The Best American Poetry

Remembering Robert Hershon [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

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Like many others, I am deeply saddened over the death of my dear friend Bob Hershon on March 20, 2021. Bob was smart, funny, and generous. He was also a wonderful poet. Bob was the co-founder of Hanging Loose magazine and press, and helped bring the work of hundreds of writers (including me) to light. He was beloved by many, and earned that love through his great generosity of spirit. Here is a poem of Bob's from last August. It may very well be one of his last poems, but like all his work it is characterized by his warmth, humor, wisdom, and literary genius. Thanks to all of his friends and fellow writers whose tributes to Bob appear below. (More texts, photos, etc. will be added as they arrive.)

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A wonderful, characteristic photograph of Bob Hershon, at a memorial reading I organized for Harvey Shapiro at Stony Brook Southampton in 2013. Now Bob is gone. He was a man filled with humor, warmth and life. He had been ill for some time, but it’s still hard to grasp. —Kathryn Levy

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My dear friend and Hanging Loose co-editor Bob Hershon’s passing has left a gaping hole in my heart. As John Yau recently wrote, he was a major American poet. The quickest of wits, he was an unapologetic city poet in the tradition of Charles Reznikoff and Harvey Shapiro. His knowledge of Brooklyn history, of baseball, popular music, movies and art was encyclopedic. If you ever shared the podium at a poetry reading with Him you made sure he went last lest you be upstaged before you ever got started.  —Mark Pawlak

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Here is the New York Times obituary for Bob.

 

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Bob’s Winter Coat
an elegy for Bob Hershon, 1936-2021

by Sherman Alexie

 

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Did You Know that Robert Hershon is a Major Poet? by John Yau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Click here to listen to

Bob reading at the DIA Art Foundation, November 10th, 2015

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Superbly Situated

you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to
right from the beginning—a relationship based on
good sense and thoughtfulness in little things

i would like to be loved for such simple attainments
as breathing regularly and not falling down too often
or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed

and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow
i became entangled in your perception of admirable objects
so you might say to yourself: i have recently noticed

how superbly situated the empire state building is
how it looms up suddenly behind cemeteries and rivers
so far away you could touch it—therefore i love you

part of me fears that some moron is already plotting
to tear down the empire state building and replace it
with a block of staten island mother/daughter houses

just as part of me fears that if you love me for my cleanliness
i will grow filthy if you admire my elegant clothes
i’ll start wearing shirts with sailboats on them

but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time—come take your seat

we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve

Robert Hershon, “Superbly Situated” from How to Ride on the Woodlawn Express.

Copyright © 1985 by Robert Hershon. Reprinted with the permission of Hanging Loose Press.

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Introducing Bob Hershon   by Joanna Fuhrman

I wrote this to introduce Bob when he received his LiveMag lifetime achievement award.

My intro for the award: Robert Hershon's 15th collection, End of the Business Day, was published this year. His work has appeared in The Nation, APR, The Brooklyn Rail, the current issue of LIVE MAG and a million other journals! He has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. His awards include two NEA fellowships and three from New York Foundation of the Arts

I think we all know that Bob Hershon deserves a Goddamn pile of lifetime achievement awards, a sky-scraper full of awards, a mountain of awards.

He needs one for his wry poetry that captures the joy and pain of everyday life, loss, aging, friendship and marriage.

Another for his absurdist poetry that skewers literary fools and know-it-all know-nothings who fill up shopping mall bookstore readings and AWP soirees.

Another for more than fifty years of co-editing one of the best literary journals in the country (and wrangling the OTHER editors into some sort of order)

For publishing the work of high school students from all over the country and the world including some of my early poems.

As other presses embrace, the Ponzi scheme mode of publishing, Hanging Loose is unique in still not charging poets to submit poems, AND actually PAYING writers for their work

He-- of course --deserves another award for putting SO MANY beautiful books in the world (including work by so many of my favorite poets): Paul Violi, Jayne Cortez, his wife the lovely Donna Brook, Charles North, and Quote unquote “younger poets” like Tom Devany and Maggie Nelson

Another for being such a good friend to so many people for so many years. For writing poems to his friends so precise that we all feel like we are their friends too.

I’ve known Bob now for more than 30 years, and in this time his poetry has only gotten better: more honest, funnier and more absurd.

He’s the only poet I know to have a poem on the OP-Ed page of the NY Times AND the menu of a restaurant. I am hoping this publishing trend continues. I would like a Bob Hershon poem flashing underneath the tracks of the F train and in the information books at the hospital.

His work is what we need to make any kind of sense of this backwards world.

I’m looking forward to his 16th, 17th and 18th book.

AND his 50th, 51st and 80th lifetime achievement awards.

 

See also

Celebrating 50 Years of Hanging Loose Press In Conversation with Co-editor Robert Hershon

Interview by Joanna Fuhrman

 

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Bob Hershon, Dick Lourie, and Mark Pawlak. Photo by Gerald Fleming.

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 Bob and Donna believed in me  by Mandy Smoker Broaddus

Over twenty years ago Robert Hershon (and others at Hanging Loose Press - Dick, Mark, Donna...) changed my life forever by publishing my collection of poems. It felt like an incredible dream.  Bob and Donna believed in me, guided me through a new world, boosted me up, and loved me. They became my forever Uncle and Auntie. I will miss him immensely. I will cherish the compliments, the constructive criticism, the witty email banter, coffee at the kitchen counter, after dinner drinks - but mostly I will remember your keen poetics, your bright eye and all the generosity. Thank you.  Thank you so much. 💔

                                                            Mandy Smoker Broaddus, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook

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Robert Hershon R.I.P.  by Michael Lally

Bob was six years older than me and felt like a big brother, a funny one (I had an ex-cop big brother named Robert who was twelve years older and a jokester as well). Hershon's quick wit, even when aimed at me, always made me laugh, which was an unexpected gift because my inability to be equally witty usually soured me on that kind of banter. But Bob Hershon's love for his fellow poets and friends, and most folks, radiated from his heart even when cracking wise.

In fact, his readings were known for the laughter his poems often generated, even sometimes when addressing serious subjects. Some thought of him as a stand-up comic as much as a poet. But he was one of our most wonderful poets and should have had the name recognition of our most famous ones. I think because his poetry was often humorous it sometimes wasn't taken as seriously as it should have been, and because he didn't fit into the categories that critics create for poetry movements and scenes.

In fact Robert Hershon was unique, as a poet, editor, publisher, co-founder and director of The Print Center (that made it possible for many small presses to publish), and husband, father, friend, and wit. His physical presence will be, and already is, deeply missed, but his printed and recorded presence will live on. Rest in poetry, Bob.

PS: here's the full text of the title poem from his 2019 collection

End of the Business Day:

I looked in every file and folder

under the fax and behind the

Xerox. I retraced my footsteps

and pawed through the waste

paper and finally

I found what I'd done with this poem

So I folded it in half and then in

quarters and then to the size of

a matchbook

and I put it in my breast

pocket and I gave it a pat

and I turned out the lights

and I locked the door

and I ran for my life

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Lehman, Bob Hershon, Bill Zavatsky, Michael Lally

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                                                               Bob with his daughter Elizabeth       

 

                                                             Bob Hershon and his sister Sue, ca. late 1940s.

Bob was my big brother who decided to teach me to read when I was 3 and gave me vocabulary tests every week. He loved being a big brother to “little sister Susie” and we went to the movies every Saturday as kids. He took me to my first ballet, my first opera, and my first off Broadway play.

He was always funny, and that got us through a rocky childhood. I became a.therapist, and he always wanted to write, and I loved his poetry. I don’t know if you ever saw his cartoons. I have many of them, and when he had a birthday I would give him one, as he never saved them but I did. They are very clever. We never fought, talked very often, and Donna and I were close friends, and close with Jed and Elizabeth. He was very modest and talented. He had an unbelievable memory for all kinds of things. He was one of a kind.

I miss him very much and hated that he suffered so in the last few months. I saw him 3 days before he died, and he held my hand. I bought him chocolate and a big jar of cashews, and he loved that. The nurse said it wasn’t good for him and we looked at her as if she was insane. Life wasn’t always easy for Bob but he was such a kind and loving guy and he knew how many friends were rooting for him. We were all so lucky he was in our lives. (Little sister Susie)

                                                               Bob Hershon and his son Jed

                                                             Bob Hershon as a young man

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Mourning the Loss of Bob Hershon  by Thomas Devaney

His life-long work at Hanging Loose Press is beyond measure.

Bob’s poems, with their "downhome speech," lead with the heart.

The one where he puts his hand back to reach-out for his son's hand as they're crossing the street always hits me. The son much older now, Bob writes:

Don't fill up on bread

I say absent-mindedly

The servings here are huge.

My son, whose hair may be

receding a bit, says

Did you really just

say that to me?

What he doesn't know

is that when we're walking

together, when we get

to the curb

I sometimes start to reach

for his hand.

Bob was one of the great walkers in the city. Cut out of that same generous grain celebrated by Alfred Kazin and Walt Whitman, where he says: "Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."

The streets of the city are before us: Bob's gait remains distinctive. His stride is deliberate with a range of tempos. His sense of being is transmitted in the stride of his line breaks and lines.

Notice the poem “Pace.” Yes, we never know which direction he might go, or the pace the poem may take to get there. But, in its own workaday way of that form, it’s also a concrete poem. Bob writes:

on skinny old

Lexington Avenue

I speed up

to pass this man

so I can

slow down

I take

great pleasure in the exact size

of my steps

 

The poems are living maps: all the worlds in all of the names, all the places, which continue to live in Bob's honest and vivid words.

Somewhere, I believe, Sherman Alexie credits Bob and Donna with saving his life. They published Sherman's first book with Hanging Loose Press. Later, even though his big publishers wanted him to publish all of his books with them, Sherman stuck with Hanging Loose for his poetry collections. His tribute to Bob helps to tell the larger story:

Bob's Coney Island

Let's begin with this: America.

I want it all back

now, acre by acre, tonight. I want

some Indian to finally learn

to dance the Ghost Dance right

so that all of the salmon and buffalo return

and the white men are sent back home

to wake up in their favorite European cities.

I am not cruel.

Still, I hesitate

when Bob walks us around his Coney Island:

the Cyclone still running

the skeleton of the Thunderbolt

the Freak Show just a wall of photographs

the Parachute Drop

which has not been used in 30 years

but still looks like we could

tie a few ropes to the top (Why the hell not?) and drop

quickly down, spinning, unravelling

watching Bob's Coney Island rise

from the ashes of the sad, old carnival

that has taken its place now, this carnival

that is so sad because, like Donna says

all carnivals are sad.

We drop to the ground, our knees buckle slightly

at impact. We turn to look at each other

with the kind of love and wonder

that only fear and the release of fear can create.

We climb to the top and parachute down

again and again, because there is an ocean

a few feet away, because Manhattan is just a moment

down the horizon, because there was a 13-year-old boy

who believed that Coney Island belonged to him

though we know that all we see

doesn't really belong to anyone

but I'll let Bob have a conditional lease

because I know finally,

somebody will take care of this place

even if just in memory.

 

—Sherman Alexie

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Bob was my friend for more than 40 years, my publisher more than once, and a great sports fan, the Mets above all.  One of the bricks at Citi Field bears his name (a gift from his family).  He watched other sports, too, though not often the pickup basketball games at Murat Nemet-Nejat's annual summer poets parties—and even less me going one on one with Max Warsh, the son of Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. Bob looks so happy (and young) here, as do Ed Friedman and Marc Nasdor.  Me, I'm worrying about how to get past Max.

—Charles North

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                                                                 Bob Hershon and Gerald Fleming

Bob Hershon was a stellar human being. The web of writers he brought together— some now gone from the earth and the many left who now mourn him—knew him not simply as "funny" nor classically Brooklyn-irascible, but profoundly caring and generous, deeply intelligent, steeped and conversant in both literature and art. That web of writers is wide both geographically and aesthetically: his tastes took in the whole spectrum of good literature without favoring gender or ethnicity, and both the magazine and the many Hanging Loose book titles attest to that.

I remember a Hanging Loose prose poem reading that Sharon Mesmer, Jack Anderson, and I did at the New York Public Library. Bob did the intro, and during that intro grouched about critics' obsession with defining the prose poem: "If it's good writing, who the hell cares?" That was Bob. (And it should be said that Hanging Loose, under Bob's, Dick's, and Mark's editorialship, was an early home for the prose poem—no raised eyebrows when a prose poem manuscript came over the transom.) It's people like Bob Hershon who keep our literature alive at its cellular level, and those of us who knew him, loved him, are aching.

—Gerald Fleming

                                                 Donna Brook and Bob Hershon. Photo by Gerald Fleming.

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Here is Bob reading at the Paul Violi Memorial at the Poetry Project in June 2011. I can imagine that, during a pause between poems, he's recounting a wryly touching and pertinent anecdote, which will shortly be hitting the audience in the way this photograph hit me. [Photo by David Kelley]

—Tony Towle

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                                             Bob out on the town

Bob sent me these pics a few years ago. It was 2016, he was just turning 80 and a bunch of us were eating some great Italian food after a gathering at Poet's House to celebrate his birthday and the fact that some of us had just had books come out from HL Press... I think no one at the table was aware that anyone was taking pics--I certainly wasn't--so it's all very real. ---Patricia Traxler

Yes, I remember that book party. Bob: pleased that the book party went off smoothly, pleased to be in the company of close poet friends, wine, and food. What I remember so fondly from many such annual events is the late night drive back to Wyckoff Street, sitting at the kitchen counter with Bob, the great pleasure he took in tallying up the book sales, recounting who showed up, who said what, etc. Then a nightcap and to bed in the wee hours.
---Mark Pawlak

The restaurant where those photos were taken on May 20th, 2016, by the way, was Gigino's, on Greenwich Street south of Duane. Mark was right on the money in his description---Bob was extremely happy to be where he was with the people that were there, after another successful Hanging Loose celebration, and after a good dinner with good wine (and maybe one pre-dinner cocktail). ---Tony Towle

top: Bob, Patricia Traxler, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak, [?], Tony Towle, and [???].
bottom: Michael Lally, Bob, Patricia Traxler, Dick Lourie, Mark Pawlak

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Bob and Donna in Paris at an evening reading I'd arranged at a pal's apartment. Quite a few readers (including Kathryn Levy, who happened to be in town), and Bob was a big hit. (It took some convincing to get Donna to read, but read she did, and I think she was glad she did. Bob was especially happy about that.)  ---Gerald Fleming

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                                                                  Bob Hershon, Ivy Chen, Keri Smith, Wang Ping in NYC

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left photo: Jeanne Calvit, husband of Lisa Von Drasek, Sherman Alexie, Lisa Von Drasek, Wang Ping, Bob Hershon, Donna Brook
right photo: Wang Ping, Sherman Alexie, Bob Hershon

Bob and Donna visited Macalester College in 2015, with Sherman Alexie. The trio caused a sensation in the Twin Cities, with their poetry, stories, humor, and their bonds with each other. Sherman told many stories about how Bob discovered his poetry and has been publishing him ever since. I cooked a banquet for them at home. So many people came, and I had to borrow chairs from friends. One of the chairs was faulty, unfortunately. Bob sat on it, and it collapsed under him. I was terrified, but he got up and continued with the feast, with a joke that made everyone laugh. He was tough and funny. Hanging Loose Press published my first translation: New Generation: Poetry from China Today, with Dick Lourie, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman among the co-translators. It paved my path as a poet and translator for the future. Bob and Donna also hosted a baby shower for my firstborn child at their home. I still hold onto that stroller. Bob's last wish was a Chinese dinner. I am sharing a photo of us feasting on Chinese food at Hong Kong Noodles in Minneapolis. Hope he sees this and smiles from his new place. Bob has made many children of poets and writers. I'm one of them.
---Wang Ping

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                                                                                Dick, Ron, Emmett, Bob

Bob wrote a poem about Hanging Loose editors. That’s the one that, in the last few weeks, has really got to me.

We’ve been doing the same thing for fifty-five years: submissions to the magazine are screened, sent around, and voted on—mostly by mail, since we’ve never actually had all the editors living in one place. Then we meet together about three times a year. We spend a weekend sitting around a table, usually in Bob’s living room, to make final decisions. On warm, sunny days there’s a table in the back yard.

Nothing gets in the magazine until it’s been read aloud—we have to hear it. In the middle of the table there’s a pile of manuscripts. Depending on how long it’s been between meetings, there might be 40 or 50, or only 20 or 30. Ron Schreiber always took on himself the job of doling them out by turns. We never knew if Ron had some devious sorting plan of his own. That would have been in character.

Bob reads someone’s poem to us—his voice: I know it so well—first polishing his glasses with that characteristic gesture I also know so well. He’s right across the table from me. Then we vote (previous votes are disregarded; to make the cut it has to be heard). Because we are kind people, a tie vote always goes to the “yesses.” Ron’s on my right; he’s next; we always read clockwise. (Don’t ask.)

Then me, then Emmett Jarrett on my left; after he has retired into the clergy, Mark Pawlak is on my left; he’s been there forty years. After Ron died, we each had to choose our own manuscripts to read from the pile, and we didn’t need to think about tie votes any more.

Now Mark’s across the table and Bob is on my right, watchful so I don’t steal the pen he’s doodling with. We’re familiar, so joyfully and achingly familiar, with one another’s voices, and with each individual style of reading aloud. Because this is what we do. For a half-century.

Here is Bob’s poem.

The Editors Editing 

Nomi our neighbor 

Asks Donna what are those 

Guys doing out back 

Sitting around the table 

Table full of papers 

And one guy goes blah blah blah blah 

And the others all shake their heads 

And go ahum ahum ahum 

 

Then the oak leaves fall 

Then the white garden furniture 

Covered with gray city snow 

Bluejay walks across the table 

And down somebody's leg 

Blah blah blah blah 

 

Reflecting on it the week after Bob died, I realized why I was so moved by these fourteen lines. Of course, I thought, it’s a poem about eternal friendship.

---Dick Lourie

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I found another photo of Bob I took the last time I stayed with him, in 2019. I love that photo. He was sitting under his favorite painting, happy, content, at ease...full of dreams.  ---Wang Ping

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Gerald Fleming: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Brocade Dress

 

On the way back from the dance in the days of cars with bench seats, she slid over to you, put her hand on your thigh, said Shall we park? & she was dark & beautiful & now these many years later you see she was desperate for you & you for her & what did you say, Catholic boy? Oh, I’d better get home & fact was you could have said I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know what to do—and now you know that would have been OK, that she would have said I’ll teach you, then—she was kind that way—for she’d been taught & perhaps had taught others & for her this was not new, and what a lesson it would have been.

            Twenty years later you’re alone on an elevator in a department store, you’re going down & the door opens at a floor before the one you want & you see in the distance a gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair & from hard right she steps into the elevator & you look at each other & you hear her quick intake of breath as she must have heard yours & she turns to face the door & at the ground floor the door opens & each of you walks away.

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Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, a collection of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Other titles include One (also HL), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), Night of Pure Breathing (HL), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools and has written various books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (a title taken from the great Turner painting), which details an innovative process of intensive writing with adolescents—writing accompanied by outrageously loud, carefully curated instrumental music. He lives most of the year in the Far West and, when there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris. Fleming’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely in magazines over the past forty years.

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Robert Hershon Presents "Counterman," a Poem by Paul Violi

 

This poem by Paul Violi appears in his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon 

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2010

This poem by Paul Violi appears in his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon 

from the archive; first posted April 25, 2010

Dick Lourie: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Justice

It’s been reported that when the Beatles

were introduced to Steve Cropper—white genius

of Black Memphis music—the four of them

all stood as one and bowed from the waist: an

 

appropriate homage I’d say     displaying their

good sense—and making me wish that those who buy

records were that astute     instead     as we know

Steve Cropper’s name is not yet a household word

 

except when compared with that of Lowman Pauling

his own acknowledged inspiration now

forgotten     who all through the forties and

fifties played guitar and sang with The 5 Royales

 

Black musicians making Black people’s music

in the USA of lynching and Jim

Crow     colored water fountains and early

death for Negroes who didn’t know their place

 

in a better world we would all stand up

you and I     John     Paul     George     Ringo     and Steve

“The Five Royales” we’d say     as if we were

up on stage proudly introducing them

 

before a huge enthusiastic crowd

“Johnny Tanner and Eugene Tanner on

lead vocals” we’d say     “Jimmy Moore     Otto

Jeffries     Obadiah Carter singing

 

harmony    and on bass harmony and

guitar: Lowman Pauling     Ladies and

Gentlemen” we’d say “this is like gospel

sweetness caught and held by the sting of that

 

guitar—soul starts here” we’d say “and doo-wop

starts here     so will you please welcome The 5

Royales”     and then we would all kneel and kiss

their shiny shoes

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Dick Lourie’s new book, Jam Session and Other Poems (Hanging Loose), reflects his half-century of engagement with two professions: he’s both a poet and a professional blues sax player. In the book’s title poem, Jazz and Blues are two old friends sitting in a café.  A previous book of poems, If the Delta Was the Sea, was inspired by his twenty years of visiting and playing music in the Mississippi Delta. In 1966 he co-founded Hanging Loose Press with Bob Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, and Ron Schreiber. He is still active as co-publisher and co-editor.

[Click for more information on Steve Cropper, Lowman Pauling, and the 5 Royales.]

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Jiwon Choi: Pick of the Week (x2) [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Memoir Mori

 

In Part One, I will introduce my mother, butcher-in-chief

feasting on her young, bones and gristle, sauté

and sizzle with toothsome glee. Day-old tabloid soup

moving you on to

Part Two where I make my escape to a liberal arts college

and become afflicted with a condition known as poetry-writing

where I Ouija-board Plath nightly for instruction on restitution

and virgin suicides.

In Part Three I seek solace in philosophy (I fuck

therefore I am) also known as impersonating Freudian slips:

you’re not a family until you’re a tragedy.

How to begin Part Four?

Cue the tall, blond Tourette’s syndrome, a foolish moth

trapped inside my self-loathing. I pull his wings right off.

Must I make meaning of my stint at the 7-Eleven roasting wieners

for pimply boys seeking nirvana in Hot Pockets and Ding Dongs?

If I leave salvation unwritten, will it come in?

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Let’s Go Out Tonight

 

Charging from one neck of the woods to another

the cab driver pushes our chariot from one pothole to another

over patches of pigeons while the radio bleeds the blues

“Is that Blind Lemon?” I ask

“Lightnin’ Hopkins,” he says

“But Blind Lemon liked Hopkins to play with him sometimes,” I add

“How come you know about that?” he turns to look at me

He is an older black man, forehead furrowed with Socrates’s worries

“I like the blues,” I reply

By the time we pull up to the curb John Lee Hooker is cajoling

“Let’s go out tonight!”

so I pay my fare and do just that.

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Jiwon Choi is a poet, teacher, and urban gardener.  She teaches preschool at the Educational Alliance, a multi-generational non-profit located on the Lower East Side of NYC.  She is a long-time gardener and coordinator for the Pacific Street Brooklyn Bear’s Community Garden located near downtown Brooklyn. She is also a poetry editor for Typehouse Literary Magazine. Jiwon is the author of One Daughter is Worth Ten Sons, published by Hanging Loose Press. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.  

Robert Hershon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Chatter

I did the Saturday puzzle on Sunday and

the Sunday puzzle on Saturday and I

watched a thousand hours of cops and robbers

when my friend assigned me the task of writing

a baseball poem, since right now there is no

baseball except in memory so I thought of

the Miracle Mets and then the Boys of Summer

but they both seemed frayed from overuse and I

began to think of the teams of my boyhood, call them

the Boys of Early Spring—Eddie Stanky and Pete Reiser

and Cookie Lavagetto,  Kirby Higbe and Ed Head and that perfect

baseball name, Dixie Walker, brother to Harry the Hat Walker,

and remembered more as a bigot who wouldn’t play with Jackie Robinson

than as an outfielder, but I didn’t know that when I was

ten and we had the only television set at 946 Bushwick Avenue

and  I watched the games by  myself with a bag of candy corn

the cheapest loose candy Woolworth’s sold, assuming

the Dodgers and I would grow old together (twelve, fourteen, beyond)

and wondering why all baseball announcers had Southern accents

and now the rich players and the even richer owners have finally

decided to play some baseball and I guess I’ll slump down and

stare at the games, by myself again, without candy corn

but maybe with a sip or two of Scotch

 

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Robert Hershon has written 15 books of poems, most recently End of the Business Day and Freeze Frame. He's won two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and three from the New York Foundation for the Arts.  Hershon has been co-editor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. [Ed. note: Bob Hershon passed away on March 20, 2021. See the Tribute Page for more information on Bob's life and work.]

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"Jayne Cortez and Ted Joans" [by Robert Hershon]

Twenty years ago or so, when I was still director of The Print Center, I was at a book party, chatting with Jayne Cortez [pictured left] and Ted Joans.

“I need to come out to Brooklyn and talk to you about a book I want to publish,” Ted said.

“One of your own?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said.  “Years ago, Allen Ginsberg told me ‘Never publish yourself.’”

I knew Ted and Jayne were friends, but that still struck me as a bit awkward since Jayne famously self-published all her books. 

“Well,” she said, “Duke Ellington told me, ‘Honey, always control your own shit.’”

And she always did.

-- Robert Hershon

Poem for Father's Day (Terence Winch)

My father, Paddy Winch (1905--1971), worked as the custodian of St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school in the Bronx, which this poem commemorates. He was a very generous and loving man, much beloved by his children and all who knew him. The photo shows him playing the banjo in 1958 in the house in Cahercrea, County Galway, Ireland, where my mother, Bridie Flynn, was born and raised. My parents were in Ireland that summer, their first trip back in almost 30 years. (Dublin cousins Noel Rogan and Martin Dawson are also seen in the photo.)

 

Custodian

            for charlie fanning

_________________________________

 

I ran the shovel along the street,

a razor path through the sidewalk face,

snow lather parting for me, for my father,

our feet crunching in the city night.

 

We grabbed the garbage cans from school

and church and dragged them up the iron

stairs.  I lugged burlap bags stuffed

with bingo cards, light as cream puffs.

 

We swept the auditorium with green sawdust

from huge drums.  We hammered and drilled

in his workshop, where tools hung on pegboard,

their images silhouetted behind them 

 

For instant identification and placement.

Once he sawed his index finger in half

on the power saw in a moment of inattention

in a life otherwise built of skill and care.  

 

Once a year the Monsignor made him climb inside

the giant boiler and clean it out

with enormous pipe cleaners till he was black

with soot that took days to wash off.

 

Sonny boy, he called me, and laddie buck.

He always said just do your best. 

We loved to watch him fall asleep

on the couch, Daily News over his face

 

Snores filling the apartment

with the music of rest well deserved.

His finger took years to heal enough

for him to play again but a black scar

 

Ran down its center. He’d give me a rub

with his unshaven face, rough as sandpaper.

He’d pretend he didn’t know me, scrubbed from

the tub, the lovely lie delighting me every time.

 

from Boy Drinkers (Hanging Loose Press, 2007)

 

Interview with Tony Towle [by Jess Matuozzi]

[Guest Author Note:  Thank you to Jess and Tony for this fascinating interview and to Hanging Loose Press for permission to reproduce the poems discussed in it!]

JM: Your poetry taps out a wry tango with history; you’ve looked at it, through it, over it, beyond it, within it, and around it, describing the historical perspective of the backward-glancing present as “the cartoon with the one perennial frame.” And so we’re here to speak of poetry’s intersection with history, personal and collective.  

Let’s start with the former. How has your writing process changed with age? I’m not referring to changes in style, like your shift from pop collage to a more conversational mode, but rather, to changes in the way you experience the writing process. 

TT: My first thought is: how can aging not have changed my writing process (along with everything else!)? But when I try to figure out what those changes have actually been, I draw a blank. If the “writing process” is the manner in which the poems are made, regardless of individual content or style, I think I have to say that there hasn’t been perceptible (perceptible to me, anyway) change since I got going in the early ‘60s. Perhaps I mistake what you are getting at. Feel free to steer me onto the right track! 

 

JM: I’m afraid I only have directions to the wrong track. It’s located at the intersection of poetry and history in the broadest sense: that is, at the site where poetry catalyzes cultural shifts that can, ultimately, be historical in their import. I’ve always seen your poems as being quietly countercultural — “The City in the Throes of Despair,” for example, crashes the ethos of “accomplishment” against the sort of openness that allows for “beauty to interrupt constantly.” Do you see your poems as countercultural? 

 

TT:  The poem you refer to was written in 1967, when the “real” counterculture (politics and sociology more than poetry) was well on its way to being a force in national life; but my work had nothing to do with that, nor was I personally very much a part of it, although I knew many poets who were. I’m not so much countercultural as a classic outsider, whose work is perhaps quietly subversive. Part of the subversion can be a free-wheeling parody of conventional thinking, with an insistence on being gratuitous, stubbornly irrelevant  to “normal” society and daily reality. The poem in question is surreal and absurdist, with satiric reference to Robert Moses, real estate developer Samuel Lefrak, and the Borough of Queens (where I grew up).  I write different kinds of poems, so one could find examples that are other than what I have just described. But I would maintain that I’m a subversive outsider rather than a counterculturalist, which usually implies an agenda beyond poetry itself.

 

JM: This differentiation you’ve made between the countercultural and the subversive is very useful; it offers a clearer vocabulary for discussing poetry’s role(s) in the public sphere. Now you’ve got me thinking about the value of anchoring subversion in a rich array of historical references, as you do in recent poems like “Misprision” and “Five Days in June.” When you find yourself animated by the mischievous impulse to pen something “gratuitous” or “stubbornly irrelevant” to conventional society, what historical period do you find most compelling to engage with, and why?   

 

TT:  It’s really whatever comes across my radar and suddenly seems right for inclusion in a particular poem. I’ve read enough history — starting in earnest at the age of eight — so that the material exists in my head as a kind of repertory. But the historical aspect may not be the primary motivation for the poem. “Misprision” — an archaic word for misunderstanding (among other meanings) — is about double entendres, a couple of them rather pornographic (Sappho’s original tongue, indeed!); the whole is made ambiguous by a naïve narrator going through a series of misprisions. Ambiguity is a prime feature of the subversive, at least my version of it. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity in poetry, and with art in general, but the average person is not. (The meaning should be clear, damn it!) Irony is another feature, and irony is often ambiguous. “Five Days in June” starts out as a lampoon of the clichéd and ubiquitous “Today,” used as an introductory phrase carrying bogus authority for a point that is not in the least proven: Today,  Americans are less inclined . . . Today, women prefer . . . This has annoyed me enough over time so that a couple of years ago I found myself composing this short poem that I think ridicules the device but is entertaining beyond that. So I don’t know if this poem is really “historical” — though it does reference the Ottoman Empire — since what could be less historical than Today? 

In any event, in both these poems it is aspects of language that drive the car, with historical references, among other items, along for the ride. In general, I’m pretty eclectic. In my book Winter Journey, there are mentions and scenarios that include the storm god Teshub, medieval Baghdad, the Mongols, Plutarch, the Battle of Kursk, Catherine the Great, John Calvin, Samuel Barber, John Clare, Val Lewton, Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, Genghis Khan, Ogodei Khan, En-Hedu-Ana, Sargon of Akkad, the Sumerians, Phoenicia, Elijah, Ahab, Jezebel, Genghis Khan again, Parthia, Sappho, Charles VIII of France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Sassanians.  

 

JM: I remain curious about what drives your propensity for more distant historical allusions. So I’ll conclude by asking you this: if you were to embark upon a sustained poetic foray into the life of some figure from the more distant past, who would you choose?  

I don’t think my sensibility is suited to do a long-poem biographical treatment of one individual, à la Robert Browning, or Byron — or my late friend and colleague Paul Violi, who was wonderfully adept at creating extended studies of historical figures (or invented ones, for that matter!).  I wouldn’t be able to sustain it, and it would end up as something else. As to a propensity for distant historical allusions, that began long before I started writing poetry. I think it had to do with escape. I often found (find) the present limited and unsatisfying. History has always given me somewhere else to go.

 

*    *    *

The City in the Throes of Despair

 

The great worm of the north, in whose footsteps we tread,

eludes us with a thousand lightnings.

However the bus, the nourishment of the city, pulls in,

and nothing has been accomplished though beauty

interrupts constantly, interpolating a row of moments

like a pink balustrade basking in the sun.

 

The buses and planes go forward in clouds of yeast and salt,

lurching over the pipes and turbines of the city

as Wyoming would slide down the coast of Norway

and I look from the plane as from the vantage point of a roof

to see the Lefrak Building shielding my eyes from Manhattan.

Lefrak, whose first name has escaped me —  like Catherine

the Great's last — into the wild blue,

but who with Moses, whose first name is an anticlimax,

has left us the Queens of today and tomorrow.

 

We surprise the great worm in the frozen waste of his sleep.

Our magic ax and feather do their work

and the monster lies helpless in scattered and giggling pieces.

The five boroughs are safe and rainbows arch over the brick,

bright birds with their pinions are free to range once more,

but in whose colorful wake our hurtling plane seems spiritless,

planning to touch only Chicago and perhaps Detroit,

with a landing in the meantime however subtle meaning an emergency,

with no one congenial until reaching the ground, parachutes billowing,

and relaxing on the train back to New York, the parachute as a souvenir.

 

Tony Towle, 1967

from The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000

(Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

 

 

Misprision

 

someone said Sappho could be understood

only through her original tongue

and I said I didn’t think so

as educational as that would probably be

 

someone wrote that Charles VIII

entered France in the 1490’s

and I said to myself: I don’t think so

he was born many years before that

but he did penetrate Italy in 1494

as far as Naples, and didn’t withdraw

for an entire year, which seems extraordinary

by today’s standards

but he finally lost virility and everything else

by hitting his head on a doorway in 1498

 

someone wrote that gardening was a literature 

in which scholars nibbled at the edges 

of what appeared to be an insurmountable edifice

and I thought: that makes perfect sense,

nibbling is an authentic scholarly pursuit

and eventually the edifice will get lower

and can be surmounted

 

somebody said that cretins painted murals

and got out of labyrinths but that seems unlikely

and someone wrote to say it’s time for a poetry museum

but I don’t understand how anyone could possibly know that

and isn’t that what our books are already

glassless vitrines 

where you’re allowed to run your fingers over the art

or nibble on the implications

or loiter in the white passageways between the lines

hoping to meet the lenders to the exhibition

 

Tony Towle,  2004

from Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, 2008

 

Five Days in June

 

Today, the most overused introductory is Today,.

 

Today, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.

 

Today will be yesterday tomorrow, and it will be clear

that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

 

Today, I will put ten dollars on Pigs in Moonlight, take my winnings

and disappear into the Ottoman Empire.

 

Today, the Ottoman Empire is a furniture store on Queens Boulevard.

 

Tony Towle, 2015

from Noir: Poems 2008-2017, Hanging Loose Press, 2017

*    *    *

[Tony Towle, a quintessential poet of the New York School and the city of New York itself, is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Hanging Loose Press, 2001).  His most recent collection is Noir: Poems 2008-2017 (Hanging Loose Press, 2017).]

[Jess Matuozzi received her PhD in English and African American Studies from Yale University in 2016. She is currently a fire dancer, primate conservation activist, and English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.] 

 

Transaction Structures and Blurbs – Some Graphical Assessments for the Busy Executive [by Justin Jamail]

I hope that you find these executive summaries
Helpful, though yours, darling, are the transaction costs
I have least wanted to minimize...

 

Down the rabbit hole of literary enjoyment [by Alice Spiegel]

Alice slid down the cute and stopped along the way to enjoy

-- the poetry of F. T. Prince, represented with three exemplary poems, on Tom Clark's blog

-- a profile of Mets' announcer Gary Cohen, the best play-by-play man in baseball today

-- Notice that the caption on the TV had it that "Game of Thrones" was not eligible of this year's holocaust." With the sound turned off, I wondered whether it was "telecast" that was meant?

-- an interview with French scholar Vincent Debierre of the Unversity of Lyons: the subject, deconstruction; the guest, David Lehman.

-- Alice thought about Stanley Fish's statement that as a professor and scholar he was obliged not to speak the truth but to be interesting. Was this statement an example? 

-- Kafka: "A melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal principle." (The Trial)

-- Do you think deconstruction and its strategies as adopted in various disciplines has anything to do with the emergence of "fakery" and the underlying debate on what constitutes truth and falsehood?

-- Did you write a poem called "Fuck You, Foucault"? Yes, I did. It was published in Hanging Loose, the new issue of which has some wonderful stuff by such poets as Robert Hershon and Terence Winch.

-- Aren't Alan Ziegler's "squibs" swell?

-- Whether you have seen "La La Land," or not, the idea that its box office and critical success aroused controversy will seem either a foggy memory or a strange piece of info. But it did, and for its explication, and for excellent insights along the way about the art of Hollywood musicals, you can do no better than read Geoffrey O'Brien's essay "Let's Face the Music and Dance" in The New York Review of Books, April 6, 2017.

-- Then Alice, gainfully employed, had to go back to work.

on http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.com/2017/09/ft-prince-three-poems-mimicry.html

Poetic Perfection: David Lehman's Three Favorite Poems of 2011

NPR's senior editors asked me to name three of my favorite poems of 2011 and to record some thoughts about them. I chose three poems that share a sense of mystery and the uncanny – a spooky but also exhilarating glimpse of a spiritual world beyond our own. All favor plain speech, an unadorned directness, eschewing the glamour of rhyme or traditional form. -- DL

Read the full article here. 

Hail to thee, Herr Hershon and "Hanging Loose"

The new issue of Hanging Loose in hand reminds me to protest an injustice done to the poet Jeni Olin, a hardy Hanging Loose perennial, in the December Vanity Fair.  There was much to dislike in the article on Larry Rivers, but the sentence devoted to Ms. Olin takes the cake for calculated insolence: "A young poetess, Jeni Olin, was in residence during the last five years of his life." The knowing use of poetess, which sounds like a put down even if you're not PC, combines with the weirdly impersonal "was in residence" to give the impression that Jeni Olin -- more properly described as Rivers's companion or partner -- held the amatory equivalent of an academic fellowship at the Rivers abode. It's a cheap shot, a gratuitous insult founded on ignorance and schadenfreude. .

But to happier things. Hanging Loose Press has new books by Jeni Olin (Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems), Michael Cirelli (Vacaitons on the Black Star Line), and Erika Miriam Fabri's Dialect of a Skirt, In the new issue of the magazine, editor Robert Hershon recollects his days in San Francisco's North Beach in the late 1950s. He arrived on the opening day of the Howl obsecnity trial. "The Chronicle seemed full of Beat this and Beat that. I didn't hear this as literary, just the popular press's tag for the current mode of bohemianism. Soon Herb Caen, the columnist everyone read every morning though everyone denied it, invented the much-hated word Beatnik -- 'Beat' plus Sputnik."

So many notewothy poems here. I like Philip Dacey's fluid rhyme-driven quatrains, Marc Cohen's enigmas (that "baffle me / And the miserable creatures / Who happily live inside me"), Bruce Kawn's narrative "menu," Diane Seuss's long lines full of Whitmanic self-celebration ("I wore a lip gloss // that made my mouth look like glass and rode the frisky horse of time, mane braided / with stars, down the serpentine humps of the slide"). Seuss's "It Wasn't a Dream, I Knew William Burroughs" is a knockout.

Marie Bahlke, approaching her ninetieth birthday, weighs in with a poem entitled "Nineteen Forty-Six" while the section devoted to "Writers of High School Age" includes Nikki Rhodes, of Vancouver, Washington, who "has had work in the Seneca Review and The Battered Suitcase. She has two poems here, but the one that won my heart is "Dear Mississippi." Here's how it ends: "River, it would be the most / wonderful flood; even the moon would come play / with us in the boat. Everyone / important would be there, Mississippi River. / Everyone would be there but you." -- DL

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Paul Violi

This poem by Paul Violi appears is his collection Overnight and has been reprinted in a number of places, including The Best American Poetry.

Counterman

What’ll it be?
   Roast beef on rye, with tomato and mayo.

Whudduhyuh want on it?
   A swipe of mayo.
   Pepper but no salt.

You got it. Roast beef on rye
… you want lettuce on that?

   No. Just tomato and mayo.

Tomato and mayo. You got it.
…Salt and pepper?

   No salt.  Just a little pepper.

You got it.  No salt.
You want tomato?

   Yes. Tomato. No lettuce.

No lettuce.  You got it.
…No salt, right?

   Right. No salt.

You got it. – Pickle?

   No, no pickle. Just tomato and mayo.
   And pepper.

Pepper.

   Yes, a little pepper.

Right. A little pepper.
No pickle.

   Right. No pickle.

You got it.
Next.

   Roast beef on whole wheat, please.
   With lettuce, mayonnaise and a center slice
   Of beefsteak tomato
   The lettuce splayed, if you will,
   In a Beaux Arts derivative of classical acanthus,
   And the roast beef, thinly sliced, folded
   In a multi-foil arrangement
   That eschews the Bragdonian pretensions
   Or any idea of divine geometric projection
   For that matter, but simply provides
   A setting for the tomato
   To form a medallion with a dab
   Of mayonnaise as a fleuron.
   And—as eclectic as this may sound –
   If the mayonnaise can also be applied\
   Along the crust in a Vitruvian scroll
   And as a festoon below the medallion,
   That would be swell.

You mean like in the Cathedral St. Pierre in Geneva?

   Yes, but the swag more like the one below the rosette
   At the Royal Palace in Amsterdam.

You got it.
Next.

-- Paul Violi

This is my twelfth and last Sunday Poetry Post, and I thought I’d end the party by leaving a big gift box on your doorstep, one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets.  You want elegance, wit and a flawless ear?  You got it.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

Bob Hershon (pictured here, with Elizabeth Swados, prior to their reading at KGB Bar last Monday evening, has been selecting our Sunday poems from Hanging Loose. Photo credit: Star Black

This poem by Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel appeared first in Hanging Loose 47 in 1985 and later in her book, A Primer for Buford.

WRITING POETRY ON NEW PAPER

Rich
alluring
this sudden change seems
     sinful
too free and easy
for a Dustbowl Woman

I must walk carefully
     on good paper
     one word at a time
     feeling my way down a
                 new path
     not yet realizing

there are no inky crossouts
     no roadblocks
     of junk mail flyers
     to slow my pen

-- Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel

I wish I had the time and space to tell you the whole remarkable story of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel.  Luckily, there’s an excellent website that will supply her biography and let you read some of her poems.  In fact, you can hear Wilma reading some of her work in her clear, no-nonsense fashion:
digital.library.okstate.edu/mcdaniel/index.htm

In brief, Wilma was born in Oklahoma in 1918 to a poor farming family that became still poorer in the Dustbowl of the Thirties. In 1936, the McDaniels joined the army of 0Okies who headed to California, desperately seeking work. Wilma remained a farm laborer all her working life. She died at age 88, in 2007.

Her story is not very different from thousands of others except that some time in her early teens, Wilma began writing poems. She wrote about family and friends and – that rare subject in American poetry – work. All kinds of work, from picking fruit to repairing old machinery to running a tiny store, all the occupations that keep small rural towns going. At some point, her poems began appearing in church newsletters and local papers. And then, years later, somehow she connected to the poetry community and began publishing in literary magazines.

We first heard of her from a California poet named John Oliver Simon, who encouraged her to send work to us. We loved her writing right from the start and she appeared in the magazine with great regularity. We went on to publish four full collections of her work, but we weren’t alone; she published many books with small local presses. In her last years, her reputation grew steadily. Universities took note of her great talent and special history and began teaching her work. National Geographic called her a national treasure. She was named poet laureate of Tulare County.

Poetry didn’t make her rich, of course, and the frugal habits of a lifetime remained with her always. When an envelope arrived from Wilma, I’d shake out the contents. There would be, say, ten poems, all written in black ink, on the backs of religious flyers, on the insides of flattened cereal boxes, on the unused spaces of junk mail, all carefully trimmed to the size of the poem, so she could save the unused portions.

At one point, I sent her a ream of 24# white bond paper and I waited to see what she’d do with 500 sheets of virgin stock. Months went by and the poems continued to arrive on scraps of cardboard and newsprint.  Then, just when I was about to ask her whether she’d ever received the package, she sent Writing Poetry on New Paper.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Hettie Jones

This poem by Hettie Jones appears in her most recent poetry collection Doing Seventy.

Praise
                        for Marie Ponsot

All praise the midweek market,
the first-of-the-season sexy zucchinis
gazing up from their crowded
boxes

All praise the cherries, their tight
red bellies, the sweet, slender stems
and the pit, ah the pit, to be nursed
in the mouth, cajoled to give up
its last sweet hold, praise

them.  Praise all.  All praise.

Years ago, I was talking with John Gill, editor of a good small press with the maddeningly generic name of New/Books, about another small publisher and John frowned.  “Tell me how many first collections they’ve published,” he said.  Few or none was the answer.  New/Books had published my own first collection Swans Loving Bears Burning The Melting Deer a couple of years before, one of many firsts they took a chance on.

That conversation has stayed with me over the years as the first time someone had said to me in so many words that having the courage to publish new authors was a responsibility for a literary press.  Over the years, Hanging Loose has tried to have at least one first book on every list, including those by Kimiko Hahn, D. Nurkse, Sherman Alexie, Joanna Fuhrman, Michael Cirelli, Maggie Nelson, Mark Statman, Jeni Olin, and many others.

Along the way, we developed an odd little specialty: First books of poetry by older writers who had published lots of other stuff but never poetry. Jack Agűeros had written for Sesame Street and off-Broadway, done translations, and headed El Barrio Museum. Elizabeth Swados had written novels, textbooks, children’s books, operas and Broadway musicals. Hettie Jones had been a busy editor and had written many children’s books and the celebrated Beat Generation memoir How I Became Hettie Jones.  Curious coincidence: Each of these authors was 58 years old when that first collection appeared.

had known Hettie for years and was fond of her, so when she’d say to me “Some day I’ve got to send poems to Hanging Loose,” my smile may have been a bit forced, since I didn’t know Hettie wrote poems, much less poems we’d want to publish, and it’s a situation that can strain friendships. Every editor will recognize this nervous state. Luckily, we had a happy ending, which isn’t always the case. We liked Hettie’s poems -- her humor, her economy of language, her fury at injustice. Her first collection, Drive, followed soon after. It got fine reviews and won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Two other volumes have followed. Praise shows Hettie at her straightforward best, full of love for the bounty of nature, her East Village neighborhood and the very lovable Marie Ponsot.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jack Anderson

This poem by Jack Anderson appeared in Hanging Loose 88 and was the title poem of his 2009 collection from HL.

GETTING LOST IN A CITY LIKE THIS

Getting lost is the first thing you find yourself doing here
You stand getting lost right in front of your front door
You wander another way and wonder of wonder
You bump into yourself getting lost there once more

You discover no street parallels anything else here
restaurants sink lost into stews of addresses
Facades circle squares and disappear lost
While strollers walk lost through rainstorms of architecture

Tram cars get lost but slither past carefree
You ask “Is this Prague?  Or Paris?  I’m lost.”
If you found your way yesterday you didn’t you’re still lost
For though you stare at the map the map stares back lost

From now on you can never abandon being lost
So wherever you find yourself you must love yourself lost

-- Jack Anderson

The hangingloosepress.com website includes a complete index to the 95 issues of the magazine we’ve published so far (#96 will be out in April, grab your checkbook!) and I frequently find myself wandering around in it, usually to check the spelling of a name or the accuracy of a title, but often just roaming aimlessly.

Hmmm, did we really publish her? Did we publish him that early? I’m always intrigued by people we published in one issue who we never heard from again. (When I find editors who like my poems, I build a hut on their front step and stay there until they burn me out.)

In contrast to those who come our way but once, there are the HL lifers, the people whose work we have printed year after year, sometimes decade after decade, whose writings are inextricably bound up with our history and the perception of who we are.  Of these, no one has had a longer HL life than Jack Anderson.

Jack had three poems in the first issue, which came rolling out of the mimeograph machine in 1966, and four poems in #93, with frequent visits along the way. He is very civilized company, a witty and sharp-eyed New Yorker and a knowledgeable world-traveler. At the same time, his work often touches on his memories of church suppers and the like in the Milwaukee of his boyhood. (Oddly, his poems almost never reflect his other long career, as a dance critic, for The New York Times and other publications.) I love this poem, Getting Lost, because it combines bad-dream menace with playful language and an ultimate sweetness. It evokes my favorite travel moment: Arrive in a new city, stick a map in your pocket and start walking, getting lost, getting found, getting lost again, until the city begins to yield its essential shape. What’s better than that!

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Sherman Alexie

This poem by Sherman Alexie appeared in Hanging Loose 56 and was reprinted in The Business of Fancydancing, his first book.

DISTANCES

I’ve watched the Children of The Third World starving on television.  I’ve heard the stand-up comic ask, “why didn’t the cameraman give that kid a fucking sandwich?” I know all the mothers of America have told their kids: “Clean up your plate.  There are people starving in India.”  When I was young, living on the reservation, eating potatoes every day of my life, my mother would tell me to “clean up your plate or your sister will get it.”

*

A woman writes to a man who used to live here.  I write back, pretending I’m the man she’s been searching her whole life for.  “Do you still love me,” she writes to ask him, and me.

*

I do not speak my native tongue.  Except that is, for the dirty words.  I can tell you what I think of you in two languages.

                                (excerpt)

“Distances” was the first poem of Sherman’s to appear in Hanging Loose, twenty years ago this spring, when he was still a student. We had the good sense to ask for more immediately and that quickly led to a request for a manuscript. The Business of Fancydancing, his first book, was published in 1992, leading The New York Times Book Review to say “Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.”  Not bad for a first book from a small press, eh?

We’ve published six books of Sherman’s altogether. The newest, Face, is Small Press Distribution’s best seller of the past ten years.  Of course, he’s also published an amazing number of story collections, novels and journalism, made movies, entertained countless audiences, and won many awards.  I suppose that’s the reason for a question I began hearing a while back: “I guess Sherman has changed a lot over the years, huh?” They don’t mean “I guess Sherman doesn’t live on commodity cheese anymore.” They’re longing for me to say, “Yeah, he’s become a monster of ego, impossible to please.” When I say that’s absolutely not true, the disappointment is palpable.

The other question I hear a lot, from smirking interviewers, is “Say, how did an Indian from out West ever come to publish with a press in Brooklyn?”  I’m often tempted to say he was tied to a pony and led into the fort by John Wayne, but I usually just point out that he was a college graduate and so he knew how to put stamps on an envelope.

My favorite recent question came when Sherman made his second appearance on The Colbert Report some weeks ago. Donna Brook and I accompanied him both times. We were waiting for him to show up at the studio when one of the producers walked by. “I remember you,” she said. You’re Sherman’s parents, aren’t you?” Either we’re looking more Indian or Sherman’s looking more Brooklyn or her eyes were closed.

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Penelope Jane Reid

This poem by Penelope Jane Reid appeared in Hanging Loose 41 and later provided the title for Smart Like Me: High School-Age Writing from the Sixties to Now.

SMART LIKE ME

They put me right near
the maternity ward.
I know;
they want me to see
what I’ve missed in my life but
I know.

The women in there all think they’re
so lucky;
they’re not sixteen.

The women in there
have been praying for years
for what I
just threw away.

What would he have been?
Or she?
Crazy like him.
Smart like me.

-- Penelope Jane Reid

In 1968, Dick Lourie proposed to the other Hanging Loose editors (Emmett Jarrett, Ron Schreiber, me) that we start a regular section in the magazine devoted to writing by high school students.

I thought it was a terrible idea.  I don’t want to read a lot of third-rate imitations of rock lyrics and adolescent moaning about lost love, I said.  Let them publish in their school magazines.

Luckily, I lost the argument and, right from the beginning, we began to receive amazing work from young poets all over the country (along with the expected romantic laments.)  I don’t know how they found us in those pre-Internet days when the few hundred copies we printed rarely traveled west of the Hudson, but find us they did and the poems and stories have kept coming now for forty-two years.  At a rough guess, I’d say we’ve published work by over 600 high school writers.

In the late eighties, we decided to collect a lot of the pieces in an anthology.  The news didn’t thrill everybody. A major funder sniffed: “I can’t imagine why you think we’d have any interest in supporting work by high school students.”  Hmmm: We went ahead without anybody’s support and, happily, that first collection got rave reviews.  Two others have followed and a fourth, When We Were Countries, (with Mark Pawlak as lead editor), will be published this spring.

Penelope Jane Reid’s “Smart Like Me” appeared in  HL #41, in 1981, one of three we ran.  Looking back at it now, it still seems to me a marvel of concision, all the more powerful for its tight lines and lack of embellishment.  We never saw any other poems from her.  She was a student at J.M. Atherton High School in Louisville, Kentucky when #41 came out.  The last we heard, for the anthology’s contributor notes in 1988, she’d gotten a degree in journalism from Indiana University.

The high school section has produced a few poetry lifers – Joanna Fuhrman and Rebecca Wolff come to mind – but most of the young writers wander off to other pursuits.  Penelope Reid would be in her late forties now.  I hope she’s had a sparkling journalistic career and maybe, just maybe, the occasional itch to scribble down a terrific poem.

-- Robert Hershon

Editor's note:

Poems by high school students appearing in Hanging Loose have been selected for The Best American Poetry on several occasions. Jorie Graham chose a poem by Jendi Reiter for BAP 1990; Adrienne Rich chose two poems by Natasha Le Bel and one by Deborah Stein for the 1996 volume; Marc Jaffee's "King of Repetition" was picked by Lyn Hejinian for the 2004 edition. I'm trusting my memory here, and there's a chance I'm leaving out somebody. But you get the idea: Hershon and his coeditors have a great eye for young talent. -- DL

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Jeni Olin

This poem by Jeni Olin will appear in her new collection, Hold Tight: The Truck Darling Poems, which will be out from Hanging Loose Press this spring.

DEPAKOTE

I felt most at home on this pill in a bucolic shire
of the Hamptons amid the piss-colored braids
of wheat on a Metamucil can, milkweed & sneeze drops,
a track The Loneliness of a Middle Distance Runner
never checked out in the Orangeade foam of dawn.
Glistening like a brow in an aspirin ad on the telly,
I’ve got a brain like soaked coral.
I’ve got a tongue like a baby’s penis.
I’m Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense --
I’m dead but I don’t know it.
My pen, my Eskimo blood spilled cheekily
over good & dear people.  I managed to write this
by myself With a Little Help from My Friends.
When I said, “Oh get me away I’m dying,”
I meant I wanted a cigarette & a problem child
on a peony-filled evening.  In the dry heat
of photocopy fans, making Easter cards with the, uh,
terminally ill, you hold the retinal scanner to my heart.
“Now I know how Joan of Arc felt
as flames rose to her Roman nose &
her hearing aid began to melt. . . ”
And in the darkened underpass I gave
blood & now my French is shaky.

-- Jeni Olin

If I tell you that the titles of a sequence of poems in Jeni’s new book are Depakote, Abilify, Klonopin, Xanax, Paxil, Lamactil, Meridia, and Lithium, you will conclude that she has not always had an easy time of it.  And you would undoubtedly figure just what to expect: poems so lugubrious, so dismal, so unrelievedly saturated with gloom, that, upon turning the last page, you’d be feeling a need for some strong medication of your own.

But that’s not the case: Jeni Olin writes the most energetic poems about depression ever put to paper.  Every poem is a thrill-ride. When you turn a corner, you have no idea where you’ll end up and the images come speeding by you, from a can of Metamucil to Joan of Arc’s nose. Yet the poem never feels like a random collection of unconnected lines. It adds up. The sheer exuberance of the language and the surprising connections are the very opposite of what the title tells you to expect. You can feel a little guilty: How can this writer’s problems make me feel so good?

-- Robert Hershon

Robert Hershon Presents a Poem by Donna Brook

This poem by Donna Brook first appeared in Hanging Loose 42 and also appears in her collection, What Being Responsible Means to Me.

THE SCHOOL OF PAIN

No one comes here to learn
what we teach.

They all want to be better off for it,
to know its applications, to grow
from the experience, to go through
just once.

What we offer
is the fact that it hurts
and is not the same as pleasure.
We’ve found

anything else, or less, or more
is not pain.

-- Donna Brook

I started out as an admirer of Donna Brook’s poetry and then I became an admirer of Donna Brook, so, in addition to being her editor, I became her husband.  Just to make that clear.

The School of Pain appeared in Fall 1982.  In the poetry world, Big-Time Suffering still had its ardent fans: Finish eating your depression stew, dear; it will make your poems grow up big and strong.  We still got lots of Dear Sylvia and Dear Anne poems from young women longing to be miserable.  The boys had to dress up as Berryman and Lowell.

Of course the idea that agony is ennobling goes far beyond the making of poems.  It’s still with us in relentless daily news reports – the guy who thinks he’s a better person because he’s had stomach cancer, the hollow-eyed saint, the uncomplaining amputee, the positive thinker being chewed on by tiger.  If it really worked that way, there would, indeed, be a real School of Pain, and it would have a waiting list.

-- Robert Hershon