The Best American Poetry

Poet Spotlight: Terese Svoboda [by Kristina Marie Darling]

A Guggenheim fellow, Terese Svoboda is most recently the author of Professor Harriman's Steam Air-Ship, her seventh book of poetry, and Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet. She has also published six novels, a memoir, and a book of translations from Nuer, a South Sudanese language. Great American Desert, a book of stories, is forthcoming March 2019.
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A Process Note

I don't see my poetry as difficult, I see it as playful. The mind wants to play. It wants, in its aesthetic experience, to return to a work of art and retrieve something more from it at every contact. Otherwise it will discard that glittering toy, bored. I'm currently playing with plays, getting on and off the stage of poetry. I'm also interested in technical language, and its poetics. Everything has already been written – or else nothing has been written, each moment its own possible play of sound and sense.
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On the Aesthetics of Textual Difficulty

Poetry that requires interpretation is perhaps a show of dominance: you have to know so much in order to appreciate my work, e.g., Eliot and Pound. Enter Hope Mirrlees, her long poem “Paris” published by Virginia Woolf four years before “The Wasteland,” critiqued by TLS as “spluttering and incoherent statement displayed with various tricks of type...It is certainly not a “Poem.”

Verlaine’s bed-time…Alchemy
Absynthe,
Algerian tobacco,
Talk, talk, talk,
Manuring the white violets of the moon.

Here was a woman who knew six languages by the time she was twenty, including Zulu, friend of Stein, Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and of course Eliot, and she lived with a classics scholar. She was not lacking in cultural references. More contemporary evidence of different political and aesthetic pressures that have affected what is considered acceptable as experiment is the erasure of radical poetry of the 20s and 30s, with the conservative 50's and 60's emphasis on sunsets and in formal structure. 

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A Folio of Poems by Terese Svoboda

Out of Ringing Ears

Renegade automated car says it can get us back
[automated voice: get us back]
Where?

Slip of paper crushed
still warm
thigh-curved from its sleep-upon
says

Called Forth ring ring no sympathy
the better the sooner get back

Whose renegade scalp do you see taken
in a world of get back?
The tonic someone (No, we have not met)

the invisible people on stage
clothes on hangers
the gin [the automated voice: get back]

well-dressed vs. ill-dressed she said
and Not this time beat time

[schottische] slow polka to you

and over the table, the bedspread
                               under which a house hides
the chair-rung entrance
and the costume
I wore her clothes all my life even now her blouse curses me from the closet
Pretend! Limp possum at the vet's 

The chorus needs feeding
The chorus has broken the toilet
The chorus on its hind legs
The chorus, its back to Greece 

Water deliciously advances
voices over it [stage mis-direction] under it
A canon signals The End
ring, ring [automated voice]

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Sandwich

Across the stage of the plains interstate inter state interstate dell and dell and plains, there is a scene where they run out of gas.

You — in the white shirt —

I'm just as scenic. Listen: There was a tremendous knocking.

Knock, knock. No joke?

They put him in a closet.

Not a dell.

They put him in a closet and the door, hung wrong, had a gap at the bottom where you could shove a whole sandwich through, though the bread got a little dirty. As for thirst, I don't know. No light of course except through the gap so the sandwich came in dark and dirty.

Whispering voices from the phone.

Can you get it?

There was a tremendous knocking across the plains, sometimes as if on a windowpane. Sometimes enough to break it, or else from below.

You don't know that.

It's a kind of knowing, just like the knocking you say you heard just after they ran out of gas. And who is the they anyway? The usual suspects, M and F, old while you're not and because of that, always running out of gas.

They wished there were windows. There were sandwiches they made for themselves, they didn't shove them all.

You need a window left open if it's going to rain. But that means mud will be tracked in by the gas-less, earning alienation. The door won't open.

Time gaps while they run away like that, after someone else finds him in the closet. Maybe the someone went looking for a coat, a winter coat that he thought he had hung in there. Pee-You.

M and F forgot their homemade sandwiches and they ran out of gas.

How do you know?

Someone called. Someone said Look in the closet.

It was you.

I was wearing a white shirt, easy to spot. I didn't need a coat.

They walked a long way before anyone picked them up, and it never stopped raining. The dell came up while they were walking. A farmer in the dell. A big Ford truck with 4WD.

Interstate.

No trace of footsteps because of the rain.

Interstate gets into the car like a hum. You would think they were fleeing the site but no, they just ran out of gas.

What if guilt is free like the falling of rain? Instead of cooped up in a closet? He was crying.

I'm not related. I'm not the last or the late. I'm not — really. I say: there was a scene and someone went inside but whether —

A white shirt is easy enough to spot. Dirt just falls on it.

There was a tremendous knocking.

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Shame Helps

A sudden not-breeze fills the air.
Two men dressed in corduroy approach, one pulling a boat.
A boat of agony.
Heigh-ho. Greeting. Greeting.
Fleeting smile, both. The word smile left on the faces of the Fourth Wall.

How to read that?
The optic nerve gets it up.
What has been done weighs the Heigh.
The smarter of the men has a dollar hanging from a pocket.
Acquisitive or generous?
Balance implies a man out of sight removing his shoes.
Why a man is the question.
The philosopher in the second row wants to punch the usher.
Such restraint stupefies the audience into paradoxical sleep:
they stop worrying but their eyeballs still roll.

And if the heavens help with a hole in the roof above the lights: drip, drip,
the two men look to the exit, shamed, unwilling to follow one or the other without a speech.
Let us bury Caesar.
I hope we find some sand.
Creepy, the way birds in stillness sing.

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Fusion Construction

 

The sun shows off--
                                    pocket it.

You saw electrons bloom on a newsreel,
let's have a timeline.

                                                Six men
show, a nice number for progress
but which wears the dress?
            (he's got courage like Turing)           

                        They build its basket but
fuel must eat something:
time, this time.
            Big logs

are lifted, an animatronics
of change, a mechanical buffalo

—nice Handel, hear it under
the voiceover?--but Babel bubbles up

e.g. irrational fear, unwarranted
code, another country's
                                                penis.

Change requires copulation,
nakedness, pleasure.

Eat
the coxcomb and the sun will not rise.

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What? is your line

I think I'm panicking
I think I'm panicking
etc.
crying practice

windowless

quick, a dream:
one of you holds the other
What? is your line
the gun is fake but you need a license

Miss Vulgarity comes forward in
a lack-of-bathing-suit competition

a different voice speaking “I”
to an “audience”

rants: and you and you and you
and it wasn't like that

brief interview with an innocent bystander
before the lover slash narrator finds his way over

an absent Noah leaves the room

floating along and then the queen says
women were at best queens then
WE

the chorus   too loud
but that is opinion
answers back: the building is burning

insert choreography
where who keeps the extinguisher where backstage

but I or you end up in a boat
racing   it's a matter of race

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1718 – Nantucket Beach

Poet Spotlight: Traci Brimhall [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Traci Brimhall is the author of three collections of poetry: Saudade (Copper Canyon Press), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press). Her next collection, a hybrid of essays and poems, Come the Slumberless from the Land of Nod is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Slate, The Believer, The New Republic, Orion, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014.  She’s received a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and is currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University.

A Process Note

The selection below is from my most recent collection, Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017). They are verse plays spoken by a chorus of ageless girls and appear spread out in the book across multiple personas. They’re supposed to function sort of like a Greek chorus and some of them were once written as poems in a single voice but got broken into this community voice. I’m interested in the ways oral storytelling are narratives that can be reshaped or lost and how poetry is often so focused on the singular “I”. My books so often engage the mythic, and myths seem to me to be collaboratively composed as allegories for the social and cultural moment.

Formally, I think it’s difficult only in that it is unexpected. And because it is formally odd, I try and make its content a bit more clear at times. Although I want to challenge a reader at times, I also want to be generous with them. I love them, though it’s fair to say my love isn’t always easy. The form also allows me a different form of maximalism. In workshops, rejections, and reviews of my books I’ve been criticized for being, essentially, too much. I know I’m a poet (and person) of excess. The verse play lets me take up lots of visual space and extend the line beyond even the lengths I usually allow myself. I think female poets have traditionally been celebrated for being concise and controlled, and I feel downright naughty for trying to spread across both margins.

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In Which the Chorus Describes Cafuné on the Eve of the Passion  

 

Maria Helena:

The night in costumes, in church bells, in pews sucking on free salted caramels.

 

Maria Thereza:

In the general’s breath before he pinches the child's jaw open and spits in her mouth.

 

Maria Helena:

We did nothing to stop it. Why would we? We only witness, record, recite.

 

Maria Thereza:

Besides, no one else tried to stop history from making itself on stage. Everyone fantasized a different present.

 

Maria de Lourdes:

In the pews, the unrepentant traced their hands onto hymnal pages. Behind the curtain, the toothless, the leprous, burying themselves in scherzo and nude boas.

 

Maria Thereza:

Jesus makes it to stage but forgets his lines, the new Passion simmers in the journalist, the priest, the poet watching the dictator's parade from an unlit room, composing meager epics and running the planchette across the letters written on the wall:

 

Maria Madalena:

Will we survive?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Of course not.

 

Maria Madalena:

Will the country?

 

Maria Aparecida:

Ask again later.

 

Maria Madalena:

Is God's love absolute?

Maria Aparecida:

Nana, nenê.

Maria de Lourdes:

The night is ripping its dress to bind soldiers' wounds. It's painting the church with the blood on the torturer’s floor.

 

Maria Helena:

It’s nailing together the gallows.

 

Maria Thereza:

It’s combing men's hair with its fingers, singing,
o nenê dorme no chão, and measuring their necks.

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In Which the Chorus Explains What Was Stolen in 1966

Meet the Press: Shrew & Cat in the Sun Press

Dante Di Stefano: In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988 John Ashbery wrote: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” Considering the efflorescence of political poetry right now, and your own background as a union organizer involved in direct political action, could you begin the interview by riffing on Ashbery’s quote and its relevance to the political poetry being written in the Trump Era?

Joe Weil: I think a lot of political poetry preaches to the already converted, but in that sense it is as vital a trope as carpe diem is, or as vital as an elegy for a recently deceased poem might be. That might make political poetry seem dangerously close to a conventional form or rather formula (lots of rhetorical devices including anaphora, lots of listing and enumerating, the use of invective, the inserting of a We and a Them, and so on).  But when Political poetry fails, like when most poetry fails, it fails in the way its puts lines and nouns and verbs together. It does not fail intrinsically because it is political poetry. There is nothing innately wrong or inferior about political poetry. Much of the world’s best poetry is political... Blake’s Chimney Sweeper poem (the one in the Experience section) succeeds both as a political poem, but also as a powerful poem about the suffering of child laborers. Its words are so well chosen and so chilling. It is as great a poem as Goya’s “Saturn Eating his Children” is a painting. Most of the poems we love by the romantics were deeply political. Time has blurred the causes, but left the images and the main ideas of freedom and newness vivid. Political poetry might be considered tacky or obvious, but it surprises me Ashbery didn’t take to it, since he often liked traipsing the thin line between the sublime and the tacky, the lyrical and the obvious (he loved playing with cliché) . One of his poems ends with: “Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulations.” That ominous declaration rings politically true at this moment in time though the poem was written in the 1950’s. Political poetry, when it is good, continues to have many lives and uses. It transcends its moment and exceeds its own cause. Done well, it is both anciently sudden and suddenly ancient. It does not date

DD: In the “Pre-Rambles,” or introductory essays, to the first two issues of Shrew you lay out some guidelines for the magazine. I’m most interested in your idea of a “pre-standard” aesthetic, a concept that I think connects to another idea you’ve written about, a “Eucharistic vision” of poetry and the world. Could you unpack these concepts for us?

JW: If you start with “Standards” you’re already publishing poems that fit a mold. The mold may not be precise or even visible, but it’s there. The editor is imposing his or her “ur” poem on every poem that passes through. In a "pre-standard" idea of publishing, you find people willing to enter. So you find poets rather than poems and you say: Hey buddy, got a poem for me?” The magazine is not based on excluding the many to pick the few. I always thought this was too much like the cool bouncer at a disco saying who can and who can’t get through the door. Most of the time the criteria run along these lines:  

Poet A writes a poem about the color blue. It gets rejected. Poet B, a widely known poet writes a poem about Blue, it not only gets accepted, but the editor brags about having Poet B in the mag. Let’s say both were of equal quality: well, then, the true standard was not quality, but hierarchy.

When I started this Shrew, I asked friends whose work I liked to send me something. They sent it and I published it, and I also did the same with the art. “Pre-standard” does not mean an absence of standards. Rather, it means “toward a standard.” You start with people of good faith, friends or at least poets you’ve met under good circumstances, and you ask them to join you. Free play eventually finds the rules, but the rules can never find free play. So, I begin with free play. And yes, it is part of my idea of Eucharistic reality, of being part of a body where all are welcome to enter. It’s strange because, if you give people free play, they start creating their own standards, often far more exciting and interesting standards than you, yourself, would have imposed. I hate snobbery. I think it is the source of all race and class and gender hatred. So death to snobs. But there is something that is a healthy snobbery: you don’t let those who like to play the bouncer at the disco in. They might create a room full of beautiful people, but who knows if that’s really the best room for a party?

DD: Part of what makes Shrew so dynamic and vital is that it champions, both implicitly and explicitly, the overlooked, the broken, and what I’ve heard you call the “motley,” that is, what Hopkins would call “dappled things.” Could you talk a little bit about poetry and all things counter, original, spare, strange?

JW: I love comic poetry, and by that, I mean something different than just Billy Collins. I mean work with the fool’s cap, with the touch of Harlequin, with deep sadness to the comedy so that you know the clown is dancing on the edge of a steep cliff and the banana peels are flying off to meet him and to kill him.. I love poetry, also, that can laugh at itself, that breaks the 4th wall. I also revere poets like Vallejo who I know was the poet equivalent of someone who lived his art so intensely that he became the Shema—as did Emily Dickinson. I know he is not the greatest of all Spanish poets, but my favorite poet in Spanish is Miguel Hernandez, who I first read when I was 18 and everyone in my family was dying. His fierce love and integrity destroyed me—in the best way. He broke me down. I love May Swenson, especially her sex poems. Wanda Coleman is a poet I return to as well as Wallace Stevens, Bob Kaufman, Williams, and Whitman, also Carolyn Kizer, Maggie Nelson. I’m very motley in my tastes. I might read a sonnet by Milton, a sonnet by Wanda Coleman, King Lear, and funny poems by the California poet Ronald Koertge, all in one day. Why not? I like the magazine to go in many different directions. I always liked the idea of motley. When I was very little, I always dyed all my Easter eggs every color so that they came out a sort of sloppy brown, but if you looked close enough,  if you put your eyeball right up against the egg, all the colors were still in there, and they were like some beautiful brawl of colors—all swirling around and through each other. I think I’m still that way. The sheer mess of it all delights me.

DD: Maria, tell us about your experience as Guest Editor for Shrew.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Guest Editor, Shrew Issue 10: I Love Shrew because the design of the journal is beautifully clear and clean. I really like the layout and the combination of poetry and art. I love the Pre-Ramble and the way it gives each editor a chance to frame the issue and to contextualize the work chosen. I am thrilled with Shrew’s combination of poetry and art. I think the art opens the poems up to another way of seeing and feeling. For me, I feel uplifted by the combination. In short, Joe Weil’s concept for Shrew is brilliant.  

DD: Tommy, what made you want to help Joe Weil develop Shrew?

Tommy Stella, Managing Editor, Shrew: I’ve helped Joe with a few projects in the past and I’ve always enjoyed every single one of them. One day I logged into Facebook and saw a status update that Joe made talking about how tired he was of magazines and how he was going to start his own magazine that celebrates writers and writing, etc etc sic sic sic. I immediately messaged him and asked what he needed.

DD: How is what Shrew is doing different from other journals are doing?

TS: The goal of Shrew is to combine what I’ve learned from working for various online newsletters and social media accounts with Joe’s knowledge of the poetry/magazine world (combined with Colleen Curry’s fantastic design). Our current goal is to make a product that is accessible to poetry initiates and to general readers. The beauty of Shrew is that everything is meticulously designed. We are completely open to every single writer who submits to us. And we mean that.

DD: Colleen, what motivated you to take on the task of designing an online literary magazine?

Colleen Curry, Graphic Designer, Shrew: Joe was my poetry professor in college. When I heard that he was looking to start a digital zine and that nobody had stepped into the role of designer yet, I volunteered. I have a lot of respect for the poems Shrew publishes and strive to showcase them in a way that is unique, timeless, and never takes itself too seriously.

DD: What do you see Shrew as providing that differs from other current online zines?

CC: Shrew is a platform first and a magazine second. It's founded on the idea that poets thrive in a network. All of Shrew’s strength lies in the insight of its contributors and the thought put in by Joe and other guest editors to anthologize a theme, practice, or place and to start a dialogue which can then continue online, sometimes in a future issue.

DD: How, as the designer, would you describe the look of Shrew?

CC: It’s punchy and that’s deliberate; I wanted to approach Shrew as a brand. Publishing is a turbulent industry, always in flux, and the way we consume media is constantly changing. I want Shrew to be able to keep up with that, so everything from the magazine itself to our website and social media is grounded in a few simple, highly adaptable design elements. (Yes, it's a lot of red.)

DD: Joe, you have also published several books by other poets under the imprint of Cat in the Sun Press. Could you talk about that press and the books you’ve published there?

JW: I first published my former student Micah Towery because Micah had been so vital to my life early on at Binghamton University. He had helped set me up with a mic so that I could do my Joe Weil morning poem show which appeared on Facebook and had over 600 members at one time—including the poets Dorothy Laux, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Patricia Smith. Then Micah and my former student Adam Fitzgerald set up THETHEPOETRY.com which was initially a platform for my rants and essays, but which we opened up to many young poets and writers who later became far more famous than I. Micah did so much and I did his book Whale of Desire, which I love. Then, my wife Emily and I asked Micah to come on board and he is really the one who makes the press possible, but we published a book of poetry and art by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, which Emily spent a great deal of time editing, and we did several other books, including a book of essays by Alfred Corn, which Micah edited and put together. We run it this way: I have the book put together, edited and designed,  and then it is put on print on demand, and the poet keeps all profits from the book. I don’t get a dime, not even a percentage. So the poet maintains control of his or her art. I think it works best that way. Maria claims it gave her a whole new part time career as a painter because people started buying her paintings when they saw the book. Before this, I was involved in creating Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. I like creating presses and zines, but then I tend to run away after they get established. I like inciting things and then getting out of town before it becomes boring.

DD: You are married to a talented poet, Emily Vogel. How has being married to her changed your relationship with poetry and writing?

JW: I’m a devout malpracticing Catholic. Marrying Emily is my means toward not being damned to hell. It’s my vocation. It’s a sacramental marriage and I know this is going to get me jeers in some quarters, but, hey, it’s the cultural belief of my Irish Catholic ancestors. Before we had kids, Emily and I would wake up, kiss, get dressed, have some breakfast, then go to separate floors of the house we rented and write all day. We’d meet again in the evening, watch a movie, fall asleep and get up to do it all over again. Emily also painted, so there was a lot of paint on the floor. I play piano, guitar and several other instruments. So we were always doing our art. We started doing gigs together and then we also sang and played music with the readings. Eventually, we wrote a book together called West of Home, a book of responsorials, which ended up as a play produced by the Wombat Theater company at KGB Bar in 2013 (or it may have been 2014). We’ve done a lot of interesting things, but now we have two children, both on the autistic spectrum. Their presence in our lives, and our love for them, has re-shaped everything. They broke three of my guitars and I finally decided this was a message from God (I don’t play guitar that much anymore). Emily is a fantastic poet who doesn’t always get involved in my projects. She has her own, including being poetry editor of Ragazine, As for as my relationship to poetry, poetry was always my secret imaginary friend who came from the other side of the universe through the tiny holes in a screen door. Poetry still comes to visit me. Being married to Emily and loving my children has made those visits even more welcomed and necessary. I write more poems about being a father now. Can’t help it. They’re more surreal and more conversationally lyric than my former narrative poems. So I’ve changed, but not on purpose. I don’t know what the changes will amount to yet.

DD: How have your young children changed your understanding of poetry?

JW: I am sixty. I do everything far too late in life. My children arrived when I was 54 and then 55. They are on the spectrum and largely non-verbal. They present challenges that I already experienced by having an older brother who had suffered damage to his brain, had a hemispheral removal that didn’t stop his convulsions, and eventually ended up blind and paralyzed. I like to fool myself that I got a training in love and caretaking from my brother that will help me with my kids, but that’s not so. I have never experienced a love as fierce as I feel for my children. Trying to explain it would be a catastrophic failure. They are going to be six and five and still are not potty trained. I joke and sing and talk to my wife while cleaning the poop from their legs. When Gabriel can’t sleep and is stimming (a term in autism meaning self-soothing movements) I stay up all night and try everything I know to comfort him and help him sleep. Clare has lively conversation with objects and qualities of light, and shadows. She is in a world I wish I could visit, just to love and understand her more. My children have affirmed for me that love is the only impossible thing I will ever accomplish. I love them. I wipe the poop from , the world where people think they understand autism because they watched a movie once. How do you explain that love crushes you into something you never intended, but that’s okay? You can’t. It sounds trite. Everything I say about my children sounds trite. Perhaps someday I will be able to say one thing that seems to me to be absolutely accurate and worth saying.

DD: What is one thing American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JW: I think American poetry needs more listeners, people who don’t want to be poets so much as read or go to readings. The trend in all the arts is that everyone in the audience is also in the business. That’s like LA where everyone might have done some acting or knows producers or would-be directors. Maybe this is good and I don’t want it to change too much, but I think, overall, it makes me worry about this all being solipsistic. I think American poetry needs more ways for poets to come up. Right now, there’s the academic MFA, or there’s the spoken word route. Both are limited, and as they gain power, both create false binaries and are too rigid a frame. I began reading in bars. I was spoken word in that sense and still am, but I don’t do the formulas. I don’t read with slam voice or with that slightly fry voice, little question at the end some academics use. There are affectations I’d like to see less of. I’d like to see more ways to succeed, more small grass roots community readings. I’d like to see funds for small readings all through the country and I’d like those funds to be administered by the hosts of series, so a poet who wrote a book could actually go around and get paid—and be a local force. I had an idea for a poetry union with a gauntlet of readings all tied together in a loose affiliation, a sort of circuit. They do it in slam and they do it in academia (but unofficially). The presses could be acknowledged by certain series and their poets sent out to tour for, say, a modest 200 a reading. I’d love to see book carousels at every series with the local mags and latest books and chaps in the carousels. I’m not holding my breath.

DD: I heard you’ve been writing bird poems lately. If the following poets were birds what kind of birds would they be? Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Schuyler, & Joe Salerno.

JW: Wallace Stevens: Plump shrike, wonderful at what he does, but rarified and sometimes cruel.

William Carlos Williams: Sparrow would be too obvious, probably more one of those parrots or canaries that have survived in cold places by living near electric stations and hot boxes.

Gertrude Stein: A noble Ostrich.

Charles Olson: A very grave, but kindly Stork.

Ezra Pound: A parrot in an old Edwardian house crying: “crack, crack! Thy winter winds! Bah!!!”

Emily Dickinson: Definitely a hermit thrush singing from a rare perch on a clothesline at dusk.

Gwendolyn Brooks:   A blue jay, someone who loved taking beautiful things to her nest, but could also drop an acorn with great precision from a hundred feet of sky to hit the bullseye of some idiot’s head.

James Schuyler: A beautiful pine warbler. I love his flower poems.

Joe Salerno: Ah, my dear friend Joe. Joe liked boat-tailed grackles. He loved the iridescence in their feathers. He would be a boat-tailed grackle, but one which, if he heard a child crying, would come over and gently begin to sing.

DD: Your friend, the late Joe Salerno, deserves a much wider audience than he has had. That he has had any posthumous audience at all is largely because of your efforts, which involved, among other things, publishing his book, Only Here. Could you discuss his importance to you as a poet and as a friend?

JW: My efforts were certainly not alone. The poet Sander Zulauf did far more of the heavy lifting and Salerno’s family did far more to keep his legacy alive. I help because I loved him, miss him, and I purchased so many copies of his book that I can still give one every year to a student I think will love his work. I helped because he was damned good as a poet and because I loved him, because he may have been the best human being I ever met. As a poet, everyone at the local New Jersey readings became attentive the second he stood up to read. We all loved his poetry. He’d won the Hopwood Award at Michigan, but you’d never know it. He never told anyone about his degrees in philosophy and the workshops he attended at Michigan where he more than held his own with Gregory Orr, Les Josephs and Jane Kenyon. He quit poetry for many years to raise his kids. I met him when he was forty and just getting back into the scene. We became friends naturally and by accident. We always went to readings together and he often drove me there and back because I didn’t always have a car. For months after he died, I could still feel his presence in a car, his denim or his flannel shirt beside me. He left an actual physical life behind him wherever he went. A new poem by Joe was an occasion. Then, the way he listened! He’d quote back lines from poets who were reading for the first time, encourage them, become their mentor in about ten seconds.

DD: I’d like to end with a poem by Joe Salerno, the title poem from Only Here.

            Only Here

            I wake
            Holding the blue piece
            Of a dream. And lying still
            On the cloudy pillow,
            Before the day’s first word
            Spreads meaning out over the world,
            I let the morning rain
            Be all I am.

            And in the slender
            Stone-colored light, the ordinary
            Promises of my life are made again,
            Attaching themselves silkenly
            Like rain to the window
            Or my car glazed like a white rose
            In the driveway.

            And the dream
            Now cold, blows away
            Like history, my wife
            Stirring beside me, the feathery touch
            Of our first child turning
            In her widening belly. Downstairs
            The kitchen waits. There is nothing
            To decide. Everything asleep
            Is about to awake, the day
            Set like a mighty clock
            In the silence.

            Opening our eyes,
            We lift the world; the universe
            Tossed like rain from the tips
            Of our lashes. Only here
            Our ordinary eyes learn to find eternity—
            There is nothing else. The luster
            Is the plainness we walk in;
            This poverty we rise to
            At the end of dreaming—
            The sacrament each day
            Of our feet touching
            The floor.

---

Joe Weil is an assistant professor at Binghamton University. His reviews, essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He has four full-length collections of poetry; his latest collection of poems is A Night in Duluth, published by NYQ Books. In 2013, he was the recipient of the People's Poetry Award by Partisan Press. Joe Weil co-founded Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. He has since created Cat in the Sun books with his wife Emily Vogel. He is the Editor in Chief of Shrew. Having grown up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Weil now lives in Binghamton with Emily and two small children, Clare and Gabriel.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007). She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010), The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012), The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica, 2013). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.

Tommy Stella is a writer who earned his MA in English from Binghamton University. His recent comic book, I Think It Will Be Okay, is available to read on his website. He is a writer for Need2Know, Daily Pnut, Headlines and Heroes, and The Lunch Read. He also does book PR at Wunderkind PR and is the assistant to author Charles Soule.

Colleen Curry is a New York-based writer as well as a self-taught designer and artist. She is a graduate of Binghamton University.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

 

Meet the Press: Green Writers Press—Dede Cummings, James Crews, & GWP authors/poets

Dante Di Stefano: How did Green Writers Press come into being?

James Crews: Green Writers Press, an independent, Vermont-based publishing company, founded on Earth Day in 2014, is dedicated to spreading environmental awareness and social justice by publishing authors who promulgate messages of hope and renewal through place-based writing and environmental activism. Former Little, Brown book designer, Dede Cummings, founded the press out of her home office in southern Vermont with the mission to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups and social justice organizations. Our list has expanded significantly, publishing such authors as Julia Alvarez, David Budbill, Chard deNiord, John Elder, Dr. M Jackson, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, and Clarence Major.

DD: Can you talk a bit about the “localvore” approach of the press, combining environmental activism with the work of publishing?

Dede Cummings: One reason we started Green Writers Press was to print our books sustainably, and use eBooks and audiobooks to reduce our fossil fuel use. We are excited to be publishing our own authors, and we welcome your support to help us spread the word. In today’s world of social media and online transactions, here are GWP, we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object, into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and eBook publishing.

Our vision is that, collectively, our printed and eBooks will become a chorus of voices of writers and readers, artists and photographers, who care about the fate of the earth and want to do something about it. Though we believe our books will be interesting to Vermont residents, Green Writers Press has national distribution and we hope to have a broad reach and impact. Our voices need to be heard, which is why we refer to our press as a global press. We are—we all are connected on this planet we love. It is our hope that we can create a community around our press and the books we publish.

DD: Using the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry as a point of departure, could you talk a bit about the poetic significance of Vermont? How has this place influenced you as a poet and editor? What, if anything, links Vermont poets as widely disparate as Major Jackson and the late Ruth Stone, for example?

From editor and former Vermont state poet laureate, Sydney Lea: While even as I make one, I myself feel somewhat impelled to challenge any generality regarding so wide-ranging a group of poets as those in our anthology.  Indeed, the “Vermontiness” of this collection may reside particularly in its non-homogeneity. Our little state has a rightful reputation for orneriness and individualism, and I think those qualities prevail first to last here. Yes, there is often among our authors a strong sense of place, but not always. There is often, but not always, a vivid consciousness of the seasons. I could go on, but what really abides in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Second Edition is the autonomous voice. No one poet here would be mistaken for another. I find that bracing and gratifying.

From editor and Vermont state poet laureate, Chard DeNiord: While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in [this anthology] claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich legacy of the state's poetic tradition. In addition to this, I would add that Vermont's legacy of fierce independence, self-reliance, and ingenuity, from its earliest settlers to its present citizens, continues to typify not only Vermonters, but its best poetry. Like its farmers, inventors, loggers, and sugarers, Vermont poets enjoy memorializing their state's stunning landscape and rugged character. Vermont is both a liberal and conservative state, pulling two ways at once just as a good poem does. One of the qualities that endures as a bittersweet yet alluring theme in much of Vermont poetry is its ironic double nature as an archetypal paradise and formidable wilderness. This seeming contradiction provides the perfect prescription for sublime poetry where the landscape intersects with Vermont's poets' lives in memorable ways, as in Robert Frost's "Home Burial," Hayden Carruth's "Emergency Haying," Ruth Stone's "Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Laundry," Major Jackson's "Enchanters of Addison County," Louise Gluck's "Burning Leaves," Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," Mary Ruefle's "Jewelweed," Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Headwaters," "David Budbill's "Sometimes," Julia Alvarez's "Homecoming," "Sydney Lea's "Dubber's Cur," and "Leland Kinsey's "Surviving Bulls." The rugged life-style that has typified the lives of so many Vermonters over the past three centuries, as well as the mystical Green Mountains,  continue to find their way into Vermont's contemporary poetry, as evidence by the more than 100 strong poets who fill this volume.

DD: Vermont Exit Ramps II puts the poetry of Neil Shepard into conversation with the photography of Anthony Reczek in interesting ways. What is the most notable aspect of this dialogue for you?

From Vermont Exit Ramps II photographer, Tony Reczek: Tamra Higgins, one of the founders (with Mary Jane Dickerson) of Sundog Poetry, in her wonderful introductory remarks at the Vermont Exit Ramps II Book Launch, said: “How fortunate we are to have the long-lasting friendship between Tony and Neil transubstantiated into this book!” 

That’s probably the most notable aspect of the VER II “dialogue” for me, how in many ways the book is a continuation of a conversation started some five decades ago, when we first began rambling around the Vermont countryside.  VER II carries on that same conversation, but our instruments have changed, and the riffs have a greater complexity and nuance.  But the conversation – no, the song – still emerges from that shared sense of wonder first encountered those many years ago.  We just keep riffing on it.

From Vermont Exit Ramps II poet, Neil Shepard: I agree with everything Tony and Tamra say:  how VERII transmutes a remarkable friendship spent rambling around Vermont for the past forty or fifty years into this crystallized series of poems and photographs that record the changing nature of the pastoral landscape.  

Most of the poems are what we’d call post-pastoral – they examine the flashpoints and tensions between natural and the human-built landscapes – whereas the photographs offer a mix of modes, sometimes casting backward to traditional pastoral images, and sometimes capturing the what-is of contemporary post pastoral Vermont. So, in this dialogue between old friends, sometimes the photographic images reinforce the poems, and sometimes they clash with the written word, But overall, what’s most remarkable to me, in addition to our ongoing friendship, is how two artists (poet and photographer) demonstrate their love and attachment to the Vermont landscape, which they both record and interrogate through the word and the photographic image.

DD: Tell us about some of the other books in your catalog. What elements link Green Writers Press poetry collections?

DC: Green Writers Press is proud to offer some stunning poetry books in our catalog. We are looking for new and emerging poets that write about the earth and our place in nature and the built environment, poets who give voice to those who are marginalized in our society, and established poets who want to publish with us and enjoy the benefits of working collaboratively. Green Writers signed the new poetry collection by Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, and we are thrilled to work with such a notable American poet as Pack. We also recently published Dirt and Honey, by Rachel Vasquez Gilliland, an emerging Mexican-American poet and feminist. Another upcoming book is titled Time Inside, by Vermont poet Gary Margolis, about his work with maximum security prison inmates. Last, but not least, GWP just published A Bouquet of Daisies, by seventeen-year-old poet, Megan Alice, with proceeds benefitting the Planned Parenthood Federation. We strive for a diverse chorus of poetic voices and our literary magazine, The Hopper, also awards a poetry prize, now in its third year. Winners include John Saad in 2016, Ralph Black in 2017, and our 2018 winner, Charity Gingerich. Our poetry editors are James Crews, Anna Mullen, Ellie Rogers, Emma Irving, Dede Cummings, and Caroline Shea.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JC: We have a bias for poetry that is accessible to as large an audience as possible, and because we are an independent press run almost entirely by women, we also believe that more female and transgender voices are needed in American poetry to give voice to those who have been kept quiet for too long. But as an environmentally-minded publisher, we hold close to Robert Bly's idea of "shared consciousness" with the natural world — an outlook long held by Native Americans before us. This idea puts forth that elements of the natural world are just as intelligent and conscious as humans (if not more so), and perhaps the current environmental crisis would not be so dire if more people saw the world in this way. We need more American poetry that acknowledges our essential interconnectedness as a planet and as a human species. To paraphrase the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, we'd like to see more poetry that awakens us from the illusion of our separateness. 

DD: What does the future hold for poetry at Green Writers Press? 

JC: Because our publisher is an award-winning poet in her own right, we give a lot of attention to publishing and promoting our poetry catalog. To that end, you can expect to see several new collections which showcase diverse American voices, and which unflinchingly tackle the environmental crisis. You can also look for anthologies that are in and of themselves forms of resistance against the prevailing fear and outrage infecting our politics and our country as a whole. For instance, we'll be publishing an anthology edited by our poetry editor, James Crews, called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, with a lovely preface by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

DD: You recently published Landscapes with Donkey by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (translated by Ellen Skowronski-Polito). Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

DC: Winner of the 2016 ASLE Translation Grant to support the cross-cultural sharing of ecoliterature, translator Ellen Skowronski-Polito presents Marrero Henríquez’s poetry and vision to an English-speaking audience. In Landscapes with Donkey / Paisajes con burro, Spanish poet José Manuel Marrero Henríquez follows a gentle, gray donkey on his travels through the hillsides of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located off the western coast of Africa. Wise and thoughtful, the pensive quadruped, a “doctor of the earth,” studies the limits of ground and sky  with the unique perspicuity of a donkey’s gaze. On a journey far beyond the pasture’s horizon, the donkey, humblest of poets, takes flight to the Americas, Asia and Africa and unravels the mysteries of this transcendentally beautiful and profoundly life-giving planet we call home.

José Manuel Marrero Henríquez is a poet, writer, essayist, and tenured professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He has published extensively on literary landscapes and on a variety of topics of Spanish and Latin American literatures. He has served on the advisory board of EASLCE (2010-2014) and is a member of the advisory board of Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. He has recently edited Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts (Franklin Institute, 2016) and is co-editor of Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el siglo de la gran prueba (Catarata, 2018). Paisajes con burro, his latest book of poems, was awarded a 2016 ASLE translation grant, and has been published as Landscapes with Donkey under the translation of Ellen Skowronski-Polito (Green Writers Press, 2018). His most recent endeavor of a Poetics of Breathing, a general ecocritical theory, resonates within his creative writing and advocacy of environmental issues.

A sample poem, the first one in the book, in Spanish and in English:

            La pezuña raspa el suelo
            para enterrar el punto
            que a su interrogación falta
            y el sol fortalecido esfuma
            la energía encarnada en el campo.

            No queda humedad en las cosas
            y se evapora la vida
            para siempre.

            No hay voces, niños,
            águilas, culebras,
            ni siquiera buitres,
            o ruiseñores.

            Dormitan en los libros.

            Terco, seco el páramo
            y azul el cielo, el burro
            escarba su pregunta
            en el suelo.

——-

            The hoof scrapes the ground
            to bury the point
            that lacks its question
            and the strengthened sun blurs
            the energy embodied in the field.

            Things lose their moisture
            and life evaporates
            forever.

            There are no voices, children,
            eagles, snakes,
            not even vultures,
            or nightingales.

            They doze in books.

            The páramo dry
            and the sky blue, the stubborn donkey
            scratches his question
            in the ground.

---

Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English, and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her seconds poetry collection, The Meeting Place, is due out in May 2018 from Salmon Poetry in Ireland, and she is at work on a collection of stories called Spin Cycle. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede is a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in West Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, newly installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.

James Crews is an up-and-coming poetry editor and poet himself, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in creative writing / poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column and grew to love the Great Plains. He now lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles from the Robert Frost Stone House.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

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.] 

 

John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan.  It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's high school…  Special thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin Jamail]

Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge.  Ashbery’s playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise, contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations.  Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run.  Many years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor, John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my first year at Trinity.  John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain.  He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.

Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:      

Student: How do you get inspired?

Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait.  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.

Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?

Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens.  I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses.  I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns.  I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school.  The population was something like 8,957,000.  She had the most population of any of the cities.

Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?

Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet.  I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually.  It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer.  Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter.  I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint.  I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.

Student: What poets inspired you the most when you were younger

Ashbery: Actually the first modern poet in that anthology.  It was all strange to me as it probably is for anyone who encounters modern poetry, asking “What is this?”  “It doesn’t make any sense!”  But then I began to like that.  Some of the poets I liked actually made a lot of sense but I was still too inexperienced to realize this.  My favorite one was W.H. Auden, who you wouldn’t think today would give readers that much difficulty; partly because his later poetry was much more uncomplicated and straightforward.  But he hadn’t written his later poetry yet.  His earlier poetry is rather obscure and puzzling.  I became very attracted by his way of using different tones and styles, like vernacular of various kinds, and prosy journalism, and all of these mashed together in the same poem.          

Student: What inspired your poem “Some Trees”?

Ashbery: The poem “Some Trees” was inspired by falling in love and also by reading the poetry of Marianne Moore, which I was reading a lot of at the time.  I think that there’s an influence in that poem of Marianne Moore’s, certainly the half-rhymes that she used a lot. 

Student: Do you write with the intention of getting at a deeper meaning?

Ashbery: Deeper than what?  I write with the intention of expressing a meaning that I couldn’t put into words until I’ve done so by writing it in the poem.  

Student: Do your poems just come to you or do you sit down thinking I’m going to write a poem now?

Ashbery: Yeah I guess I sit down thinking, or hoping, “I’m going to write a poem now.”*

Student: Do you disagree with the critical interpretations of your poems?

Ashbery: Yes, always, including the favorable ones.     

Student: Do you understand your own work?

Ashbery: No—but as I said, that’s why I write it, hoping that I’ll be able to understand it eventually.*

Student: Does other art inspire your poems?

Ashbery: Certainly painting and music, especially music.  I listen to music when I’m writing.  I think if I had known how to do it I probably would have written music instead of poetry.  What’s interesting is that it’s a linear experience in time as is a poem.  You have to stay with it until the end to know what it’s all about, whereas a painting you can look at and say, “O yeah, I got that.”  The time that is built into the experience for me is very much something that the poetry is about, too.  It’s the universal subject.  My poetry often reflects my past, childhood, and so forth.  The temporal quality of poetry is why I switched from painting to writing poetry.  But I look at a lot of art, too.  I worked as an art critic for a long time and had to force myself to really look at something so I’d remember when I sat down to write about it what I had seen.  That was a very valuable experience.  One thing that’s the hardest to do is give your attention to anything.  By painfully forcing myself I learned a valuable lesson.              

Student: If you could bring five items to a deserted island what would you bring?

Ashbery: Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.   

Student: If you weren’t a famous poet what other work could you imagine yourself doing?

Ashbery: I can’t imagine myself doing any work.  I don’t think poetry counts.  I would like to have been able to do other things, like writing music, as I just mentioned, or writing novels, which people would then actually read.  But it’s very difficult to write a novel, whereas it’s easy to write poetry, provided that you’re a poet.  I’m always amazed at performative art, like a violinist who plays an incredible concerto.  Of course, it’s easy for him because that’s what he does.  It wouldn’t be easy for me.

Student: Do poets have a responsibility to be political?

Ashbery: I think people have a responsibility to be political.  I don’t think that poets have a responsibility to write political poetry, because I think any poetry is political in the sense that it makes you reflect on life, and feel glad you’re alive if it’s a good poem, and it makes you want to act in various capacities from love or militant philosophy and experience different forms of your life.  I don’t like political poetry because I invariably agree with the message in it and don’t have to be reminded of it.  

"The End of the Evening" by Kenneth Koch with Reflections by Katherine Koch [by Justin Jamail]

[Guest Author Note: I recently had the pleasure of coming across The End of the Evening - a board game created by Kenneth Koch - at the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection.  What follows are reproductions of the game, courtesy of the New York Public Library and the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, and reflections by Kenneth Koch's daughter Katherine.]

JJ: So this object is amazing and brings to mind so much of the excitement of being around your father.  I am thinking most especially of the combination of inspired zaniness and extraordinary learnedness that one experienced with him (and also reading his poetry!).  Did you ever actually play The End of the Evening -- what was it like?  What were the rules?  Who won?  This is three (maybe four) questions!

Katherine Koch: I was my father’s eleven-year-old test subject for The End of the Evening. He wanted it to exist as a real, playable game with the satisfaction and fun of games, the surprise and uncertainty that can come out of a very simple structure.

My father always loved and was confident about trying new things, new forms, new ways to find an audience to surprise and exhilarate them. This was 1967, an exhilarating moment in our culture, very much so in New York City. All kinds of social and generational barriers were being broken down and all kinds of money started being available for projects in the arts, the wilder the better. So, the idea of making and finding a market for poetic board games—he wanted to do more than one—seemed possible—why not?

As with many different forms he tried out, he wanted to subvert it at the same time as he followed its rules. He loved making up palindromes, for instance, but only if they were ridiculous and required an equally ridiculous backstory. At one point he felt he’d successfully “destroyed” the palindrome when he came up with things like, “Anna Anna Anna Otto Hannah Otto Anna Anna Anna.”

One subversive thing he does in The End of the Evening is he tricks the player. I’m not sure this would have gone over so well if it had been played as a real game: if you land on the square “HOPELESS NEUROSIS—advance 8 spaces,” you land on DIE, and are out of the game. After the first time you played this wouldn’t be much fun. The Old Age section of the board consists of four squares that say DIE, one square that says “LIVE—Move backwards one roll,” and one square that says “LIVE IN ITALY CROSS BRIDGE GO TO COMINCIA.” It’s kind of funny and means that old age is almost impossible to navigate, but it’s unfair if you’re actually playing the game. 

On the other hand, if you land on PSYCHOANALYSIS and have to go back 18 spaces, you end up back in childhood, back at the square called SLEEP. This is witty and more fun, since you get the chance to keep playing. 

As an eleven year-old I played board games all the time; my friends and I had played them since we were little, starting with the great Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, moving on to Monopoly, The Game of Life, Clue. My father and I had played board games and card games in the evenings after dinner for years—giving my mother some time off after working a full-time job and cooking dinner.  He was a great and keenly competitive lover of almost any kind of game, games of skill and games of chance, board games, card games, games like tennis, baseball, bowling, ping pong, gambling at casinos. He loved magic, the magic of cards and coincidence.

So one evening in the winter of 1967 my father sat me down at the dining room table with this piece of paper on which he’d started a game not unlike Life or Monopoly in the sense of showing the course of a life in sections from childhood to old age. Instead of moving through events like starting a family, getting a mortgage, buying property, going to jail—it showed stages of life not unlike the stages of my father’s life! The life of a poet—there were squares like WRITE A POEM, THE UNIVERSITY, GO TO ITALY, LITERARY REPUTATION, PSYCHOANALYSIS,  and MAKE LOVE.

I am not sure why he thought Kenneth Koch’s life story and dreams would be interesting to a game-playing public, but he had vast confidence that what he loved and found funny would appeal to a wide audience.  Besides, he did include the simple universal stages of babyhood—EAT, CRY, NAP, PLAY—followed immediately by DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING, then, as adolescence begins, THE BEACH. Of course, the beach. ADOLESCENT PIMPLES, one of my favorite squares as an 11 year-old (before I myself fell victim to them), came right after THE BEACH.

As my father began showing me The End of the Evening, I thought it was hilarious, and also moving, even when I didn’t understand what was going on. The themes were very Kenneth Koch: Italy, psychoanalysis, literary reputation, love; the strangeness was, too—the last squares being different stages of the evening. That bit of sehnsucht, yearning for the sublime.

He appreciated my appreciation. We laughed a lot while he pointed out various squares and lovable juxtapositions (KISS ME followed by WRITE A POEM INSPIRED BY ITALY), his sometimes abrupt sense of humor (GIVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, then OBTAIN POWER, then BUY SAILBOAT AND GO TO MEDITERRANEAN)  but he also wanted to get down to business: how to make the game fun to play. Because it’s one thing to look at the board appreciatively, another thing to step into the dance.

So, a few times, we started out at START, throwing a die to advance along the squares, and using counters, probably pennies. He liked pennies, symbolic in his childhood of the magic of money and magic tricks. It was fun to play, but my father the strategist wanted to make it make sense all together: the events at the different stages of life; and the squares where you follow special instructions; and the bridges between life and Italy, between Italy and Evening; and does the final square, “The End of the Evening—victory” give the winner enough strange poetic joy?

He also needed my help as an artistic and visually precise kid to make the final, central section of five squares, Evening. I measured and drew the squares with a ruler, and that’s my handwriting.

I liked the game, partly because I adored my father, and it was an interesting and puzzling variation on the games I’d played all my life. He kept changing it around after we’d played it a few times: you can see how he made the decision to replace the instructions in about five squares with “EAT.” I don’t know if you were supposed to literally eat something if you landed in those squares or if it’s merely descriptive, as MUMPS and COLISEUM—FALL ASLEEP are. He also added complexities involving THE MEDITERRANEAN and GREECE which didn’t quite get integrated into the game.

Oddly, he signed and dated it: at the lower right, it says “Finished March 30, 1967 K.K.” I guess it was complete for him as a work of art, though it never quite came to life as a game—which is just as well! Better to devote his psyche to poetry than to figuring out how to make a board game work.

JJ:  I am of course struck by the "life within a life" -- I mean the Italian life -- that seems to be going on in the inner loop in this game.  What was it about Italy that appealed in this way, do you think?  Was it Italy itself or your father's particular experiences there or both? (surely both! but how?)

Katherine Koch: As you see, Italy is super important to the game: you can only get there by narrowly escaping death from old age, and the only way to win, to reach Evening, is to go through Italy.

You’re right that it must be both the qualities of Italy itself and my father’s own experiences there that gave him the idea to make Italy into a kind of paradise within the game.

I think he felt an intense kind of longing, nostalgia, for the beauty and peace of Italy because it was where he’d had some of the happiest times of his life, times that were cut short by a tragedy. 

He and my mother lived there, mainly in Rome, on their year-long honeymoon, and that’s where I was born. After a year or so back in New York City, we took an ocean liner to Florence, where my mother had gotten a Fulbright to study Italian literature. My parents both talked about the months in Florence as a kind of lost eden. My mother had gotten pregnant shortly after starting classes there and was delighted at the prospect of a having a second baby. Meanwhile the three of us would do things like take walks together in the countryside beyond our house on the other side of the Arno—at age two I always wanted to go further and further, and would have to be carried home. Years later, back in Florence, my father burst into tears showing me the gate we would go through as we started out on our walks.

When she was six months pregnant, in April 1958, my mother suffered an almost fatal miscarriage. She would have died if my father hadn’t raced all over Florence begging for blood for transfusions—her blood type was fairly rare, it was Rh negative; and it was Easter week, when most businesses were closed. 

We went back to busy, gray New York as soon as we could, and my parents’ marriage was never the same afterwards, to hear them tell it.

So that is the serious background to the Italy loop of the game, the very Kenneth way in which he wove sadness and loss into sweetness, silliness, and, lest we forget, into The End of the Evening—VICTORY.

Meet the Press: Canarium Books—A Conversation with Joshua Edwards

Dante Di Stefano: Kenneth Koch, adding to the famous adage by Wallace Stevens, said: “Not only is all poetry experimental, but all that is truly experimental is poetry.” When I think about the work Canarium Books has published I think of this Koch quote. Can you begin by discussing the Canarium catalog along the lines of the experimental (the surprising, the anti-quotidian, the unorthodox)?

Joshua Edwards: I don’t trust anything poets say, but I like the way Koch’s adage sounds! U.S. poetry’s standard metric of experimentalism has a lot to do with syntactical disruption, fragmentation, and the deployment of philosophy and its problems, and I think many of our books fit the bill, but newness isn’t what we’re most interested in as editors. We certainly do our best to publish work that challenges modes of inquiry, explores how language can be used, wonders what’s worthy of attention and obsession, and reimagines forms, but mostly we’re looking for unique visions and interesting thinking.

DD: How did Canarium Books come into being?

JE: I guess you might say it was an experiment. A year or so after graduating from college I had the idea to start a journal, mostly as a way to educate myself about poetry, and through poetry, about the world. I had no idea what I was doing and no money, but I was fortunate to find funding and to cross paths with a few great young poets in Oregon, and with their help The Canary was born. That lasted six years, until we decided to transform the journal into a press ten years ago. At that time I was graduating from an MFA program at University of Michigan, and I pitched an idea to the program for a collaboration, whereby they’d help with printing costs and interested students could help out as readers and managing editors. Miraculously it all worked out. The first two books published were Union! by Ish Klein and Tod Marshall’s The Tangled Line, and we’ve recently published our 26^th and 27^th.

DD: Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book is such an amazing book. Not only does Buffam succeed in taking an ancient form and rendering it in a vividly contemporary way, she’s composed a hybrid text, which is exceedingly complex and, yet, easily accessible. She winds up writing a book that is a serious contemplation on motherhood in the digital age, and at the same time its one of the funniest books in recent memory. What do you find most notable about this book?

JE: I find all the characteristics you mention to be notable, but for me it’s the consciousness at the center of A Pillow Book that makes it so powerful. Suzanne is incredibly funny, and I think she has a profound understanding of the relationship between humor and its dark or difficult sources. There’s a kind of electricity that runs through all of her books that holds everything together while also creating moments that jump off the page. But I’m skirting your question. I guess my answer would be that I find the sharp, sustained portrayal of restlessness to be my favorite aspect of A Pillow Book.

DD: What does American poetry need more of, in your opinion? Less of?

JE: The young poets who are starting presses and doing all sorts of great stuff right now are really inspiring, and I think they can answer this question better than me, but I’ll offer my cranky answer nonetheless: What poets in America and all people everywhere need is health care, safety, and affordable lives, but speaking specifically about poets in this country, they need more freedom and less nationalism and “culture.” About 80 years ago somebody (Herman Bonnert or Frank Zacone or Henry Maar or someone without a good publicist) had the idea to twist a balloon into a recognizable animal shape. Whatever made that first balloon animal happen—be it the chance encounter of a clown and a giraffe at balloon factory or a person’s desire to make a child laugh at a birthday party—is for me the poetic moment, when imagination brings something surprising into the world. (Take that, Koch and Stevens.) A lot of poetry is the product of a manner of thinking, which trades the classified impulses of creation for a kind of political affect or performance. Wonderful things can still happen in this mode, since language has its own magic and the individual mind is ultimately irrepressible, but it’s hard to make a great work of art with the qualifications of an industry. The overwhelming majority of the poets I know compete with each other for a handful of academic jobs. Teaching is of course an absolutely amazing career and time to write is a miracle, but the industry that has been built up around creative writing is out of control. I think poets need to be very aware of the institutions that support them and the technologies used to disseminate their work.

DD: What is on the horizon for Canarium Books in 2018 and beyond?

JE: Our recently-released 2018 books are giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper and Anne Kawala’s Screwball, which are both super examples of poetic experimentation. 2019 will be slow for us as publishers, since we’re focusing on our current roster of authors and none of them have manuscripts that will be ready this year, so we’re going to take that time to do some other things. We helped our friends at Marfa Book Co. to put on a poetry festival in August 2017 and we’ll likely do that again next summer. We’ve also organized performances by a couple of my favorite songwriters (who I think of as poets with guitars), Mitski and Christopher Owens. I’d like to keep doing that when the occasion arises. In 2020 and beyond, there are a couple of new books by current Canarium folks lined up and a translation or two.

DD: Tell us a bit about Anne Kawala’s Screwball (translated by Kit Schluter).

JE: Screwball is a wild ride. Like John Beer’s Lucinda, it’s a book-length poem or verse novel that changes forms as it goes, and every page offers something unexpected. I won’t go into the plot too much, for fear of ruining some surprises, but I will say that it involves a huntress-gathress, an iceberg, and an adventure that traverses geographies. Anne Kawala is a virtuoso, and this is a book that puts on display her vibrant imagination as well as a multitude of technical talents. Hats off to Kit Schluter for his excellent translation.

DD: You recently published giovanni singleton’s AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

JE: There’s so much going on in AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper that any description I could give of its themes and ideas would be reductive and not do justice to giovanni’s great book, so I’ll just stick with the basics. The book is a collection or gallery of poems, many of which incorporate or are comprised of images (mesostics, illustrations, performance scores, drawings), that explore lives, how we’re perceived, and how we live together, among other things. We’ve got a page at our website with recordings of giovanni reading beautifully from the book, so I’ll end by directing folks there: http://www.canarium.org/recordings

---

Joshua Edwards co-edits Canarium Books and works at bookstores in West Texas and Chicago. He’s the author of Castles and Islands, Imperial Nostalgias, and Architecture for Travelers, among other collections; he translated María Baranda’s book-length poem, Ficticia; and his photographic projects have been exhibited at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Rice University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Galveston Artist Residency, the Pensacola Museum of Art, and elsewhere. Information about his work and the reading tour he’s currently on can be found at www.architecturefortravelers.org

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Meet the Press: Jacar Press—A Conversation with Richard Krawiec

Dante Di Stefano: How did Jacar Press come into being?

Richard Krawiec: I've been involved in writing and publishing since forever.  Back in the 70s in Boston, I had a friend who mimeographed sheets of poems and stories in his 3rd floor garret. From that time on I was in love with the small press world.  After my novel Time Sharing was published by Viking Penguin in 1986, I worked in a variety of sites that were mostly excluded, at that time, from literary programming - homeless shelters, women's centers, prisons - including death row, literacy classes, housing communities, drug treatment programs, ESL classes.  I started a non-profit, Voices: A Creative Community, whose mission was to teach writing as a tool of self-empowerment in communities marginalized by the dominant culture, and to help people from those communities develop their writing and teaching skills, and I would then hire them as teachers.  Through Voices I created Jacar Press, and we published a variety of learner-authored texts, including, in 1993, the first anthology of writing by people who were homeless - In Our Own Words. We also published a textbook, An Invitation to Write, which offered ways to set up participatory, learner-centered workshops in alternative sites to adult learners.  I was told by the distributor that it was used in 31 countries and considered a seminal text in the field.  Who knows?

When my wife at the time developed a serious illness, I had to step back for a while and take care of her and my two children.  Other than publishing my own stories, poems, plays and non-fiction pieces, I didn't re-enter the publishing world until the 2000s.  When Obama was elected in 2008 there was much discussion about the need for a stimulus program to jump-start the economy.  I thought, writers could use some help too.  So, I conceived of the idea of a poetry cookbook, an anthology alternating between poems and recipes written by poets and their friends: The Sound of Poets Cooking.  I wanted all the proceeds to go towards providing stipends for writers to teach free community-based workshops.  At first, I tried to give the book away to other publishers, but no one wanted to be so generous with the proceeds.  So, I finally decided to revive Jacar Press. Interestingly, after a brief spurt during which Jacar Press did hire writers to teach workshops at a number of sites, interest in teaching in alternative sites waned so we began to donate our proceeds to activist groups we felt were working for progressive change.

DD: Could you talk about what it means to be “a community-active” literary press? 

RK: We call ourselves a Community-Active press because we don't make any attempt to be profitable, preferring to invest our money in causes we value, while also supporting developing writers by offering free and low-cost writing workshops.  We still offer free workshops, most recently to women in prison, and free writing and theater-based workshops for survivors of sexually assault. But another part of our community active vision is enacted by bringing visiting writers to NC to teach low cost craft workshops - $25 for half a day.  We host an annual event, A Gathering of Poets, bringing some of the top names in poetry, elders and new voices, to NC and we underwrite most of the cost, so poets can, for $100-$125, take 4 craft workshops (and, also, get free breakfast and lunch) from people we'd otherwise never see in this state.  This year, on March 30, 2019, we'll be bringing Marilyn Nelson, Li-Young Lee, Chloe Honum, Kaveh Akbar, Eduardo Corral and Renee Emerson to NC for our Gathering of Poets.  In the past we've had headliners like Lynn Emanuel, Patricia Spears Jones, Dorianne Laux, Rickey Laurentiis, and others.

So we serve the poetry community by offering free outreach workshops, and low-cost workshops. We’re always open to suggestions from writers, any writers. Have a workshop you want to offer to an under-served community?  Pitch us.

Lately we’ve been making a lot of direct donations from book sales.  We gave $1500 to a young woman entering college in D.C. through a scholarship handled by the Urban League.  This Fall we are giving $400 to help cover the costs of books for a writing major, preferably a person of color or non-binary gender.  We have made cash contributions to, among others, the Black Art Futures Fund, Black Lives Matter, ConPRmetidos, Dakota Access Pipeline Fund, Doctors Without Borders, Durham Literacy Council, National Immigration Law Center, Orange County Rape Crisis Center, Raleigh PACT(Police Accountability Community Task Force), Song(LGBTQ activism), Syrian Refugee Relief, Women’s Theater Festival.  Sometimes it's a straight donation.  Sometimes the donations are geared towards paying for someone to attend activist training, or women's theater.  Recently we donated $600 worth of books to an inner-city teen summer program.
 
Lastly, we are 'community-active in supporting the larger poetry and literary press scene by sponsoring the $500 Julie Suk Award for the Best Poetry Book published each year.  We publicize extensively not just the winners, but all the finalists and their presses (as a way to support the independent press scene).  Past winners have been Kaveh Akbar, Monique Ferrell, Rickey Laurentiis, Noel Crook, David Roderick, Susan Elbe.   

DD: What common elements do Jacar Press books share? 

RK: This is a tough one, and I have really tried to think this through.  Our publications are diverse. We publish work by established as well as new writers.  Betty Adcock, Gibbons Ruark, are masters at lyricism, and newcomers like Kelly Michels and Sharon McDermott are getting there.  We publish the “hypnagogic” verse of Jaki Shelton Green (just appointed NC's first African-American Poet Laureate Yay!), rooted in the tradition of Troupe and Shange, as well as younger voices like Monique-Adelle Callahan D, whose work is fed by the community of Cave Canem. What do the finely crafted prose poems of Deborah Bogen have in common with the haiku by women from 6 continents in Wishbone Moon, or the ghazals of Shadab Zeest Hashmi? The delightful and fresh eye Adam Scheffler turns on contemporary America, with the 80+ voices, from teenagers to Pulitzer Prize winners, confronting violence against their communities in Resisting Arrest?   What do Dorianne Laux and Cornelius Eady hold in common?  
 
I think it’s attentiveness to craft, distinct voice, a commitment to writing the best poems they are capable of, and the ambition to write poems that matter.  

DD: Tell us about the literary journal connected with the press: One.

RK: One.  Talk about herding cats.  Ever try to get a majority of 8 editors to agree on a poem?  

Seriously, One has been a joy.  We limit submissions to one poem at a time so that our editors can read, reread, and discuss - as we often do - all the submissions.  We have been fortunate to have received work from people who have won the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and MacArthur Genius Awards, but we are just as open to newcomers.  We have a global vision, and have published poems by poets in Nigeria, Ghana, Dubai, Lebanon, Ireland, Turkey, Scotland, Spain, England, India, etc.  We were thrilled when Rasaq Malik, from Nigeria, won an Honorable Mention in the Best of the Net, and honored to have Claudia Emerson win that award. We read until we find 21 poems we reach a consensus on.  We also have a Second Look section where we revisit a master poem each issue.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion? 

RK: More readers.  The number of people who define as poets seems to outstrip the number who buy poetry books.  

DD: What’s on the horizon for Jacar Press? 

RK: We have never been a regional press.  I see that trend continuing.  This year we are going to host 3 readings in NYC - Aug 22 at KGB Bar, Aug 26 at Bowery Poetry Club, and Nov 9 at Poet's House. We're looking into sponsoring events for our authors in Cleveland and Chicago and Boston. I will personally be travelling to Ireland this Fall, reading in Skerries, and participating in the Bray Literary Festival.  In the past we sponsored Irish editions of a book by Gibbons Ruark, as well as readings in Dublin, and hope to expand on that.  I will also be travelling to France, hosted by my French publishers in readings and conferences in Paris, Bordeaux and Toulouse, and I plan on exploring possibilities for Jacar readings and workshops in that country.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a Jacar Press collection? 

RK: I’ve decided to offer here the title poem from the late Kathryn Stripling Byer’s final manuscript, which we plan to publish in early 2019.  The book was originally scheduled to be published by a well-known press, but they were not enthusiastic about publishing it after she died.  Jacar, which had previously published two chapbooks of Kay’s, one in a hand-letter press fine arts edition, believes the book is arguably her best work and we are honored to be chosen to publish it.  This poem was finished a few months before she died from lymphoma on June 5, 2017, and, clearly, she knew what was on her horizon.

        Trawling the Silences

        This end-of-March day, I’d rather watch hawks surf
        the thermals than contemplate what lies ahead.
        Or behind in its wake. In the few hours left, let me keep
        my doubts shut, my windows wide open, their sheer curtains
        billowing.  It’s March, after all, having come in
        a lamb and departing a lioness, stalking my back yard,

        leaving her paw prints alongside the patient ephemerals
        rising again out of leaf litter.  Squirrel corn. Spring beauty.
        The first rue anemone.   Today I would rather
        read field guides, repeating the whimsical names
        of our niche-dwelling mussels about to be wiped out by backhoes
        and bulldozers.  Pimpleback, Snuffbucket.  Monkeyface
        Pearlymussel.  Don’t let their names be forgotten,I’d pray
        if I prayed, though just naming a thing is a prayer,
        wrote Simone Weil, turning her face to the almighty
        silences.  The silences.  Where would we be
        without them, what were we, what will we be, oh to be,
        and again be, that damn linking verb.  I’d rather be tracking
        my lioness up to the rim of that mountain top,
        I’d rather let be and let go.  Let the anemone
        cling, the hawks soar, the lioness squander another day
        trying to find what she’s looking for.  Give her another day,
        I ask the Almighty.  Give the birds one more day
        scolding the rapscallion squirrels stealing birdseed.
        I rest my case, carapace, my own little voice trawling
        the silences, the bully wind boasting its presence in present-tense,
        no linking verb to shut down the show.  Let
        my lioness lounge in the sally grass.  Licking her paws.

---

Richard Krawiec has published three books of poetry, Breakdown, She Hands Me the Razor, and most recently Women Who Loved Me Despite (Second Edition, Sable Books).  His work appears in dozens of literary magazines, including Drunken Boat, Shenandoah, sou’wester, Lavure Litteraire, Dublin Review, Chautauqua Literary Journal, New Orleans Review, Blue Fifth Review, Connotations, etc.   In addition to poetry, he has published 2 novels, Time Sharing and Faith in What?, a story collection, And Fools of God, and 4 plays. His most recent novel, Vulnerables (Editions Tusitala, and Points Press), was published in France to widespread acclaim, even reviewed in the French edition of Rolling Stone. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the NC Arts Council (twice), and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is founder of Jacar Press, a Community Active publishing company that also runs an online magazine One. He has taught writing to people in homeless shelters, women's shelters, prisons, literacy classes, community sites and elsewhere.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Meet the Press: Dos Madres Press—An Interview with Robert Murphy and David Giannini

Dante Di Stefano: How did Dos Madres come into being?

Robert Murphy: Like Athena the Press sprang from the head of Zeus – along with a headache - or was it from his thigh as with Dionysus. (well, actually, the head and heart of The Muse probably is more accurate – and a bit of the unexpected, if not miraculous thrown in). And it is longer in the tell of it than anyone would wish to hear, because it has to do with my own journey as a writer and a poet, and for the last fourteen years, along with my wife, Elizabeth, a publisher.

Until the age of forty I was completely unknown to the vibrant literary community of the Greater Cincinnati Area. I, for the most part, wrote in isolation (literally) often in my car.  I was not in academia, but made my living in the building trades.  One day my brother suggested I enter a local competition sponsored by the Greater Cincinnati Writer’s League. My poem won, and a year’s free membership to the League came along with it. The GCWL had, and still has, monthly meetings where the members’ work is critiqued by poet/teachers from the likes of Xavier University, the University of Cincinnati, Miami U. and, Thomas More College, and others.  The miraculous thing that happened was that at one of those critiques Dr. Norman Finkelstein, poet and scholar/critic, after the meeting took me aside to say that he was astonished that I was not known to him, and where exactly had I been.  At work in a different world, I said. But it was he who opened his world to my life with an introduction to not only significant local writers such as Tyrone Williams, and Richard Hague, and Cincinnati’s first poet laureate, Pauletta Hansel, but also to more distant luminaries such as Nathaniel Tarn, Harvey Shapiro, Michael Heller, and to one who became in a short year my friend, mentor, and alma pater: the extraordinary William Bronk.  This all began thirty years ago.  And finally in 2004 I decided to give back to that community kind enough to take me in. To give back, in some small measure, all that I had been gifted.  The project was made all the easier by my wife Elizabeth who is a gifted graphic designer, portraitist, and iconographer, and now a celebrated book designer.  Which means, of course, that she is the true midwife of the Press. I am but the ghost in the machine. As for a name, we decided on Dos Madres, two mothers in Spanish, in honor of our own mothers, respectively: Vera Laverne Murphy, and Libbie Hart Hughes, both lovers of literature and promoters of literacy, and who contributed financially to us in the nascent years of the press.

DD: How has publishing poetry changed for you since beginning in 2004?

RM: Well the obvious change involves sheer numbers. The significant increase in those seeking publication, and then just the problem of finding a way of doing it.  It can be a bit harried for three people, I being the only reader, my wife Elizabeth the only designer, my son manning the website.  It is truly a Mom and Pop corner grocery store kind of concern.  Still in all we have managed somehow since 2004 to see 176 titles by 107 authors into print.

And that means, too, thousands of books mailed out.

My wife and I began this enterprise thinking we would just do chapbooks for poet friends. We printed our own chapbooks on our laser color printer, even folded and stapled them. And when we began doing the perfect-bound books we started with traditional offset printing, which cost-wise, demanded that we print at least 500 copies to gain any price advantage. As you can imagine, given the nature of poetry readership, 500 copies of any book produced by an unknown press was likely to remain significantly on their shelves for a very long time.  In fact, I still have hundreds of copies of books from that early period. Luckily, with advancements in laser technology came the possibility of printing fewer books at a time, and also the ability to reorder as the need arises, yet with a quality indistinguishable from offset.  We found a printer who could print books of high quality, not only in black and white, but fine color reproduction as well.   

DD: Tell us about your catalog. What do Dos Madres poets share in common?

RM: First of all, when I look upon our catalog (here) I am every time reminded of the virtuosity of the design for the covers of these books.  There has just been unstinting praise of Elizabeth’s design work:  the look of the books: outside and inside, cover and text, the clarity, the appropriateness of the appearance of the poem on the page – the font, the margins, the decorative and organizational aspects she brings to enhance the quality of each book. Elizabeth’s presentations are unique. And as far as what our authors share in common, despite their eclectic nature in terms of tone, style, formal and informal verse: as one our author’s Dick Hague wrote (he having edited our ten year anniversary issue: The Realms of the Mothers – The First Decade of Dos Madres Press: “It is not possible to generalize about all these Dos Madres Poets, beyond claiming their universal mastery of craft. Beyond that, the diversity of theme, subject, form, diction, speaker echoes what I, a former collector of beetles, loved about the insect order Coleoptera: a tremendous range of size, structure, color, habitat, life cycle.   . . .  Likewise, Realms of the Mothers shows in the domain of poetry a rapturous fondness for, and extensive expression of, a similarly multifarious creation.”

And also I do find it interesting that the Press has published not just the expected numerous poet/teachers/critics from the academic community but a group consisting of two editors of professional magazines, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, an eminent doctor of pediatric psychiatry, a Jungian therapist, a pediatrician, the head of the emergency room of a Greek island hospital, a physicist, a somatic therapist, an eminent professor of cognitive science, a lawyer, a psychologist, a librarian, a writer of children’s literature, a legendary artist from the psychedelic era, a world renowned expert in biological regeneration, award winning high school teachers, one of the foremost scholars of Sufism, and councilors in mental health and drug rehabilitation. And perhaps most importantly not a few who took on the role of mother and housewife, the raising of children and so in turn the bearer of the future - maintainers of the light and life of civilization.  The voices of those many who often go unheard while employed in the most important job in the world.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

RM: More readers. And poets who don’t write narrowly for other poets, though that surely will go on, that necessary con-verse-ation between the voices of the living and the dead, the past and the present, and all that futures there (and all of it in our heads). And, of course, it is good to remember as Whitman said, “To have great poets you must have great audiences.” We are at the risk of always losing both. And what did Pascal say. “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Alone, with our terrible loneliness, always a difficulty, for sure.  And without a smartphone or an I Pad. But I do believe that Pascal might have agreed that the read of a good book of poetry would go a long way to solve our problems as well. One of David Giannini’s books of poetry being a possible cure.

DD: What can we look forward to from Dos Madres in the near future?

RM: One hopes, of course, for more of the same, if by the same one means those qualities of language which may make a difference in the reader.  And, if he or she is alert enough, change them forever.  Such a book, and a recent addition to our catalog is Christopher Smart’s Cat by Igor Webb.  The late novelist Philip Roth wrote of it,  . . .”it’s marvelous, excellently written, inventively told, full of intelligence, funny, often with a novelistic flair . . . “ Born Igor Weiss in Slovakia, he and his parents survived the Holocaust in hiding and then after the war made their way by way of Ecuador to upper Manhattan. The book takes Igor back to Slovakia as an adult, retracing his childhood—and also veers off into numerous engaging side trips into literature, so that the whole thing reads quirkily as much like a literary miscellany as a memoir, with both genres having equally impressive heft.” 

Another great read, which will come to press soon, probably in August is, by noted poet Roger S. Mitchell. his Reason’s Dream. Elaine Sexton says of the book, “In Roger Mitchell’s sinuous new collection, he speaks of “a livable oblivion,” something “better than rapture,” where “ the dog catches what it knows it can’t catch,” and something “keeps us rafting/this waterfall of urgencies/in a storm of interrupted calms.” This master poet . . . raises the bar, here, again, illustrating the intense delights in the lyric moment, where the articulated self comes alive in the natural world.” And, with any luck we will have another book from David Giannini.

DD: You’ve published two excellent books by David Giannini, Faces Somewhere Wild (2017) and The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up (2018). Could you tell us a little bit about what you admire in these books and introduce David Giannini?

RM: You mean beyond his wonderfully eccentric intelligence, his ability to surprise, his quixotic perception, his fine ear, his wonderful eye in observation of nature, his ability to hear all the possibilities in a word in association with others: a sentence, a stanza and so create a poetry that gets up on its hind legs and howls . . , that is to say . . . come almost physically alive?  Beyond this, I would say it is his deep and abiding compassion, his full human heartedness, not just for his fellow man/woman/child but for all that creatures there – if we but for a moment look, hear, see and feel, take the census of a breeze. For, indeed, it is a world that for many of us is in want of reintroduction – as if forgotten, but always wanted, always yearned for, always waiting to be remembered, that lives trembling with invisible, anticipatory recognition for us there.

DD: You’ve had eight books published in the last three years. This is amazing by anyone’s standards? How do you write so prolifically?

David Giannini: I’ve said and written that poetry is daily and not merely some subject to be studied in a classroom or a lesson with given ‘prompts.’  I have always enjoyed what Mallarme said: “Poetry is not made with ideas; it is made with words.” I very rarely start a poem with a concept or any sort of preconceived notion. A word or phrase or image comes to me, and I try to ride the crest of an inspiration and craft a poem usually through many drafts. I am always working at writing. I discard a great many false starts, whole drafts, or just wrong-headed ways of wordy work. All writers do that. I rise at 4 a.m. most days, jot and /or revise immediately, sometimes in a more or less liminal state, between dreams and waking. There are words and / or images, as I said, already knocking around in my head, waiting to be said or typed into my computerized journals and drafts. I work for several hours until my wife gets up, and most days I am working on several drafts at a time throughout the day, nearly every day. On any given day, I may go out and stack cordwood or go to a dentist appointment, poetry reading, etc., but lines of poems I am working on stay with me and I often jot things in my car while driving. Before cellphones there were drivers scribbling on pads or napkins beside them in the car. It is all a matter of persistence, discipline, and long love for what I must try to accomplish. I have the feeling, the sense, every day when I wake, of rising into poetry.  Cid Corman, who wrote over 100 books of poetry, used to say, “catch the poem as it is occurring.” The immediacy of the thing at hand that seems to be thinking you as you work on it, that’s the feel. It can take years sometimes to finish a single short poem. It can also take just few minutes, but when the latter happens there is always the sense that it has come from a long way off, a long gestational period. I find a certain spiritual dimension through perception of physical things, the interrelations of all things and beings. I have two or three more completed, full-length books not yet out to publishers, and at least one chapbook.  Well, they are all books, though some, usually academics or those who are overly influenced by professors, apparently feel that chapbooks are “less.” It is a silly notion. Leaves of Grass was first published with just 12 poems (later closer to 400.) Tomas Tranströmer’s first book contained 17 poems, a slim volume. On and on. The point is: they were books. I have been very fortunate to have Richard and Elizabeth Murphy at Dos Madres Press, and Joan and John Digby of Feral Press (a.k.a. New Feral Press) as publishers who are also fine, interesting, and very talented people who like my manuscripts. Writing, as you say, “prolifically,” refers only to amount.  My publishers and others also see quality in the amount, of course, or they would decline publication. 

DD: Beginning with the title, tell us about The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up.

DG: The title comes from a prosepoem (as I spell it) in the third section of the book.  It is the last line or sentence of “Returning Gift.” Some people have told me they use that line as a sort of aphoristic mantra sometimes. The book is divided into three sections. The first section contains relatively short lyrics, some with deadpan, absurd humor, and even a line riffing on Whitman. The middle section is a suite of 10 poems for my wife, Pam, tracing our relationship, how it began, and the sense of how there is “third being formed from tones of talk we fuse”, not a child, but what the marriage deeply is. I speak, in all of those poems, in somewhat oblique terms, feeling and intuitive terms, taking Emily Dickinson’s cue in “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” as epigraph. Some things are more truly revealed when seen at an angle, rather than looked at flat on. That section continues in lyric tradition. The third section is composed of prosepoems. They, too, are anchored in lyricism, but also in metaphysical and comedic circumstances. There are thematic, lyric, and metaphysical-spiritual elements in this and the previous two sections that call to each other, back and forth, throughout the book. At the same time, so much of life is comic and absurd, tragically so. There is not enough meaning in life without poetry, without attempts to find meanings not obviously present every day. There are a number of the prospoems that I still find humorous, and apparently some readers do, too. I try to write books and not just a sort of anthological smattering of poems that may not cohere as a book. Many poets find it difficult or even oppressive to talk about their books thematically or generally, and I am one of those. All I can really say is that once I have an intuitive grasp of what poems work well together a book begins to gel. I have an almost absolute trust in my intuitions, though Pam, my wife, has sharp and intuitive critical instincts, too, and often points out defects in later drafts of poems, for which I’m grateful!  A single line or even a phrase may undergo 50 drafts, and even then Paul Valery’s saying is at least in the background: “A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.”  Enough said.

DD: The third section of The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up consists of “Vertical Prosepoems,” a designation that characterized the poems in another one of your recent books, Porous Borders. Can you explain what you mean by a “Vertical Prosepoem?”

DG: I call them Vertical Prosepoems to call attention to their relatively narrow (3”, left-to-right) margins that force a reader to break into the next part of a sentence more quickly than in normative prose paragraphs. It is a way of focusing attention or concentration more sharply. I am calling the reader’s attention to something resembling prose, with ‘justified’ margins, yet with a sense of the narrow linearity of most poems, especially lyric poems. The prosepoem allows for more expansiveness and flexibility, but is ‘held’ in its visual shape that is both and complement and offset to its internal structure. Here I pause and say it’s not good to intellectualize what is essentially an organic process of ‘making.’ I usually pay close attention to the sonic elements, the “music” as some still call it, such things as internal rhymes or repeated sound patterns, for instance, within the rectangularly upright prosepoem on the page. Someone asked why I don’t just leave the lines ragged on the page, instead of with ‘justified’ margins. I’m not sure I know the answer, but it has something to do with an enigmatic sense of flat-top obelisks or monoliths which may be tributes to something unknown or once known, with or without instructions or runes, or inscriptions, like those on gravestones, and I’ve always liked that alien monolith in the book and film, 2001, A Space Odyssey.

DD: Who are the contemporary poets you admire the most?

DG: I don’t like to even imply hierarchies. I’ve learned to appreciate a wide range of people and their ways, of poems not at all like mine, but ones that may succeed beautifully on their own terms. I enjoy reading and exploring, for instance, Elizabeth Willis as well as Irene Willis and Williams Hunt (the latter two are terribly neglected!) Andrew Schelling, Lewis Warsh, and lately I am enjoying more of Sarah Sousa’s, Charles Rafferty’s, and Xue Di’s poems and prosepoems. I have very little use for urban poets and poetry that often seem to live too far up in their heads, away from the body and its senses. As usual, though, exceptions prove the rule. Some poets, like Warsh, are able to bridge, it seems, a sense of urbanity with a sense of the rural. Octavio Paz once referred to “the lacerated speech of the big cities.” I’ve always admired what Gertrude Stein once wrote, “Civilization is always rebeginning in the country.” Yeah, man! That’s a very contemporary idea! I also still have a lot of love and respect for Gary Snyder’s work as a whole. Same for Susan Howe and Jean Valentine—all wildly different poets!

DD: Whose work do you return to the most?

DG: In poetry, the dead: Tomas Tranströmer , Henri Michaux, Rene Char, Zbigniew Herbert, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Riding, all early ‘influences’.  But as Louis Zukofsky once said, “Influence is literally in the air.”  All is of influence, every thing and every phoneme—Everything!

DD: I'd like to end with a poem of yours from The Future Only Rattles When You Pick It Up:

 

            INVERSE MIRROR

            A man fiercely tight in himself, stone-like,
            nevertheless scrabbled forward along a massif

            and felt a fierce break in the clouds
            where a woman fiercely light, cloud-like, floated

            over the man fiercely tight in himself, stone-
            like, and so on they went into the master task

            of reflections, where one was not the other
            and the other was not the one, and both upon

            reflection found themselves curiously inverse,
            one up, one down, each wanting to speak,

            wanting truth, but knowing that the last word
            is never in, though it is waiting.    

                    by David Giannini

---

Robert Murphy’s work has appeared in the literary periodicals Smartish-Pace, The Colorado Review, Notre Dame Review, Cultural Society, Marsh Hawk Review, Beans and Rice, LVNG, the Annals of Scholarship, and Live Mag!. He is the author of a chapbook, Not For You Alone (2004), Life In the Ordovician - Selected Poems (2007), and From Behind The Blind (2013) - all published by Dos Madres Press. He is a 2000 winner of the William Bronk Foundation prize for poetry. Robert Murphy is executive editor and publisher of Dos Madres Press. He is married to the iconographer and painter Elizabeth Hughes Murphy, who is both book designer and illustrator for Dos Madres Press. 

David Giannini’s most recently published collections of poetry include: THE FUTURE ONLY RATTLES WHEN YOU PICK IT UP (Dos Madres Press, 2018;) IN A MOMENT WE MAY BE STRANGELY BLENDED (New Feral Press, 2018;) FACES SOMEWHERE WILD (Dos Madres Press, 2017;) SPAN OF THREAD (Cervena Barva Press, 2015;). He has been a gravedigger; beekeeper; and taught at Williams College, The University of Massachusetts, and Berkshire Community College, as well as well as preschoolers and high school students, among others; and he worked as a psychiatric case manager for 31 years.  His Installation, The International House Dust Collection, was exhibited most recently at the Yager Museum in Oneonta, New York.   He has been a committee and board member of The Becket Arts Center where a dramatic reading of his extended narrative prosepoem, RIM, was produced in 2005. Giannini was the Lead Rehabilitation Counselor for Compass Center, which he co-founded, the first rehabilitation clubhouse for severely and chronically mentally ill adults in the northwest corner of Connecticut. He started and hosts Writers Read, an ongoing series of monthly readings by poets and fiction writers presenting at The Lee Library in Lee, MA. He lives among trees in Becket, Massachusetts with his wife, Pam, and their two cats, Mina and Maya.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Alone with John Ashbery (by Angela Patrinos)

“We had macaroni for lunch every day,” John Ashbery read, “except Sunday, when a small quail was induced / to be served to us”

This produced laughter from the audience.  Mr. Ashbery looked up from the page at us, and delivered the last two lines:

“Why do I tell you these things?
You are not even here.”

But we were there — at least three hundred of us, possibly more — we’d come to see him, to hear him tell us these things, and more things. Every chair was taken in Wollman Hall and those audience members who’d arrived not late, but not early, either stood or sat on the floor. The poem, titled, “The Room,” begins:

“The room I entered was a dream of this room.

Surely all those feet on the sofa were mine.”

                                                                                          At the start of the evening, in his introduction, the poet and scholar David Lehman said that he’d studied Ashbery’s poetry as an undergraduate at Columbia University. And while Mr. Ashbery read from Notes From the Air, the two men sat side by side at the table, as intimately unacquainted as people sharing a table at the public library, each reading from his own copy of the same book, one aloud, one silently, and Mr. Lehman seemed a student again, absorbed in the poetry of one of his favorite poets.

 

 

Mr. Ashbery, in a white shirt, read not slowly, not quickly, and rarely looked up.

After reading from his published poems, Mr. Ashbery pulled loose pages of new poems from a well-handled manila envelope. Now, it wasn’t going to be possible for any of us to follow along, either from a book or from memory.      

To hear a poem being read without having had time with the poem on the printed page is to feel mildly unmoored, and in between poems, when Ashbery looked up, his gaze was as piercing as it was opaque, which lent to the sensation.  But his gaze is a private gaze that allows for privacy; one needn’t be seen drifting in public.   

 

He read a new poem titled, “He Who Loves and Runs Away,” and then searched in silence for another poem to read. As he leafed through his papers, we watched in our own silence, staring at him so intently as though it was our duty to keep him from vanishing between poems.

 

“I wanted to read something, but I can’t find it,” he finally said. 

 

He moved on to his translations of [Pierre] Reverdy, and then he talked some about his poetry, and took questions.

 

Of the poem “The History of My Life,” he said, “The poem sounds like straight autobiography, and actually it is, but I didn’t realize it when I was writing it. I had been writing about my own life without knowing it.”

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
even.  There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in.  No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years.  As I aged

increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,

thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud

came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.

About the strange non-engagement between dreams and life: “We dream, we get up, we go about our business and a few hours later, we’re back to being invaded by dreams. The president dreams, the pope dreams. But we go about our lives as though these dreams never happen.”

Ashbery had read a pantoum, the title poem of his collection, Hotel Lautreamont (which also appears in Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems.) About this unusual form Ashbery said, “The pantoum is weird and rather frustrating — you have to abandon what you wanted to write and let [the form] write it for you.  This is one of the only poems I have written on a computer, and I found it rather helpful.”  He usually types his poems on a manual typewriter.

About starting poems in the middle: “The middle is where everyone starts writing.  It’s not as though there is a threshold called The Beginning.  The same can be said for the end — there’s no formal ending.” 

Does he attend openings and visit galleries? He does.

John Ashbery confides that he is looking forward to the Poussin exhibit at the Met where he might see Poussin's Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice.

 

from the archives; originally posted April 16, 2008. Reposted today, April 7, which was designated "John Ashbery day" in perpetuity in a ceremony in the New York City Council in April 2006 during the John Ashbery festival we staged at the New School that week.  Participants included  Strar Black, Billy Collins,Jane Freilicher, Jorie Graham, Daniel Halpern, Jane Hammond, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Meghan O'Rourke, Ron Padgett, Jenni Quilter, Archie Rand, Eugene Richie,David Shapiro, James Tate, John Emil Vincent, Susan Wheeler, Dara Wier.

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Adam Clay and Meagan Cass of Shelterbelt Press

DD: How did Shelterbelt Press come into being?

AC: Meagan and I were both teaching at the same university and we decided to form a press to be affiliated with the university so our students would have a hands-on experience. We also wanted to focus on a press that would have social justice at its core, so in publishing books, we also want to think about how the work we publish can do something important and valuable in the world. We plan to incorporate ideas of activism into publicity.

DD: What have been some of the challenges and rewards of starting a new press?

AC: One of the largest challenges is always funding—finding a range of support created some challenges, but the rewards are well worth it. And of course there are many. Primarily, having the chance to read so many different writers is a huge award. Receiving support and guidance from other presses, too, has been especially rewarding.

DD: The first book Shelterbelt will publish is the debut collection of an amazing poet, Eloisa Amezcua. Can you tell us a bit about From the Inside Quietly?

AC: Eloisa’s book is an amazing debut that explores life and loss, family and identity. As we talked about the collection, it seems the image of reflection comes to the surface. The poems are very direct in their assertions and explore a wide range of ideas, including sorrow alongside joy. We particularly love how the book manages to have a wonderful sense of humor at times.

DD: Meagan, your new short story collection, ActivAmerica, is on my reading list for the winter break. As your website notes, this collection explores how we confront (and exert) power and re-imagine ourselves through sports and athletic activities. What draws you to this subject matter? What connections do you see between the writing life and the world of athletics? What did you learn about yourself and American athletic culture through the writing of this book?

MC: Thanks for these wonderful questions, Dante, and for putting my book on your list! Sports were a big part of the community in the town where I grew up. I played (and still play) soccer, ran track, figure skated. It was a decade after Title IX was passed, so there was all this rhetoric surrounding “girl power” and athletics: like, through sports girls/women will defeat the patriarchy! Of course, it’s way messier than that. The book helped me understand the ways in which certain unequal power dynamics manifest on fields, rinks, and courts, power dynamics which impacted me and my teammates growing up, often in the form of patriarchal coaches and struggles with body image and eating disorders. I also learned more about how American sports/fitness ideology often masks different forms of injustice. Writing and sports are deeply related for me. They both involve daily practice, humility, and the need to develop both individually and within a broader community. No one writes or story, or kicks a soccer ball, in a vacuum.

DD: Adam, I recently read your newest poetry collection, Stranger. For me, the central poem of the collection was “Our Eternal Sounds,” which begins with the line: “What might all songs lean into?” Another poem I admire in Stranger, “Everyone Trying to Start / Something New,” ends: “…every record / flipped to its B side is only grace / garnered with more grace.” Could you talk about your poetry in terms of these two quotes? Could you riff on the different kinds of music that converge in your poems?

AC: Thank you for reading the book so closely! Both of those poems are thinking about poetry in terms of music, though I think “Our Eternal Sounds” is thinking specifically about poetry as the place from which language was born, while the other poem is thinking of music as a form of mourning. The book is trying to explore, more often than not, abstract ideas in concrete form. I also tend to speak my poems out as I write them (and have music on during the process of writing them), which might explain how the theme comes up throughout the book.

DD: What’s on the horizon for Shelterbelt Press in 2018 and beyond?

MC: At this point we’re thinking a lot about publicity—as mentioned above, financial well-being can be a challenge related to running an independent press. We’re going to AWP to engage with the literary community and are looking forward to how readers will respond to Eloisa’s book.

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from Eloisa Amezcua’s collection?

        SELF-PORTRAIT

        I walk between whitebrush and blackfoot
        daisies alone at the desert botanical garden

        and know not to touch the devil’s
        tongue or saguaro spines but still

        I move my hand closer to the teddy bear
        cholla until I touch it or it touches me

        the needles clinging hollow
        curve under the skin and I like it

        I used to be a nice girl
        euthymic too

        but when the only thing
        you have left of yourself                              
                                                is pain

        the filter with which
        you move through

        the world becomes impossibly
        tender like fingers swollen

        papules of foreign material
        lodged in the body

        to be unroofed or
        left there to dissolve 

Meagan Cass is the author of Range of Motion (Magic Helicopter Press, 2014). Her fiction has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Pinch, DIAGRAM, PANK, and Puerto del Sol, among other places. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois Springfield. Over the last fifteen years, she has done editorial work for a range of national literary journals and presses, including Stirring, Harpur Palate, Rougarou, and Sundress Publications.

Adam Clay is the author of Stranger (Milkweed Editions, 2016), A Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World (Milkweed Editions, 2012), and The Wash (Parlor Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review, Boston Review, Iowa Review, The Pinch, and elsewhere. A co-editor of TYPO Magazine, he serves as a Book Review Editor for Kenyon Review and teaches at the University of Illinois Springfield.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018).

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID WOJAHN [by Nin Andrews]

I

 I recently moved back to my hometown, Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the most exciting events in Charlottesville is their annual Virginia Festival of the Book. In preparation for the festival, I have been reading the books of some of the featured presenters. I thought I might interview a few of the poets that I am most looking forward to hearing read, starting with David Wojahn's collection, For the Scribe.  

 

NA: Tell me about the evolution of your latest collection, For the Scribe? How did it begin?

DW: Thanks for the kind words. I’ve always considered myself an elegiac poet, but in the case of this book I wanted to break out of that mode. I’d never really had much interest in writing about “nature,” so I thought I might start there—with some animal poems, for example. But I found that the only poems of this sort that I could write were about extinct animals: passenger pigeons, Tasmanian tigers, ivory-billed woodpeckers. These poems became a series within the book, and the collection started to arrange itself around them. And so I couldn’t escape from elegy after all, despite my efforts! The intention of the book, I guess, is to find the means to move between personal losses—death of family, beloveds, and friends—and loss on a grander scale: threats to what used to be called our democratic institutions, ecological destruction, apocalypse. I also tend to arrange my books around sequences, groups of related poems, or poems in multiple sections that can run to ten or more pages. There are five such sequences in the new book, and I try to get these longer pieces to be in dialogue with the shorter lyrics.

NA: I love how you make the political personal and vice versa. While eating bivalves, for example, you think of prisoners being force-fed at Guantanamo. I’m wondering if you might say a few words about your poetic intuition, your process, and this kind of weaving you so beautifully do.

DW: The poets who have most inspired me over the years are figures like George Oppen, Thomas McGrath, Muriel Rukeyser, and especially Robert Lowell. These writers didn’t draw a great distinction between the personal and the ideological, and they taught me how important it is for a poem to try to navigate between the micro and the macro, the private life of the individual and a public reckoning with history and politics. Finding the means to make those two things merge and commingle is a task that feels essential to me--as a moral imperative as much as an aesthetic one. “Political” poetry that merely rants in a preaching-to-the-choir way simply bores me; so does autobiographical poetry that doesn’t seek to find some respite from mere self-disclosure. But when these two intentions can come together, can alchemize into a third thing, then the poem has a chance to avoid agit-prop on the one hand, navel-gazing on the other.

NA: I had to laugh out loud when I started reading “Nineteen Eleven Blues,” which opens with Ronald Reagan talking about Elizabeth Bishop. I wondered if we could post that here. And maybe say a few words about it?

DW: I wrote an essay awhile back about Bishop and Reagan, about the America Reagan represents and the one that Bishop exemplifies. I am bewildered by the way that even people on the left who should know better think of Reagan as great leader—to me he was simply an intellectually impoverished reactionary and a genial criminal. Bishop was a fundamentally apolitical individual, but her work is profoundly democratic and progressive; it continues, on its smaller scale, the transcendentalist tradition of Emerson and Whitman.

Bishop and Reagan were born within 48 hours of one another, in February of 1911. Czselaw Milosz, another figure who’s a touchstone for me, was born a couple of months later, as was the greatest of the Delta Blues singers, Robert Johnson--in one of her letters to Robert Lowell, Bishop rhapsodizes about hearing an LP of Robert Johnson’s songs. Bishop, Milosz, and Johnson had more in common than their birthdates: they’re artists who obsessively write about the conditions of loneliness and exile, and do so with immense invention. So I wanted to find a way to write about them, and came up with the notion of having each of them compose little essays on one another. So Milosz speaks about Reagan in a sonnet that samples some lines from one of his essays; Johnson speaks about Bishop and Milosz in a poem modelled after one of his blues lyrics, and Bishop writes about Johnson in a villanelle. That left Reagan to write about Bishop, again in the form of a sonnet, though in the poem Reagan’s not exactly capable of much insight. In college he actually attempted to write some poems, although I can’t say I’d recommend them.

NA: When I was a student at Vermont, one of your colleagues called you a poet of dark lyricism and a poet who is not afraid to be challenging. He contrasted you with what he called “chatty, undisciplined poets of our day.” Is that how you see yourself?

DW: I suppose my poems are dark. I love good comic poetry—Kenneth Koch is a favorite of mine—but couldn’t write comedy if you put a gun to my head. But I have a special affection for poetry that challenges me, intellectually and emotively. And that often means difficult or allusive poetry. I love something Geoffrey Hill wrote: “Whatever strange relationship we have with the poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” My sense of what a poem should do isn’t that haughty and dyspeptic, but the poems I most admire are always aware that the diction of poetry can be different from the conversational, that it can be strange and majestic like the language of The Book of Common Prayer—you heard passages from that book a lot if you grew up, as I did, as an Episcopalian in the ‘50s. On the other hand, I write a lot about popular culture, music especially, and also films. Subjects like these don’t always mix very well with a Grand Style. I like it when my poems can function as mash-ups of high and low cultural allusions, of high and vernacular diction. I also like to write in a variety of formal and metrical approaches—free verse in one poem, received form in another. What purpose does it serve to favor one method over the other? Louis Zukofsky said that poetry’s upper limit is music, its lower limit speech. I want a poetry that moves steadily between one limit and the other.

NA: You are often referred to as a political poet. How do you keep your head, your heart—your poetry alive in this insane time?

A Dare to Be Unconventional: Nin Andrews and Dante Di Stefano Discuss Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017)

DD: In his introduction to the anthology Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to Present,David Lehman notes: “Writing a prose poem can therefore seem like accepting a dare to be unconventional. It is a form that invites the practitioner to reinvent it.” Using Lehman’s words as a jumping-off point, could you talk about your experience of writing such lovely, brilliant, challenging prose poetry over the years? Why is the prose poem your preferred medium?

NA: When I began writing, I wanted to write short stories. I wanted to be the next Eudora Welty or Flannery O’Connor. I wanted to tell the story of Miss August, even back then, of a transgender boy, growing up in the 1950s and 60s. The title scene of the book: a young girl and boy looking at a Playboy Magazine, flipping open the centerfold of Miss August—was already written in some version or another. In that scene, the girl cringes, just as I did when I was eight or nine years old, and announces, Whatever that is, whatever made that lady into Miss August—that is never, ever, ever happening to me. (I didn’t have too much to worry about, but Miss August gave me nightmares for years.) The boy, gazing at the same centerfold, said one day he’d be Miss August, adding, Just you wait and see. 

But in my last of year of college, I took a creative writing class with David Lehman in which he taught us the wonders of the prose poem. We read poets like Gertrude Stein,  Russell Edson, Henri Michaux, Julio Cortázar, Günter Eich, Tomas Tranströmer, Zbigniew Herbert, Wisława Szymborska, Max Jacob, Octavio Paz, and so many others.  I was smitten. My whole world changed. And I knew I would never  be a fiction writer.

The prose poem was and is the form I have always felt most at ease with, the form in which I could wear jeans to the literary ball. No more pretenses, no more dressing up in outfits that didn’t fit me. I like to write in smaller units, stanzas or paragraphs, and I have always been enchanted by the magic and music and mystery of poetry. I also love humor and surrealism, as do many of the masters of prose poetry. And I love how prose poetry can mimic other forms and mock one’s expectations and assumptions.  Even when lean towards fiction, as I did with Miss August, I want to write each page as a prose poem. I never want to give up that tightness that poetry offers, that jewel-like quality, even if I am writing a novel.

DD: In your latest book, Miss August, you draw on your childhood experiences growing up in the south, outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, an area to which you’ve recently moved back. What insights did you gain about yourself and your writing from the imaginative return you made in Miss August, and the actual return you made moving back in real life? What can the South of the 1950s and 1960s tell us about America today?

NA: When I wrote Miss August, I thought I was writing about the past. And that we, as a culture, were finally moving towards a less racist, less sexist and less oppressive future.  I thought I was writing about a time and place mostly visible in the rear view mirror.  My insight—I was living in a bubble.  

I should have known, I suppose, what the character, Gil, points out in the beginning of the book—the past has not really passed.

After the events this summer in Charlottesville, none of what I have to say about that is new or surprising. And I am not a journalist or a historian or a political scientist so I don’t have much to say about the state of America today. 

But I grew up in a time and place where people spoke out against integration. Their logic or justification, like the logic of the Southern Manifesto, was that people are happier mixing only with their own kind. I remember one man telling me how sorry he felt for Arthur Ashe. The poor fellow, he said, he has only white tennis players to play with.   

People believed in dividing lines then.   

DD: Miss August is startling and beautiful. It reads like a novella, in many respects. The finely crafted characters of Sarah Jane Lee, Gill Simmons, and May Dee have stayed with me quite vividly in the months since I first read this book. Can you talk a bit about creating, and living with, these remarkable characters?

NA: Thanks Dante. You are too nice!

Sarah Jane and Gil and May Dee lived easily in my mind for years, chattering on about this and that. They are based on people I loved as a child, on a woman and friends who had inside them a kind of music I associate with the South and with a southern accent and sensibility.

I don’t know what it is, but there is something about the South, something about its character and characters that casts a spell over me. I love the landscape, the warmth, the people, and the stories people tell. And how people talk and take their time talking  . . . 

Some days I think I could listen to people talk all day, especially if they have a good accent going. It’s the lilt, the twang, the slow dance in the telling. And the descriptions, the similes and metaphors, and the expressions like: You don’t want just a pig in a poke, or, Put a pinch of salt on his tail for me, won’t you?

Just the other day, I was eavesdropping, listening to a guy who was describing a pretty woman he disliked. His words: She’s got the legs of a filly and the soul of an old nag.  And no, you can’t steal that.

DD: As you discuss in your writer’s note at the end of the book, it took you years to engage the legacies of racism and inequality that contextualized your childhood in the south. White middle class writers seem particularly hesitant to write about issues of race and class; nobody wants to be another Vachel Lindsay—that is, to be unintentionally, inexcusably, and naively racist. Obviously, you’ve avoided those pitfalls here, by creating a layered, unflinching, and delicately nuanced portrait of the Jim Crow South. What did writing Miss August teach you about your own history, about race and class in America, about writing race and class in America?

NA: Before writing Miss August, I thought a lot about the hesitance you are describing, about the silence of white middle-class Americans.  And all of the reasons I shouldn’t write about these topics. And the potential pitfalls in any effort to write about race and class. There are many reasons to remain silent. After all, as you say, no one wants to be another Vachel Lindsay.

My father used to say that if you are a well-fed man in a room full of hungry people, you shouldn’t mention the nice meal you just ate. You should stay quiet.

A writing professor told me that I shouldn’t write about my racist ancestors or parents. He said it would be like the child of a Nazi writing about the Jews or World War Two.

A friend and poet once said that she thought of the white silence around these difficult topics as a curtain, a privacy screen, behind which one can safely undress. After all, who wants to be exposed?

It seems logical to avoid uncomfortable subjects even if that means disowning or denying one’s own part or place in history or society.

I simply felt that I wanted to talk about my formative years. But to write about my past, even in a fictional way, composing stories and prose poems based loosely on my childhood, was to write about race and gender and class. After all, I was raised by a black nanny who hated other African Americans, by a father who helped to start an all-white private school, by a father who was also a gay man and who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, by a mother was from Boston and not a typical woman and not a bit like Southern women, by farmhands who were illiterate and who were my playmates, by friends’ parents who called the Civil War –The War of Northern Aggression.  

But my goal as a writer is not to explain, pontificate, or change what is or was, but simply to describe, to bear witness. I know that my particular vision and filter is tainted, colored not only by my class, race and gender, but also by my inevitable prejudices, fears, eccentricities, opinions, and blind spots. Nevertheless, it is liberating to write. Silence, for me, is suffocating.

DD: All of your work, but particularly your last three books, Why God Is a Woman, Our Lady of the Orgasm, and Miss August, speak powerfully to the misogyny that is pervasive in virtually all aspects of American life. You’ve spent your whole writing life, examining nuances of gender and sexuality. I wonder what your thoughts are for making the literary world more equitable and not just for women, especially in a country where Donald Trump is president?

NA: Gender roles have always seemed silly to me, as well as arbitrary. Maybe that’s why I’ve written so much about them.

After all, it was my father, not my mother, who played what would be considered a feminine role in my childhood. He took care of me when I was sick. And he helped pick out my dresses (he insisted they had to be short or long, no midis, as they were called back then) and lipstick (the redder the better), and he told me how to style my hair (like an upside down tulip).  His own closet was filled with expensive Italian suits, silky soft shirts, and hats. My mother wore LL Bean boots, men’s socks and dirty brown skirts or jeans. She was dairy farmer and an activist. She was the one in the family who took up political causes. 

But that doesn’t answer your question.

Really, I don’t know how to make an equitable world, literary or otherwise.

As to Donald Trump and this country . . .  Do you think he’s an ugly reflection of what we don’t admit about ourselves.  Some golem-like part of our national psyche that has been dwelling underground, wearing Bilbo’s ring and yet gaining power for years, waiting for his moment to emerge?

It still stuns me that white women voted for Trump. Clearly, misogyny and sexism are not limited to the male gender.  Women of color, on the other hand, did not vote for him.  Women of color consistently vote in favor of women’s rights and health. Women of color might be our best hope for the future.

DD: I’d like to end with a poem from Miss August. Could you introduce one of your favorites?

NA: I’ll choose this one which isn’t really a favorite, but I think it might help to introduce the book. In it Sarah Jane is speaking as an adult about her friend, Gil:

The Story of Gil Simmons

Sarah Jane

People still talk about Gil Simmons. They say, That boy was one strange bird. They say, He wasn’t right in the head. They say, His daddy ought to have taught him a thing or two. These are Lessington, Virginia folks, mind you. When I was a girl, they shot deer frozen in their headlights and stray dogs that howled at the moon. They flew Confederate flags in their front yards. They spoke to God and ghosts and called black folks niggers. And they closed the public schools. Don’t let the coloreds in our classrooms, they said. Restrooms neither. But Gil, they thought, was the strange one. Stranger than a faggot, they said. Still do. I smile, light up a cigarette, and say, Define normal, if you will.

Nin Andrews is the recipient of the 2016 Ohioana Award for Poetry. Her most recent book is Miss August (CavanKerry Press, 2017).

Dante Di Stefano is the co-editor, with María Isabel Alvarez, of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018)

Happy Birthday Frank! Michelle Dunton interviews David Lehman about Frank Sinatra

Michelle Dunton of Writing Fun interviewed David Lehman upon publication of Sinatra's Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World

"The Unavoidable Sensuous Apprehension that We Were Indeed a Little Ball in Space . . . " David Lehman interviews A. R. Ammons

A recent issue of the New Yorker (the same issue that published David's poem "It Could Happen to You") included an article about the poetry of A. R. Ammons. The article mentions Ammons' Paris Review interview, which David conducted in 1996. You can read the interview here. 

Even better, you can listen to the complete interview tapes. These are a treat; as one would expect, Ammons' discussion of how he works is fascinating and filled with terrific advice for all poets, regardless of where they are in their career. 

David Lehman interview A. R. Ammons Parts I - III

(I almost stopped reading the New Yorker piece early on, when the author describes Ammons as "puttering." Clearly he never met this great genius--which I did, in Ithaca, on many occasions--or "puttering' would never have come to mind. sdl)

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Nicci Mechler of Porkbelly Press

DD: On your personal website, you have a great quote: “In a perfect world, Audre Lorde and Joseph Campbell would sit down over a few pints of Mudder’s Milk to speak about the way our dreams and magic connect us all, teach us all—the way both are vital to a full and vibrant expression and expansion of culture & self.” Can you start the interview by talking about these artistic forbearers, and what it means to you to run a poetry press in America in 2017?

NM: Thank you. No one’s ever asked me about that one before!

The book that most affected me in college, still the one I give to friends at any opportunity, is Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. We choose pieces for Sugared Water, our anthologies, and our Porkbelly chapbooks in the place where struggle, speculative work, humor, sure voice, feminism, and the intimate journey converge. Ray Bradbury might call it tipping out the “beautiful stuff” we hold inside of us, or the voices to help “lead [us] through the dark.” Everything, for us, is about the journey, and accompanying the poet or writer along the way. Our staff interests touch everything from hiking to graphic novels, expressionist printmaking to death positivity and queer theory. We bring that to our lit.

The majority of our writers are women or female identifying, trans, non-binary, queer folx. We support the work of immigrants and expats, multicultural and intersectional work. We love first books, those starting out, and books by poets and writers well on their way. Our poets range in age from teenage to octogenarian. We look to regional artists when we can, and make a lot of our cover art in house. Running a press in 2017 America is, for us, the work of citizens of the world making way for important voices, marginalized voices—voices we need.

DD: How did Porkbelly Press come into being?

NM: Sugared Water came first, a market for genre-straddling work, for speculative work, for new writers and experimental writers and established writers trying something new, for humans letting us into their internal landscape. I decided to go with a handmade approach, a callback to years of making zines, using traditional printmaking and bookbinding methods.

After a few people sent packets of poems clearly from a series (most of our chapbooks are clusters of poems), and many of those poets had no chapbooks listed in their biographical statement (why not?), I did a lot of thinking about the books I owned and what was missing. I’d read this book is the thought that convinced this artist-writer-printmaker-bookbinder to ask for those poems to make books of them. Some generous, lovely poets (and writers!) took me up on that, and trusted a fledgling press with their book.

A handful of our titles still come from poets and writers we find in our Sugared Water queue.

DD: Tell us about Sugared Water.

NM: Sugared Water is a handbound, limited edition literary magazine. Each cover is printed by hand using traditional printmaking methods. Our most recent issue, no. 5, combines screen printing and letterpress (vintage wood type individually inked with 2-5 colors and pulled on a Vandercook Proof Press). We made 240 of our first issue, but since our storage is a box in my closet, I’ve come down to about 100 numbered copies per issue. We’re currently staffed entirely by women,

We look for work that’s sharp and image-dense, work that makes us stop and look up from what we’re reading. Work we’re thinking about days after we’ve read it. We feature a large number of women and genderqueer folx, and we make space for trans, nonbinary, genderfluid, and those living in between or everything. No hate speech. Magic, yes. Speculative, yes.

Each issue is supposed to be 56 pages, but some seasons we’re a little greedy and hit 80. 

DD: You’ve published some incredible poets, notably Chen Chen, E. Kristen Anderson, and Eloisa Amezcua. Amezcua’s Mexicamericana seems a particularly necessary poetry collection in the Trump era. Can you tell us a bit about this collection?

NM: Yes. We’re so honored to have these voices, established and up-and-coming, and I’m so, so thrilled to be part of so many literary histories. Porkbelly Press published Chen Chen’s first book. When I read a first book and have trouble believing it’s a first book, and I think—how has this ever been passed up? Why isn’t it already an object people can hold? Why aren’t people already gifting this to friends who need it?’—that feeling is why I started a press in the first place.

This collection is a light in the dark.

Mexicamericana is a cluster of poems about being, about identity, otherness, and the strength it takes to persist, to cross borders, borders sometimes separated by a dangerous line. It’s about people dying for politics, the resilience of self and identity and the convergence of selves, the fact that people are not illegal. People are not illegal.

People are not illegal.

People are dying.

And people are surviving.

And we won’t have a fucking wall.

DD: Tell us about the other amazing collections that are a part of your 2017 chapbook series.

NM: 2017 has sex and body autonomy and desire and infertility (fertility too) and so much strength. 2017 investigates survival and intergenerational trauma, erasures made from punk rags (more sex), ritual, feminist monsters with sharp teeth & blades, blood, bone, and power. Our authors this year: Amber Edmondson, Kelly Lorraine Andrews, Melissa Atkinson Mercer, Donna Vorreyer, Anita Olivia Koester, M. Brett Gaffney, Lindsay Lusby, Kristi Carter, Maggie Woodward, and Eloisa Amezcua. By the time this interview appears, we’ll have just released Apples or Pomegranates by Anita Olivia Koester, Daughter Shaman Sings Blood Anthem by Kristi Carter (covers hand-printed in metallic ink!), and will soon release Found Footage by Maggie Woodward (including erasures!), and Blackbird Whitetail Redhand by Lindsay Lusby.

DD: Porkbelly Press also publishes micro chapbooks, collections of 8-10 pages. How does the micro chapbook as a form differ for you from a regular length chapbook?

NM: Micros tend to be single arcs or very tight clusters of work. It’s an opportunity for poets & writers to send a small sampling out into the world, though they’re curated with the same attention to design and detail as our chapbooks. It’s a taste that can be enjoyed easily in a sitting.

DD: How has Cincinnati influenced the press and your work as a poet/artist?

NM: My father worked close to the river for many years, and I often spent a portion of my weekend downtown at the jewelry manufacturing company where he served as vice president. He worked long hours, and I was there with him more than a few times when the rest of the shop was empty. My childhood is steeped in the architecture, landscape, and lore of this city, and I carry that with me today. It’s why my press is named Porkbelly, after the pork belly trade in Cincinnati. A fellow printmaker beat me to the name Steamwhistle (a local letterpress studio), paying homage to the shipping history of the city, which nestles into a wide bend of the Ohio River. Best American Poetry blog did an interview with Glass recently—Tony named his press after a major trade in Toledo; I suppose we Ohioans have a thing for industry.

DD: You are a talented visual artist. I admire the work on your website, particularly the assemblage to Emily Dickinson titled “Open Me Carefully.” How has your work in the publishing field influenced your art and vice versa? (Clearly, the stunning design of your books is one point of connection).

NM: Thank you so much. “Open Me Carefully” is an homage to a book of the same name, detailing the relationship and letters between Emily Dickinson and her childhood friend, Susan (who moved in across the hedge and married Emily’s brother). I spent a semester avoiding Henry James and mining Dickinson’s poems for erotic poems ostensibly written for Susie, of which there are many. My focus is inexhaustible now and again, always following the personal connection, the surprise, or the secret. Attention to detail and craft spring up from an education in art and writing. It’s inevitable.

Craftsmanship and the hand of the artist are important elements in Porkbelly’s line. I grew up writing stories, making art, and climbing trees to hide, to read, and to ambush my cousins with water balloons. Precision is very important in all of these endeavors.

My visual education certainly informs my writing, and when it came time to start a magazine, and then a press, it lent me the confidence and skills necessary to hand-produce books of a quality with which I’m happy, and which delight (I hope!) the recipients and authors. Though that means a double helping of self-criticism sometimes, and more stress about the occasional 1/8^th inch variation in cover size than I’d like to admit, I am honored to help in bringing these books into being.

DD: What draws you to the chapbook? What can the chapbook offer that a full length collection can’t?

NM: At Porkbelly, each chapbook is made by hand from start to finish, and I love the variety of chapbook design and presentation. I can afford to collect more small works; I can afford to produce more. Most importantly, hand-binding and experimentation in production are valued in chaps. Chapbooks don’t give you time to be distracted—they feel intimate and quirky. Chaps may contain several arcs, but it’s a distilled potion.

DD: What’s forthcoming from Porkbelly Press in 2018?

NM: More first chapbooks investigating things like navigating chronic illness with body-love (first-generation Russian-Jewish-American Minadora Macheret’s Love Me, Anyway), a first book by a Muslim woman of color (Noor Hindi’s Diary of a Filthy Woman), a book of ekphrastic poems inspired by Diane Arbus’ photographs & a poet’s journey (How Darkness Enters a Body by Sarah Nichols), erasure poems imagining the voice of Elizabeth Short reclaimed from a crime novel about her murder (Dreamland for Keeps by Sarah Nichols), and a collection of prose poems which left us speechless (Lisette Alonso’s Wednesday’s Child).

DD: Could you end the interview by giving us a poem from a Porkbelly Press poet?

NM: Yes, absolutely. Below is a selection from Eloisa Amezcua’s Mexicamericana. This poem was selected for Best American Poets 2017 and first appeared in Public Pool. In her chapbook, it’s spaced a little differently, with a lot of white space for breathing room, and several page-turns to punctuate it.

            Watching Underworld, Inc. Episode 3: Human Cargo

            The Pima County Morgue,

            approximately 110 miles

 

            from my childhood home,

            houses John Doe, Jane Doe,

 

            [sexless] Doe. Dated remains

            found in the Sonoran Desert—

 

            nameless and alone. The medical

            examiner holds a fragmented

 

            cranium, points to where

            the eyes would go. 

 

                            /

 

            I cross the border        on foot.

            My father         waits for me

 

            in the McDonald’s       parking lot

            one block         into America.

 

            I stand        in the line

            labeled             Ciudadanos.

                        

                            /

 

            Francisco, a people smuggler

            in Nogales, says his secret

 

            is training others

            to hide and survive.

           

                                /

 

            I don’t remember much           from middle school

            US History—               who lead the troops

 

            that took          Fort Ticonderoga         or who forced

            General Pemberton                 to surrender in 1863—

 

            but I remember            like yesterday

            the sound of my mother’s voice

 

            practicing         the Pledge of Allegiance

            before her                    naturalization ceremony.

                

                                /

 

            A Border Patrol agent

            explains how after five days

 

            on foot in the desert,

            skin begins to split

 

            from the burning sun—

            flesh exposed and open.

 

            Nothing can be done once

            the breaking has started.

           

                            /

 

            Gratitude is a word that comes to mind.

           

                            /

 

            In Phoenix, Magdalena buys and sells

            moneyless migrants wholesale—

 

            their families unable to pay off cartel

            trafficking rates. Three women/girls sit

 

            one room over, faces hidden with pillow cases—

            they're background. And Magdalena, she talks

 

            a tough talk, says business is business

            and business is good. Her face concealed

 

            by a black bandana and mirrored sunglasses

            reflecting the camera back into itself.

        

                            /

 

            When the show’s over,            I’ll call my mother

            just to hear      the sound of her voice.

 

            Como estas?           she’ll ask.         And I’ll lie,

            tell her things are fine the way

 

            she’d say          the same to her mother

            thirty years before                    when she moved

 

            to this country                         alone

            with her husband.                    I’m haunted

 

            by that for her.             I moved thousands of miles

            away                alone                just to feel

 

            closer. Before        we hang up, she’ll say

            Dios te bendiga, picture me signing myself

 

            or kissing a crucifix                  I can’t bring myself

            to wear.           A blessing I don’t need

          

            but I take it                 anyways.

 

Nicci Mechler is a graduate of Northern Kentucky University (BFA Studio Art, Masters in English). Between research, novel revisions, poetic alchemy, reading, retreats, and caring for roomies, rescue dogs, and rescue kitties, she makes art, edits the literary magazine Sugared Water, and runs Porkbelly Press (a micro press in Cincinnati, OH). She is also the editor and maker of several zines, including the body image zine LMLMB.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for the DIALOGIST. Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America, forthcoming from NYQ Books.

Educators Roundtable: Dean Rader & Marie Fuhrman [by Kristina Marie Darling]

 

Dean Rader publishes widely in the fields of poetry, American Indian studies, and visual/popular culture. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. His recent collection, Landscape Portrait Figure Form, (Omnidawn Chapbook Series 2014) was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the Best Books of Poetry of the year. In 2016, he won the Common Good Books Prize (judged by Garrison Keillor) and in 2015 was the recipient of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award (judged by Stephen Burt). He has also written scholarly books, including Engaged Resistance: Contemporary American Indian Art, Literature, and Film from Alcatraz to the NMAI (University of Texas Press, 2011), which won the Beatrice Medicine Award for Excellence in American Indian Scholarship and Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry(University of Arizona Press, 2001, edited with Janice Gould). He is a professor at the University of San Francisco.  For more information, visit his website. 

 

An Indigenous daughter of the West, CMarie Fuhrman was born in Southwest Colorado and has lived in various rural towns of states all along the Rocky Mountains. She has earned degrees in Exercise Physiology, English and American Indian Studies and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho where she co-teaches Native Literature and Ethnic Studies classes and is associate poetry editor for Fugue. Cindy’s poetry has been featured in Broadsided Press’s NoDapl compilation, two anthologies, and several literary journals including Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art. She is recipient of the Burns Award for poetry and multiple fellowships. Her current project, The Problem of My Body, focuses on the forced sterilization of Native women. CMarie divides her time between Moscow and McCall, Idaho.

 

In anticipation of Tupelo Press's forthcoming Native Voices anthology, I'm pleased to introduce a conversation with our co-editors about what the book makes possible in the classroom. 

KMD:  You are all both accomplished educators, with positions at such colleges as the University of San Francisco, University of Idaho, and many others.  I’d love to hear more about your experiences teaching poetry.  What’s missing from contemporary writing programs and the conversations that take place within them?  

DR: I think there are two answers to your question. One answer involves what gets taught to undergraduates in terms of Indigenous poetry. This includes classes to both English majors and--in some ways more importantly--to non-English majors. For example, at USF we have a very popular class called “Native American Literature and Film” which fulfills the university’s literature core requirement. It is designed for non-English majors and will be, for most students in the class, the only literature class they take in college. Increasingly, there are courses like this all over the country. And they are popular. Professors who teach these classes are often overworked and perhaps even under-prepared--especially for poetry. This anthology will help them teach contemporary Indigenous poetry in an inclusive way that highlights not just the thematics of poetic creation but its forms as well.

I also think more and more students are pursuing graduate studies in Native literatures. We definitely need more students--ideally more Indigenous students--getting PhDs in literature, English, AIS, and American studies. What has been missing for these students is a current anthology of Indigenous poetics that arms them to to graduate level work in Native poetries.

The second issue is about poets themselves and what gets taught in graduate creative writing programs. I think recent books by Natalie Diaz and Layli Long Soldier might get taught in MFA programs, but there is a vast canon of Indigenous American poetry that does not get taught in graduate programs because graduate writing courses tend to focus on craft, and for years readers have been taught to read books by Native writers through the lens of theme or context or culture. This anthology helps correct that.

CF:  I agree with everything that Dean said.  As a teacher of Native Lit and advisor for our Universities IKEEP (Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program) I am responsible for teaching Natives and non-Natives about Indigenous literature.  I often teach classes for Native students only, but I have taught mixed classes as well.  What I have found in teaching both is that Natives would have to learn about Indigenous writing from a non-Native perspective and non-Natives were never given the chance to hear about craft or the impetus for a poem or story from the Native writer.  Often I would invite, via Skype or classroom visit, the writers and poets to talk to the students themselves, but this is not always feasible.  It is my hope that a collection like this one might be able to bring those voices into the classroom directly.  This way, both student and teacher may gain a better perspective and understanding of Native writing.

KMD:  In what ways is pedagogy politically charged?  Can our decisions as teachers create a more inclusive and just artistic community?  

DR: A great part of teaching is related to 1) knowledge and 2) comfort. Most poets and professors who teach did not, themselves, read poetry by Native writers in college or graduate school. So, they are less likely to teach it now. I think many professors shy away from teaching, say, Wendy Rose poems or Simon Ortiz poems or LeAnne Howe poems because they don’t know much about tribal histories or even larger Native histories. Furthermore, Native issues are not forefront in American culture right now the way African American and Chicano/a issues are. So, the political urgency of Black Lives Matter or the immigration debate may, for some, feel exigent. I would argue though American minority issues, the marginalization of people of color, and the absence of Natives from popular and political culture, and the larger issues of class make teaching works by Native writers paramount at this moment in history.

KMD:  What new directions do you hope that this anthology opens up within our thinking about poetry, literary tradition, and aesthetics more generally?  

DR: I hope this anthology encourages writers and professors to think about Indigeous poetry in terms of craft. I really hope our book shifts the lens a little bit so that people do not turn to Native poetry just to “learn about Indians” (as I heard someone say not long ago) but to learn about art. What if readers start thinking about Native poetry the way they think about Native painting and pottery--as modes of aesthetic production, as vibrant acts of creation.

CF: I can’t say this any better.

KMD:  Tell us about one particular contribution from the anthology that you would be excited to teach.  How would you utilize this particular work in the classroom?  

CF: I am excited to teach work by Nimiipuu poet Michael Wasson.  First, because he is from the Nez Perce tribe which is located here in Idaho, not far from the University.  Many of our students are Nez Perce and I think they would be honored and inspired to hear from one of their own.  Not to mention, Michael’s work is outstanding.  His poems are complex, multi-layered, and extremely poignant.  I am excited to bring poets into the classroom that reflect my students.

KMD:  Given the anthology’s unique structure, what does this book make possible within the context of writing programs?  For writing communities more generally?  

DR: The book’s combination of poetry and craft are going to be unique. I also like the idea that our book foregrounds influential poetic texts. This highlights the ways in which poetry is a kind of collaboration, or at the very least a conversation. It also helps illustrate direct influences and echoes.

CF: Generations and a sense of community are very important to Native people.  This book is way of honoring our teacher, our elders, and inspiring our children to write their truths as well.

Because this book is comprised of writing from poets all over the US (including Alaska and Hawaii) it gives a more complete picture of the Native American experience, particularly the contemporary experience while honoring the past.  Though this book is not meant to be a historical work, it does help to fill the gaps in both the current events and the overlooked history of Native people in the U.S.

For more information about our anthology, our mission, and how you can bring this book to life, please visit our Kickstarter page.  

Satire, Stars, and Protest: A Conversation with Paul Fericano [by Emma Trelles]

Paul Fericano is a working class poet, satirist and social activist. He is the author of The Hollywood Catechism (Silver Birch Press) and several more poetry and prose books and chapbooks, including Interview with the Scalia, Commercial Break, Driving to Reno with Freud, and Loading the Revolver With Real Bullets. He is the editor and co-founder of Yossarian Universal (1980), the nation’s first parody news service, and he is a founder of SafeNet, an advocacy group that assists survivors of clergy sexual abuse by fixing on healing and restorative justice; he also writes an online column about this work, A Room with a Pew. 

Since 1971, his poetry and prose have appeared, disappeared and reappeared in various underground and above-ground literary and media outlets in this country and abroad, including: The Antarctic Review, Inside Joke, Mother Jones, Poetry Now, Projector, The Realist, Saturday Night Live, SoHo Arts Weekly, Vagabond, The Wormwood Review, and Catavencu Incomod (Romania), Charlie Hebdo (Paris), Il Male (Italy), Krokodil (Moscow), Pardon (Germany), Punch (London) and Satyrcón (Argentina). Paul Fericano received the Howitzer Prize for his poem, “Sinatra, Sinatra,” an award he himself created and exposed as a literary hoax to reveal the absurd nature of competitive awards. The following year, Commercial Break received both the Prix de Voltaire (Paris) and the Ambrose Bierce Prize (San Francisco) for upholding the traditions of socio-political satire. He resides on the San Francisco peninsula. 

 Because I am valuing order at the moment, I thought I'd start at the beginning -- literally. The front matter of your book includes praise from a variety of newspapers & publications both here and across the pond. I noticed that several described you by summoning the language of subterfuge, such as how you write "like a wanted man hiding out in the basement of Poetry magazine" (Chicago Sun-Times) or that "if a witness protection program" existed for poets, you'd be in it (Washington Post Book World). How does your work, and this book in particular, connect to the covert?

Yeah. If you talk to some of my friends they’ll swear they never heard of me. The Hollywood Catechism represents the progressive arc my narrative has taken since my high school seminary days at a Franciscan boarding school in the sixties. My desire to write conspired with my need to be funny which collided with my vocation to serve God.  As a naïve fourteen year old freshman I was taught that God and poetry were essentially great because both were solemn and unfathomable. In English class we were instructed to examine not feel. Poems were prayers and prayers were sacred with no hint that ancient writers even knew what a joke was.

What little I knew of poetry and God was encyclopedic compared to what I knew about sex and my own body. During this time the priest who ran my screwy English class was sexually assaulting me under the guise of medical treatment. I was a fearful, angry and depressed kid, ashamed and confused about something I couldn’t name. The irony of my dismal situation was almost comical. I was studying to be a priest in the house of God, being molested by a priest who was teaching me English, and looking for salvation in poetry. 

One day in religion class, after reading the story of “Mr. Blue,” a modern day parable about a crazy character who doesn’t fit in, I began to write my thoughts in a daily journal. The tide turned for me near the end of my freshman year when I discovered a battered copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy wedged behind a toilet tank in the seminary’s main bathrooms. Some of the pages were torn out which led me to believe the book was not just there for reading. I’d been ignorant my entire short life until I opened that book. For the first time since my arrival I felt someone was speaking directly to me. Six months later I left the seminary for good.

What happened after you left?

By 1977, I was reading and learning from living poets like Edward Field, Wanda Coleman, A.D. Winans, Ron Koertge, Al Young, Laurel Speer, Steve Kowit, Ishmael Reed, Sharon Olds and Gerald Locklin while promoting a second collection of my own poetry, Loading the Revolver with Real Bullets, published by Second Coming Press of San Francisco, my hometown. The year before I had instigated “stoogism,” a mock-literary movement that Allen Ginsberg dubbed “the only movement with a punch line.” The label “standup poet” was being attached to my name and I was playing the role of court jester in a crowded throne room. It was an exciting time to be involved in the small press literary scene.

Stoogism

i dreamt of Moe
last night
he was crying
he took
the laughter
out of his head
and thanked me
and when I saw
myself
about to cry
he whispered:
wake up
and go to sleep
and i did

And then you morphed from satirist to provocateur!

The following year my poetry and politics got me in trouble with the California State Senate. A short, eighteen-line poem from my second collection was photocopied, distributed, and read on the floor of the senate by Bob Wilson, a senator from Costa Mesa. Wilson used it as a reason why the California Arts Council (CAC) should be abolished. The poem in question, “The Three Stooges at a Hollywood Party,” was a spoof of American conservatism.

Wilson claimed it slandered actors John Wayne, Randolph Scott, Stuart Whitman and Glen Campbell, who were all mentioned in the poem. Since the book had been published with grant money from the CAC, the senator argued that California would likely be sued for libel. Within hours of his stunt several major news outlets picked up the story, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian of London, and even the Soviet news agency Tass, which allegedly tried to use the films of the Three Stooges as propaganda for capitalist violence. Dozens of newspapers published the poem. By the end of the year, the book had nearly sold out.

What kind of stage are you setting, so to speak, with a photograph of Burt Lancaster as Elmer Gantry on the cover of this book? 

There’s a lot going on there. There’s the hucksterism of religion and the mumbo jumbo beliefs portrayed in the movie by an actor who, in real life, was a free thinker and champion of liberal causes. There are issues of veneration, hypocrisy and self-delusion presented in the context of a Hollywood culture that survived the McCarthy witch hunts and most of Mickey Rooney’s films. There’s the foible of star idolatry wedded to divine providence. Reciting prayers, memorizing lines and writing poetry are subversive acts. Religious devotion and celebrity worship demand allegiance, but poetry does best when it steers clear of any nonsense that defines it as something better than something else. The book’s cover also represents some personal mischief. Burt Lancaster bears an uncanny resemblance to my father.

Reading this book felt like eating a wild stew of American socioculture and celebrity: Poe and Freud appear alongside Curly and Moe from The Three Stooges; Lon Chaney, Jr. "howls" in the manner of Allen Ginsberg; God throws the hammer down on the "First Lady of Radio" Kate Smith; Porky Pig translates Basho; and Sinatra is defined as an multi-tiered entry in a dictionary. What is important about this kind of collaging? What does it add to the even greater gumbo of American letters?

It extends the reach of my own poetry by relating to time and place and reminding me to take the writing seriously but not the self. (The only thing good about self-importance is that Trump has given it a bad name.) I have no idea what my work adds to that steaming pot of literary mush. The danger of being as relevant as yesterday’s news comes with the territory and I willingly accept it.

[But] missing the mark means you took the shot. I like breaking the fourth wall and speaking directly into the camera. The late poet Ann Menebroker aptly described this rebellion as “Chico Marxist.” Lampoons, parodies and spoofs in literature are hazardous grinds that exact a price and take a toll. Poems like “Sinatra, Sinatra,” “The Director’s Prayer,” and “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” dare readers to take their hands off the wheel and close their eyes. 

Sinatra, Sinatra

Sexual reference:
A protruding sinatra
is often laughed at by serious women.

Medical procedure:
A malignant sinatra
must be cut out by a skilled surgeon.

Violent persuasion:
A sawed-off sinatra
is a dangerous weapon at close range.

Congressional question:
Do you deny the charge of ever being
involved in organized sinatra?

Prepared statement:
Kiss my sinatra.
Blow it out your sinatra.

Financial question:
Will supply-side sinatra halt inflation?

Empty expression:
The sinatra stops here.
The sinatra is quicker than the eye.

Strategic question:
Do you think it's possible to win
a limited nuclear sinatra?

Stupid assertion:
Eat sinatra.
Hail Mary full of sinatra.

Serious reflection:
sinatra this, sinatra that.
sinatra do, sinatra don't.
sinatra come, sinatra go
There's no sinatra like show sinatra.

Historical question:
Is the poet who wrote this poem still alive?

Biblical fact:
Man does not live by sinatra alone.

In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man," you've taken one of the most notable poems of our times and married it to the blight of racism. Your model is a poem written by Wallace Stevens, one of the great American modernists who was also a racist and whose indelible work many writers (including myself) feel conflicted about.  To make matters more complex, you are a white man writing about an experience you have only observed vs. endured. Could you share a little bit about your choices behind this poem and how you work through nuance, contradiction, and the hesitancy that can accompany them?

You’re the first to nail that. A lot of my poems have secret passageways and trapdoors that chart unlikely escape routes. I had been re-reading a book of poetry by my friend, klipschutz (Kurt Lipschutz), which included his very funny “Thirteen Ways of Eating a Burrito.” At the same time, the news had exploded about Trayvon Martin, the young, unarmed black man in Florida shot and killed by a man who felt threatened by Martin’s looks and behavior. The first line that came to me was “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.” I thought: “Okay, a little channeling of Wallace Stevens would be a healthy thing right about now.” The poem became an absurd retelling of Stevens’ original use of language and ideas with an attempt to reconcile the “eye of the beholder” with the specter of race and racism.

I’d also like to add that while I am, indeed, considered white, I didn’t always feel that way growing up. My family’s thick, black hair, dark, olive skin and imperfect English, as well as those of other Italians in our neighborhood, stood in stark contrast to our neighbors of German and Nordic descent. Race and prejudice in the fifties were as common as rabbit ears on a TV set. It wasn’t unusual to hear words like “black dago,” “dirty wop,” and “guinea” used as nasty invective or with reckless familiarity. The epithets had an isolating effect, particularly if you were very young and heard such distinctions being made between white kids and everyone else. 

What we experienced was nothing compared to what some African American neighbors went through. It wasn’t just white against everyone else. Italians, my uncles included, would sometimes call each other “dago” as if they were talking about fish. But they were just as guilty of using the “N” word as the guy around the corner who flew a Confederate flag every Fourth of July. Some kids would repeat what their parents said, but others crossed the line looking for trouble. I was with my older brother and some cousins in the park when we saw a big white kid pounding on a small black kid. The black kid was someone we’d seen before, my age, about eight years old. My brother, who was 12, ran over and told the white kid to pick on someone his own size. He took a swing at my brother and my brother decked him with one punch. I never forgot it.

At first the tone of this collection feels predominantly playful in terms of subject matter and language, but by the time I finished reading it, I could see that it was also wistful and melancholy all along, addressing not only the silliness of celebrity but also its solitude and, by turn, your own. Why do you find humor as a valuable construct in your work? What tradition do you feel you are a part of in terms of this aesthetic? 

It’s valuable in my poetry because it helps liberate and, in some ways, define the struggle I believe we all have with the absurdity of needless suffering. It’s not enough to stand for something and be angry with how the country is run or where the world is headed. To effect change you put that something, whatever it is, in play.

I think the tradition I’m part of demands I navigate this new golden age of satire with a pocket full of pyrite and no compass. The offensive nature of any satirical work (mine included) is implicit and inescapable. This is not a time for the timid or thin-skinned. I believe I’m just as sincere as anyone else in trying to determine why I’m somewhere rather than how I get anywhere.

There are a lot of borrowed forms in your book -- from Catholic prayer, to found dialogue, to structures imagined first by Ginsberg & Stevens. What do you like about working within an already set framework?

I absolutely love parody. It’s a difficult and challenging form that requires even more discipline and concentration than usual. It’s immensely satisfying when you stay true to the original and hear your own voice. The Catholic prayers came quickly and easily, particularly “The Actor’s Creed” and “The Halle Berry.” In the poem for Robin Williams I used his own words to address the loss I felt on the passing of my friend. Writing “Howl of Lon Chaney, Jr.” was both torture and bliss. I went into a zombie trance for months and loved it. A parody of Ginsberg’s most famous work is doomed to failure from the start if 1) you don’t have a convincing subject of your own to carry the poem; and 2) you’re unprepared to carry it through all the way. I felt fortunate. A twisted Hollywood culture had produced Lon Chaney, Jr. His life, in front of and away from the camera, was eerily compelling. The transformation of the poem itself became an apt metaphor for his heart-wrenching makeover as “The Wolfman.”

Who specifically has influenced your poems and how you approach them?

A lot of my poetry is inspired by an endless list of brilliant and peculiar characters from the classics to cartoons. One of the few positive things I took away from my seminary training was discernment, self-discipline and good study habits. I valued a diverse education and appreciated singular voices no matter how contrary or complex, no matter how silly or strange. Kurt Vonnegut, Buster Keaton, Bob Kaufman, Jelly Roll Morton, A.D. Winans, Dr. Seuss, Adrienne Rich, Scrooge McDuck, Pablo Neruda, the Ritz Brothers and hundreds more, all had a hand in twisting my work like a pretzel.

My personal holy trinity consists of Edward Field, Joseph Heller and Paul Krassner. Their sharp, contrasting styles have taught me to trust my instincts and bring a pie to a knife fight. In the workforce I paid attention to Ferlinghetti, Diane DiPrima and Lenny Bruce.

We labor in a field of tall egos. It does us good now and then to acknowledge our contemporaries and offer praise without favor. In the seventies I attended a reading by Richard Eberhart at the University of California at Davis. At a reception afterwards, Eberhart encouraged us to not only read the works of living poets but to “drop them a line.” He believed in sincere and unsolicited communication at a time when people walked to the curb to check their mail. Poets, he said, should inform other poets. It’s one way we learn who’s out there in the field with us. 

What are you working on now?

 I’m involved in a number of writing projects. One is a verse novel based on stories my father told me about growing up with wise guys in North Boston. Another is a verse memoir about the first 100 days of my abuse at the seminary. I’m also crafting, under my parody news syndicate, Yossarian Universal, a series of reports and dispatches emanating from an unknown source. The dark, Klingon days of Der Gropenführer are upon us and it’s going to take more than a few torches to illuminate the skulkers who prowl the shadows.

The upside-down optimism that Trump promotes is a threat not only to reality but to legitimate madness. Speak truth to power, yes, but also speak crazy to crazy with a straight face. Reclaim the narrative. When clergy abuse survivors, fearful of being re-traumatized, ask me how I’m still able to walk into a church today, I tell them I simply make the sign of the cross with one hand and hold my crotch with the other. 

 I like to remind myself that the vast literary landscape I wander through often bears more of a resemblance to the “Cheese Shop” sketch in Monty Python’s Flying Circus than it does to the grand ballroom scene in The Great Gatsby. Karl Shapiro, who had a wicked sense of humor, once told me that if you laid out all the poems in the world end-to-end, people would use them to walk on.

 

Paul Fericano will read his work at Bird and Beckett Books and Records on Sunday, November 12, at 2 pm, as part of Three On a Match, The New and Improved Reading Series.  

Thomas Devaney interviews the late Bill Berkson for the "Brooklyn Rail"

Devaney/Rail: Earlier today you said “something something, baby” and were kind of charting a geography of a tone: connecting a sound in Virgil Thomson’s voice, which you said Frank O’Hara was picking up on. Did you know Thomson through O’Hara?

Berkson: Yes, but also through my mother (Eleanor Lambert). It was very interesting to know him. He had such an interesting speech pattern—this kind of Kansas. It was Kansas, but it was your grandmother. Very high pitched.  

Rail: I know your mother worked in the fashion world. How did she get to know Thomson?

Berkson: He got real fixed on my mother. There was a wonderful man named Morris Goldie who was a friend of the musicians, and he gave some of the most terrific parties. He was not a musician, he was not an artist, and he and his brother had an office supply business, I think that they made things like shredders. Morris had met my mother and thought it would be a great idea to put her and Virgil together. So we had this dinner which was Virgil and my mother and me, and a very close friend of my mother’s named Sybil Connolly. Sybil was an Irish clothes designer (pleated linens and Irish textiles), and also very much involved in rescuing old Irish crafts like glass blowing and tatting and so forth. The five of us had dinner, and so forever after when I would see Virgil (this is an example of how I can get to his tone) the first thing out of Virgil’s mouth would be “How’s Mama!” 

INCONVERSATION BILL BERKSON with Thomas Devaney
http://brooklynrail.org/2017/11/criticspage/BILL-BERKSON-with-Thomas-Devaney

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http://brooklynrail.org/2017/11/criticspage/BILL-BERKSON-with-Thomas-Devaney