The Best American Poetry

Black Bart, Po8 (by Laura Orem)

On August 3. 1877, a stagecoach was held up at gunpoint while traveling from Port Arena to Duncan's Mills, California, by a man disguised by rags and cloths covering his head and body.  He was notable, however, for his calm manner and the politeness with which he conducted the robbery. In a deep, pleasant, and courteous voice, he requested of the stage driver, "Please throw down the box."  After emptying the cashbox of its cash, the robber politely took his leave and disappeared into the brush, but not before leaving a piece of paper behind. On it was written:

"I've labored long and hard for bread,
For honor, and for riches,
But on my corns too long you've tred,
You fine-haired sons of bitches.

- Black Bart, 1877"

Underneath the poem was this note: Driver, give my respects to our old friend, the other driver. I really had a notion to hang my old disguise hat on his weather eye. While it probably didn't take the sting out of being robbed, at least the stagecoach driver could take some comfort in knowing that he'd been held up by one of the most colorful figures in the Old West: Charles Boles, aka Black Bart the Poet.

Charles Boles is believed to have been born in England in 1829. At the age of two, he emigrated to New York with his parents, where his father set up a farm. In 1849, Boles joined thousands of other hopefuls in the California Gold Rush - apparently without too much success, since by 1854 he was back East to get married, and by 1860 he and his wife Mary were living on a farm in Illinois.

At the start of the Civil War, Boles enlisted in the 116th Illinois Regiment. He served with distinction, was wounded in the battle of Vicksburg,and received two honorary promotions, to second and first lieutenant. After the war, however, Boles couldn't seem to settle back into farming. He left his wife and wandered West to try his luck at prospecting. After a while, the letters home stopped, and his family believed he had died.

Nothing is heard of him from 1871 to 1875, when a stagecoach was robbed in Calaveras County, California, by a mild-mannered, well-spoken bandit disguised in rags. Charles Boles had become Black Bart, gentleman thief and poet. (Boles apparently had cribbed his moniker from a dime-novel serial .)

For the next eight years, stagecoaches up and down California were relieved of their money by Black Bart. Victims remarked upon his pleasant demeanor, refined wit, and lack of profanity. When one stage driver asked him, "How much did you make," he replied ruefully, "Not that much for the chances I take."  On one occasion, after a robbery, he appeared at a lonely farmhouse, looking to buy his dinner; the family's 14-year-old daughter later described him to detectives as "intellectual in conversation, well-flavored with polite jokes."  After a while, Boles began leaving poems behind, signing some of them "Black Bart PO8," and newspapermen of the day fell over themselves to publish them. Black Bart was as colorful as any fictional character, but the best part was that he was real.

Boles was finally captured in 1883, when the laundry mark on a handkerchief he dropped at a robbery led police to his boarding house in San Francisco. The detectives were clearly impressed by him. In their report, they wrote that Black Bart was "a person of great endurance. Exhibited genuine wit under most trying circumstances, and was extremely proper and polite in behavior. Eschews profanity." Despite his charm, Boles was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to prison for eight years. He served four years at San Quentin before being release early for good behavior. He assured the mob of reporters waiting for him that he was through with both robbing and poetry.

Black Bart, however, couldn't just fade slowly away. In February 1888, a month after his release, Boles' room in his boarding house was found vacated. While there were many copycat robbers after him, no definitive trace of Black Bart or Charles Boles was ever found.

from a stagecoach robbery on July 25, 1878 in Oroville, CA:

"Here I lay me down to sleep
To wait the coming morrow,
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
And everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will, I'll try it on,
My condition can't be worse;
And if there's money in that box
'Tis money in my purse.

Black Bart
PO8"

 

The Spires of the Gleaming Kiln [by Emma Trelles]

Because it is Halloween, and because I love all that is dark sparkle and lore, I settled in last night and read one of the Grimm Brothers' bleaker fairy tales - Hansel and Gretel. It's the last chapter of a collection I've kept since I was a child and I don't think I've opened the book since then either. I recalled a sketch of the story - a brother and sister lost in the woods, trying to find their way home, and a witch who traps them because they are hungry and her house is made of gingerbread and cake.

Well. There's that, but there's also the whole other part I forgot about, such as that the reason they are lost to begin with is because their father and stepmother have deliberately left them to die in the forest. Twice.

The first time, the resourceful Hansel finds the path back because he marks the way with pebbles that shine in the moonlight. The second time he uses bread crumbs to track his trail, but they disappear into the mouths of grackles and rabbits and the like. The witch cages Hansel and fattens him to eat; Gretel is made into her kitchen slave. Eventually the clever girl shoves their captor into an oven, and the two return to their father without grudge. As if it was that easy to forgive betrayal.

I once loved the macabre theatre of these tales. It seemed to me, in my little girlness, that while the world was dangerous, at least it was interesting, a place where spells might explode at any moment or where children could rescue themselves. Last night I thought of H&G, now grown, perhaps choosing to forget the crone with the red eyes and the keen animal nose, the father who abandoned them. Perhaps not.

Here is their future, as seen by Louise Gluck, who authored the line I pinched for the title of this post.

Gretel in Darkness

This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas...

             Now, far from women's arms
and memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of the gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

A Birthday (by Laura Orem)

Today would have been Sylvia Plath's 77th birthday. She left an astonishing number of good-to-excellent poems for someone who died at 30, a testament not only to her talent but to her dedication to her craft and iron Yankee work-ethic. Easily, so easily, she could have been writing still - imagine that raw voice honed by five more decades of experience and maturity.

Arguably, she is the single most influential poet of the mid-20th century. Not just her poems, written at the very edge of daring (how many of us are that psychically brave or foolhardy?), but her endlessly re-hashed and microscopically-examined life. Part of this the result of her own myth-making - at its best, her writing is so powerful, so compelling, that it creates its own epic biography. Part of this comes from the mythologizing by her own mother (her sanitized Letters Home, edited by Aurelia Plath, was a best-seller and obligatory reading by young female poets when it came out in 1978), and by the endless books and articles written about her. Anyone who knows anything about Plath knows all the details of her life: her suicide attempts, her marriage, her children, her death - and everyone has an opinion. The story continues into the present - it was just this year that her son, Nick Hughes, a biologist and expert on fishes, the baby of whom she wrote, "Love set you going like a fat gold watch," hanged himself in Alaska. Tragic, yes - but how oddly personally tragic this death felt to so many! We feel proprietary over her, as if somehow her story is part of our own.

But how can we really know someone we didn't know? The answer is, we can't . We can know the facts of Sylvia Plath's life, and we can know her work. The rest is filling in our own blanks, making Plath into something we each want her to be, something that fits our own mythology. We didn't (most of us, anyway) know her personally, and we don't, we can't, know her now, 46 years after her death. The details of a life aren't a life. And this detritus of detail and what we project onto Plath can obscure the poetry. When she writes, in the first line of "The Jailer," My night sweats grease his breakfast plate, we are pleased because we get exactly to whom she is referring and why; like teenagers whispering at a lunch table, we are in on the secret.  But maybe we are so invested in the backstory, the poem itself is compromised - Yeah, you tell him, Sylvia. Kick his poetic ass.

Sylvia Plath wasn't a symbol, and she wasn't ours. She was a gifted, difficult, dedicated, passionate, troubled, and brilliant woman.  Other than that, we cannot presume to say what went on in her heart. (After all, are we just what we write?) But what we can know is the work, because what we have is the work. Look, I like gossip as much as the next person. I've read the biographies and I've read her journals and letters and I know all the juicy bits. But today, on her birthday, I'd like to try to honor her poetry by untethering it from all this - to read it the way poems should be read, on their own merit, good or bad. And when Plath is good, she is transcendent. Today, I grieve in the only way I have any right to - for the poems that did not get written, for the work we will never have.

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Written October 27, 1962

Lorca is Green [by Emma Trelles]

 
 
 Federico Garcia Lorca was a poet with deep set eyes and a hood of thick eyebrows. When pressed together, his lips resembled two curved shells. He was a diminutive man who walked with a limp. His hands were delicate and resembled a child's.

Since I read recently that the Spanish government will soon try to exhume his remains, I have thought much about Lorca, his words but also his body, what must now only be his disassembled bones, his prettiness and his flaws dissolved to minerals. He is perhaps buried near Granada, where hundreds of men and women were executed by gunshot in 1936, during the Civil War, beside a cemetery wall  and its surrounding hillsides and olive trees.

Lorca died in summer, four months before the olive harvest and when the trees' silvered branches were likely heavy with petals and fruit. Some of them are very old, their leaves long threaded by a wind that arrives through a vacant archway, as Lorca wrote, "...blowing relentlessly over the heads of the dead, in search of new landscapes and unknown accents; a wind that smells of baby's spittle, crushed grass, and jellyfish veil, announcing the constant baptism of newly created things."

Lorca is green as the sky at the hour of the crepúsculo, when the moon begins its bright ascent and the sidewalks fall to darkness. Lorca is the shadow-green of mangroves and pines, the slash of green beneath the egret's eye. He is the green that enters in silence; he is the green that returns.

Lorca was a poet whose work I read out loud and in Spanish to my mother and stepfather. She made Cuban coffee and served it in tiny china cups. He sat at the kitchen counter and noted, kindly, that my pronunciation was better than he had expected, quite good, in fact. 

That summer when my mother's hair had finally grown back after her chemo, her head now dark and budding with curls, I could read espadas and adelfa but did not know they meant swords and oleander. It is easier to speak than to understand. Spanish, with its velvet-clad consonants and hopeful vowels, each letter sounding exactly as it appears. Nothing is left behind. Nothing is buried.

When my mother says my name, her voice rings like a little gold bell, and I think of yellow, a color that, like her, is filled with resolve. Yellow is a window, a locket, a poison that can heal. Yellow is Pinar del Rio -- heat and flat valleys and where my mother's people are from. When I was a girl, yellow was the braid she wore long and down the middle of her back; yellow was the garden of succulents she grew, their branches circuitous, and each leaf's shape a surprise: a paddle, a button, a dagger, a heart.

This Just In . . . Live blogging from Bill Hayward's Intimacy Project

Bill Hayward sends along this link and photos from The Port Authority, where poets Jeff Johnson and Claire Donato are live blogging poetry every day during the performance's 10-day run.  Check it out!

"Bibliomorphic" [by Jim Dolot]

Bibliomorphic

Things that are shaped like books but are not books
Abound.  One leaf opens over another.
The folding-chairs are books manqués, no doubt,
Though only when unfolded for the booths,
And only such in this folding, defeated poem,
Which will not be, even by a reader, repeated.
Bebe Rebozo is a name shaped like a book,
Book him, you serifs, before he gets away,
Though who he wasn’t we otherwise don’t remember
(Our synapses are fading now and yellowing like books.)
A box of candies open, a laptop, a sandwich,
All of these are (sort of) like books, at least for now.
The body is bibliomorphic, symmetrical,
Libriform, and lasts about as long as a paperback.
So is the butterfly in this novel and that.
The universe, book-formed, has a central seam
For two great wings, star-marginalia visible
Only to those who have the right strength
Reading-glasses, and the minuscule g
Turned on its side is a bicycle, ant, or book.
Books are Kabbalahform, cubic, Kaabaesque.
They take part in the night-closing of the shops.

-- Jim Dolot

"3,000 Days" [by Erika Moya]

3,000 Days

After three thousand days we stopped loving. 
It left quietly, before the first blue in the sky,
while one could still see stars and long shadows. 
It walked barefoot across the moonlit floor admiring its feet, 
holding a pair of shoes in one hand and an old toothbrush in the other.
It tried to look back but the thought of salt was too great.  When it
       reached the door,
it shut its eyes going back to minutes prior, with you in bed and your
       quiet breath.
It tried to memorize your lashes and the creases in your lips, each
       a mini-wrinkle.
It wanted more time but knew that more time was not an option.
It did not close the door entirely for fear of making noise, so
       that forever
after we stopped loving, everything was framed in the sullen violet
of almost morning.  Almost something that was not enough.

-- Erika Moya

"Fear of the Future" [by John Koethe]

Fear of the Future

In the end one simply withdraws
From others and time, one’s own time,
Becoming an imaginary Everyman
Inhabiting a few rooms, personifying
The urge to tend one’s garden,
A character of no strong attachments
Who made nothing happen, and to whom
Nothing ever actually happened -- a fictitious
Man whose life was over from the start,
Like a diary or a daybook whose poems
And stories told the same story over
And over again, or no story. The pictures
And paintings hang crooked on the walls,
The limbs beneath the sheets are frail and cold
And morning is an exercise in memory
Of a long failure, and of the years
Mirrored in the face of the immaculate
Child who can’t believe he’s old.

-- John Koethe

from Ninety-Fifth Street by John Koethe. New and highly recommended. HarperCollins.

"My Three Sons" [by Angela Ball]

MY THREE SONS

Are tapping wing-tipped feet.
What scrapes
Has today scripted?  Soon.

A building next to a body shop
Without bodies.  A doctor who said,
“I know your doctor, he knows
My work.”

The next building a pea soup
Color.  Bent flowers
On a desk.  A doctor saying,
“You are all legs.”  Would
That were.

Another look at the place:  a leatherette
Lounger, tufts of Kleenex,
An aide asking, “Are you sure
You’re all right?”  I have never
Been.

Fred could have been my dad, now
Could be the sons.  In a way.

-- Angela Ball
(from Field)

Collage and Poetry, Part Deux (by Laura Orem)

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece on poetry and collage and called for poets who work in the genre to send me JPEGs of one or two pieces, as well as a few words on any connections they see between the two art forms. I've gotten some lovely pieces and very cool insights, but I'd like some more. So, if you haven't sent me anything, please do! I will post something in the next few weeks about the topic (sending me the pictures says you are giving me permission to post them here on Best American Poetry).

Send one or two images and your words of wisdom to me at lauraorem@gmail.com.

Thanks!

(Pablo Picasso)