The Best American Poetry

The Genesis of my "Dear John" [Ashbery] Letter [by Stephanie Paterik]

My socks didn’t match. That was my first mortifying thought as I shucked my shoes in John Ashbery’s foyer. They were almost the same color, but not quite, and this was not how I’d hoped to greet a living legend.

The mood during Ashlab’s first pilgrimage from Manhattan to Hudson, N.Y., had been exuberant. Like kids on a field trip, we were visiting Mr. Ashbery’s house to see how the poems are made. Yet as our van pulled up to the Victorian mansion, a hush rushed through the group. We stepped inside, slid off our shoes and nearly tip-toed onto the opulent floral rugs. If we were poets in the New York School tradition, this was our cathedral.

Was it Mr. Ashbery’s grand life and home, or the nature of our assignment that inspired such reverence? The home’s front rooms conjure a museum, with curated artwork and antiques arranged with a devilish sense of humor that draws you close. Is that a painting of a bleeding man above the baby grand? Is that a modern black and white photograph over a pink velvet love seat? Is the chandelier missing a bead or two, tucked behind a stone bust? What about the nutcracker beside porcelain nuts? You might be a guest in a private home, or you might be wandering through the latest MoMA exhibit.

We obsessively photographed everything we saw, observing the scene more than entering it. I took 333 photos and connected most with the everyday objects -- the lone spoon in the dish strainer, the Ivory soap bottle, the vitamins, the honey, the collection of twisty-ties, the Mod Podge, the A.A. Milne book Now We Are Six.

Then, there was our weighty task: to map the home of one of America’s most influential poets. You cannot document anything for posterity without thinking about the inevitability of loss. If poets lived forever, we would not need photographs. If poets lived forever, their homes would not become museums. If poets lived forever, we could ask them, endlessly, how they wrote this line, what they meant by that book, which honey is best for morning tea. (Mr. Ashbery might answer Tupelo: The Cadillac of All Honey, which sits on his kitchen counter.)

My mind turned to Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who passed away the same month we visited Hudson (Feb. 2012), and the pain of knowing I could never read another “new” Szymborska poem. I also thought of an episode of This American Life about the warehouse of memories that disappears with us. Our time to create and to record knowledge is finite. Archivists can only preserve so much.

Mr. Ashbery descended the stairs that afternoon to thank us for our work, and we gave thanks to him. Not just for opening his home, but for opening his interior life through poetry. As our van pulled away, the mood was meditative. I began to write Mr. Ashbery a letter, which turned into an epistolary poem. The sun disappeared behind the Hudson River as I wrote.

I placed a short version of that poem in my thesis manuscript. And when my thesis advisor, David Lehman, saw it, he asked to publish it on The Best American Poetry blog and to send a copy to Mr. Ashbery.

The poem was meant for him all along, with gratitude and reverence. Click here to my post of April 23, 2012.  http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/04/dear-john-ashbery-that-is-by-stephanie-paterik.html

  -- Stephanie Paterik

"How to Write a Love Poem"- Part 1 [by Stephanie Paterik]

Arguably the biggest occupational hazard of the poet is that sooner or later, your lover will request a love poem.

If you are either very cocky or very skilled, you might whip out a fountain pen and write a fitting ode upon a cocktail napkin.

But if you possess the slightest doubt about your abilities, or about the notion of "love poems" in general, you might quiver in your oxfords.  

Most writers I know agree the love poem is the hardest to write. Breakup poems? Child's work. Meditations on death? No problem. Pastoral portraits and comic scenarios? They can be rendered with fair effort. But the love poem risks sentimentality, vulnerability, cliché -- and worst of all, the probability of falling short in its attempt to capture the enormity of the emotion.

For all of these reasons, love poems impress and intimidate the heck out of me. So on the eve of March, an hour before kissing February good-bye, I find myself researching the history of love poems, revisiting modern favorites and distilling some lessons from them all.

Lesson No. 1: Follow Clichés to their Roots

When I think of love poems, the verse that pops into my head is "roses are red / violets are blue." It's inevitable, and it makes me equate all love-y verse with shallow greeting cards. Who wants any part of that? 

But as is the case with so many clichés, this flower stems from an interesting seed. 

Edmund Spenser (pictured at the top) immortalized the image of red roses and blue violets in 1590 with his epic poem, The Faerie Queene:

 

It was upon a Sommers shynie day,

When Titan faire his beames did display,

In a fresh fountaine, farre from all mens vew,

She bath'd her brest, the boyling heat t'allay;

She bath'd with roses red, and violets blew,

And all the sweetest flowers, that in the forrest grew.

In the following stanzas, Chrysogone falls asleep in the grass and is impregnated by sunbeams, leading to the birth of faerie twins. The goddesses Venus and Diana steal the newborns. Not exactly the stuff of greeting cards!

Spenser was more concerned with supporting Queen Elizabeth I and the Reformation than writing a transcendent love poem. But the sensuality in his verse is far more inspiring than the versions that arrived centuries later.

He's also known for "Amoretti," a sonnet cycle exploring his courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Boyle. She's rendered as his practical if not unromantic counterpoint, which gives the poems a tantalizing tension. In the sonnet "One Day I Wrote her Name," Spenser writes: 

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

 But came the waves and washed it away:

 Again I wrote it with a second hand,

 But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

 "Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

 A mortal thing so to immortalize;

 For I myself shall like to this decay,

 And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

(If you're interested in Spenser, you'll enjoy this thorough biography over at the Poetry Foundation.)

So how did Spenser's roses and violets make their way to us? Two hundred years after he penned the lines, they appeared in a collection of English nursery rhymes called Gammer Gurton's Garland:

 

The rose is red, the violet's blue,

The honey's sweet, and so are you.

Thou are my love and I am thine;

I drew thee to my Valentine:

The lot was cast and then I drew,

And Fortune said it shou'd be you. 

 

And a hundred years after that, in 1862, the image swam the English channel to appear in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, in which Fantine sings "violets are blue, roses are red / violets are blue, I love my loves." It sounds lovely in French, which gives us the pleasurable slant rhyme: 

 

Les bleuets sont bleus, les roses sont roses,

Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours.

So our Valentine cliché has an alluring literary tradition, and simply knowing that helps me embrace the love poem a little more. Next Thursday, I'll share some favorite love poems and lessons from current writers. 

Until then, xo February.

***

Prompt: Find a love poem you admire, be it classic or modern, and determine what makes it successful. Next week - some prompts to help write one.

Images: "Prince Arthur and the Fairy Queen" by Henry Fuseli (middle) and 1901 edition of Mother Goose (bottom).

Putting Down the Hammer [by Stephanie Paterik]

I’ve been a happy renter all of my adult life, relishing the freedom of a short-term lease. But in the fall, without warning, the unfamiliar desire for a place of my own crept into my bones.

It might have started at last year’s AWP conference in Chicago, where a group of poets lectured on the craft of assembling a manuscript. They said you need a room of your own, a space where you can hang poems on walls – live with them, listen to them, rearrange them. New Yorkers in the audience (myself included) laughed out loud as we pictured our studio and one-bedroom apartments with wall-to-wall furniture.

But, wouldn’t it be nice?

Pretty soon, I couldn’t stomach the cranky landlady, hang artwork on other people’s nails, or live with Rental Apartment White on the walls. Quickly and miraculously, my husband and I found a good deal, closed on a home and hired contractors to begin renovations last week. 

Every other night, we take three trains to Brooklyn to visit our home. I bring a book and enjoy the anticipation. When we arrive, we swing open the door, turn on the lights and find our space transformed.

On Day 1, the floors were meticulously covered with paper. Day 2, a living room wall disappeared and old brick, wood and piping were exposed. Day 3, brick and wood gave way to gleaming white columns. We order pizza and sit on the floor of our empty apartment, appreciating all of it.

Tomorrow, a light fixture might show up. A countertop might come down. We never see the workers – we never see the work – so it feels as if our home is inventing itself day-by-day, eager to surprise and please. I know it’s the product of sweat and craft, but I like to pretend there’s some magic involved.

I felt the same way watching my parents’ first house rise out of the desert. We would visit the dirt lot to take pictures and appreciate every plank. The stakes with little red flags marking the construction perimeter seemed to grow straight out of the ground.

Perhaps not coincidentally, I’m rediscovering the joys of being a reader as I wait for my home to manifest. Usually, periods of reading but little writing fill me with guilt. I should be making something! I should be knocking down walls and writing lines! Who am I to enjoy another’s hard work without doing my own?

But this week, I’m content to admire other people’s creations – an indulgence we writers sometimes strip from ourselves.

I wonder, when you became a serious writer, did you also become a serious reader? Did you start studying the workmanship of novels and poems, breaking them apart to understand how to put yours together? And did that enhance your appreciation but diminish your ability to get lost in it a little bit? Did you start measuring how your own writing stacked up against everything you read, endlessly calculating the balance?

The beauty of the reader is her ability to open a book, be surprised and imagine that it made itself in an instant, or that it always existed. She almost can forget the creator, the toil – a literary Big Bang.

It’s fun to forget the work and rediscover the art of appreciation. Sometimes, there’s pleasure in putting down the hammer.

Prompt: Read something, anything for fun. If you’re looking for a recommendation, might I suggest The Paris Wife, a novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley? The author, Paula McLain, earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and published two poetry collections. It's so enjoyable, I'm actually losing sleep to read it.

Tongue-tied [by Stephanie Paterik]

The word utterance keeps coming to mind this week.

It’s not a word I’ve thought about before. If I saw it on the side of the road, surely I would drive by.

It means a cry, an animal’s call, a power of speaking ... one or more words preceded and followed by silence. It derives from the Middle French outrer, “to go beyond.”

Why's this on my mind? Perhaps because I’m reading poems by prisoners, preparing for a community poetry reading at St. Paul’s Chapel, and trying to crystallize my thoughts into daily blog posts.

All three remind me of the limits of language and the human desire to go beyond it. And that reminds me of speaking in tongues.

One quirk of my upbringing is that until I was 10, my parents ministered a small church in Phoenix, Arizona, called Springs in the Desert. Being a charismatic congregation founded by people who came of age during the Pentecostal movement, it was home to the kind of worship you don’t see every Sunday. 

The elementary school cafeteria that the church rented out would fill with guttural sounds, an eruption of dancing, singing and praying, voices layered over voices and tambourines. When someone faced a hardship, worshippers lay hands on the shoulders of the people in front of them, creating a human conduit of prayer. Some prayed in words, others prayed in tongues.

Like Alice in a mysterious wonderland, I was fascinated by the idea of a secret language of the soul. I imagined that one day I would open my mouth to say something perfectly plain, and an otherworldly utterance would fly out.

It never happened. My family moved on. But that early image of adults sending fervent, unintelligible words into the ether still mystifies me.

Glossolalia is the term for speaking and writing in tongues, and it means “utterances approximating words and speech.” Some studies have found that when people practice it, their language centers go dark and emotional centers light up, suggesting it’s not about language so much as emotional experience.

Augustine of Hippo looked askance on glossolalia but recognized jubilation, or “sounds of exaltation without words.” As a writer, I connect with his idea:

What is it to sing with jubilation? To be unable to understand, to express in words, what is sung in the heart. For singers, either in the harvest, or in the vineyard, or in any other busy work, after they have begun in the words of their hymns to exult and rejoice, being as it were filled with so great joy, that they cannot express it in words, then turn from actual words, and proceed to sounds of jubilation. The jubilee is a sound signifying that the heart laboureth with that which it cannot utter.

How often do you labor with what you cannot utter? I do all the time -- at this very moment, in fact! Utterance, then, is a yearning for pure expression, a desire to communicate something weightier than traditional language can bear. This could be the very definition of poetry.

Kei Miller’s poem “Speaking in Tongues” helps me understand the idea of utterance, and it’s worth listening to him read it here. The speaker recounts being dragged to church by his grandmother, and standing in awe of the language he witnessed:

 

I remember my grandmother unbecoming

the kind of woman who sets her table each Sunday,

who walks up from the river, water balanced easily

on her head. My grandmother became, instead,

all earthquake – tilt and twirl and spin,

her orchid-purple skirt blossoming.

She became grunt and rumble – sounds

you can only make when your shoes have fallen off

and you’re on the ground

crying raba and yashundai and

bababababababba

 

The poem pivots when the speaker, older now, meets a friend who ridicules tongue-speakers. The opportunity for embarrassment hangs low. Instead, the speaker surprises me by drawing his grandmother close and defending her practice, reframing it with his poetic lens:

 

[...] Years later a friend tells me

tongues is nothing but gibberish – the deluded

pulling words out of dust. I want to ask him

what is language but a sound we christen?

I would invite him to a tent where women

are tearing their stocking, are on the ground

pulling up fresh words to offer as doves to Jehovah.

I would ask if he sees no meaning here

and if he never had the urge to grunt

an entirely new sound. The poem, always,

would like to do this, always wants to break

from its lines and let a strange language rise up.

 

Whether we are prisoners, parishioners or poets, skeptics, believers or agnostics, we are united in our frustration with language.

It betrays us. It evades us. It comes up short when we need it most. It's why the things we care about are hardest to write.

And yet language is the best we have. So we pick up these humble words, we smash them into sounds, and if we’re writers, we glue them together again. We press our poems against the bars and hope something breaks through the clink.

When Bishop’s Crusoe eyes the knife, when Eliot dares to eat a peach, when Ammons beholds the garbage heap, they crack through -- they “go beyond” language to achieve a state of utterance.

Sometimes we prevail. Sometimes we fail. Dear reader, I love that we try!

***

Speaking of, don't you think The Best American Poetry blog is doing nothing short of mapping the poetic genome? Everything has a place, from Cary Grant’s birthday to a poet’s struggle with belief to a close reading of Dickinson to the beauty of the word “sure.” Thank you for letting me map out my small corner this week. It's been a pure pleasure.

Image: Voynich manuscript, which some believe to be an example of written glossolalia. 

Mark Your Mad Men Calendars for April 7! [by Stephanie Paterik]

Folks, our favorite literary television show announced today that it will return April 7 with a two-hour, movie-style premier. 

Brush up your O'Hara, stock up your vermouth and plan your parties accordingly -- and invite me, please!

"Mad Men" creator Matthew Weiner isn't giving much away about the penultimate season opener. But new cast photos suggest that Pete grows sideburns, Betty slims down and our favorite women, Megan, Peggy and Joan, are still in the picture.

"It has some cliffhanger elements to it, it does propel you into the rest of the season -- it does foreshadow a lot what the season is about," Weiner told The New York Times. "But I was like, I want to write a movie here, that we can create the atmosphere and vibe of the season.”

I don't know about you, but I'm always a little amazed that the show gets away with poetry. When Don Draper reads section four of Frank O'Hara's "Mayakovsky," it's like bumping into a good friend in an unexpected place. "What, you go here, too?" Confusion and happiness ensue.

 

Because of this, I find myself wondering, who are these writers? How did they find themselves in TV? And how can I take their jobs?

It turns out Weiner does most of the writing himself. He studied literature, philosophy and history at Wesleyan and got an MFA from USC. He penned the "Mad Men" pilot back in 1999 while working for "Becker."(!) The strength of that script landed him a gig with "The Sopranos," and he waited until the mob show wrapped to shop around his period drama.

Weiner spoke about the writing process with the Times last year, saying, "There's about a three-week rumination period, which involves a lot of napping, a lot of holding books. Whether I'm reading them or not, I cannot say." 

Sounds familiar.

When he started writing season six, he put off his best ideas, saving them for that nebulous "later." Finally, his producers told him, “go for broke, use up everything you have.”

“So I decided to throw it all in,” Weiner told the paper. 

David Lehman offers the same advice to poets. Don't put off writing the poem. Catch it when it comes to you. I can't wait to watch "Mad Men" go for broke, and can't help but wonder which 60s poet we'll run into next.

***

Your daily prompt: Recap a televesion show episode in poetic form.

-Stephanie Paterik

 

Photos by Frank Ockenfels/AMC

The Bruise on the Apple [By Stephanie Paterik]

About once a year, I'm compelled to humiliate myself in the form of a hip-hop workout class.

As a perfectionist, I don’t give myself many chances to fail. So it’s weirdly thrilling to slip into a studio alongside lithe, muscular men and women who learned to move their bodies to a beat in youth while I sat in a windowsill reading Madeleine L'Engle. I get a little rush knowing that I can’t do what they do, that the next hour will bring fresh embarrassments, that this will be ugly.

Every time I attend a class, I build up my tolerance to imperfection. Ten years ago, I walked out of a funk aerobics workout five minutes in. Yesterday, I stuck it out for 45 minutes before feigning an emergency phone call.

My lack of rhythm is what you might call “the bruise on the apple.” Lane DeGregory, an amazing writer and Pulitzer winner with the Tampa Bay Times, tells reporters to think of their subjects as apples. From a distance, the fruit is red, waxy, beautiful. But if you turn it in your hand, you are liable to find a bruise. 

Show the bruise on the apple, and your writing crackles with authenticity.

In verse, we call this balancing the poetic with the antipoetic. A tony studio full of agile dancers is poetry. The sight of me in the back row trying to grind my pelvis, do a hip pop and flip my hair to the tune of Genuwine's "Ride it My Pony" is antipoetry. I make the class more interesting! The class makes me more interesting! Everybody wins?

This was a hotly discussed topic at the New School, where the worst insult you could give a piece of writing was to call it “a Poem with a capital P.” That is to say, a poem with no antipoetry, no reality, no roughness. I’m grateful for a community that supports beauty but is skeptical of perfection. 

Every artist walks this aesthetic tightrope, and I draw inspiration from five who do it particularly well. Who are your favorites?

1. Louis CK

No city exemplifies the bruise on the apple better than, well, the Big Apple. Living here means experiencing the constant tension of life's glorious and revolting extremes. No one portrays this better than the comedian Louis CK, whose TV show is disgusting and heartwarming in nearly the same beat. Check out Season 2 Episode 6, which opens with a shot of a masterful musician playing the classical violin in the subway, then pans to a man undressing and bathing on the platform. This scene comes next:

 

2. Kohei Nawa

While wandering through the Met one day, I spotted a stunning object: a deer made out of giant glass beads. When I stepped closer, I realized the beads covered a real, taxidermied deer. Pix-Cell-Deer #24 lures me in and makes me recoil about 10 times whenever I visit it. The artist says, "By covering [the] surface of an object with transparent glass beads, the existence of the object itself is replaced by 'a husk of light.'"

3. Danita Geltner

I'm fortunate to be friends with the artist Danita Geltner, and one of the many reasons is that when I visit her Tribeca home, I get to enjoy the amazing sculptures she created in the 1980s and 1990s. My favorite is Inlet (below), made from acrylic rods, beach debris and bones covered with sea salt from the Dead Sea. She stopped making visual art to write poems, which similarly juxtapose the manmade with the natural and the harshness of death with the joys of life. Read her Pushcart-nominated poem "Being a City Girl, I Screamed" and see what I mean.

4. Wayne White

He's best known as one of the creative forces behind the 1980s kids show Pee-wee's Playhouse. When I watched it growing up, I had no idea it was an East Village art project. He's become famous again for drawing pop phrases on old thrift shop paintings, begging the question, which is the poetry and which is the antipoetry? PBS aired the entertaining documentary Beauty is Embarrassing about his work this week.

5. French street fashion

This isn't so much a person as it is everyday women on the rues of Paris. When I visited Montmartre last summer, I was taken with the way everyone incorporated hard/soft, high/low, pretty/ugly elements into their wardrobes. Take a women's dress with a sweet bird pattern, add a skull-and-crossbones zipper, and you have Parisian street style. Ines de la Fressange sums it up in her book Parisian Chic when she suggest pairing chiffon dresses with battered biker boots, diamond necklaces with denim shirts and tuxes with sneakers.

There's something to this sensibility, oui?

***

Daily prompt: Take a poem and underline the images that strike you as poetic, and double-underline the images that strike you as antipoetic. How are they working together? 

A Whale of a Cliché [by Stephanie Paterik]

Halfway through a poetry reading in a Greenwich Village bar where Bob Dylan used to perform, a peculiar trend emerged. 

The word “whale” was slipping out of the mouth of every other poet.

In a workshop a few days later, another whale swam into the room. After class, I flipped through a poetry collection only to find more blubber. There were blue whales, gray whales, humpbacks and orcas. Sperm whales, bottlenoses, delugas and fins. 

What was up with poets and whales?

I was a newcomer to New York and to poetry, and like the village outsider, I saw the place with fresh eyes. 

Yet the more readings I attended and the more poets I befriended, the more I felt the pull of poetry clichés. My vision grew cloudy. At the height of this blindness, I wrote a dreadful note to myself:

Write a poem about how when you first entered the poetry world, you found they were all obsessed with whales. Comical. End poem on a note about whales and their mysterious beauty.

Praise Whitman, I never wrote that poem.

I don't mean to pick on whales or anyone who has written about them, myself included! I mean to ask, how do we resist the poetry cliché? I'll tell you what I do, and I hope you'll share what works for you.

*Make a list of banned diction. This is a good bar game to play with poets--everyone shouts out words like moon and sycamore, someone makes a list, and you agree to exclude them from your next round of work. This is like when Top Chef contestants cook with one hand tied behind their backs and stun the judges with creative dishes.

*Take notes during your day job. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wished to make a living just writing poetry. But if that wish came true, my poems would suffer. Working in another field gives you access to an orphanage of language just waiting to be adopted by poetic parents.

Rescue words wherever you can! While editing a business magazine, for example, I open a Word document and copy all of the unusual language I come across. I met the term hot-swappable that way.

*Use the language of your hobbies. David Lehman taps his knowledge of Jewish composers to lively effect in his poems. My friend Amanda Smeltz makes sonnets out of hip-hop lyrics. Julie Sheehan introduced us to the language of cocktails, and Louise Glück to the language of flowers. I'm thankful for them.

*Watch old films from the '40s and '50s. In The Philadelphia Story, Katharine Hepburn defines the archaic word “yare.” It’s wonderful. ("It means, oh what does it mean? Easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, bright -- everything a boat should be.")

 

The only time I’ve read this word is in The Tempest, and I can't find it in my Webster's dictionary. Classic films are time capsules for dated phrases, transatlantic accents and sing-songy cadences that no one, save Kelsey Grammer, uses anymore. Resurrecting old clichés is fair game.

*Lastly, read Middle and Old English. I know, I know, it sounds masochistic! But once you start, it’s intuitive, and you pick up all kinds of awesome words. A professor at Cambridge made our class perform an entire play in Old English, and I'm still grateful for the experience. 

Along those lines, I use Forgotten English Knowledge Cards as prompts. Some gems include:

gimlet-eyed: A sharp-sighted, inquisitive person in the nineteenth century.

gander-moon: The month of recovery after a woman gives birth. A husband who took interest in other women during this time was called a gander-mooner, in reference to a gander who wanders off while his mate hatches eggs.

fixfax: A wooden device with holes for the necks and wrists of people accused of fortune-telling and sales fraud in Scotland and America. They were fixfaxed in the public square, where people pelted them with “humiliating projectiles.” 

bankrupture: Variant of bankruptcy. Fourteenth-century Italian moneylenders worked outside on wooden benches called bancas. If a banker ran out of cash, his bench would be destroyed. Bankrupture = broken bench.

So go out! Go yarely! Leave the village to collect a pail of shiny words and bring them back for us to enjoy.

***

Your daily prompt: Find a word you’ve never written before, and use it in a poem.

 

Image by Brandon Cole via Encyclopedia Britannica. 

The Singing Bowl [by Stephanie Paterik]

My husband celebrated his 40th birthday last week, and being a planner, he sat me down six months ago.

“I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” he said quite calmly, holding my hands. “At the very least, a midlife crisis.” 

“OK...” I said. “Are we talking red convertibles?”

“No, no. Not like that. I'm going to search for meaning.”

I exhaled. Then fretted. I had been planning to whisk him away to the kind of mindless resort that plies you with Mai Tais and corn fritters and lets you nap in five different kinds of hammocks. Clearly, I had to reverse course. I needed a meaningful gift. 

I brainstormed. I made spreadsheets. I googled “my husband is turning 40 and would like to do something meaningful what should I give him any ideas please I will give you my credit card number without using PayPal just please ok?”

This search turned up breath mints emblazoned with the phrase, “Look Who’s 40!” They were only sold in bulk.

That’s when I noticed the grimy brass bowl of pennies and keys balancing precariously on our windowsill. It was a singing bowl, left behind by my mother-in-law when she passed away. Unsure of what to do with it, we had used it as a coin dish for six years.

I backed away from Google and went to work cleaning the bowl, polishing it, and purchasing a suede mallet to make it sing. I packaged it with a gift certificate for a meditation retreat and congratulated myself.

My husband was thrilled with the retreat. But the bowl, he set aside without much comment. It lay in a pile of wrapping paper for several days before I dug it out and placed it in his hands. 

“Aren’t you curious?”

“I never was able to make this bowl sing,” he confessed.

“That’s not possible.” I handed him the mallet, and he rolled the leather stick around the metal lip. His shoulders slumped.

It made no sound.

I gave it a try. How hard could it be? But the only way I could coax any sound from it was to bang it like a gong.

I had envisioned offering up an instrument that would connect my husband with his mother, a spiritual mentor whose guidance he needed. Instead, I’d made him feel disconnected and inept.

The Silent Bowl was the worst present of all time. Even worse than the Look-Who’s-40 mints.

Desperate, I went to YouTube for instructions and found that we had been playing it all wrong. We mistakenly glided the mallet around the inside of the bowl instead of the outside. We flicked our wrists when we should have held them steady. We gripped the bowl rather than turning our hands into flat, supportive pedestals.

My husband tried again.

The room was silent. The bowl began to shiver. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, an otherworldly hum rose from its mouth. Before long, the bowl was shaking and our apartment was filled with song.

***

I play the singing bowl every day. When I’m stressed. When I have writer’s block. When I start a project and when I end it. The sensation of the buzzing brass and the contrasting low/male and high/female tones produce an unexpected joy and focus.

And the singing bowl is teaching me a lot about poetry:

*The value of instruction. It’s easy to view writing as a mystical practice reserved for the ordained. But get the right tools and guidance, and it’s not so mysterious.

*The shape of a poem. As a poet, I often focus on first and last lines, aiming to wallop readers at the beginning or the end. As a journalist, I spend 75 percent of my time crafting a lead and only 25 percent fleshing out the story.

But what about a singing-bowl or diamond-shaped poem that begins inaudibly, escalates to a howl, and ends in resonance?

Louise Glück, one of my favorites, does this well. Consider her shocking poem “Mock Orange,” which begins innocently: 

 

It is not the moon, I tell you.


 It is these flowers


lighting the yard. 

 

She makes a sound in the next stanza, when she reveals:

 

I hate them.

I hate them as I hate sex.

 

Smack-dab in the middle stanza, the poem bellows:

 

and the cry that always escapes,


the low, humiliating


premise of union–

 

Finally, the pitch softens to a point of resonance:

 

And the scent of mock orange


drifts through the window.



 

How can I rest?


How can I be content


when there is still


that odor in the world?

 

This happens again in her poem “Hunters” (from A Village Life) when a rat screams in the middle stanza. See how she builds to it and walks away from it here. 

*After playing the bowl, sometimes I hear a phantom ringing for hours. It lodges in my ear. Similarly, you hear singing-bowl poems long after you read them.

*Every bowl sounds different, because everything in the universe vibrates at its own speed. You, me, bowls. The trick is finding the frequency that makes a bowl sound its best. Perhaps when we create poems we imbue them with a perfect, solitary frequency. 

That might explain the magic of the first draft. I have murdered many good poems with excessive revision, making all the right choices only to find my verse lifeless on the gurney.

Instead of trying to make a poem right, I want to find its frequency. Where does it sing, vibrate, excite? When does it burst into song? Can it sing louder? Can it be a coloratura soprano? When I make this small change, does the volume go up or down? Does the tone become more or less clear? How about now? And now?

Somehow, metaphors bring clarity, birthdays bring meaning, and Mary, my mom-in-law, fills our apartment with music and poetry.

***

I am happy to be writing about poetry here this week and look forward to meeting you in the comments section! A student at heart, I’ll leave a prompt at the end of each post.

Your daily prompt: Find an example of a singing-bowl poem, or try writing one yourself. Let us know how it goes.

There Are No Words, and We Must Speak Them [by Stephanie Paterik]

“There are no words.”

That phrase flooded my newsfeed in the minutes and hours after 20 children and six adults were murdered at a Connecticut elementary school yesterday.

I understand the feeling. One of my relatives was gunned down in a senseless act of violence this May. My aunt’s brother, a sweet-hearted musician with a penchant for floppy hats and coke-bottle glasses, died when a gunman opened fire in Seattle’s Café Racer Espresso. I didn’t know him, but I shared my loved ones’ grief. There were no words then like there are no words now. 

Speechlessness can be troubling to a poet, so I was heartened to come across Bob Hicok’s poem “In the Loop” yesterday, which he wrote after the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings. (Special thanks to Kerrin McCadden for sharing the poem on Facebook.)

Ironically, Hicok wrote 230 wonderful words about having no words. Here’s how it begins: 

 

I heard from people after the shootings. People

I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely

the same message: how horrible it was, how little

there was to say about how horrible it was.

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed

because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,

to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually

I answered these messages: there’s nothing

to say back except of course there’s nothing

to say, thank you for your willingness

to say it. Because this was about nothing.

 

At the same time Hicok was experiencing the fallout of these shootings, my husband was writing about them for a national media outlet. He was among the many reporters who hastily packed bags, flew to Virginia and didn’t come home for several days. 

He called me often, miserable. The sick feeling that there was nothing more to say – that he might be a parasite, an intruder – nearly swallowed him.

I never covered a national tragedy, but one of my first jobs as a reporter was covering the night cops shift at an Arizona newspaper. I befriended a police scanner and called the 9-1-1 operators every couple hours hoping there was no bad news. Most of the time, we’d exchange jokes about  people finding rattlesnakes in their toilets and the like.

But eventually, there is bad news.

On those days, I’d duck under the yellow crime tape and watch EMTs drape white sheets over bodies. I’d knock on the doors of people who lost someone they loved in a horrific manner. I still remember the parents of a young fighter pilot who crashed near San Diego. The grandmother of a toddler who perished on the train tracks. Bewildered Blockbuster employees who watched as a customer was gunned down in the video rental line. 

Honestly, I felt guilty about writing those stories. When I sat on the grieving grandma’s well-worn sofa, asking her that awful question – “how do you feel?” – and watching her cry, I felt like tragedy’s intruder.

But at some point, it occurred to me – no one had ever kicked me out. Every time I knocked, someone opened the door. Someone invited me into a family room – at once familiar and unfamiliar in the way that all family rooms are – brewed coffee, opened the old, brown photo albums and told me their stories. Readers got to know the victims because of the willingness of family and friends to tell their stories. Because of the bounty of their beautiful words in those horrific moments.

The fighter pilot’s father even walked me through his yard, pointing out the remnants of plastic airplanes his son once played with as a kid. Years later, he remembered “that nice reporter” and asked me to write a follow-up about his son’s posthumous achievements.  

It took me years to realize this, even as a lifelong lover of words. It’s the simplest thing. It’s why we write:

Words heal.

I know that as poets we sometime’s share the reporter’s guilt, as if we are obligated to write something profound when tragedy occurs, yet our words don’t quite rise to the occasion. A friend of mine once sheepishly submitted a poem about 9/11 to a workshop, and the teacher consoled her by saying, “It’s OK, every poet feels compelled to write about it.” There’s a kind of camaraderie in our compulsion, even when we fumble.

Let’s fumble more.

We need words at a time like this. But we also need more than words. We need to cast off our clichés and ideas about what should be said and express something real. It might be a quarry of nothingness and senselessness and dumbfoundedness and grief. Hicok fearfully journeys down that pit:

 

A boy who felt that he was nothing,

who erased and entered that erasure, and guns

that are good for nothing, and talk of guns

that is good for nothing, and spring

that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,

and scotch for others, and “and” for me

 

Sometimes “and” is the best we’ve got. Sometimes, we can give ourselves permission to be ineloquent and unprofound. To be simple and real and say “there are no words, and I must speak them.”

Today, I asked my aunt which words, if any, comforted her after the brutal loss of her brother. This is what she wrote:

“The words that stand out in my mind the most are from my dear friend Trea who lives in NJ. She wrote... ‘If I could, I would hold you and rub your back and tell you I love you.’ She told me to take care of myself and eat. She even told me what I should be eating to stay strong and healthy through this difficult time. Most people told me they were sorry and, of course, I felt their love, but Trea had a gift with her words. I'm crying while I remember the pain and still feel it.”

My aunt needed something beyond sentiment, something practical – a warm hand on her back and a hearty meal. I want to remember this the next time I attempt to console a friend or reader.

Hicok knows this. After all, his weighty poem rests on the simple conjunction “and,” a practical part of speech that gets the job done.

 

[…] “and” that is good

for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise

go about going away, bereft of us and us

of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing

like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,

empty of everything but a scarf, still opens

its doors at every stop, because this

is what a train does, this is what a man does

with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,

why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,

and then it had just begun.

 

We must write and speak and listen our way through this tragedy. Because otherwise, why the poet? Why the writer? Why the human?

 

 ***Stephanie Paterik is a freelance writer, editor and author’s assistant in Manhattan. She earned an MFA in poetry from The New School and, as David Lehman’s research assistant, worked on The Best American Poetry 2010, 2011, 2012 and the forthcoming Best of the Best. Her work has appeared in Anderbo, PARADE, Adweek, The Arizona Republic, The Wall Street Journal and others.

"Women of the Hudson" [by Stephanie Paterik]

Skinny, tan women of the Hudson—
all ages roast on a little boardwalk
in June. Some have fake boobs
and some have wrinkles.
They all seem to be there alone,
giving one another the right
amount of space. One faces the road,
one lies sunny-side up on a bench.
Another, over-easy on the wood pier.
I’d like to go back and join them,
though I am pale and prefer pants.

– Stephanie Paterik

"River" [by Stephanie Paterik]

The river never threatens to
dry itself up, or cast itself into itself.
The river holds the plank
but never walks it. River,
you must be my summer friend.
I will explore every blade
of your manmade banks until I know
you properly, and I will write you
these stories about myself, not as an act
of ego but an effort to expose myself
to you, so you might know me
and call me friend, too

-- Stephanie Paterik

"Dear John" -- Ashbery, that is [by Stephanie Paterik]

for John Ashbery

I am in your kitchen photographing the noon
light on your Ivory soap bottle and the lone spoon
in the dish strainer. You’ve lined up various kinds
of honey in front of a boom box, and we can hear
you breathing heavy with the physical therapist
upstairs. We are here to document your life while
you are living, though everyone refers to you in the past,

as if you were a ghost banished to the second
floor to do calisthenics forevermore. I note the die
in your little leaf vase, and persuade the archivist
to open the sheet music. You never play it anymore.
When a person goes, the archived mind goes
kaput. The best place to eat ravioli in Hudson?
The neighbor who broke the piano? The sculptor

who cast the dead-eyed gittern player in the foyer?
I am a voyeur peeling back your flimsy white curtains
to see how you spy on the world, notice a chandelier bead
hidden behind the damsel’s bust. A safety pin holds
together the rug. My mismatched socks look bad
against your Persian prints, so I photograph them
and all the mirrors I am in as if to say “I was here!”

sharing some fibers with greatness.
But I see myself in none of it, John,
the Parisian silk, the shock art hung crooked
over the chaise, the nutcracker with little fake nuts.
And I am sorry for the mismatched socks, really I am,
but your rug looked so lovely against my feet.
We are here to preserve your things

because we can’t preserve you. 

-- Stephanie Paterik

An Interview with Alex Crowley, winner of the Paul Violi Poetry Prize [by Stephanie Paterik]

When the poet Paul Violi passed away last spring, his friends and colleagues created a poetry prize in his honor. It is a fitting tribute, considering he inspired incredible loyalty and enthusiasm in his students at the New School’s MFA program, where he taught until his illness. 

Alex Crowley, a recent poetry graduate, won the first Paul Violi Poetry Prize. He will join dozens of poets who will share Paul's work at a memorial reading on Friday, December 2 at 6:30 p.m.at the New School (Lang Center, 55 W 13 St, NYC). The thirty-year-old grew up in Central Massachusetts, studied sociology at Vassar, and has lived in New York for seven years. You can find him writing in Bushwick, running the Mental Marginalia Poetry Series in Williamsburg and jamming with his post-hardcore band Warmth. 

I had an opportunity to interview Alex at The WEST café in Brooklyn last week. But first, I'll share a poem from his winning submission:

First Time As Industry, Second Time As Dross

All the mills I know are factory outlets now.
Museums for modern art or condominiums
With glossy sales brochures. This one has its own water taxi.
The one next door, a spa. Free of Bolsheviks and other neighborhood delinquents
They've found a way to scam & cheat on the collective
Bargaining agreement. Now is not the time to quote
The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Or tell everyone about my indigestion, how it stems from an anxiety
Over chronic indigestion. Am I getting enough fiber? My skin's begun to seep
Caffeine. Every day I ponder quitting, thinking that might make me
Better as a person or a lover; a green
Patina on weathered copper. Exactly what
I’m still not sure yet. I’ve lost the manual for how
To replace this multicolored vinyl siding. Gimme clutter, maybe paste
To make pastiche. Wipe the grease off
Grubby fingers, stubbled workers grumbling on
About pulled punches and pork sandwiches. The menu changes
Day to day. It would be nice to feel invested, have some input
On an outcome, not just paid to waste my time
Corroding in the bowels.

SP: Did you get a chance to study with Paul Violi?

AC: I didn’t ever get a chance to work with him, although one thing that is really cool is everybody that was really close with him says, ‘He would have liked your work, and he probably would have liked you because you’re on the fringes of things.’ All the stuff I’ve read of his is brilliant. I’m excited for this event, the Paul Violi Memorial Reading in December, because I think he’s someone who should continue to be recognized, just given the effect he’s had on our peers and people that are good friends of mine, people who loved him so much.

SP: What most inspires you about his work?

AC: His ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary. That’s one of those things I think people are talking about when they ask, ‘Can you teach writing?’ The ability to take something that you observe regularly and find that place in it where you can just poke that place, and it just transforms into something new. You don’t just look at that thing differently; you look at the whole world differently. I think that’s what writers like us are seeking in some measure. We have all this material -- where do we start poking it? How do we know when it’s transformed? There's no way to know if the equation is going to work beforehand but you know when you get to the end if the equation doesn’t work.

Found in Translation [by Stephanie Paterik]

 

“To write in Slovenian is to write in fragility,” poet Aleš Šteger said at a New School poetry forum on March 29. He was speaking of his fractured native language. 

He and Brian Henry, the Virginia-based poet and translator, visited the university for a cross-cultural conversation about poetry and translation. They collaborated on The Book of Things, which BOA Editions released last November and is a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award. At the New School both read their poems, then fielded questions from moderator David Lehman.

Šteger is something of a poetry rock star in Central Europe – he has the awards and the haircut to prove it. He published his first book at age 22 in 1995, and Slovenia promptly heralded him as one of its most promising writers. Since then, he has written four books of poems, a fictional travelogue, and a collection of lyric essays.

Šteger also helped found the Days of Poetry and Wine Festival in Medana, a village near the Italian border. There he met Henry, who later translated Šteger’s English-language debut.

The Book of Things is exactly that – a collection of fifty poems titled after everyday objects, such as Earring, Aspirin, Toothpick, Cork and Cocker Spaniel. Šteger carefully sets a table — full of objects you know, love and rarely think about — and then he flips it over. Not like a New Jersey housewife, mind you, but a skilled and inquisitive poet.

Šteger read a few Things, including “Shit” and “Egg.” The latter begins, “When you kill it at the edge of the pan, you don’t notice / That the egg grows an eye in death.” (Hear the poet read it in English and Slovenian in the video above.)

True North [by Stephanie Paterik]

“Poetry is astounding,” Charles North [pictured at left, interviewed by David Lehman at the New School on 22 February] writes, “if you don’t spend too much time on it.”

At 69, North has spent more than four decades writing, studying and teaching poetry. He established himself as an influential member of the New York School, published ten books and serves as poet-in-residence at Pace University.

He pulled back the curtain on his work at a New School forum last Tuesday night, telling a packed audience how he came to poetry in his twenties, invented a new poetic form and collaborated with the brightest writers of his generation. Many were in attendance, including Tony Towle and Ron Padgett, who cheered North on from the front row. Students filled the seats and sat in the aisles to hear him read a retrospective of work, including poems from Complete Lineups and Cadenza.

North can demystify his process, but the results are no less astounding. Whether he is arranging characters into a baseball lineup or parodying a sappy love song from South Pacific, you get the sense he is constantly inventing (and often playing).

He created the “lineup” poem when a fellow Columbia University student sought help with a dissertation. “Here’s your dissertation,” North cracked, handing over a baseball-style lineup of revered writers.

It became a game, and North eventually cranked out seventy lineups about everything from famous lovers to tall people. You need not understand baseball to appreciate the image of Julia Child on first base and Abraham Lincoln in the outfield. And if you do understand baseball, you get to puzzle and delight over North’s selections. Here’s how our poetic general manager lines up literary terms:

Pun  ss
Paradox  1f
Metaphor  cf
Simile  rf
Hyperbole  1b
Irony  c
Understatement  2b
Zeugma  p

(Click here to hear him read several more.)

North gets a lot of credit for the lineup, but many of his poems drip with invention. He told the audience he wrote a poem called “The Nearness of the Way You Look Tonight” after he and his wife, Paula, parodied the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Younger Than Springtime.”

Who's on first? Charles North at the New School

We'll post a full report soon but here's a taste of what you missed if you couldn't make it to Charles North's reading and interview last week at the New School. Fantastic! 

Video by Stephanie Paterik.

-- sdh 

Video: John Ashbery Reads From 'Illuminations'

In May, Norton will release John Ashbery's translation of French poet Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem sequence, Illuminations, originally published in 1886. Click to see Ashbery read and discuss the poem "Promontory" at The New School on February 7, 2011. 

- Stephanie Paterik

 

An Evening With John Ashbery [by Stephanie Paterik]

John Ashbery, who forged his poetry career out of a genius ability to surprise us, spent last Monday evening talking about the art of chance.

The poet visited an audience of 300 people at The New School to read poems from his most recent book, Planisphere, and from Illuminations,  his translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s prose poems due this spring from Norton.

Ashbery repeatedly encouraged the audience to invite chance into their work. Slam words together, he said, welcome surprises in your titles, your sestinas and your writing prompts.

His own ability to surrender control and piece together disparate items helped him master both poetry and collage. (He exhibited 30 years of his collages in 2008.) And it has produced astonishing lines like “nobody knows I’m a nudist” and “how can I lick some calendars?” both from poems he read Monday.

David Lehman, the event’s moderator and the New School’s poetry coordinator, asked Ashbery how the processes of poetry and collage compare.

“In my case, they’re very similar,” Ashbery said. “It’s taking something and saying, ‘that would look nice next to something else, perhaps that thing over there.’ The element of chance plays a very important role. Something is ripped out of its context and forced into a new one, creating a new kind of meaning.”

This is why he is so fond of the cento, he said, a form composed of lines taken from other authors. It allows him to preserve his favorite lines of poetry “as a kind of scrapbook.”

And the sestina? It’s both torture device and thrill ride, Ashbery said, “a cruel, iron maiden form” that gives one the sensation of riding a bicycle downhill.

“The form brings an element of chance to play in a poem,” he said. “The lines will end with six words you couldn’t possibly have imagined before writing the poem. I welcome it as a way of opening and exploring new territory in a poem.”

 

Photo credits: bottom, (c) Star Black (2011); top and jump, Stephanie Paterik.

The Ashbery Poetry Forum

In the next few days we will have a full report on the John Ashbery Poetry Forum at the New School on February 7. Meanwhile, here is Mr. Ashbery answering one of the moderator's questions.

Photo credit: Stephanie Paterik (2011)

"In the Last Forty-Five Days" [by Stephanie Paterik]

I have shaken raw sugar packets
stolen wireless Internet
made love in the morning
measured vanilla extract
watched apple spice cake go brown around the edges

and you are still where I left you in the Arizona sun.

I have drawn flowers for your headstone
selected thank you cards with a white bird on the cover
wondered why we imagine the dead to be flying rodents
stared directly at the sun
curled my hair for a passport photo

and you are still where I left you.

I have sliced bananas for the Cheerios
started signing e-mails “Warm Regards”
gained five pounds
completed one thousand downward dogs
scrubbed my yoga mat and thanked the Buddha-beaded guru

and you are still.

I have met with a tall accountant
worn black wide-brimmed hats
dreamt of a riverboat on the south of France
bought local blueberries
framed a photograph of an orange blossom

and you.

-- October 2010