The Best American Poetry

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Morton Marcus

The First Laugh 

The first laugh was God creating the universe. That guffaw is still exploding in all directions, hollowing out and filling the farthest reaches of space.

What could have been so funny? The idea of light and sound after all that darkness and silence? After the eons of brooding and grumbling?

It must have been something bigger than we can imagine, something that elicited more than a cackle, a chortle, a chuckle or giggle, a snicker or titter.

Something say as big as a billion chandeliers of stars, millions of spinning galaxies with super nova popping like flashbulbs inside them.

Or maybe not. Maybe something as small as an ocean or a mountain, a whale or an elephant, or even us.
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About 18 months ago, when Morton Marcus knew that he was terminally ill and was preparing the manuscript for his phenomenal final book, The Dark Figure in the Doorway (White Pine Press), Mort sent me a batch of poems that he wanted to include in Sentence, which he had so generously supported with his work, his money, and his good will. Because I have always admired Mort’s humor, intelligence, humility, and reaching after “something bigger than we can imagine,” it was my pleasure and my honor to be able to include some of Mort’s final work as a tribute to a long and various career, which included not only poems and prose poems (see his excellent Pursuing the Dream Bone from Quale Press) but film criticism and a public radio interview show in California. One of his many guests on that show was Christopher Buckley, who says of Mort:

I was always impressed with his poems, and equally with his writing on poetry—clear, direct, accessible, specific, accurate, historical, all in service of poetry rather than the poet himself—whether in interviews, informal or formal critical evaluation/appreciation. But the great energy and character of the man was the thing. I found that especially evident in the prose poems, but regardless of form, what I always found was a generosity and a wide-ranging embrace of experience of life on the planet.

Near the end, when the diagnosis was bad, but before he was feeling the worst effects, he sat down and wrote up his essay, “My Life with Weldon Kees”, for the anthology in homage to Kees that Christopher Howell and I were editing. He worked hard and consistently and sent me a hard copy with a disc and a note saying he wanted to get this done before he was done—he was dedicated to the work, to contributing to the larger project of poetry. Mort always worked hard, on his own work and on appreciating the work of others. I recall the radio interview I did with Mort for his NPR radio show from Santa Cruz —I was amazed and a little embarrassed that he had invested so much time and attention on my new book, was so supportive. He always made time for you and let you know he was focused on you, something I am sure his students appreciated for over thirty years. Mort had the great character it takes to make great poems. He is missed by many.

Morton Marcus passed away at his home in Santa Cruz in October, 2009.
-- Brian Clements

from the archive; first posted October 3, 2010.

Syntax, Sound, and Sensation: Terrance Hayes in Conversation with Alan Michael Parker

In June, 2016, Terrance Hayes visited Florida to read and teach in the University of Tampa low-residency M.F.A. program. In the course of his presentation, he made a comment about syntax and sound that struck me as important, and worth exploring. Despite our both being distracted by the seventh game of the N.B.A. Finals later that evening—a game to ruin any Davidson College professor’s mood—we agreed to correspond via email, and this conversation ensued.

Terrance Hayes is the author of five collections of poetry, including How To Be Drawn in 2015. His honors include a 2010 National Book Award, a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship and a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His website is terrancehayes.com.

 

 

 AMP: Welcome to the non-place of email. Let's dive in, over our heads.... If I understood correctly, sometime in your artisitic development, you began to associate the extension of syntax with the production of a different kind of music within the poem. Is that an identifiable moment? Would you care to elaborate?

TH: I was drawn to syntax early in my reading life. It was the feeling something beyond words was being communicated in the bones of  poems. Certainly that was my experience of Keats’ “To Autumn”— specially that first stanza. When I first read it in college, I didn’t associate its power (mellow, carnal oozing power) with the fact it was a single over brimming sentence: 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; 

Conspiring with him how to load and bless 

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; 

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, 

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; 

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells 

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, 

And still more, later flowers for the bees, 

Until they think warm days will never cease, 

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. 

The same feeling came in certain passages of prose. I remember a college professor beginning to sob as he read Molly Bloom’s soliloquy of yes in Ulysses. It’s one of the longest sentences in the English language (4391 words according to Wikipedia).  I must have associated the sentence’s breathless charge with his emotional reaction. There were no periods—he couldn’t take a breath to collect himself.  I’m still trying to create that sense of charge and “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in my work.

AMP: I love your description of the “o’er-brimm’d”: that’s a great ambition. In that passage, Keats also holds it together contrapuntally, via end-rhyme and those almost-parallel caesuras in lines 7-9, which lead us to read backwards into memory as we move forward in the sentence. Is that something you do too? Or, rather, what’s your way of managing the length and breath of such a charged sentence?

TH: I see “contrapuntal” and “caesuras” and get a tad nervous. Especially when thinking about my early drafts of a poem. I mostly follow something closer to what Frost called “the sound of sense”:

“Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading). The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.”

I am trying to find the sense in a sentence: its sense of rhythm, its sense of verbs and nouns, its sense of thought and sound.  I work in units of sentences as often as I work in units of line and image.

AMP: Cool, those connections that you draw between a sentence’s musical properties and its meanings....

“Rhythm” is a term that I tend to fudge when I’m discussing sound and sense; it’s such a difficult concept. Maybe I can ask you to consider an example from Frost, and talk a little more about rhythm.

In “West-Running Brook,” Frost observes of the water:

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always 

Raising a little, sending up a little.

I think that one way to read these lines is as a discussion of rhythm, the riffles in the water “contraries,” as Frost calls them elsewhere in the poem. Would such a metaphor be consistent with your use of “rhythm”? Or are you thinking of the rhythm of a sentence in another way? Could you elaborate upon your use of the term?

TH: The word “rhythm" is fluid. Sometimes I’m thinking about varying the length and speed of a sentence. As in the first poem in my collection Wind In A Box. (Is it self-important to refer to one my own poems?) That’s sort of an exercise in staccato sentences. And in the ways punctuation impact a sentence. A series of periods, some slashes, a dash:

WIND IN A BOX

This ink. This name. This blood. This blunder.

This blood. This loss. This lonesome wind. This canyon.

This / twin / swiftly / paddling / shadow blooming

an inch above the carpet—. This cry. This mud.

But most times I’m thinking of rhythm as a kind of pattern. As in the ways subordinate clauses and repetition can expand a sentence. Especially the way lists can expand a sentence. The catalogues of Whitman and his Beat progeny, for example. Ginsberg spins wildly creating a fog of image that first long, elastic sentence of “Howl.”  That first sentence is one of the most technically dazzling dimensions of “Howl.” I don’t know if that answers your question. I agree rhythm is a difficult concept. Because it is such a personal/intuitive concept.

AMP: Now that we’re talking about sentences in your work expressly, I’d love to hear you comment upon one or more of the poems in your latest book, How To Be Drawn. In light of this conversation, I’m especially interested in the formal play in “Who Are The Tribes," the “Portrait of Etheridge Knight…," and “Some Maps to Indicate Pittsburgh”—all of which use words inside boxes and/or charts. Care to dig in a bit?

TH: The notion of “formal play” is on the mark. What it suggests is I’m just playing—or trying to play outside my given tendencies. Since sentences are my default inclination, the poems you mentioned are instances of trying something different. Of trying to shift my focus. They are genuine, intimate experiments. Meaning I don’t see them as natural extensions of the sentence. Though you’ll find maybe some syntactical play, the attention is given to form. Not that I’m Jordan—I’m no Jordan, but it’s akin to asking Jordan the relationship between his dunks and his work on his jumper or his defense. He was, when he developed his jumper and defensive prowess, only trying to broaden his skills… 

AMP: So what’s next, in terms of formal play? Is there a kind of poem you’re working on, that you haven’t been able to write?

TH: Great question. I’m mostly/usually concerned with the last poem and the next poem. The last poem was accompanied with drawings. The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape. The poems of late have been pretty long. The poem before the last poem was over 1200 words. So I’ve been trying to work my way back to compression via sonnets lately. But I don’t know. I don’t mind not knowing.

AMP: I’m going to highlight a phrase from your latest excellent response, and take the conversation in a slightly different direction. 

You write, “The next poem is presently several scraps waiting to find a shape.” Do you think this is true—that phrases, or scraps, or oddments, are “waiting to find a shape”? Maybe the shape is yours, and you have certain shapes internalized that wait for the scraps you collect by writing? Or… maybe there are shapes waiting to find scraps… in the culture? Care to comment?

TH: Yes, I mean scraps waiting to find a shape. As in what I suspect happens in quilt making. I’m just gathering bright bits of thoughts and conversations, imagery in my notebook. Waiting to stitch/thread something compelling together. Usually the brightest bit becomes the poem’s heart, its engine.

AMP: You mention your notebook. Could you talk a bit about how your process might elucidate the quest for “o’er-brimm’d-ness” in the syntax? How do you handle, literally, the writing, so as to facilitate in the composition process the ambitions you identified earlier?

TH: I have to talk about basketball again here. I can’t say I’m handling the writing so much as continuously practicing with it. I am trying to broaden my facility with it. I am practicing form, of course, but I am also practicing thinking and feeling. It’s all practice. That’s what Thelonius Monk says. For me, poetry is all practice. Occasionally practice pauses for a game—which is to say, some of my poems get published— but my habit is practice. I’m practicing to sustain my strengths while strengthening my weaknesses. I like a long sentence, for example. So I have to push myself towards new challenges with long sentences. One of my challenges/experiments in How to Be Drawn was to push myself into longer poems. These days I’m trying to work my way back to the sonnet. It all takes practice. One can fail in practice. One can experiment and scrimmage. There is intimacy and measure. Practice is a laboratory, a workhouse, a habit. For me, poetry is the practice of language. —June-September, 2016

What good are our literary efforts if we are dead? [by tree turtle]

I taught myself to read as a toddler to be close to my momma. My momma loathed me. I was, as she described me, her "sissy child" or the "changeling." Any admiration she had, arose from guilt. She was more business manager, army general, and torturer than momma. Which was worse: her violence against me (verbal, physical, sexual) or the violence that she allowed others (including siblings and my theatrical manager) to exact on me? Still, strangely, I loved her. Most of all, I did not want her to be hurt. I would hide underneath her sewing machine under the castoff cloth when my father would beat her.

One time after he beat her through the window out onto the roof, I holed myself so far under the sewing machine that my hand got caught in what turned out to be a secret compartment where she kept two of her most treasured books: Heidi by Johanna Spyri and Imperial Woman by Pearl S. Buck. Both novels are about orphan girls. My grandmother (a ruthless prostitute and madam despite coverups told by some in my family) disowned my momma: my grandmomma placed my momma on a Pullman Porter's car on a train out of Philadelphia and shipped her to live at a private black children's orphanage in Washington, D.C. My momma's favorite novels (and I still have the exact copy of Imperial Woman today) told tales of brutal girlhood and womanhood about which she inimitably understood. By the time I was three, relying foremostly on those novels, I could read.

I was aided by a special ability: eidetic memory. Eidetic memory is the capacity to intensely recall phenomena only seconds or minutes after exposure. The ability actually decreases as a child moves into adulthood. The first book I ever held in my hands was a copy of the King James Version of the Bible. At church, I would hold it open and when the deacon read aloud the passages to which the preacher referred, I connected the text with the orality and remembered entire passages. That's how I came to learn almost all of the Psalms. A brother and I were briefly tutored by a religious couple named the Morgans. Mrs. Morgan was shocked to discover that I could already recite long Biblical passages from memory. She gave me thrift copies of "classic" books and poems to "test" my recall. At three I was also unusual in that I spoke in complete sentences. But, my speech went deeper. My eidetic memory empowered my structural recognition of language. I wanted to know how it all ticked. I began to understand the language that I recalled as vocabularies set within sentences.

My goal was to learn vocabularies and glean the mechanics of sentences. I taught myself vocabularies using the Britannica encyclopedias and thick bound dictionaries in my home. My immediate family was poor, violent, and lacking in college education, but they were intensely literate, especially in Christian texts. I began to understand the weight of simple, independent subject-verb declarative statements when I honed in on Psalm 23: "The Lord is my shepherd. He leads me in paths of righteousness. I will fear no evil. I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever." I reached a milestone when I was able to differentiate between the present tense of "The Lord is my shepherd" and the future tense of "I will fear no evil."

I recognized verb tense by figuring out the intelligibly within the preacher's reference to Psalm 23: the Lord's care of us meant that, in the future, we would be blessed without fear and homelessness. I connected meaning with recalled oral images, and recalled oral images with texts. By the time I tackled Heidi and Imperial Woman, I knew vocabularies and sentences. I then proceeded to move beyond the basics of declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory states from the Bible into a style of expression that seemed limited in that Christian text: descriptive expression. At their best, whether nonfiction or fiction, stories thrive on vivid narrative description. The Bible's religiosity seemed governed by a different order--less storytelling and more rumination, exaltation, questioning, imprecation, vituperation, invigilation, and praise.

Then, just after turning three, I began journaling. I used pieces of paper torn from the legal pads on which my momma wrote out monthly bills, organized chores, and kept track of her menses. My first instinct was to document the systematic burning done to me by a sibling so that I could show my pediatrician, Dr. Margaret Mary Nicholson, a piece of paper that described the atrocities in lieu of speech. My momma beat me and made me swear never to utter what my elder brother was doing to me or anything else in our family. Writing seemed a means to express my struggle without disobeying my momma's commands.

As you may know full well by now, I was no ordinary toddler, and I felt very close to death. I thought that there may surely come a time when my momma or any family member might actually kill me. So I was very conscious of mitigating my behaviors so as not to cross them while still exercising my own will. My eidetic memory posed a threat to my momma. She warned me repeatedly that if I told what I remembered (with the enormous precision and depth that it came to me) that I would be responsible for the break up of my family. "You could go to an orphanage," my momma threatened. "Or we could be homeless." All of these horrors did indeed befall me: soon I would be removed from my mother's care and placed in foster facilities. Soon I would be homeless. Our family would indeed be broken up and it is a testament to my good mental health as a person today that I have moved beyond the castigating guilt that I once felt for simply telling the truth about the violence. 

And then it came to pass that my momma discovered my journals. She also discovered that I had been removing, reading and then returning her novels to the secret compartment in her sewing machine. She dragged me into the upstairs hallway by the bathroom and struck me again and again in my face. Then she handed the novels to me and told me to go downstairs and put them on the bookcase shelf in the den because they were obviously no longer a secret. I stood at the top of the steps, collecting myself before descending. She berated me for taking too long at the top of the staircase. Then, with a tap on my back, she pushed me. I tumbled down the steps like a rag doll. I knew I had injured my head as soon as I hit the bottom step. This was the first of a series of concussions that I endured through violence over the course of my childhood. My momma lied to Dr. Nicholson about the true source of my injury from that day. She lied about most of my injuries. As a toddler, I taught myself how to read and write. But at that moment, at the bottom of the steps, I began to cloak my reading and hide my writing. What good were my literary efforts if I was dead?

The Rivers Between Us: A Conversation Beginning in the Hudson River Valley with Claire Hero (Lea Graham)

The writer, Claire Hero, and I are neighbors here in the Mid-Hudson River Valley.  I live in Poughkeepsie and she, across the river, in Esopus.  We are also both transplants to the area.  We thought it would be interesting to begin a conversation about our sense of the river valley and see where it took us.  We were curious to find out how or if it had influence in our current writings.  You’ll find New York’s Hudson here, but our talk moves out to New Zealand, Northwest Arkansas, Minnesota, Chicago and Worcester, Massachusetts. We hope you’ll enjoy the ranging and exploratory nature of our talk as much as we did.

 

Claire Hero is the author of the chapbook, Dollyland (Tarpaulin Sky); Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press) and two other chapbooks: afterpastures (Caketrain) and Cabinet (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome and elsewhere.

 

***

 

LG:  I have been thinking a lot about how much I love the Hudson—and the trains that come with it and how it ties me to my home geography on the Arkansas, but how so often I feel daunted by all that the Hudson River brings--the historical significance of it (the Half Moon, the Hudson River School of Painters, etc.) and the enormity of its geographical properties (the estuary itself and the canyons that exist within it).  Sometimes the information bundles that come with the river and this valley sort of stun me in my writing.  

 

Btw, I like the notion of the frozen river between us!  We are neighbors, for sure, but the river as some kind of division or organizing line is interesting.  I always love how people say to me:  "Oh...you really need to move to this side of the river."  What they mean is the political left-ness of the communities to the west of the river, but they use "this side of the river" as a metaphor to talk about it.

 

How does this particular geography affect you?

 

CH:  Stuns, yes. The Hudson River Valley reminds me so much of New Zealand. In part this is due to the silencing factor of the landscape. What is there to say about the sublime?  

But I also like the Hudson Valley, I think, because it has always been a shipping lane. A thoroughfare. The means of exploration. It's like a poetic line.

 

LG:  Yes, the sublime....  I think in some ways for me, the Hudson River Valley reminds me of a grander version of the Arkansas River Valley, partly where I grew up and where my paternal side of the family is from (originally, store owners and cotton farmers in the bottoms). We just didn't have that sense of grandeur.  I mean Arkansas is, after all, considered--or at least for me in my childhood—part of the raffish edges of America!  So in so many ways, it is easier to see it without the grandeur of early U.S. history and the connection to the ocean (hence, Europe) getting in the way.  One of the things that I learned years after I had left home which helped me to reverse this notion of my home place as "backwards" was to read that there were so many accessible rivers that crossed and connected in the state of Arkansas that there wasn't an immediate need for roads.  You could get anywhere more or less in the state on the waterways.  Roads have always been a sign of progress, a measure of how successful or progressive a community is and its desire to connect with the outside and exceed the parochial.  It was a kind of relief and delight to read that the delay in road building was at least in part because of the river roadways that naturally existed.

 

CH:  Rivers as roads.  The Hudson River has frozen this year, two feet thick in some places, but the shipping lanes continue.  Things - information - passes through the Hudson Valley.  We are a thoroughfare.  We are a destination and a means through.  We can stand on the Walkway and watch the river move through and some of us cross over and some of us jump.

 

In New Zealand I was intimidated by the landscape.  It was too sublime.  Either you call out your name and hear only echoes of your own mutilated voice, or you pass through areas so empty, so unfinished, that you realize your car could tip over the edge and no one would find you.  In New Zealand I had to focus on the animals, which were entirely prosaic: sheep, millions of them, bleating each spring into silence.

 

But in New York, everything is wild.  It bears the oldest marks of white colonization of any place I have ever lived; stone walls, like rivers, like arteries, pass information through the broken forests.  Yet it doesn't feel entirely settled yet.  Coyotes howl through the nights.  There are whispers of bears.   New York doesn't have billboards, not really, no signs to clutter up the view.  The landscape feels almost languageless, in a way, as though anything could be scrawled across it, yet it is so wild, so lush, that you know that any mark you made would be, within the month, eaten by weed or water.

 

LG:  Languageless.  I completely agree.  But here's the dissonance for me:  It looks wild, lush and all, but the knowledge of how long people have been here--and particularly, the Europeans--makes me feel like anything I think about this river, this valley has already been thought, already been written about, discovered, or rendered into art.  I especially think about the painters—Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School.  Cole was thinking seriously about this place, its water and sky, or as he referred to it, “the soul of all scenery,” about 200 years ago.  While his concerns were mostly different than mine, I still find it daunting to think about the length of time people have been here and thinking hard on this place.

 

CH:  "Already been written about, discovered."  - To say that is to say we live in a fixed place, but the thing about places is that they are never fixed.  They bleed through boundaries.  Seeds, animals, humans: everything moves through, leaves traces, makes changes.  I'm thinking about the problem of this dissonance in two ways: palimpsest and translation.

 

Place names, stone walls, brass plaques: these are palimpsests.  I can see traces of the world that was here before, but somehow, I can't really touch it.  A mile and a half from my house is the church where Sojourner Truth's owners went each Sunday.  It's a museum now.  Inside, an older woman in a floral hooded sweatshirt will show you cases with wampum and bone fish hooks, moonshine bottles and an egg beater, the remnants of a sleigh factory destroyed in 1901.  None of these things help me understand where I have landed, yet somehow they congregate into an image.  A sentence.  A vocabulary for Esopus.  And there are other palimpsests: the bones of animals on the shoulders of the road, the wasp globes in the trees that winter reveals, the remains of someone's picnic washed up on the river bank.  In a poem like "reviving Coyote" I was trying to address such palimpsests: the coyote roadkilled at the end of my street growing through elements taken from women's Indian Captivity narratives.

 

 

reviving Coyote

 

Coyote slinks out of the road & into my hands. Out of my hands & into my mouth. With my teeth she bites the bark in two that binds her. With my tongue she licks the placenta off the words. Coyote steals out of my mouth & into my hair. Out of my hair & into my skin.  In my skin she drags the forest floor, looking for the bodies. In my skin she hacks back the dark. (& who are those masked that ring round the wood?—) Coyote sneaks out of my skin & into my lungs. Into my nose. With my nose the earth is clean as paper.  Coyote scrawls herself across it, crawls into my hands. With my hands she rends the voles in two. With my hands she opens a door. Inside I am waiting. Inside I offer her a kind of apple, some Indian cake, a bed of hides, & didn't we bed down, Coyote & I, in this shabby cave while the hunters searched for us in the vast boscage of the body? Didn't we couple in our fear? Coyote runs over my snowy terrain, marking my skin with her claws. How do I tell you that my body is the road upon which Coyote dies? How do I rear what births from my mouth?

  

CH:  Then there's translation. Recently I've been interested in bacteria, specifically in invasion and translation. Bacteria exchange DNA with members of their own and other species in three ways, but the most interesting to me is translation, whereby a bacteria cell can absorb naked DNA left by a dead cell and add it directly to its own. This leads to change, to adaptation. The “evolutionary butterfly effect,” as explained by the Italian biologist Telmo Pievani, is “the uncontrollable propagations of nonadaptive effects beginning from a functional modification.” Or, as Emily Dickinson would put it, “Infection in the sentence breeds.”

 

I am an invasive species. Anything I wish to say about the Hudson Valley has to pass through a mouth that has opened in many places. These places change my language, my hearing, my sense of how to name the world and what the world includes. I carry place in my accent, my mouth which refuses to give up the Minnesota O even after years away, and in my vocabulary, which swaps and absorbs new names for old things. To be transient is to be always translating, it seems, so there are gaps, but there is also that possibility of infection, of a new organ arising from a new combination. This is what I was getting at in a poem like “[Dredge up].”

 

 

DREDGE up

the earthwords,

hook them

onto your tongue –

 

*

 

these castings:

            the breakdown

of organic

matter

 

terraundeforming

 

*

 

& the slow

articulation

 

joint to joint

 

tongue to

whatever emerges

 

with various organs &.

 

 

 

LG:  The palimpsest and translation, yes.  As you talked about the church turned museum and all of the traces (moonshine bottles, egg beater, etc.) that are left from the turn of the century, I began to think of the various ways I’ve experienced that in all of the places I’ve lived.  Growing up for a time with my maternal grandparents on a large and working farm outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas, there were all kinds of traces of what had been there before.  One of the enduring images in my work is a toolbox stowed in the bathroom that was full of arrowheads, fishhooks, grinding stones, and Civil War cannon balls.  Each morning I would go into the bathroom and consider the mystery of that box containing the objects discovered from plowing.  These physical objects in this particular place connected with my learning Arkansas history:  my grandparents’ farm wasn’t so far off The Trail of Tears.  A few years ago, while visiting my father, who lives in the Arkansas River Valley area, I went to look at the gallows where Judge Parker, the “hanging judge,” presided.  I discovered not only that the names of those killed at the gallows were largely indigenous names, but that nearby was a bend in the river where you could have seen the tribes floating by on their forced relocation to Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears happened in more ways than one.

 

When I moved to urban places, I found these remnants in different ways.  In Chicago, there are the storefronts and cornices that are left over from businesses long gone that you notice for their elegance and/or out of place-ness within the surroundings.  For about a year or so I worked at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum as a docent. The house is located on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and was a pretty stark difference against the surrounding architecture.  To be sitting in this house that helped birth the Settlement House movement and early social work, but that was adjacent to the 1970s architecture of the campus, felt like a secret, in some ways.  I had a sense of that neighborhood before the university had arrived.  There was a quiet and solemnity among the 19^th century furniture and art that created an energy against Halsted’s traffic bustle, co-eds and Greektown up the street.  Teaching at the university when I was a grad student was a similar experience (though different sense of time) since we were teaching in classrooms with bolted down desks and these long, thin bullet-proof windows.  The university had been built around the time of the Chicago Riots and that history was built into its very rooms.  One of my early teaching tactics around analysis was to ask students why they thought their seats were bolted to the floor. 

 

When I moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived for eight years, I noticed the palimpsestic nature in the names of places.  When you talked to a Worcester native about Rizutti’s Goodnight Café burning down, he or she might say, “Oh, you mean what used to be Old Billy’s Lounge.”  There was even a certain pride among people who could name what the place had been called several businesses earlier.  And as you said, I wasn’t quite sure that it helped me understand where I was, but it did accumulate as image and tone of the place.  

 

I think you’re exactly right about translating.  The mouth that has opened in other places.  While the Mid-Hudson River Valley may seem overwhelming at times, I, too, think that I translate the place out of my various accumulations and sensibilities that come from elsewhere.  You with your Minnesota O, me with my love of double modals and slower, circuitous talking and walking.

 

CH: I envy you your toolbox of mystery!  My grandmother’s house was similar.  She was a hoarder, part of the generation that went through the Depression.  Everything, from button to jar, had value and a multiplicity of possibilities.  Like words, they accrued and offered.  They were for picking over and dreaming through.

 

You know, Lea, it’s funny that we’re both from river towns.  I grew up in a river town in southern Minnesota, and I have been wondering lately if living beside the river made me restless.  Is this why we are both so transient?  Oceans are grand but annihilating, and lakes are stable but stagnant, but a river is somehow always new.  It is passage and possibility.  It endures and erases and alters.  Often as a prelude to writing I go for a walk, and here in Esopus it means down the hill, past the overgrown orchard where the deer linger, to watch the Hudson.  And even better, the Hudson is tidal!  It moves both ways.  Like a poem,

Brian Clements Presents Three Short Poems by Bob Heman

Information

The boat is the story the ocean tells. The village listens intently and sings

for fish. The road carries the carts in only one direction. Where it ends the

railroad seems propelled by lights.

Information

The edge of night is propped up against the farm. The chickens are filled

with a secret storm. Only the valiant lady is allowed to rest. Soon she will

begin a search for tomorrow. Her guiding light is a man filled with wheat.

Information

The beards get on the train and remove their hats. Or they don’t remove

their hats but instead open their books. Inside their books there are no

boats. The women are all modest. In one, a rooster crows.

_____

Bob Heman has been publishing his Information in many journals and in a couple of books for several years. The Information just keeps coming. He has been the editor of CLWN WR (formerly Clown War) since 1971.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by J. E. Wei

In the Field

The bungalow is empty now.  The clock swings in silence.  (I see Grandpa taking me to the urine bucket on a mossy floor, where bamboo curtains moldered.)  The bigger room of the first uncle is filled with webs; over there, the second uncle’s smells dusty; the third room (used to be a pig sty) was built for the third uncle, now a monk in the mountains.

Outside the door, dogs hear the squeak.  You ride me on the bike, like those mornings when we had shadows—don’t be sad the rice paddies are full of weeds.  In the field, fireflies shine with your favorite stars; they are friends saying good-bye. They call out your name: Peace Pine.  Peace Pine.  It isn’t far and let me walk with you—cross the bridge of orchids, So Long, my pine, So Long, my pine.

-----

J. E. Wei's prose poem appeared in Sentence 6 and in Best American Poetry 2010. He teaches at St. John's University in Taiwan.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Peter Johnson

Hawk

 

Sometimes I awake with a headline stuck in my head: Doctor in Bangor Treating Elvis for Migraines; Pharmacist Completes History of Drive-InMovie Theater—and I write it all down in my little red notebook. But there are other nights when blood rocks my heart, and people I’ve injured or thedead appear, hovering above the ceiling fan. The city is asleep, the city is awake, the city is napping. Does it matter? I think, climbing insomnia’s creaky stairs to an attic that doesn’t exist, trying to remember what is good, what is right.Yesterday, my student fell from a tree and died. That morning I knelt before the dog’s crate and kissed her goodbye. I stopped to buy cough drops and a backscratcher. I was cut off twice and beeped at once. My student wrote a story about the Civil War, about heroism. He wrote about an uprising of Christmas reindeer, about a boy and his imaginary camel. He drew a cartoon called the “Devolution of Man,” and he once wrote: “Artists have to try, no matter how hard to love their enemy because it is up to artists to save humanity.” Because he believed in what he wrote, he wasn’t my best writer. He wasn’t a liar, he wasn’t waiting for applause. The clap of crows emptying a tree was enough for him, the simple architecture of an egg. He had climbed, I think, to gain a different perspective, like the hawk that mysteriously appeared today. I was walking to class and sensed his dracular presence, then heard a squirrel’s lament no more than ten feet away—a bone-crushing sorrow for life, for death.

-----

This prose poem by Peter Johnson appeared in the first issue of Sentence. Peter's Rants and Raves: Selected and New Prose Poems is out from White Pine Press, and it caps off a sequence of four books of prose poems by one of the subgenre's most significant practitioners in recent years. Peter was also the editor of The Prose Poem: an International Journal.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Joel Allegretti

Gaston Leroux

 

Frankenstein was the creator, but the name in time came to refer to the creation. Were someone to identify a human being as God, the inevitable response would be ridicule, if not concern for psychological wholeness.

Dracula, befitting a vampire’s sinister and Christ-stripped immortality, has surpassed the intentions of his demiurge. The implacable descendent of Attila the Hun removed his elderly, mustached figure from the crypt of Bram Stoker’s epistolary novel to be transmuted into a morphine-destined actor’s signature role, clean-shaven and tuxedoed, to be transmuted again and again, diminished ever further.

The Phantom of the Opera is a deceptive fellow, too. The era of his fictional environs notwithstanding, 20th-century imagination manufactured him. Gaston Leroux published the novel that introduced the misshapen titular character in 1910, two years after the debut between book covers of Ezra Pound’s poems. The Phantom is only five years older than J. Alfred Prufrock.

Leroux was the artificer, but had no hand in this progeny’s reputation. The French-born Phantom metamorphosed into the alter ego of Lon Chaney, whose Grand Guignol makeup was awarded eternity as an icon of American silent cinema. Leroux’s exposition of the forbidding face was sketchy and rendered through the stunned recollection of the Phantom’s obsession, Christine:

But imagine, if you can, Red Death’s mask suddenly coming to life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its nose, and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury of a demon.

An unspeakable birth defect, indeed. No one can tell what guided Leroux’s design. Chaney’s models were disfigured World War I soldiers.

Leroux’s Phantom was an architect alienated by his hideousness, by the inaccessibility of heterosexual love. Filmmakers and theatrical impresarios reduced him to a deranged musician. The febrile Renaissance man became a pathetic acid-scarred violinist, became a bargain-striker with the devil, became a Broadway tourist attraction.

Leroux’s Phantom died quietly and romantically. Diagnosis: a broken heart. The Phantom’s maker did not leave in such grandiloquent penny-dreadful fashion. Gaston Leroux died in 1927 of uremia.

-----

A mini-essay/prose poem in belated celebration of Halloween. One of the pleasures of editing Sentence has been publishing work like this that straddles conventional boundaries of genre (or subgenre) and thereby extends ideas of what a "prose poem" (and thus a "poem") is or can be. This particular piece will appear in Sentence 8, which will appear shortly. I also love the way this piece takes a kind of pop culture approach to a pre-pop-culture era--in particular the era of High Modernism, which also happens to be the era of the birth of cinema, the most pop of pop culture.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Douglass Guy

Coracobrachialis
 
A deep muscle of the armpit, its action is adduction--put the arm against the body. It can permit love letters to be folded near the chest and stuffed into envelopes, but it cannot raise them to the mailbox (elevation is the action of larger counterparts). Cramped little muscle near the heart.

______

I offer this short prose poem by Douglass Guy this week because I love very short poems, especially when they do a great deal in very little time and space. This prose poem appeared in Sentence 7.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Jack Myers

Arf

Dogs give commands to me in one syllable,
the same one again and again.
I speak back in polysyllabics
above my one great bark.

It's like my dreams falling all night
in technicolor splendor. I can't remember what.
When I open my eyes and look back
I'm just grateful I fit my body through
this space as big as a bark.

And the conversations I have with myself each day...
They're like those silver balls on poles
across which gags of burnt electricity arc.
And I'm laid out below, inert,
until my head smokes and I stagger off
with a grunt-thought, cough-out, my smashed send-off.

The same thing happened to my friend Larry
who claims he never woke up at birth.
So for $45 the holistic doctor placed a
bouillon cube on his forehead and a lump
of cheese over his heart, and Larry woke up
and coughed and coughed in dog language
and we knew to bring him water. It was a miracle!
Only we're not sure what.

I imagine that's why we have the public flasher
who is able to prepare us
for the right moment on some random day
when he'll drop the blinding light of his body
down in front of us: "Bark!"
He makes us feel exact.

My intuition tells me yes
even a stone can bark.
Only the sound it makes is millions of years long
and I'm standing in the silence and dark
between its two great phonemes of need,
going to sleep, waking up, going to sleep.

In last week’s post I mentioned Jack Myers, a greatly underappreciated poet who published over a dozen books and taught for many years at SMU and in the Vermont College MFA program. Jack passed away about a year ago. He was one of the first poets, to my mind, who mastered the post-confessional/conversational/serious-by-way-of-humor mode that many other poets subsequently have become much more famous than Jack for writing. This poem is from Jack’s National Poetry Series-winning book As Long as You’re Happy (Graywolf, 1986). Seamus Heaney, in selecting the book, called Jack’s poems “stylish in their pretence of being without style, wise in their pretence of just fooling around”; exactly so.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Charles Kesler

A Traveling Monk Observes

 

I have noticed in my travels that people do not put Kleenex out for guests. They do not even put out trash cans to put the Kleenex in that they do not put out. I have noticed in my travels that people do not put towels in their restrooms for their guests to wipe their hands on after they wash their hands. I have spent much time meditating on why this is so while I have waited for my hands to dry, usually in a dog paddling or bicycle tire pumping manner. I confess I sometimes discretely use their decorative towels to wipe my hands on, but I always feel guilty and end up rolling around on the floor asking the host to please forgive me. About half of the hosts do forgive me and the other half usually include the shell in the scrambled eggs they cook for me at breakfast. I crunch and smile and determine to mend my ways, but decorative towels loved this much make me want to puke on them; I don’t like to get sick so I’ll just go on meditating while my hands dry. I have noticed in my travels that people do not put a lamp near enough to the guest bed if at all. Aha I see now. I do not need a Kleenex, a trash can, a hand towel, or a lamp because I am a Traveling Monk and I meditate, I meditate, I meditate, and I meditate in the dark.

 __________

 

If you live in New York or San Francisco or Chicago or the Twin Cities, you may not realize that in much of the rest of the country poetry is a traveling monk of sorts, scrounging to find a home where it is welcome. Many towns have a resident community poetry group or two, and those little groups of poets (who usually pride themselves on not being academics) are largely responsible for providing the life force of poetry outside colleges and universities in this country. My hometown has the Wednesday Night Poetry Series, which has been booted out of a couple of coffee shops recently for being a bit too rowdy, for (gasp!) selling books of poetry without sharing a cut with the building owner, and for not generating the proper level of coffee sales. Apparently the musical acts still hosted at those venues inspire far greater desire for caffeine than did the poets. The WNPS now meets in a local community center, which is probably its proper home.

 

My former home city, Dallas, has a burgeoning literary scene that now boasts many venues for poetry and poets’ groups such as the Dallas Poets Community (despite the almost universal death, as in most cities, of the independent bookstores like Patty Turner’s Shakespeare Books that once were the de facto home of such groups). The current health of poetry in Dallas is due in part to the leadership of the late Jack Myers, Thea Temple, and the late Robert Trammell and the non-profit organizations they spawned—The Writer’s Garret and Wordspace (both of which have received crucial support from John and Marquetta Herring at Paperbacks Plus). Those organizations have added to the cultural life of the city, but the smaller, ad hoc subgroups and the individual poets wandering the streets in search of poetic sustenance deserve credit as well.

 

Charles Kesler (author of The Book of Willie) is one of the many poets who has helped to keep poetry thriving in Dallas—they are far too many to list but I especially remember Christopher Soden, Tim Cloward, Joe Ahearn (now in Austin), Jeff Davis (now in upstate NY), Fran Carris, Michael Puttonen, Michael Helsem, Patty Turner, Mary Anne Redmond, Renee Rossi, Rauan Klassnik (now in Mexico), Shin Yu Pai (now at Hendrix College in AR), Ray Bianchi (now in Chicago). My apologies to the many other poets in Dallas I have not mentioned here.

 

“A Traveling Monk” originally appeared in Sentence 3 and is reprinted in An Introduction to the Prose Poem.

Brian Clements Presents One More Poem by Morton Marcus

Navel

1.

                Button sewn to our skin, the thread bitten off by the eternal seamstress, the darner of celestial socks.

                Sewn to our chests that way, you would think it holds body and soul together, the only button on the flesh coat.

                But it’s more like the flower that never bloomed nine months after it was planted—the tight, waxy petals a scar from a wound we had nothing to do with and know nothing about.

2.

                Every now and then I imagine the dead lined up for as far as I can see outside a telephone booth in a railroad terminal. Everything is silent. Nothing moves. As if the dead waited endlessly for the phone to ring, part of a museum exhibit where the locomotives bulk cold and still in the background.

3.

                When young we stare at ourselves in the mirror, poking and prodding it, giving it our full attention.

                Later, admiring the beauty of our bodies reflected in the glass, we forget that it’s there, don’t even notice its mark between heart and groin.

                Old, we stand with arms at our sides, staring at what we’ve become, the sagging belly, the flaccid breasts, and with a longing we can’t understand, our eyes return to its puckered circle, the plugged connection, the scar we never understood, the waxen bud that never bloomed.

 

Mort Marcus paid good attention to the world, and, like Francis Ponge, he paid good attention to the language we use to talk about the things of the world. Time after time Mort created object poems like “Navel” that serve as evidence not only of his attention to the world and to objects and to language, but to the relationships of people to objects and language, which is probably why so many of his fellow poets loved and admired him. Peter Johnson says of Mort:

What I remember most about Mort was his generosity and absence of ego. Certainly, Mort was a fine verse and prose poet, moving effortlessly between the two forms, but it was his interest in others and in life’s particulars that informed his life and work. When I invited Mort to my college, the gig was to visit one class and do a reading. Mort did three classes, and would have probably taught three more if they were available. He didn’t do the extra work to be nice or so he could hear himself talk endlessly (though Mort could certainly talk).  He was always in the state of perpetual intellectual agitation. Sometimes he could seem belligerent about it, but you knew no one-upmanship was involved.  He realized life was short, so why screw around being nicey-nice about ideas. Let’s go at it and try to discover why the hell we’re here and how poetry fits into it all. Probably what I’ll miss most about Mort is his optimism, especially at a time when so much contemporary poetry is laden with fashionable irony and cynicism, so that it often sounds like dialogue from a second-rate sit-com. Mort was an authentic voice. Fortunately, he left a great deal of terrific poems behind.

Brian Clements Presents a Poem by Morton Marcus

The First Laugh 

 

The first laugh was God creating the universe. That guffaw is still exploding in all directions, hollowing out and filling the farthest reaches of space.

 

What could have been so funny? The idea of light and sound after all that darkness and silence? After the eons of brooding and grumbling?

 

It must have been something bigger than we can imagine, something that elicited more than a cackle, a chortle, a chuckle or giggle, a snicker or titter.

 

Something say as big as a billion chandeliers of stars, millions of spinning galaxies with super nova popping like flashbulbs inside them.

 

            Or maybe not. Maybe something as small as an ocean or a mountain, a whale or an elephant, or even us.

About 18 months ago, when Morton Marcus knew that he was terminally ill and was preparing the manuscript for his phenomenal final book, The Dark Figure in the Doorway (White Pine Press), Mort sent me a batch of poems that he wanted to include in Sentence, which he had so generously supported with his work, his money, and his good will. Because I have always admired Mort’s humor, intelligence, humility, and reaching after “something bigger than we can imagine,” it was my pleasure and my honor to be able to include some of Mort’s final work as a tribute to a long and various career, which included not only poems and prose poems (see his excellent Pursuing the Dream Bone from Quale Press) but film criticism and a public radio interview show in California. One of his many guests on that show was Christopher Buckley, who says of Mort:

I was always impressed with his poems, and equally with his writing on poetry—clear, direct, accessible, specific, accurate, historical, all in service of poetry rather than the poet himself—whether in interviews, informal or formal critical evaluation/appreciation. But the great energy and character of the man was the thing. I found that especially evident in the prose poems, but regardless of form, what I always found was a generosity and a wide-ranging embrace of experience of life on the planet.

Near the end, when the diagnosis was bad, but before he was feeling the worst effects, he sat down and wrote up his essay, “My Life with Weldon Kees”, for the anthology in homage to Kees that Christopher Howell and I were editing. He worked hard and consistently and sent me a hard copy with a disc and a note saying he wanted to get this done before he was done—he was dedicated to the work, to contributing to the larger project of poetry. Mort always worked hard, on his own work and on appreciating the work of others. I recall the radio interview I did with Mort for his NPR radio show from Santa Cruz —I was amazed and a little embarrassed that he had invested so much time and attention on my new book, was so supportive. He always made time for you and let you know he was focused on you, something I am sure his students appreciated for over thirty years. Mort had the great character it takes to make great poems. He is missed by many.

Morton Marcus passed away at his home in Santa Cruz in October, 2009.
-- BC

Jerry Williams, Guest Blogger October 3 -10

 This week we welcome Jerry Williams as our guest blogger. Jerry is an associate professor at Marymount Manhattan College. His first collection of poems, Casino of the Sun, (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2003), was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second collection  Admission (Carnegie Mellon, 2010) is "as funny and tough and thrilling a collection of poems as I’ve read in some time" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly). Williams is the editor of  It's Not You, It's Me (Overlook Press, 2010), an anthology of poems about breakup and divorce.  He lives in the Bronx with his wife, Shelby Stokes.

 In other news . . . For the next several months, Brian Clements, founding editor of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poeticsand editor of An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009) will introduce our Sunday poem selections. Brian teaches in the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University and blogs at mirrormirror. His latest book, Jargon,(Quale Press) will appear in December.

Welcome, Jerry and Brian

-- sdh