The Best American Poetry

Monday [by Mark Ford]

The nearest thing in Britain to the Best American Poetry series are the volumes annually issued under the aegis of the Forward Prize, which are intended to bring together ‘the best’ poems published in the course of the year. Prominently featured in these tomes is the work of the poet who wins the main Forward Prize, awarded for a single collection. This year’s prize, worth a cool 10k, was announced last Wednesday; and it was awarded to – pause for dramatic effect – Mick Imlah for The Lost Leader. Now this was so much the right choice it took me a while to believe it. Mick – who, I guess I should ‘fess up, has been a close chum for some 25 years – is a truly miraculous poet. Until recently his work has been known only to a handful of connoscenti, mainly because he Bartlebyishly preferred not to publish it. His first volume, Birthmarks, came out in 1988; it won plently of plaudits, and over the ensuing decades I’d occasionally ask  if his second was ready, to which he liked to reply ‘Almost’… I guess all poets have a perfectionist streak, for, as Stevens once noted, publishing a book is ‘a damn serious business’. In December of last year, however, Mick was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, and this forced his hand. The Lost Leader is a substantial book, for it contains twenty years worth of poetry, and it grows better with each re-reading. Particularly exhilarating is its final section, called ‘Afterlives of the Poets’, which consists of two longish poems on Tennyson and James Thomson (author of The City of Dreadful Night), and a final, haunting meditation on the posterity reserved for the 99.9 (followed by however many 9s you want ) percent of poets who don’t achieve stellification, that is, a place in the canon and on the curriculum. Their afterlives may be invisible, they may not win prizes or be deemed ‘the best’, but they're out there, nevertheless:

 

though day’s glare or the northern night obscure them,

though nature has done with them, still through the void they hurtle their

wattage,

powered with the purpose of having been – being, after all, stars,

whose measure we may not take, nor know the wealth of their rays.

Sunday [by Mark Ford]

   It’s a calm and sparkling day in North London, the weather mockingly at odds with the language of gloom and panic suffusing the papers and airwaves. Money, Wallace Stevens once suggested, is a kind of poetry, and there’s been an epic quality to the epithets and prophecies with which commentators have attempted to convey the enormity of this week’s carnage. I’ve always relished fiscal terms, and my first book, Landlocked, includes a poem called ‘Super Black Thursday’ which attempted to capture the feel of late ‘80s financial mayhem:

                                Across the city
            Terminals are ablaze with the absurd news,
            The markets shooting out in all directions,
            In random, jagged leaps. Your eyes are
            Seized by dysfunction.

   This week’s plunging graphs and uncomprehending, incomprehensible commentators suggested to me another facet of Wallace Stevens’s famous equation – despite centuries of sophisticated economic and critical discourse, money and poetry remain on some level utterly mysterious. Listening to a financial wizard trying to explain some rare form of derivative transported me back to a seminar in which some expert in avant-garde poetry tried to explain in layman’s terms the work of Jeremy Prynne. Of course, if your pension handlers had invested your all in that rare, and now worthless, form of derivative, you might want to question Stevens’s analogy. Poetry does occasionally get blamed for plunging nervy types into despondency and madness, to use a phrase of Wordsworth’s, but more often it’s seen as therapeutic, as enabling self-expression, as fomenting that precious commodity, confidence, which all those speculators have so mysteriously lost. You can see where this is going… those G8 leaders must modify their bail-out plans, the trillions on offer must be tied with an extra condition: the daily production of a sonnet, sestina, villanelle or equivalent by every city trader, from the lowliest spiv to the most exalted CEO.

-- Mark Ford

Mark Ford, Guest Blogger October 12-18

Mark Ford lives in London.  He is the editor of Selected Poems by Frank O'Hara (Knopf, 2008) and the Library of America edition of John Ashbery's Collected Poems, the first volume of which has just appeared.  He is the author of an acclaimed biography, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Cornell University Press, 2000). His most recent book of poems is Soft Sift: Poems (Harcourt, 2003). A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, he teaches at University College London. Welcome, Mark.

Stuff, or "Clean up your room! It looks like the Collyer Brothers!" (by Laura Orem)

Buddhists believe that possessions get in the way of spiritual growth. Too much clutter agitates the mind and prevents the calm necessary for deep self-reflection and meditation, and represents attachment to things of the earth instead of the soul. This bumps right up against our consumer culture, in which success and worth are measured by the amount of stuff you have. New stuff, better stuff, the coolest stuff - the more of it you own, the more prestige you have.

We do, however, recognize the drawbacks of such a system. On TV, along with all the commercials urging us to buy things, there are myriad shows to help people organize, sort, clean, and divest their homes of all their accumulated detritus. All of us know (and some of us may be) packrats, people who cram their attics and basements and garages with all kind of odds and ends, people who never seem to throw anything away. But there is a difference between being a packrat and being a hoarder. Packrats can be hard to live with if you are neatnik, but their lives aren't hampered by their stuff. Hoarders, on the other hand, collect and keep anything and everything, useful or not, broken or not, hygenic or not. Severe hoarding is recognized as a mental illness, life-crippling and difficult to treat. It is the Buddha's worst nightmare.

When I was a sloppy little girl (now I'm a sloppy big girl), my neat and organized mother used to poke her head into my bedroom and mutter dire predicitions that I would end up like the Collyer Brothers. Homer and Langley Collyer are names that are perhaps losing their resonance, especially outside of New York, but their junk-stuffed Harlem brownstone riveted the nation in the late 1940s. Long before Mission: Organization and How Clean is Your House?, the Collyers were the first celebrity hoarders, and their collection of junk was of epic proportions.

Franz Lidz, in his 2003 book, Ghosty Men, tells the strange and sad story of the brothers.  Born in the 1880s, Homer and Langley Collyer were the sons of a Manhattan gynecologist and a woman who traced her family roots back to the Mayflower. Their father abandoned the family, and the boys lived with their mother until she died. They both graduated from Columbia University, Homer with a law degree, Langley with a degree in engineering. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Langley ever actually held a job, but Homer practiced for a while as part of a firm, specializing in Admiralty law. Not for long though: one day, he just stopped showing up. By the 1920s, with both their parents dead, the Collyer Brothers had become a odd fixture in their old Harlem neighborhood. After going blind in 1934, Homer did not leave the brownstone, but Langley would venture out at night in his endless pursuit of junk, dressed in ratty late Victorian garb and dragging a cardboard box on a rope in which to haul his treasures home.

Langley in the 1920s

The brothers had few run-ins with the law over the years, mainly because of their increasingly filthy and cluttered yard and because they refused to pay real estate taxes until the police showed up to evict them. Finally, on March 21, 1947, police received a phone call from a mysterious and never-identified "Charles Smith," announcing that a dead body could be found at 2078 Fifth Avenue, and that the dead body belonged to Homer Collyer.

    
    2078 Fifth Avenue, March 1947

Simmons College Chinese Poetry Conference (part 2) -- 顾爱玲 [by Eleanor Goodman]

This afternoon, the Simmons College Contemporary Chinese Poetry Conference came to an end, dispersing two dozen Chinese-language poets out into the world.  (Watch out, world!)  Some are headed back to the mainland or Taiwan or Hong Kong, some are traveling to New York or California, and a golden few are taking the opportunity to swing by Mexico while in the hemisphere.  One of those going on to the land of Corona happens to be our oldest participant, Qi Weiguo 齊衛國, who, at a spry 82, insisted on holding the door open for his fellow poets.

A short report from the Simmons Chinese Poetry Conference -顾爱玲 [by Eleanor Goodman]

I’m grabbing a few seconds away from the conference to post some photos from the past two days of translation and dialogue.

 

First, the man who managed to bring together over thirty scholars and poets from the PRC, throughout the Chinese diaspora, and here in the States, for a weekend of work and fun – a happy Professor Afaa Michael Weaver.

On Friday, we arranged tables that included a Chinese poet, an American poet, and a translator to work together on translating a poem together. Here, Richard Howard, the Taiwanese poet and translator Leung Ping-Kwan 梁秉均, and Professor Michelle Yeh 奚密教授from UC Davis are discussing on Richard’s poem “Refugee”.  Witness Richard using his usual charm on Michelle.

A No Hemlock Rock (don't kill yourself) [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

Shine On Crazy Jade

Don’t kill yourself.  Don’t kill yourself.
Don’t.  Eat a donut, be a blown nut.
That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,
stand on a street corner rhyming
seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with
racket.  Allow medical terms.
Rave and fail.  Be an absurd living ghost,
if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

Let your friends know that something has
passed, or be glad they’ve guessed.
But don't kill yourself.  If you stay, but are
bat crazy you will batter their hearts
in blooming scores of anguish; but kill
yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;
shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.
I will give badges to everyone who’s figured
this out about suicide, and hence
refused it.  I am grateful.  Stay. Thank
you for staying.  Please stay.  You
are my hero for staying.  I know
about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut.  Rhyme opus with lotus.
Rope is bogus, psychosis.  Stay.
Hocus Pocus.  Hocus Pocus.
Dare not to kill yourself.  I won’t either.

puddles and clear skies [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

This is my Jessie, jumping in rain puddles.

It is a blue sky over Brooklyn today and as the rain clouds head out to sea cold air from the north is racing in to fill the void and bringing brisk and windy days.  I used to dread these first cold days and the passage of summer because I enjoyed the heat so much but nowadays if it took a blizzard to get rid of these mosquitoes, I'd say bring on the snow. 

A friend of mine, Jonathan Cott, wrote a book called Sea of Memory about his experience of losing a big chunk of his life memories.  He had to be briefed about what had happened in his life over the past ten years.  A lot of people on the world stage, and a lot of people he had known personally had died over those years.  He had to find out about all of them all at once.  As one interviewer summed up, "It was a massacre."  It is an extreme example, but all of us have to return to what we knew and know it again.  Memory as a sea brings with it the notion of the vast unseen, and the necessity of diving into the wreck, as Adrienne Rich put it.

Then there's Jessie, two years old and with barely a puddle of memories as of yet.  Seems pretty happy splashing.

Happy New Year [Jennifer Michael Hecht]

This is the second post I've ever blogged, yesterday's post being the first, except maybe when I blogged for the New York Times a few times, but they just call it blogging, it's not really.

I'm posting this poem as a New Years poem for my fellow Red-Sea-Pedestrians; for those of us who live like fish, scholastically, it is a poem for the new academic year; for the rest of my fellow Mericans, it is for autumn; for the international readership, look, we're doing the best that we can.

Zoo Review

To begin is to let things out of control.
The park’s caged condor stumbles to the fore.
The mind can not be told what it does not know.

Let us begin by calling a massive bird a soul;
each wing wide as the height of a man or more.
To begin is to help things out of control

with a clasp of fence in beak and a forceful fold
of what was given, then out the rifted door.
The mind must graze what it can not hold.

If the population of the park took up a goal
of leaving, it wouldn’t stop to wonder where to go.
To begin is to chase thoughts out of control.

Likewise, as love and birth have come to show,
much can not be seen before we are ashore
where minds find what, at sea, they did not know.

The bird adjusts its shoulder-feathers like a stole,
a bristling cape, a heft of flight, a height left low.
To begin is to let things out of control.
The mind can not be told what it does not know.

"A National Anthem?" (by Laura Orem)

                                        

I grew up near Baltimore, so field trips to Fort McHenry were obligatory in elementary school. We learned the lyrics (first verse, anyway) to "The Star-Spangled Banner" in kindergarten, and posters of Francis Scott Key always had pride of place on Social Studies' bulletin boards about Famous Americans. Getting in and out of Baltimore from the south requires either a trip over the Francis Scott Key Bridge, an elegant arch that marks where the Patapsco River empties into the Chesapeake Bay, or through the Francis Scott Key Tunnel, a not-so-elegant concrete passageway under the mucky waters of Baltimore Harbor.

However, I've never been too fond of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a song. Famously, Key, a lawyer, wrote the words after watching the Battle of Baltimore while imprisoned on a British warship during the War of 1812. The poem, called "Defence of Fort McHenry,"  was published in September of 1814 as a broadside by Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, who was Key's brother-in-law (connections are everything). Nicholson realized that the words fit the melody of "To Anacreon, in Heav'n," the official song of a group of amateur musicans who performed in the 1760s and who used the song to gauge the sobriety of the singer: if you were sober enough to stay on key through one verse, you could keep drinking. As a song, "Anacreon" leaves a lot to be desired. Melodically, it's appallingly difficult to sing; it's unbelievably long; and its chorus consists of many variations of the four lines: "And long may the Sons/Of Anacreon entwine/The Myrtle of Venus/With Bacchus' vine."  But when the poem was republished later that month in the Baltimore Patriot and the American with the notation, "Tune: To Anacreon," the two were permanently connected.

 

                                                 

  FSK peering through the rockets' red glare

What I find particularly problematic, though, is that Key's words are so bloody pugnacious.