The Best American Poetry

"Be Ashamed to Die Until You..."* (by Jenny Factor)

Stanley Kunitz once implored all of us to become the person who writes the poem. 

Every day, I am humbled and delighted by the community of writers, students and faculty, with whom I work at the Antioch University Los Angeles low-residency MFA program.  My colleagues and students take risks on the page, write hard, read seriously, live lives of meaning, and are wickedly talented. But what wows me again and again is this community's vulnerability, expansiveness, and humility. This puts very big, wide margins around the possibilities for words. Margins so big that everyone has room to risk and learn. And dream.

When I was a young poet returning to Los Angeles, recently divorced, newly "out", child in tow, with a satisfying dot-com editorial job, low-wage but creative, and without many local literary connections, Eloise Klein Healy came into my life as a gentle can-do dynamo. I'd meet her at readings, and through mutual friends; and eventually, we began a conversation about poetry. I became aware that she had created and was directing the Low-Residency MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles, the first low-residency program on the West Coast. 

Fast forward seven-tenths of a decade to 2006. Around the time I began teaching at Antioch University Los Angeles, I asked Eloise about our program's special focus on literature and the pursuit of social justice.

On Not Knowing with Ron and Sandra (by Jenny Factor)

I know you're probably not local to Los Angeles, but I wish you could come out to hear two of my literary heroes, Sandra M. Gilbert and Ron Carlson read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena this weekend. 

Founded in 1894, Vroman's is Southern California's oldest and largest independent bookseller (two of Vroman's early employees are restacking books in the photo, above). 

Here are a few words from Ron Carlson on bewilderment and humility and listening in the act of writing:

"Beginning a story without knowing all the terrain is not a comfortable feeling. It is uncomfortable enough in fact to keep most people away from the keyboard...But there are moments in the process of writing a story when you must tolerate that feeling: you stay alert to everthing that is happening and by listening and watching, you find out where you are going by going there. 

"The single largest advantage a veteran writer has over the beginner is this tolerance for not knowing. It's not style, skill, or any other dexterity. An experienced writer has been in those woods before and is willing to be lost; she knows that being lost is necessary for the discoveries to come."

from Ron Carlson Writes a Story (Graywolf Press), page 15

Sandra Gilbert is one of my favorite living writers. She speaks of life as a woman, a daughter, a mother, a thinking person. "You write because you dream a different self into being when you write," Sandra M. Gilbert says in her essay, "Why Do We Write", On Burning Ground: 30 Years of Thinking about Poetry (University of Michigan Press). "You write because you meet a new you in writing, a you you didn't know you had."

Ron Carlson and Sandra Gilbert will be reading at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, California on Sunday, April 15, 4p.m. 

 

God's Optimism in April (by Jenny Factor)

At the AWP conference in Chicago, I attended a panel--the first panel of the first morning--on contemporary Jewish poetry. There was a lot of genius at that table, and an adorable baby in the audience about whom the moderator said, "Don't be angry at that baby. We like that baby." A very happy little panel. Of all the things in that room I found to like, I left there utterly taken with the work of young Hasidic poet, Yehoshua November. 

Here is the poem he read that morning, from his first book, God's Optimism (Main Street Rag, 2010). 

Baal Teshuvas at the Mikvah

Sometimes you see them

in the dressing area

of the ritual bath,

young bearded men unbuttoning

their white shirts,

slipping out of their black trousers,

until, standing entirely naked,

they are betrayed by the tattoos

of their past life:

a ring of fire climbing up a leg,

an eagle whose feathery wing span

spreads the width of the chest,

or worse, the scripted name of a woman

other than one's wife.

 

On Reading Part II: Reader's Block (by Jenny Factor)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my writing friends asked me a week ago whether I'd ever heard of a problem where writing is going fine, but all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it completely hurts to read. Hurts to read? I asked him. You mean like back pain?

"Sort of! My eyes just won't go there. I open books. I can't focus on them."

We were catching up over chicken sandwiches, followed by a tart with sliced pears and caramel sauce. Yum. But honestly, this is a hard time for my friend. His parents are unwell. In a short 8 months, he’s changed jobs and ended a marriage, and just lately, he’s moved onto some of his own medical tests. 

He was surprised. But I wasn’t. At least, not very. I’ve known a number of colleagues, students, and members of my very own book-addicted family who have gone through a period of time where reading, once an outlet and a pleasure, felt almost palpably painful. The introspection. The quiet in one’s own head. Quiet that has to stay quiet enough to open to a writer’s voice, to another human’s point of view. Sustained focus. And all of this striking a self who no longer feels like the same, stable self.

I call it "reader's block" and it can feel just as insidious as the writer's version.

I do have a few strategies for dealing with it, though....

1. Try to read a single poem like a meditation every day.

Maybe twice per day. Give up on whole books and turn to the kinesthesia of repetition. Find and notice every piece of punctuation. Basically, run your mind mouth over the words multiple times and try to emblazon them into you.

I found this exercise during a time when I was going to shul regularly. During the month of Elul (usually sometime in September), there is a tradition of reading the same psalm every day. I have now done this three times--three whole months, exploring the words of this single poem. I'm amazed by how the poem begins to open--familiar, calming, and yet somehow also always fresh.

On Reading, Part I: Reading for Writers (by Jenny Factor)

I have this Magellan-esq idea about reading that I want to explore today...

In my experience, reading (for a writer) is something like an opera singer's scales, a kind of preparation of the whole body for the writing work that comes after (months after, years after, moments after). It's the best place I know to get my conscious-editor mind and my writer-mind to meet on some common ground. It's like going on a journey with a boat full of Me.

The Me's in the boat are--sensory me, who reads; writing me, who loves to swing words around but can't look through the side or rear view mirrors, and editor me, who likes to figure out how all the contraptions are built. Really, it's the book itself that is our territory. The moments the book does something inside me--hits me in the solar plexus, makes the top of my head tingle, gives me a new kind of vibration in my hands or feet, makes my inner eye create pictures, gives me a heavy, settled-in feeling, jingles in my ear--that are the scenic lookouts, the encounters with wildlife, the hairpin turn, the trees. 

I love how the cartographer's or bird watcher's spirit animates that idea-- the idea of reading for completeness, for discovery, to give the body and mind a full-immersion experience with language, and its co-vessel, craft. We settle into the text with our unified selves, like fly-fishers, or Columbuses, or canoers up the Amazon......

What I’m saying is this: every book is a territory, a geography, unmapped by our own mind until we’ve read it, until we’ve been there. A full penetration into the jungle of otherness, over the leafy floor on the swinging vines of words. Liking the book isn't important. The aim is completeness. The aim is a cartography. The aim is nothing more or less than the complete exploration of the effect on ourselves of everything that can possibly be said.  

Reading hits the mind in any number of places:

the literal,

the visual,

the visceral.

And more. It hits the mind, and it often hits it so well, and so subtly, that it's hard to figure out where the book struck.

The goal for the writer is not just the reader’s joy, the reader’s transport, but also the doctor’s clinical observation and analysis of this joy and transport. To take books apart and figure out how they work on the reader. 

Writing is a stunning business. We put down a charged line of letters, a form of communication, richer and more textured than actual depicting speech. If we're lucky (especially in the tiny enacting contraption that is a poem), every word vibrates like an excited electron and has the ability to send off sparks. We will never really know how our words are detonating in the mind of the Big Other (see Lacan) when we put them on a page and pass them across a table to someone we have never met. How their impact is being created and recreated in the brand new, not-our-own body. 

The writer who reads must test this kinetic-body-mind-recreation process in the only reader she knows personally—the only reader to whom she has direct bodily access: herself.

-jf

Stephen Crane: American Poet (by Jenny Factor)

Today is the opening day for millions of baseball fans--including me. (This poet cheers for the Dodgers.)

Another fan of baseball, Stephen Crane (b. 1891 in New York, and shown above as a Syracuse University undergraduate), made a name as a journalist, and wrote novels, short-stories, and poetry at the turn of a prior century. Here is a brief biography of the artist--and his influential friends--thinkers such as H.G. Wells and Henry James. And here is some information on his baseball-loving Syracuse days. And here is a wonderful Best American blog post on his birthday in November. 

A highschool sophomore I know sent me the following poem; in fact, it is his favorite early American poem. Stephen Crane’s “’Truth,’ Said a Traveller” he wrote, "presents two conflicting themes, first that truth is an achievable phenomenon, and second that it is mysterious and unreachable, a shifting, relative, and utterly mysterious entity." 

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a rock, a mighty fortress;
Often have I been to it,
Even to its highest tower,
From whence the world looks black."

"Truth," said a traveller,
"Is a breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom;
Long have I pursued it,
But never have I touched
The hem of its garment."

And I believed the second traveller;
For truth was to me
A breath, a wind,
A shadow, a phantom,
And never had I touched
The hem of its garment.

In his fascinating 1975 essay, "The Hole in the Bucket", (Coming into the Country, University of Michigan Press) John Haines claims that  "American poetry lacks ideas." He continues, "Like all large statements, this one covers a lot of ground and leaves plenty of room for error". Was Haines responding to a lack he felt in 1975 that previous generations of American poetry had not shared? Yes, he seems to be!

However, it is precisely a poetry of ideas that I think we are beginning to see, more and more, in some of recent contemporary poetry...sinuous, philosophical long poems. Quirky philosophical sonnets. Experimental leaps and fancies that hold ideas central and foremost. Ben Lerner. Fanny Howe. Olena Kalytiak Davis. Claudia Rankine. Dan Beachy-Quick. Ben Doller. Douglas Kearney. Paisley Rekdal. And on and on.

Thanks, Stephen Crane. Thanks, John Haines. 

Beach Weather & Beware (by Jenny Factor)

On April 16, we mark the 53rd anniversary of the publication of William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White's The Elements of Style--truly the classiest of forays into the nays and naughts, and ayes and oughts of grammar. 

I have a long affinity with these funny savvy men, and I have to throw James Thurber in with the lot, because his own collaboration with White, Is Sex Necessary (written in 1929, but feels more midcentury) surely deserves to be quoted one day on a show oft-cited in these pages, namely AMC's Mad Men. (Check out Is Sex Necessary, if you haven't already read it...it will forever affect how you think of bluebirds, lampshades, and feminism).

My favorite moment in The Elements of Style, however, does not take place in a lampshade, but rather on some sort of sunny April day, I like to imagine, much like today, on a sidewalk or on a beach. 

Here they are, Messieurs Strunk and White, on the difference between "will" and "shall":

"A swimmer in distress cries, 'I shall drown; no one will save me!' " But a suicide says, "I will drown; no one shall save me!" 

The item is naughty, or was to sixteen-year-old me, who first read it over lunch hour on the floor of the Beverly Hills High School library. To be so glib, so smug, so wry about something important and dark--how perfect for an adolescent. And this was Strunk and White--clearly high-school English-teacher-sanctioned naughtiness too!

These lines always remind me of Stevie Smith's chilling 1957 foray into similar water:

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It's the best weather of the season here in Pasadena, California today. The warm, breezy bathwater kind of day that makes a person think of the beaches and bellyaches of youth--when the breeze cut the cheek with a kind of salt, and the tide dashed in and out, and the tiny body was too small still for sweat, the water temperature perfect, or cold in that all-alive way, and some home base of towels and shade and popsicles to return to, to be wrapped up and plopped flat in, and....well, that's the kind of day it is. And it's spring break--the very last day of spring break--too!

Call it a writer's temperament, but in spite of the weather, or because of it, I'm peckish and morose. And so I found myself this morning hunting down old judgmental and funny Strunk and White for my favorite beach-themed quote.

Jacques Lacan: Imaginary Philosopher (by Jenny Factor)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my son's favorite people is Jacques Lacan. "He's dead," you say? Well, you have a right to your opinion.

I can tell you that Lacan has been riding in the backseat of my Toyota Prius, keeping my teen and me company as we cross town between school and our small house, whose front yard is set in a great school district and whose backyard answers to a not-so-fine one. My son does not always agree with Lacan, but he knows him like a brother. As the wheels turn, we rattle on about current events, the unknowable Big Other, the Register of the Real, the Lack, and other Lacanisms made popular by a man we refer to as Jacques or just "Jack". 

My son never had an imaginary friend, but I now live with my son and his Imaginary Philosopher.

And truly, if you ask him, my kid can tell you what Jacques thinks about everything...

The Imaginary, The Symbolic, and the Real: Three types of experience, all bound up in signfication (and signifiers)

Reading "Reading" at the LA Public Library ALOUD Series (by Jenny Factor)

Just home from a very smart conversation between two thinkers and critics--Marjorie Garber (The Use and Abuse of Literature), and David L. Ulin (The Lost Art of Reading)--whose latest books speak to that intimate act, reading. (If reading is in a "crisis", Garber suggests, that means merely a "turning point" and "bring it on!")

I have to admit (abashed), I went to hear Garber twice during her Los Angeles visit. Professor Garber had been something of an icon to me when I was an adolescent at Harvard University, lodged in the third row of Sanders Theater, in a favorite seat, stage left, listening to her enact the act of reading and questioning Shakespeare. If as Ezra Pound suggests in The ABCs of Reading that we must read a book three times to have truly read it: once when we are younger than the protagonist whose consciousness carries the plot, once when we are their age, and once when we have outlived them (or at least outlived their story), I was giving my second read to Marjorie Garber, herself, now that I am nearly the exact age she must have been when (unless my memory fails me) in matching fuscia miniskirt and heels, she unlocked a lady's jeweled trunk, critical interpretation upon interpretation, with such innuendo and aplomb that I think I once audibly gasped. 

I am also a fan of David Ulin's--and particularly of his brave recent little polemic. 

And so I'm home with a number of thoughts about reading, and would like to write more on this.

For now, let me simply leave you with two links:

Seth Lerner's review of The Use and Abuse of Literature by Marjorie Garber (Pantheon; 320 pages)

David Ulin's very fine essay from the Los Angeles Times on the topic that became his new book, The Lost Art of Reading (Sasquatch Books; 160 page).

Of Witness (by Jenny Factor)

I'd like to say a little something about "Been There/Done That" as a creative urge. Or for that matter, about remembrance of any sort that requires for its continued potency the visit of someone who lived through and lived beyond the tragedies described.

Frankly, I'm worried. What is the trajectory of humanity's memory after the singular embodying human voice fades out? What if the art isn't made? The symbol or symbolic act not enacted? The bridge not extended...?

Sunday was Yom Hashoah for my son's Hebrew School class--the day in which the Shoah is remembered throughout the diaspora world.

Our shul is blessed to have among our members a poet survivor--a very fine poet--Zahava Sweet whose book, The Return of Sound was published by Bombshelter Press in 2005.

But the Shoah is still taught largely voice to voice, witness to non-witness. 

What will be required for the Non-Witness one day to be able to say, "this is because what happened to me when I was brought out" Of Poland. Or Austria.

A certain vibrant subsection of contemporary poetry is written from the tradition of "I was born there" "I lived that" "I was watching". But what is the trajectory of that poetry after the voice in which it is sounded fades out, dies of old age or perceived triviality or the inability to create something lasting of lasting horror. Of course outside of art and self there is no lasting horror. And isn't that, then, the problem? What if the art itself cannot or does not manage to thrive beyond the human connections and day-to-day political potencies that sustain and nourish it in its own era?

When (and how) is Poetry of Witness poetry-enough and witness-enough? And what if events of genuine importance have no living poet-witness left at all?