The Best American Poetry

SHAKESPEARE, WHERE WE EARNED OUR NAMES

some minx’s token

laid on our tongues, some civilization’s   content so absolute

we can row a canoe seaward into its   azured vault   vocabulary,

we can salt backwards in minutes to 

Name him,

that what he gave us was more knowledge

overwhelmed by seeing us,

a violent sorrow

and  this sorrow that I have by right

is yours,   man and woman both, which

Empowered him out of nature

in some loneliness-allure crossing the face twice,

like the cuttlefish turning over its colors,

blame due of blame,

that first lights on him,  then us, following in

our bodies’ grammar, profound language found

by our carnal stings or unbitten lusts

word over word,

the ugly part of beauty

moved from the gut  to resume the shape

of   Cordelia in his arms,

unfinished storm-flower where   the darkness folded up

and you asked yourself     Will it eat me?

like the feeding earth-  worm of conscience,  swallowed by its 

own red sound,

seas incarnadine,

Faith, half asleep   in your arms, that

What you know, you know,

inward breaks

even before it is named, even before it benchmarks who you are.

>>>>

by Elena Karina Byrne

Antioch Review, Winter 2008

forthcoming in Burnt Violin, Tupelo Press 2011

PROZAC, ANGST, AUTHENTICITY AND OUR DUENDE [by Elena Karina Byrne]

Sweet are the uses of adversity

--Shakespeare, As You Like It

     No, "Fear Factor" is not a  television show, but a mantra of our times. Politics thrive on fear. We fear for our lives, our freedom, our health, our earth's health, our happiness...  A recent study showed antidepressants are the most popular drug in the U.S.  This is alarming and not surprising and dims our future light a bit, don't you think? Something perceptually shifts beneath our feet. Joshua Clover, as so many others, pokes at our “blindered view of the future,” so, shall we, consider philosophy's idea that our existence belongs to those who respond with angst? Heather McHugh, Thomas Lux, Michael Ryan and others have written about angst and authenticity, perhaps a more familiar breeding ground for poets, theoretical physicists and artists. At Sarah Lawrence College I remember the stories: Plath's empowerment with her angst and anger with her own subconscious; John Berryman being too drunk to speak, yet suddenly "sober" on stage when ready to read;  Theodore Roethke's battle with depression, a pair of pants found under the books and papers on his desk, etc., etc., and etc. The Urban Dictionary tells us angst is a brooding "transcendent emotion " and  "An 'Angst Culture' is also rising in the Scandinavia, where more and more people become 'Angst.' " Transcendent, transgressive? Personal angst (health failing, grief, loss of financial ability to survive, etc.) , collective angst (war, environmental destruction, social/cultural pressures...) has come together in language, language alive in an urgent need to move, to translate. James Wright told us he "wasted" his life; Sharon Olds knew the sorrow of family, the soul like a tiny hotel soap slipped between her ribs;  Sappho's love shook her heart, " Without warning / as a whirlwind / swoops on an oak" ; Lorca's duende called forth "black sounds,"  brute beauty, the "phosphorescent green anemones" of the soul, the "crushed grass" beneath our feet. Somehow, these days, can it seem our angst is less existential, less forgivable?  A. Alvarez's old book, Savage God, "The Art of Suicide" echoes Ophelia's "I was the more deceiv'd" and Hopkin's "But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me/ Thy wring-world right foot rock?", and all that comes with the risk of being alive amidst adversity, real and imagined.

     "Bear those ills we have" (Hamlet) with discourse's energy? With imagination's energy? (see Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare 1781 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare) For the sake of this blog, I'd like to bring forth just a few poets who recently speak to us on this subject, who come into view from the subtext-mind: poets Cathy Colman, Amy Newlove Schroeder, Marcia Cohee, Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucia Perillo, Sholeh Wolpe, and Floyd Skloot are, like Virginia Woolf, "writing to a rhythm" that begins in the distressed mind and body.

    Pain and anxiety wrangle in the same bed of  "otherness." Poet and translator Sholeh Wolpe (The Scar Saloon & Rooftops of Tehran, Red Hen Press, 2004 & 2008; Sin, Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhazad, University of Arkansas Press, 2007) foreground-feels Lorca's idea of the duende, ignites simultaneity between sorrow and joy, and enters the body of alienation in order to speak and be heard: 

But mark this— I do not belong anywhere.

I have an accent in every language I speak.

Cathy Colman's  first book, Borrowed Dress, which won the Felix Pollak Prize, chosen by Mark Doty, gave us unexpected beauty within the myriad contexts of insight and philosophy, art and personal intimacy. Her fabulous forthcoming second book, Beauty's Tattoo (Tebot Bach, 2009) includes some poems that view illness which creates an exiled "other" self . The first poem, "Half-Life: Postcard To Atom," opens the metaphorical trap door, not to the basement or attic, but to the sky:

I’ll tell you what I’ve inherited: years that go in both directions./

There is no salt divinity here, no rain.

All night I dream of a new body.

not next to me, but my own.

The by-product of  this struggle is a profound eloquence. Colman addresses this by telling us we are our own rescuers in her poem "Letter To A Stranger" :

and you’re calling to yourself

before you die of exposure, “Over here,” 

just over this bridge’s sudden amnesia,

“I’m over here.” 

    Another wonderful Californian poet, Amy Newlove Schroeder,(the new 2009 Field Prize winner with her book Sleep Hotel) like Cathy Colman, takes personal angst as the fractured self to task by bringing it into the universal realm of what makes us authentic. Here's a seized moment that comes from darkness, what Randall Jarrell called, "darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness./ And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

Stolen from the Night Factory

 

nights were the worst—

I was not hollowed out—I was belled

 

gazing out the window at the empty branches of the imago tree

 

my brain a rising sun over a blasted horizon

the steel-wool conviction of it

 

interrupted capital, interrupted stream—a dam in my mind

 

all closed, all fired, all friendless and stupefied

 

inside: nothing,

not even the covered wagon of days to come—

 

I want to end with Lucie Brock-Broido's poem-excerpt, "How Can It Be I Am No Longer I"  which energizes what is lost by what is found:

I was a flint

To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm,

A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

...

That I would be--- ... fanatic against

The vanishing....

Let us bliss-back into ourselves through language. Let us be fanatic in our writing, against all things vanishing!

Judith Hall presents a poem by Jennifer Clarvoe

MI RITROVAI

Here I was refound by a dark self;
My self was found by a darker self, obscure.
I was not one self, but made of wood

Within this wood – not single, but multiplied
On into darkness.  No way to see for rest,
For all the trees, for all the terza rima.

A tree grows in the wood – what would you have me
Do?  They all diverge into the darkness,
Dive into darkness, urge to obscurity.

How could one do anything but fall
Into a swoon, svanire?  One cannot
Stand this, one cannot stand in the middle

Of this.  And then I was found out by an
Obscure greeting – salve – strange advice
From something dark and savage that nonetheless

Spoke of salvage, through the loss, darkly.
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura.
I back myself to the edge of a dark shelf.

Man hands on misery to man, it deepens --
So much deepens that one cannot stand
Here, in the middle of this mirror trove.

-- Jennifer Clarvoe

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2009, v. 67, no. 1
_____________

Note by Judith Hall

     Dante’s pilgrim begins in a forest and ends looking at the stars. Lucky pilgrim, whose inarticulate terror is met and cleared by faith, hope, and charity! Clarvoe’s figure faces “a darker self, obscure” and speaks in the end in the tongues of stars:  Dante, Marianne Moore, Philip Larkin.
    Recognition haunts but may not edify, not immediately, if “strange” or unsought:  Dante’s doubt; Moore’s despair; Larkin’s beloved selfishness. Such blessings, such lessons -- nearly a parody of succor -- are familiar and perverse: symbols Baudelaire would’ve flung at any earnest reader:  doubt, despair, selfishness.
     Blake thought Dante saw clearly but did not always comprehend his visions. Clarvoe comprehends the very postmodern terror of a “mirror trove.” Clarity, in this context, is irrelevant. Obscurity, as in Monet’s late water lilies, or Dickinson's circuits, tells a slanted truth no less enchanting for its complications.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Peter Jay Shippy

Daphnis and Chloe

To soften their mouths they practice kissing
The earth like defectors or popes
Or Raskolnikovs seeking absolutions.

Her face pales like a page
Of deleted sentences.

        “What?”

Her eyes are like wildflower seeds, perfect
For his little catapult.

        “Nothing.”

-- Peter Jay Shippy

from The Antioch Review, Summer 2008, v. 66, no. 3

______________

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review publishes the best available representatives of different aesthetic strategies.  Shippy’s poem represents a minimalism that is not shorn of strangeness. Although it devolves as it proceeds and ends in “nothing,” the poem evokes more than its occasion and its titular allusion.

A minimalist poem, if dedicated to simple diction alone or surface effects, may put the reader in mind of Gertrude Stein more than anything -- the Stein who noted, “You don’t know what it is to be bored.”  Shippy’s petit love poem, au contraire, is as complicated as it is delicate.  Are the lover’s face and her eyes “perfect / [f]or” him, but more so as deletions occur?

The poem benefits from the page:  perfect for a letterpress broadside or else lit – “from within”!? – and projected on a washed museum wall.

Judith Hall presents a poem by Richard Kenney

New Year with Nipperkin

And so the world begins again
In mild disarray
Where the best laid plans of mice and men,
It’s said, "gang aft agley."

"Gang aft agley"-- that sounds just right--
Strangulated, glottal,
Where violence meets backwardness
Summarily throttled.

So merrily and merrily
The Monday doth embark
Us on another work whose week
Will leave us in the dark,

A drink in hand and Parkinson's
Or worse, maybe, to stir
The ice into its carillon               
Of Larkinsense and myrrh:

More light! More weight! More love! Less hate!
The Mass, the Seder, ah
The tools we use to disconfuse
Ourselves, etc.

And so, to bed. I draw the shade.
Should auld acquaintance croak
They’re none of mine, nor Auld Lang Syne,
Whoever he is.*

* Joke

 -- Richard Kenney

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2006, v. 64, no. 1
and The One-Strand River (Knopf, 2008)

_____________

Note by Judith Hall

            Under the metrical sparkle and behind the man in his cups, or with his little cup for nips, his nipperkin – his kin as nip? – a reader senses, counter-intuitively, more light.  For the darkness in Kenney’s poem is comparatively mild, made of lushly orchestrated cacophonies and allusions to Larkin’s “Aubade”, mit a bit o’ Goethe via Hecht.  Burns is also toasted:  “To a Mouse”, to “Auld Lang Syne”.

Surely after eight dark Bush years, we brutalized-and-izing Americans are warmed by a “joke” more readily than Burns’ “cup of kindness” “long ago”.  For those in the mood to memorize now for New Year’s Eve “New Year, with Nipperkin”, remember to add to it “a little touch” of Scotch, as Studs Terkel used to say. No ice.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Mong-Lan

BANGKOK [neon lights]

O the orchids of Bangkok!
O the luxuriant ladyboys, their devilish seductive smiles
O the decadence, the freedoms of Bangkok!
your serpentine ways
into another unawares our embrace defined night-days
one thinks in embraces

young girls from the village pretend to be go-go girls
naked from waist up
                             city girls completely naked
Go-go girls dancing like embarrassed sardines
in the lady-boy club   an effervescent pretend land . . .
                                          Miss Brazil, Miss Mexico,
Miss France, Miss Singapore, surgically amplified.

in another bar
birds breathless up cunts,
ping pong balls inserted, being thrown out
birds flying out of cunts
needles & needles being pulled out of cunts.
a whole string of sharp needles
razors being pulled out     a whole string
of razors being pulled out.

-- Mong-Lan

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2005, v. 63, no. 1 

______________

Note by Judith Hall

           The poem offers artfully, stanza by stanza, ambiguities that beguile and wound. Who dominates? Survives? If the tone were “clear,” gustative, or narrowly exhibitionistic, glee would overwhelm “pretend” and “embarrassed” erotic enticements. Glee would pun and romp from Bangkok to Bang Cock.  Has anyone traced “glee” as a predictable descendant of “rage” in poems by feminists of yore?

          The tone here, instead, harmonizes early waifish ejaculations with figures atomized, ashamed, and with the final, dominating implements of pain. If there is pleasure in surrender and survival, in aggression and assertion, then the scandal of domination is not its violence -- imagined again as omnipotent idyll -- but its affirmation of lyric enterprise.

          A reader, engrossed in the cadences and repetitions, the images pulled along a snuffing out, passes through and then survives – the poem! – the poem imagined!  Or does the reader dominate the poem by comprehending it?  Mong-Lan’s poem enacts various pleasures.  Freedom could be imagined in such a wake.

Judith Hall presents a poem by James Cummins

Tiresias

You learn how to be a man from your father.
Your mother teaches you how to be a woman.
You have to fear becoming an old man
before you’ll take on the wiles of the mother—
her movements, gestures, the way her face
suddenly, at odd moments, becomes your face

Turns out that old adage about saving face
was really about saving the face of the father.
His was the look you wanted on your face
whenever you’d realize you were a woman.
Those moments shocked you—and your mother,
who’d assumed you’d turn out to be a man

But it’s not that you haven’t ended up a man:
mornings you shave, staring into a man’s face;
you have the proper attitude toward your mother.
You just don’t want to be a man like your father,
and the best way to do that is to be a woman.
The first time you saw this happen in your face,

it scared you; your hand flew up to your face.
Not only did you have the cunning of a man,
now you also had the guile of a woman.
You look into the mirror at your new face,
one begun the night it surprised your father,
humping a blanket that turned into your mother.

How could the bastard do that to your mother?
And why had you never seen this in her face?
What was it you saw next day in your father?,
A look that told you he was the better man?
And what do you think he saw in your face?
Did he know then that you were a woman?

You repressed that morning in the way a woman
might repress an impractical love for a man.
When he’s around, you can see it in her face—
her Don’t-trust-him-but-still-love-him face.
Your father never thought of you as a man.
It was natural you’d try to seduce your father.

First you showed your father your “mother” face;
but then you showed him your other face,
the sly face a man wears when he’s a woman.

-- James Cummins

from the Antioch Review, Summer 2004, v. 62, no. 3, and Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull, 2006), a collaboration with David Lehman.

-------
Note by Judith Hall:

Some poems benefit from silence, from being read alone, and Cummins’s sestina is an example.  Alone, Tiresias’ desires, his dilemmas, amuse, yes, but also resonate, nauseate, and recollect the value of a life examined.

Some readers claim that character matters little in a culture enamored of fate or, in our case, entertainment.  Alone, reading such a claim – a desire? – a reader could marvel at this latest “reality” desire mars.

Is a blog too cacophonous a context to remember silence in and solitude? Or “soliturd”, as originally typed . . . Why not print out Cummins’ sestina, turn off your computer, and read “Tiresias” among Thanksgiving memories?

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Terrance Hayes

A Small Novel

The protagonist spends the first twenty pages
crossing a bridge wearing nothing but red
swimming trunks and sneakers with no socks.

I can remember standing naked
outside my neighbor’s window at fourteen
when I read the paragraph about the placard of night

held up by pine trees.
Where ever there is a mention of solitude or desire
I think, without wanting to, of Race. Race

when the protagonist spends a page long sentence
trying to work free a knot of shoe string
in his basketball sneaker. Race

when he spends the hot seasons of his twenties
like a beggar with no mouth. Race
when he tells his wife: “There are no Open Houses

on Easter.” Late in the book he feels himself
becoming a shadow. On page 113 just as I reach
the final sentence about traffic like the sound of wind

like the sound of water, a horn yelps somewhere.
“It was all he’d ever known of rivers…”
I pencil L.H. in the margin. I think, without wanting to,

That they will find this book someday
and turn its muddy bosom all golden in the sunset.
On its blank last page I write the poem

“The Blue Langston” which begins:
“O Blood of the River songs, O songs of the River of Blood,”
and ends: “There was nothing I could do about Race.”

-- Terrance Hayes

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no.
and Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006)

_________________

Note by Judith Hall

         The poem amalgamates so elegantly the fictive and the lyric; and by “elegant,” I mean, etymologically, legible and then graceful.  It clearly, gracefully shows the act of reading as a defining act -- one capable of altering despondency into a poem about despondency.
          Hayes’ tone here is not entirely unlike Mark Strand’s comic angst in “Chekhov: A Sestina” -- another poem wherein a character contemplates what a characteristic act might be in both an unsympathetic world and a contestable form.
          Langston Hughes, though, is the key predecessor, the Hughes of The Big Sea (1940) and The Weary Blues (1926) and the Hughes who wrote, “The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.”  Let a young man’s “novel” leave the hard laughs to elders, if it shines by despondency alone. Yes?

Judith Hall presents a poem by Dorothea Tanning

EVENING

He told us, with the years, you will come
To love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
And comforted them.

-- Dorothea Tanning

from The Antioch Review, Winter 2004, v. 62, no. 1
and A Table of Content (Graywolf, 2004)

_________

Notes by Judith Hall

1. A note should not be longer than a poem.

2. Tanning’s “o” sounds -- her “come,” “love,” “comforted” struck against the longer “told” and “souls” – counterpoint with sonic half-companions despair. Music, though, does not ease affect, and the poem persuades, at least this reader, by suspending resolution.

3. Modest assonance? Is assonance modest? Erotic?

4. A note should spur – inspire? – a reader to reenter the poem.

Judith Hall Presents a Poem by Andrew Zawacki

Agrapha

Giving up isn’t giving in, but a different kind of poverty

And if we didn’t mention them all in order, it wasn’t our fault:

Our strength gave out before the daylight tapered,

Schedules were strict, the weddings obliged to go forward

Even with strangers involved, and sisters and mothers of strangers,

Playing Russian roulette with five bullets coughed into the chamber

And swallow the razor and other old parlor games,

Keeping appointments with overcoats and nautical charts of the crime

While someone kept telling lies about factory bylaws, saying

Don’t be afraid, I have called you by name, you are mine

And almost believing it, a survivor peddling insomnia’s cure,

Calculating which bridges to burn, which heretics, which beds:

A package that never arrived from a mispronounced province

Or a lightswitch left on overnight at the back of the hall,

Rehearsing the wreckage of telegrams, padlocks, and skeleton keys

And storms on the coast with other betrayers to please.

-- Andrew Zawacki

from The Antioch Review, Winter 1999, v. 57, no. 1

Note by Judith Hall

The Antioch Review often publishes poets who are “little known,” whose poems rise on their own merits out of immense slush.  So it was with “Agrapha,” one of  Andrew Zawacki’s first publications.

When it appeared later in his by reason of breakings (Georgia, 2002), the poet included a note on the title: “Agrapha is Greek for ‘the unwritten places.’  The italicized line is from Isaiah 43:1.”  The title thus introduces a paradox in space, and the italics confirm his uncanny tone – wry, sacred, both.

Posted above is the poems as it originally appeared. All inaugural capital letters -- except the first and the Isaiah -- were removed in by reason of breakings. To me, the capitals support line autonomy, increasing tension, by additionally resisting "unwritten places." Any comment? Debate? Dear reader?