The Best American Poetry

July Market Report [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

My husband’s recent diagnosis of celiac disease came as a complete shock to both of us. He had been experiencing many months of debilitating symptoms that had been attributed variously to chemotherapy, post-surgery recovery, and an intractable infection. Doctors told us that his symptoms would wax and wane and that he might just have to live with them. 

Finally, and almost as an afterthought, his oncologist Dr. Dean Bajorin ordered the simple blood test for celiac (“highly unlikely, but we may as well be sure.”). Within a week we had a preliminary diagnosis, within two, it was confirmed by a biopsy.

Continue reading . . . 

Korean American Feminist Poetry [by Anna Maria Hong]

Hi! I’m very excited to be guest blogging for The Best American Poetry this week, as I’ve been an admirer of the series for a long time and am a fan of the persons editing the series and this blog. I love that writers here have the leeway to talk about anything, and if I do this again I may write about ‘70s divas, the perfect Manhattan, and what my dog would say if he could talk, but for this, my first run, I will keep my posts poetry-centric, writing today about three Korean American feminist poetry panels that I’m participating in or have recently produced.

The first of these panels took place last March at the Thinking Its Presence: Race, Creative Writing, and Literary Study Conference at the University of Montana, Missoula, an invigorating new forum produced by the poets Prageeta Sharma and Joanna Klink, who founded the conference in 2014 to “examine innovative creative writing and scholarship that re-thinks the complex and inseparable links between literary forms and the racialized thinking, processes, and histories that have shaped this country since its founding.” The conference takes its title from scholar Dorothy Wang’s book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013), which in turn takes the phrase "thinking its presence" from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's poem "Chinese Space" from her collection Empathy. As Adrienne Rich said, one never knows what the life of a poem will be.

Featured readers at this year’s conference included the keynote speaker Claudia Rankine who delivered a mind-rousing reading from Citizen, John Keene who read a terrific story from his new fiction collection Counternarratives, William S. YellowRobe who read from his strange play Native American Paranormal Society, and the irrepressible Marilyn Chin. Panel topics encompassed technoshamanism, how translation fractals race, tributes and responses to Amiri Baraka’s work, and the personal essay, among other lively subjects.

I produced and moderated a panel titled Why KA? FP with the poets Youna Kwak, Hannah Sanghee Park, and Franny Choi. (The “F” stands for feminist. I like the idea of Feminist Poetry as the answer to most questions.) I wanted to enact this panel to feature the writing of these talented and forthright writers, to discuss phenomena we address as KAF poets, and to draw attention to these experiences through our very presence. Small though our numbers were, this was one of the largest gatherings of KAF poets we’d known, and certainly so including the audience.

Gathering together in person affords the opportunity to have a fluid conversation, so after reading new work, we discussed a few questions including the following:

• Where did you see yourself in children's stories when you were children or young writers?
• What is an enjoyable racialized poetic moment that you've experienced lately?
• What is the most annoying question that you're frequently asked?
• What is a question that you would like to be asked?
• How do you write good poems?

Then we opened up the discussion to the audience who asked excellent questions, making for an enjoyable, idea-provoking, sustaining experience.

I will mention that these poets’ writing styles vary tremendously, as you may see by reading the poems below, and as I expect they will among the poets on the two Korean American female poet panels I’ll be participating in next April, both produced by the young award-winning writers Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and EJ Koh. The first panel will take place at the AWP Conference in Los Angeles; the second will happen at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C.

The presenters on the AWP panel will include Marci, EJ, Hannah, and Franny; Arlene Kim will also present on the Split This Rock panel. We’re working out the details of what we’ll be focusing on, but here’s a list of “13 Reasons to Do a Korean American Female Poetry Panel" that we’ve come up with:

1. To feature new writing by exciting poets.
2. To redress underrepresentation of new writing by KAFP.
3. We are tired of hearing, "Your English is great. Where are you from?"
4. To disabuse the notion that we are overrepresented.
5. Korean adoptees coming of age now are seeking someone to speak to their experiences and discovering silence.
6. To do something other than eat Korean BBQ in LA.
7. Korean Americans are more than K-pop, kimchi, and great skincare products.
8. Though we’ve been confused for each other, we are only sometimes confused.
9. To deflate the distrust engendered by misogyny and white hegemony.
10. To speak to Korean American women who are not pretending to be Korean American women.
11. To express solidarity (yep) with other women of color.
12. To respectfully disagree.
13. To disrupt centuries of silence.

Throughout the week, I’ll be featuring new poems by contemporary American poets whose work and persons I like. The first poem is by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello from her collection Hour of the Ox, winner of the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, forthcoming in 2016 from the University of Pittsburgh Press. This poem originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of Thrush Poetry Journal.

 

Brother Returns As Chrysanthemum

Didn’t we think we were more than this—
little suns unfurling above the earth? 

We thought we were constellations
in soil, entire galaxies anchored to dust.

Ravenous, we believed our thousand
arms could hoard the horizon—

eclipsing ourselves even as we waned,
bereft of all but shadow.

Arlene Kim, author of What have you done to our ears to make us hear echoes? (Milkweed Editions), wrote the following poem, which first appeared on diode:

 

American Gothic: Revival

        . . . these are the very hours during which solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys . . .


                                                                                                        —from Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet 

Dear Rilke, I am not young and I am not a poet. I slink around the city, disaster-footed, sure for danger, face unknown, I pull my hoodie up. I snick around, I slink around the city’s back. Short for danger. My motherless face bagged. I like a girl at Taco Bell but she knows only my voice. I wear my clothes like a blanket around the shipwreck of my body, the et cetera of my body. Like Dracula, I don’t exist. There is no such thing as a moonless night. There are only nights and nights in a blown together indigo accordion. I’m there at 2 a.m. to shut down Leilani’s, pilfer burritos and lumpia. I like to keep zippered all the way. I like the sound my skateboard makes on the asphalt. I think dreadlock is a funny way of putting it. I call my face a jihad. I, the lesser victor. I call my face a tattoo. One my father gave me—someone else’s face Frankensteined to mine. Inside my head, my father’s words,  notations, fatwas. My father stalks me like a footnote. Follows me—   when I see boards pasted with pictures of the missing, I look for my face. That is me, gone. It’s been much more than 24 hours. In society. Among citizens. I never take off my hood, because inside I’m all wolf. My reasons are still unknown.

Dear Rilke, I read your book. I read your book anyway.

 

The next poem is by EJ Koh, a Kundiman and MacDowell fellow and visiting scholar at the University of Washington, from her collection A Lesser Love:

To My Mother Kneeling in the Cactus Garden

For a month I tried to think of what to say.
How many times you’ve swept a kitchen knife
across your neckline and said, This is how
you end a marriage. How many more wicks you light
for god. I could tell by your eyes you’ve never 

seen him. What would you call the feeling
of abandon and caution and relief that keeps me
tethered to you? Let me be the husband
you prayed for, the son you wanted, or mother
who held you. I’ll build your new patio swing

and fold your coffee linens, wash your hardened
feet in warm water. To me you have become a prison
of its own light. I’ll grow greens and the parsley
you love and wrap them into cold sandwiches.
I will place them where you can reach with ease.

 

Here’s a fablesque poem by Franny Choi, the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing):

http://thejournalmag.org/archives/9907

There’s fancy footwork in this poem from Hannah Sanghee Park’s collection The Same-Different, which won the 2014 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/246710

And I’ll conclude today’s post with a verse/essay by Youna Kwak that appeared this summer in The Offing. Among other accomplishments, Youna recently earned her Ph.D. in the Department of French at NYU. I think of our fellow poets and friends in France in posting her verse essay “You”:

http://theoffingmag.com/essay/you/

On "What Shall We Ask of Writers?" by Albert Maltz (1946) [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Do his observations hold true today?

Over at Design*Sponge, one of my favorite blogs, Grace Bonney has introduced a new column wherein she asks favorite artists or designers to show and describe their teenage bedrooms. This got me thinking so I went through some old photos and found this one, of my sister:

She's reading "A Long Day in a Short Life," by Albert Maltz (1908 –1985), who wrote fiction, plays, and screenplays. Maltz was one of "the Hollywood Ten," a group of writers who were blacklisted when they refused to answer the House Un-American Activities Committee's questions about Communist Party affiliations, their own and those of their friends and colleagues. Maltz was fined and, in 1950, sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. Blacklisted in Hollywood and unable to work there for many years, he moved to Mexico after his release from prison and remained until 1962.

In 1946 Maltz published a controversial essay in which he criticized the shallow aesthetic tenets of the left, questioning whether art was to be used as a weapon in the class war. Here are a few excerpts.

It has been my conclusion for some time that much of left-wing artistic activity—both creative and critical-— has been restricted, narrowed, turned away from life, sometimes made sterile —because the atmosphere and thinking of the literary left wing has been based upon a shallow approach. Let me add that the left wing has also offered a number of vital intellectual assets to the writer—such as its insistence that important writing cannot be socially idle —that it must be humane in content, etc. Schneider enumerated these assets and I take them here for granted. But right now it is essential to discuss where things have gone wrong—why and how. I believe the effects of the shallow approach I have mentioned—like a poison in the bloodstream—largely cause the problems Schneider mentioned. Indeed, these problems are merely the pustules upon upon the body, the sign of ill health . . .

Whatever its original stimulating utility in the late twenties or the early thirties, this doctrine—"art is a weapon" —over the years, in day-to-day wear and tear, was converted from a profound analytic, historical insight into a vulgar slogan: "art should be a weapon." This, in turn, was even more narrowly interpreted into the following: "art should be a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon." Finally, in practice, it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessities and programs, it is worthless or escapist or vicious. The result of this abuse and misuse of a concept upon the critic's apparatus of approach has been, and must be, disastrous. From it flow all of the constrictions and—we must be honest— stupidities—-too often found in the earnest but narrow thinking and practice of the literary left wing in these past years. And this has been inevitable. First of all, under the domination of this vulgarized approach, creative works are judged primarily by their formal ideology. What else can happen if art is a weapon as a leaflet is a weapon? If a work, however thin or inept as a piece of literary fabric, expresses ideas that seem to fit the correct political tactics of the time, it is a foregone conclusion that it will be reviewed warmly, if not enthusiastically. But if the work, no matter how rich in human insight, character portrayal and imagination, seems to imply "wrong" political conclusions, then it will be indicted, severely mauled or beheaded—as the case may be. 

Maltz was criticized harshly for the essay, so much so that he printed a retraction. Too bad. Do you think his observations hold true today? 

You can read the complete essay here. 

Maltz wrote the film "The House I Live In," a short in which Frank Sinatra teaches a group of children about religious tolerance. The title song is inspiring. You can read more about the film in David Lehman's book Sinatra's Century: One-Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. 

Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood-Lehman; Ghost Poet: Edgar Allan Poe

My final "Medium of the Month" post over at the Inquisitive Eater: 

Who better to usher in Halloween than Edgar Allan Poe, the master of horror, suspense, and the macabre. Does your lifelong fear of being buried alive originate with Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”? Do you ever lie awake imagining a heart is beating from beneath the floorboards? You have Poe to thank for your nightmares. He brilliantly locates our collective fears and animates them in the short stories and poems written over the course of his brief and mysterious life. His ballad “Annabel Lee” hovers over Vladimir Nobokov’s “Lolita,” whose protagonist’s first love is “Annabel Leigh.”  (“When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel [Leigh] was no nymphet to me”). Then there’s  “The Conqueror Worm,” an appropriately creepy poem that comes to us from beyond the grave. Poe describes a theater performance; the actors are “mimes,” the hero is a large worm that eats the actors. The curtain falls. Boo!

---

The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe

Lo! ’t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Wo!

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

 

Continue reading over at The Inquisitive Eater. . . 

Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood-Lehman; Ghost Poet: John Ciardi

I'm continuing my stint as Medium of the Month over at the Inquisitive Eater. Here's my most recent post: 

Today’s ghost poet is John Ciardi (1916-1986). In addition to being a professor and prolific poet, Ciardi produced an acclaimed translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In three linked sonnets, Ciardi’s poem “Aunt Mary” tells the story of the death and life of a lonely woman whose love was too much for those she loved (she “loved us till we screamed . . .”). She’s the aunt who squeezed your cheeks too hard, forced you to kiss her, hugged you to her bosom (which smelled of drugstore perfume), and wanted so desperately to be loved that you turned away. Ciardi’s use of alliterative slant rhymes (peppers, pressure, scorchers) and repetition carries you along to the poem’s sad end. Stanza two conjures the messy, crowded, noisy immigrant household that Ciardi, the son of Italian immigrants, may have experienced in his own childhood. The poem begins with macabre humor but ends with the narrator’s graveside epiphany and understanding of his loss.

Aunt Mary died of eating twelve red peppers
        after a hard day’s work. The doctor said
        it was her high blood pressure finished her.
        As if disease were anything to Aunt Mary
        who had all of her habits to die of! But imagine
        a last supper of twelve red peppers, twelve
        of those crab-apple size dry scorchers
        you buy on a string at Italian groceries,
        twelve of them fried in oil and gobbled off
        (Aunt Mary was a messy eater)—and then,
        to feel the room go dizzy, and through your blood
        the awful coming on of nothing more
        than twelve red peppers you know you shouldn’t have eaten
        but couldn’t help yourself, they were so good.

Continue reading here. 

Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood-Lehman; Ghost Poet: W.H. Auden

In the spirit of Halloween, I'm serving up poets from the past for the New School's Inquisitive Eater. Here's my second post, about a W.H. Auden poem inspired by M.F.K. Fisher: 

M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992), could count among her many admirers the poet W. H. Auden (1907-1973) who in his introduction to Fisher’s “The Art of Eating” (MacMillan, 1954) boldly states: “I do not know anyone in the United States today who writes better prose.” He cites several examples, including the passage below.

“I now feel that gastronomical perfection can be reached in these combinations: one person dining alone, usually upon a couch or a hillside; two people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good restaurant; six people, of no matter what sex or age, dining in a good home. . . A good combination would be one married couple, for warm composure; one less firmly established, to add a note of investigation to the talk; and two strangers of either sex, upon whom the better-acquainted could sharpen their questioning wits . . .” (The Art of Eating, pg. 738)

Isn’t’ that terrific? Fisher’s conviction and specificity are qualities that make her writing so enjoyable, and so difficult to imitate, though many have tried.The essay from which the passage is taken (“From A to Z: The Perfect Dinner”) likely inspired Auden’s poem “Tonight at 7:30.” in which he translates into poetry what Fisher describes so deftly in prose. Here is a representative excerpt:

            For authentic 
comity the gathering should be small and unpublic:
at mass banquets where flosculent speeches are made
            in some hired hall
we think of ourselves or nothing. Christ’s cenacle
seated a baker’s dozen, King Arthur’s rundle
the same, but today, when one’s host may well be his own
           chef, servitor and scullion,
when the cost of space can double in a decade,
even that holy Zodiac number is
            too large a frequency for us:
in fact, six lenient semble sieges,
           none of them perilous,

            Is now a Perfect
Social number. But a dinner party,
            however select,
is a worldly rite that nicknames or endearments
            or family
diminutives would profane: two doters who wish
to tiddle and curmurr between the soup and fish
belong in restaurants, all children should be fed
            earlier and be safely in bed.
Well-liking, though, is a must: married maltalents
engaged in some covert contrast can spoil
           an evening like the glance
of a single failure in the toil
            of his bosom grievance.

Continue reading over at The Inquisitive Eater

 

Blog Exclusive: Bill Hayward's portraits, and Bob Dylan [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

The first Act in Bill Hayward's stunning Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs is a series of "traditional portraits." While he includes images that one would describe as "traditional," others hint at Bill's impulse toward abstraction and experimentation. President Ronald Reagan, for the cover of Fortune magazine, appears Presidential; on closer examination you can see that Bill has captured--in the tilt of Reagan's head, his slightly raised eyebrow, his lips parted and his arms crossed--the former president's belligerence.There's playfulness in the portraits of dancers, with whom Bill has a unique sympathy that he's nurtured for his entire career. I love the portrait of New York City Ballet's Edward Villella. Only a true dance lover would know to capture Villella when his hands are arranged in the signature Balanchine style; fingers loose and separated so that when the dancer is in motion, the audience sees the entire hand. McCarthy-era attorney Roy Cohn looks appropriately sinister. An aging Milton Berle seated before a painting of cabbage roses reveals the dark side characteristic of so many comedians. Here's someone you know and love; his stance and expression daring you to guess at what he's thinking. What was he thinking? 

From Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs by Bill Hayward, © 2015, published by Glitterati Incorporated 

(Ed note: This week we're featuring photographs from Bill Hayward's Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs. Find yesterday's post here. sdh)

Blog Exclusive: Introducing Bill Hayward's "Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs" [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Photographer and filmmaker Bill Hayward has just published Chasing Dragons: An Uncommon Memoir in Photographs (Glitterati, September 2015). Uncommon it is, and beautiful, and quite possibly the first of its kind. Bill has agreed to let us share his artistic vision with you by featuring throughout the week images from his extraordinary book.

Chasing Dragons documents in photographs, paintings, and film stills, Bill Hayward’s evolution over five decades from portrait photographer to abstract painter, filmmaker, and multimedia artist. The heart of the book comprises 346 images in five acts that are subdivided into sections, each with a particular focus and accompanied by brief passages of text or poems. These images quicken the imagination with an energy that seems to jump off the page. You can read Douglas Glover’s in-depth review of Chasing Dragons here.

Both David and I have separately had the experience of being photographed by Bill. When I scheduled my session, Bill told me to clear my afternoon of any obligations and he wasn’t kidding. When I arrived at his studio he asked, as a prelude to our session, about the kitchen of my childhood home – my mother’s kitchen. Over the next several hours I built with paper and string and other odd pieces a kitchen table that would be my prop while Bill took pictures. Memories surfaced, some pleasant, some frightening. I left Bill’s studio at dusk feeling both lighter and more vulnerable, the way one might feel after a psychological breakthrough. (The novelist Justin Taylor describes his photo session with Bill here.)

Over the years we’ve often written about or featured Bill Hayward’s work on this blog. If you're a fan, you'll welcome his new book; if you don't know Bill's work, now is your chance to discover this visionary artist.

sdh

Medium of the Month: Stacey Harwood; Ghost Poet: Ben Jonson

I'm thrilled to be "Medium of the Month" over at The New School's The Inquisitive Eater. Here's my first selection: 

Stacey Harwood,  poet laureate of the New York Greenmarkets and New School faculty member (where she teaches ‘Food Narratives’), serves as our Medium of the Month for October. She brings the voices of poets past to The Inquisitive Eater this Halloween season. Welcome, Stacey.

 

A persistent fantasy of mine is that someday I’ll convince a team of great chefs to prepare a meal based on Ben Jonson’s poem  “Inviting a Friend to Supper.”

I read the poem as having three parts: the fawning invitation, the description of the groaning board, and the promise of a convivial atmosphere. I love that up front Jonson stresses that the company is more important than the meal. And from today’s vantage point, Jonson comes off as the original locavore: the food must be seasonal and affordable (And, though fowl, now, be scarce, yet there are clerks, / The sky not falling, think we may have larks.).

 Continue reading over at The Inquisitive Eater. . . 

On the lookout for aphorisms thanks to Yahia Lababidi [by Stacey Harwood]

After reading Yahia's first post, I've tried to become more alert to aphorisms in my reading. Today, while reading W. H. Auden's introduction to The Portable Elizabethan And Jacobean Poets: Marlowe to Marvell, I came across this. What do you think Yahia? 

"Only stupid people are without affection and only dishonest ones think of themselves as rational."

sdh

From the archive: 9/11/2008 (by Stacey Harwood)

My office is in a building adjacent to Ground Zero.  The ceremonies are about to begin. The ramp at the far end of the pit is lined with flags of the victims' homelands. Otherwise, there isn't much to see.  A few more tourists than usual, and overnight, employees in one of the office buildings managed to drape an "Obama for President" banner across two floors.

-- sdh

Goodbye Bubble Wrap! Thanks for the Memories . . . [by Stacey Harwood]

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Sealed Air will introduce iBubble, a version of Bubble Wrap that will not pop under pressure.

In the early 1960s, when my father was a salesman for Ethyl Visqueen Corporation, Sealed Air was one of his customers (along with Orchids of Hawaii, the makers of plastic leis). Whenever he returned from a sales call to Sealed Air's New Jersey factory, he brought home samples of Bubble Wrap that I could take to school and distribute like contraband to my classmates. Whatever brief periods of grade-school POPularity I experienced I owe to Bubble Wrap.

The samples were packaged like pages in a loose-leaf notebook and smelled like gasoline. Once, the company experimented with Bubble Wrap in primary colors that it hoped to introduce as gift wrap; another time Sealed Air came up with sheets comprising large “bubbles” roughly one-inch in diameter. These were more difficult to pop and were more likely to deflate than to burst, which may not have hurt its value for packaging but was disappointing from the point of view of children wanting to disrupt the classroom with a chorus of fart noises.

My suburban childhood home was partially furnished by Bubble Wrap. When we discovered my mother’s allergy to feathers, we removed the offending filling from our living-room furniture and replaced it with wads of Bubble Wrap. Drafty windows? Bubble Wrap. 

One day my father arrived home with two extra-large rolls of the stuff.  These my mother turned on their sides and disguised with slip-covers fashioned from yellow fake fur, for lightweight portable seating. 

--sdh

Happy 4/20 Mom! [by Stacey Harwood]

My Mother's Hands, April, 2013

My mother was a grade school teacher for over 30 years. She taught both 3rd grade and kindergarten in the public school system and was one of those teachers who changed the display outside of her class room for every season and holiday. She made intricate murals that were quite beautiful and imaginative. She used craft paper, felt, and cotton fluff and whatever else was on hand and would cut out shapes with scissors and paste them to the background. I seem to remember helping her but I'm not certain that I did.

My mother in one of her aprons.

My mother was also a talented seamstress: She made aprons and a new set of kitchen curtains for every season. She made a play-circus tent that fit over a card table. She made fake-fur slip covers for giant rolls of bubble wrap that we used for seating (my father was a plastics salesman and Sealed Air was one of his customers).  She knew how to mend things and taught me how to do the same. ("Mend" is such an antique word.) She sewed our Halloween costumes and matching outfits for my sisters and me. A lot of cross-stitch and rick rack were involved.

My brother Hunter ready for trick or treat

L to R: Hunter, Stacey, Tami, and Amy Harwood

This is all to say that in addition to working with her mind, my mother loved working with her hands; it breaks my heart that she is unable to do so anymore because of her severe arthritis. It is only with great difficulty that she can unscrew a bottle or open a bag of frozen vegetables. Plus, she's in constant pain. "You don't know the half of it," she said, when I asked her how bad it had gotten.

When I read about the relief that marijuana brings to arthritis sufferers I was eager to find a way for my mother to try it. I didn't want her to get high -- she lives alone -- so the usual delivery systems were not an option. There were recipes online for a tincture that could be applied topically but I had no way of controlling the strength or safety of something I would concoct myself. I've followed the medical marijuana scene closely and am impressed with what the communities are coming up with in California, Seattle, and Colorado. While medical marijuana is now legal in New York, the rules are so complicated and arcane that it will likely be years before anyone can experience its benefits. 

Then, a year or so ago friends visited from San Francisco. Turned out that they knew someone who knew the person behind "Doc Green's Pain Relief Cream."  A few weeks after our friends returned home, a well disguised package arrived with a 4 oz jar of lavender scented theapeutic cream inside. My mother's early April birthday seemed the perfect occassion for her to give it a try.

The cream has a silky texture and is lightly scented. "It feels lovely when I put it on," says my mother. And yes, it helps a lot with the pain. She's began by using it on her shoulder but lately has needed it for her hands and wrists. Sometimes, it's the only thing that works when the unbearable pain keeps her awake. 

I've since discovered new sources for marijuana based healing balms, cooked up in home kitchens by forward-thinking generous entrepreneurs. It angers me that such a useful product is not readily available. 

-- SDH

(This is an update of a post previously publish in April, 2013.)

Overheard: University Place & 14th Street [by Stacey Harwood]

He: I'm on a new diet.

She: No, what diet?

He: Didn't I tell you about the challenge?

She: No.

He: It's with SoulCycle. I signed up. 

She: Soulcycle? Ugh. So first they torture you and then they starve you? 

-- sdh

The Inquisitive Eater: What's Cooking Diego (Velázquez)? [by Stacey Harwood]

Diego Velázquez, An Old Woman Cooking Eggs. 1618, Scottish National Gallery. Edinburg. © Trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland

A Masterpiece in Texture and Culinary History

Diego Velázquez (1599-1660) was in his late teens when he painted the masterpiece, “An Old Woman Cooking Eggs,” now on view at the Frick Collection, together with other paintings on loan from the Scottish National Gallery.  Art lovers and culinary historians can benefit from multiple viewings of this stunning achievement.

The painting depicts an old woman doing precisely what the title claims while a young boy stands by holding a flask in his left hand and cradling a rope-wrapped melon in the crook of his right arm.  It is an example of the bodegón, paintings of humble kitchen and tavern life, at which Velázquez and his contemporaries excelled during the Spanish Golden Age.

Continue reading at The Inquisitive Eater. . . 

Point, Click, Shop! A Few Holiday Gift Suggestions [by Stacey Harwood]

1. New and Selected Poems by David Lehman "Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.” - Ken Tucker

2. The Best American Poetry 2014 guest editor Terence Hayes. "One of the strongest volumes in recent years, Hayes makes an offering to readers: "salute what I salute, and be transformed as I have been transformed." " Publishers Weekly

3. This Way Out by Terence Winch. "Winch's seventh collection is "imaginative, soulful, and funny...THIS WAY OUT gives us Terence Winch at the top of his game."—Bob Hicok

4. Holistic Tarot by Bennebell Wen “Benebell Wen’s erudite, personable guide to Tarot is essential reading not only for Tarot learners, but for writers, artists and anyone interested in the mysteries of the human psyche." -- Amy Glynn

5. Paul Violi: Selected Poems 1970-2007 "These poems consistently amaze but never veer into implausible flights of fancy and always remind readers to celebrate the world." --Publishers Weekly

6. Short: An International Anthology of Five Centuries of Short-Short Stories, Prose Poems, Brief Essays, and Other Short Prose ed. Alan Zeigler “Essential reading for anyone interested in the short form.... The array of writers is unprecedented, and the pieces are fabulous, engaging, and, well, they’re short!”  —Gary Shteyngart 

7. Spin Cycles by Charles Coe "Charles Coe has done something remarkable and indispensable. He has reminded us, as the best fiction always does, that every person has a story to tell, even that sad, disheveled, and vaguely disturbing street-wanderer from who we a avert our eyes when we pass." –William Martin, Back Bay and The Lincoln Letters

8. Castrata: a Conversation by Laura Orem "Castrata" is a conversation across history—a conversation about the body’s centrality in grief, rage, and ultimately in triumph" -– Leslie McGrath, author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage and By the Windpipe.

9. Why God is a Woman by Nin Andrews "On the island where I grew up--Virginia in the 1960s--mothers told their daughters, 'it's a man's world.' Nin Andrews stands that world on its head, throwing its absurdities into sharp and witty relief. But her poems are for men as well as women, inviting us all to re-imagine love, desire, death, and visions of paradise."—Anne-Marie Slaughter

10. Bloof Books Just about any title from this hard working small press will please and delight. Here you will find recent titles by Danielle Pafunda, Sandra Simonds, Jennifer L. Knox, and Peter Davis.

12. Poets have to make a living. Jennifer L. Knox has figured it out with Saltlickers, her inspired and inspiring line of flavored salts. All natural, with "no preservatives or other creepy shiznit." I made gravlax. 

13. Give the gift of giving. Heather McHugh, poet and guest editor of BAP 2007 established Caregifted to give long term caregivers "a week off, to give them a week where they’re magically transported to this breathtakingly gorgeous place of nature and art, and let them sleep late if they want, relieved of the duties of caregiving.” Caregifted deserves our support. 

14. Ports of New York Meleu Port-style wine. Because it's delicious. Because Frédéric Bouché loves poetry. 

15. Todos Santos Writers Workshop. Beautiful setting, brilliant faculty. You deserve it. 

-- sdh

What Would Kafka Do? [by Stacey Harwood]

On October 21, 1985, The New Yorker published this poem by Raymond Carver:
 
Kafka’s Watch

I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns, and
an infinite eight to nine hours of work.
I devour the time outside of the office like a wild beast.
Someday I hope to sit in a chair in another
country, looking out the window at fields of sugarcane
or Mohammedan cemeteries.
I don’t complain about the work so much as abou
the sluggishness of swampy time.  The office hours
cannot be divided up!  I feel the pressure
of the full eight or nine hours even in the last
half hour of the day.  It’s like a train ride
lasting night and day.  In the end you’re totally
crushed.  You no longer thing about the straining
of the engine, or about the hills or
flat country, but ascribe all that’s happening
to your watch alone.  The watch which you continually hold
in the palm of your hand.  Then shake.  And bring slowly
to your ear in disbelief. 

            To a devoted Carver fan, the poem seemed uncharacteristic: more lush than the spare style that tagged Carver as “minimalist.”  I loved the poem, clipped it, and committed it to memory.

            Ten years later while reading Kafka’s letters, I came across this passage, written in October 1907, when Kafka was 24 and had begun work for the Italian insurance company Assicuraziono Generali:

 

             My life is completely chaotic now.  At any rate, I have a job with a tiny salary of 80 crowns and an immense eight to nine hours of work; but I devour the hours outside the office like a wild beast.  Since I was not previously accustomed to limiting my private life to six hours, and since I am also studying Italian and want to spend the evenings of these lovely days out of doors, I emerge from the crowdedness of my leisure hours scarcely rested . . .

            I am in the Assicurazioni Generali and have some hopes of someday sitting in chairs in faraway countries, looking out of the office windows at fields of sugar cane or Mohammedan cemeteries; and the whole world of insurance itself interests me greatly, but my present work is dreary.

            I don’t complain about the work so much as about the sluggishness of swampy time.The office hours, you see, cannot be divided up; even in the last half hour I feel the pressure of the eight hours just as much as in the first.Often it is like a train ride lasting night and day, until in the end you’re totally crushed; you no longer think about the straining of the engine, or about the hilly or flat countryside but ascribe all that’s happening to your watch alone, which you continually hold in your palm . . .

My immediate reaction was dismay. Although I know all about collage and "sampling"  I wondered about the propriety of what RC had done. Did he take too many liberties? Does the title indicate that this is a “found” poem? When Carver later published Kafka’s Watch in a collection, he added the epigraph “from a letter.” Does that addition make it right? Or is it plagiarism pure and simple?

Would Kafka approve?  Do you?

-- sdh

"Jeweat?" Tips from Ethel Cotton's 1960 Course in Conversation [by Stacey Harwood]

A few years ago at the Tompkins County Friends of the Library sale I picked up a complete Ethel Cotton 1960 Course in Conversation comprising twelve lessons that promise to turn a shy wall flower into a master of repartee. Here's a tip for today: 

More on #5:

A Public Service Announcement: How to tie a bow-tie [by Stacey Harwood]

The bow-tie is having more than a moment. Consider this: David and I recently visited Benjamin Peters mens' clothing store in Ithaca, New York. Where just a few years ago the bow-ties would have been relegated to a small corner of a display case, they now occupy a full rack in prime real-estate near the front of the store. Every day we spot fashionable young men sporting bow-ties. At the recent celebration of Mark Strand, David and John Guare compared notes on their preference for the bow-tie, and David came to its defence recently in the New York Times .

This, in my view, is a positive development along with the Mad Men inspired return to the fedora. 

So get on board, little children, and dress like grown ups! If not knowing how to tie a bow-tie is the only thing holding you back, I'm here to help. These are instructions from The Art of Manliness, one of my favorite websites, introduced to me  in 2009 by Sally Ashton:

Click over to the Art of Manliness website to watch the "How to Tie a Bow Tie" video. 

You will have to practice but mastering the bow-tie is worthwhile. Soon you will be as expert as Paul F. Tompkins. Richard Sherman breaks it down here: 

Yes You Can!

Details here.

Fall Haiku by Stacey Harwood

Saturday market
In Union Square: Cantaloupes
Alongside apples.

Confused by weather
The woman on the subway
Wears socks and sandals.

Turning a corner,
Into Sixth Avenue wind,
The man holds his hat.

At Gonzo cafe
On Thirteenth, outdoor tables
Are empty by eight.

Looking up, nothing.
On the horizon, two lights
Grow brighter, then dim.

(from the New York Times, October 4, 2004)