The Best American Poetry

"The Friday Night Fights" [by Ronald Wallace]

David Wagoner selected a sonnet by Ronald Wallace for the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry. Wallace, who once wrote a sonnet a day for 365 days, wrote "No Pegasus" on the back of a boarding pass to escape from conversation with a garrulous salesman.

Ed Ochester has written,

“Whenever I hear people lament the loss of traditional forms, I try to give them a brief lecture on organic form AND I try to point them to the poetry of Ron Wallace, who is a master of the sonnet, the sestina, etc. And does them so gracefully in contemporary diction that a reader may not be aware that Wallace is writing in a conventional form. And, more important that mere formality, it’s all done from the heart."

Here is Wallace's poem "The Friday Night Fights" from Ochester's anthology American Poety Now (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007). Note Wallace's characterization of Howard Cosell, the loquacious sportscaster with the melodramatic voice, who sparred verbally with Ali, covered boxing, and was a fixture on "Monday Night Football."

The Friday Night Fights

Every Friday night we watched the fights.
Me, ten years old and stretched out on the couch;
my father, in his wheelchair, looking on
as Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson
fought and won the battles we could not.
Him, twenty-nine, and beat up with disease;
me, counting God among my enemies
for what he’d done to us. We never touched.

But in between the rounds we’d sing how we’d
Look sharp! Feel sharp! & Be sharp! with Gillette
and Howard Cosell, the Bela Lugosi of boxing.
Out in the kitchen, my mother never understood
our need for blood, how this was as close as we’d get
to love—bobbing and weaving, feinting and sparring.

-- Ronald Wallace

"Jazz" [by Angela Ball]

Jazz

I’d like to know everything
A jazz artist knows, starting with the song,
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

Like to make some songs myself:
“Goodbye Rickshaw,”
“Goodbye Lemon Drop,”
“Goodbye Rendezvous.”

Or maybe even blues:

If you fall in love with me, I’ll make you pancakes
All morning.  If you fall in love with me
I’ll make you pancakes all night.
If you don’t like pancakes
We’ll go to the creperie.  If you don’t like pancakes
We’ll go to the creperie.
If you don’t like to eat, handsome boy,
Don’t you hang around with me.

On second thought, I’d rather find
The fanciest music and hear all of it.

I’d rather love somebody
And say his name to myself every day
Until I fall apart.

-- Angela Ball

From Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds by Angela Ball (University of Pitttsburgh Press).
And from The Best American Poetry 2001 (edited by Robert Hass)

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!

Happy Birthday, Edward Field

"When I started graduate school and was utterly depressed by the solemnity of it all," Ed Ochester writes, "one day by accident I came across Edward Field’s book, Stand Up, Friend, With Me. I think it may have saved my life. Though not as well known as some of the other New York School Poets, Ed has a sweet and often whimsical personal voice and is stylistically daring. One of the first openly gay poets, he was the first American poet to make extensive use of movies and other pop culture elements. When I learned that his selected poems from Black Sparrow was no longer available, I rushed to do another selected of his at Pitt.”

Field was born on this day in Brooklyn in 1924. Asked to select a representative poem by Field, Ochester chose "Tailspin" from Fields's book After the Fall: Poems Old and New, which the University of Pittsburgh Press published in 2007.

Tailspin

Going into a tailspin
in those days meant curtains.
No matter how hard you pulled back on the stick
the nose of the plane wouldn’t come up.

Spinning round, headed for a target of earth,
the whine of death in the wing struts,
instinct made you try to pull out of it that way, by force,
and for years aviators spiraled down and crashed.

Who could have dreamed that the solution
to this dreaded aeronautical problem
was so simple?
Every student flyer learns this nowadays:
you move the joystick in the direction of the spin,
and like a miracle the plane stops turning
and you are in control again
to pull the nose up out of the dive.

In panic we want to push the stick away from the spin,
wrestle the plane out of it,
but the trick is, as in everything,
to go with the turning willingly,
rather than fight—give in, go with it,
and that way come out of your tailspin whole.

-- Edward Field

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

ALICIA SUSKIN OSTRIKER

“Alicia was one of the first poets I recruited for the Pitt Poetry Series and we’ve been together for many books. I think of her as a life-giving poet, one of the best writing now in this country.”
—Ed Ochester

The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz

As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselves

The owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf

And the happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted—

Black dogs, tan dogs,
Tubes of glorious muscle—
Pursuing pleasure
More than obedience
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,
Sometimes they’ll plunge straight into
The foaming breakers

Like diving birds, letting the green turbulence
Toss them, until they snap and sink

Teeth into floating wood
Then bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.

"The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz” from American Poetry Now
(ed. Ed Ochester) $27.95 • 408 pp.

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Robin Becker

"Robin is one of the most varied of the poets on the Pitt list in her style and subject matter -- and the foremost feminist poet of her generation. If the word 'feminist' scares you, or calls up some cliché like ‘no sense of humor,’ you should become acquainted with her work. And grow up."

—Ed Ochester

THE BATH

I like to watch
your breasts float like two birds
drifting downstream; you like a book,
a glass of wine on the lip
of the porcelain tub,
your music. It is your way of dissolving
the day, merging the elements of your body
with this body. The room fills with steam
like mist off a river—
as intimate to imagine you
pleasuring yourself: watery fingers, slow
movement into fantasy.
You call me in and take my hand
in your wet hand. I have to shield my eyes
from the great light
coming off your body.
When you ask me to touch you
kneel by the water like a blind woman
guided into the river by a friend

from American Poetry Now $27.95 • 408 pp.  © 2007 University of Pittsburgh Press

Also by Robin Becker from the Pitt Poetry Series:

All-American Girl $14.00
Giacometti’s Dog $14.00
The Horse Fair $12.95
Domain of Perfect Affection $14.00

American Poetry Now (ed. Ed Ochester) features poems by Robin Becker and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Lynn Emanuel

 Eavan Boland says that Lynn’s poems ‘have rare power: they connect to the world through estrangement.’ Yes, but that may sound forbidding. They’re also enormously playful and witty. She has an ‘Homage to Sharon Stone;’ she speaks in the voice of a depressed book; she even, as in the following excerpt, speaks from inside Gertrude Stein.

—Ed Ochester

excerpt from  inside gertrude stein

Right now as I am talking to you and as you are being talked to, without letup, it is becoming clear that gertrude stein has hijacked me and that this feeling that you are having now as you read this, that this is what it feels like to be inside gertrude stein. This is what it feels like to be a huge typewriter in a dress. Yes, I feel we have gotten inside gertrude stein, and of course it is dark inside the enormous gertrude, it is like being locked up in a refrigerator lit only by a smiling rind of cheese. Being inside gertrude is like being inside a monument made of a cloud which is always moving across the sky which is also always moving. Gertrude is a huge galleon of cloud anchored to the ground by one small tether, yes, I see it down there, do you see that tiny snail glued to the tackboard of the landscape? That is alice. So, I am inside gertrude; we belong to each other, she and I, and it is so wonderful because I have always been a thin woman inside of whom a big woman is screaming to get out, and she’s out now and if a river could type this is how it would sound, pure and complicated and enormous.

“inside gertrude stein”

from American Poetry Now

$27.95 • 408 pp.

© 2007 University of Pittsburgh Press

Also by Lynn Emanuel from the Pitt Poetry Series:

Then, Suddenly— $14.00

American Poetry Now features poems by Lynn Emanuel and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Ed Ochester Presents David Shumate

“Is ‘the prose poem’ an oxymoron? Of course not, and we have some of the most remarkable writers of the prose poem in the Pitt Poetry Series. David Shumate is one, and his first couple of books with us have gotten rave reactions. His books are both moving and fun to read, and the poems are as tightly organized as good sonnets.”

—Ed Ochester

Translating a Poem

Some say they run their fingers over the page as if it were a message from the dead. Others say a word is a kind of fruit. You slice it open and catch the juices in a bowl. Still others recommend carrying the poem with you into a dream where it might become a bird or a fish. I have a poem in front of me now. Its Chinese lines are delicate. Papery. The thin strand of its meter is like the breath of a sleeping child. I’ve just translated the first line. It has to do with that kind of sadness spring brings. There’s something so familiar about it. As if I’ve just bumped into the poet outside a market and we’ve both dropped our bags. We get down on our knees. She picks up my head of lettuce. I reach for her apricots as they roll into the gutter.

“Translating a Poem” from The Floating Bridge $14.00 • 88 pp. © 2008 University of Pittsburgh Press

Also by David Shumate from the Pitt Poetry Series: High Water Mark $12.95

American Poetry Now features poems by David Shumate and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Ed Ochester Presents Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

LYRAE VAN CLIEF-STEFANON “Lyrae was a winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (the Pitt Poetry Series is one of three publishers of the Cave Canem prizewinners). Her first book, Black Swan, was well-reviewed and sold well. Her new book, ]Open Interval[ is amazing. I heard Lyrae present some of those longer, new poems in a summer garden reading, and it was one of those events where you could hear the crowd's intake of breath, and then silence, and then huge applause.” —Ed Ochester

Transit of Venus

The actors mill about the party saying rhubarb

because other words do not sound like conversation.

In the kitchen, always, one who’s just discovered

beauty, his mouth full of whiskey and strawberries.

He practices the texture of her hair with his tongue;

in her, five billion electrons pop their atoms. Rhubarb

in electromagnetic loops, rhubarb, rhubarb, the din increases.

“Transit of Venus” from ]Open Interval[$14.95 • 96 pp. © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press
 Also by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon from the Pitt Poetry Series: Black Swan $12.95
American Poetry Now features poems by many poets from the Pitt Poetry Series.

Ed Ochester Presents a Poem by Toi Derricotte

“I first heard Toi read some years ago at Old Dominion University, and knew right away that I wanted to do her next books . . . She founded, with Cornelius Eady,  the first workshop and retreat for African American poets: Cave Canem, which has been spectacularly successful in mentoring younger writers and bringing their work to publication.”

—Ed Ochester

 

In an Urban School

The guard picks dead leaves from plants.
The sign over the table reads:
"Do not take or touch anything on this table!"
In the lunchroom the cook picks up in her dishcloth
what she refers to as “a little friend,”
shakes it out,
and puts the dishcloth back on the drain.
The teacher says she needs stronger tranquilizers.
Sweat rises on the bone of her nose,
on the plates of her skull under unpressed hair.
“First graders, put your heads down. I’m taking names
so I can tell your parents
which children do not obey their teacher.”
Raheim’s father was stabbed last week.
Germaine’s mother, a junkie,
was found dead in an empty lot.

“In an Urban School” from American Poetry Now 
$27.95 • 408 pp. © 2007 University of Pittsburgh Press Press

Also by Toi Derricotte from the Pitt Poetry Series:
Captivity
Tender

American Poetry Now (ed. Ed Ochester) features poems by Toi Derricotte and many others from the Pitt Poetry Series.