The Best American Poetry

Monsieur Hulot, Mademoiselle Heather, Au Revoir [by Simon Barraclough]

A couple of years ago, after reading some Eliot and watching some Jacques Tati, I thought it would be a smashing idea to write a parodic blend of the two and it started thus:

The Hulot Men

Mistah Hulot—lui mort.

We are the Hulot men

We are the French men

Smoking together

Pipe bowls filled with straw. 

but it didn't get much further, thankfully. But another entanglement of poetry and Tati has come together in this image of Monsieur Hulot's brother-in-law's swanky new car in Mon Oncle:

for the cover of Heather Phillipson's new book is inspired by this vehicle. Regardez-vous:

and this cover has already had an article devoted to it in Art Review (one of the perks of being a practising artist as well as a poet).

The reason I mention all this is that last night was the London launch of Instant-flex 718 (Bloodaxe) at the Art Review Bar just off Old Street ('Silicone Roundabout' as almost nobody calls it) and the great and the good (although I prefer the term 'the out and the about') gathered to start up this gorgeously hued vehicle and drive it away.

The first words I heard out of Heather Phillipson's mouth, back in 2007, were:

The only men it's safe for me to love are dead –

O'Hara, Stevens, Berryman.

when I read with her at The Poetry Café in Covent Garden and I became a fan at that moment. These are the opening two lines from 'Devoted, Hopelessly', which appears in the book. By the way, the title refers to the type of glue used to bind the book. I could talk about how the title and some of the poems inside speak of the materiality of language as used by the poet. But I won't. 

What I will say is that this debut collection contains many hilarious, touching, surprising, and intriguing poems with wonderful titles like 'German Phenomenology Makes Me Want to Strip and Run through North London', 'Red Slugs in Every Irrelevant Direction', You're an Architect and I Want to Make Dinner for You' and 'Actually I'm Simply Trying to Find My Dressing Gown Sash'. 

I like a launch to be more of a party than a reading and Heather chose to read a single poem, pushing the needle of the 'launchometer' almost as far away from the 'reading' end of the 'party – reading' scale as it is possible to do. But she left us wanting more, which is always a good thing. 

Another good thing is that four of us peeled off to eat fish and chips at Kennedy's on Whitecross Street, which is worth a visit if you're ever out East.

So. As Monsieur Hulot departs at the end of Mon Oncle to allow his nephew to bond with his formerly stuffy father, Monsieur Arpel, so must I depart at the end of my week as guest blogger. It's been a pleasure and there were many other things I wanted to write about, like how can we get people to stop saying "x won the Internet"? but perhaps I will continue with these over at Mo' Worse Blues.

Au revoir. I leave you with an apposite poem from Heather Phillipson.

The Distance between England and America

Much could begin like this: a large man,

tie slackened, voice buoyed up by altitude.

My mind's elsewhere –

the air-conditioning. It's cold.

Above the Atlantic he bellows long vowels to me,

and I'm cabined, window-seated, polite.

With my English tone, I'm inadvertantly provocative –

No more salted pretzels for me, thanks Jeff.

 

At the sound of Charles Darwin's bassoon,

earthworms, apparently, writhed.

Jeff booms: Pittsburgh, golf clubs, his search for a wife.

I twist in my seat – suggest something,

in my movement, of all evolution.

His blanket folds back like an invitation

to navy shadows and polyester.

Heat and anything could happen under there.

 

Oh, take your loafers off, Jeff –

throw them in the aisle.

Your gusto can conquer my boredom, our bed can be the sky.

It's warming up. We won't be sleeping.

For almost nine hours beneath United Airlines covers

we'll share everything but thought.

In the morning, white bread rolls and Columbus, Ohio.

Women distribute plastic cutlery in the night. 

 

For more information on Heather, click here.

 

 

 

And – Which is More – You'll Beowulf, My Son! [by Simon Barraclough]

"Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" That is the question. Yes, Heidegger, that's a pretty good originary question. I might go further back and ask why is there matter at all? But an originary question one gets asked a lot is "What first got you into poetry?" and variations thereof.

I had two 'big bangs' or inflations, or 'mini-bangs'. One courtesy of Auden when I was about 13 but one much earlier, when I was about seven years old, courtesy of Miss Campbell and Beowulf.

Ah, Miss Campbell, exotic and intoxicating on so many levels: a substitute teacher (a fresh face), an energetically tousled redhead, a lover of poetry, and a Canadian. In Huddersfield, at the start of the 70s – man's footprints freshly planted on the Moon – Miss Campbell was a sign of futurity and opportunity for me.

When the time came for her to leave ahead of our seemingly endless six-week summer holidays, she chose to leave us with two things on that poignant Friday afternoon: proper fresh popcorn and Beowulf.

Having only eaten pre-packaged, sweet soggy cardboard like Butterkist, I'd never seen popcorn made like this. I didn't know you could make it. Actual, neutron star-dense kernels of real corn. Hot oil. A sealed pan. A hail storm within the pan, and then an overflow of bright white and yellow corn-novae. Miraculous. But more so after butter and salt were added. From that day on my tooth became a savoury tooth and has remained so.

And, as we munched, she turned herself into live cinema by reading a modern translation of Beowulf to us. Terrifying. Suspenseful. Gory. Electrifying. I've no idea which translation she read to us. Look at how many there are:

Annotated List of Beowulf Translations

but it made me realise how exciting, troubling, suspenseful and entertaining poetry could be. Not that it always is. And not that is should be or has to be. But it was a great start for a seven-year old.

Years later I relished Seamus Heaney's 1999 version, which translates "Hwæt!" as "So." which is exactly how my Irish aunties begin every new story: "So."

So, I'd like to mention that there is a brand new translation missing from the list above, by Meghan Purvis. It begins, as playfully and colloquially as Heaney, with:

Stop me

if you've heard this one before: the lands up north,

hoar-bent, frost-locked, need deeper plows

to dig them. Here is one.

I haven't ventured much further than this yet but I'm on my way, with my popcorn, and memories of Miss Campbell.

Beowulf by Meghan Purvis from Penned in the Margins, London

 

 

 

Maris, Pollitt, Rumens [by Simon Barraclough]

There's only one reason to go to Piccadilly Circus: to visit Waterstones' magnificent flagship store. Okay, the cocktails at The Criterion are good also. Plus the ICA is nearby. Oh, and it's not far from Cicchetti's either. But remember that this part of London recently replaced the Swiss Centre cinema with M&M's World. I don't really even know what that is. I know that the vicinity smells of sickly sweet chocolate and the edifice pummels the retina with primary colours but I tend to scurry on by.

Anyway, I went to Waterstones last night to see Kathryn Maris, Katha Pollitt and Carol Rumens read from their new and recent books published by Welsh publisher Seren (the editor in chief, Amy Wack, was in town to introduce the three).

It's an odd thing writing up a reading. You're tempted to switch to 'book review' mode but then you'd be kind of reviewing people, which, until Google Glass makes it the norm for us to give each other 'star-ratings' as we walk down the street, doesn't feel right to me.

Plus, compared to reading poems on the page, a live reading has so many additional variables. Like tone of voice, length of intros, particular words that are explained and over which the poet stumbles when they come around in the text; and perhaps one of the poets might knock over a glass of water just before reading a poem about a washer woman. I'm not saying these things happened last night, but they might have.

Anyway, the large and appreciative audience was treated to three readings of great style, wit, emotion and skill. I have all kinds of rules and pet peeves about poetry readings but two halves of ten minutes from each poet worked very well. Certain themes recurred, including ironic, not-entirely-ironic, and rather political takes on Bible stories and experiments with the linguistic style of the King James Bible. 

There were poignant reflections on age and youth and the changing relations and attitudes between both, often within the same body. There was also a palpable, creative, tension between American and UK tendencies, especially regarding form. The three poets almost described a smooth spectrum from Rumens's frequent use of form, to Maris's increasing use of form, to Pollitt's occasional use of form.

Some discussion followed about these technical matters in the Q&A but no firm conclusions were drawn. Needless to say, I wrote down many choice lines and phrases in my notebook but I'm not sure they will work that well out of context (a bit like the way lines from poems posted as tweets often don't work) but I can recommend the poets' respective books:

God Loves You by Kathryn Maris

The Mind-Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

De Chirico's Threads by Carol Rumens

I also learned that 'Seren' means 'star' in Welsh. I should have known that, but it was pleasant to learn. I will leave you with one complete poem, from God Loves You. A domani.

This is a Confessional Poem

I am guilty of so much destruction it hardly matters

anymore. There are so many thank-you notes I never wrote

that sometimes I’m relieved by the deaths of would-be 

recipients, so I can finally let go of the shame.

I was awful to someone who was attached to the phrase

‘social polish’, as though she’d acquire it through repetition.

I took an overdose at a child’s 6^th birthday party.

I was born in a country which some have called

The Big Satan. I abandoned the country for one

that is called The Little Satan. I wished ill on a woman

who has known me for years and yet never remembers

who I am – and now she’s involved in a public scandal.

I have been at parties where I was boring.

I have been at parties where I was deadly boring.

I have worn the wrong clothes to sacraments, not

for lack of outfits, but for a temporary failure of taste.

I’m a terrible, terrible liar, and everything I say is full of

misrepresentation. I once knew a very sweet girl

who stabbed herself in the abdomen 7 times.

She believed she was evil and thought 7 was a holy number.

Besides that she was sane, and told me her tale

out of kindness – because guilt recognises guilt,

the way a mother can identify her own child.

I met her in a class called ‘Poetry Therapy’

in which the assignment was to complete this statement:

When one door closes, another opens.

I wrote: At the end of my suffering there was a door,

making me guilty of both plagiarism and lack of imagination.

I was the vortex of suffering: present, future and retroactive

suffering.  The girl tried to absolve me.

‘Don’t be Jesus,’ she said. ‘There are enough around here.’

I know I should thank her if she’s alive,

but I also know it’s unlikely I’ll rise to the task.

 

—Kathryn Maris

 

Bank Holidays, Bunking Off, Pasolini [by Simon Barraclough]

Yesterday was a Bank Holiday in the UK. This is a day we occasionally grant to our banks so that they can take a breather from refusing to lend to businesses, insisting on unnecessary payment protection schemes, finding ways to turn public bailout money into private bonuses, and so on. They need to replenish their batteries.

And the rest of us need to go have lunch in cafés attached to museums and galleries. For a freelancer, depending on one's success or commitment, either every day is a Bank Holiday or Bank Holidays remain something that only other people enjoy. I must confess, I bunked off and practised my F major scale.

I also had time to reflect on a recent event I organised for the BFI (British Film Institute). The BFI has a generous and welcoming attitude to poets and it enjoys exploring the links between poetry and cinema. Over the last few years I've been involved in their poetry/film crossover event 'O Dreamland', which invited poets to write about their digital archive (The Mediatheque); I launched my collaborative Hitchcock homage Psycho Poetica at the BFI in 2010; and last year Isobel Dixon, Chris McCabe and I premiered The Debris Field there.

This year I was asked to organise something for their recent epic Pasolini retrospective and I considered various approaches. I thought of poetically 're-staging' Theorem using six poets playing each of the main characters, and I also toyed with comparing the 'swinging Sixties' of Pasolini, Antonioni and Bertolucci.

But in the end I took my lead from Pier Paolo himself and his love of the literary portmanteau movie, so I suggested A New Decameron: ten films, ten poets, ten film clips, one evening of poetic and filmic enthusiasm. 

I asked nine other poets and writers to join me: Jane Draycott, Charles Lambert, Glyn Maxwell, John McCullough, Valeria Melchioretto, Luca Paci, Cristina Viti, Stephen Watts and Chrissy Williams. We were also lucky enough to have Rosa Mucignat of King's College London reading some of Pasolini's poetry in the Friulian language, with translations by Cristina Viti.

The sold-out show was funny, moving and powerful by turns and I wanted to give you a little taster by posting Chrissy Williams's poem and a film clip here. Chrissy freely admits to being obsessed with Pasolini's clownish muse, the great Ninetto Davoli. I'm currently talking to the BFI and the poets about getting all the work online in the near future.

First a small sample of the irrepressible Davoli from Chrissy's chosen film The Canterbury Tales.

 

And now her poem.

Ninarieddo

for Davoli in The Canterbury Tales

"col tuo sorriso, fulmineo e buffo" — Pasolini

"My only enemy is time" — Chaplin

 

I step to the screen

with your face so big, a kiss

with my arms reached up

would wrap around me whole.

Slip tongue, slip lip to the camera.

I fell in love with a face once

until it swallowed me.

 

And all him loved that looked upon his face

That each him loved who looked upon his face

No length of time or death may this deface

 

Step, nod to the screen and wink the bride.

You, happy as a goldfish in a glade.

You, little tramp with laughter for a face.

The bride winks back, slips back into a stolen moment.

Slip tongue to the world and hope for many moments.

 

and your face    is a song, fool

your eyes         light a dance, fool

lip-tight             on the laugh of language

                        on the laughter

 

Step hip to dance with shadows till it's time

and it's always time to dance with shadows.

We dance against the day the music slips.

We dance the laugh of lips in bandages.

 

Thy face is turned in a new array

Your face is mottled in a new array

 

No step is left behind,

just kicked in a new way.

Stories shift, dreamed high,

kicked about in an angel's face

which changes, because

everything is always changing

although it stays the same.

No story is left behind,

just slipped on in a new way.

 

and I'll see you here       again and again.

I'll love you here             again       again.

I'll fall and catch my heart         in your constant face.

 

I fell in love with a clown once,

with a fool. Now I am the new clown

of no good, who falls with a cane

as time rearranges the stories of your face.

 

Is the face enough?

Is any one face ever enough?

 

In all his face there was no drop of blood

With his face pale and with a heavy cheer

Now list you down with face all pale of hue

 

I fell in love with your face once,

with the face I found, and I will follow it, 

love, through all our familiar stories.

 

More about Chrissy Williams here.

The View from the Cuckoo's Nest [by Simon Barraclough]

Huffy Henry blogged      the day (Berryman)

I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)

I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.

For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)

But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)

Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.

Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)

I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)

but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.

But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:

“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)

So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):

Hooha! Hooha!

Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...

 

O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted

Ill-bred dud-hawk!

Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!

(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)

And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern: 

Cuckoo

It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.

(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)

For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.

New Voices and Beautiful Books

For each of the last ten years, the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship Reading has produced four of the most beautiful books printed that year. Between the covers of the chapbooks -- designed by Gabriele Wilson and featuring patterns selected from Susan Meller and Joost Elffers’s 2002 Textile Designs:Two Hundred Years of European and American Patterns -- are the words of four New American Poets chosen each year by four poets invited to judge. This year, Vijay Seshadri, Dara Wier, and Matthew Rohrer joined Alice Quinn and the staff of the Poetry Society -- Brett Fletcher Lauer, Elsbeth Pancrazi, and Charif Shanahan – to bring together another surprising and invigorating collection of poets and poems and an evening’s fascinating reading.

The first poet-judge to speak at the May 3rd event, Vijay Seshadri, highlighted the important role that the Poetry Society's Chapbook Fellowship program plays in supporting poets early in their work, before their first books come out, in rescuing each poet from their "desolation and isolation," adding,"not that desolation and isolation do not return later...and again and again." As each poet - judge and chapbook winner alike -- rose to read, the CUNY graduate center auditorium brightened with the flourishing enterprise that is poetry written and read today. Through chapbooks so beautiful as to tempt even the most resolute e-reader to begin surreptitiously collecting, the works of four talented new voices were showcased in a reading that included an audio debut by Siri. Only Justin Boening or the speaker of his "To Be A God" can say whether she was invited.

In the introduction to Travel & Leisure, Vijay Seshadri writes of ’Eric Bliman’s “deadpan, offhand, but nevertheless intensely focused layer-by-layer metaphor-making…an individuation that makes this poet difficult to place in a cultural moment…[and work that] seemed neither old nor new but perennial.”

                 In Pompeii’s hot mud, hollow pietàs were trapped.

                 Poured plaster revealed their human forms.

                 Here, a coal car’s wheels polish the track.

                                                                -- from “Prometheus in Pittsburgh”

 

Alice Quinn introduced Cherry Pickman, selected by Lucia Perillo, for her Theory of Tides, in the introduction to which she emphasizes “how the poems move, through gradual accretion and sideways association…" and what they deliver: "Sometimes a semi-joke in how the sentence had changed meaning at the line break. Sometimes a deepening of an assertion or a denial of what I’d taken for a given. These poems are exacting, and demand precision in their language.”

              …There is something metal or magnet

             that keeps us at our slow progress. We are charged

            with the static of skeletons, the trickle down

 

            of vertebrae, of the soft feather pressed fast into rock.

                                                                                 -- from “The Passage”

 

Of the poems in Justin Boening’s “Self-Portrait As Missing Person”, Dara Wier, who selected his work, writes, “What draws my attention is their intricate attempts to pry into some kind of understanding by any means available, realistically possible or not.”

When you need

                                                me to hurt, I’ll dim in the linden leaves,

                        I’ll hide in the fire-scarred hills,

                                                            and the great guards

 

                        of my gilded name

                                                will circle around to protect me.

                        And you’ll be there.

                                                And I’ll know your name

                        as a god knows your name,

                                                as a father knows your name,

                        but you won’t recognize me.

                                                                            from "To Be a God"

Matthew Rohrer stood in for D.A. Powell, and before introducing Danielle Blau, remarked on the collaboration evident in the Chapbook Fellows Program and the chapbooks themselves and read a few poems titled "Poem Written With Basho." With regard to Danielle Blau's work, he noted that “to inhabit the imagination is to engage the world.” In the introduction to "Mere Eye", D.A. Powell writes that it is “ a collection of collapsed time, filtered light and compiled images writ against the formless void in cinematic sequencing.”

                        We are transmitters of the universal

                        tap water. Eucalyptus backwash-

                        funnelers. We’re the backlash

                        of backwoods tunneling.

                        We are trumpeters of Wormwood

                        Whiplash. Please come to our party.

                                    from "We Are Purveyors of the Absolute Vacuum"

For more, see these features on the Poetry Society website:

new and interesting first book poets of the last decade; 

poems from the first 36 chapbook winners;  

"In Their Own Words", poets writing about their work; and

"Old School," poets writing about past poets.

 

Madge McKeithen has written about poems in several essays including those collected in her book, Blue Peninsula (FSG, 2006). She initiated the One Page Poetry Circle at the NYPL in 2006 and at the Darien Library in 2009. Her work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Utne Reader, The New York Times Book Review,and Best American Essays 2011. She teaches nonfiction in the Writing Program at the New School and blogs at madgemckeithen.com

 

Post Wherein I Propose the Annexation of Canada by the United States by Means of Daoism [by Anthony Madrid]

All right, let’s all try and remain calm. I’m not going to go up the front steps and walk through the front door, here. I’ma go around back and come in through the kitchen window. So I need you all to be patient.

FIRST CONCEPT. What I call “social” reading. What do I mean by that. I mean reading contemporary poetry in a spirit of (a) wanting to know what’s going on in Poetryland, and (b) shopping for friendships. This is rather different from reading like a normal person, who simply wants a good time. People who read socially (in the sense I’m advancing here) don’t mind as much if they’re not having a good time. They are playing a different game, with different stakes. They want to know “the lay of the land”—and that means they have to map the swamps and the abandoned parking lots just as much as the places where they might want to be. For a certain kind of reader, that knowledge by itself is enough to make the suffering worthwhile, and if you add to that the potential for discovery with all its attendant thrills—the possibility of finding uncharted isles where dinosaurs still live or whatever—you get some idea of the stakes involved for the “social” reader. The deal is you get a map going, and then you can give directions.

I also mentioned “friendship shopping.” Here’s where Facebook comes in. Today, the supreme ease with which you can have a written conversation (boing!, right there, instantly) with somebody whose poetry does it for you—and how quickly thát can turn into friendship, sex, children, a new civilization—well! this is another good reason to put up with the inevitable boredom involved in the mapping project….

SECOND CONCEPT. Virtually every one of you reading these words answers the description I am giving here. You piss and moan about it, but you want to know what’s going on and you want to “get into it” with people. It’s just like with music when you were in high school. You were studious—you just didn’t call it that. You wanted to know all there was to know about glam rock or rap or whatever the fuck was your deal. We were all like this. Metal. Psychedelic shit. Beck. The difference is: With poetry, you can “friend” Beck, and Beck has nothing better to do than chat with you, ’cuz he’s lonely and starved for praise….

THIRD CONCEPT (hold tight for this one). Americans ignore Canada a lot. Apropos of poetry, there is a certain amount of reasoning involved, and that reasoning is elegant and convincing: “Why would I fuss with Canada, when I haven’t even read _______ [some American poet]? I’ll come ’round to Canada later.” Also, many American poets have a certain amount of resentment towards Canadians, on account of the way the ones who come down here almost always parade their scorn of US backwardness and obnoxiousness (which would be fine, except they act like they don’t expect you to agree).

But here is precisely where I take my first step through the back window and into the kitchen sink. Listen: There is no actual reason to think of Canada as a separate country. Thinking of Canada as a separate country is like thinking of the states of New York and Pennsylvania as separate. You can, if you insist, but the warrant for doing it is slender. Who in the world is gonna stop her ears and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t wanna know what’s going on in Philadelphia; I’ll get to Philly after I’m done with the rest of the US….” (I deploy {PA + NY} as my example here because those two states’ combined populations = the total population of Canada. Plus most of Canada’s people live right there in that zone anyhow.)

—But here’s the clincher.—Go back to Concepts 1 and 2. Admit it: you are a social reader. You can’t get enough of charting the cliques: the Cool Kids, the Freak Shows, the People Who Can’t Write for Shit but Are Total Babes—OK, then! there’s this whole other neighborhood you haven’t been to yet…. It’s right there across the street, and you’re putting off checking it out ’cuz you’re silly!

I’m not saying Canada is this golden Shangri-la where exciting things are happening, 24/7. No, the whole beauty of what I’m driving at is precisely that Canada represents more of the same of what we already got, down here—more Cool Kids, more Freaks, more friends, more everything! You can’t get enough, right? You wanna know all there is to know, right? Well….

FOURTH AND FINAL CONCEPT. Daoism. I have in mind, in particular, the emphasis in the Daodejing on “actionless activity”—and stealth. You probably see where I’m going with this.

The Canadians don’t need to know about any of this plan. We will simply annex them, mentally. We’ll quietly start reading them, and caring about them, and reviewing them. We should submit to their online journals. We need to know what those journals are.

Again: There is no need to announce. Indeed, we want it to go down such that “when our work is done, our task accomplished, throughout the country, people will say it happened of its own accord” (Daodejing 17).

My brothers and sisters, join me in this. Go, reread the Daodejing and let us march upon the Canadians with our minds. They cannot resist us if we have the Dao on our side.

• • • • • • • •

The Widows' Handbook [by Bruce Kawin]

For the rest of the week I'll be writing mostly about survival:  what it means to keep writing even if it looks as if your work will never get published and the difference it makes if it is or isn't professionally published, self-published, read to a group, or left in a drawer.  It seems appropriate to start by looking at a forthcoming anthology of poetry (and some prose) by widows—survivors—many of whom have had no training as poets and are being published for the first time.  The book is called The Widows’ Handbook, and it will be published in a few months by Kent State University Press.  You heard it here first.  Putting this book together and getting it published was an inspiring commitment to survival, particularly considering how many publishers declined to read the manuscript.  The book was edited by two bereaved women, Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn.  I wrote some questions for them.  Lise answered first, then Jacqueline. 

Bruce:  Are you both widows?  Do either of you have experience as editors or creative writers?

Lise:  I am a widow; my second husband and I had been happily married for almost twenty years when he died in October 2006. The other editor is Jacqueline Lapidus; she lost her beloved partner, but he was not her husband. Not having the legal status of a widow added in many ways to her burden.  As for my editing experience, I’ve co-edited some academic books, but this is my first time editing poetry.  I’ve published a few poems in collections of poetry by linguists.

Jacqueline:  Not only that, but there was a wife—the Lawful Awful, from whom  he had been estranged for years.  I have been a professional editor for 50 years (not counting high school newspaper) and have been publishing poems in literary magazines since 1963.

Bruce:  How many publishers did you try before finding Kent State Univ. Press?

Lise:  Fifteen queries to likely-looking places, resulting in five submissions, all rejected; that’s not counting the publishers who wouldn’t look at a manuscript unless it was submitted through an agent.  But after we were in negotiations with KSUP, one of the ones that just didn’t respond eventually showed serious interest.

Bruce:  Did you consider self-publishing?  Did you reject the idea, and why?

Lise:  I did consider it, but Jacqueline, who has been an editor, author, and translator for many years, was unwilling to consider that except as a last resort. She felt that a work this substantial deserved to be a "real book." And now we have it both ways, because KSUP will make it available as an e-book.

Jacqueline:  In fact, I wasn’t willing to consider it at all—not even as a last resort!  Promoting the book is hard enough without having to do distribution as well, even with online bookstores available. And I couldn’t afford to put any money into such a project.

Bruce:   How did you attract manuscripts?  Where did you place ads or notices and what did they say?

Lise: Jacqueline is very experienced in this area. She placed ads in Poets & Writers Magazine (print and online) and the Seacoast Writers Association newsletter, worded like this:

WIDOWS: Seeking women’s poems and short personal essays (max. 500 words) about experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure). Bereavement (sudden or following illness/long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people’s responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, support systems (or lack thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), rebuilding (including but not limited to finding new love or focus).  We are a published poet/editor and a scientist/professor, both widowed.     Manuscript will be submitted to trade publishers. Payment: contributor’s copies. Deadline: June 30,     2011. Send with SASE for reply to: The Widows’ Handbook, [followed by Jacqueline’s address].

Jacqueline also contacted numerous poet friends and asked them to spread the word.  Some of those friends helped put her in touch with well-known widowed poets (O’Hehir, Gallagher, Gilbert).  She also selected a few widows’ poems from the anthology Love Over 60 (eds. Chapman & McCormick, pub. by Mayapple Press in 2010—we both knew Robin Smith Chapman from college and Jacqueline had a poem in that collection) and from their own books.

Bruce:  Did you rule out widowers, and if so, why?

Lise:  Most women who are widowed – especially older women – face a much harder time financially, socially, and in finding new partners – than men of comparable ages and personal histories.  For many women, the social isolation (because some married couples stop inviting widows to join them, leaving you not only lonely but wondering if they ever really liked you at all) and the financial hardship compound the devastation of losing their partners.  My late husband had been widowed twice before we met – he lost one young wife in a car accident and the next young woman to breast cancer, and he was deeply traumatized for years by those losses.  So I would never consider a man’s grief to be less deep than a woman’s.  But…he found new partners as soon as he was ready for them, and it seems that people are always eager to play matchmaker for a nice man who wants a wife.  That said, I wish we had included some older gay men who have lost their partners, because they also often experience social isolation and a very limited circle of possible new partners, in addition to their grief.  (The "beauty trap" catches them as much as it catches women.)

Jacqueline:  As Lise says, in our gendered society the social situation and status of widows differ from that of widowers. There are other books that include both, but there had never been an anthology of poems by widows. I wanted to showcase the aspect of widows’ lives that nobody wants to admit.  I conceived The Widows’ Handbook as an anthology of women’s poems, not an anthology about bereavement or grief in general.

Borges and the Camels [by Bruce Kawin]

                                                                          for John Ashbery

Two stories from the mid-1960s.

When I was an English major at Columbia, I took a creative writing course from Kenneth Koch, who changed my life.  Actually it was a class in modern literature with some creative assignments.  I have never met anyone who knew so much about modern literature.  He assigned books we had never heard of, like Svevo's Confessions of Zeno, Pasternak's Safe Conduct, and Machado de Assis's Dom Casmurro (which became my favorite novel and which I've taught for years; a student told me recently that Woody Allen likes it too, which makes perfect sense).  He sent us out to review The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.  He had us read Borges's Ficciones and the latest issue of Art and Literature.  And he told us stories.  One of them dragged me into a labyrinth, made me part of it.

 

As a way of explaining "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote" and "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," Koch told us that he had been sitting on a New York park bench with Borges when Borges said that the way one could tell that the Koran was an authentic document was that there were no camels in it.  If someone had wanted to create such a book and then plant false, artificially aged documents that appeared to establish its existence in the 7th century C.E., that person would certainly have included some Arabic local color, such as camels.  Koch wanted to show us how Borges could read even the Koran as a potentially false text and how the fact that there were no camels in it could prove the Koran was authentic if one was in a Borgesian mood.

 

At the time I was also taking a class in what was then called Oriental Humanities, and the assignment for that week was the Koran (trans. A. J. Arberry).  I read it with Koch's Borges story in mind.  There are two camels in the Koran. 

 

The question is, did Borges know that?  Koch apparently did not.  If Borges did know about the camels, then he was doing an advanced Borgesian number on Koch and anyone to whom Koch might tell the story, expecting that someone who heard the story and knew there were camels in the Koran would have reason to doubt its authenticity.  That was the trap that he set, and the story ends with my hearing the story, finding the camels, and wondering what I had been led to wonder.  Or it ends today, with my writing this.

 

Because Borges may not have known about the camels.  He could simply have been raising the issue that the Koran could be a faked and planted and falsely substantiated book.  I don't know whether Koch was in on the joke (I never discussed this with him; I was mostly too intimidated to go to professors' office hours), and I don't know whether Borges knew he was setting a trap.  I met Borges a decade later when he visited the University of Colorado at Boulder, and I got a chance to ask him about the paradoxical final sentence of "Borges and I" ("I do not know which of us has written this page"). He said there was no paradox and that "Borges and I" was a simple record of how he felt when he got mail addressed to Borges.  So readers may have made up the ultimate Borges, the one who lays out labyrinths for careful readers, the one who knew Koch would someday have a student who would hear the story, read the Koran, and be convinced that its existence was a literary conspiracy, a student who never would guess that Borges might just have been careless and missed the camels.

Is There Poetry in Soccer? By Alissa Fleck

Musing on how to make sense of myself as a soccer player with the heart and mind of a poet

The diehard poet sees a poem in everything. The most seemingly unpoetic experience still offers a story through her lens. Who can say exactly why the poet’s brain works this way?

In some cases, it is an organizing factor. In others, it is a mechanism of defense or cathartic process. At times we construct narratives to protect ourselves from what is raw, painful or inexplicable. We put language onto what we cannot understand, we grapple for a semblance of sense or beauty. Words protect us. That’s how we can write poems about trauma, for example, how the most unimaginable pain can become poetic.

What about distinctly “unpoetic” experiences of the everyday? Poems exist on the most mundane of subjects. Nothing is mundane in the hands of the skilled poet or, rather, the mundane becomes extraordinary in that it is mundane.

But how much of life does the poet approach, not with the images or pieces of a poem, but with the actual poetic process itself?

Everything I do seems to fall into the same general interest areas, requiring use of similar parts of the brain—I write and research and write some more; I curate a reading series for poets; I make music—with the notable exception of playing soccer. I like to think language is a realm in which I have some degree of mastery and playing music seems to exercise the brain in many of the same ways. Where does soccer fit in, besides making me—ideally—a more well-rounded person? 

While I enjoy the game immensely, I am all but incompetent on the soccer field. At the risk of constructing a false dichotomy, I’ve always considered myself more intellectually-inclined than athletically. Of course the two need not be mutually exclusive; indeed perhaps I can fuse the disparate pieces of my life and say it is possible to see the sport of soccer—or any sport for that matter—as a poetic experience. 

For skilled players, there is a great deal of, well, skill to playing soccer. There is foresight and strategy. You make predictions, take gambles and develop systems of spoken and unspoken communication with teammates. You get better by practicing and watching the masters (rarely in life, however, is that not the case). 

There’s a certain art to the balance of the game. You must learn to read your opponent, to think ahead and visualize. So much of the game is lived abstractly, in one’s head, before any play is made. A play takes a moment, while visualization and strategy last all match—even all season. Soccer involves immense amounts of running and passing and work, punctuated by small, intense bursts and climaxes as when a player takes a shot.

How similar all this sounds to the poetic process. A great deal of work goes into crafting a poem. There are hours upon unseen hours of toiling for the little bit that's ultimately displayed. To begin to understand that work, you must read between the lines, unfold and dismantle the finished product.

All poetry is also a conversation, just like soccer, though neither is a conversation in the most traditional sense. Poets converse with their contemporaries and their predecessors, while soccer players converse with their teammates and their opponents. They get to know each other intimately. As my sports fanatic uncle has always preached: “Everything you need to know in life, you learn on the soccer field.”

There’s certainly rhythm and repetition to soccer, as with poetry, but there is also a lot that is unpredictable and beyond our control. Despite certain limiting repetition of a soccer game, there are infinite possible outcomes. 

In poetry as in play, we can control what we do but we cannot necessarily control the consequence. We cannot control how a game will unfold just as we cannot control how a poem will unfold—what will it become once it’s left to others’ interpretations?

Alissa Fleck is a freelance writer whose work has appeared on Bitch, Truthout and Narrative.ly and in the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and more. She writes a weekly literary column for NY Press.