The Best American Poetry

Why everything is going to be OK. [by Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Dear Bleaders,

I’m supposed to be cleaning!  I was given a specific task: straighten up the kid’s bookshelves for Jessie’s birthday party this weekend.  But then my husband, who suggested this task, took the kids and went to Goodwill to get rid of some of the heaps of stuff of which we’re getting rid, leaving me alone to sneak like a thief back to my computer to write you guys a quick post.

I figure as long as I finish by the time he’s back, I’m good.  So.  What I want to tell you is pretty important.  I spent the weekend in Omaha and now have another Homaha in these United States.  What great people I met.  Ridiculously cool people.  Ridunkulous.  And they gave me roast beast, and took me to hear Yo Yo Ma, and made jokes about Exit 420.   If you don’t get it, don’t pay it no mind, but if you do get it, you get that it is good to know.  I gave 6 talks in four days!  One to a synagogue full of clergy, mostly Catholic priests, collared and mostly grey-haired.  Some rabbis, some ministers, some visitors, a lovely woman who said she’d driven six hours to see me.

I told them that I’d come to tell them about Poetic Atheism.  There is no God, but as Durkheim said a hundred years ago, what we thought was God, was the community.  What we feel when we are gathered together, that there is something larger than us, that feeling is true.  It’s us. 

We can add to it that what we thought of as faith is love.  We have to try to believe in each other, in our mutual misery and compassion.  

The solace we have to offer one another is sufficient to our wounds.

Our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning.

There is no hidden world of meaning.  The feelings of meaning are the meaning.  It’s all true.

Human beings need community, meditation, and ritual.  We need to come together and pray that we will do the right thing, that we will help each other, and that we are capable of helping one another.  It’s a long shot, but it’s better than trying to believe in some third party and hoping that he will do the right thing. 

Am I telling you that all this time you’ve been alone in the dark?  Yes.  Come sit with us.  We're right here.  Turn on the light.

We must look after one another.  There is no heaven.  We are all going to die, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe two years from now, maybe forty years from now, maybe sixty.  It doesn’t matter all that much.  There is an eternity on either side, an eternity, so who cares?  Life is not theater, you can’t miss the end.  You are here.  It’s wonderful.  We made it into existence together. 

We have to start coming together and singing, celebrating.  Health Care, people!  Gorgeous African-American president and presidential family!  Now is the time to lift our voices up.  We are all there is.  We don’t have it for very long.  We have it right now.  America is a lot of things.  I know.  Tea party.  I know.  Beck, and not the good kind.  But it’s okay.

We are here together.  We can keep each other company.  We can see that if this is the world, if our consciousness is what we have of consciousness, than what we feel and what we make is very important indeed.  You’re sacred because you are, and it’s my job to support your awareness of the true and glorious reality that is.  It’s your job to support this awareness in the rest of us.  We are getting better at this.  We are going to get even better.  That's why everything is going to be okay.

Excellent work staying alive since last week, most of you.  Let’s try to do even better next week.

By the way, on my way home from the airport we got stopped on the Brooklyn Bridge and there we stayed for two and a half hours, my whole little family and me, from around 12:30 am to 3 am, when they finally backed us off the bridge.  Meanwhile we got out of our cars.  We heard someone had jumped and saw boats and helicopters shining lights.  Then we heard there was a woman who had climbed up into the bridge girders and was going to jump.  John encouraged me to walk down to where it was all happening; given what I’d been writing about lately, I should just go down and see.  So I did, there was a woman up there, a cop up there near her, I saw him hand her a cigarette, I saw him light it for her, I saw her talking to him, I saw her move her long, brown hair behind her ear. 

Like I said, she hadn’t come down when we left, they’d turned us around to get out, but I felt sure she’d come down, she was talking calmly for hours, there were tons of people everywhere.  We googled it when we got home but saw nothing of it.  Then yesterday saw a report.  She’d jumped.  After we were home in bed.  She’s in critical condition.  A 41-year-old woman from Long Island.  Like so many of us, or thereabouts.  So forgive me, bleaders, for repeating myself.   Stay, everybody.  No more going off the deep end.  Stay.  Let’s all give up together, right here, right now, and have chocolate cake.  But don’t give any to the dog, because chocolate isn’t good for dogs.

I love you like crazy,

 Jennifer

from the archive; first posted March 24, 2010

Poetry & Belief: In Conversation With Lisa Marie Basile & Rachel Eliza Griffiths

This is part of my Poetry & Belief Series. Read parts 1 and 2 here, with poets Lisa A. Flowers and Rosebud Ben-Oni, respectively. In part 3, I interview Rachel Eliza Griffiths, an astounding poet and visual artist. 

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LISA MARIE BASILE: Your work as a poet draws upon some beautiful ideas of god, and in your language there is a feeling of holiness. But then you write, "For a husband who could not save his entire family/ because he only had two hands.  For their house split/ in half by water.  For his wife’s last words:  you can’t hold on/  and hold me.  For the absence of God as she dropped his hands/ and gave herself like a petal to the gulf." Sometimes I think writing is the poet's way of finding God, even if it exists only in our hopes. Are you trying to find or provide answers in your work?

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: I don't want to write poems that ever attempt to answer anything, especially anything as complex and profound a subject as God. I'd rather leave the space of finding answers to the reader. I'm fine with being unresolved. We can each try to make sense of the world until the next moment arrives to remind us how little we know. As a poet, I'm more concerned about how questions function in my poems and in the ways these questions resonate with tension for the reader and myself.

The intimacy between language and readers is already a great power. I would hope that my work would reflect my desire to witness a strong sense of spirit in our common experiences, including our miracles, however ordinary, however sublime. Often, I feel aligned to the role of a witness, a participant of what Lorca articulated in his theory of Duende.

When I read another poet's work and I can suddenly hear or experience Duende, I feel both gratitude and hope.

The lines you quoted are from a poem. 'Hymn to a Hurricane', which was written about Hurricane Katrina. One of the many things about the poem is about my role (and frustration) as a poet when this was all happening. I watched and listened to so many stories of loss and survival. One day I was watching the news and saw a man who shared how he had been holding both his wife and son as they struggled to get up on their roof. At a pivotal moment the husband and wife realize that they are all not going to survive. Before the husband has to choose the wife lets go of his hand so that their son is saved. I will never forget the man's face or how he held his son against him as he shared this. His name was Hardy Jackson and his wife's name was Tonette Jackson. I believe he died from lung cancer in 2013. The poem was also about trying to make a record for his and his wife's faith, to name and to acknowledge so many human beings - gods, to me - on a number of scales, whose lives were given to known and unknown forces.  What I am also trying to say is what happens at the end of her poem, "Photograph from September 11", when the poet Wislawa Szymborska writes, "I can do only two things for them - /describe this flight/and not add a last line."

LISA MARIE BASILE: I first met you when we worked together on the unBound video for Joseph Quintela's Bookdress project. In this, we resurrected a sort of Eve-like creature, but the whole video involved the cycle of birth, death and nature. What was it about this cycle that intrigues you as a poet and photographer/videographer? 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: That was an amazing day! When I arrived with my camera I felt as though I had stumbled onto the set of a fantastical movie. To find oneself in a universe of paper was overwhelming and exciting. Honestly, I thought it would be a difficult ekphrastic assignment to use Quintela's visual work to create another work of visual art that could be viewed and interpreted independently from its original source.

Later, while editing, I realized there was actually a creation story in the footage. I didn't know that while we were working. My mind wanted to visually explain how such a landscape could exist and how the characters, all three women (The Book Dresses), interacted with the landscape and each other. What if Adam didn't exist? What if the rib pulled out of a human life was language?

Then I took away the chronological order of the footage and added found footage, mostly of animals - jellyfish, bees, and owls - because I felt that all of the paper was obscuring the more primal feelings I had experienced and observed during the project. There were moments when the expressions on your faces resisted the sense of the paper world in which you existed. Then I cut the footage so that it became very fragmentary, frenetic, dreamlike, and distorted, which was how I had begun to feel as we worked together in that underground gallery.

LISA MARIE BASILE: I am not religious, but I want to create the sense of meaning I find so beautiful in religion. Often I struggle with appropriating the decadence and aesthetic of my Catholic upbringing while not believing. How do you filter your own spiritual or religious beliefs into your work? 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: For me, these areas aren't isolated and are unlikely to be filtered from other elements of my work. For example, in nature I find a persistent spirituality. In my work, I may blur several religious vocabularies together but there is always something more happening. Nature works as such. T.S. Eliot achieves this in his Four Quartets where he uses both imagery and symbols from both western and eastern religions to discuss man's relationships with time, universe, and religion. The most important thing for me is that I view these spaces as complexly human. They are tense, intimate, and contradictory spaces for me. Ultimately, I don't want to have too much distance between where I locate my spirituality and the language I use.

LISA MARIE BASILE: I absolutely loved your book The Requited Distance, like all of your work. When I read it, I think I fell apart!  I love the book's uncanny way of exploring grief and transcendence, much like someone trying to find their way through the mire of beliefs.  What was it about Icarus that inspired you to write this book, and why did you choose the American desert as a landscape? 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: My resistance to writing about mythology is where this book began. I kept asking: do we really need another book of poetry about the gods & their bad behavior in the 21st century? How and why do I need to contribute to that conversation? The poems began to arrive and I had to stop dismissing my own voice's need to use them. I had to stop asking reductive questions because I was afraid to write about some real issues in my life.

Actually, many years before I even began to work on the poems, I'd made a number of drawings --- a sequence of self-portraits of myself as both Icarus and the Minotaur. Then I looked through some old journals and discovered I'd been obsessed with the Icarus myth as a teenager. After I graduated from high school, I had completely redacted those memories and I don't know why.  But it was the relationships between the father and the child, the inventor and his invention(s), the queen and the bull, and the supporting cast of gods and the Minotaur that lured me back to Crete as an adult.

And I didn't choose the desert consciously. It began to insinuate itself in my questions about Icarus and my attempt to connect the myth to a contemporary landscape, which ended up being America. Out of all of the myths, I feel that the Icarus myth is one of the most American if that makes any sense.

LISA MARIE BASILE: Do you think male writers write about God in a different way than female writers? 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: I don't know. Let's ask God one day.

I mean I think male and female writers are not a monolith and that amongst both sexes you'd find limitless and nuanced incarnations regarding how God is or is not experienced in a poem or by characters in a novel. The craft and imagination of the writing about God is what would draw me in to reading something or skipping it.

LISA MARIE BASILE: Is there a poet/performer/artist/photographer that you think deals with religion/atheism/myth in an interesting way? 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: This is a terrific and impossible question! There are so many names that come to mind so I'll just tell you what I've been reading and looking at recently. 

Visually, I'm spending time with Jasper Johns' Regrets as well as the works of artists Marina Abramović and Ana Mendieta. I think each of these artists have pursued extraordinary conversations, which speak to some of the themes we've been discussing together.  

At this moment, I'm all up in Jericho Brown's New Testament. I think its title doesn't begin to give away all of the complexity, intelligence, spirituality, terror, courage, and grace he explores. I think I'm into my second or third reading of it now.  And as I read Brown, I've also been rereading Rilke's Duino Elegies and revisiting the collected poems of Larry Levis. I like to bridge different voices together for suspended amounts of time.  There is a lot of loss happening in my life right now and these voices are helping me to bear it.

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RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS is a poet and visual artist. Her fourth collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow, will be published by Four Way Books in 2015. Currently, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

 

 

 

LISA MARIE BASILE is the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, October 2014), and the chapbooks Andalucia and Triste. Her poetry and other work can be seen in PANK Magazine, Tin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Huffington Post and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for Diorama, a NYC-based collaborative poetry/music salon. She is a graduate of the New School’s MFA in Writing program, and works as a content director. Find out more about Lisa here. Follow her on twitter @lisamariebasile

 

 

Poetry & Belief: Lisa Marie Basile in Conversation With Rosebud Ben-Oni

This is part II of the Poetry & Belief Series. In this interview, Rosebud Ben-Oni and I discuss how her work directly interacts with faith and culture. She also offers a new poem.

Check out the Poetry & Belief series opener here.

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Lisa Marie Basile: Your work deals largely with God and culture. I loved these poems, and thought there was a lot to unpack here. How do you approach writing about belief? Was this something you always knew you'd examine, or does it fall out naturally?

Rosebud Ben-Oni: I’ve been drawn to conflict for as long as I can recall. I struggle with the weight of the various histories I’ve inherited. Perhaps it’s also the nature of being mixed, and the experiences of living in places like Jerusalem and the U.S.-Mexican border, that I must respond to these histories and places in order to be of them.

Since I am not of one thing (and really, few of us are), I must create places and memories in verse to give myself origins as a writer. Recently, I guest edited an Imaginary Homelands feature for Winter Tangerine Review, and wrote this introduction to the series in which I proposed that hybridity has its own purity, and the idea that origins evolve and have more than one story.

Rarely is anything static, so why should our literary and religious canons be? Around a decade or so ago, I stopped attending Shabbat services regularly; I felt something was stuck. I wanted to move forward, to something greater. I can’t do this with Judaism as it is now. I do still recite prayers like the V'ahavta because otherwise I wonder, what is a Jew without practice? (For me that question mirrors this one: what is a writer who doesn’t write?) Even though I no longer belong to a synagogue, I stay bound to the idea of inherited history by praying. But it is in poetry that I engage with the cosmos, as a living thing beyond being alive, as a force that stretches towards something beyond limits. That is what I mean by moving forward. 

Lisa Marie Basile: Your new poem All The Wild Beasts I Have Been is an intense examination of religious belief and family acceptance in a time of war. I sense a deep struggle in this poem, and want to know more. After all this darkness and grief - is the writing cathartic?

Rosebud Ben-Oni: I have to fight for that kind of catharsis, and it never fully comes because I’m old enough to know better. I don’t just mean peace in the Middle East; I mean admitting all the beliefs that make me a poet. Living in Jerusalem brought out something very brutal and raw that I cannot destroy. That kind of candidness that reveals the division between the soul and the brain, the secular from the spiritual, all the contradictions that make life difficult. Jerusalem, as sacred as it is held, is very provincial at the same time. While I will always love the city and at times long for its winding roads and diverse landscapes, for its place in history, it wasn’t until I left Jerusalem that I could move forward as a poet and write about it.

Lisa Marie Basile: You come from a very multicultural background and it has definitely made a beautiful impact on your work - a Jewish father, and a Mexican mother. This is a lot to ask, but did you ever figure that poetry would help you unravel, make sense of, and define the many facets of your personhood? Or do you find poetry creates more questions?

Rosebud Ben-Oni: When I was younger, I used to struggle with some Jews who didn’t consider me a “real” Jew because my mother is Mexican of Indian/Spanish heritage and a convert.  Just this year I’ve finally began to explore the uglier side of faith, when I’ve brandished my teeth, when I’ve failed, when I broke from any hope for the stellar and fell deeply into the dark provincial. I recently saw Under the Skin, and it reminded me of my years in Jerusalem— the alienation, the wanting to be human when I could not be. When I listen to the movie’s soundtrack, especially to this song “Love,” to all those drawn-out, contorted, synthetic notes, I remember the fumbling, the unbearable solitude, the days closing in as I realized I could not make a life for myself in Jerusalem.

This year was a turning point in both my writing and my life. My husband and I married in two different ceremonies: a Chinese tea ceremony and dinner to honor his side, in which his 80-something grandmother flew all the way from Hong Kong to attend, and then a Jewish ceremony, which was completely in Hebrew with English translation, performed by a female rabbi, surrounded by my mother’s family on the shores of South Padre. No one from my father’s family came to either wedding.

Like my father had been embraced by my mother’s family, so was I embraced by my husband’s family. At the second cereomony on Padre Island, I was overwhelmed that so many people we loved were in one room. Some had crossed great physical distances to be with us that weekend. While I did feel sadness for the absence of my Jewish family, the unknown—will I ever see them again—  rests, though uncomfortable, within me, and I give it that space. I found I could only do that when which the poet self finally connected, completely, to the human part of me.

Lisa Marie Basile: Whose poetry explores faith in a way that you've found really inspiring?

Rosebud Ben-Oni: I absolutely love the Donald Revell translation of “Zone” by Apollinaire; it is one of the reasons I decided to write poetry of faith. Of course Adrienne Rich’s “Yom Kippur 1984” inspired me when I was younger as well as Yehuda Amichai’s bilingual Hebrew and English translated collection Poems of Jerusalem and Love Poems. I cannot know and love Jerusalem without reading Arab Israeli, Palestinian and Druze poets either; I recommend Samih al-Qasim (check out Sadder than Water, translated by Nazih Kassis) and Dana Dajani’s spoken word  piece “Love Letter from Palestine.” Naomi Shihab Nye, of course— her poem “San Antonio” was read for our wedding. Recently, Lisa Katz named a number of new Jewish poets in her essay “Beyond Amichai.” Rattle has just published an issue on Poets on Faith(#45) that is worth checking out.

Speaking of faith, did you see this performance of Jessica Lange in American Horror Story? It’s camp, but you don’t have to see past the camp to understand the world Jessica Lange is creating as Elsa Mars. Everything is off about the performance: the blue eye shadow, the oversized powder blue suit, her off-key performance in Lange’s slightly off German accent. The glitter raining down on her as she spins, arms outstretched as if seeking some cosmic embrace. Elsa Mars really in the power of her cardboard world, as she bears something more pure than she is herself, on her threepenny stage until the end of the performance— and we are left with her bewildered, terrified expression, that world so quickly gone, as if she is alone, as if no one has heard her.

Watching this, I was reminded that my own faith is as evanescent as it is eternal. It is such a powerful performance.

Lisa Marie Basile: (That is one of my favorite scenes from AHS! I love when camp & kitsch is used to sort of play with the actually quite serious implications of faith, isolation and meaning. But that's a whole different conversation!)

So what are you working on now? What would you share with our readers?

Rosebud Ben-Oni: My next collection explores conflicts of all sorts, including a series where I reimagine both Biblical and pop culture figures as “the younger sister.” It started with a poem called “If Cain the Younger Sister”, which was reprinted in this interview; I’ve always had great sympathy for Cain and felt that he has often been misunderstood.

I’d like to share a new one that I’ve dedicated to poet J. Michael Martinez; it’s called “If Delilah the Younger Sister.” It’s a response to Amichai’s “Wildpeace,” and pays homage to Delilah from the Book of Judges, as well as the film Roadhouse and heavy metal, especially Guns N Roses. I am the bride after all who sampled Metallica’s “Wherever I May Roam” in her vows under a chupa between Hebrew prayers.

I suppose this poem, like others in the series, is a prayer in which the poet poses the questions to her faith, for the sake of uncertainty and not in spite of it, because one of the greatest questions ever asked was: where do we go/where do we go now?

 

If Delilah the Younger Sister

  

You say peace won’t come from one person

Or poems it isn’t

Wildflowers and plowing wilderness

No it wouldn’t come if we let it

Piety isn’t a bright blue sky but its absence

The other side the same

Seven days and seven nights you say grinding

In the prison house no where do we go

                                    Where do we go now          

                                                Where do we go

String skipping I’m making faces

With j michael martinez                   conjuring

The bands the wrong times those glam

In the grunge era     

where we exit

Sheena headlines

The ramones                         catch it on j michael late night

Arsenio there’s a revival kip winger headlines twisted sister

Skipping rope on torn j michael

Halos there’s a revival my dear dear dead ones hanging out

In the roadhouse is that you samson here’s one last fight

Sweep the leg ehud the left-handed BE NICE until it’s time

Kiss

My

Converse and gideon

Pluck from your bowl and wool this

                                    I I I I I 

Reborn a mercedes on feeder roads          I’m the big man

Filling vacancy           I’ve possessed patrick swayze

Shaved heads and brass fettered the monster

Trucks driven to this j michael

Eat world where all the boys and girls

Belong to a j mötley michael crüe

The last tour last exit to the wake   raving raving

Where do we go where do we go now

                                    Sweet

Marilyn j michael manson of mine yes

Drunk in heart-shaped burlesque yes

The mosh pit oh the accidents

A cracked skull a copped feel fickle hands

Carrying us off    if not a busted strobe

If not a ring-ripped nose                  if cracked

Concrete beneath now where do we go

The hills are alive with michael van

J halen where do we go now

The rattail in hand

Whipping

Motorcycle

Wind

 

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Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, ROSEBUD BEN-ONI is a CantoMundo Fellow and the author of SOLECISM (Virtual Artists Collective, 2013). She was a Rackham Merit Fellow at the University of Michigan where she earned her MFA in Poetry, and a Horace Goldsmith Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her work is forthcoming or appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Bayou, Puerto del Sol, among others. In Fall 2014, she will be a visiting writer at the University of Texas at Brownsville’s Writers Live Series. Rosebud is an Editorial Advisor for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts (vidaweb.org). Find out more about her at 7TrainLove.org

LISA MARIE BASILE is the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, October 2014), and the chapbooks Andalucia and Triste. Her poetry and other work can be seen in PANK Magazine, Tin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Huffington Post and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for Diorama, a NYC-based collaborative poetry/music salon. She is a graduate of the New School’s MFA in Writing program, and works as a content director. Find out more about Lisa here, read a review of APOCRYPHAL here, and follow her on twitter @lisamariebasile

 

Poetry & Belief: In Conversation With Lisa Marie Basile & Lisa A. Flowers

When I set out to write APOCRYPHAL, my first full-length poetry collection, I knew very little about what it would be, but I knew there was something pushing me to do it. It was a feeling, an almost-thing, a belief. It was this banging internal knowledge that though my body would die, at least my words could reincarnate in their reader's view. I am an atheist who wrote an entire book around the concept of the Apocrypha, those non-canonical non-stories, the hidden documents, the dirtied bits. I wanted to say, 'here is my reality,' in fragments and half-remembered memories, because whether or not their foundation was entirely the truth, or whether I not I could accept them as true, they were mine and they were acknowledged. I suppose a portion of why I write comes from shame and fear. When I write, the words somehow leave me and just are, in some way removing my ownership. I enjoy the writing and rewriting of my own personal myth. I like turning bad people into characters whose mythos I can manipulate. I like sending lovers to heaven.

When I was a child my Italian grandparents put me into Catholic School -- meaning, they paid for the schooling. One lunch day, the nun asked us what Jesus' love meant to us. What? I was eight. "I don't know what it means because I can't see him," I told them. I then was brought to the bathroom to have my mouth washed out over the sink.

This 'rebellion' marked the early formation of my observational personality, but it also left me feeling shameful. If everyone believes -- if I don't believe -- who am I, and why do I still find the grandiose beauty of Catholicism so intriguing? Was I wrong? Am I searching hard enough? Maybe he can't see me? How could my heart still want for God when my mind had never really been there?

I suppose I write to find my own God, or to explore that loss and shame. I get to create my own playground of paradise and punishment. I get to ask and answer questions. 

I was told once in my first MFA course that God just isn't subject that could easily be explored. Actually, I was told to basically drop it. So of course I didn't. I kept at it, and kept reading the work of other poets whose personal beliefs were or were not synonymous with their verse. I am fascinated with contemporary poetic notions of reincarnation, death, myth and religion and atheism. 

And so in this series, I will interview poets about how their work intersects with belief.

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To kickoff, I interviewed Lisa A. Flowers, whose poetry is as rich as myth itself.

Lisa A. Flowers is a poet, critic, vocalist, the founding editor of Vulgar Marsala Press, and the author of diatomhero: religious poems. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Collagist, and other magazines and online journals. Raised in Los Angeles and Portland, OR, she now resides in the rugged terrain above Boulder, Colorado. Visit her here or here.

Lisa, your poetry - as well as the poetry you're drawn to as a reviewer and curator - share one thing in common: a sense of grandiosity, always on the edge of the profane or sacred. You're written the book, "diatomhero: religious poems" (whose title you call an anagram of the bible’s “I am the door”). What attracts you to myth and god as a contemporary poet? Why has poetry of god and myth has long captivated poets? What is it that continuously haunts us in modern times?

Myth has always defined the times in which we live, in that it is rooted--whatever its subsequent incarnations-- in fear of mortality and nature. It's around this fear that religion and cultural value systems, which have always been present, spring up. So, that fact alone makes it a perpetually contemporary factor. However, of the two (mortality and nature) only death remains as impenetrable as ever.

Nature is now widely assumed to be "understood", even though Lars von Trier, in stark contrast to Thoreau, Keats, et al, called it "Satan's church." Is mortality always primitive, no matter how many millions of years have elapsed, like Kaspar Hauser ushered eternally into the drawing room of a great estate? It's an interesting question. But the truth is that the wilderness is just as wild and uncontrollable as the knowledge that we're going to die. It's just that death cannot (ostensibly) "report back", like a hurricane or a catastrophic earthquake can. I think this, in a crude nutshell, is the conundrum that enthralls poets, whether they're Romantics or hardcore realists.

The other aspect that's riveting (and far more important, I think) is transformation, which I talk a bit more about in this interview at THEThe Poetry. If myth can provide an historical template for the ingenuity of fear to build on, it can also provide an ever-accessible template by which one can find their way out of just about anything. So many people are obsessed only with entry points, as if they alone define the outcomes that science is continually searching for.

So, "I am the door" is about entrances and exits. I like to think of the structure of myth as a sort of OCD like system in which specific actions are calculated to produce results. Someone washing their hands obsessively or having to take two steps back every time they take two steps forward isn't that much different to me than the genesis of the most beautiful and transcendental myths on earth.

I am attracted to your work because the body of it is one long poem, really, always expanding on itself. You play with notions of rebirth in all of your work, as though death does not really exist. For example, I sometimes feel there is a real disparity between my true beliefs and my writing (which almost always centers on some sort of Lynchian, pseudo or strange paradise).

I constantly try to resurrect everything because I'm afraid of loss, and so divinity becomes default. In reality, I am an atheist. I'm so fascinated and excited by poetic explorations of heaven and hell, especially when the writer has complicated religious views. Do you write what you want to believe or what you hope is true?

Great question. It would be easy to say that there is some wish-fulfillment there, but I also believe that creation can produce tangible results ... like a ghost who strains to become perfume, or something like that. I have pledged never to abandon the people I loved who have died, and diatomhero is largely about honoring that commitment. So, in that sense, to call the writing fantasy would be a sort of betrayal. I do write about what I want to be true, of course. But I prefer to think of my own desires as entirely secondary to the work itself. Also, I love your description of God as a default. It reminds me of an article I read recently, which touched upon the body of Christ, itself, as the center of time.

Because religious and mythic poetry is surprisingly commonplace in the contemporary sphere, how do you think, as a reviewer, poets can successfully explore this area without sentimentality, predictability and sloppiness?

I can probably best answer that question by quoting one of your own statements (which I loved) back to you. In a recent interview with The Huffington Post, you said: "from a poetic perspective, I would like to say that it is not my responsibility to write what is clean and free from bullshit. It is my responsibility to write what I want to write." I think that's really the main caveat ... the bottom line being that, as long as something is expressing itself effectively, there are absolutely no rules.

As a reviews editor, I see so much pedantic nonsense, so many "carefully structured", paranoid, academic explanations that are afraid of pure, channeled, sensuous response. My friend CA Conrad likes to quote Mina Loy, who said: "If you are very frank with yourself and don't mind how ridiculous anything that comes to you may seem, you will have a chance of capturing the symbol of your direct reaction." Therein, indeed, lies the road to originality.

You can read parts I and II of Lisa A. Flowers' Emere's Tobacconist (excerpted from diatomhero) here and here.

LISA A. FLOWERS is a poet, critic, vocalist, the founding editor of Vulgar Marsala Press, and the author of diatomhero: religious poems. Her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, elimae, Tarpaulin Sky, The Collagist, and other magazines and online journals. Raised in Los Angeles and Portland, OR, she now resides in the rugged terrain above Boulder, Colorado. Visit her here or here.

LISA MARIE BASILE is the author of APOCRYPHAL (Noctuary Press, October 2014), and the chapbooks Andalucia and Triste. Her poetry and other work can be seen in PANK Magazine, Tin House, The Nervous Breakdown, Johns Hopkin’s The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, The Huffington Post and Prick of the Spindle, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and a co-curator for Diorama, a NYC-based collaborative poetry/music salon. She is a graduate of the New School’s MFA in Writing program, and works as a content director. Find out more about Lisa here. Follow her on twitter @lisamariebasile

XO,
Lisa Marie Basile

The Presence/Absence of Jewish Culture in Catalunya, Aphorisms of Jose Bergamin [by Sharon Dolin]

Ancient mikveh in Girona

This will be my last post from Barcelona. I had wanted to translate something else. Or to speak about the shadow of Judaism that shows itself in unexpected places. Such as in the Mercat de Born, a huge market that is an archaeological site from the 18th century, when Barcelona was defeated by the Bourbons and the Catalans lost many of their rights. There was an exhibition of photographs by a contemporary artist and poems influenced by the Kabbalah by Salvador Espriu, still the most famous Catalan modern poet. And a critic's new book who writes that the "secret" to Espriu is the structure of Kabbalah in his poems.

Or I could tell you about the traditional music I went to hear in the neighborhood. And they played Sephardic songs. By way of introduction, the singer asked, "Does anyone know what a mikveh is?" "I do," I said and everyone turned around to look at me like I was a ghost from Catalunya's Jewish past.

Or I could talk about the Jewish museum in Girona I went to that was mostly filled with tombstones. And finally, just last year, they figured out that what seemed like a cistern was the last remaining synagogue's women's mikveh (ritual bath).

Instead, I'll leave you with a painting by Merce Rodoreda, the most important novelist of the 20th century in Catalunya. She wrote poetry but my Catalan is too meager to translate any.

Watercolor by Merce Rodoreda

I leave for New York tomorrow. Last days are always saddest for me anyplace. When I went to the Miro museum here, I chanced upon a certain Castilian poet whom Miro quoted and admired. So I bought his book of aphorisms, a posthumously published collection. His name is Jose Bergamin and the book is Aforismos de la Cabeza Parlante (Aphorisms of the Speaking Head). I have translated from Spanish one of his aphorisms and turned it into lineated verse:

The soul is memory;

the body, forgetting.

If memory, through words,

is the soul of history,

will history also contain

through the word, a body

of forgetting?

I have spent most days here writing a memoir, in prose. I am more aware, as I attempt to write about what I remember, how much I have forgotten. How much remembering is an exercise in creating a fictive body that has some connection to the felt truth of a life lived. All histories, especially personal histories, contain a body of forgetting and remembering. Bergamin was right about that.

It's been a pleasure to send you notes and musings from a city I have grown to love.

The Ollave, by John Foy

Many thanks to David Lehman and Stacey Harwood for inviting me back as a guest-blogger this week.

I recall reading somewhere – maybe someone can help me with this – that ancient druidic rites, or perhaps they were Welsh bardic initiation rituals, included the following. You had to lie in a trough of water on a cold night, wholly submerged and breathing only through a straw, and compose in your head a long poem in a complicated meter. The next morning, you had to emerge from the water and recite your poem.

How many could graduate from that school?

I earned my MFA in the early 1990s from a reputable institution. I am, therefore, a Master of Fine Arts. Anyone who has earned the degree should take careful note of this particular passage from The White Goddess, by Robert Graves. In my tattered edition, the passage appears on page 457:

“Who can make any claim to be a chief poet and wear the embroidered mantle of office, which the ancients called the tugen? Who can even claim to be an ollave? The ollave in ancient Ireland had to be master of one hundred and fifty Oghams, or verbal ciphers, which allowed him to converse with his fellow-poets over the heads of the unlearned bystanders; to be able to repeat at a moment’s notice any one of three hundred and fifty long traditional histories and romances, together with the incidental poems they contained, with appropriate harp accompaniment; to have memorized an immense number of other poems of different sorts; to be learned in philosophy; to be a doctor of civil law; to understand the history of modern, middle and ancient Irish with the derivations and changes of meaning of every word; to be skilled in music, augury, divination, medicine, mathematics, geography, universal history, astronomy, rhetoric and foreign languages; and to be able to extemporize poetry in fifty or more complicated meters. That anyone at all should have been able to qualify as an ollave is surprising…”

Best of all is that “appropriate harp accompaniment”! He made no mention of poetry workshops or lying in troughs of water all night.

Cheers,
John

APIA Series: Eugenia Leigh Poem and Interview [by Sally Wen Mao]

The next fearless poet to be featured is Eugenia Leigh! Here’s another honey badger who will be riding the wave of this summer’s Honey Badgers Don’t Give a B**k Tour. I am endlessly excited to showcase Eugenia’s work and go on an epic book adventure with her. Not only is her work full of the kind of vitality, toughness, heartbreak, and faith that begets the most devastating poetry, Eugenia is an amazing spirit and fantastic reader.

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). The recipient of fellowships and awards from Poets & Writers Magazine, Kundiman, Rattle, and the Asian American Literary Review, Eugenia serves as the Poetry Editor of Kartika Review. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently a doctoral candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

In the following poem “We Called it the Year of Birthing”, Leigh begins with a story of making, of genesis: “God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this/into a bird, he said…And make with this,/ a new father.” From the beginning, we understand that what God is asking of the speaker is painfully inconceivable. It is up to the speaker to rise up to the request—to turn brave, to pick up shards, her own traumas being “sordid with similar beaten people”. To turn these fragments, these wrecked objects—feathers and bolts and nails—into something whole and human, requires a kind of alchemy.

But magically, forcefully, the next stanza turns, creating its own poetic alchemy: “Others of us—/the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds/to form tools. Then we spend our days/mending bent humans or wiping the humans/mired by all the wrong fingerprints.” This poem is not a poem about merely facing the past. This poem is not a poem about merely pain. This poem is about the courage it takes to collect the darkest scrap, the vestiges from one’s history, the raw spaces, and heal them by re-making, re-building, re-birthing—the speaker and the speakers are agents of creation rather than decimation, reclamation rather than repudiation. At the end of the poem, we are rewarded with a moment of absolute wonder: “The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,/ we hovered over this child who, unlike us,/ was born whole.” The thrill and triumph of this line is not without its acknowledgment that the baby born into this new family is “unlike us”. This poem moves from the impossible to the miraculous in four short stanzas. Be on the lookout for Eugenia Leigh’s forthcoming collection from Four Way Books, Blood, Sparrows, and Sparrows!

 

 

We Called It the Year of Birthing

 

 

God handed me a trash bag bloated with feathers. Turn this

into a bird, he said. He threw me a bowl of nails. And make with this,

a new father. God gave some people

whole birds. Readymade fathers with no loose bolts.

The rest of us received crude nests. Used mothers.

 

I banged the nails into two planks of wood

and marched around a church screaming, Father, father

until friends appeared, hammering

the scraps they were given to make something of themselves.

 

When beaten hard enough, some people scamper into corners

sordid with similar beaten people. Others of us—

the stubborn, unbreakable humans—weld our wounds

to form tools. Then we spend our days

mending bent humans or wiping the humans

mired by all the wrong fingerprints.

 

The morning the first baby was born in our circle of friends,

we hovered over this child who, unlike us,

was born whole. You were given a good mother, we said. A good father.

Each one of us prayed.            We scrubbed our soiled hands

before we held his swaddled body.

 

                            first appeared in PANK

 

 

Interview 

 

In the words of Angry Asian Man, who are you? What are you all about?

I am a poet and question asker who believes in miracles and believes in you. I am the friend you call when the world is skeptical of your latest, looniest dream. My favorite kind of human is the kind who was almost crushed, but came out the other side with a laugh and a giant middle finger toward the hell that almost claimed her.

 

Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?

Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, my first collection of poetry, will be published by Four Way Books this October. It is not the book I intended to write, but it’s the one that needed to be written.

I credit my “guardian angel poet” Laure-Anne Bosselaar for honing in on the first poem I wrote about my father and encouraging me to explore that narrative. As a close-minded young poet resistant to becoming “another poet writing about her fractured family,” however, I stayed in the mud of bad poems hiding in extravagant metaphors for many months before resigning to the idea that Laure-Anne might be right. The story I needed to tell might be my personal history after all.

It wasn’t until Marie Howe then gave the assignment to write a poem about “where I come from” in a litany devoid of metaphors or my other literary crutches that I started to tell the truth as brazenly as I could manage. I wrote those first poems six years ago, and I don’t know whether I could write them now. I hope to honor that younger poet by presenting this book to the world with fervent intention and without any apologies.

 

Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?

I love the secrets poets embed into their line breaks and wonky forms. I believe every tiny revision a poet makes will change the poem’s overall impact a hundredfold. This might be because I err on the side of finding meaning in everything—not only in poetry, but also in life—and I love poetry because every word and break and white space is infused with meaning. My favorite part of the practice is discovering what the physical shape of a poem or the sound of a poem might be trying to say, and then laboring to bring out that hidden layer as much as possible.

 

Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?

The Bible was my first exposure to poetry—not only the Psalms, but also much of the prophetic books, which are also part of the Jewish Tanakh. Religious scriptural texts truly are the original experimental, cross-genre masterpieces. The book of Genesis, for example, tells two creation stories, and in the first of the two, the narrative is written entirely in prose until God creates humans. Then suddenly, injected into that first prose chapter, we see three surprising lines of poetry to describe the way God creates humans, as if to say that’s how well crafted we are.

How anyone could mistake this piece of art for a scientific account baffles me. It sounds to me like this story was written to help us rewrite how we perceive ourselves and perceive the world around us. That’s both the magic and the danger of powerful writing: it can reshape our worldview.

The first contemporary poets I fell in love with were Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I was 13 years old and drawn to their ruthless honesty and their pains because this was the age I first began to struggle with my own will to live. I do often wonder, however, how much of my personal worldview and my own style of writing at that young age were influenced by their words. 

 

What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?

I am more comfortable writing about violence, death, pain, and rampant brokenness, but I am interested in what it looks like to write also about renewal and redemption in a way that isn’t saccharine and stays true to our struggles. How does a poem shake the humans and demand that we all have hope without being preachy? Or should we dare to do that at all?

For a long time, I believed an artist’s most important job is to report what we see and know with unflinching truthfulness. But what if an artist’s job is also to challenge what we see and know by imagining possibilities beyond our present realities? Maybe this is a conclusion the better and wiser poets have already come to, but I am only now coming to them myself. The learning process begins with writing terrible poems about positive things, which I’m attempting to do lately.

 

If What I Mean Is Hummingbird, If What I Mean Is Fall Into My Mouth [by Natalie Diaz]

In Mojave, the words we use to describe our emotions are literally dragged through our hearts before we speak them—they begin with the prefix wa-, a shortened form of iiwa, our word for heart and chest. So we will never lightly ask, How are you? Instead, we ask very directly about your heart. We have one way to say that our hearts are good, and as you might imagine if you’ve ever read a history book or lived in this world, we have many ways to say our hearts are hurting.

The government came to us first in the form of the Cavalry, then the military fort (which is why we are called Fort Mojave), and finally the boarding school. The government didn’t simply “teach” us English in those boarding schools—they systematically and methodically took our Mojave language. They took all the words we had. They even took our names. Especially, they took our words for the ways we love—in silencing us, they silenced the ways we told each other about our hearts. 

One result of this: generations of English-speaking natives have never heard I love you from their parents, which in their eyes, meant their parents didn’t love them. However, those parents never said, I love you, because it didn’t mean anything to them—it was an English word for English people. There is no equivalent to it in the Mojave language—the words we have to express our feelings, to show the things berserking in our chests for one another are much too strong to be contained by the English word love. 

But after boarding schools and work programs sent them to the cities for work, our children stopped speaking Mojave—they were beaten if they were caught talking or singing in their language. Maybe when they came home their parents spoke to them all about their hearts, but if they did, the children didn’t understand anymore. 

It is true, the Mojave language does not say, I love you—and it is equally true that the government was hoping we would quit expressing this toward one another, that we would never again give each other tenderness. While we don’t say, I love you, we say so much more. We have ways to say that our heart is blooming, bursting, exploding, flashing, words to say that we will hold a person and never let them go, that we will be stingy with them, that we will never share them, that they are our actual heart. And even these are mere translations, as close as I can get in English. 

Despite Cavalries and boarding schools, our language is still beautiful and passionate—it carries in it the ways we love and touch each other. In Mojave, to say, Kiss me, is to say fall into my mouth. If I say, They are kissing, I am also saying, They have fallen into each other’s mouths. 

The word for hummingbird is nyen nyen, and it doesn’t mean bird—it is a description of what a hummingbird does, moving into and out of and into the flower. This is also our word for sex. Mat ‘anyenm translated to English means the body as a hummingbird, or to make a hummingbird of the body. On a very basic level we have a word that means body sex hummingbird all at once.

 

I think of the many lame things people say when they want to have sex with someone--imagine how much more luck they would have if they came to you with that lightning look in their eyes and that glisten in their mouths and said just one word: hummingbird. And you would think: bloom, sweet, wings that rotate, heart beating at 1,260 beats per minute, flower, largest proportioned brain in the bird kingdom, syrup,iridescent, nectar, tongue shaped like a “w”—which means something close to yes.

Recently, an adult learner who is teaching her children the language in her home asked our Elders if they could teach her to tell her son that she loves him. They told her that we have no word for that. But, the learner insisted, I need to know because I never heard my parents say that to me, and I will not let my son grow up without hearing me tell him that I love him. The Elders asked her, What is it you really want to tell him? The learner was emotional at this point, her words had caught in her throat. Instead of speaking, she made a gesture with her arms of pulling someone closer to her, and then she closed her eyes and hugged her arms against her chest. Ohhh, one of the Elders exclaimed, Now, we have a word for that—wakavar. 

Maybe there is no great lesson to be learned here, but when I sit down to write a poem, I carry all of this language with me onto the page--I try to figure out what I really mean, what the words really mean to me. I don’t ever want to say, love, if what I mean is wakavar, if what I mean is hummingbird, if what I mean is fall into my mouth. 

What’s New at The Chicago School of Poetics

 

Now in its second successful year, The Chicago School of Poetics (CSoP) is kicking off 2014 with truly unique online course offerings and amazing opportunities to work with leading international poets in an intimate and collaborative setting.

From the comfort of your home or a nearby café, you can participate in courses using our innovative and user-friendly program—choose face-to-face, real-time video or simply listen in. Join an international conversation—courses have included students from Morocco, Canada, and Australia, as well as from the United States. This is a friendly environment for anyone who is looking to refine their work and connect with others.

In order to give students more opportunities to work with our faculty, we have initiated a new 6-week shortened course format that costs less and requires less of a time commitment. We’ve also streamlined our website, so courses are easier to find and registration is only a click away. Click here to register now: Class sizes are limited to maximize face time with the instructors.

Also, check back at chicagoschoolofpoetics.com for registration information about our next master class with Pierre Joris on April 26.

The glowing space is ours. CSoP showed the way!
—Eileen Myles

This is what a school truly should be – think of Black Mountain College – beyond all the boundaries & borders.
 
—Ron Silliman

 

I am surprised at how much I have learned and how much my writing and editing process has evolved.
—Angie T.

 

I felt lucky to receive such input from an established poet and the price was a bargain because I felt I gained a lot from the class.
—Michael S.

 

Winter 2014 Course Offerings

Poetics Level I with Kristina Marie Darling
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Blending lecture, written exercises, and in-class feedback this course is designed to help you view your poetry with the cold eyes that are necessary to make instinctual edits based on the many tools at your disposal.

 

Poetics Level II with Larry Sawyer
Saturdays, February 22 – March 29
Time: 12:30 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CST
Poets use techniques such as automatic writing, random effect, shifts in writing method and even location, personal archeology, access to a wide variety of secondary source texts, found language, investigative poetry techniques, journal keeping, experiments with the basics of traditional forms, list poems, etc.

 

Pulse Poem Pulse with Barbara Barg
Mondays, February 24 – March 31
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Language is a poet’s instrument. This class focuses on developing dexterity and creativity with the rhythm, texture, and tonal qualities of language. Students will break language down to its melodic and percussive elements and explore rhythms and sounds from diverse, sometimes unusual sources.

 

Red-Headed Stepchild: The Unholy Spawn of Poetry and Story with Sharon Mesmer
Tuesdays, February 25 – April 1
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
Students will examine some very early examples of what we now think of as “hybrid” writing, then blend the hallmarks of those early models (brevity, spontaneity, tightly-focused imagery) with contemporary ideas and techniques (collage, appropriation).

 

Shock the Monkey: Poetry and Mass Media with Larry Sawyer
Sundays, February 23 – March 30
Time: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. CST
Marshall McLuhan’s statement that “Art is anything you can get away with” will be a stepping off point for an examination of how current or popular music, movies, and the cult of celebrity influences one’s world and therefore also one’s writing. Students will study the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortunes of present-day celebrities and use appropriation, investigative methods, parody, the conceptual, replacement methods, hybrid narrative, and ekphrasis to push the limits of their poetry.

 

Erasure Poetry with Kristina Marie Darling
Thursdays, February 20 – March 27
Time: 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. CST
This course will focus on erasure poetry, meaning poetry created by excising significant portions of a found text, which is then edited, shaped, and structured by the poet.

 

                                     

                                     

 

Chicago School of Poetics core faculty: Barbara Barg, Kristina Marie Darling, Steve Halle, Francesco Levato,  Sharon Mesmer, Larry Sawyer

 

Drinks with Poets: Peter Oresick [by Sherrie Flick]

Big Jim's in the Run

When I asked Peter Oresick if he'd like to drink with me, I suggested one of my favorite Pittsburgh bars, Big Jim's. Big Jim's isn't like the other establishments Drinks with Poets has featured this week; it isn't a re-done dive bar or a bar with artisan anything. It's, as I like to say, a bar-bar. A place where you can get a thin yellow beer and a shot of whiskey--a basket of fries. A place where the bartenders will change the channel to Law and Order as easily as the Steelers. Big Jim's is, as they say, "in the run." The run is a little section of lower Greenfield where many steel workers once lived, and amongst those families was one named Warhola.

When I asked Peter if he'd like to get a beer with me on Sunday, he said, "Of course. I'll be at church down the street. Why not show up early with your camera and I'll give you a tour?" The church, a conveniently short walk from the bar, is St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church. And this is the church that Andy Warhol himself attended all of his Pittsburgh life. Its roots are Carpatho-Rusyn, as were his, as are Peter's.

I have, for years, wanted to see this church, knowing the influence it is said to have had on Warhol and his work. Peter snuck out of the service to retrieve me from the street, and I sat quietly while the priest (who was going on a little long this day, Peter whispered) finished up. The heavy smell of incense--art everywhere. Crazy colorful panels of art. I could only imagine Warhol as a boy staring at this eccentric beauty, letting it soak in, taking it with him to New York City. And we all know what happened next.

We strolled down the street after church. A beautiful sunny fall day. At Big Jim's we wanted breakfast and beer. Over the murmur of TV sports, we pulled up chairs into the soft light at our table and talked Carpatho-Rusyn, Warhol, and poetry for an hour or so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

St. John Chrysostom Byzantine Catholic Church

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part of the church's ornate interior

Drinking Beer After Church

By Peter Oresick

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Rooney's Old Irish Style Ale and Big Jim's Breakfast

After church each Sunday, our clan drifted to the opposite end of the block to my grandparents’ house for food and beer. I grew up in a small Ukrainian immigrant colony in a factory town on the banks of the Allegheny River. The priest gave us a sliver of wine-soaked bread on a golden spoon; our grandmother climbed steps from her coal cellar to offer chasers of beer. 

Beer, back then, was a Pony Bottle of green glass with white painted lettering. “Rolling Rock.  From the glass lined-tanks of Old Latrobe we tender this premium beer for your enjoyment, as a tribute to your good taste. It comes from mountain springs to you. ’33.’” I don’t remember what mystified me more: the painted white pony or the meaning of 33.

But my father always wanted “the prince of pilsners.”  “Have a Duke!” was the motto of the Duquesne Brewing Company. Then, in 1963, the Pittsburgh Brewing Company changed us all with the first pull-tab beer can. We loved Iron City from then on. And litterbugs were born all over town.

Since my college days, I’ve grown even fonder and more mature about beer. And extreme beverages. In central Turkey I saw the ancestral home of King Midas and I met Professor Patrick McGovern, the great archaeologist of ancient brewing. I’ve tasted his Midas Touch, and his Chateau Jiahu from 7,000 BCE, and his Egyptian Ta Henket re-brewed from residue in a pyramid chamber.

Beer appears in many of my own poems, but here is an ancient poem--from a clay tablet written by a Sumerian poet circa 1800 BCE--that is said to be the oldest. Na zdorovja!

Hymn to Ninkasi  (translated by Miguel Civil)

Borne of the flowing water, 
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag, 
Borne of the flowing water, 
Tenderly cared for by the Ninhursag, 

Having founded your town by the sacred lake, 
She finished its great walls for you, 
Ninkasi, having founded your town by the sacred lake, 
She finished it's walls for you, 

Your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud, 
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake. 
Ninkasi, your father is Enki, Lord Nidimmud, 
Your mother is Ninti, the queen of the sacred lake. 

You are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel, 
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with sweet aromatics, 
Ninkasi, you are the one who handles the dough [and] with a big shovel, 
Mixing in a pit, the bappir with [date] - honey, 

You are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven, 
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains, 
Ninkasi, you are the one who bakes the bappir in the big oven, 
Puts in order the piles of hulled grains, 

You are the one who waters the malt set on the ground, 
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates, 
Ninkasi, you are the one who waters the malt set on the ground, 
The noble dogs keep away even the potentates, 

You are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, 
The waves rise, the waves fall. 
Ninkasi, you are the one who soaks the malt in a jar, 
The waves rise, the waves fall. 

You are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats, 
Coolness overcomes, 
Ninkasi, you are the one who spreads the cooked mash on large reed mats, 
Coolness overcomes, 

You are the one who holds with both hands the great sweet wort, 
Brewing [it] with honey [and] wine 
(You the sweet wort to the vessel) 
Ninkasi, (...)(You the sweet wort to the vessel) 

The filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound, 
You place appropriately on a large collector vat. 
Ninkasi, the filtering vat, which makes a pleasant sound, 
You place appropriately on a large collector vat. 

When you pour out the filtered beer of the collector vat, 
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates. 
Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat, 
It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates. 

 

Permission from: "Copyright J.A. Black, G. Cunningham, E. Robson, and G. Zlyomi 1998, 1999, 2000. The authors have asserted their moral rights." Scholarly Versions at their Home Page The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford University.

**

 

Peter Oresick is a poet and editor, with Nicholas Coles, of Working Classics: Poems on Industrial Life. His most recent book is a serial portrait in verse of Andy Warhol--Warhol-o-rama.

The poetry of Noah [by Rachel Barenblat]

In Jewish communities around the world this week we're reading the Torah portion named after Noah. (Here it is in English.) I can't really imagine that this is a comfortable Torah reading in Boulder and environs this year.

This one's given rise to some great poems. Take Noah's Wife by Linda Gregerson, which begins (immediately after the title):

    is doing her usual for comic relief.   

                        She doesn’t

               see why she should get on the boat, etc.,

    etc., while life as we know it hangs by a thread.  

The poem is sharp, biting, exposing the dysfunction at the heart of this old family story. (Maybe it's God's dysfunction; maybe our own.)

Or The New Noah, by Adonis (translated by Shawkat M. Toorawa) -- "between Heaven and us is an opening, / A porthole for a supplication.." Or Chana Bloch's "The Flood." Or Rivka Miriam's "Noah" (translated by Linda Stern Zisquit.)

I've struggled with my own Noah poems. They haven't come easily. It's too simple to make of the Flood something trite and pat. I see the same impulse in some of the rhetoric around contemporary floods and disaster. (If you want good poetry about a modern-day flood, don't miss To Die Next To You, poems by Rodger Kamenetz accompanied by illustrations by Michael Hafftka.)

And then, tucked into the end of the Torah portion -- after the Flood -- there's an entirely different story, the wild parable of the Tower of Babel. Judy Klitsner makes a compelling case that the sin of the people building that tower was a kind of coercive groupthink. It's fascinating to notice that that story begins with the observation "And all the earth was of one language and of one set of words..." What would our world, what would our poetry, be like if we had only one language available to us?

The story of Babel's given rise to some great stuff too, like Barbara Hamby's collection of that same name.

What can we take from the juxtaposition of flood and tower? The lens of poetry is one of the hermeneutics I like best. Read the portion itself as though it were poetry. Look for repeated words and images, for surprising turns of phrase.

First we're nearly swept away by tehom, the deep (a feminine noun which evokes the name Tiamat, the Babylonians' goddes of salt water.) The waters tower "high, high above the earth." Then "Fifteen cubits higher the waters towered." Then "And the waters towered over the earth a hundred and fifty days." Then the people begin to build a city and a tower that reaches the sky, much to the Divine chagrin, and God resorts to scattering us over the earth and complicating our speech.

This week's Torah portion shows us an excess of yang and an excess of yin, one might say; a lack of balance. Floodwaters towering; then bricks towering. One midrash holds that the people of Babel became so fixated on building their tower that if a person fell to his death from the high scaffolding, no one cared, whereas if a brick were dropped from high up and shattered, everyone wept to see the great project set back one brick's-worth.

May we all find ourselves able, this week, to stay even-keeled. To resist the self-aggrandizement of towering over anyone or anything. To find the right balance of femininity and flow without washing anyone away. To seek to build edifices with our lives and our words which honor the dazzling diversity of human language and heart, instead of pushing anyone to conform.

Thanks for being with me this week, BAP readers. It's been a pleasure. To all who celebrate: Shabbat shalom!

 

Images by Daniel Maclise and Peter Brueghel, both found on Wikipedia.

The change [by Rachel Barenblat]

Every year I'm surprised by how variable the change is. The other night, when it was still Sukkot, we had a pair of friends over, a couple we've known since college and their son. Our son, who is almost four, proudly explained that this -- gesturing to the little skeleton of a house, garlanded with tinsel -- was a sukkah and that his dad had built it and we had decorated it. Then he explained that the leaves on the trees around us are turning orange and yellow because it's fall. The two statements seemed of equal import, coming out of his mouth.

Our friends' son, who is almost five, all but rolled his eyes. (He is practically grown, as far as he is concerned; the revelations of the almost-four set are old hat for him.) But then he really looked around, and exclaimed, "your leaves really are turning yellow! Ours are still green." They live only ten minutes away by car. But to get from there to here, one goes up a long slow hill. We're on a ridge. It's enough to make autumn's colors pop here while they're still lurking beneath the visual spectrum at his house.

Every year at this season I think of John Jerome, may his memory be a blessing. I return to my little green commonplace book, the one I started during my first tour through grad school. Its opening pages are all Doty and Birkerts, Brodsky, Anne Lamott. And then there's this:

Yellow [creeps] up the maple stems outside my window. I look up at the forest on the hill and imagine I can hear, inside all those stems, a zillion little doors clanging shut. Shutters pulled in, shades rattling down. Tree to leaf: you're beautiful, but you're history. You're archives. You just got a promotion: your new job is mulch.

All I wrote down beside that quote was John Jerome's name. But it's got to be from Stone Work.

Of course, the man who wrote that line has moved on to his new job, too, whatever exactly that may be. Six years of rabbinic school, going on three years of my rabbinate, and I still don't pretend to have any certainty about that. Some years I re-read Stone Work in the spring. I love the way it begins with the spring equinox, flakes of falling snow melting on the hot coats of happy and well-exercised dogs. A hint of new life, at a time when the outside world still seems to be dead, or at least sleeping.

John and I corresponded for a few years, back when I was at Bennington. He had been grown up in Texas, as I had, and had moved to the hills of western Massachusetts, as I had, and had made a living and a life for himself as a writer, as I hoped to do. I wrote to him about how his description of childhood swimming in the lazy Guadalupe river had made me nostalgic. About my hopes of living a writerly life. I still have all of the letters he sent me, a sheaf of neatly-typed pages. Every so often I think about reading them again, but I can't bring myself to do it, yet.

Sukkot: the festival when we move out of our homes and into these peculiar temporary little houses. Halakha, Jewish law, stipulates that the roofs be made of organic material and that one be able to see the moon and stars through them. My friend and teacher Rabbi Arthur Waskow once mis-typed the sukkah's "leafy" roof as a "leaky" roof, and then decided to keep the wrong word as well as the right one.

Our bodies, our lives, our certainties are as fragile as these little temporary houses. And when our time is up, we come apart, leaving behind only memories, and maybe an idle strand of tinsel to be found months later when the snow recedes.

Dylan Thomas: Wild Child [by Larry Sawyer]

I was recently marveling over this poem by Dylan Thomas, “Who are you who is born in the next room...” (published in 1945) from a series of pattern poems called Vision and Prayer because of what it does or enacts so successfully, and in doing so, how it transcends its arbitrary form. I don’t have the entire series in front of me, so it may be that this particular shape has some relevance that isn’t obvious when it’s viewed out of context because apparently these shapes form a series. What seems most interesting to me is how this writing works so well to set a scene and create a poetic equation with an ending that comes as somewhat of a surprise in a visceral way with such depth of metaphor, while it almost completely resists its own rhyme scheme. It provides an almost perfect balance between meaning and form that still manages to raise interesting questions because of certain effects.

I’m drawn at the outset to the two somewhat cavernous caesuras. The first comes after “In the birth.” It seems appropriate that the poet creates this gap in the line after the word birth (where the reader nearly falls in), and the second occurs after the word “alone.” Both caesuras offer a perfect physical illustration of what is being described (the pregnant pause) because the reader is forced to involuntarily pause after these words, which not only gives them emphasis but reemphasizes in a very graphic way the visual provided a few lines earlier with “I can hear the womb opening.”

From the poem’s opening there is a double meaning established because of the dramatic tension inherent in the first three words. The intentional ambiguity almost has the reader questioning himself or this might also be Thomas asking the question of himself.

Dualities cascade throughout. In the idea that Jesus was God’s word made flesh. The two physically separated rooms exist showing the reader as separate from what goes on in the other room. Also, the mention of a “wall thin as a wren’s bone” seems to underscore a difference between what the speaker perceives as the natural and unnatural world.

It’s quite marvelous that “Wren bone” is an anagram of “new borne.” Other imagery underscores an idea that this event on some level is holy but, again, a duality within the structures finds the reader noticing a shift of perspective in the mirror image of the poem that begins as the lines reach a midpoint and then recede in the second half. The poem’s structure mimics what is described, i.e., the poem itself is turning or shifting. These lines could be read in multiple ways “In the birth/bloody room/unknown to the …” or “In the birth bloody/room unknown to the…”

The poem, although only 71 words, does start with a vision and end with a sort of prayer but is Thomas describing his own thoughts on his own life that started with a similar birth but resulted in the many physical, mental, and domestic problems which plagued him for years? Or is this a meditation on our relation to the natural world and the unnatural, as represented in the poem, is the overlay of religiosity that is placed upon us that begins at birth? Thomas paints a prime moment, birth, which serves as a hinge between these two “worlds” i.e., the natural world and the world of civilization (and all the socialization that civilization demands).

As the wall is a part of the civilized world, the infant is not, yet anyway, and the point is emphasized internally as the rhyme scheme pairs “wild” and “child” together as a final example of the mysterious duality that ripples throughout what might have been a poem that Thomas wrote in one sitting in a very short amount of time.

The visual pattern creates interesting parallels that otherwise might not have existed had the poem been left aligned. The final interesting afterthought is that the form provides the reader with an object to be stared at, which it gives it an element of spectacle. Because of its symmetry the object simultaneously resembles a box, a shape of some sort like a pyramid reflected in water, a crucifix, the human form with arms outspread, and finally and obviously a diamond. Sixteenth Century alchemist Agrippa also included this shape and its opposite, which would look like a jagged hourglass, in his “Of the Proportion, Measure, and Harmony of Man’s Body,” which included diagrams of geometric shapes aligned with the human form. These two shapes comprise the ebb and flow of the alternating patterns in the book.

By starting with such an unanswerable question, by including such vivid imagery (e.g., heart print), and ending with such a violent twist, the poem registers like a minor earthquake and we stare down into its dark abyss and wonder what it meant to the author, as well as what it might mean to everyone facing the riddle of human existence.

Nota bene: See if you can guess which other literary wild child may have served as partial inspiration for this particular song by The Doors.

  

New Books by Contributors to Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets [by Luke Hankins]

A number of the poets included in my anthology Poems of Devotion (Wipf & Stock, 2012) have superb new books out. Here’s a list of the ones I know of and have read:

• Bruce Beasley: Theophobia (BOA Editions) (Look for my review forthcoming in Contemporary Poetry Review)
• Steven Brown: To the Wheatlight of June (photographs by Ben Nixon, poems by Steven Brown) (21^st Editions)
• Morri Creech: The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser Press)
• Jennifer Grotz (translator): Psalms of All My Days by Patrice de la Tour du Pin (Carnegie Mellon Press) (See one of the psalms and my brief commentary on de la Tour du Pin here.)
• Marjorie Maddox: Local News from Someplace Else (Wipf & Stock)
• Maurice Manning: The Gone and the Going Away (Harcourt)
• Eric Pankey: Trace (Milkweed Editions) (See my commentary here.)

I highly recommend each of these.

"Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer": Music, protest, and the 'poor rhymes' of Alexander Vvedensky

The subtitle to the film Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, a documentary airing on HBO tonight (June 10, 9 p.m.), is accurate: Nadia Tolokonnikova, Masha Alyokhina, and Katya Samutsevich, who were arrested on Feb. 21, 2012, after performing for 40 seconds on the alter of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral, do indeed embody many of the precepts of 1970s punk-rock culture. Although presenting themselves as a band, they view their work as performance art as much musical performance. A collective of unstated numbers of young women, Pussy Riot has found its most effective communication tool to be planned “spontaneous” musical performances that consist of rudimentary songs proclaiming their feminist, anti-authoritarian stance.

         In the documentary, the members come off as tough-minded, resourceful, and wry: “It’s not too hard,” one of them says of their punk-band strategy: “Write a song and think of the place to perform.” Filmmakers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin have footage of the group assembling at a protest site, divvying up the musical duties (“You play the guitar”), and diving headlong into a song or two before scramming.

         Since the sacrilegious sin-crime and immediate arrest that made the group famous worldwide lasted a mere 40 seconds captured on what looks like a jittery cellphone, the bulk of A Punk Prayer is taken up by the show-trial of what I’d call the Pussy Riot Three. Placed behind a glass cage, the three women are allowed to make occasional statements, but their defense team comes off irritatingly smug and complacent – it’s as though the lawyers defending Pussy Riot lacked Pussy Riot’s own awareness of just how offended the combination of defying the Orthodox Church and Vladimir Putin’s leadership would be to the court system.

         The trial exerts a sickening fascination. The film is warmed by the comments of some of the defendants’ parents. Soon after Nadia tells us that her father is “wonderful… so supportive,” he proves it. A thoughtful, baby-boomer generation man, he tells of being told by his daughter of Pussy Riot’s church-invasion plan as they rode the subway. He says he immediately tried to talk her out of it, but “after a few stops” on the subway ride, he realized she was determined to go through with her actions. His reaction? “I started helping out with the lyrics,” he says.

    Unmentioned in the film is the debt Pussy Riot says it owes to the Russian poet Alexander Vvedensky (1904-1941), himself a government-suppressed poet of organized anarchy, and, like the Pussy Riot Three, a member of an art collective, OBERIU (Association of Real Art). During her group’s trial, Nadia specifically cited Vvedensky’s “principle of ‘poor rhyme’… He said, ‘Sometimes I think up two rhymes, a good and a poor one, and I pick the poor one, because it is the one that is right.”

         A Vvedensky poem collected in the superb, recently published An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets) includes lines that could be a Pussy Riot lyric:

How cute!

Will they cut or bite off their heads

It makes me want to puke.

All those about to die get cold feet.

They have activity of stomach,

Before death it lives as hard as it can.

But why are you afraid to burn up, man?

Nadia and Masha are serving two-year sentences in prison camps; Katya was released on appeal. One key moment in A Punk Prayer occurs during a break in the trial: When informed that Madonna had written the group’s name on her back to display it at one of the concerts, and had donned a balaclava onstage as a gesture of solidarity, the faces of Nadia, Masha, and Katia are intent, avid. They seem not to be thinking, “Cool! A big star likes us, maybe we’ll become famous, too, and be freed!” Instead, what their faces communicate is: “Oh, good. Maybe she gets it. Maybe some of her fans will now hear about us and get it. Our message still has a freedom on Madonna’s back, and in covering Madonna’s face. She’s not as good as we are at communicating this freedom, this audacity, but she’ll do until we get out.”

(After tonight’s premiere, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer will be repeated on June 13, 16, 18, and 22.)

 --Ken Tucker

 

Extreme Elegies [by Michael Schiavo]

 

Michael Gizzi (1949-2010)

Morgan Lucas Schuldt passed away on January 30 due to complications from cystic fibrosis. I wanted to sketch a portrait of Morgan for this blog, wanted to write about not only his extraordinary life, but the love supreme that his poetry embodied. His death, though, is still too close, and it will take me just a little more time.

I attended his memorial services in Tucson, where he lived for much of the last decade of his life. Like William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsberg before him, Morgan was a thoroughly Jersey boy, but he found a home in Tucson. He found Mark Horosky and Adam Chiles. He found Stephanie Balzer and Barbara Cully. He found Boyer Rickel.

The climate change from Vermont to Arizona—I mean going from unseasonable April warmth in New England to anomalous frosty weather in the Southwest—the mourning at various memorials those few days—as well as the bourbon that occasionally accompanies said grief—fused with passing a year earlier of Paul Violi—another friend and mentor—all this left me tattered. I returned to work at The Bookstore physically twitchy, emotionally worse.

After catching up with Matt on what I’d missed—including a poetry reading by Clampitt House fellow Bruce Snider—I was presented with a stiff manila envelope. Scrawled on the front was a signed note from the poet Barry Sternlieb: “For / Michael Schiavo / a few from the zen master. / (one just a proof, / the other a signed + / numbered edition— / primitive, but still / packing a punch!)”

I slowly unsealed the envelope. After removing one of the cardboard flats, I gently untaped the fine paper therein to reveal broadsides of Michael Gizzi’s “Extreme Elegy” and “Second Extreme Elegy” that Barry had printed in the mid-’80s. At one point, after a few months of employment at The Bookstore, Matt had informed me that I was only the second poet he’s ever hired. The first was Michael Gizzi.

A Tonic, A Ton

 

Barry is a wonderful guy. We would talk whenever he’d stop by the store, and I know we talked about Michael Gizzi, but I can’t remember as I ever told him just how much I loved his work, how much it had, at one point, intimidated me, and then later enthused me with its familiarity. I’m sure I never told him that one of my favorite Gizzi books is Continental Harmony. And I’m positive I never told him that “Extreme Elegy” is one of my favorite poems not just in that book, not just of Gizzi’s, but of all time.

What I wonder is if Barry will ever fully understand what he did for me this past spring, even when he reads this. In that one moment, through that unassuming act, those poetic powers that I felt closest to, that I felt were forsaking me through the deaths of those whom I most loved and respected (M. Gizzi himself passed away in 2010), all at once, those powers announced their presence.

I wept.

Not out of grief, no, but filled—and not of a sudden—with the consolation of the universe.

—

EXTREME ELEGY

Michael Gizzi

 

                                   after Ives

 

The Last Rites, man

3 helpings! Extreme

Triadic Unction a -bury

a -port a -ton, troughwater

with shadowbarn

                                   like mausoleum

deathward we glide, our viscera

slung The pitch

of New England the mind of an ear

shockt into blooming a -shire

a -vale a –wick     oaken

lid going to sleep

near still-

ness of my life—America,

un

writable love

of foliage in voice

          beside an axe

                    ’til evening

Canvas in moonlight an oversight

comin’ up backstream But only

          a rheumy cache

                                        of russet spittle

like oaken funk, New England, a tonic

 

                    a ton

 

Chockfull of Metaphysics [by Michael Schiavo]

 

Constance Rourke, Grand Rapids, 1938

 

Constance Rourke wrote many books, including biographies of John James Audubon, P.T. Barnum, and Davy Crockett. Most importantly, she wrote American Humor: A Study of the National Character. Greil Marcus penned the introduction to a 2004 NYRB reissue of the book and Luc Sante posted a glowing tribute to Rourke on her birthday last year. I found a used copy years ago at the Montague Book Mill and reading it brought immediate recognition with every sentence. Rourke traces the American character first through three different archetypes: the Yankee peddler, the backwoodsman, and the minstrel. She goes on to sketch how these various strains of humor, these ways of approaching life, manifested themselves not only in everyday Americans but in the work of Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and other American writers.

Luke Hankins has written on this blog about devotional poems, and the anthology he edited, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, in which three of my poems appear, offers the reader a diverse selection. Starting with excerpts from Eliot’s Four Quartets, the anthology travels through the second half of the 20th century into the 21st, offering up hymns by poets like Brother Antonious, John Berryman, Denise Levertov, Yehuda Amichai, A.R. Ammons, Leonard Cohen, Louise Glück, Marie Howe, Carl Phillips, and Sufjan Stevens. Luke connects the devotional mode in the West to the Metaphysical Poets like Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Southwell, and Bradstreet but includes other traditions, such as Hebrew, Islamic, Buddhist, Zen, and American Transcendentalism. Rourke’s book acts as prelude for that last one. In a country where almost 90% of the citizens feel they have a direct connection to the divine, this devotion—simultaneously to the real in front of us as well as to our own imagination—is a testament of another kind, as we hold together a nation-state while following 300 million distinct personal religious impulses, whether to Yahweh, Christ, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It’s in this realm that the devotional poem, for me at least, edges from the metaphysical to touch the ’pataphysical.

I wanted to use a passage from American Humor as an epigraph to my collection, Green Mountains, as so many of the humors Rourke writes about seem to be roaming around these poems. And the mode is certainly devotional, if anarchic, a carnival. Each time I thought I had settled on one, maybe two, I found another. I wanted to use the whole book as epigraph: the ranges of the Green Mountains were containing the echoes in a much grander vista than I first thought, one that put them on the same plane of conversation and back-and-forth, rather than one text supplementing the other.

But this makes it sound like publication of Green Mountains is imminent. ’Tis not. H_NGM_N published Ranges I and Forklift Ranges II, but Ranges III still needs a home before I started sending out the entire manuscript for rejection. ’Til then, enjoy some samples of would-be epigraphs.

 

American Humor (1959)

 

The farther he receded from view the more completely he changed into a sly thin ogre something greater than human size.

•

Peddlers may have been chockfull of metaphysics. Their secret has been closely kept.

•

Scratch the soil in China or Tibet or North Africa, and up would spring a Yankee, exercising his wits.

•

The Yankee was often called practical, but in the bits of story and reminiscence quickly accumulating about him, his famed ingenuity seemed less a practical gift than a knack for making changes.

•

The Yankee would often spend hours whittling; in his hands unexpected and fanciful shapes would emerge from white hickory, which added nothing to a practical existence.

•

Listless and simple, he might be drawn into a conversation with a stranger, and would tell a ridiculous story without apparent knowledge of its point. With not a change of tone, out would leap an odd figure. “He walked away as slick as a snake out of a blackskin.” “There we was amongst an ocean of folks and cutting up capers as high as a cat’s back.” A gulf often yawned between the large facts and his scanted version of them; as he marshaled the characters in a story he was an actor and a troupe.

•

But this reluctance was only another form of masquerade. These bits of indirection were social; direct replies would end many a colloquy: questions or evasions prolonged the talk and might open the way for more.

•

He could even take the Revolution as a joke; most of his songs about it streamed nonsense.

•

Though he talked increasingly his monologues still never brimmed over into personal revelation.

 

Sam Slick, the Yankee Pedlar

 

A barrier seemed to lie between this legendary Yankee and any effort to reach his inner character. The effect was so consistent, so widespread, so variously repeated that the failure to see him closely must be reckoned not a failure at all but a concerted interest in another direction. He was consistently a mythical figure; he appeared in the forms of expression taken by myth, in cycles of short tales, fables, and plays. Plain and pawky, he was an ideal image, a self-image, one of those symbols which peoples spontaneously adopt and by which in some measure they live. Overassertive yet quiet, self-conscious, full of odd new biases, he talked—this mythical creature: that was one secret of his power. A deep relish for talk had grown up throughout the country, on solitary farms, in the starved emptiness of the backwoods, on the wide wastes of the rivers. The response seemed an outcome of isolation; yet the same thirst existed upon the denser populations of the East. His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he also created a fresh sense of unity. He ridiculed old values; the persistent contrast with the British showed part of his intention; to some extent he created new ones. He was a symbol of triumph, of adaptability, of irrepressible life—of many qualities needed to induce confidence and self-possession among a new and unamalgamated people. No character precisely like him had appeared before in the realm of the imagination. In the plays he may have stemmed at first from the Yorkshireman of early English plays; the framework of many a situation in which he appeared may have been borrowed; but he had existed in life outside all these; and his final character was newly minted. It was to survive in many fanciful manifestations an as outline of the American character; it has never been lost.

•

His slanting dialect, homely metaphor, the penetrating rhythms of his speech, gave a fillip toward the upset of old and rigid balances; creating laughter, he also created a fresh sense of unity.

•

He not only created a bestiary; with the single digression to the floral he insisted that he was a beast—a new beast, and the records prove that in this contention he was often right.

•

He was in fact a Mississippi river-god, one of those minor deities whom men create in their own image and magnify to magnify themselves.

•

Crockett’s philosophy was simple: he wanted to save the land from the speculator.

Davy Crockett

Inflation appeared with an air of wonder, which became mock wonder at times but maintained the poetic mode.

•

. . . he lied from the delight of invention and the charm of fictitious narrative. . . . The truth was too small for him.

•

Sometimes the songs were adorned with corals and dolphins and fireflies. Most of them kept the rolling choruses with a touch of nonsense.

•

The young American Narcissus had looked at himself in the narrow rocky pools of New England and by the waters of the Mississippi; he also gazed long at a darker image.

American Humor (2004)

To sustain burlesque something more than grotesqueries is needed. Satire enters into its attentions; once a territory is invaded by burlesque, all its objects are likely to look puffed and stretched, pinched and narrowed. But pure satire stands aloof, while burlesque wholly possesses its subject and wears the look of friendship.

•

The action included many digressions of plot, and minor travesties. Showers of puns and double entendres fell, underlined in the text and no doubt sufficiently stressed as spoken, yet never appearing as palpable hits, for they came in enormous abundance, tumbling one over another; they effervesced and overflowed; they often chimed and were musical.

•

This lawless satire was engaged in a pursuit which had occupied comedy in the native vein elsewhere. As if it were willful and human, the comic spirit in America had maintained the purpose—or so it seemed—to fulfill the biblical cry running through much of the revivalism of the time: to “make all things new.” It was a leveling agent. The distant must go, the past be forgotten, lofty notions deflated. Comedy was conspiring toward the removal of all alien traditions, out of delight in pure destruction or as preparation for new growth.

•

All their modes were outward, rhapsodic, declamatory, full of song, verging upon the dance, adorned with symbolic costume, moving toward that oratory which was half burlesque.

•

He always demanded an audience: yet in the end, though he included the critic, though his self-consciousness grew noisy and acute, his finest efforts seemed mainly for his peers.

•

Half magnification, half sudden strange reversal, these tales were likely to culminate in moments of “sudden glory” that had a touch of the supernatural.

•

The strangest, most comic experiences, quiddities, oddities, tales, and bits of novel expression were treasured and matched one against another.

•

Grotesquerie and irreverence and upset made their center.

•

What he did in that walk, was from the irresistible promptings of instinct, and a disinterested love of art.

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: Romney's Secret Jobs Potion

A bar survives as a small business because people come in and buy drinks. How does that happen? Well, it might be because people sense a hip vibe, it might be because the beer is cheap, it might be because all the Yankees fans in the neighborhood have decided to watch the tragic series against the Tigers together on one particular flat-screen TV, it might be because the bar gives out that terrific goat cheese thing at happy hour, it might be because everybody knows your name. Any of these and more might make a bar successful.

None of these have anything to do with tax policy. Or regulation. Instead, they have to do with the existence of customers—i.e., people.

So if you’re talking about “creating jobs” or “helping the middle class,” you ought to be thinking about people. Why did the rabbi and the priest walk into a bar? They both had enough money in their pockets to splurge on a cocktail or pitcher of beer or glass of Bordeaux or whatever it is clergy order when they’re in a joke. And that money came from a job, in their case, a job with an organization that pays no taxes.

The tattered idea that lowering tax rates for business will increase hiring is absurd. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia pays $0 in tax, and yet closed St. Mary of the Assumption, along with some smaller parishes and many schools, this past summer. That means not only an out-of-work pastor, but teachers, secretaries, janitors, clerks and administrators all losing their jobs. The Roman Catholic Church’s taxes couldn’t get any lower; what the enterprise lacked was parishioners—i.e., customers—i.e., people.

And regulation? Well, The Catholic Church, along with other religious institutions, is exempt from many regulations, particularly the ones that promote equality and fairness by forbidding discrimination. For example, in Iowa, a business is not allowed to hire or fire someone “on the basis of age, race, creed, color, sex, national origin, religion, or disability,” unless it is "[a]ny bona fide religious institution or its educational facility, association, corporation or society.”

But most regulation exists to keep people from harm, not from injustice. Rules against serving toxic food or dumping slag in the drinking water or selling cars that don’t have functional braking systems are good for people—i.e., customers—and, indirectly, for businesses, because they keep customers—i.e., people—alive. The reason bars have to get liquor licenses is to protect those customers—i.e., people—from a substance that can be very dangerous if not properly handled. A dead customer will not boost revenues. A dead customer won’t enhance that hip vibe. A dead customer won’t bring his friends in next April, when the Yankees’ chances look pretty good again.

O burdensome regulations! O burdensome taxes! In Mitt Romney’s Bar & Grill, he’s pouring a secret jobs potion that’s going to jump-start our economy without even a sideways glance at the actual human beings behind economic transactions like ordering a Fuzzy Navel. The only people in his post-Citizens United wo rldview are corporations, who will pay less tax and follow fewer rules. To make up for that generous gift, he’ll slash “wasteful” government spending on such whatchacallems as: 

• teachers
• inspectors
• auditors
• analysts
• secretaries
• scientists
• researchers

Prepare to get fired, bureaucratic slackers, at which point, you’ll cease to be a customer—i.e., person. But don’t worry, that small business called St. Mary’s, just down the block from your out-of-work ass is sure to use its windfall tax break and freedom from regulation to hire more priests and nuns, folks who don’t need the contraception not covered in their health insurance. Ask your parents to send you to Divinity School. You’ll clean up in that libertarian dreamscape, that model of trickle-down economics, that no-tax, low-regulation utopia where the secret jobs potion flows freely through every empty pew.

 

 

 

Julie Sheehan, Constituent Bartender: ObamaCare as Imperial Fizz

The case against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. ObamaCare, is not nearly as fun as an Imperial Fizz, though it's definitely fizzy. All of the law's ingredients, the whiskey, rum, lemon juice and sweet, sweet sugar of insurance policy arcana--all except the sparkling water of a mandate--have already been mixed and are being shaken as we speak. They can’t be taken apart at this point without dumping the whole shebang down the drain, which is not to say that the Supreme Court won’t do exactly that. And the glacial pace of the Affordable Healthcare Act's implementation, like the slow-motion process of its enactment, gives opponents plenty of time to whip up a frenzy of anti-Imperialism, before this drink ever hits the coaster.

I, ______________, should not be forced to pay for health insurance.
Fill in the blank with “taxpayer,” “small business,” “Utah” or “Catholic bishop,” and you’ve got the argument against ObamaCare. All of its critics base their opposition on that word forced, raising issues of liberty.  Certainly, the recent contraceptive flap was initially introduced—by Republicans, not the media—and framed as a question of religious liberty. But if we’ve discovered anything from that debate, it’s that liberty is not the only value Americans hold dear. Liberty’s not the only value enshrined in the Constitution, either. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the big three, and it wasn’t long before the national conversation morphed against Republicans’ will into one about a different set of values: whether women deserve to pursue the kind of happiness that comes from choosing when they have children, and to have the kind of life that comes from preventing pregnancy when it poses a health risk. Guess which two values trumped the third in a contest between the religious liberty of bishops (total of 195 in the U.S.) and the life and happiness of women (more than 150,000,000 in the U.S.)?

Not only are bishops a tiny group, they don’t use contraceptives and nothing in the health care law is making them do so. But when they act as employers, rather than as leaders of spiritual flocks, they have to follow the same rules as secular hospital or university administrators. As employers, they can’t dictate the health care decisions of their employees. They are not Imperial, though they do have nifty regalia.

Leaving the contraception coverage rule aside, I look at the broader debate over health insurance and find it odd that so much resistance to ObamaCare has come from the religious community, particularly fundamentalist Christians. Jesus had a lot to say about taking care of each other, from loving thy neighbor to all those blessings on the poor and vulnerable in the Beatitudes. He spent quite a bit of His time healing people and feeding them, and none of it lobbying. While He never ran for office, it’s easy to imagine Him favoring universal access to health care. On this specific topic, He said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.”

Here’s what the emphasis in the New Testament is not on: taxes, small business, states’ rights or, frankly, political liberty. What little Jesus said about taxes, “render unto Caesar’s what is Caesar’s,” seems to argue in favor of paying them. He never mentioned small business, unless you count the enterprising moneychangers and dove-sellers in the temple, whom He whipped. Judging from that rare example of holy rage, His policy was not pro-business. The Chamber of Commerce would have despised Him. Jesus talked more about divorce than taxes. Where is the fundamentalist Christian groundswell to make divorce illegal? And how do the 1 in 3 divorced Evangelicals—Evangelicals defined as Christians who attend church weekly, take the Bible literally, and proselytize—reconcile their own failure to stay married with Jesus, their Lord and Savior?

But on caring for others, Jesus had a lot to say. He was inclusive, embracing tax payers, tax collectors, Samaritans, women, and other “others”—one might almost describe Him as a single payer plan. ObamaCare, emphasis on “care,” is inclusive, too. Embrace that moniker, Mr. President. It’s the Christian thing to do.

Hold Steady [by Michael Robbins]

When I was a wee bairn in the seventies, a mass-market paperback called The Poetry of Rock was often to be found among the macramé and marijuana seeds. This anthology was a weird little bible to me, its concordances the records that were always lying around with their mystically resonant titles—Aja, Slider, Sticky Fingers, Dixie Chicken—and glorious gatefolds. I’d pore over lyric sheets the way Harold Bloom claims he immersed himself as a child in Blake and Hart Crane. My earliest act of literary exegesis was attempted when I was eight or so, as I listened again and again to a secondhand eight-track cassette of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, trying to understand what it could mean to know “how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.”

Paul Muldoon writes of Leonard Cohen, “his songs have meant far more to me / than most of the so-called ‘poems’ I’ve read.” The list of artists of whom I could say this seems long until I remember why “most” of the “poems” I read are “so-called.” Popular music—rock and roll at first, soon followed by pop, country, jazz, disco, R&B, the blues, soul, hip-hop, metal—has been for me less a passion or obsession than what Kenneth Burke said poetry was: equipment for living. I remember listening to “Tumbling Dice” as a teenager and wondering whether even the Stones themselves understood what perfection they had achieved. I didn’t get people who simply put music on in the background as they talked or read or ate. You had to, yes, immerse yourself in it, like a religious mystery. In college, before I quit drinking, I rarely got laid, in part (only in part) because the end of the night would inevitably find me pressed against a stereo or jukebox, trying to filter out the sounds of a party or bar so I could concentrate on the Ramones. It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. Rock and roll is, among other things, our profoundest celebration of the ridiculous.

Fuck Them [by Michael Robbins]

Most of the poets I know are atheists. Hell, most of the people I know are atheists. Given that only 1.6 percent of Americans self-identify as "atheists," I conclude that I live in a bubble, like most hypereducated aesthetes on the liberal-left end of the political spectrum (I realize that's redundant). To their credit, most of the atheists I know don't consider themselves to be super-special people who should get together and crow about how much smarter they are than all the dimwits who fall for old fairytales about their big daddy in the sky, which is what Daniel Dennett would have them do (consider the self-triumphalism of the ReasonFest conference).

I have nothing at all against either a philosophically-informed atheism or a casual atheism that arises from a simple lack of religious temperament. There is little that annoys me as much as that smug atheism whose adherents refer to themselves as "freethinkers" or "brights." I have met a lot of these people, and not one—not a single one—has ever had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Perhaps my anecdotal experience is misleading. Perhaps there are scores of self-described freethinkers who know the history of the concept of reason, who have read Aquinas and Kierkegaard and Jonathan Edwards and Karl Barth, who can refute the countless historical errors and category mistakes of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins as handily as David Hart and Mark Johnston can. But if there are, they're keeping a low profile. And I'm confused about why they would associate themselves with an intellectually bankrupt movement (Johnston rightly calls them "undergraduate atheists"). Because there is an honorable atheism, a school of real thought to which atheists can lay claim. Hart puts the point this way:

The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche. How much more immediate and troubling the force of his protest against Christianity seems when compared to theirs, even more than a century after his death. Perhaps his intellectual courage—his willingness to confront the implications of his renunciation of the Christian story of truth and the transcendent good without evasions or retreats—is rather a lot to ask of any other thinker, but it does rather make the atheist chic of today look fairly craven by comparison.

Nietzsche would laugh at the idea that the human animal could free itself from delusion by seeking an ontological foundation in the natural sciences. Because the idea is laughable.