The Best American Poetry

Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Collaboration

Amy Lemmon (who will be a guest blogger in September) and I have been at work on a series of collaborate poems with two restraints: the stanzas are written in abba rhyme, with a mandatory mention of Abba, the singing group, in each poem.  Here's one for those of you who can't get out to see Mamma Mia! -- Denise Duhamel

CAN THIS MARRIAGE BE SAVED?

"I've had enough!" he said. "I'm moving out
tonight!"  He left the toilet seat up,
the toothpaste uncapped. I logged on to Meetup
dot com to scout for a guy who would scrub tile grout,

take out the recycling, not leave whiskers in the sink.
My first message was from a guy who played the ukulele
inviting me to the Ukulele Cabaret at Jimmy's. A melee
of goatees, hula skirts, and sweet umbrella drinks

shimmied through my mind. I pressed Delete,
and opened a jar of Skippy, my husband's toast crumbs evidence
of his abominable manners. Meanwhile, my Prince
of Lysol must have been hiding under a dust sheen

in the parlor of some Victorian house. "I'm yours, m'lady,"
his email began.  I went to his website, "Mr. Clean
At Your Service Dot Com." A gilt-framed scene
of a man in a French maid's outfit, a masquerade he

conjured, accompanied by an MP3 of Duran Duran
singing "Is There Something I should Know?"
Trembling, I clicked "Reply" and typed "Hello,
Ever since opening my first box of Spic and Span,

I've found housecleaning incredibly erotic."
My keyboard was sticky from my husband's
Twix bar fetish. I jumped up to wipe my hands
with Purell and take an antibiotic

before checking my email again. "Methinks I can help--
Have you ever seen a hunk vacuum in only an apron?"
I took a breath. Did I dare become the patron
of a Dirt Devilish escort? When Björn and Agnetha split up, I yelped

that true love was a sham. In those good old Clearasil days,
I rooted for Benny and Anni-Frid, Carly Simon and James Taylor,
Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, Jr. Now, outside, winter sun shone on a trailer,
my husband loading his lumpy boxes labeled "RAGE" and "MALAISE."

-- Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon

Writing Blurbs [by Nin Andrews]: Part Three

Another Ode to Denise Duhamel

Reading Denise I always have this urge to call her up and say yeah, and wow, and me, too, and oh gross, and yes, yes, really I want to talk about your poems, like the one about Barbie who is trying to have sex with Ken, and I remember thinking poor Barbie, and Ken really was a sorry excuse for a male. I’ve never liked a square-jawed man with a crew cut and no dick, but a lot of women would. I know. It’s sad.  But I digress . . .

Because the truth is I am newly in love with Denise’s poem about a woman writing a poem in a Maidenform bra, called “I Dreamed I Wrote This Sestina in my Maidenform Bra,” and I thought and I think how perfect it is, and how the form of a sestina reminds me of a woman in a brassiere, and maybe panties, too, with lace, and silk, with pink roses or lavender, and how a man in Fruit of the Looms or even Calvin Kleins wouldn’t look anything like a sestina.  No, he’d be a haiku. And then I think of other favorites, like the one about Nick at Nite which, even if it is about the difference btw Americans and Filipinos, I think it’s also about the difference btw men and women, how we say yes and mean no.  Or another time.  Or we say no, and mean talk me into it?  Or, get lost asshole, depending on the night and the who and the when. Or maybe the if.  Or whether it’s a poem or a story, and some men and nights are the one and some are the other ones, if you know what I mean. Poems are much easier to think of as nudes. Which reminds me that I love the poem Denise wrote about swimming nude with Nick, and I really love that she doesn’t leave Nick’s penis out of the poem or out the salty water but says how tiny it grew, and I want to tell her about the penises in the Maine water and how these penises pray they’ve never been born, that’s how cold it is, and if you see them, you might think they never have been, and I know people are going to think I only think of penises when they read this, even the little tiny ones, and of course they’re right. 

-- Nin Andrews

Writing Blurbs [by Nin Andrews]: Part Two

An Ode to Denise Duhamel

Right now I am trying to write a blurb for Denise Duhamel’s fantastic new book called Ka-Ching, and I love, love Denise.  Who doesn’t? But how can I say it? 

Denise is one of the poets I actually look forward to reading? (Okay, maybe not diplomatic.)

Even her sonnets, her pantoums, and her sestinas are natural and fun and don't posture as if to say, see?  I'm a poet.  Smarter than you are, you dumb-ass reader.

And they make me want to stand up and clap and say wow, and sometimes I do. (Now I sound like a cheerleader with pompoms, and it’s true. I am.)

And I love how Denise levels the playing field so words like Maidenform, nubbins, and Captain Hook are all in the same poem, and every topic and word is as serenely present in her work as every other word or topic, as if all can be a natural part of the day's thoughts and scenery—and it is--

which reminds me of how Denise was the first person who really taught me how to give a good reading. I told her I was afraid to read orgasm poems aloud -- in front of an audience. She admitted that people are a little freaked out by pussies, for example, and they would probably expect me to be somehow a woman in flames, a woman in red, or totally hip or flip, so I should be just as everyday as I am.  Dress up as if I were going to church or maybe a nice cocktail party.  Wear pearls, a plain black dress, flats, and red lipstick.  Look all prim and proper like the woman I was raised to be and just say, as casually as if I was talking about the weather, Whenever I go out, I carry a pussy with me.  Sometimes the pussy talks to me . . .

And smile sweetly, as if this happens every day.  Now doesn't it?

Of course she gave me the instructions in a loud voice in the middle of restaurant that went suddenly quiet as the folks at the tables around us stopped even lifting and lowering their forks.  There wasn't even a chink-chink.  No, everyone else wanted to know, too, just how to read pussy poems.  In a black dress. With red lipstick.  In New York City.

-- Nin Andrews

Memories of Jane Cooper part 2, by Denise Duhamel

I just finished reading Kazim Ali’s “From the Open Sea: The Body and Lyric in the Poetry of Jane Cooper,” which appears in the March/April edition of APR. His meeting with Jane at her apartment in the summer of 2001 was not unlike mine in the spring of 1987. He describes the way she moves “around the kitchen slowly, deliberately, doing one thing and then another—warming the cups with hot water, pouring the hot water out, placing objects on a tray: the cups, a sugar dish, a creamer.” I remember her temperament—so unlike mine, so mannered, so precise, so attentive. Jane was not a multitasker—she performed each task singularly, almost Zen-like. When she was talking to you in conference, you really had the feeling she was thinking of nothing else—not another student and certainly not her own life. Kazim Ali brings it all back for me, with a pleasure and with a tiny sting. Of course she would go on to nurture other poets—she was Jane. But I also have a slight feeling of jealousy, like the first time I saw another patient waiting outside my therapist’s office. For months, I hadn’t seen anyone, as he saw me just before his lunch hour. Then we’d changed my time and there was another poor soul slumped in a chair in the waiting room—and I thought, “Hey, wait a minute!” It was the first time I realized fully that my therapist had other clients. But the sting I feel is only tiny, as I am exceeding grateful for Kazim’s recount of Jane and his thoughtful exploration of her poetry.

Most interesting to me is something I’d heard long ago but forgotten—that Jane never sought to publish her first book of poems about “a woman’s experience of war.” (This would have been post World War II.) I remember this story in relation to the MFA students at Sarah Lawrence-we were, of course, all eager to publish our work. What kind of restraint must Jane have had to spend years writing poems and then keeping them to herself? What kind of critical eye must she have had to judge her own work as not ready? Was it because she didn’t want the world to know about her lost love that we’d only heard and speculated about? Was he a soldier who’d died? Because she’d never married, we students were eager to know the details of her life. But for all her student-centeredness, all her devotion, Jane was not without boundaries. In fact, she was not co-dependent in the sense we know it now. We never would have felt it appropriate to cross the line and ask about her life or her own sorrow.

But now, I must admit, I am obsessed about those first poems. Where are they? What library has them? I don’t want to read them to find out about the lost love—I want now to see how they were made. What were her images like? How much white space did she use? Did she employ couplets? Were there meditative prose poems like those of her friend James Wright? Were they overtly political like those of her friend Muriel Rukeyser? How much were the poems concerned with the body and death?

I am at Yaddo this month and returning once again to Jane’s work, the signed copies she donated to the colony’s library. Jane had beautiful rounded handwriting, spanning books she signed from 1969-1995. The first poem in her first published book, The Weather of Six Mornings, begins: “I’ve died, but you are still living.”

Denise Duhamel, Yaddo

Memories of Jane Cooper (by Denise Duhamel)

I’m on a residency at Yaddo, where there has been a fire in the main office building. The fire took place early Friday morning (1-2 a.m.) No one was hurt—or in the building at that hour, thank goodness. But the telephone and internet cable wires have “melted,” which is not a good sign for those of us addicted to email and google. So I have forwarded my blog posts the night before to Nick, who is Vermont, so he can put them up for me. I can usually catch a ride into town to Uncommon Grounds, a wireless coffee shop, after dinner. But no one likes to go in the morning since that is when everyone is busy at work.

I have been thinking a lot lately about Jane Cooper, who died, at age 83, on October 26th of last year. She was my first female creative writing professor at Sarah Lawrence. She was in her last year of teaching before retirement, and I was in my first year as an MFA student—the virgin and the crone, the mother and daughter, the wise one and the fledgling. I admired her beyond belief—her direct yet enigmatic poems, her perfect bangs (it never looked like she needed a haircut), her deliberate opinions, the slow and careful way she took apart her students’ poems. She had been very ill as a child, as had I, and her amazing prose poem “The Children’s Ward” influenced my own early poems about illness—or gave me permission, as it is common to say now. She was a calm presence when I had to move apartments mid-year because of a crazy roommate situation, and she actually let me store all my belongings—boxes of books and papers, suitcases, even small pieces of furniture—in her office between semesters. My graduate student assistantship was to help with the shopping and set up the receptions for poetry readings. Jane patiently taught me which kind of crackers go with which kind of cheeses, how to shop for wine. I had to help design the Poets and Writers ad for the graduate MFA program, tape all the readers on a heavy ancient machine to be archived in the library. Jane was a compassionate boss, a wonderful leader, yet I didn’t want to be her.

I may have rebelled against Jane because I thought, arrogantly, that her poetry suffered because she was such a good teacher. She kept a file on each of the students she’d ever taught. Not only that, she kept those files in her apartment! In her living room! I had my last conference there—it was customary—and I was secretly horrified that she had kept, or it seemed so to me, a copy of every student poem she’d ever commented on. I heard someone say—a visiting writer? another grad student?—that Jane could have had more of a “career” if she wasn’t such a devoted teacher. In retrospect, her poetry didn’t suffer at all. Perhaps there would have been “more” poems if she’d had more time, if she’d focused less on teaching, but the poems she’s left us are incredible gifts, her consciousness, not only about her own body, about bodies in peril.

I believe that Jane struggled with the subject matter of her poetry—to reveal or conceal. She was “a lady,” and I say that without the utmost respect. One time a student mentioned “Trojan” in a poem—and Jane, not knowing the student was referring to a condom brand, commented on the poem as though it was about the Trojan War. Yes, we all had a good laugh after class, but it wasn’t as a cruel a laugh as you might expect. Jane, who had no husband, who had no children, fascinated us. Graduate students are sometimes self-involved, it’s true, but it did seem that Jane was there solely for us.

About a decade after I’d graduated, Jane and my husband and I were at Yaddo together. My husband, Nick Carbó, also went to Sarah Lawrence, but a few years after I did, and he told Jane how sorry he was he hadn’t had the chance to work with her. He meant the lament as a compliment, not as a need a favor. But, without missing a beat, Jane asked us both to look at the poems we were currently working on. We thought it a courtesy, that she’d say, “Thank you for letting me read these…” or something to that effect, but instead, the next night she set up conferences with us. I didn’t want a conference—I’d taken advantage of her enough during graduate school. I was at Yaddo, for goodness sakes. I didn’t need her anymore. “Nonsense,” she said—she had already marked up the poems. She met us in back-to-back slots in the Pine Garde living room, giving us a ½ hour conference each. I’d like to say that I was “beyond” Jane’s comments, but she really helped me to transform two of the poems I’d written. Nick couldn’t believe her insights. In exchange for her conferences, we took Jane to a nearby mall. She needed shampoo and was allergic to lots of chemicals, like I was. We went to a big retail story—the Bon Ton?—because I thought she’d like Clinique. Jane was dazzled by the mall and claimed she’d never been in one before. It was hard for me to believe, but I did believe her. She purchased her own shampoo, refusing to let Nick and me buy it for her.

While at Sarah Lawrence, I also studied with Jean Valentine, Michael Burkard, and Thomas Lux, who all were good friends to Jane. Over the years, I’ve relaxed into more friendly relationships with them, something more akin to peers.

While I will never be the teacher that Jane was, I did wind up teaching. While I will never be the nurturer that Jane was, I did wind up letting a student stay in my apartment when he was between homes, I did call on behalf of a student who was in trouble with her student loan. While I’ll never be the poet Jane was, I did wind up writing my poems. And though I think of myself as rebelling against her—my wild and unrestrained (by comparison) poems, my wild hair—I do have some Jane in me. Though I’ve married, Nick and I don’t have any children, anyone to take care of us in old age. I get a chill from Jane’s poem “Hotel de Dream” in which her friend Muriel Rukeyser makes an appearance to say: “I’ll never put you in a nursing home…/I promise, Jane, I’ll never put you in a nursing home.” Of course, Muriel died before Jane did, and it was probably a promise Rukeyser couldn’t have kept anyway. At Yaddo, Jane told me she was afraid of nursing homes, afraid of leaving New York. And her final home was a nursing home in Pennsylvania. Nick and I also claim we’ll never put one another in nursing homes.

It was always a thrill to see Jane read. She had poise, grace, and an understatement that served her poems well as she delivered them. The last time I saw her, she had to read sitting down. Because of her Parkinson’s, she shook as she picked up a cup of water with both hands. She put the water down slowly as though the cup was very heavy, and I remembered the time she made me tea for the conference in her apartment. Even then she moved slowly, carefully, as though she had all the time in the world.

-- Denise Duhamel, Yaddo

Jane Cooper