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

Experiments in Publishing/Escape Through Poetry [by Vincent Katz]

I am thinking about time, how it divides and separates. I have been attempting to locate myself in the present, and I think I am getting better at it, but it is hard work. The mind wants to slip back into the past, to glory over supposed triumphs and fret over past defeats — or to pump itself up over things it is looking forward to or cower over things it is apprehensive about. Yeah, you know the drill. But to be in the present, when one can achieve it, is a gift to oneself, and ultimately to everyone else as well. Meditation is a practice for this, and so is going to poetry readings.

 

I’ll always remember an early poem of Anne Waldman’s called “Things That Make Me Nervous” — and the entire poem reads “Poetry readings. / People. / Dope. / Things I really like.” Which, back in the day, all went together. I looked up the poem and found it in Waldman’s collection Baby Breakdown, published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1970. It was in a period when major publishing houses thought it made sense to go with the zeitgeist and try publishing some far-out poetry, almost as though they were record companies, gambling that one of these books could be the Next Big Thing. Others in this class include Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire, published by Holt Rinehart and Winston in 1969, and Tom Clark’s Stones, pubished by Harper & Row, also in 1969. These were hardcover publications with dust jackets and very sharp design, seemingly because the decisions were left to the poets. Joe Brainard blanketed Padgett’s book with white stars on a royal blue jacket, cover and endpapers. His hand-lettering of the title and author’s name is exquisite. Clark’s book also has jacket design by Brainard, in this case a large piece of yellow swiss cheese on a black background with the author’s name on the vertical axis. Brainard also contributes a blurb, which begins, “Ron Padgett is a poet. He always has been a poet and he always will be a poet. I don't know how a poet becomes a poet. And I don’t think anyone else does either…” Ted Berrigan’s “liner notes” for Waldman’s book are typically effusive. He starts out casually, “Anne Waldman is easily the most exciting poet of her generation, and Anne and her poems are among the great pleasures of everyone’s generation. Half the population of America is under 25, and Anne Waldman, at the age of 25, is a star. It seems she can do anything, and she has, and does …” Later, he adds something as true today as it was in 1970: “She has altered all our lives for the better simply by her presence, for she is no wielder of power, but simply a presence that permits everybody to be themselves and more often than not their best selves in the world…” He concludes, “This book is an ordinary miracle.” I love that Berrigan dated this blurb, printed on the book’s dustjacket folds, “May 18, 1970.” Baby Breakdown is really a far out book! The half-title and title page are hand-drawn by Waldman, and the inside of the book also features experimental typography and layout.

  

Tonight I heard two poets reading their poetry, Bobby Byrd, from El Paso, Texas, and Todd Colby, from Brooklyn, and they both, in very different ways brought me back into the sound of a human voice. That seems obvious, but it’s not. Too many times, at readings, there’s a different sense, an overriding thought, usually, of how is this going to come off, what’s my percentage in it, the calculation of a laugh, or a particular point of view that will give the poem, or more to the point, the poet, support. Poetry doesn’t work like that, nor do poets. First of all, it has to be about the poem, or the poetry, not the poet. Not that poets are not glamorous, fascinating, and fun to look at. And not to deny that they are the authors of their work. But there has to be a moment in the reading when you forget all about the poet, who they are, where they live, what they are wearing, who’s that sitting in the back row, and you are left floating, coasting on a wave of words that takes you to a place you simply could not have imagined before you came to the reading.

 

In Appreciation of James Tate, 1943-2015 [by David Lehman]

I became a convert to James Tate’s poetry when he published Constant Defender and Reckoner in 1983 and ’86 respectively. I was asked to review his work for the Washington Post Book World, and this in part is what I wrote:

 “Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. [Tate’s poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that it may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that refuse to lend themselves to instant analysis.”

 What I did not suspect was the break-out success that occurred a few years later with Distance from Loved Ones. Tate had always had a unique comic sensibility – he was hilarious but with an edge, almost a menacing edge. He continued to write poems that enlarged the boundaries of the comic imagination. But suddenly there was an overflow of wonderful prose poems – the title poem of Distance from Loved Ones, for example -- and for the next twenty-five years, Jim managed to reinvent the prose poem as a form while turning them out at an astonishingly prolific rate. Some could be read as parables, some as shaggy dog stories; there were those that depended on a single idea carried to an extreme and others in which the dialogue took over. He was a master of the uncanny.

It is quite possible that no poet of our time has done more to integrate narrative and poetry than has James Tate. Poets are greater than the sum of their influences, but to get an idea of where Tate comes from you would need to consider the tales of the "grotesque and arabesque" of Edgar Allan Poe, the French surrealists with their exaltation of chance and accident, the casual diction of New York School poets and the value they place on variety and possibility, and the wild fabulism of certain South American writers – an assemblage that suggests a diversity of impulse while conveying only the vaguest idea of what Tate was up to when he undertook to satirize a concept in such prose poems as “National Security” or “Bounden Duty."

For the writer interested in the prose poem there is no one’s work that will prove as rewarding as that of James Tate. In Dome of the Hidden Pavilion, Jim’s latest book, scheduled to appear from the Ecco Press in August, there is a poem entitled “Invisible,” which I find charming although it doesn’t have the metaphoric richness of, say, “The Key to the Universe” in the same book. The story in “Invisible” is deliberately banal, concerning the chance meetings of two men. One of them knows the other, or acts as if he does; but the speaker tells us he “didn’t know the man,” so the encounters are always just this side of ghostly. When the mysterious stranger calls him Chester, the speaker exclaims, “How did he know my name?” It turns out that both men have been “here” for many years: "“But I’ve never seen you here before,” I said. “Maybe one of us is invisible,” he said." There is a further twist but I cite this exchange not only for the beauty of the logic but because of the resonance of the repeated “here” and because the title fits the poem expertly and with stunning simplicity.

I had the good fortune to collaborate with Jim on The Best American Poetry 1997. He read the poems of the year with the generosity and eclecticism that the task requires and with such acumen that the book remains a classic of the series. As an editor I learned much from Jim’s judgments and instincts – he enlarged my sympathies as a reader. We did most of our work by telephone but when we got together to confer, we discovered that we shared a taste for Tanqueray martinis and responded to an exhibition of Elizabeth Bishop’s paintings with the shared conviction that one of her pictures would suitably grace the cover of our anthology. And so it did.

We have lost too many important poets in the last twelve months. But I feel the loss of James Tate with an especially sharp pang. He was one of our best, most original and exemplary poets. Read his books – any or all of them – and know, as surprise follows surprise, that the experience will change you forever. 

***

(Ed note: James Tate and Dara Wier visited the New School for a poetry forum with David Lehman in the fall of 2008. You can read our account of their visit here.  sdh)

Best Russian Poetry; Atlanta Review Russia Issue, Part 2: The Translators

OK, so how many of you go straight for the bios at the back of the mag? I know, as an editor, I do. (More generally, I also read the footnotes first, to familiarize myself with the territory.) We are fortunate to have among the translators of the Russia Issue of the Atlanta Review many who are accomplished younger English language poets in their own right. A partial list only: Ilya Kaminsky, Phil Metres, Derek Mong, Valzhina Mort, Philip Nikolayev.Today, it is their turn to shine, and my, to rally the troops. I invite the translators themselves to post in comments paragraph-long proposals for their books-in-progress and, of course, for prospective publishers to contact them. I invite readers to return to this page to explore the links as more of the features, and brief reviews of books, are added. Today's post concludes with "a review of the literature"; recent Russian poetry books in English translation. The number of presses that publish poetry in translation being countable on one's toes and fingers, each of these is, indeed, a major achievement.

The Chicago Translation Workshop is Daniil Cherkassky, an accordionist and author of a socialist realist blog, gramonist.livejournal.com; Anton Tenser, poet and linguist specializing in Romani languages/ ethnography; and Sasha Spektor, writer and professor of Russian language and literature at the University of Georgia-Athens.

Alex Cigale​’s poems and translations appear in Literary Imagination, Modern Poetry in Translation, New England Review, PEN America, Two Lines, and World Literature Today. He is a 2015 NEA Translation Fellow, for Mikhail Eremin, and also edits at MadHat Press, Plume, St. Petersburg Review, Third Wednesday, and Verse Junkies.

Boris Dralyuk translated several volumes from Russian and Polish and is co-editor of the Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015). He received First Prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award and the 2012 Brodsky/Spender competition. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Katie Farris​ is the author of BOYSGIRLS (Marick Press) and co-translator of several books, including Guy Jean’s Selected Poems and Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press). She teaches at San Diego State University.

Benjamin Felker-Quin studied Russian and literary translation at Hampshire College, where he worked on the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam, Alexander Vvedensky, and Joseph Brodsky. He lives in Pennsylvania.
He is one of the translators of the forthcoming Writing in the Dark: Five Siege Poets (UDP, 2016).

Anne O. Fisher​ has translated the classic Soviet satires The Twelve Chairs and The Little Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. She and her husband, Derek Mong, received an NEA Fellowship for their translations of Maxim Amelin.

Sibelan Forrester​ is Professor at Swarthmore College. Her translations of Stepanova have appeared in Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Zephyr Press 2013), shortlisted for the 2014 Best Translated Book Awards.

Alyssa Gillespie​ is Associate Professor at Notre Dame. Her books include A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva (2001) and Taboo Pushkin: Topics, Texts, Interpretations (2012). She won the 2012 Compass Translation Award and placed third in the 2011 Brodsky/Spender Prize.

Born in Riga, Latvia, Dana Golin​ has poems in Russian and translations in English appearing in Cardinal Points, Druzhba Narodov, Gvideon, Novy Zhurnal, Big Bridge (tribute to Andrey Voznesensky), Cortland Review, IPR, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Plume. She has a graduate degree in psychology and works as a counselor.

Moscow-born Peter Golub​ edited the online New Russian Poetry for Jacket Magazine. His books include a translation of Andrei Sen Senkov’s Anatomical Theater. Recipient of the 2010 Pen/Heim Translation Prize, he lives in San Francisco.

Betsy Hulick​ lives and writes in NYC. She is the translator of Uncle Vanya and Other Plays by Anton Chekhov (Bantam Classics, 1994), Nikolai Gogol's Inspector General (produced on Broadway), and the poetry of Pushkin and Vladimir Aristov (with Julia Trubikhina Kunina) forthcoming in 2015 from UDP.

Ilya Kaminsky (see poets).

J. Kates​, a poet and literary translator, is the editor of Zephyr Press. He lives in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. His Mikhail Yeryomin: Selected Poems 1957-2009 won the Cliff Becker Book Prize and is out from White Pine Press.

Yasha Klots​ is Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and the author of Joseph Brodsky in Lithuania (in Russian). With Ufberg, he co-translated Tamara Petkevich’s Memoir of a Gulag Actress and Sergei Dovlatov’s The Outpost: Notes of a Correspondent.

Phil Metres​ is the author of A Concordance of Leaves (2013) and abu ghraib arias (2011), winner of 2012 Arab American Book Award in poetry. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry and garnered two NEA fellowships. I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky is just out from CSU.

Derek Mong​ is the author of Other Romes (Saturnalia Books), poetry editor of Mantis, and a doctoral candidate at Stanford. He and his wife, Anne O. Fisher, published the first English-language interview with Maxim Amelin in Jacket2.

Ainsley Morse​ translates from Russian and the language formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. Her books include I Live I See: the selected poems of Vsevolod Nekrasov (2013) and Anatomical Theater by Andrey Sen-Senkov (2014).

Valzhyna Mort’s (born Minsk, Belarus) two poetry collections are Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Blue Flower Arts, 2008, 2011). Editor of two poetry anthologies, she is a recipient of the Lannan Fellowship and the Bess Hokin prize. She teaches at Cornell.

Since relocating to the U.S. in 1990, Philip Nikolayev​ (b. 1966, Moscow) has published primarily in English. Nikolayev’s four collections include Monkey Time (2001 Verse Prize) and Letters from Aldenderry (2006). He lives in Cambridge, MA, and co-edits Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

Jamie Olson​ writes about poetry, translation, and Russian culture on his Flaxen Wave blog. His work appears in Asymptote, Cardinal Points, and Two Lines (Kibirov), Russian Life (Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak), Drunken Boat (Irina Yevsa),and Crab Creek Review. He teaches at Saint Martin’s University in Lacey, WA. 

Henry W. Pickford is Associate Professor at Duke. He works in philosophy and literature (chiefly German but also Russian). He is the translator and author of Critical Models: Catchwords and Interventions, by Theodor W. Adorno (Columbia University Press) and Sense of Semblance: Philosophical Analyses of Holocaust Art (Fordham, 2013).

Ian Probstein​ (b. 1953) is a bilingual English-Russian poet and translator of poetry, author of eight books of poetry in Russian, one in English, a book of prose, some dozen books of translation, and 250 publications in several languages.

Dmitri Psurtsev (b. 1960) is a Russian poet and translator. His two books of poetry, Ex Roma Tertia and Tengiz Notebook, were published in 2001. He teaches translation at Moscow State Linguistic University.

Misha Semenov​ (Princeton class of 2015 valedictorian, studying architecture and translation) was born in San Francisco to Russian parents. His translations are in St. Petersburg Review, Talisman, and Big Bridge 21st Century Russian Poetry Anthology. He won an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Compass Translation Award.

Bela Shayevich, a Soviet-born writer, illustrator, and translator, lives in Philadelphia. She co-translated Vsevolod Nekrasov’s I Live I See. Her translation of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novel The Big Green Tent is forthcoming from Macmillan in 2015.

Kat Shapiro​ (Ekaterina Chapiro) is a poet and translator studying for her M.A. in poetry and American Studies at the University of Copenhagen. She has contributed essays and translations to the Potomac Review, Able Muse, and Asymptote.

Larissa Shmailo​’s translation of the Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun is from Cervena Barva Press. Her latest collection of poetry is #specialcharacters, from Unlikely Books. A novel, Patient Women, is forthcoming from BlazevOX.

Nika Skandiaka (b. Moscow) grew up in the U.S. and lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. She has published translations from Russian and translations of English poetry into Russian. Her poems are in TextOnly, Vavilon, and Ulysses Unchained.

Alexandra Smith​ is a faculty member of the University of Edinburgh. Her books include Song of the mocking bird: Pushkin in the work of Marina Tsvetaeva and Montaging Pushkin: Pushkin and Visions of Modernity in Russian 20th-century Poetry.

Charles Swank graduated from Hampshire College, where he studied literature, translation, and Russian. He lives and works in western Massachusetts. He is one of the translators of the forthcoming Writing in the Dark: Five Siege Poets (UDP, 2016).

Julia Trubikhina​ (Kunina), born in Moscow, is visiting Associate Professor at Hunter College, CUNY. Julia has published four books of original and translated verse in Russian, and a translation of Vladimir Aristov into English (forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse).

Ross Ufberg​’s translations include Memoir of A Gulag Actress by Tamara Petkevich, Polish writer Marek Hłasko’s Beautiful Twentysomethings (2013), and Vladimir Lorchenkov’s novels The Good Life is Elsewhere (2014). He co-founded New Vessel Press.

Katherine Young​ is the author of Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Prize finalist). Her poems are in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, and Shenandoah; her translations placed third in the 2011 Brodsky/Spender Prize.

SELECTED RECENT BOOKS

Gennady Aygi, Into the Snow: Selected Poems (Sarah Valentine translator, Wave Books, 2011); Child-And-Rose and Field Russia (Peter France translator; New Directions Press, 2003, 2007)

Polina Barskova, This Lamentable City (Ilya Kaminsky translator; Tupelo Pres, 2010) and The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems (Boris Dralyuk, David Stromberg translators, Melville House, 2010)

Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Endarkment (Eugene Ostashevsky editor, Lyn Hejinian introduction, Genya Turovskaya and Bela Shayevich translators; Wesleyan University Press, 2014)

 

Sergey Gandlevsky, A Kindred Orphanhood  (Phil Metres translator; Zephyr Press, 2003)

Inna Kabysh, Two Poems (Katherine Young translator; Artists Proof Editions)

Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing; Selected Writings (Matvei Yankilevich translator; Overlook Press/Duckworth 2009)

Vladislav Khodasevich, Selected Poems (Peter Daniels translator, Michael Wachtel introduction; Angel Books/The Overlook Press, 2013). "Vladislav Khodasevich occupies a place just below the giants in the Russian pantheon of poetry, unique for having come to maturity during the Berlin immigration of the 1920s and 1930s. The British poet and translator Peter Daniels's Selected is best at representing Khodasevich's substantial formal craftsmanship (though he may be served in English by following meter less regularly). This Russian Thomas Hardy/Robert Frost, who can at any moment remind one of a 1930s Frank O'Hara, may be read nearly as an early Confessionalist! Here is the conclusion, in Peter's translation, of his classic poem to his father, 'Dactyls'".

He had six fingers, my father. His son? He has inherited
     neither the humble heart, the brood of children,
nor the six fingers. Like placing a bet on a dubious card
     he stakes his soul, his word, on a word, a sound.
Now on a January night, drunken with six-fingered meter and
     six-fingered verses, the son remembers his father.
.

Aleksei Kruchenykh, Victory Over the Sun (Larissa Shmailo translator, Eugene Ostashevsky introduction; Cervena Barva Press, 2014). "Velimir Khlebnikov, literally, missed the train on co-penning this one, contributing only a poem to Kruchenykh's libretto. Staged alongside Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy, the original 1913 production of Victory is remembered primarily for Kazimir Malevich's costumes, lighting, and set design, instigations for the Suprematism and Constructivism still to come in 1915 and 1919, respectively…. Nothing is more fitting for this centennial of "Russian Futurianism" than a celebration of Kruchenykh's great contribution to poetry, his Zaum, and not just for its verbal play – the inventive neologizing and the épater-le-bourgeois utopianism – but for the underappreciated antilyricism of his verse, as well. In communicating to us his musicality in English, Larissa Shmailo has done a remarkable job in conferring on Kruchenykh his true due as a poet." AC

Lev Loseff, Selected Early Poems (Henry W. Pickford translator; Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2013)

Kirill Medvedev, It’s No Good (Keith Gessen et al. translators; N+1/ Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012). "Imagine Charles Bukowski hopped up on a Marxist Sorbonne education and you have Medvedev. If you want to understand the current situation in Russia, nationally and in poetry, this book is the best primer I know." AC

Vadim Mesyats, A Guest in the Homeland: Selected Writings (Simon Pettit, Bruce McClelland, Alex Cigale, et al. translators; Talisman House, 1997)

Vsevolod Nekrasov, I LIVE I SEE (Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich translators; Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) 

Anzhelina Polonskaya, A Voice: Selected Poems; Paul Klee's Boat, (Andrew Wachtel translator; Northwestern University Press, 2004; Zephyr Press, 2013)

Lev Rubinstein, Catalogue of Compleat Comedic Novelties (Phil Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky translators; UDP, 2014)

 

Mariya Rybakova, Gneditch (Elena Dimov translator; Glagoslav, 2015)

Andrey Sen-Senkov, Anatomical Theater (Ainsley Morse and Peter Golub translators; Zephyr Press, 2013)

Gleb Shulpyakov, A Fire Proof Box and Letters to Yakub (Christopher Mattison translator; Canarium Press 2011, 2014)

 

Arseny Tarkovsky, I Burned at the Feast, translated by Phil Metres and Dmitry Psurtsev (Cleveland State Press, 2015). "Having had a front row seat as these translations made their appearance over the past five years in various periodicals (see links below), my reaction has been that Metres and Psurtsev had largely accomplished something that I had previously thought impossible, giving us a Tarkovsky in lyrical, fluid English versions that capture the voice, intelligence, character, and the very substantial poetic gift of the man." AC

Marina Tsvetaeva, Dark Elderberry Branch (Jean Valentine and Ilya Kaminsky narrators; Alice James Books, 2012 )

Alexander Vvedensky, An Invitation for Me to Think (Selected, Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankilevich translators; New York Review Books, 2013)

Mikhail Yeryomin, Selected 1957-2009 (J. Kates translator; White Pine Press, 2014, Winner of the Cliff Becker Prize). "Of Yeromin's Poems, the critic Ilya Kukulin has written that they give “metaphorical expression to the transformation of the soul.” In this respect, he connects Yeryomin to Osip Mandelstam, another practitioner of the eight-line verse, finding therein a common source in Mandelstam’s writings on Dante’s “search for the spiritual foundations of the world.” Kukulin concludes that these external transformations have an invisible counterpart in the internal “soul work, the discovery of one’s own ‘I’ – for the apprehension of all these treasures. Each time, this apprehension may only be partial [provisional] and so it requires a choice…. Yeryomin’s art offers one possibility for how such poetry may endure in the post-modern era.... Even with all its philosophic qualities, it remains a personal [private] and faith-filled [trusting] lyric.” Jim Kates's Selected offers flashes of the brilliance of this acknowledged master whose body of work (all octets!) constitutes one of the most important of the second half of the 20th c."

She closed her eyelids. Not to step, but be plunged
Into a garden hidden beneath them. The trees 
Not yet alphabet, now no longer ancient alleys of text.
Love is still a second hedge. Movement 
No longer burdensome, but even less a burrow.

Lips do not discover with a word
The radiant appearance of pearls
Over my face.

Relocations: 3 Contemporary Russian Women Poets. Polina Barskova, Anna Glazova, and Maria Stepanova (translated by Catherine Ciepiela, Anna Khasin, and Sibelan Forrester, respectively; Zephyr Press, 2013)

I'm a phenomenon quite out of the ordinary; the Notebooks, Diaries and Letters of Daniil Kharms (Tony Anemone and Peter Scotto, editors and translators; Academic Press, 2013)

The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Robert Chandler, Irina Mashinski, Boris Dralyuk editors; Penguin, 2015)

The Development of Russian Verse, Cambridge Introduction to Russian Poetry by Michael Wachtel (Cambridge University Press, 1999, 2004)

Poems from the Stray Dog Café, translated by Meryl Natchez with Polina Barskova (hit & run press, 2015)

Stray Dog Cabaret (Peter Schmidt, Catherine Ciepiela, Honore Moore translators; New York Review Books, 2007)

Russian Silver Age Poetry, Sibelan Forrester and Martha Kelly, editors and translators (Academic Press, 2015). “It being dauntingly impossible to do justice in translation to that great world treasure that is the Poetry of the Russian Silver Age, editors and translators Forrester and Kelly have given us something more — selections of best existing translations are here amended by new ones and framed within their wider cultural context — the contribution that poets have always made to their culture and age — as critics, essayist, and yes, historians. A valuable personal discovery for myself was Mayakovsky’s touching tribute on the death of Velimir Khlebnikov (1922). This much needed book promises to become indispensable to students and experts alike." AC

FORTHCOMING BOOKS

Vladimir Aristov, What We Saw from the Mountain (Julia Trubikhina Kunina, Betsy Hullick, Gerald Janecek translators (UDP, 2016) 

WRITTEN IN THE DARK: FIVE SIEGE POETS (Polina Barskova editor, Ainsley Morse et al translators; UDP, 2016)

AND THE REALLY BIG NEWS!

The New York Times headline: Columbia University Press to Publish New Translations of Russian Literature (100 NEW BOOKS!)

ENGLISH LANGUAGE JOURNALS publishing Russian poetry in translation

ATLANTA REVIEW RUSSIA ISSUE (Dan Veach editor, Spr. 2015, XXI.2)

ARS INTERPRES (Alexander Deriev editor)

CARDINAL POINTS (Irina Mashinsky, Robert Chandler, Boris Dralyuk eds.)

FOUR CENTURIES (multi-lingual; Ilya Perlmutter editor)

INTERNATIONAL POETRY REVIEW (Spr. 2014 Slavic Issue; Kathleen Macfie ed.)

MADHATTERS REVIEW (Russia/Ukraine No. 12, Marc Vincenz editor)

THE MANHATTAN REVIEW (Issue 15.2, Philip Fried editor)

MODERN POETRY IN TRANSLATION (Sasha Dugdale editor)

ST. PETERSBURG REVIEW (Elizabeth L. Hodges et al. editors)

SPRINGHOUSE JOURNAL (Elizabeth L. Hodges editor)

TELEPHONE 4, Sveta Litvak Issue (Paul Legault, Sharmila Cohen editors)

Best Russian Poetry; Russia Issue of Atlanta Review (Spr. 2015, Vol. XXI, No. 2)

 I owe the pleasure of this week to the evening spent at Cornelia Street Café at the back table with David Lehman and Lawrence Joseph (his friend of 50 years!) Jump cut: When I recently asked David might he feature the Russia Issue of the Atlanta Review I'd just edited on the BAP blog, he offered me this residency to guest blog on the subject. It seems only fitting then that, in my first post, I do exactly that. Without further adieu.... AC

Welcome! Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Yevtushenko, Brodsky. I have probably just summed up what most of us know of modern Russian poetry. And yet there could hardly be a nation more important for us to understand—or one with a greater enthusiasm for poetry. Yevtushenko’s readings used to fill football stadiums. Brodsky might have, had he not been exiled from his country as a “social parasite.” (On their worst days, poets sometimes wonder if what they do is useless. Imagine having your country tell you so officially!

But what these poets do is far from useless, and it was out of fear, not scorn, that Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union. As Osip Mandelstam, who died in Stalin’s prison camps, once said: “Only in Russia is poetry respected; it gets people killed. Is there another place where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” Independent thinking, a broad and humane perspective, imagination, fearless criticism, creativity itself—these are the things that repressive regimes fear most, and for which we turn to poetry and poets.

Here indeed are some chilling poems in which the personal and the political intersect, like Andrey Gritsman’s “Sarin, Soman, Tobun.” But also remarkable is the extent to which these Russian poets have refused to let political struggles dictate their agenda, finding space for free and imaginative exploration in the ample country of their own art.

At Brodsky’s trial his Soviet judge sneered, “Who enrolled you in the ranks of the poets?” “No one,” replied Brodsky. “Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?” Brodsky would go on to win the Nobel Prize and become Poet Laureate of the United States. But the young and unrecognized poet’s answer still stands: what makes an artist is not the approval of society, but the expression of one’s own humanity. 

Nobel Prize or not, all poets still face the vast, snowy tundra of the blank page, with which this issue fittingly begins. And yet, from prison cells to castle keeps, Arctic to desert to Amazon jungle, they come bearing gifts of the human spirit, for which we will always be grateful.

 Dan Veach, Editor & Publisher of the Atlanta Review. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Happy birthday, Ben Jonson, thou rare spirit and kinsman of mine [by DL]

Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Of the canonical English poets, was there ever a finer rhymester than "rare" Ben Jonson? His poems sing; they are lyrics that require no musical accompaniment, though the impulse to set his words to music must always be great. Jonson's facility with triple rhymes is unrivaled, as in this gorgeous song from his masque Cynthia's Revels (Act I., Sc. ii.):

ECHO'S SONG

Slow, slow, fresh fount, keep time with my salt tears;
   Yet slower, yet, O faintly gentle springs:
List to the heavy part the music bears,
         "Woe weeps out her division, when she sings.
              Droop herbs and flowers;
              Fall grief in showers;
              Our beauties are not ours":
                   O, I could still,
(Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, )
               drop, drop, drop, drop,
Since nature's pride is, now, a withered daffodil.

Happy birthday to us, big Ben. -- DL

Phil Levine & the Burger Bitch [by Kate Daniels]

photo (c) Vanderbilt University

About twenty years ago in Nashville, when Philip Levine was Vanderbilt University’s visiting writer, there was a Burger King on 21^st Avenue South, at the edge of the college’s magnolia-fringed campus.  It had a large parking lot that butted up next to a place called San Antonio Taco, where Vanderbilt students lined up to buy galvanized buckets of long necked beers on ice to ease down their guacamole tacos and buffalo wings.  The parking lot belonged to Burger King, but SATCO customers often parked there.

Nowadays, Panera Bread (which has replaced the Burger King) employs a large, male security guard festooned with handcuffs and a police baton to patrol the lot, making sure the spaces reserved for Panera customers go to Panera customers.  But back in 1995, Burger King had a sole female employee performing that job.  Anyone who’s spent time around college students can tell you it’s dangerous to get between them and their beer.  So it was not unusual to see this woman – in her late fifties, early sixties – running out of Burger King in her brown polyester BK uniform, a matching kerchief flapping around her neck, a matching cap bobby-pinned to her dyed blond hair.  Like a lot of people who do these kinds of jobs, she was a good employee, and took her work seriously.  To discourage the students from parking where they wanted to park, she sometimes shook a rag at them, sometimes she just called out.  Overwhelmingly, (of course) they ignored her.  When she wasn’t trying to chase off illegal parkers, her duty was picking up trash.  You’d have thought anyone could see it was a miserable job, and taken pity.    Still, it was a job, right?  And in 1995, she must have been making $4.25/hour – minimum wage at that time – $170/week if she worked full time.  Some of the students called her the Burger Bitch.  I just hope she never knew…

As it happened, my colleague and best-friend-of-Vanderbilt Creative Writing, Vereen Bell, sometimes had a cup of coffee and did a little last minute paper grading in the Burger King before crossing the street to class.  It was convenient, cheap, quiet.  It’s hard to describe Vereen: somewhere in his late 70s now, he’s an iconic figure at Vanderbilt where he’s taught for more than half a century, he’s pretty much transformed the English Department from its midcentury roster of white-men-teaching-white-men into the lively, diversified department it is today.  (Read about Vereen here)

In the English Department, we were thrilled when Phil won the Pulitzer Prize for The Simple Truth on April 18, 1995.  He actually took the call in his office with his door open.  Vereen was in his office, across the hall, ready with a bottle of bourbon.   I was in an office just a few doors down – brand new to Vanderbilt, taken aback by its surface formality and the constraints of a conservative campus culture.  “Please be quiet,” warned a placard hung in the hall outside the department.  “Voices can be heard from within.”  I’d never been part of an English Department where talking was discouraged…

As soon as Phil confirmed he had won (“Yes. Isn’t it sweet?” he said to my colleague, Mark Jarman.), I watched in astonishment as various faculty and staff rushed up and down the hall, arms full of liquor bottles, or wrapped around trash cans, commandeered as ice buckets. Soon, a full blown party was underway in the Department’s Duncan Library.  What I remember best is the expression on Phil’s face – bemused, pleased, still something a little bit held back (maybe because Franny wasn’t there).  I read later that he said, of the Pulitzer, “If you take it too seriously, you’re an idiot. But if you look at the names of the other poets who have won it, most of them are damn good.”  His face reflected those split emotions that afternoon.

Well, what does this have to do with the Burger Bitch, her miserable job, and her pathetic little life picking up trash and chasing drunk college students out of Burger King’s parking lot?

Just this:  when Phil gave a poetry reading at Vanderbilt later that semester, Vereen Bell introduced him.  The reading was packed.  When it was time, Vereen unfolded his tall frame and made his way to the podium.  In his slow-paced and garrulous manner, with his soothing, south Georgia accent, he began to talk, bypassing entirely the impressive literary credentials of Philip Levine. He told, instead, the story of the Burger Bitch, how he had started talking with her one day as she went about her trash-dumping duties. 

“She came and sat down at the table with me,” he said.  “She told me what her job was, and how hard it was, how difficult it was to get the students to listen to her.

“Then she asked me what my job was.  ‘Well,’ I said, feeling a little embarrassed, ‘I teach over there at the college.’  She brightened up right away.  ‘You do?’ she answered.  ‘Then would you do something for me?’  ‘Sure,’ I said.  ‘Would you please tell those girls not to laugh at me because of my job?’”

In the audience, our own laughter, our wry smiles, the subtly self-congratulatory atmosphere we’d created around ourselves of having a Pulitzer Prize winner on faculty dissipated instantaneously.

For a few seconds – and I will never forget the feel in the room – Vereen let us sit in that.  

And then he said, “Maybe you wonder why I’m telling you this story.  Well, it’s because it’s the best way I can I can think of to introduce Philip Levine.  He understands how that woman who works in the parking lot at Burger King feels about things.  And he writes poems about it.”

Now, that introduction – so astonishingly apt, so unique in American poetry – has become Phil’s epitaph…

Kate Daniels is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.  Her most recent book is A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU: 2011).  It includes “Crowns,” a poem she wrote for Philip Levine.

The First Class with Paul Violi [by Alexandra Bennett]

Is it possible to know someone you’ve never met, someone who has been completely invisible to you in the flesh but has marked your life in an indelible way? This is my question in regards to the poet Paul Violi, a man I’ve never seen in person but one I’ve come to know through his Selected Poems and the descriptive, warm, and love-inducing stories shared by others who knew him for a long time or perhaps only shared a moment in his presence.

            By the time I arrived in New York City, Paul had already passed away. I was studying in The New School’s MFA program, and his name was frequently heard throughout the writing classes and at poetry readings. Mysterious to me then, the goal soon became to figure out who he was as a writer and person, about his teaching style, and the way he viewed the world through an “an ever-widening hour, / where fountains in the rain / half frozen, half music, / shine with a dim dream of the sun.”

Many have written about Paul’s unusual influence; their stories are posted on this blog, and others are embedded in various writings. Memories of Paul circle around themes of gratitude, warmth, and sheer amazement at the poet’s unique capabilities. Those who sat in Paul’s classes tell of his intense focus during conversations, his generosity as both a sincere listener and a speaker who elicited “clarity drawn from darkness / song from thought.” One young man, who knew Paul only through writing, recounts how he reached out to the poet about a possible collaboration. Paul responded to his inquiry and suggested that the two have dinner. He later sent him several of his books, all in the spirit of goodwill and connection. I’m thinking of these lines from “One for the Monk of Montaudon:”

For it’s a pure and simple joy
to eat and drink with those I love,
to stay late and celebrate a few certainties
while confusion and scorn
and a few other crazy, weather-beaten guests
continue to roll across the cold floors

I love this idea of sharing a meal to fight back some of life’s crazy. It seems to be an authentic and real solution, to break bread and enjoy one another’s company amidst all our joys and difficulties. Yet, it also seems to be a rare thing in today’s world.

This was Paul’s mode of operation, though. He found happiness in connecting with others. Earlier in “One for the Monk of Montaudon,” the poet explains:

And I’m glad of a chance to meet people,
like Miss Ohio
(“five foot nine, eyes that shine”),
if for no other reason than the pleasure of shaking hands or the                  opportunity
of leaning into the distances
while a strand of smoke lingers, and rises,
and turns like an unheard but legible desire.

 In these moments we lean into the distances with Paul. We meet others; we meet him. His scenes help us gain a tiny eye and an enlarged heart for what’s going on around us, the people whose lives are intersecting with our own.

Whether on a construction site, in a Nigerian village, or somewhere in his own thoughts, the poet’s life serves as an example of joie de vivre. In another posted tribute (there are dozens), one reader tells about the time Paul ran into the freezing North Sea wearing only his underpants, simply because the water was there and he was alive. This reminds me of his vibrant poems from Harmatan, which relay Paul’s experiences in Nigeria while serving in the Peace Corps.His work, life amongst the people, and keen observations come marching before us, instructing us to hop on the motorcycle behind him as two packs of wild dogs attack from the bush, “leaping over the handlebars, / all fangs and spit flying in strands”. There’s an intense uncertainty here, “alarm still ringing in your head,” and we question how the poet will navigate the rest of our ride.

As we think of poems, like “Index,” we see the writer splurging on language, venturing into what interests him most, things he's appreciating in the moment, the paths he questions, and even items that some of us might initially consider dull. For Paul, all of life was a poem waiting in the wings, a chance to put thoughts to paper, to expand his understanding through iterations and imaginings. Selected Poems is a memorial of the poet’s mind in motion, one that bares its musings – all of the things that can happen in an hour, the loves and losses, the knowable observations, and the darker uncertainties. His lines can bring us back to the surface, as they prompt, “Is life all you know?” Such questions remind us to breathe, to think beyond our ever-present worries. And we need these reminders, especially when we find ourselves disavowing our life’s work three times in the same day (see “Index” again).

Continuing to turn pages in Selected Poems, we see just how seriously Paul took the poetic possibilities within any situation. Poem after poem demonstrate his deep curiosity of small moments in time. It’s as if an idea twitches ever so slightly, and then the poet traces the thread, nourishing additional thoughts and fictional exploration. He takes it into something much larger and more imaginative.

So what has the poet-scholar taught us on our first day of class? If we’re willing participants, we see that there is always something on the other side. Violi left the door open for connection and further questioning. The hour widens as we sit with him, contemplating both light and weighty things, all of which seem weightier by the end of our time together.

Selected Poems will continue to transmit the teacher’s voice. I’m reminded that “it’s a good day / when the wind is pure sensation” and I can stretch out with the writing before me, meeting the poet who hummed each line, breathed each thought. At the beginning of his day, I can almost see Paul stepping out of his house in Putnam Valley, his teacher’s bag full of students’ papers and his comments. It’s early in the morning. He puts one foot past the threshold and calls forth any new or unusual thing. He’s asking someone or something to cross his path, to make itself known in a small or quiet way, and he’s smirking ever so slightly.  

This week we celebrate Paul Violi’s life as a friend, poet, and teacher. On behalf of David Lehman and The New School’s Writing Program, we invite you to attend a special night honoring the poet. Please join us this Wednesday, February 11 at 6:30pm at The New School’s Wollman Hall (65 W. 11^th Street). Find more information here. 

Alex Bennett received her MFA from The New School in 2013. Her work has appeared in the Sosland Journal, The Best American Poetry Blog, the New School Writing Program blog, Insights Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches writing at Parsons. 

Review of Julie Babcock's Autoplay [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Julie Babcock's stunning first collection of poems, Autoplay, offers spare, carefully crafted lyrics that are as familiar as they are uncanny.  By invoking the seemingly tame imagery of Midwestern cities, the poems in this striking collection lull the reader into a sense of complacency, only to skillfully undermine this expectation that they will encounter a familiar narrative.  As the book unfolds, Babcock excavates violence, discontent, and enchantment from beneath an unremarkable exterior—marked by "the green hills of the gold course," "baby-sitters," and "breath against the mirror"—restoring a sense of both danger and wonder to everyday life.  In doing so, Babock offers the reader a perfect matching of form and content, particularly as her stylistic dexterity illuminates and complicates the content of the work itself.

With that in mind, Babcock's use of received literary forms to deliver unexpected content is particularly impressive.  She draws a parallel between inherited modes of writing (of which couplets, tercets, and quatrains are only a few examples) and the Midwestern cultural landscape, suggesting that both have been made to seem inhospitable to creative endeavors, but can give rise to stunning imaginative work if we allow them to.  She writes in "Ohio Apologia,"

A twin can never divide her wealth.

I planned to go where I'd never melt
into a mold of virgin or slut. 
I wanted to love you to love myself. 

I crossed the rivers with my bag of stealth
my story line revised and trussed,
but a twin can never divide her wealth.

Here Babcock simultaneously inhabits a traditional literary form and received ideas about femininity, suggesting that one can work within these bits of inherited culture to expand what is possible within them.  In much the same way that the speaker herself is "twinned," her story line is "revised and trussed," suggesting the inherent instability of both literary traditions and narratives of identity.  Autoplay is filled with beautifully crafted poems like this one, which offer a carefully constructed relationship between style and content. 

Along these lines, I found Babcock's use of domestic imagery compelling and provocative, especially as she suggest the violence inherent in being confined to a given place.  She creates a wonderful tension between the confines of formal poetry and the volatility of the images contained within these formally pristine edifices, suggesting the inevitable discontent with one's origins.  Consider "Autoplay,"

I am the baby-sitter.  She
is snuggled so close
we might be one.
We hear a noise
and flee the house.
"We're safe," I say, as we jump
on the outdoor trampoline.
Double somersaults
of fear... 

For Babcock, a particular place entails not just mere surroundings, but specific gender roles, modes of communication, and narratives of identity.  In much the same way that the speakers' voices are contained within neatly presented tercets, couplets, and pantoums, the violence inherent in narratives of place is also subsumed within these orderly forms.  What's fascinating about this tension between style and content is the way that Babcock subtly suggests that conflict, and contradiction, can reside beneath a seemingly un-rippled surface.  Like many of the poems in Autoplay, this piece is as beautifully crafted as it is self-aware.  This is a stunning debut, and Babcock is a poet to watch. 

Review of John Gallaher's In a Landscape [by Kristina Marie Darling]

John Gallaher's finely crafted poetry collection, In a Landscape, reads as an exercise in blurring boundaries, an effort to challenge the received models of writing, reading, and authorship that we have become accustomed to.   Presented as a book-length sequence of linked lyric pieces, which appear in long, Whitman-esque lines, the work in this stunning new book asks the reader to consider the myriad ways that poetry overlaps and intersects with memoir writing, particularly as Gallaher strives to eliminate any distance between the speaker of the poems and the author.  In many ways, Gallaher's work gestures at the artifice inherent in the lyric "I," offering instead poems that allow the reader to observe the inner workings of memory and consciousness experience. 

Gallaher's work is perhaps most impressive in moments when he creates an expectation on the part of the reader that the work will read like prose, then proceeds to undermine that readerly expectation.  For instance, the work is presented in long lines that look, at first glance, like prose, leading the reader to expect a linear narrative, filled with exposition, that creates an orderly progression from one event to the next. As the poems unfold, one is surprised and delighted to discover the poems' elliptical and associative logic.  By creating this provocative relationship between form and content, Gallaher suggests the artifice of the narratives we create to lend a sense of order to the world around us.  He writes,

I just forgot how to count Roman numerals, and had to look it up.
I used to be good at them, and would always wait for the end of T.V. shows,
where I'd get to count the date.  The game was:  figure out the date
before it blinked away...

Here Gallaher presents us with lines that look like prose on the page, but remind us that consciousness and memory are inevitably fragmentary, no matter what narratives we construct around them.  In many ways, Gallaher prompts the reader to see the beauty inherent in fragmentation, suggesting that these brief episodic narratives and associative leaps remain closer to the truth than the clear linear progression that one finds so often in prose.  In a Landscape is filled with poems like this one, which remind the reader of the artifice inherent in the creation of narrative, which offers only an illusion of wholeness and coherence. 

Along these lines, Gallaher's associative and elliptical narratives suggest that consciousness itself is fragmentary, and memory represents only our efforts to lend a sense of continuity to our experience of the world around us.  The poems in this carefully crafted collection frequently use the style of the work to make this ambitious philosophical argument, offering the reader a perfect matching of form and content.  Consider this passage,

The other night we drove downtown and something was on fire
somewhere.  We could smell it and see smoke, but
we couldn't tell exactly where it was.  A little to the east and south
of the parking lot, I think?

What's most intriguing about this passage is Gallaher's use of enjambment.  By breaking the line after "fire," and beginning next line with "somewhere," Gallaher suggests that the uncertainty and subjectivity of narrative increase as it's made more and more elaborate.  This idea comes across most noticeably in the phrase, "A little to the east and south...", which evokes a sense of certainty through its specificity, a sentiment that is undermined as the sentence unfolds in the next line ("of the parking lot, I think?").  I find Gallaher's use of style and technique to convey to evoke the subjectivity and artifice of narrative to be artful and compelling.  In short, In a Landscape is a finely crafted book, and a wonderful addition to this writer's already accomplished body of work. 

Formal Innovation & Textual Rupture: A Conversation Between Kristina Marie Darling & Tony Trigilio [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Kristina Marie Darling:  Your new book, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 1, offers readers an extended engagement with 1960s mass culture, exploring the myriad ways that television and radio shape the individual consciousness.  This idea that culture determines what is possible within thought, and within the human mind, is gracefully enacted in the content of the poems, which appear as pristine couplets.  I'm intrigued, though, by moments when the form is broken, and the poems deviate from the pattern that has been established.  As the writer, how do you know when a form should be broken?  What does breaking form make possible within the content of your work?

Tony Trigilio:  Thanks so much for your detailed reading of the book.  My hope is that, as you mentioned, readers can identify with the ways mass media and individual consciousness shape each other in the book.  As I get deeper into Vol. 2 of the Dark Shadows project (about half-finished with the second volume now), I gain a deeper appreciation of mass media's roots in the verb "to mediate."  I realize the connection is obvious: but it's one thing to experience media/mediation intellectually, and an entirely different thing to experience it psychically and viscerally.  Like all of us, the development of my own psyche was mediated by electronic communication—for me, it was television and radio, and for folks growing up now, it's digital media.  It just so happens that the mediating force for me was a kitschy vampire and all the nightmares he caused me (though I was way too young to understand he was kitschy).  As scary as the continual nightmares were, they did introduce me to the power of dream and to the idea that dream-reality is as vital and real as waking-reality. 

I appreciate your remarks on the symmetry of the couplets, and, perhaps more important, your remarks about those moments when I break the couplets.  For me, the breaking of the couplets creates an asymmetry that speaks back to the formal boundaries I've deliberately imposed on the project.  The accumulating couplets lead, for me, to a weirdly discontinuous feeling of finality in each segment of stanzas.  By "discontinuous," I mean that each segment of couplets sustains itself until eventually reaching a resolution (the one-line stanzas that break the couplets) that is really not a resolution at all, because, ideally, it resists the expectation for continuously symmetrical couplets.  It resists the desire for resolution.  My hope is that the one-line stanzas lead the reader to the next segment of couplets as part of an ongoing chain of formal buildup and formal collapse.  This dance between structure and collapse offers, for me, an ongoing chain of speech (form) and silence (collapse) always mediated by the white space of the page and the horizontal lines that break up each segment of the book.  I'm working with the same couplet structure in Book 2, but I'm also starting to feel like I need to break into a different formal constraint for Book 3.  I don't know what form will suggest itself for Book 3 yet. 

This tension between speech and silence seems vital to your poems, too.  Your work often brings me back to John Cage and his urgent sense of the musicality of silence—really, his adoration of silence as a phenomenon that's just as powerful as sound (and, in the same way, his adoration of noise as a phenomenon just as powerful as music).  Whether you're elevating footnotes and indexes from the margin to the center, or whether you're writing haunting silences into the abstract lyric or prose poem, it feels like you want to enact the limits of speech at the same time that you're urgently speaking.  Your work reminds me that even though language never gets us to the real thing-in-itself, we absolutely have to keep speaking, because language is our ticket into the cultures we live in, and is our vehicle for re-envisioning the cultures we live in.  Can you talk a little about the writers and artists who've influenced your interest in silence?  In literary terms, your work evokes Jenny Boully's writing, among others, but the way Cage comes into my mind when I read your work makes me curious about who your influences are from other art forms, too.

KMD:  Thank you for your generous and thought-provoking reading of my work.  I appreciate what you said about the importance of asymmetry in a text, particularly the ways that such an imbalance (whether formal, visual, or sonic) leaves room for the reader to imagine, speculate, and participate in the process of creating meaning from the text.   To forge connections between different elements of the poem.  We definitely seem to share an interest in fostering a more active reader, prompting them to inhabit the text and help construct it. 

In my own work, I strive for asymmetry of all kinds.   This can range from formal imbalances (like footnotes to an absent text, or footnotes that become the main text) to pairings of very different types of language, taken from vastly different registers and discourses.  I feel that this kind of asymmetry in a literary work almost always involves silence, a gap between what the writer has articulated and the connections that the reader must forge himself or herself.  For me, this silence, this gap in a poem or story is where the reader's imagination lives, it's the aperture where he or she enters the work and begins to interact with it. 

My most recent book, Fortress, uses silence perhaps more than any of my other collections.  The book  begins and ends with erasures of Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain, in which I erase human suffering from the book.  As you can imagine, there wasn't much left, only "the fragile blue thread," "the small arc," and "hands placed on a piano...remembering a song as though it were another form of breathing."  The poems themselves are confined to the margins, made to inhabit the book's least habitable spaces.  I'm very interested in the effect that this unwieldy amount of white space has on the reader.  I hope that the visual imbalance of the book, in which text is overwhelmed by white space, and sound by silence, prompts the reader to consider the myriad ways that we are coaxed to fill silence, to eventually find beauty in what most would call an absence. 

I would have to say that the text that most piqued my curiosity about silence, white space, and erasure was Yedda Morrison's Darkness.  She erases people from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, leaving only the natural world in all of its threat, ruination, and majesty.  I love the fact that the gesture of erasure becomes as meaningful as the text itself, illuminating and complicating the small fragments with which we are presented.  In many ways, meaning resides in what isn't said, in what is taken away.  In my own work, I certainly emulate this use of white space and silence to spark the reader's curiosity, to prompt their own imaginative work.  Along these lines, Ronald Johnson's Radi Os and Janet Holmes The Ms of My Kin are also favorites, along with Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay. 

While we're on the subject of erasure, silence, and white space, I'd love to hear more about the moments of rupture within your poetry.  The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) is wonderfully cinematic in its presentation, as the poems are presented in discrete episodes, almost like scenes of a television or radio show. I admire the way that the transition from scene to scene, the break in narrative continuity, invites the reader to speculate and imagine in much the same way that incompleteness, white space, or asymmetry would in a literary text.  What possibilities does a rupture in the narrative thread open up within your work?  By challenging received narrative structures, and the reader's desire for continuity, what other ideas, hierarchies, and assumptions can a poem challenge? 

TT: My sense of textual rupture is, I think, much like the excellent way you describe your sense of textual silence—operating as a “gap” in the text “where the reader’s imagination lives.”  A ruptured narrative thread offers the reader a chance to participate in shaping a narrative rather than just passively receive the text.  My hope is that, as I challenge the reader’s desire for continuity, I’m highlighting the artificial linearity of traditional narrative structures.  I’m trying to foreground the constructed-ness of narrative in order to allow maximum space for associative leaps within sections (and between lines and stanzas) of the poem.  I really like how your remarks on asymmetry are encouraging me to reflect on the assumptions about narrative and non-linearity that simmer between the lines when I’m writing (not just writing the Dark Shadows poem, but, really, as I write anything).  I’m often trying to negotiate new kinds of narrative structures that tell stories through gaps in meaning.  I guess I like to take what looks like traditional narrative and reveal—and revel in—what is non-linear and not always rational about the way it unfolds.  In my ekphrastic response to the Dark Shadows TV show itself, for instance, I absorb the slow, interminable, episode-by-episode crawl of soap opera narrative (a crawl I enjoy, all the same, as a fan of soap operas) while simultaneously re-imagining this linear narrative crawl in a poem where fragments of autobiographical detail frequently irrupt. 

I’m drawn to how this approach disrupts traditionally received hierarchies of narrative.  My discontinuities are an effort reveal the seams produced by narrative threads, rather than conceal them as part of a fantasy of wholeness.  In doing so, I’m trying to re-think the assumption (a hierarchical assumption that puts the writer above the reader somehow) that narrative only functions as a force that shapes the chaos of experience into digestible linearity.  We don’t experience the narratives of our everyday lives this way, and I’m drawn to work that reflects our actual experience—work that allows narrative to emerge as messy, associational, in-progress, and sometimes ruptured. 

The roots for this approach to narrative date back, for me, to my discovery of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor comic books, especially how his seemingly mundane, quotidian storytelling becomes associative and moves by implication rather than declarative exposition.  But Pekar’s work moves this way only if I’m attentive to the gaps in meaning between panels (like the way white space functions between stanzas in a poem, or the way white space deliberately “imbalances,” as you described it, the written word).  I’m drawn to much the same in entirely different writers like Lydia Davis, too.  In form and structure, her work unfolds in mini-narratives, of course; but, as one reads her work more closely, the narratives actually emerge in crisply accumulating roundabout moments of thought.  I’m drawn to how much her work might look linear on the page, but how her commitment to psychological and phenomenological detail produces narrative momentum that is recursive rather than linear.   

I see this same sort of recursive movement in your work, especially in the new book, Fortress, with its sly “minor plots” swerving around, while also propelling, the major plot of the unfolding margins and blank pages (“the book’s least habitable spaces,” as you put it so well in response to my previous question).  But the blank pages aren’t just a representation of absence or loss—too much is happening in and around that so-called blankness.  The seemingly ancillary text and footnotes instead allow a rich narrative to emerge through distinct objects that function as vital social and psychological markers in the narrative. 

I’m fascinated by the weight placed on what could seem like marginal relics or curios in your work—photos, keys, discarded gloves, jewelry, empty bottles, forgotten photos, among others.  Amid the silences and textual traces, the actual physical phenomena represented in the poems are intellectually and emotionally crucial to the dramatic situation and to the reader’s experience.  I’m especially drawn to what the domestic objects in your poems evoke and reveal about the psyche, and what they permit the psyche to hide.  You take mundane, everyday objects and invest them with radiant intellectual and emotional meaning.  As I deepen my own commitment to those objects in your texts, and as those objects then become more and more psychologically resonant, I begin thinking of the vital curios that mark the boundaries of the psychic spaces I inhabit myself (those spaces that I inhabit happily, and those that unsettle me).  This isn’t just an autobiographical tangent for me, as a reader of your work: instead, it’s a moment when, as you mentioned earlier, the reader becomes an active agent encouraged “to inhabit the text and help construct it.” 

Also—and I guess this is related to what domestic objects both reveal and hide—I’m struck by the rich textures of the rooms and homes in your poems.  As you write in a particularly tense moment of physicality in Fortress: “the             room is multiplied into a house of rooms and the house into a city of houses, the body is carried forward into / civilization” (68).  I remember interviewing Nick Twemlow last year, and, during a discussion of how our childhoods influence us, he remarked that every house he remembers from childhood has a unique “tone” of its own.  I feel like this could be a description of how you approach rooms and houses in your work: your work sounds out the tone of each space, and it does this through an intense dialogue between silence and speech.  Can you talk more about the generative potential of objects, houses, and rooms in your work?  I hear the echo of Stein’s cubist-influenced attempt to render the physical world from as many angles of vision as possible—and to make a new kind of coherence from the messy collision of these frames of reference.  But I imagine the scope of what you’re doing is wider, and I’d love to hear more about the poetics of space in your work. 

KMD:  First, thank you for the incredibly generous reading of Fortress.  I really appreciate the way you described Lydia Davis's work, suggesting that her "mini-narratives" read as an "accumulation of thought," an effort to create coherence from the disparate (and often very strange) phenomena with which we are presented.   I really admire the way Davis calls our attention to the artifice of these narratives.  And I agree wholeheartedly that narrative offers the illusion of wholeness, that it feeds into a fantasy of coherence and orderliness that simply doesn't exist in the (often very random and disconnected) world around us. 

I see the poetics of space in Fortress as an effort to suggest the myriad ways that the creation of narrative, and the stories we construct in order to link disparate experiences, are much like building a cathedral, a beautiful house, or a room in which to keep various artifacts and mementos.  In Swann's Way, Proust describes this as the "enormous edifice of memory," and I love this comparison between the individual's search for order in the world and elaborate architectural structures.  We often build beautiful shrines around experiences that are important to us, and more often than not, we use narrative to do this.  The creation of narrative becomes an act of both homage and preservation, much like building a sacred architectural space. 

When writing Fortress, I was also intrigued by the ways in which objects, mementos and artifacts accumulate much like the narratives we construct around events.  In many ways, these objects, these keepsakes are the accumulation of thought that you so eloquently describe in Davis's work.  For me, thought and memory are embodied and physically palpable, and I love exploring the implications of memory manifesting in this very tangible way.  Because these objects, these mementos are a kind of language unto themselves.  They serve as beautiful and emotionally charged signifiers, which represent something purely internal, a memory or emotion that is housed inside the individual subject.  When memory is externalized in this way, narrative becomes the link between interior and exterior, between self and world, between internal language and shared culture. 

I think this is why I'm so drawn to scholarly forms:  the footnote, the glossary, the archival fragment, etc.  These fragmented, marginal forms of writing resist the fantasy of narrative cohesion in a way that I find fascinating.  But perhaps more importantly, the reader is implicated in this the process of creating a narrative around an event that isn't theirs, a memory that is part of a consciousness other than their own.  I love thinking of fragmented forms as  bridging the gap between interior and exterior, but also, between self and other.  And this is what scholars do so much of the time.  They create magnificently cohesive narratives around diary fragments, notebooks, and texts from another temporal moment, artifacts of another consciousness.  I'm very interested in the ways the relationship between reader and text doubles back on itself, is mirrored and refracted. 

With that in mind, I'd love to hear more about your literary scholarship and the ways in which it informs your poetry.  I certainly admire the way you've pursued both very different forms of inquiry with equal precision and dedication.  What does your background as a scholar make possible within your poems?  Would your poems be possible if you had never written or published scholarly writing?  And most importantly, is possible to separate poetry and scholarship?  After all, your poems read as gorgeously rendered deconstructions of much of the literary and cultural landscape. 

TT: Your excellent description of the poetics of space in Fortress really captures the experience of reading the book—the architecture of narrative functioning as an extension of the architecture of physical space.  And I love how the Proust quotation speaks to this relationship between the mind and the tactile world.  Thinking of writing in this way makes narrative an experience of fluidity—of “exploring the implications of memory,” as you put it so well.  It’s a compelling argument for the generative potential of narrative, where, as readers, we co-create from what is implied, fragmented, and/or absent.   

I can see how the process of finding a language for absence owes a debt to scholarly forms, especially considering that contemporary scholarship is understandably skeptical of assertions of self-presence.  Thinking more about your question on the influence of my scholarship on my poems, I work from an initial premise that creative writing and scholarly writing are not in opposition to each other.  The research and shaping of an argument in a scholarly essay or scholarly book is itself, I think, a creative act.  I’m grateful for your kind words about how my scholarship and my poetry overlap each other.  My scholarship and my poems are inseparable, even though they almost always work in different registers of language and levels of diction, and they are modes of creation that make each other possible.  My background as a scholar helps me understand where intellectual and affective energies can feed each other.  While my scholarly training helped me become a better, more complete reader of poetry, it also encouraged me to complicate poetry’s traditional lyric “I” and to challenge, for myself, the primacy of this “I.”  Scholarly work on subjectivity creates, for me, a middle-way between contemporary poems that resist selfhood and contemporary poems that celebrate selfhood.  I don’t want to abandon the “I,” but instead want to dramatize it within the social and cultural contexts that make it a speaking subject and not a static “I.”  I’m most drawn to poems that create a stage for a self whose speech is constructed from a web of complicated, interrelated political and historical forces (my debt to Foucault oozes from every pore of this sentence, I know).   Poems such as “Special Prosecutor” and “[email protected],” from my first collection, The Lama’s English Lessons, definitely wouldn’t exist in the same way if not for my scholarly research on the way power circulates in written language and speech.  Also, my poetry collection Historic Diary might not have been possible without my scholarly background in New Historicism.  The book’s title came from the name Lee Harvey Oswald gave to the diary he kept in the USSR.  Just the fact that someone might call his/her diary “historic diary” is, for me, a cipher for the productively messy relationship between poetry and history. 

I’ve enjoyed our collaborative dialogue, and I’ve learned a lot—especially about the experimental potential of silence, speech, and narrative—from the give-and-take of our discussion of our shared interests.  As we approach the end of the interview, I find myself coming back to a question that reaches beyond our specific, individual projects and, more generally, talks about the ways we approach our work.  We are both writers who seem to thrive on juggling multiple projects at once, sometimes in multiple genres.  I always try to keep in mind that if I don’t work hard to create the day-to-day consistency of a sustained writing practice, I’ll be juggling projects but never actually finishing them.  Can you talk a little bit about your work habits—where you write, or how often you write, or maybe what kind of environment you need to write in?  I’m drawn to this question, I guess, because I always like to hear fellow writers talk about how deliberate they have to be about carving out writing time.  The wonderful paradox I’ve found is that I need disciplined regularity—writing as much as possible in the same location and sometimes at the same time every day—in order to experiment and take wild leaps in the writing itself.  It’s something I learned many years ago, when I was a professional musician, and I realized that the discipline of rehearsing several times a week was a requirement to making the kind of music that was constantly full of surprise and that swerved from predictable song structures.   The work habits required to make and record music translated naturally to writing habits, even though writing is such a solitary and quieter mode of art-making (of course, it’s noisy in our heads, but I mean that the physical space around us is quieter than, say, a music studio).  The process of learning how to create productive work habits as a musician, then, led to a kind of lightbulb moment for me in learning how to create productive work habits as a writer.

I also want to add a final note about how great it is to be a part of the same press as you, BlazeVOX Books.  I often say to friends and colleagues that BlazeVOX publisher Geoffrey Gatza has built a press that reminds me of the old SST record label.  SST Records took chances with risk-taking music that other labels were too tradition-bound to touch, and their track record with such music was so good that I had to check out everything the label put out.  Whether or not I knew the band, I wanted to pay attention if their album came out on SST.  As a reader and writer, BlazeVOX means to me what SST once did as a musician.

KMD:  I've enjoyed our collaborative dialogue as well, and appreciate your description of scholarship as a middle-ground between "contemporary poems that resist selfhood and contemporary poems that celebrate selfhood."  I think this is why I'm so drawn to scholarly forms of writing in poetry, as they allow for a polyphonic text, allowing the same speaker to try on various discourses and registers.  For me, scholarly forms, when used in a creative way, can complicate the lyric "I" in a way that I find thought-provoking.  Jenny Boully's The Body: An Essay is a great example of this.  

And thank you for asking about my work habits.  Most of my books wouldn't exist without artist residencies.  These literary arts fellowships encourage me to deliberately carve out time in exactly the way you described.  This is also where I meet many of my collaborators.  What's more, the opportunity to work alongside artists from other disciplines is great for challenging the limitations I tend to impose on my own practice.  It's difficult to say something is impossible in poetry when one is surrounded by painters, composers, installations artists, and sculptors, many of whom use text in interesting and surprising ways.  For me, all of writing is a collaborative act, and consciousness is essentially dialogic.  I think this is why I'm so drawn to working in collaborative, communal settings like Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, and Yaddo.

BlazeVOX Books has created a kind of community too, and it's been so much fun collaborating with other writers who publish with the press.  What could be better than a literary press that not only publishes experimental, innovative, and challenging work, but connects its authors to other writers around the world?  It's an honor to be published by the same press as you, and I've also been able to connect with several other writers I admire through BlazeVOX:  Susan Lewis, Leah Umansky, and Carlo Matos, to name just a few.  I love the sense of community that BlazeVOX creates for its writers. 

Let me just say that it's been a pleasure conversing with you.  I feel like I've learned so much about your work, my own practice, and the larger literary community.  Thank you for a great conversation! 

A Bardd Americanaidd in Wales [by Bob Holman]

Language Matters with Bob Holman is now available to stream on PBS Video. 

“Foneddigion a Boneddigesau! Fy llinell gyntaf o gynghanedd!” The Welsh is slow and halting, pried off the page, the performance knowing and with flair. If I do say so myself.

I am saying it myself.

It’s me. On stage. Stomp, 2012, Vale of Glamorgan, Cymru (Welsh for “Wales”).

The Stomp (Y Stomp, in Welsh), is the National Poetry Slam of Wales. It is part of the annual Eisteddfod, the national cultural festival of all things Welsh. As I say in “Language Matters,” “It’s a lot like the state fairs in the US, except that instead of prizes for pies or pigs, the prizes are for poetry.” 

The first Eisteddfod was in 1176, when Lord Rhys invited poets and musicians from all over the country to compete for a seat at his table. You could sing for your supper, and then get fed. Winning was an entree into the house of the Lords, and a golden meal ticket for the winning poet. The chair you pulled up to the table was a special Bard’s Chair, and to this day, the prize for the winning poet in the Formal Category is a Chair. Hand-carved by an artisan, the winner gets to take the Chair home, sit in it, and write more poems. In Welsh.  

For me, as usual, the whole thing started at the Bowery Poetry Club, when we hosted readings by Welsh poets as part of the Peoples Poetry Gatherings, 2002-03. That’s where I began to feel the intensity around this ancient Celtic language. Whenever I bring up Welsh in New York, the response is invariably, “Well, what about Irish?” While the Irish fought and gained political independence, they did so in English. The Irish language is now much more endangered than Welsh. The Welsh never fought for independence, but rather cultural parity, and today Welsh is considered the only endangered language to have come off the endangered language list. It’s a success story by any metric, which is why it got its place in “Language Matters.”

One of the poets I met at the Club is Grahame Davies, who writes in both Welsh and English, and whose work and being was crucial in my decision to study Welsh. Grahame lives the fire and rigor needed to keep this ancient language alive. The fire is contagious, and to prepare for the film, I flew to Wales and began my own formal and informal study of the language. 

Grahame picked me up at the Caerdydd (Cardiff) Airport, and we headed for breakfast with Elinor Robson of the Welsh Language Society. I confessed my dream to them, and we all laughed over a full Welsh. What? I, who didn’t even know enough to fly to Manchion (Manchester) to get to Gog Gymru (North Wales), who couldn’t say Blaenau Ffestiniog (the slate-mining town where I live in Wales), let alone spell it, who hadn’t even met Dewi Prysor! was proposing that I participate in next year’s Stomp! I, who didn’t know from “hwyl” (aloha), was going to write and perform a poem in Welsh -- all for this documentary I was making for PBS.

And as you now can see on the front page of the live-stream at PBS.org, the fantasy came real, all duded up in lucky Tibetan cap and Mexican guayabera, taking on all comers at Stomp 2012. “Ladies and Gentlemen! My first line of cynghanedd!” I am saying, to translate the first words of this post. And it really was the first cynghanedd I ever wrote. 

In the film, the line is followed by a raucous audience response, Stomp cards held high—unlike the U.S. Slam, at the Stomp the audience is the judge, and they judge by holding up different colored cards to indicate their favorite poet. Watch as I collect a brotherly hug from Dewi, my mentor, friend and Stomp opponent, also an award-winning novelist and Stomp-winning poet, whose current job is translating episodes of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” into Welsh.  

The cynghanedd is what separates formal Welsh poetry from free verse; in fact, it is what separates Welsh poetry from any other poetry in the world. There are six different forms of cynghanedd, and to win the Chair, you must write a poem that includes sections written in each. Each form has its own rules, here’s a general description the poetic device Marerid Hopwood, in her handbook Singing in Chains: Listening to Welsh Verse, describes as “consonant chime :” to create a cynghanedd , a line is divided into three sections, a double caesura. The middle section is thrown out. The two sections left, must have all their consonants (except the last) match up. In other words, the vowels, and of course in Welsh, Y and W are always vowels, are immaterial. The sounds we use to make rhymes don’t count.  

Now from here things get a little complex. Sometimes there is internal rhyme, sometimes rhyme line-to-line, sometimes both—but let’s just leave it at that. The extraordinary thing is that a Welsh audience can hear the cynghanedd, applauding an especially good one, and be quite aware of a poet trying to slide something by. As an American poet writing in Welsh, even in the Stomp, to come up with a cynghanedd was quite a feat.  

(Hopwood’s title is of course a line from “Fern Hill” by Dylan Thomas. The irony is that while we think of Thomas as the Welsh poet, in Wales he’s often not even considered to be in the top tier. Why? Because he didn’t write in Welsh. In fact, many people think that a lot of Thomas’s power comes from his having heard and digested the sounds and rhythms of Welsh poetry as a youth, and then using these Welsh cynghanedd forms in English.  For your further elucidation, another poet who used Welsh forms and sounds was that old Jesuit and inventor of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins)  

Quick cut back to breakfast—Grahame and Elinor waving goodbye, I’m training/bussing it to Nant Gwrtheyrn, the Welsh Cultural Center, where I will begin my formal study of Welsh. Flashback to Stanza Poetry Festival in St. Andrews, Scotland, six months before, where another Welsh poet, Sian Melangell Dafydd, replies to my comment that I want to learn Welsh by saying “there’s this magical place in Llyn…” Flash forward to Grahame Davies’ brillant Everything Must Change, a novel that is a mash-up of the Welsh language protests of the 60s with the bio of Simone Weill. Flash further forward to my two weeks’ immersion at Nant where my Welsh teacher Llinos Griffin is prodding the Cymraeg (Welsh language) out of me, saying “You, know, you really should meet Dewi Prysor…”

…And what was your first line of cynghanedd, Bob? you’ve probably been wondering. “Yn ysgwd yn fy esgyrn.” Which, as you can see in “Language Matters,” I learn how to pronounce as I drive our van (my full title: host/driver) through scenic Wales, and which the show’s storyteller/line producer, Sian Taifi, also tries to instill in me by having me sing the words.

 Besides Sian, Dewi and Grahame, the film also shows me learning with David Crystal, Europe’s most famous linguist, and Ivor ap Glyn, poet and TV host/producer. The line translates, “I am shaking my bones,” and as you can tell by my rendering, I really was.

The Stomp is a variant of the US Poety Slams, and I’ve done enough Slams to know that grabbing attention at the top is crucial.  So I asked Dewi to teach me something that would bust through in case anyone at the Stomp should heckle my mispronunciation or lack of mutations, (Mutations! The bete noir of the Welsh language. Did you notice back a-ways how cynghanedd mutated to gynghanedd? Not a typo! In English and French we often elide one word into another by dropping the last letter: singing to singin’, eg. In Welsh, you “mutate” the first letter of the incoming word, so that, for example, if you are going to Bangor, you would say im Mangor, the B of Bangor mutating to an M. Which of course makes driving in Wales even more fun.) So the title I came up with for my Stomp masterpiece is: Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg!  which, lovingly translates to “Fuck Off! I’m a Fuckin’ Welsh Fuckin’ Learner!” 

Not only would I be trying to turn my lack of Welsh into an advantage by begging for the sympathy vote, but I’d also be paying homage to the colorful language the Stomp is known for, especially as used so expressively by my mate Prysor and the training camp he established in Blaenau (The Queen), with occasional side trips to Llan (Y Pengwyrn) and Tanygrisiau (Y Tap) -- three major pubs in three parts of town. It’s also worth noting that there are no indigenous curse words in Welsh; like Ffwcin, they’re all borrowings from bully English. 

Playing between orality and literacy is one of my favorite areas of poetic exploration. In fact, it was how I got involved with Endangered Languages in the first place. Of the 6000 languages in the world (I just love saying that!), only 700 are written down. The Welsh oral traditions, from the Celitc storytellers and Druid poemmakers all he way to today’s Stomp, has been crucial to the language’s survival. And it was through my investigations into the roots of hiphop poetry (hiphop IS poetry!), that I first came across the Language Crisis.

Having established myself as an appropriately iconoclastic bardd Cymreig in the poem’s title, I felt it was important that the first line of the poem reverse field and show my respect for Welsh culture: “Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr,” imparts to me a mythic status, as I identify with the deepest image of Welsh mythology: “I feel like the Red Dragon entering into battle.” You may have noticed that Wales is the only country with a Red Dragon on its flag: the symbol of Wales, sleeping underground next to the White Dragon (England), waiting only for the Apocalypse to disinter, and then emerge victorious in the ensuing battle royale. Wow. 

I straighten out this lie in the next line: “Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp.” “Actually, I’m just a stupid American poet trying to hold me own in the Stomp.” Another secret of Slam success: flip the script! Set up a high image, and then undercut it with your own vulnerability.  

The next lines reference my aforementioned debt to hiphop. Hiphop is part of my lineage, too—for a while there in the 80s my tag was the Plain White Rapper. To write this section took painstaking work at the Blaenau llyfrgell (library) with a correlating a rhyming dictionary and a Welsh-English dictionary—why oh why is there no rhyming Welsh-English Dictionary?

 

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

 

My address? The definition of randomness 

The contradiction of definition!

Definition Demolition!

 

This also gives a nod to the course I’ve developed at Columbia, “Exploding Text: Poetry Performance,” using extra-literary means to add even more meanings to a poem via collaborations with film, dance, theater, et al.

After this jangly, dirty, provocative opening, I felt it was time for some “real” poetry, and being a “real” poet myself I knew just what lines to use: steal them, from a couple of great poets.

 

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

 

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother
               But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

 

I was truly hoping someone in the audience would out me here (I should have had a plant!), so that my next barrage, taking personal blame not only for my plagerism but also for every crime ever committed during the horrific triumph of Capitalism known as US Imperialism would have more resonance:

 

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

 

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH Parry     Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

 

This is followed by the lines from “Language Matters.”  

Cynghanedd, defended from the orality of the skalds, has been an integral part of Welsh has survived. Hopwood confesses at one point that she believes you can only truly write cynghanedd in the language that evolved in tandem with the poetic form: Cymraeg (Welsh). In essence, her whole lovely how-to is actually nothing but a piece of propaganda for the perpetuation of Welsh. 

Cymru, the Welsh word for Wales, means Us, The People. “Wales” is a Saxon word, what the Saxons, the first conquering invaders of Wales, called the Celts there—“The others,” “Those guys over there.” Isn’t it time for the world’s nations to be known by the name that their people call themselves? 

And now, the Grand Finale:

 

Baby baby yr unig ffordd o atal y gerdd hon – yw cusanu cusanu
Lle mae pob cusan yn dod yn air Cymraeg

Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

 

Baby baby the only way to stop this poem is to kiss kiss

Where each kiss becomes a word in Welsh

in My Big Head of Dreams

It’s true that my relationship with Welsh is a lot like having a lover—you have to give everything and there’s always more and thank goodness it’s never enough. But my head of dreams – in English I wanted this to be my big head, big enough to hold all these languages and the idea that somehow or other that this piece of theater, sacrificing myself on the pyre that is the Stomp, would show my love and respect for Welsh, that I would go to his extreme in order to bring my own personal touch to a documentary that is all about the essence of humanity, which I believe language is, but which can also be talked about in theories and data where it’s possible human contact may be lost.

Of the 12 poets who made it to the National Poetry Slam, Dewi and I were the first two names out of the hat. We went up against each other, splitting our supporters’ votes, and giving the first round to some brilliant whippersnapper poet who had somehow made cynghanedd a mode of conversation—brilliant! As if Byron were crossed with Frank O’Hara, say. 

Because we were knocked out in the first round, the crew was able to shoot a wrap-up, right then and there, full of loss that meant nothing, and surrounded by a language that had taught me important truths that would infuse the whole film. And my life. 

After the wrap, the crew really wanted to hit the road. I felt bad—for the poet to leave a reading early is bad form, in any language. But it was already late, and our flight back to the States was at 8:00 the next morning, and we had to drive to Llundain, and the Welsh sky was already ablaze. And my big head was full of big dreams but no way sleeping. 

The poem and translation below are published in my most recent collection,Sing This One Back to Me  (2013, Coffee House).

 

Ffwciwch Oma! Dwin Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg! 

 ((Dyna’r teitl)

 

Rwy'n teimlo fel y ddraig goch yng nghanol y frwydr

Bardd Americanaidd tumffat yng nghanol y Stomp

Eisiau ymddiheuriad? dim posibiliad...

Eisiau nghyfeiriad? Dyna ddiffiniad o wrthddywediad

A distrywio’r diffiniad!

 

A dach chi’n gwybod pam?
Mi dduda’i thach chi pam!

Achos -- mod i'n Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg, 

Dyna ffwcin pam!!!!!

 

Hen Gychwr Afon Angau, // mae o’n gwbod 

Beth ydwyt ti a minnau, frawd

Ond swp o esgyrn mewn gwisg o gnawd

 

Dygwyd y llinellau uchod ar eich cyfer oddi ar

R Williams Parry a TH Parry Williams yn enw 

Imperialaeth Americanaidd....!

 

Foneddigion a Boneddigesau! 

Fy llinell gyntaf o gynghanedd:

“Yn ysgwyd yn fy esgyrn”

Mae’n wir wyddoch chi – 

Dwi YN “ysgwyd yn fy esgyrn”!

A dach chi’n gwbod pam?

Achos  fy mod i'n Ffwcin Dysgwr Ffwcin Gymraeg, 

Dyna ffwcin pam!!!

 

Baby baby yr unig ffordd o atal y gerdd hon – yw cusanu 

cusanu
Lle mae pob cusan yn dod yn air Cymraeg

Yn fy mhen a’i lond o freuddwydion

 

 

Fuck Off, I’m a Fuckin Welsh Fuckin Learner!

(That’s the Title)

 

I feel like The Red Dragon In the Middle of Battle

stupid American poet in the middle of the Stomp

Want an apology? No possibility!

My address? The definition of randomness (The contradiction of definition)

Definition Demolition

 

And you know why?

I'll tell you why! 

Cause I’m a Fuckin Welsh Fuckin Learner, that's why

 

Old River Boatman Death (Rwilliams Parry), he knows it

What art thou and I, brother
But in a uniform batch of bones of flesh

(TH Parry-Williams)

 

The lines above stolen on your behalf from R Williams Parry & TH arry Williams in the name of American Imperialism!

 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

My first line of cynghanedd!

“Shaking in my bones”

It’s true you know

I AM “shaking in my bones”!

And do you know why?

Because I’m a fuckin Welsh fuckin learner that’s fuckinwhy!

 

Baby baby the only way to stop this poem is to kiss kiss

Where each kiss becomes a word in Welsh

In My Big Head of Dreams

Let's All Love Jenny Zhang Together! [By Rachel Fayne Gruskin]

I discovered Jenny Zhang about a year ago because her book had just been published by one of my favorite small independent presses, Octopus Books. That book, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find is like a fart joke camouflaged as a refreshing example of modern poetry. I’m not the first to say that some modern poetry is praised purely for being subversive. (flarf, anyone?) However, Zhang’s work is truly revolutionary, but not just for the sake of being so.

 Zhang lets everything go in a way that made me feel like I was up to her ear and being fed secrets in the most deliciously impish way. She’s a poet’s poet and touches on everything from the kind of tangible jealousy we can almost taste in our mouths to a virtually comic-book style use of onomatopoeia.

The exaggerated line breaks and seemingly simplistic colloquial tone are without doubt characteristic of many modern poets and can be found here, in I Ate Marigolds.

 

I Ate Marigolds

I ate Marigolds      for attention            no one noticed

I was forced         to go public               people watching            themselves as long-

er limbed creatures        they have          um       no beauty

 

-By Jenny Zhang, from Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

 

Here’s another favorite:

Anything

your tinny hands are inside tins

I grow as I finish fourth

each de grade action is a great thing

I feel like a great thing

great things are called things and this thing is not inside time which is as tinny as

sorry mom

I wasted dishwater again

I feel feelings

 

this is touchable

Some kids died rollerblading

It’s very touchable

my mother spoons me and in kissing my lips she says she wants to stay

like this forever

me too and I also want to be my own mom

and kiss myself

 

-By Jenny Zhang, from Dear Jenny, We Are All Find

 

Robert Herrick and "Liquefaction"

A friend from Cambridge, England, writes:

The sexiest word in the language, I think sometimes on lovely days as I walk along tree-lined streets and look at the women in their loose summer frocks, is liquefaction. The word refers to the transformation of a substance from a solid to a liquid state. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), in one of his most beautiful short poems, captures the exact sense of the word that I have in mind.

UPON JULIA'S CLOTHES

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!

-- Robert Herrick

And here is the man himself:

5 Day Trip. Day 3 by Rosemary Griggs

    The attacks of September 11th were very difficult for me as they were for many people.  It was the last year of my MFA program.  In addition to teaching and flying, I was finishing my thesis which was a book length collection of poetry about a flight attendant named Kimberlie.

    I was surprised some flight attendants were able to work right away.  I was afraid there were going to be more attacks.  I took an unpaid week off which the airline allowed us to do without a problem.   After a week, I had to go back to work.  I was scared and grieving but broke.  In the briefing I had with the two other flight attendants prior to our trip, I told them I was scared and it was my first trip back.  One of the other young women said, “I’m scared too, it’s my first trip too.  My mom is coming on all our flights with us.”  Her mom could pass ride space available for free as part of our employee benefits and it wasn’t a problem getting on any of the flights because they were all practically empty.  In spite of what anyone may think, I fully admit I was so glad to have a mom there watching over us.  The other young woman working with us didn’t seem frightened at all.  Her husband was a high school history teacher and the attacks caused him to change his entire course to 9/11 backstory.  For the first time in his teaching career, his students were enthralled.

    Of course, flying and finishing assignments and my thesis, 9/11 entered the poems.  The fear I felt.  The images I saw.  Very shortly after 9/11, I went to the Hong Kong Ladies’ Night Market where a vendor was selling t-shirts with screened images of the Twin Towers burning right before they collapsed.  The shirts were hanging outside his booth, high on display.  He saw me looking at them with shock and disgust and he looked at me indignantly as if to say, “That’s right.”  

     I had scheduled for Eileen Tabios to be the Guest Author in the class I was teaching.  She spoke to the class about the difficulty of finding language immediately after a tragedy occurs.  Grappling with language myself, all I could see was the image of the dust settling and feel a sense of quiet dislocation.  Images without sound.  It became the final poem of the collection.

 

 

Plots and Sisters [by M. J. Fitzgerald]

Robert Fitzgerald

Before I launch into the posts, I want to thank The Best American Poetry Blog for giving me this opportunity, and I need to set the posts into the context of the research and writing I am doing about my father, the poet Robert Fitzgerald, whose translations of The Odyssey and The Iliad have been the most clearly recognized American verse translations of the great epic poems for the 20^th century. There have been other translations – Lattimore, Lombardi, Fagles to name just a few  – but his seem to have stood the test of time in a particular way. More than fifty years later, his translations are still frequently the ones assigned to high school students and undergraduates studying the classic in translation, and a significant swathe of the literary world has remained very aware of his work.

Success and recognition came to my father in the early to mid sixties: he was offered the prestigious position of Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard in 1965, and he taught both there and at Yale until he retired after the publication in 1981 of his late great accomplishment, the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid.

It is the backdrop to this success and recognition, that interests me most of all now, although when I began to think about writing a memoir, the main impulse was a desire to look into my own childhood.

Robert Fitzgerald (c) 1950s, Italy

I was the third in a clutch of six children, five of whom were born and under the age of five in 1953 when we left the United States for Italy, thanks to a Guggenheim Fellowship and an advance from the publishers for the translation of The Odyssey. My parents thought we would spend one year there, but Italy turned out to be so much less expensive than the United States that my parents did not return until 1965, and the sixth child was born in Italy in 1955. I lived the twelve years between the age of three and the age of fourteen in Italy, going to Italian schools from kindergarten to seventh grade. I then went to boarding school and college in England. I never attended an American school, coming to the United States only for vacations and then for visits. My formative years as a writer were spent in England, and that is where my novels and stories were first published. I came and settled permanently in the United States after I accepted the position of Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota that I still hold.

As I thought about and sketched out my own memory pieces, however, I found myself growing more and more interested in exploring my father’s background, what had shaped him to become the man and the literary figure he became, the role he played in mid-twentieth century letters, and his friendships with some of its great literary figures – from Ezra Pound to Flannery O’Connor. Perhaps because my own background has been so European, this exploration has become a way for me to also understand and appreciate the more American side of my heritage as well as my literary inheritance.

I have been driven by what I have found among his papers at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. But my interest in his background started with a visit to Springfield, Illinois, and to the catholic cemetery where many of the Fitzgerald family were buried from the 1870s.

And this is where I start with the posts. I hope you will bear with me, because my original and rather sentimental question about a burial turned into an intriguing and much more complex study of family, class, and life and death in the first decades of the twentieth century. 

                                                    Plots and Sisters.

                                                                      I.

           
The Fitzgerald burial plot is a double just by the main gates, to the right of the office of Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois, with one big salmon-colored rectangular slab of marble placed behind a dozen or so smaller tombstones. Though large, the salmon headstone is not monumental in any way, and is perfectly proportional to the surrounding stones. The names of my great-grandparents and their dates are inscribed in the long side of the rectangle. On the short right side are the dates of one of their sons who died in 1899 at the age of eighteen. Most of the smaller stones bear a name and that person’s dates, but three of them are inscribed simply and in large letters “Grandma”; “Mother”; “Papa.” In front of them is the stone that bears the name Fitzgerald and that shows the boundary of the plot.

            The two plots are not tightly packed, and when I stepped into the cemetery office to inquire, the clerk found index cards with the surname Fitzgerald that made clear that one lot of twelve spaces was bought by my great grandfather James and the second by my great-grandmother Nora.

            I was in a hurry. I had come to Springfield for a mere twenty-four hours, without even knowing why. It had just seemed absurd that for almost twenty years I should have lived within a day’s drive from where I knew that my father, Robert Fitzgerald, poet and translator, had been born a century ago, and not yet have been there. The final impetus had been given by the installation of a marker to honor him, organized by William Furry, the Director of the Illinois Historical Society and inspired by the suggestion made by the head reference librarian Jim Huston. I had not originally considered including the cemetery in my visit, but was already returning for the second time in less than two days.

        We had twenty minutes to spare in the last couple of hours before I had to start the long drive back, before we were to meet with the head librarian in the top floor of a building where earlier in the year a number of boxes had been found that contained files from my grandfather’s legal practice. Among the files of long forgotten cases, there were photographs of my father and his brother, as well as of people Jim and Curtis had not been able to identify, and letters from my great-aunt Agnes. These were letters that my father never saw, that had been hidden in the attic of this office building for ninety years.  From those found so far, Jim told me, it was clear that their mother’s sister Agnes took the two boys to the beach for an extended time during the summer of 1916: my father was not yet six, and his brother Monty was three. Their mother Anne had died of puerperal fever ten days after giving birth to Monty, on March 25, 1913.

            But Anne was not buried in this plot. Her body was taken back to Albany, New York and buried there. Already the day before, on my first visit to the cemetery, during the first hours of learning so much about my father’s childhood, I had been struck by this fact: she was not buried in the Fitzgerald plot, where by then her father-in-law and three of her husband’s siblings as well as the grandparents were buried. Why? At breakfast that morning I talked it over with Bill and with Jim. Ferrying a body is not easy, I said. There were a number of hoops to jump through: the casket had to be lined in a special way, and pages of paper work had to be filled.

            Perhaps in 1913 little paperwork would have been necessary: Bill pointed out that caskets were frequent cargo, stored with luggage. There were even funeral cars on trains, he told me, where a number of caskets would have been picked up and dropped off at stations all across the country. 

            Whichever way I turned and spun the fact, it continued to strike me as strange. I had always understood that my father’s parents were devoted to each other. I had always known that Robert Emmett Fitzgerald and Anne Stuart had met ‘on the stage,’ children of a middle class solid enough to allow them to be well-educated, and to allow them the early indulgence of acting before my grandfather took up his legal practice. They were engaged a long time before they married, and married in 1905, five years before my father was born, little more than a year after Robert Emmett suffered the severe accident that I remembered, in the language of a child, as being ‘squashed between two tram cars,’ which put a definitive end to a career as an actor, and which would eventually develop into a tubercular hip.

        But at the time my father was born the hip had mended, or so everyone thought. I knew Robert Emmett shared a legal practice with his brother Arthur, and I imagined the family was all set to live the peaceful small town life on “aristocracy hill”, on the right side of the railroad tracks, a stone’s throw away from his and Arthur’s mother Nora, who after the death of her husband took over the running of the successful grocery business James had built up since the 1860s; and another long stone’s throw from where Frank Lloyd Wright had recently built a house for one of the wealthiest widows in town. My father Robert was born in October 1910, and by June 1912 Anne was pregnant again.

            “Of her death nothing rises from the dark” my father wrote in Animula, a poem from the 1930s. And indeed, how could anything be remembered by the child, who was more than six months away from his third birthday when his mother died? But what about his father, left a widower with a toddler and a baby, who had to move back home to the bustling and fussing housekeeping of his mother? In one of the essays he wrote in the 70s, my father did recall his father’s bouts of drinking between the time of his wife’s death and the death five years later of Monty, the son whose birth had caused the puerperal fever that took her from him.

            “…I am sent to fetch him from what I sense to be degrading company -- not very, in fact; only a few men playing poker in a shabby office downtown, with whiskey and syphon bottles beside them.” (A Third Kind of Knowledge, p.5)

        Neither father nor son seemed to question the distant and unvisited gravesite. I wondered whether my father’s sense of his mother’s absence ‘removed as by a razor’ could have been multiplied by the absence of a place of mourning, whether his father’s grief would not have found some miserable outlet in visiting her graveside. Are not cemeteries exactly that, places where mourners can carry out the life-long rites of bereavement? There is no benefit to the dead of a place of mourning. But for those living, destined to live afterwards permanently without them, it seemed to me that there is the constant comfort of knowing a stone marks their past existence, their present influence, their future memory.             

            My father mentions Calvary Cemetery in connection with the progression of his father’s illness which followed quickly his younger brother’s death at five, a victim of the 1918 influenza epidemic that raged around the world as the First World War was coming to an end:

            “A polished small coffin took the center of the parlor, and there the small boy lay, turned to pale wax, an utter stranger in his Eton collar. I do not remember what happened at the funeral Mass or what happened at Calvary Cemetery. One day not long afterward my father stayed home with a boil. Since it was not a boil but the sickness of the bone working outward, he never went back to his office, nor to any poker game, nor again to the church or cemetery….” (The Third Kind Of Knowledge, p.10)

        In subsequent years, on the regular walks my father took at his father’s insistence, perhaps he did sometimes turn and make his way there, just over two miles due north of 215 Jackson Street, to stand helplessly in front of the salmon-colored rectangle of stone that bore the name Bernard, the nickname Monty, and the pitiful span of years of his only brother. Surely he must have thought of his mother, as well. Could the razor of her absence have made an even deeper cut by the absence of stone and word, Anne Stuart, May 5 1878 -- March 24 1913?

Keeping Things Whole: A Tribute to Mark Strand [by Danielle Elizabeth Chin]

On October 9^th, about four hundred spectators gathered in The New School’s Auditorium for A Tribute to Mark Strand. Eighteen esteemed poets read from Strand’s work while an overhead projector displayed a slideshow of Mark Strand through the years. The feverish chatter before the reading, and the way Strand was embraced and greeted by friends, family, and fans as he elegantly made his way around the room, made the event seem more like a star-studded reunion than a poetry reading. 

Co-hosted by John Beer and Andrew Zawacki (former students of Strand) and presented by the Academy of American Poets, the New School Writing Program, and the Poetry Society of America, the tribute served to honor Strand’s Collected Poems. It was also a belated birthday celebration -- Strand turned 80 on April 11^th. 

“The added advantage of holding this birthday party now,” Beer said, is that we can identify Mark with the character in one of his poems who says, “though I was over eighty I still had/ A beautiful body.” Strand looked as handsome as he had in his youth, with features strongly resembling Clint Eastwood. 

L to R: Sarah Arvio, Tom Sleigh, Peg Boyers, David Lehman. photo (c) Danielle Chin

On the stage, the first group of nine poets sat in trios around tables elegantly draped with cream-colored cloth. There would be no intermission as the second group of nine poets switched places with the first as a way of “keeping things whole,” Zawacki said, alluding to the poem by Strand on the program.

Strand’s illustrious career as a poet, prose writer, translator, and editor spans nearly forty years. That he became a poet took him by surprise. Before the age of twenty, he dreamt of becoming a painter. 

“I was never much good with language as a child…the idea that I would someday become a poet would have come as a complete shock to everyone in my family,” Strand had said in an interview with Bill Thomas for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

Before reading Strand’s poem “Luminism,” Edward Hirsch remarked, “Some marvel that one of our greatest poets would have rather been a painter.”

After his student days at Yale and Iowa, Strand went on to become a Fulbright Scholar, a MacArthur Fellow in 1987, the U.S. Poet Laureate in 1990, and a 1999 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Blizzard of One.  He has written numerous collections of poetry: Collected Poems (Knopf/Random House, 2014); Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012); New Selected Poems (Knopf, 2007); Man and Camel (Knopf, Alfred A. Knopf, 2006); Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Dark Harbor (Knopf, 1993); The Continuous Life (Knopf, 1990); Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1980); The Story of Our Lives (Atheneum, 1973); and Reasons for Moving (Atheneum, 1968). He has also published two books of prose, many volumes of translation, and children’s books. 

In their readings, anecdotes, and avidity of their performances, each poet -- David Lehman, Honor Moore, Edward Hirsch, Alan Shapiro, Sarah Arvio, Carol Muske-Dukes, Timothy Donnelly, Peg Boyers, Jorie Graham, John Koethe, Vijay Seshadri, Jacqueline Osherow, Mary Jo Salter, Susan Stewart, Tom Sleigh, Rosanna Warren, Charles Wright, and Strand’s own daughter, Jessica Strand -- captured the sharpness and wittiness of Strand’s writing as well as his personality. 

As Strand’s poetry was read, the room reverberated with laughter, contemplative sighs, nods, and at times, exclamations from various members of the audience.

 “Mark is one of the funniest poets I’ve ever known,” Carol Muske-Dukes said. Instead of reading one of Strand’s poems, she created a collage of her favorite lines from his poetry. Some lines incited roars of steady laughter, such as “The huge doll of my body refuses to rise./ I am a toy for women.”

 

L to R: Vijay Seshadri, Rosanna Warren, Susan Stewart, Mary Jo Salter, Jaqueline Osherow, Charles Wright, Timothy Donnelly, Jessica Strand. photo (c) Danielle Chin

“I’m reading to you, Dad,” Jessica Strand said to her father before she read “What It Was.”

Strand received a standing ovation before he took the stage. “I thought maybe fifty people would be here. I never think anybody’s going to show up,” he remarked.

“If I were a poet, those were the poems I would’ve written. If I were a poet who had friends, those are the friends I would have read my poems…But hey, I am a poet!” Strand said, prompting the audience’s laughter.

Strand was as entertaining in person as the speakers he writes in his poetry. “I’m not reading my best poems,” he warned. “My best poems are the ones you will read when you buy my book.”

Before he left the stage, the crowd stood for a second standing ovation and a few members in the front rows sweetly sung “Happy Birthday” to him. Even as the lights in the Auditorium flickered, the night seemed far from over. Everyone stood, patiently waiting to embrace, praise, and speak to him.

“Mark Strand is a world poet and he also has built a world," said Susan Stewart, to introduce her reading of Mark's poems in translation.

Some of Strand’s poems isolate various dimensions of reality.  An example is “Reading in Place,” which David Lehman, wearing a stylish striped bowtie for the occasion, read. The poem begins with the narrator asking the reader to imagine a couple looking out at their home, then to imagine a person reading only the beginning of this poem about the couple and filing it away. The person finds the poem years later to read that the couple are “are on their way home, still feeling that nothing is lost, / that they will continue to live harm-free,/ sealed in the twilight’s amber weather.” The speaker asks, “how will the reader know,/ especially now that he puts the poem, without looking,/ back in the book,/ the book where the poet stares at the sky/ and says to a blank page, ‘Where, where in Heaven am I?’”

How lovely would it be to live in suspended bliss feeling as though “nothing is lost,” nor ever will be like the couple in the poem that is never read to the end? Or would it be preferable to be the poet wondering, “Where in Heaven am I?” Why remain suspended like the couple or the reader who never finishes the poem when the real paradise might be whatever we, like the poet, have the power to create on the blank page?

The night showed Strand is not just a star in the literary world; he is truly loved. A Tribute to Mark Strand was evidence that Strand never had to stare at a blank page for very long. 

 

Danielle Elizabeth Chin is an alumna of Marymount Manhattan College and a second-year MFA student in creative writing at The New School. In recent years, she has received The John Costello Award and an Honorable Mention from the American Literary Merit Award for an essay. She has published an original song on the Side B Magazine website.  She served as Chapter President of Sigma Tau Delta for two years and is a member of Omicron Delta Kappa and Alpha Chi Honor Societies. 

Celebrate the Life and Work of Paul Violi (part 2) by Michael Quattrone

(Ed note: This month, Coldfront will publish a wide range of writing in an attempt to capture the spirit of Paul Violi and his writing. Here is part 2.)

Commedia Violi

by Michael Quattrone

 

Tuesday morning in Putnam Valley, New York:

Population: 9,500
Elevation: Infrequent

Paul Violi is standing at his desk in a navy blue, flannel bathrobe and brown, Ecco walking shoes. He has just returned from a driveway jaunt to retrieve the Times, which his wife, Ann, had run over on her way to work. He tosses the paper aside, removes a deerstalker cap and unwinds a wool scarf from his neck.

“It’s windy out,” he reports. He reaches for his coffee, but the mug has vanished. “By the time I find it, it’ll be cold.” Violi has the stoic squint of a movie star. The corners of his mouth draw in when he smirks, or laughs, or grimaces. Disappointed but not flummoxed—or perhaps flummoxed but not truly disappointed—Violi surveys the familiar territory of his workspace.

The poet’s desk is long and narrow, more sideboard than escritoire. Its antique varnished oak bows beneath the weight of books stacked high on either side of Violi’s circa-1985 Wizard™ word processor. Histories on the left side, everything else on the right. Atop a moldering volume of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria sits a bouquet of cigarette butts in a restaurant-style, glass ashtray, and a red plastic lighter on a half-empty soft-pack of Tareyton cigarettes. He proffers one to his guest before lighting up himself, and then leans over the precarious stacks to peer outside. The second-story window reveals a trapezoid of lawn below, badly in need of raking. Violi has decided to wait for all the maple leaves to fall before addressing them, at which point they will likely be covered in snow, and he will have to chop firewood instead. In the distance, a dog barks at the passing of a neighbor’s invisible car; Violi sits.

Continue reading here.  

Interviews With Poets: Matthew Zapruder [by Erin Belieu]

Hello again.

Another quick and impertinent Interviews With Poets before scrambling off to more reading gigs. I’ll be schlepping around for my about-to-be-released book Slant Six from now till December (Columbus, St. Louis, San Antonio, Austin, Miami, etc.). I just read the first review--which was very kind--but the reviewer also seems to think I'm a recovering alcoholic based on a satirical poem called "12 Step." (The poem is written from the point of view of a writer vowing never to write another "personal" poem again). I'm always gobsmacked by what people get out of my poems. A total mystery. But mostly not an unpleasant one. I mean, nice of them to care at all, right?

Speaking of poets we care about, today’s is Matthew Zapruder. Matthew is another poet I’ve known for as far back as my adult memory goes. But I didn’t come to know Matthew well until he invited me to join the Wave Press Poetry Bus Tour that he and Joshua Beckman organized in 2006.

 Part Electric Kool Aid, part Bataan death drive, the tale of that two month tour with a clown car full of poets (actually, a biodiesel-fueled motor coach)--reading in bars, bowling alleys and barns all across the US and Canada--is one of those rare moments in poetry history that I believe will be remembered (“They did what?”).

 My most emblematic story about Matthew comes from that bus tour, when we’d stopped in Salt Lake City to do a reading. The night before we’d had a raucous gig in Boise, Idaho and everyone on the bus was shagged out, content to make an early evening of it. The fine poetry citizens of Salt Lake had another idea.

 We were at a bookstore called Ken Sanders Rare Books. The name conjured a gentleman collector of foxed, 1^st editions. We imagined a small audience of well-behaved poetry aficionados and then to bed. What we got was the hairy inch from a bacchanal—heaps of amazing food, wine flowing, 60s era, socialist chanting, singing, and guitars. There were also other “refreshments.”

 It was after these that I found myself squinting slack jawed in front of a large, framed illustration hanging on the bookstore wall. Made in the 1940s for a pharmaceutical company, the picture is titled “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land,” and is a highly detailed cartoon of an adorable germ creature being tortured by a gang of tiny space trolls. It is, to use the parlance of the day, deeply fucked up.

Matthew wandered over to me while I was staring (and staring) at it. We had an intense conversation about how very IMPORTANT the picture was, containing ALL the metaphors for EVERYTHING. It seemed obvious that “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land” was the “Key To All Mythologies” and Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” rolled into one. 

Then Matthew said, “Erin, you must buy this. You have to. You were destined to have it.” 

I do not remember purchasing “Germ Isolation In Dingbat Land,” nor do I remember paying $300 for it (though the signed receipt that arrived with the package does make my case harder to prove). But it now hangs on my kitchen wall, a permanent reminder to Adam that I may not be trusted with the debit card.

Which is to say Matthew has a genius for transmitting his deep enthusiasms and passions, both in his poems and in person. I think part of his gift lies in the fact that he’s not pushy about it. More that Matthew offers gentle revelations, as his poems show us this moment, this thought, this scientific theory, this can of Cocoa Cola, this sound that this bell is (not) making—all of these compel our fullest attention.

 The world of Matthew’s poems is shadowed with the unheimliche, though his recognition of these disturbances doesn’t forget what is also charming, sly, humorous, and even sweetly wistful. It is this uncanny quality of attention, the exact gradations in shades between states of human being, that make him an irritatingly difficult poet from which to steal. Lord knows I’ve tried.

 And knowing his four, critically-admired, award winning poetry collections well,  I am simply left with a strong sense of Matthew’s generosity, his willingness to risk sincerity for the sake of meaningful connections, and the potential for adventure he offers if we’re willing to go on the trip.

*************************************************************************** 

So, Matthew, I can tell if someone actually knows you based on whether or not they refer to you as “Matt.”  

Why do you hate being called Matt? Don’t you think it’s kind of a sporty alternative to the original, like the ultimate frisbee playing version of yourself?  

Also, what’s a nickname of yours that you do like? Please share it with us.

I was called Matt in high school, for some reason. I never liked it, and in fact do hate it. It just sounds so ugly when I think of it in reference to myself. Which is strange, because one of my best friends is a Matt, Rohrer. I like it on him. So to answer your question, if someone calls me Matt it either means they don't know me or knew me in high school. Which is kind of the same thing actually. 

Maybe I just like the you in Matthew, it seems communicative, and makes me feel slightly less lonely.

When I went to college, there were a few guys there who were from the greater NY area who seemed to enjoy calling me Mattie, which seemed endearing, like I was their pal from hockey practice. That nickname by the way was solely endemic to that region. I have a few friends who call me "Z" which is fine. I want to say you can call me whatever you want, but that seems potentially dangerous. Nicknames are way too revealing, I don't ever want to actually know what people think of me. 

 Well, that’s reasonable. I think those of us with non-contractible names suffer from a little nickname envy. Though a number of my grad students call me “Tiny E” after the mini Elvis character on SNL. So my jealousy has been assuaged.

Moving on, you just told me the other day that you guys are about to have a baby. Mazel tov! Really wonderful news. And you especially will be a great dad. 

 But this made me think of Cate Marvin’s essay about being chosen for a prestigious residency, and when they found out she’d just had a baby, some on the committee were concerned she’d waste her time writing “terrible mother poems.”

 Are you concerned parenthood is going to make you write “terrible father” poems? Or are dude poets safe in that regard?

Tiny E. That is awesome. I shudder to think what my grad students call me.  

And thanks. Your confidence is much appreciated. I am currently surrounded by baby gear as I'm writing this. I have recently been introduced to the existence of many items that address needs I had no idea existed, and I'm sure this is just the beginning. 

You know, in fact I am a bit worried about that. Not because of poems by others I have seen, but because I have a tendency to write out of my own experience, and to find the language within it that seems most potentially electric and luminous and to follow it wherever it goes. That's how I write, and it requires a delicate balance of attention to feelings and weird objectivity toward those feelings, if that makes any sense. Sometimes though I have found that the stronger and more immediate the feelings surrounding the experience (particularly with death), the more difficult it is to have the necessary distance to follow what Stafford called "the golden thread."  

In other words I agree with Keats when he wrote that in a great poet a sense of beauty obliterates all consideration. And I get the feeling that having a kid is an intense dose of consideration, and mattering. Which is good. I'm sure there will be nothing I will care more about than the baby and his mother and our little family. So I wonder what that will do to the objectivity of my relation to language in balance with said feelings. I want my experience, however personal, to be representative through the mechanism of our collective consciousness (i.e. language) to as many people as possible. To my mind that happens for poets through the pursuit of "beauty," though of course that term means something very different to each poet. 

 On the other hand, as I think Montaigne wrote (not that I've read any Montaigne), most of my life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened. So odds are I'm as usual worrying about the wrong thing. 

Yeah, well it’s probably just as well Keats didn’t have any kids, saving us all from his “Ode On A Diaper Genie.” But I think kids actually do heighten one’s sense of negative capability, as it certainly puts you in a position of GREAT unknowing. You figure out quickly that grasping after fact and reason is an entirely pointless exercise when it comes to infants.  

Next question: 

 I’m not sure if you remember this, but there was a time when we were reading together years ago and I had a panic attack on stage—wobbling legs, squeaky voice, some hyperventilating—and from the corner of my eye, I saw you reposition your chair near me at the podium in what looked like preparation to break my fall if I did in fact collapse. (This is by far the most gallant gesture anyone has ever made toward me, and is the root of my great affection for you). 

But you NEVER seem to sweat behind the podium. Never. Is that because you’re incredibly confident deep down in your soul? 

 Also, why do you think so many poets are such terrible readers? I mean even poets that you like on the page, and then see them in person and they use the horrible “poetry voice" and mumble, and their poetry patter sucks. Or they natter on for 25 minutes and then read a two minute-long poem. What’s the key to putting on a good performance?

Wow, I totally remember that! We were in Montana, if I'm not mistaken. That was just the insane beginning of what turned out to be a truly insane two months on that Poetry Bus. I can't believe you decided to come along; you are a truly adventurous soul. 

It's funny, I think of you as a great reader. You seem to be attentive to the fact that you are in front of an audience. I used to get very nervous when I read, but I did it so many times I think I just got used to it. I still get that feeling of despair and why did I ever leave my house woe, but now it manifests more as a kind of almost total enervation, a desire to sleep for a thousand years that comes on in a very strong way about an hour or so before the reading. Recognizing the feeling and knowing what it is when it's happening helps.

To tell the truth, I think it's natural to have an internal resistance to reading poetry aloud. I think it's a big risk. At first, when I started reading, I was worried about what people thought of me. Now I'm worried about something else. I want something from a reading, a kind of experience, it is probably completely unreasonable, but I want to feel a sort of collective attention, not to me (and in fact when I am reading well the attention really is mostly away from me) but to possibility and to language and to lucid dreaming. And if I am reading and I don't feel that in the room, I have a deep sense of failure. That's a personal thing, it's not really oh they did or didn't like me, but more, I have organized my life around creating this kind of feeling not just in myself, but in others, and if it doesn't work, often for reasons beyond my or anyone else's control, then I get very sad, almost completely depressed. 

You are right, a lot of poets are terrible readers. Often they just go on too long, and choose the wrong poems to read. Almost any reading is ok if it's not too long, at least it's interesting. In your example in the question that is a 27 minute reading, which to my mind is pretty long even if there's just one reader. I want there to be a collectively accepted sign to make when someone has gone on too long. Something that starts out gentle, so if someone has just lost track of time they can get a warning and can gracefully call it to a close. Maybe we can work that out at a future AWP. Here's what I suggest: time your reading, and then multiply it times the number of people you are reading with. If the number you get is something horrifying like 190 minutes then you should rethink your set.  

As far as negative capability and kids, I think my main task is going to be to minimize the amount of internal irritability with which I reach after fact, reason, and butt wipes. But again, what I think I'm going to have to worry about and what I'm actually going to worry about are surely very different things. 

Ah, you are wise to know the difference. And thank you for the compliment on my readings. Once I gave up my last vestiges of personal dignity, it got a lot easier.

And regarding useful signals, I know a writer who ran a reading series who came up with a sure fire solution for willfully long winded readers--she put plants in the audience who’d simultaneously jump up for a standing ovation when blowhard writers went well beyond their allotted time.

It worked pretty brilliantly. Few audience members can resist the social pressure of the standing O. If you wanna try it out at AWP this year, I promise to be the second person on my feet. 

Final Question: One of my favorite books of yours is Come On All You Ghosts. Did you watch a lot of Ghost Hunters to prepare for it? Tell us a real life encounter with a ghost you’ve had.

That is a brilliant idea that writer had, passive aggressive standing ovations. And sad that it was necessary to come up with. 

I just want to say, I know you are being funny (which you are!), but that thing about giving up personal dignity ... I think there's a deep truth to that. A reading really isn't about the writer. It seems like it is, for a lot of social reasons, but in the end I just don't think that's what makes a really great reading. It is, in a way, about giving up one's own dignity, becoming somehow transparent to the language and ideas. I know that when I have given my very best readings, I feel as if I am just a bit behind the words, almost physically pushing them into the audience, and they arrive there in the room as if they have their own materiality, which of course they do, as sound and then as idea/electrons in the minds of the listeners. I hope when I am reading aloud to be completely forgotten, if I am then I am doing my job well. 

I don't watch Ghost Hunters. I've never seen a ghost. I've very occasionally heard voices, which is how I wrote that poem, the title poem of that book: a voice kept saying that phrase in my head, it was as if there was another consciousness with me for several weeks, insisting that I be attentive to something, it took me a while to really listen but when I did the poem came pouring out, not dictated, but as if something had finally been released. That is not how it usually works for me. Which is probably good, because it was more than a little crazy making when it happened. The only other supernatural thing that has happened to me, many times (I would say at least 15 or so) is, I think I see someone on the street, someone I have not heard from or spoken to for many years. Or they come to mind. It's completely unexpected and random, and if I think I've seen them it always turns out it's not them, usually it couldn't be, they live far away. I think huh, that's strange, I thought that was Ben or Olena. And then that person will call or email or something else. It's like a little living pre-shadow, so maybe the opposite of a ghost. As usual, a completely useless power! But a nice one actually. 

Thank you, Matthew. This has been a very edifying conversation. And I can’t wait to meet the Li'l Z and see you sporting a BabyBjorn! Very fetching.

Soon to come, as promised, Dana Levin.

#TBT: John Ashbery and Joan Allen at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery November 2009

photo 2009 (c) Star Black

Star Black took this photograph at the opening of John Ashbery's first show of his collages at the Tibor de Nagy gallery, November, 2009.

Interviews With Poets--Day 4--Cate Marvin (by Erin Belieu)

Good morning again.

I have so many poets I wanted to interview that I’m going to have to scramble to get them all in. Too many worthy subjects…

 (Update: the kind wizard behind the curtain at Best American Poetry just extended my week blogging to get to them all. Thank you, Benevolent Wizard!).

Today is Cate Marvin.

 I can’t remember exactly when I met Cate: a misty recollection--something about us sitting on a bar banquette maybe 12 years ago, with Kevin Prufer as a vaguely alarmed buffer wedged between. I do remember deciding I was going to actively befriend Cate in the most full contact way possible. I loved her attitude. I loved her sunglasses and her “This Is What A Feminist Looks Like” t-shirt. In the face of my determination, her resistance was futile.

 But before the person, I loved the poems: Cate’s dense, sinuously interwoven stanza structures. The precise, often formal syntax pushed up against subjects full of surprise, startling observations, and dramatic energy.  I loved the changeling tension between her poems’ black humor and vulnerability.

 Cate’s first book, World’s Tallest Disaster, announced one of those voices you feel is suddenly thrust upon you fully formed, like a late 20^th century Athena popped up whole from Zeus’s brain-splitting headache. Cate’s forthcoming collection, Oracle, due from Norton in early 2015, takes that undeniable quality of voice and sends it into hyper drive. Can’t wait to have it in hand.

The following was done in the moments between trying to finish the long lists of things we’re both on deadline for. Cate and I share the attention disorder of habitual over-committers:

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Cate, you are known in the poetry world for what some have called “The Marvin Death Stare.” I know your daughter Lucia has inherited this, too. Actually, Lucia’s death stare is even more intense than yours, which is a disconcerting thing to see on the face of an adorable kindergartner.

 Where does the death stare come from? How many generations of death-starers are there in your family?

What you refer to as “The Marvin Death Stare” is actually descended from the VanKirk family line. My daughter and I got it from my mother, who can freeze you out with a single look that’ll make your very blood cells tremble. She used to shoot it at me when I was a kid to let me know I'd fucked up. After a while I began to think it was funny. When she tries to use it on me now, I just laugh.

 But now that I think about it, my father is capable of giving a pretty evil stare himself. And that makes me recall the very appalling and deadly stare of his mother, which I'd later see in the eyes of my cousin's daughter. So I guess it is in fact genetic.

 Half the time, I’m not even aware I'm giving the death stare. I'm probably just in a state of concentration, trying to remember which groceries I need to get. I guess my face takes on that look when I'm concentrating, even when dwelling on the mundane. 

 It comes in handy, however, if I want to kill someone with a look, someone I deeply despise, and the latest someone was a kid at a birthday party my daughter went to. She was watching my daughter (who was admittedly acting like a total freak) and turned to her friend to mutter, "She's WEIRD." Overhearing this, I focused hard on this child and tried to pour molten lava over her through beaming rays of hate from my eyes. The kid did end up looking a little uncomfortable.

 It became apparent that my daughter had inherited the death stare before the age of two. She gave one of her daycare teachers THE LOOK, and then actually rolled her eyes. Total stink-eye. I couldn't believe it. I would have been embarrassed if I hadn’t felt so proud.

This takes me to another thing I wanted to ask you about, i.e. intensity—there’s a dude who a few years back admonished both you and me for turning what he saw as Plath’s influence in our work into a kind of (insert sneer) competency. He was using us an example of writers whose work is promoted by the MFA universe, which is apparently populated by zombies. I got the sneaky feeling he doesn’t like our poems.

 As for myself, whatever else anyone may fairly say sucks about my work, stylistically, thematically, I don’t have much in common with Plath, other than having been born with the same set of parts, a willingness to own anger as a thing human beings feel occasionally, and a female subject position that is sometimes apparent in my work. I’m gonna say it’s a superficial comparison.

 But you, Cate Marvin, do recognize Plath’s influence, especially in your forthcoming book Oracle (due from Norton is 2015). You’re definitely having a chat with Sylvia in this next book.

 Beyond irritation, how do you respond to the suggestion that we’re both boiled-down Plath made safe for academia?

    You know I think that being compared to Plath is a compliment, and I think she would have admired the certain stringency in your work. But you're too pokey and too interested in the daily to be readily compared to Plath. It's funny to find you and me (and Plath!) boiled down in a statement, because this is just the sort of thing you see happen all the time to Sexton and Plath. (Though I am proud to boiled down with you, Erin, in any literary pot, and perhaps this is a recipe Carl could attempt one of these days.)

 Now, if you are going to make those kinds of statements, you might just want to sit down and read the work, and maybe think a little bit harder, because it is straight-up obvious that while Plath and Sexton are working some similar angles (along with the other Confessionals) they are VERY DIFFERENT writers. They both get slammed. Plath "strong-arms" the reader. Sexton is "indecent." Basically, these ladies are not very lady-like, and so it seems their work somehow doesn't deserve to be read outside the context of their lives and/or gets thrown into some kind of moral stink-tank where people get their knickers in a twist because someone's writing toward a newness some don't wish to recognize or comprehend.

 But I never read the piece you're quoting from. It doesn't actually bother me a whole lot, if at all. I mean: who cares? I guess I have to admit I'm not interested in defending myself from what I guess is maybe an attack, and this is not due to laziness, but rather because I ALWAYS find the whole MFA PROGRAM = BAD conversation really pointless. This is what I think of MFA programs: THANK GOD THEY EXIST. I was a secretary for a year and a half after college, had zero time to write, and was so grateful after that to spend a few years in a place that valued my work and existed as a space specifically created to nurture writers.

 I think the term "confessional" is lobbed against women writers in a very predictable manner. If you write something "personal" and it happens to be from a female perspective, it's somehow not "art." Go read Sexton's amazing poem "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Inquire Further." She makes a clean argument, and levels the ground: "My kitchen, your kitchen."

 I wasn't aware I'd been boiling down Plath into a "competency." Maybe I have been! All I know if I'm trying to write the best poems I can write. They're not all going to be good. I mean, come on. I'm doing my best here! And I hope my work will continue to test itself and transform over the next few decades as I finish out this here life. I think the thing a poet can most hope for is to be challenged by his/her/their work. I try to be open to what comes, and not worry about the fashions and criticisms that surround me (the living, breathing me)-- as such, I read mostly dead poets. Which may be why I did not know this guy cared about me so much as to detest me. Le sigh.

 The truth is I’ve held off from reading Plath deeply over the past decade or more because I’ve recognized that she’s an all too substantial influence on my work. However, there are poems in my forthcoming book, Oracle, that pay homage to her. Some of this is due to a congruence of events that occurred over the past couple of years. First, I went to a Plath Symposium of the U of Indiana in the fall of 2012, and it was thrilling. I felt very connected to her, and to those who love her work. Second, I was teaching her work during the time the Steubenville rape case was so prominent. It then so happened I was asked by the Academy of American Poets to write a poem for the 50^th anniversary of Plath’s death. I had a lot of mixed feelings about doing this. But in the end I came to (I hope!) weave together her narrative with the Steubenville case, because I think the scene in The Bell Jar in which Esther is nearly raped feels very contemporary. Oracle also houses a suicide, that of a girl who has been sexually compromised (though this narrative very much lurks at the baseline of the book). Finally, there are poems in the book that I like to think would have cracked Sylvia Plath up. She was one funny motherfucker.

Leaving aside the fact that you just referred to my poems as “pokey,” (LEAVING THIS ASIDE, CATE), I imagine he would say his critique wasn’t intended to be personal.  But it does hit me as lazy, in that too many critics feel comfortable having a frame of reference for all of about five to ten women poets throughout history in total. And to actually know Cate Marvin is to like Cate Marvin, of this I feel certain.

 Though, it is true, when we first met back in the day, it was me who hit you amiss. (I won’t bring up the touchy subject of the AWP sternum jabbing incident again, though I have Mark Bibbins as a witness if it comes to a deposition). You definitely found me to be an acquired taste.

 I find a number of my good female friendships in poetry have started with this thankfully short-lived but wary dynamic. Do you think the business of poetry and publishing pits women against one another? Why or why not?

For the record, I never poked you. You and Bibbins made that shit up. I was raised as way too much of a WASP to even consider touching a stranger, much less poke them in the sternum. (Even while drunk at a bar at AWP.)

 But it is true I did not care for you at one time. And that's because people told me you didn't like me! And I was threatened by you, saw you as a rival after you got a job over me, and I really needed to get over myself to recognize that you and I actually had quite a bit in common.

 I suspect women can be inclined to hate one another in the manner they hate themselves. I mean, is it not obvious that we are trained to hate ourselves? I used to have the luxury of time to spend a great deal of it depressed, and I would solemnly slog over to Walgreens to buy a stack of women's magazines and a pack of smokes. Then I'd spend the evening reading through these magazines and feel even worse about myself and my entire fucking life. I stopped reading these mags at some point, mostly because they no longer published good articles (it used to be you could find great articles by super smart women on topics like skin creams-- I always loved to see language artfully weave itself around these seemingly inconsequential matters).

 So, even prior to having my baby, I opted out. I had this reckoning with myself as a woman in her thirties, and I made myself come to grips with the fact that vanity would not serve me well into my future as an older woman. It had come time for me to recognize I would no longer be the __________ -iest woman in the room.  And when women compete with one another we do not serve to improve our situation.

 When I had my kid, I was forced to give up my customary evenings of indulgent melancholy. And it was at that time that I saw myself in a larger context, and that context was WOMEN. I saw I had way more in common with women, everywhere I went, as they too were dealing with trying to get the goddamned car-seat snapped into the stroller, they too were sleepless and raccoon-eyed and covered with spit-up . . . and I got over myself. I recognized that the female poets I was most threatened by were exactly the ones with whom I wanted to be in conversation. So, yeah, in that way, I guess, I came to love other women because I finally made peace with myself. I no longer had the time or energy to inwardly project the deep-seated loathing that’s continually funneled through all of us by the media. 

 Yet I think we're now living and writing in a time in which women just are not as interested in bringing one another down. That we recognize we all have to deal with the same shit, and that by sticking together and talking about it we have a real shot at making the changes we want to see actually happen. 

Speaking of women’s magazines, despite you having chucked in the patriarchy's gym towel, you really are the most idiosyncratically stylish woman I know. With the sparkle clogs and boots and the leather jackets and the hyper animated socks paired with really excellent jewelry.

 How do you square this with your feminism? Why don’t you do as many other women intellectuals in academia and buy boxy, faux Guatemalan jackets at Chico’s that make your hips look disproportionately wide and be done with it?

 Are you, to use the phrase of the moment, a bad feminist? 

One of the nice things about being a “woman” is the fact we have so many options available to us as far as fashion is concerned. It’s for this reason I love having a daughter. She really has fun expressing herself through her clothes. And she is an outrageous dresser.

 
It is part of my feminism – on a purely personal level – that makes me uncomfortable with the idea of wearing skirts, dresses, and any clothes that are “revealing.” I don’t want my body on display. It makes me uncomfortable to attract attention that way. Like I said, that’s just me.

 [*Heteronormative Statement Warning*] My boyfriend recently told me he’d like to see me in something other than jeans. Later, he made a suggestion that implied he’d like to see me wear a skirt. And I reacted kind of violently, telling him (true to our times, in a text message): “Okay, I need you to understand something. I don't wear skirts because I don't like them. I don't like wearing them. I don't own any. I don't want to own any. If it's my legs you want to see, you can see them whenever you like in private.”

 Then I realized I was being really unnecessarily cranky, so I followed up by saying: “Okay, why don't you show me what you have in mind? I'll try to be open to your ideas.”

 And here’s why I love this guy. He says in response:  “I don't give a shit what you wear. More teasing than anything. I'll wear the skirt if I can find a nice one.”

 I can’t help but appreciate a man who refuses to take his “masculinity” too seriously.

 Now, Erin, you’re going to think I’m cranky (and you know how I tend to get cranky about these matters) when I say it is in fact bad feminism to criticize women for shopping at Chico’s. My mom likes to shop there, and there are tons of super badass female academics I know who rock those clothes. So I won’t lower myself, Erin, by taking a cheap shot at that particular genre of fashion, especially because I rather admire it. Wearing clothes that don’t aggressively flatter the body in the way that’s expected strikes me as quite a natural choice. Plus, I’ve been known to shop at Chico’s.

 There. I said it.

 But there have been times when I have thought that I might want to consider dressing differently, as if it might be in my best interest to consider donning a sort of disguise, so as to be more respected in the workplace.  Because I tend to wear a pretty “young” look (jeans, and more jeans): because, yeah, these are the clothes in which I feel most like myself.

 The fact is, I’m not terribly imaginative when it comes to fashion. A friend of mine once opened my closet and, on seeing about twenty pairs of matching black clogs, said, “I’m worried about you.” I say, figure out what works for you and buy twenty pairs of it. Buy it in varying shades so no one suspects that you just can’t be bothered to do your laundry. 

 Simplicity is the key. My first fashion idol was Batgirl. She of the black suit and red hair. All covered up, but shapely, and not to be messed with. Nothing frivolous about her.

 Though one thing I love about poets is despite how serious they are about their words, they love THINGS. Show me a poet who doesn’t have some odd collection of brik-a-brac, whether it’s books, jewelry, or furniture. Poets are all about thingyness. We love most the details. And I love that about us.

 As for being “good” or “bad”—don’t binaries suck? What’s so goddamn great about Literature is that it resists such categories, as does humanity, inherently.

 Feminism? I think one is strongest in their sense of FEMINISM when s/h/ze allows his/her/their idea of it to take different shapes, that is, is willing to allow it to be redefined in conversation with others. The meaning must be shared and, thus, continually altered, to retain meaning. That’s what keeps it alive and necessary for me as just another person trying to navigate this fucked up world on a day-to-day basis.

Wow. That is an incredibly smart, nuanced response, Cate. The only thing I can say at this point is:

HAHAAHAHA, YOU SHOP AT CHICOS!!!

Thank you, Cate Marvin; this has been a very edifying conversation.

I don’t even know who’s up tomorrow. I think Dana Levin. So please tune in because Dana always has a lot of interesting opinions to share.