The Best American Poetry

Star Black's Portraits of Poets: from the BAP Gala, 9/25/08

Meghan O'Rourke

Richard Howard

Lee Upton

Laura Cronk and David Lehman

John Ashbery and Adam Zagajewski

All photos by Star Black. Adam Zagajewski was reading at NYU that evening, but he and his party joined the BAP / New School crowd at Cafe Loup, where this picture was taken, after the reading.

Lally and Winch at KGB Bar Last Night (When We Were Young) ["Poets' Photos" by Star Black; report from Julia Cohen]

Terence Winch and Michael Lally read at KGB Bar last night when all of us were fifteen years younger. Star Black took their photographs. Julia Cohen's filed this report:

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On Monday nights, sometimes I think about buying groceries after work and then going straight home. This week I actually made it to the grocery store. But then instead of getting on the subway to Brooklyn, suddenly I'm at the KGB Bar, tucking my groceries under a table, waiting for the reading to begin.

Last night the room was packed -- I was afraid my broccoli raab would be kicked by the crowd. Michael Lally and Terence Winch have such distinguished and dynamic careers, it's clear why the KGB was filled with a diverse and supportive audience. Lally is an actor, an anthology editor (re: None of the Above: New Poets of the USA, 1978), and the author of 27 books. On his blog, he characterizes himself as an, "ex-jazz-musician/proto-rapper/Jersey-Irish-poet-actor/print-junkie/film-raptor/beat-hipster-"white Negro"-rhapsodizer/ex-hippie-punk-'60s-radical-organizer's take on all things cultural, political, spiritual & aggrandizing." His poems have an intense musicality to them, a blend of Irish ballads, disco, and jazz that at some points spin out into archly political poems that address the disgraces of the Bush administration and at other times refocus on the microcosm of tensions embedded in his own Irish American culture/childhood that created a sense of rich tradition and community to the exclusion and expense of others, which Lally still contends with.

Winch is an acclaimed musician, a short fiction and a non-fiction writer, as well as a poet. Switching between elegies, villanelles, the Q&A format, and humorous but biting narrative digressions about his youth, Winch steered his reader through his Irish Catholic upbringing and examines the personal experiences, the larger social movements, and philosophies that made him test his faith. It's as though he has opened his memory box and allowed us to sort through it. In the process, we find much more than birthday cards and old love letters -- there are broken beer bottles, communion wafers, and a few flakes of dried blood.

-- Julia Cohen

Terence Winch
Photo by (c) Star Black

Michael Lally and son Flynn
Photo by (c) Star Black

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2008

Interview with Tzimon Barto: Languages, Poetry and Education [by Lera Auerbach]

 I am always fascinated by people who are masters of more than one profession.  I interviewed Tzimon Barto for the Best American Poetry blog. His passions and knowledge run deep. Tzimon Barto speaks seven languages fluently, reads ancient Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; his love of poetry is contagious, his ideas about education are inspiring.

      

For a taste of Barto's music-making here he is performing Mozart's Rondo for Piano and Orchestra in A major with the SWR Symphonieorchester and Christoph Eschenbach.

 

Love's Philosophy [by Percy Bysshe Shelley]

Love's Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river,
And the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In another's being mingle--
Why not I with thine?

See, the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister flower could be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea;--
What are all these kissings worth,
If thou kiss not me?

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

An Interview with Rachel Hadas [by Aspen Matis]

Rachel Hadas is the author of more than twenty books of verse and prose, including the acclaimed poetry collections Poems for Camilla, Questions in the Vestibule and, most recently, Love and Dread. Her poems appear in many magazines, journals, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, and she is a frequent reviewer and columnist for the LondonTimes Literary Supplement. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry, an Ingram Merrill Foundation grant in poetry, and an award in literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and she has taught courses in literature and writing at Columbia and Princeton and is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark, where she has taught for many years. She lives in New York City.

I corresponded with Ms. Hadas via email about poetry’s power to offer “the life raft of language by fusing the private and the universal. We also discussed imagination’s ability to press back against the pressure of reality and the gritty nature of the poetry that feels most alive — that these poems are “often made of mundanity and suffering,” not merely sterile sentiments and “truths.”

And through the poet’s transcendent work, we glimpse the complex weave of love and dread called life. 

Photo credit: Shalom Gorewitz

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

Poetry has always meant for me the place where inner life and outer world meet. It helps and challenges me to express, observe, clarify, get a second chance. At different stages of my life, poetry has enabled me to remember; to replay; to find courage; to tell the truth. Although I haven’t always been aware of this salient role poetry has played, I’ve been writing steadily for well over half a century, and poetry has always offered what James Merrill, a friend and guiding light, called “the life raft of language.” So even if I didn’t always know why, I turned to poetry from an early age and never stopped.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course? 

I’m wary of making grandiose claims for poetry. (Would that it were, that anything were, a unifying force!) Poets have always loved to talk about how powerful and important poetry is, and I’m no exception. Poetry’s power to fuse the private and the universal always amazes me, as does its ability to offer a reprieve (as you aptly phrase it) from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence. But poetry’s role is more complicated than that. Poetry is often made of mundanity and suffering; if it excludes or flees them, it risks being empty, generic, sentimental. Each poet has to manage their own balancing act, whether in formal or thematic terms, or both, between the mundane and the visionary, the public and the private — one could add so many pairs. A complicating factor is that poets come with their own talents and temperaments, their own obsessions and models, their own reading and experience.

Your most recent book of poems, Love and Dread, was published by Measure Press in July of this year to widespread praise. Poet Jessica Greenbaum describes the collection as “contemplative and joyous,” writing that — in this collection — you have “set up shop at the borders of inside and out, past and future, life and death, the conscious and the subconscious,” and your “wares from these liminal thresholds are those rarest of treasured souvenirs that absolutely cannot be found anywhere else.” Poet and translator A.E. Stallings describes the collection as prophetic, its tone and content evoking the pandemic months before it ravaged the globe, writing that the work “seems to speak already to that world of closeness and anxiety,” and poet Andrés Cerpa writes that the book finds “the quiet truths that exist in the everyday ceremony of love,” calling the book “poised and ecstatic.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Finding titles for my books used to pose a challenge — not anymore.  Since I fell in love with Shalom Gorewitz early in 2013, and later that same year was quite sick, and then when Trump started to loom on the horizon, and since, the twin themes or poles of love and dread have seemed incredibly clear. They’re even clearer now, in our time of unremitting disasters: lots of daily dread, yet not only dread.

To step back a bit, my poems have addressed mortality, have tended toward the elegiac, since my father’s death when I was seventeen. In the decades since then, the largeness, the universality both of our sense of attachment and of the fear of losing what we’re attached to — this has felt increasingly like my master idea.  Often this doubleness has played out in a single poem — not only the title poem of “Love and Dread” but in, say, “A Poultice” or “Midair,” and other poems in the collection, most of which was written between 2015 and 2017.  Originally I thought of dividing the manuscript into a Love section and a Dread section, but it seemed truer to life and art to weave the dark and the light together — as they are woven together every day.

Your stunning poem “In the Cloud,” published in The New Yorker in May of this year, beautifully evokes two dual abstractions: language and digital technology, such as Zoom and the cloud, where contact and content exist — but virtually. You write: “Words deeply pondered start to freeze — / as when before our tired eyes / Zoom stalls and stops (and no surprise), / leaving a dark screen, a blank hour / to fill with after and before.” What moment or interaction — or ongoing experience and feeling — sparked the light of this powerful poem?

“In the Cloud” had the original and very flat title “The List,” and it really was inspired by a list, which I really did lose, of words my poetry students (in a Gen. Ed. Poetry course I was teaching remotely for Rutgers-Newark in the fall of 2020) didn’t know. Once I began to jot down those words from memory, the rhyme and meter carried me swiftly along.

A lot of the poems I’ve written in the past few years are rhymed tetrameter couplets. A.E. Stallings, in her Foreword to Love and Dread, writes that “the indicative mood of this volume is the couplet, the wedding of opposites, as if translated from a language where “love” and “dread” do indeed rhyme.” I’d only add that for better or worse, I rarely overthink (or even think consciously at all about) formal matters; the decision tends to make itself, and off I go.

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

In the seventeenth century I especially love George Herbert (I’m hardly alone in that), and in the eighteenth, perhaps following in Merrill’s footsteps, Alexander Pope.  Compression, elegance, wit.

Your new book of essays, Piece by Piece, was published by Paul Dry Books in June of this year. Scholar David Mikics calls the work “haunting and intensely memorable,” and the publisher describes the collection as a book “about paying attention.” In the introduction, you write that you are “interested in…the obliterations and transformations of memory,” and, in this exploration, you pose the questions, “What and how do I recall what I’ve read, sometimes many years before? How, at different times in my life, did books help me?” What is the role of literature in your life? And how do reading and living well and fully relate to one another, in your eyes?

Piece by Piece is in many ways a memoir of reading: what I read, what I remember, how it helped. What Wallace Stevens said about the imagination, that it helps us to press back against the pressure of reality, comes to mind; reading does that, it can offer or seem to offer us a safe place, an escape. But just as I said earlier that mundanity and suffering are crucial elements of poetry, in the same way the very reality against which reading might seem to exert a saving counter-pressure is also found in books. 

Sharing a book, reading to a child, teaching a text to students — I don’t know a better way of caring, of human helping, person by person, page by page — whether with a toddler on one’s lap or staring at a screen full of faces. I’m the child of bookish parents, the mother of a bookish son, sister of a bookish sister, and the fortunate teacher of hundreds of students.

Piece by Piece, I hope, is about all these things.

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

I’m not the only older person to opine that young poets should read.

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

I’ve recently finished a collection of poems entitled Pandemic Almanac. Also, my translation of one of forty-eight sections of the Dionysiaca, a zany and baroque Greek poem from late antiquity, should appear next spring. Working on this translation kept me happily occupied during the first stages of the pandemic.

“Translating,” says my husband Shalom, “is your Sudoku.”

Anne Sexton: On the Anniversary of her Death [ed. Terence Winch]

 

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

 

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

 

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

 Anne Sexton studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her nervous breakdown and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable. Her second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die (1966), a further record of emotional illness, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). Sexton taught at Boston University in 1970–71 and at Colgate University in 1971–72. She also wrote a number of children’s books with her close friend, poet Maxine Kumin.  Sexton died by her own hand on Oct. 4^th, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton), and Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978) were published posthumously. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton, was published in 1977 and No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose in 1985.      [from the Encyclopaedia Britannica]

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

 

An Interview with Justin Jamail [by Aspen Matis]

Poet and attorney Justin Jamail is the author of Exchangeable Bonds, published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. His poems and commentary have appeared in many journals and online publications, and he is the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden. Raised in Houston, Texas, he now lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

I corresponded with Mr. Jamail via email about the radical nature of uncommon wit, the arena of poetry criticism as a realm “where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed,” and the pleasure of rereading great works many times over. We also discussed the intimate relationship between clarity and metaphor thought Mr. Jamail’s original definition of “exchangeable bonds” in the context of a poem: “Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.”

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

I write poems for fun, as an intellectual challenge or game, and because I think poems can be beautiful. Also to impress my wife and other friends.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

Very generally speaking, it seems to me that art is necessary for the good life. I just mean that as an empirical observation — I don’t have any explanation for why it is necessary or what it “does,” and I am not interested in those questions at all. That man does not live on bread alone can also be taken as an empirical observation rather than as a moral or theological principle. That is what I mean here. Poetry is a kind of art, so it fills that role in “our present society” as it has in every other society. Its comparative advantage, I guess, is that it fits in the pocket or average memory and, among literary arts, seems to me to place the least burden on the audience. Its apparent necessity notwithstanding, our present society rather overvalues art and poetry than undervalues it — or so it seems to me.

In your view, in what way does our present society overvalue art and poetry? I imagine that’s an uncommon perspective, among poets.

Oh, I mainly mean expressions that seem to reveal an expectation that promises more from art than it can give. Expectations that poetry will make the audience better, wiser, or more successful people or citizens, for example. Or, as a very different example, any expectation that any aesthetic experience can approach the value placed on oil paintings. It’s modern cant (there’s an 18th century influence!). I would gladly have all awareness of the existence of Picasso erased from my mind in exchange for the current market value of one of his paintings. Probably.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Demonstrate uncommon skill and wit without the appearance of effort or diligence or pride.

Your book of poems, Exchangeable Bonds, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2018. Poet and editor David Lehman praised the collection as a “book worthy of its legacy,” in which one “can sense the benign influence of such major New York School figures as Kenneth Koch and Paul Violi.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this debut collection? Is there a particular inquiry or exploration that unifies the book? And what do you hope readers will be left with, after the final page?

These were what seemed to be most of the best poems I had written over a pretty long period. Tony Towle, one of my favorite poets, was nice enough to give me advice on the ordering in addition to some splendid editorial comments. I hope the audience likes the poems. For someone as authoritative as David to have sensed the influence of poets as great as Koch and Violi is pretty humbling. There is no doubt that those poets exert a huge influence on my sense of what makes a poem successful.

What do you do (beyond listening) when “The room pulls away” and you are standing, as in your fine poem Early April Subway?

Write poetry! — or anyway a line or two.

What are exchangeable bonds, metaphorically speaking?

Any mechanism that turns one thing into something apparently unrelated to the first thing. Like a chrysalis that turns a caterpillar into a pocket knife.

You dedicated your book to “My fathers” — who are these men? 

Jeffrey Jamail and David Lifson

You are an accomplished attorney, currently the General Counsel of The New York Botanical Garden; is there a place in your creative practice where your legal and poetic fascinations unify? Or are these lines of work necessarily distinct — two independent threads of your life’s tapestry? 

I don’t see much connection. The scenes and clichés of office work life enter poems fairly often, I notice. Hmmm… I may write a Georgics of the office…

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

Robert Herrick. Andrew Marvell. Shakespeare of course if we are talking early 17th century (is he part of the “long 16th”? Probably.). I read a lot of 17th and 18th century sermons; I think it is a neglected area of excellent English literature. If I had the time for an academical career I would concentrate on this. I read some poems by Sarah Egerton and Anne Finch last year and liked them quite a bit. I like Oliver Goldsmith’s writing. It’s hard to be inspired by 18th century poetry because there is a lot of “inside baseball” — references to each other and contemporary events and so forth. But I admire it a great deal. Those poets were masters of skills I don’t seem to have developed to any meaningful degree.

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?

Poetry criticism is an area where people who have a desperation to say something when there is nothing to be said seem to have that defect most exposed. I have been told that one should not argue about taste, but that is not a reason for extending one’s exposure to bad taste. When poetry is critiqued well, what happens is that a critic has told convincingly in what way a poem or poet is successful or unsuccessful. This is valuable because it can form what is really only an impression of taste (or something) into clear ideas. Sometimes criticism can be the occasion for general remarks on mankind, of course. Such writing is often also a pleasurable or beautiful thing in its own right.

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 haven’t noticed much correlation, but I don’t read enough to take an intelligent view. The results of the system seem consistent with the construction of the system?  

The reason great works become obscure is that there are too many great works to read conveniently and there is also (as Johnson noted) a social pressure that many seem to feel to keep up with whatever is current, so good things get neglected. I mean, I am 41 years old, have enjoyed English literature for decades, and am only now reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with attention. Yet there are serious people who consider it the most admirable work in the language! For every such book that I have neglected, there must be dozens of less famous works. Also, I think I could defend an observation that there has been a steady increase in the quantity of literature of all kinds and all qualities. What keeps me, in particular, among those responsible for great works falling into obscurity is that I reread favorite works many times over. I guess I have a terrible memory for literature!

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

Read more.

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

A Georgics of the office and more short lyric poems that I hope my wife will like.

An Interview with Lawrence Joseph [by Aspen Matis]

Lawrence Joseph is the author of seven books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). His other books of poems include So Where Are We? (FSG, 2017), Into It (FSG, 2005) and Codes, Precepts, Biases, and Taboos: Poems 1973 – 1993 (FSG, 2005). He is also the author of Lawyerland (FSG, 1997), a nonfiction novel. He is Tinnelly Professor of Law (emeritus) at St. John’s University School of Law and lives with his wife in New York City.

I corresponded with Mr. Joseph via email about poetry as an access to viewing and comprehending “the inner lives of a culture,” the language of law, and the power of musicality to jolt us into new worlds. We also discussed the writing of poems as a “prayer for illumination and perfection.”

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

I write poems because I need to. Making poems is an integral part of my sensibility, of who I am. Poetry, for me, is human language in its most charged, distilled form, deeply infused with emotion and feeling, intellect and sensuality. A poem is an aesthetically composed object, an expression of the poet’s interior and exterior worlds. Robert Hayden described “the writing of poems as one way of coming to grips with inner and outer realities,” as “a spiritual act, really, a sort of prayer for illumination and perfection.” I wholeheartedly agree.  

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society? A unifying force? A destabilizing force of social and personal change? A reprieve from the mundanity and suffering of day-to-day existence? An access to greater empathy? A glimpse of inspiring beauty and truth? A compass that reveals new clarity of thought, redirecting our collective course?

Poetry helps us make sense of, and see, the realities of the worlds that we individually and collectively live in. It shows us the inner lives of a culture. At any given time it is the common voice with in us.  

Your most recent book of poems, A Certain Clarity, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in March of 2020. Described by the publisher as “passionately driven by an acute awareness of a deeper order in which beauty, love, and justice are indistinguishable,” the work presents selections from your six prior books of poetry. The New York Times calls the book “a major work of American art.” In your perception, is there an inquiry or exploration that unifies this newest collection? An underlying intention? And what do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

Each of my books has been written as a book, not as a collection of poems. My intention was that A Certain Clarity also be read as a book in itself. From the beginning — my first book, Shouting at No One, was published in 1983, and included poems written back to the mid-70s — my poems have addressed the power structures of American imperial war-making, finance capital, racism, misogyny, and ecological destruction, revealing the vicious hatred in America of the poor and weak. But, also from the beginning, I’ve set against these worlds of cruelty, violence and subjugation deeper truths — for me, the most human truths — of beauty and love — truths which, first of all, I believe in, and are, ultimately, what in my work I wish to leave my reader with.

You are the Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law in New York City, and — writing as an attorney — you have published on the subjects of employment, tort and compensation law, labor, jurisprudence, and legal theory. John Ashbery once called your work “poetry of great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness.” Is there a place in your vision where your legal and poetic fascinations meld, like tin-lead alloy wires becoming solder? Or are these professional threads necessarily distinct — two independent filaments of your mind’s tapestry?

In the United States the language of law covers every social, economic and political issue. During my forty-five years professionally as lawyer, I’ve practiced and taught this language, written critically about it, know it well, and have used it in my poetry. When Wallace Stevens, a career-long practicing lawyer, was asked about writing poetry and being a lawyer, he replied: “I don’t have a separate mind for legal work and another for writing poetry. I do each with my whole mind.” I feel the same way.

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

I’m writing my next book of poems, which will pick up where my last book, So Where Are We? left off, in early 2016, before Trump’s presidency and the pandemic. I’m also working on several prose projects, in various forms and genres.

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

I’m always learning my language, the American language, which, of course, is constantly changing, as America itself is constantly changing. Over time, I’ve created my own tradition. I look for poets and poems that jolt me into their worlds. I take apart poems that I love on every level of form and content that I can imagine and try to write poems that will have the same effect on a reader that these poems have had on me. And music, sound — poetry is, above all, sound. Be as attentive to the sounds of your words as you are to what your words say.

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” 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?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

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

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

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

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

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

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

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

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

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…

An Interview with Jennifer L. Knox [by Aspen Matis]

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections: Days of Shame and Failure, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, A Gringo Like Me, and, most recently, Crushing It. Her poems appear in many anthologies, including five volumes of The Best American Poetry, and in publications such as the New York Times, the New Yorker and American Poetry Review. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. The developer and curator of the crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, she teaches at Iowa State University.

I corresponded with Ms. Knox via email about poetry as an access to our subconscious, the joy (and profundity) of incongruous humor, humanity’s “endless capacity for self-deception,” and writing poetry as a means of purposeful dissociation—a counterintuitive, healthy path to healing. We also discussed the subtle beauty of poems that “have a bridge player’s memory,” the masterful way the “bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways.”

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

I write poems to dissociate in a healthy, purposeful way that doesn’t leave me hungover, in jail, or dead. I’ve long suspected that there was a physical component to the act of writing poems, because I feel good when I write poems, but I feel stupid when I engage in exclusively mental pursuits, like math. Recently I read that traumatized brains access an unprecedented calmness when they dissociate; though that calm is, in itself, addictive, purposeful dissociation is a healthy path to healing. Imagine putting on an astronaut suit and bounding around the smoldering ruins of your childhood. You see an object that terrified you long ago: an empty tin can with a fork sticking out. “We can use this!” you shout to the reader and hold up the can, which no longer scares you at all. Our “conversations” are different every time; I never have to be the same speaker. I can be Zsa Zsa Gabor, or a tree stump, or an SOS signal floating up from the ocean floor. As poems are relatively short, I only have to breathe the atmosphere for a brief time.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

Poetry gives us access to our subconscious, which we need to heal and evolve.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Defy expectations.

Your work is often praised for its sharp humor. The New York Times calls your poetry “massively entertaining,” and the Los Angeles Review writes of your “laugh-demanding wit.” Of your work’s tone, The Critical Flame says “Knox’s humor is the kind of funny which is surprising, generous, and vulnerable, and which demands generosity and vulnerability from the reader. This is the kind of funny we have found in writers as various as Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, and Kenneth Koch.” What, in your view, is the relationship between humor and truth? Between levity and profundity?

There are different kinds of humor. The one I enjoy using most often is incongruous humor, which defies the reader’s expectations, and my own as I write the poem. Sometimes the result is funny, sometimes it’s scary. Either way, not getting what I thought I was going to get feels very “true.”

Your most recent book of poems, Crushing It, is widely acclaimed. Publisher’s Weekly calls the collection “Darkly inventive… This is a careful, thoughtful book about the complexities of identity and the difficulty of words,” and The New York Times Book Review says that the work “hits, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery.” What inquiry or exploration unifies the collection?

Our endless capacity for self-deception—even in the face of the Anthropocene. 

What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

I would love it if readers felt that they had been seen in a perfectly imperfect way.

From 2016 through 2017, you developed and curated the online crowd-sourced poetry project Iowa Bird of Mouth, which honored Iowa birds through “the words and stories of bird lovers, bird watchers, writers, artists, musicians, teachers, students, scientists, nonprofits, federal and state organizations, environmental stewards, and nature lovers.” The project was supported by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, and over 750 people from around the world contributed original writing. What inspired this exciting project? And what exists at the nexus of poetry and flight? Of birds and wonder? Are you yourself a birder?

Iowa Bird of Mouth began with the question: why are some people compelled to create and others are not? For the Iowa Arts Council fellowship, I envisioned an online space in which people felt their words belonged, as if they were all part of one giant squawking, undulating flock. I researched crowdsourced poems (such as David Lehman’s long-running “Next Line, Please” project at The American Scholar) and saw that anonymity, access, and an inspiring subject were essential in motivating “norms” to participate. Iowans have an affinity for wild birds. Iowa Filmmaker Colleen Krantz told me, “I grew up on a cattle farm in western Iowa. There was absolutely nothing to look at and nothing to hear. But birds were the bling on our farm.”

I hoped that wild birds would draw people to the poem, and they did. Though I have adopted many parakeets and lovebirds, I knew nothing about wild birds. Thankfully, Iowa Young Birders Director, Tyler Harms, volunteered all his mad ornithological skills. I’m gobsmacked that Iowa Bird of Mouth happened. I’m pretty sure the reason I was able to pull it off was that the universe needed it to exist, though I don’t know why. You can see the website here. My essay about the project in American Poetry Review is here. The text and code are available for use in non-commercial projects. 

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Folly, hubris, self-deception, coping mechanisms, animals, TV, counter-intuitive manifestations of kindness and love, mushrooms, telecognition, homing instincts, science, crime.

The Los Angeles Review writes that your poetry “leaves the reader a different person.” To what extent is a great poem like a chemical element, reactive, interacting with the atmosphere of the moment—forever altering those who discover it, like sun on seeds?

My mother is an excellent bridge player. She has to pay attention to and remember everything that happens during the play of a hand. The poems I love have a bridge player’s memory. The bells that are rung in the title and the first line reverberate through until the end, shifting tones all the while in unexpected ways. Flannery O’Connor’s surprising yet inevitable ending is established by the end of the first line. So like a seed, the poem is waiting to pop. All it needs is the light of your attention. 

A CERTAIN CLARITY, AND TWO POEMS BY LAWRENCE JOSEPH [by John Hennessy]

 

Happy Juneteenth!  As noted earlier this week, I hope to take this opportunity to raise awareness of a few books that were launched in the early days of the pandemic. Lawrence Joseph's A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems came out in March, 2020, just as much of the country was shutting down, to excellent reviews in The New York Times, LRB, and elsewhere. Writing in the London Review of Books, Michael Hofmann stunningly observes:

“Almost uniquely among contemporary American poets, Joseph doesn’t retail privities, doesn’t chase the minuscule scraps of sublimity left to us, doesn’t retreat to his literal or figurative cabin in the woods. Readers of his work may be tempted to conclude: this poet doesn’t have a personal life. That’s because what the poems give us are the past fifty years – Joseph’s adult lifetime – in terms of event, public policy and the evolution of civilisation: the Detroit Race Riots, the Vietnam War, Watergate, the Twin Towers, globalisation and the internet, archaic and experimental weapons, from stones to ‘steerable/bombs, unprecedented precision, flexibility,/cost,/one, two/trillion’, from axes to ‘those low-flying A-10 Warthogs/ ... each of them, firing/one hundred bullets a second’. Then on to turbo-capitalism, the 2008 slump, Occupy Wall Street, toxins in the water in Flint, Michigan and beyond, Hurricane Irene and the flooding up and down the East Coast, the wars in Lebanon and Gaza and Syria and Afghanistan and Iraq (twice). I remember saying to myself long ago that if you are looking for a poetry that lucidly and systematically offers a sense of this world as a place where things go continually wrong, there is no one but Lawrence Joseph. It’s as though, instead of famously not doing so, Jane Austen had written only about the Napoleonic Wars, or Kafka about World War One.”

It's my pleasure to present here two of Joseph's poems. ("In One Day's Annals" was first published in The Common.)

IN ONE DAY’S ANNALS (by Lawrence Joseph)

Inscrutable the Muse Who Selects My Fate;
Breaking News Graphic, Word of the Attack

Spreads; History of the Great Exegesis;
The Gospel According to Saint Matthew;

Truly Stupendous Levels of Hatred;
and others, too many to mention, each

with their own characters, dialogues, scenes.
In his eternity, up to his waist in a pool

of green liquid poisons, the president who
raises his eyebrows, blows out his cheeks,

purses his lips, feigns surprise, smirks.
In one day’s annals, seen through Sweet

Revenge’s windows, Carmine Street’s
gold dusk light, purplish bronze shielding

Teardrop Park turning a misty gray, slipping
on the ice, falling, headfirst, onto Rector Street,

Number Two subway train’s lights go out—
he continues to play—lights on again—

he finishes, lifts his guitar and kisses it—
on one of fifteen years of Wednesdays,

millions of gallons of untreated sewage
discharged from the North River Wastewater

Treatment Plant’s pipes into the Hudson
and Harlem rivers. What’s clear,

delicate, beautiful, what’s ugly, horrifying;
but why we go to the end of the night

is for no other reason than another
moral to the story, the primal paradise

the body remembers, elemental stasis
of infinities of light and of time, hypostatic.

Lawrence Joseph was born and raised in Detroit, the grandson of Lebanese and Syrian Catholic immigrants. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently So Where Are We (2017) and A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (2020), both from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I also want to mention—and recommend— his book Lawyerland, alternately dubbed novel, non-fiction, and non-fiction novel. He recently retired from St. John’s University School of Law, where he was Tinnelly Professor of Law, and lives in New York City.

Joseph is sui generis in American poetry—an apparent insider (frequently anthologized in Best American Poetry and other collections, Jonathan Galassi is his book editor) who until recently spent his days teaching labor law, far from the MFA circuit. Throughout his work, Joseph turns his uncompromising moral vision on the brutality inherent to the structures of power and calls for their dismantling. While his language and forms are utterly contemporary—this is a new poetry of resistance—his work is doubtlessly informed by Melville and Whitman, Stevens and Stein. A poet of “great dignity, grace, and unrelenting persuasiveness,” as John Ashbery has written, Joseph expertly combines images, ideas, and the language of political economy, labor and capital, racism and war, with expressions of great beauty and physical and emotional intimacy.

On Utopia Parkway, by Lawrence Joseph

Between Grand Central Parkway and Little Bay,

from One Hundred Sixty-Ninth and Hillside

 

to Union Turnpike, to work — countless days the streets

I take to work. The front yard of roses — 

 

did I write their names down correctly? — 

Zephirine, Charis, Proud Land, Drouhin, Blale.

 

Q31 bus, among the words I hear are

Jamie, Jamie does not like to be humiliated,

 

Jamie is not about to forget it, either. Not

physically well, a poor man, arrested

 

on suspicion of selling cigarettes loose,

on the street, held, choked, left unconscious,

 

still handcuffed, no cardiopulmonary resuscitation

administered, pronounced dead, the cause of death,

 

according to the autopsy report, a homicide — 

rectally infused puree of hummus, nuts, and raisins,

 

by employees of the Agency’s contractor,

isn’t torture, Director of Central Intelligence

 

explains, but, merely, legally justified means

of enhanced interrogation. 3708 Utopia Parkway

 

was Joseph Cornell’s small wood-frame house.

He might have worked on the Medici Slot Machine

 

on his kitchen table, a Renaissance Box, a theater

he called it, the Medici and Mussolini’s Fascist state

 

set in a metaphorical relation, its inner lines

the lines of the floor plan of the Pitti Palace,

 

the inclusion of an actual compass rose the expression

of an ascent from the temporal to the spiritual.

 

In what place, the Federal Reserve’s

monetary spigots and banks’ access

 

to cash pieced together with indexed futures, to reduce

the market’s decline — in what places, violations

 

of which forms of which eternal laws?

Is it error, the idea that no place, too, is a place?

 

On the corner of Utopia Parkway and Union Turnpike,

in red-blue twilight abstracted into an energy

 

blowing it apart, in spaces of language transformed

and coded, to be decoded and recoded in the future.

FATIMAH ASGHAR, KRISTINA FAUST, AMA CODJOE, FRANCISCO MÁRQUEZ: DISQUIET POETRY PRIZE WINNERS [by John Hennessy]

For the last four years at The Common we’ve been happy to partner with the DISQUIET International Literary Program, a two-week long conference bringing together writers from North America, Portugal, and throughout the Lusophone world. Our tenth-anniversary edition, Issue #20, featured a special portfolio of “Writing from the Lusosphere”—that is, “Portugal and its colonial and linguistic diaspora, with works in English and in translation exploring Lisbon, Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, and Mozambique.”

This partnership has also led to our publishing poems by the winners (and some of the runners-up) of their annual DISQUIET Poetry Prize. It’s my pleasure to present the first four of those winning poems here.

 

KUL, by Fatimah Asghar

Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kul.

A spell cast with the entire
mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. What day am I promised?

Tomorrow means I might have her forever.
Yesterday means I say goodbye, again.
Kul means they are the same.

I know you can bend time.
I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no

other reason than I deserve her.
If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
bring back the grave. Pluck the flower

of my mother’s body from the soil.
Kul means I’m in the crib eyelashes
wet the first time they open. Kul means

my sister is crawling away from her
on the bed as my father comes home
from work. Kul means she’s dancing

at my wedding not-yet-come
kul means she’s oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kul

means I wake to her strange voice in the kitchen
kul means she’s holding my baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.

Fatimah Asghar is a poet, filmmaker, educator and performer.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others.  Her work has been featured on news outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective, a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship recipient and a Kundiman Fellow. Her chapbook After came out on Yes Yes Books fall 2015. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color and the writer of If They Come For Us (One World, August 2018), a collection of poems that explores the legacy of Partition and orphan-hood. Along with Safia Elhillo, she is the editor of Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket 2019), an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender nonconforming and/or trans.

 

OFFSTAGE, CHRIST, by Kristina Faust

At the meal with the earnest centurion and the woman full of pain, he wanted to say the lamb was delicious. It surprised him to love it as much as he did the blinking gaze of the newly sighted, but to say so didn’t suit the narrative that was running through his fingers like water.

The bed they’d given him for the lonely night was more than adequate for a man. Besides, he was now nearly sentimental about the roughness of linen and the funk of straw.

That he’d never learn to cook was only one of the regrets that came to him in quiet rooms. He felt an ache at the back of his tongue knowing he would lose the taste of aniseed, say, the way others so easily forgot visions of the world without end and lapsed into dirt sense when merely stirred by a voice, a flame, or the shimmer of oil.

Kristina Faust is a native New Jerseyan living in Grand Rapids, MI. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2018 Disquiet Literary Prize for poetry.

BURYING SEEDS, by Ama Codjoe

for Betty Shabazz

Who, when they killed her husband, was carrying
twin girls—not in her arms, but in an armless
sea, with bits of blood as food. She covered

her daughters in the waters of her body.
She covered her daughters in the rooms
her body built, pressed against the wooden

floor of the Audubon Ballroom. She must have
cried, as my mother did, when she stuttered, Twins?
into the paper gown of the hospital room.

The body longs for its double. Even twins
stretch long their arms toward other strangers.
The first time I visited a mosque, I was surprised

to be separated from my father and brothers.
I sat, with the women and girls, alone.
From across the aisle, I stared at the men

longingly. As a child, I asked my preschool teacher
why I couldn’t play outside, shirtless like
the boys. It was a hot day. Before she could answer,

I relented, wearing my favorite undershirt—the one
with Archie, Betty, and Veronica—chasing
my sun-kissed brothers across the playground.

Lately, when I glimpse my nakedness in the half
mirror above the bathroom sink, I’m looking
at the photograph of Pauline Lumumba baring

her breasts as a sign of mourning. The widow’s
breasts and mine hang like four weeping eyes,
without titillation, fertility, or innocence.

I wanted to write a poem for Betty Shabazz
because her high cheekbones and luminous
eyes are like a BaKongo mask breathed

into with life. After her husband’s lifeless
body was wrapped in white linen and covered
by the words: what we place in the ground  

is no more now a man—but a seed—she took
one last look at him who had smiled at her
and touched, countless times, her unveiled face.

My mother did not wear a veil on her wedding day.
Eighteen years after their divorce, my father
fidgets with the gold band she slid along his finger.

As she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger,
shimmying the ring over my father’s knuckle,
which words did her mind circle over: worse or better 

death or death? That night, did my mother bunch
the hotel bedsheet in one hand like a nosegay?
Did she allow it—another white dress—to drag,

crumpled, behind her? The vows we promise
one another are veils through which we envision
the future; we enact our dreams using a vision

clouded by tulle and lace. Grief-stricken, Betty Shabazz
said of her husband’s assassination, Well, it finally
happened. Weeks prior, she had taken to wearing

her husband’s hat for comfort and continued to do so
after he died. I want a desire that could be mistaken
for grief to cloud my face, to make me shudder, to twist

my mouth into a cry. Once, I shared a bed with a man
who, as a boy, heard his parents’ lovemaking. I was
confused, he admitted, it sounded like they were in pain.

Grief is the bride of every good thing, Betty Shabazz
reminds me. I’m wearing a veil the shape of a waterfall,
which is also the shape of my mother’s dress falling

from her shoulders. Through its fabric, I can see a cloud
turning into a horse and a plane that could be a star—
a star that might be a planet. It’s hard to tell from here,

wrapped in the caul of the present, fixed on this plot
of grass, with so many seeds buried underground,
and winter—forged into a circle—threatening never to end.

Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude, forthcoming in 2022 by Milkweed Press. Among other honors, she has received a 2017 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. She lives in New York City and works in social justice and the arts.

 

PROVINCETOWN, by Francisco Márquez

Fixed at sunset, a wooden blue shack
as if with it a million scenes of shipwrecks,

not black rock or islands of fog rising individual
in a barrenness of salt. It is not that

it was not beautiful, but that I tried to conjure
its momentous light, eternal

that is inside the ordinary, and couldn’t. If I look
backwards, the mysteries forming themselves

in darkness, I remember
the heaviness of heat.

A soporific wave lifting from concrete.
There was more a strangeness

in the dark square of water lifting
from a mallard having submerged,

like the sun into water, than there was
to that wooden place. But to think of it

in exile, in its solitude of water,
to see it turn significant

against what could destroy it,
it was then I saw myself becoming it.

Francisco Márquez is a poet from Maracaibo, Venezuela, born in Miami, Florida. He is a graduate of the MFA program at NYU, and his work appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Narrative, and Bennington Review, among other publications. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Tin House, and The Poetry Project, as well as Letras Latinas and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is assistant web editor at Poets & Writers and lives in Brooklyn, New York. His poem presented here will be reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2021.

JOHN MURILLO: AN EYE ON KONTEMORARY AMERIKAN POETRY [by John Hennessy]

Today we turn to John Murillo’s Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry as we continue looking at several books that came out early in the pandemic:

 “Well, there is the pandemic, certainly. But I believe this current moment to be equally defined by the worldwide protests against anti-Black violence. One thing that’s occurred to me—and, to be frank, saddened me to no end—is that there has never been, and may never be, a moment in which it is passé to write about black suffering. There is a poem in my first book that I would dedicate, when I read it to an audience, to Sean Bell. A couple years later, I added Oscar Grant to the dedication. Now, I can dedicate that same poem to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and it will read as if I wrote it specifically for this moment. Next year, the poem will be relevant because of another Black body dropped. And it’s not because I was at all prescient when I wrote that poem, or any of the poems in my new collection. It’s because the conditions that give rise to these poems have not changed, and—all recent public proclamations of organizational solidarity notwithstanding—show no signs of truly changing any time soon. All to say, the current moment is not just the current moment, it’s tradition.”

--John Murillo, in an interview with Dora Malech, July 2020

Born in Los Angeles, John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie, finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (2020), winner of the 2021 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  His many honors include the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Times, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.  He teaches at Wesleyan University and in the low residency MFA program at Sierra Nevada College.

Murillo’s poems appear in multiple issues of Best American Poetry and in the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African-American Poetry. Here’s “On Confessionalism,” from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common and reprinted in Best American Poetry 2019.

On Confessionalism

Not sleepwalking, but waking still,

with my hand on a gun, and the gun

in a mouth, and the mouth

on the face of a man on his knees. 

Autumn of ’89, and I’m standing

in a section 8 apartment parking lot,

pistol cocked, and staring down

at this man, then up into the mug

of an old woman staring, watering

the single sad flower to the left

of her stoop, the flower also staring,

my engine idling behind me, a slow

moaning bassline and the bark

of a dead rapper nudging me on. 

All to say, someone’s brokenhearted. 

And this man with the gun in his mouth—

this man who, like me, is really little

more than a boy—may or may not

have something to do with it. 

May or may not have said a thing

or two, betrayed a secret, say,

that walked my love away.  And why

not say it:  She adored me.  And I,

her.  More than anyone, anything

in life, up to then, and then still,

for two decades after.  And, therefore,

went for broke.  Blacked out and woke

having gutted my piggy and pawned

all my gold to buy what a homeboy

said was a Beretta.  Blacked out

and woke, my hand on a gun, the gun

in a mouth, a man, who was really

a boy, on his knees. And because

I loved the girl, I actually paused

before I pulled the trigger—once,

twice, three times—then panicked

not just because the gun jammed,

but because what if it hadn’t,

because who did I almost become,

there, that afternoon, in a section 8

apartment parking lot, pistol cocked,

with the sad flower staring, because

I knew the girl I loved—no matter

how this all played out—would never

have me back.  Day of damaged ammo,

or grime that clogged the chamber.

Day of faulty rods, or springs come

loose in my fist.  Day nobody died,

so why not hallelujah?  Say amen or

Thank you?  My mother sang for years

of God, babes and fools.  My father, 

lymph node masses fading from

his x-rays, said surviving one thing

means another comes and kills you.

He’s dead, and so, I trust him.  Dead,

and so I’d wonder, years, about the work

I left undone—boy on his knees

a man now, risen, and likely plotting

his long way back to me.  Fuck it.

I tucked my tool like the movie gangsters

do, and jumped back in my bucket.

Cold enough day to make a young man

weep, afternoon when everything,

or nothing, changed forever.  The dead

rapper grunted, the bassline faded,

my spirits whispered something

from the trees.  I left then lost the pistol

in a storm drain, somewhere between

that life and this.  Left the pistol

in a storm drain, but can’t remember

ever wiping away my prints.

 

In an interview, when asked about the collective purpose writers have, Murillo answered:

“I believe literature has the potential to make us more human. Poetry, drama, literary fiction, creative nonfiction—when done right—can show us exactly who we are and who we still might become. For better or worse. So, yes, I do believe we have a collective purpose. Not necessarily as individuals, or in our individual works, but as a whole, I think we’re here to help us—humanity—do and be better.”

This humanitarian center to his project, his poems, his person, is immediately apparent when you read Murillo, and it’s clearly in evidence in “On Confessionalism.”

In the same interview he was asked: What’s the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words?

The answer: “A seventh grade love letter.”

So he’s funny, too, and that humor that also occasionally appears in his poems highlights their deep seriousness. This is especially in evidence in his linked sonnet sequence, “Renegades of Funk,” from Up Jump the Boogie. Murillo is a virtuoso when it comes to the sonnet, and at the heart of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry is the magnificent “broken” crown, “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” some of the most challenging work to appear in this reader’s lifetime.

These poems illustrate what Murillo has said in another Q and A: “I write, first of all, in the tradition of the witness.” His work as a witness is concentrated, full of clarity, invention, and a humanity made stronger by its vulnerability.

On Negative Capability

      Whitewalls  Mudflaps

Late night howling down

   a dark dirt road   Headlights

killed and so the world gone

   black but for the two blunts

lit  illuminating Jojo’s fake gold

   grin    One girl each  screaming

from the backseat  we raced

   the red moon  rawdogged

the stars   His mama’s car

   my daddy’s gun   Public Enemy

Number One   Seventeen and

   simple  we wannabe hard-

rocks threw rudeboy fingers

   and gang signs at the sky

Blinded by the hot smoke

   rising like the sirens

in the subwoofers   blinded

   by the crotchfunk rising

from all our eager selves   We

   mashed in perfect murk   a city

block’s length  at least

   toward God   toward God

knows what  when  or why  

   neither Jojo nor I  not our

two dates screaming   had a clue

   or even care   what the dark

ahead held       Come road

   come night   come blackness

and the cold   Come havoc

   come mayhem   Come down

God   and see us   Come

   bloodshot moon running

alongside the ride  as if

   to warn us away from  as if

to run us straight into   some

   jagged tooth and jackal throated

roadside ditch     When Jojo

   gunned the gas  we pushed into

that night like a nest of sleeping

   jaybirds  shaken loose and

plunging    Between our screams

   a hush so heavy   we could

almost hear what was waiting

   in the dark

(from Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, first published in The Common)

VIEVEE FRANCIS: Devotion [by John Hennessy]

As I noted earlier this week, for the next few days my focus here will be on presenting work by several of the poets we’ve published in The Common. Today we turn to the inimitable Vievee Francis.

THIS MORNING I MISS SUCH DEVOTION, by Vievee Francis

There is a sister whose voice is gentle as a lullaby. A lulling. Even when angered she won't yell. A particular upbringing that eschews the loud, though such a woman can be found embracing those whose voices swell in the streets. Perhaps less saintliness than a vicarious expression of her own rage? Frustrations? Drawing the brawler, the harsh and violent close. The softness embedded in her accent. An oiled woman. Pink lipstick on her brown lips. A woman who pulls biscuits on a Saturday from the oven. Bathwater woman. Sweet liquor in a white cabinet woman. I have found this woman in Tennessee. In Texas. In Alabama. In Mississippi. And clung to her.  Darling, and Dearest, and Hush Honey on the tongue. Not silence but delicacy, a blue slip in the drawer. A breeze through the oak leaves. Cuss and she won't shush you, she'll laugh and take you inside. Feed you cake, brush out your damp hair, pull you onto her lap, draw the cedar from the wound.

 

Born in West Texas and raised there and in Detroit, Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2010) and Forest Primeval (winner of the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry magazine, many editions of Best American Poetry, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship, and in 2021, the Aiken Taylor Award from The Sewanee Review. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

In an interview Francis has said: “I want to know how poetry serves us collectively and as individuals in ways that meet this era, this moment; however, in order to gain that understanding, contexts cannot be ignored, nor can history be set aside. It is the intent of my instruction and an inherent objective of my own poetry to upturn how we think about poetry, its lineage, and the cultural impact of received aesthetics.” And of her own poetry, Francis says, “I’m very much saying that how African-American women are defined is inhuman in its narrowness, and that I, for one, am not going to allow it.”

The idea of giving oneself permission, no, not just the idea but the act of giving oneself permission—permission to confront and dismantle such pathological definitions, to write against them and in doing so upend them—to give oneself permission to be an intellectual, as well as permission to love, to be loved—infuses all of Vievee Francis’s work. We read Francis and it’s a give and take: we take her example and give ourselves permission to do the same.

Here are three more poems by Vievee Francis (first published in The Common):

 

THE BEAUTY OF BOYS IS 

that they are not men,

that they have not settled into their beards and

remorse, their crow’s feet and givens.

There is not yet an investment in houses

settling onto their foundations, hair, or

yesterday. The boy senses his time is precarious,

growing shorter as he sprouts up, so he spends

time believing, in everything,

                                                   he climbs and

he tumbles and tunnels and spills and 

puts to good use his stones and his quarters,

penknife and book, even the stick he uses

to defeat his awkward shadow. He will dream

into existence a raft, a rocket, a fort of mud.

From a cloud

                        a gift of horses. 

From the sand

                        castle and moat,

                        kingdom and cause.

Every boy knows he is a lone king,

that above hover dragons

from which he cannot withdraw, and so he must

pull from his quiver the makeshift arrow,

so he must, draw the bow, and not yet divided

from his body all is possible.

                                                  He looks up

toward a darkening horizon, certain. So certain.

 

 

ON LEAVING THE MOUNTAINS AND COMING

TO THE CITY I THOUGHT I LEFT FOR GOOD

Without the backdrop of leaves and scat,

the possum playing possum, its mate

the same. Without the tip of the road,

its black pitch wound like a widow’s wail

through the wet trees. Consider the undergrowth

and what hides there. The brown bristle

of the hedge. The singular call of a bird

its beak red-tipped, it’s feathers black

as a pool in the moss. Without the reflection

of a dog’s tongue in the water, or the stone

lobbed over the surface in order to see

the surface ripple like a skirt being pulled up.

Only the city, present, in the face like a shout,

like a lie yelled as if to assert its veracity, but

everyone hearing it knows it’s just not true.

I reenter the city still standing, its back turned

to the forest of bears and bluing brush, and

the inedible red fruit, the berries hung just at the mouth’s

reach, that beckon easily as they would poison. Me

and the city that wraps me in its leather coat and spikes,

tragic ink, and garble: vodka after vodka, after

shot after shot, my slurred proclamations

of love where love doesn’t go far, but lays

dead as a clever rodent. In the alleyways

I kick my boots against a crumbling wall

that will always be crumbling but never fall.

The smell of sausage spilling from a factory

of sausages assuages the memory of a canopy

of green, and the verge pressing into my waist

like the hands of a man eager to take

my measure, the heat like a cologne

emitted from the skin, like a fear of

the wild before entering another, wilder.

                    --Vievee Francis

 

 

MOAN SOFT LIKE YOU WANTED SOMEBODY TERRIBLE

 (C.S.)

And if it comes to pass, the would be politician, or the lover,

and what was said was never meant, is now distant

as those moments your desire swirled about you

like new snow, cold and brisk and enlivening, remember

it was you feeling adrift,

misunderstood, calamitous, and alone, you dear,

who so needed the need grew into a rally, a rant

of promises now un-promised –

 

And the night is a hand slid over your mouth. Demanding

your silence. It surprised you,

the shift, the sudden denial, the smooth indifference –

though truth be told –

there were hints of the turn of weather in the air. Remember?

All that bluster you took

for courage. All of those copperheads you took for care.

            --Vievee Francis

The New York School Diaspora (Part Five): Nin Andrews [by Angela Ball]

Sometimes I feel so inspired
after Ulalume González de LeónI think I am flying. Yes, flying far away. So far away, in fact, that between you and me, I am at a loss for words. So this is what it’s like to be an artist, I think. Which brings me to the question: if I had to choose between being bliss and writing about it, which would I choose?

Oh Yellow Bird, I sigh as I gaze outside. Oh Yellow Sun, Yellow Mood flooding my office with longing, I want to surrender to you. I want to give up all my bad habits.

I am so filled with happiness, I do not write. I cannot. What should I do? I finally ask you, my dearest poet friend. You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.

Word by word, line by line, I change my mind. I change my mood, my laundry, my socks. I change the sun into wind, the wind into clouds and grief. I talk about my soul as if it were a shroud, my heart as if it were lost. Then I change it into a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.

Yes, I lie. Today, I am a poet. I write lies.

Nin Andrews is the author of seven chapbooks and seven full-length collections of poetry. Her poems have appeared in many literary reviews and anthologies including Ploughshares, The Paris Review, The Best of the Prose Poem, and four volumes of Best American Poetry. She has translated the prose poems of Henri Michaux and edited an anthology of them titled Someone Wants to Steal My Name (Cleveland State University Press). Her most recent book, The Last Orgasm, was published by Etruscan Press in 2020.

In writing this poem, I was thinking how inspiration is the crack cocaine of writers—that there’s a high when the rush of ideas and images and words coalesces in the mind and begins to form a poem, an essay, a story. But there are also those days when the high is there, but one can lack the ability to translate it into words. I wanted to describe the distance that sometimes opens up between what I feel and what I can express, between what I say and what I mean, between what I describe and what I actually see. I was also thinking of the Mexican poet, Ulalume González de León, and how she often addresses that which cannot be put into words.
--Nin Andrews

The New York School Diaspora, Part Five: Nin Andrews

Nin Andrews’s poem, “Sometimes I feel so inspired,” like the poems of Frank O’Hara, engages the mutable and its quandaries, the seemingly competing needs to experience bliss and to write it. Here, as in O’Hara, there are friends to consult: “What should I do?” . . .”You don’t answer. So I watch you. I do what you do.” The vexed question, Be or Write: O’Hara evaded it. Or rather, surrendered to both, as Andrews does in this poem inspired by Ulalume González de León.

Like Mayakovsky, O’Hara and Andrews are clouds in human dress, implicated in the bliss of vapor’s changing shapes. O’Hara’s heart resides in his pocket, “it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy”; Andrews’ changes hers into beauty, nourishment, practicality: “a sparrow, an egg, a frying pan.” As O’Hara says, “The eagerness of objects to / be what we are afraid to do / cannot help but move us.”

“Sometimes I feel so inspired” is an encounter of sensibility with world. To read is like strapping oneself to an experienced parachutist. We land on the fact of poetry and its seminal prevarication.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora (Part Four): Barbara Hamby [by Angela Ball]

               Ode on My Prison

This morning I read about a couple arrested
       for selling hundreds of tickets to heaven
which they said were made from pure gold
       and all you have to do is hand yours over
to St. Peter and you are ushered into paradise. Tito Watts,
       the mastermind of this scheme, told the police
Jesus gave him the tickets in the parking lot
       behind the KFC and told him to sell them
so he could pay Stevie, an alien Tito met at a bar,
       to take him to a planet made of drugs.
"You should arrest Jesus," said Tito. "I'll wear a wire
       and set him up." His wife agreed they both
wanted to leave Earth, and I know how she feels,
       because most newspaper stories are such a bummer—
sexcapades, lying, the Russians—so Jesus, where
       is my golden ticket? Not that I'm all that keen
to go to heaven, but I would like to go to Vietnam
       and Cambodia, though I guess a travel agent
could set that up for me, and I'm always fantasizing
       about dropping in on Haydon’s immortal dinner
and eavesdropping on Keats and Wordsworth or spending
       a fortnight in London in 1601, seeing Shakespeare
as Hamlet's father’s ghost, taking in the general squalor
       and maybe picking up some manuscripts
from the printing house floor, tucking them in my farthingale,
       and then taking off to Chawton Cottage to stalk
Jane Austen for a while, though in that dress it’s going to be hard
       to go incognito, so maybe I should wear black jeans,
and you may be forgiven for thinking that I’ve touched down
       on that planet of drugs, but who needs them
really when your mind can spin out its own delirium,
       a dream here, a phantasmagoria there, and right now
I'm fixated on Tito wired to bust Jesus, and doesn't it seem
       sometimes as if we’re hanging around the KFC
waiting for something supernatural to appear, not Jesus,
       but maybe Walt Whitman walking to New Orleans
with his brother, a cloud of words crowding out Stevie
       and the other aliens as Walt fuels his own dream
of America where we’re looking after each other instead
       of grubbing for all the moolah we can stuff
up our backsides, though a friend of my sister’s says that Earth
       is an alien penal colony, and we’re all doing time
for crimes against the universe, so I guess Stevie’s a rogue
       guard in the Florida penitentiary, and sometimes
my body does seem like a prison of sprains and back pain,
       my mind like the trenches at Verdun—the mud,
the mustard gas—yet when the war is over, I'm still alive,
       seem to have all my limbs, every cup of tea
is ambrosia, and if that’s not enough, it’s May, jasmine
       and roses are blooming, my heart clambering
over the clouds as if on wings, and I can’t help but think
       of Solzhenitsyn looking back on his years in the gulag
saying, “Bless you, my prison, for having been in my life.”

I usually start writing with an image (golden tickets to heaven) and then let my mind roam free and make wild associations. I love it when a poem surprises me, and this one did. It was like riding a roller coaster. I wrote it during the summer of 2018 in Florence. I had had a busy spring semester in which I hadn't had time to do much writing, but I had been collecting lots of starts and notes. I think I ended up writing 45 pages that summer, which turned out to be over half of my new book Holoholo. I was on fire. I doubt I'll see the like of that again, but I can always hope.

--Barbara Hamby

Barbara Hamby is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). She was a 2010 Guggenheim fellow in Poetry and her book of short stories, Lester Higata’s 20^th Century, won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University.

The New York School Diaspora, Part Four: Barbara Hamby

“Ode On My Prison,” from Barbara Hamby’s peripatetic new book, Holoholo, recalls Frank O’Hara’s celebration of the immediate, “Having a Coke with You,” that begins, “is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne.” Hamby’s imagined travelogue spools from news that  a couple has been arrested for “selling tickets to Heaven.”

In O’Hara-esque fashion, Hamby honors her subject by departure in pursuit of the extravagant choices it suggests.  Instead of a ticket to Heaven or O’Hara’s “warm New York 4 o’clock light,” she opts for “Vietnam and Cambodia” “Haydon’s famous dinner,” “Walt Whitman walking to New Orleans,” a “cup of tea,” “May,” “jasmine and roses.” The result is both baroque and colloquial. Invoking Shakespeare’s turn as Hamlet’s father’s ghost, Hamby then riffs on the bard’s trope of mind as prison by making hers “like the trenches at Verdun” and her body “a prison of sprains and back pain.”  Provided in lieu of the abstractions we expect, these harsh specifics are pure comedy.

The poem rejects the monotony of heaven in favor of the chaos of dailiness. It accepts the premise of earth as prison, one that—like Solzhenitsyn’s—inspires permanent gratitude from its inmates.

--Angela Ball

The New York School Diaspora Part Three: Allison Campbell [by Angela Ball]

STENDHAL SYNDROME

Ever wanted to make love to a work of art—
die in the obscene smear of paint or a written passage
where the protagonist stands on a Sears Tower diving board
but then climbs down, ever mirrored a manikin and felt
you were falling into its apparel, the fabric swimming you,
sometimes listened to music with the back of your head
or took a moment in the bath to observe the water in opposition
with your hair, had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying
something hidden, finding a stranger knew your feelings exactly,
but more so, decided nature is wonderful, but alive, you needed
acrylic, oil, the page, a breathing note, or a warm drink in a white cafe
designed by someone rich from drawing children in animal suits?
It’s not that you cannot go on living without these things,
it’s that without them you have questioned the point.

Allison Campbell is the author of the prose poetry collection Encyclopédie of the Common & Encompassing. Her work has appeared in such places as Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Tampa Review, Witness, and Rattle. She lives in New Orleans.

In a museum built into the side of a mountain, I stood before Claude Monet’s Sunset on the Seine in Winter. Until this point, my experience of Impressionism was limited to dentist’s office reproductions and wall calendars. But in this museum, I stared at the orange-red dot-of- a-setting-sun and felt myself falling into the river. I began to cry. I did not know what I was experiencing, but later learned that the syndrome was named in 1989 by an Italian doctor who saw many patients whose physical and mental health were affected by the beauty of Florence. I wrote this poem pointing out overwhelming episodes, instances when I was acutely receptive to human-made beauty.
--Allison Campbell

The New York School Diaspora, Part Three: Allison Campbell

A member of the New York School seminar that participated in the USM Center for Writers’ 2014 Symposium on the New York School of Poetry and the South, Allison Campbell served as The Best American Poetry’s special correspondent, blogging about the event.

“The Stendhal Syndrome” is an affliction named after the 19th-century French author, whose description of his experience in Florence first documented the phenomenon. Of his initial visit to the Basilica of Santa Croce, where Niccolo Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo Galilei are buried, Stendhal wrote

I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty ... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations ... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves'. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.

Allison Campbell’s invocation of art-generated rapture, its head-over-heels multi-part interrogative, suggests Kenneth Koch and his“Fresh Air”; in particular, this line: “Did you ever glance inside a bottle of sparkling pop?” It also recalls Frank O’Hara’s desire, expressed in “Personism: A Manifesto,” for a poem to exist not between two pages but “between two persons,” “Lucky-Pierre style,” and the melding of art, nature, and identity that Keats enacts in “Ode to a Nightingale”: “Now more than ever seems it rich to die.” We are most ourselves when in transport, when we’ve “had a pop song puncture to nerve by amplifying / something hidden.”

--Angela Ball

Marilyn Monroe, Poet [by Heidi Seaborn]

Tomorrow on June 1, Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 95^th birthday. Even now, nearly sixty years after her death, she remains one of the world’s most iconic figures. We know that she continues to serve as muse and subject to poets, but she was also someone who had a deep relationship to poetry. The poet Heidi Seaborn’s new collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe arrives on Marilyn’s birthday having won the PANK Books Poetry Prize. Best American Poetry has invited Seaborn to guest edit a week devoted to Marilyn Monroe in Poetry.

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After her death, Arthur Miller said of his former wife, Marilyn Monroe, “…she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.” As a poet who has written a collection largely in the persona of Marilyn Monroe, I find Miller’s description sad, but also intriguing. Did he really see her as a poet, or was he referring to her as having a poetic soul? Having thoroughly researched Monroe for my collection, An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (PANK Books, June 2021), it’s not clear that Arthur Miller ever read Marilyn’s poetry. But I have.

When Marilyn died in 1962, her personal possessions were bequeathed to her acting coach and friend, Lee Strasberg. Decades later, and long after Strasberg was also dead, his widow Anna Strasberg discovered two boxes of Marilyn’s letters, journals and poems. Eventually the contents of those boxes became a book, Fragments (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment). Fragments contains mostly handwritten documents reproduced and transposed into text and some letters Marilyn typed herself. What’s revealed is everything from Marilyn’s grocery list for a party to letters to psychiatrists, to her notes for an upcoming interview with Life Magazine to her inner most anxieties. And intertwined in all these remnants from her heart and mind, are poems or fragments of poems. Here from a red spiralbound ‘Livewire’ notebook that Buchthal and Comment attribute to being from the summer of 1958 when Marilyn was in LA filming Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot.

 

“I left my home of green rough wood—

a blue velvet couch I dream till now

a shiny bush just left of the door.

[illegible] down the walk clickity clack as my doll

in her carriage went over the cracks—“We’ll go far away”

The meadows are huge the earth (will be) hard

on my back. The grass surged touched

the blue and still white clouds changing from an

old man shapes to a smiling dog with ears flying

Look—

The meadows are reaching—they’re touching the sky

We’ll leave We left our outlines against/on the crushed grass.

It will die sooner because we were there—will something

else have grown?

Don’t cry my doll don’t cry

I hold you and rock you to sleep.

hush hush I’m I was only pretending now that I’m (was)

not your mother who died.

I shall feed you from the shiny dark bush

just left of the door.” [1]

Marilyn never finished this or any of the rough drafts of poems that we find in journals and sheets of hotel stationary. Inspired, I wove lines from Marilyn’s forgotten poems into my own, to create a collage of her voice and the one I created for her in my persona poems. In one, I pulled lines from a poem Marilyn had written on the stationary at the Parkside House in Surrey, England where she and her brand-new husband, Arthur Miller, stayed while she filmed The Prince and the Showgirl in 1956. In my research, I had discovered an interview given by a maid who took care of the Millers at the Parkside House. In the interview, the maid described observing Marilyn writing and quietly crying. In my poem, I combine the observer and observed:

 

What the Maid Witnessed

~with lines from a maid’s interview and a poem Marilyn Monroe wrote in 1956

 

Mrs. Miller alone at the kitchen table, writing, a cup of tea

                                She remembers—her pale chiffon dress

pink robe

                            that she wore on a windy afternoon when she walked

feathers fluttering at her wrists like cherry petals

                            where no one had ever been

fingers curl a pencil

                            her clear-eyed baby who lived to die

hair the color of her milky tea

                            The woman stares

confetti of tears

                            & stares in space[2]

 

To have gathered Marilyn’s words into my own poetry feels like an act of completion. And recognition, that I am recognizing Marilyn not just as a poetic soul, but as a poet. I came very late in life to poetry and to being known as a poet, I imagine that if Marilyn had continued living, she might have turned more deeply to poetry. And be renown not her celebrity and beauty but also for her words.

 

 

[1] Fragments by Marilyn Monroe, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment

[2] An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe by Heidi Seaborn (PANK Books, 2021)

 

An Interview with A. E. Stallings [by Aspen Matis]

A. E. Stallings is the author of four books of poetry: Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax, which won the Poet’s Prize and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award; Olives; and, most recently, Like. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, she lives in Athens, Greece.

I corresponded with Ms. Stallings via email about the addictive nature of creative discovery, poetry’s ability to “give life more abundantly,” a poem’s power to rescue readers across time and generations, poetry’s inexorable connection with humanity (and, thus, the medium’s longevity), and the fearlessness required of great critics—the boldness to lead with one’s aesthetics and taste. We also discussed the beautiful notion of “poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.”

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

Reading or knowing or memorizing poems probably has a greater role in my inner life than writing poems. A lot of writing poems is frustration or not getting anywhere or having crises of confidence: it means being willing to write bad poems. Of course, when you write a really good poem and you are discovering something as you write there is no other feeling in the world like it—it is addictive. I think what poetry can do in a way is give life more abundantly… there is a feeling of being fully alive and alert to the various-ness of the world. In a great poem, I feel fully conscious.

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I think poetry has a diminished role in our present society at large, if we are talking about the Western Anglophone world. But that doesn’t trouble me much. Poetry tends not to be part of our discourse—I would put that down largely to its diminished place in our education. At the same time, you can look at the popularity of MFA programs—the number of people actively studying to be poets—or what a sensation Amanda Gorman was at the Inauguration, and you can see there is still a hunger for it. I don’t think it matters that poetry isn’t wildly popular, as long as it is deeply appreciated by some. Poetry was around before the alphabet and it will be around when thousands of species of plants and animals alive today are gone, when the glaciers are gone, when languages that exist now are gone, basically for as long as there are human beings. So I don’t worry about poetry at all. But a poem can rescue you, can keep you company even across time and generations. A memorized poem becomes part of your brain, and no one can take it away.

There are many people for whom poetry would be important if they were exposed to it as an enriching pleasure, rather than a school text for decoding. Imagine if people only learned music as music theory. Memorization and recitation, reading for pleasure, learning poetry by heart, these are the most important parts of poetic education.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in her work?

Be out of fashion with the times. Write what you like. Write for your ideal audience.

Renowned literary critic Sir Christopher Ricks describes your poems as “never less than the true voice of feeling, and always more.” The MacArthur Fellowship committee praised your “mastery” of poetic form. What, in your opinion, is the relationship between form and meaning? Between structure and ingenuity? 

Structure and form, meaning and ingenuity, are ideally entangled. A sonnet that is also a great poem could only have been a kind of sonnet, not an ode or a ballad. A form—whatever that is, it could be a sinuous ribbon of spare free verse, or the blocky paragraph of a prose poem—should feel that it is pushing interesting choices and also undergirding those uncanny decisions. What you aim for ideally is something that feels both surprising and inevitable.

Your most recent book of poems, Like, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The judges called it “a collection of inventive formal poetry that challenges, gives shape to, and delights in how the art form mimics and distorts the universalities of life.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection?

I don’t tend to write poems in a programmatic way—I write the poems that are available to me at the time. As such, they tend to map loosely onto life events, and so be thematically related by accident. I think the biggest difference with this collection was the decision to put the poems in alphabetical order by title, which seemed to work surprisingly well.

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

I am fond of the Metaphysicals, particularly Marvell and Donne and Herbert. There is a poem by Matthew Prior I love (“Jinny the Just”). I am a fan of Keats and Byron (not so much Shelley, “Ozymandias” aside). With the Metaphysicals, the crash of science, intellect and emotion. From Byron, a way of writing about current events. From Keats, vowel music.

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?

I think the best critic writing today hands down is Ange Mlinko. She is willing to lead with her aesthetics and taste, something a lot of critics are afraid to do now, and then to support with her intellect and her ear and her wide reading. She is fearless. William Logan also leads with taste, and I often read him with pleasure (unless it is about me), but I don’t always trust the scathing wit to be in proportion to the “offense.” Still he is always worth reading, thought provoking, and, like Mlinko, fearless. 

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

Some very good books do win prizes of course. But no, it isn’t always the best ones. I’ve been on committees for prizes, and the race does not always go to the swift—a committee has to come to a consensus, and consensus is often compromise. Also the sheer number of poetry books out there (this I think is partly to do with poetry’s professionalization) can make it hard to winnow. I’d like to think that while a lot of accomplished poetry drops away, great poetry will tend to emerge from the background noise sooner or later.

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

Write what you like! Read outside of your generation. Read poems from other languages.

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

I am always trying to eke out the odd poem. I have been writing a lot of prose this year, essays of various kinds. Translation is endlessly fascinating to me. At present I am working on Virgil’s Georgics, which, as a poem concerned about the environment and politics, seems particularly topical.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

At first I read “inquiries” as “injuries,” which perhaps says something. I write a lot about discord and about under- and afterworlds, so I suppose these must interest me. Often it is an emotion I am after. I have started to think about poetry as its own emotion, a mood in which the world, even in minor glimpses, is perceived as vibrating with significance.

The New York School Diaspora: Part Two, Julia Johnson [by Angela Ball]

Failure

I’m standing at the stove cooking pancakes
when in walks a goat.
The goat is black and white and gives me
a look over the bridge of his nose that I recognize 
as a look of sadness.
And so I have a sad goat in my kitchen.
The tornado sirens have stopped.
He’s countertop height. 
The cast on my arm under the sleeve
of my sweater isn’t visible to the goat, and I’m  
glad for that. I flip the pancakes.
The goat shakes gently his beard, kicks
his left hoof, and stomps. I try to imagine
anything as smooth as a flipped pancake
as I wait for the other side to brown.

I was introduced to the work of Russell Edson, Charles Simic, James Tate and the French surrealist prose poets, including Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Guillaume Apollinaire early on in my writing life, in high school. Their influence is forever in my imagination, I think, as are the Surrealist painters. One day, I was standing in the kitchen in Kentucky cooking pancakes when I heard tornado warning sirens. This poem came out of that moment. 

--Julia Johnson

The New York School Diaspora, Part Two: Julia Johnson

My post here last week, “The New York School Diaspora, Part One,” asserted that the values of the New York School of Poetry survive to enliven much of the strongest American poetry. James Tate’s work, incorporating what appreciative critics have called “the surrealism of everyday life,” represents a branch of this diaspora.

Julia Johnson’s “Failure” shares with James Tate’s work (in such poems as “The Buddhists Have the Field” and “The Distant Orgasm”) the marriage of the pedestrian and the unexpected. It shares one of the key convictions of New York School poetry: life is chaotic, resists explanation.

The poem’s title, “Failure,” sits at an oblique angle to the poem. We are tempted to think of how tragedy is goat-song, and how failures of character result in tragedy. There’s the expression, diluted by time, “I am the goat.” Is the goat a stray sacrifice? Why does he stamp? From whence his sadness? Why does the speaker cook pancakes when there is a cast on her arm? Why glad that her cast is hidden? Is the now-absent tornado connected with the goat? With guilt? Question marks rotate playfully, as in an old illustration of bewilderment. The incident, as solid and self-contained as a flipped pancake, calls to us. The cooking continues.

--Angela Ball