The Best American Poetry

Charlie Simic's BAP

Launch reading for BAP 1992: Pictured are Charles Simic, David Lehman,.Jonathan Aaron, Lynda Hull, Rosanna Warren. Hull and Simic are in the second photo. We chose a Joserph Cornell box for the book's cover art. Charlie was writing a book on Cornell. -- DL

Att 7 pm October 30: a celebration of Joe Brainard's Selected Letters

Joe Brainard is the only painter whose work adorns the cover of two volumes of "The Best American Poetry"

For Joe Brainard

The road sign said snow
‘Well, I never said it was spring’
in 1968 in whose loft downtown
under a cobweb of windshield

a butterfly beneath a branch within
a border of blue 1953 Easter Seals
the sun surrounded by streaks
of blue and white in a frame

and a wave crashing against it
the logic a rhyme of college and collage
the logic a rebus the message simple
Nancy a blueprint bingo cherries

and two fragments of letters
handwritten big block letters neat
I looked and the three hairs
in the sink spelled out Joe

David Lehman, 12/ 20 / 2000 

On October 30, 2024, at 7 pm at St Mark's Church in NYC there will be a reception in honor of Joe Brainard's Love, Joe: Selected Letters (edited by Daniel Kane; Columbia UP). .The evening will include readings by Brad Gooch, Vincent Katz, Anne Waldman, Keith McDermott, Michael Lally, Ron Padgett, and Ann Lauterbach.

Paul Auster and others remember Joe Brainard here.
https://youtu.be/I2Znn0oGrfE?t=304

See, too, this "Homage to Joe Brainard."

Tonight at KGB Bar

KGB MONDAY NIGHT POETRY PRESENTS...

Matthew Rohrer + Pablo Medina + Tangie Mitchell

   
Monday, October 7, 2024

KGB BAR 85 E. 4th St. NY, NY 10003

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Readings start at 7:30 pm

Hosted by John Deming, Jada Gordon, Susan Lewis, Tyler Allen Penny and Selena Spier

Two drink minimum

 

*****

Matthew Rohrer

For a Farrier

 

Reading a kind of  laborious

poem about rural things

and a horse is shot

for breaking its leg.

I still don’t get it.

Surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

I text my friend

who is a farrier

(you know—

someone who shoes horses)

I say surely there’s a way

to heal a horse.

                        And I wait

but he doesn’t text back

he’s busy with the pounding

and clanging.

 

Raising his hammer

over a bright orange horseshoe

and pausing

because in his head

a line by Issa

can be heard.

-- Matthew Rohrer 

The Gala Launch [of BAP 2009]: A Report [by Liz Howort, with Star Black's photographs]]

The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 featured prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.

The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.

David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:

“Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”

John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprised of movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2)  Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

     -- Liz Howort

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post--launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood [Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black]

The cover art for BAP 2009 is a collage by John Ashbery.

In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading  "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.

It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening! 

     -- Liz Howort

Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post--launch cocktail party in their nearby loft.  John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist.  Poet Star Black shares these photos:

l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)

L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)

L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood [Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black]

The cover art for BAP 2009 is a collage by John Ashbery.

Poet-musician Terence Winch is a guest on HARRY'S POETRY HOUR [by Earle R. Hitchner]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wBNf-BRb6A&t=1008s

Link above is to guest poets Terence Winch and Kit Robinson who join Harry E. Northup for readings and discussion of their verse on Harry’s Poetry Hour. The program is produced, hosted, and recorded weekly by Northup as a part of MPTF Studios' Creative Chaos. Terence Winch goes first in this audiovisual recording.  

Be sure to move your cursor to the far-left beginning of this audiovisual recording link.

NOTE: One of many highlights in this recording is “Childhood Ground,” a song composed by Terence Winch and performed by singer and pianist Eileen Estes and fiddler Michael Winch, Terence’s son. Go to 17:48 on the horizontal timer of the video.

Among Terence Winch's many books of verse are It Is as If Desire, That Ship Has Sailed, This Way Out, The Known Universe, Lit from Below, Boy Drinkers, The Drift of Things, The Great Indoors, Falling Out of Bed in a Room with No Floor, and Irish Musicians/American Friends.  In my considered opinion, Terence Winch is the best writer of villanelles today and overall one of our finest poets.

 “Paradise Bronx,” an article about the Bronx by Ian Frazier in the July 15, 2024, issue of The New Yorker, was mentioned by Terence Winch in Harry’s Poetry Hour.

30 Years On: 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.

Report on “Song of Self” and “Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin” performance, Kyiv [By Tracy Danison]

Looking east across the summer theater stage, Syretsky Park, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024, 5:54 a.m. Photo © Tracy Danison

The morning of 15 August, the feast of the Assumption (of the mother to the father and son), at dawn, in the summer theater of Syretsky Park in Kyiv, Ukraine, I performed my Song of Self and Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin.

The video is on my YouTube channel @TracyDanison beginning 24 August but you can also find it now on Instagram or Facebook. The written version of the poems figures below. Thanks for sharing Song and the Exorcism. Thanks for doing a Song of Self yourself. As for an exorcism, I can think of more than one – How does Sting put it? – “priest, poet or politician” that might benefit from an exorcism, can’t you?

The video recording is only a memento to an act of Real Presence, an artefact of a moment or place created in space and time by my performance and recorded by an imperfect technology. 

In an effort to get as much self into the words as possible, I used rapidity and hoped for spontaneity, hoped to give a glimpse of my a-temporal, a-spatial, existence-making, entanglement with Other, ideas and things: I wrote the poems, printed them and put them in my pocket.

Many tropes and words from poets and writers and thinkers I love fell into place as I tried to put my intentions on paper, so I put them in, just like that. For Black Nail, the poem that initiates the (1975) movie Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller, summed up for me pretty well that truth is irony. I was then quite distressed to learn of it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

And, in those days, reading Germinal excited me so, I had to jump up and pace around every couple pages. I’ve realized since that nothing signifies something beyond words.

Oh, yeah.

Mirror field audio visual installation with television tower just behind. Babi Yar memorial site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

The evening I was writing Song of Self and Black Nail, the evening before I was to begin my train trip to Kyiv, my son, now partnered and a father himself, told me he’s been diagnosed with the same psychic disorder I had to put up with until recently.

He’s getting medicine for it, though.

And with that, I am consoled – thanks to time and the experience and the well-marinated thoughts and ideas contributed to me by Lina Wertmüller, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare, among others too numerous to thank.

He told me just last night that he was going through a whole day feeling well: “Dad, I think it’s working”, he said.

Reading what are essentially drafts from printouts, I performed Song and recited Black Nail once, without rehearsal or revisions.

In the evening after my performance, there was a drone and missile attack on Kyiv.

There is a very big and important television tower in among the woods not too far off where I was staying. I saw a drone or some drones get shot out of the air, as it seemed, just outside the window. Maybe that tower was the target; there was, I am told, a hard fight for it during the battle for Kyiv. From what I saw, I think the defenders used some sort of Gatling gun against the drone/s. The building trembled when it/they exploded.

I conclude from this experience that, given that I got the proportion of toad’s tongue to virgin’s first menstrual blood correct, my Exorcism does not take immediate effect. 

I picked Syretsky Park at random, pointing a green space on the map when I got to Kyiv. Madame Google indicated it was within walking distance of where I was. The evening before I walked to the park to check it was open in early morning. The next day, I arrived at the park just before the break of day.

The Black Nail inside Moloch’s brain: Contemporary colorized photograph of a killing trench lodged in a shard of granite near the child memorial at the Babi Yar site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

I noticed the summer theater where I performed when I walked through the park gate.

Before going there for my performance, I did not know that Syretsky Park was just across the street from the Babi Yar memorial or that the park was the site of a camp for various captives from 1942 until the end of German occupation or even that the place is part of the physical and moral topography of what we call “Babi Yar”.

I chose Kyiv for the Song of Self and Black Nail because the war against Ukraine has been made into a war against those who believe, as I do, that each person is a person, equal in fact to all other persons, no conditions, no exceptions.

The world begins where self begins, I believe.

It was coincidence that I found myself at the Babi Yar site. The television tower that might have been the target of the coming evening’s drone attack is located there. Off the paths, there are signs of deadly fracas and firing positions. 

The Babi Yar memorial is made up of reminders that the thousands murdered there were, in the locution of the poet and Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders, a human being, individuals, persons. Their voices whisper on the wind, rustle and sigh in the bushes and boughs of the trees. Literally. Never forget, never forgotten.

Stanczyk, court jester, broods on the victory of Moscow, by Jan Matejko (1838-93), Warsaw Museum of Art. Photo © Tracy Danison

As I was walking up through the park, avoiding a crowd of oblivious joggers and dog walkers, I had a vision. I don’t remember if I had read the description somewhere before or how the vision came to me.

It is of a guy standing over a little pile of not-quite-dead-enough human being and, with a submachine gun, shooting into the pile, an idiot spattering himself with flesh and bone, spreading superfluous terror and suffering. As he goes a-murdering from pile to pile, in his mind, this guy is obsessively scrolling “I am a German. I am a German. I am a German”.

This awful vision reminded me that Black Nail, murder-love, begins with how a person believes they exist.

These days, wherever you go, there is much encouragement for this sad guy’s belief that being part of some group or movement lets him exist. In some form or another, I’ll be trying to take Real Presence on the road and do some counter-encouraging, including in Ukraine, a lot of whose people are, thanks to the anguish of cultural discontinuity and war and the efforts of Putin and his allies to conjure Black Nail, teetering on the edge of “ethno-national” hysteria.

By the way. “Firstest with the mostest” and fastest to the rightest place, Ukraine is set to win, and soon, the war that the neither the Germans, nor Swedes, nor Turks could do, confining Russia to the north and bringing down its empire for keeps. Russia’s defeat will almost certainly generate Babi-Yar-shaped moral and practical consequences. Dread them.

________________________________

Song of Self

Waking as like from a fretful dream,

Here I am!

There are You!

Here I am!

I celebrate myself.

Still air, wind, cool, heat, light, dark.

I celebrate a blade of grass, the head of a dandelion

I celebrate a sharp green blade of grass,

I mourn the frowsy fragile head of a dandelion

Up down this that, heart side, mind side, before, behind, yonder

And soon. Past and Present. Future Perfect.

And what I assume, You assume too.
For every atom belonging to Me, the same belongs to You.

And not quite.

Mud shapes according to its water.

In light dust may beguile different. Yet.

Be, the finale of me,

You, the disciple of me!

Me, the disciple of you!

We, the apostle of You.

Smile or Spit. Up to you.

We want is finale of seem

We be Imperators of ice cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

Girls that dawdle in such dress.

Boys that whip, those muscular ones.

And who remains take that bedsheet

And spread it so as to cover the mouth that is dumb.

I celebrate Me.

There. There is there.

That is. There.

A swell in a wave and a speck in the dust.

Plus B + I + [ ~≠U/speck and wave]   

Makes here, where I and You are.

Thus, plus I + [ ~≠U], a place, a door.

Before the door we are there.

Gone through the door, we are here after.

To maintain attitudes, hold your position
To die bravely on yonder hill

And much should blind you,
Much must evade you.

All. At the cost of a bedsheet

And You left behind.

Breathe in. Breathe out

What a song to sing!

Birds and flight. Fish and swim,

Look and sky.

See and horizon.

A fine song!

Sing this song and never go home

Sing this song and everywhere is home

Sing this song and there’s no home

Take note before we sing

We cannot know where we’ll go

Only that I will wind up here with You.

Celebrate me.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

 

Black nail

You. Minds of my generation.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Russia. Listen. Vladimir. Listen.

Banqueted on sweet, sticky lies

Raise your eyes. Fine omens. Firefly signs.

Crackling Portents.

Curlicues of alchemical anatomy Nobody understands.

And Nobody was the fiction of a blind man. Now dead.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Your bright eyes fixed everywhere but on the Other

You knot stories babbled by babies in blindfolds

Truth is plain to see but too hard to say.

So say something, anything.

Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Saint Nick! A young man!

Lord, Christ Christmas, Beejesus! A young man!

Say it again! Say it again! And again.

To win is to succeed.

And to lose?

An inspiring late night movie

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man! Listen.

Vladimir.  Listen Russia.

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

When will we end the human war?

 

Listen! You have it all!

The power of the kingdoms. Like Binyamin says.

The murder, the pain, the stink of the dead.

All the bewildered motherless bitches with the thousand yard stare.

Fast-firing cannons, rocket bombs

And jellied gasoline and rattling guns

Tiny drones like dragonflies hurling potato mashers.

Thrilling. Exciting. Powerful. Emotional

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

 

But. To succeed is not to win.

You have to win to win. Listen. Russia.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

I still haven’t told you what you must to win winning.

I’m addressing you.

Those who believe.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

To win, you’ve got to love it.

The Murder, the pain, the horror, I mean

The Moloch stink in Vlad’s nostril.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

Fill your libraries full of tears.

Look at yourself through the grave

You’ve got to love the stink, I mean.

Santa Claus is Jesus as an old fella!

 

Those who want to believe. Listen

Russia. Those who want to take off your clothes.

Listen. There is a narrow sliver of steel, a black nail

Just here, at heart’s gate.

 

Embossed along the barbed rim:

“who love murder in their heart

Die.”

Russia when will you be an angel?

Vladimir wants to touch it,

Press on it a bit

As if you really were a prisoner

And it were only your limp prick.

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as young man

Kris Kringle is Beejesus as an older guy

Christ Christmas is Saint Nick in drag

Thursday falls next Tuesday

Russia. How can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

 

Russia, Vladimir is quite serious.

This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

Russia is this correct? Are you naked?

Is your prick limp ?

Quick. Reach out. Take my hand

Or die.

 

You have been told.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

Terence Winch & Kit Robinson to Read August 6, 4-5 PM Eastern Standard Time

David Shapiro reads his poems, June 16, 2011

Jul 10, 2011     http://inspiredwordnyc.blogspot.com/

Poet David Shapiro @ The Inspired Word's Big Apple BAP: NYC's Best American Poetry Poets, Thursday, June 16, 2011, @ One and One Bar/Restaurant, Nexus Lounge, Manhattan, NYC.

David Shapiro is an American poet, literary critic, and art historian. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of 13, his first book was published when he was just 18, and he was a finalist for the National Book Award at 24. Shapiro is one of the most prolific and important figures of the second generation of the New York School and has appeared in six editions of Best American Poetry.

This inaugural Big Apple BAP: NYC's Best American Poetry Poets was a night celebrating New York City's finest poets, whose poems over the years have been honored with inclusion in the highly respected annual anthology, The Best American Poetry. http://www.bestamericanpoetry.com/

Hosted by The Best American Poetry's founding editor, David Lehman, the debut lineup included a dazzling array of accomplished poets: Mark Bibbins, Jennifer Michael Hecht, David Shapiro, R. Erica Doyle, Jerome Sala, Elaine Equi, Michael Cirelli, Stacey Harwood, George Green, Carly Sachs, Matthew Yeager, Amy Holman, and Vicki Hudspith.

It was a fabulous night of poetry.

Founded by award-winning journalist and former Village Voice columnist Mike Geffner, The Inspired Word is one of the hottest new poetry/spoken word series in the country, happening every Tuesday and Thursday night in Manhattan's East Village.

Venue: One and One Bar/Restaurant (downstairs Nexus Lounge)
76 East 1st Street (corner of 1st Avenue)
Manhattan, New York City
Filmed & Edited by: Laurence Wallace
http://www.laurencewallace.com/

Save the Date: A Poetry Reading in Response to Antisemitism [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Sunday, February 18, 2024, 2:30 PM

In Person at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
Edmond J. Safra Plaza
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10280

Livestream

Cultural critic and keynote speaker Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen: How They Rise, Why They Succeed, How They Fall, will provide historical context for today’s worldwide uptick in antisemitism, focusing specifically on New York City. Curators Martine Bellen, Ruth Danon, and Andrew Levy have brought together poets Rosebud Ben-Oni, Jordan Davis, Sharon Dolin, Joanna Fuhrman, Nada Gordon, Patricia Spears Jones, Pierre Joris, Adeena Karasick, Vincent Katz, Burt Kimmelman, Basil King, Stephen Massimilla, Sharon Mesmer, Uche Nduka, Mercedes Roffe, Sean Singer, Yerra Sugarman, Anne Tardos, and Edwin Torres to share works, reflecting on this current moment. 

Find more information here.

Richard Wilbur at the Y (in 2009) ([by David Yezzi]

Richard Wilbur gave a splendid reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y last night. After a knockout selection of poems new and old, he capped the evening with a bit from his forthcoming translation of Corneille's The Liar, which will be out in August in a volume that also includes his new translation of Le Cid. Dorante's long speech from Act Two absolutely killed!

I had the priviledge of introducing him, which was a bit like your little brother's garage band warming up for Radiohead. The audience was patient, and I tried to keep it short. Here is what I said:

<< Richard Wilbur makes it look so easy. His poems are as close as we are likely to come to teasing out of our contemporary speech a classical poise. But don’t be fooled. As T. S. Eliot said of the poems of Ben Jonson, their “polished veneer . . . reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity.” Which is to say his surface tensions span shadowed depths, if we have eyes to see them.

Yet so close do Wilbur’s poems come to seamless utterance, to perfect expression – in their music, argument, energy, wit, and sense (which in Wilbur’s case also means “good sense”) – that one could almost forget that they are hard-won and do not shrink from challenging their own formal elegance. The poems convince us that they have achieved their ideal form, that they could not be written any other way. But their pleasing air of inevitability is by no means inevitable.  Wilbur’s poems are the mysterious product of the poet’s lifelong mastery over the momentary: they are stays against transience. 

Here’s how the poet Philip Larkin once described the purpose of poetry. “Most people say that the purpose of poetry is communication: that sounds as if one could be contented simply by telling somebody whatever it is one has noticed, felt, or perceived.” “I feel,” Larkin said, that “it is a kind of permanent communication better called preservation. . . . Of course, the process of preservation does imply communication, since that is the only way an experience can be preserved.” Larkin wants to put the emphasis on language-as-preserver rather than language-as-means-of-communication, because, he says, “it makes it sound harder, which it is!” As Robert Frost knew well, “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of” is the poet’s ultimate ambition. And Wilbur has lodged with us an extraordinary number of poems, indelible and unforgettable.

The teaming list of “moments” that Wilbur has preserved will be different for each reader, since all of his poems perform the function in some way: The bibulous mind-reader at the café table in Rome comparing a sun-hat wafting from a parapet to a thought being forever lost. (The mind-reader, like the poet, is a preserver of moments.) Or the bird that has flown in at a window, “humped and bloody,” making its way, finally, back out to freedom as a father and his daughter look on. Or, outside another open window, a clothes line that fills the morning air with angels, some in bed-sheets, some in smocks. Then there is the marriage of true minds that Wilbur likens to a rose window or the firmament. Indelible moments, unforgettable.  

How does he do it? It’s a mystery. Howard Nemerov once proposed an ideal for poetry based on mystery. Good poems posses three indispensable qualities, he believed. “1) a poem must be very mysterious, 2) but it must have an answer (in other words, a meaning) which is precise, literal, and total; that is, which accounts for every item in the poem, 3) it must remain very mysterious, or become even more so, when you know the answer.” Wilbur pulls off this essential bit of wizardry again and again. Take as only one example his classic poem “The Ride”: a journey on  horseback “Through shattering vacancies / On into what is not,” which becomes a dream that the poet wakes from and yet inhabits long into waking. Wilbur’s mysterious states of consciousness – in poems such as “The Ride,” “The Mind-Reader,” “A Digression,” “This Pleasing Anxious Being,” are among the clearest views we have of these shadowed depths. As Randall Jarrell once wrote of Wilbur’s work, he “obsessively sees, and shows, the bright underside of every dark thing.” Wilbur sheds light on the mysteries of experience, preserving these mysteries by finding the exact words for them for the first time. >>

from the archive; first posted May 22, 2009

Friday, March 31, 2023, at 6:30 pm: An Evening with Terence Winch at the Arts Club of Washington [by Stacey Lehman]

Put this on your calendar and be there! 

Terence Winch, September, 2022. Photo by Tom Goodwin

An Evening of Poetry

By and With Terence Winch

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Friday, March 31, 2023,   at 6:30 pm

That Ship Has Sailed, Terence Winch’s ninth collection of poetry, synthesizes the serious and comic to address sex, love, loss, death, belief, the afterlife, and the past. In February 2023, the University of Pittsburgh Press published this latest collection by Winch as part of its fabled Pitt Poetry Series.

ACW Members Free  -  Non-members $15

Reading and Wine Reception

Arts Club of Washington, 2017 I St NW Washington DC 20006

Find more information about this event here

Find out more about Terence Winch here.

-- sdl

Poetry & jazz: Dana Gioia reads "Meet Me at the Lighthouse"

 

Memories of the BAP 1992 Launch (ed. Charles Simic)

Bill Wadsworth, executive director of the Academy of American Poets, organized the launch readings of the 1992 and 1993 editions at the Alliançe Francaise in New York City.  Bill kept these photos from the 1992 event, including a group portrait of the participants, a portrait of the series editor and one of Lynda Hull with Charles Simic looking over her shoulder.

For Memorial Day: Charles Laughton reads Walt Whitman, with music by Bernard Herrmann

In 1944, composer Bernard Herrmann, known for his film scores, collaborated with the producer Norman Corwin on “Whitman,” a half-hour dramatic presentation invoking America’s iconic poet to rally the home front during World War II. It was heard by millions of listeners. It’s a classic exemplar of a forgotten creative genre: the radio drama. 

You may read more about this collaboration and listen to a excerpts from a contemporary recording here. 

--sdl

Tonight at 7 PM (East Coast time): Michael Caine and Poets (including Lally and Lehman)

Organized by Suzanne Lummis: << You won't want to miss this All-Star Line-up. It's a ZOOM event. Click event for link. Please join us! >>

Listen: Tracy K. Smith Reads and discusses Kamilah Aisha Moon's "Irony" and Louise Erdrich's "Stone Love" from The Best American Poetry 2021

 

An Interview with Laura Cronk [by Aspen Matis]

Laura Cronk is the author of two books of poems, Ghost Hour and Having Been an Accomplice, both  from Persea Books. She is the chair of undergraduate writing at The New School in New York City where she teaches courses on pedagogy and creative practice and coordinates programs for writers such as the Summer Writers Colony and The Riggio Honors Writing & Democracy program. Originally from Indiana, she currently lives with her family in New Jersey.

I corresponded with Ms. Cronk via email about poetry as “a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer,” poems as an instrument of investigation, and American citizens’ “complicity with… everything that was being done in our names.” We also discussed the profound value of literary community, people with whom one can enjoy “long, late night conversations about poems and writing… meandering, deep” talks that open new pathways forward.  

What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Lately I’ve been thinking of writing poems as a spiritual practice like meditation or prayer. This is my latest attempt at getting out of my own way, sidestepping my own pessimism. 

Your most recent book of poems, Ghost Hour, was published by Persea Books in December. Poet and literary critic Craig Morgan Teicher describes the collection as “a fierce coming of age, a coming into—with heart, humor, and humility—one’s own,” and poet Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta calls the work “brilliant.” Your publisher categorizes the collection as emanating “from adolescence and other liminal spaces” and evoking “profound consideration of contemporary violence.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

Ghost Hour is divided into three sections. The first group of poems circles around origins and lineage and is set in a rural Midwestern landscape. The long middle poem is an elegy for a queer first love set against the same backdrop. The third section of poems are more varied formally, more experimental, tend to be located in urban settings, and grapple with the complexities of contemporary adulthood. As in my first book, I was interested in investigating complicity in my new book. The investigation in Ghost Hour is more personal, considering the things that have most haunted me over the years I was writing these poems. 

For several years, you curated the Monday Night Poetry Series at the famed KGB Bar in the East Village. Why, in your view, is the public performance of poetry important? And what is something unexpected you learned from your long tenure in that exciting position? What’s the greatest gift the experience offered you?

To mark the 20th anniversary of the Monday Night Poetry Series, those of us who have hosted reminisced about the experience here. Looking back at it, I’m so glad we captured some of those memories. Star Black and David Lehman started something really special that’s still going strong — most recently with Zoom readings and a reading on the iconic 4th Street stoop. Hosting the Monday Night Poetry series was an amazing experience and an incredible education. As an audience member or host I’ve heard almost all of my idols read at KGB. I learned how important it is for poets to have a place to perform for each other, relax and cut up with each other, and appreciate a well-poured drink. 

Your first collection, Having Been an Accomplice, won the 2011 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry. Poet Anne Waldman praises the book for its exploration of “the vicissitudes and pleasures of the relational and often domestic beloved,” observing that the work “then proceeds to invent a fascinating persona in the figure of the child-like Citizen Queen, a disarmed goddess sitting in her apartment, questioning her power and efficacy.” Poet Brenda Shaughnessy describes the collection as “Dreamy yet certain, lovelorn and love-buoyed,” adding that “the sadness in the poems has joy-rounded edges, the delight scooped out of melancholy and offered, shining.” To me, the book seemed unified and composed by the desire for a powerful voice of clarity in a time of dangerous opacity and unthinkable destruction. In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I began this book as the U.S. was launching its invasion of Iraq and I felt enraged and hopeless, full of the need to do something. The thing I ended up doing was writing poems about my complicity as an American citizen with the war, with the president, with everything that was being done in our names. I was also interested in the joy and the sacrifices involved in falling in love, embarking on an adult life. At a point those two very different interests blurred and merged. I don’t know what I hope people are left with. I’m always hoping to really capture the full depth of feeling I’m writing about and to have it land like a punch in the gut. So I want people to feel punched, I guess? 

You serve as chair of undergraduate writing at The New School, where you coordinate the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. What has been the greatest pleasure of this educational post, for you? And the greatest challenge? What are your hopes for the program, through this time of remote learning academic redefinition?

John Reed’s wonderful book about The New School, A Drama in Time characterized the Riggio Honors Program as “the first academic program to treat writing, equality, and justice as a single subject, and to implement its philosophy in its internal structure.” I’m so passionate about this program. Besides the connections the program draws between writing and justice, the commitment to fostering a true community for students is the program’s most important goal. I think, for recent alumni, knowing that there’s this serious, generous group of writers who are really in your corner can make all of the difference. We’ve weirdly come through the pandemic stronger than ever. There’s been a clarifying aspect of this experience. No one wants to waste any time. Even over Zoom some really deep connections have been made. There are ways that being online made aspects of the program more accessible for some, like those who have caretaking responsibilities, and that has been something we want to continue to support. And shy people do love a good Zoom chat. It’s especially good for jokes, asides, some of the things that confident people manage to say in person. Of course it’s been really, really hard to not be in each other’s physical presence. I’m looking forward to the fall and the beautiful sensory overload of being in a room together talking about writing. 

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

There is so much incredible contemporary poetry being published now that I’ve really been focusing my reading there. I did just wander into a local used bookstore, though, and buy The Portable William Blake which I’m planning to dig into this summer, even though it has a musty smell. Do any BAP readers have any tricks for refreshing bad-smelling used books?

Are there any reliable critics? If so, who, and why is his or her perspective useful? If no, why not? What happens when poetry is critiqued? What is gained? What is lost in translation?

Most contemporary critical writing about poetry seems to be coming from a place of love and deep engagement. Or that’s what I happen to read. I’m thinking of Craig Morgan Teicher’s book We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress. It’s such a joyful book, one that makes me feel really connected to poetry and poets. I love Sean Singer’s newsletter The Sharpener. Megin Jimenez, who also hosted the Monday Night Poetry Series, is a poet who has been writing reviews of international fiction and nonfiction. The experience of reading good critical writing is like being immersed in a conversation with a really smart friend. So satisfying.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Justice, candor, memory, conversation, romantic love.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

I really think we can’t worry about this as artists. We just have to do our work and support other poets in the ways that we can. There are so many things we can do to contribute to the poetry ecosystem. There’s writing but there’s also editing, hosting readings, writing reviews, interviewing other writers as you’re doing now, teaching, starting writing or reading groups, the list goes on...

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

Now is the time to have long, late night conversations about poems and writing. Find your people to have meandering, deep conversations with. 

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

I really love essay-like poems and poetic essays. I have a few in the works…

Saturday, December 12: Celebrate the Best American Poetry 2020

We're not going gentle into the end of 2020! Join us this Saturday for a celebration of Unamuno Author @PaisleyRekdal's selection for @BestAmPo 2020 Anthology! RSVP: https://t.co/tZfNxlOScl 🥳🤠🤗@DesperateLit #Unamuno53 pic.twitter.com/f1dWMdbBtQ

— Unamuno Authors Series (@UnamunoAuthors) 

Asian American Writers Workshop Celebrates BAP 2020

This #PoetryTuesday we're partnering with @TheAALR and @SmithsonianAPA to share ten poems from BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2020, edited by @PaisleyRekdal.

From 10 AM until 7 PM, we'll be sharing a poem every hour. Stay tuned & follow this thread! pic.twitter.com/DTTH53bktG

— Asian American Writers' Workshop (@aaww) October 27, 2020

--sdl

Provincetown Arts: Group reading with Major Jackson presiding, 8 / 25 / 20