The Best American Poetry

Square Poems in Round Holes (by Jenny Factor)

When I was a child, I’d often read poems I didn’t understand. I’d throw my thoughts against the poem like a locked box, trying to parse the words together, so that the lock would slip open.

There were poets whom I knew were mostly beyond me, but my mind rubbed against them systematically, like my cat rubs her face against a hairbrush, and there were others whose work was made mostly of sound rather than idea, and those I could drink up like a glass of water. Emily Dickinson was in the first category, and Theodore Roethke in the latter. 

I wasn’t a fan of Dickinson. Why should I be? A West Coast child who had no use for a version of nature that focused on the fly, the snake, and a bunch of east coast birds. Dickinson’s world was lacy, with holes. Her snakes all seemed to be wearing little Preacher’s suits. Not enough sex in it, I might have said, had I been anything but a child. 

But then I stumbled on two short Dickinson poems of nonconformity. 

441

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me—

The simple News that Nature told—

With tender Majesty

 

Her Message is committed

To Hands I cannot see—

For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—

Judge tenderly—of Me

 

I was an oddball kind of child. Not fitting in was kind of my philosophy. 

260

I'm Nobody! Who are you? Are you – Nobody – too? Then there's a pair of us! Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!   How dreary – to be – Somebody! How public – like a Frog –   To tell one's name – the livelong June –   To an admiring Bog!

At last, a code I could use, a message I needed!

Later, I returned to Dickinson, and we sat together in the window where she whispered to me. I was grown by then. She’s not in my body as a form of sound. She’s in my mind, deep down there, like a series of locks. I open one, and she opens another. And in this infinitely regressive chain, she and I travel through a lonely place together. 

Cool Titles: is 5 (by Jenny Factor)

I've been thinking lately about Cool. About cool before the concept of cool. Or before the cool people of today knew about the concept of Cool because we weren't born yet. Take E.E. Cummings in 1926, for instance, entitling his third book of poetry, in titling his fifth book as book

is 5

which must surely have been among the coolest titles of poetry books published in 1926, or in any other year for that matter. 

Which is why I want to take a moment to say that I really like E.E. Cummings. 

He makes verbs out of typography. He metaphors the hell out of grammar. He lets a lot of air into his sentences. (Or philosophy. Or science. Or thought. Or ego. Iconoclasm. Or humility. Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe I'm just not seeing him clearly. Readers: your thoughts?)

What he does do is karate chop the line breaks and even whole/holey/un-whole words--a trait for which he has been both praised and lambasted. (Edmund Wilson called his punctuation "hideous".)

It's true! Sure, we probably knew his poems sounded good. But did you ever wonder why? One story I can tell you about E.E. Cummings is that he was apparently hiding a pocketful of meters and a burial plot of sonnets inside his outwardly-apparent "free verse". Marilyn Hacker broke the news to me in a conventional sonnet class. I was 25 years old and floored. Instead of "Where's Waldo?", poets with a hankering to do so, could read swaths of Cummings and ask, "Where's the buried sonnet?" She showed me some secret examples. 

The Poetry Foundation web site's bio of Cummings seems to point toward confirming this. From the age of 8 to 22, Cummings practiced writing in traditional verseform. So it's no wonder, no puzzle, and no surprise that a deep canon hovered under the cannon he carried back inside his heart and mind and experience from the first world war (where, incidentally, he hung out with Pablo P. and other avant garde artists).

E.E. Cummings: a stealth formalist. 

And yet, also, paradoxically, a rebel. Adam Kirsch's terrific exploration of Cummings in The Harvard Review shows a man who contained (and complained) these complexities. 

Who else deserves the Too Cool for School award for titles of poetry books? 

Poetry Society of America's "Old School"

If you have a little time at work today, I'd highly recommend a brief trip over to the Poetry Society of America's "Old School" collection. Similar in some ways to the classic poems section of Slate, where David Lehman has located an 'overlooked masterpiece by Thomas Gray', Old School also pairs pre-19th Century poets with the contemporary poets who adore them. 

Find out about Matthew Rohrer's Shelley-inspired tattoo. Get brave with Yu Xuanji and Tina Chang. Experience Keats as a fragment of Ed Hirsch's consciousness, and hear George Herbert through the ears and mind of Alfred Corn. Oh I'm out on a kind of date there too, but my favorite pre-19th Century poet is wearing a wicked Invisibility Cloak. (And anyway, just between you and me, I think this poem of Robert Frost's might have competed hard as my top pick if I hadn't already written about it here.)

--Jenny Factor

The Drunkenness of Things Being Various (by Jenny Factor)

Since the first of the year, the days here in sunny So Ca have been unseasonably cold and occasionally wet. Several times a day, in and out of the house with dog, in and out of the car with groceries, with book bags (literally, bags o' books), with jackets in arms, once shed, abandoned and retrieved from the car, with leash, with ball, with muddy feet, I walk out past our rose garden.

Our rose garden--53 years old--another woman's treasure. Our rose garden belonged to our home's third occupants: not the 1930's-era Macy's furniture buyer, or the former general who sent away to Sears for plans for our house, but to the camelia horticulturalist and his wife, his wife who preferred roses. (We bought the home from the fourth owners, one of whom had once interned at the finest nursery in Pasadena, and had a verve for flower arrangements. Her rose arrangements "sold" me on the house, over twelve years ago. Not as skilled as Wallace Stevens, I toy with the art, understanding it very little. But I love my roses nonetheless. A sample of my latest creation is in the photo above.)

Anyway, no season surprises me more about roses--which have their pert season, the one where the insects first discover them, then the season they grow rank and stem-molded, and the season it's hard to cut them from the stalk before their little nethers are showing, so warm and ripe--indeed, little surprises me more about the seasons of roses than this season, this impossible January season, where the buds stay tight as long as they can, preserved as if in a nursery, and picturesque with drops. Where the roses themselves seem to belie winter, seem to speak back to short days, seem to promise something before failing at it. Every monday I wonder, will this be the week the gardener decides they are finished and cuts them back? This is the season of symbiosis and surprises. This is the season where the roses to me seem juxtaposed and various, seem to me like poetry.

One week, I ran into my gardener's young assistant: his wife was about to have a baby. It was fall. He carried around his phone. The next week, a red rose I'd been eyeing, a perfect red bud was gone after the gardeners came. It was hers, I hoped. No Rapunzel rules around here. The gardener, John, once told me that it makes them sad to watch the roses they care for die on the vine.

And now, it's full-on winter, as winter as California can get. Seeing them there--my garden's last Abraham Lincoln (a dark red, meant for bud-cutting, dainty as petticoats when it later opens), and my last Ballerina (fat and pink and white), a half-dozen lemon drops (with their faint ghost of citrus), I never go outside without thinking I should cut them. Cut them before the rain gets them. The rain that is always threatening.

Later in the sink, my house is filled with earwigs and fat spiders. All the symbiant, hiding life that took refuge inside the petals. Can you imagine sleeping in a rose? eating in a rose? all the wet winter long....And what are the insects symbiant in ideas, in creativity, in mind? The houses made by roses!

Rose gathering in rain reminds me of one of my favorite metrically lopsided, rhyming-and-repeating delicious little poems, by British poet, Louis MacNeice (and it's well-worth clicking through the biography of this capable, quirky, orderly man who made his living in words and the world--not just poems): 

Snow

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. 

                                                    by Louis MacNeice

 

(not my roses)

Those Lonely Early Days of January (by Jenny Factor)

Two days ago, right about now, my family and I headed over to Orange Grove Boulevard, a wide, almost leisurely road with green lawns and mountain views that slices through the westmost-half of my hometown, Pasadena, CA. We parked nearby and walked into the darkness, the clumps of people. The sun had set, and families and college students had camped out on the side of the road, as they do each year, awaiting our parade. Portable camp fires and sleeping bags tangled in the toes. Kids impatient and excited, running from parent to parent, mouths smeared with lollipops.

Getting to the Grove is a project. Each driving-street heading N/S is blocked, and guarded. The Wrigley Mansion, whence the parade ventures, sits proudly on its long lawn, littered with TV cameras on poles, bins of extra flowers, each in their little plastic phallic green cups. And in the center of the road, the lonely giants--perfect, prepped floats--parked, coned-off, and waiting for dawn. Flowers and seeds, oddly lit by ten-foot tall lights. Throngs of people and dogs walked alongside, flasked and ear-muffed.

And my favorite element...four wandering minstrels, age say 18, from some nearby college played inventive variations on Auld Lang Sine on a clarinet, saxophone, accordian, and guitar.

And when the new year hit, we shared the countdown on a public avenue. Cheering all around. 

But today, on the first "work" day ("word" day) of the calendar year, it's hard not to be lonely. Time passes, people pass too, never to come back to my long solo stem, to my lonely body to visit. And I found myself thinking about this poem of James L. White's below:

Making Love to Myself

 When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you’re with me again, just the way it was.

After work when you’d come in and
turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed,
filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls,
trying not to wake me which you always did.
I’d breathe out long and say,
‘Hi Jess, you tired baby?’
You’d say not so bad and rub my belly,
not after me really, just being sweet,
and I always thought I’d die a little
because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.

We were poor as Job’s turkey but we lived well—
the food, a few good movies, good dope, lots of talk,
lots of you and me trying on each other’s skin.

What a sweet gift this is,
done with my memory, my cock and hands.

Sometimes I’d wake up wondering if I should fix
coffee for us before work,
almost thinking you’re here again, almost seeing
your work jacket on the chair.

I wonder if you remember what
we promised when you took the job in Laramie?
Our way of staying with each other.
We promised there’d always be times
when the sky was perfectly lucid,
that we could remember each other through that.
You could remember me at my worktable
or in the all-night diners,
though we’d never call or write.

I just have to stop here Jess.
I just have to stop.

                by James L. White

I teach this poem. Not every term. From time to time. We listen to how it talks. We smell the gasoline and the leaves. It's sensory and simple. But the story is complex. We put it in our bodies. Our bodies take in this poem. Our minds take in this story. It gentles us in a bruised place. 

But today, it's alive again for me. What I don't want to put down. What I have to. And going forward into this brave new year, I'm looking back. And I just have to stop here, people. I just have to stop.

* The sketch is by Bartolomeo Cesi, Two Men in Florence Kissing, 1600.

In Praise of Amateur Singers, Carolers, and More (by Jenny Factor)

You now behold (in the photo above) a group of Beverly Hills High School alumni (parents, bankers, singers, and friends) returning to the alma mater as they do each December to sing "Still, Still, Still" with their old high school singing group, The Beverly Hills High School Madrigals.

They are singing under the baton of a very dear teacher, Joel Pressman, who was already making room for creativity and discipline, tenderness, tough love, and a lot of humor when I was a creative soul lost in the halls of that high school. Mr. Pressman's powerful voice draws us all back. What a teacher! What a singer! And all those voices--those alums who have gone onto careers in diaper-management, advanced cookie baking, accounting and the law, we alums who still love to sing, who still remember to slow down for that huge diminuendo in the final verse, and know how and why to watch the conductor--well it leads all of us in the audience to a place very close to tears!

Here is a video of this year's event. Over a hundred singers of all ages. And Joel Pressman with the baton.

  I had been a parent for oh about a minute when I realized that I would never again stumble upon a group of carolers singing on floor 3 of the mall, children chiming off-key in a red velvet auditorium, middle school brass sections bugling themselves bug-eyed at Disneyland without instantly bursting into happy tears.

Every face, every trying-hard face is so shiny and focused. And then there are always a few faces, bored and daydreaming...the child in the navy satin poof skirt inaccurately mouthing the words. The boy with the monkey-face dramatics who couldn't quite pull the requisite colored outfit together, and would fit in better at the local Chuckie Cheese. And the social dynamics. Gee, they just slap one in the face until the stomach remembers the old flip-flops. Nodding to the parents with a "hip" Queen medley mostly from Bohemian Rhapsody, "mamma, I killed a man...my life had only just begun..now I've gone and thrown it all away" as we audience members howl with laughter, the joke on us for getting old, humming along. A high school diva in a black slinky dress, draped over a piano as if she were a lounge act, supported by four guys her own age in hats and bow ties, two of whom she'd never date, and one who would never date her (wrong gender), and the one who just maybe...and that isn't even storying up to the accompanist. The girl-on-girl duet, part love, part catfight. The sounds of the audience, the live net of high school affections and antagonisms, providing the soundtrack to the series of festive, frought events. I love them. I love every single one of them.

There we sit, we parents, grandparents, and other partisans, holding our tinier-each-year camcorders and recording our bigger-each-year children. I am purged over and over by the beautiful imperfection of the music, from the tiny beauty pageant kindersingers, to the high school minnesingers or maestros, tuning with purpose, and following the conductor with more verb and verse. Sometimes it seems as if you can feel layers under the singing or strumming--the hours of practice, all the different ears assaulted by scales, the "have you practiced enough" arguing behind every household door, and then later the "stop practicing till you have done your homework" or the "that dress is black but it's too short" "too fancy" "too casual". The parents, the children and their dreams. Like raising peacocks or grooming unicorns part of what's so touching is knowing that this is it, this is childhood, the most "adult" form this art will ever have for many of our children. 

It seems so grown-up really, to believe in this effort and practice and excellence. To work hard. And then to come together to live it all out. What's wrong with us adults--so quickly bored and scattered, our energy dissipated by not wanting to disappoint our own hopes. How big we were, small like that!

Last week on NPR, Barbra Streisand (now in a new movie) was interviewed by Terry Gross. She talks about singing "People who need people," a song whose lyrics might be exactly opposite of what she believes, but they felt right. She talks about the moment when she was thirteen, and a bridge in the music, a bridge she swore was too long, suddenly got filled by a new idea for her, and when she came back in, the sound that came out of her--it was new. It was something she didn't know she had inside her.

And so this is what art is like. What life is like. Near as I can tell it.

We stop worrying about perfection. We pause for not knowing. We let effort happen, for its own mysterious reasons in its own mysterious state. 

And sometimes, if we're very lucky, both Heaven and Nature sing!

Thanks, Joel Pressman. Happy Holidays to One and All...j.f.

Winter Solstice Time (by Jenny Factor)

Henry David Thoreau, while barely catapulting out of his own 20's, was nevertheless ready to dispense valuable advice on creativity and the energy necessary to sustain a life of purposeful alertness. Here he is speaking on mornings.  

"The most memorable season of the day, the awakening hour. 

For an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night. 

Be awakened by our Genius, not by the mechanical nudgings of some servitor.

Be awakened by our own newly acquired force and aspirations from within, not factory bells.

Be awakened to a higher life than we fell asleep from; and thus the darkness bear its fruit, and prove itself to be good, no less than the light."

--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

 

I love these quotes. And largely, I love mornings. Though, in those funny creative collisions and collusions so common to early parenthood--timeless days, endless nights--one December, I found myself reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden over my infant's sleepy head. You may imagine I got a bit of a kick out of the statement on mornings that Thoreau makes above. And still today, on this "shortest day of the year", I curse at my 'nudging mechanical servitor' and solemnly swear that my rescue dog--the newest "baby" to interfere with my sleep--must be by tautology, logic, and luck, my personal genius. Now if only I could teach him to use a pencil....

All to No End from Literary Los Angeles (by Jenny Factor)

            all to no end save beauty
            the eternal -

                        from The Crowd at the Baseball Game by William Carlos Williams

It's been a big week for poetry around here. Last Friday, the Mayor of Los Angeles named our city's first poet laureate--baseball-loving poet, Eloise Klein Healy. Eloise is probably not the first baseball-loving poetry royalty. But is she the first poet to pitch puns and sling similes for the Boys in Blue?

I'm not an expert, so I invite fans in the stands to throw peanuts. But if I'm not mistaken, Marianne Moore batted for the Yankees. Eve Merriam, a very fine poet, and a winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize in her youth--in fact, she wrote one of my favorite poems on new love ("I'm telling my hands not to blossom into roses"), penned these ecumenical lines:

Bare-handed reach
to catch
April's
incoming curve.
Leap higher than you thought you could and
Hold:
Spring,
Solid,
Here.

I loved attending the little poetry inauguration ceremony at the downtown library, falling though it did smack dab in the midst of an Antioch University Los Angeles poetry residency. I stole an hour away for happy announcements in a musty, muralled place. After, back "home" on the Antioch front, poet Kazim Ali came to visit from Ohio, and put us into our bodies and into sound. Then my mentees and I began to work on crafting their project period contracts, pulling books off shelves, as we will off and on all week, coming to a common vocabulary about literature and their own work and the changes and growth they hope for in the term ahead. And also a conversation about passions, about finding words in all their pockets. I love the dialogue and the magic of it. And the accidental discoveries.

Like this one. Here is another poet West Coast poet who has taken up the Dodger cause: B.H. Fairchild writes about a certain player's time spent as a Brooklyn Dodger during his own pre-poetry Kansas youth in "For Junior Gilliam." Gilliam served as second and third baseman for both the Brooklyn and Los Angeles' era Dodgers, was named 1953 Rookie of the Year, and ultimately became among the earliest African American major league coaches.

So on behalf of all Dodger-loving poemphiles everywhere:  Congratulations to the first poet-laureate of L.A., Eloise Klein Healy!

Happy Birthday, Marilyn Hacker (by Jenny Factor)

Tuesday marked the birthday of poet, Marilyn Hacker. In her honor, I've been thinking about a writing an odd multi-part fairy tale poem, based around a particular Grimm story, and featuring a transgendered bear. I may never finish it (well, actually, yesterday I finished a draft) but if I do, it is meant to be a kind of tribute to something wonderful she did when she was just about precisely my age. I am a long-time fan of all her work, but I am a fan, in that way we love what we love that feels particularly personal, almost like a secret, of her very brilliant series of poems based around the legend of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, and featured in her fourth book, Assumptions (Knopf, 1985). 

I love The Snow Queen poems for the figure of the Little Robber Girl, whom Hacker depicts as a saucy, savvy, tough-skinned and tender tomboy-girl. The friendship between the Little Robber Girl and Gerda saves Gerda's life, allows her brother's rescue. The Little Robber Girl knows how to handle her knife, how to maneuver around her mother, how to get dirty and stay clean. I'm simplifying.

Cranberries and Poems: Red Popcorn of the Underworld (by Jenny Factor)

I am holed up in the kitchen at the makeshift windowseat table nearest the stove, monitoring a tiny pot of cranberries, citrus, and clove. These cranberries are even now popping their little heads, with a pud-pud, and becoming one with the pot's round universe. 

Our new rescue dog must smell this. Though she is so shy that she'd usually rather shove her large body into the semi-hidden spot between the couch and the coffee table, today instead she is stationed outside the kitchen door, on a small pad we put there, as close to the alley-kitchen as we'll let her wait. Cranberries are an ingredient in one of her favorite treats. 

To say this house smells like family, or a hopeful complexity, would be literally correct. But that belongs to my thoughts of tomorrow. To me, right now, it's the sound I'm after. Pud pud--as the cranberries give way to the heat and pressure I've assembled around them.

Something about this sound reminds me of the imagery-making sensation of my childhood, when I knew I was "catching a poem" as soon as I could envision a secondary world hovering by simile or metaphor over the one I was living and standing in. Those little tadpole poems had a single idea to animate them. And that was plenty. I feel oddly sentimental for their simple sense of plenty.  

To my child’s brain, these cranberries are “red popcorn”...Regular (corn-kernels) are the popcorn of air and these cranberries are the popcorn of water, or red mud, or the underworld. I could say they sound more like fish bubbles than drums. Or that they sound like rain. Or risk taking. And there would be the Poem of That. 

Tony Hoagland, in Real Sofistikation: Essays on Poetry and Craft describes a three-pronged taxonomy of poetry (by which Hoagland means, there are three main categories into which one could sort the driving energy of any given poem): image (“red popcorn”), diction (a kind of thought-applied, processed image, such as “red popcorn of the underworld” or “sound of risk”), and rhetoric (in which an argument is sustained). Poems each seem energized by one of these three primary drives: to embody image, to embody diction, to embody rhetoric. 

I’m wondering today whether I could map that taxonomy onto the originating impetus: the drive that makes the poet make the poem. 

How do you know you have a poem? (Or I really mean, how does any writer know it’s time to pick up a pen, or race to the keys? What thought or sound or idea leads us to the zero-draft, the raw-recording of the coming-on of an energy that will, with work, become the poem?)

In childhood, for me, it was so simple:   I “caught” an image. I had a poem.  For several happy, simple years that poem-process lasted. 

Then I dived deep into the riptides of adolescence, the emotional vibrancy of my early twenties. I came to “recognize” that start moment for a poem by a kind of sound and language--a single line that might lodge in my head, attached to the half-shape of an idea of some sort, or a sensory-tantalized remembering. I could “see” the poem--its discreet shape in the distance, and following that sound, that one line, I’d move toward it, hoping to sneak up on it before it left me. 

One of my friends says (actually, this is from the poet, Elizabeth Knapp) that she first feels a poem in her hands. A kind of tingling. At least, that was true when she was in her twenties--an emotive time in my experience for the poetry project.

Is that emotive sense, then, similar to Hoagland’s diction (a kind of emoted-through image, a processed simplicity). And if so, is this part of Hoagland's typology also a form of impetus for the making of a poem? A point or type of origin?

By my thirties, the origin-place had changed again. Moving toward rhetoric, an argument would arrange itself metrically along a line, or I’d feel the ache of two lines rhymed together, with a few yummy multisyllabic words placed just right inside the meter. It felt so good, so kinesthetically good, to think and “argue” that way. Sure images would come to me, and so would “good lines” that weren’t metrical at all. But the beginning was in an effort to self-reveal--the origin's hope was that possibly a bit of eloquence, or aimed-after eloquence would redeem that process.

This is all too subjective. Too in the kitchen, smelling cranberries. 

The topic, though, isn’t mine. It’s old. It’s complex. It’s hopeful. It’s yours. 

How do you know you’ve just “met” the thought, or sound, or texture, or taste, or argument, or rhyme, or imagined world that will “start” your poem? What trip do you take to that underworld where cranberries turn their whole bodies into incense, where the red mud becomes a dinner dish.

Becomes childhood again. Becomes tomorrow.