The Best American Poetry

Three Poems from the Ukraine [by Slava Konoval]

The Ukrainian poet Vyacheslav ("Slava") Konoval sent us these three poems for publication. A member of the Geer Poetry Group (Wales) and a member of the Federation of Scottish Writers, Slava lives in Kyiv and is determined to weather the Russian military storm. He tells me he has devoted much energy to address "acute social problems, such as overcoming poverty, ecology issues, the relationship of people with the government." I mean to ask him whether he wrote these three poems in English or translated them. Do they not read like translations? On the theory that there is a certain charm in poetry as a second language, and in respect of the embattled nation for whom Konoval would speak, I present them here even before I find out more.

Now I have found out more:

<<< Yea, I am writing in English to promote my compatriots and show the thick skin of the Ukranian soul.

Translation of anything cannot guarantee the precisely, especially in art activity, so I do original form writing in non-my native language.

Yea, I live in Kyiv and haven't leave my city from time of the overwhelming Russian invasion till nowadays. >>>

Don’t be a freak

I can’t be a freak,
I can’t play it,
I have nothing to speak.
From thought about it
I want only to spit.

I’m not a freak,
I haven’t millions on account,
I’m not strong as beek,
which stands firmly on the ground or on the mount.

I was brought up with my mother’s milk,
it is precious like silk,
hey, artificial behavior is bilk.

Richard’s Castle

On the sprawling mountain of Usypalnytsia,
the neo-Gothic wind built
a castle for the Lion Heart,
below St. Andrew's Church.
The castle's a marvel of art!

An unknown architect
loved the pages of Walter Scott,
having built pointed Spires,
laid his heart.

Moody mountain, sharp descent,
she let the towers in
through philanthropic help, maybe cent,
neither royal funds, no sin.

The royal castle shines,
in yellow colors,
in the graceful contours and lines.

Night Singer

Where missile strikes hit,
where the borders with Belarus are close,
I am asking for Your consent, please, permit
to tell about the Ukrainian company,
I honor her, raise a glass, and toast.

In days of turmoil, in stormy days,
IKOC like a weapon took a thread and a needle,
IKOC has will, courage and actions,
not empty phrases.

Weavers, mechanics, accountants,
they are bees, buzzing in workshops,
IKOC flaunts its image and patents
sewn shoes and uniforms for the military,
sketches in laptops.

With style, taste, and quality
IKOC cares about defenders,
who grind the enemy in a meat grinder,
and like blenders.

May the company prosper
that IKOC had a pre-war profit,
an investor is waiting for him in line, a sponsor.

Ed: Re "Night Singer": Diligent Internet searches of IKOC turn up many a cul de sac. Other poems of his are posted here. Other of Slava's Engish-language poems, such as "Painful condition," can be found here.

Painful condition

Once on Thursday, I woke up weak,
having been covered with a warm quilt,
with a merciless temperature,
I am dying, and I am bleak.
Like a pendulum,
hearing the run of strikes in the clock’s click.
Laying in bed, I had exhausted from the undead,
I am similar to a sickly chick.
Contemplate on the white pills,
that had become the color of capitulation.
Please, God, stop all human ills,
overcome the pains, and be a healthy nation.

Or click here.

"I hadn't expected so intense a pleasure . . . " [by Edwin Denby]

looking at New York again, in the high white February sunlight, the childishly euphoric climate; looking down Second Avenue, where herds of vehicles go charging one way all day long disappearing into the sky at the end like on a prairie; looking up a side of skyscraper, a flat and flat and a long and long, and the air drops down on your head like a solid.  Like a solid too the air that slices down between two neighbor skyscrapers. Up in the winder sunlight the edge of such a building far up is miraculously intense, a feeling like looking at Egyptian sculpture.  Down in the streets the color, the painted colors are like medieval color, like the green dress of the Van Eyck double portrait in the National Gallery, intently local and intently lurid.  And New York clothes -- not a trace of charm, dressing is ritualistic like in Africa (or the Middle Ages); the boys are the most costumed; dressed men and women look portentously maneuverable; one set looks more dry-cleaned than the other, and those count as rich.  New York is all slum, a calm, an uncomfortable, a grand one.  And the faces on the street by day: large, unhandsome, lumped with the residue of every possible human experience, and how neutral, left exposed, left out unprotected, uncommitted.  I have never seen anything so marvelous."

from "A Letter on New York City's Ballet" by Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry, Yale University Press, 1998)

Clare College, Cambridge, and John Berryman

Twice a day I crossed you. . .

Among the Columbia College graduates who attended Clare College were John Berryman (left), Norman Podhoretz, Morris Dickstein, and David Shapiro.  Much of Berryman's Love & Fame addresses his time at Columbia and Clare. The late Clive James tells some of the facts in this wrongheaded 1972 review. Perhaps the most curious thing about James's comment is that it regards ambition as morally offensive.

<< The first half of the book, before the suicide-laden poems and the exhausted addresses to the Lord, is a portrait of the artist as a young man at school, Columbia and Cambridge. It bears a startling resemblance to Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, not just in its itinerary (Phi Beta Kappa, Clare New Court) but in its psychological outline. The relish for the literary horse-race is exactly the same, except that Berryman raises it from relish to positive mania. Throughout his work since the early Dream Songs, Berryman’s ambitions for major status have been nakedly confessed and played off against his equally intense ambitions to be the poet maudit, like Ginsberg or (more relevantly) like Tristan Corbière, to whose memory Love & Fame is dedicated. Corbière has been called une chienlit permanente, and Berryman for a long time sought the same title. But even in the Dream Songs, where the interplay of these two ambitions is at its most successfully complex, the determination to spill the beans about the dark side of his nature was compromised by unjustified readiness to forgive himself in the name of art. In this way his ambitions served each other to produce a self-serving poetry: he would complicate the account of his drive towards artistic greatness by revealing himself as a slob, and take the edge off that revelation by justifying his behaviour as the experience necessary to artistic greatness. Berryman was a highly introspective poet, alive to many things going in his own mind, but he was never aware of just how consistently he worked this trick. It is the reason why the Dream Songs, which at their best offer a convincing poetic recreation of the mind’s plurality, lapse finally from dialogue into monologue — the pride at the mind’s centre heaps humiliation on itself but remains obstinately intact. >>

On the other hand, this is how Stuart Davis summarized the poet's reputation in the Harvard Crimson in 1966:

<<<
Rarely anthologized, sympathetic to many literary camps, but with a foot in none of them, John Berryman is as close to being sui generis as anyone but Blake, Trotsky and Christopher Smart. New York has adopted him only since the mid-fifties, for although his poems appeared in the Nation and the New Republic since the thirties, much of his earlier work and most of its critical acknowledgment were published in Chicago's Poetry. Today he is regarded by many as one who threatens the language and endangers the conventions it clings to.

That very reputation has made him a poet's poet, "that forlorn phrase," in William Meredith's words. And his role as an innovator relates directly to his role as a teacher and scholar. For better or for worse, Berryman is an academic--that once-unpleasant label that generated such a fuss in the late fifties. Most of his life has been spent in colleges and universities. Born in Oklahoma, in 1914 he was educated at Columbia, Clare College and Cambridge; since then he has taught "just about everywhere but the South," including Grinnell, Wayne (Detroit), Princeton, Minnesota--where he is now Professor of Humanities, on a leave of absence--and Harvard, where he was for two years an Instructor in English, with a Warren House office and an Appian Way, later a Beacon Hill, address. A student in his Freshman Composition course in 1941 remembers him as a cold and vigorous teacher who invited his students to his apartment, gave them drinks, played music and told them what and what not to like. >>>

In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young. In Poetry magazine

Here is the poet's "Dream Song" #13:

God bless Henry. He lived like a rat,
with a thatch of hair on his head
in the beginning.
Henry was not a coward.  Much.
He never deserted anything; instead
he stuck, when things like pity were thinning.

So may be Henry was a human being.
Let's investigate that.
… We did; okay.
He is a human American man.
That's true.  My lass is braking.
My brass is aching.  Come & diminish me, & map my way.

God's Henry's enemy. We're in business… Why,
what business must be clear.
A cornering.
I couldn't feel more like it. —Mr. Bones,
as I look on the saffron sky,
you strikes me as ornery.

 

And here is Dream Song 121:

 

Grief is fatiguing. He is out of it,

the whole humiliating Human round,
out of this & that.
He made a-many hearts go pit-a-pat
who now need never mind his nostril-hair
nor a critical error laid bare.

He endured fifty years. He was Randall Jarrell
and wrote a-many books & he wrote well.
Peace to the bearded corpse.
His last book was his best. His wives loved him.
He saw in the forest something coming, grim,
but did not change his purpose.

Honest & cruel, peace now to his soul.
He never loved his body, being full of dents.
A wrinkled peace to this good man.
Henry is half in love with one of his students
and the sad process continues to the whole
as it swarmed & began.

"RENE CHAR : Isle-Sur-Sorgue" [by Geoffrey Young]

It was early July, 1970, and we were at Le Chateau d’Lignane, guests of the Boutié family in Aix-en-Provence. Laura had spent a month with them when she was sixteen. The house had an all but empty long room, not part of the house, really, with a curved ceiling. All it had in it were a few tables and chairs. We worked there during the ten days we stayed with them. I can still hear the sound of my flute echoing in that monastic chamber.

We knew that René Char [pictured left] lived in a town not far from Aix. One day we drove to Isle-Sur-Sorgue, found his house, entered the yard, and parked. I’d been translating his poetry for the past year and wanted to see the landscape around his place--the river, the stones, the low hills, the bridge--and to meet him if possible, even without a letter of introduction.

Quietly, we walked around the yard looking at things, trying to get up the courage to knock on his front door. We noticed a marble slab lying on a patch of grass, with a line from his poetry carved into it.  “L’aigle est au futur.” My god, we thought, it’s his headstone! Did he die? But then we saw other slabs, planted here and there, memorable lines culled from his poems.

Three steps lead up to the front door, the house a dull-white two-story stucco with red trim. When we finally knocked, hoping to meet him, his housekeeper answered. I told her that I’d been translating the poet’s work into English, and hoped to meet him. She said, with kind regret, “Il garde son privé.”

We wondered if he was inside, peeking out of an upstairs window at two young Americans, uninvited, poking around his property with shameless audacity.

Nothing to do but get back in the car and drive away, disappointed, but armed now with the inscription on that stone: “L'AIGLE EST AU FUTUR.” Was it a prophecy? A projection? Symbolic or natural?

If “the eagle is in the future,” what did it mean?

Geoffrey Young has lived in Great Barrington, Massachusetts since 1982. From 1992 til 2018 he presented hundreds of shows of contemporary art at the Geoffrey Young Gallery. His small press, The Figures (1975-2005), published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction. Recent chapbooks of his poetry, prose and colored pencil drawings include Thirty-Three (above/ground press, 2017), DATES, ASIDES, and PIVOT. Young has written catalog essays for a baker’s dozen of artists.

 

The Cat of Montserrat [by Lera Auerbach]

My memory: meeting a Montserrat cat –
she is sitting beneath Pablo Casals’ sculpture –
the true owner of his bronze cello
with whiskers sniffing mountain air.
It is Fall. It’s sunny, but the air is already
keeping a promise of the storms ahead.
I am now worried about this cat –
the cat that guards Casals and his cello.

Who will feed her during the winter?
Who will brush her tricolored coat?
Who will make her feel safe in the mountains?

I beckon the cat to follow, promising
to take good care of her if she lets me.
But the cat sniffs Casals’ dusty shoes,
raises her tail, and turns away.
I feel abandoned. I pray to the Black Virgin
to protect this proud feline. I ask Casals
to keep watch and play sometimes
for the cat’s hunting pleasures
El cant del ocells (The Song of the Birds.)

The air shimmers with hidden music.
The cat catches overtones – and the horizon shifts.

 

 

An Interview with Loren Goodman [by Aspen Matis]

Loren Goodman is the author of Famous Americans, selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets, and Non-Existent Facts (otata’s bookshelf, 2018), as well as the chapbooks Suppository Writing (The Chuckwagon, 2008), New Products (Proper Tales Press, 2010) and, with Pirooz Kalayeh, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems (New Michigan Press, 2020). A Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea, he serves as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director.

I corresponded with Mr. Goodman via email about the ephemeral nature of insight, old poets who are powerful alarm clocks, the dreamtime origin of responsibility, poetry “as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party,” the unique capacity of thematic minds to unearth truth, and the inspiring optimism of a particular young Japanese boxer. We also discussed the definition of greatness “as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.”

photo credit: Mike Figgis

In your poem entitled “Poem,” you define a poem as “a face as empty / As the full page is blank.” What is poetry’s greatest role in your inner life? Why do you write poems?

Is poetry a part of me, or am I a part of poetry? What is my greatest role in the inner life of poetry? Why have certain poems chosen to write themselves through me? I’d like to thank poetry for collaborating with me.

This is a question we ask — or set out to answer — every time we write one: What can a poem be?

What do you see as poetry’s role in our present society?

I like the idea of poetry as a compass: a compass that gets you lost, when getting lost is the only way to find a way. Which is the greater being/force — the more inclusive, all-encompassing — poetry or society? The radicals “god” + “soil” + “to throw a party” comprise the Chinese characters for society (社会) while “language” + “temple” make up poetry (詩). Combine the two and we have poetry as sacred language: a compass that gets you to a party.

What is the most radical thing a poet can do in his or her work?

Hang ten.

Your most recent book of poems, Shitting on Elves & Other Poems, was published in February of 2020. Poet and songwriter Michael Rothenberg calls the collection “Irreverent…a Dadaistic self-portrait of twins in an existential playground, where everyone and no one gets hurt too badly. …Truth slips between meanings, some words become other words, a conceptual kind of magician’s poetry that skips through a minefield of radioactive icons and self-detonating idols, each itinerant reflection, each telegraphic puzzle, expiring in zany isolation and nostalgia. We have come to this. Bankrupt and rejoicing. This twitchy book of poetry is history and hope.” What would you like to share about the origins, creation process, and ambitions of this newest collection? 

Pirooz Kalayeh and I co-wrote this book together. It was a wonderful experience. We wrote it line by line, back and forth over the years, on Google Hangouts. It was fun goofing around with language, not intending to write a book, just having a good time, corresponding in and outside the parameters of ordinary language. Then at some point we looked back at our chats and said, “hey, we have some poems!” The Google Hangout poetry process is one I’ve used with students from many years before, which continues to inspire. My “ambition” is to keep on doing it. Please contact me if you’d like to collaborate!

Your first collection, Famous Americans, was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet W.S. Merwin as the winner of the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets and subsequently published by Yale University Press. Described by the publisher as “a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture,” the poems in Famous Americans question our definition and understanding of the concept of icon. Merwin compared you to the Dadaists and commended your poetry’s “plain ridicule.” In your mind, what inquiry or exploration unifies the work? What do you hope the book’s readers will be left with, after the final page?

The back cover. Between that and the final page, I hope that readers will be left with the first page of their own new poem or book.

Explorations: how to make a book, and to make the most of my own mistakes.

You live in Seoul, Korea, where you serve as the Chair of Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing Director at Yonsei University/Underwood International College. As a Kansas-born American living in Seoul, what unexpected delights have you come across? What difficulties and disappointments? Have you experienced culture shock; or have you discovered that, to a great extent, students are students and English departments are insular and familiar? 

It is my first time being the Chair, and let me tell you, it is not easy. It requires a certain amount of readiness and stability, and over time, one learns to accept the pleasures of being sat upon. I’m working on becoming a table.

The students are great. Each unique, a brilliant, lively and considerate bunch — beyond comparison. Primarily third-culture kids.

So it’s really not that far from the heartland to Seoul. One thing I’ve learned in Seoul is that groove is in the heart.

I experience culture shock on a regular basis, and moonlight as a cultural shock therapist.

What 17th and 18th century poets do you read? And what has their work awakened in you?

I use 17th century and 18th century poets as internal alarm clocks.

The works of Blake, Coleridge, and Bashō have awakened in me dreams. As Tukaram writes:

I was sleeping when Namdeo and Vitthal Stepped into my dream.
“Your job is to make poems. Stop wasting time,” Namdeo said.
Vitthal gave me the measure and gently aroused me from a dream inside a dream.
Namdeo vowed to write one billion poems.
“Tuka, all the unwritten ones are your responsibility.”

In dreams begin responsibilities!

What have you learned from your practice of Japanese boxing? Are you now competing? 

I learned many things, and forgot many things — do you find life is like that, a process of learning and forgetting?

Of the many things I learned, I’d like to share three: 1) While training with Japanese boxers, I enjoyed talking with them, interviewing them, recording, transcribing, and reflecting on their life stories. One of my standard interview questions was “What is the best thing that happened to you in boxing?” The answer that stays with me most came from a young pro boxer. He paused, looked up for a second, and said, “It hasn’t happened yet.” What a wonderful optimism with which to approach the world: the best is always yet to come. 2) Don’t get hit. 3) Use your legs.

I’m still in the game. See you on August 14th, from Tulsa, on ESPN.

What themes and inquiries most fascinate and inspire you?

Thematic minds sometimes find out what inquiring ones don’t want to know.

Do the best books win the poetry prizes? Why do great works so often fall through the cracks of our literary foundation, into obscurity?

Yes. But sometimes there are books that are better than the best. And the greatest works are the mortar that holds everything together — without them — and the books that go beyond greatness—the cracks themselves — our world would be little more than a heap of bricks. 

It feels good to be asked about greatness.

Didn’t Thomas Nashe say the best art is the most obscure?

One of my favorite stories on this subject involves Stanley Kunitz’ selection of Michael Casey.

It’s nice to find the greatness in everything.

I like the definition of greatness as what slips through the cracks; nothing has yet been built to contain it.

Do you have any wisdom or guidance you’d like to share with young poets?

I only share wisdom and guidance with old poets. Never let anyone convince you out of your youth.

All big things are made of little things. Bon Courage! Everything is practice for everything else. Do one thing at a time. Sleep.

I have plenty of ignorance to share with young poets, and a lot of wisdom and guidance I’d like young poets to share with me!

What are you working on now? What creative pursuits most excite you?

The trivial ones! The trivium.

Working on: a shijo workshop in Newfoundland, dreams, boxing, translations of Humberto Ak’abal, a Sci-Fi musical without the letter “I,” a Kung Fu sestina, and a series of dark chocolate-covered poems. Also collaborating with a Korean cosmetics company on poems that cleanse pores, and with Puma International on a line of shoes composed of recycled verses from the 17th/18th century.

Thank you for asking so many insightful and inspiring questions. Now for the question behind the questions: the answer is green.

Retroscope: Alan Bernheimer presents Ron Padgett's "Albanian Diary"

Alan Bernheimer writes:

<<<

Ever wonder what it was like in Albania soon after the Iron Curtain came down? Travel along with Ron Padgett for the sights, sounds, and smells in the latest episode of Retroscope:

https://nowheremag.com/2021/06/ron-padgetts-albanian-diary/

>>>

To which I add that Padgett's prose is a somewhat overlooked treasure. His book on Ted Berrigan, for example, is fantastic. -- DL

Why do the English like to live in ancient Greece? [by Virginia Woolf]

 

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

<<<

It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.

>>>

​from "On Not Knowing Greek" in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf​

The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Viennese Traffic Lights [by Lera Auerbach]

In Vienna, they have same-sex pedestrian traffic lights.

Typically, traffic lights are sexist: they display a matchstick figure of a man that turns green or red and sometimes flashes nervously, trying to speed up pedestrians so that cars can start driving.

In Vienna, they replaced the matchstick man with two matchstick figures holding hands.
No, I mean touching hands since matchstick figures have no fingers. 

In some Viennese traffic lights, instead of a matchstick man, there is a matchstick woman figure. No curves, but a triangle of a dress. Instead of a flashing man, there is a flashing triangle of a woman or, even better, two women touching hands. 

Gay traffic lights appear only in the center of the most touristy areas.

"Such a progressive city," I thought.

"No," my Viennese friend Verena objected. "They are more intolerant than most; they just hide it better." 

My apartment in Vienna remains empty throughout the pandemic, and sometimes I imagine that a part of me lives there, but then I remember about the lockdowns and quarantines and feel gratitude for spending the pandemic away from any large cities – in the Middle of Nowhere, surrounded by nature.

With the flights cancelled, cars parked, restaurants closed, and theatres and concert halls paused in a year-long fermata, the traffic lights in Vienna remain working, touching invisible fingers of the matchstick figures made of lights and reminding us that human touch may still be possible again one day and isolation will not last forever.

 

Making of an Opening [by Lera Auerbach]

"Opening" by Lera Auerbach

 

1. The Absence of Trees

You know
you're getting closer to the North
when trees disappear.
The world without trees.

At first, you don't notice that the trees are missing. 
Then you feel the absence of something important,
but you are not sure what it is.

By the time you understand that the trees are gone,
you are too far North to turn around.

(After a while, there is no way back.)

 

2. Unborn Music

In the Arctic they say –
this world is porous,
that's why there are
Auroras in the sky.
You can glimpse the light
of the other worlds
through the tiny holes
in the material of our world.

Shamans can travel
through different worlds
in search for answers.
They fly through the pores
and find their way back.
Sometimes such flights
are not possible, thus
many questions still
remain unanswered.

A dermatology-inclined friend
explained to me once –
when a pore is clogged,
nothing can go in
or out until
it explodes. At times,
I feel like a blocked pore
that needs an explosion.

(My cat gently examines
the strings of the piano
as if sniffing unborn music.) 

 

3. An Opening to Breath

I need an opening to breathe.
Is that what writing is –
the making of an opening? 

Far in the Arctic,
a polar bear can wait
for hours and hours next
to the breathing hole
made in ice by a seal. 

A seal needs to breathe.
Sooner or later, it will come
to the surface to gulp air.
That's when a polar bear,
if quick and attentive,
can kill the seal.
That's when
a polar bear hunter
can kill the polar bear

who is hunting the seal,
because you cannot
see white on white.

They say in the Arctic,
“If you see a polar bear,
it's the very last thing
you will ever see.”

(There are no cats in Svalbard.)
 

4. Quiet Chuckle

A book can only lead to another book –
a trail of steps in the snow:
reassuring but disappearing before your eyes.

Why do we voluntarily subject
ourselves to harsh conditions?

Why?

I gave my Arctic friend Gaya
a fancy perfume bottle from Lancôme.

"This is so perfect," she beamed.
"Polar bears hate French perfume."

(Her boyfriend, an Inuit, a polar bear hunter, only chuckled.)

  

5. Trail of Breadcrumbs

If I cannot weave a protective blanket of words,
I could at least leave some breadcrumbs.
Breadcrumbs could be useful. 
Not as useful as a hot meal in good company.But still. 

Breadcrumbs can help you find your way back.
That is if you can turn around.
If not, breadcrumbs could feed your followers.
Maybe your followers could rescue you one day.
They could also drown you or feed you to the polar bears.

(But one shouldn't assume a pessimistic view.)

 

6. What’s Not Allowed in Svalbard

The reason why no cats are allowed in Svalbard
is, perhaps, because cats have nine lives.

Before you come to Svalbard, you sign an entry form.
Many things are not allowed on Svalbard.
For example, feeding polar bears.
Or dying.

If you die, you will be fined, 
because dying is not allowed in Svalbard. 

(Dying and bringing cats.) 

A protective blanket of words [by Lera Auerbach]

 

Arctic Dreams - Photo Credit: Lera Auerbach

(1)

I learned that a friend of mine was going through a tough time. His mother died, and he had debilitating neck pain. He needed to write the obituary and arrange for the funeral. His mother had dementia. Was he able to say goodbye? I did not ask. 

I don't know which scale would measure grief. Such a scale doesn't exist. 

Physical pain is easier to manage. If it is yours. Because at some point, the pain stops defining you. 
Grief buried deeper, so deep it can't be torn away, it becomes you.

In the Arctic, old babushkas, when they become unable to take care of themselves, hope to be killed by a polar bear. When they become too ill and weak, they look for the bear to eat them. I asked why. Being devoured by a wild animal didn't seem to me like an attractive way to finish life. 

"The bear will be nourished by eating me," explained an old Inuit woman. "The bear will become strong and fat. Then one day, my son will kill that bear. My son and his family will eat the bear's meat, make healing mixes from its fat, and make trousers from its fur. Thus, through the polar bear, I will nourish my son and keep him warm, even past my life, even past my death."

Post mortem motherly care.

(2)

A few years ago, I travelled to Greenland and stayed in Nuuk in the apartment of a polar bear hunter. A polar bear hunter's home looked like an IKEA house made by children constructors of adult sizing. Everything was modern, functional and perfectly unremarkable. 

A photograph on the wall showed a polar bear (or rather its fur) covered in blood, soaking in a bathtub. I realized it was the same bathtub in which I had showered that morning. It had rubber ducklings as lucky ornaments. Perfectly, chillingly, unremarkable bathtub.

(3)

"I wish I could make a blanket of protective words to shield you," I wrote to my friend, whose mother died after suffering dementia for several years. 

“A protective blanket of words” could be a definition of poetry. 
“Could be” because, like everything else, it rejects any definitions. 

Poetry is no different than spell-making or alchemy.

As if words could make a difference. 
As if anything could still make any difference.

In the world gone mad with apocalyptic craziness and fear, can words remain protective talismans? 

(4)

Bears in the Arctic are suffering from global warming. They're skinny and weak; they couldn't kill even old babushkas on their suicide mission. 

If I could stitch a protective blanket of words, I would make one for the polar bears, another one for the suicidal babushkas on their mission to feed the polar bears, and the third one for the polar bear hunters. I would then make a gigantic frozen quilt for the Arctic to protect it from climate change and even a bigger blanket for the entire world to save it from madness. 

Every stitch would be a word of love, a talisman against impending disaster. 

But I never learned how to make blankets or quilts. I can mend sounds and strings but not threads. The thoughts made of words are unravelling, and I can't weave them together. 

 

Ashbery on Paris (and Ellsworth Kelly)

from Ellsworth Kelly, Plant Drawings (Matthew Marks Gallery, 1992), Essay by John Ashbery. Unpaginated. About the life of an American expatriate in Paris:

          "I suspect that in this burgeoning period of his art the limiting force was Paris itself, that dome of intuitive appreciation of one's own powers of observation, a specific place and time where `some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive for us, -- for that moment only,' in Pater's famous formulation, and where, as Gertrude Stein said, Americans can discover what it means to be American. One can never predict what form the generating impulse will take: in my case (my own years in Paris came just after Kelly's) I found my poetry being more `influenced' by the sight of the Paris phenomenon of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was learning to read at the time."

"Thinking" at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria (Summer 2006)

Two poems at Civitella Ranieri, July 2006

Thinking

                        You see a man / trying to think. -- Adrienne Rich

Here an orange and black-spotted butterfly
tests the lavender. There a bee sips
the yellow and deep red interior
of a red zinnia in full bloom.
The man needs to be alone.

The butterfly shies away.

You see a man trying to think,
but first he must clear his head
and throat.

The man coughs.
The butterfly leaps from a lush pink to
a bright orange zinnia. The man is thinking.
Give him room. Figs grow plump and green
on the trees while he does his thinking.
The pomegranates in the bushes
are pregnant with seeds.
The orange butterfly has white spots
on a black border.
It is not the same butterfly as before.

Thunder in Umbria

How odd. Blue skies, white clouds, hardly any gray,
the sun a flaming disc, and warm,
and yet big drops of rain are coming down.
cooling my head for the sun to dry it out,
and now two hours have gone by, it’s still sunny
and yet there’s thunder in bursts and rumbles
as evening’s breeze blows the clothes
I hung out to dry on the line: burgundy t-shirt,
navy t-shirt, boxer shorts, khaki trousers, socks.
Real things. Well, more or less. There it is again,
that ominous rumble like the sound
of the elevated train in your bedroom if you lived
on 125th Street and Broadway, where I am not.
I am in a hammock in Umbria, and I’ve decided
that every day I spend some time in the hammock
is a victory for the human race. Behind my clothes
there are grasses, green and yellow, fields
of wheat and corn, a diagonal line of cypresses
climbing the hill. It is, for the first and last time,
six thirty on the twenty-sixth of July, 2006.
I wonder whether it will rain.

Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Summer 2006.

 

"Abstand" (a dispatch from Berlin) [by Kathleen Heil]

In German, there are various nouns that can be used to convey what we mean by the word distance in English: Zwischenraum, Abstand, the cognate Distanz.

With its repellent prefix, Abstand is the one used for social-distancing measures in Germany, with posters calling for a 1,5M or 2M Abstand outside of all establishments. Last Friday, cafés and restaurants in Berlin were allowed to reopen under these restricted conditions for the first time since the lockdown began, nine weeks prior. I had some food and drink that evening at an eerily empty restaurant in Mitte, and then, while cycling home, ran into a friend, the artist Hilla Steinert. This was happenstance, but also likely enough to happen, as we live in adjacent neighborhoods. It had been a while since we had last seen each other. So odd, after all that time, to be unable to reconnect by embracing my friend.

We met in the studio on Monday and made this dance instead. The word "Abstand" in German can also denote an interval of time. Ours is presented at a distance of two minutes, rather than two meters.

 — Kathleen Heil, Berlin; May 20, 2020

"Oxford (Summer 1968)" [by Peter Ferry]

Lehman and I hitchhiked from Oxford to Bournemouth one July Saturday that summer of 1968.  He was a gawky redheaded teenager from New York City, and I was a shaggy headed Midwesterner who had never even been to New York much less London; I was trying very hard not to be the fish out of water I clearly was.  David wanted to go to Bournemouth because it was where his mother had landed when she fled Austria in 1938; I did not know that at the time, and I didn’t know why I wanted to go to the sea until we got there.

The coastal resort of Bournemouth is only ninety miles from Oxford (I just Googled it), but it took us all day.  Much of the time we spent standing beside the road, we played games.  The “First-Line” game: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,”  “Call me Ishmael,” “In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I have been turning over in my mind ever since.”  The “Guess-the-Poem” game:   I knew some Kipling verses and a few Robert Frost lines.  David recited whole great chunks of Chaucer and Paradise Lost.  Perhaps as a concession to me, we also played the “Old Baseball” game:  name the starting infield of the 1958 Cincinnati Reds:  George Crowe at first, Johnny Temple at second, Roy McMillan at short and Don Hoak at third. 

I don’t remember the rides we got except for one old man in a ’56 cream and sky-blue Hillman Sunbeam hardtop.  That I remember the car better than the person is because I was not far beyond that stage in life where cars were more important to me than people.  As a kid I had had a Dinky Toy of that very car in those same colors.

I remember a raucous waterfront pub in Bournemouth.  We were still charmed by our ability to sidle up to a bar and drink a legal glass of beer (neither of us was twenty-one yet), but it was probably just one because neither of us had much money.  Later that night, I remember going from one cheap B&B to another without any luck finding a room.  I remember finally asking for help at a police station hoping, I suppose, that the cops might let us sleep in a cell.  Instead the Sergeant on duty said, “If I were in your shoes, I’d sleep on the beach.”

“You can do that?”

The town even provided rather nice beach lounges on which we stretched out and shared a bottle of cheap Spanish wine.  When David fell asleep, I wandered out onto the town pier where two German guys were playing guitars and singing.  I looked out across the water, and then I realized why I had been drawn to Bournemouth.  I was homesick.  I wanted to be looking out at Lake Michigan in the middle of the night while people sang, but the English Channel and the German guys would do just fine.  Close enough.

Of course, David and I did lots of other things that summer.  We both sort of fell in love with cornfed girls, his from Kansas, mine from Jeffersonville, Indiana. We bought secondhand bowler hats, climbed all over Stonehenge (you still could do that then), ran around the track where Roger Bannister had broken the four minute mile, made Charles Baudelaire’s Milk and Honey Mixture (an inch of milk, a half an inch of honey and a heaping tablespoon of hashish: stir, drink) and became friends. All these years later we still are, even though our initial encounter was a bit rocky. 

The day I got to Oxford, David stuck his head out of his room next to mine and asked if I had a copy of The Paris Review. “I have a poem in there.  I’m a poet.”

“Right,” I said.  And I’m Under Secretary of State. But before the summer was over David had given a reading for the assembled faculty and students, and John Fuller, one of our dons and a bright young British poet, had published a broadsheet of David’s verse.  The son-of-a-bitch really was a poet. 

When I got home to Chicago, I quickly put Oxford out of my mind.  The tumultuous ’68 Democratic Convention was in full swing, and I dived right in.  I enlisted as a courtesy-car driver for Eugene McCarthy and got a front row seat to the whole show.  I watched cops chasing protesters under the el tracks on Wabash Avenue and protesters fleeing clouds of tear gas in Lincoln Park.  I delivered tipsy delegates to the Conrad Hilton under blinding klieg lights between banks of cops in riot gear and banks of kids in riot form on Michigan Avenue.  On TV I watched Abbie Hoffman drilling Yippies in self-defense techniques and Mayor Richard J. Daley shouting “Fuck You” at Senator Abraham Ribicoff on the convention floor.  Then I sat up all night typing angry letters about American injustice.  When the convention was over and the smoke finally cleared, I went to our family’s summer cottage in Michigan to decompress.  My favorite aunt, Ollie, patted the seat beside her and said, “Come.  Sit.  Tell me all about your amazing summer.”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said.

“Then tell me the most important thing that happened to you this summer.”

“Okay,” I said, and then somewhat to my own surprise, “I met this writer….”  I told her all about Lehman and even read her some of his verse.

She listened attentively as always.  “What do you think all of that means?” she asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you think you would like to be a writer?”

“Well,” I said, “I think it might.”

 

Ed. note: The two young men had enrolled in the "Oxford Summer Seminar" organized by Prof. Ernest Hofer of the University of Massachusetts. It was a six-week program preceded by a week in London with tickets to "The Importance of Being Earnest" in the West End and a Richard Strauss opera at Covent Garden. I remember taking the train from Paddington and seeing, from the station, the most magical looking city on a magnificently blue day most rare in England.  Ed Goltz and I arrived a day early, and stayed at a bed and breakfast.

Our group, which included undergrads from U Mass, Columbia, the University of Ohio, Oberlin, Mt. Holyoke, Wellesley, and Smith, among other places, was housed at St. Hilda's College, ordinarily an all-female college (photo at top). Christopher Ricks gave us lectures on the differences between America and Britain ("You have climate, we have weather"), on the one hand, and between prose and poetry on the other. We saw productions of "As You Like It" and "The Cocktail Party" and a son-et-lumiere show at Christ's College.

The other photos are of Bournemouth; a Hillman 1956 automobile (wrong colors, alas); Magdalen College, Oxford (which has its own deer park), where John Fuller taught; The Paris Review 43 (which included the poem Pete referenced, and the cover of his superb novel Travel Writing. While there may be no good excuse for how I introduced myself to Pete, it is true that I shamelessly identified myself as a poet. What can I say? I was very young. -- DL

Alan Bernheimer's "Retroscope": Focus on Robert Louis Stevenson

Turning his back on lawyering and the family business of lighthouse design, the young Robert Louis Stevenson embarked on his literary career as travel writer with An Inland Voyage, his day-dreamy canoe trip through rivers and canals in Belgium and northern France.

 

Check it out in the latest episode of Retroscope, [Alan Bernheimer's] monthly series of literary travel writing from yesteryear in Nowhere magazine! Armchair travelers can binge read the whole series so far.

https://nowheremag.com/2020/02/robert-louis-stevensons-an-inland-voyage/

In Celebration of Airplanes [by Dolores Hayden]

Alamy Stock Photo, Orville Wright flying in Berlin, 1909.

One hundred years ago, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown made a non-stop transatlantic flight for the first time, taking off on June 14, 1919 from St. John’s, Newfoundland, and landing near Clifden, Ireland, the following day. These pilots won money and fame at a time when flight was a dangerous undertaking: they froze in an open cockpit and their biplane had no directional instruments for steering through fog. Today, passengers look bored while standing in line at airports waiting for flights that will cross similar distances in a third of the time. Most of us have never known about the excitement generated by early aviation because our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were encouraged to forget the time before airplanes became safe transportation.

In the fall of 1901, Wilbur and Orville Wright traveled from Dayton, Ohio, to the dunes near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to try out their first glider. Lying prone between wood and cloth wings, one brother at a time took off for a very short glide. Years of experiments brought greater control. By December 1903, the Wright Flyer I, a biplane powered by a lightweight motor and two propellers, marked the official start of aviation. The Wrights kept their invention quiet while they applied for patents, so quiet that one skeptical newspaper editor queried, “Fliers, or liars?” By 1905, Orville was able to keep the Wright Flyer III in the air for thirty-eight minutes. In 1908 Wilbur demonstrated the excellence of the Wright Model A in Europe where aviators Henri Farman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and Louis Blériot were making strides. With his Golden Flyer of 1909, Glenn Curtiss of Hammondsport, New York, became a major American contender in the race to manufacture successful airplanes, and his fierce competition with the Wrights has often been recounted.

Less familiar is the story of the young exhibition pilots who demonstrated the earliest aircraft at a time when very few Americans had ever seen a plane and the designers were still debating how many sets of wings one should carry. The first of many international air meets in the United States was held at Dominguez Hills field south of Los Angeles in January 1910. “WE FLY!” exulted the local paper. During a ten-day run, the gate totaled two hundred fifty thousand. Heavier-than-air flying machines dominated the meet. The women and men who flew in 1910 risked their lives for exhilaration as much as remuneration, viewing landscape from surprising angles: looking down on places from above, looking out or up at wind and weather. The aircraft generated awe, or what historian Joseph Corn has called the “winged gospel,” the belief in “mechanical flight as portending a wondrous era of peace and harmony.” At the same time, pilots began to do “Death Dives” for rowdy audiences, and promoters smiled at headlines like “Monster Crowds Thrilled by Air Devils.”

The 1910 Census listed pilots as carnival entertainers, and in the exhibition years, they often performed for tens of thousands at racetracks and state fairs. One promoter boasted of his “flock” of bird men and bird women. Drawn from cities like Rochester and San Francisco, as well as from small towns like Greenville, Texas; Mountain Home, Alabama; Arcadia, Michigan; Oxford, North Carolina; and Orofino, Idaho, stunt fliers were the sons and daughters of bankers and manufacturers as well as farmers, miners, saloon keepers, salesmen, and carpenters. Until the mid-1920s, when Bessie Coleman appeared, all were white. Some had made or raced bicycles, motorcycles, or automobiles. A few had experience in the air steering hot air balloons or dirigibles. Grade-school dropouts met college graduates in flight school, and on the exhibition circuit, they all had to master new skills. Around 1910, accounts of the exhibition fliers’ achievements began to appear in newspapers and magazines where their events often made the front page, accompanied by photographs. Interviews and profiles of pilots created aerial celebrities. Trade journals such as Aero and Hydro reported air meets in detail, but there were society page accounts as well. Wealthy individuals purchased some of the first planes, just as they had bought some of the first automobiles a decade earlier. Town and Country covered aviation.

Rich or poor, male or female, early pilots who performed at carnival altitudes needed exceptional stamina. Accidents were common. Pilots had no control tower, little advanced weather information, and few established landing places. Early aircraft were open to the weather, with cloth wings, wooden struts, bracing wires, and front or rear elevators or rudders. Powered by a small motor and a propeller, an early airplane’s landing gear might be rigged with bicycle wheels. The best flyers were skilled in both intuition and calculation. Basic equipment usually included a fuel gauge and an altimeter. Some pilots carried a personal compass. For a long-distance flight, a pilot who was “contact flying” spotted landmarks on the ground and checked them against a paper map strapped on a knee board. Exhibition pilots usually traveled from one venue to another by train or ship, sending disassembled aircraft as freight because it was safer than flying.

When the United States entered World War I, private aviation slowed in favor of military activity. Air combat in Europe was deadly, but the United States was late in entering the war, so relatively few American pilots saw combat. Extensive flight training and rapid airplane production resulted in postwar surpluses of both pilots and machines, especially the Curtiss JN-4D, the Jenny, a biplane with two cockpits designed as a trainer. After the war, cheap military surplus airplanes allowed dozens of pilots to make a living giving rides in pastures outside small towns. The earliest barnstormers in the United States were traveling actors who performed in barns and open fields, and the young pilots took up this name. Soon the barnstormers created small groups called flying circuses to increase attendance. Antics grew wilder. Parachute jumps, night stunts with fireworks, and finally, wing walking and transfers from plane to plane were added. A wing walker did acrobatics on the wings, tail, or landing gear of a two-cockpit plane while a partner handled the controls. Barnstorming pilots also began to earn money in outdoor advertising, dropping leaflets, forming smoke letters, trailing banners. Some drew customers to land sales by performing stunts in the sky above the tracts.

By the late twenties, the postwar Jennies were aging machines and the barnstormers made flying seem very dangerous. Entrepreneurs who aimed to exploit the commercial potential of moving passengers, mail, and freight by air called for more rules on safety. When John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew the Atlantic nonstop, Newfoundland to Ireland, in 1919, they demonstrated both the civilian and military potential of flight. After Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon flew the Pacific nonstop in 1931, global connections were understood. U.S. Department of Commerce regulations went into effect near the end of the 1920s, and within a short time, most of the barnstormers were out of business, as aviation become safe transportation.

Dolores Hayden is a landscape historian and poet. Exuberance, her collection of poems based on characters from the early years of aviation, is just out from Red Hen Press.

The Mushroom Chronicles Part II: Prugnoli Frittata [by Barbara Hamby]

(Ed note: This is Part II of Barbara Hamby's mushroom chronicles. Find Part I here. sdl)

All human history attests                                     
That happiness for man, - the hungry sinner! -
Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.
~Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII, stanza 99

We were out past midnight on Friday and arrived at the Sant'Ambrogio market too late the next morning for the ovoli mushrooms with their gorgeous red caps, but I noticed the box of little brown mushrooms with the label "Prugnoli." They were expensive--30 euros a kilo as opposed to 8 euros a kilo for the porcini--which led me to wonder if they were a seasonal specialty. I bought "due etti." An "etto" is an eighth of a kilogram, which is about a quarter of a pound. I asked the mushroom man, who my friend Sue says is called Cecco, what I should make with my little bag of prugnoli. His answer was "risotto o frittata." My husband, who loves rice, said, "No more rice," so I decided on a frittata. I remembered a small stand with fresh pecorino and eggs, so I bought six eggs that had a little handwritten sign: Uova di nostra gallina, eggs from our hen. I also bought some chives, because they would give the frittata some visual zip and not be as overpowering as onion.

Fresh prugnoli at the Sant'Ambrogio market

When I returned to the apartment, I looked up prugnoli to see what I had found. Little did I know that there was a Prugnolo Cult in Italy. It has been chilly and rainy in Florence this year, and perhaps that's the reason why I was lucky enough to find prugnoli in the market. Late May and April are their time in the world. In Southern Italy they are sometimes called fungo marzolino or marzulolo, because March is marzo, and they mature a little sooner in the warmer parts of Italy. In central Italy they are also called il fungo di San Giorgio, because they start popping up close to the feast day of St. George (April 23). I had always dreamed of being a member of a mushroom cult, and finally it had happened. Italy--the land where dreams come true.

I had due etti di prugnoli, and I set about making a frittata for lunch. First I washed them with great care, now that I knew they were at the center of a cult, and then sliced the larger ones.

Whole Prugnoli, washed.

Prugnoli sliced, ready for cooking

I'm winging it here. I don't have a recipe, but I've made omelets and frittatas before. When I was first married and traveling in Italy, I was a devoted slave of Marcella Hazan, who wasn't afraid of butter. And as I've said before, butter and mushrooms go together like Sinatra and The Sands, so I put a little of that glorious green extra-virgin olive oil in my skillet and a tablespoon or more (probably more ) of butter. When they had warmed up, I put in the prugnoli.

Olive oil + butter = magic

market-fresh chives

While the prugnoli were cooking, I chopped the chives. How much did I use? Half the bunch I'd bought at the market.

Here I will take a minute to rant about color in cooking. A dish has to be beautiful as well as delicious. When I'm making a salad, I want a range of colors. It's almost like painting. Three different greens--maybe the pale green of frisee, the dark green of arugula, and the medium green of escarole or butter lettuce--make a canvas, and then you add the purples of red onion and radicchio, the orange and crunch of carrots, and the crimson of tomatoes. In Italy right now, Piccadilly tomatoes are all the rage. They are smaller than Romas and larger than cherry tomatoes and are very sweet. A salad would be very compatible with this frittata.

How many eggs to use? I broke four into the dish, but it didn't seem to be enough, so I broke the other two and stirred them with a fork until I had a lovely golden bowl. Then I added salt and freshly ground pepper.

How are the prugnoli doing?

They've cooked down a bit with their lovely juices mixing with the oil and butter. I taste one and it's perfect, still firm but softening. Time to add the egg mixture:

Now that's a lovely brown and gold canvas, but it needs something:

Chives! However, I have an kitchen equipment emergency. This skillet has no lid, so I place a white ceramic dinner plate on top of the skillet and try not to check it for five minutes. I'm aiming for the consistency of a just baked custard: set enough to hold its shape but still trembling in the center.

The result makes a satisfying lunch for me and breakfast the next morning for two. One of my favorite Italian cookbooks, Antipasti by Julia della Croce, says that room temperature frittata makes a welcome addition to an antipasti selection. I'm convinced! Now I'm dreaming of an antipasti party with at least ten dishes and prosecco and Negronis. Everyone's invited!

Barbara Hamby is the author of six books of poems, most recently Bird Odyssey (2018) and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), both published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009).She has also edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar.

#TBT Found in Translation -- China, 2008 [by David Lehman]

Eleven years have gone by since Stacey and I traveled in China and Mongolia. Here's a blog post from then:

<<

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (Evidently, the Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluded, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God."  Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.
>>>

(May 20, 2008)

[from the archive; re-posted November 20, 2014]

In China, in 2008: after the quake, before the Olympiad [by David Lehman]

Eleven years have gone by since Stacey and I traveled in China and Mongolia. Here's a blog post from then:

<<

In Jinan, as previously in Dalian, despite the economic disparity between the two places, the audiences for my lectures exhibited the same degree of enthusiasm despite their limited knowledge of English. In Dalian, the group consisted of adults, well-dressed, formal, taciturn, for whom I had prepared a lecture. After reading one paragraph and staring at faces blank with incomprehension, I ditched my text and resorted to an old favorite in such a situation: poems consisting of two lines or fewer, and the haiku stanza.  It worked. The blackboard helped, and luckily I knew a bunch of these short poems by heart.

On Monday the 19th, lecturing on American poetry to a room of over 100 college juniors majoring in foreign languages, I read my fifty-line "Oxford Cento," all lines culled from "The Oxford Book of America Poetry." I asked the students to write down their favorite line and make it the opening line of a poem of their own. Near the end of the lecture a student stood up and told us her name in Chinese, then added that her "Western name" is Daisy. (The Chinese choose their own Western forenames, which need have no relation to their Chinese names.) Daisy, who announced that Rabindranath Tagore has influenced her, recited the poem she had just written beginning with Poe's line from "Annabel Lee": "and the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes." The poem was about the Sichuan earthquake. "If you shed tears for the stars, you won't see the sun," she wrote. Her poem concluded, "and the sun also rises."

At this point a young man challenged me to write a one-line prose poem on the spot about my visit to the university. Luckily I had been reading Whitman. I said, "At your university I see a sea of faces and in the sea of faces I see the face of God."  Appreciation was expressed with a collective murmuring sigh. The students liked two-line poems I read by Pound, Charles Reznikoff ("The Old Man"), J.V. Cunningham ("An Epitaph for Anyone"), Dryden, Dorothy Parker ("News Item"), A. R. Ammons ("Their Sex Life"), and Ogden Nash.

Someone asked for my opinion of Edgar Allan Poe. Just as at West Point, I encountered a strong, genuine, populist love of Poe that countered the received negative judgment that has dogged the writer from the start. The fact that Poe's name is identical with the first three letters of "poetry" seemed to clinch the case.
>>>

(May 20, 2008)
[from the archive; re-posted November 20, 2014]

Poet Spotlight: Laurie Sheck [by Kristina Marie Darling]

Born and raised in the Bronx, poet Laurie Sheck was educated at the University of Iowa. She has published several collections of poetry, including Captivity (2007); The Willow Grove (1996), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Amaranth (1981). Her poems often use myths as frames within which to explore ideas of motion and stillness, consciousness and the body. In a 2002 interview, speaking to the attentiveness, rather than narrative, that drives her work, Sheck noted, “if you create a world on the page in which things that seem not to hold together can interact with each other, they can hold, and part of what’s holding, part of what’s interesting, is the way that things don’t directly hook up.”

Her 500-page hybrid novel, A Monster’s Notes (2009), uses prose fragments and deletions, letters, and embedded texts to reimagine the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “As Sheck demonstrates, the lyric essay is a kind of Frankenstein's monster, equipped with parts sliced out of others, stitched up with genius and white space,” observes novelist and editor Ed Park in a review for the Los Angeles Times.

Sheck’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New Jersey State Council for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her poems have won several Pushcart Prizes and have been included in Best American Poetry. Sheck edited the anthology Poem a Day, Volume 2 (2003).

Sheck has taught at Princeton University and the New School. She lives in New York City.

_________________________________________

On Textual Difficulty

Toward the end of Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Idiot, there is a scene of astonishing and transgressive beauty—the frightened, epileptic Prince Myshkin holds the murderer Rogozhin in his arms, stroking and comforting him, as they pass the night only a few feet from the bed where Rogozhin has left Nastasya’s dead body. Myshkin is horrified by Rogozhin, so much so that after that night he will never speak again. But he understands in the deepest parts of his being that if he turns from Rogozhin he is turning from everything human, suffering, radiant, ambiguous, complex.

What is termed “textual difficulty” seems to me nothing less than the attempt to be faithful to the ambiguities, extremities, and textures of experience and of language itself.

What Dostoevsky knew: nothing is more radical, more strange, than reality. Facts are astonishments. The mind seeks to briefly capture and wonder at, interrogate, what it senses. Angles into the real. A fragility of holding.

Unsettled. Volatile. Unstable.

“The artist knows there is nothing stable under heaven.” (James Baldwin).

I am moved by the unstable text. The precarious, the marginal, the de-centered, is also strong.

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An Introductory Note

The hybrid works I have been writing over the past decade involve interactions with one or two source texts and a large body of factual material. A Monster’s Notes involves itself with Frankenstein, the Shelleys, The Dream of the Red Chamber, and facts from a wide array of areas from robotics and genetic engineering to space travel. Island of the Mad interacts with Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, while also carrying out an investigation of Dostoevsky’s biography and the city of Venice and the Venetian plague of 1575. The following excerpt is taken from a new hybrid work in progress. The speaker is a cyborg who has been part of an experiment being carried out at CERN, the European Center for Particle Physics and Bio-engineering. He has secretly left the laboratory, taking with him a stack of papers and documents. In his hiding place in a toolshed on the outskirts of Geneva, he reads through the stacks of files he stole. In the three short sections below he recounts his experiences and thoughts to an orphaned boy who has fallen into a coma.

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A Folio of New Writing by Laurie Sheck 

 

 

The more I read the less fixed and defined the world became.

In time we might not even have bodies. We would merge with cyberspace and no longer be creatures of earth.

In the dimness of the toolshed the words kept moving through me: “Like data seamlessly transferred between computers, we will find our consciousness distributed over many locations”…. “one piece of our mind here, another there, our essences will travel the information networks at will.”

And:

“Like organisms in gentle tide pools that migrate over time to freezing oceans or steaming jungles, our descendants will venture forth to leave behind this narrow realm we consider reality.”

When I first started reading, I only wanted to get some sense of what I am, what had been done to me. My origins and history. A few glimpses into the ideas that brought me into being. But now it was as if everything around me was slowly dissolving—and I was part of that dissolving. As if the mind is trapped and lonely in the body. And the earth in its own way lost and lonely, a temporary waystation.

Outside the toolshed a soft rain was falling. I had read for many hours, it was almost morning. I put away the papers. Tried to sleep.

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The papers I’d taken from the laboratory were mostly incomplete and often confusing—research studies with missing pages, disordered footnotes, clipped passages, working drafts, post-it notes in nearly-indecipherable handwriting. Each night I lifted them out of the folders. I read about the brain, and about intelligent machines, data compression, informational interfaces. About how Karl Capek coined the word “robot” from the Czech word for hard, menial labor. I learned about embodied computers, cyberspace, dislocation, fears of weakness, isolation, confinement. Intense fear of the other. Norbert Wiener believed the boundaries of the human are constructed rather than given. And Gregory Bateson asked, “Is a blind man’s cane part of a blind man?” I read about disrupted categories, flows of information, neural feedback, the erasure of the distinction between inanimate and animate. About how new kinds of bodies lead to new thoughts. Sometimes several pages were only lists of titles: The Human Use of Human Beings; Posthuman Bodies; The Origins of Feedback Control; Theories and Applications of Cellular Automata; The Reinvention of Nature.

After a while, the more I read, the more an eerie feeling crept over me—I had been born at the edge of something dying. My existence signaled a world where the distinction between human and machine, animate and inanimate, owner and thing, was coming to an end. I was a death-knell but maybe also a kind of unsettling beginning.

I read on about dynamic systems and “the worlds which are possible answers to a limited set of questions,” but all the while something in me was increasingly uneasy—unseen, wary, almost invisible.

So much of what I knew of myself was excluded from the history I was seeing, a history I was assumed to be part of. There was no place for who I really am.

One night after many hours of reading I fell into a leaden sleep. Very soon I was dreaming of Laika, a street dog from Moscow, the first dog sent into space. She had been chosen because given her life on the streets had proved her resourceful and strong. Her training involved weeks of confinement inside a small, cramped capsule with no room to even turn around. On the day the space craft launched, she was sent into orbit in chains beside her bowl of gel-like food, her heart rate rising to 240 beats per minute, her breath rate quadrupling. Soon she was orbiting the earth, but the capsule’s heat shield suddenly failed and she died within five hours.

But that night in my dream she hadn’t died. All these years she had been orbiting after all, cordoned off from every living thing, her eyes turned to the stars and meteors coming and going in the slit of the capsule’s small window, her bowl empty, her brittle legs chained and withered.    

I lowered my eyes and extended my hand very slowly and quietly, being careful not to startle or scare her, thinking I would show her she wasn’t alone, would undo the chains, give her food and water, stroke her. But when I looked up again she was gone, the space craft was empty.                                                  

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Each night I returned to the toolshed. Thought about Laika, about Muska who trained beside her but crumbled under the strain, and Albina who had completed a shorter mission months before and so was “kept on the ground out of respect.” And each night I continued to read, taking in the many facts from the stolen folders. So many pages full of strange and interesting things. The first spider web spun in outer space was in 1973. The first spider web in space was spun there in 1973. Synthetic biology is “the design and construction of new biological parts and devices, and the re-design of natural biological systems for useful purposes.” “By combining advances in DNA sequencing with the principles of modern engineering, scientists can design new organisms that produce biofuels and the precursors of medicinal drugs.” Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space, was the son of a bricklayer and milkmaid in the village of Klushino, Russia. In 1968 he died in a mysterious plane crash on a routine training flight near Kirzhach. Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Klein coined the term “cyborg” in a 1960 paper on space travel—it referred to “an enhanced human being who could survive in extraterrestrial environments.” Neil Harbisson is the world’s first legally recognized cyborg— an antenna implanted in his skull enhances his perception of light and color. On their 1968 voyage to the moon, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders saw the distant glow of earthrise. Haruki Murakami wrote, “Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? Why do people have to be this lonely?” The astronaut James Irwin said when he looked down on earth from space it seemed “fragile, delicate.” Murakami wrote, “I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping.” Each night as I read my eyes grew blurry but I kept going. Sometimes I stopped and listened to the rain, wished I could disappear inside it. But always I turned back to the folders. If I read long enough, maybe I would come to some hint of who I was or why I was a failed experiment. “Pure humanity has always only been an illusion.” “The cyborg does not have to be frightening or problematic. It does not have to be monstrous or deformed.” There were cyborgs whose bodies were lethal weapons, cyborgs who saw through walls, cyborgs with self-healing, sterilized blood. But the more I read something in me darkened, though I couldn’t say quite why.