The Best American Poetry

Much Depends on Dinner: Cooking with Phoebe Putnam

me in Jaipur.

Hi all!  I want to share with you my favorite home-cooked Indian dish, which at home my husband calls "my mom's spinach," because no one in India, apparently, but Uttam's mom makes this particular spinach dish.  She invented it.

Now let me be absolutely honest:  when Uttam and I first went to India, he was very excited for me to taste his "mom's spinach," and I was rather less excited.  I don't like saag, the Punjabi dish that is creamy and mushy and dark brown and redolent of cloves.  I just don't have a taste for it.  So I was relieved and delighted when my future mother-in-law set before us little bowls of brothy, tomato-y spinach, hot and fresh tasting, flavored with cumin and flecked with golden drops of ghee, and a tall stack of soft, gently toasted chapthis.  We ate it in 120 degree weather, just before the monsoon season, on the cool marble floor of their great room, fans whirring, cross-legged, with our fingers.  But I think it's perfect for winter too, and hope you'll try it soon.

Braised Greens in Buttery Tomato Broth (& fast fresh bread!)

Cooking time: ~ 45 min, start to finish, serves 2-4.

INGREDIENTS

SPICES

We can all agree that the intimidating thing about Indian food is the feeling that there are all these spices.  But the good news is that this is a fiction.  There aren't all these spices.  There are really only 5 important ones, and you use at least four of them every time you cook.  The secret of cooking Indian food at home is this little round tin; no cooking happens in Indian homes without it

 

This little tin is the best.  It sits on top of our microwave, over our stove, and is much nicer than fiddling with a lot of screw tops.  Mine has my name engraved on it because my husband is romantic like that, but a regular one costs about $7.  The spices should run you about $2-4 per bag in an Indian grocery store.

Going clockwise, starting with the container with the spoon, you'll want to have on hand:  

1. Mustard seeds; 2. Cumin seeds (whole).  3. Turmeric. 4. Salt.  5. Cayenne pepper.  6. & 7. The two lumpy beige powders are cumin powder (in the center) and coriander powder.  In terms of #s 1-5, these don't vary from home to home.  #s 6-7: Someone might substitute something else for the cumin powder, which I like, but basically you'll always have the others.  

OTHER INGREDIENTS:

- When you're buying the tin and spices, also buy a small bag of "atta" (whole wheat flour), & a jar of ghee (you can use butter if you like but ghee is nicer).  Think how cool you'll look going up to the shopkeeper and asking for atta!  (pronounched AH-ta).

- Two bags of fresh baby spinach

- 1 jar of canned tomatoes (doesn't matter how big; you won't use all of it)

- 1 lemon

- A little olive oil

COOKING! 

easy easy easy.  ready?

1. Fast Fresh Bread first.  Put some flour in a bowl, 1-2 cups.  Add a 3-4 tablespoons of water.  1 tsp oil.  1 pinch salt.  Rub it all together until it's a very dry ball about the size of a grapefruit.  It shouldn't be sticky, wet, glistening.  If it is, add more flour. You want it quite dry, just holding together in a ball. Cover, set it aside. 

Conclusion: Mary Jo Bang's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

 

[Mask from a "Masopust" celebration at a Czech Waldorf School]

Poet Mary Jo Bang's comments about her covers show her to be, as always, interested in the visual world as a series of masks, performances, costumes, and veils.  Which reminds us to remember the cover as covering, as staged prop, as inexorable and necessary deception:  "The mysterious relationship between the cover and the poems," she writes, "serves as a veil through which I read the poems."

"A cover that disappoints can make me dubious about the poems I’m about to read. Is it wrong to admit this?...I most admire book covers that tangentially nod to the interior text, yet don’t feel over-determined by it.

...I like that relationship to have a satisfying ambiguity, and to refuse a simple reductive deconstruction. It’s enough for me—just right for me—that the poems and the cover share a tone, or an artistic sensibility. It’s enough if they gesture toward something. I suppose I like finding my way to what that 'something' is."

1. Brenda Shaughnessy's Interior with Sudden Joy (2000)

 

"Interior with Sudden Joy takes its title from the Dorothea Tanning painting on its cover. The actual painting is large [and has been split] between the front and back covers...isolating the two charmingly transgressive women on the front cover.

By flipping the book over, the two assume their proper place in the original tableau of a strange (interior) room. Like the poems within, the image is both psychologically rich, and slyly playful. Both share a fusty Freudian sexuality; both hint at a narrative but refuse completion. Both speak of desire."

2. Mark Bibbins’s The Dance of No Hard Feelings (due September, 2009)

 

"The cover's photograph, by Kristen Wright, is called 'Masopust' — which is a Czech pre-Lenten carnival period (like Mardi Gras) in which costumed villagers perform skits or dances in front of homes where they are paid for favors with treats so 'that there will be no hard feelings during the days of merriment.'  The young merrymakers with their dragon kite on the cover are set against (and headed into) an eerily empty landscape; similarly, in Bibbins’ poems, a celebratory insouciance is complicated by a sense of a difficult world... The speaker stands just off stage, or behind a mask, saying just what we could say if we dared (and had a mask to hide behind).

The poet’s sky-blue name, with its playfully balloon-ish font, links him with the sky into which the imaginary dragon flies and the child and young adults are marching beneath. The name sits atop a gray wall, a layer of world, as it were, and below that, on a second layer of gray, is the child-like, pre-cursive printed title in crayon yellow. The font reminds one of (and links Bibbins’ poems to) the opening credits of Dr. Strangelove, and of the later concert film, Stop Making Sense. All of which gestures towards a lineage."

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3. Anna Rabinowitz’s The Wanton Sublime (2006)

"The cover is designed by Chip Kidd, a graphic novelist who is equally or even more well known for his book covers and designs; it takes a photograph of a statue of Mary by Michelangelo and blurs her face into a vague shape with enough suggestion of eye, nose and mouth, to read 'female' and 'face,' but she remains an otherwise empty vessel. In retrospect, her closed eyes communicate her Madonna piety, as does the slight downward tilt of her head.

This very lack of exactitude is the subject of The Wanton Sublime, a book-length exploration of the notion of Mary. The stylistically fractured poems attempt to delineate the icon’s vast mythic proportions—an ultimately impossible task...

On the cover, she only has, because she only needs, half of a face; that half-face is further divided by a playful zipper line of tiny black type aligned, not horizontally as convention dictates, but vertically down her face, like a seam that might be opened to reveal an inside, if only she had one. The small letters, visually arresting against the cream-colored background, grow closer and closer together, as if some kind of gravity were tugging at them." 

Mary Jo's covers are the only ones of our series to date that center exclusively on the human figure.  In a different, less protean, less abstract sense than Nick Flynn's, they are marked by a preference for the unsettling and the unsettled.

She has chosen a painting of two women in a state of dangerous half-undress (as indicated by the burning cigarette almost, but not quite underfoot); a blurred Madonna with half a face, a line of text streaming down the face that seems to me not so playful as MJB suggests, but rather, tearful; and a small family, with no visible faces at all, under a dragon kite, turned away from us, towards a vast and empty plain.

Thank you, Mary Jo, for these powerful images; thank you to all of the other poets who generously contributed their thoughts-- Don Share, Nick Flynn, Jesse Ball, Stephen Burt, David Lehman, Major Jackson.  And thanks to you, for commenting and reading this past week!  It's been wonderful.

- Phoebe

Major Jackson's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

I had no choice but to ask poetry editor of Harvard Review and poet, Major Jackson, for his covers after admiring his website (click his name): a veritable thing of beauty.  Major hasn't disappointed; his covers are ones a graphic artist might choose, of blacks, blues, and whites in highest, starkest contrast.  And they are lightly informed, like his website is, by a postwar, Blue Note aesthetic.  Which means, when it comes down to it, that Major's covers suggest the possibility (among others) of the poetry volume as album, and hence the poetry cover as album cover, reminding us of the songs within.

Major's choices:

1. Sonia Sanchez's We a BaddDDD People (1970)

"The appropriation of the African mask and other iconography in modernist art is well-known, but many African-American poets have also used African art to signal their political and cultural awareness, and aesthetic choices. Many of the books published by famed editor and poet Dudley Randall of Broadside Press in the 1960s and 1970s indicate a renewed pride during that time in Africa as cultural source and inspiration for African- American artists.  

The people in Sonia Sanchez’s We A BaddDDD People are of course, black Americans but also diasporic and continental Africans alike.  African-American poets continue to don black artists on their book jackets."

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 2. Harryette Mullen's Muse & Drudge (1995)

"I am a fan of simple design yet depth of meaning.  My friend and co-worker at the Painted Bride Art Center, the poet Gil Ott, was a dedicated small-press publisher who adored and admired Harryette Mullen’s poetry.  This is evident in his publication of her two collections S*PeRM**K*T and Muse & Drudge; the latter is a personal favorite.

It’s an amazing, innovative collection whose cover always reminds me of that Louis Armstrong song  “What did I do to be so black and blue?” [begins at 42 seconds -pfp] But also, the cover makes an implicit connection between the poet and the blues singer, who is one of the personae contained in the collection."

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3. Michael McClure's For Artaud (1959)

 

"Because of its rich simplicity, Michael McClure’s book jacket has always been a favorite; it's one of those jackets that does the near impossible of playing with dimensionality and depth."

Whew.  So good.  Thanks, Major.

Tune in Saturday morning after breakfast for our last post this week, with Mary Jo Bang.

- phoebe

PS: more blue note covers can be found on this japanese website....

 

David Lehman's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

Good morning!

Very pleased to bring you today the favorite poetry covers of David Lehman, poet, occasional painter, and founding editor of the BAP series.  The image above is a picture of Larry Rivers, next to Grace Hartigan's hat, both of whom (Rivers and the owner of the hat) are also, as we have seen, primary interests of Don Share.  (For more poets on covers, see Nick Flynn & Jesse Ball's picks.)

In a more intensive way than for Don, however, David's interest in collaboration is at the heart of his interest on covers.

It's a great subject, the cover art of poetry books, especially considering the overlap in sensibility between practitioners of the literary and visual arts, and how often it happens that a painter writes poetry (and really good poetry) and a poet makes watercolors or collages.

In descending order, beginning with one out of many of Rivers's covers for Koch, here are David's choices and the larger questions they seem to raise.

3. Kenneth Koch's New Addresses (2000).

Question: Shall a cover be the canvas that sponsors a literal collaboration between image and lyric text?

"The complementary nature of Rivers's art and Koch's poetry is remarkable and worth examining in detail..... The cover of New Addresses splices reproductions of poems, adds a cameo photo of Koch, and uses splashes of color not so much to highlight a text as to show that beyond their meaning, the words function as visual signs and markers. It's exceptional, and I find it inspiring.

As one who paints when he gets the chance, I can testify to the purely visual pleasure of alphabets -- including those of foreign languages little known. Some of Franz Kline's black-on-white drawings look like Chinese calligraphy smuggled behind the occidental curtain."

2. Houseboat Days (1977) by John Ashbery. Cover R. B. Kitaj

Question:  Shall a cover serve as a second title to the work, a visual title that elaborates the linguistic title?  If so, should the poet not choose the second title just as he chose the first?

Ashbery got to pick the covers for a number of his books: "Houseboat Days," "As We Know," "Your Name Here," "Flow Chart," as well as for  his art criticism, "Reported Sightings." He has marvelous taste and many friends who are painters, and a look at such covers as I've mentioned gives you an idea of the extraordinary range of his affinities[...]

My favorite Ashbery cover is the one featuring the black-and-white painting R. B. Kitaj did for "Houseboat Days (Viking, 1977). A young woman in an old-fashioned dress holds a paddle on a boat. But the chiaroscuro effects (the sky is an uproar of clouds), the look on her face, and the strong diagonals in the picture combine to create an eerie or uncanny feeling as if someone from another decade were serenely paddling into our pond.

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1.  Hymn to Life (1974) by James Schuyler. Cover, Fairfield Porter.  Image not available

1. A Few Days (1985) by James Schuyler.  Cover, Darragh Park.

Question:  Shall a cover reveal what the poems themselves reach out towards and seek but cannot obtain?

"The covers of James Schuyler's books spring to mind... I'm torn between Darragh Park's cover for "A Few Days" (Random House, 1985) -- lush purple loosestrife on light green grass amid dark green trees -- and Fairfield Porter's almost abstract rendering of a tree for the cover of "Hymn to Life" (Random House, 1974). Both pictures are so right for this poet who turns to landscapes not simply as an aesthetic choice but as a way of dealing with the anxieties and actualities that make such pastoral tranquility so attractive and so hard to come by."

Thanks much for these haunting, impossible dreamscapes, DL.

Do the questions that David's covers suggest resonate for you?  Mary Jo Bang has different questions, as we'll see soon.  What are yours?

Steve Burt's Cease & Desist List [by Phoebe Putnam]

"Poets and book designers should stay away for at least the next five years from cover images by:

Mark Rothko

Vincent Van Gogh

Jackson Pollock

Barnett Newman

and Jan Vermeer

I thought that rule would go without saying until I saw more than one serious, thoughtful new poetry book this year that violated it."

                         - poet and poetry critic Steve Burt

Do you agree?  Would you add to this list?

Image of Rothko's No. 3, 1949 can be found here; real painting can be found in nyc, here.

Round 3: Jesse Ball's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

After Don Share's playful typographical covers, and Nick Flynn's chromatically saturated, sinuous ones, we continue today with the covers of poet, novelist, and former spy Jesse Ball, who may or may not be on your radar screen right now.  But I suspect he will be.  He has this to say about covers:

I have actually made a brown paper cover to cover over paperback covers that I didn't like while I was reading the volume in question.

And this:

I will say that what I like best of all is just cloth without a dust jacket. If a book has nice cloth I usually discard the dust jacket.

(Don't you here find yourself conjuring up secret memories of cloth covers?  how rare it has become, the textilic touch of a book...)

Here are Jesse's three.  They are austere, wind-beaten, starkly beautiful.

1. Rilke's Duino Elegies, translation C. P. Snow

"The Rilke is elegant and in some ways represents both Rilke's grace and the gentleness and fineness of Snow's translation."

2. WCW's Pictures from Brueghel

"The wheat in the WCW cover gives a beautiful impression of chaos and also of learning, of indebtedness to what has been, and resistance to easy grasping. It is a shame that it mentions the prize at the bottom corner, but such things seemingly must be."

3. Simic, Selected Early Poems

The Simic is a hardcover, but not cloth, so it must keep its dust jacket. I like the quietness and relevance of this cover. Typographical covers often have that effect:  they are just telling you what's inside, and that is kind and correct, particularly for a selected poems.

I included a shot of the spine and back because they are crucial. Here the image of Simic is in tension with the simple title on the front. The fact that these are his "early" poems gives the book an immediate narrative and a poignancy.

Jesse has glossed these images so well that I'll keep mum.  But do let me know what you think.  Thanks for these, JB.

Round 2: Nick Flynn's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

For today, I asked poet and memoirist Nick Flynn to share his favorite covers with us.  Oh so different from Don Share's choices.  Whereas Don has chosen classic covers, strong, graphic, architectural, typographical covers that tilt their way towards the intertextual and the satiric, Nick has chosen covers that have no such sense of jovial calm.  His three seethe with color and torqued forms.  They are vexed, lush, unruly.

1. Rebecca Wolff's The King

2. D. A. Powell's Chronic.

3.  Marie Howe's Kingdom of Ordinary Time.

Nick's choices may at first appear diverse, ranging from the dark, unsettling, biological (Powell), to the neo-punk, as if Vivienne Westwood inflected (Wolff) or to the vibrant, scrawly, and childlike (Howe).  But they share a strong, baroque sense of pattern, and reveal themselves as a group to be what I would call late-Hellenic in style: ornate, ordered images about to burst into disorder.

 

Fantastic.  Thanks, Nick!

And thanks to all of you for your comments...

Don Share's Favorite Covers [by Phoebe Putnam]

We begin with Don Share, poet and Senior Editor of Poetry, who will start us off this week on cover design.

Having been asked for his top three ("Only three? how difficult!") Don considered a few options...

"Among my favorites are Larry Rivers's covers for Kenneth Koch's books, and particularly the one he designed for Frank O'Hara's collected poems (later used on the selected),"

He settled on "the cover of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems as my no. 1."

 

"This book never ever fails to get my heart pumping, and scholars will soon observe that the color scheme is indebted to the old Howard Johnson’s restaurant chain!"

Other options vying for first place--

"I’m also fond of the famous Grace Hartigan cover of O’Hara’s Oranges: Twelve Pastorals;... and of course Jasper Johns’ cover  for the MOMA edition of In Memory of My Feelings is incredible...!"

Pick 2:

"Next... Geof Huth’s superb cover for Ron Silliman’s The Alphabet."

"Huth is one of our very best visual poets, and his cover design not only makes you want to hold and read the book... it’s a poem by itself."

And finally.....

Finally, the cover of Jack Spicer’s My Vocabulary Did This To Me – a Nathaniel Dorsky image – is arresting and haunting.  In some ways the austere Black Sparrow cover of Robin Blaser’s edition of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer is a lot more appropriate, and I adore it as well.  Then, too, Jess’s cover for Spicer’s After Lorca cover is terrific & iconic...  and yet...

I’ll pick Graham Mackintosh and Stan Persky’s design for The Book of Magazine Verse – a delicious parody of the Rago-era Poetry magazine cover design: how could I not?

There we have it!  Top Three, complete with many spiraling alternative possibilities.  Visually diverse (save for a love of typographical play) and all the more compelling for it.

Thoughts?  Personally, I can't quit Grace Hartigan and her oranges.

Many thanks, Don:  so, so rich!

Covering covers this week! [by Phoebe Putnam]

Hello, all!  

Absolutely excited to be by your side this week!  

Let's get started, shall we?

POETRY COVERS are what I've been asking a handful of incredible poets about over the past few weeks.  They've responded with passion and enthusiasm and in so doing have made it clear to me that the visual world of poets is a secret world that they will gladly share if asked, if pressed, if cajoled....

Having done a bit of this cajoling, I'll be sharing here the covers that they've shared with me, and some of their thoughts about their choices, as well as their thoughts about covers in general.  (Steve Burt, for instance, has a Cease and Desist list of painters that need to be retired from poetry covers for the next five years!) 

Over the next week, I welcome and encourage you to share your own favorite poetry covers, and any images of or thoughts on book covers in general.....

(for instance, this one's a beaut.)

Phoebe

 Roadster duet image from 2 or 3 things....

Cover image from Caustic Cover Critic

Phoebe Putnam, Guest Blogger July 27-August 2

This week we welcome Phoebe Putnam as our guest blogger.  Phoebe teaches in the History and Literature concentration at Harvard, and recently completed her first manuscript, Land Lies in Water, on the panoramic vantage in small poems by early-career poets.  She has published on Wallace Stevens, and is a recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize for her essay on Elizabeth Bishop's poetics of touch.  She is delighted to be part of this week's Best American Poetry blog where she will be  featuring contemporary poets and their thoughts on book covers and jacket design.  Her design blog, Silk Felt Soil, can be found here. Welcome, Phoebe.