The Best American Poetry

On "Joan Mitchell" [by Sharon Preiss]

                                

                    Harbor December (1956)                                                    To the Harborbormaster (1957)

The Baltimore Museum of Art had to wait two, long, pandemic-years to open its Joan Mitchell retrospective. But finally, Harbor December and To the Harbormaster’s jittery wine-dark reds and cold-water greens are lapping the walls in Gallery 1, while the joyously mercurial La Vie en Rose and the exuberant Salut Tom warm the walls deeper in the exhibition.

Mitchell was born to old-school wealth in watery, windy Chicago in 1925, spent some early obligatory years on the East Coast, and was a contemporary of the abstract expressionists who broke painting’s rules and assured the triumph of the New York School. But Mitchell was of that scene, not in it. Or in it but not of it. She began traveling to Paris starting in the mid-fifties, after successfully showing with the East Village heavy hitters at the Ninth Street Show, and ultimately bought a property in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, where she, her paints, and her army of German shepherds lived until her death in 1992. Her paintings are a dynamic blend of Abstract Expressionism’ hardscrabble muscularity and France’s vibrant Post-Impressionist affair with life and color.

As a synesthete, color was the lens through which Mitchell felt and saw the world. She was also an athlete, and her physical engagement with her canvases is evident. The intense verve of her work surprises over and over, and to walk through the galleries at BMA is to be awestruck. Never mind the violent darkness of some of them, nor what you may know about her prickly personality, her turbulent relationships, her fraught romance with scotch. Though she could be, at times, angry and bitter, her expressions in paint, even of her darker or more confused feelings, are rife with her urgent love of life.

With many of the pieces on loan from private collections, and so rarely seen in public, the chronologically arranged show presents some small early pieces of figurative work along with photos, books of poetry by friends, and a looped video interview with the painter in her Vétheuil studio. There’s also a supplemental soundscape of letters, music, and poetry guiding the viewer through the galleries. The listener is privy to a personal tour of Mitchell’s thoughts and inspirations, from her early pieces that experiment with cubist obfuscation on through the creation of her masterworks and late paintings, including an homage to one of Van Gogh’s final paintings, Wheat Fields with Crows. Mitchell’s painting, an eight-foot-long diptych of wind-whipped evergreen and gold blowing across a mostly white ground is slyly titled No Birds. No omens, no doom, just the dark swirling wheat beneath a weather-heavy sky interspersed with… Wait. Is that pink!? Is the weather breaking? La Vie en Rose, indeed.

                                         No Birds (1987)

Speaking of La Vie, if you’re lucky enough to live in New York City, that painting is usually on display at the Metropolitan Museum in their Modern and Contemporary Art wing. Ironically, (or perhaps not), this quintessential Joan Mitchell work came out of a particularly dark and artistically dry period in the mid-1970s, as did the absolutely sunny Salut Tom. Both pieces are among her largest, each one a quadriptych, with the four panels stretching together to a stunning twenty-two and twenty-six feet, respectively, and reaching upward of nine feet in height. Patricia Albers, in her 2011 biography of Mitchell, Lady Painter, calls La Vie’s “four movements…a symphony…Joan’s tour de force emotional reckoning” of her long, turbulent relationship with fellow artist Jean-Paul Riopelle, which finally imploded when he and Mitchell’s young protégé, Hollis Jeffcoat, became a couple and ran off together. While the painting is stunning on its own, knowing the backstory makes the moody intensity of the work even more potent.

  
La Vie en Rose (1979)                                                                               Salut Tom (1978)

The same could be said for Salut Tom. Not only is the painting also part of this period of loss and despondency, it’s a post-mortem homage to Mitchell’s great friend Tom Hess. Hess was the longtime editor of Artnews and, as such, championed Mitchell and her contemporaries. His death, at 58 from a heart attack, was a devastating shock. Yet Mitchell’s luminous yellows interspersed with airy puffs of white and sky blue are a celebration rather than a dirge.

Many print reproductions don’t do Mitchell’s work with color justice. But the installation images on BMA’s website give a taste of the sheer WOW of the show. It’s on display in Baltimore until August 14 and will travel to the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris from there.

https://artbma.org/exhibition/joan-mitchell/images

Working With Others: George Schneeman at Poets House [by Sharon Preiss]

The East Village of New York City in 1966 was a bohemian paradise. You could rent a decent sized apartment for about $200 a month; Saint Mark’s Church on East 10^th and Second Avenue, one of the oldest churches in the city, was hosting rock bands, experimental theater, and poetry readings; and the 1960’s sense of  “anything goes” was in full swing. Just two blocks down the avenue from the church was the Gem Spa newsstand and its famous Egg Creams, on the corner of Saint Mark’s Place and Second, and within a stone’s throw or two of that lived a good chunk of the second generation New York School Poets: Ted Berrigan, Alice Notely, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bill Berkson, Dick Gallup. This community of poets, all in their 20s and early 30s, often hung out at each others’ apartments, cooked and ate dinners together, and riffed off each other for inspiration and collaboration.

Enter the artist George Schneeman. Ron Padgett had met Schneeman several years before where he had been living in Italy, and Schneeman – with his affable openness, good humor, and background in poetry – fit right in with the group when he and his wife Katie decided to move into the ‘hood that year. Schneeman had already worked collaboratively with other American writers who had visited in Italy, but here in New York he would find a lifelong home and a cadre of friends for whom and with whom he would create some of the most warm and joyful works of their respective careers.

A Painter and His Poets, on view at Poets House in Battery Park City, New York, until September 20, 2014, collects almost 100 of Schneeman’s works that involve these, and other, poets – book covers, posters for readings, artist/poet collaborations, and portraits of the poets themselves – in the largest retrospective of Schneeman’s collaborative works to date (the artist passed away in 2009). What stands out as the viewer wends her way through the poetry stacks to view the many pieces of the show is the sheer sense of fun these friends had creating art with each other. If there had been a group credo, which of course there wasn’t because this was an anti-credo kind of group, it might have been “Making art is serious work, but the work doesn’t have to look so serious.” If there was no sense of joy in the end creation, or in the process itself, then what was the purpose of making it?

The works are characterized by the happy accidents that happen when collaborators have no plan for the outcome and no real aesthetic agenda. Most of the pieces are on simple poster board or paper, and Schneeman’s contributions are often found-images from old magazines, books, and newspapers. A typical work session might start out with George gluing one of these images – the front grill of an old car, a stylish fedora, a snippet of sheet music – onto the page and passing it off to the poet for the next stage of contribution. Most likely, whatever the poet added would be a non-sequitur, whatever lines or words had been roaming around in his or her head and needed to find a home, or maybe some random association the poet made with the image. Meanwhile, George would be cutting and pasting on another sheet, and the poet and artist would exchange, building up image – maybe another generally non-related image or a swath of paint – and word until someone, usually George, declared the piece done. Surely, in this reductive description, the final outcome must sound like just a jumble of unrelated nothing. But there is clearly some magic that happened in the process of two like-minded people working together without agenda, with love and admiration for each other, with the idea of making something fun and interesting uppermost in their minds as opposed to trying to make “art.” 

Often the line between visual artist and poet and who contributed what when became blurred. In “My Knee” by Schneeman and Michael Brownstein, it’s likely the first image was that of the man in the scarf in the upper left of the piece. Or was it the collage-within-a-collage on the lower right, a pasture of brown cows superimposed with an upside-down anatomy illustration, a couple of colorful seashells floating above the plain, and a hand-drawn cow leaping over the crest of tree? Of course it’s likely Brownstein contributed “My Knee” and “and no planet” with the indecipherable cross-out next to it. Could it be that Brownstein imagined the man had fallen off the tilted chair and hurt his knee? Or did Brownstein’s knee hurt that day? Does the “planet” refer to the odd landscape? And what of “Sexy Anina”: the cat or the maiden or both? Somehow, the question of narrative and meaning becomes moot in the sheer pleasure of the mash-up and how, beyond all reason, it hangs together, it works. 

Dick Gallup, in his contribution to the excellent 2004 book on Schneeman, Painter Among Poets, from Granary Books, likens the work of collaboration between poets and visual artists to “recess” as opposed to the rigor of the “adult special ed” they engage in when working in isolation on their own. Gallup calls the collaborative session with Schneeman “Equal parts of fun and consternation, which is just how recess should work out.” The metaphor is perfect: the imaginative play of kids – unaware of standards of good play, bad play, right play, wrong play, trying to sell their play for profit or impress anyone with it – fosters a creative freedom that is intense and satisfying, but most importantly fun. Kids play and create as a natural act, and so did Schneeman and his peers. It’s refreshing to smile or even laugh out loud at a work of art in a world where ever more self-important theories of art and writing are espoused and the –isms (conceptualism, formalism, post-genderism, post-millienialism) not only often stand between a work and its viewer but are sometimes even needed to understand and appreciate a work. Schneeman would have none of this. He disliked theory, he even disliked perspective in paintings. In another essay from Painter Among Poets, art critic and poet Carter Ratcliff calls this “modernist ‘difficulty’…the dreariest of academic virtues. In place of ‘difficulty,’” Ratcliff continues, “[Schneeman] puts a clarity so unqualified that one doesn’t know how to account for it.” I propose we don’t even have to “account for it,” we just get to enjoy it.

Grief, Literally: Three Books [by Sharon Preiss]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On September 12 in 2008, on a sunny Southern California day, Karen Green came home from a short errand to find her husband, who had been fighting severe depression, had hanged himself on their patio. On July 25, 2007, Francisco Goldman’s wife body-surfed for the first time while on vacation in Mexico, floated to the surface of the water immobilized after tumbling through a wave, and died the next day of complications from a severely damaged spinal cord. On December 30, 2003, as Joan Didion prepared dinner in the kitchen of her home in New York City, her husband slumped over in his armchair in the next room and died during cardiac arrest.

The heart aches for the survivors of these sudden losses. The inexplicable tragedy, the depthless hole that’s left behind after the death of a life partner. If we, as mere observers, can imagine the pain of having to move forward through the days and weeks and months after such a cataclysm, the actual experience of it must be exponentially more wrenching.

How do people get through such experiences? In the case of Karen Green, Francisco Goldman, and Joan Didion, part of their process is to write books: Bough Down, Say Her Name, and The Year of Magical Thinking. These three vastly different books chronicle certain commonalities of life after the sudden death of a partner – the disbelief, the self-blame, the numb reckoning. Beyond these commonalities, though, each book explores a very personal journey of grief – that monumental and volatile emotion that rushes through the hole of loss leaving the survivor confused, bereft, immobilized. 

Karen Green’s Bough Down (Siglio Press 2013) -- a series of prose poems, interspersed with the writers own small-scale collages -- opens with a snapshot review of the months before her husband’s suicide as if looking for evidence of what was to happen or a way to find the loophole that will allow a different outcome. It’s June, summertime, with shining moments of work in the garden, things being tended to assure their thrive and bloom, as a wife tends her sick husband so that he might, too. “I bake and you eat, digest. Vanish. I pray you back to me and there you are.” Menace, though, lurks, and there’s no way to unknow it: “(But) here my prayers are called prayers and are answered. Here I still see in color.”

The first collage interrupts the narrative at page 15: a small note on which typed phrases have been affixed and partly rubbed out:

            September, and so it

            It has now

            Why the fu__ would anyone send me a pin

            I can’t even

            I miss

            And it’s p_______al

            His face

            His teeth

            In the last

            Why did ­_e

 

The second collage follows on the next page, more broken lines and unanswered questions. And from here the timeline shifts, the story blurs. Minutes no longer follow their logical tick from one to the next. The husband’s there. He isn’t. There are people “offer[ing] up black and white dreams as consolations.” It’s autumn, it’s summer, there’s pills, more dreams “of standing on the shore and not seeing his ear whorls in every shell.” The horror of, “I worry I broke your kneecaps when I cut you down.” Memorials, wakes, visitors are disembodied vignettes of phrases and faces: “At least he” and “He will live in your”. “Everyone gathers, everyone drives off, what remains remain remains.”

Karen Green, whose husband was David Foster Wallace, writes, to my mind, the most the way grief feels: syntax, logic, time is disjointed. There is no stream of consciousness, there is no flow of days. Memory mashes against the current moment and usurps it, being awake feels like sleeping, sleeping is full of the nightmares of the daily and the tangible. Green’s sentences lurch or wind or morph, her images create disjunctions that reconnect on the next page or the next week. And yet, as grief continues its mad whirl, somewhere outside is a real world, a human on the other end of a phone line, an accumulation of days that becomes the weeks and months of a year. Grief’s strong undertow whips against it, but it cannot stop it. 

Nor can the march of the real world stop grief. Rather, the two somehow finally wash together, as a violent surf stills at low tide. The undertow remains, but is quieted. Our muscles and minds strengthen to resist its pull. The loss will never leave, but, as in the last poem of the book, “Another couple made a daughter in the room where we and the bookending dogs had our last nap.” Our human impulse will always be to strive for life – fleeting and fragile as it is: “I can’t help but root for all this perishable animal behavior. I is perishable, can’t is perishable, help is perishable, roots are perishable.” And still, the last line of the book: “I can’t wrap this up.” 

Francisco Goldman’s Say Her Name (Grove 2011) is a loving homage to his deceased wife, Aura Estrada. The book opens with the stark facts: the date of Aura’s death; that she had just turned 30; that she and Goldman had been married just shy of two years; that her mother, Juanita, blames Goldman for the loss of her daughter; that her uncle, acting on behalf of Juanita, told him to put anything he has to say to him or her in writing. And so he does.

What he has to say is everything: every detail he can remember about their meeting, about her smile, about the smell of her hair, about the custom-made dress she wore to their wedding, about the domestic rituals they shared together. He pieces together from her journals and her stories to him her childhood, her relationship with her parents, her former loves. He shares her writing, her ambitions, her curiosities, and her confidences to her girlfriends. He tells of the joy they experienced in their life together and the anguish he’s felt in his life apart. The book sweeps back and forth from present to past, from their time together to the time before they met and now to the time they been so terribly separated from each other, the motion of the story again resembling the way grief interrupts the present with its pull toward memory, its push toward fantasy, its depleting demand for attention, and its immobilizing washing away of rational thought. Through the writing, though, the reader has been given the gift of Aura’s life, and Goldman’s extraordinary eulogy leaves us feeling the world’s sad loss of this singular person.

Joan Didion’s approach is more clinical, more methodical, and The Year of Magical Thinking ( Knopf 2005) moved me less than the other two books. She dryly identifies her self-pity within the first paragraph of the book, and she refers to the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Dunne, as “the fact,” as in, “I wrote the words…a day or two or three after the fact.” Yet, this is how Joan Didion must deal with her pain and disbelief. In the haze of activity in the hospital emergency room, when the doctor must tell her her husband has died, she preempts him by stating “the fact” first. The doctor’s taken off balance. “’It’s okay,’ the social worker said. ‘She’s a pretty cool customer.’” And so she is, and so she has to be. “As a writer,” Didion tells us early in the book, “I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish.” It is this “impenetrable polish” that she relies on to carry her through the mist of days that follow her husband’s death. It is “the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs” that she uses to work though her feeling that she should have seen this coming, that she could have done something to prevent it, that if she figures out where she went wrong she’ll be able to bring him back.

Inexplicably, we do move through these losses. At the end of her first year without her husband, Didion notes the colored Christmas lights she’s strung on a tree in her apartment. They are not the same lights that had been strung the year before her husband died. Those had burned out and had been discarded. “I bought new strings of colored lights,” Didion tells us. “This served as a profession of faith in the future. I take the opportunity for such professions where and when I can invent them, since I do not yet actually feel this faith in the future.” Life will not be the same without her husband, but there will be a future. By allowing us to read their stories of grief and pain, we find faith in the future, too.

Punk At The Met [by Sharon Preiss]

We’ll never get to the bottom of who ripped the first T-shirt and wore it as an anti-fashion statement. Or who first pierced flesh with a safety pin and claimed it as an accessory of opposition. Or who first spiked his hair in defiance to wearing it “straight.” Truth is, in the Punk movement none of this matters anyway. Sure, there is something identifiable as “Punk Fashion,” but one’s manner of dressing is only an external marker for an internal attitude, a way of living that might best be summed up like this: “Fuck The Establishment.”

And so the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current show “Punk: Chaos to Couture” is a bit of a conundrum. Couture is about as far away in its sensibilities from Punk as Luciano Pavarotti is from Joey Ramone. Punk is subversive, it’s about turning the world on its head. Punk is born of rebellion and the sheer creative joy of fucking up the norm. Couture, well…. Couture is the absolute highest end of fashion and elitism – it’s exclusive, it’s expensive, it caters to la crème de la crème, and it is, for all its finery and particularity, consumer fashion. It is The Establishment to the nth degree. It is not, nor will it ever be, Punk.

That being said, the Couture clothing on display until August 14 is beautiful and provocative and clearly owes an extensive debt to the influential rips and tears and hardware and edgy de/re/con/struction of Punk. After three small introductory galleries attempt to tell the history of Punk -- mostly through looped film and soundtracks of the era’s seminal bands along with reconstructions of New York’s CBGB men’s room and London’s protopunk clothing store Sex -- the several galleries of the show are divided into various aesthetic categories: DIY Hardware; DIY Bricolage; DIY Graffiti and Agitprop; and DIY Destroy.  DIY, of course, means Do It Yourself, and here’s the conundrum again: no single person who ever donned one of these outfits did anything about it him/herself except wear it, if anyone beside a model wore any of this clothing at all. Punks create their clothing themselves to be worn in everyday settings, they do it themselves for themselves and for purposes equally utilitarian as aesthetic. Would I wear any of the clothing on display? You betcha, in a heartbeat. There are leather jackets with crazily inlaid zippers; shirts made of interlocking gold-tone chain and safety pins; luxe organza and tulle ballgowns hand painted with swaths of rich jewel-tones; dresses and pants and skirts and tops adorned with staples and studs and spikes. Would I consider myself Punk if I ever got to slip into one of these wonders? No, I’d consider myself rich and lucky. Punk is a look that you earn and create, not a look that you purchase.

The most intriguing of the galleries is the third portion of the introduction. On the center dais are fashions created by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren for Sex in the 1970s paired with contemporary outfits that mirror and echo the original. Careful examination exposes the cheaper fabrics and more slapdash construction of Westwood’s looks, while the newer clothes have a much heavier hand in their design. The placement of pins and zippers and straps and holes is carefully considered, and the fabrics are top quality, but the homage is clear and loving. The newer designs seem not to be merely rip-offs of the originals.

 And that’s exactly where and how the exhibit flounders. Even with the Punk music blaring in the background and the gallery that was designed to feel like an underground club, even with all the messy spiky wigs on every mannequin, even with the final mannequin of the show giving the exiting crowd the middle finger, the show seems to merely display how yet another original anti-establishment movement was co-opted by the establishment. 

Thankfully, it’s on this point that the book that accompanies the show so fabulously succeeds. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a catalogue look so little like the show itself, but thank goodness for that in this case. The book Punk: Chaos to Couture, published by The Met and distributed by Yale University Press, does exactly what the show does not, excepting that one small gallery: it places side-by-side original Punk style with contemporary Couture design. The book is chock full of period photos from the 70s paired with runway and editorial shots of the fashions inspired by the originals. The newer designs now feel less like a rape and rip-off and more like unrequited love. Couture will never be Punk, but, Lord, does it love it and does it want to be. The newer fashions now look both nostalgic and fashion-forward, something the galleries at the Met missed, no matter how loud the music or spiky the hair or dirty the model of the CBGB bathroom (which is, by the way, way off the mark – that model looks pristine compared to the real deal). 

I’m not sure why the Met didn’t use any of these early photographs in the show, but they make the loving connection between these two widely disparate worlds that Couture fashion on isolated mannequins does not. Perhaps that’s another way the book succeeds: in the photos the fashion is worn by people. Even on the runway, as outlandish as some of the looks are, what we’re looking at is people in clothing. The outfits are meant to be worn (well, most of them anyway), not isolated, fetishized, analyzed. As Richard Hell says in his essay in the book:

But clothes themselves, no matter how beautiful or interesting, are not great art: they remain decoration, unless they’re actually worn, vivified into soul plumage, by an artiste of personal appearance. There’s something inherently sad about clothes in themselves, and fashion, no matter how lovely or effective. Clothes are empty. 

See the show, marvel at the fashion, and be prepared for its emptiness. Then buy the book and be vivified.

A Poetry Tour That Rocks [by Sharon Preiss]

You are one lucky dog if you are in Iowa City, Iowa, tonight July 9, or in St. Paul, Minnesota, tomorrow July 10. You’ll get to go checkout the Graywolf poetry tour at either Prairie Lights Books or Common Good Books. I and about 50 other audience members were at the kick-off reading last night at BookCourt here in New York City, and what a yummy treat it was!

Now, I’ve been to a lot of poetry readings, to which I sometimes say Ho-hum. I mean really, I love poetry – always have and always will, but sometimes: Poetry Reading: Ho-hum. Right?

Not so last night. Maybe, just maybe, there’s something new in the air, something different. Something more than the usual lilting enunciation with the careful hold and lift at the linebreak. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – it’s the way so many of us have read poetry outloud for years. And I’m not saying we should all become masters of the art of the poetry slam – the sometimes in-your-face rapid fire of the rap and rant. But there’s something Sophie Cabot Black, Stephen Burt, and Brian Russell offered last night that’s in-between, something where the words were allowed to carry their meaning without so much “meaning” being emphasized. Sort of like we do in speaking. Yes, speaking. The words were allowed to carry their meaning in the same way they do when we speak, so that for the most part the poems last night were “spoken” rather than “read” outloud.

How utterly refreshing! How full of fun and personality and conversation this reading was. The audience wasn’t being done unto, we were being talked to, engaged. Now, that doesn’t mean that the poetry was all light and funny and without depth and power. On the contrary. Many of the poems Sophie Cabot Black read, for instance, were about a dying friend. Her poems engaged, she said, in a kind of call-and-response to the poems the friend was writing in his final months. And so the conversational tone of them, the sense of discussion between the two poets, and the ongoing search for answers and meaning was able to shine through in the reading of “It Never Goes Away.” 

…We never know

How much it takes, this business

 

Of departure; you stare into the ocean

Outdone by all you want. Enough

Of what continues. Here it comes again,

 

The turning of dark and dirt, unable to stop:

Love, even with everything to be sad about.

Likewise, the poems in Brian Russell’s book The Year of What Now create a narrative from a husband’s point-of-view of a wife’s serious medical diagnosis, her subsequent treatment, and the husband’s response. In his “speaking” of the poems Russell recited from memory, not looking at the page but rather telling the story directly to the audience. There was an element of good theater in his delivery, “good” meaning that Russell allowed the poems rather than the speaker to tell the story. Clearly he’d practiced a good long time to get out of the way of the words of the poems, and the poems reflect that both on the page and in the performance last night. These are the ultimate lines of the title poem of the book:

I can’t remember the date

he died or even

the year    of what now

are we the pure products    and what

does that even mean    pure    isn’t it

obvious    we are each our own culture

alive with the virus that’s waiting

to unmake us.

The middle reader of the evening was Stephen Burt, who brought a sort of John Cheever meets Eddie Izzard flair to his portion of the evening. While many of the poems reflect a sort of joyous suburban banality – babies and their parents all napping in unison, a leafy cloudless college campus – “The Paraphilia Odes,” for example, let us peek past the living room curtain into the private lives of the people who live there:

O my companions in microfiber & leather

O my companions in spangle & tulle

O my companions                    cat carriers in hand

Great treasure has been given to you to lose

Burt’s glee in the paradoxes of a being a real multifaceted person living a seemingly conventional life is apparent, again, in his reciting of his poems. He is happy to let us in, to tell the whole truth of the world as he sees it, as sometimes banal and sometimes quixotic as it is, and he spoke the poems to the audience as if taking us into a fun confidence.

Even if you can’t make it to Iowa City or St. Paul in the next couple days, get the new books – The Exchange, Belmont, and The Year of What’s Next – and read them. Read them out loud and let the language do the heavy lifting of finding the meaning of the poems. There’s real life, real joy, really something happening here.

  

Mas Lorca! [by Sharon Preiss]

June 5 was the 115^th anniversary of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca’s birth. Happy birthday, Freddy! LIVE from the New York Public Library threw a fine celebration for him on June 4, with readings of his work, readings of work he influenced, a dramatic performance of a lecture he gave expounding on his experience in the U.S. and the creation of Poet in New York, and a grand finale performance by Patti Smith, who recited two Lorca poems and sang a couple songs.

It is Lorca who is credited with advancing the concept of duende as an aesthetic mode and artistic ideal. Literally speaking, a duende is a mythological creature –a goblin or a sprite – that causes mischief and disruption. The word is derived from the Spanish word for “owner” (dueno), and the implication is that the uncontrollable and out-of-hand is the true ruler of the world. Lorca’s vision of duende is that the artist needs to surrender to danger and disruption in order to get to the heart of his art. From the opening lines of his lecture:

 Well then, before reading poems aloud to so many people, the first thing one must do is invoke the duende. This is the only way all of you will succeed at the hard task of understanding metaphors as soon as they arise, without depending on intelligence or on a critical apparatus… Poems like these are not likely to be understood without the cordial help of the duende. 

The poets on hand this evening to pay tribute to Lorca – Philip Levine, Tracey K. Smith, Paul Muldoon, John Giorno – remarked on the danger of the duende, the risk involved in letting go of rational thought in surrender to deeper, darker forces. “The duende does not come at all unless he sees that death is possible…The duende wounds. In the healing of that wound, which never closes, lies a man’s work,” Muldoon quoted from Lorca’s lecture “Theory and Play of the Duende.”

The poet and musician Patti Smith has been surrendering to the duende for all 40 or so years of her remarkable career. Though her poetry hero is Arthur Rimbaud, certainly Lorca’s work is progeny of Rimbaud’s poetic call to disrupt the senses in order to find true meaning. Anyone who’s seen her perform knows that Smith channels forces from beyond and surrenders to wherever those forces take her through her performance. Likewise, the actor Will Keen, who interpreted selections from Lorca’s Poet in New York lecture, which is interspersed with poems from the book, gave a riveting performance that I’m sure convinced those new in the audience to Lorca’s work that he was worth getting to know better. An additional treat to the evening was Lorca scholar Christopher Maurer’s invitation to Lorca’s niece, Laura Garcia Lorca, to the stage to read several poems in their original Spanish.

“Lorca had no wish to see his poems dead on the page,” said the evening’s host, Paul Holdengraber. As the celebration of the poet’s life and work continue through July 21 (follow the link for more info: http://lorcanyc.com), is assurance that Lorca’s poems and legacy will live on.

Happy Birthday, May Swenson! [by Sharon Preiss]

Tuesday, May 28, would have been May Swenson’s 100^th birthday. In her lifetime Swenson was a playwright, a professor, a lesbian, a Mormon, a translator, a lover of nature, a feminist, a critic, and a poet. On the evening of her birthday this week, Poets House, Poetry Society of America and The Library of America got together in Poets House Kray Hall to celebrate the quiet beauty and integrity of Swenson’s life and work with a reading of selections from the recently published Collected Poems, a handsome edition designed for posterity by The Library of America.

To be honored with publication by The Library of America is no small thing. The mission of this organization, founded 34 years ago and funded in part by seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities, is to help “preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing…America’s best and most significant writing.” And yet, as several of this evening’s participants mentioned, Swenson’s sometimes deceptively simple poems are now often taught more in middle school than in graduate school. This definitive collection of her wider body of work, including some of her writings about poetry, will reintroduce readers to “the linguistic density, sonic intensity, and erotic charge” of the greater portion of Swenson’s work, as poet Sharon Dolon pointed out during her portion of the evening’s talk. 

It’s true, Swenson’s poems can be a little “sweet:” several of the poems read by the eleven poets, critics, and editors who participated in the evening elicited from the audience happy laughs and surprised exclamations of joy in their closing lines, as opposed to the solemn hums and grunts that “important” poems often receive. But what’s wrong with a little levity and delight in poetry from time to time? As the editor of the new book, Langdon Hammer, pointed out, “Swenson was popular and accessible in a century known for poetic difficulty.” For poetry to stay alive in the hearts and minds of the general public, every era must have a poet or two whose work, on the surface anyway, is simple and straightforward. Think Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Billy Collins. Every beginning reader of poetry will, if she’s so inclined, find her way to greater levels of difficulty and sophistication in poems only by starting with work that is more simple and straightforward. Very few of us started a love of poetry by reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, or Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, or Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily” (“Rose is a Rose is a Rose is a Rose.”)

And yet, there is an underlying complexity to Swenson’s poems that presents itself variously as metaphor and double-entendre, economic exactitude of language, pinpoint line and word placement, and formal choices that are as pertinent to the poem as the words themselves. There is nothing wasted in Swenson’s poems, but the layers of even her simplest work reveal themselves to careful readers like the petals of an opening blossom. Here is “Four-Word Lines” in its entirety:

            Your eyes are just

            like bees, and I

            feel like a flower.

            Their brown power makes

            a breeze go over

            my skin. When your

            lashes ride down and

            rise like brown bees’

            legs, your pronged gaze

            makes my eyes gauze.

            I wish we were

            in some shade and

            no swarm of other

            eyes to know that

            I’m a flower breathing

            bare, laid open to

            your bees’ warm stare.

            I’d let you wade

            in me and seize

            with your eager brown

            bees’ power a sweet

            glistening at my core.

The poem is breathtaking. The precise and compact “four-word lines” move the poem “forward,” yet the form forces line breaks that slow the reader down so that she can revel in the mellifluous aural flow of the poem. The sound of longing that the interlinked long i’s and e’s create in the first few lines then floats down and through the lilting feeling of relief the double f and l sounds create in “feel like a flower.” Bees are flower’s pollinators, so while the lover’s eyes do have “brown power,” the flower, in this sense, is the bee’s lover. The intense longing and the potential sting of the bee are assuaged in the poet’s receptiveness and openness under the gaze of the beloved.

The evening ended with a live recording of Swenson reading her elegy to her father, “Feel Me.” “’Feel me to do right,’ our father said / on his death bed. We did not quite / know – in fact, not at all – what he meant.” How fitting that the dying words of the poet’s father should also involve the mystery and magic of language, as Swenson’s own poems do. The poem continues on to explore the possible meanings of these words, posing question after question and possibility after possibility. The elegy, a tender paean to the beloved father, is also a meta-poem that plumbs the depth of the poet’s own work.

This poem, too, is an example of Swenson’s signature “Iconographs,” a type of concrete poem wherein the placement of words on the page acts to enhance the meaning of the poem. “Feel Me” was originally composed on the page with two streaks of white space moving diagonally through the first four then final three stanzas of the poem. The streaks create a disjointedness that echoes the challenge of understanding: there can be a stark break between word and meaning, between what is said and what is understood. 

In her essay “The Poet as Antispecialist,” Swenson writes that the experience of poetry is “based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear to things as they are and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming.” Reading and re-reading Swenson’s poetry opens up this “becoming.” As the poet Samantha Thornhill remarked in her portion of the evening’s celebration, beyond the precision and exactitude of Swenson’s poems, “the page is a playground and poetry is lawless.”

Natasha Trethewey: A Poet of Our Time [by Sharon Preiss]

Natasha Trethewey is the perfect poet for the 21^st Century Obama-era United States. Her work embodies much that is current and important in today’s America as the country is being forced in so many ways to move out of its selfish childhood and into a more mature adult place in the world. To claim she is the most contemporary of poets may be a bit odd to say of someone whose poetry is so much steeped in the historical past. But as she examines history via her precise poetic dissections of paintings, photos and texts, and works to untangle her own story of her American heritage, she lays bare our country’s complex and often troublesome saga of race relations, white superiority, and hubris with all its lingering prejudices and bias.

In 2007, Trethewey was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her Native Guard, a series of poems that swings between the Civil War-, Ante-bellum-, and 20^th Century-era South. Tretheway’s own parents (he white, she black) met in the early 1960s at Frankfort State College in Kentucky, and, as Trethewey writes in “Miscegention,” 

            In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;

            they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

 

            They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name

            begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

 

Two poems later, in “Southern History,” she weaves herself into the story:

 

            Before the war, they were happy, he said,

            quoting our textbook. (This was senior-year

 

            history class.) The slaves were clothed, fed,

            and better off under a master’s care.

 

            I watched the words blur on the page. No one

            raised a hand, disagreed. Not even me.

 

This would have been about 1984. It’s shocking that even then, the real story’s not being told.

Trethewey’s most recent book of poems, Thrall, published in 2012 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, traces the origins of the story back even further. At a recent reading at New York City’s Cosmopolitan Club, co-hosted by the University of Georgia, of which Trethewey is an alumna, she read exclusively from this book and talked a bit about her work. 

Thrall is an amazing book, the language leading the reader so gently into the brutal world of colonial dominion that we are smack in the middle of it, forced to look into the mirror of history before we can pull the cloak of denial over our eyes. Even the word “Thrall,” so close to “thrill” or “trill” and moving from the whispering “th” through its cascading “all,” does not imply the imprisonment of slave or captive that it actually denotes. 

In the four-part poem “Taxonomy,” the poet describes a series of 18^th Century portraits that could, at quick glance, look like simple familial paintings or ones of a master and his slaves. But these are casta paintings, and they were created to codify the equations of mixed race families. Trethewey deftly incorporates lilting phrases like “crown of lace,” “soft curl of her hair,” and “An infant, she is borne” to show how the delicacy of the painting can obscure its more sinister implications. But by the closing lines of the first poem in the series we are shown a closeup of the servant who carries the mestizo child:

            … He is dark

                        as history, origin of the word

            native: the weight of blood,

                        a pale mistress on his back.

 

            heavier every year.

 

Trethewey’s way of unveiling injustices and illuminating wrong-thinking echoes Percy Bysshe Selley’s, “Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.” And yet the distorted must still be righted. In the poem with which she closed her reading, “Enlightenment,” the poet and her father revisit Thomas Jefferson’s home in Monticello after it’s been scientifically determined that Sally Hemings’s ancestors are part of Jefferson’s own lineage. Trethewey recounts how, on their first visit, her father defended Jefferson’s actions:

            how Jefferson hated slavery, though – out

                        of necessity, my father said – had to own

            slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

 

            he could not have fathered those children:

                        would have been impossible, my father said.

In the present visit, they both now know the real story, and their love for each other has endured despite her having to find her own way past the “knowledge” he’d previously passed on.  This “knowledge,” the poet implies, is what we must always be questioning and fighting against, these seemingly fixed barriers that keep us “other to each other,” as Trethewey phrases it in the last line of the poem. And as the book’s epigraphs so aptly put it: 

            What is love?

            One name for it is knowledge.

                                                -- Robert Penn Warren

 

            After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

                                                -- T.S. Eliot

PEN World Voices.4 [by Sharon Preiss]

(This is the fourth and last installment in a short series about the PEN World Voices Festival.)

 

Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. Next year, even if you can get to only a few of the myriad events scheduled, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.

 

Burma: Sunday, May 5, 2013.

Burma’s Poetry Scene is active and vibrant. And so is its poetry scene. The former is sanctioned by The State and includes Heroic Verse about the Official History of the Country. It can be studied in schools and can be recited without fear of recrimination. The latter has sometimes been outlawed. It makes a distinction between The Glorious History of the State and personal history, between the sanctioned experience of The Citizens of the State, and the personal experience of the individual people who comprise Burma’s cities and countryside. Burma’s poetry, with a small “p,” glorifies language and learning and openness, and it has often been read and shared in only small teahouses and private homes. In its past it’s been fed carefully and secretively from the few scant volumes of international poetry that have been translated into Burmese from other languages. And though the Official Government does not accept the latter as Burma’s Official Poetry, it is celebrated for its bravery both here in the US and abroad.

On the final day of PEN World Voices, the well-known Burmese poets Zeyer Lynn and Khin Aung Aye joined anthologist James Byrne to present a discussion and reading of modern and contemporary Burmese poetry as it is practiced by this dedicated and thriving community. Byrne, who lives in the UK, is the editor of the international poetry magazine, The Wolf, and he recently helped co-translate and co-edit a book newly available in the US, Bones Will Crow: An Anthology of Burmese Poetry.

The three writers spent the afternoon choosing poems to read in both Burmese and English and discussing the fraught history of poetry in a country shackled by a military dictatorship that has had limited communication and interaction with the outside world and has all but quashed forms of expression not sanctioned by the state. Most notions of the modern world in general and of Modernism in art had to be carefully smuggled back in to Burma by students who studied abroad in the 1930s. Books and ideas were translated and traded clandestinely, while the approved channels of education remained woefully behind the times. As late as 1968, even forward leaning Burmese poets were deliberating the value of poetic devices like free verse and colloquial speech, devices that, while in common use in other poetries around the world, were still little used by contemporary poets of Burma.

The poems read on this day, though, were fresh and contemporary and full of tension and play. Not all the poetry was political, but the background shading of many of the pieces was colored by freedoms denied, experienced, or yearned for, whether the poems were narratives of personal experience, lyrics of flashing beauty, or modern epic inventions. These are poems neither supported by- nor supportive of- the government, and should you be traveling in Burma, you won’t hear them read as part of the annual poetry competition there. But through the efforts of these poets and anthologists, and others like them, the door through which poets and poetry can travel to and from this country has been opened just a little bit wider.

PEN World Voices.3 [by Sharon Preiss]

(This is the third installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival.)

Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. Next year, even if you can get to only a few of the myriad events scheduled, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.

Obsession: Joy Harjo on Time: Friday, May, 3 2013.

Imagine that Time is not merely the linear ticking off of seconds, one following the other in the ever-progressing movement of this moment to the next. Imagine instead that it is fluid, immense, infinite, and that you could dive in and out of it at any point you choose.

Imagine that your daydreams and déjà vus, your waking thoughts of other places – even places you’ve never been too – are not merely idle wanderings or fluke tricks of the mind, but are actually travels to and knowledge of other realms.

Imagine not dismissing these daydreams and sensations, but developing them, allowing them to flower as full experiences in their own right, and honoring them as real travels through and with Time, not just flights of fancy.

Such is Joy Harjo’s experience with Time. For her, Time is a being that can be bent, one that can be worked with, altered, conjoined, entered into or exited from at various points other than the here and now.

Time is Harjo’s “Obesession,” and her talk on Friday night was one of a new PEN mini-series that heard Lewis Lapham expound on Smoking, Andrew Solomon explore Sleep, Simon Critchley discuss Memory Theater, and Naomi Wolf muse on Truth. I suspect not a single one of these other intellects brought the audience to the mystical territory that Harjo reached in her travel through Time. 

In her recent memoir, Crazy Brave, Harjo opens with a very early childhood memory. “[S]omething happened that changed my relationship to the spin of the world. It changed even the way that I looked at the sun,” she writes. She then describes her first experience with “this suspended integer of time.” As she and her father are driving down the road on a hot Oklahoma summer day, the radio plays a jazz tune: 

I wonder what signaled this moment, a loop of time that on first glance could be any place in time. I became acutely aware of the line the jazz trumpeter was playing…I don’t know how to say it, with what sound or words…I followed that sound to the beginning, to the birth of sound. I was suspended in the whirling stars. I grieved my parents’ failings, my own life, which I saw stretching the length of that rhapsody.

Is it possible for a human being to stand so far out from the fabric of Time she can see the entire pattern of life that would make sense of the senselessness of some aspects of the world? This is Harjo’s design is honoring her travels with Time.

Surrender to the elasticity of time allows for a more fluid interpretation of our life’s story. “Words and stories are energetic beings,” Harjo explained during her talk. If we allow for a non-linear relationship to time, we may be able to alter outcomes that seem set in stone.

She told a mythic story of someone being falsely accused of murder and an angry mob about to inflict its own brutal justice. In the moments she had before her fate was sealed, the accused was able to leave the here and now and travel to genesis of the story where she saw the crime and the true perpetrator. Coming back to the present, rather than simply denying and pointing out the actual criminal, the accused began a story and song of the entire origin of the event, so that the identity of the murderer became so obvious he confessed and the crowd retreated from their mistaken target of justice. Is it possible to travel back to the dawning of an event and explore its physical and psychic sources so that the story ends differently than it seems it ought to? Harjo’s own specific use of language in her talk demonstrates her convictions: “I was in a story not too long ago,” she says as she begins weaving her next story.

With the audience in an otherworldly hush as the conversation ended, Harjo exclaimed on ending a bit early, “Oh, I thought we’d have to be here till midnight!” Time.

PEN World Voices.2 [by Sharon Preiss]

(This is the second installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival.)

Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. This year’s theme was Bravery, and audiences were privy to diverse happenings that occupied 24 venues, included almost 120 writers, and brought to the public seventy-plus events. It would be impossible to attend everything on every day, but, next year, even if you can get to only a few, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.

 

Resonances: Contemporary Writers on the Classics: Thursday, May, 2 2013.

This is one of my perennial favorites of the Festival, always full of revelations and surprises. Four international writers each discuss the influence of a particular “classic” writer on his/her work, alongside brief readings from that writer’s work and his/her own. This year opened with the Glaswegian author James Kelman, who traced his palpable iconoclasm to Rene Descartes. Kelman’s “primary influence is not in the Anglo-American literary tradition,” and he finds blessings in his limited early education: “Fortunately I didn’t go through higher education, so I was not subject to writers I hated.” “I am sensitive to ideas of language, imperialism, identity,” he continued in lauding Descartes. The “Meditations,” in particular, are characterized by “the primacy of the individual’s vision,” an underlying anti-authoritarianism, and the emphasis of the unbreakable union of mind and body.

Kelman’s latest US publication is the novel Mo Said She was Quirky, which Kirkus calls “A bracing stream-of-consciousness tale of life on London's lower rungs...a gritty and wise snapshot of urban life.” Descartes’s Meditations and Other Metaphysical Writings is available as a Penguin Classic.

Nadeem Aslam, whose family fled from Pakistan to the UK in 1980 for political protection, has a boyish soft-spokenness that neatly disguises his own devout politicism. “I vote every time I write a sentence,” Aslam stated, and invoked the Polish writer Bruno Schulz as his classic hero. “It’s almost as though a color of the spectrum would be missing if Bruno Schulz and not been alive and writing,” Aslam said, and read a passage from “The Street of Crocodiles,” a short story from the 1934 collection of the same name. Though clearly Schulz’s lush prose and “mythologized reality” has had its influence on Aslam’s own work, it is perhaps more the fearlessness of his life that has left the greatest impression on Aslam. Schulz, a Polish-Jew with great intellectual prowess, worked in the first half of the 20^th century, a dangerous age for the author on many, many levels. He was 50 years old when was gunned down by a Gestapo officer on a street in his hometown in 1942.

Nadeem Aslam’s latest novel is The Blind Man’s Garden, the second of his novels to explore the post-9/11 lives of Pakistani and Afghani citizens. Bruno Schulz’ Street of Crocodiles is available as a Penguin Classis paperback.

Thomas Mann’s work is notable for its symbolic insights into the psychologies and fates of artists and intellectuals, and the Japanese writer Gen’Ichiro Takahashi drew parallels between Mann’s novella Death in Venice and his own Sayonara, Gangsters. Takahashi describes his own work as “contemporary, experimental, and post-modern,” and read a grisly passage describing a debauched version of “body art” and one of the character’s violent revulsion and reaction. The book’s jacket describes Sayonara, Gangsters as “an inventive novel about language, expression and the creative process that unfolds through hilarious sketches.” Death in Venice, according to Mann himself, is “the story of the voluptuousness of doom, but the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist’s dignity.” Takahashi, who first read Mann’s novella in high school, noted the deep impact re-reading the work had on him when he reached the age of Mann’s anti-hero, Gustav von Aschenbach.

The final speaker of the afternoon was Eduardo Halfon, the Guatemalan-American author of The Polish Boxer. An engineer by training and trade, Halfon describes himself only as a “reader,” not a writer, until he read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. The author’s note in Hopscotch invites the reader to choose between linear and non-linear ways of reading the novel, by making suggestions of chapter orders, noting chapters that are “expendable,” and telling the reader s/he can also feel free to choose a chapter order herself. “The lack of structure spoke to the engineer in me,” Halfon said, and went on to discuss the continually evolving structure of his own book as he adds, changes, and subtracts chapters as publishers print translations into different languages. The Polish Boxer is available in the US through Bellevue Literary Press, and Hopscotch is published by Pantheon Books in a dual Spanish/English edition.

PEN World Voices [by Sharon Preiss]

(This is the first installment in a short series. Stay tuned for more about the PEN World Voices Festival!)

Every spring, for nine years running, the PEN World Voices Festival brings an astounding array of writers from all over the globe to New York City for a weeklong exchange of ideas and celebration of matters of literary exigence. This year’s theme was Bravery, and audiences were privy to diverse happenings that occupied 24 venues, included almost 120 writers, and brought to the public seventy-plus events. On Monday, April 29, you could hear Russian, Palestinian, Native American, Trinidadian, French, and American novelists, poets, playwrights, and journalists read from their work at the opening-night kick-off at Cooper Union’s Great Hall. On Tuesday you could choose from a gala honoring American novelist Philip Roth; a workshop with Caribbean writer Earl Lovelace; a talk with exiled Iranian non-fiction writer and novelist Shahrnuch Parispur; or a discussion of Memory Theater with British philosopher Simon Critchley. And that’s merely a sample of Tuesday’s events. It would be impossible to attend everything on every day, but, next year, even if you can get to only a few, you’ll get to be part of a remarkable conversation about life and literature that you won’t soon forget.

Bravery in Poetry: Wednesday, May, 1 2013.

The current executive director of the Poetry Society of America, Alice Quinn, introduced seven contemporary poets who, in turn, each discussed a poet whom he or she admired and felt brought bravery to their work. Particularly powerful were Yusef Komunyakaa’s veneration of Muriel Rukeyser, Eileen Myles’s ode to Akilah Oliver, and Hilton Als’s homage to Brenda Shaughnessy.

Of the seven poets honored, Shaughnessy is the only living poet, and Als, justifiably, finds a great open courage in her newest collection Our Andromeda. He read her “I Wish I Had More Sisters,” which appeared in the September 20, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, where Als is a writer. On the surface, the poem is a perky ode to sisterhood – the closeness, the separateness, the camaraderie, the jealousy that so many sisters share. But lurking in this taut, sometimes funny, quickly-moving lyric, is the desire, the lack. The poem, which on the surface seems to be about the wonders of intimacy, hovers above the black hole of want, the emptiness of what isn’t there.

 Komunyakaa cited a “lack of hesitation” in Rukeyser’s work that moved her closer to

“learning the so-called other,” and read “St. Roach” from her ultimate book The Gates, a collection of poems that were birthed by her experience as the president of the PEN America Center in the 1970s. The poem’s repetition of the phrase “For that,” which opens most of the lines, serves as a multilayered condemnation, first for the things the you of the poem is accused of, but also for the speaker of the poem for her received contempt of the other, for her willful ignorance and her prejudice. As the accusations reach their climax and the speaker comes to realize her offense, the poem turns: “Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time…Today I touched one of you for the first time…I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.”

 

Myles choice of the work of Akilah Oliver was a revelation. Oliver flew a bit under the mainstream radar. And, sadly, she died in 2011 at the age of 50. But Myles’s mission to “introduce her to you” was a terrific success, as she read several poems from her latest collection A Toast in the House of Friends and an earlier chapbook, The She Said Dialogues. Oliver’s poems are amalgams of lines culled from conversations, observations, day-to-day happenings, critical theory, academic tomes, and both cooked and raw snippets from her busy mind’s constant stream of thought. The lines combine to create both sundry and sophisticated musings on identity and life: “I’m walking down a carnival, not beautiful, not that smart, not that blessed, but a tenacious hostage. What does it mean to be a post-colonial subject? An I in a category that as of yet is I not Idaho. At first I was lost but now I am found.”

In her overview of bravery in poetry, Alice Quinn quoted from Elizabeth Bishop’s paean to W.H. Auden on the event of his death. Auden’s writing, Bishop said, “made us feel tough, ready, and in the know,” and Quinn reminded the audience that good poetry is all about taking risks (“not just unconventional line breaks,” Mary Karr quipped). The best poems expose something close and dear to the writer, which then exposes its like in the reader. Again, from Muriel Rukeyser: “I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.”

To hear the full talk on Bravery in Poetry, go to http://worldvoices.pen.org/event/2013/02/14/bravery-poetry

Learning to Love Lorca [by Sharon Preiss]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Lorca extravaganza continues! Don’t worry if you’ve missed some of the early events that have already happened New-York-City-wide in celebration of this poet of mystery and intrigue. There is plenty more to come. Happenings including film screenings, readings, talks, concerts, and exhibits of Lorca’s art, manuscripts, and personal possessions span through July 21. Plus, there is a beautifully re-packaged, newly released, updated version of Poet in New York available in stores now (FSG, $17) with reproductions and inclusions of some of the material that’s currently on view in the “Back Tomorrow” exhibit at the Wachenhiem Gallery in the Schwarzman Building of the NYPublic Library. If you are a Lorca fan, the new book and the exhibit are musts, and if you’re curious or ambivalent about his work, as I have been, this is a superb opportunity to explore why Poet in New York issuch a revered collection and why eighty-three years after Lorca’s fated visit to our fair city, his darkly conflicted vision of Gotham is as relevant as ever.

My problem when I first tried reading Poet in New York in 2008, when the Grove edition of the poems came out, was a twofold mix of confusion: I wasn’t able to let my logical mind wander through the surreal images of the poems, compounded by the fact that I couldn’t grasp that someone would write a book about how much he hated New York. The first stanza of the book, from the poem “Back from a Walk,” is:

        Murdered by the sky.

        Among the forms that move toward the snake

        and the forms searching for crystal

        I will let my hair grow.

The poem continues with four couplets of similarly quixotic and frankly negative images – limbless trees, broken-headed animals, a butterfly drowned in an inkwell – culminating with the repetition of the first line, “Murdered by the sky.” What was I, a lover of reason, beauty, and logic, not to mention a lover of New York City, to make of this opening poem?

Since then, I’ve not only read the introduction to the poems – a practice I usually eschew until after I’ve read the entire book (I don’t want my experience to be tainted by someone else’s, but in this case it was immensely helpful) – but I’ve come to appreciate, if not entirely agree with, Lorca’s point of view. 

Lorca came to New York from Granada in 1929, when he was 31 years old, and was already known as a playwright and poet in his home country. His purpose in coming to the U.S. was not to seek fame and fortune, but to nurse a broken heart and have a new experience. He suspected he would dislike the city, but he needed a rearrangement of his senses, at least so said Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, former friends who panned his latest book, the popularly acclaimed Gypsy Ballads, as being dull and predictable. It’s fair to say that New York duly rearranged his senses and that his work would never be dull and predictable again.

He hated the crowds: “These are the dead who claw with earthen hands / the doors of flint where clouds and sweets are rotting.” He hated the dirt: “Dawn in New York / has four columns of filth / and a hurricane of black doves / splashing in putrid waters.” He hated the Hudson: “That gray sponge!” But most of all, he hated the lust for money and the striving for more and more. “From the sphinx to the vault there is a tense thread / that pierces the heart of all poor children.” Lorca witnessed, first hand, the spectacle of Wall Street when the stock market crashed in October 1929, and the death and despair over the loss of mere money made him sick.

He found respite in the streets of Harlem in the company and culture of Black Americans, who he identified with the Gypsies of his country. And he was saved from the long brutal days of August in the city by a friend who invited him to Vermont for the month. He also traveled to Cuba, which he loved. All these adventures are chronicled in the poems, and there are moments of sublime happiness alongside the pieces that document his less-than-enthusiastic take on the City.

The downbeat poems of the collection give a new spin on the notion of negative capability, where rather than being a passive conduit of the beautiful mysteries of the world, the poet becomes the lightning rod for brutal reality, where it’s equally viable to write magnificent and moving poems about the world’s exposed underbelly as it is to write odes to Grecian urns.

It’s hard not to wonder what Lorca would make of today’s New York. It is probably cleaner, but certainly more crowded. The hollow howls of the City’s weekend and holiday carousing would horrify him, though he might have been able to appreciate what a center of world culture we’ve become. One thing that hasn’t changed, though, is the materialism and money grabbing. Though they don’t read tickertape anymore, there’s still a mass of people here that worships the stock market and aches for profit, whatever the human cost. That, above all else, is what turned Lorca off to New York. Ah, but these months are a celebration of his life and his work. Let’s leave “the others, those drunk on silver, cold men,” to their own devices. Let’s just follow Lorca through the streets for now and appreciate the city in all its dingy, horrible beauty, and honor the poet who sang it. 

For more on the program and to find a schedule of events, go to http://lorcanyc.com/program.

Review: The Collected Poems of Ai [by Sharon Preiss]

Ai’s single poetic form was the dramatic monologue. Her seven books published between 1973 and 2010, collected in a hefty Norton edition released in February of this year, comprise almost two hundred pieces – monologues all – written in voices as various, profound, and quixotic as JFK, James Dean, General Custer’s wife, and her own family ancestors. Rarely does she repeat a character, and her rich imaginings of their individual lives, thoughts, and speech sustained her entire poetic career.

Her earliest book, Cruelty, was published in 1973 when she was 26 and still fresh out of U Cal Irvine’s MFA program. The poems of this book are short, tight stanzas of concentrated hardscrabble, where labor, marriage, blood, dirt, loneliness and frustration, whirl themselves into evocative episodes of hard-luck and hard-living. These flint-like chips of poems, mostly hovering around 15-20 lines or so, have none of the well-known narrators or scenes that the future poems were to so famously develop over multiple pages, but their sharp scenes of spite, brutality, and despair sparked the fires of Ai’s following six volumes.

Here is the title poem in its entirety:

             The hoof-marks on the dead wildcat

            gleam in the dark.

            You are naked, as you drag it up on the porch.

            That won’t work either.

            Drinking ice water hasn’t,

            nor having the bedsprings snap fingers

            to help us keep rhythm.

            I’ve never once felt anything

            that might get close. Can’t you see?

            The thing I want most is hard,

            running toward my own teeth

            and it bites back.

 

Killing Floor, published in 1979, opens with the title poem, a three-part narrative that follows Leon Trotsky through Ai’s imaginings of his exile and nightmares of betrayal and assassination, from the Soviet Union into Mexico. The book establishes Ai’s movement toward appropriating the voices of known characters and the longer monologues that became her trademark. Not all her characters are known figures, in this or any of her subsequent volumes, but Killing Floor opens the door.

From the Japanese writers Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata discoursing on their work, their loves, their inner lives, to Lope de Aquirre, a 16^th century conquistador who dreams of El Dorado in the Amazon Basin but whose life ends in a familial murder/suicide in Venezuela, the stories are inspired and vivid. Ai’s gift is not so much as ventriloquist. While her vocabulary and diction do change some from poem to poem, the depth and strength of the poems derive from her ability to enter the heads and lives of her characters and articulate their thoughts and actions in intense and richly colored ways. Her two-part poem for Ira Hayes, the Native American Marine immortalized with six others in the iconic photo of the Iwo Jima flag-raising but who died an alcoholic death ten years later, finds him lying in a ditch, drunk on a Friday night, looking up to a moon, “the night hen’s yellow egg,” just before “a huge combat boot/punches a hole in the sky/and falls toward me.” Saturday, part two, finds Hayes pouring pepper into a cup of coffee “to put the fire out.” “I pass gin and excuses from hand to mouth,/but it’s me. It’s me./I’m the one dirty habit/I just can’t break.”

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book titles alone read like a list of Seven Deadlies – Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, Greed, Vice, Dread, No Surrender – and in each of the poems either the world is malevolent and the characters react accordingly, or the characters are so and the world is mirrored back in their baleful images. Ai’s only editorial note in all the books is at the start of 1991’s Fate, which, she states, “is about eroticism, politics, religion, and show business as tragicomedy, performed by women and men banished to the bare stage of their obsessions.” Even the Virgin Mary finds the world brutal and hostile as, in Fate’s title poem, she looks onto a scene of protestors at an abortion clinic, thinks of her own fated pregnancy, and sees an antiabortionist throw a rock that “descends like Christ/into the body of a woman,/who cannot defend herself/against the judgment of man and God,/for we have always been the receivers/of what is given without love or permission.” 

In 1999, Vice – a selection of poems from her previous books plus eighteen new poems – won the National Book Award. It’s after this, in her last two books, that Ai begins to more fully develop characters from her family history. As she was writing the poems for Dread, published in 2003, she had no way of knowing that she had only a short nine years left to her life, but it’s oddly fitting that, among the monologues written in the voices of, for example, World Trade Center first responders, JFK, Jr., and a disgraced high school teacher from Rapid City who falls in love with a beautiful prostitute who turns out to be a man, she reaches toward her own ancestors to put some definition on the story of her own life. Throughout her books, there have always been poems exploring the lives of freed slaves, Native Americans, and the deeply American conjugal joining of white, black, red, and other ethnicities, but now she begins to name names in her own mosaic lineage. She identifies herself as being “1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, ¼ Black, and 1/16 Irish.” What of the 1/16 that she doesn’t identify? Perhaps it’s this she’s working to reclaim in so many of these final poems.

While writing her final book, No Surrender, Ai knew she was dying of cancer, and she describes the
progression of one woman’s untreated breast cancer in the ultimate poem of the collection, the horrific Cancer Chronicles. Whether or not the poem describes any part of her own experience, one cannot say for sure. It’s always a dangerous thing to read too much autobiography into poems, and her imaginings of the late stages of the disease and the subject’s life imply that this is not her exact story. Nonetheless, after reading the entire collection of Ai’s work, there is a keen sense of the poet’s fearless stance in facing life’s ugly underbelly. This is the only book (aside from the new and selected Vice) that does not have a title poem. “No Surrender” was Ai’s battle cry, and the open-ended conviction of these words as the title of her last book is a fitting epitaph for this singular poet’s life and work.

Jean-Michel Basquiat at Gagosian [by Sharon Preiss]

Wunderkind/High school drop-out. Gifted artist/Street scribbler. Incredibly successful in his early 20’s/Heroin addict dead at 27.

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s life was a study in warring forces, forces that fueled both his painting and his addiction, forces that likely did him in in the end. He favored large, rough, cartoonish depictions of his subjects (mostly people), often painted on backgrounds of emphatic primary colors or garish aquas and oranges, finished with crayon and graffiti-like text. The paintings sold to elite collectors in the 1980s for astronomical prices, and they still do today.

    

The Gagosian show is an excellent opportunity to look at the work again and consider it anew. Hung in the spacious 24^th Street gallery, with ample natural light coming in from the windowed tops of the 20-foot walls, the paintings are as thrilling and as enigmatic as ever. The artist’s trademark faces are, for example, on the one hand grotesque and vulgar, more skulls than faces, with their grid-like teeth and wide empty circles for eyes. Yet they are also not only obvious homages to African masks and primitive paintings, many of them are essentially self-portraits. Then there are paintings like “Eyes and Eggs,” a fairly straightforward portrait of a line cook that one could view as a respectful depiction of the ordinary working man, yet the artist has imprinted the canvas with the tread of his sneakers as he walked all over it. The paintings themselves on first glance can seem slap-dash and crude, but a closer looks reveals the artist's many layers of working and reworking the image and its components. Was Basquiat a high artist intentionally looking to make cultural commentary with his raw form, or was he a merely a talented kid overly exalted by the art establishment who couldn’t quite pin down what he was trying to say after all? While many of the paintings can be read as a certain thumbing of his nose to the world of high art – while incorporating those very elements – one can also see a certain thumbing of his nose to himself and his work.

          

Basquiat rode into the galleries on the wave of street graffiti artists who were being “discovered” in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a world that essentially consisted of clandestine criminal activity that became oddly intertwined with the world of high art. Unlike most of the other street artists showing their work at the time, Basquiat didn’t paint subway cars or use spay paint for his work. Under the name Samo (Same-oh, as in Same Old), he markered short, pithy phrases and sentences on the buildings of lower Manhattan, a kind of street poetry whose remnants turn up in the later canvases. In 1980 Basquiat participated in an exhibit put on, in part, by Fashion Moda, a South Bronx artist space and collective that encouraged outsider and untrained artists. He also met the artist Andy Warhol that year. Most of the graffiti-artist darlings had very brief moments in the spotlight, but Basquiat had a staying power, likely because he had a precocious intelligence and some thirst for fame. His friendship and work with Warhol helped.

His amazing career lasted a short eight years (he is a member of the 27 Club), but he was prolific. The
Basquiat Authentication Committee has rubber-stamped over 2000 pieces of work, and the Gagosian show, on view until April 6, has over 50 on view. This is certainly not as comprehensive as the grand Brooklyn Museum exhibit of 2005, but it provides a decent cross section of the work. There are a few multi-panel pieces studded with incongruous text and illustration whose overall effect call to mind the interior advertising on subway cars, while some of the individual panels give nod to Basquiat’s love of comic books. There are several pieces that display the artist’s quirky methods of canvas stretching. And there are several examples of his homages to black musicians, sports heroes, and everyday working people. One of the most compelling and fully realized of these is “Ribs Ribs,” where the ennobled Rib Man, crowned with a halo and looking almost like a superhero, serves up ribs from his own body. This is Basquiat at his finest, where all the influences come together in a coherent image that he hasn’t second-guessed or denigrated with his own personal editorial. Striking, too, are the eerily similar paintings “Bicycle Man” and “Riding with Death,” the former an exuberant yet darkly foreboding piece of death as a bike rider painted in1984, the latter, a man riding the back of skeleton, painted shortly before the artist died.

A recent auction at Christie’s fetched an amazing $26.2 million for a 1981 portrait of a fisherman (not on display at this exhibit). If you go to Artnet.com, you can find out which Basquiat pieces are for sale, buy one yourself, hang it over your sofa, and try to figure it out.

Matisse: In Search of True Painting [by Sharon Preiss]

Matisse was part of the Fauvist movement – the “wild beasts” – a group of early 20^th century artists known for their brash use of color and their emphasis on manipulation of paint as equal to, or more important than, true representation of form. The main members were Matisse himself and Andre Derain, whose vibrant portraits and landscapes are often comprised of multiple brushstrokes of startling and counter-intuitive hue. (Andre Derain, "Charring Cross Bridge," 1906, pictured above)

The current Matisse exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals something utterly surprising about the master’s work: it is not so much his use of color that gives the paintings their depth and vividness. In actuality, the vast majority of his work comes alive the way it does because of his distinctive and forceful use of black.

The exhibit is not your typical collection or retrospective of work. Rather, what we have are various incarnations of the same painting or subject hanging side by side. Typically, one or more of the pieces are painted with a nod to other contemporary painters’ style: We see Matisse using pointillism, for instance, in one of his depictions of the Gulf of Saint Tropez (top), then switching over to a more impressionistic stroke in another painting of the same scene (bottom). In the two portraits of the Young Sailor, he first painted with a more obvious, shorter brush stroke, then painted the next version in the flatter, overall-paint style that became part of his signature. According to the text of the exhibit, he didn’t necessarily consider these painting studies or think of one being more finished than the other. He often hung them side-by-side in exhibits, both as completed works. Apparently, people found it interesting for a while, but sometime in the 1920’s, viewers got bored with the repetition and Matisse fell out of favor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All the while, though, he was honing his mature technique, the flat swaths of saturated color juxtaposed with strong lines of texture and pattern. Almost all of those lines are bold black strokes, so bold, in fact, that they belie their simplicity and provide such vibrancy that the paintings become much, much greater than the sum of their parts. Look closely, for instance, at “Interior in Yellow and Blue.” Reduced to its components, it is merely two flat planes of blue in opposing corners bisected by an equally flat yellow. The objects – table, vase, chair, melons, lemons – are actually quite vague and abstracted. It’s the elegant lines of the wrought iron chair and table base; the squiggle on the melon rinds; the interlocking diamonds of the vase; the weighty outline of the lemons; and the leafy pattern of the background curtain that make the painting what it is. And yet, the lines are all quite simple. The effect of the flat angular plains, rich color, and all those black strokes give the paintings a deep dimentionality, an illusion of depth and texture, a lush richness that breaths life into the scenes. 

The show will hang at the Met until March 18, just a few more weeks. Get there if you can and rediscover a master.

The Homeric Answer [by Sharon Preiss]

In preparation for re-reading The Iliad and The Odyssey with a few friends, I’ve been taking in The Cambridge Companion to Homer and M.I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus. And I’ve enjoyed the insight, the speculation, the scholarship involved in parsing the puzzle of the pre-Homeric world. But sometimes, it seems to me, the scholars are taking this all a little too seriously. Consider this: 

Imagine, if you will, that the world as we know it is completely wiped out – all humankind, all buildings, cars, libraries, computers, animal life, plant life, all our daily accoutrements, all record that we ever existed. There’s not even any rubble with which to piece together the facts of our civilization. Everything, everyone is dust. Except for one thing, one thing remains as a document of our existence, a record that we were here. That one thing is a DVD of Oliver Stone’s most recent movie Savages.

Now suppose that some marauding alien spaceship lands on our decimated earth and finds that one thing left of our entire history and civilization, they find that last existent copy of Savages. Naturally, said aliens pop the DVD into their playing device (go along with me here) and conclude that life, indeed, had existed on this earth, and they watch the DVD over and over and over again trying to figure out who we were, what our world was like, what happened to us and why.

 

It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen Savages or not to continue the scenario. It could be any action movie, any form of heroic popular entertainment. Think Jason Bourne of the Bourne Series, Bruce Willis in the Die Hard movies, Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible. In Savages, the plot line is essentially this: Two highly successful Californian pot growers and distributors, Dan and Chon, are being pressured by the Tijuana drug cartel to give the cartel a cut of their business. The Californians are the heroes, essentially nice guys who just want to be left alone to do their thing. The Mexicans are violent, underhanded, moral-less. When the threat of violence isn’t enough to convince Dan and Chon to partner with the Mexicans, the Mexicans kidnap the girlfriend they share, Ophelia, the one thing they both care about most in the world. The rest of the movie centers around the various plots the two enact to get Ophelia back. There’s also a dirty DEA agent who works on the down-low with all the parties involved to further his own interests; there’s the head of the cartel, Lorena Elena Sanchez, who inherited the drug empire after her husband and sons were assassinated; there’s Elena’s Mexican henchmen who perpetrate horrific violence on anyone who stands in the way of their plans; there’s Elena’s daughter who attends college in the US and who tries to keep her distance from her mother’s world but ends up getting dragged in anyway.

For us, understanding the plot is simple enough. What are our aliens to make of this, though? Remember, this is the only document of our civilization, and the aliens don’t have the benefit of knowing this was merely popular entertainment, a fictional story with hyped-up characters and scenes that are intended to wow an audience as opposed to keep a proper history of our world. What would they make of Dan’s peaceable Buddhist leanings versus Chon’s post-Iraq-war-vet tendency toward violence that seems to win out in the end? And how about the crucifixes, tarot cards and blood-lust of the Mexicans? Why is there always a landscaping crew in a rickety pick-up truck every time Lado, our main henchman, visits an American home? When Ophelia describes her namesake as “the bi-polar basket case who committed suicide in Hamlet,” what the heck does that mean? When various characters refer to the Red Queen, Bono, Cheech and Chong, Butch Cassidy, 1984, and Henry VIII, how could anyone ever figure out those references? And, for the love of God, is everyone in this world perpetually high on weed, coke, or booze?

The world of Homeric scholarship is a bit like aliens trying to construct a clear picture of our world through analyzing an action flick. Yes, that’s a bit reductive – the earth’s prehistory wasn’t completely wiped out before Homer, it was simply not recorded. And modern civilization has a vast array of scientific and analytic tools at its disposal to piece together evidence from ancient civilization and figure out what it might have been like. But so far our best source for piecing together the Bronze Age of Greek history is Homer, and that is a bit like aliens having to rely on Oliver Stone’s aggrandized story-telling to piece together a picture of our modern world.

Homer was a storyteller, a poet. He was a performer, not a historian. The Homeric heroic poems may not have even been considered high art in their day. That’s not to say they are not artful – there is incredible talent in the creation, memorization, and performance of the poems. Homer, like Mr. Stone, has a studied technique, a masterful presentation. And, like Oliver Stone’s story, there are side tales of morality, of belief, of friendship, of love from which we might draw some reasonable conclusions about the values and beliefs of the characters. But these are characters and this is a fictional story. Let’s not forget that even though archeologists have discovered and excavated what is probably “Troy,” there is no evidence of a decimating battle between the Achaeans and the Trojans. There is no evidence that any of the heroes of the epics ever existed. And even Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer’s, complains that Homer’s depiction of the gods in the lives of the Bronze Age heroes takes into account little of what people likely believed at the time.

Oh, shoot, that’s right. I forgot all about the gods! Maybe I should be comparing the epics to the latest Superman, Batman or Ironman flick instead of a straight-up action movie. Oh, well, listen: Just pass the popcorn and pour me a large fountain drink – I’m sitting back and cracking open The Ilaid tonight, ready to be entertained.

The Last HaHa [by Sharon Preiss]

There were such nice responses both here and on my Facebook page last week when I published my farewell to Mobile Libris, I thought you might enjoy a poem I wrote a few years ago in celebration of our fall 2010 season, one of our busiest. I read the poem at our annual ML holiday party, and it was a huge hit. There are, of course, some inside jokes, but I hope readers here enjoy it, too.

The poem includes book titles that we sold during the season, along with excerpts of blurbs and reviews from the books, a bunch of real subtitles (oh, the subtitles!), and some imagined email correspondence with clients and staff. Hope you get a laugh out of it, too. The book industry is full of weird quirks, enough to make you cry sometimes.

 

Fall 2010, From the Desk of Mobile Libris

 

It is 12:30 on Monday, September 13

and the former chair of the FDIC is throwing down

the gauntlet at the New York Palace Hotel. “It’s a

Senseless Panic, we’re having a meltdown, there are

thirty-five hundred guests, we should have 150 books, we can sell

40-50 a day, we need a fix, a bailout, fix our broken

system.” Mobile Libris is given a blunt indictment…

We sold one book.

 

It’s 6 o’clock pm and we’re sending Half the Sky

to Women in Communications

It’s 6:30pm and The New York Public Library is traveling an

American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.

The Women’s Republican Club hosts Great Negotiations:

            Agreements That Changed the Modern World.

The New School presents the season’s first non-fiction forum:

Geoffrey O’Brien and The Fall of the House of Walworth:

A Tale of Madness and Murder in Gilded Age America,

a Downward Spiral of Festering Insanity and murderous

mentality. Darkly Mesmerizing.

 

It’s 7pm at Alliance Fancaise: Happiness!: A Guide to

            Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.

It’s a brilliant synthesis, a revolutionary look,

tremendously engaging. Compelling. Inspirational.

Revelatory. Eloquent.

 

It’s Fordham University, Poets Out Loud

Eleventh Street Bar: Triptych Readings

It’s emerging and established writers

brought together for brief and luminous

readings in New York City’s East Village.

 

It’s 7:30pm on the West Side Highway

across from Chelsea Piers, and Nancy Brinker

is sharing how her sister’s struggle and death

led her to raise money for scientific research

in the hopes of one day finding a cure.

 

It’s KGB Poetry on East 4^th St, after a bit of rain,

and Rita Ann Higgins is Throwing in the Vowels

while Cohorting with Philip Fried.

And at the 92^nd Street Y, in the Warburg Lounge,

in the corner to my left, wearing the red and white striped

trunks -- Eliza Griswold with her Dispatches from the

Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam – the Tenth

Parallel!! She’s a courageous reporter, a gifted writer.

The book is deeply impressive and immensely rewarding.

Her talent is like a blinding light! She gives us a rare look

and a riveting investigation of the triumph of the human

imagination; an essential work that will remake the world

in years to come!

 

And in the corner to my right, also wearing red and white trunks –

one of the few people in America committed to

exposing the monstrous elephants in the room, she blends

outrage and optimism, she’s a voice of conscience

in a time when we need conscience more than ever,

one of Time Magazines 100 most influential people --

Arianna Huffington, with her hard hitting polemic: Third World

America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class

and Betraying the American Dream.

 

How Our Economy is Undermining the Environmental Revolution

How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life

How Does It Feel to be a Problem?

How the Fierce Handle Fear

How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America

How the Tea Party Movement is Fundamentally Remaking

            Our Two Party System.

How Wars End

How Religion Divides and Unites Us

How to Raise a Drug Free Kid

How Colleges are Wasting our Money and

            Failing Our Kids – and What We can Do About It

How Pleasure Works

How Food Shapes Our Lives

How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

How Mighty Table Tennis Shapes Our World

How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World

How Medicine, Meditation and Madonna Saved My Life

How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas and Found Happiness

 

Hello Booksellers: just a gentle reminder that you are expected

to arrive at your venue 20-30 minutes before the start time of the program.

Thanks, Sharon

 

Hi Sharon, Jane is going to cover my event next Thursday. Thanks, Katie.

 

Hi Sharon, Nick Kristoff and Sheryll Wu Dunn will be signing copies

of Half the Sky at Cooper Union, the UN, the New York Times,

Saturday morning, Monday noon, and Thursday evenings for the rest

of their lives. Can you sell books for us there?

 

Hey Jessamy. It’s Sharon. I won’t be coming in today. I think I’m

coming down with the Icarus Syndrome.

 

Hi Sharon. Just want to let you know that Priya will be working for me tonight.

Thanks, Katie.

 

Booksellers: Please remember, we always tell the event coordinators

that you will arrive 20-30 minutes before the start of the program.

Please bear this in mind when planning your time. Thanks, Sharon

 

Sharon, Kim will be working my Saturday event. Thanks, Katie.

 

Dear QRST University Press. Thanks for getting in touch and

asking Mobile Libris to be part of your University Snoozefest

next week. We’ll gladly be there! Cheers, Sharon

 

Booksellers: You must be on time for your events, 20-30 minutes before the

start time of the program. This is important. Sharon

 

Hey Sharon. Shantaya will be covering my Brooklyn Library event next Tuesday.

See you later, Katie.

 

Hi Amanda: I need to take the day off today. This Icarus Syndrome has really got me down. Sharon

 

Hi Sharon. I know that it’s 4:45 on a Friday afternoon

and the chances for this are slim, but could you possibly

sell books for us in five minutes at Soho House? I think

we’d need about 750,000 books. They are expecting 20 people.

 

Hi Sharon. Anne will be covering my event tonight. Thanks, Katie.

 

Hi all. I’ll be out of the office for the next few days. I just can’t seem

to get over this Icarus Syndrome. Sharon

 

And now it is Saturday, December 18, 2010.

Our season has been The True Story of the

Riot Grrrl Revolution, The (Almost) Complete and

(Entirely) Entertaining Story of America.

A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention,

A Super Sad True Love Story,

A Story of Punishment and Deliverance.

 

It’s been The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power and

Civilization. We’ve had Adventures in Taxidermy,

Adventures Among Ants, Adventures in the

Margin of Error.

 

It’s been a Journey Behind the Headlines.

It’s Three Women, Three Miracles,

and a Ten Year Journey of Discovery and

Friendship.

 

It’s now The End of the Day, The End

of the West, The End of the World

As We Know It. The End and the Beginning.

Closed for Business [by Sharon Preiss]

Last night, after a long look at my empty office space, I left Mobile Libris for the last time. It’s been a good run, these past seven years of selling books. It’s a tough business – margins are slim, prices are fixed, book-buying habits are changing – but we made a good go of things, even in this sluggish economy. Mobile Libris is a success story even though it is no more.

For those of you not familiar with Mobile Libris, we sold books here in New York City exclusively at author events. We had no brick-and-mortar store; rather, we had a fleet of booksellers who traveled off-site to all manner of author talks, conferences, book parties, readings, panels, discussions – pretty much wherever we were asked to go – to sell books. Our one requirement: the author had to be there to sign. We were known by our black, wheeled suitcases. Event organizers would look out for one rolling into her space, spot it, and know the books had arrived.

I came up with the idea for a mobile book-seller while I was managing a Barbara’s Books in LaGuardia Airport. How I ended up there is a bit of a story in itself, but suffice to say I took what I expected to be a throw-away job selling books between semesters of teaching freshman comp and fell in love with bookselling. I was there for almost five years. Occasionally we were asked to handle off-site events, but usually the logistics of getting books from the airport to the event location was much too complicated. One time, though, I accepted, and sold copies of Susan Fales-Hill’s Always Wear Joy at a charity fundraiser where the author was the keynote speaker. It was magic – the book, the author, the audience: all were perfectly matched. They listened to her with rapt attention and lined-up to buy books and catch a few words with Susan after her talk. This, I thought, is the way to sell books. Each book became a precious memento of the evening, a souvenir with a personal signature that would evoke that event every time it was read or even looked at on the shelf. There must be a way for me to sell books in this manner on a regular basis.

So I gathered the few resources I had – a book about how to start a business in New York, a few connections in the publishing industry, an idea of a reading series or two where I could start, a good friend at the New School writing program (thank you, David), and good personal credit – and started a book business. At first I worked out of my home in Astoria, Queens, with a UPS post-box that would accept packages for me in Manhattan, centrally located by Macy’s in Herald Square, so I could get to any location in the city easily. I’d pick up my books, put them in my suitcase, and be off. And though the magic of that original event wasn’t replicated every time, it was often enough. More importantly, people were appreciative and I sold books.

I was taken by surprise by how quickly the idea took off. I expected to eke out a living by servicing two or three events a week, but almost right away I had to hire a helper to cover events that were booked for the same day and time. Within a short period of time, the guys at the UPS store were complaining that my boxes were taking up too much room, so I moved to an office-share close by. The paper engagement calendar I used to keep track of events, income, and expenses wasn’t going to cut it anymore, so I bought a Mac and switched over to an electronic calendar system which worked great for the 10 or so booksellers I now had working for me. Pretty soon, we outgrew that space, too, and then the next as well, and for the last three years we’ve been on West 29^th Street in a 600-sqaure-foot office that was usually filled to the brim with books and books. At the end of our reign I had three full-time employees in the office, a part-time intern, and about 25 booksellers servicing about 50-75 events every week. Our record number of events for one day was somewhere around 22.

The booksellers and I had the privilege of selling books in amazing locations and meeting extraordinary people we certainly wouldn’t have the chance to otherwise. I sold books in Martin Scorsese’s and Joan River’s homes; I met Alan Alda’s mother at book party where Regis Philbin stole a book from me (“I’m taking this book!!”); I’ve dined in the Metropolitan Club, the University Club, the James Beard House; I heard Patricia Neal scold a rude kid at a book party by starting out, “Do you know who I am, young man?”; Rod Stewart and Paul McCartney have bought books from Mobile Libris, as have Mayors David Dinkins and Ed Koch; we’ve sold books for Cathie Black, Walter Isaacson, Malcom Gladwell, Mary Higgins Clark, Vernon Jordan, Mario Vargas Llosa. Like I said, it’s been a good ride. Did I say “Good”? No, it’s been an extraordinary ride.

So why stop? Mobile Libirs was as successful as it ever was when I made the decision to close, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not a business person; for God’s sake, I studied poetry in grad school! I had taken Mobile Libris as far as I could go. I wanted to sell the business, to see it continue, pass it on to the person who could take it to its next level. Ah, but you have to love books, not money, to see the value of a book-selling business. I had a few bites and one offer, but it wasn’t right. Better to close and let this chapter of my life close behind me.

What’s next for me, then? I don’t know. I took a leap out into the nothing and am working to see what will happen next. I have a few ideas – return to teaching, go into the text-book trade – but I’m not sure. At this point all I know is my key ring is lighter by four keys and Mobile Libris is closed.

Two Tickets to Paradise [by Sharon Preiss]

Dee and I are about to wrap up Paradise. It’s been a long journey, through Hell, Purgatory, and now, The Ultimate: in these last few cantos we are about to meet God. That in itself will make this 18-month endeavor worthwhile, but, boy, am I walking away from this project with a lot more than a little imaginary face-time with the Creator of All Things, a lot more than I expected, and Dee is too.

I’d been wanting to reread the poems for a while, ever since a friend who taught a kind of spiritual-inquiry course based on The Divine Comedy gave me a copy of the text he used for the course. It sounded intriguing. Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy, written by Helen Luke, a Jungian psychologist, follows Dante’s travels and encounters as an archetypical journey that humans on the path toward “individuation” – Jung’s term for self-actualization or wholeness – take. It seemed so intriguing, in fact, that I grouped the book along with the various translations of The Comedy that I’d read in college and sat them on a special shelf, just waiting for the project to begin. That was in 1996. The books sat on that shelf for about 15 years.

At last, in the summer of 2011, the time was right. I was beginning to suspect after these 15 years that I wasn’t going to undertake the project on my own, and so I took a leap and asked Dee. She is intelligent, well-read, open to new ideas. Would she be game? No timeline, no agenda, just read and discuss, just the two of us, flying blind through the afterlife with no one but the unknown Helen Luke to guide us. Yes, she’d be game.

After leafing through multiple translations, we settled on Dorothy Sayers’s. What a treat! She cleaves to the original terza rima, and her poetry is a delight. Most importantly, as it turned out for our reading, she has a clear sense of the “divine” in The Divine Comedy. One gets the sense from comparing her translation and notes to others such as John Ciardi, Mark Musa, or John Sinclair, that she, like Helen Luke, was interested in the application of Dante’s journey to living souls, and that one could read the poems as guides to living well in this life as opposed to reading them merely as a narrative of who Dante saw, where, and why in the afterlife. Dante, after all, will return to his life on earth with a clear directive to tell the story of what he experienced on his journey. The poems are meant to be more than a strong and illustrative warning to those whose fate hangs in the balance. It’s clear the poems are meant as a guide for good living and right thinking in the here and now.

It’s especially easy to miss that point if you stop with the Inferno, which, unfortunately, not only a lot of readers but so many translators do. Hell is action packed and grizzly with scenes of mayhem and violence. It makes for great reading, and one gets the real sense that everyone there deserves what he got. Purgatory seems lightweight in comparison, with souls not so much eternally suffering for their sins as being sorry for them. It’s a little namby-pamby, not the stuff of 21^st century thrills at all. Interestingly enough, though, the sins and sinners in Purgatory are almost identical to those in Hell, with one important difference: in Purgatory, the souls are on the road to Heaven; in Hell, they are damned for all eternity. What differentiates the two groups of sinners is that the souls in Purgatory are able to purge the weight and shackle of their sins because they take responsibility for their previous wrong-thinking and wrong-action. They see their part in the error of their ways and are willing to clean up their side of the street. In Hell, the sinners take great glee in blaming others for their downfall, and that blame will keep them stuck in their misery for all time. In one of the loveliest tropes of the book, just before the final cantos of Purgatory, Dante finds himself wandering alone through a Sacred Wood. It is, in a very real way, the same wood he was in when he began the poem, though that was dark and terrifying. Dark is transformed to Sacred here because of the gleeful and willing shift of the burden of responsibility, just as the souls in Purgatory are transformed in comparison to those in Hell.

Part of the joy of reading through all three books of The Comedy is witnessing the pilgrim Dante develop and transform as he moves along the circles of the afterlife. He is able to walk alone in the Sacred Wood – no longer dark and terrifying – because he has absorbed the lessons and information that have been shown to him along the way. He’s not only seen the condemnation of others for their acts, he’s come to understand these tendencies toward evil are also his own. After all, the opening lines of the poem are a confession that somehow, somewhere, he’d lost the right way in his life’s path. His guide Virgil tells him his path up and out must go down through hell first because Dante has to see how bad things can get before he can transform himself.

And transform he does. He eventually comes to admit his pride; his short-sighted love of things, people, power; his placing of intellect over matters of the spirit. He has changed and grown in his insight and understanding of what is truly enduring and important as being human is concerned. And though Dante’s personal ultimate sight is set on being closer to a Christian God, the lessons are broad and roomy enough for all of us, including me and Dee.

In Paradise, Dante sees the souls who’ve made it to their final, joyful destination. These are the souls who’ve learned to love the whole fabric of life. There is no jealousy, there is no regret, there is no sorrow. There is only the happy understanding that they have lived their lives the best they could, putting spiritual principles first as often as was possible. And as Dante gets closer to meeting God, he encounters a wonderful paradox: as his understanding of right living blossoms into understanding divine love, he comes to realize that, no matter how close to God he becomes, he’ll never know it all. In fact, part of getting closer to the Divine is accepting the ineffable. The Divine is a mystery, and the more one accepts the mystery, the closer one is to the Divine.

I don’t know that Dee and I can claim we’ve come closer to the Divine, but, I admit unashamedly, it sure feels like it. As a non-Christian, I hadn’t expected the poems to resonate with me on the level they did. Dee, who is a practicing Catholic, says her faith and understanding of the journey to God has been deepened. Certainly, our friendship has deepened, as we spent week after week parsing the poetry together and following Helen Luke’s lead in seeking the application for The Comedy’s lessons in our own lives. By the way, the poem is called a comedy because it has a happy ending. It’s worth reading all ninety-nine cantos to come to it.

Dee and I are planning to expand our two-some to include a few others for our next book. Anyone care to join us in Troy?