The Best American Poetry

A Muse in Drag...or Fur? (by Jenny Factor)

Has it ever bothered anyone else that the convention of the Muse is typically female? Is this purely a sexual preference (which could then be unhinged successfully by a writer's gender or by her romantic affiliation)?

Or are we all just hanging upside down on the Monkey Bars, waving to our Mommas?

One culprit may be the stereotype of the Woman as Good Listener. But whoever is clinging to that patootie must be forgetting many women: Gertrude Stein, for instance, who famously opined of writers that "it is necessary always to be talking and listening". Me? Woman though I be, I'm even less good at the listening. I have to sit on my hands at family dinners to remind myself to let my son get a word in edgewise, dammit.

Then there's the Beauty bit--that the female muse is desirable, her luminous fertile attention like a ray of sun, her limpid eyes worth courting.

Or is it the Grace of Muses that makes our language teacup-delicate, careful and deliberate?

Why couldn't a pet poodle be a muse, his head leaned in as if to ask yet another open-ended question....? Why not Cary Grant with that tender, wry attention? Or old Walt, smiling benignly and a bit scandalously over his damp beard? Have you ever written a poem that interlocutes with a different sort of listener....?

Yup, I'm sure I'm saying what you already know, but: The Muse Issue--at its root--has everything to do with (1) wanting to be heard (and at the same time not heard)--(2) with audience (and at the same time with privacy, with intimacy)--and (3) with how the desire to communicate (to someone--i.e., not to declaim) changes speech.

Cause How-can-it-be-worth-it-that-I'm-this-fabulous-if-nobodys-out-there?

-J.F.

Mentors & Apprentices (by Jenny Factor)

This week, I have felt more than a little silently thoughtful after reading Jim Cummins' missive from the outpost of a younger-self-and-Kenneth-Koch and Denise Duhamel's memories of Jane Cooper.

For those who have shared my sense of wonder, there's a recent book, Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship, by editors Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker. This is a collection of essays by young women poets about the poets who first influenced them. Each essay is followed by a selection of creative work that demonstrates a sort of functional or spiritual community between the pair of writers. (My come-clean moment: I have an essay in this volume.)

The origin of the modern word mentor and mentorship dates back to a character in The Odyssey. Mentor was often the Goddess Athena in disguise—posing as a friend of Odysseus who watched over young Telemachus in his father's absence. For the Greeks, the word was connected to intention, spirit, passion, and admonisment. Latin etymologists adapted this gentleman's name into the Roman word for "mind" (mens, mentis). A mentor, hence, is a powerful, brilliant figure.

An apprentice, by contrast, takes her linguistic lineage from the Latin verb apprendehere, meaning "to learn". Note that the English "apprehend" implies an action by the student—whose teacher could be demonstrating by counterexample as easily as by wisdom. Hence, one might apprentice oneself to any piece of text on a page—from Shakespeare to a recipe book, but can only be mentored by a mentor.

Just curious: To what, if anything, is your work enthrall*? (which means literally, "to make serf", c.1576; though for me, this experience is necessary, meaningful, positive)?

-J.F.

Looking for Gold with Heather McHugh...tonight (by Jenny Factor)

A few months ago, I went on a search for meaningful ambiguity. I held pages to the light. I read upside down in the dark. I got lost in the Cave of Celan, and rounded the Cape of William Empson (check out 7 Types of Ambiguity—a 1930 typologic classic). I separated Opacity from Obscurity, and made a Pass at some meek, mindful word-maven maidens who were waiting for epiphany on the sea cliff above the shore. (More on this journey some other time.)

In the December 2007 issue of Poetry Magazine, Heather McHugh winked at me, letting me know she'd been on the same treasure hunt. She wrote:

As soon as I detect the sign of the x at work, I'm near a buried treasure...You (the poet) make the mark of the x because to elaborate—to literate—beyond that mark would diminish its meaning...As an artist, I'm likely to love the x better than the gold.

If you're looking for treasure in Los Angeles tonight, you might want to set sail for the Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood. Heather McHugh will be reading there at 7p.m. Her appearance is co-sponsored by the UCLA Office of Cultural and Recreational Affairs, the Friends of English, the W Hotel, and several other terrific organizations.

Hammer Web Site:   www.hammer.ucla.edu
Hammer Information Line:  310.443.7000
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90024

Is the Air Ripe for Art? (by Jenny Factor)

Ever wondered why you were having such a great few months? Have you found a muse? Or are you just jumping onto a worldwide phenomenon?

Well, the headlines have the answer. Here is the latest from today's Associated Press:

Worker Productivity Up 2.2% In First Quarter

Poets, nice going with those pens!

-J.F.

Sor Juana de la Cruz (by Jenny Factor)

Now a note from the 17th Century, when bold, brilliant Sor Juana de la Cruz (1648-1695) entered a convent in order to find time and space to read and write.

Before Mexican Independence, before Women's Liberation, before any of that...Sister Juana found patronage in her brilliant European visitors (the viceroy and vicereine from Spain), spoke her mind (so frankly she courted trouble with theological authorities), and wrote reams and reams of treatises and poems. She ultimately died of the plague while tending to other sufferers.

Here is an exerpt from her poem, "I approach and I withdraw" by an unknown translator:

I approach, and I withdraw:
who but I could find
absence in the eyes,
presence in what's far?...

So caring is my love
that my present distress
minds hard-heartedness less
than the thought of its loss.

This poem reminds me slantwise of Catullus' "Odi et Amo" (a.k.a. "I hate and I love"). You can read all her work online here.

-J.F.

Sandra Cisneros (by Jenny Factor)

I love Sandra Cisneros for her dualities—of our various Americas and of our Americas-of-the-mind. She is the daughter of a Mexican father and a Chicana mother. Cisneros also writes across genres—which is why in spite of her famous fictions, I still get to mention her as a Cinco de Mayo poet.

When I think of Sandra Cisneros (1954-present), I see her poised in the plane bathroom in her poem “Original Sin”—shaving her underarms with a 69 cent razor so that when she lands in Mexico City to see her father's side of the family, she can “open my arms wide armpits clean/as a newborn’s soul”.

I also think of the day I read her very short story, “Elevens” (which you can read here) roughly eleven times in a row:

when you've eleven, you're also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don't. …Like some days you might say something stupid, and that's the part of you that's still ten. Or maybe some days you might need to sit on your mama's lap because you're scared, and that's the part of you that's five…Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden dolls that fit one inside the other, each year inside the next one. That's how being eleven years old is.

I don't know how 11 was for you, but that's how it still is for me!

-J.F.

Photo Credit: www.sandracisneros.com

Octavio Paz (by Jenny Factor)

Octavio Paz (1914-1998) is a Nobel Prize winner who, once long ago, spoke to a ragtag group of strangers in Boston, and I was there. I remember him as a short, disheveled, earnest man who traveled with a translator. Perpetually late, I had trammeled up the ramp to crowd into the back of the cozy (crazy?) Visual and Environmental Studies building. I don't know—and will never know—why he wasn't speaking in a Humanities building. I suppose I saw it all as part of his phenomenon of Otherness in a reading marked by the natural delays and frustrations of speech and translation.

As a poet, Paz owes much to the Surrealists. His essays—too—read slow and deep. I've labored off and on for years with The Labyrinth of Solitude (Grove Press, 1985). Here is an exerpt:

The foetus is at one with the world around it; it is pure brute life, unconscious of itself. When we are born we break the ties that joined us to the blind life we lived in the maternal womb, where there is no gap between desire and satisfaction. We sense the change as separation and loss, as abandonment, as a fall into a strange or hostile atmosphere. Later this primitive sense of loss becomes a feeling of solitude, and still later it becomes awareness: we are condemned to live alone, but also to transcend our solitude, to re-establish the bonds that united us with life in a paradisiac past.

--- from "The Dialectic of Solitude", Chapter 9

And that, Readers—in a nutshell—is why we make friends, why my son just hopped on his first rollercoaster (to keep pace with the other sixth graders), why some people tumble into one-night stands while other couples zip their days up in a great lifelong love affair. And it’s also the Why (of course!) behind the phenomenon of Mother's Day!

-J.F.

Tres Poetas for Cinco de Mayo (by Jenny Factor)

Hola, poetas! Though it's cloudy today, no lloren*. There's romance in the air. Here on the West Coast, local restaurants with surnames like "Cantina" and first names like "Dona Margarita" are streaming so many red-and-green flags and streamers you'd think it's Christmas. Radio shock jocks are punning furiously on cerveza, tequila, and churros. Not sure why the fuss? Here's a brief history of Cinco de Mayo—the so-called "Mexican Independence Day"*.

How about some poems for cinco de mayo? you plead.

Buena idea, amigos! Check back later today for tributes to three poets of Mexican heritage.

-J.F.
* "don't cry" May 5, 1862 was the day a group of soldiers in Puebla, Mexico, proved to thousands of French troops that Mexico intended to remain independent of foreign control. Others would argue, though, that the true Mexican Independence Day (independence from Spain) is May 15, 1810.

A Westcoast Special Report from Robert Montoya

(Editor Note: Saturday and Sunday marked the 13th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the UCLA campus—J.F.)*

The LA Times Book Festival—the inaugural event to a long, barbecue-filled summer! This particular festival is one of my favorite events in Los Angeles. It brings together an incredibly broad range of people—families, professional writers, students. It was great to board the Westwood-bound bus in Echo Park and see at least ten other people dressed for the event: bags, sandals, visor hats. Official "Book Buses" launched from other parts of Los Angeles and Orange Counties—some with spoken-word poets or community book talks on board.

On Sunday afternoon, I took a seminar with Robert Pinsky—small enough to move from a lecture hall to one of the graduate roundtables in Haines Hall. 13 or 14 participants gathered around (MFA students, graduates, teachers—even a high school principal) as our former U.S. Poet Laureate spoke about the musicality of poetry and the texture of language. Professor Pinsky typically asks his graduate students to compile a 40-page booklet of poems that are important or significant to them. He suggests either typing or writing the poems out by hand, updating it occasionally, and binding it into a personal commonplace book of modern times. I figured I could learn something from this and so have begun my own personal anthology. It's not often you write out poems by hand anymore...and I've found it helps more clearly understand the "feel" of the poem.

* Robert D. Montoya is a poet and manager of reader services for the UCLA Library Department of Special Collections. He contributed this report.

More Driving Moments in Los Angeles

This week, KUSC is offering collaborations between poets and musicians—good old stuff from folks you probably didn't know had ever collaborated.

Each day on the radio, there's an appealing sound byte. This morning, we heard from e.e. cummings (1894-1962)—that poet who likes to embed classic metric structures (rhymes and iambs) within a subversive forensics of language.

With collaboration (and creative relationships) on the mind, I re-read cummings' 73 poems, and found myself transported to a city street corner in Poem 30, as a clown handed me a daisy.

Here is an excerpt from that piece in honor of poet, teacher and thinker—Jason Shinder:

and while never saying a word

who was anything but dumb;
since the silence of him

self sang like a bird.
Mostpeople have been heard
screaming for international

measures that will render hell rational
—i thank heaven somebody's crazy

enough to give me a daisy.

* Self Portrait by e.e. cummings

-Jenny Factor