The Best American Poetry

"On Bedtime and Books" [by Victoria Kelly]

For three years, before I had my own children, I was a Court Appointed Special Advocate to two little girls living in the foster care system. As a CASA, I visited these girls weekly—at home, at school, and at daycare—and attended all court hearings relevant to their placement. My goal was to make sure they were safe and thriving—both in their foster home and when they visited their mother, who was overcoming a series of difficulties in her life. The role as a volunteer CASA is not unlike that of a social worker—get to know the children, learn their routines and habits, and hope that they come to see you as someone they can trust. If many cases, they will confide in you things they might not confide to a foster parent or a social worker, situations that could become harmful or life-threatening.

I loved these little girls. We played paper dolls and “running away to Hollywood.” I watched them enter kindergarten and learn to read, sounding out each word with furrowed brows, and then graduate to chapter books. These girls were fortunate to have a caring foster family. But in their guardianship situation they were not so lucky. They still linger in the foster system after many years, caught in a court battle that remains unresolved.

It was heartbreaking to watch these girls struggle to feel safe, to understand where they belonged, to wonder if they were wanted. Now that I am a mother to two little girls of my own, I look back on those years I spent as a CASA with new eyes. It was what drew me to support the Pajama Program, an organization that provides new pajamas and new books to children like the ones I knew. The children they help are in foster care, or living in shelters, or living in poverty, or have been abandoned. These are kids who do not get tucked into bed. Sometimes these pajamas and books are the only new things they have ever received. Pajamas, and books, help them feel warm and secure at a time when they are most vulnerable.

I can’t imagine what it would have felt like to have never owned a book as a child, to have never had those long Sunday mornings in bed reading, dreaming up new worlds. If you would like to get involved, visit the Pajama Program site to donate, sponsor a book drive, or volunteer at their NYC reading center. Or go here to learn about volunteering as a CASA. 

from the archive; first posted October 7, 2015

Meet the Press: Tupelo Press Anthologizes Poetry of the Pandemic

Dante Di Stefano: Tupelo Press just released the anthology Four Quartets: Poetry in the Pandemic. Could you tell us a bit about this anthology and its genesis?

Kristina Marie Darling:  I had the privilege of co-editing Four Quartets with Tupelo Press’s Publisher & Artistic Director, Jeffrey Levine.  When curating the anthology, we wanted to showcase the many different styles and aesthetic approaches that writers have taken in depicting what is essentially a shared experience.  To that end, we chose sixteen chapbook-length folios, including two collaborative folios; a folio in translation from the original Korean; innovative folios like Dora Malech’s postmodern lyrics and Mary Jo Bang’s captivating hybrid text; and folios that honor tradition and reframe it for a thoroughly contemporary cultural moment, like Jon Davis’s Pandemia and Maggie Queeney’s The Patient.  Though some of the work was specially commissioned for the anthology, we felt it was important to also hold an open call.  In the end, we were humbled by not only the sheer volume of submissions, but the artistic vision and the quality of the writing.  This open call enabled us to present twelve established voices alongside four exciting new ones.  And because we received so many outstanding submissions, we featured many of the poets in Tupelo Quarterly’s most recent issue, TQ22. 

DD: Four Quartets, as you note in the introduction to the anthology, bears witness to life during the pandemic. It is timebound, historic, and (what Carolyn Forché has called) evidentiary in ways that other anthologies are not. Stephanie Strickland’s poem “Time-Capsule Contents” underscores, in its title, the preservative impulse of the anthology. There was also a very quick turn-around from conception to publication for this book. Could you talk about how these factors influenced your editorial work on this project?

KMD:  To help deliver such a timely book at the right moment, so that readers see their lived experience reflected in the poetry, was an honor and a privilege. In this moment of pandemic, protest, upheaval, and isolation, we felt it was important to present a project that cultivates community through the literary arts.  We at Tupelo Press have been thrilled to see Four Quartets achieving this goal, our recent zoom launch being one example.  It was heartening to see over eighty enthusiastic guests who came out to celebrate poetry—which has been, truly, a light in dark times. 

Let me just say that the completion of this timely anthology would not have been possible without Tupelo Press’s gifted staff, which includes Allison O’Keefe & Jacob Valenti, Operations Administrators; David Rossitter, Managing Editor; Kirsten Miles, Director of the 30/30 Project; Alan Berolzheimer, Consulting Editor; & Emily Bruenig, Fulfillment Coordinator.  They were instrumental in designing the anthology, sending out proofs, and gathering materials such as author bios and photos, but also fulfilling the donor rewards for the Kickstarter campaign that made the book possible.

DD: There are two collaborative section in this book, the excerpts from a long poem by Yusef Komunyakaa and Laren McClung and the poems co-written by Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito. This type of collaboration seems particularly moving and effective during a time of physical distancing. Could you discuss what you found most notable in these collaborations?

KMD:  It’s exciting to see the ways that technology has invited a spirit of collaboration even in this difficult cultural moment.  Traci and Brynn actually completed their co-authored folio long distance, so what a thrill to see them perform together during our Zoom launch.  Yusef and Laren also gave a captivating collaborative reading during our online celebration, and how great that people from all over the world could experience these wonderful performances, which shine a light on both artistic intention and collaborative process. 

DD: How did you decide on the organization/ordering of the anthology?

KMD:  We sequenced the anthology to highlight thematic and stylistic continuities.  We also wanted to create a narrative arc through the arrangement of the poetry, beginning with writers bearing witness to our current moment in the most powerful of ways, and then, moving forward to inspire a sense of hope, community, and generosity of spirit.  For this reason, we felt it was important to place Denise Duhamel’s Strength near the end of the book, for example, along with Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito’s Wild Recovery & Rick Barot’s wonderful prose pieces. 

DD: B.A. Van Sise’s stunning photographs have their own section. How do these images contextualize and converse with the poems in the anthology?

KMD:  I think of the anthology as a ledger of both history and community, of solitude and the lyric imagination.  In this respect, the photographs serve a necessary documentary purpose, while at the same time affirming the confluence of literature and the fine arts, of the ways that poetry can be illuminated by other mediums and disciplines.

DD: South Korean poet, Lee Young-Ju, translated by Jae Kim, is the only international voice in the volume. Can you talk about her poetry and the dialogue it opens with American pandemic poetry?

KMD:  I was excited to see Lee Young-ju and Jae Kim’s submission because of the sheer beauty and innovation of the poetry and the incredible skill of the translation.  But also, it places the American writers in the volume in a global context, while also evoking a sense of shared community and grief across the boundaries of nationality, language, and identity. 

DD: In the introduction to Four Quartets, you reaffirm Tupelo Press’s commitment to supporting underrepresented groups. Can you tell us more about this commitment?

KMD:  I’m so glad that you asked about this.  In addition to Four Quartets, Tupelo Press published the first anthology of indigenous American poetry in over twenty years, which places gorgeous creative work alongside essays on craft and artistic tradition.  The anthology, Native Voices, was co-edited by CMarie Fuhrman & Dean Rader.  Our catalogue is comprised of over 60% women and non-binary writers, compared to other university and trade publishers, whose ratio hovers around 30 or 40%. 

Additionally, when I first joined the staff of Tupelo Press, I felt it was important to expand and diversify our editorial process, and to that end, we have implemented panels of preliminary judges for each of our contests.  More specifically, we have hosted panels of all women and non-binary poets, as well as panels comprised of a majority of writers of color.  These preliminary judges, who represent artistic excellence across the boundaries of race, class, gender, and aesthetic standpoint, offer an opportunity to bring additional perspectives and voices into our editorial discussions.  This practice ultimately challenges me as an editor to expand my sensibility, my thinking about poetry, and to interrogate my own aesthetic preferences.  

DD: What was the most surprising, edifying, or otherwise remarkable aspect of editing this anthology?

KMD: Even in a time of isolation, it’s been wonderful to see the many forms that collaboration can take, whether it’s co-authoring a ghazal, translating, deconstructing a larger literary tradition, or reframing an artistic inheritance for our current cultural moment.  I’ve enjoyed seeing poets in conversation with visual artists and with one another, but also, it’s been inspiring to witness artistic exchange and literary community persisting even in the most adverse of circumstances.  

DD: Since this is a Meet the Press interview, can you tell us a bit about the history of the press and your involvement with it?

KMD: Jeffrey Levine founded Tupelo Press 22 years ago and released our first 5 books in 2021. Since then, we’ve published approximately 275 additional titles, and to great acclaim, always taking such care that the look and feel of our books matched the brilliance of the writing. We’ve launched so many important careers, including Ilya Kaminsky, Jennifer Militello, Matthew Zapruder, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Maggie Smith, and on and on. We’re especially proud of our recent anthologies, Native Voices and Four Quartets, and of our long-standing commitment to provide a platform for women, people of color, and LGBTQ writers.

Since joining the staff of Tupelo Press, first as Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and later as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press, I’ve been intrigued by the ways that our books bridge the gap between literature and the fine arts, whether through the creation of artisan quality editions, or through collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.  Tupelo Quarterly, the online literary publication of Tupelo Press, was created to deepen this aspect of the press’s mission and extend its presence into the digital realm.  In recent years, we’ve created a singular space for collaborative texts, poetry films, cinepoetry, sound poems, and more. 

DD: What should readers look forward to from Tupelo Press?

KMD:   I have to say, our current list of new and forthcoming titles is one of our strongest yet. We will be publishing a book of poetry and archival collages by Katy Didden: as well as Chee Brossy’s first full-length collection, Stegner fellow Corey Van Landingham’s second book, Love Letter to Who Owns the Heavens; Laurel Nakanishi’s Berkshire Prize winning collection, Ashore; a book of stunning visual poetry by Naoko Fujimoto; and a debut book of poetry by Kelly Webber, whose sheer talent and graceful metaphors astonished us during our recent July Open Reading Period. 

DD: Here are four brilliant poems from the anthology. I wanted to end with these because they are among my favorite in the anthology and because they give a hint of the range and caliber of poetry contained therein.

---

Traci Brimhall and Brynn Saito

    Dear Past

    I couldn’t do it again, that worrying. Time before 
    our wild recovery, before I learned
    my prayers in the gray kingdom, before shelter
    was a signal for burning eyelids 
    and grief tea. Tribes more ancient than memory 
    walk through you. They wander 
    the thinnest sky, place between pen and page, 
    neighbor and trigger, frontline 
    and garden: whole homelands exist 
    on faith alone. I couldn’t do it again: 
    all of the forgetting, my spirit fleeing my body 
    for another present. Do I forgive you? 
    You carry my grandmothers. I carry verses. Your panic 
    is almost mine, but I refuse 
    the enemy’s image. Truce is a mask 
    made of pressed flowers. Daughters unleash 
    a nation of broken sons. Dear replica 
    shotgun, dear unroped memory: Did I suffer enough?

---

Shane McCrae

    When Our Grandchildren Ask Us What America Was Like Before

    We lived in giant     tin eagles we used rags

    Wrapped around human bones as torches we were dogs

    Each dog in its own bird     we didn’t speak

    To each other but     yes we could talk

    Yes they could hear us yes     they didn’t answer

    Our questions     but they heard

    Us we spoke light     to light the corners too     dark for the torches

    Those shadows even light     from burning bones won’t touch     yes

 

    A god’s shadow     is cast inside

    Its body     no they weren’t gods

    No     more like noises made     music by dancers

    We made the shadows then     we searched

    The shadows then we made new shadows when we danced

    Again     we spoke around the torches no     we could-

    n’t hold them like you would we had     no hands

    We held them burning in our teeth and smiled

---

Denise Duhamel

    The Unreturning, 2020    
        (after Wilfred Owen)

    The prez calls us THUGS, has his henchmen hurl
    Teargas and flash bombs. Then he builds a Wall/
    “Baby gate” around the White House. Appalled,
    We adorn it, lauding the afterworld

    With wreathes and crosses, signs reading “Stay Woke,”
    “I can’t breathe.” His last minutes, George Floyd called
    To his momma. Tamir Rice was enthralled
    With his BB gun. Cops kick in bike spokes

    Of Brooklyn protesters. Last May, at dawn
    Police shoot Dominique Clayton, remind-
    Ing us it’s not safe to sleep while black. Drained
    Of life—Michael Brown, Sandra Bland. Guns drawn,
    Tasers zapping, America’s vile blind
    Spot. This hothouse, this “pushing daisies” chain.

---

Dora Malech

    After “The Day After My Father’s Death”

        to keep the other children safe
        from my infectious grief
        they left me in lockdown
                —Bill Knott

    Explain quarantine to children,
    says the headline. If they could
    read, we could leave the truth
    lying around for them to trip
    over, but these little ones are
    still blank and shiny as their own
    wet thumbs, so we say
    this is a one-time thing.
    We’re near the end.
    We can see them again soon,
    meaning each missed
    someone. Soon, near, one,
    can, we say. Those were the
    generic words the mini-mart
    had, so we stocked up quick,
    watched rain drip off the roof.

---

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-five books, which include Look to Your Left:  A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle (University of Akron Press, 2021); Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry (Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, 2021); Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; DIFFICULT:  Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry (Black Ocean, forthcoming); ANGEL OF THE NORTH (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming); and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which will be launched by Persea Books in the United States.  Penguin Random House Canada will also publish a Canadian edition.  Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; five residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors.

Tom Disch: "God's Big Giveaway!"

 On July 1, 2008, at 8:27 in the morning, Tom Disch posted this entry under the heading "God's Big Giveaway!" on his "live journal" blog. Under-appreciated to this day, this outstanding poet and writer -- brilliant, inventive, versatile (sci-fi author, book reviewer, theater critic) -- died by his own hand (gunshot) on July 4th, 2008.

<<<
And what's the best gift you could get from One Who is Himself a Big Idea? What else but a Big Idea of your own? So here are two of them to take up and run with--as I did with one of them once.

To wit: an Anthology of Nobel Prize Acceptance Speeches. By great writers who knew better than to ever expect such an Honor to fall on them and crush them to happy bits. Yet hasn't it been, for all the times its been misdirected to some Slobovian nobody, the Supreme Reward for any writer? Don't even the greatest seem to curdle with envy when it goes to someone else? What avails the acclaim of all one's Slobovian peers and competitors if that final feather is missing from one's cap? Finally, isn't a Nobel Acceptance Speech the one genre of writing that everyone would like a go at? Well, this anthology would be an opportunity for all the also-rans to have their day in court.

I broached the idea to some poets and novelists of my acquaintance, many of whom thought it was in the worst possible taste (and might queer their chances at the real thing?); others agreed it was a great idea, and when I got a contract. . . But the most interesting and over-the-top response was from the poet James Schuyler, since deceased.

I didn't know know he was a Mad Poet, for he kept that part of his oeuvre tucked away, out of sight. Sometimes, it seems, Schuyler was Christ, and he certainly thought a Nobel his due and an honor bound his way. My invitation, therefore, was like tacking up "King of the Jews" on the cross to which he would soon be nailed. He went bananas, and my poor anth went nowhere.

But it's still a good idea, and most writers with a sense of humor might agree. It would give them a chance to graciously acknowledge the public's applause for still unwritten masterpieces and to explain, with whatever degree of irony or sincere self-regard, what they were trying to say in all those honored tomes. Not just everyone can apply. There should be some faint likelihood of its not being entirely a pipe dream--or where is the fun or the edification? And a good advance is probably essential or the better sort of mendicant will simply reply with polite sneer. But in its ideal form wouldn't you want to read such a book enough to actually buy it?

I would like a mention on the Acknowledgments page if you do wrangle it into print.

As to Big Idea # 2, I'll get to that later.
>>>

from the archive: first posted November 1, 2008

The Many Golden Bees that Hum Inside My Heart: 3 New Books

[3 Book Recommendations by Dante Di Stefano]

The Last Orgasm
Nin Andrews
Etruscan Press, 2020

In her own words, Nin Andrews’s new collection is a “book of poems of gratitude, admiration, memories, grief, and love.” The Last Orgasm accomplishes what Andrews has accomplished throughout her body of work: to consistently write a poetry of complex intelligence, empathy, and humor; no one else in American poetry combines quite so seamlessly the metapoetic, the allusive, and the mirthful. Andrews displays an ecstasy of influence everywhere in The Last Orgasm, as she evokes, honors, and queries the likes of John Ashbery, Jorge Luis Borges, Denise Duhamel, Antonio Machado, Maureen Seaton, Tim Seibles, Walt Whitman, and many more. This is a book to be read and reread for its delights, for its wisdom, and for its acknowledgement that poetry (and the poetry of a self-unfolding-in-time) is far more heady and far more elusive and far more omnipresent and far more fleeting than any definition of it might imply. The first stanza of the poem “Last Night” conveys some of the beauty and strangeness to be found in these pages:

    Last night I dreamt
    that the bees—the many golden bees
    that hum inside my heart—
    were leaving, one by one,
    flying through a hole in the screen
    and into the night.

Every page of The Last Orgasm hums with such mystery, such sweet lack, such release.

Naming the Lifeboat
Justin Gardiner
Main Street Rag, 2020

In his essay on Robert Frost, W.H. Auden invokes Samuel Johnson to explain the aims and impetus of Frostian poetics: “The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” Justin Gardiner’s debut poetry collection, Naming the Lifeboat, recalls Auden’s Frost-by-way-of-the-good-doctor. Gardiner, who has lived in Antarctica and travelled through many remote wildernesses, writes the kind of poetry that has everything to do with joy and survival. The poems in Naming the Lifeboat traverse the South Pole, the high seas, Laos, Bolivia, the suburbs, the small towns, and the remotest regions of the United States. Gardiner explores the interior landscapes of grief, love, and pain, detailing family mental illness, romantic relationships, and everything in between. These are poems of pilgrimage, poems where a finely-calibrated wisdom leans into deep longing: “Given the traveler’s lot, / all arrival is invitation / to future loss—.” If you want to read the kind of poetry where epidermis meets bark and the mind loves the heart, this is the book for you.

Bone Chalk
Jim Reese
Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2019

Poet Jim Reese’s nonfiction debut, Bone Chalk, contains two dozen essays filled with the careful attention to detail and the emotional intelligence that characterizes his poetry. Reese draws his subject matter from a lifetime in the Great Plains and he assays the people and the landscape of this region with clarity and nuance. Formally, Reese variegates his approach to the essay, providing straightforward narrative memoirs, braided narrative essays, short lyrics, and incorporating epistolary elements; Reese also echoes poems he has written, composing essays from bumper stickers as he did in his poetry collection, Really Happy (NYQ Books, 2014). The essays' subjects range from a loving portrait of a mother-in-law to a lighthearted memoir of being a college mascot, from a lyric observation of teenagers in line at a pharmacy to a deep exploration of crime and violence in the Midwest. Perhaps the most notable essay in the collection, “Never Talk to Strangers: Twelve Years in Prisons and What Criminals Teach Me,” details Reese’s experiences teaching poetry in prisons, while exploring the personal ways violent crime has shaped his life. Even when writing about the weightiest of issues, Jim Reese employs a warmth and a humor that forms the amiable core of his aesthetic. The essays in this collection feel like affable prose poems stacked one on top of the other. If you want to feel the pulse of the heartland, Reese will guide your hand to its wrist.

WORKING SPACE, post-script: CLOSER TO HOME [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

Art calls to art; the conversation remains by design ongoing, unfinished.  I’m thinking about all pieces I didn't address. 

The very last visit I made to a museum was local--the Harvard Art Museum--to meet a friend to go upstairs to visit the conservation lab (where my better half works).  Here’s a glimpse:

Leaving the museum, not knowing it was about to close down, I looked across the inner courtyard at one of the more amazing recent acquisitions, a self-portrait by Kerry James Marshall (Untitled, 2008). 

Six feet tall and five feet wide, Marshall's painting is utterly compelling, a yin and yang of dark over light. The outstretched palette reminds me of Parmigianino’s outstretched hand, here a microcosm of a working space. The angled paintbrush dips into the black circle on the palette, black like a hole, black like the black circle of the painter’s hand.

Two years ago, I visited a class of undergraduates sharing their final Museum Studies assignments:  ekphrastic poems informed by technical study of works of art.  “My palette is the milky way,/ and my canvas is a blank slate” wrote a student who had focused all semester on Marshall’s painting:

    I am a shadow of my own image
    under the light you shine on me.

“Everyone and everything we see is a self-portrait,” suggests Terrance Hayes in his poem, "Self-Portrait as the Mind of a Camera," after the work of photographer Charles "Teenie" Harris (How To Be Drawn, Penguin, 2015).  The poem continues:

    ...What if, in your previous life,

    You were born a black man's camera?  Suppose you lived
    As something filled with a light and darkness that's defined
    By what it touches.  What if you could hold everything

    You behold in a chamber inside yourself: a sense of the existential,
    A sense that color sometimes conspires against you, a sense
    There are people who would be anonymous without you?

Perhaps the best poetic analogue to the self-portrait is the sonnet, that form with just enough room for a face, an about-face, and a final reflection.  How do we fit ourselves into or fight against the framings we inherit?  What room do we have to choose? In Hayes’ stunning recent book, American Sonnets For My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018), one sonnet begins, “I lock you into an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet,” and I think about locking gazes.  The poem ends:

    I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart.
    Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor.  It is not enough
    To love you.  It is not enough to want you destroyed.

This reminds me of Ashbery’s final address to the artist in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” The chamber in the poem where self and reflection are facing off has become the kind of chamber that holds a bullet:

    Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,
    Offer it no longer as a shield or greeting,
    The shield of a greeting, Francesco:
    There is room for one bullet in the chamber:
    Our looking through the wrong end
    Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed
    Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately
    Among the features of the room, an invitation
    Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"
    Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely
    Enough how it wasn't.

What is the end or the aim of a self-portrait?  In another Hayes sonnet, one obsessed with endings, every sentence in the poem ends with “life.”  The poems Hayes reflects on challenge us to reflect on our life sentences:

    Rilke ends his sonnet "Archaic Torso of Apollo saying
    "You must change your life."  James Wright ends "Lying
    In a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island,
    Minnesota" saying "I have wasted my life."  Ruth Stone ends
    "A Moment" saying "You do not want to repeat my life."
    A minute seed with a giant soul kicking inside it at the end
    And beginning of life.  After the opening scene where
    A car bomb destroys the black detective's family, there are
    Several scenes of our hero at the edge of life.  A shootout
    In an African American Folk Museum, a shootout
    In the middle of an interstate rest stop parking lot,
    A barn shootout endangering the farm life.  I live a life
    That burns a hole through life, that leaves a scar for life,
    That makes me weep for another life.  Define life.

 

WORKING SPACE: WAITING ROOMS [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

In January, I flew to see the Vija Celmins exhibition at the Met Breuer – the last flight, the last exhibition, as it so happened, of the year.  Here's the closest thing to a "Self-Portrait" in Celmins’ work:  a meticulous drawing/collage of a tiny envelope addressed to herself (from her mother), with separately drawn stamps: a house, waves, clouds—but also fire, explosion.

It reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "In the Waiting Room," in which the child (in Worcester, Massachusetts) is suddenly galvanized by the O of pain of her aunt's cry from the dentist's office, an O that somehow is and is not her own. 

        But I felt, you are an I,
        You are an Elizabeth,
        You are one of them.
        Why should you be one, too?

A self-address implies a dislocation.  When I flew to New York I was suffering with shingles; it flared along the nerve branch from my spine down my arm to my hand—the nerve I felt when I lifted a cup of coffee, or a pen.  I had a hunch that Celmins art would teach me something about what nerves are – strands of electrical impulses?  Were they the fibers of my being (did my being have fibers?)? Celmins’ astonishing renderings of spiderwebs, of the surfaces of waves, of cosmos after cosmos of (apparently) pulsing stars – the acuteness of her eye, yoked to the patience of that hand:  when I stood in the gallery the work absorbed me, helped me to find and lose myself.  Art sees you; poems read you.

I was not prepared, this summer, for the utter lucidity with which John Ashbery’s long poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” reflected back to me the pressure and yearning of shut-in days, even from its opening lines:   

        As Parmigianino did it, the right hand
        Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
        And swerving easily away, as though to protect
        What it advertises.  A few leaded panes, old beams,
        Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together
        In a movement supporting the face, which swims
        Toward and away like the hand
        Except that it is in repose.

Yes, that’s the gesture of the COVID dream in which you reach toward someone and then at the last minute realize you mustn’t and pull your hand away.  For me, a miracle of Ashbery’s opening lines is that even as he tells you so plainly what is there, and so precisely and technically how Parmigianino went about making what we see (as Vasari wrote), he is able--as effortlessly as the light arriving--to make a place in his poem to establish a soul:

        The time of day or the density of light
        Adhering to the face keeps it
        Lively and intact in a recurring wave
        Of arrival.  The soul establishes itself.
        But how far can it swim out through the eyes
        And still return safely to its nest?  The surface
        Of the mirror being convex, the distance increases
        Significantly; that is, enough to make the point
        That the soul is captive, treated humanely, kept
        In suspension, unable to advance much farther
        Than your look as it intercepts the picture.

Marianne Moore writes, in “When I Buy Pictures”--or, as she amends the act in the first lines of her poem, “what is closer to the truth, / when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor”—this is what matters most:

        it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
        it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

There’s something of this in Ashbery’s poem and Parmigianino’s portrait, in the ways we register most acutely now how much it matters to be humanly face to face.  “Do you not see,” Keats asks in a letter, “how it takes a world of pains and troubles to school an intelligence and make a soul?”

        The soul has to stay where it is,
        Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
        The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
        Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
        Posing in this place.  It must move
        As little as possible.  This is what the portrait says.
        But there is in that gaze a combination
        Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
        In its restraint that one cannot look for long.
        The secret is too plain, the pity of it smarts,
        Makes hot tears spurt:  that the soul is not a soul,
        Has no secret, is small, and it fits
        Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

I wish we could start over and take five days to keep reading Ashbery’s poem, the way it moves in and out of the painting, a studio, a day, the breeze turning the pages.  But we’re out of time.

WORKING SPACE: READING / NOT READING [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

This is the kind of reader I’d like to be:

In the spring, as a way to keep “meeting” during lockdown, my friend Cammy and I would talk twice a week about writing.  Because we were having trouble reading anything in a sustained way—the mind would sputter or fizzle or veer away--I proposed (only half-joking) not-reading Rilke’s Duino Elegies.  Instead of fighting against it, our reading would tolerate and even embrace interruption, distraction, digression, frustration, etc.  The reading would be our zigzagging between.  So that, for example, when “The First Elegy” asks (in Edward Snow’s translation),

            Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angel’s
            Orders?

the answer could come from the jackhammers digging up the pavement half a block away, or the honk band practicing in a neighbor’s yard, or the videos of Italian balconies, or the Berklee School of Music virtual online choir singing What the world needs now is love sweet love, or the blue jay on the branch outside my window, springing up and down, up and down, as if he has read James Wright's poem and knows that “the branch will not break.”

Already, I misremember: I am sure that Cammy and I sat together on my back porch (porch for which I have never been so grateful), instead of calling each other, as we did, to read the poems.  Sometimes I’d stop to take a picture of the birds on the feeder with my phone; their comings and goings became part of the poem. The elegies themselves seemed more intense, not less, for letting themselves be broken into--and out of--in this way.  The last of the elegies, the tenth, offers this wish:

          One day, at the end of the nightmare of knowing,
          may I emerge singing praises and jubilation to assenting Angels.
          May I strike my heart’s keys clearly, and may none fail
          because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings.

It’s the emphatic repetition of the wish that strikes an echoing chord in me, and my eye keeps zigzagging:  in fits and starts, the feeling intensifies.  Is it here, the emotional architecture of the poem?

           may I,-- 
           May I,--

           May the tears,--

                                 How will I cherish,--
           Had I only,--

                                                      How we waste,--

          We study,--
                                                                   Whereas –

I try to puzzle my way through the German on the left-hand page, wondering about the wish to “strike my heart’s keys clearly” – Is that a piano? 

            Den klar geschlagenen Hammern des Herzens

Are there keys in the German, or only hammers?  I can’t tell.  While I’m leaning over the page, a little bee – a honeybee, dark, small furry – lands with a tap, precisely on the verb geschlagenen.  She stays for a while, just gently vibrating there.

Over the spring and the summer, sometimes it surprised us what was easy or hard to not-read this way.  Mrs. Dalloway, for example, leapt into focus.  Had I never registered before that Clarissa Dalloway is recovering from the 1918 flu?  Of course, there were other kinds of crucial reading going on that I cannot speak to here.

[The great John Lewis died.  I read and cannot more heartily recommend his memoir, Walking with the Wind.]

*

In August, I proposed to Cammy that we try reading John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, a poem like a continuous soap bubble blown from a great big hoop, one bubble elongating, blowing through the next.  Not-reading Ashbery together was a great surprise, perhaps the most satisfying work we’d taken on. 

I knew I wanted to write about it here, for the blog—but wanted to revisit what I’d scribbled in the book itself.  It’s one of my old crumbling books, almost read to death.  If I don’t want to lose any pages, I should probably be carrying it around in a plastic bag.  Could I find it anywhere?  Not upstairs, not down.  Lucky to be at last (after retiring) in one house, one state instead of always traveling back and forth—the book I wanted to put my hand on always, by definition, where I was not.  This morning, at last, it turned up.  I had forgotten: the last time I’d read it, it was out on the back porch.  As we’d talked about the poem, a tiny gray feather had drifted onto the page, then away from the page and across the round porch table.  I’d caught it and closed it carefully into the book.

The Godfather of Trolling, or Who Was Lucian? [by Michael Fontaine}

One hundred years ago, in April 2020, we were lucky to host Michael Fontaine as our guest author, just as his timely translation of Vincent Obsopoeus's How to Drink: A Classical Guide to the Art of Imbibing (Princeton) came to print. Michael continues to explore this subject and has recently published a companion piece in Classical Wisdom Litterae. Here's an excerpt with a link to the full essay. The publisher has generously agreed to drop the paywall for the November issue. A bonus: check out the stunning illustrations, especially those of the Dürer frescoes, for which Michael needed special permission to share. 

Continue reading . . . 

-- sdl

ps. Click here for parts one, two, three, four, and five of Michael's April blog posts.

WORKING SPACE: BALANCE [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

A poem, a painting, a poem.  Dickinson, Vermeer, Stevens.

Here's Emily Dickinson's poem, "There's a certain Slant of light" (#258 in the Johnson edition, #320 in the Franklin edition):

    There's a certain Slant of light,
    Winter Afternoons--
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes--

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us--
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference,
    Where the Meanings, are--

    None may teach it--Any--
    "Tis the Seal Despair--
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air--

    When it comes, the Landscape listens--
    Shadows--hold their breath--
    When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death--

This poem takes me back to Friday morning services in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, to the columnar quiet and then the first blast from the organ, that pressure:  I feel the heft.  The clamor that framed -- and punctuated -- our time in that cool space.   

“Balance” is a verb.  Poems perform balancing acts.  In the last stanza of Dickinson’s poem, we balance, briefly, with the listening landscape, the shadows holding their breath, between the coming and going of the Slant of light.  The poem makes room for that; the sentences make room.  Listening space, breathing space.

A certain Slant of light streams in the window in Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance, alighting on her face, her hand, the twin pans of the balance, her other hand balancing lightly on the table.  In the winter of 1995, I had tickets to see the Vermeer Exhibition at the National Gallery—but the show was closed by a government shutdown.  On the last day before my flight away, when the show briefly reopened, I was in the long line waiting in the cold to get in.  And the crush!  Impossible to linger in front of a painting, to approach it slowly from across the room.  That mattered, of course – but it felt as if it didn’t matter, as if the focus and balance in the paintings invited me in.   Almost pressed against The Lacemaker (barely the size of a sheet of note paper) I lean with the woman in her toward her pins and bobbins, and the almost invisible strands threading between them.  Although her face is towards us, in my memory I’m somehow looking over her shoulder, as if steadying myself to do her work. 

“Still” is a verb.  Vermeer’s Woman Holding a Balance stills us – not by freezing us, but by offering us a balance; we slow down until our stillness matches the stillness seeming to arrive in the painting.  A momentary stay against confusion. Our breathing could unsettle the golden pans.

Less than ten years before Vermeer painted this painting, an immense explosion (90,000 pounds of gunpowder, stored in a convent), devastated Delft.  I don’t think his paintings shut that explosion out; instead, I think their fragile balancing acts are performed humbly, aware of the threat of chaos they might counter.

The reader in Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” leans in the summer night above his page like Vermeer’s Lacemaker over her lace:

    The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

    The house was quiet and the world was calm.
    The reader became the book; and summer night

    Was like the conscious being of the book.
    The house was quiet and the world was calm.

    The words were spoken as if there was no book,
    Except that the reader leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
    The house was quiet because it had to be.

    The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
    The access of perfection to the page.

    And the world was calm.  The truth in a calm world,
    In which there is no other meaning, itself

    Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
    Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Just now, the “calm world” in Stevens’ poem feels wished for, rather than achieved.  The fulcrum in the poem comes in the sixth and seventh lines, where the reader

    …leaned above the page,

    Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
    The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

    The summer night is like a perfection of thought....

Bent.  Inclination.  In the pandemic winter, I enter into this poem’s wanting.  The smoothly unspooling phrases tense and catch on these intermediate commas, and bunch up in the much most of a wish that can’t quite manage to smooth itself out.  The poem’s perhaps not, as it seems, an assertion or description of calm, but a balancing act.

WORKING SPACE: GET CLOSER [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

It's James Thurber's birthday today.  In his quasi-fairy tale, The Thirteen Clocks, time is frozen; the warm hand of Saralinda can do nothing to set the clocks ticking again.  I've always loved its strange mix of logic/magic, as when the Golux offers this instruction:  "If you can touch the clocks and never start them, then you can start the clocks and never touch them." "Hold your hand this far away," he tells Saralinda. "Now that far.  Closer.  Now a little farther back.  A little farther.  There!  I think you have it!  Do not move!"

That space between the hand and the clock, like the distance between the poem and the work of art.

*

Ten years ago, my students were reading poems about Caravaggio's painting, "Conversion on the Way to Damascus."  It offers a fantastically foreshortened view of Saul/Paul on his back on the ground, almost under the feet of the horse he's fallen from, his arms wide apart as if forced open by the light.  Behind the horse and under Saul's back, everything is black.  It's a great, strange painting.  But when I tried to show it to them, the projector blew its bulb.  Blank wall.  Had I been waiting for that to happen?  We were not in rural Ohio, but--for that lucky semester--in Rome, a twenty-minute walk from the Piazza del Popolo.  We get up, go out, and hit the cobbled pavement.

Elizabeth Bowen, in A Time in Rome, insists that "knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through the thinning shoe-leather." We sweated our way along the crowded sidewalks of the Via di Ripetta, eventually spilling out off-axis into the wide piazza.  Across the way, there's a billboard half the expanse of the church wall:  just a line of writing and a tiny car.  Avvicinati di piu, it says.  "Come closer."

Does it matter what it's selling?  That's what we've been trying to do--come closer to the painting.  We cross the piazza, but just as we arrive at Santa Maria del Popolo, the doors are closing for a service.  It's not for so long that we've missed our chance for the day.  Just enough to make us wait.  We sit outside on the steps and re-read that morning's poems:  Thom Gunn's "In Santa Maria del Popolo" (1958), Stanley Plumly's "Comment on Thom Gunn's 'In Santa Maria del Popolo' Concerning Caravaggio's The Conversion of Paul"(2000), and Paul Otremba's "Surfing for Caravaggio's Conversion of Paul"(2008).  In all three poems, getting close to the painting is crucial to feeling what it wants us to see.  Gunn's poem sets the scene in the narrow chapel where the painting hangs:

     Waiting for when the sun an hour less
     Conveniently oblique makes visible
     The painting on one wall of this recess
     By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
     I see how shadow in the painting brims
     With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
     But a dim horse's haunch and various limbs,
     Until the very subject is in doubt.

Gunn waits to see the light.  Plumly, responding to Gunn, puts his lire in the lumen box to light up the painting.  Otremba, following in the literary but not literal footsteps of the other two, enters the keywords, "Caravaggio, painter, Santa Maria del Popolo" into his computer.

     I don't have to go to Italy
     to stand in line for a conversion,
     or to be, as the poet says, still falling.

In fact, the computer gives Otremba too much:  other versions Caravvagio painted of the scene, other Caravaggios, an intensifying chiaroscuro inducing a vertigo of its own, and a sense (Otremba writes) that even "If I were closer, I wouldn't understand." When, at last, we go in, there is no place to stand in the tiny Cerasi Chapel.  When we see it, it knocks us back, we are too close.  Caravaggio wants us to enter Saul's experience, wants the painting to be difficult, almost impossible to see. 

Is it perverse of me not want to show you the painting at all?  I'd almost rather go back to Alice Fulton's "Close," which, like Caravaggio's painting, situates us

...an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me

in full frost.  We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.

Sitting near the window of a coffee shop (this was a year ago, after looking at the Frankenthaler exhibition), I thought about these paintings and these poems, until the window washer came and erased my face.

WORKING SPACE: CLOSE [by Jennifer Clarvoe]

I am thinking these days about one of my favorite ekphrastic poems, Alice Fulton's "Close," the first poem in Felt (W. W. Norton, 2001).  It responds to Joan Mitchell's "White Territory," but I hadn't seen the painting when I fell for the poem.  What I love about it is the way it tries to get me close to the painting, how it makes me feel the tricky, charged intimacy of that encounter.  Right-justified, the lines run right up to the edge of the page, as if pushing us to see what isn't there.  The poem opens like this:

To take it farther would mean dismantling doorframes,
so they unpacked the painting's cool chromatics
where it stood, shrouded in gray tarpaulin
near a stairwell in a space so tight
I couldn't get away from it.
I could see only parts of the who,
I was so close.

I was almost in the painting,
a yin-driven, frost-driven thing
of mineral tints
in the museum's vinegar light.
To get any distance, the canvas or I
would have to fall down the stairs
or dissolve through a wall.
It put me in mind of winter...

I miss being that close to paintings in this pandemic winter.  Scale, proximity, lighting, relation to the human in the room.  One of the last actual exhibitions I went to see, roughly a year ago, was at the Princeton Art Museum, of Helen Frankenthaler prints, room after gorgeous room.  The show was called "Seven Types of Ambiguity," after William Empson's essay on reading poetry.  The prints were all glass-faced, so my photos bring back my own floating through the rooms:

I gave up long ago trying to avoid reflections in the glass; I like their memorializing the visit, my having been with the art, the way the prints began to transform the space I moved through, behind my back.

Fulton puts us "in mind of winter" to conjure not only Mitchell's scumbled whites, but also to invite the company of Wallace Stevens' "Snow Man," who must have a mind of winter not to think "of any misery in the sound of the wind."  The snow man, who,

...nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Some of the most powerful non-representation art makes us confront this:  the x-ing out of the human in the scene, a conversion into radically negative capability.  How can one enter into what is happening here?

The ending of Fulton's poem returns to Stevens, shifting from where we've put the painting to where the painting puts us.  It's not, whatever the winter, a cold response:

You put me in mind of winter where I live,
a winter so big I'll have to dismantle myself
to admit it: the always winter
and its consolations of flint.
This is not an illustration.
It's what I saw when the airbag opened,
slamming me with whiteness like the other side.
I came to consciousness on braced arms,
pushing my face from the floor
in order to breathe,
an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me

in full frost.  We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.
Though we could see only parts of the whole,
we felt its tropism.
We leaned toward, liked,
its bitter lungs.  We almost were that
winter tissue and cranial colored paint.
We were almost in the picture.  We were close.
We left each other a note.

"We leaned toward, liked, / its bitter lungs."

Here's another, closer picture from the Frankenthaler exhibition.  I'm closer to the glass and it's started to swallow me up--though maybe you can see my arm holding the camera to the right.  Someone in the middle is falling down a rabbit hole.  Into the painting?  Out of it?  "We were almost in the picture.  We were close. / We left each other a note."

Because I so miss this being-with-pictures, as I miss so many other kinds of being with, the poems (ekphrastic and otherwise) that give felt dimension back to me, that get me to see feelingly, are the ones I want most now.

The Great(est) Game [by John Emil Vincent]

In today's New York Times, a place I know we all rush for the latest and "greatest" in poetry criticism, David Orr asks, in "The Great(ness) Game,  basically, what will happen when THE generation of GREAT poets is gone. 

       Orr begins with noting that John Ashbery is the first living poet to have a volume in the Library of America.  And this leads Orr to ponder: "What will we do when Ashbery and his generation are gone? Because for the first time since the early 19th century, American poetry may be about to run out of greatness."

       Hit the 7-elevens! Stock up on greatness before the twister hits!

       First off, “Great,” is a sloppy term, something to which Orr’s pile-up of potential definitions and questions, mostly rhetorical questions, gestures. To give him some credit, the definition of “great” is his topic; but notice the plague of single words meat hooked in quotation marks (“greatness,” “great,” “boring,” “good,” “major,” “serious,” &c.)—and THEN notice when Orr increasingly decides meat hooks aren’t necessary.  Words whose meaning he begins by suggesting are up for grabs, are by the end of the essay, grabbed. The start of the essay is addicted to quotation marks on terms, while the end, I’m not sure if he thought this was subtle, features few. For a piece dealing with definition he plays faster and looser with the indefinite and definite than any writer I’ve ever read. Defining “great,” he opines, is an “increasingly blurry business.” [these quotation marks are mine—from now on I will bold the words he himself puts in quotation marks.]  However “increasing blurry,” the term “great” is at the beginning of the essay more often then not held in quotation marks, and, by the end, great stands naked, proud, and apparently self-evidently in focus. 

          1. “The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business.”

             Orr blames this on postmodernism’s questioning of “Truth, Beauty, [and] Justice.” But simple sense might tell us that as history progresses, we have fewer and fewer filters (years, critics, just plain old historic contingency) through which poetry must pass to get to us eager readers. Contemporary poetry is precisely that, contemporary, these poems haven’t been around long enough to have dependable gauges of “greatness” even were we to wish to make such questionable judgments. And there is the adventure! There is the delight, the pleasure, the challenge for the contemporary reader. I do not for one read a poem to decide, “Is this great?” I read it to see if it invents, if it makes me run out and read it to all my overly-patient friends, if I can’t stop running through lines of it as I fall asleep, if it gives me insight into big or little questions I’ve been puzzling over. Or if it shapes in language something that has been floating in the often addled ether of my thinking. Or if a new device makes me see language and its possibility in an unexpected way.

"The Ambivalence of Being in Glück’s 'The Triumph of Achilles'" [by Caroline Malone]

Opening the box. Opening the book. Opening the self. What often initially emerges from opening is just what Pandora unwittingly released into the world: fear, ignorance, jealousy, and hatred. And just as often, agency has either been denied or stripped from the one who lifts the lid, or in the case of Pandora, uncorks the jar. This swirling cloud of misery easily blinds us to the hope trapped inside the vessel of gifts from the gods and goddesses. In opening, we release boundaries either permanently or temporarily, and for varying lengths of time and amounts of space. For many, the potential discovery, insight, and growth are worth suffering, with the absence of clarity ultimately causing deeper damage to the self. Experiencing the self must become communal for the price of isolation is the death of identity, the soul. Helen Vendler writes that art, especially poetry, is a means by which one identity reaches out to another, tries to explain itself to another, gathers images to define its shape, to clarify itself, to author itself. A constant, ever-changing business, the desire for terminus is intense, and the existential angst can devour one. There is great relief in declaring something finished, beyond change.

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

In the poetry of Louise Glück, the boundaries of self are destroyed and recovered through the dialectic of identity formation. Like Kali, the speaker in Glück’s poems both creates and destroys the world of the self in hope of reconciling with death and accepting the way things are (reality). Our identities are constructed, according to the modern paradox, by others. And one’s inner authority struggles against outside disabling conceptions to accomplish the self. Yet, identity is provisional, constantly evolving in slender moments of time and space, sometimes almost imperceptibly. It is also through these multiple perspectives that Glück comes to know and understand the self. Her lyric personae become vehicles through which the poet discovers and authors both the linguistic, ephemeral self and the contingent, embodied self. The tension produced between these incarnations is what makes

Glück’s work so powerful. The evolving self, constantly subject to revision, is composed of different voices, is most safely explored on the page, yet to enter language is to abandon human relation.
In The Triumph of Achilles, Louise Glück records the process of creating the self. These early poems explore the tentative movement from emotional isolation to humanity. For Glück, leaving the safety of the mind for the page is a risky endeavor for even something as controlled as the poetic lyric posses the power to expose too much of the self, thus inviting vulnerability. Yet the desire for intimacy requires action, and Glück accomplishes this through the form of the poem. It is the tension between what can and cannot be said, through the possibilities and limitations of language that Glück explores being and non-being. The lyric form's power to contain yet release, to hide yet reveal, to dissolve yet embody allows Glück to cautiously test the boundaries between two equally attractive states: the protected self of Platonic forms and the vulnerable self of the assailable world.

In The Iliad, the great warrior Achilles embodies the perfectionist qualities of the Greek heroic age. He admits there are better orators, more clever men amongst his ranks, yet he knows his strengths, and therefore has lived for honor, for his standing in the eyes of others; for Achilles, life is less important than his reputation. By the tenth year of the Trojan War, Achilles has achieved his goal of surpassing all others to become the greatest hero among the Greeks. Isolated from the Greek troops, Achilles is consumed by his uncontrollable rage, a rage that is a curse and a gift from the gods. Yet despite the hero’s temperamental, impulsive, selfish character, Achilles’ withdrawal from battle provides him the opportunity for discovery and allows for the truly defining moment in his mortal existence. Sulking in his tent over Agamemnon’s insult, Achilles explains to Odysseus why he will not rejoin the fight:

Fate is the same for the man who holds back,
The same if he fights hard.
We are all held in a single honor, the brave with the weaklings.
A man dies still if he has done nothing, as one who has done much.
Nothing is won for me, now that my heart has gone through its afflictions
In forever setting my life on the hazard of battle. (Book 9, 318-322)

The dishonor Achilles has suffered leads him to question the basis of his life, and in his bitterness, he encounters emptiness previously unknown to him. However, his insight is squandered as Achilles chooses to remain selfishly centered on what he might personally gain or suffer. Confronted with this new self-knowledge, Achilles’ boundaries must shift. He cannot remain by his ships forever – he must decide whether to sail for home where he will live a long, undistinguished life, or stay to fight where he will further enhance his reputation but die in the process. It is only upon the death of the beloved that Achilles is moved to act. When he hears of Patroclus’ death, Achilles is transformed through the pain of loss. It is not, after all, his prowess on the battlefield that earns the hero victory but rather his entry into the fallen world of the mortal. Being almost a god, Achilles appears to have seldom experienced such passion other than his rage. He does not know what it means to be fully human. But the pain of separation from the human, Patroclus, leads Achilles to grief and the expression of his grief takes form in his particularly brutal stalking, killing, and defilement of Hector.

Glück’s The Triumph of Achilles becomes a metaphor for the human condition as it charts the evolution of the self in all its incarnations. Throughout the collection, the self’s choice remains constant: to enter the world of human relation or to live in the perfected world of the mind. Glück’s speaker locates the struggle for the self in the argument that because the body will perish, the autonomous self will be betrayed; the dependence of the self / spirit the mortal frustrates autonomy. Glück’s compromise is the poem, the linguistic self. Neither fully vulnerable nor entirely exposed, the self on the page comes as close to perfection and protection as possible. Glück’s compromise, then, is the divided self. Like Achilles, who is part mortal (Peleus, his father) and part immortal (Thetis, his mother), Glück’s speakers celebrate and lament existence. The poems in The Triumph of Achilles explore the opposing human longings of creating the self, creating boundaries, and giving the self to the other, thus losing distinction, which threatens identity. The loneliness of one and the pain of the other.

The signature of Glück’s poetry is tone. Particularly in the first four collections, the poems are subtle, calm, and controlled, embodying stoicism and endurance. Furthermore, Glück uses understatement, metaphor through statement to create the complex, evolving self. In The Triumph of Achilles, the self is explored in a mythical context, chiefly through Biblical and Greek classical subjects. Glück’s use of artifact and story revision allows her to create a distance from her own life necessary to observe the self with disinterestedness, thus simultaneously opening and protecting the boundaries of the self. The self embedded in the myth and the form of the poem becomes the lyric persona. The speaker in “Mythic Fragment” is Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit through the interference of the father who grants her request for freedom by changing her into a tree. Apollo’s passion represents a threat to Daphne’s autonomous self and therefore she is unable to retain her boundaries. To avoid having the self subsumed by one male, the female relinquishes agency to another, the father; Daphne renounces power in exchange for protection. The paradox is, of course, that the protection also limits the self, cuts it off from human relation, including the father who abandons Daphne to isolation in her new form. This altered self is captive in the form of a tree, an object that is hard and incapable of feeling: a petrified self. Daphne must choose between beauty and erotic desire (Apollo) and safety and confinement (the father), and in either case, the autonomous self is negated. To give in to erotic desire is to lose control of the self, is to draw closer to one’s body and the body of the other, and the resulting pleasure adds to the mixture forcing the speaker to acknowledge mutability. If one never partakes, then one is never empty.

“Mythic Fragment,” then, is a metaphor for the self’s struggle to find a form, to find a voice, to exist on its own terms. The structure of the poem, 18 two beat lines, mimics the fragmented self it portrays. Much of what we know about Greek antiquity comes to us in pieces, quite often with major sections of the vase, temple, painting missing. The story is incomplete. In the middle of line 11, the brief narrative comes to a full stop just as Daphne’s self becomes arrested. Upon realizing the price she must pay to preserve the autonomous self, Daphne tells her reader:

When
the god arrived, I was nowhere,
I was in a tree forever. (9-11)

The remaining lines constitute a direct address to the reader, the tone, released through spare diction and imagery, initially sarcastic as the speaker asks us to “pity Apollo,” then becoming stoic and detached:

--as
I stiffened in the god’s arms,
my father made
no other sign from the water. (14-17)

At the end of the poem, the father remains unresponsive, the father-daughter relationship empty. In “Mythic Fragment,” the speaker, Daphne, has no chance to become whole. Although Glück does not consider herself a feminist poet, the fact remains that “Mythic Fragment,” as do many of her other poems, gives voice to the female trapped in patriarchy. Once again, the embodied self betrays the authentic self or spirit. It is the form of the poem that confirms identity.

Whereas the speaker in “Mythic Fragment” clearly rejects the prospect of union with another, the speaker of “Hawk’s Shadow” reveals ambivalence toward the other. Glück uses the image of the hawk carrying its kill as a metaphor for the speaker’s relationship to her lover. As the predator hawk soars through the sky, the single shadow cast on the ground is composed of the living and the dead. The shadow is an omen of separation. Here, Glück imagines again that giving the self to the other results in violence and thus damage to the autonomous self. As the speaker remembers the lovers’ embrace, she notes that once the hawk and its prey merged into shadow “they disappeared.” In response, there was discovery, the emergence of the self, in the speaker’s mind:

And I thought:
one shadow. Like the one we made,
you holding me. (10-12)

The structure of the poem emphasizes the passivity of the speaker and the agency of the natural world, which she sees as hostile. The image of the hawk, its kill and the shadow they create is bounded by statement in lines 1-4. Next, the vivid image of the predator in lines 5-9 is followed by another statement in the last three lines. Statement “embraces” what destroys, creating boundaries that isolate the self. In the shadow of the hawk and its kill, the speaker sees the archetype of the self, or rather the self that is created in the relationship with the lover. The monosyllabic words and enjambed lines create tension and speed the pacing of the poem, expressing the speaker’s anxiety over the relationship. The poem ends with the simile expressed as a sentence fragment, which reflects the speaker’s sense of the self being engulfed. Moving from statement to image of predator and prey back to the abstract shadow, embodied existence is contained within the boundaries of the mind where it may be controlled and protected.

Relationship is seen as a test of endurance in part eight of “Marathon.” The nine section poem documents the end of a love affair and the speaker’s discovery that time ultimately takes all love away. But time can also slow or even stop time in the speaker’s mind. In “Song of Invisible Boundaries,” the speaker addresses her lover as she struggles to locate the self in time and space. One moment in dream the next awake, the disembodied speaker still floats in post-coital disorientation. As a result, even location in the physical world becomes difficult to determine:

Last night I dreamed we were in Venice;
today, we are in Venice. Now, lying here,
I think there are no boundaries to my dreams,
nothing we won’t share. (1-4)

On reflection, the speaker admits that intimacy with the other consumes the self, “this lying in the bright light without distinction” (13). Yet the speaker locates authenticity in the linguistic self; the sensual, corporeal self is allowed minimal expression. By the end of this section, the speaker sees that grief does not fully transform the self; there will always be the body’s memory of the union.

In the title poem “The Triumph of Achilles,” Glück further explores and creates the linguistic self through the mask of the legendary Achilles. Myth allows Glück the distance to approach what is most intimate and vulnerable – to love another human being. The godlike Achilles finds himself grief stricken over the loss of his beloved Patroclus. This loss forces Achilles to confront his own mortality. With these new boundaries of self, Achilles is able to achieve his greatest triumph: Becoming truly human. This grief makes Achilles fully alive and initiates him completely into the fallen, mortal world of humans. Observing the self through the Achilles—Patroclus relationship, Glück discovers that separation from the other can be more devastating to the self than intimacy. When Patroclus wears Achilles’ armor, he in effect becomes Achilles and for a time, the two men merge into one identity. By reclaiming his armor and rescuing Patroclus’ corpse, Achilles rescues the self and honors union simultaneously.

For the most part, The Triumph of Achilles expresses Glück’s ambivalence of being. From the stringent opening lyric “Mock Orange,” a poem in which the speaker expresses her revulsion with sex and its power to destroy the self, to the closing “Horse,” in which the other is finally given a voice, a voice that attempts through empathy to reinforce the bond between lovers, Glück charts the self in transition, in constant flux. Yet that Glück chose to title the book The Triumph of Achilles suggests that the developing identity on these pages acknowledges more consistently that perhaps although need and desire threaten the autonomous self, they do not necessarily reveal a defective selfhood. After all, Achilles was only one half immortal.

-- Caroline Malone

from the archive; first posted January 26, 2012

Dispatch From A Distance - Roads And Seeds, A Trace [by Cara Benson]

“There is a rhetoric to walking.” - Michel de Certeau

Most everyone I know right now is alternating between sheer terror over politics (I’ll leave it at that) and a desperate search for respite in order to manage the panic. Same here. It’ll come as no surprise to anyone who’s read any of my previous Dispatches that I take to walking when trouble is afoot (sorry). It gets me out of my interior, both my four walls and my mind, and into the body and the outer world. As I am physically capable, which I try not to take for granted, I can just go. I don’t need to have a thing sorted out but eventually how to get home.

Of course walking is ripe for metaphor, that time-honored mechanism for making sense of the world, especially if one is writing about it. As I am walking to interrupt myself, to disrupt the mind’s search, seize, categorize, repeat, I will leave it to the reader’s imagination to make of this string of sentences what she will. In fact, I’m in a mood to write a series of digressions and left turns, similar, at times, to how I walk (this grove, that path, over a hill, why not). Again, so long as I make it back.

I’ll start off with a confession: I trespass. Beyond being of European descent in the US, what I mean here is that I sheepishly tiptoe past POSTED signs all the time. In my defense, I’m not traipsing across someone’s back yard. There are thousands of wooded acres around me that host no dwellings. I do not hunt, rip it up on ATVs, nor leave detritus behind (these are often the concerns) – quite the opposite. I typically pick up any litter I come across (Mylar balloons know no borders) or pull dead branches from squashing new growth. I am very careful where I tread so as not to tear moss, for example, from a rock. Not to create mud, to cause erosion. I pay close attention when I am walking through what I will call raw woods, when I am not traveling a previous path that has shown over time that the forest will be just fine with this trail boring through it. Whether on private or public terrain, I am acutely pained to tramp down green, to step on an unsuspecting red eft, to leave a trace. Sometimes it’s just easier to walk a road.

One of the draws for moving up on the hill where I live was that even the paved routes stretching out in the vicinity of my home hold a boundary with much wildness. This area is one of NY State’s largest contiguous forests. Seasonal waterfalls, rampant wildflowers, long stretches of wooded land or meadows fill as much of the lengths along these roads as do homes, though those are here and I am curious about them, too. As I wander roadside, these walks can lend themselves to notions of rural flâneusery. I am out of step with utilitarian travel, as the urban flâneuse is by strolling city sidewalks as she does. What is it I am browsing if not shop windows?

Dogs. I know where all the dogs are on these walks. Or should I say that they make themselves known. Some are more aggressive in their pronouncements than others and I make guesses about their people based on this behavior, like we do with parents and their offspring. I could be wrong, of course, but sometimes the humans are outside or yell from an open window and one in particular seems hellbent on confirming my suspicions. (For the record, I adore puppies and love to nuzzle the noses of dogs, but not all canines have been raised as snugglers. Just saying.)

Other creatures that are plentiful out here: chickens. They seem to be fearless in foraging right at the edge of passing cars or trucks. Roadside gullies must have the best pickings. I am proud to say I have become a pretty good clucker.

Site of the heron sighting

And once, a Great Blue Heron! Less than 20 feet from me I spotted his stately, curved-neck repose atop leggy stalks, raptly focused on a swampish watering hole for a catch for dinner. So sleekly upright. I caught his blended colors (not as starkly blue as one might expect) and slim-limbed silhouette among the young trees and stopped on a dime, just behind a larger trunk. Slowly, I moved back into sightline. Holy, the biodiverse world is a glory. I stood with him forever (3 minutes) until he powered off.

Then there’s Duck Duck and Buzz, two white fowl with orange bills, best buds, that have their own homemade pond in front of a neighbor’s house down the road in the north direction. Buzz is much bigger than Duck Duck. Or is it the other way around? The bigger one (let’s agree on Buzz) had come to my neighbor with a sibling. They were deeply bonded, I’m told, and when Buzz’s sib died, he was inconsolable. My neighbor (I can’t remember her name even to get it switched. No! It’s Laurie! Or is that the woman who lives down the side road?). Whatever her name, she, too, became distraught, caring as she did about her despondent Buzz, until one day driving along a county route down off the hill with traffic speeding by was young, soon-to-be-named Duck Duck on the side of the road. She turned her car around and pulled up beside him. Legend has it that she opened the door and Duck Duck hopped in. Now the two of them, the ducks, are inseparable, and LaurieLisaLiz has a superb set up for them. Lilypads in the pond, room to roam, nighttime digs for sleeping in the slightly abandoned barn along a path in the trees beside her house. Duck Duck and Buzz are a high point on my walks when I head this direction. I don’t always see them right away as they might be squatting down in the grassy banks of the pond. I crest a hill and crane my head to see if the stark white bodies are hunkered in or floating. They rise up when I see them! I always call out in the happy goofy voice I use with my cats. Duck Duck! Buzz! There you are. Such cuties. They quack quack, lowly, little duck noises. I only ever saw Elizabeth once, to learn the lore and to get their names. I’m grateful that I can use the syllables they’re used to hearing and that I’m hoping signal me as friend. My clucking is better than my quacking, so far. 

Occasionally as I walk I wonder, does anyone notice my peculiar patterns? My mutterings, farmer’s blows (clearing the nostrils sans tissues), conversing with birds and self and god as I go? My boisterous swishing of a stick? Deer flies and mosquitoes don't give a shit about spray repellent, so in bug season I whip around a piece of downed maple with chunks of acorns still clinging to the mast to ward them off. It’s my version of a handheld accordion fan and I use it to the fullest. The faster I walk, the faster I wave and chatter. I might as well be doing Python's Silly Walks. Though sometimes I “pull it together” if I hear a car coming, I am often caught in the act of exhibiting my private self in public.

It is a particular vulnerability to be the walking body roadside as a motorized vehicle approaches, then passes. I ready myself to leap, if necessary, and every so often find myself staring down the drivers. Same as with my imagined dog owners, I make guesses or have visceral responses to the sounds of the oncoming cars or trucks or motorcycles. The louder the machine, the more obnoxious the person, especially if it's an intentionally aggravated volume. Then the upending of my tiny narratives – what if it’s a beater, the driver too broke to fix it, limping along as best he can in a hostile economy (systemic thinking is never far). Then my sympathy is evoked. I hear you, sister. I get it, guy. A moment of solidarity whizzes by.

Something there’s more of on roadsides: trash. I feel like such a nellie, but I hate it. Sometimes, my better self works very hard to give people the benefit of the doubt that the scandalous crap at my feet blew out of their hands or backseat unknowingly. Or I labor to see it as part of the mosaic, to puncture romantic notions about purity, about humanless nature. I’m reminded of something I read on eco-regional studies, that nature ain’t just out there. Humans, after all, are creatures of the planet. It’s how we live on it, with it, with creatures and dirt and each other, cars and machines – all technology – included, that is at issue. This same article reported that crows were struggling in the initial pandemic lockdown because less people were driving, and their main dietary staple of roadkill had severely decreased as a result. It’s an interactive scape – everything. Planet. Where and how we walk. What it means to be wild. I love this expansion of how to consider the world and my small part in it. 

And then I think the person who dumped his truck ashtray out the window is an asshole. (Keep walking, Cara.)

Speaking of technology, sometimes I bring my phone with me to track time or to take pictures. A recent shot of Cardinal flowers, the scarlet-robed beauties lining a wet run as if they are marching up water greens to their blue source, was such a catch. But that’s deep woods. What do I photograph roadside? This is the season of color in the leaves: flaming reds, tangerine dreams, delicious yellows. The understory is marvelous, too. Goldenrod, Snake Root, and Joe Pye Weed, so designated after the English name of Mohican sachem Shauquethqueat who used the flower as remedy, fill fields and edges at eyelevel. I have been watching them bud, flower, sustain pollinators, and turn to seed, which I am now collecting from the public right-of-way. I carry scissors and paper bags to clip and transport fluorescences for seeding the land behind the church where I live. Back home, I store the bags where their contents can properly dry until it’s close to the first frost. That’s when I’ll cast them, then lightly walk the area to ensure good seed to ground contact. Seems I do want to make something of my wanderings, after all.  

***

Cara Benson's writing has been published in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, Hobart, and elsewhere. Kevin Young chose her poem Banking for the Best American Poetry 2011. A recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, she lives in ancestral Mohican territory in upstate New York. www.carabensonwriter.com.

Read previous posts in this series: Hello From A Distance, Enter Geese, and Whose Woods.

Meet the Press: Iniquity Press, Vendetta Books & Big Hammer

Dante Di Stefano: How did Big Hammer and Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books come into being?

Dave Roskos: Big Hammer & the press began in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I moved to New Brunswick on July 4, 1986. Eliot Katz was the first New Brunswick poet I met. He was stapling posters around town for an upcoming poetry reading at The Court Tavern featuring Andy Clausen and the Lunar Bear Ensemble. He gave me a poster & encouraged me to come to the show & read in the open reading, which I did. There was no on-going poetry reading series in town at this time. The Roxy series from the early 80s had run its course and was history. I used to ask Eliot when the next poetry reading was every time I saw him. He must’ve gotten tired of me wanting to know when the next reading was all the time, because he encouraged me to start a reading series myself and then he told me how to do it.

I co-founded The Proletkult Poetry Circus at The Court Tavern in March of 1987, with fellow poet Chris Aubry. Bob Rixon was the first featured poet, followed by an open reading. The magazine grew out of the reading series & several other series in NJ, Philly & NYC including:  POETSWEDNESDAY at The Barron Arts Center, founded & run by Edie Eustice (earlier on with Sofran Crotty, later with Joe Weil), Liza Pille’s Tuesday night series at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, Jacko Monahan’s ongoing-for-decades series at The Brighton Bar in Long Branch, Frank Finale’s Without Halos readings in Ocean County, Betsy Robin Schwartz’s series at The Metuchen Public Library, Dave Lancet’s series at The Pipe Line & The Fringe in Newark, Lamont Steptoe’s series at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, Barbara Holland’s series at The Speak Easy in Greenwich Village, Enid Dame & Donald Lev’s Home Planet News  readings at The Cedar Tavern, Yictove’s series at The Knitting Factory, etc. The magazine included poets I had met through these various scenes, as well as poets from around the country who I only knew through the mail.

Big Hammer #1 was published in 1988. I typed it up with a typewriter onto sheets of 11 by 17 inch paper, double-sided, & had it photocopied at a local print shop. Ken Greenley and I used the MACS at The Roost, a free computer lab at Rutgers University, to type up “camera-ready” pages for the chapbooks and magazines. The Roost was open 24 hours, comfortable enough & conducive for stoned & even tripping poets typing up poems at 3 am. I typed Big Hammer # 2 & several chapbooks at The Roost. Big Hammer #2 was printed by my friend Tom Pulhamus, a poet (& later an editor at Long Shot) who worked as an off-set printer at Mike Cote’s Ploughshares Press. Mike let Tom print the magazine on his off-hours for the cost of materials. An enormous labor of love. Ken Greenley used to do guerilla print runs at his various office-temp jobs, printing his mag Half Dozen of the Other on the boss’s dime & time.

There was a vibrant poetry scene in New Brunswick in the 80s & 90s. Big Hammer was one of several New Brunswick-based poetry magazines at that time. There was Arbella, edited by Anthony George & Tom Obrzut, Conceptual Vandalism edited by Doctor Nein, Guillotine Broadside edited by Miriam Halliday & Matt Borkowski, Half Dozen of the Other edited by Ken Greenley, & Long Shot edited by Eliot Katz & Danny Shot. This was just in New Brunswick. Other notable NJ small press poetry mags of the time, which many of us read & sent work to, include Joe Weil’s Black Swan Review & Anti-Lawn, out of Elizabeth, Herschel Silverman’s Beehive, out of Bayonne, and Richard Quatrone’s Passaic Review.

DD: Your publishing endeavors reflect aspects of the poetry zine subculture of the 1980s & 1990s. I don’t know much about that subculture, but what I do know is that it was a confluence for multiple aesthetics, undergirded by a radical DIY poetics and favoring hybridity before “DIY” and “hybridity” were even terms that were bandied about so often. Could you talk about that scene, your role in it, and how it fit into (or didn’t) the broader world of poetry?

DR: The 80s & 90s zine subculture is simply a continuation of what is now called “The Mimeo Revolution” of the 1960s & 1970s. By the 1980s mimeograph machines had been largely replaced by Xerox or photocopy machines. Some folks even refer to the mags produced in the 80s & 90s as “Xerox Zines.” Most of the editors were also poets. Some of my favorite poet-editors from the 1960s & 70s include Tom Kryss (aka T.L. Kryss), Gene Bloom, D.r. Wagner, d.a. levy, rjs, Douglas Blazek, Diane DiPrima, John Bennett, Steve Richmond, Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Marvin Malone, Kell Robertson, Charles Bukowski & Neeli Cherry (aka Cherkovski), A.D. Winans, F.A. Nettelbeck, Allen De Loach, & The Willie.

Three anthologies of 1960s Underground Poetry that I love above the others & return to the most are The East Side Scene, edited by Allen De Loach, The Living Underground, edited by Hugh Fox, and Pacific Northwestern Spiritual Poetry edited by Charles Potts. These books are fun & taken together they are a master’s class on mid-twentieth-century American Underground Poetry.

The 1980s were a fun time to be a small press poet. There was a national network of poets connected by readings, magazines, fliers, posters, word of mouth, the telephone, & the post office. There were zine-review-zines like Fact Sheet 5. And there was Len Fulton and The Small Press Review, holding it down since the 1960s.

Some classic underground poetry mags from the 1980s include: Alpha Beat Soup edited by Dave Christy, Bouillabaisse, Cokefish, and Cokefishing In Alpha Beat Soup by Ana & Dave Christy, Planet Detroit by Kurt Nimmo, Poetry Motel by Patrick McKinnon, Action by Jim Cohn, Big Scream by Dave Cope, Big Fire Proof Box by Joel Kuszai & Chris Ide, Catalyst by M and Kathleen Kettner, Home Planet News by Enid Dame & Donald Lev, ArtCrimes by Steven B. Smith, Ben Guylas, etc, Impetus by Cheryl Townsend, Lactuca by Mike Selender, Guts by Keith Dodson, Fell Swoop by Joel Dailey, Raw Bone by Tom House, and road/house by Todd Moore. (There is a new book entitled Belvidere Books & Guns about Todd Moore & road/house press, edited by his son Theron Moore. It contains interviews with some of the folks mentioned here. I published Todd’s chapbook Blind Whiskey & the Straight Razor Blues in 2008).   

Some notable mags from the 90s include: Napalm Health Spa edited by Jim Cohn, THE-HOLD/Underbeat Journal by Cait Collins, Iconoclast by Phil Wagner, Transcendent Visions by David Kime, Lucid Moon by Ralph Hasselmann Jr., Driver’s Side Airbag by Michael Halchin, FUCK! by Lee Thorn, & Weird Poetry/American Living Press by Michael Shores & Angela Mark.

My friend Bree, of Green Panda Press & Least Bittern Books, created The Gonzo Library of the Indy Outlaw, Whole Books Meat & Ephemera, or The Outlaw Library, for short. Bree & some other poet-editor friends (rjs & Alex Gildzen) made a few posts in the beginning, but I think she mainly just set it up so that I could run with it. Bree is a poet-editor from Cleveland in the spirit & tradition of d.a. levy, Daniel Thompson, & Jim Lang.

Many of the poets & publications mentioned here are represented in The Outlaw Library: www.outlawlibrary.blogspot.com

DD: On your website you note Big Hammer (and I assume, Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books) reflects: “a vision of America that is unfathomable to those in the suits & ties and even those with the ponytails and the birkenstocks. His poems are written by auto mechanics and plumbers and ferriers and people who know the difference between fuel injection and carburetors.” Does this mean a Working-Class vision of America? A nonprofessional, non-academic view? A Whitmanesque democratic vista? If so, what does this view offer that other views do not? How does this view connect to your understanding of poetry in general?

DR: That’s not my website. That’s The Outlaw Poetry/Free Jazz Network in France created by my friend Klaus Thiemann. That quote is by poet-editor Mark Weber, of Zerx Press. Very kind of him to say. & yes, sure, it means all that, & the kitchen sink. Throw in a mimeograph machine for good measure. Poems by & for Proles. I don’t know if it’s a view, or stance, so much as a way of life.

Poet-Editor LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) said something in 1960 that speaks to the rest of your question:

“I didn’t especially think that there was any charted-out area in which the poetic sensibility had to function to make a poem. I thought that anything--anything you could grab--was fit material to write a poem on. That’s the way I think about it. Anything in your life, anything you know about or see or understand, you could write a poem about if you’re moved to do it. (....) And I don’t think that there are any kind of standard ideas or sentiments or emotions or anything that have to be in a poem. A poem can be made up of anything so long as it is well made. It can be made up out of any feeling. And if I tried to cut anything out of my life--if there was something in my life that I couldn’t talk about...it seems monstrous that you can tell almost anything about your life except those things that are most intimate or mean the most to you. That seems a severe paradox.”

DD: You published Harvey Pekar’s essay on Sun Ra. Could you talk about that book and the relevance of Sun Ra and Pekar today?

DR: They were both DIY, long before that phrase was bandied about so often, as you said above.

Harvey’s Sun Ra article was first published in a Canadian jazz magazine called CODA in 1975. The article covers Sun Ra’s career till around 1973. The chap book/reprint I published also includes photos of Sun Ra & the Arkestra performing at The Painted Bride Arts Center in Philly, taken by poet-editor Lamont Steptoe of Whirlwind Press.

Sun Ra will be relevant as long as musicians improvise, or forever. The Arkestra is his legacy, Afrofuturism, his compositions & recordings & poetry, what he did with the moog, The Outer Space Employment Agency, Space Is The Place!, & his most pertinent question of all: “It’s After The End Of The World! Don’t You Know That Yet?!”

Besides being a pioneer of Underground Comix, Autobiographical Comix & Per-Zines, & an accomplished & widely published Jazz Writer, Harvey Pekar also wrote serious literary essays. Harvey has a character in American Splendor named Herschel whom he  describes as a “working class intellectual.” When I met Harvey he thought it was great I was a furniture mover & when we talked on the phone a few years later he remembered that & it was a plus in his book. Not so much a plus in many a snob’s book. Harvey was a working class intellectual supporting himself & later his family as a “flunky file clerk” at a VA Hospital in Cleveland. Harvey said writers should get a “flunky job” that they don’t have to think about & allows more energy for the real work, which is writing. The day job is just about Survival. Later on after the American Splendor movie he got many book deals & wrote several graphic-novel-style history & social studies books, often with historian Paul Buhle. Besides a stack of mostly self-published comic books, followed by a stack of big name press hardcover & trade paperback graphic novels, Harvey left a sprawling paper trail of jazz & literary essays in publications as different as DOWN BEAT and B.N. Duncan’s TELE TIMES. Some of Harvey’s Iniquity Press/Vendetta chapbooks, including Sun Ra, are posted on the outlaw library blog.

DD: How has Jazz influenced you as a writer and an editor?

I like all kinds of music, like I like all kinds of poetry, but I’m real-heavy into Free Jazz. Free Jazz is the music of the streets. A clarion call to action. Listening to Free Jazz inspired me to pick up an alto saxophone & just start playing. I can’t really articulate how jazz influenced my writing or editing, but it definitely influenced my horn playing (which is not jazz or free jazz -becuz it’s not based in the blues-but sound poetry or noise). I named my son after Albert Ayler. I love the music. However, I was writing poetry long before I found Jazz. I’m not a Jazz Poet. 

The late & much loved Steve Dalachinsky was a great Jazz Poet. He used to write poetry at live jazz shows. He has a 250 page book of poems he wrote at every single Charles Gayle gig from 1987 till 2006 (The Final Nite).  THE MANTIS for Cecil Taylor 1966-2009 came out on Iniquity/Vendetta in 2009. Poems written at Cecil Taylor concerts. Pure Spontaneous Combustible Jazz Poetry from a Pure Jazz Poet Soul. Ya can read THE MANTIS for free at the outlaw library...   

DD: What are five Jazz albums every poet should should listen to?

DR: Here’s seven that I enjoy listening to: Spiritual Unity by Albert Ayler, Free Jazz by Ornette Coleman, Ascension by John Coltrane, Humility In The Light Of The Creator by Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Congliptious by Roscoe Mitchell, & Giuseppi Logan’s first two records on ESP-Disk.

DD: One of the books that really stood out in your catalogue was Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper by Hungarian poet Géza Szőcs, translated by Paul Sohar. How did you come to publish this book? What do you find most compelling about this poetry?

DR: Great book of poems. All the books of Hungarian translations by Paul Sohar are published by Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek in Romania. Liberty, Rats and Sandpaper was edited by Zoltán Böszörményi, but Paul came up with that great title. Paul Sohar lives in NJ when he is not in Budapest. He approached me in the 90s & said that Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek needed an American publisher with ISBN numbers to partner with so that the books could be published & distributed in the USA. It’s been an honor to share in this collaboration, but I have to be clear that it is their vision & that they do all the work. All I do is provide ISBNs. Paul is tireless in his work writing & translating urgent poetry.

DD: Many of the books you publish are guided by an aesthetic that derives partially from mid-twentieth-century American poetry, especially the Beats, but also the so-called Confessional poets, and the New York School. Could you talk about this aesthetic and also about some of the authors you’ve published?

DR: Especially The Beats, but also Meat poets like Charles Bukowski & d.a. levy. Ted Berrigan a big influence on many poets in Big Hammer, far as The NY School goes, from younger poets (now in their 50s) like Chris Stroffolino, Candace Kaucher, Boni Joi, and Tom Obrzut to his friends & students like Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, Joel Dailey, Joel Lewis, & the late poet-editor Tom Weigel, whose poetry sings in eternity.

Some gone poets I’ve published chapbooks by include Donald Lev, Kell Robertson, Andrew Gettler, Allen Johnson, and Ed Galing; all five represented in Big Hammer & The Outlaw Library. May the Muses crank out mimeographed broadsides of their poems & pass them out on street corners in eternity.

Again, it’s an everything including the kitchen sink with a mimeograph machine thrown in for good measure aesthetic.

I learned alot about mid-twentieth-century American poetry by reading Walter Lowenfels anthologies. I first read Cleveland poet-editor rjs in Lowenfels’ WHERE IS VIETNAM? I found a copy in a used bookstore in Asheville NC on lunch-break on a long-distance moving job, read it all the way home to Jersey in the cab of the truck. Years later I answered an ad in Factsheet 5 that rjs had placed giving away free copies of Douglas Blazek’s Broken Knuckle Poems, which he and Tom Kryss had published in the 60s. The copy of Factsheet 5 was from the 90s & it was the mid 00s but rjs answered & we traded books & zines generously & eventually published his Collected Poems on Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books. He introduced me to Tom Kryss & we too became friends & put out his book light dark light. This chain of events started by picking up that copy of WHERE IS VIETNAM? Walter Lowenfels was completely egalitarian. His anthologies are a big part of my education. He also turned me on to William Wantling & Olga Cabral, for which I am eternally grateful.         

Matt Borkowski is one of the reasons I started Big Hammer in the first place, to publish and promote his poetry. Same goes for Ken Greenley & Michael Pingarron. Three poets from off the streets of New Jersey who have left this realm for parts unknown. Their poems scream from under bridges & from factory floors, scrawled in blood on shithouse walls. Not just those guys, other gone friends as well, like Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, Stuart N. Ross, Charlie Mosler, & Bob Rixon; all from Jersey, all there in the beginning; along with alive-&-kickin’ poet-pals Joe Weil, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Anthony George, Tom Obrzut, John Lunar Richey, Lamont Steptoe, Chris Stroffolino, Dave Cope. All folks in the first two issues who have continued to be in Big Hammer over the years, creating a kind of core, most of whom have chapbooks &/or trade paperbacks from the press. Three other gone poets from the early days of Big Hammer, but who I never had the honor of putting out a book by, are Aisha Eshe, Barbara A. Holland, and Enid Dame. (Give them a read!) That’s only the beginning though. Ya can read the first 18 issues, & issue #21, of Big Hammer for free in The Outlaw Library, and see who else joins the party as time goes on, if you feel so inclined.

DD: Your own collection, Fall & All: Book 2, invokes William Carlos Williams. Could you talk about Williams’ legacy, and, also, about New Jersey as a home for poetry?

DR: I love William Carlos Williams. I sent poems to Allen Ginsberg when I was a teenager & he wrote back “Read WCW for complete grounding.” I find myself returning to Spring and All and Descent of Winter all the time. I also really dig Paterson. A man is a city. No ideas but in things. I can’t talk about WCW without also talking about Alfred Kreymborg and OTHERS magazine, which was conceived at Grantwood, an artist’s colony in Ridgefield, NJ, & which Williams helped edit. Kreymborg also put out annual hardcover anthologies, also entitled OTHERS, for a few years. The complete run of OTHERS magazine has been posted online at The Modern Journals Project (modjourn.org). You can also find affordable copies for sale online. It’s an education in early-twentieth-century poetry. Alfred Kreymborg did important work. OTHERS mag had a huge influence on Big Hammer 19 thru 21, as those 3 issues came out roughly one hundred years after OTHERS, & form a trilogy. I was blown away by how relevant these poems from a hundred years ago are today.

New Jersey has been a great home for poetry for me. The list of poetry reading series I ran off earlier, most of which were in NJ, speaks to that. That was just a list of readings I had gone to over the years. There were so many other scenes going on as well. NJ has a rich history, from Walt Whitman to Williams & Kreymborg to Walter Lowenfels, who lived in Mays Landing, to Allen Ginsberg to Amiri Baraka to Joe Salerno, & all the NJ poets I’ve mentioned in this interview. I’m happy to be from NJ. Rent is kinda high though.

DD: What can we look forward to from Iniquity Press/Vendetta Books?

DR: Gonna bring back my zine STREET VALUE. Eventually make more Big Hammers. Books by Beth Borrus, Bertha Sanchez Bello, Jen Dunford-Roskos, Loring Hughes, Katalin Mezey (translated by Paul Sohar), Joe Weil, Dwyer Jones, Tom Obrzut, Anthony George, John Lunar Richey, Damian Rucci, normal, Dave Church & Bob Rixon. That should keep us busy for a while.

DD: Could you end by giving us a poem or poems from poet (s) you’ve published?

DR:  Thank you for asking such great questions & thanks too for this opportunity to talk about poets that I love. Here are two short poems, by Matt Borkowski & Miriam Halliday-Borkowski, respectively...

A Walk Is A Prayer

a walk is a prayer if taken well,
one foot in heaven,
one in hell;

upon the earth where all have fallen,
a walk is a prayer

—Matt Borkowski

 

Wedding Song

“Gently Gently do one confident chore
in front of me lovingly, daily.” (Rilke)
Gently Gently do one confident task
in front of me lovingly, daily.
“Lead me this way near the garden.” (Rilke)
Lead me this way near the garden.
Gently, lovingly, confidently, daily.
Give me nights that are luminous
tantric
drala
above the enemy
Mountain Energies
“A man’s home is his wife.” (Talmud)
Behold our authenticity!
A woman’s home is to face everything--
or else!

—Miriam Halliday-Borkowski

---

Dave Roskos has been writing poems since 1979 and has written several books including Intensive Care (Black Rabbit Press) & Lyrical Grain, Doggerel Chaff, & Pedestrian Preoccupations (Cat in the Sun Books/ReDUX Consortium). He lives in Seaside Heights with his wife, poet/collagist Jen Dunford-Roskos, and works as a Direct Support Professional for a non-profit Mental Health Agency.

Two Dozen Reasons to Make Dinner [by Adrienne Su]

Twelve Ways Cooking Is Empowering:

1. When you look into the refrigerator at what used to elicit a wail of “there’s nothing to eat,” you see the makings of a frittata, pizza, or fried rice.
2. After making and eating the frittata, pizza, or fried rice, you can gloat about not having wasted the scraps in the refrigerator.
3. Scraps in the refrigerator start to look less like clutter and more like material for a creative project.
4. If you’re working on a creative project unlikely to generate income, such as a book of poems, you can turn humble ingredients into excellent food.
5. What’s in your food is under your control.
6. You can’t always control how a dish will turn out, but you can learn from disappointments.
7. Even with occasional disappointments, your house smells terrific and feels like a home.
8. After cooking, you’re forced to clean your house, or at least the kitchen, thus supporting another round of cooking.
9. You can directly support people who are sick, mourning, occupied with a new baby, protesting, or simply living their lives.
10. If you live in a place where restaurants don’t serve what you long for, you can still have many of the dishes you crave.
11. You have fewer cravings for sweets and snacks because you don’t feel, after a meal, that something is missing.
12. Fewer things are missing.

Twelve Usable Cookbooks:

1. America’s Test Kitchen, Bowls
2. Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking
3. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook
4. Deborah Madison, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
5. Peter Meehan et al, Lucky Peach Presents 100 Easy Asian Recipes
6. Urvashi Pitre, Indian Instant Pot Cookbook
7. Susan Purdy, The Family Baker
8. Julie Sahni, Classic Indian Cooking
9. Lorna Sass, Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way
10. Ellen Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook
11. Alice Waters, The Art of Simple Food
12. Online archives of Fine Cooking magazine (technically not a cookbook, but as trustworthy as #1-11)

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 5, 2020)

The Two Kinds of Poets [by Adrienne Su]

I have an informal, untested theory that when it comes to sustenance while writing, there are two kinds of poets: coffee poets and food poets. Coffee poets (who in some cases could be considered tea poets) can go half the day or longer without solid food; their focus is sustainable without the distraction and mess of eating. Coffee poets who are also capable of writing in public spaces are doubly blessed, as they can log many hours in a cafe without having to incur the expense of meals with their beverages, or the interruption of leaving for lunch. Bringing a thermos, they can bide their time in libraries, getting lost in the books they’re reading and writing, enjoying a communal version of a solitary activity.

As a food poet, one whose energy levels are better maintained by six small meals a day versus three large, I envy coffee poets their long stretches of concentration. They aren’t constantly reminded by hunger of their profane, alimentary existence as human animals. When they write at home, their kitchen sinks don’t fill with dishes within the first three hours. Their keyboards don’t get sticky or greasy. They don’t end a day of writing only to realize that, bit by bit, they have eaten all of last night’s leftovers and there is nothing for dinner.

The inimitable Kazim Ali is a coffee poet: “Early morning is my writing time-- and coffee is the key to my experience. I buy beans from local roasters, preferably organic. My favorite is Mexican coffee, the darker the roast the better. I used to hand grind the beans (more for the meditation quality of doing the work, rather than any notion of coffee purity) but now I just have a little grinder for them. In the past I swore by the french press or a pour-over if I was only drinking a cup, but these days I make drip coffee in a coffee-maker because it’s easier to make a lot and keep it hot. If I don't drink it black, I'll drink it with stevia and almond or oat milk. Mahmoud Darwish (in that rapturous extended passage near the beginning of his memoir of the Beirut bombing of 1982) says ‘Coffee is the sister of time,’ and I believe it. I hover over sentences with that warm company.”

Kazim, who in addition to poetry has written memoir, criticism, novels, and translations, while also building a distinguished record of editing and teaching, is clearly driven by more than coffee. Yet knowing this detail about his process suggests that we food poets might do well to streamline the way we work, to be more like coffee poets, only with food. We can’t cut food-preparation time down to that of brewing coffee, but we can aspire to limit it on certain days.

Generally, when cooking, I find that I have to be all in, mindfully trimming fat, fishing out lemon seeds with a tiny measuring spoon, intuiting the springiness of dough. Otherwise, I cut or burn myself, or over- or undercook things. Most “quick and easy” recipes don’t work for me; they spur an inattention that ends in disappointment. Yet on the rare occasion that I find myself free to write for a day or the better part of a day, I don’t want to dwell in cooking. I also don’t want to resort to a giant pot of stew that has to be eaten so many times that you never want to see it again, the way dogs resign themselves to their kibble after begging for what you’re having.

Here are a few ways to hang back from the kingdom of cooking while trying to sidestep taste fatigue:

* Embrace the powers of the microwave, which generates less dishwashing than conventional cooking and in summer keeps the kitchen cool. I’ve been making the Szechuan Green Beans in Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet for decades; it cooks in the dish it’s served in. (Barbara Kafka started out as a poet.) Marie T. Smith’s memorably titled Microwave Cooking for One helped me finish my last book; the chili and the fish chowder are as simple and good as promised, and the recipes multiply for when you’re not isolating. Julie Sahni’s Moghul Microwave contains miracles, too, among them Parsi Chicken and Savory Keema Cake.

* Cook extra of whatever you’re making the day before, but make sure it includes two or more of these elements: spicy, sour, bitter, fermented, or contrasting textures. Having to eat the same dish over and over is more tolerable when it has complexity; it takes me a long time to tire of Chinese spicy noodles, in vegetarian or carnivorous versions, hot or cold, inflected with some or all of these: sesame paste, peanut butter, black vinegar, chili oil, a touch of sweetness.

* Cook extra dinner before your writing day, but with specific plans to transform the leftovers into something different. Two books that can help with this are Leftovers by Kathy Gunst and Green Plate Special by Christine Rudalevige.

* Do what my parents did when raising teenagers and working: order rice-based takeout meals, then extend them with your own rice and vegetables, keeping the vegetables easy: sliced Napa cabbage simmered in chicken broth, stir-fried broccoli or asparagus.

* Team up with a local “food poet” friend whose eating preferences are compatible with yours, even if lockdown forbids eating together. Each of you cooks a dish, then gives half to the other.

Chances are, you will still spend more time in the kitchen than a coffee poet will. But channel Kazim’s observation about the “meditation quality of doing the work,” and adapt the wisdom of Mahmoud Darwish to your own temperament. Spicy noodles, too, can be the sister of time.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 4, 2020

Everything in Its Place [by Adrienne Su]

Poet and memoirist Sandra Beasley cooks differently depending on whether she’s writing poetry or prose: “I’m a tremendous fan of mise en place; one of my favorite wedding gifts was a stack of glass nesting bowls that I use. I’m methodical which, to be honest, is something that I pride myself on as a poet as well… For prose, I’m a mess—indulgent snacking, weird sleep and meal hours, hoping my husband does most of the cooking! I get overwhelmed with the scale of prose projects. I cook better as a poet.”

I can’t help but connect this to Sandra’s facility with forms. Writing a sonnet or sestina is an overt act of ordering raw material, taking the chaos of human existence and working it into a recognizable shape, with strict rules governing what can appear at the end of each line, how many lines there will be, and sometimes how many stresses each line should contain. Many good formal poems break some of the rules, within the bounds of what I call, in the classroom, not looking like a mistake. One could argue that free-verse poems do the same - give shape to the shapelessness of experience - and the best free verse does exactly that. But something about mise en place mirrors the compulsive neatness of rhymed quatrains, the symmetry of a pantoum returning to its first and third lines as it completes its mission of saying every line twice, without ever quite repeating itself.

Here is a curry in progress, in Sandra’s kitchen:

A fellow devotee of forms, I’ve made similar efforts to create order in the kitchen. I share Sandra’s enthusiasm for mise en place, which is essential for the speed of Chinese cooking (the actual cooking, not the prep, being speedy). I also do - or did, pre-Covid - methodical lunch preparation. Ideally, I’d start the work week with four of something like this in the fridge (not five because some weeks included a lunch out or at home):

This was a makeshift sardine banh mi - the carrots and radishes quick-pickled, the baguette not pictured; that’s mayo in the sauce container - and a side of fruit. Other favorites include calamari and white bean salad, with mesclun or farro in the other compartment, or a bowl. It isn’t quick, but making four at once cuts down the time spent per lunch. Seeing the containers stacked in the fridge erases a daily problem from the week and pre-empts the junky snacking that follows a hastily purchased, not-really-what-you-wanted sandwich. Most of all, thinking about lunch is over until the weekend.

Some advance-lunch guidelines: Once you have your stash, don’t give in to the temptation to eat one for dinner midweek; not only will you lose a day, you’ll also get tired of it. Don’t repeat a lunch for two consecutive weeks; you’ll get tired of it. Sauce or dressing should travel in its own container, to be mixed just before you eat. If the lunch involves good bread, slice and freeze the bread for the week, thawing what you need for the next day overnight, or let it thaw in your lunch bag during the morning. Some ingredients have to be added the day you eat, such as avocado; use a reminder app to carry the mental load of remembering to add them. Keep salt and pepper at work. If you have the space where you work and it’s allowed, having a small toaster oven there can be life-changing.

It’s hard to fend off the notion that poetry writing is an irrational, struck-by-lightning activity that doesn’t respond to ongoing effort. For sure, there are days when it seems to resist. But writing of any kind works better when you keep trying, and it’s less intimidating if you view writing as a form of organizing. Sandra reports about her photo: “I use that cooking time for planning writing projects; in this case, I was working toward delivering a commissioned poem on deadline.” I find this reassuring evidence that poems are made, not granted by deities. And on those days when kitchen organization seems impossible and you keep reaching for the chips, maybe that’s a good time to muck around in a larger, more sprawling project, dare I say prose?

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 3, 2020)

Without Restaurants [by Adrienne Su]

Poet Faith Shearin reports from sheltering-in-place in Massachusetts: “We are cooking a ton because even the carry out in Amherst and Northampton has shut down. I miss restaurants more than I can say. I love a lot of food I don't know how to cook: Indian, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese… Our Covid diet consists largely of the things I was raised on. Several generations of my ancestors drank iced tea and fried chicken in eastern North Carolina; I made my first batch of cornbread with my great grandmother before I learned to read. My great grandparents were farmers and corn was their most prolific crop. I was served grits with one soppy egg for breakfast, and cornbread with most soups; both sides of my family were devoted to Brunswick Stew. Nobody could completely agree about the ingredients in this dish so a lot was left to interpretation and imagination. I like to pull the chicken off a freshly cooked bird, dice some onions and garlic, chop basil, then add corn, red potatoes, and lima beans to a broth that is half tomato sauce half chicken broth. One grandmother liked to add green beans; another favored several meats, including pork. Some folks make it thin, with tomato juice, and some make it thicker with tomato paste. I make cornbread like this: 2 and 1/2 cups of coarse ground cornmeal, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 egg, 1 and 1/3 cup buttermilk, 2 tablespoons of butter. Cook at 375 for 25 minutes. I sometimes serve the stew with a spinach salad or make a fruit cobbler to go with it, or I throw a sweet potato in the oven and serve it with a little bit of butter and brown sugar. I like to cook when I am in the mood and rapidly tire of it when I'm doing it three times a day. I know a lot of people feel like this. The food I can cook well is the food I learned to make from my grandparents; it tastes like childhood.”

Faith and I are old friends. We both call the American South home - Kitty Hawk, NC for Faith, Atlanta, GA for me - but both live now in places where cornbread and Brunswick stew are more novelties than staples. Although my family arrived in the South much later than Faith’s did and our fried chicken was more likely to come from a restaurant than a cast-iron skillet on the stove, I share her connection to fruit cobbler and grits, and felt the estrangement when I first moved North. My Thanksgiving stuffing is cornbread-based. Like Faith, I cherish Indian, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants. My grandmothers cooked Chinese food, but I didn’t grow up cooking with my grandmothers, as the link had been broken by World War II and the Chinese Communist revolution; I never met my paternal grandmother. My mother, driven with her family from their home in Shanghai when she was a child, had to teach herself how to cook Chinese food in 1960s Atlanta, which meant the ingredients were Southern-inflected, the techniques explained in English by Joyce Chen and Grace Zia Chu. But because she knew how the dishes were supposed to look and taste, my mother was well-prepared to use (and adapt) the instructions. By the mid-1980s, Atlanta’s Chinese restaurants had multiplied approximately one hundredfold since my father’s arrival in 1948; many catered to a Chinese clientele. Our lives had reached the point where time was scarcer than money, so we often lived on good-quality takeout plus home-cooked rice and vegetables.

Faith’s lockdown-narrowed diet reminds me that the foods we associate with comfort and home are not necessarily made in the home. Restaurants build meaningful family memory, too. Without restaurants, her longing for, say, tofu with bok choy is no less a part of who she is than her skill in turning out a Brunswick stew; it only joined the family later. This spell of eating what we can is an opportunity to expand self-knowledge. What do we miss the most, and what is different about us without it? What skills from previous generations - even if we have to imagine them, as I imagine Faith’s great grandparents in a bad year for corn, or each of my parents as a foreign student in Georgia, faced with the mystery of buttermilk or white gravy - are we calling on now? What do we know how to cook that, out of forgetfulness or the excitement of the new, we haven’t cooked in a decade and are bringing back because the pantry, or a pandemic-driven sense of continuity with lost forebears, points to it? It’s worth recording, occasionally if not regularly, what we’re eating these days, as well as what we aren’t. One day we’ll be able to look at the list, understand what it reveals, and possibly even write again, with new perspective on who we’ve become.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 2, 2020)

The Pauses between Poems [by Adrienne Su]

Most of the poets I know have been temporarily silenced, at least in verse, by the Covid-19 crisis. Recent months recall the aftermaths of 9/11 and the 2016 presidential election: impossible to write creatively about, impossible to turn away from. To seek the distance needed to transform experience into reflection feels like closing your eyes at the wheel. To wander into gray areas, so that a poem might begin in one place and end in another, requires a surrounding prevalence of non-gray areas. Now everything is gray, and wandering hazardous.

Was it really only a short time ago that the average poet was maneuvering to maximize writing time, stealing half an hour before a work meeting, setting alarms fifteen, then twenty minutes earlier than normal, or making notes in a parked car or real-life waiting room? As recently as February, as if poem-making conditions were normal, I was identifying strategies for increasing writing time by reducing time spent planning, shopping for, and preparing meals, without giving in to joyless repetition, frozen dinners, or excess takeout.

I’m more of an authority on the latter (not giving in) than the former (kitchen shortcuts), although I’m interested in both. Even before the rituals of eating became central to life under lockdown, I saw every meal as a chance to celebrate being alive and able to savor breakfast, lunch, dinner, or one of the many semi-meals I sneak in between. It’s a near-obsession. Despite repeated culling and frequent visits to the library, I have nearly 300 cookbooks, in addition to several shelves of food nonfiction. Over the years, including many spent parenting alone, I’ve assembled an army of appliances meant to save time - pressure cooker, stand mixer, food processor, programmable rice cooker, immersion blender, Vitamix - but also a number of things that aren’t about saving time: canning supplies, ice-cream maker, pizza stone, cake-decorating tools, and an admittedly neglected manual pasta machine. When there’s room for it, cooking is a pleasure and the closest thing I have to a hobby. Yet I find (or, pre-pandemic, found) myself constantly chafing at having to choose between writing and cooking, and resenting cooking for so being relentlessly non-optional.

Before the novel coronavirus upended routines, I often got up early Sunday, intending to go to the grocery store while everyone else was either at church (this is rural Pennsylvania) or lingering over waffles. I’d list what ingredients needed to be used up, then deploy an Eat Your Books search to create a week’s worth of menus that called for them, thus generating a second list, of what to buy. But I tend to page through cookbooks as if they were restaurant menus: “I’ll have the pesto-grilled salmon, please, with butternut-squash risotto and a side of broccoli rabe, probably followed by peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream,” with the intention, the next day, of switching to Chinese food. The list would grow complicated, requiring stops at multiple stores. By the time I actually reached the first store, it was crowded, and by the time I finished shopping, it was mid-afternoon. If I wanted to make lunches to take to work that week and dinner for that night, I’d have to start cooking right away. What happened to my plan to shop early, then have a little bit of Sunday to write?

Somehow, over time, though, the writing got done. That most of it has recently been about food seems relevant, but domestic chores can be the enemy of writing about anything, including domestic chores. I’ve unwittingly cut other things out - I’ve missed out on most movies, for instance - but, stepping back now, realize that I’m not completely inefficient in the kitchen. Over time I’ve developed a few ways to nourish a day of writing, on the occasion that such a rare day can be found, without too much compromise on taste. This week I’ll talk about some of these ways, with input from a few other poets on sustenance and writing (or sustenance and lockdown).

In the meantime, I say to any poet who can’t write poems these days, I’m with you. I can’t, either, especially as each day’s bad news keeps multiplying in scale and range. But not writing poems isn’t bothering me yet. From a writing point of view, I’ve found the Covid-19 crisis to be, in addition to a mass tragedy and magnification of inequality, a reminder that silences are nothing new. I didn’t write in the immediate aftermath of childbirth, or in the time around any move, or while starting my teaching career. I’ve even had days of silence in an artists’ colony, which in pragmatic terms is a waste but in creative terms, natural. Writing is a conversation. Sometimes you talk, other times you listen, and what you eventually say is more meaningful for your having listened. The entity you’re conversing with might not care what you think - it may even want to do you mortal harm - but by listening to it (while doing everything you can to avoid infection by it), you are developing a response. Like the vaccine we’re all waiting for, that response could take a long time. Pandemic-prompted non-writing can be a form of writing. By paying attention, we shape the white space around our lines and stanzas. That white space is not the absence of poem but a defining element of a poem’s structure. In the meantime, whether or not we’re able to compose a line, we have to eat.

A Bright Green Side of Broccoli Rabe

1 bunch broccoli rabe, about 1 lb.
1 Tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic, peeled and coarsely chopped
Salt
1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes or a seasoning blend such as Penzeys Tuscan Sunset, Florida Seasoned Pepper, or Lemon Pepper

1. Put a large pot of water on to boil, as if you were cooking pasta, over high heat. (If you are cooking pasta, reserve the hot water for it in step 3.)
2. While the water heats, rinse the broccoli rabe, then cut the small stems and florets into 2-inch lengths. Using a paring knife, peel the outer layer of skin from the thick stems, then cut them into 1-inch lengths. As you cut, collect the thick stems in one bowl, the leafy florets and small stems together in another.
3. When the water comes to a boil, add a tablespoon or so of salt (adding it gradually, as dumping it in can cause the water to bubble up further). Then add the thicker stems of the broccoli rabe. A minute later, add the florets and small stems. Stir briefly, let the water return to a boil, then drain the rabe and spray with cold water to arrest its vibrant color. Drain well. At this point, you can set it aside until close to serving time, even refrigerate it overnight.
4. Shortly before you’re ready to eat, heat the olive oil in a wide saucepan (12” is nice) over medium heat. Add the garlic and stir until it’s fragrant but not browned, a few seconds. Add the drained broccoli rabe, stir to coat with the garlicky oil, and season with red pepper flakes or seasoning blend and salt to taste. Toss and stir until heated through, a couple of minutes, adding an extra minute or so if the greens were refrigerated.

About 4 servings, 2 if you love bitter greens.

(Ed note: This post first appeared on June 1, 2020)