The Best American Poetry

Berlin Postcard: The Giants Find Each Other [by Katha Pollitt]

Saturday, October 3, was Reunification Day, the anniversary of the formal reuniting of East and West Germany in l990. Here in Berlin, where I am currently living, the big event was a weekend-long outdoor spectacle involving Die Riesen, giant marionettes created by the French street theatre company Royale de Luxe. Some two million people turned out to watch a huge little-girl giant and an even more enormous grown-up-man giant dressed as a deep-sea diver wandering in search of each other in various neighborhoods. It was meant as a 'Maerchen" or fairy-tale, although no one seemed to know the story of the little girl and the deep-sea diver (who sometimes wore a yellow fisherman's slicker and rain hat). Something about separation and reunion, anyway. Since it was a beautiful warm blue-sky day (one of the few! it rains a lot here) my husband and I set out to find them. We walked and walked through the Tiergarten and stood in a huge crowd on Unter den Linden next to two rather cranky dads who pooh-poohed the whole extravaganza as overly expensive (a running theme here -- Berlin is a poor city, by German standards) but were clearly enjoying themselves. The promised giants didn't appear and eventually we had to leave. (Two bits of local anthropology you'd never see in New York: at the street fair stretching along Unter den Linden you could buy many kinds of alcoholic beverages, including schnapps, and just stand about pleasantly drinking; the great lawn in the Tiergarten, along which the crowds walked, was littered with the bicycles people had used to get there. Unlocked bicycles.)

My German teacher, Ursula, whom we ran into later, said the problem was that the little girl giant was kaputt. Sehr traurig! But late that night we saw the two giants at the Brandenburg Gate, sleeping. The little-girl giant was sleeping on the big-man giant's lap. You could hear them breathing very quietly. It was strangely moving.
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Perils of the Poetry Reading [by Katha Pollitt]

    Am I the only person who finds it hard to follow an unfamiliar poem when I hear it read out loud and don’t have the text in front of me? Even when reading to myself at my own pace, I might have to go over a poem several times to really get it,  but  at a reading,  the poems whizz by  unstoppably-- no chance of a second hearing, and all the helpful visual cues of print , like punctuation, italics, quotation marks, and even line breaks,  are absent.  A stray thought enters my head --  I wonder why they painted this room turquoise? -- and in seconds I’ve lost the thread.  (I’m speaking of what you might call “literary poetry” here,  poetry written primarily to be read silently, not spoken word, which is intended for the ear from the outset.)

   I often find that the poems I’ve enjoyed most at a reading  seem oddly flat on the page when I hunt them down in a book.   What made the poem seem striking and fresh was  the poet’s performance: the energy and especially the humor was in the voice and manner and gestures, not the words themselves.  Or it was the story the poem told: the poetry reading as a series of anecdotes, with the poet placing and embellishing each one in his introductions: My uncle ran a chicken farm in Iowa,  and when he ran off with the Methodist minister’s wife my aunt killed all the chickens and  gave them to the nuns, and out of that comes this next poem, “Saint Rooster and the Holy Choir of Hens.”  it’s been suggested, in fact, that the proliferation of poetry readings, and their importance to a poet’s career, has actually changed the way poets --  “literary poets” -- write, encouraging verbal simplicity, talkiness, easy emotions, simple narratives, and punchlines. It’s  the poet as stand-up comedian/tragedian. 

    Still, you can see why poets would try to shape their art to please their audience -- and notice how we now commonly speak of  poetry’s audience rather than poetry’s readers, which tells you something right there.   It can be painful and embarrassing to stand up before a small group of  miscellaneous strangers who expect you to entertain them and instead offer poems they might find bewildering, or remote.  I've given readings  at which I just want to say, oh well, never mind, let’s just go have a beer and talk about health care reform. 

      Wislawa Szymborska’s “Poetry Reading” (translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)   may be the definitive account of a reading at its awful,  humiliating worst.  To paraphrase the old Jewish joke about the Catskills hotel (“The food is terrible!” “Yes, and the portions are so small!”), the audience is not only tiny, it’s not even listening.  And yet, Symborska disperses her pity, her warmth and her satirical humor so evenly among poets and audience members and even the muse, poor thing,  that what in lesser hands would be just another complaint about the world’s indifference to art becomes a gesture of understanding, forgiveness, love.

POETRY READING

To be a boxer, or not to be there
at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds? 

Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare --

it's time to start this cultural affair.

Half came inside because it started raining, 

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

The women here would love to rant and rave, 

but that's for boxing. Here they must behave. 

Dante's Infemo is ringside nowadays.

Likewise his Paradise. O Muse.

Oh, not to be a boxer but a poet, 

one sentenced to hard shelleying for life, 

for lack of muscles forced to show the world 

the sonnet that may make the high-school reading lists 

with luck. O Muse,

O bobtailed angel, Pegasus.

In the first row, a sweet old man's soft snore: 

he dreams his wife's alive again. What's more, 

she's making him that tart she used to bake. 

Aflame, but carefully--don't burn his cake!

we start to read. O Muse.

 

        -- by Wislawa Szymborska 
                (from View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems Harvest Books, 1996)

Readers Real and Ideal [by Katha Pollitt]

 I love the Gertrude Stein quip David Comiskey posted in response to my last blog: “I write for myself and strangers.”  that just about covers it, doesn’t it?  Another reader sent in a  different version: “I write for myself and strange people.” That’s probably  just as true.   For some more portraits of the reader in one’s head, I queried members of  WOM-PO, a listserv of mostly poets (both sexes) devoted to discussion of poetry by women.   Here are some answers: Emily Dickinson,  YOU, “the me which is that feathered thing alive and barnacled on/as my soul,”  “people who need my words,”   a friend in Colorado with whom the poet has exchanged a weekly poem for the past 33 (!) years, “my former next-door neighbor, Joan, who didn't go to college, but who is a terrific reader,” a  longstanding poetry critique group,  a local poetry listserv in Sebastopol, CA. Linda Rodriguez  says she writes for “a literate, reading person somewhere out there in the world, someone curious who wants to see beneath the surface of life” -- a version of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader --  but others longed to reach people, including their relatives,  who didn’t read poetry and who might be electrified by something they wrote. “When I find a fifteen year old girl in a small town somewhere that has read a poem and gone on to the library filled with questions,” writes Sina Queyras,  “Well, that’s what it’s about for me.” If that doesn’t happen, don’t lose heart.  As Kate Bernadette Benedict points out “My internalized reader may not even be born yet!”  

  Mary Oliver  agrees with Benedict.   “I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now,”  she wrote in “A Poetry Handbook.” Of course, Oliver is  one of the most popular poets  in America right this minute -- it’s not like she’s waiting for posterity to catch up with her.   Billy Collins,  the other most popular  poet,   has a  riff on Oliver.  It’s a funny poem, but I can’t decide if he’s making fun of her.  Is he mocking her somewhat vatic claim on posterity, debunking the idea of posterity as anything special, ruefully deflating the concept of universality, or even comparing  Oliver’s poetry to a wet dog?  What do you think?

To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now

           

       I write poems for a stranger who will be born in some distant country hundreds of years from now. - Mary Oliver

Nobody here likes a wet dog.

No one wants anything to do with a dog

that is wet from being out in the rain

or retrieving a stick from a lake.

Look how she wanders around the crowded pub tonight

going from one person to another

hoping for a pat on the head, a rub behind the ears,

something that could be given with one hand

without even wrinkling the conversation.

But everyone pushes her away,

some with a knee, others with the sole of a boot.

Even the children, who don’t realize she is wet

until they go to pet her,

push her away

then wipe their hands on their clothes.

And whenever she heads toward me,

I show her my palm, and she turns aside.

O stranger of the future!

O inconceivable being!

whatever the shape of your house,

however you scoot from place to place,

no matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

I bet nobody there likes a wet dog either.

I bet everyone in your pub,

even the children, pushes her away.

 -- Billy Collins

The Expulsion

Adam was happy -- now he had someone to blame
for everything: shipwrecks, Troy,
the gray face in the mirror.

Eve was happy -- now he would always need her.
She walked on boldly, swaying her beautiful hips.

The serpent admired his emerald coat, 
the Angel burst into flamea
(he'd never approved of them, and he was right).

Even God was secretly pleased: Let
History begin!

The dog had no regrets, trotting by Adam's side
self-importantly, glad to be rid

of the lion, the toad, the basilisk, the white-footed mouse,
who were also happy and forgot their names immediately.

Only the Tree of Knowledge stood forlorn,
its small hard bitter crab apples

glinting high up, in a twilight of black leaves.
How pleasant it had been, how unexpected

to have been, however briefly,
the center of attention.

                        -- by Katha Pollitt
                            from The Mind-Body Problem (Random House, 2009)

Whom do you write your poems for? By Katha Pollitt

It’s easy to describe the readers I  have in mind when I write my column in The Nation:  the 185,000 Nation subscribers, who are mostly liberals, progressives and leftists  of various sorts,  college-educated, over thirty, up on the news.  I know quite a few of these readers, and hear from them all the time.  Beyond the magic subscription circle, there’s the larger community of feminists, other journalists, and writers I admire including a few dead ones in my head. 

   But whom do I write my poems for?  “Anyone who wants them” is one easy answer. “Myself” is another. Both are true in a way, but incomplete.  Who is that “anyone” who pockets the breadcrumbs I cast upon the water?  And if I write for myself, why do I  try to publish my poems and care what anyone thinks about them? At least for me, communication is intrinsic to writing, so I must have some blurry idea in mind about who I’m communicating with -- or, perhaps more accurately, given the state of poetry these days,  wish I was communicating with.

  There’s a sociological answer to the readership question. According to  The Poetry Foundation’s  survey, “Poetry in America,”  the most frequent readers of poetry (or, as the study oddly calls them, “users” of poetry)  are middle-aged women with post-secondary degrees, who began reading, or using, poetry when they were young.  That’s me all over!   Sociologically,  “I write for myself” and “I write for anyone who wants it” are not such different statements after all.

   But what about the ideal reader?  The one who really sees what you are trying to do in a poem, and if you can please that demanding but simpatico person, you  feel you’ve gotten it right? If you’re lucky, you might have a teacher like that when you’re young, or a  friend, or a fellow poet or two.  Failing that, or in addition to that,  you might have to imagine your ideal reader, as Dante for all intents and purposes imagined Beatrice, whom he’d had such a crush on when they were kids.

   One popular type of imaginary ideal reader is, curiously, the non-reader.  In “In My Craft or Sullen Art,”  Dylan Thomas claimed he wrote not for literary people or for the ages but for “the lovers,/their arms round the griefs of the ages,/who pay no praise nor wages/nor heed my craft or art.”  And indeed, if  those lovers disentwined themselves long enough to read a poem, it was probably one by Thomas,  one of the last poet-celebrities of the English-speaking world. 

   Yeats (right) was another one who envisioned an ideal non-reader. In l914, fed up with  the  ideologically overheated  Dublin literary-political scene, he imagined his ideal reader as a Connemara fisherman,  a “wise and simple man”  whom Yeats believed belonged to an older, better, truer, more organic (in the old sense) Irish people.  What saves “The Fisherman”  from nationalistic  sentimentality is Yeats’ admission that this ideal  fisherman-reader does not  exist. He is  a necessary fiction, a dream:

 

Although I can see him still.

The freckled man who goes

To a grey place on a hill

In grey Connemara clothes

At dawn to cast his flies,

It's long since I began

To call up to the eyes

This wise and simple man.

All day I'd looked in the face

What I had hoped 'twould be

To write for my own race

And the reality;

The living men that I hate,

The dead man that I loved,

The craven man in his seat,

The insolent unreproved,

And no knave brought to book

Who has won a drunken cheer,

The witty man and his joke

Aimed at the commonest ear,

The clever man who cries

The catch-cries of the clown,

The beating down of the wise

And great Art beaten down.

Maybe a twelvemonth since

Suddenly I began,

In scorn of this audience,

Imagining a man,

And his sun-freckled face,

And grey Connemara cloth,

Climbing up to a place

Where stone is dark under froth,

And the down-turn of his wrist

When the flies drop in the stream;

A man who does not exist,

A man who is but a dream;

And cried, 'Before I am old

I shall have written him one

poem maybe as cold

And passionate as the dawn.'

Turning Thirty

This spring, you’d swear it actually gets dark earlier.
At the elegant new restaurants downtown
your married friends lock glances over the walnut torte:
it’s ten o’clock. The have important jobs
and go to bed before midnight. Only you
walking alone up the dazzling avenue
still feel a girl’s excitement, for the thousandth time
you enter your life as though for the first time,
as an immigrant enters a huge, mysterious capital:
Paris, New York. So many wide plazas, so many marble addresses!
Home, you write feverishly
in all five notebooks at once, then faint into bed
dazed with ambition and too many cigarettes.

Well, what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except
really you don’t believe wrinkles mean character
and know it’s an ominous note
that the Indian skirts flapping on the sidewalk racks
last summer looked so gay you wanted them all
but now are marked clearer than price tags: not for you.
Oh, what were you doing, why weren’t you paying attention
that piercingly blue day, not a cloud in the sky,
when suddenly “choices”
ceased to mean “infinite possibilities”
and became instead “deciding what to do without”?
No wonder you’re happiest now
riding on trains from one lover to the next.
In those black, night-mirrored windows
a wild white face, operatic, still enthralls you:
a romantic heroine,
suspended between lives, suspended between destinations.

                                          -- Katha Pollitt
                                          (from Antarctic Traveller, Knopf, 1983)

Poems about Poems: Why not? by Katha Pollitt

    Is there something wrong with writing poems about writing poems? And if so, what? My friend Richard Howard was the first person who told me he didn’t approve of  that subject, but since he said it while saying nice things about a poem I had written on that very theme, I didn’t take it as a blanket prohibition, just a personal preference.    It turns out a lot of people share it.  Jackie Sheeler, commenting on yesterday’s post, compares it to ‘talking to your analyst about being in therapy.”  Actually, I think that’s what psychoanalysis is supposed to be all about (see Daniel Menaker’s hilarious novel, The Treatment, for the cleverest portrayal ever of  a shrink, the impossibly vain, hostile, and infuriatingly accurate super-Freudian Dr. Morales, who thinks everything is about himself, sex, or both). But maybe that’s why I didn’t stay in it very long: talking about the shrink to the shrink just seems so rude.   Expensive, too. 
  

   The self-referential nature of art is old news.  We don’t mind songs about singing and singers, or paintings about painting and painters, as any self-portrait is bound to be: here am I the painter, painting myself painting myself. There are dozens of movies about movie-making: Sunset Boulevard, Day for Night, Contempt, Adaptation, to name just a few. Why should poetry be different? Why shouldn’t poets, from time to time, reflect in verse on what is, after all, their occupation and preoccupation?

  Perhaps there’s a moral aspect: poetry is not “the real world,” where real people , ie people who don’t read poetry, live. So if you want to reach real people, you have to write about something they care about-- baseball or the Byzantine Empire or having a baby, whatever, just not about poetry, because you can be sure that’s the one thing they don’t care about.  Writing a poem about poetry  only going to puzzle and bore non-poets.  Worse, it’s going to sound “elitist,” which is a grave sin in our faux-egalitarian country, where it’s okay to rejoice openly in having lots more money, houses, boats, cars, gadgets,  and power than others, but not in having a big working vocabulary, a good education or a consuming interest in anything unprofitable. Perhaps writing poems about poetry comes across as a way of  saying, I’m so special. Prompting the inevitable response: Who do you think you are, anyway?

  Given all this, it’s not surprising that when poets write about writing poetry, they often sound a little depressed.  My psychiatrist-writer friend Anna Fels , whose book  Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives  you should read right away if you haven’t already,  takes a clinical view:  “As a shrink,” she wrote in an e mail after reading yesterday’s post, “ I've wondered sometimes if such poems  represent depressive periods in bipolars or cyclothymics since so many modern poets have been bipolar.” Maybe, but maybe those poets are just responding naturally to the situation of the poet in our time, the sense of being always at the margins, of having to justify one’s existence, of offering the world something the world doesn’t really want.

   Here’s a wonderful poem by Grace Paley (right) about exactly that: 

          

          The Poet's Occasional Alternative

I was going to write a poem 

I made a pie instead     it took

about the same amount of time 

of course the pie was a final

draft     a poem would have had some

distance to go     days and weeks and

much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking

tumbling audience among small

trucks and a fire engine on 

the kitchen floor 

everybody will like this pie

it will have apples and cranberries

dried apricots in it     many friends

will say     why in the world did you 

make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable

sadness I decided to

settle this morning for a re-

sponsive eatership     I do not

want to wait a week     a year     a

generation for the right

consumer to come along

Complain, Complain: Poems about writing poetry [by Katha Pollitt]

     Have you ever noticed how many modern poems there are in which the poet complains about the difficulty of writing poetry?  I suspect this is a relatively recent addition to the long list of poets’ complaints, perhaps replacing the traditional lament that the poet’s girlfriend won’t sleep with him. Now chances are she’ll do that, at least for a while.  Back in the day poets  wrote scads of poems about about how cold and heartless or just mysteriously uninterested the desired woman was, but at least the poem itself was not the problem.  Poets  were always comparing themselves to shepherds tootling on flutes or panpipes, which sounds restful and pleasant and not very musically challenging, or to madmen raving, birds warbling, or other images of spontaneous and untutored communication.  Perhaps it was easier when you had the Muse to do the heavy lifting.

   I thought about this because of a dinner party I recently attended, to which each guest was asked to bring a poem to read around the table. Most of the guests were writers, although I was the only poet.  I am embarrassed to say how long it took me to choose my poem -- so many of my favorites I had to disqualify as too long, too sad, too intimate, too familiar,  or inviting an inaccurate autobiographical reading.  I mean, nobody wants to have to hear the whole Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock before they get to eat dessert.  Aha, I thought, Stevie Smith! A poet I love. She’s funny, she’s poignant, she has lots of short poems.  Lots of short poems about Christianity (no), death (no), ridiculous people (no) and unhappy love(no!).  Just when I was about to have a fit -- because did I mention that I left all this to the last moment and had persuaded myself that I was about to make a great fool of myself in front of a whole roomful of people I admired and esteemed and even, in one or two cases, was a bit afraid of  and was beginning to wonder if  possibly my humiliation was the whole secret point of the exercise --  I found  this wonderful poem:

Mrs. Arbuthnot

Mrs. Arbuthnot was a poet

A poet of high degree,

But her talent left her;

Now she lives at home by the sea.

In the morning she washes up,

In the afternoon she sleeps,

Only in the evenings sometimes

for her lost talent she weeps,

Crying: I should write a poem,

Can I look a wave in the face

If I do not write a poem about a sea-wave,

Putting the words in place.

Mrs. Arbuthnot has died,

She has gone to heaven,

She is one with the heavenly combers now

And need not write about them.

Cry: she is a heavenly comber,

she runs with a comb of fire,

Nobody writes or wishes to

Who is one with their desire.

   As it happens, another guest brought  a poem on the same theme, Brenda Shaughnessy’s "A Poet’s Poem":

If it takes me all day,

I will get the word freshened out of this poem.

I put it in the first line, then moved it to the second,

and now it won’t come out.

It’s stuck. I’m so frustrated,

so I went out to my little porch all covered in snow

and watched the icicles drip, as I smoked

a cigarette.

Finally I reached up and broke a big, clear spike

off the roof with my bare hand.

And used it to write a word in the snow.

I wrote the word snow.

I can’t stand myself.

  If Mrs. Arbuthnot had written a poem about not writing that poem about the sea wave, it might have been this very poem.   

   So if nobody writes or wishes to who is one with their desire,  has the poem itself become the elusive, resistant love object, the modern  Phyllis or Clorinda?

Katha Pollitt, Guest Blogger August 2-9

photo by Christina Pabst

 This week we welcome Katha Pollitt as our guest blogger.  Pollitt's new book of poems, "The Mind-Body Problem," is just out from Random House.  She is a columnist at The Nation and lives in New York City. Her collection of personal essays, "Learning to Drive," is out in paperback.  Listen to Katha Pollitt's interview with Matthea Harvey here. Read her interview with Adam Gopnick for Granta here.  And follow her blog here.

Welcome, Katha.