The Best American Poetry

PROZAC, ANGST, AUTHENTICITY AND OUR DUENDE [by Elena Karina Byrne]

Sweet are the uses of adversity

--Shakespeare, As You Like It

     No, "Fear Factor" is not a  television show, but a mantra of our times. Politics thrive on fear. We fear for our lives, our freedom, our health, our earth's health, our happiness...  A recent study showed antidepressants are the most popular drug in the U.S.  This is alarming and not surprising and dims our future light a bit, don't you think? Something perceptually shifts beneath our feet. Joshua Clover, as so many others, pokes at our “blindered view of the future,” so, shall we, consider philosophy's idea that our existence belongs to those who respond with angst? Heather McHugh, Thomas Lux, Michael Ryan and others have written about angst and authenticity, perhaps a more familiar breeding ground for poets, theoretical physicists and artists. At Sarah Lawrence College I remember the stories: Plath's empowerment with her angst and anger with her own subconscious; John Berryman being too drunk to speak, yet suddenly "sober" on stage when ready to read;  Theodore Roethke's battle with depression, a pair of pants found under the books and papers on his desk, etc., etc., and etc. The Urban Dictionary tells us angst is a brooding "transcendent emotion " and  "An 'Angst Culture' is also rising in the Scandinavia, where more and more people become 'Angst.' " Transcendent, transgressive? Personal angst (health failing, grief, loss of financial ability to survive, etc.) , collective angst (war, environmental destruction, social/cultural pressures...) has come together in language, language alive in an urgent need to move, to translate. James Wright told us he "wasted" his life; Sharon Olds knew the sorrow of family, the soul like a tiny hotel soap slipped between her ribs;  Sappho's love shook her heart, " Without warning / as a whirlwind / swoops on an oak" ; Lorca's duende called forth "black sounds,"  brute beauty, the "phosphorescent green anemones" of the soul, the "crushed grass" beneath our feet. Somehow, these days, can it seem our angst is less existential, less forgivable?  A. Alvarez's old book, Savage God, "The Art of Suicide" echoes Ophelia's "I was the more deceiv'd" and Hopkin's "But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me/ Thy wring-world right foot rock?", and all that comes with the risk of being alive amidst adversity, real and imagined.

     "Bear those ills we have" (Hamlet) with discourse's energy? With imagination's energy? (see Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare 1781 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nightmare) For the sake of this blog, I'd like to bring forth just a few poets who recently speak to us on this subject, who come into view from the subtext-mind: poets Cathy Colman, Amy Newlove Schroeder, Marcia Cohee, Lucie Brock-Broido, Lucia Perillo, Sholeh Wolpe, and Floyd Skloot are, like Virginia Woolf, "writing to a rhythm" that begins in the distressed mind and body.

    Pain and anxiety wrangle in the same bed of  "otherness." Poet and translator Sholeh Wolpe (The Scar Saloon & Rooftops of Tehran, Red Hen Press, 2004 & 2008; Sin, Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhazad, University of Arkansas Press, 2007) foreground-feels Lorca's idea of the duende, ignites simultaneity between sorrow and joy, and enters the body of alienation in order to speak and be heard: 

But mark this— I do not belong anywhere.

I have an accent in every language I speak.

Cathy Colman's  first book, Borrowed Dress, which won the Felix Pollak Prize, chosen by Mark Doty, gave us unexpected beauty within the myriad contexts of insight and philosophy, art and personal intimacy. Her fabulous forthcoming second book, Beauty's Tattoo (Tebot Bach, 2009) includes some poems that view illness which creates an exiled "other" self . The first poem, "Half-Life: Postcard To Atom," opens the metaphorical trap door, not to the basement or attic, but to the sky:

I’ll tell you what I’ve inherited: years that go in both directions./

There is no salt divinity here, no rain.

All night I dream of a new body.

not next to me, but my own.

The by-product of  this struggle is a profound eloquence. Colman addresses this by telling us we are our own rescuers in her poem "Letter To A Stranger" :

and you’re calling to yourself

before you die of exposure, “Over here,” 

just over this bridge’s sudden amnesia,

“I’m over here.” 

    Another wonderful Californian poet, Amy Newlove Schroeder,(the new 2009 Field Prize winner with her book Sleep Hotel) like Cathy Colman, takes personal angst as the fractured self to task by bringing it into the universal realm of what makes us authentic. Here's a seized moment that comes from darkness, what Randall Jarrell called, "darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness./ And we call it wisdom. It is pain."

Stolen from the Night Factory

 

nights were the worst—

I was not hollowed out—I was belled

 

gazing out the window at the empty branches of the imago tree

 

my brain a rising sun over a blasted horizon

the steel-wool conviction of it

 

interrupted capital, interrupted stream—a dam in my mind

 

all closed, all fired, all friendless and stupefied

 

inside: nothing,

not even the covered wagon of days to come—

 

I want to end with Lucie Brock-Broido's poem-excerpt, "How Can It Be I Am No Longer I"  which energizes what is lost by what is found:

I was a flint

To bliss & barbarous, a bristling

Of tracks like a starfish carved on his inner arm,

A tindering of tissue, a reliquary, twinned.

...

That I would be--- ... fanatic against

The vanishing....

Let us bliss-back into ourselves through language. Let us be fanatic in our writing, against all things vanishing!

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Yona Harvey

Since May 3, Rob Casper, editor of jubilat, has selected work from his pages to post for us on Sundays. Starting next week, we will be showcasing the taste of William Waltz, editor of Conduit.
Thank you, Rob, for illustrating ways that poets continue to invent the world. And welcome, William.
-- DL

For this post, my last for the Best American Poetry blog, I decided to do something new: feature a poem we've accepted for jubilat so recently that it isn't even yet slated for an issue! When I heard my dear friend Yona Harvey read this poem some months ago, I knew we had to have it for the magazine. The deftness with which it unspools its extended metaphor (and the final twist of personification), coupled with its brilliant use of repetition both to rev up and slow down the poem, really wowed me. I also loved its tone, which reminds me of Yona: quietly direct, honest, powerful. But most of all I was thrilled to see how in "Hurricane" Yona reframed an age-old dilemma: how parents let their children rush head-first into a dangerous, even catastrophic, world. It seems like an almost impossible subject to make new, and yet Yona does it so well I have to believe poetry can and will reinvent the world.
-- Rob Casper

HURRICANE

Four tickets left, I let her go --
Firstborn into a hurricane.

I thought she escaped
The floodwaters. No -- but her

Head is empty of the drowned
For now -- though she took

Her first breath below sea level.

Ahhh       awe      &       aw
Mama, let me go -- she speaks

What every smart child knows --
To get grown you unlatch

Your hands from the grown

& up & up & up & up
She turns—latched in the seat

Of a hurricane. You let
Your girl what? You let

Your girl what?

I did so she do I did
so she do so --

Girl, you can ride

A hurricane & she do
& she do & she do & she do

She do make my river

An ocean. Memorial,
Baptist, Protestant birth -- my girl

Walked away from a hurricane.

& she do & she do & she do & she do
She do take my hand a while longer.

The haunts in my pocket

I’ll keep to a hum: Katrina was
a woman I knew. When you were

an infant she rained on you & she
do & she do & she do & she do

-– Yona Harvey

Rob Casper (and Lisa Olstein) on Prose, Palemale and Lola

We started jubilat primarily to publish poems, and we are lucky enough to fill the magazine with amazing work by both emerging and established poets. These days, we get thousands of submissions through our online Submission Manager system (which jubilat helped develop through the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses), and when we do layout we usually have dozens of leftover poems -- a terrific position, as it allows us to give a distinctive shape each issue.

After ten years of publication, it is still challenging to find the right lyric prose and found pieces to complement the poems we run. While poems come to us, we -- the editors and myself, as well as the contributing editors and editors-at-large -- continually need to search for the right prose. We look for work that not only does what poetry does -- i.e., shows how we use language in open-ended ways to act out the wildly, wonderfully mysterious condition we know as living -- but makes us realize how poetry is not some specialized, removed practice but a way of engaging the world as universal and as necessary as the language it comes from.

Lisa Olstein, our first managing editor (and a terrific poet -- her second book, Lost Alphabet, just came out from Copper Canyon Press), happened upon just such a piece, which she called "Today the Sky Belonged to Lola." As Lisa said in an e-mail to me back in February 2007, it came from a website that "outrageously, lovingly documents the lives of Palemale and his partner Lola, the red tailed hawks living in/near Central Park." As you may recall, this was national news back at the time -- the co-op where the two hawks lived were debating removing their nest, sparking a huge public response. Lisa sorted through a year's worth of daily entries to compile what she called "a strange narrative that is part celebrity urban love story, part paparazzi obsession with celebrity urban love story, part who knows what?" Here's a snippet of the pieces, which ran eight pages in jubilat 15 -- perhaps you can decide what it is really about!

Beautiful Lola!

They didn’t visit the falconry circus up at the East Meadow today.

Lola!

The beautiful couple on the Oreo.

Late in the evening he abandoned any attempt to make a catch and retired in the vicinity of Pinetum. Lola went to bed on the Beresford.

Palemale.

Lola over the Model Sailboat Pond.

I wonder if the air feels solid under his chest or does it feel as gentle as it does on my face?

Palemale peers into the Linda #2 window.

Palemale heading uptown.

Palemale and Lola had some visitors today.

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Paige Ackerson-Kiely

One cannot blog this weekend without referring to Independence Day. I thought of honoring the holiday by writing about patriotism, and how liberal thinkers should reclaim the term as a way to strive for the great ideals our nation was founded upon. And I thought of saying how such ideals always come face-to-face with the messiness, the ambiguity of reality -- and, how poems are ideally equipped to showcase the latter in service of the former. I even started searching for a good poem from jubilat's pages that deals with politics and identity in the complex ways I think they ought to be dealt with -- with an understanding that we, and the world, never operate in an either/or manner (or, in terms of metaphor, never operate according to tenor or vehicle), but by holding both at once, and then some.

But something funny happened: I found a poem that went in a different direction in relation to our annual celebration of nationhood. Which is the point: any point I was going to make about the above, in a polemical way, is far less interesting than what I can discover by looking for what a given poem can tell me. The poem below, by Paige Ackerson-Kiely from issue 11, made me think of fireworks -- not their pyrotechnical specs, but the great rapturous spectacle of them, and the cultural event (with crowded streets of onlookers) that takes place around their going off. If I weren't looking for a poem to write about on this holiday, I'm sure I never would've made such an associate leap with Paige's poem -- even now, I know it's a stretch. But that's one of the wonderful ways poems work: by suggesting more than they seem to mean on the surface, and being open to larger possibilities -- allowing a reader to read into its images, its epiphanies. I love to imagine that when Page's poem begins "I locked up all / of the beautiful things / that might move me" it could refer to those big large colorful explosions in the sky, and that by time it arrives at "Lay / down your sweet head / for now // to know as we do know / to know. To know / one damn thing" it could be saying something essential about who we are -- alone and together -- at this moment, when we celebrate how our country began and dream of what it can become.

-- Rob Casper

THE POTENTIAL OF RAPTURE

I locked up all
of the beautiful things
that might move me.

The bell around a dark ankle
turning and turning.

A stranger smiles.
Her face is no curling-up
in bed.

If I knew the world was going
to end, I’d just run out into
the street and fuck the first
chick I saw, says a
teenage virgin.

Where you go when you are scared

that we might have the verdant
and the humid. Friendly air.
People meaning their handwaves.
An answer is the way you can jump
from a ledge equal to your height
without getting hurt.
Your home.
Every pane of glass
someone laid on their precious
breath. There.
Or there.

Boy I am
leaving too many rooms
for the crowded street. Lay
down your sweet head
for now

to know as we do know
to know. To know
one damn thing.

-– Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by Lisa Jarnot

There's nothing like holding a new issue of jubilat for the first time. Until that moment, the issue -- and all the work that goes into it, from selecting poems to conducting and revising interviews to ordering and proofreading -- seems unfinished. But what a feeling, to see and touch the end result! This week I had such an experience, with jubilat 16. It was a thrill to see how well the cover, by poet and jubilat editor-at-large Terrance Hayes, turned out -- it was based on a hand-out he gave for a panel presentation on Wallace Stevens, and ties in well with both Srikanth Reddy's piece on Stevens and digression and our first-ever forum, on African-American Experimental Poetry (which we'd been talking about doing for years -- so exciting to see it in print). j16 also includes many poets I've admired, published in our pages for the first time -- poets like Brenda Ijima, Ange Mlinko, Alice Notley, and Ed Roberson. We managed to include some wonderful found pieces/reprints, too, like a selection from 20th Century visionary Buckminster Fuller's book I Seem to Be a Verb and selected aphorisms from the 13th Century German philosopher Albertus Magnus.

Contributing editor Brett Fletcher Lauer (who is my co-worker at the Poetry Society of America, and a poetry editor at A Public Space -- he's a brilliant poet, too) was responsible for the latter reprint, as well as another new section for the magazine: a trio of responses to Jack Spicer's "Magic Workshop" questionnaire (which the famed Bay Area poet used to select students for his private classes). As Spicer wrote by way of explanation/instruction, "This questionnaire is in no sense designed to indicate whether you can write poetry . . . [but] I must have some guide as to which of you would most benefit from a workshop of this particular content. Some of the questions will seem bizarre or pointless, but it would be useful if you would answer them all as precisely as possible." Christian Hawkey and Matthew Rohrer both contributed their precise, and delightful, answers, as did Lisa Jarnot -- the below is by Jarnot, whose work I have admired for years, and it is also her first time in the magazine!

Jack Spicer Magic Workshop Questionnaire

I.
With the gums gone marching
are they gone. And though the nose is next to nothing,
the eye is marching gone.
And now the downside
Of the radiator on the downside of the floor
is it, the even row of it
fit to raise
a din of children.
You will count the teeth of mongoose
You will stay in the midst of them,
You will know the mongoose, you will hear them
in the narrow mongoose dawn.

II.
In the snow endlessness
Snow, and sea salt
He lost his sounding snow.
The color white. He walks
Over an antelope skin carpet made
of snow.
Without eyes or thumbs
He suffers all the snow
But the snow flakes quiver
In the snow and in the endlessness
How is it that a wound
His snow is left.
Snow, and sea salt and snow
In the snow blown endlessness.

III.

Blue-rooted heron, spring lake
frog song, like me no traveler
Taking buoyed rest, loose-winged water-bird
And dumb with music cheeping.
I stand upon the waterfront, like him no traveler
traveling, dangling on traveled wings.
I caw and take my rest.
They will not hunt us for
The flesh of the hunter is hunted and is dumb.
The sound of an arrow, the sight of a hunter
is hunting a  life without wings.
So let us die for death alone is motion
And death alone will make these herons fly.
Dead wingless flycatching ocean
hybridized to die.

-- Lisa Jarnot

Rob Casper Presents a Poem by L. S. Klatt

   I had breakfast with my friend Amanda Schaffer today -- in addition to being a poet, she is a science and medical columnist for Slate and its newly launched offshoot DoubleX (www.doublex.com). We talked about her new article in the latter magazine, "This Goat Did Not Come From an Artificial Womb," (http://www.doublex.com/section/health-science/goat-did-not-come-artificial-womb). The article addresses the scientific and cultural issues around the idea of "baby-in-the-box technology," and about the current line of thinking that "gestation now seems like a kind of cellular apprenticeship," in which "cellular cross-talk" and other conditions — from the noise of the womb to the mother's levels of stress — can affect the baby-to-be.

    What does this have to do with jubilat? One of the magazine's goals is to create a dialogue that showcases the beauty and strangeness of the ordinary. To that end, we've run some pieces that on first glance don't seem to belong in a poetry magazine: interviews with a rogue perfumist and a neon sign maker, a list of moves from the Wrestling Information Archive, journals from penguin scientists in Antarctica, a list of conceptual approaches to buildings, and so on. Amanda's article shows the ordinary made strange -- pregnancy outside the body -- as well as detailing how ultimately mysterious the ordinary is, as science can't replicate the body's complexity. And my few quoted sections above show how Amanda's playful, often metaphoric language shows how much her version of science writing has in common with what shows up in our pages.

    Finally, this morning's conversation reminded of a wonderful poem by L. S. Klatt that we published back in issue 7:

    FETUS IN ORBIT

    I played with the pre-cows in outer space

    they were cows of a higher mathematics

    amoebas absent hoofs
    no tails to sweep the sparkles

    but I was at home in their blacks & whites
    the folds, the solar system

    then I was told I would eat a thousand cows

    I lay there, disbeliever, like a figure 8 in milk

-- L. S. Klatt

Poems both refigure and resonate with the world around the reader. "Fetus In Orbit" connects to Amanda's article, and the debates it contains -- both problematize the space of gestation, and what that means about who we are. "This Goat Did Not Come From an Artificial Womb," while pointing to trends that show a greater certainty about pregnancy, also shows how much we don't yet know -- Klatt's poem seems to take this as a starting-off point, and its imagery is powerfully suggestive without answering anything. Looking at both the article and poem, I can only shake my head and smile -- I’m still trying to figure out exactly what I think or feel. And isn't that the most interesting place to be in -- the place where we are psychically still unfinished, and constantly developing?

-- Rob Casper

Rob Casper Presents Christian Hawkey

The poem of Christian's I choose from The Book of Funnels takes "the end / of the driveway" as a point of departure, and inhabits a psychic landscape as meaningful in its openness as Michael Teig's is in its focus. This is a poem whose quatrains visually illustrate how it moves: as a kind of funneling of the imagination, where Christian's great sense of play contends with another end, "the end of us." It also shows how a poet can be a collector of words, waiting for the right place/moment to feature what is otherwise useless -- you'll see what I mean, I assure you!

-- Rob Casper

NIGHT WITHOUT THIEVES

The day is going to come -- it will come -- put on your nightgown,
put on your fur. And yea unto those who go unclothed,
unshod, without fear, fingering the corners
of bright countertops

and calmly, absentmindedly, toeing the edges of clouds
drifting in a puddle. Put on your deep-sea gear,
your flippers, and walk to the end
of the driveway.

It will come. Be not afraid to chase large animals.
Once, I had a conversation with the eye
of a moose, looming wetly
through the branches.

I was terrified. I froze. I backed away. I imagined it.
And then on the other hand there are those
truly fearless: schools of silver minnows
darting in and out

of the gills of blue whales -- how many invisible organisms
do we sustain without knowing it? Our own,
for one. Put on your crowded body,
like Vallejo

who pulled the sea over his shoulders in the morning
and stepped firmly into ground. Thus,
when the day came, he conducted
electricity

perfectly -- unknowingly -- and wrote by the red light of his teeth
after a glass of dark wine. Put on your lamp shade.
Put on your cage. If, in the shape of a key,
the shape of a woman,

a bank of swollen clouds surging over the tree line,
a world basipetally descends
break it open: how pome
and granate

meet in dense honeycombs, red seeds erupting inside a mouth.
And though we lose eleven eyelashes a day
by blinking alone we cannot enter
the Kingdom,

nor can we move sideways, high on this narrow goat path,
without the proper footgear; a pebble's kicked loose,
and the echo returning
from the ravine

sounds like an avalanche, and is. Put on your helmet.
Take off your clothes. If anyone even thinks
about laughing
it will be

the end of us -- Rita, hand over the kazoo. Thank you.
Now hand over the other one. Good.
And in case of an emergency
realize, quickly,

there is no emergency and move on. Like a thief in the night
the day came. Then night came,
and emptied out its thieves
into the furious sunlight.

-- Christian Hawkey

Rob Casper presents Michael Teig

Ten years ago, as summer started, two friends and I dreamed up jubilat. We did everything, from deciding on a title (early ideas like Pome and String Index didn't make the cut) and a size (we wanted our magazine almost to fit in one's back pocket) to creating a budget and setting up an office at UMass, where we were grad students in the MFA program. (Luckily, the faculty were very supportive -- the late Agha Shahid Ali, then director of the program, cleared out one side of his office for us). My friends, Christian Hawkey and Michael Teig, stayed on as editors for ten issues. As successful as they were in that capacity, they also wrote award-winning collections of poems.

Michael's collection, Big Back Yard, came out first. It was the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, and was published by BOA Editions in 2003. Here's one of my favorite poems from that collection -- a poem I got to read the first day of the first workshop I took at UMass! Next week: Christian Hawkey.

THE HOLE WE'VE BEEN DIGGING

Since I've come home, put on all my shoes,
watched lawns, frankly green and unapologetic,
lick up to rickety bridges, the neighborhood houses

come into focus cautiously, like something dropped
from the sky, like memory, the narrow street
sleepless trees, the cars postered in leaves and pollen.

I've come home and the pond is back
in a slate suit, suit of hours. I dig in the yard
with a stick, stop at the grocery, handle produce.

My mother is older, more urgent, less assuring
as she tilts into the stove with a cigarette --
We're rarely as good at ourselves as we imagine

and this could go on for hours
while only the radiator has something to say.
It's always time for work here, about to rain.

In the street, people you don't know
don't talk to you, though they say heaven
is a place of great civility

where a statuette of diligence
stands straight up, or some other
virtue too mystifying to account for.

I'd like to believe it entails not getting dressed
for a day or a week, the rain-soaked and bikini-clad,
the under-employed with a halo of bar-darts.

That it happens here, casual as undressing.
My companions come and go as they wish.
We lay down in the hole we've been digging

and it's a pleasure, really, alone or with a friend,
rarely looking at each other, thinking
you hear the screen-door, some recollected music,

the river and lumber trucks racing out of town.
The past is mostly just that:
I watch it all a bit strangely.

Thirty years ago on this street, my father drove me home
in a blue convertible, wondering like all parents
if he could simply keep me alive

-- Michael Teig

All these years later, I'm still struck by the poem's quiet lyricism -- its subtle stretching and deepening of the domestic, the way it  speaks of home and family so gracefully that you don't realize (or, in keeping with the narrator's understated, offhanded tone, want to realize) what the stakes are until the final couplet.

-- Rob Casper

Rob Casper presents "jubilat" (and Sarah Gridley)

As the publisher of jubilat, I rarely edit the poems we accept. Ninety per cent of the time we take what we get, as is. In the case of the other 10%, we might ask to change a word or two, or possibly end the poem a line earlier; but no dramatic alterations. While I believe the best poems create their own terms -- terms that push our thinking in new and exciting ways -- I sometimes envy editors of fiction and nonfiction, who are expected, even encouraged, to edit the pieces that end up in the pages of their magazine.

However, once in a great while I have the opportunity to work with the author on a poem we have accepted. This was the case for Sarah Gridley's "Acousmatic," which we published in the last issue. We had published Sarah previously -- her poem "Cuckoo's Report" was featured in jubilat 3. I greatly admired that poem as well as her first collection, Weather Eye Open, which was published in the  University of  California Press New Poetry Series in 2005. After Sarah read for the Poetry Society of America's third New American Poets Festival in 2007 (in addition to publishing jubilat, I also work as Programs Director for the PSA), I asked her to send along some new work to the magazine.

Included in Sarah's batch of submissions was "Acousmatic." Before we had gotten a chance to respond, she sent along a much revised second version. It was this that sparked my interest -- it seemed like it was moving in the right direction formally and rhetorically. And I also found it as powerful as it was mysterious, like acousmatic sound itself: the notion of hearing something without knowing its cause. Sarah sent in a third version while we were looking at the second, and I didn't like it as much. After discussions with my editors, I wrote her back asking her to consider returning to the earlier version. She sent along another draft in response and told me the poem had been difficult for her to edit because it dealt with the experience of witnessing friends bury their child. The questions that preoccupied her in the poem were "how parents can survive such losses, how friends can help only so far, how no 'higher power' feels accountable or responsive to me, how beauty, turned a fraction on its axis, feels vicious."

This note made me realize anew how poems help us contend with the most confusing experiences, and how privileged I was to be able to publish such essentially human work. I was also grateful to Sarah for being so collaborative in the revision process. "Acousmatic" went through one more revision, and the result still makes me marvel at how a poem can be so philosophically, psychically, and imaginatively engaging.

-- Rob Casper

ACOUSMATIC

not a concept, much less a faith—
not quiet

but coming forward from the dust, a white mare
partially bone, primarily fast in the higher field

and was the sound of snow dissolving, glass being blown
from lips of beginners

where by love I mean a failing,
copious and opaque, heart without a practical power

most feeling the gives of undone
fountain and basin, the water

penned in, the tension to ring where the water
turns down, where the beads are cracking

our sun’s white code
in the courtyard foreign beyond the window

plurally into something else
when I live on the look of muteness, where I lived on the look

of happiness
rose that was quanta—

I ask after cost—after gouge of grass
and sky, after cause

that hides its cause
in unsustainable shapes of pain

in tempos habituating grass
redbud trees in arriving and splitting

accost, accost, come closer to my ribs
not only the understanding

has a language
be it wind in rings of meanest direction

or deepest remove when bluest in surface
by memory I mean

a skin: a cover for the underworlds
that we might try to breathe

or hear in wind a single
soothing thing

or hear of wind a kindred displacement
in our skins to the added

subtractions we live in, sun over sand, the coppered hem-
wetness, sun in tons of bells, in apples cut open

for eating
yes now I am listening to your fallible sounds

pity for the you
that is stranded, pity for the you

who dazed or faceless
where now I am hearing a mechanical click

to see I had no beautiful shelter
the motioning colors of the trees, the edgewise

pit before beginning
to take up

listening as something harder, to take up
walking as something longer

attach me, walking, attach me

--  Sarah Gridley

Rob Casper Presents Heather McHugh and Sarah Manguso

jubilat has had the great good fortune to have work included in The Best American Poetry a number of times -- a coup for the magazine, and a great affirmation for the poets. In fact, I'm happy to say that the very first poem we accepted was our first poem in the anthology, which I still find hard to believe! Here it is:

MY ONE

and only: money

minus one. No noun
like a pronoun! -- best of all

the jealous kind. Come, come,
company doll, cide with a coin,

one moan, one
more, honey

bunch.

Of course, such lexical wizardry could come only from Heather McHugh. She was one of my teachers -- many years ago I audited her seminar at the University of Washington. And what a seminar! I read poets like Anne Carson, Paul Celan, Michael Palmer, and Yannis Ritsos for the first time, and looked at poems like Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Filling Station" and James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" in new ways, thanks to Heather’s brilliant readings. (I still have her handout of poems, tucked away in the top shelf of my closet for safekeeping.) Heather’s own poems are brilliant, and it’s amazing to see in "My One" how much she makes of so little said, in a darkly swervy take on the beloved -- multiple meanings included. 

I thought by way of contrast I'd also include Sarah Manguso's "Address to Winnie in Paris," from our third issue, which Robert Creeley picked for the 2002 Best American Poetry. If Heather's poem creates the intricate workings of a tiny but momentously and mysteriously important machine, Sarah's poem lays out in seemingly straightforward prose the logic of its address -- but with enough accruing layers to infuse it with lyric power. It is the kind of poem I believed in completely, word for word, the first time I read it -- and I still do. And though it speaks at a distance from its subject (and its subject's object), its take on love is as internal, and as psychically and philosophically evocative, as that of the poem above.

ADDRESS TO WINNIE IN PARIS

Winnie, I am writing this on behalf of my friend Harris. He loves you and wants you to love him. I have never been to Paris, but I have heard that it is a good place to be in love in.

The Arc de Triomphe is real. The Jardin des Tuileries is real. The Eiffel Tower is very real. The carafe of wine, the remains of dinner, the bill: all real. None are necessary to your life.

Harris has confided that he enjoys dating. To profess such a thing is to advertise a facility for one kind of loneliness, which has nothing to do with the other kind: the one you did not know was there until afterward.

The part of the betrayal which wounds the most is hearing that it has already happened.

Diderot wrote that the word is not the thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing. Plato wrote of the need to be reconjoined with the rest of oneself. My analyst speaks of codependent impulses in modern society. These various explanations are metaphors for an inaccessible truth.

In de Laclos, a betrayal is an invitation to a string of further betrayals, each one taking you further from the original. If the hell for lovers consists in being betrayed, the hell for the beloved consists in betraying. These hells constitute the world.

A much older friend writes: Most romances do not last, and it is best to forget them. Tolstoy writes: All happy families are alike. My teacher says: Bad poems are all bad for the same reason: imprecision

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bulfinch’s, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.

Up above the high-water mark, angels with their teeth and their sharp little wings watch us with murderous disinterest. They sentence us for the one crime we all commit.

It is said by area doctors that cowboys notoriously misrepresent their degree of pain. For this reason their diseases progress far beyond the point at which treatment is beneficial. Are they lying?

If I could read only one sentence for the rest of my life, it would be the one where the jailer says to Socrates I can see that you are a good man, the best one that has ever been in this place.

These examples are meant to dissuade you, Winnie, from loving men other than my friend Harris. He asked me to write this poem.

Arvol Looking Horse, a Sioux leader, called Devils Tower the heart of everything that is. Very large objects remind us of the possibility of the infinite, which has no size at all. But we understand it as something very, very large.

What the lover seeks is the possibility of return, the strange heart beating under every stone.