Elegant Thorn Review

Elegant Thorn Review Is on Hiatus

2010-03-06T12:05:00.003-07:00

Sadly, with school and all of my other writing projects and blogging duties, I do not have time to maintain this site right now. I am putting the Elegant Thorn Review on hiatus indefinitely.

If you have sent me submissions, please consider them rejected and send them to magazines that will love them and appreciate them.

Apologies for having to do this - but no sense in pretending.

Elizabeth Iannaci Reviews "An Urgent Request" by Sarah Luczaj,

2010-01-15T09:38:00.004-07:00

I'm very pleased to feature a guest review by Elizabeth Iannaci of An Urgent Request (published by Fortunate Daughter Press) by Sarah Luczaj, a book I was supposed to review (I read it and loved it - HIGHLY recommended) but never did. I featured three of Sarah's amazing poems back in August of 2009.

* * * * *

An Urgent Request, Sarah Luczaj, Fortunate Daughter, an imprint of Tebot Bach. 2009, $10.00

With An Urgent Request Sarah Luczaj has given us an astonishing collection of 21 poems that at once, manages to slow-dance with the intangible, yet is rooted firmly in everyday reality. This is a collection that underlines and embraces the contradictions inherent in the human condition. A poet of exceptional ability, Luczaj moves fluidly from the surrealistic to the concrete and back again. Take the opening lines of the book’s first poem, “For José Drouet (1968 - 1989)” which establish a real sense of place in a real world:

José, the light is moving in the water
José, I carved a poem in the walls of a room

Then suddenly we are taken on a leap with:

the room was dust
and the planets were
trapped as the people
in it were, and it broke
on them, and the room
broke on the sky which
is made of dirt as
the room is made of
dirt, and the people
are made of dirt
and also the stars

This is indeed a leap. We understand that the neither sky, nor the people are made of dirt. Yet we recognize the truth of it. After all, aren’t we and everything in this universe star stuff, created from that one moment, that big bang? So, when we read the next lines: it broke / on your body made of stars we recognize the truth of that as well.

The poem is the perfect opening for this book as it has, dare I say, a sense of urgency befitting the title. As do many of the poems in this beautifully varied collection. Like the prose piece “The Noise is Still There”: “Whether I am aware of my breathing or drunk, if I practice the violin or not, / and particularly when opening doors.” Again, Luczaj has expertly created a sense of urgency. The piece has a velocity fueled by its structure. Except for its title, there is no mention of any noise in the poem and we are compelled to add the poem’s title to the sentence fragments which propel us forward.

With some poems the title echoes and reverberates as in her short piece, “Missing The Dead” :

If I could catch some daylight
as I catch
the snow melting from the roof
I could bring a bucketful
inside
and pour it out until it fills the room
in the middle of the night

Without the title it’s a pretty little poem. But the words “Missing The Dead” add a fragrance that not only elevates the piece, but might cause a reader who has ever missed someone gone from this world, to pause and take a breath.

Luczaj displays various styles including the superbly-crafted villanelle, “Child Song”. Here, the repeating lines do exactly what they should, they bear the weight of repetition, yet gather additional significance from the lines they bump up against: “Wood, warp, feather fish scale, skin / The world is stamped, the world goes in.” are not only incantatory, but also almost magically embody the macrocosm outside in the sing-song microcosm of the child.

These poems are overflowing with a love apropos of Luczaj’s Buddhist and psychotherapist background: a mother’s love in the breathtaking “Oh My Girl”:

oh my girl with the endless water
looking for a bank to knock against
looking for a boat to carry
oh my girl, wondering what’s wrong with you that the
world isn’t right

love and straightforward gratitude in “My Life Is Brilliant” which is nonetheless, a kick-in-the-solar-plexus indictment of injustice:

I was not sentenced to death for infidelity
blasphemy, murder
or not having put enough salt in the soup.

and her vast love and understanding of humanity with, what I take to be a persona piece, “Here Is A List Of Things I Ate Yesterday”:

For one blank moment
on the floor of the toilet cubicle
the whole damned world was eaten

There’s a proliferation of wonderful contradictions in the book, as in “Washing Her”: “‘I can’t / move’, she says. And moves.” In the title poem, “An Urgent Request”, the speaker claims: “I don’t need poetry. / I already have a body.” (a fabulous contradiction in a poem) and ends with: “Just give me the words”. Yet in “Imperative” which can be thought of as terms for a deal, the speaker says:

Take off your voice
Leave your eyes for now
And I’ll take off my arguments…
I’ll take off words

One can argue that poetry exists in the spaces between juxtaposition. But this is more than that. The poems in An Urgent Request demonstrate the endless contradictions that exist in the physical universe, the laws of which we are all subject to.

Luczaj is not without a sense of humor. “Holiday” is a three-page poem that reads like a short, short story which chronicles something akin to a Moroccan Hotel California:

This isn’t
a swimming pool’ he cries,
‘It’s a trap! It’s specially designed
to drown people. There’s no way in!
There’s no way out!’

Yet she leaves us with a reprieve and the image of her grandmother’s now waterlogged watch, lying useless in the sun.

Constantly exploring the terrain of the internal the results of which are manifested in the external, Luczaj artfully articulates what it is to be human. In reading An Urgent Request, we have an opportunity to become more so.

—Elizabeth Iannaci

~ Elizabeth Iannaci is a poet living in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and for five years served as one of the Directors of The Valley Contemporary Poets (a not-for-profit poetry organization) where she was coeditor of their yearly anthology. She was a finalist for the 2009 New Letters Literary Award and her work has been widely published in journals and anthologies throughout the United States and Europe.

Wallace Stevens - Armchair Visionary

2010-01-15T09:31:00.002-07:00

A great review of Wallace Stevens' recent collection of Selected Poems - seems a new one comes out every few years. He's been dead for a while, so you think they'd just issue a Collected Poems that is definitive and be done with it.

This comes from More Intelligent Life.

WALLACE STEVENS, ARMCHAIR VISIONARY

When Wallace Stevens died, few of his Connecticut insurance colleagues even knew he was a poet. With the recent release of his "Selected Poems", Ryan Ruby revisits a man who proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

You can find them anywhere you go. Unshaven young men who slam down cheap liquor in remodelled dives. From their stools they hold forth on the doctrines of this obscure mystic or that obscurantist philosopher, and then they brawl for brawling’s sake. They swap stories about the tiny towns they reached by thumbing a ride or hopping the rails, tales that invariably end with a night in jail or the gutter and a rescue from some local angel. This is what’s known as Experience, to be distilled into stanzas that can fit within the circumference of the bottle stains on their cocktail napkins.

These are lifestyle poets, the Beats of yesteryear. Should you find yourself in the presence of one, ask him (always him) whether he likes the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Not one will say yes.

To a lifestyle poet, Stevens’s biography presents a problem. Born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens never quite became a member of the Lost Generation. He considered moving to Paris to become a writer, but caved to pressure from his lawyer father and stayed in the States, where he studied at Harvard and earned a degree from New York Law School. In 1916 he and his wife abandoned the bohemia of New York's Greenwich Village for sleepy Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens began work for a local insurance company. By 1934 he had become vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, a post he would keep until his death from stomach cancer in 1955, aged 75.

Stevens published "Harmonium", his first book and one of the most important collections of 20th-century verse, when he was 44. He went on to win two National Book Awards, a Bollingen and the Pulitzer, yet when he died, his office colleagues were surprised to learn that he had been anything but an insurance executive. "It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job," he once said in a newspaper interview.

“I have no life except in poetry,” Stevens once wrote to himself in the late 1930s. To put it another way, he was a square. But lifestyle poets–like autobiographical novelists–are wrong to believe that experience is the necessary foundation for what one writes. The faculty sustaining the literary enterprise has always been the imagination. This "is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos," Stevens wrote in "The Necessary Angel", a book of his essays published in 1951.

Lifestyle poets remind me of the critics in Stevens’s poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, who tell the titular musician:

‘But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

What these critics fail to understand is not only that, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar,” but that this transformation is necessary for any form of transcendence to be possible. Like the tune, a poem cannot be both "beyond us, yet ourselves" if it all it manages to do is describe things "exactly as
they are".

In Wallace Stevens the transformative power of the imagination has found an enduring champion. His oeuvre is densely populated with poems bearing unashamedly cerebral titles, such as “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”, “The World as Meditation” and “The Poem that took the Place of a Mountain”. According to the Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry, a handy tool set up by John N. Serio, the editor behind the recently released "Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems", the word "imagination" appears 47 times in his work (not including cognates such as “imagine”), beating out such poetic tropes as “sight”, “shadow” and “image.”

Stevens proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary. You needn't go off to war like Byron or take to the road like Kerouac to have yourself an adventure. If your mind is expansive enough, you needn’t even leave your chair. “Merely in living as and where we live” the air is already “swarming / with metaphysical changes,” as he wrote in “Esthetique du Mal”, a long poem featured in the collection.

Yet Stevens’s mind was not merely expansive, but a universe unto itself. As he described in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Even when he tries his hand at spare minimalist stanzas, for instance in his often anthologised “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” (a poem whose depths a critic could surely plumb for obscure biographical references if so inclined), Stevens is simply unable to suppress his lyrical musings on whether to prefer:

The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos.
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

More than any other American poet, Stevens became a visionary, a status
that Arthur Rimbaud–that great adventurer and mediocre poet–rightly
claimed was the goal of writing verse. In "Lettre du Voyant", Rimbaud wrote that poetry, through a poet's "long and systematic derangement of the senses", could change ordinary reality into something extraordinary, a "factory into a mosque". For Stevens, too, a poet’s “choice of the commodious adjective” could reveal the divine qualities of the objects that make up “grim reality”. This is because it is the poet’s “description that makes it divinity”, even when the reality may be nothing more than “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

"Selected Poems" (Alfred A. Knopf) by Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio, out now

Picture credit: Bettmann/Corbis

(Ryan Ruby is a writer based in New York. He is working on a novel set among the bohemians in postwar Greenwich Village. His last article for More Intelligent Life was "How I learned to stop worrying and love Frank O'Hara".)

John Gallaher - Winner of the twelfth annual Boston Review poetry contest

2009-12-17T15:11:00.004-07:00

Congratulations. Interesting poems.

John Gallaher
Winner of the twelfth annual Boston Review poetry contest
In John Gallaher’s series of “Guidebook” poems, Big Brother (or some other faux Reality Show) is on tape loop in the Cartesian theater. Shards of jaded narrative are locked in a house together, and they hate each other! The poems are full of paratactic leaps, each a desperate attempt at escape, except, we find out, escape is just another schtick, e.g., “Adam turned aside to indulge a passion for turning aside.” But Gallaher gives us to understand that all the digression, all the zigzagging in the world won’t really get us outside the “penopticon.” Our moves are written into the script. This is disturbing, of course, but “Rosie was mostly happy though and knew that all would one day be another day.” These poems may be the boxes we’re always trying to “think outside of.” ‘Lots of luck!’ they tell us. “Now there is relentless war between us, says the senator, as he goes off to dine with Buffy.” With their cast of recurring characters, the poems in Gallaher’s series are as bitter and skeptical —and funny!—as (old) Bob Dylan songs. We may not know the way out, but we’d better not get too comfortable here in the endless preview. Are we being warned? Near the end, “Chicken Little and the Boys have some words.”
—Rae Armantrout, Judge

Go read the poems.

New York Times: John Ashbery, Toying With Words

2009-12-17T14:59:00.003-07:00

Helen Vendler on John Ashbery.

PLANISPHERE: New Poems
By John Ashbery
143 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.
$24.99

John Ashbery, Toying With Words

By HELEN VENDLER

Published: December 8, 2009

John Ashbery’s new collection, dedicated to his partner, David Kermani, draws its exotic title — “Planisphere” — from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” in which two perfect lovers have been kept apart by the goddess Fate, since their perfection would be her ruin:
And therefore her decrees of steel
Us as the distant poles have placed
(Though Love’s whole world on us doth wheel),
Not by themselves to be embraced,
Unless the giddy heaven fall,
And earth some new convulsion tear.
And, us to join, the world should all
Be cramp’d into a planisphere.
A three-dimensional globe is flattened to two dimensions, and the distant poles at last can touch. Such an image fits Ashbery’s surreal imagination, with its arresting leaps and resistant incoherence.
Ashbery’s conjuring mind is full of huge amounts of information — philology, movies, Old French, camp slang, archaeology, cartoons, the poetry of the ages, bibliography, Victoriana, television ads and more. Ashbery’s own mental inventory is a comic one, the contents of a trading ship straight out of the pages of a colonizer’s journal:
It is still being loaded by natives with cone-shaped
hats on their heads. Here come the transistors,
bananas, durian (a fruit said to have a noxious smell),
baby bottles, photocopiers, and souvenirs,
such glorious ones! Nothing useful except key-chains,
lockets to be furnished, a ball to stuff with life.
Like many of Ashbery’s descriptions, this one becomes allegorical in the end, as the composer/artist acquires, besides his ironically exclamatory “glorious” souvenirs, aids to artistry: a chain for keys (music? metrics?), a locket for pictures of beloved people, a mini-globe (Stevens’s “Planet on the Table”) to “stuff with life.” Whitman too, as comic and appetitive as Ashbery, imagined himself as the terrestrial globe, “stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.” But the accumulation of a lifetime’s printed poems can also cause eventual revulsion: the “River of the Canoefish” is charming when the first canoefish is spotted, followed by another. But today the sight can hardly be borne, the fish have so overpopulated the river of life:
Today they are abundant as mackerel, as far as the eye can see,
tumbled, tumescent, tinted all the colors of the rainbow
though not in the same order,
a swelling, scumbled mass, rife with incident
and generally immune to sorrow.
Shall we gather at the river? On second thought, let’s not.
Ashbery has always liked to play games on many planes. This volume is an “A to Z” of life (like the guidebook line, “London A to Z”): we know this because the titles are arranged in alphabetical order, from “Alcove” to “Zymurgy” (“the chemistry of fermentation in brewing” — not a bad description of the making of a poem). Overturning clichés is another familiar Ashberian game: we’re not startled when someone says “King Alfonso of Spain,” but we are when we hear “Alphonse I of Bemidji.” The bane of language, for Ashbery as for Flaubert, is the “received idea” — the idea everyone mouths and takes for granted. Even after the received idea has been overturned (say, by a war), the agents of cliché immediately try to restore it:
About fourteen passengers working overtime
by the end of the war restored challenged idées reçues,
set things to rights.
The poet persistently undermines that restoration of the status quo in order to render the mind once again “new, tender, quick,” as George Herbert said.
Ashbery also juggles the infinite possibilities of genre, his mind running through many exhausted topics at once, trying for one that still has life in it:
Why what a lovely day/street/
blank canvas/pause/orb/
old person/new song/milestone/
caned seat this is! I think so.
Some of the games “prove out” exhilaratingly for the reader, some are perhaps too private, some too abstruse, some too silly (there are a couple of Steinish collages that don’t earn their keep, one of them made from the titles of movies). But when the Ashberian associative complex works (as in the cases cited above) the mind is delighted by its unexpectedness. Conversation is nearly always the pretext, as in the poet’s shorthand summary of life in old age: “This is how my days, / my nights are spent, in a crowded vacuum / overlooking last year’s sinkhole.” Depending as I do on the poets to tell me — even via comic despair — what each decade of life feels like, I laughed with gratitude at the “crowded vacuum” of one’s 80s as a point of vantage, and grimly took in the melancholy shrug of “last year’s sinkhole.” “Where is Rumpelstiltskin when we need him?” Ashbery asks, and then himself spins the straw of experience into the gold of a page.
Ashbery, the master of sinuous syntax (see his “Three Poems” or “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”) has performed surgery on his poems here, often bringing them into the wry epigrammatic domain of Dickinson:
I made a joke about how
it doesn’t dovetail: time,
one minute running out
faster than the one in front
it catches up to.
That way, I said,
there can be no waste.
Waste is virtually eliminated.
But several poems, notably “Planisphere” and “Pernilla,” belong to Ashbery’s ambitious longer lyric mode. I quote, for readers longing for the lyric Ashbery, the conclusion of the love poem “Alcove,” which opens this volume with a wondering joy at the return of spring and ends with a vista of love, despite its inevitable separateness, surviving the worst days of old age:
We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.

In his rendering of American speech, slang, cliché, Ashbery has surpassed most of his contemporaries. But his persistent reach into the “rut” of tradition should not be forgotten. He could say (with the great Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío) that he is very 18th century and very archaic and very modern, daring and cosmopolitan. When he becomes most serious, it is in the presence of either catastrophe or truth. His onslaughts of tragedy, emotional or physical, are of geological force while not relinquishing the vocabulary of irony: “and the land mass teeters once more, crashing / out of gloaming onto the floor near your heels.” As for truth, it always hovers out of reach: he speaks of “today’s version of the truth,” on which “The enamel is just not going to keep.” Or, in a more sinister vein, the desired truth “just kind of sails overhead / like a turkey vulture, on parenthetical wing, / empty as a cupboard.”
There are self-elegies here: I feel a pang hearing Ashbery say, “Time to shut down colored alphabets’ / flutter in the fresh breeze of autumn.” His “small museum / of tints” has provided ambiguous prophecies, curdled recollections, menacing prospects, emergencies, landscapes and puzzles; it has no less provided memories of youth, intimacies of love, the comedy of the ephemeral, the transhistorical speech of painting, and the literary in its quoted quintessence. The poet’s last look here is a “glimpse of / the books in the carrel, sweet in their stamped bindings”; one of these days, the carrel will hold his “Collected Poems.”
Helen Vendler’s Mellon Lectures, “Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill,” will be published next spring.

NYRB - Podcast: Charles Wright’s Sestets

2009-12-17T14:55:00.001-07:00

From the New York Review of Books.

Podcast: Charles Wright’s Sestets

Charles Wright reads from his latest collection of poems, and talks to Sasha Weiss about the importance of landscape in his work, his writing process, and how he came to experiment with the six-line form.

December 11, 2009, 12:55 pm

Holloway Series in Poetry - Ann Lauterbach

2009-10-26T09:44:00.003-07:00

Ann Lauterbach is one of my favorite poets, and I have never before heard her read. If you know her work, you too have probably wondered how it sounds out loud, how she reads the syntactic and visual elements of her poems. Now you can know.

Holloway Series in Poetry - Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is the author of seven books of poems; her most recent book is The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. She is a Professor at Bard College, where she co-directs the writing division of the MFA program.

Recorded February 5, 2009

Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright

2009-10-26T09:40:00.002-07:00

A nice post from Open Source - something to keep you busy while I try to get around to reading and posting submissions. I'm working on it - and I also have some nice photos to post.

Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright

Aired, Podcast, Shows, Whose Words These Are | chris, October 21st, 2009

Recorded

Wed, October 21

Prompted by last weekend’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival, the question has been: where does poetry come from these days? And where is it going?

C.D. Wright speaks of her output as “a few reams of freedom.” Father was an Arkansas judge and a nearsighted bookworm, like herself. Mother was a court reporter. “Of the choices revealed to me,” she has written in her memoir of life and craft, Cooling Time, “crime and art were the only ones with any real sex appeal.” I love her take on the local and the global in her head and her poetry:

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with C.D. Wright. (61 minutes, 28 mb mp3) [Play]

The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I did not stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, “People who don’t change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker.” I would not describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by so many other tongues.
Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89

“I believe in a hardheaded art,” she has written, “an unremitting, unrepentant practice of one’s own faith in the word in one’s own obstinate terms.” Her terms run to the erotic, the choleric, the comic, in her own “luminously strange idiom,” the New Yorker said, “eerie as a tin whistle.” She read for us and talked with us at the Watson Institute here at Brown, where C. D. Wright and her husband Forrest Gander both teach writers.

Q: What talent would you most like that you don’t have, yet?

A: Well, I can’t cook. That’s a big drag, because Forrest [Gander, my husband] can’t cook very much either. It’s a real let down. We both love to eat.

I don’t have another language — I would really like to have a second language. I’ve become very attracted to Spanish. And Spanish is still somewhat doable. I read a lot of Spanish literature in translation.

Q: What kind? New, or old, or … ?

A: This summer I read prose writers: the Argentine writer César Aira, the Spanish writer Javier Marías, I read Roberto Bolaño, a Chilean.

Q: Bolaño speaks to you?

A: Yes, he does. For one thing, he was a poet for twenty-five years. All his protagonists and antagonists are poets — they are completely unruly.

Q: Who does your work in another medium?

A: I love the jazz of the 60s and 70s— Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea — I’ve been missing that lately.

In painting, I love Elizabeth Murray and I love Agnes Martin. Agnes Martin said her paintings were for people to look at before daily care strikes. I found that a wonderful phrase. Elizabeth Murray’s work I find very exciting, very alive. Agnes Martin’s makes me feel like I just had a really good cup of tea and I have a fire going and can look at the day ahead.

Q: Report to the ancestors. What’s the state of the art?

A: American poetry is incredibly various. America’s strength is that is so flexible, compared to other countries. America, as a nation is losing that, though.

Q: What is the quality you look for in a poem?

A: I love language, I like filthy language, hieratic language, I like obscure language, archaic language, technical language — so I probably have the least affinity for the real minimalist writers. I like people who are kind of besotted by language.

Q: What’s the keynote of your personality as a poet?

A: Honesty. But I’m not incorruptible. In general, I think that’s the characteristic that I got from my dad, who didn’t believe in any gray areas. I think it’s important to me.

Q: What’s your motto?

A: “Be brave, be without malice, be as original as you were made to be.”

A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

2009-10-10T09:08:00.004-07:00

After a bit of a hiatus, ETR is coming back to more frequent posting. Sorry for the disappearance - school has more hectic than I remember from the first time around.

I'll begin the return with this review of Wallace Stevens from The Nation.

A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

By James Longenbach

This article appeared in the September 14, 2009 edition of The Nation.

August 26, 2009

SYLVIA SALMI
Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems
by Wallace Stevens; John N. Serio, ed.
Buy this book

In the fall of 1936, after a decade of not doing so, this magazine sponsored a poetry prize. Of the 1,800 poems submitted, said the editors of The Nation, "the overwhelming majority were concerned with contemporary social conflicts either at home or abroad." The winning poem, Wallace Stevens's "The Men That Are Falling," was an elegy for soldiers recently killed in the Spanish Civil War, which reads, in part:

Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips,
O pensioners, O demagogues and pay-men!

This death was his belief though death is a stone,
This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die.
These stand among the most uncharacteristic lines that Stevens ever published. Coming upon them in the elegantly compressed compass of the new Selected Poems, it's difficult to imagine that the author of a quietly unnerving pentameter like "The river that flows nowhere, like a sea" could have written the line "Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips."

Yet to read "The Men That Are Falling" beside some of the greatest poems of the twentieth century--"The Snow Man," "A Postcard From the Volcano," "The River of Rivers in Connecticut"--is to be forced to rearticulate the extremely complex terms of Stevens's achievement. Stevens stands simultaneously among the most worldly and the most otherworldly of American poets, and it is paradoxically through his otherworldliness--through poems whose plain-spoken diction feels spooky--that his respect for the actual world is registered. What is uncharacteristic about "The Men That Are Falling" is not the desire to write about a controversial war; Stevens often did that. What distinguishes the poem is the unconvincingly urgent rhetoric in which that desire is registered.

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1879. After attending Harvard College and New York Law School, he began working in the insurance industry in 1908. He quickly became one of the country's foremost experts in surety law, and in 1934 he was named vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company. "The truth is that we may well be entering an insurance era," he wrote in "Insurance and Social Change," published in 1937, the year in which the first Social Security benefits were paid. Surveying the nationalized insurance schemes of Italy, Germany and Britain, Stevens tried to convince his colleagues that the Social Security Administration posed no threat to their business or their personal lives.

Other great modern American poets had full-time jobs. Marianne Moore was an editor, William Carlos Williams a doctor, T.S. Eliot a banker (and later an editor). What distinguishes Stevens is that he never gave the impression of feeling any tension between the different aspects of his life. Once he quipped that "money is a kind of poetry," but more often he emphasized that his legal work was in no way poetic, just as his poems were not meaningfully involved with the logics of law or economics. In an essay called "Surety and Fidelity Claims," he even admitted that his work would seem tedious to almost anyone: "You sign a lot of drafts. You see surprisingly few people. You do the greater part of your work either in your own office or in lawyers' offices. You don't even see the country; you see law offices and hotel rooms." Unlike Ezra Pound, who was an amateur economist, Stevens had a professional's sense of the limitations of expertise. He resembles in this regard George Oppen, who stopped writing poetry for over twenty years in order to devote himself to personal and social problems that poetry did not have the power to ameliorate, however implicated in such problems poetry might have been.

Stevens also experienced extended periods of silence. At Harvard he was the president of The Advocate, a prestigious literary magazine; he exchanged sonnets with the philosopher George Santayana, for whom he would later write "To an Old Philosopher in Rome." But after leaving Cambridge in 1900, he wrote no poems for almost a decade. And when the magisterial "Sunday Morning" appeared in 1915, in Poetry magazine, it seemed to have come from nowhere; almost no apprentice work preceded it.

Stevens's first book, Harmonium, appeared eight years later, when the poet was 44, and it is still the most astonishing debut in the history of American poetry. In contrast, the poems in Pound's A Lume Spento or Williams's Poems barely let us glimpse the great work to come. But after publishing Harmonium, Stevens gave up poetry for another decade. His daughter, Holly, was born. "My job is not now with poets from Paris," he told Williams, who was a close friend. "It is to keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby's chariot turning."

Anyone who cared about American poetry presumed that Stevens's career as a poet was finished, but then "The Idea of Order at Key West" suddenly appeared in 1934. Beginning at age 55, Stevens finally assumed the profile of a poet, and the great books of his maturity (Ideas of Order, The Man With the Blue Guitar, Parts of a World, Transport to Summer and The Auroras of Autumn) were published at regular intervals. He continued working at the Hartford until well after the age of mandatory retirement; he declined an invitation to be the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. Shortly before his death in 1955, his Collected Poems received both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

One of his last poems was "The River of Rivers in Connecticut":

There is a great river this side of Stygia,
Before one comes to the first black cataracts
And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

In that river, far this side of Stygia,
The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,
Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,
Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.
He could not bend against its propelling force.

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances
That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington
Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction...
Call it, once more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

The river of rivers feels mythic, as momentous as the river that separates us from the afterlife. But this decidedly earthly river is not crossed only once; we need no ferryman, no Charon, to carry us over. The river is fateful because every moment of human life is fateful. It flows through the familiar towns of Haddam and Farmington, its water flashes in the sun. It is an emblem of our mortality, an endless flowing, but more important it embodies a sweet acceptance of oblivion: the river carries us nowhere, not like the sea but like a sea--like any sea at all.

Stevens once remarked that while we possess the great poems of heaven and hell, the great poems of the earth remain to be written. Both "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" and "The Men That Are Falling" are products of Stevens's lifelong ambition to write such poems--poems that honor mortality without needing to look beyond it. But even as "The Men That Are Falling" disdains the extremities of heaven and hell, it embraces earth in a language of fitful extremity: "This death was his belief though death is a stone,/This man loved earth, not heaven, enough to die." In contrast, the consolation of "The River of Rivers in Connecticut" feels enticingly complex because the poem's diction is so eerily generalized, its syntax so quietly declarative. The poem's celebration of human limitation would not feel convincing if its tone did not make small means feel magical.

This tone is Stevens's great achievement, his most enduring response to the world. Some poems seem relevant because of what they say, because of their subject matter. But all poems are truly relevant, whatever they say, because their manner of saying seduces us to inhabit the poem's language as if it were our own--despite the fact that any great poet's language is witheringly idiosyncratic. We feel, reading a great poem, that a small corner of the soul has for a moment become public property. Stevens describes this feeling with uncanny abruptness in "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," a poem that makes the act of reading and the act of writing feel indistinguishable: "The reader became the book."

Stevens first became himself in one of the earliest poems reprinted in the Selected Poems. "The Death of a Soldier" was written in response to the letters of Eugène Lemercier, a French soldier who was killed in World War I, but it feels as if the poem could be about anyone.

Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,
When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.
The cycles of the natural world cannot stop to record Lemercier's death; the clouds go nevertheless in their direction, which can't be specified, because it's theirs, not ours. For Stevens, there is immense consolation in this disregard for an individual human life--an assurance that the natural world will prevail despite the human appetite for destruction. The language of Stevens's most characteristic poetry partakes, in small ways, of this consolation: "The Death of a Soldier" does not mention Lemercier, who has already disappeared.

Stevens did not always write with the incandescent plainness that distinguishes poems from "The Death of a Soldier" to "The River of Rivers in Connecticut." Sometimes he is a poet of extravagant verbal energy, a show-off who indulges in lines like "Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan/Of tan with henna hackles, halt!" And sometimes he is more celebrated for such showiness than for the austerity that more truly becomes him. Stevens himself thought that the interplay of plainness and fanciness (or what he called reality and imagination) was central to his work, and he placed a programmatic account of this interplay at the center of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a long poem that asks to be treated as a masterpiece:

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.

"Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" is an enactment of this notion; the poem oscillates between an imperative to perceive the world plainly and a complementary imperative to imagine the world extravagantly. We need continually to create "fictions" that explain our world, and we need, as our world changes, to wipe such fictions away, returning to a plain sense of things that is itself an imaginative achievement. "In the absence of a belief in God," said Stevens in one of his most willed moments of self-confidence, "the mind turns to its own creations and examines them, not alone from the aesthetic point of view, but for what they reveal, for what they validate and invalidate."

This quasi-philosophical aspect of Stevens seemed very attractive in the later decades of the twentieth century, especially after the death of Eliot, whose Christianity sometimes inflected the academic critical establishment that championed his poems. Today this aspect of Stevens feels threadbare--as if the professional lawyer came to imagine that he was also a professional philosopher. I don't find what Stevens called his "reality-imagination complex" very engaging, and neither does John Serio, who says in his introduction to the Selected Poems that while many of the longer poems "do spur us intellectually," they "may not move us emotionally." Serio sees Stevens primarily as a lyric poet, and while he has excluded some of the longer poems from his selection ("Extracts From Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas," "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War," "The Pure Good of Theory"), I have trouble imagining the house growing quiet enough for even a devoted reader of "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" to become the book.

At issue here is not a preference for shorter poems; at issue is the particular kind of language that most authentically constitutes Stevens's gift.

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations--one desires
So much more than that.

This opening stanza of "The Poems of Our Climate" begins in an idiom that mirrors the stillness of the scene described, but when Stevens says that one desires "so much more" than an arrangement of pink and white carnations, the poem takes a peculiar turn. I'm convinced that Stevens thought he should desire more, but I'm not sure he actually did. His deepest inclination was (to quote the one phrase in the poetry that sounds like it was written by an insurance executive) to remain "within what we permit." So when Stevens reaches for sensual exuberance ("Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan") or passionate commitment ("Taste of the blood upon his martyred lips") or philosophical profundity ("Two things of opposite natures seem to depend/On one another"), the language often seems willed, as if the poet were embarrassed by his own taste for deprivation. "Is it bad to have come here/And to have found the bed empty?" asks Stevens in a little poem called "Gallant Château." The answer, undeflected by the wish to be different from oneself, is "It is good."

In the poems that matter most, this question needs neither to be asked nor answered: the language carries its own conviction. Early Stevens--"The Snow Man":

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow.

Midcareer Stevens--"The Man With the Blue Guitar":

It is the sea that whitens the roof.

The sea drifts through the winter air.
It is the sea that the north wind makes.
The sea is in the falling snow.

Late Stevens--"The Course of a Particular":

Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind,
Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less.
It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

These poems, like any of Stevens's best poems, make deprivation feel seductively like plenitude.

All the best poems are preserved in this collection, a culling that is considerably more severe than that of the selected volume it supersedes, The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by Holly Stevens and published in 1972. The whole of Stevens is represented here--the plain, the fancy, the philosophical--but the latter two categories have been pruned, affording the best of Stevens more prominence. This winnowing is over time inevitable (nobody reads the whole of Wordsworth or Tennyson), and I would go further: it's hard to imagine a need to reinhabit "Description Without Place" ("It is possible that to seem--it is to be") or "Late Hymn From the Myrrh-Mountain" ("Unsnack your snood, madanna"). Without the distraction of this willed language, the greatest of Stevens's poems, the movingly stark poems written during the last five years of his life, stand out even more vividly as the culmination of his career:

No soldiers in the scenery,
No thoughts of people now dead,v As they were fifty years ago:
Young and living in a live air,
Young and walking in the sunshine,v Bending in blue dresses to touch something--
Today the mind is not part of the weather.

Some readers might prefer the fanciful or the philosophical; others might argue that austerity cannot fully exist without its complements. But when we hear the sound of Stevens in poems by subsequent poets, it is most often the music of austerity, at once worldly and otherworldly, that we hear. Mark Strand: "From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,/A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room." Louise Glück: "I can't hear your voice/for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground." Donald Justice: "In a hotel room by the sea, the Master/Sits brooding." Carl Phillips: "The wind's pattern was its own, and the water's also." To say that these lines are indebted to Stevens is like saying that fish are indebted to water: the sound of Stevens has entered the sound of poetry in the language.

Tricycle Community Poetry Club

2009-08-29T15:09:00.001-07:00

Very cool - and membership in the Tricycle Community is free.

The Tricycle Community Poetry Club
August 26, 2009; Posted by James Shaheen
We’ve just launched the Tricycle Community Poetry Club, co-sponsored by Rattle magazine, a biannual poetry journal based in Los Angeles.

We’re kicking off with Peter Harris’s “Will Buddhism Survive.” Peter is a poet and “moonlights” as a professor of English at Colby College, where he teaches American Literature and poetry workshops. Here’s what Peter has to say about the poem:

I am currently a student at the Treetop Zen Center in Oakland, Maine. Three years ago, as part of Tokudo study, I was reading the Diamond Sutra chapter by chapter, explaining my understanding, then writing a poem. The Diamond Sutra stresses discriminating between thoughts about Buddhism and the experience of it.

In Chapter 6, the question arises whether Buddhism will survive. The early Buddhists lived in fraught times, too. I had the unoriginal thought that humans would have a better chance of surviving a while longer if we realized our original or Buddha-nature…

Read the rest here. If you’re not yet a member of the Tricycle Community, join us—it takes just a few seconds and besides, it’s free.

New qarrtsiluni call for submissions: “Words of Power”

2009-08-15T18:45:00.004-07:00

Submissions deadline is fast approaching, so hurry up and send them some work.

New qarrtsiluni call for submissions: “Words of Power”

August 2nd, 2009

For the second autumn in a row, Beth Adams and I will be stepping out from behind the curtain to edit an issue of qarrtsiluni ourselves. The deadline for submissions is August 31, and publication will begin around September 15. We’re pretty excited by the theme.

This time we’re looking for words of power: curses, spells, charms, prayers, incantations, mantras, sacred scriptures, explicit performative utterances, oaths, or legal instruments. Submissions may consist entirely of such super-charged language, or may riff upon or explore such language. Submissions of visual art may of course take a more figurative approach to the topic; images of amulets and other power-objects, for example, would be welcome. But otherwise we urge contributors not to interpret the theme too broadly. Please don’t just send us a piece of writing that you think is powerful according to some subjective evaluation. We’re looking quite specifically for language freighted with mana and/or executive force, or writing about that kind of language. If you’re not sure whether something qualifies, feel free to query.

Please limit written material to no more than five items per submission, with individual pieces not exceeding 3,000 words. Please refer to the general guidelines before submitting, and note especially the recommendation to query us if we don’t acknowledge receipt within two days — occasional server hiccups and email glitches are a fact of life on the internet.

We look forward to reading your words of power with an unusual admixture of excitement and trepidation. This issue could be a real test of our editorial juju!

We’re also really pleased with the results of our first annual poetry chapbook contest. Here’s the announcement about that.

Read more: http://www.vianegativa.us/2009/08/new-qarrtsiluni-call-for-submissions-words-of-power/#ixzz0OJ3Sz9b2
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution Share Alike

NYT- Poetry Chronicle

2009-08-09T17:07:00.001-07:00

Some new poetry books, reviewed by the New York Times.

Poetry Chronicle

Reviews by STEPHEN BURT

Published: July 29, 2009

THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS
By W. S. Merwin.
Copper Canyon, $22.

Nostalgia, grief, fear for our planet and a subdued resolve in the face of advancing years arrive together in the Hawaii-based Merwin’s 22nd collection of new poems, which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. As in all of his verse since the late 1960s, Merwin does away with punctuation, letting line breaks and sense determine syntax and pace. The results suggest whispers, laments, accounts of long-ago memories, even voices from an underworld: “the dead are not separate from the living,” he says; “each has one foot in the unknown.” Looking back at old photographs and childhood houses, at horse pastures and “splintery unlit” schoolrooms, Merwin represents faint consolations, autumn and nightfall, and a parent’s dying words: “All day the stars watch from long ago / my mother said I am going now / when you are alone you will be all right.” Lines move forward almost ceremonially, confident in the simplicity of their diction, like “clear water revealing / no color but that of the gray / stone around it.” As he has before, Merwin writes gravely of species in peril, among them our own: endangered bats and departed songbirds “were singing of youth / not knowing that they were singing for us.” Yet most of the work in this capacious book considers not the earth’s mortality but Merwin’s own: poems shift from his first years to his most recent (he will turn 82 this September), from the helplessness of a young child to the profound resignations of old age.
ARCHICEMBALO
Poems.
By G. C. Waldrep.
Tupelo, paper, $16.95.
Waldrep’s title denotes an antique keyboard instrument with 24, or many more, keys per octave. Notoriously hard to play, such instruments made subtle and challenging music, with notes a conventional score could not include. Waldrep’s sometimes bewildering, often exciting prose poems make their own unconventional music, replete with slippages, repetitions, suggestions: “Every sound is tropical, every sound is perishable,” he writes. “My aunt sends one wrapped in butcher paper & string.” Most poems take quizzical titles from musical terms (“What Is a Threnody,” “What Is a Motet”), and most take rhetorical gifts from Gertrude Stein; yet Waldrep’s poems, far more than Stein’s, revel in the variety of their subjects. Some include clear scenes and characters, as when the poet helps a boy cross a cold road: “we walked slowly, because he was not yet done with being five.” The poet also leavens his intricate compositions with self-consciously playful asides: “Nothing is what it appears to be, I say. To which you reply, yes it is.” Waldrep (who studied the labor movement for his Ph.D. in American history) attends to the meaning of work, to the hardships of lives unlike his own: “Who Was Scheherazade” begins “My job was to pick rocks.” Yet his great triumphs combine such outward sympathies with self-conscious attention to inward oddities, to fleeting thoughts, to the vectors of energy in abstract words: “If I subtract sacrifice from appetite from what fierce attention do I then compromise a strict union, have I faltered, have I made an argument for grace.”
TRYST
By Angie Estes.
Oberlin College, paper, $15.95.
Gleeful and gorgeous, delighted by puns and other wordplay (including words from French, Latin and Italian), Estes’s fast-paced free verse, rich with internal rhyme, takes rightful pride in the beauties it flaunts and explains. Her fourth collection finds, for recurrent motifs, saints’ lives, medieval manuscripts, gold leaf and the alphabet: “hearts bloom / out of Ds like lamb chop sleeves / in the script of the fifteenth-century / scribe”; in a gilded Book of Hours, “the letters / have fallen out of the words and lie / scattered on the ground.” Each deft poem weaves together multiple topics — some art-historical, others autobiographical — through chains of homonyms and knotty analogies: “Take Cover” skates from the French “couvre feu, cover the fire” (the origin for our word “curfew”) to disheveled bedcovers and 1950s-style duck-and-cover drills. Though Estes revels in European reference (Dante, Trieste, Greta Garbo), her matchless hunger for experience makes her indelibly American: “how the tongue / keeps lapping the world’s / loot,” she exclaims, “even in the 499th lap / of the Indy 500.” The arts — from Cimabue’s painting to haute cuisine — are for Estes never mere luxuries; rather, the arts, and our pride in them, give us the only effective countermeasures to loneliness, helplessness and serious pain. And pain — remembered or feared — is always somewhere: “So Near Yet So Far” connects a lunar eclipse, a film starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth, a concept from high-energy plasma physics and “the necklace / of pearls my father bought my mother / for their forty-fifth wedding / anniversary, which she made him / take back.”
SELECTED POEMS
By Eilean Ni Chuilleanain.
Edited by Peter Fallon.
Wake Forest University, paper, $12.95.
Admired in Ireland since the 1970s, Ni Chuilleanain (pronounced knee QUILL-an-awn) deserves American attention too. Raised in the port city of Cork, drawn to visionary experience, yet alert to domestic and urban detail, she looks at once inward to things of the spirit and outward to coastlines, Continental Europe and an omnipresent sea. “Hurried exiles” disembark in Cork, “reach out for a door and find a banister, / Reach for a light and find their hands in water, / Their rooms all swamped by dreams”; the poet sees, in the grain of wooden furniture, “the long currents of a pale ocean / Softly turning itself inside out.” Poetry is for her an attitude, a kind of summoning, but also “another skill, as fine / As judging the set of milk for cheese, / A belief in the wisdom of a long view from one window.” Her visionary sentences favor soft consonants and muffled stops, without rhyme: their tones vary from celebratory to bitter, from the openly prayerful to the curtly appalled. Ni Chuilleanain’s Italy can get pious or touristy, but her Irish sites stay mysterious and credible. Poems on religious subjects pay homage to hermits, saints and nuns, sometimes with feminist undertones; poems of family life handle memories well. A mother’s sacred spot is “the place where the child / Felt sick in the car and they pulled over / And waited”; a young woman, coming home late on a bus, thinks “Nobody who knows me knows where I am now.”
~ Stephen Burt’s most recent book is “Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry.”

Sarah Luczaj: Three Poems

2009-08-02T20:57:00.004-07:00

In the near future, I will be reviewing Sarah's recent collection of poems, An Urgent Request (published by Fortunate Daughter, an imprint of Tebot Bach). For now, here are a few poems to keep you inspired, all three are from the collection.

An Urgent Request

Hello and goodbye,
flour, vegetables, coffee
and orange juice.
A body, a soul, thoughts,
a moment of freedom.
Words. I am so jealous of your words.

I would like to buy some Polish grammar.
All of it.

I would like to buy a reusable bag
for the case endings.
Please segregate the genitive
from the dative well.

If war were to break out tomorrow
which of the neighbors would kill us?
How do they all know what to do?
How do my friends walk around
with all they know and feel?
Why won't they talk to each other?

It's just a question of words—
the wrong ones got delivered.
They don't fit.

We fear our words say
something about us
instead of using those damned words to speak.

We gravitate irresistibly
towards the passive.
Mostly women.

I am furious.

Deliver those words please,
I cannot wait any longer.

I need not only the perfect
and imperfect verbs
and each separate verb-concept
but a precise dividing line
between them.

I know that will be more expensive.

I am prepared to pay postage.

Yes, the country I live in
really exists.

It is called where-I-am-now
or, for short, my name.
It's even in Europe.
So, you see, it won't cost so much.
This document will most certainly
even be translated.

I know exactly where I am.
You understand?
First you have to give me the words!

I’m leaning over the desk now
and my hair is falling over the forms
and I'm sweating.

Yes, I need prepositions too.
And the cases to which they attach.

I need those little joining wires.
Several thousand of them.
They'll be cheaper if I buy them
all at once.

I don't need poetry.
I already have a body.

Just give me the words.

* * * * *

my life is brilliant

No one I love
has died so far today.

Every single war in this world
has passed me by.

I am not starving and I haven’t stumbled
onto any terrorist’s map
or into anyone’s axis of evil

Nobody tortured me today.
No policeman shot me by accident or on purpose
No tidal wave swept my house away

I was not sentenced to death for infidelity,
blasphemy, murder
or not having put enough salt in the soup.

* * * * *

Blaze

It’s autumn, season of mooching poets, mellow
fruitfulness and death, of blazing lanterns
standing in the trees, of crunching dry gold

standing, of black skeletons poking through,
of apples, I want to straighten my spine,
eat gold leaves, rocket down

to earth scuttle across someone’s face, someone
lying naked in a field, sun bleeding through eyelids
thinking last time, defiant joy, I want to be it

and the wind that breaks up the block of blue
that fits over us today, the wind that makes
it’s sea sound in my hair the wind that rushes

over the flat stones at the door, the stones
from the riverbed, the wind that grasps
the leaves and flings them high and brightness

* * * * *

~ "An Urgent Request" originally appeared in The Pedestal; "my life is brilliant" and "Blaze" originally appeared in Other Voices. I am grateful to these fine magazine for the right to reprint the poems here.

Sarah is a psychotherapist. You can find her at her personal site, or at her online therapy site.

Tricycle - Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation

2009-07-29T15:48:00.002-07:00

Excellent article by one of my favorite Buddhist poets.

Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation

By Gary Snyder

IN THIS WORLD of onrushing events the act of meditation—even just a "one-breath" meditation—straightening the back, clearing the mind for a moment—is a refreshing island in the stream. Although the term meditation has mystical and religious connotations for many people, it is a simple and plain activity. Attention: deliberate stillness and silence. As anyone who has practiced sitting knows, the quieted mind has many paths, most of them tedious and ordinary. Then, right in the midst of meditation, totally unexpected images or feelings may sometimes erupt, and there is a way into a vivid transparency. But whatever comes up, sitting is always instructive. There is ample testimony that a practice of meditation pursued over months and years brings some degree of self-understanding, serenity, focus, and self-confidence to the person who stays with it. There is also a deep gratitude that one comes to feel for this world of beings, teachers, and teachings.

No one—guru or roshi or priest—can program for long what a person might think or feel in private reflection. We learn that we cannot in any literal sense control our mind. Meditation cannot serve an ideology. A meditation teacher can only help a student understand the phenomena that rise from his or her own inner world—after the fact—and give tips on directions to go. A meditation teacher can be a check or guide for the wayfarer to measure herself against, and like any experienced guide can give good warning of brushy paths and dead-end canyons from personal experience. The teacher provides questions, not answers. Within a traditional Buddhist framework of ethical values and psychological insight, the mind essentially reveals itself.

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it. Poems are a bit like this too. The experience of a poem gives both distance and involvement: one is closer and farther at the same time.

TRADITIONS OF DELIBERATE ATTENTION to consciousness, and of making poems, are as old as humankind. Meditation looks inward, poetry holds forth. One is private, the other is out in the world. One enters the moment, the other shares it. But in practice it is never entirely clear which is doing which. In any case, we do know that in spite of the contemporary public perception of meditation and poetry as special, exotic, and difficult, they are both as old and as common as grass. The one goes back to essential moments of stillness and deep inwardness, and the other to the fundamental impulse of expression and presentation.

People often confuse meditation with prayer, devotion, or vision. They are not the same. Meditation as a practice does not address itself to a deity or present itself as an opportunity for revelation. This is not to say that people who are meditating do not occasionally think they have received a revelation or experienced visions. They do. But to those for whom meditation is their central practice, a vision or a revelation is seen as just another phenomenon of consciousness and as such is not to be taken as exceptional. The meditator would simply experience the ground of consciousness, and in doing so avoid excluding or excessively elevating any thought or feeling. To do this one must release all sense of the "I" as experiencer, even the "I" that might think it is privileged to communicate with the divine. It is in sensitive areas such as these that a teacher can be a great help. This is mostly a description of the Buddhist meditation tradition, which has hewed consistently to a nontheistic practice over the centuries.

Poetry has also been part of Buddhism from early on. From the 2,500-year-old songs of forest-dwelling monks and nuns of India to the vivid colloquial poems of Kenji Miyazawa in 1930s Japan, there is a continuous thread. Poetry has had a primary place of respect in Chinese literary culture, and many of the best-known poems of the Chinese canon are touched with Ch'an and Taoist insight. Some of the finest poets of China were even acknowledged Ch'an adepts—Bai Juyi and Su Dungpo, to name just two.

Although the Chinese Ch'an masters liked to say "The lowest class of monk is the one who indulges in literature," we have to remember that blame is often praise in the Ch'an world. The Ch'an training halls, with their unconventional dharma discourses and vivid mimed exchanges, and the tradition of the Chinese lyric poems, shih, with their lucid and allusive brevity, were clearly shaping each other by the early Tang dynasty.
Ch'an teachers and students have always written their own sort of in-house poems as well. In formal gung-an (koan) study, a student is often called upon to present a few lines of poetry from the Chinese canon as a proof of the completeness of his or her understanding—an exercise called zho-yu, "capping verses" (jakugo in Japanese). Such exchanges have been described in the book A Zen Forest by Soiku Shigematsu, a Japanese Rinzai Zen priest. Shigematsu Osho has handily translated hundreds of the couplets as borrowed from Chinese poetry and proverb. They are intense:

Words, words, words—fluttering drizzle and snow.
Silence, silence, silence—a roaring thunderbolt.
Bring back the dead!
Kill the living!
This tune, another tune—no one understands.
Rain has passed, leaving the pond brimming in the autumn light.
The fire of catastrophe has burned out all
Millions of miles no mist, not a grain of dust!
One phrase after another
Each moment refreshing.

These bits of poems are not simply bandied about between Zen students as some kind of in-group wisdom or slangy shorthand for larger meanings. They are used sparingly, in interviews with the teacher, as a mode of reaching even deeper than a "personal" answer to a problem, as a way of confirming that one has touched base with a larger Mind. They are valued not for the literary metaphor but for the challenge presented by the exercise of physically actualizing the metaphor in the present. They help the student bring symbols and abstractions back to earth, into the body. Zen exquisitely develops this possibility—yet it's not far from the natural work of poems and proverbs anyway.

The Buddhist world has produced numerous poets and singers of the dharma whose works are still admired and loved. Milarepa, whose songs are known by heart among Tibetans, and Basho, whose haiku are read worldwide, are perhaps the most famous.

I STARTED WRITING POETRY in my adolescence, to give voice to some powerful experiences that I had while doing snowpeak mountaineering in the Pacific Northwest. At first I wrote "directly as I felt." Then I discovered the work of Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence. Aha, I thought, there is more to poetry. I became aware of poetry as a craft—a matter of working with materials and tools—that has a history, with different applications and strategies all over the world over tens of thousands of years. I came to understand poetry as a furthering of language. (Language is not something you learn in school, it is a world you're born into. It is part of the wildness of Mind. You master your home tongue without conscious effort by the age of five. Language with its sinuous syntax is not unlike the thermal dynamics of weather systems, or energy exchanges in the food chain—completely natural and vital, part of what and who we are. Poetry is the leap off of [or into] that.)

I ran into a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins with the lines,

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep

This helped me realize that literal mountains were not the only place to climb. I was recovering at the time from a little frostbite suffered on a winter ascent of Mt. Hood. (It should be said that mountaineering is not simply some sort of challenging quest. It has that aspect, but for dedicated climbers the strategy, the companionship, and the cooperation is what makes climbing the game it is.) Climbing also opened me up to the impermanence, the total scariness, the literal voidness under my feet, the exposure, as we say, of consciousness itself. What deep and soulful thoughts that witnessing the gulf below can give you.

Read the rest of the article.

Aram Saroyan - Beat America

2009-07-17T16:31:00.002-07:00

Nice article on the Beats posted over at The Poetry Foundation site.

Beat America
What did we learn from Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg?
by Aram Saroyan

Original artwork by Paul Killebrew

It's been more than a decade since the death of Allen Ginsberg, but in the interim I've found that he's stayed with me as an informing, tempering, guardian-like presence of a stature equaled only by my late father. Allen and I were never really friends, but having said that I feel an urgency to qualify and emend it. He meant as much as or more than any friend I can think of, and in the years since his death it's come to me that he was one of the two or three great teachers of my life. He looked me up and down, and looked me in the face, taking my measure for good or ill, and then informed me, on several critical occasions, where I had gotten it right or wrong. I bridled at the negative assessments but then quickly or slowly realized the generosity implicit in them and, more to the point, their correctness.

I also realize that with his passing there is simply no one to fill his shoes. He had the energy and curiosity and hunger for the crowd to be seemingly everywhere, and that is something we could do with more of in our poets. Our great ghosts of the outer limits, from Emily Dickinson to Robinson Jeffers, are all well and good, but we need more of the shambling, love-besotted Whitman, Allen's great exemplar, of whom he was the finest avatar we've yet had. That he was Jewish is also, to me, half-Jewish and much in colloquy with that side of myself, a wonder and a blessing. He was a Jew who rejected and defied the worst, and at the same time typified the best, of our tribe. He left the inbred zealots and the mammon-obsessed equally behind and demonstrated, into the bargain, the native practicality of my grandmother's putting a bowl of chicken soup down on the table and commanding one to eat. He paid the rent and the utility bill and only then sat down to write poesy. He was a mensch.

The Jews, like the Armenians wronged by history on the scale of genocide, are obsessed by morality, and this can swiftly segue into self-righteousness. Allen, the brilliant pied piper of the hippies during the '60s, had the insight to see in Kerouac's disgruntled redneck—"Blow me, Ginsberg," he reports being commanded more than once when Kerouac had grown fat and old—to see in this drunken misanthrope a golden teaching. When all of us were caught up in being right, so to speak, Kerouac bedeviled everyone by being heartbreakingly wrong. He kept the other side in human perspective, perhaps in a way similar to Allen's later teacher Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist with whom Allen and Anne Waldman collaborated to create Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder.

Trungpa came from the Crazy Wisdom lineage in Buddhism. Before his early death, he scandalized the American spiritual community with his drunkenness, his promiscuity, and, most notably, a confrontation with W.S. Merwin in which his devotees at a retreat violently terrorized the poet and his girlfriend. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is perhaps the most famous of Trungpa's books, and the title summarizes his approach. The story goes that when Allen first met him, he was surprised and put off by Trungpa's drinking.

"You should stop drinking," Allen told him. "You can't be a drunk when you're a spiritual leader."

Trungpa told Ginsberg fine, he would stop drinking if Allen would cut off his long hair and shave his beard. Allen, always up for a cosmic joust, went off and did that, then returned clean and shorn to Trungpa, presumably still at the bar.

"Okay," Allen said. "Now it's your turn."

Trungpa reportedly told Allen that he liked drinking too much to give it up—which sounds a lot like that Catholic Buddhist, Allen's other guru, Kerouac.

As a teenager in Manhattan, I turned to poetry because I couldn't understand what life was about and thought I might uncover some clues in such writing, which, according to Louis Zukofsky, finds an order "that can speak to all men." Howl, which I found during high school, was like an encyclopedia of the emotional and psychic life that had been driven under in me, with the result that I felt restless and bored a lot of the time. It was like finding a deep neural and psychic autobiography in the middle of the snow job of late-1950s/early-1960s America. Life is big, it said. It has a lot of colors. It's serious. It's funny. It's full of suffering that is also like bread, nurture, on a journey of the soul. I could say that reading it broke me open, so that I could discover myself in the deeper history of our time and kind.

Which was quite a favor to render a screwed-up adolescent.

Allen called me from Naropa one year, trying to track down a photograph of Kerouac that I'd used in Genesis Angels: The Saga of Lew Welch and the Beat Generation. It was a head shot of Jack wearing a crucifix, which had appeared originally in Mademoiselle. The crucifix had been airbrushed out of most of the reprints of the photograph, which may have been why Allen was looking to find the photographer, a man named William Eichel, whom I never located. After going over these details, we got on to other things. My father had died recently, and Allen told me a story about his father, the late poet Louis Ginsberg, who had been a high school teacher in New Jersey. When he'd visited his father in the hospital during his last illness, Allen said Louis told him that as a little boy he'd lived near a magnificent building, a great tower with chimneys from which, at certain hours of the day, huge plumes of smoke billowed. Louis had dreamed of this building and wondered what went on inside it. He promised himself that when he grew up he would go there and find out. Years later, as an older man, Louis made his pilgrimage.

"Do you know what it was, Allen? That great tower that set me dreaming?"

"What, Pop?"

"It was a glue factory."

During the same call Allen lightened my spirits by telling me how much he liked Genesis Angels, which had received mixed reviews. We talked a while longer and then he said he was getting worried about the phone bill, and I let him go. The part about the phone bill is pure Allen Ginsberg to me, the great poet of his time with one eye on the utility company.

During the '60s, in my minimalist phase as a poet, I ran into Allen one afternoon on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. I'd just purchased some bell-bottoms and a hippie shirt, thinking I'd take the plunge into my generation's attire, and Allen looked me over seriously.

"What's going on?" he said.

"Well, I think the clothes are beautiful, so why not wear them?" I said, trying to keep my inflections relaxed, though I felt caught out by him in an experimental exercise.

He nodded and made no further comment about it, and we got to discussing my one-word poems.

"Are you lazy, or what?" It was the sort of comment that could have come only from Allen or from my father.

"No," I said.

Ten years later, when I'd abandoned postmodernism and become a writer in an older tradition, Allen attended a reading I gave with Bill Knott at St. Mark's Church. Afterward, he commented to me that a poem I'd read took an "us-and-them" stance that he considered incorrect. This was priceless information, not about the quality of the poem so much as about how it is one continues to write. It was, as I see it today, part of the higher literary physics that he and Kerouac reinstated, so to speak. The reason you didn't take an us-and-them stance I heard explicitly echoed later in my reading of William Hazlitt and Henry James, among others. The moral example of literature wasn't judgment, that is, but empathy, which is why Shakespeare is our greatest exemplar. Allen was telling me, in his way, that I had turned down a cul-de-sac.

* * *

The Paris Review interview with Jack Kerouac was the brainchild of Ted Berrigan at a time when, hard as it is to believe, Kerouac was an almost forgotten man. Thank God Ted didn't forget him. It was a few months before the fabled Summer of Love, 1967, and Ted stopped in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was living at the time. He brought along fellow poets Ron Padgett and Tom Clark, as well as Larry Bensky, who went on to become a mainstay of Pacifica Public Radio's political reporting. For everyone but Ted, the Cambridge trip was a spur-of-the-moment lark. For several lovely spring days, people variously drifted in and out of, snacked and rapped in, napped and slept at the Central Square two-story house I was renting with a couple of roommates—everyone enjoying the atmosphere of the town at the height of the '60s—and then all of the impromptu visitors but Ted drove back to New York. Ted invited me to accompany him up to Lowell to interview Kerouac, and the poet Duncan McNaughton showed up with a big late-model car to drive us all there. I accepted the invitation on impulse—at that moment of the '60s I'd very nearly forgotten Kerouac myself.

Ted's impromptu choreography: Jack had loved my dad's work, Ted knew, and he also knew I'd be reluctant to come as the Ambassador of William Saroyan, as it were, and made his invitation spontaneously casual—and off we went.

Kerouac, a bull-like ruin in his dark Lowell ranch-house living room, was the last of the Beat triumvirate I met (Allen was first, then Burroughs), and I saw him only that single afternoon and evening, but it proved to be a strange rite of passage, a goofy but enduring literary baptism.

Ted, a red-haired Irishman in his early 30s who liked to pop pills, gave Jack a handful of Obitrols almost as soon as we stepped into the living room, and Jack gulped them and never looked back. Ted knew Jack's work comprehensively, minutely, and with intimate biographical details in the bargain. He was a great interviewer because he was also ready, willing, and able to run the full gamut of Jack's demotic vocabulary, which like Shakespeare's was a great repository, from the idiomatic to the high literary.

"God, man, I rode around this country free as a bee." Kerouac told us about his time with Neal Cassady. "We had more fun than five thousand Socony Gasoline Station attendants can have." I sat in the dark living room—the afternoon had turned to evening, but no one had bothered to turn on the lights—thinking this doesn't sound like the Paris Review interview I read with Truman Capote.

I had a signal Edward R. Murrow moment, but it came up a little too late for me to deliver a non-Murrow-like smart-ass punch line I had in mind. I asked Jack what the difference was between Buddha and Jesus. He looked up at me quickly, nodded seriously, and said, "That's a very good question. There is none."

This response, not unexpected, nevertheless kept me quiet, for which I thank both deities. My planned answer: "Buddha knew karate."

During the interview Jack, perhaps intrigued that the son of one of his first literary influences was now looking to him, asked me to repeat after him, line by line, the words of a poem of his from Mexico City Blues:

KEROUAC: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps. Say that, Saroyan.

SAROYAN: Delicate conceptions of kneecaps.

Concluding:

KEROUAC: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

SAROYAN: Like kissing my kitten in the belly

KEROUAC: The softness of our reward

SAROYAN: The softness of our reward

I stumbled once or twice—there were some complicated lines—but a thick-skinned, hardheaded 23-year-old writer was getting some basic training, not in literature per se, but in repeating the words of a master. That is the correct existential posture in the lineage of mystery—surrendering to it—that the Beats revived. So, my young friend, it was as if Kerouac was saying, Let's appreciate it together; even though I wrote it, it's both of ours now. When I'd completed this exercise, Jack rewarded me with a modest encomium that has traveled with me down the years and that I've tried my best to be worthy of. "You'll do, Saroyan," he said.

David Orr Reviews Thom Gunn: Selected Poems

2009-07-11T09:17:00.002-07:00

A nice review from the New York Times of Thom Gunn's new Selected Poems.

Too Close to Touch

By DAVID ORR

Published: July 10, 2009

Christopher Felver/Corbis -
Thom Gunn

All poets, if they are any good,” Charles Simic has said, “tend to stand apart from their literary age.” The key phrase here, of course, is “if they are any good”; average poets don’t just stand within their age, they compose it. But we sometimes talk as if poets are exceptions not simply when they write well, but because they write at all. According to this way of thinking, the art form demands such devotion to one’s individuality that every poet, no matter how lowly, is a kind of outsider — a Cheese Who Stands Alone. This perception frequently finds its way into depictions of poets in popular culture; it also emerges in the vehemence with which poets themselves regularly declare their opposition to labels, categories, schools, allegiances, booster clubs, car pools, intramural softball teams and so on. Yet when everyone is busy standing apart, how is it possible to stand out? What does real independence look like?
Possibly something like the work of Thom Gunn, whose new Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $14) is edited by August Kleinzahler. Gunn, who died in 2004, began his career as a hot young poet in England (he published his first book, “Fighting Terms,” when he was only 25) and was generally associated with the taut, plainspoken aesthetic favored by writers like Philip Larkin and Donald Davie. In 1954, he left England for San Francisco, where he eventually settled after studying with Yvor Winters at Stanford. Gunn embraced the city’s bohemian lifestyle — Edmund White called him “the last of the commune dwellers . . . serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night” — and he grew increasingly interested in syllabics and free verse even as he continued to hone the metrical forms that distinguished his early career. He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch . . . well, Allen Ginsberg). This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background.
It’s also the kind of background that leads to misleading career narratives. Like most people, poets rarely undergo multiple metamorphoses in their lives and art over a short period. In time, they might shift their style; they might take up different subject matter; they might buy a duplex in Miami. But generally speaking, their existence is reasonably consistent, and they stick fairly close to what they know. Gunn, however, not only moved from England to America, he exchanged the rarefied air of Cambridge for the hothouse of 1960s-era San Francisco, became openly gay, started dabbling in drugs, began writing about the urban underbelly and set about tinkering with the verse techniques that had made him (relatively) famous — all in the space of about 10 years. Critics often attribute changes in a poet’s style to changes in his life; this much change in both arenas threw some readers into what could be described as a tizzy of questionable causation. British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more “relaxed” versification. (You can still see this dynamic at work today, whenever critics contrast Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before.) In any case, all of the talk about Gunn’s life and style, and style and life, almost makes one wish the poet had stayed in England; at least then no one could say he wrote seven-syllable lines because of Jefferson Airplane.
Kleinzahler believes that Gunn’s development was steadier and, in some ways, more conventional. He’s right. Gunn began to come into his own with the publication of “My Sad Captains” in 1961, when he was 32, and his work steadily strengthened for the next four decades. In his best, most characteristic writing, Gunn is what you might call a poet of friction: he’s interested in the ways in which surfaces push off, against or into each other. Consider his description of surfing in “From the Wave”:
The mindless heave of which they rode
A fluid shelf
Breaks as they leave it, falls and, slowed,
Loses itself.
Clear, the sheathed bodies slick as seals
Loosen and tingle;
And by the board the bare foot feels
The suck of shingle.
There are many ways to write about surfing — one could focus on the danger, the grace, the speed and so forth. But it’s typical of Gunn that while he gives us a sense of all these elements, he’s drawn to instances of contact: the point at which “the bare foot feels / The suck of shingle”; the moment in which “marbling bodies have become / Half wave, half men, / Grafted it seems by feet of foam.” Feel and touch and pressure are constants throughout this selection, whether it’s the longing of a hawk for “the feel . . . / Of catcher and of caught / Upon your wrist”; the swimmer who remembers “the pull and risk / Of the Pacific’s touch . . . Its cold live sinews tugging at each limb”; or simply the “secure firm dry embrace” of longtime domestic affection.
Even in the AIDS-related elegies that dominate his most famous book, “The Man With Night Sweats,” Gunn is drawn to comparisons involving substance brought to bear on substance. “Still Life,” a poem about a terminal patient, concludes with the image of “the tube his mouth enclosed / In an astonished O.” “The Missing” imagines the vast web of friendships, now vanishing, as a “supple entwinement through the living mass / Which for all that I knew might have no end, / Image of an unlimited embrace.” But the poem that gives “The Man With Night Sweats” its title is perhaps Gunn’s most arresting use of this sort of metaphor. The poem begins with a man waking at night (“I wake up cold, I who / Prospered through dreams of heat”) and recognizing the rising weakness in his once-powerful body. It concludes:
I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.
The delicate suggestion of alienation, or at least separation, between self and body (“Hugging my body to me”) presages the even greater disruption that occurs in the final couplet. We think of the earth as being our foundation: we’re “on solid ground.” The image of an avalanche is especially disturbing, then, because it suggests that what had supported our bodies is now bent on destroying them. The touch has become a blow; the heat of friction has become a conflagration. Here, Gunn is (consciously or not) rewriting the great American poem of unity between body and earth, Robert Frost’s “To Earthward.” That poem ends: “When stiff and sore and scarred / I take away my hand / From leaning on it hard / In grass and sand, / The hurt is not enough: / I long for weight and strength / To feel the earth as rough / To all my length.” Oh no, says Gunn, you don’t.
One can quibble with some of the choices in this volume. Kleinzahler’s version of Gunn is a little more austere than some might like, even when the poems themselves are bent on advertising their countercultural bona fides. It’s puzzling, for instance, that space was made for a druggy yet prim couplet about, yes, Jefferson Airplane (“The music comes and goes on the wind, / Comes and goes on the brain”), but not for any of Gunn’s epigrams; for instance, the superb “Barren Leaves,” which reads in its entirety: “Spontaneous overflows of powerful feeling: / Wet dreams, wet dreams, in libraries congealing.” Gunn was a very funny poet, and it would have been good to see more of that. But of course, his total output ran well over 500 pages, almost all of which are well worth reading, and any selection was bound to have holes critics would cry over. It’s to the credit of this remarkable writer that those absences seem unimportant beside what is so rousingly present.

Two Poems: Ray Succre

2009-07-08T22:50:00.001-07:00

Apartment 208

I find the remnants of
his seasonal praise of a highness,
or of some god,
in the dumpster
by the parking lot.

Feathers and blood, a beak
that's been engraved with
a woodburner,
engraved with some haggard letters
in a pictogrammatical language
in a box
in the garbage.

That chicken-killing man
down the hall
makes animal sounds
in recreation, practices them,
nails money in envelopes to his
own front door,
makes me nervous and wary.

Either of us is made absurd
by the other.

* * * * *

A Nova Rests on the Briar

Red dot—why, because the dizzying stab
snapped apart the center of my thumb,
an accuracy of point;
every pore could be a torn open hole.
The grimy thumb was desert. The nail, sky.
The point? Impermanence.

I was pulling brambles to drink four p.m.,
as they were playful to me,
and had the look of freedom where they grew,
having spread wherever they pleased
like petrol on the surface of an eye.

If my own eye should quetch and leak,
for the human brambles I've seen vanish,
until my very skull were dry,
I would not, in a torte of grief,
rewind or blink, rub or drift my focus loose.

The red nova on my thumb is tasted and forgotten.
In the seconds between stab, red, and suck,
men and women had left the Earth forever,
red novas swollen over by cold, hands, clutched
and then dismissed.

I grasp the brambles and drag them out of life.
I can kill them all by five.

~ Ray Succre currently lives on the southern Oregon coast with his wife and son. He has been published in Aesthetica, BlazeVOX, and Pank, as well as in numerous others across as many countries. His novel Tatterdemalion (Cauliay) was recently released in print and is available most places. A second novel, Amphisbaena, is forthcoming in Summer 2009. He tries hard.

Poem: Gina Goldblatt

2009-07-08T22:40:00.004-07:00

Broome St.

lungs are full of smoke down on Broome Street
foamy voices babble out a cacophony of sounds
a flagrant boisterous symphony

plucked from the fingertips of late nights in melody
neither tendon nor freckle
out of sync

the children of a wise discussion on visionaries
urchins of the night
garlanding their balconies with carrot flowers

the men and women in the apartments above
dreaming brilliant dreams of puppy dogs and string instruments
seduced to hugging their bedposts with upturned sleepy smiles

~ Gina Goldblatt is an aspiring writer who attended Suny Purchase College in New York, where she earned her Bachelors in Literature. This is her first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.

2009-07-06T19:20:00.001-07:00

A cool article from The Poetry Foundation.

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.

An introduction to the 21st Century's most controversial poetry movements.

by Kenneth Goldsmith

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. What does it mean to be a poet in the Internet age? These two movements, Flarf and Conceptual Writing, each formed over the past five years, are direct investigations to that end. And as different as they are, they have surprisingly come up with a set of similar solutions. Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else’s? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there’s a sense that these words aren’t meant for forever. Today they’re glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. Fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, these strategies propose an expanded field for twenty-first-century poetry. This new writing is not bound exclusively between pages of a book; it continually morphs from printed page to web page, from gallery space to science lab, from social spaces of poetry readings to social spaces of blogs. It is a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty.

Yet for as much as the two movements have in common, they are very different. Unlike Conceptual Writing, where procedure may have as much to do with meaning as the form and content, Flarf is quasi-procedural and improvisatory. Many of the poems are “sculpted” from the results of Internet searches, often using words and phrases that the poet has gleaned from poems posted by other poets to the Flarflist e-mail listserv. By contrast Conceptual Writers try to emulate the workings and processes of the machine, feeling that the results will be good if the concept and execution of the poetic machine are good; there is no tolerance for improvisation or spontaneity.

Flarf plays Dionysus to Conceptual Writing’s Apollo. Flarf uses traditional poetic tropes (“taste” and “subjectivity”) and forms (stanza and verse) to turn these conventions inside out. Conceptual Writing rarely “looks” like poetry and uses its own subjectivity to construct a linguistic machine that words may be poured into; it cares little for the outcome. Flarf is hilarious. Conceptual Writing is dry. Flarf is the Land O’Lakes butter squaw; Conceptual Writing is the government’s nutritional label on the box. Flarf is Larry Rivers. Conceptual Writing is Andy Warhol. No matter. They’re two sides of the same coin. Choose your poison and embrace your guilty pleasure.—KG

FLARF & CONCEPTUAL WRITING

Jordan Davis Three Poems on Demand

Mel Nichols I Google Myself

Sharon Mesmer The Swiss Just Do Whatever

K. Silem Mohammad Poems About Trees

Nada Gordon Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas

Drew Gardner Why do I hate Flarf so much?

Gary Sullivan Am I Emo?
A poetry comic.

Caroline Bergvall The Not Tale (Funeral)

Christian Bök The Great Order of the Universe

Robert Fitterman Directory

Kenneth Goldsmith Two Poems from “The Day”

Craig Dworkin Fact

Vanessa Place Miss Scarlett

	FLARF & CONCEPTUAL WRITING
	Jordan Davis	Three Poems on Demand
	Mel Nichols	I Google Myself
	Sharon Mesmer	The Swiss Just Do Whatever
	K. Silem Mohammad	Poems About Trees
	Nada Gordon	Unicorn Believers Don’t Declare Fatwas
	Drew Gardner	Why do I hate Flarf so much?
	Gary Sullivan	Am I Emo? A poetry comic.
	Caroline Bergvall	The Not Tale (Funeral)
	Christian Bök	The Great Order of the Universe
	Robert Fitterman	Directory
	Kenneth Goldsmith	Two Poems from “The Day”
	Craig Dworkin	Fact
	Vanessa Place	Miss Scarlett

Steve Klepetar - Three Poems

2009-06-10T15:47:00.005-07:00

Minor Feats of Time Travel

I have opened the door to our meeting
next week, here in this bare conference
room, empty of coats. With the key I
found lodged in the snow near a broad
oak’s gray roots, I slipped the lock of past
time and drew you with me, here where
the future waits bent over its little bowl
of cream. Gently I pet its sleek coat
and, quite naturally, the future purrs
and I am comforted again. You emerge
from the well of time a little dazed, as if
you’d wakened from a dream – your father
offering mints from a ragged roll
pulled from his briefcase, smelling
of leather and cold. How kind his face,
how deep his longing for your success.
How seriously he takes your little
triumphs, multiplied by some mysterious
factor in his European brain.
Somewhere on a stage you stand, shy
and modest as ever, smiling as the Dean
(or is it the Mayor or some dignitary
with a smooth black coat) hands over
some prize – a snow white paper with blood
red seal or plaque of black granite set in wood,
your honorific etched on its gleaming face.

* * * * *

Turning to Stone

One night I turned to stone
bathing in glaciers of the moon.
So quiet then, and all the soldiers
sleeping on their pillows of sand.
We were hard then, and still,
not accustomed yet to the way our
blood congealed in cold blankets of sky.

I consulted my wrist, I asked my neck
how it would breathe and swell.

Even now, I wouldn’t count the stars
or pretend my restless feet were roped
with veins. Even when every whisper

serves another purpose in my twisted
ear, I will not pull sullen geese
around the northern rim of earth.
I will not stand bare-headed in the cold
nor offer rescue to patient worms.

Above a flash of cinders, guilt rises in smoky
swirl. What will I pull from the reed bed
when my arms can barely dangle

at my side? Even in this dream’s
dim light, I penetrate the secret name.

Today I own this granite face,
today embrace this hair of schist and shale,
this strange, quartzite body,
this voice transformed and hardened into glass.

* * * * *

Gates of Paradise

How long have we hunched here, backs
pressed against these bars
of bone? Some kind phantom marks

the rubble at our bleeding feet, consoles
our hungry ears with fables of home.

How long have we sung these wailing
psalms at the icy faces of stars? Mowers
hum in heat-drenched August grass

and tree tops sway in their maidenly dance.

Almost everyone we know is gathered
here beside the river
of indifference, cursing in their hasty

clothes the name of newts and milk and mud.

We wake late to headache light
where someone has paid our swollen

bill and left a crumpled twenty
for the maid. We lift our eyes, drink spirit
water from a plastic glass. Outside

our window a fire sword dances in glacial wind.

Where is that lovely fjord encrusted with blue
tinged ice? How far will the shelf of earth recede?

Here at the gates of Paradise midnight jugglers
haunt fire-lit ground and dog shadows sniff

the margins, high bush cranberry, wild grape vine.

By love’s burning ropes we are bound.
Cats wind ginger tails round slippery fingers of dawn.

~ Steve Klepetaris Professor of English and Faculty Director of Advising at Saint Cloud State University in Saint Cloud, MN. This is his first appearance in Elegant Thorn Review.

Joelle Nebbe - Rieveaulx Abbey (Four Photos)

2009-06-01T16:12:00.005-07:00

See more of Joelle's photos at her Flicker page.

David Baker - Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

2009-06-01T15:57:00.002-07:00

Nice essay.

Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

by David Baker

The issue is not just that we grieve, nor when we grieve. The issue is not just why we grieve in poetry, nor how the beautiful song of poetry capitulates to or conspires with the task of weeping. These and more. I like to think of the sound of weeping, along with the sound of laughing, as among the first thoughtful articulations a human being ever made. More than growls or grunts, more than snarls or barks or howls, weeping and laughter indicate passional responses to experience, to a perception of circumstances not only in the present but in the past and—even more fascinating—the future. Nothing else cries or laughs the way we do. These two primary forms of vocalization evolve further into songs: ecstatic language, as it were, standing beside itself, speaking out of its head. It is no accident that the two fundamental modes of lyric poetry are precisely these, crying and laughing, the intonations of grief and pleasure. By this I mean, the elegy and the love poem.

I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, with two particular examples from the American nineteenth century. At hand is the problematic of Walt Whitman's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," I want first to remind us of the complex narrative structure of Whitman's poem for his beloved deceased, and to unpack the poem's dense sets of images, stories, locations, and most important, its figures. As I intend the term, a figure is not just a body, a human figure; and not just a trope or metaphor, a figure of speech; but also a number, a mathematical figure. Next, I will relate this poem to another central nineteenth-century American elegy, Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death." Finally I will propose a paradigm shift in our thinking, and reading, about the American elegy.
"Whitman's elegy, like his great song
of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy"
Strange things are afoot. A foot in Whitman's poetry is a different body part than in other poets' work. Whose body is before us in Whitman's lilac elegy? The literal circumstance of Whitman's great poem is the funeral procession following Abraham Lincoln's assassination and death on April 14, 1865. Good Friday indeed. Whitman's poem accompanies the death-train that slowly bore Lincoln's body from Washington, D.C., all the way to burial in Illinois. At least in its beginning, the poem abides by a conventional, ritualized manner of mourning. Surely this poem is forefather of The Waste Land, commencing as it does in April, the cruel month, and proceeding in a series of aggrieved stages, through the city, into nature, into death, toward something sounding like prayerful redemption. As Peter Sacks argues in The English Elegy, the performance of ritual—the mournful, often staid formulation of grieving—is an elegy's primary rhetorical gesture.

Whitman's lilac elegy begins just so:

1.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd,
And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night,
I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring

Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

2.
O powerful western fallen star!
O shades of night—O moody, tearful night!
O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.

In these first sections we hear a sober, then almost quietly sobbing voice of the poem, in radical contrast to Whitman's usually hortatory and encouraging profusions. This is, remember, the ur-poer of exuberance, cheerleader for democracy, the electrically charged poet of erotic contact and corporal intelligence. But note in section 1 the restraint, the underspoken dignity, as well as the formalized introduction of the poem's primary tropes, the triple image-into-symbol or, as he says, the "trinity sure to me you bring" that accompanies the poet's imagination through the odyssey of this poem. This trinity will evolve, eventually becoming the western star, or the planet Venus, which serves as a figure for Lincoln; the fragrant, plentiful, natural emblem of lilac; and, as a stand-in for Whitman, that hermit thrush with its doleful song. The particular curse of spring's eternal rebirth here, its immeasurable irony, lies in its perpetuating mementi mori, its blooming reminders of death. That is T. S. Eliot's terror in The Waste Land, and Whitman's, who not only mourns, but "yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring [italics mine]." But why Venus, the goddess of love, in an elegy? Why lilac? Why, for that matter, Lincoln?

Section 2 sounds the poem's death knell and identifies the crisis at hand: how to face "the black murk that hides the star," how to accept that Death has taken the new democratic hero. Juxtaposed with the stasis of this seemingly insoluble problem is section 3, the "miracle" of the natural trope, a lilac growing by an old farmhouse with its human "heart-shaped" leaves and its perfume. In the odor of lilac—is there anything so sweet, so profuse? —lingers a touch of the poem's subversive power. Psychologists tell us the sense of smell is our most nostalgic sense, the one most capable of triggering memory. It is also our least articulable sense. That is, we have far fewer words to describe smell than any other sense. Another irony then: such bodily knowledge yet such intellectual stupor. But of course this is the romantic's ideal formulation.

Section 4 activates another sense, the sound of the solitary thrush's song calling from deep within natures heart, from "the swamp," a place not quite water or land, or perhaps more meaningfully for Whitman a primordial place of both water and land. This solitary singer seems a strange figure for Whitman, usually so gregarious, hungry to situate himself among others and sing "over the roofs of the world," as he says in "Song of Myself." But again, so much about the lilac elegy is atypical. Whitman is not by any means an elegiac poet. Grief, sadness, pessimism are not the keys in which he typically plays. He is so energetically urban and hopeful, so enlivened by the prospect of crowds and bodily contact. But this will be one of the central trajectories of the poem: to move away from the city into the solitary, inhuman woods, in order to find his voice and regain his poetic vocation. The song he hears—always a necessary intonation in an elegy—is "deaths outlet song," and the singer, the bird, is literally his "brother." Notice the increasing archaic formality at the end of this section. "If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die" takes its diction from Quaker idiom. Whitman's mother was a devout Quaker, we may remember.

Sections 5 and 6 find Whitman propelling his poem forward, making it move, as the train moves. Elegies rarely have momentum, preferring the mournful deportment of stasis, stillness. Here the natural images seem battle-scarred (the Civil War blue and gray of violets and debris, the "spears" of wheat and grain-"shrouds"), but also potentially healing as the world "springs back" to life. The gathered crowd of people in section 6 abide by Sacks's elegiac formula, becoming a country-wide funeral mass, listening to the poem's song, here still a "dirge." Notice at the end of this section how Whitman transplants the sprig of lilac that he broke off at the end of section 3 into the coffin of the president.

Section 7 continues the gestures of enlargement and forward motion: "With loaded arms I come, pouring for you." Echoing the dark confessions of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—which he first published in the great 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "The Sun-Down Poem" (note the westward-facing gesture)—where Whitman's desire for intimacy and human-sameness finds him admitting that not "you alone" are weak or blank or susceptible to pain, here the figure of the dead hero first becomes a trope for all the dead of the war: a figure, in fact, for Death itself, "O sane and sacred death." The "you" of the poem evolves, swelling past them all, to the very thought of death: "For you and the coffins all of you O death." Then in a gesture of quiet but fertile abundance, he hastens to cover death all "over" with bouquets of roses, lilies, and as he says, "mostly" lilacs. He seeks not just to adorn the coffin but literally to bury death.

An aside about all these flowers. I mentioned earlier the immense, lush fragrance of the lilac. Why this flower, apart from its springtime significance? Imagine the body of Lincoln traveling, so slowly, for days and days across the country. Imagine the potential smell. We know that people heaped flowers on the railcar as it passed or as it stopped. They are paying tribute, but they are also covering the stench. Thus, for Whitman, the lilac provides a powerful aroma, not just a "scented ... remembrancer" but a natural air freshener, making the very air new.

Whitman slows his momentum in section 8, at this point where he begins to discover his vision of transcendence. To be reborn, first he must die, or at least descend to an underworld. He calls it "the netherward black of the night." Thus Whitman's scheme for the elegy enlarges to include an epic trope. He himself walks into a dark wood, his Virgil the star, and commences his own journey to death. This is one of my central points: not just Lincoln, but also Whitman must die in this poem. His elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy. He asks for strength and direction in section 9, "lingering" in spiritual limbo in the swamp. He listens to the thrush; he begs for it to "Sing on." Like the bird, Whitman yearns to sing; it is his natural demeanor. But of course the second crisis of the poem is that the death of Lincoln has stifled or murdered Whitman's ability to sing and to praise. Such is the point of his awful doubts in section 10:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on
the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

These first three questions serve to ask how Whitman himself might assume the qualities of the poem's eternal constants—the star, the lilac, the thrush. How, he asks, can he "warble," how can he shine, what shall be his perfume? Immediately nature answers. Carried on the world's winds, a breath of inspiration floats to him from around the globe. He breathes-in (spiro is Latin for "I breathe," we might recall) the breath of the world and knows now that his simple expiration will be his song. To expire exercises both of its meanings: to breathe out and to die.

Go read the whole article.

Three Poems: Amy Wright

2009-05-26T07:41:00.004-07:00

TEN

The farmer met the wife when they were both
already old by some measures, plumb
as the lines of fence coming together.
They turned back and became strangers,
condescended to the world and used words,
no longer accepting there were things
about each other they could never know.
I was born here, she said
& he touches it, reaching down.

The mountains are a sanctuary and the illusion of sanctuary.
One might become one there,
as Little Brushy is, as joy is one that feeds the cattle
and courses snowy into milk.

A deer does not surrender to a certain kind of life
but Amyntas wades the creek against the river,
the idea & slip. Harness and stall of the domestic.
The farm family made a home comfortable enough
to become strange in, framed by frost.
The people twist kleenex and trundle toward each other laughing.
We were taught to draw snow at school, she says.
We were taught to draw upon it.

* * * * *

ELEVEN

The dumb respect of mud daubers for solitude
trumps porch and colony. They leave
their tubes at night, provisioned with paralyzed spiders,
to sleep in the air. In the room of air.
First one has to become spacious enough
lying on the grass, for the grass to roll out in.
Plank of the body broad
inside the narrow nest spit laboriously
into place and crawled out of.

• • •

In the brush, spiders go on spinning the forest
new dogstar webs,
waiting the way parts of the self wait to break
in a way that enters into.

If the air were less direct
with the crashing waves of birds,
the creatures would misunderstand
the euphoric instruments.

* * * * *

TWELVE

A fine thread of rain steams the crumpled towel
of earth. In the fields cattle stand pulling grass
& nothing operates the concept of reality.
Is there any birth, any other splendor
than…the going on / the loneliness.

The good life, in principle, is a current one rides into,
disintegrating.

Song curries the horses in a trade Amyntas answered.
They ride together, two paints taking the hills
behind them step by step,
the proper order too small for their reasons.

She was following him at the moment.
Dialog turning over a question they had nursed.

~ Amy Wright’s chapbook, There Are No New Ways To Kill A Man, was just released from Apostrophe Press. Previous publications include American Letters & Commentary, Quarterly West, and Grist. She is the Prose Editor of Zone 3 magazine and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Austin Peay State University.

Four Photos - Pam Morris

2009-05-17T20:06:00.004-07:00

~ Pamela Morris is a friend and client. She took these pictures during a 2005 trip to Colombia. She is a nurse by day (and night) who enjoys photography.

Bookforum - Liberal Mediation (Rae Armantrout)

2009-05-11T19:43:00.002-07:00

A great review of one of our best poets.

Liberal Mediation
By Tim Griffin

Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. Yet these meditations are often counterintuitive and sometimes downright absurd in their complexion, referencing cartoon characters (Wile E. Coyote and Rainbow Frog), miming the standardized phrases of tabloid headlines and business transactions (“These temporary credits / will no longer be reflected / in your next billing period”), and rehearsing bits of dialogue rooted only in the vapid grammars of cultural cliché (“I think our incentives / are sexy and edgy”).

With such seeming self-contradiction, Armantrout is a special case even to the extent that she willingly turns a critical eye on her own poems, aware of the possibility that they risk mirroring a kind of commodity logic, merely fulfilling conventional expectations for poetry as an expressive medium. As she once put it pithily, “[Readers] want to identify with the speaker of the poem as one might identify with an action figure,” and so they might seek in poetry only a “confirmation of what they already feel (or wish they felt).” This observation explains much, in fact, underscoring Armantrout’s bond with her generation’s appropriation artists, who were similarly suspicious of traditional conceptions of expressivity. Better to draw from the well of the mass media and disrupt its modes of transmission than to remain locked up in romantic, prepackaged notions.

Armantrout’s writing in her latest volume, Versed, will thus be familiar to her longtime readers for its way of holding meaning (and identification) in uneasy suspension. Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings. (In the context of what Armantrout has called her “faux-collage,” the bloodless billing statement quoted above easily assumes metaphysical import, for instance.) Her crystalline word selection underscores her motive for indexicality—“Any statement I issue, / if particular enough, // will prove / I was here,” she writes, as if words could be like hands with a firm grip on things—and yet her crisply pop vocabulary belongs also to the realm of high-definition television. Armantrout ably frames a highly mediated world using its own language, even as she deftly employs quotation marks and overly familiar diction to delineate those voices we “receive” in contemporary culture, leaving open and in perpetual play in her compositions the question of where the real begins and the (pre)fabricated ends, or where the poet emerges and where she disappears.

Indeed, the recurrence of already-known phrases and images seems to predicate an active desire—or Pavlovian impulse, as the case may be—among figures in the poems to locate themselves within that continuum. These are characters who want to be in character. A woman buying a gallon of vodka “may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic / in a film,” Armantrout imagines. Elsewhere, an anonymous voice calls out, “Hey, / my avatar’s not working!,” while still another poem sounds a note of estrangement in the face of such media: “To be beautiful / and powerful enough / for someone / to want to break me / up // into syndicated ripples.” (Again, isolated, these lines are compelling enough, but their metaphoric value accrues only in context.) In this regard, Armantrout’s poetry might well have previously suggested that subjectivity today is in a dialectical embrace with the forces of media, looking for moments of cathexis or catharsis, but her very first poem here, the three-sectioned “Results,” implies that the ante has lately been upped, with media inviting participation from its consumers, so that their “expressed” voice is just the one given to them:

Click here to vote
on who’s ripe
for a makeover

or takeover

in this series pilot.

votes are registered
at the server
and sent back

as results.

As in Armantrout’s other work, it is in the space left open for the reader, who must navigate these voices, that the potential for alternatives resides. (The instability allows the reader to create his or her own meaning even while aware of any given poem’s constructedness. Of course, this meta-self-consciousness also gives rise to comic irony. Another fine line: “Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.”) But the second section of the book, “Dark Matter,” underscores a new sense of what’s at stake: Having recently dealt with cancer, Armantrout sets certain poems in the hospital and juxtaposes her witticisms with brutal lines about her sickness—with the science of cellular structures presenting in these poems a difficult extension of interpretative dilemmas in text. (Following the billing language above: “Metaphor / is ritual sacrifice. // It kills the look-alike.”) How do you, after all, mull matters of life and death when hearing the music pumping out at the local Starbucks? What space can you occupy then? A passage from the poem “Pleasure”:

Only distinctions can
matter.

(Canned matter.)

The irony cuts two ways, at once opening up and closing off possible experience, yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox.

Poetry Month - Thom Gunn

2009-04-30T13:58:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Katy Lederer

2009-04-30T07:19:00.001-07:00

That Everything's Inevitable
by Katy Lederer

That everything's inevitable.
That fate is whatever has already happened.
The brain, which is as elemental, as sane, as the rest of the processing universe is.
In this world, I am the surest thing.
Scrunched-up arms, folded legs, lovely destitute eyes.
Please insert your spare coins.
I am filling them up.
Please insert your spare vision, your vigor, your vim.
But yet, I am a vatic one.
As vatic as the Vatican.
In the temper and the tantrum, in the well-kept arboretum
I am waiting, like an animal,
For poetry.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Charles Wright

2009-04-29T14:57:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Jack Gilbert

2009-04-29T06:27:00.001-07:00

Jack Gilbert, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his last book, Refusing Heaven, is now in his mid-eighties, still celebrating and sorrowing to the fullest. He has returned with an elegiac collection in which he reconsiders, as the figure of Ovid says in one of the poems, "White stone in the sunlight…Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all."

****************************************

The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive
in the difficult way adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead. He thinks of long
before that, the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted
the General, their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls
of the compound. A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid
in her uniform bringing his breakfast each
morning on a silver tray: toast both light
and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world
like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Sapphire

2009-04-28T05:07:00.001-07:00

A poem from the 1999 volume Black Wings & Blind Angels, by Sapphire, who is also a novelist. (Her novel Push has recently been made as a movie entitled "Precious," a winner at Sundance which will be released in November.)

****************************************

Some Different Kinda Books

I
She asks why we always
read books about black people.
(I spare her the news she is black.)
She wants something different.
Her own book is written in pencil.
She painstakingly goes back & corrects
the misspelled words.
We write each day.
Each day the words look like
a retarded hand from Mars
wrote them.
Each day she asks me how
do you spell: didn't, tomorrow, done
husband, son, learning, went, gone . . .
I can't think of all the words she can’t spell.
It’s easier to think of what she can spell:
MY NAME IS CARMEN LOPEZ.
I am sorry I was out teacher.
My husband was sick.
You know I never miss school.
In that other program
I wasn't learning nothing.
Here, I'm learning so I come.
What's wrong with my husband?
I don't know. He's in the hospital. He's real sick
I was almost out the room
when I hear the nurse ask him,
Do you do drugs?
He say yes.
I say what!
I don’t know nuthin' 'bout no drugs.
I'm going off in the hospital.
He's sick.
I'm mad.
Nobody tells you nuthin'!
I didn't hear that nurse
I wouldn't know
nuthin'.
Huh?
Condoms? No, teacher.
He's my husband.
I never been with another man.

II
I think he got AIDS
he still don't tell me.
I did teacher. I tried
to read the chart at the hospital
but I couldn't figure out those words.
Doctor don't say, he say privacy.
The nurse tell me.
She's Puerto Rican. She say your husband
got AIDS.
I go off in the hospital.
Nobody tells me nuthin'.
He come home.
He say it's not true,
he's fine.
He's so skinny without his clothes
he try to hide hisself nekkid
don't want me to look.
I say you got to use
one of those things.
He say nuthin's wrong.
with him.

III
He stop sayin' that.
Now he just say he's gonna die
all the time
all the time
dying.
I say STOP that talk,
the doctor say you could
live a long time
my sister-in-law say,
he got it so you got it
it's like that.
I say, I don't got it,
my kids don't got it either.
Teacher, I need a letter for welfare
that I'm coming to school
on a regular basis.

IV
He's in P.R.,
before that he started messing around
again.
Over the Christmas holidays
he died.
That's where I was at
in P.R.
I'm fine. Yeah, I'm sure teacher.
What do I wanna do teacher?
I just wanna read some different
kinda books.

~ Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Norma Cole

2009-04-27T06:54:00.001-07:00

We Address
by Norma Cole

…a lead pencil held between thumb and forefinger
of each hand forms a bridge upon which
two struggling figures, "blood all around"…

I was born in a city between colored wrappers

I was born in a city the color of steam, between two pillars, between pillars and curtains, it was up to me to pull the splinters out of the child's feet

I want to wake up and see you sea green and leaf green, the problem of ripeness. On Monday I wrote it out, grayed out. In that case spirit was terminology

In that case meant all we could do. Very slowly, brighter, difficult and darker. Very bright and slowly. Quietly lions or tigers on a black ground, here the sea is ice, wine is ice

I am in your state now. They compared white with red. So they hung the numbers and colors from upthrusting branches. The problem was light

Our friend arrived unexpectedly dressed in black and taller than we remembered. In the same sky ribbons and scales of bright balance

The problem and its history. Today a rose-colored sky. Greens vary from yellow to brown. Brighter than ink, the supposition tells the omission of an entire color

Which didn't have a musical equivalent. In those days the earth was blue, something to play. A person yearned to be stone

Clearly a lion or sphinx-like shape. The repetition of gesture is reiterated in the movement of ambient light on the windows, curtains, and on the facing wall, the problem

and its green ribbons. The hands almost always meet. Turquoise adrenaline illusions adjacent to memory, to mind. We address

memory, the senses, or pages on a double sheet, classical frontal framing. I want you to wake up now

~From the Academy of American Poets

New York Times Book Review - Poetry Chronicle

2009-04-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, it's not often the New York Times Book Review covers poetry, so this must be a poetry month gift to us readers, especially since one of the books covered is by my favorite poet, Charles Wright.

Poetry Chronicle

Reviews by JOEL BROUWER

Published: April 24, 2009

WHAT GOES ON
Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009.
By Stephen Dunn.
Norton, $24.95.

The speaker of Dunn’s recent poems is a regular guy cursed with an understanding of human nature more subtle than he’d prefer. A poem like “The Unsaid” succeeds not only because it nails its depiction of a couple stalled by miscommunication and reproach — “In the bedroom they undressed and dressed / and got into bed. The silence was what fills / a tunnel after a locomotive passes through” — but because the poem’s very existence squares its pathos: the speaker understands the problem perfectly but still can’t solve it. A typical Dunn poem opens up a basic human trouble — a body souring with age, a marriage souring with regret, a believer souring with doubt — meditates on it with equal parts seriousness and good humor, and finally offers not quite consolation but acceptance, a sense of having gained some measure of dignity simply by looking life in the eye. As is true of every other poet who ever lived, what’s best about Dunn is also what’s worst: in his case, a plainspoken, curlicue-free lucidity (I actually want to say “wisdom,” but fear it makes Dunn sound square or folksy, faults he’s too sharp and wry to be accused of), which is a tonic in small doses but can cause numbness if consumed in quantity. “Please Understand” ends “I’ve never been able to tell / what’s worth more — what I want or what I have.” “What Men Want” ends “After the power to choose / a man wants the power to erase.” “Nature” ends, “Gray, then, was the only truth in the world.” I trust the poet’s every nuanced ambivalence but eventually find myself wishing — against my better instincts, and his — that he’d burn a house down or get baptized or anything else definitive and audacious.
MERCURY DRESSING
Poems.
By J. D. McClatchy.
Knopf, $25.
Has your companion ever reported some wonderful thing you said in your sleep, like “snowflake operator” or “funky nectarine”? I regret to inform you that no matter how clever you may have thought your unconscious self, McClatchy probably has you beat: the first line of his “Poem Beginning With a Line Spoken, I Am Told, in My Sleep” — “The names of every place were once so cold” — is in iambic pentameter. Given McClatchy’s formal virtuosity, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he jots his grocery lists in terza rima, too. Such exquisiteness sometimes seems merely an end in itself, as in “Indonesia,” which cleverly compares, for 30 lines and no good reason, an epidermal rash to an archipelago. “The Seven Deadly Sins” possesses a relentless elegance of expression, but many of its ideas are banal (“Dogged voluptuaries usually make straight / For the very thing they over and over have had, / Then vomit up the greedily swallowed bait”), grandiloquent (“When Francis of Assisi ate, / Ashes were his only spice. / The condiments in plump Cockaigne / Disguise the taste to help explain / Why temperance is a sacrifice / The belly’s meant to palliate”) or nonsensical (“From alley to boardroom, in coffee cup or coffer, / Not to accumulate but to count, to compare, / Brings down both the beggar and the millionaire”). McClatchy is most engaging when he’s got a story to tell instead of an idea to fuss with. “Trees, Walking” is a powerful and wonderfully strange account of the speaker’s relationship with his father (among many other things), and “Sorrow in 1944,” a sonnet sequence imagining how life might have turned out for the son of Madama Butterfly, represents the collection’s most focused and indispensable moment.
ONE SECRET THING
By Sharon Olds.
Knopf, $26.95.
Admirers of Olds’s poems will find more of them in this, her ninth collection. Olds selects intense moments from her family romance — usually ones involving violence or sexuality or both — and then stretches them in opposite directions, rendering them in such obsessive detail that they seem utterly unique to her personal experience, while at the same time using metaphor to insist on their universality. The speaker of “Home Theater, 1955” spends the poem’s first nine lines — a full quarter of its total length — describing the skimpy animal-themed bedclothes she wore as a child, then tells the story of a night her father became so violent her sister had to call for police officers, one of whom the speaker remembers glancing at her bare legs. In its final lines, the poem switches in a blink from autobiography to myth: “Soon after our father had struck himself down, / there had risen up these bachelors / beside the sink and stove, and the tiny / mastodons, and bison, and elk, the / beasts on my front and back, began, / atonal, as if around an early fire, to chant.” It’s a nifty move, but a pretty familiar one — Olds has been making it for almost 30 years — and in this book it’s too often too easy to see the epiphanies coming. When in the first lines of “Animal Dress” the poet’s daughter puts on her mother’s black sweater “with maroon creatures / knitted in,” you can tell you’re in for another Joseph Campbell moment in the poem’s final lines, and sure enough.
SESTETS
By Charles Wright.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.
Wright’s poems don’t bear down toward conclusions, they expand and evanesce as if in a valiant, impossible effort to comprehend and demonstrate Wittgenstein’s dictum that “the world is all that is the case.” Wright’s new collection of short poems is less a book unto itself than the next installment in a continuous poem he’s been writing for 40-odd years. “Description is expiation, / and not a place to hunker down in,” he writes. “It is a coming to terms with. / Or coming to terms without. / As though whatever we had to say could keep it real. / As though our words were flies, / and the dead meat kept reappearing.” These accounts of language as simultaneously a fond illusion and our only hope for a stable place to stake a claim on reality pose the problem Wright wisely resists pretending poetry can solve. Instead, he revels and finds a freedom in it: “Water remains immortal — / Poems can’t defile it, / the heron, immobile on one leg, / Stands in it, snipe stitch it, and heaven pillows its breast.” Trouble can arise when Wright’s open-endedness leads him to believe that any idea, no matter how ungainly or hackneyed, deserves a place in the poem, as in “Music for Midsummer’s Eve”: “Time is an untuned harmonium / That Muzaks our nights and days. / Sometimes it lasts for a little while, / sometimes it goes on forever.” I can swallow “Muzaks” with some effort, but those last two lines wouldn’t pass muster at Hallmark. Fortunately, few such clunkers disrupt Wright’s complex and contrary harmonies.
Joel Brouwer’s books of poems are “Exactly What Happened,” “Centuries” and, most recently, “And So.” He teaches at the University of Alabama.

Poetry Month - Carl Phillips

2009-04-26T08:53:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Taije Silverman

2009-04-26T08:51:00.001-07:00

Terezin
by Taije Silverman

—a transfer camp in the Czech Republic

We rode the bus out, past fields of sunflowers
that sloped for miles, hill after hill of them blooming.

The bus was filled with old people.
On their laps women held loaves of freshly baked bread.
Men slept in their seats wearing work clothes.

You stared out the window beside me. Your eyes
were so hard that you might have been watching the glass.

Fields and fields of sunflowers.

Arriving we slowed on the cobblestone walkway.
Graves looked like boxes, or houses from high up.

On a bench teenage lovers slouched in toward each other.
Their backs formed a shape like a seashell.
You didn't want to go inside.

But the rooms sang. Song like breath, blown
through spaces in skin.

The beds were wide boards stacked up high on the walls.
The glass on the door to the toilet was broken.
I imagined nothing.

You wore your black sweater and those dark sunglasses.
You didn't look at me.

The rooms were empty, and the courtyard was empty,
and the sunlight on cobblestone could have been water,
and I think even when we are here we are not here.

The courtyard was flooded with absence.
The tunnel was crowded with light.
Like a throat. Like a—

In a book I read how at its mouth they played music,
some last piece by Wagner or Mozart or Strauss.

I don't know why. I don't know
who walked through the tunnel or who played or what finally
they could have wanted. I don't know where the soul goes.

Your hair looked like wheat. It was gleaming.

Nearby on the hillside a gallows leaned slightly.
What has time asked of it? Nights. Windstorms.

Your hair looked like fire, or honey.
You didn't look at me.

Grass twisted up wild, lit gold all around us.
We could have been lost somewhere, in those funny hills.

And the ride back—I don't remember.
Why was I alone? It was night, then. It was still morning.

But the fields were filled with dead sunflowers.
Blooms darkened to brown, the stalks bowed.
And the tips dried to husks that for miles kept reaching.
Those dreamless sloped fields of traveling husks.

~ From The Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - John Hollander

2009-04-25T08:21:00.001-07:00

"Some Playthings," by the distinguished John Hollander, a poet for whom serious and light verse, the formal and the playful, flow forth in equal measure.

****************************************

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewski

2009-04-24T17:49:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Joshua Beckman

2009-04-24T07:34:00.003-07:00

[In Colorado, In Oregon, upon]

by Joshua Beckman

In Colorado, In Oregon, upon
each beloved fork, a birthday is celebrated.
I miss each and every one of my friends.
I believe in getting something for nothing.
Push the chair, and what I can tell you
with almost complete certainty
is that the chair won't mind.
And beyond hope,
I expect it is like this everywhere.
Music soothing people.
Change rolling under tables.
The immaculate cutoff so that we may continue.
A particular pair of trees waking up against the window.
This partnership of mind, and always now
in want of forgiveness. That forgiveness be
the domain of the individual,
like music or personal investment.
Great forward-thinking people brought us
the newspaper, and look what we have done.
It is time for forgiveness. Dear ones,
unmistakable quality will soon be upon us.
Don't wait for anything else.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Jane Mayhall

2009-04-24T05:00:00.001-07:00

Today we remember the poet Jane Mayhall, who died a few weeks ago at the age of ninety, and who wrote remarkable poems on such subjects as "Wastebaskets" ("in all that / heaven and debris, a lot of / my first gut ideas / were right") or an obsolete subway token found in a shoulder bag, a symbol of the long-burnished imponderables in a New York life. Born in 1918 in Louisville, Kentucky, Mayhall attended Black Mountain College, where she met and married the maverick Leslie George Katz, and came to New York with him to found the Eakins Press, an important publisher of specialized books of photography, art, and fine writing. (Their friends and colleagues in the fertile mid-century period in New York City included Walker Evans, James Agee, and Arthur Miller.) Mayhall wrote several books during her long bohemian marriage to Katz ("our courtship had the grace of / infidelities, myriad moods—/ so many skies"), but it was only in 2004, at the age of 85, that she published a full-length volume of verse, Sleeping Late on Judgment Day, which gathers her frank poems of wisdom and long love—notably, the poems of mourning and abiding passion she wrote to her husband in an outpouring of new work after his death in 1997.

****************************************

Notes For Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary

Lofty, but not above it.
How could anything so rash happen?
The Baptist ice-cream, and a pitiful living room.
The pastor in seersucker, red-faced,
bewildered as icons.

It was a wild decision, youth and Mercury
at our heels. The Parish didn't even have a piano.
But wedding strains, coached to overdo (and love
is private). The greatest concentration
was defiance.

Silence was the marriage ring we chose.
The cake I recall was Tastee brand,
you barely took my hand.
No urge for bridal costumes, heaven opening up
the purgatorial rites. And we

all stepped forth, in faith.
The worst disasters were golden givers of advice:
sausage makers. We liked to think of
living without a Name. And quandaries besmote—
like Oxymorons.

Because we didn't believe in obligations,
we never thought about divorce.
And we were blessed. Going to sleep with
you at night, to welcome the strange, uncoercive
incense of another day.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Toi Derricotte

2009-04-23T07:31:00.001-07:00

In Knowledge of Young Boys
by Toi Derricotte

i knew you before you had a mother,
when you were newtlike, swimming,
a horrible brain in water.
i knew you when your connections
belonged only to yourself,
when you had no history
to hook on to,
barnacle,
when you had no sustenance of metal
when you had no boat to travel
when you stayed in the same
place, treading the question;
i knew you when you were all
eyes and a cocktail,
blank as the sky of a mind,
a root, neither ground nor placental;
not yet
red with the cut nor astonished
by pain, one terrible eye
open in the center of your head
to night, turning, and the stars
blinked like a cat. we swam
in the last trickle of champagne
before we knew breastmilk—we
shared the night of the closet,
the parasitic
closing on our thumbprint,
we were smudged in a yellow book.

son, we were oak without
mouth, uncut, we were
brave before memory.

~ From the Academy of American Poetry

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewksi

2009-04-23T07:25:00.001-07:00

Poetry Montrh - Jim Powell

2009-04-22T07:04:00.002-07:00

Jim Powell, a poet of California, has recently joined the Knopf family at our sister imprint, Pantheon, with a collection entitled Substrate. Powell's attention to the landscape and our place in it is crisply honed, as in today's selection, "The Pond." The poem is part of a series in which various feathered creatures and thoughts on the wing fly out of what Powell calls "the muses' birdcage," a phrase from the ancient Greek philosopher and poet Timon of Phlius.

****************************************

The Pond

On the back way
there are planks laid
across the swampy places,
jet black loam where water
pools in the dents,

a place on the path
I double back to
and catch myself returning
mirrored in a sheet
of water, the world

doubled back
in the glassy pool:
wind animates the leaves
and the glint shaken from them
winks flickering

in the pond dreaming
at the secret center
past the last screen
of ferns and creepers, bramble
entanglements

and periphrastic
evasions this place
a steady witness for
the rehearsal of a ghostly
life in signs

and tokens, clairvoyant
the way dreams
betray us to ourselves
in a changeling masquerade
uncovering

another nature
another self
to read in the face there
in the water till reflection
troubles the mirror.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - August Kleinzahler

2009-04-22T07:01:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Grace Paley

2009-04-21T15:19:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Keith Waldrop

2009-04-21T05:24:00.001-07:00

The Luxury of Hesitation [excerpt from The Proof from Motion]
by Keith Waldrop

things
forgotten
I could

burn in hell forever

set the glass
down, our
emotion's moment

eyes vs sunlight

how removed
here, from
here

towards the unfamiliar and

frankincense forests
against the discerning light

everybody
sudden

frightful indeed, the sound of
traffic and
no appetite

the crowd

I would like to be
beautiful when
written

Click for a larger view > "Horse and Rider" by Keith Waldrop - From The Academy of American Poets

W. S. Merwin Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

2009-04-21T04:29:00.000-07:00

Very cool - a poet I often enjoy very much.

Pleased by His Pulitzer, Surprised by Poetry

By Motoko Rich

W. S. Merwin

W. S. Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for poetry on Monday for “The Shadow of Sirius,” a collection that the Pulitzer board described in its citation as “luminous” and “often tender” — and that Merwin called a happy accident.

“It’s always assumed that you’ve planned everything in advance and that it all fell into place,” Merwin said, speaking by telephone from his home in Haiku, Hawaii. “If people are honest, very few gardens are exactly the way they were planned, if they were ever planned. They evolve, just like children grow up.” (And no, he said, the name of his current home does not refer to the three-lined metered Japanese poetry form, but means “break” and “straight up” in Hawaiian.)

He said that he always looked to be taken by surprise — “surprise that it happens at all and surprise that it works and that it’s complete.” After writing several new poems, he continued, “I suddenly think there are quite a few poems and I want to see if they have any relation to each other and begin to see what order they might be in and see if they really come to a collection. I wouldn’t make any rules about how it happens any more than you can do about what makes a birdsong complete or anything else.”

“The Shadow of Sirius” was written without punctuation and in free verse, and its poems are among the most autobiographical of his career. They touch on themes of memory, wisdom and childhood.

“In the time when the conventions were much more obvious and abstract — the sonnet or the heroic couplet — it was pretty clear when something was complete,” Merwin said. “But it’s not so clear now. I don’t have any kind of religious principles about whether things should be rhymed, metered or free verse. A poem takes its own form and all of those things are good.”

Merwin described the collection as having a first section about childhood and remembering childhood, “not from a distance, but from inside.” The middle section is a collection of elegies to dogs, and the final section is about later life.

In a review, Publishers Weekly praised the volume — Merwin’s 21st, according to his publisher, Copper Canyon Press — as his “best book in a decade.”
Merwin said he continued to be taken by surprise by poems. “I have one written in my notebook,” he said. “I haven’t even typed it up yet. Maybe that’s a surprise waiting for me.”

Poetry Month - Yusef Komunyakaa

2009-04-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month - Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

2009-04-20T08:02:00.001-07:00

Transit of Venus
by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb
because other words do not sound like conversation.
In the kitchen, always, one who's just discovered
beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.
He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;
in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb
in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Brooks Haxton

2009-04-20T07:59:00.001-07:00

Today's selection is from Brooks Haxton's book They Lift Their Wings to Cry, a title that refers to the vibrating wings of the snowy tree cricket, who is a kind of poet, scratching out a ysterious music. As Haxton tells us in the title poem, "This poem also / cries, and hushes as your mind draws near."

****************************************

Storm

Cattle egrets in the dry grass waded
like white clerics at the hooves
of brood cows, heifers, and new calves.

Forked lightning. Calm.
The darkness in the cattle tank welled up
and flooded the reflection of the trees.

Turkey vultures wheeled, and wheeled away.
No swifts, no swallows, children gone indoors.
Rain seethed into the willowtops,

sky flashing, while the black bull
under the water locust glowed
with an inward surge of darkness.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Stephanie Hemphill

2009-04-19T09:37:00.002-07:00

Knopf's books for young readers include many books of poetry by an old bedtime favorite, Jack Prelutsky (whose most recent title is The Swamps of Sleethe), and lately, an unusual verse portrait of Sylvia Plath entitled Your Own, Sylvia, which is a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book (given for excellence in young adult literature). Written by Stephanie Hemphill, the book is appropriate for high-school-aged readers and beyond, as it introduces Plath and her world through a chorus of voices around her—poems in the voice of her mother, Aurelia Plath; her "Grammy Schober"; her many boyfriends and teachers; various therapists and roommates through the years; her husband, Ted Hughes, and other significant fellow poets such as Ruth Fainlight and A. Alvarez. Today's selection is a poem in the imagined voice of Anne Sexton, who, along with Plath, Hemphill explains in one of many thorough marginal notes to the poems, participated in a seminar taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University in the fall of 1958 and spring of 1959, also attended by the poet George Starbuck. "Lowell introduced Sylvia to confessionalism, a kind of poetry defined by placing the literal Self at the center of the poem," Hemphill explains to young readers who may not know the term; she also usefully quotes the
memoirs of Anne Sexton, placing in context the ambition and developing sense of themselves that these poets had in their twenties. Sexton wrote that she had heard "Sylvia was determined from childhood to be great, a great writer at the least of it. I tell you, at the time I did not notice this in her. Something told me to bet on her but I never asked it why. I was too determined to bet on myself to actually notice where she was headed in her work."

****************************************

Robert Lowell's Poetry Class

Sylvia stretches her skin
to fit someone else’s bones—
her poems not yet her own.

George Starbuck, Syl, and I,
trinity of the master poet’s class,
drink martinis, chow potato chips

at the Ritz, until slightly blitzed.
Drinks making us more real,
we talk suicide until laughter

tears from our eyes.
Then we bunch into my car
for the Waldorf Cafeteria's

seventy-cent dinner,
none of us having a better
or demanding home life to return to.

I implore Sylvia to push herself,
pluck the drum of her heart
until it bleeds. Sometimes I think

Lowell praises Sylvia too much,
or maybe he just sees something
in her language that I cannot.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Paul Guest

2009-04-19T09:27:00.001-07:00

User's Guide to Physical Debilitation
by Paul Guest

Should the painful condition of irreversible paralysis
last longer than forever or at least until
your death by bowling ball or illegal lawn dart
or the culture of death, which really has it out
for whoever has seen better days
but still enjoys bruising marathons of bird watching,
you, or your beleaguered caregiver
stirring dark witch's brews of resentment
inside what had been her happy life,
should turn to page seven where you can learn,
assuming higher cognitive functions
were not pureed by your selfish misfortune,
how to leave the house for the first time in two years.
An important first step,
with apologies for the thoughtlessly thoughtless metaphor.
When not an outright impossibility
or form of neurological science fiction,
sexual congress will either be with
tourists in the kingdom of your tragedy,
performing an act of sadistic charity;
with the curious, for whom you will be beguilingly blank canvas;
or with someone blindly feeling their way
through an extended power outage
caused by summer storms you once thought romantic.
Page twelve instructs you how best
to be inspiring to Magnus next door
as he throws old Volkswagens into orbit
above Alberta. And to Betty
in her dark charm confiding a misery,
whatever it is, that to her seems equivalent to yours.
The curl of her hair that her finger knows
better and beyond what you will,
even in the hypothesis of heaven
when you sleep. This guide is intended
to prepare you for falling down
and declaring détente with gravity,
else you reach the inevitable end
of scaring small children by your presence alone.
Someone once said of crushing
helplessness: it is a good idea to avoid that.
We agree with that wisdom
but gleaming motorcycles are hard
to turn down or safely stop
at speeds which melt aluminum. Of special note
are sections regarding faith
healing, self-loathing, abstract hobbies
like theoretical spelunking and extreme atrophy,
and what to say to loved ones
who won't stop shrieking
at Christmas dinner. New to this edition
is an index of important terms
such as catheter, pain, blackout,
pathological deltoid obsession, escort service,
magnetic resonance imaging,
loss of friends due to superstitious fear,
and, of course, amputation
above the knee due to pernicious gangrene.
It is our hope that this guide
will be a valuable resource
during this long stretch of boredom and dread
and that it may be of some help,
however small, to cope with your new life
and the gradual, bittersweet loss
of every God damned thing you ever loved.

~ From Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Wallace Stevens & Donald Justice

2009-04-18T10:21:00.002-07:00

Today we offer selections by two pillars of American poetry, reflecting on the American sublime: first, the poem with that title by Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), and then a poem of memory by Donald Justice (1925-2004), whose work often describes the settings that defined who we were in the last century, with his own delicate sense of where the sublime was, perhaps, to be found. The work of both these poets is always in print, but an entirely new Selected Poems of Wallace Stevens will be available this coming August, edited by the Stevens scholar John N. Serio.

****************************************

The American Sublime
by Wallace Stevens

How does one stand
To behold the sublime,
To confront the mockers,
The mickey mockers
And plated pairs?

When General Jackson
Posed for his statue
He knew how one feels.
Shall a man go barefoot
Blinking and blank?

But how does one feel?
One grows used to the weather,
The landscape and that;
And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,

The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.
What wine does one drink?
What bread does one eat?

****************************************

Dance Lessons of the Thirties
by Donald Justice

Wafts of old incense mixed with Cuban coffee
Hung on the air; a fan turned; it was summer.
And (of the buried life) some last aroma
Still clung to the tumbled cushions of the sofa.

At lesson time, pushed back, it used to be
The thing we managed somehow just to miss
With our last-second dips and whirls—all this
While the Victrola wound down gradually.

And this was their exile, those brave ladies who taught us
So much of art, and stepped off to their doom
Demonstrating the fox-trot with their daughters
Endlessly around some sad and makeshift ballroom.

O little lost Bohemias of the suburbs!

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Sharon Olds

2009-04-17T07:49:00.001-07:00

A poem of ending from Sharon Olds.

****************************************

To See My Mother

It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Ted Mathys

2009-04-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

The National Interest
by Ted Mathys

We are interested in long criminal histories
because we've never bedded down in a cellblock.
With the sibilance of wind through the swaying
spires of skyscrapers as my witness. When I say
cover your grenades I mean it's going to rain I mean
there is mischief in every filibuster of sun.

We are interested in rigorously arranging
emotions by color as we've never been fully
divested of blues. With drinking till my fingernails
hurt as my witness, with hurt as my witness.
When I say be demanding I mean be fully
individual while dissolving in the crowd.

We are interested in characters who murder
because we've never committed it or to it.
With an origami frog in a vellum crown spinning
on a fishing line from the ceiling as my witness.
When I say please kneel with me I mean between
every shadow and sad lack falls a word.

We are interested in ceaselessly setting floor joists
because we've never pulled a pole barn spike
from a foot. With bowing to soap your ankles
in the shower as my witness, lather as my witness.
When I say did you see the freckle in her iris I mean
the poem must reclaim the nature of surveillance.

We are interested in possessing others who possess
that which we possess but fear losing in the future.
With a fork as my witness. A dollop of ketchup,
hash brown, motion, with teeth as my witness.
When I say you I don't mean me I don't mean
an exact you I mean a composite you I mean God.

We are interested in God because we can't
possess God, because we can't possess you.
With a scrum of meatheads in IZOD ogling iPods
as my witness, technological progress as my witness.
When I say no such thing as progress in art I mean
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins"

We are interested in ambivalence as ribcages
resist being down when down, up when up.
With the swell of the argument and the moment
before forgiveness as my witness. When I say power
is exclusion I mean a box of rocks we don't
desire to deduce I mean knowing is never enough.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Angela Shaw

2009-04-16T13:37:00.001-07:00

Children in a Field
by Angela Shaw

They don't wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Mark Strand

2009-04-16T05:45:00.002-07:00

Two short poems that can be read as allegories of a poet's creative life, fifteen years apart in the career of Mark Strand. "The Midnight Club" originally appeared in his 1991 collection The Continuous Life; "I Had Been a Polar Explorer" in Man and Camel, in 2006.

****************************************

The Midnight Club

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon's light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

* * * *

I Had Been a Polar Explorer

I had been a polar explorer in my youth
and spent countless days and nights freezing
in one blank place and then another. Eventually,
I quit my travels and stayed at home,
and there grew within me a sudden excess of desire,
as if a brilliant stream of light of the sort one sees
within a diamond were passing through me.
I filled page after page with visions of what I had witnessed—
groaning seas of pack ice, giant glaciers, and the windswept white
of icebergs. Then, with nothing more to say, I stopped
and turned my sights on what was near. Almost at once,
a man wearing a dark coat and broad-brimmed hat
appeared under the trees in front of my house.
The way he stared straight ahead and stood,
not shifting his weight, letting his arms hang down
at his side, made me think that I knew him.
But when I raised my hand to say hello,
he took a step back, turned away, and started to fade
as longing fades until nothing is left of it.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Carl Phillips

2009-04-15T14:45:00.000-07:00

Poetry Month - Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

2009-04-15T07:13:00.001-07:00

Death Barged In
by Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

In his Russian greatcoat
slamming open the door
with an unpardonable bang,
and he has been here ever since.

He changes everything,
rearranges the furniture,
his hand hovers
by the phone;
he will answer now, he says;
he will be the answer.

Tonight he sits down to dinner
at the head of the table
as we eat, mute;
later, he climbs into bed
between us.

Even as I sit here,
he stands behind me
clamping two
colossal hands on my shoulders
and bends down
and whispers to my neck,
From now on,
you write about me.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Louise Gluck

2009-04-14T14:56:00.001-07:00

Poetry Month - Deborah Digges

2009-04-14T05:07:00.001-07:00

We were saddened to learn of the death of Deborah Digges, who was
fifty-nine, this past weekend. Her books of poetry were Vesper
Sparrows (1986), Late in the Millenium (1989), Rough Music (1995), and
Trapeze (2004). In her memory, we offer "Greeter of Souls."

****************************************

Greeter of Souls

Ponds are spring-fed, lakes run off rivers.
Here souls pass, not one deified,
and sometimes this is terrible to know
three floors below the street, where light drinks the world,
siphoned like music through portals.
How fed, that dark, the octaves framed faceless.
A memory of water.
The trees more beautiful not themselves.
Souls who have passed here, tired brightening.
Dumpsters of linen, empty
gurneys along corridors to parking garages.
Who wonders, is it morning?
Who washes these blankets?
Can I not be the greeter of souls?
What's to be done with the envelopes of hair?
If the inlets are frozen, can I walk across?
When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds,
do I put on the new garments?
On which side of the river should I wait?

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Maureen N. McLane

2009-04-13T13:50:00.002-07:00

Poetry Month - Kevin Young

2009-04-13T13:38:00.002-07:00

In the aftermath of the sudden and unexpected loss of his father,
Kevin Young found himself composing a series of food odes—odes to
grits and crawfish and okra; an "Elegy for Maque Choux," a "Song of
Cracklin." Perhaps a way of feeding the unassuagable hunger of grief,
the poems form a symphony of family remembrance which stands at the
center of his latest volume, Dear Darkness.

****************************************

Ode to Pepper Vinegar

You sat in the tomb

of our family fridge
for years, without

fail. You were all

I wanted covering
my greens, satisfaction

I’ve since sought

for years in restaurants
which claimed soul, but neither

knew you nor

your vinegar prayer.
Baby brother

of bitterness, soothsayer,

you taught
me the difference between loss

& holding on. Next to the neon

of the maraschino cherries,
you floated & stayed

constant as a flame

on an unknown soldier’s grave—
I never did know

how you got here

you just were. Adrift
in your mason jar

you were a briny bit of where

we came from, rusty lid
awaiting our touch

& tongue—you were faith

in the everyday, not rare
as the sugarcane

my grandparents sent north

come Christmas, drained
sweet & dry, delicious, gone

by New Year's—

no, you were nearer,
familiar, the thump

thump of an upright bass

or the brass
of a funeral band

bringing us home.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Rachel Contreni Flynn

2009-04-12T16:59:00.002-07:00

Yellow Bowl
by Rachel Contreni Flynn

If light pours like water
into the kitchen where I sway
with my tired children,

if the rug beneath us
is woven with tough flowers,
and the yellow bowl on the table

rests with the sweet heft
of fruit, the sun-warmed plums,
if my body curves over the babies,

and if I am singing,
then loneliness has lost its shape,
and this quiet is only quiet.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Jean Garrigue

2009-04-12T16:57:00.001-07:00

A spring poem for Easter day by Jean Garrigue (1914-1972),
anthologized in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets edition The Four
Seasons, edited by J. D. McClatchy.

****************************************

Spring Song II

And now my spring beauties,
Things of the earth,
Beetles, shards and wings of moth
And snail houses left
From last summer's wreck,
Now spring smoke
Of the burned dead leaves
And veils of the scent
Of some secret plant,

Come, my beauties, teach me,
Let me have your wild surprise,
Yes, and tell me on my knees
Of your new life.

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Yusef Komunyakaa

2009-04-12T10:27:00.003-07:00

Poetry Month - Dahlia Ravikovitch

2009-04-11T11:08:00.002-07:00

Hovering at a Low Altitude
by Dahlia Ravikovitch
translated by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld

I am not here.
I am on those craggy eastern hills
streaked with ice
where grass doesn't grow
and a sweeping shadow overruns the slope.
A little shepherd girl
with a herd of goats,
black goats,
emerges suddenly
from an unseen tent.
She won't live out the day, that girl,
in the pasture.

I am not here.
Inside the gaping mouth of the mountain
a red globe flares,
not yet a sun.
A lesion of frost, flushed and sickly,
revolves in that maw.

And the little one rose so early
to go to the pasture.
She doesn't walk with neck outstretched
and wanton glances.
She doesn't paint her eyes with kohl.
She doesn't ask, Whence cometh my help.

I am not here.
I've been in the mountains many days now.
The light will not scorch me. The frost cannot touch me.
Nothing can amaze me now.
I've seen worse things in my life.

I tuck my dress tight around my legs and hover
very close to the ground.
What ever was she thinking, that girl?
Wild to look at, unwashed.
For a moment she crouches down.
Her cheeks soft silk,
frostbite on the back of her hand.
She seems distracted, but no,
in fact she's alert.
She still has a few hours left.
But that's hardly the object of my meditations.
My thoughts, soft as down, cushion me comfortably.
I've found a very simple method,
not so much as a foot-breadth on land
and not flying, either—
hovering at a low altitude.

But as day tends toward noon,
many hours
after sunrise,
that man makes his way up the mountain.
He looks innocent enough.
The girl is right there, near him,
not another soul around.
And if she runs for cover, or cries out—
there's no place to hide in the mountains.

I am not here.
I'm above those savage mountain ranges
in the farthest reaches of the East.
No need to elaborate.
With a single hurling thrust one can hover
and whirl about with the speed of the wind.
Can make a getaway and persuade myself:
I haven't seen a thing.
And the little one, her eyes start from their sockets,
her palate is dry as a potsherd,
when a hard hand grasps her hair, gripping her
without a shred of pity.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - James Merrill

2009-04-11T07:48:00.001-07:00

A Selected Poems of James Merrill (1926-1995) is now available in
paperback, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. As ever, his
range astounds, and the poem below, from 1985, reminds us how timeless
and timely his work is.

******************************

Page from the Koran

A small vellum environment
Overrun by black
Scorpions of Kufic script—their ranks
All trigger tail and gold vowel-sac—
At auction this mild winter morning went
For six hundred Swiss francs.

By noon, fire from the same blue heavens
Had half erased Beirut.
Allah be praised, it said on crude handbills,
For guns and Nazarenes to shoot.
"How gladly with proper words," said Wallace Stevens,
"The soldier dies." Or kills.

God's very word, then, stung the heart
To greed and rancor. Yet
Not where the last glow touches one spare man
Inked-in against his minaret
—Letters so handled they are life, and hurt,
Leaving the scribe immune?

~ From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Wayne Miller

2009-04-10T05:08:00.001-07:00

Nocturne
by Wayne Miller

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It's time

to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - Mei-Yao Ch'en

2009-04-09T07:37:00.002-07:00

An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend
by Mei-Yao Ch'en
translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Do not be offended because
I am slow to go out. You know
Me too well for that. On my lap
I hold my little girl. At my
Knees stands my handsome little son.
One has just begun to talk.
The other chatters without
Stopping. They hang on my clothes
And follow my every step.
I can't get any farther
Than the door. I am afraid
I will never make it to your house.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Shambhala Sun - The Vomit of a Mad Tyger: The Spiritual Autobiography of Allen Ginsberg

2009-04-09T06:08:00.000-07:00

I loved this article when I read in the magazine, and I think any Ginsberg fan will love it as well. The piece really looks at his Buddhist practice, but it's not really possible to separate that from his poetry. So this article becomes a look at the spiritual poetics of Ginsberg, one of our greatest poets.

The Vomit of a Mad Tyger
The Spiritual Autobiography of Allen Ginsberg
By Allen Ginsberg
The Shambhala Sun presents this exclusive auto-biographical account from the late poet and cultural icon Allen Ginsberg, narrating his spiritual journey from Blake to the Buddha.

We’ll begin at the beginning, because what I’d like to do is trace what spiritual inklings I had that led to interest in Tibetan Buddhism and guru relationship.

I was in love with a high school fellow who went off to Columbia College when he graduated a half-term before me in Central High School in Patterson, New Jersey. So I decided to go to Columbia College instead of Montclair State Teachers College, where all of my family had gone. Out of some kind of devotion I broke away from the traditional pattern of my family but I didn’t have money, so I had to take a scholarship entrance exam. On the ferry between Hoboken and New York I got down on my knees and made a vow that if I were admitted to Columbia, I would do everything I could to save mankind. It was a naive bodhisattva’s vow out of fear of not getting into Columbia.

Around the time I got into school, I ran into William Burroughs and Lucian Carr and Jack Kerouac. We became friends. Our conversation between 1945 and 1948 was recollections of our own childhood inklings, including the big question, “How big was the universe?” I think Kerouac and I had a sense of panoramic awareness of the vastness of space. So the question, how big was the “unborn,” arose. Or, how vast was the space we were in, and what was the mystery of the universe?

That led to a lot of conversations and inquiries with marijuana and wandering around the city considering the look of the buildings and the appearance of the facades of Times Square, particularly. Times Square seen as a stage set with a facade that could vanish at any second. That impression of the apparent material of the universe as “real,” but at the same time “unreal” in some way or other, either because we were high, or because time would dissolve the “seen,” or maybe some trick of the eyeball reveals the “facade” as empty.

So we began talking about what in 1945 we called a New Consciousness, or a New Vision. As most young people probably do, at the age of fifteen to nineteen, whether it’s punk or bohemia or grunge or whatever new vision adolescents have, there is always some kind of striving for understanding and transformation of the universe, according to one’s own subjective, poetic, generational inspiration.

That led to an exploration of the otherwise rejected world of junkies around Times Square and the underworld. The world of drugs—which had a slight effect in transforming consciousness or altering moods and was presumed to be a kind of artistic specimen trial—I found quite harmless and useful as an educational experience, though some of my contemporaries did get hung up, like Burroughs—although the main problem seemed to be alcohol more than any other.

In 1948 I Had some kind of break in the normal modality of my consciousness. While alone living a relatively solitary vegetarian contemplative life, reading St. John of the Cross, Plotinus some, notions of “alone with the Alone,” or “one hand clapping,” or The Cloud of Unknowing, or Plato’s Phaedrus, and William Blake, I had what was, for me, an extraordinary break in the normal nature of my thought when something opened up.

I had finished masturbating, actually, on the sixth floor of a Harlem tenement on 121st Street looking out at the roofs while reading Blake, back and forth, and suddenly had a kind of auditory hallucination, hearing Blake—what I thought was his voice, a very deep, earthen tone, not very far from my own mature tone of voice, so perhaps a projection of my own latent physiology—reciting a poem called “Sunflower,” which I thought expressed some kind of universal longing for union with some infinite nature. The poem goes:

Ah, Sun-flower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded within snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

I can’t interpret it exactly now, but the impression that I had at the time was of some infinite yearning for the infinite, finally realized, and I looked out the window and began to notice the extraordinary detail of intelligent labor that had gone into the making of the rooftop cornices of the Harlem buildings. I suddenly realized that the world was, in a sense, not dead matter but an increment or deposit of living intelligence and action and activity that finally took form—the Italian laborers of 1890 and 1910, making very fine copper work and roofcomb ornament as you find along the older tenement apartment buildings.

As I looked at the sky, I wondered what kind of intelligence had made that vastness, or what was the nature of the intelligence that I was glimpsing, and felt a sense of vastness and of coming home to space I hadn’t realized was there before but which seemed old and infinite, like the Ancient of Days, so to speak. But I had no training in anything but Western notions and didn’t know how to find a vocabulary for the experience. So I thought I had seen “God” or “Light” or some Western notion of a theistic center, or that was the impression at the time.

That got me into lots of trouble, because I tried to explain it to people and nobody could figure out what I was saying. They thought I was nuts, and in a way, I was. Having no background and no preparation, I didn’t know how to ground the experience in any way that either could prolong it or put it in its place, and certainly didn’t know any teachers whom I could have consulted at Columbia University at the time, although D.T. Suzuki was there.

My first experience with Blake was quite heavenly, but the second experience, about a week later, was just the opposite. At the Columbia bookstore looking around and thinking about this and that, suddenly a sense of sea change of my consciousness overtook me again, and I got scared because everyone in the bookstore looked like some sort of wounded, neurotic, pained animal with the “marks of weakness and marks of woe” on their faces that Blake speaks of in “London.”

A night later, wandering around the Columbia campus, it happened again with a poem called “The Sick Rose,” which goes:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

And I had a sense of the black sky coming down to eat me.

Go read the whole article.

Poetry Month - Pamela Spiro Wagner

2009-04-08T05:53:00.001-07:00

How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Bill Hotchkiss - Season Turn

2009-04-07T16:46:00.002-07:00

Season Turn

At the end of two weeks of storm,
With snow and bright gusting wind—
Then the most astonishing rainpour,
Roadside ditches spill out onto pavement,
Lane lines disappear in a sheen of runoff—,
Then lightning to the north, strike
After strike, blazing the bellies
Of clouds that wink in silver orgasm.

I drive down from the college on the hill,
Note a few cars nosed into roadside brush,
I test my own brakes, I grasp at the wheel:
Avoid the Cedar Ridge road, go a longer way,
Stay lower and hope no sudden snowfall
Will obscure my vision completely.

But the rain stops, handfuls of stars
Where the clouds shatter, grow thin
And within an hour seem a stream
Heavenwide of mist fragments beaten
Eastward on the High Sierra, a half moon
Sows light on the wet oaks and pines.

Where Casa Loma turns off Rattlesnake,
I pull over, cross pavement on foot, intent
Upon gathering mail. I meet the three
Of them, veering from me but unhurried,
A doe great with life, and two yearlings,
Still following mother, they sidle
Away, steam rising from their backs,
Hooves slipping on slick asphalt,
Bound forward then, though nothing’s
Alarmed them, and tails twitching
They disappear under moon-spattered
Manzanita, the leaves pulsingly wet
This darkness of halfmoon and clouds.

At the end of the storm we have meeting—
Though our paths do not cross, but merely
Draw near, and that chance recognition
In the eyes of three deer and a human.

~ Bill Hotckiss teaches at Sierra College in Grass Valley, CA. He has published many volumes of poetry, many novels, and has written some primary criticism on the poets Robinson Jeffers and William Everson. And he is my friend.

Poetry Month - Jill Bialosky

2009-04-07T05:04:00.001-07:00

Jill Bialosky's Intruder is a volume which stretches our understanding of the creative process and the mind behind it, as in "Touch-Me-Nots," given below.

Click here to download a printable broadside of this poem.

Touch-Me-Nots

She brought a little of the country into the city
in the pots of impatiens she had planted.
The petals white, pure, the opposite of color.
She had transferred the impatiens from the garden,
digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam,
one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing
the roots into the earth. Despite the quality
of the soil—its rich decomposition of life—
still they would not last. The plants were hardy
and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves,
the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air
awash in pollen. She looked into the flower
as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering
sustenance independent of a body, free floating
and regenerative and wholly belonging
to what was impossible ever to touch.

~From Knopf Poetry

Poetry Month - Du Fu

2009-04-06T06:55:00.004-07:00

Poem A Day: Du Fu's "Summer Outing"

As David Young reminds us in the introduction to Du Fu: A Life in Poems, the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) produced many outstanding poets, but Du Fu's highly personal voice—his responsiveness to the natural world and to the often chaotic political situation around him, his candid approach to the shifting fortunes of his own family—makes him an especially significant poet for modern readers. Young's crisp and natural translations of Du Fu's poems, grouped into chronological sections with useful paragraph introductions about where Du Fu is and what he is doing in a given period, gives us fresh and full access to Du Fu’s inventive spirit. "His response to the world," Young writes, "to the vicissitudes of history and the grandeurs of landscape, exceeds our capacity to generalize. At the same time, he is willing to incorporate homely details—chasing chickens around his yard, listening to the chirp of a cricket, receiving a gift of shallots from a neighbor—that many poets would find too trivial to mention. The result is a significant expansion of what a poem can include...We can say that Du Fu is the poet who truly originated the lyric poem as we presently know and value it."

The poem below comes from a period (745-750) during which Du Fu, "too young to take up the hermit's life and too ambitious to be bohemian in the way [his contemporary, the poet] Li Bai was," returned to the capital city of Chang'an where he had previously failed the Imperial examination that would allow him a government post. As Young reports, he was frustrated in his efforts again, and hung around the capital, casting about for patronage and writing poems, gradually gaining in strength and skill as a poet.

Click here to download a printable broadside of this poem.

A Summer Outing

1

How nice to board the barge
as the sun meets the horizon

the breeze picks up
the water ripples

we sail past groves
of thick bamboo

and anchor in the cool
of water lilies

the young men mix
some icy drinks

the girls are slicing
lotus roots

but the clouds right overhead
grow black

rain makes me rush
my poem.

2

The shower wets the benches
we were sitting on

the wind blows hard
and rocks the boat

the southern girls'
red skirts drenched

the northern beauties
seem to have ruined their makeup

the mooring line
saws and cuts the willow

the barge's curtains are soaked
from breaking waves

our going home
will be wet and chilly

as if we were having autumn
right in the heart of summer.

Go to the Poem-A-Day website to comment on this poem, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and much more.

Read more poems from Du Fu: A Life in Poetry

Meet David Young at Indiana University on April 8.

More about Du Fu: A Life in Poetry

About David Young

~ From Knopf Poetry

Vinnie Kinsella - NaPoWriMo

2009-04-06T06:11:00.001-07:00

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo).Vinnie Kinsella is another poet doing the poem-a-day thing this month, and he is also the editor of Four and Twenty.

Here are a few of his poems from the first week of NaPoWriMo.

Photos of My Late Grandfather

My face, his image, her pain.
How could a mother in 1978
embrace reflections of a man
buried in 1964?

My Filthy Soul

Upside down I turned my body
wash and squeezed
the vacant bottle.

Is there nothing that can cleanse me?

Devotion

Precisely at midnight his fingers stroked the keys.
The game was afoot, and he was afloat:
twenty-nine poems to go.

Brian Wood - Three Images

2009-04-05T14:22:00.008-07:00

I am honored to host three images from a well-known and amazingly talented artist -Brian Wood. Rather than try to do his biography justice on my own, I will include a portion from his site and allow readers to go read the rest if they so choose - the added benefit to me in this is the inclusion of two more images.

All the links here take you to his main page where you can explore the various galleries of his art.

Brian Wood: Introduction to the Artist and the Work

Brian Wood is an artist working with multiple media in New York City. His paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs are exhibited internationally and are held in private and public collections.

Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Tampa Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa; the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Concordia Art Gallery in Montreal; the Museum of Modern Art in Prague; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and many others.

Brian Wood’s awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for printmaking and photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a number of Canada Council Grants, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He currently teaches at Hunter College in New York and previously taught at Yale University.

Wood uses multiple media to foreground differing awareness in his ongoing exploration of consciousness. He uses different media to both stimulate and respond to various states of mind and multiple levels of thought. The literal is dissolved through metaphor and illusion. Just as trauma can imagine itself into ecstasy, these works transform matter, body, and mind through imagination. Rooted in our biological ground, Wood’s pieces are markers on the shifting borders of self and world.
Brian Wood uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Each medium allows different spatial and material illusions and each offers a different experience of time.

Read the rest.

Here are three more images he has graciously allowed me to post here.

Untitled 1994

Verge, 2008

Poetry Month - D. Nurkse

2009-04-05T07:43:00.001-07:00

April 5: Exile’s Child by D. Nurkse

D. Nurkse’s personal and cultural vision of the relation between fathers and sons informs his latest volume, The Border Kingdom, which also includes some significant additions to the growing canon of post-9/11 poems by American poets.

Exile’s Child

I asked my father
permission to kill a fly.
I came back and asked
—could I kill another?
He thought for a while
and said—No. Evening was taking

the sting off a family outing.
Along the beach, cousins
were charring meat. The waves
were turning an intense No-color.
I asked, was he in combat
in the old country? He said—No.
Then I was enraged at him,
feeling he was asleep, like the sand,

like the striped umbrella whose shadow
fell at right angles to night,
like my serious brother toting sums
in a leather-bound ledger. The flies alone
were awake, and their drone,
fainter than surf, was audible
only when I knelt and held my breath
stock-still by the banked coals.

More about The Border Kingdom

About D. Nurske

Jim Holt - Got Poetry?

2009-04-04T08:59:00.004-07:00

I like this article from the New York Times Sunday Book Review. When I was in sixth grade, and only for that one year, we were required to memorize and recite poems in my English class. And if we wanted some extra credit, we could voluntarily memorize more poems and recite them to the class.

I hated it, but I did it. Wordsworth. Tennyson. Poe. Many others. Their rhythms and diction stuck in my head for many years, eventually informing - unconsciously it seems - my own early attempts at writing poetry.

I'm guessing this practice has fallen from use. Too bad. I think it accomplishes many things, not least of which is an intuitive sense of how language can work in new ways. But this is something parents can do with their kids - we don't need schools for everything.

Got Poetry?

By JIM HOLT

Published: April 2, 2009

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Olimpia Zagnoli

This may seem eccentric, not to say masochistic. If you are a baby boomer like me (or older), your high school English teacher probably forced you to learn some poetry by heart for class recitation. How we howled in protest! What was the point of memorizing Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” sonnet or — in Middle English, no less! — the first 18 lines of “The Canterbury Tales”? Our teacher could never answer this question to our satisfaction; the best she could do was some drivel about our feeling “culturally confident.” But memorize them we did, in big painful chunks, by rote repetition. (There is torture lurking in the very word “rote,” which is conjectured to come from the Latin rota, meaning “wheel.”)
A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.
For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.
The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme (if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance. You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words. (Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.
That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in. If you don’t have one left over from your college days, any good bookstore, new or used, will offer an embarrassment of choices for a few bucks — Oxford, Penguin, Norton, etc. Or you might try ESSENTIAL PLEASURES: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud (Norton, $29.95), edited by the former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky.
But which poems to memorize? I started with Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” — a little lyric that Stephen Spender once said was the most beautiful thing in all of Auden. Next I tried Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess” — a Nabokov novel compressed into 56 lines. Browning, although not quite a first-rate poet, proved to be especially fun to memorize because of his exotic vocabulary and jaw-breaking diction. For sheer length, the most ambitious poem I’ve tackled is Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (a favorite, as it happens, of Stephen King). At 204 lines, it takes 10 minutes to get through — just the time it takes me to walk from my apartment to the Chinese laundry.
By now, my mental treasury of verse pretty much spans everything from Chaucer up to the present. (Tennyson was the last major gap, which I’m just now plugging.) There’s a heavy concentration of Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats (whose symbolic hocus-pocus finally makes some sense to me), plenty of delightful warhorses like “To His Coy Mistress” and “Kubla Khan” and a good bit of light verse (like a long poem about a duck-billed platypus that becomes a brilliant diplomat only to resign in disgrace after laying an egg). Although I’m a little thin on contemporary verse, one of the best poems I’ve learned by heart is Richard Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Its delicate rhythms at first proved rebarbative to my memory, but when I finally got it down I was so delighted with it that I wrote Wilbur a fan letter. He wrote back, saying that he always advised his students to memorize poems: “If one is delayed in a bus terminal, or sitting in a foxhole, it’s wonderful to have an inner anthology to say over, yet again, in one’s mind.”
One should be skeptical, though, of some of the alleged advantages cited by champions of poetry memorization. “I wonder if anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry . . . can fail to write coherent sentences and paragraphs,” Robert Pinsky once said. Well, responded David Bromwich, just take a look at the autobiography of Marlon Brando, who memorized heaps of Shakespeare.
Are there cognitive benefits? I sometimes feel that my mnemonic horsepower is increasing, but that’s probably an illusion. “Memorizing poetry does seem to make people a bit better at memorizing poetry,” Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, “but there’s no evidence that the skill carries over to other tasks.”
Nor, as I have found, will memorizing poetry make you more popular. Rather the reverse. No one wants to hear you declaim it. Almost no one, anyway. I do have one friend, a Wall Street bond-trader, who can’t get enough of my recitations. He takes me to the Grand Havana Cigar Club, high above Midtown Manhattan, and sits rapt as I intone, “The unpurged images of day recede. . . .” He calls to one of the stunningly pretty waitresses. “Come over here and listen to my friend recite this Yeats poem.” Oh dear.
The grandest claim for memorizing poetry is made by Clive James, himself a formidable repository of memorized verse. In his book “Cultural Amnesia,” James declares that “the future of the humanities as a common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart.” A noble sentiment. I just wish that James had given us some reason for thinking it was true.
I don’t have one myself, but I hope that I have at least dispelled three myths.
Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.
Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a muscle, not a quart jar.
Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod. You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.
Jim Holt is the author of “Stop Me if You’ve Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes.” He is working on a book about the puzzle of existence.

Poetry Month - Ann Lauterbach

2009-04-04T08:53:00.001-07:00

Elegy for Sol LeWitt
by Ann Lauterbach

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.

The lines on your walls
follows directions
as if

as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

~ From The Academy of American Poets

Poetry Month - D. A. Powell

2009-04-03T05:23:00.001-07:00

corydon & alexis, redux
by D. A. Powell

and yet we think that song outlasts us all: wrecked devotion
the wept face of desire, a kind of savage caring that reseeds itself
and grows in clusters

oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as
god's own ribs

what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don't birds covet the seeds of
the honey locust
and doesn't the ewe have a nose for wet filaree and slender oats
foraged in the meadow
kit foxes crave the blacktailed hare: how this longing grabs me by
the nape

guess I figured to be done with desire, if I could write it out
dispense with any evidence, the way one burns a pile of twigs
and brush

what was his name? I'd ask myself, that guy with the sideburns
and charming smile
the one I hoped that, as from a sip of hemlock, I'd expire with him
on my tongue

silly poet, silly man: thought I could master nature like a misguided
preacher
as if banishing love is a fix. as if the stars go out when we shut our
sleepy eyes

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Knopf Celebrates Poetry Month with Poem-A-Day

2009-04-02T08:22:00.001-07:00

AA Knopf is one of the biggest and best publishers in the nation. They too are supporting National Poetry Month - and here is their announcement.

Knopf Celebrates Poetry Month with Poem-A-Day

This year, Knopf’s Poem-A-Day celebration is dedicated to the memory of John Updike (1932-2009), who remained loyal to the art of poetry throughout his career as a brilliant and popular practitioner of the short story and the novel, and as perhaps the most generous and eminent literary critic of our time.

Be sure to sign up for the Poetry Newsletter — each day during the month of April, you’ll receive a new poem right in your inbox. You can also subscribe to the Poem-A-Day feed.

Look for poetry activity on the Knopf Twitter, and enter for your chance to win a copy of Updike’s collection Endpoint by entering the Poem-A-Day Sweepstakes.

And take a look and consider adding these signed poetry collections to your bookshelf, only available through RandomHouse.com.

Poetry Month - Rae Armantrout

2009-04-02T06:49:00.001-07:00

Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

•

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

•

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Puerhan - "Poetry Mala"

2009-04-01T16:04:00.004-07:00

Puerhan has been writing 108 poems in 108 days as a form of spiritual practice, an idea that I find incredibly interesting and useful. Go check out his site.

Here are a few samples.

108 Poems #082
A sunny yellow daffodil
Gazing out the window
I forget the morning is grey

108 Poems #081

Glistening cells
And sweet juice
Fibres caught between my teeth

108 Poems #080
Nothing seems certain
Least of all the movements of the heart
Undermined by a stomach full of doubt

Poetry Month - Jack Gilbert

2009-04-01T12:09:00.003-07:00

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.

~ Academy of American Poets

Celeste Thompson - Write a poem a day for National Poetry Month

2009-04-01T07:31:00.003-07:00

Celeste Thompson at Ardent Shanty has accepted a challenge to write a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

April is national poetry month. I've committed to writing a poem every day this month, and I'll post the results of that goal on here.

When I decided to do this, I brainstormed some topics to write about. The immediate themes that came to mind were birds, music, sex, food, and fish. Hmmm. Those are things I always write about, so it's apparent that I need to think outside the box for some fresh ideas.

This is her first effort:

Describing Nokkelost* to Disarmingly Handsome and Unfailingly Polite Mr. C

Nutty, creamy, and spicy. Intensifies with age.
Supple. Elastic. Smooth.
Fragrant clove buds hide inside these pale, creamy walls.
Slight saltiness lingers on the lips.
Semihard. Aged. Generous fat content.

Sometimes smells like rye.

*Nokkelost is a Norwegian cheese, banned in the US over mad cow disease fears.

Seems like a great challenge - if anyone else decides to join in, please send me a link to your blog. I might even join in over at Integral Options Cafe.

FSG Poetry Announces a Poem-a-Day

2009-04-01T07:27:00.001-07:00

Nice Poetry Month promotion from FSG, one of the best supporters of poetry among the major publishers.

FSG Poetry Announces a Poem-a-Day
We're always evolving here at the FSG poetry blog, trying to bring you better and better National Poetry Month content.

This year, we've started a new promotion, one poem daily delivered directly to your inbox. Our poets have selected the verses themselves, so you'll be receiving daily selections from the likes of Louise Gluck, Frederick Seidel, Charles Wright, and tons more.

To sign up, just click here, or fill out the information in the sidebar to the right.

Tags: National Poetry Month, poetry, FSG

April Is National Poetry Month

2009-03-31T04:48:00.001-07:00

And here is this year's poster:

TED Talks - C.K. Williams: Poetry for all seasons of life

2009-03-30T07:33:00.003-07:00

A great talk from a few years back at the TED Conference.

Poet C.K. Williams reads his work at TED 2001. As he colors scenes of childhood resentments, college loves, odd neighbors and the literal death of youth, he reminds us of the unique challenges of living.

Williams started writing poetry at 19, after taking only his required English classes at University of Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, he began gearing his poems toward social issues, such as the brutality that civil rights activists often faced and his anti-war stance with respect to Vietnam. Over time, although he continued to write about society, his work became more personal. His focus shifted to the intersection of profoundly different lives in crowded urban spaces, using these instances to examine sensitive issues such as race and class.

The subject matter of his work is not its only controversy, and Williams is often compared to Whitman and Ginsberg because of his unusually long lines of verse. Despite his unconventional poetic form, he has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. He has also published five works of translation and a psychologically introspective memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself.

New Spring Poetry Books

2009-03-18T15:02:00.003-07:00

The Academy of American Poets has assembled a list of the new poetry books this spring, with info and a sample poem for most if not all of them. Damned awesome of them, especially as National Poetry Month is right around the corner.

Below is a list of new poetry titles that will be published in spring 2008 by the sponsors of National Poetry Month. Browse the list by poet, title, or press. Click on a title to get more information and a sample poem. Support your local bookseller by searching for poetry-friendly bookstores by State at the National Poetry Map, or buy the book online at Amazon.com.

Here are a few favorite poets of mine with new books:

Face
Hanging Loose Press
by Sherman Alexie

Versed
Wesleyan University Press
by Rae Armantrout

See Jack
University of Pittsburgh Press
by Russell Edson

The Dance Most of All
Alfred K. Knopf
by Jack Gilbert

The Winter Sun
Graywolf Press
by Fanny Howe

Or to Begin Again
Penguin
by Ann Lauterbach

Sestets
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
by Charles Wright

There are dozens more at the site.

Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief
by David Baker

The issue is not just that we grieve, nor when we grieve. The issue is not just why we grieve in poetry, nor how the beautiful song of poetry capitulates to or conspires with the task of weeping. These and more. I like to think of the sound of weeping, along with the sound of laughing, as among the first thoughtful articulations a human being ever made. More than growls or grunts, more than snarls or barks or howls, weeping and laughter indicate passional responses to experience, to a perception of circumstances not only in the present but in the past and—even more fascinating—the future. Nothing else cries or laughs the way we do. These two primary forms of vocalization evolve further into songs: ecstatic language, as it were, standing beside itself, speaking out of its head. It is no accident that the two fundamental modes of lyric poetry are precisely these, crying and laughing, the intonations of grief and pleasure. By this I mean, the elegy and the love poem. I want to consider the configuration of the elegy, with two particular examples from the American nineteenth century. At hand is the problematic of Walt Whitman's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," I want first to remind us of the complex narrative structure of Whitman's poem for his beloved deceased, and to unpack the poem's dense sets of images, stories, locations, and most important, its figures. As I intend the term, a figure is not just a body, a human figure; and not just a trope or metaphor, a figure of speech; but also a number, a mathematical figure. Next, I will relate this poem to another central nineteenth-century American elegy, Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death." Finally I will propose a paradigm shift in our thinking, and reading, about the American elegy. "Whitman's elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy" Strange things are afoot. A foot in Whitman's poetry is a different body part than in other poets' work. Whose body is before us in Whitman's lilac elegy? The literal circumstance of Whitman's great poem is the funeral procession following Abraham Lincoln's assassination and death on April 14, 1865. Good Friday indeed. Whitman's poem accompanies the death-train that slowly bore Lincoln's body from Washington, D.C., all the way to burial in Illinois. At least in its beginning, the poem abides by a conventional, ritualized manner of mourning. Surely this poem is forefather of The Waste Land, commencing as it does in April, the cruel month, and proceeding in a series of aggrieved stages, through the city, into nature, into death, toward something sounding like prayerful redemption. As Peter Sacks argues in The English Elegy, the performance of ritual—the mournful, often staid formulation of grieving—is an elegy's primary rhetorical gesture. Whitman's lilac elegy begins just so: 1. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, And the great star early droop'd in the western sky in the night, I mourn'd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love. 2. O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear'd—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul. In these first sections we hear a sober, then almost quietly sobbing voice of the poem, in radical contrast to Whitman's usually hortatory and encouraging profusions. This is, remember, the ur-poer of exuberance, cheerleader for democracy, the electrically charged poet of erotic contact and corporal intelligence. But note in section 1 the restraint, the underspoken dignity, as well as the formalized introduction of the poem's primary tropes, the triple image-into-symbol or, as he says, the "trinity sure to me you bring" that accompanies the poet's imagination through the odyssey of this poem. This trinity will evolve, eventually becoming the western star, or the planet Venus, which serves as a figure for Lincoln; the fragrant, plentiful, natural emblem of lilac; and, as a stand-in for Whitman, that hermit thrush with its doleful song. The particular curse of spring's eternal rebirth here, its immeasurable irony, lies in its perpetuating mementi mori, its blooming reminders of death. That is T. S. Eliot's terror in The Waste Land, and Whitman's, who not only mourns, but "yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring [italics mine]." But why Venus, the goddess of love, in an elegy? Why lilac? Why, for that matter, Lincoln? Section 2 sounds the poem's death knell and identifies the crisis at hand: how to face "the black murk that hides the star," how to accept that Death has taken the new democratic hero. Juxtaposed with the stasis of this seemingly insoluble problem is section 3, the "miracle" of the natural trope, a lilac growing by an old farmhouse with its human "heart-shaped" leaves and its perfume. In the odor of lilac—is there anything so sweet, so profuse? —lingers a touch of the poem's subversive power. Psychologists tell us the sense of smell is our most nostalgic sense, the one most capable of triggering memory. It is also our least articulable sense. That is, we have far fewer words to describe smell than any other sense. Another irony then: such bodily knowledge yet such intellectual stupor. But of course this is the romantic's ideal formulation. Section 4 activates another sense, the sound of the solitary thrush's song calling from deep within natures heart, from "the swamp," a place not quite water or land, or perhaps more meaningfully for Whitman a primordial place of both water and land. This solitary singer seems a strange figure for Whitman, usually so gregarious, hungry to situate himself among others and sing "over the roofs of the world," as he says in "Song of Myself." But again, so much about the lilac elegy is atypical. Whitman is not by any means an elegiac poet. Grief, sadness, pessimism are not the keys in which he typically plays. He is so energetically urban and hopeful, so enlivened by the prospect of crowds and bodily contact. But this will be one of the central trajectories of the poem: to move away from the city into the solitary, inhuman woods, in order to find his voice and regain his poetic vocation. The song he hears—always a necessary intonation in an elegy—is "deaths outlet song," and the singer, the bird, is literally his "brother." Notice the increasing archaic formality at the end of this section. "If thou wast not granted to sing thou would'st surely die" takes its diction from Quaker idiom. Whitman's mother was a devout Quaker, we may remember. Sections 5 and 6 find Whitman propelling his poem forward, making it move, as the train moves. Elegies rarely have momentum, preferring the mournful deportment of stasis, stillness. Here the natural images seem battle-scarred (the Civil War blue and gray of violets and debris, the "spears" of wheat and grain-"shrouds"), but also potentially healing as the world "springs back" to life. The gathered crowd of people in section 6 abide by Sacks's elegiac formula, becoming a country-wide funeral mass, listening to the poem's song, here still a "dirge." Notice at the end of this section how Whitman transplants the sprig of lilac that he broke off at the end of section 3 into the coffin of the president. Section 7 continues the gestures of enlargement and forward motion: "With loaded arms I come, pouring for you." Echoing the dark confessions of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"—which he first published in the great 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass as "The Sun-Down Poem" (note the westward-facing gesture)—where Whitman's desire for intimacy and human-sameness finds him admitting that not "you alone" are weak or blank or susceptible to pain, here the figure of the dead hero first becomes a trope for all the dead of the war: a figure, in fact, for Death itself, "O sane and sacred death." The "you" of the poem evolves, swelling past them all, to the very thought of death: "For you and the coffins all of you O death." Then in a gesture of quiet but fertile abundance, he hastens to cover death all "over" with bouquets of roses, lilies, and as he says, "mostly" lilacs. He seeks not just to adorn the coffin but literally to bury death. An aside about all these flowers. I mentioned earlier the immense, lush fragrance of the lilac. Why this flower, apart from its springtime significance? Imagine the body of Lincoln traveling, so slowly, for days and days across the country. Imagine the potential smell. We know that people heaped flowers on the railcar as it passed or as it stopped. They are paying tribute, but they are also covering the stench. Thus, for Whitman, the lilac provides a powerful aroma, not just a "scented ... remembrancer" but a natural air freshener, making the very air new. Whitman slows his momentum in section 8, at this point where he begins to discover his vision of transcendence. To be reborn, first he must die, or at least descend to an underworld. He calls it "the netherward black of the night." Thus Whitman's scheme for the elegy enlarges to include an epic trope. He himself walks into a dark wood, his Virgil the star, and commences his own journey to death. This is one of my central points: not just Lincoln, but also Whitman must die in this poem. His elegy, like his great song of himself, is ultimately a self-elegy. He asks for strength and direction in section 9, "lingering" in spiritual limbo in the swamp. He listens to the thrush; he begs for it to "Sing on." Like the bird, Whitman yearns to sing; it is his natural demeanor. But of course the second crisis of the poem is that the death of Lincoln has stifled or murdered Whitman's ability to sing and to praise. Such is the point of his awful doubts in section 10: O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love? Sea-winds blown from east and west, Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting, These and with these and the breath of my chant, I'll perfume the grave of him I love. These first three questions serve to ask how Whitman himself might assume the qualities of the poem's eternal constants—the star, the lilac, the thrush. How, he asks, can he "warble," how can he shine, what shall be his perfume? Immediately nature answers. Carried on the world's winds, a breath of inspiration floats to him from around the globe. He breathes-in (spiro is Latin for "I breathe," we might recall) the breath of the world and knows now that his simple expiration will be his song. To expire exercises both of its meanings: to breathe out and to die.

Elegant Thorn Review

Elegant Thorn Review Is on Hiatus

Elizabeth Iannaci Reviews "An Urgent Request" by Sarah Luczaj,

Wallace Stevens - Armchair Visionary

John Gallaher - Winner of the twelfth annual Boston Review poetry contest

John Gallaher

New York Times: John Ashbery, Toying With Words

NYRB - Podcast: Charles Wright’s Sestets

Podcast: Charles Wright’s Sestets

Holloway Series in Poetry - Ann Lauterbach

Whose Words These Are (14): C.D. Wright

Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil. Copper Canyon, 2005. p. 89

A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

By James Longenbach

August 26, 2009

Tricycle Community Poetry Club

New qarrtsiluni call for submissions: “Words of Power”

NYT- Poetry Chronicle

Poetry Chronicle

Sarah Luczaj: Three Poems

Tricycle - Just One Breath: The Practice of Poetry and Meditation

Aram Saroyan - Beat America

David Orr Reviews Thom Gunn: Selected Poems

Too Close to Touch

Two Poems: Ray Succre

Poem: Gina Goldblatt

Flarf is Dionysus. Conceptual Writing is Apollo.

Steve Klepetar - Three Poems

Joelle Nebbe - Rieveaulx Abbey (Four Photos)

David Baker - Elegy and Eros: Configuring Grief

Three Poems: Amy Wright

Four Photos - Pam Morris

Bookforum - Liberal Mediation (Rae Armantrout)

By Tim Griffin

Poetry Month - Thom Gunn

Poetry Month - Katy Lederer

Poetry Month - Charles Wright

Poetry Month - Jack Gilbert

Poetry Month - Sapphire

Poetry Month - Norma Cole

New York Times Book Review - Poetry Chronicle

Poetry Chronicle

Poetry Month - Carl Phillips

Poetry Month - Taije Silverman

Poetry Month - John Hollander

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewski

Poetry Month - Joshua Beckman

Poetry Month - Jane Mayhall

Poetry Month - Toi Derricotte

Poetry Month - Adam Zagajewksi

Poetry Montrh - Jim Powell

Poetry Month - August Kleinzahler

Poetry Month - Grace Paley

Poetry Month - Keith Waldrop

W. S. Merwin Wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Poetry Month - Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry Month - Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Poetry Month - Brooks Haxton

Poetry Month - Stephanie Hemphill

Poetry Month - Paul Guest

Poetry Month - Wallace Stevens & Donald Justice

Poetry Month - Sharon Olds

Poetry Month - Ted Mathys

Poetry Month - Angela Shaw

Poetry Month - Mark Strand

Poetry Month - Carl Phillips

Poetry Month - Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno

Poetry Month - Louise Gluck

Poetry Month - Deborah Digges

Poetry Month - Maureen N. McLane

Poetry Month - Kevin Young

Poetry Month - Rachel Contreni Flynn

Poetry Month - Jean Garrigue

Poetry Month - Yusef Komunyakaa

Poetry Month - Dahlia Ravikovitch

Poetry Month - James Merrill

Poetry Month - Wayne Miller

Poetry Month - Mei-Yao Ch'en

Shambhala Sun - The Vomit of a Mad Tyger: The Spiritual Autobiography of Allen Ginsberg