The Best American Poetry

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. Technical diffiuclulties prevent us from posting the scene that 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? 

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. Technical diffiuclulties prevent us from posting the scene that 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? 

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

Lawrence Joseph at the New School [by Stephanie Paterik]

In Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote “don’t be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law.”

Few poets understand this sentiment as poet and longtime lawyer Lawrence Joseph does. Joseph, who teaches at St. John's School of Law, has published five books of poems, and the Rilke quote serves as an epigraph for his book of prose, Lawyerland, which humanizes lawyers – for better or worse – by recreating their intimate conversations.

Joseph spoke at a New School forum last week about his decision to follow the path of poets who earned their living outside the literary world. And he read several poems from his books Into It and Codes, Precepts, and Taboos: Poems 1973-1993.

Imagine Perry Mason reciting verse in lieu of a closing argument and you have an idea of what it’s like to hear Joseph read. He offered an intense and authoritative reading of Some Sort of Chronicler I Am, which describes a panhandler on the 3 train with scant sympathy for the man’s spiel about contracting AIDS. 

“Specified ‘underclass’ by the Department of Labor/ —he’s underclass, all right: no class/ if you’re perpetually diseased and poor. … —blessed , indeed; he’s definitely blessed. His wounds open here, on the surface:/ you might say he’s shrieking his stigmata.”

 Tidy couplets counterbalance the tough tone of this poem. As in so much of his work, Joseph captures the beauty and brutality of life through an unflinching lens and applies order to it. Everything becomes law.

Chronicler also alludes to famous writers who witnessed life through other professions, including Wallace Stevens, a lawyer, and William Carlos Williams, a physician.

Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Irremovable Soul [by Stephanie Paterik]

Jennifer Michael Hecht is “a minor famous atheist,” as she puts it. Her bestselling book Doubt: A History made her a cult figure among skeptics and catapulted her into the public speaking circuit.

At a New School poetry forum last week, the popular philosopher, professor and BAP blogger spoke to the home crowd, musing on her career, poetry and soul (more on that later). In addition to life after Doubt, she discussed her latest nonfiction project, Stay, and her most recent book of poems, Funny. 

Hecht, the rare poet with a Columbia Ph.D. in the History of Science, read from her first book of poems, The Next Ancient World, which serves as a love letter to future anthropologists.

In “Please Answer All Three Of The Following Essay Questions” she asks: “If someone wanted to make you/
slap them, hard, would it be better for him or/
her to say that your father didn’t like to hear you/
sing, or to say that your mother purposefully pricked/ her finger and bled into the coleslaw she brought/
to the physics-department picnics every year.”

Hecht recited “Villanelle If You Want to Be a Bad-Ass” and “Cannibal Villanelle,” prompting moderator David Lehman to ask why she delights in the form.

“I fall in love with lines,” she said, “and the Villanelle repeats the line.”

The Eighty-Eight Keys of Phillip Lopate [by Stephanie Paterik]

Phillip Lopate (center) speaks with admirers at the New School

 Phillip Lopate is best known as a master of prose, penning more than a dozen novels, essay collections and anthologies in his 40-year career. He also writes for magazines about his great loves, namely film, architecture, and travel.
 
But as a young man in New York in the ’60s and ’70s, Lopate wrote poetry. He befriended many New York School poets while studying at Columbia University, read for a poetry anthology, and published two books of verse before moving onto prose.
 
At last Wednesday’s New School forum moderated by David Lehman, Lopate revisited “the poetry years” and discussed his latest book, At the End of The Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay. His greatest hits are here, alongside an insightful essay about life as a young writer in New York (a must-read for anyone interested in the New York School).
 
“Emotionally, I’m embarrassed about some of these poems because they are a young man’s poems – I was very horny,” he joked, getting laughs from an audience of thirty MFA students. “I wrote a lot of poems about breakups. It seemed like a good poetic subject.”
 
Lopate penned many of the poems while wandering the Upper West Side, catching films at the New Yorker Theatre between classes . He was a bachelor then, contemplating themes of domesticity and cosmic aloneness among the well-furnished brownstones. His stripped-down verse deftly combines humor, depression, sexuality, and spirituality, themes that resonate at any age.

Audience members enjoyed Lopate’s reading of “Furnished Room,” which states “you/ have to return to your furnished room/ with the tall ceilings/ which are unusual for their antique molding/ but why does one need such a high ceiling?/ Better to live under the bed than to have that high ceiling!” Later in the poem, he expands this notion by asking, “am I really lost/ for good/ under the furnished stars?”
 
He also read  “Creating a Space,” in which the speaker clears a space for a loved one, be it God or a woman. It reads like a single person’s psalm or Zen meditation.
 
Lopate explains: “I had been reading [the Indian mystic poet] Kabir and a lot of Sufi poems. There was a lot of Buddhism in the air, and I was interested in that kind of discourse.”
 
David Lehman, a longtime friend and fellow Columbia alumnus, asked Lopate about his notorious “distrust of metaphors and similes.”
 
“I like to think I use all 88 keys,” Lopate said.
 
“That’s a metaphor!” Lehman interjected, getting laughs from the crowd.
 
Their repartee ignited a discussion about the anti-poetic tradition as a corrective to poetic diction. One student asked how to handle sentimentality in poetry at a time when irony is prized over sincerity, and Lehman and Lopate emphasized the importance of balancing the two impulses.
 
“I don’t feel there should be a big separation between mind and heart,” Lopate said. “Once you understand they’re integrated, once you understand how close they are, you won’t worry so much about sentimentality.”
 
“There’s a difference between sentiment and sentimentality,” Lehman noted, adding that a distrust of the latter should not obscure the importance of the former.
 
Lopate encouraged young writers to take a few years off between undergraduate and graduate school to gain life experiences that will fuel later work. And he shared five tricks he uses to propel his own writing “when the cupboard is bare.”
 
They’re so good, we’ll share them with you too:
 
1. Use multiple genres to elevate your writing. For example, write a poem first to establish a rhythmic base, and then turn it into a prose piece.
 
2. Ask questions about what you just wrote. As Lehman pointed out, Lopate is “always qualifying.”
 
3. Fuel your creativity with research. Lopate focuses on “what I’m reading now, seeing now, thinking about now. I’ve fallen in love with research.”
 
4. Indulge in another art. For Lopate, it’s cinema. “I can sit through almost any movie, but I can’t read every book.”
 
5. Save a new insight for the end of your piece. 

-- Stephanie Paterik