The Best American Poetry

Next Line, Please: A Hole in One [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week, we were invited to play a game of word golf, a prompt which lets our imagination go as we try to solve a puzzle composed of slightly altered end words. Who had the lowest score and the win? Well, let us begin:

In “To Tell the Tiller From the Tail,” Eric Fretz managed the task in seven lines:

Bukowski said “the moonlight always seemed fake”
through the plastic thatch of my faux-Samoan fale
in California, just before the fall.
But in that time the tales we told were tall.
Now facts have changed, there’s nothing left to tell.
See: two black birds fly above the bright teal
sea, as if a simulacrum of the real.

Dr. Lehman applauds "the attention-grabbing opening line and the daring use of “simulacrum,” a piece of academic jargon that means fake in one context and is fake in another." I myself enjoy any poem that is set in a car in California.

“Apophasis at the End of the Year” by Steve Bellin-Oka’s offers crisp imagery and several dives into the Bukowski-esque. 

I half-tried to love this makeshift life: a woman’s fake
pearl earring falls off. She rattles in her purse for the fare,

the bus hiccupping ahead. Carbon monoxide fart
of the tailpipe. Always we are gone and there, “fort”

and “da,” as in Freud’s grandson’s game. To ford
a river, to find good footing, I run my fingers beneath the fold

of your crisp white shirt. You tell me my hands are cold.
In six weeks, we will leave this town. One December story I told

you: a pregnant woman side-saddle on her camel, the toll
of the jostling through sand. Another the stars might tell—

our compulsion to repeat, to wander. To forget the desert’s teal
flowers and hail. This makeshift life, half-pretending it’s real.

Christine Rhein employs the image of a ladder to exemplify the work of this exercise. Here is her “Act of Betrayal”:

Precise, a painted forgery: fake
love. The portrait (that gazing face)
in a museum-house you pace
around all night. Yes (hell yes), pack
up (your sorrows) the dreamy peck
of still-life fruits. Sun-kissed wine. Peak,
scentless blooms (that laughter peal).
Brushstrokes to your heart, wildly real.

And a quick tip-of-the-hat to Louis Altman's brilliant couplet in the "underrated manner" of Alexander Pope:

How skeptical we are, how hard we think to make
A phony work of art for avarice, just for lucre’s sake.

For more poems, couplets, and noteworthy commentary, please visit the American Scholar's page for the full post! And as always, a new prompt will arrive next week.

It's a Very Appalachian Hanukkah (by Erika Meitner)

Being Jewish in small-town Appalachia around Hanukkah time is an exercise in resourcefulness.  We have no synagogue here--only a lay-led Jewish Community Center.  The president of the center is very fastidious about keeping the mass emailings to official events and business, but about two nights ago, she sent out a note that it was ok to use the list to discuss where to find Hanukkah candles locally.  

The emails started, hot and heavy:  the Target had blue and white candles, the Target was out of them, someone spotted them in the Kroger bargain bin by the registers marked down to 50 cents along with leftover matzah, someone else found two kinds (!) at the Walmart at the end-cap of Aisle 13 near women's shirts.  Then more emails followed, about where to find chocolate Hanukkah gelt (see picture).  All the Big Box stores are one town over in (ironically) Christiansburg.

My husband pointed out tonight that we actually have seven boxes of Hanukkah candles in our house.  I've apparently become an incidental hoarder of consumable Judaica products.  What if the Saxes need a box though?  Last year, they were forced to use Advent candles from the Party Central store (a shanda!).  And there was the one unfortunate year where the only place I found candles was at the Walmart Christmas Shop, in the back of the store where the garden center normally is.  I was so excited to find the candles, tucked between boxes of those light-up outlines of deer people put on their lawns that pretend to eat grass, that I bought a few boxes, along with Hanukkah "garland," and I didn't even care that the cashier wished me a Merry Christmas when he rang me up.

 

Now, if you know your Lenny Bruce, you know that garland, like Drakes Cakes or Instant Potatoes, is a distinctly Goyishe item.  I don't even care, though--I live in Appalachia.  I will buy anything with a Jewish symbol emblazoned on it that I find at the Walmart.  My mother-in-law is really into decorative holiday items:  Santa dishes, festive serving platters, hand towels with snowflakes on them.  One year, for Christmas, she got me a giant Hanukkah platter with doves and stars on it, and now, in Appalachia, I am glad for my giant seasonal decorative Goyishe-Jewish platter, which will be pressed into service during tomorrow's latke-making marathon, when even the cats will start to smell like deep fried hash browns.

So this is a post about resourcefulness and community, syncretism and adaptation.  I was thinking about this in the context of poetry today--especially the syncretism.  Are there ways that other practices or cultures wend their way into contemporary American poetry, and are adopted, torqued a little, and ultimately embraced into the fold?  I think of Terrance Hayes' pecha kucha poems from Lighthead, where he takes a Japanese business presentation format and turns it into a poetic form.  I think of Maureen Thorson's practice (and what is a writing practice, if not a ritual?) of napowrimo--national poetry writing month, where poets come together virtually to create new work each day, and the communities that have grown up around this new practice.  And I'm totally thinking of asking my mother-in-law for this Hanukkah felt wall-hanging for next year (which is really, I suspect, made by a Jew with serious Advent-Calendar envy).  

* * *

Recommended Hanukkah poem:  "A Christmas Story" by Alan Shapiro, from his book Happy Hour.

Poem of the night, in honor of the Festival of Lights, starting tomorrow at sundown, and in honor of the simultaneous loss and pleasure inherent in syncretism, or any time two things are joined together:

A Light Says Why by Karen Volkman

A light says why. From all the poor prying. Again we attain a more 
regal posture--small bird accompanying slips between our whim. 
Where will we flicker, loose as two feathers from a wren's back? Gone, 
do not brood for all the hands that miss you. They hardly hold. Don't 
wait, one who thought a dark eye could save you, like night with its black 
paws curled and gone to sleep. There are only two names to remember, 
Loss and Pleasure, crossed in this field like no man's borrowed light. Call 
the far-sighted foxes to the launching. Call the small deer scattered in 
the back brush, swift as flit. Contingency has arms and hands and wasted 
faces. And a body, shrunk and scurvy, built to burn.

(ed note: this post first appeared on November 30, 2010)

Being Jewish in small-town Appalachia around Hanukkah time is an exercise in resourcefulness.  We have no synagogue here--only a lay-led Jewish Community Center.  The president of the center is very fastidious about keeping the mass emailings to official events and business, but about two nights ago, she sent out a note that it was ok to use the list to discuss where to find Hanukkah candles locally.  

The emails started, hot and heavy:  the Target had blue and white candles, the Target was out of them, someone spotted them in the Kroger bargain bin by the registers marked down to 50 cents along with leftover matzah, someone else found two kinds (!) at the Walmart at the end-cap of Aisle 13 near women's shirts.  Then more emails followed, about where to find chocolate Hanukkah gelt (see picture).  All the Big Box stores are one town over in (ironically) Christiansburg.

My husband pointed out tonight that we actually have seven boxes of Hanukkah candles in our house.  I've apparently become an incidental hoarder of consumable Judaica products.  What if the Saxes need a box though?  Last year, they were forced to use Advent candles from the Party Central store (a shanda!).  And there was the one unfortunate year where the only place I found candles was at the Walmart Christmas Shop, in the back of the store where the garden center normally is.  I was so excited to find the candles, tucked between boxes of those light-up outlines of deer people put on their lawns that pretend to eat grass, that I bought a few boxes, along with Hanukkah "garland," and I didn't even care that the cashier wished me a Merry Christmas when he rang me up.

 

Now, if you know your Lenny Bruce, you know that garland, like Drakes Cakes or Instant Potatoes, is a distinctly Goyishe item.  I don't even care, though--I live in Appalachia.  I will buy anything with a Jewish symbol emblazoned on it that I find at the Walmart.  My mother-in-law is really into decorative holiday items:  Santa dishes, festive serving platters, hand towels with snowflakes on them.  One year, for Christmas, she got me a giant Hanukkah platter with doves and stars on it, and now, in Appalachia, I am glad for my giant seasonal decorative Goyishe-Jewish platter, which will be pressed into service during tomorrow's latke-making marathon, when even the cats will start to smell like deep fried hash browns.

So this is a post about resourcefulness and community, syncretism and adaptation.  I was thinking about this in the context of poetry today--especially the syncretism.  Are there ways that other practices or cultures wend their way into contemporary American poetry, and are adopted, torqued a little, and ultimately embraced into the fold?  I think of Terrance Hayes' pecha kucha poems from Lighthead, where he takes a Japanese business presentation format and turns it into a poetic form.  I think of Maureen Thorson's practice (and what is a writing practice, if not a ritual?) of napowrimo--national poetry writing month, where poets come together virtually to create new work each day, and the communities that have grown up around this new practice.  And I'm totally thinking of asking my mother-in-law for this Hanukkah felt wall-hanging for next year (which is really, I suspect, made by a Jew with serious Advent-Calendar envy).  

* * *

Recommended Hanukkah poem:  "A Christmas Story" by Alan Shapiro, from his book Happy Hour.

Poem of the night, in honor of the Festival of Lights, starting tomorrow at sundown, and in honor of the simultaneous loss and pleasure inherent in syncretism, or any time two things are joined together:

A Light Says Why by Karen Volkman

A light says why. From all the poor prying. Again we attain a more 
regal posture--small bird accompanying slips between our whim. 
Where will we flicker, loose as two feathers from a wren's back? Gone, 
do not brood for all the hands that miss you. They hardly hold. Don't 
wait, one who thought a dark eye could save you, like night with its black 
paws curled and gone to sleep. There are only two names to remember, 
Loss and Pleasure, crossed in this field like no man's borrowed light. Call 
the far-sighted foxes to the launching. Call the small deer scattered in 
the back brush, swift as flit. Contingency has arms and hands and wasted 
faces. And a body, shrunk and scurvy, built to burn.

(ed note: this post first appeared on November 30, 2010)

Meet the Press: Shrew & Cat in the Sun Press

Dante Di Stefano: In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1988 John Ashbery wrote: “there is not much ‘political’ poetry that I like for the reason that the political sentiments reiterated in it are usually the exact ones I harbor, and I would rather learn something new.” Considering the efflorescence of political poetry right now, and your own background as a union organizer involved in direct political action, could you begin the interview by riffing on Ashbery’s quote and its relevance to the political poetry being written in the Trump Era?

Joe Weil: I think a lot of political poetry preaches to the already converted, but in that sense it is as vital a trope as carpe diem is, or as vital as an elegy for a recently deceased poem might be. That might make political poetry seem dangerously close to a conventional form or rather formula (lots of rhetorical devices including anaphora, lots of listing and enumerating, the use of invective, the inserting of a We and a Them, and so on).  But when Political poetry fails, like when most poetry fails, it fails in the way its puts lines and nouns and verbs together. It does not fail intrinsically because it is political poetry. There is nothing innately wrong or inferior about political poetry. Much of the world’s best poetry is political... Blake’s Chimney Sweeper poem (the one in the Experience section) succeeds both as a political poem, but also as a powerful poem about the suffering of child laborers. Its words are so well chosen and so chilling. It is as great a poem as Goya’s “Saturn Eating his Children” is a painting. Most of the poems we love by the romantics were deeply political. Time has blurred the causes, but left the images and the main ideas of freedom and newness vivid. Political poetry might be considered tacky or obvious, but it surprises me Ashbery didn’t take to it, since he often liked traipsing the thin line between the sublime and the tacky, the lyrical and the obvious (he loved playing with cliché) . One of his poems ends with: “Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulations.” That ominous declaration rings politically true at this moment in time though the poem was written in the 1950’s. Political poetry, when it is good, continues to have many lives and uses. It transcends its moment and exceeds its own cause. Done well, it is both anciently sudden and suddenly ancient. It does not date

DD: In the “Pre-Rambles,” or introductory essays, to the first two issues of Shrew you lay out some guidelines for the magazine. I’m most interested in your idea of a “pre-standard” aesthetic, a concept that I think connects to another idea you’ve written about, a “Eucharistic vision” of poetry and the world. Could you unpack these concepts for us?

JW: If you start with “Standards” you’re already publishing poems that fit a mold. The mold may not be precise or even visible, but it’s there. The editor is imposing his or her “ur” poem on every poem that passes through. In a "pre-standard" idea of publishing, you find people willing to enter. So you find poets rather than poems and you say: Hey buddy, got a poem for me?” The magazine is not based on excluding the many to pick the few. I always thought this was too much like the cool bouncer at a disco saying who can and who can’t get through the door. Most of the time the criteria run along these lines:  

Poet A writes a poem about the color blue. It gets rejected. Poet B, a widely known poet writes a poem about Blue, it not only gets accepted, but the editor brags about having Poet B in the mag. Let’s say both were of equal quality: well, then, the true standard was not quality, but hierarchy.

When I started this Shrew, I asked friends whose work I liked to send me something. They sent it and I published it, and I also did the same with the art. “Pre-standard” does not mean an absence of standards. Rather, it means “toward a standard.” You start with people of good faith, friends or at least poets you’ve met under good circumstances, and you ask them to join you. Free play eventually finds the rules, but the rules can never find free play. So, I begin with free play. And yes, it is part of my idea of Eucharistic reality, of being part of a body where all are welcome to enter. It’s strange because, if you give people free play, they start creating their own standards, often far more exciting and interesting standards than you, yourself, would have imposed. I hate snobbery. I think it is the source of all race and class and gender hatred. So death to snobs. But there is something that is a healthy snobbery: you don’t let those who like to play the bouncer at the disco in. They might create a room full of beautiful people, but who knows if that’s really the best room for a party?

DD: Part of what makes Shrew so dynamic and vital is that it champions, both implicitly and explicitly, the overlooked, the broken, and what I’ve heard you call the “motley,” that is, what Hopkins would call “dappled things.” Could you talk a little bit about poetry and all things counter, original, spare, strange?

JW: I love comic poetry, and by that, I mean something different than just Billy Collins. I mean work with the fool’s cap, with the touch of Harlequin, with deep sadness to the comedy so that you know the clown is dancing on the edge of a steep cliff and the banana peels are flying off to meet him and to kill him.. I love poetry, also, that can laugh at itself, that breaks the 4th wall. I also revere poets like Vallejo who I know was the poet equivalent of someone who lived his art so intensely that he became the Shema—as did Emily Dickinson. I know he is not the greatest of all Spanish poets, but my favorite poet in Spanish is Miguel Hernandez, who I first read when I was 18 and everyone in my family was dying. His fierce love and integrity destroyed me—in the best way. He broke me down. I love May Swenson, especially her sex poems. Wanda Coleman is a poet I return to as well as Wallace Stevens, Bob Kaufman, Williams, and Whitman, also Carolyn Kizer, Maggie Nelson. I’m very motley in my tastes. I might read a sonnet by Milton, a sonnet by Wanda Coleman, King Lear, and funny poems by the California poet Ronald Koertge, all in one day. Why not? I like the magazine to go in many different directions. I always liked the idea of motley. When I was very little, I always dyed all my Easter eggs every color so that they came out a sort of sloppy brown, but if you looked close enough,  if you put your eyeball right up against the egg, all the colors were still in there, and they were like some beautiful brawl of colors—all swirling around and through each other. I think I’m still that way. The sheer mess of it all delights me.

DD: Maria, tell us about your experience as Guest Editor for Shrew.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Guest Editor, Shrew Issue 10: I Love Shrew because the design of the journal is beautifully clear and clean. I really like the layout and the combination of poetry and art. I love the Pre-Ramble and the way it gives each editor a chance to frame the issue and to contextualize the work chosen. I am thrilled with Shrew’s combination of poetry and art. I think the art opens the poems up to another way of seeing and feeling. For me, I feel uplifted by the combination. In short, Joe Weil’s concept for Shrew is brilliant.  

DD: Tommy, what made you want to help Joe Weil develop Shrew?

Tommy Stella, Managing Editor, Shrew: I’ve helped Joe with a few projects in the past and I’ve always enjoyed every single one of them. One day I logged into Facebook and saw a status update that Joe made talking about how tired he was of magazines and how he was going to start his own magazine that celebrates writers and writing, etc etc sic sic sic. I immediately messaged him and asked what he needed.

DD: How is what Shrew is doing different from other journals are doing?

TS: The goal of Shrew is to combine what I’ve learned from working for various online newsletters and social media accounts with Joe’s knowledge of the poetry/magazine world (combined with Colleen Curry’s fantastic design). Our current goal is to make a product that is accessible to poetry initiates and to general readers. The beauty of Shrew is that everything is meticulously designed. We are completely open to every single writer who submits to us. And we mean that.

DD: Colleen, what motivated you to take on the task of designing an online literary magazine?

Colleen Curry, Graphic Designer, Shrew: Joe was my poetry professor in college. When I heard that he was looking to start a digital zine and that nobody had stepped into the role of designer yet, I volunteered. I have a lot of respect for the poems Shrew publishes and strive to showcase them in a way that is unique, timeless, and never takes itself too seriously.

DD: What do you see Shrew as providing that differs from other current online zines?

CC: Shrew is a platform first and a magazine second. It's founded on the idea that poets thrive in a network. All of Shrew’s strength lies in the insight of its contributors and the thought put in by Joe and other guest editors to anthologize a theme, practice, or place and to start a dialogue which can then continue online, sometimes in a future issue.

DD: How, as the designer, would you describe the look of Shrew?

CC: It’s punchy and that’s deliberate; I wanted to approach Shrew as a brand. Publishing is a turbulent industry, always in flux, and the way we consume media is constantly changing. I want Shrew to be able to keep up with that, so everything from the magazine itself to our website and social media is grounded in a few simple, highly adaptable design elements. (Yes, it's a lot of red.)

DD: Joe, you have also published several books by other poets under the imprint of Cat in the Sun Press. Could you talk about that press and the books you’ve published there?

JW: I first published my former student Micah Towery because Micah had been so vital to my life early on at Binghamton University. He had helped set me up with a mic so that I could do my Joe Weil morning poem show which appeared on Facebook and had over 600 members at one time—including the poets Dorothy Laux, Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Patricia Smith. Then Micah and my former student Adam Fitzgerald set up THETHEPOETRY.com which was initially a platform for my rants and essays, but which we opened up to many young poets and writers who later became far more famous than I. Micah did so much and I did his book Whale of Desire, which I love. Then, my wife Emily and I asked Micah to come on board and he is really the one who makes the press possible, but we published a book of poetry and art by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, which Emily spent a great deal of time editing, and we did several other books, including a book of essays by Alfred Corn, which Micah edited and put together. We run it this way: I have the book put together, edited and designed,  and then it is put on print on demand, and the poet keeps all profits from the book. I don’t get a dime, not even a percentage. So the poet maintains control of his or her art. I think it works best that way. Maria claims it gave her a whole new part time career as a painter because people started buying her paintings when they saw the book. Before this, I was involved in creating Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. I like creating presses and zines, but then I tend to run away after they get established. I like inciting things and then getting out of town before it becomes boring.

DD: You are married to a talented poet, Emily Vogel. How has being married to her changed your relationship with poetry and writing?

JW: I’m a devout malpracticing Catholic. Marrying Emily is my means toward not being damned to hell. It’s my vocation. It’s a sacramental marriage and I know this is going to get me jeers in some quarters, but, hey, it’s the cultural belief of my Irish Catholic ancestors. Before we had kids, Emily and I would wake up, kiss, get dressed, have some breakfast, then go to separate floors of the house we rented and write all day. We’d meet again in the evening, watch a movie, fall asleep and get up to do it all over again. Emily also painted, so there was a lot of paint on the floor. I play piano, guitar and several other instruments. So we were always doing our art. We started doing gigs together and then we also sang and played music with the readings. Eventually, we wrote a book together called West of Home, a book of responsorials, which ended up as a play produced by the Wombat Theater company at KGB Bar in 2013 (or it may have been 2014). We’ve done a lot of interesting things, but now we have two children, both on the autistic spectrum. Their presence in our lives, and our love for them, has re-shaped everything. They broke three of my guitars and I finally decided this was a message from God (I don’t play guitar that much anymore). Emily is a fantastic poet who doesn’t always get involved in my projects. She has her own, including being poetry editor of Ragazine, As for as my relationship to poetry, poetry was always my secret imaginary friend who came from the other side of the universe through the tiny holes in a screen door. Poetry still comes to visit me. Being married to Emily and loving my children has made those visits even more welcomed and necessary. I write more poems about being a father now. Can’t help it. They’re more surreal and more conversationally lyric than my former narrative poems. So I’ve changed, but not on purpose. I don’t know what the changes will amount to yet.

DD: How have your young children changed your understanding of poetry?

JW: I am sixty. I do everything far too late in life. My children arrived when I was 54 and then 55. They are on the spectrum and largely non-verbal. They present challenges that I already experienced by having an older brother who had suffered damage to his brain, had a hemispheral removal that didn’t stop his convulsions, and eventually ended up blind and paralyzed. I like to fool myself that I got a training in love and caretaking from my brother that will help me with my kids, but that’s not so. I have never experienced a love as fierce as I feel for my children. Trying to explain it would be a catastrophic failure. They are going to be six and five and still are not potty trained. I joke and sing and talk to my wife while cleaning the poop from their legs. When Gabriel can’t sleep and is stimming (a term in autism meaning self-soothing movements) I stay up all night and try everything I know to comfort him and help him sleep. Clare has lively conversation with objects and qualities of light, and shadows. She is in a world I wish I could visit, just to love and understand her more. My children have affirmed for me that love is the only impossible thing I will ever accomplish. I love them. I wipe the poop from , the world where people think they understand autism because they watched a movie once. How do you explain that love crushes you into something you never intended, but that’s okay? You can’t. It sounds trite. Everything I say about my children sounds trite. Perhaps someday I will be able to say one thing that seems to me to be absolutely accurate and worth saying.

DD: What is one thing American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JW: I think American poetry needs more listeners, people who don’t want to be poets so much as read or go to readings. The trend in all the arts is that everyone in the audience is also in the business. That’s like LA where everyone might have done some acting or knows producers or would-be directors. Maybe this is good and I don’t want it to change too much, but I think, overall, it makes me worry about this all being solipsistic. I think American poetry needs more ways for poets to come up. Right now, there’s the academic MFA, or there’s the spoken word route. Both are limited, and as they gain power, both create false binaries and are too rigid a frame. I began reading in bars. I was spoken word in that sense and still am, but I don’t do the formulas. I don’t read with slam voice or with that slightly fry voice, little question at the end some academics use. There are affectations I’d like to see less of. I’d like to see more ways to succeed, more small grass roots community readings. I’d like to see funds for small readings all through the country and I’d like those funds to be administered by the hosts of series, so a poet who wrote a book could actually go around and get paid—and be a local force. I had an idea for a poetry union with a gauntlet of readings all tied together in a loose affiliation, a sort of circuit. They do it in slam and they do it in academia (but unofficially). The presses could be acknowledged by certain series and their poets sent out to tour for, say, a modest 200 a reading. I’d love to see book carousels at every series with the local mags and latest books and chaps in the carousels. I’m not holding my breath.

DD: I heard you’ve been writing bird poems lately. If the following poets were birds what kind of birds would they be? Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Schuyler, & Joe Salerno.

JW: Wallace Stevens: Plump shrike, wonderful at what he does, but rarified and sometimes cruel.

William Carlos Williams: Sparrow would be too obvious, probably more one of those parrots or canaries that have survived in cold places by living near electric stations and hot boxes.

Gertrude Stein: A noble Ostrich.

Charles Olson: A very grave, but kindly Stork.

Ezra Pound: A parrot in an old Edwardian house crying: “crack, crack! Thy winter winds! Bah!!!”

Emily Dickinson: Definitely a hermit thrush singing from a rare perch on a clothesline at dusk.

Gwendolyn Brooks:   A blue jay, someone who loved taking beautiful things to her nest, but could also drop an acorn with great precision from a hundred feet of sky to hit the bullseye of some idiot’s head.

James Schuyler: A beautiful pine warbler. I love his flower poems.

Joe Salerno: Ah, my dear friend Joe. Joe liked boat-tailed grackles. He loved the iridescence in their feathers. He would be a boat-tailed grackle, but one which, if he heard a child crying, would come over and gently begin to sing.

DD: Your friend, the late Joe Salerno, deserves a much wider audience than he has had. That he has had any posthumous audience at all is largely because of your efforts, which involved, among other things, publishing his book, Only Here. Could you discuss his importance to you as a poet and as a friend?

JW: My efforts were certainly not alone. The poet Sander Zulauf did far more of the heavy lifting and Salerno’s family did far more to keep his legacy alive. I help because I loved him, miss him, and I purchased so many copies of his book that I can still give one every year to a student I think will love his work. I helped because he was damned good as a poet and because I loved him, because he may have been the best human being I ever met. As a poet, everyone at the local New Jersey readings became attentive the second he stood up to read. We all loved his poetry. He’d won the Hopwood Award at Michigan, but you’d never know it. He never told anyone about his degrees in philosophy and the workshops he attended at Michigan where he more than held his own with Gregory Orr, Les Josephs and Jane Kenyon. He quit poetry for many years to raise his kids. I met him when he was forty and just getting back into the scene. We became friends naturally and by accident. We always went to readings together and he often drove me there and back because I didn’t always have a car. For months after he died, I could still feel his presence in a car, his denim or his flannel shirt beside me. He left an actual physical life behind him wherever he went. A new poem by Joe was an occasion. Then, the way he listened! He’d quote back lines from poets who were reading for the first time, encourage them, become their mentor in about ten seconds.

DD: I’d like to end with a poem by Joe Salerno, the title poem from Only Here.

            Only Here

            I wake
            Holding the blue piece
            Of a dream. And lying still
            On the cloudy pillow,
            Before the day’s first word
            Spreads meaning out over the world,
            I let the morning rain
            Be all I am.

            And in the slender
            Stone-colored light, the ordinary
            Promises of my life are made again,
            Attaching themselves silkenly
            Like rain to the window
            Or my car glazed like a white rose
            In the driveway.

            And the dream
            Now cold, blows away
            Like history, my wife
            Stirring beside me, the feathery touch
            Of our first child turning
            In her widening belly. Downstairs
            The kitchen waits. There is nothing
            To decide. Everything asleep
            Is about to awake, the day
            Set like a mighty clock
            In the silence.

            Opening our eyes,
            We lift the world; the universe
            Tossed like rain from the tips
            Of our lashes. Only here
            Our ordinary eyes learn to find eternity—
            There is nothing else. The luster
            Is the plainness we walk in;
            This poverty we rise to
            At the end of dreaming—
            The sacrament each day
            Of our feet touching
            The floor.

---

Joe Weil is an assistant professor at Binghamton University. His reviews, essays, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He has four full-length collections of poetry; his latest collection of poems is A Night in Duluth, published by NYQ Books. In 2013, he was the recipient of the People's Poetry Award by Partisan Press. Joe Weil co-founded Monk Books with Bianca Stone and Adam Fitzgerald. He has since created Cat in the Sun books with his wife Emily Vogel. He is the Editor in Chief of Shrew. Having grown up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Weil now lives in Binghamton with Emily and two small children, Clare and Gabriel.

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is a recipient of the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, and the 2008 American Book Award for her book, All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007). She is the Founder/Executive Director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ, and editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She is also Director of the Creative Writing Program and Professor of Poetry at Binghamton University-SUNY. She has published sixteen books, including What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010), The Place I Call Home (NYQ Books, 2012), The Silence in an Empty House (NYQ Books, 2013) and Writing Poetry to Save Your Life: How to Find the Courage to Tell Your Stories (MiroLand, Guernica, 2013). With her daughter, Jennifer, she is co-editor of four anthologies.

Tommy Stella is a writer who earned his MA in English from Binghamton University. His recent comic book, I Think It Will Be Okay, is available to read on his website. He is a writer for Need2Know, Daily Pnut, Headlines and Heroes, and The Lunch Read. He also does book PR at Wunderkind PR and is the assistant to author Charles Soule.

Colleen Curry is a New York-based writer as well as a self-taught designer and artist. She is a graduate of Binghamton University.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

 

Next Line, Please: Hazards, Brawls, and the Value of Bad Titles, Tee Up! [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Last week on Next Line, Please we saw risks, perils, bad titles, and numbers on parade.

Christine Rhein's  “Occupational Hazards,” moves from one to 12 and back in the course of a work day:

One coffee after another. Two bosses. Three days
to corporate reorg, worldwide meetings, four
or five hundred PowerPoint slides you need
to start drafting. That smile—6 p.m., at your desk—
Boss A stopping by while buttoning his coat:
“remember, it’s all about moving the goalposts.”
At 7, Boss B: “remember, it’s all about moving
up the ladder … we’re counting on you to work
your magic.” Eight times nine columns, rows,
ways a spreadsheet can be skewed. Ten o’clock =
dinner deleted. 11:30 = bedtime = your pillows
propping the laptop + its steady overheating +
your nightstand printer running out of black.
Twelve years and counting. One life. One life.

There’s so much to like here: the way the opening draws you in, the business jargon (“reorg”), the movement of numbers mixed with breaks like "worldwide meetings" and the bosses "counting on you."

Pamela Joyce S did fine things with a couple of titles on David's “bad titles” list. Pamela used the “one to 10” option and took desirable liberties with some of the numbers (“Wonderland,” “create,” “benign,” “tension”):

Welcome to Wonderland, where your sublimation
is our pleasure. We too desire your secret dreams,
always très discreet, like damselflies dining in
delphinium. Those damn selfies for Tinder will
never be reviled by five angels of redemption,
nor deep-sixed to protect the innocent. We at
Wonderland understand the seven virtues and sins,
the sheer weight of them and how you long to create
something of nothing, transform dangerous to benign,
illicit to inspired, explicit tension to tender lines.
Please explore our Psychomachia room where you
will find a willing muse, music, art, and words to mine.

Truly sublime.

Another title on the “bad” list sparked Steve Belin-Oka’s surprising apicultural adventure, “Self-Portrait in a Side-View Mirror”:

This dying bee—a wonder it’s lived
until this late in the year, last week’s snow

an insulin shock dose to the raving leaves,
which lift and swirl in whirlpools

of wind. The November sun’s mad buzz
through the gauze of clouds. I watch

a hawk veer west, clasp a dove
in its talons. Say as a child I believed

sugar water in eyedroppers would save
vulnerable creatures. Now I know

malarial sepsis will hatch in the blood
of the weak. Despite pity, despite quinine.

Click here to read the full post, with even more hazards and brawls.

As for next week, it's time to tee up! We have a brand new prompt to play with, and the name of the game is word golf. In this exercise, poets focus in on the words at the end of each line, changing that word one letter at a time until the first end word has morphed into its opposite. For example, good to evil, or, white to black. It's a really fun and interesting endeavor, and you'd be quite tickled by how well the tension builds. Can you do it in 11 lines? 14?

Visit the American Scholar's page to see an example of a successful game of word gold (I mean, golf!) and to enter your candidate!

Schiller and Other Poets in Marbach, Germany [by Tami Haaland]

On one of my last days in Germany, I went to Marbach, only a few minutes by train from where I was staying. I had considered it over the previous weeks because it was Friedrich Schiller’s birthplace, but I didn’t realize the Schiller National Museum along with an extensive Literature Archive is the centerpiece of the town. 

Schiller was born in Marbach in 1759, when his father served in the military for the Duke of Württemberg who lived in Ludwigsburg. Later Schiller’s father retired to manage the parks, forests, and botanical gardens I have mentioned in earlier posts. Now these areas provide public space for the city, but at that time they were part of the Duke’s plantations and hunting grounds. I wonder if young Schiller skipped along the tree-lined walkways or whether his father created some of the nearly hidden pathways through the vegetation around the castle. 

Because of his father’s connection to the Duke, the Schiller family was subject to the Duke’s wishes, and when Friedrich reached the age of thirteen, the Duke insisted he be sent to military school.  The family had hoped he would become a minister, but the education he received allowed him to study medicine and law. Still, the Duke’s intrusion into the family sparked a life-long interest for Schiller in how power can be abused, a theme that appeared in his first play, The Robber. It was performed in Mannheim, and Schiller spent time in jail because he failed to ask permission to leave Ludwigsburg. In addition to jailing him briefly, the Duke also insisted he never write drama again. It wasn’t long before Schiller sought asylum and refused to abide by the Duke’s orders.

The elegant museum devoted to his legacy opened in 1903.  There are no English translations for the exhibits as in many German museums, but it is a rare treat to see the handwriting, portraits and personal effects of so many writers. One wing of the classically designed museum is devoted exclusively to Schiller. A wall of portraits dominates the first room, and additional rooms are focused on his letters and manuscripts. For me, the pages that show his revisions—lines crossed out or arrows that specify where lines should be moved--are favorites because they reveal more about the mind at work than pages with a perfect surface.

Beyond the manuscripts, I found myself admiring a rough drawing he made of his arm and closed fist. One room contained his clothes—two sets—one more formal than the other. Something about these personal items—his hat, his shoes, his mirror—provide the imagination with more access to the mystery of the person than any of the portraits. He owned a large quartz crystal and several prisms, and I can only assume he was fascinated by light.

The second major wing of the museum houses the work of his contemporaries—Goethe, Hölderlin, Kant, Mörike and many others. Here, there are only small samples, a page or two from each person with presumably many more stored in the library archives.

A connecting hallway in the basement allows access to the Museum of Modern Literature. The entrance,  a narrow, dark green room, is devoted to Eduard Mörike who was born in Ludwigsburg. His death mask appears near the door, and as in the older museum, some of his personal effects are on display. The most notable part of this exhibit is a series of wooden pieces of different lengths leaning against the wall, each with an engraved line from the poem “Am Mitternacht” (“At Midnight”). The exhibit invites slow reading and contemplation while walking the length of the room.  In the poem, a personified night, “leans dreaming against the mountain wall.” She is the mother of small streams who sing to her a lullaby about the blue skies of day, but “she is tired of it / and thinks the blue skies sound sweeter.”  Her discontent is a bit surprising, and in the context of the poem it is understated. She cannot escape either her identity or time. 

Further into the modern museum, two exhibits will extend into 2019, The Invention of Paris and Thomas Mann in Amerika, which had not quite opened when I was there.  The Invention of Paris features candid street photos of Paris and the work of writers such as Heinrich Heine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Celan. Here, too, each display case holds manuscript pages and letters. A few samples are available at the link above.

On the way back to the train I found myself winding through the city's seventeenth-century houses and cobblestone streets. Though it would have been nice to visit Schiller’s birth house, where his family lived until he was four, it was too late in the day. The Schiller Museum was enough, and now that I've left Germany, I'm finding the well-orchestrated and layered website provides access to treasures far beyond what I encountered while I was there. 

Phantom Signs: A Review of Philip Brady's New Collection of Essays

Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City
Philip Brady
The University of Tennessee Press, 2019

Philip Brady’s new collection of essays, Phantom Signs: The Muse in Universe City, assays the enthusiasms and hidden architectures of a lifetime spent in academia and in poetry. Brady, poet, professor, basketball player, editor, and book publisher, brings tremendous erudition and empathy to bear on topics ranging from the wrath of Achilles to the flat earth theories of Kyrie Irving. Phantom Signs offers dispatches from the interstices between middle age and old age; the essays in this volume derive their momentum from the competing imperatives of the poet and the editor. As Brady notes in the introduction, “this book emerges from the tension between these two modes of being in the world: the writer’s dark, the editor’s light.” Brady’s subject matter is multifarious, vertiginous, constantly overlapping; the approach of the essays themselves are by turns Borgesian, Deleuzian, and Dionysian. Brady is not afraid to stutter step, to sucker punch, to jackknife, to parry, to juke, to barrel down the lane, to take a charge, to lay out, to confess, to faux-disclose, to retrace, to praise, and to re-envision himself and his ideas through a kaleidoscopic array of experiences—from his childhood in Queens, through his Peace Corps days in Zaire, to his years teaching at Youngstown State University in Ohio.

Phantom Signs skitters playfully between memoir and criticism, impelled forward by the inspired imaginary chirography of luminary figures—real and fictitious, heroic and infamous—beginning with Chinua Achebe, Achilles, and Aeneas, and ending with Zarathustra, Robert Allen Zimmerman, and Louis Zukovsky. Brady recounts love affairs, travel, aging, a late marriage, recollections from early childhood, the innerworkings of a small poetry press, the insights gleaned from a life wed to great literature.  Along the way there are notable observations, such as: “Poems are so enigmatic. Each emerges from some private darkness which publication does not entirely dispel. No one wants to be taken in by a false poem. An accidental verse.” Here, as everywhere else in Phantom Signs, Brady emphasizes the mysterious, the atomized substance of words charged with the ambition of enduring. In an essay that served as a commencement speech for the Wilkes University MFA Class of 2016, Brady writes: “When I say that writing begins with failure, I mean only that it begins there—what happens next is what counts. Most people give up. I think that those who make writing a life’s vocation aren’t necessarily the most talented; they are merely the most willing to experience profound and continuous defeat.” For those of us who love poetry, it is lucky that Philip Brady is one of those who haven’t given up.

---

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Poets and Their Places [by Tami Haaland]

My time in Germany is coming to a close, and for the past week I’ve been conflicted each day about whether to stay in Ludwigsburg or head out on the train to other parts of Germany, France, or Switzerland. In Ludwigsburg, I can walk through Favoritepark and the palace botanical garden on my way to downtown or choose a slightly different direction and stroll the palace gardens of Monrepos. The town has become familiar to me now, and I like having my small apartment as a home base. On the other hand, I would like to see as much as possible before I go back to Montana. The Favoritepark train platform is three minutes away. I can take the S4 to Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof (main station), and from there, a person can go anywhere. With the Deutsche Bahn phone app, it’s a breeze to buy an inexpensive ticket.   

Last Tuesday I visited Strasbourg, just over the French border. The town has a long history of independence dating back several hundred years and is now the site of the European Union Parliament. When I arrived at the main station, I asked for directions at the information desk, and it was easy from there. I walked along cobblestone streets until I arrived at Strasbourg Cathedral, distinct from many other cathedrals because of its pink stone.  Once inside I sat near a pillar for some time thinking about who had been there, who was here now, how many hands over how many years contributed to this stunning space. 

Among its regular visitors, for a time, was Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe. He spent a year studying law at the University in Strasbourg and made a regimen of climbing to the outside balcony of the cathedral. There he would quiet himself, then step out onto a small platform with no railing, and in this way he would address his vertigo. In his autobiography, he speaks about this exercise as a pivotal experience. It allowed him to overcome his fear of heights, which then allowed him to see and do more in his subsequent travels to Italy and elsewhere.

After I returned from Strasbourg that evening, I spent one day and part of the next walking around Ludwigsburg or staying in my apartment with notebooks and computer, sometimes glancing out the window at the train platform. Then, around noon on Thursday, I made a spur of the moment decision to go to Tübingen.

Unlike many German cities, Tübingen wasn’t bombed during World War II. Germany is a patchwork depending on where the bombs fell, with some cities almost entirely decimated and then rebuilt afterwards with simpler, unadorned surfaces. But in Tübingen, the medieval city center is still intact and lively with small shops and many bookstores leading to the university. Narrow cobblestone streets curve up and down above the Neckar River that borders the old city. The castle, high on a hill above these buildings, now belongs to the University and houses ancient art ranging from 40,000-year-old figurines carved from mammoth ivory to Egyptian sarcophagi and Greek pottery. In addition to the museum’s ancient figurines, I was especially thrilled to see one of the gold death masks from Mycenae and a sculpture of a Minotaur head from Crete.

I went to Tübingen, however, because I wanted to see where Friedrich Hölderlin lived. One of the German Romantics, he spent his university days in Tübingen with his two philosopher friends, Hegel and Schelling. Much of his work appeared prior to 1805, when his life was marked by a major shift. He was accused of treason but had a mental breakdown that left him hospitalized in Tübingen. At the end of a year, he was pronounced incurable and released. Luckily, a carpenter’s family who had read his earlier works took him into their home, where he lived in a tower on the river just below the old city. He was given three years to live but survived for thirty-nine, though his family and friends neglected him after his breakdown. In their PEN/USA Award-winning Translations of Hölderlin, Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover provide an account of his importance to contemporary literature. 

I imagine Hölderlin watching people on an adjacent island or carriages crossing the bridge. His tower would have given him a perfect view of the river and anything that passed by. I wanted to see the interior of his tower, but the museum is closed for renovations and won’t open until 2020.

Since arriving in Germany two weeks ago, I’m thinking in short German phrases and attempting longer sentences, then plugging up the holes with English. This situation would probably improve if I could stay longer. Though I don’t expect to make much headway before my reentry into the US next week, I did recently buy a poetry anthology fittingly called Deutsche Gedichte, a lovely blue hardback with shiny copper polka dots. Originally published in the 1980s, it’s been updated and re-released this year, and while I’m taken with its cover design, I’m also doing a bit of translating. In the flurry of wondering where I should go next, focusing on individual words and lines is a pleasure.

Right now, I’m working on Ingeborg Bachman’s “Mein Vogel” (“My Bird”). She opens with these lines, “Whatever happens: the devastated world / will sink back into twilight.”  Despite the devastation, I think the lines are hopeful. They have to do with the overriding presence of natural rhythms. Light returns in the morning. No matter what, twilight and darkness settle in.

As I write this, a perfect half-moon shines through my little window. Maybe I’ll go to Heidelberg on Sunday.

Next Line, Please: Title Precedes Text [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please, quizmaster Lehman provides a new prompt for NLP regulars to try out.

For this prompt, let's start with on of these two titles: “Occupational Hazards” and “Barroom Brawl.”

The former works because "it is part of our discourse, a phrase that can suit many purposes or occasions;" and the latter because "it, too, is a familiar phrase and may conjure up a very concrete scene."

Now on to the rules...

Write a poem 10 to 15 lines long. A second constraint might prove useful. For example, you may write a 10-line poem divided into two five-line stanzas, both of which have identical last lines.

Or—and what a stunt it is—a 12-line poem in which the numbers from one to nine appear in English or homophonic form. You are encouraged to take liberties. The word for “five” in French sounds like “sank”; “four” is “fear” in German; “nine” is “nein” in that language; the word “one” is included in “wonderful.” It’s a wonderful paradox that constraints act as liberators of the imagination.

Visit the American Scholar's page for the full post and to enter your candidate!

Next Line, Please: Like People in Novels [by Virginia Valenzuela]

“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

“The Gauge of Dissonance,” by Aaron Fagan uses the line as an epigraph. The title gets us started on a high note, and "rises to eloquence," provokes thought:

We can, but there is no one there to explain us to ourselves
Or others—the tidy or perfectly untidy inner lives of strangers
Designed for us to love or not love but love then unlove
And then love again by story’s end. And no one is so perfectly
Self-aware as those imagined in all those parallel linear lines
Of prose like striped prison uniforms now set free in verse
No matter how unskillful their behavior might’ve been those
Years ago, beneath a balcony in Paris, and the decision to leave.

The third and fourth lines struck me as very Virginia Woolf-esque. Well done.

Millicent Caliban's poem, “Death Sentence” offers us another way in to Wharton's sentiment:

We can’t behave like people in novels.
We haven’t got the time, the wit, the grace.
We are bored, overworked, exhausted,
or plunged so deep in our personal swamps,
we cannot rise to the necessary
insight, irony, or self-reflection.

We slither around in the opaque mud:
reptilian, repulsive, repugnant,
lacking an author to prompt our passions,
detonate desire. We can see no plot,
no climax, no redeeming denouement.
Alas! Condemned to remain post-modern.

And finally, Patricia Wallace’s “The Window,” a sonnet, with a terrific opening, and a lovely turn:

Coming not out of nowhere, like the cold October wind
down from the mountains, the ten-year window arrives,
revising the scope of binoculars from far
to near, and we’re staring it right in the faces
of our suddenly ghostly children. We’re searching for
a story that leads to a different ending, magical
realism or a fable where polar bears regenerate
and glaciers like ice cubes refreeze, or at least
the old inhabitant trees hang on, their birdless limbs
whispering to one another. Now a blip on
the radar, we’re trying to invent new characters, better
than we are. But we can’t behave like people in novels,
can we? Jumping backward in time, heeding the warning
signs, giving the predictable conclusion the slip?

We also applaud Patricia Smith (whose poem begins with the Wharton epigraph, and then “I certainly hope not—” ), Louis Altman (whose phrase “a Dashiell Hammett evening” could launch a dozen poems), Donald LaBranche, Keith Barrett, and Elizabeth Solzburg for work of exceptional merit.

More poems on the American Scholar's page, along with the full post! And a new prompt next week~

A Visit to Winchester [by Tami Haaland]

I was in Winchester, England, this week to offer a poetry workshop at Winchester College, a boarding school founded in 1382. The students, teachers, and I met in a room of the college library. We read Sandra Alcosser’s “What Makes the Grizzlies Dance,” and I shared two of my own poems featuring deer, grizzly bears, and butterflies, all leading to a prompt about encounters with animals. The students told me they weren’t accustomed to this kind of writing, yet they had plenty to say and volunteered to share their work with each other.

This wasn’t my first visit to Winchester. I’ve been here several times to meet with colleagues or students at the University of Winchester, and nearly always, someone will mention Keats’ visit to the city two hundred years ago. He wrote “To Autumn” there in September 1819, and visitors can follow the walk thought to inspire the poem—around the cathedral, down College Street, past the house where Jane Austen died only two years before in 1817, past Winchester College and along the River Itchen, one of the chalk rivers of southern England.

An article in the Guardian, however, says the view from St. Giles Hill may have inspired Keats as he looked down on fields recently purchased by a wealthy banker. The poem, seen in this light, has an edge of social commentary during a time when landowners monopolized the harvest, and food prices were high. Scholar Nicholas Roe suggests that patterns in “To Autumn” parallel the sensibility of King Alfred the Great (849-899 CE), famous for driving the Vikings out of England but also a poet and a humanitarian who argued for translation so that more people, men presumably, could be educated. A large statue of King Alfred stands near the ancient entrance to Winchester, though it wouldn’t have been there in Keats’ day.

Regardless of where he walked, and I imagine he walked in various places over the course of two months, Keats would not have been the first poet to combine multiple sources of inspiration into one poem. Apples, fields, flowers, river, swallows and gnats appear in his lines, and like a painter, he did not simply imitate what he saw but created his own design. It may even be that the rhythm of walking influenced his poem.

Rumor has it that Keats intended to stay longer in Winchester so that he could use the library at Winchester College. I’m curious what he wanted to research, or maybe he just wanted to prowl through books. In any case, Winchester College refused access because he was not a gentleman. In his letters, Keats complained about the absence of a “tolerable library," but he admired the bookstore on College Street, then called Robbins and now P & G Wells. Around the corner is The Wykeham Arms, a pub he was said to frequent.

Hearsay surrounds Keats’ brief time in Winchester and a good deal is documented through letters and scholarship. In snooping about, other details have surfaced. He was short of money, and he hoped to do what was necessary to become a more popular writer. I assume this would have allowed him to make a living from his work. And during his stay in Winchester he wrote 1500 lines. Divided by the 58 days he stayed there, he averaged 26 lines per day. Some say he aspired to 50, a goal I’m keeping in mind.

Fashion and Beauty with Poetess Vinny: Going Back to School [by Virginia Valenzuela]

Dear Poetess Vinny,

I’m considering graduate school to earn an MFA in Creative Writing. I’m in my late forties, a mother, and my main concern is how to present myself in a university setting. Should I wear clothes I would wear to work? How far can I dress down? Any advice would be much appreciated!

Yours, 

Poetess

Dear Poetess,

Taking on a Masters in Fine Arts is a wonderful challenge filled with creative torrents, fast-paced learning, and hopefully, major literary inspiration. It’s also a place to meet talented, like-minded people who will boost your ambition and support your pursuit of writing, which is something we can’t always take for granted.

Many graduate programs are populated by recent college grads, but MFA Creative Writing programs tend to be a little bit different. MFA students are quite diverse in age, race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and previous careers, especially in programs in places like New York.

So let’s talk fashion.

A lot of people in the Masters in Fine Arts programs in New York have day jobs, which means there will always be at least one person in your class wearing a button-down and slacks and one in a blouse and dress shoes. There are also a lot of unemployed poets, daytime baristas, nighttime bartenders, and everything under the sun; meaning, you’re just as likely to find people in skinny jeans, t-shirts, and converse shoes. All this to say, no one is going to judge you based on what you wear to class. 

I interviewed two women in the Creative Writing Program at The New School to find out a few things, such as what they did before grad school, why they came to the program, and which shoes they wear when putting their best foot forward.

 

Profile 1: Where professional meets glamorous

Heather Newman is 57, a suburban wife, mother of two kids aged 20 and 22, and the owner of a playful, fluffy Coton de Tulear named Sir Lancelot, the royal dog of Madagascar. Heather has worked as a freelance writer and copyeditor for Family Circle magazine, an associate producer for TV and radio at Grey Advertising, and an on-air TV news reporter at CBS. She is a second-year student in the poetry concentration.

Poetess Vinny: What made you want to return to school after having a successful career in all of these exciting fields?

Heather Newman: While I was home raising kids, I started to write creatively, taking classes and workshops whenever possible. Most people my age opt for low-residency MFA programs. I wanted the full-time interaction with a vibrant literary scene. Jane Fonda says she has lived a life in five acts. For me, the MFA is my chapter three.

PV: Did you have any reservations about joining a program that, statistically speaking, has a high population of people under 30?

HN: No. I love young people. My challenge is technology. But I’m getting better. I use google docs, Instagram, thinking about Twitter… and I love The New School, its professors, students, commitment to social justice, and the incredible literature classes. In fact, I wish the program were longer.

PV: What kinds of clothes do you wear to class? Readings? What do you wear to feel comfortable and confident? 

HN: I’ll admit I adore clothes. (I once wrote an ode to my closet.) Leather jackets, boots, fun scarves, funky jewelry. Not that it really matters…it’s the work that counts. But still, I never met a lipstick I didn’t like!

 

Profile 2: The power of passion

Lindiwe Priscilla Krasin, 42, is a Bronx-based black power feminist. She writes poetry and creative non-fiction and has been published in the Journal of Progressive Human Services. Before coming to the New School, she operated the business Sex & Safari. Sex & Safari “is all about the sex appeal aesthetic. We design sexy wardrobes, spaces and parties. I am all about being sexy,” says Lindiwe, a now second-year student in the Creative Writing MFA.

Poetess Vinny: What made you want to return to school after having a successful business, starting a family, etc.?

Miss LPK: This is my second masters degree. My first is in modern and contemporary Middle Eastern Art History. School and writing have kept me alive, 'cause to be frank, I have had a crazy life. My love life and family life are in shambles right now. I finally went back on psychiatric medication. If not for school and writing, I'm not sure I would have anything to live for. It has been that raw for me. My life is really Mi Vida Loca nuts.

PV: Did you have any reservations about joining a program that has a high population of people under 30?

LPK: I did not consider my age. I don't care if people look at me as older or not. Whatever it is, it is.

PV: What kinds of clothes do you wear to class? Readings? What do you wear to feel comfortable and confident? 

LPK: I mean for me, honestly, I am a living brand. Lately I have gone to class looking absolutely bummy and gross, but I have had stuff going on that has driven me almost mad so that explains all that. However tonight I am wearing a perfect fall evening-at-school ensemble: shimmery gold leggings and a long sleeved scoop neck body suit from Forever 21 in Union Square, a gold and white fine wool scarf as a cummerbund (super sexy) and simple purple and silver Asics jogging sneakers. I look amazing. I have my braids up in a fiesty looking pony tail. I never wear foundation. I eat coconut oil for extended fertility (fingers crossed) and good skin. Occasionally at night, if I'm going out, to a reading or drinks with my peers, I will cover my skin with something (lotion or powder) to give me a natural body glow.

In conclusion…

I hope this helps you, and others like you, feel confident moving forward with the next steps in your literary life. An MFA is a great way to meet people, to talk about amazing books, and to heighten your skills as a writer. And if you make a few fashion statements along the way, well, that’s just icing on top of the cake.

 

You can find Heather’s newest poems on The Inquisitive Eater

For more on fashion and poetry, please visit my blog, Vinny the Snail

 

And to have your questions about fashion and beauty answered, please comment below!

Meet the Press: Green Writers Press—Dede Cummings, James Crews, & GWP authors/poets

Dante Di Stefano: How did Green Writers Press come into being?

James Crews: Green Writers Press, an independent, Vermont-based publishing company, founded on Earth Day in 2014, is dedicated to spreading environmental awareness and social justice by publishing authors who promulgate messages of hope and renewal through place-based writing and environmental activism. Former Little, Brown book designer, Dede Cummings, founded the press out of her home office in southern Vermont with the mission to spread a message of hope and renewal through the words and images we publish. Throughout we will adhere to our commitment to preserving and protecting the natural resources of the earth. To that end, a percentage of our proceeds will be donated to environmental activist groups and social justice organizations. Our list has expanded significantly, publishing such authors as Julia Alvarez, David Budbill, Chard deNiord, John Elder, Dr. M Jackson, former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, Raquel Vasquez Gilliland, and Clarence Major.

DD: Can you talk a bit about the “localvore” approach of the press, combining environmental activism with the work of publishing?

Dede Cummings: One reason we started Green Writers Press was to print our books sustainably, and use eBooks and audiobooks to reduce our fossil fuel use. We are excited to be publishing our own authors, and we welcome your support to help us spread the word. In today’s world of social media and online transactions, here are GWP, we remember that your head and your heart need nourishment from the natural world. With that as our credo, we embark on a journey to bring the beauty of the published book as a tactile object, into the homes and hands of our readers, and we also embrace the technology of tablet and eBook publishing.

Our vision is that, collectively, our printed and eBooks will become a chorus of voices of writers and readers, artists and photographers, who care about the fate of the earth and want to do something about it. Though we believe our books will be interesting to Vermont residents, Green Writers Press has national distribution and we hope to have a broad reach and impact. Our voices need to be heard, which is why we refer to our press as a global press. We are—we all are connected on this planet we love. It is our hope that we can create a community around our press and the books we publish.

DD: Using the anthology Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry as a point of departure, could you talk a bit about the poetic significance of Vermont? How has this place influenced you as a poet and editor? What, if anything, links Vermont poets as widely disparate as Major Jackson and the late Ruth Stone, for example?

From editor and former Vermont state poet laureate, Sydney Lea: While even as I make one, I myself feel somewhat impelled to challenge any generality regarding so wide-ranging a group of poets as those in our anthology.  Indeed, the “Vermontiness” of this collection may reside particularly in its non-homogeneity. Our little state has a rightful reputation for orneriness and individualism, and I think those qualities prevail first to last here. Yes, there is often among our authors a strong sense of place, but not always. There is often, but not always, a vivid consciousness of the seasons. I could go on, but what really abides in Roads Taken: Contemporary Vermont Poetry, Second Edition is the autonomous voice. No one poet here would be mistaken for another. I find that bracing and gratifying.

From editor and Vermont state poet laureate, Chard DeNiord: While there is no such thing as a particular brand of Vermont poetry, the poems in [this anthology] claim Vermont as their place of origin, bearing witness to the remarkably rich legacy of the state's poetic tradition. In addition to this, I would add that Vermont's legacy of fierce independence, self-reliance, and ingenuity, from its earliest settlers to its present citizens, continues to typify not only Vermonters, but its best poetry. Like its farmers, inventors, loggers, and sugarers, Vermont poets enjoy memorializing their state's stunning landscape and rugged character. Vermont is both a liberal and conservative state, pulling two ways at once just as a good poem does. One of the qualities that endures as a bittersweet yet alluring theme in much of Vermont poetry is its ironic double nature as an archetypal paradise and formidable wilderness. This seeming contradiction provides the perfect prescription for sublime poetry where the landscape intersects with Vermont's poets' lives in memorable ways, as in Robert Frost's "Home Burial," Hayden Carruth's "Emergency Haying," Ruth Stone's "Things I Say To Myself While Hanging Laundry," Major Jackson's "Enchanters of Addison County," Louise Gluck's "Burning Leaves," Galway Kinnell's "The Bear," Mary Ruefle's "Jewelweed," Ellen Bryant Voigt's "Headwaters," "David Budbill's "Sometimes," Julia Alvarez's "Homecoming," "Sydney Lea's "Dubber's Cur," and "Leland Kinsey's "Surviving Bulls." The rugged life-style that has typified the lives of so many Vermonters over the past three centuries, as well as the mystical Green Mountains,  continue to find their way into Vermont's contemporary poetry, as evidence by the more than 100 strong poets who fill this volume.

DD: Vermont Exit Ramps II puts the poetry of Neil Shepard into conversation with the photography of Anthony Reczek in interesting ways. What is the most notable aspect of this dialogue for you?

From Vermont Exit Ramps II photographer, Tony Reczek: Tamra Higgins, one of the founders (with Mary Jane Dickerson) of Sundog Poetry, in her wonderful introductory remarks at the Vermont Exit Ramps II Book Launch, said: “How fortunate we are to have the long-lasting friendship between Tony and Neil transubstantiated into this book!” 

That’s probably the most notable aspect of the VER II “dialogue” for me, how in many ways the book is a continuation of a conversation started some five decades ago, when we first began rambling around the Vermont countryside.  VER II carries on that same conversation, but our instruments have changed, and the riffs have a greater complexity and nuance.  But the conversation – no, the song – still emerges from that shared sense of wonder first encountered those many years ago.  We just keep riffing on it.

From Vermont Exit Ramps II poet, Neil Shepard: I agree with everything Tony and Tamra say:  how VERII transmutes a remarkable friendship spent rambling around Vermont for the past forty or fifty years into this crystallized series of poems and photographs that record the changing nature of the pastoral landscape.  

Most of the poems are what we’d call post-pastoral – they examine the flashpoints and tensions between natural and the human-built landscapes – whereas the photographs offer a mix of modes, sometimes casting backward to traditional pastoral images, and sometimes capturing the what-is of contemporary post pastoral Vermont. So, in this dialogue between old friends, sometimes the photographic images reinforce the poems, and sometimes they clash with the written word, But overall, what’s most remarkable to me, in addition to our ongoing friendship, is how two artists (poet and photographer) demonstrate their love and attachment to the Vermont landscape, which they both record and interrogate through the word and the photographic image.

DD: Tell us about some of the other books in your catalog. What elements link Green Writers Press poetry collections?

DC: Green Writers Press is proud to offer some stunning poetry books in our catalog. We are looking for new and emerging poets that write about the earth and our place in nature and the built environment, poets who give voice to those who are marginalized in our society, and established poets who want to publish with us and enjoy the benefits of working collaboratively. Green Writers signed the new poetry collection by Robert Pack, entitled All One Breath, and we are thrilled to work with such a notable American poet as Pack. We also recently published Dirt and Honey, by Rachel Vasquez Gilliland, an emerging Mexican-American poet and feminist. Another upcoming book is titled Time Inside, by Vermont poet Gary Margolis, about his work with maximum security prison inmates. Last, but not least, GWP just published A Bouquet of Daisies, by seventeen-year-old poet, Megan Alice, with proceeds benefitting the Planned Parenthood Federation. We strive for a diverse chorus of poetic voices and our literary magazine, The Hopper, also awards a poetry prize, now in its third year. Winners include John Saad in 2016, Ralph Black in 2017, and our 2018 winner, Charity Gingerich. Our poetry editors are James Crews, Anna Mullen, Ellie Rogers, Emma Irving, Dede Cummings, and Caroline Shea.

DD: What is one thing that American poetry needs more of, in your opinion?

JC: We have a bias for poetry that is accessible to as large an audience as possible, and because we are an independent press run almost entirely by women, we also believe that more female and transgender voices are needed in American poetry to give voice to those who have been kept quiet for too long. But as an environmentally-minded publisher, we hold close to Robert Bly's idea of "shared consciousness" with the natural world — an outlook long held by Native Americans before us. This idea puts forth that elements of the natural world are just as intelligent and conscious as humans (if not more so), and perhaps the current environmental crisis would not be so dire if more people saw the world in this way. We need more American poetry that acknowledges our essential interconnectedness as a planet and as a human species. To paraphrase the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, we'd like to see more poetry that awakens us from the illusion of our separateness. 

DD: What does the future hold for poetry at Green Writers Press? 

JC: Because our publisher is an award-winning poet in her own right, we give a lot of attention to publishing and promoting our poetry catalog. To that end, you can expect to see several new collections which showcase diverse American voices, and which unflinchingly tackle the environmental crisis. You can also look for anthologies that are in and of themselves forms of resistance against the prevailing fear and outrage infecting our politics and our country as a whole. For instance, we'll be publishing an anthology edited by our poetry editor, James Crews, called Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness and Connection, with a lovely preface by former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

DD: You recently published Landscapes with Donkey by José Manuel Marrero Henríquez (translated by Ellen Skowronski-Polito). Could you introduce this collection and end the interview with a poem from it?

DC: Winner of the 2016 ASLE Translation Grant to support the cross-cultural sharing of ecoliterature, translator Ellen Skowronski-Polito presents Marrero Henríquez’s poetry and vision to an English-speaking audience. In Landscapes with Donkey / Paisajes con burro, Spanish poet José Manuel Marrero Henríquez follows a gentle, gray donkey on his travels through the hillsides of the Canary Islands, an archipelago located off the western coast of Africa. Wise and thoughtful, the pensive quadruped, a “doctor of the earth,” studies the limits of ground and sky  with the unique perspicuity of a donkey’s gaze. On a journey far beyond the pasture’s horizon, the donkey, humblest of poets, takes flight to the Americas, Asia and Africa and unravels the mysteries of this transcendentally beautiful and profoundly life-giving planet we call home.

José Manuel Marrero Henríquez is a poet, writer, essayist, and tenured professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. He has published extensively on literary landscapes and on a variety of topics of Spanish and Latin American literatures. He has served on the advisory board of EASLCE (2010-2014) and is a member of the advisory board of Ecozon@. European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment. He has recently edited Transatlantic Landscapes: Environmental Awareness, Literature and the Arts (Franklin Institute, 2016) and is co-editor of Humanidades ambientales. Pensamiento, arte y relatos para el siglo de la gran prueba (Catarata, 2018). Paisajes con burro, his latest book of poems, was awarded a 2016 ASLE translation grant, and has been published as Landscapes with Donkey under the translation of Ellen Skowronski-Polito (Green Writers Press, 2018). His most recent endeavor of a Poetics of Breathing, a general ecocritical theory, resonates within his creative writing and advocacy of environmental issues.

A sample poem, the first one in the book, in Spanish and in English:

            La pezuña raspa el suelo
            para enterrar el punto
            que a su interrogación falta
            y el sol fortalecido esfuma
            la energía encarnada en el campo.

            No queda humedad en las cosas
            y se evapora la vida
            para siempre.

            No hay voces, niños,
            águilas, culebras,
            ni siquiera buitres,
            o ruiseñores.

            Dormitan en los libros.

            Terco, seco el páramo
            y azul el cielo, el burro
            escarba su pregunta
            en el suelo.

——-

            The hoof scrapes the ground
            to bury the point
            that lacks its question
            and the strengthened sun blurs
            the energy embodied in the field.

            Things lose their moisture
            and life evaporates
            forever.

            There are no voices, children,
            eagles, snakes,
            not even vultures,
            or nightingales.

            They doze in books.

            The páramo dry
            and the sky blue, the stubborn donkey
            scratches his question
            in the ground.

---

Dede Cummings is a writer, book designer, and publisher; founder of GWP. In 2013, she attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and in 2014, she taught a class at the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. Dede attended Middlebury College, where she discovered cross-country skiing, majored in English, and was a recipient of the Mary Dunning Thwing Award for Poetry. In 1991, she received an award to study with Hayden Carruth at the Bennington Writers’ Workshop. Dede has had her poetry published in Mademoiselle magazine, The Lake (along with an essay about Maxine Kumin), Connotation Press, and other magazines and journals. Dede’s first poetry collection, To Look Out From, was the winner of the 2016 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize (April 2017). Her seconds poetry collection, The Meeting Place, is due out in May 2018 from Salmon Poetry in Ireland, and she is at work on a collection of stories called Spin Cycle. Throughout the 1980s, Dede worked at Little, Brown & Company, rising to senior book designer. When the company was bought by Time/Warner and moved to New York, Dede headed north to return to Vermont and start freelancing as a designer. She has designed many award-winning books by such authors as Thomas Pynchon, Mary Oliver, William Shirer, and Andre Dubus, and she is a five-time winner of the New England Book Award, including two additional “Best in Show” awards for Sorochintzy Fair by Nikolai Gogol and World Alone/Mundo a Solas by Nobel Prize Winner Vincente Alexandro. Dede is a public radio commentator for Vermont Public Radio and frequently lectures and teaches at writers’ conferences. She lives next to an apple orchard on a dirt road in West Brattleboro, Vermont, with her family, where the home office also looks out onto a solar array, newly installed in 2014, that powers the press from the sun.

James Crews is an up-and-coming poetry editor and poet himself, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in creative writing / poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in writing and literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column and grew to love the Great Plains. He now lives on an organic farm in Shaftsbury, Vermont, just a few miles from the Robert Frost Stone House.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of two poetry collections: Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016) and Ill Angels (Etruscan Press, forthcoming 2019). Along with María Isabel Alvarez, he is the co-editor of Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump's America (NYQ Books, 2018). All proceeds from this anthology go directly to the National Immigration Law Center.

Poet as Travel Guide [by Tami Haaland]

For the next few weeks, I’m living in a small apartment in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, Germany, and on the weekends, I’ll be teaching a brief seminar on Montana literature at Pädagogische Hochschule Ludwigsburg or Ludwigsburg University of Education. Since I arrived on Monday, I’ve been settling into time zone and location, organizing my life, and walking. I like the way travel focuses a person on basic concerns—where to sleep, what to eat, how to return after venturing out. It appeals to my inner hunter-gatherer. Rather than using GPS, I prefer to discover where the road goes, a method that does not guarantee success but is satisfying on its own. So far, I’ve come across crisp fallen apples, fresh blackberries along a walking path, and kale planted at the end of a field for anyone to pick. The Waldorf School just above the campus seems to be surrounded by small farms, complete with resident goats, and today there were perhaps fifteen small wild sheep called muffelwild in Favoritepark.

Favoritepark is a small forest situated directly beside the campus leading first to a colorful hunting lodge and then to the palace built by Duke Eberhard Ludwig who famously said, “There are already enough boring towns.”  Ludwigsburg is not old by the usual standards. It’s an 18^th century city that developed because of the Duke, and it is lovely and spacious, full of trails designed for walking and biking. One path I especially like is the Planetenweg that connects Ludwigsburg to other towns on a path where large steles with sculptures on both sides represent the planets, and the entire system is built to scale. Made by students at the University, these steles feature dismembered human/god figures in relief on the front side and engraved images on the back, where parts of the body are connected but less recognizable, more like a being made of fire. Exhibited on a tree-lined walking path, these sculptures extend out from a gold metal sphere that represents the sun.

There is something about seeing the dismembered Erde, or Earth, that feels ominous. I don’t know if this is intentional since all of the figures are similarly portrayed. Because I don’t know German well, I go through the motions of reading the explanatory plaques, and then I make things up. I recognize some words and add my own false assumptions, as if conducting that familiar writing exercise of creating a poem by pretending to translate an unfamiliar language. I imagine climate change and a troubled world as I view this portrait of the Earth, but I don’t think that’s what the students had in mind.

Apparently Ludwigsburg is also the center of Swabian poetry. The first night I was here, my hosts mentioned the Swabian dialect, which is connected to a 2000-year-old ethnic group in this area. Friedrich von Schiller, from Marbach am Neckar, and Eduard Mörike, who was born in Ludwigsburg, appear to be the two most prominent poets connected to Swabia. In the 19^th century, Longfellow anthologized Schiller’s “Count Eberhard, the Weeper of Würtemberg,” elsewhere translated as “Count Eberhard, the Groaner.” It’s a battle narrative written in quintains that specifically mentions Swabian lands.  What appeals to me more, though, is this short poem from Mörike, “September Morning,” translated by Charles L. Cingolani, which provides a sense of this place, where “colors / Stream forth in molten gold.”

Of course we’re a month past that kind of brilliance, but there are still leaves on the trees, the weather is mild, and Ludwigsburg is celebrating the season with a pumpkin festival. Some say it’s the biggest in the world.

Next Line, Please: An Epigraph in Search of a Poem [by Virginia Valenzuela]

What prompts a poem into existence? Dr. Lehman suspects that many poems are byproducts of reading, coming across an arresting line, an interesting image, a noteworthy character, and we think of it as a point of departure.

In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton writes: “We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can we?”

For this week's prompt, write a symmetrical, two stanza poem under 14 lines, allowing for a duet, if not a dialogue. Or perhaps an unrhymed sonnet?

It’s up to you whether to use Wharton’s line as an epigraph or as a line in your poem—possibly the terminal line of one or both stanzas.

Visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate! Deadline: Saturday, November 3, midnight wherever you are.

Interview with Tony Towle [by Jess Matuozzi]

[Guest Author Note:  Thank you to Jess and Tony for this fascinating interview and to Hanging Loose Press for permission to reproduce the poems discussed in it!]

JM: Your poetry taps out a wry tango with history; you’ve looked at it, through it, over it, beyond it, within it, and around it, describing the historical perspective of the backward-glancing present as “the cartoon with the one perennial frame.” And so we’re here to speak of poetry’s intersection with history, personal and collective.  

Let’s start with the former. How has your writing process changed with age? I’m not referring to changes in style, like your shift from pop collage to a more conversational mode, but rather, to changes in the way you experience the writing process. 

TT: My first thought is: how can aging not have changed my writing process (along with everything else!)? But when I try to figure out what those changes have actually been, I draw a blank. If the “writing process” is the manner in which the poems are made, regardless of individual content or style, I think I have to say that there hasn’t been perceptible (perceptible to me, anyway) change since I got going in the early ‘60s. Perhaps I mistake what you are getting at. Feel free to steer me onto the right track! 

 

JM: I’m afraid I only have directions to the wrong track. It’s located at the intersection of poetry and history in the broadest sense: that is, at the site where poetry catalyzes cultural shifts that can, ultimately, be historical in their import. I’ve always seen your poems as being quietly countercultural — “The City in the Throes of Despair,” for example, crashes the ethos of “accomplishment” against the sort of openness that allows for “beauty to interrupt constantly.” Do you see your poems as countercultural? 

 

TT:  The poem you refer to was written in 1967, when the “real” counterculture (politics and sociology more than poetry) was well on its way to being a force in national life; but my work had nothing to do with that, nor was I personally very much a part of it, although I knew many poets who were. I’m not so much countercultural as a classic outsider, whose work is perhaps quietly subversive. Part of the subversion can be a free-wheeling parody of conventional thinking, with an insistence on being gratuitous, stubbornly irrelevant  to “normal” society and daily reality. The poem in question is surreal and absurdist, with satiric reference to Robert Moses, real estate developer Samuel Lefrak, and the Borough of Queens (where I grew up).  I write different kinds of poems, so one could find examples that are other than what I have just described. But I would maintain that I’m a subversive outsider rather than a counterculturalist, which usually implies an agenda beyond poetry itself.

 

JM: This differentiation you’ve made between the countercultural and the subversive is very useful; it offers a clearer vocabulary for discussing poetry’s role(s) in the public sphere. Now you’ve got me thinking about the value of anchoring subversion in a rich array of historical references, as you do in recent poems like “Misprision” and “Five Days in June.” When you find yourself animated by the mischievous impulse to pen something “gratuitous” or “stubbornly irrelevant” to conventional society, what historical period do you find most compelling to engage with, and why?   

 

TT:  It’s really whatever comes across my radar and suddenly seems right for inclusion in a particular poem. I’ve read enough history — starting in earnest at the age of eight — so that the material exists in my head as a kind of repertory. But the historical aspect may not be the primary motivation for the poem. “Misprision” — an archaic word for misunderstanding (among other meanings) — is about double entendres, a couple of them rather pornographic (Sappho’s original tongue, indeed!); the whole is made ambiguous by a naïve narrator going through a series of misprisions. Ambiguity is a prime feature of the subversive, at least my version of it. I’m very comfortable with ambiguity in poetry, and with art in general, but the average person is not. (The meaning should be clear, damn it!) Irony is another feature, and irony is often ambiguous. “Five Days in June” starts out as a lampoon of the clichéd and ubiquitous “Today,” used as an introductory phrase carrying bogus authority for a point that is not in the least proven: Today,  Americans are less inclined . . . Today, women prefer . . . This has annoyed me enough over time so that a couple of years ago I found myself composing this short poem that I think ridicules the device but is entertaining beyond that. So I don’t know if this poem is really “historical” — though it does reference the Ottoman Empire — since what could be less historical than Today? 

In any event, in both these poems it is aspects of language that drive the car, with historical references, among other items, along for the ride. In general, I’m pretty eclectic. In my book Winter Journey, there are mentions and scenarios that include the storm god Teshub, medieval Baghdad, the Mongols, Plutarch, the Battle of Kursk, Catherine the Great, John Calvin, Samuel Barber, John Clare, Val Lewton, Hedy Lamarr, George Antheil, Genghis Khan, Ogodei Khan, En-Hedu-Ana, Sargon of Akkad, the Sumerians, Phoenicia, Elijah, Ahab, Jezebel, Genghis Khan again, Parthia, Sappho, Charles VIII of France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Sassanians.  

 

JM: I remain curious about what drives your propensity for more distant historical allusions. So I’ll conclude by asking you this: if you were to embark upon a sustained poetic foray into the life of some figure from the more distant past, who would you choose?  

I don’t think my sensibility is suited to do a long-poem biographical treatment of one individual, à la Robert Browning, or Byron — or my late friend and colleague Paul Violi, who was wonderfully adept at creating extended studies of historical figures (or invented ones, for that matter!).  I wouldn’t be able to sustain it, and it would end up as something else. As to a propensity for distant historical allusions, that began long before I started writing poetry. I think it had to do with escape. I often found (find) the present limited and unsatisfying. History has always given me somewhere else to go.

 

*    *    *

The City in the Throes of Despair

 

The great worm of the north, in whose footsteps we tread,

eludes us with a thousand lightnings.

However the bus, the nourishment of the city, pulls in,

and nothing has been accomplished though beauty

interrupts constantly, interpolating a row of moments

like a pink balustrade basking in the sun.

 

The buses and planes go forward in clouds of yeast and salt,

lurching over the pipes and turbines of the city

as Wyoming would slide down the coast of Norway

and I look from the plane as from the vantage point of a roof

to see the Lefrak Building shielding my eyes from Manhattan.

Lefrak, whose first name has escaped me —  like Catherine

the Great's last — into the wild blue,

but who with Moses, whose first name is an anticlimax,

has left us the Queens of today and tomorrow.

 

We surprise the great worm in the frozen waste of his sleep.

Our magic ax and feather do their work

and the monster lies helpless in scattered and giggling pieces.

The five boroughs are safe and rainbows arch over the brick,

bright birds with their pinions are free to range once more,

but in whose colorful wake our hurtling plane seems spiritless,

planning to touch only Chicago and perhaps Detroit,

with a landing in the meantime however subtle meaning an emergency,

with no one congenial until reaching the ground, parachutes billowing,

and relaxing on the train back to New York, the parachute as a souvenir.

 

Tony Towle, 1967

from The History of the Invitation: New & Selected Poems 1963-2000

(Hanging Loose Press, 2001)

 

 

Misprision

 

someone said Sappho could be understood

only through her original tongue

and I said I didn’t think so

as educational as that would probably be

 

someone wrote that Charles VIII

entered France in the 1490’s

and I said to myself: I don’t think so

he was born many years before that

but he did penetrate Italy in 1494

as far as Naples, and didn’t withdraw

for an entire year, which seems extraordinary

by today’s standards

but he finally lost virility and everything else

by hitting his head on a doorway in 1498

 

someone wrote that gardening was a literature 

in which scholars nibbled at the edges 

of what appeared to be an insurmountable edifice

and I thought: that makes perfect sense,

nibbling is an authentic scholarly pursuit

and eventually the edifice will get lower

and can be surmounted

 

somebody said that cretins painted murals

and got out of labyrinths but that seems unlikely

and someone wrote to say it’s time for a poetry museum

but I don’t understand how anyone could possibly know that

and isn’t that what our books are already

glassless vitrines 

where you’re allowed to run your fingers over the art

or nibble on the implications

or loiter in the white passageways between the lines

hoping to meet the lenders to the exhibition

 

Tony Towle,  2004

from Winter Journey, Hanging Loose Press, 2008

 

Five Days in June

 

Today, the most overused introductory is Today,.

 

Today, nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about.

 

Today will be yesterday tomorrow, and it will be clear

that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about.

 

Today, I will put ten dollars on Pigs in Moonlight, take my winnings

and disappear into the Ottoman Empire.

 

Today, the Ottoman Empire is a furniture store on Queens Boulevard.

 

Tony Towle, 2015

from Noir: Poems 2008-2017, Hanging Loose Press, 2017

*    *    *

[Tony Towle, a quintessential poet of the New York School and the city of New York itself, is the author of thirteen poetry collections, including The History of the Invitation: New and Selected Poems 1983-2000 (Hanging Loose Press, 2001).  His most recent collection is Noir: Poems 2008-2017 (Hanging Loose Press, 2017).]

[Jess Matuozzi received her PhD in English and African American Studies from Yale University in 2016. She is currently a fire dancer, primate conservation activist, and English teacher at Trinity School in Manhattan.] 

 

John Ashbery's Visit with High School Students [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note: Scholar and poet Andrew McCarron has kindly shared with us this transcript of a delightful Q&A session between the late great John Ashbery [pictured left] and Andrew's high school students at Trinity School in Manhattan.  It blows my mind to think of John walking into one's high school…  Special thanks to the Flow Chart Foundation for providing the tape and permission to share this with you. Here's to chap-stick! -- Justin Jamail]

Despite the difficulty of his work, I have consistently taught the poetry of John Ashbery in my English classes at Trinity School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  My students have ranged from fourteen to eighteen, and pretty much without exception, the students have loved the challenge.  Ashbery’s playfulness, his roving sense of wonder, and the childlike way his poems try making sense of an incomprehensible universe of surprise, contradiction, and changeability, captivate their imaginations.  Whereas I started out teaching his short poems (e.g., Some Trees, The History of My Life, and This Room), I’ve since moved on to teaching longer works like Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, A Wave, and the book-length Girls on the Run.  Many years ago, on May 8, 2003, I invited my old Bard College professor, John Ashbery, to a ninth grade English class I was teaching during my first year at Trinity.  John had come from the dentist’s office where he’d been given a shot of Novocain.  He was dressed in a white blazer and a blue tie for the occasion and was bemused by the interest of the teenagers.

Here’s a partial transcript of the Q&A, recorded by my colleague and friend Bill Zavatsky, who was also present:      

Student: How do you get inspired?

Ashbery: I used to wait around for inspiration when I was your ages, but realized I wouldn’t get very much written if I had to wait.  So, as the years have gone by, I’ve trained myself to get along without inspiration and it seems to work just as well.

Student: Did you enjoy an active imagination as a child?

Ashbery: Yes, I used to invent cities and people as imaginary citizens.  I would do this on the beach where I grew up, on Lake Ontario, where I’d build sandcastles or houses.  I used to make large maps on big sheets of cardboard and put on all the names of the cities and towns.  I remember one country where the capital city was Murielsville because of a little girl I had a crush on in grade school.  The population was something like 8,957,000.  She had the most population of any of the cities.

Student: When did you realize you wanted to pursue the life of a poet?

Ashbery: Well, I still don’t want to pursue the life of a poet.  I started writing poetry when I was in high school actually.  It happened when I first discovered modern poetry in an anthology of Louis Untermeyer.  Up until then I thought I wanted to be a painter.  I became gradually more interested in poetry and it was easier to do than paint.  I didn’t have much talent then, surely, as a poet, but I ended up not having any talent as a painter, I think.

Student: What poets inspired you the most when you were younger

Ashbery: Actually the first modern poet in that anthology.  It was all strange to me as it probably is for anyone who encounters modern poetry, asking “What is this?”  “It doesn’t make any sense!”  But then I began to like that.  Some of the poets I liked actually made a lot of sense but I was still too inexperienced to realize this.  My favorite one was W.H. Auden, who you wouldn’t think today would give readers that much difficulty; partly because his later poetry was much more uncomplicated and straightforward.  But he hadn’t written his later poetry yet.  His earlier poetry is rather obscure and puzzling.  I became very attracted by his way of using different tones and styles, like vernacular of various kinds, and prosy journalism, and all of these mashed together in the same poem.          

Student: What inspired your poem “Some Trees”?

Ashbery: The poem “Some Trees” was inspired by falling in love and also by reading the poetry of Marianne Moore, which I was reading a lot of at the time.  I think that there’s an influence in that poem of Marianne Moore’s, certainly the half-rhymes that she used a lot. 

Student: Do you write with the intention of getting at a deeper meaning?

Ashbery: Deeper than what?  I write with the intention of expressing a meaning that I couldn’t put into words until I’ve done so by writing it in the poem.  

Student: Do your poems just come to you or do you sit down thinking I’m going to write a poem now?

Ashbery: Yeah I guess I sit down thinking, or hoping, “I’m going to write a poem now.”*

Student: Do you disagree with the critical interpretations of your poems?

Ashbery: Yes, always, including the favorable ones.     

Student: Do you understand your own work?

Ashbery: No—but as I said, that’s why I write it, hoping that I’ll be able to understand it eventually.*

Student: Does other art inspire your poems?

Ashbery: Certainly painting and music, especially music.  I listen to music when I’m writing.  I think if I had known how to do it I probably would have written music instead of poetry.  What’s interesting is that it’s a linear experience in time as is a poem.  You have to stay with it until the end to know what it’s all about, whereas a painting you can look at and say, “O yeah, I got that.”  The time that is built into the experience for me is very much something that the poetry is about, too.  It’s the universal subject.  My poetry often reflects my past, childhood, and so forth.  The temporal quality of poetry is why I switched from painting to writing poetry.  But I look at a lot of art, too.  I worked as an art critic for a long time and had to force myself to really look at something so I’d remember when I sat down to write about it what I had seen.  That was a very valuable experience.  One thing that’s the hardest to do is give your attention to anything.  By painfully forcing myself I learned a valuable lesson.              

Student: If you could bring five items to a deserted island what would you bring?

Ashbery: Sunblock, chap-stick, the works of Proust, antidepressants, and flares.   

Student: If you weren’t a famous poet what other work could you imagine yourself doing?

Ashbery: I can’t imagine myself doing any work.  I don’t think poetry counts.  I would like to have been able to do other things, like writing music, as I just mentioned, or writing novels, which people would then actually read.  But it’s very difficult to write a novel, whereas it’s easy to write poetry, provided that you’re a poet.  I’m always amazed at performative art, like a violinist who plays an incredible concerto.  Of course, it’s easy for him because that’s what he does.  It wouldn’t be easy for me.

Student: Do poets have a responsibility to be political?

Ashbery: I think people have a responsibility to be political.  I don’t think that poets have a responsibility to write political poetry, because I think any poetry is political in the sense that it makes you reflect on life, and feel glad you’re alive if it’s a good poem, and it makes you want to act in various capacities from love or militant philosophy and experience different forms of your life.  I don’t like political poetry because I invariably agree with the message in it and don’t have to be reminded of it.  

On the Life and Poetry of William C. Mullen (1946-2017) [by Anthony Antonucci and Andrew McCarron]

[Guest Author Note:  I asked Andrew McCarron and Anthony Antonucci to share the news of their project to write a literary biography of their friend and mentor the classicist and poet William Mullen.  Their essay is below along with a reproduction of Mullen's Enchanted Rock, which was selected by John Hollander for inclusion in the 1998 edition of Best American Poets.]

Think of this post as a press release.  We are currently in the process of composing a short literary biography of the late classicist and poet Dr. William C. Mullen (1946-2017). Professor Mullen died last November, just two days shy of his seventy-first birthday.  As the unofficial stewards of his literary legacy, we wish to share the insights that we have gleaned from our mentor’s life-in-letters and to demonstrate our gratitude for the compassion, companionship and exemplary model of the life of the heart and mind that he embodied for us.  

Bill spent the majority of his dynamic career teaching Global Classics at Bard College, a liberal arts campus in New York’s Hudson Valley, where he was a colleague and friend of the poets Robert Kelly, Joan Retallak, and the late John Ashbery.  Unlike these celebrated authors, Bill built an international reputation as a scholar and a translator, rather than a poet.  Harvard’s Gregory Nagy, for example, referred to Bill’s book Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton University Press, 1982) as the best book ever written on Pindar’s odes.  In the margins of his works and days, when he was not pursuing his research, participating in conferences, and teaching his popular seminars, Bill wrote poetry.  Although individual poems of his were published in The Best American Poetry series (1998) and elsewhere, he didn’t live to see his dream of an original book of his own verse in print. 

Twenty-four hours before he died alone in the graveyard behind the church rectory in the bucolic hamlet of Barrytown, New York, his home for a quarter century, Bill sent us a collection of thirty new poems.  In this email he expressed pride in a series of poems he’d recently completed, though he also lamented the complex circumstances that inspired them.  This exchange marked Bill’s final communication with the land of the living.

The remarkable thing about someone’s poetry is that the spiritual fingerprint of that person is contained in their words long after he or she is gone.  And perhaps those fingerprints are especially vivid for poets who write primarily for themselves, free from the constraining literary personae demanded by identification with any specific school of writing (e.g., Language Poetry, Beat Poetry, New York School Poetry, etc.), or by the suggestions of market-minded editors and publishers.  Indeed, reading Bill’s poetry suggests that it’s in the private work of unpublished writers that we can more readily glimpse the unique role that poetry can play in how we go about making meaning out of our lives as we attempt to decide how to occupy the tent of night.  Bill’s poems draw on the traditions of poetic form to engage the places and topics that affected him most: from the landscapes of the Southwest, to Mesoamerican mythology, to the exhibits he’d encountered at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, to his lifelong love affair with Homer, to his fleeting romances with men far and wide, or the many locales he lived and taught in over the years, from Harvard to Austin to Berkley and Bard, to Greece, Russia, Italy and Manhattan.  As an aesthetic devotee of Wallace Stevens, Bill’s verse combines formal discipline with lyrical beauty to trace order out of chaos, rendering his fraught, thoughtful life meaningful through poetic composition.   

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that every life that succeeded in making something meaningful from what it was made of deserved to be told.  By this criterion, Bill Mullen’s life story warrants telling, particularly for readers who believe that art can help human beings to realize their final, spiritual form, no matter how difficult the odysseys undertaken to get there.  In the space between Bill’s prodigious accomplishments and his private struggles with HIV/AIDS, loneliness, and depression are the marvelous poems he left behind.  Stay tuned.  The story of William C. Mullen will soon be told!  Sing in us, Muse, and through us tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy.  

 

-Anthony Antonucci & Andrew McCarron

 

Enchanted Rock by William Mullen 

 

            1

I could sit all day on this esplanade--

always come back here when my trips are done.

 

Sit with their nectar, claim it for heart's calm,

make it into phrases all afternoon.

 

Fountain ledges braided by fluted granite,

comforting hexagons of civic stone.

 

Harbor like the beginningless and the endless.

Heart's calm like the colossal clouds of June.

 

            2

Suppose there were steps down into the Hudson,

for sacred bathing, like a Banaras ghat.

 

Suppose I could have done with all the honey,

hived in a notebook, like a sacred writ.

 

June would become July, and mere immersion

make everything look sacred in the heat.

 

Immersion would become the liberation.

Triumph lie in the not phrasing it.

 

            3

Like student hours, half a life ago,

cloud-watching through my carrel's tinted glass.

 

There to please the fathers, ravel the texts,

come up with secrets no one else could guess.

 

In the book dust, the air-conditioning,

I can admit there was a kind of bliss.

 

The archives acquired by the Texas billions.

The boyish expectation of success.

 

            4

But best was time off at Enchanted Rock, 

two hours west of Austin, acres huge,

 

magma massed over the green steaming plain.

I would sit in full lotus on my ledge,

 

meditate some secret about Spirit,

how it rides it out, age after world age.

 

Soar with the heat waves and the thunderheads.

Then climb down to a chute at the Rock's edge,

 

            5

Plunge in its torrent, roar, shiver in silence

on the warm granite, by a tamarisk.

 

All the time in the world to amaze the fathers

by absolute acquittal of each task.

 

In the meantime, sitting in princely ease,

my thoughts like riffles, and my flesh like musk,

 

I had disappeared into a spell of sweetness

about which they would never know to ask.

 

            6

Now it is the fathers have disappeared.

Enfeebled. Disesteemed. Estranged. Or dead.

 

Their love, when all is summed, was never grudging,

nor the debt ever adequately paid.

 

A youth will seem ungrateful, or insouciant,

I shrug it off because he's just a kid.

 

And was there any secret about Spirit

I could have, even had I tried, betrayed?

 

            7

Now the fathers are nowhere to be seen.

And so I see them in colossal clouds

 

tall all summer out over the harbor.

Their blessedness bestrides the esplanade’s

 

serenity the livelong afternoon.

Ebbs and floods with the estuary's tides.

 

Floats in the limpid spaces between worlds,

undemanding as Epicurus' gods.

 

            8

Would the clouds look different after immersion?

Back in the endless and the beginningless?

 

In the meantime I sit and think of the Rock,

that its sweetness was, that its spell took place.

 

It is like the sun sunk in these fountain ledges

(their film over the granite an abyss).

 

Now it is a disc under the cloud cover.

Now it is a dazzle I couldn't face.

 

 

Next Line, Please: It Was I [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please contributors laid out false confessions on a surprisingly eclectic mix of topics. Charise Hoge’s “Shooting for the Moon” wins the "sonority prize" for the run of rhymes that energizes it:

They handed me a gun
—dusk, as it happened,
moon misbegotten on
my glass-top table. Sullen,
I aimed—not pointing at anyone,
not blaming the run
of Furies, not looking to shun
repercussions of a percussive gun.
Shards surround, leaves abun-
dant fever the ground. It’s autumn.
I’m mad for a glow minus reflection.

Some NLP regulars suggested that the writer cut the first line. David voted to retain it, and Keith Barrett and Emily Winakur, suggested that the opening two lines be flipped. What do you think?

Donald LaBranche's “But Now,” contains a parochial school recollection that takes quite a turn:

St. Teresa’s parish, late 1950’s. The church is impenetrable, aloof,
a single candle for light. It is the week of our First Communion.
The Sisters have marched us in, shoulder-to-shoulder, index fingers

at our lips, to rehearse the good confession before Saturday. They are legion.
“Here is the door to the confessional. Here is the kneeler. The screen.”
Here is the story we must hear: “She was in a class before you and sat

where you are sitting now.” (They are a well-practiced Greek chorus.)
“She contrived made-up sins, was unrepentant, laughed at the sacrament,
hoped to fool the priest. The Devil was not fooled. When she took the host

during Mass, the Devil had her by the throat and choked the lie out of her.
Her parents wept, and she was buried in unhallowed ground, lost forever.”
We had not known that we were naked, nor that we should have been afraid.

Inspired by the great man of confessions himself, Patricia Wallace's “Augustine Confesses” has an immutable claim over our attention:

Theft thrilled me. Not the despised pears
but ripeness and excess. I loved
my own undoing, my errors, my shame.
My liberty was that of a runaway, my sexual habits
at a skillet’s center, outrageous desires
hissing around me. Unreasonably attached
to the pleasure of mortal bodies, I fused
with one I never name. So deeply engrafted.
When she was torn from me, my maimed heart
limped along a trail of blood. Then came longing
for immutable light, my soul laddering higher
and higher, through all the degrees of matter,
through the heavenly spheres: the eternity
beyond time itself. Breathless, that moment
of brushing lightly as skin against it

Patricia, in the spirit of the prompt, also confesses to stealing most of the language for this from Augustine’s Confessions, for a result which is “not necessarily true to Augustine’s argument,” a remark that may spur you to return to the source, or wonder at the remarkable action of taking things out of context.

To read more "confessional" poems, and to check out Dr. Lehman's own own effort, “Lazy Day,” which capitalizes on the homophonic les idées (“the ideas”) in French, visit the American Scholar's page to enter your candidate!

"The End of the Evening" by Kenneth Koch with Reflections by Katherine Koch [by Justin Jamail]

[Guest Author Note: I recently had the pleasure of coming across The End of the Evening - a board game created by Kenneth Koch - at the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection.  What follows are reproductions of the game, courtesy of the New York Public Library and the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate, and reflections by Kenneth Koch's daughter Katherine.]

JJ: So this object is amazing and brings to mind so much of the excitement of being around your father.  I am thinking most especially of the combination of inspired zaniness and extraordinary learnedness that one experienced with him (and also reading his poetry!).  Did you ever actually play The End of the Evening -- what was it like?  What were the rules?  Who won?  This is three (maybe four) questions!

Katherine Koch: I was my father’s eleven-year-old test subject for The End of the Evening. He wanted it to exist as a real, playable game with the satisfaction and fun of games, the surprise and uncertainty that can come out of a very simple structure.

My father always loved and was confident about trying new things, new forms, new ways to find an audience to surprise and exhilarate them. This was 1967, an exhilarating moment in our culture, very much so in New York City. All kinds of social and generational barriers were being broken down and all kinds of money started being available for projects in the arts, the wilder the better. So, the idea of making and finding a market for poetic board games—he wanted to do more than one—seemed possible—why not?

As with many different forms he tried out, he wanted to subvert it at the same time as he followed its rules. He loved making up palindromes, for instance, but only if they were ridiculous and required an equally ridiculous backstory. At one point he felt he’d successfully “destroyed” the palindrome when he came up with things like, “Anna Anna Anna Otto Hannah Otto Anna Anna Anna.”

One subversive thing he does in The End of the Evening is he tricks the player. I’m not sure this would have gone over so well if it had been played as a real game: if you land on the square “HOPELESS NEUROSIS—advance 8 spaces,” you land on DIE, and are out of the game. After the first time you played this wouldn’t be much fun. The Old Age section of the board consists of four squares that say DIE, one square that says “LIVE—Move backwards one roll,” and one square that says “LIVE IN ITALY CROSS BRIDGE GO TO COMINCIA.” It’s kind of funny and means that old age is almost impossible to navigate, but it’s unfair if you’re actually playing the game. 

On the other hand, if you land on PSYCHOANALYSIS and have to go back 18 spaces, you end up back in childhood, back at the square called SLEEP. This is witty and more fun, since you get the chance to keep playing. 

As an eleven year-old I played board games all the time; my friends and I had played them since we were little, starting with the great Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, moving on to Monopoly, The Game of Life, Clue. My father and I had played board games and card games in the evenings after dinner for years—giving my mother some time off after working a full-time job and cooking dinner.  He was a great and keenly competitive lover of almost any kind of game, games of skill and games of chance, board games, card games, games like tennis, baseball, bowling, ping pong, gambling at casinos. He loved magic, the magic of cards and coincidence.

So one evening in the winter of 1967 my father sat me down at the dining room table with this piece of paper on which he’d started a game not unlike Life or Monopoly in the sense of showing the course of a life in sections from childhood to old age. Instead of moving through events like starting a family, getting a mortgage, buying property, going to jail—it showed stages of life not unlike the stages of my father’s life! The life of a poet—there were squares like WRITE A POEM, THE UNIVERSITY, GO TO ITALY, LITERARY REPUTATION, PSYCHOANALYSIS,  and MAKE LOVE.

I am not sure why he thought Kenneth Koch’s life story and dreams would be interesting to a game-playing public, but he had vast confidence that what he loved and found funny would appeal to a wide audience.  Besides, he did include the simple universal stages of babyhood—EAT, CRY, NAP, PLAY—followed immediately by DEVELOP UNDERSTANDING, then, as adolescence begins, THE BEACH. Of course, the beach. ADOLESCENT PIMPLES, one of my favorite squares as an 11 year-old (before I myself fell victim to them), came right after THE BEACH.

As my father began showing me The End of the Evening, I thought it was hilarious, and also moving, even when I didn’t understand what was going on. The themes were very Kenneth Koch: Italy, psychoanalysis, literary reputation, love; the strangeness was, too—the last squares being different stages of the evening. That bit of sehnsucht, yearning for the sublime.

He appreciated my appreciation. We laughed a lot while he pointed out various squares and lovable juxtapositions (KISS ME followed by WRITE A POEM INSPIRED BY ITALY), his sometimes abrupt sense of humor (GIVE BIRTH TO A CHILD, then OBTAIN POWER, then BUY SAILBOAT AND GO TO MEDITERRANEAN)  but he also wanted to get down to business: how to make the game fun to play. Because it’s one thing to look at the board appreciatively, another thing to step into the dance.

So, a few times, we started out at START, throwing a die to advance along the squares, and using counters, probably pennies. He liked pennies, symbolic in his childhood of the magic of money and magic tricks. It was fun to play, but my father the strategist wanted to make it make sense all together: the events at the different stages of life; and the squares where you follow special instructions; and the bridges between life and Italy, between Italy and Evening; and does the final square, “The End of the Evening—victory” give the winner enough strange poetic joy?

He also needed my help as an artistic and visually precise kid to make the final, central section of five squares, Evening. I measured and drew the squares with a ruler, and that’s my handwriting.

I liked the game, partly because I adored my father, and it was an interesting and puzzling variation on the games I’d played all my life. He kept changing it around after we’d played it a few times: you can see how he made the decision to replace the instructions in about five squares with “EAT.” I don’t know if you were supposed to literally eat something if you landed in those squares or if it’s merely descriptive, as MUMPS and COLISEUM—FALL ASLEEP are. He also added complexities involving THE MEDITERRANEAN and GREECE which didn’t quite get integrated into the game.

Oddly, he signed and dated it: at the lower right, it says “Finished March 30, 1967 K.K.” I guess it was complete for him as a work of art, though it never quite came to life as a game—which is just as well! Better to devote his psyche to poetry than to figuring out how to make a board game work.

JJ:  I am of course struck by the "life within a life" -- I mean the Italian life -- that seems to be going on in the inner loop in this game.  What was it about Italy that appealed in this way, do you think?  Was it Italy itself or your father's particular experiences there or both? (surely both! but how?)

Katherine Koch: As you see, Italy is super important to the game: you can only get there by narrowly escaping death from old age, and the only way to win, to reach Evening, is to go through Italy.

You’re right that it must be both the qualities of Italy itself and my father’s own experiences there that gave him the idea to make Italy into a kind of paradise within the game.

I think he felt an intense kind of longing, nostalgia, for the beauty and peace of Italy because it was where he’d had some of the happiest times of his life, times that were cut short by a tragedy. 

He and my mother lived there, mainly in Rome, on their year-long honeymoon, and that’s where I was born. After a year or so back in New York City, we took an ocean liner to Florence, where my mother had gotten a Fulbright to study Italian literature. My parents both talked about the months in Florence as a kind of lost eden. My mother had gotten pregnant shortly after starting classes there and was delighted at the prospect of a having a second baby. Meanwhile the three of us would do things like take walks together in the countryside beyond our house on the other side of the Arno—at age two I always wanted to go further and further, and would have to be carried home. Years later, back in Florence, my father burst into tears showing me the gate we would go through as we started out on our walks.

When she was six months pregnant, in April 1958, my mother suffered an almost fatal miscarriage. She would have died if my father hadn’t raced all over Florence begging for blood for transfusions—her blood type was fairly rare, it was Rh negative; and it was Easter week, when most businesses were closed. 

We went back to busy, gray New York as soon as we could, and my parents’ marriage was never the same afterwards, to hear them tell it.

So that is the serious background to the Italy loop of the game, the very Kenneth way in which he wove sadness and loss into sweetness, silliness, and, lest we forget, into The End of the Evening—VICTORY.

Young Charlie Manuel [by Dayn Perry]

[Guest Author Note:  Professional sportswriter, Chicagoan and Mississippi native Dayn Perry creates exuberant and frequently ribald poetry which generally takes flight from baseball cards and other images of ballplayers.  I could not rest easily without sharing these with more people.  Dayn Perry's futile efforts can be found here, mainly.]

 

Young Charlie Manuel packs his shotgun shells with loose-leaf tobacco. That way it just stings a little.

Young Charlie Manuel once benched all of West Virginia for not hustling.

While Loretta Lynn is rightly known as the “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Young Charlie Manuel is just as rightly known as “Good Buddy to the Shenandoah Valley.”

Thanks to Young Charlie Manuel’s soothing presence and weather-predictive hinge joints, he is on occasion able to talk a tornado back into the clouds. “Hold on now, bossman,” he says to the approaching F4 while sitting in his idling pickup with the driver’s side window rolled down. “Let’s you and me figure this out. Hop in and we’ll take a ride.”

Young Charlie Manuel, while playing for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, walked into one of Tokyo’s finest restaurants for the first time, and the staff knew immediately to prepare him an off-menu dish of squirrel meat and dumplings. He said upon sopping up the last swaths of gravy with a flaky buttermilk biscuit, “では、神を恐れるチャウチャウ、小さい相棒をありがとうございました。 y’すべての右である、知っている ya’ll ですか?”

When Young Charlie Manuel needs to clear his head, he takes his black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88 — the one with the aftermarket Piper J-3 Cub engine, which he and Rebel Dabney towed out of the junkyard with a battleship chain — out on the rural route and opens her up just a bit.

Young Charlie Manuel would probably be able to relax a bit more if he didn’t have a vast haul of corn liquor in the trunk and strap-bolted to the undercarriage of that black, street-illegal 1955 Olds 88.

Prolly be okay, though, since Young Charlie Manuel is deputized in every county that the creek runs through.

Did you see that shit? Young Charlie Manuel gunned her at the crest of that hill and easily cleared that doe and that opossum crossing the road. Woo-wee shit.

Young Charlie Manuel has, for several years running, been voted Meanest Sumbitch and Nicest Sumbitch in the Valley. Which one he presents you with pretty much depends on you.

Young Charlie Manuel would punch his way out of this dead-end town, ‘cept Young Charlie Manuel has always had thing for dead-end towns.

The next time a jurisdictional authority doesn’t survey a mounting disaster and mutter, “God Almighty Damn. Better call Charlie,” will be the first.

Ideally, he knows that the only way to get aholt of Young Charlie Manuel is by CB radio.