NewYork State’s Finger Lakes, recalls the trees of Muir Woods that as we married we believed would live near us the rest of our lives. The only other time that I’ve heard trees and their earth breathe like those was on blotter acid—Skinner had handed these to us the spring when we housesat Kitkitdizze for Gary, the tabs printed with a double vajra—that we dropped in Minnewaska State Park Preserve while the mountain laurel was blooming, the spring after we drove back east from California.

The native tulip poplar, Liriodendron tulipifera, can be spotted here and there throughout our watershed—if you look way up. Not a common tree but unmistakable. Its large creamy blossoms remind me of magnolia and it’s a lucky walk when one turns up fallen on the forest floor. Three years ago I discovered that an actual magnolia variety could survive along with us! from the wildflower specialist at Cornell Botanical Gardens I brought home a grown-from-seed cucumber magnolia, Magnolia acuminata, that will someday flower in May. Not as fragrant as the North Carolina magnolias that lined the street where we lived when Peter was in grad school, any more than our northern vines of the same name might overwhelm us with such scent as Greensboro’s jasmine. But as the Irish say, it’s the same but different.

The whimsy and wistfulness of autumn is truly here when saffron crocus rises from the ground. Following weeks of the tinted varieties, now we are seeing the white. In Ithaca, these are the blooms that during our “[S]eason of mists and mellow fruitfulness” that convince the bees “warm days will never cease,” evidenced in this week’s adjoining photo.

Of course I’d like most of all to have a Handkerchief Tree, in order to hold close by me my most favorite city London. But the stock that gave rise to the rare specimen near Kenwood on Hampstead Heath is South African. Would it be too much to ask friends who know so much more about plants than I to find a representative variety that can withstand zero Fahrenheit??

Planting an eventually towering trees takes 10 minutes. Hundreds of hundreds of 10 minutes have been required to restore the century-neglected grounds around them, labor that infuses into even the most stubborn head gentleness and confidence. I sow seeds, keep no maps, wait for nature. How many times have I bent to unknown flora that pop up: Want more shade? Want more sun?
                                                                                                        —MG, 19 October 2022