The Best American Poetry

Diary as Form, or a Case for Hybrid Genres [by Megin Jimenez]

In one of her brilliant essays, poet and novelist Fanny Howe proposes the diary as the ultimate subversive genre: anarchic, directionless, unconcerned with narrative or context. (I believe it's in the collection The Wedding Dress, I will insert the quote when I'm near the book.) 

Not every diarist is writing for a reader other than herself, but there is something curious in that activity: manifesting thought through writing - what does that change inside the self? In her journals (published in 2008), Susan Sontag justified reading a lover's diary by saying one keeps a diary, in part, in to have it read secretly by one's lover... She describes her self as expressed in the journal:

“Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself.

"The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather—in many cases—offers an alternative to it."

I have been taken with reading writers' journals for the past few years, not only for the glimpse it offers at their lives and inner thoughts, but for the unparalleled reading experience they offer. This isn't the case for any diary or journal, I don't mean the day-to-day notes and records, but rather the writer "thinking out loud".

It's that place between fiction and poetry, which I find myself writing in, as well (prose poems, or collections of sentences) - the skeleton of the sentence bearing the luscious flesh of poetry. Plot is not a loss, rather, there's a sense that the pressure, the drive for a tidy beginning-middle-end is removed. There's time to hang out with a thought, or a paragraph, without rushing to find out what happens. The structure, while remaining prose, can bear a poetic approach to language, where the language is the happening itself, rather than a vehicle for getting the reader from point A to point B. (Aside on the prose poem: I heard Russell Edson, prince of the prose poem, refer to contemporary poets' fascination with form as a distraction. Writing the poem, reading the poem in relation to its form is ultimately a distraction from the language.)

I recently re-read the first volume of The Diary of Anais Nin and found myself taking it slow, in a really good way, in a poetry sort of way. There was movement, events happening, descriptions of people, but I did not exercise my irritating habit of rushing through, as I do too often when reading fiction.  This time I noticed much more her own awareness of The Diary as its own sort of writing. She describes it variously as her vice, her greatest pleasure, the place for writing all. She took passages out of it to use in her fiction (at that point House of Incest and Winter of Artifice), which she saw as a surrealist, or mytho-poetic distillation of her experience. Everyone important to her (Henry Miller, her analyst Otto Rank) discourages her from writing in the diary and urges her to use that energy instead for her external work, her self in the world, her fiction. It's interesting that the diary remains her best known and most read work. It's important to note that she didn't see it as a private record of her life, she saw it as a lifelong project. She had someone transcribing previous volumes (at least during Volume 1), often let people read from it and saw it published in her lifetime.

I've read some of Nin's fiction (A Spy in the House of Love and Winter of Artifice) and was not too crazy about it. Her dramatic ("poetic" is her word) approach, her attempt at a surrealist space make the prose feel dated, almost prim (despite being about sex), in a way the writing in the diary never is. The writing in the diary is philosophical, witty, vivid, and sometimes simply beautiful. Take, for example, this description of June Miller (Henry Miller's wife), which is a kind of prose poem itself: 

“It was not only that June had the body of the women who climbed every night upon the stage of music halls and gradually undressed, but that it was impossible to situate her in any other atmosphere. The luxuriance of the flesh, its vivid tones, the fevered eyes and the weight of the voice, its huskiness, became instantly conjugated with sensual love. Other women lost this erotic phosphorescence as soon as they abandoned their role of dance-hall hostesses. But June’s night life was internal, it glowed from within her and it came, in part, from her treating every encounter as either intimate, or to be forgotten. It was as if, before every man, she lighted within herself the lamp lighted by waiting mistresses or wives at the end of the day, only they were her eyes, and it was her face which became like a poem’s bedchamber, tapestried with twilight and velvet. As it glowed from within her, it could appear in totally unexpected places, early in the morning, in a neglected café, on a park bench, on a rainy morning in front of a hospital or a morgue, anywhere. It was always the soft light kept through the centuries for the moment of pleasure.”

How amazing is "the lamp lighted by waiting mistresses or wives at the end of the day”? I also love how "a neglected café, on a park bench, on a rainy morning in front of a hospital or a morgue" conjures Paris so quickly, in this condensed way.

There seems to be something gendered about this (there's something gendered in the word "diary", even), and I hesitate to say too much about it for fear of getting mired in the Gender Question Quagmire... But my sense, at least with Nin, is that the reason the diary could contain all (that is, her best writing), was because it could contain both personal and public self, personal and public writer. As we know, this has always been a difficult juggling act for women artists, who have historically either felt forced to choose the domestic, the internal over the public "artist's life" or have sacrificed sanity, sobriety, children, respectability, to live out their creative self. What struck me about Nin is that she cherishes the domestic and maternal parts of herself, she doesn't apologize for them. (She sees the establishment of a beautiful environment -- a home or a garden -- as one of her accomplishments, and values her maternal care of Henry Miller and other artists (Artaud, etc.). By maternal I mean caring for them financially, physically (feeding, clothing) and as editor (whereas I would have sent his sorry ass back to New York).) Perhaps ideas about fiction at that time (a manifestation of the male, public self in the world) did not have the space for her particular voice and talent, hence the freedom and fantastic writing in the diary.

Violette Leduc is another writer I would place in this category, and who is woefully under-read. Dalkey Archive, which is a wonderful press, has published a lot of her work in translation into English. (She is best
known for authoring Thérèse and Isabelle, which was turned into a sexy lesbian schoolgirl movie in 1968.) Her books are not diaries, they are more like memoirs, but they have the same feeling of the writer set free. The reader is also set free from holding the breath for the plot to reveal itself, and can instead enjoy the astounding language, the extended thought.

Here is a taste, this is from La Bâtarde (1964), a memoir of her childhood raised by her mother and grandmother, a recurring theme is being a "bastard", the illegitimate child of an aristocrat father she never met. She is describing her relationship with her mother, intertwined with her birth (originally in French, translation by Derek Coltman):

"Let’s go back again, open your belly and take me back. You have told me so often about the misery of dragging around looking for a room, of not being able to find one because your waist was no longer slim. Let us suffer together once more. I wish I had never been that thing, a fetus. Always present, awake inside you. It was inside your belly that I lived your shame in those days, your sorrows. You sometimes say I hate you. Love has innumerable names. You live in me as I lived in you then. I saw you naked, I watched your most intimate ablutions. No mother can ever have been more abstract than you are. Your skin, your legs, your back when I wash you, the kiss I ask you for in the morning have no reality. How am I to make contact with you? Clouds, elm trees, wild rosebushes are matters of indifference to you. Don’t die as long as I am still alive. Let’s go back again, carry me as you carried me then, let’s be afraid together of the rats you had to step over in the passage to your room. Your blood, Mother, the blood trickling as far as the staircase when I came out of you, the blood streaming from someone dying. The instruments, the forceps. I was your prisoner just as you were mine. Forgotten, abandoned beside the stream made by your blood when I arrived. It’s normal enough, you were dying. It was a long time before they washed the mess off me. But the people who pointed their fingers at you, the people who refused you a bed before I was born, stayed glued to my skin.” 

***

That's all I got for now. Thank you for reading. The copy editor in me begs your patience for any awkward phrasing or punctuation errors in any posts -- I have tried to stay true to the blogging tradition and written in the moment! Thanks again to Stacey and David for letting me share a few thoughts on BAP.

from the archive; first published March 3, 2012

Flying Into the Unpredictable: Publishing During a Pandemic [by J. Chester Johnson]

(ed note: We checked in with J. Chester Johnson to find out how he's fared over the course of the last 18 plus months with the publication of his timely Damaged Heritage. Here's his update. sdl)
My latest nonfiction book, Damaged Heritage: The Elaine Race Massacre and A Story of Reconciliation (publisher: Pegasus; distributed by Simon & Schuster), was released on May 5, 2020 in the midst of a raging covid pandemic that relentlessly and unmercifully brutalized New York City. Those of us who reside in the City and who could do so clung to the interiors of our homes, going outdoors with much fear and trembling.

Into this environment, Damaged Heritage had been published. In turn, a book launch, scheduled for the New York City Harvard Club, was kyboshed, and both my agent and publisher told me to “cool” my expectations on book sales, for Damaged Heritage would be flying into the unpredictable, but clearly adverse headwinds of covid with bookstores everywhere then being shuttered for indefinite periods of time. So, I then chalked up my new book as just one more learning experience to be encased among others that friends and relatives suggest should make me stronger; however, I was getting too old to make much use of such learning experiences. . .I thought.

Nonetheless, there were obviously new paths to be conquered in response to the pandemic. Zoom-type presentations and book plates replaced traveling for in-person gatherings and face-to-face signing of personal inscriptions. On-line interviews then prevailed. At the same time, accommodations were now made possible as a result of new ways of reaching the public. For instance, on Sunday, June 28^th, 2020, I conducted a zoom appearance at 8:30AM before a congregation of the Episcopal Diocese of Florida that lasted an hour; just three hours later, I made another zoom presentation on the book before the Washington National Cathedral in the District of Columbia.

Such a tandem would not have been possible in the absence of zoom or its equivalent. Indeed, I’ve already given nearly 90 presentations, including interviews, on Damaged Heritage. I found that zooms allowed me to reach more people and to participate in more places. Moreover, podcasts represented not an insignificant part of the book marketing effort. Zoom-type appearances will undoubtedly be with us for future “book tours”. One cannot predict an experience like the covid pandemic affecting the way future practices will be conducted; however, speaking as one, I found the results from new approaches of marketing books often quite effective and satisfying.

Damaged Heritage had three, main messages. First, it told of a terribly murderous massacre of African-American sharecroppers and their family members – known as the Elaine Race Massacre – on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta; too few people knew anything about this event, which was conceivably the worst attack against African-Americans in our country’s history. Second, the new book told of my maturation process in discovering that my favored grandfather participated in the Massacre; in addition, notwithstanding my having grown up in a racist family in the very racist region of the Massacre, the process also led this erstwhile white Southerner to the embracement of both Black liberation and a progressive, structural format for racial reconciliation between Blacks and whites.

Third, Damaged Heritage tells the story of racial reconciliation and deep friendship that developed between Sheila Walker and me for seven years and extended to family members on both sides. Sheila was a descendent of victims of the Massacre, granduncles who were shot numerous times by white posses and left for dead, but survived. For several years, Sheila and I talked publicly in numerous forums about our reconciliation. She died in March of this year, and I was requested by her family to give the eulogy.

The torture and murder of George Floyd occurred only three weeks following the release of Damaged Heritage. I simply had no idea how much the racial reconciliation and deep friendship that existed between an African-American woman (Sheila Walker) and a white man who grew up in the South along the Mississippi River (namely, me), as described in this book, would resonate with people following the death of George Floyd that resulted in public outpouring of grief and horror by both Blacks and so many whites, together with consequential confrontations between citizens and law enforcement, including, on occasion, federal troops. Sheila and my racial reconciliation and friendship, combined with the disclosure of this unknown event, the purposefully hidden story of the Elaine Race Massacre, seemed to galvanize readers to Damaged Heritage.

For example, in late July, 2020, two months following release of the book, I was informed by my publisher that Damaged Heritage stood at #3 on a significant Amazon Best Seller list for books sold through Kindle. More recently, I found that the book had been included in Goodreads’ multi-year list of Best Nonfiction Books of Horrifying Events, alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago – admittedly, my book is down the list, but nevertheless on the list.

The ole saw that “timing is everything” has its use, but I prefer to believe and adhere to a terse epigram I discovered that had been written cryptically in small, printed letters and incongruously on the gray walls of a New York City latrine located in a writers’ hangout: “Just keep writing”. Part of this book had been written as far back as 2013; filling in the blank spaces between the lip and the cup meant years. One shall never know, and one should never guess. Just keep writing.                                                                                                                                  

Chester Johnson is a poet and nonfiction writer. In addition to Damaged Heritage, he has written three, other books, recently published: St. Paul’s Chapel & Selected Shorter Poems, Now And Then: Selected Longer Poems, and Auden, the Psalms, and Me. Find out more about Chester Johnson here.

The End of Summer--Tutti Frutti Tarts [by Barbara Hamby]

Summer is ending, but the impulse to pile on the fruit is almost irresistible. For Labor Day I made a Lemon Mascarpone tart with a combination of plums, blueberries, raspberries, and cherries. Right away the Italian description "tutti frutti" came to mind. It translates as "all the fruits." I didn't manage to do that, but I did my best. 

A week later for my friend Elizabeth's birthday, I made Patricia Wells' Lemon Lover's Tart, because lemon is her favorite. I've made this tart over and over, but I've never made this Tutti Frutti version. I also wanted to try out my tartlet tins.

The pandemic has made all kinds of obsessions seem less weird. I'm studying French and Italian on Duolingo, talking things over with my little cat Patsy, and all summer I made fruit tarts. Oh, I also wrote a lot of poems. I call that a good summer. Thanks for sharing it with me. -- Barbara Hamby

McClure Kick Blues [by Vincent Katz]

Tomorrow, at the California Shakespeare Theater, in Orinda, California, there will be a memorial to poet, playwright and thinker Michael McClure, who passed away in May of 2020. Along with Diane di Prima, of all the great poets we have lost in the past few years, Michael for me defines an era. It’s funny to think of it now, but it’s McClure and di Prima who somehow stand for a whole experiment in poetry and living that remains vital to me, and I imagine always will. I think it is partially the integration of their poetry with a way of thinking about living that is the key to their vitality.

In his introduction to the first edition of Ghost Tantras, published by City Lights in 1964, McClure wrote:

I WAS HERE AND I LIKED IT!

It was all O.K.

I suffered.

There were scents, and flowers, and textures, beautiful women.

I was a handsome man. I invented love.

I radiated genius for those who saw me with loving eyes.

I was happy — I laughed and cried. Constantly new

sights and sounds. I trembled and sweated

at the sight of beauty. I laughed at strong

things because I loved them — wanting to kick them in

and make freedom. When I go I’M GONE.

Don’t resurrect me

or the duplicates of my atoms.

It was perfect !

I am sheer spirit.

Tomorrow, poets, musicians, publishers, friends will celebrate this poet who some link to Shelley and Lawrence, and who I see as a human being able to intuit his living on earth in relation to all other living beings, and simultaneously to flesh that out in relation to the beauty, and sometimes terror, he sensed in the arts of painting, music, dance, theater. He wanted to reach most of all, to reach out, to resist, to feel the softness of the couch beneath his lover and himself, the dissolving of inside and out, the hummingbird, the bombs falling on Cambodia, consciousness creating and destroying itself each instant.

                     

As a kind of parting gift, Michael left us Mule Kick Blues and Last Poems, published this year by City Lights. Editor Garrett Caples’ account of how the book was put together makes clear both McClure’s fastidiousness when it came to form and his openness to such questions as sequencing and grouping poems. A sequence of four “Death Poems” in a section called “MORTALITIES” evinces one of the most joyful attitudes toward death I’ve seen in poetry, something perhaps not surprising to readers of McClure, but still a fantastic thing to have:

                                                            TO GROW OLD IS A JOY PRECEDING THE BIG ONE.

                                                                            Death is a dark chocolate cake,

                                                                      sweet, and filled with deep blue tortures.

Remember Michael tomorrow, remember joy, remember poetry.

Relevant Nature [by Vincent Katz]

In 1928, André Breton published the novel Nadja, loosely based on a brief affair. Text from the back cover the Grove Press edition, translation by Richard Howard, calls the novel “the story of an obsessional presence haunting his life” and goes on to state, “The first person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work — pictures of various ‘surreal’ people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in Nadja’s presence and which inspire him to meditate on their reality or lack of it.” Breton invented a genre, the book as photographic prose poem, which has found new life today.

In Breton’s day, taking all the photos and having them printed and readied for publication were arduous tasks; today all that is almost an afterthought. Some creative artists today have been stimulated to try to reinvigorate the photograph in its relation to text, thereby heightening both the potential of image, usually produced via that mundane accessory, the smart phone, and the text, which often lingers in some nebulous zone, neither poetry nor prose, a different gambit from the blending of the two that entranced French authors last century.

When Claudia Rankine used photos in her epoch-marking Citizen, the images were usually in the mode of illustrations, or jumping-off points for her verbal manifestations. In her follow-up, the massive and in some ways more experimental Just Us: An American Conversation (2020), the photos are still illustrative, often historical in nature, but they are simultaneously more deeply embedded in the book’s meaning.

A more experimental approach, one with deeply satisfying results in terms of the co-habitation of word and image is s*an d. henry-smith’s Wild Peach, published by Futurepoem in 2020. henry-smith is an artist and writer, and everything about Wild Peach makes it clear the book has been thought about as an object in its entirety. The endpapers and dividers are a dusky mustard yellow. The typography and layout of the titles is raw and energetic. Eager to get to the first section, “in awe of geometry & mornings,” one turns the page and finds a centered photo of a hazy view of a dried-out field being moisturized by the obscuring fog above it. Turning the page again brings us to the book’s first text, “dirty nails,” which begins, “eat me Infinity Serpent High Priestess of Sun the flowers we ate went straight to my hips rosy red w/ sweet water linen draped I feel so squishy today…” An erotics of the word reminding me of de Kooning’s erotics of paint is quickly palpable. Yet this short text ends surprisingly, “…I inhale light dirty pupil learns today how mud purifies & an increased sensitivity to nightshades I lift my head from the train tracks it is nice to sweat it reminds me that I am open whether I like it or not the conditions will decide”. This book is open, “dirty nails” beseeches almost that, despite everything not in our favor, we too should lift our heads from whatever train tracks we may find them on, to live in the squishiness of our real.

As the book continues, it swerves and peaks, picks up velocity, then swoops. All along, it is bringing us, however we are: “if it doesn’t cost me my life, it doesn’t cost anything at all.” Suddenly that line reminds me of a line from a different context, but now they are inextricably bound. It’s from a rehearsal by the Grateful Dead; before they start, Jerry says, “We’ve got nothing to lose but our lives.” I love that line too, because our lives are the most valuable things we have (wait a minute, did I not know that before reading Wild Peach?), and yet we must risk everything in any moment if we (the planet) are to survive. As henry-smith puts it in “calm down calm down,” “I’ve wasted a lot more time than necessary looking for the tools / they’ve always been right before me”. Wild Peach is a lush volume, the poetry as much as the photos, which are mostly of nature, but viewed in a way that makes it contemporary. Relevant nature. The more I read and look, the more I am amazed by its generosity.

Kora Lives! [by Vincent Katz]

WKCR is on, as it often is at this time of day, and they are playing selections from Miles Davis’s fusion period — “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down” and “Splashdown,” to name two. It is providing the right vibe, as the radio often does, to composing thoughts about two books that are on my mind. When I was a teenager, a little after those Miles tunes were released, I had some favorite books of poetry. They were talismans, I carried them with me, they could ward off depression and evil by their mere presence, without even needing to be opened, or read. Part of that had to do with their physical presence. I remember the series of books Gary Snyder published with New Directions, especially, one summer, Earth House Hold. Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, published by Grove Press (the edition with the red and purple cover overlaying a photo of O’Hara seated on a Gothic stool). The same poet’s Lunch Poems, from City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, back when the covers were not glossy. They were printed on soft card stock, each title in identifying format and design, differentiated by the color combinations. Lunch Poems will always recall the orange and blue in its layout. Another book I carried with me everywhere that summer I was 15 was another title from the Pocket Poets Series, William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations.

I loved Kora in Hell. Just gazing at its cover was of inestimable benefit to me, and I enjoyed reading it. It felt very adult, its jokes easily understood, its thought-connections sublime and not necessarily accessible to all. It represented a kind of secret knowledge. This was unlike some of Williams’s better known poetry, which prided itself on using everyday language and meeting the reader halfway. That poetry was modern, in that it didn’t always feel like what poetry was supposed to feel like, but it was anti-modernist, or maybe non-modernist, in its ratcheting down of degree of difficulty. Anybody could read those poems (though not anybody can write them!). Kora was different. I liked the classical reference in the title, the Greek word kora itself, coupled with that word “Improvisations.” I think that was the one that got me the most. I was listening to a lot of jazz; the idea of improvising a book, or sections that made up a book, was thrilling to me.

Looking around last year, I realized I no longer had that copy of Kora, so I ordered another one. I made sure to order one from one of the earlier printings, a first edition it looks like. I just wanted to make sure I got one that looked and felt like the originals, as though it was made of cotton, dyed red. “March had always been my favorite month…” the prologue tells us. And, “What I had permitted myself could not by any stretch of the imagination be called verse.” I agree with Williams that these are not like French prose poems, but to my mind they are poems in prose, or rather, one long poem in prose:

“Fools have big wombs. For the rest? — here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further : if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.”

That is the first section of the first “chapter”. Each chapter is composed of three numbered sections, some have which have corresponding texts in italics. I was going to say that my reading this time, some forty-odd years later, showed that these early experiments of Williams’s were not as successful as I remembered. But the reading, the looking at the text, does not allow me such an easy assessment. A poem can be made of anything we are told in Chapter XX. In the final chapter, we learn, “The particular thing… dwarfs the imagination, makes logic a butterfly, offers a finality that sends us spinning through space, a fixity the mind could climb forever, a revolving mountain, a complexity with a surface of glass; the gist of poetry.” A little more on imagination’s transformative power (“How ridiculous!”), how leaves blowing on the ground have forgotten the branch on which they grew, yet "somehow invoke a burst of warm days  not of the past  nothing decayed : crisp summer!” And the final paragraph informs us:

“Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises : this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fullness.”

Maybe it’s the way I read it that needs to change. Instead of starting at the beginning and attempting to forge straight through, I should glimpse things here and there, creating my own patterns within those suggested by the poet in his improvisations. Kora was first published in 1920 by the Four Seas Co. of Boston. At that time, Williams was half the age he would be (74) when the next edition, published by City Lights, came out.

Anne Waldman has a granddaughter named Kora. Anne the adept of so many traditions, including the Greek. I’ve been reading her many books, trying to keep up with her, delighted. Lately, I got focused on her 2004 book, Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, published by Penguin in the Penguin Poets series. The books Waldman has published with Penguin form a remarkable series in that they are not so much collections of separate poems as book-length meditations on specific areas of consciousness: Marriage: A Sentence, Structure of the World, Manatee/Humanity, Gossamurmur, Trickster Feminism.

Structure may be the most particular of all, as it is devoted to a specific subject, a specific location, a specific object, a specific man-made holy sanctuary devoted to the veneration of the divine: the Borobudur stupa, built in the 9^th century CE in Java, Indonesia. An introductory note explains: “Designed as both mandala or psychological map for the Buddhist pilgrim, as well as a spiritual challenge to the curious layperson or secular aesthete, Borobudur was built on a hill that sits on Java’s lush Kedu plain. It has a long and complex history and was almost lost until its ‘discovery’ in the nineteenth century… Most powerful at this site perhaps is the narrative sequence of reliefs carved into the million stones, narratives which teach a spiritual, gentle, and harmonious way of life. The reliefs are arranged so that as one ascends the stupa the stories turn complicated and abstract… Borobudur is essentially an image of the world according to the Buddhism of the Mahayana.”

Waldman’s book is not so much about the stupa as it is a guide to Mahayana in the form of experimental poetry for which the poet has become known. Waldman has taken cues from Williams’ In the American Grain, his epic poem Paterson, and Charles Olson’s call for “a saturation job,” applying study to a wide range of topics. In Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble, the reader is treated to Waldman’s takes on the “Four Noble Truths,” “Walking out of Six Styles of Imprisonment” (hell realm, hungry ghost realm, animal realm, human realm, warring god realm, god realm), 4^th century stories of the Buddha, “Mantra” (with paraphrase of Milton), “Steps of a Bodhisattva,” “Mudra,” “An Aside on Karma,” “Peregrinations of the Dakini” a Glossary and Bibliography. A Magnificent, Beneficent Tome! All should carry it with them! Come to the River, Put Down your Book, and Dive!

 

“Nations are narrations

Spiritual sites are narrations

Ineluctable witnesses to other narrations

Are the panoptic meditators in their own bell jars…

A connotative splendor resides here…”

Amiri Baraka Catching Up With Himself [by Vincent Katz]

One day, a year or so ago, Oliver said to me, in passing, “I need to read some Baraka.” When someone, especially someone close to me, says something like that, I leap into action. I leapt to my keyboard and ordered him The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris with input from the author. Published in 2009 by Basic Books, the Reader does not cover the last fifteen years of Baraka’s production, but, at close to 600 pages, it certainly covers the early years, from the late 1950s through 1999.

To supplement this, I recommend SOS: Poems 1961-2013, published by Grove Press in 2014. This volume, edited by Paul Vangelisti, shows the scope of Baraka’s poetic achievement and is especially surprising in its final section, titled “Fashion This,” which covers the years 1996-2013. Here, we see the poet at his most unguarded. Many of these poems have not been previously collected in book form. They maintain the same senses of urgency and outrage that animate Baraka’s poetry throughout, but they are tempered with a lightness, a delicacy at times, that can be shocking and disarming.

I’ve shied away from Readers as they focus on a consensus of what an author’s best work is, or someone’s assessment of that, leaving out much interesting peripheral work — but the LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka reader feels essential. Partially that has to do with Baraka’s participation in the selection, but mainly it’s because the man was so prolific, something the Reader makes clear. He published poetry, music criticism, fiction, and was a successful playwright from his early days on. He was also a significant editor of literary journals — first of Yugen, with Hettie Jones, and then, with Diane di Prima, of The Floating Bear. Baraka always had a voice.

I’ve often wondered what it is that catapults a poet into a wider consciousness, and I believe much of it has to do with prose writing. While poetry remains a particular province, prose, if it is well-written and timely, can reach a much larger audience. In Baraka’s case, his two books on music, Blues People, published in 1963, and Black Music (1968) did precisely that. The first was composed as a study of the origins of jazz and has the subtitle The Negro Experience in White America and the Music that Developed From It. The second book was composed of articles and reviews previously published in DownBeat, Kulchur, and as liner notes for such artists as John Coltrane and Sonny Murray.

Selections from these seminal studies are included in the Reader, along with a fantastic, often hilarious account of a trip to Cuba in 1960, originally published in Home: Social Essays (1966). There is much more in the Reader, including a selection of at-the-time unpublished works. One of these returns to Malcolm X, a seminal figure in Baraka’s movement from downtown bohemian to uptown Black Nationalist in the late 1960s. In the ‘70s, Baraka adopted an explicitly Marxist ideology, elaborating and expanding his views on race. In the Reader, this is referred to as his Third World Marxist Period. In one of the last pieces in the reader, “Malcolm as Ideology” (1995), Baraka critiques Spike Lee’s interpretation in his 1992 biopic.

I am powering through the Reader, and it has been a supreme education for me about a lot of things, mainly about Baraka himself. His framing of stories and his furious outbursts, the rage and neurosis he lays bare on the page, stem directly from the condition he eloquently describes, in many different genres and styles, throughout his life. He made the decision as an artist to leave all that visible on the page.

He didn’t sugar-coat, and he didn’t try to cover up the nastiness of some of his feelings. Ultimately, though, in his poetry especially, he comes to moments of pure bliss, when he seems to feel at home, to have located himself finally in his culture, and there he has written some of the most tender verse of our time. Much of it can be found in the final 130 pages of Vangelisti’s book, poems mostly unpublished during Baraka’s lifetime.

Here’s one:

“Note to AB”

I became a poet

Because every thing

Beautiful seemed

“poetic” to me.

I thought there were things

I didn’t understand

that wd make the world

poetry. I felt I knew

who I was but had to

Struggle, to catch up

w/ my self.

Now I do see me

sometimes, a few worlds

ahead, & I speed up, then,

put my head down,

Stretch my stride out

& dig

There me go, I scat &

sing, there me go.

Is Shakespeare Still Readable? [by Vincent Katz]

I am excited to be back at the B.A.P. post desk! This week I plan to riff on things I’m reading and see where that takes me. I usually read a mix of favorites and new work, often going back to things that have affected me powerfully in the past. I like the way books come to litter a place, diving into obscurity for extended periods before resurfacing bold-faced and re-determined to command respect. Alternatively, there are those books that lie there perennially, always available yet untouched for months or years at a time. This summer I picked up such a book and threw it into my overnight bag — the updated Folger Library edition of Hamlet, published in 2012 and edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. I think it belongs to my son Oliver. I say “think” as I found it in the vicinity of his room; there is no handwriting in it I can identify as his, and no evidence he ever looked at it.

 

We used these same editions when I was in high school, probably read the same syllabus. There may be a tendency to look down on these editions as “school” editions, or to think that one should be able to read Shakespeare without notes at this point, that one should be able to get what one gets out of the words alone. I am here to tell you that, unless you are really schooled in sixteenth-century poetry (and I know some of you are), then this is not the case. I understand a lot more of Shakespeare than I did when I was in high school, but there are still usages I want to fine-tune in my reading. And this brings me to the beauty of these editions. They are not at all precious, you can take them anywhere, they are clearly and elegantly designed, they have the benefit of having the notes on pages facing the text, and, for this reader at least, the choices of which usages to include notes for were judicious.

 

For example, in Act 3, Scene 2, when Hamlet is prepping Horatio to observe the King’s reaction during the play Hamlet has prepared for him, here are some of the notes given:

84: comment: observation

85: occulted: deliberately hidden

86: unkennel: a term describing the driving of a fox from its lair

89: Vulcan’s stithy: forge of the Roman god of fire and metalworking

92: censure of: i.e. forming an opinion about; seeming: appearance, behavior

 

Here’s the passage:

I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,

Even with the very comment of thy soul

Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt                      85

Do not itself unkennel in one speech,

It is a damnèd ghost that we have seen,

And my imaginations are as foul

As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note,

For I mine eyes will rivet to his face,                          90

And, after, we will both our judgements join

In censure of his seeming.

[Maurice Jones as Hamlet in Chicago Shakespeare Theater's 2019 production]

The reading is enhanced, made easier, by this helpful edition. I now want to read all of the plays in these editions. I picked up Hamlet in Oliver’s room, thinking, there is a reason I needs must read this text again (Shakespearean English is quite addictive!). And there was. The embodiment of madness, was it not of love fomented? Was it purely of his father’s motive? And what did that entail? I’ve been reading it to my mother, and we love to repeat to each other, “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” It’s an oral art, a text made to be used onstage. It is simultaneously some of the best poetry in our language. I wonder if it is really passing out of use now. I mean, do kids love this language as much I did at their age, and still do?

[Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2, on Shakespeare at Play's iOS app]

Vincent Katz, Guest Author September 13-17

photo © Vivien Bittencourt

This week we welcome back Vincent Katz as our guest author. Vincent is a poet and translator. He is the author of the poetry collections Broadway for Paul (Knopf, 2020), Southness (Lunar Chandelier Press, 2016) and Swimming Home (Nightboat Books, 2015), as well as The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (Princeton University Press, 2004), which received a National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is the editor of Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (MIT Press, 2002; reprinted 2013), and his writing on contemporary art and poetry has appeared in publications such as Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, and The Poetry Project Newsletter. As curator of the “Readings in Contemporary Poetry” series at Dia:Chelsea from 2010 to 2021, Katz edited the anthology Readings in Contemporary Poetry (Dia Art Foundation, 2017). In 2021, he collaborated with Sarah Sarhandi on the opera While There's Light, based on his translations of Propertius. He lives in New York City.

Find out more about Vincent Katz here. 

Welcome back, Vincent.

-- sdl

Meet the Press: Etruscan Press's Tribus Imprint

Dante Di Stefano: In the introduction to Trio and to the book that preceded it, Triptych, you discuss the concept behind Etruscan Press’s new Tribus imprint. Could you talk about how Etruscan’s new model came into being and some of the benefits of publishing a three-in-one volume?

Philip Brady: The idea for Tribus was partly an aesthetic choice, and partly a logistical one. Aesthetically, Etruscan is committed to a dialogue among genres, and Tribus has given us a chance to see poetry in a new, dialogic, light. In Tribus, authorship is shared; we are reminded of the communal origins of poetry; and we are given a new lens through which to see the connectedness of verse. Readers approach the text in a new way — it’s not just a beginning and ending, but three connected narratives. Readers are invited to browse, compare and contrast.

As for logistics — as years pass, Etruscan has acquired more and more authors, but we continue to publish only six titles a year, of which only three to four are volumes of poetry.

The hardest thing I have to do as an editor is turn down work by poets I love whom we’ve previously published. It’s heartbreaking because it’s one thing to be turned down by a stranger and quite another thing to be rejected by someone who has already shown commitment to your work. Yet, it has become more and more common. Doing three books in one volume is enormously helpful in publishing great work and showing continued commitment to authors we love. And we hope that the audiences for each poet will be introduced to the other poets in the Tribus.

The first Tribus, Triptych, came about because I had submissions from two Etruscan authors, Peter Grandbois and James McCorkle. Then another book came along by a colleague from the (Ohio) NEOMFA program. I had always admired Robert Miltner’s work. That’s when the idea of Tribus came to me. The more I thought about it, the more connections I saw among the three manuscripts. I contacted the three authors. Fortunately, they enthusiastically agreed, and the result is Triptych.

But I could see that this might be a way to address the problem described above. So now I was looking for connections among submissions from Etruscan veterans. And sure enough, I found that the manuscripts submitted over a five-month period by Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop shared tonality and motifs, while being wildly different in settings and themes. Karen, Diane and Daneen all agreed to join in Trio, and they took the collaboration a step further, exploring connections and working together.

DD: What was it about the work of Karen Donovan, Diane Raptosh, and Daneen Wardrop that threaded together for you when you began to think of the project that would become Trio?

PB: Each book is replete and fully empowered. Still, presented in one codex, webs of continuity appear. Trio highlights the way that women, in the penumbra of the patriarchy, fashion conduits for life, power, and loss. Trio augurs identity within and beyond selfhood. Trio reconfigures utterance by stretching, almost to breaking, line and syntax (as Daneen Wardorp says in an interview, “I love enjambment.”).

Composing their books separately, together three poets orchestrated what Diane Raptosh calls a “triunity.” In a “Trialogue” included in this volume, they converse, riffing off each other, weaving “centos” of one another’s lines, a poetics which, as Raptosh writes, let her “feel the  tendrils themselves turning into a new kind of work.”

DD: There are two more Tribus selections in the offing, one including a collection I wrote. Could you talk about these two forthcoming books?

PB: So, the next step was to actually solicit a Tribus. Our two flagship authors, National Book Award finalists William Heyen and H. L. Hix, are both wildly prolific. and produce far more work than Etruscan could ever publish, even though we’ve done 13 Hix and five Heyen titles. Meanwhile, Dante, your new manuscript showed up. So, I thought that a new kind of connection might be made here — one more consciously wrought: Etruscan Generations. You agreed first, and then I sent Hix and Heyen your manuscript and asked for something to go with it. They both replied right away, and we have a new Tribus.

The latest is a collection including one Etruscan poet and two poets who aren’t previously published by Etruscan, but whose work seems powerfully connected. Ann Pedone’s Medea, Katherine Soniat’s Starfish Wash-up, and D.M Spitzer’s Overflow of An Unknown Self all came to us, with very different modalities—yet each renews the connection between contemporary and antiquity. 

DD: Sadly, Daneen Wardrop, whose collection Endless Body, closes out Trio, passed away before the book’s publication. What do you find most memorable about her work, in this volume and elsewhere?

PB: Dante, I sit before this question and come back to it over and again. So many images: first seeing Silk Road—the delight of entering into that magical, historical journey of Donata Badoer; watching as the work emerged, working with Daneen through a succession of cover images—she was an astute art lover with a trove of references and connections—talking about the poetics of evoking  the past in poems which employ and resist narration…And then on to Endless Body—an unframed sequence crafted out of one of poetry’s prime elements—the art of enjambment—as if in breaking, lineaments reveal the oracular—the space where story yearns forward onto the empty page, the exhaled breath. All too soon to speak of. All too soon to be.

DD: Karen, I was first introduced to your work through Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of what you call tiny stories and essays. From 1985 to 2005 you co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose. I’m curious to hear any thoughts you have about your long engagement with short prose. There’s only one prose poem in Planet Parable, “I Saw Egrets Flying.” What has short prose taught you about lineated poetry (and vice versa)? How did your understanding of short prose inform the multiplicity of stanzaic patterns and formal choices on display in Planet Parable? When you are composing, how do your poems begin to assert themselves in formal terms?

Karen Donovan: Thanks for all these questions, Dante. Yes, Walker Rumble and I founded ¶ way back in 1985 and published 25 issues over 20 years, working with hundreds of writers doing ingenious things with short prose. The work spanned categories – prose poem, flash fiction, microfiction, creative nonfiction, essays, letters, lists, rants. We described the contents of ¶ as “short bursts of ordered sensibility of 250 words or less” and let folks decide what to submit under that wide sky. Forging literary ground in the universe of shortness was a fantastic editorial experience. All during that time, I was making my living as an editor and professional writer, but in my creative life I was writing lineated poetry and never thought of myself as a writer of prose. When I started doing the prose pieces that wound up as Aard-vark to Axolotl, it was mainly just to play with the cool vintage illustrations in an old Webster’s dictionary we owned. Before too long, I realized I was writing paragraphs and had to laugh. The form had evidently percolated into my body and all it needed for a spigot was that dictionary.

What short prose taught me is that it must be as well written as poetry, to set Ezra Pound’s dictum on its head. You can’t have a wasted syllable. “That first line is pretty close to that last line,” as Walker once said.

Whether I’m writing poetry or prose, I try to craft strong sentences and put them in the right order. It's usually very clear when I need end-stopped lines and when I don’t. The egrets piece in Planet Parable that you mentioned is a good example. It tries to make transparent the long, loose discursive process of thinking while taking in continuous, seemingly random data from the world. It’s a slightly distracted internal disquisition that unfolds in time, so I wanted a stream of prose. Versus poetry, which is really a method of obliterating time. Everything in a poem happens at once, even in a narrative. The idea crystallizes and pops into existence and hits the reader like a photon.

Making a formal choice is a matter of knowing where the energy is in my idea. What form will allow me to capture it? Sometimes I think about form before I start writing, and sometimes I let the content pile up and dictate its form to me as I go (trusting in Levertov’s great description of form as “a revelation of content”). Form sticks to content quite mysteriously. Form is also a good editing tool. I often like to write in syllabics, which has its own handy, built-in Exacto knife. One of the most formally experimental pieces in Planet Parable, “This Is Why Advanced Ontics Is Taken Pass/Fail,” is constructed of decasyllabic lines that break apart as the poem moves forward and then reheal as the poem concludes. I needed to handle an onslaught of ideas from biology, chemistry, quantum physics, metaphysics, and more, and I wanted the poem to be both show and tell. Syllabics gave me the structure to hang on to this trapeze act. But still – it’s made with sentences.

DD: There’s a prose piece from Aard-vark to Axolotl that I kept thinking of when I was reading Trio, “The memory fruit,” which begins: “You are not singular. You are not really yourself. Something else makes you: deep snow, grief offered names, love as portable as a small stone.” Could you riff on the experience of publishing your work in a three-in-one volume, and the work of Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop in light of “The memory fruit”?

KD: Dante, you are clairvoyant. Calling up “The memory fruit” from Aard-vark to Axolotl is more relevant to the making of Trio than you could know. The illustration that goes with this piece is titled “Achene of Buttercup in vertical section, showing solitary seed.” I was writing about loneliness, the experience of losing a friend to whom I had a lifelong soul connection, the shock of realizing how much of my identity had been formed in her presence and now felt as if it had disappeared with her. And now… Diane and I lost Daneen to very sudden death, right when we were getting ready to celebrate the publishing of Trio, after months of intimate poetry conversation, immersed in one another’s language, resewing our lines together as centos, and birthing this volume together. The sense of loss is very similar. Our work and our minds are in explicit relationship, literally bound together. Trio itself is now the memory fruit. My hope is that it will go on generating attachments among our books every time a reader looks into it.

DD: I love one of the last lines in Planet Parable, “the vast thirsty ashes of the world” over which the rain speaks. There’s something so lovely and sad about the intense music of this moment, a moment that emblematizes Planet Parable’s thematic and formal concerns. What points of connection do you see in Planet Parable’s telescoping ecopoetics, the historical excavations of Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, and Endless Body’s exploration of corporeality and consciousness?

KD: Why the hell isn’t this beautiful project we are living going better? Is it possible to do it another way? All our books cohabitate with this question from different sides. Diane’s book sings with the mind and spirit of a woman who saw an alternative: “My advice was cultivate that love / which craves the happiness / of partner most, his or her / person next. Yourself last. / Be kind to the new. // In freedom / is safety. When people / learn this, they’ll know equality.” Daneen says, “Don’t worry about the awe. / There is no history except slate, / no biography except occasional winter wheat, / deer treading sun.” In the last poem in Endless Body, she asks, “At what rip in the gravity do we enter?” In its vast, thirsty ashes, the world yearns always to re-create itself after it is destroyed.

DD: Would you share a memory of Daneen Wardrop while working on this project and talk about the significance of Endless Body for you as a reader?

KD: Endless Body is endlessly generative – in subject matter, language, image, tone. Reading it is an experience of motion, tendency, current, experiment. Many of the poems are titled using word variants from Dickenson’s drafts. The book’s openness flows from Daneen’s receptive, absolutely original sensibility. Every conversation and email thread we shared brought that same light.

Here’s an example. One of her ideas for doing a reading together was to invite the whole audience in. I quote her: “If we end up doing readings virtually, we might ask people to use the chat function to suggest an image or idea they’re interested in/obsessed by that day at that minute. We might then, among the three of us, be able to find one of our poems that speaks to or complements that idea and choose to read that. It would probably be chaotic to do that for the whole reading, but we could have a couple of those interludes? This may be totally out there, but given the claustrophobia I sometimes feel with zoom, it might be cool to think of ways to air things out, widen things out.” Exactly. Air. Wideness. Out. That’s Daneen!

DD: Diane, In Run: A Verse History of Victoria Woodhull, you write through multiple personae inhabiting a variety of formal approaches. You’ve written many persona poems throughout your career, most notably in your collection, American Amnesiac, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. I’ve heard you speak eloquently about writing persona poems here. How was writing through and about the historical figures in Run different from persona poems you’ve written in the past? What other thoughts can you share about writing persona poems? What are some of your favorite persona poems written by other poets?

Diane Raptosh: I believe every poem is a persona poem, including—and perhaps especially—poems crafted from the I. American Amnesiac is in some respects a weirdly autobiographical poem, despite the fact that its speaker, Calvin Rinehart/John Doe (from Amnesiac) is a formerly affluent white man whose life specifics do not much resemble my own. But his status as participant-observer, his sense of being simultaneously subject and object, his many neuroses and certainly his anxious obsessing over the state of America are characteristics I consider my own. As for why write anyone writes persona poems, this portion of John Keats’s Negative Capability seems helpful: “A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other Body—The Sun, The Moon, The Sea . . . —the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” These sentences make good sense to me.

John Doe felt like someone I needed to fill in for; he felt more or less like a real person think-feeling in my mind. Writing about and through Victoria Woodhull—with her array of secondary characters—felt similar. I identified with her in many ways: she was all raw energy, unschooled, eccentric. I am “educated,” yes, but I come from humble beginnings. It felt easy to “become” Woodhull, as I have bucked many of the same restrictive scripts put in place for women, including traditional marriage, lifelong monogamy, and more. I love to take on voices and topics that allow me to learn as I compose. Why write what I know?

In terms of other persona poems, I studied carefully Tyehimba Jess’s incredible verse collection Leadbelly as a primary model for writing persona poems about a historical figure with a cast of other, necessary characters included. His was my go-to text for how to bring to life a historical character. So too, I would like to give a shout-out to my Trio mate, Daneen Wardrop’s Silk Road, which, as Phil mentioned, is written in the persona of Donata Badoer, Marco Polo’s wife. What an incredible book! Beyond these, Patricia Smith writes some of the most powerful persona poems I have ever encountered. Her “Skinhead” is stunning. Of course, Robert Browning’s duchess is in the background, looking as if she were alive. James Tate has great persona poems, as do Robert Hayden (“Night, Death, Mississippi”) and the poet Ai. I love her work. For the past decade or two, I have found it easier to arrive at emotional truths through writing persona poems; doing so allows me to enter a sense of boundlessness. That said, right now, I am at work on a manuscript written from the I. The time feels right to risk some things from that pronoun.

DD: What did you learn about nineteenth century American culture and literature through the creative process that you hadn’t learned through scholarly research?

DR: I’ve always been an American history buff and did a lot of scholarly research for Run. Understandably, I encountered differing narratives about who Woodhull was. But I wasn’t looking for that exactly. I wanted to uncover and offer a possible version of her—from birth through her presidential campaign—based in “fact” and informed, imaginative conjecture. I wrote the book from a conviction that all history is what Plutarch called historia: both fact (chronicle history) and fiction (feigned history). Mostly I wanted to get Woodhull’s story out there in the best way I knew how: through poetry. I was bugged that it took me until I was almost 55 years old even to have heard of her! Doing the research, I was reminded of how much the 1870s mirror our times in terms of, well, the usual categories: oligarchical economic structures, slavery-centered political frameworks, misogynistic scripts, caste systems, racism…. I was researching and drafting the book during the Trump/Clinton campaign. It comes as no surprise that long before presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton was mocked as “the devil” by certain sources, nineteenth-century tabloids used Woodhull family photos, featuring bedraggled characters and caricatures of Woodhull as “Mrs. Satan” as stock to lampoon all suffragists. To answer your thoughtful question (at last!), I feel that to understand someone, you have to become them. I’d like to try being everyone! This is what literature helps us do. Rather than aiming to arrive at an “objective” understanding or at some definitive rendition of Woodhull, the creative process enabled me to enter—through acts of imaginative, empathic transport—the essence of Woodhull, as well as to channel the energies and voices of other figures important in her inner circle.  

DD: Could you share some thoughts on the Emily Dickinson who appears in Endless Body? What is the Dickinsonian influence or imprint on Trio as a whole?   How does Dickinson inform what Daneen Wardrop called the “spiritual conversation” unfolding in this three-in-one book?

DR: What a wonderful question. I would say there is a Dickinsonian tonal complexity, or perhaps better: a tonal mischievousness at work in Trio as a whole. Equally present: an overall Dickinsonian wit. More on Emily Dickinson’s overall imprint in the final paragraph.

Dickinson appears in Wardrop’s Endless Body implicitly and overtly. I would go so far as to say that Dickinson is “the blade in the melody” of Endless Body, which Wardrop herself points to in her poem “+ Glowed + Absent—through.” Dickinson inheres in every endless dash—that pointer, that magisterial gesture, that “vast barrette” mentioned in Wardrop’s “+ Catch my + slips so easy.”

More specifically, I would say that her poem “Emily Dickinson undressing” (which begins with this epigraph by Roland Barthes: Imagine [if possible] a woman dressed in an endless garment...”) is a map by which we might effectively navigate Wardrop’s whole book. In this piece the poet suggests that “If I knew how to pray, words would cross wefts / of endless garment / bobbins still spinning in the world—” This is precisely what Endless Body does: with every taut line, with each knowing turn, it stitches a limitless fabric: “Some veils are red. // Some tulle is ripped. // In this deep tippet the world starts”—the full while the poet rips through to eternity. As Wardrop’s I types out her words, seams redden and glow—. These seams form the spiritual conversation that all of us in Trio are having. I hope readers too will experience this numinous quality. This immanence. These bladed melodies.

The + Glow + Absent—through. Similarly, Karen Donovan invites us all in her poem “So Many Swans Could Mean Something” to stand “on the great divide where the mind / is always leaving the body behind.”

DD: Would you also share a memory of Daneen Wardrop and talk about her legacy as a poet, scholar, teacher, and person?

DR: There is so much to know about Daneen; every day I uncover some new mystery about her. Her roles in rock, folk, and bluegrass bands—as lead singer and guitarist throughout her college years—transformed into a tenured English professorship at Western Michigan University, 1990-2020. During that career, she earned many awards, including the Distinguished Faculty Award at WMU and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She was a nationally renowned Emily Dickinson scholar (Emily Dickinson's Gothic: Goblin with a Gauge (1996), Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (2009), as well as Dickinson’s poetic heir apparent. She inspired her colleagues, students, and friends—from those associated with WMU to poetry lovers and climate advocacy communities.

In 1997 Daneen adopted her daughter Lian from China: Lian is featured in many of the poems in Endless Body (“LiLi and I speak to each other raining hands—” says the poet in “Afternoon”). I also have a daughter from China right around Lian’s age. Daneen and I had a number of conversations about our adoption experiences. We traded stories over Zoom about airport experiences with our “backpack babies”: how we literally had to sprint—daughters buckled onto our bodies—from one mysterious office to another, for meetings with adoption officials in China. Daneen’s multi-layered poems about adoption continue to move me—through. I’ve no doubt that she was a first-rate mother, daughter, sister (“My family speaks to each other with thunder on their sleeves, / whiskers in their bellies,” according to “Afternoon.”)

Honestly, I feel as if I was just beginning to know her as a friend. She was very funny, deeply authentic, and modest to a fault. She was incredibly large hearted. A kinder person we might never know.

As for Daneen’s poetic legacy, I would point to her ability to take on almost any subject, any persona, any tone, with mastery. I would easily place her among the most brilliant American poets I have encountered. Her work is a high-wire act of heart and erudition, pause and profusion, compression and munificence.  Endless Body is her tenth book.

---

Poem from Daneen Wardrop’s Endless Body:

Gift

A mix-up—the package arriving two weeks after she was.
White box painted with red and yellow flowers
bright as patois. No perches like on a bird house?
. . . a butterfly house. Each slot hardly wider than a match—
the wings must have to shut together to enter.
Do the butterflies tilt and fly in without stopping— 
clapped-closed and no stopping?
She was dry, thin lips
cut as the line around a country.
The box came without instructions.
This is not sadness. I come in and out of the blunt.
Why would they want to be in there,
darker than an inside.
I will not retract a single tilt of her face.    

---

Poem from Karen Donovan’s Planet Parable

So Many Swans Could Mean Something

I don’t want to talk about what we have lost, I am not sure
there is a difference between prayer and conversation

anymore, why anything happens, why thinking
is like this breathless occupied midnight.

Out back where the clouds skim the black surface
of the pond, it’s as if we called them, and now

you are saying, Look, the whole flock is here.
They drift, nickering, white boats on a moonless tide,

making and breaking engagements on a night when everything
gets decided. It is time to sleep, but who can sleep?

The water could not be blacker. We watch them,
lights off in the house, window slid wide,

standing on the great divide where the mind
is always leaving the body behind.

---

Poem from Diane Raptosh’s Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull

Victoria Solos the Stuff of Free Love

This is my lover, but when I cease to love him I will leave him.
This is my lover. For him I am, of an evening, leaf and hymnal.
This is my lover. But when I seize love, summer trees sing off-key.
This is my him. But should I leave love, I will seize the hymning.

This is my hymn. When love is squeezed by law, it is despotism.
This is my law: it is ruddy—leaf love, heady, and shouldered by all.
This: if I want intercourse with one hundred men, so I will have it.
These are my loves: my leeway to think freely, to feel out thought.

This is my lover: it is this her-dominion—my reedy belief-weave.
This is my love: it is how bees dance maps and plants eat the light.
This is love. When I cease using my, seas ease leaves into freefall.
This is my love: this slipping of strings, fringe reef leafing into tree.

This is the love: limbs that snap through the lungs to sycamore out.
This, how love lilacs: I stand arm in arm with every act of my life.

---

Philip Brady is the author of five collections of poetry: The Elsewhere: Poems and Poetics (Broadstone Books, 2021); To Banquet with the Ethiopians (Broadstone Books, 2015); Fathom (Word Press, 2007); Weal (Ashland Poetry Press, 1999) winner of the 1999 Snyder Prize; and Forged Correspondences (New Myths, 1996) chosen for Ploughshares’ “Editors’ Shelf” by Maxine Kumin. Brady’s poetry has received the Ohioana Poetry Award, The Ohio Governor’s Award and six Individual Artists Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, a Best of Ohio Writers Contest Prizes, a Newhouse Award and a Thayer Fellowship in the Arts from New York State, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Listowel Writer’s Prize (Ireland) and residencies at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Arts, Hawthornden Castle (Scotland), the Tyrone Guthrie Centre (Ireland), Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain), and Cimelice Castle, (Czech Republic). He has also been a visiting lecturer at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria and the Poets’ House in Donegal, Ireland.

Karen Donovan’s new collection of poems, Planet Parable, was published in 2021 by Etruscan Press in an innovative multi-author volume called Trio, which also includes complete books by the poets Diane Raptosh and Daneen Wardrop. Her two other books of poems are Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books), which won the Lexi Rudnitsky / Editor’s Choice Award, and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press), which won the Juniper Prize. She is also the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl (Etruscan Press), a collection of tiny stories and essays inspired by the illustrations in a vintage Webster’s dictionary owned by her grandfather. From 1985 to 2005 she co-edited ¶: A Magazine of Paragraphs, a journal of very short prose.

Diane Raptosh’s verse collection, American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award as well as for the Housatonic Book Award in poetry. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor’s Arts Award in Excellence. An active ambassador for poetry, she has given workshops and readings everywhere from riverbanks to prisons. The holder of the Eyck-Berringer Endowed Chair in English, she teaches literature and writing at the College of Idaho, where she also co-chairs the program in criminal justice/prison studies. Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull, published in a collection of three poets’ works, is her seventh and most recent book (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021). www.dianeraptosh.com

 

Daneen Wardrop was the author of five poetry collections: Endless Body (Trio, Etruscan Press, 2021); Silk Road (Etruscan Press, 2018); Life as It (Ashland Poetry Press, 2016), winner of the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award; Cyclorama (Fordham University Press, 2015); and The Odds of Being (Silverfish Review Press, 2008). She was also the author of several works of literary criticism, including Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing (University Press of New England, 2009). Wardrop’s honors include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Poetry Society of America’s 2006 Robert H. Winner Award, judged by Jean Valentine. She was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, and died on April 8, 2021.

"Quite Possibly the Sexiest Dance Ever Put On Film" [by Mindy Aloff]

David Lehman's Labor Day post about the movie "Picnic" prompted several comments, here and elsewhere, but this one, by dance aficionado Mindy Aloff, stands out: 

"Oh, I agree with the writer Laura Leivick: It's quite possibly the sexiest dance ever put on film.

"The choreographer (uncredited) was Miriam Nelson.

Her IMDb bio: 'Debuted on Broadway in 1938. Married fellow dancer Gene Nelson. When Gene joined the Signal Corps, Miriam went to Hollywood and signed an acting-dancing contract with Paramount. She eventually became a choreographer in film, choreographing many musical numbers for Gene once he had a contract with Warner Bros. After her divorce from Gene, she eventually married producer Jack Meyers. Miriam was an extra in the party scene in Breakfast at Tiffanys, playing the girl arguing with the man wearing an eye patch. Taught Ingrid Bergman her dance scene in Cactus Flower. In 1969 she choreographed Disney on Parade. She married producer Jack Meyers and was eventually widowed. She returned to the stage in 1992 when her friend Marge Champion produced Ballroom at the Long Beach CLO. Her autobiography, with a forward written by Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards, was published in 2010.'

Aloff: "It also didn't hurt that the cinematographer of "Picnic" was James Wong Howe (with uncredited Haskell Wexler as the Second Unit Camera Operator), that Jean Louis had designed Kim Novak's dress, or that the little outdoor spot they were dancing in had been designed by Jo Mielziner, who, with colleagues art director William Flannery and set decorator Robert Priestley, won an Oscar for Art Direction-Color for their work on this film. Of course, crucial to the effect of the dance scene was George Duning's Oscar-nominated score. His 'Theme from "Picnic"' (which reached Number One on the 1956 Billboard charts) was, as the resisting stars gradually inched together, suavely introduced to and then--Oh, Mama!--melded with the music of the 1930 song 'Moonglow' by Columbia's musical director Morris Stoloff. The fact that Holden, allergic to dancing, had to get practically falling-down drunk to do the scene, while Novak couldn't wait to tear herself away to go to church, located this superficially cool summer-evening intimacy on top of an underground volcano of banked fires; the individuals can barely relate while the sliding musics mate them. Someone reviewing it brilliantly compared it to a baked Alaska; as Laura quipped to me about Holden, 'He can bake my Alaska any time.'"

The sexiest dance ever put on film? Here it is. You decide: 

Summer of Fruit Tarts--The Berries [by Barbara Hamby]

I had a friend in college who when everything was going great would say, "It's the berries!" I knew right away what he meant. Berries are one of nature's most beautiful gifts. When we were hunter-gatherers, berries were there for the picking although now someone else picks them and they show up in little boxes at the market. 

Blueberries, blackberries, raspberries--they are little party favors of the gods, Demeter's joy at Persephone's return. They can be eaten by the handfuls right off the bush, made into jams for winter, or baked into tarts. I wanted to try Tartine's pastry cream with Rose Geranium. I planted two rose geranium plants in my herb garden in the spring to use in a jam recipe, but when I saw the pastry cream recipe, I couldn't help myself. You soak four leaves in two cups of warm milk for a half hour and then make the cream. The rose geranium is a perfect compliment to the blackberries. If you don't have the rose geranium, you can use rose water.

Since I wasn't going to be taken out for dinner on my birthday this year, I decided to make my favorite Ligurian fish stew and end with this lemon mascarpone tart with blueberries, blackberries, pitted cherries, and little sprigs of mint. Happy birthday to me.

 

As summer's bounty is nearing its end, I'm freezing berries in anticipation of berriless days ahead. Berries are a metaphor for the small sweet things in life. In the nearly extinct Tofa language in Siberia, "to go berry picking" is a metaphor for death, which seems very beautiful to me.

For the Stars Over Paterson [a review by Dante Di Stefano]

When the Stars Were Still Visible
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021

Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s newest collection, When the Stars Were Still Visible, continues the poet’s decades-long Proustian excavation of time and memory. In Gillan’s oeuvre, time, and memory, sometimes occluded by, but never subsumed in, nostalgia, form a garden of forking paths the poems journey through, on the way toward a kind of secular earned communion. This journey takes Mazziotti Gillan away from, and returns her to, the “dark foreign self” she initially hated as a schoolgirl her poem “Growing Up Italian.” The story that Mazziotti Gillan so frequently returns to is the story of how a young girl (a daughter of immigrants, born into poverty) whose first poem was published in Saint Anthony Messenger carved out a life for herself as a successful poet and professor. For Mazziotti Gillan, the processes of assimilation into the mainstream American middle class are convoluted and nuanced, fraught with peril and freighted with meaning. Her work constantly retraces the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, and yet the hills of her ancestral home in San Mauro, Italy haunt even her earliest poems. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s body of work resists the coming-of-age narrative that it often asserts. Mazziotti Gillan’s work also explicitly rejects the assimilation narrative that is often puts forth; in fact, Gillan’s poetry challenges fixed notions of American-ness by dramatizing the processes of remembrance so important to the construction of identity in traditional Italian American families. Mazziotti Gillan’s ultimate subject, therefore, is the remembering self.

When the Stars Were Still Visible centers the remembering self as it retraces and rewrites the concerns and the tropes that have constellated Mazziotti Gillan’s work since her collection Where I Come From was published in 1995. Readers of Mazziotti Gillan’s work will recognize a familiar cast of characters from her previous volumes: her immigrant parents, her husband, her son and daughter, beloved family members, friends, classmates, and the ghosts of Paterson and San Mauro. Similarly, the themes that thread throughout all Mazziotti Gillan’s previous books reassert themselves with remarkable clarity in When the Stars Were Still Visible, delivering another moving exploration of love, family, loss, and mortality. In the title poem, Mazziotti Gillan writes: “So many memories swirl / like bits of color in a kaleidoscope, / and so impossible to explain.” To full expression’s kaleidoscopic impossibility, Mazziotti Gillan holds up hundreds of shards of specific memories as shining and tightly-packed as the silver balls her Zio Guillermo made from the foil inside his Camel cigarette packs.

The poems that stand out the most in When the Stars Were Still Visible are the ones that either fill in an as yet poetically underexamined corner of the poet’s autobiography or feel like a resolution to a part of the poet’s autobiography that has supplied the material for many earlier poems. “Taking my Brother to the Barber” provides an example of the former kind of poem. In this poem, a sibling relationship spanning more than seventy-five years spirals out in a bittersweet aria ending on the brother’s huge dark uncomplaining eyes. “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas to Give Me Courage” provides an example of the latter kind of poem. In poems from previous volumes, such as “Is This the Way It Is Between Mothers and Sons?” from All that Lies Between Us, Mazziotti Gillan has explored the distance between adult son and aging mother. However, in “My Son the Lawyer Quotes Dylan Thomas…” the distance collapses as the son reaches out to encourage his mother using the lines of the Welsh poet’s most famous villanelle. Just as many of her poems end in uplift, “My Son the Lawyer…” resolves (in uplift) the mother-son story arc that runs throughout her body of work.

In Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s poetry, her father forever whistles as he walks back home from an evening playing bocce and drinking wine at the Società Cilentana. Her mother forever places a bowl of steaming farina on the counter of the kitchen on 17th Street. Frank Sinatra’s voice forever booms from the jukebox in the basement of the student union at Seton Hall University. The popular girls in her seventh-grade class forever form a club called the Ritz Girls and go about their exclusionary work. She and her sister forever make paper dolls in the tiny closet of their room, unaware that it is what they don’t hold in their hands that will transform them. Her husband is there, young and handsome. Her children are there. The Paterson from her childhood is there, along with her parents and siblings. The sadness and weight of time are there. And so is a barely articulable lightness. She is singing. As she says in the poem “Last May in San Mauro, Cilento, 2017”: “I hold the memories close to give me comfort when I am most afraid.” Reading her work, I feel less afraid of aging and what comes after. I feel her warmth. I hear her singing. I see the stars over Paterson. What else could a reader ask for?

Fedora [by Lauren MacArthur]

They are really quite impractical – yet 
Don Draper, Humphrey Bogart and my Grandpa
Insisted on their costly cover
As did Al Capone

Upon don, 
They trench Mason-Dixons at-brow
Northern cranial stealth demarking 
Southern mandible sprawl

Owning 4.5 inches of latitude
2.5 inches in longitude – at least
Inherently obviates indoor deposition, then
Librarianesque requisition

Don Draper:
“I salute my ad beneath the crown, 
 released precisely upon the punctuation of my own pinch”

Bogart:
“The gutter-dent annoys the lens
prodding a harder hunt for my pupils”

Al Capone:
“As the snap-brim mandates your gaze
 the ribbon’s tidy bow smiles you to like me”

Grandpa:
“I am a lad under the mohair
coarsely stranded."

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Peach-O-Rama [by Barbara Hamby]

I go a little crazy when peaches are in season, which in North Florida is between the middle of June and the middle of August. We're a 45 minute drive from Georgia, which is the center of the peach universe. The best of the best is the Elberta peach, which is like biting into everything the world promised you but snatched away until the moment when that golden flesh hits your tongue and the juice is running down your arms. Standing over the kitchen sink is the preferred position during the week or so that Elbertas are released by the Peach Gods into the mortal realm. 

After this experience, then I start thinking about how to preserve some of the peaches for the winter. Peach jam is a must. Not only is it good with toast and jam, but if you slice some jalapenos in a jar or two then you can add it to a cheese board. I also make a white-peach saffron confiture, which is a looser French jam. White peach and lemon verbena is also a great combination.

But peaches this beautiful deserve to be put into a tart. I started with a riff on the Patricia Wells' Apricot Almond Tart, substituting peaches for the apricots. It's a divine tart not matter what fruit you use. This is a photo of the tart before it goes into the oven.

https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

The perfection of the Elberta is expressed in all its golden glory! The Wells tart recipe is wonderful, but this year I wanted to try another one--Amanda Hesser's recipe. It is very different from Wells' recipe, but it is wonderful in its own way. The photograph at the beginning of this piece is Hesser's Fresh Peach Tart: https://food52.com/recipes/14217-peach-tart

Another peachy tart that is beautiful and delicious is this white peach tart. The White Peach is in the markets here around the beginning to the middle of August. This tart needs peach jam, and lucky for me I had some fresh jam that I'd made in July. I use the Tartine recipe, which calls for peaches, sugar, and lemon juice. It's a simple perfect recipe.

 The perfume of a white peach is like a whiff of paradise, not the Old Testament one but the land of milk and honey in which everyone is illuminated by an inner light and poetry is on their tongues. This is an Italian recipe, and when I saw it, I knew I had to try it if only to be faithful to my peach-mania.  https://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/white-peach-tart

I'll leave you with this poem from my new book, Holoholo. Even when I'm in the middle of summer with its abundance of peaches, I am thinking of their passing from this world:

 

                        Ode to the Last Peach of Summer

How many summers are left me, fierce afternoons in July

            as I bite into globes of ripe peaches, juice running

down my hands, the aching splendor of their golden flesh,

            some as big as a baby’s head with its fuzz

and tender skin, but always I’m thinking of you, the last peach

            of the year, sometimes in September, one year

on October fifth, and you're a little hard, my sweet nut,

            or mealy, the rough fabric of your meat, its scent

a faint telegraph from August when I’m wallowing

            in so many peaches I bake pies, make peach jam,

some with jalapeños, pour Bellinis, but with every bite

            I get a little closer to you, and November looms

with its desperate peachless days. O pit with crevices

            like the dark side of the moon. Juice exploding

on my tongue. Flesh of your flesh. O to live in a world

            that has peaches, a moment or two in the riot of summer

before rain begins to fall, and in the dark woods mushrooms

            sprout like gold coins in the last grass of the year.

_____

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. She  is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Holoholo: Poems (2121) Bird Odyssey (2018), and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), all  published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which also published Babel (2004) and All-Night Lingo Tango (2009). Her first book, Delirium, won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire, won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry and was published in 1999 by New York University Press. She teaches at Florida State University where she is Distinguished University Scholar. You can find out more about Barbara here.  

"How to Write a Villanelle" [by Martin Stannard]

Click here for "How to Write a Villanelle" -- and below that "How toi Write a Sonnet" -- by Martin Stannard, who writes:

<<<
Good morning, and welcome to August.

 

This is to announce that "How to Write Poetry" is now available at its very own website: https://how2writepoetry.blogspot.com/

 

and today sees the release of Issue #2 of the series: "How to Write a Villanelle", which you will find there as a blog post , and also free to download as a PDF if you are looking for that special gift for someone who is difficult to please.

 

I know I said that #2 would be about how to write an epic, but several people responded to Issue #1 ("How to Write a Sonnet") by asking for help to write a villanelle, and so here we are.

 

Best wishes etc.

Martin
>>>

Summer of Fruit Tarts--Figgissimo [by Barbara Hamby]

The sauna of a Southern summer seems made for figs. When David Kirby and I bought our house, I discovered an old fig tree near the driveway and the vegetable garden. The woman who sold us our house told us her father had had a victory garden there during World War II. Does the fig tree date back to the forties? I wish I'd asked her. 

A fig tree is a glorious creature with large leaves that look like the palms of a giant. I've planted two more trees since we moved in. We had to have a pine tree in the front yard removed, and I'm going to plant another one where the pine was. Early in the fall fig trees begin to loose their leaves, but when they start to leaf out in the spring, their bare brown stems erupt with little rosettes of green, and I know that the figs are on their way.

This summer has been miraculous. I usually make two flats (12-jars per flat) of fig jam. This year I made 36 jars, and two fig tarts.

I'm wondering about the figginess of this summer. Could the drought during May followed by torrential downpours be the reason? Probably not, because this is a pretty typical late spring into early summer. I have to compete with the birds and squirrels for the figs. This year I got all St. Francis of Assisi and addressed the critters. "Brother and sister birds, you take the high figs and I'll take the low ones. Then we'll all live as one. Brother and sister squirrels, I know you're hungry, too. Please take all you want, but please don't take a bite and then go on to the next fig. Let's share the lusciousness."

It seemed to work. Fig jam is one of mother nature's true gifts. Bread, butter, and fig jam with a cup of coffee or tea makes an ambrosial breakfast. With a strong stinky cheese it goes well with an aperitivo. I haven't tried this yet, but I'm going to make a crostata marmalata, the Italian breakfast tart, with fig jam. 

I inherited David's mother's copper jam-making pot, and I cook up two or three batches of jam every summer. Our trees have small brown figs called Brown Turkey, that seem to me more concentrated in flavor than their larger cousins. In my mother-in-law's recipe for fig jam the only ingredients are figs, sugar, and lemons. The most complicated part of making fig jam is fig curation. The season is only a couple of weeks in July. It starts slowly and then builds up speed. On good days I pick a pound in the morning and another pound in the early evening. Every two days I have enough for a batch of jam. But figs are tender little orbs. You have to watch them or they'll turn into mush. 

Since I had so many figs this year, I had plenty for tarts. My first tart was beautiful, but the crust was a disappointment. That's because I tried a crust that wasn't Patricia Wells' crust. The second one was beautiful and balanced. The recipe is from her great book At Home in Provence, which won a James Beard award when it came out in 1996. I was at the Miami Book Fair and saw her demonstrate some of the recipes. The copy I bought is falling apart because I've tried so many of the recipes. The fig tart is a variation on the apricot almond tart. The only change I made was that I substituted orange flower water for the almond extract. This photo is of the halved figs without the cream filling.

I'm hoping to find some purple figs at the market later in the summer, and try the recipe with them. Here's the recipe again: https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/verlets-apricot-tart-101800

Next week: It's a Peach-luscious world

Reflections on Sam Truitt’s Tokyoatoto [by Andrew McCarron]

 

I am concluding my week of blog entries on the poet’s notebook with some reflections on the poet Sam Truitt’s marvelous recent book, Tokyoatoto (Station Hill Press, 2020). This book-length poem was composed in a small pocket-sized notebook during a ten-day trip to Tokyo in late Fall 2019, five months before the Covid-19 Pandemic shut down international travel. The poem begins in New York City as the poet travels to JFK Airport and concludes with his return. Impressions, thoughts, sights & sounds, and memories were jotted down in real time. Having lived in Tokyo from the age of three to seven, and having not set foot in the city or elsewhere in Japan since that time, the book enacts T.S. Eliot’s poetic dictum “to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Truitt expresses something similar early in the poem when his plane begins its descent into Tokyo’s Narita Airport: “Gliding downward through clouds & then under & cotton & black mountains in gold light I found myself inexplicably sobbing now gliding downwards tears in & spilling from my eyes toward the most beautiful place on Earth 52 years coming home.”    

Returning to Japan at the end of his fifth decade of life, Truitt records the shifting parameters of his consciousness through words. He reveals the nature of this poetic project while waiting for a Tokyo subway sometime over the days following his arrival: “one senses a web each of us hold together & against & around us like a net knit of civility not docility as there are some faraway landscapes in our mind & in our heart & our bodies are dreaming all of them uniting to listen to the underground hum its magic.”  

The book offers a sketch of those reflective moments in life when we try making sense of things, when we seek to express the accumulation of where and who we’ve been as we slide perpetually into the future. What it’s like, how one things moves into another, what we remember, the lacunas of what we forgot, what we’ve read, the mystery, and all the saw-toothed fragments of memory that weave continually through what we see: coalesce. The ever-expanding geometry of our consciousness reveals itself, momentarily, before the pattern changes.

It’s no coincidence then that the majority of Truitt’s odyssey occurs in transit: via foot, taxis, buses, subways, trains, and airplanes. Here’s some text from the flight over: “as we scoot over Siberian ice & crags & rock & out the grey & purple river-looped land in the orange light band I guess must now be south as north becomes it.” Or a moment toward the end of the book recorded on a subway: “& then I am in the subway wondering where exactly I am though knowing inordinately & knowing I need to do a quick search of my body to locate the ticket…” The movements that propel the poem frequently open up to flowerings of philosophical insight and questioning, such as the following moment in the middle of the poem: “you could say sex alone makes it worth it yet even sex wears thin & then you’re stuck with a habit of working within a structure…” No conclusion, though, is given much time to marinate before the focus leads elsewhere: “& so it goes back & forth until it is gone.”  

The structure and physical layout of Tokyoatoto is significant. Each page of typed text (one section per page) is presented opposite a facsimile of the handwritten page from the original notebook he kept from November 23 – December 3 2019, with almost no alterations or additions. Why is this? As Robert Creeley famously put it, “Form is never more than an extension of content.” The inclusion of the original handwritten notebook in the published book captures what it’s like to make sense of the intersections of past and present, place and moment, self and others, matter and spirit, and the familiar and the foreign as they’re consciously experienced in the flux of time. What unfolds across the work is an experience of the unified field without a deliberate fielding of the experience.

 

Note on author: Sam Truitt is the author of the ten books in the Vertical Elegies series. He is the co-editor of In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley and Eating the Colors of a Lineup of Words: The Early Books of Bernadette Mayer, and a host of the podcast Baffling Combustions. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts, he lives in Woodstock, NY.

The Poet's Notebook: Interview with Carley Moore [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: Of all the contemporary poets and writers I know, few are as bracingly honest, funny, and heartfully transgressive as Carley Moore. In addition to being an NYU professor, and proud mother, Carley is author of the novel The Not Wives (Feminist Press, September 2019), the essay collection, 16 Pills (Tinderbox Editions, 2018), the poetry chapbook, Portal Poem (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), and the young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012). I am so appreciative that Carley agreed to be interviewed for this blog. Thanks Carley!]

 

AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process?  

CM: I started keeping a diary when I was in the third grade. After a hospital stay, my parents bought me a small plaid diary with a matching pencil from the hospital gift shop. That diary was probably the beginning of my journal writing, which after high school and college morphed into more of a space for my creative process and lesson planning. 

AM: What roles have your notebooks played in your creative process over the years?

CM: They are essential to everything I write, whether it’s poetry, fiction, or essays. I do some freewriting at the beginning and end of every writing session and it helps me hold onto what I’ve been working on that day and also figure out what might come next. A few years ago, I did The Artist’s Way, and that really helped me get messier in my journal, and introduced me to the concept of “Morning Pages,” which are just three pages of mess, never to be looked at again. I didn’t stick with the idea of never returning to the writing, but I’m grateful for the encouragement to be a messy writer, to write almost as if painting. I’ve since moved into bigger notebooks and paintbrush like pens and I really love that.

AM: Can you reflect on an instance in which you wrote something into your notebook that ended up being the final version with minimal editing when you got around to typing it out?

CM: Some parts of my dissertation were free-written and stayed much the same when I moved from notes to the final document.  Poems often undergo minimal transformation too. I lately write poems as Instagram posts and those are completely as is/whatever tumbles out of me. Typed into the Insta platform and not my notebook, but really the same idea.

AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?

CM: I try very hard to bring the freedom of the notebook into the computer, like I want the typing to be as messy as the stuff in the notebook, but invariably, I tend to get a little fussier with sentences and sentence structure when I type. In the notebook, everything is a lot more fragmented and list-like and I don’t really worry very much about sentence structure or grammar.

AM: Would you like your notebooks to be read by others, or are they private?

CM: They are private. I don’t want anyone else to read them. Not necessarily because they are full of secrets although they do contain some of the worst—grouchiest, whiniest, crabbiest—parts of me, but mostly because they’re my space to play and do whatever and they are not anything finished or for the public. I give my students the same space in their private freewriting. We all need something that is completely our own and is just never bothered or scrutinized by anyone. 

AM: What do you do with your notebooks once they are full or finished?

CM: There are different places on my bookshelves where I have them. Many older ones are in a big plastic bin in my hallway closet. I don’t tend to reread them or take them out. I’m not interested in them in that way. I do look at the previous notebook for a couple of weeks because there’s cross over and especially with novels, I may have taken notes that I need to remember or hold onto to keep going. 

AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?

CM: My great grandmother kept a diary that I’m hoping to inherit at some point. It’s very mundane, but I love it. She wrote things like, “And then we walked up over the hill.” I also love the look and feel of journals and notebooks and the kinds of pens people have used. I may have seen some of Emily Dickson’s fascicles which I became obsessed with for a while—these are the hand-stitched chapbooks she made of her own work. I think I also say Emerson or Thoreau’s journals a long time ago, which were fascinating too. 

AM: Do you incorporate non-linguistic elements into your notebooks (e.g., line drawings, doodles, collage, painting, etc.)? Is there something that makes your notebooks or your “notebook practice” distinctive?

CM: I doodle a bit and make a lot of squiggly marks, but mostly it’s just messy cursive. I went to Catholic School until 3^rd grade even though my family isn’t Catholic and handwriting was very serious, a whole subject unto itself. I was crowned (with a Burger King crown!) handwriting queen in second grade and was very proud of that. My writing up until a couple of years ago, has always been very neat. I’m glad to have freed myself from that tidy work. 

The Poet's Notebook: Interview with erica kaufman [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: In addition to being an accomplished and innovative poet, erica kaufman is the Director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking. The institute, which has been offering professional development workshops for teachers and students since its inception in 1982, is built around the primacy of the notebook and pen as instruments of investigation. Even after the institute was forced to go remote by the pandemic, the notebook and pen remained the pillar and ground of the texts and questions that its various workshops pursued. Not surprisingly, erica’s two books of poems INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books) emerged out of the forge of her notebooks. I am delighted that erica agreed to be interviewed for this blog!]

AM: When did you begin keeping a notebook as part of your creative process? 

ejk:  I’ve kept a notebook as part of my creative process for as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved notebooks as an object--there’s something that is just innately appealing about opening a fresh notebook and completing the last line of the last page of a notebook. Not too long ago I was visiting my parents and found a stack of notebooks from elementary school (3rd grade). It was fascinating because I don’t actually remember writing and keeping any sort of journal at that time, but I did. The notebooks were labeled with my name and the year, and filled with poems with the occasional dated prose entry. My elementary school notebooks are hardcover, often from the Looney Tunes store (if there was such a thing in the 1980’s on Staten Island).

AM: What roles have your notebooks/journals played in your creative process over the years?

ejk: I prefer to write by hand. I use notebooks to keep notes, often lists of things I hear or see, strings of words or phrases that I find interesting. I am always writing--it is how I focus my attention, how I digest information I’m taking in, how I learn. I always try to keep separate notebooks for different purposes--one for notes, one for poem drafting, one for job work...But inevitably these categories bleed into each other so I also spend a lot of time recopying materials from one notebook to another. When I draft a poem I almost always do it in a notebook first, and I revise by recopying drafts and seeing how different small changes feel as I try them out. Writing poetry is a very physical process--I need to experience multiple drafts and I need to have all of my notes and versions of a single piece in one place so I can move back and forth between renditions of a poem before settling on what might be the closest to a final one. The notebook is also where I might test out something I’m thinking about through prose that might later become a poem.

 AM: What happens when you write in a notebook that doesn’t happen when you type?

ejk:  This is a topic that has gotten a lot of attention in recent years--I’ve read articles with titles like “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades” (NY Times), “Handwriting shown to be better for memory than typing” (Big Think), and “Attention, Students, put your laptops away!” (NPR). In short, it seems as though we have scientific proof that typing and writing by hand are actually different cognitive processes that lead to different things happening in the brain. I know that for me, anything I write by hand sticks in my head in a very different way than if I’m typing. I retain or remember anything that I write in a notebook, the same is just not true when I’m typing. Increasingly I’m also aware that I bring a certain anxiety with me to the keyboard--when I’m typing it is as if whatever I’m working on has different stakes attached to it. When I’m ready to type I’m usually on my way to finishing and submitting something (for my job or for my personal work). So, that’s a totally different experience as well. I’m just not a person who really writes on a screen for pleasure. I’ve even tried the ipad with stylus approach where I could write by hand and have that translated to type, but it didn’t or doesn’t feel the same. The notebook is my version of a sandbox or a laboratory. The keyboard is more like the stage or lecture hall.
AM: Would you like your notebook  to be read by others, or are they private?

ejk:  My notebooks aren’t private, but at the same time, I’m not sure that they would make sense to anyone but me. I have a tendency to create catalogs and lists of phrases and words more than anything else. So the notebooks are full of these dispersed between poem drafts. I suppose there’s a way in which the notebook then becomes a puzzle?

 AM: Can you reflect on the experience of seeing the notebooks of a poet whose work you admire?

ejk:  When I was in college I had the privilege of taking a workshop with Anselm Berrigan. At that time he was writing “Zero Star Hotel,” and I remember walking with him after class and he showed me what the poem looked like in his notebook. I remember thinking that the stanzas looked like windows, the poem a large building. I also remember that this was a moment that marked a shift in how I thought about my writing practice. I suddenly realized that the “journaling” I’d always done was writing in its own right. I continue to relish (and remember) moments where I notice a poet writing in a notebook because of how it makes their writing process tangible (to me) in a different way. 

AM: Why would you encourage someone interested in writing poetry to keep a notebook?

ejk: I think it is essential! I would encourage someone interested in writing anything to keep a notebook and to think of that notebook as a space with no predetermined goals. When I’ve worked with younger writers, there still seems to be a certain idealization of the notebook as a diary, a place to put one’s secrets and gossip. But, really, the notebook, for me at least, is a place to put anything that is done in writing. What is most useful is the discoveries that happen when I look back through all the writing I’ve done along the way. I’m able to find pieces of poems that can then find new homes in other projects. I can also see how my own writing is changing and how I want it to change. Because I do so much of my revision by hand, seeing the earliest drafts of pieces can often remind me of where I began in a project, and can also then guide me back to certain important questions that the work I’ve made might not have answered as of yet. I’ve been working on an epic trilogy for the past decade or so—thus far it includes INSTANT CLASSIC and POST CLASSIC (both out from Roof Books). I knew the project was a trilogy because of what I found in my notebooks.

The Poet's Notebook: Jean Holabird’s Travel Notebooks [by Andrew McCarron]

[Guest author note: In 2019, I attended an eightieth birthday party for the New York City poet Tony Towle. The gathering was hosted by Tony’s good friend, the artist Jean Holabird, and Tony’s partner, the actress Diane Taylor. Having arrived at Jean’s Tribeca loft early, I had an opportunity to see some recent work. In particular, she shared a series of impressionistic Moleskine notebooks that she kept while traveling around the country on Amtrak over a period of two years during which her loft was being renovated by the owner. The drawings and poetic jottings in these notebooks blew me away, conjuring comparisons in my mind with the Fourteenth Century Travels of Sir John Mandeville or the travel poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Jean’s notebooks contain visual and textual snapshots, stills, and scenes from the places and moments she encountered on her wanderings, capturing poetic fragments of New York and America before and during the pandemic. Perhaps the larger story of place and time that her notebooks convey won’t be clear until many years hence. I asked Jean Holabird to contribute to this blog with a short reflection on her travel notebooks along with some images. Thank you so much, Jean!]   

Life, Illustrated

    Since my teens, I have chronicled life and travels in various media: writing, sketching in pencil, watercolors, oil paintings. The Moleskine notebooks did not coalesce into their present incarnation until 5 or 6 years ago. They have become, in effect, “visual” or “graphic” diaries.

   I was led to this gradually: remember watching my father draw on family trips (and trying to emulate) – a show of Roy Lichtenstein sketchbooks at MoMA several years ago (enchanting jottings of designs and ideas in colored pencil) – and, more recently, seeing the tiny notebooks kept by my friend, the wonderful artist John Willenbecher (filled with magical bits and pieces that had caught his fancy).

   Although depiction of the amazing places I have been lucky enough to visit has always been the driving force, there is also, as a friend opined, an attempt to “own” the objects of interest. Thus, the notebooks are, in a sense, the means to “own” my daily life. This was very important during the 2 years I spent as a nomad while my building was being re-furnished – the books were like anchors, mooring me to the present.

   In the year of the pandemic, they were companions as I roamed the emptiness of Lower Manhattan, marveling at, and recording the glorious blossoming of restaurants in the streets. 

Most of all, the notebooks are a fun way to keep track, seeing, and working. They are also quite useful at rendering the past retrievable, and providing material to be used in other formats.

  

   Jean Holabird, July, 2021