The Best American Poetry

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Yona Harvey

Since May 3, Rob Casper, editor of jubilat, has selected work from his pages to post for us on Sundays. Starting next week, we will be showcasing the taste of William Waltz, editor of Conduit.
Thank you, Rob, for illustrating ways that poets continue to invent the world. And welcome, William.
-- DL

For this post, my last for the Best American Poetry blog, I decided to do something new: feature a poem we've accepted for jubilat so recently that it isn't even yet slated for an issue! When I heard my dear friend Yona Harvey read this poem some months ago, I knew we had to have it for the magazine. The deftness with which it unspools its extended metaphor (and the final twist of personification), coupled with its brilliant use of repetition both to rev up and slow down the poem, really wowed me. I also loved its tone, which reminds me of Yona: quietly direct, honest, powerful. But most of all I was thrilled to see how in "Hurricane" Yona reframed an age-old dilemma: how parents let their children rush head-first into a dangerous, even catastrophic, world. It seems like an almost impossible subject to make new, and yet Yona does it so well I have to believe poetry can and will reinvent the world.
-- Rob Casper

HURRICANE

Four tickets left, I let her go --
Firstborn into a hurricane.

I thought she escaped
The floodwaters. No -- but her

Head is empty of the drowned
For now -- though she took

Her first breath below sea level.

Ahhh       awe      &       aw
Mama, let me go -- she speaks

What every smart child knows --
To get grown you unlatch

Your hands from the grown

& up & up & up & up
She turns—latched in the seat

Of a hurricane. You let
Your girl what? You let

Your girl what?

I did so she do I did
so she do so --

Girl, you can ride

A hurricane & she do
& she do & she do & she do

She do make my river

An ocean. Memorial,
Baptist, Protestant birth -- my girl

Walked away from a hurricane.

& she do & she do & she do & she do
She do take my hand a while longer.

The haunts in my pocket

I’ll keep to a hum: Katrina was
a woman I knew. When you were

an infant she rained on you & she
do & she do & she do & she do

-– Yona Harvey

Epistolary form & Maggie Nelson interview in jubilat

   Right now I'm reading Emily Dickinson's letters as part of a summer book club with Dara Wier and friends in the writing program, and we're thinking about the epistolary form. 

For poets this form is familiar... in writing as in letter-writing, we might conjure a real-and-imagined addressee— someone we respond to, someone elsewhere who we expect might open the envelope, someone to be made aware of what it is we have been doing, thinking, meaning in our own words.

    While writing to you, part of our imagination is also busy embellishing you— we are writing to our inner understanding of you...  In addition, we are writing to and from a real-and-imagined inner understanding of the relations between us... And so the reality of relations within the epistolary form is variable; is reliant on the mind of the addresser.... (part of why love letters are so abundant, I think.)

The addressee propels the poem absently.

But sometimes there is more of an absence— here is an excerpt from an interview with Maggie Nelson in jubilat 24.

I think when I wrote Bluets I was like, wow, I don't have any addressee, and I'm very alone here, so that book in some way puts to the test what speaking to a "you" may or may not be.        — Maggie Nelson

Read more from the interview conducted by Dara Wier.

Subscribe to jubilat for a complete transcript.                                                                                  

What cannot be put in a letter?

jubilat 13's found content includes this list of items forbidden to be sent in the mail.

"Entry Forbidden" [Selections from the International Mail Manual, "Country Conditions for Mailing," May 2005, U.S. Postal Service] by Deborah Golub [excerpt]

Ecuador
All maps showing the territory of Ecuador with incorrect boundaries.
So-called "Panama" hats.
Bits and mouthpieces made of copper.

Germany
Absinthe.
Articles bearing political or religious notations on the address side.
Melatonin.
Playing cards, except in complete decks properly wrapped.
Pulverized coca beans.

Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Horror comics and matrices.

Guatemala
Gardenia plants and seeds.
Police whistles.

Guyana
Bees.

Iceland
Sausages.
Toys made of lead.

Read "Entry Forbidden" in its entirety.

Subscribe to jubilat for this & more like this!

— Compiled by Halie Theoharides, managing editor of jubilat.

jokes, questions, sandwiches in jubilat

jubilat's sensibility is often curious, quizzical, interested in guessing, as poets frequently do— and I’ve been thinking, recently, about what guessing does to one's imagination — not only the acceptance of ‘not-knowing’ for certain, but also, and here I think, more importantly, the surprise-canvas of thin air.

In thinking about all the questions I am having to ask & answer recently, most of which have arrived in numerical form so as to accompany the end of the fiscal year, I’ve been glad to find a great wealth of wild guesses in the archives of jubilat.

First is a terrific poem by Jono Tosch, called "Thomas Merton", published in jubilat 21 and accompanied by a video I love very much, here ... in which we are dealing with questions like

Can a sandwich make another sandwich?

and lines like

I want to die in a nice delicatessen 
with all the lights off except for one,
the light on the bread.

...

Read the poem & watch the video.

—

 

Next is one of my favorite interviews in jubilat history— in December 2011, Matthea Harvey conducted a JOKE Q&A interview with then five-year-old Max Timchak in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The full interview is available in jubilat 22 and online here ... and is providing us with all the answers.... to questions like...

Matthea: Why do shirts look so plain? 
Max: Because the people, they're hopeless. 

Matthea: Why is hair always grey?
Max: Because they're pumas.

Matthea: Why do alligators never wear sweatshirts?
Max: Because they have rectangle bodies. 

...

Read the interview.

—

 

Finally, I leave you with a few lines from "Should I learn a new language?", a poem by Rachel B. Glaser, for when one might feel like rejecting the requests of reality. 

SHOULD I LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE

by Rachel B. Glaser

No! I'm getting married on a boat in five minutes 
I'm having a baby on the table 
I'm elaborately renewing my vows 

...

Read the poem & watch the video.

 

 

 

 

FOR THIS & MORE: Subscribe to jubilat.  

Jono Tosch is a woodworker, artist, and poet who lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is the author of the chapbooks Under Sea (Chuckwagon Press) and Probably (Kendra Steiner Editions). You can find some of his non-poetry works on Etsy, shop name "orchardspoonworks."

Rachel B. Glaser is the author of MOODS, Pee On Water, and Paulina & Fran (forthcoming 9/1/15).

—

Compiled by Halie Theoharides, managing editor of jubilat.

 

 

 

 

 

jubilat video/poems featuring rain, pools, river, water, swimming...

For this post, we're searching water.

 

"Pool" by Sabrina Orah Mark from issue #23

  

    Make a splash, says Brother. Set an example for all the merry children lining up behind you, says Brother.

    I turn around. These children do not look merry. They look very unmerry.

 

*    *    *

 

LYRIC by Kathleen Ossip  from issue #26

 

 

I came from salt water        in August I swim in salt water 

 

 *    *    *

 

 Brain in a Vat by C.S. Ward from issue #22

 

C.S. Ward reads "Brain in a Vat"   

I heard that the Bermuda triangle has been
hovering in Buffalo for the past 20 years,
says the twilight man beside me

  *    *    *

 

INTERVIEW with Brenda Shaughnessy  from issue #8

A fathometer measures the depth of the water by sound: it throws a sound down to the ocean floor and measures depth by how long the echo takes to come back up.

 

 

  *    *    *

 

FOR THIS & MORE: Subscribe to jubilat.  

 

Compiled by jubilat's managing editor, Halie Theoharides. 

Halie Theoharides on Amelia Rosselli in jubilat

I had never heard of Amelia Rosselli until I began typesetting jubilat 27 but since then I have been wild about her poetry.

Here is a picture of Amelia Rosselli that I made and here are a few things I learned.

Amelia Rosselli was an Italian poet and translator.
She was the daughter of an Italian anti-Fascist Resistance hero and an English political activist.
She was born in 1930 and died in 1996.
The poems of Rosselli's which Diana Thow translated and which appear in jubilat 27 are wild and leave me very alive and wondering!
I can't wait to find out more about her and I am so glad that Diana Thow has brought these poems to jubilat & world.

Here is how one of her poems begins: 

This garden that within my figured
mind seems to want to open new
small horizons for my joy after last night's
storm, this garden is slightly white
maybe green if I wish to color it
and it waits for someone to step inside,
its pacificity is unappealing.

So many things to think about especially once you start to think about a "figured mind" containing a garden "slightly white / maybe green if I wish to color it"...That is a kind of visualization enacted in the poem that can bring things about, make things happen where no things were happening, set a place for a weird magic to inhabit and then to have mixed emotions about. Anyways, below here is that magnificent poem in entirety,  traversing a kind of inner-being-speak into outer-territory-mapping— it "nearly screams" and then it flexes back upon its graceful withholding. It does a thousand other things too... It is clever and seems to unfurl like the smartest tendril-question of a vine, testing the outer reaches of imagination, going into them.

This garden that within my figured
mind seems to want to open new
small horizons for my joy after last night's
storm, this garden is slightly white
maybe green if I wish to color it
and it waits for someone to step inside,
its pacificity is unappealing. A dead corner
a life that descends without caring
to cellars full of meaning now
that death with its effusions has declared
its own importance. And within
the effusion a small dream insists on being
remembered—I am peace it nearly screams
and you don't remember my solemn shores!
But the garden is quiet—paradise, by a trick of fate,
isn't anything that you seek outside of me,
I who am the renunciation; it announces me
first painfully then cautiously in its

creation the firmament I sought.

 

Read more of Rosselli's poems here. Subscribe to jubilat here.

 

Amelia Rosselli (1930-1996) is one of the most important experimental Italian poets of the twentieth century. Her poetry collections include Variazione Belliche (1964), Serie Ospedaliera (1969), Documento (1976), and Impromptu (1981). 

Diana Thow holds an MFA in literary translation from the University of Iowa.  She lives in Berkeley and is pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Halie Theoharides is the managing editor of jubilat.

Halie Theoharides on "Native of Heaven" by Emily Hunt

Before coming to the MFA program at UMASS Amherst, I worked at a rural public library. One of my tasks was to periodically weed through books in the children's room that no longer circulated. In one afternoon, I looked up the meager statistics of the presidential biography series, swept each and every one off the shelf, deleted their records from the catalog, aggressively stamped "DISCARD" on their endpages, and stacked them in no order on a book sale cart in the basement, to be sold for a dime. This is standard procedure for every book we deleted, but the thrill of this act has stuck with me and now when I am feeling so tired of this mess we’re in I try to remember The Day I Deleted The Presidents.

Another cure for feeling hopeless in the face of patriarchy is reading defiant/revolutionary writings and knowing that they are being read and shared by others. “Native of Heaven” by Emily Hunt appears in the first pages of jubilat 26 and is that kind of poem you want broadcasted everywhere.

At the request of Emily Pettit, jubilat's incredible and very wise Publisher, Hunt went on to make a video of "Native of Heaven" in which a recording of the poem plays over a procession of presidential portraits, much like the ones found on the covers of those dusty, unread biographies I was so ready to be done with.

Being glared at by these textbook portraits of men while listening to Hunt's poem is amazing.

Emily Hunt: Native of Heaven from jubilat on Vimeo.

It’s a challenge to divide our attention away from what we accept to see everyday, and to instead listen and engage  with the unseen voices that chip away at dismantling the messed up systems in our brains and in our daily lives and in the rotten, groping powers that lust for even more control. I feel such gratitude for this poem's ability to place the reader right here in our complicated, disastrous reality and to simultaneously incite reconceptions of the future. I feel it all— protest against the patriarchy, inexhaustible sorrow and dismay at what has happened and what has failed to happen, awe and respect for Hunt's ability to voice this looming reality alongside the particularities of daily experience. All while wielding lyrical lines and direct political address with great agility.

"Native of Heaven" as understated poetic manifesto dismantles and subverts historically exclusive, presidential speech. It is the kind of poem we need, and I'm so glad to share it here. 

— 

NATIVE OF HEAVEN

by Emily Hunt

 

What if we had

a female president

right here on the ground

in 2014.

Would they make jokes about her blood on SNL?

Or compare her shocking term

to the spacious cycle of a lily?

Would hate or pity win?

I guess I don't want to do it

but I would like

dental insurance.

I care about my skull.

What if when I got my check

it was a decent portion

of a full year's salary

marking with the strength of math

every hour I'd spent

teaching children how to read.

Every winter in our world

I could use that money

to pay for my heat.

So sheepishly

raised by the dead

and dying men

I might step into

high hot water

and wait for spring.

Even once it drained

there wouldn't be much

space for someone else.

Opaque in my periphery

might stand steadily

the shapes of houses, settled sky,

ice crystals, concrete

grains and flowers,

clean April wind,

and my leaders, so good

at shutting doors.

What if my kid grew up in this

a little dead between the categories?

Is it not strange that man –

with the pages of history spread out before him –

is so slow to admit

the intellectual power,

the moral heroism of woman,

and her identity with himself.

If we could first know where we are

we could then better judge

what to do, and how to do it.

It will become all one thing

or all the other.

Where is the broad and generous confidence

in the efficiency of true

democratic institutions?

You cannot deny one class

the full measure of their natural rights

without imposing restraints

upon your own liberty.

These things were said by

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abraham Lincoln,

and Carl something a century and a half ago.

Ten years later

Lincoln's long gone clamor

went wandering to claim that

the mystic chords of memory

stretching from every battlefield

and patriot grave, to every living heart

and hearthstone, all over this

broad land will yet swell

the chorus of the Union

when again touched, as surely they will be

by the better angels of our nature,

but I don't think it happened.

A few days ago

one of my students

argued against equal pay

while I stood in front of him.

The girl to his right

apologized after class

for being such an airhead.

When I was 14, this girl my age

was raped at school

and in the morning

they announced it.

She was called a liar and a dumb slut.

She transferred and I ran into her.

Maybe she'll be president.

It might be sort of like

how it is now

except we'd have a woman show the way

while we listened to her speak.

—

Emily Hunt is a poet and artist living in San Francisco. Her first book, Dark Green, is just out from SONG CAVE. 

This series is curated by Halie Theoharides, managing editor of jubilat. 

Introducing jubilat

Beginning today and continuing on Sundays for roughly 12 weeks, Halie Theoharides will select poems from the pages of jubilat and present them here with commentary. Halie is a poet, librarian and visual artist and the Managing Editor of jubilat. Her poetry can be found online here. A chapbook of her work will be published by Factory Hollow Press this summer.

Welcome, Halie. 

Rob Casper (and Lisa Olstein) on Prose, Palemale and Lola

We started jubilat primarily to publish poems, and we are lucky enough to fill the magazine with amazing work by both emerging and established poets. These days, we get thousands of submissions through our online Submission Manager system (which jubilat helped develop through the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses), and when we do layout we usually have dozens of leftover poems -- a terrific position, as it allows us to give a distinctive shape each issue.

After ten years of publication, it is still challenging to find the right lyric prose and found pieces to complement the poems we run. While poems come to us, we -- the editors and myself, as well as the contributing editors and editors-at-large -- continually need to search for the right prose. We look for work that not only does what poetry does -- i.e., shows how we use language in open-ended ways to act out the wildly, wonderfully mysterious condition we know as living -- but makes us realize how poetry is not some specialized, removed practice but a way of engaging the world as universal and as necessary as the language it comes from.

Lisa Olstein, our first managing editor (and a terrific poet -- her second book, Lost Alphabet, just came out from Copper Canyon Press), happened upon just such a piece, which she called "Today the Sky Belonged to Lola." As Lisa said in an e-mail to me back in February 2007, it came from a website that "outrageously, lovingly documents the lives of Palemale and his partner Lola, the red tailed hawks living in/near Central Park." As you may recall, this was national news back at the time -- the co-op where the two hawks lived were debating removing their nest, sparking a huge public response. Lisa sorted through a year's worth of daily entries to compile what she called "a strange narrative that is part celebrity urban love story, part paparazzi obsession with celebrity urban love story, part who knows what?" Here's a snippet of the pieces, which ran eight pages in jubilat 15 -- perhaps you can decide what it is really about!

Beautiful Lola!

They didn’t visit the falconry circus up at the East Meadow today.

Lola!

The beautiful couple on the Oreo.

Late in the evening he abandoned any attempt to make a catch and retired in the vicinity of Pinetum. Lola went to bed on the Beresford.

Palemale.

Lola over the Model Sailboat Pond.

I wonder if the air feels solid under his chest or does it feel as gentle as it does on my face?

Palemale peers into the Linda #2 window.

Palemale heading uptown.

Palemale and Lola had some visitors today.

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

One cannot blog this weekend without referring to Independence Day. I thought of honoring the holiday by writing about patriotism, and how liberal thinkers should reclaim the term as a way to strive for the great ideals our nation was founded upon. And I thought of saying how such ideals always come face-to-face with the messiness, the ambiguity of reality -- and, how poems are ideally equipped to showcase the latter in service of the former. I even started searching for a good poem from jubilat's pages that deals with politics and identity in the complex ways I think they ought to be dealt with -- with an understanding that we, and the world, never operate in an either/or manner (or, in terms of metaphor, never operate according to tenor or vehicle), but by holding both at once, and then some.

But something funny happened: I found a poem that went in a different direction in relation to our annual celebration of nationhood. Which is the point: any point I was going to make about the above, in a polemical way, is far less interesting than what I can discover by looking for what a given poem can tell me. The poem below, by Paige Ackerson-Kiely from issue 11, made me think of fireworks -- not their pyrotechnical specs, but the great rapturous spectacle of them, and the cultural event (with crowded streets of onlookers) that takes place around their going off. If I weren't looking for a poem to write about on this holiday, I'm sure I never would've made such an associate leap with Paige's poem -- even now, I know it's a stretch. But that's one of the wonderful ways poems work: by suggesting more than they seem to mean on the surface, and being open to larger possibilities -- allowing a reader to read into its images, its epiphanies. I love to imagine that when Page's poem begins "I locked up all / of the beautiful things / that might move me" it could refer to those big large colorful explosions in the sky, and that by time it arrives at "Lay / down your sweet head / for now // to know as we do know / to know. To know / one damn thing" it could be saying something essential about who we are -- alone and together -- at this moment, when we celebrate how our country began and dream of what it can become.

-- Rob Casper

THE POTENTIAL OF RAPTURE

I locked up all
of the beautiful things
that might move me.

The bell around a dark ankle
turning and turning.

A stranger smiles.
Her face is no curling-up
in bed.

If I knew the world was going
to end, I’d just run out into
the street and fuck the first
chick I saw, says a
teenage virgin.

Where you go when you are scared

that we might have the verdant
and the humid. Friendly air.
People meaning their handwaves.
An answer is the way you can jump
from a ledge equal to your height
without getting hurt.
Your home.
Every pane of glass
someone laid on their precious
breath. There.
Or there.

Boy I am
leaving too many rooms
for the crowded street. Lay
down your sweet head
for now

to know as we do know
to know. To know
one damn thing.

-– Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Lisa Jarnot

There's nothing like holding a new issue of jubilat for the first time. Until that moment, the issue -- and all the work that goes into it, from selecting poems to conducting and revising interviews to ordering and proofreading -- seems unfinished. But what a feeling, to see and touch the end result! This week I had such an experience, with jubilat 16. It was a thrill to see how well the cover, by poet and jubilat editor-at-large Terrance Hayes, turned out -- it was based on a hand-out he gave for a panel presentation on Wallace Stevens, and ties in well with both Srikanth Reddy's piece on Stevens and digression and our first-ever forum, on African-American Experimental Poetry (which we'd been talking about doing for years -- so exciting to see it in print). j16 also includes many poets I've admired, published in our pages for the first time -- poets like Brenda Ijima, Ange Mlinko, Alice Notley, and Ed Roberson. We managed to include some wonderful found pieces/reprints, too, like a selection from 20th Century visionary Buckminster Fuller's book I Seem to Be a Verb and selected aphorisms from the 13th Century German philosopher Albertus Magnus.

Contributing editor Brett Fletcher Lauer (who is my co-worker at the Poetry Society of America, and a poetry editor at A Public Space -- he's a brilliant poet, too) was responsible for the latter reprint, as well as another new section for the magazine: a trio of responses to Jack Spicer's "Magic Workshop" questionnaire (which the famed Bay Area poet used to select students for his private classes). As Spicer wrote by way of explanation/instruction, "This questionnaire is in no sense designed to indicate whether you can write poetry . . . [but] I must have some guide as to which of you would most benefit from a workshop of this particular content. Some of the questions will seem bizarre or pointless, but it would be useful if you would answer them all as precisely as possible." Christian Hawkey and Matthew Rohrer both contributed their precise, and delightful, answers, as did Lisa Jarnot -- the below is by Jarnot, whose work I have admired for years, and it is also her first time in the magazine!

Jack Spicer Magic Workshop Questionnaire

I.
With the gums gone marching
are they gone. And though the nose is next to nothing,
the eye is marching gone.
And now the downside
Of the radiator on the downside of the floor
is it, the even row of it
fit to raise
a din of children.
You will count the teeth of mongoose
You will stay in the midst of them,
You will know the mongoose, you will hear them
in the narrow mongoose dawn.

II.
In the snow endlessness
Snow, and sea salt
He lost his sounding snow.
The color white. He walks
Over an antelope skin carpet made
of snow.
Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers all the snow
But the snow flakes quiver
In the snow and in the endlessness
How is it that a wound
His snow is left.
Snow, and sea salt and snow
In the snow blown endlessness.

III.

Blue-rooted heron, spring lake
frog song, like me no traveler
Taking buoyed rest, loose-winged water-bird
And dumb with music cheeping.
I stand upon the waterfront, like him no traveler
traveling, dangling on traveled wings.
I caw and take my rest.
They will not hunt us for
The flesh of the hunter is hunted and is dumb.
The sound of an arrow, the sight of a hunter
is hunting a  life without wings.
So let us die for death alone is motion
And death alone will make these herons fly.
Dead wingless flycatching ocean
hybridized to die.

-- Lisa Jarnot

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by L. S. Klatt

   I had breakfast with my friend Amanda Schaffer today -- in addition to being a poet, she is a science and medical columnist for Slate and its newly launched offshoot DoubleX (www.doublex.com). We talked about her new article in the latter magazine, "This Goat Did Not Come From an Artificial Womb," (http://www.doublex.com/section/health-science/goat-did-not-come-artificial-womb). The article addresses the scientific and cultural issues around the idea of "baby-in-the-box technology," and about the current line of thinking that "gestation now seems like a kind of cellular apprenticeship," in which "cellular cross-talk" and other conditions — from the noise of the womb to the mother's levels of stress — can affect the baby-to-be.

    What does this have to do with jubilat? One of the magazine's goals is to create a dialogue that showcases the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary. To that end, we've run some pieces that on first glance don't seem to belong in a poetry magazine: interviews with a rogue perfumist and a neon sign maker, a list of moves from the Wrestling Information Archive, journals from penguin scientists in Antarctica, a list of conceptual approaches to buildings, and so on. Amanda's article shows the ordinary made strange -- pregnancy outside the body -- as well as detailing how ultimately mysterious the ordinary is, as science can't replicate the body's complexity. And my few quoted sections above show how Amanda's playful, often metaphoric language shows how much her version of science writing has in common with what shows up in our pages.

    Finally, this morning's conversation reminded of a wonderful poem by L. S. Klatt that we published back in issue 7:

    FETUS IN ORBIT

    I played with the pre-cows in outer space

    they were cows of a higher mathematics

    amoebas absent hoofs
    no tails to sweep the sparkles

    but I was at home in their blacks & whites
    the folds, the solar system

    then I was told I would eat a thousand cows

    I lay there, disbeliever, like a figure 8 in milk

-- L. S. Klatt

Poems both refigure and resonate with the world around the reader. "Fetus In Orbit" connects to Amanda's article, and the debates it contains -- both problematize the space of gestation, and what that means about who we are. "This Goat Did Not Come From an Artificial Womb," while pointing to trends that show a greater certainty about pregnancy, also shows how much we don't yet know -- Klatt's poem seems to take this as a starting-off point, and its imagery is powerfully suggestive without answering anything. Looking at both the article and poem, I can only shake my head and smile -- I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I think or feel. And isn't that the most interesting place to be in -- the place where we are psychically still unfinished, and constantly developing?

-- Rob Casper

Rob Casper Presents Christian Hawkey

The poem of Christian's I choose from The Book of Funnels takes "the end / of the driveway" as a point of departure, and inhabits a psychic landscape as meaningful in its openness as Michael Teig's is in its focus. This is a poem whose quatrains visually illustrate how it moves: as a kind of funneling of the imagination, where Christian's great sense of play contends with another end, "the end of us." It also shows how a poet can be a collector of words, waiting for the right place/moment to feature what is otherwise useless -- you'll see what I mean, I assure you!

-- Rob Casper

NIGHT WITHOUT THIEVES

The day is going to come -- it will come -- put on your nightgown,
put on your fur. And yea unto those who go unclothed,
unshod, without fear, fingering the corners
of bright countertops

and calmly, absentmindedly, toeing the edges of clouds
drifting in a puddle. Put on your deep-sea gear,
your flippers, and walk to the end
of the driveway.

It will come. Be not afraid to chase large animals.
Once, I had a conversation with the eye
of a moose, looming wetly
through the branches.

I was terrified. I froze. I backed away. I imagined it.
And then on the other hand there are those
truly fearless: schools of silver minnows
darting in and out

of the gills of blue whales -- how many invisible organisms
do we sustain without knowing it? Our own,
for one. Put on your crowded body,
like Vallejo

who pulled the sea over his shoulders in the morning
and stepped firmly into ground. Thus,
when the day came, he conducted
electricity

perfectly -- unknowingly -- and wrote by the red light of his teeth
after a glass of dark wine. Put on your lamp shade.
Put on your cage. If, in the shape of a key,
the shape of a woman,

a bank of swollen clouds surging over the tree line,
a world basipetally descends
break it open: how pome
and granate

meet in dense honeycombs, red seeds erupting inside a mouth.
And though we lose eleven eyelashes a day
by blinking alone we cannot enter
the Kingdom,

nor can we move sideways, high on this narrow goat path,
without the proper footgear; a pebble's kicked loose,
and the echo returning
from the ravine

sounds like an avalanche, and is. Put on your helmet.
Take off your clothes. If anyone even thinks
about laughing
it will be

the end of us -- Rita, hand over the kazoo. Thank you.
Now hand over the other one. Good.
And in case of an emergency
realize, quickly,

there is no emergency and move on. Like a thief in the night
the day came. Then night came,
and emptied out its thieves
into the furious sunlight.

-- Christian Hawkey

Rob Casper presents Michael Teig

Ten years ago, as summer started, two friends and I dreamed up jubilat. We did everything, from deciding on a title (early ideas like Pome and String Index didn't make the cut) and a size (we wanted our magazine almost to fit in one's back pocket) to creating a budget and setting up an office at UMass, where we were grad students in the MFA program. (Luckily, the faculty were very supportive -- the late Agha Shahid Ali, then director of the program, cleared out one side of his office for us). My friends, Christian Hawkey and Michael Teig, stayed on as editors for ten issues. As successful as they were in that capacity, they also wrote award-winning collections of poems.

Michael's collection, Big Back Yard, came out first. It was the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and was published by BOA Editions in 2003. Here's one of my favorite poems from that collection -- a poem I got to read the first day of the first workshop I took at UMass! Next week: Christian Hawkey.

THE HOLE WE'VE BEEN DIGGING

Since I've come home, put on all my shoes,
watched lawns, frankly green and unapologetic,
lick up to rickety bridges, the neighborhood houses

come into focus cautiously, like something dropped
from the sky, like memory, the narrow street
sleepless trees, the cars postered in leaves and pollen.

I've come home and the pond is back
in a slate suit, suit of hours. I dig in the yard
with a stick, stop at the grocery, handle produce.

My mother is older, more urgent, less assuring
as she tilts into the stove with a cigarette --
We're rarely as good at ourselves as we imagine

and this could go on for hours
while only the radiator has something to say.
It's always time for work here, about to rain.

In the street, people you don't know
don't talk to you, though they say heaven
is a place of great civility

where a statuette of diligence
stands straight up, or some other
virtue too mystifying to account for.

I'd like to believe it entails not getting dressed
for a day or a week, the rain-soaked and bikini-clad,
the under-employed with a halo of bar-darts.

That it happens here, casual as undressing.
My companions come and go as they wish.
We lay down in the hole we've been digging

and it's a pleasure, really, alone or with a friend,
rarely looking at each other, thinking
you hear the screen-door, some recollected music,

the river and lumber trucks racing out of town.
The past is mostly just that:
I watch it all a bit strangely.

Thirty years ago on this street, my father drove me home
in a blue convertible, wondering like all parents
if he could simply keep me alive

-- Michael Teig

All these years later, I'm still struck by the poem's quiet lyricism -- its subtle stretching and deepening of the domestic, the way it  speaks of home and family so gracefully that you don't realize (or, in keeping with the narrator's understated, offhanded tone, want to realize) what the stakes are until the final couplet.

-- Rob Casper

Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Sarah Gridley)

As the publisher of jubilat, I rarely edit the poems we accept. Ninety per cent of the time we take what we get, as is. In the case of the other 10%, we might ask to change a word or two, or possibly end the poem a line earlier; but no dramatic alterations. While I believe the best poems create their own terms -- terms that push our thinking in new and exciting ways -- I sometimes envy editors of fiction and nonfiction, who are expected, even encouraged, to edit the pieces that end up in the pages of their magazine.

However, once in a great while I have the opportunity to work with the author on a poem we have accepted. This was the case for Sarah Gridley's "Acousmatic," which we published in the last issue. We had published Sarah previously -- her poem "Cuckoo's Report" was featured in jubilat 3. I greatly admired that poem as well as her first collection, Weather Eye Open, which was published in the  University of  California Press New Poetry Series in 2005. After Sarah read for the Poetry Society of America's third New American Poets Festival in 2007 (in addition to publishing jubilat, I also work as Programs Director for the PSA), I asked her to send along some new work to the magazine.

Included in Sarah's batch of submissions was "Acousmatic." Before we had gotten a chance to respond, she sent along a much revised second version. It was this that sparked my interest -- it seemed like it was moving in the right direction formally and rhetorically. And I also found it as powerful as it was mysterious, like acousmatic sound itself: the notion of hearing something without knowing its cause. Sarah sent in a third version while we were looking at the second, and I didn't like it as much. After discussions with my editors, I wrote her back asking her to consider returning to the earlier version. She sent along another draft in response and told me the poem had been difficult for her to edit because it dealt with the experience of witnessing friends bury their child. The questions that preoccupied her in the poem were "how parents can survive such losses, how friends can help only so far, how no 'higher power' feels accountable or responsive to me, how beauty, turned a fraction on its axis, feels vicious."

This note made me realize anew how poems help us contend with the most confusing experiences, and how privileged I was to be able to publish such essentially human work. I was also grateful to Sarah for being so collaborative in the revision process. "Acousmatic" went through one more revision, and the result still makes me marvel at how a poem can be so philosophically, psychically, and imaginatively engaging.

-- Rob Casper

ACOUSMATIC

not a concept, much less a faith—
not quiet

but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field

and was the sound of snow dissolving, glass being blown
from lips of beginners

where by love I mean a failing,
copious and opaque, heart without a practical power

most feeling the gives of undone
fountain and basin, the water

penned in, the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads are cracking

our sun’s white code
in the courtyard foreign beyond the window

plurally into something else
when I live on the look of muteness, where I lived on the look

of happiness
rose that was quanta—

I ask after cost—after gouge of grass
and sky, after cause

that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain

in tempos habituating grass
redbud trees in arriving and splitting

accost, accost, come closer to my ribs
not only the understanding

has a language
be it wind in rings of meanest direction

or deepest remove when bluest in surface
by memory I mean

a skin: a cover for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe

or hear in wind a single
soothing thing

or hear of wind a kindred displacement
in our skins to the added

subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open

for eating
yes now I am listening to your fallible sounds

pity for the you
that is stranded, pity for the you

who dazed or faceless
where now I am hearing a mechanical click

to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise

pit before beginning
to take up

listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer

attach me, walking, attach me

--  Sarah Gridley

Rob Casper Presents Heather McHugh and Sarah Manguso

jubilat has had the great good fortune to have work included in The Best American Poetry a number of times -- a coup for the magazine, and a great affirmation for the poets. In fact, I'm happy to say that the very first poem we accepted was our first poem in the anthology, which I still find hard to believe! Here it is:

MY ONE

and only: money

minus one. No noun
like a pronoun! -- best of all

the jealous kind. Come, come,
company doll, cide with a coin,

one moan, one
more, honey

bunch.

Of course, such lexical wizardry could come only from Heather McHugh. She was one of my teachers -- many years ago I audited her seminar at the University of Washington. And what a seminar! I read poets like Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer, and Yannis Ritsos for the first time, and looked at poems like Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Filling Station" and James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" in new ways, thanks to Heather’s brilliant readings. (I still have her handout of poems, tucked away in the top shelf of my closet for safekeeping.) Heather’s own poems are brilliant, and it’s amazing to see in "My One" how much she makes of so little said, in a darkly swervy take on the beloved -- multiple meanings included. 

I thought by way of contrast I'd also include Sarah Manguso's "Address to Winnie in Paris," from our third issue, which Robert Creeley picked for the 2002 Best American Poetry. If Heather's poem creates the intricate workings of a tiny but momentously and mysteriously important machine, Sarah's poem lays out in seemingly straightforward prose the logic of its address -- but with enough accruing layers to infuse it with lyric power. It is the kind of poem I believed in completely, word for word, the first time I read it -- and I still do. And though it speaks at a distance from its subject (and its subject's object), its take on love is as internal, and as psychically and philosophically evocative, as that of the poem above.

ADDRESS TO WINNIE IN PARIS

Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.

The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.

Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.

The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.

Diderot wrote that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.

In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells constitute the world.

A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bulfinch’s, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.

Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.

It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?

If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailer says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.

These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.

Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.

What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.

Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Srikanth Reddy)

In jubilat's fifteen issues, I've had the opportunity to publish many of my favorite poets—poets I first read and loved as an undergraduate, as well as poets who had taught and mentored me in the two decades that followed, such as John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, Heather McHugh, W. S. Merwin, Dara Wier, and James Tate. This was a great honor, and a thrill to boot -- I still marvel at seeing their poems in the pages of the magazine. But my job is not simply to feature established poets I admire, whose poetry shows up -- and has, for many years, shown up -- in all sorts of great places. No, my job is also to find poets whose work isn't in other literary magazines like ours, and maybe not even in literary magazines at all -- at least not before we publish them! The idea of debuting a poet, while obviously romantic, is also essential to a literary magazine like ours. We must continually find new voices to add to the mix of our 160 pages per issue, to place the the established voices in a larger and more vital context and create the most dynamic conversation about poetry that we can.

With this in mind, I'd like to introduce the last poem in jubilat no. 3 -- a poem written by a brilliant (and very friendly!) Harvard Ph.D. student I'd just met:

A VILLAGE JOURNAL

Went to the knife-grinder with my broken tool
and a gunny sack brimming with soy. Was told to return

the third or the second day; withdrew to my lean-to;
made out a report, buried it under the threshold.

Outside: a rust-colored beetle crawling the fabric.
Inside: night-mowers sweeping a violet meadow.

Affixed a red pin to each point where they'd been;
took down the projection; rolled it up in a canister.

Scrubbed my blister. Boxed the green pins. Practiced
in front of the mirror for a while. Mainly greetings

and some simple questions: what sort of machines
did they leave in the salt flats? In the forests

Did they stay very long? Lay down on the string bed.
The stringy bed. A new kind of sleep. Dry, mottled,

clawed flakes of sleep; sleep of the father thrumming.
Woke to the granite wheel sound. Mist, thatch.

Radioed ahead; was told to wait, waited; smoked.

It's easy now to see what we saw then, in this quiet, elegant poem: a subtly unsettling account of the psyche at war, in "a new kind of sleep" no report can keep buried. (It is also, alas, more timely now than in the spring of 2001.) And when I told my new friend the editors and I had all agreed on "A Village Journal," I was surprised to learn he'd never published a poem before. Srikanth Reddy was therefore our first bona fide debut, and an auspicious one at that: since then, his poetry has shown up in such illustrious magazines as American Poetry Review, Grand Street, and Ploughshares, and his remarkable first collection of poems, Facts for Visitors, was published in the University of California Press's New California Poetry Series in 2004. But he was ours first! I can only hope that among the thousands of submissions we receive each year, we continue to find a handful of such poets, and poems, to champion in our pages.

-- Rob Casper

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Lenard D. Moore

Last week I featured Matthew Zapruder's poem "Mind the Gap" from the first issue of jubilat -- for this week's post I've picked a poem from our forthcoming issue, due out next month. When asked about their magazine's aesthetic, many editors talk of featuring the best in established and emerging poets, regardless of school, reputation, region, etc. etc. Some just simply say they publish the best-quality work they receive. Such responses do a disservice to the job of the editor, which is to edit! And the only thing magazines add to our literary culture is the way in which its selections (of poets published in other magazines) present a unique vision of poetry. But not a static one -- to me, each issue of jubilat is as an argument about the art as impassioned and dynamic as it is surprising and sometimes even contradictory.

It is with that last point in mind that I come to Lenard D. Moore's "Black Poet Writes His Wife." Simply put, it's not the kind of poem that fits neatly into our magazine. The poems we publish tend to push syntax and/or structure much further than it does, and also tend to exist in a more imaginary space/world. By contrast, Moore employs the epistolary form in the most direct way possible -- salutation and signature included. The subject of the poem, a brief, sweet note from husband to wife, is seemingly ordinary, and its first two lines, "I arrived almost lunchtime / at the Hartford/Springfield Airport" couldn't be more pedestrian. And yet, what follows is as lively, and at the same time subtle, as anything in jubilat. This same contrast is true, too, of the way the poem celebrates Blackness -- "Black" is, after all, the first word we read, and it defines the speaker. And yet, I find the way the poem touches upon race truly beautiful, and beautifully true. "Black Poet Writes His Wife" is firmly grounded in the "real" world (and, in making reference to its writing, seeks to undermine its own artifice), but in a refreshing way: the speaker infuses all he observes and remembers with a lyric charge that makes the poem all the more sincere. It feels to me, therefore, more intimate, more compelling than other poems than begin in a place so known. 

Does this mean that it's a "jubilat" poem? No -- if I had one poem to serve as an example of what we look for, this would not be it. Still, there's something about "Black Poet Writes His Wife" that would strongly connect to such an example -- maybe its spirit, its deftness, its discoveries. But I'm still mystified by it. And as proud as possible to have it in our pages.

-- Rob Casper

BLACK POET WRITES HIS WIFE,

Dear Elizabeth,

I arrived almost lunchtime
at the Hartford/Springfield Airport.
When I stepped outside
the temperature felt half
what your fever was.
It was the first time
this traveling year
that chill cut clean
to my black man bones.
It wasn’t too long
before random rain started
messing with my head
as if I were a canvas
out in the drizzled weather.
The sun hasn’t seen me
nor have I seen it—
just a simple sky all day.
This fall foliage is jumping
like the juke joints
I used to tell you about,
the ones where my sister and I
won chicken sandwiches dancing
against anybody who dared
while bass bossed the walls, 
I wish you could see this town,
all red, yellow, orange.
Please don’t worry.
I am taking myself back
to Raleigh, in four days—
your birthday, our anniversary.
Well, I got to write a poem now.
Keep that sugar all bottled up
like that molasses
I told you I grew up on.
I know I’ll dream you here
as sure as your skin is brown.

Your husband,
George

-- Lenard D. Moore

Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Matthew Zapruder)

I am delighted to blog on poems and poetry for the Best American Poetry, and honored to follow in the footsteps of editors who have made this blog so lively. So, for the next three months of Sundays I'll send along poems from the pages of my literary magazine, jubilat.

A little bit about the magazine: I started it with other MFA students at the University of Massachusetts almost ten years ago. I remember booze-fueled nights on Michael Teig's back porch, arguing with Michael and Christian Hawkey about poems in the rangiest, most engaging way I'd experienced. jubilat began in that sprit, and with the great influence of a seminar we three took with professor Dara Wier called "Form and Theory in Contemporary Poetry" -- a seminar that used as its central text, without explanation, The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Through that class we realized the importance of reading poems within a larger context -- a context attuned to poetry's unorthodox connections to the world. We decided jubilat would present contemporary American poetry, but to place it alongside a varied selection of translations, reprints, found pieces, lyric prose, art, and interviews with poets and other artists. Instead of sectioning all of this off, we wanted to mix it together, the way the mind mixes the last poem it just encountered with all matter of thoughts and observations firing at the same time.

To that end, the first issue of the magazine -- out in Spring 2000 -- began with a fragment of Sappho, translated by Anne Carson, along with notes that quote a wonderful Emily Dickinson letter. It also contained a sizable selection from "The Jubilate Agno," the epic poem by the 18th Century English poet Christopher Smart for which the magazine was named (and which was included in the same aforementioned seminar!), as well as photographs of the back of library cards by Erica Baum with lovely fragments of cross-referencing notes (like "Opossums / Persimmons"), a long interview with Michael Palmer that touched upon such topics as his work with dancer Margy Jenkins and the use of philosophical texts in his poems, and "The Lost Epic of Arthur Davidson Ficke," a list of annotations, commentary, and notes of reference for an epic "rescued" by James Tate and Dara Wier.

And of course, we included poems by our favorite contemporaries -- among them Jorie Graham, Heather McHugh (who also gave us great translations of Paul Celan), Claudia Rankine, and Dean Young -- as well as a few of our peers, including the last poem of the issue, by a fellow UMass graduate student named Matthew Zapruder:

MIND THE GAP

A little portrait of me lies in the flowerbed
making allusions, watching her comb her hair.
She sings into the shattered mirror:
"But you will last as long as the rose,
as long as the glass, glass tulips . . ."
A can opener smiles on the night table.

I remember she loved and feared the dark.
Whenever the horses broke loose and threatened the begonias
her heart trembled under my hand like a bat.
We'd huddle all night in bed, counting.
The horses filled us with the ineffable grandeur
of their silent pounding, or something like that.
Mostly I liked not knowing what to expect.

The sun looms angrily, high above, stranded.
She walks, or rather meanders, towards my portrait, chanting
|"Phillip, your green thumbs, the envy of All Wales."
Each wisp of her hair grows larger, they wave and shine
like snakes you can see through. How strange. She
bends over me, blocking the sun.

This romantic, playful, intimate, and deftly unsettling lyric (how strange indeed, to be a portrait in a flowerbed observing one's beloved!) seemed the perfect place to end our beginning -- and we were happy to announce that our magazine was ready to not know what to expect. Much has changed since then -- like Matthew, Christian and Michael went on to write award-winning collections of poem -- but as Publisher I continue to try and find ways for the magazine to showcase the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary, and how experiments with language and image speak in a compelling way about who we are.

-- Rob Casper