The Best American Poetry

Garrison Keillor: This day in 1492, 1917, and more. . .

It is always a pleasure to have a poem selected by Garrison Keillor for his Writer's Almanac. He posted my poem "Radio" today -- perfectly timed, as Tuesday was the official pub date -- and filled in the historical context. Did you know that on this day the Bolshevik revolution began? But because "the Russians were still using the old Julian calendar. . . .the revolt [was said to take] place on October 25th — and so it was called the October Revolution." I happened to be in Moscow on October 25, 2007, which by one calculation was the eightieth anniversary of the revolution. I attended a lot of literary events that week, and not one person spoke of the significance of the date. The only mention of Lenin came from a tour guide at the Kremlin. -- DL

Drinks with Poets: Jessica Server and Nancy Krygowski [by Sherrie Flick]

Today, I drink with two poets who explore how and where and when and why we drink. From Kelly's Bar to Salt of the Earth. --Sherrie Flick

Salt of the Earth - Jessica Server

Before my senior year at Boston University, I was introduced to the Cantab Lounge. I had just turned 21, had just returned from living abroad (where I’d discovered my tolerance for tequila), and after having spent most of my life acting older than my years, had just learned to embrace the peak of my youth.

A Central Square dive, the Cantab became a kind of classroom for me – the kind with bluegrass and twinkly lights. I recall a sense of great clarity, as though the Cantab was right where I was supposed to be.

My tastes have since changed, moving from clear – tequila, gin, and vodka— to the complex, the browns and reds of whiskey, bourbon, and wine. Craft cocktails. Old Vine Zinfandels.

While I love the smoky earthiness of where I’ve landed, I sometimes crave those unfettered undertones - juniper or agave – that cut to my youth, even knowing that memory has distilled them into something much simpler than truth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scotch - Chivas, Chartreuse, Sorel, Apple, Lemon at Salt

 

The Cantab Lounge

The fifth string of the twangy mandolin

pulled on my shirt’s loose third button.

Charlie’s intense eyes, his face caught up in

 

a violation of the white moon-face

of his banjo, before he left that place

and moved to Nashville, before I made a case

 

for myself; I had to grow the fuck up.

Long summer nights were hot with sap

dripping from trees to the Charles. The club

 

hid me in all that freedom to solo.

I envied them, in lax plaids and bolo

ties, flaunting their sexy pit stains that show

 

ardor, how men can be grimy and hot

and still beautiful. Effortless charm bought

strum by strum—like twisted threads in a knot

 

they needed only each other, the stink

of the place, cheap whiskey, their own fingers.

I tapped the table, downed another drink.

I never told them I played, could fingerpick

and strum; I preferred fandom as I licked

salt off the pad of my hand. It was quick

 

when later at the club Charlie’s hands found

my ass, played it like a five-string around

the floor. He studied me close, churned me out

 

in old timey rhythms. I was once

a tuned and polished dulcimer—a young

rare thing, yet easily mastered. I clung

 

to the music upon me. And just as fall

arrived, I lost it; chose instead those walls 

and the club’s cool gray cement floors. It all

 

happened at the Cantab, where I turned down

settling down, replaced it with dim lights, brown

corduroy thin at the knees from owning

 

the music. It was the twang. The cheap feel

of damp breezes up my jean skirt. A real

desire that one night, I’d shock them all, peel

 

two shots of tequila down at the Cantab,

sling a banjo on my knee. So badly

I wanted to jam, toss my hair, their plaid

 

sweaty equal. But I didn’t. So I

slid the skirt further up my pale thin thigh

and played the part I knew. Later, high

 

and blithe on the stoop of Charlie’s worn, white

Central Square three-flat, fiddles collided

with the burnt morning, let loose the tide—

 

a tongue flicking its way down my neck’s

skin in perfectly measured flesh-frets,

a hand unbuttoning my shirt on the bed—

 

later still, I stroked his banjo’s pearly strings,

slid each nickel-plated rope between my fingers

as he slept, his rolling breaths falling into sync.

 

Kelly's Bar - Nancy Krygowski

For more than 20 years, and in many different states, Sherrie and I have drunk together. Since we've lived in Pittsburgh, Kelly's has been a favorite bar, probably because its dim lighting, loud music, and low slung vinyl booths recall the dive bars of our youth. There, the past mingles with the present.

My thoughts about the ways in which drinking--what I drink, how I drink, why I drink, who I drink with--has changed for me over the years prompted this poem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Manhattan - Kelly's Bar

 

So Easy

Someone says a woman’s name and someone else says, she’s getting

divorced but I only met her at a party, a nervous hour and a half where

 

I didn’t have much to say, not so different from now—sitting in a bar

with women who won’t talk about their marriages, fears,

 

the fact that this is our lives—so we talk about clothes, food,

sometimes kids which makes me miss my 20’s and 30’s when life

 

was about sex. We didn’t sleep because of sex, we ran because of sex,

streaked our hair, hurt our friends, searched for used combat boots,

 

free condoms because of sex and more sex—and we worked

to buy alcohol which we drank for fun, not to relax.  Now the almost-

 

divorced woman is as close as we get to that gut rush, fever gasp, life-

and-death feeling that has nothing to do with death, which is why

 

we want it.  So easy, the woman at the party had said, handing me

a scallion smeared with cream cheese, wrapped in ham.  She couldn’t

 

think what to bring then remembered her mother, cigarette in right hand,

tray in left, heels clicking linoleum then quieting on shag as she served

 

her friends onions.  How simple life can be, the woman had said, or that’s

what my reaching heart wanted to think.  Did she know then her husband

 

would leave? That she didn’t love him, or he didn’t love her?  I know

these words are merciless, too roomy to hold love’s delicate glasswork. 

 

Same as the question I won’t ask:  What makes us happy?  We pause

long and loud when the waiter says, Would you like a second round?    

**

Jessica Server received her MFA from Chatham University. Currently, she writes a weekly food column for Pittsburgh City Paper. She works as a writer and teaching artist in Pittsburgh. Sever the Braid is her debut chapbook. 

 

 

 

 

Nancy Krygowski’s first book of poems, Velocity, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. She was the Booker of Poets for the Gist Street Reading Series.

Hump Day (plus one) Highlights by Stacey Harwood

Lots going on this week!

For his guest blogging week in September, Joshua Mehigan invited 19 translators to share their views on the qualities that readers should consider when seeking to read translations of verse in languages they don’t know. His posts were so popular that they're worth highlighting again, especially since Joshua has added new material that was unavailable in September.

For Part I, Joshua asked contributors to  list up to five things readers should consider before reading a collection of poetry in translation. Read the answers here.

For Part II, Joshua asked contributors to list up to five contemporary translations of poetry that they think  work as English-language poetry while also faithfully conveying the semantic content and something of the original’s greatness or importance. He also asked them to cite the most successful translation they've done. Read the responses here.

We are grateful to the following poets and translators who generously contributed to Joshua's posts: Geoffrey Brock, Bill Coyle, Dick Davis, Rhina Espaillat, David Ferry, Christophe Fricker, Jonathan Galassi, Rachel Hadas, Len Krisak, David Lehman, Charles Martin, Robert Mezey, Michael Palma, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, Roger Sedarat, Alicia Stallings, Rimas Uzgiris, and Philip White.

---

 Daniel Nester's Incredible Sestina Anthology is out and to go along with it, he's posting a series of interviews with contributors to the volume. They discuss their own introduction to the form along with the spark that inspired their poem. If you've never attempted a sestina, reading these interviews just might motivate you to pick six and get going. 

---

I love Joy Katz's essay on poetry and grief over at the Poetry Foundation website. It's lovely and moving both for her observations and her elegant language.

-- sdh

Drinks with Poets: Sheila Squillante [by Sherrie Flick]

In Pittsburgh people like to give directions by referencing places that no longer exist. Thus: Butterjoint is where More's used to be.

More's (pronounced more-ayes), a fine old-time dining establishment, had an ancient bartender who knew his cocktails and the appropriate glasses in which to serve them. A giant piano sat stuffed into the corner with a faithful group gathered round belting out show tunes. It was dark and dank and fading, and we knew it was destined to close, but we loved More's and often hung out there, the youngest patrons at the bar by about 30 years.

Butterjoint, an off-shoot of Legume restaurant next door, replaced More's bar and has recently zoomed into its own with handcrafted cocktails and a small menu that hosts excellent pierogies. It's a bubbling beam of happiness on Craig Street in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh and a great place to hang out. I covet the tiny tables by the front window. Sheila Squillante and I grabbed one of those and tried on an old-timey Pickle Back for size. --Sherrie Flick

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pickle Back: Old Heaven Hill Bonded Bourbon, house sour pickle brine

 

Pickle Back

By Sheila Squillante

I had no idea I loved bourbon until two years ago. Someone handed me a paper cup with an inch of Basil Hayden’s at a funeral after-party. “Two fingers, neat,” I would later learn is the term for this. I sipped it carefully, a little tentatively. I expected, I think, to hate it. But I did not hate it. No, I did not.

I touched it lightly with the tip of my tongue and let it spread, smoothly over every surface of my mouth. I swallowed and it was like ingesting autumn light. Not burning but warmly suffusive. Golden and everywhere. I was at a funeral and this was all body, all life. I loved it.

Learning this love, coming to embrace it as part of me, has felt like an unlikely blessing, much like finding real, dear friendships in my 40s. I never expected it but how sweet and welcome! What a comfort and balm.

So I do associate bourbon with new friends (like the one who asked me to be part of this series), but also, actually, with old ones.

My friend, the poet and sociologist, Sandra L. Faulkner, has been drinking Maker’s Mark for as long as I’ve known her. We met in a community poetry class more than ten years ago, and she struck me immediately as a powerful, feminist force—both her work and her person. Full of whimsy, but not to be trifled with, Sandra drank Maker’s then the way I drink it now: not neat, but with one, perfect, icy rock.

Sandra’s own love of bourbon was recently featured in Small Batch: An Anthology of Bourbon Poetry (Two of Cups Press), which includes her poem “Invitation to a Dead Grandmother.”

She is also a talented knitter, canner, and pickler of glorious produce, and I have no doubt that were she with Sherrie Flick and me at Butterjoint, she would also have ordered the shot with a (Delectable! Unexpected!) back of brine.

Next time my friend comes to town, I’m treating.

 

“Invitation to a Dead Grandmother”

By Sandra L. Faulkner

 

It’s happy hour, Dear Miriam,

I want you to come meet us

drink in our church-house

play hangman with the kid-

the game that seems like toddler talk

        the missing prepositions-

who needs all of those words?

 

Notice your barren worries for me

squirm well after your death:

knitting needles wrapped with vests

cookie butter soft on the counter

child organized cabinets

with cans of trout and oysters lined like a bus

service by size from oven to altar.

 

I would pour you a fresh bourbon or scotch

cask strength and uncut like in the old days

splash in some pretend soda,

a toast to the child with your name,

the one you told me I needed.

It’s (always) cocktail hour here

at our house, the church of the petulant parrot:

        I want _ Manhattan.

 

Ignore the impatient mommy-words that snake

down the drain at bath time,

the curtains sewn with crooked hem

because the (damn) tension is screwed

on your bequeathed machine,

 

notice the kid’s first word-

your post-children hobby-

under the kitchen table as he vomits

fur balls of anxiety with crusty food

after the ():

        I don’t wanta bite the bears

        _ _ _ _ _ _ _ they are too strong.

 

**

Sandra L. Faulkner is the author of two chapbooks, Hello Kitty Goes to College (dancing girl press), and Knit Four, Make One (forthcoming, Kattywompus Press). Her poetry memoir, K4, M1: Knit Four, Frog One, is forthcoming (2014) from Sense Publishers.

Sheila Squillante is a poet and essayist living in Pittsburgh. She’s associate director of the MFA programs at Chatham University, editor-in-chief of The Fourth River Literary Journal and associate editor at PANK. 

"The Food Critic" poem by Tomás Q. Morín

The Food Critic

My beat is the restaurant,
the diner, the chop house.
On any day, without calling ahead,
I’m whisked into a plush booth
lit by fresh, white bulbs
gauzed in yellow. My picture,
an old photo probably cut from a book, hangs
in every kitchen in town
next to the garlic and knives.
Two, maybe three, fit waiters
will taxi plates and flood
the crumbling chains of ice in my glass.

Food is truly the best subject
for a poet. At least, we were told that
when books went away.
Few of us could believe it
when we were given a paycheck
and an audience. Now, no more rhymes
or pretty books with pretty names.
But, it’s not as bad as it sounds.
There are worse things
than being one of the acknowledged
legislators of taste.
Just think of the poor novelist
who must write movies or obituaries;
there’s little difference, I’m told. 

For the masses, I dine
on both the good and the bad. In Reno
I ate a street bird—pigeon,
I think it was—that tasted like tobacco,
with dry, brown rice
and just-picked beans fresh
enough to pop between your teeth.
Once, I sliced a rib-eye
in Omaha, bone-out, so tender
it blinked like a cat.

This is the kingdom
we have inherited. Happiness
is a solemn slice of black tie cake
waiting in every hotel room,
while grief is missing the pyramids
of donut burgers and twinkies
after your funeral. And love,
well, love is still the first law
of the land
because what else is a double-scoop
of bacon ice cream
if not a monument to self-love?
Now, every poet is a love poet,
which should be cause for celebration
because every editorial, column, and review,
is now a love letter, a valentine
like this one
I’ve just typed for you,

      Hungry Reader:

Where the unswept walkways
of the streets convene and jut
into a soiled T tattooed on the
face of the horn-brown waters
a boat with the bones of a
house rocks. Where a dozen
odd rows of riveted steel
benches once held whale
watchers like penitents, where
a generation earlier deckhands
briskly scrubbed the sop of
viscera, forty may comfortably
dine. Two hundred and fifty
five green-black bottles of
globetrotting grapes stacked
like the dead lie in repose off
the kitchen. Corralled by
windows, from any table
the city rises coal-grey and rotten
in the west like broken fingers
on an untended hand.
Eastward, the pitiless ocean
laps the cold hull out of which
a dumbwaiter ascends with
disks of fried crab in
horseradish puddles. Glazed
Berlin venison is the special,
roasted with authentic wall-
climbing wild carrots. Double-
barreled cherry blintzes mark
the end of the meal and the
violet bruise of a late sky.  

---

"The Food Critic" by Tomás Q. Morín is reprinted with the permission of the author and the American Poetry Review, where it appears in Volume 42 No. 6. Tomás Q. Morín is the winner of the 2012 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for his collection A Larger Country. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close: 40 Essays on Philip Levine. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Narrative, Boulevard, Slate,Threepenny Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. You can find out more about him at his website here.

An Interview with Brooklyn Poets Founder Jason Koo about The Bridge [by Daniel Nester]

Poet, teacher, and founder of Brooklyn Poets Jason Koo emailed me a few days ago to tell me more about its new venture, The Bridge, which he describes as “the world's first poetry networking site connecting student and mentor poets.” After a few exchanges, it turned into a real interview, which appears below. Brooklyn Poets launched a campaign to develop The Bridge; their Indiegogo page has a video and more details.

I enjoyed exchanging thoughts with Jason about poetry and mentoring, as well as new ways of teaching and learning--“delivery models,” as we say in the education business--and, of course, The Bridge.

 
I guess the first question I have would be: Is this a social media poetry site? 

Essentially, yes. The Bridge would be a social network for poets, though something like "craft network" would be closer to what we have in mind. There are a few examples of poetry networks out there, such as poetry.com, but the design leaves a lot to be desired and there's a lack of seriousness about craft--it looks like a site for amateurs.

Ah, the BBS and message boards. I remember them well. So The Bridge will take a different approach, I take it?

What we're hoping to build is a space where amateurs can interact with professional, teaching poets--poets who wouldn't be caught dead on a site like poetry.com. You see this on Instagram, where professional photographers share work in the same community as amateurs. But in our community, poets wouldn't just be sharing and commenting on each other's work, liking it, etc.; student poets--a better term than "amateurs"--would have an opportunity to get serious critiques of their work from mentor poets they admire.

On poetry.com, a "review" of a work consists of a little comment and some stars and everyone tries to accumulate points and badges. That sounds like a lot of fun, but no one's going to learn how to become a better poet that way.

Well, you also have an actual faculty, a super line-up of poets, from Melissa Broder to Jenny Zhang.

Now Hear This: Wednesday, November 6, 6:00 PM Launch Reading to Celebrate David Lehman's New and Selected Poems

New York University Bookstore (Broadway and Waverly Place, NYC)

Reading followed by conversation with NPR's Ken Tucker

FREE

“Very few writers can actually shape how you see the world. David Lehman is such a writer.” —Robert Olen Butler

“Inventive and often winningly sincere…Lehman is candid as well as ironic—sometimes, both at once. He generates a maniacal, irreverent, fast-thinking range of references to movies, poems, history.” —Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World

“Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.” —Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Drinks with Poets: Joy Katz [by Sherrie Flick]

Many Monday nights I climb the stairs to Harvard & Highland in the East Liberty neighborhood of Pittsburgh. The bar sits above its sister institution Union Pig & Chicken, and you can order from UP&C's menu until 11pm. I teach until 9:30. They have barbequed tofu, mac n cheese, and greens. They also have an assortment of, I am told, delicious meat, but I am a vegetarian and that this comfort food is available to me post-classroom is almost as luscious as the space itself.

Harvard & Highland is a comfy urban bird's nest--snuggled up above the concrete. Streetlight glow trickling in through the big windows lets you settle in, stay a while. This isn't prime time for the bar of course, late Monday night. So it seems special. Friendly bartenders, beautiful cocktails.  --Sherrie Flick

 

H&H Sour: Bourbon, Pistachio, Lemon, Egg white, Angostura

The Sour

By Joy Katz

In my second year of grad school, I threw a party for the incoming MFAs. A party in my little apartment with something in a big pot, like chick pea stew. In strode a guy freshly shaven in a jacket and tie. He said he’d have a Manhattan. This was before cocktails made their comeback, a long while before the glamstalgic first episode of Mad Men, so the jacket, the well-brushed hair, the casual, confident demand utterly lacked context. I have beer and wine, I said, irritated, certain this guy was very insane. He eventually became a good friend.

I had my first martini sometime later that year, no idea what a martini was for or what was in it, just thought I’d order one, and I held it and sat watching my friends play pool at the sticky pool table in the Central West End of St. Louis. The guy who demanded a Manhattan now lives outside of Paris and does international security work he cannot discuss. I remember very well his short story in which the narrator is made of metal. Eventually, over the next decade, martinis became a regular part of my life. I love that they are made of metal, an icy shaker of bitter liquors.

A cocktail is part of my peaceful life. I have enough of a dark side just in my brain; I don’t drink much. But I have a weakness for the kind of places that have opened, even near my house, in Pittsburgh, the kind of bars I used to like to go to in New York, where you shout at your friend over an expanse of marble and order things from bartenders wearing vests and ties.

My students are friendly. They are respectful of each other. In certain moments they seem to me not quite real — made of something warmer than metal, definitely. Even though they are at this moment driving cars and writing checks and caring for pets. Some of them are married; some have kids. They are throwing parties in their apartments and ashing their cigarettes into the last dab of hummus.

My students work hard, they are serious. It’s time for midsemester feedback, I tell them in an email. Is there anything not working for you in 20^th Century American Poetry? I ask as though I were, ridiculously, in sleeve-garters, ready to shake up an assignment out of ingredients they dream up. Someone brings candy corn to class. We talk about John Berryman. It is all so good. It is almost too sweet, my students, this story. I had better—quick—spit, lest the gods switch up my luck.

We talk about Berryman’s sequiny cocktails of poems, the Dream Songs. In them a man tries to hold together his elegant, ugly, hairy, sad, bored, brilliant, keening, awful, crude selves among the “tranquil hills, & gin.” At a party a few years ago in someone’s apartment here in Pittsburgh, the poet CA Conrad practically spit when Berryman came up. He said, I hate the Dream Songs. Really? a young woman poet asked, surprised. I hate suicide, Conrad said.

The mad artist is a myth; a poet shows up and does her work. This I tell my students. And: Let’s get back to the words.

This is just a chill little sour, but it can’t not taste of Theodore Roethke’s “crucifixion on barstools.” It has a tang of Elizabeth Bishop’s private corrosion, Larry Levis’ boozy, lyric staggering, Dorothy Parker’s disillusion, Howard Nemerov dragging his decrepit raincoat around the lovely side streets near Wash U., in St. Louis. The old story goes: one night Nemerov, walking home, was kicked out of his own gated neighborhood. I’m the Poet Laureate! Nemerov said. I don’t care if you’re the Pope, the cop said. Get out.

**

Joy Katz's new collection is All You Do Is Perceive. She teaches 20th Century Poetry at Chatham University and writes essays on poetics.

Binge-Watching The New York City Ballet on AOL by Stacey Harwood

Anyone who has been visiting here knows I'm absolutely mad about ballet, especially as performed by the New York City Ballet company. When I was a child, my parents subscribed to the NYCB's Sunday matinees. We traveled by car to the city from our suburban home and had a pre-performance picnic at the 79th Street Boat Basin, where Roy Cohn docked his 95 ft yacht.

  Our seats were in the Fifth Ring of the New York State Theater (now the David H. Koch theater). They cost $1.00 and were arranged one behind the other along the railing. From that vantage point, the dancers were mere dots on the stage below. My father justified the seats by telling us that from this height we would take in the entire stage and be able to observe the architecture of the ballet. Apparently, he was onto something.

 When I was finally able to afford better seats, watching a ballet up close was a revelation, in ways both good and bad. On the one hand, you could see the dancers' faces, their lightening quick footwork, the grace of their arms, the beauty of the partnering, but you also saw them working. Hard. Sweat would fly off their bodies, their costumes could become soaked through. There were occasional grunts and after an especially grueling sequence, you could see the dancer fighting to keep his or her heavy breathing in check. Still, one of my favorite sounds is the pad of ballet shoes across the stage as the dancers assume their places.

It wasn't until many years later that I came to appreciate the gift of ballet that my parents gave me. We were witness to the finest choreography of the twentieth century. We saw Balanchine and Jerome Robbins ballets performed by the very dancers on which they were made. I sometimes imagine that Frank O'Hara and Edwin Denby were in the audience for some of the same performances.

The world of ballet is endlessly fascinating. It is a closed world with its own hierarchy and culture. Ballet dancers give their all to their art. Their careers are usually over by the time they reach forty. If they're lucky and manage to be injury-free, they may eke out a few more years in the less demanding roles.They are not wealthy when they retire.

I'm always surprised that more young people do not attend the ballet. While tickets can be expensive, there are usually discount programs available. Who wouldn't want to see young highly trained individuals executing difficult moves to beautiful music? Beats me.

Perhaps this new series, launched by AOL and produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, will change minds and influence how young people spend their money. Instead of blowing $100 on a few fancy cocktails, why not take in a ballet? The Nutcracker Suite begins on November 29.  And I'm happy to make recommendations for the 2014 season. Won't you join me?

-- sdh

Monday Comics by Nin Andrews

Drinks with Poets: Heather McNaugher

 It seems to me I’ve always been friends with poets. Even in the midst of graduate school--when people sometimes picked teams—you could find me at the poet table waving at the fiction writers.

I am, I should note, a fiction writer and a food writer. So I feel like a bit of an imposter guest blogging here, but I also feel at home.

Hello friends! Poets! Hello. Sit down. Would you like something to drink?

For 10 years I served as Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series in Pittsburgh. There, we hosted a prose writer and a poet each month on the third floor of James Simon’s sculpture studio. Heading out for drinks with the writers after the reading was one of my favorite things to do. Friendships formed over stories and laughter. Beer, cocktails, wine, coffee. It didn’t matter.

For this week I've decided to recreate that moment to a degree by taking a series of poets living in Pittsburgh out for drinks. Ideally, these posts will serve as an introduction to a host of great poets with a bonus tour of excellent places to get coffee and cocktails and beer in Pittsburgh (poetic drink insight included).  --Sherrie Flick

The Extra-short Americano: Your Brief History

By Heather McNaugher

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Roomy 8 oz. Americano made with the scalding hot water, not whatever tepid, lukewarm bath water comes out of that machine." Commonplace Coffee Co., Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh

When you’re a housecleaner who covets a career change to a high-end artisan espresso roasteria in Seattle in 1995, you had better make sure your drink is in order. No more Venti Vanilla Half-caf Soy Latte with Whip. You need to streamline and taste coffee, not obscure it in so much cotton candy.

There are many ways to order this drink. Most involve hand gestures for maximum control over the barista who in lamb-chops and National tee is, by nature of his craft, a perfectionist and control freak. He doesn’t need your help. You point to the tower of 8 oz. to-go cups. Staying or going, the to-go cup gives you options. With your thumb and index finger you make a letter-C, about six ounces high. “Extra-short 8 oz. Americano to go.” Next, using the full and impressive length of your left arm, you point to a little-used machine in the corner. “Made with the scalding undrinkably hot water from over there, not whatever tepid lukewarm excuse comes from this thing.” Here you chin-point disdainfully at the primary machine, calibrated for perfect espresso; not so much, apparently, for even reasonably hot water.

In recent years you’ve had to adjust your ordering. Amidst the patter of telecommuting bloggers, early Cat Power on Spotify, and the hiss of steaming cappuccino milk, “extra-short” has more than once been misheard as extra-shot. This has middle-of-the-night ramifications involving cold sweats and racing existential doubt. So you’ve taken to saying “roomy”—“a roomy 8 oz. Americano”—which, well, it’s not your brother in his Bucknell sweatshirt whose back you’re slapping—“Hey, roomy!”  It’s just not the same at all.

At this point you turn away so as not to micro-manage the actual shot. Here’s the dilemma: while it’s true you are devoted to the approximately three shops in Pittsburgh that specialize in ristretto (restricted), you in fact prefer a slightly lungo (long) shot. The end of the shot, after all, is where the deliciously sharp full-impact lives. Pour it too long, of course, and all that infra-white acidity overwhelms the bean’s flavor. It’s a delicate operation they run, our neighborhood baristas, with as many variations as there are customers in line. Utterly subjective. The result: you can’t watch. 

The extra-short Americano at Commonplace in Squirrel Hill comes closest to the shots you made at Vivace in Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where David Schomer literally wrote the book and set to work patenting a device to control water temperature as it hits the coffee. When you mention to the Commonplace barista that you once worked for David Schomer, you are no longer just some 40-year-old-way-past-cool-high-maintenance customer. You are a connoisseur trained and mentored by an espresso king. You don’t play the Vivace card on every new barista. Just the ones you sense might listen a little more closely, take that crucial extra second or two toward a drink that has no place to hide. 

**

From 1996 to 1997, after several months on dishes and register, Heather McNaugher was finally trained and permitted to pull espresso at the Vivace Roasteria in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. These days she pulls poems from students at Chatham University.  

Tonight at KGB: Star Black + Meena Alexander + Amy Lawless

KGB Monday Night Poetry is pleased to present...

Star Black + Meena Alexander + Amy Lawless

Monday, Nov. 4, 2013

Hosted by John Deming and Matthew Yeager

Series founded in 1997 by Star Black and David Lehman

Doors open at 7:00 pm

Reading starts at 7:30pm

Admission is FREE

www.KgbBar.com

85 East 4th Street * New York, NY

 

Star Black founded the KGB Poetry Series in 1997 with David Lehman. Her most recent books of poems are Ghostwood(Melville House) and Velleity's Shade (Sarurnalia Books). Her collages were recently exhibited at John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University's MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literature.

 

 

Meena Alexander's new book of poetry Birthplace with Buried Stones (TriQuarterly Books/ Northwestern University Press) is forthcoming in Fall 2013. Her volumes of poetry include Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk andQuickly Changing River. Her poetry has been translated into several languages and set to music. She has written the acclaimed autobiography, Fault Lines as well as two novels. She is author of the academic study Women in Romanticismand the book of essays Poetics of Dislocation. She is Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York and teaches at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

 

 

 

Amy Lawless is the author of the poetry collection Noctis Licentia, the chapbooks Elephants in Mourning and My Dead.   A 2011 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, her work has appeared in a number of jounals; a poem co-written with Angela Veronica Wang will appear in Best American Poetry 2013. She teaches writing in New York City and blogs at amylawless.blogspot.com and Best American Poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

Upcoming, Fall 2013

Nov 11    Craig Morgan Teicher + Alex Dimitrov

Nov 18    Joshua Beckman + Geoffrey G. O'Brien  

Nov 25    Sophie Cabot Black + Lisa Olstein      

Dec 2      David Lehman + Kim Addonizio        

Dec 9      TBA + TBA

Sherrie Flick, Guest Author November 4-8

This week we welcome Sherrie Flick as our guest author. Sherrie is author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness (Bison Books) and the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting (Flume). Her work appears in many journals and anthologies including, recently, Tom Hazuka's Flash Fiction Funny, Cortland Review, and Redux. She writes a regular food column for Pittsburgh Quarterly and serves as series editor for At Table, the food writing book list at University of Nebraska Press. For 10 years she served as Artistic Director for the Gist Street Reading Series and is currently co-founder of Into the Furnace, a writer-in-residence program in Braddock, Pa. She lives in Pittsburgh. Visit her website www.sherrieflick.com and follow her on twitter @SherrieFlick .

Welcome, Sherrie.

In other news . . .

Wednesday, November 6, 6:00 PM: Launch reading to celebrate David Lehman's New and Selected Poems:

NYU Bookstore
726 Broadway (near Waverly)
New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-4678

The reading will be followed by a conversation between David Lehman and cultural critic Ken Tucker.

A Selection of Contemporary Australian Poems (Week 5): joanne burns

 

 

 

 

 

 

sesame

 
    the flowers on the cactus
came and went like
a speed boat across the plate
glass   you wake up and then you
fall asleep wink quick or is it
the reverse; everything so fast
you can’t remember when you last
saw the wallet for the war ration
coupons it smelt a little mouldy
the last time you found it unsure
of how to access its navy blue
emptiness      a thought vanishes
into the air’s crevices you have to
rely on your fingers for good tips
a beachcomber’s manual will not
help, you knew how to reach for
the wall when the salt water stung
your eyes    [maybe] the best thing
to do between the tick and the tock
is to hold your breath:    the air’s veins
open like a patient map you won’t
need a good vocabulary

joanne burns

Ever inventive, bemused and laconic, since talking with joanne burns (1945-) sounds just like reading joanne burns, where then does the conversationalist stop and the poet start? Neither probably does. Since 1972 she has had around 15 poetry collections (including prose poems/micro-fictions) published. Recent books include an illustrated history of dairies Giramondo Publishing 2007, 'amphora' Giramondo Publishing 2011.

From Adam and Eve to Scarlett and Rhett. . .

 

Autumn Song [by W. H. Auden]

Fairfield Porter "Autumn Morning" 1949

Now the leaves are falling fast,
Nurse's flowers will not last,
Nurses to their graves are gone,
But the prams go rolling on.

Whispering neighbours left and right
Daunt us from our true delight,
Able hands are forced to freeze
Derelict on lonely knees.

Close behind us on our track,
Dead in hundreds cry Alack,
Arms raised stiffly to reprove
In false attitudes of love.

Scrawny through a plundered wood,
Trolls run scolding for their food,
Owl and nightingale are dumb,
And the angel will not come.

Clear, unscaleable, ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead,
From whose cold cascading streams
None may drink except in dreams.

-- March 1936

-- sdh

Creativity is Not a Microwave- by Alexandra Zelman-Doring

Nothing moves, but everything changes.  “Hold the ball in your hand.  Now, without changing your grip, allow it to be there.  Did you move your muscles?  Don’t.  Without moving. Hold it. Now allow it to be there.” Polina Klimovitskaya teaches the actor profound and simple change.  “Simple changes and one is no longer bound.”  One becomes free as an animal, open as a child.

For the actor the simplest thing will always be the hardest.  We grow so impeded, so rational, so ensnared, that the most natural thing seems unattainable.  It takes true, hard work to regress, especially where memory can be of little help.  To move spontaneously again, to learn to be…To truly inhabit a character, to know a character in our bones, we must train a part of ourselves exceeding what our intelligence readily allows.  And to be fascinating on stage, to steal the show, wake the audience, unify the spectacle, it requires nothing less than the reawakening of our most reticent instincts.  Klimovitskaya is a method unto herself, in other words, a master; she teaches a clear vision, encompassing a wealth of past teachings and showing us what the future will require of us if we mean to stay awake and create an authentic, living theatre for our time.

Polina has been doing it for years- a veteran of the Moscow Art Theatre in Russia, Klimovitskaya  holds an MFA in Directing from State Theater University, Moscow, and a Ph. D. from Yale University.  She started her work as an actress and director in Russia, studying with disciples of K. Stanislavsky and E. Vachtangov, and directing with the last assistant of the great stage innovator, V. Meyerhold. In the US she has performed at Yale Repertory Theater, and played Mama in the Academy Award winning film Molly’s Pilgrim. Polina has directed numerous productions in Europe and in America, and is the founding director of the Terra Incognita Theater.

She knows that she should write a book, or a book should be written on her.  People have been trying. It is difficult to capture her teachings. My first summer study in her class stayed with me for many years; I remembered each moment of every one of her classes- I recalled tossing a ball, eating an apple, walking, sitting- each action seemed one of the most dynamic I had performed in my life.  When I told Polina that I wanted to try to “write her” we were as skeptical as we were exited, for what she teaches “ is living, it is harmonious, which is to say, alive, creative, never static,” and that goes for her process, also. When I found out she would be teaching her “animal workshop” this summer at Michael Howard Studios, I told her I wanted to try.

For years teaching the “animal” workshop, she has observed its continued effect on actors of every age, coming to her from every variation of background and training. The work is transformative through and through.  It is innovative, visionary, complete. And it is not a mystery. I ask her when and how her interest in this work began. 

“There is a basin of water, throw in a stone, you hear it fall.  Throw a stone into a bucket—you wait longer, it’s more mysterious, takes longer, you hold your breath.  Throw a stone into a deep lake, and you don’t know where the bottom is—with some people, you hear the pebble, shallow,” Polina smiles and ruffles a hand through her auburn hair. Her English is eloquent and her words always apt. A thick, graceful Russian accent colors it in. “An actor is like that.  That depth is how we can describe what makes an actor magical, charismatic, attractive…some have a magnetic attraction.   My interest began when I was very young, about 13 years old.  My friend was the most beautiful girl in class.  She was. And not because she was my friend, she really was the most beautiful—but all the boys followed another girl, ‘why’ I asked myself. I started to watch animals, children…great actors, they are all the same.  What pulls us, what is that attraction?  The ability to live from the somatic body. I didn’t use this terminology, then.”

I ask her to describe what the result of her work is, in most actors.  “What I teach draws from the creative, deeper, spontaneous center, call it magical, call it magical to create.”  She is twisting her arm, weaving the expression of what this might be, a web just inches away from her navel. “We don’t work for result, working for a result is like trying to get a new lover…the night you go out and try to get a new lover, it is impossible.  But go out, just go out to enjoy yourself, and someone will call in the morning. We must let go of waning to grab hold of anything.  St. Therese would go through a long process, for small moments, only small moments, of praying. We keep training, and our training, is like St. Theresa’s prayer. The memoirs of St. Theresa are like acting.” Praying embodies the abandon that the actor must fall to in order to work. “If we could figure truly out the process of art, if we believe in absolute control, could not a computer do for us what we do?” She asks. “Modern society wants to control, but creativity is not a microwave.  We want to drop into deep somatic level, where the spontaneous mind lives.”

“The metaphor is this:  every text will require us to come to it from somewhere, so that it can affect us, in a particular way.  Every play is a new meeting.  In life we meet people, establish friendship, attraction—the way we are attracted to one person is not the same way we are attracted to another.  We gain self-knowledge, and can have better relationships; we grow more flexible, in touch with inner animal, then it doesn’t matter if it’s Shakespeare or avant-garde, if it is Peter Mary or Jane who you are playing. What the actor prepares is not an image.” The point is, who is meeting the challenge.  And for this one must learn not only to react, but to respond. “The more and deeper that I sense myself, the more spontaneously will I respond intuitively.”  She has hit upon the basis of the work she does with animals in the workshop. “There is no more intimate way to go within, to experience ones layers of anatomy and psychology.”  There is a method to the magic.  But talking about it can’t get us there. “Enough talk! We might know it. If knowing it were it, we would have nothing to do.  Instead we have two hours and forty-five minutes left of class. We must work.”

“Begin by walking.  What if we were to walk quietly? What changes?  Acting is an art of suggestion.  What if we were to feel the floor with our feet?  Like it or don’t like it, but feel it.  There is a spider two inches below the navel.  That is the center.  Try walking from the center.” Her warm up is always very thorough.  And very difficult. Polina puts in a tape, a drum beat, it sounds like a fast heartbeat, and very low. Her students are to move with the drum.  Not dance to it, not try to copy it, but to move with it.  Why is it so difficult to move when you are not to dance, only move?  We don’t know how.

In harmony there is no missed spot, no possibility of error.  It is like an actor in character, who can trip and summersault across the stage and do no wrong, for character is not portrayed, but embodied, inhabited. Polina has begun to move.  She lifts her feet and sets them down, testing the ground.  Very slowly, she begins stepping, it is like she is feeling something out, sliding into some precise harmony just looming in the air about her.  Her hands move, she is dancing, but it is not a dance, she spins, “spin” she tells us, “circles, feel the space.” At the moment of watching Polina, the receptive student will not be able to help but feel no less than an expansion within herself. There is a change, and this is an easy change. You watch a free thing and something releases in you, that simple. Something like the pleasure of bird-watching. Polina is a master of teaching, but also of leading, of being, of sharing.  It is a visceral instruction--bountiful, immediate.  Her spoken instructions appear mysterious at first, but the actor is meant to wonder about them intuitively, before plugging them in to the larger picture.  “Get into your bones.  Try to get into your bones. What does it mean, get into your bones?”

            *

The students choose an animal, and research the animal in depth.  They must know each detail, from skeleton to mating ritual, skin type to general appearance.  Above all they should take note of their own reactions, their immediate response to these investigations. Talking about the animals, they begin the associative work that goes on in the creation of any character, the ignition of what Stanislavski called imagination and Polina refers to as deep associative structure.  

A tiger, a cobra, a rhinoceros, and a horse.  Polina interrogates.  Male or female?  Does the animal display monogamous or polygamous behavior? Which sense is the strongest? What bit of information provokes the strongest reaction in the students?  What attracted them, what repulsed them?  “They are so alone, very separate…and male tigers kill their babies.  That is very disturbing to me,” says the girl who has chosen to work on a tiger. “The cobra has the choice to insert poison in a bite, or hold it back,” the Cobra shares. I hear Polina mutter “Richard the III” under her breath. 

“Associate things that ordinarily will not associate, then you will become an artist…”  The students watch videos of the animals roaming the wild, every day.  Wild animals only. “When you speak about your animal, try to describe something within yourself, it’s extremely personal, as with text and characters. What is the organ through which Hamlet survives? This is crucial.  It’s impossible to know it before you perform, before you experiment, otherwise it’s all intellectual.  Knowledge only comes when we work.  Brain doesn’t help to act.  The psyche is also an organ with a function.”  I inquire further.  Polina compares acting to love making. “One of the main things is we need to continually merge, it’s giving up on the notion of oneself, and yet being profoundly in the body… being another person, your cells, everything responds, moves differently…with  good acting you dissolve in love, and you have to follow whatever it is.  What do you need to learn to be a good lover? To be in your body and to give it up…focus and relaxation, you cannot hold, holding will prevent you, and yet you need to be very focused…” She freezes as though allowing all she will say to gather within her beforehand, in the wisdom of one of her generous smiles. “The purpose of love making is dissolving rigid internal structures. No matter how cynical or pragmatic people are they still dream of real love where split between body and mind is overcome. In sex or method acting, the split remains. Ultimately everyone wants to overcome rigid self form- it’s very suffocating, no matter what people say there is in all of us same longing for freedom, liberation...”

Polina does not suggest that we undergo a Freudian psychoanalysis.  But what she teaches requires a certain willingness on the actor’s part to open up to what our conditioning, our civilizing, represses with a vengeance.  We have to air our inhibitions.  We have to perceive our bodies as we have never perceived them, experience them as we never would have otherwise.  That does not mean undergo therapy, “acting should not be therapy!” but it means investigation, experiment, uncovering some fearsome layers.  In the end it may be therapeutic, but not because of the work itself, rather because art, as Polina often emphasizes, is.  She once shared with me the greatest complement she received after a show:  a man told her he got into a taxi after watching her work, but had to get out a few blocks later. “He wanted to walk, he wanted to feel life, he wanted to live because he felt that life was wonderful.”

As actors, we portray the basest characters and passions. And this means, know them in our bones. Polina’s animal work leads us to viscerally experience these human states, without judgment. “We have been taught since childhood what is pretty and what is not. Have you ever seen a piece of wild, natural land, untouched?  Is it ugly?  Have you ever seen a piece of nature that people didn’t put their foot in, that was ugly?  Is a true wild animal ugly?  A tiger jumps on a zebra—we must learn to observe this without finding the tiger a criminal.  There is nothing criminal about that tiger.  The zebra smells a certain way, it must be slain.”  We judge Blanche and Mitch.  But the audience must watch them as we watch a zebra.  “I can be portraying the ugliest person in the world, but the whole point is there are no disgusting people. The actor is disgusting, tragedy is always beautiful, never ugly, because its humanity.  Human beings are precious and incredible, and when they go wrong, there is a beauty in it…”  It was an extreme statement, but Michael Chekhov said that if Hitler could be properly enacted, no more Hitlers would be born into the world. 

            *

Polina is much more than an acting coach and theatre director.  She is an intellectual aware of her work as an element of time and place. “When I teach you, I am thinking about the future, ten, fifteen years from now.  We are not fixed people.  And you must realize that, if you are to avoid conflict in yourselves. Today, in society, change comes much faster.  We are standing on a threshold.  We are about to leap from one era to the next.  You, your generation, will have to make the jump.  The only way to make it is to be flexible.  Rocks cannot move, but water can flow. Water has a better chance of survival than a rock. My process is very simple.  Always to reestablish contact with an old forgotten friend.” Polina is talking about the animal nature in us, the one we neglect and eventually forget altogether; that force of nature that sits in waiting, a  “treasury,” as she puts it.

“Each particular period puts out its conditioning, and asks artists to overcome.  Writers thorough intuitive mind, actors through body—in our time, we are living a culture from the image about life, externally, it’s all about body image, society cultivates it.”  It makes our work just that much more difficult. Polina teaches a process, as well as the concept of a process as a lifetime endeavor, a lifelong love. And a tireless surrender: “the result is in the audience’s soul, as an artist we only go through the process.” She teaches from such a wealth of experience, that it will take a book just to tell her life. I kept her up until three in the morning hearing her stories about the Soviet Union, about the earliest plays she directed, her struggles and successes as a woman and a Jew wanting to direct in Russia during impossible times.  At the end of a long night, Polina looks at me out of her two, wide-awake eyes.  I must have asked her what she feels she has become, or some such petulant question. “I don’t consider myself a theatre director, I don’t know, the result will be in you…in the end there is no result, just life.”  

 

http://www.michaelhowardstudios.com/Michael_Howard_Studios/Teachers.html

http://terraincognitatheater.org

'I Feel A Bit Like A Spy': NPR's Q&A With David Lehman

photo (c) John Tranter

(Ed note: In a year that included publication of The Best of the Best American Poetry and The Best American Poetry 2013, David Lehman has also published his New and Selected Poems,(Scribner) which hits bookstores this week. NPR's Camila Domonoske recently spoke with David by telephone. Here's an exerpt with a link to the full interview. sdh)

 

Seventeen years ago, the poet, writer and editor David Lehman resolved to write a poem every day. It sounds a little similar to , which kicked off yesterday — except that Lehman kept it up for five years, publishing many of the daily poems in literary journals and in two well-received collections.

Lehman's reputation for prolific output extends beyond his poem-a-day project. For the past 25 years, he's been the series editor for Best American Poetry, the annual anthology series that he founded in 1988. He also chose the works for the 1,200-page Oxford Book of American Poetry, on top of editing collections of erotic and prose poetry, writing frequent reviews and releasing nonfiction books on topics from Jewish songwriters and the New York School of Poets to the detective novel and Deconstruction.

When Lehman started to work on a retrospective collection, it took him two years to sift through what he'd written. The result, New and Selected Poetry, presents samples from his work in reverse chronological order. Over the phone, Lehman told me about his unhelpful anthologizing know-how, his 40-year effort to translate a single poem and why he's inspired by spy novels.

You have a lot of experience selecting poems from the body of work of other poets. How does that relate to the project of curating your own work for a book like this?

I feel that when I read for the Oxford [Book of American Poetry], or the Best American Poetry, I read as generously as possible, and I have a certain receptiveness to American poetry — and really world poetry, in all its variety. And then to my chagrin I found that all of this know-how and experience did not necessarily help me in making selections of my own work. It's much more difficult to see your own work with a certain kind of quiet detachment that is necessary in such a project.

continue reading . . .

Fire Up Your Kindle for Ming Holden's "The Survival Girls"

We first met Ming Holden in 2008, during a visit to Mongolia. At the time, Ming, a graduate of Brown University, was a Luce Scholar working on establishing a PEN chapter for Mongolian writers. If I remember correctly, she was the first poet to receive the prestigious award.

Since leaving Mongolia, Ming has continued with her advocacy work and activism on behalf of the disenfranchised. In 2011, she traveled to Kenya to work with refugee girls. At the end of her seven weeks there, she had founded the Survival Girls, a theater group comprised of six Congolese refugee women ages 18-23 living in a Nairobi slum. The Survival Girls have since stayed together as an independent and self-sustaining women's empowerment and artistic expression group. Their membership has doubled and they've competed in local competitions, and been contracted by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees to perform all over Nairobi about female genital mutilation and other social issues. 

Ming has written an account of her experiences, which is now available for download to Kindle. You can buy a copy of The Survival Girls from Amazon. Read an exerpt of on Glimmer Train. Find out more about Ming Holden here. Follow her on twitter here and on The Huffington Post here.

Congratulations, Ming.

-- sdh

"Private Eye" [by Ron Horning]

For some reason I think Ghirardelli Square is Aquatic Park

and walk to the end of Columbus one Sunday off. Pretty bad,

so it must have been a lot different when Spicer came here—

with his transistor and a young poet he wants to sleep with—

 

to bake off a hangover left from drinking and writing to dark.

All you see now is a brick mall full of tourists about to be had.

There’s the Bay, OK, but that’s the beach? Where’s one queer

to bring to life ghost stories so much better now than a myth?

 

Hard to imagine someone as real as Jack Spicer here for hours,

and so, after managing to avoid what’s happened to the place,

I head back to the Dante and another dinner of pork and beans.

 

But first I cross Broadway and, in City Lights, buy Flowers,

poems by George Stanley whose lines read like a small face

that starts to glow as this room darkens. Maria, in our teens.

 

-- Ron Horning