The Best American Poetry

In Burlington, Vermont, September 2018

When we went to Burlington, Vermont, in September 2018, as guests of Major and Didi Jackson, we discovered Barr Hill gin (sublime), sipped a drink that a local cafe owner concocted in Major's honor, went to a party, chatted with Dan Fogel, got photographed with a US senator, and drank coffee in the window on Sunday the 17th, our last day, with a newspaper in my pocket and Stacey's camera capturing the moment:Photo credit: Stacey Lehman

Lt. Pete Campanelli, NYFD [photograph by Bill Hayward]

lt. pete campanelli, nyfd

photo(c)Bill Hayward

Pictures from an Institution (The Columbia Review reunion of 2005)

from the reunion of Columbia Review editors and writers organized in spring 2005 by Les Gottesman: on top, left to right, John Hollander, Richard Howard, David Lehman; below, Rika Lesser (blurred), David Lehman, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky. The venue: Bob Holman's Bowery Poetry Club.

Our love affair was meant to be. . .

Happy anniversary to us!

Photo by B. A. Van Sise.

Archie Ammons and friends at the launch reading of BAP 1994

from left to right, A. R. Ammons, James McManus, James Cummins, A. E. Stallings, Angela Shaw. The reading was sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, William Wadsworth executive director. The Academy sponsored the BAP launch reading from 1992 through 1995. For digging up the photo, we're indebted to Jim McManus.

James Merrill's "Log" [on JM's Birthday]

James Merrill in Athens, 1971. Photo by Tom Victor.

Log

Then when the flame forked like a sudden path
I gasped and stumbled, and was less.
Density pulsing upward, gauze of ash,
Dear light along the way to nothingness,
What could be made of you but light, and this?

-- James Merrill (1972)

from James Merrill, Selected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (Knopf, 2008)

from the Introduction by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser:

“When James Merrill’s first book of poems appeared in 1951, it seemed unlikely that he would emerge as one of the era’s crucial poets. He was not political, enterprising, dogmatic, addicted, or suicidal. At first his poems seemed cautious except in their implications. Later – the Sphinx always smiled – they seemed enigmatic but dazzling. His originality was a part of his respect for tradition. His wisdom came from his shrugging off any pretense to it. He was, he said, just ‘a man choosing the words he lives by.’ From those words he made some of the most ravishing, surprising, intimate, and memorable poems written in English.”

On “Log”: 

“In Merrill’s poem, the inevitable splitting of the self, the forking of the vital flame, diminishes the speaker thus reminded of his mortality. but the very bifurcation produces sudden illumination and even gaiety. (The poet can make light of the dilemma after all, and as soon as ‘upward’ suggests ‘up word,’ the word “Log” itself in retrospect breaks into two meanings, a journal entry and a piece of fuel. So it is that dark is made light – and ‘light’ becomes heavy, dense with implication.)”

Billy Collins Scores Big Time in London

OK everybody, before going to brunch, ask yourself this one question:
Who wrote the world's biggest big-ass poem?
Hint: the title of the poem is "Breakast"
Hint: this poster is located near a construction site in London.
If you guessed Billy Collins, you win.
"Post Poetry is a great new genre," Ida Noise told this reporter.
Partisans of Jennifer L. Knox's "Hot Ass Poem" may advocate magnifying it on a poster in Portland, Oregon.

OK now. . .off to brunch you go.  -- DL

Photographer Benoîte Fanton’s dance vision: Get on up, hold on! [by Tracy Danison]

"L'Arène", from Don Quichotte de Trocadéro: Choreographer: Jose Montalvo/Performers: Sandra Mercky, Patrice Thibaud/Venue:Théâtre National de Chaillot, 2013

Monsieur Loyal commente

la ballerine s’évente

et pique la piste

en vrille

rouge banderille

                                              (MC Gayffier)

– MC talktalking / ballerina / thrusting / redded blade /right through

The season of giving has come and, I expect, like hatchlings blindly looking for a behavioral model, you all’ll be needing something lovely – a little brain and eye toy – to fix on in the New Year 2020.

I’m glad to gift you with a glimpse of the work of live performance photographer Benoîte Fanton (www.facebook.com/BenoiteFantonPhotographies).

Judging from Fall 2019 retrospective shows hosted by both Mac Créteil, choreographer and activist Mourad Merzouki’s urban dance temple in suburban Paris, and the high-brow commercial Théâtre du Rond Point on the Champs Elysées, Fanton’s dramatic images speak not only to me, Karine, and my circle of esthetically circumspect performance gourmets, but to every kind of lover of the movement arts.

So it should. Fanton has specialized in capturing dance performance – photographing more than 2000 classic, modern, contemporary and urban dance shows in Paris and across France – for the last 15 years or so of her 20-year career.

The photographs offered above and below are from Fanton’s retrospective collection, entitled Sur quel pied danser. I reckon Sur quel pied danser means to be in some doubt as to how to go forward. As a collection Sur quel pied danser, Fanton writes, is dedicated to the notion of holding on (with aplomb) once you, as James Brown famously implores, Get on up.

Get on up, hold on: good advice for opening any year, but especially for this one which open out on to the last chance to do something serious about the climate emergency before it becomes so complexly exponential there is nothing we can do.

At Fanton’s shows, and in her photo book (also titled Sur quel pied danser), each photo is accompanied by a short meditation by MC Gayffier, painter and musician and, of course, poet. Gayffier’s lines admirably take on, fit to and gel with Fanton’s pictures.

I’ve interpreted rather than translated what I think of as Gayffier’s “New Parisian Loose Haiku”. In my mind, the mechanic of her writing was like that of a neo-realist painter than Zen-consciousness warrior: looking from the model to the words and back again. The interval between the focus points was where the poetry was written.

I’ve tried this same imagined mechanic in my interpretative effort of Gayffier’s work, swinging my focus from her lines to my visual sense of the photo, putting down the words that result. I hope my encounter with Gayffier’s sensibility makes her work shine through for you.

Get on up. Hold on.

from "'Meditations in an Emergency" [by Frank O'Hara]

One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.

-- Frank O'Hara

View of Manhattan from the Smith/9th St. subway station (photo by Stacey Harwood)

"Dusk" [by Amy Gerstler]

Dear, I can’t subsist on this diet
(really more of a fast—celery
seed and a soft word every other
month) any longer. Is that blood
on your pillowcase or another girl’s
lipstick? I want you to know
I’ve had such unalloyed joy
over the past several decades,
smelling your hair and petting
your sweat-beaded feet while
you were asleep. It was far sweeter
than I ever thought possible.
But my ancestors are welling up
in me now and keep nudging me
towards the door. Bells are rung,
harps are played: recessional music.
We both know the theater will close
in a few minutes. If you had been
more attentive or a better pretender
I could have run on fumes for a few
more years, sipping snow melt,
remaining quite high on it. Let
the record show I recited prayers
for your perpetual ascension
and good health as I laid this note
in its frozen envelope on your desk
and left, taking both dogs, the teal
parakeet and the black cat with me.
They got custody of our love.

from American Poetry Review (2008)

Facsimile Mantelpiece [poem and photo by Angela Ball]

Ed note: A few weeks ago, Angela Ball visited David and me in Ithaca, NY.  One morning over coffee, Angela showed me pictures of her lovely home in Mississippi, where she lives and teaches. I was struck by the arrangement of objects on her mantelpiece and asked for the story behind each. This poem is Angela's reply. Thank you, Angela. sdl: 

photo(c)Angela Ball

Arranging things on a mantel you have latitude
the longitude is missing just the latitude
to choose things
A series of completions or 
incompletions; in 2014, John Ashbery’s husband
said of their interior, “It’s probably the last
version” but so changed
now as is James Tate’s
the house of the strangest yard sale
that after a warm rainy breakfast
of intersections and messages
asked me
to choose

Size of course is always relative
The red scarf above the fez-capped man, the wiener
mobile, Dagwood, and R2D2
could wrap their Central Park, their Yosemite; maybe
their outer space
The mirror is an ocean
propped to the wall
As for the miniature edition of James Wright’s
The Branch Will Not Break
its largess
saved many from the wish
to give up before beginning
This ragtag display’s password
might be “generous”
since below it, in summer,
no edited forest burns

The man with the fez is some remote relative of the Shriners who swooped down the hospital hill
gripping the steering wheels of their midget cars on the very day a newborn was presented to a
mother by the gull-wing armature of a nun. And it is this very Zebra-cat with its free birdseed
who is now heard neighing, meowing, and trilling from a James Tate poem standing alone near a
cotillion of fruit trees and Minnow-Bucket Road

Angela Ball directs the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, MS, where she lives with her dogs, Miss Bishop and Scarlet, and a volunteer cat, Whisker. Her most recent book is Talking Pillow (University of Pittsburgh Press).

 

Goodbye to All That!

On Silver Street, Cambridge, England. .  .

David Lehman and Kevin Young discuss John Ashbery's "Worsening Situation" for "The New Yorker"

In this New Yorker podcast, David Lehman joins New Yorker poetry editor Kevin Young to read and discuss John Ashbery’s poem “Worsening Situation” and his own poem “Stages on Life’s Way"

To prep for the interview, David (pictured left in this 1997 photo by Jack Mitchell) wrote "On John Ashbery's 'Worsening Situation'":

On John Ashbery’s “Worsening Situation”

Like a collage, I wrote, the bruised words
Shampoo the hair of the dog. Or like
The simile eclipsing the thing it is likened to,
Which remains unnamed. The feast is
Near enough to watch but too far to reach
By foot. To up the ante, we get an echo
Of Keats's last poem or a quote from Rimbaud.
The key repetition occurs here. We feel
We have been riding the A train since 1965.
Rides, ceremonies, rites. What's the point?
Yet it bothers me, everything I haven't disclosed
Fully. I still read spy novels and get crank
Phone calls. I'm like the guy whose wife
You see on TV wondering how to get 
My collars clean. Tell her I'm somewhere 
Else -- Paris, Texas, for instance..

-- David Lehman [November 2017; in American Poetry Review, May/June 2018]

Mother's Day [by Terence Winch]

Mother’s Day

 

My mother did not live to be a hundred
like the old nuns in the Sacred Heart
convent, sheltered from life. She was
fifty-five when she died. I was the baby
of the family. It does not seem so long
ago to me that I snuck into bed
between her and my father, no greater
antidote to fear than that. Life is not
a slow read. We speed through it,
pages flipping. After her funeral,
I hated the smell of flowers.

She used to make my brother take me
to the movies to help me breathe
in the cool dark of the air-conditioned Elsmere.
Now all I want to do is watch movies in bed,
central air humming through the house. I cried
so much when she died that it still embarrasses me.

 

She used to visit me in my dreams,
even sometimes speaking to me from
the beyond. But I haven’t seen
or heard from her in years.

My own heart thumps
wildly in my chest sometimes,
when I think about the story ending.

My arms are swollen from allergy shots,
my son examining bumblebees
in the backyard. I inhale as deeply as I can.
Flowers don’t bother me anymore.

 

[This poem was written, I think, ca. 2000. The photo shows me, checking the time, and my best friend, Dennis O'Toole, sitting on my mother's lap in 1948 in Rockaway Beach, NYC. My mother was Bridie Flynn from Co. Galway, Ireland.]

In Memory of Will Gary

Joyeuses Fêtes! Eight “street portraits” from Sarah Meunier: eight reasons to love suburban Paris

 

all that

About two million people live in the 40 square miles of Paris intramuros, each enjoying an average annual share of national income of 75K €. Five million people, each getting along OK and sometimes not on an annual average 40K share of national income, live in the very rich, very poor and middling communes just beyond the congested ring-road called the "boulevard Périphérique," which was built along the line of the city walls of 1871 between 1956 and 1973. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

If you’ve been to Paris, you’ve seen the urban tableaus.

The miscellany of blue-jeaned and be-suited, be-skirted individus hustling from métro station to a host of previously unremarked glass, wood or steel doors of every shape and size, all of which, surely, must lead to some form of, more or less obscure, money-generating activity …

You’ve seen them. The bustlers and moppers in the hotels, the stork-standing servers armed with brown trays haunting the restaurants and cafés, security guys in cheap suits, usually cheerful-seeming, shelf-stockers and cashiers… And firemen! And I’ve only ever seen fire “men”:  well-filled, clingy, muscle shirts and pants, discretely streaked with a glisten of attractively trickled sweat, jogging and jiggling hither and yon as the working day clatters open…

You’ve seen them, usually in white or blue pants and lab-style cotton jackets: plumbers, heat and lighting technicians, deliverers, mail-people on yellow bikes saluting concierges, those who gesticulate in the ubiquitous pharmacies and medical-test laboratoires.

Finally, perhaps most especially, you’ve noticed the drivers and passengers of the little white utility trucks that bear mysterious names – the raisons sociales, as they say, of enterprise –“Socranil” or “Cefelec”, “Sofrapup”, “Pippubli” or “Acrosoc”.

At home, many of the above-mentioned tableau thems are my neighbors.

As such, they go back and forth to jobs, have children, pastimes, apartments, taxes to pay, errands to run, points of view, tastes, quiet thoughts, bref, as Robert Graves once famously summed up the routine of life, “all that”. 

                    back and forth

The nearest suburbs, north & south, east & west, are linked to Paris’ social fabric by metro termini. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

Sarah Meunier, also a neighbor – also a photographer of "street art" who works closely with the Lavo // Matic “graffiti” gallery in the thirteenth arrondissement – has made “street portraits” of many of these, our mutual thems, our mutual neighbors, hors tableau, as they go about their lives. As if for study, an outsize proof sheet of her portraits was hung above the drinks table during the open house of La Fabrique Bagnolet arts center this past Fall.

Meunier has managed to pull forth a certain, almost Hollywoodian, glamor in the familiar, most-often anonymous, human beings whom I run across every day in the stairwell, on the street, at the market, in the stores, in the bus, in the metro: those who animate the thems we see in the Paris tableaus.

I offer these eight Sarah Meunier street portraits as my end-of-year-begin-the-year gift. I offer them as eight reasons to be of good cheer about the true state of humanity, eight reasons to love and esteem the people who make France and, above all, eight reasons to love our neighbors.  

Joyeux Noël 2017, Happy New Year 2018.

      in the metro

The people recorded in Sarah Meunier’s street portraits live within an arc defined by the stations Porte de Pantin (Line 5), Mairie de Lilas (Line 11), Gallieni (Line 3), Robespierre, Croix de Chavaux, Mairie de Montreuil (Line 9) and Château de Vincennes (Line 1). ©2017 Sarah Meunier

points of view

Sarah Meunier told me she only recently began doing these portraits, after long hesitation. Although she now says she enjoys the often tense interpersonal negotiation involved in doing a street portrait, getting one doesn’t really get easier with experience. “It’s tricky,” she says. “Taking a photo, it’s like getting into somebody’s private life – “ ©2017 Sarah Meunier

pastimes

“People, generally,” says Sarah Meunier, “they just have a problem with their body image. And that’s really why they are reluctant to be photographed, at least in public.”©2017 Sarah Meunier

 

those who animate

Sarah Meunier uses black and white for its “timelessness”; these are public records, after all. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

                    the raisons sociales of enterprise

Meunier most often accosts her subject in the street, asks permission and does a rough and ready shoot. That’s what she was doing the day we met to talk, going around the neighborhood garage sale, asking to take portraits. ©2017 Sarah Meunier

        glamor in the familiar

Sarah Meunier can also shoot on the sly. She then goes to the subject and shows what she’s done – she says she gives the photo to all the people she takes. This fait accompli approach is difficult, she says, because, while it can capture the un-self-consciousness that so often reveals a human personality’s beauty, she has to “‘hose people down” with the camera if she wants to have a chance of capturing the expression or the look that really brings the person out. © 2017 Sarah Meunier

Tracy’s Lives of the artists: #1: Christine Champagne

Beyond words at the Bal perdu bistro

How do contemporary creators live and what do they make of it?

There are thousands of artists working in in France today.

If I had the nerve, not to speak of the time to listen to the end of the story, I’d ask each artist I meet, What do you live on? How do you live? And What’s your mood and attitude as you face the first two questions?

I’d do this because, myself a person with what they used to call a “checkered” story and, except for one small detail, an uncertain future, I’ve often supposed that someone besides my sweet boy might, after that one future certitude has kicked in, wonder how I looked at my life and managed my practical means and ends, compared, say, with the way Savage, Johnson or Boswell looked at and managed theirs? 

It is impossible to know how far any individual responses of any individual artist to such questions represent some general reality usefully comparable to whatever. All the same, when a series of even partial responses to even one of the three interesting questions, it might provide a starting point for other artists to put together their own, more complete, responses. Thus, using Tracy’s Lives of the Artists, handbook for the artistically perplexed, those who have not yet kicked on through to certitude could begin putting together a pastiche of first-hand stories that could help them understand their own situations.

Lyonnesse, Lyonnesse, Christine Champagne: "Creation is a sort of élan, a surge of presence from within me…"

So, when Christine Champagne, an artist working well beyond words today, wrote me a letter that touched intelligently on What do you live on? How do you live? What’s your mood and attitude? I saved and translated her words & sense to put together the essay that follows.

“I am looking at water and the sense I have of it”, Christine began, “So as to thread some video-sculptures and photos that I now have in my head around it (water). I am learning new stuff also… and in coming months I’ll be hand-developing my photos, which requires a little bit of set up! I am also on a team project on an angel theme where I will be doing the B&W photography. O! Yes. I am also modeling for a photographer friend: a pleasant, and also, a learning, experience on and about the other side of the lens; also learning some new techniques and a new way to look at my métier.”

Christine then went on to tell me about her experience living and working as an artist today in Paris, in France, saying that, basically, now, a working creator today – one who is not already in the infinitely small rank that makes up the publicly recognized “artist” on the private market or who is supported in some other way by the public market – cannot make a living as an artist, even in a small way. She concludes “This is just what I am feeling at the moment; I’m feeling upset; I don’t say this every day…”.

Perfection, Christine Champagne: “I want to bring some well-being to others, give them a spiritual break, to provide a bit of dream.”

Christine’s work, she acknowledges, aims not so much to pleasing the onlooker as at having a dialog with the onlooker’s heart. In that, perhaps, the creative product she wants to sell is different from others, so not really any more comparable to any other creative product on the market than she, as a person, is comparable to other creators. But, in terms of not making a living off her creativity, she asks me to keep in mind that, in addition to her personal creating, she teaches and makes original jewelry for another account.

“I don’t object to working for others or on things that aren’t of my invention”, Christine continues. “I feel I am creative in that, too. But, doing all that I do does not allow me to compensate the family for the costs I generate by my own creative work.”

Despite the tolerance and generosity of her family, she says, she winds up feeling guilty about being so little a contributor to the common enterprise… adding that, in a better world, money from her creative efforts would enable her to spoil her own people, at least a little, as well as enable more, bigger and better, more complex, productions.

“I love to experiment, break new ground,” she writes, “This takes time, it has to be taken forward carefully.” …But money takes time and time is money, even in Paris, and today’s creator, like most working people, especially, perhaps, the female ones, has no time.

The contemporary way of doing things is out of whack, Christine affirms. “It can’t be right,” she says, to not be able, even working a straight job elsewhere, to practice a vocation. A visual artist, like a barista or bank worker or assistant professor who wants to buy living space, some leisure time, or just be a bit above the bare minimum, is forced to work two or even three jobs.

Beyond the economic realities that today limit the lifestyle possibilities of most other working people, there is the way the creative market is organized that puts the brakes on hopes of an artistic career. “Unlike everybody else,” Christine points out, “And in addition to working steadily at other work, an artist who wants to even the most modest recognition has to take on several, unpaid, but highly necessary, jobs, quite distinct from her creative production: support functions such as marketing, logistics and technical work.”

Like any other merchandise, creative work doesn’t speak for itself, she says. But unlike other merchandise, nobody but the artist has to do all that support stuff before they can even get it to somebody who will put it before the public. Creative production “does not have My stuff by huge international brand stamped on it,” or even the reassuring imprimatur of some reputable gallery, she points out, which predisposes a buyer or exhibitor to believe in a creative product’s quality, taste and with-it-ness.

In our system, Christine says that, for instance, even if employers are obliged by law to pay a driver a minimal something for taking an overpriced box or a higher-paid worker from point A to point B, they are not obliged to pay any associated investment costs, such as driving license, clothes or car. So, too, for today’s visual artist.

The contemporary visual artist pays upfront, just like an Uber driver, for her tools and materials, plus for advertising, space rental – in short, 200€ here, 300€ there… The management, of course, that is, the curators, publicity agents, and so on and so forth, like the Uber management, get paid upfront and also generally work for somebody else. Of course, Christine points out, if the artist is not known or well-enough known, she has to, first, get these paid employees interested enough that they want to get the upfront money from the visual artist!

Illuminations, Christine Champagne: "My work is also a spiritual path, a search for the depth of life."

There are other particularities in the Paris market, Christine writes. Most galleries are strict rental arrangements as is a restaurant or cell phone sales point. “The owner rents the space, that’s all, allows the artist to fill up the gallery. If it sells, it sells. If not, the owner has his, even if the artist has nothing at all.” For the most part, the “self-interested friendship” of a gallery-owner à la Paul Rosenberg, who understands the work exhibited and promotes it does not exist for today’s working artists.

Christine has some trouble imagining how such a system developed, where no one takes any risk but the most vulnerable one, the producer. And it certainly is true that even the ceaselessly-wailing farmers have some protection, not to speak of notaries, lawyers, accountants, doctors, even those lowest of the low on the economy’s value-chain, have some sort of social-risk sharing arrangement, whether it is unemployment insurance or subventions or restrictive professional legislation.

Once and if the means are available to meet the public, Christine says, the nature of creative production makes an eventual meeting of minds with an interested public a costly, long-term project. “It’s interesting to demonstrate, to persuade, to force the brain to follow on an idea or a concept. All that’s good, I like it.”

But for this, the creator has to do a lot of exhibitions and be as present as possible on the scene and in the market. Understand that, in Paris, a stand at an exhibition costs between 1,000 and 10,000 euros, usually for three or four days and not including packing transport, lodging, meals or set up help.

Christine concludes her letter with a statement of her own intent in her creation, putting into question, at least obliquely, whether contemporary economics even leaves room for such intentions, even as a past-time or what one feels as an ineluctable vocation.

“I’ve said enough about money,” she writes. Money is necessary to live, but money is certainly not what motivates my creation. My work is also a spiritual path, a search for the depth of life. No, this way of putting it is not adequate: Creation is a sort of élan, a surge of presence from within me… I try to refine this feeling and to work it into sculpture, photographs, installations. I firmly believe that our lives are not limited to what we see of them in daily life”.

In the context of her personal motivations, then, for Christine, the almost impossible economic cost is worth the candle. “What is formidable in showing one’s creative production is the encounter with others,” she affirms. “It has no price, thank goodness.”

For Christine, the human exchange is in the creation of a vision shared for a moment, a unique bridge between two worlds, hers, his, theirs and mine, or maybe a bridge for all of us to the bigger, invisible part of living. “I think about things in different ways so that I can show my worlds, and make them available to everyone… “I want to bring some well-being to others, give them a spiritual break, to provide a bit of dream.”

 

Paul Violi and daughter Helen (courtesy James Periconi)

Eleven Questions for Eleven Poets [by Alan Michael Parker] - Part III

More fantabulous answers by superb poets, including some scary responses... Part III of III... Find Part II here.

Question 9: List five events in your life that mattered to you during the writing of your book. 

Max Ritvo: I read the book Ardor by Roberto Calasso, which is about the Indian Vedic tradition. This religious tradition encouraged its devotees to spend their entire lives in ritual dance to commune with the gods, to the extent there was no time left over to build permanent buildings of worship. Which feels to me like a life writing poems. The Vedas spent much of their time addressing the creation of the world and the fundamental ecstasy of desire. They do so using hallucinatory Freud-like myths in which a god has sex with his interior monologue, Speech, only to have the child rip out the womb of Speech itself and force it on his father's head as a turban so he may never impregnate such a potent womb again. This is all I could ever aspire to have my imagination create. It also is a religion that focuses around the guilt and complication of eating meat, and I am a vegetarian. So Ardor's blood runs strong through this book. Grazzi, Roberto! On a less literary note: I got dumped during cancer. I got married to the most wonderful woman in the world. My illness is now terminal. I am in great pain and on many drugs. All of these things made me feel very strong feelings, and so I wrote poems about them. Since my mentation has certain very idiosyncratic features, the poems cohered into a meaningful whole with kind of a narrative around them. And this, my friends, is Four Reincarnations!

Chris Santiago: Akita. I wrote the first draft of the long title poem as I was graduating from Oberlin and moving to Akita, Japan, to teach English. It was a relatively isolated part of the country, with even more snow than my home state of Minnesota. That experience of isolation— living in another language, one I could hardly read or understand—was a gift. It gave me solitude, distance, and perspective.

Manila. From Japan, I was able to backpack around Southeast Asia. At least a few poems came out of this, including “Photograph: Loggers at Kuala Tahan,” which is about getting drunk with some loggers we befriended in the Malaysian rainforest. I also traveled to the Philippines a few times. My uncle Flu put me up and showed me around. He took me on some adventures, introduced me to his network, and regaled me with stories, many of them harrowing. 

Los Angeles. After Japan, I lived in LA for fifteen years and worked several odd jobs: I worked in a call center; I read scripts and rolled calls at Miramax; I was a substitute teacher in South LA and Long Beach, and a graveyard shift editor for a wire service. I also dealt with mild depression, and would go one or two years at a stretch without writing a poem. When I met my wife, Yuri, it was, as Karl Ove Knausgaard says about meeting his own wife, like day broke. After we had our first son, the poems started coming again.

Minneapolis. A few weeks after I defended my dissertation—which included an earlier draft of TULA, my mother died unexpectedly. Up until that point, it had been a season of joy: not only had I finished the program at USC, but I had gotten a job teaching literature & creative writing. The job was even back in my hometown, where my mother and father were still living when she died.

I was, of course, devastated. Part of me wanted to set the manuscript aside—it was hard for me to look at it. It became clear to me how much the poems had to do with my mother, how she tried to transmit our family’s history to me, through songs and stories. The fact that I never learned her language is the seed the book grew out of: I never learned it, but when I hear it spoken, it’s like a music and a home.

But my circle—from USC, from St. Thomas, from Kundiman—gently kept the pressure up. After Daniel Slager called me to say that A. Van Jordan had picked TULA for the Lindquist & Vennum Prize, I called Yuri and cried for a long time. I’m grateful that my mother was at least able to read a draft of the manuscript.

Megan Snyder-Camp: Falling in love with the Pacific Northwest coast and wondering about the origin of these bleak place names like “Dismal Nitch” and “Cape Disappointment.” The birth of my daughter. Sitting with writer, Native Studies scholar and enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe Elissa Washuta at a bar one night and her rattling off a long list of books I needed to read (she was right). My husband losing his job. Driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike with my dad, a trip we used to make all the time but hadn’t in many years. Encountering the term “ruin porn.”

Clint Smith: It’s impossible to disentangle the poems in this collection from the broader racial justice movement that stemmed from the death of Trayvon Martin, and later Michael Brown. These poems are shaped by and responding to the political moment from which they are birthed. These poems are also deeply informed by my work both a teacher and researcher in prisons over the past two years. I teach creative writing at a state prison in Massachusetts and in my doctoral program, I am being trained as a sociologist focusing on the relationship between prisons and education. My proximity to both the people I worked with in the prison as well as an extensive engagement with the social and historical literature outlining how the prison system came to be very much inform my political, and inevitably artistic, commitments.

Tony Trigilio: The Boston Marathon Bombing. Boston, where I lived for ten years before moving to Chicago, already was a big part of the book. The Marathon bombing occurred very early in the composition process, while I was only a few pages into the manuscript. This is a violent book at times, and it has to be, because it documents the politically turbulent year, 1968, when these Dark Shadows episodes first aired, and the painful world we’re living in now. The Marathon bombing is the book’s first violent act. Even when I wasn’t directly writing about Boston, the bombing shadowed just about everything as I wrote the first section of the book.

Gun violence in Chicago. I’ve lived in major urban areas for almost three decades, and I’ve never seen anything like this. The body count we experience every day is heart-wrenching and infuriating. The episodes I watched for this book originally were broadcast in 1968, and I imagined the book would document the global violence of that year (all but ignored in the show’s fictional, soap-escapist seaport town of Collinsport). I just didn’t anticipate how violent my own city, and at times my own neighborhood, would become as I wrote the book.

Playground, East 67th Street

Playground, view from the 4th Floor (c) Stacey Lehman

So this is where the children hide all day,

These are the nests where they letter and draw,   

where they put on their bright miniature jackets,   

all darting and climbing and sliding,

all but the few girls whispering by the fence.

 

And now I am listening hard

in the grandiose silence of the snow,

trying to hear what those three girls are plotting,   

what riot is afoot,

which small queen is about to be brought down.

 

        from "Snow Day" by Billy Collins (Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems)

 

-- sdh