The Best American Poetry

The List, Seagulls, & Paul Guest Shouting [by Lindsay Daigle]

When I was little, I liked to make lists of things: sports I liked to play, bands/singers I liked to listen to, R.L. Stein books I’ve read and have yet to read. It was all usually things I liked, things that sort of defined me at the time. Today, I was similarly moved to make such a list, but this time, of TV shows I like, ones that warrant binge-watching entire seasons at a time. I don’t quite know why I’m compelled in this way. Why is the act of making a list a pleasurable thing? Is it the thinking process, the discerning? The result, the seeing them all together? Once I’ve exhausted the obvious ones, I’m forced to think of ones I might have forgotten about otherwise, thereby perhaps reinvigorating the idea? Homage? Inclusion? (Exclusion?) Is it like creating a club and I’m the leader who gets to approve membership (like picking teams in grade school kickball)? Am I attempting to keep myself organized? If I write down every city I’ve ever been to, will I then know myself more fully? Am I better able to hold myself together after listing every film that has ever made me cry?

 

And following this list of questions, another— Why the list poem? Similar to my list-creating desire’s elementary origins, the list poem is a technique often introduced to the young writer as a handy image-compiling tool. Some primary school teachers ask their students to create list poems to introduce themselves to their classmates, or when poetry is brand new. It’s easy. It’s fun. It’s productive, straight-forward self-reflection. And all of these are assets to someone in her late 20s (or, anyone older than primary school age) too. The list poem enacts this youthful ease of compartmentalization, while engaging with the more mature task of exploring a thing from all its angles.

 

Catherine Bowman makes lists in “Sylvia’s Photo Album,” “Things To Eat, Paris, 1953” and her series of “Things To Do” poems, all from The Plath Cabinet.  Susan Firer’s list poems include “Small Milwaukee Museums,” “Where Song Comes From,” and “The Wave Docent.” Paul Guest gives us “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge,” “To-Do List,” and “Things We Agreed Not to Shout,” which is reproduced here:

 

 

Things We Agreed Not to Shout [by Paul Guest]

 

 

Mom is dead. Dad melted. Again.

Bitter recriminations. Bitter infidelities. Bitter.

Streisand is on. Finnish curses on the firstborn

of everyone who held us back. My credit rating.

Your many catalogs of shame. Scrapbook time.

 

Do you remember where we sank the kindergarteners?

 

Infectious constipation. In our spare time,

we enjoy perfecting methods of evisceration.

 

Bingo. Also, fire. Let’s make a baby.

 

Not anymore. You feel kind of weird inside.

 

My brother’s indiscretions. My indiscretion

with your brother. That lost weekend in Vegas.

Landslide of therapy. Moving to another state. Again.

 

We are running out of America. Faster.

Right there. Good girl. Judas Priest lyrics.

Freebird. Woo. Random latitudes.

 

Imagined injuries. Getting tired of your meniscus.

Seriously. Routing numbers

and decade by decade

delineations of your bra sizes. Beginning with the seventies.

 

You promised. I thought you were

asleep. I thought you wouldn’t mind it.

 

Surprise.

 

 

The list poem inherently invites the reader into its space. It asks for suggestions. What’s left out here? What could be added to this list? What kinds of things have you agreed not to shout? (To Guest’s list, I’d add, “Curse words at seagulls in the morning.”)

 

But there’s also a clear reason why the reader’s additions are not a part of the list already (so clear that it probably doesn’t need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway): This is not my list. This list is a representation of the speaker at a particular moment in time. It’s possible that he might agree next week not to shout curse words at seagulls in the morning. But at the time of the poem, it wasn’t a defining piece of his character. Maybe it’s a piece of mine though… So maybe I’ll create my own list… And oh, another reason the list poem is so spectacular! The encouragement of new poems. And then, years after you write your own “things I’ve agreed not to shout” poem, you might write another one because maybe you’ve decided to start shouting at seagulls since then. It’s a wonderful process, really.

 

So I’m going to go make a list of all my favorite TV shows. Who really knows why. But when I’m done, the list will exist, and I will have it to look at and consider its implications, what it says about me as a TV watcher, an entertainment seeker, an American, a human being. And maybe I’ll never look at it again. Or I’ll make another list in 15 years because this list doesn’t define me anymore. Or maybe I’ll make a poem of it, like John Ashbery’s “They Knew What They Wanted,” a list poem comprised of film titles. And then he’ll write a poem in response to mine comprised of only TV show titles. And then… well, the list goes on, doesn’t it?

Hump Day Highlights by Stacey Harwood

 

Megin Jimenez, who has written some of my favorite BAP blog posts, is Poet of the Month over at the Inquisitive Eater.

Sharon Mesmer recounts her "Mindful Nervous Breakdown" in a revealing series over at Dharma not Drama. Settle in and read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.

In the category of "better late than never," here's Leo Braudy's Pete Seeger was no Llewyn Davis. Braudy's Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s,  is just out from Asahina & Wallace.

Who says poetry makes nothing happen? Sharon Mesmer sends along this article by Kirby Olson about how Marianne Moore's little-known "The Camperdown Elm," pictured below, helped save Brooklyn's Prospect Park.

Am I leaving anything out? Send your highlights to me at [email protected] or write them in the comments below.

-- sdh

 

Hump Day Highlights

illustration (c) Robin Tatlow-Lord

Which poetic form is, according to John Ashbery, like 'riding a bicycle downhill'? Still don't know? Go here.

"Reading Dickinson in French is a kind of antidote to the agitation, beauty, and confusion so brilliantly aroused by, and housed in, her poems." Catherine Barnett writes beautifully on her discovery over at the Poetry Society .

Grace Cavalieri continues her monthly poetry roundup for the Washington Independent Review of Books.  This month she shines her generous light on books by Ava Leavell Haymon, Stephen Dunn, Tom Kirlin, Mark Tredinnick, and Diane Wakoski, among others.

The Boston Review publishes Sandra Simond's Notes on Nursery Rhymes.

Cave Canem hosts an old-fashioned rent party in Brooklyn's Dumbo. Go. Contribute. Dance.

Here's where we highlight two of our favorite multi-taskers: Grace Cavalieri interviews Linda Lee Bukowski, restored and published for the first time by Didi Menendez.

-- sdh

(Have a highlight? Send it to me at [email protected] )

Hump Day Highlights [by Stacey Harwood]

 Where we showcase the activities of our friends.

-- Joshua Mehigan (right) is poet of the week over at Brooklyn Poets. Head over to read his "Heard at the Men's Mission" along with his comments on the poem, poetry, and his life in New York's coolest burough. 

-- Eduardo C. Corral is joining the faculty for the The Lambda Literary Foundation upcoming Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices (August 3010, 2014). Details on how to apply are available here.

--Andrew McCulloch introduces Tom Disch (below right) to readers of the The TLS.  Here's an excerpt:

“On the Extravagance of Princes: a Letter of Advice”

by Tom Disch; introduced by Andrew McCulloch

The American Tom Disch (1940–2008) is probably best known in the United States as a science-fiction author, but he was also a children’s writer, librettist and playwright, poet and critic. Although genre writers with serious ambitions are often viewed with suspicion and condescension by the literary establishment, the fact that Disch was, as Dana Gioia puts it, “an illegal immigrant from across the literary Rio Grande” gives him a clear and often refreshing perspective on the precepts and practice of poetry. This emerges both in his verse-essays and his criticism. A review he wrote for the TLS in 1981 begins: “Poetry, like the more enthusiastic forms of religion, has a great potential for embarrassment. There is a calculated oddity to much of it that is liable to strike non-believers as silly, like opera capes or Dali moustaches”. There is nothing either operatic or surreal in Disch’s own work. Indeed, it may have been because of what Blake Morrison called his “affectionately debunking treatment of recent American practice” that he had to go to England to find a publisher for Burn This (1982), the collection in which “On the Extravagance of Princes” appeared.

Read the full piece and poem here.

How did we miss Poem Ending with a Phrase from Federico Garcia Lorca and The Killer, two poems by David Lehman published by The AWL last November? Find them here.

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights

This week we're highlighting activities and accomplishments of friends and former guest bloggers:

Eduardo Corral (Slow Lightning,Yale University Press) has embarked on an ambitious reading tour.

Jessica Piazza's poems appear in Mezzo Cammin, an online journal for formal poetry by women. Her recent book is Interrobang (Red Hen Press).

Ross Martin consults his Council of Elders.

Kenji C. Liu's Your Father Tongue, one of three poens that appeared in a recent issue of Barrow Street, has been turned into a compelling video.

Alexandra Zelman-Doring's A community of mortals is a runner up for the Bodley Head/FT Essay Prize.

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights

Another terrific review, this one by Grace Cavelieri, in this month's Washington Review of Books:

"Lehman is a combination of Mark Twain, Charlie Rose and John Le Carre with a little John Donne thrown in. Is he historian? Rabbi? Storyteller? Yes and more. I say, take the book on a cross country trip and you’ll find literary entrapment that keeps you from looking out the window . . . "

Read the full review here.

Listen to David Lehman reading 'Yours the Moon' on the PBS NewsHour Arts Beat.

Some times you just don't know what's going on in your own back yard. Turns out that a talented New School graduate student has been recording Poetry Forums and uploading them to the school's web page. Who knew? Now we know. You can listen to David Lehman with Auden scholar Edward Mendleson and award winning poet Tina Chang:

Audiograph: Edward Mendelson Moderated by David Lehman Read our review of this program here.

Audiograph: Tina Chang Read our review of this program here.

Denise Duhamel, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2013 makes it easy for you to catch up on the poets you should be reading now with her reading list for her course Advanced Women Poets: Books You May Only Be Hearing about Now. The good news, writes Duhamel, is that "there is room in this Advanced Women Poets seminar, no prerequisite required."

Ford Madox Ford had a novel idea for how to evaluate a book. It's put to use in this review of Jennifer Michael Hecht's important new book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.

A Crucial Flare in the Dark: The National Poetry Series Wants You!

We leave you with this:

(via Remodelista)

-- sdh

 

 

Hump Day Highlights by Stacey Harwood

Over at delirious hem, Susana Gardner is curating the Audio Advent Calendar. Day 3 features Pattie McCarthy and Elizabeth Bishop. Day 1 pairs Martha Reed with Dawn Lundy Martin and Day 2 pairs Kyle Schlesinger with Robert Creely. Go listen!
 

Stay: On Growing Up Atheist & Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Secular Argument Against Suicide  Alyssa Morhardt in conversation with Jennifer Michael Hecht at luna luna.

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights by Stacey Harwood

We first met Ross Martin through his poetry and have been thrilled to watch his career take off. Ross is an Executive Vice President at Viacom Media Networks and runs Scratch, a creative swat team driving innovation across the company. Just recently, Ross was included in Fortune Magazine's "40 Under 40" list of rising business leaders. Clearly, he's gained wisdom over the years. Here's a sampling from a recent post on his blog Something Burning: I used to say all the time that one of my biggest goals was to bring creativity and innovation to every area of an organization. Problem is, that kind of hubris presumes creativity and innovation aren't already present in those areas, and that I'm somehow the one who can bring it. Read the full post here.

With a courtly nod to the work of the Academy of American Poets, Rauan Klassnic over at HTML Giant, has begun posting what he calls a complementary series of poems that might not fit in those highlighted by the Academy. Most recently his, Academy of American Lunatics posted Your Conscript, by Danielle Pafunda (Natural History Rape Museum, bloof, December 2013). Check it out.

Gift buying time. We feel you. If you want something unique, like the linocut of Philip K. Dick pictured above for example, Reb Livingston comes to the rescue with a Pinterest board for inquisitive readers.

Sherman Alexie talks poetry, booksellers and Kobe on KUOW.org. Kobe beef or Bryant? Listen and tell.

Got something for Hump Day Highlights? Send it to me at [email protected].

-- sdh

Hump Day (plus one) Highlights by Stacey Harwood

David Lehman has a playlist to go with his New and Selected poems.  You'll find it on Largehearted Boy.

Did you miss the anniversary of The Gettysburg Address?

Two Poems for Gettysburg by Catherine Woodard

Jennifer Michael Hecht's Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It is in bookstores and receiving well deserved notice:

Against Suicide: Interview with Jennifer on To the Best of Our Knowledge.

In "Stay" writer makes a case against suicide. Jim Higgins review in the Journal Sentinel

"If you’ve ever known someone who committed suicide, or have contemplated it yourself, or have admired a personal hero who died by his or her own hand, please oh please read this."  Maria Popova's in-depth review on  Brain Pickings.

 --sdh

ps. Help me come up with a better title for this weekly series. I don't like "Hump Day."

Hump Day (plus one) Highlights by Stacey Harwood

Lots going on this week!

For his guest blogging week in September, Joshua Mehigan invited 19 translators to share their views on the qualities that readers should consider when seeking to read translations of verse in languages they don’t know. His posts were so popular that they're worth highlighting again, especially since Joshua has added new material that was unavailable in September.

For Part I, Joshua asked contributors to  list up to five things readers should consider before reading a collection of poetry in translation. Read the answers here.

For Part II, Joshua asked contributors to list up to five contemporary translations of poetry that they think  work as English-language poetry while also faithfully conveying the semantic content and something of the original’s greatness or importance. He also asked them to cite the most successful translation they've done. Read the responses here.

We are grateful to the following poets and translators who generously contributed to Joshua's posts: Geoffrey Brock, Bill Coyle, Dick Davis, Rhina Espaillat, David Ferry, Christophe Fricker, Jonathan Galassi, Rachel Hadas, Len Krisak, David Lehman, Charles Martin, Robert Mezey, Michael Palma, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, Roger Sedarat, Alicia Stallings, Rimas Uzgiris, and Philip White.

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 Daniel Nester's Incredible Sestina Anthology is out and to go along with it, he's posting a series of interviews with contributors to the volume. They discuss their own introduction to the form along with the spark that inspired their poem. If you've never attempted a sestina, reading these interviews just might motivate you to pick six and get going. 

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I love Joy Katz's essay on poetry and grief over at the Poetry Foundation website. It's lovely and moving both for her observations and her elegant language.

-- sdh

Hump Day Roundup

A few items worth reading this week:

War and Baked Beans by Robert Olmstead:

(c) Jon McNaught

Robert Olmstead, who has distinguished himself as an accomplished novelist, takes our breath away with this moving column about our sad and scary state of affairs: 

These days I feel my edges falling away. I am sure this is weakness. What else could it be in this armed and dangerous land of ours? When people learn that I teach they sometimes launch into lengthy condemnations of young people: their music, their laziness, their callowness. This makes my blood boil. Young people do not make war. Young people do not decide to send off the drones. But young people will be there to do the dirty work when the old people tell them to. Young people will be there to shovel the manure.

Read his entire essay War and Baked Beans in the New York Times here.

Lera Auerback and Laurie Anderson:

A scene from the Moscow production of Lera Auerbach's opera The Blind, for which audience members were blind folded. The Blind had its premiere in New York City during the recent Lincoln Center Festival

Shortly after the debut of her groundbreaking opera The Blind, Lera Auerback sits down with Laurie Anderson for Harper's Bazar.

"Everywhere I go, I visit cemeteries or abandoned ruins—including one in a very small village in Brazil that you can only reach by boat. You walk in and there's this incredible cemetery, with all sorts of flowering trees and completely disintegrating graves," she says, gesturing like an orchestra conductor, dark curly hair flowing around her face, her eyes gleaming. "And there's a sign at the entrance: PLEASE DO NOT DUMP BODIES UNATTENDED. It was exceptionally beautiful, in a gruesome way."

Much about Auerbach's career, including The Blind, is just that: beautiful, gruesome, devastating, and daring. Now 39, Auerbach, born on the border of Siberia, composed her first opera at age 12, and defected from the Soviet Union in 1991, when she was 17, to study at Juilliard.

Continue reading here.
Read Lera Auerbach's Best American Poetry blog posts here.

 

The 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced on Thursday, October 10. Here's what one reliable news source has to say about John Ashbery's chances of winning.

If you have an item for "Hump Day Roundup" e-mail it to us at [email protected]

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights by Stacey Harwood

A few items worth looking at today:

Rachel Barenblat's post about John Jerome, a writer who meant a lot to me, especially when I took up competitive swimming as an adult, sent me to Google, where I found this appreciation by Bruce McCall (scroll down).

Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu have been David's agents at Writers' Representatives since he began publishing books. They also represent Harold Bloom, Douglas Crase, and Terry Teachout, whose biography of Duke Ellington  is long-listed for the National Book Award in Nonfiction 2013. Their website gives an interesting round-up of book-related news.

Didi Menendez is at it again, this time with her "Glossary of Deidres," a mesmerizing film-in-progress of Nin Andrews' poem, with appearances by Lisa Marie Basile, Rita Maria Martinez, Ivy Alvarez, Duriel Harris, Victoria Selbach, Mulu Harper, Angela Hardy, Tammy Brewer, Kathleen Rooney,Leah Umansky, Ivonne Bess, and Nin Andrews. More Diedres will be added until the poem is finished. (Read by Timothy Brainard.)

If you know me at all, you know I love ballet, which is why I found this short film fascinating.

The Gramercy Tavern is among my favorite New York City restaurants, in part because Chef Michael Anthony joins in the celebration of National Poetry Month. I follow him on twitter, (@chefmikeanthony) where he shared this video.  It reminded me of my 2009 tour of the Union Square Greenmarket with his chief steward Modesto "Mo" Batista, which was documented by Time Out New York here.

Share your Hump Day Highlights with me: [email protected]

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights

Jennifer Michael Hecht on suicide in the military and how to stop it.

The American Scholar is a consistently smart and relevant journal, filled with compelling fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. The current issue arrived yesterday and is especially worthwhile because of Jennifer Michael Hecht's straightforward and important essay about suicide in the military, adapted from her forthcoming book Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It (Yale Univeristy Press, November, 2013). Here is an excerpt:

Those who have never felt intense inner pain should not scoff at its power. As the 17th-century doctor Robert Burton wrote in The Anatomy of Melancholy: “Hope, ye miserable. Ye happy, take heed.” Everyone suffers; no one escapes. When the bad time comes, it will feel like it is never going to end. But it will. We must think it through now so that the training against suicide kicks in and saves our life and the lives of our fellows.

The reason I say “the lives of our fellows” is that one of the principal predictors of suicide is knowing someone who has committed suicide. We influence each other to an extraordinary degree. Parents who kill themselves leave behind children who are three times as likely to kill themselves as children who make it to age 18 with living parents. It’s not just parents. According to sociological studies, one suicide in a community very often leads to a rise in suicides by people who knew the deceased, or knew of him, or felt themselves like him in some way, especially with regard to age, sex, and occupation. In my new book, Stay, I compile a large number of studies showing that suicidal contagion is real. It shouldn’t surprise us, because studies have shown that with weight, smoking, recycling, and other choices, people do what they think the people around them are doing. Even with choices as permanent as getting tattoos or having a third child, people follow each other. After one suicide, the suicide rate in a given area increases. It happens at schools; it happens within professions; it happens after a celebrity suicide; and it is happening in the military right now.

Because of this phenomenon, suicide is also homicide—you take somebody with you. When you take your own life, you normalize suicide for people who liked you and who are like you. Once the numbers reach a critical mass, as they have in the military today, it is a massacre. We have to take better care of each other by insisting on sparing ourselves in periods of emotional agony. What I want to tell our soldiers and veterans is this: If you want your buddies to live, you have to find a way to live, too. . .

You can read Hecht's essay here.

Kudos to poets Farrah Field and Jarred White

Craig Morgan Teicher reports in Publishers Weekly that Field and White will open Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Bookshop (126A Front Street) in Brooklyn's Dumbo neighborhood that will focus almost exclusively on small press poetry book. Read all about it here.

-- sdh

Hump Day Highlights

A few items that are worth reading:

We first got to know Michael Robbins when Robert P. Baird posted about him here. We've been watching and applauding his ascent ever since. Here's an excerpt from a recent column in The Chicago Tribune, where he is a regular. Follow the link below to read his entire piece.

We don't lack for denunciations of the state of American poetry. Mark Edmundson wrote an ill-informed essay on the subject in the July issue of Harper's. To prove his thesis that "contemporary American poets now seem to put all their energy into … the creation of a voice," and to answer his question "What is a poet now?" Edmundson cites not a single contemporary American poet under the age of 59. Think about that for a second.

I happen to find Edmundson's essay particularly galling, since every poem I've ever written puts the lie to one of his more ignorant claims:

Contemporary American poetry speaks its own confined language, not ours. It is, by and large, pure. It does not generally traffic in the icons of pop culture; it doesn't immerse itself in ad-speak, rock lyrics, or politicians' posturing: it gravitates to the obscure, the recondite, the precious, the ancient, trying to get outside the mash of culture that surrounds it.

Continue reading here.

"Food poems" are hard to get right but Terence Winch succeeds with three poems in this month's Alimentum:

Small Potatoes

We went out to eat.
It was like walking on eggs.
The waiter spilled the beans
and then we ordered.
I had the sour grapes
with the spilt milk,
which made you cry.
You wanted tough
muffins. How do you
like them apples?
the waiter asked.
He was the apple
of our eye. But every
thing in the end seemed
like small potatoes.

Read "Plums" and "Money, Food, Love" here.

Does Didi Menendez ever sleep? She works tirelessly on behalf of poets and artists and is a poet and artist herself.  She recently teamed up with Nin Andrews for an issue of her journal Poets and Artists. You can download it here to read poems by Kelli Russell Agodon, Mark Halliday, Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton, Carol Moldaw, and James Needham, among others.

Quote:  "You have to know how to hurt your reader." Danielle Pafunda, speaking at last night's Poetry Forum at the New School.

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If you have candidates for "Hump Day Highlights," send them to bestampo.com.

-- sdh