The Best American Poetry

Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop
Image © Joseph Breitenbach

Celebrating the Library of America's ELIZABETH BISHOP: POEMS, PROSE AND LETTERS
edited by Lloyd Schwartz

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

The New York School Diaspora, Part One (Denise Duhamel) [by Angela Ball]

DEAR AMERICAN AMNESIA,

I know you are only trying to make

white people feel better—

and some of us might even appreciate it,

but maybe it’s good you sometimes let us remember

certain things, like the origin of gratuities.

Racist restaurant owners “hired” newly freed

slaves who they didn’t have to pay

and passed on the expense to diners

who had the choice of tipping

or not. Any American waitstaff or stripper  

today knows how temperamental

a customer can be—how grabby, how angry,

or sullen. How cheap. By 1938,

America established a minimum

wage, but not for hospitality

workers who were expected to live

off tips. (Translation: Ladies,

shake those tits.) The Great Depression

and Great Recession seem quaint and faraway

because you prefer we deep-six the fact

Wall Street hasn’t changed. But, Amnesia,

sometimes even you can’t repress

everything in us—consider our American paranoia

and guilt. Chomsky says zombies

are just the latest manifestation of our need

to be punished for what we’ve done

to the Indians and slaves. How easy it is

to make white Americans afraid. Afraid we’ll be

treated the way we’ve treated others. Jen Hofer asks,

through which holes does history break into our day?

Who built the White House?

Why are corporate cubicles shaped

like swastikas? Why are there so few

Asian leading men? When the 60’s           

revolution happened, women turned

to vintage clothing so fashion magazines had to

do something to control them, get them back.

Enter diet pills and the term cellulite. Rubens

celebrated those bumps in his 17^th century paintings,

but a 1968 issue of Vogue decried them  

as a disease the most focused of women could cure

through exercise, diet, and rubbing their legs

with special rolling pins. Now the wage gap   

is replaced by the thigh gap,

as we try to squelch

that persistent subcutaneous fat,

bubbling up like everything, Amnesia,

you’d rather we forget.

I wrote “Dear American Amnesia” after reading Rachel E. Greenspan’s article “’It's the Legacy of Slavery’: Here's the Troubling History Behind Tipping Practices in the U.S.” (Time, October 15, 2018).  I remembered all my waitressing jobs, the lousy shifts, the fussy customers, and my smiling incessantly even when I wanted to pour coffee over the head of a customer who grabbed me as I walked by his table. The poem started down that path but suddenly veered into bigger questions of who America values in society, who we pay well, who we pay poorly, and why.

--Denise Duhamel

Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She served as the guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2013. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

The New York School Diaspora Part One: Denise Duhamel

I have long believed that the poets of the New York School, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler, have exercised a lingering and salutary influence on American poetry. This conviction led to a 2014 Symposium at the University of Southern Mississippi, “ The New York School of Poetry and the South,” featuring Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Barbara Hamby, David Kirby, and David Lehman, and a special issue of Valley Voices, a literary journal based at Mississippi Valley State University. In this blog post and others to follow I will showcase what I term the New York School diaspora, a concept that I hope to make clear with poems by writers who honor the virtues of play, wit, the chaos of reality and the belief that, to paraphrase Frank O’Hara, life is too important to strangle with seriousness

“Dear American Amnesia,” part of Denise Duhamel’s topical and captivating new book of poems, Second Story, owes something to Kenneth Koch’s ground-breaking reformulation of the apostrophe: a poem addressed to an abstract entity or quality. Koch’s progenitor here is, of course, one of his first poetic saints, Percy Bysshe Shelly. Koch’s departure from his source resides in the degree of intimacy he assumes, an easy colloquialism both humorous and poignant. Koch perfects this technique in his 2000 volume, New Addresses, with poems like “To World War Two,” that begins with “Early on you introduced me to young women in bars,” progresses to “As machines make ice / we made dead enemy soldiers . . .” and ends, “You died of a bomb blast in Nagasaki, and there were parades.” Koch had never before written a poem about his WWII experiences, but the impersonally personal nature of his new address created an expansive context that made it possible. By addressing abstraction in “Dear American Amnesia,” Duhamel isolates the obliviousness of our dominant culture, defining it by what it chooses to ignore. 

Duhamel’s poem addresses the gap between the way things are and the way they ought to be: a gap obscured by miasmas of amnesia. Not only does this approach produce humor—“(Translation: Ladies, /shake those tits.)”—but frees the poem from the tediousness of assigning blame to particular people. We are both victims and enablers of such notions as “the thigh gap.” 

In pointing out some of the affinities of “Dear American Amnesia” with The New York School of Poets, I don’t mean to suggest that the poem is derivative. Duhamel’s letter poem joins what Wallace Stevens called “the long conversation between poets” bearing its own inimitable stamp.

--Angela Ball

An Interview with Denise Duhamel [by Aspen Matis]

Denise Duhamel is the author of Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She guest edited The Best American Poetry 2013 (Scribner) with David Lehman, series editor. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. I had the pleasure of corresponding with Duhamel via email about her newest book Second Story, her guidance for young poets, the radical nature of telling the truth, and poetry as a place where words exist to help people live by expressing the sublime.

Your new book of poems Second Story is sharp and vibrant, painting the humdrum and the disastrous alike in bold and searing images that endure in my mind like places I’ve really been and scenes I’ve really lived. The poems awakened in me both wonder and fear. In flashes of joy and insight, the collection “investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment,” exploring themes of climate change, exploitation, poverty, robbery, social complicity, personal agency, resistance to sacrifice, guilt, memory, and the convenience of forgetting. In the words of the publisher, “With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, [Duhamel] bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell.” What would you like to share with readers about the second story you illuminate so powerfully in this latest collection? Why is the oft-hidden nuance you highlight and evoke so important to perceive?

When I moved to Florida in 2000, I was confident that Al Gore would become president, that we’d have clear policies to curb ecological degradation. I was so sure of it, in fact, that I moved into an apartment close to the ocean. It wasn’t so much that I had my head in the sand (no pun intended) the years that followed. I still understood the urgency—and by 2005, I had lived through my first major hurricane, Wilma, which made its Florida landfall barely two months after the more infamous Katrina. Then I live through the disaster of the Deepwater Oil Spill in 2010 and the insidious BP commercials that followed, promising “funds to study the Gulf’s wildlife,” like BP was somehow the good guys. But 9/11, the subsequent wars, and the financial crash of 2008, kept me busy protesting other things. I still had a naïve hope that the climate crisis, horrible as it was, was manageable and that eventually politicians and industry would respond accordingly. One of my first political acts was as a fifth-grader writing to President Nixon protesting aerosol cans that were harming the ozone layer. When the EPA banned them shortly thereafter, I had a sense of accomplishment and justice that must have infused my thinking. Then in 2017, Hurricane Irma destroyed my apartment just ten days before Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico. I kept a journal in my most terrified moments and transformed these entries into “Terza Irma,” the long poem in the center of Second Story. Once I’d finished that poem, I started to write others about my Uncle Wil, an early environmentalist who rode a Vespa when I was a teenager. Corporations continue rob our natural resources, which made me think of all the other things robbed from us, including our very lives in cases of police brutality and Covid-19. Shortly after I’d finished the Second Story, the pandemic hit and I put in two extra poems that also address the severity of our political moment. 

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? 

All of the above! We are lied to, day in and day out. Advertisements, self-help books, and politicians have coopted language to such an obscene extent that “friends” are now just clicks on Facebook. And don’t even get me started on how our former president perverted the word “patriots.” Poetry is a place where words are there to help people live, to say something sublime. Poets aren’t selling anything, not even their books really, as you can hear people read poems for free on Vimeo or YouTube.

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

To tell the truth, warts and all.

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

Yes! I am of the age now when I start sentences with “Thirty years ago, I…” so I am entering my “impart wisdom” decades. Even though I don’t understand all the challenges young poets face, which are slightly different than the ones my generation faced, I would like to say to young poets…Be fierce and fearless. Don’t worry about the fame or recognition part—easier said than done, I know. But each poet’s path is different. I had three small press books (all out of print now) before Kinky was published by Orchises Press, a press no longer publishing books but lovingly maintained by Roger Lathbury. I was 39 before I was hired by Florida International University, my first permanent, “real” job. I was 40 before University of Pittsburgh Press started publishing my books. Not everyone will win a big book prize their first time out. Or ever. If you love poetry, you love poetry. If you read a lot of good poetry, you will get better at writing it. Being patient doesn’t come naturally to me, but I work at being patient every day, especially as I coax out my poems. I hope that will give some comfort and perspective to the young poets coming up.

On Anne Porter, Poet, 1911-2011 [by Lucette Lagnado, 1956-2019]

A 95-Year-Old Poet Finds Her Muse and Literary Praise

'You Can't Drive Anymore,
But You Can Still Write';
Homage to Her Late Son

By Lucette Lagnado (1956-2019)

The Wall Street Journal

Nov. 11, 2006 12:01 am ET

SAG HARBOR, N.Y. -- At 95, Anne Porter has senior moments, like finding a ticket that says "Keep This Ticket" in her purse and having no idea what it was for or how it got there.

It is one more frustration of getting old, along with relying on a walker to compensate for an uncertain gait and wearing oversize glasses to reinforce fading eyes. Mrs. Porter also finds inspiration in these setbacks, and that has helped to launch an unlikely, late-blooming literary career.

That mysterious ticket, for instance, inspired this poem:

I keep it carefully
Because I'm old
Which means
I'll soon be leaving
For another country

Where possibly
Some blinding-bright
Enormous angel
Will stop me
At the border

And ask
To see my ticket.

Mrs. Porter was 83 years old when her first volume of poetry, "An Altogether Different Language," was published in 1994. The book was named a finalist in the National Book Awards. A judge of the awards, David Lehman, a poet and professor at The New School in New York, subsequently decided to include Mrs. Porter in The Oxford Book of American Poetry, placing one of her longer poems alongside the works of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.

"Anne Porter is a marvelously talented poet who has not yet received the recognition that is her due," says Mr. Lehman, who praises her work for its "literary simplicity and directness."

Asked why she keeps writing poems through her 80s and 90s, Mrs. Porter responds that art may be the only pursuit that old age can't wreck:

"You can't sing anymore, you can't dance anymore, you can't drive anymore -- but you can still write," she says.

Poetry is a field filled with productive old people. Stanley Kunitz, the American poet laureate who died in May at the age of 100, was writing poems and being published till the end of his life. The late Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz received the Nobel Prize when he was nearly 70. John Ashbery, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, is prolific at nearly 80. The new U.S. poet laureate, Donald Hall, is 78 and still working.

Mr. Hall muses that some elderly poets may find the medium well-suited to the rigors of old age: "Poems are made for other persons to read but made out of silence and solitude, and perhaps there is more silence and solitude in the world of the old," he says.

Mrs. Porter has developed a knack for chronicling the rigors of old age with biting verse, as in "Old in the City":

You stay away from doctors,
They'd send you to the hospital,
Where pieces are cut out of you,
And after that you die.

She has done readings at Canio's Books, a literary hangout here in Sag Harbor, at churches, schools, libraries and at downtown New York bar called KGB, where many in the audience were in their 20s. "I was perfectly comfortable," she says.

Mrs. Porter was married to the artist Fairfield Porter, considered one of the greatest American painters of the 20th century. After he died in 1975, she found life on her own difficult, especially as her health declined. She lived with her youngest daughter for years. When her daughter married and moved out, Mrs. Porter suffered several crises. "I fell downstairs twice," she says. Alone and increasingly vulnerable, she decided to sell her home and move into an assisted-living community run by Quakers.

She was all set to go when her daughter and son-in-law offered her another option: come live with them in a nearby town, not far from the home she owned for decades with her late husband. They built Mrs. Porter a separate wing with vaulted ceilings, giving it the look and feel of a cathedral. In one sun-drenched room, they set up a desk and workspace and hung paintings and drawings by her late husband. In the space opposite the desk, they placed her favorite painting of all, of her late son, Johnny, who died in 1980.

One of Mrs. Porter's most acclaimed poems, written when she was in her early 70s, is a lengthy homage to her late son, who suffered from what she believes to be either schizophrenia or autism:

Though your shoelaces were hardly ever tied
And you seldom wore matching socks
You tried to behave with dignity in the village
"So as not to embarrass my little sisters."

...

And for years your times at home were so short and so far apart
That hearing them once called "visits" you turned white,
So deep was your speechless fear
That you might be only a guest at home, and have no home.

Mrs. Porter says she usually thinks about a poem and outlines it in her mind, and only then begins to sit down and write. She prefers scribbling verses on stray pieces of paper -- backs of envelopes, old invitations, whatever she finds at hand. Only when she has a final version does she sit down and begin to type it up.

Shunning computers, she works on an ancient manual typewriter belonging to her late husband. It is hard for her to walk, so she stuffs a pouch attached to her walker with notes and drafts and rolls it around from room to room.

After her 1994 book, she published "Living Things" this year. It contains the poems from her earlier collection and 39 new ones. This year, her publisher, Zoland Books, now an imprint of Steerforth Press in New Hampshire, asked for more poems that would go in a new anthology.

Being able to live with her family has helped her with her poetry, she suspects. "I feel sheltered. While I am in bed, I can hear them laughing and I know they are good," Mrs. Porter says.

She adds: "Institutional life is a little chilling to a person's imagination."

Born in 1911 to a family of Boston Brahmins, Mrs. Porter remembers writing poetry as a child of 7. She attended Bryn Mawr and Harvard, but dropped out of both. After her marriage, she raised five children and quietly continued writing.

The marriage was stormy, she and others recall. Mrs. Porter led her life in the shadow of her husband. "There was a lot of hospitality -- cooking, plus raising five kids and she had her hands full," says Elizabeth Porter Balzer, her daughter. Whatever poems Mrs. Porter wrote, she wrote on the side.

She only threw herself into her own work as an artist after her husband died. "I remember realizing that I was alone, and I'd have to be more organized," she says. "I had these poems, and I thought that it would be worthwhile working on them. I started to write."

In the mid-1990s, David Shapiro, a poet and art critic decided to help Mrs. Porter find a publisher for her work. "I thought that she was hiding in an Emily Dickinson way," he recalls. Mrs. Porter received a $1,000 advance from Zoland.

Anne Porter at a reading held in September at the Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary Church in Southampton, N.Y.

On a recent weekend Mrs. Porter read from her newest book at Sacred Hearts of Jesus & Mary, a Roman Catholic church in Southampton, N.Y., that she used to attend. The audience included parishioners who used to pray with her, many of them elderly, along with a sprinkling of artists.

She and her daughter took turns reciting "For My Son Johnny," as some in the room grew misty-eyed.

Afterward, lines formed and she greeted old friends who came up to embrace her and get her autograph. Finally, exhausted, she headed home with her daughter.

"People don't use their creativity as they get older," she said. "They think this is supposed to be the end of this."

Ed. note: Portrait of  Anne Porter by Fairfield Porter.

Happy 233 Birthday Bad Boy Byron

I WANT a hero: an uncommon want,
  When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
  The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt,
  I'll therefore take our ancient friend Don Juan--
We all have seen him, in the pantomime
Sent to the devil somewhat ere his time,  

       -- Don Juan, Canto I

--sdl

An Interview with Major Jackson [by Aspen Matis]

January 19, 2021

AM: 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?

MJ: Fascinating catalogue, all of which I have experienced over the years in reading and teaching poems, that in fact, are not mutually exclusive. Political poetry that I love, for example, pushes me toward a greater consciousness of complicated issues that point to imbalance of power and injustice, and many of them I’ve also found to be exact and beautiful in their lyricism. Yet almost always, with the best poems, I am awakened to language (its palpable presence in the body and mouth) and thus, too, sensory experience. I’ll add to that a growing sense of wonder that marks us as human beings. The best poems are multidimensional and multimodal in that way.

Your most recent book of poems, The Absurd Man, confronts the struggle for meaning in a technological world and ponders the value and nature of creation in the face of meaninglessness. What, in your view, is the meaning of your life?

Of course, on any given day I could answer this differently. You’ll have to forgive the lack of clarity as I truly believe the answer is far more complex than what will land here. In the past and today, I have talked about challenging the precincts of meaning, which takes a great dosage of critical intelligence and, believe it or not, love. I find meaning in the passionate pursuit of the “real” as Milosz phrases it. In writing poems, I am strongly committed to the possibility of uttering something that cracks and breaks through the veneer of my insecurities and fears, that pierces the armor I’ve built up that disconnects and alienates me from humanity. 

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

We are bound, regrettably, by the strictures of language; meaning is its own prison, and thus, our lives become faint replicas of outdated ideas and what was previously discovered. No matter how beautiful the garden evoked in language, if it merely alludes to some biblical origin story then it is valueless, and quite possibly redundant. We rarely discuss the ethical imperative of “making it new.” Understandably, it is a weighty responsibility to put on poetry, a tall order as we say. Yet still, out of relevancy and quite possibly a spiritual urgency, a poet has to discover radical ways of picturing and sounding out this moment. That’s pretty far-reaching to me. In this way, poetry speaks to the living fact of being alive today. For example, some in our country believe it is 1776; I have been saying lately that we need a new image of patriotism so that we do not fall victim to a vision of the past that constrains us.

What, in your view, should that new image of patriotism look like?

My favorite image of patriotism is new Americans taking the oath of allegiance which I had the pleasure of witnessing once during a friend’s naturalization ceremony. There was not a dry eye in the room. It made me hopeful about the future of our country, and the bedrock foundations of freedom and opportunity. Scraggly hordes of men pretending we are in colonial America carrying weapons is the stuff of history books that exploits political divisions and frankly stokes the flames of populism that seem aimed at the worst of our humanity. Every American is a patriot and no one group can claim greater right to that label than another. 

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

Probably the Metaphysical Poets, chiefly Andrew Marvell and John Donne. Donne’s poems “The Ecstasy” and “The Good-Morrow” are favorites. I like poems that are intellectually demanding yet aim for a single argument about love and life, not to mention the transcendent aspects of sex. Also, someone who reads my poems closely knows that I hinge quite a bit on metaphor and its ability to order thought and give it shape.

You edited the 2019 edition of The Best American Poetry. What was that experience like for you? How, if at all, did editing the anthology affect you? Are you proud of the book? How do you feel about the process—and the product of your labor—in retrospect?

As I write in the Introduction, editing the book had me fall in love again with poetry; after many years of teaching and editing, I was becoming cynical and dispassionate. The experience was akin to standing on a beach for a year and deciding to plunge into a series of crashing waves; the richness of life in American poetry is stunningly humbling. Human beings transcribe as much joy and love in poetry with great relish and embodiment as they do their pain. Such inner musings authentically rendered in language deeply impacted my spiritual life. I only wish I could have doubled or even tripled the anthology in size. So many other poems would have found their way into its pages. I read all of the previous Best American Poetry introductions, which was its own education. Also, too, I was reminded of the importance of magazine editors whose curating is so underappreciated. It was a joy to work with series editor David Lehman. One gets a sense of his and others’ huge contributions to literary culture.

Ed note: For Aspen's interview with Mitch Sisskind, which we posted last Thursday (Jan 14, 2021), please click here.

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (II) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

                                    What other poet
                                     is on his knees in the frozen clay with a spade
                                    and a silver fork, fighting the old maples,
                                    scattering handfuls of gypsum and moss, still worshipping?

                                                            Gerald Stern --“Making the Light Come”

Listen to Stern read “Torn Coat,” form his new collections: Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020):

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/podcasts/152229/torn-coat

 We continue the celebration of Gerald Stern’s 95^th birthday (February 22), with a few poems inspired by—and dedicated to — him.

Toi Derricotte

Thoughts on Jerry Stern’s 95^th birthday

I’m reading the
poem by Jerry in the new

New Yorker & right as I
read the last lines about the dead

warbler singing—

“and he sang from time to time, dead or not,
a ‘rising trill,’ as the book says,
in the upper levels where the worms are.”

the noon bells of the cathedral
bong out in agreement!  As if they want

it banged into my head:
The poems are always

with you. Lines like that
visit every day—comforting—

your wise, funny,
loving truths. But when they

put on their coats
to leave,

I hold tight & weep.

Jeff Friedman
The Long Heat Wave

                        for Gerald Stern                    

Give me back the long heat wave, the sweat dripping
from eyelashes, the stained blouses, the black windows,
the spiders dangling from their silver bridges,
the wasps lighting on the branches of the cedar bushes
as they waited for me to make a dash for the screen door.
Give me back Herman Meltzer, our upstairs neighbor,
who forged his last check with a flourish before the police
took him away in his checked pajamas, handcuffed.
Give me back Hanna Gorelick in her red satin robe,
her hair in rollers; and Cathy Cowser naked in front of the window;
and “A Day in the Life” with its scratches and pops,
John Lennon singing “I read the news today, oh boy…”;
and my thick brown hair—every morning
I brushed it down so hard my scalp stung, but the curls
sprung up before I left the bathroom mirror;
and my father warning the butcher at Sherman’s Deli
not to trim off too much fat from the corned beef.
And give me back Barbie Silverman’s long smooth legs
in her black short shorts, the Santa Maria rising from
the bottom of the river, the goddess undressing in the eye of the Arch
as the rabbis chanted to the brown muddy water.
Give me back the blue butterflies streaming
through the emptiness above the tall white sycamores,
the speckled blackbirds shitting on the Handshears’
new Oldsmobile, no matter where they parked.
Give me back my mother balancing her checkbook at the kitchen table—
“Everyone in Israel is beautiful,” she says; and
my father in his shorts, thumbing through
a thumb-size version of The New Testament and
marking in red the passages he would use to make his sales pitch to the goyim,
raising his fist to the TV tube every time he hears
another special report—“But is it good for the Jews?”—
and my sister with her thick black hair,
waiting by the silent phone for a date to call.
Give me back the burning red coils in the sky, the plague of locusts,
God railing into the wind, the dark news that floats through the windows,
the spark of light at the beginning of our world.

Kimiko Hahn: Birthday ode to Jerry
Ode to the Line "oh God of mercy, oh wild God"

You, capping some kind of unhinged sonnet (shops/pots, Philco/Bolero,
tie/automatic eye/1945); after list upon list (in fact, like a ship's listing);
you from a tiny room with knives flashing and red with laughter;
you from the scribbled ballpoint of a deity--I don't believe in God
but you I believe in, what with your 1945 ungodly
farting, screaming, dancing immigrant knowledge that
prompts me to ask of myself what could possibly
be my raging I have never seen X the way I did Y--?

(Note: the line is from "The Dancing" by Gerald Stern)

Jonas Holdeman
Stern Sonnet

                                for Jerry

I’ll bet you didn’t know Gerald Stern was born
on February 22, 1925, that his father’s real
last name was Dohlgypyat and if you did, I’d say
you need to get out more, and I’m sure you didn’t know
when Gerald Stern was 14 years old he rushed into
a burning tenement building, rescued a family of
Ukranian immigrants from certain death by conflagration—
and though that didn’t really happen,
I don’t think Jerry would mind if I told you that
or about when, at breakfast, he tapped the back
of my hand with an index finger, asked, Did you know
I ran the mile in high school? went on to tell how, every day
after classes, he hiked up Overlook Drive to Schenley Oval,
the abandoned horse track in south Pittsburgh to make two circuits
of the mile and a quarter, run until Harry, his father, came to get him
and I can see him now setting down his books,
walking the packed dirt freckled with chickweed and clover and violets
toward the grandstand, breaking into a slow trot,
rounding the first turn, churning into a canter, legs pumping
now into a gallop, surging the curves, plunging
headlong down the homestretch, hair flying wildly behind
as he tossed his head, screaming with pain or joy--
then he told me about a boy, an eight year old messenger,
blue wool jacket, red satin tie, funny grown man hat,
delivering messages, packages all over downtown
and how he had to go into the Asbury Hotel, how there was
a sign in the lobby, “No Jews and no dogs,”
that’s the way it was in those days,
asked could I imagine walking into that place every day,
every day seeing that sign and wondering,
What could they possibly have against dogs?

David Rigsbee
At Last a Meadow

                for Gerald Stern at 95

I drove down with Linda
to meet you in 1977, that tough year.
On the way back, careening through the Poconos,
we nearly soared off a cliff, when I launched 
into an inspired and definitive analysis 
of “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which she thought,
tossing her blonde mane, ridiculous.
It was the wild beginning of love,
two desperados, an ancient Mercedes,
and an underlined book by that old Nazi, 
Heidegger, tossed in the back.

You opened the door and greeted us, 
I remember, horn-rimmed and blinking.
That was the beginning.  When I visited again
years later with a different girl in tow, 
a picture of you with Paul McCartney
caught my eye.  It was a party, you said.
When he asked you what you did,
you replied, “I’m a poet.”  Then added,
“And what do you do?”  This led to a duet:
“Try a Little Tenderness,” which you correctly
 tied to Jimmy Durante, not Otis Redding.

There was an evening in San Francisco
when we went around the table:  Kizer,
Hirsch, Levine, Diane Johnson, Alice Adams, 
Schevill and the scholar fromage, Leon Edel.  
We were each to recite a poem from memory
and to keep going until we ran out of poems
or drink.  By the end of the evening, only you
endured, reciting with gusto any poem 
we mentioned. Even the most obscure.
I managed only one, the poem that ends,
“time will throw a dart at thee.”  

After I had returned from a summer in Rome,
you showed up at a reading I gave in New York
and cheerfully recalled how you had taken a piss
at the Arch of Titus, the original anti-Semite.
“I guess you could say it was an arch-piss,”
was how you put it, complete with a pause
to allow that to sink in.  Running into you
later at the Met, you recounted, underlining
your cleverness, how you had landed 
a two-week assignment, free of obligation,
at a balmy southern university for $35K.

But there was also the dog, the schnitzel,
opossums and Jack, whose first fame 
puzzled you, Jesus and Nietzsche, Galileo,
1945 and the world “at last a meadow,”
the pigeons and Sylvia, the shaking and sadness
but also the dancing, always the dancing,
and the atrocious singing, and the stories
of Stieglitz and Orwell, of saints forgotten,
of Pittsburgh and Paris, soot and snow,
love affairs, assignations, Poland and Germany
with the dead nearby, brilliant, and beloved.   

Karen Subach: From a postcard sent to Jerry from Rhodes in October, 1995:

Dear Jerry,

You would be walking around
with a sprig of thyme in your hand
and an olive wreath on your head.

You would be waving to Turkey from Rhodes Harbor
and wondering why there was so much bloodshed
when there was Homer
— and Cavafy,
and every lemon picker could recite a little Sappho.

Hurry up and buy your house on Samos!
Find a little door to paint teal—
and a patio with a mosaic
where you can write your poems.

Alicia Ostriker:

Into the Street

                    for Jerry Stern

Here comes the sun again
reminding everyone to rise and shine
so we pour the coffee and hear the news

we pick up the paper and sigh like arthritic dogs,
and we might like to blow our exasperated
brains out, when we think about the world 

then again we might laugh ourselves silly 
figure out how to profit by it
or wonder how to love it anyway

This is what freedom and consciousness are for
as if we are standing on the roof
of a very tall tower

looking at the complicated view
then taking the elevator
going out into the street

Lucky us

Michael Waters
Letter to Stern from Suceava

J:

           The waitress upon whom I’ve bestowed
A vulgar sobriquet, Titsecu,
If only to vex my faux-jealous wife
Who asks if I’d flirted enough to learn
Her name (I’d hunkered down to write a poem),
Would prod you to sing some ’40s standard
Or apt “Romania, Romania,”
Not because she doesn’t know how sorry
Her future in this town will be. She does.
She unbuttons her soiled, unisex smock,
Café Tzara sewn in cursive above
One sentry-stiff breast, just as her girlfriend
Skids the Ducati curbside. And she’s off.
I imagine you here among street kids
Who’d trail you, your rabbinical piping,
From train station and dump and sewer nerves
To the only crêpe stall that serves Gypsies.
Almost ninety, you’d boom out brotherhood—
That worn word—as your lice-ridden parade
Revved past pyramids of rat-gray rubble,
The lunar ruins of this post-comm muddle.
The waitress might hear you and, if she knew,
Almost forgive me. Titsecu, I tease
As my wife struggles not to unfrown.
Tough Titsecu.
                         Ever yr bad boy,
                                                    M                             

We are blessed to live in what your friend Philip Levine named “The City of Gerald,” a city-poem in which we can learn how “to see the universe in an acorn & hear the music of the lost in an empty Pepsi can,” and “where the imagination is king & the honey locust its bride.”

Happy Birthday from all of us poets, readers, students, friends, warbles and red maples!

For essays on Gerald Stern, see Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc, Trinity University Press, 2016)

BLESSED AS WE ARE: Happy 95th Birthday, Gerald Stern! (I) [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

  
                                                                        “….but show me two hands concealing

                                                                            love and you have the whole history of the human race there”

                                                                               -Gerald Stern, “Love,” In Beauty Bright

Jerry,

I open my eyes under the mosquito net and one mother is so close I can see my blood pulsing in her engorged abdomen. She can’t fly yet because she’s too heavy and still working on pumping out the unnecessary water; that’s how fresh our encounter is. I know my blood provides the protein she needs to nourish her eggs. I took what didn’t belong to me to nourish mine. Proof of it: my son is still asleep, serene, under his mosquito net. But I’m itching like hell. And my neighbor almost died of dengue. The mother senses my murderous intentions. I sense that.

It’s February 20, two days before your 95^th birthday. When given a choice of weeks to blog, I chose this one so I may say here, on Best American Poetry, “Happy Birthday” to you, our Best.

Jerry, I will not tell you how mother-mosquito and I settled it, but I can tell you that geckos have been proliferating insanely in this ocean-fronting apartment in Las Terrenas (Dominican Republic), and each day I pretend I have not given roaches an ultimatum, and have been working on my rages (sharpening them, yes) and complicities, and on the trickiest one, mercy.

I have been reading your newest gift to us all, Blessed as We Were: Late Selected and New Poems, 2000-2018 (W.W. Norton, 2020) and your voice reading “Frutta da Looma,” “Adonis,” “Knucklebones,” and “Blessed as We Were” feels as close as it felt when I listened to them in December, in your apartment. I’m reading and re-reading you (you and the poems, you as your own poem) so I may love the world (its peaches and rain and goats and beetles and hollyhocks and cracks and sweet necks and green gracehoppers and live and dead warbles, the baby rat with empty eye sockets, and even every single human, at least for a bit) and love it despite its absurdities and murderous bent, and sometimes I repeat after you, “enough of pain, and down with / 666—I’ll take kindness, most of all / kindness, for love is the murdered thing,” and sometimes “the humming that is called poetry” is enough and sometimes not, and then too I return to your poems, so I may stroke the cicatrix over the dead bullet that’s made a home in your flesh.  

This week I tried to draft a poem for you. It turned into a poem about hot flashes, how they return me to my mothers, how they burn with love. You were in it, a matriarch. You showed me how to save a frog trapped in NYC traffic. Street vendors had run out of boiled chestnuts. You said Don’t ever stop. Walk backwards and forwards. Follow the smell of burned pretzels.

It was a bad draft. It will never be a poem, but you were so outrageously beautiful in it.

Beloved Jerry, here are a few poets sending wishes in anticipation of your birthday—with more celebratory thoughts and a garland of poems inspired by you, for you, tomorrow:

Chase Berggrun: Dearest Jerrele, your smile and song brighten my every day. Here's to 96, 97, 98, and 99. Love always, Chase.(Mihaela’s note: Read also Chase’s “Jerrele: On Being the Personal Assistant to Gerald Stern”:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2019/12/jerrele-on-being-the-personal-assistant-to-gerald-stern)

Jill Bialosky: From the esoteric of “Blind Nothingness” to the mundane of a “Plaster Pig” anything can trigger a magisterial Stern poem that transforms as it evolves.  From our days when I was your student at the Iowa Workshop where one of my nascent poems, “Oh Giant Flowers,” was inspired by your passionate impulse, to championing your later work at Norton, I have been blessed by your loving spirit and your big embracing poetic voice. You are the youngest ninety-five year old I’ve ever known with more brilliance to come. Blessed as We Were is a triumph. 

Kate Daniels: I first fell in love with the poetry of Gerald Stern in 1978 or ’79 shortly after he had published Lucky Life.  I was in the MFA program at Columbia University, and I recall that poets all over the city were talking about an unusual book which had won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets and was nominated for a National Book Award. It was a somewhat late-in-life second book. Jerry was 52 when it came out: a late bloomer, we younger poets mused. When I read it, I understood why it was the topic of so much conversation. From my first acquaintance with them, Jerry’s poems swept me away with their eclectic voice, magnanimous, even operatic vision, their boldly expressed intensities.  They made me rage and weep. I wanted to write poems like his – big poems capable of carrying big emotions, addressing big, important subject matter. There it all was in the pages of Lucky Life.

It was my infatuation with that book that would have taken me to hear him read at the old Donnell Library on 53rd Street.  While I deeply admired poets like Adrienne Rich and Robert Penn Warren, I was sometimes intimidated by the personae in their poems.  Jerry’s poems seemed to be speaking right in my ear, just to me, conversant with all my secrets and insecurities, giving me permission to be imperfect and unsure. All those years ago, when he stepped to the podium, unbuckled his watch and then tore off his jacket and threw it on the floor, and began reading and talking all in a sort of sweaty jumble, I just fell in love with the messy humanity of the poet himself which so closely replicated what I felt in the poems themselves. 

Since then, I am fortunate to say that I have known Jerry as both poet and friend for more than thirty years. He remains one of the enduring masters for me – of poetry, of course, but also of a certain way of being human that provokes both heartbreak and a warlike rebelliousness.  I am grateful for his longevity, and for the way his work continues.  His parlance – even as he approaches one hundred years old – still delights and staggers me.   Happy birthday, Jerry – you darling, you rascal, you brilliant and subversive old heartbreaker, you poet for the ages.                                                                                                                  

Lynn Emanuel and Jeff Schwartz: As blessed as we are to have you and your poetry. Much love and happy birthday.

Alicia Ostriker:

Dear Jerry, your way of lifting your chin and your voice in glorious praise and blame of our world, in raucous laughter and deep grief for our absurdities, has been an undying model and influence on me.  Yes, you single-handedly changed to course of the river of American poetry.  It needed changing!  Hurrah!  Happy birthday now and forever.

Jeff Friedman:

We’re whirling and singing, our faces red with laughter,
our bones shaky, our trumpets blasting,
Colleen’s hair streaming, my dome with its single crater shining—
whirling and singing, doing the dance of freezing cold New Hampshire,
the furnace on the blink, icicles inside the windows,
the oven on for heat, Ruby barking your name,
the three of us chanting your poems into white clouds,
O glorious 95th, O beautiful Jerry,
With love from Colleen, Ruby and Jeff
And wishes for 5 more Jerry Stern books by your 100th birthday

Ilya Kaminsky: What a lucky life to have met the poet who knows, finally, the power of maples. To know the man who loves cows best when they are a few feet away--and he opens the dining room window, so cows reach in to kiss! What a lucky life! To be blest with everlasting music. Thank you for opening these windows for us, thank you, Gerald Stern.

Richard Katrovas: In the 80s, Jerry visited my first wife Betty and me in New Orleans numerous times. Betty, her mother Lynn, Jerry and I on a couple of occasions fell into one of the Greek bars on Decatur, I think it was the Delphi. The tinny Greek music, cranked up, as always, too loud, made it impossible to communicate without shouting. At one point, a thoroughly shit-faced sailor from one of the Greek merchant ships docked on the river tore off his shirt, jumped on a table, and danced, his face contorted with something part joy, part excruciating pain. Perhaps it was excruciating joy. I thumped my chest and shouted, though the music was so loud only Jerry could hear me, "My people!" Jerry leaned toward my ear and simply said, "That dance is thousands of years old," which was his way of telling me to show a little respect not for the drunk sailor, but for the ancient spirit that inhabited him and mandated that he dance. 

Joan Larkin: Thank you for all the songs––at supper tables, in taxis, in elevators––in all the rooms and on all the pages your voice brings alive. And for the way you wear your hat…  Love on your day and always.

Tony Leuzzi: Dear Gerald, one of the happiest days of my life was meeting you in Lambertville for an interview, followed by a lunch, and then an impromptu search for hats. I learned so much from you that day, not only about your own work, not only about your memories of Stanley Kunitz, and not only about your thoughts regarding Whitman's connection to the Jewish prophets, but also what it means to be immersed in a profession you love. You showed me the manuscript of your then book-in-progress, In Beauty Bright, which happens to contain one of my favorite poems of yours, "The Two Graces." But as I sign off, I must thank you for all of your work and, in particular, a poem that moves me more than all the rest: "Bela"--your tribute to Bela Bartok. As my favorite classical composer, he is perennially undersung by most. But your poem, filled with biographical information, is somehow intensely personal and moving in ways that have given me great joy. I salute you on your 95th!

Phillis Levin: Forever new, dear Jerry, in your ancient faith in the word, you remind us of why we are here and what we are here to do. Thank you for showing us a way to turn and tune one’s being into an instrument of praise. 

Lia Purpura: Happy day, Jerry! We share the same birthday — remember singing to me in the halls of EPB? From Baltimore, I’m singing to you. And with love.

Barbara Ras:    Dearest Jerry,

 If I could I would list 95 reasons why I love, admire, and cherish you. But space prevents that, so I will list 10-- one per decade, rounding up.

1. When your work appeared on the poetry scene, a ripple went through the Force, and poetry was changed forever by your exuberance and originality.
2. Your praise of the world makes me a better person.
3. Your laments urge the world to improve.
4. Your praise and your laments equal each other in beauty, subtlety, ferocity, and righteousness. I would miss them if they didn't exist.
5. Your voice is a song of prophets, Gypsies, cellists, philosophers, the stiff dog, the blind rat, and a universe of the living and the dead, many trees, and roses, just to mention a few.
6. Your music lifts my spirits to places I've never been before.
7. You are funny and wise.
8. Your memory exceeds the length of the Old Testament, which means you know a lot and share your knowledge generously.
9. Our long talks on the phone have been better than sex, though you would probably disagree. It’s okay--even when you disagree I love you.
10. Your friendship has been a miracle in my life.

David Rigsbee: You and your work have been on my mind for nearly 50 years, and I come back to your poems every year.  You have been one of the handful of poets who replenish my own imagination.  Thank you for that and for your kindnesses to me over the years and for your incomparably good company!  

Ira Sadoff: Sending love to my adopted Jewish uncle and dear friend for forty years, who's been so generous, who's inspired me (and countless others) and my work, and whose humor, whose passion for justice, his respect for history and nature has made him not only a great poet but the great person he is. Stay healthy, Jerry. We need you and love you.

Philip Schultz: At JFK waiting for a flight to Rome, remembering seeing you in the 70’s, you on Van Adam, welcoming me to the big city. Always so excited, bursting with joy and love of poetry, life. Such a dear friend, human, our walk in the park a month ago, the same twinkle in your eye. Much love, boychick!

Karen Subach: Blessings, Jerry, on the occasion of your 95th birthday! The times in the backyard of Governor with its tangle of green, you singing, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens,” turmeric “sunflowers” across your white shirt during curry feasts— and other times during my sorting through your piles of letters on onion skin papers in the house full of quilts, you making your morning phone calls in your wool cap— “Phil! Phil!”— you telling Diane’s son Jason to stop killing mosquitos because each one has a soul—and you shouting from my truck at the homophobic Topekan Christian protestors of arts events: “F*ck all of you! I love sodomy!”— among so many moments of deep awareness, good counsel, father-daughtering, poet-to-poet listening, shared appreciation of absurdity, outrage at injustice, grief at parallel losses—come to mind as I recall you. I love your beautiful wildness— your fearlessness in love and in life. Thank you for your poems. Thank you for your teaching. Health! Peace! Joy! Much love—

Judith Vollmer: Happy Birthday, dearest Jerry, who showed me how to read a city, how to love mine/ours—Pittsburgh—unconditionally, and how to sing the strange music. Blaze on, beloved teacher, beloved friend.

Michael Waters: Your generosity, your poems, and your presence, Jerry, teach me how to be a poet. Your humor and rage given language and shape prod me toward better work. I read your new poems and hear you singing them and suddenly I'm inside your voice. It's a great place to be, a space like no other, distinctive, American, making and remaking itself word by word. Happy 95th, Jerry, and thank you for each of your remarkable gifts.

Ellen Doré Watson: Jerry! O thou of most ravenous & fertile mind—and a heart the size of Greenland!  Trickster, lover, singer, laugher, you have enriched us all with your words and self.  Thank you, in every language.

Afaa 尉雅風: Jerry, so how is it that you are both time traveler and carrier of a magic wand of tradition, crossing genres and generations? You and August Wilson in the same neighborhood? Amazing, my friend, and more amazing that you electrify the language now for nearly a century, a sign of certain immanence or shamanistic bond made in the breath of the three rivers’ air.

Dean Young: Gerald Stern has been a fundamental source of poetic vitality for as long as I have been reading poems.  Over the years, his gait may have changed, but his poems always leap and bolt with ageless energy and verve.  Obviously, Gerald Stern is one of our greatest renewable resources!

Photo of Gerald Stern at The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, September 2010. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald. 

Photo by Lawrence Schwartzwald of The Best American Poetry 2010 launch reading, with Thomas Ellis at the lectern and, in the front row, David Lehman, Amy Gerstler, Amy Glynn, Gerald Stern, David Shapiro. 

Photo of Gerald Stern, Sharon Olds, and David Lehman at launch reading. Photo credit: Lawrence Schwartzwald.

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal [by Mihaela Moscaliuc]

Poetry in Times of Oppression/Virtual Poetry fest in honor of Ernesto Cardenal

As I mentioned in yesterday’s posting, for the second year in a row, the International Poetry Festival of Granada, Nicaragua, now in its 16^th edition, will take place only in virtual format. As they announced the cancellation of the ‘physical’ event, the organizers explained that the current political situation in Nicaragua creates “no favorable environment for any festive activity.” According to the Human Rights Watch 2018 World Report, “Ortega’s government has aggressively dismantled all institutional checks on presidential power,” which has allowed his government “to commit egregious abuses against critics and opponents with complete impunity.” (https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/nicaragua). The same document reports that “a crackdown by national police and armed pro-government groups in 2018 left 300 dead, over 2,000 injured, and hundreds arbitrarily arrested and prosecuted.” The numbers quoted by other sources are even higher.

In the January 22/24 issue of Confidencial, writer and Festival board member Gioconda Belli declared that at this time the people of Nicaragua are in mourning for the deaths, dissapearances, and imprisonment of those voicing dissent. In this “jailhouse atmosphere” of repression and harassment, “the only poetry that fits,” Belli wrote, “is that of protest.” (https://confidencial.com.ni/the-daniel-ortegas-regime-ties-to-hijack-poetry-festival-in-nicaragua/). She also suggested that a celebration like that of previous years would be an affront to Nicaraguan people’s suffering. In past festivals, poetry events were interspersed with local music and dance, and integrated also into a day-long, spectacular carnival/traditional masquerade that celebrated life and death, and which always included a ritualized “burying” of a particular evil such “intolerance,” “hatred,” or “violence.” (Photos from the 9^th edition of festival & carnival: https://designyoutrust.com/2013/02/the-ix-international-festival-of-poetry-in-granada-city/

 

This year’s virtual festival will be honoring Ernesto Cardenal, one of Latin America’s most revered literary and revolutionary figures. Poets from around the world will be read a poem in his honor and the event will be streamed through Facebook from Feb 20-Feb 25. You may watch it at https://www.facebook.com/FIPGNicaragua

 

Cardenal was born in Granada in 1925. On January 20, he turned 95. Active in the Sandinista revolution that ousted Anastasio Somoza in July 1979, Cardenal served afterwards as the Minister of Culture, but gradually broke away from the Sandinista government, becoming an increasingly outspoken critic of the current Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his authoritarian rule. A prolific writer who has authored over forty poetry collections and whose work has been translated into dozens of languages, Cardenal has occupied, over the years, ideological positions that have at times stirred controversy. He has been hailed or criticized for being an iconoclast, a visionary, a mystic, a Marxist, and a leader of the liberation theology movement. In his writings, whether addressing injustice, corruption, greed, the world’s transient beauty, or love, he documents and witnesses with eloquence and urgency, often by bringing religion, politics, and science in conversation with one another.

 

Priest, writer, translator, sculptor, diplomat/politician, social activist, Cardenal founded both a spiritual/religious commune (Solintiname, on Lake Nicaragua) and a cultural foundation (Casa de los Tres Mundos, in Granada, where I met him briefly in 2017). He was declared person non grata by Samoza for seeking justice, ‘suspended’ by Pope John Paul II for being political, and reviled by politicians for prizing integrity.

 

I don’t see Cardenal as a poet of contradictions (as I may seem to suggest above), but of human plenitude. I admire his reverence for, and commitment to, the earth and the cosmos—a commitment reflected also in what he has called his work’s “exteriorismo” (which translates, in simplified terms, into a preference for direct observation instead of metaphorical articulation). Robin Bower argues, in an appraisal of Cardenal’s work (“Remembering things past: Reading history, writing memory, and the poetics of agency in Ernesto Cardenal”), that critics have often rushed to assign his work to reductive categories, and suggests that we look instead at how in Cardenal’s body of work “the denunciatory, the religious, and the epic are all part of a self-reflexive poetics grounded in a conviction of the transformative power of poetry itself in its capacity to refashion memory, subject, and society.”

 

Poetry as diplomacy, communion, individual and communal transformation--

 

Cardenal writes about pre-Columbian history or the U.S. imperialist interventions in Central American history (see, for instance, “La Hora 0” / “Zero Hour,” with its “trucks and trucks loaded with crates of arms/all marked U.S.A., MADE in U.S.A.,/arms to catch more prisoners, to hunt down books,/to steal five pesos from Juan Potosme”—tr. Donald D. Walsh) with the same frankness with which he celebrates bodies and stars or, as in “Zoológico de Iquitos” / “The Zoological Garden of Iquitos,” a Peruvian zoo’s “Amazonian animals”—"the great leopard in repose/ (…) / the papagayo birds draped in flags of color/the sloth with terrifying yet weak claws / (…) / the ecstatic tortoises, each on its own rock/the elastic otter.”

 

This poem takes its time honoring each imprisoned creature, then shifts the tenderness toward the “nine-year-old Indian guide” who

 

picked up from the ground an immense

                                    red petal

that had fallen from a tree

            and said to me:

‘Touch it; it’s as smooth as the leopard’s coat,’

and, indeed, it was as smooth as

            the silky fur with quadrilateral spots

                        that we did not touch.       (tr. David Draper Clark and Cesar Ferreira)

 

Protest poetry or politically-engaged poetry can feel like the only poetry ‘fit’ for certain times, absolutely. The months before and for many months after the U.S. 2016 presidential election, I did not write at all because I felt I needed to --and wanted to, and couldn’t--write only about what was happening. (Since then, a number of poets have confessed to similar experiences.) However, re-reading Cardenal’s work I was reminded that poems do not have to engage with politics or current events in order to do significant work and to benefit us during historical and political crises. I thought also of Neruda’s view of poetry as “an act of peace,” and how the metaphor itself posited writing as an engagement with conflict, and how it also conferred poetry-making the status of a political act. While not writing, I translated. In 2016 I was translating from the Romanian a collection of poems by our contemporary Liliana Ursu—Clay and Star, published this past fall by Etruscan Press (https://etruscanpress.org/shop/clay-and-star/). These were not poems of protest. They were not, by most measurements, even slightly political. Further, Ursu, like Cardenal, is a religious person, which I am not, and her poetry is deeply spiritual, while my own is anything but. One thing that had attracted me to her poems, I realized then, was precisely that they provided me, in disconsolate times, with possibilities for accessing hope where I saw none, and beauty when my own work could no longer contain it. This was not escapist poetry, but poetry that insisted that I learn to renew hope in our common humanity, and that helped me recharge emotionally and spiritually. I had also grown up in a political system (Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime) in which religious practices were akin to acts of dissent, so Ursu’s monasteries, nuns, and monks stood, if not close to God, at least far away from daily corruption and repression.

 

Though ostensibly radically different, Ursu’s and Cardenal’s works converge to engage each other. To honor “El Padre” Ernesto Cardenal, I will end with a poem Ursu dedicated to Thomas Merton--the scholar, poet, and monk under whose tutelage Cardenal lived in the Trappist monastery at Gethsemani (Kentucky) between 1957-1965.

 

 

Liliana Ursu (tr. Mihaela Moscaliuc)

 

The one who leaves few footprints in the snow

                                                                         To Thomas Merton

 

He splits wood,

leaves few footprints in the snow—

their life shorter than that of the small

pine tree fire

above which he warms his hands

before dovetailing

the icon frames—

before taking back to his hut an ice cube,

water he’ll use at twilight

to make coffee,

its black eye—sole indulgence,

its fragrant eye—sole gratification.

 

He leaves few footprints in the snow

and they’re quickly erased by birds

for whom he sows wheat and crumbs

under the window where he reads the Psalms.

 

Kentucky, Abbey of Gethsemani, January 21, 2000

           

In My Unknowing: Vermont’s Poet Laureate Chard deNiord [by Elizabeth Powell]

Walking the lush, wooded trails near my home in northern Vermont, I have come to appreciate the beautiful, sometimes elegiac, liminal spaces between heaven and earth. I have grown to love that fuzzy line between what is and what I cannot know. As a teenager I thought I knew everything. How exhausting that was! Youth mostly believes in sheer will mixed with magic, at least mine did. Sometimes I yearn for that solidarity of mind and opinion, but mostly not. This week on my walks, while communing with raspberries and Queen Ann’s lace, mosquitoes and moths, I have been contemplating this saying: “The number of things unknown to Buddhas outnumber the grains of sand on the bank of the Ganges.” 

Indeed, we have only a finite understanding of the ineffable world, and poetry seeks to remedy this human dilemma. This week our Vermont State Poet Laureate has reminded me of these eternal questions in his splendid and resplendent new collection of poems due out next year from the University of Pittsburgh Press. In his forthcoming collection of poems, In My Unknowing, Vermont’s own deNiord explores the nuances and paradoxes of unknowing. 

The inviting, lyrical voice in these luminous and accomplished poems extends a hand to the reader to come on the philosophical/spiritual voyage of the via negativa. Indeed the ars poetica at work in this collection is a kind of via negativa. These searching poems seek to explore the white light of unknowing and knowing coexisting inside the room of a poem. For as soon as we think we have acquired knowledge, something in the natural world reminds us that all is flux, that to grow spiritually and otherwise is to unburden oneself into a quiet, questioning wisdom. For, as the poet Richard Wilbur once wrote: “Love calls us to the things of this world.”

The book’s first and title poem, In My Unknowing, recognizes that in order to begin to understand we must, as the Psalm 34.8 says, “ taste and see” what is good—understand it with our earthly senses first, in the physical way our bodies can “know”. Our senses are one force of understanding, but there is also a counterforce that exists in the world that seeks to not know because the prime mover of this world, whether one believes in God or not, is ultimately unknowable. Our greatest knowledge is to know that we do not know. Why is that? 

These poems are deeply searching and smart, engaging with the immutable, and the epistemological insights that delve into these human conundrums of understanding. Further, this work reminds me of deNiord’s generation’s clarion call of “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden” sung about in the song “Woodstock” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. In writing “Woodstock”, the great Joni Mitchell implored that we all must work toward making heaven on earth, an Eden, especially during tumultuous times, and let’s face it most of the times in America have been tumultuous and full of suffering, except for a privileged few: We are stardust/ We are golden/And we've got to get ourselves/ Back to the garden.

The work also brings to mind a Christian biblical text, 1 Corinthians 13:12: “When I was a child I talked like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I set aside childish ways. Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” This text signals to me that part of paradox of knowing/unknowing is also being known fully, having faith in things seen and unseen, converging to make knowing someday possible. What we can say about the unknown is that we do not know and that we can use the natural world to try and express what our unknowing might contain and reveal. This is the work at hand in deNiord’s brilliant poems filled with musical propulsion, quiet images, the deep searching of a philosopher and poet for spiritual food. 

Here is the opening poem, one of my favorites:

IN MY UNKNOWING 

Oh taste and see.

Psalm 34, 8

I was driving through the fields of Heaven when I realized I was still on Earth,
because Earth was all I had ever known of Heaven and no other place would do
for living forever. I had grown beyond belief from seeing that everything I felt
had sprung from lives I’d already lived, so that I could feel the way I did, which
was so much I had no idea where to begin. The crawling? The slithering? The
leaping? The flying? The dying? If you had been there with me in the passenger
seat and asked me about the newt or flea or pachyderm, I would have told you
everything I knew, which was a frightening amount, and not only that, but just
how much I loved them all—those Heavenly beings: the serpent, the lion, the
mosquito, the hawk, the antelope, the worm; and not only beings, but stones as
well. Each particular thing so mysterious in my unknowing, I knew I was living
forever. I knew the fields through which I was driving were the fields of Heaven in
which I was tasting and seeing, seeing and tasting.

AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARD deNIORD

Rilke said, "We must live the questions" which were your questions here in this book, this part of your life? What questions did this book answer for you in the writing of it? Or did it bring you more questions?

Indran Amirthanayagam---Poetic Globalist (Terence Winch)

Indran Amirthanayagam is one of the most remarkable figures roaming the contemporary poetic landscape. Like some of the poets he most admires—Cavafy, Neruda, Hikmet (all mentioned in the poem below)—he is a citizen of the world. Born into the Catholic Tamil community (a minority within a minority) of Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) in 1960, he left with his family for England when he was eight, seeking refuge from his native land’s ongoing strife as well as care for an autistic brother. He lived in the U.K. for six years, attending grammar and primary school there. When he was fourteen, the family moved again, this time to Honolulu, where his father, also a poet, had been offered a job. In Hawaii, Indran was one year ahead of Barry Obama, whom he knew slightly, at Punahou School.  In 1978, he left Hawaii for Haverford College in Pennsylvania. After getting his B.A. there, he moved to New York to become, like Lorca, “a poet in New York.” He picked up a master's at the Columbia School of Journalism and remained in New York until 1993, when he got a job with the U.S. Foreign Service, having  become a U.S. citizen in the late ‘80s.

Indran reading “Fire Department”

His Foreign Service positions have included stints in Argentina, Belgium, the Ivory Coast, Mexico, India,  Canada, Peru, and Haiti. This is a man who gets around.

He writes and publishes in English, French, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Portuguese (but sadly and ironically, he has forgotten Tamil, his first language). In the DC area, where he has many friends, he runs a reading series at a Haitian restaurant called Port au Prince and has just become editor of the Beltway Poetry Quarterly, an online journal. He is indefatigable; he works full time; he writes a poem a day, at a minimum; he travels constantly. In the first half of this year alone, he felt he simply had to go to San Francisco to help celebrate Ferlinghetti’s hundredth birthday; he caught a train from DC to New Orleans to take part in a literary festival; he brought his 83-year-old mother back to Sri Lanka for the first time in 30 years; he’s made several trips to New York. He may be the most ubiquitous poet on the planet.

He always wears a hat. 

His poems (the ones in English, anyway) have a directness, almost a plainness, about them. His work is deeply literary, full of reverence for his fellow poets, but devoid of stylistic pretensions. The poems are like enhanced emails, addressed to his friends and readers, but made resonant and luminous through the work of the imagination.

 

Gift at the End

I woke up the other day and thought about the best gift

I could offer friends turning a year older on the various

continents—I know people everywhere like you, thanks

to powerful social media—a poem, certainly, electronic

card, phone call, even a visit? Can you imagine boarding

 

a steel and aluminum plane—wood used only

for some interiors in first class, the metallic bird

driven by a well-rested pilot and a series of computers--

to say hello to you in Rotterdam, or Madras,

or in the port city of Alexandria? But I know only

 

Cavafy there, through poetry, and in Moscow,

Nazim tootling about in a car, metallic also, not yet

with dynamite under the hood, and Neruda straddling

a horse through the Andres on the way to Argentina,

walking on the beach at Wellawatta with his mongoose.

 

So how to justify these loose associations, stream

of consciousness running through the World Wide Web

without any brake, no formal mechanism to stopper

imagination and force, at least, the appearance

of form, migration certainly the only truth.

 

and the need to finish the poem, walk it back home,

stop the beast in the kitchen, give him a treat,

some Wilfred Owen, just days before

the War’s end, shot dead—dulce et decorum est—

or straight to the point, the full stop.

 

—Indran Amirthanayagam,  10 July 2019

 

 

 

Whitman in Washington [by Terence Winch]

For six years I worked in the old Patent Office Building in Washington, where the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery are located. The building began its service to the people in 1840, making it one of Washington’s landmarks. I worked there as an editor from 1986 to 1992, before the recent renovations, completed in 2006. In my time, the building still had the feel of the 19th century. I entered every morning through the basement, which always made me think of the catacombs—bulging, thick walls, narrows corridors, stairs that might have met the building code a hundred-plus years ago.  Here's a daguerreotype from 1846, showing the building in its early days (and the early days of photography):

What really made this a special place for me was that Walt Whitman had trod these very same corridors during the Civil War, when the building became a makeshift hospital: "Overflow casualties were housed in the Capitol, in churches, taverns, and schools, in the Georgetown prison and General Lee’s Alexandria mansion. Whitman found them lying between rows of glass display cases in the Patent Office, ‘noblest of Washington’s buildings.’ The Greek Revival shrine to American ingenuity was normally an exhibition hall for models representing ‘every kind of utensil, machine, or invention, it ever enter’d the mind of man to conceive.’ …Now it was a hospital, ‘a curious scene, especially at night when lit up. The glass cases, the beds, the forms lying there, the gallery above, and the marble pavement under foot—the suffering and fortitude to bear it in various degrees—occasionally, from some, the groan that could not be repress’d.’” (from Justin Kaplan’s life of Whitman). I would often imagine Whitman making his rounds in the same building where I worked, sometimes even sensing his presence.

“Whitmanesque” has come to mean that big-hearted, empathetic embrace of whatever life places in one’s path, that exuberant appetite for experience. Whitman’s invention of American poetry has a lot to do with that expansive spirit, and with his frankness, whether about war or sex. He did not back down, or look away. He did not write like anyone who came before. His use of language—open, plainspoken, direct—is the antithesis of poetic. He remains alive in his work because the work itself is so immediate. It is language with a pulse.

There’s a remarkable 1875 chalk on paper drawing of Whitman by Thomas Dewing in the American Art Museum’s collection. Reproductions of it fail to capture its depth and power. When you look at the original, you almost feel like you’re face to face with Walt himself. Because of conservation concerns, the work is very rarely displayed, but I used to ask one of the curators to take it out of storage and show it to me every once in a while.

When the museums in the Patent Office building re-opened in 2006, I was delighted to find a little room in the Portrait Gallery solely devoted to Whitman—with paintings and photographs, and rare copies of his work on display. I went back there last Wednesday evening after work to further explore the Whitman room, only to discover it had been replaced. Too bad—they should have made it a permanent exhibition.

For my week of guest blogging on the BAP site, I think I’ll mostly stay on the subject of Washington poets, or at least some of those poets I’ve been fortunate enough to know.

My current attentiveness to Whitman I believe derives from a visit to the Walt Whitman rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike on the way back from Connecticut a few weeks ago:

Namesakes

OK. We get on 95 and drive all day.
We stop at the Walt Whitman rest stop
on the Jersey Turnpike, and the dog and I
both pee in a secret wooded area just beyond
the trash cans and parked cars. We are hurtling
through space and time, through Connecticut,
New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland.
O Walt—and Joyce Kilmer—your poems have earned
you Turnpike rest stops! Horrible places jammed
with anxious travelers in need of a bathroom.
I buy bacon and egg on a croissant and wash it down
with water. But these are not the worst of monuments.
Joyce could praise those leafy arms, while Walt would
love the salt of the earth in their restless wandering.

(ed note: This post first appeared on July 27, 2008)

A Modern Take on “Marriage” [by Heidi Seaborn]

Are you or have you been in an MFA Poetry program?  Are you over 50? Ok, then you’ve read Marianne Moore's “Marriage” and know it is considered one of the most important works not just from Moore, but of Modernism. [Ed: Marianne Moore's "Marriage" may be found in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.]

Published in 1923, “Marriage” is a long, complicated collage of statements and quotations on marriage, gender and male/female relations that evolve into a dialogue between Adam and Eve and it still holds up today. The institution of marriage has fundamentally not evolved drastically, despite women’s rights, legalization of gay and interracial marriage. And Moore’s use of collage to create the overlapping conversation of husband and wife, Adam and Eve is perhaps more relevant today than ever.

We can envision Eve and Adam, sitting by the glow of the television, iPhones in hand, scrolling.Without looking up from his iPhone or to see if he is disturbing Eve, Adam blurts out: “Treading chasms/on the uncertain foot of the spear” and continues on “Past states, present state,” his voice rising.

Eve shifts a bit as Adam has interrupted her own social media scroll. But he doesn’t notice, busy blabbing on about nightingales, apples, before admitting he “stumbles over marriage,/a trivial object indeed.” Does Eve bother to look up at this admission from Adam? She does for a moment, wondering if someone had posted wedding photos on Instagram that she’d missed, glances over at iPhone. Seeing nothing, she returns to study her own iPhone. They continue on for a while like this, maybe a “hmmm” or a grunt of acknowledgement that the other has spoken.

Then Eve lights up, reads a snippet from her Facebook feed “for love that will gaze an eagle blind” quoting her friend Tony Trollope, and then a jibe from Shakespeare’s Twitter feed. Now Adam is paying attention. He hates that she follows Shakespeare, some girl crush he thinks.

Two can play at this. They both start going back and forth, throwing out insults gleaned from social media pals and (possibly fake) news sites. Adam cites John Cournos’ retweeting Ezra Pound—“a wife is a coffin” is met with “well, maybe she ‘leaves her peaceful husband’ that Eve snagged from a Simon A Puget’s fashion blog.

Side by side on the sofa in the dim light of the television, they continue on, heads bent over their weapons. When the television volume turns up to air an ad from Daniel Webster’s “Liberty and Union”, Adam and Eve briefly look up before returning their gaze to the little screens in their hands. Marianne Moore would not be surprised.

Poet Spotlight: Brenna Womer [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Brenna Womer is a prose writer and poet in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and an MFA candidate at Northern Michigan University, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and composition as well as serves as an associate editor of Passages North. Her work has appeared in The Normal School, Indiana Review, DIAGRAM, Pleiades, and elsewhere, and she is the author of honeypot (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance (C&R Press, 2018).

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Artist’s Statement

I think utilizing the craft of textual difficulty, in its limitless forms, is essential for contemporary poets and prose writers. Obviously, stream-of-consciousness has been a part of the mainstream for some time now and paved the way for writers like myself who intend for the aesthetics of some pieces to weigh as heavily as the text itself. In my piece “Hypochondria, or The Disease,” I rely on the difficulty of the formatting to evoke a sense of anxiety in the reader as they decipher some of my personal experiences with debilitating mental illness; the reader has to work a bit harder for the narrative. I’ve been told the piece is frustrating and exhausting, which isn’t language typically attributed to successful work, but in the case of this particular piece as well as some of my other creative nonfiction and poetry, it’s exactly the point. I like to think of it as an exercise in empathy.

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A Folio of New Writing by Brenna Womer

company

 

put on a show
for me
he asks
while I ride
on top
and wonder
what it is
he thinks
I’m doing
now
does he
think I mash
my own breasts
and pinch
nipples hard
and red and
raw at home
alone
with my dogs
watching
he asks
tell me what
you really want
tell me where
you want it
but I want
to go back
to the couch
and eat
my cold
bagel but
I know he
has to
come before
I get
my everything
toasted
with plain
cream cheese

______________________________________

tenure

 

I trade my body for good company       or company     more often than not           but professor doesn’t see me in the hallway               copy room             elevator           parking lot doesn’t see me      if my tit’s not in his mouth     when his red stag isn’t dribble down my chin    and sticky     to the leather of his couch like my grandparents’ couch        the family I don’t call family because         they only love me during second service       vacation bible school          bless this food and the women who prepared it a family by any other name         is a sexual history an untethered novelty             so I ask him about his parents but of course            they’re dead of course         because professor is so many years of being             a white man in this world               in this grad-student pussy             is sixty-five years of asking       let’s go to the bedroom    

     and I am forty fewer of   okay

___________________________________

 

slow burn

 

my age always closer to the scotch in his glass       
we slow-dance     
next to the pool table
he asks me follow but I   
can’t didn’t don’t   
know how and his arms are rigid and his hand
too firm at my waist his fingers
like a trowel in my stubborn soil but he keeps
his eyes closed because it doesn’t need to be me       
“me and mrs jones” and my uncooperative           body           always taking up more space than
it should
                 he asks again just follow damnit       but I’m drunk on light beer and can’t make any more
or less of myself            and I know he has a wife at home       that they sleep in separate beds and her name is Gretchen    but I’m in a sundress and a fresh twenty-one while his cheek is
whisker-burn against my own                                         like my father’s when he used to kiss me
goodnight

_______________________________________

Thanks to The Rumpus, where these poems first appeared.  

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

___________________________________________

An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

___________________________________________

A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

 _______________________________________

The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

________________________________________

Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.

Poet Spotlight: Elizabeth Powell [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Elizabeth Powell is the author of The Republic of Self, a New Issue First Book Prize winner, selected by C.K. Williams. Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances was a 2016 New Yorker Books We Love, a Small Press Best Seller, and won the 2015 Anhinga Robert Dana Prize, selected by Maureen Seaton. Her novel Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, will be released in Spring 2019. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2013, Ecotone, The Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Sugarhouse Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Johnson State College. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

A Process Note

All poetry is physics, is a theology of being and thingyness, is transformative narrative. I am attracted to hybrid form as a way to push the imagination into new ways of thinking and seeing. The imagination is what helps to express what is difficult or unseen and begin to understand how its creative stance can revolt against status quo of American consumerism. There is a strong link between social justice and experimental prose and the hybrid lyric essay/poem because the power of the imaginative/spiritual/dream propulsion of writing is beginning to move us away from the old ways of seeing that no longer serve. The creative force is that which has the power to free. My lyric hybrid novel, “Concerning the Holy Ghost’s Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues” explores how that redemptive idea interfaces with and investigates the consumerism and desire so rampant in American culture. I employ a pastiche of forms from disparate places such as a JCrew catalogue to the Book of Common Prayer. The book looks, in part, at the intersections of conservative evangelical misogyny, the new cult of domesticity (that is fashioned, in part, out of the idea of retro), and the social drive of the American advertisement and consumer system of belief.  My book thinks about creative force as prophecy, as the muse of history, as spiritual guide, as metaphor, as structural device, and, ultimately, as resistance.
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A Folio of New Writing by Elizabeth Powell 

AUTOCORRECTING THE LYRIC I

 

I keep autocorrecting myself. I don’t want to autocorrect myself. I autocorrect when I don’t want to autocorrect. It disturbs the fusion of my interior monologue. I cannot keep up with how fast things are changing. If I use autocorrect I am more suitable for you to see. I am dressed. I am not as naked as my fast typing might insist.

Autocorrection is a kind of conspiracy theory of reality based on the probability of words and un-nimble fingers. Thought is more easily rendered when you autocorrect, so it is said. But I know I am made from a God that makes homemade bread in the desert, even if He doesn’t have yeast. I am not made of touchscreen typing, though it is didactic consideration. My fusion is a kind of Cupertino, inserted into the narrative even though it was never meant to be there. Yet, autocorrection is supposed reduce the probability I am wrong to you in the way Cary Grant never seems wrong to anyone.

When I autocorrect myself, it is better than back when I merely erased myself. There are many ways of erasure: deletion, drunk and disorderly, disintegration. Acting is a favored mode, and that’s why I like theater, drama, monologue. I’ve had practice passing as a Jew and passing as a WASP because my math teacher explained that I am what used to be called in New York, a Mic-Moc, though I am not Irish. I have become kind of good at doing this passing, though the one identity is always trying to autocorrect the other. Can you guess which parent of mine is a Jew? A Gentile?

Let’s say I’m fusion of cold borscht and finger sandwiches on white. I’m matzo ball Jew Bagel and thrifty Campbell’s soup with dried parsley don’t worry about me luncheon. I’m noodle kugel and I’m turkey divan casserole. I’m Bubbeleh and I’m Dearie. I’m Ma and I’m Mummy. I’m the Episcojew, and I am strong and not strong! I have a family tartan and a silence in the Vilnius ghetto. I cannot be buried in the holy land, but I cannot be cremated. I am passing and have passed, heard the murmurs   of lovely   & also…Dirty Jews, Fucking Gentiles. I have paid close attention to speech and learned how to autocorrect instantly. As quickly as fire, which used to follow me around like a strange cat. Fire on the Amtrak from DC to NYC, fire in the living room burning the shag rug, Fire on the Mountain at the Dead Shows.

Now, I just keep turning my words into something else beside fire like someone with a personality disorder trying to make everything look good! It is humbling and uncool, but I keep trying to fill in the blank of myself with words that keep changing. It is better, the Boston Brahmins say, to have a history not a past, so when I speak in the “I’ it must be my Jewish side, when I say that I am a vaudeville act in a quiet New England house. I’m the Daughter of the American Revolution in third class steerage.

I’m the debutante in the Pogrom. I’m a morpher like autocorrection. I have tried to make myself acceptable to both sides. Literally.

I am an Elizabeth…I autocorrect into an   electric   elsewhere

I am also Ann                And   Another

Powell to     Power   to Pose  

In Hebrew my name would be Bathsheba Bat Label

Bathsheba    becomes      Banshee, Battery

Also, I am delighted: Cary Grant was Jewish & Cary Grant was Church of England. He was perhaps the