The Best American Poetry

A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes [by Witold Gombrowicz]

Who hasn’t wished for a painless way to find out what the big shots of philosophy – the Hegels and Kants, the Nietzsches and Sartres – thought of the human condition? It has never made for easy reading, the pondering of such formidable thinkers, and most explainers and textbooks tend either to get things wrong or to massacre the language.

Still, the reader aproaching Kant or Hegel needs help, and when it comes from someone with a sense of humor and a refusal to be boring, my heart leaps up.

So it did when I opened Witold Gombrowicz’s Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (trans. Benjamin Ivry; Yale University Press), an exceptional effort at summarizing concepts in bold, declarative sentences. Descartes had one important idea, “absolute doubt.” Kierkegaard had grown up on Hegel’s philosophy, then suddenly “declared war on him, in one of culture’s most dramatic moments.”

Gombrowicz (1904-1969), arguably Poland’s greatest modern novelist, took Schopenhauer's pessimism in stride. Schopenauer's "is a grandiose and tragic vision which, unfortunately, coincides perfectly with reality." 

Gombrowicz writes with a comic wit that made him persona non grata in his Soviet-controlled homeland. He spent his last years lecturing in Paris. A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes, which he was working on when he died, is like the course in philosophy you wish you had taken in your junior year.

-- DL (2004). Reading the book rekindled my fascination with Schopenhauer and inspired me to write my poem "The Will to Live," which went on to win the Laurence Goldstein Award from the Michigan Quarterly Review. Pictured above: Raphael's "School of Athens."  

"That Ship Has Sailed" by Terence Winch [by Stacey Harwood Lehman]

Terence Winch's That Ship Has Sailed (University of Pittsburgh Press) arrived last week, and reading it has given me many pleasurable hours. Here is "Father," a favorite poem that in a few brief lines conjures an entire life:

Father

I have your cuff links and tie clips.
I have a box with your IDs in them.
Your steamfitters union card from
the middle of the war. I have the toolbox
you and I made together when I was a kid.

I have the bookcase you brought home
when the Monsignor bought new furniture
for the rectory and threw it out. It's right
upstairs in my living room. I have your banjo,
which still sounds great. All I'm missing is you.

        by Terence Winch from That Ship Has Sailed 

You can read Anne Harding Woodworth's fine review in the Innisfree Poetry Journal, along with new poems by Terence Winch here.

"Invited to Life: Finding Hope After the Holocaust" [by B. A. Van Sise]

Recommendation: "Why Dance Matters" by Mindy Aloff [by Stacey Harwood-Lehman]

Raphael Soyer Raphael Soyer (American, b. Russia, 1899-1987) "Dancing Lesson"

I've been reading Mindy Aloff's Why Dance Matters (Yale University Press, 2022) and was delighted to see this much deserved rave review by Willard Spiegelman in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). The range and depth of Mindy's dance scholarship is, frankly, astonishing. I've had the lucky experience of attending ballet performances with Mindy, and she even agreed to join me at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to screen a film of an obscure ballet ("A Wedding Bouquet" by Fredrick Ashton with words by Gertrude Stein). Mindy's observations and insights have deepened my appreciation of ballet and now, having read Why Dance Matters, I am even more eager to contionue my exploration of the wide world of dance. 

About a third of the way through Why Dance Matters, you encounter several paragraphs that address the question "Why does looking at dance matter?" I've often left the theater having been deeply moved by a performance and desperate to hold on to the afterimages of what I've just witnessed only to have them slip away when city noise intrudes. Here's why, says Mindy:  "If you consider dancing seriously -- as something more worthy of your concentration than gazing at a Lava Lite -- then you quickly learn that even for a short, simple number there is quite a lot of information to take in, and to do so requires fast eyes, keen hearing, and a capacious memory. There are elements in any dance, regardless of the tradition or style, that are difficult simply to recognize as they go by, much less to analyze and then discuss, just as there are indeed layers of possible significance to poetry that begin to reveal themselves only after many rereadings." 

And later: 

Simply trying to appreciate what actually takes place in a dance -- the facts of dance action -- is hard enough. A more extreme brain workout is trying to witness what the dancers are doing while remaining aware of the theatrical effects or illusions their movement is intended for the audience to see. If the choreography is coordinated to a musical score, then to recognize and track points of coordination as they happen and be able to recall them later should earn you admission to Mensa. And trying to keep track of all of this while remaining receptive to whatever epiphanies of meaning the dance may provoke -- and perhaps while being overtaken by rapture, too--requires a type of multitasking in while your consciousness, so to speak, has one eye on the stage and one watching your brain be a brain. 

The reader is then invited to take a walk with Mindy among dances where "the multitasking might prove not only as usefull to brain health as sudoko but even more enjoyable."

Take the walk! Buy Why Dance Matters here. 

Dance matters. You already know this if you're a season ticket holder to the local ballet company. And it matters if you dance alone while dusting, or with your partner at a wedding or Bat Mitzvah. 

On Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, "Queen of Queer Theory" [by Blake Smith]

from  "Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake" by Blake Smith
Tablet, January 12, 2023

Subhead: "The queen of queer theory sought to relieve the persecution complex that haunted the West. Instead, her work has intensified it"

<<
There are (at least) two sorts of women who love gay men in a way that makes gay men like me nervous. Camille Paglia is one of the best-known representatives of the first sort—along with those other Italian American celebrity fruit flies, Madonna and Lady Gaga: energetic, pretentious, (pop-)cultured women who imagine gay men as their “creative” and “interesting” counterparts.

The second kind—stereotypically nerdy, mousy, and frumpy sweater-wearing—loves gays not as a gaggle of chattering slags who support her self-conception as someone sexy and scandalous, but rather from the safe distance of books. These women read and often write about gay men and gay sex, in an intellectualized fantasy through which they escape their own sexuality. (Why young women of this type increasing purport to be gay men, and pursue surgery in an attempt to make themselves so, is a mystery for another time.)

Perhaps the most intellectually significant example of the second type was Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, one of the founders of queer theory. In her books Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and The Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Sedgwick laid crucial theoretical groundwork for the study of how male homosexuality, and queerness more generally, shaped and were shaped by the literature, philosophy, and culture of the modern West. As a gay man and an academic, I have long felt a pull of gratitude toward her, and also a push of revulsion against what I can’t help but recognize as her cringe-inducing type.

Sometimes reading an author you have the unsettling certainty that if you’d known them in high school, you’d never have let them sit with you in the cafeteria. In the same way that I shudder inwardly at the sight of a dowdy, apparently asexuated woman reading “boys’ love” manga or The Song of Achilles, I am troubled whenever I read Sedgwick—a fat straight woman who recounted the miserable paucity of her sexual relations in Dialogue on Love (1999)—write about male anal eroticism with annoyingly evident delight at her transgression of academic propriety. The gay male thinkers who made her work possible, like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, never insisted on such ostentatiously provocative specificity in their writing, whatever they did in practice—not least because they imagined that the erotic, as Barthes’ American translator Richard Howard put it, is what the writing intellect can obliquely evoke but not directly enact.
>>>

For the rest of this article, click here.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: JANUARY 11, 2023

If you are, like me, endlessly fascinated with the sonnet and all it can hold, you’ll want to get yourself a copy of The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays by Dora Malechand Laura T. Smith which will be released tomorrow by University Of Iowa Press.  From Phyllis Wheatley to Diane Suess, from Muriel Rukeyser to Patricia Smith, this anthology captures the flexibility and durability of the form. In addition to sonnets old and new, there are essays following each entry. A true delight of a book!

Claude Rawson on Stanley Fish, Derrida, the Rise and Ruin of Critical Theory (1991)

The more things change, the more they stay the same -- or get worse.
From "Old Literature and Its Enemies" by Claude Rawson, London Review of Books, 25 April 1991.

The identification of theory with a more or less coercive political agenda has been pointed out from time to time, and its more triumphalising publicists are increasingly open and even boastful on the subject. It has merged with the wider issues of ‘political, correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, and one or two other phenomena which have lately attracted worries of a ‘new McCarthyism’. An article in the Wall Street Journal of 13 November 1990 reported the now notorious affaire in which Stanley Fish, Chairman of the English Department at Duke University and a major national power-broker of the theory trade [below right], wrote to the Provost of the University demanding that local members of the National Association of Scholars should be banned from ‘key committees involving tenure or curriculum decisions’, subsequently affirming that the organisation was ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’. The NAS is said to be dedicated to the preservation of traditional scholarship. The founder of its Duke University branch is James David Barber, a civil rights activist and past president of Amnesty International, which suggests that the association may be something other than a hotbed of reactionary prejudice. At all events, Fish circulated his letter among a handful of ‘trusted colleagues’, one of whom ‘was sufficiently taken aback by its contents to see that it was made public’. When the campus newspaper broke the story, ‘Prof. Fish denied ever saying that NAS members should be excluded from tenure and curricular committees. “It was really strange to hear him say that,” a student editor marvelled. “We had the letter with his own words asking just that, right in front of us.” ’ Fish ‘declared himself unavailable for comment’.

But not for long. Two months later, Fish was being reported in the New Republic (18 February 1991) as having said that he didn’t believe ‘free speech’ was anything ‘more than an expression of power’. A graduate student asked him to elaborate: ‘“I want them,” responds Fish, referring to students and faculty, “to do what I tell them to.” Later, he explains to a small group: “I want to be able to walk into any first-rate faculty anywhere and dominate it, shape it to my will. I’m fascinated by my own will.” ’

At this point, with the issue reduced to the egocentric billowings of an individual, the example would seem to lose its representative status. This is not so, however, for several reasons. One is that coercive egomania on this scale has become an institutional feature of literary studies. It goes with positions of tribal leadership in a discipline not formerly given to the unquestioning worship of intellectual thuggery, and the damage it does to the educational process is something we should be thinking about. A variant case, reported on in Lehman’s book [Signs of the Times], is that of [Jacques] Derrida. An equally soft-spoken authority called Houston Baker, on record as saying that choosing between Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck is ‘no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza’, and that his ‘career is dedicated to the day when we have a disappearance of those standards’, can nowadays be elected President of the MLA. It seems evident that such an out-look would not get him very far in the fast food business, which adds countenance to the proposition that people go into English studies because they’re unlikely to make a success of anything else.

Secondly, this style of egomania attracts to itself and to its hangers-on – in the form of salaries, support services, perks, lecture fees and the expensive hoopla of conferences and other promotional circuses – immense sums of money which would be better spent on more urgent educational priorities, including better schools for some of the disadvantaged groups on whose behalf, it seems, Professor Fish and his analogues will only go so far as to limit the free speech of others.

A third feature of this coerciveness is that it has its institutional reflection in codes of behaviour which the university to which Fish belongs is seeking to impose on its members. The New Republic reports, for example, that Duke University has initiated a group with the Committee on Public Safety-like title of ‘Committee to Address Discrimination in the Classroom’. This body, which was given the charge of uncovering faculty racism in the classroom, found very little in the way of overt bias. But in its monitoring of the classroom it did discover examples of ‘disrespectful facial expressions or body language aimed at black students’. The committee has promised to continue its work.

Duke, you may say, is perhaps unusual. Once a traditional and unflamboyant institution, it decided a few years ago to go trendy. With the aid of the entrepreneurial Fish it has collected the biggest and loudest assembly of literature professors dedicated to [Alvin] Kernan’s scenario of doing dirt on literature (a nest of singing turds, as one disaffected wit described them). It is the world’s largest hypermarket of hard theory, as well as of applied multiculturalism, and the launching-pad for more round-the-clock attention-seeking fatuities than there were air sorties in the Gulf War.

But it’s evidently not the only place where a thought police, or body-language police, is getting into gear. A programme at Tulane University in New Orleans is being set up in which ‘faculty and students will be encouraged to report on each other’ for signs of racism and sexism, with every department watched by ‘an “Enrichment Liaison Person” to inform the administration about continuing progress in ... the “Initiatives” ’, according to an anguished letter to the press from the Chairman of the Political Science Department. Many universities have more or less avowedly institutionalised the practice, in making appointments or promotions, of preferential treatment on grounds other than the candidate’s contribution to knowledge or his or her intellectual ability.

These not only include the candidate’s race, sex or sexual preference, but the correctness of his or her opinions. One result of this is that departments which used to make themselves mediocre by preferring white males over better-qualified women or blacks are now making themselves doubly mediocre by the same process in reverse, with many of the original second-raters still in place. This seems bad not only for scholarship but also for race and gender relations.

The American press (Newsweek and the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, regional dailies and the campus papers) have picked this up in recent months, with predictable references to Orwellian nightmare and McCarthyism. David Lehman reports the ‘commonplace wisdom among job-seekers at MLA conventions that ... if you want to make it in the criticism racket, you have to be a deconstructionist or a Marxist or a feminist. Otherwise you don’t stand a chance.’ There is no doubt that this is the advice given to graduate students when they are considering their research topic, by advisers who may be motivated as much by a realistic estimate of the student’s career prospects as by a political agenda of their own.

***

Lehman’s Signs of the Times examines the impact of Deconstruction in the United States. It does not engage in technical debate as John Ellis or Thomas Pavel have done, and is not an academic but a ‘journalistic’ book: journalistic in an honourable sense, which will doubtless not be immune from the sanctimonious sneers of the high priests of the de Man cult, who freely use journalism to decry the journalism of those who reported the Nazi sympathies of their dead leader’s wartime journalism.

What Lehman offers is a survey of the current fortunes of Deconstruction as a professional or ideological routine, and especially as a talismanic or valorising term, in American intellectual life, and of its penetration into other disciplines than literature. He also gives the fullest account I have seen of the known biographical facts about de Man, which apparently include financial irregularities, possible bigamy, a Rousseauistic callousness towards the children of his first marriage, as well as Nazi collaboration and four decades of mendacity or dissimulation on most of these subjects.

Lehman offers good coverage of the gobbledegook and doublethink brought to bear in de Man’s defence: ‘De Man’s entire writing effort is a silent trace of the reality of an event whose very historicity, borne out by the author’s own catastrophic experience, has occurred precisely as the event of the preclusion – the event of the impossibility – of its own witnessing’; ‘only the trivially guilt-ridden pathology of bitter academics who have always resented de Man’s intellectual, i.e. critical, power would want de Man to have inscribed himself in a conversion narrative’; and, especially startling as refutations of alleged anti-semitism go, ‘are not, indeed, Paul de Man and his deconstruction somehow overwhelmingly Jewish – as Jewish as anyone, in our multinational 1980s, can be?’

The fullest coverage is reserved for Derrida’s responses in the journal Critical Inquiry, which assail the assailants with the finesse of Ubu Roi and the conciseness of Castro. The second rejoinder, engagingly entitled ‘Biodegradables’, is longer than all six answers to his first defence put together, and must be the most voluminous mixture of Shandean self-exhibition and vulgar abuse ever to have been allowed into a journal professedly committed to rational discourse. The English text of these pieces incidentally suggests in places that Derrida and his translator do not have between them a sufficient knowledge of both English and French to know that he doesn’t mean what he is sometimes represented as saying. Since Derrida regularly lectures in America, and since his American readers read him in translations from the French, the potential for misprision opens up as an abyss of truly continental proportions.

Derrida’s inordinate polemical scripts are the written counterpart of his lecturing style, an advanced case of galloping logorrhoea. The audiences are vast, but with definite signs of shrinkage as the days go by, and Lehmen wonderfully describes a scene at Cornell in 1988: ‘The undergraduate sitting behind me whispered excitedly to her companion, “He isn’t God,” in the tone of one who is trying to persuade herself of something.’ The subject was ‘The Politics of Friendship’. On the Monday,

                       he commenced his lecture by quoting Montaigne, who was himself citing Aristotle:
                       ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ The two parts of the sentence are incompatible,
                       Derrida observed. If there is no friend, to whom am I speaking? Or, with a shift
                       in the formal emphasis: if I can address you as my friends, how can I say there is
                       no friend?

The following Wednesday, with his audience halved but still running into hundreds, he addressed ‘Liberty, equality, fraternity’:

                     ‘Fraternity? Cela suffit!’ he said. Fraternity ... was exclusionary ... True friendship
                      is understood as possible between two men but never between a man and a woman
                      or between two women. ‘The double exclusion privileges the brother, even above
                      the father,’ Derrida said – fighting words in a discourse in which patriarchy is in as
                      much disrepute as, say, phallogocentrism ....

On Friday it was question-time. The scene switches to a ballet of ingratiating interrogations, fielded with deprecatory simpers or oracular condescension. But watch the punchline:

                    A professor of Romance studies tossed him a verbal bouquet, or tried to. He observed
                   that a certain passage in Montaigne’s essay on friendship is ‘the most Derrida-like
                   passage in Montaigne’. (Derrida disagreed.) ... With the air of the star pupil, a literature
                   professor returned to ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Was the ‘asymmetry’ in
                   the apostrophe not an example of the ‘breakdown between performative and constative
                   language’?

                   This afforded Derrida an opportunity he could seize. ‘The asymmetry of the sentence
                   makes one wonder which half of the equation is subordinate,’ he said, then launched
                   a monologue that concluded with the observation that ‘one of the most interesting features
                   of phallogocentrism’ is that ‘you can’t have an animal as a friend.’ Question: ‘You said that
                   women are excluded [from traditional concepts of friendship], yet Aristotle likens friendship
                   to the mother’s desire to know her child.’ Answer: ‘Mothers are not necessarily women.’

Claude Rawson is the Maynard Mack Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University.

Ad-Verse Reactions: Poets / writers Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley quiz each other on advertising, pop culture, late-stage Capitalism and monsters

Both Jerome Sala and Jack Skelley have just released “new and selected” volumes. Both writers have had careers in advertising and PR. Both use pop culture (and many other related subject matters) as thematic material. Now both are interviewing each other.

Jerome Sala’s book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Jack Skelley’s book is Interstellar Theme Park: New and Selected Writing (BlazeVOX books). Other works by Jerome include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books) and The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier). Jack recently released Dennis Wilson and Charlie Manson (Fred & Barney Press), and Semiotext(e) will publish his “secretly legendary” novel Fear of Kathy Acker in April 2023. Sala lives in New York City, Skelley in Los Angeles.

Jerome Sala Though your poems use pop characters sometimes decades old, they never seem dated. I’ve noticed something similar when doing readings of my own work. I can read a poem that contains the pop culture of years ago, and yet people respond to it as if it’s written yesterday. This suggests that as much as culture has changed, something has stayed the same. What are your theories on the currency of your work?

Jack Skelley. It’s funny how popular culture, long considered ephemeral, has persisted and infiltrated high culture. And not just Boomer-era figures, either. (Boomer culture is rightly condemned, I think, for its domination.). But more recent stars, moguls, etc., if iconic enough, may attain “pop archetype” status, despite the atomization of the culture at large. It has something to do with an inherent, trans-historical, human need to idolize. So I am inspired by current figures too: Divas such as Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus and Lana del Rey appear in my book. The attempt is not simply to cash-in on their name recognition – not that there’s anything wrong with that! – but to extract from them – or even assign to them – an imaginative resonance.

Jack Skelley: You milk current trends and icons as well. How Much? has meditations on sitcoms, a wide range of movies, sports stars (Charles Barkley) and, perhaps most prominently commercial products. A series of entertaining poems analyze the marketing missteps of Coke products. How do you explain your attraction to these themes?

Jerome Sala: The Oulipo Group of writers, who designed a collection of wildly creative writing experiments, devised one called “translexical translation.” The way it works is that you recast any text in a new vocabulary, such as rewriting a classic in the language of today (their example was a piece entitled “Skinhead Hamlet”). When I read this, I realized a lot of my own poems did something similar but on a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, level. Instead of philosophizing about the meaning of life, for example, I have written poems debating the meaning of Coke, as you mentioned. I’m fascinated by how the spiritual values of our world have been secularized by media, commodification, and simulation. To explore this, I like to take what seem like the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments, carved in stone. I think the same sort of dialectic, a mock-heroic mode really, is the source of the humor in both of our works.

Jerome Sala. We have both been professional writers of ads, PR, web “content”,etc., rather than follow the usual path of the poet/teacher. What are some of the ways this has affected your work? And how has writing poems and fictions influenced your business writing?

Jack Skelley. Like you, I draw a lot of absurdist humor from “ad-speak.” But also, on a formalistic level, there is an epigrammatic concision to good ad copy. For me, the most impactful taglines are the shortest: seven words or fewer of pure definition or motivation. (I tend to break taglines into two types: definitional or inspirational types.) And although I love a poem or story that veers into wild, uncharted spaces, I also want every word to count. Which is why puns and wordplay – where a turn of phrase packs more than one meaning, providing a little brain-orgasm – are so important in both verse and advertising. I also like to toy with marketing forms. My poem “Athena del Rey” is composed as a press release, for example.

But I want to hear your thoughts on the same question… Can you detail how your creative writing has influenced your business writing and vice versa?

Jerome Sala: Somewhere in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, he writes that advances in one art are sometimes accomplished by borrowing the forms and practices of another. It’s fun to take this idea literally. So, like you, I’ve borrowed the forms of advertising for poems. I’ve incorporated TV commercial formats (“Variations on a Theme by Subaru”), sweepstakes letters (“Dear Potential Millionaire”), and product proposals (“The Individuals Club”). I used to write a form of advertising called “Direct Response,” which asks for an action in a blatant, almost confrontational way. In keeping with this approach, sometimes I dare my own poetic writing to be as direct as possible. As for my business writing, I’ve employed many poetic practices—such as elaborate, sometimes bizarre metaphors. These work especially well as lead paragraphs in “thought leadership” articles.

Jerome Sala. One of the joys of Interstellar Theme Park is how it not only makes fun of pop excess but celebrates it. Some poems are dark and dystopian, others ecstatic and utopian—and many with aspects of both. I wonder if the book is saying our culture could go either toward doom or heaven. Care to comment on this mix of moods?

Jack Skelley. The tension between dystopia and utopia constantly vexes.  As a supposedly enlightened (post) Modernist, I feel a responsibility to confront suffering and existential anguish. The darkness is always there. And yet something guides me (and many others) back to transcendence and resolution. If you look through the literary canon, it’s an ever-present thematic mixture. Percy Shelley wrote some of the most lyrical poesy of the Romantics. But it’s in the service of hardcore political, social and sexual liberation. Riffing on Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound in my title poem “Interstellar Theme Park,” I wrote the line, “I want thick, chewy anarchy in a candy-colored shell,” which kind of sums up this conflict. At the opposite end of the cycle, there are dark Modernists such as Samuel Beckett. But even his plays circle – endlessly, nauseatingly sometimes – around a yearning for transcendence.

Jerome Sala. In a poem like “The Gospel of Elon” you rewrite a Gnostic myth using contemporary business and pop culture. This creates a satiric tone. At the same time, it translates a mystic text into our contemporary, secular culture. I’m fascinated by the integration of the visionary and the mundane in your writing. Your work is both funny and illuminating. Are you, like Blake, following “the road of excess to the palace of wisdom”?

Jack Skelley. That Blake reference – from The Proverbs of Hell – is classic. There certainly are palatial excesses in business rhetoric. I mock for many reasons. Priests of money such as Elon Musk drape themselves in false grandeur. And the language of Gnostic Gospels gets wildly grandiose. Psychedelic. Among Gnosticism’s spectacular tropes are long lists of higher beings. One passage of my “Gospel of Elon” poem adds brand names:

                        Metatron was also called Enoch,

                        The Lesser Yahweh, Yaldabaoth,

                        Verizon, Celebrex, Alcatel,

                        Lucent and 700 other titles.

Jack Skelley. Of course, Jerome, you explode the language of business and advertising much farther than I do. A major section of How Much? includes your “Corporate Sonnets.” These 30 formally satisfying and amusing poems layer clichés to gather gravitas. And their high irony channels sonneteers from Edmund Spencer to Ted Berrigan. Can you tell how you landed on this cool concept?

Jerome Sala: I remember an art director once told me, “I’m going to strangle the next person who tells me to ‘think outside of the box.’” Moments like that wake your ears up to the degree that everyday working life is structured around cliché. A line made of two clichés instantly came to me— “I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth / To think outside of the box…” and I wrote a short poem composed of such expressions. People enjoyed it so much I thought why not a sonnet sequence derived from such language.  When I read these poems aloud, people who worked in offices or freelance burst out laughing. Some even thanked me, as if these poems were a sort of public service. In fact, people from all types of work have told me their daily life is filled with such jargon. Those who work in factories, academic departments, even social work could all do their own version of “Corporate Sonnets.” I think hearing such language formalized helps free you from its influence. Work occupies most of our waking life. Shouldn’t it be the center of our poetry?

Jack Skelley. Extending the gleeful mockery of corporate speak, several of your poems address economic issues, and tie them back to the subject of art or poetry. One example is “The Second Coming of the Stimulus Checks.” Both communism and capitalism are targets. Tell us about your attraction to commodities, monetary policy, etc? Does it spring from political positions or what?

Jerome Sala: In that poem, I was fascinated by how quickly the shift happened from one kind of economic policy to another. Before the pandemic, we were in the era of neo-liberalism—austerity, entrepreneurialism, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps”, “rugged individual” ideology. These doctrines were preached obnoxiously from all corners of the culture. Then, when the pandemic hit, even the most rightwing economists seemed to realize the economy needed to be fed cash, and lots of it (“restorative financial yoga”) if we were to avoid a meltdown. In the poem, I was making fun of the old entrepreneurial ideologies of right wingers, but I was also getting impatient with more leftist thinkers—with whom I usually identify. The reason: even though the old neoliberalism was dead, many couldn’t let go of it. There was very little theorizing about the new post-Keynesianism, accompanied by loudmouth authoritarians. Also, I was fascinated by MMT (Modern Monetary Theory) that, instead of seeing money as “evil,” was now exploring its use as a social good. Wallace Stevens once quipped that “money is a kind of poetry.” I think poems inspired by that idea can become subversive in interesting ways.

Jerome Sala. How have L.A. and Disneyland inspired your work? It seems these locales, as “Disneyland Dreams” suggests, are especially adept at blending dream with reality. Your writing suggests there’s an inherently trippy quality to the city. Can you elaborate?

Jack Skelley. Oh man. I could go on forever about the Los Angeles creative milieu. For starters, this is where I was born and mainlined the “dream machine” entertainment ethos of TV, movies and music. Growing up here – where location shoots are a daily occurrence – gives one a healthy, behind-the-scenes snark towards the business. But the impact of Disney and theme parks – what I call “Disneyfication” in my Author’s Intro – goes deeper. My first childhood memory is seeing Mickey Mouse and Pluto wall decorations from my baby crib. That’s some powerful pre-verbal branding! And to this day I dream variations on dark rides and theme parks. These archetypal forms mirror parts of the psyche. The book title, Interstellar Theme Park, satirically posits the amusement park as a metaphor for cosmology, the essentially literary act of creation. I nearly included a second epigraph: Paul Valery’s belief that “the universe is built on a plan, the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect.”

That symmetrical plan manifests as a Jungian, mandala-like map of Disneyland. In this context, much of my stuff references the universe as an ultimate narrative – a Divina Commedia… accent on comedy.

Jack Skelley. Tell us about your literary influences. I love how many of your poems make a rhetorical argument about a certain topic, often in a compressed, conversational style. Not unlike Frank O’Hara, Joe Brainard and others of the New York School. But there are also poets and writers who doubled as copywriters. You even clued me in to Beat poet Lew Welch, who is rumored to have come up with the fantastic tagline “Raid Kills Bugs Dead!” Is this a genre?

Jerome Sala: I seem to remember the philosopher Theodor Adorno once commenting that the challenge Brecht set for himself was to create didactic art in an age that was suspicious of it. The milieu in which my own writing came of age has looked down on the “message” poem. This inspired me to try to go the other way—to write poems where “message” was blatant—and still work as poetry. “Message” poems are my own version of “agit-prop,” a genre of writing that was abandoned after the 60s. And I think there is a connection with commercial writing. Vladimir Mayakovsky, aside from being a revolutionary poet, was also, of course, a copywriter. I think he saw the discipline, a sort of writing technology really, as excellent training for literary pursuits. Add to that the fact that poems are ads for themselves: they’ve got to sell you on reading them!

Jack Skelley. Lightning Round: 15 words max per question.…

Who is your favorite monster?

Jack: Bride of Frankenstein. What a hottie!

Jerome: Godzilla—who reminds us to stop screwing around with the planet.

Can drugs and poetry get along? If yes, which drugs?

Jerome: I rely on dense philosophical books and meditation—great mental highs.

Jack: Lately I steal from psychedelic botanist Terence McKenna. Mushrooms spoke to him.

Who is your favorite pop artist?

Jerome: St. Vincent—Bowie… at least for today!

Jack: Dua Lipa. Such great remixes! Also for today at least.

How do you use social media to market your writing?

Jerome: I’m old-fashioned. I still have a blog: https://espressobongo.typepad.com/

Jack: On Instagram I’m @HelterSkelley. My kids will disown me if I join Tik-Tok.

WEDNESDAYS WITH DENISE: Jill Bialosky's "The Deceptions"

POET AS PROTAGONIST: JILL BIALOSKY’S THE DECEPTIONS

Jill Bialosky’s latest novel is driven by a poet narrator—her ambition, her intelligence, her desire and all that has been squelched. This protagonist will fascinate any reader who has felt marginalized, belittled, and erased by the patriarchy. THE DECEPTIONS unfolds as a narrative of awakening, an education in Greek gods and goddesses (including photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art), and a literary critique. The poet is a spouse and mother (a new empty nester), a teacher, a daughter to an ailing mother, and a mentor to a young literary neighbor. The poet’s world is upended when a more famous Visiting Poet comes to the all-boy’s school where she works. She shares with him her ambitious book manuscript, sonnet crowns which reimagine Leda and Zeus. Bialosky’s protagonist is in conversation with Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” (with which the books opens) and, in many ways, also with Maxine Kumin’s “Pantoum, With Swan.”

https://www.poemist.com/maxine-kumin/pantoum-with-swan

I’m hesitant to say much more than this as the twists and turns lead to an explosive conclusion of THE DECEPTIONS. I can’t recommend this book enough.

Congratulations, Jill! -- Denise Duhamel

"The Triumph of Bullshit" [by T. S. Eliot]

Did you know that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit"?  Neither did I until I started reading The Poems of T. S. Eliot, volume one (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the massive tome edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in an heroic act of scholarly dedication. Of its 1311 pages, approximately nine hundred and sixty are devoted to commentary, and I cannot imagine a more meticulously annotated book of TSE's greatest hits. I meant to review it nearer its pub date last December, but to do it justice would require forty seminar hours. The commentary and notes are immensely valuable. Eliot is no doubt the profoundest modern poet, and the one with the greatest lasting influence. And it is good to remind us, as the volume does, that in his younger days, Eliot had an irrepressible sense of humor that was gloriously incorrect. Consider "The Triumph of Bullshit," one of tse-tse's "scabrous exuberances," in Ricks's phrase. Here 'tis. -- DL

Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Ladies, who find my intentions ridiculous
Awkward, insipid and horribly gauche
Pompous, pretentious, ineptly meticulous
Dull as the heart of an unbaked brioche
Floundering versicles feebly versiculous
Often attenuate, frequently crass
Attempts at emotion that turn isiculous,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

Ladies who think me unduly vociferous
Amiable cabotin making a noise
That people may cry out "this stuff is too stiff for us"-
Ingenuous child with a box of new toys
Toy lions carnivorous, cannon fumiferous
Engines vaporous- all this will pass;
Quite innocent, -"he only wants to make shiver us."
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.

And when thyself with silver foot shall pass
Among the theories scattered on the grass
Take up my good intentions with the rest
And then for Christ's sake stick them up your ass.

Many believe that every good poem must be read at least twice. You can read this poem a second time here. -- DL

from the archive; first posted November 8, 2019

"First Class : America’s Marvelous Midcentury Stamps" [by David Cobb Craig]

<<< Every picture tells a story—even one on a postage stamp. Presented hugely enlarged, the 144 stamps in this book chronicle a stylish era of design: mid-20th-century America. Spanning the late 1950s to the early 1970s, these mini-masterpieces were created when the US post office started to lavish color on its stamps and to hire the best midcentury talents to design them. The roster includes Japanese American children’s book illustrator Gyo Fujikawa, barrier-busting Black graphic artist Georg Olden, industrial design legend Raymond Loewy, and sultan of psychedelia Peter Max. Photographed at five, ten, and even fifteen times actual size, each stamp is presented with a morsel of fun info that will broadly appeal to stamp collectors, history and nostalgia buffs, midcentury design fans, and everyone who likes to geek out on magnified views of tiny, beautiful images. >>>

Homage to Paul Fussell (1924-2012) [by Robert Pinsky]

            On March 15, 1945, Paul Fussell, a lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry Division, who would later become my teacher at Rutgers, underwent an intense barrage of German artillery, lying facedown in a clearing alongside his platoon sergeant and military tutor, Edward Keith Hudson. Fussell was twenty years old. Hudson was thirty-seven.

Fussell wrote vividly about that day in a 1982 piece for Harper’s entitled “My War”:

      <<< I was psychologically and morally ill prepared to lead my platoon
in the great Seventh Army attack of March 15, 1945. But lead it I did,
or rather push it, staying as far in the rear as was barely decent.
And before the day was over I had been severely rebuked
by a sharp-eyed lieutenant-colonel who threatened court martial
if I didn’t pull myself together. Before that day was over I was sprayed
with the contents of a soldier’s torso when I was lying behind him
and he knelt to fire at a machine gun holding us up: he was struck
in the heart, and out of the holes in the back of his field jacket
flew little clouds of tissue, blood, and powdered cloth. Near him
another man raised himself to fire, but the machine gun caught him
in the mouth, and as he fell he looked back at me with surprise, blood
and teeth dribbling out onto the leaves. He was one to whom early on
I had given the Silver Star for heroism, and he didn’t want to let me down. >>>

A German shell wounded Fussell terribly all down the back of his body and legs. The same shell killed Sergeant Hudson, the working-class older man who had forgiven young Lieutenant Fussell many mistakes, while teaching him how to lead a rifle platoon.

            Facedown, pressed against one another, the two men were holding hands. That was a custom for mutual reassurance, as Fussell in his old age explained to an interviewer: reassurance that neither of the two men would run away—as many officers had done. So my teacher says for the camera, his old man’s voice rising on the plural noun in rage and contempt. Edward Keith Hudson’s violent death, he says in the same interview “is behind everything I’ve done.”

from chapter eleven of Jersey Breaks by Robert Pinsky (Norton, October 2022). Photo credit:  Eric Antoniou. 

Paul Fussell's books include Poetic Meter and Poetic Form andThe Great War and Modern Memory. 

From The Guardian, May 24, 2012:

The US writer Paul Fussell's 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory was, according to the British military historian John Keegan, revolutionary. Fussell, in what he called "an elegaic commentary", shaped a picture of the horrors of the first world war, and the cold stupidity of its leaders, made more trenchant by his own experiences in the second world war. He also used the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and others to show how the romanticising of the war and its heroes provided the creative spark for modernism, and the sensibility of disillusion and distrust of authority that characterised the so-called "lost generation".

The success of that book, acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic – though Philip Larkin thought it "obscene nonsense" – and the winner of America's National Book and Book Critic Circle awards, propelled Fussell, who has died aged 88, from a scholar of 18th-century English literature into a position as a public critic. From that position, the influence of his early subjects, such as Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, became evident in his scalpel-like dissections of American society. >>>

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/may/24/paul-fussell

Wednesdays with Denise (October 12, 2022): The Prose Poem

T This ‘Wednesday with Denise” is devoted to the prose poem, such as those included in Short (edited by Alan Ziegler) or, if you can find it, Michael Benedikt's anthology The Prose Poem.

I encourage you, too, to take a trip around the world via the prose poems in ARC. Prose poets in this anthology—from England, Ireland, the Philippines, Iraq, Nigeria, Australia, and Tunisia—appear alongside names more familiar to an American audience like Joan Mazza, Rikki Santer, and Ron Padgett. Dr. Pragma Suman, ARC’s editor, includes an interview with featured poet Peter Johnson.

https://www.arcmagazine.co.in/_files/ugd/7b4db6_376a3a14987649e4a57b8cd1b4441b24.pdf

Peter Johnson is also the editor of the seminal magazine The Prose Poem: An International Journal, which was published from 1992-1999. The archives are available here:

https://digitalcommons.providence.edu/prosepoem/about.html

"Ode to Poking Around" [by Catherine Woodard]

            “I wish to speak a word for the art of poking around,” begins philosopher and nature writer Kathleen Dean Moore in a fine art book beautifully built around her essay by lone goose press.

            I wish to speak a word for the artistry of Poking Around, the limited edition letterpress collaboration by lone goose proprietor Sandy Tilcock and artist Margot Voorhies Thompson. Poking around is exactly what they did for 10 days at the PLAYA residency for writers, artists and scientists in Summer Lake, Oregon. PLAYA’s high desert landscape is very much the fourth collaborator in the project.

            I arrived the same April night as Tilcock and Thompson and spotted them at sunrise combing the shore of the playa, an alkaline lake surrounded by desert, mountains and forests. What they found poking around often found its way into their pages in inventive ways. Thompson scooped up coarse dirt while hiking on the hillside the second day to study the complexities of colors underneath her feet and to add to her array of stains. Tule reeds, which Native Americans used for many things including weaving, doubled as something to draw and something to draw with. A bit of barbed wire for the final page marks the human hand on the landscape.

            Moore’s essay is from her 1996 book Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water. While her focus is paying attention in the natural world, Moore acknowledges that the art of poking around “can be practiced in libraries and antique stores and peoples’ psyches.”

            At our first communal dinner that week at PLAYA, three book artists, two stream biologists, a sculptor, a photographer and several writers discussed how crucial poking around – inside and outside of our heads – is to all art and to science. We agreed our best work is seldom what we set out to do but what we discover.

            PLAYA’s setting is steeped in surprise. During his 1843 mapping expedition, Captain John C. Frémont stood in several feet of snow on what he named Winter Ridge and looked down the snow-free playa he named Summer Lake. Because he had already seen the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Frémont correctly surmised there was a vast stretch of land in the West where water does not flow to an ocean that he called the Great Basin.

            One of my favorite pages of Poking Around is inspired by the cracks in the crust of the alkaline lake. Because PLAYA attracts residents who speak science as well as art, I now understand that the polygonal patterning is tensegrity, a structural term coined by Buckminster Fuller and an efficient way in nature or in building to control compression.

            In the video, Tilcock and Thompson explain the design evolution possible working together at PLAYA. They have collaborated several times before but never in the same space and time. Tilcock’s workshop, with its 1940 Vandercook 219 proof press, is in Eugene. Thompson lives 120 miles away in Portland. Only a few steps separated their PLAYA studios, so it was exhilarating for them to bounce back and forth as they blended art and type (Gill Sans for the text and Castellar for display). As Tilcock notes, Thompson’s drawing of the cracks “almost tickles the type.”         

            The book will debut Thursday, Oct. 22 [2016] with a reading by Moore hosted by PLAYA and Laura Russo Gallery 805 NW 21^St Ave. in Portland. RSVP to DeborahFord@playasummerlake.org for the 6-9 p.m. event.The original drawings and book will also be on display Oct. 20-Dec. 30 at the John Wilson Special Collections at Multnomah County Library at 801 SW 10^th Ave. Portland. Poking Around will be available at lonegoosepress.com beginning Nov. 1.

Catherine Woodard helped return Poetry in Motion to NYC’s subways and is on the board of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in CNN online, Painted Bride Quarterly, RHINO and other publications. She is a former journalist who lives and plays basketball in NYC. 

from the archive; first posted October 17, 2016

Ron Charles in the Washington Post on BAP 2022

<<<
Want to read more contemporary poetry but don’t know where to begin? For expert curation and variety, you can’t do better than “The Best American Poetry 2022,” edited this year by Matthew Zapruder. These 75 poems are arranged alphabetically from Aria Aber to Jenny Zhang, including Terrance Hayes, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Diane Seuss, Ada Limón and others I recognize and many I don’t. (One obvious omission is Zapruder himself [pictured left], but series editor David Lehman singles out one of his great poems in the foreword.)

Zapruder strikes just the right note in his introduction. “If you are reading this and don’t read much poetry, or feel uncertain in relation to it, you are more than welcome here,” he writes. “Please know that I chose these poems thinking of you. I, too, feel uncertain, unsure of what poetry is for, especially during eerie, frightening, and confusing times.” 

He finds encouragement — and motivation — in fine writing. “A hope that starts out as a tentative, inchoate feeling can, in a poem, be dreamed forth, envisioned as a concrete possibility; only then, when we start to imagine how things could change, can we begin to act to make it so,” he writes. “Poems remind us that, at our core, we share something deep.
>>>

-- Ron Charles, Washington Post
(Ooctober 7, 2022)

Ethelbert Miller Reviews "The Best American Poetry 2022"

Read it here

https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/best-american-poetry-2022

and for a foretaste, here are a few paragraphs from Ethelbert's review:

<< In the opening paragraph of his introduction Matthew Zapruder tells us what’s coming before we place our order.

“If you are reading this and don’t read much poetry, or feel uncertain in relation to it, you are more than welcome here. Maybe you are browsing in a bookstore, or have been assigned this book for a class, or have received it as a gift. Please know that I chose these poems thinking of you.”

This is an admirable approach to editing a collection of poems. If we were talking about food we would expect carryout even before the pandemic. Might the reader find a milkshake after turning a few pages?

One will find quite a number of poems dealing with death. No surprise here. Our lives the last few years have been restricted; many people separated from their families and loved ones. Death is a writer’s topic, the poet ponders not just loss but the meaning of life. Zapruder writes, “Many of our contemporary poems enter into that conflict between the self and the collective—not to resolve it, which would be impossible, but to clarify our position.”  >>

Auden's Predictions in "For the Time Being"

<<< Reason will be replaced by Revelation. Instead of Rational Law, objective truths perceptible to any who will undergo the necessary intellectual discipline, and the same for all, Knowledge will degenerate into a riot of subjective visions—feelings in the solar plexus induced by undernourishment, angelic images generated by fevers or drugs, dream warnings inspired by the sound of falling water. Whole cosmologies will be created out of some forgotten personal resentment, complete epics written in private languages, the daubs of school children ranked above the great masterpieces.

Idealism will be replaced by Materialism. Priapus will only have to move to a good address and call himself Eros to become darling of middle-aged women. Life after death will be an eternal dinner party where all the guests are twenty years old. Diverted from its normal and wholesome outlet in patriotism and civic or family pride, the need of the materialistic Masses for some visible Idol to worship will be driven into totally unsocial channels where no education can reach it. Divine honors will be paid to silver tea-pots, shallow depressions in the earth, names on maps, domestic pets, ruined windmills, even in extreme cases, which will become increasingly common, to headaches, or malignant tumors, or four o’clock in the afternoon.

Justice will be replaced by Pity as the cardinal human virtue, and all fear of retribution will vanish. Every corner-boy will congratulate himself: “I’m such a sinner that God had to come down in person to save me. I must be a devil of a fellow.” Every crook will argue, “I like committing crimes. God likes forgiving them. Really the world is admirably arranged.” And the ambition of every young cop will be to secure a death-bed repentance. The New Aristocracy will consist exclusively of hermits, bums, and permanent invalids. The Rough Diamond, the Consumptive Whore, the bandit who is good to his mother, the epileptic girl who has a way with the animals will be the heroes and heroines of the New Tragedy when the general, the statesman, and the philosopher have become the butt of every farce and satire.

Naturally this cannot be allowed to happen. Civilization must be saved even if this means sending for the military, as I suppose it does. How dreary. Why is it that in the end civilization always has to call in those professional tidiers to whom it is all one it be Pythagoras or a homicidal lunatic that they are instructed to exterminate. O dear, Why couldn’t this wretched infant be born somewhere else? Why can’t people be sensible? I don’t want to be horrid. Why can’t they see that the notion of a finite God is absurd? Because it is. And suppose, for the sake of argument, that it isn’t that this story is true, that this child is in some inexplicable manner both God and Man, that he grows up, lives and dies, without committing a single sin? Would that make life any better? On the contrary it would make it far, far worse. For it could only mean this: that once having shown them how, God would expect every man, whatever his fortune, to lead a sinless life in the flesh and on earth. Then indeed would the human race be plunged into madness and despair. And for me personally at this moment it would mean that God had given me the power to destroy Himself. I refuse to be taken in. He could not play such a horrid practical joke. Why should he dislike me so? I’ve worked like a slave. Ask anyone you like. I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. How dare he allow me to decide. I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every single night. I haven’t had sex for a month. I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy. I wish I had never been born. >>>

from For the Time Being © The Estate of W. H. Auden

The speaker is King Herod, who has just ordered the massacre of the innocents, the slaying of the first-born of Judea. The question is whether Auden agrees with the predictions, particularly those in bold face. Is he, like Trilling in The Liberal Imagination, committed to the notion that that self-criticism is the writer's first obligation? When Herod says "I'm a liberal," is this a comment on Herod (self-delusion) or on liberalism? One could argue that Auden discredits these predictions by assigning them to the villainous Herod. Nevertheless, a case can be made that many of these negative predictions have come to pass.

The new two-volume set of W. H. Auden's complete poems, meticulously assembled and presented by Edward Mendelson, is highly recommended (Princeton University Press). DL

Poet Spotlight: Shane McCrae [by Kristina Marie Darling]

I'm thrilled to introduce this new poem by celebrated writer Shane McCrae.  As a longtime admirer of McCrae's work, I never cease to be amazed by his ability to bear the distinctive lineation of Frank O'Hara and the cadences of classic New York School poetry into new and unforeseen sociopolitical territory.  

Poet Shane McCrae grew up in Texas and California. The first in his family to graduate from college, McCrae earned a BA at Linfield College, an MA at the University of Iowa, an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a JD at Harvard Law School.
 
McCrae is the author of several poetry collections, including Mule(2011); Blood (2013); The Animal Too Big to Kill (2015); In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Gilded Auction Block (2019). His work has also been featured in The Best American Poetry 2010, edited by Amy Gerstler, and his honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

--Kristina Marie Darling 

A New Poem by Shane McCrae

"Intellect, anxiety, philosophy, history, art": Rachel Abramowitz and Tina Cane in Conversation [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It is a pleasure to introduce this conversation by two outstanding and generous literary citizens:  Tina Cane and Rachel Abramowitz.  In both writers' bodies of work, we see a poetics powered by community, enriched by conversation and emboldened by dialogue across genres and mediums.  

Rachel Abramowitz is also the author The Birthday of the Dead, which just launched from Conduit Editions, as well as the chapbooks The Puzzle Monster, winner of the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun prize (forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022), and Gut Lust, the winner of the 2019 Burnside Review prize (Burnside Review Press, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, The Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Oxonian Review, POOL, jubilat, Sprung Formal, Transom, Colorado Review, and others. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Oxford, and has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York. 

Tina Cane was born in Hell’s Kitchen, NYC in 1969 and grew up in the city’s East and West Village. She attended the University of Vermont, the Sorbonne and completed her master’s degree in French Literature at ​the University of Paris X-Nanterre and Middlebury College.  She is the founder and director of Writers-in-the Schools, RI, for which she works as a visiting poet. Over the past twenty-five years, Tina has taught French, English, and creative writing in public and private schools throughout New York City and Rhode Island.  Her poems and translations have appeared ​in numerous publications, including Spinning Jenny, The Literary  Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Common, Poem-a-Day.  Her work,The Fifth Thought, was the 2008 Other Painters Press chapbook winner. Her books include The Fifth Thought,Dear Elena: Letters for Elena Ferrante, Once More With Feeling, and Body of Work. Tina was the 2016 recipient for the Fellowship Merit Award in Poetry from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She currently serves as the Poet Laureate of Rhode Island where she lives with her husband and their three children. In 2020, Cane was named a poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Tina is also the creator/curator of the distance reading series, ​Poetry is Bread.  Alma Presses Play, Tina's debut novel-in-verse for young adults readers, will be released in September 2021 with Penguin/ Random House Books.

Tina Cane: There's a poem I keep returning to called "Vantablack" from your new collection, The Birthday of the Dead. It's named for that blackest shade of paint ever made, but manages to encapsulate the book's exploration of how, in your words, "any human interaction" with the natural world "turns out  to be devastating in unexpected ways." The thrust of this observation pervades your book, which is a place where "the forest fills and unfills, drops itself down root tubes and turns to dark lace." Where does this vision of our relationship with nature spring from? How would you characterize your relationship with the natural world?

Poet Spotlight: Cole Swensen [by Kristina Marie Darling]

It's truly an honor to introduce this new work by acclaimed poet Cole Swensen.  Here, she offers a complex and gorgeously lyrical phenomenology of perception, deftly interrogating the ways that language shapes one's experience of the senses and the world around us.  In Swensen's newest work, the unique artistic opportunities of poetry - performative language, metaphor, and the image - are brought to bear on these philosophical questions with incredible skill.  It is the associative logic that Swensen implements that allows her to present inquiries into the nature of language and perception in a visceral way. Indeed, "New Green" involves and implicates the reader in the speaker's efforts to understand - and delineate - a clearer boundary between self and world.  This is a stunning addition to an already accomplished body of work.  

Cole Swensen is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently On Walking On (Nightboat, 2017), Gave (Omnidawn, 2017), and Landscapes on a Train(Nightboat 2015), and a volume of critical essays. Her poetic collections turn around specific research projects, including ones on public parks, visual art, illuminated manuscripts, and ghosts. Her work has won the National Poetry Series, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and the PEN USA Award in Literary Translation. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she is the co-editor of the Norton anthology American Hybrid and the founding editor of La Presse Poetry (www.lapressepoetry.com). She teaches at Brown University.

New Green by Cole Swensen 

What is the unseen, and how do we see it before it emerges? That is the nature of earliest things, and you try to observe what comes first—a blade of grass, a livening of the moss, an outbreak of leaf—looking out the window and then walking outside in search of emergence. It really does have a different color—which is also what’s puzzling your child as she runs out of the house holding up a crayon, asking “What does New Green mean? Haven’t all colors been around forever?” And I think of the translation that I’ve just finished for a catalogue in which the artist, among a list of colors, included verd, which turned out to be old French for vert, and, sure enough, Old English has grene, but despite this clear illustration, the child refuses to believe that it’s possible to invent a new color simply by inventing a new word.

"Days of Winter" and "Limbo" [poems by Sean Singer from "Today in the Taxi"]

Days of Winter

Today in the taxi I brought a Chinese couple, parents of a student at Columbia, from Amsterdam Avenue to JFK. The girl was crying, the mother was crying, etc. The parents sat in silence for most of the trip. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Chinese. I did offer them a little package of tissues. On the other hand, the sun came out and it warmed to 24 degrees.

A driver should find a fixed object on the road, such as a sign or a tree, and when the car in front passes it, count three seconds before his own car passes it. Then add a second for each hazard—rain, or darkness.

The road is not unlike a little pressed-between vessel that the car pushes along its black bloodstream. A psalm instructs that It will be as it is said.

Limbo

Today in the taxi, driving a commercial real estate type from 43rd and Madison to 57th and Park I said, “Would you prefer to go up Madison, or Park?” He said, “It doesn’t matter. Either way we’re fucked.”

And it was true when a black pier of birds burst from the building, like fulfillment.

I too, seek to weave a memory from foam. A black bottle opener and the blackest bottle, and the flow of liquids. You cannot know it; you can see it.

General “Beedle” Smith reported that in April 1945 when they liberated Buchenwald, he witnessed:

“General Eisenhower go to the opposite side of the road and vomit. From a distance I saw Patton bend over, holding his head with one hand and his abdomen with the other. I too became sick.”

When the oncoming headlights are too bright, it is said you should look to the side at the lines on the road. You would stop yourself from being blinded, and stop yourself to imagine the road ahead, unstrung, and the rubber against it.

Sean Singer was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, in 1974. He has an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Rutgers University-Newark. Singer is the author of three books of poetry: Discography (Yale University Press, 2002), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; Honey & Smoke (Eyewear Publishing, 2015); and Today in the Taxi (Tupelo Press, 2022). In 2005 he was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Find out more about Sean Singer here.  You can purchase Today in the Taxi, from Bookshop, Amazon, and Tupelo Press.