The Best American Poetry

Besieged, assailed, and stormed

  
Here's an excerpt from a recent live chat transcript between readers, writer Ligaya Mishan, and Paul Muldoon, poet and poetry editor for The New Yorker (and guest editor for BAP 2005):

QUESTION: ...Contrary to public opinion, good poetry seems to be constructed, rather than spontaneously created. This obviously takes a lot of time. Therefore, how would you suggest a serious student of poetry manage or even afford to have this time? Should he just Wallace Stevens it?

PAUL MULDOON: It’s certainly true that it takes more work than most people might consider. That’s largely because all the work goes into making the poem look as if no work whatsoever has gone into it. And reading, both of other poems and the poem that’s even now coming into the world, is vital. But it’s still not like getting ready to run a marathon in Kenya. The exercise analogy doesn’t quite work. No amount of physical practice or mental preparedness will ensure that one will be able to run the marathon of the poem.

QUESTION: How does one get started as a poet? Clearly, trying to get published in The New Yorker off the bat is a long shot.

PAUL MULDOON: One gets started by having a lot of nerve but a nerve tempered by nervousness. Hubris tempered by humility. The chances of getting published in The New Yorker are slim in the sense that we publish only a hundred poems a year. But the chances of being published here are nonetheless real if you manage to write a really stunning poem. Nobody ever knows when, or how, that might happen. Soon, I hope.

Here's to stamina and "soon" for anyone flummoxed by their own stubborn drafts.  Read the whole transcript here.

-emma trelles

The Spires of the Gleaming Kiln [by Emma Trelles]

Because it is Halloween, and because I love all that is dark sparkle and lore, I settled in last night and read one of the Grimm Brothers' bleaker fairy tales - Hansel and Gretel. It's the last chapter of a collection I've kept since I was a child and I don't think I've opened the book since then either. I recalled a sketch of the story - a brother and sister lost in the woods, trying to find their way home, and a witch who traps them because they are hungry and her house is made of gingerbread and cake.

Well. There's that, but there's also the whole other part I forgot about, such as that the reason they are lost to begin with is because their father and stepmother have deliberately left them to die in the forest. Twice.

The first time, the resourceful Hansel finds the path back because he marks the way with pebbles that shine in the moonlight. The second time he uses bread crumbs to track his trail, but they disappear into the mouths of grackles and rabbits and the like. The witch cages Hansel and fattens him to eat; Gretel is made into her kitchen slave. Eventually the clever girl shoves their captor into an oven, and the two return to their father without grudge. As if it was that easy to forgive betrayal.

I once loved the macabre theatre of these tales. It seemed to me, in my little girlness, that while the world was dangerous, at least it was interesting, a place where spells might explode at any moment or where children could rescue themselves. Last night I thought of H&G, now grown, perhaps choosing to forget the crone with the red eyes and the keen animal nose, the father who abandoned them. Perhaps not.

Here is their future, as seen by Louise Gluck, who authored the line I pinched for the title of this post.

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...

             Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of the gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

Lorca is Green [by Emma Trelles]

 
 
 Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet with deep set eyes and a hood of thick eyebrows. When pressed together, his lips resembled two curved shells. He was a diminutive man who walked with a limp. His hands were delicate and resembled a child's.

Since I read recently that the Spanish government will soon try to exhume his remains, I have thought much about Lorca, his words but also his body, what must now only be his disassembled bones, his prettiness and his flaws dissolved to minerals. He is perhaps buried near Granada, where hundreds of men and women were executed by gunshot in 1936, during the Civil War, beside a cemetery wall  and its surrounding hillsides and olive trees.

Lorca died in summer, four months before the olive harvest and when the trees' silvered branches were likely heavy with petals and fruit. Some of them are very old, their leaves long threaded by a wind that arrives through a vacant archway, as Lorca wrote, "...blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things."

Lorca is green as the sky at the hour of the crepúsculo, when the moon begins its bright ascent and the sidewalks fall to darkness. Lorca is the shadow-green of mangroves and pines, the slash of green beneath the egret's eye. He is the green that enters in silence; he is the green that returns.

Lorca was a poet whose work I read out loud and in Spanish to my mother and stepfather. She made Cuban coffee and served it in tiny china cups. He sat at the kitchen counter and noted, kindly, that my pronunciation was better than he had expected, quite good, in fact. 

That summer when my mother's hair had finally grown back after her chemo, her head now dark and budding with curls, I could read espadas and adelfa but did not know they meant swords and oleander. It is easier to speak than to understand. Spanish, with its velvet-clad consonants and hopeful vowels, each letter sounding exactly as it appears. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is buried.

When my mother says my name, her voice rings like a little gold bell, and I think of yellow, a color that, like her, is filled with resolve. Yellow is a window, a locket, a poison that can heal. Yellow is Pinar del Rio -- heat and flat valleys and where my mother's people are from. When I was a girl, yellow was the braid she wore long and down the middle of her back; yellow was the garden of succulents she grew, their branches circuitous, and each leaf's shape a surprise: a paddle, a button, a dagger, a heart.

Craig Morgan Teicher, Guest Blogger, October 25-31

This week we welcome Craig Morgan Teicher as our guest blogger.  Craig is a Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle.  He is the author of Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007). Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA) will be published in 2010.  Find out more about Craig here.

We also welcome back Emma Trelles as our tropical correspondent. Emma is the author of Little Spells, (GOSS183). Her work has appeared in publications such as Verse Daily, 3 AM Magazine, Oranges and Sardines, Gulf Stream, Newsday, the Miami Herald, Latina magazine, and the Sun- Sentinel, where she was the art critic for three years. She is the editor of MiPOesias Magazine's American Cuban Issue, the recipient of a Green Eyeshade Award for art writing, and a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry. Emma sometimes teaches creative writing at the Florida Center for the Literary Arts and at the Art Center/South Florida.

A Theremin and an Odyssey [by Emma Trelles]

  For some reason, DL's post showing Lee Wiley poised to sing reminded me about this documentary. Maybe it's because both images hold that grainy mystery shared by many of the films and photos from the early 20th. Or maybe it was that Wiley, a jazz chanteuse, was hitting her stride right around the same time as the theremin. Who knows. My brain works a lot along the lines of "One of These Things is Not Like the Other."

I saw Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey at my friend Mahoney's house, which is oft-cluttered with amplifiers, circuit boards, and computers, as well as oddly-shaped knobs, fountains of wires  and metal boxes whose functions remain a mystery to me. Mahoney is a dreamer-guitar-player-inventor-geek-science-buff. He loves all things electric.

The Russian-born Leon Theremin invented his namesake instrument somewhere around 1920, giving public recitals in New York and Europe for almost two decades afterwards. The theremin became a quick hit with artists everywhere, and went on to serve as soundtracks for outer-space and monster flicks, as well as for scores by synth-inventor Robert Moog and Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame (there's a rather mesmerizing bit in the film where Wilson just blathers on about the theremin's grandeur.)

All interesting stuff, but then the story becomes as strange as the oscillating and ethereal spookiness the theremin emits (more weirdness: the instrument is played without touching it). In 1938 Leon vanished and did not reappear until 50 years later, with an explanation that includes a kidnapping, the KGB, and a labor camp where he was forced to perform spy-related tasks.

His ultimate reunion with family and friends sort of choked me up, especially his meeting with protégé Clara Rockmore, who is widely considered a master thereminist and who narrates much of the story.

One of my favorite parts of any movie is after the ending, when the screen turns dark and the credits roll and there is hopefully a song playing. I like to sit back and think about what it is I've seen. This is my last post of the week with BAP but not the last time I'll visit. This week I've read entries by other writers about Parisian cemeteries and the Rolling Stones, Obama at the All Star Game, and how to make a spicy sweet Italian liqueur with under-ripe walnuts. I've read poems and interviews and so much more.

And now I'd like to mull it all over, with a bit of help from Ms. Rockmore, she of the gifted hands and the fabulous silver turban.

Wise Latina [by Emma Trelles]

Nothing breeds opportunity like controversy. And when the former arrives in the guise of a cool baseball tee - even better! I don't think Sonia Sotomayor thought she'd birth a fashion line when she spoke in 2001 to the University of California's  Berkeley School of Law. But I'm glad it happened. Because now there are hoodies, journals, aprons, and thongs reminding us that even in this economy, simple words can still turn a buck or two.

As the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and of a father who runs his own small business, I applaud virtual merchant Nova for thinking on her feet.

In a similar spirit, I'd like to offer a mini-thesaurus to all the journalists out there who are running out of Latino-flavored adjectives to describe the soon-to-be judge. I've seen "fiery" and "spicy" in abundance, but since I wouldn't want anyone to confuse Sotomayor with a jar of salsa, here are some others. Use at your will, deadline scribes. The cost is gratis.

feisty, frisky, gutsy, scrappy, vibrant, sparkling, effervescent, calorific, spirited, emphatic, impassioned, vehement, peppy, frolicsome, zippy, sportive, sprightly, spunky, vigorous, dauntless, avid, audacious, plucky, fearless.

I'd like to close out with some words by another wise Latina - poet Sheryl Luna. I met her in West Palm Beach at a reading for the excellent  The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry. I haven't seen her since, although we do give one another an occasional on-line shout-out. But I do feel like I know her a bit because of her blog, which is filled with music and writing that is unpretentious and soulful. Much like her poems.

Here's an excerpt from Pity the Drowned Horses.

 

Woman as a River Between Borders, by Sheryl Luna

 

I. The Chihuahua Desert

 

I rose early to wash the desert grime, watch

the unearthly flight of doves, the way pigeons

were poisoned incorrectly or how an elephant

was beaten with a stick. This is the way

 

                               of beginnings, women charmed by fits of language,

                               the cadence of bees around garbage cans,

                               the laughter of grackles, hot sun baking Coca-Cola

                               to sidewalks. Tumbleweeds and arroyos hush

 

                               day-long trips through barrios.

                               I am sand. My eyes grainy, tears brown,

                               and what of the different tones of bees or flies,

                               how a sting can kill us?

 

                               I'm speaking the language of smokers,

                               lung-full and wary, breathing a refinery chore,

                               my eyes black pits. Historically

 

                               I was fruit, voluptuous and campy, some might say

                               exotic, cheekbones native, my hips swaying.

When Band Names are Like a Poem [by Emma Trelles]

above: ¡Socialismo Americano! album cover/Mister Entertainment & the Pookiesmackers

below: Zira's guitars

Humbert, The Holy Terrors, The Postmarks, Kill Miss Pretty, The Gruntled, Bling Bling, Map of the Universe, Tongues of the Heartworm, Mister Entertainment and the Pookiesmackers, the Curious Hair, Clambake, Trapped by Mormons, Kreamy 'Lectric Santa, Whirlaway, I Am Stereo, Zombies! Organize!!, the Freakin' Hott, Secret PE Club, Secret French Kissing Society, Secret Service, The Brand, Livid Kittens, The Eat, the Creepy T's, The Laundry Room Squelchers, To Live and Shave in LA,  Harry Pussy, Xela Zaid, Ex-Cretins, Load, the Dharma Bomb, Catalonia, The 18 Wheelers, The Avenging Lawnmowers of Justice, Machete, Milkcan, Sixo, Natural Causes, Los Diablos, Baby Robots, Frosty, Number 3 Pencils, The Heatseekers, Mongo, Dakota, Shuttle Lounge, The Enablers, Doersam, Postface, The Bikes, Psycho Daisies, Dooms de Pop, FivesixsixFive, Plutonium Pie, For Squirrels, See Venus, Spam Allstars, the Cichlids, Monotract, Zira, Boise Bob, Angry Pudding, Rimsky, I Don't Know.

Notes:

[ All of the above bands are, or were, from South Florida. ** I've seen them playing one smoky club or another over the course of many years.  ****Writing this list reminds me of late nights followed by a morning visit, in my pajamas, to the Cuban coffee walk-up window down the street from my apartment.******The guy who owned it was named Manny.******  The list also brings to mind a line from "Heat," by Denis Johnson, whose poems I was quite taken with in grad school. ******I used to write in my contributor's bio that I tended bar at the Incognito Lounge.********Here in the electric dusk your naked lover/tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth ]

 

 What follows: some Cuban-son-meets-Afro-urban-funk beats from the Spam Allstars, playing at Hoy Como Ayer in Little Havana.

Lions of Chicago [by Emma Trelles]

  This is me, not seen, sitting on the front steps of the Art Institute of Chicago in June and listening to Lisel Mueller's poem.

Here's a beautiful bit of it.                                                                

Monet Refuses the Operation

Doctor, you say there are no halos

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don't see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

                                                                        

   The Art Institute is the third stop of The Poetry Foundation's  Chicago Poetry tour, a walk (and a free podcast) through the city's architecture, history, and of course, the poems it has inspired. Since I was staying at the Palmer House, I was able to hit six stops of the downtown leg, with the voices of Gwendolyn Brooks and Albert Goldbarth in my head. Also Wilco and Coltrane, but they were already in my ipod. Take the tour online or download it here. It's pretty stellar, especially when you're wandering along South Michigan Ave.

 

    I love Chicago. Regal and humble, it's such a grand American city, and I mean that in all the right ways. I zipped in for a Wednesday to Thursday stay, thanks to the Guild Literary Complex and the Palabra Pura reading series, which pairs Latino poets from the area with those of us who live elsewhere.

   I read with Jacob Saenz (left), among other writers, and it was fortifying to meet and dine with artists and publishers who were spreading the good word from the enclave of Pilsen. With its murals of heroes and saints, and its tiny bodegas, the area reminded me of my own nearby nabes of Little Havana and Hialeah. Somos hermanos, todos.

  

   Tonight is Palabra Pura's July installment, featuring Maria Melendez (Momotombo Press) and Luis Humberto Valadez. Drop in early at Decima Musa and order the cheese enchiladas. They go quite well with poems. Reading details are here.  

Why I am not a painter [by Emma Trelles]

                                                                     "Sardines," by Michael Goldberg, 1955

1. I can't draw.

2. I am already a  dilettante on the bass guitar.

3. I prefer mulling to doing.

4. I hope never to attend Art Basel Miami Beach again. Okay, maybe the more intriguing satellite fairs, but that is absolutely it.

5. Chemicals make me sneeze. A lot.

 

Why I Am Not a Painter

by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

 

Hold up: I just discovered this love letter that Joan Mitchell wrote to Michael Goldberg while he was in Rockland State Hospital, Orangeburg, N.Y., "in lieu of serving prison time for writing bad checks on her husband's account." Thank you Washington Post, for feeding my lust for all that was Mitchell.

Wednesday

Hey beautiful,

Just got your letter . . . -- God you mean a lot to me -- it's never been like this before in my life. I cleaned the studio -- made the bed . . . -- I'm using the paint off your palette -- I feel so close to you . . . -- I'm drinking the beer you left on the windowsill -- & I'm kissing you -- this I do all the time . . .

At twilight the locusts begin [by Emma Trelles]

                                                   

         

The moment you put the blah-blah-blah on it, it destroys the whole thing. 

I am currently fixated with the late painter Joan Mitchell.

My obsessions with artists usually come courtesy of a documentary film, one I can record (let us now praise the power of the DVR!) and watch repetitively until I can quote, from memory, most of the declarations made by its subject.

My paintings repeat a feeling about Lake Michigan, or water, or fields of...It's more like a poem, no? And that's what I want to paint.

This morning I saw Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter for the sixth time since I recorded it in May. I could explain away my compulsion by saying that I wanted to write about her today, and what better way to do so than with her rough and quick voice in my head, or to follow her slight frame as it moved among her lyric and hypnotic pictures.

I wanted to see the small town of Vétheuil where she lived and painted, just outside of Paris, and how she dissolved its light and trees.  

 

  I wanted to hear about her time in New York with Hans Hofmann and de Kooning and Pollock. I wanted to close the blinds against the glare of July, sit in a cool, dark room, and see with Mitchell's eyes: her dogs, her sky, the importance she placed on the "feeling of a dying sunflower."

Mitchell possessed much of the contradictions found in her work. She could be cutting and abrupt, but she was also  humble. She didn't think her work held light, for example. She didn't think many painters could contain what St. Augustine called the queen of all colors. She thought Franz Kline knew how, and of course, Matisse.

He has light as well as color. Oh, he's fabulous. Look at it! Come on, baby...

Open Window, 1905, by Henri Matisse

The road to knowing Mitchell's work is mapped with deep blues and yellows culled from the hot heart of summer. Her blacks are penetrating, her brushwork both fierce and fragile. Her mother was a poet, and when Mitchell was a girl, she also wrote poems. In the film, she recites the last line of one she remembers writing before her father pushed her to pick one art and master it.

...and bleakness comes through the trees without sound.

Mitchell went on to collaborate with several poets, among them James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and Nathan Kernan. But the title of this post comes from a recent poem by Mark Doty, and I would not want to be the one to dismiss ekphrasis as anything less than the meeting of two makers.

To Joan Mitchell, by Mark Doty

At twilight the locusts begin,

waves and waves,

nothing to do with lamentation...

...    like her great canvas

in four panels,

continuous field so charged

as to fill the room in which it hangs

with an inaudible humming...