The Best American Poetry

"River" [by Stephanie Paterik]

River

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.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

River

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.

from the archive; first posted June 19, 2012

Stephanie Paterik: Finding Success in Business & Creativity with the Editor-in-Chief of Adweek

Stephanie Paterik, editor in chief and senior vice president of Adweek (as well as a contributor to the BAP blog), on the role the study of poetry has played in her career:

Why Not Now? with Amy Jo Martin

Stephanie Paterik is editor in chief and SVP of Adweek. In this episode, Stephanie shares a Why Not Now? story with Amy Jo that shaped the journey of her life and career. She had been working as a journalist in Phoenix for several years when she made the decision to quit her job, move to New York City, become a poet, and start an editorial consulting business on the side. This part of Stephanie’s journey felt like a detour, but it ultimately led to the role of editor in chief of Adweek.

Click here for the interview. And she was a mixed doubles champion in tennis (2013).

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).